Last weekend: pleasant dinner with Purple and Ms. Antisocial Butterfly, followed by FOGcon and Seanan's book launch party and more FOGcon.

There followed a week of mostly face-down in Freelance Conference Stuff, interspersed with the odd doctor here and there.

I entered into a dialogue with one of the doctors about gender, and how I don't want any. The upshot has included a formal entry of a note to this effect in my demographics section, my proper honorific (Reverend), and swapping my gender marker to Unknown. We'll see what havoc this plays on my medical records.

This came up in discussion with Purple, and some extensive clowning followed. The upshot of all that was that I may actually have a short-form description of my actual gender, which is: Langford Death Parrot.

Thursday evening, my general feeling of malaise resulted in a short walk down to the hot tub, where I soaked my ergonomically annoyed muscles and listened to some neighbors chat about this and that. One of the horror stories involved some really disturbing behavior from a random small child involving a watermelon. I went back and googled; I didn't find anything about a kid (not surprisingly), but I did find a story about an increasingly acrimonious divorce case which had included the following escalating bad behavior:

( Includes implied threats of violence. )

Today was beer bash at Virtual Hammer, followed by dinner.

Purple had a baby shower before beer bash, which was why he was late. (The baby is a co-workers; he's not pregnant.) I warned him about the bread pudding fruit pies (not recommended) and he emerged about 15 minutes later, having been waylaid by a random conversation with a random friend. He is a sociable guy! He was slightly chagrined at having taken so long when he'd said he'd be right back, but I can't complain, since I benefit from this habit of his fairly significantly. (He's very sociable, and observes that I can be very sociable when I know someone, but rather less with new people.)

phone arrived, and Purple had just wondered if Mr. Tux were going to show up at all. I looked at my watch and said that it had just gone five; Mr. Tux didn't usually arrive until at least then. Sure enough, Mr. Tux emerged a few minutes later. R wandered through and chatted with the crowd. My hair and my earrings and my headphones all match. It's great!

Surrealist Band Guy dropped through and visited for a bit.

The fire pit did not light. Someone, not me, will need to file a ticket.

I'd been working steadily on the current dreamsheep, and Purple asked was it the nose I was working on. I sort of distinguish between "nose" and "chin", although in sheeps it's pretty much the same area. Purple took that distinction, and ran with it to some pretty terrible places. He later contemplated the topology of my original plan, and asked some fairly salient questions about the double-eversion phase and terminology related thereto, and also the stealth phase. "Why does this sheep have a green asshole?" The nose vs. chin question led down a chain of logic which ended on etsy with the phrases "docking muff" and "machine washable" (very important, that last).

We'd thought that Ms. Antisocial Butterfly wouldn't be joining us for dinner, but she called. She doesn't leave town until tomorrow. So we decided on a dinner location (Mountain View) and topic (pizza).

The rubber chicken for help system ticket 1,000,000 has seen better days. I had handed it off to Purple upon leaving, but it was in bad enough shape that he really did not want it around. We ceremonially consigned it to the trash, after a last commemorative picture.

Circumstances under which gender-policing can be actually hilarious: ( mention of genitals, non-explicit. ) Purple is great and I want to keep him. We headed off for dinner.

Purple and I circled the first parking garage and failed to find a spot. (I got there first, I believe.) We went up the second, and finally found spots on the fourth floor (out of five possible). I found mine, then he arrived and parked just as I was getting out of my car, so I waited for him while he juggled bluetooth and phone and he joined me at the elevator. Ms. Antisocial Butterfly had arrived on time, and we were a little delayed for once.

Ms. Antisocial Butterfly disapproves of any cracker-eating jerks who give her initials a bad reputation.

We had salad and wings and pizza and scurrilous discussion. Purple commented on weaponized earrings, after observing how my earrings do a delightful little shimmy when I shake my head. We iterated on that a bit. I draw the line at explosions near my ears.

