Well, yay. Now that I've spent the entire night hacking away at my xvfbtex research code, I can now use my XGLTEX X server through a texture mapping onto the surface of a sphere, or through the rippling main viewing surface, just by moving the mouse pointer to one or the other. The shared memory code now even gracefully detaches the shared memory segment without having to go hunt it down from the command line.

Now, if I can just get my bloody C++ STL ntree extension to work the way I want, I can reimplement the entire 3D Zone server code to use it, port in the Xserver work, and then work with multiple X screens from within a 3D world. Finally, to sit back in a floating pretty emacs and write the VR tree code I've been wanted to for so long.

So, let's see, what with work and all I should have this done... oh... maybe by Christmas. Grr.

Oh well. At least I can make X wiggle now. :-) And that makes Rikku wiggle, too; which can hardly be a bad thing ;-)

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contemplative

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Personally, I'm puzzled that one could score higher on both CG and LG than NG, but the results otherwise seem fairly accurate. Thanks to harliquinmayhem for this pleasant flashback :-)

Well, here's an unsurprising test result...

You scored as alternative. You're partially respected for being an individual in a conformist world yet others take you as a radical. You have no place in society because you choose not to belong there - you're the luckiest of them all, even if your parents are completely ashamed of you. Just don't take drugs ok? </td> alternative 79% Upper middle Class 75% Luxurious Upper Class 50% Middle Class 42% Lower Class 17% What Social Status are you? created with QuizFarm.com

[	Current Mood	|	mellow	]
[	Current Music	|	Scrapped Princess soundtrack	]

I started a slightly worrisome thread about long hair, for those curious about some other uses to which people have applied theirs. :-)

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sore

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I'm too sleepy right now to document this delightful little bit of fluff - this is really just a placeholder to remind me to. :-)

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One of my high schools had a reunion at Scholtz's Biergarten, and it turned out to be really rather cool. Although I didn't recognize even close to everybody, there were a number I did remember, especially some cohorts from the engineering-prep honors physics class a bunch of us were in under the esteemed Mr Lynn; the cheerleader Dana, tall but gymnastically unhindered by it (and as outgoing, attractive and determined as ever, it seems), Billy Sederholm, and others.

Me, in elementary.
Yes, I'm a blonde.

But the real surprises were from further back, like finding out that my girlfriend in 3rd(?) grade, Lisa, is still sweet and refreshing to be around, and grew up to be quite as attractive as an adult as I ever thought she was then. The girl who was (is) one day younger than I, Suzanne, was also there, with similar effects. They're both quite unsurprisingly married, and there's a cute tale of one watching her son golf at a competition, desperately wanting to cheer, with her husband holding her to the ground by her shoulders to prevent her breaking her son's concentration (again).

To my frustration, my cellphone camera managed to enthusiastically destroy the pictures I snapped of these two very photogenic women, so I can only hope Lisa's pictures from the event turn out, and that I'll have a chance to scan them..

Too bad the girl I was smitten by in fourth grade, the pretty Norwegian from Oslo named Solveige Aas, didn't somehow appear as well. My elementary school social life would have had better representation - and I probably could have talked to her, now :-)

On the sad side, it seems that one girl from elementary can still remember my hassling her about her laugh. I think I thought she wsa cute then, so perhaps it's just the only excuse I could think of to talk to her? It would be shameful to have a shy misexpression of interest end up scarring someone instead.. I feel guilty :-( What do you think: would taking someone out to dinner nearly thirty years later make up for it somewhat? Hmm...8-)

Later, as a senior,
then, a freshman :-)

Back on the high school side, the reunion did lead to a lot of interesting conversations, compulsive picture taking, an unexpected binge of chatting in German with a couple of folks, an so on. So, overall, a pretty good time.

Presumably there will be another such event in September or so, where there's some inconceivably small chance my mostly-unrequired first love interest from high school might appear. But most of the really complex social interactions for me were after I switched high schools for my senior year: the beautiful german girl, Katrin, my second and thankfully requited second love, all the thespians and other musicians, etc.. Of course, I've already run into a good number of -them-, at the drama reunion a year or so ago. :-).

