This evening, my landlady was showing my apartment to a prospective tenant, so I decided to make myself scarce by hanging out at work instead. I started out reasonably enough, checking my personal email and such, but in the end somehow wound up spending well over an hour reading through my own livejournal's archives. Which was entertaining enough in its way, although I kind of can't believe how many entries I've dedicated to bemoaning my own lack of focus and work ethic over the years. (Given how much anguish that particular personality flaw seems to have caused me over the years, you'd think I'd have gotten around to fixing it by now.) At any rate, embarrassing as some of those old entries can be, I find I really do like knowing that I've got some sort of record of the last 6+ years, no matter how patchy and indifferently written.

That's not the only nostalgia kick I've been on lately, though. Playing the Miles Edgeworth DS game demo has done a fantastic job of reigniting my indefensible fascination with the Phoenix Wright series of games. Which has actually been kind of frustrating since I happen to have no access to said games at the moment, and there's surprisingly little interesting fan work available online, at least that I can locate. (Although the fan video set to 'Schadenfreude' is pretty good if you know the characters.)

I've also found myself doodling MAIOS, my D&D character from earlier this year, despite the fact that I haven't played it since the group decided to shake things up by starting a d20 modern campaign several months ago. While the shaking up was (and continues to be) good, I do kind of hope that we manage to get back to that original campaign at some point. I might not actually be all that good at playing MAIOS, but I've rarely had so much fun inventing a backstory, psychological profile, and physical appearance for a D&D character.

In less pathetically geeky news, the relationship thing is going well. The dude, let's call him MB, is incredibly sweet and earnest and makes my hormones go 'ping!'. I worry sometimes that it's not going to last, and that the longer the relationship goes on the more painful it will be for both of us when it eventually runs aground on some rocky shoal or other, but for the moment at least I'm enjoying it all too much to care.

So it's been a while, eh? Things have been fairly crazy over here. First I lost my internet connection due to cable-chewing squirrels, then there was the week-long goodbye party good times for my little sister, and then there was... okay, and then there was a lot of video game playing and laziness. But still. I've got, like, 2/3 of a good excuse for not posting.

What else has been going on? I finally found myself a D&D group, for one thing, and they're not even people from work! They are all pretty great, although they seem to find the idea of a girl who plays D&D kind of strange. Which, in itself, is a bit strange to me. After all, the person who introduced me to D&D was female and about half the people I've played with on a regular basis have been female as well, at least if you count the many times I roped aforementioned little sister into playing silly little one-player campaigns. Anyway. I am playing a warforged sorcerer, who is basically a magical robot soldier who specializes in setting things on fire. The only downside to this character is that I can not seem to stop myself from doodling pictures of it during work. It's a magical robot! How can I resist?

What else... I watched a bunch of episodes of the TV show Mad Men over the weekend because it had been recommended to me, because it was available on watch.ctv.ca, and because I was playing my way through a grind-heavy RPG and wanted some distraction while I pummeled monsters. I have kind of mixed feelings about the show. I feel like its a well crafted show of consistently high quality, and I do appreciate how it avoids demonizing any of its characters, but it's not really a very pleasant show to watch, and what social commentary it contains seems either limited and obvious or nearly 50 years out of date. Though maybe I would have appreciated it more if my attention hadn't been split between the show and my game. Who knows.

Also, I am a bit mystified by Obama's choice not to release photos of detainee abuse. I mean, I can understand his other reversals on, say, the use of military tribunals. I don't agree, but I can understand. The photos, on the other hand... what can he possibly have to gain by not releasing them? The official line is that the photos would inflame anti-American sentiment, putting American troops in danger, etc. I guess I can't conclusively prove that that wouldn't happen. However, I can at least attest to the fact that not releasing the photos has significantly eroded my own personal trust of the current American government, and I find it hard to believe I'm the only one who feels that way. Those pictures must be really, truly, unbelievably heinous to be worth the damage that not releasing them is going to do to the current administration's reputation.