Walking back, he helped me liberate my long loose hair from my briefcase strap, pulling it a bit in the process and apologizing. His weekend plans include heading off with Cousin Antisocial to see the aunt and uncle and helping them haul stuff around, then coming back on Sunday and presumably collapsing a bit. I may inquire after sociability on Sunday, but am not expecting necessarily anything. :>

I have no idea what I'm doing for April Fool's Day.

I am losing track of my days again.

Stuff has been happening at work.

Being a parent, even a fishparent, is hard. (But very worth it.)

Purple said a thing and it stuck in my brain and played all sorts of havoc on various functions because brains. It wasn't a bad thing for him to have said, but my brain grabbed it and sort of dragged it under the couch and stayed there with glowing eyes for a while. That was last night. Fortunately a round with the database seems to have knocked that clear of my brain.

Yesterday some of the lights in the cafeteria were flickering weirdly. I filed a ticket, then called security and asked them to summon the electrician.

Today, while the entire table was on a topic that they found very concerning and of immediate interest, but I found tedious as hell, I spotted someone walk in with bright blue hair. It was, of course, the fellow to whom I had caused to be mailed a sawed-off pool noodle! I excused myself and popped up to go say hello. (I had to. Our hairs match!)

He was happy to see me, and mentioned that his group had been taking my name in vain that morning, talking about the helldesk software. He introduced me to the guy he was standing next to, likewise in from out of town, but a rather lot further away out of town. The other dude has been with the company like forever, and is something like employee #3. That's some history there. I explained why I'm feeling optimistic about the direction the helldesk software is taking: the underlying technology is not terrible (apparently), the layer they put on top of it was misguided at best, and happily the group working on it now hates it more than I do. And I described the experience of being in what was supposed to be a user session, but one of the guys who was supposed to be quietly listening and maybe asking questions kept jumping in with details about how the thing was *worse than we thought*. #terribleparfait Plus I was one of the movers/shakers in the IRC preservation effort.

So I've now shaken the hand of that dude.

When I got back to the lunch table, the conversation was still going on.

Between a Windows 10 upgrade gone weird, a normal Windows update gone severely rebooty, and a number of away-from-desk tasks, Purple wasn't around for much of the afternoon and evening. Around about 6:30 I tiptoed over with a can of the good (blue) mountain dew to check-see if he was doing all right. I poked my head into an office gone still and cold, all screens off, laptop bag still leaning against a file cabinet. So he was in the office (somewhere), just not there. Possibly not for a few hours, my nose said. I set the can of Dew on the desk and headed back for my own cozy little cube, reflecting on how I had come to the conclusion that the office had not been sat in for a while, and tracing it back to the stillness, smell, and temperature of the air -- all of which sensing had apparently been done by my nose.

It was, at length, time to go home. I had hit my second wind and was Doing Various Things when Purple wrapped up. I could have kept going for at least another half-hour.

Purple, it seems, is a colorful guy. Today he was wearing that really bright green shirt. He reminisced about a time a friend addressed him making reference to that color, even though that friend might have never seen him in that shirt. I reminisced about that time he'd worn that shirt with the camel-colored overshirt. "Dress to wound," he said smugly. Then we played imaginary dressup and tried to put him in the intentionally worst plausible outfit we could think of.

Flip-flops with fuzzy socks, plaid pajama pants, polo shirt with a standard tie (or maybe a 70s button-down open down to the last 2 buttons with gold chains), a smoking jacket or a tracksuit jacket, and ... a hat.

I argued for a fedora. He declared that a propeller beanie would be over the top, but a newsboy cap...

"You know what the Library Monkeys called that back in high school?"
"What?"
"A Shawn hat."

After we finished giggling from that, we made to split, but got sidetracked talking about me vs. the database tool. He seemed concerned that I was still wrestling with it, and offered troubleshooty helpiness. Eventually, after kind of going "er ... mostly I haven't had enough time with it..." I pointed out that it looked like he was trying to troubleshoot, and I didn't really think it could be helped further except by more time and fewer random ... I paused. It wasn't quite that the horses had got out of the barn and now the barn was on fire, it was that the barn hadn't even been there five minutes ago. So, yeah.


