Reaching My Threshold...

So with all of the times I've watched the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, I had never previously caught the fact that it features a song that could be the theme song for this blog:



Of course, to be fair, there's a lot going on in the scene that features this song, so it's tricky to pick up on the lyrics.

Edit:  Along with a Let Me Google That For You link, here's a link to the lyrics for Scott's benefit.

Why Do I Work So Hard?

Because my boss could kick my ass:



Related:

Boss:  Don't start being mean to me.  You're going to make me cry and then you'll feel bad.
Me:  You don't get to play the girl card with me.
Boss:  Fair enough.

Sad Little Man

This morning I was listening to Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails while I was on the elliptical.
When I finished - over 1,600 calories in about 50 minutes - I got off and grabbed a towel to wipe off the sweat, and I'd left my Bluetooth headphones on and kept the music playing.
The song featured in the video below was playing, and it occurred to me that it was pretty much the perfect soundtrack music for a sad little man going about his sad little morning routine:




Which is, perhaps, not the most charitable view to have of myself, but what can I say?  The endorphins were wearing off...

Someone Was Filming Me...?

Okay, this video is pretty gross, and not at all safe for work but...holy crap.
My stomach still hurts from laughing.  It's just all too familiar...



Edit:  Now with the actual video.

And I Still May.

And if there were no rewards to reap,
No loving embrace to see me through
This tedious path I've chosen here,
I certainly would've walked away by now.
And I still may.

-Tool, "The Patient"



I listened to this song on my way in to work this morning, primarily because I've had part of it repeating in my head for...well, for years, honestly, but rather more steadily and insistently for the past couple of days:  "Is this a test?  It has to be.  Otherwise I can't go on."
However, upon listening to it, the excerpt above is what really stood out for me, particularly as there is no loving embrace to see me through, and it seems less and less likely that there is any sort of reward to reap.
And yet, well, in the words of the song, I'm gonna wait it out....
I'm not sure if it was listening to the song that set the pace for the day, or if it was a bit of prescience on my part that led me to listen to it in the first place, but it was much more of an "and I still may" kind of day.
Not that there was any one thing about the day, but...okay, that's a lie.  There kind of was one thing, but I'm not going to talk about it here, so you might as well just choose to believe the lie, and accept that there were multiple reasons for it to be that kind of day.
And it's not a complete lie anyway; there really were a lot of factors that went into making it that kind of day, it's just that, even in sum, they wouldn't have really been enough without that other thing.
Anyway...
So, yeah.  Rough, tedious, time to consider walking away sort of day.
But I guess I'm gonna wait it out.
Maybe it's just because I got up even earlier than usual, though I hardly think ten minutes could make that much of a difference.
Still, I do feel exhausted, and am seriously considering going to bed in the next few minutes.
In any case, that's my downbeat entry for the day.

It Spins!

It's not in its final location, and I need to give it a thorough cleaning, but...well, I had to try it out.  As you can tell, it made me happy.
(Not as "happy" as the heavy breathing would suggest, however.  But I am a smoker, the mic was pretty close, and I'd just run up the stairs.)

Hacking My Own Brain And Random Departments

The other day, Friday by Rebecca Black (no link provided because I’m not that cruel) popped into Scott’s head, and, because that’s how the sickness works, he tried to pass it along to me via IM.
However, with considerable effort – I commented that I thought I’d burned over a thousand calories from the act of concentration – I managed to prevent it from infecting me.
I accomplished it by voluntarily getting the song Like a Stone by Audioslave stuck in my head:



The reason that this worked is that, while I kind of like the song, I don’t really know it that well, and, while I hate Friday, I do, unfortunately, know it well.
This was the key to keeping young Miss Black out of my head, as I know that, when presented an option, my brain will always go with the song I don’t know very well, as I tend to find it more irritating to have a song – even one I that I like – that I don’t know playing over and over again in my head, even when the alternative is much, much more annoying.
Scott described it as “hacking my own brain.”  I pointed out that it’s just a matter of having learned a few tricks in the nearly four decades that I’ve spent living with the thing.

