friday, april 28, 2006
Beelzebub is an ampersand today
We’re reading Paradise Lost in Milton class, and I am totally enjoying it because I can visualize it in ASCII. Let me draw you a picture. If Milton played Nethack, he would (hopefully) recognize this as the beginning of Book II, where Satan is debating the state of Hell with his buddies:
-------
/----------/ \---------\
|} A }|
|} & A A ^ }|
|} A & & & }|
|} & & & }|
|} ^ H H }|
|} H & ; ; }|
|} ^ }|
|}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}|
\----------------------------/
I love how Nethack’s lower levels (called Gehennom) owe their entire mythology to this poem. You can’t imagine* how neat it is to see Demogorgon, Beelzebub, Orcus, and Moloch play a part in something I am required to read. My old friends! I met Demogorgon once, horribly; I usually pay off Beelzebub; Orcus killed me a long time ago; I have a very healthy fear of Moloch. Also, Chaos and old Night’s territory? That’s just the Plane of Air. (I’m only at the end of Book II, so I may find more amusing resonances later.)
Not only do I get to try to reconcile the chronologies of Heaven, Hell, the Bible, and Milton — like everyone else does — I get to try to make sense of the poem within the chronology of Nethack, too. But only if I feel like it, which I do.
*Somehow I think there are very few people who have read Paradise Lost after ascending in Nethack.
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tuesday, april 18, 2006
A purple dinosaur watching you
I visited the swings in the Isla Vista park today and it was awesome.
I like Isla Vista; it is a strange little place that I want to think about more. Since it’s mostly made up of students, it violates Jane Jacob’s rule that a good community needs to have people who live there for a long time. We don’t get invested in the community; we don’t begin to own buildings or bring in more sophisticated businesses, so rents are high, housing is bad, and there are a zillion weird little independent restaurants and shops. I like it, but I probably wouldn’t if I had to live there.
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saturday, april 15, 2006
Two thirds times one quarter
I like my odd combination of spring quarter classes:
- African and African-American Travel Narratives
- Evolutionary Medicine
- Language in Society
- Milton’s Major Poetry
- Unix: History, Philosophy, Influence
Ibn Battuta, hookworms, the superstandard language ideology, MILK MEE, and filesystem abstractions? Yay!
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friday, april 07, 2006
No caviar or ramen
My college has a little student lounge with a refrigerator, microwave, student mailboxes, giant reading chairs, and a couple of bulletin boards displaying flyers from two years ago. It is excellent. This is one of the various signs on the refrigerator:
It looks like this inside:
But sadly, all the soups are gone:
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monday, april 03, 2006
Beignet bandits and moldy molds
(Taken by my friend Ashley; I’m on the top left.)
So I skipped down Bourbon Street, wielded a crowbar or two, danced on the stage in a bar while quite sober, stared down black mold and fiberglass, felt aware of being an atheist among religious people, ate biscuits and canned pudding and little else, almost cried several times, slept in a gutted warehouse in the Ninth Ward, talked about boys, shoveled a million pounds of crumbled drywall, emptied floodwater out of a crab-boiling pot, staffed the coffee table at a free store, dragged muddy carpet out of a house, did not eat any meat, rode a free city bus while not sure where I was going, ate countless beignets, traipsed all over the French Quarter, listened to terrible country music, used a sledgehammer to smash walls, helped toss hundreds of cots into a semi, and took two very cold showers.
But mostly I was part of a group of twelve people who gutted two houses in New Orleans and gave some hope to a few people, and I had a crazy amount of fun with a few excellent friends (it would not have been a good trip without them). There were several hundred other people in Light City this week, and several thousand more over the past month or two. I think a lot of people had a good spring break this year.
I got used to the destruction very quickly — it didn’t bother me after a couple days, which was a little disturbing in itself. Looking for the right pictures on Flickr is difficult, though. The area looks like this; this seems somewhat similar to our trip. I may post more of my friends’ pictures later.
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sunday, april 02, 2006
Exit the spot stop
I love taking the train from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles. It is different from riding in a car; the train is slower, more peaceful, and has endless interesting things to see out of the window. At a few of the stops on the way:
