I know we haven’t done one of these in years. It’s been so long, I won’t even bother using the special friends filter.
Here’s the deal, boys and girls! Friday night, we will go into Manhattan. We will subway up to all you can eat sushi. We will eat, honestly, all we can. They’ve got non-sushi stuff for the heathens. Probably drinks will be drunk after, and people who need to can crash at my place.
I’ve talked with kikibird, redvector, _yggdrasil, and others about this so far. If you’re reading this, you’re a welcome attendee. Get in touch with me, I’ll get in touch with you, and we’ll work out the details.
To make things more interesting, windexcowboy and shmivejournal have each bet five dollars on utini2 winning. Some said I should have given them five to one or seven to one odds, but they were fine with taking three to one. I might be out thirty bucks, but odds are I’ll be up ten.
Today’s far too gorgeous to be working on either of my papers, let alone spend in Draenor or Azeroth. After pushing the party line at Spring Saturday, I took the long way home. Past the cherry blossoms in Newark, hitting Jersey City for Ibby’s to take to my roof. But it was closed, periol was off at work, and I couldn’t get a hold of anyone else from Jersey City. Armed only with tacos from a JC joint (Ayn Rand, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Castañeda in the bookshelf), I’m about to hit my roof for a while.
If you shout up, I’ll let you in, and make you a margarita.
I just had one of the top twenty meals of my life, and I have sought out amazing meals and eaten the food of he whose cuisine reigns supreme. Thank you Yelp reviewers. Wow. I can follow that with nothing but dry toast for the rest of the weekend as nothing will come close.
EDIT: Yar. Pegu yet again. But viva for seasonal menu.
EDIT DEUX: I wish Louis Roberts, the Carnal Plumber, was alive to see this.
I thoroughly expected litigious asshat Jack Thompson to blame video games for the horrific tragedy at Virginia Tech. The moment I heard about it, I knew he’d be pounding the war drums against virtual violence. The predictable waste of flesh did not disappoint.
Just a few hours after the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech that resulted in the death of 33 students, game regulation crusader Jack Thompson went on Fox News. Details are only now starting to come out about the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, a South Korean resident alien.
Thompson was introduced by Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer as an “expert in school shootings”, and used the event to rail against violent video games. Thompson blamed the “murder simulation games” without even having information on the killer. Now that Cho has been identified as the gunman, there is no indication from news reports that he was even an active gamer.
And you know are they treatable? They’re usually dead after something like this happens because the police take them out or they take themselves out. The question really is can we spot them. And the problem is we are programming these people as a society. You cannot tell me — common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they’re on a mass killing spree in a video game, it’s glamorized on the big screen, it’s become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high. And we’re going to have to start dealing with that. We’re going to have to start addressing those issues and recognizing that the mass murders of tomorrow are the children of today that are being programmed with this massive violence overdose.
*sigh* Now that the truth is out over Cho‘s lack of gaming, of course neither statement will be retracted. And the summit on media violence carries on, with the ESRB insisting that it has the same goals as the concerned parents…
I’m dry. My car’s fine. A lot of cars aren’t. If I had parked south of where I live, or a few blocks north of where I did, I would have gotten water damage. Fortunately, I got a spot on fairly high ground. The pictures from the other areas are pretty bad.
Took a walk around the “Mile Square City” during low tide this afternoon. Some roads were still blocked off, many vehicles stuck and unable to be towed out, and plenty of businesses closed. Countless basement businesses or apartments had hoses coming out of a window, shooting water onto the street. Beowoof was just about the only basement business that wasn’t closed. Sewer grates were backed up, or in some cases seemingly ejecting sewage. I walked by a number of cars that had condensation on the inside of their windows, where water had penetrated the cabin.
As of the evening commute, the only way in or out of the town by road was through the bridges that lead to the Lincoln Tunnel (the worst path due to traffic, even on a good day). The southern end (my usual route) was still completely flooded out and the western bridges were no good due to a wall collapsing into a viaduct. In the video statement from the mayor above, he advised people to not have friends visit, and for outsiders to avoid the town unless they’ve got a medical procedure being done at our shitty hospital. I’ve got supplies, I’ve got homework to do, I’m pretty fortunate.
That lake? There’s the BoA ATM I sometimes hit on the way to work, as it’s right down the road from where I live.
“We have at least 50 state roads right now that are impassable,” Codey said this morning. “This is like a blizzard without the snow.” In a statement released this morning, state officials said the state government, Garden State Parkway, New Jersey Turnpike and mass transit would remain open today. But commuters should think twice before leaving the house. “Residents should not travel unless necessary. If you must travel allow yourself plenty of time to get to your destination,” the statement said.
I’d just suck it up and wade my way to the train station, as some intersections between where I live and my car are closed off (and that’s assuming I can get my car OUT of town), but already they’ve got train lines are suspended from the flood. Wheefun. And lots of schools are closed. I do enjoy that our acting governor instructed people to watch The Sopranos last night as a way to deal with the storm.
Check out some amazing photos of the fire and flooding over here, or some intense videos from right next to the blaze here.
Two feet of water on the streets of the_boke, and a four alarm fire. What? The heavens continue to pound rain on the city, but there’s also burning ash raining from the sky.
Tried to park my car in a decently high patch of land, but this is nuts. Got back inside, but I can still smell the fire through my closed window, blocks away.
Went to Chiller Theatre with mystedraveneyes yesterday, but we hit all the other areas of the convention before the “big name” signing area, and Robert Beltrand had already jetted. Oh well. Shortly after that I saw J.D. Harmeyer, which was enough of a celebrity sighting to make me happy. We both bought toys, and came across a Harley Quinn Barbie that made her wince. Not as much as the oddly-proportioned and disturbingly glowing Harley Quinn art down the hallway of artists. I’m sure _yggdrasil‘s head would have exploded.
