well, i’ll be down in san diego for a quick whirlwind conference thing for work from tonight to wednesday afternoon, so don’t expect much from me til later this week, when i can complain about having had too many drinks and not enough sleep. should be fun and interesting even though i’m looking forward to the end of the week when i’ll be back home and jessica will be back from her work trip as well so we can do some lounging together after a week apart. aaawww, precious.

so, after six years of blogging as of a few weeks ago (SIX!), i’m still at it, which is impressive. and i’ve had the same design since college, which was just over four years ago. that’s okay, i really like this layout, color scheme, etc. it’s staying for the long haul.

the only thing i felt slightly guilty about as the years passed was keeping a picture from my senior year in college as the ‘about the author’ picture. like i was misrepresenting myself, living in the past, etc. so i finally tracked down a more recent photo, which you will now see if you let your eyeballs drift slightly up and to the right.

the thing is, it looks almost totally the same. i’m wearing a jacket in this one. you can’t see my shoes. appropriately, i’m holding a cheeseburger.

now the question is: does the similarity between that and the old one speak well of me — “he really knows who he is, he’s true to himself, even though he’s grown as a person he’s still the same fun kid at heart, he hasn’t gained inordinate amounts of weight as he’s rolled through his beer-guzzling mid-20’s”? or is it kind of sad that in terms of appearance i’ve changed so little — “try a new haircut, maybe? facial hair? better clothes that maybe weren’t bought at a thrift store? anything? you’re stuck in a rut, man!”?

as you can tell i personally don’t wrestle with this problem at all; i mean, i do still write in my online journal every week which i don’t see a lot of the 30-year-olds i know doing. but who cares, i kind of love who i was in college so in most ways i’m sticking to it for as long as i can. and a lot of the change since then has been internal and positive, so why fix what’s not broken. but i am curious if this is fear of change or realization of having achieved some level of ideal balance. and hey, at least i bought a new jacket since 2003.

now that our place is pretty much settled i have this strong urge to just go home every night and enjoy being able to sit there and relax, and it’s something i’m going to have to consciously fight so as not to become boring. i told myself the month of july i would try to go out less for purely financial reasons with all the costs associated with moving, but that month is about to end, so my excuse is not really valid any more. i will not become a permanent funcher! to that end, i’m denying my inner laziness and going out tonight, friday night, and hopefully saturday night. balance will be achieved again, and i will resume being the social butterfly who is not too old to party. honest.

oh, and here are some other things i forgot to add yesterday when i got carried away reading about joker face-painting stunts…

first, this guy takes a century-old form of grafitti — the writing of things on dusty car windows — and blows the roof off of it. will dirty car art be the new tagging?

also, i am totally printing some of these out to keep in my glovebox as we speak. brilliant and funny without the rudeness of car horns or dangers of road rage: you park like an asshole tickets. i love that they distinguish “diagonal parking — cool car” and “diagonal parking — not so cool car”. that second one must hurt the most.

a little weekend recap and some monday coolness…

friday night’s maximo park show at the el rey was pretty great. we timed it perfectly so we didn’t have to endure a single note of sub-par openers after our short walk from some warm-up drinks at gino’s new place just around the corner. i realized i’ve absorbed a lot more of the songs off the new album than i’d thought, and hearing them live did seem to make them come a live a little more. still prefer the previous album overall, but i wouldn’t sell the new one too short. it held up pretty well.

saturday was all about apartment shopping, and after that and a few online orders today, we’ll officially have all the furniture we’ve been looking for. then we went out to a nice anniversary dinner at cube (which i just reviewed for yelp as well, if you click down on that map there), which blew our tastebuds away. delicious fancy cheeses, surprisingly yummy rabbit-sausage ragu — that’s right, we ate bunny sauce! — and some choice ravioli with a fine bottle of wine from our trip to wine country in the spring. oh my, it was heaven, and we went home happy.

this morning i came across the new dark knight teaser trailer, which is excellent in buildup and dangling how the joker will sound in the next movie (answer: pretty much PERFECT for this incarnation of batman).

it was originally posted at whysoserious.com, which has been replaced with more of their continued viral marketing trickery based on a stunt they pulled at comicon. it sounds really cool, and i wish i could have been there for it. i’d link to a place where you can read more about it, but i haven’t found a complete report anywhere.

this is the best one so far, but basically defaced dollar bills (george washington in face paint) led people to the previous version of that website, which you got the code to by calling a number from a sky-writing message over the con ending in “HA HA”. then you went through some puzzles as a try-out to be in joker’s gang, leading to a location where you got face-painted like the new joker (the participants of which are shown on the current version of the whysoserious site). finally, one of them was even hauled into a truck and ‘killed’ and pictures of his dead body were posted on that same site. of course, all this is gone now and replaced with that rent-a-clown thing, so it’s a shame you can’t go back and follow it yourself anymore. oh well, the crazy interweb can be fleeting and not all total coolness lasts forever.

