p1k3::2006/9

Thursday, September 28

note to self.

A splash of red wine turns a perfectly attractive pot of chicken soup the color of well-used dishwater.

(It doesn't do much for the flavor either, but then the soup already tasted like dishwater or I wouldn't have been throwing things in at random.)

2006 September 28 :: read the margins

tuesday, september 26

insectember

flies in the living room stillness
boxelder bugs thick on the screens
sluggish the cold coming nights
drugged and dizzy in the brown grass
grown fat in the web beside the door
frantic and fading these small lives
tempting the fablemakers to speak
but i will have none of it
i am going down to the mailbox
past the anthill and the dumpster
and afterwards i will return to my chair
and my autumn will die off in idleness
while
everything rattles and dreams.

2006 September 26 :: read the margins

Monday, September 25

I felt a sinking in my gut when I saw that Neil Gaiman had a post up titled John M. Ford. Justified, like it tends to be.

I haven't read that much of Ford's work, by volume, but I did read The Last Hot Time a few years ago, and it is a profoundly good little book. Everything I ever saw of his writing on the 'net was evidence of a unique and fascinating mind.

Go and read the Making Light post. He was a hell of a poet, too.

2006 September 25 :: read the margins

Sunday, September 24

Sunday. Clean the house. There's contention over whose turn it is to do the bathroom. Eventually I break down.

Last night I drank wine and played with the computer. Here are some things that bother me about Perl:

1. I really just want multidimensional arrays to not be an annoying hack with weird punctuation. Is that so much? If I wanted to do confusing mental accounting on really simple structures, couldn't I just use C to write my little text mashers? (For bonus points, I want the documentation to stop asserting that this sort of thing is a feature, not a bug, and I should stop wanting it to suck less. Actually, I feel this way about an entire class of things you wish were different in software where the Faithful repeatedly assert that if you just understood, you wouldn't want them to be different. Sometimes this is true, but very often it is a sign that you're supposed to shut up and drink your Kool-Aid.)
2. Brackets. I may be an occasional user, but after this many years I'm pretty sure I shouldn't still forget which punctuation I'm supposed to use to access a given list/hash/whatever value.

2006 September 24 :: read the margins

Friday, September 8

Eventually, text.

2006 September 8 :: read the margins

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