speech from Wonderful Life

it's your money...and your money...and your money!

Apparently today my bank failed.   I had no idea.  

I apparently will witness no glitch in service though.   Go, FDIC!

TV

These days I'm living off the grid, in that I don't have cable or internet, mostly because Comcast sucks and I can't afford to pay the bill by myself.    I miss having roommates sometimes.   Internet isn't a big problem, as I can steal from my neighbors (like 2 out of 30 available networks aren't protected) although sometimes I have to lash the laptop to my metal bedframe with aluminum foil while reading Jackson or Griffiths in a hushed monotone in order to get a signal. 

I don't miss TV too much: my basic stance of "TV is for proles and I think I'm better than you", while some comfort in the dark of night, really doesn't get me through the day.    But I refuse to have my TV-time scheduled for me and I'm too poor to get the solution I want, which would be DirecTV and some sort of DVR.    So lately I just watch sports at bars and occasionally buy episodes of television through iTunes, downloaded at work.   I should steal them through bittorrent, I know-- and I did, for a while, before I realized it was bad karma to use the few remaining wireless feeds I was stealing for high-bandwidth stuff.

The point?   Lately I've been watching episodes of House on my commute.   And it's good and wonderful and a great show, but does every fucking episode have to end with a thirty-second moody singer-songwriter bit?   If there's anything evil that came out of the WB in the late 90s, and trust me, it pains me to say it because I loved me some WB, but it's that end-of-episode music crap.   It's fine once in a while, but holy shit, don't writers realize it loses some impact if you do it every time? 

By the way, if you're into Hugh Laurie, you should watch him play Bertie Wooster in the late-80s BBC Jeeves & Wooster shows.   Pretty good stuff; although it'll take some head-scratching to get used to his British accent again.

demand

How is it that I cannot yet buy a t-shirt that says Don't Tase Me, Bro!?

I need one ASAP.

RIP

James Rigney died yesterday.   Most people knew him as Robert Jordan.   I always assumed that he picked the pseudonym from The Sun Also Rises.    The Nielsen Haydens write it up here; if you want straight from the source, go to TarValon (the RJ clearinghouse, presumably, in this post-Usenet post-rasfwr-j age) or his own blog.

I first encountered him my sophomore year in high school, when I quietly noted what my sister's boyfriend (now husband) was reading; they were home from college for spring break or something, and I was very impressionable.   I have very clear memories of lugging around  The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, and the other really good first five, through the last two years of high school.   In college, I discovered the Usenet group devoted to him, and that became a big part of my life for a while.   I met a bunch of people from that group IRL, and still am friends with some of them, long after our active interest in RJ as an author, or Usenet as a medium, had petered out.

As that group grows up (and old) it's amazing to see what the folks who were on that scene are doing with their lives now.  For some reason, while RJ was demonstrably not counted among the more literary of the sf set, he reached a lot of people, and had a pretty amazing talent for worldbuilding and character.   He certainly got to snobby ol' me, that's for sure.

If you haven't read him, and don't have cognitive blinders toward sf, I strongly recommend his work.   RIP.

Fine

I haven't written for a while and people are getting angry.

My girlfriend (Cricket) has moved to Chicago to start a master's degree and we're being long-distance lovebirds. Fortunately Southwest flies between BWI/DCA and Midway for around $120. The holidays should be a nightmare so I'm postponing dealing with it.

As I have almost no friends in DC beyond some coworkers and a couple transplants from California who I really should spend more time with, I'm planning to coopt Cricket's social life and insert myself into it. They're mostly cool people, but I might have to work to find some other scene to explore. I live in Adams Morgan but work in Gaithersburg so when my coworkers are like "lets go have a drink in Bethesda! It's like the city but closer!" I die a little.

I hate that I forgot the three things I saw in the Express this morning that looked cool to do this weekend.

I hate that my building's gym is so small; I was using an elliptical machine today because my rugbied knees can't take the impact of too much jogging and it basically sits right behind the only treadmill. So one other person (girl) comes into use the treadmill and basically has to run with the only other person in the room ten feet behind her. A smidge awkward. She left after a while. Her aborted post-run situp/crunch technique looked violent and unhealthy. I studiously kept my eyes on my heart rate monitor the whole time. I would have watched television but she picked some shitty program. I should have put on football.

I hate that I think of cool blog posts every hour or so but don't have the mental wherewithal to get them down.

I hate that Penitent hasn't posted in a while.

I hate that my bike lock's key doesn't open my bike lock anymore.

I hate that I have to coopt Kotsko's Tuesday Hatred to get a post banged out.

I hate that I have to go to sleep at a decent hour.