More quiz silliness:

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Seventh Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Take the Dante Inferno Hell Test

I've been lax of late, both here and at my use.perl.org journal. The main reason is simple and straightforward: I've been (and still am) rather depressed. Not reaching-for-a-razor depressed, so much as why-bother-getting-out-of-bed depressed.

For a long time, I've been trying to figure out why. There are a lot of things that can (and likely do) contribute to the depression, and there are a lot of things that one would assume help to fight off the depression. I've had two projects at work get cancelled out from under me. On the other hand, I'm not being let go– they prefer to move me on to something new rather than get rid of me. I still get dragged down over being single, but I also know that I couldn't bring someone home to my apartment as it currently is. I'm trapped in a cycle where environmental factors like a wrecked apartment contribute to the sense of hopelessness, while that same feeling saps away the energy I need to address problems like the messy home. Of course there are other things at play as well.

Lately, I've come to a point where I'm not really looking for a why anymore, where the depression is concerned. I guess I'm coming to think that it is possible that I can be depressed without a specifically-identifiable external cause. In some ways this is a relief, because it lets me focus more on what I should do to deal with the effects, rather than spinning my wheels looking for causes. But I can't help feeling that I "should" be able to handle things like this for myself. That being affected by this, letting it slow me down to a practical stop, is somehow my fault.

That's the part I'm currently trying to overcome.

I can't remember if the first version of the Purity Test I ever took was the 400-question or one of the 500-question editions. I do recall that my score was much higher, then:

All that, and there were still a lot of things on the test that I could yet do, but just haven't. Yet.

Here: http://www.nomovieads.com/

Commercials before the trailers have been irritating the hell out of me for years, now. When I went to see The Guru in Orange a few weeks ago, the AMC theater I was at showed commercials, but they started them before the posted start time, so that by the "official" time the movie started, you were at the trailers.

By way of a friend's journal, I bring this:

Effort to free Mike Hawash

I don't pretend to know all the details, but from what I can tell this is the sort of thing the Ashcroft Justice Department swore to Congress that they wouldn't do. Just give us the powers, and we promise not to abuse them. Trust us.

At today's news conference with Rumsfeld, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers started out saying that the U.S. efforts were "proceeding unabetted", then quickly caught himself and corrected to to, "proceeding unabated".

The difference between abet and abate is not at all subtle.

Last night, I cut a finger on one hand with an X-acto knife while working on my current modeling project. Understand, the X-acto is a really fucking sharp knife, especially when the blade inside it is a fresh-from-the-box #11 blade. It makes a very clean, usually fairly deep cut. The kind that doesn't even hurt for the first few minutes, giving you plenty of time to ponder just how stupid bracing the part with your hand while cutting was, when you have a perfectly good cutting surface right in front of you.

Tonight, while cleaning out my airbrush, I managed to pull open the just-recently-sealed cut. Just in time, no less, for me to get a little bit of laquer paint thinner into the cut.