Cybernetic superheroes

To the rescue (so far):

Paul’s friend Scott brought over an extra modem for me. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any software for it, and Windows was baffled as to what its driver might be. AOL had no problem installing it, but without a driver from Windows, it seemed unable to find a dial tone.

Then Paul’s friend and neighbor Jeff gave me a modem, along with a CD full of drivers, and if you’re reading this right now, that modem works.

In addition, my mom was going to take me out later today and buy me a new modem and a surge protector (hey, what an idea!) and Dean Esmay sent me an email offering me one of his spare modems.

Cyberspace superheroes, one and all.

Above and beyond the call of cyber-herodom is Nate “the Great” Clark, who deposited $100 to my PayPal account. Nate just rocks.

So mad props, and more than that, my most sincere gratitude, to all of the above. Without these folks, you might well not be reading this blog page. So… er… thank them. Yes. Thank them. ;)

More seriously, all of the above are now officially declared Brown Eyed Handsome Cybernetic Resources and All Around Cool People, and are hereby awarded the Brown Eyed Handsome Blogging Order of Merit, an entirely hypothetical honor I just made up. Unfortunately, there is no cash equivalent although every one of them deserves lots of it.

Not to downplay this, but it’s worth noting that after tearing my hair out and guh-nashing my teefies down to broken shards the last couple of times this happened, I was very calm about this this time… I was really just prepared to, well, be offline for a while, since that’s what looked like was going to happen. I’m glad it didn’t, but I think I’d have been okay with it. My life would have gotten very quiet.

DON’T YOU DRAW TO THE QUEEN OF DIAMONDS, BOY

Weirdness still abounds, though. This new modem is very VERY quiet, which is nice, but, on the other hand, AOL is still not loading itself fully onto my hard drive (it opens in several steps whenever I start the program now, each of which requires me to click on OK several times, and to tell it that no, I don’t want to replace one particular driver or file with another, older driver or file). And in addition, even with this new modem, I still have to watch while AOL dials one number first, gets to step 5 in the connection sequence (connecting to network), fails, then dials a second number and gets through. It’s very odd. It doesn’t matter what order the numbers are in, or even if I only have one number listed… it will dial that number once, get to step 5, fail to connect to the network, start all over, and connect on the second attempt. I’m not much of a techie (although I’m getting awfully goddam good at installing and de-installing modems) but I can’t for the life of me figure out what kind of glitch or problem would cause that consistently.

It’s probably just a calculated effort on the part of AOL’s marketing department to get everyone to sign up for DSL. And if I had my own income it would have worked on me already, too.

NOW YOU’RE LOSIN’ ALL YOUR HIGHS AND LOWS

In real life stuff… okay, there is stuff, but much of it’s geeky and all of it’s boring, so you have been so advised and can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Paul’s buddy Scott was by a few days ago (not unusual, Scott nearly lives here, at least, for a few hours every day and nearly all day if one of his days off coincides with one of Paul’s) while Paul and I were running my RPG. Scott has seemed interested in the past, so Paul nagged him to set up a character, which he’s in the process of doing, which is interesting… I may actually have two players. Or not; Scott’s okay when he’s not gloating about his sex life (which annoys me, although I suppose it’s not his fault attractive women find me repellent), but he’s not what I call reliable. Still, he does seem interested and he’s here a lot, and as I noted when Paul was badgering him, Paul could really use the help.

