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.

A month ago today, I turned 26 years old. 26 is more than a quarter century.

I used to honestly believe that being grown up wasn't half as fun as growing up.

Now I know better.

To paraphrase Randall Munroe, now that I'm a grown-up I know that it's my turn to decide what that means.

I'm feeling pretty stoked about this revelation.

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. )

Let's play a game:

1. Reply to this post, and I will pick five of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon squee!!

My selections come from off_coloratura:

A. This is one of two icons I have that are all about the Phillipine Monkey-Eating Eagle, an animal you have to respect based on its name alone. I like unusual animals, and as one of the world's largest eagles (it has a 7' wingspan!) the Phillipine Eagle definitely qualifies. Also they actually eat monkeys. The picture in question is delightfully ridiculous; the bird looks to me like it's smirking, and who doesn't like the look of a giant terrifying bird of prey that could eat your dog smirking at them? I find it useful for both snarky posts and snarky replies, so it sees a fair bit of circulation when I remember I have it.

B. I think this is my most recent icon, and it's taken from a series of interior photos I found of the House on the Rock. I first became aware of the House on the Rock when I read Neil Gaiman's American Gods and I've been quietly fascinated with it ever since. I needed something steampunk-y for when I make posts to steamncinders, and this was the first thing I found which fit the bill in a cool way. The effect is possibly ruined by being reduced to 100x100 pixels, but what can you do?

C. A classic, in my opinion. Before John Allison drew the web-fabulous Scary Go Round, he tried to break into the traditional newspaper syndicates with a strip called Bobbins. The archives used to be online, although they aren't really in any usable form anymore, much to my dismay. This dialogue balloon is from one of my all-time favorite Bobbins, in which Shelley has a pixie-spasm and pounces on Tim after Tim makes the (clearly spurious) claim that he is not a failure in love, but rather on a love hiatus, recharging for superior future love. It's such an utterly nonsensical turn of phrase, useful for so many occasions.

D. This is another theft from the brilliant John Allison, in this case a t-shirt design. In the heyday of Bobbins, one of the main male characters (I think it was Ryan, but I have a nagging suspicion it may have been Tim after all) wrote a fictional autobiography describing his life as a punk rock anarchist. He made excessive use of the totally excellent catchphrase "Tuppin' Liberty". This design appeared on a t-shirt alongside the catchphrase in the early days of Scary Go Round, when it still had a lot of crossover with the old Bobbins shtick. I chose this icon back when I first got a account, going abruptly from 3 icons to 15, and it doesn't see as much use as I'd like, but I'm neurotically incapable of deleting old icons, and so it persists, despite not really having a particular niche it fills.

E. Man, all of my early icons were stolen from webcomics. This is the artwork of the talented Faith Erin Hicks, from her first online comic Demonology 101. I was (and am) a big fan of this comic, and had a weakness for Mackenzie, the spastic and ridiculous secondary character friend of the main character. There's some truly excellent sequence during which the primary dialogue is full of weighty and important things, and then there's Mackenzie, ranting in the background about how she's got her eye on the (clearly) big evil characters. No one pays her any mind as she gets all paranoid and shifty-eyed and mutters to herself about how she will not only keep an eye on him, but keep "both freakin' eyes" on him. I tend to use this one when I am feeling Mackenzie-ish (i.e. spastic and ridiculous and paranoid) so rather a lot, really.

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.

If I were to take a road trip to the House on the Rock (and really, how else would you get there?), Google Maps estimates that it would be about 19 hours worth of driving. It's not all that different from the drive to Chicago that I did a few times, only with Boston as a point of departure rather than Hartford. Leaving from Boston the direct route would have as possible stops along the way:

• Albany, NY


• Rochester, NY


• Buffalo, NY


• Eerie, PA


• Cleveland, OH


• South Bend, IN


• Chicago, IL


• Rockford, IL


• Madison, WI

Some of those are, of course, places I have been before. But I could do it in style, this time, if I chose. Save up money and do a great big road trip to the heart of the country. The sort of thing perfectly suited for the Summer.

