You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Suits, Showers, MLP, FimFest

It seems that a Russian astrologer is worried that NASA's Deep Impact mission has altered the comet while she was under its astrological influence, and she is suing them for $300 million in Moscow. She also wants to know whether anyone had trouble with their telephone reception at the time the experiment occurred.

In other ridiculous litigation news, NTK pointed at a lawsuit filed by Jeffrey Merkey against a variety of targets, including those well-known bastion of right-wing politics, Slashdot and Groklaw, and their socialist anti-intellectual property agenda that is aimed at preventing him from earning money by overthrowing the government. Or something. He's also made claims that Bruce Perens has made death threats against him, because Mr Perens said, "He belongs on every person's email kill file." - though when Mr Merkey quotes him, he replaces the word "email" with an ellipsis, and claims that it's sinister that Perens said that *he* should be placed in a kill file, not his email address. And there's no possibility that he doesn't know what a killfile is, since someone found a quote from him talking about learning how to use one that predates the suit. There's an interesting thread about it on LWN.

***

Just this morning, I was thinking, "It's weird owning your own house, but at least nothing major has gone wrong that I've needed to fix." And then I turned on the shower, and the shower-head fell to pieces.

Stupid brain, thinking thoughts that cause my house to disintergrate.

On the more positive side, I finally got around to doing my taxes yesterday, and it turns out that the provisional tax that I had paid was more than $1k over what I actually ended up owing - so that I only had to give them an extra $35 or so, and I was all paid up for my first installment of provisional tax for this year. Of course, that means that the government has had a bunch of interest that I could have used, but meh, I'm not super worried. :)

(I think I know why my actual income was so much lower than estimated - two years ago, I was quite worried that I wasn't going to have a job, and so did ridiculous amounts of overtime. Last year I was paid better, but had a month or more earning no money while I was on holiday/Film Festival, and didn't do very much overtime at all - so I may have actually earned less.)

So - while I should have done it a long time ago, at least it's done now. :) Of course, next year I'll have to worry about the rents I receive and so on, whereas for this tax year I only had one rent payment to worry about. Hopefully I'll have an accountant by then. :)

***

When someone says, "Run a 'My Little Ponies' game," I'm not sure that the correct response is, "Can I use the InSpectres ruleset?" :) It turned out okay, but I think I would have done better with a setting that I actually knew... okay, I can feel myself critiquing my performance while running a "My Little Ponies" game. I don't think I'll continue down that path. ;)

Jenni ran a fun game of Wuthering Heights subsequently. Good fun - though my character plummeted to a flaming doom, at least he was afire with his beloved Irish whiskey. It's games like this that make me increasingly think that random generation of important traits is actually kind of cool, at least for one-off games. :)

***

Current Film Festival schedule:

Friday 15 July
P 12:30pm- 1:55pm Double Dare
E 3:45pm- 5:15pm The Woodsman
E 5:45pm- 7:25pm Turtles Can Fly
TP 8:15pm- 9:50pm Whisky
P 10:15pm-11:50pm Dumplings

Sunday 31 July
P 11:00am-12:25pm Hank Williams: Honky Tonk Blues
P 3:00pm- 4:35pm Animation Now!
P 6:00pm- 7:35pm The Lost World
E 9:00pm-10:50pm Broken Flowers