At one point, I wanted to be a music writer. That never happened—probably because I wasn't pretentious in a way that would impress other music writers.

I work in customer service now in a call center for a major cell phone provider and it's like the worst parts of working retail combined with the worst parts of working at Initech from Office Space. It is far too easy to tell that things they do to motivate us and make work more "fun" are really brainwashing…

You make it sound like that much Tom Jones is a bad thing.

I'm surprised it worked. I guess people like Bernard Cornwell books and those Outlander books, but it's not like novels about politics during the Crusades are tearing up the bestseller charts.

It was impossible to escape this song for a while. The video channels showed the video about once an hour. It blared out of the sound systems of every retail store. The only thing worse than the song was the occasional person who got really mad if you said you didn't like it.

The original book version of The Last Unicorn is great.

The guy's voice and arrangements make me wish I could punch him in the family jewels.

Now you know how I feel when the angry nerds around here trash something I love because they don't like the male lead's haircut or things go too well for the characters or whatever.

The Nolan Batman movies, the Raimi Spider-Man movies, Star Trek: TNG, Firefly, Gilmore Girls, Game of Thrones, The Great Gatsby, Hills Like White Elephants by Hemingway, To Build a Fire by Jack London, 1989 by Taylor Swift, anything by Kanye, anything by Jay-Z, anything by the Rolling Stones (except Paint It Black,…

It reminds me of Outlaw Star more than Cowboy Bebop, but yeah…. I never liked Fillion's second-rate Han Solo or anything involving River or her brother. And I hated Jayne so much that it took me a while to stop hating Baldwin when he played Casey on Chuck.

As a life-long fantasy nerd, I don't really get why lower amounts of the stuff I expect to see in a fantasy novel are somehow a selling point.

TNG seems kind of dated now in a way I find mildly annoying. Maybe it's the fonts. Anyway…

That was pretty much my reaction. If the first part before he put his costume together had been a movie about a new character who trained to be a ninja, I would have loved it. But since it was Batman, the whole "I won't kill this random guy, but I will use explosives to kill a bunch of guys I spent a lot of time…

Don't get me started on how much I hate Batman Begins. Gary Oldman is awesome, but my nerd rage kicked in right around the time that Batman killed a bunch of ninjas. The good parts don't make up for things like the unnecessary explanation of the pointy things on Batman's gloves or the "I don'.t have to save you"…

What I like about Fury Road is that it features two weird, yet oddly
plausible future civilizations that remind me of what I love about
science fiction from the Seventies. The movie is basically just a
cooler version of the battle sequence at the end of Road Warrior, but
all that stuff about the matriarchal culture…

I love Batman: Year One, but yeah… Amen.

Apparently, I miss out on a lot of stupid drama because I'm not photogenic. Who knew there was a upside?

Word. I thought World War III or the rapture or something would happen before I had to pick a college major. Now, I'm a fat old guy working in a call center wishing that I had gotten my act together twenty years ago when there was still hope for me.

Right around the same time, another group of my co-workers watched the video for When Doves Cry on YouTube. There is no excuse for not knowing something about the Purple Rain guy.

I work in a call center and I definitely have problems with Boomers who do things like demanding free stuff they don't deserve because they've been loyal customers for X number of years, or who refuse to use self-service options because they have dumb hangups about the Internet, or who get mad and argue with me…