I’m sure there must be a “You can tell you’re an East Coaster when…” list out there that includes the item, “You get excited over a 1.8 magnitude earthquake.”

It certainly wasn’t as strong as the one a few years ago (that was around, what, a 3 or a 4?) which was piddly in its own right, so this one was even less so. With the previous one I at least got up out of my chair and stuck my head into the hallway to see if others felt it. With this one, the best I could muster was an instant message to Karon saying, “I swear I just felt our building shake.”

I’ve been feeling a little bleah for most of today, so it’s good to get excited about something. I skipped my run this morning (one of my legs was feeling stiff and tight this morning and even after several stretches today it’s still a bit that way) and I haven’t decided if I’ll attempt one this afternoon after work or not. (I am unfortunately leaning towards no.) I certainly didn’t sleep well last night, which didn’t help matters, too.

But on the bright side, my labels for Artomatic are printed and sitting on my desk, so I just need to pop by this evening and then I am completely done. People keep asking if I’m excited and the answer has been, “Not yet.” Maybe it’s because it was all so new and a learning process for me this year; I’ve already made a lot of decisions for potential future exhibiting on ways I would do it different. Hopefully once it’s all taken care of I will be a little more jazzed about it.

On the other hand, I have decided that if I sell some of the photos (which would be awfully cool) that I get to reward myself. So items I’m looking at include:

• Mario Kart Wii
• Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Camera Lens
• Brother HL-2170w Laser Printer

Mario Kart Wii just looks amazingly fun, plus there’s the online play aspect. I would sure like to experiment with a “prime” lens. And I haven’t had a printer for over a decade, since the infamous moment where Kate sent me a cursed manuscript and my printing it out literally destroyed the printer. (It started printing jibberish about 2/3rds of the way through—and no, it was not the manuscript’s actual text—and never recovered.) So for those, I am excited.

(Not that I’m actually expecting to sell any photos, of course. But the thought is pretty fun to think about.)

Overall, though, things are good. I have some friends moving into the neighborhood next month, some beautiful orchids blooming in my office, we had salsa lessons in the office yesterday for Cinco de Mayo (which was fun), and an older gentleman at the gym yesterday asked if that was indeed me at the opera last week—and that he and his wife also left before the end because they couldn’t stand it. Hee hee hee.

I was going through my web stats for Read About Comics last night, and noticed that a lot—make that a ton—of people on MySpace are hotlinking to my images there.

Now I actually don’t mind the occasional hotlink here and there. But these are people who have gazillions of visits every day to their profile page. And in that case, come on, save the image and put it on your own webspace. (Or get some free display space like Photobucket.) So I did a little research, and eventually I figured out a way to just block specific websites from hotlinking. (I could have turned them all off entirely, but it would mess up people’s RSS feeds big time, and that just seemed like a bit of overkill.)

So for now, whenever anyone tries to link to my images on MySpace? They get this image instead. (Just in case you are at a particularly stodgy workplace, I won’t put the image there. But I promise, no nudity.)

What can I say? It makes me laugh. And really, I could have been much more evil than that. This is actually not that bad all things considered. (I rather like it.) In a month or so I’ll swap it out to just being a broken image link instead, but I figure this should get at least some people to delete the links first.

Of course, for about five hours today I’d messed it up bigtime so anything linked out of my personal account was getting swapped into this, which probably made for some very funny looking images I’d posted elsewhere… Oops!

My eyes hurt.

This weekend had more video games than I think I’ve played in a 48-hour period of time in, well, a very long time. Certainly not since college.

Saturday afternoon, in-between two Restaurant Week meals (a good lunch at Filomena, an ok dinner at Ardeo that gave both Charlie and I some bad stomach pains around 3am) I went home and on a whim jumped to the final level of Super Mario Galaxy and officially won the game. In some ways it wasn’t as epic a finale as I’d hoped, but on the other hand the fun of the game for me was always exploring the new galaxies that the game constantly throws at you, forever introducing new concepts and gameplay variants every time you turn around. I still have 46 stars to go in order to collect the full complement of 120, which makes me happy because it means I’ve still got a lot of fun ahead of me.

Then, today, my friend Rob had a video game get-together. The second Wiimote for my system is currently broken so instead I brought my old Dreamcast along. We played a bunch of Chu Chu Rocket, which can only be best described as a board game involving organized insanity. It involves mice and cats and rocket ships and ever-changing events and craziness. It looks really simple at first, but there was a lot of shrieking and screaming and laughing and cursing going on.

Last but not least, Alex broke out the Eye of Judgment, which crosses collectable card games and online computer games. I never, ever was into things like Magic: The Gathering, or Pokemon, or Yu-Gi-Oh. But you know what? This was really slick and clever and addictive. I was also amazingly impressed with how well the PlayStation 3 recognizes the cards based on its camera—it does so instantaneously, and with such finesse I just stared at it for a couple of minutes. It’s a neat, neat game. I am relieved I don’t own a PS3 because I would be awfully tempted otherwise to own this game. And I really, really, really don’t need another addiction. I can just see it becoming that.

Evil! Pure evil, that game. Or video games in general.

I think the rest of the week will be video game free. Maybe now I can watch the remaining 9 episodes of Journeyman still on my digital recorder?

After I flipped a coin to help us decide which track on a relaxation CD we should listen to…

Funa: I like that you went right for the coin to make the call. That’s a good kind of decision-making.
Me: Oh, we’re ready for that on the third floor. I have a 20-sided die on my desk in case it’s a really complex decision.
Kevin: Yeah, like fighting a basilisk.