What's everyone up to right now?

[brewer]

Waiting for the T-storms to roll thru. They're about 30 min out.

[Jackalope]

They accepted our offer. We're back in the game.

[Draconic Aiur]

farting like a train

[The Valkyrie]

They accepted our offer. We're back in the game.

Accepted your offer?

When do you return their children?

[Angrboda]

If I stick to my schedule today, I get to watch baseball! I knocked out 100 pages of the book I'm reading for the 12th on Saturday, so I should be able to finish ahead of schedule. There's another 80-100 pages for another group lined up right behind that, but I'm sufficiently on schedule that I can relax a bit.

[Angrboda]

Well, I ended up running errands and reading my book on the fly, so I'm only catching the last two innings. I missed a lot of offense, but not much drama, as the Twins are spanking the Blue Jays 7 to nothing.

[Draconic Aiur]

eating chicken wings

[Angrboda]

I've got a couple hours to relax, and then three hours to read my book before the baseball game. I'm not sure I should expect an exciting game as the Twins just walked all over Toronto last night.

[Rev. Rye]

Watching Master of Disguise for the Deep Hurting Project. And I think I figured out why I liked it when I first saw it when I was a mere autistic kid: Pistachio Disguisey (Dana Carvey's character) almost certainly has autism himself: when he's not in his disguise, he has one default facial expression that covers everything from delight to finding out his girlfriend dumped him (I myself have trouble actually expressing emotion); his habit of muttering to himself is a lot like something I do; an unnatural-sounding accent (the worst fake Italian accent I've ever heard, even though he lives in America and his mother is Edie McClurg), almost like actually speaking isn't natural for him;  and most obviously, he has so little social awareness that he thinks nothing of mimicking people's vocal patterns (I shit you not, even I sometimes feel tempted to mimic other people's accents; I do know enough that other people might not see imitation as the sincerest form of flattery.) Indeed, the scene where he's talking with the Texan guy and he has a whirlwind of voices in his head seems like an (admittedly shitty) audiovisual representation of sensory overload.

And I think the film could have been much better if they played up the autistic savant angle with Pistachio. Fun fact: I was slow to learn how to talk, in fact I learned to read before I could actually talk properly, and I think it was looking at closed captions that I actually finally figured out the rudiments of learning to talk. And how did I get as eloquent as I am? Becoming obsessed with old movies, and a lot of the time, I ended up impersonating those famous actors with the distinctive voices. I legitimately think that if we saw shit like that, and we saw the struggles that he had to go through as a kid and how he coped by impersonating people, it could go a long way in making the movie (and especially Dana Carvey) tolerable. And it certainly would have actually been longer than 80 minutes and they wouldn't have had to pad out the credits. Then again, if they turned a dark comedy about homophobia and gay marriage into I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, I can't expect Happy Madison to create a legitimate autism spy comedy.

[Rev. Rye]

Dad and I spent upwards of an hour trying to activate Microsoft Office. Eventually, we managed to find my old school account and reinstalled Office from scratch. It works now.

Why did I do this? Because I found a PDF file of Leonard Cohen covers that I transferred to an XLS that caused OpenOffice to crash, but worked with Excel (well, it loaded on Excel, but Excel refused to do anything with it until it was activated.)