A New (Old) Department Department:
After more than a year after mentioning that it was coming, and then never officially talking about it again, we recently had a reorg at work.  Because they decided that the employee opinion survey-identified goal of improved communication is something that they’re going to work on for what remains of the year – and also because I’m reasonably certain they had no idea what they were doing – our managers were provided with virtually no details about what was coming beyond a vague guess as to when.
Naturally, the rumors started swirling, because, as much as executives hate to have rumors circulating, it never occurs to them that there’s a very effective method for stopping the rumors before they start.  (Hint:  It’s not keeping everything top secret and flat-out refusing to answer direct questions.)
For a while it seemed as though some major changes were in store for me – though I was assured that my neck wasn’t on the chopping block – such as being moved to a completely different department.  This was a bummer, as it meant that I’d be losing out on having the great boss I’ve had for over a year and a half.
However, at the last minute, those plans changed, and the end result is that not much of anything is changing for me.  Same job, same boss, but she’ll have a different boss, and our team is undergoing yet another name change.
I did, however, lose some team members – who performed an entirely different function from whatever the hell it is that I do – as they got moved to a different manager, and three entirely new (to us) people are joining the team, presumably to the same thing that I do, whatever the hell that may be.
In the announcement that went out, the names of the five people who will now be reporting to my boss were called out, and while it wasn’t an alphabetical listing of names, there did seem to be some kind of order in how the names were listed, which made me take note of the fact that my name was listed dead last.
I copied that bit out of the announcement and e-mailed it to my boss – who was on vacation – with the subject line “Well, at least I know my place…” and said, “Whoo!  I’m Number 5!  I’m Number 5!”  (I also told her that I was glad that she was still the boss.)
She replied that maybe “5 is the new 1.”
Like I said, I’m glad she’s still the boss…
Ultimately I can’t complain too much, as this is still much better than some of the rumored changes, and while my neck was, apparently, never in any danger, there were a lot of other necks that ended up on the chopping block.

The Key Takeaway Department:
(In briefly explaining the history of the Java programming language to someone much, much younger than I am at work, I realize that I’m talking about things that happened when she was still in grade school.)
Me:  …anyway, the key takeaway from all of this is that I’m old.

Life Expectations Department:
Some things I – perhaps foolishly – expected to see in my lifetime:
Humanoid household robots
Off-world colonies
Cold fusion
The discovery of extraterrestrial life

Something I never expected to see in my life:
A Captain America movie that’s even halfway decent

The jury is still out on some of those expectations, but today I learned that I was wrong about the Captain America movie.  Not just wrong:  dead wrong.  Captain America:  The First Avenger is excellent.  I couldn’t have – and didn’t – hoped for a better Cap movie.

Like I Didn't Have Enough Reasons Already...

Apparently I didn't have enough reasons to be envious of George Perez and the career he's built based on his incredible talent.
I mean, seriously, as much as I admire his talent - he's my absolute favorite artist, after all - I can't help but be at least a little bit envious.  Why'd you have to go and hog all the talent, Mr. Perez?
And of course he's put that talent to good use in his long and acclaimed career, so, as someone who's squandered what little he does have in the way of talent, yes, I envy the hell out of him, even as I idolize him.
But no, those things weren't enough, as evidenced by this video, in which he gets to sketch on Amber Love's butt:



Though to be fair, this also serves to make me admire him even more.
Here's to you, Mr. Perez.
Oh, and the song is kind of catchy, too.

Baltimore Comic-Con

Here are the pictures I took - the ones that turned out, at least - at the Con. I'll write more about my experiences later.

Jon’s Tips For Living With Rage

As most of you know, I’ve got some issues with anger.

The fuck you mean you didn’t know that?! I’ve been writing about my rage for almost six goddamn years, you miserable pieces of -

*Cough*

Sorry.

Anyway, as I was saying I am, for a variety of reasons, a pretty angry guy, and in the course of any given day it’s a challenge to keep myself from completely losing my shit* and going off on someone.

So how do I do it? Well, I have two** basic emotional states: either enraged or amused.

The key, I find, is to keep things on the “amused” end of my emotional spectrum, which I why I try to see the humor in most things, no matter how infuriating said things may be.

When that doesn’t work, I have some easy “go-to” mental tricks to keep myself amused, which I’ve decided to share with the world at large in case there’s anyone out there who could benefit from them. This is the first in a series(?) of Jon’s Tips for Living With Rage:

Ethel Merman.

Sure, the name alone can probably engender a mild chuckle, but there’s more to making use of the late singer to keep the rage at manageable levels than simply thinking of her name.

