Seriously, how did we ever even exist without the ability to stream from a basically endless supply of videos on YouTube through the air to a computer that fits in the pocket of one’s gym shorts???
For what it’s worth, it helped speed me up by 5 minutes on tonight’s walk, too! 🙂
I’ve been slowly working my way through this comic’s archives over the last couple of days – it’s such a cool concept with plenty to inspire you in just about every aspect you can think of. Below are a collection of my favorites … there are a lot because I had a really tough time narrowing them down, so you might want to just browse the entire collection yourself to see what inspires you! 😉
You can even order prints for some of them, which would probably make for some pretty awesome Christmas gifts this year…
Chris Hadfield – An Astronaut’s Advice
http://zenpencils.com/comic/106-chris-hadfield-an-astronauts-advice/
Taylor Mali – What Teacher’s Make
http://zenpencils.com/comic/124-taylor-mali-what-teachers-make/
Robert H. Goddard – The Rocket Man
http://zenpencils.com/comic/64-robert-h-goddard-the-rocket-man/
Alan Watts – What If Money Was No Object? – (audio track via YouTube)
http://zenpencils.com/comic/98-alan-watts-what-if-money-was-no-object/
Randy Pausch – The Brick Walls – (audio track via YouTube)
http://zenpencils.com/comic/86-randy-pausch-the-brick-walls/
C.S. Lewis – To Love at All
http://zenpencils.com/comic/103-c-s-lewis-to-love-at-all/
Lawrence of Arabia – All Men Dream
http://zenpencils.com/comic/85-lawrence-of-arabia-all-men-dream/
Douglas Adams – A Good Time to Be Alive
http://zenpencils.com/comic/62-douglas-adams-a-good-time-to-be-alive/
Albert Einstein – The Important Thing
http://zenpencils.com/comic/51-albert-einstein-the-important-thing/
Neil Gaiman – Make Good Art – (audio track via Vimeo)
http://zenpencils.com/comic/50-neil-gaiman-make-good-art/
Kurt Vonnegut – The Life of Art
http://zenpencils.com/comic/49-kurt-vonnegut-the-life-of-art/
Kurt Vonnegut – Take a Moment – (the puppy in this one looked very familiar!)
http://zenpencils.com/comic/27-kurt-vonnegut-take-a-moment/
Steve Jobs – Your Time is Limited – (audio track via YouTube)
http://zenpencils.com/comic/16-steve-jobs-your-time-is-limited/
“You are already naked – there’s no reason not to follow your heart.”
Such a catchy, little tune – I find that this song gets stuck in my head all of the time lately… 8)
I’ve written before about how I think that it’s absolutely crazy that we even entertain this idea of the government shutting down here in America, and yet here we are again.
This battle seems more vivid than others in the past simply because of what’s at stake … or at least what the GOP would like to be at stake. They’ve somehow gotten it into their heads that they can use this threat of furlough to de-fund the Affordable Care Act. You know, the one whose public insurance exchanges are set to open tomorrow and will open tomorrow regardless of whether other parts of the government shut down at midnight tonight?
The Republican party has fought and failed to overturn the Affordable Care Act no less than 40 times since it was signed into law back in 2010, even after it was upheld by the US Supreme Court last summer. Now they want to use the threat of putting nearly a million government employees out of work as leverage to get what they haven’t been able to get for the last three and a half years on their own.
Now I have no doubt that the Affordable Care Act is going to have some issues, both in its own execution as well as ancillary problems like how we’ve already seen some employers using it as an excuse to cut benefits and lay the blame elsewhere. But I think that this is an important road for us to go down and hopefully by the time we get a few years into it in full swing, that’s when the lights will finally come on that a single-payer system like the rest of the free world uses is what we really need.
Our government moves very slow, so unfortunately some growing pains are going to be required, but we’ll get there … as long as we stop people from torpedoing the project before it even gets off the ground.
And that’s always been my biggest issue with listening to the Republicans bitch about Obamacare over the last couple of years is although they all claim how it’s going to devastate our economy and small businesses and big businesses and ruin the Constitution and blah blah blah … they’ve never actually stepped forth with a comparable alternative that could actually take the place of the Affordable Care Act that they all loathe so much.
