Jim was telling me about this thing where all these Snape fangirls started seeing Snape in their dreams or something, and started forming some sort of cult about it. Or something. I'm sure he tells it better than I do. The whole thing's on fandom_wank, which I don't read a whole lot because everyone talks like the Smurfs over there, and I have Jim and Brucha to fill me in when something truly ridiculous goes down. It saddens me that Tenchi Muyo! wank never makes it onto f_w, but I can't deny that the insane HP fans really do come up with some wild stuff. Nobody does it better. Makes me feel bad for the rest. Nobody does it half as good as you. Baby, you're the best.

If I were the President, dreaming would be illegal. Those whiny "Dumb-ocrats" and their "Smell-fare" programs would probably tell me that people need to dream so they can achieve R.E.M. sleep necessary for survival. Well, I say R.E.M. hasn't been any good since they swapped their drummer for a machine, so screw that. Still, as hypothetical President, I'd want to be a uniter, not a divider, so I'd compromise with a law that says you can dream, as long as you never speak of or act upon what you dreamed about. I mean, if someone dreams a cure for cancer, let's see it, but for the most part, people's dreams make no freaking sense, so I doubt this'll ever come up.

True story: I had a dream the other night where I was being hunted down by a man I eventually recognized as Z, the pine-tree haired heavy from the new Tenchi Muyo! DVD. He wants to kill me dead, but as long as I found the seven Dragon Balls, I'd turn into a Super Saiyan and kick his ass in two seconds, only for him to come back and force me to repeat the process over and over again. We were like in some hallway from Scooby-Doo, where you just run up and down the hall opening doors and hoping the other guy wasn't there to get the drop on you. The Dragon Balls were for some reason incomplete, lacking their glossy orange exterior, and instead being this mass of wicker basket material, not unlike what all the crap is made of on the tree planet from TM! Also, finding the Dragon Balls shouldn't make you transform into a Super Saiyan, but the whole thing was pretty surreal. Eventually, like a lot of my dreams, I realized the stalemate, and woke up.

Now, I consider myself a fairly rational individual. Upon waking up, I immediately realized that I just dreamt about a bunch of shitty cartoons I like to watch, and that my dream made absolutely no sense. There are no good DBZ/TM!R x-overs, TYVM, and I groggily cursed my subconscious for trying to come up with one. Apparently, what I should have done was treat this like a profound cathartic experience, and start searching the world for other people who've had a similar epiphany. Then we'd make a bunch of crappy photomanips of our dreams and pretend like it amounts to anything. Why don't people realize that when you make this, no matter how spiritual it may look to you, to the rest of the world it just kind of looks like this. Ah, could I love him more...?

Anyway, that's all I got to say about it for now. Let's put this puppy to sleep.

( You've hit your peak. You've burned out your power, so your chi is dropping fast. I don't see any point in fighting you anymore. )

It's... yeah, it's not looking very good for this book. Let's leave it at that.

( I didn't BUILD the thing! )

An epilogue to my Tenchi Muyo! discussion from before, I put it back in and watched the extras. This mostly turned out to be a music video of the closing credits, and some sort of mini-documentary made by the producers in Japan, in which the musicians for the anime went on a "pilgrimage" to Okayama Prefecture, the real-life locale in Japan where Tenchi Muyo! is set. See, a lot of the characters were named for geographical locations in the area (e.g. Mt. Washu, the Great Seto Bridge, Bisei a.k.a Mihoshi Observatory, etc.), so I guess if you've got some time to kill and you're a big enough fan of the show, you can wander around down there and check them all out. I guess I'm not a big enough fan to appreciate this, because to me this was just a couple of Japanese people walking around in Japan, speaking Japanese, which I would imagine happens rather frequently every day, except this time someone taped it and got me to pay money for it.

Seriously, a pilgrimage to see the actual cave Ryoko was sealed away in on the cartoon? That'd be like if I went to a police station in Jersey to see the actual file cabinet Penry used to change into Hong Kong Phooey. And I'm a big fan of Ryoko's but that only goes so far with me. Past a point, she's just Hong Kong Phooey with a plasma cutlass and tits. And at least Hong Kong Phooey didn't live out in the sticks. The whole place looked like somebody's backyard, but on a damn mountain, so there's like a billion concrete stairs everywhere. Wow, climbing these stairs is just as dull as when they do it on the cartoon! That's probably why aliens usually ambush you there on the cartoon, to break up the tedium. In Real Japan, not so much.