No, the real trick is to think of a song, any song, as long as it’s not a song that Ethel Merman ever performed, or would have been likely to perform. Honestly, the further away from her style it is, the better.

Then, imagine her performing that song in her particular style.

Imagine Ethel Merman performing songs by Metallica. Or, better yet, Slayer. If you’re of a more pop-oriented bent, imagine Ethel belting out “I kissed a girl, and I liked it…” or something by Lady Gaga, or whoever’s popular these days. I can’t recommend using Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok,” because the amount of rage brought on by the thought of that song, no matter how hilariously it’s performed, vastly outweighs its amusement potential.

Ethel does gangsta rap. Ethel does disco. Really, any genre can work. Hell, even thinking of Ethel performing the songs she actually did perform is kind of amusing.

For my part, I typically default to Ethel performing “Love Bites***” by Judas Priest:

(Ethel-style crooning): Love bites you! Invites you! To feast in the night! Excites you! Delights you! It drains you to white! Love bites!

In the interest of full disclosure, I actually got the idea years and years ago from MTV personality Kennedy, who herself engendered feelings of rage and amusement in me, when she talked about having encountered Trent Reznor and thinking she’d amuse him with an Ethel-style version of “Head Like A Hole,” which she then proceeded to perform for the benefit of the viewing audience. Unlike me, Trent, apparently, wasn’t amused.

Alternatively, though along a somewhat similar vein, there was a bit Adam Sandler used to do in his stand-up routine in which he imagined Axl Rose transforming into Edith Bunker:

“DoooooooaaaahhhhhhhhhhoooooooooaaaaahhhhhhhoooooooooArrrchieee”

That’s generally good for a laugh.

So there you have it. One of the many ways in which Jon manages the overwhelming rage he faces every day.

Bear in mind that it doesn’t have to be Ethel Merman; that’s just what works for me. Paul Lynde would be a good choice, too, for example. (Mostly because he was awesome.)

Just try to imagine someone who works for you.

And if you don’t know who Axl Rose is because you were already too old to listen to his music when he was popular, don’t sweat it. And if you’re too young to know who he was, or who Ethel Merman, Edith Bunker, or Paul Lynde were, get the hell off my lawn you damn kids.

Some sample videos are included below.

*Which would be a problem not so much because I’d become violent – even in the most extreme cases I’m not inclined towards violent behavior – but because it would be humiliating, given my tendency to start crying when I get really angry.

**There’s also a third state that I call “enraged amusement,” in which I’m both really angry and really amused. I kind of hate that one.

***Not to be confused with the later Def Leppard song of the same name, which is totally not about vampires and is utterly lacking in awesomeness (not to mention the complete lack of a bestudded and leather-clad Rob Halford). Speaking of Def Leppard, they used to enrage me, but now they just amuse me because they’re old and sad.

The significant bit comes at about 1:50 in the clip below:

I Don’t Understand Anything

As I mentioned, I reinstalled Windows on my laptop last weekend. It went okay, for the most part, though it naturally took a while to reinstall all of the programs I wanted back on it – plus some new ones – and to get back all of my customizations (even after doing the Windows Easy Transfer thing, which lets you transfer over your OS and application preferences).

One area where I had some trouble, though, was in reinstalling some of the applications from HP. My laptop is a Tablet PC, with a dual-mode touch-screen that lets you use either a stylus or your fingers, and HP pre-loaded it with some applications designed to take advantage of the touch capabilities.

I didn’t use them often, but I figured I should have them anyway. However, with the exception of the Wireless Assistant and the DVD software, I couldn’t get anything to install. It would act like it was installing, but after finishing, the programs weren’t actually there. Basically, the installer would create a folder with nothing but icons in it. And I mean that literally – actual icons, as in .ico files, the little pieces of artwork that the actual icons themselves consist of. No executables, no .dll files. Just icons.

As I said, I don’t use those apps often, but I wanted them installed, especially since one of them is necessary for accessing the webcam. Which, again, I don’t use often, but…I have it, therefore I want it to work. I’ve since learned that other programs – Windows Live Movie Maker, OneNote, Skype – are able to access the webcam and use it, but I don’t have the handy little program that would let me quickly take pictures and videos and apply different effects to them.

Oh well.