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stuffed

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Lots of people, a biggish house with lots of decks, people milling around, a grill with hamburgers and hot dogs, fire-cooked, and what's my attitude?...

...I almost couldn't make myself stop writing code at work to go to the party. *sigh*. Well, it did turn out to be worth it. And some of the conversations were good, but doubtless my most amused moment was figuring out that my idea for a good japanese phrase to put on a T-shirt is a -lot- more shocking to an actual Nihonjin than I had expected.

あたし の マンコ は 美味し です、ね？
Atashi no [insert picture of mango] ha oishii desu, ne?
[rather girly]: I have tasty mango(s), don't I?

...would make a great shirt.

Well, apparently the shock value is rather more than I had guessed. Oh, the horror, the horror... Oops :-).

Anyway, it seems that he might be interested in teaching some Nihongo, so maybe, if he recovers from that initial shock, I'll have the chance to learn a bit from the only person I think I've met so far in Austin who might speak it with authenticate male inflection. It would, after all, be handing to talk to people in Japan without giving the impression I'm a fourteen year old girly mecha pilot, ne?

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sleepy

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For those of you (and you know who you are) complaining that I found gainful employment without telling you, please note that my first work day started a bare few handfuls of hours after being hired - and by a company from which I'd heard nothing since February. So; I've been a bit behind in posting notice. :-)

Supposedly I'm now Senior Linux IT, in a site festooned with LDAP, Kerberos, and AFS. My brain will probably melt between now and Sunday. The company is a startup with a genuine product, interesting internal struggles, and a blithe disregard for holidays, the fable of the forty-hour work week, and most of weekends.

So, I'll be rather less available then I have been. :-(

The best times to call me for a while will probably be between 19 o'clock and midnight, or anytime on Sunday.

Oh, well. Enough for now; I have to go osmote manuals for a while...

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If the pictures aren't cutely nested on the right side of the paragraphs with their caption overhead, then your browser can't handle cascading style sheets. So upgrade already!

As expected, much was made out of the whole thong thing, although that scene's audio came through so badly it ended up getting subtitled, and like any foreign language film, subtitled badly. How could doublet have been heard as belt loop? Definitely abbreviates an outfit, no? However, extensive humiliation didn't quite happen in video, and clearly the crowd got a kick out of it, so all's well that ends well.

Except of course, that it didn't end there, since the four of us got dragged up on stage. Nothing there was surprising until Barbie decides to make an appeal to the audience not to waste their time putting together people would obviously couldn't possibly have a good time together. Now, we can't be sure what she intended, but I certainly know how some people in the audience took it:

• Since it's pretty much impossible to guess chemistry by the surface, - for example, I've had a great time and great chemistry with women who looked like they were cut from Barbie's cloth, except with more finesse - she's clearly advocating something most already know is nearly impossible.
• Since she thinks it's easy, perhaps she's one of those who does judge people by surface.
• Since her initial reaction to everyone, as recorded, was positive, and completely at odds with her plea, she's either as bad as everybody else is at making surface judgements - but has never noticed, or she's a total dissembler when it comes to trying to look good on film, or her judgements are just so ephemeral and meaningless she doesn't remember them later.
• Since this particular date was orchestrated quite differently from the last one at the Alamo, perhaps it just hasn't occurred to her that the environment could be as much or more to blame as any alleged aspect of chemistry.
• Maybe she just doesn't like old guys :-)

Pretty ironic when virtually everyone around (mostly women in this case) reacts to such a plea by thinking Barbie was the one who didn't fit. Especially having just seen Cassidy going out of her way to chitchat with and wave at the friends of the one Barbie probably objected to. Or did she object to Champe, who briefly freaked at one point and was the only one who had dressed as a stereotype from the outset? Yet Champe's conversations with me and Cassidy wandered through detailed areas he's definitely interested in, where his conversation with Barbie, at least according to the video, amounted to whether she could play a role as a pole dancer, or wanted to bare her breasts to everyone in a hottub. Did she feel objectified?

