Enterprise No More

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It’s sad, really — for a show meant to continue the fine tradition of boldly going where no man has gone before (or no one, in the more politically-correct TNG era), all Enterprise managed to do was boldly go where no Trek series had gone before.

Straight into the tank.

I started watching Enterprise when it debuted, gave up midway through the first season (when I discovered that first-season TNG was a far better show), then ignored it until I started hearing rumors that this last season was actually watchable. I’ve been using bittorrent to watch season four, and while it’s admittedly better than the first season…well, really, it doesn’t take much to be better than the first season.

Tonight I finished things off, watching the end of the two-part arc following the derailment of the first effort at laying the foundation for the future United Federation of Planets, then following that up with the final episode of Enterprise.

(SPOILERS follow, if you care.)

First things first: while the two episodes immediately preceding the finale were decent — though I’d hesitate to collectively rate them any better than that (individually, the first half was definitely the better of the two) — the single biggest thing that stuck in my mind after watching them?

It’s really hard to take the leader of Earth’s government seriously when you’re expecting him to at any moment suddenly morph into a giant demon snake and start munching delegates right and left.

Samuels

Nothing against actor Harry Groener, of course, but his role as Sunnydale’s Mayor Wilkins in Buffy has been so indelibly burned into my brain that it was all I could do to keep from giggling when he first appeared on screen.

As for Enterprise’s finale episode…meh. I’d say a big “meh,” except that “meh” is such an apathetic term of disgust that give it any sort of emphasis is rather oxymoronic.

First off, it wasn’t really an Enterprise episode, but rather a TNG episode with a lot of Holodeck re-enactments of events set at the end of Enterprise’s 10-year mission (six years after the last actual episodes we saw) and around the signing of the accord that forms the alliance that would eventually grow into the UFP. While it’s kind of nice to see Riker and Troi walking the corridors of NCC-1701-D again…it just doesn’t feel right as an end to this series. Rather, it comes off as last, final, desperate ploy by the Powers that Be to do anything possible to drag a few more viewers to the show.

Secondly, the TNG-era framing story for this episode is set during the events of the seventh season TNG epsiode The Pegasus. Without meaning any disrespect to either Marina Sirtis or Jonathan Frakes, it’s been around eleven years since The Pegasus was filmed, and while they’re both aging well, they’re not exactly identical to their appearance a decade ago. I could even have forgiven that for the sake of the story (though it would have been easier if the overall story was better), but apparently the makeup artists didn’t even bother to reference The Pegasus for this Enterprise episode.

Here we have a screencap (actually a composite of two screencaps) from The Pegasus:

TNG Troi and Riker

And here we have a screencap from These are the Voyages…:

ENT Troi and Riker

Minor things like the ten years of aging aren’t really terribly obvious. Marina’s face has thinned out a bit, and they’re both slightly heavier than they were during TNG’s run, but that’s not really that big of a deal. Amusingly, though, it means that Troi is actually curvier now than she was at the time (compare the shadows underneath her bust, for example), and I remember how much grumbling there was about her being little more than Trek’s version of T&A (that being Tits and an Accent). Of course, 7 of 9 and T’Pol were far more blatant about appealing to the teenage male demographic that way, but back in the TNG days, poor Troi got a lot of ribbing about being little more than eye candy.

More blatantly, though, is that the hairstyle is just wrong for both of them. Apparently when they’re not busy dealing with intragalactic incidents, the crew of NCC-1701-D spent all their free time in the hair salon. Troi is sporting a straighter, more natural hairstyle far closer to what she had in the movies than the heavily permed style of the original show, while Riker’s hair is less slicked back and comes complete with a Superman-style forelock falling across his forehead.

Nitpicking? Sure, and I’ll freely admit it. But if they’re going to not just pander to the old TNG fans by bringing back Troi and Riker, but actually place their framing story within an already existing episode, you’d think they could take a few minutes to pop the DVD in and do their best to match the actors appearances.

But then, given Enterprise’s notorious disregard for Trek canon, I suppose that this wasn’t really that much of a surprise.

Anyway. Continuing on.

