Now that I’ve got a minute....
Things have been pretty busy here for the last...year or so. Particularly the last six weeks. Not that things are really slow yet, but everything else I’m supposed to be doing sound less than fascinating. So I’ll write one of these things instead.
The main news at the moment is that we got the house. I’m not sure precisely where in hell it is, in that I’ve never personally driven there. But it’s in Cherry Creek, and, every time I’ve been there, there’s been a strange lack of morons trying to buy or sell cheap drugs at me. So it’s better than this place. Which is what counts.
Not that we’re there yet. There’s still the little matter of moving everything. And that won’t be happening in my car.
I’m not certain it’ll be happening in my boxes, either. Now that I’ve got a real reason to start organising stuff around here, I’m seeing other problems caused by the flood back in May. So that’s lots of fun. More stuff than I’d thought at the time was actually destroyed. The question now is whether to move the damaged stuff, in boxes which really don’t allow for that, or not; if not, then it becomes harder, later, to list this stuff among our damages when we sue WorstPacific into extinction. So I’ll probably make some effort to move it anyway.
Meanwhile, regarding WorstPacific, there’s not really a lot of news there. Most of the lights they replaced out front in time for the city’s followup inspection last month have been destroyed since then, which seems to suit the slumlords fine. In here, the various and obvious problems remaining after they didn’t really do much this summer to fix the damages caused to their building by their building, let alone the damages to my stuff, remain the same, even though the followup inspection noted all the remaining issues, like the ceilings being unfinished, the carpet containing black mould, and the water refusing to turn all the way off in the tub. What I’m really looking forward to is moving out, and having these criminals complain at me that I left them with unfinished ceilings, mouldy carpets, and everything else they’ve caused and neglected this year. I’m also predicting that they’ll be shocked and awed that I’d just pack up and move out at the end of the lease, instead of giving them additional notice. Although, in reality, I gave them notice that day when Kristen Taylor started throwing shit into my backyard: that I wasn’t going to live here if they weren’t going to make the place livable. As far as I’m concerned, that counts as advanced notice of my intentions.
Hopefully, they didn’t forget about that.
What are the odds....
In other news, the rest of the suck is staying about the same. CircuitPity, having sent the laptop back, unfixed, for the seventh time, called me a few weeks ago, just to make sure I was really happy to have my laptop returned for the seventh time without being fixed or replaced. When it turned out that I wasn’t happy to have had it returned for the seventh time, unfixed, unreplaced, and with yet more damage caused by their people, they promised to have someone more important call me back to make sure I was happy. I’m still waiting for that call. The last time I heard from them was at about the time of WorstPacific’s useless little followup inspection. But, I’m sure that it’s just that CircuitPity are busy defrauding other customers, and that they’ll get to me sometime next year.
For those who are starting to wonder whether any company ever does its job, the answer is mostly. After UltimateExcuses failed to fix the laptop I got from them, and JestBuy took several months to replace the laptop I got from them, and CircuitPity are still in the process of failing to do anything good about the laptop I got from them, Sears, in learning that the home theatre thing I got from them had broken, got things about halfway right: they sent a guy out here to look at it, conclude that it was broken, and take it away; instead of sending the guy back out here with it to reinstal the thing once it was fixed, they sent it to some building across town, called to tell us to go pick it up, learned that we weren’t going to drive across town to pick it up, and mailed it back to us, fixed, but strangely bent up. As bad as that might sound, it at least works again. Also, according to people on phones, someone seriously fucked up, shouldn’t have bent things, shouldn’t have sent it to this building, and shouldn’t have mailed it to us; since they should have brought it back, fixed, and reinstalled it for us, they’re willing to do what it takes to make it up to us. Of course, things are too busy here to deal with all that right now, so they’re willing to remember what they’re willing to do, and get back to doing it in January, after we’ve got the hell out of here.
So that might be good news. So far.
On the subject of companies which might be good, along with everything else, I’ve been reworking wastedinc.com lately. The backend software is being updated, so it’s temporarily in beta, surprising me with fun new bugs every few hours. But it's coming together, in any case. Hopefully, I'll have everything finished this year, somewhere between packing and moving and transferring the cablemodem.
The new version of the site is more or less ready to go. Ready enough to use, anyway. Whatever else can be improved on it can wait; it'll be easier to find things to improve, and ways to improve them, once it's online and being used every day. It should go up on the first, presuming I'm able to get online that day. Right now, I have no reason to suspect that I won't be online, except that, living here at WorstPacific, I've become accustomed to assuming that Armageddon is always a matter of minutes away.
On which note: Pandemic won't be ready in three days after all. I'd like it to be, but the suck got in the way again. The story's all worked out; I just need a couple of weeks of sucklessness to type it all into a computer. I've already scoped out an office in the new house where I can get away from any intrusions. Also, I've got an Uzi9mm, in case any intrusions try to find me anyway. Also, by coincidence, the new house has castiron bars on the windows, in case what I'm writing turns out to be not fiction. I'm figuring that possibility to be remote.
On the bright side, the delays caused by the suck may have made the book a little better, in general. What I'd set up to write about fourteen months ago would have been somewhat different, having not seen Remake of the Dead or Shaun of the Dead at the time, and having not read Land of the Dead back then. All three, strangely enough, bounced pretty close to the novel I was plotting out, getting me to rethink a few things--particularly once I saw the various and brainless reactions to those things on the fora at imdb.com. That's one advantage to building off of other people's stuff in modern times: you get to see how dumb people react to minutia, and preemptively lock out their blathering in advance.
What else is new....
Oh yeah: though I mentioned this on the board already, it's actually newer than the last What's New. mistersloth--the paranoid schizophrenic from the AvC chatroom--finally got round to sending me what appears to have been his original filmscript for something called Death or Glory [I know: the title itself is a functional nonsequitur], which further appears to have been largely misspelled, badly corrected in ballpoint, possibly pissed on by something or other, and worth less than it cost him to snailmail it to me. That's all up at grem.tv" TARGET="_BLANK">mistersloth.grem.tv.
Having sent me this mess, mistersloth has further decided A) that he's immune to the disclaimer, in which we learn that all submissions automatically become the property of gremlin.net and cannot be returned, B) that, having donated this mess to me, he's earned free copies of everything I've ever written, and C) that he's going to shoot me to death. To date, none of these psychotic beliefs seems to have any bearing at all on reality. Of course, the year isn't over yet. So there might be time.
I think that's most of the real news at the moment. At least, it's everything I can currently think of. There's probably more going on, but it's being overshadowed by these elements of suck. I'm presupposing that, once I get the hell out of this place, some of these issues will evaporate, and I'll be able to remember and disregard their competitors.
Until then, here's the suck in review:

Forgot to add tags for this stupid entry.