I finally succumbed to peer pressure and made a Letterboxd account. May the Lord, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, forgive me for such a grievous sin. Mea culpa, mea culpa, etc.
It’s been just over a month since my last entry. I would have updated sooner, but the end of last month and the beginning of this one were rough, to say the least. Largely self-imposed, in hindsight, but hindsight is 20/20. I had to verify that I wasn’t actually a pariah, you see.
Even now, I’m not entirely certain I’m not. Such is life.
Even if you ignore my brief sojourn through waking night terrors, I’ve been busy this month. It’s the middle of the semester, and the mid-semester slump has started to creep in. I’m not alone in this; even in the classes we enjoy, my friends and I feel somewhat drained from the monotony of our readings and the like. I should be getting my Professional Responsibility midterm back soon, and I like to think I did well. I did fine on my IP one, though not as well as I’d have liked, even with the five points the Prof tacked on because one question confused the whole class. We also got a participation grade for Con Law today, but this made a lot of people angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. The high was a 94 (despite certain students regularly participating, or attempting to participate, with substantive comments or questions about the material); the low was a 78 (despite some students taking frequent unexcused absences or not participating at all); and the median was an 86 (with the mean just shy of that). I got an 88, so right on the upper quartile. My phone was blowing up this afternoon because the professor shadow-dropped our grades with no comment (and the email she sent after receiving complaints only raised more questions), and my study group was deeply confused about why she graded us as she did.
A shame, too, since the actual material we’ve been covering in Con Law recently has been pretty fun from a recovering history major standpoint; Dr. Paxton would be proud. And ten quintillion years in the scorpion pit of the boiler room of hell for Andrew Johnson.
That aside, things have been alright enough for the most part, although things have been happening to me instead of me making things happen. I’m admittedly not the biggest fan of this! Things are proceeding as they do; things are bending towards the Good, and yet I feel like I’m stuck meandering on rails set by others, by Providence or by Fortune. In September I acted; I saw the crown in the gutter and grasped it; I extended myself outwards.
Maybe two weekends ago, just after 1:11 that Saturday morning, I had a vision as my mind reached out across my memories and correlated their contents.
Three men sat in a damp, pitch-black cave, and they’d been there so long they couldn’t recall the last time they’d seen anything, really. They can’t even remember how they got into the cave. The first man is happy, to a point. He knows he could leave if he wanted to, but he has company, so why would he? Things may be bad here, but it could be worse. They haven’t starved yet, at least. The second man feels cold metal against his wrists, and when he shifts, he hears metal faintly clinking against stone. He despairs, knowing they’ve been imprisoned, but the other two don’t seem to listen, as if he’s just a distant echo in the dark. The third man feels the metal and hears their fetters rattle, but realizes their prison is false. He smells rust on the trio’s shackles, and given how little they’ve been able to eat, they could slip free with enough force. If the three applied themselves, they could leave at any time, so he’s content to wait until the whim strikes him.
All three are fools. I’ll let you work out why, and I’ll give my answer below.
The first has no sight, the second no hope, and the third no will to improve their situation. The third is the biggest fool of all, for he knows his prison is false yet chooses to remain trapped; worse yet, he doesn’t even tell his fellows what he knows. He thinks his knowledge of the false prison is actual liberation from that which chains him. He has eyes and yet cannot see Mt. Tai.
Last Thursday was Bar Review at the Drinker’s Pub. I drank more than I had intended going in, but not as much as I would have had I been trying to numb myself like previous weekends. I enjoyed it more than the parties I attended in September because I could take actual breathers when I needed to. Drinker’s Pub was across from Target, and I impulse-bought some rather nice erasable colored pens/markers. There was an afterparty at Lucy’s, but unlike Bar Review proper (where I more or less knew everyone there), Lucy’s was open to the General Public™, and what good is a night with dollar drinks if the wait is fifteen minutes or more? So I bounced after grabbing a Vodka Red Bull.
Hypergraphia is compulsive writing, something I’ve been all too familiar with since I was young. Give me a writing surface and carte blanche, and it will eventually become so densely packed with notes that only I can decipher it. Although I haven’t updated this blog in quite some time, my private journals are as lively as ever.
A palimpsest is a manuscript page where scribes scraped off the writing or illustration for reuse. This was especially common for parchment, which was laborious and expensive to produce fresh. However, just because a page was scraped clean doesn’t mean the original text is unrecoverable, especially nowadays with modern imaging techniques. Palimpsests parallel how deleted files on a computer can be restored, and I’ve had a science-fiction story languishing in drafting hell about that topic, but I digress.
The thematic relevance of the palimpsest as relating to the Three Fools is left as an exercise for the reader. If you’ve been paying attention to this blog, you can figure it out. I won’t insult your intelligence; you’re a very smart cookie (presumably, if you bother reading this blog and aren’t an LLM scraper).
Speaking of readers, a hearty bonjour to the French news media, apparently! I guess I’m famous now, famous enough to get a C&D letter over image licensing anyway. God bless the current international copyright regime; it made a hell of an example in Essentials of IP today, considering we were covering derivative works.
On Saturday, I met up with a friend at a flea market on Lancaster Ave. It was fun; I got three books and a very nice paperweight, then had pizza afterward. In my spare time, I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios, 2023) a lot, after realizing that my current laptop can shockingly store and run more than one game released in the past five years. I’m currently making my way through Act I as Viktor, a Half-Orc Oath of the Crown Paladin plagued by Dark Urges™. He consciously chooses to behave lawfully and goodly; it’s been a lot of fun, though getting back into the game’s mechanics was tricky at first. I plan to see Wildwood (dir. Travis Knight, 2026, adapted from Meloy & Ellis, 2011) this Friday with the same friend I met at the flea market.
As I write this, I’m in a coffee shop. I can’t recall if I mentioned it earlier, but I recently dropped below 230 (and how). I have just over 15-ish pounds to go until the end of the current phase. No joke, I’ve been raiding my dad’s wardrobe from when he was in shape in the 80s/90s (and when he cared about looking sharp). After this phase, I will have lost so much weight that I could look into bulking up again- clean bulking, that is. After this phase, I’d start looking uncanny if I lost much more weight. On a semi-related note, election day’s coming up, and I plan on going back to the middle of nowhere for it. I’m gonna get a haircut while I’m up there, not really taking any length out, but cleaning up anything frayed or uneven and adding the usual layers so my curls curl better.
Credit to Jordan (from Kline/Spelljammer, not my cousin) for recommending that leave-in spray; it really works wonders.
On the Spelljammer note, this Thursday should be our last session. We’ve managed to gather a fleet to assault Xaryxispace, put our puppet on the throne, and prevent the dead emperor of the astral elves from ascending to godhood. I’m debating when to pitch the game I’d want to run, or whether I should. On an unrelated note, Michael’s running a new campaign set in the same world as A Thousand Years of Jade (I tagged the session write-ups, but apparently that tag doesn’t exist, so you have to find them yourself), so naturally I had to join. We’ve had four sessions so far (well, three sessions plus a session zero); we meet Tuesdays from 7 to 9 because Michael has a j*b now and everyone is busy Wednesday morning, so we can’t run too late. Despite this, Michael is very skilled at pacing, so these first two sessions have gone fairly smoothly. Instead of Warlord Era China Osmanthia, this time we’re in Prohibition Era Chicago Shikawa. I still have to finish the first write-up; that, too, is languishing in draft hell.
The clock’s almost 10, and the coffee shop I’m at is closing up, so I’ve gotta get back to Anova. I had some tea and red velvet cake. As I write this, the clock reads 10, and I’m sitting on my couch back at Anova. I’ve been keeping the window in my living room open now that the air is pleasantly chilled. I have PR tomorrow morning, but not our regularly scheduled Con Law Dean’s Scholars session. I’m not sure whether I’ll order pizzas for Michael’s table tomorrow night; maybe someone else will cover the potluck’s main course(s) for a change.
I really should post this entry; it’s so overdue it’s racked up a $500 fine. So it goes with God, I guess: et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.
