On a whim today, I decided to dust off a bit of my Jpop (Ayumi Hamasaki, to be precise) and give it a listen. It is amazing what memories are invoked from just the first few tracks off of LOVEppears, which I first started listening to in 2000 — my first total immersion dives into computing (nay, computer appreciation), fleeting loves, the Milwaukee School of Engineering, Gentoo Linux, compiling Gentoo Linux, breaking all of my computers at least once.

Lonely nights in a warm bedroom, surrounded by computers, Ayu blasting through XMMS, heralding my first great interest shift. The daily commutes to MSOE punctuated with long sessions before and after class in the student center, tasting for the first time the sweet nectar of broadband, filling my belly with Japanese culture. My last serious interest in anime, my first serious appreciation for the potpourri of the Internet.

The whiteness of an Ayu wallpaper. My rust bucket truck. The couches in the Cudahy Student Center. The cheeseburgers they served there. Windows file sharing clients, their names long lost, from an age before the luxury of BitTorrent. A certain kind of orange present in my Trillian IM client. Shit, Trillian itself. Conversations never saved, never remembered, no longer the highlight of a lazy afternoon between classes. People not seen in years. Quiet conversations outside, in the cold, revisiting the high school roof.

All from Ayu’s “Trauma". If I had one hope, it was that I never lost these memories. If I had one fear, it would be losing the ability of music to invoke them.

Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack for Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫): spring and summer of 2001; warm days of my freshman year at MSOE spent waking up at 10 or 11, driving down to Milwaukee for a couple compressed hours of classes, driving back home and staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning (definitely, those were the days before week-long labs and projects).

I include the Japanese name for the film as this period was the height of my independent study of the language, and I remember teaching myself as best I knew how, learning hiragana and katakana, picking up what I could… listening to audio, letting the madness of watching Neon Genesis Evangelion at 3 AM take me. These events were the catalyst for becoming alienated from a group, which I reeled from for a bit, but in another sense, it was a self-defining moment, and worth the bizarre overimportance of how I’d been shunned.

Regardless, the songs from the album (and what I’m actually listening to now, Symphonic Suite Princess Mononoke) bring about memories of what I’m experiencing this very moment — dark nights alone in my bedroom, technology my implement of interest and my own curiosity my guide. The motif in song and memory is a kind of reserved contemplation; surely, I was at my most isolated and aloof then, but I believe it was therapeutic, and in the end it played no small part in crafting my personality as an aspiring intellectual (and maybe a bit of a misanthrope as well :).

At the end of the summer, I would dislocate my knee for a third time, and then things soon took an odd turn.

Just purged a bunch of people from my Facebook profile. I hadn’t talked to them in years and/or have no expectation of talking to them years from now. I did a smaller purge along the same lines on last.fm a couple months ago. If social networks only matter as much as the links that constitute them do, then said networks need pruning from time to time — the network needs to be able to correct its bad routes.

That said, if by chance you are a purgee and are reading this, it is nothing personal. We hadn’t talked and I didn’t see that changing. If you have a problem with that, your options are to deal with it, or begin the slow path to proving me wrong.

Been a while since I updated the blog, so I thought I would. First, an admission of guilt. If you haven’t been following the front page, I’m twittering (or whatever) now. Since I’m lazy, I’ve been updating that more than the blog.

Otherwise, the whole buying a house thing has consumed a lot of my time. The rest, really, has been Etrian Odyssey (yes, still) and Rock Band 2. But, those are going as you would expect: awesomely. The house thing is more interesting, and on the subject, I’d like to thank Tobi Silgman with the Stark Company and Christopher Ohly with UW Credit Union for helping me through the process. Both were very professional, skilled, helpful, etc., and did a great job for me under a unique situation or two.

On the house thing, I moved the first set of stuff there today, and took a bunch of pictures. It’s really awesome. And then, leaving, I smashed the car into a pole while backing out of the driveway. Now I’m down one tail light. More moving next week, I’m hoping to be fully in there by the end of October. Crazy. A month and a half ago I was only scarcely looking at buying a house, and now, here I am.

I think the whole house-buying thing finally set in today, meeting with my buyer’s agent whom I am surprisingly well-connected to (well, if two independent acquaintances count). Not one of those “oh crap, what am I doing?” moments, but certainly “oh man, this is the real deal.” I hope I didn’t look too much like a deer in headlights.

Things are coming along nicely, though, in that they’ve started and I haven’t gone screaming for the door yet. Paperwork to read and more people to talk to, though. Buyer’s agent has been awesome so far, truth be told; I’m really quite excited.

Also about houses, House starts up again in two weeks. I really need to fix the media PC by then.

I was feeling kind of nostalgic today, after the house poking around, and I always enjoyed driving Wisconsin Highway 33 (which has terminus points in La Crosse and Port Washington!). In fact, I think taking that 4 – 5 hour drive from one end to the other was my favorite part of living in La Crosse, to the point that I had often gone out of my way to start my drive at one end, so I could say that I drove the entirety of 33.

Anyway, nostalgia. I “drove” 33 again today by turning on satellite view on Google Maps, zooming in as close as I could for each location, and scrolling from La Crosse to Port Washington. Fun times.

Now that I’m looking for a house, I’m kind of regretting that large payment I made towards my student loan a month ago because “the money was just sitting there.” Doh!

• Went bowling with the Rutzes and, for expediency, let’s call them the Schucks. I wish I wasn’t so rusty. I did have one decent game though.
• On the subject of Rock Band, Appetite For Destruction would be an awesome full album for them to sell in their music store.
• On the subject of games, Rondo of Swords is pretty interesting. Hard, too, but I like the “Route Maneuver System". Adds a nice amount of tactics to the game. Atlus is easily my favorite DS publisher. And it has Izuna, apparently!
• Work destroyed me this week, but I had fun.

It’s been a couple months since moving to Madison, and my parents’ house still is the first thing I think of when I think of “home", Madison feels odd as a home city (especially since I still can’t really navigate it that well), and I still feel slightly like a visitor here at the shared house.

I think maybe I was expecting a sudden realization, a pop that yeah — this is home now, but I guess it will continue to be a gradual process.

More unnatural-feeling was explaining to Dan that the majority of the gang was not terribly interested in gaming on Monday as they had to buck up for their classes starting on Tuesday, and — definitely with a pop, this time — it dawned on me that I’m no longer part of that crowd. Tuesday is just another workday. Odd, almost. In the hubbub of moving and real work and everything, I never really noticed my summer going by, but I can definitely now note the inverse, that this is only the second time I can remember where the end of summer did not mean the start of something new.

Bizarre, really. But enough rambling about that. Nothing new with the server, my new Iron Heroes character died on Friday (not sure if I’ll follow through with the taboo of playing his “brother” next), Shards of Jade nearly happened, but not quite, today (Saturday), and it’s looking the same for Sunday. But I did buy myself some J-pop.

Work is still fun.

Too lazy to list my DS games, so go here where I’ve done it once already: http://wiki.incorporeal.org/Nintendo_DS_games_owned_by_bssteph

Gen Con in less than a week. :)

Thinking about getting a new desktop to replace my current clunker. It’s only an AMD64 3800+ X2, for chrissakes! The Core 2 Duo Fedora Core 6 box at work has made me want to upgrade.