I hate to say it, but it’s almost as if the comment spammers have won. No, they haven’t attacked the site again, but the precautions I’ve taken to prevent them are prohibitive enough that I have been having second thoughts about posting here—on my own site!Bastards!
Plus there’s the inescapable feeling, from which I’ve been suffering the last couple months, that I have nothing new to say. I had little interest in reiterating four more years of bitching about the incompetence of our vampire president. (Come on, I can’t be the only one to see a similarity. What about the Rumsfeld/Renfield connection?) There seemed little point in bothering. It’s pretty obvious Bush’s followers are concerned by only two touchstones—stopping abortions and hating queers—and they would let him get away with anything else; so why bother trying to reason with them. I came close to blogging again at the height (at 8″+, cut) of the Jeff Gannon scandal, but never got around to it. (I know a lot of the liberal blogs were outraged by the hypocrisy of the right defending a gay prostitute in the White House press room, but probably the only kind of homosexual the right wing could accept is one making a career of it. Not to mention that everyone covering the White House is a lying [media] whore to begin with.)
But the real reason for my prolonged silence is Double.
Double
Double is a freeware mah jongg game for Mac. What I like best is that it is stripped down and basic. No busy backgrounds of Japanese landscapes, no annoying MIDIs of Asian music, no complex designs on the tiles. It comes with one tile set, but others can be made by importing icon files. (The one above is an amalgam of the icons available from Homestar Runner.com plus some from Adult Swim.) The tile sets can be arranged in sixteen layouts, and recently I got the stupid idea to try winning a game on each layout. For the last two weeks I’ve been stuck at the “Formula 1” layout, shown above. It has been pretty much occupied my every evening when I’m at home. I’ve been staying up three or four hours past my bedtime. And when I close my eyes at night, I can still see Homestar characters.
But glory and trumpets, I beat the game last night at 11:51 PM. This morning, surprisingly, I won on two more layouts and this evening I’ve won on three more. Just two more layouts before I complete all sixteen, and can then have more time to blog again. Provided, of course, I can remember all these damned passwords.
