Robust McManlyPants on Average Display

Last night we got a little snow and a lot of sleet and when I couldn’t sleep I had to go out in it and take pictures. At one point I freaking huge black Mercedes made its way up our street, both unsteadily and quickly, shocking me into realizing that some people really will drive out in weather like this to get their drink on.

Around 3:00am a truck drove through and then back again, presumably dropping someone off. When they saw me they stopped and stared and even talked to one another about me before moving on. I said to The Boyf that I found this perfectly understandable since it’s not likely that someone standing in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night, wrapped up like a Russian soldier and taking photos during a snow storm was high on their list of expectations.

Pictures I took at night and pictures I took when we went for a walk this afternoon are both up in my gallery installation.

The Boyf and I have been tearing through some Netflix of late, as a hankering for old-school X-Files has been riding me ever since we went to see the movie a year or two ago. I’ve learned that I vastly prefer watching a TV show on DVD, even over watching it on TiVo. The upconvert capability of the PS3 as a DVD player is tremendously impressive. Regular DVDs look spectacular, almost as good as Blu-Ray.

Last night we popped in the first disc of season 3 of Battlestar Galactica, a show I dropped halfway through the third season when I realized I was so emotionally invested that I could no longer enjoy watching it. We skipped an episode, watched another and then watched all the most important bits of both parts of “Exodus”, the episode in which the colonists abandon and/or are rescued from New Caprica. I was left dumbfounded, over and over again, at just how good the show was. Time and again it takes concepts we know all too well from the news – in this case, insurgencies, occupations, suicide bombings and indefinite detentions – and turns them inside out for us. As 24 whiles away the seasons on torture porn, one after another, Battlestar Galactica made us root for the terrorists without even realizing it. Years later and on my second lap with these episodes I still found myself shaken.

That’s the good stuff. The Boyf points out that this is why he loves science fiction: it can say anything and it most of all can say all the things other genres can’t.

Questions I had the first time I tried to watch the show have only strengthened over time: what, exactly, is the technical difference between Cylons and humans? If a Cylon can pass a colonial fleet physical and incidental injuries and all the broken skin of everyday life, what exactly makes them different? I suppose that’s the philosophical point of the whole show, or at least I hope it is. In the meantime, I’m an engineer. The physical answer is just as interesting to me as the metaphysical one.

In a few scant hours my flight leaves for my fraternity’s national convention. I hate flying. I hate it so much. I am already packed, yes, but here are the things I’ve done tonight just to make sure I don’t get ejected from the terminal:

• placed masking tape over the ends of all the spare batteries I’m carrying for my camera
• verified on the TSA’s website that I can carry spare batteries in the first place
• researched whether it’s OK to wear my Dr. Scholl’s onto the plane. I can’t.
• identified which slip-on shoes I’ll wear tomorrow
• gone through a weeding process to pick a t-shirt that can in no way be construed as creepy or threatening in case someone at security hasn’t had their morning coffee when I get there
• identified which of my middle-tier dress socks will be most suitable for showing off to everyone in the airport
• packed and repacked so that the baggage checkers hopefully won’t have to utterly destroy the packing job I’ve done on my clothes the way they did two years ago
• learned that one of my TSA-approved baggage locks doesn’t work at all
• faced that it is pointless to try to keep my dress shirts wrinkle-free since they will simply be wadded up and shoved back in by security anyway
• researched whether I can take my camera in carry-on (I can)
• tried on pairs of jeans until I found one that didn’t need a belt
• gone through my underwear to find a pair I don’t mind someone else seeing should I get pulled aside
• learned I’ll have to pay $50 at check-in for my baggage
• been advised that I shouldn’t bother using the luggage lock that does work, even though it’s TSA-approved.

In the happy news column, the hotel is letting me do early check-in, which is good since I plan to get there and immediately find out where there’s a bar. I don’t really care that it will be 11am.

Is this what it felt like at the end of the ’80s? Some combination of “thank the gods that’s over” mixed with “what the hell can they possibly throw at us next?” I suspect it was. I was in high school at the time, so yes, it was like that, but it didn’t necessarily owe anything to the decade in general.

I am going to be mighty glad to see the back of the Aughts. In ‘99 I remember loving the gigglingly prophecied nickname of “the naughty aughties.” Turned out there was plenty of naughtiness but none of it was fun.

I turned 35 this year and on Saturday, at our big family Christmas-ish dinner, my sister admitted that she had been a little freaked out by the thought of her little brother being 35. Then it came up in conversation that the youngest member of the generation after us is about to start driver’s education and my sister turned to me with wide, frightened eyes. “Nevermind about you turning 35 anymore,” she said to me. “I have something new to be freaked out about.”

