Friday Jun 21, 2002

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I'm outta here, folks. Y'all have all been real nice and it was fun meeting you. I think my account will be up a few more days, if anyone for whatever reason wants to contact me. (Use the "Contact" button under my picture, as I won't be checking my page)

Best wishes,

Rod
digdug:
Sorry to see ya go frown
aster:
bye rod...i'll email you. smile

Wednesday Jun 19, 2002

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Lerm de doo. Not sure what to do with myself.

I went with a couple of friends to a "mixer" for "creative professionals", which I'm not, really. I ate free food, which was good; met some "creative professionals" whom I may or may not ever want to see again, which is indifferent; and I got the second-hand brush-off from the cute design student mentioned earlier,...
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Tuesday Jun 18, 2002

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Work has been pretty crappy the past two days, continuing the trend of crappiness from last week. Ever so many tedious, frustrating tasks. All day today, all I wanted to do was go home, and I was dreading having to go to a remedial swimming class. But I went anyway, and was pleasantly surprised to learn that I could still float and do the backstroke,...
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aster:
hey rod! it's pretty admirable that you're taking a remedial swimming class at age 29. i mean, some people would just write it off as one of those things they'll never figure out. good for you!

i thought i would be good at scuba because i like being in water, but in fact, it's not about swimming at all. it's about being comfortable with the tank and the mouth breathing and being so far under the surface. i'm trying to brace myself for the second class, but just my luck--someone told me a horror story today about how they sneezed during their first dive and almost drowned. sigh...
eris:
haha, you really do love stephin merritt! *grin* i am listening to i'm a vampire right now. thanks for posting that link...

i actually once lived a boy named steven merrit and it always made me smile. often in passing i mention him as "steve merrit" and naturally whoever i'm talking to exclaims "you know stephen merritt?" and then i have to remember how funny it all is...

but about the man in the high castle: i say reread it. but if you liked valis (which i didn't - i don't really like his other books in general but especially i dislike the ones after he "found god" or whichever) and you liked it maybe we just have differnt tastes... *grin*

why are you learning to swim? going on a boat trip?

Sunday Jun 16, 2002

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I feel mellow today. I haven't yet got my allowance of "downtime" for the weekend, so after I type this entry, I 'm gonna go veg. I'll just hit the highlights:

-I went to Canyon Lake with my dad and two brothers (they drove in from Houston). We rode around on the boat, and now I have a SEXY farmer tan!

-After that, I did...
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Saturday Jun 15, 2002

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Well well, who's that handsome devil?

I actually went to kinko's and paid $3.60 to scan in a photo and e-mail it to myself. I dint wanna screw with it too much, but I did Photoshop out a big overexposed blob. Can you guess where? Probably so, i'm not exactly a Photoshop wizard.

Anyways, after that I hung out with my friend Sean and played...
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dia:
Rod, my love doll, of course you may designate me as your current crushsmile I think you're intellectual prowess makes YOU the current crush material though. Not to mention your whole general thang... (how's that for pseudo-intellectual jargon?)... and I am most flattered.
aster:
hey rod, nice to see your photo!

engaged, schmengaged...why don't you charm her away from her fiance with some well chosen...uh.......raunchy pick-up lines? god, the things we're learning from the boards.

Friday Jun 14, 2002

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Man -- today was an incredibly hectic, frustrating, tedious day at work. I spent the afternoon staring at a computer screen, correcting documents, and when it was over, fucked if I didn't come right home, log on and spend 2 hours making the SG scene. Then i got up up to walk around the neighborhood, came back home and now here i am again. After...
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VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
aster:
rod--hmm, i've never been a big fan of the zork graphics games. in the ones i played, anyway, it was too easy to die or to make one small mistake that costs you the whole game and forces you to start over. the game i would highly recommend is Grim Fandango. it came out a few years ago, but it's one of my all-time faves. it's based on mexican folklore and the setting is very noir. you play a travel agent in the land of the dead whose job is to get the recently dead on their way to eternal rest. it's fun, and really funny too.

i went to the comic store here to find the latest issue of optic nerve. they were out of it, but i don't want to go back there!! that store drives me completely insane. i already mentioned the $10 entrance fee to look at dirty comics, but they also mark everything up a million percent, AND they offer unpaid "internships"! grrrr, it's just retail for fuck's sake! poor kids.
digdug:
Aster,

Dr_H is pretty funny. It just looks to me that he is probably dislexic. My co-worker is too and he is constantly asking me how to spell things.