Bringing Shran back for the rescue of his daughter seemed to serve two purposes only: to bring back one of the few interesting characters Enterprise has produced (and to give Jeffrey Combs — a fan favorite, and quite deservedly so, in my opinion, I’ve enjoyed all of the characters he’s played — one last star turn); and to come up with an excuse to waste half the hour on pointless “action”.

Oh, and to set up Trip’s demise…which, amazingly enough, actually comes across as even more pointless than Kirk’s death in ‘Generations’. At least when Kirk died he was trying to save his career the galaxy from a madman. Trip died so that Archer wouldn’t miss a speech. Oooh. Quite the noble sacrifice, that.

And speaking of the speech — we don’t even see it! We finally get to the historic moment when the charter establishing the alliance between Earth, Vulcan, Andoria, and Tellar Prime, Archer strides to the stage to make what we’re told is a historic speech…and Riker tells the Holodeck to “end program” and he and Troi stride out onto the corridors of the Enterprise D.

Meh.

Other random observations before I end this little rant…

  1. I’m sorry, Quantum Leap fans, but Bakula has never impressed me. Truth to tell, his intentional overacting and chewing of the scenery in the Mirror Universe episodes of a few weeks ago doesn’t really seem that different to me than his normal portrayal of Captain Archer. Plus, considering that he just senselessly lost one of his closest friends, his face never lost the bemused little “I can’t believe I’m getting paid for this tripe” smirk after Trip’s death. Does he have other expressions?

  2. What was T’Pol doing after Archer hugged her? I could understand her being a little uncomfortable with this sudden show of affection, but…she just kind of wobbles. She holds her right hand out at an odd angle, and gives a slight, unsteady sway from the hips up. It’s really, really odd.

  3. Did nobody on the NX-01 ever get promoted or change their jobs in the slightest over the ten years that the ship was in service? When the show opened Mayweather was at the helm, Sato was at the communications station, Reed was doing whatever he does…and ten years later, they’re all in exactly the same place (well, okay, Trip moved to Engineering…then died). No advancement? No promotions? How incredibly boring. The crew of the Enterprise-D at least showed a little motivation, changed things up, and actually grew over time. As far as this last episode shows, the crew of the NX-01 was depressingly static.

  4. Wasn’t anyone curious or concerned about how the bad guys who everyone thought were limited to Warp 2 — Shran even mentions that his shuttle should be able to easily outrun them at Warp 4 — were somehow able to catch up to a top-of-the-line Starfleet ship running at Warp 7, engage it in battle, and board it without any real trouble at all?

Meh.

I wish the head of Earth’s government had turned into a giant demon snake and started munching on people. Right during the signing ceremony. Start with Archer, then finish off the rest of the Enterprise crew (except for Sato, who’s more than welcome to run around in her skimpy lingerie from the Mirror Universe episode as much as she likes…especially in my apartment) before Buffy magically transports a few hundred years into the future thanks to the help of Willow and a mysterious amulet that Giles found hidden underneath the school’s library, slays the demon, and tosses a few bad puns over her shoulder on her way back to Sunnydale.

At least that would have been a finale worth watching.

Seattlest

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Something I meant to mention a bit ago, but spaced — I’ve recently become one of the contributing authors to Seattlest, the Seattle-centric group weblog run by the Gothamist empire.

I’m tracking any posts I toss onto Seattlest on my del.icio.us account for quick access, and my posts can also be found via this listing on the Seattlest site. Lastly, here’s my author bio.

Getting involved was actually pretty flattering, as I was actually invited in, thanks to one of the local editors reading Eclecticism and keeping an eye on my Flickr photostream. Hard to say “no” to an invitation like that!

iTunes “Silo, No. 5 – Three” by User, The from the album Abandon (2003, 2:31).

Bittorrent trackers?

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I hate to have to ask this, but two of the three trackers I knew about appear to be dead (TvTorrents went down a few weeks ago, and btefnet seems to have disappeared over the last week), and the third (novatina) has redesigned, isn’t quite as easy to navigate, and — most egregiously — doesn’t seem to have the last two episodes of Enterprise posted (4-21 “Terra Prime” and 4-22 “These are the Voyages“, respectively). Since they normally go up within 24 hours of broadcast, I’m rather surprised that they don’t seem to be on there yet.