Completely as an aside, I confess that one of the things that most bothers me about the Detroit would-be bomber is that it pisses me off to think what new indignity I’ll have to endure when I fly in a couple of weeks. What a load of shit. I’m starting to wish I’d opted for the 16-hour train ride after all.

Friday night I went out to grab a bite to eat with KJ, Steve and LeAnn. There is a new Japanese fast-food place around the corner from LeAnn that turned out to have very tasty teriyaki beef. The place kind of looks like an Arby’s on the inside, which is a little weird, but the food was good and the company excellent.

While there, though, I noticed an amusing set of matched misspellings in the cups/plasticware/chop stick/straws section:

Some recent posts by me at Pink Kryptonite, where I post as Klarion:

Reviews in Descending Chronological Order:
Stumptown #1
Models, Inc. (#1 through #4)
Detective Comics #858 & #859
X-Factor #50
X-Factor #49

Gift Suggestions, Likewise:
The Authority: Relentless
Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.
Incognito

My favorite thing about the term “stocking stuffer,” which is how I categorize my gift suggestions on the site, is that in the context of gender-play and queerness it can be interpreted as vaguely but inspecifically dirty, inspiring the imagination.

51,600 words and finished in a hurry. I hated it. I’m not linking it. Maybe in a year or two. Bascha or Josh can ask me for a copy via email but dear gods, no one wants to read this. No one good should ever want to read this. Still, digital schwag:

Weekend travels and an overwhelming hate of the book so far have slowed me down. I am determined to finish before Thursday, though, which may have me up half the night on Wednesday but it will be worth it. The Boyf has been insanely patient with my short fuse as I have slogged this far. Things are going to be so nice come Thursday.

Interesting to me is the fact that when I switched perspective characters at 35,000 words, for what I thought would just be a scene, I was instantly more engaged. I can’t make him the perspective character the whole time, but I am going to try to make him the perspective character for as much as I can of what remains. The words, like spice, must flow.

Just over 25,000 words as of today and almost entirely unrelentingly awful. Seriously, fantasy? Never. Again.

I’ve joined the staff of the gay-reader-targeted comics blog Pink Kryptonite, under the pen name of Klarion (as in, the Witch-Boy). Pink Kryptonite is in the same family of sites as GayGamer.net and PopSucker. Mainly I confess to being largely ignorant of the deep history of backstory, retcons and reboots – what with only really getting to read comics as an adult – and focus on writing about comics that currently entertain me. Also I write about how awesome Grant Morrison is.

Do you hear me, Grant Morrison? If I say your name three times, will you appear? Grant Morrison.

I would really, really love to see Lovestruck: A Romantic Comedy Set in the Horrific World of H.P. Lovecraft, but no such luck.

Not only is it Guy Fawkes Night, and thus important to anyone who loved V for Vendetta (and hates seeing wingnuts who get their rocks off on authoritarian bullshit try to claim that book as a metaphor for their own rage bone), it’s also the day the flux capacitor was invented.

And seriously, Sandman is twenty years old? Nearly twenty one? Good grief.

I started last night just after midnight. I went to D&D today, so that was a big chunk of non-writing time, but I still made it past the 3,000 word mark. Here’s a PDF link for Bascha.

Note: I’m not sure I’d view either of these images while trying to eat.

This hilarious waste of perfectly good paint got linked from a comment thread on Unfogged sometime in the last few days. It’s well worth spending some time zooming around with one’s mouse and reading the explanatory text. Money quote: “Some stars shine brighter than others,” said of the stars on the American flag. My other favorite thing is probably the note that the little white boy represents both boys and girls and children of all races. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

At any rate, tengu was chatting with me the other night and asked if I had seen the response piece, “One Nation Under Cthulhu” and sent me the link when I said I had not. I’m impressed! It’s got buckets of blood, Great Old Ones, Deep Ones, some critters that could arguably be Mi-Go and/or Star-Spawn of Cthulhu and Satan wearing an expression somewhere between perplexed and pleasantly surprised. No Shoggoths, but I guess they would tend to crowd others out. The arm-stump Elder Sign being drawn on the Constitution is the crowning touch of class.

Best comment from the Wonkette thread on the response piece had to be, “If he passes out loaves and fishes, tell him you already ate.”

Finally, because the Internet is nothing if not a space that encourages creativity, this animated GIF. If you don’t get it, watch They Live sometime. It’s a classic.

I liked it very much.

That said, I kind of feel like I’m losing the ability to watch and enjoy new horror movies. By the end I just wanted everyone to be OK. I didn’t want anymore surprises. I audibly cried out and/or screamed more than once during the movie. I got emotionally invested. I found myself watching with my hand over my mouth so it wouldn’t have far to go to get to my eyes.

I have to do something to undo this.