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The Last Question

Isaac Asimov is widely thought of as one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. This is a story that he has been quoted as favoring above all his other works. It is very short, and I think that once you read it you'll see why it's his favorite. A great deal of it is hopelessly naive, like the notion that in the year 2061 a computer would take up an entire city block, but other elements of his vision of our distant future are mind boggling and more than plausible. I'll just go ahead and say that I got goosebumps when I reached the end of the story. I know that I get goosebumps at times when most people wouldn't, like when the Phantom sings that last long note in "All I Ask of You - Reprise" in Phantom of the Opera, but I think this story warrants them. Seriously, read up. It's short and very good.

loren

I overthink, therefore I overblog...

I want to make a blog, my myspace account is blocked. Here is the location that I have chosen to get my blog fixed now that myspace is inaccessible from my place of work. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the powers that be notice our entire office's bandwidth being sucked up by my new outlet for interweb literary exploits, but until that time, this will do.

A lot of the time, there's stuff going through my head, and I want to talk to someone about it. Until recently, I never talked to anyone about anything. That's changed recently mostly because it had to, or I might have gone postal. Even now, there's times when I feel like I need to communicate, and I don't feel like there's anyone I can talk to. At these times, when I'm overthinking and stressing, I blog. Typing out my thoughts often has the same therapeutic effect for me that venting to a close friend can have, though I am seldom as honest with myself as I probably should be. I also feel as though, even if no one is there listening to what I say immediately, I know that there are people out there who care and who will read it eventually, so I still feel like I'm talking to someone.

Guess what, I made a new song. You should be listening to it by now unless it didn't load properly... It's a total ripoff of an Iron & Wine song called "Faded from the Winter". And by ripoff, I mean, I stole the notes and chord progression from his verse for my verse, but the picking pattern and position on the fretboard are both different, and my chorus chords are different too, so huzzah. I did mention that I'm incapable of original thought right? All I can do is poorly copy other people's work. Most times I don't even realize I'm doing it, and usually I draw from enough and varied sources that you can't tell it's a carbon copy of someone else's work.

Oh, by the way, in this song, I ripoff his (Sam Beam of Iron & Wine) guitar tone and vocalization technique. Which basically means I finger-picked and whisper-sang. Also, the words are just stuff that was going through my head that day, I actually really did fall asleep at work...I'm sure the sleeping and falling down are metaphors for something but I'm honestly not sure what. The harmonies are lacking and the mix is terrible, you'll need to turn up your speakers, and just this once, it actually doesn't sound better in headphones, but whatever. Take it for what it's worth, which isn't much, but at least I'm showing it to people, I've got four or five that I don't want to even put up here.



I guess I'll put the lyrics up here, cuz some of it's kind of hard to understand...I don't annunciate well.



***

At work I fell asleep
And dreamt I was at home
It was...Beautiful

And last night in my sleep
I dreamt you were here with me
You were so...Beautiful

I...fell asleep
Won't you wake me up?
I...fell down
Won't you pick me up?

Sitting all alone
Staring at the phone
Waiting for your call...

What if you don't come?
What if you don't care...
At all?

I...fell asleep
Won't you wake me up?
You...fell down
I can't pick you up...

You came by after all
You built me up so I could
Take the fall...

But tonight as I sleep
I'll dream you're here with me
It'll be...Beautiful...

I...fell asleep
Please don't wake me up
'Cuz in my dreams
I can still feel loved.

I...fell down
Please don't pick me up
'Cuz if I lay here, on this cold ground
I'll never have to fall

Last night in my sleep
I dreamt you were here with me
You were so...Beautiful...


***

There you have it. I think I could probably go on for a significantly longer time than I have as of yet, but I don't think it's advisable for several reasons, not the least of which is that most people probably skipped the majority of this blog as is. I don't blame you for that by the way, it's way too long and whiny.