Given the choice between a sweet, personable, petite, intelligent brunette with a cute figure (スマート is probably even more accurate, for you nipponophiles) and gorgeous eyes, versus a clueless, somewhat heavy blonde with a breast hangup and a professed reliance on alcohol to be interesting, it's pretty easy to guess that the only one likely to befriend Barbie is Cassidy, who can probably find the good in Barbie that Barbie herself seems to be going out of her way to keep the guys, and the audience, from seeing.

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If the pictures aren't cutely nested on the right side of the paragraphs with their caption overhead, then your browser can't handle cascading style sheets. So upgrade already!

Okay, So a number of my friends have been harassing me about not reporting back on the goings-on in the filming of me and my co-victims for the next episode (to be shown this Thursday, 2004-03-25 19:00 CST) of Alamo Drafthouse's, Chemistry 101, which is generally described in my earlier post about getting drafted. So here I am, 28 hours later, finally posting my overdue update.

Let me apologize in advance for any crazily misspelled names, as well as the fact that any character summaries herein are based on horribly incomplete information, in a forced situation, under pressure to construct barely-founded opinions on the spot in front of a camera about people who might be dissembling or totally stressed - and so are, in other words, pretty much useless :-)

Allen Boots on South Congress, Sunday at 13: at 1522 South Congress was the designated meeting place and perhaps the first faint bell of the surreal day to come. Cassidy was the first of the victims to arrive, followed by me and somewhat later by Barbie. We wouldn't meet Champ, the surprise fourth for our erstwhile trio, until later. Why do I say surreal? The very first thing to happen is the lot of us were caparisoned with fashion-accessory approved cowboy hats, and then immediately forced to drink cans of Coors beer (that's pronounced kerrz, for those not from that particular section of this beer's fanbase).

The Victims

Barbie getting face-painted later by a computer graphics artist, Jonathon Gilbreath

Me, some of you already know; for those who don't, just see my LiveJournal profile for a broad conceptual sketch. The face paint in this picture is from one of the events. Cassidy is a winningly cute, upbeat, intelligent, petite, English major, for whom the picture above does little justice. Barbie is a busty, drinking bartender, from a club whose name I've forgotten, but that is reportedly right next door to a Bone Daddy's. Champ is a kind of Midwestern, mid-twenties cowboy studying for the bar, with a vague resemblance to the Baldwin brothers and a liking for Halo. Even just going by clothing (other than the hats), most people would have supposed us to be from different subcultures, but that's probably one of the interesting aspects upon which reality shows capitalize.

Here's the agenda as it turned out:

• Meet. Absolutely none of the expected truth or dare. Puzzlement.

  Everyone who came with us to the last Chemistry 101 knows that the principals had exchanged kisses early due to the whole true or dare thing. Apparently having left their more salacious component at home this time, options such as truth or dare, hottubs, heavy drinking, and so forth were replaced by long car rides (with Champ forced to drive), too-late presentation of the warm bubbly water idea, or the lackluster intoxication abilities of Coors.

• Importuned by an opportunistic Canadian band

  A purported Canadian band saw us gathered behind Allen Boots, unsurprisingly noticed that the females are both quite attractive, and promptly requested the opportunity to take pictures of them dressed in the band's signature T-shirts. The women accept, the huge shirts are donned and knotted strategically long enough to take pictures, and the band departs happily.

• Long, long car ride with the victims attempting to film each other.

  Okay, so we might have tried to film each other while the camera was left in standby mode. Were we supposed to be film students? :-) Still, the film-each-other idea wasn't bad, except for becoming bored with trying to fill a long country car ride with it.

• Rodeo - heavy petting zoo.

  Something furry and teething attempted to champ on Champ. Cassidy clearly adores cute animals. I skipped taking feed for the animals so the females would have more (I've handfed hundreds of animals, so it wouldn't have been exactly novel for me), yet we all ended up joking about how incredibly fat and handout-underwhelmed the animals were.

  The animals apparently had a better idea of what to do in front of the camera, since a couple of them were busily trying to couple, (hence my quip of Heavy Petting Zoo). Now, our editors just need to put that scene in slow motion with some boom-chicky-bowm-bowm music and our movie audience might leave satisfied. :-)

• Rodeo - vampiric cow milk sucking automated mechanistae.