Fortunately, some of the scenery was rather impressive, and the lady who sings the closing credits was friggin' hot, which almost made up for her custom of attaching notes of well-wishes to the various sights on her trip, apparently a token of religious endorsement for the success of the Tenchi franchise. In fact, the second stop on their journey was to a Shinto shrine, where they say a prayer for OAV3. I'm pretty sure the souls of your dead ancestors have better things to do with their time, but what do I know? From the look of things, a lot of other people had passed through doing the exact same thing, like Okayama is Tenchi's version of King's Island or something. I didn't really pay attention, but I'm not entirely sure the observatory isn't some sort of fan-operated shrine on the side, too. None of this exactly makes me regret worshipping a Jewish carpenter, if you know what I mean.

All right, I need to get this stupid book done. Three months is a lot quicker than the last one went down, but I still didn't plan on taking this much time to finish it. Maybe it says something that my fandom has gotten me thinking about cosmological theory, while Harry Potter has me firmly entrenched in the ins and outs of... the Dusty Finish.

( Cut to the Mothership if yew weel. )

I'm bored out of my mind tonight, so we'll make it a two-fer. Make up for me ditching these things for two weeks, right? Nah.

( Untie )

Got a bunch of stuff to do tonight, so let's get on with it.

( Worth the wait, I hope. )

Hey, kids? What I need you to do is don't settle in, and don't get a snack, because this one's really short, OK? OK.

( So short I'm not even sure why I'm cutting it. )

Had someone else get fired from my job last week. This time it was a new hire who, according to the scuttlebutt, refused to take the drug test. I don't know if it's true or not, although I have to admit, I can't imagine a lot of other ways to get yourself fired less than a month into a new job. Refusal to take a drug test has happened before in my experience, and the only reason I can think of not to do it is that you must know you won't pass. There might be some sort of personal dignity issue that could play into it, too, but a lot of jobs out there require some sort of drug testing, so I have a hard time imagining a person signing on to work at a place without considering that it'll come up.

I've seen people get fired in the past, and it always irks me, because most of the time it's over some petty thing that goes too far. In 2003, we had a guy who simply didn't show up for work for an entire month. He'd only been working there for less than a year, so doing this used up all of his vacation and sick leave. The boss kept calling him for some kind of update or explanation of his whereabouts, but never heard back. Then one morning he just shows up, like nothing was wrong at all, and he'd just go back to work as usual. I was far less pleased to see him, as I'd had to pull a lot of long hours to cover his workload, and I wasn't shy about telling him so. My lab manager and the VP in charge of our lab sat him down and basically asked him to explain where he'd been all this time, and he claimed to have been laid up in the hospital or something. When asked to provide medical records to prove his story, he responded by saying "I could... but I won't." They fired him on the spot. What I find the most galling, though, is that despite all the hassle he'd caused us, for apparently no good reason (I refuse to believe he was ever in the hospital, unless Jesus himself tells me otherwise), he tried to stay on with us just a little longer, offering to help train a replacement once we'd hired one. I know all this because our manager and VP were pretty casual around us, and we'd all started to think of this guy as a joke about three weeks into his unexplained absence.

It was so pathetic to me when I heard about that. "I'll stay on to train my replacement." In the first place, I trained him, so I hardly needed him to get a new guy up to speed. In the second place he didn't know how to do his own work right. I figured that out when I wound up covering for him while he was AWOL for a month. In fact, before he disappeared, he came to me asking if he could do such and such with this method, and I told him it wouldn't work, only to find that he'd been doing it anyway in spite of my informed opinion. The guy couldn't train or be trained, so what good was he? Besides, why would we need to replace him? We'd gotten along without him for a month, and managed to keep pace rather well. The mystery is why we hired him in the first place. Indeed, I strongly believe that this guy was the final straw in a long line of foul-ups that eventually got management to close down the lab portion of the business later that year. In a detached sort of way, I could understand it, since we were just a liability to the overall company. Still, it was pretty lousy when they started laying some of us off, and my manager was fired shortly after I quit to get the job I'm in now. Those people needed the work, and it angers me that some jerkoff who didn't care could have somehow contributed to their unemployment.

