I was at the grocery store on Sunday and I decided that it wasn't good enough to just stock up on the sensible stuff I was there to get. I also needed to live a little. (A very little.) So I popped over to the candy aisle and picked up the two most unusually flavored premium candy bars I could find: Lindt's Excellence: Chili (dark chocolate), and Frey Supreme Cinnamon and Blood Orange (white chocolate).

The Chili bar is *amazing*. It just tastes like high-quality dark chocolate to start with, but it has this rich, firey aftertaste. Soooo good.

Edit: Broke down and tried the cinnamon and blood orange bar also. It's hard to imagine, but it's even better. I can only take so much white chocolate from, say, Hershey's - it's enjoyable, but it's kinda sickly-sweet and gets old fast. This stuff is spicy and tangy and delightful and I'm going to have a really hard time eating it one little block at a time over days the way one ought to do with premium candy bars.

I have really got to avoid "worst X" threads. Both "best" and "worst" threads are generally fairly pointless, of course. But "best" threads will usually contain a bunch of commonly agreed excellence with a smattering of interesting choices and at worst the occasional thing someone just latched onto due to some quirk of personality that's not fundamentally all that great. This isn't terribly exciting or anything, but it's pretty harmless to the old blood pressure.

"Worst" threads, on the other hand....you'd think that people could stick to things that are actually clearly poorly done. Game-wise, things like "Big Mutha Truckers" and most of those shitty licensed games. Anime-wise, things like...like...well, to be honest, I mostly just watch good anime, or at least ones reputed to be good, whether or not I wind up liking them personally. So I don't have an example off the top. Etc. But it inevitably seems to descend into a forum for people with shitty taste ranting about popular things, or at best, people with generally good taste calling out something they have a personal grudge against.

Case in point, the Anime group's "Worst Anime" thread. I can kinda understand some of the stuff thrown out there (I wasn't a huge fan of what I saw of Hellsing or Inuyasha, for example, and DBZ looks awful.), but people were quite seriously listing things like RahXephon (the single best mecha show I've ever seen. An Evangelion ripoff, sure, but done far better.) and Elfen Lied (which I admit to primarily enjoying on the basis of telekinetic dismemberment and female nudity, but that's not to say that it's not really well done in the way it fuses horror with harem comedy and subtler emotional notes. And the theme song is amazing.). Also, .hack//SIGN - that one I can more understand, as it's really slow-paced and clearly not for everyone, but still. Worst my ass.

Some of you may note that I have unpopular stances on certain popular things, such as not being all that thrilled with Half-Life (the sequel being a favorite, so I'm not *that* weird), and I do tend to point these out...but I'm pretty sure I've never claimed them to be the "worst" anything. Because that's silly. Popular opinion may not be a reliable barometer of quality at all levels, but if something is truly, genuinely awful (which it should be, to go into a "worst" category), that awfulness will make itself known. Not too many people would list "Manos: The Hands of Fate" among their favorite movies, y'know? (MST3K version notwithstanding.)

I've had about a month with my new job now. It's definitely a significant adjustment - I am now doing essentially the sort of office work that so many other people do for their entire adult lives, as opposed to the hectic, mindnumbing repetition of fast food or shelving library books. I'd never before used such devices as fax machines or industrial-level copying machines, nor had to deal with the bureaucratic bullshit associated with having one's own government-issued PC at one's very own desk. Which is also new, incidentally. I may only have the standard cubicle and not an office, but that's infinitely more personal space than I've had at my disposal in any previous job (I had a locker and a basket, at the library. And nothing at all at Arby's.)

The work itself is unusual in that I am being paid through a federal grant for a research project whose manager I am assisting. It is thus an entirely new position (something rare in government circles) and it means my duties are as yet ill-defined. It also means I work directly with my boss and only peripherally with anyone else. And that in turn has meant that I spent the last week doing very little aside from reading ebooks, the culmination of a gradual draining of the available work for me. (I am apparently just too efficient and quick.) I am assured things will pick up soon. Hopefully. At least on Monday there'll be a software demonstration I'll be involved with.

