By some strange confluence of coicidence, tonight I ate chocolate chocolate-chip cookies and drank dark lager with a friend who was wearing all black while watching Noir in a dark room.

Apparently I had a theme night without even realizing it.

Oy. That was not a good weekend. At least I'll have overtime pay and holiday pay coming to me....

*I come into work and relieve the guard before me*
Him: "You know what I need?"
Me: "A drink?"
Him: "I need a droid that understands the binary..."
In Unison: "...language of moisture vaporators."
Him: "And I'm not settling for one that just worked on binary load lifters, either."
Me: "As well you shouldn't."
Him: "But what I could really use is a drink." *heads off to the bar*
-Proof that there are nerds working security


"I read that they're in talks with Speilberg to make [the Halo movie], but I'm not sure how that would work. The guy doesn't have a face!"
"Well, in the books he has a name and a face, so they could give him one for the movie, too."
"Wait, there are Halo books and you've actually read them? Man, they should make your kind wear special hats."
"Look who's talking."
-The same guard and me, at another shift change


"All the librarians have to be armed when they're on duty, of course."
-1635: The Dreeson Incident by Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce


"Okay, robots should not do cocaine. Especially not Tachikomas. They're hyper enough as it is."
-My friend, regarding a comedic scene from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex


"When it comes to the safety of your family... don't you want to put yout trust in a swordsman who has shoes?"
-the swordsman's manager from Ashes of Time Redux


"He's quite the salesman."
-My friend on the above quote


"Is it just me, or is this movie a bit confusing?"
"A bit.... Wait! Have we ever seen the brother and sister in the same place at the same time?"
"...No! No we haven't!"
"Okay, now it makes sense. ...and has gotten considerably weirder."
-My friend and I on Ashes of Time Redux


Hacker: "I want to hack into his computer."
GM: "Okay. You easily break into his computer. All you find is his porn and his blog."
Me: "Heh. You should put his porn on his blog."
Hacker: "Oh, I am so doing that!"
-actual in-character conversation from last week's Shadowrun game

...it's because it's damned hard to get any sleep during the day in a brick building with no air conditioning and there's record high temperatures.

I'm about ready to go see a movie in theaters just for the A/C.

Now what was it I was I forgot to do today? My first day off in weeks where I don't have a houseguest sleeping on my couch, don't have to host a gaming session, don't have friends coming over to burn through my supplies of beer and anime, haven't been awake 30 hours straight and didn't sleep through the entire day? The only day off I get because of the overtime they need covered. What was that thing I was planning to do today that I can't really do tomorrow?

Oh, right. Finish revising that short story that's been sitting around on my hard drive for months.

::headdesk::

It'll get done one of these days, I swear.



(Anyway, I'm going to try turning in before the sun comes up for a change. Twelve hours of sleep will just about cover the sleep I shorted myself the last couple days.) 

...but things got busy. If I ever again agree to work overtime and to run a game on the same day, please shoot me. (Err... just not with a rifle, please.) I slept through Monday. Yes, all of Monday.

I put the complete run of Moribito up on my Mediafire account, to help somebody who was looking for it, so I figure I should make it available to everybody. As I've mentioned before, it's an extremely good series, one of the few with an unquestionably-badass and practically dressed female protagonist. It's based on a novel, written by an anthropologist, and the theme of how conquering cultures absorb indigenous cultures and heritage is lost runs throughout, amidst the devious scheming and fast-paced action. I actually think the adaptation is better than the original book, with more plot and character development. The second book is out now, too, and I enjoyed it immensely. I hope it gets adapted as well.

I still have Noir on there as well, although anyone with Netflix who can borrow the DVDs cheaply would probably be better served by doing that: eight years ago video files off the internet didn't look as good as they do now. I've already said how much I think you all would enjoy this series, so I won't reiterate.

Anyway, off to work. Again.



(Are those gray hairs in my beard? I'm strangely unbothered by the thought for a 27-year-old.)

It's been an unusual week.

( Polter-Cow visits, gaming and sleep deprivation. )
( An old friend visits, beer, Star Trek, and general nerd stuff )

( Casual sexism and magazine publishers )
( Amazon delivers: TSCC, Moribito, GITS:SAC )

Anyway, off to work again.

Just started the 26th hour of my day. Very tired. Worth it, though. Had fun. And managed to get my new computer built before I went to work. I can burn DVDs again! And no longer need to aim a giant fan through my open computer case to keep it from crashing. No more lagging, either. Or having to boot up twice to get the motherboard to find the hard drive. (Man, my old computer really sucked by the end there. It's a miracle it still worked at all. Why am I so hard on equipment?) Triple core CPU. Very badass.

I could swear I had something more substantive to say, but... tired! And I'm going to be doing at least another 24 hour day tomorrow, if not 30+ hours. The guys want to game in the morning after I get off work.

Although it wasn't bothering me when I went to sleep yesterday, my left eye has been kind of sore all day today. Somewhat light-sensitive, too. The bruise under my left eyelid has changed from a nickel-sized blue spot to a purple and red semicircle under the whole eye. That could make things awkward at work tomorrow night.

It all started Monday night, a couple hours after I got back from going to see some (not very good) bands play in Fremont with some friends in what was not exactly a celebration of my birthday. One of my friends and I went to the pizza place on the corner for something to eat. There were some belligerant drunk frat-boy types there, harrassing everybody and trying to pick a fight. Attempts to talk them down proved futile. When they started getting physically aggressive, I started dialing 911. I got hit the first time because I was calling the police. It was annoying, but didn't do any damage. I got hit the second time by a different guy because I'd pinned the guy who hit me the first time against the wall with my forearm across his throat. I would also categorize that one as mostly annoying. Somewhat later I got hit the third time, by the first guy again, because I was pulling him off my friend who the two of them were trying to pummel. That one actually hurt, and gave me this black eye. The police showed up around this time.

Anyway, we're pressing charges against those assholes, and the security camera and employees at the pizza place will back up our side of the story. I hate that shit like this happens in my neighborhood. I hate that these people think that they can get drunk and do whatever the fuck they want and it doesn't have consequences.

I haven't been in a fight in a long time. I've determined that I'm pretty rusty. And they're not any more fun with age.

...is agreeing to work a sixth day in a row in a week with almost-90-degree temperatures in a building where the air conditioning hasn't been run all weekend when you only own five UnderArmor HeatGear shirts and no quarters for laundry. Oh, and you waste the time that you could have spend getting quarters and doing laundry because your friend comes over (waking you up) and wants you to watch Gungrave with him and hear his theory about the ending of Noir that he tried to tell you yesterday afternoon when he woke you up with a phone call but you were trying to counterargue while half-asleep and making no sense told him to tell you in person the next day instead.

Oh, and you forgot you were going to write something about that book on paleoanatomy you read.

Just felt like griping. Enjoy your evenings, see y'all in the morning when I'm sweat-soaked and tired. And older. Frelling birthdays.

So, when I went back for some more sleep after my very long day Friday-through-Saturday, I only wound up getting a couple more hours before waking up unexpectedly. I think it might have been because of hunger. It's early Sunday morning, and I have a few things I wanted to do before my friends show up for gaming anyway, like my laundry, so I decide to roll with it. I'm way short on sleep, but I'm not really feeling it.

So, after a shower, a breakfast burrito from Memo's and a lot of time-wasting on TV Tropes (damn that wiki and its addictiveness!) and absolutely no washing of laundry, my friends start to arrive for gaming. One of them is supposed to be bringing back the Noir DVDs I loaned him quite a while ago, which is nice because I have a hankering to watch them. And when he arrives he returns to me four of the discs I'd loaned him... out of seven. The other three? Apparently his soon-to-be-evicted deadbeat housemate decided to deliver one last "fuck you" to the house by stealing them and (most likely) pawning them for cigarettes.

Damn it!

My friend insists on paying for a whole replacement boxed set, which is perhaps overkill, and even shoves $60 into my hands on the spot, much to my surprise. (I ordered the new set Monday night, so it should arrive shortly. Went with the older black boxed set instead of the newer white one this time. It just looks cooler. And more fitting: the name of the show is the French word for the color black for a reason.)

What really sucks? He hadn't had a chance to watch the last disc before it was stolen. So he's stuck in the middle of a huge, tense plot arc with no resolution. And I can't talk with him about how awesome the ending is yet. And I really want to talk about how awesome it is. It is very awesome.

Then we gamed. That part of the day was good. We played Shadowrun, which is always fun. One guy couldn't make it, so we had to run his character for him. Unfortunately, he was playing the "face" for the team- the one who does all the talking- so we had to spend quite a bit of time putting words in his mouth. One of the other characters pulled off a particularly neat trick: shooting the gun out of somebody's hand. (Absurd in real life, of course, but only a -4 penalty in the game.) I decided to have my character try it as well, but the dice weren't with me. After two complete misses, my character gave up, took the time to load a rubber bullet and just shot him in the chest instead. :-P

Then it was off to work, which I don't normally have to do on Sunday nights, but I'd swapped shifts so I could go to the union meeting on Saturday. It was really warm in the tower because of all the sun that day, the heat-distibuting shirts I wear under my body armor were all in the wash, and I was soaked in sweat the whole time. Then, in the last hour, everything went crazy. The engineer apparently forgot that a test of the fire alarms had been scheduled, so he hadn't told anyone it was happening and wasn't there to help. I had to run all over dealing with that in addition to handling everything else people needed from me because I was the only one there.

I go home and go to sleep. At this point I've been awake almost 30 hours, and I wasn't well-rested to begin with. Less than eight hours later, I get woken up by a text message from a friend over something really trivial, but I decide to roll with it because I didn't want to sleep too late. I get up and go to check what's happening on the internet.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been cancelled.

GODDAMMIT!

Yeah, it was hardly a surprise. But it's still a shame. It was an intelligent and enjoyable show. I met a decent percentage of the people on my LJ Friends List on the TWOP forums for that show. It shall be missed.

Well, maybe there will be some new, equally cool scifi show in the lead-in spot for Dollhouse next season.... What's that? Sitcoms? Damn.


....and my laundry still isn't washed.

Had to go to a union get together today from 10am-4pm, a training conference related to being a shop steward. This was after my work shift last night from 11pm-7am. If you crunched those numbers and came up with "no sleep", you are correct. I didn't really feel it until after I got home (coffee helped) but as I came up on the 24 hour mark I started to zone out in my chair. Finally crashed for three hours.

Meeting was useful and interesting, but I still don't feel like I have a handle on this shop steward thing. Luckily my "shop" is only four people and aren't really having any problems. A lot of other people there talked about all kidns of ways they're being dicked around by their companies.

Getting there and back was a pain in the ass, however. When I get my hands on the city planner who designed South Spokane Street, I'm going to give him a piece of my mind. That whole area is one big mess of can't-get-there-from-here. I had to hunt around for the return bus stop, because it wasn't near the one going the other way. And the buses were crammed to capacity like sardine cans.

It was hot today, too. After a cold, grey spring, all of a sudden it's summer. My first time wearing the vest in such warm weather. Wasn't too bad under a polo shirt (not usually my style, but the summer wear of choice for those who want to keep their concealable body armor concealed). Under that godawful blazer at work... it'd probably kill me.


Saw a damn silverfish in my bathroom this morning. I'll have to hunt it down and kill it later. Hate those things. I only mention it because it seems like half my flist is talking about their pest problems tonight, and I want to be one of the cool kids. :-)

Last night was pretty crazy. I'm not sure what was going on, but there about twice as many drunks wandering the streets as usual, all looking to make trouble. It finally culminated in a guy getting his lights punched out right out in front of my work. I'm closing the garage gate and I hear a smack. I turn around and see a guy down on the ground unconcious. Called in emergency response, but in the end he woke back up, told the cops he wasn't pressing charges and wandered drunkenly away.

I really didn't need that on a day I'd only gotten three hours of sleep.


Anyway, weekend time. My parents are visiting from Oregon for a couple days, which is nice. A little awkward, tho. The vest is going in its carrying case for now, since that's a conversation I'm not ready to have.

I'm so sick of hearing about the swine flu.

In addition to all the overwrought hysteria in the news media (no surprise there) there's also been a slew of memos at work, all fairly useless and containing tips that people should have been following all the time anyway, like "wash your hands" and "don't cough on people". And that's not mentioning the ones that just contain links to the CDC website, which would be useful if they weren't paper memos to people with no internet access at work. It's all a bit absurd the way they're going on about this. As if people in my line of work don't already take precautions to avoid catching far worse things than N1H1 from the people we encounter- like scabies, a variety of bloodborne pathogens, and knife-in-the-kidney syndrome.

And last time I checked, we've got maybe a couple hundred cases in the whole country and one fatality. I've yet to see any indication that it's any worse than the regular flu, which kills hundreds of thousands of people a year without getting this sort of press.

As usual, John Stewart puts it better than I can.

....I can't sleep.

Managed an hour, then was woken up by a small noise, and after two hours of lying awake I have to admit that I can't get back to sleep.

I even took another melatonin, in clear defiance of the warning label.

....dammit.

(Also, have reached of my patience with upstairs neighbor, his subwoofer and his copy of Guitar Hero. Complaint to landlord at next opportunity. Sick of being the only one in this building who's considerate about noise. Anyway, overcranked bass is a blight upon music.)

....is the only think keeping me upright at the moment. And I haven't even goen to work yet.

Whatever I did to frell up my sleep cycle this past week, I need to NEVER DO IT AGAIN.

So that's why the buses were rerouting around University Way last night. I figured as much. My neighborhood is having a shooting about once a month these days. It's only the friends who don't live here who wonder why I own my own vest.

I think some friends of the victim were on the same bus as me last night... I overheard them making phone calls to other friends of the victim about it. I think the guy who got shot might have been an Ave Rat... will have to ask my contact about that next time I see him for beers and anime.



I had the theme song for Kekkaishi stuck in my head for three days straight. It was really, really annoying. :-P Finally found something that would kill it... turns out the cure for J-Pop is Evanescence. Thank goodness for my collection of Noir AMVs.



Gaming tomorrow. Shadowrun. Much paranoid fun and zany schemes to be had. Worth not getting much sleep for. :-)

My work is right down the street from where SakuraCon was held this weekend. This led to a few strange sights, as wild bands of cosplayers roamed the streets of Seattle. The first was the most noteworthy, however....

It's about 5:50am on Friday, and I'm nearing the end of my shift, standing at the front desk. (Well, more like pacing behind the desk like a caged animal... I'm not good at standing in place.) It's still dark out, although it's never really dark in a city. At the corner, I see a figure cross the street heading my way. The silhouette's all wrong. Bulky shape of the upper body and arms looks like some sort of padding worn over the clothes: unconcealed body armor? The two-foot-long object in his hand has a shape on the end like the muzzle and front sight of an M-4 carbine. A police officer with a tactical load-out? That's not a normal sight downtown, even when they're expecting big crowds. You only saw cops bringing out the automatic weapons when there was some sort of incident in progress and they were waiting for SWAT. Something's going down, and way too close. This is bad.

Then he gets to this side of the street, and I see that the tip of the rifle is orange. It's a fake. And now that I can see the whole thing, the overall shape doesn't match any weapon I know, and I know most of the common ones. The "armor" on his arms and legs is just black motorcycle racing pads, commonly used to portray futuristic body armor in low-budget scifi. His vest is just a utility vest, Stargate SG-1 style. (No real ballistic vest would zip up in the front, for obvious reasons.) His fatigues say "Umbrella" over the pocket. It's a Resident Evil cosplayer.

"Way to give a guy a heart attack, bro," I say as I step out front.

We chat briefly about where he can find the best deal on parking (it's his SUV that's been parked out front all night). He's impressed when I identify his costume, but it's not that hard. I've never even played Resident Evil, but the Umbrella logo is kind of a dead giveaway. I suggest a duffel bag for his prop, because people can see it's a gun from a lot further away than they can see that it's a fake. (It's tucked in the SUV by then, thankfully.) He comes back again a few minutes later with a friend for more parking questions. They're both really impressed when I peg the friend's costume as from Gilgamesh. It's an interesting coincidence, since me and a friend are 23/26ths of the way through watching that series at the moment. (Don't feel the need to add it to any must-see lists. It's decent, but at best I'm probably going to grade it a B. And it's getting an instant demotion to C- if the ending doesn't answer some of the myriad unanswered questions. The whole series is a big plate of vague with a side order of vague and some vague on top. It's a lot more fun if you get tipsy and make tasteless remarks while watching, because it's ripe for it.)  He hasn't got the hair, though. Gilgamesh characters have the emo-est emo hair in the history of emo hair. John Connor's season 1 emo hair has nothing on these guys.


From there, the weekend largely passes without incident. I am royally frustrated with the property management at work. I did a report last week that so thoroughly explained step-by-step the cause of a problem the building's been having that I almost felt like I was talking down to them. Last night I find that rather than change the wrong part to match the correct part, they changed the correct part to match the wrong part. Well, at least they match now. That's... sort of progress, right?


The season finale of The Sarah Connor Chronicles (it better not be the series finale!) and episode of Dollhouse that aired Friday night were both very surprising. Dollhouse very suddenly jumped ahead in two plot arcs that I thought were long-term. TSCC was... kind of bullshit, to be honest. That's no way to leave off.

Very tired. Only slept about an hour and a half. Stayed up way too late after work watching anime. It wasn't even that good. I mean, it wasn't bad, it just wasn't "go all night day without sleep to watch the whole thing in one go" good. I just wasn't feeling tired, which is my body lying to me because the bright light from when the sun came up neutralized all the melatonin my brain was producing that was supposed to make me sleepy. I'll make up for it tonight.

Taxes tomorrow. Considering how little I make, you'd think it would go quicker. Do you think it's worth the trouble to try and claim body armor as a business expense?

So, I've been neglecting this thing for more than half a year now. Sorry to just up and almost entirely drop off the internet like that. (Again.) Had a lot of stuff going on and kept getting busy and distracted and stressed and wound up putting off dealing with this for a lot longer than I'd realized. It's been sort of a strange time for me: working a lot of overtime, getting stuck with a new schedule where I work swing and graveyard shifts, sleep deprivation from working split shifts, watching Noir again for the first time in six years and getting totally hooked on it, watching Noir again with better subtitles, making my friend watch Noir, buying Noir on DVD, working the double shift from hell during a snowstorm, getting a transfer to just graveyard shifts so I have consistency but live a nocturnal life, having my friend crash on my couch for three months until he could find his own place, working the holidays, more overtime, going on only four hour's sleep every Sunday so I can game with my friends before work, watching a whole ton of movies and anime with my friend who was crashing on my couch, forcing more of my friends to watch my Noir DVDs (yeah, I'm a little obsessed), a bunch more stuff going wrong at work, and still more sleep deprivation. (Gah... not much sleep the last few nights days due to scheduling conflicts... really looking forward to catching up on ten or twelve hours of it before work tomorrow.)

Fun times. (Well, the anime and gaming was fun, at least.)

Anyway, I'm going to try and pay more attention to this thing from now on, because I hate ducking out on friends and people I enjoy having discussions with like that. I've been meaning for months now to write down some thoughts on some stuff I've watched or rewatched lately (including Noir, no surprise there). 

Managed to finish a short writing project that I'm thinking I might toss up here once its been through some editing (which it's almost certainly going to need, since I wrote it entirely in the slow times during graveyard shifts).

Not much to say on the world of comics, except that it seems that every single book from DC I read has either been cancelled or stopped interesting me to the point that I dropped it, so I guess I'm done with that company after six years of putting up with near-constant irritation with their bad storytelling and misogyny for the sake of their tiny handful of good writers and characters. I've been ignoring all their big crossover events, so I've no idea what nonsense they're up to right now anyway. But on the upside, ignoring the Big Two gave me time to finally read Usagi Yojimbo all the way through, and it's frickin' fantastic.

I doubt I have anything to say on the terrible casting for the Avatar movie that has not already been said.



Anyway, I've been out of the loop for a while... what'd I miss?