my to-read list is getting really long. i WILL finish blood meridian tonight, if i have to stay up til 2am, dammit. i’m pretty over psycho cowboys roaming the desert at this point, even though it got much better in the second half.

i’m so practically done moving now too. last night i didn’t move, clean, pack, unpack, set up, or shop for anything. i just played video games and watched tv and read a little bit, which was totally excellent. now i can get back to my serious relaxing regimen and maybe *gasp!* have time to do some real exercise again someday.

i’ll attempt to keep this from being too sappy or sentimental, but tomorrow is also the two-year mark from what jessica and i diplomatically decided was our anniversary — well past the first kiss and months of grey area in between, but the calendar day on which we went on our first one-on-one, pre-planned date. also the point, on my part at least, of the mental decision to start being a couple, not just a couple of people who flirted a lot at parties, danced together, drank together, and left said parties together. the point at which it solidified that, ‘you know, i really do like this person a lot. this could really work out great’.

now it’s been literally YEARS of it ‘really working out great’. we’re roommates for god’s sake, which is also working out great, as well as officially becoming the longest relationship either of us have ever been in, and STILL GOING STRONG, BITCHES.

sorry to get all ‘o’doyle rules’ there but we are pretty much rocking it. like i said, trying not to be too sappy.

Goodbye old apartment! You gave us some great times and i'll remember you fondly, as glad as i am to be done with you and moving on to the next chapter…sniff…

after trying all day after a tip from thrillist which led to their servers being maxed out most of the morning and afternoon, i was finally able to go to the website that would allow me to validate the seemingly high price we are paying for this new apartment. you see, a place like this is not only nice on the inside, but has a walkscore of 92 out of 100.

take that, friends with nicer and/or larger apartments way out in culver city or playa del rey! i can buy a tuxedo, go to a pilates class, eat indian food, see a movie, go to a concert, get a coffee, take my (hypothetical) kids to school and a park, or get drunk easily all in under a mile from my place. and maybe some fine sunny saturday, i will do just that. try it out and let me know how you compare so i can gloat.

enough about the move. almost done with that. let’s focus on some earth-crushing crazy robot music explosiveness.

DAFT PUNK LIVE WAS UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE, AGAIN.

coachella was great, possibly better overall because it was so out-of-nowhere amazing. this was right up there though, it went on longer, we weren’t as exhausted going in from a whole day of desert heat, and weren’t ready to drop dead.

and most importantly, they upped the light show a notch in the encore, as seen above and in this youtube video below, where they lit themselves up and brought back ‘one more time’ again to the wildest applause and joyous crowd reaction i’ve seen possibly ever. you’ve seriously got to check this out. at about the minus-5:30 mark red lights travel around the setup, into the pyramid they’re standing in, and they go off with some super-cool tron-style radness:

holy god. so good.

nothing much to report, finishing the move-out and making progress on the move-in is taking up lots and lots of time. i wish i could have taken the whole week off; so far every day this week i’ve been working til 6, heading home to put in several hours of work on hauling stuff, putting away stuff, or going out to shop for needed stuff, then eating a late dinner, watching a little TV and going to sleep. we’re close though. real close. i think sunday is D-for-Done-Day.

anyway, since my moving stories are boring even me, here are some cool nerdy things i stumbled across today you may be interested in, or perhaps find as boring as moving stories:

largehearted boy dug up an old mountain goats interview that’s probably one of the best i’ve ever read, from a heavy metal zine site back in 2000. makes me really want to go out and finally pick up the coroner’s gambit.

fox chicago has a few video clips (check the tiny sidebar for the images to click) from the filming of the next batman. there’s no sound and it’s from a ways away, but you can see the batmobile, and most importantly heath ledger dressed up as the joker. i’m pretty hopeful… i think they have the look down pretty good (i mean, have you seen the close-up shot of his face?… creepy awesome!), so if heath can really nail way a crazy-ass joker talks and acts, i think this’ll be even better than the first one.

i’ve been hooked on podcasts for months now; i’ve pretty much stopped listening to the radio entirely since a few years back when i got a car stereo with an auxillary jack to hook up the ipod. music is great and all, but with a serious lack of great new albums i want to listen to over and over, i’ve managed to fill almost my entire week’s worth of commutes with podcast listening. the favorites that kicked it off were my introduction and rapid falling-in-love with this american life, finding out there was an audio version of the classic savage love, and yes, i’ll admit it, a few video game news/discussion ones as well.

well, my new infatuation came through an introduction via this american life of a show called radiolab. they used an excerpt from a show on morality and how we make moral decisions based on subconcious calculations in our brains, and it was really interesting. so i went to their site and subscribed and listened to the whole show it was taken from, and it was outstanding. now i’m catching up on some back catalog episodes and they’re all really really great. it’s a mix of science, philosophy and humor as they pick apart big questions from a scientific, historical, and anecdotal standpoint, and the hosts are extremely affable and enjoyable to listen to. honestly, these are the kinds of things the internet was made to be bringing us, and i am loving it. if you’re a commuter with an ipod, i definitely recommend checking it out.