Catherine Tate and David Tennant (before she was cast on Doctor Who)

paintedaugusta.deviantart.com

An old friend of mine who has been creating art for at least as long as I've known her (going back to high school) is, like most of us, in need of some money. She's decided to start trying to sell some of her art, and I said I'd pass her links along to my friends. Much of her work can be seen here. She also has a painting she calls Ladybug Parkinglot on eBay. It's ending late Friday, and the price is surprisningly low at the moment. So eyeball her work, give her feedback, and feel free to buy things from her.

In other news... silly photographs.

We went to a grocery a couple of nights ago, and as I was determined to refrain from engaging in any capitalism due to my low funds, I just bumbled around the store to kill time. I took some odd pictures that make me wonder how much silliness I miss when I'm busy gathering food.



They look... sort of content. Are they on meds preventing any unfortunate incidents, or is an unfortunate incident about to manifest... right... about... now?



Oh... that's what diabetics need: chap stick. Lots of chap stick.



And lozenges will answer the question of whether or not you are diabetic. Who knew?

"I wrote it in my diary so I wouldn't have to remember!" -Doctor Henry Jones, Sr.

I'm going to try to find a walk-in repair place that gets along with the warranty on my computer today. First I have to pick it up at the shop where I left it, which might be a hassle since they aren't actually there most of the time. I wonder if they aren't really a computer repair shop at all, and they're really a front for something like that antique shop in the Friday the 13th TV series. Maybe the employees are really out hunting down cursed mother boards and locking them up in the shop at the end of the day.

I realized I'd done a bit of writing on the computer, which was one of the main purposes of my having the computer. Since I had no idea it would be an ex-computer within a month, I hadn't backed up anything. Often when I lose things I wrote I can actually reconstruct them from memory, sometimes resulting in the writing being better the second time around. But this time, I have no idea what I wrote. I just parked it all on the computer, and I have no recollection of what it all was. So unless there's some data recovery whammy they can put on the computer, I might have lost a bit to Lucien's library. Lesson learned.

the events of the last week or so

Tonight the girlfriend and I attended a Puppini Sisters concert in Virginia. It was a nice show, but it was at a venue that waves ridiculously overpriced cafeteria food at you (and having been at work all day and rather famished, I was a total sucker), resulting in a $70 tab for a personal sized pizza, a hot fudge brownie sundae, three cokes, some bread pudding, and a plate of gumbo between the two of us. I don't mean to sound like a cheapskate, but I'm not exactly a lawyer or the practitioner of some other stereotypically highly paid trade, and I feel that for $70, there should have been naked Martian waitresses or something (maybe those green slave girls from Orion on Star Trek?) and much better food than something I could get at a school cafeteria. And I am so broke. I had a shiny new computer that I've only owned for one month, and the hard drive vomited and died right on the one month mark. At first the web browsers quit loading pages, and the prompts told me to contact my internet service provider. I did so, and I got to go through the utterly useless hour-long tech support call they give everybody. In the middle of the call, I saw on my phone that my friend Myke Amend was trying to call me. That kind of scared me because he's a busy guy, he doesn't call often, and when he calls the result is usually some kind of profound conversation. However, I was already so freaked out, I was certain he was calling to tell me that my computer was sending furry porn to everyone I know or something. Fortunately I later learned that he was working on a print job and had some questions about my printer experiences. Anyway, the warranty might cover the hard drive replacement (I'm figuring that out tomorrow), but for now, I'm at the mercy of dial-up and hogging said girlfriend's computer. But the way things tend to go, I expect this to cost me a bunch of money anyway. When I saw the bill for the food, it made me think of all the dumb places my money ends up and say "Gee, I wonder why I'm so broke?" It took forever to save up for the computer, which is now dead. I have to publish a comic by early October. I have Halloween plans that I would like to begin piecing together. And I have dumb habits of buying comic books and building nests out of them. And then there's food, rent, etc. I've concluded that the only way to escape this existence of always being one bad week away from living under a bridge in a cardboard box is to become a hooker. Or a drug dealer perhaps. Pirate? Orion slave girl? A lawyer maybe? This is getting ridiculous.

What's pop music doing in Narnia?!

We caught a late showing of Prince Caspian last night. Aside from three assjerk 20-somethings who thought they were Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot and decided to sit right behind me and periodically yank me out of the story with their live DVD commentary (I'm surprised there hasn't been an epidemic of "movie rage"--a movie theater version of road rage where paying customers snap and physically assault these idiots), I loved the movie... until one of the final scenes in which some sappy modern pop song begins playing inexplicably! In Narnia. In a story set in 1941. Okay... who thought this was a good idea? This song immediately beams you out of Narnia and into... a movie theater where most of the audience, in unison, says "whuh?". That was the reaction. How many focus groups and test screenings did this survive to somehow emerge as a sound ending to the movie? Was it tacked on at the last minute? Did Disney mandate it in fear of it not being a proper Disney product without some crappy trademark Disney pop music presence? Did they have some corporate drone in a suit and the director screaming at each other over this? They might as well have had the producer enter the scene and loudly fart on screen. If they wanted to start subtly fading the atmosphere from Narnia back into regular earth/1941 London they could have... played a pop song that would have been around in 1941. Idiot movie people.

On a side note, I'm learning through this post that this spell check doesn't recognize the word "Narnia". Baffling.

last night's dream

I was standing on a sidewalk holding a cat. A man who was smoking a cigarette approached me.

Man: I'm going to have to kill that cat.

Me: Um... no. You can't.

Man: Yep. I'm killing it.

Me: I won't let you!

Man: Definitely killing the cat.

I run off, tightly holding the cat while yelling about how I won't let him kill it.

Torchwood finale upsets Hitler

from failing_angel