Heat

The weather has been pretty hot up here in Berkeley. Must be way worse in South Bay. I don't do well in the heat and I do even worse in humidity. At least in California it's mostly just hot. When it's cold you can always wear more, but when it's hot, well there's a limit to how much you can take off. One thing I hate most about the heat is that when it's really hot at night I have trouble sleeping. For instance, the other day I slept on the couch with the door to the balcony open because it was just too darn warm in my room. And by warm it was probably only like 80-85 degrees. When I'm home in the South Bay, it's always much warmer on the second floor even with the window open, so sometimes in the middle of the night, I'll trek downstairs and sleep on the couch. Thankfully it seems to be getting cool again. Sorry for the boring post. Next time I'll talk about ninjas and dinosaurs.

Never in Abelian Years...

Today was the first day of class. For my degree I need eight units in an outside minor, so the plan right now is to do it in the Math department. I know right? Never in a billion years did I think I would take a graduate level math course as a computer science major. But wouldn't you know it, being a computer graphicist requires a decent math background, especially in linear algebra, so I'm taking the advanced matrix computation course. Flying Spaghetti Monster help me. Actually it doesn't seem like it will be too bad... yet.

The course met this morning, but afterward I decided to sit in on differential manifolds. A 2-manifold is a two-dimensional surface that can be embedded in three (or I suppose higher) dimensions, such that the local region around any point on the surface resembles a disk. A 1-manifold is a curve. This is of possible relevance because we often represent an object with its surface boundary in computer graphics, rather than as a volumetric solid.

During the introductory lecture for differential manifolds the professor mentioned that he's had engineers take the course and one even found the course to be so enlightening about what math can be/is, that he switched to the math department. The professor also mentioned that this was an introductory level graduate course. So I thought to myself ok, maybe I can learn something here. Keep in mind I don't have a strong math background. But as soon as he started doing some algebras and defining some vocabulary, like what a "ring" is, I knew I was out of my element. He said that (R, +) is an abelian group. I heard this and I was like what... "a billion groups"? Then he said, if you don't know what abelian means yet, then this course is not for you. And so I proceeded to doodle.

Bummer

James Jean will no longer be doing Fables covers after issue 81. Sad.
http://www.processrecess.com/index.php?uid=B47FAF

Batman Cosbaby

So adorable... cannot... resist. But must... resist. Life... depends on it. Well, not really. In fact, not at all. But still... must... resist.

The Aliens vs Predator ones look cool too. They all look good. Iron Man. Actually the movie ones look better than the Batman ones.

NBA on NBC

One of the best parts of watching USA basketball at the 2008 Beijing Olympics was being able to hear this on TV:


DOO DOO DOOOO DOO DOOO DOOOOOOO DOO DOOOOOOOOO DOO DOO DOOO DOOOOOO DOO DOOO DOOO DOOO DOODOO!!!
DOODOO DOOO DOOO DOO DOOOO DOODOODOO DOOODOOOO DOOODODODODOOODOO DOOOOOOOO!!

Day Man and Night Man

Day Man,
OOOAAAAAAAAUHHHHHHH
Fighter of the Night Man!
OOOAAAAAAAAUHHHHHHH
Champion of the sun
OOOAAAAAAAAAUHHHHHH
You're a master of karate
and friendship for everyone!


This show is awesome.

Night Man

Barf

The weather was quite nice today so I made the trek down to south side for some lunch. A homeless? dude was lying on the bench next to my table outside within the Asian ghetto. As I was eating I kept hearing this splashing sound. Turns out the guy was barfing. Five times. So I left. Yay Berkeley.

Synesthesia

Have you ever asked yourself, what does the color "e" look like, or what does the word "blue" taste like? Me neither. But apparently for some people, that is a sensible question to ask due to synesthesia. Synesthesia is when the stimulation of one sensory perception triggers an involuntary reaction of another sense. This is also known as cross-sensory perception.

