Microfilm shelving project journal: Day 3,468.

I am beyond physical exhaustion. Hallucinations have become more commonplace. I begin to wonder if the purple orangutan really wants to be my friend or if he is merely setting me up. I refuse to be a pawn in his little simian game of chess....

For two and a half days straight now, The Powers That Be have had me moving microfilms one cartful at a time from the microfilm mines behind the Course Reserves Department out onto the floor and shelving them.

I have not had to do this kind of physical work, on my feet constantly, for a long time now. Normally that's what I have minions for, but unfortunately, the type of minions we employ around here do not have the mental capacity to be trusted with a job as mentally taxing as putting microfilms in alphabetical order.

I wish I was joking on that last part.

So that leaves me and my esteemed coworker, Lady Dementia, to get everything hauled out into the front area by the end of the week. I know it doesn't sound terribly hard, but when you're used to sitting at a computer for eight hours a day pushing book carts around and carrying armloads of microfilms around can be incredibly taxing, especially doing it all day long for several days straight. If I hadn't lost about sixty pounds recently I doubt I would have even made it this far. I would have died of exhaustion somewhere among the endless stacks of microfilm where the film-spiders would have found my lifeless corpse and dragged it away for a midnight snack.

Note to self: in regards to film-spiders, invest in flamethrower.

In case you've wondered, this project is a big part of why I've been neglecting my bloggly duties of late. It has eaten up almost all of my time during the day planning and executing it, and at night I've either been spending time with friends to relax or resting to heal my tired, broken, undead body.

Hopefully, however, it will be over by the end of the week and we'll be done picking up the pieces and fixing any errors by sometime next week so I should be able to post more often after that.

Until then, no rest for the wicked.

Of Dust Bunnies and Rock Anthems

Well, despite being the dead of summer, it's officially spring cleaning time here at the dungeon. All of the racks and iron maidens are being polished, the books of forgotten arcane lore are being given a good dusting, and the giant blast furnaces are being scrubbed down. Of course we've already lost over fifty minions on this last job alone, since The Powers That Be refuse to actually turn off the furnaces while they're being cleaned. Seems a bit self defeating to me, but hey, as the poet said, mine is not to reason why, mine is but to do and send others to die.

Or something like that.

Or not.

We've also been cleaning out the office break room, the contents of which have so far included:
-An entire shelf of outdated catalogs from various office supply companies (some going back to 2003)
-A box full of small, black, plastic things on whose function no one seems to agree
-Dozens of folders full of time sheets dating back as far as 1995
-A folder containing all of the job descriptions in the library dating from 1989 (The thing is actually printed on Dot Matrix paper)
-Trays, plates, knives, forks and cups of all sizes and shapes
-Two coffee makers, both of which have a thick crust of long-since-dried coffee and mold on the bottom
-Approximately 23,547,900,342 boxes of holiday decorations.

So at least we're prepared if there's ever a tinsel shortage.

Back at the overlord homestead, things have been surprisingly uneventful, although busy. The wife is currently working on a project related to her dissertation, so my evenings are much more boring than usual. Boring enough that I've finally been able to beat all of the songs on Rock Band on Expert! Booyah! Take that, "Green Grass and High Tides"! You thought your obtuse rythm and illogical, insanely fast solos had defeated me, but I rose up once more and pierced your shield of sixteenth notes with the sword of my sheer rock-and-roll awesomeness!

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Sorry. I majored in overly-long-victory-rants back when I attended Overlord University. Old habits and all.

Attack of teh kewt

I have seen the face of cuteness, and it's name is WALL-E.

So this weekend I took my wife, Mrs. Overlord to the local megaplex to see Pixar's newest animated feature, WALL-E (Which, for those of you who haven't seen it stands for "Waste Allocated Load Lifter - Earth Class"). I must admit that going into this movie I had the highest of hopes. The preview was one of the funniest I'd seen in a long time, and as anyone who reads the same webcomics as me knows, I'm a big sucker for cute.

Now normally when I go into a movie with great expectations a horrible, horrible thing happens. Somehow, no matter how good they are they end up disappointing me. Only a few movies (most notably this past winter's Cloverfield) have completely lived up to my hopes. And if they don't, I generally end up being overly harsh on the film in retaliation. I'm happy to say that WALL-E not only lived up to my expectations, but even surpassed them.

WALL-E is a comedy about a scatterbrained robot dealing with his loneliness on an Earth long abandoned by humanity. Despite being the only robot still functioning on the planet, he dutifully keeps going with his endless job of cleaning up trash on the polluted planet. Soon, however, his predictable world is disrupted by the arrival of EVA, another robot for whom WALL-E soon falls head over treads. Giving away any more would be doing a disservice to both you and the movie. Suffice to say, the script is tightly written, and hilarious.

This is the kind of comedy that they just don't make anymore. You know, the funny kind. The kind that doesn't involve Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler or toilet jokes. This is the kind of intelligent, thoughtful humor that has long been missing from modern movies. One thing that may turn off some moviegoers is the fact that the first half of the movie is almost completely without dialogue, however in this case, that's a very good thing. The physical comedy alone is well worth seeing, and the fact that Pixar can make a love story come to life using only two words ("Waaaaall-e" "Eeeeeeeeva") is a testament to this film's genius.

One final note: I've heard a few people say that this film is not really a kid's movie. Although there's certainly nothing inappropriate for kids, it's a more thoughtful movie with almost no dialogue that today's jack-ass generation may find hard to sit through without dying of boredom. Well I hate to sound like a cranky old person (Get off my lawn!), but that's exactly the kind of thing kids should be watching. Too many kids movies today are focused on crude, unintelligent humor and mind-melting action with no thought required, which means that the generations after mine are becoming overly-stimulated and unable to appreciate anything with more depth than Deuce Bigalow. With that in mind, this movie is quite a welcome change in direction that parents would do well to take notice of.

My rating: 9.5 out of 10 lashings.

Bad News

>Sigh<

So as if I didn't have enough going on lately, my bike is up on blocks in the backyard again, this time with a flat tire. I came out of work the other day and found it completely flat, which means that I haven't been able to get my daily exercise in a while and I'm feeling lazy. Hopefully I'll be able to replace the tire tonight and ride to work in the morning, but in all honesty, with the temperature approaching 100 degrees in the afternoon, I'm not sure that's still a good idea.

In another bit of unfortunate news, I think I may have to start posting less often on here. I've been so busy at home and work lately that it makes it hard to find the time to get on here and update, and when I do get some time in the evenings, I'm so exhausted that I'm more likely to use it to watch DVDs of Angel or play around on Second Life or Rock Band. Not to mention that I'll be starting grad school in a few months and probably have significantly less time for the foreseeable future.

So for now, I'm toning down updates from "Every Weekday" to "Sporadic" I'll probably only be updating when stuff happens that's worthy of an update. I apologize for the inconvenience, but honestly, there's only so much evil to go around and I'm committed to providing quality over quantity.

Catching Up

First of all, I must apologize. It seems that somehow, someone has managed to hack there way onto this blog and replace my last two posts with babbling gibberish from some weak-minded fool posing as your mighty overlord, as if my loyal readers wouldn't notice the difference.

Suffice to say, the perpetrator has been caught, and is currently undergoing heinous tortures the likes of which are unfathomable to most minds. Let that be a lesson to all of you out there never to p*** off someone who collects vintage dentist's equipment.

I would have noticed sooner, but the last couple of days have been incredibly hectic here at the dungeon. It seems that our new boss has decided to make many well-deserved changes to the way things happen around here, but that means that someone has to be the one to make them happen. Yesterday, for example, was spent frantically shelving microfiche the had been lying around for weeks now waiting to be reshelved by one of my colleagues who decided that it would be easier to simply... well... not do anything. I'm not sure what the powers that be decided to do to her, but I do know that the screaming finally stopped sometime after I got to work this morning.

Anyways, with so much going on in the dungeon and such a rash of people to torture lately, I've been entirely swamped this week. In fact, I should probably let you go now, as I think the hacker is just now regaining consciousness and I have an innovative new torture lined up for him that may revolutionize the dungeon industry. It's too soon to tell you exactly what it is (patent issues and all that), but I will say that it involves a scalpel, a staple gun, and three live badgers.

No one messes with The Overlord.

Day off

No real post today. I apologize for rushing off on you like this, but I'm swamped with backlogged work here at the dungeon and I'm still a little... off... from yesterday. I'm mostly feeling better, but there's still a general malaise that's been creeping in now and then. I did update the "Fellow Overlords" section with the blogs of those who responded to Friday's post, however, so go ahead and check them out.

Real posts resume tomorrow, I promise.

Time Out

Those of you who have been here from the beginning know that I don't normally break character. Well today I'm going to. Today the evil overlord thing just doesn't seem as funny to me. Tomorrow I can be funny again and we can maybe try to go back to the way things were, but today I just can't do it, no matter how hard I try.

For those of you who have not yet heard, last night George Carlin, the legendary comedian, died of heart failure.

George Carlin was one of my earliest and most revered heroes; one of the very few people in the world that I'd be willing to label as such. Carlin was not merely a comedic genius; that in and of itself is common enough. He was a prophet; a social commentator without peer. His ideas literally transformed my entire world when I was young, and continued to do so all the way through today. The way I am today, the way i think, the things I do, can almost invariably be traced to his influence.

George was irreplaceable. His unique brand of comedy, philosophy, thoughtfulness, and outright anger will never be duplicated. For many years now I thought that Carlin would live forever. Even despite hearing of his heart problems and knowing that he was getting old, the idea that he could die simply never occurred to me. He was immortal in every meaningful sense of the word.

In talking to my friends this morning, I realized that Carlin is only the third person who's ever died in my lifetime that I will really and truly miss, who wasn't a member of my family. The other two being Douglas Adams and Hunter S. Thompson. I won't say that all of my heroes have died, because that's obviously not true. There will always be heroes, as long as there are people for them to inspire. But I will say that most of the people who truly inspired my childhood and changed the way that I look at the world have now gone away. The only ones left of the five giants that shaped my worldview are Roger Waters and Tom Waits. I guess Rock and Roll really does make people live longer.

I know that whatever I say about George will be hollow and meaningless. His work is his own greatest monument to his genius. I like to think that every time I make someone laugh, or think about some small thing in a new way, that's a tiny tribute to George Carlin, a man who dedicated his life to changing the way people look at the world around them.

Like George, I'm not a religious person. At best I could be described as "non-religious", although I'd be more likely to use the term "Agnostic". So I won't waste anyone's time by saying that I'll "pray" for him, or that "I know he's in a better place", because that's not true, and even if it was it would be insulting to his legacy and memory to say so. All I know is that a bright, fiercely burning light has gone out of this world and for the moment, at least, everything seems a lot darker for it.




"I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately."

"Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck."

- George Carlin -
- 1937-2008 -