tablesaw | Entries tagged with los angeles

I don't have time to write fully about last weekend, because I still need to catch up on sleep from the same busy weekend. We saw seven different friends groups, a comedy show, a wedding, a historic building, and rain. All told, we drove around 700 miles down and up the Pacific Coast.

I'd particularly like to write about the show, House of Gains. We've been seeing some very high-quality improv recently, and I'd like to do better at pinning that butterfly after the fact.

One small joy was that we managed to transport the pink-champagne cupcakes all the way from SLO to Los Angeles. The frosting typically doesn't travel well outside of refrigeration, but we used a system of cold packs around inverted quart-sized mason jars to make the trip. (We put a cupcake on the lid, then screwed the jar on top of it, giving the frosting and pink chocolate shaving protection for the entire car ride.) Luckily we only had to move three this way, though we might try more in the future.

I also managed to give a Christmas gift I neglected to ship last year: The first issue of a Cenobium, a Hellraiser zine from the 80s(?) which I found unexpectedly in the used section of a comic book store. (See, writing more blog posts probably would have encouraged me to do more research about it while I still had it in my possession, because I can't find much about it now.)

Current Mood: drained

The last two weeks, Psyche and I visited the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood to take part in their Nitrate Festival. The Egyptian is one of very few theaters that is allowed to project nitrate prints, and they haven't done so for a few years because they were closed for renovations before and after the pandemic. We saw two Hitchcock films, Rebecca and SpellboundRebecca, an archivist from the George Eastman Museum talked about nitrate prints. There were some things I already knew. I learned how vivid the images can be when I saw Casablanca, and I learned how the silver emulsion can catch the light when I saw Laura. The archivist stressed how because nitrate prints are generally stronger, the images on the print are usually closer to the negative retaining subtler "colors," while later printings start to develop higher and higher contrast. This was incredibly apparent when watching Rebecca on what was one of the first printings of the film, previous in the private collection of producer David O. Selznic. It was unbelievable how good it looked for preserved (not restored) film that was about 80 years old.

Spellbound wasn't as impressive, either in the print or the content, but the Dali sequences looked really good, as did Gregory Peck. I try to get the preview screen whenever I see something at the American Cinematheque, but I missed the one for Rebecca. Here's the screen for Spellbound.

The preview screen for Spellbound at the Egyptian Theater.

(I needed to post an image hosted on DW in preparation of talking about it with

dedalus_1947 before seeing Dune: Part Two at the Chinese Theater.)

Pretty boring month, right?

OK, so let's see what's been happening.

Well, I voted in the Democratic Primary on Super Tuesday. That was three weeks ago; it's the same month. I don't even have time to get into that whole mess.

On March 5, I was already starting to get anxious about what I was hearing about COVID-19. I work in a coworking space, and while I had my own office (shared with one other person), I spent a lot of time in the community kitchen, and I was starting to feel uncomfortable. I told my boss I was going to work from home starting the next day. I work at a small startup, where a few people already work remotely, but my CTO and I have tended to work closely in person. At the time, I had planned to work from home on Friday and Monday, then return for the staff meeting on Tuesday on site, to make further decisions there.

On Sunday, March 8, I saw my parents, sister, and nieces in person, for what may be the last time in a while. My oldest niece had a basketball game, and I watched with the family. Afterward, we went to Olive Garden, where we we had an alcove to ourselves and washed our hands. Later that day, I got an email from work, the CEO and CTO had decided that the whole company would be working from home. It felt good to get a head start on social distancing.

On Monday, March 9, I had tickets to see House of Games with David Mamet in person. I was pretty anxious about going, it would probably be a crowded space, but it wasn't a thing I really wanted to miss. A mishap with our cars meant that I ultimately couldn't make it, which was a bit of a relief.

My five-year wedding anniversary was on Saturday, March 14, and we'd planned a small weekend trip to Catalina. If you don't know, Catalina is a small island 26 miles off the coast of Los Angeles, easy to see when the air is clear. But it's a little isolated, the only way on or off the island is via ferry. And in the week leading up to the trip, I was increasingly anxious. Psyche wanted to go, practicing social distancing and cleaning/sanitizing as we go. I wanted to cancel, increasingly convinced that I had been exposed, and worried that symptoms would manifest while we were on the island, cutting off access to the ferry and stranding us away from our well-stocked home.

