So, I came home after work to find a snail crawling on my mailbox. I felt pretty lucky. Work continues, and I’m actually having some reassurances that I’m doing an okay job. That’s truly thrilling. Pretty soon some of my work will be visible to the world outside of non-disclosure agreements. Roko has decided that she has no realistic choice but to return to Japan, probably as soon as tickets to Tokyo get cheap after New Year’s Day. We’re both trying to be optimistic about our pretty uncertain future. Yes, we have considered getting married, but we agree that it’s not yet time to do that. Anyway, I hope something good will happen.

Here’s the man himself. Shishka, Rayme, Christina, Aaron, and I had an excellent time at the launch party. We played some Halo 2, which feels to me like a less-friendly Timesplitters 2. Shishy and I enjoyed Shirley Temples. We all sat around and talked about Xenogears and Xenosaga. After the festivities, Rayme and Christina and I went back to Shishka’s apartment for games while Shishka himself was helping tear down all the dozens of XBoxes and TVs. Apparently Christina is a Sakura Taisen fan, so we shared some geeky memories. I held my own in a few rounds of Guilty Gear XX#Reload even on the XBox and even though it had been months since I’d played last, mainly because Rayme and Christina had only picked up Guilty Gear recently. All in all it was some of the best fun I’d had in quite a while. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to hang out with geeks of my own flavor. It’s looking more and more like Rayme will probably move in with me once Hiroko leaves the country. I guess that if nothing else, at least I’ll have someone to help me learn OpenGL. Apparently he’s quite well-versed in that arcane stuff.

Here it is, the famous symbol of Seattle. I passed right under it on my way to the Halo 2 private launch party at the Science Fiction Museum. Hm, I guess it’s time to tell you the story of Shishka. Way back in 1998ish, I had just discovered an online comic-art community called [yoU aRe Drawing!][1]. There I met a guy from Alaska, who went by the name of Shishka. For some reason we got along quite well, talked quite often, and sent each other our drawings. He’s one of the main reasons I started playing Xenogears, which became my favorite game of all time. He convinced me to stop buying dubbed Evangelion tapes and to go for the subtitled ones instead; this indirectly led to my interest in the Japanese language, which pretty much shaped the last five years of my life. Now I’m here in Seattle, working a job I always wanted, and I’m kind of in charge of that little yoU aRe Drawing! thing. I hadn’t talked to Shish much in the past couple of years, and was only vaguely aware of his situation. Then, one night, I got one of the weirdest phone calls of my life. A strange voice asked “do you know who this is?” It was Shishka. He’d moved to Seattle, and had visited my apartment that very day, but I wasn’t there. Apparently he’d been in Seattle for a while; he moved here and within 48 hours had a job at the legendary [Bungie][2]. Yeah, the Microsoft-owned guys who released one of the most anticipated games of all time just yesterday. We’ve gotten together a couple of times since then and re-became friends, this time in real life. Anyway, Shishka’s role at Bungie includes being a fan-community relations guy, which means he gets to fly around the country to big LAN parties and conventions and such being a Halo celebrity. The night of Halo 2’s launch, he was to work at the crazy fan event and following private Bungie event. Our long-time mutual online friend Hitomi from California, Shishka’s best buddy Rayme from Alaska, and I, were invited. I drove over to Seattle Center and made my way to the Science Fiction Museum. On the way there I ran into a blackjack dealer who was looking for the same building so that he could deal at some _other_ Microsoft party that was going on at the same time. We looked for the building together, and for some reason he ended up telling me about the Biblical screenplay he’s working on. Whatever. Before going into the place and meeting up with everyone for a raucous good time, I captured this moment. [1]: http://urdrawing.com [2]: http://www.bungie.com

I got renter’s insurance. The terms and conditions read like an outline for the apocalypse.

So. The people in our country voted last week. I think I’ve given up having any political opinion other than that I’m sick of having the rest of the world hate us. I don’t really feel qualified to claim to know what’s best for the country, or what we should do to other countries. Call me when we return to tribal life, the only human cultural system that seems to work.

This monster has been my hobby for the past few weeks. I’m working on a site, which I’ll host from the machine itself, detailing all of the nastiness I had to go through to get it to run a modern operating system, talk to our AirPort Express and the internet, and do all of the other things I wanted it to do.

I couldn’t let this site remain so ugly any longer. Please let me know how this new design suits you. Well, I’ll be surprised if anyone but Ann notices most of the changes, really.

In 1984, Apple had two computers with GUIs: The Macintosh, which has gone on to be the most pleasant computing platform in the world, and the Lisa, which most people have never heard of. The Lisa was even marketed as the “Macintosh XL” for a while, before it was finally canned once and for all so that its little brother the Mac could take center stage. Legend has it that all of the Lisas Apple couldn’t sell are piled up in a landfill somewhere. This photo was taken at the computer museum tucked into the back corner of [RE-PC][1], a treasure trove of nearly-useless computer junk just south of downtown Seattle. For some reason I ended up buying a Power Macintosh 9600/233, circa 1997, from the $20 as-is mystery pile. The adventure to turn this relic into a Mac OS X server/router deserves its own entry, heck, its own site. [1]: http://www.repc.com/