organization

Orthogonal Pareidolia

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I’ve a horrible record at remembering labels. Proper names especially, and nouns more generally. Most broadly, classifiers of any sort. Which is part of why I’m so bad at languages, despite learning the grammar and pronunciation almost immediately. When it comes to vocabulary, it’s like I’m tacking weak post-its over everything, and every time I turn they blow away. This probably also feeds into my trouble with mathematics (despite again understanding the concepts), and my inability to remember my phone number.

It always trips me up; I expect the words to be there, and then am unprepared when they’re not. I search for synonyms, and find that whole part of my lexicon misplaced. When this happens for every third word, conversations with me can become rather tiresome. I suppose I should just start coining my own words; it would save me such anxiety.

To assuage some of the botherment, I keep a file on my desktop of words that I keep forgetting. (The filename is “words you keep forgetting.txt”.) Many of them are absurdly common, and I use them almost every day to describe some of my favorite concepts — but when I reach for them, they’re just not there. Words like catharsis, exposition, disregard, catalyst, and paraphrase. Others — prosopopeia, dysphemism, moiety, breviloquence — are a bit more specialized. I can probably get away with not remembering those when I need them.

Why, therefore, it has taken me until today to start a file on fantastic names, I don’t know. Potential titles, character names, and band names — the sorts of things that come up all the time, then disappear into the vapor. At the moment all I’ve got is a phrase I found nestled in my head when I woke today: Airtight Harem. The actual words were Airtight Harlem, which is also good, but I meant the former.

(Airtight Heirloom isn’t quite as good. Too obvious.)

Fixing the hole where the ghosts come in

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I’ve moved the stereo cabinet upstairs now, and it seems to fit the hole in my wall decorations (which I had put up around the stack of boxes) quite well. I was wondering at first what happened to the glass door which should be on the front of the cabinet — and then it hit me. This is that stereo cabinet.

I could have sworn I wrote a short piece on the thing a few years ago, but I can’t find it to link to. Ah well. Never mind — it just has to do with poltergeists and glass-based explosions. Nothing worth getting into here.

The transportation of my consoles to the cabinet went quite neatly. Though I wasn’t knowing initially what to do with the cords and controllers, I found that winding them up and tying them neatly with twist-ties is the best solution. If I want to get one of the consoles out, I just have to pick it up and grab the right cables and pads/sticks from directly next to it. Of course in an ideal situation these would all be permanently wired up to a decent TV — but I’m not in an ideal situation, so neat and respectful storage is the best I can do for the moment.

Having this cabinet here also gives me an object against which to neatly stack my game magazines (which had taken to sprawling all over my room wherever they saw fit). My issues of ODCM (a complete run, sans issue #1 — and I almost got it at the time! Stupid me!) are on the bottom shelf, next to my poor old SMS.

Lacking space on my shelves still, I put my stack of Saturn games on top of the cabinet, accompanied by my “overflow” Dreamcast case, containing such things as the original Planetweb browser, the Space Channel 5 sampler, various burned utility discs, and so forth. Non-game material, which I only tap into on occasion.

Now that my desk and a large part of my floor are freed, I will be able to further organize things the next time I get a burst of energy. My printer can come off of the floor and go on the desk. My computer books can go back on the floor under the desk, where they belong. I also moved one of the shelves on one of my bookcases down a couple of notches; I had a couple of NES games which were drifting around without a place to rest, and doing this has not only made room for them along with the other games but has allowed me to put my game genie, book, and NES cleaner back with the rest of the cartridges.

Very slowly, things are shaping up around here. Of course I will be leaving here for school in a matter of days — so I’m not sure why I’m putting so much effort into things. I suppose if what I am doing were actually useful, however, I’d never get around to doing it.

Ah me.