Psyche won out. She finds it easier to relax while out of the house and was more confident in our ability to stay responsibly isolated. And a somewhat rainy weekend meant the village was pretty empty, making it easy to give everyone a wide berth. On Saturday, we did a golf-cart rental to drive around the island for an hour taking in the views looking toward Long Beach. We spent a lot of time making plans for the next time we go and can do things that require closer quarters, like the mini submarine for reef viewing.

In the last week, restrictions have gotten progressively tighter, and we've avoided going out. We ordered delivery on Tuesday, which was a wonderful moment of normalcy, even if we had to tell the delivery person to leave the bag outside the door, and wait for him to leave. On a trip to our post-office box to pick up some delivered supplies, I grabbed In-N-Out on the way home (they've had a sock-day policy since before the pandemic). The PO service is going through some changes too. They're an essential business, so the can (and according to service agreements, must) stay open to receive mail, but they have contingency plans for progressively worse scenarios. I signed up for a "virtual mailbox" service, where they email pictures of all mail and packages, so we can avoid trips to pick them up unless they are critical.

We also went to Psyche's office to pick up some supplies as she's working from home now too, and on the way back, we tried to find a place along the way home to get out and breathe. But as you may have heard Angelenos who had been told that social distancing in nature was okay all headed out at the same time to many of the same places, defeating the purpose. At a usually quiet beach, we saw a small crowd of people (and possibly the remnants of a classic car show that had decided not cancel?), and as we drove along the coast, most of the vista points had a few dozen people. We did eventually find a spot with only a handful, where we could stay several yards away from the others, and the views were incredible. The rain, combined with reduced car use has kept the air cleaner than I think I've ever seen, and from Rancho Palos Verdes, I could not only see downtown Los Angeles, I could pick out individual buildings.

Today, we made a trip out to bolster our grocery supplies, particularly our fresh vegetables. We went to a local Japanese market, because there have generally been reports that businesses run by and geared towards Asian Americans have been hit with the extra damage of racism. They still seemed well stocked, but most of the stores around here seem to be doing well. Regardless, it was quiet, and it was easy to keep distance from other patrons.

For dinner, we made minestrone, and paired it with bread that Psyche baked yesterday. Both were delicious.

Some other things I've been doing:

( Movies, TV, Music, Puzzles )

Phew. What's next?

Current Mood: numb
Current Music: Stay (Faraway, So Close!)

Last weekend, I attended the Doctor Who convention Gallifrey One for the sixth year. It was loads of fun, and I'd love to write all about it, but it's a big topic, and I've been bad at updating, so I'm going to post this blog the moment I'm done with my tea, regardless of what I left out. Maybe I'll make another post with more info, maybe not!

Gally is kind of a big deal in the Doctor Who fan world, but it's always been a little weird for Psyche and me, because it's also a local convention. On Twitter, I'm following people preparing a week in advance for intercontinental flights to spend a week in Los Angeles on vacation, but for me it's just half of my commute. In fact, for the first few years, we didn't even take Friday off to attend all three days of events.

This is also the first year that I was a part of the programming. A feature for the last few years has been a block of TARDIS talks. They're structured like academic talks, though that refers more to the approach to a topic than the occupation of the presenter. At some point the organizers described as something like a chance to talk about your favorite Doctor Who subject for fifteen minutes uninterrupted, and I took that to heart. For almost two years now, I've been obsessed with the connections between the ancient story of the Trojan War (which most people know about), the medieval story of Troilus and Cressida (which most people don't know about), and the Doctor Who story "The Myth Makers" (which pretty much no Who fans have actually seen because the BBC lost all the tapes). It's a superstorm of niche obsessions, and I finally had a chance to unleash it on the unsuspecting world (at least, the world that decided to skip the interview with Tosin Cole.

I'm hoping to put it online in some form, but the version I ended up with was mostly notes, so I need to reconstruct it. I'm thinking of putting it together as a video on YouTube, because I did some PowerPoint humor that I don't really want to give up on. Maybe set a goal to have that done by the end of the month.

