8.30.2000
Happy birthday, Mom.posted by Jason Schupp 12:51:43 PM || momp momp
"Sweetie, please shut the cat. All of the summer is getting out."
"Get off of me."
("I'm not on you.")
"I don't like your camel."
"Those are endangered, you know."
("What are endangered?")
"Okay."
It's fun to have a friend sleeping on your couch, talking in her sleep.
posted by Jason Schupp 12:09:14 AM || momp momp
8.29.2000
It has begun.posted by Jason Schupp 12:52:25 PM || momp momp
I've got one more to add: Biwitched, featuring Samantha, Darren, Endura, and the Sex Warlocks. The worst part of the flick was when Endura cast a spell on two homophobic movers, with the following incantation:
Let those who would bash today
Become themselves... Oh... So... Gay!
Directly after this, though, was the best part of the flick, so I guess it all evens out.
posted by Jason Schupp 12:50:11 PM || momp momp
8.28.2000
Holy crap. This page looks like hell in PC/Netscape 4.7. I need people to warn me. If that could be you, please feel free to do so in the future! I really need to be pelted with vegetables.(Note: Someone did warn me. Several days ago. I need to wake up...)
posted by Jason Schupp 12:47:52 PM || momp momp
I'm currently on hold with the gas company to let them know that I'm not responsible for the outstanding balance on my apartment's gas bill. The automated phone system started with:
Thank you for calling Peoples Gas. To continue, please press 1.
Er... why? Is this a test to make sure I'm awake?
posted by Jason Schupp 12:08:49 PM || momp momp
8.25.2000
I probably won't post much over the weekend, as I have a wedding to go to tomorrow, and then Sunday I'm considering going.... *gerg* going.... *ack* Sorry, this is hard for me to say. Going.... into... *erg* intotheofficetogetworkdone. Bleh.In the meantime, you can read an angry letter (just below!), or if you're feeling really nostalgic, you can read the complete archived set of Running Tally, the weblog that birthed Somnolent.org. I want to perk up the navigation a bit, to make it easier to go from month to month without backtracking to later months, but I have a haunted pub to go to right now, so it can wait. Ta!
posted by Jason Schupp 6:54:11 PM || momp momp
A Concerned Letter to the Previous Tenant of my Apartment
August 25th, 2000
Dear Lukas Haule,
What is the big fucking idea with leaving the gas bill unpaid? I just got home and found that in the mail I received a letter for "Occupant" from People's Energy. I thought, Oh, this must be my initial, new-resident gas bill. Good. Hell no. Good is not the word to use here. Lukas, you owe People's Gas $93.61. Now I have to call them and tell them that I just got here, and probably will have to get the landlord involved, too, to verify both my claim and that you had moved out on the 3rd. If you think I'm paying this off for you, you're off your nut. According to this, I only owe something like $13, and that should be pro-rated to account for when I moved in. The rest of it is yours, boyo.
Had I known that you had skipped out on this bill, I would not have had a nice chat with the mailwoman last weekend about you being gone and me being the new resident. I would not have given her your mail to make sure it got to you or the original senders. No, I would have asked her to throw your mail out, or use it at Burning Man for something creative, if she was going.
Thanks muchly. And could you have at least tried to clean up the place before you moved out? Fucking hell! Unless you're one of my regular readers, you have no idea of what I found in the bathtub drain.
Cheers,
Jason Schupp (your old apartment's new resident)
ps. Why are there no closet rods in any of the closets? Did you take them, or were there never any to begin with? I'm going to assume that you took them, because I saw clothes hung up on a rod in the bedroom closet when I initially came to check the place out. What the hell do you need closet rods for? And why did you take them, but leave the shower curtain rings on the shower rod?
posted by Jason Schupp 6:34:07 PM || momp momp
I want to speak up, but I don't know if I should. See, I know what the rock that showed up underneath John's bed is, and I know how it got there. I could just tell you the ending right now. It's John's story, however, and I don't want to intrude upon the telling. It just leaves me sitting here holding my tongue, though. Not like this whole rock story is a big deal like the ending to The Crying Game or something. Maybe it's just too early for me to be reading websites. Voot.
posted by Jason Schupp 8:40:01 AM || momp momp
8.23.2000
<Jason_idle_work_haha> Egads.<dvg_afk> electronic gads!
<Jason_idle_work_haha> Woop!
<Jason_idle_work_haha> Super fast action gads!
* Jason_idle_work_haha can't believe he just said "super fast action gads."
It's #blogirc night. Pop on over to irc.skunkworks.cx, port 6667, starting around 7pm CDT. You know, when Survivor starts. I'm gonna be late.
posted by Jason Schupp 5:21:46 PM || momp momp
To: Those Wacky [company deleted] Kids:;
From: Jason Schupp <jason@[company deleted].com>
Subject: foodish
I'm going to be boring and order from Noodles in the Pot today. Anyone
who wants to be predictable with me, let me know, and we can place a
joint order. Don't think that this is my way of saying I'm ready to
make a commitment, though. We've only been together for a couple
months, and I don't want to rush into anything at this point. We're
still getting to know each other, and I don't want to put undue
pressure on either of us. And what if one of us wants to start seeing
other people? Please understand what it is I'm saying. I like you a
lot. We just shouldn't rush into anything. But we can have lunch.
posted by Jason Schupp 12:11:37 PM || momp momp
<meta>
Today is Weblog Question and Answer Day.
John asks: So, now is it that I've been so far out of the loop lately and didn't read about it, or has Jason been keeping really quiet about Somnolent.org? Mostly quiet, John, as I haven't had a chance to update the old placeholder page to announce the semi-birth of Somnolent.org. But if you had looked, I had left a note for the Chicago Weblog Cabal (you know, the one that doesn't exist) over at the secret meeting space. But you didn't hear that from me, and neither did anyone else.
Wendell fails to answer my question: Why am I never satisfied? Now, I could say something flippant about Wendell not being on the right team to help me find out, but I won't. Not directly, anyway. What I will say is that I've got a hidden perfectionist streak that keeps foiling my plans, many times before they get off the ground. Bad streak! Bad, bad streak!
Mom (you figure out which one is her) asks: Why don't you call? You're right, Mom. I should call. But not tonight, as I'm getting together with 40 million of my friends to watch all the Survivor hoo-hah. I know, I'm a sheep. Ba-a-a-a-a-ah.
Speaking of Survivor, Ernie is setting up SurvivorBlog, starting with 10 webloggers that vote one another off the blog, week by week. I think it's too late for me to get in on it (he needs women for it, currently), but I've got to keep an eye on this.
</meta>
posted by Jason Schupp 10:39:18 AM || momp momp
8.22.2000
Note to self: although there are many good things to be said about Jones Soda, if you're going to jaunt merrily to your computer with a bottle, open the bottle over the sink first. Just in case.Actually, Jones is kind of cool (even though I just discovered that they do contain caffeine... which is only a problem for me, since I quit a year ago) because of the constantly changing labels with really nice black and white photography. You can even submit your own photos. Carbonated fame awaits.
posted by Jason Schupp 9:45:47 PM || momp momp
Punk ass.
posted by Jason Schupp 9:28:24 PM || momp momp
Wow. Anything less than ISDN -- when you're used to having at least that, even at home -- really feels like trying to suck olives through a stirring straw. While I'm waiting to hear back about DSL, I'm using some free schtick to check email at night. 56k is so... wow, it's not all that swell. It's not a turtle, but neither is it an antelope.
posted by Jason Schupp 9:28:07 PM || momp momp
A collectible card game based on the porn industry. I can't make these sort of things up. I don't think I would have wanted to. I mean, I'd rather go have sex or watch some porn.
posted by Jason Schupp 4:19:05 PM || momp momp
I do not care how much money you have, that you're with the mob and have ties to that nice, glittery club that houses a womanflesh factory of titillation. I don't care how nice your car is, or how much it will cost to fix it if you get hit. You do not pull out in front of me when you make a right turn, you will look before you accelerate, and when I pass you up, you'll like it. Fucker.