Maybe I'm crazy.

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.

Sometimes productivity is better than relaxation.

Things have been somewhat stressful in my life lately, both at work and in my leisure time. That isn't necessarily an indicator that anything is wrong, but it has a tendency to leave me feeling run ragged and out of sorts. And one of the byproducts of that is I start just getting through the day. Living hour-to-hour and day-to-day and not lifting my head to look at the bigger picture. A few times in the last couple of months I've arrived at Friday night with nothing to do and no real plans for the weekend. And while a nice evening in spent puttering in front of the television is restful and good every now and again, doing so too much leaves me feeling like a loser, emotionally; I feel as though I haven't got any friends, even though I have.

This past weekend was not like that. It was a total whirlwind. After work on Friday there was a company outing to Good Times, which is rumored to be closing in April (to make way for an Ikea, eventually, if the stories are to be believed.) It snowed all day Friday, making the outing something of an adventure. Saturday I spent the whole day at Camp Denison in Georgetown, helping with construction and rebuilding to make sure that steamncinders is good to go this Spring. And then Sunday afternoon I showed up in Watertown to help dystopiac effect a move to Brookline. I only pitched in for a couple of hours, but by Sunday evening I was feeling drained and as sore as an old man.

And now it's Monday and I'm back at work (and, as thablueguy put it, grateful to just be sitting on my ass in front of a desk for the day.) And, oddly, there's a way in which this taxing and exhausting weekend was more restorative than a weekend spent sitting on my ass might have been. I worked hard, which made me feel productive. And that sense of accomplishment is good for the soul; even if the root causes of the stress in my life are still unresolved (for the moment, anyway) it's good to know that I did something, actively did something about them. Sure, what I did may have been tangential to the root causes in the first place. But activity is preferable to sitting around with anxiety preying on my mind and my dreams.

My blog is in a sad state, I know, but it's been a long Winter. Bear with me, and I'll try and get back in the habit.

Tom Milsom has done a Jonathan Coulton cover ("Still Alive", specifically.) It's quite good.


As we all know, covering Jonathan Coulton is a one-way ticket to fame and fortune and everything that goes. I just wanted to take this opportunity to say I knew of him before his internet popularity asploded (well, more than it already has, I guess.)

I am having a weird few days.

Its the lulziversary. Never forget. 12 months later, and they're still calling it a hoax.

ZOMGWTFBBQ IT WAS NOT A HOAX.

ETA: Oh heck yes! My spirits have successfully been raised.

The Yankee Doodle closed. You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to Hell!

Man, even the ./shutdown season finale was a downer. Although it was still awesome. Y'know, like the Empire Strikes Back.

OMG I AM DRINKING BRAWNDO!

Brawndo's got ELECTROLYTES. And that's what PLANTS CRAVE. They CRAVE ELECTROLYTES. Which is what BRAWNDO HAS. And that's why PLANTS CRAVE BRAWNDO. Not WATER, like from the TOILET.

1,000 mg Taurine!
50 mg Guarana Extract!
200 mg Inositol!
200 mg Caffeine!
5 KINDS OF SUGAR!

I am totally in a movie mode lately. A couple from the 3-day weekend:

• Cloverfield -- 3 stars -- I'm in rollick's camp on this one. I found it an engrossing and enjoyable movie. There's one scene in particular, in the subway tunnels, that got to me pretty thoroughly squirming in my seat and crawling up the walls. I'm glad I sat towards the back; though I didn't experience any problems with the whole movie being shaky-cam, I can easily see how others did. I really liked that the movie had the balls to do certain things, and I was ambivalent about others, but on the whole there was nothing I really disliked. Apparently my opinion is not shared universally, however.


