Saying farewell to 2014 and hello to 2015

To say 2014 was a year of change for me would be a mild understatement. The last three months have been pretty crazy, mainly with the shift into a new job and all the rippling changes that come from that.

It's been a crazy-as-hell year:

• My previous employer had an utter meltdown from a transfer in ownership that made most of 2014 an unpleasant and somewhat nerve-wracking experience.
• Job-hunting (see above) taught me no small amount of humility.
• A dizzying number of friends moved on to other phases in their lives and friendships I'd assumed were solid were solid seemed to be shockingly-fragile while others remained just as shockingly solid, if not more-so. People always surprise me.
• The Bike Gods unleashed their wrath upon me for reasons I cannot fathom.
• Some damn good books came across my path ("The Martian", "Tower Lord", "Skin Game", and others).
• I concluded a role-playing game campaign that was a good thirteen years long (give or take).
• Said gaming group lost and gained members. New faces around the table. New dice in the hand. New campaigns going on.
• I got to visit England for the first time in ages.
• Bad habits have started to catch up with me but now I'm inspired to fix them, so there's a silver lining in that cloud.

So now I'm sitting in my apartment to greet the New Year. We're suffering a mild cold-snap here in the Bay Area and it turns out my apartment's wall-heater is dead as can be, making my apartment akin to an icebox. Thankfully I have a space heater that works nicely. I'm suffering from a mild cold/bug/something that discourages me from going out. The mail just delivered Guardians of the Galaxy on DVD and I believe I've managed to kill off the ants invading the bar in my kitchen, so I think there's a movie and some sipping bourbon on the menu to greet 2015.

Whomever you are and where-ever you are, may you have a very happy New Year and may 2015 bring you more good than bad in your life.

Cheers!

Adventures in Pasta Making

A birthday or two back I got a pasta maker.

It languished, unused, for ages atop my freezer until today. I got a recipe for making pasta and decided to make it a try.

And that's when everything went wrong.

First off, I tried the recipe and found that there simply wasn't enough liquid in what I was following to make the pasta stick together in a ball.

Then, when I managed to get something that approximated dough, it took forever to get something useable to come out of the damn pasta maker.

And then the ant infestation returned as I struggled to get the noodles cut.

And then the pasta maker broke, gumming up the works with dough.

So you're not supposed to wash the pasta maker with soap and water for reasons. So instead, I had to bust out three different sets of tools and a can of compressed air to try to get to the hidden-away corners in the goddamn thing to clean it properly and then repair the broken track.

So now I'm covered in flour, I have ants in my kitchen and no idea how they're getting in. I have noodles that may or may not be an utter disaster. And I am irritated beyond words. The things I do in the name of the FSM...

Review: "The Last Christmas"

Aaaah, the Doctor Who Xmas special. It's become a thing since the days of RTD and continues under Moffatt's reign.

The last couple of Xmas specials have been beyond crappy so I had no expectations for this one.

It probably helped.

I could go all spoiler-y and recap the plot but I don't think I will this time. Instead, in broad strokes, Moffatt told a tale of creepy monsters mixed with Xmas schlock (complete with Nick Frost as Santa Claus himself). It was weird, oddly-funny at times, and creepy in others. Moffatt retains is ability to create disturbing monsters that play off of perceptions. It was - as this season has gone - a pretty good episode. Though as I say that, I should be clear: most of the season has been nearly unwatchably-bad.

Many thanks to V for letting me watch a recording. Cheers.

Figures

It's that slow, subtle feeling that something is off. Your throat feels a bit scratchy and raw. You have a headache. You get winded easily.

You go to work anyway. Maybe it will get better. The day goes on and you do feel better. Then the afternoon comes and you feel the "off" feeling stronger.

Yep. Getting sick. Just before goddamn Xmas.

Hello Nyquil. Glad I'm on holiday for a few days. Sigh.

Thoughts on "The Hobbit: Bloat of the Five Armies" (or something like that)

Just saw the third Hobbit flick.

I hold to my previous opinions on these films. They're not adaptations of Tolkien's novel. They're takes on a 13-year-old boy's Dungeons & Dragons campaign that was inspired vaguely by the book as half-read then turned into a comic book, then filtered into a video game, and then distilled into a sound byte for marketing wonks.

It's a pretty film but bloated, excessive, and ridiculous in so many parts.

The funny thing is that I liked all the actors. They all did fine with their roles. I enjoyed them all on screen (though I wanted more of Beorn throwing down with the Orcs). The story was just... unnecessarily-inflated with garbage while skipping over actual valid stuff from the book.

Tolkien isn't spinning in his grave. He's breaking free as a Nazgul to seek revenge for the butchery done to his story.

Books

Commuting on BART requires a few things:

1. Patience.
2. Flexibility.
3. A poor sense of smell.
4. Tolerance for the eccentric behavior of one's fellow human beings.
5. A strong immune system.

What the hell does this have to do with books? Well, points 1, 2, and 4 are all greatly-assisted by having reading material on-hand. I could load some books on my phone and read, but I'm not a fan of burning through my phone's battery unnecessarily. Plus the screen is kinda tiny. I could get an e-reader to replace my dead Kobo, but I haven't yet decided on what I want or how to deal with my excessive number of epub e-books (largely ruling-out Kindle).

So dead trees it is.

I got "Clariel" by Garth Nix, back in November and burned through it a little too fast. It was a nice prequel to his Abhorsen series, though a little choppy for me in parts.

I also got "The Slow, Silent Regard for Things" by Patrick Rothfuss. While I enjoyed it, I found myself irritated that this distracted from book three of his Kingkiller Chronicles.

I'm kind of an entitled ass when it comes to my entertainment. I've come to accept that and am somewhat glad that nobody really cares all that much about my whining.

So I found myself at loose ends on reading material and splurged a bit to get "The Red Sword" by Miles Cameron and gambled on its sequel, "The Fell Sword".

I'm a bit over 150 pages into "The Red Knight" and am enjoying it. Cameron is clearly someone with an SCA background and is a little too in-love with describing medieval armor components and attire, but he is solid at world-building and I'm really enjoying his characters and setting. The story is interesting and the magic system intrigues me. I expect good things from this.

After those two are done, I plan to go to "Half a King" by Joe Abercrombie. I like Abercrombie's work, but I didn't want to read one of his books before Xmas. His bleak stories tend to depress me.

After that is "Words of Radiance" by the ever-awesome Brandon Sanderson. That's a fat book and will take me a good long while.

I need a bigger bag. Sigh.

Time flies

Nearly a month since I tormented the world with my ridiculous nonsense! How could I let such a lapse take place?

So yeah. Most of my last four weeks has been adjusting to new employers and all that fun stuff. Gotta redefine the job and what it means in my life, etc., etc.

It's been a thing.

Not much that's blog-worthy (and given the inane prattle I post, that's saying something). I will say that I'm getting a tad tired of Oakland going into protest-riot mode every twenty seconds. I get that there's some serious racial imbalance out there and some insane injustice, but blocking freeways, shutting down BART stations, and destroying local shops in riots isn't helping, guys.

That's about it on my end.