In closing, I think it'd be a good idea to mention that I MIGHT be thinking about leaving myspace for this site instead. Now, it lacks some features I like a great deal, including blog subscriptions, picture pages, friends, and profile page comments, but I can't access myspace at work anymore, and there's a lot of weirdos on there anyway. You can leave comments on blogs on this site, just like myspace, and I don't mind people e-mailing me instead of using the myspace message system, it's practically the same, especially if you have a web-based e-mail provider, like gmail. While this site lacks most of the social networking features of myspace, I do prefer the blog editing and management interface. Maybe I'll do a mix and match thing...although that doesn't really fix my lack of access to myspace for forty hours a week, and at work is when I usually need to "space" out (haha, see what I did there? little pun...) the most. 8 hours in a cubicle without any interaction with someone other than my coworkers can be....stifling...

Anyway, thanks everyone very much for reading, I appreciate it, and hey, even if you don't read or comment, I still think you did, so I feel better either way. Hooray for me.

loren

Day 2 (with pics!)

ok, this one really will be fairly short, cuz we have to go to bed, and we have to pack up first so that we can get to the show early tomorrow to try out the Wii.

what i will tell you briefly is that, the doors opened at 9:00. we walked in at 9:30 and immediately rushed to the west hall to hold a place in line. now....the sight that met my eyes as i walked the inestimable length of this line cannot be expressed in mere words...at least not in any human tongue. i did catch the experience on digital tape however, so you can all experience it similar to how i did when i show you my precious footage....my precious. needless to say, the wait was over six hours, and i wasn't ready to blow my entire second day at E3 to wait for the Wii. so the plan is to get there before the doors open tomorrow and be at least fairly early in the line....

and now? onto the pics.

i decided that the easiest thing to do was to show you guys my schwag, since i've now taken over 500 pictures of show related stuff, much too much to sort through at the moment. the sheer volume of the goods, free goods i might add, that i have collected on this trip boggle the mind. words however, fail to properly demonstrate this as well, so i took pictures and am now posting them for your veiwing pleasure!

we must naturally start at the beginning, in this case, the carriers for my hoarded wealth, a.k.a. "bags"

next we have the bound items, including a variety of print media. please recall, all the items featured here were free of charge.

(these bad boys i got for winning three mini-tournaments. two were in brain age, and one was a new game called "big brain academy". today i finished thirty calculations in 20.38 seconds.)

moving on, we now come to the final section, "apparel and miscelaneous"

the black one on the left was for winning a game called "fury" coming out from an australian company in '07. it was four on four and vaguely capture the flag-ish, and we won, so we got a shirt.

now my personal favorite...this i got just for playing the game called "fury" (see, it's a cool little "f"

ah yes, "good stuff", as they say. and, as they say, that's all i have to say about that.

Shorter than I planned

well, basically i realized i didn't have as much to say that's relevant to you guys as i originally thought i would, primarily because anything i learn is made public before i have a chance to tell you, and secondly because most people don't give a flying rat's hind quarters so....this will be short. also, we had some adventures getting settled into our room. not to mention the traffic, whic , by the way, is insane. literally.

anywho, one of the big selling points at least in my mind about our particular hotel, is the availability of free internet in the room. now the sales reps are not only somewhat less than knowledgeable, but also somewhat misleading concerning the internet access. over the phone i was assured a standard ethernet wall plug, only to find upon arrival that it was in fact wi-fi internet, and shoddy at that. now for me this wasn't a large setback since i happen to have a built in wifi ready internet card. my roommate toby however, is stuck in the era of manacled (what you might call "cabled") internet access. so after a great deal of "futzing" as they say, and tweaking of our internet connections, it was determined that toby could not piggy back his computer's connectino off of mine. so to best buy we went.

best buy yeilded to our ready hands the bountiful fruits known as a "USB wireless adapter". this new-fangled device seems to be able to detect our wireless signal, but utterly incompetent when it comes to locating the ephemeral entity known as the "interweb." long story short, i'm online, toby's not. bummer man.

the rest of our night was spent aquiring sustenance in the form of what you hu-nams refer to as peetza, or so i'm told. filling it was indeed.

now, as i'm sure you've all been waiting with bated breath, on with "the show"

so E3, first impressions? whoa.....

