1. This website Hello, this website!

2. Sleep I shall definitely be doing a bit of sleeping.

3. My youth I think it's probably not an overstatement to say that REM and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were, for better or worse, two of the things that had the largest cultural impact on me when I was growing up. "Fall on Me", "Belong", "Shaking Through" — well, there's so many REM songs that I love, or loved. And, as with anything that you grow up with, it's hard to know whether I changed or the band changed first, but I know that my unconditional love of everything that they did pretty much ended with Reveal, their 2001 album that somehow missed out on the sense of mystery that was a key factor in getting me hooked in the first place.

But knowing that I'd have some time to kill over this weekend, I ordered the band's latest, Collapse Into Now, earlier this week. And I've given it a couple of listens, but will probably come back and write about that a bit more later.

And Buffy? Well, again, it's difficult to uncouple my logical knowledge of what other people think of the show (is that the kind of geeky one in which Sarah Michelle Gellar kills vampires?) with how much I loved it in my mid-to-late teens. But, again, I've got hold of the third season on DVD, although I've got a bit more trepidation about re-watching the old episodes than I do listening to REM's new songs (will they hold up to how I remember them, ten years on?) Again, more later, unless I've ruined all my childhood memories entirely and am left a broken wreck in the corner or something.