It's a good thing chevy chase bank is so convenient. I was just looking over my account history and they charge me $2 each time I use a different bank's ATM. This is in addition to the $1.50 or $2 that the other bank charges you to use their ATM. Freshman year I accused the NIHFCU of stealing for doing something similar.
I just got the toxic avenger musical soundtrack in the mail. The evil dead soundtrack is pretty great, so I have high hopes.
(from a star trek: voyager episode review)
Rocket scientists of the week: Kim and Torres, with their brilliant deduction that if you connect the stars on a starmap, you get a flight path. It's hard to think of a Voyager scene that's makes a character look any dumber, and that's saying something.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Last weekend I saw Inglorious Bastards with Matt and Lisa, and then saw 500 Days of Summer with Rachel, Peter and Kate. It was a movie weekend.
Inglorious Bastards was very entertaining. It alternates between tense scenes, funny scenes, and then extreme violence. The premise was a little absurd. It was also a bit disturbing to see people in the audience clapping while watching a man get beaten to death with a baseball bat. I guess anything goes when it's a Nazi. Brad Pitt was pretty good, the actor who played the villain was quite good, and I was surprised to see little Sam from freaks and geeks playing a soldier. You didn't see much of him during the film though.
500 Day of Summer was good in a tragic and uncomfortable sort of way. Kate told me that the first scene is meant to throw you off and think that maybe their relationship worked out in the end, but about a third of the way through the movie I knew there was no way it could end well. Relationships don't work when one person is obsessively passionate and the other person can't make on their mind. I think I was at a disadvantage during the movie because I don't look for rings on peoples fingers (which was a key story element in this movie) and I have a hard time keeping track of a timeline when the it's just a jumbled bunch of numbered days. And at the end I interpreted the next girl being named Autumn to mean that the poor kid was doomed to go through a cycle of obsession and was about to get his heart broken again. (It's tough being a passionate man.) Kate thought it meant that he was moving forward with his life and that things would be different. I guess we'll never know.
(betting whether the 2008 Casino Royale was a remake of an earlier Bond movie)
Puja: If I lose, don't tell Sunjeev.
me: Why not?
Puja: He won't like that I bet so much money.
(brief discussion about whether $20 is really so much money)
me: But if you win we can tell him?
Puja: Yeah, then it's okay.
me: Won't he know that you'd been betting anyway?
Puja: Yeah but then it will be like I was really certain and I just bamboozled you.
Inglorious Bastards was very entertaining. It alternates between tense scenes, funny scenes, and then extreme violence. The premise was a little absurd. It was also a bit disturbing to see people in the audience clapping while watching a man get beaten to death with a baseball bat. I guess anything goes when it's a Nazi. Brad Pitt was pretty good, the actor who played the villain was quite good, and I was surprised to see little Sam from freaks and geeks playing a soldier. You didn't see much of him during the film though.
500 Day of Summer was good in a tragic and uncomfortable sort of way. Kate told me that the first scene is meant to throw you off and think that maybe their relationship worked out in the end, but about a third of the way through the movie I knew there was no way it could end well. Relationships don't work when one person is obsessively passionate and the other person can't make on their mind. I think I was at a disadvantage during the movie because I don't look for rings on peoples fingers (which was a key story element in this movie) and I have a hard time keeping track of a timeline when the it's just a jumbled bunch of numbered days. And at the end I interpreted the next girl being named Autumn to mean that the poor kid was doomed to go through a cycle of obsession and was about to get his heart broken again. (It's tough being a passionate man.) Kate thought it meant that he was moving forward with his life and that things would be different. I guess we'll never know.
(betting whether the 2008 Casino Royale was a remake of an earlier Bond movie)
Puja: If I lose, don't tell Sunjeev.
me: Why not?
Puja: He won't like that I bet so much money.
(brief discussion about whether $20 is really so much money)
me: But if you win we can tell him?
Puja: Yeah, then it's okay.
me: Won't he know that you'd been betting anyway?
