The Naked Cowboy in his native environment.

He strikes with fury.

His technique is unstoppable.

Fatality…

My sister says that the sensation of him grabbing her ass may never leave.

Main Building (Unit) - Fruiting Body

• Approximately 1M tall x 10M diameter for juvenile development stage, 4M x 25M for adult.
• Does not suffer production penalties when under fire
• Production rate directly linked to size of fruiting body, minus any areas currenly under weapon effect (burned, poisoned)
• Creates low-specialization units
• Can move, very slowly, suffers 75% production penalty while moving
• Takes constant damage when under environmental effect-low nitrogen atmosphere

Basic Unit - Epsilon

• Very low intelligence, can not use projectile attacks, can not use “learn” on enemy equipment for re-use
• Very robust, difficult to kill, can regenerate very quickly when not under weapon or environmental effect
• Can survive in low nitrogen atmosphere environment longest of Spore units
• Can be “upgraded” to environment normalization unit Delta, or absorbed into a Delta unit to replenish lost mass
• Can be absorbed by any higher level command unit to replenish lost mass
• Two Epsilon units can merge together to create a larger Epsilon, but any mass over normal will slowly be lost, as the photosynthesis cannot maintain the additional mass.

So I’m in New York, and it’s fantastic. This place really doesn’t sleep. Honestly, no, it doesn’t. And if you try to sleep, it will piss on you and begin doing some kind of extraordinary street maintenance outside your window. Then it will plant some 10kW Sodium Lamps outside your room and shit on your dog. There are some things that are so stunning about it. Mostly, it’s the decay. The city is failing so beautifully. The new buildings, the polished growth? Meh, it’s OK, I guess. But I have never been to a city that is so good at falling to pieces. The crumble of the sidewalk, the abandoned building, the stripped car, this is the New York flora and fauna. Instead of a lengthy natural cravasse, you have a warehouse that was, by all visual assessment, built out of one foot squares of glass and untreated steel, and then allowed to age at the bottom of the Atlantic for thirty years, before being dredged up to sit up proud. Where a fox or deer might leap out across your path somewhere else, a man of completely indistinct heritage, perhaps a Chinese Indian, atop a bicycle purchased at K-Mart for $40 sometime in 1982 and allowed to fester under a pile of animal droppings. A beautiful place, in it’s horrible ugliness.

I will figure out stock market investing if it frickin kills me.

I’m a smart guy, and I can do it. And it has the potential to provide the life I want for myself.

On to less boring stuff - I love Steven Barnes books. I really do. But the man is mad, mad, mad for racism. He sees it everywhere, which I suppose he has a right to, but seriously, man, whoa. I found his blog and I thought “Hey, I like John Scalzi’s blog and his books, maybe I’ll find a whole bunch of authors I’ve enjoyed and be able to see the world through their eyes.”

Whoa, wrong. He’s a nut. I mean I suspected, when I found his homepage and located The Five Minute Miracle, but never this level of crazy.

I have, however, found the RSS feed for “How Not To Ruin Your Life” by Ben Stein on Yahoo! Finance, which is a breath of fresh air. The man simply makes sense of what is, for the great many, a total babble of insanity. We’ll see if the Rich Dad/Poor Dad guy or Jim Kramer (whose TV show I enjoy immensely) on The Street are as enjoyable to read.

I started today with all the glorious expectations that one makes of a Tuesday. Wine, women, song, celebration of all things, in all ways. I can’t tell you how many Tuesdays I’ve had that were pure bliss.

The reason for that is that Tuesday, on the whole, sucks. You recover from how bad Monday was and just hope that the work you put off until Wednesday doesn’t span into Thursday, which means you’ll have to do something daft like work on Friday too. Tuesday is a good day to take a long breakfast break, or go shopping during the morning hours when you think nobody is likely to notice that you’re missing. It is not, as a rule, the right day for office politics or hardware failure. Those things are reserved for Wednesdays when everyone is finally ready to do some real work or Mondays, where you’re going to be screwed from the get go anyhow.

I got a double helping of both. I’ve now been in the office 20 hours straight, and I’m not exactly “feeling the Umpqua” on this whole thing anymore. It could be because the last time I ate anything substatial was 15 hours ago and the vending machine mysteriously stopped running at midnight. It could be the fact that I was about to give up and call in for a ride home, but my cellphone is mysteriously cancelled because the payment is past due. Not sure what the deal is there, but I called and threw a wad of money at it because I NEEDS MY CELLPHONE. I probably use my phone less than anyone else I know, but not having it is like the equivalent of losing a body part. An important one, like a foot or an eye, not a gimme like a ring finger or a nipple.

And the politics. Oh, lordy. The Game has been running rampant. Must be the season for it. Pre-spring outbursts. Something related to mating season and pre-positioning yourself for the rut. I have no idea.

I’m so tired.