Boppin' Through the Wild Blue

I do a lot of complaining. How 'bout some stuff I like lately?
It's nice to be writing again. Progress is slow. It's harder work than I remember. Seems like when I wrote before I was doing it for fun, now it's a real effort. But again, this is complaining, so in the interest of the glass being half full- it's nice to be writing again.
Boppin' along on my bike ride to work is the ipod my lovely wife gave me. So while I can't read on the bus when I'm not taking it, I have my music.
I made my first ebay sale. For two bucks plus 32.74 shipping I sent away my 1983 Kenner Jabba the Hutt with his 1990's special edition slave Leia and jester Salacious Crumb. To a guy named Sean in New Zealand. He seemed excited- I am out of pocket for the shipping and eagerly awaiting the PayPal transfer. Donation of toys may be the more rewarding choice in future. There's no money involved but there's no effort or money risk either.
I have a wife and a mortgage! This is far better than I ever expected. We are both rather lazy and fairly poor. I tend to like it that way.
Torchwood's second season was less unrelentingly dour, and third was, as my friend Anthony put it "Slit-Your-Wrists Fun". If I crapped too hard on Torchwood in the past I make my apologies. But I do not forgive Cyberwoman. That was shite.
Speaking of television that is awesome: I nominate Defying Gravity to run for seven seasons! In this day and age that would be a miracle, but if anything on right now deserves it, I say this does.
OPTIMISM! SPACE! How I've missed you. BSG is all well and good, and the finale was beautiful, moving and haunting. But how long since SF was PLEASANT? Doctor Who, Star Trek, Stargate. Worthy programs all. Defying Gravity has some of that spirit, and although there is mystery too I feel less likely to be betrayed by premise and less, well, LOST than I did when I was grudgingly watching Lost. DG is funny, sexy, and very much my thing. Oddly, my wife even liked it a bit. So, of course, if you're reading this in 2010 and thinking "Defying What?" it will be a tragedy of television failure, and also par for the course lately.
Maybe we all have too much else to do? Certainly we have loads of choices. And I know (though I'll never understand) that people like different things than me? And that it costs a lot to make tv and keep things on the air if nobody's watching. Anyway, what I'm saying is, if you like SF even a tiny bit, or you like adventure or human interaction or mystery or romance, I suggest you watch and then make noise about Defying Gravity.
What else is really cool lately? I like Linkara's ATOP THE FOURTH WALL video blog on that guy with the glasses dot com. That guy is just glorious. He has me HOWLING at his scathing reviews of terrible comics. Thanks to my friend Kirk for pointing him out.
I'm enjoying the read on my latest Hugo winning novel: To Say Nothing Of the Dog by Connie Willis. A FUNNY Hugo winner is something of a rarity, and all the better for having read Jerome K Jerome's Three Men In A Boat. Again I must credit Kirk. He told me he's reading my blog: so I have to have some shout outs. DUDE! Like that.
I liked playing Neverwinter Nights Gold from BioWare on my PC, thanks to Devin. Reading the instruction manual was kind of a chore: 175 pages of mathematically derived methods of stabbing people until the gold falls out of them and no pages of kissing? Didn't seem like my thing.
Still, it's very playable, even for a guy who has no idea what he's doing. My pre-made elf wizard character didn't even make it out of the local 'Hogwarts' before she managed to impale herself on a trap I think I may have unwittingly set myself. But the picture and sound are very good. The game is like seven years old, I wonder what they've done since?
What I mean is, I wonder if they'd like my help being paid to write dialog for whatever they're doing now. My incomplete resume requires I build a game module with the NWN toolset and the first environment I tried to assemble gave me an error message and shut down.
Have I mentioned that for a nerd I have almost no savvy with computers?
Shame to be a nerd AND have no techhie traits.
I'm one of those daydreamy nerds, leaving the hands-on stuff to other, wiser heads.
And I love comics. I don't buy many of them (see mortgage) but I like reading them. The Blackest Night story in Green Lantern is SO CREEPY AND COOL! Booster Gold is probably on the verge of cancellation because I like it a lot. Spider-Man and Hulk had their 600th issues and both were very good. Dan Slott and Jeph Loeb and all the others deserve mucho praise. The Legion of Three Worlds story from DC was great, but I never met a Legion of Super-Heroes I didn't like, so all three at once and much much more was a freakin' dream come true!
So much did I enjoy it that I bought the follow-up new series' first issue Adventure comics #1 (or #504, if you prefer to pretend it's the same series as the old one) with a Superboy main feature and a LOSH back-up feature.
And I have to beg to differ with Linkara: Superboy Prime is MUCH more than a strawman fanboy paradigm (I'm paraphrasing here, I can't remember exactly what he called him) He's a great villain because I understand him very well: nothing is ever as good as he remembers it from when he was a kid, he's usually lonely, frustrated and angry and miserable because of his own actions and (thankfully this part is not that much like me or hopefully most of the readers) he tries to kill everything that frustrates him. Don't get me wrong, Linkara's Countdown putdown is entirely on the nose, that series blows. But don't throw the Superbaby out with the bathwater. With Geoff Johns writing that guy, I understand him entirely, even as I cannot condone him and I desperately hope never to be crazy enough to emulate him. But THAT'S why he's a great villain. Because I can ALMOST see myself in his pissed off red shoes.
That's a good reason to blog periodically about stuff I like. After GL:First Flight (I STILL haven't gotten all my bile out on that one!) I wanted to remember the wonderful things.
And I haven't touched on nearly enough of them. Louis C.K.'s airplane sketch about ingratitude keeps coming back to my mind: 'how quickly the world owes you something you didn't know existed 5 minutes ago!'
I am far too ungrateful, selfish, lazy, ignorant to deserve a world of such wonders as this. I hope for the future. I hope to be a better husband to my wife. I hope to read many wonderful things, watch many wonderful things, and write many wonderful things.
Also my father-in-law and mother-in-law are giving me a trip to the Netherlands.
How dope is that?
They rock.
Also things went quite well sitting in and being funny with the 404s at Animethon. Not least because my interest is peaked in the sci-fi and comedy that anime has to offer.
So, all in all, my life is 'Pretty spankin'.
Which reminds me, cartoons are fun too. Yeah, Kim Possible!
And yeah, George Carlin! Yeah John Hughes! Yeah Scrubs! Yeah Futurama! Yeah Fringe! Yeah My Friends! Yeah My Family! Yeah My FABULOUS Wife!
And Yeah me.