The Miserable Annals Of The Earth

October 1, 2005

TIPPIN AROUND WITH MY BRAINS ON THE FLOOR

We. Are. Moved.

I could tell you endless anecdotes from the Great Move, like the thing where I volunteered to pack up the contents of SuperGirlfriend’s refrigerator for her so she could focus on getting the rest of her kitchen packed up, and I wound up packing 17 boxes full of nothing but different bottles of salad dressing, and then she wouldn’t let me throw out the little packet of Ranch that had come with a McDonald’s grilled chicken salad she’d brought home for lunch several weeks before, because “you can never have too much salad dressing”. I could tell you that, and note the enormous amount of willpower it took for me not to say ‘au contrair, mon cher, any amount of salad dressing at all is too frickin’ much salad dressing’, but, well, it’s just one minor particle out of the blizzarding shitstorm of despair and horror and shrieking stress that has been the Great Move, and now, it is All But Over (we still have a few boxes left to unpack), so we’ll leave it alone, except for me to relate this, which should give you a fair impression of how the whole thing went, overall --

This morning we woke up and it was nice. We love the apartment and we’d had a very pleasant Friday evening (good dinner at Tony Roma’s, bad Cronenberg movie at the local cinema) and if there’s anything better than waking up with SuperGirlfriend on a Saturday morning when we don’t have to do anything by any particular time and can just laze around as much as we pretty much want, I don’t know what it is.

However, we had decided to knock off two of the last remaining Big Unpacking Tasks today, namely, getting the rest of our books out of boxes and onto the shelves, and getting my HeroClix out of their little plastic baggies and back out on display. I’d taken care of the comic books earlier this week, and we’d already put up all the paperbacks, so we only had the hardcovers left to do, and it seemed pretty easy. So we got up, and SuperGirlfriend said “May I make you some breakfast?” and I said “Sure thing, baby, want some music while you do that?” and she said “That would be nice, I was thinking I’d like some way to listen to music last night, will it be too hard?” And I (foolishly) said “Oh hell no, I’ll just hook up the X-Box, take two minutes.”

And Satan laughed and laughed and laughed, the fucker.

See, SuperGirlfriend has this GIGANTIC entertainment center. It is roughly the size of Rhode Island. Okay, fine, I tell a slight lie, I admit it. It is, in fact, about the size of a standard entertainment center, but it has two more wings added onto it, one on either side, that provide additional storage space. It’s very nice and looks good, and is very useful, except that, in a fit of sheer madness that can be likened only to the derangement of invading Iraq, or voting for Dubya in the damn first place, whoever designed this thing designed it to be all one fucking piece that is 71 ¼” from side to side. Yes. That’s right. It’s SIX FEET WIDE. And just about the same height. And it’s about 22” deep. And it weighs roughly 700 lbs empty… okay, probably not, but still, it has to weigh over 100 lbs.

As we planned this move, SuperGirlfriend fretted about the entertainment center. She’d had three guys help her move it into her current apartment, and as she put it, “it nearly broke them”. We probably weren’t going to have no three guys helping us move the damn thing out of her apartment and into the new one, we were going to have me, and maybe a spare husband of one of the girlfriends who had agreed to help SuperGirlfriend move this time, and, well, she fretted, because while I am a towering colossus among men in terms of… er… um… fanaticism about Silver Age superhero comics, I suppose… I am not exactly over-endowed with physical might. So, you know, she fretted.

And then, when it turned out that nobody’s stray husband wanted to have anything to do with us moving, and my seven foot tall friend named Bane has a bad back, well, I fretted, too. (Bane helped us move, but he had to be careful how strenuously he exerted himself, which was disappointing, because I figured, hell, if you’ve got a gigantic Batman villain helping you move, not only should he be able to tote an oversized entertainment center on one shoulder, but we could probably stop off at a bank on the way over to the new place and have him rip the vault out of the wall for us, too.)

So we decided to hire some professional movers to help us with just the entertainment center, which was a fine idea, except for the bit where the spastic motherfuckers dropped the damned thing down the flight of stone stairs leading up to our new front porch and broke it into a heap of match sticks.

