It turns out that mixing Eternal Darkness and my Nietzsche reading actually works pretty well - there’s nothing like summoning an ancient god of unspeakable evil between sections of Twilight of the Idols.

How was my long weekend, you ask? Well, although Chris and I had planned to go drunken bowling with friends in honor of Valentine’s Day, we started feeling exhausted and shitty come Saturday afternoon so we ended up ordering Chinese and spending the evening with Iron Chef and Silent Hill 2.

We’ve been continuing the zombie theme since then with copious amounts of Eternal Darkness - we’re nearly finished now. It’s my first time through, but Chris (zombie master that he is) has already done it four times. As much fun it is to scare the cat by doing the zombie lurch around the apartment, we’ve decided that what we really need to do is get ourselves a copy of the Tome and move to a mansion in Rhode Island with a forbidden city in the basement. Forget video games - we’d spend all our time summoning zombies of different alignments to fight each other. It’s also fun to leave a red Horror locked in the bathroom for whoever needs to take a bath next.

Five years already? You would have thought I’d get bored with saying things by now, but somehow I manage to keep doing it. Lucky for you, right? This past year has been a big one for people I know from other contexts - work, school, family - telling me that they read my site (and in some cases have been reading it for a long time). It’s always a weird moment, especially if they’ve recently read through my archives - I myself haven’t read any of that stuff in years, so it’s probable that if you have, you’ve got a much better idea of what I was like at eighteen or nineteen than I do. If you discover I liked goofy bands and goofy people four years ago, don’t hold it against me. We were all teenagers once (and some of us are still teenagers even in our twenties).

Things our cat will eat include cookies (both Oreos and fortune cookies), bread, orange juice, cereal, dried apricots, and crackers (especially Wheat Thins and Triscuits). Things our cat will not eat include tuna, chicken, milk, and bacon. Our cat is slightly defective.

Bobst, the biggest of NYU’s libraries, is hollow in the middle - the empty column up the center of the building is referred to as the atrium, but you may remember it in association with a couple of student suicides we had during the fall semester. People threw themselves over the tenth floor railing - not outside the building, you understand, but inside. After the second time this happened, elaborate preventative measures were taken. In order to get anywhere in the library apart from the first floor or the basement levels, you had to take the elevator to the seventh floor (and only the seventh floor) and then walk the rest of the way up or down as necessary. Overzealous campus security guards would hover around the exits of the stairs and the balconies asking you what you wanted on whatever floor you happened to be on. Of course, they also didn’t know where anything was, but that’s not really the point. The point is that it was an incredible pain in the ass, and a ten minute trip to photocopy, say, an article from a journal too old to be in periodicals and too new to be on JSTOR turned into a forty-five minute excursion through the bowels of Bobst.

Anyway, I hadn’t been inside the library since this semester started until I went in today for yet another article, now that work on my thesis is well underway. The arcane elevator procedures have finally vanished, but in their place there are now gigantic Plexiglass barriers around all the balconies. Whatever architectural effect the designer of the atrium had once hoped to achieve has now been thoroughly mangled by these big shiny plastic walls everywhere, but I suppose I should be grateful that at least we can use the elevators again. And that suicidal NYU students will have to find other buildings from which to jump.

Chris and I just watched Memento again. I’ve always liked how it manages skillfully to deal with a number of interesting epistemological and existential issues without just beating you over the head with them (as some other films are wont to do). I haven’t yet gone through the scenes in chronological order, although I probably will at some point - I’ve watched it the standard way several times and still manage to get confused about which scenes come before which others.

Although a reader sent a subscription my way a while back, I rarely read Salon these days. I get my news from Google News and the Times, and their non-newsy content hasn’t impressed me in a long time. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a profit off them - it turns out that if you subscribe to Salon Premium for $30, you can get $37 in magazine subscription refunds (while still keeping your Salon subscription). So if you’re willing to front your thirty bucks and wait a couple of weeks, you can actually get paid to subscribe to Salon. Who knew?

Incidentally, my shunning of Salon does not extend to the bits written by the dear old Rabbit. But that sort of goes without saying.

While I’m probably going to get stuck voting for him anyway, this latest NPR interview is yet another reason to be totally unenthused about John Kerry. Even setting aside for a moment his absurd pseudo-analysis of the distinction between marriage and civil union (as a reason to be against the former and in favor of the latter when it comes to anyone who’s not straight) - I mean, what a completely boring wuss. I’m hardly a radical, but why are all the liberals afraid to be liberal this year?

Apparently someone finally got around to suing a company that promises penis enlargement: Horton’s lawsuit alleges that Leading Edge promotes its enlargement products by e-mail, radio ads and television - including a half-hour infomercial starring adult-film legend Ron “Hedgehog” Jeremy. The lawsuit accuses the defendants of fraud, theft and money-laundering. The lawsuit claims that oils and herbal supplements marketed by Leading Edge under the brand VigRx do not produce the promised permanent enlargement of the penis or cure for erectile dysfunction, among other things. The products cost an average of $110 apiece, according to the lawsuit.

I should have realized that unpacking and setting up the last of my console components and games would mean I’d get absolutely nothing done this weekend, and yet I did it anyway. It’s almost like I wanted to spend six hours playing SSX3 instead of grading quizzes! Luckily, Chris is doing his part to save me from myself by developing his own SSX addiction. While we do have two PS2s, we have only one copy of SSX3 - the multiplayer section isn’t all that great, so I’m forced to do something else at least once in a while, while he feeds what I feel is ultimately an unhealthy obsession with Allegra. (Clearly, Kaori is the best character ever.)