new show, old comics

i stumbled across this xkcd comic on garfield a while back, and i kinda want a poster of it. hell, even making fun of garfield for being banal merchandise driven tripe is played out by now.
and then today, i saw this. now i'm wondering how many other dark as hell garfield strips are in the early years that i've forgotten about.

on the t.v. side, heroes season 3 is about the most infuriating thing i've watched since 'attack girl's swim team vs. the undead'. i'm willing to accept a certain amount of comicbook logic and the resulting retarded decision making, but the whole thing just feels hastily thrown together with the unwritten assumption that all the characters have suffered massive head injuries. there are only a couple people around who don't immediately take the very obvious WORST FUCKING OPTION in any situation, and the writers have the balls to hang the plot tension on the problems that those same characters created by insisting that they had to do these stupid, stupid things. examples follow, so if you haven't watched, don't bitch about having sub-par t.v. spoiled for you.


1) nathan remembers he's a fucking senator and decides to do 'stuff'. this stuff is, obviously, setting up a gitmo for superhumans and a paramilitary unit to do blackbag / snatch & grab operations on anyone with a power. despite HAVING A POWER HIMSELF. see also, his brother, mother, father, daughter, and several close associates. he seems genuinely confused as to why the rest of them think this is a Bad Idea.
later on in the season, he decides that he must Do Something to Stop This as it is Wrong.
IT'S YOUR FUCKING PROGRAM JACKASS.

2) peter carrying a gun, ever.
dude, you're not going to shoot anyone, we all know you're a giant pussy.

3) peter and matt taking turns pointing a gun at danko's head, then immediately realizing it's a shitty idea to execute him. well, no shit. 5 minutes of thinking about these things called 'consequences' would have eliminated about 2 1/2 episodes worth of air time for those two though, so i guess acting like retards on screen is the price they had to pay to get their check that week.

4) claire and everything she does. in short, her dad noah agrees to work with nathan to round up superhumans in exchange for claire getting a pass and not going into a cell for the rest of her life. a condition of this is that she not run around like a goddamned superpowered idiot.
claire then spends several episodes whining about wanting to be 'normal' before deciding that it is a better idea to fuck with the agents rounding people up and smuggle other supers to safety. so, 'not' normal. she stashes one of the supers in her house for a couple days. yes, the house that is being watched by agents. who know what this guy looks like. no, they don't even bother to shut the fucking shades or drapes. yes, the agents suspect that she's hiding this guy. the episode 'exposed' is a complete clusterfuck of mouth breathing stupidity on the part of everyone involved, and caused me actual physical pain to watch.

so far, the only upside to season 3 has been watching sylar destroy people's asses. i don't even care that he keeps switching sides, i'm just hoping that he gets to kill most of the main cast by the end of this nonsense.

another entry into the "this should surprise no one" file

lo and behold, after a month of harassing people and getting no response via email or phone, it was finally discovered that the company i was told to use for a service that we absolutely require can not, in fact, perform said service.

as opposed to the extremely helpful and punctual company specializing in this area which i was forced to tell we will not require their services.

next week's project, of course, is me going to the original place and set up installation dates and changeover to their service now that i have proven, once again, if i do a couple weeks research on something this is a more accurate method than "boss picks company name out of a fucking hat".

a conversation from the apartment of infinite horrors

n: "so, having just one beer is like getting a handjob from your sister. yeah, you can do it, but if you're getting anything out of it, there are serious fucking problems there."

a: "mgd 64 is like getting a handjob from your brother."

n: "because it's fucking awful?"

a: "because if someone gives you one, you gotta finish it yourself."

n: "and you're not going to respect yourself for that."

blurb of the day

courtesy of mr. destructo:
"My favorite part of the Sin of Onan — besides, basically, its being free, low-impact and awesome — is knowing I just Early Aborted something like 20 million people. Fuck, I didn't even give those poor sonsabitches a chance. Think about it: every time I jerk off, that's an overachieving decade of Stalinism served on tissue paper. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm getting kind of hard. If this keeps up, today's premature death rate is seriously going to be maoing my zedong, if you know what I mean."

sentence of the day

re: samuel l. jackson as mace windu.
"Mace Windu is a boring old man with no personality who does not even so much as raise his voice during the whole trilogy, let alone call someone a motherfucker."

teachers

semi-ripping off a topic from lj's question of the day: what teacher(s) did you have that inspired you and why?

i have three.
1) mrs. willing, my 7th grade science / homeroom teacher. she realized early on that i had no business being there, so she let me fuck around for the entire class period, and read / do whatever i wanted so long as i wasn't disrupting the rest of the class. i am sure that the fact that i'd read and learned most of the text by the end of the first week of class had something to do with this. i didn't find out until a couple years later when my mom got drunk and let it slip, but she was also the teacher that told my parents it would be a good idea for me to skip 5th and 6th grade. (small grade school, all teachers knew almost all the students.) she let me read this book instead of doing my math homework for a couple weeks, sleep in class, got me into the nerd science & math olympiads, etc. basically, she let me go at my own pace, and introduced me to a lot of much more interesting stuff when the rest of the class was spending a week learning why whales are mammals.

2) mr. z, highschool english / writing teacher.
z was the opposite of mrs. willing and spent most of the semesters i had with him undoing my incredibly shitty schoolwork habits. z knew how well i could do if i decided to put some effort into it, and didn't let me coast or half-ass my way through anything. if i put in enough effort to get a c, even if that would have been an 'a' paper for anyone else, i got a fucking c. he raked me over the coals in grading, taunted me in class, and made me work harder than any other teacher i'd ever had. when i took my placement tests for college, i tested out of english. spent the next couple years taking 400 and 500 level college language and english courses that looked interesting as filler. thanks z.

3) dr. susan haller. computer science professor in college.
spent 4 years telling me to drop out of the major and basically go fuck myself. was completely correct to do so. turned me into the fucking dr. doom of writing code. laugh at me will they? i will DESTROY THEM ALL.
for what it's worth, i'm still not great as a programmer, but i will be damned if i'm going to stop working on something until i get it right.

i somehow missed this by a couple weeks.
yes, this makes me feel old.
still, bonus points for rolling out on the town with a copy of erich fromm instead of 'shoes quarterly', and for the smoke tucked behind the ear.