Yesterday was my first day of (paid) work since 2001... I am now an employee of Books-A-Million. First day wasn't too bad, but it's still retail. Oh, and it's a bookstore, so I saw quite a few things that really irritated me, not the least of which was seeing Oprah's name stamped all over Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, since apparently it's the latest title in her book club. You might think that's a good thing, since tons of people are reading the book just because Oprah recommended it, but also take into account that most of these people will get nothing out of the book (assuming there's something to be gotten out of the book, given its classic status; I haven't read it myself) because they're already mindless Oprah zombie-slaves. I remember when Oprah was pitching Steinbeck's East of Eden and she dedicated an episode of the show to "discussing" the book. (more...)

Already had 'em, but I made a few changes to the way they're working. Unfortunately, I was working with an older version of the comments template (apparently the latest version wasn't the one on my hard drive), so I unwittingly overwrote some of my later changes and had to try and do my best to recreate them. I may not have done so as well as I'd like, so if you notice anything drop a comment or send an e-mail and let me know. And I kicked up the comment maxlength quite a bit (since once or twice people have had problems with that), so you should be able to post some pretty long comments now. If you want. (more...)

It's a little late, I know, so to make up for it you have my apologies and TWO new pieces -- A Crayon Haiku #14 and... oh bloody hell... a cover review of the September 2003 issue of "O, The Oprah Magazine". Enjoy! If you can.

In other news, Ice Anvil Online is back from its recent hiatus with a review of S.I.C.K. (Serial Insane Clown Killer). Also, Matt of X-Entertainment gives us an update on his fish in the X-E blog. They look like neat little fellers. 🙂

So to reiterate, SC's been updated with A Crayon Haiku #14 and a cover review of "O, The Oprah Magazine", September 2003 issue. Ugh and damnit.

Okay, should have another Scary-Crayon article for you sometime later today, and believe me when I tell you that it's shaping up to be really scary stuff. But to temper the horror, I'll probably throw up another Crayon Haiku as well.

So, how 'bout them dreams? I just had a rather strange one. (more...)

So I'm having a bit of a problem with the computer right now. Tried to run the virus scanner but after the thing ran for about an hour and a half (no viruses found thus far) and had still gone almost nowhere I opened up the window to find that it had wasted most of that time scanning some temporary internet files, yet these files didn't go away when I cleared the IE cache. Grrr! So I stopped the virus scanner to go get rid of these -- apparently I'm supposed to run Disk Cleanup to get rid of them -- and Disk Cleanup won't run. It starts, but then it hangs while scanning old files for compression purposes so that it can tell me how much space I'd stand to gain by letting it do its cleaning work. I DON'T CARE; I JUST WANT THE FILES GONE! So yeah, it's pissing me off. (more...)