Oh, and I did go for a run yesterday. No idea how far I went. I spent about 1/3 of the time running (maybe 1/2), the rest walking, for about 45 minutes. And my legs fucking hurt today. Guess that means my body got a workout. Maybe I'll try again in a day or two.

Meme.

• Post ten of any pictures currently on your hard drive that you think are self-expressive.
• No captions! It must be like we're speaking with images and we have to interpret your visual language just like we have to interpret your words.
• They must already be on your hard drive - no googling or flickr! They have to have been saved to your folders sometime in the past. They must be something you've saved there because it resonated with you for some reason.
• You do not have to answer any questions about any of your pictures if you don't want to. You can make them as mysterious as you like. Or you can explain them away as much as you like.

( pics )

I actually had a really good time at my boss's house. Everybody was Chinese except me. Five kids and six adults. Elaine's mom is really cute and speaks more Mandarin to me than English (good practice for my ears), and there was a couple there who lived in Vietnam (they are Chinese-Vietnamese and own a restaurant on Kingsway) during the war and immigrated away as refugees (in their teens). Hearing their story about what it was like there was really fascinating. I also learned how to say "good night" ("jiu tao") and "goodbye" ("joi gin") in Cantonese, as well as "thank you" ("gam ung", I think?) in Vietnamese.

Even though there's a huge Asian population here, it's still pretty segregated from the rest. I guess the language and cultural barriers are part of it. Anyway, very cool to be immersed in it, the constant switching between languages, and eating different food than what I'm used to, and talking about the old country versus Canada, and how different it is for their kids than it was for them. My boss's mom was in Taiwan while they were occupied by Japan, so she also knows Japanese (but has forgotten most of it).

My boss kept feeding me and feeding me, and sent me home with a buttload of food. She and I have become closer over time (in November it will be two years), and I enjoy working with her (most of the time).

Also, there was a slightly rotund, adorable Pomeranian named Bubbles. Damn, are Poms cute.

Went to the Richmond Night Market with Ranae, Maitland, and Shannon last night. I think it gets more corporate every year. But I did find a Bean Curd Saving Box (bottom left in the pic) which was so lolarious that I had to buy it. Anthropomorphic tofu for the win.

Ranae also got me Kattenmelk from Amsterdam (she and her BF just got back from a trip to France and Amsterdam). When I saw the box, my first thought was that they had milked some cats. But apparently it's low-lactose milk just for kitties. SO FUNNY. Look at that cat on the front. He very seriously and earnestly endorses Kattenmelk.

Tonight I'm going to my boss's house for a barbeque. She's an avid gardener, so I'm looking forward to seeing the garden and her house. And her kids are really nice (they're 12 and 13).

I dreamt last night I was running. I've never been a good runner. I pretty much hate it. But I think I might try to run for a bit today -- I need to get exercise somehow. I expect much pain and suffering.

I got my bike almost exactly two years ago. ( picspam and sentimentality follow )

Both my bikes were stolen from my apartment building. Just discovered it this morning. Am currently on hold with Vancouver Police Department.

Am still kind of in shock/denial. Don't know how the fuck I'm gonna get another bike.

I was on a boat, at any rate. On Friday after beers on Third Beach (for Adam's b-day) with Josh, Mo, Trent and friends, we were riding along the seawall somewhere east of Yaletown when Trent spotted what he was pretty sure was Drew's boat. "Drew!" he called, and Drew called back, "Hello!" So we went and hung out on Drew's boat for a while. People were eating ginormous freshly-trapped crabs, drinking beer, listening to music inside the boat and listening to Drew and his friend play guitar and muted trumpet, respectively, on deck. The view was beautiful and it was just generally a really fantastic fun time.

This weekend I played several more hours of Final Fantasy II (IV for the purists), and read a couple hundred more pages of Quicksilver. In other words, I was fairly sedentary. Quicksilver is pretty awesome so far, although people's (I think specifically trochee?) descriptions of his sex scenes are pretty accurate. They're all mechanical and physiological and overall extremely un-sexy. Sorry Neal, you win at a lot of things, including awkward nerd-sex.

My uncle is on the cover of the Vancouver Sun today, playing trombone.

Anony(nony)mous wrote an amazingly epic HOT six-part Dr. McCoy/Nurse Chapel fic which is so amazingly perfect that it has consumed my brain. I admit that Karl Urban picspams at ontd_startrek may have contributed to my seeking out het fic containing Bones, but honestly I also just kind of stumbled over this one while trawling the kink meme and then spent several hours reading it and falling madly in love with it. The first three parts (one self-contained fic), "Jim Kirk's Limp Dick and Other Obstacles on the Path to Love" are from Chapel's POV, and its sequel, "Jim Kirk Is An Insufferable Idiot and Other Lessons Learned Along the Way," the other three parts, are from Bones's POV. The yin and yang interplay of the two is gorgeous. The author's characterization (read: invention) of Chapel's personality is genius, and Bones and Jim (nu-Trek versions, mind you) are spot-on. READ IT, DAMMIT.

