Enthusiastick Journal

[Error: unknown template qotd]sleetfall is a smart guy. I mentioned to him the other day that I had somewhat left LJ behind -- I still read it fairly religiously, but the days of my making regular lengthy posts seem to be behind me. And he said that he understood, but pointed out that at least my journal had kept me writing regularly. And that was unequivocally a good thing. Like I said, he's a smart guy.

Writer's Block questions like this, though? Make me think: good fucking riddance.

I am following dystopiac's lead, since I have been meaning to start posting to LJ again anyway.

It's been like 5 months since we started dating, so you would think I would have mentioned the fact that I have a girlfriend. That I have not done so should not in any way be considered a reflection upon her.

So, folks out there in LJ-land, this is Angela, alias frendzimagnary. I think she is swell.

This Summer, a villain will rise.

(No, I'm not talking about the Dark Knight. I will talk about the Dark Knight eventually, because it was staggeringly good. But later.)

I'm talking about Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog which, as of last night, is no longer free to watch but is still available on iTunes.

I think my friend Jaywalt put it best when he said, "It's like Joss Whedon got together with the internet and made a musical for you." He's absolutely right about that. Ever since I became obsessed with Jonathan Coulton I've had a thing for music about mad scientists (prior to Dr. Horrible, the latest incarnation of this obsession came in the form of Paul & Storm aping JoCo's style for the Masters of Song Fu contest with the inestimable song "Live".)

Take that thing and multiply it's awesomeness a thousand fold. Throw in Joss Whedon writing fantastic and positively Sondheim-ian musical numbers, Nathan Fillion being a laugh-riot mook and mugging for the camera, Neil Patrick Harris being funnier than he is in Harold & Kumar and darker than he is in How I Met Your Mother, a running gag about a Mr. Ed-style equine super villain (Bad Horse, the Thoroughbred of Sin), Felicia Day standing around looking sweet and pretty, Simon Helberg being unpleasantly sweaty... the list goes on and on. The number of cool elements in this thing is staggering. Every time you think it can't get better, it does.

It's a 3-act musical, with each act consisting of an episode about 14 minutes long. If you've somehow missed the tremendous internet buzz that this thing has generated, then I'm telling you now to get on board. You'll be walking around humming the songs for days to come.

What?

WHAT???

WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

ETA: Spoilers in the comments.

That's now twice in my life that I've been sitting in the passenger seat of a Volvo thablueguy was driving when some idiot smashed into us from behind at reckless speeds.

We're both fine, but the car is probably totaled.

Last night I got home from work and, after a small amount of putzing around, decided to put a load of laundry in the wash. By my reckoning I had just enough time to get it started before my weekly Steam & Cinders Directors' meeting was scheduled to start. The situation had gotten somewhat dire; I'm a typical guy, and require only socks, t-shirts and underwear in my day-to-day existence. T-shirts I had, but socks were running low, and underwear was tapped out, so laundry had become necessary.

The washer/dryer in my apartment's basement sort of sucks, but provided you do smallish loads it can be coaxed to work. I only had enough quarters for one load anyway, so I figured I would do one load as a stop-gap and then do some more laundry at some future date when things had calmed down some (ha!)

So I loaded up my dirty laundry into the bag and, as is typical for me, swapped stuff out of my pockets before heading to the basement. Typically I carry my wallet and cell phone in my pants pockets at all times. Both of these items were now tossed onto my bed. The wallet was replaced with quarters, and my cell phone made way for my house keys. My house keys generally live in my coat pocket, but the door to our back stairwell locks automatically, and I don't like to chance being locked out (and I don't usually throw my coat on to go to the basement and do laundry.)

My laundry got underway, as did the meeting. I excused myself about a half an hour in to move my one load from the washer to the dryer, then returned and put it out of my mind. Several hours later there's a break in the action, so I dart downstairs to grab my laundry, intending to come up and fold it as we wrap up the meeting. Only I don't need to fold it, because some compulsive and well-meaning neighbor of mine has already done so. The dryer had been finished for about two hours at that point, so it's unsurprising to me that someone had pulled my stuff out of there. I'm grateful that they folded it instead of just leaving it in a heap as I would have done, but it's a little unnerving and creepy to have your underwear folded by a stranger.

I didn't dwell on it at the time, though. Just hastily stashed the folded laundry in my room and returned to the common area to finish up the meeting.

Cut to this morning, when I am getting ready for work. Running a bit later than I intended, I scramble to make myself presentable and just get out the door. Pat down my pockets -- what the Hell, why are my keys in there? Oh, I guess I never swapped back from last night. OK, so keys go into my jacket pocket. Remaining quarters go back into the quarters bucket. There's my cell phone, and my iPod, and...

Hmmm.

Where the Hell is my wallet?

After checking several places where I normally stash my wallet, and then several others where I wouldn't normally put it but where it might logically end up, I still came up empty. In the lead-up to the first S&C event, thablueguy and I allowed our apartment to become something of a disaster area. It's not exactly filthy, just overwhelmingly messy and cluttered with crafting supplies and LARP-related paraphernalia. As a result of this my room's natural messiness has been kicked into overdrive. And so very quickly it dawned on me that, even though I'm highly confident my wallet is still in my apartment somewhere, a thorough top-to-bottom search for it was a fairly daunting and hopeless prospect.

Alternating periods of enraged frustration and stymied hopelessness ensued. In the end I grabbed some cash from my rainy day fund and came in to work late (which meant buying a Charlie Ticket, as my Charlie Card is, of course, in my wallet); I could have just worked from home, but I'm not confident I would have been able to stop myself from looking all day long enough to get any work done. In fact, if I had stayed home, in the end I probably would have flipped out and begun cleaning my room. Which would have been good -- it's unlikely to happen in the next few days otherwise -- but I have stuff to do at work and just couldn't accommodate that particular bout of crazy at this juncture.

I'm really hopeful that my wallet turns up quickly, when I get back to searching for it. I'm just trying to reassure myself that it will be OK. I'm calmer now than I was on my way to work, but even so, there's part of me that wants to blow off all my plans and just find the damn thing, if only for my peace of mind. But my wallet and it's contents are just things, in the end, and since I believe them to be still in my possession (even if I don't have them on hand at the moment) I am trying as hard as I am to chill out and live without them.

I've just got 'round to watching the Series 4 premiere of Doctor Who.

( Cut for those who have somehow avoided all spoilers for Series 4 including the promos. )

So apparently SUP (the Russian company that recently acquired this site from Six Apart) has disabled the creation of ad-free Basic Accounts on LiveJournal. So it's been reported, anyway -- my understanding is that they tried to slip the change in under the radar, buried in obscure language in an announcement, but their cagey users found them out. They also noticed some subtle censorship taking place in the Most Popular Interests list, and now the hardcore LJ kids are up in arms.

I could get riled up about this, about the fundamental lack of understanding of the user base being displayed, but really, why bother? The site is a business, and they are trying to run it like one. And they're doing it in a shady and asinine way, and if they piss off their user/customers enough, they'll lose money. That's a pretty strong feedback loop, a pretty sharp learning curve, so here's hoping they'll learn.

But I'm honestly not sure how much I care anymore.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a die-hard. I'll be here until the bitter end. I've been on LJ for over 6 years, and I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. My friends page is still an important stop in my daily browsing, and I expect it to remain as such for the foreseeable future. If nothing else, it's a convenient aggregator for RSS feeds from elsewhere (I kid, I kid.)

Still, this flub on SUP's part makes a pretty convenient clarion call for the beginning of the end. It will take a while, but sooner or later this too shall fall into obscurity (and go dead, entombed in distant servers, &c.) And it will just be another cultural phenomenon that exploded and changed the way human beings communicate and went mainstream and, in the end, was displaced by something newer and smarter.

Oh, you thought I was talking about LiveJournal? Oh, no. No, I was talking about blogs. In general.

But I digress.

In a conveniently related announcement, I have started moving some of my blog-like content elsewhere (this is in addition to the Twitter account I've had for a while now.) Redoing my tags made me realize how much link-dumping I was doing here, in place of actual posts, so now I have a Tumblelog (by Tumblr), and I highly recommend you check it out.

I've also started putting a bunch of my really pretentious indie gaming musings on an entirely separate blog (syndicated here: enthusiastick.) I knew not all of my LJ friends would be interested in reading that stuff, and a lot of my other friends in that circle have WordPress blogs. I could have set up a custom friends filter, but as I said, why bother? I was moving webspaces anyway, so the timing just seemed right.

And, as it turned out, it was.

Just a quick head's up: JoCo is doing a concert with Paul & Storm in Northampton on Thursday, April 3rd. So I will (once again) be looking for people to come to the show with me... only instead of being conveniently in Somerville, this show will involve an actual road trip. All interested parties should feel free to get in touch with me and mark your calendars.