Now, one of SuperGirlfriend’s other girlfriends has an extra (normal sized) entertainment center we can have if we can get over there to haul it away, but hooking up with someone with a truck has been a problem lately. (We apparently have exhausted all of our Truck Use coupons with the various friends who have trucks for the next century or so during the Great Move.) And the moving guys insist they can fix the pile of matchsticks that they turned SuperGirlfriend’s entertainment center into, but it may take a while. And in the meantime, the TV, VCR, DVD player, stereo receiver, and X-Box destined to stay in the living room have NOWHERE TO GO, so they are sitting around on the floor, and SuperGirlfriend won’t let me hook any of them up temporarily because I hate hooking up electronics and every time I have to do it I swear and scream and fill the ether for miles around me with psychic vitriol and if I do it before we get some kind of entertainment center, I’m just going to have to do it again when we finally DO get one.

But, hey, hooking up the X-Box is pretty easy, since when I moved my electronics across the hall, I had a couple of the SuperKids help me carry the whole damn stack at once and didn’t have to unhook a goddam thing except the single cable leading to the TV. (And somehow I managed to fuck that up, because since then I’ve tried to hook everything up again a few times just to see if all is well and I cannot for the life of me get the speakers hooked to the stereo receiver to work again. They worked fine across the hall in the Tiny Apartment, but they won’t do a goddam thing except sit there and look like fuzzy black shoe boxes over here in this one. Christly no good goddam things.)

So I figured, no problemo, I just hook the co-ax cable running from the VCR’s out port up to the TV’s in port, and since everything else (including the X-Box where all my music currently lives) is piggy backed to the VCR, we’ll have Blue Oyster Cult and the Cars and Melissa Etheridge and the Guess Who and Boston and Counting Crows and Everclear and all that other geezer rock crap pouring out of my TV’s built in speakers in a trice.

A trice, I thought.

A veritable trice.

Heh. Well, see, remember the part where our TV is currently sitting on the floor? When I hooked it up before, I had it sitting up on top of the TV stand which I’d been using over in the Tiny Apartment. However, over the past week that TV stand has migrated back to the Mawster Bedroom to hold up the other big TV that SuperGirlfriend and I watch in there, because, you know, any time now, some goddam entertainment center or other is supposed to show up for the living room, and in the meantime, as noted, the TV is squarely on the floor, which wouldn’t be a bad thing, except it means all the ports in the back of it are about a quarter of an inch off the floor, and, well, I would have gladly hunkered down and hooked it up anyway, except the rolling shelves with all the other accessories on them were a few yards away, and one or the other would have to be moved, and if we moved the shelves, well, we wouldn’t have a wall socket handy, and if we moved the TV, I’d die, because it’s really fucking heavy and it’s sitting on the goddam floor.

So I was contemplating the prospect of getting down pretty much prone on the floor on my oversized stomach and peering with a flashlight at the back of the TV to hook up a co-ax cable, after somehow moving the TV over to the shelves holding the electronics, which would mean picking UP the TV, since we have really nice hardwood floors and I’ve already put some pretty wonderful scratches in them in two or three places by injudiciously dragging large chunks of inanimate matter across them while moving in, and when I do that SuperGirlfriend shrieks like the lunch whistle in Hell and then cries and cries, and that makes me sad. And I was thinking “Fuck, there has to be a better way”, when suddenly, like a bolt of lightning out of the blue, the Better Way struck me -- we could listen to Radio Paradise, because by the tatty-haired Christ Himself, we now have DSL.

I tell you, no one has ever been more electrified by divine inspiration since Ben Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm. I skipped, I hummed, I sang, I fairly flew across the living room to the computer, went whacking over to Mike Norton’s blog in a chortling haze, and exuberantly clicked on the link he has there to Radio Paradise. Moments later, our MicroSoft Media Player was pulsating its weird 60s pattern thingie along with the Radio Paradise broadcast… and yet… and yet…

…there was no sound.

So I sighed, because I wasn’t really surprised. See, we have SuperGirlfriend’s computer in the front room with the DSL hook up, for the good and simple reason that my computer sucks, so it is relegated to the backroom and is a typing-port only; if I have to get something from it to the Internet, I have to carry it on a floppy. And in the six months I’ve lived in River City, I have never heard SuperGirlfriend’s computer make so much as a peep. She claims it’s because her speakers are turned way down so nobody wakes up the kids after they go to sleep, but, well, I suspected her computer just wouldn’t make any damn noise.

So I asked SuperGirlfriend what the hell, dude, and she came over and noticed that although the speakers were plugged into the back of the computer, the power cord was missing. Neither of us had the vaguest clue where it might be, but my computer in the bedroom has a similar hook up and I don’t need sound on it, so off I went and got the power cord from it (a simple phrase that covers several frustrating minutes of unsnarling cords behind the friggin’ CPU) and brought it out here and…

Nope. Still no sound.