posted by Jason Schupp 3:06:42 PM || momp momp
8.21.2000
So I've decided to scrap where I was going with this design and completely start over. Why am I never satisfied?posted by Jason Schupp 5:59:43 PM || momp momp
Today at work, I finally got my own office. It's pretty barren, and I haven't brought a lot of my office minutae from home yet. All I have is my little plastic Charmander (courtesy of my dad, who found it in a box of Pop Tarts or something). There are interesting tidbits lying around that had never been cleaned out, most notably a few bottles of "beach front property." There's a bottle from Seattle (on which is a picture of the Space Needle and the proclamation, "Own Your Own Ocean Front Property"), a bottle from Florida ("Ol' Beachcomber Skip's / "Shells In A Bottle" / Your Own Beachfront Property / From Florida," with shells artificially painted in colors usually reserved for children's breakfast cereals), and a plastic package which just says "BAG OF BEACH REAL ESTATE," the location of origin a complete mystery. I'm very tempted to pour it all out into a saucer and give poor, plastic, immoble Charmander its own little desert to not frolic in.
posted by Jason Schupp 11:05:40 AM || momp momp
Nothing blew up Friday night. Damn. And even now, having found some of my power strips in the endless boxes cluttering my apartment, I can't increase my electrical intake thanks to the older style of outlets I am presented with, most of them lacking a third slot for the ground prong. Alas, and alack. Mostly lack.
Some forgotten trivia from the trip to Milwaukee. The following was seen on a marquee of the Pfister Playhouse:
Phantom
and the Pfister!
Say it out loud and try not heh-hehing like Beavis. Go on. Try it.
posted by Jason Schupp 10:46:45 AM || momp momp
8.18.2000
Tonight I'm having a bunch of people over. We'll see how prescient I am.posted by Jason Schupp 4:04:28 PM || momp momp
8.16.2000
Hearing about this sort of thing gives me the chills. An army psychiatrist in South Africa who had ran a "bizarre programme to "cure" gay conscripts" in the South African Defence Forse, has also been linked to testing drugs on servicemen who were pacifists, homosexuals, or convicted of drug use. Though the article doesn't state when this occured, other events mentioned make it possibly as recent as the 60s and early 70s.posted by Jason Schupp 3:08:05 PM || momp momp
There is a depressing lack of electrical outlets in my new apartment. I'm going to blow a fuse once everything's set up, I know it.
Here's how I see it happening: after I set up my computer, all the video stuff, all the kitchen stuff like the microwave and the superfuckerblender, and some lamps, there'll be a party, and all these folks I know will be over and revelling, and someone's going to start watching a movie around the same time someone flicks on a lamp, about which time someone will toss something into the microwave, and then someone else will be scanning their ass or something on my computer, and smack! We'll get fried with a gigavolt of free-flying electrons, irreparably altering our physiologies, killing some of us and mutating others into super-powered beings of questionable morals and perception, able to toss around twenty-ton metaphors like they were packing peanuts, but unable to capably get through a door. Either that, or everything will just go dark, and someone'll say, "Uh, hey," and I'll swear a lot.
Oh, wait. I'm safe. I don't have a scanner.
posted by Jason Schupp 10:25:58 AM || momp momp
8.15.2000
Did anyone else acknowledge half-birthdays growing up? The more I talk to people about this, the more it seems like this may have been something that only my family did, and that maybe I should shut up because it's part of some secret Schupp or McNellis rite that I shouldn't be talking about to the general public. A half-birthday is just the day opposite your actual birthday on the calendar wheel, six months away on the same day. When you hit your half-birthday, you can proudly add "and a half" to your age, i.e. "I'm eight and a half!"I'm asking because when I was a little sproggen, I'd count the days to my half birthday in the same sort of anticipation as I would my actual birthday. Nowadays, it can go right by me without me noticing, like it almost did Saturday, when I turned twenty-five and a half.
