check out the CW's promo for season three of veronica mars here.

i'm curious. of course this promo makes me all squee becauase i can't wait for the show to come back in september, but for those of you who haven't watched the show: does this actually make you want to watch it? what emotions does it evoke? does it make you puke? does it make you want to have sex with kristen bell? does it repulse you? does it make you want to go out and buy the previous seasons on dvd?

just curious.

it's stupid for me to like it, but i am liking it anyway:

yglesias: it's pretty weird to have one's social circle
pablohoney: defined by blogs?
yglesias: yeah
pablohoney: indeed
pablohoney: i have come to embrace it though
yglesias: I feel like we're the clique of the future
pablohoney: that is my favorite thing you ever said
yglesias: maybe we should get Tom to make a group webpage and that can be our slogan

indeed.

Charles is right: the Post seems to be slowly buying up the DC music scene, no doubt for nefarious ends. Travis Morrison works for the post.com as a web developer (and consequently really ought to have permalinks in his excellent blog). Chuck Brown is doing commercials for them. Chris Richards is writing a weekly column for the Style section. And while you've probably heard that Henry Rollins is moving back to D.C., you may not know that he's doing so in order to take an office manager position in the Post classified department. In fact, I'm sure you didn't know that, since I just made it up. Still, I bet he could put a prompt and decisive end to office pen theft.

Charles is also right about this: the style section should have better music coverage. I haven't really kept up with their online chats since David Sedaris Segal (what is wrong with me?) left, but my memory of his regime is that he talked endlessly about Guided By Voices (because they let him come onstage and play a couple of times), and no other relevant bands, ever (relevant = bands I like, of course). And this was well after the world had internalized GBV's important life lessons and moved on to ignoring their ridiculously voluminous output. Perhaps the new critic(s) are better, but I haven't heard anyone saying that that's the case.

This Singles File column is a great start, however, and I wish I'd been paying attention when it started up. But now I will! And you should, too: I've gone ahead and created a scrubbed style section feed with Feed Rinse. So if you just want to get new Singles File entries in your RSS reader rather than the entire style section, subscribe to this URL.

It's already scored me a good summer album candidate — immediately after the beach, naturally: the Pink Spiders CD, which is catchy, poppy & good (although also fairly old, so you may already know and be sick of them).

Hearing it made me suddenly wonder what's become of Feable Weiner, a band that's funny, talented and exuberantly stupid, in addition to being responsible for the most fun I've ever had at the Grog & Tankard. I did the necessary five minutes of Google research, but the details remain a bit hazy (and I'm not prepared to sort through the messages left on their myspace page). They seem to currently be on tour with Cruiserweight and "local emocore band that sounds like My Chemical Romance"; they've got a newish single on iTunes and a definitely new one at their label's site ($5 for a song? no thanks, regardless of the extras); and they have a recording diary for the allegedly forthcoming 2FN HOT full length.

But they also seem to have left their old label for a smaller one, and the diary's last entry was in October '05, seemingly in the middle of the recording process (or at least before mixing & mastering). You'd think they'd want the current tour to be behind a new release, if possible. Here's hoping the album they've presumably got in the can comes out before the season's barbeque grills go back in.

the first: last night after returning from some delicious margaritas, i saw a guy struggling with a heavy-looking box and trying to get into my apartment lobby. i ran to hold the door open for him, then was, like, huh. i hope i am not letting in psycho murderer dude. so i asked him if he was moving in, because i didn't recognize him. and he said, yes, he was moving into I2, but just for the summer. and then i wept tears of joy. because I2 is the apartment above mine. and that must mean that NUN has moved out. noisy upstairs neighbor is dead, long live noisy upstairs neighbor. of course, this only happened when i have approximately 10 days of staying in my apartment left, but i'll take what i can get.

the second: we're having a party! the O street gang (that sounds terribly retarded but i'm going with it anyways) is having a party june 10. no reason, except i'm in town and am super eager to see all the lovely d.c. people in one convenient place. if you didn't get an evite, don't feel slighted - i'm just disorganized. you're certainly all invited, so just shoot me an email if you want the details.

remind me to avoid republic gardens when i come back next week.

I'm back from the beach, as you may have surmised. Photos and perhaps some recapping will come later, but at the moment I'm too exhausted. The short version is that it was a lot of fun. I showed up at work today around 1:30 saturated with sweat, dog hair and fatigue, but other than that the experience was uniformly great.

Oh, and for those interested: the EVDO worked wonderfully, but someone had an open access point very near our house, so it was unnecessary. It came in handy during the car ride back, though. The final stage of my EVDO catch & release strategy will come tomorrow.

Via Stereogum: Wayne Coyne's advice to a graduating highschool class. Part 1 is here, but not all that interesting.

This has gotten me in the mood to watch The Fearless Freaks again. What a great movie.

Prompted by a WSJ article, Bunnie, the man most frequently credited with cracking the copy protection on the original Xbox, lets us in on the work he's doing on the Xbox 360. The recent exploit that allows DVD dual layer backups of commercial games came thanks to the other star of the WSJ article — a guy named TheSpecialist (he didn't release his work, but it was replicated). Bunnie's been mostly quiet about the XB360, implying at times that he wasn't planning to really get his hands dirty with it.

Well, that didn't last. Exposing a chip's silicon and extracting the cryptographic keys hardcoded on it = BAD ASS.

woohoo! big congrats to my little brother peter, who just got his navy assignment for the next four years. the details:

he will be assigned to San Diego, CA on the USS Jefferson City, a fast Attack submarine of the Los Angeles class.

i have no idea what any of that means, but i do know san diego was one of his top choices (and, um, mine too. i wasn't going to be so excited about the prospecting of visiting him in, say, guam or connecticut). anyway, i'm so proud of him! you can see him in all his fabulousness in some flickr shots.

if you were to look up the phrase "work hard, play hard," i think this weekend thus far would be its definition.

index thus far -

hours worked since friday: dozens
hours of sleep: maybe 10
hours actually spent at my apartment in lakeview: one
pool games played: like, eight? (i'm getting better!)
times photoshop, dreamweaver and pretty much every application on my computer has made me their bitch: at least 17
beers drank: innumerable
temperature today: 90
planned swims in the lake: one if not more

happy memorial day weekend!

UPDATE: some photos.

Man, what a tease. Tycho of Penny Arcade wrote a paragraph with a reference to HilariousInjuries.com. Imagine my excitement! Sadly, it doesn't exist. Not yet, anyway. What a tease.

Well, while we're waiting for someone to monetize that idea, placate yourself with these two videos that Justin showed me earlier today.

And with that, I'm headed to the beach. But, as previously discussed, I should still be online. Beachblogging to come! Possibly!

I was talking about Google with Matt last night — more specifically, when they'll fall from grace. He thinks it might be a while, and considers the period when the Gmail Generation begins running for office a likely date for the turn, what with all the secrets that have been entrusted to them.

Personally, I think it'll be much sooner. The cracks in the facade are showing: Google Pages is a bust; Orkut is mostly a bust; Google Talk is mostly a bust; and I'm deeply dubious about Google Base ever turning into anything. Amazon S3 seems to have beaten GDrive to market. We'll see if they ever do a web-based office suite replacement, I suppose — their Writely acquisition is suggestive, but I have doubts about them being able to pull off a really compelling Word replacement in the browser.

There are plenty of failures that I'm forgetting, too. Google fans generally defend this hit-or-miss history by saying the company throws stuff at the wall and sees what sticks. But now they're having trouble with their core offering, too: from what I'm reading, their search difficulties extend beyond the Sitemaps problems I've been having. The "site:" operator hasn't been working correctly, and the debut of a new crawler codenamed "Big Daddy" has been wreaking havoc with folks' PageRanks.

The trouble in search-land seems like big news. If they can't keep a handle on the cornerstone of their business, the company will stop looking quite so much an eclectic whiz kid and begin appearing a bit more like an ADD-addled savant. Now that they're public, a loss in confidence could send their suspiciously dot-commie culture and strategy spiralling off into unpleasant places.

Or maybe I'm just feeling pissy because Gmail has been screwing up all day. Either way, I'm souring on GOOG.

cliptip's got a nice little phoenix video up that you should watch to get your friday started. the video itself is nothing too special, but i'm still obsessed wtih the band and the song is, as cliptip says "a perfect little pop song." they're just SO FRENCH.

more tunes on their myspace page, all of which are real good. yeah, pitchfork calls them "soft rock." but they mean that in a GOOD WAY. good soft rock. and i'm old.

A small victory, it's true. But I had to fight long & hard with Windows XP to get this far. The Mac has a nasty habit of quickly hanging up the connection when the Airport is simultaneously on. I think that's because OS X is clever and tries to save you modem charges when you have cheap wifi. Let's hope it's really clever and doesn't extend this policy to when you're sharing your modem connection over an ad-hoc wifi network.

It's on, people. Come see the excellent Deleted Scenes and Georgie James. And, as if that wasn't enough, there might — just might — be some temporary tattoos given away. I know!

I'll be there, although I'm afraid I won't be sticking around too long after Georgie James' set — there's morning news to be rounded up, chest colds to be fought and pre-beach packing to attend to. But although I won't be rock-and-rolling all night, it should still be a fun time. Hope to see you there.

Yeah, they've got me onboard for another season.

because i don't have enough to do as it is, i suddenly got the urge to upload all of my photos that live on the blog to flickr. just for safety's sake. the first ones to go are some taken in italy over the past three or four years - you can see the beginnings of my uploading effort here. they're pretty disorganized, though.

sigh. what did we even do before flickr?

UPDATE: there are just a crapload of new pictures up there, so you may as well click through on all of them. this one is a favorite. I LOVE TED LEO.

I'll be tuning over to the Lost season finale at 9, but for the moment Charles and I are watching the two-hour American Idol extravaganza (that doesn't include the red carpet telecast, of course). So far it's pretty awesome. Do you like... scatting? Yeah, I hate that shit too. But we got some of it!

