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Special primary-themed Stream. Also new avatar (from Xquzyphyr and Overboard's awesome January 28 strip). Updates to Life, Features, and archive.
Caught a test screening tonight of a new flick called 11:14. It's a dark comedy, told in reverse chronology from a series of different perspectives. It's recommended viewing.
The best part of the evening was that I got to tell a guy from National Lampoon that I've been waiting to see the film adaptation of Bored of the Rings. He said they're working on it, and he's glad to hear somebody ask about it and he'll go back and tell everyone somebody expressed an interest.
So if the movie gets made, I'm totally taking credit.
Hi, and welcome to the site. My stats indicate that you are most likely somebody who was looking for porn on Roger's site, got a 404, and ended up here instead. I've written a Stream of Consciousness on that very subject.
Also, update to Life, and minor updates to Features (reorganization, link to site stats and my newest avatar, courtesy of Boondocks, 04.01.20) and Links (including a link to Ben's new site and astrocity.us).
It started on the registration deadline. My grandmother informed me that I couldn't vote in the primary unless I was a registered Democrat. I insisted that she must be wrong, that I'd read material all over the place saying Arizona had opened its primaries. But I looked it up, and she was right. I made the deadline, gritted my teeth, and switched my registration back to Democrat.
And then, I'll admit it -- I lost track of time. I'm registered in Maricopa County but I go to school in Coconino, and I didn't get around to ordering my absentee ballot until last week. The elections office's website told me that I had to enter my name and residential address, and it would send to the address on file; if I wanted to have it sent to another address, I'd have to come in and sign a form.
I read this to mean that I couldn't get a ballot shipped to any address but my residential address unless I came in to sign a form. It turned out I was wrong, it wasn't actually the stupidest policy ever, just very poorly worded.
I discovered this when my ballot arrived in my campus mailbox -- yesterday. As in, the day before today. The primary itself.
I called the Coconino County Elections Office and asked if they'd accept a Maricopa ballot. They wouldn't.
So I floundered around the Maricopa County Elections Office website looking for help. All I found was that a ballot postmarked on Primary Day was insufficient; it had to come in by today.
Okay, so that's not all I found. I also found FAQs, both on Maricopa's Elections Office page and on Coconino's, saying that independents can, indeed, vote in primaries. It then occurred to me that my ballot did not actually say "Primary", it said "Presidential Preference Election".
The question of, "Are they using semantics to obfuscate and make it difficult for independents to vote in primaries by accident, or are they doing it intentionally?" reflects one of the great questions in my life: "Are you fucking with me, or are you just stupid?"
So okay. I determined to check FedEx and UPS to see if I could find a place where I could ship my ballot overnight. I discovered it'd be $12, but I'm just crazy enough to spend $12 to throw my vote away.
Then I spent about an hour trying to decipher the various mapping software of UPS, FedEx, and MapQuest. UPS said the nearest shipping centers were 0.9 miles away; MapQuest and FedEx, for Lord knows what reason, said they were all 30 miles away.
Now, I have to admit something a bit embarrassing -- even though I've spent four falls and three springs in Flagstaff, I don't really know street names so well. I know how to get around the area about a mile's radius surrounding the university, but I don't know from "University and Plaza Way", I know "nextdoor to the Buffalo Exchange down by Safeway".
So finally, I spotted a landmark -- a cemetary --, printed the UPS map out, biked up to the nearest cemetary, discovered that it was indeed the same place, and followed the map from there. Ultimately, I wound up at Mailbox Plus, nextdoor to the Buffalo Exchange down by Safeway.
Well, the nice lady behind the counter told me they'd sent their packages out fifteen minutes before. I explained the situation; she told me USPS actually picks up the mail in the boxes out front of Safeway at 5:30 each day and that's just as good as next-day for an envelope addressed to Phoenix. She offered me a stamp; I apologetically told her I had no cash and threw down my Visa. She said she couldn't take it (which I really didn't expect -- my comic shop in Tempe accepts Visa, fer cryin' out loud) but just gave me the stamp anyway. Not much of a loss, but a really nice gesture; I recommend all my Flagstaff readers send their packages from Mailbox Plus, nextdoor to the Buffalo Exchange down by Safeway, from now on.
So I dropped my ballot, much cheaper than the $12 I'd expected, in the box in front of Safeway and hoped for the best. Hopefully it got there.
I would have hit Safeway for some groceries, but discovered that I had to get to my capstone meeting in a hurry. Going down busier streets than I'm used to, I had to dodge one particularly bad driver pulling into a gas station. It was cold and I was wearing a jacket whose hood offers either peripheral vision or protection against the wind, not both.
Of course, more than anything, this whole adventure points out the fallacy of our modern voting system: it makes it hard to vote. That "primary" versus "presidential preference election" foolishness, registration deadlines, the inability to drop a Maricopa ballot in a Coconino box...this is all, given modern technology, just foolishness. We need an electoral system that makes it easier to vote. Internet voting may not be ready, but we could certainly use an intermediary phase -- there's no reason you shouldn't be able to walk into any voting center in the country and vote remotely in the county where you're registered.
Well, okay, so there is -- Diebold owns the voting machines. And they'd find a way to fuck it up.
...So for shits and giggles I've been checking my latest site stats. And I've learned some interesting things. Here, have a bulleted list.
This also led me to check up on the hits for my store (no link to the stats, sorry). And all I can say is, 98 unique hits and not a single sale?! You freeloading ingrates. What, do I need more designs? I'm a busy guy, dammit! I guess spring break is coming...
So okay. All these hits from a broad range of people. I really ought to make this site more appealing. Sadly, my approach to comedy has traditionally been "just babble incessantly until you come up with something awesome", but that has of course turned up such awful site features as Thad vs. Yourgoingtohell.com. So since then, I've been more into the idea of not posting for months at a time until I have something I really want to say. Of course, this is probably singlehandedly responsible for that "86.8% of all visitors spend less than 30 seconds" statistic.
So I think it may be time for some sweet, sweet middle-ground. Hopefully I will never again do anything quite so foolish as attempt to instigate a flame war with a fundie website and then begin posting the results before anything entertaining happens, but I think I should post more often, try and get some more regular readers and, for God's sake, T-shirt sales.
So what do you, dear reader, want to see? In the past, I've avoided too many angry political rants, but that also happens to be something I'm quite good at. Or there's that rant about those stupid goddamn virus-propagating Windows users who've gotten NAU E-Mail blocked by AOL. I hear I'm much funnier angry.
I also think the Holy/Mighty Trinity needs another adventure, as well as a central repository of its previous antics, and KateStory could use a good basic character guide for the Pyoko newbies.
Food for thought.
Games: Phantasy Star IV -- finally got around to it.
Books: The Book of Merlyn
Games: Replaying Metroid Prime and, for some reason, most likely masochism, the 80-hour behemoth that is Dragon Warrior 7.
Books: A Right To Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury.