Anybody know of any other good trackers out there? My Google-fu did me no good whatsoever, and as long as Season Four of Enterprise has been a bit more watchable than prior seasons, I’d kind of like to see how it all wraps up.

Pop-Lock

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Pop-n-lockApple’s just posted their latest iPod commercial, this one titled ‘Pop-Lock’, after the style of dance in the video.

Watching it, I’m struck by two things.

  1. Daft Punk still bores me. The only time I could ever get “into” most Daft Punk songs was when I was under the influence of acid, and as I stopped bothering with recreational pharmaceuticals a few years back…well, that ended any real interest in Daft Punk.

  2. Is there any real difference between what’s now called “Pop-Lock” (or “Pop-n-Lock”, as I’ve generally heard it) and what used to be called “The Robot” back in the 80’s heyday of breakdancing? I can’t really see much difference at all, if any.

iTunes “Rock Star (Jason Nevins Edit)” by N.E.R.D. from the album Rock Star (2003, 7:42).

Uptime? What uptime?

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Prairie and I were in the midst of getting ready for dinner and a movie on Friday evening (which consists of Prairie cooking while I make appreciative “yum!” noises as I sniff the air) when suddenly all the power in my apartment went out. Power outage? The building across the street still had power…and so did the hallway in my building, as did my neighbor (who, as always, is quite happy to provide his own soundtrack to my life).

Crud. My apartment had no power. I checked the breaker box in my apartment, but all four breakers looked fine…and besides, with four breakers, any one of them popping would take out part of the apartment, not the whole thing. This wasn’t looking good.

After a bit of panicking, I tracked down the emergency number for the power company and gave them a call. After being reassured that my power hadn’t been turned off — even though I’m a bit behind on that bill, even the power company isn’t grouchy enough to kill someone’s power at 7:30 at night, long after the customer service center has closed for the weekend — we determined that it had to be the master breaker for my apartment.

Circuit breaker box, Alfaretta Apartments, Seattle, WAI wandered out into the hall and started looking for an obvious breaker box. Sure enough, there were some promising-looking boxes at the end of the hallway. Two smaller boxes, one with a single breaker switch, and two larger boxes. Not knowing which was which, I popped open the smaller of the two large boxes.

Circuit breaker box, Alfaretta Apartments, Seattle, WABingo — circuit breakers. Old circuit breakers, to be sure, but circuit breakers. I found the breakers for my apartment (all the way at the very top, of course), found the dead one, and swapped it out with a new breaker from the small pile conveniently left at the bottom of the breaker box. This is pretty old technology, which amuses me — the breakers are about the size of the base of a light bulb, and screw into their sockets. But hey, it works. Plus, there’s these three intimidating-looking things at the bottom of the breaker box — I’ve got no clue what they are, but they look pretty cool.

I was curious, though, about what was in that second, larger box, since all the breakers for the units on my floor were in this box. So, I popped it open — and immediately my eyes went wide and I took a small step backwards. I’m not often faced with “Yikes!” moments, but…

Read more

Disneyland Memorial Orgy

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It was one of the most notorious images on the ‘net when I first got online back in ’91, one passed around in various low-resolution copies, found here and there in various directories of “naughty” images — a black-and-white drawing of many of the classic Disney characters involved in a mass orgy.

Disney Memorial Orgy

Boing Boing just pointed to an LA Weekly story by Paul Krassner detailing the source of the infamous image, which dates back to 1966 and was drawn by Mad Magazine illustrator Wally Wood.

When Walt Disney died, in 1966, I somehow expected Mickey and Donald Duck and all the rest of the gang to attend the funeral, with Goofy delivering the eulogy and the Seven Dwarfs serving as pallbearers. Disney was their Creator, and he repressed all his characters’ baser instincts, but now that he had departed, they could finally shed their cumulative inhibitions and participate together in an unspeakable Roman binge, to signify the crumbling of an empire.

On behalf of my magazine, The Realist, I contacted Mad’s Wally Wood and, without mentioning any specific details, told him my general notion of a memorial orgy at Disneyland. He accepted the assignment and presented me with a magnificently degenerate montage….

The best news in the article, though, comes at the very end, when Paul reveals that he recently found a crate of posters of the image that he’d had printed back in 1967 — and they’re for sale on his website! $20 for a 14.5″x23″ poster print of one of the earliest and most notorious pieces of “Disney Porn“? Oh yeah — that baby’s mine!

Blog Definitions

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I ran across this amusing post today discussing Robot Johnny‘s upgrade to Tiger, linked first by Jeffrey Zeldman, then by Anil Dash:

And the built-in dictionary look-up is very, very cool, even if this definition of “blog” does seem like a sort of a challenge:

blog |bläg|
noun
a weblog : blogs run by twenty-something Americans with at least an unhealthy interest in computers.

It’s like it’s saying, “Blog, THIS, nerd!”…

Of course, I had to see this for myself, so I checked it out on my own system, using Tiger’s way-cool (yes, that’s a technical term) contextual menu dictionary lookup:

Blog definition

So now I’m curious. Was Robot Johnny making a funny? Or is the definition of ‘blog’ that he saw something snuck into the Candadian localization of Tiger (I’m assuming Candaian, given that his about page says that he lives in Toronto)?

If you’re using Tiger and live outside the US, what does your system define ‘blog’ as? If the definition he quoted is actually in other versions of Tiger, I’m both greatly amused, and slightly bummed that we Americans didn’t get that particular snark. Hey, I think it’s funny….

iTunes “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” by Pink Floyd from the album Animals Trance Remixes (1995, 20:26).

Star Wars Tech Geeking

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In all my years of being a Star Trek fan, it’s often not been the weekly soap opera in space that interested me as much as the universe constructed around the stories. Quite a few of the various tech manuals grace my library, and I’m often fascinated by the ingenious (and often quite convoluted) explanations and rationalizations concocted to explain various inconsistencies among the shows and movies.

It’s no great surprise, then, that I’ve just managed to loose three hours of my evening immersed in the Star Wars Technical Commentaries, a site devoted to extrapolating rather amazing amounts of data out of the Star Wars universe (incorporating not just the films, but also the books and comics).

Three sections took up most of my reading time tonight:

  1. Injuries of Darth Vader. Some slight spoilers for Episode III in here, unfortunately, but mostly information extracted from the other five films in determining just how much of Vader is human and how much is cybernetic.

    I’ve known for years that the majority of Vader’s injuries were sustained during a final climactic battle with Obi-Wan in or near a volcano that culminated in Vader falling into a lava pit (which has since been confirmed in shots from the trailer for Episode III). I’ve never known just where I picked up that information, though, and that’s always been a bit of a mystery for me. This section of the site contains two quotes that support that premise, dating from as far back as 1980.

    In an interview in Starlog in 1980, Mark Hamill recounts a background story which he had been told:

    “I remember very early on asking who my parents were and being told that my father and Obi Wan met Vader on the edge of a volcano and they had a duel. My father and Darth Vader fell into the crater and my father was instantly killed. Vader crawled out horribly scarred, and at that point the Emperor landed and Obi Wan ran into the forest, never to be seen again.”

    Aspects of the tale of the molten pit resurfaced more officially in 1983, in the novelisation of Return of the Jedi. The ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke Skywalker:

    “We fought…your father fell into a molten pit. When your father clawed his way out of that fiery pool, the change had been burned into him forever —- he was Darth Vader, without a trace of Anakin Skywalker. Irredeemably dark. Scarred. Kept alive only by machinery and his own black will….”

  2. The Phantom Menace Continuity: Droids. One of the things that really bothered me about Episode I was the apparent error in C-3P0 and R2-D2 not being familiar with Tatooine and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Episode IV, when Episode I establishes that Annakin constructed Threepio and Obi-Wan met Artoo on Tatooine. The author of the site puts forward a rather convincing argument that not only is this not necessarily a mistake, but there’s no need to assume that the droids had their memories wiped at some point.