And Live played! Remember Live? They had that song that was about abortion, maybe? Well, their lead singer and one of the American Idol contestants (possibly the one who Fuel has an embarrassing crush on) just had an epic falsetto/bald-off in their ridiculously high-heeled boots and sweaty, billowing synthetic shirts. They will presumably take alternating shifts on tour/in cryogenic suspension, supported by an increasingly cybernetic backing band, allowing rock-FM summer festival victims to enjoy "Dolphins Cry" well into the next millennium.

Also, Katherine McPhee sang with Meatloaf, who looks and sounds like he could drop dead at any moment.

And now Wolfgang Puck is brandishing a lobster at newly short-haired Kelly Pickler, who is either a masterful comic actress or simply proof that my taste in women is the product of a deeply sick misogynism. Either way, the segment is pretty fantastic.

Alright, focus: why am I writing this? To protest the travesty that's about to unfold. It seems clear that Taylor Hicks is going to win this thing, despite Katherine McPhee being talented, beautiful, and scary in exactly the right way. Now, I've got nothing against the idea of the women of America publicly proclaiming their love for a prematurely gray shlub — I'm kind of partial to the idea, actually. But not this shlub. Not this Michael McDonald-aping motherfucker. I can't take another lifetime's worth of whiteguy-soul-filled MCI commercials. I was counting on the original abomination to eventually die... or at least be imprisoned by some sort of unbreakable enchantment. Don't take that away from me, America.

But there's one normally-noxious player on the screen that I'm actually growing to tolerate: Ryan Seacrest. Sure, he's awful in every conceivable respect. But think of it this way: if it weren't him, who would it be? What's the Death Takes A Holiday scenario? I'll tell you what: it's Billy Bush. And no matter how awful Seacrest is, it seems unlikely that he'll ever become president. We need to support Ryan; if that slot opens up, it's not going to be Dunkelman taking over. It's going to President Billy and First Lady Jenna and their hemophiliac children.

Lesser of two evils, people.

clearly my blogging ability up to this point has been driven by my frenetic obsession with veronica mars and my impending move to atlanta, and now that those two topics have dried up, it has become apparent that i am a big empty vessel, devoid of any content. the media management project goes full churn for the next two weeks, stopping only for alcohol fuel along the way, so it's likely blog stuff from my end of the site will be pretty lacking. but still - random things for your discussion:

I'm heading to the beach this Memorial Day weekend, and I'm intent on bringing the internet along with me. Last year I still had a fly-by-night dialup ISP that only charged you in months when you used the service. That business model has since run its course, and I'm casting about for another way to ensure connectivity. Needless to say, the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

So I stopped by the Ver/iz/on store on my way home and signed up for EVDO service. By the numbers: $80/month, $150 for the PC5740 card and — most importantly — 14 days to return it all. I'll still get charged a prorated fee for the service I use, so it's not totally shady. Just mostly.

There's one complication, though: the card doesn't work with Macs. Well, okay, it sort of does: I've already gone through these instructions, but they mean it when they say the account has to be activated on a PC. Sadly, Charles' laptop isn't up to the task (it's always been flaky about PCMCIA cards, and refuses to recognize this one). But we have one sort-of-working PC laptop at work, and a number of EVDO cardholders who've successfully gotten their Powerbooks working with the nominally PC-only technology. So spirits remain high.

Remember when I was singing the praises of Google Sitemaps, only to quickly reconsider? Well, I'm moving from "reconsidering" to "being kind of pissed off".

For those who don't know, the idea behind the sitemap is to give Google a specially formatted file that says "here's where my content is, here's when it was updated, and here's how important each piece of it is relative to the rest". It's supposed to make the Googlebot that crawls your site work more efficiently, and give you better results. Personally, I'm sick of having old-style URLs (e.g. 001234.php) showing up for our site.

But so far the sitemap hasn't managed to do anything except banish every included URL from Google's systems entirely. Which is pretty much exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to do. I posted the following message to the Sitemaps Google Group; I'll let you know if I hear anything back.

I hope someone can help me figure out what's going on. Last week I submitted a sitemap for my blog (http://www.zunta.org/sitemap.xml). Everything seems to be working properly according to my Google Sitemaps account dashboard.

However, since submitting the sitemap every page that is in it has been excluded from the index, including many that I know used to have relatively good pageranks. I know that there have been some recent hiccups with the site: operator, but this applies to other queries as well. I wrote an SSH tutorial with the word "sshirking" in its title a while ago that got a number of links and attained a high pagerank for the unusual word "sshirking". The proper permalinked URLs used to be among the top hits; now they can't be found anywhere in the index (as proven by entering the full url as a query, e.g. http://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/2005/08/30/sshirking_work_1/index.php).

What's more, the old version of these pages -- before I changed permalink naming styles -- are still in the index. http://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/004498.php was the original URL of the above link (it now redirects to the proper URL). Only this second, less descriptive URL (which is NOT in the sitemap) is still in Google's index. It's only the files included in the sitemap that have been dropped from the index.
I tried deleting and resubmitting the map, and have patiently waited since May 18 for a new crawl to include the results. Nothing so far.

Can anyone tell me what's going on? Right now it seems that having a sitemap achieves nothing other than nuking your results from the index entirely.

It turns out that Feed on Feeds + this incredibly simple PHP XML-RPC library = your own Technorati. Well, okay, not quite — you'd still have to write your own app to crawl the internet for new blogs and add them. And I have some concerns about using the FoF RSS reader in a shared hosting environment — seems likely that those lengthy 4x/hour blow-crawling sessions are going to start getting noticed by somebody eventually.

But for now, and for a limited pool of blogs (say, all the DC-related ones), it's working pretty well. You can probably guess where this is going...

Anyway, why would I want to do this instead of just using Technorati's open API? There are a few reasons. One, to restrict the search results to a particular pool of blogs that I have control over. Two, to avoid paying Technorati money. And three, for fun. Sort of.

So, the weekend. It happened, there's no denying that. On Friday I watched basketball and drank beer with Matt, Kriston and Charles, and it was good. On Sunday I saw The Da Vinci Code with Mark and Rebecca, and it was not (although it was good to see M & R). In between I somehow managed to pick up a cold and an accompanying case of nocturnal laryngitis: for the past two days I've lost my voice right around 8pm. Yesterday it occurred somewhere during the course of the movie, so it's not from overuse.

But, my fascinating symptoms aside, the big excitement of the weekend was making the trek to the Argonaut on Saturday. This has been on my to-do list for a while. I like U Street just fine, but there's no denying that its cachet diminishes a little bit more with every new trainload of prelaw girls crammed into tubetops. Not that, you know, *I* am an authentic participant in U's cultural offerings. It's just that I, too, own a Gap card. I've been on a GSA schedule. I drink light beer, and shop at Ikea, and have strongly-held opinions about olive oil. I'm sorry. I can't help it. But I find these things just as noxious in others as you do, and consequently try to avoid doing my socializing in the presence of too many similarly callow twentysomethings.

In order to achieve that goal I'll eventually have to identify the next bar scene ahead of time, so that I can enjoy it in its unspoiled state/get a head start on ruining it. The early indications have been that H Street is going to be that scene. It's got all the signifiers: climbing real estate prices; a new music venue and several bars that are threatening to open; race-baiting WaPo gentrification articles; and, of course, the neighborhood is terrible, aka "edgy". Surely this is where one ought to go to find the city's artists, poets, intravenous drug users and other creative types. In my mind I had pictured Paris cafe culture, only with more stupid t-shirts and public urination.

So on Saturday Kriston, Matt, Ian, Valerie, Sommer, Genevieve, Jon and I — fortified with sausages and beer — ventured out from the shadow of the Ellington, hailed a couple of cabs, and headed east. "That's right by my house!" said the cabbie. He didn't seem like the indie rock type, though.

Well, we went to the Argonaut, and it was pretty good. The Sierra Nevada-ish house beer was okay, and the prices were okay, and the jukebox was okay. But there was barely anyone there on a Saturday night. The only folks out on the street seemed to be in the process of a) waiting for the bus or b) getting arrested. We had a fine time, but I don't feel particularly compelled to go back.

The X2 makes it more convenient and awesome-sounding to get there than I would have guessed. But until some more stuff opens up and some more people start going, I don't see a particularly great reason to head to Trinidad.http://www.zunta.org/tomsblog/archives/005333.php

elizabethtown really IS as bad as everyone said it was!

the only redeeming part is the use of ryan adams' "come pick me up," perhaps maybe one of my favoritest songs ever. here's a live mp3, to help make your evening prettier. cause mine sure has been ruined by this crapola film.

1. catherine finds out she'll be working out at cnn.com in atlanta this summer. promptly starts freaking out about housing on the blog.

2. matt (who, incidentally, catherine knows through kyle) spends approximately two billion hours giving catherine neighborhood/general atlanta advice.

3. catherine spends approximately two billion hours on craigslist, which yields absolutely nothing.

4. matt is kind enough to post bulletins to friendster and myspace saying his clueless internet bud could sure use a decent place to live in atlanta.

5. matt's kind friend jeanie says, hey! i just bought an enormous gorgeous house in east atlanta. i might be willing to sublet a furnished room or two for the low low price of $400 including utilities and internet for however long you need.

6. catherine says hell yes!

and that is the story of how the internet saved catherine from living in a box outside of the CNN center this summer. i never thought i'd owe anything to myspace, but turns out, you just never know!

as for my dc stint, i'll be home from friday, june 9 until probably sunday the 18th, when i might head back to chicago for a few days to pack up all my worldly possessions. hopefully i'd drive back to dc by tuesday the 20th, then drive down to atlanta friday the 23rd. good lord, 26 hours of driving in one week, here i come!

and thus hopefully ends the period of catherine posting a boring blue streak about her logistical plans for the summer. praise be!

