I should have known better.  Any day that started the way today did deserves to be drowned right at the beginning.  I mean, it started with my alarm going off at 615am... that right there makes it a bad day.

It also involved me getting into the shower without a washcloth.  But that's okay, because I also didn't have a towel.  I managed the rest of the pre-going-to-work routine without incident... even put on my shirt correctly... and headed out into the HOLYCRAPWHERE'DALLTHEHEATGO to get the DuckMobile warmed up. 

Walking towards it, I saw there was some small amount of snow covering the right side of the car... y'know, the type that'll blow away the moment you put the car in gear and barely touch the accelerator... so I change course, brush it off with my glitten-covered hands, then begin walking around the rear of the DuckMobile, heading towards the driver's side door.

I'm sure my readers who live in the Midwest may have noticed a small earthquake around 745am central time.  I need to apologize for that, as it was my fault.  My bad.  I rounded the corner of the car, made it about even with the license plate ("WNDRDUK"), when the invisible asphalt weasels reached up and grabbed my ankle.  Next thing I know, I'm headed towards the surface of the parking lot at fairly high (and increasing!) velocity. 

Left knee hit first, followed by the right knee, my face, and then the rest of me.  I'm lying there, spitting out snow and meltysalt, probably looking like a particularly comedic walrus, and all I can say is "ow."  Yeah, that's me, Mr Witty Repartee, in the flesh.  I haul myself to my feet, get to the driver's door, and where the fsck are my keys?  Sure enough, they were lying there, in the middle of the Khumbu Icefall, right where I dropped them during my failed attempt at a gravity turn.  Fortunately, my recovery mission did not result in Impact: Parking Lot 2: Electric Boogaloo.

While I drove in to the Duck U Bookstore, I began to realize that I might have done myself some harm.  The giveaway was the intense throbbing in my knees, though it was with a sense of relief I noticed no marks on my face... surprising, considering that it felt like I left an imprint of my chin in the concrete.  Not because I'm vain about my looks... after all, I know what I look like... but because customers find blood and open wounds to be off-putting.

By the middle of the day, I could feel my left knee stiffening up something fierce.  Great, just swell!  Then the student came in to sell some books back who decided that since I wasn't offering 200% back on her titles, it was okay to start swearing at me.  It's not like I'm unused to that... during Finals week, I'm the most hated duck on campus, after all... but on top of the rest of the day, it was quite the moment.

So eventually the day ended, I limped out to my car, picked up some stuff at the grocery store, came home, and took another header in the Icefall... this time while carrying two cases of soda.  It should go without saying that once again my left knee discovered that gravity ain't just a good idea, but the law.  The bruise should be amazing. 

So here I am, blogging, and I've got to go to bed and do it all over again tomorrow.  I love my life and everything about it right now.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:31 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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The Fall semester has come to an end at the Duck U Bookstore... except for Finals week.  And when it's Finals Week, that means it's also Buyback week, which means that Wonderduck is going to be in Hell.

Which would be bad, except I've been there all semester.  As yet, I still can't get into all the details, but let's just say that I still don't have an assistant manager, and probably never will again.  What I also haven't had is another keyholder.  Yup... since July 30th, I've been open-to-close every day, minimum 9.5 hours.  Minimum.  Also five home football games, a few visit days, and quite a few days where I went in on Saturday to get stuff done. 

Like I'll be doing tomorrow.  Because I've got to get that stuff done before Monday, or we're seriously screwed.  But I lost a filling a week-and-change ago, and I can't go get the tooth pulled until I've got another keyholder.  I'm doomed.  Doomed, I tell you.

I hate working on Saturdays.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:26 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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FINALLY!

Sure, maybe everybody else has already managed to get into orbit around Mün, or landed there for that matter, but I never pulled it off.  Until tonight, courtesy of my Delta-K rocket, some seat-of-the-spacesuit piloting, and a metric fsckton of luck.  Even better, I think I'll have enough go-juice to get Jebediah back, to boot!

The next step?  Land on the darned thing, and get back.  I think the Delta-K will have the oomph to get the lander up... I hope.  I have high hopes.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:05 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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I've figured out what happened to Comet ISON!

I really didn't mean to do this.  Billy-Bob Kerman was doing an EVA... for SCIENCE!... and apparently the orbit of the Delta K's capsule dipped just a smidge too far into the atmosphere.

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So I went out into the ravening hordes today.

