It occurred to me recently that, I guess, I have a beard now. I am a person with a beard.

This occurred to me only recently.

Posted by tederick at 10:31 PM in miscellaneous crap & photoblog
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The selling-shit-off thing actually worked out better than I expected. I'm down to just two or three items left and they aren't exactly the ones I expected to fly off the shelves. I cannot believe someone is actually taking the TV: that thing is so HEAVY. I feel like a weight has been lifted from my soul.

"How was your long weekend?" Well, it was fine. Not long enough. Sarafina and I had a pretty decent day of just lazing around doing nothing on Saturday, which we haven't had opportunity to do in a good long while (and probably shan't again for a while yet). But I coulda done with more of it. Actually all in all I'm in a very "nesty" mood these days. I wish it was winter, because I seem to crave little more than bed and vidja games, but it's just too goddamned hot at 3QF to accommodate my need. I am forced to go outside, where parasites are choc-a-bloc and the radiation ball rules. Is a little self-imposed agorophobia really so impossible to achieve in August in Toronto? Apparently it is.

Speaking of August: Brian K. Vaughan's meticulous re-work of the 2003 blackout within the fabric of the Ex Machina storyline is really rather breathtaking. As Shortbus pointed out, there's a unique relationship between 9/11 and blackout '03, and also a lot to do there in terms of massaging our own fond recollections of the night the lights went out (vs. the morning CNN would not go away). In narrative terms, the summer of '03 also makes for the middle of his storyline, doesn't it? I am liking that title more and more with each book that comes out.

Sockvivor continues. I've thrown away my lucky socks - I guess sixteen years is simply too much. Things are getting lean around my place - more and more stuff siphoned off to 108, to friends, to the trash heap. I feel cleansed, for the first time in forever.

I have a fondness for Star Trek III that is disproportionate to its worth.

Posted by tederick at 4:17 PM in 1701 & comix & miscellaneous crap & socks
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Take my TV. Please.

This 30" CRT Samsung 16x9 beast is sitting in my bedroom. It is six years old - I bought it for $1800 in 2002. It is in good shape. It is NOT Blu-Ray compatible, though, so make sure this thing plays forward into your home entertainment plans over the course of the next five years. It has component inputs only, no HDMI. I am selling it for $250

BUT THERE'S A CATCH

if you are willing to come and get it yourself, and get it out of my room yourself, I will part with it for a mere hundred dollars. That's right - not having to move this thing down my stairs myself is worth a bill and a half to ya. The TV is, in terms of fair warning, HEAVY AS A SON OF A BITCH. But if this sounds like you, get in touch.

Still on from previous bake-offs:

• 17" CRT computer monitor (a Samsung SyncMaster 900 IFT)
• Game Cube - no games, no controllers
• Ginger Snaps II a.k.a. Ginger Really Snaps

Posted by tederick at 7:06 PM in miscellaneous crap
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Today sucks, for reasons blah, and blah-ha, and boo-hoo, which I shall not utter here. I shall, however, say: Ha! (Not a "ha" of merriment. A "ha" of deep, diaphragm-clenching malaise.)

I will also say that if you're going to have a gigantic see-thru glowing toy bust of Fat Palp on your desk (I'm not), this is the one to have. Tell me this ain't some scary shit. Damn the Japanese are weird.

Unsurprisingly given the storm clouds over my head today and also the obvious cinematic parallels in The Dark Knight, I've been thinking about There Will Be Blood quite a bit lately. The TWBB blu-ray remains one of the highlights of my collection and the flick is just, well... "even better every time" don't cover it. It's goddamned stunning. In fact I think a blu-ray TWBB/TDK double feature (to be subtitled: The Night America Stole Your Soul) would be quite the crushing experience of cinematic awesomeness, examining the complete dissolution of moral certainty in the 21st century, and I may stage such a viewing at 1701 in the fall sometime.

That's right, 1701: behold the tag for my new domicile, in which I shall be living solo starting on September 1 of this year. I signed the lease on Friday. Now I'm all bound up with labour and logistics. More detail to follow.

Posted by tederick at 1:49 PM in 1701 & galaxy far & miscellaneous crap & movies & toys!
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Continuing onwards!:

I have a 17" CRT computer monitor (a Samsung SyncMaster 900 IFT) that I will give to anyone who still has a need for such things.

I have a 2-drawer black metal filing cabinet that I will happily part with for no fee, should you be willing to come and pick it up. The pickup might have to be slightly later in the summer because I'm still in the process of clearing it out, but claim early!

I have a Game Cube - no games, no controllers - that is yours for the plucking.

I have framed posters of Episodes 1 and 2 in varying states of repair. Please take them from me.

Still on from Sunday's bake-off:

DVDs at five bucks a pop:

• Ginger Snaps II a.k.a. Ginger Really Snaps

Books for free:

• The novelizations of Episodes I and II, in hardcover!
• Memoirs of a Geisha, also in hardcover!
• The Making of the Modern Age, which many of you probably read in history class in high school
• Oscar Widle - De Profundis and Other Writings
• Jean Genet - Our Lady of the Flowers

Keep an eye on the comments to figure out what's sold and what's not.

Posted by tederick at 9:01 AM in miscellaneous crap
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Between me and my brother, this morning:

Me: Check it out, aliens are actually real.
Adam: Damn... here's hoping he's sane. I wiki'd him and he's 78 so he may just be senile from all the age and space travel.
Me: Or maybe he has a CRYSTAL SKULL??
Adam: More likely, yes.

