I love the smell of urine in the morning

The apartment hasn't been invaded by the smoke from next door's in a while, knock on wood. Sometimes we get smoke from an apartment below us, when we have the balcony windows open, but there's nothing to do about that.

However, Smoking Woman remains, an unseen presence in the apartment next to ours. Not unsmelled, though. The landing outside our apartment reeks from cat urine. Horribly. I can only imagine how it must smell in there, considering the stench outside.

And the smell isn't the big issue. Why the hell keep cats if you can't take care of them properly? And should I call animal control or something? She's an old woman, but that's no excuse, really. There may be animals suffering in there, and while I do prefer my animals on the barbecue, that ain't a good thing.

So what to do, what to do? Any suggestions?

The mastermind always wants more. It's criminal nature

At home today. Feels like someone punched me with a blunt object across the right temple. My eye is more bloodshot than last night. I've felt the headache over the last few days, but dared to believe it wouldn't flare up again. I'm still hopeful, though I've slept a few hours today, the head is still throbbing and I'm still tired. Pointless. What evolutionary quirk decided that headaches were a good idea?

A side note (though not really). Six people answered this. There still has to be a few lurkers out there. Come on. What are you afraid of? Tell me who you are.

Male or female?
Age?
Where do you call home?
How did you discover the shows in my mind?
Have we met? Or be you a stranger?
What should I write more about?
Name a blog or three you think I would like.
Name a band I should check out.

It's a mystery. Broken into a jigsaw puzzle. Wrapped in a conundrum. Hidden in a Chinese box

Since I started writing here again, I've noticed a distinct spike in traffic. Nothing strange about that, but I'm curious as to who you people are. So riddle me this.

Male or female?
Age?
Where do you call home?
How did you discover the shows in my mind?
Have we met? Or be you a stranger?
What should I write more about?
Name a blog or three you think I would like.
Name a band I should check out.

Kind of sort of stolen from Cupcakes.

The internet is the trailer park for the soul

Back in July, I found a cool blog using Blogger's “Next blog” function. I just clicked around, and there it was.

So today I figured I would go for a repeat. Click around, and find something out there, again. Something worthwhile, something fascinating, something I would want to read.

You can probably guess where this is going.

I found zilch. Nada. Nichts. Noll. Ingenting. And so on. Or rather, I found a lot of blogs but they were all either in a language I don't read or horribly ugly or complete crap. Or at least two of the three. And sometimes maybe all three.

So I'm asking y'all, point me to some blogs. Preferably in English, but Swedish works too. Well-written stuff, please. Wow me. Pull me out of the trailer park and into high society.

I leave you with this quote:
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Psychos will always be psychos. They don’t need video games to help them

No, this won't be a rant *points to headline* I have a question. I want answers. And motivations.

The question: Xbox 360 or Playstation 3?

I'm buying one of them, probably, but which one?

What you need to know:
I like first person shooters, so it has to have good first person shooters. I'm not much of a sports or racing game person. Or complex roleplaying games either, for that matter (the video game kind at least). Though I'm open to change.

So I want opinions, and motivations. Why should I buy whatever it is. Xbox or PS. Let the commenting commence.

Oh. And there's no reason to mention Little Big Planet. I know already.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self

Jesper gave me some grief about not writing enough, over drinks on Friday night. Fair enough. See, I'm more of an editor than a writer, really, in the sense that I'm very bad at writing sprees and can't put anything to paper or hard drive without thinking it through over and over.

First thing's first. Writing spree? I'm not sure where the term originated, but it's used within the context of my creative writing class, where it signifies the act of putting pen to paper and just writing, writing, writing. The point of a writing spree isn't to write anything good or worthwhile, the point is writing. Anything. Any words that come to mind, even if it's just “I can't write for shit. I can't write for shit. I can't write for shit”.

Now, as I said, I'm not a writing spree person. Why? Because I can't live with writing something that I don't like. Everything I put down must be worth something to me.

In some ways, I can find the essence of this in a quote from Stephen King's “On Writing”:

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair--the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

I don't come lightly to the blank page. I need an idea, or a character, or something, ready in my head, to be able to sit down and write. Usually I turn this one thing, maybe a paragraph or a plot or something, over and over in my head for days before I commit anything to actual words. I over-analyze everything.

I have maybe two or three dozen embryos of stories sloshing about on my laptop. I'm going to let you people decide which one of the following I'm going to finish and polish and try to get published. Yes, published. Not here, on my blog, but for a literary website of some sort.

The stories are:
- Love at Stake. A man believes his new-found girlfriend is a vampire.
- Aquarium. A guy buys an aquarium that includes a miniature Bermuda triangle.
- The Weird and Wonderful Hair of Mrs. Atkins. A woman, with bizarre hair, finds magic in her attic.
- Roof Top. Two strange men meet on a rooftop on New Year's Eve of 1999.
- The Word Thief. A man kills another man, because he believes he is stealing letters and words from the world.

Right. Which one then? Or rank them. Or whatever. Let me know.