Everyone says they're behind the curve on music (or at least running behind schedule on telling the rest of us what's good). Hah! You don't know from behind the curve. I just downloaded The National album last week — beat that! Anyway, I like it, although I'm not as enamored as others have been. Reminds me a lot of Emmett Swimming (remember those guys? I would be completely unsurprised if it turned out I knew one of their former members without realizing it). "Abel" and "Baby We'll Be Fine" are genuinely great tracks, but it hasn't really blown my mind as an album.

More 2005 releases that I'm just getting to now: the Animal Collective album seems pretty disappointing when compared to "Grass" as a single. Maybe I need to listen to it more.

Downloaded the Bell Orchestre album on the strength of their status as an Arcade Fire side project. First: no vocals. Do you like the sound of an orchestra tuning up? Do you wish you could listen to it for 53 minutes? Then this might be for you. There's one or two pretty tracks, but it's fairly repetitive. Not a huge number of ideas are on display. For AF-affiliated pop violin, you're better off with Final Fantasy.

Speaking of side projects, Sunset Rubdown is a part of Wolf Parade Enterprises. If you really, really like Wolf Parade (and I do), you might like this. If not, you probably won't.

On DCeiver's recommendation I'm listening to the new Rainer Maria, which also seems to have the National's "sounds like a particular unremarkable rock band from the late 90s, only somewhat better" thing going. K's Choice, in this case. Or perhaps Rilo Kiley (although I really like Rilo Kiley).

Really, the only genuinely great thing I've been listening to is the Figurines album, which has now taken over large parts of my frontal lobe. "All Night", "Silver Ponds" and "Other Plans" are particularly good. Who knew Danes could sound so Canadian? Anyway, you probably ought to download it.

Everybody is jumping on the Da Vinci Code movie bandwagon — Charles said he could scroll through six pages of Tivo listings tonight before he got a screen without a Dan Brown-related documentary on it. It's disgusting. But also not something I'm above.

So, two things. First, How Things Work has got a tie-in that's worth reading. Apparently Dan Brown was too busy collecting highly suspect Biblical conspiracy theories to actually do any research for the parts of the book set in the present day.

Second, here's my Da Vinci Code review/parody from way back in 2004. Everyone tells me my writing has been a big disappointment since then, so I may as well squeeze one last gasp of relevance out of it.

The Da Vinci Code
Big thumbs down. The only interesting aspect of this book is the conspiracy-theory theology, for which the author can really only claim credit as an editor. I can't say whether any of it is plausible or not — I'll leave that to biblical scholars and that crazy guy at the farmer's market from whom Catherine and I tried to buy goat cheese one time, who wouldn't shut up about Mary Magdalene, the Holy Grail, and the Divine Right of Kings. His cheese was good, but not crazy good.

What I can tell you, though, is that Brown gets a bunch of other stuff wrong, which doesn't bode well for the viability of the biblical mumbo-jumbo. For instance: calling "left brain" thought "irrational"?! Okay Dan, the left/right brain thing is a horrible oversimplification, but if you're going to use it then at least realize that the left hemisphere is credited with language and LOGIC. Also, public key encryption is not the same thing as putting a secret message in a locked container. Sorry. Not even close. In fact, that's not even encryption, dumbass! I can't bear to talk about his magical solar powered hard disk voice recorders.

I'm too upset to continue. Judge for yourself. I've helpfully supplied a lengthy excerpt. Implied spoilers ahead.

"Robert!" Sophie gasped. "I've found something!"

Robert Langdon strode across the old church floor. Resplendent in his tweed jacket, Langdon looked every bit the respected Ivy League academic that his plodding intellect and limited vocabulary belied. With his smolderingly generic white guy good looks, those who wrote about him were frequently prompted to shamelessly compare him to Harrison Ford, although if Mr. Ford's schedule precluded his participation in such a comparison, Michael Douglas would probably also be okay.

"What is it, Sophie?"

"My... My grandfather... He's left us another clue!"

He certainly had. There, on the floor below him, were ten carved letters, which no one through the centuries, except perhaps a few hack thriller writers, had ever noticed.

CKUF HET EPOP

"What does it mean?" breathed Sophie, breathlessly. Sophie's demeanor was unusually flustered. Well, probably unusually. Actually, it wasn't entirely clear what her demeanor was usually like. She was definitely a woman, though, and attractive. Oh yeah! Also she was a cryptologist. It has to do with codes or something.

"Isn't it obvious?" smirked Langdon. His training was coming in handy now. Yes, he thought, symbology is a real academic discipline.

"It's perfect, Sophie. Your grandfather was a genius. He's perfectly summarized the beliefs of the secret society to which he belonged. All in this simple statement.

"You see," he continued, "CKUF seems to be an archaicized variant of cuff — by the way, English is conveniently the de facto language for ancient materials relating to the Grail for some reason. Most likely your grandfather included double velar stop phonemes knowing that Hebrew possessed no C equivalent, and Latin no K. Genius!

"HET is more puzzling — until one considers that the Church has persecuted all ideas associated with the concept of left, or Sinister, due to its association with the sacred feminine! Your grandfather omitted the S as a poignant inside joke — echoing and decrying the Church's shameful legacy! What genius!

"HET then becomes HEST — as in Hester Prynn, of The Scarlet Letter. CUFF HESTER. What better symbol of the Priory of Scion's struggle against religious misogyny than this bold, bumper-sticker-ready summation of the ages-old persecution of the assertion of female sexuality? It's genius!"

"And EPOP?" asked Sophie.

"Most likely a nonsense word, designed to throw off Grail seekers. Your grandfather was obsessed with duality, Sophie, and unlikely to be interested in phrases containing more than two words. He was a genius, Sophie."

"Duality? I don't understand."

With that, Robert embarked on another lengthy discourse into the meaning of ancient symbols, frequently accidentally slipping out of dialogue and into tracts of wild theorizing from an unaccounted-for narrator. None of the words were too big, though, so nobody noticed.

"And that's why," Robert concluded, "Any story involving men and women, opposing forces, or objects that are more round than they are pointy, is a secret code for how Jesus hit that Magdalene shit."

His words echoed through the impressive space of Westminster Abbey, its grand expanses dwarfing the scene below, although if using a location shoot to capture the scene was too expensive it could probably be simulated pretty well with bluescreens.

"I see," said Sophie, staring into Robert's eyes. She was conflicted: in the face of the raw sexual potency of a Harvard academic any woman would have a hard time keeping her lust in check. Yet Sophie sensed that showing her attraction now might hurt her chances with Robert later. Men — and in particular men who were screenwriters — didn't seem to like it when there was any romantic groundwork laid prior to women throwing themselves at bookish hero types upon the conclusion of their adventures. Still, those symbologist eyes...

"Tally Ho!" Their reverie was broken. Sir Leigh Teabing made his way across the church toward them. "As you may recall, I'm dreadfully eccentric and British," Teabing continued, his voice echoing off the walls as if it had been recorded on a soundstage and the reverb added later.

"Leigh," growled Langdon, upset at being interrupted. "Now is not the time. Need I remind you that we're being hunted by an unknown evil mastermind who seems to know our every move? And that in the course of our adventure we have met only three or four characters, half of whom we already know to be bad guys?"

"Righto!" replied Teabing, hurrying off nervously. "Cheers!"

Suddenly, Sophie gasped. "Holy fucking shit, Robert!" she exclaimed. "I think this might be an anagram!"

"Another one?"

who is responsible for this?

Hmm. Remember a day or two ago when I mentioned some quick & easy ways to generate a Google Site Map for your MT/WP/Drupal site? Well, you might want to hold off on that — all of a sudden we seem to have dramatically fewer entries in Google. I'm having trouble finding blog posts that I know were available before.

Hopefully this is just a case of Google clearing our their old entries prior to picking up the new ones from the site map. I'm taking some steps to make the sitemap more accessible, then I'll give it a few days to settle down. But right now this seems like a pretty bad way to optimize your site.

i may have been unhappy with the direction the season finale took grey's anatomy, but this video they filmed from this week's upfronts is basically comedy gold. (via)

Saw this on BoingBoing yesterday and meant to blog it, but then didn't: FeedRinse is a pretty neat idea. Put your various RSS subscriptions in, combine them into channels (if you so desire), then set up filters on various criteria.

Why would you want to do this? Maybe because you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about when I write about tech stuff, and don't care to learn. You could filter out all of the tech posts from our feed and just see the others. Or you could just view posts by Catherine. Or add richer keyword filtering to a Craigslist feed.

Sadly, their site is a little too slick for its own good — in order to keep up with the guy's 19 or so different blogs, I tried to put together a "Kriston" channel. Unfortunately, the dynamic feed-adding process seems to have a bug; when I added new blogs I'd get empty select boxes instead of meaningful UI elements. Oh well.

But it's still a good idea, and probably works just fine in IE or Safari or Camino or Opera or something. And the feed filtering stuff works fine, I believe — it's just the channel-creation feature that's broken. Once they get the kinks sorted out, this will be the kind of thing that ends up being unepectedly useful on a regular basis.

so i just registered for the 2006 marine corps marathon.

*shrug*

don't worry, this time around i won't be trying to bilk you all out of $2,000 for cancer.

When Google Sitemaps came out I didn't really bother to check it out. Custom-authoring some arcane XML format in order to support one (admittedly gigantic) private company? No thanks.

