Pacificapocalypse

Exploding Head Syndrome; it’s real, look it up.
Not as sexy as it sounds; there *no* actual exploding heads, just a bit of an auditory misfire, probably caused by stress and/or fatigue. Which brings me to the point, stress.

The wedding is less than two months away. Invites are out, her dress and my suit are coming along. Caterer is all set, cake is booked. But still….

Layoffs announced again at the Chronic. My position is secure, but what if the whole company goes under? Possible, not probable, but who really know?
To add the final cherry to this heart burn inducing Sundae, we’ve been house hunting; found one we can afford (oh yeah it’s definitely a fixer upper, but we have no problem at all with ’sweat equity’) now we’re on tenterhooks while the financial people and the bank people and lords know who else people crunch the numbers and decide if we’re worthy of owning a house.

So I guess my question is… crying/screaming uncontrollably or fetal up and deny the universe exists?

How about neither? Just suck it up and see what happens?

Yeah, I’m going with that one. Fingers crossed.

Random Flickr pic

Shamelessly stolen from Boing Boing.

Carla and I had a nice time at the 2009 San Francisco Zine Fest on Sunday. This week and next, I’m sharing some of the photos I took of the zinesters who came to sell their comics and zines. I’ll post a new photo each day.

This is Doctor Popular, a professional yo-yoist and cartoonist. I bought a couple of “24-hour” comic books from him, which are 24-page comic books that were created in 24 consecutive hours. My favorite is Robots Don’t Know Anything about Twitter. Doc Pop made the comic by tweeting “Robots don’t know anything about…” and used the answers that his friends tweeted back as the panels for the comic. Fun!

I don’t know if he sold out of the print version of Robots Don’t Know Anything about Twitter, as it had a print run of 100 copies (each cover was hand colored!), but he is giving it away as a free PDF. What a swell guy that Doc is.

Handsome mother fucker.

Via Boing Boing

Jury Duty
I’ve never had Jury Duty before; could be interesting, and seriously, the odds of me being selected for a jury for a criminal case, are pretty darn slim (if you know my history, you *know* what I’m talking about). And it’s a long shot crap shoot anyway, right? I get the notice that says ‘possible’ Jury Duty on Tuesday, August 25th. Says to check online Monday night to see if you have to actually show up. That’s the first cut.
Tuesday morning; crap I have to go.

So they stuff 80 or so of us good citizens into the basement of the Redwood City Superior Courthouse… fill out some paperwork… and wait. Nice lady says there may not even be a need for a jury today. That’s the second cut. 10:15 and she says yes, there is a case, it’s a civil case (civil case? boo!) and she will call 60 randomly selected names. There’s the 3rd cut. I still figure my odds are pretty good of not having to serve, but it’s all still interesting to observe from a distance sort of thing. Dammit, she called my name.
That’s the 4th cut.
59 of us and my self shuffle off to the 7th floor, Courtroom 7B. Take a seat and see what happens. Nice cross section of humanity here, everyone is well represented.
I’m still optimistic.
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Oh hell, when will this crap end? In my in-box this morning:

The Guild was given a “heads-up” today that more layoffs are in store for The Chronicle. There were no details as to numbers or departments, but additional information was expected within a day or two. Arrangements are being made for Guild leadership to meet with management representatives. If we hear anything, we will let you know. As always, please check our Web site, www.mediaworkers.org, for updates.

THERE’S NOBODY LEFT!

Okay, tragedy averted, everyone relax; I think the most important thing we can take away from this incident is this:

One student, Hongying Markowitz, compared the sound of the explosion to a “gunshot.”

Hongying Markowitz?
Most awesome cross-cultural name ever.

Well we weren’t planning on making the jump to Blu-Ray so soon, but…. our less than thee year old JVC DVD player went tits up the other day so we picked up a Samsung BD-P3600 yesterday and frankly it’s pretty awesome. All the standard stuff, up converts standard DVDs to 1080p but here’s the kicker – it has integrated WiFi and is set up for Netflix streaming and Pandora radio out of the box. Set up was painless and it recognized the network and self configured, and just like that we had access to our Netflix streaming que. And damn ain’t it good to be a gangster.
Course we’ve made a promise to only buy new releases on Blu-Ray, so we picked up Watchmen… and some older films that we didn’t already have.

And 28 Days Later.
And From Hell… okay so we duplicated a few films.

No seriously, I suck at updating.
Look here’s the thing, posting is easy. If you do it on a regular basis. But then if you get behind, it sort of swells and grows and becomes this thing where so much has happened that trying to post an update is, well, frigging daunting.
So here’s the deal.
I’m not even going to try and fill in the last two months. We’re just going to pretend that everything has been going along like usual and just go from here. Sound like a plan?

Oh and go see District 9 if you haven’t. Pretty awesome.