For the past year or so, I’ve been getting emails from various gaming sites telling me I’ve signed up for accounts with them. Funny, thinks I, I don’t recall signing up to play games on (for example) Cartoon Network’s site. Every few weeks, and sometimes more frequently, I get notification from some site with details about some account I didn’t sign up for using one of my many Gmail accounts. These sites are always gaming-related, and they almost always seem as if they’re geared toward boys between the ages of twelve and fifteen.

I’ll admit that this ongoing situation confused me — surely this person, presumably some other 12-to-15-year-old Allen Holt, would A) know his own email address and B) realize that he wasn’t getting any email from any of these accounts he was signing up for? One site, okay, sure — either you put your address in wrong or you that site’s mail setup is busted or something else kept you from getting email. But there were many of these sites this kid had signed up for, so, um, wha?

A couple of times I tried logging into these accounts — after all, I had the login information for them, so maybe I could use that info to find out who this kid who thought he had my email address was and ask him (very nicely, of course) to cut it out. But no luck. There was never any information I could use to identify the kid (which is actually a Very Good Thing, I feel, for sites geared toward younger users).

So the occasional random gaming accounts continue to appear in my inbox.

Then yesterday I received an email — again to that same Gmail account — from a teacher in Utah addressed to the parents of her new class of kids, talking about how happy she was with their progress so far this year. Luckily for me she didn’t BCC the address list: I looked through all of the addresses she sent the email to and found the name, at long last, of the boy who’s been unknowingly tormenting me for the last year (where “tormenting” equals “occasionally spamming my inbox.”)

Now I had my in.

I sent an email to his teacher explaining the situation and requesting that she tell the kid that my email address wasn’t his and asking if he would please kindly stop using it. She wrote back and told me she would, and also told me that he’s a really good kid and surely didn’t mean any harm — which I’d already gathered, of course, given the sites he was registering with, but it was still nice to hear that my email account wasn’t being used by a little douchebag.

This morning, she wrote back and finally answered the question I’d had all along: the kid’s mother has an email address one letter off from mine, and he’d either been mistyping it or just had it wrong all this time. Knowing that it was his mom’s address made the whole thing make much more sense to me. His teacher said she’d talked to both parent and child and everything should be copacetic now.

So thank you, Becky Ivory of Murray, Utah, for gracefully handling what surely must have seemed a bizarre request from a complete stranger on the other side of the country. You easily could have ignored my email or been less than friendly in your reply (assuming I was some kind of stalkery weirdo), but you did neither. I sincerely appreciate your help, and best of luck with your students — especially the clearly ones addicted to online video games.

Thank you, Bryan Safi of That’s Gay, for helping to point out the utter ridiculousness of one the television industry’s long-standing trends, one which has driven me batshit for a decade now: sure as New England snow, sweeps week and season premieres bring out a new round of straight girls kissing other girls for a quick ratings boost. That little ploy has looooong since stopped being especially effective — if it ever was in the first place — and really? It only makes your show seem desperate and kinda sad.

Don’t get me wrong: I like watching women kissing as much as anybody else who enjoys watching that sort of thing. But, to borrow and butcher a phrase from a friend of mine, it’s more that I like watching sexy people kiss as much as anything else, regardless of the genders of the people involved. And I like to see passion and desire in those kisses, not chaste oh-god-can-we-please-get-this-over-with lip-locking, which is what we get more often than not with these crass ratings-grab stunts.

That’s how you know Heroes has officially lost whatever relevance it might have had, by the way: there’s gonna be an “OMG Hayden Panettiere Kissin’ Girlz!!!1!” element to her story this fall. If I thought we were going to see a reasonably well-handled story with actual character development about Claire realizing she has feelings for another woman and how she deals with it, that would be one thing…I mean, that’s how Buffy handled the beginnings of the Willow-Tara relationship. But I think we all know that ain’t gonna be what happens. Instead, we’ll get a slew of ads about why we should watch the shocking! season premiere of Heroes! We won’t believe what! Happens!! Next!!!

This isn’t 1998, TV. C’mon. You want to shock me? Throw some dudes snogging my way. Let’s see you exploit men the way you’ve been exploiting women for years. Yeah, that’s right: I’m not gonna be happy until I see a couple of men kissing on TV. And I mean really kissing, none of this tight-lipped-just-kinda-pressing-our-mouths-together horseshit you pull with your sweeps week temporary lesbians. I want one of your top-tier network shows to feature passionate, open-mouthed tongue wrestling between two hot dudes, and I want you to promote the hell out of it for weeks before the show airs. It’s only fair.

Oh, and I don’t mean gay guys, either — it’s almost always straight women kissing other straight women or, perhaps, women of dubious sexuality, so to be fair I want the same thing for guys. If I want to see gay men enjoying each other, I can see that on cable — that’s not what I’m talking about here. What I want to see is Dr. House and Dr. Wilson succumb to the moment and go at it like horny teenagers. I want to see Sylar sucking some guy’s powers out through his tonsils instead of going through his brain. I want to see Jack and Sawyer having a serious Brokeback moment. I want to see Barney Stinson decide that his life full of chasing women has gotten boring, so he takes up chasing men instead.

C’mon, TV. It’s time. For fuck’s sake, you barely allowed any kissing between men on Will and Grace, a show about gay men. Spend the next few years making a big deal out of dudes smooching the way you have with women for the last ten, and maybe then we can all just get the hell over it and get to the point where people kissing whoever they want isn’t so shocking! anymore.

After a year-and-a-half at Harmonix, I finally had my first real tiff with a co-worker today — worse, one I actually like quite a bit.[1] Well, even the fairly mild “tiff” may be too strong a word; basically, I unknowingly acted kind of like a schmuck, and my friend/co-worker took the “unknowingly” part of that situation away from me.

I don’t like ever feeling like anyone’s upset with me ever. It’s one of my least favorite things in the world. I know it happens, of course: I’m human, I fuck up, I piss people off or hurt their feelings or what have you. But I try very very hard to make sure that happens as infrequently as I can, both because I genuinely don’t want others to feel upset because of something I’ve done and because it makes me feel all icky inside, like my guts have been coated in a spicy self-recrimination salsa and heavily breaded with angst crumbs.

I have to say, though, that I feel like I handled today’s not-quite-a-tiff like an actual, honest-to-Jebus adult. You might think to yourself: “Well, Allen, you’re 38 years old, so you totally should be handling these sorts of things like an adult.” And you’d be right to think I should, yet incredibly wrong to think that I do.

Today, however, I listened to what my friend had to say, and I apologized (even as he said an apology wasn’t necessary — to me, it was: I’d acted like a douche and should, therefore, apologize). I told him I’d try to be better about this sort of thing in the future and asked him to call me on it if I do it again.

Then I made him hug it out with me, because that’s what secure, adult men do after spats.

Now I have to figure out how to apply that same level of calm, coherent listening-and-discussing-without-letting-it-destroy-my-fragile-self-esteem thing to my more personal interactions. Even after twelve years of spending every day together, I still let the tiniest argument with Terry (or most anyone close to me) send me into a flaming spiral of depression and self-flagellation. When Terry’s upset with me — which doesn’t happen incredibly often, but still more often that I’d like, as I seem to be a fairly infuriating person to live with (sorry, Terry!) — I take it as if my entire being is at fault. When I piss her off, it’s as if I’m the universe’s lowest form of bottom-of-sneaker scum. I have exactly one feeling which even remotely compares to that awfulness, and that’s the feeling that I’ve disappointed my daughters. I’m honestly not sure which is worse.

Maybe now that I have more proof that I can handle the disapproval of others and know that it won’t kill me, that I can look it in the face and not shrink from it (at least to some limited degree with people I like and respect), I can put that same be-a-damn-grownup principle to work the next time I make Terry want to chuck a shoe at my head.

I have a feeling I won’t have to wait long to give it a try.

[1] OK, I like 95%+ of my co-workers, so that’s not a surprise.

So a month-and-a-half ago or so I decided I wanted to redesign this website in a very public manner, following the Japanese principle of kaizen, or continual incremental improvement. I doubt many of you have stopped by the site during that time, but if you had, you probably noticed that, well, there really wasn’t a lot in the way of improvement going on, incremental or otherwise. I’ve been meaning to work on the design, but have so many other things I’m trying to do that redesigning this site just wasn’t high enough of a priority. I still intend to do so — I actually have a design well underway, just nowhere near ready to start putting together. For now, though, I’m going back to the previous iteration of the site, even if it’s not my design, just so the site doesn’t look quite so damn ugly, even if it was on purpose.

I think, in fact, that the site’s ugliness was one of the reasons I haven’t updated it much lately. Looking at the site and its ugliness, temporary or not, was a reminder of the work I wasn’t doing, so I tended not to look at it and, therefore, not update it. That problem, then, is now solved, and I hope to get back to a more consistent update schedule. Regardless of the other work I’m doing and the quality of that work, I almost always feel better about myself when I’m writing. I have one of those brains that tends not to be quite sure what it thinks about things if I’m not writing my thoughts down somewhere.

I have been doing some writing, of course: during the last month over at Moviegeekz, I’ve posted reviews of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the Ryan Reynolds mindfuck The Nines and the fantastic and underrated Robert Downey Jr./Val Kilmer noir-comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, as well as the old Sandra Bullock romantic comedy While You Were Sleeping, just ’cause I like Sandra Bullock. I’ve got more stuff coming up over there just as soon as I find the chance to finish writing it; soon I’ll cross that magical fifty reviews mark and it’ll start to feel almost like a legitimate movie review site.

