Typecatharsis.

So it's 11:28 and I'm sitting here typing. I don't even think I'm going to fix my typoes. you see, back when I first knew Liam, he would have these moments of text-vomiting where he would sit back and write evertyhing that came though his fingers, and I think I'm just going to do that for a moment to see what comes of it. I'm half worried this is going to come out like a Philip Glass opera or something, but I don't have anything to lose by it and if it does work and my mind's cleared of this weird fogginess then hey! I'm a happy camper.

I'm trying not to pause but it's kind of difficult. There's not a lot going on in my head beyond this weird fascination with the phrase, "Okay" - did you know "Okay" is the most-understood word universally? That's pretty neat. I want to say it a lot more then. I very seldom say "Okay" anymore - I always opt for something more exuberant or intellectual. That probably means foreigners can't understand me. If everything were just okay though? I'd be sitting in butter. Okay, okay okay.

I'm running, I'm- no, I don't like that train of thought. I'm sitting here with a tea-lozenge in my mouth. I've been writing a lot of people for hollow occasions and I want to just set b-...sit back and write people for better realsons and mail them tea. The flavor of the week is Green, I'm not typically a huge Green Tea fan but I've grown a little fond of it when pairing it with milk. Feels very weeaboo. It's teaaboo fanfare. Hehehe.

Speaking of fanfare, I was in a mad Touhou rap awhile back. I don't know why I like typing those silly-ass raps, but it's kind of fun. Alon got me on the habit of it a long time ago, and then one night at like, 3:00 AM the next day on no sleep, I was taunted into voice-chat by Shouseiseki and we squared off in a lyrical duel that shook the shingles off the rooves of eeveryone in the room. It was pretty awesome, but I lost. I just did this one with Reimu and after we realized we had no idea who each person was supposed to be playing, we just degraded into spouting garbage about Touhou in general. It was a laugh, but it was pretty awful.

Speaking of things being fun but awful, I got to make a few sprays for someone today. I used to have a huge demand for them back when Team Fortress wasn't free-to-play and everyone wanted to slather their E-faces on walls - to the point that i remember Catherine scolding me for being a pushover and stopping what I was doing in order to make sprays and avatars for people. I'm pretty good at it. I'm not the best - there's some shit that I'm just not patient enough to crop into sprays and there's some things that just stay pixellated no matter how you slice 'em. It's like a shitty jpeg-artifact pizza. I find I'm usuing a lot of profanity in this post - maybe it's true about what they say: people who swear a lot aren't creative enough to think of other things? I could just not have any time to think though. Getting all of this out without pausing is starting to be an ass pain, but it's definitely cathartic, so I see why Liam was so fond of doing it way back when we first met.

Can't pause, can't pause, can't pause, can't pause I have to think of something though, oh shit, I have to think I can't stall out and run out of steam, uhhhh...wait for it wanti, for it wait for it. I've got it,

so I was going to type another recipe today; it was going to be the recipe for a Rut, which has a few meanings. If you Google it, the internet will tell you that a Rut is just a time of the year when Male animals get all sexed-up and such - it's basically male heat. That's not what I was going to write about. Here in America, a Rut is the colloquial term for...Well, I don't reall know. It's a hard thing to name. There's a synonym for it, and it's "Slump", but that doesn't explain what it is any clearer. A Rut is basically a long drawn span of frustrated and general >=|, but it's not depression. It's like when you get Writer's Block, but it's for life.
Liver's block. That sounds like some sort of blood clot. Nevermind. It's basically when you're kind of stewing, and frustrating, and grumpy, and dissatisfied but not depressed or sad.

I've been in a bit of a rut as of late, and only recently have I gotten ahold of it. While trying to write a recipe for a Rut, I realized that it was a really short recipe and it depended mostly on cooking instructions and ultimately, it looked a whole lot like "BOIL WATER," so I didn't write it up like I said I would.

Let me tell you how to make a Rut, so that you can avoid one or at least know when it's coming.

Do something you love for people you don't.

That's how you get in a rut. Do something you love for people you don't.

