Below are the most recent 8 friends' journal entries.

Saturday, November 7th, 2009
spacelogic	1:51p	party I hate housecleaning. *glares balefully at the embarrassing portions of her bedroom* We're having a party in about ten minutes. We're using the opportunity to wear costumes because we missed trick-or-treating due to 'flu. So Malcolm's a water molecule, Merlin's the Blue Screen of Death (this being a boy who's never used Windows) and Matisse and I are 1950s instructional video characters. Turns out, related to that, that my hair doesn't do pin curls. That's why I'm being the bad example, with wrinkly socks and a stained skirt and a partially-untucked shirt, in contrast to my neat and clean sister. Dad's being Inigo Montoya, and Mum's... Mum. Hopefully pictures will be forthcoming. Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: The Beatles - Nowhere Man (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
spacelogic	10:10p	mannnnn Numbers so far indicate we've lost Maine. Washington looking more promising but too early to tell. My dad came into my room turning the air blue over Maine -- he doesn't swear much, but he was pissed off. Me, I'm just cynical at this point. I switched to Arch, which looks like the right level of minimalism for my main machine -- I'll revisit Gentoo when I've got a vacation to set it up in and/or a shiny new system to break (I want a cheapo computer for playing with, but I feel I shouldn't buy one for a while.) In other news, I'm fed up with casual misogyny in geek circles. Current Mood: depressed (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 1st, 2009
spacelogic	3:13p	confessions of a hacker, pt. 2 I am writing this in links (text-only web browser) just because I can. I have an operational Gentoo system. This makes me semi-elite (I won't be elite until I successfully customize my kernel; right now I'm using a generic one.) Today, I'd like to talk about why I love Linux. Ahem. ( Cut for length; not scary, honest. ) Hacking makes me happy. Disclaimer: see relevant xkcd. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 31st, 2009
spacelogic	5:57p	confessions of a hacker, pt. 1 das_dingsi: Thanks for the card! It helped dispel my gloom today. (Yes, punctuality is evidently not a feature of international mail. But that worked out nice, as it happens, because it's been stressful around here today.) Everybody's grumpy from being sick and cooped up inside -- I think a fierce bad temper is one of the swine flu symptoms they don't list, because it was the first any of us showed and seems to be the longest-lasting. Matisse and Malcolm had a performance today they had to skip out on due to illness and having missed the crucial preparatory lesson, and Matisse got into a bit of a fight with Mum and Dad over that. I fought with Mum and Dad over some completely different stuff, which was trivial but seemed worthy of an all-out brawl at the time. My grandfather told my grandmother the other day that he wants to die, because his quality of life is so bad, and I'm pretty sure that's the biggest thing bothering Mum, who is snappish of late. Dad was grumpy because his computer (or rather, the printer) wasn't working. Meanwhile, I upgraded my distro with unusually destructive results, forcing me to reconfigure a bunch of files and hack up a fix for Firefox, and it installed Pulseaudio, which breaks my sound every time it sneaks past me. So I decided it was about time I did the serious-hacker thing and installed Gentoo. I am writing this from my Mac OS X partition because GRUB is now misconfigured and when I booted OS X to have a bit more ease of Google it wanted to update iTunes and had to download the whole big file. Yep. My mum thinks I'm odd for finding new OS installs therapeutic, but the thing about banging your head against a problem like a misconfigured bootloader is that when you're done, you usually have a properly configured bootloader. It feels a lot better than dealing with my grandfather dying and my still not really registering it or having an emotional response beyond guilt at my indifference. I can hack my bootloader now. Be right back. Current Mood: geeky (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 30th, 2009
spacelogic	4:32p	fuck Just got word that Gavin Newsom's withdrawn from the gubernatorial race. I actually did scream "NO." Several times. I may cry later. Current Mood: crushed (1 Comment |Comment on this)
