personal

Looney toons

A pretty ordinary Wednesday, all things considered.

We had a team meeting this morning, during which I got to briefly show off the book I recently had publish. Technical issues kept the UK half of our team from being heard for a good ten or fifteen minutes, which was weird. We could see them on the video conference screen and they could hear us, but IT had to be called in at their end. A coworker said it was like watching an aquarium, which it kind of was, although I don’t usually wonder if while I’m watching the fish they’re maybe talking about me.

Although maybe from now I will.

After that, there was one of our brown bag lunches, with guest speaker Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor for the New Yorker. He talked about the psychology of humor, how the magazine selects the cartoons it prints, and answered questions. He also confirmed something I’d often heard, namely that David Mamet has submitted cartoons to the magazine. (Discovering his Huffington Post cartoons, I can see why he’d previously been rejected.) Finally, Mankoff announced the winner of our office caption contest. I didn’t win, probably because I didn’t enter — I couldn’t think of caption by yesterday’s deadline — but the whole presentation was interesting and fun.

And you know, a free lunch. True, it was Subway sandwiches, which are to real sandwiches what David Mamet cartoons are to real ones, but that’s okay. I’m not complaining.

It was a pretty decent Wednesday.

Beware the broken glass

It snowed this morning, kind of a wet, rainy mess, and then afterward it was winter and cold.

I’m not sure I’m entirely okay with this. I just got used to it being autumn, and, true enough, it’s supposed to warm up again by the weekend, but still. I don’t think the seasons should just change like that over the course of a couple of hours. I may grumble about it here, and on Twitter, but I don’t dislike winter. I just feel like it snuck up on us this morning, and that’s dirty pool.

Meanwhile, the week is continuing pretty much as it ever does. Lots of reports at the office, broken glass to beware. It’s been that kind of week.

Is it Tuesday already/only?

Who’s Thor-y now?

Today I went to see the Thor movie, which I quite liked, and I wrote this:

They killed another of the savages last night, brought it up deck, lashed it tightly to the mast, and took turns with the captain’s whip until the poor frightened beast bled out. This morning, none of three men would claim the killing blow for himself; they hemmed and they hawed and they refused to set their stories straight, though Mr. Murtha and I questioned them each for the better part of an hour, both together and separately. As for the captain, he would claim only the whip, taking it back from the men with half-hearted admonishments I knew were more for my benefit than for theirs. He does not like me, Captain Androse, and I think that would be the case even without Mr. Murtha’s intimidating bulk constantly at my side or the crew’s natural displeasure at having a dead man sailing with them. The captain is as close to another man of science as I am likely to find aboard his ship, less frightened by superstition or believing of rumor, but I know even he would be just as glad to be rid of me. If he could kill me twice, he no doubt would have done so.

If only he knew how little I wish to be here myself.

And yet I go wherever His Majesty sends me, serving at the pleasure of the crown.

The native boy’s death is a distraction — not worthy of our time, the captain says — and what’s worse I know that he is right. What do I care that the men took a little sport with the heathen, took it all too far, and ended his life? As a slave, he would have fetched little profit, and so it is not the destruction of His Majesty’s property that galls me. Nor is it even the principle of the thing… I am bound, not only by royal decree but by the wards the king’s necromancers carved into my skin, to uphold the laws of the realm, but I am free to choose how I do so. We have better things to do than punish these men for spilling a savage’s blood.

And yet why, then, can I not let this go? Is it as a dead man myself that I take offense?

It was, whadyacallit, a Sunday.

Long weekend

I took Friday off, which was really nice, even if I did nothing more exciting with the day than go to the post office and buy some pants. (I did these separately; the post office has a lousy selection of trousers.) It was nice having the day off, though it did weirdly feel like Saturday, which by extension made today feel like Sunday. And while there are things I like about Sunday — the crossword puzzle, my writing group — there’s a certain kind of melancholy to it that I’m not sure needs to be repeated twice in one week.

But still, in reality it was two Saturdays, so it’s not so bad.

Last night, I watched Brian De Palma’s 1978 movie The Fury, which was…how should I put this? Terrible. It’s like De Palma got done making Carrie the year before and thought, “That psychic stuff was fun, but it wasn’t halfway confusing enough. Maybe we could throw in some really bad comedy, too?” The plot of The Fury is just a mess, and characters disappear for long stretches, connect in ways that either bore or don’t make any sense. It stops short of being a total disaster, but only just, and all of De Palma’s worst excesses and impulses as a director are on screen. Carrie, on the other hand, is also full of visual excess — you may know its most famous images even if you’ve never seen the movie — but it also has terrific performances, particularly from Spacek, and a simple story grounding the whole thing.

This? Not so much.

Though I did note that Andrew Stevens, whose acting in this isn’t very good, was last in Mongolian Death Worm. So, y’know, Sepegal.

Tonight, I watched Oldboy, which was….weird. Very violent, disturbing, visually impressive, and weird. I’d been meaning to watch it for some time, since Spike Lee’s American remake will be coming out soon, but Netflix only has a dubbed version available for streaming.

Other than that, I’ve been watching Scandal, which is ridiculous, but ridiculously addictive. Also, How I Met Your Mother, and I decided to sample the first episodes of Arrow and Haven. The latter is a little too Syfy Channel-y for my liking, and the former could become too CW-y, but so far they’re intriguing. Not as compulsively watchable as Scandal, maybe, but intriguing.

That’s been my weekend, more or less, and I still have an actual Sunday to go.

Monday

I had to go into the office today, rather than work from home, but that’s only because I’ll be taking Friday off. I’ll actually be taking every Friday off in November, and a good number of them next month as well, as we wind down toward the end of the year.

Next year I think I need to better manage my vacation time…and actually take a vacation, not just a handful of days or a week when I do nothing much but sit at home and — this is what I did last month, anyway — become addicted to the TV show Scandal. I’m determined that next year will be the year I finally get my own apartment again — I moved back home just shy of ten years ago now — and that will eat into my disposable income. But I still think I need to go somewhere, and use up my vacation time in more creative ways than looking at the calendar and thinking, “Oh, I guess I could take those Fridays off…”

I mean, I like a good three-day weekend as much as the next guy, but there’s only so much you can do with them.

But anyway, going into the office today wasn’t so bad, its being a Monday notwithstanding. I’m moving to a nicer cubicle at the office, though IT has yet to switch my computer and phone over, so I’m kind of spread across the two workstations right now, my computer and phone (and me) in one, and all my books and files and whatnots in the other. Hopefully it’ll be sorted out before the end of the week.

One good thing about not working from home on Monday: I don’t have to carry my laptop home with me each weekend. (Or nearly miss my train every Friday because of ill-timed Windows updates.)

And finally, one of the textbooks I put into production this year, the first one I’ve worked on since joining the larger development group, has finally published, or at least arrived from the printer. That’s a great feeling, actually seeing this thing you worked on (and hopefully helped make better) and hold it in yours hands. I think it looks great, both with the content and how it looks, and I’m really hoping the author’s pleased and that the book sells really well. I’ve got two more books due before the end of the year, and another in late January, but this has been the first book I’ve developed that’s published in a while.

So, anyway, that’s pretty much Monday. I’ll just leave you with this. You can decide how accurate it actually is:

ageanalyzer