Where Entertainment Came to Die

I'd like to thank warrenelliscom for posting a link to this comic- http://www.goonpatrol.com/planb/
Very good. Want more. Inner-child left without instant gratification.
Seeking bottled pacification.

Inigo Montoya: He's dead. He can't talk.
Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo Montoya: What's that?
Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.

I broke down and bought a Blu-ray player this weekend. Prices are down and Firefly/Serenity are available/will be available so I figured, "why not?"

So I pop in my first disc (Hitman, impulse buy- not a horrible flick but not a classic) and... it doesn't work. The disc loads, I tell it to play and.... I lose the video signal.
Son of a bitch. Now, I knew I was in trouble when I was buying a media playback device and the damn thing had an ethernet jack on the back. Fuck. I guess it's time to update the firmware.

Updating. The Firmware. On a fucking DVD player.
The damn thing has a USB slot too, for extra features. Here is where I wonder if I'm too old and crotchety to appreciate these newfangled "features."
After a hasty download, CD-R burn, and a not-so-hasty firmware update I try Hitman again.... and Fuck You Steve. No worky. On a lark I throw in my second Blu-ray purchase- Stanley Kubrick reached back from beyond the veil to slap any delusions about watching Full Metal Jacket right out of my soul. Because dead people can only smack you in the soul.
Wait. Ethereal dead people can only smack you in the soul. Zombies can pretty much do anything a live person can do, and depending on the flavor of zombie, sometimes a whole lot more.

So a double fuck you from the good folks at Sony.
...call from the wife.. thought train derailed... massive loss of life and limb... insurance covers none of it as mental mass transportation is not covered by any reputable, non-mafia carrier.

SO, I try Hitman again and notice that the light on the face of the player under the text 24P is lit up. I went ahead and RTFM (Google it) and find that sometimes TVs more than 30 seconds old are not compatible with certain new features included with the player. I disable 24P (no I don't know what the fuck it is beyond the difference between discs playing and no playing) and lo and behold there's a bald Timothy Olyphant (not a euphimism for my penis (yet)) on my TV. Do you suppose that someone, somewhere got a barcode tatooed on their prick and refer to said prick as "The Hitman" and isn't gay? Seriously, Hitman is a gay name for a weiner.

Long story short.. (too late) my year old TV is too shitty to make good use of all the possible features of Blu-ray. I already knew I fucked up when literally* five minutes after I purchased my 1080p set, the first 1080p 120Hz sets were coming off the truck. Sets with the improved refresh rate turned on still make me a little queasy, but it makes me sad that if I'd waited about two weeks I'd have the option to feel queasy watching television in my own living room instead of having to go to a friend's house to ask them to turn that shit off so I can watch in relative comfort. Seriously, panning shots in 120Hz are ridiculous and eerie. Filmed media has no business being that clear. We're a short travel away from blurring the lines between real and fantasy and ridiculous refresh rates are but a babystep on that journey.
It's 120Hz refresh rates to Ad Bombs** in one easy step. This easy step may take 50-100 years.











*- Purposefully misused. Fuck you. 1080p sets were talked about in Dickens, just never published. Prove me wrong, jerk-off.
**- Currently re-reading Transmetropolitan.

I'm listening to The Protomen. I think it's good. It's so good. I'm wishing my computer speakers weren't such shit. I think I will remedy that this weekend.

In other news: Holy fuck. The new job seems a lot more difficult than the old one. At the very least I'm working more hours. Oh well, what's a random ten hour day or two between friends? I might not even have to show up this weeknd. I suppose if it really bothered me I wouldn't have applied. There was just that disconnect- I was going to have to do the job until they found someone else. It's the old boss's maternity leave(s) all over again. Might as well make it permanent and get paid for it, right? Maybe it'll seem worth it when my raise finally shows up on my check.

In other news- A question! Why do people have to be so shitty about relatively minor things? I understand that "minor things" is a question of perception, but when you have a group of people working toward a common goal, when does "separation of duties" begin to come before "the best way to get the job done"? The short answer: Whenever it's convinient to say so if you're the person that is being asked to accomplish extra.
A simple, shitty answer to a simple question.

Did anyone ever think I had any business being any kind of management? I thought about it once... (and a few times before I took the plunge) and so far (a whole week and a half into the experience) the worst parts are
A) tasking people who were your peers a week and half ago. I'm getting a little shit for it, but I'm pretty sure it's good-natured. I am a bit more conscious of things I would have said to my peers that would be funny as a peer and horribly condescending and/or inappropriate as their "lead." I understand I can take some of these concerns for granted, but when I take that mindset I could get fucked. With luck everybody will be cool. I've only got two people "under" me and one I've worked closely with for the last seven years.* The other is newish and I'm still struggling with the guilt over not finding time to train him on higher job functions or throwing him at lower job functions the already-trained folks (myself and the other guy) can do without help. I keep telling myself it will get better, but damn. Time passes slow when you're waiting for it to pass.

B) (yeah this is a list) dealing with other fucking management. Fuck's sake. I have my group's best interests at heart. I tell myself I have the overall contract's best interest at heart. I lie to myself that I have the customer's best interest at heart. I can, occasionally, merge these ideas into a game-plan. So can the other managers. Our gameplans all include the team whose lead is presenting the currently tabled plan being the least inconvinienced. I'm new so I'm not trying to play that game, but every fucking time I hear a coworker say "I (we) are too busy to take something else on" I want to physically beat the fuck out of them. I want to beat the urge and ability to procreate right out of them. The "too busy" defense is one of my biggest pet peeves. I'm a (mostly) productive motherfucker (at work) and I still find time to let my mind wander. And we have tasks overflowing our work-basin. (That euphimism should be trademarked. It's horrible. Fucking work-basin. Task-resevoir. Goal-ocean. God damn Deliverable Golden Shower.) But, while I will say, "If you task us with this other unholy project, be prepared to have something else not be completed by that due date." I won't blanket-deny future work by saying, "My people are too busy. There's too much on our table. Our schedules are booked. The trains aren't running on time. Jesus couldn't be here for the 2nd coming because he had a prior engagement having his acupuncturist drive a crochet needle through his palm for old time's sake." I might be come an asshole-manager in time, but damn- right now while I still see clearly- the bad managers are duplicitious liars who talk up the meager accomplishments of their underlings and play off the failures as other peoples' failures while at the same time ignoring, feigning ignorance/inability when it comes to taking on new tasks. Good managers employ similar tactics but lie less and when the lies do happen, the lies tend to hurt less people that aren't management.


I don't know. Maybe the raise is worth it. At the very least no one else is taking the team in a direction I don't want it to go. I'm free to fail or fly as I see fit. Right now we're not quite doing either. Maybe we're crawling. Maybe we'll walk before too long. That's a worthwhile goal.

















*-FUCK.

There's a comic where the thong-sporting sunglasses-wearing cat is trying to hang out with the youngish cat and is inadvertandtly acting homosexual. These activities result in him skate-etching some homosexual jargon into the floor/carpet. Please link this comic.