Okay, not really -- the Martha stand-in is Kyushi from the Shadowrun line and the Judoon representative is Rocksteady of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fame -- but still. I also dug up my Liada figure from Shadowrun -- I may have to use her as Romana or a native of some new alien planet.
And speaking of the Doctor and crew, the rundown of the second Doctor's Dalek encounters is up at Retroactive Continuity Redux. Check it out!
All for now, then.
Since there was apparently some trouble involving viruses over at the old Retroactive Continuity, I've updated De's link to direct readers to the new online home of his ramblings at Retroactive Continuity Redux. And if you pop over there today (or read this post), you will be in for a treat, as De has begun to chronicle of the history of the Daleks beginning with a discussion of the First Doctor's encounters with the stylish cyborgs. Yay!
In other news, I had a bit of trouble getting online today, as somehow my router got reset and I couldn't remember the default password to log into my 3rd party firmware and configure it correctly for connecting to the web. Eventually I got all of that sorted out, though I'm sure that there are still some values that I have yet to reconfigure to my liking. I have also figured out why some of the older games that I nabbed recently (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Battle Nexus and Batman: Vengeance for $5 each!) were running headache-inducingly slow on my machine despite the fact that it should be more than capable of running these titles, so that's good. Apparently, the problem had to do with the dynamic switching of the CPU speed. Usually, when a program requires more resources, the CPU speed increases accordingly, but for whatever reason it wasn't doing that here. If I manually set the speed to a fixed higher value, however, the games run properly. So remember that if you ever have any similar problems!
By the way, have you ever noticed the redundancy of the term "walking zombie"? Unless they get their legs blown off by a shotgun blast, walking is one of the few things that zombies typically do. They didn't in the Dawn of the Dead "remake", but wow that movie was awful.
As I was telling my pal Mickey, the other night I had a rather cool dream in which I traveled with the first Doctor and a young Sarah Jane Smith. Shortly after arriving on a crumbling planet (presumably future Earth, though I don't recall the Doctor ever saying precisely where we were) not unlike the setting of "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", we determined that the Daleks (DALEKS!) were operating on the planet and were attempting to manufacture a Doomsday Device (TM) to destroy the world and take over the galaxy or effect some similarly grandiose and terrible outcome. In order to stop them, we had to locate the only surviving pretzel vendor in the area, as soft pretzels were apparently the only remaining substance with the proper texture and consistency to serve as wires in the Daleks' invention. It was even more imperative that we locate him before the Daleks did because he was so nice that he would give his sole remaining pretzel to anyone who simply asked for it -- and, if the Daleks themselves did not reach him first, whoever acquired the pretzel would be in grave danger. So after the Doctor informed us of these details from the interior of the black-and-white university building in which the TARDIS had landed, Sarah Jane and I ventured out into a Technicolor world in order to track down the vendor and thwart the Daleks' plans. Just as in many of the Hartnell serials, the Doctor was absent for most of the adventure.
In addition to the interiors of buildings being in black-and-white and the outdoors appearing in color -- which I admittedly did not notice during the dream -- some other quirky things happened that did cause me to take note. At one point, for example, I was hiding underneath a tarpaulin near the unfinished device when a Dalek saucer touched down nearby. As it did so, it first lowered landing gear consisting of a tripod, each leg of which had a wheel on the bottom. Then, after the wheels touched, the ship raised up from the ground again and the wheels rotated so that they were positioned parallel to the ground. After another light brush against the ground, the tripod legs folded inward and in half, such that the spacecraft now balanced on a shorter tripod. Wheels then emerged from the bends of the legs, at which point the Daleks' spacecraft rolled around the corner of a building and out of view. Given the way the tripod legs dangled loosely and the saucer jerked about as if suspended by a string, I was prompted to remark under my breath, "What a cheap and superfluous special effect." I mean really, weren't the Daleks already supposed to be on the planet?
And then there was the end of the dream, in which the Daleks exterminated some janitor guy who was with Sarah Jane before approaching the pretzel vendor and asking for a pretzel. I arrived just as it asked, but because -- apparently -- at some other point in the dream I had done a favor for the pretzel vendor without knowing it was him, the vendor chose to give me the last pretzel. At this point, facing certain extermination, I noticed that a crowd of hungry children had gathered around us... so I ducked into the crowd and began breaking off pieces of the pretzel for each of the children. I felt slightly guilty as I did so, though. While my actions were partly motivated by a desire to help the children, I also remained patently aware of the fact that, with me crouching, the kids effectively formed a shield that would prevent the Dalek from being able to shoot me as I made my way through the crowd and back to the school that housed the TARDIS. But now that I think about it, the Doctor was always endangering people on his adventures, so maybe that was par for the course in a "Doctor Who" adventure.
I woke up shortly afterwards, whereupon I went back to sleep and had a fragmented dream that included skateboarding, exploring an abandoned prison with a bunch of people I haven't seen in over a decades and whose names I'd be hard-pressed to remember in waking life, and drinking coffee in a roadside diner. Anyway, here's hoping that I have the opportunity to travel with the Doctor again in the near future!
"What are you?"
That is what the neighbor kid said to me today. An odd question, to be sure -- even more so because the kid can't be more than six years old. Under different circumstances, I might have asked what he meant, but the kid's age (if the kid had been ten or so, it might have been worth discussing, but at this point the kid is still clearly kinda stupid) and my being in a hurry prompted me to simply smile and wave.
As I walked to the mailbox, the kid shouted it after me several more times.
I grew increasingly annoyed. Did the kid even know what he was asking? Did he understand that his question was potentially highly offensive? I didn't know. But as I returned to drop off the mail before dashing off to the store to try and beat the rain (I failed), I looked up to answer the kid's inquiries with a final smile in his direction.
Instead of repeating his question, he instead voiced a statement that suggested that perhaps he recognized the potentially offensive nature of the question after all:
"You're ugly."
And that is how not running over and punting the annoying neighbor kid down the block came to be added to my list of charitable deeds.
I'd been using the WP-PageNavi 2.10 plugin on Scary-Crayon to display the number of pages and links to a set number of them instead of just the previous/next links. Now I am using it here as well! (Still need to update the blurb at the bottom of the sidebar to reflect that info, but yes.) It didn't originally do what I wanted it to do, so I had to do a bit of hacking to get it to suit my needs... hence my calling this version WP-PageNavi 2.10w. See, the "w" is for Wes. 
Anyway, apparently Wesoteric behaves slightly differently than Scary-Crayon (possibly a function of some of the other plugins I'm using over there), so I had to do some additional tweaks to get the plugin working over here. It also means that you may encounter some SQL errors -- please let me know if you do so I can try to fix the code accordingly. Thanks!
This is also my first trial of a plugin called Hide or Cut Post Text, which apparently works like the LJ-cut feature. Whee.
I did my taxes today. It didn't take very long -- two hours tops -- but it was still rather painful. Being anally raped by the IRS is not fun. 
I shall now proceed to list some of the swag I picked up during my most recent NYC trip! Click here to read about it. 
That is all for now, then. Ja ne, minna-san!