  Being the front guy who gives the spiel about cow milking machines and other milk-industry propaganda to a totally bored group of folks whose sole interest is the brief moment the machine is one has to be one seriously unfulfilling career. It turns out that Champ is rather amusing to startle with ideas such as other possible uses for the milking hardware.

• Rodeo - face painting for the two alphabetically earlier folks.

  Our painter was quite good with the brush, doing great designs on both my face and Barbie's. Is it weird to find yourself discussing the trade-offs in the interfaces of Maya, Softimage, and Lightwave with some guy staffing a rodeo who happens to be conversant with what output quality can be expected for various levels of expertise in each?

• Rodeo - just how tall is a Budweiser Clydesdale?

  Champ and I got into a discussion over how tall a Clydesdale is. He proposed 25 hands or so, I offered 18, and we ended up chatting with the handlers to find out. I thought cowboys knew this kind of thing? Anyway, Champ is definitely a good sport, and the conversation turned to figuring out how tall we are in hands. (Actually horses' heights are measured to the withers, I think, which would probably parallel the shoulder for a human, so basing our height in hands on the height of the tops of our heads is, in retrospect, subtly funny)

• Rodeo - amusement park rides.

  They're more exciting when you think they'll break.

• Rodeo - fretting over that nagging lack of scandal.

  While generally feeling frustrated by the lack of something more dramatic to film, my statement that we should probably film ourselves breaking rules lead to me and Cassidy discarding various ideas until she came up with the idea of mullet-hunting - complete with video cameraman in tow.

• Another long car trip - to Austin.
  The Evil Camera approaches
  

  Here we tape more segments of us opining about each other in a somewhat confessional sense. Unfortunately, since it's still earlyish, there's not a lot of data to go on. By the time we have more though, it'll be late, the final interviews will be skipped, and these will be pretty much all we have, so it'll be interesting to see how it comes out.

  We are the low energy bunch on this stage, except perhaps for Champ, who nobly acquires enough Red Bull and Coke to get the rest of us a bit more alive just in time for:

• Another long car trip - to... Granger? Something like that.

  Grr. Arriving in small country towns like this feels more like being lost. Ooo, a country western bar and restaurant. Who'da thunk.

• Cotton Club and Steak House - standard country food.

  I'll give them this, the service here was great. These folks were seriously nice to us, set us up where filming was straightforward, and generally made for a nice time. The chicken-fried steak here is reportedly quite good, and the site made for a nice backdrop to the girl-assaulting attack microphone, the crashing of the camera on the floor, and other little dramas.

• Cotton Club and Steak House - the sci-fi and thong tetralog.

  Dinner finally gave a decent chance for a more involved conversation, all of us victims in the same place, no one having to drive, and no one being distracted by trying to film the others. I, Cassidy, and Champ got into a rather long conversation about filmmakers, sci-fi books, the development of authors' writing styles, and a bunch of other silly stuff, accidentally rather leaving out Barbie, who isn't a fan of dusty tomes.

  The outfit I was trying to describe, worn by Gina, who's not far from being Cassidy's size.

  While I was trying to draw a connection between drum circles, silly somewhat scandalous parties, and the idea of how who your friends are can broaden the idea of what things you can all do together, Cassidy (I think) trapped me into detailing my attire to the Burlesque for Peace show described in an earlier entry, which had been a leather doublet, knee high moccasin boots, and a thong rather than tights. Although completely appropriate for, and complimented at the Burlesque for Peace show, men in thongs are apparently quite far from Champ's experience, and the merry fallout resulting from it might have produced one of the few halfway scandalous things taped throughout the entire experience. So I feel sure anyone attending Thursday will have a good chance of being able to harass me for one of my rare moments of being embarrassed by someone else's nonplussedness.

  Although, I now suspect that, for those women into Midwestern boys as well as the escape of dancing at gay/crossdress clubs, dragging Champ to one some evening could be mighty interesting :-)

• Cotton Club and Steak House - hey, I found a classmate from UT Music :-)

  I'm amazed that I can get dragged into what feels like the middle of bloody nowhere and still turn out to be connected with someone in the band. In this case, it was a brass player from UT Austin Music College in the 1986 timeframe, who knew Susan Harwood and other notables from our time there as music majors. Being an idiot when it comes to names, now I can't remember his, but he turned out to be playing bass in the live music at the Cotton Club.