• Sunshine -- 3 stars -- I caught this one due to the good taste of dystopiac, who enjoyed it in theaters and snapped it up on DVD as soon as it came out. Danny Boyle continues to impress me. Cillian Murphy, too. Also, once again with the "alternate ending" that was not so much. This is one of those interesting "soft" science fiction movies that asks you to accept 2 conceits without any real science to back them up (the first being that the sun is for some reason going out prematurely, and the second that staring at the sun makes you crazy.) thablueguy pointed out that you could use this movie as an example to teach Story, and he's not wrong, but in this case that's a strength rather than a weakness. It doesn't overreach and it executes extremely well on its premise.

Finally got around to seeing it this weekend, on Sunday night with macabre_grrl.

• Juno -- 4 stars -- Oh man. Man, was this movie exactly everything that I wanted it to be. The cast was unbelievable, just chock full of actors I like doing what they do best. I went into it braced for it to be less than perfect, having read adampb's thoughts. He makes good points, kind of. Rainn Wilson's cameo in the first scene is a little over the top, and if the whole movie were like that it wouldn't be nearly so good. But I found that it actually helped to establish the tone, to show off what kind of world Juno lives in. And pretty quickly after that the movie hits its stride and just doesn't quit until the closing scenes. Ellen Page is brilliant; some grown-up version of Juno MacGuff is pretty much all that I want of woman (short, cute, snarky, funny, has no respect for anything, makes fun of everything constantly, etc.) Michael Cera is maybe a touch under-utilized, but the movie isn't really designed to feature him, so that's not a significant concern. I am worried about him being type-cast as a high schooler forever and ever, but he can probably pull it off for a little while longer yet. All in all I thought it was just note-perfect, and I can't heap enough praise on it.

Maybe I'm just an internet fogey, but it seems to me that, as a means of communication, Instant Messaging seems to be dying off. It certainly is in my social circle. I have something like 100 AIM buddies. Fewer than half of these regularly sign in and spend any amount of time online. And of those, I only actually communicate with a handful. The rest are legacy buddies -- people I used to know. Once upon a time I was obsessed with keeping track of their away messages and AIM profiles. But that art form also seems to be in decline, and so my interest in it continues to wane.

So -- again, within the limited sample of my own social circle -- AIM is dying off. Where does that leave me? I'm intrigued by mini-blog utilities like Twitter, but they hardly seem like a replacement. That's comparing apples to oranges. I do a fair bit of text messaging these days (SMS) but that only works if I already have your phone number. A lot of folks seem to like Skype, but I've never gotten to into it. The only other instant messaging service I'm actually using is Google Talk, which really only works for people willing to get Gmail accounts (now, admittedly, I think everyone should go ahead and get a Gmail account, but that's another technology rant entirely.)

Recently I was having a conversation with my far-more tech-smart friend locke61dv about all this, and he pointed out that Google Talk is really just using an implementation of the Jabber protocols. It isn't anything new or clever; its an open and free alternative, specifically designed to compete against more commercial IM services like AIM. Its gimmick lies in the fact that, as soon as you log into Gmail for the first time, there's a little widget available to let you Jabber away -- a widget that dynamically updates with your contact list, thus putting you rapidly into touch with all the people you e-mail (i.e. the people with whom you might wish to chat.)

You know who else did a whole-cloth implementation of the Jabber protocols? LiveJournal.

They did it without the nifty little web-based widget, of course, which is probably why it never caught on. But the fact that it never caught on blows my mind a little. After a certain threshold, I stopped using the little Google Talk widget, in favor of downloading a client. But I also don't use the AIM client anymore, because at this point (by definition) I have multiple instant-messaging accounts. So there's utility to having all of those things rolled into one application. That's how most of my internet-savvy friends tend to roll, as of late. On my work laptop I'm using Pidgin. On my home laptop I'm using Adium. Which means that both computers could theoretically have my LJ Talk account logged in whenever I'm Instant Messaging.