The most common (or maybe the most well-studied) form of this is Grapheme, which is the association of color with letters or numbers. Imagine reading text and it's like reading alphabet color magnets. The effect is typically triggered when the letters are recognized. If there is just words in their periphery, then they'll still perceive it as black and white letters, but as soon as they recognize individual letters, they'll perceive color. An upside-down "t" will look normal, but as soon as it's flipped right-side-up or it is recognized as an upside-down "t," then they'll perceive the associated color. Another grad student was telling me about a person who would omit letters or choose odd wording in her writing. This was due to not wanting to use certain letters because she perceived them as ugly colors. I guess that would suck if you perceived the letter "e" as puke green or something.

I wonder what the effect would be if someone with Grapheme could read Chinese. Do different Chinese characters have different colors, or do the components, or maybe there's no effect at all? Other forms of synesthesia include assiocating sounds or syllables with color, and words with taste. The brain is crazy. Let me know if you're a synesthete so I can put you under a microscope and study you.

Mini Reviews (French) - The City of Lost Children, The Dinner Game, Tell No One

The City of Lost Children
This was recommended to me as someone's favorite movie ever. Now, I don't know if this unrealistically raised my expectations, but I didn't like it that much. Visually it was quite rich and interesting, much like a Del Toro movie, and perhaps even more fanciful. The problem I had with the movie was I didn't really empathize with any of the characters and there wasn't really a strong story to anchor around. The basic plot is there's a mad scientist who cannot dream, so he kidnaps children to steal their dreams. Unfortunately, the kids are all terrified and have only nightmares, which the mad scientist cannot use. One of the children who gets kidnapped is the adopted little brother of a circus freak named "One," who is played by Ron Perlman, who played Hellboy in Del Toro's movies. And One, with the help of this adorable pick-pocketing street urchin, aim to save the kid. There are a lot of weird characters, a lot of supposed deaths, but I didn't find the story to be that compelling. I was pretty bored. Another thing I found sorely lacking was the music - literally the lack of music.


The Dinner Game
A coworker of mine recommended this as a real great comedy. It was certainly funny at times, but overall it felt kind of sitcomish with a dash of Ben Stiller painful humor (think all the crap and misfortune he goes through in Meet the Parents). The premise is every week a group of guys have this dinner game of idiots. Each person is supposed to bring an idiot to the party and they get them to talk about themselves and just be nice to them. Afterwards, they pick the one they find most idiotic and invite him back to spend a night to ridicule him. That's somewhat of a setup - we never actually get to see a dinner game. The main character invites this guy who builds models out of matchsticks thinking he's the king of idiots. Unfortunately the main character injures his back and cannot make the dinner, all the while his wife threatens to run out on him. He's stick with the "idiot" who he enlists to help save his marriage. Well, hilarity ensues, if you enjoy watching the guy fall into misfortune after misfortune, because the idiot really is an idiot. I laughed out loud a few times, but mostly I just kept groaning at the stupidity of the characters. It had somewhat of a sitcom feel, partly due to the entire movie almost takes place in just the apartment. I could imagine the laugh track going off at each setback for the main character. Even the ending felt like the end of an episode of an old sitcom, where the last frame would freeze while the cheery theme music would play.


Tell No One
I'll leave off on a good note. I enjoyed this one a lot. It's a very good French thriller, with a protagonist named Alex who looks a lot like a younger Dustin Hoffman. The setup is that Alex and his wife Margot go skinny dipping in a lake. As Margot leaves the dock after a quarrel, she lets out a scream. Alex tries to swim to shore, but before he can make it out of the water, he gets knocked unconscious. Sadly, Margot has been killed. Or has she? Fast forward eight years and Alex receives a mysterious video in which Margot is seemingly still alive. Now, Alex must uncover the truth, well he doesn't have to, but he really really wants to. DUN DUN DUN. It was a good ride, where a lot of seemingly loose ends make its way back to fit nicely in the puzzle. I didn't quite feel the adrenaline rush as I did when I watched, say, Cellular, but the movie certainly kept me engaged. Beyond that I'm not going to say more about the plot because as with all good thrillers, it's better to not know anything more than you need to ahead of time. All you need to know is that I recommend it.