Well, it's been a while, and folks have gone ahead and done all the hard work for us. So if you want to be sure Google can find everything on your site (and that it'll know when you've updated it), you might want to follow one of these sets of instructions:

• Movable Type (ignore the bit at the end about URL encoding; just submit the sitemap here)
• Wordpress (submits it for you)
• Drupal (ditto)

just fyi: it looks like UPN will be rerunning most if not all of season 2, so this would be a good time for those of you who've seen season 1 to catch up. the first episode was already tonight, but you could torrent that if you wanted to. so, yeah. tuesdays, 9pm!

i just saw an ad for a movie starring keanu reeves and sandra bullock, who play star-crossed lovers, one of whom appears to be...a time traveler.

clearly, the movie industry has found the solution to sagging ticket sales and apathetic audiences.

well, looks like i have a 99% sure subletter. phew! too bad i totally ignored the issue of NUN. i'm an evil person. i've also got a place to live in DC in the fall as well. (i'm really just sticking around there to see if the balcony will burn down again.) all that's left is finding a place in atlanta, which is proving much more hellish than i would have liked. thankfully, i have atlanta encyclopedia matt at my disposal, which has already proved helpful. for now, two out of three ain't bad.

sweet. via tvguide:

Straight from the horse's mouth, Rob Thomas just e-mailed me to confirm that Veronica Mars has been renewed for a third season. The show got a 22-episode order that, depending on ratings, can be reduced to 13. Very reliable sources, meanwhile, are also telling me that One Tree Hill will be back and that Everwood is, in fact, dead. Talk about injustice.

now if only we could guarantee the first three episodes 7 million viewers apiece, i'd be a happy lady.

Alright, it's been a week. How's LastCall holding up?

No huge surprises. I guess I'm a little surprised that more people are using the opentable capability than the movie and music features, but it's pretty close.

Traffic might seem low, but I'm pretty happy with this level. People are using the service, but it's got a lot of spare capacity. And, more importantly, this level of use seems unlikely to provoke the ire of my mobile carrier.

I've gotten requests for a few more movie theaters and two reports of "no trains" being incorrectly returned by the metro component, but otherwise no real complaints. I'll be trying to address those two items — particularly the bug — as soon as I can.

the northwestern ladies soccer team, um, hazes. (not really SFW.) and is suspended. via.

first tv thought: the good - veronica mars was picked up for next season! the bad - it was only for 13 episodes. this is a classic sign that if the first few episodes don't perform well, the rest of the season won't be ordered. in fact, if the first few episodes don't do well, we might not even see all 13. i am relatively calm now as i type this, but i am telling you: if YOU DON'T WATCH VERONICA MARS THIS COMING SEASON I WILL GO APESHIT ON YOU AND YOU WILL BE VERY SORRY. IF THE SHOW DOES NOT DO WELL ENOUGH IN THE RATINGS I WILL PERSONALLY COUNT ALL OF YOU, ALL OF THE ZUNTA READERS, RESPONSIBLE, AND I WILL FLIP MY SHIT, AND THE BLOG WILL BECOME RAMBLING GIBBERISH. I WILL ALSO TIE TOMMY UP IN THE CRAWLSPACE SO NO LOGICAL THOUGHTS CAN BE POSTED TO THE BLOG WHATSOEVER. TAKE THIS AS THE FIRST OF MANY WARNINGS, MOTHERFUCKERS.

ahem. emily and i chatted this afternoon about a possible plan to take the first episode of season one coast to coast - launch an online campaign, if you will. our philosophy is that if you see that episode, you will be hooked. beyond hooked. this happened to my brother; today, michelle told me it happened to her. if i could think of a good enough contest, i would offer as first prize the season 1 dvd. i would go out and buy it and give it to the winner. so any thoughts on that, and i promise to make it happen.

tv thought 2: the grey's anatomy season finale #1 really kind of bit. i'm in the middle of #2 right now, and it is better, but the izzie/denny storyline drives me absolutely bonkers. it might be the stupidest piece of shit i've ever seen on television. alan says:

I'm not sure I have ever laughed at hard as an intentionally dramatic moment on a TV show as I did during Izzie's crying jag to convince Denny to let her mess up his heart. That entire subplot underlined everything I've grown to hate about this show and most of its characters. It's annoying enough when, say, Meredith and Cristina are gossiping about their boyfriends in the middle of a bomb scare, but for Izzy to risk two lives (Denny's and the legitimate recipient) because she's getting frustrated at how long it's taking for Denny to get a heart? George should have brained her with a bedpan as soon as he realized what she was up to. Add to that George scolding Callie for daring to speak the truth to poor, fragile Meredith, plus the shooting of Burke, one of the few characters I still like unreservedly, and my patience is really being tried here.

for this, she risks her career? SHE'S NEVER EVEN HAD SEX WITH HIM. the sex could be terrible! and if it's terrible THERE IS NO POINT.

tv thought 3: i am excited for studio 60 on sunset strip. watch a commercial here. i have to admit, i kind of have a grosscrush on timothy busfield. gross because he's really kind of ugly and fat. crush because of danny concannon.

UPDATE: as far as grey's anatomy, on the other hand, the song they played as denny wheeled into the operating room, hopefully to a painful death, was pretty. i found out is called "look at her face" by a band called the coral sea. some mp3s are here. if you wanted to d/l "look at her face" you can pay for it (pshaw) here.

UPDATE II: did georg really just say "i figured one night with you was better than never" ?!?!?!?!? THE FUCK. this show has come a long way since the awesome bomb episodes.

UPDATE III: on one hand, while izzie's storyline with denny made me want to puke and roll around in it, i still think katherine heigl is gorgeous and an amazing comedic actress. just please don't make her fall in love with any more heart patients.

UPDATE IV: i'm sorry. sorry. i know that frequent updates reload the post in your rss reader, and it's annoying. but i must. SERIOUSLY?!? A PROM STORYLINE? and who gives a fuck that the dog has cancer? sheesh. on the other hand, i would like to add that whoever plays the nazi and alex karev are severely underutilized. i would watch a show with those two characters all day long.

UPDATE V: i'll admit it. the ending made me cry. i'm such a pussy.

Edition two of the F.W. Thomas Performances is tonight at the Warehouse Theater. I don't know any of the acts this time around, except for T.M. Lowery, who was a highlight of the last show. But I have been told that the event is being held in a larger and presumably more accessible performance space than the last one. So if a fire breaks out during the show, you're less likely to die a horrible, agonizing death. How's that for an endorsement? This is probably where I should also note that it only costs $3.

I intend to go, but that plan may be short-circuited. Charles and I both came perilously close to starving to death this weekend, so some emergency grocery shopping might be in order instead.

is it wrong of me to not to follow up with people who are interested in my craigslist listing for my apartment because they can't spell words like "fill" and, um "apartment"?

or, why i like my dunkin donuts cashier.

scene: 7:30am, monday morning, dunkin donuts kiosk inside of the davis el stop in evanston.

catherine: hi, can i have a large coffee with cream and sugar, please?
cashier: did you want cream and sugar or sugar and cream?
catherine: um. (pause) excuse me?
cashier: cream and sugar or sugar and cream?
catherine: um, oh. (believing in her early morning stupor that there is a difference) cream and sugar, i guess?
cashier: busts out laughing.
catherine: (lightbulb) dude. it is WAY too early for this kind of stuff.

Yesterday I had my LASIK appointment. I'll go ahead and ruin the suspense: I'm not blind.

The whole thing happened very quickly. I showed up, put my signature on a consent form and an uncomfortably large Amex receipt, and was whisked back in to the first of two staging areas. A woman named Zoya walked me through the contents of of my postoperative kit:

No rubbing your eyes, keep your eyes shut in the shower, don't wear eye makeup — "accidentally" saying this is apparently Zoya's little joke to the male patients, and when I didn't say anything she had to stop and point out how funny her gaffe was. Sorry for missing my cue, Zoya. I guess you don't get a lot of patients who're Cure fans.

As you can see, the kit contains instructions, some Tylenol PM for the postoperative nap, a slightly nicer pair of shitty sunglasses than the last one, steroid & antibiotic eyedrops, some artificial tears, and a totally awesome transparent mask for sleeping. I like to imagine it makes me look like Richard Hamilton, but so far the only real feedback I have is Charles bursting into laughter when I stumbled to the kitchen without taking it off.

Eventually I was whisked to a new antechamber. This one had all of the doctor's degrees in it, along with his various awards (which consisted exclusively of testaments to how many thousands of patients he had treated). The idea was clearly to set the patient at ease, if only by awing him with the facility's framing budget. But hey, the doc went to UVA for both undergrad and med school! Alright! It was good to know that any potential eye mutilation would come at the hands of a guy who's thrown up in the same places I have.

But the most fascinating part of the room was this:

Presumably setting 10 is only used for particularly severe medical emergencies.

Eventually the doctor came in, brimming with self confidence. He prompted me for questions — I'd already asked his staff everything I really wanted to know, but after my first query he said "alright, that was a good one! C'mon, gimme another", I felt I ought to comply. Then he said, "Alright buddy, let's go knock this thing out." He was very Top Gun. In other contexts this kind of guy would've bugged the hell out of me, but here I found it weirdly comforting. I guess I want American Supermen to be the ones manning lasers of all sorts. Even if they're pointed at my eyeballs.

So, the actual operation. At this point I'd been well-briefed, so there weren't many surprises. And the doctor narrated everything, which was also reassuring. They put in some drops, then some more. They taped one eye shut, then taped my other eye's lashes down to keep it open. Then some sort of wire device went in to really keep it open. It wasn't particularly uncomfortable, though, and everything happened too close to my eye for me to be able to see how evil-looking the tool was.

Then something else went on there — I don't know if this was the keratome or just something to hold my eye in place. But the doctor said for the nurse to turn the suction on, and I started to feel pressure (strangely, it felt like much more pressure for the second eye — the doctor said this was common). Then everything went dim. It was a fairly unsettling effect, but the alternative would have been worse, because this was when they made the corneal flap. There was a whirring, then the suction was turned off. Vision returned, blurrily. Then the doctor moved the flap out of the way, making things much, much blurrier.

At this point the blinking red light that I'd been told to train my sight on took up about half of my visual field, and it was hard to know whether to just keep my eye still, focusing on the part where I was looking, or to try to center on its middle. I settled for the former as the laser went off, and the doctor seemed satisfied enough.