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I'm tellin' ya, I'm so busy I don't even have a duck photo for Turkey Day yet.  Later this evening, probably.  Still, for all of you and yours, have a Happy Thanksgiving!  Or, for my overseas readers, have a great Thursday!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:09 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I'm a space geek.  This should come as no surprise to many of my readers.  So when Kerbal Space Program (aka KSP) proved to be ridiculously popular, I jumped into it with both feet.  It's challenging.

More often than not, this is the result of one of my launches.  Or something similar, at least.  Sometimes it's a staging error: it's generally quite bad to deploy your parachute during takeoff, for example.  Sometimes it's just a conceptual error: if one solid-fuel booster is good, eight must be eight times as good!  But sometimes... sometimes, it's something like neglecting to cross-brace things together.  Who knew that could matter?

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:51 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
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I've a problem.  It's making my life miserable.  It's practically killed my blog, as my sharper-eyed readers may have noticed.  I can't talk about it yet.  But it's ruining my so-called life, and I don't mean that in a livejournal-y hyperbole-y sort of way. 

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:14 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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They used to call us "the PDI".  Poor Dumb Infantry.  Yeah.  That was before they wrapped us in a battlesuit, armed us with gauss rifles and micronukes, and watched us dominate the field of combat again.  Sure, that was close to 80 years ago now and tanks and other armored vehicles have taken the field back again, but the PDI is still a force to be reckoned with.

Which is why Mama Murphy's little boy is where he is right now, in a ferrocrete trench emplaced near the top of Hill 400 somewhere in the middle of a frozen Hell.  No, seriously, it's friggin' cold.  These battlesuits are great things, really... I'd have been dead a half-dozen times in the past week alone without mine... but I've had mine for six months, it's taken a helluva beating, and while Sparky over there tells me it's fine, the heater in this thing is on the fritz.

Now, I don't know why I'm here.  Hell, none of us know why our squad is perched on Hill 400, except that we were told to stay here and keep the bad guys from taking it.  We also don't know why the bad guys want it.  Herk over there says they want it because we've got it and they don't.  Herk's kind of a jerk.  Anyway, they do want it, awful bad it seems.  Down the slope of the hill, you can see just how bad... lot of scrap iron that used to be tanks sitting out there.  There's a whole battalion's worth of not-powered-infantry out there, too.  That makes me glad it's not summer... the snow means I can't see 'em, and the cold means I can't smell 'em, either.   Stupid, sending squishies against battlesuits... hope the idiot that came up with that idea is out there in the snow too.

This position is pretty sweet, considering that it seems to be Target #1 for the bad guys.  I mentioned the trenches already, right?  Six inches of... special... concrete, set into the side of a hill, so there's multiple feet of dirt and rock in front of it, too.  Pretty much proof against anything they've thrown at us so far.  When we get to go off duty, the... let's call 'em barracks, for lack of a better word that I can use in public... the barracks are even farther under ground, and it's warm, too.  The LT came by when we first moved in here, he said a nuke could go off over us and we'd be safe in there.

I don't want to find out.

LT moved on after saying that, haven't seen him since.  For that matter, haven't seen the rest of the company, either.  Still got plenty of ammo, though, so I guess we're still Ace Nifty.   We haven't come off scott-free, mind.  Brinks took a tank round to the chest; we're still finding bits of him around here, four days later.  The Newbie panicked and tried to win the war on his own.  Didn't work.  Hell, even Sarge got his armor opened up.  He's mostly unhurt, but he can't leave the barracks... too cold for an unprotected squishy up here.  Plenty he can still do, though his cooking leaves a lot to be desired.

All in all, if I have to be shot at, being a PDI in this defensive position is probably as good as I can hope for. 

Yeah, me and my big mouth, right?  No sooner did I write that than Sarge said that there's something big moving out there, out in the dark.  A few moments later, I could hear it, all squeaking metal and humming electric motors.  I poked my head up to look, and immediately wished I hadn't.  The built-in night vision viewers had kicked in automatically, so I got a really nice view of the something.  50 feet tall at the top of the tower.  About 120 feet long.  Guns.  Lots and lots of guns.  Herk said it first: "Ogre.  It's a bloody-bedamned Ogre!"

The fluid reclamation system in my armor got a workout just about then. 

