Into the Forest of Bugs

Twitter Sonnet #84

Hard foes are for people with time to kill.
Good water now comes in tiny bottles.
All life's crucial fluids constantly spill.
Partly useful are projected models.
Province borders arrange around the text.
Such are the first prizes on World's Top Thane.
Salt's handy against shapes that are convex.
When in Rome remember to conquer Spain.
The holiest churches have pancake walls.
A white motte is topped by a whole egg yolk.
Spanish words bounce like Tigger in the halls.
One gulp takes all the normal diner folk.
Dust drives like a drunk about the city.
Cold Tetris blocks are no calamity.

This is my first day off antibiotics--my normal time for a dose was two hours ago. Already I feel different. Really hoping illness doesn't bounce right back into me. Please, body, Let the Right Bacteria In.

Couldn't find anyone to play chess with last night, which is just as well. I spent almost all day yesterday writing the next script for my comic, coming up with rough drawings, and grocery shopping. I'm hoping a permanent change to a more varied diet will help me out--trying to permanently include more fresh, raw vegetables. I think I'll wait at least a week before I try having coffee.

I watched "Conversations with Dead People" last night, a seventh season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I liked. Apparently it's the work of four writers spliced into a single episode--Buffy being psych evaluated by a vampire she just met, Willow confronting a dead girl claiming to have messages from Willow's dead lover, two of the previous season's "nerd trio" coming back to Sunnydale, and, my favourite, Dawn caught in her home with a malevolent, invisible spirit. I loved how threatening the episode felt--each plot had some undercurrent of Very Wrong that the characters either ignore or simply never discover. Dawn's plot worked like a perfectly decent horror film, with some nicely timed haunted house scares. Buffy's conversation with the new vampire was perhaps the least effective, though perhaps most ambitious segment, attempting to walk a delicate line between intentional self-parody and genuine character exploration. It doesn't quite work, and Buffy's revelation that she has a "superiority complex and an inferiority complex about it" came off as kind of a clumsy thrusting of Buffy's obvious and rarely very interesting character non-arc into literal form. I suppose that's the danger of having to write about the same group of characters over the course of seven years--while everyone else might still have depths to explore, Buffy herself was kind of done in season five. But otherwise, a very nicely menacing episode.