Well, I'm a homeowner.

Now's the time for me to bumble about & run into sharp-edged things in the dark, I suppose. My shampooing attempt on the downstairs carpet seems to have come up short on the "must and cat-smell" front. I've had someone recommend getting a steam-cleaning outfit in to take care of it. Meanwhile, I'm going to work on spackling & wallpainting this weekend. Am I going to get any dry weather?

Poll question: I need to change my voter registration to reflect my new address - I *think* I'm moving into a new ward. Should I change parties while I'm at it? I've been tactically Democratic since February 2003, but I get more conservative and culturally Republican by the week. Should I re-register *tactically* or *culturally*?

'Endless Eight' finally gets to Hitler. This is easily the least political use I've seen of the Downfall clip.

h/t

A guy here at work is getting married. I observed that he had just bought a house & wondered why they had waited until now. Apparently there's a serious income gap in the mortgage terms available to couples and singles, and we tend to fall into it here at work. They're holding the wedding after the grace period allowed by the terms of his mortgage financing. I had wondered about that one-year ban on cohabitating in my mortgage application.

But he was grousing about one of the places they were getting registered with. They assigned them a sales rep who was trying to get them to put every white elephant and overpriced geegaw in the inventory on their registry. It never occurred to me that these registry things could be opportunities for high-pressure sales offensives. After all, it isn't "your money", so it's a chance to hit a couple where they're weakest - somebody else's wallet. The end result is a lot of unnecessary fancy plate & silver utensils collecting dust in one of those display cabinets like the one my former landlord was trying to get me to buy last weekend when I wandered into his distressed-antiques furniture place & mentioned that I was setting up housekeeping, of a sort.

I threw out most of my MSiA toys on Sunday, after pulling down a toy-model of the Albion from Gundam 0083 off of the top of a shelf & discovering that it had turned *brown*. The MSiA toys were mostly cast from a foul, cheap sort of rubbery plastic, especially the stuff made for the North American market. It wilts, changes color, and generally doesn't hold up well. I saved a couple of the sturdier pieces which shouldn't look like crap on a shelf, and tossed the rest of the box into the trash. In retrospect that particular hobby was a waste of money, although disassembling them and putting them back together gave me something to do with my hands while talking on the phone to particularly annoying HighQ customers back in the day.

So, I found a friend with a burn-barrel and we destroyed my excess personal papers, which had accumulated to the point where I wasn't willing to haul it with to me to a new domicile. An overflowing paper-case whose overflow filled three plastic disposable shopping bag, it took about an hour or so to incinerate the lot. Mostly ten years' worth of phone & electic bills & banking statements, but there was an awful lot of health insurance rubbish, and a fair amount of old Otakon paperwork - floor plans, hotel proposals, decorators' proposals, that sort of thing. My old passport - used once, expired eight years ago. Into the fire, all of it. Well, except a few things which just didn't need to go up in flames. That all will go into the trash - no personal information or old confidential Otakorp stuff.

I should mostly be ready to move by Thursday, which is the closing. After that, I may need to take a day or so to figure out what I should take care of before moving anything in - I have a toilet to fix, a ceiling-crack to do something with - spackle? I dunno - and assess the paint in the family/TV room on the first floor - should I give it a new coat of paint before moving anything into it?

Oh, man. Kyoto Animation's apparently collectively decided to become the otaku Andy Warhol. The same damn episode, re-animated, re-recorded and slightly modified - not just four times, not six, but - what, eight is the current guess?

Lunatics.

And now I'm embarrassed, because someone else has already had this epiphany.

You don't get much more badass than this. Girl Genius just keeps getting better & better.

Dresden Codak may operate at a higher artistic level, but it's also a once-a-month sort of operation, and is almost openly hostile to linear narrative. The Foglios crank out three color pages a week like atomic clockwork, with an exceptional narrative flow. Order of the Stick has a similar fidelity to strong, well-written narrative, but Burlew's art style is just less demanding than the Foglios', and he's not nearly as reliable, albeit not bad by online standards; also, the fake-RPG story and subcreation is clever but doesn't even pretend to originality.

Perhaps the closest competitor to Girl Genius is Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary, which has long since outgrown its original crap art & comic-sociopathy humor for a polished style & intricate space-opera plotting. But in the end, Schlock Mercenary is a *strip*, while Girl Genius is a graphic-novel serial. The Foglios are operating under a different and more demanding set of artistic constraints than Tayler. Also? Schlock Mercenary is a comedy which pulled a Cerebus, while Girl Genius has always been a serious story with a wide streak of comedic relief-style humor.

Man, I love Dresden Codak. Even though I only get about one joke in three, googling the references usually causes a follow-on snicker.

I was down visiting in Pittsburgh last weekend. I spent the weekend pestering my great-aunt - who's terribly shaky on her pins & keeps wobbling around without her cane saying that she's fine so long as she can balance herself on the walls or furniture in her house - to always carry her cane around & to be more careful of falls.

Karma took notice of this, and as I was packing up my stuff and walking out of her guest room with arms full of a bulky overnight bag, my toe caught on a stool she keeps in her hallway. I took a full-on face-fault header into the floor, right in front of her. Luckily I didn't bring her down with me, so no harm no foul, but boy was that embarrassing. Much to her credit, she didn't burst out laughing like I would have if I were in her shoes.

Hopefully I've used up all the bad-fall luck in that house for the next couple weeks.