Pearl Milk Tea - Part II

At Berkeley, there are a lot of PMT choices, but most of them are crap. TapEx, Quickly, and Sweetheart all suck. I normally get it from Lotus House, but even theirs is not that great. It tastes a bit powdery. I did recently try the PMT from Mandarin House, located in the Asian Ghetto. The tea was probably the best of the ones I've had in Berkeley. It kinda reminded me of the homemade one I had all those years ago. The pearls unfortunately were largely flavorless, but I will have to try it again. I seldom go to 99 Ranch in El Cerrito, but when I do I always get one from the Ten Ren there. You would think with all the Asian kids around, someone would open a quality pearl tea shop and charge the normal price of $2.50, but no, they get Quickly's 'cause it's cheap, as in cheap and full of suck! (EDIT: Tried Mandarin House again, and it wasn't that great. Maybe I'll try it again when it's less busy. I recently discovered the EmeryBay Public Market and the pearl tea there tasted a bit like Verde's. Not bad.)

The PMT situation in Princeton is even worse. It's been a couple years, so maybe they've improved. I ate at Tiger Noodles quite often, and the PMT there was only good enough to ward off withdrawal. I was so desperate for some good PMT that I once bought a mix from an Asian supermarket. Needless to say it disappointed. It was really bad. For some reason it tasted like peach. Yeah, it tasted fruity! The pearls were surprisingly ok though, so I ended up just adding the leftover pearls to Coke and that worked out pretty well.

So what makes a good pearl milk tea? I'll give you a second to pull out a pad and pencil. You might want to take some notes. Ok, ready? The most important thing is you have to be able to taste the tea. TapEx and Quickly taste more like chocolate milk than anything else. The tea should be sweet of course, but it can't be so sweet you get sick of it or that it overpowers the tea. The pearls should be sweet both on the outside and on the inside. They should be a bit chewy, but not overly so that it becomes abrasive, like Sweetheart's. Well, there you have it, the secret to amazing pearl milk tea - must taste like tea, be kinda sweet, and have sweet, somewhat chewy pearls! Groundbreaking, I know. Haha, sorry, I can't really describe taste so that's the best I can do.

Oh and JK, I don't lay awake at night thinking about pearl milk tea. At night I go to sleep because it's late and I'm tired.

One day I will open the In-N-Out of pearl tea. It will contain a single menu item - "Pearl Milk Tea." But if you're in the know, you can order special items such as a "4x4," which will be four pearl milk teas stacked on top of each other with a single giant straw that will go through all four containers. Or, if you'd like, you can order the pearl milk tea with "fish eggs" if you want the smaller pearls. "Animal style" will also be available, but I don't know why you'd want grilled onions in your tea. And lastly, if you order "bubble tea," the worker will blow soap bubbles in your face, and while you're distracted, punch you in the head.

Pearl Milk Tea - Part I

If you recall, pearl milk tea was on my top five beverages list.

Also goes by the name of boba and bubble tea. I personally prefer the usage of pearl milk tea, or PMT for short. Boba's fine too, when I want to save a syllable. You'll also hear me say "pearl tea," you know, 'cause I'm somewhat lactose intolerant. Bubble tea, however, does not fly with me. Who even coined this term? I hear this the most on the east coast. If someone can enlighten me as to why people call it bubble tea, I'd like to hear your explanation. (Just looked it up. According to Wikipedia, "The word bubble refers to "bubbling," the process by which certain types of bubble tea are made, and not the actual tapioca balls." LAME, the entry for "Pearl milk tea" is redirected to "Bubble tea.") Pearl milk tea is at least the literal translation of its Chinese name, and boba is a phonetic translation of a variation of the name. What is "buoba" anyway? Is that Taiwanese or is it just another Chinese name for it. (EDIT: Haha, apparently it's slang for "big breasts" in Taiwanese.) Oddly enough, the PMT I've had in Taiwan wasn't even that great even though it originated there.

Whenever I order PMT, I always get the regular, plain one. That is how I judge the quality of the entire shop. I don't care how good your green milk tea is. If your PMT sucks, you suck. So where do I like to get my fix? Well, when I'm in South Bay, more often than not I go to Fantasia. They're always speedy and they maintain a strong level of quality. After that I go to Q-Cup and Ten Ren for variety. Yes, I can get tired of Fantasia.