I complain about my new job from time to time, and we have unmotivated and apathetic employees here, too, from time to time. But the attitude around here is a lot more positive, and I think that's why I see a lot more productivity and organization going on. We hired this new girl to help me out with my lab duties, and she's really picked up on things well. It's because of her that I got to go to Las Vegas and Chicago this year, and I think I'll finally be able to return to DexCon in '07 as long as she doesn't quit in the meantime. It makes me proud to train some new people and actually see my own work ethic reflected in them for once, perhaps even magnified a little. The other day, she had been in a car wreck (not hurt, but rattled from the experience), and she had signed her notebook with the wrong date. "You put down a six, and it should be a nine," I said, just to make sure she corrected the error before one of us forgot about it. "Oh, well that figures, I have been up for the last two days," she replied, and set about fixing the entry. I was worried, since I figured she might be too strained to work safely, but she seemed to be fine after that. In five months, that's the only egregious mistake I've seen her make, besides dropping a large beaker, and that happens to everybody. I just appreciate that kind of thoroughness. No whining about smoke breaks or long lunch hours, no uncontrollable sobbing for no apparent reason, no yap-yap-yapping about whatever gossip is floating around. Just dedicated, consistent work. Newsweek did a feature on women in the workplace, and tips for how to get ahead, but in my experience, that's all you have to do, is stay focused on the work, and let everything else deal with itself. And that's advice that a lot of men could stand to follow, for that matter.

But anyway.

( Calcutta! )

Spent the afternoon in Greenwood, IN, getting measured for my tux, and then checking out the local mall. They got a nice mall in Greenwood. Had an Applebee's in it, and for some reason there were kiosks around the store selling used books, movie posters, and other stuff you'd expect to see in a comic book convention or something.

One weird thing was when I this lady stopped me and asked me if she could ask me a question. She was standing next to some cart that looked like it had cosmetics on it. Confused, I stopped to hear her out.

LADY: Have you ever heard of the Dead Sea, the lowest place on Earth?

ME: Uh... yeah?

LADY: Do you know where that is?

ME: ... It's--it's in Israel.

LADY: Very good! How do you know that?

ME: I... wh-- I just know. What's your point?

(at this point, I notice a guy in a wheelchair on my left, obviously waiting for me to get out of the way because he can't go around.)

LADY: Can I borrow you for a minute?

ME: ... No.

LADY: OK.

I assume she was hawking some kind of beauty treatment involving sea salt, but really I have no idea what she was getting at, and I didn't understand why she would pick me out of a crowded mall to make her pitch. You'd think a proper sales pitch would start with "Excuse me, sir? Would you like to [solve some sort of problem]?" Then explain how whatever she has can help me do that. Instead I have to play twenty questions just to find out what she wants, and I didn't even want to know in the first place.

Am I the only one who gets into these kinds of situations? One time I got a knock on my door on a Saturday morning and I opened it to find a man and a woman standing there with reverent expressions on their faces. "Do you ever wonder when the terror will end?" the woman asked me. "No," I said, and sent them on their way. At least with them I had some inkling that they were representing one religion or another. I'm don't mean to be rude or brusque with people, but sometimes I get the vibe that some people try to exploit your sense of courtesey to get you to listen to them, and I hate when people do that.

Anyway, I have more urgent matters to discuss. Take a look at the picture beneath the cut and tell me what's doin'.

( The aforementioned cut )

Since I got a Dragon Ball Z movie in the mail today, I'm gonna talk about that for a minute. Deal with it.

( Nutty Honey Cocoa Death! )

( And now here's something you'll really enjoy. )

I feel like there was something I'm supposed to do... Oh, right, I need to renew my car registration.

....

OK, that's done. Now I'd better post this thing.

( Mixmaster, cut faster. )

And so concludes my Labor Day Weekend of reviewing this lousy book. Doing these things once a day is kind of rough, but it's worth it to get to the halfway point in a little over a month.

( Cut down to size )

It's late, and I think I wanna play Super Dragon Ball Z tomorrow, so let's just get this one posted.

( Frieza Cutter! )

Just a quick digression before we get into the review. I was reading a rumor on the internet that they might be making HD DVDs of Star Trek at some point. Or Blu Ray. One of those ones where they can put like a million times more information on the disc than a regular DVD.

Now, my beef with this whole next-gen DVD stuff is that no one's interested in using the extra space-per-disc to put more episodes of a TV show on one disc. The Star Trek box sets as they are now are like seven discs a season, so you'd think that you could fit, say, the entire run of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" on one or two BluRay discs. Instead, the attitude seems to be that we should "remaster" every movie and TV show ever put on DVD, and make the picture quality a million times better instead of putting a million times more content on the disc.

