Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Otsp I I I's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, February 5th, 2009
3:34 pm	So I'm only taking one class a semester until I have residency, and this semester it's Introduction to Literature. This is surprisingly painful. I'm not sure if this class is required for every major or what, but I think I'm the only person in the class going for a Comparative Literature degree. I'm not even sure if there's an English major in the class. We have to discuss literary interpretations on an online discussion board and it is amazing how depressing it is to me. It's not that my classmates are unintelligent or even unrefined. It's that they don't care about literature and they don't have any reason to care about literature. It's as if I was taking a class on advanced engineering in a class made up entirely of non-engineers. They just don't think in terms of literary analysis, which means I don't get anything out of their commentary, and the class isn't relevant to what they want to do with their lives so they have no reason to care about my long-winded bullshitting on themes and implications and techniques. There's a huge difference between literary analysis and literary appreciation, but learning to analyze rather than appreciate is pretty worthless unless you want to devote some section of your life to it. The rest of the class doesn't seem to be learning all that much because they don't have any reason to, and I don't feel like I am because the class is pretty much entirely made up of reading assignments, in-class student discussions, and online student discussions. I just feel like I'm masturbating to myself whenever I give my interpretations of the stories we've been given, my interpretations are so far off from what everyone else's are. I think things'll get a lot better when I'm in classes with more specific focuses, but for now I feel completely alien in mindset to the rest of the class. I wish the teacher would give us some analytic tools to work with rather than just moderating discussions between people who were never taught how to dissect a story. The problem with writing is that there are very much tools and techniques that differentiate between professional and amateur writing, but it's all psychic and internal, and as such completely invisible to anyone who hasn't been taught about it. People are a lot more willing to tell a writer how to do his job than they ever would be willing to tell, say, an architect, and it's for this reason. There are a lot of ways a poorly built house can fall apart, and it's the same with a poorly built story, but if you've never been taught what these ways are a lot of the time they can catch you completely off guard. This class is like a bunch of architect armatures being told to build a house without even understanding concepts like load-bearing walls. Worse yet, most of the class never plans on becoming architects, so even if they did learn it'd be mostly a waste of time for them. I really wish the teacher would spend some time laying out how literature works, rather than just asking us to interpret it blindly. I'm completely self taught, so I'm sure I have horrific blind spots myself, and I don't see myself learning anything about them in this class. It's a good excuse to read some interesting short stories (Kafka's next, fuck yes), but I just feel like with a single class worth of clear lecturing it could be so much more than that. Unrelated to all this, the MahJong games are going nicely. We had our second ranked game last night. I seem to have a knack for coming in second. I'm sure nobody cares, but the stats from all the ranked games end up on This Spreadsheet. (5 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Sunday, February 1st, 2009
1:31 pm	So I've completed a full first month of my dream journal. 31 dreams in 31 days. I didn't dream every night, but for every night I didn't dream I had a night with two dreams separate enough that I recorded them apart. I've tagged each dream with whatever its primary themes were. I have the feeling that my dreams might get weird over the next few weeks. Things just turned pretty grim on this end in a way I'd rather not discuss with the internet. These 31 all take place before things turned, though. ( A few things turned up over and over again through the dreams. ) I was really surprised at how coherent most of the dreams have been. I do a little bit of cutting away incoherency when I record the dreams, and I don't record dreams that are just collections of incoherent events and images, but I never add anything that I didn't actually dream to make the dream make sense. I actually noticed I was developing a fearful habit about half-way through the month. I would get really upset at myself if I didn't feel like my dream had enough literary merit, like there was something wrong with me for dreaming some dumb dream where I just walk around a supermarket with a wizard. Once I noticed I was doing it, though, I realized how ridiculous it was and more or less stopped. Right now my worry is that I've only got a one dream buffer, so if I don't dream for two nights in a row I'll be out of content to post. I think if that happens I might just start posting "best of"'s from my past. My top 5 dreams of this month: 1) Andrew Is Pregnant (01/14/09) 2) Poison Hose (01/12/09) 3) Abe Lincoln (01/10/09) 4) Wall Dick (01/19/09) 5) The Salamander-Shark (01/01/09) (5 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
7:35 pm	One of the gifts I got for Christmas was a hand-held audio-recorder. I've started waking up in the mornings and immediately narrating everything I can remember of my dreams into the device. I'm posting the results of this to a tumblr account. I can only upload one file a day, but I'm going to make a goal of doing so. The dream-posts are here. The feed is http://lobsterdream.tumblr.com/rss if you want to add it to your rss feed. I'm going to assign tags to the dreams for reasons of hilarity and self-analysis. Already, things are kind of grim and hilarious. I also have an image-journal on tumblr, where I just post one picture a day from my image folder. It's kind of masturbatory and has a really pretentious name, but I like it. You can find it here. I don't know if I'll be able to stay constant with my updates while I'm in Florida over next week, but I'll try. I'm looking forward to seeing all of you again. (7 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
6:47 pm	OH MAN COHOS ARE THE COOLEST THINGS EVER. (2 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
6:17 pm	It's 23 degrees outside. Is this the night I freeze to death? (4 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Friday, December 19th, 2008
11:41 am	The world. . .has become a snow-globe. (2 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
1:18 am	I ended up spending the election with five other UF veterans. We sat around yelling at Florida until it turned blue. This feeling. . .a lack of resignation on Election Night. It's so alien. (2 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Saturday, November 1st, 2008
