Been on quite a Ministry kick this week - such good stuff. Whenever there’s a show coming up I always want to go, but I don’t think I’d really enjoy being in a Ministry pit as much as I enjoy listening to Ministry. For that reason I was almost glad last fall when they ended up touring separately rather than with Skinny Puppy. Two great tastes, but do they taste great together?

My friend Melissa just got a really great haircut, so I’m reminded yet again that I haven’t gotten mine cut in far too long. After my last unfortunate experience I’m still looking for a new stylist. Others have recommended Astor Place, so they’re probably next on the list. I don’t plan on having them color my hair and as long as they follow a few guidelines (very short in back, some kind of bangs in front) I don’t really care what they do, so there’s not really all that much that could go wrong.

In any case, I’m a little short on sleep and generally feeling kind of under the weather today, so after work I suspect I’ll go straight home and curl up with takeout and TiVo. One could do worse on a Wednesday.

Weather-wise, this whole season has officially been pretty bizarre, I think. It will be December on Thursday, but it’s almost 70 degrees outside right now - 67 and very humid, last I checked. September and October were both freakishly warm, and November certainly seems like it has been as well. I’m not complaining that it isn’t bitterly cold out yet, mind you, but I’m not thrilled with the idea of having summer in fall and fall in winter, either.

In any case, I’ve conferred with my associates and we’ve decided that all of these things are indicators of the proximity of the apocalypse. You coastal folk shouldn’t be surprised if you look out your window some day soon and see the awful form of the Great Old One rising from the sea. Are you ready?

Yeah, yeah, I’ve been bad. I took a sort of mini Internet vacation - as long as we can pretend that Warcraft isn’t the Internet. We played an awful lot of it over the weekend and finally got around to installing the Mac Teamspeak client, which is still in beta but seems to work pretty well. I got a new ring and drank more than was strictly necessary, but isn’t that what raids are for?

My Thanksgiving was also pretty rad; it was spent at my brother’s place in LIC, and we ate huge amounts of delicious food. My paltry offering of cornbread was blown away by the rest of it, but I don’t really mind. I drank more than was strictly necessary, but isn’t that what holidays are for?

And then Chris turned 30 yesterday, so there was also birthday fun over the weekend. It involved homemade cupcakes, I’ll tell you that much. And more drinking than was strictly necessary, but isn’t that what birthdays are for?

All of the decorations and the advertising have taken their toll: I have given in and started Christmas shopping. Even though Thanksgiving isn’t until Thursday and Christmas is more than a month away. And there’s actually very little that I still need to do - a few miscellaneous items that need to be purchased in person or were not in stock when I looked for them online, but I have plenty of time for all of that.

Here’s my final capitulation: I have switched my standard Starbucks drink from a red eye to a skim peppermint mocha for the duration. That’s right - I’m motherfucking festive.

So we had a pretty good time this weekend, as you might expect - two geeks and two new computers makes for fun all around. Chris fulfilled his dream of playing Warcraft wirelessly on the couch while watching TV, and I fulfilled my dream of walking through Orgrimmar without lagging. Outstanding!

We were pretty surprised at how dramatic the improvement in Warcraft performance actually was - our framerate in crowded areas like the cities and 40man raids has more than tripled. The processor in the current crop of iMacs is nothing special, but I guess the combination of processor, slightly better video card, more RAM, and increased bus speed really paid off. Chris went from the bottom of the Molten Core damage rankings to #2 on Saturday - mainly because it’s possible for us to actually, you know, play the game in MC now, instead of sitting through a slideshow. And that’s with all the graphical bells and whistles turned on.

In any case, I’ve been very happy with the iMac and I definitely think it’s worth the money, for those of you considering one. The overall responsiveness of the machine is impressive, and I love that hot widescreen action. My old monitor was a 19″ CRT, so I’ve also suddenly discovered a huge amount of extra room on my desk. Good times.

The weather seems to have gotten very cold again very suddenly. I don’t really mind - it is the middle of November - but because I wasn’t expecting it and am not smart enough to check the weather every morning, I was walking around yesterday in a blazer while everyone else had hats and winter coats. But I dug out and de-Tiggered my own winter coat this morning, so all is well.

According to FedEx, I have a new computer waiting in the mail room for me when I get home, so I’ll probably spend most of my weekend playing with it. I chose in the end to wait on getting a new tower - I’ll do that in a couple of years when the Intel towers are out and have become the standard. My new baby is really just a transitional machine, but that doesn’t mean I love her any less.

Chris has been away this week as I mentioned earlier, but he’s back tonight, and with a new baby of his own. But that’s mainly because he has the best employer ever. So we’re now a three Mac household - unless you count the original bondi iMac from 1998 that’s sitting in my closet, which I don’t. Poor baby.

People who have lived in New York for at least a few years tend to develop a particular sensitivity to subway cues. When it’s rush hour and the doors open in front of you to reveal a suspiciously empty subway car, wise commuters will jog down the platform to the next set of doors before they close, or wait for the next train. A vacant car during peak hours suggests either an issue of temperature or an issue of smell, and getting two seats to yourself isn’t worth putting up with either one of those problems.

This morning I was tricked into stepping onto a stinktrain before realizing my mistake, as the car wasn’t totally empty - it was just that everyone was bunched down at one end, and the people that got on at my station were already rushing to fill the available seats, so there weren’t those vast expanses of orange seating that usually warn me off. But almost immediately I was hit with an overpowering, almost Lovecraftian stench and joined everyone else in rushing to the crowded end of the car.

What was odd was that there wasn’t an identifiable source - usually there’s a single person or substance at the center of the stink radius, but not this time. Either whatever it was had fallen under a seat or it was in fact the residual odor of something that had recently been removed. I shudder to think what could have stunk so powerfully that it affected an entire carful of commuters even in its absence, but I suppose that’s something I’ll never know.

I’ve gotten a lot of mail asking about the new Penny Arcade site, so I thought I’d just post something about it and hopefully stem the flow. I wasn’t involved in this redesign, as the time I spend at my job has prevented me from taking on any other major projects in the last couple of years, but I think it’s pretty rad. Obviously everyone has different aesthetic preferences, so not everyone will like every design. But remember that I did the old site years ago, and it was showing its age both on the front end (HTML 4.0) and the backend (PHP 3). The new site is better in both respects, which can’t be bad news for anyone.

I guess what I’m getting at is: please lay off the “ZOMG UR DESIGN WUZ WAY BETTAR” mail. I’m sure there are some people who agree with you, but they aren’t me, so my reply may be unhelpful.

And also - I realize that my own site dates back to pretty much the same era as the previous PA design, and for the same reason (time). But don’t worry - I’ve got a few surprises up my sleeve and most of you should like what’s coming.

I’m resigned to the fact that I’m drinking my coffee this morning in a cheery red reindeer cup despite the fact that it’s supposed to be seventy degrees today. I have even started to think about Christmas shopping already, despite my best efforts to ignore all the premature holiday cheer engulfing Manhattan. Damn you, capitalism!

Chris is away for the rest of the week, so I’ll be having wild parties every night until he comes home. I’m just kidding, of course - I would never have a wild party. I prefer a tasteful, muted soirée. Honest.

Still really enjoying my Bauhaus CD from the other night. I understand that right now it’s tough for venues that aren’t owned by Satan to participate in this kind of thing, but I hope that will change eventually, because I’d really like to get CDs of more of the shows I go to. Tour shirts are one thing, and bootlegs are another, but high quality CDs definitely take the cake. I like hearing more of the music and less of the people going “Woooooooooo!”

Here’s something funny: the two Bauhaus shows this weekend were the first in New York in years, and were a pretty big deal, but just see if you can find the word “Bauhaus” on the front page of the “nycgoth” LiveJournal community. That one post where people are complaining about not hearing enough Bauhaus at clubs doesn’t count. Hmmmmmm.