I forgot to turn on my alarm last night and woke up five minutes late as a result, though somehow I managed to get in to work a couple of minutes earlier than usual. How does that work?
Today actually marks the last time I’ll be making this particular commute as, come Monday morning we will have moved to the new NOC. This is good news, as it’s actually closer to home than Reston is.
Though I’ve been working here for nearly five years at this point, I can’t honestly say that I’m sad to leave it behind.
It’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong with or bad about this place, it’s just that I’m not particularly sentimental about that sort of thing.
Okay, more accurately, I’m not particularly sentimental about much of anything.
Even if I were, a shorter commute would trump sentiment anyway.
Last night Verizon called to confirm that I would be home on Monday for my scheduled FiOS installation. Hello, I’ve been without Internet access since I moved into the new place; you honestly think I’m not going to be there when I’m scheduled to get it?
Here at work I’ve been downloading some of the TV shows I’ve been missing due to not having cable, which will help me pass the time until Monday morning.
I’ll be extremely pleased to have cable again, not just because I’ll be able to watch some of the shows I’ve been missing, but because using the HD antenna has been a pain in the ass.
Each channel requires having the antenna positioned differently, and frequently things will be working just fine and, with no changes, suddenly crap out.
The thing is that with the digital signal, if you’re not getting a strong signal, you don’t get static or “snow.” Instead, if you’re using Media Center like I am, you get a blue screen with white text that says that there’s no signal, or you’ll get a perfectly clear picture that doesn’t move and has no audio, or that does move in a jerky fashion, out of sync with the audio, and full of digital artifacts.
And finding the right configuration can be infuriating. What works one night may not work the next, and sometimes will be dependent on me standing in a particular spot.
So yeah, in addition to providing me with televised entertainment, getting cable will bring my stress level down a little, and lead to me spending less time screaming, “There is to a fucking TV signal!” at my TV.
In addition to some specific comics that I buy, such as Fables and Jack of Fables (which I still love and will, in the future, get back to listing the reasons why I love them), and Welcome to Tranquility, I’ve found something new to look forward to: Left Behind Fridays.
What are Left Behind Fridays? Well, first I should explain what Left Behind is. Left Behind is the title of the first book in a series of books published under that title that tell the story of a world in the not-too distant future after the event known by certain branches of Christianity as The Rapture has occurred. There have been a total of 16 books in the series, as well as a PC game and a movie adaptation starring Kirk Cameron. The books have sold extremely well, being something of a Harry Potter for fundamentalists.
I’ve been aware of the books pretty much since the first one came out in 1995, and I have been curious about their actual content beyond understanding the basic premise behind them, but I have not, of course, been so curious as to actually seek them out.
After all, while they would have a sort of ironic appeal to me in the way that Chick Tracts do, being actual novels, they’re not so easily digestible as Jack’s works, nor are they freely available the way the tracts are, and I’m certainly not going to add my filthy lucre to the piles and piles of it that authors LaHaye and Jenkins have managed to rake in from the foolish…er, faithful.
However, one day while perusing some of the non-Chick Dissection posts on Enter The Jabberwock, I found a mention of a blog called Slacktivist, which has a regular feature summarizing and humorously critiquing the books.
Or, really, at this point, book, singular.
It’s been over three years since he started, yet Slacktivist (Fred Carter) has not managed to get all the way through the first book.
But I’m not complaining, as that only means that I have, hopefully, many more years of Left Behind Fridays to look forward to.
Over the course of a weekend at work I managed to get caught up on all previous posts and am now forced to wait – rather impatiently – for each new post. I often go back to the site dozens of times in the course of a Friday in the hopes that I’ll see that L.B. in the title of a post.
What I’ve learned so far thanks to Left Behind Friday is just how stupefyingly bad the book actually is, and how grateful I am that Fred is taking the bullet for me and reading the books so that I don’t have to. His wonderfully witty examinations, filled with brilliant observations (and more than a few well-placed Buffy the Vampire Slayer allusions) about the book’s quality, or lack thereof, and the acumen, or lack thereof, with which it is written pretty much make my (Fri)day.
What makes the entries even more interesting is that Slacktivist is himself an evangelical Christian – albeit an extremely liberal one – so the books to him represent more than just bad writing, but bad theology, and are, as a result, not just bad, but full-on evil.
Thus he’s very passionate in his disdain, and that only serves to add to the fun.
(And also to the horror, when you think about just how many people there are out there who believe this nonsense.)
Beyond the posts themselves, the comments section is actually filled with some of the most intelligent and articulate discussions I’ve ever encountered on the Internet. I know that’s not saying much given the level of discourse found on the Internet, but honestly, I look forward to reading the comments almost as much as reading the posts themselves, and since there are constant additions, they can help fill the void until Left Behind Friday finally returns.
If you look through the comments you may even see a familiar name throwing his two cents into the discussion.
So Left Behind Fridays are, for me, a very good thing all around™, and I think that they are a little bit of joy that should be added to everyone’s life.
I’ve added a link to Slacktivist over on the right. Here’s a link to the L.B. Archives.
In any case, that will do it for this entry, I think.
When I return, sometime on Monday, I should be positively gushing about my hot new super-fast Internet connection, which will allow me to become bored with the Internet faster than ever before!
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