I had another date with torque_tiger last Thursday, and that ( went pretty well. )

Since then, and in general since I last wrote, things have been fairly quiet. I've generally been feeling alright, though, and while things have been going more slowly than I'd like, I've managed to get some stuff done. I finished X-Men Origins: Wolverine (and will review that at some point), and I think I'm already used to my new phone -- it now has this snowleopard as a wallpaper, music from Lost Odyssey for the ringtone/message alert, and the theme from Persona 4 for the alarm. (It's awesome in a massively geeky way.)

Talking of massively geeky things, I've been given links to a couple of nifty sites. Manga Fox has, well, manga (foxes optional; though beware occasional ad redirects) for free, including some pretty popular series, and Crunchyroll does much the same thing for anime.

Finally, because it's Music Monday (at least on twitter), I figured I'd post a couple of links. Indie Paws is a blog with a good selection of posts and quite a substantial number of free mp3's, which is always a good thing. (Also, m'friend Mag [edit: magrcon] writes for it from time to time.) I've also been listening to some Fall of Efrafa, and at that link their entire discography is available for free.

So this is an update I've been meaning to make for a while; just haven't found the time. Mainly it's about roleplaying stuff which all goes neatly behind ( a cut. )

Now for some more fun stuff, and not just vaguely geeky links that I'm sick of having open in Firefox. First up, I got a new and shiny phone -- the Sony Ericsson W302 -- and I've been playing with that a bit, although in a rather limited way as I lost the memory card that came with it (due to a rather forceful eject mechanism -- it went flying and the thing's the size of a fingernail) and my 4gb one hasn't arrived yet. I also had recommended to me ITC, which if I hadn't already bought a new computer, I would certainly take a look at. That being said, the NatAmi Project looks ambitious and interesting, if largely conjecture at this point.

Finally some geeky music stuff. First off, torque_tiger recommended the oddly-named Mungyodance to me, some kind of DDR/StepMania/arrowsmashing type thing, which looks quite fun. Apparently it has several hundred tracks, and so it should at over 3gb in size. I'd still like to give it a try, so hopefully I can arrange for someone to burn me a copy -- it'd likely take forever and a day for me to download it.

Also, on IRC the other day there was some discussion of videogame music, and naturally the conversation eventually turned to OCRemix. After much discussion we came up with a very eclectic kind of top 9 -- it was a top 10 or 12 but some were a bit awful -- though these are in no particular order and should not be thought of as in any way authorative, being after all the choices of an arbitrary group of people on an IRC channel one afternoon. If anyone has any other recommendations, I'd genuinely like to hear them. There's some great talent out there. But without further preamble:

1. Harmony - Dragon Song (Secret of Mana)
   This is such an amazing track. Some beautiful guitar and synth work as well as original vocals. I never really played any of the Seiken Densetsu series, but I can totally agree with the feeling in the track -- even when games were pretty primitive in both audiovisual and technical terms, they could really get the imagination working and make you feel invested in them.


2. The Wingless - Godspeed (Star Fox)
   This is another good one, though it's different in tone -- completely electronica, far as I can tell, but it's got a great ambience. It's long but the two parts come together really well. Again I never really played the game, but it manages to have that feeling of flight which is appropriate for, well, almost any space-combat game, but particularly made me think of the Wing Commander series.


3. Star Salzman - Pillar of Salt (Xenogears)
   I really loved Xenogears; in all its overblown pretentiousness, it was one of the first really good post-Evangelion stories out there. Sadly I never managed to finish it (though I still own a copy) due to my memory card crapping out. Anyway, this track is all kinds of pretty. It manages to maintain the distinct style of the original and have a unique identity at the same time. The middle-eastern feel combined with the sci-fi ambience reminds me of the best aspects of Assassin's Creed, too, which is no bad thing.


