i just wanted to note that certain people who now have the ability to weave the dreams, as they say, have every excuse to enter our little contest. we're already considering new prizes to add to the stack of loot…

and for the love of god, vote for the bipolar cam on makeout club's webcam survivor poll. that shad guy has a huge lead, so we're gonna have to knuckle down and get this shit done right, if you know what i mean…

another day, another heaping load of coffee. i am both insanely tired and insanely wired. it's a strange state to be in, to tell the truth.

disappointment of the day: last night i found out that they are actually saying "boycott the show me state" instead of the much more entertaining "god damn the show me state" on that there hot snakes cd. talk about your let-downs…

i'm crossing my fingers, hoping for a win in bob's contest. the number one song in the u.k. on my day of birth was fernando by abba. i think that that fact, alone, should cinch my win. right?

it seems like everyone is having a contest, these days. to get in the spirit, we decided to come up with our very own: redesign bipolar before we do! head over to the contest page for full details.

we're hard at work on developing a crafty way to track our stats on the new server. we're so hopelessly addicted to our old standby, webalizer, that we're trying to craft a way to set up system events to download the logs and process it on our own machines. we've got it all working except some damn dns cache problems. if anyone has any hints, .

it appears that we experienced a slight burp of downtime in the late afternoon yesterday. apologies to any of you that were affected by that (as a rule, i think we're rather ineffectual).

did i mention that the hot snakes cd is really fucking good? just checking…

i was planning on buying a new tv this weekend, but after finding out that i couldn't get the whopping 30% discount i was planning on, i think i might be changing my mind. curses!

well…i would have posted last night, but when i went to blogger, the server was down for upgrades. now that they have things straightened out…

i stopped by the record sore yesterday. i ended up picking up the hot snakes cd, which is frickin' amazing, and a disc by a band on slowdime called abilene. the abilene disc really has my interest. it's kind of in the vain of the new shipping news cd. really slow, low key kind of stuff. i'm digging it, even though i haven't listened to it near as much as the hot snakes. both cds come with a high recommendation. but you already knew that, right?

got the hair cut yesterday. i've been putting it off for a while, but i had the day off and some time to kill, so i went ahead and took care of the issue. you can check the results on the webcam, if you're so suited.

my stomach was feeling pretty odd yesterday. it felt like i was carrying around a boiling pit of acid inside me. so far this morning, the problem has not made itself known. hooray for that.

i sat around with paul and matt last night, watching the last part of that dune mini-series that was on the sci-fi channel. having not seen the first two parts, i'd have to say that my reaction was lukewarm, at best. that's not really comparing it to the david lynch version, either, considering that i've only seen half of that one and i was in "another state of mind." so…yeah…you get the point.

for the record: the archives are working again (they were working the day after the post that said they weren't, but i digress…), the permalinks should be fixed, as well. sorry for any confusion. we really didn't want to switch servers until we got at least the interim redesign done, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

and what i gotta do is get back to work…

work just seems to get to a point where it saps my will to live. i just sit here in this ultra-sanitized place, counting down the small amount of minutes left in my life.

and then i wake up.

we went out to good ol' za's last night for calzones and beer. we looked up and noticed the first xfl games were on the telly. we started watching, and the most miraculous thing is…matt liked it. this is of note because matt dislikes sports as a whole. so all in all, i think it was a success. paul and i liked it, as well, but we were rather taken by matt's interest.

so i stayed up too late the other night talking to kerry. we had one of those deep discussions about this or that. she's talking about doing a monthly photo zine instead of a weblog, so hopefully that pans out for her. i've always been interested in her photography, so i can't say i'll be disappointed to see more of it. her's was one of the first few 'logs that i started reading on a regular basis, and it's always nice to have a good chat with her.

speaking of my old time reading habits, a belated welcome back goes out to adam at kempa.com. his 'log was one of the ones that made me decide to get off my ass and start doin' the duty, myself. of course, matt had also mentioned it around the same time, so the pieces kinda just fell into place.

and i think i just stated that in able to do a weblog, you have to get off of your ass. in fact, the exact opposite is true. just keep that in mind.

the word around the campfire: the archives are down. we were having server problems again (this is where i'd link to the post in the archives from the last big outage…), so i went ahead and moved the actual blog parts of this page to the new server, hopefully freeing up some space. this issue has also sent my beloved stats down, making them rather useless for now. dang.

we went and saw crouching tiger, hidden dragon tonight. i'll be damned if it isn't the best movie i've seen so far this year, and that's pretty tough company. i'm at the stage where i can't even really talk about it. it was simply an amazing film. you've heard all of this, already. you can bet i'll own that one on dvd…

music for today: the get up kids, deftones (covering weezer), and son volt. don't ask me why.