On my way home, I encountered "UTF 8" on the highway. Hi!

Last night was the deadline for papers for a certain internal conference. Not the one I'm running, but the hella one that both lb and Purple were planning to submit papers for. lb submitted his in what must have been a sensible amount of time before the deadline. Up past the point we headed out of work last night (and I had occasion to explain Frank Chu very briefly in the parking lot, much to Purple's utter crogglement), Purple's conclusion was a succinct "(conclusion goes here)" sort of affair, which is more effective in a draft than in a submitted paper. I looked it over. I made a few comments, including a tentative go at a framework of a conclusion.

"$WORKNAME is fine, right?" Purple asked me. "For the paper?"

I reloaded the draft in the public folder of his server share and found my work-standardized legal name in the acknowledgements, tucked in with Mr. Bananas, his manager, lb, and a few other people. Yes, $WORKNAME is best because people can look me up by it. He got back online after getting home, and kept working on things.

It makes me quietly happy that I'm developing a few editing shorthand phrases that I can use with Purple. "Yoda" is one of them. Sometimes when he turns a sentence around, it turns out that he meant something entirely different than the first phrasing implied to me. Things like "it" and "this" sometimes have to get explicitly called, and sometimes, yep, different.

Azz: "Sounds good, Unit Test Jesus."
Purple: "I hope I don't find Unit Test Judas."

He got it submitted a comfortable hour-ish before deadline. By the end, I was able to say, "and it does not aesthetically offend me :)" He took that as the compliment it was meant as.

Azz: "unlike that combination of shirts :-P"
Purple: "that was the camel shirt with the fluorescent green shirt right?"
Azz: "yes"
Purple: "Shame I don't have purple pants"
Azz: "... ... ... you fucking eyetroll <3"

I took a long time to get to sleep last night, so I didn't wake up in time for the presentation I wanted to go to. (Purple, for his part, decided that he was going to wake up slowly reading, and then got a fifteen-minute alarm chime for the presentation, so he dialed in because there is no way to physically make it from his place to work in 15 minutes, and in any event he had been in bed at this point.) Then I had to refuel Vash, so that took longer.

Today I remembered to bring the sack of sawed-off pool noodles to work. I debated bringing one with me to lunch for Purple, but instead brought one to the conference meeting for the chairs. I gave it to Researcher Polka-Dot, and told her that it was a sawed-off pool noodle, and useful for keeping order. She was delighted, and toted it with her for the next three hours of meetings.

It was a long day full of meetings. I am really going to have to see if D16 is unoccupied before the team meetings, because going directly from the committee meeting upstairs to the team meeting is really a pain as it is at the opposite end of the building from the elevator. Since my knees and stairs shouldn't even be in the same sentence, you can imagine how well this goes. (Also, I tend to need the bathroom every hour because I drink a ridiculous amount of water to keep everything else happy, especially in meeting rooms which are overheating, which introduces more time between meetings.)

So today was the off-week for the team meeting, but our (gulp) acting director tracked down one of the higher-ups steering one of the products the team does a lot of work with, and he introduced himself and had some things to say, and the team had questions.

I am not freshly up on all the latest testing methods and also jargon, but the guy said a thing about a testing strategy which I had never heard of before. I wrote it down, resolved to google it later, and asked what his thoughts/familiarity with unit testing was. He had no thoughts, being zero familiar. I hoped that we had not just met Unit Test Judas.

After all that, the (fairly substantial) committee set off for the location where we are to hold the (small) internal conference. Since we were leaving from the ass-end of the building, we went down the stairs. That was two stairs today. I am bad at stairs. Madam Standards looked for me and waited for me to catch up. She is beginning to doubt the concept that I just ~*appear*~ everywhere. I explained the usual method.