4. Scott Peeples - Another Inspiration (Chrono Cross)
   Now, Chrono Cross I actually finished, despite it being (like Xenogears) only ever available on import here. It quickly became a favourite, although in my life when I was playing it, it wasn't a great time for me. Without wanting to sound over the top, this track reminds me of that time; it's got that little melancholy edge while at the same time being really pretty. And man, getting the end boss with the colours in the proper order was hard.


5. Arkimedes - Dreaming While I Wake (Shenmue)
   Shenmue was one of the reasons I bought a Dreamcast. I loved that game, even with all the flaws. It's a shame that the story was never really continued beyond Shenmue II, though obviously some of us still hold out hope that Sega will stop making awful Sonic sequels and go back to a franchise that has plenty of life left in it. Anyway. THis is kind of... not quite synth-pop, but it's got that 80's feel certainly. I love the original vocals on this. It reminds me a little of lo-fi stuff like Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, and that can only be a good thing.


6. ceili, Sephire - Snowfall on Forbidden Lands (Shadow of the Colossus)
   I do not have words for how unbelievably pretty this is. If you only download one from this entirely arbitrary top 9, make it this one. SotC was a good candidate for the whole games-as-art thing, and this remix is the poster child for how awesome remixes of game music can be.
   
   The last few are a bit more light-hearted, but no less good for it:
   
   
7. The Megas - The Annihilation of Monsteropolis (Mega Man 2)
   This is basically rivalled only by The Protomen, who made a Megaman Rock Opera, and really it's pretty difficult to beat that.


8. Arkimedes - Fall From Above (You Can't Stop) (Halo)
   If I did not include a Halo mix at some point, nidonocu would kill me. This one I was a bit shaky about at first (the robot voice and the other vocals really shouldn't work), but somehow this manages to be pretty great.


9. Game Over - Little Mac's Confession (Punch-Out!!)
   Don't let the pretty arpeggios in the intro fool you. This is from a Swedish band that does metal covers of Nintendo game music. If you think that sounds awesome then you are right.

I've been thinking of giving this kind of music a try, myself, though I'm not sure where to start -- I've only done a handful of remixes at all, and never really attempted anything with game music. One final related link, though I forget who I got it off: DA CHIP! is a series of chiptune reworkings of Daft Punk songs, and if that sounds like your kind of thing, then you should download it because it is free and made of all kinds of awesome.

Also? This video (SFW) shows a truly awesome Super Mario World ROMhack - no controller input at all after selecting the level. That is all.

[edit: oh yeah I forgot to add, Watchmen came out on DVD here yesterday so after some consideration I decided to order it, along with the Complete Motion Comic and the Tales of the Black Freighter animation; there's going to be a 5-disc edition in the US, but that seems to comprise basically a slightly extended director's cut of the film and the stuff I ordered, so not much point, even if it does get released here...]

Around this time last year, I'd just bought my Asus Eee PC 701 4G, and replaced my broken Nintendo DS with a brand new DS Lite. Of late, I've got hold of various add-ons and equipment to add to the functionality of those, along with rekindling some of my other 'geeky' interests: comics, anime, and roleplaying.

( First, the tech... )

That ties in nicely with the roleplaying, as both series are often touted as inspiration for and/or examples of Exalted-level combat. While I'm still very interested in that game, and continue to acquire books for it, I've recently got (back?) into the new World of Darkness. I had the core rules, and (naturally) Werewolf: The Forsaken since the release of the latter, but until recently I had not really looked at the line at all. A few weeks ago I picked up another of the main 3 games, Mage: The Awakening; and on Wednesday, I was able to get hold of Vampire: The Requiem -- completing my collection of the core three games -- and Changeling: The Lost.

As of last week, we'd begun to play a Vampire game run by Miquel; it is thanks to his efforts and those of kolat_ray that I've got back into roleplaying, and I can't thank them enough. The game we're playing is set in ancient Rome, and so far has proved to be quite interesting; it's really held my attention despite me not being familiar with new Vampire, or overly fond of vampires or Roman settings in general. (I also got interested in Orpheus, as Miquel owns the main book; although that and at least one of the supplements is fairly readily available, all six books may prove difficult to find.)

