So I'm 25 now.  I can rent cars.  Pretty cool, I know.  Now all birthdays are the same except first baby, second baby, etc., then 50, and then last.  Although because it's my first married birthday things were different.  For example, I had sort of a celebration; it was just me and my wife and her family, but it was still more than I'd had in the past ten years or so, it feels like.  I'm just not really big on people making a fuss over me.  It feels unfomfortable.

But anyway, it gave me money via parents and grandparents, which so far I've used to buy Spenser's Faerie Queene (the people at Barnes & Noble had no clue), an iPod car charger/FM tuner, and the first two Starslip Crisis books.  I've got some cash left, and I'm thinking FF 1+2.

Did you hear about FF5 and FF6 coming out on GBA this fall?  To me, this news is even more important than the DS FF3 thing.  Slightly.  Because I don't have a DS.

I finally got my iPod to "just work" on Linux, thanks to Listen music player.  It's Gnome/Ubuntu Dapper exclusive, but it works nicer than GTKPod or *shudder* Rythymbox.  It makes listening to podcasts easy.  Except for On The Media, which is totally their fault: their podcast RSS names their files "onthemedia.mp3?=XX", "XX" being the show number.  So Listen can't understand that it's filetype MP3, not MP3ANDSOMESTUFF.

So...  When will I read The Faerie Queene?  Good question.  After I finish Left Hand of Darkness, which I'm reading now, and probably after finishing Dante's Heaven.  Yes, I use the English titles.  I speak English, and read it in English translation, so that's what I do.  I also call Boethius's work The Consolation of Philosophy, not De Consolatio Philosophico or however it's spelled.

I might screen Pirates tonight at midnight.  Or I might not.  I have that freedom.