It was a… long weekend for me. To begin with, it was roughly 100,000°F all weekend, and my internet was popping in and out as a result. Normally this probably wouldn’t have bothered me, because, honestly, I don’t spend a lot of time on the cyberwebs during the weekend, but this weekend was a very rare, nothing going down but writing, kind of weekend. As some of you may know, I have a tendency to utilize the ultimateness of the cloud and all of it’s sexy glory, but when you’re left with just your phone (and not by choice) it looses a bit of it’s luster and becomes something more akin to agonizing torture.
So that’s the basic theme for this weekend: agonizing torture.
There is a silver lining, though, let’s break it down.
Friday
I got off work early on Friday. I believe this was some sort of recompense for being forced to work both Tuesday and Thursday with the Holiday on Wednesday. Many of you might be going, “So?” This is because you don’t live in Missouri or a similar state where there is only one approved way of celebrating our Nation’s birthday; Blowing up a small chunk of it with Chinese made explosives.
Yes, damn it, that is very patriotic of us.
That still might not seem too bad. So I miss out on the fun of blowing things up one year. I still get a day off work, it’s no biggie if I can’t stay up until 4 AM firing giant explosives in the direction of the moon, hoping to piss of the alien colony inside of it and prove their existence. The problem with that theory is that just because I can’t stay up all night fighting Moon-Nazis doesn’t mean that everyone in my freaking neighborhood has to get up early…
Anyway, to compensate for this utter disregard for the safety of the human race, my boss allowed me to leave at noon on Friday. So, I burned ass out of there like a NASCAR driver strung out on Grade 8 Hyper-Meth… you know, the kind that is made in a space-lab, not the low grade kind made in normal, human labs…
When I got home, I realized I’d have an entire afternoon to myself. You know, to browse the internet for high brow artistry and classical music…
However, instead I spent some time hanging out with my little brother and watching 30 Rock. It’s a secret shame…
Ok, I’ll admit it… I’d do anything Tina Fey asked to if she’d be my sugar momma… I’m not ashamed of who I am!
This Friday story is already dragging on too long, so let me cut it short by saying that I was dragged, delirious, back out into the 34 Bajjilion°F heat by my duties as a Yeti-Wrangler.
That’s the Greater Midwest’s Only Professional Yeti-Wrangler, mind you.
What I’m saying here is that I never really noticed that when the heat of the day got so bad it made the power go out, it also destroyed my internet. This would be something I would discover late on Friday night… while trying to watch Deep Space 9 with my dad.
SCREW YOU! DS9 WAS THE BEST STAR TREK EVER!
So, after not being able to fix the internet… which is saying something because I have a magic computer fixing power, I went to bed… dejected.
Saturday
I’m not going to lie. When I woke up Saturday morning, the heat of the universe was no longer melting my modem, and I was doing a happy dance thinking that my internet was back forever. After fiddling with it for a while I came to the conclusion (mistakenly) that my computer was misbehaving, and that the wifi seemed to be functional, so I’d just have to figure out my computer later. In the meantime, everyone else had internet, so that was good enough for me.
So, thinking that all would be fine in the world. I went and saw Spiderman.
You’re probably expecting a review of Spiderman now, since you know, I’ve forced you to read all that crazy stuff up above, so I’ll give you a really quick one.
A) If the movie had sucked do you think I’d have doodled Spider-Matt over there?
B) It was worth sitting through the origin story (again) to see Martin Sheen as Uncle Ben… BEST UNCLE BEN EVER.
C) The Lizard is badass.
D) Emma Stone is awesome as Gwen Stacey, but her hair doesn’t look right bleached.
E) The Lizard is much more BA in motion than you would expect.
All-in-all, I’m giving it a 7.5 on the Nerdmotron of Happiness. It has potential to grow as a series, but so far, everything about it screams, “Trilogy Curse in Effect,” and it was about as good as the 2002 Toby McGuire Spiderman.
Can you guess what happened when I got home from the Movie Saturday evening? Yes… the Cyberscapes were gone again. I exhausted the last remaining ounce of my computer-fixing ability by shouting obscenities at the modem, announcing to no one in particular that it should be working, and then whacking it with Comjlnir, my magic hammer of computer fixing.
Nothing work… so I decided to sleep on it.
Sunday
AKA: Matt Vs The Evil ISP Robots………
American businesses, hear me and understand:
I WILL PAY YOU EXTRA IF YOU WILL DESTROY YOUR PHONE-BOTS AND SEND ME STRAIGHT TO A PERSON THAT DOESN’T HAVE A LANGUAGE OR ACCENT BARRIER.
This means that it should be a person from my general area… do yourself a favor and open a call center in every city, or at least every state. Then everyone gets to talk to a person that sounds like them. This will probably aid in decreasing the number of arson threats you get a day.
I know it would have put me in a better mood when I was told by my ISP, after paying them on time every month for SIX YEARS, that it was unacceptable for them to tell me it would be OVER A WEEK before they could fix the outage at my house that was growing steadily worse. I did manage to keep from exploding the poor woman into a billion pieces with my mind… barely. I also refrained from telling her that I would burn their Kansas City headquarters to the ground while crowbarring everyone that came screaming out of it, but I couldn’t stop myself from telling my dog that… or my mother… or the cash register lady at the gas station I went to after I finally (and for the first time in my life) got angry enough to hang up on the customer service tech.
When I had calmed down, I called the service number again to get something settled without burning soul-hatred. The infuriatingly condescending robot-voice announced that there was an massive outage in my area, technicians had been dispatched, and that I didn’t need to report it again. So I didn’t. A couple hours later, I had internet again, and was calm and rational the rest of the day.
Or at least as rational as I can ever be. I mean… I am basically a sociopath, right.
That was my weekend. I thought I’d share it with you so you’d understand why I was so quiet and absent all weekend long with no doodles or stories…
Basically, I was getting a premature taste of the post-apocalyptic world…
… A world without internet…
It’s terrifying.
EDIT: It has been brought to my attention that Emma Stone’s hair is naturally blonde, and though I contest that she was definitely bottle blonde in Spiderman (probably from bleaching the red she keeps her hair as back out), it doesn’t suit her at all. It makes her look a bit washed out and alien. She’s better off dyeing.