Scratches, USEMP, Cthulu & Kittens

I've had what seemed to be some sort of gooey substance on the left lens of my glasses for a few weeks that wouldn't go away no matter what I tried. Turns out the substance was the adhesive that was holding the scratch guarding material onto my lens, and the scratch guard material had gone away. Well, three years is a good run. Heading over to the eye doctor's tomorrow afternoon to get an updated prescription and a new set of eyewear.

On the bus ride into work this morning, I finished refactoring my copies of the USEMP changes. I'll be sending the new codebase over to Sarkie as soon as I can figure out why I'm having file transfer issues...

Last night, I finally found a copy of "Crawling Chaos," a collection of H. P. Lovecraft stories from 1920-1935. I find it rather sad that one of the paragraphs from "From Beyond" sounds like a games tester emerging from crunch:

...[He] remained mostly shut in the attic laboratory with that accursed electrical machine, eating little and excluding even the servants, but I had not thought that a brief period of ten weeks could so alter and disfigure any human creature. It is not pleasant to see a stout man suddenly grown thin, and it is even worse when the baggy skin becomes yellowed or greyed, the eyes sunken, circled and uncannily glowing, the forehead veined and corrugated, and the hands tremulous and twitching. And if added to this there be a repellant unkemptness, a wild disorder of dress, a bushiness of dark hair white at the roots, and an unchecked growth of white beard on a face once clean-shaven, the cumulative effect is quite shocking.

Of course, people around me have found it hard to reconcile me reading stories from the Cthulu mythos when I've got a wistful looking kitten on my PC desktop...