I've been busy. Work is busyfying, and in between I've been experiencing the Vancouverean life. However, there's something else I've been doing in my spare time that keeps me from making many website updates. Specifically, I've been working on a project. Unfortunately, it's not WFR2. In fact, it's not any of the projects I've ever mentioned before. I decided to take a different approach with this project, and not tell people about it until it is far enough along that I know I'll finish it. I'm pretty sure that point is now. However, I'm still not going to tell you much about it, as is my style. It is much more in my style to simply post a picture and be done with it. So here you go.

From a classified ad:

Could no one really think of a better headline than this?

I just noticed that the e-mail contact on the About page has been wrong for a little while. I'm assuming no one actually tried to e-mail me, but I feel like I should mention something.

My MP is a dick. Okay, technically, I'm only in this riding for three more months, and my vote went to my home riding in the election, so he's not really my MP, but I'm still irritated.

(Summary for those of you not in the know: two weeks ago, Emerson was elected in this riding running under the Liberal party banner. Today he became a Conservative cabinet minister. Bait-and-switch, much?)

My cubicle mate just got laid off.

Just slightly unnerving.

EA has a free play pinball machine for employee use.

Pinball kicks my ass.

I'm not sure if I've indicated my current position on the television show Lost since I referenced it back when it first began. I'll state it now for clarity: the show is a waste of time. It started off with the potential to be an interesting and compelling character-driven drama with an interesting mythos, but it squandered these opportunities, instead becoming a sluggishly-paced, poorly-written, nonsense-ridden primetime soap filled with characters you just wish would shut up and die already. I could talk about it some more, but the bitterness thread at the Television Without Pity forums goes through these arguments (dating all the way back to December 2004) more precisely and thoroughly.

Lost was initially touted as a show of mysteries where everything happens for a reason. Right from the end of the pilot, viewers were eager to speculate and ruminate about what this master plan could possibly be. Through the power of fandom, miniscule details in subsequent episodes were analyzed in excruiciating detail. And it was a lot of fun. People are curious creatures, after all.

Unfortunately, in the time since then, it's become more and more clear that Lost's producers are just making shit up. Or, more specifically, they're taking care to decorate each episode so that it looks like everything is part of a master plot, but said master plot is nowhere near as intricate as they would have you believe. (The producers have already indicated that the show's mysterious numbers don't mean shit. Google it.) I don't doubt that the overall explanation of what the island basically is was known at the start of the series, and that a few plot elements were also planned, but by and large, I believe that once it became clear that Lost would have to sustain itself indefinitely on the airwaves, the writers were forced to stretch out their frail skeleton of a plot far more than they had anticipated, and completely and utterly failed to flesh it out.

What we are left with in Lost, then, is a show where the mythos is still somewhat interesting, based on the original design for the series, with all the little touches about the animals and hatches and whatnot. But the stuff they threw in, being the characters, the day-to-day plots, the utterly contrived plotlines, it's garbage. I've stopped watching the show. I read recaps at TWoP because I'm still mildly interested in the mythos, but the show itself is too plodding, boring and ridiculous to endure.

This is the part where I give you a link. Here is one person's theory about Lost's grand mystery. (It contains spoilers up to and including the first half of the second season.) It's a fairly interesting theory, and it fits with a lot of the show's elements. Then again, as anyone who's taken a Forer personality test knows, it's easy to make shit seem like fate. If this theory turns out to be correct, then hey, kudos for the planning, but thumbs down on the execution. I'll say this much though; if the theory turns out to be wrong, then purely by virtue of this theorist having put thought into these explanations, it'll be better than whatever the real answer turns out to be.

(It's also worth noting that this theory, while somewhat scientific, incorporates some slightly supernatural bents, while ABC has mandated that Lost's mysteries must have some plausible explanations for fear of ending up with a -- gasp! -- genre show.)