News You Can Bruise for 2002 February 26

Here are reviews of various Inform utility libraries from Emily Short, who has written many very good games and who had nice things to say about Degeneracy.

This weekend I'm driving down to Bakersfield for yet another relative wedding. This time it's my uncle Garry.

I never mentioned that the last time I was in Bakersfield (for Christmas) I took Sumana on a tour of Arvin, where I grew up, and also showed her the house way out in the grape fields where I used to live. That house is apparently now owned by one of Rachel's elementary school teachers.

Rachel sent her immediate family an email detailing her current set of plans. As she says, "i seem to have a habit of throwing one complicated life plan out the window every other week in exchange for another, slightly more complicated". She still refuses to have a weblog, but one of the classes she's taking is Bio 30, Human Sexual Behavior, known to the student body as "Dirty 30".

Fourthly in the list of items pertaining in some way to my family, my mother sent me a link to The Sugar Beet, a very funny Mormon satirical newspaper which achieves the ultimate Onion-alike goal of never making you want to click on a link to get more of a particular story.

Sumana gave me a set of hooks that screw into the wall and on which you hang things. I set this up in my room and it works much better than hanging all my shirts on a board outside the bathroom, which is what I had been doing. However, when I'm in bed and it's dark and I'm looking at the mass of overlapping shirts, it resembles a large leathery creature affixed to the wall, like a larger version of the unconvincing flying creatures from the original Star Trek series, or a new AD&D monster: the lurker to the side.

Sumana says that there should be a rap group called "Run DMCA".

I'm the king of rock, there is none higher
Sucka MCs should call me sire
But should not circumvent my copy control mechanism
Lest they face up to a $500,000 fine or up to five years imprisonment for a first offense, and up to a $1,000,000 fine or up to ten years imprisonment for subsequent offenses

On the 25th I undergo the first of two orthodontist appointments dedicated to getting braces on my teeth. The second one will be on the 28th. The braces will stay on for about two years. Once they come off, my teeth will presumably be straight instead of the jumble they are currently. The braces cost about $5500 and they're not covered by my insurance; bleah, but doable, especially on a payment plan.

I'm pretty nervous about getting braces, especially this late in life, but two years is not that long a time, and my bad teeth have really started to bother me; it's not uncommon for me to cut my lip while chewing food, for instance.

Today I accomplished any number of useful real-world things in addition to setting up my braces appointment. One of those things was to order a new debit card because my current one has been partially demagnetized. While doing so I got the address on my debit card fixed so that I could buy stuff online. Having done this, I followed Luther's injunction to "sin boldly" and bought a bunch of stuff from amazon.com (which I really like in all respects other than their patent evilness; the site is more like a Google for physical objects than anything else i've ever seen).

I bought a bunch of books, a CD of Morton Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna, which has haunted me ever since I heard it on KUSC back in the 1900s, and the Diablo II Battle Chest ("Buying proprietary software on amazon.com!" gasped a shocked Sumana), which I purchased because I'm still obsessed with Diablo II even though I don't really have any way to play it once I get it--my current thinking is that the Windows laptop upstairs that Leonard uses might be fast enough to run it.

I'm quite excited about this. I can click on links and cause foolish people to send me packages containing objects! Of course, there is the exchange of money involved, but what good is money if you never spend it?

That was a rhetorical question.