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Books Lying
Open
Soul-Devouring Worry:
Question of the Day:
Curse of the Day:
Phrase
of the Moment: You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life. It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004 |
Wednesday April 28, 2004 |
| Quote
of the Day -- QotD Archives
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend. -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. |
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It's far from earth-shattering news, but yes, this is an update on Wednesday. I did daily updates on this site for the better part of a year and a half, before scaling them back to five days a week some months ago. I've been missing updates lately, as my interest in working on my fiction has heated up and I've been prioritizing that over this hobby-style blog stuff. I'm not making any changes there; the fiction is going to continue to come first. However, rather than continuing to not blog some days when I'm supposed to, I'm going to drop the Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri, Sat schedule, and start blogging whenever I feel like it. I imagine I'll be doing 3-5 a week, and the content isn't going to change that much; just the times it's presented in. I didn't feel like blogging on Tuesday, but I did on Wednesday. So here it is. I didn't actually get that much fiction done yesterday, partially due to Drod getting a lot more fun once I got to level 7 and then especially level 8. Tragically, the drod.net site is still down, but I have got a link to a page with an explanation of what's going on, and an URL for a temporary forum, where I'm sure you can find a download link to get the game, if you're interested. I'm not going to go into a big discussion of the game, but I liked the serpents and the weird play styles that they required on level 7, and I absolutely love the weird, creeping, occasionally hostile tar that you first encounter on level 8. Tar combines strategy with chop chop sword action in a beautiful way, and I played Twice South, Twice East Level 8 for about 3 hours non stop last night, after beginning it when I was too tired to write anymore, and planning on playing about 15 minutes after I brushed my teeth and before I went to bed. And the next thing I knew it was 7am. I don't get the joys of the old days of gaming very often, where I could just abandon myself to an electronic challenge and devote a dozen hours in a row at times. And I've certainly not played a dozen hours of Drod in a row, but despite wishing I hadn't played for so long against the tar last night, I still have to admit that I really enjoyed myself while I was doing it. And I guess that's okay, even if most of my life is about denying myself pleasure, or trying to only take pleasure from doing things that are good for me, in the long term.
Speaking of pleasure, and the lack thereof, summer has arrived. It's been in the high 80s or low 90s here the last 4 or 5 days, and neither Malaya or I are at all happy about it. Tuesday was a bit cooler than Sunday or Monday were, and by keeping all of the windows closed through the afternoon, we weren't too uncomfortable sitting inside with a fan on us. It cooled down pretty nicely once dusk arrived, and now, at 1am, I'm comfortable in light house pants and a t-shirt. No socks. The cats aren't real happy about the heat either. Dusty's 5 years old and he used to live up north by Sacramento, where it's 100 all the time in the summer. He wasn't happy with that either, but it's never been that hot here, at least not for very long. Jinxie, on the other hand, was only born last fall, and while we had some hot days then, she was much smaller, a kitten, and had short, nappy fur. She's now covered in long, soft, thick, silver fur, and she's been lying around the last few days in a half coma. I can see why, since her fur is ridiculously long too; if you pet her with your fingers apart your hand literally vanishes from sight. She's mostly gray/silver, with a lighter gray underbelly and a few beige patches. The most impressive hairs are her white guard hairs, the longer ones that sprout out here and there and are most visible in the sunlight. I've plucked a few that had to be 5 inches long, and after a kittenhood of mangy, crooked, discolored whiskers, her facial hairs have rebounded amazingly. The outermost whiskers on each side of her nose are each at least four inches long, sticking out about two inches further to the sides than she does. Plus, she sprawls. I've recently seen her sprawled under the bed in the bedroom, where it's usually a bit cooler than in the living room, sprawled on the kitchen floor where we literally have to step over her to get to the fridge, or sprawled on the floor directly behind Malaya's office chair in the living room. A couple of days ago I found her sleeping in the bathtub, sprawled on the cold, mostly-dry porcelain. And when I saw "sprawled" I mean it. She discovered sprawling a couple of months ago, after being a neatly-perching kitty all through her kittenhood. And after discovering it, she's taken to it with a passion, usually lying half on her side, with her hind legs spread out scissors style, and her front legs paw pads down, Sphinx style. She'll also lie her front end down with the legs scissored out as well, and her head on her paw, or just off to the side like road kill kitty. It's not an unusual cat position, but it's funny to see her doing it every time she lies down now, no matter how high-traffic the area she's lying in is. Dusty, on the other hand, almost never sprawls. He squats, or hunkers, or reclines, but he doesn't spread himself out that much. This is reflected in their sleeping postures as well, since Jinxie is usually all spread out on one side, or often on her back with her paws totally stretched out. Dusty sleeps curled up, fetal position, and very seldom stretches out at all, except when he's, um... stretching. I'm not covered in a thick, constantly-shedding fur coat, but I'm not enjoying the heat very much either. It's still not nearly as hot as it used to be in La Mesa, and I lived there for five years with central air that cost too much to run in anything short of an emergency, so I can stand this, I suppose. Malaya is actually hating it more than me, which is funny since when I was up here last summer, she'd just returned from a year overseas, in a very tropical clime. And when I complained about the 90Ί temperatures in a heat wave, she'd laugh and wear long pants and point out that it was 10 degrees hotter and 80% more humid where she'd lived the past year. As you can imagine, I'm extremely sympathetic towards her heat-related discomfort the past few days.