The big guest was Christopher Eccleston, who was the Doctor in the first season of the rebooted show. I have big feelings about his performance, and it was really great to see him talking about his life, his art, masculinity, and vulnerability. We'd hoped to get an autograph, but the convention was overwhelmed, and we ultimately didn't want to give up most of our day to see him. But it seemed like he had a good time, so hopefully we'll get a chance to see him again.

And that's the honey-thick end of this mug of tea. Have a good night!

Current Mood: accomplished

For Christmas this year, I started asking for DVDs of films that were a bit harder to find. From my wife, I received Agnes Varda in California, a Criterion box set that includes Mur Murs. From my parents, I received The Exiles, which I watched tonight.

The Exiles is about the lives of young American Indians living in Downtown Los Angeles around 1960. The director collaborated with the cast of the film, who recreated scenes from "typical" nights, which coalesce into a single night for the story of the film.

It's noted as a document of Los Angeles history: much of the action takes place in portions of the city that literally do not exist any more. Bunker Hill, at the time a neighborhood of people working in downtown, was razed and rebuilt as office spaces. Hill X, where the characters gather in cars to dance, sing, fight, and generally escape the city, was also leveled to make way for Dodger Stadium. The movie palaces of Broadway exist mostly as neglected facades.

But mostly what I thought about, watching the young men and women meeting in diners, bars, and movie theaters, I think about my dad, who grew up in Los Angeles at about the same time. He would have been in his early teens, and already living on the Westside, pretty far from downtown. But Bunker Hill (and, of course, Chavez Ravine) were filled with Chicanos. And the unselfconsciousness of the filming makes it feel like I'm looking into places where my father or his cousins could have been.

I think I'm going to lend this back to my parents to see what my dad has to say about it.

Current Mood: wistful

I saw Mur Murs at the Aero last week, and had mixed feelings about it. It's a documentary by Agnès Varda about the murals of Los Angeles at the beginning of the '80s. Varda films murals of around Los Angeles talks with many of the artists. I came mostly looking for the aspects of Los Angeles history—and it was great to see some of the murals that have since been destroyed or covered up—but the film overall had a syrupy "artsiness" that left a bad taste in my mouth.

I grew up in Los Angeles in the '80s (though I was only a toddler when this movie was filmed), and there were so many twinges of memory while watching the movie. I don't know how much I've internalized the way film looked at the time as an indicator of what life looked at the time, but everything looked like something out of my vague memory. And judging by the occasional murmuring of the mostly boomer audience, others who were older then felt the same.

Because Varda always seems to have at least one mural in every shot, it leaves you feeling like Los Angeles is a is a city where very wall is filled with color, an art gallery on every street. It's not that way, and it wasn't then, and I was craving the chance to leave the frame to see the mundane spaces that I was more familiar with. But seeing those sometimes out-of-the way places knit into a dream geography is wonderful.

Some of the best moments of the movie involved the members of ASCO, an influential Chicano performance-art group. Members like Willie Herrón and Gronk talk about their early murals, which leads into their discussion of current work, culminating in the filming of an ASCO happening that is part mural, part theater, and, ultimately, part film. It's this kind of artistic synthesis that Varda seems to be chasing throughout the film, though in many places it falls terribly flat.

Where I was looking for the art to speak for itself, Varda seemed to want to comment on the art herself. She stages shots in painfully precious ways. A line of people practice Tai Chi in front of Two Blue Whales. People are provided with props to match the images of the murals they walk past. And most egregiously, while showing the entirety of the Farmer John Packing Plant mural, someone (presumably Varda) makes derisive pig sounds for a few minutes before the narrator (definitely Varda) chastises Farmer John for not showing the artists of the mural the appropriate respect. (Though, to her credit, Varda does make it a point to announce the artist credits whenever their work appears on screen.)

Maybe it's a generational thing; the older audience seemed to be eating those segments up. During the Q&A with Varda, even terrible puns were treated with absurd reverence. But the movie was made for a different audience and a different time. ASCO, who tagged LACMA in protest of Chicano exclusion from the at world, had a retrospective in LACMA recently. I can see how a film like this would be an argument for the art establishment to respect murals, but then I don't care much for that establishment anyway, then or now.

