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My species doesn't suck quite as much as I thought yesterday, though it's still trying.

While there are horribly stupid people in the world and attempting to run it, there are still sensible people with reasonable principles. Two lovely people at Microsoft- Juhi and Clint- helped me get the company VPN mostly functioning the way we wanted it last night; I was able to connect to all the relevant servers, though we can't browse to any of them. Gotta use IP addressing. Shouldn't be a problem if I can write a batch file to map the drives involved.

Ibby's, a Middle Eastern takeaway on Grove Street in Jersey City, makes excellent kofta and rice. Inexpensive, too.

I'm still working on the sleeves I have to finish by Saturday evening, though. The first sleeve. I may have to lock myself up at home tonight to bang these guys out- well, I'll be stopping for a size six Addi Turbo first.

Oh, and my Ghostbusters poster finally came yesterday. Looks lovely. Tonight I might have the time to actually hang it up. I phoned the comics shop and let them know and thanked them; they deserve it.

(no subject)

Spam title this morning: Complimentary Personal Navigator.

In my book, that's Hikaru Sulu.

D'oh.

When I bought the four-issue Ghostbusters: Legion comic book miniseries, I was surprised at first to see that it was set in 2004 despite being six months after the movie. It seemed gratuitous to me to move things twenty years, but oh, well, I'd deal with it. I got a good crossover ficlet out of it, at any rate. I also got the opportunity to construct some nice backstory for Ray Stantz when I applied for him at Milliways; as batyatoon pointed out, the city/state/Feds would have reacted REALLY differently to a major threat like that in a post 9/11 world. I postulated that the Towers had been destroyed in that universe- but that they had been destroyed when Trans-Ocean 66 came home.

Trans-Ocean 66 was the jetliner in an episode of the Twilight Zone that attempted to land at Kennedy Airport, but instead came out sometime in the Jurassic period, and then had even more trouble getting back. The written version of the episode ended with a line about "if you hear the sound of a jet's engines roaring overhead, sounding desperate and lost, send up a flare; it may be Trans-Ocean 66, trying to find its way home."... at any rate, in my version of events, the jet hit the tower with the radio mast on it. The weird temporal energies around the plane caused the radio mast to overload the navigational apparatus of every airplane for miles, and one of the overloaded jets hit the other Tower. Thus, the Towers were destroyed, but by a tragic accident- creating the Transportation Safety Administration but not the Department of Homeland Security. (Randall Winston was president anyway, as far as I was concerned.) And since the flight recorder PROVED that it was a plane lost in the late 1960's, that opened the door to the acceptance of parapsychology as a legitimate department at Columbia University- just in time for Ray and company to have positions there, then lose their grant.

Unfortunately, today I opened the last issue of the miniseries and looked more closely at an otherwise unremarkable ectoplasmic 'map' of the city. From most angles it was unrecognisable, but in one panel the map showed what looked like the southern end of Manhattan. Most of the buildings were different from the images I knew so well from 9/11 LIDAR, but... well, there are NO other buildings in the City that are both that perfectly matched and that utterly plain.

In Ghostbusters: Legion canon, the city reacted the same way to the Gozer incident because it didn't know there was another way. The Towers are still standing.

I should've looked more carefully.