*snores faintly*
Apologies for taking so long posting the report of the remaining days of Dragon*Con. I have only this to offer in explanation: my new job, due to severe understaffing, had me working a 9 hour shift my first day… a 10 hour shift the second day… then 11 hours… and 12 hours last night. I’m a bit brain-dead.
It does darkly amuse me a bit that though my first week was short a day, I’ve still managed 2 hours overtime.
Deep breath before jumping in the deep end
Grumpy me pokes his head out of his LJ cave and says, “write some stuff, it’ll help you get over yourself”.
I have a job interview tomorrow, and tonight I work a trial shift at a typesetting job. If either one of these jobs works out to a steady paycheck, I can stop sweating and resume planning for the future. I’ve been filing unemployment claims with the state for a month now, and haven’t seen check one, so things are pretty tight.
I’ve missed every summer con I wanted to go to this year because of money issues. Bleh. This is, of course, part of the general fan experience – not news to almost anyone reading this journal – but it’s still disappointing. I keep reading about cartoonists and gaming people who will be at DragonCon and grumping.
Moving my Doctor Who episodes over to DVD so I don’t have to drag around the laptop for showings; it’s a lengthy process, involving converting the episodes to DV streams, and then letting iDVD convert them back down to MPEG-2 files. Unfortunately I don’t have software that will skip the middle step. I hope the quality stays okay, there’s clear artifacting in the AVI files already. A friend pointed out that the first season never managed to get to an alien planet – only England, Utah, and a couple Earth-orbit space stations. I hope the second season’s more ambitious.
We watched Constantine a couple nights ago. It’s an okay flick if you don’t think too hard about the religious aspects involved… which, for obvious reasons, is next to impossible to manage. It’s not even that I disliked the movie, it’s just that I kept thinking, “But, but, but…” afterwards. It was also a shame that the movie was unable to rise above killing off the three obvious redshirts.
One thing is now clear to me in WoW; soloing sucks, partying generally rocks. This has of course been obvious to most of the players of the game for ages, but I am sometimes slow. Clearly I must bite the bullet (WoW does have firearms) and find more folk to group with on a regular basis.
Booklist: finished Eragon (N), Wizard’s Holiday (N), Debt of Honor – Tom Clancy (R), Just a Geek – Wil Wheaton (N), Catch Me If You Can – Frank Abagnale (R), First Lensman + Gray Lensman + Second Stage Lensman – E.E. “Doc” Smith (R), A Morbid Taste For Bones + The Hermit of Eyton Forest – Ellis Peters (R). I wish I could find my copy of Doc’s Galactic Patrol – methinks that I’ll need to start haunting used bookstores again, which is how I got the Lensman books in the first place. I have been putting off reading Chobits 6 because it’s been long enough that I’ll want to re-read the comic from the beginning, and I’ll probably also want to be able to afford 7 & 8 soon thereafter. BTW, I’d recommend anything on this list. Eragon especially was interesting to me by being remarkably unoriginal, yet well-written enough that I look forward to the next volume.
Oh, good lord, avoid The Reality Dysfunction. Nothing at all happens for 300 pages; dozens of characters are introduced and then left by the wayside; and then we start the lovingly, orgasmically detailed torture scenes of animals and small children. Really. I darn near threw the book across the room, and I certainly won’t be finishing it. My guess is that the author has serious issues to work out, but I don’t see any need to let him do so through me at $7 a book for a six-book series.
I’ll let everyone know how the job thing pans out!
Go to 110% on the reactor
Some of the interesting points of the weekend…
Friday night I got to see Carbon Leaf! Or hear them, at least… outdoor concerts are fine until the sky clouds over, the sun goes down, and it’s suddenly 50 degrees. I was huddled under a blanket for most of their set.
Saturday night I played Star Munchkin in a dark, smoky coffeehouse with three complete strangers until 2 am. For some reason, this strikes me as the opening to the all-geek version of “Faust”.
Sunday our friend Laura was with me on the way to pick Rain up for lunch when we happened upon a nasty two-SUV accident that had happened seconds before. Laura has some medical training and hopped right out to see if there was any useful first aid she could supply, while I made myself useful by calling 911. Response arrived within seconds it seemed, and while we can’t say for sure, it looks like everyone escaped with treatable minor injuries, even the three whose vehicle rolled a few times.
And, this morning I’ve done my King Kong impression again by climbing up on a building’s roof to mess with the antennas. I need to get a doctor’s note excusing me from that, or something.
From sepia tone to sickness
So I’m finally fully aware again, for the first time since Wednesday night. raininva had brought home Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow last week, and we settled down to watch it, but halfway through the movie I couldn’t stay vertical (and it wasn’t the film, really). This turned into an excruciating night’s fight with stomach flu (I lost). It’s taken this long for the nausea and weakness to fully recede; last night was my first full meal in days, and eating a proper dinner felt sooo good. Of course, insult to injury, Rain was battling the flu too by Friday morning 🙁
Sky Captain‘s visuals impressed me – the integration of the virtual sets was very slick and never distracting. I think “Dex” won the spot of my favorite character over the leads, though. Interesting to watch that movie in such close proximity to The Aviator (which I really liked, but I’m an aviation geek and a Cate Blanchett fan).
I heard on the radio this morning that the B-52s covered “Paperback Writer” for a Buick commercial that won’t air. The heck with the commercial, I want a copy of that cover!
Busy morning. Information Services is the only career I can think of where one will be metaphorically asked, “Come over and move some furniture for me; I’ve lost the keys to my house, so bring burglary tools.”
EDIT: Almost forgot! I have addicted one of our houseguests to Katamari Damacy. Resistance is futile!
“Merovingian” is hard to say
I finished The DaVinci Code this weekend. To the point: I’m glad it was a library book. I’d have been okay paying paperback price for it, but it wasn’t worth hardcover cost to me. The actual “These are coded messages in DaVinci’s works” part was interesting enough that I plan to look some of them up when I have the time, but some of them appear to depend heavily on the bias of the researcher. On the other hand, the supposed content of the secret messages startled me not at all: I’d already read about it in GURPS Warehouse 23 (yes, a role-playing game sourcebook). The remaining plot was basic thriller stuff, adequate but not fascinating. The movie will probably do quite well.
I’m happy my cell phone is working again! It got wet last week, and appeared dead as a doornail; but once it dried out completely and the battery recharged, it went back to beeping happily. So that’s a surprise expense I don’t have to worry about.
raininva has a huge article in the new issue of Undefeated magazine talking about Mechwarrior: Age of Destruction, with color CGI ‘Mech illustrations and everything. Kelly Bonilla’s design notes are kind of fun too. According to the website, it will be on shelves Jan 18th.
That’s all for now. The clock just struck 9, so time to get to work.