So now I’m aggravated, but I schlep back to the bedroom again, snag the speakers themselves (again, a much simpler description than the ten minutes of cord-untangling it neatly glosses over actually warrants) and brought them back out and hook them up and…

Silence. Still and utter silence, and goddamit, I know these frickin’ speakers work, so WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?

Now, I am absolutely certain that whatever was wrong was something very easy to fix, if only I knew a little bit more about computers, and in fact, since Radio Paradise is playing right now as I type this, I know what that was – I had to shut the computer off and let it come back up, so it could automatically find the new speakers and load the drivers for them. But I did not know that this morning, so, well, I was REALLY AGGRAVATED.

So, fine, fine, I decided I’d do the X-Box after all. But now I was REALLY pissed.

So I puzzled and puzzled ‘til my puzzler was sore over that floor level TV and the soi-distant electronics. Finally, I pushed the electronics over to the TV, when SuperGirlfriend astutely pointed out that there was an electrical outlet I hadn’t noted over on the other wall. But I still had to figure out some way to get that TV up off the floor, because there was just no way I was going to be able to hook up the X-Box with the short cables we had if it stayed down there. I needed something to put it up on, and we didn’t have anything, except this very sturdy but really ratty looking wooden table on wheels I found sitting out for the trash guys several weeks ago and salvaged. I had it on the front porch before the SuperFamily and I moved into the Vast Apartment, and since then we’d moved it to the back porch, so SuperGirlfriend could use it for her gardening stuff (we put all SuperGirlfriend’s patio furniture out on the front porch, and that front porch looks pretty damn good right now too, if I do say so myself).

So off I went to the back porch to get the ratty wooden table, which, since we had boxes of hardcover books scattered around the hall waiting to go on shelves, meant we had to clear all those out of the way, and, you know, I’m already frustrated, so all this is just adding to the stress load. But I get the table back into the living room and SuperG and I lift the TV up onto it and then she tells me to take a break; she figures she can gets the VCR and the TV hooked up herself, if I tell her how. So I do, and she does, and we finally have music, about 45 minutes after I set out to do a very simple task that should have taken me about 90 seconds.

And that more or less encapsulates how most of this move has gone. Frustration, exasperation, aggravation… and on top of all that, I was starting a new job the whole two weeks we were packing and moving, too. A new job in which, when I was offered it the first time, I was given one address to report to by my agency, so SuperGirlfriend promptly checked on the Internet and found out that I could get there by bus, so I accepted it, after which my agency told me that I wouldn’t be going to that location, but to another one, which had a much longer and far more troublesome bus connection to make, but still, I could get there, and it was more money, so fine, fine… but then, when I went to the idiotic orientation meeting they insisted all the employees going out to that job attend (which required yet another bus trip to yet another location on the other side of River City), I found out that my group would be training at yet ANOTHER location entirely, which required yet another torturous series of bus connections to access.

After finally finding out where to wait for the bus to catch it to work, and where to wait for it to catch it back home again (a hit and miss procedure that ended up with SuperGirlfriend driving out to pick my stranded, clueless ass the first night I tried to make the return trip home), I was all set, so naturally, I was selected to be part of a group that was sent over to another location in the second week of training. This wouldn’t have been bad; in fact, it would have been quite convenient, since the bus I needed to take to get there passed only a block from my house. However, it did not go anywhere near SuperGirlfriend’s apartment at all, so, since we were two weeks away from moving into my building, and she and I wanted to spend time together, she wound up driving me to a nearby bus stop every morning… which wouldn’t have been a real problem, except for the two weeks leading up to the move we also had the SuperKids in residence, which meant that SuperAdorable Toddler had to be taken in the opposite direction to pre-K daycare first…

Yeah, the phrase ARRRRGHHHHHHHH pretty much sums it up.

But we’re over the hump and nearly done; if we ever get some kind of entertainment center into the living room, I can hopefully figure out how to hook the new digital cable box up to all the other electronics, maybe resurrect the speakers that have mysteriously died, and we’ll be set, since SuperGirlfriend and I are determined that we are never moving again, not ever, until Judgement Day itself. And on Judgement Day, if we HAVE to move, God better provide transportation, and some damn husky angels to tote our shit, too, or we just ain’t goin’.

