hwan.com

For once I have some plans for the weekend. Tomorrow I'll be helping a friend celebrate their birthday, Saturday will be Nuit Blanche and Sunday I'm going to try to catch Ryan North in Queen's Park for The Word On The Street . Will all go well? Or will I find something, yet again, to complain about, perhaps one of those typical Hwan.com sour moods wherein I wallow in a pit of my own self-pity and despair ? Stay tuned!

How is that I've not mentioned Legend of the Galactic Heroes on hwan.com? I'm almost certain that I have, yet I cannot find any reference (but one, from 2005) to them. How odd. I watched the main OVA (110 episodes) over a couple years, and am now getting into the side stories, which I'd neglected for so long. Neglected because knowing how it ended I didn't feel that compelled to see the other stories. Watching them now I again am filled with admiration for this space opera, with its huge cast of characters and complex storyline. It's like seeing an old friend again, one you'd forgotten you'd had. The animation in the side stories seems somewhat improved, and it gives glimpses into relationships, or rather, gives relationships an entirely different air or slant. Aye, in this life we have only one thread we can really follow.. how many paths have we ignored or passed by, or have passed by us? Soon perhaps I will cease to consider those other paths, lest I all...

Quick recap of the past few days: Friday I went to see William Gibson give a reading and informal interview, along with some 300 other sci-fi nerds and geeks. He was there to talk about his new book, but I was mostly there just to see and hear the man up close. It was quite the experience, dampened only ever so slightly by the humidity and heaviness of the air in the church. I went through a brief period wherein I read everything the man was involved in, hungry for more of that Neuromancer-magic. That might be the first book I've read that actually made me melancholy, which I suppose says a lot about the type of books I read. Afterwards I caught up with some other friends for some HD BluRay movie watching: SPL and Planet Earth in this case. We also managed a couple games of EA's NHL 08, which is possibly the best hockey game I've ever played. The animation has taken quite a leap from NHL 07, so that the players now look like they're actually skating, instead of the od...

Eating is so important to me. Hmm, that's not quite how I meant to start this entry, but it is the sentiment I wanted to convey, which is that I love to eat well. Ever since I got out of the hospital, way back whenever it was , I've been starved for good food. I find I can no longer abide tasteless chaff that is so frequently made available. I say this now to give a greater impression, or perhaps more insight into why I did not enjoy my stay in Washington DC as much as I would've liked. Also, I find saying "Washington D.C." to be a little pretentious and pompous ass-sounding. It's just one of those aggravating things about the USA, like their stance on metric versus imperial . Bah! So I'm making some ramen right now, using the microwave. Dangerman actually was the first to show me the alternative method of making instant noodles -- that is, by not cooking them but rather heating up the water and mixing the stuff together after letting it sit. I'm not...

Washington was... well, it was alright. I can't really say that I had a great time, but perhaps I went with the wrong impressions or expectations. I did get to see much of the National mall , and passed by the White House every day, due to the hotel's location. While I didn't take part, I was at the anti-war protests on Saturday. It felt weird to be witness to something you might read on Fox News . The city itself? Uhmm... well... unfortunately I didn't really get a chance to feel it out. Our hotel was right downtown, in the business area right beside the major political buildings and the tourist stuff. I do feel a tinge of regret now, for going -- I missed the rest of the TIFF, including a chance to attend the closing gala and the Polish festival . In turn, when I tried to get home Roncesvalles was still closed off so I ended up taking a taxi. I wanted to drive up to my parent's place to drop off and pick up some stuff before the week started, but it turned out th...

I went to a TIFF Midnight Madness show to see Sukiyaki Western Django, the latest from Takashi Miike (Rekka, Ichi the Killer, Audition, Full Metal Yakuza). Actually, I haven't seen any of his previous work, though after this film I'm curious to see what they're like. Sukiyaki was, well.. like a heavy metal rock video version of Ran , except based on Shakespeare's Henry VI (The War of the Roses) instead of King Lear. It made me laugh, anyway. Oh, and I guess it's also loosely based on Django, the old Italian western. But I hadn't seen it. Buh yeah.. eh, not much else going on that I haven't already mentioned. Maybe I'll bring back a story or two from Washington.

Here's a tip: The next time you buy one of those fruit platters and you end up with leftovers, make sure to consume the strawberries first. With all that humidity in the platter, they mold over within a couple days. Also, if you mistakenly eat one, you can potentially get some sores on the inside of your mouth, including the tongue. Uhm yeah. Ok. Some news -- I'll be in Washington DC for the weekend coming up. I'm looking forward to it, but I will feel bad for my job as we are currently a little short of staff. And it's been pretty busy of late. I actually got quite upset one of the day's last week, and unfortunately some of the stress was vented on one my co-workers, which I still regret. Oh well. I also get that way, irritable and unpleasant, when I haven't eaten. Yeah, I'm one of those people. I need to eat! What else, what else.... Oh yeah, I'm watching "Hikaru No Go", an anime about this 6th grader who talks to the spirit of a great go mas...

I had drinks with friends Sunday night, a fairly informal and small affair. After several beers someone broke out a bottle of Mezcal , that wormed Mexican firewater. Decidely wretched tasting stuff, though I found it had little effect on my state of mind. I also went drinking Friday night, ending up at Sneaky Dee's. I manage to never have a really great time there, though I was with good company. I've been playing more and more with my phone, even though much of the novelty has already worn off. I'm going to see if I can't use its camera functionality more. I am a little annoyed that one cannot turn off the shutter-noise -- that's just dumb. So I like to take some surreptitious pictures now and then. Just leave me in peace! Whoooo! According to VIm, this is my 2000th hwan.com entry! Well how do you like them apples? It does rather seem like I've been talking about myself, to myself, for a very long time now. I had given some thought to quitting hwan.com this yea...

I've been getting my ass kicked lately in StarCraft. Well, it IS 2 versus 3, which is never an easy task, but my team is simply being served and served again. I place much of the blame on the map, "Diablo", which features 5 bases, 1 large group of resources in the middle, and 5 expansion plateaus in a ring on the outside, dividing the 5 bases. The primary problem is that the Protoss players build up heavy defences (Cannons, Reavers, and High Templar) while quickly expanding to their adjacent expansions. If I go ground, I must sacrifice a fair amount of units to simply break into a base. If I go air, it's a 2 vs 3 air race that I have yet to come close to winning. Normally I go heavy ground and can do enough, but the way the map is laid out there are lots of good bottlenecks and choke points preventing a strong ground group from breaking through more than one or two of the opponents. By the time I get to the third, he's amassed a nigh unstoppable force of Carriers....

Ok, so it looks like it (my cellphone) will accept MIDI files, which I guess is something but still bullshit. Good thing I have a large collection of .mid files from my Gravis UltraSound days. Oh, these sound just as bad as they did then. But before the advent of mp3, midi and mod files were what you used to listen to music on your computer. Well, if you were a nerd and had no musical taste to speak of. And no, no-one said anything about a MIDI party .

Wait, you mean to tell me that cellphone providers LOCK the phone so that people cannot, for example, use MP3 files as their ringtones?? That is outrageous! Oh, I am so upset by this, so very upset. I've been fiddling with my new phone and couldn't figure out how to set up new ringtones. Oh what a world, what a world that we should pay for crippled hardware!

Oh man how to describe this one? Certainly my playing of Psychonauts influenced much of the dream's dynamics, wherein I'm on the upper tier of a ziggurat-like building, a shopping mall or something. There are people with me, but none that I can specifically recall. Yeah, you know what? I remember almost nothing at all about this dream. A barbecue. A cola taste-test. Being crammed into a van and driven around the town. Have you seen the new season 2 of The IT Crowd ? The first episode, "The Work Outing", had me in stitches, oh my it was funny. It had little to do with IT, it just a very amusing situation. Oh, I got a new cellphone and switched to Rogers. The Sony Ericsson W200a. I plan to eventually buy a WiFi-enabled phone, but this one should tide me over for now. I like that it's super light. I may need to research how to turn off all of the Rogers swooshes and animations it has. I will say that the transition and acquisition was SUPER easy, the girl at the Rog...