The other odd thing of late is discovering how conditioned I was to working at baseball games, and planning my daily schedule around them. I'm not really paying attention to baseball this year, just enough to enjoy the Yankees' temporary struggles, but mostly to follow the Padres. I don't really care if they win or lose, though it doesn't hurt that they're winning so far, but after working most of their home games for the past dozen years, it's hard to let go entirely. I keep getting feelings like I'm forgetting something, since I'm so used to working every day for 10 or 12 days in a row, this time of year. Especially with the hot weather here the last few days, it's felt just like summer weather in San Diego. I've not been hungry enough to eat much of anything in the day here, which is par for my course in the summer, and as soon as it gets dark and cools down for a couple of hours, I'm starving. I used to sleep late, get up and eat a veggie burger or something at around 4:30, race to work, and get home starving and tired from miles of stair walking around 10 or 11. And it was then that I'd eat my main meal of the day. Yesterday (Tuesday) I was up too late due to the Drod playing, slept poorly in the hot morning and got up a bit after noon, dicked around on the computer and ran some errands with Malaya in the afternoon, and had nothing to eat but a turkey sandwich. However when it got dark around 7:30, and cooled down nicely by 9, I took a cool shower and emerged refreshed and starving. So I crafted a mega super burrito, and wondered why my legs weren't sore from work. I didn't really think about or miss working baseball games last fall, even though I was up here for the last 2.5 months of the season. So I'm wondering how far along the season will have to be this year before I subconsciously realize that I no longer work at the stadium, no longer have to pay any attention to whether the Padres are on the road or at home, or devote a single brain cell to remembering what time the game starts tomorrow. I'm guessing June. Ish. Since that's about how long it always took me to remember how much I hated my waste of time food vending job, and start to wish devoutly for someone, anyone, to come and take me away from it.
€ Just one news item today. On a topic I regularly enough ranting about. I admit it. when I saw this news item as the most popular on Yahoo yesterday when I woke up and got online, I laughed out loud.