Saturday: I went with

temptingcuriosity to LACMA for the Drawing Surrealism exhibit. The raw imagination on display reminded me very strongly of the underground indie aesthetic championed by Anna Anthropy in "Rise of the Videogame Zinesters." There's a lot of interesting connections to be made there, with the Dadaists and surrealists using games to promote automatism in creation, the use of collage (reusing sprites), and even a possible connection to the Futurist obsession with machine art.

Sunday: Virtually attended the planning meeting for the MIT Mystery Hunt next weekend. It's always good to see everyone, even the camera was mostly on

tahnan doing his one-knee-on-a-chair pose.

Monday: I said goodbye to the Xmas tree immediately after the Epiphany. That almost never happens.

Tuesday: Made it out to a boardgaming night for the first time in a while. Played Chaos in the Old World to completion for the first time, and actually eked out a win. I've had a hard time with this game before, because the extremely asymmetrical roles can make it hard to figure out how to do things, but I finally pushed through. Still not entirely my game, but I won't be so quick to avoid it, either. I also got to dazzle everyone with word knowledge when playing and generally refereeing Bananagrams.

Wednesday: My main glasses broke a little while ago, and my backups are threatening to quit too, so I scheduled a new eye exam. I also made a quick jump into Sherman Oaks to pick up last year's prescription, just in case I need to make an emergency run to Lens Crafters for a cheap replacement. Having two hours to kill, I went to one of my favorite restaurants, Toshi Sushi. It was a great evening, as I was joined at the sushi bar by three lovely women who over-ordered and were pleased to hear of my birthday so that they had an excuse to foist some of the food onto me.

A cameraphone picture of a plate of sushi, all slightly different, with an assortment of fish, rice, sauces and toppings. They all taste delicious.

A cameraphone picture of a plate of sushi, all slightly different, with an assortment of fish, rice, sauces and toppings. They all taste delicious.

Heading to bed now. More birthday stuff later.

This past weekend was a lazy one, like the New Year weekend before. (The Xmas weekend was stressful, with most of my Christmas Day trivia written on Christmas Eve.)

temptingcuriosity and I went to LACMA on Saturday, avoiding the bigger events (Kubrick and Caravaggio) and indulging our own personal preferences (Surrealist Drawings and Maya artifacts). On Sunday we stayed in, made bacon pancakes, and lounged around because it was cold outside.

I asked her what she was looking for from the new year, but I already knew what her year looked like, when I thought about it. Really, I wanted her to ask me the question. I know I want to get hired permanently at this new job, but past that I wasn't sure. Talking about it, I realized that I wanted to create more in 2013. Not a particular thing, or a big thing, just lots of things.

Recently, I say a lot that I'm too much in my head. I talk to folks a bit more on Twitter, and I'm talking to people in person, but I'm not getting things out in non-conversational settings anymore. As a true geek, I worry about the narrow bandwidth of talking to people one-on-one; I just don't have enough time to tell things to everyone I would like to. Blog posts allow you, my friends and readers, to time-shift the Tablesaw experience to fit your schedule (something I know I appreciate).

But while blog posts are always things I need to do more often, to get into the habit of writing long things (or just short things that aren't twitter), what I want to do is just create more things that I can share. And saying it the other day made me excited and happy. A good sign, I think.

This year I don't just want to do things I love, I want to make new things to send out into the world with them, so that my experiences can travel beyond the horizon of my personal bubble. I want to write about at least one thing a week, TV, movie, game, what have you. I want to make some more puzzles, definitely at least one thing I can bring to the NPL convention in Austin. I want to finally hide a geocache in LA. I want to make some games, eventually, somewhere. There's a pre-Companions DW/AW game knocking around in my head that mostly needs a lot of research (that TemptingCuriosity is eager to help with).

My birthday is on Thursday, and I turn 35, a number that is a multiple of the amount of fingers on one hand, which means that I'll probably freak out sometime this year, though I'm successfully blocking it out for now. It's a good time to have a plan, and it's a good time to have a plan that focuses so much on simple joys. Last year was not a good one, this one will be better.

