Headache

My brain is probably about the consistency of porridge right now. Next time Ron Paul asks me to donate, I'll say that I have... in the form of forty dollars and eight hours of mind-numbing boredom.

I'm getting a headache and I don't know if I want to go into politics anymore.

Is it true we really can't get anything accomplished without hours upon hours of political language and excessive amounts of ballot casting? Now, I think this process would have been literally twice as fast if we had a little bit of technology. I mean beyond the low resolution projectors and microphones. We need something like the clickers from college, something where you can immediately cast a ballot and have it counted and the results can be tallied in as little as thirty seconds, give or take three minutes for all the people still trying to figure it out. We were using paper ballots. We wrote on them with a pen and passed them toward one end of the aisle.

Does that not seem rather archaic to you? I mean, granted, you need money for technology. But clickers in college are like sixty bucks per person. I'm only twenty short.

But here I am, hopeful alternate with forty bucks in my pocket, thinking they won't need me.



I wasn't one of the original delegates, or even alternates, and I missed the Polk county convention, which people generally agreed was a disaster. I became an alternate because there is something that allows everyone in the Polk County Central Committee to be an alternate delegate. It makes sense; we were all probably elected at the same time and by the same people to represent as the original delegates. I didn't think I would be an actual delegate because they randomly assign you a number that determines in what order you are allowed to become a delegate. I was 171 out of 300+. However, I don't think there was much more than twenty alternates for Polk county who showed up, and I have no idea how many delegates didn't show up. I just know that someone from the Polk County Convention started walking along being like, "Are you from Polk? Go get your ballots." They only give ballots to actual delegates. But be careful. Alternates don't have to pay the fee. Delegates do. You know what that means? Those are forty dollar ballots. You wouldn't think it, would you? Looking at those pastel colors and that cheap staple.


[Covering up the name cause they gave me a delegate nametag to prove I was one... but it wasn't mine.]

But whatever. By the time I got to the floor, some damage had already been done. They voted to change a rule allowing the people with the most ballots to win to a rule that says the people have to have 51% of the ballots to win. Not a big difference, you think? Add some rhetoric to make it sound like they won't represent you if you didn't vote for them?

By the end, people were voting to suspend that rule just to let others win so we didn't have to vote again. It wasn't clear that you had to keep voting until you got a winner. So say eight people run for four slots. Everyone can put four names on their ballot. Two people are popular and win with over 51% of the vote. Instead of the two right under them being in the other two spots, everyone else is declared a loser and we have to vote again on those two spots. The two with the least votes are then dropped from the ballot and we now have four people for two spots. Then we vote again. What really bothers me is that instead us actually getting a majority, we just keep cycling the people and eliminating the lowest until we're all forced to vote for the same people. Is that really agreement? I don't know.

But, I think Ron Paul came out ahead. I found some people from the Ron Paul camp beforehand, and we clustered to get instructions. Afterward, I met some more Ron Paul people, probably some of the youngest people in the room aside from the junior delegates. It's my job to try and get to the next meeting of the district convention to decide who goes to state or national or something like that.

It's really weird to think about. We voted in caucuses back in January. I believe that after recount, Santorum won. But now Santorum has dropped out. And even though all those people voted for Santorum, the delegates never even got all the way up to the top.. What happens to them? I guess they vote for someone else. So even though Santorum won Iowa, he now has nothing here, but they aren't just dead votes.

Did you know the average age of the Republican voter is 65? One guy is like, "What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be out working to pay my social security?" People asked my age and when I told them, they're all like, "Oh good for you!" being all happy that someone that young was at a Republican convention.

But, like me and another Ron Paul supporter shared conspiratorially... we're not really Republicans.

Another website!

Finally! I have found a way I might spare all y'all (that is, all three of you) from expansive book reviews. And the answer is Goodreads. It is basically a website for ranking/rating/reviewing books.

So, I can go through and give books stars, one through five, from "didn't like it" to "loved it." It then adds itself to my listing of books. I could also add a written review. Others can read and comment on said review. I could group books into specific lists, like "Best Books of All Time" or "Steampunk Books" or similar things (if I thought I actually had the knowledge to make lists like best books of all time. I don't). Based on the books I rank and my rankings of them, Goodreads can then recommend me other books. I can add the books I am currently reading and my progress through them. I can add a list of books I want to read.

And that last part, the "to-read" list, is pretty awesome because I can also get a Goodreads smartphone app and look up all the books I want to read while I am, say, at the library. It also has a barcode scan which I have not tested, but I assume it allows you to scan a book and add it to your lists.

The way I've been using Goodreads recently is that I rank some of the Steampunk books I liked, e.g. the Parasol Protectorate series, and Goodreads recommends other books similar. I can look at the covers, names, and so on for the ones that look interesting, then hover my mouse over them and see their ranking. I usually shoot for at least a three or above. If that is interesting, I can read part of a description, and even click on it for full description and access to other reviews.

The reason I got signed up for Goodreads in the beginning is because they had a book giveaway contest. I did not win, but the point is that they also have contests and the like.

