Okay, this whole Blogger-no-worky thing has gone on long enough. I was already planning to take this weekend off from being a raging socialite, so I’m going to go ahead and code up something simple that runs on the HTP server and then manually grab everything off of Blogger. Both will be fairly easy; I already have a basic idea of how the system itself is all gonna go down, and copying everything over is just repetitive rote. We’ll see if I can keep the videogame breaks down to a minimum and actually get it done. And then I’ll port the code over to the front-page newsies if I have time, not that the front page gets much use nomores anyway.

It’s kinda funny that my final entry using Blogger.com is probably not going to publish on the first try.

[EDIT] Yep, it didn’t.

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I had an epiphany this morning. She was great. Ha ha ha, but anyway.

No, I really did have an epiphany today, and while it was not a she, it was indisputably great.

I’m feeling long-winded at the moment, so forgive me if it takes an eon or two to get to the point. It starts like this: there’s some seriously wicked shit out there. By that I mean, space has quite a lot of large things floating around its expanses. Asteroids, for one example, and comets, to give another - I could go on for hours. This would not be a problem were it not for what is coming after the following colon: space also has Earth in it. Worse still, those craggly bits of nastiness that I just mentioned are, predominantly, kind of close to Earth, close enough to feel the Newtonian effects of the gravitons coming from where it was a short time ago.

Before I continue, in order to abate any confusion caused by my use of the phrase, “was a short time ago,” rather than the more intuitive “is”, I should probably note that gravitational forces, like light, do not displace from one point to another instantaneously. They instead travel at a finite speed, that is, about three hundred million meters per second. When we say that the Earth orbits the Sun, we actually mean that the Earth orbits the spot where the sun was eight-and-a-half minutes ago. Our knowledge of the sun’s proverbial twenty is effectively out of date at all times. There is lag. It is not unlike the delay encountered when you turn on the spigot and have to hold tight for a minute while you wait for the water to start coming out of the hose, all the while wishing it would hurry itself up already, because those t-shirts aren’t going to wet themselves. This phenomenon, however, is not what causes your sundial to display the wrong time; you just set it up incorrectly.

Now then, back to the scary space lumps. Sooner or later, one of those puppies is going to hit us. Mass extinctions are pretty frequent around here, after all. In fact, if the fossil record is any indication, colossal biological wipeouts have happened once every 62 million years, on schedule no less, since this mess of tectonic activity came to be. Maybe it hasn’t been caused by extraterrestrial peril, maybe it has. It is irrelevant; I just wanted to make this commentary longer.

When the fateful day comes, when the inevitable impact gets jiggy with it, it is likely that the majority of us, excluding you, because you’re obviously immortal, will be considerably lacking in life. To go from six billion people down to, say, one or two thousand, requires a bit of effort, but all it takes is for a single rogue Jupiterian moon to oblige.

Unfortunately for those few postapocalypticans upon whom the burden of repopulation falls, we don’t reproduce very quickly, third-worlders and Mormons notwithstanding. Not only does it take a good twelve to fifteen years of life for our gametes to get their rears in their respective gears, but the effort required to actually perform the act is quite prohibitive. That’s my excuse, at least.

So, what can be done? Let us take a look at nature. Think of an animal that reproduces frequently and in large quantities. Rabbits come to mind for me, so we will use them.

Let us first look at what we have in common: we both eat carrots, and some of us humans have big front teeth. We both excrete stuff. I know a guy with a fluffy tail.

And now, let us look at the differences between our two races. Rabbits hop around in grassy fields; we make movies. Rabbits live in underground burrows; we drive cars. Rabbits have long, fuzzy ears; we engage in complex, philosophical debate. Rabbits are preyed upon by various species; we sometimes prey upon rabbits. Ah ha! The cause of our two species’ disparate reproductive habits is revealed: nobody eats us!

In the wild, rabbits get eaten a lot. To make up for this, they have evolved in such a way that their females burst forth with kiddies like Disney World’s front gate at 7am on a Saturday. Humans, however, usually only spit out one spawn at a time, and it rarely ends up in the dingo’s belly. To increase our progenic output, we must become food once again, but as we have long since cast off our natural predators, we are faced with but one option, this being my epiphany: we need cannibalism.

Regulating such a society would be difficult. I imagine a Darwinian, every-man-for-himself approach will be the most common, though I can also see a lottery system being quite effective. But, whatever ends up on the books, by eating each other, we will be guiding our evolutionary carriage down the dusty dirt road of litter-based procreation. A higher death rate will force us toward a correspondingly increased birth rate. By consuming the flesh of our brethren, our species will be able to remain competitive in this dog-eat-dog capitalistic society throughout the 21st century and beyond. Dibs on the rump!

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Four things:

1) I like the name that the new Pope chose. I’m not religious, despite being a confirmed Catholic; I’ve had gay friends in the past and I like having the option of enjoying the company of the odd Vegas dancer without the usual infections, but Benedict XVI is, in my mind, a well-conceived Pope name. It takes a good long time to say without being too cumbersome. Much better than John Paul II, which I always thought sounded too French. By always, of course, I mean ever since I began writing this sentence.

