Holy crap. I skipped over a month.

I hadn't realized I was on one of my hiati, but whatever. Originally I was going to write something about how it was snowing and there were seagulls outside, but then I noticed how long it had been since I wrote. The original one would've gone something like this:

But now it's gone! None shall ever know what it is to read about having softly falling snow outside and irritating bird noises together in so dissonant a harmony. Except it's not really dissonant or harmony because only one of the two generates an audible noise. Hm, is audible noise a redundancy?

FF1 Black Mage

Death Corps Black Mage

I had this awesome dream last night. I think it's because I recently got Civilization III Complete, and although I haven't played that much I guess it must be on my mind. I wasn't sleeping well at all. I had this dream where I was on one continent, and I killed a few civilizations, then went to settle a new continent. While I was there, my fledgling little territory left its cities undefended and the black mage from FF1 (only green like the Death Corps in FFT) took them over. So, my empire crumbled I guess, and I was reduced to only my strong continental cities.

At that point, my civilization and the enemy civilization both suffered rebellions that resulted in losing all but a couple of our cities. Suddenly it was like the camera zoomed into the capital and I was the Emperor of a civilization similar to Japan during this revolution. So, all these people were attacking my palace (which was more like an aircraft hangar) and my two most trusted samurai were guarding me as they rushed me into a big black car. The samurai who was driving had to back up to pull out, and as he did all of the rebels rushed out of the hanger-like structure.

The apparent leader whipped out a longbarrelled pistol and shot through the front passenger side window and hit the neck of the samurai sitting beside me in the back seat, and he obviously died. We had to drive by them in order to get out, so I was relieved he didn't let out another shot. I'm thinking they wanted me alive. It was strange, because in the dream I was actually very sad that one of my favourite samurai was just killed.

We drove out of there and for some reason my samurai friend decided we should hide out at a small farm. It resembled the poor Chinese farms you see on the poor Chinese farm movies. While we drove there it zoomed out to the Civilization map, showing my green territory's cultural border shrinking in the sea of red cities. It also showed a cute dotted path where our car was driving.

Japanese Mustache

The farm was small and crappy and I stepped in goat feces. I also noticed around this time that I had one of those awesome long Japanese mustaches. I remember meeting the farm girl, but then we didn't really do anything. I forget if I ended up winning back some territory or what.

The previous night I had a crazy cool dream about being a student of swordfighting. I'm wondering if the two dreams are connected. I really haven't been doing that much Japanese stuff or sword-related stuff, but whatever. The most fascinating part was still the sincere sadness I found when my samurai assistant was shot.

Another thing that happened quite recently is that Hans Bethe died. We referred to him in astrophysics lately, and my professor took the credit for the humour of him doing work with Ralph Alpher and Georges Gamow, but that's not what I remember him from. Bethe was someone who Richard Feynman did a lot of work with at Los Alamos and afterwards. A lot of Richard Feynman's tales recounted different work they did together and conversations they had.

One of the very last items in one of Richard Feynman's books, I think it was "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", was a letter that Hans Bethe's son, Henry Bethe, wrote about the fun times he had with Richard as a child. He was still young, and in a room full of boring old physics people, and would always ask when Dick was coming because that was generally the highlight of these parties for him. The things he wrote were really, uh... nice.

So, the other day I did like three crosswords without actually reading any newspaper articles. Then, on the subway home, I saw a man who was reading a paper with the top folded over and I saw the headline... something like "Physicist Hans Bethe Dead". That made me really sad too. I don't really get it, I just had this weird stomach dropping feeling. It's not like I was going to tear up or anything, it was just a very deep feeling of, "that sucks".

This kind of thing doesn't happen all the time. I hope I'm not becoming some crazy hyperemotional freak. That would be bad news, those people bother me. What happens when you bother yourself?

A while ago (that is, sometime in the past two months) I started listening heavily to the Flaming Lips. That is some awesome shit. The album "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" is so good.