fine whine

When it comes to free web services and sites, I am an utterly hopeless compulsive joiner. Behind me in my years of web use I have left a wide swath of forgotten accounts and un-revisited pages. Some I would use for months and others I would forget almost immediately after joining. At one time I collected email addresses (both for forwarding and actual mailboxes) and had so many that I needed to use a full sheet of paper to map out which went where (but never why).

So to stumble across something like the fantastic metafilter and to be told that no new users were being accepted was something of a slap in the face. To then see that it won some prominent blog community awards for being a community site made it even more so. I wanted to join and contribute, not just leech off the links and vicariously enjoy the conversations.

Well, I guess the powers that be decided to open back the floodgates and allow us peons back in, albeit at the somewhat limiting rate of twenty a day. Naturally I was poised on the page, anxiously refreshing until the very second the signup link was to go live... and I made it. I was the seventh or eighth person today and likely not the last for a long while of people to join, and hopefully contribute something to what is one of my primary sources for new and interesting stuff on the web.

There's really no reason for me to mention any of this, other than not wanting to talk about the fact that the inspectors found some preliminary evidence of termite activity in the house we're pursuing. Oh, and I didn't hate Men with brooms, I just didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I had wanted. Likewise The league of extraordinary gentlemen, which was far too slapdash and cobbled-together of a movie to be truly enjoyable, and quite frankly the CGI looked somewhat dated. So it's not good enough to be a SFX showreel nor does the movie stand on its own without the flashiness. All in all the book's much better (the graphic novel by Alan Moore), though I have to admit that the Nemomobile's a fine looking car, dual elephants on the front end and all.

On a related note, I enjoyed watching the BBC's The office's first series far more, and it didn't have any special effects at all.