My extensive sojourns with ebooks have led me to realize the inadequacy of the homebrew Bookr PDF reader for PSP, which develops increasing rendering errors as one progresses further into a PDF, so I leveraged part of my shiny new salary to buy myself a refurbished Palm Tungsten T3 on eBay - $125, including an addon Zeo Photo Traveler 1.3 megapixel SDIO camera card. I loves it. It's got a lot of neat functionality (massive improvements over the old black and white Palm IIIxe my mother handed down to me some years ago when she bought herself a Tungsten T2), reads ebooks like a dream...and now I have a digital camera to play with, finally. Low-end, a bit finicky, and boy did I have trouble figuring out how to get it to sync the photos over onto something internet-friendly (it does do Bluetooth internet, but I don't.). But it's something.

Something with which I can wow you all with cock shots!

The culmination of all that stuff from my last journal entry is as follows:

I have a new job. Finally, and at long last, I have one. I'm going to be a Clerk/Typist with the Ramsey County Child Protection Unit, working on the something-or-other special program they're doing with the U of M. It's not quite full-time, and it's two years only, but it's going to pay my bills and then some for that time. And it's a quick single bus hop over from my apartment, with really easy access to a grocery store (or three!) on the way home. I start on the 19th. I've already given notice at the library. Gonna miss those people, and that job. For better or for worse, it's been a substantial part of my life for my entire adulthood and a good chunk of my teens. But I have every confidence that this is my first step to something better.

I've been looking for a full time job for over a year now. Until this past week, nobody had so much as acknowledged that I'd applied (except for the City of Stillwater, who politely informed me that because I had not redundantly enclosed my resume with the comprehensive application form I had sent in, I was not eligible for consideration. Since they'd never actually told me I needed to do this, I was a bit miffed.).

But last month I applied to take the Clerk/Typist I/II/III position exam with Ramsey County, my current (for the past 7+ years) employer. And I did so, along with 400+ other people. Last week I got my results: 96%, 4th on the eligible list. I've already received two calls to schedule interviews (one with Juvenile Probation, the other with Child Protection). Keep in mind that it took something like six months to get to this point when they hired me for my current job.

I'm slightly flabbergasted. Apparently the County loves me. And only the County.

Is it any wonder I'm in favor of government work? ;P

You know, I'm not Microsoft's biggest fan. In fact, I'm really more actively engaged in despising them, most of the time. Windows, don't even get me started on it. Office? Ick. C#? Bleh. Windows Media (Player, formats, all of that) - godawful. Internet Explorer? One of the worst browsers on the market, totally UI rearranged in version 7 for no good reason. DirectX? I have no handle on whether it is, in itself, good or bad. I've never worked with it. But it's a proprietary set of APIs that makes porting to non-Microsoft OSes and devices unnecessarily difficult, so that's enough reason to dislike it. The Zune? Hahahahahahaha.

But their gaming division doesn't seem to be doing too badly. The original Xbox was nothing special, but it eventually became a serviceable enough console and I enjoy a fair number of games for it, as well as it being hands-down the console for multiplatform games. They've also got some fairly decent games under their belts, albeit mostly due to their habit of buying whole developers upon said developers achieving some sort of success.

And the 360? The console I was most down on coming into this generation? I love it. I really just got it to play the exclusive games - Dead Rising, Perfect Dark Zero, Enchanted Sonata, Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, etc. You know the drill. But as happened with my PSP, it's turning out to be so much more. Achievements, of course, are a brilliant concept. I'm not sure how achievement-whory I'm liable to be - I suspect I'll probably ignore multiplayer achievements (other than coop ones on the same console) and anything that's very labor-intensive and out of the regular course of the game, as well as ones I simply don't have the skills to get. But they add extra spice to practically any game. It's a quite serviceable DVD player - far better than my PS2, and without the stupid extra expense of the Xbox's DVD capacity (I never sprung for it, thankfully.), although I'd like it if it had more direct button controls. Downloading demos and trailers and extra content is handy. Having all sorts of tracking for what I'm up to is a little Big Brotherish, but useful.

And then there are the things I discovered today: One, it connects to and plays music off of iPods. A total shock to me (Zune compatibility, to be expected...competing product? Not so much.), and something that would be really awesome. Of course, it doesn't seem to be working with my specific iPod. Hopefully I'll figure out how to fix that, or someone will tell me, either way. More significantly...it can stream media from my PC. Music, photos, videos...all of them go across my network easy as pie. The music is okay (saves me having to rip to the 360), but I'd rather use my iPod, since I keep most of my music on my Mac, which is *not* compatible. The photos...well, I never really understood the point of that feature to begin with, on my PSP or iPod either. But the videos...ohhhh, so nice. Full-screen TV video viewing, with proper controller button shortcuts, unlike DVD. Resume where you left off. Support for video formats that the internet community actually uses (unlike my PSP and iPod)!

Translation: I now have the ultimate way to watch pirated video.

Hmm. http://www.stupidfilter.org

I think I like. (I also find it amusing - and appropriate - that the "random stupid comment" sampler seems to generate mostly Youtube comments. It *is* one of the major hotbeds of stupidity on the Internets.)

*thrills*

My 360 arrived tonight. It's all set up, works great (although I did have a brief Red Ring of Death scare when I set it flat on the ground. Standing on end seems to have fixed it.), and even included the Xbox Live headset when they claimed it wouldn't. It's kind of shitty and I don't think I'll be using it, but more stuff for the same price is always nice.

Dead Rising is indeed a bit annoying on an SDTV. I thought the problem with the text would be reading mission objectives and that sort of thing, things that I could get around with a walkthrough. No, the problem is reading all the tiny little action and item labels that the game pops up around you. I think that's fairly important, and I don't think I'm going to get to play Dead Rising until I get an HDTV. Oh well. It's my friend's copy for exactly this reason.

Now all I need is a decently long ethernet cable and a proper router and I should be good to go. Well, and a Play and Charge Kit for the wireless controller wouldn't hurt, but I plan to use my previously purchased wired one for most things.

I need to stay far, far away from eBay. I start poking around there on Tuesday hoping to score a cheap laptop to load full of RPG sourcebooks in PDF format and maybe use for Wifi and hotseat gaming and that sort of thing. By yesterday, I've wound up bidding on an Xbox 360, because, dammit, it was sitting at like $60 and that would have been a steal. Plus I do want one, and that *was* something I was planning to do with my tax refund....*after* completing driver's ed and then having my mother repay me my tuition expenses for it.

Tonight, I lost both laptops I bid on (it appears people are still willing to pay more than $100 for substantially out of date laptops, but I'm not.), and wound up paying a grand total of $270 for that 360... it jumped $25 with literally less than a minute to go. Fucking snipers. Grand total: $225 bid, $18 for 5-7 day shipping, $15ish sales tax (it's in Texas, so why they're charging sales tax is beyond me), $8 for insurance. I don't normally truck with shipping insurance, but this is a high ticket item.

Which is admittedly still a deal - I'm getting a Premium with the 20 gig hard drive, all the extras except the Live headset I don't need and an ethernet cable, plus Forza 2 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance, something that would have run me at least $400 new....but then, this one isn't new. And that money was supposed to go to said driver's ed tuition. I just couldn't let it go. *mutters*

Also bidding on Crackdown, The Darkness, and Saint's Row. I'll probably borrow Dead Rising, Perfect Dark Zero, and maybe something else from a friend. Dead Rising I don't expect to be able to play well since I don't have an HDTV, but the fact that my friend owns it lets me make sure without shelling out cash.

I received another membership offer from the AARP today. At first this bemused me, but on further reflection I can see their point. After all, in six months I'll be 25 years old. Ancient. Decrepit. Mere steps from the grave.

Also: Apparently Zodiac is rated R for "some strong killings". (among other things). This makes me unreasonably happy.