Just to prove to you scoffers that I do indeed have the greatest girlfriend in the world, tomorrow I get to watch a Bucs game because SuperGirlfriend went to the trouble of locating a nearby bar that gets all the various football games. Then we have her family, including her hideous goat eating troll of a sister, coming by at 4, but I suspect the game will still be going on so I have a ready made excuse for blowing that off. Bane is supposed to be dropping by for dinner and clix at six, which, if he shows up, will be cool. (Given that Bane actually showed up to help us move, a day after he helped someone else move – when you’re seven feet tall and own a pickup truck, I guess you’re on everybody’s Please Help Us Move list – I have no reason to doubt him, but I’ve invited many co-workers to come over and play clix many times in the past, back in Florida, and only one of them ever showed up, and then only on one occasion, rather briefly. So it’s not that I doubt Bane, I just, you know, have no faith in my life in general.)

MORONS – I’VE GOT MORONS ON MY TEAM

My fellow geeks often exasperate and disappoint me, and, well, here’s the latest occasion of my exasperation and disappointment, found over at Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog, under Wednesday, September 28, 2005:

Did I say I was exasperated and disappointed? Actually, I am filled with admiration. It takes a level of emotional retardation not commonly found even within the realm of nerddom to so concisely boil nearly the entirety of national politics down into an analogy that is simultaneously so gaggingly geekish and so moronically incorrect.

I mean, Jesus, you retards, if you’re going to compare the evil cretins in Washington to a bunch of extremely derivative fictional characters from a fairly rotten science fantasy movie franchise, you could at least get your comparisons correct. Karl Rove is not Emperor Palpatine; Dick Cheney is Emperor Palpatine. Karl Rove is… I don’t know who he is, Darth Maul or that weird looking cat Duku or someone. (I’m tempted to say he’s Jabba the Hutt, but hey, I’m fat, too, so I’ll cut him some slack for that.) But Cheney is definitely the Emperor. And DeLay is totally some evil pawn who gets killed off early in the story, so, okay, he’s Darth Maul, and Rove is Duku. As to Bush being Anakin Skywalker, I don’t know… Anakin Skywalker is actually fairly bright. I’m not sure who Bush Jr. is… maybe he’s Jar Jar Binks.

Jimmy Carter might, I suppose, be Yoda, but casting Bill Clinton as Obiwan Kenobe is frankly freaking me out. Maybe you idiots feel that more occurred off screen between Obiwan and Lea than we ever saw? Was there a suspicious stain on Lea’s tunic when they all showed up at the cantina together that only the two of you noticed? Holy Fuck, Batman, you guys are just plain goddam stupid.

Leaving all that aside (which I do with a will, trust me), I just don’t know what to say about anyone who describes George W. Bush as “the guy you kinda want to like, right?” I mean, Jesus. Maybe YOU want to like him, but 100,000 plus dead bodies into an illegal invasion/occupation of the Middle East, with a foundering economy and about $400 billion dollars of all our money being funneled, one way or another, into the pockets of the largest Republican corporate campaign contributors, I’m certainly not inclined to do much but fart in his general direction.

And, returning to the STAR WARS horseshit oh so briefly, anyone who likes any of the Prequels for any reason whatsoever obviously isn’t doing enough meth amphetamines, because if they were, they’d just fucking die, after which they’d have to shut up and stop sniveling into a modem about Karl Fucking Rove being the goddam Emperor Palpatine.

I mean, CHRIST.

On the other hand, this guy is capable of doing more than constructing erroneous and maddeningly fatuous political/geek analogies. He’s also fully able to go on and on and on at great, malicious, and frankly hysterically funny length about people who write fan fiction.

Now, I’ve been known to write some fan fiction on occasion myself, so you’d think I’d be outraged when this particular asshole says stuff like “By and large, these people are completely insane”, and goes on to describe “much of” fan fic as “so adamantly wrong headed that it’s bred a firm and undying chunk of contempt in my soul”. However, I find it difficult to become angry at anything a 22 year old dick with ears who works in a comic shops says, especially when he (a) clearly worships THE RETURN OF THE JEDI and (b) just as clearly can use the term ‘completely insane’ as an insult when he’s talking about, you know, geeks, and (c) he admits that he once sat down and read 247 PUNISHER comics in fairly short order, just, you know, for kicks.

Oh, and (d), if you go to his bio page, you can see a picture of him, and you’ll realize that when I called him a dick with ears, I wasn’t being mean, just, you know, factual. So I really can’t get mad at him, because if I looked like that, I’d have severe personality disfunctions, too.

