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Sunday night after Laur. came back from her day at work we were both a bit anxious to get out of the house. My friend The Social Bobcat had given me a ‘Go’ game as a groomsman gift (schweet) and so we decided to give it a, uh, go, at Austin Java on Barton Springs.

Go is one of those ancient games of farthest asia that always seems to attract nerdy computer guys faster than rumours that Jun Kunasagi (if you do any googling for her, it’s probably not going to be safe for work) is washing a car in the parking lot.

sound of a thousand be-Teva’d feet running to the door

The set is very nice, but the instructions left a bit to be desired. The sublime zen nature of Go and the sublime zen nature of engrish left us not entirely sure if we were playing right. The essence of the rules was discerned, but we couldn’t be entirely sure we were doing it right, or seeing the subtelty.

Nevertheless we played, trying to remember rules and then realizing that our relatively glacial rate of play had whiled away the hours to bedtime so we declared the game played and went back home.

I’ve found this very good interactive tutorial and plan on learning some more of the basics.

I’m having an ideabuzz at the moment. What’s an ideabuzz, it’s a feeling that there’s a connection between things ( which spawns an ideabuzz which reminds me of a bit in one of the Dune books by frank herbert where herbert describes a mentat working through a very difficult problem shaking his hands and frothing because he was so close to the final calculation which resolved a very difficult series of unsolubles). An ideabuzz is when you type very fast and you’re not quite sure where the idea is going, but you keep typing very fast. So, i’m having one of those right now about fake things that are meant to be real.

I never much cared for Nathaniel Hawthorne, but there is a story of his called rappacini’s daughter (one of the first best gothic stories ever written) where he writes abotu a man who puts a poison in the lips of his daughter (who is of course, beautiful) and if she kisses someone she’ll kill the kissee.

In any case, there’s a story around that, but see she’s manufactured but natural.

In the end of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Deckard encounters a wild animal ( in this future vision, the animals are all gone: goats, horses, dogs, etc. Those that remain are venerated under the hyper Christianity of that world called “Mercerism”. The wild animal he encounters is a grasshoper, he turns it over and looks at the bottom and realizes that it is in fact a simulation, a machine grasshopper. This has some meaning relative to the previous experiences he went through.

Origami, origami is amazing. I found this page at Discovery and was amazed by this stunning dragon and then i was even more stunned by the origami flower. As amazing as the dragon is, the flower is more amazing because it’s natural, it’s unnatural natural. It’s like Zen gardens, the goal is to mirror the natural ways and assemblages of natural foliage, but to do it in a way with patterns that show human intervention was involved, the natural unnatural as it were.

And that’s a lot of typing without much sorting into a coherent post. Maybe it’ll turn into something more solid later.

Lots of time in life, we have ambitions and things that we would like to have happen.

Lots of time in life, we cannot make those things happen because the environment is not conducive.

It is in times like this that I think about the battle scene of Jedi Qui Gonn Jinn and Darth Maul.

While waiting for a force shield separating himself from his attacker, Jinn kneels calmly, preparing his mind and body for the battle ahead. Maul, on the other hand, works to keep his rage stoked, so that he can attack viciously.

I recommend pooling your mental resources.