Not really. Actually, what I am about to say will only apply to a few of you.
I will not be sending any text messages any more. Or receiving them. Text messaging on my phone has been turned off. My company decided to stop paying for text plans for it's phones, which makes sense since really there aren't a whole lot of business purposes for text messages, and since I don't care enough about text messages to pay for the service myself or to get a phone of my own I will be living (quite happily) without them. Yes, unfortunately if you want to talk to me you will actually have to talk to me.
I will now crawl back into my hole, thank you for your time.
I needed to clear some space on my phone, and that meant moving some of the shitty pictures that I feel inclined to take constantly from my phone to my computer. So here, I share some with you. ( Camera phone picture dump. )
Me and "The Boys" went and saw Spiderman 3 last night. "The Boys" -by the way- is the proper noun I have assigned to the group of the only three male people that I ever really hang out with, I was not referencing my genitalia. So yeah, Spiderman 3. I did like it, but I thought it was the weakest of the three. That is unfortunate because I feel like it could have probably been the best one, were it not for a few key things.
How do you all feel about the new Transformers movie? I mean Michael Bay is a douche bag, but Spielberg is producing so who knows. When I see screen shots like this, where a small robot is giving a back-rub to the kid from Disturbia, I get dissapointed. I mean, what the fuck is that thing? Where is my 20' tall robot that can turn into a Walkman? A fucking cassette Walkman. A fucking normal sized cassette Walkman! That the cassette comes out of and turns into a sweet robot bird thing! Where is that? And then I see screen shots like this, and I think, who fucking cares about all that robot crap anyway? Who is that chick? Who cares?! Lets just have a movie about that chick looking under the hoods of cars in some sort of dampened state. That would be a movie I could get behind... You know, dong-wise.
After effectively avoiding the film for almost a month I was finally coerced into seeing "Grindhouse". I didn't wan't too, really, it seemed like it was way too long for what was probably going to be just an OK movie. The movie is long, 191 minutes long. Three hours and eleven minutes long. I don't really know how to properly metaphorize the experience... It was kind of like going to a $500 a plate charity dinner and being served pizza. I like pizza but I felt like I deserved more. If I make the commitment to spend 3+ hours in a theater, I want something that isn't just OK. Return of the King? Worth the time commitment. Grindhouse? Rent it. Wait for it to come out on video, get drunk and watch the movie, then it would probably be OK. And take frequent smoke breaks. You will want to as every character in this movie is smoking pretty much non stop. The first movie, "Planet Terror", won in my book. It was a solid, campy, zombie flick. Robby Rod did a good job. It was the same caliber of film, in my opinion, as the Sci-Fi original movies that I make a habit out of watching on Saturday nights. Better acting and direction, but that was the level that I enjoyed it at. Loose story, cheesy action, ridiculous situations. Fine. On a side note, when "Planet Terror" ended you could tell that everyone in the theater forgot that they still had 90 more minutes of all this, and their discomfort when they realized this was palpable. The previews in between the movies were honestly the best part for me. Those were gems. "Death Proof", the Tarrentino contribution to the whole mess can basically go suck a dick. That movie almost killed me. I should preface this by saying that: I hate Tarentino dialogue. Hate it. In his films where the dialogue is broken up by action, or fucking whatever I am OK with it, but that shit needs to be kept in check. "Deathproof" is literally an hour and twenty minutes of 4 chicks sitting around a table, or in a car, talking about bullshit, and then a 10 minute car chase. The end of that movie is amazing, though. And I don't mean the last X amount of minutes, I really mean the end. The last four seconds. But those last four seconds were pretty awesome. Not awesome enough to make up for me sitting through that movie, but you know, at least I had that. Anyway, my synopsis of all this is: Rent it, get drunk, watch "Planet Terror", watch the previews, fast forward to the last 10 minutes of "Death Proof", call it a night.
Alright, I am going to get a little gay over here for a second and talk about clothes. By this point you should all know that I like clothes and I take pride in trying to look decent, and since today seems to be a particularly bad day for fashion here in the office I am going to throw out a couple pointers.
1: Brown shoes, brown belt. Black shoes, black belt. If your shirt is tucked in your belt must always match your shoes. There are no exceptions to this.
2: There is no such thing as a short sleeve dress shirt. Repeat twice.
And now, Shotguns Guide to Wearing Pleated Pants: "Should I wear pleated pants?" Are you a fat guy? "No" Then no.
There are a couple exceptions to the pleated pants thing, but if you are a guy of normal build and you wear your pants below the waist like any normal person, just default to no pleats. Pleated pants are made for bigger dudes. I know they may come in your size, that isn't the point. If they made a moo moo in your size would you wear it? A couple exceptions are: If you are really skinny and you wear your pants up a little higher, although even then I might stick to just a single pleat; If you wear your pants up at your "waist" (although I can not really advise this). Think The Rat Pack, or your grandfather; Some designers are now making pleated pants that are cut such that they will lie flat when worn at the hips. This can be a pretty smart look, but again I would stay away from this unless you are really skinny. The thing with pleated pants is they must always lie flat. If there is any degree of "poof" you will look silly.
