{"id":487,"date":"2005-08-30T11:07:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-30T11:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/2005\/08\/30\/deep-breath-before-jumping-in-the-deep-end\/"},"modified":"2005-08-30T11:07:00","modified_gmt":"2005-08-30T11:07:00","slug":"deep-breath-before-jumping-in-the-deep-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/2005\/08\/30\/deep-breath-before-jumping-in-the-deep-end\/","title":{"rendered":"Deep breath before jumping in the deep end"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Grumpy me pokes his head out of his LJ cave and says, &#8220;write some stuff, it&#8217;ll help you get over yourself&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ve been filing unemployment claims with the state for a month now, and haven&#8217;t seen check one, so things are pretty tight.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;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 &#8211; not news to almost anyone reading this journal &#8211; but it&#8217;s still disappointing. I keep reading about cartoonists and gaming people who will be at DragonCon and grumping.<\/p>\n<p>Moving my <i>Doctor Who<\/i> episodes over to DVD so I don&#8217;t have to drag around the laptop for showings; it&#8217;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&#8217;t have software that will skip the middle step. I hope the quality stays okay, there&#8217;s clear artifacting in the AVI files already. A friend pointed out that the first season never managed to get to an alien planet &#8211; only England, Utah, and a couple Earth-orbit space stations. I hope the second season&#8217;s more ambitious.<\/p>\n<p>We watched <i>Constantine<\/i> a couple nights ago. It&#8217;s an okay flick if you don&#8217;t think too hard about the religious aspects involved&#8230; which, for obvious reasons, is next to impossible to manage. It&#8217;s not even that I disliked the movie, it&#8217;s just that I kept thinking, &#8220;But, but, but&#8230;&#8221; afterwards. It was also a shame that the movie was unable to rise above killing off the three obvious redshirts.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Booklist: finished <i>Eragon<\/i> (N), <i>Wizard&#8217;s Holiday<\/i> (N), <i>Debt of Honor<\/i> &#8211; Tom Clancy (R), <i>Just a Geek<\/i> &#8211; Wil Wheaton (N), <i>Catch Me If You Can<\/i> &#8211; Frank Abagnale (R), <i>First Lensman<\/i> + <i>Gray Lensman<\/i> + <i>Second Stage Lensman<\/i> &#8211; E.E. &#8220;Doc&#8221; Smith (R),<i> A Morbid Taste For Bones<\/i> + <i>The Hermit of Eyton Forest<\/i> &#8211; Ellis Peters (R). I wish I could find my copy of Doc&#8217;s <i>Galactic Patrol<\/i> &#8211; methinks that I&#8217;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 <i>Chobits<\/i> 6 because it&#8217;s been long enough that I&#8217;ll want to re-read the comic from the beginning, and I&#8217;ll probably also want to be able to afford 7 &#038; 8 soon thereafter. BTW, I&#8217;d recommend anything on this list. <i>Eragon<\/i> especially was interesting to me by being remarkably unoriginal, yet well-written enough that I look forward to the next volume.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, good lord, avoid <i>The Reality Dysfunction<\/i>. 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. <b>Really.<\/b> I darn near threw the book across the room, and I certainly won&#8217;t be finishing it. My guess is that the author has serious issues to work out, but I don&#8217;t see any need to let him do so through me at $7 a book for a six-book series.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll let everyone know how the job thing pans out!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Grumpy me pokes his head out of his LJ cave and says, &#8220;write some stuff, it&#8217;ll help you get over yourself&#8221;. 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[28,39,67,30,13,82],"class_list":["post-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-books","tag-conventions","tag-doctor-who","tag-movies","tag-work","tag-world-of-warcraft"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1xCb9-7R","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}