spacelogic	1:37p	*sighs* I hate to quote Arnold here, but dear administration bigwigs, FUCK YOU. [Further obscenities removed]. You're splitting hairs and BSing outrageously to justify a law that violates the full faith clause of the constitution and the spirit of the idea of states' rights, not to mention the right to equal protection under the law. It's disgusting. And now, a few key points about rights and freedoms: 1) Rights and freedoms are not granted. They belong to you whether or not society and the government recognize them. They cannot be taken away from you. To attempt to deny you the exercise of them is morally wrong. 2) Rights and freedoms are not earned. They belong to everyone, regardless of that person's level of morality, criminal status, or any other factor. Nobody is so low that they do not have rights. 3) Rights and freedoms have no meaning if they cannot practically be exercised. If a resource -- education, clean water, shelter, transportation, electricity, gainful employment, medical care, what-have-you -- that is vital to life, decent quality of life, or opportunity is prohibitively difficult to get, that is a violation of the basic rights of the people affected. This includes things being too expensive, not disabled-accessible, remotely located, etc. 4) No right or freedom extends to violating other people's rights or freedoms. Your right to free expression doesn't mean you can assault people, your right to your beliefs doesn't mean you can have people imprisoned for disagreeing with you, your right to use the public roadway doesn't mean you're allowed to mow people down, etc. This is the only restriction on rights and freedoms that is unquestionable, and that's why people can be imprisoned and otherwise penalized for robbery and assault and other crimes that directly violate the rights of others. Where crimes that don't do that fit in is a stickier question. 5) Rights and freedoms are not limited commodities, which must be denied to some because there aren't enough to go around. 6) Being of higher status than other people is not a right. Rights belong to everyone, remember? Current Mood: angry Current Music: Stevie Wonder - A Time to Love (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
spacelogic	2:09p	so, yeah The thing that sucks about this illness is that I don't feel that bad, except in the mornings, so I feel guilty for not being in class. Then I think about how sick Merlin was, and I think "I can't risk doing that to someone else" and then I wonder if I'm just inventing excuses. But he was pretty much unconscious on the couch for two days, zombie-like and mute when he was awake and vomiting frequently, burning with fever. This is a bizarre illness, because it seems to have hit me and Malcolm very lightly, Matisse more severely (she's almost never sick) and Mum and Merlin worst. Usually, I get it as bad as Mum, and Malcolm is the one who vomits at the drop of a hat. Mum rented some videos to make her feel better. We watched Monsters vs. Aliens (my suggestion; it's actually good!) WALL-E (overhyped in my opinion) and some episodes of Underdog, which Mum insists she loved when she was little ("how little?" Dad asked her, and she said "oh, maybe three" and we believed her because that was so not something we would've ever chosen to watch. I've lost my exposure-to-racist-cartoon-portrayals-of-Asians virginity now -- I mean, I'd seen the WW2 propaganda posters, but I hadn't heard the horrible accents. Oh, and there were "Indians" too, and believe me, those quotation marks do not begin to cover the wrongness here.) Yesterday I picked up the copy of The Ear, the Eye and the Arm I bought on my birthday. It was a remarkable book. Here's the basic outline: the year is 2194, the place Zimbabwe, where three children who are perpetually confined to their parents' mansion to protect them from their father's many enemies sneak out for an adventure, get kidnapped, and end up spending a while enslaved in a former toxic waste dump, living with a group of people who have shut themselves off from the outside world to keep African tradition alive, and nearly being killed by evil interdimensional beings. Er, not at the same time, you understand. Meanwhile, a detective agency made up of three mutants -- the titular Ear, Eye and Arm -- is trying to track them down. It's my favorite genre, the coming-of-age story, set in a setting I'd never seen before. Oh, and it's not-so-subtly feminist, but if I told you much or any of why I'd be spoiling it, because all the Crowning Moments of Feminism are bits where a woman/girl suddenly does something cool when the narrative seemed to be leading up to a man/boy doing it, and they're mostly plot-relevant. Incidentally, another book we got on my birthday was And Tango Makes Three, because Matisse insisted it was our patriotic duty. Sure enough, there's a good reason it was banned -- Merlin read it and soon announced that he wanted to be a penguin when he grew up. I knew it was promoting the penguin agenda! Meanwhile, the world keeps on turning.... Current Mood: aggravated Current Music: Stevie Wonder - A Time to Love (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 26th, 2009
spacelogic	10:04a	well, it's here My mum thinks we probably have H1N1 in the house. Merlin's sick as I've ever seen him, I'm having respiratory issues, Matisse isn't awake yet but was snoring (congested-sounding) earlier, and Mum was feeling dizzy last I heard. I'm probably not going anywhere until this is gone, exams notwithstanding. *twitches uncomfortably* Meanwhile, in profoundly weird news, Crash writer Paul Haggis leaves Scientology over Prop 8 support and I'm left trying to understand why the CoS's homophobia didn't register with him sooner. Trying to "cure" queer people isn't exactly pro-gay action. Current Mood: worried (1 Comment |Comment on this)