Paul just went about three days without pot and bore up pretty well. He played in my game last time completely straight and did much MUCH better than he usually did. I tried not to point that out to him and was hoping it might occur to him that if he could go three days without getting high he could probably go much longer, but that never seemed to be an option that even vaguely impinged on his brain… he was always, always, always looking forward to the next time he’d be able to make a connection and toke up. Paul’s a very sweet guy and a genuinely good person, but I can already see his mind starting to blacken and curl up around the edges. Even now his short term memory is unreliable and his long term memory is getting vaguer every day. He can’t do the most basic arithmetical functions even when he’s straight, and it’s harder and harder for him to reason about anything or put together any kind of linear thought process. He also has no ambition at all; all he wants to do is watch movies (while wasted) or watch TV (while wasted) or, lately, read the Silver Age Marvel Comics I have in my small collection down here (while wasted). I’m fairly sure that if something doesn’t happen, he’ll be completely burnt out by the time he’s 30 (two years from now). As it is, we talked some about it yesterday (I wasn’t lecturing or yelling, I was honestly curious what it felt like to him) and he admitted that when he doesn’t have to be at work and is just at home hanging out and doing what he wants (see above) he likes to stay buzzed all the time… he likes to stay right at the point where there is, literally, a buzz at the back and front of his head (that’s how he describes it, he says its relaxing) and colors are slightly brighter and more intense. Which pretty much requires him to smoke all day long.

He’s going right down the tubes right in front of me and I’m honestly not even sure it’s actually my place to intervene. He’s 28 years old. I’m his big brother but I’m completely uncertain what Paul does, or doesn’t do, with his life is any of my business.

It’s odd. Everyone claims Paul listens to me and regards me as a role model, but on this subject, he simply disregards everything I have to say and all my opinions, because I don’t smoke pot. (Also, I’m hardly someone to lecture him on not wasting his life. I’m 41 years old and was looking for a job as a third shift dishwasher the other day… which, by the way, I went over and inqured after and it turned out the cabbie had gotten it wrong; they didn’t have an opening. But I’d have taken the job if it had been available and offered.)

The only other person Paul listens to is our mom, and I got her pissed off mentioning this on the phone and will piss her off again when she reads it here, but Paul won’t listen to her, either, because she smokes pot and she always has, so he doesn’t consider her to be in a position to lecture him… or so it seems to me, anyway. Mom told me, rather angrily, that she had never smoked pot as abusively as Paul does and that’s true, but… ::shrug:: all I know is, Paul won’t listen to me because he considers me ignorant on the subject (and obsessed, since I don’t drink or do any kind of drugs) and everyone else he knows and might listen to… our mom, and all Paul’s friends and all our relatives that he’s close to and respects… all smoke pot, so he won’t listen to them, either.

Actually, he’s just not going to listen to anyone. He likes it a lot, his life is barren of anything else that gives him much pleasure, and unlike me, he’s never learned to live with that, and he doesn’t want to (and honestly, I guess I don’t blame him; living like I do sucks). I’ve told him that if he had a friend who drank as much beer as he himself smokes pot, he’d be awfully worried for his friend, and he nods at that, but then says (probably truthfully) that alcohol is a far worse vice than pot… and maybe it is. I don’t know. I’m such a control freak I’ve avoided both.

Anyway, let’s leave that aside; I don’t mean to turn the blog into The Chronicles of a 28 Year Old Waste Product. (Speaking of which, I casually dropped the phrase ‘waste product’ into a conversation with Paul the other night and he got really offended, but fuck him. I’ll try to be more careful, but… well… that shoe fit him really well.)

Paul read Marvels a few days ago… well, last week… and it kindled a big interest in Marvel’s Silver Age comics, which I have a very few of in my current collection (I have some of the hardcover Marvel Masterworks collections, one of Fantastic Four and three of Avengers, two big black and white ESSENTIAL AVENGERS volumes, one ESSENTIAL SPIDER-MAN volume, and a hodgepodge of Englehart Silver Age stuff that Jeff Clem sent me when I was writing the article on Stainless Steve). So he’s currently plowed through ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS, my FF Masterworks collection, my four Englehart issues of SUPERVILLAIN TEAM UP, and he’s started on the first AVENGERS Masterworks hardcover. He seems to be really enjoying the stuff so far, and if I thought Kurt would read an email from me, I’d write and thank him. But my ol’ buddy Kurt is a dick who can’t take a compliment (at least, from me) without calling his lawyer or getting a restraining order, so fuck him, too.

