it simply isn’t clear enough to new visitors, and is built around a busy-ness that has passed.
Excuse the lack of updates, please, and excuse the updates until they settle, too.
Oh, and I’m supposed to start writing another new novel on Monday, so we’ll see how that goes, and how the time spent on that interferes with time spent on redesigning the site and vice-versa.
Maybe I’ll go sketch some stuff out right now.
Or sleep.
Or masturbate, then sleep.
One of those.
I just noticed that
I have just lost the bulk of my “weekend”, and more than than, without changing the house in which I live, I now find myself in a new sort of restricted environment. Many of the players are the same, but the arrangements are different. Significantly different.
One positive effect is that as we have moved more people up and down and down and down, more of my “stuff” has got its way into this house, and it seems that the more of my stuff there is in use in this place (maybe any place), the more like a comfortable house this house becomes. Today my full couch and additional chair.5 came down the hill, and even without the chair.5 that was already here and the entertainment center switching places to make a proper arrangement, the living room to my right feels infinitely more like a living room than it has in any of the years I have ever known it. More than a decade of trying to be a living room, and a vacuumed floor and a little organised furniture, a little consumerism applied, and all of a sudden it feels *poof* like a living room to me for the first time. It’s nice.
In addition to that, things have been slightly re-arranged in my room, and it feels suddenly more like “my room” than it did before. A little more work to be done, perhaps another bookcase and definitely a chair at the desk just placed in the nook between my bed and the wall beside the door, and it will be … totally different. Before it was just … a room in which my bed was constructed and then surrounded by boxes and messes of my stuff. That little desk added, a few boxes unpacked or put away, and the whole demeanor of the room had changed. If I could figure out something reasonable to do with my artwork and had bookshelves to deply the closetful of boxes of books and reclaim my closet, it might just feel entirely at home as well.
On the other hand, my grandparents now share the house with us, and my father lives here (sleeping – don’t tell anyone – in a … camper? … out back for now), and … that changes things. No loud music, perhaps not even loud-enough TV (I was so, so happy to be able to watch my TV and movies without having to put subtitles on for fear of being too loud for father), I”m listening to my music via my iPod right now, despite the precise same music being available on the computer I am typing this into, for fear that music from the speakers would disturb sleeping people in the next room. No obscenities, even in jest. A feeling of restriction on the sort of art I produce and/or display. A definite restriction (until the laptop arrives next month, anyway) on the sort of websites I can access on this computer which resides out in a very public space. Psychological (ie: my own damn fault) restrictions on the sort of things I can write – here, in novels, in comics, everywhere – and on how I think and feel. It’s ridiculous, I know, but it’s real for me.
It’s not out of shame. Tonight already I’ve caught myself swearing two rooms away from them and wondering if they could possibly have heard it. I wasn’t ashamed of swearing, I just know they wouldn’t approve and that I don’t want to have to deal with the potential conflicts that not making them as comfortable as possible could have. I’m living here rent-free right now, taking up (perhaps) more than my “fair share” of space with my stuff while my father, whose house this is, sleeps outside in the yard. I am confident that if my grandparents decided I didn’t deserve to live here for one reason or another that they could make life very hard on me. So I try to know what things they would and would not like to see/hear/know about me doing or saying or thinking, and I try to do what I can to stay aligned with their preferences. I don’t think the things I would otherwise do are necessarily “wrong”, just that it is in my best interest to be someone other than myself when I am around my own grandparents. You probably feel the same way, though you don’t live with them, I would guess.
I’m so tired right now. I got up early, went to Pine, moved heavy things most of the day, a lot of loading and unloading, plus drove home from Pine, and… it’s just been a long day and a lot of hard work and stress (With only one major panic attack! Yay for me!), and I’ve got to head to bed.
I’m way behind on my novel for this month. (See BitPass links on the right – I’ve got about 800 more words to re-type and add to that soon, but I was hoping to have another 25k before this “weekend” was over) I’m not particularly looking forward to dealing with the NaNoWriMo “community” this year, either, which translates neatly to my not looking forward to writing a novel next month, either.