This was the critical part, I guess, because the doctor's narration sped up. "Focus on the light, focus on the light, ignore the smell, focus on the light..."

Ignore the smell? What smell? Oh, right: the smell of BURNING EYEBALL. Note: scent analysis reveals that eyeballs are made out of hair.

Then it was over. They put the flap back and told me to close my eye. A shield was taped over the eye. And then they did the same thing for the other one.

A quick post-op check on the flaps' positions, and then Charles gave me a ride home. Needless to say, everything looked weird. The effect was like looking through lightly frosted glass. There were hints of new sharpness, but the halo effect coming off every light source made it hard to make anything out.

Things are better today, but it'll be a while longer before my vision completely settles down. Right now I still see a fairly strong halo effect coming off of all illumination sources (and yeah, I know it may persist to some extent). It's kind of like living inside a Barbara Walters special.

The worst part was waking up about 4 hours into an 8-hour dose of Tylenol PM when my neighbor decided to start lathing some metal (apparently). My eyes were hard to open, they hurt, and I felt like hell. Things were better once I got some more sleep, though.

So, complications? Nothing too bad. My eyes started feeling a little itchy about an hour ago. I mentioned the halo thing. And I'm pretty sensitive to light. Oh, and there's this:

But they say if I just stick with the ruby quartz eyedrops everything will work out.

ain't nothing finer than spending a sunday on campus, mucking around with dreamweaver. though it's not as if my day would necessarily be better spent outside, since chicago has been in a kind of 40 days, 40 nights, 40 degrees scenario for the past week and a half.

anyway, happy mother's day to mine and yours! with the help of my awesome mom today, i figured out a way i can get to the wedding, move my furniture, attend my little sister's high school graduation, and spend at least a couple of weeks in d.c. this summer.

that said, if any of you all have any sort of atlanta expertise, especially in regards to where the cnn building actually is and what neighborhoods are near it that might be good to live in, and whether or not a car is necessary, i'd love to hear from you.

back to the css! woo!

hurrah! the only america's next top model as far as i'm concerned, elyse, has packed her bags and moved from hong kong to milan. this is wonderful for me because now, instead of photo-documenting the atrociously-named-and-sounding food and other products distributed in HK, she can do the same in italy! and trust me, they've got some weird ones. just for example, check out these two posts. wuao! she may as well be shopping at dear old eurospin or the winner (weiner) bar.

ahh, one more post. i'm all into the radiohead youtube today. via greenplastic, here is a sweet 13-year-old video of radiohead's performance at the mtv beach house, performing "anyone can play guitar." check out ed's awesome pirate shirt. and thom's hair. the horror. still a pretty great song.

the logistics of this summer are going to bite me in the ass, i can feel it. i write down the following not at all because i think it would make an entertaining blog post, but more for my mental sanity, which is slowly unravelling.

so this is where the schedule stands thus far:

can anyone point me towards a torrent for "the office" finale? it's called "casino night," i think, and i must watch it!

tommy and the rest of the echoditto crew are celebrating their company anniversary by going up to annapolis and racing boats, i think, amongst other sailor-like activities. i believe eating crabs will be involved as well. and it looks like tommy is appropriately-dressed for the occasion, as emily has just documented:

heh.

this "arpeggi" song is not half bad.

of course, now that i won't be here in chicago when radiohead is playing, it doesn't matter that i don't have tickets. doesn't look like they're coming close to atlanta, either. sigh.

the cleaning lady hates me.

my life is sad.

as many of you know, i am a big water drinker. i can't imagine the actual ounces of water i go through in a day. my water bottle is my savior. otherwise, i would be paying $1.25 every time i wanted a new bottle. as it is, i save my water bottle and refill it constantly at the fountain. it is important to me. i am saving the environment along with money.

but the cleaning folks always throw my water bottle away in this classroom. this is in spite of the fact that: 1) i put it on the little shelf above my computer, which to me designates DO NOT TOUCH and 2) stuff it in my mug so tightly that you could not extract it without a lot of effort.

last night i grew weary. i had been in the classroom from 8:30 until 8:30, and if my effing water bottle got thrown away again, i was going to lose it. my friend suggested taking one of the little placards that rests on the table and says "DO NOT THROW AWAY: NIE ODRZUCA" (polish version) and wrapping my water bottle in it. which i proceeded to do. with tape. so, to recap: my water bottle was on my little shelf, stuffed in my mug, AND wrapped in a note that said do not throw away in multiple languages. how else to make it clearer?

of course, when i arrived this morning, the bottle, it was gone. i can't imagine this was done out of anything other than spite. cleaning lady, IT IS ON. my next step: glueing my water bottle to ceiling. try to throw that away, biatch!

just fyi, there is a likelihood that i will be coming to you straight from hottlanta this summer, as i just got offered a fellowship with cnn.com there. this is both exciting and terrifying in many ways. more details to come! the one for-sure positive: the stress diet i've been running on since the beginning of the quarter just racheted itself up a few dozen notches. my goal of losing 10 pounds for a june wedding is now attainable! thank goodness for the little things.

Yes, it's true. I dove back into Lost last night. Sommer had missed last week's episode too, so she came over and, along with Charles, myself, some beers and a bit of morningroundupering, caught up on what's been going on on the Island.

Short answer: serious shit. They revealed another research station! They killed two characters — and ones whose backstories we were merely somewhat tired of, instead of totally fucking bored by. They inserted a twist! And Ana Lucia and Sawyer played several variations of "hide the pistol". There was lots of stuff going on, and at a pretty good decent pace. I was pleased.

I was even more excited to see that the powers that be have started placing fake Hanso Foundation commercials in the middle of Lost's regular ad breaks. "Paid for by ABC" flashed in the corner of the first one ever-so-briefly, but otherwise it seemed like a low-budget but generally plausible commercial for one of those organizations that doesn't actually sell, make or do anything, yet still feels compelled to purchase TV spots. At the end: dial 1-877-HANSORG for more information.

"Wow!" I thought to myself. "Now that's a good use of Asterisk."

Since we were still working off the Tivoed copy of last week's episode, the phoneline wasn't jammed. We put it on speaker and heard some floaty music and instructions to dial our party's extension or select another option. We hit 1 for general information and got a looping clip of somebody speaking French. Hmm. Pretty intriguing. I mashed the star key a bit and somehow ended up hearing a rap extolling the virtues of Sprite. Er. Okay. Somebody has to pay the bills for this sort of unconventional storytelling, I suppose.

Then it was time for this week's episode. As I said, pretty satisfying. And they ran the same commercial again, except this time the momentary flash said "Paid for by Sprite", and they showed a URL along with the phone number: www.sublymonal.com. If you follow that link you'll find it contains a flash animation of a bunch of TVs showing static, arranged around the word "OBEY".

First of all: this is not a great site for a nonprofit, Mr. Hanso. It's flash-based, there's no action, and the navigation could use some work. You're never going to build your list this way.

Second: it all started falling into place. I think Sommer may have been the first one to put it together. SubLYMONal.com. As in "the only one with lymon (dot com)". And what should we be obeying, anyway? Our thirst, perhaps?

This does not sit well. I don't mind being sent down blind alleys, but I don't expect to find soda machines at the end of them. This ad campaign demonstrates that the show's producers not only don't have a grand vision for the show, they also don't particularly give a shit about whatever it might turn out to be. I fully expect the Others' next onslaught to be warded off by the sight of a CapitalOne card.

I find this particularly crappy because I was completely and totally ready to jump back onboard the Lost bandwagon. As Catherine mentioned, I even decided to waste some time in Illustrator and make a vector version (PDF) of this bitmap of the Dharma Initiative logo. I figured it looked kind of cool, and might be good for some money on SpreadShirt. But after the Sprite Revelation I've pretty much lost interest in the project, to what I'm sure is Catherine's great relief.

a brief conversation that illustrates why i probably will never come around to lost again:

Thomas: they've started running hanso found. ads during the lost commercial breaks, which is cool
me: no! it's uncool!
that's the show's problem
they spend time thinking up shit like hanso fdtn ads
Thomas: yeah
me: instead of figuring out what's actually going on
Thomas: well, I'm gonna put a hanso found. shirt on spreadshirt
but in general I agree
me: you are?
10:48 PM Thomas: sure
I want one
me: you're going to make a hanso foundation shirt?
to wear in public?
Thomas: sure, well it's subtle
10:49 PM just this one
http://lostpedia.com/wiki/Image:Swan_logo_closer.jpg
I think it's understated
and I'm gonna do a black print on an already dark color, like maroon
10:50 PM hopefully only other weirdos will notice
me: tommy
that is the dorkiest thing i've ever heard
10:51 PM Thomas: come on!
you don't want one?!
me: i'm seriously embarrassed for you
Thomas: awww
I just like the design
me: uh huh
Thomas: haha
well now that you say it, it does sound bad

this is lost's major problem. 1) they spend more time on commercials than the show and 2) they inspire people to MAKE T-SHIRTS IN HOPE OF T-SHIRTLY COMMUNICATING WITH OTHER LOST NERDS, except there are approximately 7.8 million people who are lost nerds, so that's going to be a lot of t-shirt communicating.

i know i don't watch lost anymore, so i can't actually speak accurately to the show's terribleness in terms of stupid, totally pointless stuff like, uh, plot, or character development. but the cripe. i'm not past admitting that i will probably start watching again next season, because i hope now that JJ abrams is done with his mi3 duties, he can come back full-time. but i still retain serious doubts.

An interesting insight from a Slashdot thread on the Nintendo Wii and its prospects, made by a gentleman named John Hu/mmel, aka "Dark Paladin" (awesome):

it would appear that Nintendo has a lot of 3rd party support time time around, which made me think of why, and then something that Ubisoft president commented on made me figure it out.

