Grammar Is My Ward, Here In This Wilderness

I've been working on a grammar gimmick for quite some time. My intention was always to make the best possible use of my sobriquet with some kind of grammar feature, and originally I wanted to do a daily one-panel cartoon of my beleaguered, world-weary, furious grammar persona, ashtray overflowing at his side, half-empty bottle of bourbon at arm's length, screenshot of that day's terrible grammar atrocity floating in the white space above him. Since I'd probably only need to draw a handful of expressions for his/my reaction to incomprehensible YouTube mutants--exhausted, enraged, even more enraged, disbelieving, perhaps unconscious--this always seemed like something I could actually manage.

True to form, I didn't manage it, and instead I've been working on the accompanying screed about the use of language. This is taking quite a long time, because I periodically quit doing that and work on my screed about film instead. I have so much complaining to do that my complaints keep interrupting one another.

I have, however, found time for three things:

1.) Working on a wine label for a fictitious wine company that, if I make it well enough, will be used on as many as possibly two actual wine bottles by a person who makes actual wine. (Tentative Pitch #1 of 3)


2.) Starting to play this beautiful game:



3.) Abandoning it within a day for this:


...And then playing Dwarf Fortress long enough that when I finally went to sleep, my dreams were about ASCII symbols and blinking letters milling about as I frantically shouted something about rations over and over. They did not listen.

The Worst Possible Thing; Worse Than Being Forced To Kill Seven Puppies And Finding You Only Have Six Bullets

I woke up 40 minutes ago, bleary-eyed, headphones still on, having fallen asleep watching Flight of the Conchords for the millionth time because if I'm not watching anything I just lie there in bed visualizing my manifold failures and then I can't sleep.

The method behind what I generously call my life is not the point. The point is that on the screen was not Flight of the Conchords. On the screen was MS-DOS. I stared uncomprehendingly, having been awake for maybe three seconds at this point.

DOS? I thought. What?
Oh. It's the boot sequence.
Why is it the boot sequence?
I don't know. What does it say?
"The boot devices have changed."
Oh. It lists one device. The other two hard disks and the DVD-ROM are gone.
I see.
I wonder what the least unpleasant way to kill myself is.
Normally I would ask Wikipedia.
Maybe the dictionary will know.

No, I thought gravely. No, it probably won't.

Then I decided to actually investigate the problem, with what was really an astonishing level of calm and collectedness. It turned out to be minor.

One of the extremely unwise stopgap solutions I've improvised over the past year of jury-rigging my machine like some sprawling, convoluted heap of inextricable overheating devices and twisted cables had loosened. In this case, the cable was the wall plug for a hard disk which is running on external power but plugged into the mainboard (don't ask; stopgap terrible you idiot I don't have any money etc.). So the system rightfully freaked out. Simple fix. No problem. And now I am mercifully sitting in front of 40 tabs of Flock.

A year ago I had a 100-gig hard drive with basically everything important on it suffer a mechanical failure and die on me. I tried every single ridiculous solution you'll read about to recover stuff from it, up to and including the use of the freezer and smacking the thing sharply, as though to reprimand it. I've since been perpetually afraid that it will happen again before I can afford to properly outfit this thing with a backup drive and some non-retarded replacements for my various idiocies.

So an incident such as this is among my worst nightmares; to wake up and be greeted with the infuriating boot sequence, in front of which I've spent dozens of hours trying to fix things over the years, as it essentially says ALL YOUR SHIT IS BROKE AND I WON'T TELL YOU WHY HA HA HA.

And of course it's always entirely my fault, because instead of reading a book to fall asleep, I pretty much recreate early man's firestarting methods inside my computer, where appallingly stacked and unventilated devices share their increasing heat as uncleared mounds of dust gather around them. My computer's human counterpart would be Sean Penn in 21 Grams, a wheezing wreck with a shoddy secondhand heart that is in love with Naomi Watts (although that last part is actually just me and not the computer).

Just bear with me a little longer, you gasping homebuilt monstrosity. Some day I will whisk you away to the Big City, and we will both live in air-conditioned comfort, and when your hard drives finally die of old age many years from now I will frame them in appreciation on top of a sepia-toned photograph of a big, silly '50s computer. I will give you a name and then autograph it with that name and a postcript that says "Thanks For the Memories," and I will put the frame above my mantle and smile.

Coffee-Related Machinery Has Been Unkind To Me

The latest in my barrage of posts totally unrelated to film was about my coffee grinder, and how it is shit. Though there is obviously a little bit of hyperbole in that instruction manual, what with all the references to the machine being sentient, I didn't exaggerate that the ridiculous thing broke after two uses. I know how to use burr grinders; I've had two before, both of which lasted years. This one lasted a day.

Immediately before this I'd had an embarrassingly titled Cuisinart Grind Central something or other, which was just a regular old blade grinder with a nifty lid that made it quiet. Other than the fact that a lid goes over the top, this was in every way an ordinary grinder with no mysterious and easily disrupted features. It lasted about three weeks before ceasing to work entirely for no apparent reason. I exchanged it for another one, and exactly the same thing happened. At which time I moved onto my current burr grinder, and enjoyed its company for 24 hours.

So I'm not sure what the problem is. I'm not cramming these thngs to bursting with coffee beans, tamping them down with a heavy boot and frantically mashing the buttons. I'm not filling them with gravel to see what happens. I'm not even really making much coffee these days. Which is good, because it means I've been buying tea, so now I have that to drink while two pounds of coffee beans take up space in my cupboard, rendered temporarily worthless unless I intend to eat them by the handful.