September 15, 2009
Since last time, quite a few things have happened. I've moved and now live with four other people, I've started at university studying the English language and Her literature, I've quit my job at the convenience store (KIWI) and gotten a part-time job at a book store (Notabene), and I've broken the pinky on my left hand (I've operated and had my hand in a cast for a few weeks, but the cast is off now). Between the mishap of a broken proximal phalanx and the tumult of moving I've actually worked quite a bit on my web site. In particular I now link to uniformly-formatted versions of the Essays I've collected with a link to its source. I formatted everything almost entirely by hand, which took a while, except that I relied heavily on the spell checker and regular expression capabilities of TextPad. Also, I've added two new essays: An eclipse? It's my kind of magic (Dawkins) and Metacrap (Cory Doctorow) and two short stories, Carcinoma Angels (Norman Spinrad) and Shall the Dust Praise Thee? (Damon Knight).
I've read Dangerous Visions, The God Particle, and Words of Science. I'm planning on reading many more books, and in preparation for that I scanned the covers of all the rest of my books which I haven't yet read, so that I don't have to do that when I've read them.
I linked to two small Flash games, This is the Only Level and Achievement Unlocked, which mercilessly mocks the pointlessness and strange addictiveness of Achievements (for the 360) and Trophies (for the PS3) in lieu of the real game (I have fallen prey to this myself, but am slowly breaking my addiction). I also linked to Doomsday, an emulator for Doom (among other games).