The current status quo is not acceptable where your ability to see the doctor is governed by whether or not you’re able to pay for it afterwards. I had to take my wife to the emergency room unexpectedly last month and they came in asking for payment before she had gotten feedback from the doctor of what was even wrong! Healthcare in America has been fucked for a really long time, and there’s a ton of different issues that all have to be addressed, but we have to start somewhere.
Of course, all of that being said, it’s very not fair that there’s a risk of 800,000 people getting sent home without pay tomorrow because Congress can’t do their job and commit to paying for the expenses that we already committed to. The Affordable Care Act shouldn’t even be on the table, but then again, neither should any of these other jobs at NASA or the EPA or the FDA or the Smithsonian or anywhere else. It’s always been a big pet peeve of mine whenever I hear of companies giving employees mandatory days off to help save a few bucks because I feel that if you can’t guarantee a wage to your employees in the first place, then you don’t deserve to be in the business of having employees working for you.
Because that’s what an employer does – they employ people! 😯
Instead, we’re going to watch them get stuck in the middle of all of this while one party puts blame on the other, citing “Those guys over there don’t care enough to compromise so that you can go back to work!” And that’s why a lot of people hate politicians because they’re not the ones missing out on a paycheck, and no matter how you feel about our healthcare crisis, I get that it’s awful hard to give a shit about the Affordable Care Act when you’re being told that you can’t go back to work at all until one side gives in about it.
Democrats shouldn’t have to give in to the Republicans and agree to de-fund this historic piece of legislation because Republicans shouldn’t even have it on the table in the first place. They need to pass a clean bill that doesn’t mention the Affordable Care Act and makes sure 800,000 government employees who aren’t Congressmen get to continue working tomorrow, and then next week if they want to try in vain for the 400,000th time to repeal the bane to freedom that is Obamacare, then whatever…
That continued inanity among the Republican party is a separate topic altogether, but right now we’ve got people who need to go to work.
I think I’m just going to start dropping the link to this vlogbrothers video whenever anyone wants to argue that climate change isn’t an actual thing anymore because … science.
Seriously.
Pollution bad = we should make less of it.
Fossil fuels depleting = we should use more alternatives.
Polar bear houses melting away = sad polar bears.
We need to do better. Science isn’t lying to you.
As if we haven’t celebrated enough anniversaries this week, today also happens to mark the 10th anniversary of when I became a Florida resident!
Yes, it was 10 years ago today – give or take a few hours – that I pulled off onto Dale Mabry Hwy here in Tampa, my little black Sunfire loaded down with the majority of my worldly possessions, after driving 1,438 miles over a two-day span with the Northern Michigan town where I spent the first 23 years of my life in the rear-view mirror. For my first three weeks in town, I lived out of a Howard Johnson in South Tampa for $160/week … which was exactly as lavish as you would expect from a $23/night motel room!
But I didn’t care – I was in Florida. And eventually I found myself a job, and an apartment, and slowly I started to build a little life for myself down here, seemingly on the other end of the country from pretty much everyone I’d ever known…
Being so far away from family has always been hard, but generally they’ve always been pretty understanding of why I left. I’d been out of high school for 5 years, I’d gone as far as I could in the company that I worked for, my social life existed exclusively online … I just needed more than what Gaylord had to offer me, and they got that.
It’s still a little weird to think that I essentially picked the Tampa Bay area at random. I thought that I wanted to move here so that I’d be closer to the water for diving, though in hindsight I’ve yet to don a regulator since I left Michigan! Originally I was going to move to St. Petersburg, but started to look around Tampa more after a couple of apartments that I looked at didn’t live up to their promotional photos online. I was even considering Orlando at one point because I wanted to study oceanography and UCF had a program while USF didn’t.
