Gaah, being a responsible adult is annoying as hell. I'm actually doing quite well at it at the moment. But I'm never, ever gonna love it. When are we gonna get that sci-fi future where robots take care of all the annoying crap involved in living and leave us alone to develop our giant brains?
(This post is brought to you by me dealing with the fact that my house is still not quite as water-tight as it ought to be.)
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Saturday, August 22, 2015
Book People Problems
A video I thought I'd share, because I know at least one person out there will understand:
Thursday, August 13, 2015
Friday, August 07, 2015
August Currentlies
Yep, here it is. The August "Currently" meme.
Current clothes: Gray cotton shorts. Venture Bros. Guild of Calamitous Intent t-shirt. Black socks.
Current mood: OK. Kinda tired. I spent the morning doing yardwork, plus my circadian rhythms seem to be fighting me harder than usual lately, for some reason. (Probably because I spent two straight weeks on night shifts, and my body actually started getting used to it.)
Current music: Nothing memorable.
Current annoyance: The city garbage dept. says it'll pickup old items of furniture and such for a small fee, if you make arrangements for it. I called them Monday of last week, and the thing is still sitting out there on the curb. I'm going to have to call them again.
Current thing: I don't seem to have a current thing. Maybe I should find one, rather than just sitting around spinning my wheels, which is what I think I've been doing lately.
Current desktop picture: Still this.
Current book: String Theory for Dummies by Andrew Zimmerman Jones. Because how can you not want to read String Theory for Dummmies? I'm also making my way through British English A to Zed by Norman W. Shur. I was originally just going to browse through it a bit and stick it on the reference shelf, but it's proving to be strangely fascinating, so instead I'm reading it straight through, a few minutes at a time. Mostly it's making me wonder how Americans and Brits actually mange to communicate at all.
Current song in head: It's been varying back and forth between "The Rainbow Connection" and "Wild, Wild Life" by the Talking Heads.
Current refreshment: Orange spice tea.
Current DVD in player: Most recently, Kingsman: The Secret Service. Which was completely ridiculous, but, hey, that's what it was going for. Mostly it was the entertaining kind of ridiculous.
Current worry: All the terrible diseases I've been diagnosing myself with on WebMD. Thanks, internet!
Current thought: Some significant part of my brain refuses to believe that August is even a real month. In my mind, it exists merely as a sort of placeholder between July and September -- that is, months in which things actually happen. Even the weather right now feels like a hot, still, timeless expanse of nothing.
Current clothes: Gray cotton shorts. Venture Bros. Guild of Calamitous Intent t-shirt. Black socks.
Current mood: OK. Kinda tired. I spent the morning doing yardwork, plus my circadian rhythms seem to be fighting me harder than usual lately, for some reason. (Probably because I spent two straight weeks on night shifts, and my body actually started getting used to it.)
Current music: Nothing memorable.
Current annoyance: The city garbage dept. says it'll pickup old items of furniture and such for a small fee, if you make arrangements for it. I called them Monday of last week, and the thing is still sitting out there on the curb. I'm going to have to call them again.
Current thing: I don't seem to have a current thing. Maybe I should find one, rather than just sitting around spinning my wheels, which is what I think I've been doing lately.
Current desktop picture: Still this.
Current book: String Theory for Dummies by Andrew Zimmerman Jones. Because how can you not want to read String Theory for Dummmies? I'm also making my way through British English A to Zed by Norman W. Shur. I was originally just going to browse through it a bit and stick it on the reference shelf, but it's proving to be strangely fascinating, so instead I'm reading it straight through, a few minutes at a time. Mostly it's making me wonder how Americans and Brits actually mange to communicate at all.
Current song in head: It's been varying back and forth between "The Rainbow Connection" and "Wild, Wild Life" by the Talking Heads.
Current refreshment: Orange spice tea.
Current DVD in player: Most recently, Kingsman: The Secret Service. Which was completely ridiculous, but, hey, that's what it was going for. Mostly it was the entertaining kind of ridiculous.
Current worry: All the terrible diseases I've been diagnosing myself with on WebMD. Thanks, internet!
Current thought: Some significant part of my brain refuses to believe that August is even a real month. In my mind, it exists merely as a sort of placeholder between July and September -- that is, months in which things actually happen. Even the weather right now feels like a hot, still, timeless expanse of nothing.
Wednesday, August 05, 2015
I Swear, I Feel Like I Deserve A Prize For Sticking It Out To The End. Maybe A Free Set Of Knives.
So, I just finished watching Dexter. And since I've mentioned it here before, I thought I'd come back and share my thoughts... OK, no, that's not true. Mostly, I'm writing this here because after investing eight season's worth of time in that show, I am damned well at least going to get a blog post out of it.
Although, honestly, I think past a certain point I was mostly only continuing with it out of a sense of completeness and a strong, morbid curiosity as to whether the final episode was really as bad as everyone said it was. Which... Yes. Yes, it was. And all the more so because elements of it actually would have made a great ending to the show if only they, and everything leading up to them, hadn't been done so, well, awfully.
Seriously, someone could get a Masters' thesis out of all the ways in which Dexter grasps vaguely in the direction of some really interesting, brave, thought-provoking storytelling and then drops the ball on it, over and over. It is, ultimately, a fascinating failure. Sometimes it's an entertaining, even compulsively watchable one, sometimes one that threatens serious injury from all the banging your forehead against things it makes you want to do. Which is frustrating. Maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe it was too much to ever expect anything else. After all, one of my earliest reactions to this show was, "I don't see how this premise is remotely sustainable, long-term." I was right about that, and it's entirely possible nothing was ever going to make it sustainable long-term. But I can't help but wonder, a little wistfully, what it might have been like if it were written with real vision, by someone willing to fully embrace the fundamental fucked-upped-ness of it all and able to consistently resist the temptation to buy into the character's own self-deluded ideas about being a hero.
I will give 'em this, thought: they had some fantastic casting.
Although, honestly, I think past a certain point I was mostly only continuing with it out of a sense of completeness and a strong, morbid curiosity as to whether the final episode was really as bad as everyone said it was. Which... Yes. Yes, it was. And all the more so because elements of it actually would have made a great ending to the show if only they, and everything leading up to them, hadn't been done so, well, awfully.
Seriously, someone could get a Masters' thesis out of all the ways in which Dexter grasps vaguely in the direction of some really interesting, brave, thought-provoking storytelling and then drops the ball on it, over and over. It is, ultimately, a fascinating failure. Sometimes it's an entertaining, even compulsively watchable one, sometimes one that threatens serious injury from all the banging your forehead against things it makes you want to do. Which is frustrating. Maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe it was too much to ever expect anything else. After all, one of my earliest reactions to this show was, "I don't see how this premise is remotely sustainable, long-term." I was right about that, and it's entirely possible nothing was ever going to make it sustainable long-term. But I can't help but wonder, a little wistfully, what it might have been like if it were written with real vision, by someone willing to fully embrace the fundamental fucked-upped-ness of it all and able to consistently resist the temptation to buy into the character's own self-deluded ideas about being a hero.
I will give 'em this, thought: they had some fantastic casting.
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