We developers are not always the best at documenting parameters...




Also! Yesterday we saw Les Miserables at the Overture Center. It was okay, I guess? I kept losing track of the plot -- "oh, that was Cosette that Marius stepped on back there? So there was another unnanounced timejump, okay. And Valjean and Cosette are hanging out with beggars and prostitutes because, um, something." Probably if I was familiar with the story beforehand then it would have helped, but sometimes if your play needs someone to read the entire program (or the source novel) before they sit down then that means you're doing it wrong.

Technically speaking, though, the set design was really awesome. Giant bulwarks of fake-slums being moved back and forth across the stage with people hanging off them; creative use of video projected on a screen behind the actors to make it look like they were moving through a larger space. Definitely the fanciest production we've ever seen at the Overture.

Also exciting: I got a hat yesterday! I have somehow managed to come to the point where I will get sunburned after literally only an hour outside, and not even all of that in the sun since I was planting ferns under trees for cryin' out loud -- and sunscreen doesn't mix well with glasses unless you enjoy having said glasses always perched at the bottom of your nose. So I got a Stetson Panama, because by Cthulhu if I have to actually go out shopping for something then I am going to get the best one I can afford so as to put off as long as possible the point where I have to do it again. Plus when you don't look good in anything, you can pull off "just because I'm wacky that way" easier with a classy fedora than with a more casual hat. IT'S TRUE.

I have had a headache all day today. That's kind of lame.
Before mecha bugs me about it anymore, I guess I should do some retroactive posting.

Two Saturdays ago, mecha and Sarah (his sister) and Ted (her husband) came down from Indy and we went to a "Chocolate Fest". Chocolate was had by all, except Ted because for some sick reason he does not like it. Since we got there in the last 20 minutes before everyone closed up and went home, we got a lot of stuff free that we would have otherwise have had to pay for. Also, there had been a dessert contest and for most of the time the winners were display only, but there at the end they were cutting up the cake and passing out the cookies, so we got award-winning chocolatey tasties, too. The cake was pretty meh but the cookies were OH WOW.

It was fun. I got to go out in public and pretend to be a normal person who is not currently going through a life-changing traumatic event.

One Saturday ago, i.e. day before yesterday, [livejournal.com profile] nidoking came over, supposedly for snow-based schenanigans. Only since he is apparently not quite insane enough to get roped into trying to build things out of dry snow in practically-single-digit-degree weather, we mainly wound up watching DVDs and going out to eat. It was fun. I got to go out in public &c., plus I got to watch Matt play FF12. I like watching people play video games, and either peppering them with questions about the game or mocking their performance. Or both.

Today I had an advising appointment, then a counseling appointment, and then a class.

At ye olde advisor's, I learned some good things about my next few semesters, including the fact that theoretically I could graduate in spring 2008. I won't, of course; scheduling never does behave, and there'll be two classes that I need that are both at the same time, or something. But after this semester I'm basically done with prerequisites and am just left to clean up the stragglers in terms of credits achieved.

Also I learned that my advisor does a local-access late-night monster-movie cable show thing, and goes regularly to a horror con where he recently had his picture taken with Tom Savini. HOW AWESOME IS THAT. I didn't notice it until he pointed it out to me, but he even has sort of a plaque thing that is made up to look like a wooden sign on which is painted "Welcome to Camp Crystal Lake". Ha ha. My advisor is cooler than your advisor.

At ye olde health center, I basically spent an hour talking about nothing much. I am to the point where I can't seem to actually gather my thoughts enough to talk about them when the time comes. It's frustrating, but I guess it is a good sign that the badness is not always first and foremost on my mind. Chris is dead, the life I wanted is irretrievably out of my reach, and I will have to spend all the rest of my days trying to make something good out of the "second best" that I have left. But at least I'm to the point where I don't start crying every time I let my mind go idle. It's moving more towards the slow-boiling quiet sort of utter sorrow.

At ye olde class, we basically got extra credit just for showing up, for some reason I'm not entirely sure of. But hey, extra credit. Yes please.

Also, on the way to class I had to go through the union, and so while I was there I picked up a new copy of Windows XP for my upcoming computer upgrade festivities. It cost ten dollars. Sometimes being an IU student is pretty awesome.

Now time to get something to eat and go grocery shopping I guess. Hopefully mecha will not buy more Honest Tea given that there are already like a billion bottles in the fridge. ...okay, so more like 25 or 30. BUT STILL.
Yesterday mechamom and Quentin came down to take me grocery shopping and bring me some stuff that was up at their place in Indy. Turns out that there was a gun show in town, though, and since Quentin was driving, that means we wound up driving around a little until we found the fairgrounds where said gun show was being held. It was a fascinating experience to follow Quentin around and listen as he extolled the virtues of various firearms, many of which I had no idea how he could ever tell them apart. For a while I followed mechamom around too but she just looked at some crocheted baby clothes and stuff that were over to one side, which was boring. I bought genuine gun show beef jerky! It is branded "Boone's Choice" and the inkjet-printed label has a picture of some guy presumably pretending to be Boone. Yum beef jerky.

