Good Morning

• It's another beautiful morning in the DC area (two in a row!) 55°F, partly sunny and windy.
• Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize! The WHite House is 'happy for him.' Riiiight.
• My Wii arrived! Damn this thing is heavy. Now I got to cart it home. It's soooo cute though. Ken gave me like eight awesome games with it, including Zelda!

More fun from X-Play

Emperor Palpatine gets a new job!

“Now, witness the firepower of this full armed and operational invisible doggie fence!”

Attack of the Show

There's a little article in this week's Entertainment Weekly about another G4 TV show (as opposed to X-Play which I watch all the time) called Attack of the Show. It's kind of a funky catch-all about media, games, the net... it's fun and very irreverent. and that Kevin Pereira is a hottie.

Bet on Black

My favorite X-Play 'intern' (now actually a production assistant) Shirtless Eric (the skinny little Filipino) stars in another strange and hilarious X-Play parody!

G4!

For no apparent reason, I now have G4 TV again on my TiVo TV! X-Play! Ninja Warrior!

My Pen Is Blue

Hot picture courtesy of My Pen Is Blue Recommended by Jake. Warning! Not work safe (semi-nudity), and has really loud music. You were warned.

Finished my taxes! That penalty on taking out the 401k was nasty but I managed to work some of my business deductions so I don't have to pay quite as much as I'd feared.

Meanwhile, TiVo is working as well as I can expect, though I have to do the updates manually now. The sucky thing: G4tv no longer comes in! The channel is blank, even though it shows on my big tv with the Comcast box. What did it have to be G4? Why not 'Golf Channel' or something? Argh! I can't figure why this would change all of a sudden. Vexing. Update: I did some cable switching, and it seems, oddly enough, that the TiVo has nothing to do with no longer getting G4 unscrambled. Weird coincidence (like you guys care about the minutae of my cable lineup!)

Back to work

Well my day off flew by of course, though I did get quite a bit of work done. And now I have a four-day week! Another nice thing about these job hours is that I wake up in the morning when I wake up: no alarm (except on Thursdays for the dreaded early morning spin class). So I often wake up real early, like 5:30 or 6: 00 and doze for an hour while listening to music. That's of course when I slip back into a quasi-dream state and some dream from earlier in the night returns...

I had bizarro dreams last night again, this one was a serial dream through the dream cycles that involved Shirtless Eric and Billychu from X-play, and I was writing an episode where they would stand in for Adam and Morgan as hosts, dressing like them and doing impressions of them, but as the episode progressed they would slowly revert back to themselves (or the characters they were most associated with) so Billy would be a nerdy Pokemon card player and Eric would be... shirtless dancing Eric. Weird. In my dream, Eric liked the idea but he didn't want to dress in drag as Morgan. Oh, and there's a new clip of him on iTunes: he plays 'Unemployed Ninja.' Love it!

I think I need more coffee.

Stocks plummet...

...and I don't care, since I don't own any anymore! Instead here's another X-Play review with Shirtless Eric (sadly with shirt on in this one; a much more fun review is for Dance Factory but I can't find a clip of that except at the G4tv.com site, and you can't download it.)

I had several very weird dreams last night; they included folding machines, a former friend, former co-workers from Charlottesville, large sprawling marble office lobbies, elevators, and being late for several appointments, including one I have in real life with my former manager, P. Not fun dreams at all.

Oh Crap

It's after 2:00 pm already? What happened to the day?

Well, actually, I got up at 7, goofed around on the computer, then packed up a package of books for a friend in Spain. Got dressed and went to the post office. Waited forever in line. Sent off his books. Went to the grocery. Waited forever in line. (Oh, right, it's going to snow an inch or so tonight, so everyone and their cousin was at the store buying toilet paper, bread and milk. Carts full of it. Yeesh.)

Anyway, my stomach was bothering me, and the thought of going in to work was increasingly unpleasant, so I called in. Then I had some soup, did laundry, watched some X-Play (the Adam Sessler Birthday Episode where Shirtless Eric pops out of a cake--shirtless--and dances! Why? Because they always assumed Adam was gay.)

Then I chatted with Jake some. I was going to post chili pictures... maybe later. Oh, last night I made a fire in my fireplace, made popcorn and watched Harry Potter (the one where he's in the bathtub... *giggle*) It was nice.

So now I need to write but I'm procrastinating. And I'm obsessing a wee bit about Brandon Lee right now. Why? Who knows.

Brrr

It's cold.

Friday I worked until midnight. Good thing the Metro runs until 3am on weekends. I didn't get to sleep till 1:30, cause when I get home it takes a little time for me to wind down. I wanted to sleep a little late but of course I woke up at 7:00. I kind of dozed for awhile before getting up around 8:30 and shuffled around before heading off to class.

The rest of the day I did laundry, wrote a little, cleaned up, read, and watched some TV. What do you know, the original 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was on TCM! So of course I watched some of that, even though it seems silly to watch a super widescreen broadcast movie on a little 20" regular set when I could watch the DVD on my 50" widescreen tv...

Anyway, I actually watched an episode of Naruto last night. Weird stuff, and definitely more dark than what I prefer (unless you want to go real dark, like Akira). The X-Play crew sure hates him though. Here's Shirtless Eric as Naruto:



Speaking of weird stuff, I had really creepy dreams last night. One involved me being in D.C. while all these Chinook helicopters were hovering over the city. Chinooks are the military's big dual-rotor troop carriers:

So anyway, these helicopters were all over the city, and they kept getting shot down (hmm, perhaps a reflection of recent headlines? Not only were they getting shot down, but the burning wreckage always seems to almost fall on me. Sometimes it did fall on me, and the dream would do this strange reverse & re-edit where I wouldn't die but just be pinned and be able to crawl out. Also, the scale on the helicopters was all strange; sometimes when the rear fin section fell, it would look like the central support pylon of the Starship Enterprise:

Obviously this was much larger, and imagine that in flames and falling out of the sky! So, much of DC was on fire. The helicopters were being shot down by unnamed terrorists, in retaliation for some attack by the US.

Next in the dream followed some twisting terror-ride on the Metro...

Needless to say, I'm feeling a little unsettled this morning.

Friday. No Snow. Scattered Angst

Today is dragging for some reason. It's slow as far as work coming through, but I have plenty of little projects to work on. There was a little trouble where D. printed some final prints of a job that I had done proofs for, and and the final color was a little off. He was getting his ass ripped by the boss, so I stepped in and tried to save him by saying maybe my instructions on how I printed the proof wasn't clear. Then we took everything under some better lighting and the colors looked closer. So, crisis averted. Still D. gets frustrated when things don't go smoothly. You can't get easily frustrated in this job, because things rarely go smoothly.

Oh, and it didn't snow. Not even a flake that I saw. That sucks.

I want a Nintendo Wii. And I want to play Final Fantasy XII. The X-Play crew is right, the main character sure is androgynous/pretty. And his little vest thingy is cute too. Oh and the flying ships are so cool.