Wanting to make myself useful to someone, I took a backpack full of books over to Chad and Mel’s when I walked over to use their computer early Friday. Which isn’t at all exciting, but then, I said this shit wouldn’t be. But it’s pleasant having my books available so I can do stuff like that with them.

Let’s see… Mom and her husband Carl are in town this weekend, which is nice. Tonight we went out with them and my Aunt Denise and her husband Larry to a local lodge thingie for a fish fry and karioke. I actually sang in public for the very first and last time, because I STANK. I could hear myself stinking. It’s very different singing in front of strangers. I sing for myself all the time and I know I sound passable, and I’ve sung for our family at family parties, since a lot of people in my family have home karioke systems, but this time, singing in a strange place in front of people I didn’t know for the first time, I could absolutely hear how horrible I sounded… pitchy and quavery and off key for most of the first verse, until I finally settled in and, I guess, did an okay job… but nowhere near as good as I can do when I’m not worried about it. So I’m not doing that again.

Oh, yeah, I sang… well, let’s use that word loosely… “Desperado”, which everyone tells me is a karioke standard (and I can see why; it’s one of my favorite songs and it’s easy to sing, although I apparently successfully disproved that last). But those of you who know your Eagles music probably already picked that up from the entry titles.

Paul sang “New York State of Mind” and, as he always does when he sings, he kicked its ass all over the place. Paul has a GREAT voice; he’s actually amazingly talented in that regard. Nearly everyone in my family has good voices; all my brothers can sing, but Mom and Paul could, with the right breaks, do it professionally, I personally think. Mom sang well, too, but she sang some really slow country song I wasn’t familiar with, and it was like when one of your favorite bands says they’re going to do a track off their upcoming album. You just want to go ‘no, damn you, do something I know’. Of course, one does not say that to one’s mother, and anyway, I wasn’t paying any attention to her song choice when she was going through the books, and beyond that, she wouldn’t have listened to me if I’d suggested something. So it’s all good.

Aunt Denise has a good voice, too, which surprised me a little, but I guess, in my family, it shouldn’t. She also sang a country-ish song I didn’t know, but it was obviously a modern country song, so it had a good rock n’ roll beat to it and I enjoyed it.

The fish was good, but honestly, I think they could have coated pieces of inner tube in the batter they used and then deep fried them and it would have been very tasty. However, Paul and I were nicely full when Mom drove us up to Wal-mart to grocery shop a bit later, so we were immune to the lure of junk and impulse food buys.

YOUR PAIN AND YOUR HUNGER

Um. Let’s see. I watched the Season Premieres of NYPD BLUE, WEST WING, and BOOMTOWN. Not much to say there. They were all interesting, I guess. West Wing seems as if it will survive Sorkin leaving… the episode seemed quite competently put together and was fairly entertaining… but I could already feel an almost palpable shallowing of affect with the show, as if the scope had drawn in and each character had suddenly become rather more two dimensional and focused towards fulfilling one particular emotional/dramatic role in a large ensemble cast.

Blue was just more of what it’s been pretty much since Caruso left… rather formulaic cop opera, rather elevated above the grind simply due to the generally superior quality of the cast and crew. I always enjoy it when Daniel Benzali returns as noted shyster James Sinclair, but Sinclair, like every other character that was around back then, reached his zenith of four dimensionality and interest as a character in the first season, and now he’s just an interesting looking stock villain who actor has a lovely delivery of not quite entirely generic cop/courtroom show dialogue.