2:47 pm	2,439 / 50,000 (4.9%) Things are moving along well for the most part, although I am worried that I'm almost a thousand words beyond schedule and I haven't even gotten to the meat of my outline's allocated first day's work. I may be forced to edit down the number of days the story takes place across. So far it's just been Employee Ethical and Mental Hygienic Evaluation tests and sitting around in waiting rooms. Nobody's even shot anyone yet. Nobody's even gone to a futuristic TGIF and vomited after drinking too much yet. I'm having a lot of fun. This is going to be a good month. This is going to be such a bad month. (Spam a Lobster)
1:05 am	I ate too much pizza and Jello And I came home And I sat down And oh my fucking god NaNo's begun. In this month I plan to: -Have a mental breakdown. -Become an alcoholic. -Spend far too much time sitting in front of my computer in my underwear writing Kafkaesque sex scenes. -Use the word Kafkaesque at EVERY available opportunity. -Wear a lot of argyle. -Write something slightly more pleasant to look at than a turd. This journal is where I will come when things get bad. I think I will start now. (3 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Monday, October 27th, 2008
2:01 pm	I've finally brought enough of my stuff up from North Carolina to be able to get settled into my room. Things are different up here. Things don't get messy. I get writing done. I spend maybe one or two days a week out with friends, in contrast to Orlando where I honestly can not remember the last day I spent in solitude. I should know if I'll be starting Hunter in January within the next week or two. I haven't eaten fast food since I moved up. I've lost my pot-belly. Fucking weird. I've become slightly agoraphobic, and I'm torn on if this is something I should cultivate or try to shake off. I took pictures of my room here. I've brought them onto the internet for you guys. ( They're behind the cut. ) (15 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
8:38 pm	Facebook now has pictures of the gang back in high school. Here and here. Oh, memories. (9 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Friday, October 10th, 2008
3:51 pm	1000 Pictures! The folders have been numbered randomly. The participants have been listed below. See if you can match the folder numbers to the livejournal names. souvay kichara bad_samaritan robotazalea mmiayiuckoi basilisk128 herohigh phylumerzte octacon52 Justin Whoever wins attains the Ultimate Prize. ( Most submitted pictures behind cut. ) (3 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Monday, October 6th, 2008
11:05 am	I've got 700 images so far, and I'm expecting three more people to send me sets. Hopefully we'll be looking at an even 1000. Everything looks really good so far, and amazingly enough I've only caught two duplicates. Who would have known that Kim Jong Ill and Colonel Sanders would be so popular? The last few days have all been me setting up databases for my character ideas and other things like that. It's not exactly writing, but I guess it's something. My grandfather's out of the hospital again, though, so hopefully I'll be unstressed enough to write as normal for a while again. I'm really looking forward to NaNoWriMo this year. (5 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
9:45 pm	I've spent a lot of time working on my Inspirational Art directory, tagging all the images for easy access. It's a pretty monster project, but I've been putting a bit into it each day for a while now. There are a bit over 3000 images, and all the important tags have been applied. I've spent so much time staring at all of them, however, that I've decided I want to do another image exchange. Sort of like what I did in 2005. Basically, I want anyone interested to compress their 100 best images into a zip or rar or whatever and send it to me. My email is listed on my info page, you can AIM me, or whatever. Once I think everyone's submitted who's going to I throw them all into a torrent and we all guess which folder of 100 images correspond to which people. The winner gets respect. Internet respect. It's all just an excuse for me to loot the cream of your image directories for my own selfish reasons, but in a way that lets me return some cream your way. Spread the cream around. Share the cream among friends. So, who's in? (12 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Friday, September 12th, 2008
4:32 pm	New York so far has been pretty good. I haven't really left the house all that much, but I'm slowly finding my niche. I've gotten more writing done in the last three days than I did in Orlando in the last two or so months. I know a surprising number of people in this town already, whom I've been getting in touch with over the last few days. Last night was Cheese-Steak night with Lis and next Monday looks like karaoke with Erin and the Podcast Crew. It also turns out that Jake, my old college roommate, is in town. This is a pleasant surprise, since I sort of figured that we had parted ways post-college for good. I spent all of today ironing all the clothes I brought. Space Bags do a pretty fantastic job of saving space but they managed to wrinkle clothes I did not know were capable of wrinkling. My computer is in NC. This is sad. I really only managed to bring bare necessities with me to New York. In about a month I'm going to be visiting NC again and hopefully I can bring up a more sizable batch of books and so on with me. I really don't know what my life here is going to be like, yet. I think I'm looking forward to finding out. (11 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Sunday, July 27th, 2008
6:16 pm	Oh my god, does Plato make me angry. Fuck that guy. :/ (6 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
10:44 pm	The Happening was a fantastic movie. Easily on par with Lady in the Water. EASILY ON PAR WITH LADY IN THE WATER. (12 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
12:14 am	I wish I was as cool as Chef Paul Prudhomme. Two great things Chef Paul Prudhomme has done in his life: 1. Invented turducken. 2. Deflected bullet. (4 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Friday, March 21st, 2008
3:08 pm	The most recent Smash Bros/Exercise Medley Life Challenge went pretty well. Updates on the website. The new top 10 list: 1st. Alexander-929 2nd. Outcry-836 3rd. Vexxi-767 4th. Boogich-710 5th. Nicole-616 6th. Broken-608 7th. Athena-595 8th. Rangod-567 9th. Bidoof-550 10th. Otsp-533 A bunch of people are having trouble with the next date so I'll probably move it back a week. Facebook invites to be sent out in the near future. (4 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)
Friday, March 14th, 2008
12:04 pm	LIFE CHALLENGE UPDATE For a multitude of reasons, this upcoming Life Challenge is going to be rescheduled for Thursday, March 20th. Still 7:00, my house. See you then. (7 Lobsters Spammed | Spam a Lobster)