Adam is in Victoria tonight and tomorrow and so I have a date with myself for the night. It's nice to have those once in a while. Tomorrow I have birthday-present shopping to do for a couple people. And then I'm just going to read (maybe at the beach?) alllll day, and it's going to be glorious.

Catch-22 is like a cross between a Marx Brothers movie and M.A.S.H. (the latter of which I assume drew a lot of inspiration from it). Hilarious.

The sky is still a little bit light, tinged greenish. I love that. Time to read Quicksilver till I pass out.

EDIT: OH SWEET MY 1500th ENTRY WAS ABOUT STAR TREK FANFICTION. THAT'S PERFECT ACTUALLY.

I needed new sneakers because my New Balances (M574s for the win, forever) are four years old and are starting to wear out because I wear them almost every day. On ebay I found some sweet green, blue and white ones, which I later discovered are part of a series of convenience-store-themed New Balances. They have 7-11, AMPM, and Family Mart shoes, which are the ones I got. Check it (found this pic on flickr):



Yes that's right. My shoes are convenience-store-themed. I can strut with pride 'cos I'm wearing the colours of 24/7 access to snacks and cigarettes.

The whole limited-edition-sneakers thing so is fucking stupid; an obvious manipulation (it's not like the world is short on dyes, fabrics, or dirt-cheap labour) -- the manufacture of scarcity in order to bolster sneaker-fetishism and collecting. A lot of the shoes look fucking awesome, but I just want shoes with cool colours. Who gives a fuck how rare they are.

The only advantage of buying sneakers overseas is that you can buy small men's sizes (I wear a men's 6.5), because apparently women's tastes don't vary outside of fugly pink, baby blue, or grey.

Fetishistic aside: these are sweet too:

I got Catch-22 on audiobook. Some books are just better to listen to -- I've tried reading this book several times, I can tell the audiobook is going to be a breeze. It's from Books on Tape, and the reader sounds like a 1950s radio announcer, which definitely adds to the listening experience. Thumbs up so far.

I need to buy this shirt:

Critical Mass on Friday was a gong show. If you don't have people with smarts leading the group (especially in June when thousands of people turn out), bad shit goes down. We were bottlenecking and then spreading out way too thin. And we took over the Lions Gate Bridge for at least 30 minutes, which only served to enrage motorists in the extreme. There was also way too much unnecessary hostility and confrontation, on both sides. I hate that people try to provoke drivers. It's retarded.

Adam and I left after a couple hours. During the day I did errands and listened to a lot of Life of Pi. I just finished listening to it this morning. The end is really what makes it such a great book. I ended up really liking it. It's powerful stuff. It would be a good one to discuss in an English class.

My favourite song that Skream played last weekend was his remix of the song "In For the Kill" by La Roux. You can listen to it on Youtube here. It's not really dubsteppy at all -- more trip-hop and then with some drum and bass at the end.

Received the USB-SNES controller adapter in the mail yesterday! Guess what I'm doing this weekend? Adam even got an extra controller when he got the SNES, and it has an extra-long cord. Ka-KOW!

Hanging out with a bunch of ladies at Kim's house last night, I never really realized before just how many crazy rave-camping things there are in the summer. Like Soundwave and Shambala and of course Burning Man and seriously I heard them mention like 10 other parties like that. It would be nice to have lots of money and access to transportation for them all. But I'll settle with just Burning Man this year. In future, we'll see. At least I live in the city so we have dubstep parties here fairly regularly.

Final Fantasy II is like GRINDFEST 1991: ALL GRIND ALL THE TIME. Seriously, so much random battle, not near enough towns or walking around or random silly side-quests. I've also found (at least in this game, the one time I've played it) that after your Dark Knight Cecil dude (who I've named Zuul) becomes a Paladin and you're with those stupid mage twin kids, battle is suddenly way harder. 'Cause you've got three mages -- Tellah the old Jew (I dunno, the name Tellah just sounds really Hebrew to me, or like Tevye maybe?) and then the twins -- so you end up using MP like crazy during battle, and they keep getting hurt so you're casting Cure1 and Cure2 like there's no tomorrow and suddenly you're like totally out of MP and stuck in the middle of a dungeon. Fighters are so much simpler. Give me a bunch of brutes and then one white mage to cast Cure and I'm fine. At least I've got Yang the karate dude. And no Spoony Bard for now -- oy, how annoying is HE?

Quicksilver continues awesome. So does the Life of Pi audiobook (I had no idea what it was about, so every turn of the story is pretty thrilling).

