I used to be a Magic addict. I was into it several-levels-of-hell more deeply than your average player. Where most guys just knew deck types and play styles, I knew the names of all the top players in the world, what they were famous for, who their main rivals were, how well they placed in various tournaments, etc. I knew that Mike Long was reknowned for twisting game and tourney rules (sometimes referred to as “cheating”), that Jamie Wakefield always played with 62 cards in a deck, and that Jon Finkel was the guy currently wearing the “Best Magic Player in the World” cape and cowl*.

You know how most guys know which basketball player is being traded to which team and for what underlying purpose? I was like that with Magic. I used to be, anyway. Like, a billion years ago.

Our friend John was talking about Magic non-stop last night, which is what reminded me of that whole section of my life. I always feel a bit uncomfortable hearing somebody go on about the latest in card game news because it represents a time in my life that I’d rather forget. Or that I’m trying to, you know, not go back to. Just collecting those links above gave me this weird feeling in the pit of my stomach, the stirrings of something voracious and embarassingly geeky.

The problem with me is, I’m terribly monogamous about these things. The reason why I stopped playing magic was because I had discovered web dev, and it pushed the card game out of the way rather soundly. (Well, there was also the fact that the game had gotten stale, and I found that I didn’t have the skill to get to the very top. At tournaments, I would always finish at the fringes, somewhere in the top 8 but rarely making it through to the final 2.)

If I got back into Magic, there’d be no stopping it. I can never commit myself to something half-heartedly. It’s always everything or nothing with me. My every waking moment would be devoted to learning and competing. My every sleeping moment would be devoted to dreaming about the next waking moment. I’d be that nuts about it.

Fortunately, there’s little chance that that will ever happen, because the other thing with me is, once I make the decision to drop something, I never look back. Every major addiction I’ve had has ended this way, including that of my two previous girlfriends (see, even card-game geeks have girlfriends sometimes!).

I still think Magic r0x though.

*I don’t mean a literal cape and cowl. We weren’t that crazy.

Girl, Corrupted is an offbeat make-believe blog written by a lady named Monica, from New Jersey. She explains everything in her very first entry, just in case anybody takes her work seriously.

Okay, this is not a blog, see? This is merely an outlet for my storytelling and genius writing abilities.

That said, Girl Corrupted is a great way to kill time, as Monica spins her utterly surreal pseudo-fiction day by day. One of the earlier bits talks about her experience with Ron, a confused individual she found through an ad in the paper.

[The ad] listed a wide range of symptoms that could mean you are the victim of human experimentation. Some of the symptoms, such as sleepiness and irritability, were things that anyone might feel through the course of the day while others were diseases that people acquire and have nothing to do with being experimented on. Some were really funny, like being jolted awake in the middle of the night by beeping and clicking sounds.

Reminding yourself that none of this is true (although I suspect she was inspired by some weird ad she really did find in the paper) can become a rather distracting exercise, as she writes with the gusto of someone to whom it’s all really happening. And maybe it is, after a fashion. The problem is, you keep asking yourself if she’s just shitting you, and to what end.

I saw black boots stealthily coming down the decrepit stairs, followed by dark pants, and a black hooded sweatshirt. When the full form reached eye level to the window, it turned out to be a guy IN A FREAKING MICHAEL MYERS MASK.

I screamed.

He tilted his head as if puzzled by my reaction, because, you know, I could have smiled and waved.

It took me awhile but I finally learned to stopped dwelling on the fact that this was neither a journal nor straight fiction and trying to surmise which was which, and just let myself enjoy the experience. I think that’s how it was meant to be read in the first place.

Was playing around with the new Personalized Google today. The press release states that it allows users to “pick from 216 areas of interest and create a profile so search results are filtered.”

On paper it seems like a noble goal, so off I went to create my Google profile. I selected a bunch of stuff in Arts, Computers, Business, News and Music, then as a purely vain endeavor, I typed in “highfiber” as my first search.

The only difference between the search results in Personalized Google and regular Google is that the personalized stuff have a slider at the top of each page, which lets you further sort the results. Dragging the slider all the way to right (maximum strength) sorts everything according to your preferences, forsaking all logic and rationale (basically bending the results to your iron will).

The top result on the unpersonalized default view was of course, highfiber.org, which is no surprise. Our dot-org variant has long surpassed its dot-com evil twin in terms of web presence. Other listed results included my google spoof, which was also hosted up at highfiber, and some low-fat diet type things.

