anniversary

As of today I've been at my DC job a year, and in DC for a year-and-two-weeks.  Astounding.

Secret handshake, coming right up

My good friend M just defended her thesis.   I remember her first year in grad school: she and another girl her year came over and watched The Ring with roommate F and myself.   I had met her a few weeks earlier at some new student pub crawl and she immediately blew my mind by offering me a pull of the Glenlivet from her personal flask.   I'm not sure how the movie night was supposed to have worked out, as everyone in the room was single at the time (I think) and Ringu should have had us leaping on top of each other in fear.  

We did become fast friends, especially after I discovered that she was willing to put up with watching Pac-10 basketball in return for me favoring Duke, and she's put up with some pretty mopey moments over the years wherein I whined about Counterfly girls, without yelling at me too much.   She also put up with me damning her first homebrewing efforts with faint praise.   But that's all inside baseball.   At this moment, I couldn't be prouder of her.   Welcome to the club, M. 

My apartment stinks to high heaven of chili oil.   But the meal was so fucking good I don't care.

I'm watching my third ep of House in a row.  

I'm going to Prince/ton next weekend.    What bar should I go to?   The trashy undergrad one, the trashy grad student one, or the trashy townie one?   Or are they all the same bar?

Hard to shower when there's fire

Huge fire in my neighborhood last night: no water pressure this morning, either, due to incompetent city planning.

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.