It wasn't until a few days ago that I actually registered the full measure of my disappointment about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I was tooling around indianajones.com, there were some video clips from the movie on there, and I just sorta gawped at it. Good lord in fuck, why on earth would anyone ever do a thing like this. It's amazing that three Star Wars prequels couldn't make me hate George Lucas, but this one did it with one computer-animated gopher poking out of a dune hill, and took down my teenboy love of Spielberg with it. They're freezing Lucas in carbonite over in Japan in officially sanctioned product now; can we get desk-sized ones on this side of the Pacific?

On a much lower scale of disappointment is the X Files sequel. For years I have been crying "The world needs Fox Mulder!" so I guess I'm getting what I paid for this weekend; in the post-Batman orgasmic high it barely mattered to me at all that this movie was even coming out, and the results bear out:

I genuinely do: I want to believe. I want to believe in aliens and psychics and fluke men. More than that, though, I desperately want to believe that if the Man is being a scary, lying sonofabitch, there's a couple of methodical, deadpan FBI agents out there with flashlights and cell phones and a drab mid-size sedan, patrolling the highways and biways of middle America / Vancouver with a dogged (Doggett?) interest in figuring out just what the hell is going on. Maybe not solving, maybe not saving, but at least seeing. I believe in The X Files.

Rest of the review is here.

Now utterly unsure of what the hell I'm supposed to go do with myself, I'm going wander around the city and try to find new gods.

Posted by tederick at 12:12 PM in dr. jones & galaxy far & miscellaneous crap & reviews
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Well, and officially, it's summer and everything sucks. Any intimation of having to do anything at all is met by me with a massive IDONWANNA IDONWANNA IDONWANNA IDONWANNA IDONWANNA!! And I am not alone. This entire jive-ass turkey town is staring out the window (wistfully). If I were Ferris Bueller, I would take the Day Off. I am petulant, emasculated, dyspeptic, and blasé. It's something's-gotta-give mode at Tederick Central Command. (TCC: kicking the TTC's butt!)

If I were a fruit fly, I would be bumping lazily against the fruit, accomplishing nothing.

Ugh. To be on a beach, naked, with a bottle of rum...

Posted by tederick at 11:02 AM in j-o-b & miscellaneous crap & the rum diaries
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This has been a spectacular couple of weeks for feeling old. Sure, I've got long, straggly grey beard-hairs. Certainly, my memory is a leaky faucet nowadays. And by all means, my body is being goddamned odd in its response to stress. But last night? Limping up the stairs to 3QF because my right knee had apparently gone stiffie without my knowledge, settling into bed with my clothes still on and an audible "Ohhhhhhh," and then passing clean the fuck out for 2 hours before 7:00 at night? Well that's just unacceptable.

So I read me some Scott Pilgrim on the way to work today in order to engage with "youth culture," and am feeling generally content. I have yet to find an apartment, and now seem to be in jeopardy of not having anywhere to live on September 1 - expecting to be able to move in to a new place before November of this year was, evidently, a spectacular miscalculation on my part because Toronto is BOOKED UP. I will be prowling the corridors of Yonge & College this afternoon with a song in my heart, because I actually do find the whole moving-out thing very exciting right now. And then going to see Hellboy with my special lady. There could be sushi involved. So today is ok, lack of residence and bad knee notwithstanding.

Posted by tederick at 10:37 AM in miscellaneous crap
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I can't seem to get the Juno "pie balls" line out of my head today. I've also taken to using "turducken" as a swear word... though the latter is more of a secret, vulgar ambition than a curse.

When you're moving, you want to move as little "stuff" as possible, so I've stopped mending socks. That's right: sock pops a stitch, sock go bye-bye. The socks are terrified. They saw what I did to these bastards, and they're running scared. My side of it is brilliant; not only do I get to terrorize my socks, but I also get to look forward to a mid-September socking spree. New socks!

Now watch as I tear a strip off this: What is the deal with the Facebook Friend Finder? That thing is retarded. Never, not even once, has a single person who appears there been someone I can identify by name. Am I getting someone else's picks? Whose Friend Finder do I show up in? Maybe they invented the FF as some kind of second law of thermodynamics motivator within the naturally-structurecentric Facebook universe. Where we attempt to build logical roads between the cities of our social profiles, the FF tunnels through the earth to random out-points that are unrelated by any commerce to our Facebook cities. (Yikes... that metaphor barely held.) The inevitable result of following the Friend Finder to its disconsolate ends is utter entropy across the board: networking with everyone rather than select few; "friendship" as a meaningless watchword in a hazily homogenous Facebook fog. Fie!

Well anyways. I've had coffee, and written in my journal about two or three of the more beautiful things of the last 72 hours, all while sitting in the sunset rays of my soon-to-be-erstwhile home of the Danforth. I remember the summer of '04, when I did nothing else...

Posted by tederick at 5:56 PM in 3QF & miscellaneous crap & socks
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If you have anything on loan from me - books, comic books, DVDs - please arrange to return them to me by the 20th of July. (The weekend Batman comes out.)

If I have anything on loan from you that I asked to borrow, I will endeavour to return it to you within the next 10 days.

If I have anything on loan from you that you spontaneously gave me because you thought I'd like it, I have already burned your possession.

Posted by tederick at 10:05 AM in miscellaneous crap
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