Long story short, he made some less then flattering remarks about the PS3 — how it just ups the power. The same could be said for the 360. But that's no the issue for a publisher; for a publisher, all of that extra power and HD requirements goes into cost. Now, a development team needs even bigger hardware, a bigger graphics and sound team to get the same game out, which now increases the cost of the game by a large margin - say from $1 million to $7-$10 million. For a publisher, that means increased risk, reduced margins, and relying ever more on "certain" hits (which can vanish if something goes wrong — look at the Tomb Raider franches, and what they've had to do to get it back).

Nintendo is offering publishers something more than just a gimmick: they're offering them reduced price. Look at "Brain Age" - developed, tested, and ready for market in 90 days, and it hardly needed a graphics team. Since the Wii uses really Gamecube development systems with more power, that's an easy transfer of knowledge, which is why I predict that for the first year, Wii games will look pretty much like Gamecube games, maybe a little smoother.

But for the publisher, once you get past the controller issue, it's reduced cost, reduced time, reduced risk over time. If the Wii takes off at all, it may be that publishers wind up favoring it if for no other reason than it makes them more money over time.

Another commenter follows up:

Your numbers are a little off. My understanding is that a XBox/PS2/Gamecube title costs $8 - $12 million to produce (with some AAA titles going into the 20s), and last I heard HD games were expected to at least double the costs. (Is it any wonder publishers are afraid to take risks with money like that involved?)

...

Yes, sure, it might take more people to program a game for such a complex controller, but you aren't going to need 200 people churning out high res textures that will only be appreciated by people with HDTVs. Nintendo knows what it's doing.

Makes sense to me.

Just got back from Mission Impossible 3. I know, I know, don't support the Scientologists, etc. I'm sorry. I'm a sucker for high-tech heist movies. Also, strictly following that dictum would rule out large parts of Hollywood.

The verdict on the movie: indisputably loud. And it sort of made sense. It's not very satisfying, but not disappointing either. A solid entry in a personality-free whizbang franchise.

Anyway, I probably wouldn't mention it at all except at one point the inevitable CIA mole explains that he's behaving the way he is — allowing a dangerous arms dealer to roam free and complete a sale to terrorists — in order to provide justification for a major military campaign in the middle east, which will eliminate the "real enemy" and allow democracy to flourish. It's ripe for being turned into strained analyses of the new anti-neocon zeitgeist, or a segue into a review of the recent Zarqawi revelations. Surely somebody can find the courage to take the afternoon off work, go to the movies, and write up What It All Means for America.

the episode is only halfway over, and i am already prepared to say it is HIGHLY FUCKING AMAZING.

thoughts to come.

UPDATE: amanda and i summing up our reactions so far:

pablohoney: AAAAAAAAAAAH
mads t r e t c h: WHAT/
mads t r e t c h: oh jesus
pablohoney: AHHHHHHHHHHH
pablohoney: AHHHHHHHHHHHHH
mads t r e t c h: lkasjdf;lkasjdf;lkkasdjf
mads t r e t c h: ;alskdjf;laskdjf
...
pablohoney: AHHHHHHHHHHHHH
pablohoney: i AM DYING
mads t r e t c h: can't... breath....
pablohoney: WAIT
...
pablohoney: OH NO OH NO OH NO
mads t r e t c h: oh my god
mads t r e t c h: a'ldksfjal;sdkfj;alskdfjas;ldfkj
pablohoney: what
pablohoney: the
pablohoney: fuck
mads t r e t c h: ok, now can't breath and am crying
...
pablohoney: EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
pablohoney: EWWWWWWWWWWWW
pablohoney: AHHHHHHHH
pablohoney: EWW
mads t r e t c h: EWE
...
pablohoney: ahhhhhhhhh
pablohoney: ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
mads t r e t c h: OOOOO WAAAAA/ ]]

UPDATE II: if this show does not get renewed, i will kill every single one of you fuckers who has not been watching it.

SPOILERS BELOW!

Awesome:

Dear Member:

This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Major League Baseball claiming that this material is infringing:

Bird Getting Hit By Baseball: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPgEpQNHJDw

For the record, I believe that exploding birds are a part of our shared culture and should automatically fall under the fair use doctrine.

Bonus punchline: the only other clip I've ever posted to YouTube is an excerpt from a copyrighted DVD. It remains happily un-C&Ded.

Alright, here's another stab at a legitimate complaint about OS X: my copy can no longer play Flash movies. Every time Flash launches on a webpage it apparently tries to connect to my Bluetooth headset (which is nowhere nearby and hasn't been used in months). I then get a "Bluetooth Audio Failed" message and playback stops — and can't be started! Argh. This despite my decidedly non-headset-oriented settings in Preferences and Flash's settings.

This guy seems to be the only other person on the internet having this problem, and he hasn't got a solution. It's pretty goddamn irritating — I'm missing out on YouTube-based hilarity on a daily basis.

good news! via julie, it appears that the red cross has loosened some of their restrictions regarding who can and cannot donate blood. i was informed a year or two ago that i could never donate blood again because i had lived in europe for a year and could potentially have teh mad cow. and i was sad. but it looks like now, unless i am mistaken, i can donate all the delicious blood that i want. more worrisome: even though i must have donated near ten times now, i can NEVER REMEMBER MY BLOOD TYPE. what's up with that?

Today is E3, when we'll supposedly learn some more details surround Nintendo's new console and the plans of the Big Three in general. Already revealed: the PS3's $500 price tag — and that's just for the entry-level model without wifi or HD support. Yikes.

I sort of had a PSOne in college — a roommate owned it, but I chipped it — and it was a pretty fun, but not great system. I've always had a grudge against Sony's offerings, though, on the basis of their insanely bad controller. I think they just shot themselves in the foot pretty seriously.

Meanwhile, I'm getting more and more excited for the Nintendo Revolution Wii. Everytime I look at that new controller I get a little more excited.

UPDATE: NYT coverage of the Wii can be found here. In general the various gaming news outlets are saying Nintendo hit it out of the park with their demo, It's getting very favorable comparisons to Sony's presentation. which is being treated as something of a flop (largely because of the huge price tag for the PS3). No word on price for the Wii, but they've previously pledged it'll clock in at under $300. No release date either, other than the disappointingly vague and far away "Q4".

Well, my SMS project has finally been loosed on an unsuspecting world. And yeah, it's for DCist. Go check out the announcement message here — it's got all the details on what the service does and how to use it.

My dirty little secret? Throughput is an unimpressive 4-6 outbound messages per minute. If things don't crash horribly under the announcement traffic, I'll be very surprised. But there's nothing I can do but dive in and see how it handles load. Once it breaks I'll start sorting it all out.

all theories are just the product of my feeble brain, and they are totally spoiler-free. i am uninformed and naive.

UPDATE: michael ausiello says:

Words cannot express the awesomeness of this episode. There are so many twists and turns that your head will be spinning off its axis. (Note: Have some Kleenex handy. You'll need it.) And the excitement won't end with the closing credits. In tomorrow's thrilling Ask Ausiello (which goes live at midnight), I'll have an exclusive interview with Rob Thomas featuring answers to many of the big questions raised in the finale. Mr. Veronica Mars will also offer up scoop/prattle/poop on (fingers, toes crossed) next season!

UPDATE II: and here's a bit from today's chicago tribune:

The "Veronica Mars" (8 p.m., UPN-Ch. 50) season finale is a real twister. And there are twists within the twists, as the show finally resolves the season-long mystery that has occupied the young sleuth of the title and her father.

The episode came with a list as long as your arm of things that reviewers should not mention. So, here's one thing that can be said: Kristin Bell and Jason Dohring, the star-crossed friends and sometime lovers at the heart of the show, are the two finest young actors working in television.

Dohring in particular has masterfully navigated a tricky part all year; his character, Logan Echolls, could easily be a bitter, one-note quipmeister. But in this episode, and especially in the recent episode "Look Who's Stalking," he showed an enormous range of emotions, from romantic yearning to confused regret, often without saying much of anything at all.

It's acutely painful to sound like a network suit, but it might be nice if next year's ongoing mystery did not require a PhD in Veronica-ology. Even the most faithful watcher of the show had to have been confused at least a few times in the course of this season's bus-crash mystery.

Harry Hamlin, by the way, gets another juicy turn in the season finale; his parody of an over-the-hill hambone actor is dead-on and quite enjoyable. As Mac, Tina Majorino supplies steady support, as always. Even Steve Guttenberg is surprisingly good as the increasingly sleazy mayor of Neptune.

And it would be impossible to imagine "Mars" being anywhere near as great as it is without the wonderfully understated Enrico Colantoni as the young detective's grounded, fiercely protective dad.

Ah, Monday night. Broadcast wasteland. Still, there are highlights:

• David Blaine: Drowned Alive seems unlikely to be able to live up to its title. Still, I'm transfixed by the man's overpowering lack of charisma. Unfortunately Stuart Scott, a talented professional broadcaster, is on hand to emcee the whole thing, lending the proceedings an inappropriate air of competence. Right now he's interviewing Actual Yale Doctor about the horrors Blaine has faced during the past week (spent immersed in a sphere of water in Lincoln Center). Skin breakdown! Fluid loss! And, most disconcertingly, briefly elevated liver enzyme activity that began to correct itself before the big finale, but is still being used to imply that death was/is imminent. Paging Morgan Spurlock! Mr. Spurlock to the front desk! Someone's stealing your bit!

  ALSO GREAT: They're using flesh-colored wind guards on their headset mics. It makes everyone look like they've got enormous goiters on their faces. My man Stu was smart enough to say no to this idiotic scheme, however: he's got the black wind guard, so it just looks like he has a huge, cancerous mole. I told you he was a pro.

  POTENTIALLY GREATER: The discussion of how David's London fast "wreaked havoc upon his metabolism". Translation: HE TURNED INTO A BIG FAT LOAD.

