So, I don't think I've ever mentioned it in much depth, but over the past 7 years or so I've been collecting typewriters.

Seriously. Not really to collect the rarest and bestest machines ever made, but in order to find The One. You know, the one that just sort of fits me perfectly, the sort of thing you could take with you the rest of your life and be happy. Computers are nice, don't get me wrong, but if you really want to compose, there's something nice about having a machine. I think it might be, at least in part, my fascination with machines. It's nice to see the kinetic energy as your thoughts come forth.

At first I was actually sort of nonplussed - it was just like a word processor that made noise. Flash back some 4 years to me, in high school, getting suspended for organizing a war protest, and while I was sitting around in the suspension room I started writing, like ususal, on my SCM Galaxie 12. After a certain point I felt an immersion in the act of typing, which is even better on a good/great machine (I feel the SCM Galaxies fall into the "great" classification pretty comfortably). Whereas with a computer you're constantly focused on the monitor, the typewriter - for me, at least - produces a sensation that the produced words aren't coming through an intermediary. After a period of break-in, I guess you could call it, I end up enjoying what I compose on typewriters more than what I compose in word processors. Could be the mechanical noise blocking interruptions and things... but today, I was out in the park writing a little, and listening to some Debussy as it was approaching sunset, and I saw this big flock of swifts pass by, and I probably would have told you that there was nothing more beautiful in the world... so, well, maybe it's an attitude you have to take.

^{(Sadly enough, in my senior year of high school one of my dumbass friends dropped the Galaxie XII off the back of my car and killed it pretty well, although my parents found a repair shop near the city that did a pretty poor job of fixing it, producing problems that didn't even exist prior to the accident, but in '08 I found a good repair shop, and now it's still kicking around with me. I know Galaxies aren't anything too special, but they're a development of Smith-Corona's badass early designs, and it was my first machine, so I think I'll hang onto it, regardless...)}

As I was saying - I think I'm getting pretty close to having the right typewriter, The One. I've got some contenders: my Olympia SM7, the Smith-Corona Silent, and the SCM Galaxie XII. They're all pretty good, though the Silent needs a bit of TLC - gonna have to check it into the shop before school starts - although it's hard to resist the smooth action of the Smith-Coronas. There is, however, a Royal KMM that I'm dusting off... it's ungodly heavy, but it's really built well.

So, necessarily I come to this question: there are 9 typewriters within 15 feet of my bed, and another 9 in the basement. I only have two hands: which two do I run out of the house with? Let me give you a list:


^{Smith-Corona
Silent
Galaxie XII
Classic 12 (one grey, one green)
Galaxie
Electra 12
Olympia
SM3
SM7
Royal
Sprite
Royalite (plastic body, eeew)
Royalite '65
Safari
Futura 800
KMM
Sears (hey, they're cheap, but at least they're SCM clones)
Citation
Citiaion II
Electric 12}

Enough of this... gotta get back to a typewriter. Still have ideas to process...

Well, I've been busy for the past couple of days. I was working with my x64 install of Ubuntu 9.04... which was nice, until I started to find out just how many of my favorite applications hadn't been ported for 64-bit OS'es yet. In its defense, though, I did like the speed that everything ran at... although the processors seemed to be constantly running at the limit, battery life was abysmal, and it would snow crash/kernel panic all the time. Really didn't want to have to deal with that...

...so I went to the i386 version of 8.04 LTS instead, which wasn't bad, but the brightness control didn't work no matter how hard I tried, which severely limited its usage as a portable computer. That I couldn't have, and after transferring all the files from my old laptop for the second time I was getting bored, so I decided to take the downtime I had to mess around with some different Linux distros that I hadn't tried before.

So, because I like apt and all, I wanted to stay with Debian-based stuff, so obviously I tried Debian 5. It was pretty nice, and even though it didn't have some of the stuff I liked, I could obviously add it later on. In fact, the only thing I didn't really like was having to go though ndiswrapper to get my wireless card working again, which isn't really a headache, but I figured I'd save Debian for later, maybe in a desktop installation.