on and on 'til the break of dawn…

let's get something straight, right here and now: i love comics. although some are afraid to admit it, i'm not. there seems to be a stigma attached to reading comics. everyone thinks you're like the comic book guy from the simpsons: fat and stupid as hell. i'll be the first to admit that reading comics has never been directly responsible for any of my past relationships, but it certainly has ended up becoming a minor part in a few.

the history (or comics and girls: what it's all about):

i dated a girl back in 96. she swore up and down that comics were retarded. a waste of money. we had been dating for about six months, her avoiding comic day, refusing to go to the local comic shop with me, proclaiming "i know what kind of people hang out there." when one day she actually came into the store with me. she browsed around, mostly looking at the used cds. but i was taking an abnormally long time, so she started browsing the rack, looking through anything that caught her eye. soon enough i heard her say "hey…this looks kinda neat." she was looking at a copy of grant morrison's the invisibles, released by vertigo. i bought her the copy she was looking at, and the couple that preceded it, just so she can get the whole story. she ended up joining me at the comic shop more regularly, eventually picking up a bunch more titles, including steve seagle's house of secrets. this is what is known in the comic world as a "success." i had actually gotten my anti-comics girlfriend reading comics on a semi-regular basis.

the girl i dated after that was a much easier conversion, only taking a couple of trips to the comic shop to sway her. she was already a fan of the x-men cartoon, so you can only guess where her tendencies leaned. this was definitely okay by me, considering most of the x-books were already on my pull list.

the girl after that (the girl that, coincidentally, i live with in a strictly "friends" capacity) took an easy interest in hellboy, mostly considering the fact that i had a couple of trade paperbacks laying around, making it rather accessible. she sticks to mainly reading the comics that matt and i leave laying about, but she has a definite interest in daredevil, garth ennis' punisher, and powers. she's not a buyer, but at least she's a reader.

i tried dating a girl for a little bit last year, only to have that disintegrate because of my love for the comics. she was looking at the tattoo of hellboy that covers my leg, admiring the detail and even commenting on what a cool design it was. she asked me where it came from and i told her he was a character in a comic book. she wrinkled her nose at me and said "you read comic books?" and i was like "yeah. is that a problem?" so i was immediately put on the defensive. i tried to defend comics a couple of times through various conversations during the rest of the evening, but she'd just scoff or wrinkle her nose. she ended up getting rather flaky, not returning my calls, so i decided that she wasn't worth my time. too much negativity.

this is all wrapped up by my most recent girlfriend. she knew about my love for comics, and it didn't phase her. she even bought me some autographed hulk books and a hellboy mousepad for christmas. she recently sent me an article she ran across that's an actual study done on the comic reading habits of middle-schoolers. it's an honest-to-goodness published academic document. i found it damn interesting, to say the least. maybe someday comic fans will get the respect they deserve.

this is the point of the story where i tell you how i'm not your typical comic fan, i have a life, i listen to indie-rock, i'm not fat with long hair, i don't live in my mother's basement. but then i start to think: that's not your average comic fan. when i go to the comic shop, i see all kinds of different people, none of which fit that description. i would link to joe casey's "crash comments" column over at comics newsarama for a little more "real-world" comics writing, but there's no concrete link for it. just head over there and look for it, yourself.

but tonight, we see crouching tiger, hidden dragon. tonight…we destroy…

so i reviewed the list of winners for the 2001 bloggie awards. of course, bipolar didn't make a surprise appearance as "weblog of the year," despite our strong-arm tactics. maybe next year we'll be more menacing.

so as i was perusing it, i found usr/bin/girl. this site is really of note because it states that she reads about 30 comic titles on a monthly basis. a girl. this is a truly staggering number, almost eclipsing my own prodigious intake. ladies and gentlemen, it has now been proven that comic geeks have a chance of finding that fated someone. somebody tell paul and brad…

next year…bipolar breaks legs…

i just ran across 1000 robots. it's by the same guy that does exploding dog, but he uses different media to produce these drawings. this is my personal favorite.

these days seem to drag on and on and on. i guess it's really not so bad, considering this is my "friday." i don't really know what's on the agenda this weekend, but i hear that crouching tiger, hidden dragon is finally coming out here in town. i'm sure we'll shuttle out to catch that.

more after lunch…

i'm currently working on a low bandwidth version of the transmission3000 streaming radio. i got a whopping one response about it, and really that one should be disqualified. but regardless, you standard modem people out there should try it out and what you think. feedback will be muchly appreciated.

emotioneric.com is pretty damn funny. personal favorites include: this one and this one. enjoy.

i'd really like to get a crack at re-designing grant morrison's website. that thing is damn near unreadable at this point…

more tonight…