thedeadlyhook

I've missed so many birthdays, it's honestly embarrassing: botias, spikes_heart, pukajen, romanyg, dessert_first, pfeifferpack, lillianmorgan, ascian3, rikko_oko.... Very Happy Belated Birthdays to you all, and hopes for a great year ahead.

Good Christ, I'm behind on everything. I haven't even read any of the Bring Back the Porn Day entries on InsaneJournal. Something's clearly wrong with the world. Or I've just been too busy. Or both. Sigh...

coyote_william has a poll about the Slayer activiation spell: good idea or bad, morally speaking? (Not just good/bad in terms of plot device, in other words.) I've contributed to this thread a lot; I have big honking problems with "Chosen" which I apparently still need to get off my chest. Isn't it amazing how some things will nearly always draw you back into the same damn conversations?

Fic rec: We Who Are About to Die, a Spike & Anya conversation on the night before the battle of "Chosen." Really like this one, the knowing quality of it. Sublime.

( More dribs and drabs, some links picked up from the Flist )

I signed up for ruuger's Buffy is the Hero, Dammit! ficathon. Because I am insane, and don't have enough WIPs to work on. And I signed up for seraphcelene's Fic Meta-a-Thon too. Because I am INSANE. Clearly.

But on that note:

[Poll #1059076]

Downloader Beware!: iTunes 7 is a big, sucky yellow LEMON of SUCK. My software updater hassled me into installing the upgrade and oh, why did I not listen to that sinking feeling I had and skip this version? The "gapless playback" function is a buggy program-freezer - it locks up iTunes on startup. Joy. Command-period to stop it from running; the only way to get out of the damn thing otherwise is to restart. And no, there's nothing wrong or corrupted about the songs it freezes on, they play just fine. It's a suck feature that currently has no control panel I can find. Do yourself a favor, don't upgrade this time, wait for the bug-fix.

Otherwise, er... yeah, I'm still being boring.

So Hey, TDH (you might ask), Why Are You Being So Lame and Not Around Very Much Anyway?: Well, about that. I am going to be a little scarce online for the short-term immediate future. Same project eating my head as before, I'm just not done yet. And somewhere between slapping myself out of a bad procrastination habit and coming to grips with the fact that this deadline really needs meeting, I'm going to have to crack down on my LJ time, at least until the end of this month. After which I'll become a whirlwind of feedback.*

*Not that I really believe anyone's holding their breath to hear what I have to say in particular, but I do hate feeling like I'm falling behind with everyone's stories. There's such an immediate, fun rush of a new post, and I do firmly believe in feedback as an important community function. Or something like that. Le sigh. I'll just get back to work now.

( Very Minor Thoughts on the Stargates )

The Showtime Masters of Horror Series: Rocks. We've been Netflixing them, and haven't seen a bad one yet. Kudos also to Joe Dante's "Homecoming," the most pointed piece of political commentary I've seen since Team America: World Police. Iraq war casualities come back from the dead as zombies to tell us how they really feel. Ouch. If you ever wished for a horror director to take aim at political pundits, this is the one to see.

The weather is very nice today here in SF. Halloween merchandise is crowding the stores, and it's starting to feel like fall. By the time my seasonal_spuffy posting date rolls around, everything will be shiny and new and autumnal. Shiny. New. Ready-for-the-holidays. And I'll be DONE with this project, dammit. DONE.

It is rather amazing to realize how much more interested I am in updating now that my page looks so much prettier. It's not perfect, mind you - I'm not really fond of some of the screwy scrolling issues created by LJ's nailed-down length and width codes - but survey says that it's preferable to my old style.

It's our second sunny day after a seriously relentless stretch of gray-and-wintry-cold days. The PG&E guys are still goofing around out our street with god-knows-what, mostly involving jackhammering holes in the sidewalk and digging up random tarmac areas they haven't already dug up yet. ( I had to flip back a ways to find out how long they'd been out there - wow, since the end of June.) They're also working on the main shopping street near us now, so getting groceries is an adventure, although I'm not minding so much at the moment because the Ditch Witch has made another appearance. Such a neat piece of equipment to watch in that slow, anthill-building kind of way.

And one good thing to come out of this noise and clamor (aside from whatever pipe improvements we get out of it): when the sidewalk holes were re-cemented, sawhorses place all around until they dried, I mentioned to Toys that we'd missed our opportunity to carve our names in the wet cement (it was almost dry by then). He immediately looked stricken and blurted, "Oh, I wish I'd thought of that!" Which would be another checkmark in the column of Why I Love this Guy. : )