Yes, Noah's Ark. People still really believe in that, all physical impossibility aside. I guess that's why they call it "faith." No word on follow up expeditions to the North Pole to visit Santa Claus, but perhaps they're saving that for next year. I just read over the added this to the Noah's Ark Article page and added this to it, so I might as well insert it here as well. The funny thing to me about Noah's Ark believers is that they not only want to believe in the whole happy little fairy tale, but that they keep trying to defend it scientifically! So you've got grown men and women trying to work out scientific ways that Noah and his few assistants could build a wooden structure far too large to not collapse under its own weight, feed thousands or millions of animals every day, harvest and store the millions of tons of food that those animals require, remove the tons of waste when the vast majority of animals will be below deck and you can't just do it with gravity, explain how salt water and fresh water fish could all live in the same world wide ocean, etc. A bright eight year old can bring up half a dozen things about the Ark myth that can not be explained scientifically; and yet they keep trying. They've even worked on problems like "how did Kangaroos get to Noah?" and tried to map out kangaroo migration paths from Australia to the middle east. I imagine the migration of three-toed sloths and other animals from South America would require even more imaginative science, given that they need to leave several hundred or thousand years early to make it all the way across the land bridge between Alaska and Siberia. I'd like to hear the explanation for how those tropical animals survived the arctic circle. Watching adults trying to use science to support something so obviously mythical is cute, but a little disturbing. It's like a little kid who still believes in Santa Claus, but is old enough to have some rudimentary understanding of critical thinking and logic, so is therefore trying to work out a schedule by which Old Saint Nick could read every child's mind on earth, construct hundreds of millions of toys, pack them all into a sleigh that eight (or nine) flying reindeer can pull, move around the entire world in a single night, fit down and back up every chimney, eat all of those plates of cookies and glasses of milk, and even get into houses that don't have chimneys. And yes, it's sort of cute when a little kid tries that, and you hate to burst their little bubble, but you know it's going to burst soon enough, no matter what white lies you tell them to perpetuate their adorable childish mental state. The only problem with this metaphor? The Noah's Ark'ers never outgrow it. People spend years and millions of dollars on this issue, while overlooking the thousands of physical impossibilities about the story. It really is the equivalent of an adult expedition to the North Pole to find Santa Clause. Why don't the believers just drop all of the pathetic scientific explanations, and revert to magic? God did it. God teleported the animals in. God brought Noah the millions of tons of lumber he needed. God made a wooden structure that large hold together in defiance of the laws of physics and carpentry. God made the animals on board not need food, or else He made their food appear when needed and their poo and pee magical disappear. God made it rain for 40 days and nights. God made the salt water and fresh water fish able to co-exist in the same world-covering ocean. God made the water all drain away immediately and restored the millions of plant species that would otherwise have drowned and gone extinct during the flood. Making the whole thing a divine miracle wouldn't be as satisfying, but at least then they could stop wasting scientific time on absurdities, and there'd be no more need for actual scientists and critical thinkers to spare this topic a moment of thought. |
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movies!
There have been quite a few new trailers and film clips posted over on The Movie Box the last couple of days, I suggest you check out the free entertainment, forthwith! My quick rundown of the media and movies posted there April 26th and 27th.
€ AVP Featurette #3: Not bad; it almost makes this ridiculous comic book showdown of a movie appear to have a plot with human. Not that anyone is buying a ticket for that aspect of things, but it couldn't hurt. The movie appears to be archeologist type humans with various interesting weapons in a Tomb Raider style Mayan temple deep beneath the ice in Antarctica, which they discover is infested with Aliens and the Predators who have come there to hunt them. Chaos ensues. It's utterly ridiculous, but of course that's the whole point.
€ New York Minute Clips: It's an Olsen Twin movie, and it's not porn. Needless to say, I didn't click this one. I'm not sure I would have even if it had been (porn). I never saw whatever show they were on, and I've never really thought either of them were that hot. It does show the benefit of being twins; either of them by herself would be an unknown, ex-sitcom child star with a few lingering fans with vague pedophilic tendencies. But as twins, they're far, far more than twice as famous.
€ The Village Trailer #2: This upcoming movie by M. Night Shamalayananayana might be a creepy, suspenseful masterpiece, or the cheesiest thing I've ever seen. The first trailer leaned more towards the second option, but this new one is closer to the first. I semi-jumped several times during the trailer, which has a medieval Blair Witch sort of vibe, where there's no actual sign of the monsters (or whatever they are), just shadowy things racing across the screen, people almost seeing them, hiding from them, fearing them, loud noises, etc. I heard bad reviews of the script to this one months ago, people saying it was the most ridiculous thing they'd ever read, totally unbelievable, melodramatic, etc, but the director has a good track record (though I've never seen any of his films) and the trailers make it look pretty good. Great atmosphere and cinematography, anyway.
€ Van Helsing Film Clips: Nine new one minute clips from various spots throughout the movie. Malaya was jonesing for this one months ago, when I was pretty indifferent. It looked too cheesy and stuffed full of monsters and villains, sort of reminiscent of the last couple of disastrous Batman movies when there were like 5 bad guys each and it just crowded the movies to death. I began to feel more interest as I read more previews and learned to tune out the cheesy aspects of the teaser and first trailer, but I was still in the "It might be watchable if..." mode. Then the early sneak reviews started coming in, and they were almost unanimously negative.