I only saw one guy with Confederate flag merchandise. That was something, anyway. There was one vendor who apparently felt the need to warn me and mechamom to be careful around his politically incorrect merchandise, I guess because our delicate female sensibilities might be overwhelmed by the sight of bumper stickers reading "I LOVE My Country / I FEAR My Government", but eh.

At another table there were little stickers reading "PROTECT YOUR COUNTRY -- BUY A GUN". I, uh. I don't think purchasing a firearm actually increases the protection level of this country in any way, fellas. By your logic, every time someone buys a pistol with the sole intention of armed robbery, he is still somehow making the country safer because, hey, he bought a small machine that was designed expressly to kill. What a patriot!

I have nothing against gun ownership. But you're not providing a public service by owning them, and you need to reexamine your priorities if an instrument of death seems the best way to "protect" your family. Guns are kind of neat; it is fun to take them to a shooting range or an isolated bit of land and blast at a target (or in my case the ground). Just please stop worshipping them, k? K.

As the three of us were driving back to town proper from the fairgrounds, Quentin joked that we should go to the Army/Navy store and then a strip club, thus completing the trifecta of turning me into the son he never had. Oddly enough mechamom was not interested in such a plan! Man what is with chicks anyway, they don't know how to have fun. Or something.

Eventually we were done grocery-getting, and the mechaparentals bid me good day and left. Then I took my new gloves that I mentioned in passing a few days back, and the needle and thread that mechamom provided me with since I can't find my own needles anywhere, and I stitched off the fingers that Quentin cut off for me. I don't think they were going to unravel any more than the little bit they already had -- certainly the pair he did up for himself some time ago is holding up -- but I was paranoid. So now I have Army-style wool gloves, with the thumb and first two fingers cut off at the tips, and the raw ends stitched up neatly. Hooray for dexterity.

That more or less was Saturday.
Off to Indianapolis earlyish tomorrow. So long, blagowub. See you in an unspecified number of days.
I have completed my task of spending under an hour getting the family's wireless Internet all working.

Stupid five-hundred-mile drives.

ExpandDeer, "good-sized towns", and Jenny's family )

Epilogue: I left an apartment that had a broken garbage disposal and no clothes washer or dryer. I came home to an apartment with a brand-new garbage disposal and a state-of-the-art GE washer and dryer. So, you know, aces on that. Even if I also came home to a bathroom towel bar that flew off the wall the moment I touched it.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I must (finally) stop typing, and do some laundry.

(Also, yes, yes, I know. tl;dr. Here's a suggestion: don't be a rude asshole. I don't give a shit if you're too important to deign to let your eyes wander across my posted words; announcing that you are won't make me post any less. Besides, why do you think there's an LJ-cut there?)
We hit the library about an hour ago so mecha could pick up a book that'd come in; I waited out in the car. It was raining at a fairly good clip. As I waited out there, along came a mother and her three daughters, the youngest maybe 7 and the older two probably 10 or 11.

They were walking through the rain to their van, parked nose-to-nose with our car. Mom was lugging an armful of books, and one of the older daughters had a comic book. She was holding it so it was open. Facing up, as though she were reading it, except she wasn't -- she was talking with her sisters.

She cheerfully strolled over to their van, stood by it chattering with the others for a moment, and then finally got in.

All the while holding the comic open. In the rain.

Mom didn't seem to care, of course. Why should she? It wasn't HER property that her little darling was ruining.

See, this is what I'm talking about. Some people SHOULD NOT BREED.
Oh, incidentally, we saw Slither... last night, I think? No, the night before. Recently, anyway. Days blend together when you don't sleep at night.

It was actually quite good. Hilarious in parts, creepy-ooky in others, with a few of the standard horror movie startle-scares. I recommend it! Even if you may not want to take a bath ever again after seeing it.

We hit Borders last night, as well, and I got the first book of Fables and House of Leaves. Was gonna get a collection of Cthulhu Mythos stories by a whole bunch of the mythos guys, but then saw HoL, and it was only five bucks more for like four times as many pages, plus I'd read good things about it online and was intrigued. So.