But, as the rumor pointed out, the special effects for the newer shows were done on video, instead of film, so apparently that means it can't be remastered. So the idea then would be to take the original film of the actors on the sets, remaster that, and then put in NEW special effects from the ground up. This seems like a lot of trouble to go to, considering that the whole beauty of the DVD business is that you just burn a bunch of already-made TV shows onto a new format.

It seems to me that this is what's wrong with the entertainment industry. They've been focused on visual quality for so long that they don't know how to improve anything else. For example, "Superman Returns" cost like some ungodly amount of money to make, to the point where even though the movie did very well at the box office, it still wasn't enough to break even. The worldwide gross might help that out, I don't know. The irony of this situation is twofold.

First, as a Superman fan, I'm perfectly happy watching substandard special effects. The 1950's TV show was in black and white half the time, and you could practically see the table George Reeves was lying on when he did the flying sequences. When he flew in the opposite direction, his "S" emblem would be reversed. "Superman IV" frequently recycled action shots of Superman from the previous films, and it didn't even try to hide all the New York imagery in what was supposed to be the fictional city of Metropolis. It doesn't matter, because Superman's in it and he's kicking ass and saving the day. So I find it a little disappointing that Warner Bros. spent all that money to pump up the special effects on a movie that I probably would have enjoyed just fine otherwise. Not that I care if Time-Warner takes a loss, but a more profitable Superman film means it'll be a lot quicker getting the sequel made. I'd hate for some paper-pusher to decide that the vast appeal of Superman is insufficient to offset the cost of realizing him in film.

Second, the situation reminded me a lot of the same problem facing "Serenity", where the producers worked with a very conservative budget in the hopes of keeping the movie profitable. Of course, it didn't work, and Serenity barely managed to break even after two months (the usual suspects will try to tell me that "Serenity" wasn't a flop, because DVD sales will put it back in the black. But that's just the excuses people make when their pet franchise can't get the job done. No one makes feature films so they can recoup the loss on DVD.). I say this was because of the mind-numbingly depressing plot of the movie, and honestly, I congratulate the filmmakers for keeping the special effects to a minimum. It wasn't like we needed a lot of bullet time effects, holography, and CGI environments to make the insane cannibal rapists convincing. Better to save your money, just in case opening night doesn't go as well as you thought.

The point I'm making here is that as a filmgoer, I would have liked a "Superman Returns" that cost thirty million to make, and I would have hated "Serenity" even if they had increased the budget by an order of magnitude. Yet this rumor would suggest that whoever owns Star Trek now might go back and redo the whole show just to accomodate a new recording medium. And for what? The first season of TNG is gonna suck whether Data's caked-on makeup are in hi-def or not. You can make the warp nacelles look more realistic, but Counselor Troi is still gonna look really weird in her Season One hairdo. I'm not saying this wouldn't be interesting to see, but I can't imagine paying an exorbitant amount of money for this, especially when the regular DVD box sets are still rather pricey as it is. I'd prefer they invest the money into making a brand new series, and maybe hiring some writers to make sure it doesn't suck.

Of course, StarTrek.com says they don't know anything about this, so it's probably just an idle fancy by some Star Trek/DVD enthusaist, but still, the idea sounds like something someone would try. If not Star Trek, then maybe somewhere else.

Anyway, no one wants to hear me talk about Superman and Star Trek. Onward, to stuff that sucks!

( A Cut Above the Rest )

Enh, I got nothin'.

( Cut Like a Knife, But it Feels So Right )

So the word I'm hearing is that Stargate SG-1 is cancelled. All I have to say is: GOOD. F*** Stargate. The movie sucked, the TV show sucked, and that spinnoff show sucks so hard, even Stargate fans hate it, and that's saying something. They can toss SG-1 on the pile with Babylon 5, Firefly, Farscape, Lexx, Andromeda, Earth 2, Enterprise, and every other poor man's Star Trek that's been crapped out over the last fifteen years. I hope they burn down the studio and sow the lot with salt so that nothing will ever grow there again.

And Animaniacs sucks, too. That has nothing to do with anything, but since I'm in the mood, Animaniacs is one of the worst cartoons ever produced. Blaaarrrrggghhh!

( Fear. Fear attracts the fearful. The strong. The weak. The innocent. The corrupt. Fear. Fear is my ally... )

Wow, three weeks in and I'm up to Chapter Five already. I guess reading that other crappy book last year has quadrupled my strength! Wah-hah-hah. Ha! Not only that, but I feel an increase in my speed... and ah-geelittee. Sorry, inside joke there.

