In a (New) World of My Own

Stoned Guys Review Films.

Seriously. I should go to the patent office right now and file for this.

On the bus to work this morning I was sitting next to a stoner who was telling his friend about Cloverfield:

”Seriously…man. It was fucking big. It was going ROAR and…people were dying. Then came and shit flew everywhere.

Only a whole month later, but by the gods I try! Christmas photos!

I can haz candy?

I can haz candy?

Nothing in this universe is perfect, shocking as this sounds.

There are times when this blog appears to me to be some kind of self-built fantasy. If you go through entries it can seem like Mariah and Caira are passing figures in my life and we never do anything, because I censor myself before I write an entry. I cut out the bad things, avoid some of the squeamish good things and on the whole tidy it up a lot. No one wants to know that we had really great sex that one night (for the record, the Earth moved), or that we had a fight over the weekend.

But we did and we had. I said something upsetting, I hear something upsetting and then five minutes later we’re both wondering just how strong our marriage is. It’s never a question that you want to ask yourself, but when the person you turn to for support tells you to get your head out of your ass (danke, bose frau) and face matters you need to stop and answer it.

I feel we don’t communicate like we should. I’m loathe to speak up on an issue for a few reasons, mostly that I’m simply uncomfortable with a face-to-face confrontation. I scurry away to write length blog posts and hope that you see them.

Wait..

We both had our reasons for shouting at each other, but in hindsight it was all just set dressing for skirting around the fact that we’re not communicating like we should. Maybe we need more Tom Cruise in our lives. Christ, who knows, he might help.

For my part in all of this, I’m sorry that I hurt you.

I spend all day staring at numbers and spreadsheets, to the point that I have certain facts and trends burnt into my eyes, wind up working two hours overtime to prepare data and then come home to be mobbed by our own little monster who wants her daily ablutions (”dada, bath!” :).

Work is genuinely interesting. I’m surprising myself that I’m enjoying a job so much that basically has me stare at numbers all day. I physically count stock to control discrepancies – it’s not right to say ‘’stock loss” – I’m of the opinion that there’s very little theft ongoing, and even if someone steals a t-shirt, it’s a dollar gone. In the long term I’ll worry about it, but for the time being I worry about stock movements that cause the disappearance of hundreds of dollars of goods, such as happened today.

It’s a normal thing that I might be up or down a certain quantity of stock because 90% of the time we can account for it. The other 10% of the time it’s been weird random stuff like stock being shipped off to a vendor without anyone telling me. On rare occasions though we are completely missing an item without any explanation. The boxes have upped and vanished. When this happens (four times in the past week) I have to do something extreme and crazy like doing a complete physical check of the warehouse where the goods would be.

As I enter the counts into a spreadsheet and put numbers together I can see here that our sales staff and account executives have been poaching from a stock line for vendor and customer samples, without creating an order so we can track it. Over there I notice that a recent order of goods has been very sloppily shelved. The goods are spread across several non-adjacent bins, rather than being in one. Most important of all, I can see that that the random number generator that picks out items to be counted is really and truly broken, which was the big fact for me. I’ve been convinced for the last month that it weighs goods to be selected. It picks more active lines and more active goods within those lines. The problem is that it includes a prior count as being activity, so the more an item gets picked, the more an item gets picked.

Nice.

Alright, I think that’s enough geeking over facts that very few mundanes will appreciate. And now onto everything else that’s going on in my life.

On media, pirated and otherwise I’ve finally, at long last, had a chance to…

…watch the Simpsons film. I’m still iffy on it as I’m not sure I like how the humour has changed since I watched it regularly.
…watch Bender’s Big Score. Futurama=cake!
…listen to the full season 3 Battlestar Galactica. Great work, as always, although I think everyone else at work is really sick of drums at this stage (sorry, Christine!).

And lastly, Mariah and I went to see Cloverfield on Sunday last. Holy awesome film. :/ I’m already waiting for the sequel.

