Torley Lives

My brother, Mr. Zephos, finally got his own blog. About damn time. If you're expecting all rainbows and sunshine, you can go stuff yourself into a smelly barrel of burning squirrels and — er… see, it's all rubbing off on me. My bro is a lot more acerbic and bitter than I am but I love him all the same. Time to time he'll make oddly cute anime art so it works out somehow, some rule of inverse proportionality when it comes to the cheeriness of one's personality. It's for an occasion like this I save images such as the following for:

Selected passages from the book of Zephos:

Now then, there are no stupid questions, but there are lazy ignoramuses and impatient know it alls and between the two of them exists every problem in human society. It actually doesn?t bother me that much as I?m advertising, but I frequently wonder why some people would rather leave themselves out as flame bait and whine when nobody answers their question rather than do the research on their own, especially when it is in fact a Frequently Asked Question, as opposed to the obscure bizarre question from Hell.

Hmmm… I wonder why I'm naturally afraid of the phone…?it could be because of the fear of dialing the wrong number, or the disembodied voices, seeing as how I tend to rely on reading people's body language frequently… more likely than not though, it's because of all of the scary phone calls I received from my hostile relatives growing up. When your relatives scream at you in a foreign language like they're coming to their house to kill you and there's no one at home to translate, it gets a little scary.

Life is just full of problems isn?t it? Actually, the whole concept of life is to ride on the molehills and mountains of conflict until you eventually hit a bump so large that you are ejected from your mortal vessel and spattered onto the pavement of the afterlife, that or you drive into a pot hot large enough to be classified by the Encyclopedia Britannica as a cliff in a surprisingly graceful explosion.

MAYBE NOW YOU'LL READ MY BLOG MORE, BROTHER!!!123

There was an article in the news awhile ago that I haven't gotten around to blogging until now. It's titled "Too much knowledge can be bad for some types of memory, study finds" and it really resounds with me how true that has been, in my personal experience. A key phrase is:

The results show how some types of memory might be better when people forget what they know and instead approach a subject with a child-like sense of na?vet?.

I've found this to be quite the case, and although I've never really forced myself to be childlike in my perspective of how I perceive the world, it just rolls off that way like ducks off a water's back. Particularly telling was also this:

"There seems to be an inverse relationship between the ability to categorize and the ability to remember details," Sloutsky said. "If you're very attentive to details — like the children in this experiment — you can't create categories. But without ignoring the details, we would be unable to categorize."

I've been told many times that I'm observant, and yet, I have a hard time boxing stuff in. There may be a correlation. What a contradiction! I love those.

Have you ever heard Future Sound Of London's "My Kingdom"? It is one of my favorite?electronic music?compositions of all time. It samples Vangelis's "Rachel's Song" from his Blade Runner score featuring Mary Hopkin's vocals, with haunting, delayed flutes and clockwork beats that are flexible like toffee yet fascistically rhythmic, insistent on the beat like gears grinding bone. The EP version is even grander than the album edit, linking a quintet of sections into a whole, like 5 concentric circles slowly rotating like satellites around some grander solar body, each maintaining its own discreet spin while still being part of the collective mass. And I shudder.

The music video for "My Kingdom" was even greater… today, I can relate it to my SL experiences. What happens is that it takes place in an everyday sort of happenstance in an English city, possibly London, with some?Asian?guy walking around,?and then bizarre shapes — with shadows! — begin to descend upon the atmosphere, imposing their (then-crude) rendered 3D forms on the landscape. My memory is prolly grander than actually reviewing the video so many years after having watched it on?repeat with the same tape I once recorded?NIN's "The Perfect Drug", but dare I say it, I just may have found an FTP treasure trove of FSOL.

"There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start."
-Charles Baudelaire

I think Chuck was talking about TV dinners, but that's reside the point. It just occurred to me I've had this blog for over a?year, almost a year and a month, actually. Funny to look back and see I still like using the Georgia font, with the exception of occasionally choosing something else for variety's sake. A lot has changed with me, though. As I've written before, I started this blog to expound on music, but it's ended up being dominated by my Second Life. There's been a plan, but at the same time, no plan whatsoever. With a v4.0 of my preferred blogging system on the way, I'm looking forward to wonderful things.

I'll drop this for reference and note that shortly before I was to go to bed the other day, Hiro Pendragon TPed me over to take a look at the new revision of his Colt .45 gun, which he is adding feature after feature to (and I don't just mean matrix mode, lowercase). It is very cool to see it in watermelon at last — the schema is one of several different selectable themes; some of them remind me of lo-fi vidgames, in fact. Hiro is working hand-in-hand with Abramelin Wolfe as far as custom animations for gun holding and walking around are concerned. It's a shame SL doesn't have better crab-walking/strafing because I want it. Altshot.