Pulling the slider to maximum scrambled the results, and I watched the “highfiber.org” link slide all the way to the bottom. At the very top of the page was a link to FreeDOS.org, where some guy with a highfiber.com email address had posted something important apparently. The results are pretty hodge-podge, with links to deviantArt, aklan.com, cnn and eatonweb taking up the first 10 results.

As an experiment, I deleted all my preferences except for “News”, and ran the search again. This time, our evil twin highfiber.com was on top in the maximum personalized view. Below it were links to NMIA.com and CNN.com, which I suppose are more related to current events than our little flame-breathing community site.

I went back, deleted my “News” preference and replaced it with “Arts -> Visual Arts”. Unfortunately, Google wouldn’t show the slider bar this time around, probably because Visual Arts and highfiber.org are similar enough that you wouldn’t get different results from personalization (my theory only, could possibly be a bug).

As a final test, I checked all of the boxes under “Arts.” For some reason, I got the exact same results as when I just had “News” checked, i.e., with links to CNN, NMIA, Whoosh.org and highfiber.com. Now, I’m no search engineer, but something tells me CNN and highfiber.com aren’t exactly Arts-related. What gives, I say.

So as an addendum to my final test, I decided to help the engine along by typing “highfiber org,” and see what happens. Now I got the Whoosh.org link at the very top, which contained a reference to the seemingly ubiquitous highfiber.com. Well then. Isn’t that interesting.

Anyway, the GoogleLabs page does say this is all still in beta, so I guess there’s no point being a nitpicker. My initial opinion is that Google sort of took the preferences notion a bit too far; pulling the slider to maximum will take the “correct” link out of the top results no matter what. (By “correct”, I mean, the link that PageRank would’ve chosen by itself.) I’m not sure if I’m that adamant about having my personal preferences followed, at least not so much that it skews results so significantly.

But I’ll wait for the final version before making any conclusions.

Nyx and I caught The Missing yesterday, over at the swanky Greenbelt 3 cinemas. You gotta love a waiting lounge that lets its guests relax on an assortment of mattresses, recliners and beanbags. I wish I had spent some time on the big mattress; I had no idea that that would’ve been the best part of seeing this film.

You know what burns me the most about The Missing? It had a lot of talent going for it, but no real vision. Ron Howard, Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones have all made good, good movies, but here they all seem … uninspired. Maybe it was the material. Frontier westerns are always difficult to pull off, especially when your director’s main strength is in making light-hearted family movies. The main problem with the first 15 minutes of the film, imo, was that Howard tried too hard to make it feel like a frontier western. He showed, in rapid succession, Blanchett wiping her ass with a shred of newspaper, a rotten tooth that is pulled out with a pair of tongs, a deer being skinned, a cow being milked, Tommy Lee Jones chanting an indian prayer. Howard was trying to strike a chord in the audience that would make them say, “Wow, I feel like I’m really there,” but all of those efforts feel sadly short.

He spends so much time talking about the frontier in fact, that he forgets to build up the suspense for Blanchett’s “horrifying” discovery in the woods. So when we actually see it, we’re surprised not in a horrified way, but in a “where the hell did that come from? we were watching a family movie 3 minutes ago” sort of way. There is no sense of foreboding or tension or anything that would make something like this engaging to see. When Blanchett and Jones finally go off to rescue her missing daughter (who has been taken by slave-traders), I start counting the minutes till the movie ended.

The Missing is filled with little snippets of Howard’s memories of good westerns. We have sub-stories involving the colonial army, a wimpy photographer, a flooding canyon, etc., none of them really relevant.

When the movie suddenly turns supernatural on us (in a weird voodoo-esque sequence that has Jones and company praying over Blanchett), we’re literally left in the dust. They wouldn’t've even had that long-ass scene if Blanchett’s comb hadn’t fallen out of her bag for the witch-doctor to find. Talk about convenient.

In another hokey sequence, we see the witch-doctor abduct a young mother, whose baby is sleeping fitfully in bed several feet away. Later we see the mother in chains, along with her child. What the hell? He was only going to sell the mother, what was he gonna do, eat the baby? Later I realized that it was a plot device: when the child dies in captivity, the mom goes nuts, shoots herself and foils the big escape attempt. I was like, “so that’s what the baby was for!” (slaps self on forehead)

The whole movie is like this. We’re made to slog along with Blanchett as she makes her way around the haphazard plot, hoping that each poorly-directed sequence is the last. When it finally is, it’s a mercy.