It is kind of weird having money to spend, as I have lately, and I've been kind of going nuts with it, but I think I can manage to not run through it all within a 24-hour period. Especially since there's only 12 of those hours left and at some point I'll have to sleep.
Scene: inside of a Vietnamese/Chinese eatery. TED and MECHA are at the counter awaiting an order; SARAH and JENNY are seated at a table littered with remains of an earlier order. JENNY is playing with a plastic spoon.

JENNY: [leaps up] I'm gonna bug them real quick.

JENNY runs up to the counter and begins poking both MECHA and TED on their respective arms.

JENNY: Hey, guys, guess what guess what?

MECHA: ...what?

JENNY: I'm The One. Know how I know? [holds up plastic spoon] 'Cause I can bend this spoon! [does so]

MECHA AND TED: [groan]
Jenny says, "When A Stranger Calls is... wow. Just... wow."
Jenny says, "We're glad we only paid five bucks a ticket."
Jenny says, "'Cause full price would've been like being punched."
Jenny says, "It was kind of funny in places though! Like when there is Mysterious Spooky Noises coming from the next room and the girl approaches it and Ted counts down on his fingers and just as he gets to zero, the cat jumps out and is revealed to be the source of the Spooky Noises."
Jenny says, "Or the scene at the beginning where there are cops at the scene of a murder and the one cop says 'okay what was the murder weapon?' and the other guy says, and I kid you not, he says 'that's just it.... THERE WAS NO WEAPON.' BECAUSE NO ONE HAS EVER KILLED WITH HIS BARE HANDS BEFORE, EVER"
Jenny says, "Lance Hendriksen was the voice of the Stranger!"
Jenny says, "There was a preview for a movie with a video game that some people get ahold of that 'they're not supposed to have' and it's all ooooo spooky and one guy dies in the game and then dies the exact same way in real life and one of the characters goes 'omg if you die in the game you die for real!' and I leaned over to Ted and was all 'THEN STOP PLAYING'"
http://chrisonstad.blogspot.com/2006/01/computer-crisis-solved.html

It's funny 'cause the same thing just happened to me the other month.

I was neglecting to dust out my processor's heatsink before it was cool.

...wow, all of the above sat waiting to be posted for like two hours. Post away, little entry! Post away. Meanwhile, I'm off to watch Brokeback Mountain.

Hilarity!

Jan. 16th, 2006 02:53 pm
There is a new chapter in the saga of the car accident the other day. Sadly, it appears to be the last chapter, because State Farm says they're telling the other guy that they're blaming him and that's just that.

There are three threads to this that I will recount here in case anyone has forgotten stuff from earlier post.

1. The accident. It was raining and the roads were slick. Mechamom stopped at a light. Little old man driving along behind us didn't stop in time and smacked into us. No damage was done to either car, and nobody was hurt.

2. The first call we got from State Farm. Apparently little old man (heretoforth referred to as LOM) called in the accident, saying it was all mechamom's fault. She had slammed on her brakes and stopped suddenly WAY back of the light, and the street was only one lane so there was nowhere for him to go but straight into our car.

3. The call from State Farm today (this part is new). LOM called in again, complaining that nobody believed that the accident was mechamom's fault. She had suddenly changed lanes right in front of him, barrelling into his path, not even deeming to slow down. She even jumped right out of the car, ran over, and admitted that it was her fault. Why, oh why, do they insist on making him pay for his damages?

Read LOM's stories in 2 and 3 again.

And again, if you have to.

ell oh ell.

Mechamom says it's obvious that LOM doesn't know her, because she never admits she's at fault for anything.
KEYBOARD!

KEY! BOARD!

Lookit me type! Wooo! I'm typing! This paragraph won't take me two minutes to output! I can add a whole bunch of extra stuff, and babble, and generally type a lot! Because I can type at all! Hoorays!

Apparently Logitech doesn't make entry-level keyboards anymore. Teh suck. So I got the $30 entry-level MS keyboard instead, since A) it might have actually been made by Logitech, and B) the only cheaper ones were "Dynex" brand which what the hell is that?

Last night mecha and I went over to the abode of the hippies to play Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. I lost horribly, seeing as a couple of the movies I have not seen since I was a little girl. Great fun was had by all, however. Ted does his Gollum and Emperor PalpaSid impressions at the worst times.

We all four agreed that it would be awesome if the Colts lost their game today, because then we wouldn't have to hear about them for another year. Otherwise, we wind up stuck in a city of drunken fans constantly celebrating over their team's getting to go to Superbowl. Well, looks like the Colts are doing us a favor right now! Thank you, Colts! Try to lose faster next year, though.