You'll even momentarily come to resent the thing you love and the people you tolerate over it, probably. I think it might be why I haven't made a Spray in like, a year and a half or some shit. I was probably in a rut over having to make them so often, but now that i've bg- shit the phone rang, I didn't account for this, and it scared me enough to make me leap and mistype. Damn it. Well, like I was saying, I was probably in a rut over having to make sprays so often, but now that I haven't in so long, it's realyl refreshing to crank a few out and marvel at how much better I am in photoshop after some trial and error.

Yesterday my bank, a branch of HSBC, closed its New York branches and began kind of disarming to leave America. I was really saddened by this, and it made me step on this kind of Ayn Rand landmine. If you've never read Atlas Shrugged, it's basically about a world that shackles the economically strong to account for the economically weak and eventually it breeds mediocrity and everyone with talent kind of vanishes, and from there it's more of a cool espionage/political novel but you can see where I was drawing my lines having said all of that. HSBC was the first bank I'd been a client of that really made me feel like I mattered. They were prompt, they were professional, they were hard-assed about giving out information, which while frustrating sometimes was a sure-sign that they were the real deal. They basically said it was too hard to work in America, and that they sold their assets in New York to First Niagara. I was really heartbroken. I felt like the most qualified person for the job just said, "Sorry guys - this is a sinking ship."

It makes me angry, too.

Congress and the House of Representatives? They're not going to hear shit over this. The president however? He's going to get his ears jam-packed full of hatemail and garbled phone-calls. The presidency has become more and more a figurehead to me. I don't know if it's because we don't have any hard-nosed bastards like Ike Eisenhower anymore, or if it's just because Congress has so much clout, but I really wish people would stop being disgruntled over the presidency and start pointing the finger at the Congressional body that's catering to all of these Special Interest Groups, and throwing millions of dollars at corporations that are shackled by misinformed and well-intentioned policies that don't allow them to work. Sure, the money's nice, but it doesn't remove the policies that are hurting business in the first place.

Did you know Barack Obama gave so and so a million dollars to keep them afloat?
Bullshit, buddy, the presidency can't do that without getting approval from the other two branches. He's not the fucking treasurer or some shit.

Anyways. I'm going to digress on that topic. Politics always gets me hot-blooded and for all of my talk, I'm not exactly the most educated guy in the room about it - I've taken an Honors Political Course in Highschool. Granted, I had someone I believe to be the most straight-forward and realistic guy as a professor for it, but it was just that. A Politics Course.

I've paused mentally, and I need to find another strand to pick up. I know it's there, but it's kind of on the ground somewhere, like when you drop a ring in a gravel-patch and you can see it, but you can't really feel it.

I suppose I can talk about like...I don't know. I was going to look for something meta-...Hey, actually, disregard that.

Ever watch a sitcom without its laughtrack? It looks ridiculous, with people standing around waiting for punchlines to garner a laugh. Emanuel, who I admit isn't always my favorite person, and I were chumming it up over coffee this morning and he remarked that the Big Bang Theory was selling fake nerd-humor to an audience that wasn't nerds. I watched a part of it where a guy was lamenting his crummy love-life and his crappy Nintendo Emulator - the Emulator garnered a punchline pause for no real reason. He said, "Us nerds are like, 'Why's that funny? Why doesn't he just download a better emulator?'" and I kind of agreed. Moreover, he followed it up by pointing out that Scrubs doesn't have a laughtrack. They don't remind you when something's funny. I kind of admired that when I saw it in action, and it was such a small detail that, in having watched Scrubs before, I hadn't even noticed the complete lack of "AHAHAHAHHA" between every funny moment. Nope.

Scrubs, which I keep wanting to type as Clerks for some reason, respects your intelligence and leaves you the space to find the funny stuff yourself.

We took a few shots at eachother with "If this was The Big Bang Theory? ___ would have a laughtrack," it was fairly Meta but not enough to make either of us feel too brainy afterwards, I think.

