how can one be "over" the name butterstick? I DOUBT IT. jealous they didn't come up with themselves is more like it!

let's all give a big round of applause to my lovely and talented little sister, marggie, who just found out tonight that she was accepted early decision to UVa! BOOYEAH. not that there was any doubt, but i know she had been stressing about it. but, hey, marggie, now you can spend the rest of senior year as you should: WITH MUCH SEX AND DRUGS AND BEER. haha, just kidding, mom and dad. that's what college is for!

Maybe I read the wrong blogs, but this whole Fifty Cent/Bat Mitzvah debacle seems like it deserves more attention than it's been getting. Charles has the details (and links to pictures!).

I'm trying out a few new plugins to cut down on comment spam. I had thought that MT 3.2 had finally solved the spam problem, but it didn't. There was a brief improvement, but then things started up again — except now we don't have MT-Blacklist with which to defend ourselves. Argh.

So there's now some javascript trickery involved in comments. I'll be testing it out in a moment, but the best-case scenario is that you'll need JS enabled in order to post a comment. How do folks feel about that? Would it be better to use a captcha (ie an image-based code that you have to read and enter)?

UPDATE: Okay, looks like everything works — even from my phone. Since I'm the only person likely to care about mobile commenting, I'll count that as "good enough". In other news, I'm a dope: blacklist capabilities still exist in MT, you just have to go through the plugins page to get to them. Not super-convenient, but tolerable. I think I'll keep the new javascript obfuscators enabled anyway, though.

one reason (i'm sure amongst many) why austin sounds like paradise: they're hosting a 22-hour veronica mars-athon, with appearances by creator rob thomas, kristen bell, and hottie jason dohring.

is anyone watching tonight? any guesses as to what was in the letter duncan read last week?

I've taken another pass at the Gmail colorizer greasemonkey script — I'm pretty pleased with it now. Have a look, if you'd like.

my cell phone has been lovingly fedexed into my grubby little hands, i have been instructed on how to hook up my dead monitor computer to the tv so that it's usable, and i just got back from a drugstore run to pick up hot chocolate and a healthy amount of bailey's irish cream (can i say HOW MUCH i love that the drugstores here sell alcohol? i love it a lot).

even though it is 30 bajillion degrees below zero with the demon winds of hell, this truly is a joyous night.

Photos of the capabilities that will be found in Tivo's next software release. Traffic reports, weather, movie showtimes and tickets, podcasting — it all looks pretty cool. Back when I had a working MythTV install set up, I was very pleased with how convenient it was to check the weather using the TV remote. For some simple tasks the TV really is a nicer interface — even if there's a laptop sitting right in front of you.

Of course, Charles and I have a DirecTivo, so there's roughly no chance that this upgrade will reach us. As you might know, DirecTV is in the process of rolling out their own cut-rate DVRs, complete with a ridiculous ad campaign that seems to think rewinding live TV is an innovative and unique feature. DirecTivo is soon to be an orphan. I'll be counting on you conventional Tivo users to tell me how awesome all these new electronic geegaws are.

On an even geekier note, allow me to recommend Behaviour to any web developers out there. Very, very slick.

i don't think i'm near tough or hipster enough, but how awesome would it be if i went to this and joined up? based on reading this article about roller derby, i'm pretty sure i would end up dead, but it still sounds fun.

for anyone who's dying to know who kate kisses this week, you can click here, go to the canadian real player link, and find out. personally, i think it's muy disappointing, especially with her extra-hot kiss last season with you-know-who.

another spoiler behind the cut...

if there's one thing the folks here at northwestern are very good at, it is instilling the ever-loving fear of god into you. mostly fear that you, despite attending a top-notch journalism school, will never obtain a job outside of licking the boots of some magazine editor or, barring that, serving up the delicious will-be-the-death-of-me pumpkin spice lattes at starbucks. i still have two weeks left in my very first quarter and i. am. already. terrified. so i do what i usually do when i am scurred: turn to the internets. internets, will you help me get a job or, at the very least, a prestigious summer internship? i feel like an idiot asking for a summer internship, since that is so very junior year of college circa 2001, but my advisor recommends it if possible and if i feel like taking a quarter off of school.

ideally, internets, i would like a job/internship at an online news site. if i'm going to get all specific, i would like a job at washingtonpost.com or chicagotribune.com. a job that is queen of everything. or, whatever. i'm flexible. i'm also open to consulting positions for new media companies. my full resume is on my dead-monitor computer, but i will post some suckily-formatted basic qualifications behind the cut, and if my dead-monitor computer is ever fixed, i'll upload a real resume. if you have any contacts, or friends, or ideas, or alcohol, send me an email. thanks!

zunta.org: asking for your job help since november 2005.

My sister emailed asking for webmail recommendations, and of course I sent her a now-superfluous Gmail invite. For some reason this got me thinking about the site, and one feature I wish it had: color-coding of messages. This feature was one of my favorite things about Thunderbird prior to an unfortunate incident involving a massive loss of email and sworn oaths to never use the product again.

But, for the period when I still had my mail, it was easy to set up filters, and quickly tell which messages were from work, which were from the blog, and which were from the various mailing lists to which I'm subscribed. I've got several email accounts pointing at my Gmail address — filtering through the messages at a glance would be handy. And no, I will not just look at the text labels, goddammit.

So I took a crack at making a GreaseMonkey script that provides that Thunderbird-style functionality. Check it out. It color-codes your messages by label. There are only six colors in there at the moment; if you've got more labels than that, some will repeat (and others may be skipped, if they're not present on a page).

It needs some work. Allowing users to customize the colors would be good; so would un-breaking how Gmail highlights rows when you select them. Interested geeks should feel free to have at it.

UPDATE: Wolfson's pointed out that the script ought to be wrapped in an anonymous function. And it appears that when Gmail makes an AJAX callback to check for new mail it drops the formatting. Which means I'll have to dig into Gmail's javascript to figure out which function needs to be overridden in order to reestablish the formatting whenever that check happens. Nuts. Well, it still looks kind of cool.

Scientology's secret texts are being stored in a New Mexico bunker designed to withstand a nuclear holocaust.

This actually sort of makes me like them more. There's nothing innately evil about this project (other than how the money was raised to fund it, of course). And the idea of trying to construct something that will outlive humanity has a certain romance for me.

Nevertheless, I hope hordes of anti-cultists, ironists and burnt-out hippies descend on Trementina, NM and turn it into a fucking zoo. I want to see Xenu bobbleheads, goddammit.

UPDATE: Via boingboing, check out this image of the earthen constructs that mark the site.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has launched a blog helmed by the one and only Kriston Capps! Nice job, buddy.

You can congratulate Kriston here; you can write to your congressman about this horrifying waste of tax dollars here. Don't worry about sending mixed messages — it's all part of the stealth marketing campaign. If we can get Rush Limbaugh to declare a fatwa on Kriston, we'll know he's really made it.

On Saturday, I gave notice to my boss. Catherine and I were out by Tyson's to see the Harry Potter movie and eat dinner with her family. My boss lives nearby, so I went over to deliver the news. There was a knot in my stomach composed of equal parts dread and pre-movie TGIFriday's quesadilla. The two vile substances tore at me as they intermingled, reminding me that I had already made one serious mistake that day, and could be on the verge of another.

Breaking the news went amazingly well. I was surprised. I've seen my boss's temper, although I've never been its target. But he said he understood and that I'd be welcomed back if I changed my mind. Work breakups don't go much more smoothly than that. I left; we went to dinner; everything seemed better. In fact, even today, back at this unending Navy project, things seem better. Which leads, of course, to second thoughts.

But I've got no serious reservations about my decision. So in two weeks I'll be starting at Exciting New Media Consultancy, Inc., which I won't name because Technorati would then deliver this blog to their inboxes within minutes. Not that I think its existence will remain a secret for more than a few hours into my tenure there — It's just that I intend to savor those hours.

Leaving this job is still still going to be a shock. I think I've got it figured out, financially speaking, but I'm not at ease about it. It's the only real job I've had since college; I've been here for three years and change. Sure, it was boring and getting boring-er, but I had a comfortable little rut dug for myself. The prospect of change is unsettling.

Last night I dreamt that I was riding my bike down some unknown street, when suddenly I spied the stolen bike that it had replaced. It was locked to a signpost. I dismounted and walked over, and held onto both of them. I called the police but couldn't get through — and what would I do if I had? I couldn't prove my ownership of the old bike, although I knew it was mine. I woke up before I figured out what to do.

I don't usually remember my dreams. When I do, their symbolism is usually completely incomprehensible, if it's there at all. If my subconscious is going to descend to analogies as prosaic as that one, it must really be worried.

somebody assassinated butterstick. i am not even kidding.

anyway, back in chicago. back to broken laptop, missing cellphone (slipped out in my dad's car on the way to the metro), computer desk from hell that arrived while i was gone and i need to put together although it seems highly unlikely that i will be able to, and back to the last two weeks of the quarter and several billion projects. yay!

