Search This Blog

26 Dec 2009

Christmas song 1



Just play this, and you'll be done for the day...

24 Dec 2009

E-commerce is exhausting

I don't have a funny clip for this, because it's not funny. I've been trying to sell some old things on the internet and I've never met so many idiots in such a short span of time. No one seems to know how anything works, or how much it would cost to ship something. I thought I might make some money, but the amount of time I'm having to spend isn't worth it. Leading out from my Nerd hoard, There are some valuable comics in that load that are objectively shit. I've resolved to set apart the money earned from selling those and buying trade paperbacks. But the horror of what that might entail. What if they want me to ship something to the U.S.? Ugh...

23 Dec 2009

My Nerd Hoard



Over the holidays I was able to find some wonderful relics of my misspent teenage years. A couple thousand euros worth of comics, a good 90% of which I wouldn't read today if forced at gun point. I had much less cool 90's Vertigo titles than I suspected, just Preacher, Hitman (not Vertigo, but close), The Invisibles and Transmetropolitan, some Shade the Changing man, Sandman etc, but a small metric ton of x-men from the late 70's to the late 90's, even an x-men 17 from 1963 I bought in London 10 years ago. I'm glad I was never a serious speculator, crap foil embossed image titles from '90 to '95 are in short supply. I do have the first few issues of Whilce Portacio's Stone, signed by him, but apparently so does everybody else. I could shift some of the most valuable crap and buy TPB's of things I'd actually want to read. That would be the best Christmas present I could think of.

Food, glorious food



I just spent the afternoon Christmas shopping at a restaurant supply company. Navigating a large cart through stacks of 5 kilo bags of cooking chocolate to peer at the 10 by 10 feet lobster tanks, having to ask if they maybe had a turkey in the back that would fit in the oven, taking note of the fact that they were out of 2 kilo blocks of foie gras, If we would like a 6 kilo tub?
I finally found boiled duck preserved in goose fat, for the spring. Christmas really should be an orgy of excess, in every single way. There is a real reason to fatten up this winter. Come January grasshopper corpses will litter the streets, only industrious little ants will live. Merry Christmas!

22 Dec 2009

Policecops



If only they were really like this, but they're not. I spent years actively hating the police, but they probably do serve a purpose. According to a friend who worked in a womens' shelter, they're the main reason most domestic disputes don't end in bloody murder, which is something to be grateful for. I've never been particularly helped by their presence, nor have many of the people I know. There's the rule of law aspect of having a police force that I must have benefited from somehow, but mostly there have been fines, po-faced lectures, shrugs at inquiries into if they'll find my stolen property, or if they'll look for those guys that started the fight. And these are the positive encounters. I've also been fined unjustly, detained for no reason, pushed around, threatened with violence, and once pulled over because they thought I might have been speeding if they weren't there. In Rio they arrested me for a bribe, when I didn't have any drugs, they offered to arrest a dealer and get me some.
It's a problem of consistency, mostly. I just don't know what to expect. I'd much rather they either always fined you, always gave you a lecture, or well anything really, as long as they always do it. It's just the reasonability, the discussions only work if both parties are of sound mind, and even if I sometimes am and can discuss things calmly, I can't be sure of that, and neither can they.

20 Dec 2009

Heaven knows I'm miserable now.



This is the first thing I play whenever I'm depressed, and it always cheers me up. I know I'm not exactly unique in this regard, and I hate most Smiths/Morissey fans on the Internet at least. For that matter, what I know about Morissey, I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire... unless he promised to get back together with Johnny Marr, that is. I think it's exactly that quality of self-serious, but clever goth poetry set to relatively happy, complex music that Makes snap out of any funk. At no point can you take your own problems seriously when you listen to someone describing the teenage woes of artistic souls this sarcastically. I love it so much, I can't even articulate it as well as someone whose music I unreservedly hate: