Monday, December 13, 2010

I am quite busy. I'll be back on here in January.

(comments from an article about World of Warcraft)
For me WoW is not the girlfriend I never wished I met, but the one who I wish I could have just been good friends with. But I couldn't and I still can't. Now when I see her, I know I shouldn't get too friendly, because we'll get together again and we both know that won't end well.

Friday, December 10, 2010

4 layers of bubble wrap + a whole lot of masking tape. I am a MacGyver when it comes to insulating drafty AC window units.

Monday, December 6, 2010

Tonight at trivia there was a question "which law of physics is expressed I=V/R?" It was the engineers' moment to shine and we totally dropped the ball.

It looks easy when you see it written, but actually it was very hard to hear the announcer tonight because the bar was crowded and he gave the physics version first (current density = conductivity * electric field) before saying I=V/R. Peter, in his disdain for all things technical, was supplying sarcastic answers and Rachel was suggesting different laws of thermodynamics. They also give you no time to think, as I've complained before. The closest we got was Ampere's law, which is actually quite close because I is measured in amps. But no, it's Ohms law which really isn't at all the same as Ampere's law. So many weird names in physics that nobody cares whether you know.

Last week I was thinking about building a SATA switch for my media player (it has one SATA input but I have several drives I want to use) and was looking at datasheets for BJTs. I remember how everything works in theory, but the specific formulas and the math are nearly gone to me now. Maybe it's finally too late to go into mainstream engineering. My career path gets narrower every year.

(my nutella sandwich tasted weird, and the nutella itself was from a jar that I bought years ago, so I hunted around for expiration info and found a relevant forum)
Junior A: When does nutella expire? I bought some nutella like on april and wondering when do they expire. they been left in my room for like a month and opened already.
Simon T: read the label tells you everything you need to know
desdemon: It lasts forever. We had our jar for years after I remembered it and ate some. Look at the expiration date. You can easily add a year after it:)
Sylvester: Expiration dates only apply to food.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

My paraphrasing and commentary of "5 tips for meeting women" by some dude bro.

1: Even if you're not confident, try to pretend to have some semblance of self esteem when introducing yourself.
- I guess this is a good point. Nobody feels comfortable talking to someone who is jittery and awkward and always trying to back out of a conversation. But if you're this way normally, putting up a good show is only going to get you through a single painful conversation. There's a long string of them ahead and the girl will figure you out eventually. Here's a better tip: wait until you're 4 drinks in and then the initial conversation won't be as bothersome. (Or if it is you won't care.) Then just make sure you show up early to each date thereafter and down a drink or three before she arrives. This carries the added bonus of knowing exactly why you later won't remember the details of what she said, as opposed to the mystery my memory sometimes is.

2: It's not about you.
- This lesson's title makes it sound like it's going to be about asking girls questions to move the conversation along, but instead the lesson is: things are easier if you have a buddy. This is obviously true. Lots of life is easier if you can find a friend to suffer through it with you. I don't know how you could even tolerate being in a bar or at a party with no friends.

3: Approach a group of girls.
- Because I guess a girl likes it when she isn't sure if you're hitting on her or her friend. Somehow the author thinks you can just swoop in and be friendly without hitting on or getting rejected by any specific girl. Yeah, right. What a weird, creepy idea. If I was hanging out with friends and a girl swooped in to be funny and friendly with all of us, we would probably think she was crazy. Or that she wanted all of us. I bet that's what the girls assume when a guy does it. And it's probably true because it sounds like the work of a man out looking for anything he can find. Mystery does this but he mixes in negs to keep the girls unsure of whether he wants them. That's probably a good tip if you're going to try to creep into a group this way. Also, I don't approve of sucking up to friends or the herd mentality to which it caters.

4: Beckon with your index finger for a girl across the room to come over.
- Dang, don't give away insider secrets! My trick is to do the index finger beckoning while slowly licking my lips, and then at the end I punctuate it with a pelvic thrust! It works every time. Either that or it's about as creepy as I imagine. A girl would have to be super cute in order for me to not feel weird about a predatory finger beckoning. (And she couldn't be at all sketchy in a dangerous way or I'm out of there. Girls with Russian accents: this move is not for you.) Responding to that beckon is a commitment and a half!

5: Don't worry about the rejections.
- This is decent advice, though its definitely easier said than done. And its common knowledge when you're selling anything door-to-door.

(Forum comments about the HP and the Deathly Hallows)
goodterling: More like Harry Potter and the Long Ass Camping Trip. This movie sucked!

Monday, November 29, 2010

For Thanksgiving I went down to NC and visited Whitney and Joe. It was fun and relaxing. I got lots of sleep, shared Thanksgiving with a bunch of international business students, drove around Durham. And was generally pampered by Whitney and Joe. It was nice to get away. Though we did have to all go around the circle and say what we're thankful for this year. I hate doing that.

I've been watching Boardwalk Empire and I'm getting more and more convinced that it's not going to pan out. Each episode raises a bunch of questions, answers very little, and doesn't really progress the story much. Plus there are no really great moments. There are only one or two episodes left in the series, we'll see what they can do. My hopes diminish with each episode.

Finally, internet dating update. I've finally completed my profile, though the endless questionnaires were a huge pain. I resent their oversimplification of me. The questionnaires love to ask about a complex issue and then provide only 2 possible simple answers, neither of which describes my views. Then it complains if you list too many questions as "irrelevant". Anyway, now that I've done all that I've discovered that looking at girls profiles really isn't that fun. It's more like homework. Lots of reading, lots of looking at pictures without nudity.

OkCupid wants you to give each person a numerical score but I feel like you walk away from each profile barely knowing what each girl is like. Certainly not enough to score the girl. I wish there were video clips. Video clips of them talking to a friend. That would give you a good sense of the person.

(Liz Lemon on 30 Rock)
I will cut you open like a tauntaun!

Thursday, November 25, 2010

I should have known better than to pre-pay for a rental car. Saved me like 50%, but sure enough, I'm trying to slightly change something and I'm totally getting the run around.

I just want to move my pickup time from 10am to 7:30am. The website gives me an error saying "Sorry, our online reservation system shows the location is sold out for that date. Either change your entries and try again or call the location directly to confirm availability."

The lady at the national number said that she can't alter pre-paid reservations because that's an online feature. She forwarded me to online services. The lady at the online services number said that it was some kind of issue with the location's office, and she would get the same error if she tried to alter the reservation. She said I should call the location's rental center. The DCA rental location has a sweet automated message: "the location is busy helping other customers, you will now be transferred to our world-wide reservations assistance." And we come full circle.

Tomorrow morning I'm just going to head out early and hope to get an early car. I'm driving down to Raleigh. I'm kinda looking forward to the long, relaxing drive. I don't drive around very much these days.

(from a Eurogamer article about the Microsoft Kinect)
The elephant in the room is that, well, most people can't fit an elephant into their room - and a great many people don't have space for Kinect in their rooms either.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Rough night at trivia tonight. It was just me and Rachel and we scored second to last. The announcer quipped "The Better Half: 34 ... More like the worse half." Jackass. Rachel did pretty well in the food round. I was looking forward to that round because I thought I heard him say it was going to be "Boobs, Glorious Boobs" instead of "Food, Glorious Food". I guess my mind is in the gutter. (I'm not sure what boob trivia would be, but I did see that movie Breast Men in college. I'm sure I'd know most of it.) Neither of us could match explorers to countries of origin, besides Magellon. My movies trivia knowledge only helped a little. I didnt know there was a 2008 re-release of South Pacific, or that Rocky Balboa's dog was named Butkus. I didn't even remember he had a dog.

OkCupid has matched me with a few girls. It's a little surprising because I haven't yet taken the time to fill out any of their questionnaires. So I'm not sure on what basis it's matching me with people. Based on my photo? Who knows. Maybe it has software that parses and analyzes your self-description. Anyway, I got 3 mostly normal girls and 1 girl whose entire description is "I'm looking for subs to worship me."

Rachel: I was going to comment, after Kate said "You'll never get a date if you keep wearing your ex's hat." That you'll never get a date if you keep quoting your ex on your webpage!
(For the record, most of these Kate quotes are not my ex. And I will not be telling any of my future dates about this page.)

Sunday, November 21, 2010

I'm watching Mind of the Married Man. Before buying the dvd I saw a funny clip on youtube of it. This one (there's no sound). Something funny about all the guys sitting around ogling a mtv singer and not even looking up from the screen when asking their coworker to buy duplicate "just thinking of you" cards for their wives.

But it turns out that a better title for the series would be Mind of the Married Weasel. It's not fun to watch someone make up lies and then lies to cover lies, the whole while sniveling to his wife about how she should trust him more. I like for my characters to have a tiny bit of nobility to them. There was a much better Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry and Jeff are hanging out when Larry gets a phone call, and he warns Jeff that he's going to be very fake on the call and he hopes Jeff can handle overhearing it. Curb did a good job of showing how friends might conspire in a lie, in more of a harmless way. Mind of the Married Weasel is just a bunch of scummy guys who get together and bring out the worst in each other.

I'm still unsure about seeing the new Harry Potter movie before the second part comes out. But, the new Winnie the Pooh movie looks to be pretty promising. And it comes out on my birthday!

(about the "go kate" hat that I still wear sometimes)
me: It's the only hat I have so I wear it when my hair looks bad and I'm going outside.
kate: You're never going to get a date if you wear your ex-friend's cap around! Joe, buy a new hat already!

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Last Christmas my sister got be a bunch of Stanislaw Lem books and recently I've been reading The Cyberiad. It's a bunch of loosely tied together short stories but they're hilarious. It's really more of a space fantasy than science fiction, because the science parts of it are mostly just technobabble. Lots of math jargon is thrown in without being at all relevant and I could see it being distracting or confusing if you don't recognize that it's not supposed to make sense. I'm only about a quarter of the way through the book, but my favorite story so far is about the invention of a computer that writes poetry:

"What, those aren't decent poems?" protested Klapaucius.
"Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..."
Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Turl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscript go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a squared cos 2 fie!

The computer poet goes on to outdo poets worldwide, cause mass suicides, induce weeping in a force eventually sent to shut it down, and then cause supernovas in nearby stars after it is shipped to a distant galaxy.

It's interesting that the poem manages to rhyme in English even though the story is translated from Polish. I wonder how much the translator messed with it.

(from a Eurogamer article quoting a game developer talking about retailers and downloadable content)
"Actually, you need them to get to the stage where they stock the box. It's not inconceivable that you're going to ask them to give the box away at some point in time. But then, they participate to an extent in the subsequent DLC exploitation." Ah, exploitation. How we've missed you.

Monday, November 15, 2010

I'm writing up an online dating profile. It's actually not that easy to do. I've got it mostly written out but now my problem is that I don't really have any great photos of myself. There are a lot of rules about your online photo (see here) and I don't seem to have many photos of myself that don't have other people with me. I guess I could crop a photo. I wish I had been quicker to pose in front of landmarks and scenery in the past.

(from xkcd sucks redux)
So, to summarize, the brilliant joke here is this: spinning your computer chair is fun, which is an observation that has been noted by anybody to ever sit in one

Friday, November 12, 2010

I got both Katy Perry's albums. I wasn't sure what to expect, I guess something like Britney Spears. And it sort of is. It's similar to Britney or Christina (the songs flip flop between resembling each). It's not high art but I'm enjoying most of it. Sometimes I'm surprised by myself. (The Peacock song is the only one I instantly skip so far. Hummingbird is coming close. How the heck did Peacock get green-lighted for the cd? No rhymes, no melody, no steady beat. It's like a worse version of Over the Moon from Rent.)

I also picked up a bunch of The Cotton Jones Basket Ride, and it's very decent. I think I'd almost like it more if I didn't feel let down that it isn't nearly as compelling as the excellent Page France or The Broadway Hush (all of which share a bunch of the same members).

For Veterans Day yesterday I watched a bunch of Band of Brothers episodes. I'm not sure if I've written about it here before. It's generally a good show, and at some points is very excellent. It suffers from having to stick closely to a true story. There are too many characters and a bunch of the characters are only significant for their contribution in a single episode. Most of them are like the red shirts in star trek, except in trek the red shirts only ever got killed off, they never had extended scenes or were essential in saving the day.

My grandfather flew bomber planes in WWII. He never talked about it and it wasn't apparent if you'd met him because he was neither injured nor traumatized (as far as I know). But he decided to risk his life in a way that I never have, and I'm not sure that I could. I could see myself going through a patriotic phase and instinctively volunteering for something, but as soon as "getting shot at" became a factor, I'd probably talk myself out of it.

(from xkcd sucks redux)
I feel bad for the poor tech support fellows, innocent men trying to get through their day like everybody else, who will now be hounded by endless calls from fat cheesy-fingered xkcd fans, giggling incessantly as they emit a heavy-breathed “Shibboleet” and facetiously demand to speak to an engineer.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

At trivia yesterday our team Mud Grass Horse did poorly for some reason. We only did mildly better than Frenemy Engineers (just Rachel and me) did the week before. I think it was because there weren't a lot of sports or history questions for Peter and more people just means more second-guessing, with nothing much gained. I managed to convince Rachel that a photo of an Eckart (sp?) was actually a stork. I'm surprised she knew it was an eckart, I still don't know what that is.

There was a question about what was the musical in which "everything's coming up roses." I could remember that Bettte Midler singing the song and that the movie was named after her daughter's stripper character, but it wasn't until 5 minutes after handing in that round that I remembered it called Gypsy. They don't give you nearly enough time. The questions are super long, so it takes like 15 seconds for him to read, then he waits 2 seconds and repeats the question. Then he waits 5 seconds and moves on to the next question. Even the person writing down the questions has to scramble to write them fast enough. You really only get time to think for the photo and matching rounds that are handed out before the trivia starts. It's like shotgun trivia.

Alan tried to tell me that voting is a civic duty. But it's not. Jury duty and paying taxes are civic duties, and they're both a pain in the ass. The benefits of voting are derrived entirely from the results, which are often impossible to accurately predict when casting a vote. Really, it's a crap shoot. Some people think you'll have a better america if you vote one way, and other people think it'll be better the other way, and everyone's definition of "better" and "america" is different. Everyone voting with their whims just adds to the chaos.

Besides which, I often think the public in general is not qualified to be making decisions about a lot of things. Since the invention of tv we've got the public voting largely according to which candidate looks more appealing. People are also too easily swayed by name recognition, 15 second commercials, and catchy slogans. Rachel likes to call me conservative, but I'm not. I think that the conservative arguments are generally quicker to try to appeal to the emotional and mildly-intelligent. "You can't spend your way out of a recession!" It sounds reasonable at first, but really, that's the only thing you can try to do. You certainly can't save your way out of a recession.

So lets be clear: I always vote the correct way. Voting such that you agree with me is your real civic duty. If I happen to not vote, then you're free to do whatever you want in the voting booth. Going into the booth and casting a vote against mine should be a crime!

One of my former friends posted on facebook "If you didn't vote then we aren't friends, seriously." I honestly don't miss his raving facebook posts. And I don't have any civic requirements like his. In fact, you could shirk your taxes and I wouldn't mind at all. (I still have to file my dc taxes from last year. They're way late now.)

(from a Citigroup messageboard)
Tercel: Take a look at KBLB...they are going to mass manufacture synthetic spider silk. It'll be ultra-lightweight and 5 times the strength of steel.
cptnwillard: spam
Tercel: Not at all.
Tercel: Bumped for topic
cptnwillard: How is your post related to Citigroup?
cptnwillard: This is spam.
cptnwillard: Go away.
Tercel: Because KBLB is a penny stock also, except it has some value right now. Lol.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

It's the middle of the night and somehow got stuck watching this tv show called Property Virgins, it's about people buying their first home. (No, I am not shopping for a house.) I honestly think that realtors are the scum of the earth, and the lady who hosts this show is no exception. Everything about her is fake, from her smile to her tan, and I wouldn't trust anything she says.

Why even use a realtor? I guess they might have access to more listings, but there should be some other service to get around that. A good database and we'll make that entire industry obsolete. Really the realtor just tries to sell you on aspects of a house that you don't care about, convince you to ignore aspects you are concerned about and then does some questionable double-dealing when you're bidding on the house. Bidding through a realtor is like playing poker from the couch in another room, with an intermediary walking back and forth telling you what's going on. They tell you to trust them, but there's no attorney-client privilege or doctor-patient confidentiality. They're salesmen. It's like confiding in a used car salesman with your budget and concerns, and expecting him to keep your best interests in mind.

I should add that to my online dating profile when I sent one up. I don't have a lot of strict requirements, but no smokers, no druggies, no realtors.

(part of an email from a girl I knew in jr high)
Sarah R: I looked at all the old yearbooks the other day with my husband. He remembers your older sister from high school. Looking back I'm sort of mad. In eighth grade Matt Luther and I got voted most likely to eat free, and they took our picture with us standing around a garbage can. Like we eat trash?

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

I've ordered a bunch of button-up shirts. I wear t-shirts pretty much every day, but lately I've noticed that I'm the only adult who does. Every other guy wears polo shirts or button up shirts daily. Rachel said it was okay because my t-shirts have personality, and Kate said I'm just a casual person. I like being casual. I remember that TV show though, "what not to wear" and they were always criticizing people for dressing like teenagers. And I have an awkward enough time trying to get a date as it is. So I'm growing up. For now anyway. I'm also getting a nicer jacket because my ski jackets don't really work with a button shirt. I'm hesitant about upgrading my shoes though. Formal shoes are so uncomfortable. I'm going to have to find some kind of nice-sneaker compromise there.

(from King of the Hill, the school board director talking to the principal after Bobby protests the vending machines)
Karl, I wish I didn't just see what I saw here. But I did see it. And more importantly, I was seen seeing it.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

I just watched Get Him to the Greek. I have mixed feelings about it. I wrote several paragraphs about different aspects of the movie but then deleted them because they weren't going anywhere. I'll just say that the movie wasn't super funny over all. Some parts were funny. Some parts were painfully unfunny. And I don't find it credible that you can really love a girl (as we're lead to believe that Jonah Hill loves his girlfriend), have a friend force his way into an awkward, uncomfortable threesome situation, and then manage to save both the friendship and the romantic relationship. Didn't they cover that pretty thoroughly at the end of Chasing Amy?

I did like the scene where Russel Brand talks to his 7 year old son shortly after learning that the boy really isn't his son. That scene was almost touching.

(from xkcd sucks redux)
The joke here is basically that there is a paradox called the Banach-Tarski paradox that says that you can take one sphere (not a real sphere, a theoretical sphere, as this paradox doesn’t apply to real objects) and, upon cutting it into pieces, reassemble them into two identical spheres, each the same size as the original sphere you carved up. This obviously doesn’t make much intuitive sense, but it works out in the magical math land of theoretical geometry, and, as in many xkcd comics, in this panel the joke is that one of the laws of magical math land suddenly applies in the “real” world, with humorous consequences. Of course, the consequences are only as humorous as “the guy had one pumpkin and now he has two” which isn’t really that funny. In fact, I can think of a 1000 different ways that this idea could be applied with morbidly humorous consequences for the various characters of the comic. Maybe Hipster Hitler can make use of this idea by having ol’ Hitler try to use this paradox to turn his one testicle into two. Regardless, in xkcd, a funny application of this idea is probably not meant to be. The joke also fails in that Randall was apparently incapable of drawing two equal looking pumpkins.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

I saw Me First and the Gimme Gimmes with Rachel last night. It was a decent show. Me First likes to talk between each song, which I found kind of annoying. The songs are short, so it's like a 2 minute song, followed by 1 or 2 minutes of talking. Totally kills the tempo of the concert, but Me First doesn't care. They intentionally kill the tempo sometimes by stopping the song between the build up and the hard rock so they can crack random jokes.

Somehow Rachel and I got stuck behind a bunch of old people at the concert. A lady and two douchey guys who chugged beers and fist pumped to the music without rhythm. At one point they all hugged shoulder to shoulder and swayed to the music, pretty much blocking out Rachel's entire view of anything. (I offered to switch spots with her but mine wasn't a whole lot better. I could only see because I'm taller.)

Two nights ago (or maybe three now, I wrote this some time ago) I was walking out behind the verizon center looking for an ATM. There's some kind of show there that requires lots of horses or cows or something. They've got G street blocked off and filled with a bunch of fenced-off animal stalls. And there were a whole bunch of cute girls milling around wearing tight horse riding pants and doing horse-maintenance things. One even smiled at me through the fence but I didn't know what to say. If only I had really been raised on a farm, instead of just being socially awkward and uncouth.

(my visit with Puja was cancelled last week because Sonya's sick)
Puja: She seems to be doing a lot better, so by next week she'll be back to "I adore Joe" status.
(damn right)

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Just got a letter from my apartment building's management. My rent is going up $34 in December, which is the most they can legally raise my rent apparently. It's 2.05%, the 2% being management's maximum optional increase and .05% because of inflation. It's significantly, significantly less than I was worried about. And apparently they can't increase the rent more than once a year. Now staying here another year might be a viable option. It's a spacious, sunny, quiet apartment. Though in some ways a change would be nice because I've lived in DC for a long time, have no super close friends who live in the neighborhood, and memories of Kate W color all the local spots we used to go.

Kate R: Good luck with your promotion review! Maybe you'll make enough to stay in your rock-star apartment!

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Friday I saw the Thermals with Rachel. I don't think she and I have seen a concert together in like 2 or 3 years. We got dinner at Tabaq first. The mojitos there are pretty good and my calamari was excellent but I had this meatball plate that was only okay. They also played Toy Story 3 on their projector, even though that movie isn't out on dvd yet. I think they pirated a copy because after the movie there was a powerdvd error and the program quit to windows. AND, I was kinda pissed because there was this team at trivia, not long after toy story 3 came out in theaters, whose name was "Woody Dies at the end of toy story 3" which was upsetting both because Woody was such a likable character and because this team had spoiled the movie! But, (spoiler alert) he doesn't really die. What a bunch of jerks at trivia. That's probably the same bunch of jerks who stole "the better half" 2 weeks ago.

The thermals were pretty decent. One of their opening bands had their treble-base balance soooo off, all you could hear were the vocals and the drummer's cymbals. You could see that people were playing the guitars/base, but you couldn't hear it at all. Black cat drops the ball. But in this case I think it actually improved the band because you could hear the vocals so clearly and it gave it a folk-music sort of feeling. Also I was sitting on a bench with Rachel and I could hear her when she spoke without having to yell "what??" So it was really much more pleasant. The new thermals stuff is forgettable. They played most of the classic songs, which was essential, but I kinda feel like the momentum was killed by the interjection of new songs, or crappy, repetitive songs off that older new album. Really, the only worthwhile album of theirs is the body, the blood, the machine. Had they just played that album it would have been a great concert. Instead there wasn't really any moshing because of the weaker opening bands and the constant insertion of new songs.

Why do bands even play new songs in concerts? Nobody wants to hear them. I mean after a band has a legitimate album out, they'd expect that the audience came because they liked the album. And you can't really appreciate a song until you've heard it like 2 or 3 times. You certainly can't mosh to it.

Rachel drank a beer or two with me at this concert, which I appreciate. Usually I'm drinking by myself because Rachel is driving everywhere.

(talking about moving out of DC)
Rachel: You can't leave. Think of Sonya!
(Puja's daughter likes me.)

Monday, October 4, 2010

Today at trivia, someone else was using the team name The Better Half!!! Outrageous! It's the name Rachel and I would use when we were the only two on the team. We used it so much that one time I told the announcer a different team name and he said "Aren't you the better half?" Now I feel violated. This is how those copyright holders much feel.

(from xkcd sucks)
And after all that, the character I liked is shown to be an idiot, and the nerd who was just trying to be smug is shown to be the wisest of them all. Well hot damn. So much for having hope anymore.
Computer nerding it up this weekend. I got a new computer and installed windows 7. Putting the computer together wasn't terribly difficult, just time consuming. Fitting the cables without blocking airflow or fans was tricky, and half the components I ordered didn't come with screws for some reason.

Windows 7 was a bigger problem. At first everything about it was frustrating. Installing the right versions of programs, and then figuring out where they installed was tricky. And a couple things I downloaded came with trojans and I had to start all over again. Navigating the file system was a pain until I set up the shortcuts I'm used to using. It tries to be very start-menu centered, but I prefer to never use the start menu for anything. Anyway, for a while I could empathize with the frustration my mom feels when she tries to use her computer. I felt like I was battling the OS every time I wanted to do something. But it's all fixed now.

I've been playing a little (tiny bit) of civilization 5. I like the new hex tiles, and I like the new way units don't stack. It almost seems like a tactical game, until you realize that each unit just has a "combat rating" that tells you everything about it's effectiveness in combat. I haven't played any civilization games since civ 2, but it still takes 40 years for your scouts to see whats on the other side of the mountain? And 100 years to raid a nearby city? The time frames for some actions are just way, way off. Also, you'd think they'd have a more accurate model by now than deciding to "research" the wheel. Did the cavemen really do research before inventing the wheel? Okay, so it's not an accurate model of historical development. What is it then? I'm not really sure. It's a kinda fun, totally inaccurate model of how you would plan for a civilization given these circumstances. I'm just incapable of suspending my disbelief enough to think "maybe this is how the Aztecs could have developed had the white man not rained on their parade." Because its all so skewed. It doesn't help that the entirety of combat, when one unit attacks another, is that the units overlap for a moment, followed by some scuffling effects, and then you're shown how much damage each unit took. It's interesting in general, it just doesn't capture the imagination and it's not engaging.

(from an interview with a Gamefaqs faq author)
A lot of recent games have this pathetic desperation for you to "share" them. Skate 3 wants me to upload videos of my pretend self skateboarding in its pretend city. Blur invites me to Tweet my latest race victory - say, what's that sound? Oh, it's hundreds of "unfollow" buttons being clicked at once.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

I've had the new brand new album for a while now but never really listened to it. I didn't much like their last album (the devil and god are playing inside me), so I had low expectations going in. The huge problem with this album is that track 1 is terrible! What a producing mistake that was. It's like putting the dreary "No Seatbelt Song" at the beginning of the album. Nobody would make it past that. So after like a year, somehow I listened past the first song, and there's actually some good stuff later.

I think I like this song "At the Bottom" the most out of all of Brand New's songs. Excellent imagery.

(from a user review The Sure Thing)
The first ten minutes of Reiner's commentary are a must-listen if you rent this for two hilarious moments:
1) when he confesses to having been unable to direct the opening sequence because Nicollette Sheridan (the cover girl) was in a bikini and, in auditions had told him "You can't handle it" when he'd asked to see her body--and he agreed; and
2) when he says that John Cusack reminds him of himself then WITHOUT A BEAT proceeds to praise the young actor's tremendous intelligence, sense of humor, good looks, and sex appeal. Well worth it.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Watching Hancock while I eat dinner. I'm only gonna watch the first half because I have to do work, and the second half is terrible. How can a movie start so interesting and end so terribly? Will Smith does okay with his scowling and occasionally interesting interactions with Jason Bateman. Charlize Theron acts weird and annoying the whole time, not unlike Edward Cullen's wide-eyed constipated look when he first meets Bella. I guess that's the look for supernatural attraction. Jason Bateman carries the movie. Him and special effects.

Back to work.

(from a user review of Road to Perdition)
Those who are turned off by Road to Perdition because of the bloody deeds performed by Hollywood Good Fella Hanks, akin to watching Jimmy Stewart in the role of someone who kicks puppies, are perhaps missing the point.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Not a lot of time today, but I just installed windows 7 on my new desktop. Not super impressed with how windows is getting more gelled and less.. useful. The control panel at least is sparse. Maybe there are more controls hidden a little deeper. Anyway, the computer is still in pieces on my carpet, I just plugged most of the together and made sure it was all working. It seems to be. The windows experience index loves my computer. After this month I'm going to put Civ 5 on it.

I know I've been missing for a while, but I'm going to continue to be MIA until the end of the month. Busy with work. Go read Rachel's Africa posts instead.

(part of a very long user review of Breaking Dawn, the last book of the Twilight series)
Remember the template in the other books? 'Happy, happy...Just kidding! SAD!!' Well in this one it was... 'ok plot ok writing... Just kidding! I SUCK!'

Monday, September 6, 2010

As usual there is nothing worth watching on tv. Only king of the hill, but I have it on dvd anyway. So instead I'm trying to watch some semi-crappy movies on comcast on-demand (Pathfinder and then My Super Ex-Girlfriend). Now it looks like the movies on there are both censored and have commercials! What! Why would I want commercials on demand? F cable tv. I only ever got it because kate liked to watch tv. This week I'll call comcast and see about canceling it.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend is funnier than I thought it was going to be. By that I mean it's mildly entertaining. I got lunch with Amelia last Thursday and she told me how she thought her ex might have copied her apartment key, so she was going to get all her locks changed. I've never had a crazy ex though. I wonder how common it really is.

My desktop computer might have completely died via overheating. I'll find out tomorrow. I should have installed a case fan long ago.

(From an article about the best sitcoms on tv, an entry about Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia)
Your jaw will drop and you’ll squirm in your seat when you hear Frank dismiss his daughter Dee’s pregnancy with a deadpan “Do yourself a favor and flush it out.”

Monday, August 30, 2010

No trivia today because Rachel ate some ground up glass in her lunch, much like Charlie Wilson's dog in that movie. So instead I'm watching a bunch of bad movies, just to confirm that they're bad and I want to get rid of them.

So far the list is:
The Sure Thing - John Cusack's first lead role as an annoying college freshman. The girl from Spaceballs is in it as the prudish girl he likes. Besides one scene where he pretends to be a crazy hitchhiker, there's really nothing funny about the movie. All John Cusack's pickup attempts are unfunny and uninteresting. And the cross-country shenanigans are unmemorible.

Stargate - The first half of this movie is decent science fiction. Then it turns into a standard sort of rebellion movie and you seee that with all his advanced technology, really Ra just has jet airplanes and guns shaped like sticks. The alien horse-animals look terrible, even by 1990's standards, and the annoying kid actors are given way too much screen time. I think it must take all of a director's and writer's work to make child characters not be annoying. You just can't do it when you've got a dozen of them. A dozen kids in the same movie will ruin the picture, unless they're only in it for a few minutes. One of these kids was supposed to be the mentally handicapped of the group, and there's a slow motion death scene where he's running toward the other kids and the other kids are yelling at him to hurry. Then he got shot. The scene was ineffective and I was just glad the character had finally been killed off. It would have been a better movie if James Spader had shot the kid's character when he was first introduced to the kid.

Eastern Promises - Decent movie, just something I would definitely not watch more than once and didn't even really enjoy watch it the first time. Lots of abused women. Lots of distant, cold characters who pretend to be friendly while they're cold, terrible people on the inside. Apparently the Russian mafia is not as warm and likable as the Italian mafia. But it's only like half a Russian mafia movie, the other half is a "it sucks to be a girl in a russian village" movie. I do like the gay mobster's son character. He was well played.

Tomorrow is my sister Irene's birthday and I have no idea what to get her. She likes art... You all get upset when you don't know what kind of gift to get for me, well imagine being in my shoes. I never know what to get anybody!

(girl on Dating in the Dark)
Appearance is very important to me. I need to be attracted to a guy. I can't have somebody grow on me... like a fungus!

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Watching Dating in the Dark. Without whitney because she's cancelled on me. The problem with this show is that the girls range from somewhat attractive to quite attractive. It's like you aren't even risking anything by going into the dark. There's one episode where a guy thinks one girl is fat and so he rules her out, but he's wrong and she's pretty cute. (When the guy traced her outline and found out she was fairly thin he tried to be charmingly honest and quickly destroyed the date. Apparently it doesn't always go over well when you confess to a girl that you've been calling her fat nicknames with the other guys, even if you're sorry now.)

I've yet to see an episode where a guy thinks he likes a girl, but then see's her in the light and decides against her.

The whole "expert's compatibility score" thing is clearly bs. I wonder if, before they had that feature on the show, none of the guys or girls could make a decision about any particular person and the whole thing just floundered around.

This was a good episode. I thought the dufus-looking guy was going to repel the ladies with his silly suspenders and jeans look (it's like he modeled his style after Duckie from Pretty in Pink), but the girls both thought he was "perfect looking". Girls are strange.

Kathryn (to Kaylee): You're a liar!
mom: Kathryn! Don't teach her that word!

Sunday, August 22, 2010

I watched The Kids Are All Right (a movie I always mix up with the Local H song All the Kids are Right), with Dave and Huyen. Pretty good movie, except the resolution was a little unjust. It was their last night in the states so afterwards we got some pizza, shook hands, and see you in a couple years. It was a sad night but the weather was super nice so I walked around dc a bit.

This new hard drive has proved to be like poison for my computer. It was working well for a week or two and then, starting yesterday, problems galore.

First it suddenly started causing a super long delay in the post, so long that my computer would get to the windows loading, and then timeout and shutoff before I can log in. Then it burned out my psu, but luckily I had a spare in the closet. Then it caused my ram to overheat so that my computer would reboot but then refuse to even find the ram. (I wasn't sure about this until I touched the ram and almost burned my finger. I'm not sure if that problem is with the new hd, new psu, or old ram.) But everything seems to work fine when the hd isn't attached. Windows also doesn't find the drive when I hook it up with a usb adapter. My laptop seems to find the disk when I hook it up using this external media player, and it looks like all the data is still on there and everything. Now I'm running chkdsk again (I ran it when I first got the drive), but it doesn't look like it's finding anything. One file with bad sectors so far is all. It's going on 7 hours now of chkdsk, hopefully it's almost done. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when it comes back as "okay" but my desktop still refuses to read it.

(Undeclared's Ron about You've Got Mail)
"It's just pleasant. It's like waves lapping at a shore or something. It's like they're emailing each other and they don't know, they're all connecting. It's like us bonding, Lloyd, it's beautiful."

Saturday, August 21, 2010

I was going to rush down to the doctors office next week to get my Hepatitis-A booster shot. I got the original shot in January, and you're supposed to get the booster 6 months later. It's been more than 7 months now and Dave got me all worried. But according to this page, you just need to get the booster between 6 and 12 months later. I can totally wait on this.

I should file my dc tax return though. I'm not sure how long the extension I filed will put that off.

(about Dave and his wife, who came out to a movie with us)
Kate: I was totally impressed that they jumped onto the idea with so little convincing and that I got my way without having to compromise: definition of good friends.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Just watched a Reno 911 episode that had a cameo by Wolowitz from The Big Bang Theory and Charlie and the Waitress from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Wolowitz played a teenager soliciting a prostitute under his mother's supervision. The cops were going to arrest him but then decided to drive him to a Jewish brothel instead. Charlie and the Waitress played two white trash siblings who cause a domestic disturbance over a doll. (The cops thought it was a real baby at first.) The police tell the siblings to "make up" and they turn around and start making out. The police then arrest them for being disgusting. Charlie and the Waitress did a good job.

Yesterday I went to dinner at Founding Farmers with Dave and like 4 or 5 other foreign service people. Listened to a lot of talk about the foreign service, surprisingly. But it was fun. Tomorrow morning Noelle is driving up and we're getting brunch at Founding Farmers. I'm big on supporting those organic weirdos lately.

Sarah asked me whether there was anyone at the reunion who was ugly and unpopular in high school but was a knockout at the reunion. Not as far as I noticed. I think that only happens in the movies. A fair number of people have gained weight, something that's hard to avoid as you get older. But as far as I remember no girls came back to the reunion being significantly hotter than they once were. Though the girls were generally more friendly and down to earth, which in a way made them more attractive.

Now I'm watching Dead Man on Campus and feeling dumber for it. Not keeping this movie.

"Shut the hell up, you once-fat bitch!"

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

I went to my high school reunion last weekend. It was actually a lot more fun than I thought it was going to be. I couldn't convince Dan to go because he apparently still sees everyone from high school that he has any interest in seeing, which I guess would be just me and David. But I think that might have been for the best because Dan might have dragged me into his labels and us-verses-them mentality, which would have just made the reunion like high school all over again.

I wasn't super social in high school. Anti-social would have been a better description. But I decided, going into this thing, that I would put past biases and bad memories aside and give everyone a second chance. And it totally paid off. People were more friendly than I'd ever seen them. I got hugs from a bunch of girls that I was never friendly with and I talked to (and got along well with) all kinds of people that I never really spoke to in high school. It was almost a redeeming experience. Instead of thinking I went to a small town high school full of hicks and preps, I now know it was a small town high school full of normal kids who were maturing and coping with adolescence.

By far the most unusual story I heard was from my old friend Goose who spent about 20 minutes telling me a story of how he developed Schizophrenia and started hearing voices a few months before the reunion. He bought a GPS which randomly brought up a location in the desert that the voices told him to drive to, but he ran out of gas and sorta went crazy on the way. He started giving away money and acting crazy, and he was arrested and spent 2 weeks in an insane asylum in Las Vegas before his mother could get him out. Now he wants to go off his pills because he has a higher calling and he needs the voices to tell him what it is.

It was like talking to the crazy kid in SLC Punk who thought his mom was the devil. I hope Goose pulls through. He was always a good kid. I bought him a beer, I hope it doesn't conflict with his meds.

(talking about my driver's license. The bouncer had hesitated before letting me into the bar.)
Dan: No wonder he didn't believe it. Is that your photo from when you first got your license?
me: Yeah, that's me at 16. What are you talking about, I still look like that.
Dan: You sure loved those bangs.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

I got a 2TB hard drive from newegg yesterday and spent a good 3 hours trying to figure out how to format the thing. Neither Windows nor PartitionMagic want to do it, and people in forums were no help (as usual). People blamed it on everything from file system cluster sizes to northbridge drivers to windows xp being 32-bit. I finally got linux to start formatting the drive, which took a whole lot of finicking as linux always does (gparted refused to format it, but fdisk seemed to be working), when my computer overheated and shutdown 10% into the zeroing process. It does that occasionally because instead of having a case fan I just leave the case open. I probably should have ordered a fan from newegg at the same time. I'll have to get back to this next week.

Flying to CA this evening. Back on Tuesday. My mom called me last night to warn me that it's been cold in Occidental and she had finally gotten tired of it and turned on the heat. Which means the house is going to be kept at a constant like 63 or 64 degrees. Prepare to be uncomfortable. Awesome.

me: It's the same with one of my sisters.
Rachel: Is it Lauren?
me: No, my oldest sister.
Rachel: Is it weird that I know your sisters' names?
(Yes. Creepster.)
(Actually I once knew Rachel's sister's name, but I can't remember it now. I am the less creepy of us. Or maybe my memory just isn't very good.)

Sunday, August 8, 2010

I tried to stop into Sticky Fingers Cafe to see Sarah but when I got there it was a little busy and she was nowhere in sight. There were 2 people ordering infront of me and their order was going sooo slowly. Slow like you can only find in a liberal, vegan cafe these days. Starbucks would never stand for it.

After 5 minutes of no progress I cut out and went to giant where I picked up She's Out of Your League at the redbox. I'm expecting good things.

Today I'm doing work, then I'm going to try to find Dave tonight for a last night of probably-not drinking. Only single guys are good at drinking. Once they're in a relationship they're always taking it easy or cutting out early. I think it happened to me too. It happens to everyone. Except my brother-in-law Doug for some reason. Maybe I should move to Texas.

(Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee, after seeing Steve Jobs park in the handicapped parking spot at Apple)
"Oh, I never realized that those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped."

Saturday, August 7, 2010

I talked to the lady at the front desk of my building and she said that I should be able to go month-to-month after my lease is up. This is really good news. They might still increase my rent (which is already pretty expensive). But at least I won't have to move on the same weekend as the end of the fiscal year at work. Plus there is much less competition for apartments during the winter than the fall. And if I decide to leave DC mid-year I can do it without breaking an expensive lease. We'll see how much the rent actually increases.

Tonight I saw The Other Guys with Dave, Tom, Nick and Nick's wife. Nick only lives a couple blocks north of me. Anyway, the movie was a lot better than the trailer made it look. I'd give it a solid 7.5/10, while the trailer makes it look like a 4/10 at best. Actually the trailer isn't that bad. I guess what I saw was this teaser trailer, which is just stupid and not funny. But the actual trailer gives away some of the jokes, so maybe it's better that I never saw it.

(user comment to a Washington Post article about the $825 Billion stimulus bill)
Tom333: You want to stimulate the economy, Obama? Stop the embargo on UFO technology. We already have the technology for zero point energy and space warp drive. We back-engineered it from crashed UFOs. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both promised to end the UFO secrecy but they wussed out. Don't be a Demowussy, Obama.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

I just did 2 miles on the elliptical in 15.5 minutes. It wasn't super difficult either. Maybe I'm getting stronger? That's unlikely. Maybe the machine is busted and level 7 isn't what it used to be. Or maybe it was because I fell asleep on the couch during Seinfeld shortly before going down to the gym. A nap will do wonders.

I didn't really eat anything energizing. I had some coffee, then a corndog for lunch and a bunch of frozen burritos for dinner. Oh! But then I also had some after-dinner cereal, and it was that Basic 4 cereal, which sounds like it should be healthy. That's probably the secret.

After the elliptical I did 5 minutes on the stair master for my ass. That's not really true, but I thought about using the stair master! That's a good first step. I also thought about doing some pushups or light bench-presses to preempt any man-boobs, and I thought about trying to build up some manly biceps by doing some curls or something. I did lots of thinking tonight.

(Micros wants to practice fielding grounders for his baseball league, so I come up with this great idea where I bat tennis balls at him with a tennis racquet. Micros is nervous about getting injured.)
me: i don't see any problems. you've got the tennis equipment, i've got the skills. we can do this.
me: and you've got the health insurance too.
micros1781: Yeah, we'll try it. I'm just saying I'm nervous about the plan.
me: you can't go into something like this being nervous. it's gonna be great. this plan is foolproof.
micros1781: From your perspective, sure.

Friday, July 30, 2010

Movie review Friday. (Warning: spoilers about Robin Hood, Benjamin Button, and Inception)

I'm watching the old Disney version of Robin Hood. I remember watching it as a child with my family, in the room of our house that we called "the cold room," because it was always cold for some reason. The movie starts out so happy and playful. Then it gets very sad and miserable in the middle (not only is everyone in prison, but the rooster sings a sad song, and it's raining!). And then it ends on a happy note. It's an emotional rollercoaster for a child. I'll get this for my niece in four or five years.

I watched Benjamin Button last week. It was a snoozefest. I actually fell asleep about 2/3's of the way through. Imagine the most boring romantic non-comedy ever, and then have one of the characters grow younger like Merlin, but without the magic or the mystery. Also too much emotionless Brad Pitt narration like in the beginning of Interview with a Vampire. Not recommended.

I saw Inception last weekend with Rachel, Peter and Leslie. It was good. Good effects, pretty interesting environment and story. The problem was that a lot of it didn't really make sense. Peter said that once you're accepting that one person can enter another's dream, then you have to accept whatever. But somehow I don't. There was that 80's movie Dreamscape, where Dennis Quaid was going into people's dreams, and this was sorta similar. But Dreamscape was more like the Matrix and less like, umm, star trek.

-Is there really such a thing as a dream within a dream? I've never had one. One morning in college I turned off my alarm and then went back to sleep and dreamt that I was going through my morning routine. That was kinda disappointing when I woke up and discovered I had to brush my teeth and shower all over again.
-Isn't no gravity the same as a falling sensation that supposedly wakes you up? It seems like having no gravity would be a pretty major thing that would echo back through the layers of a dream. Also falling into water.
-They said that time passes 20 times slower in a dream because you're using all of your brain, but why should the time dilation compound for a dream within a dream? You can't use more than 100% of your brain.
-I could tell what was going to happen at the end. Kate said she could too. It all got pseudo-dreamy and surreal. Maybe they were too clear, before the end, about the kicking out of the different layers of the dream, so when they suddenly started skipping through the end in a montage it was clear what the director was going to do. And did they pull the A Beautiful Mind trick and have the kids not age? I guess it depends how old his memory of them is.

It was a good movie, but doesn't hold water quite as well as most science fiction movies that I prefer. Maybe it's because they explained all the rules too explicitly about the dreams within dreams. They need to gloss over the less-realistic aspects and not expound on them.

(11:54:32 PM) me: i saw that bomb squad movie that won the academy awards. that one was really good
(11:54:58 PM) Dan: f that movie. i won't see if on principle
(11:55:07 PM) me: cause you loved avatar?
(11:55:13 PM) Dan: since when did we let woman direct movies?

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Let me start by saying that I'm not super picky about my friends. I'm usually not all that judgmental and I don't think you need to have the same tastes or a super similar personality to be my friend.

That being said, I'm unfriending someone today for the first time ever. It's this dude-bro I met on craigslist. I don't have a lot of local guy friends and he wrote an ad saying that his guy friends were all busy with relationships so he was looking for some normal guy friends to just hang out. I wrote back saying how normal I am (and I am very normal) and he responded "you sound cool. what's your facebook?" Next thing I know, I'm facebook friends with a d-bag frat guy. He writes in slang and every single one of his photos is of him with a slightly unbuttoned shirt posing with either alcohol or bar girls. His favorite tv show is Entourage and his favorite book is, and I quote, "Does Men's Health Magazine Count?" This isn't a real person, this is a compilation of two dimensional characters from teenage comedy movies. Unfriended.

JP Blackford (the old GTA from my probability class at GWU, who is strangely facebook friends with Mark, Kate's sister's boyfriend) fell for it too. He was this guy's other new friend for like a day before one of them unfriended the other.

(Eric and I are driving behind Dave in his newly bought used car)
me: do we still need to pick up beer?
Eric: I don't know. Maybe we're stopping.
me: Or maybe Dave forgot.
Eric: Call and ask.
(I call Dave's cellphone)
Huyen: hello.
me: hi Huyen? It's Joe. Are we stopping along the way for beer?
Huyen: umm. yes.
me: Also, did you guys know that your car is leaking oil out the bottom?
Huyen: what?
me: (I repeat it but Eric starts laughing and drowns me out)
Huyen: Umm...
(a few seconds later)
Dave: hello, Joe?
me: oh Dave, I was just asking whether we were going to stop for beer.
Dave: yeah we'll stop at a place. Like 10 minutes.
me: okay. Also, did you know that your car is leaking oil all over the road?
Dave: what?
me: Did you know that your car's leaking a stream of oil?
Dave: what?
me: (loudly) Did you know that your car is leaking oil!
(moment's pause)
Dave: this is a terrible practical joke that isn't working at all.
(correct.)

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

The wine tasting on Saturday started early, and I had a mild stomach ache and head ache but those went away after we got started. I'd been tasting once with Eric and Dave in California, and that was pretty similar except this time we had a bus and everything was much more organized. People liked some wines and there were a few wines that people complained were too sweet, and one that Lem and Sarah said smelled like manure. I can taste the differences in the wines, but none of them really appeal to me and it's probably irrelevant whether one is slightly less bad tasting than another.

We went to 3 wineries, and I think Rachel's blog post describes each one better than I could. I'll just add some random things.

At the second winery Lem wanted to get the one cute worker girl to do our tasting, so while everyone else in the group was still finishing lunch he randomly was like "let's go!" because a free spot had opened in front of her. So he and I ditched the rest of the group and started our tasting early. I think I saw Julie give us a "what are you doing" look.

Lem flirted with the girl but it didn't really go anywhere. I think this was about an hour before, at the next winery, Lem was making fun of another guy named Chris for him being asexual, and Julie responded by calling Lem a "man-whore," and Lem protested that he's a changed man and his whoring days are over.

There were some heavy criticisms of our bus driver's soul patch. Our driver had both heavily styled, spikey hair and the soul patch, which is a tough combination to pull off if you're not a part of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

There was a lot of making fun of me because I don't eat fresh fruit. I don't really see the big deal, plenty of people don't eat fruit. Do they even have fruit in Africa? And that's huge continent! And I eat fruit it my strawberry icecream or milkshakes, or if it comes in my pancakes or something. I'm really very normal. I just don't pick stuff off trees or wander around in the produce section.

There was a pregnant wine taster at one of the wineries. It got some whispers from within our group, but I'm not a doctor so I have no opinion. Maybe she just wanted to hang out (like I did), maybe she was tasting and spitting, maybe she was European.

And I think I accidentally mooched sangria at the third winery without chipping in for the cost. Sorry.

After the wine tasting we went swimming at Rachel's building. Well, everyone else went swimming but I just dangled my legs in. I didn't have a swimming suit and, call me old fashioned, but I didn't want to borrow Peter's. It was still fun just dangling my legs and hanging out. Leslie had a great story about a girl fight she once saw at this same pool over the use of a pool chair (does a towel reserve a pool chair when the towel owner leaves the pool vicinity? The lifeguard had to hear both sides and issue a ruling). And Sarah talked to me while she did ballet and leg stretches in the water. Her ballet makes the memory seem kinda surreal, almost like a scene out of a movie.

(a user comment on the news article about Joe Biden saying that he wouldn't characterize the tea party as racist)
It's not a racist organization... Just 97% its members are white. They don't have any friends or partners of color. They don't socialize with people of color. They don't like seeing a black family in the white house. They think the AZ law is cool and just. They think all people of color get a free ride. They don't think the term "lynching" has any racial overtones, nor do they think the confederate flag means anything racial.

Monday, July 26, 2010

It was Rachel's birthday last weekend. Rocket bar on friday and I went out wine tasting on saturday. Both were pretty fun. I had a hard time finding Rachel's group in the bar, and nobody was responding to my text messages, so I watched some arena football on the bar's tv. Okay, so that part was kinda boring, but after a while I did a third tour of the bar and happened to spot Julie and Jordan. They're engaged now, which I had to find out through randomly going to her facebook page and seeing a bunch of strange congratulatory messages. Oh, Rachel got engaged too! I didn't believe Rachel when she told me because she said it so casually. But I guess she just has a good poker face because it happened right before rocket bar.

Like 5 years ago when I went to the first parties with Rachel's friends I didn't like any of them. It seemed like people were only interested in hooking up or otherwise finding out how you could further their hookup-agenda. I guess a lot of it may have been because the parties were at bars with a $10 cover charge (for guys at least). If I pay a $10 cover fee, I want at least 2 phone numbers at the end of the night to make it worthwhile. That's not really how I roll, but I could see most guys thinking that. You want to get your money's worth. (Maybe 2 phone numbers isn't being very ambitious because I've heard that the new thing these days is for girls to give out their phone numbers to everybody and then weeding people out by not responding to your voicemail. So maybe you should try to get like 10 phone numbers, just to play the odds. But I've also seen girls get super pissed when they give a guy their phone number and he doesn't call. Dating culture is a strange fig.) But my point is that the fun level has definitely increased since Rachel has settled on rocket bar. Or she's just weeded out the undesirable people. The two are probably related .

There wasn't anyone annoying there on Friday. Even Diana was courteous enough to not show up! I should hope for a DMB concert overlap every year! Leslie is still cool. Julie is still funny. Jordan was more talkative than I'd ever seen him. Mehrnaz was watching her blackberry most of the time until her friend showed up and they kinda wandered off. Puja was too tired to go and Kate Reid couldn't make it because she lost her wallet on the metro and she couldn't get into the bar. And for the first time I met Charlotte, who I'd heard about before (due to her having multiple kids, I think), and Sarah who used to be part of Rachel's friends who threw February parties. But I never met her at any of them and she seems cooler than I remember those parties being. (I just did an email search for any old evites for those feburary parties to see if they were called the fab five, or if that was my imagination. No luck, maybe I deleted them. Though I did find an email to Rachel where I tried to assert a matter-of-fact justification for my comments on the evite about girls being ugly. Wow, I was a jerk 5 years ago, I'm surprised Rachel talked to me. I wonder if, 5 years from now, I'll look back on my current emails and be embarassed.)

I'm going to cut this entry off now because I know that nobody likes a long posting. Tomorrow I'll write about Saturday's wine tasting and my newfound wine expertise. (Will I use it for good or evil...) And I still want to write about my recent viewings of The Room, Benjamin Button, and Inception.

I think Dave is in town for the next few weeks before his 2-year island vacation in the south pacific. If you can call Clarendon being "in town." I should give him a call. Maybe he'll be up for trivia if we're short handed again.

(This quote is from a few years ago but it's appropriate. Right after my coworker Jeremy got engaged we were talking about the engagement ring)
Jeremy: They say it's supposed to cost a couple months salary.
me: Yikes.
Spittle: Man, I sure hope I never love a girl that much!

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The facebook pressure is on from James to write something here about my birthday. I showed up at One Lounge way too early, because Ravi Shah told me he and Rupal would be getting there at 5:45, but then he never showed. That slacker. After a while Jamie showed up and we talked about places around dc and I got a strawberry mojito. I'd read raving reviews of the strawberry mojitos at one lounge, but the one I got was pretty terrible. So I kinda nursed it. Then when we were leaving I asked for the check and the waitress, who had an eastern european accent said "Oh the check... there is no check..." I gave her a surprised look, and she awkwardly just walked off without explaining. I was kinda worried that she had heard me complaining about the disappointing mojito, but then it turned out that Rachel and Kate had secretly paid for my drink.

We went to the new Madhatter for a while. It's a pretty nice place with a decent food menu and it was surprisingly quiet for a friday. And then I met up with Kate Reid and some of her friends out at RFD where I drank lots of unpleasant dark beers because the lady would give me judgmental looks when I ordered a light beer. But that was fun, Kate's friends are very lively. I didn't know the back room at RFD is really just a large tent over the back patio. We got stormed on a little.

It was a fun, but kinda subdued birthday. In the future don't make plans around expectations of a couple friends (in this case Puja or Ravi)- I probably would have preferred to start the drinking later.

Yesterday it was just Rachel and me at trivia night, but we kicked ass!! Our team, appropriately named the Better Half, got 46 points out of 80 possible, while normally we score something like 55-60 out of 80 when we have all four people on the team! Apparently our team is carrying a lot of dead weight! And if you had asked me last week, I probably would have suggested that I was the dead weight, but there was a movie slogans round yesterday that I totally rocked! And I correctly guessed that the first thing people think when they wake up is "what time is it?" Because that's what I usually think.

Tonight I'm going to watch the room out at Rachel and Adam's. I have high hopes for it.

(my mom talking about giving final exams for her math class)
mom: and you can't use a calculator on the test so students have trouble
me: ouch. Can't you a calculator.. That's terrible. It's not like you'll ever not have a calculator on you as an adult.
mom: you can't have a calculator on you all the time, Joseph.
me: I think i have one on my cellphone, it comes with me everywhere.
mom: Even in the shower?

Monday, July 12, 2010

If you're around dc but not on facebook for some reason (weirdo), you can come out to my birthday on Friday. Happy hour at One Lounge, and then maybe moving on to somewhere else.

I bought an xbox 360 for myself as a birthday present. More videogames. I considered getting a new computer with better graphics but I spend too much time looking at the computer screen already. (I think the 10 foot viewing distance of my tv is better for my eyes than the 2 feet computer viewing.) I used to really love videogames when I was a kid and wasn't allowed to play them. Since then they've been less entertaining, but I'm still hopeful that something will recreate that same fascination I once had.

Anyway, you can find me on xbox live as PrimeDJoe if you want. The usename comes from my PSN username of PrimeDirective, but that was taken on xbox live.

And with the capitalized DJ in the middle of this new username, maybe some online hotties (the kind that probably lurk around xbox live) will be attracted to me because they'll think I have DJ skills. I'll have to work on my freestyle rapping.

(about Dana's fiance)
Dave Shapanka: He's not as out there as Dana, but I think you can't have a relationship where both people are outrageous.
Eric: Yeah.
Dave Shapanka: Then it just ends up like Rav and Liza sharing a car.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

I went to Reynoldstock for the long weekend. I got a bunch of mosquito bites, saw more college kids at once than I've seen since college, played a little badminton, ping pong, lost my mp3 player, drank some beers, ate some barbecue, went to the beach, took a fair number of naps, and tried to defend Nicholas Cage against an onslaught of negative remarks made by unqualified movie critics. It was a good time.

One of my friends from high school's mother is on facebook and she posted a photo of a bunch of my hs friends and some townies hanging out in the local bar. She captioned it "fun times with great people" and the elitism of it disgusts me. Reynoldstock was mostly full of people whose company I happen to enjoy. But it isn't an elite club of better people. I'd probably enjoy your company too, if I met you. And if I was drunk.

College kids tend to bring out the pessimist in me. I think it's because Eric is so enthusiastic about so many things. I feel like I need to bring the general consensus back to reality. Goonies was great 20 years ago when I saw it as a pre-teenager, but it is definitely not a good movie. And if you rave about it I'm going to tell you that it sucks. The same goes for Willow, Teen Wolf, Duck Tales, and almost everything you liked as a kid. If you rewatch something like Duck Tales, and then want to rave about how it is still great, well then you have a skewed view of movies. So around Eric and college kids who mistakenly love things that should not be loved I'm a pessimist, but around Kate and those DC kids who dislike a lot of things I end up being more of an optimist. I guess it's the contrarian in me.

Joseph Gribble: Lori broke up with me though. It hurts so much! It's like my heart is a really sad man.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

I'm still alive. Been decompressing since my quarter. I should start ramping the work up again though. Having to learn the same lesson every quarter is silly.

I've been playing a little tiger woods golf on the wii. Normally I'm not a big golf guy, but supposedly with the wii motionplus it's a super-realistic golf simulation, and it's only like $60 for the golf experience, as opposed to however many hundreds of dollars you'd pay to use a golf course. And I've got a large open area infront of my tv and a fairly big tv to use. It's almost like I'd imagine playing golf by yourself would be.

Well I've only played 2 games, but I'm really pretty decent until it gets to the putting. Putting is a huge pain in the ass in the game for some reason. It's hard to see how close you really are to the hole, so I usually just look at the distance it tells you, and then try to imagine I'm putting that distance. But that doesn't work. A fair amount of the time I'll get it to the green in a couple hits and then I'll spend like 5 hits putting it back and forth trying to get it into the hole. It must be the game's fault. I'm good at putt-putt!

The only thing I don't think it takes into account is how squarely you're hitting the ball. It detects how hard you swing and how you twist the club. But it doesn't know how tall you are or how long your arms are, so it just assumes you're hitting the ball squarely. Which I think is a pretty big assumption. But I don't really know, I've never been to a driving range or anything. Maybe driving the ball is really pretty easy.

Today is Matt and Lisa's last day in dc but I think I'm being blackballed out of any celebrations for some reason. Oh well. Getting upset about things that people don't do is really just getting upset at your own expectations. My joke about Matt haunting the upper rafters of 6th & I like the hunchback of Notre-Dame was one of my few culturally refined jokes. And Matt and I never went out to bars as much as regularly as we should have, but the regular friday night lights viewings were always fun. I don't have much desire to ever live in Boston, but maybe someday they'll move out of there and we'll have the opportunity to go out drinking (or not go out) again.

(about living out in Capitol Hill)
Kate R: Plus in MY neighborhood laws are made and rights of the common man upheld. In your neighborhood kickballers drink themselves silly. I see no contest.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

I'm watching a bit of Greek while I do work. It's okay for that because it moves a little slow (though not as slow as lord of the rings, which runs at the perfect pace for doing something else). The hottest actress, by far, is the one who plays Rebecca Logan. So I took a moment to stalk her on wikipedia, and she has the same birthday as me! Though she's 3 years younger. But we're still the same horoscope sign... though I guess cancers are supposedly most compatible with something other than cancers. Hrmm. Did I post about this before?

I dunno if it'd work out anyway because her chin is 100x as defined as mine is. How do girls always keep their chins so tight? Maybe I should start chewing gum.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Is it just me or is an 8 incredibly difficult to write? I used to always write them by doing a figure-8 on the page with my pen, but when you're writing fast that turns more and more into a deformed 6. So then I started just doing two small circles like architects do (I think), but now that have gotten too tedious and sometimes my circles overlap too much or not at all. It's a crap shoot each time. Why can't we use a symbol like a backwards 3 for the 8? Or a backwards 7? Anything would be easier than this 8 character. I might just start writing an X in my notes instead of each 8.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Quick story. I went out for a beer in Adams Morgan with Mehrnaz last Saturday. We were in some bar where a lot of people were dancing, but we were sitting on stools against the wall. Mehrnaz said something about how a guy dancing nearby looked really young and I agreed with her. I might have compared the kid to Michael Cera. Then two girls walked up to me and said that they know we've been talking about them, so why don't we just say it to their face or they were going kick my ass. I was stunned. These girls were skinny, white, college girls. But they were angry and there was a lot of head bobbing and finger waving. So I reached over and smacked the closer girl and then the other one when berserk! Okay, that didn't really happen. Instead, I tried to explain that I hadn't even seen them and definitely hadn't been talking about them, but they weren't believing me. Maybe they were drunk.

They did a lot of angry lecturing that I didn't catch because of the loud music and one of the girls told Mehrnaz that she looked 18 years old (which I guess passes for an insult in some circles). We sorta reached a standoff where they weren't quite angry enough to actually attack me and I didn't really want to get off my stool to fight. Fortunately, one of their guy friends, who had been ineffectively trying to distract the girls until now, grabbed the alpha girl around the shoulders and almost dragged her away to the other side of the bar. And the other girl followed after them.

You gotta watch out in Adams Morgan, people get shot occasionally here.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Busy with end of the quarter nonsense. For now, here's some great videos:

Andrew WK does the weather
Andrew WK- Party Hard live. Those were some great concerts.

George Foreman: Mike Tyson's not all that bad. If you dig deep... dig real deep, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, deep, deep, go all the way to China ... I'm sure, you'll find there's a nice guy in there.

Friday, May 28, 2010

The Room is playing at E Street cinemas. I was watching the trailer and it seemed like a real, sorta boring movie, up until they showed the line "You're tearing me apart Lisa!" Red flag. That line dregs up a memory of discussion I read somewhere about a terrible film. Then I checked out this roof scene clip. Hilariously terrible. Definitely not seeing this bs at E street. Though I wonder if they'd do that same song and dance beforehand by the theater's manager about how movies are high art and you should join their movie club.

I just laughed harder than I have in a month at some of the amazon reviews of The Room. Thinking of buying the dvd.

edit: Not gonna see it in the theater, but did just order the dvd. That whole "I did not hit her! I did not! Oh, hi Mark" just gets funnier and funnier.

(from a amazon user review of the Room)
"I find that the movie makes more sense to me if I imagine that the character of Johnny is actually mentally challenged, but everyone is too polite to say this explicitly."

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

I'm listening to Les Miserables. Every time I listen to it I have to skip Master of the House. What a terrible, out of place song. Seems to have very little to do with the story, and whole bouncy feel of the song is definitely out of place. I guess it's supposed to break the mood after the Castle on a Cloud downer (which I could also do without. Listening to little girls babble about imaginary things is never interesting), but they could have done it in a way that matched the feel of the rest of the songs. Something with a slower beat and not as desperately humorous. Ugh.

(urban dictionary definition of "anime")
The most retarded s*** ever. The characters eyes are big and the women dress half naked and their boobs practically pop out of their tight usually school girl outfits. Retarded plots that are confusing and make daytime soap operas look like kindergarten math as far as understanding goes. The characters mouth are non-existent when talking, but when laughing become huge. Also everyone that watches it is lame and immature as hell. They talk in cutsey voices and make me want to bitch slap them. Also there's porno of it, which is f***ing clown shoes since you can get real porno everywhere.

Monday, May 24, 2010

I bought this sweet Captain Marvel shirt and wore it outside for the first time Friday. Some kid passing me said "Hey it's Billy Baston!" I was unprepared and didn't have any good response to give him. I just said "What? Oh, eh, yep!" So lame. Next time I'll shout: "World's mightiest mortal!" And all the comic nerds within earshot will cheer. Ah, nerd solidarity.

I'm sufficiently worried about the end of the quarter now that for the next 4 weeks I'm going to do no private movies or TV watching in my apartment. I'm still going to allow it for social occasions (mostly just Friday Night Lights these days) because I'm solitary enough. Need to do 204% from now on.

(Sean in Vietnam told us a story about his friend getting pulled over for speeding)
Sean: He rolled the window down and told the cop, "Ticket or lecture. Not both."

Thursday, May 20, 2010

The perfect exercise music mix can be made from the Nine Inch Nails album The Broken. You might think The Downward Spiral would make a better mix because it's a better album, but I think it's too complex with too much variety. After you cut out the intro tracks and some of the instrumental tracks, The Broken becomes 30 minutes of angry nihilism set to a frantic pace. This occurred to me earlier today when I was randomly listening to the album on the metro at rush hour, and almost started moshing in the crowded train because it's so energizing. People gave me concerned looks but I kept it all under control. I did 2 miles on the elliptical tonight, instead of the usual 1 or 1.25 miles. I am a champion.

(from the Weatherman)
Dave Spritz: But the whole thing about all of it, all the getting hit with stuff, the whole thing is, who gets hit with a f***ing pie, anyway? Did anyone ever throw a pie at Thomas Jefferson? Or Buzz Aldrin? I doubt it. But this is like the ninth time I got-
[pause]
Dave Spritz: Clowns get hit with pies.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Today I tried a Kirkland Mocha instead of the starbucks Frappuccino. It was shelved right next to the frappuccinos, comes in exactly the same shaped glass bottle, and possibly costs a little less (though it's not exactly inexpensive). Meh. It's not as bad as the foreign mocha bottled drinks you can find at wholefoods (who make full use of the excuse that they're foreign by tasting quite terrible), but it's not good and definitely not as tasty as a frappuccino. If I wanted something that tasted bad I'd drink redbull.

This is the second time I've been unfriended by Lindsay on facebook. She used to be married to the other Joe, and we exchanged a few messages a couple years ago after he told me they got married. Then one day I discovered that she and Joe were now divorced and she had unfriended me. I sent her a message: "Unfriended! You cut me deep Lindsay.." She responded that after the divorce she was culling her friends list, and had thought that I was just friends with her because of Joe. But then we were friends again. It looks like I've now been unfriended once again. She's engaged to another guy and I guess she's doing more culling of friends. This time I won't object. It shouldn't take constant effort to stay friends with someone on facebook. Online friendships are supposed to be easier than that. Her fiance's blog has some artsy naked photos of her on there. Weird.

(comments for the youtube video of the Skins characters singing Wild World at the end of season 1)
LauraGarciaCervantes: i hate hate hate how they removed this from the dvd. f***ing copyright. i dont even understand why, i mean, it was MADE. why not ADD it. Cat Stevens, if you had anything to do with this i am very displeased

Saturday, May 15, 2010

I rewatched most of Friday Night Lights today while I cleaned. Though my recording was kinda screwed by the storm and cuts out sometimes.

Some criticisms though:

Why didn't Coach Taylor just tell Tammy that he didn't know that Luke's mailbox was in front of an empty field? Because he didn't know until Buddy showed it to him and told him who lived there. Furthermore, why would it matter whether Luke's real address was in East Dillon district in past years, when the high school was completely shutdown and non-operational? Why would the mailbox have even been there if the whole area was zoned for Dillon High? They wouldn't have needed it.

It doesn't make sense that people would put a bunch of surrender flags in the coach's front yard. There was nobody in the stands for the football game, the students don't care at all about playing for the football team. The entire east Dillon community has been portrayed as unsupportive and uncaring about the football team. Parents of the players don't care when the coach shows up at the house, and students don't even stop playing basketball when the coach is trying to talk. Then suddenly they're outraged enough about a football game forfeit to go put up white flags in the coach's yard? Inconsistency. When the community doesn't care, it doesn't care. At my high school we never heard about football games except at the occasional rally. A forfeit wouldn't have even started a conversation, let alone inspired enough anger to go stake flags in the coach's front yard.

I had no idea that the random guy who stops Coach Taylor at the gas station and starts babbling was some famous coach. I wonder if most viewers knew. That scene just seemed out of place and unlikely. Some random guy recognizes the coach and start spewing metaphors about inner pirates and how to swing a sword. It was out of place and random, and neither I nor the coach could believe it was happening.

I also didn't like the scene where Tim's brother starts yelling at him in the car shop. I guess people sometimes explode with stress, but it felt too out of place because it was such a short scene. We had like about 5 seconds of regular time in the mechanic shop before Tim asks about getting paid, and then like a 2 minute explosion by the brother about all his issues, and then end of scene. It just wasn't subtle enough for me.

I do like this bicycling girl that Landry backed into. She looks like Tyra, but is even hotter!

Wait, in the last scene Coach Taylor apologizes to Tami for lying! So he did know about the mailbox and fake address, even though Buddy had to show it to him and then tell him what it was, and even though the mailbox wouldn't have mattered in past years because of East Dillon not being open. Crazy.

me: Me First and the Gimme Gimmes do a great cover of this song.
Kate: Do they do anything besides covers?
me: No. Just covers. But they do punk covers of non-punk songs, so it's really like new material.
Kate: So they're kind of like Eric's band.
(oh snap!)

Friday, May 14, 2010

An explanation of the 4 possible interpretations of "a friend in need is a friend indeed". I always thought it meant the third definition, but the first two seem more likely now.

I hate how yahoo sneaks stupid articles about UFC into their news headlines as though it's real news. "Huge upset at UFC!" I don't care. Apparently yahoo is somehow sponsored by UFC, but I'm tired of these "article" ads being interspersed in there. Mostly because I'm tempted to click on them. Also I hate how after you click out of yahoo mail, it brings you to the yahoo main webpage, but then you have to wait before typing any new URL into the window. After a few seconds the page finishes loading (or finishes the intentional delay, if yahoo is being sneaky) and the cursor automatically jumps down to the search bar. So you'll think you're typing a URL but then you're suddenly typing in the yahoo search. Huge pain in the ass. Lots of times I end up yahoo searching for a website whose URL I know because I just type it all out and hit return before the page finishes loading.

(A science blog entry about the thermodynamics of Goldilocks & the Three Bears, and Mama Bear's porridge being too cold)
The only way that the story can make sense is if, for some reason, the Mama Bear has the smallest portion of porridge. In which case, this is a story with a very different moral than the original-- it's a story about the oppression of the Mama Bear, either because the patriarchy is forcing her to eat only the scraps left behind after her husband and child have had their fill, or because the unhealthy woodland media culture has saddled her with a negative body image, leading to an eating disorder.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

I watched District 9 last night. (Spoiler alert!) Decent movie, but not stellar. None of the characters were particularly interesting and the whole alien situation seemed a little unexplored. How are their weapons so powerful, yet nobody is exploiting the aliens to have them use the weapons? Why wasn't the mothership fully dismantled and reverse engineered? We just let it sit there undisturbed for 20 years? The floating-ship technology sounds useful. I bet the script's first draft had the aliens having no useful technology, but then the studio said "This won't work in an alien movie. We need some guns! And big robot suits! That Transformers movie made a lot of money.."

I also find it unlikely that the extremely powerful fluid fuel needed to propel the ship is also coincidentally the fluid used to change humans into aliens (and back again). These are two highly specialized and unrelated functions. It'd be like discovering that diesel gas will change turtles into birds. It just seems unlikely.

(from a review of Ctrl+Alt+Del comics)
Ethan is the wacky one like all get out. He built a robot - OUT OF X-BOXES! LMAO HEUG. He talks about giraffes and cheese! LMAO RANDOM. He cavorts and gibbers and acts like he should be in an institution. His antics are supposed to elicit a laugh, but... how? It's so over the top, so wholly pathetic, that you just can't. It's not like watching someone who is naturally, gracefully funny in person. It's like watching someone desperately act the clown so you'll accept him. He flings himself out of windows, burns himself, cuts himself, walks into accident after accident and if you zoom in real close you can see the glistening tears in his eyes and he silently whispers for you to accept him so he won't be so lonely anymore. But you don't, because he's a f***ing idiot.