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Books Lying Open:
Soul-Devouring Worry:
Answer of the Day:
Curse of the Day:
Phrase
of the Moment -- PotM
Archive Flux:
How do you feel about the cat? Yes, we're easily amused by each other. -- April 27, 2005 |
Wednesday May 11, 2005 | |
| Quote
of the Day -- QotD
Archives "Never argue with an idiot. Theyll just drag you down to their level and beat you with experience." --Anonymous | ||
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My sleep schedule has been very erratic lately, and for reasons too prosaic to delve into at this juncture, I awoke at around 5am Tuesday morning, after about 4 hours of sleep. Worse yet, I could not get back to sleep, and when I finally got tired of lying in bed and kicking the cats off of my ankles while thinking about the later chapters of my novel I got up and wandered out to sit in the living room and do basically nothing. That pretty well set the tone for the day, and other than working a bit on the novel and finishing the world map (more or less; for now) of the untitled fantasy world, I accomplished pretty much nothing. I did, at least, manage to eat a reasonable amount of food, and therefore had energy for Kali class at 7. I hardly had awakeness for class, and nearly turned around and came back home and took a nap when I found it difficult to keep my eyes open on the drive there, but I didn't. Class was pretty okay though, and I woke up once I was swinging a stick around. I had nothing left afterwards though, and with hardly the energy to surf there was no blogging. I settled for eating some cornbread and talking to the morose Malaya, and then we went to bed early. Wednesday is looking up, so far at least. It's late afternoon, about 16 hours past the time I would liked to have posted this blog, but I woke up feeling well-rested and got some good work done on the fiction, and now I'm trying to finish this off before Malaya gets home from work and we head over to the gym. After that it'll be time for some food, and then we're off to dance class again. We don't even know what type of dance, just ballroom of some sort, but for $7 each for an hour class, and then free dance in the big ballroom for as long as we like, we'll learn something new, at least. Let the random news and comment and photo bits begin!
€ If you've ever turned on a cable channel after midnight, you've certainly seen one of the ubiquitous ads for Girls Gone Wild, or one of their many imitators. The concept is simple; some guys with handicams fan out over street festivals or spring break beaches or parties or whatever, and get video of drunken college girls waving their titties around. They then package the footage into two-hour chunks, and sell them on DVD and VHS for like $9.99. That wouldn't be such a scam, except that as the fine print of their ads tells you, you're entering a sort of Girls Gone Wild book club, and after you buy one tape they keep sending you more of them every month, forever, until you un-join their club (which I cynically suspect is rather difficult). Their goal is, obviously, to get lazy people to buy the same recycled content for another $19.99 per month. The real question though, of course, is whether or not the footage is any good. Given that basically infinite porn can be obtained for free online, it's surprising to me that anyone would pay for it at this point. It's especially surprising that anyone would pay for something they could, in theory, see for free. Plus it's not even porn; it's just softcore stuff, with amateurs flashing their boobs. I suppose that's the point for some guys, who prefer that "real" aspect of it. I kind of figure 80% of the girls they show are models they've hired to hang out and pretend to be real girls, but that's another issue. I bring all this up because I saw a link to a forum post with a bunch of encoded Girls Gone Wild movies. You can see it here, and I think anyone can view the forum, it's just that you need to join to make a post. Just in case, here are the file links: http://rapidshare.de/files/1574570/Gainsville1.wmv.html They're all around 20meg, in Windows Media Player format, and if you've never used Rapid Share before, you'll click and see a page with a ton of text about web hosting. Scroll down to the bottom of the table with the comparison between free and paid membership, click the free button, and you'll go to a second page with text at the bottom that says something like this:
As you watch, the time remaining will count down, and when it reaches zero a text link will appear. Click that link to actually download the file. Convenient, huh? Well what the hell, it's free. Choose your link wisely too, since you can only download up to 30meg an hour, which means you can only get one of these files, which seem to be about five minutes each. Anyway, finally getting to what I wanted to talk about initially... the footage completely sucks! It looks enticing in the commercials, where every second is a shot of some relatively cute chick with pixels over her boobies or thong-split butt, but having actually watched parts 6 and 9, from the links above, I can safely say I'll never watch another second of that shit in my life. Part six wasn't that bad, but part nine made me want to put my fist through the monitor. It's four and a half minutes or two really drunk bleach blondes sort of dirty dancing, while