There are a dozen more like that over on AICN, if you care to follow the links. At this point, even Malaya is having doubts, and she's been hot to see Van Helsing ever since she first heard about it last year. I wish I could say that the movie clips on Yahoo turned my doubts around, but unfortunately they did not. They're a very mixed bag, but they all make Van Helsing look like an expensive B-movie. When the monsters and other special effects look obviously-fake on the thumbnail sized browser screen, it's a bad sign, since any imperfections will be greatly amplified on the big screen. The Dracula guy is featured in two or three of the clips, and he's not laugh out loud awful, but none of them inspire much confidence that he's not as cheesy as the sneak reviews say he is. I can envision wincing every time he starts to talk after an hour of screen time. I was wincing from 30 seconds of Kate Beckinsale's attempted Transylvanian accent, though I have to applaud their use of an entirely gratuitous butt shot of her, for no other reason that that she'd got a hella tight ass. As last year's Underworld trailer spent about five seconds establishing beyond any shadow of a doubt. Also, that Santa's sleigh broken bridge horse/wagon leap doesn't look any less fake when you see the minute of movie that builds up to it. At this point, I think Malaya and I are waiting to hear what some real critics think of the movie, and if they're as negative about it as they were about oh... The Punisher, we'll probably save our $8 for something later this summer with less publicity, but more quality. And the Punisher film clips were good, damnit!
€ Harry Potter 3 International Trailer: It's much the same as the domestic trailer #2, and it still doesn't give me any desire to see the movie. The only change is that since I've now read all of the books, the scenes in the movie look familiar, and my only curiosity about it is to see how they turned the book stuff into visuals. There's a chance HP3 will be an entertaining movie; the first 2 were well-made, but basically boring, by a basically boring director. They've got Alfonzo Cuarσn doing the third one, and he's supposedly a lot more visually exciting and creative. We'll see. Well, you might, I doubt I will, short of
borrowing the DVD from someone next year. Malaya and I both liked the
book, but neither of us gives a damn about seeing a practically-shot for
shot movie version of it. Unfortunately, this ain't LotR, with a great
team of writers and a great director turning an overlong, unfocused,
literary fantasy epic into a more tightly-plotted movie with vast visuals.
The HP books have their charm, but they're never vast or epic or anything
you just have to see on the screen, after reading about it.
€ Kill
Bill 2 International Trailer: I didn't watch this trailer, having seen
the full movie last week, but it did remind me how good a film it was. I
think KB2 will grow in import on DVD, when we all get a chance to see it
several times and get to really know the characters and enjoy the scenes
and dialogue. Oddly, my strongest memory of KB2 is the photography,
which was just gorgeous. The early black and white scenes in the church
especially; everyone was just glowing with heavenly overhead lighting, and
throughout the film there are constant extreme close ups of the actors,
and they all look so perfect for the role and the dialogue they're dealing
out. € Garfield:
Making of Clip: My regard
for this property is well-known, but I was going to suffer through
this clip anyway, out of a queasy fascination with what looks like it may
well be the worst cartoon film ever made. Unfortunately the clip is
on AOL and you need to download and install some sort of proprietary
viewer to watch it, and I wasn't about to go there. € Mean
Girls Clips: They've got a 4 minute clip from early in the movie. I
made it through about 30 seconds. You may do better. Admittedly, I'm at a disadvantage, since I don't dislike high school
movies. I hate them. Loathe them. I'd sit through a sappy romantic date
movie before a high school movie. I don't know why I feel so strongly
about/against them, but I think it's largely since I was so bored and
disinterested with my own high school experience. Also, every glossy high school TV show and movie is just so absurdly
unrealistic. All of the actors look like they're about 25 (this one is no
exception), everyone knows and is deeply involved with each other, all of
the students are ridiculous stereotypes, etc. The whole genre is just so
vapid and unrealistic that it makes me very unhappy, and I want nothing to
do with it. More realistic ones aren't necessarily bad; I don't
dislike The Breakfast Club, for instance. But the phony, Beverly Hills
90210 style teen soap opera just turns my stomach at a glance. € Godsend
Video Clip: Didn't watch it. Don't care. Looks like yet another creepy
kid sees ghosts/visions movie, with a medical ethics terror plot tacked
on, and it just doesn't interest me. |
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