Shenanigans resulted in some running around where Madam Standards went off with the people who were going UP the STEPS, despite her plan to walk back with me because she'd forgot her badge. Then she went back but by that time I'd already gone up in the elevator, then we were headed back but she wanted to scope out the power outlets, and so we went back...

By the end of all that, I'd exceeded my steps by a few hundred. I complained to Purple a bit. He was ... "helpful".

Now that I was back at my desk, I shared the hope that this guy is not Unit Test Judas. We all googled the test thing that he had mentioned. Purple, who knows more about testing ideologies than I do, declared that it wasn't quite even a buzzword, as one of the major requirements for a buzzword is buzz. This testing ideology had about as many other supporters besides the clickbait bingo bandits who have their writeup paywalled off as there are other plaintiffs in Frank Chu's labor dispute against the 12 Galaxies.

Eventually it was time to go. This time, I was the holdup -- I'd decided to go ahead and book the conference room we were planning for the green room. It didn't say it was restricted in the calendar system, so I set up an appointment. Then I got the rejection message -- it was restricted after all. Drat it. So I would have to file two tickets: one to ask for the room, and one to ask that the room be named to reflect its status (in accordance with the standards).

I filed the ticket to book the room. In doing so, I discovered that there were two ranks of tickyboxes, none of which were relevant to my needs in booking, but both of which were required, with no 'n/a' selection. So I would have to file a third ticket about that. Then, upon submitting, I saw that the terrible green UI showed up blank, although the terrible blue and white UI showed the details. Fourth ticket.

Again, I was still swearing when Purple came to retrieve me. I thanked him for being supportive and listening while I wrestled with the fucking thing. We headed out by way of the kitchen -- I had grabbed some toast and hot chocolate earlier, and had a plate and cup to drop in the dishes -- but the kitchen floor was being actively washed. I left the plate on a nearby table, as this was the lesser inconvenience.

He didn't see my car at first. "Where did you park?" "Near you." We rounded whatever it was that was blocking the view, and he saw the little white sedan in the space right next to his car, and he mused that he had in fact been in to work a little later than he'd planned on, due to the presentation that morning.

We chatted for a while in the parking lot.

Purple: "And the guy was -- what's-his-name, British, in a lot of romcoms..."
Azz: "...Alan Rickman?"
Purple: *doubles over laughing* "You're certainly watching different things than I am!"
Azz, slightly defensively: "The only British [male] actors I know are: Alan Rickman, Bendydick Cummerbund, Sir Ian, Sir Patrick... Oh! And John Cleese! Eric Idle! Eric-the-half-a-Bee!"
Purple, howling with laughter: "ERIC THE HALF A BEE IS NOT A REAL ACTOR. HE'S A BEE. HALF A BEE."

Somehow (via "Bad Touch") we got onto the time I sprayed myself in the face with glitter, twice, as a result of being too tired to play with physics.

We hugged goodnight. We still had a few words left. Then I bent over a bit, exposing the top of my head to him. He scritched me gently on the head, then told me I was weird. :)

Friday:
Today I solved lb's fruit mystery at work. The answer was jujubes. The problem was, about yea big and round, green and red, the guy didn't know what they were, he'd found them at a local grocery and brought them in. I thought on it for a bit and decided that might sound like jujubes, so I googled that and pulled up images. Those looked like I thought they did, so I showed him the pictures on my phone, and I had solved the mystery. (And everybody else gathered around my phone and went Ohhhhhhh.)

On Wednesday, Purple and I discussed being the Weirdest One in the Group. He and I are both usually that person. Between us, I usually am. Between him, me, and lb? That's still up for grabs, but sometimes it might be lb.

I got a random compliment on my lipstick. Yay!

The very large Office Depot bag of old-as-balls software has been reduced to a spreadsheet and about 4 DVD cases' worth of space. Yay!