Current Mood: creative

Psyche wanted to see the Perseid meteor shower last night. Her original plan was to see what was going on in the Griffith Park Observatory, but they aren't doing anything special for the showers, and the park closes at about 10:30, anyway. So instead we drove out to Antelope Valley to find a quiet spot in the desert to watch the stars.

We did the teenager-in-the-movies thing and lay down on the hood of her car to watch the sky. (It turns out that the engine can stay pretty hot for a while, so it's not always the best idea.) We got a pretty good showing of meteor, a number of small shooting stars, and a few big enough to leave afterimages. We talked about how we were into space as children.

We were far enough out of LA to get a real look at the sky, clear enough to remember again what the Milky Way looks like. And when we looked around, we could see the various "sunrises," where the light came up from places beyond the horizon and made the sky and clouds gray to the south.

In the starless sky of a city, it's easy to think about space what we now know it to be, an endless expanse of void. But under the bountiful sky, I saw so many things, and each one felt so close: a slightly vaulted ceiling, I might reach if I stretched just a bit more.

When we got back to Hollywood, Psyche asked if her eyes were all right, because the sky had a slightly purple tinge. No, I said, that's just what it looks like here. And when there are low clouds, it can get even pinker, like the sun is always just setting. I think that's amazing too, but I'm glad she asked me to go out, because it's been so long since I really saw the stars.

I'm back in LA, and recent evidence confirms that Portland may be quirky, but Southern California is weird, the kind of Capital-W Weird that encompasses Lovecraftian-level Weirdness.

There was an earthquake in Los Angeles last night. It wasn't big (magnatitude 3.7, below the 4.0 threshold for most Angelenos to care about), but it was centered in a populated area (I was playing board games less than a mile from there only three hours earlier). It also managed to move through most of the LA Basin without losing much strength; it woke me up sixteen miles away, wondering if this was the beginning of a large quake, tensing to leap out of bed and prepare for coming chaos. Instead I fell right back to sleep, and when I woke up, I couldn't remember why I was looking at the clock at 3:18.

The Los Angeles City Council voted to ban medical-marijuana dispensaries within city limits. This puts city law at odds with the state law which is at odds with federal law. (The LA law is also at odds with federal law since it affirms the right to "grow and share marijuana in groups of three people or fewer.") I love this quote:
"The best course of action is to ban dispensaries, allow patients to have access under state law," [Councilperson Jose Huizar, who proposed the bill,] said. "Let's wait to see what the state Supreme Court decides and then we will be in a much better position to draft an ordinance that makes sense."
Because when the law is unclear, the best thing to do is take the most drastic action possible while waiting for a final result.

I just recently learned about a wonderful blog series running on the KCET website: Laws that Shaped L.A. One was nominated by gaming buddy Mark Valliantos: "The Roots of Sprawl: Why We Don't Live Where We Work." It's about the 1908 zoning laws (the Residence District Ordinance and the Industrial District Ordinance) of Los Angeles, and how they were designed by the first Progressives who were trying to use the laws to create a more ordered and virtuous city.
"People had a sense that when it came to land use of the city, we could spread out, we could avoid some of the problems of the East Coast industrial cities," he says. "But in the end, it's a shame. We went too far in the other direction, too much toward cars, too much toward sprawl. We're still repairing that today."
My other favorite so far is on the Laws of the Indies enacted by King Philip II of Spain in 1573, which explains why Los Angeles isn't centered near the port (where Long Beach is) and why downtown LA's grid clashes with the areas around it (a story continued in an article on Thomas Jefferson's 1785 Land Ordinance.)

Occupy LA was an odd moment in our police history, when the LAPD (the L.A.P.D.!) was calmly letting Occupy do their thing. And yet, when folks take chalk to the streets, someone I know (don't know if I should reveal their identity) got caught in a MacArthur Park–like cleansing of the area, which resulted in getting beaten with a nightstick when trying to leave. It wasn't until after the police had begun firing rubber bullets into the crowd that a different officer let them through with the advice, "Run and hide."

