lorem ipsum

I’ve posted a new private post, “Prejudice with a halo”, directly underneath this one.

Basically what I’m saying is log in, chump.

Life is so good, doggs.

Seattle’s annual conspiracy to keep people indoors on the sunniest weekend of the year kicked off this weekend, with the first several days of the Seattle International Film Festival, 2008.

Cinemaphiles and hipsters alike converged — indeed, are still converging — on the Emerald City, to take in hundreds of movies of wildly oscillating quality. And I? I was among them. I managed to catch two unqualified masterworks, Russia’s Mermaid, and Japan’s Love and Honor, an absolutely unparalleled feat of sustained quality in SIFF flicks.

After all, last year saw me catch the superlative Shotgun Stories, immediately before the truly wretched Cthulhu, the only movie about which one might actually — and accurately — say, “My favorite part was when Tori Spelling raped the gay man.”

Oh, SIFF…bless your heart.

I’ve been getting some serious wanderlust lately…you know, that sort of itchy, uncomfortable, can’t-sit-still feeling you get, like when you wear the same t-shirt for a couple weeks straight, and it has started to be colonized by some seriously uncharitable microbes?

Okay, perhaps you don’t know that.

Still, the urge to move has gripped me, and gripped me strong. I’m entertaining several options. Actually, I’m not sure that they’ve coalesced into “options” yet, properly speaking. I guess what I mean is that a shortlist is coming together. I’ve spent time in Bend and Portland, and enjoyed both immensely. I’m also considering a major shakeup, such as heading to Kentucky (and learning to distill bourbon), or moving to France, and continuing to work with ordinateurs.

Maybe I’ll see you around, kids.

Since I’ve only just instituted reader logins and private posts, I figured I ought to let everyone know that there is a rather meaty — if invisible — private post immediately before this.

If you have private post privileges, now is the time to take out your secret decoder rings and log in.

If you don’t, I guess now is the time to ask for them.

As many of you are no doubt aware, I have long been obsessed with the idea of filters and macros. I have spent an inordinate amount of time tinkering with Gmail’s fantastic filtering system, developing a labyrinthine convention of persistent filtering and forwarding that effectively reduces my manual involvement with an individual email to the act of opening/reading it. For example, an email from Kate that mentions Dan would get the labels “Kate”, “Dan”, and “SE++”; the same email, sent instead by Dustin, would get “Dan” and “SE++”, and skip the inbox entirely (though it would remain marked as unread). And this is just a simplified peek at what I’ve got set up. For some reason, this level of automated organization holds a deep fascination for me, a fascination second only to my profound affinity for relatively unnecessary gadgets.

Imagine my near-hysterical delight, then, when I found this little guy, the literal convergence of my two nerdiest, guiltiest pleasures, over at lifehacker, the possibilities for which have essentially sent me into an hourlong nerdgasm that is still going strong.

…

Yesterday, Rick asked Llyw and me what one album he “had to” listen to, leaving us to decide what exactly he meant by that. Considering his speckled and inconsistent experience with music, it was an interesting exercise.

Llyw’s selection: St. Elsewhere

My selection: Glenn Gould’s bookend recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations

In other news, I f’ing love these little info graphics.

Guess who’s the number three result when you Google “lorem ipsum”?

This guy.

Or rather, I was.