Bash was fun. I claimed a table and protected its chairs. Then lb came down. We chatted for a bit. I spied the tall, chill Australian dude with all the hair who had been in that infamous meeting with us, and waved at him; he came over. I grabbed food. Purple showed up. The short, intense Australian dude with none of the hair (phone) came over. (phone often works from home, so lb counts it as a social success that he's willing to come in to spend time with friends-and-co-workers willingly.) There was general hilarity and funtimes, as well as very cranky discussion of the helpdesk situation. Later, R and the Other Guy came over. Mr. Zune did not make it a full #cupcake crew, but it was very close. The Dean swung by; we're still waiting for word from Mr. Sub-tle on movie night. Good times. There was a wasp. Purple teased me about the wasp.

We split somewhat earlier than some times; Purple had a 2600 meeting to catch. I had more work (Thursday was pretty much a wash; I came in at 4pm due to terrible sleep schedule shenanigans). I did not stay super super late, but late enough that the PM I'd chatted with at fuck o'clock the previous week told me to go home on her way out the door.

Saturday, I slept through the parts of the day when I was not drooping from the heat.

Sunday, I ventured forth for supplies -- groceries, gas, and fabric for the upcoming Halloween costume -- and did laundry. Also slept.

Monday:
Woke up early enough to be in the office before lunch. Set some more balls rolling. Found, to my delight, that the tall, chill, Australian dude with all the hair had joined #cupcake. Introduced a few members of #cupcake to Things I Won't Work With. Purple and phone were already aware of it, but it was new to Mr. Zune. Enjoyed a nice quiet lunch with Purple and two of the guys. I've been having regular enough 1:1s with my manager since she got back from vacation that today's was actually shorter than the allotted time!

After grinding through more stuff in my inbox, I turned my face reluctantly in the direction of the notes I was typing up from the meeting last month: I was aware that there was a big section of active yelling in the middle of it, and since I am generally conflict-averse, I was dreading doing that part.

Reader, it was the creamy nougat-with-almonds center of the poo-coated dramabomb that was that meeting. (I am cognizant of this as an object that no-one ought to be putting in their mouth.) In the middle of the Angry Guy being angry, lb being stern, me being earnest, and the Chill Aussie being low-key, were some amazing statements from the buck-passer-in-chief and the goon from IT. My notes are sprouting editorial comments.

My buttons came today. I declared to Purple that I'd want to leave by 8 in order to get to Jo Ann's for further fabric supplies. ( Read more... )

Today contained many awesomes.

Workstuff: It was supposed to be the day for a fix release on the helpdesk software. We'll see how things are on Monday. We'll also see how my workload is going into Labor Day weekend -- Hipster Researcher has announced intent to come back from a conference with audio recordings. Since the point of my ridiculously detailed notes from 2nd Thursday is that we can't retain audio on the servers, he may have to cut bait if my workload is too high to spare time for that.

I have the butterfly & Gaiman package of BPAL from synecdochic! This whole thing is so much fun. And I have run into some scents that maybe I don't want to keep, which means eventual delight for someone else! (Either that or a garlic wine/cherry lime horrorsyrup situation, where the vessel of woe is tested by a succession of people until it is gone.)

It was beer bash day. I brought my own bottle of non-beer and secured a table. phone joined me, and Purple, and some of the guys. "Hi guys!" said Lennon Glasses Guy, and then realized that technically, if "guys" is gendered, I am the odd man out. So to speak. I allowed as how since I wasn't presenting particularly femme at that point, I wasn't particularly offended. Purple pointed out that the hat (a black floppy-brimmed sun hat, one of the woven paper and plastic thread ones that I go through slightly slower not-in-Arizona) wasn't particularly butch. I allowed as how the skirt of the day was fairly butch. Then we discussed how to butch up that hat. "A beer hat!" Purple declared. Yes. That is butch. Then we figured out how to *un*-butch the beer hat: fancy drinks (possibly with lots of fruit) in lieu of beers. Purple's brain got stuck on the mental image of the mojito-hat, and seemed to sort of white out from glee.