I tried to find some places to get cheap roleplaying books from, and I was surprised to find Amazon had some good deals. I've ordered Promethean: The Created and Hunter: The Vigil to complete the set of new World of Darkness main books, along with 3 supplements for Werewolf and two for general World of Darkness use.

I'm vaguely considering going to the comic/gaming shops in the near future, possibly today, as I've not been in a very long time; it'll be interesting to see what they have.

(How am I affording this? Well, it was my birthday last week, and I am eternally grateful for generous relatives. Also? They let me have a credit card.)

I know a kid who thinks he's hip hop cause he buys it
I know a kid who thinks he's hip hop cause he never buys shit
Underground or mainstream
Some are bound to change schemes.

     -- Sage Francis, Underground For Dummies

So I'm listening to Sub.FM a lot lately -- I first saw it mentioned on Warren Ellis' twitter -- seeing as dubstep and its related spinoffs seem to be the in thing of late, and for once I actually like the genre. (There's also the more obviously-titled Dubstep.FM, but I'm not so keen on that one; DubTerrain is pretty neat though.) The quality of the stream's not brilliant, but in a conversation elsewhere there was some talk of audio enhancers. Normally I'm skeptical of these, but mikosquirrel pointed me in the direction of the DFX Audio Enhancer, which (on certain types of music at least) works really well; with dubstep, you can crank the bass to obscene, bone-shuddering levels, as it should be.

( In which I ramble a bit about music and other cultural stuff. )

Finally a couple of arty type things that I rather like: Multicolr Search Lab lets you pick up to 10 colours and use them to navigate a selection from "10 million of the most 'interesting' Creative Commons images on Flickr". It's a nice idea. Also, New Math is all kinds of awesome; reminds me a bit of one of my favourite artists, Jenny Holzer.

So, I've been following up with some of the tech things I've mentioned in past entries.

( Yes, this is a little geeky. )

Thanks to salith, I should be getting a pretty decently-specced PC custom-built and ready within the next two or three weeks; we decided on the parts a few days ago, and I gave him a cheque yesterday. It cost substantially less than I was expecting it to, having looked at prebuilt machines of comparable specification, and it should be pretty expandable as time goes on. The only thing we were unable to find on the site used was the live bay thing for the Audigy, but I could feasibly take it out of this machine. I'm planning to keep this one around as a spare, as it still works OK and everything; it's just not very powerful. Alternatively, I may get a KVM switch so I can run both machines as necessary, but I'll work this all out when I actually have the new PC.

Talking of PC stuff, I found a couple of useful sites for desktop backgrounds/wallpapers. I've had the most use from DesktopNexus, though 4scrape has some pretty neat stuff too.

As there's been some malware going around on Twitter lately, LongURL Mobile Expander is a pretty handy add-on that lets you see the full address for shortened URLs, in case of any doubt. I recall reading somewhere that people are substantially more likely to click links in a Twitter feed than in an email, despite such things not necessarily being any safer.

So, based on various people's comments, the view on Twitter seems fairly sharply polarised, with some people quite vehemently against it. (Personally, I like it a lot.) As this post is not so much about Twitter but more things from there, I think I'm safe to proceed with only a reference to nidonocu's rather eloquently-put post, "Twitter, or how I learned to stop worrying and love 140 characters". For what it's worth, although I still have the service set up to ship tweets to LJ, I've now set it so only tweets with a certain tag will appear, and even then (assuming it works) they'll be under a cut. And surely, if scrolling past a cut tag is that much of an issue, then it's not just my entries you'll have trouble with.

( Anyway, without further ado... )

So, I've been playing with a few new toys recently, both software and hardware.

( First up, and my favourite thing in ages... )

Finally, it's worth mentioning that I'm looking into expressing creativity in writing; two books I got recently, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down The Bones (which treats writing as Zen practice), and The Ode Less Travelled, a book on writing poetry by the ever-lovely Stephen Fry, have made me think about giving it a try.

It's my first public post in a little over a week -- twitter nonwithstanding, and autoposting that still isn't working -- and I wanted to talk about the weekend just gone, which was particularly good, especially the Sunday.

( Saturday wasn't bad either, but not much happened. )

In the next few days, I need to work on the final project for my photography course; I've selected the 10 images I want to use, but I still have three questions to answer at ~200 words each, and it needs to be in before next Monday. I've also some work to do on my arts course before Monday evening, but that's less pressing. Ideally before I go out tomorrow, the books from Wisdom will be delivered, and I'll have time to burn a DVD for lord_kook, as he's going to do some mixing and possibly other work on my album CityZen when he has time.

Happiiy, there's more good stuff to talk about today. I've been pretty busy since I last wrote, but (mostly) in a good way.

First up, I've put some of my new art online; after looking for a place to host images and music, as I already have a place for ordinary photographs. I returned to DeviantArt (as electricdog) after a six year absence -- my old account, straywulf, has some very old artwork, but I may repost some of that on the new one, which currently has 5 pieces not posted elsewhere, three of them brand new.

I also got an account on SheezyArt, which -- unlike DeviantArt -- accepts music as well as images, but there were issues with the site yesterday so I've not yet uploaded anything there.

Talking of music, I wish I'd seen this Penny Arcade strip before I named my 'band' -- Schrödinger's Wolfman would be an awesome name.

Finally on the subject I've added a few bits to my Miscellany gallery, all or less of which may be amusing.

( There is yet more. )

I've not been neglecting my spiritual side either. I managed to get Natural Radiance by Lama Surya Das, a book and CD set of teachings on Dzogchen, something which I've been wanting to practice ever since I heard about it. I've found the set to be incredibly useful and effective, and I'm not even halfway through yet. Also, I got an email telling me about the Foundation Course now available on the Free Buddhist Audio site; along with the downloadable talks, it's proving to be a valuable resource.

There's a little bit of a downside though. Despite getting all this creative stuff done and potential courses coming up, I've sacrificed a holiday to Amsterdam in order to study. And, although I'm getting a lot of enjoyment out of my games, books, and so on lately, and as much as I prefer to be solitary, I'm still getting pretty lonely. Hopefully that'll pass in time, and I'll have classes to keep me occupied.

There's been a lot of good stuff going on lately, so I'm going to avoid talking much about games and such like I usually do -- with the exception of saying there's no way I can overemphasise how completely frickin' sweet the DS remake of Final Fantasy IV is -- and focus on that instead. Hopefully I can get it all down without going on for too long.

( Education, new phone, finally some help )

I've also changed my appearance somewhat. I'm now completely clean-shaven (having used some really good King of Shaves products my stepdad got me a while back), and my hair is black (pure black this time, rather than the blue-black I've used in the past) instead of red. What I wanted to do was have the majority black and use a lightening colour to make the ends and midlengths red, but that didn't take as well as I'd hoped; still, it kinda works, and I think the black suits me. When I was young my hair was pretty much platinum blonde, so the other end of the spectrum seems to work quite well too. I'm trying to take a little bit more care over the way I look, which is helping me develop confidence and making me feel more like I can just be myself. With all the stuff that I've mentioned above, it feels like I'm in a good place and doing as best as I can.

[edit: Forgot to mention, in the last few days it seems my internet connection has got substantially faster for no reason that I can readily determine. I'm not complaining by any means, but it's a bit odd.]

So, things are looking up. For the past several days I've been trying to foster a more optimistic attitude than usual, and it seems to have paid off. I've been thinking a lot, and I've also ( done a few things too. )

At the recommendation of m'dear filterchild, I downloaded Renoise, a multi-platform piece of music software, and I'm considering buying it as it's only €50 and it seems really good. It runs reasonably well on the notebook, and the license lets you use as many different versions of it as you like, so I could install it on a Windows machine too, as long as I was the sole user. I got a pretty sweet pair of DJ/monitor headphones, too; I don't mind using the little earbud ones for my mp3 player or whatever, but the ones I had for serious use broke. (Also got some music by Super Furry Animals and The Stranglers, for a bit of variety.) On the level of appearance, I found the time to re-dye my hair, and it's a much better colour now, if somewhat darker than usual. My folks bought me a really awesome pair of durable sandals. And I still love my keffiyeh.