Well, I'm feeling pretty good about this next installment, since I happen to know it debuts a character that I've come to really appreciate. That's right, he's got the moxie to turn this sinking ship around. Let's watch, shall we?

( Cut because I'm fighting Elecman in Megaman 1 and that's the best way to kill him. )

Mike > Glycerine.

( Cut for Cut's Sake )

My job's gotten a little more hectic since I got back from Vegas, which kind of throws off my plans. Nevertheless, I'm too masochistic to stop myself from reviewing this book, so no worries there. It'll just take me till Christmas to finish...

Part of my trouble is that the R&D staff is gone, so I'm stuck filling in for them. I really don't want to be R&D, for a variety of reasons, so just call me Acting R&D Chemist for now. The stability guy's gone, and thankfully we hired a new one, but until he's trained, we're kind of in a bind. Things get hectic quick, all of a sudden I'm in the thick.

One guy, the guy who trained me on HPLC, was fired about a month and a half ago. This irritates me for a lot of reasons, primarily because he was supposed to teach me how to use the GC at some point, so now I've had to figure it out myself. Our GC's been in mothballs for years, but circumstances have called for it to be put back into service as of this April. "Hey, do what you gotta do with that GC," I told him, "but make sure you do the calibration check first, because the data's no good to us if the machine's not working right." And he'd go yeah-yeah-of-course-I-will, and I knew he wouldn't. So that's what I'd been doing since Vegas. Fuzzy orange gloves on my hands, bubble flow meter because the rotometer on the carrier gas line doesn't work, staring into the fan as it churns out hot wind at me, using a dental mirror to check if the flame is lit. Feelin' like a chemist. If some punk walked up to me and told me I could shout Chromatographos at this thing and get it to work in two seconds, I'd give him a stack of books just so I could dump 'em out of his hands. I'm starting to wonder if that's what my predecessor was doing...

He was a smart guy, but I never cared for his attitude. This was the guy who stated matter-of-factly, that Jews couldn't drink milk. And it's not like he argued with me when I corrected him, but I found it pretty strange how he's just say stuff like it was gospel, considering how frequently he'd be contradicted. For example, he told me that I needed to leave the range hood on in the instrument room whenever the GC was in use, because of the hydrogen gass being pumped through it.

In the first place, the hydrogen flows at a very low pressure, and when the instrument's in use, it's all being burned up, leaving only water vapor anyway. In the second place, even if the flame went out and hydrogen should escape into the room, the range hood would be useless, since it's several feet away, and lower than the outlet on the GC where the gas would be coming out of. The hydrogen would have to sink down, then manage to be light enough to get sucked up into the hood. Fact is, hydrogen is the lightest element in the universe, and hydrogen molecules are so small, they probably seep through the microscopic cracks in the roof. Indeed, I called tech support to confirm this, and they assured me that any room with an air conditioner would take literally forever to build up enough hydrogen to cause a problem. This made perfect sense to me, and I wondered why no one else had bothered to call tech support and figure this out for themselves.

And he just had a maturity problem. One time, someone discussed wrestling, and he did a friggin' X-chop in the middle of the lab. Jumped up in the air and everything. He's the guy who waits for everyone to start talking about tattoos, just so he can point out that he has more tattoos than anyone else in the room. Well, I have the least tattoos out of any given assortment of people, but you don't hear me crowing about it. It's a thing with me, that I prefer not to discuss my hobbies and interests at work. You're never gonna hear me talk about Marvel Comics, or the Dark Lords of the Sith, or whether Dragon Ball GT is canon or not. Part of this is because I'm a recluse who doesn't want my co-workers to know more about me, and part of this is because I'm a chemist working on chemistry in a chemistry lab, so my interest is piqued right there. This guy seemed to have the same love for the field, but I found his attention to detail somewhat limited. Anytime something unexplained would happen, he'd attribute it to "chelation". Hey, this sodium hydroxide solution is putting off caustic vapors. "Oh, that must be because the sodium is chelating with the hot water. " I mean, maybe he's right, but the way he'd say it, I never quite believed he knew what "chelation" meant, let alone why he thought it was responsible. And if anyone told him off, he'd spend all day sulking, which I found far preferable to when he was in a good mood, which often involved barking like a dog.

And yet, I don't see why he would have gotten fired. He seemed like he could at least maintain a level of productivity that could preserve his job. I tend to think he was just asking for it. I should probably drop the matter, since there's probably someone out there who'll google "GC hydrogen chelation" and find a dumb yellow Harry Potter review.

( Cut for some dumb yellow Harry Potter review. )