honestly, at once it's better and not as good as i'd expected. it took a little while to really pick up, wen i found the square enix booth particularly was when i began to enter the zen state of mind i had expected from the start. i played somewhere in the double digits of games that aren't out yet in the states, some of which haven't even been announced. ranging from the gritty action of "Dirge of Cerberus" to the incomprehensibly cute dragon quest game centered around slimes, to the artsy interpretation of classic zelda gameplay known as "okami", everything was splendid. my feet are of course sore, but it's so far been well worth it.

i've also been privvy to some exciting new developments in several different gaming worlds, such as the announcement of the new alliance race in the Burning Crusade expansion for WoW (draeni, by the way), a trailer for Halo 3 (which i'm not that excited about...) a few pre-recorded videos of enemy ai and character creation tools being used by lucas arts and in tom clancy's newest rainbow six.

domo arigato mr. roboto. domo arigato mr. roboto

sorry...

oh, i also got a great deal of free "schwag". among the items were several gaming/computer-related magazines, a world of warcraft players guide and binder, a kingdom hearts 2 player's guide, a gametap t-shirt (it was free, come on...) and a hat.

this isn't as exciting as it sounds, but i also one a mini-tournament in brain age, and another similar game that hasn't come out yet called "big brain academy" the brain age contest was simply four people all doing 30 simple arithmetic calculations as fast as they could. i finished in twenty two seconds, the guy who get second place took 33 seconds. apparently the est time of the day was 21 seconds, so i was a little off the mark, but i still won a semi-cool notebook. the other game, big brain academy, seems to use similar mini games to encourage memory and analysis capabilities, but is much less focuesd on hard subjects like reading and arithmetic, but rather on ideas and general principles. the mini game i competed in and won for instance, was a game where two or more objects would be shown on a scale, and based on the information provied you'd have to guess which object weighed the most. at first it was very simple, only two objects, and obiviously whichever was lower was heavier, but then it got strange, with 3 or four scales, and multiple objects on each scale, having to use info from all four to find which one weighed the most. i won that too, again receiving a notebook.

i also waited in line for about a half hour to plya the new super mario brothers, and for waiting i received a carrying case for the ds lite for free. now i have to buy one :P

i also played the new zelda game for the ds, only the multiplayer version, i pllan to try out single player tomorrow. it was actually very fun though, it's basically a game of capture the triforce, where one team is link, and the other is this sort of god character controlling three statues with the touch screen. you draw paths for you statues to patrol, and if they see link they'll chase him down. link can outrun them unless he's carrying a triforce piece. i won that too...

let's move on to some things i did not do. i did not play final fantasy twelve, i did not play the new WoW expansion, i did not play mega man zx, i did not play children of mana or sword of mana, and i did not, i regret to inform you, ,play a Wii. Rest assured my friends, these shall all be remedied tomorrow and the next day. i'm seeing tomorrow as an opportunity to do some more video recording than i did today, all i really recorded today was some performances by the renowned "video game pianist", which was great, although i missed the zelda theme and some mario stuff....bummer.

now, i did not play the wii.....not for lack of trying mind you, it was because they closed the line since so many people were trying to get in....tomorrow i plan to make the nintendo booth my first stop and stay there until i've tried one out. nintendo is one of the only booths with women who are dressed appropriately, all the others etiher have no women at all, or they're dressed as traditional booth babes have become expected to dress, in a word, innapropriately. i respect nintendo for that, it was much more comfortable hanging out at their booth than some of the others...one interesting thing they did for people having to wait in line was....they had people sitting in a booth somewhere on the floor, i don't know where. they were in a white studio with a microphone and a video screen, and a camera on them, which piped their image in realtime out onto a wall of tv screens that the line hugged. so while you were waiting in line, you were talking to realy people, but on a tv screen. they could see you through a camera feed, and hear you with a microphone, and they spoke to you, it was pretty cool. at first i didn't realize it was live, and i was taking pictures of one girl and she started talking to people, it kinda freaked me out.

well, that's about all i've got for now, i wanted to go through the pics i took (about four hundred...) and put some up, but there's simply too many to do that for right now. maybe later, maybe not at all. thanks so much for reading, i'll be talking to you later :)