I've also been considering taking up a course again, and one thing I have in mind is to go down to Red Tape Studios back home and see if I can try again at the music training course I attempted (and failed) last year. It occured to me that if I went for the Thursday afternoon class (assuming they run it on the same days again), I could avoid the rush-hour trams and go down to Games Workshop after class and get some gaming in, then come back after that when the trams would be quieter.

Other than that, I'll take a look at what the Open University are offering, as well as investigating Sheffield Hallam and Sheffield U; I've just now requested a prospectus from each.

[edit: Totally forgot to mention, we've been looking into the details of our planned holiday in Amsterdam at the start of September over the last few days. There's some really nice apartments and there's a lot we want to do, so hopefully it'll be a good trip -- I'm certainly looking forward to it.]
[edit2: I've done some photography while I've been here too, so if any of that turns out well, I'll post it here when I get back home -- I don't have the cable with me to connect the camera to a computer.]

Another week, another update, I guess. On the whole, things have been good since I last wrote; today's been a pretty lazy day, though I did just get out of the shower after dying my hair again -- a darker red this time, which I'm not sure I'm as keen on Scratch that, it's a reddish/purplish brown and I hate it, I'll have to buy better dye tomorrow -- and, of course, it's afforded me time to write here.

( My week, then. )

At home, I've been using my notebook to chat to a couple of friends with video and audio via Skype; I was surprised at how effortless it was to get it all working, and it feels like closer contact than talking over IM or whatever. It was good to hear Russ' voice again, and I spent a good while talking to huskion one night as well; among other things, we talked about NEET and Hachikō. Subsequently he linked me to some interesting things about where he lives: some myths about Poland and this picture of the British Embassy in Warsaw.

That's pretty much everything that's been happening, and I think we should be having dinner soon. There's not a lot planned for the weekend, though hopefully I'll be seeing actively_lazy for a bit tomorrow afternoon [edit: due to a mistake with the buses, he's not able to visit as it'd not be worth it for the little time he'd be able to spend here, so we'll have to make it another time] and with luck, I'll see shirosirius before I go back home some time next week. (I'm thinking luck maybe isn't on my side at the moment though.)

So, after a week or so at my mum's, I figured it was time to write. The journey here was easy, and I managed to pick up the latest issue of Wired en route; although I've been unable to subscribe (only one place near me ever seems to get it in, and it's inconvenient to go there; no website seemed to have it) I found that Wired UK will be relaunching next year, so that could well be interesting.

( While I've been here... )

Plans for the rest of my stay -- which is going to be at least another 10 days -- include going to the Royal Armouries to see an exhibition of movie arms and armour, and a bit of shopping to hopefully get a mod for my DS letting me play homebrew software and emulators etc. For the most part I'm planning just to take it easy, see friends if I can, and try and enjoy myself.

[edit: changed my journal style -- hit up electricdog.livejournal.com to see]

[edit2: I am troubled by this error message: (drivel:5139): Drivel-WARNING **: Throbber animation not found]

So, like everybody else, I downloaded Firefox 3, and it's considerably improved, in that most of my extensions and plugins work again, and at least some of the time it doesn't spaz out when I try and load a Flash video. (I really need more memory as a priority, and probably at the end of the year/start of next I'll try and build a new machine.)

( Digression on tech/social networking )

I've got into some new music lately, thanks to friends and a film; Climax Golden Twins featured in the soundtrack for Session 9, and when I mentioned this, roque reccommended the amazing, dark dubstep work of Burial. (There's a good review of his first album here, which describes the sound pretty well.)

I wrote a new track too, and created an image to go with it; click the thumbnail below for a bigger version.

Schrödinger's Dog - Neon Blue Deep, dark ambient for the middle of the night. Jagged guitar, reverberating beats and synth sweeps keep the pressure. Incomplete without surface noise.

I'd be interested if anyone knows of good creative software (music mainly, but anything's good) for Linux, as I've just bought an EeePC which runs Xandros, a variant of Debian. At huskion's suggestion, I'm also thinking of getting some kind of mod for my DS that would allow me to run homebrew software; I'm sure there's trackers and suchlike available, though I think I'm going to get a lot of use out of Jam Sessions and Electroplankton (both official releases) in my new side-project.

Due in part to hot weather here, my sleep pattern's been quite messed up. That's meant I've not got a lot done, but I do have a few things worth writing about. Quick mention first: I've signed up for FoodFeed (with the usual username), a semi-pointless Web2.0 doohickey that I claim I'm using to keep track of my diet, but which is actually fairly superfluous. I also re-dyed my hair the other day, and had an important haircut while I was at it.

( There are still birthday things to mention. )

I wanted to try and work on some music the other day, and once again I found something I'd started working on some time ago and finished it off. What there was only ran for somewhere between one and two minutes, so I had a fair bit of work on my hands. I'm pretty happy with the result, though, and I also created a community here on LJ for my music -- schrodingersdog -- though I've not yet had the time to set it up fully. When I do, I'll crosspost music and any pertinent information to there.

Image by rcameraw

Schrödinger's Dog - Shattered Light (80bpm, 4:36, 7.17mb) This is an Isolationist piece, starting off discordant but with melodic elements as the track progresses. As with a lot of my music, this is in some ways like a soundtrack; it's based in part on a dream I had about Akihabara.

That's about it for now, really. I was originally meant to be going to town again today and meeting kyu_diary, but as it's already after 5:30pm that's not going to happen; I said I may go over in the evening, but I've still got things to do here.

The last few days have been pretty busy. On Sunday, I got a call from kyu_diary, and spent time with him and imperial_wolf; we had something to eat, then for no particularly explained reason we decided to go to the toy superstore in the same area, and we all ended up with soft toys. Mine was a present, and is the single most adorable thing in the universe: a li'l white tiger with the cutest face. I would post pictures but it might destroy the internet (read: it would entail finding the cable for the camera).

( Moving swiftly on... )

I've made plans for what to do with my birthday money, which included an unexpected and substantial gift voucher from Toroka; I'll get a new DS, an EeePC 700 series with a case and extra storage media, and preorder a few games for the PS2 (Growlanser: Heritage of War aka Growlanser V Generations, Soul Nomad & The World Eaters aka Soul Cradle, and Baroque) that are due for release throughout June. (I also played the demo of Ninja Gaiden II -- due out on Friday, so I'll get it next week in probability -- and it is the most awesome thing ever to be awesome in a long long time.)

On top of that, I should be seeing wingedwuff (among others) at the end of the month, and he says he'll give me his old phone (a Sony Ericsson S700i) as a present; he's also invited me to go with him to see Pendulum in Sheffield in October/November time. So things could be a lot worse, and I now have a few days to relax with nothing really planned.

For certain definitions of interesting, the last couple of days have been... interesting.

Between Friday night when I went to bed and this morning about 10:30, I think I can only have been awake for maybe six hours. I don't know whether it's something to do with the meds or what, but sometimes I sleep for huge amounts of time like that. Feel better for it, but still.

( Anyway, today was more active. )

The same cannot be said of things in general. My mood's still been volatile, and since coming home I've not been feeling too good. I've nothing really to do until Tuesday, but I'll try and get to the Buddhist centre that evening if I can. Then on Thursday I have a few options -- it's kyu_diary's day off, but there was also a plan of seeing my ex for a drink or whatever. It could be good to spend some time with him, but it might dredge up painful memories.

( Cut for PS2 ramblosity )

Other than that, iminta stealth updated with a bunch of other sites that you can add, so I've registered on a few of those. iLike was something I was already using on Facebook, and it's pretty cool for the whole free music kind of thing, as is The Hype Machine. Also music-related (and pretty awesome) is SonicLiving, though it seems somewhat US-centric.

On a more literary front, I've also signed up to two rather similar services: Goodreads and LibraryThing. I've flung out a few invites here and there for these sites, so apologies in advance if anyone gets an invite they don't want; I'm not trying to spam, I just think these are genuinely interesting and useful and figured that some folks might want to check them out.

I also got around to uploading some photos taken with the cheaper of my cameras, which I usually take out with me. Sheffield Monochrome only has eight pictures in it at present, out of around 30 I took, but a lot of the others didn't really come out very well.

Seems like a while since I wrote here. Anyway, things have been pretty up and down for me lately; my sleep's been erratic at best which has caused me to miss out on a few things, and what should have been a ten-minute job installing my new DVD drive this morning took an hour orso and was incredibly frustrating overall.

( I'm going to try and focus on the good though. )

Today I've been working on a few things, this journal included; unfortunately though, for various reasons, neither kitsunefury or myself were able to go to the Buddhist centre this week, though I may try for next Tuesday as there's a puja.

I've also got back into playing my PBeM game after a break of about 4 months, and completely revised a piece of music; I also realised I'd made the error of setting my mp3 encoder to use j-stereo rather than true stereo, meaning the panning wasn't coming through properly on some pieces. I've also bought a couple of music production magazines lately, so I imagine some samples from their cover DVD's will be showing up in my music soon. Here's the track:

• Schrödinger's Dog - Terminal Faith [version] (124bpm, 3:37, 5.6mb)
  
  Downtempo ambience with melodic guitars, deep beats and crystalline keys. I'm really pleased with this one; it serves as a breathing-space after the darker first tracks in the collection, and it was interesting to work on something less beat-driven than usual.

Tomorrow I have plans to spend time with kyu_diary, though when I'll get into town (or to his place) to meet him I don't know. Friday I need to pick up my prescription, but asides that, I have no plans (or much money to do anything). That being said, I did hear from an old friend (most will probably know him as iakat, though that journal's no longer updated) via Facebook, and he suggested we go out sometime to Corp or whatever. I also heard from an ex for the first time in ages, but after some consideration I felt it wasn't in either of our best interests to actually meet up again after all this time.

( The last two days have gone pretty well. )

Yesterday, a large part of the time was spent doing things on the computer; I'd wanted to go visit kyu_diary, but by the time I got things finished, it was too late. I went out to meet kitsunefury, and we got some food before heading to the first night of the introductory course at the Buddhist centre; it runs for six weeks, with a further six week follow-on after that. I was pleased to see that such a large number of people had come to the course; there must have been fifty or sixty in total. It was all very well organized, though despite bringing a camera, I didn't manage to take any pictures. The centre's really beautiful, so I'll try and take some next time.

Rusty certainly enjoyed being there, and for me, meditating for the first time in a while was beneficial; though, and I'm not trying to sound superior or anything, but I've really moved way beyond the basics. I talked to one of the teachers there about an experience I often have in meditation, and it seems likely that I may have developed a degree of samadhi or even reached one of the jhanas, which to me is self-evident proof that Buddhism is right for me and definitely works. It's worth mentioning also that the excellent Aro community has a very interesting (if concise) page about "Being gay, practicing Tantra"; well worth a read, as is much of the rest of the site.

Once the class was finished, we browsed the bookshop. There weren't any books that I wanted for once, and Rusty couldn't afford one, so we left fairly quickly, and caught a bus back into town that was running either a little late or very early. I didn't want to go straight home, so we went for a drink at the virtually-deserted Casbah before parting ways.

I've no real plans for the rest of the week, as I don't have a lot of money left, though I've got plenty to do at home. On Monday I'm seeing the doctor again, primarily to get more meds, but there's a couple of other things I need to bring up like how I've not been sleeping so well.