Lessee, what else. A couple days mechamom and I were in an accident. We were stopped at a light in the rain, and a little old man rear-ended us. He was perfectly pleasant and apologetic, and shared our relief that nobody was hurt and there was no damage. Then the next day he called his insurance agency and said it was our fault. Mechamom had "slammed on her brakes" "way behind where she was supposed to stop at the light", and "the street was only one lane in both directions so he had nowhere to go but into us" so now his car is "wrecked" and he is "injured" "because of mechamom". Gonna have to call industrial-grade bullshit on all that, buddy, it's like a four-lane road with a big breakdown area on the side, and while mechamom brakes like a carsickness-inducing lunatic, that was one of the times she actually braked properly. Also, keep in mind, you're the one who rear-ended us. Maybe you shouldn't've been following so close.

Gods having a keyboard is awesome.

BATGIRL

NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA BATGIRL

(think I'm done now.)
Wolf Creek was a huge disappointment. An hour of Road Trip Movie, about ten minutes of surprisingly tame gore and torture, and the rest was mostly just your usual suspense. Ebert's a fuckin' liar.

Between this and Undead, Ted has decided that he hates Australians.
I invite everyone to have a nice day today, for whatever reason you care to select.

Me, my reason is 'cause we're seeing Wolf Creek today. If you are unfamiliar with this title, save perhaps that it is an unrated slasher flick, then these snippets courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes should shed some light on my anticipation.


It apparently descends into a pool of bloody entrails with its lurid and sadistic killings.

Its graphic depictions of mindless cruelty are revolting.

As it goes on, the action gets implausible enough to seem like parody.

Perhaps Roger Ebert says it best, in his no-stars review: There is a line and this movie crosses it. I don't know where the line is, but it's way north of "Wolf Creek."

Sounds like our kind of movie, y'know?

what the

Jul. 14th, 2005 11:26 pm
http://www.luckykazoo.com/media/2005/06/jcb-ballet.html

Also, I think I completely forgot to mention that mecha and I saw TMBG last night (with Corn Mo opening, and man, was that ever the weirdest musical experience I've ever had). It was awesome. Except at the end when these two probably-drunken bitches (and a guy, but he didn't do much besides shove in and then stand there) practically pushed us down to cram in front of us, and spent the encores moshing into everyone, putting their arms around random people, and apparently trying to flirt with Linnell.

Do not shove me out of the way, slam into me repeatedly, and block my view of the band I'm trying to watch. Or else your spine will meet my elbow when I stand with it pointed towards you and wait for you to crash into it. Not that she even seemed to notice. Probably too boozed up to feel pain.

Mecha says the same one I elbowed also tried to stomp on his toes a few times before we switched places because she was shorter and thus easier for me to see over. However, he was wearing his boots from Fed Ex, which have safety toes. Take that, bitch!

Dan Miller is way too good at guitaring. I just thought I'd mention that.
So for English class I'm working on this group project thing where we're looking at student perception of campus safety and what the campus safety folks can do to better achieve the goals they claim to have in mind. I took on the job of writing up a survey which we basically all mailed to a bunch of students asking them to fill it out if they liked and not kill us if they didn't. And just now I slapped all the results thus far into Excel, and sorted them a few ways to get a feel for the trends I'll be needing to talk about in the report thing.

I'm rather fascinated by the one guy who selected options on the webpage form version of the survey indicating that he is not at all concerned about safety on campus, while also feeling that the campus is not at all safe.

Especially fun is where I included a field asking for any ideas people might have on upping safety that weren't addressed by the radio button questions. My favorite responses there:
  • "Inform girls not to go to strange boys houses!!!"
  • "make it a wet campus"
  • "The campus is safe enough as it is. But, i suppose they could lower the speed limit on the streets to 5mph, hand out mandatory construction helmets, and cover all sharp edges with Nerf foam."

Needless to say, that last one came from a gentleman rather than a lady. You can tell he has ever so much respect for women and their silly flighty "concerned about safety" ways.

Also, mecha and I hung out with [livejournal.com profile] nidoking on Saturday, and at least some amount of fun was had by all. The reason I did not mention this before is Saturday evening I was tired and Sunday I had to take care of mecha because he was ubersick. Messr. nidoking, please to not be poisoning my roommate, as he is the only one I have. Thanks.

I am in love with the video for this song. Even though it is sad.
Messr. nidoking: if you haven't gotten your weekend all taken up yet, Shaun of the Dead is playing tomorrow and Sunday at 1:30, 4:50, 7:50, and 10:10. Care to accompany me as I force mecha to drag me to one or another of the showings (it has not been determined which yet)? If so, when is good for you?

Mmm, last-minute planning is fun.
You have not lived until you've spent a Saturday night at Chili's discussing Star Trek.

Bonus points for if you're asked the name of the ship with the phasing cloak and you can answer without the slightest hesitation.

In other news:

Dear Dave Willis, you own my soul. I hate you.
Love, me.

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