From there I tried Linux Mint, which is just sort of an optimized Ubuntu variant. I suppose it's nice enough if you can't just go "sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras" on your own, but I was exploring now, so I figured I'd give it a shot. And honestly, I didn't think so much of it once I'd gotten into it: the GUI for the program installer was pretty inefficient, and actually locked up a couple times, and I wasn't impressed by the default configuration of GNOME. It sort of felt like a quasi-KDE environment... which is fine, I suppose, but I use GNOME because I don't care for KDE. Skipped over Mint pretty quickly, actually...

...and then just went to the i386 version of Ubuntu 9.04. Now everything is stable, all my programs have been transferred over, and everything is working well. Feels Good Man^TM.

And I found a copy of Rez at a local Gamestop, which was totally awesome! It's really very cool. I think that if you own a PS2 you should at least see it.

I ENDED UP DOING SOMETHING VAGUELY SENSIBLE AND BOUGHT A NEW LAPTOP YESTERDAY. IT'S AN HP, ONE OF THEIR SMALLER MODELS. SO FAR IT'S BEEN WORKING OUT JUST FINE, ALTHOUGH NOW I'M STARTING TO REMEMBER HOW LONG IT'S BEEN SINCE I'VE ACTUALLY INSTALLED AN OS; GOING THROUGH ALL THE LITTLE PACKAGES I NEED DIDN'T SEEM TO TAKE THIS LONG BEFORE, AND THEN THERE'S THE FACT THAT I DECIDED TO INSTALL THE 64-BIT VERSION OF UBUNTU 9.04, WHICH MAKES IT A BIT MORE DIFFICULT. SOME OF THE 32-BIT PACKAGES ARE HARD ENOUGH TO COME BY. NO XMMS BUILD FOR THIS VERSION EITHER, WHICH MAKES ME SAD. I USED TO USE A LOT OF AMAROK BUT XMMS WAS SORT OF A CHILDHOOD THING FOR ME BECAUSE I ALWAYS REMEMBER USING WINAMP 2 BACK IN THE DAY.

^{FUNNY STORY, WHEN I WAS CONFIGURING EVERYTHING FOR THE NEW UBUNTU INSTALL I MANAGED TO FUCK UP MY PERMISSIONS AND EFFECTIVELY LOCK MYSELF OUT OF THE SUDOERS FILE, AND THIS WAS AFTER I TRANSFERRED ALL MY STUFF OVER FROM THE OTHER LAPTOP. AND I DIDN'T WANT TO HAVE TO REFORMAT AGAIN, SO I ENDED UP CRAWLING THROUGH A ROOT SHELL FOR ABOUT A HALF HOUR BEFORE I FIXED IT. THAT'S THE LAST TIME I FUCK WITH THE USER PERMISSIONS.}

TURNING 21 TOMORROW; MY PARENTS GOT ME A BOTTLE OF RED LABEL. FEELS GOOD MAN. NOW I JUST NEED SOME CIGARS AND A COUPLE AFRICAN NATIONS TO COLONIALIZE AND I'LL BE ALL SET.

ACTUALLY, THERE'S SOME GIN LYING AROUND. MAYBE I SHOULD MAKE GIN AND TONICS AND SAY THAT I'M DOING IT IN ORDER TO STAVE OFF MALARIA.

ALSO, BILLY MAYS IS DEAD.

Going on another Kraftwerk bender right now. At first I just listened to them for a couple songs that I liked (Autobahn and Pocket Calculator, I think...), but now that I've listened to them for a while longer I've really started to get into them. I think the moment came when I started messing around with the KORG DS-10 synthesizer (which is a pretty badass app, if you have a DS) just a few weeks ago, and I got a handle on how exactly electric music is made. Although the rhythms might be a bit more simple and less syncopated, it's a really great feeling to have complete control over every sound that's being produced. I'm not used to this kind of creativity, and it feels really good to play with it.

All this theory is starting to pay off too... which is a nice feeling considering how much it sucked to learn.