Despite the exceptions I truly believe deep down that everybody, despite their build or weight, looks better in flat front pants.
I don't think anyone can say that what happened yesterday at Virginia Tech wasn't super awful. I hope we can all agree on that. And they haven't quite figured out why the young, South Korean fellow did all this, which makes it even more frustrating. What really gets me about this, though, is the finger pointing. Before they even identified the shooter Jack Thompson was blaming video games, for no other reason than because Jack Thompson is a complete fucking tool-bag. And since the first shots were fired, the thing I have heard most about is gun control. I don't really care about gun control. I don't own a gun. I don't really want to own a gun. I have shot guns before. It can be fun. I am not big on killing stuff, and shooting at stationary things doesn't really do it for me, although I could see how it would be fun. I guess. I don't care if you own a gun. There, thats out of the way. The argument that keeps coming up is that if everybody on the campus had been packing a "gat", tragedy could have been avoided. I guess. The polar opposite of a situation will always yield a different outcome, and is it even worth mentioning? If the guy who shot everybody hadn't had a gun tragedy could have been avoided. But whatever, guns are a fact of life. Some people have them, most don't, and a couple who do have them are going to shoot some undeserving folks with them from time to time. It just seems to be that way. The proposed scenario scares me a bit though. Everyone having guns. I mean, in a perfect world yeah, somebody on that campus had a gun and took the crazy fucker out before he did too much damage. The potential reality though is maybe a bit worse. I don't know about you, but I would rather be in a room with thirty people where one crazy guy has a gun, than that same room with twenty nine scared people with guns all trying to shoot the one crazy guy. That seems worse to me. Think airplanes. We don't give everyone boarding a commercial plane a steak knife, we have air marshals who are trained and anonymous, and screened to ensure that they aren't crazy. And since it isn't reasonable to secretly deputize 1/10th of the population, I think guns are just something we have to be worried about. Right? Weather or not guns are illegal, people are going to have them, right? I know a couple of you that read this are pretty politically minded, and I can think of at least one representative from each side, so I am kind of interested to hear some opinions on this matter from people I know, and potentially respect, rather than the mouth-breathers on the Fark message boards. Since I tend to sit pretty much in the middle of the political spectrum, and honestly try to avoid such issues, I feel like I miss out on some valid arguments for both sides.
Oh, I hope you all got your taxes done. I did, and it sucked.
Every ad says the home advertised is in Denver. At least 90% of the ads are not for homes in Denver. Aurora is not Denver. Glendale is not in Denver. Thornton, Westminster, Broomfield, Littleton, Centennial, and Englewood are all also not in Denver.
Most ads are completely useless. "Denver 2bd 1.5ba, Awesome Apt" is not a terribly helpful advertisement. On the rare occasion that you get pictures they are all of something stupid. There will be like, a picture of the railing for the stairs, a picture of the bathroom, a picture of a wall with a window on it, and a picture of the Kanji symbol for hope which is apparently on the outside of the building. That is not a joke, that is the ad that I am presently looking at. Nobody lists square footage. Why would you not list square footage? I have looked at two bedroom apartments that were smaller than the one bedroom that I have now, and I have looked at one bedrooms that were enormous. Again, why would you not list the square footage?
Apartment owners lie. A fire escape is not a balcony. A "bath tub" is not a "hot tub". Colfax and Pearl is not a "great neighborhood", unless you mean a "great neighborhood" to score coke and pick up hookers. A curtain hanging in the middle of a 400 square foot studio does not create a "spacious one bedroom". And the side of a Chipolte is not a "great view of the city".
It looks like getting what we want/need means moving out of the area. Not far out, I mean like to the Highlands which is where our best prospect right now is. Because apparently every apartment in the Cheeseman/Cap Hill/City Park area that is big enough, doesn't allow cats. And that is lame.
Everybody that I have talked to in the past three months knows that I am ultra stoked about Frank Miller's 300. Here is a review for that movie. I want to see it even more now.
