this is posted only because it is complete bullshit, but amusing.

Star Wars Horoscope for Leo

You add a whole new meaning to self-assurance. You are a nurturing person with great physical strength. Like many Leos, you will see that your mission for good is completed. You are very optimistic about the future. Star wars character you are most like: Princess Leia

What Is Your Star Wars Horoscope?

people as commodities are only valuable when they're young.

Japan takes fear, consumerism, and the human body to a whole new level.  As usual, Nippon is at the cutting edge of the tragi-comic postwar devolution.  It's when I look at Japan that I think, "we may think we're progressing, but we have actually hit the apex, and we are on the way down."  I'm not sure what the apex was.  World War II?  The Berlin Wall?  9/11?  It's sad to think any of those would be the pinnacle of human civilization.  Then you start wondering if we ever reached the apex at all, or if we just fell off the plateau. 

glitters in the night

I saw a fruit bat last night.  It was in the tree I was sitting under by the Yarra River.  Good-sized, one of those cute ones with the fox faces.  It was crawling amid the branches, looking for fruit, presumably, not minding the party boat-barges filled with teenagers that had just come back from a day at the races of the Melbourne Cup with their silly hats and puffy cocktail dresses.  The bat fit better with the slowly spinning ferris wheel behind it, an older and cheaper pleasure.  Supposedly Coney Island is going out of business and its rickety amusement park may have to close - too bad, in my opinion.

I also went into a casino for the first time in my life.  I only stayed ten minutes.  ID was not demanded from me - "not you, ma'am, you're okay" - and although at first I felt out of place, in jeans, it became apparent that all the rich socialites weren't actually gambling.  They went to private rooms and restaurants and chocolate stores.  The slot machines and card tables were populated with people from my socioeconomic class, or maybe even lower.  Unhappy, desperate people continuously pressing buttons to make little fruit shapes swirl on a screen.  It's like a nirvana of capitalism - monetary amounts are posted all over, 5 c, $30, and everything glows and blinks - cheap and superficial.  It's fascinating, probably because I'm so detached from it.  Even if I go to Vegas after graduation, I swear to God, I won't gamble.  I was born in the year of the Rabbit, after all, and Rabbits don't gamble.  Occasionally there's the sound of coins in a downpour as somebody wins something, but it's rare.  The house always wins.  The bouncers are black or Latin, the casino workers and waiters Asian.  Behind me was a man on a cellphone: "I'm somewhere in the casino, I don't know where I am." 

infrastructure falls apart.

This is what Radiohead's In Rainbows makes me think of.  It's really a picture of South Australia, on the road between Adelaide and Melbourne. 

Nature.  Space.  Alive.  Quiet.  Rather perfect for Ilium at the moment, I must say, and makes me want to go on a road trip out west, the cold west - farther into Wyoming, perhaps.  Well, that's subject to mom's approval, and if we really are going abroad, we must save for that. 

Crazy. Five stars to nearly everything, highest ratio yet.  It feels like the post-Chernobyl world, the one where the humans and their buildings  and pain have rotted away, and the radioactive animals are free-grazing.  Which is also why it reminds me of outer worlds: Europa, Contact.