Setsuled's Journal

Victoria the Cat's in a rather tight ball of sleep on my bed at the moment. Nothing seems to be getting through to her.

I decided I'd spend to-day goofing off. I sense somehow that I need to do that now and then; set aside a day where I do nothing constructive, and merely have fun or something like it. I have a vague idea that it'll help me stay focused on other days.

So I walked to Starbucks and finished reading the astonishingly long translator's introduction for the Penguin edition of Plato's The Republic. The fellow felt it important for the reader to understand the environment in which Plato wrote this work. An idea I can readily appreciate, and I enjoyed the information about Greece from around 500 to 400 BC. It's rather terrible that Socrates was executed for heresy, and the fact that he was so killed in a society more purely democratic than our own reminded me of the rancorous religious folks in the United States. No wonder Plato had such a low view of democracy.

The coffee I got at Starbucks was terrible, so I walked to Barnes and Noble and got there a slightly better mocha. Lotta walking. The one thing my car was definitely useful for was for goofing off. In that respect I sorta regretted not having the use of it. It also sucks that I wasn't able to go to the Dresden Dolls concert on New Years Eve. That makes three Dresden Dolls concerts I've missed now for unforeseeable circumstances.

After I came back, I tried playing video games, but somehow my heart just wasn't in it. There wasn't much to do in Fallout 2 and I'm hideously sick of Morrowind. I tried to get back into Neverwinter Nights but that didn't even slightly work out.

I watched a bit of Return of the King, and just kind of gazed at it like it was in a museum, thinking about how, really, it's just perfectly beautiful. I wanna live in Minas Tirith.

I went over Boschen and Nesuko a bit, as I sometimes do, trying fruitlessly to read it as someone who didn't write it, and figure out which elements are working and which aren't. All I can really say is that I think I'm happy with some of the concepts and characterisations, but that I'm rather disappointed in my dialogue.

Let's see . . . I also watched bit of the Tori Amos DVD Welcome to Sunny Florida and read some of V for Vendetta. Alan Moore just never disappoints. It's like a hybrid of the Joker and Batman in 1984, only better.

I'm gonna go read some more of it now . . .