Posts from May 2010

I was going through old writings, and I found this transcription of a dream I had back in November of 2008!

A couple of nights ago I had another one of my “building” dreams, wherein my dream people construct some sort of structure for me to explore. It happens with surprising frequency, and they’re some of my favorite dreams.

This one was a bit different, though, in that it was based on my own house:Carrie & I were hosting some sort of small party or something in the middle of the day. There were people over at our house. It was actually our real-life house with the correct layout and furniture and everything. Carrie, as usual, was spending most of the party in the kitchen making drinks and prepping food and all that fun stuff. At one point we ran out of something and I asked her where it was so I could grab some more.

“Oh,” she said, “I put it in the attic.”

“In the attic?” I was surprised. We’ve NEVER gone into the attic since we moved in here five years ago.

“Yeah,” Carrie said. “I got in one of my cleaning fits, and I ran out of stuff to clean down here so I started cleaning the attic. Come take a look!”

She led me out into the laundry room in the east end of the house where a panel in the ceiling led to the attic (in the real world this panel is in Carrie’s closet) and after a bit of wiggling she crawled up into it and then helped pull me up as well.

There was a rather small, cramped space up there, but with drywall and carpet instead of exposed beams. There was a window on the east wall that let in light. In the northwest corner of this area, though, was a very narrow hallway that went west a couple of feet. After one step down it opened up into a small, windowless, carpeted living room type of space with an angled roof. There was a leather couch on the east wall. The south and west walls were covered with cheap steel shelving, on which were displayed dozens and dozens of classic toys: Gaiking, a lion Voltron, and tons of other 80s toys.

Needless to say I was extatic. This was amazing! “Yeah,” Carrie continued, “I cleaned up this room but didn’t know what to do with all of this stuff. I think we should get rid of the TV.”

Indeed, there was a TV on one of the south-wall shelves. “Not so fast,” I said as I examined it. “Our TV is on its last legs. Maybe we can use this one.”

Carrie picked up some bottles of apple cider (what we’d come up here to get) and I noticed that there was an opening to another hallway in the northwest corner of this living room. “What’s down here?”

“I don’t know,” Carrie said. “I never got that far.”

I promptly headed down the hallway. About five feet down there was an open doorway on the right (to the north). On the other side of the doorway was a small, furnished bedroom with a sunny window. About five feet further down the hall ended at another small, furnished bedroom which took up the entire remainder of the west end of the attic.

“Hey, there are two more bedrooms up here!” I called out to Carrie, who followed me into the hallway. “That makes this a five-bedroom house,” I said with faulty math. It only made the house have four bedrooms, not five.

This west-most bedroom had sliding glass doors on its north wall. They opened onto a small deck, maybe 5′ × 7′. The west railing opened onto a path, which I followed. It wound around the rooftops of the neighborhood houses. The neighborhood suddenly had become like something out of a Miyazaki movie, like Porco Rosso or Kiki’s Delivery Service: old-world European with a lot of flowers and stones and moss.

I totally remember that dream! It was really cool how the world in the dream kept on unfolding and expanding, and the rooftops at the end were truly beautiful in the gentle, warm sunlight. Good job, Dream People!

There is an inflatable tick at my vet’s office. This post is to check whether or not I can update this blog from my new phone app.

With this new album, “Barely There,” @TeezyWeezy has joined the ever-growing pool of my friends who have released albums! Jeez! So many in so short a time!

Anyway, Taisha has a priddy voice and mad skillz on da pianer, so everyone should buy this album. Plus it has a Trevor Peach cover! OMGooses! All proceeds go to help Taisha move out of the sticks and back to civilization.

GET IT.

It’s already my Album of the Month, and now you can enjoy it in both Physical CD form and as a download from iTunes.

GET IT.

My birfday was on Thursday, and for a present my ever-loving wife gave me a ticket to w00stock 2.0 at the Moore Theatre in downtown Seattle. Not coincidentally, it was @SphinxAkashaa’s birfday last month, and his ever-loving wife also gave him a ticket to w00tstock 2.0 at the Moore Theatre in downtown Seattle. So the two of us (our wives had to work and stay home with a baby, respectively) went and saw the show last night.

It was lots of good.

Let me just try to do a quick run-down of the many, many things that happened at the show. This probably won’t be in order at all, but oh well:

The show was run from a Macbook, and the desktop was visible on a giant screen in the background throughout basically the entire show (unless they were showing something else on the screen). You would actually see the mouse cursor double-click on the next section of the show to start it in Quicktime, which would then go fullscreen. The background of the desktop was Ceiling Cat:

Paul & Storm did their “Opening Band” song.

Canadian sketch comedy troupe LoadingReadyRun did a humorous time-travel reading, then showed two sketches on the big screen. One was only okay—about superheroes who all have similar emblems so get confused as to whom the signal in the sky is summoning. The other one—about a guy who obsessively installs Linux in EVERYTHING—was really very funny.

Molly Lewis performed four songs: the three-movement one about the assassination of Lincoln, a brand-new one that didn’t have complete lyrics about wanting to have Stephen Fry’s baby, the one about breaking up with Wikipedia, and then a “Two Girls, One Uke” version of “Conjunction Junction” with Presidents of the United States of America drummer Jason Finn backing them up, and a special surprise to perform the spoken-word segment of the song. Don’t take my word for it, though; I recorded it:

Xbox Live banhammer Stephen “Stepto” Toulouse gave a humorous reading about the process of banning people from the Xbox Live service. He gave it in the style of a pious religious reading, with Paul & Storm backing him up as chanting monks.

Two guys from Loan Shark Games are making a sequential puzzle video, and they’re showing a different piece of it during each of the next few w00tstocks, starting with this one. It was a funny video that involved one guy juggling some very specific objects. Then they did a live plate spinning trick. The climax of the trick was a hand holding a stick on top of which was a spinning tray, on top of which was a really long pole (probably four or five feet), on top of which was a spinning plate. Very impressive.

Wil Wheaton gave a reading from his book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives, about the first time he went and saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Interesting side-fact: I’ve never seen it, and have absolutely no desire ever to do so. It sounds like a dreadful time to me. But it was a well-written and well-performed reading, with again Paul & Storm backing him up with snippets of songs where appropriate.

MC Frontalot did a set. It was really hard to understand his lyrics; I think a combination of mic volume and speaker placement made it so that where I was sitting was just not the best place acoustically. But man, what energy! Very entertaining.

Hank Green performed a couple of his nerdy songs, about particle physics and evolutionary biology. And one about Star Trek: TNG, which he said he never imagined he’d be performing in front of one of the cast members.

Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame gave a very funny talk that started with revealing his geek street cred about how he got his first kiss from a girl he met playing Dungeons & Dragons at the public library. He then told funny behind-the-scenes stories about Mythbusters, and show lots of in-depth clips from an upcoming episode. He was very funny and engaging.

Paul & Storm closed out the show with a set. There wasn’t anything new in it, and I’ve (strangely enough) now seen them three times within the last nine months or so, but they’re still very entertaining. They brought Wil, Adam, and Jason out to do the “Pirate’s Wife’s Lament” with all the Arrrs.

There were a series of running audio and video gags throughout the show between performers. One of them was “A Moment with Wil,” wherein We’d spend a few minutes watching Wil do something, like wear a necktie or drink a Guinness or eat a pizza. A funny gag in those series of videos was that the episode numbers quickly jumped from three to seven to fourteen. Then there were a series of audio clips of George Takei singing various songs that would end whenever he said, “Fire,” which would be followed by phaser and explosion sound effects. Really hilarious stuff. They also showed the Academy Award Winning Film trailer and did a funny bit with the Trololololo song when they came back from intermission.

I bought the official w00tstock 2.0 t-shirt and it came with a free matching poster! Looks like this:

The whole show lasted just a few minutes over four hours (including intermission). Good times. I only took five photos during the whole show, and here they are (click for larger):

Big thanks to @wilw @paulandstorm @donttrythis @Molly23 @mc_frontalot @Jasonfinn @hankgreen @LoneSharkGames & LoadingReadyRun #w00tstock

— Christopher Harris (@angrybeef) May 8, 2010

Yesterday (Monday) Carrie & I went with Marvel’s X-Men’s female clone of Wolverine, X-23, to the new location of Taqueria El Guadalajara on 6th Ave, in the same building as the Neighborhood Market.

I’d never been to the old location on Tacoma Ave, but it was somewhat of a local institution. But now it’s much closer to me! Anyway, I really liked it. I had Asada enchiladas, and I really liked the flavor profiles; it was different than what you’d get at an El Toro. Also, the margaritas are frikkin’ awesome. They’re strong and they’re not at all sickly sweet like you might get elsewhere. It’s nice to have a good mid-level style of Mexican restaurant in the 6th Ave neighborhood, rather than just low (Taco Bell) and high (Masa).

Link of the Month:
Axe Cop
A remarkable collaboration: This webcomic is illustrated by professional comic book artist Ethan Nicolle. It is written, however, by his 5-year-old brother Malachai. As such, the stories have all the coherence and logic you would expect from a 5-year-old, but with excellently-drawn illustrations, which just makes the story seem even stranger and absolutely 100% fall-down hilarious. Must be experienced to be believed.

Album of the Month:
Open Mike Eagle: Unapologetic Art Rap
I’ve never done this before: This album is so good, I’m making it my Album of the Month before it’s even been officially released (I got an advance copy a couple weeks ago) on 5/11. The lyrics of this album are intelligent, witty, funny, and about actually interesting subjects. Mike is not afraid to sound smart. He has a fantastic flow, which is easy and relaxed without sounding at all lazy. It’s almost conversational, like you’re having fascinating discussions with a good friend who really knows what he’s talking about without sounding haughty or snooty about it. And above all that, it’s damnably catchy. An incredibly confident and high-quality debut album. Take a look & listen:

Book of the Month:
Memories of the Future Volume 1 by Wil Wheaton
Wil Wheaton takes an irreverent and hilariously snarky look back at the firsty half of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation with amusingly embellished synopses, behind-the-scene recollections, and very honest reviews of what was, honestly, not a very good season of television. Not a tell-all book at all, the results are more like sitting around watching the episodes with Wil with him shaking his head and saying, “I can’t believe they wrote that,” or getting excited and going, “That was actually pretty cool!” It’s a funny and fun read—I just wish it could have been the whole season instead of just the first half.