My buddy is letting me borrow the first season of Battlestar Galactica. It’s one of those shows I’ve been meaning to watch for a long time (like Lost, which I still need to do) but never quite got around to.

Now I’m getting caught up. So far I’m only through the first few discs but I can say I’m really enjoying it. It’s just what I need to be honest. With as busy as I’ve been the past few weeks a little relaxing downtime after work with a good sci-fi show suits me just fine.

Edit: I finished Season 1 last night and yeah, I am hooked. Great show!

I watch what most would probably consider a below average amount of TV. The shows that I do watch tend to be the kind that usually inform. For example, I’m a big fan of a lot of stuff on Discovery HD Theater. Not just because it makes my Bravia look amazing, but because there’s some genuinely cool stuff on there.

But whenever there’s a show that has to do with nature at all - especially documentaries - I have this constant, underlying fear that they will cut to a closeup of a spider. I mean, spiders are in nature right? Well, apparently nature is made up entirely of spiders in my world view. Shows about forests will have all kinds of terrible wolf spiders and black widows. A show with the desert will invariably have camel spiders the size of small SUVs. Even places that have no right containing spiders will have them. Mountain dwelling spiders. Arctic spiders. Subterranean sonar-using spiders. It doesn’t matter where that NatGeo or Discovery camera crew goes, I somehow feel that you can count on the fact that there will be spiders there and that they feel it is their duty to display those spiders to you in an arbitrary fashion.

This makes no sense. The vast majority of shows that feature nature have nothing to do with spiders. And in fact, I like to enjoy nature in person quite a bit so I have first hand knowledge that there are not spiders waiting for impromptu cameos around every tree. Believe it or not, it can at times be harder to find a spider than it would be to simply not find a spider.

I don’t even hate spiders that much. I’m not a fan by any means, especially when they get above a certain size, but I can deal with them. Something about one-thousand eighty progressive lines of spidery detail (particularly when it is hairy and features numerous eyes) given without any warning bugs me. You could be watching something entirely relaxing, like a tree canopy, or water fowl and then it’s an immediate cut to a horrifying spider view. Put away the fucking zoom lens, mister camera operator.

I’m not entirely crazy for feeling this way since I’ve gotten burned before, but I’m still overreacting. Thankfully I think I’m starting to get over this. It hasn’t been easy but little by little I grow more accepting of spiders and that they simply are in nature and sometimes they get caught on camera.

I just spent five minutes trying to “fix” my DVR because it wouldn’t fast forward. Turns out I was watching live TV.

Last night Paul came by and hung out. As always it was good times. We went to the Coney Island near my house that I’ve been meaning to check out for a few months now for dinner and it was totally great. There’s something about a Coney Island place with friends that is just fantastic in my opinion. The food was pretty good too I can happily say; not quite to Zorba’s level (and certainly not as good as Lafayette) but it was pretty damn good.

We headed back to the house where I gave a quick demo of some of the beats I’m working on and then moved on to Professor Layton and the Curious Village for the NDS. This is a game about solving puzzles. It’s very much like that comic shows actually. Every time you try and do something, a person tells you, “Hey, how about you do this puzzle first.” Being a jerk of a professor who acts like an insufferable know-it-all you have to prove to the simple villagers that their pointless mind games are child’s play.

The game is actually quite pretty, with very nice looking art and a level of animation for critical scenes that surprised me, even voice over work (which was hilarious on in its own way). We hadn’t really gotten too far into the game to see what exactly made the village so curious except for the obvious stack of homes reaching into the sky. We did, however, learn that I am an absolute bloodhound at finding “hint coins.” Must be from those days as a kid playing pixel-hunting adventure games.

The puzzles kind of attempt to fit with the game’s plot/story/environment but sometimes they’re pretty blatant about the “Hey, solve this math problem,” attitude the game has. That said, a couple that we came across were actually quite tricky and fun. I don’t really have any puzzle games like this that encourage actual critical thinking (I have to do a lot of that at work as it is…) but this might be worth picking up when I can find it used for cheap.

After that we watched a few episodes of Flight of the Conchords, one of my favorite shows as of late. Paul seemed to appreciate the dry and often wacky sense of humor that the show has, and that we both also share.

Before it was time to call it a night Paul helped me unlock level 5 in Rez HD. After failing on the final boss (making me realize just how bad I am at this sort of thing now) I realized it was after 11:00 and that I should probably head to bed.

I have no less than seven drafts sitting in my WordPress right now. Seven. Several of these are really good posts too… Or will be when I actually write them. Work is really hitting hard right now and I’m running on all cylinders to keep up. Hopefully I’ll get some time this weekend to do a little writing.