Last night I completed reading Sybil Leek’s Diary of a Witch. Although I’m not a fan of Sybil’s writing style, the book is very interesting. It’s part biography, part rant. She covers everything from her time living gypsies in New Forest to her thoughts on reincarnation.
I’ve been progressively cleaning my room for the past couple days – tackling a different section each day. Yesterday I got rid of 4 old computers that hadn’t worked for years, plus an old laptop that was probably almost as old as I am. I’ve recycled thousands of pieces of paper and shredded at least that much.
There sure is a whole lot of junk in here.
I just started watching Welcome to the Scene. It’s a pretty good show. Entertaining, at least.
It’s about a group of pirates. The group encompasses everybody from the source at the dvd plant to the person who writes the nfo for the release.
I really, really hope that the people who made the show have nothing to do with the real pirate “scene” because, if they do, they’re all a bunch of noobs and don’t stand a chance against the MPAA/RIAA.
They share files via ftp. That’s right. Good old, unencrypted, cleartext, ftp. They communicate via email. No, not PGP/GPG encrypted. Oh, and the email addresses are linked to their real names. They chat via irc. No, not i2p irc. Just plain old, cleartext irc. Their browsing is far too fast for them to be proxying with Tor, or anything like it. Did I mention they use FTP?
After all my technical griping, it really is a good show. Go download it.
During MutantFest, I finished reading Hunter’s The Rum Diary. It’s your typical Hunter Thompson book, but with rum instead of drugs.
A whole lot of rum.
Last week, while I was looking for something I could put on my poop at MutantFest to help break it down, I discovered Tea Tree Oil. I’ve been using it in my toothpaste for a while, but never really realized what the stuff was.
It’s a first aid kit in a bottle. Here is a list of some of it’s uses:
Tea Tree Oil is a natural antiseptic, germicide, antibacterial, fungicide. Many people use tea tree oil for: athletes foot, cold and flu, oral thrush, cold sores & canker sores, tooth ache & gum infections, ringworm, candida, head lice or louse, cleanser additive, gum problems, mosquito bites, bug repellent, cockroaches, deter flees, mouth ulcers, herpes, cuts, abrasions, after shave, sunburn, anorectal or vaginal yeast infections, unwanted body odors, acne, toe nail infections, and many other uses.
The first day of MutantFest, Tina managed to acquire a bug bite above her eyebrow about the size of a quarter. It was huge. When we got back to camp, she put a couple drops of my tea tree oil on it and, after a couple hours, it was practically gone. I also used it as a bug repellent, since I hate putting that Raid stuff on my skin.
I highly recommend picking up a bottle.
I just got back from the Autonomous Mutant Festival. Well, sorta. Directions to the festival weren’t announced until 5PM on the 5th (before that all we knew is that it was probably somewhere in the Randle, WA area) which means that, with traffic, we didn’t arrive till about 10:30PM. Long story short, we basically drove five miles past the festival because it was too damn dark to see anything. I don’t recommend driving in a forest that you’ve never been in at night – especially not one that has crazy bats that fly at your windshield, ala Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
On the 7th we attempted to walk to the festival, but only made it about 2.5 miles (up a mountain, I might add). After that, Tina wanted to drive to it, but driving in a national forest is just depressing (sorta ruins the one-with-nature vibe), and I was perfectly happy just camping.
So we started home this morning because Tina had monstrous bug bites and was getting bored. We did see the festival on the way out, but it didn’t look like there were more than a couple hundred people. Overall I’d say that Mutant Fest was a bust, but camping was fun.
Pictures will be up soon.
I’ve just finished reading Sean Kennedy’s The Bloodstained Rabbit. I should probably start off by saying that I’m not a big fan of the horror genre – in fact this is probably the first real horror novel I’ve read. That said, I liked the book. A lot.
I don’t think it was so much of a horror book as it was a thriller. (Although it has all the makings of a good horror: nazis, the occult, lots of gore, interdimensional beings, etc.) Sean did a great job with keeping you tense (the scene with the Indian hunting party....I burned through that a sentence a second because of the suspense).
It could have used more editing, though. There were plenty of obvious typos that probably would have been fixed if one more pair of eyes had looked it over before printing.