Someone just give Susan a book deal already. I'm starting to feel guilty about reading stuff this good for free.

The Xbox Linux people have already started the Free60 Project, an attempt to get Linux running on the new XB360. Their documentation already contains some interesting tidbits about the machine's architecture. I'm not a hardware geek, but it looks like it's going to be a tough nut to crack. The CPU is designed to check that what it's running comes from Microsoft. That's a more deep-rooted level of trust-checking than was present on the XB1. The previous Xbox's protections could be removed by turning them off via an injected replacement BIOS. This time the checks may have to be fooled rather than simply disabled. They'll no doubt be harder to get to, as well.

At the moment I'd say the smart money would be on the discovery of an exploitable bug in a game showing the pathway to opening up the device. Whether such an exploit will translate into a multipurpose machine as practically useful as a cracked XB1, or simply prove to be a novelty, I couldn't say.

Mostly I'm thankful that I didn't die on my trip to and from Brewster, NY. For a day involving 12 hours of travel on buses and trains, everything went pretty smoothly. Okay, the cab I had arranged for didn't show, and the path from the Port Authority to Grand Central was unexpectedly blocked by the Macy's parade. My sister and I still managed to catch our train, though, and had a nice dinner with the New York wing of our clan. Interested family members can find pics here, although my failure to change the camera's settings away "smoky bar" means that they're kind of lousy.

Only other thing worth noting: I read Cold Skin on the trip, and it was pretty good. Plenty short and plenty unsettling. All in all a good book for teachers to get in trouble with the PTA over.

we'll be at big hunt in dupont circle tonight from 9:30 or 10 p.m. on. come on out, bitches!

Looks like the Xbox 360 might have been pushed out of the gate a little early. Some users are reporting crashes, evidence of which can be seen on Flickr. Suddenly I'm not so disappointed about the shortages.

well, a grand six months or so after i bought my laptop, on sunday my screen flickered, gasped and apparently died. tommy says it has something to do with the "backlight." i say that i am "screwed." it will be virtually impossible for me to be in chicago in the next couple of weeks without my computer (and i'm not sure how long it will take for the dell people to fix it). i have a major article, a newspaper layout project and a take-home final to do before the quarter is over. not to mention that i need my computer for email, blogging, mindless distractions and downloading the VERONICA MARS TORRENT! AHHHHH.

do universities usually have some sort of laptop lending program? should i buy a laptop for like two weeks and then return it? should i go shoot up the dell HQ?

My silly contribution to the Penny Arcade ELoTH:TES project got mentioned in Wired (in the context of a larger article on the wiki). Cool.

I really appreciate everyone's advice in the previous comment thread (keep it coming, if you've got more). Also thanks to ogged for directing his sage readership over to advise my callow self. As you all can probably tell from my responses in the thread, I'm still leaning toward taking the job. If I'm going to gamble with my career, now is the time to do it. Maybe the last time.

But I'm going to be subjected to some high-intensity hectoring from my mother over the holiday, who is not a fan of this earn-less-money initiative. And I'll actually crunch the numbers, instead of estimating them in my head on the way to the metro. And I'll be talking to the guy who's leaving the position on Friday. Maybe he'll tell me all the bohemianism is a lie, and the place is actually run by Chets in sandals. We'll see whether my starry-eyed idealism emerges from the weekend unscathed.

At any rate, happy Thanksgiving to everybody.

Alright, internet. You're going to have to forgive me just a little bit more career navel-gazing. I could use some advice.

The folks I interviewed with made me an offer yesterday. It wasn't what I was hoping for — it'd constitute a 10% cut from my last paycheck. If you count the raise I got between the interview and the offer, it's almost a 22% cut. They do 401k matching, bonuses and stock option stuff that my current employer doesn't, but it won't make up the difference.

My current job kind of sucks. It revolves around getting Microsoft technology, which I don't like, to do boring things for military and government clients. Our standard contract involves working for a client who has been sold something expensive by Microsoft but has no idea what to do with it.

The new job seems like it would be better. They use open source software. It sounds like clients typically approach them, say "we want people to think our website is cool," then let them run wild. Blogs, RSS, location-based services, AJAX — I'd probably get to play with all that good stuff. These are technologies I like messing around with in my spare time. And although I know there'd be drudge work like in any job, I think there would be much more room for doing interesting and innovative things.

At my current job I'm top dog. This is, to some extent, because we're a technical house of cards — I can't make myself watch webcasts about ASP.NET 2.0 in my off time like a Microsoft shop's CTO should, and nobody else on staff knows anything about software development. But my boss loves me, and I can pretty much get away with whatever I want. Business is starting to take off (hence the raises). I used to be able to work from home more days than not, but I don't know if that will ever happen again.

The new job would make me a developer working directly under the CTO. It's a slightly bigger company, but this move would still look like a step down on my resume. The place is filled with young people whose politics I admire, and from whom I could learn new things (instead of just treading water). The commute's slightly worse (although that will likely change in a few months), but although they only allow for one day/week of telecommuting, it looks like a more reliably pajama-friendly position than my current job. Also, I could wear jeans to work.

I think that's it. And I think I have to take it. I need to write out my budget and make sure everything adds up. Fewer electronic toys and fancy dinners with Catherine should do it. Aside from those, I'm not very high-maintenance. But I do hate the thought of, years from now, little Tom Jr. and Tomasina leaving a shittier house in a shittier neighborhood to go to a shittier school than would have been possible, if only their pop didn't hate SharePoint so goddamned much.

This is a young company; it could pay off down the road. Of course, we're on the brink of the "paying off" phase at my current job — it's just that now I can see that the payoff is a long career working in the government contracting ghetto. I meet people on this job who work for private companies but have navy.mil email addresses. That's how long they've worked on this goddamn project. I really, really don't want to end up like that.

This would be a do-over, with better politics, technology and people. I don't know if this is a really stupid decision, but I think I'm still young enough to be a little stupid.

Here's where you tell me what a dope I am. Trust me, I probably need to hear it.

holovaty & co officially present post remix. the goal, in adrian's words:

* To spotlight the work of outside Web developers who've made cool and interesting projects ("mashups") using Post content.
* To provide information about washingtonpost.com's various data offerings (APIs and RSS feeds).

could be neat! *especially* if they figure out a way to improve washingtonpost.com's RSS feeds. i do love getting my post RSS feeds two days after an article has been published.

...but this blog has helped me in stranger ways before, so i thought i'd try it out.

my lovely, talented and handsome younger brother peter (check out his drill team photos here, or graduation photos here) is moving to saratoga springs, ny, this winter, after the first part of his crazy navy nuclear sub training is over in charleston. he's having a hell of a time finding an apartment - SS, i guess, is a pretty small/resorty town, so it's not like they've got a craigslist. does anyone have any way of finding a realtor or some listings that could help him out? if so, shoot me an email. much thanks.

i'll be at the black cat backstage tonight at the lucky bastards show, reporting for DCist's excellent Three Stars feature. come on out if you'd like!

You've doubtless heard about Sony's recent DRM fiasco. Today, word that a piece of tape placed on the CD can defeat the copy protection. So can the holding down the shift key, or turning off autorun, for that matter.

This is all very funny, but I'd encourage people not to conclude what the following Slashdot commenter did:

Really, there's nothing they can do. If someone can create software to copy-protect a CD, some enterprising soul can create software to defeat it.

This is true, but only because it includes the term "CD". At the moment we're lucky to have a popular digital audio standard (Redbook CD) that has no DRM built into its format, and a digital video standard (DVD) with poorly designed security that is now easy to break.

But let's not lull ourselves into a false sense of security. The next generation of digital media will have very strong protections — geeks have won this round because the DRM people were sloppy and at times relied on security through obscurity. That won't happen again. The cracking of the current generation's formats also took place under a lax legislative atmosphere that, post-DMCA, does not exist. And it's only thanks to a relatively small handful of brilliant experts — people like DVD Jon and Bunnie Huang — that we enjoy the digital freedom we currently do. A little disincentive can go a long way. There simply aren't that many sufficiently brilliant people that have to be dissuaded.

It is theoretically possible to make a digital format that is all but uncrackable, and I wouldn't be surprised to see someone succeed at such an implementation. The electronics industry is trying to build DRM into our home entertainment centers and PCs. If they succeed in that effort the situation will be even more bleak. We'll truly be at their mercy.

Yes, the analog hole will always exist. But taking advantage of it requires expertise and some relatively expensive equipment. And the end product will never live up to the source — particularly since the source formats' fidelity gets better with every new release.