2) I cut my finger real good Friday night. I was at a party that my sister’s boyfriend was having for his friend who was home from Iraq, and while minding my own business, trying to enjoy my pilsner full of cold Rolling Rock, some adjacent goofball got a little overzealous with his gesturing, which led to him smacking my glass, shattering it in my hand, and cutting my left index finger. Blood dripping down my hand (I think I nicked a vein), I looked at the goofball square in the eye, chose my words carefully, and finally settled on, “Dude, ow.” I was sort of drunk.

3) I’m wearing a new pair of jeans that I got at Old Navy on Sunday. I’m quite fond of them. The pockets are much better than the pockets in this other pair of jeans I have, though not nearly as good as the pockets in this other pair that is different from the other one. Good belt loops, too. A solid pair of pants all around.

In case anyone is wondering, I got the 33″ version. I considered the 34″ one, but I knew I’d never fill it up. The preceding two sentences were meant to be an iPod allusion, specifically, the choice between the 20 GB and 40 GB versions, but since this was not abundantly clear, and thus would not be received by the majority of the audience, I thought it would be a good idea to clarify. To those who would cry “fatty,” I retort with, “Well, I’m actually more of a 32″ waist, but I like my pants loose,” though I’ll grant you that I used to indeed be quite chubby.

4) I think Some Adjacent Goofballs would be a great name for a band. I’m feeling something like Reel Big Fish with a little bit of Slipknot mixed in.

Disclaimer: the above statements include an assertion that would indicate a prejudice on my part against those individuals who subscribe to the French nationality. No such thing is present. I love all people of all nations, including the French kind. In fact, after a particularly invigorating workout, I even occasionally smell like one.

The French Nationality would also be an awesome band name.

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This promises to become a new feature on Watch Ray Purge. I think I lost count of how many verbose, well-written away messages I’ve put up in AIM and promptly lost forever several hours later when I came back from the bathroom. This should be a good way of preserving them, barring any further wanton bullcrap by the all-too-ubiquitous Blogger.com service.

Incidentally, if anyone knows of a good alternative to Blogger.com that runs on the local server rather than some far-off Google farm that FTP’s the entries over, and can easily parse through the files that I’ve generated with Blogger over the eons to get my old entries back, let me know.

You will find that the message has been cut, tenderized, seasoned, and browned to perfection since its brief stay on your buddy list. Additions abound. Those of you who reach the site via my AIM profile (which I believe is a large portion if not the majority of visitors) are invited to skip over the stuff you have already seen, unless you have not, in fact, already seen it, in which case you will finally reach a state of having seen it, which I have little doubt will heighten the experience by at least a moderate increment.

Anything that has been deleted is done so without any indication whatsoever. It is gone. I see this as an incentive to read my away messages, though you will probably see it as an abuse of my editorial license. To you, I say, “haw haw.”

So here goes sumpin’:

I should have known better than to think that I wouldn’t encounter debilitating computer problems on a code freeze day. Every conceivable way that my workstations could render themselves useless was demonstrated. But, were they done at that point? Oh no, they had to reach into the deepest depths of hell, conspire with Beelzebub himself, and come up with new, unthinkable ways to make my life utterly inconvenient.

First, the network connection creamed out on me. I called IT, I waited. When the IT lady showed up a half-hour or so later (an unusually fast response), she told me that my classified workstations were registered under someone else’s name, which meant she couldn’t touch it. I thought it was wonderful that I’d been there a month already and no one had ever told me that I had to fill out paperwork to have my workstations registered under my name.

So I filled out the forms, and an hour or two later, an hour or two closer to my deadline, I was ready to be fixed. The lady repaired the connection, excellent, but now my mapped network drives weren’t coming up, great. I called IT again, and they remoted into my machine to install something that it apparently cannot possibly work without, but without which it had somehow worked just fine theretofore.

I think what fascinates humans so much about computers is that despite being finite state automata, they still manage to behave randomly. They do not, of course; I use the adverb iteration of the word random here merely as idiom. Randomness is nothing more than a human simplification used to account for factors that we do not yet have the technology to observe, and does not actually exist in this or any other Universe. The concept of probability stems from this abstraction, with the sad consequence being that Douglas Adams’ idea of a ship that runs on improbability is decidedly bunk.

Furthermore, the nonexistence of randomness in the Universe also leads inescapably to the conclusion that fate is very real. This is not to say that what is going to happen is going to happen no matter what anyone does about it; it is more to say that what is going to happen is going to happen, and we are all going to do exactly what needs to be done to make it happen, regardless. I personally try not to think about the fact that free will is an illusion - it will be impossible to prove until someone figures out the Unified Equation that governs the Universe down to the smallest quantum of matter, and when or whether that ever happens is up to fate. Anyway, a few minutes later, my keyboard stopped working.

To say that I was stressed out about making my deadline yesterday is to say that getting your penis sanded off hurts. It’s a good thing that everyone was ribbing me for actually wanting to make the deadline. It made me realize just how right this industry is for me. All said and otherwise done, I didn’t even bother making the deadline in the end, and when my immediate superior dropped by my cubicle this morning to tell me, “Shame and dishonor to you for missing the freeze - ha ha, just kidding, whatever,” I knew I’d made the right decision.

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No, really, I’m just testing. I think it might be working again. Let us pray.

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