July 14, 2023

2023.07.14
"Earth is gone! we're the only two humans left in the universe!"
"Oh God I'm sorry, Leela"
"Maybe this was meant to be- maybe you and I were meant to build a new world here..."
"We can avoid humanity's mistakes."
"Like the tuba!"
"Yes! We'll be like Adam and Eve."
"Only without the tuba."
Screw you Futurama :-P

Minor UX win...

I made a minimalistic free shared white board program, kirk.is-drawing ( https://kirk.is/drawing/ ) - actually it came in useful as a whiteboard for an interview today!



I forked a version of it as a drawing program with my niece during our weekly calls, and I was pleased it was straightforward to steal a UX trick I noticed for drawing in Apple Notes - they put the strokes from the broad highlighter tool BEHIND the strokes made by the fine tip pen. The resulting outline-centric approach is a nice cheap cartoon-y visual style. (Shown in the crude trackpad doodle here)

July 14, 2022

2022.07.14
[Harold Ramis] once said to me, "Life is ridiculous, so why not be a good guy?" That may be the only religion I have to this day.
Judd Apatow

The answer to the age old half empty or full glass question: It depends on your last action with it. If you drank from it it's half empty, but if you filled it it's half full.
edbuilds in /r/showerthoughts
You know, that's a little corny but actually a little profound? Like I think what's important about ANYTHING isn't isolated internal identity but how it interacts with other things. Everything meaningful - literally, anything with meaning - is emergent from connections and interactions. (Quantum-wise, this might be akin to "observation" being an integral part of... well, kind of everything!)

July 14, 2021

2021.07.14

July 14, 2020

2020.07.14
I talked to a young man with white hair on a boat cabin in the middle of a stormy sea. He forgot everything about himself exept for the fact that his name rhymed with 'Time' so he started calling himself Time.

I offered him an orange in exchange for a meaningful chat. He took the slice and told me "Nothing's set in stone, but they're set in a dirt road. If you roll your wagon in the same path too much it'll soon be the only path you can take without struggling."

Brains are meat computers that turn sugar into thoughts.
Reagalan, /u/showerthoughts

The answer to the age old half empty or full glass question: It depends on your last action with it. If you drank from it it's half empty, but if you filled it it's half full.
edbuilds in /r/showerthoughts

Good link on how We literally *do not know* what we do not know about COVID-19; thinking of the possible long term ramifications of even the quiescent virus is sobering. (That said; I know herpes/chicken pox are related, and HIV seems to be kind of its own thing. Still, one way or another viruses become a permanent part of our lives.)

It also reminds me of a sentiment I read recently that "our civilization owes its continued existence to the fact that HIV can't be transmitted by mosquitos". I think that might be overstating the case, but it's pretty alarming.

from Haruki Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running"

2019.07.14
from Haruki Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running":
Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy.
I'm struck by how, except when you're young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don't get that sort of system set by a certain age, you'll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.
In every interview I'm asked what's the most important quality a novelist has to have. It's pretty obvious: talent. No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist. This is more of a prerequisite than a necessary quality. If you don't have any fuel, even the best car won't run.
I don't care about the time I run. I can try all I want, but I doubt I'll ever be able to run the way I used to. I'm ready to accept that. It's not one of your happier realities, but that's what happens when you get older. Just as I have my own role to play, so does time. And time does its job much more faithfully, much more accurately, than I ever do. Ever since time began (when was that, I wonder?), it's been moving ever forward without a moment's rest. And one of the privileges given to those who've avoided dying young is the blessed right to grow old. The honor of physical decline is waiting, and you have to get used to that reality.
On the body of the bike is written "18 Til I Die," the name of a Bryan Adams hit. It's a joke, of course. Being eighteen until you die means you die when you're eighteen.
Emphasis mine on the bit on aging.

I was most struck by the bit about talent as an intrinsic property... sometimes my employer talks so much about "we have a growth mindset" that I feel a bit called-out, or like as a person with fixed mindset I should be able to file some kind of discrimination suit...