Sony looks like a bunch of boobs, but that's largely because the CD format ties their hands. CDs won't be around for ever; neither will Sony's chagrin. This is a battle that is going to have to be fought over and over. Maybe the geeks will save us every time. Congress would only have to do it once.

much props to kyle for being my first official visitor who is not a boyfriend and for braving the magic futon. also much props to him for getting me in to see the super furry animals, who put on a fun, adorable show, complete with motorcylce helmet wearing and celery crunching (by the way, the rest of you fools, kyle set a pretty high standard for visitors; from now on every guest is required to get me on a guest list for an awesome concert, or at least the equivalent. mmk?). then props for meeting matt, who is just as nice as he comes off on his site, and props to rj3, who was a master of parallel parking and unparking (he drove to the show, parallel parked, and when we came out, he had been literally bumpered in by a fancy gray bmw. how he got out of there, i'll never truly understand). so yeah. props all around! and especially major props to chicago for being such a pretty city to fly out of at night. whatta skyline.

sigh. i knew it had to happen soon. after nearly two and a half years of constant wearage, the only jeans that ever looked good on me are dying. they're developing tiny holes that, if they become much larger, will soon be quite indecent.

every girl knows the journey that is finding the perfect pair of jeans, and i thought my life-long search had ended that day in nordstrom when i picked up this pair for only $50 (which seems incredibly and laughably low considering what most jeans cost these days). i should have known better. i should have bought six pairs. because i was a fool and thought that particular brand would always be carried by nordstorm. or somebody. anybody.

but they're not. in my crazed internet searches the past few weeks, as my jeans were falling apart before my eyes, i have found nothing. apparently this brand is italian (of course) and generally makes more mens jeans than womens. sigh. so if anybody knows where i can get a pair of boot cut low rise size 5 energie jeans, let me know. otherwise, please pity me with suggestions of jeans that look good on you and don't cost $300. cause i need a new pair.

Bah! Just when I'm wallowing in the crapitude of my job, daydreaming about leaving, my boss goes around and gives everyone a ridiculously generous annual raise. It's a nice surprise, but it doesn't change much except the level of guilt I'm experiencing — the nature of this project is such that for quite a while now I haven't been able to do my job as well as I would like. If I had to fill out a quarterly accomplishments form right now, "not jumping in front of the Metro" would be right at the top of the list. It doesn't really feel like I should be rewarded for that.

In other news, Catherine got home safe & sound, so everything is pretty great.

I got a haircut last week. I didn't really need one yet, but Catherine's was getting into town soon and I thought I'd better get through those first few awkward post-haircut days before she arrived.

So I headed into my favorite non-threatening haircut factory chain, gave them my name and waited to be randomly assigned to a stylist. This is a risk, I know. Most people develop a personal relationship with the person who cuts their hair. It's understandable — this person holds a lot of control over your life, and you have to trust in them completely. It's kind of like with Jesus, except the tipping mechanism is different.

But I like a more stochastic approach. Usually I'll draw someone from the thick hump of the bell curve — a pleasant immigrant lady without much English who does a good but unremarkable job. Other times I'll luck out and get one of the women who dress like fortune tellers (quick rule of thumb: the more jangly bracelets, the better the haircut is going to be). Once or twice in Cherrydale I got a smokin' hot Asian girl with a fondness for sporting leather pants and bored expressions. She gave me terrible haircuts that I didn't mind a bit.

Today was slightly different, though. I got a male stylist. Not so weird in itself, but he didn't fall into either of the male hairdresser stereotypes: he was neither grizzled nor effeminate. He was just some guy, about my age, with a goatee. If I ran into him in any other setting, I would address him as "dude". He was a dude.

I'd been in this situation before, in a slightly more traditional barbershop setting. The barber and I got through it by talking a lot about how great it was when the Redskin Cheerleaders visited his mall. You know what else is great? Sports! Yeah man. Also, heterosexuality. Bitchin'!

But this time there was a shampoo involved. That proved to be a problem. I'd like to jump to my own defense and say "it's not that I'm homophobic!", but I'm not sure that I'm the one who gets to make that call. You can, after all, get into a lot of trouble for declaring yourself "not sexist" (lousy bitches). Still, I don't think it was homophobia.

I say that because, in a way, it was the complete lack of sexual tension that I found so disturbing. I find scalp massages, or anything approximating a scalp massage, to be just about the greatest thing ever. In Charlottesville I once got a haircut from a woman who was also a masseuse, and who tried to up-sell me on her services by administering a scalp massage more thorough than my $11 actually justified. I walked away utterly relaxed, feeling like my bones had been replaced with a pleasantly warm liquid filling. Also, I was keenly aware that I owed Catherine some flowers.

It just isn't the same when a dude — not a professional male hair-cutter, but a dude — is handling the hair washing. All I could think was "I'm paying for this?" and "How did our lives lead us to this moment?"

I need to be sold on the shampoo. I need to think the shampooer cares deeply about his job and, more importantly (of course!), my personal well-being; that this isn't just some horrible kabuki intended to symbolize clients' dominance over their groomers. This guy looked like he was just counting the hours until he had to go pick up his stripper girlfriend. Which is fine, but kind of diminishes the experience. Seriously, just give me a sink and a towel. I think I can figure it out.

What Ezra says. Sarah Silverman's act is pretty funny; the movie doesn't really add anything to it, though, except the padding necessary to achieve a still-unimpressive 72 minute running time.

She's only got one comedic insight, but it's an important one: that horribly offensive jokes can be told without meaning, but still remain funny. To say that the act becomes about the audience's response would be wrong — it's not that thoughtful. It's just about making the folks listening squirm while doubled over with laughter. When her material manages that feat, it's very, very good.

But there's a little too much filler, and her big finale is basically Jim Carey's talking butt bit. Pretty lame. Silverman is very funny, but doesn't appear to have great mainstream commercial prospects, and probably couldn't fill an HBO special. Still, I look forward to many years of bit appearances by her in various alt-comedy productions. Because really: what if David Cross had breasts?

Today's gonna be a good day — Catherine's landing at National around 10:30 tonight. But my lingering Puritan genes are pushing me to punish myself before that happens. The office where I'm working is close enough to National that, if I look out the window, I can read the signs on the airport's Metro platform. Heading home and then coming back out to meet her seems kind of silly, particularly given how far behind we are on this project. So it's gonna be a little bit of a late night.

Still, it won't be nearly as bad as the Thanksgiving death march I've arranged for myself. That day will begin with a 6AM bus ride to New York, followed by a couple of hours on a commuter train. Then it's dinner, back on the train, then back on the bus. I'll be getting home around 2:30AM on Friday, having discharged my familial duties in the absolute minimum number of hours possible.

I did the second half of this trip last year; it wasn't too bad, but I'll definitely need a good novel. I had my heart set on this (murderous antarctic amphibians? sold!), but nobody in the area seems to stock it. Suggestions for suitable replacements would be appreciated.

Yet more content! Sort of. I've finally gotten around to dumping some pictures onto Flickr. Including:

• Pictures of the Nice Jenkins/Truman Sparks show at the Grog and Tankard.


• A set from last week's attempt at football at Meridian Hill Park (about which I've been meaning to write an embarassing account).


• And of course the much sought-after "miscellaneous other junk".

I hacked together some Javascript for Unfogged to help users (by which I mean me) keep track of their place in the site's fast-paced and sprawling comment threads. It'd be overkill for this site, but I may as well post the code. Perhaps someone else with a big Movable Type site will find it useful. It'd also be easy to adapt to any other HTML page that needs to remember users' scrolled positions from visit to visit. Code after the jump.

It's been a while since I've written a gloriously nerdy post. This hack would certainly fix that. The only problem is that it doesn't work. But it almost does.

I really like Quake 3 Arena. It's my favorite game in my favorite genre. Unfortunately, I don't really have a machine that's ergonomically suited to playing it. The laptop's awkward and the easy chair in front of the desktop swallows you whole.

Enter the Xbox. A clever Brit named Carcharius took the freely available Quake 3 source code, used the not-so-freely-available XDK, and released a port of Q3A that could be played on hacked Xboxes, provided that the user had the game's original data files (and a valid CD key, if he wanted to play online). That's a fairly impressive feat when you consider that the Xbox has a mere 64 megs of RAM — it's an extremely impressive feat when you see how smoothly the game plays. Sure, some of the graphical bling has been disabled, but it's still very fun.

The only problem is the controller. Internet opponents will generally be using the vastly superior mouse/keyboard combo. Stuck with the unwieldy Xbox controller, getting pwned was inevitable. But, like most of life's problems, this was nothing that a little soldering couldn't fix.

