What have I done today? I made pancakes. I totally failed to buy a used bike from the local bike recycling project. I spent far too much time browsing through a used book and video store. I started watching Ashes to Ashes season 2 at the behest of a coworker. I got some tasty take-out tempura from the Japanese restaurant down the road. I tinkered with the layout of my dreamwidth blog. I sketched a portrait of my current D&D character and posted it there.

In short, I accomplished nothing of any note. But I had more fun than usual in the process.

PS. I've been using Photobucket for image hosting, and while it's serviceable, I'm not exactly thrilled about it. Can anyone recommend a better alternative?

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very pleasant show to watch, and what social commentary it contains seems either limited and obvious or nearly 50 years out of date.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.

Tonight I made dinner from scratch for the first time in a long time: a simple, pseudo-eastern european affair involving ground beef, potatoes, mushrooms, and a generous dollop of sour cream. After that I ate cookies and dango for desert while watching anatomy lectures on YouTube. I now plan to just lie around listening to music for the rest of the evening, and maybe sketching a little if I get really ambitious.

Oh yeah, life is good.

After work today I went for a walk around Markham's downtown. Well, I'm guessing it was the downtown, at least; Toronto and its suburbs have a disconcerting habit of sprouting clusters of imposing high rise buildings more or less at random, so it's hard to be sure. All the buildings in this pseudo-downtown area -- office buildings and apartments alike -- had a glossy, corporate shine to them. Close-packed and elegantly organic, they reminded me of a coral reef made of glass and steel. Everything there was astonishingly clean, almost antiseptic. Beautiful and at the same time subliminally repellent, like a city caught in the uncanny valley between reality and disneyworld.

I sometimes feel a little bit the same way about my new workplace. It's gorgeous and fun and loaded with interesting perks and clever people, but at the same time it's also so very, very corporate that it hardly feels real. It's simultaneously a marvelous playground and the strictest, most adult place I've ever worked. I think it may be trying to steal my soul. I think it may be succeeding.

Adding to the unreality of the whole experience is the fact that, weekends aside, I've only seen sunlight through the windows of the office building where I work. It's dark when I arrive and dark when I leave. I feel like I've gone nocturnal, though of course the exact opposite is true.

I don't know if I would want to work in a job like this for more than a handful of months at a time. I don't know if I could. But for now it's shaping up to be a very interesting co-op term indeed.