in a couple of weeks, this journal will be seven years old.

when i think about the person that i was when i first started this journal and the person that i am now with all of the changes that has happened in between... it's a lifetime ago.

here's to seven more. *champagne glass clink*

i just learned that the word 'spaz' which is a mildly offensive term in the US is a highly offensive term in the UK. i get the impression that it's not offensive of the curse-word sort like "fuck" or "shit", but rather that it's a categorical offense like a racial slur would be ("nigger" or "chink") except towards the mentally challenged.

wonder how it is anywhere else.

so in honor of the fact that i can't make it to the damned flashbulb concert, i was inspired to finish the expert steps that i had started a while back to Mellann. i think it's a 12.

[zip file with hard and expert steps]

the flashbulb is playing in seattle on july 22nd at Chop Suey in Seattle, WA, then on july 23rd in portland at a location tba, then on july 25th in san francisco at a location tba.

if i had known about this a few weeks ago and if i didn't already have commitments beforehand, i would have totally bought my plane ticket to eugene for two days earlier.

all of you who still live on the west coast, i'm jealous.

the local crepe store here has a poster up for a summer drink - a frozen hot chocolate.

until i saw it and cocked my mental head to the mental side at the seeming contradictary nature of it, it never occured to me how "hot chocolate" isn't really two separate words, it's one singular concept. "hot" in this context doesn't really function as a descriptor for temperature of a drink, it defines the drink, identifies it in its entirety. if the drink isn't hot, you don't call it a "warm chocolate". if you put it in the fridge and let it cool down, you'd be hard pressed to give it a name other than "hot chocolate". it doesn't feel right to call it a chocolate drink or even a chocolate milk.

i think the main reason this happened has to be because the 'main name' of the drink (if you will) is used mainly in a different way, so it can't stand on its own in the context of the drink. when people say, "boy do i want chocolate", images of candy bars come to mind, not a drink. thus, the drink needed its own identity to separate itself from just chocolate to avoid confusion.

what probably needs to happen to change it is for some strong Brand presence, such as Starfucks, to market hot chocolate under a new name and for it to become popular enough that it takes over as the new name for hot chocolate. which is unlikely given that even with the strong brand, people who go to starbucks still go there to order "coffee" as opposed to "a starbucks".

and also seems to be a large effort to go through simply to make it so that the name of the frozen version would make more sense.

still fun to think about, though.

a long time ago when i had long hair and was fairly tan from summer tour maybe or what not, every now and again people would mistake me for being native american.

earlier this week for the first time in many years it happened again. the security guard at Walgreens asked me "are you native american?" because he has a lot of friends in texas/new mexico who are native american, apparently.

it makes me wonder what it would be like to marry a native american woman, what people would think of our kids. family photos would be interesting, especially with my mom and dad. it'd be fun to confuse people.

since moving to full tilt, i've been generally making more money playing limit HORSE than i have playing no-limit hold 'em.

granted, the stakes aren't quite equal; i'm playing .25/.50 NLHE and buying in for $30, and i'm playing .50/1 and occasionally 1/2 HORSE buying in for $50 or $60. but still. it's interesting.

The hand of the night was playing stud hi/lo, i started with A35 of hearts. I 4thed and 5thed the flush, but all of the rest of my cards were 9 or higher. dammit.

old stomping grounds versus current stomping grounds.

ugh.

what dance game machines still exist in eugene/springfield?

it's interesting to see Kung Fu Hustle on the Spanish channel. it looks even more unnatural than hearing English dubbing.

anyway.

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Q: You call yourself the world's most influential influence on Michael Jordan. Who's your influence?

[Leroy Smith]: Every day I am truly inspired and motivated more and more by myself. The amount of motivation I have to offer me is boundless.

so i cashed out a lot of my money on cake to start a new account on full tilt (which i haven't done yet since the money *just* got into my account), but i left $500 to essentially play the $10k guarantee bounty tourney that i play consistently.

the first few times i played in it i got hit with some rough rough beats, but the past three nights i've placed in the money, fighting as a short stack most of the time. Two nights ago i placed 13th, last night i placed 45th, tonight i placed 25th.

something i have to begrudgingly admit is that i'm a much better tournament player than a cash player, at least at hold 'em. I don't want that to be the case because i feel like cash play is more profitable in the long run and reaps better rewards, but there's a subtle difference in play between cash and tournament, and there's a certain kind of mentality i think i have in tournaments that i should apply in cash games and i simply don't.