Sarge was on the comms, trying to get permission to withdraw the squad, even while the rest of the group was getting on the firing line.  There wasn't enough ferrocrete in the world to put between us and it.  Jimmy was laughing like a crazy man... he couldn't believe that they were sending one of THOSE at us.  To be fair, it did seem like a bit of overkill to me, too.  And then it fired, and I realized we were doomed... it was a good two klicks outside of our longest-ranged weapons.  When those rounds hit, it was like a hand came down from the heavens and scooped out a chunk of the hill.  A big chunk.

The next rounds took out the top of the hill, three squaddies, and the barracks.  The rest of us scattered to the four winds... except for me.  Because I'm an idiot.  Because I never did like running very much.  But mostly because half of my left leg is gone, and that's a helluva limp to deal with.  The built-in medkit in the suit shot me up with joy juice and locked down the stump awfully quick.  Not gonna bleed out, in any case.  Yay for me.  I'm just gonna be run over by a giant self-aware unstoppable war machine.  Well, if I'm going down, I'm going to go down in style.

When the top of the damn thing's tower crested the edge of the trench, I was there, flipping it off.  It actually stopped moving, like it was either confused by what I was doing, or it was expecting me to do something else.  So I flipped it off with my other hand.

And the top of the tower, where a lot of an Ogre's sensors are located, exploded.  As did a lot of the rest of the thing.  I know now that it was a combination of bombs from a squadron of fighters, big shells from Divisional Arty, and the rest of the company finally showing up... but at the time, I just sort of stared at my fingers, wondering why I'd never managed to do that before.  The painkillers, y'know.

Anyway, it was the company Intel guy that took my picture.  You've seen it: one guy, flipping off the Ogre, better known than that Iwo Jima picture now.  Yep, that's me.  Luckiest bastard in the world.  Mama Murphy's idiot son.  The limp isn't too bad, all things being told.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:36 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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Oh look, a bird.

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So just before the Duck U Bookstore closed for the day, I got a phone call from The Librarian.  As it'd been a month or so since we last saw each other, she was like "hey, dinner," and I was all like "hey, cool, where," and she was like "sushi," and I did the whole "ace nifty" thing and hung up and got the store closed and, like, boogied out to go meet her.

I'd like to apologize for that sentence.

I showed up a couple of minutes late, as I am old and slow, but as it turns out it didn't matter.  The place of sushi was as crowded as I've ever seen it... on a Tuesday, no less.  It took nearly a half-hour for us to be waited upon, another half-hour for the food to be delivered.  But when it arrived... oh, when it arrived...

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:11 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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As terrifying as it is to think about, Duck U's midterms ended this past Tuesday.  The rest of the week was this odd beastie called "Fall Break."  Similar to Spring Break in that the Duck U fledgelings got a few days off from school, but completely dissimilar in that the weather is cold and ishy.  Anyway, on the Friday of Fall Break, the Duck U offices are closed... and when that happens, the Duck U Bookstore is closed as well!

Which meant that I only worked for a few hours today, after a meeting with the Duckford Visitor Bureau of course.  I was home by 4pm, and after some breakfast (no, I didn't mis-type; what else do you call the first meal of the day?) decided to take a nap.  Just a couple of wonderful, wonderful hours of blissful slumber, unconscious to the cares of the world, refreshing both the mind and the body.  Afterwards, I'd sit down and finally close out the first Evangelion movie writeup.  It's a good plan, let's go with it!  On three... one, two, three, sleep!

Four hours later, the plan had been crumpled up and thrown into a trashcan.  I can only assume I needed the sleep, but geehorseyfat, that sort of thing does play hob with the whole blogging thing.  Maybe tomorrow night... after working the football game, then dinner with Ph.Duck.

Hey, it could happen.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:43 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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After having missed the movie Pacific Rim in the theatres this summer, I vowed that I would purchase a copy of it as soon as it became available.  This, I did not do.  In actuality, I pre-ordered the film in a Blu-Ray / DVD package close to three weeks ago.  When it was delivered this morning, I was very much like a duck in a rye bread store.  Sure, I couldn't actually DO anything with it until I got home, but it was here and that was all that mattered.

I came home, made some dinner, fired up the DVD player, and sat down to watch.  Now, understand something.  When it comes to watching movies at home alone, I tend to pause the film a few times... run to the bathroom, get something to drink, y'know, that sort of thing.  Not tonight.  Tonight, I didn't even notice the time passing.  From moment one to the post-credit scene, I was locked into the film.