Thursday Jun 13, 2002

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Don't think me too flighty, but I started another painting this evening. At work I'd been doodling these little floating blobby wisps that I call "ghosts", and kept imagining them as little cotton-candy-colored things bobbing around in a soupy brown fog. So I decided I had to see what they'd look like on canvas.
The funny thing is, as I was doing the underpainting, I...
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VIEW 5 of 5 COMMENTS
aster:
oh, and re: computer adventure games. YES! i have the infocom games, but as part of a boxed set called "lost treasures of infocom." i've been playing adventure games forever, since the days of atari and the vic20 (remember those scott adams games?). i have some new ones too, like Grim Fandango and The Longest Journey.

there's actually a place online where you can play the old infocom games too: http://infocom.elsewhere.org

and people are still writing these things, although they are called "Interactive Fiction" now. last year i went looking to see if anybody had written anything with "adult" content. what i found was hilarious and fascinating. an "adult" text adventure totally defeats the purpose, of course, because if you're trying to get off, why would you want to play a game where you have to go looking for objects, solve puzzles, etc. tee hee hee!!
digdug:
Man!

You guys are even bigger nurds than me! Except for the Stephen Merritt part. That's cool.

Wednesday Jun 12, 2002

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OK, I changed my mind and decided to write something after all. I've just been putting an undercoat of burnt umber on a little painting I'm starting up. It's only about 7x9 inches, and I started it by just picking up a pencil and drawing a grotesque cartoon character on the canvas. It started out as some sort of creepy monk -- then I put...
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VIEW 5 of 5 COMMENTS
digdug:
I was just trying to sound pretentious.

Why is all of the Tintin paraphanelia so expensive? There is this store in NY and SF, can't remember the name, "something world" or something, anyway, they have all of this really great Tintin stuff and Wallace & Grommit, The Little Prince, I guess mostly European cartoon stuff, but the point is that everything is about 25%-50% more than you would ever wanna pay for the stuff. I did buy a little orange Tintin note pad and I seem to recall a Wallace & Grommit car freshener that I never used, then broke and it proceeded to really leak and stink.

rambleramblerambleramble
aster:
hi rod...maybe i should give tomine another try. i really like his drawing style--and the "stiffness" doesn't bother me so much--but it was the writing that i found a bit bland. i'm really into clowes's stories because they make me laugh, cry, and give me the absolute creeps, too.

i just bought some tintin books in quebec city--cheap! and fun to read. it's a great way to improve one's french. did you know there is an asterix movie out?

Wednesday Jun 12, 2002

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I said I was going to talk about my art projects today, so I will. Not for too long though. I'm feeling tired-ish. (Maybe i should only do this every other day.)

. . .

Nope. Don't feel like writing. I'll do it tomorrow.

Tuesday Jun 11, 2002

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Hi, I'm back. (Thanks to justplainlane for commenting on my first journal entry, by the way)
Tonight I sold 5 boxes of books to Half-Price Books here in town. For most of my life I've been an avid book collector, buying books on impulse a half-dozen at a time, too be read, or half-read, or left unread later. Then I'd sell them and use the...
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dia:
You should give me some tips, Rod. I'm perhaps the world's most insane bibliophile. Not to mention I just snake everything free from the back of the thrift stores at night, duking it out with the Mexicans on huffy's, to find treasures like turn of the century printings of the Prisoner of Zenda, and Original 1st edition Edgar Rice Burroughs books. What I was going to do in college, before time collapsed on me, was become a literary editor, thus I figured it best if I read as much as I could, which I never exactly did, just found myself collecting. Then I took to reselling on half.com and it's not been such a fruitful venture for the amount of work. I'm thinking to get a van, load em all up in some type of order in their milk crates (like section them off into genres) and ask at the doors of different shops what they need. If I feel ambitious I could alphabetize them. I bet if I did this in the city, maybe I could actually get rid of them. I have some incredible books I could never part with, and then some incredible books that other people would love more, and then some really shoddy books that would sell anyways. So. SUGGESTIONS APPRECIATED.

P.S. One of my greatest heartbreaks ever was storing a huge collection of artbooks in a basement, and opening them up to find them waterlogged, and maggot-infested... including some signed by authors and such. Wanted to die. On the spot. Throw myself on the maggot books and light a match.

And TinTin is my favourite comic book as well. Along with Krazy Kat (they put it in a book) and Little Nemo.

Monday Jun 10, 2002

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Hi, I'm a new member! I was torn between writing my first journal entry and making my first message board post tonight; I decided to go with the journal coz it seems less . . . less something. I'm not sure what. Anyway, I'm not even going to say very much because I just totally gave myself eyestrain drawing my profile picture in Photoshop. So,...
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