Somewhere else on his blog, this guy notes that he isn’t quite sure what’s so inherently wrong about most fan fiction, but he does know that he finds nearly all of it deeply disturbing in some manner he cannot fully articulate. So, if he ever finds this page, I will do him a service by pointing out exactly what it is that is so wretched about most fan fiction, even the stuff that is written by people who actually aspire to something approaching an enjoyable prose style:

Fan fiction, by and large, is written to fulfill a compulsion/obsession that revolves around having certain favorite fictional characters (which the writer does not own the rights to) engage in certain specific behaviors that are, for some reason, deeply meaningful to the writer. Having the character perform the behavior is the paramount driver of the story’s plot, and whether the character has ever in its fictional existence been depicted as having the slightest interest or inclination towards that sort of behavior is entirely irrelevant.

For example, I was once in an Amateur Press Alliance in which a member who was gay insisted on printing fan fiction stories where Hank Pym and Ultron had a semi-incestuous gay relationship. I couldn’t read more than four sentences of any of these stories without being filled with a frenzied urge to track this guy down and bang his head against the wall until shards of plaster penetrated whatever it was he was using in place of a functioning brain, and I do not think that urge to ultraviolence stems from homophobia, as this guy stridently insisted when I cautiously voiced a criticism of said story. No, I rather think my murderously infuriated response arose from my certain knowledge that (1) Hank Pym isn’t gay, (2) Ultron is an admantium robot who has no genitalia or orifi and who therefore cannot have any kind of sex with any human being at all, gay or incestuous or otherwise, and (3) even if Hank Pym and Ultron were gay and could have sex, Pym is a genius and therefore isn’t stupid enough to bend over and let a homicidal superpowered cybernetic sociopath which has vowed over and over again to kill him as horribly as possible shove an indestructible metal phallus up his ass.

This is the key to why nearly all fan fic bites, licks, and chews, even the fan fic that is written by people who actually have some talent for writing: the characterization sucks. Which is to say, the characterization, such as it is, is driven, not by what has been previously established through more canonical and authorized work on the character by better, professional writers, but rather by the impulses and obsessions of the fan fic author, who is only typing the crap out because he really really REALLY wants to see every female member of the X-Men have sex together, and whacking off over all the badly drawn fan-toons at the various Yahoo groups that cater to this deeply twisted need isn’t getting there for him any more. (In the case of female fan fic writers, the stories usually, although certainly not always, center more on relationships than sex, often featuring various fictional marriages that, for generally good and sound reasons, are never ever going to happen to the fictional characters in their authorized adventures.)

This is one reason why I generally consider John Byrne to be a professional fanfic writer. Byrne doesn’t give a shit what’s been established for a particular character; once he gets hold of it, he just does whatever the hell his own particularly deviant and frequently sociopathic impulses dictate. Thomas and Englehart spend decades establishing the Vision’s humanity; Byrne, however, feels deep in the blackened cinders of what passes for his soul that “the Vision is a toaster!”, so, well, that’s what he writes. Byrne’s characterization rarely or never has anything to do with what has been previously established on any character he writes, but his many moronic fans only buy his stuff so they can drool on the artwork anyway, so it doesn’t matter, except to those of us who enjoy good characterization and care about continuity, and who would therefore prefer it if fan fiction remained the province of amateurs on the Internet where we can safely ignore it.

Okay, so, hopefully, that’s all clear, and I can move on to my next subject.

CLAP FOR THE WOLFMAN, HE GONNA RATE YOUR RECORD HIGH

Speaking of people who write fan fiction and other people who diss them-- Remember that lunatic who wanted to film my life story? Well, apparently my callous rejection of his overtures a year or so ago has twisted him deeply, as a recent ego search on my part turned up a couple of comments he had posted about me to some chat threads.

One of them has already disappeared; even though I saved the page to my favorites, there’s no sign of the comment now when I go back to that page, and I foolishly didn’t copy it anywhere else. It’s too bad, because in that comment my wannabe cinematic biographer said something like “Doc Nebula has many character flaws (psychotic paranoia and casual cruelty being among them) but one thing he is not is self deluding”. And it got better as he went on for several paragraphs about my work and, well, my personality, behavior, lack of sex life, and putative ancestry, as I recall, but like I said, I can’t find it again. However, the other one was still there when I went back to it, so now you can enjoy this guy’s apparent obsession with me nearly as much as I do: