Signs you're getting old...

I love A Series of Unfortunate Events to death. They are everything children's books should be: smart, funny, and most of all, not condescending to its audience. It's some of the best writing around these days, and manages what is probably the hardest trick in the book-- being self-aware without being self-conscious about it. I'm not sure if the author is singular or a committee (a la the Hardy Boys books or Nancy Drew I treasured as a preteen), but whoever it is, the stuff is brilliant. It's like Rocky and Bullwinkle: something parents can read with their kids, and neither feels talked down to or ignored. Of course it helps to have a rather dark sense of humor, but I find being a parent has already done that to most of my friends.

Anyway, what brought this on was my friend Natalie's bemoaning the fickleness of pop culture as regards the Care Bears. You see, a movie is being made of the first three books of this increasingly traumatic series, and I was browsing the IMDB message board on the movie, looking for tidbits, and found out that teenage girls were hoping there was a SoUE clothing line at Hot Topic, so they could buy them and wear them to the premiere.

Wait a minute! I thought. How come they seem so young?, and then I realized I was probably more than twice as old as most of them. Eek! When did that happen?
I guess it shows I'm still hep with the kids today. Plus, I'm learning invaluable things, like this tidbit from one moviebuff27:

I REALLY hope the clothes come from Hot Topic, that'd be much better than instead of - dun, dun, dun - LMITED TOO! EW!

Better not!

Who knew? If I ever have kids, this stuff will be key, I'm sure.

Paarfi does Tech Support

No shit there I was, having an absolutely terrible day. The sort of day you're glad the universe didn't put a small puppy in your path, because people look at you funny while you're strangling it. The solution?

The Viscount of Adrilankha, of course.

Well, that wasn't my original thought, but I was depressed, and at the library, and one thing lead to another, and, well... it just happened. Then I thought, "Hey, it's 6pm, and I don't want to go home, because my net connection is teh suck right now, why not head to a coffeeshop with wireless? They're all the rage with the kids these days, I hear!"

Book and laptop in hand, off I went.

Upon arrival, I ordered a large chai, paid far too goddam much for it, and sat down, unsure of whether or not to read Brust, or hang out on IRC and update my computer to the latest Ubuntu bits. As fate would have it, I decided upon "both". And thus was born a very odd evening, with my hanging out on #ubuntu, and sounding like a tech support drone in a very bad Regency romance novel. Unfortunately, that was a couple of weeks ago, so I can't bring the genius back, but I highly recommend it, always assuming, of course, that anyone ever actually reads this.