    C-3PO is a protocol droid, a sort of valet, and is programmed for keeping confidential information. In his early conversations with Luke Skywalker, he evaded discussion of Princess Leia until late after key facts were told in Kenobi’s presence. When Obi-Wan began to tell Luke a tale about Anakin and the Jedi, Threepio requested to be shut down, likely to avoid discussion and facing awkward memories about his Maker’s tragic fate. Nevertheless the supposedly inert droid was only pretending unconsciousness; as he eavesdropped on the conversation he swayed slightly but visibly. This evasive behaviour was prompted by Threepio’s recognition of Anakin’s lightsabre. [ITW:SWT, ANH]. At the time of the Battle of Hoth [TESB Radio Drama, p.103], Princess Leia observed that the droids regarded her and Luke protectively, but she did not guess the actual relationship. Ultimately on Endor [Return of the Jedi: Radio Drama, p.181-182], C-3PO joined Luke Skywalker at his father’s funeral pyre, and there he openly acknowledged Luke’s father.

    It should be unsurprising that neither of the droids recognised Kenobi when they met in A New Hope. C-3PO rarely met Kenobi before: never at all before Attack of the Clones; only (apparently) briefly during the Clone Wars [Labyrinth of Evil]. They probably didn’t meet again until Tatooine [ANH]. As a young man, Kenobi generally overlooked R2-D2, and they were only present together during a few brief scenes when other people or crises were the focus of attention. For their part, neither droid could be expected to recognise Kenobi (or Owen Lars) in the Tatooine desert after 19 years of aging. Kenobi may have eventually recognised Artoo, but astromech droids of every colour combination are common. His remark about never “owning a droid” could be wry misdirection, since his Order forbade knights from accumulating individual possessions*. Artoo’s recollection of the younger Kenobi may have added to his zeal to find the desert hermit, though this may never be provable.

    […]

    C-3PO is tactful and secretive, and a bit self-centred. R2-D2 is unintelligible to almost everyone except C-3PO. Both droids are common models, and the human characters they dealt with in the prequel era had been wounded or aged beyond recognition by the time Luke Skywalker’s adventures began. These two facts explain all of the would-be discontinuities. There is no need to suppose that either droid has ever suffered a memory-wipe anytime within the span of the movies, as some of the most naïve commentators suggested. Conversely, there is sufficient evidence that C-3PO (at least) retained his mental integrity since the Clone Wars. If any malicious faction (e.g. the threat by Alderaanians [ROTS novel p.415]) did attempt to mind-wipe Threepio — effectively murdering him as a continuous person — then the post-Endor evidence shows that this attempt failed or the droid escaped before the dirty deed.

  3. Endor Holocaust, an exploration of the aftereffects of the Death Star’s destruction while in close proximity to the forest moon home of the Ewoks.

    The circumstances at the end of Return of the Jedi lead inevitably to an environmental disaster on the Endor moon. The explosion of a small artificial moon in low orbit sends a meteoric rain onto the ewok sanctuary, on a scale unmatched since Endor formed. Through either direct atmospheric injection of small particles, or showers of ejecta from large impacts, the atmosphere will be filled with smoke and fallout causing a gargantuan nuclear-winter effect.

    Unless the rebel commandoes on Endor were executing a suicide mission, the rebel fleet was evidently able to intervene to protect their immediate vicinity: probably an area comparable to Luxembourg. Debris fragments amounting to the mass of the rebel fleet might conceivably have been diverted from that particular locality (by the exertion of the fleet’s tractor beams) and onto adjacent areas of the Endorian globe. However this is only a tiny fraction of the total mass incident on the moon during an event lasting mere minutes. The mass of the entire debris cloud and fireball is incomparably (inexorably) greater than the combined mass of both fleets over Endor.

    A general climatological catastrophe was unavoidable. Averting the disaster would have required physical action on a scale greater than the construction of a Death Star, within minutes of the battle station’s explosion.

And, of course, there’s a lot more on the site. Fascinating stuff, if you’re into this kind of thing. :)

Flickr’s on a roll

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Okay, so maybe this whole brouhaha about Flickr being purchased by Yahoo wasn’t such a bad thing after all. They’ve been on a pretty good roll recently, as evidenced by their news page (which I’m quoting liberally from here, as they don’t seem to have permalinks)…

10th May, 2005

Remember the 5MB limit per photo for your uploads? That was the olden days! Now pro account users can upload photos of up to 10MB each (while, perhaps, cursing their ISP for the slow upload connection – in this age of the two web, why the asynchronousness, o ISPs?)

11th May, 2005

IPTC support (finally)! Friends, today there’s another good thing in Flickrland, and that’s support for IPTC data embedded into your photos. Keywords become tags! Captions become descriptions! Marvel as one framework’s terminology is swapped for another! Smile as the location fields in IPTC become Flickr tags!

12th May, 2005

We’ll we’ve gone and done it. In answer to countless requests, photo pages no longer use a Macromedia Flash wrapper to display photos; instead we are using an old technology called “DHTML.”

In addition, the “Send to Group,” “Add to Set,” and “Blog This” buttons above photos now allow you to perform relevant actions right there on the page!

And also, links now work in notes! (And we’ll soon be adding some more cool auto-linking features when the links point to Flickr pages.)

Also rolled into this release are a whole lot of little tweaks and fixes that should make your photo page viewing more enjoyable all around.

Pretty nifty! Poking around with it, I like the changes they’ve made (especially being able to put links within notes), and there have been hints dropped that there might be more goodies coming up. Bring ’em on!

iTunes “If Your Kisses Can’t Hold the Man You Love” by Rasputina from the album Frustration Plantation (2004, 3:07).

Finally!

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Tiger arrives!After far too much stürm und drang, UPS finally managed to get their act together and drop my box from Amazon on my desk this morning.

I got home after work, popped in the disk, and hit the fateful “Erase and Install” button. A few minutes later (probably about 15 or so…I didn’t time it, but it went faster than I expected) I was prompted to reboot, and Tiger was up and running.

OS X 10.4

So far, I’m really liking the upgrade. Things are definitely a bit snappier than 10.3 was (I love the fact that each successive upgrade from Apple is actually faster than the prior version). Dashboard I’m not entirely sold on yet…great eye candy, I’ll see how useful it actually is as I keep playing around. I haven’t had much chance to play with Spotlight so far, as aside from importing my mailboxes, I’m running on a pretty clean slate at the moment, so there’s not a lot for Spotlight to work with yet. That will change with time, of course — and even without using Spotlight’s document-searching capabilities yet, it’s proved to be just as capable of an application launcher as Quicksilver was.

Most of the evening so far has been spent downloading the latest versions of the applications I use frequently and getting my day-to-day workspace set up. I’ve only run into two noticeable snags so far:

  1. The most current version of Microsoft’s keyboard driver (I have a nice keyboard I got for free when I was working on the Microsoft campus — unfortunately, it’s one they don’t make anymore) doesn’t appear to support the extra keys on this keyboard. I’d gotten very used to using the handy shortcut keys for ‘cut’, ‘copy’ and ‘paste’, and they’re now non-functional. A little frustrating, as it’ll take some time for me to re-train my muscle memory away from using them.

  2. No matter how carefully I try to back things up, there’s always something that I realize that I’ve forgotten later on. I’ve grown to accept that over the years — it’s rarely anything I can’t live without if I have to, so I’ve gotten used to this element of Russian Roulette when doing a full Nuke and Pave. Unfortunately, this time the casualty was one I’m definitely going to miss: Photoshop (yes, I’m one of the many people who…ahem…’acquired’ a copy of Photoshop at some point). A definite bummer, as I’m not likely to have the $600 to get my own legal copy anytime soon, and I’ve long since lost track of any sources for less-legal means of acquiring software. Ah, well…so it goes, right?

So all in all, a pretty successful upgrade, and I’ve got lots of little nooks and crannies to play in as I poke around. Yay for new toys!

Update: Well, one more issue, this one potentially a little more serious. For some reason, I don’t seem to be able to send mail through either my Speakeasy account or the account on my own mailserver. Not sure what’s going on here.

I can receive message from both those accounts, and I’ve set up POP access on my gMail account, though, so I can at least send messages through gMail, but I don’t seem to be able to send through my @michaelhanscom.com address, which is a bummer. My mailserver’s been a bit tweaky for a while anyway…maybe it’s time to investigate rebuilding that. Oh, boy is that going to be fun…

iTunes “Where Time Becomes a Loop (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Difficult Listening Hour (full mix) (1999, 58:41).