One problem I had before the reinstall, which I’d hoped would go away, involved the touch screen. If I left “touch” – as in, using your finger – turned on, it would engage in “ghost clicks.” Just randomly clicking on the desktop as if it were being touched. This could be a problem, as it frequently would launch things like the control panel, and a series of ghost clicks could start uninstalling important programs and OS components. In the past, I dealt with that by simply turning off touch, and simply using the stylus as my input device.

But, as with my webcam, if I have it, I want it to work. So, having reinstalled Windows and installed a new driver, I’d hoped the problem had gone away. Alas, it hadn’t. I decided to try downloading the driver directly from the touch-screen manufacturer. While there, I noticed that they’d apparently added all sorts of multi-touch enhancements, letting you do all kinds of interesting things by pressing one, two, three, or four fingers on the screen at a time.

Neat.

So I downloaded their driver, and, per the instructions, uninstalled the HP driver. This necessitated a reboot. Once that was done, I launched the setup for the N-Trig driver…which promptly failed, saying it couldn’t detect any N-Trig hardware.

Annoyed, I checked Device Manager, and, sure enough, there was an exclamation point on something called “Unknown Device.”

Several reboots, a System Restore, another System Restore, and a lot of Googling later, I completely powered down the computer, took out the battery, let it sit for a while, then started back up.

This time Device Manager showed “DuoSense HID” under the “Digitizers” category. Yay! So I launched the driver setup, which actually started to install without saying it couldn’t detect the hardware, which looked promising. So I wandered off and let it do its thing, only to come back some time later to find that the installation had failed.

Multiple power cycles later I tried again, and this time it came up and complained that the old software was still installed and that if I clicked “Yes” it would remove the old software and shut down the computer, and that it would resume setup once I turned the computer back on.

Daring to hope once more, I proceeded.

Success!

Except…

I don’t have all of that multi-touch coolness that I’m supposed to have. Putting multiple fingers on the screen – except when doing the standard “pinching” to zoom out/in thing – doesn’t do jack.

I found another driver on HP’s site that says that it adds the multi-touch capability, but I’m wary of trying this again. I even downloaded and installed some “wintab” API that’s supposed to make the “N-act Hands-On Gestures Vocabulary” work, but no dice.

So I don’t understand. Is there something I’m missing? Presumably the drivers I (finally) installed were what was given to HP, who customized them in some fashion, but I’m pretty sure those were the drivers I had installed back when this whole mess started.

I don’t understand anything.

In any case, despite wanting to be able to do cool stuff like what you see below, I’m going to leave well enough alone for now. After all, it was bad enough when I thought that maybe I’d somehow fried the actual hardware. Most of my Googling on the subject had talked about the only resolution being to return it to HP and have them put on an entirely new screen. Which is fine, if, unlike me, your warranty didn’t expire a month and a half ago…

Edit: Ahhh...okay, maybe I understand something. Looked at the N-Trig page again and found something that says that a trial download of N-act Hands-On Gestures Vocabulary will be available in the “summer months of 2010.”

You're So F***ing Special

If you've seen the trailer for the movie The Social Network, you've most likely heard this choral version of Radiohead's song Creep:



The people behind this version have given a similar treatment to a bunch of popular songs, but I think the one below is my favorite:

!!!!!!!!!!!

Edit: Apparently no browser actually likes that embed code. If it's not working, go here to see the trailer for the new season of The Venture Bros.

Warning: Language Ahead

I'm not a gamer, so I typically have little to no interest in anything about games, especially if it's an MMORPG - Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game - but sometimes I do appreciate the cool trailers made to promote the games.
Such is the case with this trailer for DC Universe Online:




(Edit: Now with non-jacked-up embed code)
Or to put it another way, HOLY FUCKING FUCK BUCKETS!
I'm still not going to become a gamer or actually get involved in this particular game...but damn.
I had a total nerdgasm when Superman just dismissively took out Black Adam.
Okay, I'll now resume my regularly-scheduled lack of interest in games...

!!!!!!

For No Reason (Not That There's A Need For One)

Here, it's a Nick Cave song. Why? Why not? I mean, it's Nick Cave.



If you're gonna dine with them cannibals, well sooner or later darlin' you're gonna get eaten...

Bonus: Nick performing Love Letter on Letterman:

Random Links And Observations

I went for a walk this afternoon, and here are some things I encountered:

A tall, gangly teenaged boy on the phone, arguing with his girlfriend:

"You said you'd be there! I didn't know you were going to fuckin' Pittsburgh!"

