Okay, so a bunch of folks told me I have to read Achewood but as with all things I’m a bit behind… I’m working my way through the archive now, and I have to agree with everyone who’s said that they’d buy the second teeshirt on this strip :)
Author Archives: kirabug
why won’t you be an asshole like i asked you to?
okay. so sometimes i’m not mentally healthy. stress buildup mostly. and usually i can let off steam by writing melodrama that would make you puke. i keep at least one or two tragedies going at any given time for such a purpose.
and i’m in one of those moods right now – too much everything for my puny self to handle, so i’ve turned back to this sort story i started a while ago. i’ve been looking forward to this one since before school started and now that it’s done it’s time to write some horrible tearjerky thing that will have even me groaning in five years’ time.
but the problem – okay, it’s about a guy who falls in love with this girl, but she’s going out with someone else, and that someone else breaks her heart so she’s really fragile but the first guy, he loves her anyway but he doesn’t know how to show it and he does something incredibly stupid. stupid stupid stupid. unthinking and stupid and tragedy ensues.
but that’s the thing, if he doesn’t do the stupid thing, there’s no plot. and see, i’ve really started to like this guy. he’s a nice guy, if a bit dumb on the relationship end of things, and he really does love her and it’s horrible how they end up and it’s not fair and, well, i don’t want him to do this horrible stupid thing. i like him.
(a quiet part of my brain just chanted, kira’s got a boyfriend, but that’s unfair ’cause that’s a different tragedy altogether.)
anyway, he’s taken on a life of his own, which is okay and all, but i still really need him to do this stupid thing, or I’ve got no climax. No plot. No denouement. (look it up.) Without this, there’s no change in the characters, and believe you me when you see what a stupid thing he does, you’ll know change is necessary. Dammit. I want to yell at him….but something tells me that yelling at the nonexistant people in my head is frowned upon by the sleeping denizens of this household.
Sleep is going to be sketchy tonight. maybe tomorrow i’ll stuff him back in the box.
An Ongoing Debate
Today is a new beginning for someone, just not for me.
This morning, I got up early to drive my sister to school. It’s the first day of 11th grade and her schedule is a total mess, so she wanted to beat the crowds to the counselor’s door.
It’s a strange feeling to drive the old roads on the first day of school. I’m out of high school eleven years now. The building hasn’t changed on the outside, but the traffic through it (and around it!) is not the same traffic that greeted me. It’s a different world there, and I’m a different person.
It’s easier to notice how much things change when you’re in school. Every year is a new start, and a new chance to make your mark. Entering tenth grade (the first year of high school in our district), you’re terrified, but entering eleventh, those fears are gone. Entering twelfth, you’re terrified to leave and anxious to get out all at the same time. College flows the same way; your life is delineated by semeter and roommate and building. You know when each year has passed. You know (if you have time to stop and think about it) how much you’ve changed from one year to the next.
Once that routine is broken, it’s not so easy to tick off the changes. I measure my time by the movement from one cubicle to the next, by the change in supervisors and the change in responsibilities. Without the seasonal terror of a fresh start, one day runs into another, and one year starts to feel much like the next.
I wanted to stop this morning, point out the sites that were important when I was an eleventh grader. Here’s the tennis courts where I got cut from the team. There’s the house where we hung out after school sometimes. There’s where the pay phone I used to call Dad to get a ride home was tucked in at the end of the band hall. There’s where the science teacher lived, there’s where the twins lived, there’s the pizza shop that was a gas station that used to sell smokes to the kids when the truant officer wasn’t around.
But the fact of the matter is that it’s not my junior year, it’s hers. She’s got her own demons to chase and her own memories to forge. And I have trainees to teach, special projects to complete, and a routine to maintain so that each day can continue to blur into the next.
Yep, I named one of them.
An Introduction to Science, the Kansas Way.
The Kansas Board of Education will soon be voting to determine whether or not Intelligent Design should be taught side-by-side with the theory of evolution in their schools. Obviously, such a decision is highly important, as it affects whether or not science teaching in the United States continues to go to Hell in a handbasket. To whit, I present a excerpt from one of the letters that the Board has received:
I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.
Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.
Take this seriously, please. Go learn more about FSM and Pastafarianism and why we should all address this important educational issue. Science is, as Wikipedia defines it, “Reasoned investigation or study of nature, aimed at finding out the truth. Such an investigation is normally felt to be necessarily methodical, or according to scientific method – a process for evaluating empirical knowledge”. Faith, on the other hand, is “as the affirmation of belief without an ongoing test of evidence, and even despite evidence apparently to the contrary”.
If we’re going to teach our students that science=faith, we might as well choose the stupidest possible faith to set equal to science, because we’re already destroying their ability to reason and think.
Entertainment! Nifty!
So Nighthawk was looking for a natural language interpreter when he came across a site with interactive fiction. Those of you who can actually remember the eighties might know “interactive fiction” better as “text adventure games”, though many of the “games” on this site aren’t really games so much as interactive stories. We went through 9:05 and through Photopia — they’re both excellent, you should try them. But you have to run/install stuff to get them to work, so you probably won’t be able to check these out at work.