vruba and I made a little game called Khromax. It’s simple and addictive and has pretty moving colors and sounds.

You can play it on that there web site right now. Or, if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and are willing to part with the outrageous sum of $0.99, you can play the much niftier multi-touch version on those things.

I did most of the programming  — unfortunately breaking my proud multi-decade streak of never learning any dialect of C — and Vruba did some graphic design. Also, bikko talked us into a few sensible things like version control and not being too terrified of openGL.

That game again is Khromax, on the web or on your phone. Tell your friends to ask for it by name!

julieclipse died three years ago today. Three years. A third of the time she and I were friends. A quarter of the time since I met her. A little more than a tenth of my life. The same all-too-brief amount of time that she and I knew we wanted to be together forever. I can't stop counting.

Everywhere I look, life is short and everything changes. She's missing the future, and it bothers me. She'll never know about Obama. Or iPhones. Or the latest cetacean research. Or promising new kinds of birth control, cures for cancer, or vaccines for HIV. Or this really good book I read last week. When good things happen, I'm deprived of her joy. When confusing things happen, I'm deprived of her opinions. Soon my habit of this yearly posting won't make any sense — not because I'm getting over it, but because no one will read LiveJournal anymore. Her digital ghost has no Twitter or Facebook accounts.

Those previous, infinitely better three years, I skipped a number of fairly important things to spend time with her. At the time I felt a little guilty, but now I'm sure glad I did that.

If you were planning to spend any part of today fretting over some minor hassle, may I humbly suggest you skip it. Go hang out with people who mean something to you instead. It's a far better use of your time.

I live in Portland again.

If you go make yourself a collar at the collar factory — and really, why wouldn’t you? — you’ll find you now get a nifty little illustration of said collar, composited on the fly.

Some day I may get back to using LJ for things other than pimping my latest for-profit project, but, eh.

vruba and I made a thing.

Draftastic is a "collaborative editor". Like a wiki, only lots of people can edit a page at the same time, and you get to see what everyone else is doing.

There's still some polishing to do, and tons of features we want to add, but we've been using it ourselves for months, and figured there was no reason not to share. I think it's pretty neat.

If you want to co-author a screenplay with someone, or write some steamy group fanfic, or especially if you work for a large organization that maintains a lot of documentation or product copy and doesn't bat an eye at paying gobs of money for software, check it out.

And we're off.

I'd keep livejournal up to date on our progress, but I've really got nothing to offer besides one-liners, and there's an optimal medium for those now. So, those of you who want to "follow" the trip can do so on the twitter.

julieclipse died two years ago today. It never gets better. A little easier, but not one bit better.

Be good to the people you love while you can.

Drive less.

Some notable stars of my friends list (though not nearly enough of you) have recently posted to let everyone know to what, in the most shallow sense, they've been up. Since I occasionally like to use this journal for its intended purpose — just to throw off my enemies, mind you — I shall now do the same.

To be sure, stuff still happens to me. I've still got schemes a-plenty, things I'm excited about, and there's still lots of grief and bitter, bitter rage to go around. But those things are news for another post. The tedious minutiae of my day-to-day existence — my own personal rat race — is this:

I have a piece of paper which authorizes me to think about biology in a semi-professional capacity. Half-way to being a real scientist, essentially. For having been allowed to earn this document, I owe some people a great deal of money. To keep the student loan mafia at bay, and to cover the comparatively small costs of living and being sometimes entertained, I get up in the morning, walk to a random coffee shop, position myself carefully so my laptop screen is facing a wall, and make web sites. Web sites where people can buy lovingly hand-crafted collars and matching cuffs with their sweetheart's name on them, or only the finest vibrators, nipple clamps, and floggers, literally by the dozen.

I always wanted to make the world a better place. I'd like to think, in some small, perverted way, I already am.

In case you were wondering, I'm on the Flickr now.

I'll probably use it to post more than stupid cat pictures.

If you're lucky.

As I believe d_mcetiquette would tell you, it's always nice to send a card.