Fantasia is very good, but to nitpick, it tends to be a little too milky and a bit bitter like coffee. I don't drink coffee so I'm only extrapolating the smell of coffee to the taste of it. I prefer my beverages to be thin. I find them more refreshing that way. For example, when I (used to) drink milk, I always drink skim milk - 2% and beyond is kinda gross. I always get pulp free orange juice because bits of pulp is not refreshing, and I am not a fan of smoothies. I've probably alienated all five of my readers in this last paragraph, but let's move on.

My favorite PMT was back when the Ten Ren in Cupertino Village was run by this middle-aged Chinese lady who would make every drink to order. She would even taste the mixture (with a clean spoon!) before deeming it worthy of my taste buds. Sure, it would take a while, but it was worth it. Sometimes when I lay awake at night, I can still taste the tea. At one of my parents' friend's house, the grandma made homemade PMT that was amazing. She could open her own store and blow Fantasia out of the water.

Next: Bad pearl milk tea and the secret to making amazing pearl milk tea.

Runner Ups

The format was different than past years. Previously when registering you would pick out the day you wanted to watch the Electronic Theatre, and I *think* every showing was the same. This year there were like 80 shorts, and you could attend any of the screenings of the competition. Each one would show about 30 shorts, so I wasn't able to watch all of them, but afterwards you could vote for your favorite one. It's odd though, as the 80 shorts didn't seem to be uniformly distributed through the screenings. Anyway, these are some of the other ones I liked:

Oktapodi

I wouldn't be surprised if this one won.

Now Look What You Did - Cigarette


Mauvais Role


Chump and Clump
Official site here with trailer. I can't find a video the whole thing :(.

Our Wonderful Nature

Ok, quick post. Just got back from Siggraph '08 in LA. They have a computer animation competition each year and this was one of my favorite entries (if not THE favorite). There were some other good ones that I'll post as I find them.

Mini Reviews - Ponyo, The Visitor, Heima

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea
To put it lightly, not Miyazaki's best. I couldn't decide if Ponyo was cute or creepy. I mean, she's a fish with a humanoid head and dude, that's creepy. There wasn't much of a story and what little there was just didn't make a whole lot of sense. Nothing is explained. What I did like though, was the animation. I miss traditional animation sometimes, so this was great. I wasn't always a fan of Miyazaki's character designs, but underlying the seemingly childish drawings is an impressive depiction of realistic movement. Pay attention to how much is captured when the mother is cooking or how there are tons of cars moving about in a parking lot in an otherwise banal scene.

There were a lot of little moments in the movie I loved, including all the scenes where Ponyo is discovering little bits about the human world or when Sosuke is communicating with his father in Morse Code. The movie does move a little slowly, but it's the slow and patient scenes that were wonderful. The overall movie, however, was kinda blah.


The Visitor
Liked this one a lot. It's largely a character piece about an elderly man given the inspiration to jump start his life again. I actually don't want to say too much, because I think it's better if you don't know too much about it and are able to watch the movie slowly unfold. It's not that there's a complicated story or anything. In fact, it's really quite simple, but having no prior knowledge about what to expect from the characters makes it a more engaging experience. Anyway, you'll have to accept on blind faith (and the 92% on RT), when I say it's good.


Heima
Not sure if I should even review this, as I didn't stay to watch the whole thing. It's a documentary on Sigur Ros when they went back to Iceland and gave free concerts all over the country for their fans. Mostly it comprised of their performances with mini interviews of the band members. I really like their one song, Hoppipolla, which was used in the Planet Earth trailer, but overall their songs are a little too mellow for me, which is why I didn't sit through to the end. I guess this wasn't much of a review, so it all works out.

Awkward Turtle!

I recently discovered the Awkward Turtle. Luckily it wasn't because of an awkward situation... I think. 'Cause I'm... never awkward. But at least I'll know what to do now when awkward situation arises! AWKWARD TURTLE!!!

Look at it, it's so awkward with its two flappy legs



But it doesn't stop there. No sir. Apparently, according to some other interns, there are many more awkward animals! Like, the Awkward Turkey.

Here are two awkward animals in their natural habitat, having a grand ol' time.