And now there's Anaheim where the police seem to be going on a killing spree aimed at driving toward a 1965-style riot. Local radio station KPCC compared the situation to the one described in a 1963 report by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations . The local nickname "Klanaheim" was earned in the '20s when the Ku Klux Klan briefly (and ultimately unsuccessfully) took over the city government. But resident OC Mexican Gustavo Arellano
Wonder why Orange County trembles whenever its Mexicans protest? Welcome to the Citrus War of 1936, the most important event in Orange County history you've never heard of.
His article about the Citrus War of 1936 details an extended racialized labor struggle in which
Orange County Sheriff Logan Jackson deputized citrus orchard guards and provided them with steel helmets, shotguns and ax handles. The newly minted cops began arresting [mostly Mexican] strikers en masse, more than 250 by strike's end. When that didn't stop the strike, they reported workers to federal immigration authorities. When that didn't work, out came the guns and clubs. Tear gas blossomed in the groves. Mobs of citrus farmers and their supporters attacked under cover of darkness.

While doing dishes, I heard music coming through the open windows. I went to investigate, I discovered a giant street fair. Now I am getting a Coolhaus ice cream sandwich.

A small crowd of people in summer clothes enjoying a street fair in a large parking lot. In the background, a band plays covers and a line forms to buy gourmet ice-cream sandwiches.

A small crowd of people in summer clothes enjoying a street fair in a large parking lot. In the background, a band plays covers and a line forms to buy gourmet ice-cream sandwiches.

Also, Andy Dick is selling poetry.

Andy Dick waves to a friend in the $1 Poetry Booth at the Hollywood Street Fair.

So this week didn't work out so well.

After an initial flurry of activity filing for unemployment insurance and sending a few e-mails to staffing agencies, I fell into a funk of avoidance, leading to a mini freak out on Thursday. I talked with friends and family who reminded me that it's ok to be freaked out about being unemployed for the first time in over a decade, and that a few days of not doing anything productive is fine.

I'm going to try to set myself onto a daily working schedule come Monday. While it's nice to sleep in until 11 or noon, I'm not actually productive when I stay up late. Once it nears sunset, I start feeling like my work day is over, and I stop doing other things. I think that forcing myself to at least be awake by nine every morning will add a few hours to my "working" day, at the very least. More measures will probably be forthcoming.

I did manage to do a lot of nonproductive things, though. I entered a local crossword puzzle tournament and participated in a sudoku contest at Logic Masters India. boardgaming night (played Roll Through the Ages), role-playing-game night (beta-testing a game by Josh Robern), a party to read and mock Fifty Shades of Grey as a group, and an NPL party. And in addition to that, I saw a bunch of friends at different times. I joined the site Quora despite its "real names" policy, by hacking together a form of pseudonymity out of its nascent system. And I sauteed chicked without freaking out.

Starting Monday, I'm going to add DW to my list of daily things to do. For reals.

Food poisoning over the weekend. That was fun. As with the last time I got food poisoning, I can blame no one but myself, since I wasn't eating out. Luckily, I didn't end up at the hospital this time, but the weakness from dehydration and not eating kept me knocked out for two days.

My stomach's still a little skittish, but I bounced back strong. I'd been feeling a little out of shape before the poisoning, and after spending a weekend too week to open a bottle of orange juice (yeah, really), I've been leaping to get back on the exercise routine.

It's been a great time to be out and about in Los Angeles too. Except for the rain yesterday, but also because of the rain yesterday. It's all cool and crisp again, and it feels like an LA winter should after the cold snap earlier in the month.

As you may start hearing news of a shooting near my home, please know that I am fine and safe.

I was in the Valley today, doing some preliminary holiday shopping on a day off. The wind has been incredible; it would be a Santa Ana, if it weren't so chilly.

We do have a few trees around that lose leaves in the winter, and those leaves were finally being knocked off the trees, flying up and around across the streets.

At one point, I even saw an honest-to-god tumbleweed roll in front of my car (though it was only about the size of a soccer ball).

It's still going strong, up here in the north valley. I'm pushing back an invisible wall just getting to and from my car.

Got a few geocaches on the way out too. Also, I got my bonus last night. A pretty good day, all told.

Last night I came home with a headache, and I ended up falling asleep early, sleeping with the lights on. That's always disorienting (I couldn't figure out what day it was when I woke up), though I caught up with the sleep I needed, and I'm feeling much better.