I know it's been done to death, but more snow? Really? Yesterday morning I hit the pinnacle of my winter rage when my vehicle basically fell into a particularly nasty pot hole. Nasty enough to give me a flat. As I was changing my tire in a parking lot, cursing the world, some old codger came to look over my shoulder and aggrivate me throughout the process. Which was awesome. Getting the wheel off I realized that there was nothing wrong with my tire but that I had bent the shit out of my rim. That was the worst case scenario because I kind of needed new tires anyway and wasn't opposed to just going out and buying a new set. Buying a new wheel was not somthing I was hoping to do. To shed some insight on this, 17" Volkswagen wheels are really, REALLY, expensive. So I thought I might try to have the wheel repaired, which is still pricey, but less pricey than a new wheel. I took it over to the tire place to have them take the tire off of the bum wheel so I could take that to the wheel place but when they got the tire off I was introduced to the new, upgraded worst case scenario, which is that the tire while having no apparent outside damage was pretty much shredded on the inside. So now I need new tires, AND a new wheel. Hooray for $800 pot holes. I hate you winter, I hate you so much!
a podcast about my favorite hoody as an independant film
[15 Jan 2007|11:53am]
[
mood
|
danish
]
[
music
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Echo & The Bunnymen - The Cutter
]
I finally had a chance to play with a Wii this weekend. What I had maintained as my position now is verified. This is not for me. The reason for this is that "gameplay" is the least important thing for me when playing games. Nintendo has never really produced graphically rich games with compelling plots. They have always tried to make the games more "fun". Give me plot, and give me graphics. How fun the game is to play doesn't matter, because honestly I don't really find video games that much fun to begin with. From time to time though, I find them interesting. Give me a plot that keeps me interested and give me graphics that keep me engaged in what is going on and I am sold. The games that I typically like are as much fun to play as they are to watch someone play. In where the player isn't necessarily controling action, but manipulating strategy, or guiding the plot along. There is the rare exception to this, but pretending to throw a bowling ball doesn't get me there. I am aslo, as it turns out, much better at bowling in real life.
I have set a record for most comments on a single post by simply talking about operating systems. People get very wordy when defending what flavor of computer they use. It's weird. I didn't know it mattered so much.
Does anyone want to talk about how awesome the 24 premier last night was? Because it was super awesome! I am super stoked for tonight. Did you see when Jack went all Lost Boys on that terrorist? Holy shit man!
I have a question for you Mac types. The situation is this: Two macs in a house, one is desktop connected physically to a router via wired ethernet and the other one is a laptop connected wirelessly. An iTunes library resides on the laptop. The question is, using the shared library (or whatever it's called) feature in iTunes, can you access the laptops iTunes library from the desktop, over the network? I've poked around the Apple site and it looks like you can, but rather than using terminology that someone like me (a fucking geek, for christ sakes) can understand, Apple has to use their bullshitty hipster names for everything. I mean, I have no idea what a fucking "Bonjour" is, but it seems like it might be a key part of this process because that seems to come up a lot. I would research this further but I am afraid that I am going to discover that (fucking) Bonjour is just a stupid name for "A (fucking) Network" and my head will explode. So maybe one of you fine people will know. Help a brother out.
It is snowing. Again. I probably should not have come in to work today, but honestly I was kind of sick of sitting at home so I drove in anyway. It was the worst drive of my entire goddamn life. I almost didn't make it. And I mean that very literally. There were several times where I stopped my car and it would not move forward, again. I am not joking when I say that I am not entirely sure that I will be able to get home again. I did a solid for somebody this morning which has resulted in them ordering me some chinese food for lunch which should be here shortly. After I eat that I am going to try and drive home before the roads get any worse. Yay!
I just managed to liberate my car from its arctic cocoon. Weather or not I will be able to get it anywhere is still up in the air, but I was able to get it out of its parking spot. Small victory. I had forgotten how much I like shoveling snow. When I worked at the garage, every time it snowed I had to shovel out all my cars. It usually took me a couple hours. Never in my life was I in better shape than I was two winters ago. This is Maine we are talking about, too. I know out here two feet of snow is enough to shut the city down for 3 days but back home snow like this is practically a weekly event. They just keep the roads plowed and nobody panics. I am not sure how this becomes such a big deal out here. Oh wait, the "we won't actually do anything to the snow, we'll leave it be and just hope it melts tomorow" method doesn't actually work that great. I mean, state of emergency? National Gaurd patroling the roads in Hum-Vees looking for stranded motorists? It wasn't that much snow. I've driven to school in worse snow. 15 miles through the back roads of Roun Pond. Barefoot, too. And it was all up hill.
Anyway... Apparently the airport is still closed. According to their website they will open two of their six runways tomorow at noon. So they should be back up and operating fully by Sunday when Cortney is supposed to fly in. And according to the airline, as long as DIA is open and her flight doesn't get canceled for some reason she should be fine. The airport is going to be more packed and insane than a typical Christmas eve, but she should be able to get out. So thats good.
All in all this blizzard has been treating me pretty well. I got two extra days added to my vacation, which doesn't hurt my feelings at all. It's been very nice and relaxing. Of course I was smart enough to not try to go anywhere yesterday. But I like being forced to just chill the fuck out because sometimes it doesn't occur to me that I need to do that from time to time.
Hope you are all well, and that this blizzard hasn't fucked anyone too much.
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