( A few of us made dinner plans. )

While we were cruising through an intersection, there came a honking from the right lane. Purple, who had been driving, hadn't registered the same level of detail I had. "The Civic cut in from the right and was going too slow for the Subaru, who was pretty mad judging from the way it honked," I explained. Purple had thought as much, but he'd been watching different parts of the road. Then traffic slowed hella down and halted for a traffic light, just as the Civic got out of the way of the Subaru and wound up in front of us, which put us about in line with the Subaru. "It's phone!" I said, and busted up laughing. Indeed, the somewhat honky driver of the Subaru was in fact our co-worker and friend. "Hey phone!" Everybody's windows were down. He heard his name (much to his surprise), looked over, saw us, and we had a short and hilarious chat until the light turned green and we headed off thattaway.

( Parking shenanigans and dinner. )

R and the Other Guy had ordered with dessert in mind. Then we learned that the place does not do dessert! So we set forth into the foodie district of downtown Palo Alto with dessert in mind.

The first place was too crowded. (Purple spoke up in praise of my being decisive, even though it was decisovely negative.) The place across the street was too young and hip. The place across the other street said it was "so good." We elected skepticism, and looked at all the buzzwords on the windows. The next place did have a dessert menu, but it also looked kinda trendy and such. ( Dessert was eventually accomplished. )

I laughed a lot tonight. I feel great.

Thank you to everybody for the well-wishes! :D It was a perfectly lovely day.


In which I tell a story in lightly edited IRC, as bedtime is coming sooner than winter is:

#adventuresofstnono

( Read more... )


#dreamwidth

[23:45] <Azz> Today I got to hear Robert Picardo, LeVar Burton, and Brent Spiner speak.
[23:45] <Azz> BEST BIRTHDAY
( Read more... )



Other bits:

( Read more... )

What can I say about today?

( Work & lunch & stuff. )

The guest speaker was Ken Thompson. Everyone was very excited. It was an interview with one of the senior dudes, who had a compilation of prepared questions. It was great fun to listen to.

At one point, it transpired that Ken had brought something for show-and-tell, in case things got slow. It was an Enigma machine. We were duly impressed. He told the story of how he had come by it (lost the coin flip, but later inherited it) and the other fellow held it up so we all could see. Ooo.

Eventually they opened up the floor for questions. Ever since he'd mentioned Berkeley specifically by name, my brain had been going down the breaking-things path. (The story of my father vs. the variable speed card reader goes here.) As I listened and grabbed the occasional picture, I thought about what the best question might be. What about the most expensive thing he had broken?

Some questions later, it solidified in my mind, and I caught the attention of the guy with the microphone. I held it carefully as Ken answered the previous question (and handed it back to the guy who'd asked the previous question when he needed to clarify, because some things just need amplification). And soon enough it was my turn.

The question I asked was shaped a little like this: Breaking things can often be a significant part of a computer person's life. Could he talk a little bit about some of the more interesting times he tried to break something, broke something, or almost broke something?

I noticed absently that my voice, amplified and re-broadcast over the speakers, was clear, full of humor, and without raspiness or hesitation. It was a reasonably nice voice. Apparently I've been coming to terms with it.

The question was wildly popular; as I sat back, my #cupcake compatriots congratulated me on an excellent question. He settled in to give us context and then a hell of a story. I will do my best to relate it; I've been poking around to see if there's a better version up online elsewhere somewhere. However! There were no few times that he'd in fact had written permission to fuck all sorts of shit up, and in one particular workplace, they'd been in the habit of leaving little easter eggs for him inside the hospital mainframe, with taunting messages to the effect that he could never get this one. And in his pursuit of this particular one, he had managed to de-couple the login function from the password file that it was supposed to check, with the result that there would be no more logins. And he couldn't get them back together. (Appropriate noises from the audience.) However! He had two terminals open. And he was still logged in over there. And he managed to discern that he could make the login program check for a password against the terminal. And he did. And he was back in. And hooooooo boy the stuff he could get into. And after that, this trick was in his arsenal.

