A few friends and I spent a few hours a week watching Three Kingdoms, a 95-episode Chinese historical drama that seeks to tell as much as it can of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms era in Chinese history (roughly 184-250 CE). Hundreds of characters come together and struggle for preeminence, heroes rise and fall, and great nations tremble before the unrelenting force of history. I've heard this story referenced so many times, I knew one day I'd have to experience it for myself, and now I have. I know stuff about Cao Cao, my friends, and if you are dedicated to being the best person you can be, someday you may know stuff about Cao Cao as well.
SuperMutant Magic Academy is a hard-to-find but phenomenal webcomic that has since been collected into a much-easier-to-read anthology. Its creator, Jillian Tamaki, has done storyboard work for Adventure Time, among many other things. This comic primarily concerns itself with the inescapable anguish of being alive and teen romance drama, but it has its fair share of utterly surreal, brilliant moments, and it's always hilarious. It makes me smile and feel warm, even while it makes me sad. Truly a great human work. Think of all the things you're missing.
Conscious of the ways these media were isolating me from the mainstream, and frustrated by my inability to share them with others effectively, I wrote this poem to express my dissatisfaction with all the beauty I'd found but was barred from leading people to see. I feel like I'm always awake, and it's lonely.
Somebody at work had a lot of extra jerky, and gave me a huge bag of it. I walked around the building handing it out to random passersby, brightening up their days with my unexpected gift of jerky. I was no Jerky Santa; I did not discriminate between naughty and nice. I simply shared the joy of jerky with one and all, and all was well. Food is a beauty most easily shared, but most transitorily enjoyed. You get hungry again.
I expected many guests in my office, so I baked many cookies for them (many more than shown here, in fact). It was a pleasure, once again, to share the gift of food, and I received many compliments for it. But they left after taking a cookie, and it was just me and the computers again. I ate two cookies.
If you're reading my blog, and you aren't reading David Foster Wallace, your priorities are all wrong.
I did not eat those chips. I did well. Sometimes, the darkness is your ally.
The Grand Budapest Hotel was the most marvelous movie I saw this year, more perfect even than Mad Max or Star Wars. I saw it three times, and I cried, and cried, and cried all the more. The beginning to the end was a perfect, crystalline moment of clarity in a muddled world, and I smiled and laughed. One friend told me it made her feel very strong emotions, but she couldn't pin down exactly why. There was nothing to pin down, though. The film is a warm hand in yours, a soft kiss, a force of love.
My wife sends me flowers on Valentine's Day, not the other way around. If you think that's a problem, you ought to reconsider your preconceptions. If not, do it anyway.
This was me toying with those vague, dissatisfied posts some people love to plaster all over their social media feeds. Something is wrong today, but they are not interested in talking about it -- they just want you to know how grumpy they feel. But I was not feeling grumpy. I was feeling conflicted, and I went about it as a reasonable person would, but framed in a distinctly negative way. It was an experiment, and I didn't like the result, and I didn't do it again.
This was another experiment. I love Metal Gear Solid, as is evident above. I've tried to learn everything I can about the story and what it all means, even though it's totally insane and difficult to take seriously at the best of times. But it's no less meaningful to me, for all that. Knowing these games' popularity, I was reasonably certain I'd get a good number of interesting responses. I was wrong, and I only received one or two questions that I even considered to be in the spirit of my prompt. I misjudged my audience badly.
But I also got this Metal Gear quote wrong, so what do I know.
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