• Cotton Club and Steak House - two-stepping.

  I'd never two-stepped, as far as I know, and was a bit reluctant to risk tromping anyone's feet until getting a chance to suss out the pattern. Our female camera-handling support staffer offered to assist, but before that occurred Cassidy took up the gauntlet, proving to be a deft and positive guide, despite only having limited familiarity with it herself.

  I'd tag this as probably being both the most surreal and yet most appealing segment of this whole little adventure, for a number of reasons. For me, few things could be more surreal than being in country music bar by choice, even with a cowboy hat premeditated. Add to that having run into a college peer in the band, seeing lots of happy people instead of the meat market I was used to in Austin, catching zero flack over hair or face paint (Champ vehemently underestimated the patrons here, I was less concerned), and then throw in two-stepping personally to country music, and we are now firmly outside of past experience or expectation. As for the appealing part, that should be obvious. I'll just say that Cassidy is a cool chick, fetching, insightful, and with a nice knack for saying the right thing.

• Another long, long car trip

  True or dare was brought up, then forgotten. Our filmmaker happily dreamed of abandoning a group of mutual strangers in a town like Granger with only $50 to get by on, like a twisted little stepchild of Survival instead of a dating game.

  Barbie reminisces about her ordeal of spending an age marooned with her (girl) friend on the side of I-35, out of gas, with a detailed examination of the amount of beer available during the experience. She also expresses her enjoyment of the constrained relationship she has as a bartender with her regular patrons at the bar, and how many of the regulars tend to spend much of the day simply moving from bar to bar, presumably having the same kind of shallow relationship with each barkeep as a substitute for having no other analogue of friend in their lives.

• Diaspora

  Tired and worn, even the late, too late offer of hottubbing went by the wayside. Barbie joked about being filmed drinking Coors by herself on a tailgate. The opportunity to record our final impressions of each other was ditched. In the end, we all simply departed.

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Dread and excitement. The Chemistry 101 staff just called... and our exercise in surreality begins tomorrow afternoon. Wish me luck?

Of course, some confusion on their part, or possibly weather, may delay the filming for a different day. So I may not know one way or another exactly when until mere hours before :-)

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If the pictures aren't cutely nested on the right side of the paragraphs with their caption overhead, then your browser can't handle cascading style sheets. If the pictures have thick black borders, then your gnarly old browser doesn't support PNG transparency. So upgrade already!

So, I get this faintly scandalous e-invitation to the Alamo Drafthouse, which is running another episode of Chemistry 101, which is basically an Austin-specific dating reality show, which in this particular case is showcasing three folks one of whom is my friend Rachel's friend Lisa - Hence the name "LISA GONE WILD!!!" on the e-vite.

Lisa (left) and Rachel (right) at a 1997 party

Now Lisa's an attractive female, so I could see how she'd end up on a reality show - although she's not really the type I go for (her being more than just a little bi notwithstanding). Rachel, on the other hand, is someone I've always found to be exceptionally cool, bright, and hot, as well, but I hadn't had much opportunity to chat with her since med school took her out of Austin. So now the chance to see her after so long, and to meet her also-cool husband Kevin, seemed quite compelling.

So I went.

Lisa asleep at a party in 1997. Cute though.

Seems like a pretty harmless setup right? Go meet a memorable college friend, see her friend (who probably can't even remember you - she drank more back then, she claims) get publicly harassed, howl at the screen a bit in the scandalous spots, and eat and drink the usual lovely things we're used to finding at the Alamo.

Naturally, as I arrive, I recognize nobody for quite some time. Although Ashley, a chemistry-101-ophile of some standing sitting next to me, was fun to talk to, I was feeling a bit despondent at the idea of not getting to visit with the main reason for coming...

They had these little Scantron sheets that make a nice extension of the metaphor of "Chemistry 101". I wrote my order on one: Poultrygeist chicken pesto pizza and a lemonade, yum.

Fortunately Rachel and I did somehow manage to recognize each other after so long, and she and Kevin even left their -huge- group to come up and visit with me for a couple of minutes. I'd sat near the front, but moving back to join them wasn't viable - they'd packed the cinema almost all the way across with friends :-) and sitting with them was out.

