You all read xkcd right?

Right?

What the hell are you doing here if you don’t read XKCD?  Well, you’re missing out, but go read today’s comic.  When he’s on, he’s on.

My computer edges closer and closer to the big junkscrap in the sky.  This afternoon it bluescreened me up until 15 minutes ago when I finally plugged her back into all of her peripherals and (somehow miraculously) she came back to life.  My two developing theories are:

1) The peripherals are acting as some kind of life support.  Which sucks because it means that until I rebuild her she’s useless to me as a laptop.

2) The peripherals are causing the problem.  Which is more likely, and I have a good idea as to which one it might be.  Which sucks because if it is and I rebuild the computer only to plug in the peripherals again… well, you follow what I’m sayin’.

Ah well.  I’ll continue to see what I can do to help her out.  But I’m being pretty ineffective about solving computer issues of late.

I started a new exercise regime this morning, and I just finished it and am covered in sweat.  I haven’t done that in a while.

My computer is slowly starting to die.  She’s coughing up blood from her poor, rotted lungs, a final reminder that she was once great, but now naught but a feeble machine attempting, attempting, attempting, but failing so poorly.  It’s enough to make a man weep.

Wow, I was incredibly tired for the past few days.  I kept feeling like there should be something going on, and yet that I did not want to be doing anything, and barely left the bed. Still, the apartment feels all the emptier without the Wagnerian snoring of my two compatriots (I’m sure I contributed my own basso section, mind) nor the rattling of the dice against the wood during the day.

Also, it is getting hot.  Summer is heralding its entrance.

What have I missed…

I was one of the few handfuls of people which thought Spider-man 3 was fine.  Admittedly, I was expecting another X-Men 3, and we all know how I felt about that piece of shit.  So to see a movie that actually made some cohesive sense between the three plots, and to have an overarching theme tying it all together in the end (although admittedly in a rather Deus Ex Machinaist sort of way) made it tolerable enough for me.  I do not in any other way shape or form think that the movie was terrible – and for reasons I will not dare explain, I liked Kirsten Dunst in the movie, although I don’t think she makes for a very good Mary Jane.

(Although I must criticize the movie for the one point I find unforgivable: Why the fuck would that sonofabitch butler keep his goddamn mouth shut for the past three(?) years while his master spirals down a dark path of obsession and delirium, only to speak up at the very end, is beyond me.  It was unconvincing and anticlimatic.   So fuck him.)

People stoning women in the digital age makes for very disturbing news footage.  While I’m not 100% sure, journalistically speaking, on how I feel about having coverage of such events, or more importantly showing them blanketly to the masses, I believe we’re all at least in accordance with the fact that stoning people is wrong.  Especially women, especially because you don’t like their boyfriend.

The Heroes season finale was surprisingly disappointing. For a series whose worst episode has been just “good”, to have a season finale that, honestly, blew chunks is mind-boggling.  They pretty much used up every “cool” moment in the episode before, with the finale feeling more like a lame over-dramatized epilogue than an actual finale.  And the “cliffhanger” at the end?  Please.   Your audience is smarter than that.  Poo-poo, Tim Kring.  Poo-poo.

I bought the Alien Quadrulogy DVD boxed set a few days ago at Best Buy, and sat through all four of the films over the weekend.  Each film is really of a different genre than its successor.  Alien was pure gothic horror, with alien, unforgiving landscapes, betrayal, and a ghostly monster threatening the crew of the Nostromo.  Aliens was more 80s military science fiction, in the vein of Predator, although maintaining enough of the surface architecture from Alien to give it a gothic feel.  Imagine, if you will, marines storming into a ghost story.  That’s Aliens, in a nut shell.

Alien 3 was a bit of a return to the original’s gothic horror roots, but the treatment of the xenomorphs in the earlier two films had already ruined the ghostly feel, which ruins the gothic atmosphere.  Having seen the man behind the curtains, as it were, it becomes more a Man vs. Nature tale, in which nature here is a hostile lead-smelting factory and one pissed off xenomorph.  The alien, however, finds even itself in an environment that is alien and hostile to itself, which  the humans in the movie eventually use to their advantage.

Alien Resurrection was more hard-up science fiction.  Having given up on the pretenses of its horror roots by this point, there is nothing in AR that doesn’t scream straight up sci fi beat-’em up.  Ripley’s a science experiment gone awry, the alien queen has a womb, Winona Ryder’s a robotic rebel… it’s all just a wee bit anime, really.

I think that’s all I have for now.