My heart goes out to that poor, poor cracked-out woman and her now misshapen rectum.

You can thank Sarah for showing me this one, folks. She may have clicked on the link at random, but it was only after having shown me a video of a man dressed in an inflatable whale suit attempting to awkwardly hump another inflatable whale. Say what you will about him, but the horny bastard is determined:

1) Nate is blogging again, this time at Under the Thinly Veiled Guise of Sanity. It’s blogging for the depressed, by the depressed. And it’s pretty damn funny. Check it out.

2) I imported all of my old archives, so now the the engine’s tentacles reach back to October 2002. I’m in the progress of updating some of the categorization, but you can still check any and all of them out.

3) I joined Twitter. Been meaning to for a while now, but just have never gotten around to it until today. There’s not much there, but stay tuned because I suspect it’s all that will get me through the workday for the near future.

QUANTUM is actually a perfectly serviceable action movie, plenty full of chases, hand-to-hand fights, and choppy editing. It’s barely recognizable as a Bond film, though. Aside from the character’s name, penchant for banging attractive women he’s known all of five minutes, and wrinkly old, party-pooper M, Daniel Craig’s James Bond could really be any other tortured action hero out there. Like Jason Bourne.

And that’s where this movie ultimately fails. It so desperately wants to Be like the BOURNE movies it forgot what’s supposed to make it a James Bond movie: a sense of fun. Even during CASINO ROYALE, as dark and violent as it was, you never forgot you were watching a 007 movie. This was a new Bond, a younger, more violent and raw chap, but you felt like you were watching a Bond in training. In QUANTUM — the first direct sequel in the Bond pantheon — all of this is thrown out the window. Bond spends most of the film miserable and vengeful, intent on hunting down the organization that killed the only woman he ever loved in the first film.

In the end, he does succeed in bringing in the man responsible, but he’s not any happier for it, and certainly no closer to being the James Bond we’re used to seeing. Hopefully the next film — which I’m sure is already being planned — will change this.

It wasn’t a bad time or anything, but whenever I go up there I don’t feel entirely comfortable. Like I’m just out of sorts. Last week I was up there by myself for sales training. I went out a couple of night with some guys from work, which was entertaining, and the rest I spent holed up in the hotel, drinking my two free allotted beers a night, or at the Panera down the road. This week, I went up with Mike and Steph. Mike drove, so my freedom of movement wasn’t greatly impacted. He went out with his bosses two nights, so he had to drive. Steph stayed in her room, drinking beer and talking on the phone. This left me without many options for entertainment. I ended up taking my laptop and walking the half-mile down the road to Panera. Tuesday night, I was hiking down the side of the dark road in the freezing cold, my shoulders hunched under my leather jacket, laptop slung over one shoulder. The occasional passing car would throw up a moment of gloomy lighting, and then I’d be alone again in the darkness. Idly, I started humming the theme from the Incredible Hulk like a yuppie Bruce Banner. It made me realize how glad I am that I don’t have to take the bus everywhere.

Let’s see, what else have I been up to?

I’d been reading THE WATCHMEN over the past week. I’ve tried to read it before, but couldn’t get into it and would abandon it fity pages in. This time I am actually enjoying it quite a bit. It’s a little dense, and I still can’t stand the way the books of the time were colored, but it tells a really cool story. Especially since it was really the first comic to deconstruct superheroes. TIME lists it as one of the top 100 English-language novels since 1923, which I think is a bit of a stretch. But it is good. Makes me actually look forward to the movie opening in January — that is, assuming it actually comes out.

FREAKS AND GEEKS has been in my laptop’s DVD player the past two weeks. I’ve only made it through the first three episodes, but it is damned entertaining. It stars pretty much every actor who has ever appeared in a Judd Apatow movie, which is fitting since he produced the show: Jason Siegel, Seth Rogan, James Franco, and a few others whom I recognize but can’t put a name to. The show occasionally wanders close to the “too awkward to watch” precipice, but never plunges over the side. On a whole, it’s funny as hell. I think a bunch of the same people were also in UNDECLARED which aired a year or two later, so maybe I’ll give that a shot too.

That’s pretty much it. Sarah is having a halloween party Saturday night, so tomorrow and Saturday morning I need to put the finishing touches on my costume. It’s a Heroes and Villains-themed gathering, so I am going as someone who suits me. I’ll put up some photos on Facebook/MySpace on Sunday.

JAB

Am currently engaged (Make it so!) in the process of transferring everything from my desktop PC to my lappytop in an effort to make the latter my primary computer. The reasoning behind this is that I spend precious few hours at my apartment, and when I am using the computer, it’s generally the laptop My desktop is buried in my bedroom on a neat little workstation, but it always feels claustrophobic when I’m in there. Consequently, I spend little time using the desktop. But it contains all of my music and a whole host of useful programs that I miss when absorbed on the desktop.

The only downside to using the laptop exclusively is that it only has a 80 gig hard drive, so I think an external hard drive is to be had in the near future. One that can hold a terabyte or so of data. For all the porn, television shows and copied movies that make up my collection of illegally gotten material. An extralegal capitalist, I am.

Next year I might look into getting some kind of docking station for the lappy. That way I have something into which I can plug the 24″ LCD monitor I intend to buy. And a regular keyboard. Laptop keyboards are okay, but if you’re writing anything of extended length, a regular full-size keyboard is a godsend. Then should I want to emulate an actual desktop computer, I can do so.

I’m feeling poor right now, however, so none of these purchases will be made in the next six months. I am going to be tightening the checkbook I never ever use a little until next summer, save up some money. I’d also like to get a new car next year some time as well.

That’s pretty much it for me right now. How are you?

JAB

Nate — or maybe it was his wife — suggested yesterday that we take a little trip there. I was actually looking forward to going because the opening of my new story, “A Zombie Romance,” takes place at a Chuck E. Cheese. (Or “Showbiz Pizza” as we called it back in the day, when we wore onions on our belts, as was the style at the time.) It was the perfect opportunity to refresh my memory — which, sadly, is pretty damn vague when it comes to life events before age 14 — of what a Chuck E. Cheese looks like.

It’s not that the join is rundown or anything, though there were tons of trashy parents there. It’s that all the entertainment blows. The tons of video games you could demolish your friends at have been replaced by simple arcade-style games where everyone is a winner. The one game I had any interest in was a Mario Cart game, and these little seven-year-old fuckers were hogging it. So we wasted our paltry free tokens that came with the food on a crappy first first-person shooter and skeeball.

The one highlight was that Nate is still afraid of the animatronic mascot. He doesn’t even like to make eye contact with it. It’s fucking great.

I did manage to come out of it with a fairly good visual of what a Chuck E. Cheese is like. Though I think in my story I might spruce it up a little, to make it cooler. It certainly needs it.

JAB

Once I get feedback from a few people, I’ll make any appropriate changes, then start sending it out for publication. I’m thinking either Clarkesworld or Strange Horizons.

Update: Looks like it will be Strange Horizons as Clarkesworld is not accepting submissions till the end of September. Makes that choice easier.

JAB

The domain “lolzombie.com” is still available, though.  I am seriously considering buying it and start lolzombie-ing myself.

Is there anyone out there who might be interested in helping? Anyone?

Bueller?

JAB

Last.fm is pretty damn cool. It’s an online music service which tracks what you’re listening to, based on that, recommends other music to you. So you search for a band you like, listen to a couple of their songs and create an online playlist, and then other similar bands are recommended to you. For instance, I was listening to some tracks by the Queers and clicked on a similar band, Teenage Bottlerocket. Like Ron Burgundy, they’re the balls (and I just discovered they’re made up of some former members of the the Lillingtons).

This shit is addicting. I wish I’d discovered it sooner. I’ve been really tired of all the music I’ve been listening to lately, and want new stuff to listen to. But it’s hard to just walk into a music emporium and find a new band to like. Last.fm actually seems like it might do the job.

Interesting. By signing up, you also create a public profile where others can see what bands you’re listening to your favorite tracks. If you wanna see what other swill I like, you can find out here.

JAB

One item of note: When we were wandering around Gatlinburg last night, I went into one of the many tiny shops selling touristy stuff. There was no shopkeeper at the counter, staring suspiciously at potential customers, which I found unusual. Most of the time that is all they do because it’s not like anyone is going to buy something. Then I went around the corner and nearly stepped on him. He was out cold on the floor, curled up behind a row of tacky t-shirts that bore clever lines like “I am a Princess (My father is the King of Kings).”

I’m not sure if he was dead but I didn’t stick around to find out. I wonder if someone beat him to death with his own shoe?

JAB