The half doesn't seem so important now. Is that from a fear of aging, or from the insignificance of one more half when you already have fifty halves under your belt?
posted by Jason Schupp 10:03:08 AM || momp momp
8.14.2000
Had a very relaxing day Saturday, despite getting boxed in on the I-94 Retirement Home for a little bit. Primary Cohort Michelle and I went up to Milwaukee to visit John, who is just as funny in person as he is in his diaries and weblog, and is a real sweetie (little things, like giving me bus stubs without asking for compensation, is enough to make me all warm and fuzzy inside). We hooked up at Comet, some meta-trend café (that probably has a webpage, but I'm too lazy at the moment to look for it) that served pretty decent rice and cheese. We were joined by special guest star Tim, also (along with John) of Bluffmag. It was like a meeting of the old-school queer Milwaukee digerati but without any of us putting that sort of pretense upon it.I also took a couple of hours to pop over to Gen Con (hence the needed bus stubs), where I saw a couple of folks I knew, saw a bunch of stuff (most scary thing: a Pikachu in leather corset holding a cat-o-nine-tails), bought a few things, refrained from buying a few other things, and basically got gaming geekery out of my system for a bit. Potentially coolest thing I bought: a necklace/stone/password thinger for The Stone, a series of puzzles on the web that require you to do some searching in the realms of science, history, mathematics, and art.
Afterwards, I hooked up again with John and Michelle and went back to John's pad where we met the infamous Snackey and Lips. For readers of John's diaries, Lips is just as cute as described, just as Snackey is just as much a little bastard. Later, we went to something-Webb for dinner (described by Michelle as "Just as bad as Clark's on Clark back in Chicago, but worse"), where we were joined by another Tim (again pointing out to me that there is a very small circle of Real People in Milwaukee that all seem to know each other in passing, if not more familiarly) who may or may not have a webpage, I don't know. Much delicious conversation switching from criminal pathology to computer shenanigans in the office and webgeekery and back again.
We ended up talking late into the night, and Michelle and I got home around 3 or so in the morning. As much as the people from Milwaukee always seem to bemoan the city, I always have a good time there. A punk (as in, -er) once told me that there are no boring places, only boring people. This much I have seen to be true.
posted by Jason Schupp 12:58:39 PM || momp momp
Now I'm getting spam in foreign languages. How cool.
Date: So, 13 Aug 2000 12:15:18
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To: jason@nullmeansnull.com
Subject: REKLAME für kostenlosen Service...
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besuchen sie unsere webseite und urteilen sie selbst...
posted by Jason Schupp 12:21:29 PM || momp momp
I wrote a haiku. Good for me.
Actually, Joe took some time to summarize a lot of the recent goings-on at net.weblogs.com, wherein he says some very nice things about me (thanks!) and points to some of my recent contributions. Dig that action. (Dig also that Crazy Uncle Joe has joined the net.weblogs team. I can't wait to see what he's going to do now...)
posted by Jason Schupp 11:41:30 AM || momp momp
I kind of regret saying it, being a self-appointed webdork and all, but I'm starting to enjoy webless existence outside of the office. I'm able to concentrate on things, bits of life that require my attention, and actually get a few things done.
My major accomplishment this weekend (and it doesn't sound major, but trust me, it was) was getting my bathtub unclogged. It had gotten so bad that it was taking over a day to drain from just one shower. On Sunday morning, I plunged the hell out of it, to have black (black!) water fill my bathtub. After a time, the water level stopped rising, so I let it sit, hoping the clog had come undone and the mildew-scented black murk would drain. After a jaunt to Target with Primary Cohort Michelle (who still does not have a webpage -- I plan to suck her in by offering her webspace here so she can do a weblog on stupid people she runs into, a very entertaining project waiting to happen), we had found that the water had drained, leaving some weird sort of black barrier reef in by bathtub and a small hair clump in the drain. I wiped up most of the black gunk, pulled out the hair from the drain, Tilexed the tub so it didn't look like the remains of someone's finger painting project, and found that water did indeed now flow down the drain as Mother Nature had intended when she invented plumbing. I ended up throwing down some chemical pipe cleaner I had picked up at Target, just to be safe.
