Bruno is now at the bottom!!

Jerksblog!

Date-Based Archive Jerksquad needs love! Mars needs women!

What with Jerksquad 2.0 open for business and me with a full-time job, Jerksquad needs more questions for me to extoll my humor on!

If you haven't visited Jerksquad in a while, head over there and ask something... hell... post something that isn't a question.

Posted by erin at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)

Date-Based Archive Good Sushi, Bad Luck

Yesterday was a busy day for me. At last! After two weeks of not doing very much I had a lot of work that I was really responsible for. It's been a long time since I've been responsible for anything at work. I mean a loooooong time. However, being in charge of some stuff and having the person I work under out for a couple of days meant that a lot of things were bound to go wrong, which they did. Files mysteriously corrupted themselves, storyboards were not the right size, applescripts crashed multiple times! It was very exciting and somewhat harrying.

Then me and N. and Alison went out for kaiten sushi with Zoe! It was at this place here:

http://menupages.com/restaurantdetails.asp?areaid=0&restaurantid=2765&neighborhoodid=0&cuisineid=0

(also, the comments on the link above are ridiculous - the service was excellent!!)

"Kaiten" means something like moving, so basically, it's conveyor belt sushi! Hooray! There's a conveyor belt that travels around past booths and the sushi bar and around back by the chefs. You take the sushi you want off the belt, and the color of plate it comes on indicates the price. When you're done, the waiters count your plates and calculate the price. At this restaurant, the sushi plates had little clear plastic domes over them, adding to a kind of 1950's feel of the place. The sushi was just OK taste-wise, although some of the cuts were pretty good, some of the rolls were questionably flavored.

It was really great to go there after such a stressful day at work.

This morning the subway was pretty frustrating. It took a long time for an R to come, and when it showed up, it ran express! Grrr! I was wearing a jacket because of the rain, but the Times Square station was really warm. Then I had to walk from Union Square, so by the time I got to work I was sweaty and rained on, and ten minutes late, even though I left on time! I was kind of bummed, because I had to finish up last night's work disaster. But then when I came in, Ziggy had bought delicious moon cake! It's apparently some kind of mid-autumn Chinese festival. I've only had moon cake once before, at Sam's.

Then later, David gave me a kinderegg! What a great surprise! I think I might have talked with him about kindereggs in the past. Maybe I gave him one once and now I don't remember. Who know?! Between the moon cake and the kinderegg, this morning really turned around.

Posted by erin at 03:20 PM | Comments (0)

Date-Based Archive The Party Got Really Good After You Left

Sooooo at my new job things are pretty good so far. I seem to work very hard part of the time, followed by long intervals of doing nothing at all. Normally I'd pace out my work so it appears that I'm working the whole time, but the current nature of the work is kind of like, "So-and-so-needs-this-really-soon".

I haven't fallen into a rhythm of eating lunch yet. At KND I ate at the lunch table for an uncomfortable time (as covered in my comic strips), until I moved into the color lab and ate at my desk. I always packed a lunch because that was more affordable. Now that I'll be drawing regular paychecks and I work every day, I could, potentially, afford to buy much more often. And there are tons of places to buy lunch in the Village, boy howdy, but not that many places to eat it. I hesitate to just go to restaurants by myself, so buying food at one of the many, many deli-type establishments is a reasonable option however, delis don't generally have seating, and public space in the Village, particularly around NYU, fills up real fast with students and what not. I could buy food and bring it back but then, at work, there's not exactly a cafeteria to eat it in, or even a break room. There's just the conference table, out in the middle of the work area. There's a problem with that in that all of my new coworkers will see me eating alone, reading a book.

A lot of people on my new "crew" go to lunch together, but they don't tend to ask me. I don't sit right near them, so they often sneak out without me noticing. I ate with them last Friday because they went to get food to bring back and eat at the conference table. Then I ate my packed lunch with them, which was nice.

Mostly I'm just complaining like this because it's difficult to be at a new job until one falls into the rhythm of things. Once I figure out how I fit in and whom to eat lunch with and where to eat it, things will get a lot easier. Not to mention as soon as I have a steady supply of work and when I know how to do it... that'll be easier too.

In the meantime N. and I have gone to several parties lately. Coworker-Mike's party last weekend was pretty freaking cool. N. and I showed up first and stayed until everyone else left, because N. and I are drinking like we have something to prove. That's right - we didn't get invited to those types of parties in high school, so now we're making up for it.

Last Friday me and Alison threw our "we lost again!" Tokyopop-sucks party. I didn't get a lot of RSVPs (so I didn't request any, whatever), so I thought only four people were coming. Instead a ton of people showed up and a good time was had by all! Particularly after Hal and Kerry and Rick left. Somehow, even with Kerry drinking (??!) the party got a lot cooler after they were gone.

On Saturday N. and I hung out with Jake and Maggie and Ryan, and discussed this new ZeroG service thingy, among other things - things like PHIL FOGLIO LIKING MY COMIC! OK, so he only saw one panel, according to Jake, but he totally said "I would so hire that person." Which is more impressive to N. than anyone else.

On Sunday N. and I went to check out the ArtBots in Harlem, but like, a different part of Harlem than where we live. In fact, N. and I totally failed to cross 6th Ave on the way there because of some crazy Jamaican parade. Out on the streets near the parade were the random Harlem street-barbecues that I've become accustomed to seeing. If there's a bank holiday or a blackout or a three-day-weekend people in Harlem throw up one of those tent-like-things and break out the lawn chairs and throw a barbecue on the sidewalk or in Central Park. I guess everyone else in America has barbecues on summer weekends too, but you don't really see it, because it's on a deck behind a white picket fence inside the backyard of some gated community or something.

Posted by erin at 06:45 PM | Comments (4)

Date-Based Archive To all L33t h0mownerz

Some interesting spam I got this weekend:

--------------------

Hello d>ear hoXVme owner,

WXe hav#e bCee-n nIotiPTficAed tWhaW5t yoKur mortgPa`g\e rate is fixed
at a verFy h}i>gh inDterest rate. ThereQ4fore yuvou are currently
ouverpnayintng, wLh~ich sum7hs-up t%o thRouQsands of dolIlOar>s annually
.

Luckily for you w{e cdan gGmu0aarantee the low*est ratees in the U5.S.
(3.42%). So h7urry because thse rate forecast i~s not lookinxTg gooIMd!

The}re is nRQo o5gbl6uigatiopmn, and idt's FREE

Lock oMTn the 3.42%, even w*ith ba0d crXedit6!

-----------------

Clearly it's been run through a filter, but I think it's kind of funny anyway.

Posted by erin at 11:24 AM | Comments (0)

Date-Based Archive First Day on the New Job / Yogurt Incident / Noah and the Zombie Apocalypse

After much delay, my new job finally started yesterday. Unfortunately there's not a lot of me to do yet, and I don't really have my own desk yet, per say, but in a couple of weeks we'll move down to a different floor and I'll have stuff like a desk and a non-communal computer, and a regular schedule of things to do.

It turns out I haven't used Flash in several years, and the program has changed a ton.

N. and I have been ordering from Fresh Direct a lot recently. It's pretty good, for the $5 surcharge they bring delicious groceries to your door. Last time I screwed up, though, and instead of ordering four 8oz cups of plain yogurt, I got four 32oz containers of plain yogurt by accident. I can use a certain amount of yogurt up making fat-free brownies (ah, "No Pudge Fudge") and whole-wheat pancakes, but I still have about two and a half of these yogurt containers left - and the stuff all expires on October 8th. So if anyone's got any suggestions for recipes, I'd be glad to hear 'em.

Meanwhile, over Labor Day weekend N. and I went to our friend Q's birthday party, where Q took a nice picture of N. Below you can see how the flash really lights up his nose:

It is clearly the zombie apocalypse which N. fears in this photo.

We spent the rest of Labor Day weekend watching the anime Naruto based on the zeitgeist of Otakon and the recommendation of certain friends and coworkers. We watched 30 episodes of Naruto, and I can tell you that the first 20 episodes are completely worthless. Among them are only 10 episodes worth of new footage. There are a plethora of flashbacks, including one memorable scene where a character actually flashes back to someone having a flashback. At episode 30 Naruto improves significantly, however, it is still far from being a "good" show. When I confronted said friends and coworkers who supposedly like the tripe that is Naruto, they excused themselves by copping out and claiming to like the manga. The manga alone couldn't explain Naruto's popularity. Thousands of people download episodes of the Naruto anime every day. The show is so popular in Japan that it has reached episode one hundred - which is rare in today's anime industry.

I have a lot more complaining to do about Naruto, but you can look forward to that in posts to come.

Tokyopop mailed us again - we totally lost. So now if you haven't read Chronin yet, feel free:

Posted by erin at 12:39 PM | Comments (4)