But I did get work started on a series of binary encrypted message-T-Shirts this weekend, so I’m a little bit closer to getting something done. And maybe next weekend I can get my teeth fixed. I mean, I’ve had insurance for what, 23 days now? Fuck. That’s one month’s premiums down the drain. Anyone want a brief messahe encoded into binary and hand-painted onto a T-Shirt? Let me know. I’ll have more information on that and my other shirts available soon.
I hope.
I’ve seriously got to get some sleep now.
Night.
Okay, so. Because of the combined problems of I can’t afford to buy MT 3.1 right now and I don’t really want my site covered with hundreds of ads for Levitra, I’ve ‘closed’ every comment on every old entry, everywhere on Modern Evil.
I can’t afford to buy MT right now because I want to buy the new iBook next month, and I’m trying to keep my spending down so I can afford it. Actually, since the new models announced today include a price drop on the model I wanted combined with a speed bump and bigger hard drive, I’m pretty happy with the timing.
But as soon as either A) You guys donate $100+ to ME, or B) I pay off enough of my outstanding debt to cover the iBoox twice over (ie: some time next year, considering Christmas) I’ll go ahead and buy a license for the new version of MT, get it set up, and restrict comments to typekey users. Seriously.
So, yeah. I haven’t rebuilt all the pages yet, so you’ll think you can comment, but then when you try to, it won’t let you. For a little while. I’ll try to find the energy and patience to do that tonight.
I thought it might be handy to go through the debates, carefully listen to what each question was, and make note of whether each candidate responded at all to the question and in the event that they responded to the question, what they said. I have just spent over three hours on the first debate alone, so don’t expect the other three to come soon. I’ve got another ….. what, 18 days until the election? Fine. So here you have it. The relevant parts of the questions (ie: the questions themselves) and the most relevant parts of the answers (and in cases where nothing they said was in response to the question being asked, notation thereof).
Pretty straightforward. I basically assumed you’ve seen or heard the debates here. If you haven’t, you should go to audible.com or iTunes and download the debates for FREE. Double-check that I understood and conveyed the intentions of the messages of the candidates if you like (or if you suspect I have distorted) by getting the actual debate recording and comparing their actual words to what I wrote down. If you want to argue with my analysis, I will expect a time notation in the relevant audio file so we can all go see what was actually said.
I have not tried to make any notation as to whether either candidate’s statements are true or false, just to repeat what they said. If they said some lies and I repeated them here, feel free to comment – though I fully expect you to link to trustable sources that agree with you if you do.
In the text below I have used the following conventions: Questions are in bold, though the moderator’s setup statements are not. The most relevant responses are italicized, the less relevant responses that are still somewhat on the topic of the question are not, (and the responses that are only questionably related to the question are parenthetical.) Where the candidate made no relevant response I have put the phrase “NO RELEVANT RESPONSE” in all caps. I’ve made sure that every time either candidate was given the opportunity to respond, their name appears here on a separate line. This means that you’ll see a lot of “NO RELEVANT RESPONSE”, as their extended discussions often were not relevant to the question being asked. I am also posting a much shorter version of this that only includes the most relevant responses. It is more clear, I think, and it’s there if you’re interested. So, here we go:
Presidential Debate #1, 9/30/2004
Question 1: Do you [Senator Kerry] believe you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another terrorist attack on the United states?
KERRY: Yes I do. (By building international alliances, strengthening our military and intelligence, by going after financing [of terrorists] more authoritatively, by reaching out to the Muslim world, and by isolating radical Muslims.)
BUSH: NO RELEVANT ANSWER
Question 2: Do you believe the election of Senator Kerry on November 2nd would increase the chances of the US being hit by another 9/11-type terrorist attack?
BUSH: (I do not believe Senator Kerry will be elected.) NO RELEVANT ANSWER
KERRY: