Today’s Diesel Sweeties is particularly excellent:

It’s funny because it’s true.

Graeme: Hi Chris, you have a new account. Your username is chriseng and your temporary password is forestocelot.

Me: I want my new pen name to be “Forest Ocelot”. It sounds like a character from Metal Gear Solid… a character who sneakily eats a lot of Doritos and covertly watches Buffy from inside his blanket fort.

Graeme: That sounds like the best activity. I loved the cardboard box suit in that game. ‘oh, don’t mind me, i’m just a cardboard box someone left here’

I can totally imagine the game controls too. Like you have two views, one is ‘fort view’ where you have a little /\ slot to peek through and you have to use some combination of index finger paddles to strafe and zoom, and analog joystick to view the screen, and if you stay in the same position for too long then your arm starts to hurt so it glows red on the little body of the man on the top left corner of the screen, and if it gets too sore then your view starts to waaver and you collapse, so you have to shift from one arm-lean to the other all while keeping your view zoomed in on the television. while you covertly watch buffy, you have to zoom in untill you can see the relevant action on the tv, and a counter starts to run on the bottom of your screen indicating how long you’ve watched for, but you loose points for watching commercials, so you have to quickly not look at the tv, and guess how long the commerials are gonna be, and eat as many doritos as you can. but here’s the catch, you run out of doritos halfway through the first commercial, and so you have to_leave_ the blanket fort, but you don’t want to, so you have to sneak out of the fort, and make your way to your backpack (doritos are not in the kitchen, that is stupid, who keeps doritos in the kitchen). and make it back before the commercials are over. So it switches to godview perspective, and you’re limping because your leg went asleep.

.. yah, forest ocelot. totally best videogame charater ever.

Wow, so much stuff to talk about in the last couple of weeks. I started working an extra day at the bookstore, which means I have a little bit of extra pocket money… that will probably go to buying books at the bookstore… and will inevitably sit on a table at my house since I am totally out of room on my bookshelves. I bought about another 10 this week too. Geez, I’ve got a big paper monkey on my back.

Hm, what else?

- Taking advantage of the brief stint of beautiful weather, I went on a picnic in the park with Mrs. C this past week. We ate focaccia sandwiches, olives, dolmades and eccles cakes, drank orange creamsicle sodas and fended off attacks by a very cute bulldog puppy that thought our sandwiches were his.

- When I lived with my friend Dylan back in 2000, we were bachelor types that ate in the living room while watching Star Trek: Voyager and used one condiment. The Condiment, a.k.a. Saigon chilis in oil. I’ve tried other chilis in oil from various manufacturers, but there was something about Saigon that made it extra good. Maybe it was the promise of a new millennium. Anyway, I hadn’t seen it since and presumed that it just disappeared (like all of my turn of the century optimism) until I went to Save-On Foods the other day and there it was, as if waiting for me. The Condiment is back; all hail The Condiment.

- Also at Save-On, we scored a $6 copy of AtmosFear–you know, the DVD update of the old classic VHS boardgame Nightmare, where the “Gatekeeper” verbally mocks you and calls you maggot while you try to win. Excessive awesomeness for cheap. If anyone wants to hang out and be verbally abused by a fictional character, let me know.

- Completely unintentionally, my 1500th scrobbled song on LastFM turned out to be “Dirty White Boy” by Foreigner. It feels like there should be some kind of hidden meaning in there. Maybe there’s some not-so-hidden meaning in there…

- My sweetie bought me the Playmobil “Brokeback Viking” set. Well, seriously, what would you call it? There’s two Norsemen hanging out in a cozy tent with a bearskin rug. *cough* I suppose it’s an appropriate Easter gift though, since the Norse killed lots of Christians and then became them. There’s an analogy in there if you look hard enough.

- Speaking of Playmobil, the Viking line appears to be discontinued but one of the new series for 2007 is the Romans, and come its release in August the trireme is totally gonna be fighting my Norse longship.

- And finally, I am now on Facebook, so poke away:

Boy, things have been busy for me in the past couple of weeks. Yes, the writing project is still taking up tons of time. It was supposed to be ready this past week, but plans got revised and scaled up and that basically meant revisiting previous plans and adjusting them accordingly. So, right now I’m figuring it’s gonna be another month or so ’til things are in place enough to start wildly blabbing about.

Aside from that there were two other things that loomed large on my personal radar:

1) Cory Doctorow:
On Thursday, Cory Doctorow of science-fiction authoring and Boing Boing fame came to speak at Simon Fraser University for their annual Leonardo Lecture. It was a riveting and timely speech entitled “The Totalitarian Urge: Total Information Awareness and the Cosmic Billiards” (which is online is audio form here) and the bookstore I am lucky enough to work at, Sophia Books, got to sell books at the event. So it was extremely gratifying to be able to help out and support the career of a writer/social philosopher that I respect very much. Even more gratifying was the fact that he is extremely personable, friendly and down to earth, talking to everyone and making himself available to sign books both before and after the speech. Nice guy.

But the REAL jaw-dropper came the next day when he dropped in to Sophia’s to sign some books for the store and chat. At the end of his visit, he presented my co-worker Sean and I with first draft print-outs of his next book, Little Brother, which he’d finished only two weeks before. THAT is fucking RAD. Categorizing the novel in broad strokes, it’s about the preservation of personal freedoms, hacking and being a teenager today. And it’s good. I was up ’til 5AM last night (this morning) reading it until I was in serious danger of passing out onto it. I’ll have finished it by tonight, and I’ll report back to you more tomorrow.

2) Saturday Morning Cartoon Party:
This is something I’ve been wanting to attend for a few years now but up ’til last weekend I’ve never had the chance (owing mostly to working shitty jobs that demanded I show up on the weekend). Every year, Toren Atkinson–extreme cartoon fan–throws a party wherein everyone shows up early in the morning and watches cartoons for several hours while ingesting all manner of sugary breakfast cereals (pajamas optional). Being the ‘toon fan I am, this year I booked off the date from any other engagements months in advance and Mrs. C and I made our way over to Toren’s house at around 8:15 or so, just in time for an episode of Galaxy Rangers, which was both awful and better than I thought it was going to be (since most things viewed through the rose-coloured glasses of childhood nostalgia are freakin’ AWFUL and you should take pains to avoid revisiting them if you have the chance).

Well, long story short, we were maybe the first to arrive and almost the last to leave (at just after 4PM). Our brains had melted and our guts were churning cauldrons of milk, refined flour and sucrose. I also managed to score a Darkest of the Hillside Thickets shirt I’ve coveted for years, so that was all to the good. In short, excellent times.

The crowning moment though (and I don’t care how sad you think this is), was the fact that after nearly two decades I finally got to satisfy one of my long-term junk food cravings: eating Frankenberry. Those of you who have constant and ready supplies of Frankenberry nearby are probably going, “EEEURGH! Why would you want to?!” Well, because it’s not available up here in Canadia (at least, not the part I live in). Here, it is a legendary foodstuff which apparently once roamed free in our breakfast aisles but was forced into extinction by General Mills. So, since my late teens, every time I went down to the States I’d poke around in supermarkets looking for it (as well as Squirt and Strawberry Powdered Quik–also not available in these parts), to no avail. But what should Toren manage to procure three boxes of? Yes, Manna from, well, not Heaven… maybe Albertson’s. Anyway, I got to toss back a few bowls of the stuff as well as one of Boo-Berry (although no Fruit Brute or Yummy Mummy, because apparently Toren isn’t cool enough to have access to a time machine). It wasn’t legendary tasting; my tastebuds didn’t explode with delight, but it certainly wasn’t bad and it was definitely satisfying. I even got to take a half-box home with me, so when the mood strikes me again I’ll be able to swiftly satisfy the urge.

Lately, there’s also the business of My Teeth:
A lucrative business, if you happen to be in the dentistry profession. The two fillings I got a week or so back cost me a grand total of about $50 or so after isurance kicked in. The four wisdom teeth which are getting extracted at the end of the month will cost about $1800+ upfront (and are probably only covered 50% by insurance). Plus, the two bottom ones are in DEEP, which means I’m recovering for 3-4 days afterward, and because of the scheduling I’ll have to take two days off work, which will cost me on my paycheque. So, yes: painful in a variety of different ways, and all the more ironic for the fact that they’ve never bothered me before.

Oh, and the Dishwasher:
We totally bought this dishwasher (it’s getting delivered later today), because Mrs. C and I are grown-ups now and we don’t have to our chores if we don’t want to. And we don’t want to–we want more time to do other serious grown-up things like watch cartoons.

1) Trying to set-up webpages and deal with the finickiness of configuring them properly makes me want to stab myself in the junk with a fondue fork. That’s why I’m going to leave the procedure to professionals in future.
2) Tenacious D - The Pick of Destiny is a much funnier movie than it probably should be.

In case you hadn’t heard the news, Cory Doctorow (who is one of the principal contributors on BoingBoing and has written several books) will be in Vancouver on March 8th and 9th. He’s doing a lecture at SFU on Thursday (the 8th), and will be at Sophia Books on Friday (the 9th) for a signing. Check out the poster below for more info, and I’ll see you there!

So, what’s new this week? More writing, more research (should that be “Mo’ Writin’ Mo’ Reserch”?) and Mrs. C is off in delightful Calgary getting drunk with her co-workers.

There’s really not a lot to report on other than that (I mean, I could tell you about all the research I’ve done on volcanic phenomena, but I’m pretty sure you don’t wanna know), so I’ll just post a couple of links:

PlanetQuest: New Worlds Atlas: How awesome is it that you can check out every single planet that NASA knows about, zooming in and getting info on them in a 3-D model? Also, how awesome are belly-dancing punk-y astromoners? The answer to both questions is a not surprising “super-awesome.”

Philip Straub: I think he is one of my new favourite artists. Check out all of his stuff, but take special care to flip through his “Concepts” section. This is my new desktop wallpaper. “Hey, Philip. That was my mind. And you blew it. Thanks so much. No, really, thanks.”

And, finally, I’d like to say that this never stops being funny. Ever:

“Sy Hoyven…den…sen.” Brilliant.