The Xbox's controllers are actually USB devices, despite their distinctly non-USB plug ends. Tear open a spare female USB cable (left over from an unused motherboard riser) and a spare Xbox cable-end (surplus thanks to an extension cable I had previously purchased) and you'll find that the wires match. Okay, the Xbox controller has an extra wire (yellow, I believe), but that can be safely ignored. Match 'em up, solder 'em together, apply tape, and bang! You'll end up with something like this:

That's the Xbox to USB cable, then a USB A/B cable, then a USB hub, then a USB to PS/2 adapter, then a PS/2 mouse and keyboard. I had come close to the geek holy grail: having all of the components for a nerdy project lying around in one of my tupperware tubs of electronic crap. I was just missing one thing.

I didn't have a USB keyboard. The setup worked great with a USB mouse, but I still had to use the Xbox controller for movement (I only had PS/2 keyboards handy). I made a trip to Microcenter to remedy this, but foolishly allowed myself to be seduced by the (not that much cheaper) idea of buying a USB to PS/2 adapter instead of a new, bulky keyboard. Sadly, the Xbox is too stupid to work with the adapter. The setup you see above is useless. I'll have to buy a USB keyboard after all.

But I was close, goddammit.

via amber, i see that a blog has been started in nyc wherein women take cameraphone pics of men who harass them on the street and write about the experience (they've got a wiki, too). who's telling who to smile now, biatch?

yay! rj3 and i went to the chicagoist happy hour at monk's downtown last night. they had a $200 tab, and i got two free drinks out of it, which is more than those jerks at DCist ever did for me. jerks. though rj3 and i are apparently d.c.-troverted and spent most of the night chatting with each other about, including other things, the differences between chicagoist and dcist and the blogging scenes in each city, we did meet chicagoist's editor, rachelle, who was a super sweet heart and who, it turns out, also loves pandas! whee! i especially liked her because she listened patiently to us explain the butterstick phenomenon without once calling us idiots.

chicagoist's report is here, and you can see rj3 and me in a photo here. i need a haircut.

this measurement of caffeine (via amanda) cannot be near correct, right? because i just had a venti starbucks coffee and i am feeling quite good, thanks very much. whereas when i have one red bull, i basically collapse on the floor in a quivering, jabbering heap.

Skateboard x Rollerblades = this. Neat.

Still, if I'm gonna kill myself on a recreational device, I think I'd prefer to do it on a pair of these things.

The interview went well. I like these guys, and I think they liked me. It really seems like an ideal workplace: more structure, but still with plenty of freedom. Projects for clients worth giving a damn about. And, most importantly, coworkers from whom I can actuall learn things. Anyway, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Other news: when I got back to my block, I found it filled with MPD officers. I'd estimate six police cars (some of them unmarked), and ten or twelve cops swarming in and out of the run-down house on the street that always has folks hanging out in front of it. "Search warrant," said the cops, in a way that made it clear that this statement encompassed all of the information they were prepared to share.

Judging from the variety of people who'd hang out in front of the house,, the cars that'd stop by, and the occasional stray whiff of pot smoke, it was pretty clear that those guys were dealing something. But they never really bothered me, or Charles, so far as I know. I got a "what the fuck do you think you're doing" one time when I dared to walk through a pre-deal crowd of their friends on the sidewalk, but I don't think that outburst came from anybody who actually lived in the house. The only other interaction I had with them was when two of the guys hanging out there stopped me and Charles as we walked by and asked us to settle a bet: which has the larger penis, a whale or an elephant? I said whale. And I stand by that, goddammit.

Anyway, it looks like bad times for those folks. I can't say I feel too sorry, though. Sometimes on my way to the Metro on summer mornings I would see a little old lady sitting on a cushion on a folding chair outside that house. Maybe she was escaping the heat; maybe she was escaping something else. She doesn't deserve to have some deadbeat nephew or grandson selling drugs on her lawn, even if they were doing it with a minimum of ruckus. On the other hand, she doesn't deserve to have her relations thrown in jail, either. Here's hoping it all works out for her.

the one good thing about this?

getting to wear this (purchased over the summer in florence. in fact, i pretty much based my entire decision to move to chicago on the fact that i own this hat):

i am fully aware of the ridiculosity, but am also fully aware that it feels like i'm wearing an awesome, warm, baby panda on my head.

(when in reality is really just a baby rabbit and cow)

Charles is soliciting help from the internet in naming his goldfish, which inexplicably made it through the weekend. So far my suggestions of "stinky", "wrinkles" and "superdude" have fallen on deaf ears. BONUS POINTS for anyone who can name additional dead classroom pets of the Simpson children.

And with that, I'm off to the i/v.

oh. mah. god. most disgusting story you'll read on the internets today.

this is what i spend time doing when i'm supposed to be finishing up an article, writing a huge research paper and starting work on a 1,000 word profile. this and reading hysterical stories about public masturbators on the CTA red line, which i ride quite often, and taking mental notes on how to deal with them when the situation inevitably, uh, arises. yup.

Right?

I've got a job interview this afternoon. I feel pretty confident — I already know that my biggest failing is working too hard, that I am a self-starting team player, that I'm keen to leverage new synergies in a proactive manner, and that manhole covers are round so that they can't fall down the holes they cover. And really, what else could possibly be asked in an interview? But if you all have any tips, now's the time.

guess what? i'm repping for the district this thursday - mr. loop and i will be attending the chicagoist happy hour at monk's bar downtown. they'll have a tab, at least until it runs out, which i am sure it will soon after i arrive! the only real question: should i dare wear my DCist t-shirt?

i can tell, it's time for some serious intervention. chicago has apparently gotten to me in a deep, dark way.

because i am SERIOUSLY CONSIDERING BUYING BOOTS WITH FUR ON THEM THAT I WOULD TUCK MY JEANS INTO AND I NEED YOU ALL TO STOP MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Oof. I want to want to write a good blog post. Something's wrong, though, and large amounts of coffee are strangely unable to fix it. Is this seasonal affective disorder? Belated single sad-sack-ism? Or just the mind-numbing awfulness of my current work situation? Right now I'm leaning toward option C — it's relatively easy to take steps to remedy that problem, at least (and I am — take that, career!). Well, snappy prose be damned. Last night's show at Iota was good enough to be written about, even lifelessly.

Despite Charles loaning me the car, I was late to meet Julie and Brian for dinner in Clarendon. What can I say — I was still in the throes of what I took for inspiration on last night's Metro ride home, furiously scribbling a backstory to contribute to the Penny Arcade wiki I mentioned last night. Afraid of losing momentum, I hastily wrote it up before leaving the house — the page is here, but in my hurry I didn't really make it very funny. But folks have already begun contributing to it, and I feel it's a solid shell on which the community can build the legend of an insane children's cartoon auteur. The novelty of the medium's thrilling, even if the content isn't.

Anyway, dinner was good, and we headed to Galaxy Hut for a beer afterward. Larry's changed some things. It's a lot more silvery inside than I remember. I miss the little blacklit planets in the window. And though the smirking, cartoony art is nice, it's going to get tiresome if Larry follows through on his promise not to rotate it. Still, the Hut is the Hut, and I love it. Also, the new bartendress has the same birthday as me, which surely must mean something (although apparently not that I ought to be given free beer).

Julie and Brian opted not to go to the show. I got there a couple of songs into Charles Bissell's set. The club was packed. Iota is a great place to see an okay show, but a lousy place to see a great show: there are just too many bodies. And they really, really ought to knock down that island wall of brick — I could only see half the stage for most of the show. Things thinned out a little as the evening progressed, but Sommer was stuck outside until Okkervil's set due to the room reaching capacity.

Anyway, the music: god damn but I love the Wrens. Bissell did a good job of the now-classic looping layering thing, putting that just-perfect level of distortion of his to good use. But the live Wrens get by on sloppy rock energy more than anything else, and as a lone performer, Charles didn't wow the crowd. I still enjoyed his set, though.

Man Man came on next. At first I was enthusiastic. "If I ever get hired to score a punk-rock remake of The Nightmare Before Christmas, I am totally calling these guys," I thought. But their later songs devolved, or maybe I just got tired, until it seemed like they weren't doing anything but making a huge racket — and doing so for their benefit more than the audience's. Also, nonsense lyrics do not endear me to bands. Screaming "mustache! mustache!" probably seems hilarious in rehearsal, but if you guys can't be bothered to give a shit, why should I?

Ah well. What do I know? The G is ready to join their travelling circus, apparently, and she's got much better taste in these sorts of things than I do. Probably an extra cup of coffee or pint of beer would have radically altered my opinion of Man Man.

Speaking of the Pygmalii, I only really spotted the Nabob. He was on his way back from the bathroom, and I waved, and he peered out from around the corner and gave a guarded wave back, perhaps nervous (appropriately) about internet-related acquaintances. I decided to wait until the wind had shifted in my favor to approach, the same way you would try not to spook a rhino when sneaking up on it on the African plain. But the crowd was too dense, and I lost track of him and the rest of the PIIAB crew (despite their flowing Victorian garb). This was probably for the best, as my weekday-evening conversational skills are usually limited to "argh my knee hurts" and "where do I get more beer".

