Pigsflew.com

The site is now up to scratch. It has a bunch of new things:

• We’re now WordPress 2.0, with all the features offered therein. I’ve already found a few things I like.
• I’ve done up a new theme, using only the old banner from before. I think it looks a lot better.
• I’ve got the gallery up and running with a bunch of new material there. It’s run by the Lazyest Gallery (misspelling intentional) plugin.
• There’s a brand new piece of music over at the music page. If anyone knows of a sort of Music gallery plugin similar to the image gallery but allowing playback of music without explicitly also allowing downloads, please let me know. I actually have to modify the one I have because it’s not *quite* adequate.
• I’m aware that in Internet Explorer, the Contact form looks messed up. I’ll fix it eventually.
• Thanks to someone pointing it out, I’m using a new Livejournal Crossposter which is fairly nice.
• I’m moving my livejournal over to the username Pigsflew and comments there will be disabled by default for statistical purposes. I’ll be friending you all from there soon, and Warugikaiu is going bye bye if the transfer works nicely. Of course, it may just screw everything up. I’m prepared to take that risk.
• I’m now hosting a blank page. Scroll to the bottom of Pigsflew.com on any page to check it out.

-Adrian

I was just at an improv show, Improv With Attitude’s last show of the semester. And the last time their seniors this year would perform with them. Each of the seniors had their two minutes to speak, or play more games, or say something, and all of them had their own way of saying goodbye. Everyone seemed to say goodbye with a laugh, except one. One gave a speech, a real, nonimprovised, straight from the heart speech.

When I was a freshman, Josh was the first person I met as a student. I met a few people during orientation, but I don’t speak to them anymore. I met Josh even before I met my roommate that semester. He was how I met my current roommate, Scott. He was my in into a very large portion of my circle of friends now. Heh, at one point he was drunk during a party, and he was talking to me that year, he was saying, “you’re fucking awesome, man. You’re fucking awesome.”

When you’re a freshman, and all your ‘friends’ aren’t so much friends as ‘gather a couple people, get stoned, and drunk and watch movies and make fun of each other’, and being the sober one in the group… it means a lot that I could walk into Josh’s room, talk to him about whatever, and he wouldn’t hold it against me. He wasn’t without temper, but when he was angry he (as far as I know, heh) gave me a shot to fix it.

He talked briefly during his speech about some of the people, without mentioning any names, who’d pissed him off, a faux pas, possibly, but not a bad one. People who had caused some difficulties, with him or with the team, but in the end he said that his experience had been an overwhelmingly positive one.

I saw him afterwards, chased him down, and gave him a hug.

Josh, I couldn’t think of how to say it then, but I think you already told me.

“You’re fucking awesome, man. You’re fucking awesome.”

I love doublespeak.

Let me explain. No, let me give an example. A short exchange between myself and my roommate.

Him: “I’m trying to think of another thing we could do.”
Me: “Well, you could always get coffee”
Him: “That’s what I was thinking. But I’m trying to think of how to say it without saying, ‘do you want to go out for coffee.’”
Me: ” ‘Do you want to hang out this weekend?’ ”
Him: “That’s what I was thinking…”
Me: ” ‘Um… maybe… how about… i dunno… coffee?’ ”
Him: “Hey, that’s pretty good…”

See what I mean? Doublespeak. You say what you don’t mean with the implication of what you mean, or you say what you mean but with a blunted edge to it, or you don’t speak when you might in order to say the same thing more acceptably.

I love it.

It’s a nice, semi-uncomplicated but precarious puzzle that can either be haphazard or carefully controlled, and it’s really fun to work my brain around.

I play games. I always have. And what I’ve realized is that, while I don’t really like losing, I like it a lot better than winning too easily.

I think I’m winning a pretty decent game right now, and I’m all smiles.