Thanksgiving was a quiet day with family and Gelson's food. It's been gorgeous in LA, recently and Thursday was no exception. I got to see my neice again, who is now walking and occasionally saying syllables.

On Wednesday, I saw The Muppets at the El Capitan, which was cool because the El Capitan is the location of the Muppet Show in the movie itself. As we walked in, the audience received wristbands with jingle bells on them, to accompany the stage show of Kermit and Miss Piggy singing winter holiday songs. As the previews began to play, the audience developed a spontaneous tradition of jingling before the preview played, during the screen containing the MPAA rating.

Working the days before Thanksgiving, I was a wreck, though. As my department gets ready to be transferred to the new company, everyone's been trying to run out their sick days before they lose them when we get cashed out. As a result, we've been horrifically understaffed, with more than half the department gone at any given day. Especially when combined with the holiday. I've been carrying a lot of stress home with me. My holidays are postponed until the end of the month, when I'll get a four-day weekend from November 29-December 2.

On Saturday, I went over to Dave's for his birthday celebration, playing The Secret of Mana to celebrate his 30th birthday. It was a lot of fun. I'd been itching to play videogames for a while, but somehow not managing to sit down to do it when at home. Spending a few hours wandering around on an SNES game was just the ticket.

Earlier that morning, I took part in the LA Homewalk for the United Way. Thankfully, it wasn't raining (it would rain on Sunday), and so everyone stayed dry. The most surprising thing was that according to my GPS, the length of the walk was more than the 3 miles/5 kilometers announced. When I was finished, my GPS said 3.98 miles, well over 6 kilometers. That explains why it took so much longer than expected. In all, I raised over $400 for the United Way.

On Thursday, I saw The Language Archive at the East West Players. It was a really good show, and it hit a bunch of emotional buttons for me, between a painful breakup and the loss of language between generations. There was a question-and-answer session after the show, and the director mentioned that among the ten people at one early production meeting, seven had experiences not speaking the language of their grandparents, including Japanese, Korean, Yiddish, and Lakota. The show continues through this weekend, and I recommend it, if you can make it.

Driving home tonight, I wanted to breathe in the colors of the sky like anesthetic.

On Sunday, at the season opener of Dungeonmaster, I saw

aimegame before the show, among others. When I asked what she'd been doing, she said, "Racing go-karts!" and invited me to join her and some friends on the track on Monday. I'd been feeling a little under-socialized, so last night I headed out to Torrance to race.

It was my first time in a go-kart, but I acquitted myself well.

aimegame had yelled that the only thing I had to do was "GO FAST," and I took it to heart, barreling into turns and sliding all over the damn place. It turns out that my previous experience with drifting in Mario Kart was incorrect: in fact, sliding around curves makes you go slower, rather than giving you a burst of glowing speed. On the other hand, skidding around a corner takes less time than crashing into the corner, and my drifiting kept me from a race-stopping collision with the barriers several times. Though I was in the basement among eight racers in my first match, the second, when it was just the three of us, I managed to eke out second place over

aimegame.

What I didn't expect was the toll it would take on my arms. I know I don't have the greatest upper body strength, but after the races, my arms were trembling, and it hurt to lift things, which was a bit much, even for me. It certainly didn't feel like I was overstressing myself while I was racing, but there was a decent amount of adrenaline. Whether the steering actually did require more work than I'd realize, or the rush of speed had simply caused me to grip the wheel too tightly for too long, my arms were wrecked. Between that and some bumping around in the cart that left my back and sides a bit sore, I've been feeling the kart all day.

I'm probably going to join them again, but I might need to work more on my push-ups before then.

This has not been the greatest week, for various reasons. Some of those reasons are private and complicated. Some of them are not. Among the public and uncomplicated reasons, I went to work today without my cell phone. Or my keys. And I have no idea where the building manager is or when (or if) he'll be back. So I'm at Kinko's now. The "let's just spend some time in Hollywood" time has run into "uh, can I get in touch with someone to let me sleep somewhere?"

Among the private and complicated ones, well . . .

