Man. I haven't daylogged in about four months, and haven't noded at all in almost that long. To be honest, I think I've kinda fallen out of love with this place, though not for any particular reason I can name. About the only thing I've been doing is keeping the release list updated in the Nintendo DS node (which itself needs a rewrite that I keep planning to do).
My ISP has been extremely finicky the past week or so, and right now I can't connect, so I don't know when I'll actually get to post this. At the moment it's 1:41PM on March 29th.
Coincidence is a funny thing. Yesterday I ran into a friend of mine from high school, a Baha'i immigrant from Iran named Shah. (Actually, he's legally changed his name to an Anglicized "Shaw", though I'm not sure if there's supposed to be any change in pronunciation.) I was at the library and just getting into my car, when I hear somebody call my name. He was parked right next to me and had just arrived. We talked for a while. Sha{h/w} is in a lot of ways in the same boat I am. He's struggling in college; I dropped out. We're both still living with our parents, and he's got more problems on that front than I do. I have no friends to speak of, and neither does he, albeit for entirely different reasons. He's unemployed, and I have a shitty job that I'm apt to lose any week now (which is to say, the company that owns the place is almost certainly shutting it down soon).
Anyway. We exchanged phone numbers and emails, and we might go do something next weekend. What, I don't know. I was never good at figuring out what people in groups are supposed to do. Still, it might be nice to have something approximating a social life.
Let's see, what else. I wrote a short story earlier this month. Actually more of a short short; about 1500 words. I posted it in the writing section of an online forum that I'm active in, which all things considered was probably a bad idea. Some of the comments I got were downright stupid (if earnest), but that's not the issue. When it gets right down to it, I just can't take criticism. I have an overwhelming tendency to take it as a personal attack. So when I started getting such criticisms, knowing that my reaction is almost certainly uncalled for, I would temper my replies, and eventually it just became so wearing that I stopped wanting to read the thread. It wouldn't be so bad were it not for the fact that I do this in real life too.
Some of the comments I got I did acknowledge as good criticism, but frankly I have no enthusiasm for rewriting any of it. The main reason is that about three-quarters of the way through writing it, I realized that the idea behind it was something I'd read before. I'm almost certain it was in a story by Harlan Ellison, probably in one of the four collections of his I read last year. It's not the first time I've had an idea that I thought was totally original and then found out it'd been done, but it's a lot more disheartening when it's a good bet you never came up with the idea on your own anyhow, it's just your brain mining the subconscious.
I had to replace the alternator in my car last week. Three hundred bucks. Worst part is the damned thing is barely worth that much anyway. I'm going to need to replace it soon enough.
I just got one of these newfangled Razr phones. Don't ask me what specific model. It's nice, but even the "low" setting on the volume is far too loud, and though it has a mini-USB port (which doubles as AC), it apparently doesn't have any onboard drivers, so there's no way to transfer your own sounds or images to it. At least, so far as I can tell. I only fiddled with the thing for like 15 minutes.
And now I close with a bit of interesting trivia: The state of Virginia apparently has a "Jefferson Davis Highway". I'm not sure why this surprised me.