Did I mention the little quiz they give you?

But onward with the hearsay about the event. After the film of the last trio of victims is shown, you get to watch a bunch of folks you don't know get drafted through whatever demented mechanism, voting by volume, divination, or other twisted way the staff might devise for find sacrifices for the next, intimately, thoroughly filmed compete-a-date exhibition. Can't argue with being a spectator to that, eh?

It's quite cute, really. The Scantron sheets are supposed to be the answer form for some fourteen questions of incredibly obscure hipness trivia about fashion, wine, designer clothing, make-up products, foreign nation's melon production, geography, STD triage, and other unfathomables. I have to transfer my order to a more generic sheet of paper I hadn't initially noticed so I can apply the Scantron to its natural mission. I feel confident my answers for #1 and #2, and most of the rest are just... frightening. Okay, make that "brutal" instead of "cute".

Lisa baring her ass at a party in 1997

As it turned out in real life, after this mind-warping little quiz, the show itself was hilarious. Lisa, Russ, and Sarah (if I have her name right) get ferried around in a Jaguar to Laser Tag, boozing, Truth Or Dare, and other fine entertainments, while being filmed the entire time. Russ takes the slightly-goofy-but-deliberately-hip approach (which Lisa liked for a while, so it wasn't all that bad), while Sarah plays the conservative reserved type, and Lisa covers her natural wild streak with aplomb. It's funny watching a girl being cool on screen while all her friends in the audience are screaming "slut" with enthusiasm from the audience - right beside her.

Alcohol turns Russ more transparent, and by the end it looked more likely that Lisa would score with Sarah than anything else, except that Sarah had already backed away from the Truth Or Dare to strip Lisa's underwear and nothing since then had really warmed up the scene yet.

Then we score the evil little quizzes. I get #1 and #2 right, then totally bomb the "Which wine is not the red?" - apparently despite four of the five answers being the correct non-reds, I picked the one red wine. Dammit. I wonder if I'll beat a 3?

After the show, the victims (*ahem*, stars) are pulled up to the front stage for last words, evil suggestions from the audience, and other such closure type items. Only Lisa is actually looking sane and well adjusted at this point, despite probably being the wildest of the three of them in real life. Although Russ does end up kissing my left-hand companion, Ashley, before the end, when she volunteered.

Then the third stage begins, where people are told to stand if they got any significant number of questions right. Apparently one show was won by getting as few as just three right, so at first people scoring at least that are told to stand.

Uh-oh. I did manage to beat three, despite the test having been concocted by evil fashion ninjas from the ninth dimension. Well, at least a lot of other people are standing.

By five though, quite a lot fewer are standing, then by eight or so, it's beginning to look sparse. By nine, there's a debate whether or not the group can be reduced any further and still make quota.

Oh shit. I got ten right.

So, suddenly a bunch of us are on stage with the ringmaster. About four women, the rest of us men.

Oh shit. I know I dropped chunks of pizza on myself while eating... did I get them off?

We're forced to introduce ourselves.

Suddenly I'm reminded I'm not exactly a people person, no matter the years I spent in theatre, no matter the concerts at the UT Performing Arts Center with only two, or even one, other musician, no matter being comfortably naked in front some eight hundred people (a lot of them were naked too, I think). Instead I remember the appallingly low Interpersonal score mentioned in the earlier post, my quiet year or two as a hermit, and the probable existence of pizza on my trousers, no matter how tasty. And technically I haven't brushed my hair since yesterday (about 3 hours ago). Did I mention the ingrown whisker? Aaagh!

The guys are mostly playing the goofy/cool thing Russ started out with. It works pretty well, the crowd seems to like them. I feel cowed. Now, why am I up here again. No, let me rephrase that, why is the crowd suddenly three times louder when I'm introduced?!

Pardon me while I go into shock now.

I hypothesize, that since Rachel and Kevin's whole group saw them get up to come greet me, that I've been adopted. Either that or a lot more people than I thought like long hair, or pizza chunks (no, I got those off), or something. Who knows. I'm still in shock. Being congratulated after the event has shut down by scads of folks who apparently voted for me (apparently some of the women found my lack of goofy refreshing), or according to a few, voted for me twice (is that legal?) is just too inexpressibly weird for words.