  Man. I'm kind of surprised/alarmed at how much I dislike this idiot. Let's move on.



• I really enjoy commercials for gardening products. The spokesmen crack me up: they're invariably older but craggily virile men — ex-firefighters looking to spend more time weeding with their beloved wives, mostly — who confidently expound on the merits of whatever revolutionary advance in dirt technology they're peddling. I always get a kick from the recognition of another demographic's Marketing Achilles Heel. Much easier to see others' than your own, I suppose.


• Telecom commercials! First, the cable company bragging that it supplies steady jobs. Now there's a good lobbying approach: pass preferential legislation for our industry because we employ people. Of course, whoever they're going to lose their business to probably also employs people, so I'm not quite sure what they're getting at. Perhaps this is a DC-area narrowcast meant to scare politicians with cable repairguy constituents. Still, seems like a pretty lame argument.

  Next up is AT&T, which, among a series of pledges to do things like "bring us the future", let loose one or two interesting tidbits. First, a thinly-veiled appeal to network neutrality advocates — "we won't block access" was the wording, I believe (which isn't really specific enough, but it's interesting that they're addressing it). Second, they promised to observe local right-of-way. I can't remember the wording, so I can't be sure, but I believe this is tackling the municipal broadband legislative question.

  If they meant these pledges, good for AT&T. But even moreso, good for us: if the telecoms are feeling threatened enough over these issues to create commercials filled with friendly promises rather than commercials filled with self-serving lies, the EFF must be making progress.

Okay, after reading Steve Rubel's explanation, I think I get it — it's just that there's nothing much to get. Or rather, there's exactly what I thought there was: OPML sharing will be used to determine what people are interested in. Consumers can find new sources of news and marketers can pitch to them more effectively.

This seems like a much bigger win for the marketers than the users, though. RSS empowered content consumers in some obvious ways — it made it much easier to stay on top of many sources of news. OPML provides a slick, hi-tech framework for providing statistically justified blog recommendations, but to be honest I've always felt that blogrolls and interblog links work fine for that sort of thing. OPML's big advantage will be centralizing that data so that it can be more easily mined.

I suppose it may help inject some more ad revenue into the blogosphere, but that's really the only major benefit I can see. I can't imagine a scenario under which an end user would be all that interested in using OPML sharing. This is a technology that'll be implemented in the backend of RSS readers in order to provide a shiny but unnecessary recommendation engine — and, not coincidentally, a new source of marketing data. But that seems to be about it.

npr's weekend edition has a piece up where two gourmet food writers go to ben's chili bowl. it's actually kind of poorly paced and boring, but, it's ben's! and there's this great exchange:

npr lady: "i'm listening to you order, and you've ordered a substantial amount of food..."
male food writer: "...and we've only had four meals today..."
npr lady: "is there...some secret to your digestive system?"
male food writer: "oh, here come the cakes and pies."

they also address the problem they had of finding a d.c. local food speciality, and agree it's the half-smoke.

I gotta say, I don't really understand what's so exciting about this OPML business. Is it a good format for exporting lists of blogs? Sure, apparently. For note taking and compiling lists of references? I think so, based on what I've read. And could Share OPML.org provide Amazon "people who bought X also bought Y"-style recommendations to the world of blog reading (or at least bring a more accurate version of it, since I'm sure it already exists somewhere)? Sure.

But beyond that, I have to admit that I don't get what the big deal is. There's apparently a community of people really excited about OPML, so I feel pretty confident that I'm missing something. I don't remember, but I can imagine that in the past I might've foolishly said dismissive things about Dave Winer's last XML format — I certainly wasn't able to imagine its usefulness for tracking packages, finding apartments on Craigslist, or powering my screensaver. So I'm trying to be circumspect, and to bite my tongue — I really do want to understand the OPML hoopla. But right now it's lost on me.

Catherine sent me this earlier today: Simpsons versions of the Battlestar Galactica cast.

matty and his lady are a-heading to europe, and more specifically, florence, and he's asked for my input in the area. emboldened by my success in advising matt f. during his italy trip, i've put a massive amount of suggestions behind the cut for the beautiful city. feel free to chime in.

This is kind of fascinating. How do you design a warning sign for a nuclear waste repository that will remain dangerous for ten thousand years? How can you make that warning remain comprehensible and credible for twice as long as human civilization has existed?

Apparently you start by commissioning a government study that considers hazards like psychotic mining robots and an Amazonian anti-male dystopia. Then you pour a lot of concrete.

New project time. The SMS dealy should be released imminently — I just need to write the help system (and, uh, ignore a persistent bug and elusive bug). I should be able to wrap that up this afternoon.

I've got a new project in mind, though. For a while I've wanted to be able to pipe sound around the computers in the apartment more easily. The Linux server is connected to a pretty nice stereo system, but it's a headless unit. We tried using SliMP3 as a webserver-based MP3 jukebox for a while, but the latency was pretty irritating. And besides, I want to be able to pipe other kinds of audio around — streaming internet radio, youtube soundtracks, even mail notification beeps. And I'd like for the various computers in the house to be able to use it (not simultaneously, though).

There are various solutions to the problem of playing MP3s over a network, but I want something a little more universal and cheap. Ideally, it'd be an icon that sits in the system tray. Click on it and it turns green (or something) and all your sound starts magically coming out of a server connected to a set of nice, big speakers.

This page shows the outlines of a solution. It involves piping raw audio samples across a network to something that catches them and shoves them at the soundcard. There's no buffering, but that should be okay — I want realtime audio, so that everything stays as closely sync'ed as possible. If the wifi gets spotty and some samples get dropped from time to time, that's fine. I've managed to get a proof of concept variation on the article working:

On the server:
listen for incoming data on port 1234 and pipe it to the rawplay application
nc -l 1234 | rawplay

On the client:
convert an mp3 into raw audio samples
mpg123 -s somemp3.mp3 > somemp3.raw
print the raw data across the network to the rawplay instance on the server
cat somemp3.raw | nc <server's ip> 1234

This setup works decently — it sounds slightly weird, like the sampling rate is a tiny bit off and as if it has a weirdly flat frequency response. But I'm going to blame that on mpg123 for now. Unfortunately, this trick doesn't account for grabbing live audio off of your system — that's the hard part. But I think this example code, combined with SoundFlower and some OS X Sockets 101 (yet to be learned), should take care of that.

Justin gave a demo of OS X software development on Thursday that made everything look encouragingly awesome and easy. Ideally I'll be able to wrap everything up in a slick GUI package, then resurrect my .NET skills and build a Windows version. Construct a proper server (a few dozen lines of Python should do), throw in FLAC support to avoid wasting bandwidth, and I'd have a pretty neat app.

That's the plan, anyway. I'm sort of hoping someone will pipe up in comments and say "that's already been done, you can download it here".

what happens when some medill folks head to the sketchiest bar in evanston on cinco de mayo? well, actually, not that much. mostly they drink a ton of beer and play pool badly.

getting set up to buy radiohead tickets (ie, opening 32 billion different tabs in firefox and preparing myself to refresh them constantly; hey, it worked before!) while so hungover that my eyes can barely focus is perhaps not the most fun thing i've done on a saturday morning. curse you, radiohead. the things i do!

UPDATE: well, that went as expected. the biggest piece of bullshit? ticketmaster telling me that i could only have one browser window open to request tickets. what. the. fuck. on the other hand, it's nice to know that radiohead is still the only band capable of making me so giddy/nervous at even the possibility of seeing them that i want to throw up.

sigh.

So, as everybody knows, Mike Grass, friend to me and Catherine and cofounder of DCist, has launched his newest professional endeavor, a blog for the Washington Post's Express newspaper. The site looks great, and I have no doubt that it will be a wild success — Mike was born to be an editor. It seems highly likely to me that I'll be pestering him for a cushy IT job someday.

But there's already a tic of the new site that's erupted in controversy: the bolding. Between this and DCist's now-partially-abandoned editorial "we", Mike's establishing a pattern of copy-editing controversy.

Well, personally I can't get enough of it. And if you can't either, I can help sate your bottomless lust for bold. Presenting the Expressamifier, a Javascript bookmarklet to bring FreeRide's distinctive look to virtually any webpage! Just click on and drag this link up to your browser's quicklinks bar (where Firefox sticks "Getting Started" and "Live Headlines" by default):

Expressamify

Then browse to any site and press it. Our sophisticated algorithms will selectively highlight text to maximize, uh, boldousity. Yeah.

And, as a special bonus, you can try running it on the Express website itself for a unique surprise. The resulting reaction is not unlike matter and antimatter colliding.

SPECIAL BONUS NOT TONGUE-IN-CHEEK ADDENDUM: Okay, so the bookmarklet will try to remove the bold from FreeRide. But it turns out that there's so goddamn much of it that you have to run it several times to remove it all. No joke.

ALSO: This bookmarklet is pretty inefficient, and could easily crash your browser. Don't use it if you have unsaved work in some other tab.

AND: It seems to produce an error in IE, and doesn't work at all in Safari. But shouldn't you be using Firefox anyway? This clearly isn't the sort of thing I'm going to waste time debugging. Probably.

FINALLY: Because it's late and I apparently can't adopt a consistent sarcastic voice, I should point out that the stuff above about Mike is meant in earnest. The stuff about liking the bolding... yeah, not so much.

I expanded on my little science project, and now you can call 202-318-0196 and use an automatically-updated menu system to navigate & listen to the ten most recent podcasts from work. And hear my voice! Excitement, internet stalkers! And yeah, it sounds weird to me, too.

If you're interested in hearing me hold forth on Asterisk and why it's sort of awesome, head on over to the EchoDitto blog — I've got some more voluminous ruminations over there.

