OK. Finally got this Bittorrents thing all sussed out... I hope. So far? Freakin' fast and super-reliable. Best p2p 3v4r. I can find obscure anime with all the episodes bundled together and download all 2 gigs in about 15 hours, or it also supports auto resume-ing so I can get it piecemeal. Yay! I'm working on getting "Seikai no Senki" (Crest of the Stars) and "Stand Alone Complex".

I love the kind of anime where there's this cheesy romance and then some fighting and stuff. Maybe some giant robots. Maybe some demons. It's a great formula that gives me the same guilty pleasure I got when I was 16 and reading comic books like "New Mutants".

At least when reading "Sandman" or something, I could think to myself "Oh, this is really deep!" and even if not totaly true, still justify the $50 spent on back-issues. But "The X-men" and "Spider-man" et al... These comics had no real... anything. It was pure fantasy, pure escapism. A place to let my inner nerd roll as many twenty sided dice as it wanted at once.

There's a great feeling that only us geeks know. It is this: the feeling that you have when you've just bought a whole stack of comics and they're all nesting neatly in their mylar so no one can touch them, no one but you. And you close the door to your room.

Click.

And you know you're going to sit down on your bed and read all of them, until you fall asleep, even though it's only noon now. And nobody will open the door, and nobody will see what you feel. And Wolverine will fight Sabretooth again and again, forever.

...

Here's some found poetry one of my students gave me today. They were doing an exercise which required the filling in of some blanks marked "from" and "lives in" and "hobbies" and so on to make a list. One student's answers read:

above the school roof
in the blue sky
catching leaves

...

Also: UFOs