Keep On Knocking But You Can't Come In

As mentioned in my previous post, last night I watched the premiere of Fantastic Four on Cartoon Network.
I’m not so sure that I’ll give it a second chance.
Basically, it’s up to the usual standard of Marvel animation projects of this century, which is to say that’s it’s better than most of the crap they cranked out in the early 90s, but it’s nowhere near the level of most of the DC stuff.
(In fairness, Marvel did have extremely good CGI Spider-Man series on MTV a couple of years ago, but it didn’t last long.)
There’s far too much of an anime influence to the look of the show, the CGI is poorly integrated with the standard animation, the music sucks, and they used stock voice actors rather than hiring regular actors, which is the route that DC animation projects normally take.
Oh, and while Sue Storm is called Invisible Woman right out of the gate (it took her over 20 years to graduate from Girl to Woman in the comics), she’s still presented like something straight out of 1963 rather than the strong, capable woman who could easily mop the floor with the rest of her team if she so chose. I mean, in this episode she actually swooned.
Ben (The Thing) was handled okay, except for the retarded idea about having him spray paint a “4” on his chest (“He’s made of rock, so, logically he’ll just spray paint the number on himself!”), but honestly, it’s kind of hard to screw his characterization up.
So yeah, overall, from my perspective, it kind of sucked.
But if you like anime – or if you’re a fan of previous Marvel animation efforts such as X-Men: Evolution – you’ll probably like this.
Of course, I shouldn’t give too much credit to DC’s animation efforts. Sure, Batman: TAS, Superman: TAS, Batman: Beyond, and Justice League were all excellen, but there have also been some missteps recently, such as Teen Titans, The Batman (which is totally unrelated to the previous Batman projects and nowhere near as good), and Krypto.
Continuing in that vein is their upcoming Legion of Super Heroes, airing Saturday mornings on the newly-formed CW Network, which is the result of the mergers of The WB and UPN.
From what I’ve seen so far LSH looks a lot more like Teen Titans than it does Justice League (even though the Legion appeared on an episode of Justice League), so I’m not holding out much hope for the quality of its storytelling.
Oh well.
I’m suspecting that sometime before Thursday I’m going to get a call informing me not to bother showing up for work on Thursday, or ever again.
Yesterday our boss told us all that before we left for the day we had to make sure that our contact information in the employee directory was up to date.
When we asked why, his response was, “Because I told you to.”
It doesn’t bode well…unless what you’re hoping that he’ll be calling us all to tell us we’ve been laid off and wants to be sure ahead of time to have the right number to call. If that’s what you’re hoping for, then yeah, it bodes extremely well.
On the other hand, at one point he asked me if I was planning on taking time off in two weeks when Scott will be taking time off so that he knew whether or not he needed to bring someone in to work overtime, so who knows?
The one good thing that would come of losing my job is not having to continue with the cross-training.
As mentioned, my desk merged with another desk, and Scott and I have to learn how to do their jobs, and they have to learn how to do our jobs.
Over the weekend, Scott was learning their stuff, which meant that I was teaching our stuff…to someone who has no interest whatsoever in learning it and who clearly thinks that what we do is pointless and retarded.
Looking at things from his perspective, I can see his point, but tough shit: he’s supposed to learn it.
Of course, the problem is that I don’t have any particular interest in teaching it to him if he doesn’t want to learn it. I’m not his keeper; if he doesn’t want to do his job, fuck him.
The new workspace did feel kind of cramped. While I have four screens in my workspace, I only have two computers, one Red Hat box and one XP box, which makes it kind of difficult to do some of my tasks very effectively, as they sort of require having three computers, two of them XP boxes.
The other problem is the TV, and the fact that I’ll be in a confined space with people watching and discussing/arguing about various sporting events.
That’s assuming, of course, that I ever have to go back.
Once again it had been my intention to sleep the day away today, but I only managed to “sleep in” until 9:30.
After eating breakfast I sat down to watch Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which I’d borrowed from Scott. I’ve finally been getting around to reading the books, and that was the one movie I hadn’t caught anywhere along the line, so I figured I’d check it out.
The books are okay, but as I find myself getting frustrated with them I remind myself that they are intended for children, though I’m reasonably certain that as I child I would have been equally frustrated by the same things that frustrate me now.
In any case, I was on the couch watching the movie and during a particularly loud scene I heard a rapping at my door.
Not having any friends who would just stop by unannounced, I knew that it was most likely some kind of missionaries peddling some kind of crazy…err, I mean, spreading the good news of their faith.
Looking out through the peephole my suspicion was confirmed. Given that Harry Potter had been in the midst of screaming at the top of his lungs as Lord Voldemort poked at his scar when they knocked, it was a safe bet that they knew someone was home, even though I had since paused the DVD.
I considered swapping out the DVD with something a little racier and then inviting them in, and if they asked me to turn it off I would point out that this is my home and that they’re the ones who came knocking on my door, and that I don’t go to their houses and ask them to watch porn so there’s no reason why they should come to mine and ask me not to.
Ultimately I decided against it because this would involve too much effort, and more importantly it would involve allowing complete strangers to come into my home, and no matter what you’re selling – religion, encyclopedias, or ultra-realistic sex dolls – that’s just not going to happen.
(I order my ultra-realistic sex dolls directly from the manufacturer over the Internet and therefore have no need to get them from door-to-door salesmen)
You’ve got a slightly better chance if you’re a hot chick, but if you’re going around to shill for your religion the odds are that you’re not going to be much fun anyway – unless you were a missionary trying to bring back temple prostitution as a form of religious expression but were going the “ountain comes to Muhammad” route with it this time around and bringing the temple to the worshippers, though that seems pretty unlikely – so you’d be left out in the cold too, sister. Come back after you’ve lapsed from your religious practices and we’ll talk.
To be fair, I realize that these people are doing what they believe is right, and I also know from Scott’s stories of his missionary days that it’s an uncomfortable position to be in and that life as a missionary isn’t a lot of fun, but the cold hard fact of the matter is that it’s not my fault that they’ve bought into a religion that is the spiritual equivalent of selling subscriptions to Grit in order to get great prizes, so why should I have to suffer for it?
For the record, I don’t think they were Mormons, as they looked a little old and their shirts weren’t white, but in any case I just ignored them until they went away, then went back to watching the movie.
And that was my morning and early afternoon.
The rest of the afternoon and my evening are likely to be less exciting, excepting, of course, the half an hour spent watching the new episode of The Venture Bros. tonight.