The Awkward Turkey looks so much like a Turkey it's uncanny. Try it, it's like Thanksgiving whenever you want.

Or, how 'bout the Awk Hawk.

AWK HAWK!!!

It's so silly it's brilliant.

I Remember it Differently

Don't worry about it-
A MAAAAAN'S GOTTA DOOO WHAT A MAAAAN'S GOTTA DOO

Curse you, Dennis. I've been listening to it all day. It's stuck IN MY HEAD.



EDIT: Go to http://www.whedontube.com/ for all three episodes.

The Middleman

"The girls come in, they come out. They talk in groups of varying size. There's no pattern, I don't like it."
"That's because they're sorority girls not Soviet spies."



Caught an episode of The Middleman on ABC Family early this week. I was quite tickled by this episode and all of its pop culture references. It certainly worked in their favor that several of those references were from Ghostbusters. The show looks quite cheap, but it didn't hinder my enjoyment. It'll inevitably get canceled, so I'll have to enjoy it while it lasts. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong (the cancellation that is, not my enjoyment of it).

ADD - Reading in Doe Part 2

There's a wall in the magazine room with the latest issues of the more read magazines prominently displayed. One in particular caught my eye. On the cover it read, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Okay, that was a sensationalist title, but it did get my attention. The piece is actually a general commentary on the Internet. The author is not saying that easy access to a wealth of information is making us stupid, but rather he is speculating that it's altering the way we think.

"Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link."

He's using mostly anecdotal evidence, but what he says largely describes my own experience. He says, "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." I do that too; I tend to constantly skim and scan a large variety of things, always ready to move on to the next item. My attention constantly shifts and I'm easily distracted when I'm online.

Anyway the article is pretty long and he goes on to talk about how the brain can remap itself and the all encompassing-ness of the Internet. He eventually gets to the evolution of information, like how Socrates was hating on the development of the written language, but it all worked out in the end or something. I don't really know as I only skimmed it. He should know better than to write such a long article.

Chinglish - Reading in Doe Part 1

So the other day I was in Doe Library on the Berkeley campus. There's a magazine room on the second floor, so I thought it would be nice to sit in a big comfy chair reading magazine articles on real life printed pages. One article in Wired I found particularly interesting was about "Chinglish." I'm sure you know what Chinglish is - it's the butchering of the English language by native Chinese speakers.

The article is a month old now, so maybe you've come across it already. The main point of the article is about how English has become so successful (might as well be the universal language), that naturally there are now more nonnative English speakers trying to adopt the language than there are native English speakers, which can lead to a form of English being developed in China that is a completely different dialect than what we speak. Is the world still isolated enough that these different dialects can still pop up? Given Singaporean English aka Singlish, it seems entirely possible. By dialect I don't just mean a different accent. It's already pretty impossible to even get rid of the fob accent, and who cares? There are many many different accents in America alone. What's more interesting is grammatical structure. As the article points out, Chinese and English have very very different forms of grammar. It makes sense that a Chinese speaker would try to formulate sentences in their native structure, much like I will sometimes speak Chinese using an English sentence structure to the bemusement of my parents. And in isolation, the transference of grammatical structure seems possible.

Some of the evidence that they give is horribly translated English, what we traditionally think of as Chinglish. But I don't think Chinese speakers will start to call handicapped bathrooms, "deformed man lavatories." Ok ok fine, I'm sure this was just a funny example to get me to read the article. And it worked.

But I am somewhat skeptical if this type of Chinglish will develop into the same kind of a standard that Singlish is. The goal of learning how to speak English is to communicate with other English speakers or someone who speaks a different language than you do, so there must be some accordance in grammar otherwise there can be a lot of confusion. Then again, English is a needlessly complex language, so maybe some simplification isn't a terrible idea. Let's just do away with verb tenses. I'm not a historian nor a linguist, so who knows what kind of English will develop. I'm certainly not arguing against the possibility as presented in the article. In any case, this got me into thinking about Joss Whedon's Firefly, and how sometimes the characters would spout really horribly pronounced Chinese (usually curses). This was due to Whedon thinking that in the future, with the large amount of Chinese speakers, eventually some of it will become integrated into our every day language, much like French and Latin phrases are and so on.