Not really of course, and they probably are using a looser term of "growth mindset" than I am - but yet, I'm aware I have fixed mindset, it protects me in some ways, throws up roadblocks in others, and I try to act to mitigate its disadvantages while enjoying some of the psychological reassurances it offers.

It does strike me that there's an amusing meta-issue here; someone with a "growth mindset" is OF COURSE more likely to believe that switching mindset is possible than someone starting with a "fixed mindset"...

ENGLISH GAME: PLACE THE WORD "ONLY" ANYWHERE ON THE SENTENCE:
She told him that she loved him.
I wonder what other languages that works with...

July 14, 2018

2018.07.14
Remember, the end is nearer.

BRIDE: (QUIETLY, TEARFUL) Ladies and gentleman... I'm afraid there won't be a wedding after all. Because, you see... my fiance has... has died.
HECKLER FROM BACK PEW: Louder!
BRIDE (LOUDER, ALMOST HYSTERICAL) My fiance has died!
ANOTHER HECKLER: Funnier!

the robotic ruler of the river of no return

2017.07.14
River Raid was one of the finest games produced for the Atari 2600. One of the first vertically scrolling shooters, this game was remarkably well designed. While the enemies (copters and boats and later small jets) could only threaten the player with menacing kamikaze moves upon approach, the constantly diminishing fuel supply would lead the player to recklessly hightail it down the "River of No Return" to pass over replenishing fuel depots, a tension-provoking detail most other games of the era couldn't match. And I am going to introduce you to the games indisputable conqueror.

First, a note about the game's author, Carol Shaw- the first professional female video game designer. This game is her singular masterpiece (I don't think many people really look back that fondly on "3-D Tic Tac Toe", and the 1-on-1 Pong-like action of her "Polo" tie-in game never saw the light of day...) This interview has her talking about her experience. But her peers thought she was great, designer Mike Albaugh said
I would have to include Carol Shaw, who was simply the best programmer of the 6502 and probably one of the best programmers period....in particular, [she] did the [2600] kernels, the tricky bit that actually gets the picture on the screen for a number of games that she didn't fully do the games for. She was the go-to gal for that sort of stuff.
As a guy who wrote an original Atari 2600 from scratch in assembly , I know how tricky that kernel stuff is... (and true confession, my game ended up having its kernel tweaked by genius Paul Slocum anyway.)

One of the cleverest bits of River Raid is its use of pseudorandom number generators to generate section after section of the river - this let the game pack in a consistent, huge game playing field even though the whole cartridge was only 4K bytes of ROM. The levels alternated between straight sections and split sections and went on practically forever.

Over a decade ago I got to wondering about how far the river went, and got so far as having B. Watson generate this image of the first 4 sections, guaranteed to bring a bit of nostalgia to the 80's gamer heart:
(Of course the funny thing about posting this kind of image is that River Raid scrolls from the bottom, but webpages scroll from the top...) That project to map out more of the river never went anywhere, but this AtariAge thread gets revived from time to time... and I would say, the indisputable Ruler of the River of No Return (and one of the participants in that thread) is one "Lord Tom"

For starters, here's Lord Tom's map of the first 600 river sections...

And how does Lord Tom know what the first 600 sections look like? I contacted him at AtariAge (such a damn fine resource!) and he said
To make the map, I wrote a Lua script for use in the BizHawk emulator that essentially cheated through the game with the plane offscreen somewhere, taking screen-shots of each enemy/terrain slot along the way (32 per map section). I assembled these into the big map with a simple Java app.
But that wasn't enough for Lord Tom. He's a member of the "TAS Community" - Tool Assisted Speedruns, folks who learn how to let machines help them drive through to the ending of games faster than any human ever could. They don't cheat - the actual code of the game is sacrosanct - but by abusing every input available to them they're like the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar getting ready to dive back into the Matrix, mastering the code behind the world that lets, say, Mario move like a crazy drug-fueld Ninja, or in Lord Tom's case, to build a frickin' robot to play the game better than any human (or 'bot) in history ever has. Specifically, to get the maximum possible score of 1,000,000 (or in Activision speak, !!!!!!) That looks like this:


To give that robot a script, he built a replica of River Raid in Java, one that could reproduce all the twists and turns and boats and helicopters and fuel tanks that that little cartridge's algorithm could churn out with incredible precision, and then used it to power something like the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of Quantum Physics, plotting out a millions of possible futures for each frame, then pruning and working the best 150,000 or so, until he got a damn near optimal path. (And to give you an idea of this robot's skill about this, not only does this well-nigh perfect path take an hour twenty to get to that million points, Activision would send you a patch designating you a "River Raider" if you sent in a photograph showing that you got 15,000!)

So, in his own words:
Yes, due to the technique I used for solving the game, I had to write a Java simulator, which I think ended up being something like 10,000 times faster than trying to do the bot computations through the emulator. And I only simulated the game's logic/state; I didn't actually output a display or sound, though in the grand scheme of things that would have been easy enough to do.

The solving algorithm focused heavily on fuel and (of course) score. Since fuel is consumed at the same rate regardless of speed, it's best to almost always go full throttle. There are a few terrain exceptions, and the other main exceptions are slow-downs to get extra fuel or manipulate which enemies move/don't move to make them easier to kill.

For fuel, I basically looked at the map and plotted out how far I'd get for each life (once fuel becomes rare, it's better score-wise to die for a full tank than to keep slowing down to milk depots). Then for various points along the route (e.g. section 5, 10th enemy) I'd specify a minimum fuel to have -- any solution paths with less fuel would be killed.

The only non-survivable states in the game relate to fuel, and then very limited times when e.g. you can't slow down fast enough to clear terrain, or avoid an enemy that's about to hit you.

Other than that, it was pure heuristic; 30 times a second it would simulate paths with each possible input, eliminate duplicates and deaths, and periodically score them and keep the best several thousand. To handle islands, I stipulated that a certain # of paths would always be kept alive on each side of the screen. As I recall, the algorithm would score and cull several times each section; it never really "looked ahead" at all, just periodically compared outcomes for 500,000 or so input possibilities and kept the best ones.

I think all in all, I calculate the bot simulated over 2 trillion game states to complete the game. 
You can read even more details at his TASVideos Submission Page, but I think you get the idea here.

Amazing. I've done Atari coding and even some Java-based "tool assistants" (to get photorealistic images into the long-lost site pixeltime, or to remove the scrolling credits from still backdrops) but nothing that comes ANYWHERE NEAR what Lord Tom (or Carol Shaw, for that matter) has done.

July 14, 2016

2016.07.14
We used to tell our phones where we wanted to go, and the phone would tell us how to get there. With Pokemon Go it's the other way around.
LOL Republicans - During the Republican Convention, Toy Guns Banned, Real Guns Allowed - though I guess it makes a kind of logical sense for a city that gave us the Tamir Rice shooting. Toy Guns: know the real danger.
Gingrich broke congressional politics by turning into a get-reelected-at-any-co$t game. The idea of him as a Cheney-like VP is scary as hell.

July 14, 2015

2015.07.14
It took "Scare Me" by Major Lazer to realize that the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" is just about the same riff as the Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams".




July 14, 2014

2014.07.14
The best from If Pixar Made Star Trek:

July 14, 2013

2013.07.14
fissure, n.: No relationship can grow without also cracking; the key is to use the cracks as handholds, to pull yourself up.

Just an FYI: In a mirror, you can only kiss yourself on the lips.

Raise your hand if, like me, you only know the word 'analgesic' because you played the Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure as a kid.

hello from my past self!

(1 comment)
2012.07.14
Having finally figured out electronics recycling in Arlington, I'm getting rid of old devices, including this laptop:


I liked the post-it I had written about some time ago-- apparently my past-self knew my future self all too well...

Something's wrong
When you regret
Things that haven't happened yet.

from cinema paradiso

2011.07.14
"Once...a king gave a feast for the loveliest princesses in the realm. Now, a soldier who was standing guard saw the king's daughter go by. She was the most beautiful of all and he fell instantly in love. But what is a simple soldier next to the daughter of a king?

