games

Lost hour

I lost an hour somewhere in the middle of the night. Has anyone seen it?

In all seriousness, I’m not such a big fan of the whole “spring ahead” half of Daylight Savings Time. I suggested the other day, via Twitter, that it ought to happen on weekday, preferably Friday, and would be a whole lot more popular if it did. Just imagine if you were at work, maybe in the long afternoon hour of three to four, and suddenly you just didn’t have one of those hours to worry about anymore. Suddenly, instead of two hours left in your workday, there was only just the one.

I haven’t quite worked out the whole “fall back” part of it just yet. If there was one day of the year when you’d be expected to work an extra hour, without extra pay, a whole lot of people would use that day to call in sick. It’s not a perfect — or even good — system, but there’s got to be something better than the outdated system we’re using now.

Anyway, I spent the hours I did have today not doing a whole lot. I watched another episode of Saturday Night Live’s first season, and I remain convinced that anyone who claims the show isn’t as good as it used to be, or that it just recycles sketches week too week, really needs to watch this first season in full. These episodes don’t just have recurring characters, and they don’t just reuse a lot of the same jokes; they re-air entire sketches and segments week to week. Think that fake commercial was funny the first time you saw it? It probably wasn’t, at least not very, but don’t worry, you’ll see the same exact commercial two or three more times at least. And yet there’s a weirdly endearing, “hey nobody’s watching this so we might as well just try anything we want” attitude that’s often sorely missing from the show nowadays. I’m not sure it’s something I want from the show, and I don’t think it would be at all a ratings success, but you kind of have to admire a show that gives both Loudon Wainwright III and ABBA two songs apiece in a single evening. Or at least wonder about what kind of weird parallel universe you’ve wandered off into.

I also went for a short walk, despite the not-quite-finished rain, and I finished the New York Times Sunday crossword. I also finished “Fright of the Bumblebees,” the first of Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures. I really liked Telltale Games’ Monkey Island game, and I decided to give this one a try. There’s not a lot of re-play value in these episodic games, but I think the animation, humor, and puzzles are worth the price of admission. I bought all of the Wallace & Gromit adventures, so I’ll probably play the others in the weeks to come.

And then later this evening, I watched a couple of episodes from Masters of Horror (“Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” and “Cigarette Burns”), looking for a good and quick scare. They both had their moments, “Incident” in particular, but both fell a little short of spectacular. With rare (but well known) exceptions, anthology series are usually like that.

Oh, and I finally finished doing my taxes. It’s not so difficult — though not as easy, apparently, as it could be — but I still don’t love doing it. My father bought H&R Block’s home software, so that’s what I was using, though I did notice at one point a grammatical error in its on-screen explanations. What can I say? I’m an editor. It’s not like I can just turn that part of my brain off.

Anyway, now I think I’m going to go to bed. It doesn’t necessarily feel like bedtime — it does, in fact, feel like it’s an hour earlier — but I’ve got to go to work tomorrow.

“It flies like a truck.” “Good. What is a truck?”

It rained all day here, and so I spent most of the day inside playing computer games and just hanging out. I played a little with the dog, watched a little TV — including a little more of Saturday Night Live’s very odd first season — and not a whole lot else.

This evening, after dinner, I watched The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. I think if I’d watched it when it first came out, when I was seven years old, it would be one of my favorite movies. As it is, seeing it now for the very first time, I just find it agreeably weird. I like what Noel Murray says about it:

…it remains an occasionally incomprehensible rush of subplots, sight gags, mythology, and bizarre fashion choices, truer to the spirit of classic adventure stories than to the letter. Which may be why people who love the film feel the way they do. Buckaroo Banzai assumes an attitude of poise and purpose in an otherwise awkward universe.

Now I think I’ll do a little late-night capping — tonight is HCC‘s third anniversary — then call it a night. There’s that darn Daylight Savings Time to contend with, after all.

ETA: I neglected to add — maybe because I still can’t quite believe it — that my eyeglasses broke today. I was cleaning the lenses and the frames just snapped at the bridge. This is especially annoying because these were a replacement pair for glasses that broke back in June, less than a year after I’d bought that first pair. This was also around the same time that another pair of glasses, bought concurrently with the first broken set, themselves broke. I think I’m going to skip going back to Pearle Vision, where I bought both of the quickly broken frames and the now quickly broken replacement pair. I’m not especially rough with my glasses or anything, and this is just ridiculous. I’m back to wearing my old set, which I luckily kept, and which hasn’t once shown signs of breaking in the decade-plus that I’ve owned them.

Onward to Tuesday

Today, not at all unexpectedly, was very Monday-ish. I spent it mostly marking up a couple of chapters on counseling older adults, because there’s nothing like reading about dementia to get the week of to a rollicking good start!

According to my Forgotten English desk calendar, today is not only International Women’s Day — which I guess means that every woman gets the Kathryn Bigelow “I Am Woman” treatment today? It’s also the Feast Eve of St. Gregory of Nyssa, who despite what you may be thinking was neither a capper nor a Doctor Who character. Apparently, he was a fourth-century Armenia archbishop.According to the calendar, he “relates a story of a nun who forgot to say her benedicte and make the Sign of the Cross before she sat down to supper, and who in consequence swallowed a demon concealed among the leaves of a lettuce.”

Which is neither here nor there, but it’s more exciting than my day, that’s for sure. I spent too much of the evening playing this Comedy Central game, and now I’m just getting ready for bed.

Monday various

  • I think the most interesting thing about this new Dante’s Inferno video game — which itself sounds pretty silly, a mashup that misses the point of both sides — is this quote:

    “We look at companies like Walt Disney, where they’ve got intellectual properties that feel like their own, but are based on literature from a time gone by,” said John Riccitiello, Electronic Arts’s chief executive. “A great intellectual property can live a second or third time in new media, because it gives you a head start.”

    Because it underlines that Disney made it big by adapting well known tales it didn’t originate (from the very beginning, actually) but nowadays runs for its lawyers anytime someone tries to do the same to it. This is nothing new, but shouldn’t Mickey Mouse be, you know, out of copyright by now?

  • The headline reads, After Taliban hit supplies, Army chef serves up 42 days of Spam. [via]
  • You can keep your fart noise generators, this is the only iPhone app I’d really love to have. If they make it available for the iPad, I may just have to break down and buy one.
  • “A third of all children aged five to 16 are convinced that the body of one of their teachers has been taken over by an extra-terrestrial being.” Tell me, can you prove that they haven’t? (Then again: “The survey was commissioned by 20th Century Fox to coincide with the release of Aliens In the Attic on DVD.” So, you know, grain of salt and everything.) [via]
  • And finally, I’m basically just copying this from Making Light, but I agree that Cat Valente makes maybe one of the best arguments for why we still need publishers in the world of e-publishing:

    Funny thing is, if this future came to pass and the market were nothing but self-published autonomous authors either writing without editorial or paying out of pocket for it, if we were flooded with good product mixed with bad like gold in a stream, it would be about five seconds before someone came along and said: hey, what if I started a company where we took on all the risk, hired an editorial staff and a marketing staff to make the product better and get it noticed, and paid the author some money up front and a percentage of the profits in exchange for taking on the risk and the initial cost? So writers could, you know, just write?

    And writers would line up at their door.

    I’m obviously biased, since I work as an editor (for a smaller textbook and professional publisher). But sometimes, there’s a middleman for a reason.

Thursday various