I will say this though. Using online translators can lead to some awesome translations. Try translating something in English to another language and back. There's a good chance you might receive something vaguely poetic. If I could go back in time I would love to have tried to pass something off like that as poetry in my middle school/high school classes. Or, this might happen:
Bye. I mean, zai jian.

Top Five Beverages

Ok, first real post, and it's a top five list that is in no particular order. Here goes:

1. IBC Root Beer
2. Orange Juice
3. Coca-Cola
4. Pearl Milk Tea
5. Apple Sidra

As you can see, I like soda. I crave its cool, bubbly, refreshing goodness. On a hot, sweltering day, nothing beats a cool can of the good stuff, not even ice cream.

To add some substance to this post, I will talk a little bit about root beer. But don't worry, eventually I will touch on each of the other beverages in future posts. See, like any good writer, I'm already planting the seeds for future topics.

Ok, root beer. I love root beer. I still remember back when I lived in New York and I had my first taste of root beer at a daycare, I thought it was the best thing ever. As it stands now, IBC Root Beer is my favorite. It has always been, dating back to middle school, but it was much more difficult (and expensive) for me to get, so it was actually rare for me to drink it. You might be thinking, it's probably just the glass bottle. Everything tastes better in a glass bottle. Ok yeah, the glass bottle is nice, keeps it cooler I think, than an aluminum can. But no that is not the reason alone.

Let me also mention some other root beers I like. I also like Barq's and A&W. I absolutely hate Mug. It's terrible. Really really terrible. I've largely drank Barq's and A&W all my life. I used to really like Barq's over A&W, because of its carbonation. It certainly seems more carbonated anyway. Eventually though, I grew to prefer A&W, because well, Barq's was just TOO carbonated and coke-like. And I really started to like the sweetness of A&W and how well it went with vanilla ice cream. Now, I'm an old fogey and everything tastes a little bit sweeter. Not the - I love life so everything is sweet kind of sweet. But more the - man, how much sugar is in this, it's TOO SWEET, I'm gonna get diabetes! kind of sweet.

IBC fits nicely between these two. It's nicely carbonated, but not TOO carbonated. It's sweet, but not TOO sweet. It's juuuuust right. It also comes in a glass bottle. And it sure is delicious when combined with ice cream. Now that I have something that resembles an income, I can afford to buy it at Target. So yeah, I always have some IBC in the fridge for when the craving hits.

(I don't claim to be a connoisseur of root beer as I don't go around trying homebrewed stuff. The realm of root beer I live in largely consists of the commercial products.)

Sidenote on root beer floats: Good root beer and cheap ice cream go the best together. The creamier the ice cream, the worse it is. I'm equating classy ice cream to creamy ice cream, and I'm actually not sure if that's a fair comparison. Anyway, point is: you don't need good ice cream to make a good float.

The Beginning

Hello. I'd thought I'd start by giving a little introduction to the birth of this blog on this Sunday evening, August 3rd, 2008. This will be my first foray into the blogosphere. I've never had a Xanga, MySpace page, or whatever it was people used back in the day. Ok, that's not entirely true. I had something that resembled a blog during my second year of undergrad, but that was rather unrefined so I'm not gonna count it. But this one will count, even if this is the only post I ever write. That was largely the barrier for me, whether I could consistently post. By consistent I mean a post of at least once a week, don't want to set the bar TOO high. Blogs tend to start out fairly strong, but then they just sorta taper off, until people I guess simply run out of things to say or just lose interest. So yeah I certainly have things to say now, and I'd imagine things will go fairly well for a month or so, but there are no guarantees, meaning you should savor every delicious word I write.

So what do I have to write about? What can you expect from me? In the short term, I'll probably just talk about random things I like, dislike, maybe give some top five lists, just general things that are not time dependent. In the long term (if there is a long term), this blog will probably degenerate into my thoughts on comic books, television, movies, technology, and current events (ha!). I'm hoping this blog might even be educational at times, but I'll probably be very hand wavy in my explanations so that's a disclaimer right there. Oh, and henceforth, I'll try not to start off my posts with a lie.