I'm running on nothing again after finishing that diatribe, and worse still, my tea-lozenge is entirely gone now, so I'm getting dry-mouthed as I attempt to keep up with the odd pace with which I'm typing. I don't really like that.

I got into a talk about my childhoo-...I think I've actually told the majority of that story here somewhere or another, I'm not going to touch it twice. I can sort of say that I've been relating a lot of stuff back to my childhood for some reason. Lots of talking about how I presume I established my odd reluctance to accept gifts, and my need for independence.

I'm going to digress now and talk about Soda. I've always been a fan of Soda - preferably very weird soda like Cucumber, or Elderberry, or Malta Goya (whatever flavor that shit is) - and only recently have I broken my casual drinking of it, which has been replaced by tea and water after having swapped msot of my soda-consuption over to Club Soda, which is really nice. If you've got an addiction to bubbles but you're watching your waistline, swap to Club Soda: it gets stains out of fabric, it tastes very refreshing when it's ice-cold, it uh, wait, wait, wait, I forgot where I was going with this. It does something else too. Oh! yeah! It's full of like, calcinates or something that also cure bellyaches.

So it's better for you than traditional soda, it removes stains, and it cures belly-aches. Club Soda is like, the swiss-army beverage. Keep some around.

If you're a fan of cocktails, too, it can be used in some pretty neat stuff.

I've gotten off-track, though. I don't know where i wwwas even going with this soda talk, so I might jsut leave it there.

I've been considering playing video-games a bit more. Emily gave me a good push earlier when she gave me Half-Life, so that I could join her in a famously difficult mod for it called "MasterSword" - I was curious because it has one of those Unarmed routes. Now that i have it, I guess I have an incentive to try it out.

Other quite interesting flavors were "Realm of the Mad God," "Dwarf Fortress," and um...Oh, Arcanum again. You've already heard me gush about Arcanum, but I was on this big Saint Astraea kick, and they have this Knight who pledges Loyalty to you and these white Saint's Robes, and you can actually make it through the entire game without killing anyone, so I was thinking that I could basically go Deus Ex with it and do a piety playthrough as a Saint with no kills.

About the others though. Realm of the Mad God has a Priest -And- and a Paladin class and it's got cheesy 8b-it graphics, which is sort of charming in its own right. However, I have a sneaky sucpicion that evetyone's going to stop playing it after its initial popularity, kind of like Recettear for everyone but Yuugi, who still plays it after i bought him it for his birthday. I kind of like that - not the "Everyone dropping a game," but that Yuugi hasn't dropped Reccetear and Terraria.

As for Dwarf DFortress, I've always kind of had this awkard appreeciation for it. It's got those aformentioned cheesy 8-bit graphics, but it's also got this massive prestige attached to it. It's like the hallmark of Hardcore Gaming. The game of Neckbeards. The Pabst Blue-Ribbon of "Oh shit, people can play this?"

It used to be a hot topic in Maid Army to name Dwarves after all of our friends and then post the ensuing antics as Liam stands in a pit of Lava and just doesn't give a shit and Arzi flips his lid and decides that everyone but Andy is expendable and must die.

Moreover, I've always had this weird appreciation for games where I can pick crops. I grew up - after my RTS and FPS stints - playing Citybuilders. I loved Zeus and Pharaoh, these two City-Builders by Sierra that allowed you to pick what goods you liked. You have no idea how many pomegranates I grew, and how many Sea Urchins I gathered. Looking back, if I could play it again, I think I'd just make my town the most PIOUS CITY ON THE BLOCK.

It'd be like playing Uesugi in Atlantis. Or Egypt.

Gotta think, gotta think, gotta thik- no, I think I'm good. Looking at the clock, it's 1:26 now, and I think I'm going to leave it at this.

My head's feeling much clearer and I think I might make a habit of this in the distant future by following it up with another similar disorganized and lengthy post like this. I'm going to name them "...Wh- damn it, it's so hard to think of a name for these things without pausing to think of a name for these things. I'm going to call them "Uninterrupted"s because that's what they are and that's most certainly the most honest name for them.