Non-depressing things I've learned in the last week:

1) Despite the beard, I am apparently still quite recognizeable as a zombie Steve Irwin, thanks to my stunningly cheap costume (even though I kind of look like a dead boy scout).

2) Nostalgia for old games is great for procrastinating/reliving your gaming console-less childhood; I myself have been playing through the old Marathon games of late. Bungie was responsible for some of the best old games (especially ones that could be played on the Mac), like Marathon, the Myth games, and the anime-style Oni (which I've yet to manage to beat thanks to those damndable ninjas!), before they got pwned by the industry, lost the rights to their best games, and fell to making nothing but Halo. Which, by the way, is a loose continuation of the Marathon story.

3) Knowledge of the Exalted world is, apparently, useful in some academic settings. I've had the "privelege" to take a class on Daoism this term, which sounded very interesting but has degenerated into most of the students just marvelling at how fucked up and self-contradictory most of the religion is. However, in discussing their mythology, I was able to bullshit my way through a class discussion having done only a tiny fraction of the reading and knowing a whole lot about the celestial hierarchy and celestial bureaucracy in Exalted. So thank you, White Wolf, for being cleverly derivative!

4) Pants are the devil.