hard and dark... like a thumping metal press!!

I didn't get all that much done today... slept in fairly late, then spent the afternoon hanging out with Tim neuroticmonk at Caribou, where we were nominally working on stuff (I did read a paper on IR techniques written by this terribly clever guy at Google) but mostly discussing terribly abstract geeky things.

But I felt the need to get out of the apartment, go somewhere interesting, in the evening. Despite my prodding, I failed to get anybody else to come with, so I ended up going by myself... to Goth-Industrial Night at the Masquerade! Bizarre, yes.

I had a lot of fun, though. There's a lot to be said for this sort of thing. It's full of people who're clearly there just to have fun, and aren't taking stuff very seriously... I mean, there was a guy walking around wearing this huge black plastic-y shiny coat with brightly-glowing edges and a huge luminescent atomic symbol on the back. And a lot of people were wearing goggles on their foreheads... what's with the goggles? There were stranger outfits than that. The whole thing's totally absurd, absolutely hilarious :) But everybody seemed to be enjoying, which is the whole point. They played a bunch of loud, thumpy music, including "And All That Could Have Been" and some other NIN favourites... and at one point, the DJ was mixing together "Closer" and "Number One Crush", which was pretty cool. I was rather expecting something more obscure that I wouldn't recognize...

I spoke with people, asked how they got their hair to do that (one fellow told me that he used glue, but that his hair was green independent of the glue), found out that one girl was just there to see a different sort of club environment (she's apparently normally at places where dancers are just grinding against each other), and another was considering leaving early because she had to go to work in a veterinarian's office in the morning (she's going to Kennesaw State, outside of that, and lived in Pensacola for a while)... and danced and danced and danced, mostly in a vertical fashion, which is to say that I danced by means of bouncing up and down and waving my arms in a rhythmic manner. Many people around me were sort of pseudo-tangoing around with themselves and waving their hands in front of their faces in a "ooh, I'm mysterious" sort of way. I think I saw Slinky there. He's a psiu.

Hilarious. You guys should all come with next time :) Maybe I'll get a bowtie and wear my lab coat...