Neverwhere

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Neverwhere tells the story of Richard Mayhew, a Londoner who stumbles ‘between the cracks’ of the city to discover London Below, a magical (and none-too-friendly) alternate London hidden beneath the streets.

I first discovered Gaiman through the Sandman series of graphic novels, and later his short story ‘Goliath’ that can be found on the Matrix website. I’d also read Good Omens a while ago and greatly enjoyed it, though at the time I didn’t connect Gaiman’s name with anything. He’s got a wonderful eye for the dark and the bizarre, and I’ve found his work quite good so far — but Neverwhere just didn’t quite grab me as much as his other work has.

I enjoyed it, but not quite as much as I was expecting. It was an extremely quick read (I read it in two days, with my only reading time being on the bus to and from work and at lunch), and was a lot lighter than I expected. I believe it was Gaiman’s first novel after his years of work on the Sandman comics, and I’m wondering if that may have affected his writing style as he got used to stretching away from the necessarily sparce narrative employed in comic work. I’m not at all sure, but that was how it felt to me — just a little rushed, as if there were a lot more details there that weren’t being presented. It also wasn’t quite as literary as I’d been hoping — one of the hallmarks of the Sandman series that sets it above so much other comic work in my mind was the great depth and background to it, drawn upon from myths, legends, and stories of cultures throughout the world. Neverwhere, despite being a novel rather than a series of comics, didn’t have that same expansive feel to it.

Still, an enjoyable, if light, read, and I’ll continue to track down the rest of what I can find from Neil Gaiman.

I’m back!

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Okay, so…yeah. It’s been over a week since I paid any attention to my website. Sorry for being so lazy…there’s been a fair amount of crud going on, and, to be honest, I just wasn’t in the mood to bitch and moan about it until some more of it was resolved. It’s not exactly all resolved now, but now I’ve gotten to a point where it was bugging me more that my page was sitting untended for this long. So, I put two posts up before this one…and now it’s time for me to babble.

Yay? ;)

This, then, is the lowdown. I’d already mentioned that at the beginning of the month I’d lost my position at Andersen, and then about a week later I got a new position at Microsoft. All seemed well and good — unfortunately, as there always seem to be, there have been complications.

First major thing — it took three weeks after starting at the new job before I got a paycheck. Not a good thing. Second major thing — my payscale pretty much sucks — $9.74/hr. Put the two together, and I end up in some rather interesting financial binds. Rent is coming up, bills are late…ack. Pfft. Grrr. Things are starting to get back on track — I got that 3-week (though only 40 hours) paycheck, and now things should start coming in on time, plus I’ve gotten my first paycheck from helping out around the apartment building, and I got my security deposit refund from the old apartment, so I’m getting things back on track, it’s just made for a lot of stress.

I’m still pretty worried about the pay, though. This just isn’t enough for me to make it without a lot of difficulties and eventual restructuring if things don’t get better quickly. The work around the building is helping — I get $10/hr for that — but I can only put in a maximum of 20 hours a week for that. Still, it’s better than nothing.

The whole thing’s been worrying me, though. A year ago when I was still in Anchorage and working for GCI I was making $14.65/hr, plus $6.85/hr a few hours a week at Suncoast, and paying a third of all the rent and bills for a huge apartment in Turnagain. Now, sure, I escaped from Anchorage to live in Seattle — but now I’m making just a little more than half of what I was, and paying more than half of what I was. By going from Andersen to Microsoft, my income has dropped by about $300/month, while my expenses jumped by about $60-$80/month in bus fare to get back and forth to and from Redmond. Ouch. The entire thing’s got me a little paranoid that I might run out of money — and I’d hate to make it this close to a full year down here and then get so broke I have to head back to Anchorage.

That would suck. A lot. :( Hopefully it won’t get to that point, though.

There are some bright points. The extra money from helping out here at the apartment building is going to come in very handy. Also, the people at Todays know that $9.74/hr is well below what I’m worth, so they got the manager at my current posting to agree to a 30 day evaluation to see if we can bump my pay rate up. I’m not sure how easy that will be when it took 3 weeks to get my first paycheck worked out, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. However, it will have to be a pretty decent jump to make keeping the posting worthwhile…and though I like the place I’m at, am having fun with the work, and enjoy the people there, if it’s not paying my bills, I’m going to have to ask for something different.

Ah, well. Things are definitely tight, but I’m not broke yet. I’m sure it’ll all work out in the end. Just keeping my fingers crossed until then.

In other news, life goes on fairly much as normal. Candice’s mom was down here for the weekend, so they were out doing mom/daughter things for a much of the weekend while I was working around the building. We did get the three of us together for lunch on Saturday and some wandering around the Pike Place Market, and for church on Sunday at a small Lutheran church that Candice has started going to (with me on occasion) close to downtown. The weekend was gorgeous, too — spring is certainly giving way to summer, and at the moment, we’ve got clear skies and no forecast of rain anytime soon. Sunshine everywhere, 70-some degree temperatures — definitely something I can deal with! :)

Basically, life goes on, pros and cons, ups and downs. I’m sure it’ll all work out eventually. It’s just not always fun when it’s in the process.

Life or Something Like It

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Candice and I had been talking for about a week now about trying to take some time out of our schedules to wander down and see a movie, and finally got the chance last night. It was Candice’s turn to pick, so we ended up watching Life or Something Like It, with Angelina Jolie.

While it wasn’t anything amazing, it was certainly a very cute little romantic comedy, and I think it might be the best role I’ve seen Jolie in (and a very welcome change from the dreck that was Tomb Raider). An enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes, at the very least.

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ISSN 1539-4387

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Back in March I found out that I could apply for an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) for my blog, legitimatizing it as a serial publication in the eyes of the U.S. Government. I figured what the hey, I might as well, applied — and just got the noticed that I’m registered!

This doesn’t really have any truly major benefits or consequences for me, other than the fact that librarians everywhere can now look me up in the ISSN database, but what they hey — I’m official. Why not?

Funniest man on the planet?

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I’m not entirely sure if Robin Williams is the funniest man on the planet or not, but after being able to see him live tonight — it wouldn’t surprise me!

Don, Rick, Candice, Chad, Marty, Aimee, and MeaganA while ago, Chad surprised me by letting me know that he’d picked up tickets for Candice and me to go along with him, Don, Rick, and Meagan to see Robin Williams’ standup routine when he came through town. I was pretty floored by this (tickets were $100 a pop!), but there was no way I was going to say no! So, tonight Candice and I wandered down to the Paramount (just a few blocks down from my apartment) to meet up with the gang, and found out that Marty and Aimee had shown up for the show also! We all hung around outside for a bit, then wandered our way in for the show.

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I wanna go!

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This may surprise some of my friends, as I’m not generally known as much of a country listener (you can thank/blame [depeding on your preference] many of the women in my life for that little quirk), but there’s a show at the Gorge that I really wish I could afford to see, and had the transportation to get to.

Saturday, May 5th: The Brooks and Dunn Neon Circus and Wild West Show, featuring Brooks & Dunn, Dwight Yokam, Gary Allan, Chris Cagle, and Trick Pony (one of the best country bands I’ve ever heard – I babbled about them in March of ’01 when I discovered their album).

Ah, well. Just thought I’d whine for a moment. ;)

That’s icky

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I’m actually in the midst of making an entry right now, but I had to say something about this. I’m currently using the Opera webbrowser, which uses built-in banner advertising to generate revenue to keep the software free. I can live with that, as Opera is a very good web browser (and when I have the money, I can purchase it to get rid of the banner), but the banner I’m currently getting is really annoying me.

Rather than car, credit, or casino ads, I’m currently getting a banner that starts with a picture of the American flag. The next frame says, “Own a piece of history…”, and the third frame offers, “Own a plaque made with the metal from the World Trade Center”. It then closes with, “WE WILL NEVER FORGET”.

Part of me knew that there would be people capitalizing on the tragedy as fast as they could — and, true to form, postcards featuring the WTC became hot items within hours after the attacks — but this one just makes my skin crawl. Personally, I think stooping to this level of crass commercialism and exploitation is just horrendous.

Guess I wouldn’t make it in the advertising world, huh?

Incidentally, this is the page that you get when you click on the banner, just in case you’re curious enough to check.

Hello from Microsoft!

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This is mostly just me being silly — I wanted to grab a chance to make a post to my blog from within the Microsoft domain. ;)

I’ll get back and put some actual content up soon, I promise.

Blade II

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Candice and I went out to see Blade II this afternoon. Candice didn’t think to highly of it (she likened it to a “Popeye on crack” film — just substitute Blade for Popeye and blood for spinach — and called it the “silliest vampire movie [she’d] seen in years”), and while I can’t really refute her impressions, I had a lot of fun with it. One of the few sequels that I think comes close to matching the original.

The original Blade was one of the better vampire/action films (as if that were a genre in itself) I’d seen in a while, and Blade II does a fairly good job of continuing the storyline from where the first movie ended in a plausible way, and taking the action quotient up a notch. Icky new bad guys, fun fight scenes, and Wesley Snipes being a badass — you can’t really go too wrong with that!

Good bits: the new baddies, the ‘Reapers’, are all sorts of cool. Similar to vampires, but faster, stronger and — most importantly — much ickier, I was more impressed with how they turned out than I expected. The trailers were savvy enough not to show off the Reapers’ most defining characteristic (a wonderful thing, as it made for an actual moment of surprise when it was first revealed, and too many trailers these days are less previews than they are visual ‘Cliffs Notes‘ for the films themselves…but I digress), and the effects for that were extremely well done. Once I got over the ‘ick’ factor and paid more attention to the work, I was impressed at how seamlessly they were integrated into everything else, and how they fit the characters themselves.

Kudos also to the writers — the same writers as the first Blade, which I think helped — who were able to preserve continuity for the characters, the plotline, and the tone of the film from the first one. Kris Kristofferson had what could have been a thankless task of returning as second fiddle to Snipes in his role as Whistler, but they were able to give him a role that actually had more meat to it than I had expected it to after hearing that he was coming back for the second film.

For the most part the fight scenes were a lot of fun, though they did at times succumb to the two pet peeves I have about modern action filmmaking — hyperactive over-editing, and the ‘stutter shutter’ effect. There were also a couple instances where key characters (Blade and his opponent) were entirely computer-generated, which didn’t quite look real. Things in this area are definitely improving over time, but it’s still not to a point where it can fool the human eye.

Overall, Blade II was pretty much exactly what I was looking for — a fun romp, with fun special effects and action. Easily worth my time and money to go see.