There were more questions, and more answers. ( Read more... )

This weekend, mostly I slept. I'm not entirely pleased with the Android app display on the Fitbit sleep tracking, because it seems to show average duration of the individual sleep sessions, not total sleep in that 24 hour period. Thus it appears as though I got 6 hours of sleep on Saturday, when in fact I got 12 hours of sleep. (This is normal for Saturdays.)

I also had trouble logging sleep when I'd forgotten to put on the tracker overnight. I'd left it on the charger because it was having some funny business, and then I wasn't feeling up to getting out of bed to retrieve it.

My "smart" alarm clock, which was programmed prior to the latest US time shenanigans, decided it was time to switch over this weekend. I can't rightly remember when the time actually does change, but I am certain that it will be heralded by wrath from my Overlady, who dislikes the whole thing more than I do. (Since I dislike it heartily, her wrath is impressive.)

I had Adventures with my debit card (and my Costco card) yesterday evening. I went out to run some errands (get my phone swapped back -- oh, right).

So my phone, Jonathan Strange, has had Close Encounters of the Di-Hydrogen Monoxide kind. Again. I'm pretty sure at this point that what I did was set him down in a puddle on the bathroom counter, but in any event he started acting flaky on Friday, and the cause was discovered to be water all up inside him. Not much, but enough to cause Flakiness. So I stripped him and tossed him in a bag of rice, as one does. From the previous Adventure, norabombay had been kind enough to send me her old handset, a Galaxy S with slide-out keyboard (ooo!) who was promptly dubbed Mr. Norrell. (As one does.) So I traipsed down to the phone service place with Mr. Norrell and had him swapped in until I found out whether Jonathan would make it or not. Sunday, after allowing Jonathan time to dry out, I put him back together and he worked. So back to the store with us to do the swap again.

Incidentally, if you have an Android, I highly recommend SMS Backup (or similar, but that's the one I have used) to make sure that the things that Android doesn't sync off the shelf get ... sunk? Synchronized.

( Costco, lost-and-found debit card, and the current state of my closet. )

Writing note: Michael's shirt choice is deliberate. There was a general howl of laughter when I described him. (Michael is first seen wearing a yellow plaid shirt unbuttoned over a disreputable Slackware t-shirt, and then gets referred to by "the nasty mustard plaid shirt".) That outfit is a combination of Geekboy Stereotypes, enough so that a collection of non-geek ladies can recognize it.

And purple is the hot new color for guys. Ones who can pull it off, that is. Lavender plaid is a bold fashion choice for many, but some people can pull it off. The one dude's eye-searing striped 800080, DDA0DD, and ADFF2F shirt is fashionably Wrong. It looks absolutely dreadful, but he has the whole blatantly outrageous thing going, and can pull it off.

I discovered at some point in my Goth Phase that black did not stain like the other colors did. This became crucial with art classes daily in high school. Currently, I am a klutz, and I spill things on myself, things including, but not limited to: household chemicals, solid foodstuffs, water, implements of temporary writing, implements of permanent writing, cosmetics, highly-colored liquid foodstuffs, office chemicals, cat hair, cake, death, wax, vinegar, and wine. For most of these things (with the exception of bleach and bleachlike substances), black will take the least damage. In order to not have spilling happen, I need to either sit in one place with a book and no pens, doing nothing and touching nothing, or I need to be so careful as to preclude my having any actual fun or getting any work done. In order not to have staining happen, I need to either not spill, or wear stainproof clothing. Stainproof black won out.

One of my favorite black shirts, the all-black Nine Inch Nails one, with black printing on black cloth, was a casualty of a bathtub in severe need of bleach. The resulting burned-looking brownish-orange marks looked intentional, though, so it's now one of my coolest pieces of clothing, and almost assuredly without duplicate.

I'm a Winter, so I can get away with black, especially with darker lipstick to (vanity) wash out that perpetual patch of reddened skin at the lower right corner of my mouth.