Anybody have Super Nintendo games they’re trying to get rid of? I’m trying to augment my pathetic collection of SNES games. I still play it, and I kick ass. There’s no dual joystick. I am particularly seeking: Mario Kart, NBA Jam, Yoshi’s Cookie. What I really need is to find some old suburban garage sale full of cheap SNES.
Update: Just got NBA Jam Tournament for $8.
With apps are completed, I can now drown myself in an orgy of video gaming, as I promised myself in October.
My current “gaming PC” powercycles itself every other time I boot it, and complains about a corrupt registry file on each successful boot, and it has an overclocked 1.4 Ghz Celeron. I think it’s time for some new hardware. Build vs Buy, the eternal dilemma. Digitaldeals, don’t fail me now.
I still have to pick up a new video card. Some good primers on the current video card affairs: Top PC Video Graphics Cards. And Tom’s Hardware Guide to The $500 Gaming Machine . I’m thinking a NVIDIA GeForce 6600 256MB, aiming for around $100. If you know anything about this bullshit, please chime in. (If NewEgg has permanently assigned a deliveryman to your house, don’t bother; you are a purchasing nutcase, let go of the credit card, god help your company if they ever give you PO carte blanche.)
Also, has anyone else seen the Xbox 360 Call of Duty 2 demos in Best Buy? My god, it’s gorgeous; I nearly spurted in the aisle. Must… game…. immediately.
Oh, heralds angels are a singing: I am done, I am done; application season is over for me. And my wallet is $1,020 lighter.
December? Since when was it December? These apps were supposed to be done three weeks ago. I just re-read the third draft of my personal statement. It sucks suck sucks. I sound like a robot. If my personal statement were a tree, it would be a dull, prattling, idiotic tree. Where’s the life, the vitality, you saucy bastard? I need to spice this shit up. Can I use the word “motherfucker” in my personal statement? Is that allowed? Where’s my list of Personal Statement Do’s and Don’ts? Hm. It’s not listed. Judgement call, I guess. Back to the dungeon; I had to come up for air and to let the steam out.
How many adjectives are there for expressing hunger satiation? “I’m full”, “I’m stuffed”, “I am sated”. That last one is a stretch. Write in the comments if you can think of more. My diversity statement thanks you.
Over the Thankgiving break, some uncles were in town and our family went out to dinner in New York. I greeted my uncle at the restaurant:
Uncle: (Cantonese) <Hello! Long time no see. Has your Chinese ???>
Crab: <Hallo hallo, uncle. What does “??” mean?>
Uncle: “Improve.”
Crab: Oh.
The dash, “—”, takes balls to use. I’m still working my way up proper semicolons. Shrunk & White says to use a dash “to set off an abrupt break or interuption and to announce a long appositive or summary.” When I find out what an “appositive” is, I’ll know I’m ready.
I think if I were to publish an album of English-composition song parodies, I would first go for The Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon”. The chorus writes itself: “comma comma comma comma comma comma medium\ you come and go, you come and go”.
Update: Screw whatever appositives are. I managed to use a dash in my one of my PSs. God only knows if its proper usage. Here’s the clip:
Returning home from the restaurant that night, our uncle offered to take us to enjoy the midnight snack—a bona fide Cantonese tradition— and to eat some skewered rat. Unfortunately, we were too full.
I’ve started writing my personal statements in the Wordpress textarea, cutting and pasting every once in a while into a Word document. Historically, an open blog panel has been much more welcoming to my nouns and vowels than Word has ever been. The blank Word screen is terrifying to me; it dredges up visions of aborted late term papers. (Oh, sinful is he who makes half-hearted abortion puns.)
Anyway, we’re making progress. Hopefully, I can hammer out a diversity statement tonight. It’s going to be short. I’m considering posting it here. My personal statement has finished the first pass. It’s about blogging. God, I’m so pathetic, I know. I also can’t decide if I’m balls enough to include a URL to the old college blog. Must remember to go back and clean up some of the language and self-pitying ethos.
Spectator: “How Do I Get to Brooklyn? Google it!”: a focus piece about Google Maps, a nearly-year old service that throws in a little Columbia-doesn’t-have-it angle at the end for tradition’s sake.
The article mentions Tuft’s Campus Compass , a Google Maps mash-up of on-campus resources. If we had Sundial’s XML format up and running, we could probably mush together a campus map of events. Even then, I’m not convinced how useful it would be. One cares primarily about the event’s date/time and content, not where it is. “On-campus” at Columbia is a small radius, in any case.
Thanksgiving comes and goes. Apps still unfinished. Maggie Superstar is disappointed; she had high hopes for a “good writer like [me].” She cites my early blogging. My new shit doesn’t have the same zing. I feel like an aging musician living in the shadow of a kickass debut album.
I started reading some of the old stuff to glean some inspiration. Here’s my first ever blog post on April 14, 2001:
Greetings. This is my first post. Woohoo! I created this blog to a) provide a forum for my half-finished thoughts and incomplete essay and b) spare my friends of my unbearable introspective moods.
In this blog, I will rant, postulate, examine, emote, and, lastly, whine. If I stumbled upon an enlightening or beautiful thought, I’ll try to explain, elaborate, explore it and its implications. If I find something interesting on the web and it makes me think, I’ll post a link and my resultant thoughts on the subject. If I remember a word that I like a lot, I’ll list it, and use it in several different sentences. I’ll try to adhere to a form of grammar and style, in order to boost my languishing literary skills. If I use another contraction, I will edit it out. This is starting to sound like a constitution of sorts… sheesh. Alright, enough with the preliminaries! On to —
Ah, the youth’s exaltations. I have actually managed to stick to those basic principles. The past contains such gems as on Feb 1, 2001:
I just opened an orange I had saved up, only to find it had gone bad. … I don’t think one could find a more poignent example of an opportunity wasted than in rotten fruit.
And then there is the classic quips and nonsense that is actually thinly-disguised sexual frustration on March 14, 2002:
Twice this week, I’ve heard two different professors use the term “hippie” during a lecture. And both times, everyone giggled. “Hippie” is a funny word. It’s like hearing your professors say “yippay!”
…
Anyway, sometimes I figure it’s better for the rest of the world that I do not have a good singing voice. Because if I did, and you combined it with my charming wit, my powerful charisma, and, of course, my rugged good looks, I would be in quite the situation….. I believe the scientific term is: “vagina abundance.”
What happened? Did the spirit drain from this space? I think I need to cut my blog reading in half, leaving only those that represent unique perspectives, that of lawyers, large sunnyvale/mountainville company evangelists, and celebrities, and link blogs. I’m sick of punditry, my own and others. All the snarkiness out there is tiring and unnecessary.
I also noticed that irregardless of the time, I would always complain how shitty my blog was. So, that universal is comforting.