Eastwood city on a saturday night is like a beehive, a burgeoning mass of dressed-up, made-up humanity. “City,” in this case, is really just a euphemism since its land area is barely larger than your average barangay. But maybe they called it that because it feels like the whole city is crammed in there with you.

There were no less than 3 separate events going on when I passed by this evening, not to mention the hundreds of people who were just there to hang out, middle-class style (myself included). Basically this involves a cup of coffee, a pack of cigarettes, and a long conversation. This place makes a killing with beverages: the collective body heat of 10,000 patrons evaporates most drinks faster than you can knock them back. Of course, having a bladder the size of a thimble means I still have to keep hitting the john every two or three minutes, but that part of Eastwood is airconditioned so I don’t mind much.

You know you’re having one of those days when the guy beside you at the toilet queue is a painted mime, complete with red suspenders over a black & white striped shirt and a little French artist’s cap. I swear, seeing him at the urinal was absolutely surreal. I was like, Is he really peeing or is he going through the motions just to annoy me? Sadly, I was too weirded out to actually look over his shoulder and check. Another one of life’s great mysteries goes unanswered.

After a few moments, he “zipped up,” turned toward me and waved. I was speechless for a while until I thought to look behind me, and see another (!) mime. God only knows where the second one came from. Maybe he pulled himself out of the hand dryer or something.

They nodded at each other briefly, and one of them said (!), “Today, we’re educators.” They both laughed heartily.

I was staring fixedly at my piss stream through most of this, so I never saw how they exited. I wonder if they did one of those annoying, going-down-the-nonexistent-staircase routines. That would’ve blown my mind.

Played counterstrike until the wee hours last night at our favorite gaming lan. I haven’t come near cs in about a year now, after playing it every single day in the pre-1.0 days … you know, back when it was actually a skill game.

Being that mike, kel, herv and i were all n00bs, we just hosted up our own little private 2v2 game, while the rest of the shop was exploding around us in some enormous online conflict.

Well, I’m exaggerating.

There were only 9 other guys in the section with us, and they had hosted up their own private game too. But what a game that must have been! They were thumping the tables, cursing, standing up and pacing when they got shot … I actually expected a real fist fight to break out right there in front of us, if not for the fact that you don’t respawn at full-health afterwards. One of the guys actually stood up in the middle of a round, walked over to the guy that had killed him, and started mouthing off while the other guy vainly attempted to finish the round. The air was so thick with testosterone, you could take DNA samples by inhaling.

I can’t remember the last time I was ever so into a game that I actually started getting angry, but apparently, with these guys it was second-nature. Maybe they felt like they were samurais, or virgins even, defending their honor … I don’t know.

I thought it was pathetic. On the other hand, I thought it was hilarious too.

Hilarious in its pathetic-ness.

• Aint It Cool unveils the title of the 3rd Star Wars prequel. “Return of the Jedi”, it ain’t.

• Richard Simmons is charged with misdemeanor assault, for slapping some random guy at the airport. The guy allegedly said, “Hey everybody. It’s Richard Simmons. Let’s drop our bags and rock to the ’50s,” at which point Simmons walked over and slapped him (on the face … it wasn’t a sexual harassment charge lol).
  

Nicole’s Diary of an Internet Affair describes her relationship with a guy she met on the internet. They fall in love online, and eventually decide to meet. It’s a nice story, the sort of thing you smile and talk about in whimsical tones at dinner parties with civilized people.

This is really happening, In 20 minutes the man that I have come to love and I will meet for the first time. I feel the watering of my eyes as I try to suppress the sick feeling that I have felt all day. My legs carry me as fast as I can allow them to, towards our meeting place …

I suppose the romantic nature of the story makes it hard to forget that Nicole and her lover Paul are both married, with children. She mentions this fact only once, as part of her site’s tagline:

We were both married and should have known better, but we couldn’t help falling in love and our lives changed forever…

Am I the only one who finds this wrong? Her diary focuses solely on her relationship with Paul; I spotted just one reference to her family in a month’s worth of entries, as if they are a completely unrelated subject, a different world. And maybe they are, to her.

Paul strokes my fingers with his thumb and this feels right, I feel no guilt. […] This is perfect!

I’ve been asking myself why she decided to write this all out in a public blog. Is it some sort of catharsis? Does she want to get people’s opinions?

Is it a love letter to Paul?