Yesteryesterday, I attended the SL Future Salon event to discuss the future of stuff held at none other than the SL Public Library. I got to speak beforehand with SNOOPYbrown Zamboni, who is very nice and has a really cool SL name. I asked what it meant, and he explained to me it was like a hybrid of Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Which makes me ponder, if they mated, what sort of children would they have? Would Schroeder play their lullabyes and Lucy be their godmother? Maybe?a cruel, woefully abusive one? That, I do not know. And oh, Skyllar Skidoo has a nice nose and a nice website which I've been to before. You can see me resting at my Jadey's feet like a good cat does. <3>

Club Elite is back. Latest Clubel sighting (where for art thou, Bel Muse?). *breathes*

Midnight City, the island edition, is NOW OPEN to the general public — come visit, Residents of SL. It's not just a shopping experience; it's an experience! Stores are still being set up and Launa is not well so her park needs to?be textured — get well soon, Lau! — but I must have visited four times in one day. You can see a Snapzilla photostream here.?A realistic cityscape with really fine people who have class and ass and sass, all at the same time. Of course I am totally biased… yay me! Which rhymes with Aimee, as in Weber, who is a principal builder of skyscrapers. There are docks, a sort of slum,?and taxis advertising The Lion King (the Broadway edition)?for some?inexplicable reason.?Check out the San Franciscoesque view here: I used to play Mean Streets on the Amiga and Deus Ex on the PC, and I am getting vibes that I haven't had in years. It's not quite a return to my childhood, but it's nice to know setting daylight and twilight at the same time allows for enwondrous contrast.

I am wearing a new dress by Aestival Cohen right now. FRONT | BACK. Her creative outlet is called the Aetherstyle Boutique @ Grange (149, 61) , and she really specializes in a lot of cute anime things with sort of a thick-edged contrast and lotsa fun. Just so happens that as I was going to do a "Hard Knock Second Life" routine as a steps,?that madman Rickard Roentgen almost ran me over with his jeep, with?Aim and Pommie Zaius in the back seats. I just had to ride along.?Looks like trouble.?The terror. THE SHEER TERROR.?BEATS 4 FREAKZ.?Harooo??And just when it couldn't get any better, it did, and Rick started trying to scale the Trumpian skyscrapers in some sort of politically-motivated statement against the height tax. Oh, wait, anachronism. That wasn't the best part though, 'cuz when the ride finally stopped, Rick had a problem getting out. Aim had to come and fine him for his egregious trespasses against jeepkind. Officer Aim has a kinky taste for the unusual.

Soon enough, Morse Dillon beamported me to check out his new HQ, it's called SLiced and built on Magenta, one of the classic colored sims. Looks like the region has been burgeoning in recent times. Morse has a keen eye for detail, something I can relate to, and he's been careful to texture each and every one of his steps subtlely and differently. He explained to me he is going for a sort of department store look grounded in realism, and he shared what I believe are some great ideas if he can pull it off. A whole line of casual "Morse menswear" from him might?be very promising!

Besides Emote-A-Ramas, Siggy Romulus also has a new anti-blog blog called blogshite?and a clubby club dubbed Club Micro. Compact, space-efficient, and fully usable: has a VIP section with primfficient chairs, a disco ball, and even tabledancing. You've got to see it inworld for yaself. Ask Siggy! Clubs are lonely places without any friends to dance with, so it's fortunate that Jauani let me know of a new "event" that was taking place called Feted Critical Mass something-or-other. Reverse frame. Don't feed penguins (or do).?Gratuitous colorboxing.?Eheheh.

Why has Blobbus been dancing over 8 hours?

And that's a wrap.

It's like… I'm in a car… something high-tech… going through one of those tunnels with the amber overhead glow, a tunnel that never seems to end. Just the shadows passing over as the beams break through the windows and vanish through the endpoints of the dashboard to the trunk, until the next line scrolls by. I see myself crouching, lying in the back seat. The leather is cool, it's black and this car is very smooth and comparatively silent — at least that's what I know of it.

I'm feeling glum today, and I know why. I could feel better, should feel better, but doing so wouldn't actually make me feel better because of what I know. I don't want to go into details until I've had more time to digest what's going on, but I will just say awful things happen in life. All sorts of tragedy that hurts the more it's closer to you, especially if it's you who's afflicted and tortured. Burning pain is bad, but maybe a numb void is worse, because that way you don't even feel.

Life changes are hard. I guess it's hard for a baby to be splooshed out of a womb; even though the baby can't articulately say it at the time, baby can sure cry. Adolescence is often an awkward stage, and later on, so are things like "mid-life crises". Being a senior must be tough too, because even with lots of cash in the coffin (or coffer), physical health is probably suffering and who knows what else has deteriorated down the drain. When one is old one longs for childhood, but children often want to grow up fast and dress up like Mommy and Daddy. It's such a strange paradox.

What I'm trying to say is . . . I'm going through a really difficult time right now, and I have to. Being difficult like this?isn't a choice, but how I react when I'm in this tunnel with lights going past is. I cannot freeze up with fear.?In the front seat, the driver, is my beloved Jadey, and I'm thinking I should move there, to?the passenger seat, so I can be more than her passive pet and be beside her again. Especially during this time: the car's in motion though, and I'm going to have to move fast.

This loop is almost over.