That’s it for now — just wanted this site not to feel quite so abandoned. More to come soon!

Some Saturdays are made for getting out of the house and adventuring: going to a park and running around or going to the beach, perhaps. Some Saturdays are made for housework. Some Saturdays are made for travelling or socializing or games.

And some Saturdays…aren’t.

My boss linked to a YouTube video yesterday on Twitter which I wanted to share with you guys, but I couldn’t find a way into writing about it. See, the video (by TheraminTrees) is all about what’s known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect: their studies demonstrate that people who are incompetent don’t realize that they’re incompetent. They think they’re as smart and capable as everyone else and don’t recognize that others are more competent than they. Their complete lack of self-knowledge occludes their entire view of the world and affects their interactions with it.

(Funnily enough, highly competent people tend to undervalue their own competence, assuming better of everyone else than they really should.)

But scanning through the news this morning, I realized there was an absolutely perfect connection, a note-perfect example of exactly the sort of person Justin Kruger and David Dunning were talking about in their study: Sarah Palin.

Watch the video below with Palin in mind, and enjoy. (If it helps entice you to watch the video, I’ll note that the word “sodomites” appears several times.)

Just a reminder that even if it seems I haven’t been updating this site a whole lot lately, it doesn’t mean I’m not writing stuff.  Want to know what I thought of Blade Runner: The Final Cut?  Or about the recent announcement that there will be twice as many contenders for the Best Picture Oscar next year?  Or maybe you’d like to see a newer, less violent trailer for Inglourious Basterds?  (No, I know, Noah…not you.)  Then head on over to Moviegeekz and take it all in there!

OK, yes. The site has done gone ugly. Not that it was necessarily beautiful before, but it’s even uglier now. Really, it’s not you — it’s me.

I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week at An Event Apart in Boston, a conference for web developers. Several luminaries in the web design and development field — people whose blogs I’ve been reading for years — presented talks, and the conference did exactly what it was supposed to do, what I’d hoped it would do: it got me re-energized about web development. I realized that I really do enjoy building websites, even if I’ve been more than a bit bored with the specifics of what I’ve been doing lately.

I hope to have more to say on this topic soon, but for now know that my site’s uglification is part of a project. One of the concepts I took away from the speakers at the conference was rooted in the Japanese term kaizen, or “progressive and continual enhancement.” That means…well, okay it means sort of the exact opposite of what I’m doing, but bear with me for a minute. Kaizen means I don’t have to pull down an entire design and start from scratch: I can make small, subtle changes over time. I’ve already begun doing this to Moviegeekz and Mother Mirth, Terry’s site.

For this site, though, of all my sites…I need to have my own design here rather than use a stock theme, which is what I was doing. So I scrapped that theme and I’m starting with nothing. I currently have no style or design on this site. And over time, I’m going to make progressive changes and build it up into something which hopefully won’t suck. I’m designing in the public eye, to some degree: I’ll put up here whatever I have whenever I’m done working on any particular bit. It won’t always look good — it sure doesn’t right now — but hopefully when I’m done it’ll be something I can be proud of. And I plan to document some of what I’m doing.

I have no idea how long this’ll take to do, especially since it’s not really my main focus. I won’t be offended if you read what I write here in an RSS reader for awhile. But I hope that the project will be interesting and that you’ll check in from time to time to see how it’s going.

Hey, you remember last week when I said I had an article going up on RockBand.com soon? Well, it’s live. If you’ve ever been in a band and wondered whether it’s a good idea to date one of your bandmates, you’ll definitely want to check the article out.

Oh, hell, what am I saying…all of you should check the article out. I had a lot of fun writing it, and I hope y’all enjoy reading it!

Some of you might remember Moviegeekz, my old movie news-’n'-reviews website I ran for a couple of years but let flounder and die in 2006.  Well, given how much writing about movies I’ve been doing here since I started updating this site again — and the fact that of the six posts I have rattling around in my head right now, five of those are about movies — it seemed appropriate to dig up the grave, exhume the corpse, pump some coffee into it and slap some lipstick on there.  It’s now live once again with all of the reviews I’ve written since its demise copied over to it.

And not only does it have those recent reviews, it has a brand-new one you can’t get here!  Click on over to read my review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and feel free to poke around a bit while you’re there.  And don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed!

I’m pretty excited about this development — it just feels right, y’know?  And it doesn’t mean I’m abandoning this site, either — I have plenty of non-movie stuff to write about sometimes, and all of that will continue go here.  Stay tuned!