I did run into Kyle, though, through some small miracle of convergent drink-finding paths. I stupidly forgot to bring my camera, but he looked like he was doing a pretty good job of flaunting the club's ridiculous no-photo rule. Head to his site and you'll probably find some pictures by and by. I also ran into Drew earlier in the evening, although sadly for the internet he wasn't taking any pictures.

Alright, finally: Okkervil River took the stage. I'll keep it short. These guys are rock stars and they should be playing the 9:30, right now. Despite some excellent singles, Black Sheep Boy spends a little too much time down-tempo for it to become my new religion. But their live show is fantastic. Now they just have to wait for the audience's size to catch up with their talent. It won't be long. Keep an eye on the Black Cat — I suspect their next trip through town will be the last show you can go to without having heard somebody's little sister tell you how cute Will Sheff is.

Oh, and PS: they covered the Wrens' "Ex-Girl Collection" straight into "For Real". Ten dollar shows don't get a lot better than this one was. I was lame, though, and split before the encore.

Via Wonkette I see that the Kazakh government is once again raising a fuss about Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen's much-funnier-than-Ali-G character. This won't stand — God clearly intended for America (and our li'l British buddies) to belittle whomever we want, whenever we want. It's all right there in the Bible, probably. Regime change, anyone?

Kriston doesn't like Penny-Arcade. I disagree with him about the comic's merits, but I guess I can understand where he's coming from. Tycho — the strip's writer and chief blogger — has a prose style that can be gratingly pretentious; the comic's gags lean heavily on non-sequiturs and in-jokes; and Gabe, the strip's artist, admits that his visual style is heavily cribbed from Stephen Silver .

But Tycho's doing something that I think even Kriston will like. Actually, I think Kriston will especially like it.

You may not have heard of Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga, but that's only because it doesn't really exist. Tycho invented the pretend franchise about a half a year ago as a blank canvas onto which all the most ridiculous conventions of the fantasy, Pokemon-derived, Saturday-morning cartoon, video/roleplaying game and shameles-kiddy-commercialism genres could be projected. Not too much has been done with it since then — a strip here and there, but that's about it.

Today, a new development: Tycho has created an ELotHTES wiki and invited readers to contribute. The setup is pretty straight-laced: the Elemenstor Universe is overwrought, incoherent and thoroughly broken, thanks to the franchise's imagined commercial history. The true stroke of genius is Tycho's insertion of grudging references to a little-loved, Ewoks-style cartoon departure from the canon called "The Wizbits" that briefly aired at some point in the past and horrified all true Elemenstor fans.

I have no idea whether any of the contributors will be genuinely funny, but the idea behind this project is a great one. The end product may or may not be hilarious, but it's certain to be an entertainingly incomprehensible, self-referential universe. It's fertile ground for nerds to riff on: I've already got an idea for the bio page about the Wizbits' executive producer that could best be pitched as, "What if Aleister Crowley had invented My Little Pony?"

First: Okkervil River and the Wrens' Charles Bissell. Tonight, IOTA, $10. Who's in? And are any of you interested in meeting up for a late-ish pre-show dinner in Clarendon?

Second, and much more depressingly: WWE wrestler Eddie Guerrero is dead. What can you say about something so sadly predictable? He was a talented guy, but that business chews people up at an alarming rate. It's pretty much the same as the carney lifestyle would be if it paid a little better and somebody wailed on you with a baseball bat every night between the tilt-a-whirl and your trailer. It sounds like Eddie died sometime shortly after breakfast on Sunday, but despite the morning hour I'd say the smart money is still on an overdose. Like a lot of wrestlers, Eddie had a history of problems with painkillers.

Sigh. Well, Tivo can watch RAW for the memorial package. The rest of us will go get rocked. Come join me — we'll invent a drink and call it the Frog Splash in Eddie's honor. I'm thinking tequila and creme de menthe.

It appears that whenever we receive a trackback the site rebuilds itself. The problem: when it rebuilds it ignores all entries after the one titled "mission accomplished". I have to go in and manually rebuild the site in order to get newer posts (like this one) to show up.

It's pretty irritating, and I have no idea how to fix it. Since we get a lot of trackback spam, it's a real problem. If anyone knows the answer to this issue, please feel free to share it with the rest of the class.

UPDATE: Okay, I just successfully sent a test-trackback from a dummy blog without any entries disappearing. Time to come up with a new theory for why this is happening.

UPDATE 2: New theory. I had renamed our trackback scripts from the Movable Type defaults in an effort to curb spam. As a result, those scripts didn't get overwritten when I upgraded to MT 3.2. I'm thinking that comment spammers were still hitting those renamed scripts via Google's cache of the site. Those old scripts were triggering rebuilds using old code and, more importantly, the old database. Which means that only data added to the site prior to the switch to MySQL was showing up. Make sense? No? Well, at least it's extremely boring. But on the off chance that someone else has the same problem, let me suggest you rename or delete those old scripts. Hopefully this will take care of the problem. I could be completely wrong, though, and this post may disappear again. So, uh, if you can't read this post, you should probably ignore its contents.

most of you probably already know about this site, but i just can't express my love enough for kayak.com. it's certainly the best and snazziest site i've found for looking up cheap airfare. what it is is basically a compendium of airfares from all the sites - you just search your point of departure, destination and date, and it'll list the best prices from across the web. its buzz feature, which incorporates google maps, like anything cool these days does, is also kinda neat.

With apologies to Anna Kournikova, Maria Sharapova and Catherine, I present the hottest, uh, " tennis" player ever. All I can say is: God bless ESPN2. I thought that the 3AM Magic: The Gathering tournament coverage I witnessed in middle school could not be topped. I was very, very wrong.

Also: fr1st post (among myself, Charles and Kriston). That means I get dibs, right?

check out this new york mag column on female sex columnists in new york city. unsurprisingly, everybody's favorite slutty d.c. blogger, jessica cutler, is featured. she comes off as absolutely crazy in the interview. but you know what? she's also the only interesting one.

Alright — I think everything is working. Not only are we on MT 3.2, but I've upgraded from using the filesystem-based Berkeley DB to MySQL. What does this mean? Basically nothing. But backing stuff up will now be marginally easier. Also worth noting is that 3.2 is supposed to cost money, but I somehow downloaded it from Movable Type's website without them remembering to ask for a credit card. And the download shows up in my account "purchases" section and everything! So: shhh!

In other news, Charles bought a fish. We're not naming him until he proves he can make it through the weekend without dying.

i saw pride & prejudice last night, and i am here to tell ye olde folks who are worried about it sucking compared to the 1995 a&e six hour version adaptation of the book: ye have nothing to worry about. and this is coming from somebody who is clinically obsessed with the a&e version, and more than clinically obsessed with colin firth. i first saw the a&e one when i was a junior in high school, and in the following nine years or so have probably seen it at least a dozen times (thanks to tommy buying me the dvd as a present early on in our relationship; even back then he know not to get in the way of my tunnel vision colin firth obsession).

anyway, the 2005 movie, directed by somebody named joe wright, i think, is almost like a completely different film. it's much more boisterous and fast-paced and, um, dirty. not like sex dirty, dirty like there are chickens and pigs and sweaty dancing people everywhere in cramped halls and drinking beer and laughing. and it's very, very funny. the a&e version is very prim and proper and slow and restrained in a lovely way - which works for that film because over the course of six freakin' hours, it can afford to do that, to rest on every detail and take the time to let the feelings between darcy and lizzie build.

in the new theater version, of course, you've only got two hours, so it's kind of like, bam bam bam, wickham what? no biggie! yeah, some of the interesting sub plots have been cut down a ton - wickham and mr. collins being two of them - and for those who love the book and the a&e film it kind of sucks. but the rest of the movie almost makes you forget about that because the rest of what it focuses on is so well done. it's shot beautifully, and keira knightley deserves all the praise she's been getting in reviews, as do the rest of the actors. i especially loved this really brief scene with lizzie, when she and her uncle pull up in front of darcy's house in derbyshire during their vacation. in approximately three seconds, knightly shows, hysterically and without saying anything, disbelief, regret and a thorough mental-self-kicking for having rejected darcy's proposal when she could have been mistress of all she is seeing. she really is excellent and very natural.

i was surprised by how much i liked donald sutherland as mr. bennet, and brenda blethyn as mrs. bennet was fantastic and much more sympathetic than the same character in the a&e film. at first, matthew macfayden as darcy seems terrible and stupid. man, he must have been terrified taking on this role, knowing what he had to go up against in colin firth. but by the first proposal scene with lizzie, he had totally won me over. he's got a great voice (think alan rickman's) and he plays darcy more as of a confused, taciturn but essentially good-natured man instead of the total asshole who grows into a kinder, gentler darcy that firth did. he and lizzie also have believable chemistry that develops naturally during the course of the film.

in addition to all the wonderful acting, the film is just really, really beautiful and warm. wright uses lots of long one-take shots, especially during ball scenes, following characters around, and the lighting and set design are beautiful. honestly, it basically felt like a completely different film than the a&e version. i felt like i was watching a totally separate movie, so even though i enjoyed it so much, it didn't feel like i was betraying my obsession with the a&e version. they're different films with different aims and different ways of interpreting the book, and it works for both of them. highly recommended!

