Hey look at that! A bunch of sticks!

So yesterday we got hurricaned. I lost power for eighteen hours and was Internetless for even longer. Apart from that, it was a nice warm rain and all that humidity that I’ve been hating for last month. The weather is now quite nice. Good hurricane everybody.

Also, I had a cucumber and some mayo in the fridge that I assume is no longer good. Poor wasted food. I did finish my ice cream, though.

Why did nobody tell me that there was a movie made about Hypatia last year? Everyone knows that she was my favorite personality from the Library of Alexandria. What am I paying you people for?

I have recently learned that there are things called Drabbles which are stories exactly 100 words in length. The Internet tells me that they are typically done for fanfiction, but I have decided that I am going to do a whole bunch of them using the superhero world I’ve built up in my head since childhood. It’s like fanfiction of my own creation. Or something. Anyway, I’m going to try to do fifty of them and then put it all up as one page here, but in the meantime, to fill out a post, here is one of them:

In the Grand Canyon there is a secret facility built on a rift in the universe called the Nexoid Portal. Dave works security in the Nexoid building. One night the sensors blinked to indicate that something was trying to come through. When Dave checked on the rift he saw his daughter who had died two years before.

— — —
In other news, if anyone out there has been reading the X-Men comics for the last couple years and thinks that reading a parody of them would be quite nice, there is a new Micro Adventure by my good friend G:DR right in the section of this website where those are kept. They’re the only comic parodies you can trust.

I find the month of June 2010 guilty of the following:

• One count of my partner who does all the work I don’t want to do being on vacation for a month, leaving me with twice the work to do and the only person at work I can have a real conversation with gone.
• One count of a staff member just not showing up any more leaving us shorthanded by one for the duration of the month.
• One count of a staff member injuring herself with a box cutter leaving us shorthanded by another one for the duration of the month.
• Two counts of staff members losing family members causing us to be further shorthanded, in one case for a week and in the other for the duration of the month.
• Four counts of machinery literally breaking.
• Three counts of my supposed second in command leaving early without letting me know and leaving me with extra work that I had to rush through so I could be done in time to catch my ride.
• Two counts of my supposed second in command calling in to say he won’t be coming to work for reasons deemed suspicious.
• One count of me not getting done in time to catch my ride.
• One count of the paper being delayed hours to wait for the results of a hockey game. (Fact: Anyone who cared about that game and for some reason hadn’t watched it on television or caught the results on the news or on the Internet or from friends should really just not bother)
• Untold counts of me spending hours trying to get to sleep but unable because of heat or noise from outside.
• Eight counts of me finally being asleep and then being awakened by some external stimuli (In one case it was a cannon salute for the Queen. Am I the only one who thinks maybe she’s been around the world enough that a cannon salute isn’t going to impress her much?)
• One count of being called into work when I had already been awake for twenty-one hours.
• Three counts of me crashing an sleeping for ten or more hours at a time, eating up an entire day of time spent not working.
• Two counts of having to postpone Father’s Day dinner because of work.
• Two counts of having to cancel blood donation appointments because of work.
• Three counts of having to turn down Hanging Out With Friends time because of work.
• One count of ruining a shirt on a jagged metal bit at work.
• Two counts of ruining pants beyond the point of wearability (and for me that point means they are quite damaged.
• One count of me injuring my finger in such a way that blood came out from under the fingernail.
• One count of a long scratch on the back of my neck from the corner of a machine I was reaching under.
• One count of not having access to the Internet on my only day off during one week.
• One count of the twenty-four hour gas station I used to stop for juice when I had to walk from work apparently not being open twenty-four hours any more.
• One count of locking myself out of my apartment.
• One count of the truck I was in nearly being hit by a drunk driver (or if not drunk, just a very bad driver).
• At least three counts of papercuts (those are just the ones that occurred after I decided to keep a list of annoyances).
• One count of being a month with so many annoyances I decided to keep a list.

Now, I fully admit that the vast majority of these are quite minor and several were obviously much worse for other people than me, but the fact it was all condensed into one four-week span really made June 2010 a month that I will not miss in the least. It joins the year 2006 in Times PDR Mostly Didn’t Enjoy. But hey, it is all over now.

So, I lost my cable channels. I mean, I’ve not been paying for cable for years, but for some reason instead of getting the basic channels one is supposed to get, I was getting an eclectic mix of networks with no rhyme or reason.

I was getting TVTropolis, which was good for getting sitcom reruns, something everybody should enjoy at least now and then. I was getting A&E, and though it was no longer the A&E I remembered from my youth with documentaries and stuff, I watched the occasional crime show or really censored episodes of the Sopranos on occasion. I had Spike, which is a monstrously stupid channel from what I could see, but they had Star Wars on, pretty much nonstop. PBS had some science programs worth watching, but mostly I just watched kids shows like Effing Super Why. Also, there was an informercial channel which could amuse if you were in the right mood and maybe one or two sports channels that I pretty much never watched.

Basically, I was getting enough channels to flip around a little bit before I realized how much television sucked and would move on to something else. But now I only get the three basic Canadian channels or whatever. Now realizing that there is nothing on happens faster than ever before.

I may not watch all that much television, but unlike some I don’t lambast the entire medium. There are things I appreciate about it. In a way even watching it alone seems more like a social activity than watching DVDs or downloading episodes of things. It seems less canned on television somehow. I suppose that is, in part, because of the unfortunate presence of commercials which, though annoying, are at least a sign of companies trying to keep you up to date on their activities. Also, much more positive than commercials, is the fact that you can get breaking news interruptions. If I’m watching a rented movie and the Queen sets herself on fire and then declares war on the Vatican and then has a swordfight with the Pope, I’m gonna miss the whole thing, but if I’m watching most television networks you’d think they’d interrupt programming to say “Holy Shit, check this out!”

When I watch programs online, such as the Daily Show and Colbert, I guess I get the ads (the annoying one of the connections to the outside world) but even then I lack the other thing I like about the medium of television. Sometimes I am definitely in the mood to say “Okay, TV, let’s see what you’ve got for me.” Sometimes I might find something worth watching. An episode of some show I didn’t know existed, or an old one I had forgotten or some movie from the eighties, who knows? As far as I am aware there is no way for me to just “flip around” on the Internet.

I mean, YouTube comes close to that level of flip-aroundedness, but… It has also somehow succeeded in having more garbage than television. Go figure.

Granted, he was on the Internet before, but now he is also available as a torrent on Demonoid. Since that story is about the only complete thing I’ve finished and put online, I thought it would be good to get it out somewhere where someone might actually accidentally read it.

Paradoxically, I hope it doesn’t accidentally lead people to know I exist because then I might feel bad when I don’t make more things…

Updated: I guess it is a full on Adventure Dennis day over here. Inspired by the upload I whipped up a quick drawing of Adventure Dennis himself in a different style which can be seen to the left there.

Furthermore, Marq has given a high-tech upgrade to the Adventure Dennis comic page and it is now like seventy-seven times more awesome than it was when it was just a whole bunch of pictures one after the other. It actually seems way too spiffy to be on this website, but I’ll take it!

And I’ve uploaded two Adventure Dennis desktop wallpapers. One is from back in the Contains2 days and is 1024×768 and another is newer and 1366×768.