random incoherence and infantile meanderings

ShapeCard 2008, originally uploaded by Nomad Scry.

This is the long promised picture of the story postcard that Shape sent me this year. As you can see, the postal system was utterly brutal to the inks.

… is a pain in the butt.

I work on third shift, which means that I sleep during the day and am [tada!] awake at night.  Normally, this is not a disruptive matter.  Normally, I am at work when everyone else is sleeping and my stomping around being -awake- does not bother anyone.

Except, I’m not at work this week.  I won’t be at work next week.

So instead, I’m throwing everyone’s schedules off.  Everyone is staying up late.  And not sleeping well, because I keep making “strange noise” and turning on the lights and generally being a nuisance by being awake.

Which sucks.  I feel like a big arse.  I should just give in and sleep during the night, like a normal person.  At least while I am out of work, right?  Except, I don’t actually seem to get anything done when I’m up during the day.  And doing halfsies, where I sleep a bit at night and a bit at day… yeah, I’m slowly falling WAY behind on simple things like checking my email and updating my podcasts.

I’m not sure how to resolve this and by the time I figure it out, I’ll probably be back at work again.  Then my antisocial ways will save me again.

Volume 3 ended last week. I haven’t decided if I am going to continue to waste the little bit of time I have on bubble-gum pop with practically no real redeeming value. I do enjoy watching the episodes each week (on Hulu.com) but it seems like the bit that made the first season so engrossing is missing somehow.

So I’ve been trying to work out for myself what it is that is detracting so hard. I mean, they are doing some things wonderfully right. For instance, the amount of story progression made in just a few episodes, sometimes in just a single episode, is a wonderful change from most shows. I love story arcs, but only when they get concluded satisfactorily. Which is, sadly, not what Heroes has been doing.

In one of his books on writing, Orson Scott Card said to reach into your shelf for ideas three times. The first time is a cliché and the second time is a personal cliché. The third time is something new. It feels like the writers of Heroes are only reaching up that first time. The ideas that have been ending up in the final shows are certainly not consistent with the everyday people turned into super humans base concept that the entire series is predicated on. Take the catalyst, the missing catalyst, for example.

Throughout the third volume, everyone has been fighting for control of the two parts of the secret formula. Once the two parts have been acquired, then it turns out that someone has a third part, a catalyst. And the catalyst is hidden in… (duh duh dunn) someone. The fact that it turned out to actually be exactly where everyone knew it was, was disappointing. But when it turned out to be a magical glowing mist, that basically broke the entire world construct. And they did that without a single blink. They reached up to the shelf of ideas and dropped the first one they grabbed into the soup of stories. It didn’t fit this story.

All of this just makes it really hard to continue to justify the time expense that watching Heroes is costing me. At least it is better than Sanctuary. But what isn’t?

(The sad thing is that I will probably end up watching more Sanctuary and more Heroes.  I have no scifi backbone.)

1. Braindouche! Advent Day 18: I Don’t Know
2. Buzz Out Loud 875: Jazz fingers
3. Cato Daily Podcast: Avoiding Overreaction to Terrorism
4. Christiana’s Shallow Thoughts #253 – Choices
5. Geek Radio Daily December 18th 2008
6. Geek By Night Episode 09 – The Secret Life of Mindy Gibson
7. MobileTechRoundup 157
8. School of Podcasting: My Gmail Was Hijacked
9. The Weird Show 111: Flashback to 2002-12-28
10. The Podge Cast Episode 022: This Was a Triumph!
11. How To Grow Your Geek Show #18: November Catchup Voicemail Show
12. ealc: The Right of Princes
13. Der Geek Episode 22*: In the Market for the Holidays
14. LAN Party weekly podcast – 12/15/2008
15. Drupal Podcast 67: Do It With Drupal ’08 (Live)
16. The Company Episode 18: Our Father
17. Some Welsh BBC channel that I don’t know why I listen to since I cannot understand a word of it: C2: BB Aled, Sgorgasms, Dewi Prysor, Four Christmases, Gwyn Maffia a Beryl, Meryl a Cheryl!
18. PGOC 066: Mad Science Games  — I got a whole 4 seconds of this one.  Not sure what went wrong with my download, so I’ll have to try again tomorrow.
19. iFanboy.com Pick of the Week #163: Nightwing #151 This week’s pick, Nightwing, was so positive that I wanted to go out and pick up the entire run of Nightwing. It sounded absolutely marvelous.
20. NewMediaGear: The Best Podcast Gear of the Year – Mic Edition
21. Slice of SciFi #191: Interview with “Star Wars: The Clone War”’s” Ashley Eckstein
22. Confessions of an Internet Addict: Episode 10 Discussions of a Dangerous Mind
23. TCLP 2008-12-14 News (Comment Line 240-949-2638)

I cheated a bit on this one and included a few from early Saturday. I’m not expecting to post another of these until sometime Sunday/Monday, so it’ll even out in the end.

Scry’s To Do List:
Rom’s computer
Towel Rack
Tree lights
Rom’s playlist – 33%

Notice anything missing?  That’s right!  I’ve wrapped and taped and boxed and sent out the disfunctional Wii.  I even have a good bit of hope that it will be back to us before February is over!

(A quick check shows that Jade’s Wii is now in Newark, NJ.)

I spent about two hours picking and choosing tracks from my library of MP3 to sync over to the Sansa e260 that Jade and I are giving to Rom for Yule.  By the time I stumbled off to bed, an hour late, I had a whopping 1 Gig of music sent over and another 2 Gig to figure out later on.  That’ll leave him a bit to muck about with if he wants to maybe record some voice stuff.

Yes, I am going to turn him into a podcaster before I even get around to it for myself.

Progress is being made.  I just wish that I could figure out how to better manage my time.  Or get an extra 12 hours a day.