I sincerely hope it’s not because she’s proud of cheating on her husband and her family, because, from the way this is written, she sure could’ve fooled me.

Ah, the stressful day. I love that stomach-tightening, carpal-inducing feeling that you get from being on the edge of a deadline. It’s the closest a non-athlete gets to an adrenaline high, I think.

I spent yesterday throwing together half of a corporate animation for SM (yeah, the shopping-mall moguls). The courier was sitting in the living room waiting for me to hand over my TV-dinner-style obra maestra so he could whisk it away to the clients, those faceless, blue-suited beings who spend their waking hours plugged into the hive mind.

At around 3 in the afternoon, I’m really getting my rhythm, as is often the case when you’ve been working on something for 6 hours straight. I’m churning out work that would take your average office-based designer (a lowly, slave-like being) twice as long to make, and I’m pumped. Unfortunately, when the messenger dude arrives, my concentration is shot all to hell, coz I have to stand up and have him sit somewhere and get him some water, etc.

When I sit back down, I blank out. Like the proverbial goldfish. I stare at the screen for a full minute trying to recall what I was doing. It’s sorta like that disoriented feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and your sheets are drenched in semen. You can see the results of your labors plain as day, but you can’t remember doing any of it.

I love how my PC and I have developed this ridiculous, empathic relationship. (Wait, wait, “love” is not the right word for how I feel about this …) Anyway, when I’m stressed and pressed for time, I begin to make a lot of mistakes and have to go back and redo things. My PC acts the same way mostly. With the messenger dude waiting a few feet away from me, my rig hung twice, once during a burning session so i had to throw the CD away and start over.

Maybe I’m just anthropomorphizing (sp?) my PC here, but it always wigs out when I’m wigged out. And when I’m calm and relaxed, it’s smooth as a Barton. (Ha, a little shameless geek humor for you there.)

Although I love my rig (mostly, except when we’re both stressed), I do look forward to replacing it with something, well, more like a machine and less like a goat. Something, I dunno, more befitting a Major Geek.

Like one of these, maybe lol.

Anyway, I did make it to my deadline, not that that was ever in contention. The messenger guy would probably just have wrenched my hard drive from its chassis, yakuza-style, if I couldn’t deliver on time :/

A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded a generic-looking ErosAsia video starring one Azumi Kawashima. You know the sort: the ones where these fragile-looking, flat-chested japanese girls chirp like birds when fondled, and the guys look like they have day-jobs scrubbing army latrines.

In any case, it was the most boring piece of drivel I had ever seen. I thought the girl was cute though I only got fleeting glimpses of her face through the forest of pinwheeling limbs.

This wasn’t the first Kawashima video I’d found either, and when I checked the rest of them out, I got that same empty feeling, as if I couldn’t remember how to get an erection.

I found nothing of interest among my other Japanese videos as well. It was almost as if the Thief of Horniness had come in the night and siphoned all their sexual energies, leaving me with dozens of videos of people pushing at each other with their crotches, like an over-crowded meat locker.

Yesterday, as I downloaded my umpteenth megabyte of some random girl (supposedly French, but really, who cares, she’s naked isn’t she) getting chinese-finger-trapped by what looked like a trio of ex-cons, it came to me that perhaps there really is such a thing as Too Much. Not because I feel threatened by a group of sweaty, muscular men with a horny gleam in their eyes, mind you, but for a deeper, more personal reason. That is, I had grown tired of it.

It’s a curious situation. Your mind and your body are so intertwined that bodily needs are translated into mental desires, and so deftly that you can’t even tell if it’s your mind or your body (or both) making you do things. (In this case, I mean “do things” such as “looking for porn online,” and not, “fornicating with furniture.”)

Kicking the porn habit has proved to be just as difficult as quitting smoking, probably because something inside me (i.e., my brain) doesn’t want to stop. Not really, anyway. I don’t want to quit smoking because there is a genuine desire to keep lighting up, to keep puffing away, to keep looking unspeakably cool smoking by myself under a streetlight.

The question I suppose would be, when does that desire dissipate?

And, does it ever?

In the case of porn, will I ever get sick of it? Sometimes, I get little signs like these, and they make me think. I’m not sure if I’ve reached some sort of plateau here, having seen everything and therefore, being surprised (and turned on) by nothing. My offical theory is that a preponderance of porn induces a sort of enlightenment that ultimately results in my being absolutely apathetic towards it.

How very circular that would be.