I love books. I still have the nostalgic connecting to actually holding a book, turning the pages, flipping backwards to find a particular detail, stuffing it in my bag, curling up on the couch... I also don't own a Kindle Fire, so I have no other real choice. And the library is free. Even though there is a 78 hold wait on the Hunger Games.

Long live the written word!

In Recent News...

I would have had a post for you. It was a short little clip on wanderlust and the various places I want to go. I think summer always makes me want to go to a tropical paradise. I start getting all swoony about beaches. Even a picture of the Dali Lama with a bunch of heavy islander-looking guys will make me swoony simply because they are islander-looking and that makes me think of beaches...

And I want to go to a beach. Or on a cruise. Or crash on an island where everyone has their own creepy interconnected backstory and there are crazy invisible forces and polar bears roaming about...

I never did finish Lost.

But you lost that small gem of a post because of my phone. Basically, I wrote that post on my phone and hit "publish." I happened to be in data roaming at the time. I had also used up my 50 mb of allowed data roaming. So technically, I could not use data for publishing. But I had wi-fi. And I had been using that on my phone instead of data. So I thought my Blogger app would publish through wi-fi. Well, it didn't. It tried to use data. And it couldn't publish through data, but it kept on trying. And as long as it was trying to use data, I couldn't use wi-fi. My webpages refused to load because I wasn't allowed to use data. And I couldn't delete the offending post because for some reason, the delete button would not press. And it was a virtual button, so you can't like look for gum stuck under it or anything like that. I ended up having to delete my Blogger app. The small post was lost.

A moment of silence for my small post on wanderlust.

Moving on...

I have become addicted to a webpage game of a similar variety to Facebook games, in as much as one can get addicted to a game where you must use energy for most things, you only have ten energy, and they recharge at the rate of one energy every ten minutes. That's an hour and forty minutes for your whole ten energy.

However, moving past energy problems, I have found this game very addicting. But that's for me. The only things really truly addicting to me usually have some storyline going on that I MUST follow. Have you every seen me play Dragon Age or Dragon Age II? I invested around two weeks, almost solid, to each one of those games, playing through it once, then playing through it again, this time carefully engineering all my choices to reflect a desired overall plotline.

Even Sims 3 draws me back as I engineer shallow soap opera plots for my house of hapless victims... ahem, Sims.

So what is this addicting energy-swilling game Linsey is rambling on about? (Oh, apparently I don't type my name in Blogger much. Good thing, as I apparently misspelled it. Shucks, there went my announcement hype.) The game is called Fallen London! And that link will take you to my character profile. From which you can sign up!

As far as I can make out, the game is a post-apocalyptic Victorian-era role-playing game. It's sort of steampunk, but doesn't have much in the way of inventions. Apparently London has fallen, dragged down by bats or other nefarious means to a place below the earth. This place is often referred to as the Neath (as in beneath) and the surface... well, the Surface. London is much closer to Hell as a result and rules, including the rules of physics, can be a bit different here. There are four primary stats you can invest in, and I believe with time you can get them all high, but I chose to go with shadowy and persuasive. My character is a bit of a sneak-thief.

And in Fallen London, you have a vast amount of freedom to choose what you want to do. You get storylets, which are often repeatable snatches of story, like robbing a weasel-seller or trying to make a name for yourself in the artistic world by telling jokes. Some of these lead to more extensive quest-lines, others you just keep doing to up a skill or gain some materials. There are also cards which are one-time use random storylets.

You can obtain a variety of equipment. For some reason, you start of in prison. You become acquainted with the interface through your attempted escape, and choose your first skill that you want to pursue. When you get out of prison, you are wearing manacles and prisoner's rags. These can easily be sold for some less offending clothing with a variety of stats.

And that is what has occupied my imagination of late. I was mentally following my character through the darkened streets of the Neath, a girl with long braids, a bowler, suspenders, trousers over scarlet stockings, a dog at her heel.

Well, at least it is interesting to me.

And I would want my dog to look like this:


This was David's sister's dog, a puppy named Champagne. She's half yellow lab and half Great Pyrenees, I believe. She was the most adorable puppy, but Becca couldn't keep her because she moved in with us and our apartment only allows cats... and we would've kept her, if we could have. Breaks my heart.

Anyway, the Amish ended up taking her, so now she's an Amish dog. I doubt she'll keep her name, but I don't think she really knew it yet.

I wonder where we will find a dog like that when we're ready for a dog.

Update... of a sorts.

I'm sorry I haven't posted anything in... well, I can't remember the last post, so it might as well be forever. I've been working on another pet project, detailed at my new blog called "Dreading Telling Mom." The name is a bit of a joke as Mom already knows. Sorry mother, the joke is a bit at your expense, but it isn't really intended toward you specifically, but the institution known as "Mom" in general.

Wow, this is starting to sound like an update post. I don't normally do those unless I have something to ponder on. What can I ponder on that would make this less of an update?

The first thing that springs to mind is cheese. Why always cheese? Why do you haunt me so?

Now I kind of want cheese. But I already brushed my teeth.

So not cheese. Let's see... bacon! *sigh* Am I hungry or what? But it is 23:30 already and I don't want to eat before bed. And I already brushed my teeth.

Well... nothing comes to mind. You may have to be content with that. And hey, I wrote a lot at my other blog. Give me a break.