At last he succeeded in meeting her, and he told her he could no longer live without her.

The princess was so taken by the depth of his feeling that she said to the soldier, 'If you can wait for 100 days and 100 nights under my balcony, at the end of it I shall be yours.'

With that the soldier went and waited one day...

two days...

then ten...

then twenty.

Each evening the princess looked out, and he never moved! In rain, in wind, in snow, he was always there! Birds shat on his head, bees stung him- but he didn't budge.

At the end of ninety nights he had become all dry, all white. Tears streamed from his eyes. He couldn't hold them back. He didn't even have the strength to sleep. And all that time, the princess watched him.

At long last, it was the 99th night...

and the soldier stood up, took his chair and left."

"What happened at the end?"

"That is the end. And don't ask what it means. I don't know."
Watched the "Director's Cut" of "Cinema Paradiso" last night with Amber--over two nights actually... it's long! Probably a bit too long, in retrospect I prefer the brevity of the version I had in college. This was the transcription I made way back in college... here's an alternate translation along with a bit from the Director's Cut where Toto tells his interpretation of the story to Alfredo... again, maybe it says too much.
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
Unknown quote, referenced in "Cinema Paradiso"

http://www.widgetpress.com/defense - holy crap. Software patents are out of control. What a way to kill innovation.

dancing demon

2010.07.14

--I remember this program on TRS-80s from when I was in elementary school! Really impressive and detailed animation for the time, and you could compose the dance from a collection of steps...
http://squid314.livejournal.com/275614.html - World War II -- who wrote that crap? Were the writers just phoning it in? So unbelievable. (via Bill the Splut )
Diet Observations: There's a delay of 2-3 days between good/bad eating and scale results. And "bathroom weight" can account for .5-1.5 lbs. So weird how day to day "flux weight" can totally dwarf truly worrisome, longer-term trends in weight gain!
At Hogwarts School for Wizards, the 'special ed' kids were the most inadvertently dangerous of them all.

One day Jenny awoke to realize she could fly...but only up to 1000 feet, whereupon she instantly lost her newfound power forever.

Excessively-"Agile" development: "So, where's the finish line? Guess we'll paint it when we get there."
I want to be the Jared of Wendy's Taco Salad and Atomic Fireball Candies.
http://designfabulous.blogspot.com/2010/07/htc-1.html think the iPhone 4 was a bit minimalist? These HTC proposals are just stunning.

"nice guy"

(2 comments)
2009.07.14

...Heh. I also remember him playing against Mark Hamill in the game "Wing Commander III"


Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.
Sir Julian Huxley

The Point-of-view gun is a device created by Douglas Adams for the movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; it does not appear in any of the previous versions of the story.
According to the film, the gun was created by Deep Thought prior to its long pondering of the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. When used on someone, it will cause them to see things from the point of view of the person firing the gun.
-Wikipedia on Hitchhiker's Guide Technology - had never heard of this but I love the idea.

"Sugar, your thighs are hives of honey, and I am the Bumble Bee of Love" -- new Blender of Love!

northern bound

2008.07.14
Home again, home again, jiggidy jug.

Got to hang around the Jersey shore yesterday with the extended family, cousins and all that. People weren't allowed to do much besides wade because of the rough riptides, which were kind of fun.


Video of the Moment

--(2019 REPLACEMENT) Mascot Bloopers make me laugh. So many big furry things, so little dignity


Article of the Moment
Clay Shirky' on group dynamics, what lets online communities self-organize and survive, and what patterns they often fall into.


how many college bands are going to be named "terrorist fist bump"?

the boy is back in town

(5 comments)
2007.07.14
So I got back Thursday. I was happy to see how many comments the links I prepublished last week got, maybe that's a nudge about what most interests people about the site...

Probably of interest only to people who A. are me, or related to me B. like Chicago photos or C. were, you know, getting married that weekend, I've added a lightly annotated set of Chicago photos to the set from my previous trip circa 2005.