There were other cities where I’d considered in between, before I had the guts to go all in and just go to Florida, too. Grand Rapids, Lansing, Kalamazoo … even some little town in Maine at one point, simply because I had a friend who was stationed there in the Navy … good god, am I glad that that one never quite worked out! I like lobster, but not enough to tolerate that kind of cold…
The truth is that none of those places worked out for one reason or another, and even though I was bitter about each one at the time, it was kind of all the better because deep down I’d always wanted to move to Florida … those were merely intended to be stepping stones, even though in hindsight I’m sure I’d have gotten stuck in any one of them and probably would’ve never made it to where I am today.
I love living in Florida, just like I love living in Tampa. It’s a big city, but not so big that I’m afraid to walk around downtown. Right now we’re just about equal driving distances to the Gulf beaches and to Disney World, so you can’t beat that! I love having choices of places to go – something we didn’t have up north – whether we’re talking about things to do on a weekend or even just which Walmart to go grocery shopping at. Plus, we have enough places to eat that the nice place doesn’t have to mean Chili’s or Olive Garden.
Obviously I love the weather, especially going into the next couple of months where it starts getting a little cooler … but not nearly that cold.
Contrary to many of my neighbors up north, I actually like the diversity that comes from living in a bigger city – i.e. unlike my hometown, Tampa has more than one gay person and more than one black person, and not everybody speaks English, either! I love seeing palm trees everywhere, including in my own front yard. And I think it’s neat that often times we get to watch cruise ships head out to sea when we take Cleo to the dog park down by the water.
It’s funny because Sara and I have talked randomly about whether we’d ever want to move someplace else, be it closer to family either in Michigan or New York, or even to somewhere entirely different, and thankfully she’s kind of on the same page as me on this one in that Tampa is our home and we like it here just fine. 😉
I’ve lived almost 1/3 of my life now here in Florida, to the point where I can’t really picture living anywhere else. Sure, we might like to move up to a bigger house at some point, but we’d still stay here … in fact, we’ve kind of already got the neighborhood picked out once the book sales start to pick up!
When I first moved down here until I’m not really sure when they stopped, I used to have nightmares where I’d suddenly be not living in Florida anymore – I’d be back at my old job stocking shelves at the warehouse, and eventually I’d think that my rent is due soon, and then someone would have to remind me that that was over, now, and it didn’t work out and that’s why I was back home again. It had been such a struggle for me to get here that the threat of losing it was very scary because I figured that all it would take was one slip up and without anyone around to bail me out, I’d have no choice but to go back to Michigan…
Needless to say, I don’t really have those nightmares anymore, but it’s no question that moving to Florida has probably been one of the most significant events in my adult life. It’s incredibly cliche, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true – sometimes you just have to pack up and follow your dreams and see where the road takes you. There’s a part of me that wishes I’d have had the guts to do it sooner and I couldn’t tell you how many years I stared at that map of Florida that I had taped to my door before I finally took that leap, but at least I did it and that’s really all that matters.
You Can’t Vaccinate an Octopus
http://boingboing.net/2013/09/25/you-cant-vaccinate-an-octopu.html
Admittedly I was drawn to this one simply because the title is awesome, but it’s actually kind of interesting if you take a couple of minutes to read it. Apparently octopuses have a different type of immune system than us crazy vertebrates do which prevents them from learning how to fight different kinds of diseases. They say it’s one of the reasons that octopuses aren’t farmed for foods – because farmers typically pump their animals up with vaccinations to protect them from disease in such close, container quarters.
Also, just how much octopus do you eat on a daily basis, anyways?! It’s the chicken of nowhere, really.
Still, the more you know! 
![93a7be157a4a3c456ce00deea319c2c2[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/93a7be157a4a3c456ce00deea319c2c21.jpg)
(http://www.itsamememario.com/Nintendo+Pics/Yoshi-Cake/595)
![itsamememario.com_404_1376493073[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/itsamememario.com_404_13764930731-575x448.jpg)
(http://www.itsamememario.com/Nintendo+Pics/Best-Workstation-Ever/404)
![e195b67283375faaa3be580ce871b1e2[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/e195b67283375faaa3be580ce871b1e21.jpg)
(http://www.itsamememario.com/Nintendo+Pics/Another-Wedding-Cake/594)
![itsamememario.com_385_1376493027[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/itsamememario.com_385_13764930271.jpg)
(http://www.itsamememario.com/Nintendo+Pics/Its-Dangerous-To-Sleep-Alone-Take-This/385)
![itsamememario.com_375_1376493055[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/itsamememario.com_375_13764930551.jpg)
(http://www.itsamememario.com/Nintendo+Pics/The-Legend-Of-Donkey-Kong/375)
All links via It’s a Meme, Mario! – great site!