Pacific Rim gave me everything I hoped for from this particular movie: giant robots punching giant monsters in the face.  Repeatedly.  In clever ways.  There are going to be two types of people who see flick: those who hate it, and those that realize that it's the best movie ever.

Let me stay that again, in a stylized way that makes it look like I'm shouting each word, then pausing dramatically afterwards or something:

BEST.

MOVIE.

EVER.


Now that I've gotten that out of the way... for an anime fan, Pacific Rim is probably the closest we'll ever get to a live-action Evangelion (giant robots punching giant angels monsters in the face), but without the whiny hero and with more Rinko Kikuchi.

Look, the film is full of cliches.  I got that, but here's the thing: you don't care.  It resonates with the kid in you and makes it jump up and down like it's full of chocolate and mountain dew. 

Watch it.  Love it.  Thank me later.  If I didn't have to go to work in the morning, I'd watch it again.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:22 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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1 Saw it in the theaters, it was awesome.  Of course everyone was a scenery-chewing cliche.  But that's how it should be!  The point is that they did it so amazingly well.

Also, Rinko Kikuchi should be the new spokesmodel for the Dreamliner... covered in carbon fiber and smokin' hot.

(Yeah, I used that before.)

Posted by: Mauser at October 16, 2013 05:50 AM (TJ7ih)

2 Saw it in the theater opening weekend, loved it to pieces. They did so much right and not enough wrong to be bothered about. Stacker's "One, don't touch me... two, don't ever touch me..." bit is brilliant. The... courtship, for lack of a better term... is another well-done thing. (As one Tumblr commentor puts it, "Please Daddy can I kick his ass he just asked for it please oh please oh please?!?") Keeping angst to the minimum requirements, yet another.

If anything its main flaw is that there wasn't enough of all the good things, but that would've made it twice as long a movie. (More of the other Jaeger teams! More giant robot punch! More more more!)

Posted by: GreyDuck at October 16, 2013 11:31 AM (3m7pZ)

3 I give the movie 5 SDF-1s!  (And wholly endorse the Duck's review of it. )

Posted by: Dreamshadow at October 17, 2013 10:07 AM (T5fuR)

4 I really enjoyed it too.  
Though I admit to wanting to pull my hair out at the ending...  Nuclear reactors don't explode (well, not as nuclear explosions).  That's always bothered me in movie.  Nuclear reactor != nuclear bomb.

Posted by: DrHeinous at October 22, 2013 10:04 AM (/Y+Yb)

5 By the way, Honest Trailers did one for Pacific Rim that sums it up nicely.

Posted by: Mauser at October 24, 2013 01:46 AM (TJ7ih)

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So the only problem I had with my new computer, Nori, was that the keyboard that came with her was absolutely terrible.  Oh, don't get me wrong, it worked fine, and the wirelessness of it was a pleasant experience... but it was a chicklet.  That is, the keyboard is of chicklet-style, little square keys, like a laptop's keyboard except slightly less pleasurable to use.  You're expecting something comfortable to type upon when you have a desktop computer, after all.  However, all my keyboards still had PS/2 connectors, and Nori only had USB... so I had to use the terribad keyboard for a while.

Until today.

Not only is it a full size, full key keyboard with keys that actually CLICK! when you press down on them, but the Logitech G105 has LED backlighting as well!  It's lovely, particularly when you look at it through the viewfinder of my camera and it looks like the LEDs look like they're pulsing right-to-left due to what I assume is a weird frequency thingy between the LEDs and my camera. 

I happily packed away the wireless keyboard and laughed when it gave a quiet *beep* when it was taken out of range of the computer.  I'm a cruel duck.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:18 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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On the whole, this has been a really bad week.  I might even be able to tell y'all about it sometime.  As a trade, here's Rio Tachibana in her sugar glider outfit.

Why do I like such a stupid, stupid show?

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News came out today that Tom Clancy had passed away at the age of 66.  He was probably best known for "inventing" the Techno-Thriller genre of writing in books such as The Hunt For Red October, Red Storm Rising, The Sum of All Fears, and many, many more.  He was also a part-owner of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team.  The books in the so-called "Ryanverse", based on the adventures of Jack Ryan, all hit #1 on the bestseller lists, and here at The Pond, he has a couple of shelves all to himself in the library.  It's safe to say that once his books began to be ghostwritten, their quality dropped, but until that point he was clearly one of the giants of the literary world.  I remember when the book Rainbow Six came out... I was running a Waldenbooks here in Duckford, and I bought the first copy out of the box.  I then took it home and put it in a difficult-to-reach location for three weeks, just so I wouldn't read it.  See, I was about to take a week's vacation, and I wanted it to be my vacation read...