<sup>COMING-OF-AGE SIDEBAR HERE: I've got this feeling like I passed some kind of point in my life. I don't know if other people get this kind of feeling, but as if by magic I just feel older. Things I remember from what I'd call my childhood are starting to go into soft focus... little things are chipping off, bit by bit. I suppose that I may not be used to this feeling becasue I've had electronic apparatus/the Internet for most of my life, and the data that I remembered always stayed put, more-or-less. That's certainly not the case with your own memories. Brain chemistry changes, I suppose, and with it goes your entire state of mind. So, I guess I've just about ended my formative years. I think I got some good things out of them - although I probably didn't start out on the right path or with the right intent I think that the sum of the parts ended up yielding a pretty good set of skills/intelligence. Not that I mean to endorse the Hegelian dialectic or anything, but, anyway...

FEELS GOOD MAN</sup>

Currently I'm in this sort of groove where I'm not really producing anything as far as writing is going, but I'm kind of examining my whole procedure, and what I'm trying to produce. I hope that I'm communicating something important with the literature that I compose, because sometimes I'm not really aware that I'm making a greater point. Or should literature even do that?

(This would be a good time for me to formally declare that I consider myself to be a Modernist, if it hadn't become apparent to anyone prior to this. By this I mean that I think that human intelligence/reason are the most important part of humanity, and though these faculties we can devise the principles under which the universe operates, find capital-T Truth, and create the best possible system under which to live, with the best quality of life.)

So, if you want to get in my head right now, read these books in this order:

1. Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, Kaufmann translation
2. Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics
3. Aristotle: Politics
4. McLuhan: War & Peace in the Global Village
5. Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

^{You know, I gave a copy of Wind-Up Bird to my ex a long time ago, and I hadn't read it then. I don't think that she ever read it... but I wish that I'd gotten to it sooner. Murakami's work gives me this feeling of peace like nothing else I've ever read. It's like opening up this microcosm of humanity, but you also feel very solitary. Sort of like watching a clockwork model, or playing SimCity.}

As for my current state of mind... I dunno how to describe it, exactly. It's sort of a Taoist acceptance of the path that the universe will take, so while I like Nietzsche a lot I don't think that I'm as adamant as he was... well, that's probably it. I think that I've come to appreciate the human experience in its entirety. It's impermanent, but it's fun to play with.

^{Incidentally, things that are fun to play with (besides breasts, silly!) include the Timesplitters 3/Future Perfect physics engine, particularly when you're using Remote Mines to play catch with the Zeep. If I could take one game to a desert island... it'd probably be Timesplitters. Consider that one of my stronger recommendations.}


So, as I was saying, it feels good to start with something unknown (let's say, for the purposes of discussion, Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express, and come to a point where you feel that you understand and appreciate the things that make it what it is. In this case it's good, but I think you could have this kind of experience with anything. You could say that it's finding the necessary characteristics of an object, then.

Geez I love Kraftwerk.

Uh, so what's the score if David Carradine kills himself? I suppose it's the base +10, then the bonus +15 for senior citizens...

^{UPDATE: Apparently he died whilst fapping. I dunno if that qualifies you to be a martyr for 4chan or something. Definitely sort of odd, but at least you can't be embarrassed when you're dead. I totally would have been.}

Addressing serious philosophical issues here, kinda busy. And being lazy, it's summer!

Oh, and I've neglected to mention that in a couple weeks I'll be turning 21. In Illinois, that's the age that you can (finally) buy handguns, so naturally I'm going to get on that before booze and things like that. So, anybody got any suggestions? I was looking for something that fits these qualificiations:

* auto-loading
* large (15+) mag
* small-caliber, probably 9mm para
* under $750
(optional, but nice): has a .22LR conversion kit available

Right now my best contender is a 9mm Glock, probably the 17. IL doesn't allow CCW, so that's not really a concern for me, and even if I could I don't think I would. That said, I don't mind the Glock's ergonomics at all, and the controls feel nice to me as well. And I absolutely adore their simplicity.

Oh, and the uber-Modern lines of the Glock are very nice as well, but I shouldn't base this decision on physical appearance.