…though I don’t really get the Hitler reference in the watermarks – kids these days… 😛
Holy cowzers, have we come a long way!!!
So apparently I missed the official date earlier this spring, but would you believe that this year marks 10 years that I’ve been blogging?! Technically I think it’s been a little longer than that, but try as I might to dig up those very first posts that I did on comedic-genius.com pre-2003, the farthest that I’ve ever been able to go back is to the beginning of my LiveJournal days … May 7, 2003, to be exact.
And here we are, roughly 10.3 years later.
I first started blogging when I was 22 years old, still living at home, and was arguably still in my fairly early days of writing, whereas a decade later I’m staring down over 700,000 words and nearly 3,000 posts later on this blog alone, not to mention the seemingly countless other websites and side projects that I’m constantly trying to juggle! I’ve said it before, but I just think it’s kind of cool to have this vast repository of stories and random happenings that have occurred in my life over all of those years, and it makes me wonder what the next ten years are going to look like…
I hope I’m still blogging in another 10 years when I’m … ughhhh, 43 years old?! By then I’ll probably have kids running around, and my wife and I will have been married for more than 15 years, and hopefully I’ll be writing those brilliant blog posts from my yacht out in the Gulf of Mexico after selling out in an amazing money grab that the world of humor columnists have never seen before! 😉
Whatever happens, with any luck I’ll manage to capture the best of the highlights right here … or maybe on another site, although given how long it takes me to do redesigns, probably right here! At the rate I’m going, in 10 years this blog will likely be over 2 million words and 5,000 posts, and though they may not have much coherency from one post to another, that’s my life and I like it just fine that way…
As sort of a fun, little look back at the last ten years, I took a dive into the archives and picked out these ten posts that stood out to me as reflection-worthy from the last decade. They don’t necessarily represent huge moments in my life, but I thought that they were kind of fun in a random sort of way and besides, 2,826 is a lot of posts to go through and tagging has only brought us so far, so this is about as good as you’re going to get! 😛
We’ll sync up again in 2023…
![919YdoOHuHL._SL1500_[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/919YdoOHuHL._SL1500_1-575x814.jpg)
Regardless of what you actually thought about tonight’s series finale, it’s kind of strange to think that this incredible show – arguably one of the best suspense dramas on television these days – is now over after 8 long years!
This is one that my wife and I have been watching from the very beginning … in fact, we had actually just started dating when this show premiered in the fall of 2006. I don’t recall what actually drew us to tuning in, but it certainly didn’t take long before we were completely hooked. Maybe it was Michael C. Hall himself – I’ve been a big fan of his since Six Feet Under, even though Sara never showed much interest in revisiting that one. Ironically, I guess Dexter ended up being centered around death as well, albeit the other end of the equation this time around…
But boy, did this show have down pat the art of leaving you on the edge of your seat! Maybe not so much in this last season because admittedly the first few episodes for the most part felt a little dry, but some of those earlier seasons were killer … pardon the pun. Never before have I had a show that’s made me exclaim, “Why aren’t we watching this six months from now on DVD?!” more consistently after every episode, and they did a really great job with a lot of the guest stars for each season, too … my favorite, of course, being John Lithgow as Trinity – the storyline that culminated in probably my single-most favorite episode in the entire season.
