Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

When I reach the point that even Guy has updated more recently than me (although admittedly only with Naxx videos that would be sure to confound my faithful audience of “my parents”) it’s time to post something.

The temperatures in Michigan are staying pretty consistently below 20 degrees, which means I’ve been getting in the Christmas spirit this year, and that can only mean two things: aluminum Christmas trees, and orcs on flying carpets.

Really.

Bonus: how many people are going to click the first picture just to see how many books they recognize?

Extra bonus excuse: one of the motivators of my sloth is the ease of simply bookmarking whatever I come across on delicious

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I’m so out of it with regard to music now, I only just found out that Ben Folds Five had a reunion concert in September. But! I found the whole video online when I logged into myspace for the first time in forever. The guys play the entirety of The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner live before an incredibly lucky audience — yes, even “Your Most Valuable Possessions,” which Ben’s dad comes out to nervously read from a cue card.

Reinhold Messner has gotta be one of my top five albums of all time, easily, and I know Ben Folds is awesome to watch live. I bought Sessions at West 54th DVD beforeI even owned a DVD player and bought it to my boyfriend’s house to watch, and we were all astounded by it. I bought the official score, borrowed my boyfriend’s keyboard, and almost learned to play “Narcolepsy” except for these chords that are made to played by someone with giant Ben Folds hands amd not freaky midget hands like mine.

So, being unable to really play Ben Folds Five songs, I did the next best thing and named my computer after one of them. Looking back, it wasn’t that great of a computer, so maybe that was unfair of me. At any rate, this got me reminiscing while I watched Ben Folds Five perform, about all my computers:

• Firefly, my graduation present, the K6-2, which eventually got cannibalized into other machines by Troy.
• Leo, my mom’s old computer, the other K6-2, that we loaded with an absurd amount of RAM and used to run Mandrake Linux after Jeff’s old iMac exploded.
• Jane, which I got from Wal-Mart and ran Linux.
• Una, which Josh Rowe built, and ran Windows XP so I could play FFXI. But it was NOT named for Yuna or anything like that, but after Una from Faerie Queene.
• Daenerys, the first computer I built. It was a learning experience, so I thought her epithet “Stormborn” was quite fitting. I sold it to my father, and he used it until it was stolen just recently.
• And finally… Mal. There have been a number of things that I can credit for keeping me almost-sane while working at the casino, and Joss Whedon’s Firefly and the joy that came from building this computer are two of them. When I switched it on and it worked, I went “Aha! I can really do this! I rule!”

Not even counting my family’s nameless computers, all the way back to the Kaypro and Commodore-64. Well, there’s two ways of navel-gazing into my past, right there.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

Yes, I did resign today. No, I didn’t run in there and go “ZOMG THIS PLACE IS EVIL” — I told them I was going back to school, which is true, I just had been planning to stay another couple months.

All my supervisors and coworkers have been thoroughly decent, which is why I gave two weeks noticeand spared them the lecture. I just couldn’t reasonably live with myself in that position.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

We constructed a guild specifically to play World of Warcraft in a reasonable way, with a focus on five-man instances and a schedule that was compatible with human lives. The trouble is that the rewards for doing the more elaborate raids are almost nonsensical by comparison, ridiculous. I’m not talking about bosses, or middle management, or whoever is being gutted tonight. Even their undead pool man, a Goddamned civilian, drops a ancient, spiked crown that peers deep the future.

So, you build your organization out to grasp that fruit. For a time, you aren’t jiggered for five mans, because now you have eight. And once the tens have arrive, you have thirteen. It’s some magical Goddamned ratio, written into existence, that ensures human suffering.

Fuck the rest of this shit. I want our next President to have managed a guild.

(Penny Arcade, natch)

Well, see, it’s not all bad, there’s a job opportunity for me. My fifth grade teacher said that I’d be the first woman president.

Of course, I don’t want to be the first woman president, because I want the McCain administration to be so astonishingly, mind-bogglingly successful that Sarah Palin is elected by a landslide in 2016.

I also want a puppy.

And a Cubs world series.

Well, we’re one step closer there, with Zambrano’s no-hitter yesterday.

Things are looking up.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

Today, I’m putting in my two weeks notice at my job.

I think the assault may have had something to do with it. Not alone, not by itself, but as a last straw, a kick in the pants.

There was an old Asian couple at the baccarat table. They were fighting. She slaps him.

He hits her, hard, with his cane, and she falls straight back onto the floor.

He was arrested.

She keeps playing all day.

They’d been there four days and didn’t have a hotel room.

Four days. Eighty years old. Assault.

I’ve been doing this job for too long knowing it was really, really wrong, and I kept doing it, because I am lazy and afraid of change.

No more.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

A few weeks ago, a 13-year-old lectured me over Ventrilo because I was quoting John Prine’s “Illegal Smile”.  “Why would you listen to a song about marijuana?” he asked. Because it’s a good song. It’s fun. And it gives me a perverse joy to be far more anti-establishment intellectually than I am in reality; to be the polar opposite of my floorperson who thinks that “some of the stuff on Nickelodeon is a little suggestive” — you work in a casino! What sort of role model does that suggest?

And it all has me thinking of one of the more amusing escapades of my 14-year-old self convincing a few members of my freshman English class that I was really a total pothead. We were assigned to do a persuasive speech, and some perverse part of myself decided that marijuana legalization was a perfect topic. I was — and still am — pro-legalization.

Of course, the fact that I never smoked pot (or cigarettes, or drank underage) was exactly what made me the perfect person to do this. They made the assignment, they could hardly tell me that my perspective wasn’t allowed, especially when my main source was a recent special issue of National Review devoted to the drug war.

It wasn’t that unusual, as far as my teenage shenanigans went. Many of them involved drug references — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a particular favorite. What makes that speech interesting after all these years was remembering how uncomfortable my father must have been, balancing his fears over his teenage daughter getting involved in drugs with the knowledge that, policy-wise, I really was on the right side of the issue, and once the issue came up, he was really too honest to deny that. It’s a special geeky sort of honesty that has to be a unique danger of geek-parenting: the “drugs are bad, mm’kay?” school is certainly much simpler.

Of course, he needn’t have worried; my high school years remained pretty innocent, while the bimbo-blondes with their pro-life speeches were, within a few years, always having mysterious “miscarriages” following nights of drinking and smoking.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

In the movie Finding Forrester, there’s a part where Sean Connery admits he took the ringer out of his phone some years ago.  When I first watched it, Chuck pointed at the television and went “See! See! That’s what I want to do!”

At the time, I didn’t understand it. At the time, I also thought that not having creditors was a good way to avoid being harassed by creditors. How little I knew.

What this is basically saying is, if you have my home phone number, and I’m not answering, it’s probably unplugged. My sleep is worth more to me.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I really like to think I’m not that judgmental, but is it really that much to expect that a guy can spell simple words, like “where”? Or that they remember the last time they read a book?

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

Having gone to the casino with Nink on Wednesday, I can now honestly say that I really don’t get the appeal of slot machines.

I do, however, see the appeal of female orcs in lederhosen.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I want to do NaNoWriMo again, and finish it this year, but I can’t think of a plot!

I guess that’s what October is for.

Also, what’s the point of not having debt if I’m just going to be harassed by someone else’s debt collectors all day?