posted by Jason Schupp 11:33:27 AM || momp momp
8.11.2000
I am a gamerdork. I will admit to it. That's fine. So I don't need to learn how to play D&D. But the big winking heads of the demo are funny, for some reason. Absurdity, I'm thinking. (Do I lose points for saying the DM's kind of cute?)posted by Jason Schupp 2:49:01 PM || momp momp
*looks at this page on a Mac screen.*
*looks at this page on a PC screen.*
*looks at the Mac.*
*looks at the PC.*
Okay, either I've got some screwed up gamma settings on one of these, or whoever said that the color safe browser palette looks the same on both platforms is a fucking liar.
posted by Jason Schupp 10:24:30 AM || momp momp
8.10.2000
I admit it. I'm fascinated with the show Survivor, even though I've only caught one and a half episodes. I want to see who wins. I'm interested in their antics. But I have to say that survivorsucks.com is an even better way to keep track of it all. Just the summary of the first episode was enough to send me into giggling fits.posted by Jason Schupp 5:39:11 PM || momp momp
So I'm back. Kinda.
I'm still working on the design and I haven't quite yet gotten the hang of this Blogger thinger, I've only last night finished moving everything to my new pad, and most of my time at work is spent actually working these days. This is kind of problematic, as I still don't have a home account to do all this kinky Internet stuff from. Anyone in Chicago who can recommend a good source of DSL, feel free to let me know. I'd say that it's getting lonely at home, but I wouldn't know. I haven't spent one solid evening at home yet!
posted by Jason Schupp 4:38:44 PM || momp momp
And it took me three days to get Blogger working. Story of my life right now. Nothing is going quite right.
The movers arrived on Saturday two and a half hours late, which turned out to be alright, since I was nowhere near done packing (and ended up leaving a few things behind in the interest of time). The guy who lived in my new place before me had moved out three days later than expected, so the owners never cleaned the place (though they did repaint, the smell of fumes still lingering up through this morning). Monday night my building's super changed the locks on my doors, but neglected to leave a way for me to contact him and get the new keys. I was lucky to still have the keys to my old place, so I had a floor upon which to sleep. That night, which was supposed to have been spent doing laundry and grocery shopping, was spent playing phone tag trying to get someone out to the place to let me in. (And when someone did finally get out there, our signals were mixed and I was somewhere else.) Tuesday morning I went back to my new place to find that the locks had been switched back to the old ones, with a note (and a phone number). I got in and called the super, who came out to switch the lock cylinder back to the new one and swap keys with me. Tuesday night was spent back at the new place, giving furniture to friends and helping them move it. Wednesday night was spent packing all the stuff I left behind from the weekend. I spilled leftover fridge-food on the floor. I nearly ran out of space in my car for things I was saving. I wasn't done until 2am, and in fact, I don't think I've gotten to bed at all this week before 1am.
At my new place, the bathtub drains slower than an IV drip, there's no blinds in the bedroom window so the whole courtyard can see me get dressed, there's no hot water in my kitchen sink, the gate buzzer/intercom is broken, I have no air conditioning, no internet access, I still don't have the mailbox key, and there are boxes everywhere.
I am exhausted. I am wiped out. I need a good coma for the next few days. I'm sure things'll get better. Just soon. Please, soon.
On the plus side, In the midst of all of this (and my old roommates moving to Arizona), I am finding out what bloody wonderful friends me and my old roommates have. You guys have been an incredible help during all of this. I love you guys.
posted by Jason Schupp 4:14:53 PM || momp momp
8.7.2000
The look is half done, I haven't fooled around enough with the blogger settings to format this the way I want it to, and I can't get the graphics to compress satisfactorily, but fuck it. I've gone too long without a place for my voice and my voice alone. I was getting itchy.posted by Jason Schupp 4:13:49 PM || momp momp