I think this setup is kind of neat (if somewhat pointless). But I am disappointed that, now that I've fixed the script to actually grab the ten most recent podcasts (instead of the ten most recent that have media enclosures in the RSS), our Chuck Brown podcast no longer shows up. Go go's not really my cup of tea (outside the context of DC Lotto commercials, anyway), but I'm still mind-bogglingly happy that such a podcast exists, even though it was recorded before my time with the company. I'll have to remember to ask Tim how the hell he pulled that one off. I sort of suspect that Mr. Brown was deeply confused by the experience.

first we have michael chiarello and his classic "hate is hard to fix" comment on zunta. now i find out that by bashing mischa barton's hellacious OC prom dress, i'm further driving the world towards a big, black abyss of doom.

um, sorry?

How can it be five games into the Wiz/Cavs series and I haven't checked in with the WizNutzz? It's inexcusable. Fortunately, TNT is trying to educate me about Heineken Light at the moment, providing an opportunity for me to check in with the font of all Wizards commentary in the universe.

And as always, they deliver. One example: mathematical proof that Gilbert Arenas is better than LeBron James. Evidence supplied by real, professional math dudes! You can't get this kind of in-depth analysis at the dead-tree sports outlets, people.

UPDATE: Tonight's empirical confirmation of the above proof seems to have suffered from some sampling error. Don't fret, by game 7 I'm confident that further stochastic measurement will have vindicated science once again.

Former FCC chairman Reed Hundt has responded to Kevin Drum's request that he weigh in on net neutrality. The results are not good. I think. I haven't got time to pore over the thing at the moment, and it's slightly hard to decipher what he's going on about. The man actually uses the word "twas" — perhaps the only blogospheric construction more irritatingly precious than "whilst".

His initial discussion might spiral into complaints about the digital divide and a veiled call for approaching net access as a regulated public utility. I can't really tell. To the extent that he's endorsing that particular pipe dream, consider me on board.

But his primary point seems to be a parrotting of the new line the telcos are taking, now that it's becoming clear that folks aren't falling for the pathetic lies of the Mike McCurrybots that have been deployed. The argument goes something like this: "Waaaaahh! Video-Over-IP is coming! It's going to require new infrastructure to handle its immense traffic! Otherwise internet video won't work, and existing networks will become hopelessly clogged! Grant us an effective monopoly on IP services (via the ability to set the price of competitors' services) so that we can pay for these changes!"

This is a load of crap. First, ISPs are already maintaining service in the face of a high-bandwidth app, and doing so just fine. It's called BitTorrent — maybe you've heard of it? If you have, and you use it, you may be interested to know that your downloads probably don't run as quickly as they theoretically could. Many big ISPs are now throttling BitTorrent traffic in order to ensure other clients' quality of service is uninterrupted (and to save themselves money). This is as it should be. If bandwidth is really in short supply, it could be done for video as well. And there are other things that can be done, too — for instance, caching servers at the ISP level to save bandwidth as a subnet downloads a particularly viral YouTube clip a hundred times in an hour. These things cost money, but it's pocket change compared to building a new infrastructure. And you are currently paying them to do something, right?

So what about the other half of the question — the fantastic new services we'll miss out on if we don't agree to give Comcast a leg up against every .com that doesn't own a cable network? Count me as a skeptic. If there's demand for those services, the networks to support them will get built. I didn't take a lot of econ courses, but this seems pretty obvious.

To the extent that there'll be a holdup translating demand into supply, it'll be the ISPs' own damn fault. Right now their billing policies make no sense. They sell you an all-you-can-eat connection at a set speed, but become very upset if you actually use the bandwidth you've theoretically purchased, like an buffet manager tersely asking a fat guy to leave. Comcast, for example, doesn't publish download limits, but every month it sends out letters to its heaviest users threatening to suspend service if they don't ratchet back their use of the network. They refuse to say what the limit is — all signs indicate that they just print out a set of letters and mail them out to their top downloaders, regardless of how much was actually downloaded. It's a really, really stupid and dishonest way to do things.

If heavy bandwidth use doesn't provide additional revenue that's needed to build the systems to support it, the answer is to make it do so — but NOT by granting a permanent anticompetitive advantage. Instead, meter bandwidth like the water company does. Charge a flat monthly fee for connectivity and account maintenance, plus a reasonable per-gigabyte usage fee. This would end up hurting geeks like myself whose data-sipping neighbors subsidize part of our digital gorging, but it's really the only way to approach the problem that makes sense — and it's how big companies pay for bandwidth.

Do it this way and the market ought to sort everything out. There's no reason to grant Comcast-On-Demand a relative monopoly versus a theoretical TivoIP service. Someone who uses on-demand video from a third party will consume a lot more bandwidth — Comcast can still expect to get paid for the work they do to support these wonderful new services.

What they can't expect is support for their empire-building aspirations. I realize the telecom execs are really excited by their monopolistic dreams, but the rest of us just want them to do their fucking jobs quietly and well. I signed up with Verizon because I needed internet access, not because I wanted to purchase all of my information services from them for the next few decades.

meh.

Believe it or not, I still get a steady trickle of comments on parts one and two of my SSH tutorial from last August. I'm happy to help those unfortunate enough to be shackled to a cubicle inside a restrictive firewall. And although there are better SSH tutorials out there — mine uses an old and relatively user-unfriendly SSH server package, for one thing — there are probably few that are more loquacious.

But I didn't answer all the questions that folks had. As I ate lunch today I took a stab at finding an answer to the biggest one: how to play Yahoo Games over SSH. I was pleasantly surprised to find how easy it was to get working, so I thought I might as well write it up. This method should work for other apps too (World of Warcraft comes to mind, although I guess it might let you configure a proxy server manually, instead of using this SOCKS hack).

Pretty much everything but "twitch" games, which use the un-SSH-able UDP protocol (and would suffer from the latency anyway) should work with this method.

daily candy chicago starts off a post today about a new european market by bemoaning the evils of lard. but if you read this delicious piece on lardo di colonnata (really, just pig's back fat), soon it's all you'll want to be eating. via megnut.

goddammit, i knew it. the limited amount of waste tickets on sale for the US radiohead shows are already all gone. i guess i'll have to try my luck with ticketmaster like the rest of the rubes. even then, it's likely i won't be able to get a ticket, and then i have to weigh how much i actually want to see them. tickets are approximately $50 as it is; is $100 worth it to me? $200? i guess, it's sad to say, at this point, that's doubtful. it seems likely to me that there will be three distinct radiohead periods in my life: my youth and theirs as a band, where i saw them a dozen times for minimal amounts of money; their inevitable popularity and acclaim where tickets are still somewhat reasonable but always sell out too fast too buy and my income doesn't allow me buy scalped ones from evil folks so i won't see them live for years at a time; and their slow decline where they'll start doing stadium shows for hundreds of dollars (face value, mind you!) but i will be old and rich and eager to relive my rock glory days that i will pony up. it seems we are currently in the second period.

i just realized there are only two episodes left in the entire season. it is certainly not a sure thing the CW will pick up VM for next year. and if they don't, we will NEVER GET TO SEE LOGAN AND VERONICA HAVE SEX. so people. you need to watch tomorrow. some random ass predictions behind the cut. vaguely spoilery!

With Kriston in Chicago as well, the nerd contingent finally had numbers on Catherine, and the three of us ended up making a trip to the completely awesome Chicago Comics (conveniently located just a few blocks from Catherine's apt).

Thanks to Tim I've been jumping back into comics recently — he set me up with some Sandman and Transmetropolitan torrents, and I'm slowly working my way through them.

I have to say that I don't really get the appeal of Sandman. And it's not just that I'm tonedeaf to this stuff — I dig the mythical mystery, and I enjoyed American Gods. But so far the series just seems to be about a pale, skinny sliver of humorlessness who spends a lot of time on concerns related to faeries and the dreamscape. It's like some terrible, terrible Trent Reznor/Tori Amos collaboration. I'll stick with it, but so far it hasn't hooked me.

Transmet's considerably more enjoyable, even if Ellis's writerly narcissism isn't actually dismissed by his constant winking in the way he seems to think it is. Also, it provides another excuse to link to a photo of Julian's awesome Spider Jerusalem Halloween costume. And I think it might provide a comprehensive alternate philosophy of journalism for Catherine, should this Medill thing fail to cover all the bases.

I added to these at Chicago Comics. Kriston bought a bunch of incomprehensible but cool Marvel alternate universe thingamajigs, and a mixed bag of DC trade paperbacks. I stuck with my tried & true formula: volumes 7 and 8 of Powers (and 9's out already!? w00t) and a Hellboy spinoff that's not quite as awesome as solo Mignola, but still pretty satisfying in a "former Nazi scientists' hubris unleashing unspeakable supernatural horrors" kind of way. And that's one of my favorites ways.

So yeah — dorking it up: recommended.

I'm back from Chicago, barely. My redeye to DCA had powered up the engines for takeoff when a light went off. Apparently a warning system had registered a false positive, incorrectly indicating that the pilots had set the controls to some sort of wildly suicidal configuration. Back to the gate! Two hours later, the ground crew admitted defeat and I got bumped to the next flight, which was merely delayed, not cancelled. Also, ATA came through with a $50 discount card. I remain irked, but I'll get over it.

Chicago was great — first and foremost because Catherine is there, of course, but also just because it's a great town (albeit a rainy one on this particular weekend). She, Kriston and I walked a lot, drank a little, and ate way, way too much. And, as mentioned, met a bunch of fine folks from unfogged and the charming Dan. All in all, I declare my time in Chicago a success, even if there was a little more of it than I intended. But now I'm dead, dead, dead tired.

photographic evidence that the two lads were here and duly squired.

the weekend also provided the opportunity to meet up with several unfogged folks and dan from iconoduel, and everyone was wonderful. have i mentioned how much i love the internet?

the only crappy thing was the sucktastic experiences both tommy and kriston had getting out of the city. kriston's account is here; tommy took a cab this morning at 5am to ostensibly catch his 6:30am flight...which ended up being instead at something like 11:30am. fabulous.