Well, it’s ready for release. The Story, or at least the part of it that I both consider to be finished and able to stand on it’s own. I intend this to be ultimately part of a larger story, and I will edit it as such (some of the exposition would fit better elsewhere).

Anyways.

Express Elevator is set in the year 2073, where there’s just been a terrible accident above Io. People are screaming and things are exploding. Read it, enjoy it. Flame me for the song and dance number with buxom space bimbos, love me for the gratuitous (yet strangely touching) Martian lesbian sex scene.

Watch! Full-on antenna on antenna alien love.

…wait, that’s the sequel. Christ, just read it. I’m releasing this under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license. This is to say you are free to alter and redistribute this work, so long as you do not charge for access or remove the original attribution to me as the author. As such I’ve also uploaded the source TEX file for easy alteration.

You can grab the TEX file here.

Feedback is absolutely welcome, either on this thread or by email to me. Work is still ongoing, I’m constantly fixing typos, rewriting sections, fixing grammar and the like.

Additional credit goes to Mariah for nit-picking my grammar, Jen for nit-picking my spelling, Tef for advice on grammar and Mofidul asking for more space battles.

Heh

Imap+Growl=Spam

The portrayal of geeks by mainstream media is a constant source of frustration and anger for me; we’re usually shown (or, in reality TV shows, implied) to be socially inept virgins who live in our parents basements. We pass our time cataloguing our Star Wars memorabilia, correcting people on the proper use of the word “midichlorion” Slave Leia costumes. If you happened to see last night’s American Idol, you will have a fair idea of what I’m speaking of.

Really, fuck that.

I’m not going to deny that there’s an extreme fringe among geeks who even I find creepy, but guess what folks, there are yiffs, sodomites and masochists in all of the walks of life. I’ve personally known one completely ordinary appearing person who had tastes and interests that left me feeling physically sick, but they had the gall to smirk at me because I have a deep and abiding love of vintage science fiction. Thank you.

Myth 1: We’re socially backwards.
We’re not socially inept; most of us simply prefer to interact in means that we enjoy more. Internet discussions, instant messaging, text messaging, etc. You need to understand that we don’t talk for the joy of talking; we use it to communicate. Maybe it’s why we’re seen as so dysfunctional. We’re not so much ignorant of social norms, as we are aware of them, but we simply don’t care. Get the fuck over it.

I much prefer to deal with other geeks in social situations. Pleasure for me is playing network games with them for a few hours, sitting down around a table to play a pen and paper role-playing game, reading the latest part of a length email correspondence, or talking to them on an instant message network. How is going to parties and functions, for me and us, supposed to match this?

Myth 2: We have no friends.
Rubbish. Kaede lives in Japan, Michelle, Mike and Eileen live in Ireland, Flemming lives in Denmark, Gabi lives in Oklahoma and Jennifer lives in Texas. I keep in touch with them regularly both through the phone and internet, and I’ve had as many an enjoyable evening with them as I’ve had with any friend in the flesh. Actually, our relationship goes a little bit deeper. We don’t have the inhibitions that being in person brings, and the fatigue that seeing each other every day brings. It runs deeper and truer than many flesh and blood friendships and relationships that I’ve had.

Myth 3: Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons are the be-all of our interests.
For sure, I enjoy both of these, although most people’s interests in science fiction and fantasy run past these. I’m a middlingly-successful photographer, I’m teaching myself to write lengthy pieces and I love all kinds of science fiction and fantasy more than anything else. Star Wars has flashy special effects, but how is that to compare with the Book of the New Sun, The Night Land or At the Mountains of Madness?

Myth 4: We’re fated to die virgins and never know the comforts of the opposite sex.
I’m married to a wonderful wife and have a beautiful daughter. Enough said.

So get over it already. We have a mark of strangeness upon us, but we wear it openly and proudly. Without geeks quietly beavering away you would not have computers, or the television, or the internet. We are the people who work behind the scene to make sure the trains run on time, who make sure that supermarket stocks your favourite brand of biscuts, and geeks always have been at the heart of the entertainment industry.

/sigh

Don’t we all feel like this come each new year?