I just looked back at the release history of his books...arguably, he hasn't released a good book since 2002's Red Rabbit or 2003's Teeth of the Tiger.  I don't think it matters, though.  Even if you stop right there and include his non-fiction titles (mostly co-authored with "researcher" John Gresham), he has an enviable back catalog to say the least.  Not too shabby for an insurance salesman who sold his first title to a history press for $5000...

I'll have to put him up there with Heinlein on the short list of my favorite authors.  Now, where is my copy of Red Storm Rising anyway...?

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:36 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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I remember, back in the day, the America's Cup sailing race was A Big Thing, when Dennis Conner brought the Cup back home in 1987.  Heck, Ted Turner (yes, that Ted Turner) captained an America's Cup boat in 1977.  But today, one of the greatest comebacks in the history of sports in general occurred, when Team Oracle USA won the Cup 9 - 8, after being down 8 - 1 to Team New Zealand.  Yep, they had to win eight races in a row to hoist the trophy, and they did.  Simply incredible. 

Even more incredible are the boats the teams are using now.  Back In The Day, they used boats that looked like yachts.  Now?  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Team Oracle USA's boat!

It's a damned F1 car is what it is!  Carbon fiber multi-hull design, hydrofoil-capable, and a 13-story tall hard wing!  They don't even bother calling it a sail, it's a bleedin' wing!  But, oh, can these things fly.  The Kiwis hit 44kts in a 16kt wind, for example.

I know nothing about sailing, and little of the America's Cup, and care about the same amount, truth be told... but I just needed to express both my amazement and disgust with the new boats.  Oh, and to congratulate Team USA, too.  Woo yay!

But next time?  Use real boats, 'k?

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:04 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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It's time!  Get your greasy little face up next to the speakers, kids, because DJ Wonderduck is back with another installment of Saturday Night Tunage!

More fun than a barrel of monkeys, more educational than a box of lincoln logs, less metal than an erector set, that's SNT!  I've got a batch of new songs for ya, so let's get right to the tunage!

more...

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I interrupt what would normally be a look at F1 Practice from Singapore for a story.  A story about how things can be happy one night, and sad the next.  I come to tell you a story of Wonderduck's Thursday and Friday.

As those of my readers who have an unhealthy obsession with me may remember, my friend Vaucaunson's Duck makes his way back to Duckford once or twice a year.  As is usual, we got together for sushi last week, along with his lovely and talented wife, Geese.  As she is a busy executive-type-person at a major special effects company in San Francisco that you may have heard of, she returned there last weekend, but Vauc stayed behind.  As he's my bestest friend (not-living-in-Duckford division), we planned to get together again for dinner.

In the bestest friend (Duckford-resident division) category, we find The Librarian.  Long-term, not obsessed, readers will remember her as a fixture around these here parts for quite a while, and while we're not getting together as often as we used to (work work work work work), we still have an active and goofy friendship.  We had plans to get together for dinner.

And then it hit me... my two bestest friends, who have never met but have heard much of the other from me, could actually get the chance to be in the same place at the same time!  RAWK!  WOO!  And so, at a place called the Stone Eagle (so named for the concrete eagles scattered around the facility), a longtime wish of mine came true... The Librarian and Vaucaunson's Duck finally met each other, and a three hour long conversation, punctuated by flurries of eating (try the Reuben Spring Rolls!), took place.  Fortunately for my sanity, the two of them were kind to my poor wretched self and DIDN'T haul out the truly embarrassing stories they could have.  I'm fairly sure they actually liked each other... to the extent that two fairly dissimilar individuals can like each other on such short exposure, that is.  For some reason, that was important to me.  I mean, sure, if they didn't hit it off, they'd both still be MY friend, and in my tiny little Wonderduck-centric mind, that's all that matters, but... well.  Y'know.

So that's the good... what's the bad?

Today, Friday, September 20th, marks four years since Momzerduck passed away.  It still hurts to realize that she's never going to call at 7pm again, or never make chocolate chip cookies, or even just give me a hug again.  I miss her every day.

Long four years.  Four really long years. 

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