Exchange of the Moment
"It just occurred to me that I'm sitting around the house in my underwear."
"....Yeah, it's like you're always the last to know, huh?"
Err, "Anonymous" and Me last night.

Article of the Moment
Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature. The pieces paints with an overly-broad brush, but has some interesting ideas. There's a lot of stuff we have trouble admitting about human nature, I suppose because of the risk that labeling some unpleasant behavior as "natural" might grant a license to keep that behavior up.

hey bud

(2 comments)
2006.07.14
I don't think I have an instant messenging client that's really good at letting me know what buddy icon I'm currently displaying to the world. That's a bit annoying.


Hedbergism of the Moment
In my house I have a sliding glass door, and on it is a sticker that says "Warning: Alarm System". And it's a pretty simple alarm system, consisting of... a sticker.

Puzzle Solution of the Moment
A formal-ish paper-based method for solving Soodoku... it reminds me of why I dislike the game. Crosswords at least involve playing with the meaning of words, and with "Paint By Number"/picross/Nonoagrams you have the payoff of a new image.


Odd Memory of the Moment
"Will we ever see each other again?"
"I don't know. Probably no."
Rob K. et al. Summer 1995.
Rob and I were working at Tufts' Curricular Software Studio, and he got involved in a sweet summer romance with a gal who was just there for the summer from... Germany maybe? And he related this sad bit of final evening conversation... you have to hear the second line with a light accent for it to work.

For some reason that second line bounced in my head this morning as I was walking to a sales demo in the heat of a Cambridgeport morning. It took me a minute to remember the basic scene (foreign gal heading back home) and then longer for the context, I couldn't remember if it was from my own past (I didn't think so, because in general I've stayed in touch with my international ex-romances,) or a movie, until finally I realized what it was. Funny how I had to piece the memory together through the feelings it provoked, which is how my head sometimes works.

lying, which war robe?

(1 comment)
2005.07.14
I just finished "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe"...I've had a boxed set of all 7 "Narnia" books for the longest time, but, like my reaction to Asimov's Foundation trilogy, something about it intimidated me when I was a kid, and I never got around to tackling them since. Probably a preview for the upcoming movie adapation got me to look at them again.

My question is this: the entire book is a pretty clear metaphor for Jesus' death and then the battles of Revelation. There are a lot of things that map pretty clearly to the Christian life and the story...one detail, though...there's this "other lion", a statue in the Witch's courtyard that Aslan frees, that says stuff like "Did you hear what he said? Us lions. That means him and me. Us lions." It seems like this lion (that Edmund previously assumed was the statuefied Aslan) is a metaphor for something, but I have no idea what. Anyone remember and care to guess?


Slate Articles of the Moment
Slate on the meaning of sunglasses. I love my current prescription pairs almost as much as the convenience of my old clip-ons...black plastic is just the classic way to go.

Also a good photo-essay on the snapshot art of Lee Friedlander. I know I risk sounding like a total Plebe or Rube or whatever when I say this, but does my lack of care about lenses and exposure time and what not prevent my photos from being "art"? (Not "good art", but still...) People are so dismissive of "just snapshots" but I dunno...give a little thought to subject matter and framing and keep an eye open for interesting light conditions and what not, and it certainly feels like it starts to approach "art"...seems like it ain't rocket science, or at least it doesn't have to be.


Quote of the Moment
The little girl expects no declaration of tenderness from her doll. She loves it -- and that's all. It is thus that we should love.
DeGourmont. I don't think it's that simple, but still.

cool stuff! from the web!

(7 comments)
2004.07.14
Quote of the Moment
There are no answers, only cross-references.
Weiner

Transformers of the Moment
It's not as cool as that Soundwave Breakdancing video, but Iacon City has lots of 3D models and transformation animations to look at.