Alright -- I'm gonna try upgrading Movable Type. Everything is backed up, I think. But there's still a high probability of weirdness.

Lost is here. You might need RAR software to uncompress it before playing it.

Veronica Mars is here (I think).

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

from a ew.com article:

The Tailies and their new friends, Michael, Jin, and Sawyer, were hiking towards Forward-Section camp when they came upon a steep embankment. They began to scale the rise, dragging Sawyer (feverish from his gunshot wound) on a makeshift stretcher. Bringing up the rear of their little caravan were Libby and Cindy. Now here's where things get interesting: By the time they reached the top of the ridge, Cindy was gone, presumably ''taken'' by the Others. How did this happen?

With Libby's help.

I'm calling it: Libby's a plant. She's the Ethan of the Tailies' camp.

First off, go to the tape. Libby's the last one to interact with Cindy. And Cindy's carrying a large blue knapsack. By the time they've climbed to the top, Libby's carrying the knapsack. You're telling me she took the knapsack from Cindy and then proceeded to forget all about her? This is a ridge, not K-2 — you don't just ''lose'' people like that. Also notable: Cindy hands Libby a walking stick of some sort, just before we lose track of her completely. As this handoff takes place, we see a cavelike opening in the background, right where Cindy's about to pass. And it looks as if there's some sort of shape inside.

But here's my best evidence of Libby's treachery: Tonight, she told Sawyer she's a clinical psychologist. Well, who appears to have designed this tropical house of horrors, according to a certain orientation video? A team of clinical psychologists, that's who. Coincidence? What do you think? Is there such a thing as coincidence in the world of television drama? Consult the little Locke on your left shoulder (as opposed to the tiny Jack on your right).

the new "pride & prejudice" is getting some seriously good reviews. salon gives it a glowing one (3 pages worth! lordy!). which reminds me, the last time i caught a salon movie review was the totally effing hysterically bad one for "shop girl." you really should read it just for entertainment value (fave para: "Martin's performance is one of implacable, rubberized unhappiness; you get the feeling he saw Bill Murray in "Lost in Translation" and thought, "I can do that." He can't, though. Is Ray a damaged divorcé who falls in love with Mirabelle, after his own fashion, but can't express his feelings? I guess that's the idea, but you can't really tell. He could also be planning to add her to his collection of chopped-up girlfriends beneath the pool. He could be a narcoleptic. He could be the reanimated corpse of Richard Nixon, nervously sweating embalming fluid. He could be shot so full of Botox it's a wonder he can speak at all."). oh, and also this paragraph: "There's so little sexual chemistry between the actors in this film that it seems like a kind of accomplishment. I've seen shows on C-SPAN that were hotter than this. There's an early scene with Danes and Schwartzman in bed that's no worse than mildly embarrassing, but I sat through the film in queasy terror, awaiting the moment when the Nixon zombie might doff his clothes, expose his burnt-sienna flesh and make sweet, sweet love to his little mademoiselle."

i've since seen "shopgirl," and it really wasn't that bad - certainly less grating than i found the book, for sure. however, it suffers from two unbearably terrible aspects: the screaming symphonic repetitive score that plays each and every single time there's a scene with a hint of lovelorn emotion in it (which is, obviously, like every five minutes, and i'm not kidding - the music is BAD); and the bizarre narration of steve martin at certain points in the movie. dude simply cannot narrate. he sounds like he's reading a children's book to a group of, um, mentally disabled children - reading bits so slowly, loudly and painstakingly so that we REALLY GET THAT MIRABELLE IS EMOTIONALLY UNSTABLE AT THIS CRITICAL MOMENT.

i think the movie would have been actually pretty good if martin had simply gotten rid of the score and the narration and let the subtext of those particular scenes speak for themselves at the moment. but, he didn't. at least he has claire danes to salvage the entire thing for him, and though i do like her, i feel like she's pretty much always playing the character from "my so-called life." but it's still a good performance, and i'd recommend the film for a rental.

for you voyeurs out there (i.e. all of you) here's a picture of my newswriting lab from yesterday in the medill broadcast studio (i am looking bizarrely off into the distance, probably at something pretty and shiny). we spent most of the week writing broadcast scripts on particular stories, and then went in front of the camera to record live spots/be anchors/run the cameras/sounds/teleprompter. i have to say, it was kind of nifty. the broadcast supervisor told me i have a great tv reporter voice. which i found weird, since i HATE my voice and always thought it was too low/husky to translate well in any sort of medium. but now, screw medill! 11 o'clock news, here i come.

I realize that with Catherine gone these little blog-related agenda tidbits — I like to think of them as "stalkable moments" — are much less intriguing. But I'll go ahead and mention this anyway: DCist Happy Hour! Yeah! Woohoo!

Friday, 6PM. 51st State. Map! Hope to see you there.

Allow me to direct you to Charles' post about our new favorite weekday morning music video act, Coheed & Cambria. They've been around for a while, I guess, but this is my first encounter with them. "The Suffering" is a genuinely great metallish pop song, but the rest of the album seems pretty lackluster. Still, check out Charles' recounting of their backstory. These guys don't make concept albums — they're a concept band. When their lyrics say "until the stars go out", it's meant literally — the stars going out is a plot point in their bizarre scifi epic.

I'm sure it will end with one or more band members on a rooftop screaming at the assembled police below, but at the moment their multimedia spectacle is pretty damn entertaining — even if most of the music isn't.

ALSO: speaking of good pop songs embedded in otherwise regrettable albums, I heard Liz Phair's "Why Can't I" over a box-store PA last weekend, and you know what? It's a pretty good song. We were all too busy (justifiably) yelling "Judas!" when it came out to notice. But if Kelly Clarkson had released that track, we'd all have revelled in its ironic catchiness.

UPDATE: A dozen or so listens later, "The Suffering" is still pretty great. You can listen to it here. But listen to it on a decent set of headphones — there's a surprising number of backing vocal lines that are easy to miss.

I don't know who has decided to create the inevitable Butterstick blog, but I find the early signs encouraging. I particularly like the tagline, "I'm a panda, and I've got things to say." Tell 'em, stick.

All in all, a satisfying episode of Lost. There was, of course, one major piece of fanservice for both the misogynist and seething proletarian demographics.

But more importantly, there was undeniable haunting! That's right, g-g-g-ghost Walt could be seen by Sayid, confirming that Shannon isn't crazy, just kind of a bitch. I can't remember the last time pop culture has had a solid, unambiguous ghost. A reliable ghost. The kind of ghost they had in the fifties. An American ghost, goddammit. Perhaps ivory tower liberal academia's tyrannical influence on our supernatural entertainments is finally coming to an end. Screw ghost relativism, I say.

Sure, it's fine for the lone hauntee to descend into paranoia as a menace unseen by everyone else draws closer and closer — but only as an excuse for making everyone's eventual deaths that much more grisly. If folks realize they're under otherworldly assault, they won't just naturally wander under that ill-conceived chandelier, after all. Allowances for that sort of thing can be made.

What's not okay is using spectral subjectivity as an excuse for "was it all a dream?"-isms. Nuts to that. Up yours, Henry James! Ghost Walt is now clearly the objective advance guard for something heavy-duty-spooky, and I'm pretty happy about it.

titles are hard, okay?

it had to happen. last night, around 11:15 p.m., i came face-to-face with the dreaded NUN.

it'd been a long day. hell, by wednesday, it'd already been a long week. in class, even though it's a print and reporting lab, we're working on broadcast stuff this week, which means writing scripts for radio and tv, and then actually getting in front of a camera, nicely dressed, and talking, which is basically every non-broadcast journalist's nightmare. i would prefer to stay in my jeans and pumas and mumble and type away at my computer, thanks very much. anyway, after that totally draining and creepy episode of lost, i just needed some sleep. so around 10:30 i fell into bed.

around 11, the typical noises started. the running, the leaping, the dropping of boulders, the elephants performing ballet, etc. it was worse than it'd ever been. after about 15 minutes of shoving my earplugs ever deeper into my ears and tossing around making stab-kill motions, i got of out bed, threw on some clothes, and stomped upstairs, fully intending to bring hell.

except i'm a pussy. so i tapped gently on the door, and when somebody, after obviously assessing me through the peephole and deciding i looked like a crazy homeless lady with bedhead, said, "uh, YES?" obnoxiously, i was sheepishly like, "um, oh, hi, it's your neighbor from downstairs, the one without any balls, because if i'd any sense, i would have knocked your ass from here to kansas by now?" you know, except for that last part.