they mumble about who's going to hold their cigarettes, who's going to hold their shirts, who's going to hold their beers, can they have their t-shirts now, etc. All while some off camera guy with an annoying voice tells them to turn left, then turn right, then take off their bras, etc. Directions they consistently misunderstand, or simply ignore as they giggle stupidly. They could not be more drunk and annoying, and by the time they finally get their boobs out you don't even want to see them anymore. I guess if a guy has some fetish about drunken college girls at parties he might really enjoy the footage, but it did nothing for me. Let's give some props to the ex-frat boys who thought this shit up though; they get to see free boobs galore, they have virtually no expenses at all, and they're probably millionaires by now. Best of all, if you look on the GGW website on the merchandise page, they've got crappy clothing for sale at truly astonishing prices. $25 hats and t-shirts, and $85 sweatshirts. I couldn't imagine why anyone would want one of those, much less want to pay several times retail value for it, until the idea of seeing free boobies in person occurred to me. Of course! Guys are buying the merchandise, wearing it to parties, carrying their own cameras, and getting drunk girls who are stupid enough to believe they're going to be on TV and get discovered like Pam Anderson was at that football game. "Of course we're really the Girls Gone Wild guys, honey! Now take off your top and make out with your girlfriend, and maybe you can come backstage with us later if you want to be sure you get lots of face time in the video..." I'm so glad I'm not out there trying to date anymore.
€ Lastly, my dad mentioned eating out in an email the other day, and I was amused enough by my reply to him that I saved it to stick into the blog. His comment:
My reply:
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 usic,
and then a couple of photos of nothing in particular.
€ A friend of mine mentioned in email a few days ago that he had some free tickets to a Nine Inch Nails concert that night, and that he'd try to get a bootleg with his pocket recorder to send me. I thought that was nice of him, but asked if he'd missed my blog mentions of having the new NIN album, With Teeth, already. In his reply he said that yeah, he'd seen me say that, which left me confused. Why would he ask me about bootleg recordings when I had the full quality studio ones already? More on that below, after his concert review, just FYI.
It didn't occur to me until later that he's a person who really enjoys concerts, and live recordings, and that to him they're as good or better than studio recordings. And thus our different takes on the issue. To him, live recordings are good and desired and prized. To me they are inferior scratchy crowd noise things that can be tolerated if there's something on them I can't hear on a CD, but are otherwise of no use. So when he asked me if I wanted a bootleg of the concert I assumed he must not have seen that I had the CD already, while to him my already having the CD didn't really factor in at all. Funny how communication can so easily become impossible, due to an inherent difference in world view.
€ The fridge in our condo came with the place, and is not a very new model. It says it's "frost free" but it's a goddamned dirty lie, as the steady build up of ice in the freezer testified to. We'd been ignoring it for months and months, but when the top shelf was becoming difficult to use thanks to the ever-growing mass of frost, I finally took it upon myself to chip it away. My tools, as partially seen here, were a metal spoon and a butcher knife. The job was actually pretty easy, since I just wedged the blade under the ice, levered it off in big hunks, and tossed them into the sink. The scale is a bit hard to see here, but it's a good six inches deep in the sink, and there were individual hunks of ice coming off, all perfectly flat on one side, that were at least the size of a small pizza.
As you might expect, upon completion of Operation: De-ice the freezer was repacked, and it felt about 20% larger than it had before. Plus we found a whole bag of frozen raspberries we didn't even know we had, glued to the upper back corner.
€ Dusty is a lap cat, but while he enjoys being on my lap, he loves sitting on any portion of Malaya's body that is horizontal long enough for him to take up a position upon it. Here's an example.
She laid on the couch sideways, curled up for a bit, and Dusty first tried to curl up in front of her tummy, then walked around the side and back of the couch before finally just sort of hunching down on top of her hip and kidney. He stayed there for quite a while too, happy just to be sitting on his mama, no matter how awkward a position he had to assume to stay there. And trust me, this is far from the weirdest place he's ever laid on her; you should see him contorting and leaning to maintain purchase on her lap when she's sitting cross-legged on the floor, or kneeling down to organize receipts or papers she's got spread all over the floor. And maybe someday you will. |
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All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
oday's
blog is rather a hodgepodge, and definitely hails from the "better
late than nothing" school of misnomers. You have been warned.