This blonde chick wants a lock of my hair?! Oh, what the hell, why not...

Well, if it should indeed happen that I'm mysteriously voted into a dating reality show, I can only hope to acquit myself honorably, or at least entertainingly, because I know that without question, no matter how horribly the actual events pan out...

...Pretty much everybody I know, will know exactly how badly it turns out.

Or how well it turns out. Is optimism like pleading the fifth?

Did I mention some of the other inductees were cute? :-)

Come on, Optimism. ;-)

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As usual, I'm a sucker for a test, and I've been an advocate of the multiple types of intelligence perspective for some time. So when my friend </a></b></a>elissa_carey posted a link to just such a test I had to try it.

Of course, there were the little bits of meta-humor: like posting the results probably supports the low "interpersonal" rating, and that it's been so long since I drew anything (errr... high school?) that I had to run a quick experiment to see if I could perform simple motions of a pencil in loosely-euclidean space. The latter was bemusing enough that I thought I'd post these snapshots of a tiny bottle of saline, one filtered through a cellphone camera, one filtered additionally by whatever passes for my dusty and forlorn ability at drawing - I can tell just by looking that I drew the plaid background by concept rather than by actually looking at it (note the lack of perspective in the drawn plaid), which I find rather interesting by itself.

The test rated my inputs as:

I'm a little disappointed, since I have friends that should definitely outscore these, but the conveniently quick quiz just doesn't have the detail to let them score that high (I'm thinking at least 14 or so for a more representative top end). RMS would probably push the Log/Mat' to around 20, even for a testing method that can distinguish raw ability from training. But the real purpose of this, I think, is to make people more aware of just how broad and varied human abilities actually are, and that's kinda cool :-) It certainly helps to explode the myth that a single kind of intelligence is the sole kind worth valuing, or that two different people could be so trivially and superficially compared as the stereotypical IQ rating would suggest.

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hungry

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Valentine's was an amusing evening at Burlesque for Peace, with my charming, lissome friend Gina (in a cute, largely photon-permeable costume pictured at right), and the ever-delightful company of my friend </a></b></a>sheenaqotj who had brought her own little entourage of consorts.

A reasonably fun event, although beset by outside cold - a big issue considering how little many were wearing :-)

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[	Current Music	|	Bladerunner soundtrack	]

Jennifer's Setup: [...] Chad (AKA DJ RITT) is starting a tribal dance party/ dj thing at headhunters on Mondays. I'm trying to get a group of rabble rousers to dress all in black, with black and white skull makeup on to go do a progressive drinking/ bar hopping party to some of the more stuffier establishments [...]

The Results: Jennifer did Chad's facepaint first the day before, but there was not opportunity to redo it the day of the fateful Tödgesichtwanderung, when all the rest of us were decorated. We're wearing full black clothing - the better to match the bichromatic Zulu Warrior face paint. The warpaint itself is far more disturbing in real life than in the pictures. Many clubs, many startled people - from the warehouse district to Headhunters (8th & Red River), such a darkling group gets a lot of attention.

Trivia: For those into such details, Jennifer the Death Pixie is wearing a stylish deathly black Silicon Graphics cap of Oxygen Death. The mask at the upper left is a digitally manipulated version of one of us in warpaint.

More Info: There is a cache of additional pictures, including those of Chad (the DJ) and Scott (with the 'fro). Target page uses cascading style sheets (CSS) - it'll go hard on you if you're using obsolete browsers - upgrade to Mozilla to fix!

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Ever played Warcraft? Or do you perhaps have a sneaky suspicion that an adorable, fluffy sheep might just be a nuclear ordinance in disguise? Then check out recent happenings in the Stratholme "Ye Olde Petting Zoo & Pub" Newsflash to see just how horribly true your fears really are.

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I found this thought-provoking picture yesterday, having stumbled across a whole website on the obvious topic. Are -your- french kissing skills up to the task? Hehe :-)

Personally, I've always liked deep french kisses, but I have to admit that Cameron, here, could be a challenge... :-)