Stuff and Nonsense.
Hi everybody, remember me? It's been a wacky two months. Some thoughts:

-So I'm giving You Could Have It So Much Better a better listen than I usually do, and it strikes me as an odd mixture. Byrds meet Doors meet eurotrash. And some other more recent influences. I'm very sketchy on those.

-The CTA is scheduled to get worse in less than a month, which is especially disconcerting due to my needing 2.5 hours to reach the Double Door on Saturday, only some of which was my fault.

-I feel strongly that should our society collapse in the foreseeable future, marketing will be heavily involved. Approaching, for example, politics from a perspective of selling product results in an orchestrated effort to deny useful information to the electorate. Which is perhaps problematic. Maybe I'll expand on this sometime.

-Speaking of the Double Door on Saturday, the Go! Team put on a characteristically fantastic performance. They are still best described as "the soundtrack to the happiest day of your life." Lots of new songs, which were all excellent. We saw Ninja coming out of the bathroom. For the 99% of UChicago that hasn't heard of this band: [We Just Won't Be Defeated]

-Sometime I'll write up my September trip to New York and Washington, especially the now infamous "naked in the Bronx" incident. And the only slightly less colorful "escape from Long Island" episode. And the reason I owe the Virginia State Police a favor

-There's also some poems I should put up / finish writing. I'm toying with the idea of a book of "Science Fiction Poetry" as an approach. I think it's an untapped genre. Artificial intelligence stuff like "Branch Prediction" would fit in. Also I keep trying to write songs about post-apocalyptic wastelands.

-Taking Computer Science classes here is somewhat akin to taking a Spanish class where all the lectures are about linguistics, but which still requires weekly papers in Spanish. Which is to say the programming side of things is not very often taught to us, per se, so much as the theory we're expected to implement. Or, as roommate Rob says, "Do you know C?" *Tosses C manual at you* "You now know C."

-Thanks to the requirements of my Computational Linguistics class, I now know Perl. It is casually psychotic, in a functional way.