With various emotional ups and downs, it's pretty clear that I'm experiencing some general depression. And now that those emotional things are kind of settling, it's just out there in the open. Nothing major, but still annoying to deal with. Especially when all this stupid stuff happens.

So, just, generally, if you have a moment, I could kind of use people saying things to boost up my self-worth. I'm in the frame of mind where I don't immediately discount them, and they've been absurdly beneficial to me the last few days. They don't even need to be creative, just hearing good things from other people is kind of what I need at the moment.

That, and for my manager to finally be there when I walk back across the street.

ETA: I finally got in touch with my manager. Or rather, my manager's son, since the manager is apparently on vacation. So he graciously drove over and let me into the house. Time to numb my brain with TV.

Things done since ever.

Bought tickets for the NPL Convention in Providence. Will be flying into Boston on the 4th (5 p.m. EDT), looking to bum around before heading to the hotel on Wednesday afternoon, then flying out of Logan early on the 11th (7 a.m.). Who'll be around?
I also said, "Screw it!" and asked for the rest of that week off from work, so it's going to be a real vacation for me all through to the 15th. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. But it will not be working.
I'm coming out of a funk (well, came out of a funk a week or so ago). It's always hard to identify it when I'm in it, till my body rebels and says, "No, Tablesaw, you need to do things again. You're going to do those situps, and then you're going to go out and see people." I'm looking ahead to when the pushback happens, the time when I feel a little sick or a little tired, and I let my momentum slip, and I can't pick it up again. On the horizon, this is most likely to happen because . . .
I'm probably going into the dentist this week to get my other wisdom tooth looked at. I have a feeling it's going to need removal too. The last time that happened it took a lot out of me. If it happens again, I'm going to need to plan ahead so that I can remomentatize myself.
I planned to go geocaching with trinker, and then found out it was to happen on her birthday, so I went all out to be the birthday fairy. It turned out kind of okay.
All the TV shows ended, and everyone is pregnant, I guess.
My phone, my crappy-ass phone—that is only one step removed from a crappy assphone—has started losing its charge, so I'm actually getting a smartphone. Virgin Mobile, which I've been using to keep my cell-phone bill under $10/month, has an unlimited data plan for $25/month. It should arrive this week. So that'll be interesting.
The Portal 2 print is framed and gorgeous-looking. I'm also wrestling with framing these prints on the cheap, which would be easier if the United States and Canada hadn't decided that they wanted their own special paper sizes.
Oh, I got a haircut too. For me, it's super short. But then, my hair was getting kind of long. For a while, it looked way too young for my big, bearded, thirty-three-year-old face, but it's looking better with a beard trim.
I watched a friend run Dungeon World at Strategicon over the weekend, which got me rereading Apocalypse World. After playing through a campaign, the directives made a lot more sense. It's a fascinating game, which is probably why I keep talking about it to everyone I meet. Also, much like with Smallville, I'm seeing it in the shows I watch. Sons of Anarchy and Dexter are totally running on Apocalypse World.
Finished Dragon Age:Origins. Pablum is too exciting a word.
Visited the Museum of Death, knocking another item off of my bucket list (defined as things that are close enough for me to throw a bucket at). It was disappointing. I was hoping for a curatorial perspective beyond, "WOW ISN'T THIS COOOOOOOOL!? SERIAL KILLERS, MAN! FUCK SOCIETY!" There were some nice touches: a set of crime-scene photographs near (what I assume was) the brief mention of the murder-suicide. On the other hand, relics of Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein were counterposed with "ads containing humorous depictions of cannibals." Yeah, that wasn't too pleasant.

Gotta go to bed now . . .

Tablesaw!

It's the saw of the table!

Weekend

Nitrate

Covideology

Gally 2020 (In the Time It Takes Me to Drink a Cup of Tea)

Exiled from the Past

Mur Murs

Some Cool Things

2013, 35, 52, etc.

In Your Multitude

Keep SoCal Chthonic

Why I Want to Stay in Hollywood

Increased Posting Looks the Same as No Posting.

Ooooogh

Safe and Sound

Today in the Valley

Walking It Back

Sky

GO FAST

Blatant Appeal for Flattery and Other Good Thoughts.

Infodump

Profile

April 2025

Links

Tags

Page Summary

Syndicate

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags