I love Blood + far more than I should. Even the English dub is good! I think a box set might have to be an Otakon purchase next year.

Aside from griping about the state of affairs these days, there are a number of things going well; I shouldn’t forget that, and I shouldn’t forget to mention it. I am, for as much as I’m the type of person who’s bemused and annoyed at the early beginnings of the holiday season, I’m happy that the holidays are here. I love the bright lights in the city and all of the decorations, the warm drinks and the company of family and friends makes it more than worthwhile.

In other news, and around the web, I was thrilled when I found out that the guys behind Applegeeks has released an action figure based on the robot girl that Hawk, the main character, created with some mad science and a Mac earlier in the comic. There were a few available at Otakon last year (which reminds me, I should book our room for next year!) but she finally made it onto the online store. Of course, she’s been sold out for weeks, but when she’s in, I’ll have to pick one up. Speaking of action figures, when ThinkGeek turned out their World of Warcraft figures, both Raevyn and I were excited. Suffice to say those’ll be somewhere in the house during the holidays.

Anyway, as far as griping is concerned, one of the things that annoys me to no end at the office is unnecessary communication. You know what I mean – if you work in an office at all, you’ve probably become used to what I’m talking about – people who respond with messages like “ok” and “sure” when in all honesty they didn’t need to say anything at all, and so on. Personally, I’ve become something of a mail filter-fu master when it comes to things like that – making sure I’m not on mailing lists that have nothing to do with me, and making sure I filter things like calendar appointment responses and automated messages directly to a specific folder or to the deleted items folder. Still, it’s tough in the workplace to escape the person who sends you an email and then immediately comes over to talk about it, and then sends you another email about what the two of you just discussed. It’s enough of a pain at the office, that I certainly don’t like dealing with it outside of the office. Outside of the office, spam is the big problem for me, but Lifehacker has some tips on how to deal with things like that. Personally I think most of them are good.

In the vein of unnecessary communication and information overload, I just installed NoScript this weekend (I know, shameful that it took me so long to try it) but so far it works fabulously. Highly recommended.

As for other projects around the house, I’m torn between this one to turn my home theatre PC into a Media Center PC (Polaris, the home theatre PC, is also hooked up to my turntables and the ShoutCast server) and this one to turn my old XBox into a killer media center. I was thinking about getting an XBox 360 after the holidays (or during if the sales are good) and that would free up the original XBox for a project like this. And the other thing about building a new HTPC was that I didn’t want to add even more computers to our electric bill – it’s already awfully high. We’ll see though, I’l keep them both in my back pocket. If we move out of here and into a new place at any point soon, I’d still want a dedicated HTPC.

Hm. And people wonder why I don’t have a Facebook account. It’s bad enough that I have an atrophying MySpace account that I never look at. I should just delete it. The history of social networks entertains me to no end, even though I have no real love for Facebook and MySpace – I miss the Tribe and Friendster days – back when Friendster was actually good. Still, maybe I’ll toss something together about that history for Gears and Widgets. I haven’t posted there in a while.

Finally, thanks to the lovely (and saucy, despite her objections!) Pastilla, here are 15 Unfortunately Placed Ads. Cheers!