And you know what? I'm going to go ahead and do that. Because there are a lot of people out there with whom I'd like to IM, if they're still actually doing that. But I'm not going to cling to the dying wreck that is AIM. And I'm not going to wait for all of you to get Gmail accounts. If you're reading this, by definition, there's a decent chance you already have a livejournal account. Which means you already have an LJ Talk account, even if you don't know it. So if you were to go ahead and set it up on whatever IM client you use, then your buddy list would automatically be populated with all your mutual friends on LJ (including, potentially, me.)

And if enough of us do that, the thing might actually become useful. And I could stop staring at the AIM screennames of people I haven't talked to since high school, and actually start chatting with people I care about.

Does anybody want to go see Old Springs Pike with me? They're playing at the Paradise Lounge on January 24th (that's a Thursday), opening for some band I've never heard of. I have a suspicion tickets will go fast and would rather buy them in advance, but I also don't especially want to go to a show by myself. I'd make that sacrifice to see Old Springs Pike, though, they seem keen. I'm a sucker for four-part harmony... and of course it doesn't hurt that one of their members is Johnny Gallagher (recently of Spring Awakening fame.)

And speaking of music, the deadline for sing_along_club is this Friday, January 11th! My vocals are in -- are yours? Get 'em in, people!

For those who missed it when I shilled for sing_along_club the first time, the idea is this: every month we pick a geek-rock song and sing our hearts out into some sort of digital recording. These tracks are then submitted to the moderator, sweetafton23, who remixes them into an old-fashioned sing-along track featuring all of our voices together. This will be the inaugural song, so be sure to sign up and get in on the ground floor.

One of my coworkers got a Flip Video Ultra delivered to the office this morning. Counting theferrett, that makes two people I know who have them. And now one of my other coworkers who's a bit infamous for impulse buys, went and ordered one, too.

Shiny. Waaaaaant...

Saw a couple of movies over the weekend. I should get back in the habit of seeing at least some movies while they're still in the theaters. I like it.

• The Golden Compass -- 2 1/2 stars -- This was about what I was expecting: really very pretty eye candy with a truly deplorable screenplay. I am a big fan of His Dark Materials, and I have considered the challenges of adapting the story of this book to the screen (and they are many.) But even so, they could have done a better job. It opened promisingly enough; the scene with Lyra hiding in the cabinet and preventing Uncle Asriel from being poisoned was about right. Then it descended rapidly into a strange forced march through the pertinent plot points.
  
  If you aren't familiar with the book I'm sure it made no sense, and even if you are you likely noticed how off the rhythm was (I certainly did.) They plowed blithely through the climax and then lingered on an anti-climactic scene that went on so long I briefly thought they were actually going to carry on through the ending cliffhanger of the book (which would have made no sense, but that was pretty much a lost cause.) And then it just stopped.
  
  Good eye candy, though. Hooray for anbaric airships and polar bear fights.


• Charlie Wilson's War -- 3 1/2 stars -- This one was much more satisfying. It was strangely relieving to see an Aaron Sorkin screenplay on any sort of screen. Although Tom Hanks can't deliver the Sorkin dialogue properly, something about the cadence is just off, so it drags rather than popping. Could be a fault with the direction, I suppose. Oh well. Phillip Seymour Hoffman was the understated star of the show as far as I'm concerned. The story bobbed along, with funny beats in all the right places; it kept me interested and entertained through to the end, not in a spectacular way but certainly in a good one. And the ending quote was made of win and awesome and also truth.
  
  Also? Now I know what somebody was talking about. Tom Hanks nipples are offensive.

Juno is still on my list of films to see. sleetfall has already beat me to it, and that's just unacceptable. But I feel as though I ought to round up an actual crowd of friends with whom to go see it, which may take a little doing.

First post on the new MacBook. w00t.

I got this meme from sweetafton23.

1. Go to wikipedia, on "random":
   The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
   Wildflowers of Soldiers Delight


2. Go to Random Quotations:
   The last three or four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
   "There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action."
   Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)


3. Go to flickr and click on "explore the last seven days":
   Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.


4. Use Photoshop or similar to mix it all up. Post it.
   

For something generated so randomly, that worked out pretty damn well.