A little further along the way, there was a tiny, yippy little dog chained up in a yard that was yipping its yippy little head off at this older woman and large young man, who were just standing there staring at it. The yipping was so high-pitched and cartoonishly annoying as to sound like a parody of a yippy dog, or as if someone had forced it to breathe in some Helium.
The woman was saying, in a soothing tone, "Just calm down. It's okay."
Meanwhile I'm thinking, "Why are you trying to reason with the dog? Just keep moving," as it was clear that they, like me, were just passing by. "Why are you standing there antagonizing the thing? Are you retarded?"
It was at that point that I noticed that the woman was not talking to the dog, but to the guy, who, despite his size, was covering his ears like a child, and was letting out a similarly childlike groan.
Oh.
Whoops.
The guy then let out a howl and started to rush the dog, which backed away and increased its yipping to even more manic levels, which caused the guy to retreat, clutch more tightly at his ears, start crying, and wailing, "Nooo-oooooo! NOOOOOOOOO!"
So, yeah.

*****

As a reminder to those who knew about it, and to inform those who didn't, tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day.

*****

It was my friend Eric's birthday yesterday, and today, to celebrate, he and a bunch of his friends are hitting up a local strip club, which is having an amateur night, and he invited me along.
Unfortunately, that's "local" for him, which means it's in Delaware.
Still, I seriously considered going, since I haven't seen Eric in over seven years, and haven't been to a strip club in nearly eight.
I would actually like to go to a strip club, but I'd hate to go alone, and the circumstances of my life are such that I don't really have any friends that would or could go with me.
But ultimately I decided against it, as, under the best of circumstances, I hate driving anywhere that it takes more than an hour and a half to reach, and being in the thick of Northern Virginia/DC/Maryland traffic on a Friday afternoon is about as far from the best of circumstances as you can get.
If I'd had any sense, I would have taken today off and headed out that way during the non-peak hours.
But then, no one has ever accused me of having any sense.

*****

I have a doctor's appointment on Wednesday - I'm hoping I'll be put on different medication and be able to get off the insulin - which includes a complete physical. I figured that would take the better part of the morning, so I decided I might as well just take the day off.
When I was considering making the trek to Delaware, I decided that since I'd be losing the better part of my weekend I might as well take Monday and Tuesday off as well.
So now I don't have to be back to work until Thursday.
Too bad I don't have anything to do with that time off...
It turns out that I wouldn't have been able to take today off anyway, as I ended up having some meetings that I couldn't really afford to miss.

*****

My Boss: I'm planning for us to do an off-site team-building kind of thing pretty soon. Just a day to get out of the office and do something like go bowling, or play pool or something.
My Boss: Or we could just go someplace nice for lunch or something.
Me: Well, as far as the bowling or whatever...I pretty much suck at everything across the board, so I vote for lunch.
(We ended up, based on my suggestion, deciding to have lunch and then go to the Udvar-Hazy Center to see an IMAX movie.)

*****

I've started hitting stories from around 1981 in my Savage Sword of Conan reprints, and I'm finding that the nudity is starting to disappear, so it looks like my theory that The Universe got them to stop featuring nudity just as, in early puberty, I was on the cusp of becoming a regular reader was the correct explanation.

*****

I really wish this were real so that I could direct all of the people fruitlessly coming here in search of boob size-related knowledge to buy themselves a Droid:

How To Become A Hero (The Easy Way)

(Click on the Facebook badge to the right to become a Fan of Heroic Portraits)

Posted Without Comment

(Found via Mark Evanier's blog)

Happy Birthday, Dear Jack...

You know, given his antipathy towards all things that aren't all about Jesus, Jack T. Chick probably has no use for birthdays - he most likely thinks they're some sort of Gay Satanic Illuminati Occult Catholic Liberal conspiracy - but the fact remains that everyone's favorite fundamentalist propaganda artist was born into this fallen world 86 years ago today. Happy birthday, Jack! Keep on keeping on; that pesky old Rapture is bound to happen eventually!



(A note for the faint of heart; the above video featuring one of Jack's out-of-print tracts is, well, not for the faint of heart.)
Oh, and I should probably mention that I was born into this sinful, sinful world on this day a comparitively short 38 years ago.