Since then, I've seen a good number of episodes, ones I saw and loved the first time round (mainly S1 and S2), new and awesome ones (S5 and S6), and the disappointing ones that inspired the title of this post (S9).

Apparently, I have a huge well of affection both for the show and for the two main characters. I didn't really think about it in the years since I used to watch religiously, and in fact I missed a lot of first-run episodes, because a couple of years after the show debuted, I got too busy for TV. But there was something formative and influential about watching it, and I love Mulder and his sunflower seeds and porn obsession, and Scully and her one eyebrow that seems to levitate somewhere north of her forehead. And both of their mumbling. I love them. I want to sit down and watch every episode I didn't see, catch up on all the mythology even as it spirals out of human comprehension.

The X-Files love renewal was a purely positive experience until we watched four S9 episodes in a row the other night. This isn't to say that any of the episodes are bad, as such. It's more like...say you're a hummus lover. You go to the shop for hummus, and they're out of your favourite brand, so you buy this other hummus. And it's definitely made from mushed-up chick peas. I mean, it's not entirely unhummussy. But...it could've been the other hummus. Not that it's objectionable to put in your mouth, just that it's not your hummus. It's entirely missing the tahini. I don't understand how anyone can think it's really hummus without the tahini. And it doesn't count if you spend your entire meal talking about tahini. The tahini actually has to be there.

The best part about watching this all out of order is that there are still a shitload of earlier episodes I haven't seen. Maybe I'll dig out that one that Stephen King wrote. I hear he doesn't suck.

She wasn't someone I knew intimately, but someone I had definitely wanted to build more of a friendship with and to get to know better. She seemed, not just amiable and friendly, but actively chipper and sunshiney. Why is it so often the last person you expect? asked Staci. I guess it's because people who are good at covering up never get help for themselves.

It feels like a bomb went off in my social group. I'm very concerned for the people who were closest to her, one in particular. What do you even do with this information? Where do you put it? What part of your brain is equipped to process this?

For some reason, I'm struck with the urge to answer Cindy's question, about "how you would weather a tragedy of this magnitude without some sort of spiritual under girding." Maybe pontificating is how I deal with stuff.

Of course, because my company does its business online and by definition attracts overenthusiastic fans, rumours abound when any such move is in the works. Such as this lovely, responsible bit of reporting. Notice how it rampantly speculates on how our studio was to be shut down and the remaining jobs shipped to the West coast, when the reality ended up being 21 people laid off. Not that that doesn't suck, but there are 300 people in our office. Or this article, from the same source, back in February, predicting downsizing all over the place. I can't recall the number, but it was either six or eight people in the end.

Thing is, we are gamers. We work at video game companies because we like video games. We read the gaming press. Don't the people who write these stupid, unsubstantiated articles think about the stress they're causing people at the company they're writing about? I guess that's less important than maybe getting a scoop in case some of their wild speculation winds up being true.

So I guess it's not enough to learn that, when you work in high tech, you have to resign yourself to seeing a whole company get shut down around you, and to being laid off, perhaps even only three months after the last time you were laid off, you also have to learn to expect rampant and gleeful speculation about your company collapsing around your ears, and anyone who steps up to say, "Hey, these are people you're talking about" gets labelled a fanboi and a shill.

In related news, though you grow a callus after you've seen enough of it, seeing friends get laid off will never, ever be easy. The only consolation is knowing how awesome they are, and how many companies out there will want to snap them up if they have an iota of sense.

(Index of all photos to be found here.)

Wedding Photographer:
Larry and Iskra got hitched on June 27th, in the sweetest Justice of the Peace/Register Office ceremony I've seen. I was the unofficial photographer, but that's only because the best photographer among us was saying her vows at the time. Iskra's sister Tsvety came to stay for a couple of weeks. Sadly, now she has gone and the newlyweds are facing a mountain of immigration paperwork. Heath and I are trying to give them the benefit of our experience, but the forms have changed several times since we went through it.

Screen writer:
Heath, Larry, Greg and I co-wrote a short film for this year's 48 hour film contest. It was my first taste of co-writing anything, and the pressure was on, since we had to finalise the script before we left on the Friday night so that Greg could begin shooting ASAP on Saturday morning. What we came up with was very surreal and absurd, which may have been a testament to our mental state while writing it. It was also my first taste of seeing something I helped to write realised on-screen, and I have to say that Greg did a great job of it. Many of the scenes, and even the particular shots, were how I had imagined them in discussion, or even better. I think it came out a great short film, without even taking into account the circumstances under which it was made.

Sadly, due to technical difficulties, we submitted the film too late to qualify for the contest, but at least we had something we were happy with.

(Malef)actor:
Athena got a request from one of our friends, someone heavily involved in the SCA, to prepare a short performance for an event that took place this past weekend. This consisted of the two big fight scenes from Romeo And Juliet, and I--who have never really picked up a sword before--was cast as Tybalt, master sword fighter, and participant in the most sword fights of any cast member (three). Cue some intensive choreography and practice.

At the event on Saturday, we arrived while the SCAers were at feast (dinner), and were immediately identified as actors thanks to the fact that we were 1. In character, with the two house groups shooting malevolent glances at each other across the street, and b. Carrying live steel (SCA fighting rules state that all weapons must be tipped). The king called me a malefactor. Actor. Same difference.

In the interpretation we did, thanks in part to casting limitations, we ended up having Juliet, Tybalt and Benvolio as scrappy girls, and instead of having R & J meet at a ball, they met in a brawl. Essentially, Juliet took the Gregory role in that scene, and made flirty eyes at Sampson...you'd be surprised how the lines lend themselves to it. Everyone was playing their roles pretty sexed up, except me. I was mainly Anger Management Teen. The second brawl was in the tavern, amongst SCAers who had been drinking a while, by torchlight. I was a little nervous of waving my sword around in that situation, but nobody got stuck with anything they shouldn't've.

I killed my coworker Sean, and then Heath killed me. (I got better.) It's fun to do something so ephemeral--you really had to be there; I can't do it justice in the explanation--but it's a lot of work to put in for such a short payoff.

Woman in man in man's clothing
The casting was announced for the play we're putting on in the autumn: I'm playing Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew. Yes, it's yet another manservant role, but this time I get to spend most of the play pretending to be my master, who's a big ole fop. Rehearsals started last week.

Workaholic
You may have noticed that my two plays overlapped last week, with rehearsals for the second one starting in the week of the performance of the first. You can imagine my joy when our team at work was also given a deadline, with six days' notice, of Sunday afternoon (Monday morning in our Korean office). I worked nearly twice my normal workweek, and by the end of it was talking scribble. We spent the first three days tracking down and fixing some highly technical problems that were causing things not to work at all. That was before we could even start polishing the content that we needed to sign off on by Sunday. We were also in the middle of learning a new process with new, highly complicated software, when this deadline got dropped on us. In between all that, I was going to rehearsals where I was told that I needed to be louder in the performance. Yeah, I will, but I have to save something.

I have never been so glad in all my life for it to be Monday. I think I'm going home early.

And he was wearing a most fetching red-lined tux jacket with jeans. And I got all starstruck, and so did Heath and Gilliam. Next time we go and see him we are forking out for close seats. Because he's worth it :).

Today I have been at a friend's house for a BBQ and have drunk way more beers than I should've. I don't know how normal it is to hang out, and get drunk, with co-workers as my main social life, but I should stop comparing myself to some notion of normality. It's not like I'd know normal if it jumped out and bit me in the face. One thing I've always loved about my place of work is that I don't have to pretend to be someone I'm not, or to censor things before they come out of my mouth (except in meetings, but, y'know).

I don't think I've really addressed this before but my friend Staci is my new co-worker. We share an office and do essentially the same job. I can't believe my incredible luck. I've had friends who I've liked as much as Staci, but I've never before had the confidence that it was mutual. I think if I had cooked up a friend character and had her brought to life, she would be Staci, except maybe with a little more confidence in her own abilities about certain things. Before we shared an office we were spending plenty of time hanging out, but since she got this job it's basically been a mind-meld. We spend all day looking at text that has been machine-translated from Korean, and then we hang out afterwards. We have a bizarre language that only we speak, made of Engrish combined with Doctor Who-fandom. Our friends fear us. We also play in three of the aforementioned D&D games together. Do not cross us or we will in-joke you to death!

I think I should wrap this up so I can get some more rice salad (the remnants of my contribution to the party) and soak up some of the beer so that by the time Leila arrives I will be comprehensible.

Oh, and go check out The Return of the Movie Musketeers: Indiana Jones 4, which I totally knitted a chain mail hood for.

Now let's imagine that through a series of miscommunications this decision got painted as a unilateral decision on my part, that I took without consulting or informing anyone, that was based on nothing except a lunatic fancy I'd cooked up, that affected not just one small part but the entire game, and that would have huge effects on how long it will take to translate the game into other languages. Let's also imagine that the people thinking this are six time zones away and predominantly speak English as a second (or third) language. Cue angry meetings, emails, people running around with their hair on fire, blame flinging, angst, me second-guessing my decisions, stressful and teary confabs with my boss, and, finally, an awe-inspiring pep talk in the smoking area from my friend Cam, who convinced me to stand by my decision once the confusion had been smoothed out.

I made him cupcakes.

Sadly, that game started to unravel as longer and longer intervals went by in between sessions, and finally the DM lost interest in DMing (for now, at least). A D&D-shaped void in my life opened up. I ended up joining a game where I rolled up an impromptu barbarian, made up a half-arsed backstory, and joined a session-in-progress. For all the lack of thought I put into that character, she's ended up being my favourite so far (and there are two more I will get to in a moment). So many times players come up with elaborate backstory that gets roundly ignored by the DM and it's as if the characters exist in a void. Although Andy is a great storytelling DM, the set-up of his game kinda had that effect; we made up backstories as to why we were on a ship, then in the first session got magically transported forward through time, and none of the people, organisations, or even countries we had incorporated into our stories existed any more. Ariletha, my impromptu barbarian, on the other hand, is full of frontstory. I retrofitted some backstory after our first play session, but what's interesting is what's happened to her since we started gaming; she's escaped from slavers, found a long-dead brother who is now a solar angel, died and been reincarnated in the body of an elf (she was formerly human). That's a lot of frontstory for a group that's playing a module known to most gamers as a non-stop dungeon crawl with little time for roleplaying, and it gives me a lot to get my teeth into.

Since starting that game, I've also joined another group with an elf necromancer who worships the goddess of death, and my Kitten Killing group has started up again with another person running the game, and my character in that is a self-sacrificing cleric who doesn't like to own stuff. It's hardly any wonder I can't keep track of who I am at any given time. In addition to all this, some friends keep talking about starting up a Vampire LARP (live action role play; yes, I'm plumbing the very depths of my nerdiness), and I have a character all written up for that game already. I even bought her boots and am knitting her a vest. (You dress up for LARPs, which is at least half the appeal.)

The only problem is, just when I had all these games going along happily, my impromptu barbarian one went on hiatus while the DM and his wife (who plays in the group with us) have a baby, the elf necromancer one finished to make way for another game that some of the same people are playing without me (it'll probably start up again in a few months, but until then I'm out of luck), and my Kitten Killing group's DM and his wife (who plays with us) will also go on maternity/paternity leave in September. So it's either too many D&D groups or too few. What's a girl gotta do to get a constant flow of nerdery going around here?

The rules are in the extended entry, for the few who haven't seen this on everyone else's blog already, but basically: memoir in six words. Ready?

Both the flying, and the thud.

I decided to buy a different brand of deodorant, not because I didn't like my old one, but because I thought the all-natural, organic, not-tested-on-animals, aloe vera, sensitive skin, no alcohol, no aluminium one would probably be better for me, the environment, and everyone else.

Turns out it was like putting cayenne itch powder on my pits. I was up almost all night Thursday in agony and felt like the dead when I had to get up Friday. Nothing, not aloe gel, topical anaesthetics, or prescription cream from the dermatologist, would help me. Finally I got some sleep by putting cold wet washcloths on it and sleeping that way.

I mean, just because it's made from plants doesn't mean you can't be horrendously allergic to those plants, but I could've lived without the irony overdose.

Heath and I were relaxing, watching any old rubbish in HD, just because we can, and I was happily settled with a beer at hand, alternating between knitting and doing some work remotely, when suddenly Heath jumped up and ran to the kitchen.

What? What's up?

My roach sense just went off. I heard one in here. . .AHA! Oh, wait, there's another. And another!

Larry says that what he heard from his room was just "Four! No, Five!! SIX!! SEVEN!!!!"--raising in pitch with every number. He came out to find us peering into the kitchen, expressions of horror and bafflement on our faces as we saw four roaches twitching their last on the floor, with another in the hallway, and at least two or three more having been spotted scuttling under cupboards.

We've always had a problem with roaches, ever since we moved in. Rarely do we see the living kind, just the ones that are already mid-expiration in that characteristic neurotoxin spasm, even though we don't put down any poison. Our theory is that our neighbour, who lives like Howard Hughes in piles of decades-old mail and is only ever seen bringing shitloads of new stuff into the house and never throwing it away, deals with her clutter-created roach problem by putting down bait and letting them come over here to die. Well, today she must have had the exterminators in because we counted 40 big ones and a scattering of little ones when we were done. Maybe four or five of those were crunchy and had obviously been dead behind the shelves for a while; the rest were freshly squeezed.

We pulled everything out of the cupboards along the wall of the kitchen that we share with our neighbour, chased roaches with brooms until they died. We wrassled them on the countertops, we tangoed with them in the toaster. We stalked, ears to the walls, listening to what sounded like a bowl full of rice krispies popping in the cavity, wondering whether there was a whole army of them in there or just one very noisy one in its death throes.

The worst part is that we now have all the clean-up ahead of us. Sure, the kitchen is more or less roach-free (I pretty much assume we cohabitate with a few at any given time), but I have to clean the insides of the cupboards, clean all the things we're putting back into the cupboards, wipe the surfaces, and scrub the sink, where one particularly persistent one went to die. This isn't just because of the Touch of Roach, but because we had no choice but to use the bug spray. At one point we'd been cooped up with it so long that Larry and I had to go outside to clear our lungs. We talked about using the Raid and a butane lighter as a flamethrower. I wanted to go all Ripley on their asses.

Damn, I think the floor is dry from where I mopped it, and now I have no more excuse to put off part 2: reconstruction. This is going to take a while. Then, a shower will be completely necessary.

For the very strong of stomach, here is photographic evidence, magnifiable if you should so desire. Please note my thoughtfulness in not embedding the picture, even as a thumbnail.

What could I possibly be talking about? Why, our new 50" plasma HDTV, of course!

Last week I had three days off work (which is more than the total days I took off in 2007) to spend with Anthony and James, who were visiting from England. We had a grand old time, with the touristy sightseeing things and the pubs and the going in every shop on South Congress and the museums and the drinking on Sixth Street and the Alamo Drafthouse, but as usual with such events, one of the more memorable things about the trip was a random piece of graffiti we saw, of a jubilant cow saying 'WOO!' (not moo), and the words 'Abba' and 'crime' written separately about its person. Naturally, within seconds, we'd turned this into a new version of an MC Hammer song, and continued to sing it for the rest of the trip.

They left on Wednesday for San Francisco, where another mutual friend, Robert, lives. I didn't get to go this time but one day I may make it there. I didn't realise until a few months ago that we now live on the same continent once more. Now I'm just waiting for Anthony and James to get back to the UK and upload the photos on flickr so you can see some of the fun--and, of course, the jubilant cow.