If you get the reference, you're as a big a gamer as me.

Blogging Under the Influence

For the past, oh, six days now I have been feeling ill. Symptoms fall in the range of your common garden-variety virus, sore throat, sinus congestion, runny nose, headaches, fevers, chills, speaking in tongues etc...
So I've been stocking up on vitamins, fruits, soups, drugs, throat lozenges and other tradition cures/alleviations. I bought a packet of NyQuil liquid caps to help me sleep since that seems to be the most difficult thing for me to do when I'm sick.
Last night, I was lying on my couch feeling miserable and self pitying and watching Firefly actor/producer commentary. It made me laugh, which made me feel a little better. At about 9:30, I decide that I want to hit the sack early, so I crawl upstairs to my bathroom and rummage around my medicine closet. Let me say here that I have enough medical supplies to support the third mobile infantry and enough drugs to stun a team of oxen. As I'm looking through my many and varied pharmaceuticals (some purchased over the counter, some prescription use only) I realize I have left my NyQuil liquid caps downstairs. I did however, notice a bottle of NyQuil liquid.

The only problem is that this particular bottle of cherry flavored NyQuil expired in November of 2008. Now, I know what you're thinking, surely I just went downstairs and got the packet of freshly purchased nyquil liquid caps and took those. Surely I dumped that half used bottle of liquid death down the drain. *ahem*
So I measure out the appropriate dosage from the Cherry NyQuil and throw it down the hatch. At this point I can safely say that the flavor engineers over at NyQuil have a really good sense of humor. Calling this product "cherry flavored" is a sin equivalent to filling grenadine bottles with hamster vomit and selling them in bulk.

Now, I know what you're thinking, and in my defense, let me just say that drinking two year old NyQuil is not as crazy as it sounds. I've had a clinical trials course and I know something about what happens after the best used by date on pharmaceuticals. Usually, the product simply loses efficacy. The effects of the drug are lessened not changed.
So I crawl into bed with the taste of rodent upchuck still on my tongue and settle in for a nice long sleep....

I wake up at about 11:00pm and I'm groggy and dizzy but otherwise comfortable. In my semi-conscious state I ask myself, why did I wake up? Surely, the medication didn't work. So I stumble out of bed and go downstairs. It takes me a while to find the liquid caps (because I'm drugged out of my gourd). I crack them open and take the full the dose. This is where things get a little weird.


I fall asleep again and my dreams become vivid and grand. I can see geometric shapes laid out against a pastoral landscape and I hear the voices of Joss Whedon, Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, and Ron Glass. They are talking and talking and they won't stop talking and when I wake up 2 hours later I can still hear them talking. That's right, I am awake and I can still hear the disembodied voices of the men doing firely commentary. I stumble into the bathroom and everywhere I look, there are shapes, mostly rectangles with dots at the vertices. The voices keep talking and the shapes are sticking to the walls and I stumble back into bed. I wake up two hours later and the voices are now a cacophony in my head. I try to close my eyes again but the room spins and I can see citadels built upon layered and interlocking rectangles with dots at the vertices. The noise increases until I feel my head is going to split open. Why won't they shut-up, I can't sleep unless they shut-up. As the voices reach a crescendo, I bolt upright and then there's silence.
I'm covered in sweat and my heart is pounding, but the room is cool and silent. I take a few deep breaths and fall back down to my pillow. As I close my eyes, all is quiet, but I see a single rectangle, outlined in silver, with blue dots at the vertices floating in the middle of my mind's eye.

An Evening with That Author Guy

The Fighting Librarian and I spent the evening at a book signing/reading with one of my favorite authors, Christopher Moore. There's nothing like hearing an author wax prosical to make you want to fire up the old blog.

He was supposed to read an excerpt from his new novel Bite Me: A love story (linked on the site above), but ended up just chatting with the audience for an hour and half. He told stories, talked about his new found fame, and then fielded questions from all the weirdos in the audience.

It was a really really good time. He was witty and self deprecating, funny and sincere. To be short, I would really like it if he and I became friends. I've actually written him a few fan letters and was amazed when I got replies...within 30 minutes. I'm not kidding. I wrote the guy after I read Lamb and not even half an hour later I got a response wherein he commented on my email. That is to say, unless he has some dastardly clever reply program, I think he actually read and responded to my email. Now that's a man who's dedicated to his fans.

For those of you who have not read Mr. Moore, I highly recommend picking up some of his stuff. Lamb is spectacular, but it's even better if you're familiar with some of the christian mythology. A Dirty Job stands out as one of the best and most hilarious books I've ever read. I put it up there with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (though it's a different kind of humor).

I also, just recently, purchased a DROID. You may know if it as the only phone/operating system that comes close (in terms of popularity) to the iPhone. Now, you all know I'm a HUGE fan of Apple and the Macintosh computer. I learned to type on an Apple II gs and my first personal computer was beige Macintosh G3. I've had a clamshell iBook and powerbook titanium, and my computer right now is an aluminum iMac. I've loved them all. However, when it came time to get a new phone I had two reservations when it came to apple. 1) I like having a physical keypad for typing. Something about the iPhone touchscreen keypad drove me bonkers. I would start to twitch and mutter curses in german. 2) Apple's business practice vis a vis the App store is just short of despotic. I don't like the closed door iron fist acceptance rejection policy and I don't like that I can't make my own app and load it on my phone. Apple has always kept tight reigns on their hardware/software, but at some point you begin to stifle creativity. Enter the Android operating system. Made by a somewhat less despotic Google to be an open source, pretty GUI whereon you don't need to void your warranty to upload any app your tech savvy grandmother just made.

The Motorola Droid, the flagship of the Android fleet, has a slideout qwerty keyboard and an open source philosphy I can get behind.

So far, I love it! I've never had a true "smart phone" before and I love how it syncs up with gmail and gmail calendar. The screen is big and beautiful and the apps are wicked fun. There's even an app that let's you download public domain literature.

O.k. that's all that's on my mind for now. I hope you all are happy and well.

=SP=