This is pretty much how my interview for the Alleycat went.

Mr. Lincoln, tear down this peculiar institution.

Sevenscore and ten years ago, our forefathers brought forth upon this continent a new birth of freedom, conceived in civil war, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great contest with the descendants of traitors, testing whether this freedom, or any freedom so conceived, can long endure. We are met on a day of remembrance, when the dead of Gettysburg were buried by a President who would be buried a few short years thereafter by a bullet fired against civil rights. These were not the last martyrs of freedom; the dead of Selma, of Birmingham, of every lynching and riot lie in hallowed repose with them, dead so that the great hope of our Constitution might live - our Constitution, a beautiful, bittersweet promise so long unfulfilled, but brought into the full light of glorious day by a long-suffering but unconquered people in the name of another martyred President.

We cannot hallow their graves, or sanctify their deaths, any more than their own actions have consecrated them. It is for us the living, instead, to dedicate ourselves to the struggle which they have so nobly advanced. It is ours to take from their last full measure of devotion the inspiration to stand guard around the tomb freedom's enemies have prepared it, and give it space to be born anew, phoenix-like - that all may be free from need and privation, that the riches of our continent may not be plundered and poisoned for the few, and that government by the people, for the people, and of the people shall not perish from the earth.

What I'm listening to today.

Just heard it on the radio, so I tracked it down on Youtube and downloaded it. Great song, sad as hell. I wanna learn it for the guitar.

White supremacist chucklefucks in North Dakota, and all that entails.

It's a big dustup up North Dakota way: this tiny town called Leith has been chosen by a racist organization as a place to settle, in hopes of taking over the local government. And ever since this shit started, it's been a nonstop chuckle factory. What to talk about first? How the racists got shown up when a bunch of Lakota grandmothers stole their Nazi flag and burned it?

Or maybe how their leader is 1/8th black? I shit you not. Apparently Craig Cobb, the guy leading this schiesse-on-wheels, is in denial at the results, and wants a "more reputable" DNA company to test him. When that inevitably happens and he sees the results, it sounds like he won't change his mind, he'll just become a "border guard for people more pure than I," at least according to the article.

What a pathetic joke. Reminds me of this Dave Chappelle skit I saw once.

The stress of college life.

There's an ad trying to get me to play Naruteymans Z or something on the internet that I just saw on my Deviantart. I don't know why, in this era of targeted ads, they think I'd be interested. While it's true I play a browser-based game, and that I somewhat like anime, I'm not interested in kids' animes.

I'm grabbing ahold of that because that is the least, smallest, tiniest problem I have before me. I think that's the way to go here... ease into this. I just tried to take a sip of water, just to discover my mug is empty. Which reminds me that the office manager (don't dare call the lovely and capable Brenda Brown a mere "secretary" or you'll soon regret it; she really is the most useful person in the office, myself included) has gotten tired of people not pitching in for Culligan water, and has staged a strike. The water cooler has a call to action taped to it. Tragedy of the commons. I'm going to go get some faucet water, I'll be right back.

Coming back from that, I noticed a stress ball on my desk. It's got a smiley face on it and it was given to me by my Intro to Graduate Studies professor. I'm going to skunch him a few times before I continue. There, much better.

They want a campaign, and they're damn well gonna get one.

I'm going to be a candidate in the 2014 Student Senate elections.

I'm not eligible to run for President, and probably won't be eligible to run for Vice President. That's okay. What I want to do, I can do it from the Senate. And what I want to do is put an end to the corrupt government that currently dominates there.

Here's the situation. Last semester, Student Senate's Finance Committee was disbanded by fiat. Imagine President Obama having the power to disband the House Ways and Means Committee because he finally got sick of the Tea Party's shit. That's what happened here, except in this case the Tea Party was the good guys, and the guy doing the disbanding wasn't even elected. It was Aaron Prestwich, some hired CSC functionary, elected by nobody. The Eagle, which is our student newspaper, rightly kicked up a fuss and pointed out just how contrary this was to constitutional democracy.

Let my people roll?

Apparently the very first d20 was made in Ptolemaic Egypt.

What's really cool is how similar it is to modern d20s, shapewise. It just goes to show the universality of mathematics: it's pretty much the only branch of knowledge that's completely free of social construct. The symbols and the way we write the numbers are social constructs, sure, but the underlying principles are the same. And apparently, the icosahedron is the simplest way to render an object with 20 sides of equal shape and size. (Because there's so little in the way of social construct, xenobiologists are suggesting that in any first contact scenario with an alien race, we'll likely be "speaking" math until we can figure out each others' manner of communication and then the languages therein.)

The only real differences, of course, are that it's not made of plastic like our dice, and it's not quite as balanced as our dice, and obviously the characters on the dice. They didn't have Arabic numerals or a place value system in Ptolemaic Egypt; they didn't even have Roman numerals. The characters are instead from the Greek numeral system which, like the Roman, used letters to represent numbers. However, looking on the faces, it's a scattershot of different numbers, with values ranging from 1 to possibly even 1000, if I'm reading the cursive right and that is indeed a sampi. (It could also be a localized, demotic-influenced alpha, as this was Ptolemaic Egypt.) So whatever game they were playing with this, they either didn't need a 1-20 numbering system, or the Greek letters didn't stand for numbers.