a nice, normal-looking guy opened the door, and i said, "oh, i'm so sorry to bother you, but, um..." at this point my eye drifted downwards to the strange red feather duster/tickle thing he held in his hand, and i was like, either i am interrupting some very kinky sex or some very vigorous cleaning, but, well, must press on! "...i'm not sure exactly what is going on up here, but the noise you're making, well, it's kind of, uh, incredible." i actually said the noise was incredible. i'm not sure why i chose that adjective. i should have said it was murder-inducing, but whatever.

the guy, who seems very nice, apologized profusely. "oh, i'm so sorry, but i was just messing around with my cats, and you know how it gets."

uh. no, actually. i don't know how it gets to the point where you're messing around with your cats that it makes the sounds you've been making, unless you are STRAPPING ANVILS TO THEM AND STANDING ON A LADDER AND DROPPING THEM REPEATEDLY ON THE FLOOR MOTHERFUCKER WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING TO THOSE POOR ANIMALS?

at this point a tiny, sleek gray cat escaped through the door and raced down the stairs, obviously desperate to escape whatever this guy had been doing to him and his cat colleague, like, dressing them in suits made of stone and then launching them out of slingshots straight into the floor above my head. NUN raced past him, still apologizing, and i went back down to my apartment, saying, "oh, yeah, well...thanks for listening."

and that was that. frankly, i'm disappointed to learn that the reason for all the noise is two poor kitties. i had hoped he had at least chained a hippo up there, or was harboring a 250 lb. fugitive who liked to do aerobics in the middle of the night. ah well. the disappointing facts of reality.

my classmate laura sent me this link with the note: "i fear this is the path you are heading down." i'm not sure if she thinks i'm just a wee bit too into pandas, or i actually like pandas so much that i will eventually one day marry one, but either way it's pretty funny.

even just two months into my program, my panda obsession is legendary. BUTTERSTICK 4EVER.

we all know well that d.c. loves public art involving wacky animals. well, they're not alone. florence is pulling out the cows. not at all out of place amongst the florentine beauty, i'm sure. apparently chicago does it too. (via)

you can see my florence photos here and, if you feel like browsing an enormous unorganized directory, here.

so, a couple of friends and i are taking bets on who the chickadee who is going to die tonight on lost is. the winner gets the cheapest bottle of wine that we can buy, so there's a lot at stake. here are our choices:

friend 1: determined that it is kate.
friend 2: claire. who needs a baby mama anyway?
catherine: rose. how HEART WRENCHING would it be to have the two plane groups finally reunited, only to have bernard find his wife dead? when they were SO CLOSE?

your thoughts?

moving right along, i can let the indignities of jschool pass me right on by because i have two things to be SUPREMELY excited about: harry potter and the new pride&prejudice! the movies, that is. i am going to be back in d.c. for the harry potter premiere, and all i gotta see is we better be there at least the day after the opening night. if i am going to accompany "friends" to the opening night of the star wars "movie," then yall better indulge my potter love.

the new pride & prejudice film is a more interesting subject. flying in the face of firthites everywhere, somebody dared update the clas six-hour A&E version of the book. let's be realistic, now: ain't no one ever going to make a better version of the book than that one, and 75% of that reason has to do with colin firth as mr. darcy. the new mr. darcy, one matthew macfayden, is certainly pretty, but in all the previews and pictures i've seen of the film he always looks so...sweaty. kind of like a constantly-wet john cusack. presumably with a british accent. wet worked for darcy in the brilliantly imagined lake swimming scene of the A&E version, but otherwise i'm pretty sure people like their british boys to be normal and dry. and a bit taller, please. anyway, i've heard, surprisingly, amazing things about keira knightly's performance in the movie, so i'm going to hold judgement out about it until i see it. which i will. as soon as possible. who's with me?

well, i've reached about the halfway point in my first quarter at northwestern, and i feel like i should have something meaningful to say about the experience thus far. but, shocking no one, i'm sure, i, uh, don't. it's had its ups and downs. the first quarter of the first quarter was undeniably exciting and new, as it always is, i think, with most experiences; the second quarter of the quarter has been a slow realization to the fact that a lot of what i'm learning is really kind of a pain in the ass. this quarter is essentially journalism 101, and there's a reason some people try to opt out of it if they can: it's boooorrrrring. it's all AP style and skimming ethics and bullshit papers and some kind of bullshitty articles. some of the stuff i've written and reported on has been genuinely fun and quality; i think i've churned out a bunch of decent articles. other times i think i'm just spinning my wheels. most of all i think: i REALLY don't want to be a reporter!

but am i feeling this way because i think i am so awesome and above it all that i shouldn't even have to suffer through the indignities of learning the basics? and the answer is yes. totally. so i'm just shutting up and finishing up the rest of the quarter and looking with much anticipation towards the next three, where i really think i'll be getting into more interesting stuff.

on the plus side, all my professors and classmates are truly wonderful, so i'm having a great time there. on the minus side, NUN has discovered the joys of techno music in the afternoons, so i'm about to kill myself. not that he has anything to do with jschool, but he sure does make it difficult to read me some 80 pages of media law. so i've been taking to the coffee shops. something i NEVER thought i would do. and all i can say is, caribou coffee, why the fuck are you so popular? you serve shitty drinks, you look like a log cabin threw up all over your inside, and THERE IS NEVER A SEAT FOR ME AND MY PILE OF BOOKS AND SHINY LAPTOP. my other option is a cute if tiny cafe down on broadway run by a nice but leering eastern european man, and to get to the bathroom you have to go behind the counter, with his permission, into the dank inner bowels of the store where mops and buckets and presumably dead bodies and rats rein supreme to pee in a 2x2 space where the door doesn't even latch shut properly. but he makes yummy cappucinos and has free wifi. so i shall return.

also, if anyone has brilliant insights on if bloggers should be protected under a federal shield law, leave 'em here. i have a bullshitty research paper to write. the brilliant matthew yglesias has already contributed his thoughts; YOU TOO CAN BE IMMORTALIZED.

The call by Republican congressmen for an investigation into who leaked information about our government's secret prisons is a good thing — anything that shines light on the issue is. But I have to admit that I was a little dismayed to see such an apparently cagey political response coming from the right after Harry Reid's secret session masterstroke. All of a sudden each party appeared to have their own leak investigation to make hay over, effectively neutralizing lingering Plame-Affair fallout.

But now I see this. And it pleases my petty partisan self immensely.

No time for blogging — an understudy has arrived at the job, and I've got to intermittently pay attention to him. I suggest that you go terrorize my sister's newly-revealed blog instead. I particularly like the smooth transition from pictures of a cat goiter to pictures of indistinct charred meats that's featured in this post.

Just saw an ad for the new cartoon on Adult Swim. Doesn't look very funny. And I've got to be honest: I don't really care for the comic. It occasionally hits its mark, but no more often than, say, Mother Goose & Grimm (seriously). Plenty of comedians have proven that racial politics are fertile ground for comedy, but the Boondocks' writing is frequently flat, and half the time it seems phoned-in.

Overall: better than Blondie, worse than Foxtrot. If you think I'm an idiot and have a particular strip in mind, I'd love to be proven wrong. But right now it seems as unfunny to me as any other middling newspaper comic.

Also, Aaron McGruder went to the hated University of Maryland. QED.

Cripes but there's a lot of white people around here all of a sudden. Don't get me wrong, I'm decidedly one of them. But my trip this evening to the Shaw Giant was a strange experience. It's not unusual for me to be the only white face in the store on such trips, but tonight the place was crawling with my caucasian yuppie peers. Including, in a particularly preposterous touch, a group of three apparent hill staffers — one of them wearing a "ROOTS" sweatshirt — discussing how great Barack Obama is. The girl behind me in line was checking her Blackberry. But the kicker was when the line moved efficiently and a separate clerk bagged my groceries. Giant must be pouring some money into this previously forsaken store. I expect an olive bar to arrive any day now.

I don't mean to claim innocence here. I'm just as guilty as the next guy of contributing to this process. In a small way, some of the neighborhood's residents will be gradually priced out because of my personal preference for living near the cool bars (they should take heart: I'll eventually fail to find affordable property, and be forced to move to Manassas). It's inevitable, and although I don't feel guilty, I do feel bad. And so should you, fellow Shaw Giant gentrifiers. Try to keep your head down a little more. It's not our neighborhood, and it's impolite to point out that it's going to be.

every man's dream, right? almost can't believe the police arrested them instead of setting up camp.

What an unusually beautiful weekend. Also, an unusually football-oriented one. For some reason Kriston decided we should get out and enjoy nature on Saturday, and worse, to do so by engaging in an embarrassing athletic display. "Football!" he said. "It'll be great!"

