i'm going as an urban cowgirl, with a black lace skirt and a tank top, fishnet stockings, boots, a cowboy hat, and a gun holster. i don't have a lot of money, so i'm pretty happy that, since i already had everything but the gun holster and fishnets, the whole costume was just eight dollars. i'm wearing it saturday night for billy and jessica's halloween party in dallas.

i'm not sure that an urban cowgirl is such a brilliant idea, but i wanted something easy, inexpensive, and comfortable. also, i think it will look cool, and what was it that g.i. joe said about looking cool and how it was half the battle?

i have this one-piece Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant white jumpsuit that i wore to a party in Culver City saturday night, with bright yellow dish washing gloves pulled over the gathered wrists, and a sawdust mask on my face.

i told everyone I was a mailman.

on friday for the party I was the one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater. I was very, very purple. purple clothes, purple hair, purple horn, purple sparkly fake eyelashes, purple jelly bracelets, purple all over the boy...

but that was the warm-environment costume, so tomorrow I am going to be a wizard, and I will wear my wizard hat and my long black cape and go trick-or-treating with little kids in the cold october air. I'm recycling my sparkly tights from the purple people eater costume, but otherwise it's a whole new look, baby.

So... what's everyone going to be for Halloween? I still haven't decided yet. I have a penchant for coming up with odd costumes from the materials at hand at the last moment. And, well, we're not doing anything tonight, as most of the parties and such are this weekend, so I've still got a little time.

Behold: Captain Gangbang. (Well, a draft version without the right colors or anything.)

How cool is it that Wil Wheaton is presently reading Ishmael and listening to Amnesiac?

He gives the geeklog world a good name, if you ask me. You can't always say that about WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER.

I thought that being on break would let me figure out what the hell is going on in the world, but no. it still doesn't make sense. meanwhile, it's friday already and I haven't done nearly enough homework.

Does anyone else feel like finding a nice remote island right about now?

<meanwhile> It's nice to see CNN has upgraded AMERICA'S NEW WAR to AMERICA STRIKES BACK. We've now moved beyond the Procter & Gamble phase of this engagement -- and into the George Lucas phase. What next? The Klumps? The New Batch? </meanwhile>

my situation and jared's are certainly not the same, no.  but i banned the old creeps and now i have new creeps, new creeps on dialups who know where i live.  what the fuck do i do with that?

A couple of things.

I don't equate Alison's comments creepfest with the random dude who left something snippy on Jared's site. In the latter instance, I suspect it was just some lazy link surfer who hair-trigger-posted something reactionary, dismissive and mean and moved on. Obviously I don't have access to Jared's server statistics, but I'd be willing to bet his heckler has scarcely returned even to follow up on his verbal assault.

With Alison, there's definitely a personal grievance at work. I can't conjecture as to its nature, save to say it's obviously some form of resentment.

Why Alison in particular? Pure random chance. We all have our detractors in life. If we're fortunate, we manage to filter/tune them out over time. In Alison's case, unfortunately, one such bilious specter has bubbled up from the past and is now "reconnecting" with her, however perversely, through the interface of her web site.

On some level, Alison, you should be flattered that someone's taking the time to harass you. On the other hand, words can be as forceful as fists and hurt like grenades, so I understand your trepidation. I would cast my vote in favor of maintaining your comments system. Chalk up the almost negligible blowback (considering, for a moment, your numerous admirers) to due process.

Oh, and ban offending IPs like crazy. :)

and here's why i want to take my comments system down again. this time, i'm being personally attacked by someone who very obviously knows me; they're taking things i shared with them in confidence and using them to insult me. they're also impersonating my friend ryan on my site, and impersonating me on his. what's scary is that i don't really know who it is. i've been searching my mental archives for weeks, thinking about who i've told what to, what friends i've had that i don't see anymore, who i may have hurt unknowingly, but i haven't come up with any concrete answers. this is the thread that started it all, and it's definitely the worst one.

how am i dealing with it? i've just been banning IP addresses, which i guess is working, but it doesn't really solve the problem of who is doing this, why they are, what i did to deserve. it's nothing to do with my readership, which hasn't increased or decreased in awhile, but i thought i'd chime in while we're talking about assholes.

jared, it's all a big trade-off, really; with more readers come more losers. while it's nice to have a small group of people you know who are reading your site, there's not much you can do to return your readership to that nice original state once it goes up. you can't decrease the craziness of your screeds to decrease the asshole-magnetism, either, because, well, why would you want to do that?

so. i don't know what to do.

Jebus. I'm beginning to see why Alison took down her comments system a while back. My traffic has increased quite a bit in the wake of my coverage of the events of the past few weeks. Which should be a good thing... I've never been over around 50 people a day on average, and in theory it's nice to have lots of new people reading my crazy screeds and being exposed to my ideas and whatnot. But, being relatively unknown has its advantages too, like not having to deal with clueless, hateful morons all the time. I think I liked it better when I had my cosy little community of 40-50 readers, most of whom I have corresponded with and consider to be friends in one way or another.

Some of you guys have seen your readership balloon quite a bit over time. How have you dealt with that? Has it made the experience better or worse, overall? Discuss...

I know, Rabi, I know. I'm not trying to be insensitive(though I'm probably succeeding nonetheless). It's just too unreal to me. I'm sheltered here in the middle of the country, where not much changes and few people were directly affected. And, like I've said, death just isn't very real to me in the first place, because I've never been close to it. All I know, I know by proxy. Based on that, I know that I don't want to know more anytime soon.

dead people are still dead, and I still haven't gotten as far as caring about what might happen to me.

Brother Jared, I do not yet grok in fullness these events.

Waiting is.

Well, it's been a few weeks now, so...

Where do we stand? Life for me has pretty much cycled back into an opaque normalcy of everyday tasks and obligations. Mostly unintentionally, and out of necessity, I've buried all of it in work and study, for the time being at least. I'm still numb, but not in the stunned, adrenaline-charged manner of a couple weeks ago. It's more of a hollow, icy-cold feeling at the base of my spine, and in the background of my thoughts. Visceral horror exchanged for a more subtle, creeping dread.

Dread of what? I think the uncertainty of what the future holds, and most of all, the realization of my impotence to really do anything about it. I've always felt that I was largely in control of, and responsible for, my own life. That if it was to be ruined or greatly changed, I would most likely be the impetus. Never have I felt so powerless, so dependent on and beholden to forces completely beyond my control(well, at least human forces, anyway. Nature is another thing altogether.)

I could be drafted within a year or two and sent to die in the wastes of Afghanistan. Or, I could be vaporized or infected or otherwise wiped out in an equally senseless act of violence right here. Such possibilities just haven't ever computed into the Plan(ever-changing though it has been.) I've always worked on the assumption that I would be the one calling the shots in my own existence, at least until I made the choice to forsake some of that control of my own volition. So much for my little self-contained, self-determinate, self-centered microcosm.

Perhaps that's ultimately a mark of maturity, an illusion wisely forsaken. At any rate, it has led me to a greater sense of urgency, and a lessened vulnerability to despair and its accompanying paralysis. In the absence of guarantees about the future, doing something, anything, with the here and now suddenly seems much more important. Perhaps this will be the jolt which finally breaks me from my longstanding holding pattern of calculating and planning, and into a posture of action and accomplishment again. I could certainly live with that result. But I wish I had come by it through entirely different means than this. I want to learn from my own mistakes, not those of others. That's not nearly as realistic of a proposition today as it was even a few short weeks ago, sadly.