June Critical Mass (bike FRENZY) tonight, Gothtrad tomorrow. YES.

I saw some graffiti this morning that said "Decreasing Property Value."

I was also thinking last night about how it would be funny to "vandalize" buildings by making them prettier. Like, to paint over an old tacky sign on an old business and make a nicer-looking one with the business name. Or to paint pretty embellishments related to the business (flowers on a flower shop, etc).

Also apparently there are a lot of massive tomes in my future (on top of Stephenson). Because my dad lent me a GIANT book on the Punic Wars. And I also kind of want to read The First Man In Rome. Well, Adam tells me to bring books to Burning Man for downtime. I do tend to read a lot when I'm on vacay.

I finished reading The Diamond Age. It was really good, save for the lack of an actual ending. Like I said to sainfoin_fields, Stephenson had everything leading in the right direction and then was like OH I'M TIRED OF WRITING THIS THING, I'LL JUST END IT HERE.

He's still awesome enough that I'm getting hooked on him, though. I started reading Quicksilver yesterday, which so far seems to be a fanfic about Isaac Newton. I am entirely okay with this. Really liking it so far. The fucker is 971 pages and I spent about 3 hours reading it yesterday and I'm like only 100 pages in. So it's gonna be another Anathem / Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - type read. Which I totally love.

Also Adam and I have been playing tons of SNES. Cohen (Adam's roommate) got Final Fantasy II at Salvation Army for 3 bucks. I've been in RPG heaven lately -- I'm like partway through Secret of Mana, Lufia II, AND FFII. Worrrrrrrrrd.

Oh, and the ontd_startrek party post on Sunday was fucking epic. Broke the comment threshold. I wasn't there posting, but I've been trying to just read everything since Monday. I'm still only on like page 85 (of 122) or so. Lots of funny shit.

There's another epic dubstep party this weekend -- Gothtrad is playing. w00t. So, in all, lots of things to be stoked about and look forward to.

Yay, good weekend. I'm kind of braindead today though.

On Friday was our Indian buffet dinner with my boss & co. The food was good, company was good. Her kids are so nice and smart.

Saturday I cleaned house and played Secret of Mana. Then in the evening we went to see Skream at Richard's on Richards, which was super fucking awesome. He played dubstep, but he also played some bassline (which I also really liked). And he played forEVER -- people just kept cheering and he kept playing until something went wrong with the sound system. The whole set was excellent (he played lots of his "hits" which I've heard many times at other parties and on mixes). Taal Mala and Max and Ben Ulis played beforehand. Oh, and Daega Sound System. And Kim and Nicole were there, too. I spent lots of time talking to Kim -- I haven't seen her very much lately and it was good to hang out again.

We went to an afterparty with Kim at the Dollhouse and stuck around till about 4. Michael Red was playing. I think the Skream guy was actually at the party too.

As you may imagine, we slept most of the day yesterday. And I played a bunch of Lufia II, which is a really awesome fun game. I like the puzzles, although some of them are, like, impossible. The story is cute, and the game-play flows really well. Recommended.

I'm about 50 pages from finishing The Diamond Age. I'm also listening to the audiobook of Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Not bad so far. I've got Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson on hold at the library, which I'll pick up today.

I realized I have seen Soul Blazer before. I haven't actually played it, but I do remember watching somebody play it for hours. I think it was Toren, but I can't fully remember.

Tonight Adam and I are going out for Indian buffet dinner with my boss, her kids, and a friend of hers.

Last night I dreamt about Zachary Quinto. There was, like, a possibility that he and I were going to date (!). And he was in some really weird theatrical production (in my head it had something to do with the Shanghai theatre in The Diamond Age).

Secret of Mana is pretty darn good! I played it on the emulator today. It will be even better when I get the SNES controller hooked up to my computer. The store on Fraser and Broadway was no good -- he wanted like $60-$120 dollars for games. No price tags, he just quoted me prices on each game I asked for. Hate.

I am nostalgically listening to Mr. Bungle.

I got a Dreamwidth from florence_craye (THANKS!). I haven't done anything with it yet.

The Star Trek ONTD meetup on Saturday got cancelled/postponed. :( Ah well, I still get to go see Skream, so hell yes to that!

I've been drinking tonnnnnns of (brewed, black, unsweetened) iced tea these days.

I can confirm that the following SNES games suck:

Battletoads (ONE FUCKING ATTACK BUTTON.)
Maximum Carnage (seriously, why did you bother, there are only 17,000 arcade games just like this one)
Killer Instinct (like a bad Mortal Kombat)

Also, Earthworm Jim is too hard and confusing to be good.

We've been playing Mariokart over and over again. Going to the store near Fraser and Broadway tomorrow.

Also I bought the SNES-USB adapter on the internets today.