Photographic evidence was deliberately not collected. And just in case, we all shot dirty looks at the teenage girl who was photographing the nearby foliage. But despite there being a number of witnesses, we did play some football. Kriston, Yglesias, Charles, Jeff Dubner, Ezra and the tragically URL-less Jeremy all came to Meridian Hill Park expecting to toss the pigskin. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that none of us owned a football. Charles and I had brought a couple of frisbees, so we played a bit of Ultimate while we waited for the football-owning Katy to arrive and save us from our masculine failings.

The Ultimate was not a pretty sight to behold (it's going to be back to two-a-days for a while, guys). Also, Charles' skills have not atrophied as much as I had hoped based on the substantial quantities of cigarettes and booze that he's consumed since we last played each other. Much to my surprise we all seemed to do a lot better with the football.

I'd played football all of twice before, and only one of those times occurred even remotely close to the burly side of puberty. Yet for some reason I was chosen as one of the two quarterbacks. I like to think it's my "intangibles", or perhaps my "court awareness". Either way, the juggernaut comprised of Jeremy, Katy, Jeff and myself proved to be unstoppable, and good triumphed over evil. We mostly owe our glorious victory to Dubner's tenacious defense, although everyone had nice plays at one time or another. The precise clockwork of our mid-atlantic coast offense ("run that way!") also played a part.

Really, I have only two important things to report. First, Ezra Klein can do that back-flip-to-standing thingy. You know, where you're lying down, and kick your legs, and then BANG!, you're back up. That seems pretty good for a member of the punditocracy, right? Do you think Krugman can do that shit? I'll tell you right now, he can't. And if you've got the choice between two authors writing intelligently about national healthcare, BUT one of them may also be able to do a spin-kick, which one are you going to read? It's obvious. Ezra brings the value-add.

Second, I am a million years old. We played touch football for what, 45 minutes? My limbs were already stiffening up by the end. The next day my legs ached, my abs ached, and I was pretty sure I had turf toe, despite not actually knowing what that is. Apparently the elliptical trainer and the ruthless physicality of the software development game isn't keeping me in as tip-top shape as I had thought. Still, it was a lot of fun at the time.

Sunday was appropriately sedentary. Apparently one of the folks in Charles' church has started giving away his Redskins season tickets as a form of protest against Daniel Snyder, and this week I was the beneficiary of the spare. Rock.

I'd never been to an NFL game before. It was pretty great. The spectacle; the Skins' victory; the Eagles' loss — each sweeter than the last. Wow. Even the Philadelphia fans were great. Sure, they were detestable, just as Charles had promised, but they were detestable in exactly the right way. The ones near us were polite enough to be foreborn, the ones away from us were obnoxious enough to get kicked out, and all of them were pathetic enough to prompt truly outrageous post-game gloating from Skins fans on the Metro.

All in all, the footballiest weekend in a while. Oh yeah: feeling obligated by a Microcenter splurge on SD memory earlier that day, I took a ton of mostly uninteresting pictures. They're here, if you're interested.

nobody ever pooed in the foyer to my apartment in washington, that's for sure. (unless tommy and charles are hiding deep, dark secrets.)

gross.

UPDATE: according to a neighbor who actually saw the offending poo (i only smelled its remnants, or, er, whatever, when i came home from class around 1 pm) it looked like a "mass" that had been "scraped off of something." i am about to die of disgustedness and terrifiedness. who. does. this?!?!?

UPDATEII: best blog post ever, perhaps?

Good stuff. (via)

or, D.C. bloggers coming together in chicago. yay for hanging out with nm and rj3! boo to feeling like you're going to puke from too much old style and cheese fries.

Check out Amazon's new Mechanical Turk initiative. It seems to involve earning small payments for completing captcha-style tasks. It's broken at the moment, but this still seems like a pretty interesting development.

so. where have i been? i don't know. i'll admit it - beat reporting and the constant writing about often-non-newsworthy events (we have to come up with three stories a week, whether or not there's actually, you know, A STORY happening in our area) has worn me down a bit. i did write a hysterical article yesterday, though, on a leather fetish museum in my beat. it was pretty awesome. did you know benjamin franklin might have been a sadist?! in a related note, the museum's guide, upon learning i was from d.c., reminded me that the Mr. DC Eagle contest will be held nov. 19! get your application at the bar now!

anyway, hopefully i can take this weekend to recharge - rumor has it that ms. seeking irony is in town, so i'm looking forward to a d.c. blogger reunion with her and mr. loop. and in a couple of weeks, the brave kyle will be the first to take advantage of the magic futon, flying in for the grand total of something like 36 hours and taking the windy city (and a super furries concert) by storm. and, then, THEN, i'm home for a week for thanksgiving. HOOrah. hopefully i'll muster up the energy to write something semi-interesting before then.

Cheney-style sneer/smile not included. Also, my arm is not actually exploding into an Akira-style monstrosity. But the shirt is as pictured!

Microsoft appears to be deliberately undersupplying the Xbox 360 so that they can claim stores have all sold out of it on launch day. Way to inconvenience your customers, guys.

More complains about the paper I get for free. Well, sort of get for free. There are still rarely any copies at Mt. Vernon Square circa 8:30AM. I usually find a copy on the train instead. I like to pretend that I have a yellow-line manservant who dutifully crams a copy next to my preferred window seat at some earlier stop, but today he was derelict in his duties. Should I ever meet him, I will have to have him caned.

So I only managed to find a copy of the entertainment guide today. A few things jumped out, and since I have nothing better to blog about, here they are:

• E3: Boy George did not invent gender bending. I'm not claiming to be an authority on the intersection of pop culture and identity politics, but it seems like the word "Bowie" should have crossed someone's mind while considering this article's thesis. Also, the answer to your question, "Could 'boy/girl' be hardwired into our brain stems alongside 'friend/foe'?" is a definitive "yes". Although I don't think the relevant pathways are actually located in the brainstem.
• E5: Gwen Stefani's harajuku girl coterie is a product, not a source. They're Americans hired to pretend to be harajuku girls (info via the Governess, I think? Solid sourcing, I know).
• E11: I know that the phrase "x-cum-y" sounds all scholarly & shit, but you may want to avoid it for instances where y is equal to "tasting".

I've made the appropriate notes to your personnel file. Otherwise, keep up the good work. See you at the office Christmas party!

UPDATE: Whoops — apologies to Sommer, who points out that I probably got the faux-Harajuku tip from her.

And if anyone reading this is shopping for Charles but doesn't actually like him very much, allow me to suggest that you buy him this.

Thirteen fucking hours, if you count transit. Yeesh. Observations:

• The saying that US military bases are the only place in the world where communism works seems to be true. Also, the omnipresent aura of the 1950s gives things a distinctly Cuban feel. It was a brave aesthetic choice to subvert yourself, military-industrial complex, but I think you pulled it off. Bravo. The well-appointed skate park (really) was a particularly nice touch.


• My coworker makes almost no sense. I'll be saying something completely boring but comprehensible to the client -- "then you'll need to upload the file", for example -- and he'll loudly interject to say something like "it's like peeling a boiled egg!" And we'll all stand there, waiting until it's safe to resume making sense. But before we can he'll explain the analogy, inevitably by telling a story about his time in the navy that involves superiors or inferiors making some sort of ridiculously naive but uninteresting assumption about something. "You can't take a skiff that far out -- they've only got 100 gallons of fuel!" These stories are usually punctuated with sound effects, and they never, ever have an ending.


• The army is dysfunctional, and working through the bureacracy on this project is going to take approximately forever. But that's okay, 'cause I don't much feel like doing work anyway.


• Also encouraging: my new listen-to-ipod-instead-of-coworkers-in-the-car initiative is off to a promising start. You kids doubtless already know this, but the new Broken Social Scene is pretty damn gorgeous. Catherine recommended Rogue Wave to me, and they're pretty good too in a Shins/Nada Surf kind of way.

So what'd I miss? Are we impeaching people yet?

susan gets a visitor in THE REPUBLIC OF GEORGIA before i get ONE in CHICAGO? a major american city? with electricity? and several airports? and a visitee with a MAGIC FUTON?

for shame, puny people. i'm sure your pathetic excuses are legion. VISIT ME OR FEEL MY WRATH!

if you seriously want to warm the cockles of your heart, you should watch this video of butterstick taking his first steps. it is. so. freaking. awesome. isn't there some sort of hormone drug we can inject him with to make him stop growing? cause he's pretty much at a perfect panda size right now.

But I can't share any of it just yet (or, if things work out, ever). Sorry. Go read that source code again. That should provide some entertainment, right?

In other news, I get to go to lovely Carlisle, PA tomorrow for work. I'm to report to the Shady Grove metro at 7:15, and will be dropped off at 6. Sounds like fun, huh? Hopefully I'll be able to squeeze out some embittered blog entries during the car ride.