Off to San Diego tomorrow, to visit RI for his birthday. Hiho.
The dread Mom has been and gone, and the visit went without notable incident. No time for relief, though, since I have to get a week's worth of stuff done in the next two days so I can visit R for his 40th birthday.
| Your Ultimate Roleplaying Purity Score | ||
| Category | Your Score | Average |
| Hacklust | 35% Has conversations in between massacres | 52.4% |
| Sensitive Roleplaying | 25% All the game's your stage | 50.8% |
| GM Experience | 23% Closer to a novel than to a campaign | 66.7% |
| Systems Knowledge | 80% Played in a couple of campaigns | 89% |
| Livin' La Vida Dorka | 55% Has interesting conversations in public | 60.2% |
| You are 46% pure Average Score: 66.5% | ||
Eeek! This is so cool. I'm geeking out over Book scanning robots!
Oh, the irony! Lizzard will appreciate this: now that I've thought of a subject (philosophy) that interests me enough that I might be able to overcome my dilettantism and go back to school...it turns out that the only good local university with a (non-technical) evening program only offers a multi-disciplinary degree! The feeling seems to be that nobody could possibly be interested in a part-time evening program unless it was for an MBA or professional program.
According to The Political Compass I'm a sort of cross between the Dalai Lama and Tony Blair. Go figure. At least it pegs me as about as Libertarian as the Dalai Lama and about as economically right wing as Tony Blair. Actually, this is one of those quizzes where the questions are ambiguous; while it's usually clear what they're driving at in terms of the political spectrum, a close reading of the actual wording often makes it difficult to pick something close to your actual views. For example, what can one make of the assertion "No one can feel naturally homosexual"? Presumably they mean something like "Homosexuality is not genetically determined", but it's not at all clear that what they really intend isn't "Homosexuality is a conscious choice." But you could hold or reject any combination of those views and still hold it's nobody's damn business whether someone is homosexual. The Battleground God quiz was much more closely reasoned (as befitting one created by philosophers rather than political journalists). If you take it, be sure to also take the Iconochasms quiz (match the policitical icon with the "unexpected" quote or action); I did pretty well, except at recognizing when Winston Churchill was being an asshole.
Yesterday I got my first response to my profile on match. Unfortunately, she doesn't sound like a very good match to me; she has one of those two-sentence uber-generic "I like to laugh and have a good sense of humor" profiles, and her preferences are so broad as to amount to "must be male; should be breathing." It really makes me wonder whether she's even interested in me in particular or if she's just shotgunning. Courtesy dictates that I respond, even if it's just to say no thanks, but I wonder what I should say. Should I try to get her to provide enough information so that I can tell better whether she's as dull as her profile makes her seem? What's the etiquette? Is it kinder just to politely indicate lack of interest without giving reasons, or should I suggest that she ought to follow some of the advice that match offers on how to set up a profile?
I've started a new blog called Blogosophy, where I can record my philosophical musings. Or ramblings. Whichever.
I've been having way too much fun with Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, by which I mean that it's been distracting me from things I really ought to be doing. I had planned on going to the gym yesterday, and running some errands (I need new towels and things for when my Mom comes to visit in a two weeks), but I spent most of the day lying on the couch and reading Atheism instead. My cat was happy, and I have to admit that it's pretty blissful to stretch out with philosophy and a purring cat.
I must say, though, the copy-editing on the book is pretty horrible (curse you, Temple University Press!). It's not too hard to spot when the text says (P~D) but means P(~D); it's much harder to spot when it says P(~D) and means P(D), and it's full of both sorts of errors. I suppose it keeps you on your toes.
My one discontent is that I'm bubbling with ideas on this, and none of my friends are really up for discussing it. Most of them are, to put it mildly, tempermentally unsuited to heavy duty logic-chopping, and the ones that are suited would prefer to spend their energy on their own research projects. It's not really suitable for blogging, either, or at least not this blog; I already only have about two regular readers, if that, and I'd hate to drive them away. Maybe I need to write an essay.
According to the Dante's Inferno online quiz, I'm heading for Limbo, along with the virtuous pagans. Which is a little odd, since my friends RH and SO are heading for the 6th Circle, home of the heretics, and I'm at least as heretical as they are. RH points out that SO also scored high on the Wrathful scale, which may have tipped the balance away from Limbo for him; she won't say what it was for her. Unfortunately, the quiz was taken down when the server threatened to melt under the onslaught of sinners curious about their fates; apparently this was a fast-spreading link.
As I was saying, I've been trying to think whether there's any subject that excites me enough to overcome the inertia I feel about going back to school. My friend Job, who knew me in college, suggested that I used to be pretty keen on philosophy, and he thought that I displayed a talent for it. Certainly it was the subject that I took most seriously, after History and Computer Science. I can't really see going and getting a degree in History after all this time, and while my work would pay for CS grad school I'm not sure that's a big enough break from what I'm currently doing to suit me. Or maybe it would. Hence the philosophy and CS books cropping up in my reading list.
Current reading includes: Atheism: A Philosophical Justification by Michael Martin, On Numbers and Games by John Conway (of the game of Life fame), and The Long Hot Summoning by Tanya Huff.
Spring is here, and a young man's thoughts turn to love....my thoughts turn to spring cleaning. I've even been thinking of replacing some of my furniture; my cat has emerged victorious in his ten-year war on the upholstery of the couch, so maybe it's time. This actually relates back to the reading, since I'm also engaged in a philosophical spring cleaning of sorts. Maybe it's part of a general itch to examine my life now that I'm divorced and really starting to feel middle-aged.
Another part (or maybe the same part) is that I've been thinking about going back to school; some of my friends have been urging me to do so for quite some time. They perceive, correctly, that life as a programmer isn't exactly intellectually stimulating to me, and that's something I really crave. There are certainly times when I regret not having attended UC Berkeley's History PhD program when I was accepted, although I still don't see how I could have swung the burden of debt since they weren't prepared to come up with any financial aid (not even TA'ing) for at least a year.
I've been held back, though, by my unfond memories of certain aspects of academia, and a general inability to decide what I'd really be happy studying. No doubt Lizzard will attribute this to my dilettantism, and no doubt she's right.
The person (I think of her that way, since that was her handle on match before she deleted her profile in a fit of pique) has written back, and we've agreed to go out for "coffee or something sometime". And then she goes to Europe for two months. We'll see what happens, but I'm not getting my hopes up; I get very mixed signals from her email... but it's considerably less stressful to be going into it with no particular expectations.