Art of the Moment
Classic Modern Art meets Modern Classic Video Games in Pac-Mondrian...a very clever mashup, I didn't realize the whole Pac-thing would be quite so robust, though it's not quite as playable as normal Pac-Man.

but would it still have all those damn thorns

2003.07.14
Quote of the Moment
In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.
Hubert H. Humphrey, via Ross

Game Review of the Moment
Cool and funny if you know anything about MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), a review of the ultimate one of those, "Real Life". (via slashdot)

girlyman

2002.07.14
Link of the Moment
Disturbing and thought provoking article "The Feminization of American Culture", discussing how new chemicals in the environment may be acting as "synthetic female hormone" and possibly be somewhat responsible for changes in developed countries like decreased sperm count for males, younger onset of puberty in females, and even a general shift in cultural attitudes.

One of the more intriguing (if not guaranteed to prove the central thesis) correlations:
Use no statistical tricks, no manipulation of the data--simply use best-fit trend lines, plotted on linear coordinates--and the two lines practically coincide. The graph of declining sperm density perfectly parallels the decline in male college graduation rates.

Funny of the Moment
I have a dream. It's not a big dream, it's just a little dream. My dream - and I hope you don't find this too crazy - is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire, calling the fire department would actually be a wise thing to do. You can't have people, if their houses are burning down, saying, "Whatever you do, don't call the fire department!" That would be bad.

braver new world

2001.07.14
Moral Issues
Heard this on the BBC on NPR Friday morning, couldn't find it on the US Wire Service: France upholds 'right not to be born'. "France's highest court of appeal has ruled that disabled children are entitled to compensation if their mothers were not given the chance of an abortion.", the families argued that the doctor's had not acurately diagnosed the children's condition. A rather disturbing factor is how the lawsuits are being brought in the name of the children, rather than of the family. Over all the issues are so weird and complex that I can't wrap my head around them.


MicroSquish
Recently I was on a carnival ride called "The Drop Zone" with my nephews when I saw a similar Windows error message.

The Drop Zone is rather fun. They strap you in the ride, you are lifted to the top of a tower, about 100m from the ground. There are computer screens at the top which give you a narrative about how some spacecraft is going down and the whole crew are going to have to bail out, and then they drop you. You experience free fall for a few seconds. The kids scream. You land safely.

The second time we did the ride, we got to the top and Windows had crashed. This time it was my turn to scream...

from the T-shirt Archive: #8 of a Series

"Hand With Reflecting Sphere". A lot of geeks have an Escher shirt. I thought this shirt, by having a single Escher image, was much classier than the ones that had like 6 images all around the shirt.


Six wise, blind elephants were discussing what humans were like. Failing to agree, they decided to determine what humans were like by direct experience.

The first wise, blind elephant felt the human, and declared, "Humans are flat."

The other wise, blind elephants, after similarly feeling the human, agreed.
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"What's it all about? After the last line, *what*?"
--Henry Miller
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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting."
--Alan Dean Foster
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For the record I unlocked all the Smash Bros. characters. The trick was using Samus from Metroid.

Lena was impressed by my realization of novelty being such a motivator in my life- claimed she was jealous, even.

At this rate, I may be into my fourth KHftCEA entry at the end of this month, a new record.  Not that I should type just to fill up memory.
99-7-14
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She lay on her side, the table lamp on beside her. I saw that damned chin hair still, and the curving line down to her hollow waist and up the bump over her hip that's so unbelievably beautiful it proves God's a perverted ass freak.
--Matthew Klam, "Issues I Dealt With In Therapy"
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"Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered"
--H. L. Mencken


visiting grandma and aunt ruth- grandma tells of my elderly grandfather ensisting she have a new car when the old one was still fine- the cosmic-sounding logic of the very old.
97-7-14
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I want to catch two score fireflies and give them to you

idea for a program: firefly simulator / screensaver

these people take summer fireflies for granted  ..that seems like a sin

(yes central ohio has glorious fields full of lightning bugs- I've missed them. I'm somehow surprised they're such a hearty insect.)

(...he writes, on the indiglo screen- like jen's glow-in-the-dark fetish)
97-7-14
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my arms smell of sunblock i like that.  why are smells so important to  me?  'my hands are now pleasantly scented with lilac and rebekah.  i think i'll sleep happy'
97-7-14
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