i'm not sure what that means; wheni start up my account on full tilt in the coming week, i'm going to start by playing more cash than tournamnets so i can clear the bonus that i think i still earn even though i'll be getting rakeback, but after i clear that, i may have to reevaluate where i emphasize my play, or at the very least try hard to discipline myself to apply the sort of proper aggression i have when i play in tournaments.

i'm in a creative sort of space right now, but don't have a great outlet, or at least an outlet i care to explore for a length of time at 0320.

today consisted of getting up after about five hours of sleep, doing some random thinkgeeking before working on the hermiston show, going into the office to meet with barry about various fall logistics over a turkey, bacon, and spinach crépe, coming home to deal with administrative emails, taking a three hour nap, playing in an online poker tournament whilst cat/house-sitting and watching batman begins, and then deciding to work on hermiston stuff again since the nap i took was much longer than i thought.

and now here i am.

*pause*

i almost want to write a stepchart. there's a song i vague could write one to, but the ending would be rough if i did the whole song because of how it changes character.

maybe that's not in the cards tonight, though. i should really consider sleeping.

in the 2008 WPT event that Van Nguyen won (yay for the first female to ever win a WPT title), there was a hilarious moment where Van hit a pair of 7s on the flop and put Ethan Ruby all in on his short-stack when he had an open ended straight draw.

ethan ended up folding, which i felt was fairly questionable based on the chip stack he had compared to Van as the chip leader. What was hilarious was that after he folded, the WPT essentially did a "rabbit hunt", where the next cards to come were dealt by the dealer to a hidden cam which revealed that Ethan would have missed his straight. And after those cards were revealed, the commentators congratulated him, saying, "well, it's clear now that he made a good fold there!" or something similar to that.

which made me laugh out loud. i hope that the people that take comments like that to heart sit down on my table.

house/cat sitting for mark and amanda while they've been on vacation has given me the opportunity to watch hockey and basketball finals, and one of the adverts on rotation from these events is this:

it's probably one of the most fucking annoying adverts i've seen in a while because of the music. i don't care that it's background music of an advert; there's no excuse for creating arpeggio movement in the right hand using exactly the same notes and the same voice leading as the block chords in the left hand. maybe if the bass only used the bass line instead of doubling the chord; maybe if the bass used a pad sound instead of the same piano soound as the right hand.

maybe if just five more seconds of effort and thought was put into it. if i was a manager of advertising for canon and saw that, i'd fire the music guy.

the fact that it passed the mark and is on advert circulation feels lazy, neglectful, and pretty successful at making me not take the camera that seriously. which is odd that my reaction is as strong as it is since the music has nothing to do with the product at all. the power of advertising.

i didn't sleep terribly well last night, so i decided earlier to schedule some time for a nap.

exhausted in the middle of the afternoon, i put on an episode of Qi, lay down, and tried to nap, but i was having problems trying to aotually fall asleep. i'm not a fan of Just Lying Down, so i found my laptop and started playing a stage of gemcraft just to zone out.

i ended up playing a couple of stages and then there was maybe another ten minutes before my alarm was supposed to go off to wake up. so i did some random internetting, and then when my alarm went off, i did a mental assessment of how i felt, decided that i was refreshed enough from my fake nap, and got up to do some work.

i'm not sure if i've ever consciously had a successful nap without actually napping before. it was interesting, mainly just how exhausted i felt before i lay down and then how fine i felt after. i don't think it's the sort of thing i can pull off often, but it was pretty nice for it to work this time.

still, i bet i'll be in bed by midnight tonight.

well. it will depend on the 9pm poker tournament, i guess. :)

the bridge section to the star trek voyager theme is very similar to the bridge between the A and B sections of the first movement to Shostakovich's 5th Symphony.

yesterday while i was cat-sitting, mark and amanda's new kitten was doing amazingly cute things, so i had to take some video.

need to figure out what i'm doing for lunch. a sandwich sounds pretty good. wonder where i can pick one up that'll do what i want.

I think I need to buy a hat.

I haven't taken hats very seriously since high school, but recently I've decided that it would be good to have one for playing poker if nothing else.

problem is, I'm not sure what hat fits my sort of personality these days. any hat I wear looks strange to me.

I'm open to suggestions.

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on monday i thought it was tuesday and this morning i thought it was yesterday.

this has been a surprisingly long week. But not in a bad way.

it's weird to think that it was just four days ago that we had our crawfish/poker night which seemed so long ago, and yet it was a year ago that i was in the final stages of interviewing and accepting this job at tulane which seems not long ago at all.

for those of you who i am not friends with on facebook:

[http://www.darknote.org/birthday2010/]