Puja: Yeah but then it will be like I was really certain and I just bamboozled you.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
I just got back from Rachel and Adam's wedding out in San Diego. It was lots of fun. The sun was a little hot but in general the weather was quite nice, and the wedding appetizers were a little strange (there was some crazy octopus gazpacho and I accidentally ate some kind of duck liver sandwich) but I wasn't bothered by it.
There's something wonderful about being at a wedding when you're unrelated to the couple. It's probably one of the happiest days in their lives, and they didn't have to invite you along but they chose to anyway. I don't know Rachel and Adam all that well so I felt really privileged and I loved everything about the event. Also, everyone ended up being so cheerful, even Adam's step-mother who supposedly got a little angry or Rachel's dad who tells strange nomad-stories just seemed like quirky pieces of a beautiful larger picture. I really had a fantastic time.
Oh, and I saw strippers.
(blog about quest grinding in World of Warcraft)
When WoW implemented daily quests, I realized the industry was really going in the wrong direction. Daily quests are hardly different than a list of chores for some kids living on a farm. You login, you load up on your "dailies", and you grind them out for money and reputation. People do these exact same quests hundreds of days in a row. To make things worse, the culture of the game has devolved such that people averse to grinding out their dailies are called lazy.
There's something wonderful about being at a wedding when you're unrelated to the couple. It's probably one of the happiest days in their lives, and they didn't have to invite you along but they chose to anyway. I don't know Rachel and Adam all that well so I felt really privileged and I loved everything about the event. Also, everyone ended up being so cheerful, even Adam's step-mother who supposedly got a little angry or Rachel's dad who tells strange nomad-stories just seemed like quirky pieces of a beautiful larger picture. I really had a fantastic time.
Oh, and I saw strippers.
(blog about quest grinding in World of Warcraft)
When WoW implemented daily quests, I realized the industry was really going in the wrong direction. Daily quests are hardly different than a list of chores for some kids living on a farm. You login, you load up on your "dailies", and you grind them out for money and reputation. People do these exact same quests hundreds of days in a row. To make things worse, the culture of the game has devolved such that people averse to grinding out their dailies are called lazy.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Yes, it has been a long time since I updated this thing. I am a busy man these days. Busy and important, as I like to tell myself. This has been my first non-busy few days in a while so tonight I'm hunkering down with an el riconcito burrito (something about their ground beef is delicious) and some star trek. Should be a promising night. Gonna be a busy week as I try to finish my bi-week a day early because I'm flying off to a wedding on Friday.
Ah, this is a good episode. Any time Picard argues with another starfleet officer about whose mission holds precedence, you know is going to be a good episode. And he just pronounced "charade" so that it rhymes with "promenade". I did that once at a dinner with Kate's dad and Kate's sister made fun of me. Apparently you can't take pronounciation tips from Jean Luc.
(about a science fiction roguelike whose premise is that the earth's core has destabilized and exploded, and you have to recover the core from where it landed on another planet)
DraQ: I could readily ass-pull more plausible SF stories when I was four.
DraQ: Why try to make SF if you intend to s*** all over science? They could have invented fantasy setting as dissociated from reality, as they deemed necessary, after all. Compared to this crap Plan 9 From Outer Space looks like diamond-hard SF.
DraQ: Will not buy/download/warez.
Jasede: DraQ sticks it to the man again, vowing not to download the free roguelike from Pirate Bay.
Ah, this is a good episode. Any time Picard argues with another starfleet officer about whose mission holds precedence, you know is going to be a good episode. And he just pronounced "charade" so that it rhymes with "promenade". I did that once at a dinner with Kate's dad and Kate's sister made fun of me. Apparently you can't take pronounciation tips from Jean Luc.
(about a science fiction roguelike whose premise is that the earth's core has destabilized and exploded, and you have to recover the core from where it landed on another planet)
DraQ: I could readily ass-pull more plausible SF stories when I was four.
DraQ: Why try to make SF if you intend to s*** all over science? They could have invented fantasy setting as dissociated from reality, as they deemed necessary, after all. Compared to this crap Plan 9 From Outer Space looks like diamond-hard SF.
DraQ: Will not buy/download/warez.
Jasede: DraQ sticks it to the man again, vowing not to download the free roguelike from Pirate Bay.
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