Boomtown I don’t know what to say about. It seemed kind of generic… like an introduction to the characters for those of us who didn’t watch last season, but without the journalist, assistant district attorney or paramedic showing up much or at all, it was mostly just another generic cop show this time around. Rebecca DeMornay was stunt cast as one of the two female perpetrators and she’s generally fun to look at, but there just wasn’t that much to the episode, and what there was felt rather contrived… and next ep, when they will apparently reveal that the two good looking female perpetrators were sexually involved with each other, seems even more perfunctory, somehow. It’s as if someone noted that other shows were getting away with titillating lesbian subplots, so what the hell, let’s throw one into Boomtown. I normally don’t mind good looking women macking on each other on camera, but it just seems gratuitous in this context… as it did, come to think of it, in the Season Premiere of CSI, a show I normally don’t watch and won’t again, since none of the actors have one tenth the screen presence, charisma, or sex appeal of any of the regulars on CSI:Miami.

This season’s Survivor, on the other hand, is shaping up to be truly great celluloid junk food. Watching those miserably inept bastards in the Morgan tribe get hoisted on their own petards over and over again seems endlessly entertaining so far, and seeing black adonis Osten start whining about how he wanted to go home because he was afraid he’d get sick was, honestly, very gratifying to me. Here’s a guy who has obviously devoted a large part of his consciousness (such as it is) for much of his recent life to sculpting this amazingly muscular and well defined body... who is, by nearly any standards of masculine pulchritude imaginable, a total hottie (or ‘biscuit’, as the secretarial pool on West Wing called Matthew Perry’s slumming lawyer character)… and he’s crying like a little girl four days into this televised reality show that literally hundreds of thousands of people competed to be included in, sniveling endlessly that he's tired of being there and he just wants to leave.

Ah, but I admit it; you can’t go wrong, showing me a guy much better looking than I am taking a beating. Which is the major reason I enjoy watching Reindeer Games even though it’s a pretty lousy movie. (The other two reasons are on Charlize Theron’s upper torso.)

Scott brought over his DVD set of the Extended Edition of Fellowship of the Ring the other night, so I’ve watched the movie for like the fourth time in a month now. I honestly think it’s very nearly a perfect film (much better than Two Towers) and I’m fairly sure it is the finest fantasy film that’s ever been made (although, honestly, the competition isn’t stiff… Willow? Krull? Oh, please…) I can pick nits, noting stuff like ‘well, there aren’t many shades of moral or ethical grey in Middle Earth, are there’, and that’s true… heroes are pretty heroic, villains are utterly villainous, and there isn’t much of a middle ground (although Sean Bean gives a wonderfully nuanced performance as the deeply flawed but ultimately noble Boromir, and, well, Gandalf IS a pothead, and some of the elves are kind of snotty). I also still think Liv Tyler was horribly, horribly miscast; she’s the one person in the movie whom I constantly see as Liv Tyler in costume and make up, not the character she’s portraying. However, the casting of the other parts is so perfect (especially Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Richard Chamberlain, Cate Blanchett, John Rhys-Davies, Elijah Wood, and Sean Astin) that I guess, statistically, they had to screw up once, and honestly, within such a huge ocean of wonderful acting, Tyler's standing out like a sore thumb really doesn’t matter.

I also watched The Story of O on DVD, which Mel lent me when I dropped off all those books. Some blonde girl and a couple of guys I didn’t know were over there visiting Mel when I stopped by, and said blonde girl (whose name I honestly cannot recall) mentioned that the movie had ‘really sucked’, and, yes, it’s certainly soft core porn, but for all that, I found it to be a really imaginative and interesting portrayal of a dom/sub S&M relationship, with a completely hot actress playing the central part. Nothing wrong there.

Kind of on that subject, and definitely under the Information You Really Don’t Need heading, I discovered while we still had the Soul Calibre II game that if you want to practice Ivy’s moves with her whip sword, it’s a lot of fun to have her practice on Talim (one of the other very hot chick characters in the game) especially if you’re using the practice mode where your ‘opponent’ just stands there and takes whatever you dish out. Watching/having Ivy lash the hell out of Talim was alarmingly enjoyable to me. I would imagine that means Trinity was entirely correct in refusing to even meet me. There are, apparently, some weird lizards living in my head…::grin::

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.