If I had to rank my top three seasons, they’d probably go:
And so as for tonight’s season finale…
*** SPOILERS ***
…I guess I’m kind of torn about it because when we first watched it unfold, I was kind of content up until the fade away with Hannah and Harrison in Argentina, and then we met Lumberjack Dexter and things got a little weird! And I think it was confusing because all of this time, we had been setup with the notion for the finale that this only ends one of two ways for Dexter – either in a body bag or in prison, and so at least *I* didn’t put an ounce of thought into the idea that maybe there were other ways that Dexter could finally “be punished” for his sins, too.
I mean, I kind of had a feeling that Deb would one way or another be a casualty, though I wasn’t really sure how. And I’ve read some complaints about people not liking that Dex took her body out to sea in the same manner that he dealt with all of his other victims, but I suppose for me that was a little symbolic because he did feel responsible for all of the bad that had happened in her life, even if it hadn’t been dealt directly from his knives. So I was ok with that.
Now that fact that he survived the hurricane while his boat did not … a bit far-fetched, but whatever – it’s a TV show about a serial killer who’s eluded his peers at the police dept. for 8 years now! Hurricane survival is the least of my worries!
I guess what I didn’t care for, ultimately, and I have a feeling that many people agree with this sentiment, is the last minute or so where we see Dexter alive and living the life of a lumberjack … somewhere.
I may have missed a clue somewhere that hinted otherwise, but as far as I could tell, we’re to believe that he’s now living a lonely life without Hannah and Harrison, and that’s his punishment for all that he’s done. Kind of rough and unexpected, but again if we all knew that this series had to end with Dexter finally being held accountable for the things that he’s done, isolation as a means to protect the ones that he loves from himself is a pretty harsh reality for our lovable serial killer.
It makes sense, but it doesn’t leave the best taste in your mouth … almost making you wish that somebody had bested him instead.
If it had been me doing the writing, I’d have taken it one of two ways instead…
If we were able to ultimately get to the happy ending, Dexter would open the door to the cabin to find Harrison and Hannah there waiting for him … maybe even for the first time, where Harrison comes running to him and Hannah cries as they lock eyes and the screen fades.
Granted, even I myself would argue that the happy ending is a bit much for this show … as much as I wanted to see Dexter & Hannah live happily ever after … and so instead, here’s a super simple way in my eyes to redeem the existing ending with hardly any changes at all…
Dexter comes home to the cabin after a long day at work and the camera fixates on him to imply that now he’s very much alone. Then Dexter stands up and walks into the other room where we find a kill room has been setup with a new victim waiting for him, and we end on the note that even after faking his own death, Dexter will never truly escape his Dark Passenger.
I don’t know … I guess the ending was a little bittersweet and I would’ve liked to see it go a bit differently, but in reality if I look back to some of those earlier seasons, even then I remember thinking that I couldn’t imagine how long he’d be able to evade anyone who managed to catch onto his trail. I’ve been saying this for eight years now, but it still makes me want to read the book series to see what they did differently … to be completely honest, at one point this season I actually found myself up late one night looking for plot synopses of the books to try and get some insight on what they were going to do with the final season, and everything that I read made it sound like they actually deviated quite a bit from the books for the TV show. Apparently he’s with Rita much longer – she might not even die, and I guess at one point Dexter starts to teach Aster and/or Cody how to kill like he does.
It would be fun to go back and read them now, especially having such an incredible mental picture of Michael C. Hall as Dexter Morgan to help put a face to the main character … I know how most people always rave over the book compared to the movie, but it’s kind of funny how sometimes seeing a Hollywood face that’s become attached to a role can make the original book itself shine in a whole new light. I know that I was that way after watching Peter Jackson’s telling of The Lord of the Rings, anyways.
All in all Dexter has been a pretty great show, even if it did lose a little steam here in the final season or two … I think after so much chaos, it actually starts to limit your direction a little – I know I personally felt that way with Weeds there at the end. Still, I think this is going to be a fun one to load up on the DVD Player/Magic Streaming Box in 5 or 10 years to revisit the serial acts of one Dexter Morgan … the finale might not have been exactly on the nose, but there was still way too much great TV in the earlier seasons not to give it a replay on down the road when there aren’t any other arguably justifiable serial killers on TV worth watching. 🙂
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