I feel like today should be special somehow, but it's not for me. I miss her as much as you can possibly miss a person every damn day; I haven't been holding any extra heartache in reserve for the anniversary.

If, five years ago, you'd told me I would one day willingly run – much less run – in a "12K", I would have laughed at you.

It was actually a lot of fun.

Even if my mom did beat me.

Telomeres are repeated non-coding buffer sequences at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes that protect against erosion by incomplete replication and differentiate the legitimate chromosomal ends from accidental breaks in need of repair.^*

Hey! Stop!

( Did your eyes start to glaze over there? )

Got some ink installed today.

Not that you can tell, but that's my left arm, just below the sleeve on a standard issue witty t-shirt. The design is Julieclipse's personal logo. It was done by Aaron Goodrich, an extremely agreeable chap working at Infinity Tattoo.

The color is a little messed up on account of blood. I'll have a better picture when it heals.

One afternoon when I was very little—say, four years old—I remember lying on the living room floor playing with legos. My mother was playing her harpsichord on the other side of the room. Some baroque piece I'd heard a thousand times before. The lego set was a little horse-drawn catapult that I marched around the carpet. At one point I rolled it under the couch, pretending the lego people were hiding from something, and suddenly I was incredibly sad. Nothing had changed, nothing was wrong, but something about the combination of the legos and the music made me freeze. I was painfully aware that the song would end, and afternoon would become evening, and I'd have to put the legos away, and even if I did it all the next day it wouldn't be today anymore. I didn't cry or tell mom, but I lay there for a long time feeling unbearably empty. It's my first memory of any acute emotion that didn't have some obvious physical or social cause. It left a lasting impression, but I didn't really get it until years later (but years ago now) when, in a totally unrelated conversation, julieclipse explained it for me:

Julieclipse: When I was young, I was terrified of wet paint.
Julieclipse: I mean truly scared.
Julieclipse: I think (mom would remember for sure.. heh..) I used to insist we detour all the way around the other sides of malls and things to avoid wet paint. There was one particular Sesame Street skit that had paint -everywhere- and spurting all over the place and muppets of some sort dancing and singing and I could barely watch it...
Julieclipse: Heh.. I used to be afraid of balloons too. 'Cause of the sound they made when they popped, of course. I'd forgotten about the paint thing until just now..
Julieclipse: Y'know, when I think back to some of the deepest feelings I can remember from my childhood, most of them (except for the balloons.. that was just fear of loud noise..) were about the irrevocable passage of time.
Julieclipse: Which sounds kind of profound for a toddler/preschooler.. but.. I think that's partly what the wet paint was.. if you paint something you change it, and you can't really change it back, there's a premanence to paint..
Julieclipse: If it's still wet, it can get on other stuff and change that too.. if it's dry, it seems like it's always been that way. Maybe I'm overinterpreting.
Julieclipse: But like, if I'd be playing with my mom's toes or something while she was reading and she moved her foot, I'd feel this profound sense of loss. I'd try to get her to move it back, but generally she didn't..

I knew just what she meant. The "irrevocable passage of time" was one of our private catchphrases after that, but it was usually a joke. "We're out of milk?" "Damn the irrevocable passage of time!"

Had we been more enlightened (instead of just precocious) kids, the lesson might've been something like change is the only constant, or attachment is suffering. Linearity happens, get over it, right? This too shall pass. But enlightenment is easier for people without agendas. We compensated for temporality with ambition. If the world is going to insist on changing, at least try to make it change for the better. Ever since Julia put the right words to what young Nick was feeling, the real message has been perfectly clear to me: time sucks.

The staples came out yesterday. No skin grafts required. In a few weeks the only way you'll be able to tell something happened is if you knew me before. Still very sad. Still very confused. Still very angry.

( No one wants to read this stuff... )

I lost my best friend Tuesday night.

( Words fail... )

I miss you, Julia.

A picture story for vruba

(Sorry about the phonecam quality.)