Yesterday Mom and I went and saw The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Myself, I had already read a very lucid review on it that pretty well condemned it, so I didn't have high hopes. But I resolved to go in with a pessimistic attitude and watch it anyhow. Everyone else figured they'd like it, and it seemed like they got just what they expected. Expectations are powerful in this kind of situation.
-We were expecting the theater to be jam-packed, but when we got in there there were maybe four people scattered through the higher seats. This did not bode well. We scattered our own selves and, after fifteen minutes of previews (really), the movie got to starting.
-It started with a bunch of singing dolphins. That is not a good thing. In fact, I can't think of a much worse way to start it. Singing dolphins? Opera-style?! And from there things proceeded to get only marginally better. Okay, I'll give th movie makers one thing: the special effects were terrific. I enjoyed all the special effects. But, like the astute reviewer noted at Planet Magrathea (though don't hope to get in for quite a while, because the bandwidth limit has been continuously exceeded for the last few days), the movie had one serious flaw: it wasn't funny. The whole point of the books was that they were hilarious. The movie took out all the good jokes, or, as the reviewer (one MJ Simpson) pointed out, in a lot of places actually rewrote them to be less funny. That's why the movie was crap. Simpson (just go read the review) says, "This is one of the least funny comedy movies ever."
-I generally make up my own material, but since Simpson made so many valid points I would've failed to make, I figured I wouldn't try to do it better, because I'd just fail. So I quoted him for most of my own review.
-The bottom line is: don't go see the movie. If you must, wait until you can rent it.
-Other than seeing the movie, the last few days weren't very eventful. I went to Graeter's a few times. If anyone wants to go to Graeter's with me at any time, you've generally got a yes. In fact, I just realized that would make a terrific place for me to meet friends whenever the occasion to do so arises. I love Graeter's.
-Tonight I'm going to turn on my shortwave radio and listen to a broadcast in Esperanto, one emanating from Havana, Cuba. That'll be fun.
-I have a buttload of homework from those two little days I was absent. All that homework'll probably take me all tomorrow to do. So I'm not looking forward too much to tomorrow.
-I made a new buddy icon. IM me and look at it. The joke is that my initials are NDB and that also stands for "Non-Directional Beacon". And "National Discount Brokers", but that's stupid. "Nondirectional" describes me nicely, I think.
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- Judas Priest!
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Sick day
Today I stayed home from school. I had had a really sucky day at school yesterday because I was sick the whole time and especially achy, and I didn't want to go through with that again. As of writing, you poor saps are waiting anxiously for the let-out bell, which will ring in one minute and thirty-five seconds. By the time I'm done, you'll probably be home.
-Matt wanted to know (over IM) yesterday whether there was any "sick-day bloggage" expected. I guess so. I also sent him a picture of the italic from my font, which is called Cyril. The italic is turning out real nice, and I'm up to l so far. Once I'm done with this font I'm going to send it off to Linotype (typeface company) and see if they like it enough to sell it for me. I personally think it looks awesome, but that's obvious.
-In my last post I forgot to tell about the creekwalk Micah and I took past the power pylon at Seymour Preserve. It was pretty awesome, except toward the end. We took the same route described in the last creekwalking post to that pylon and then kept on going. After trekking through an expansive field of four-foot-high, brittle weeds, we ended up across the street from a brilliant creek that happened to be at the edge of Caldwell Nature Preserve. When we got to the creek we found the going would be nice and easy, since there was a trail running right next to the creek for its entire length. In Caldwell we had probably the most fun we've ever had on a creekwalk.
-Eventually that creek flowed into the Mill Creek, which, according to my map, would take us directly under a cool railroad. However, we didn't follow the Mill Creek exactly, because Micah wanted to veer upward and into what he thought was a shortcut. It wasn't. What it was was a dank, dreary, depressing place called "American Crushed Steel" (we think--that's what it said on the side of a machine there). American Crushed Steel was a vast muddy plain strewn with enormous piles of metallic trash sorted into separate piles. Each pile had a different kind of garbage in it. Parts of old wheels go here. Inexplicable metal circles there. Dead coffee cans in that pile, springs in this one. Micah and I trudged through the thick, inescapable mud, dodging frequent puddles of water and sometimes not dodging them, walking across fallen doors and beside defunct bulldozers, and came disbelievingly to a fence with a railroad on the other side, just like we'd planned all along! Here we stopped next to a caboose on American Crushed Steel's side of the fence that hasn't run for at least thirty years and pulled Pop-Tarts and Sprite out of the backpack we'd been alternatingly carrying. We must've looked for all the world like juvenile hobos.
-We resolved to wait here until a train passed by and then turn back and go home. That plan didn't work. We sat for probably an hour and nothing passed by. We heard trains tantalizingly close but out of view on other tracks somewhere and had to just sit there. Eventually we got fed up and turned around. We were much more tired by then. It was less fun to walk back through Caldwell and not fun at all to walk back through the field of four-foot weeds, but we knew we had to. Just before night, we arrived home. That was March 14th, by the way.
-In more recent epochs I've had subs from Subway and inquired about employment but found they're looking for those over 18, and I've gone driving on short excursions with Mom and with Dad. On one of them I got to eat at Applebee's. They're really expensive. And we've also had lots and lots of kittens roaming the house. We have nine of them: six from one cat, three from the other. Adding the two mothers, we have eleven cats in the house. Soon we have to start giving them away.
-It's a rainy, junky day outside. I picked a good day to be sick. I think I'll probably be at school tomorrow. Isn't it cool that it snowed on Sunday? I think that's awesome.
-My mom wants me to start up a t-shirt business and so do I. I'll do it soon, I think. Also I'm going to work on the snake cage I started building two years ago and haven't given a passing notice ever since. I think I'll do that this weekend. I did get some nails from Hader the other day when I biked up to Complete Petmart with Micah to get some crickets for his snake. What I'm doing recently is finishing up all the things I started doing long ago and should've finished then too but got distracted, possibly by the school year starting so suddenly.
-Which brings me to that the school year is about over, isn't it? There's only about a month and a half left! Soon I can go to Crowduck and West Virginia and all sorts of stuff! Also I'll have to start thinking about the future. (What a drag, no?) Mom thinks I ought to be an editor, not a proofreader. I didn't know the distinction exactly. As it turns out the distinction is about $20,000 more a year(than a proofreader's $30,000). And a "Senior Editor" makes about $80,000. So I'm definitely considering this kind of thing.
-My CD is about over, so I guess I'll let your eyes go and maybe I'll do something else.
-Matt wanted to know (over IM) yesterday whether there was any "sick-day bloggage" expected. I guess so. I also sent him a picture of the italic from my font, which is called Cyril. The italic is turning out real nice, and I'm up to l so far. Once I'm done with this font I'm going to send it off to Linotype (typeface company) and see if they like it enough to sell it for me. I personally think it looks awesome, but that's obvious.
-In my last post I forgot to tell about the creekwalk Micah and I took past the power pylon at Seymour Preserve. It was pretty awesome, except toward the end. We took the same route described in the last creekwalking post to that pylon and then kept on going. After trekking through an expansive field of four-foot-high, brittle weeds, we ended up across the street from a brilliant creek that happened to be at the edge of Caldwell Nature Preserve. When we got to the creek we found the going would be nice and easy, since there was a trail running right next to the creek for its entire length. In Caldwell we had probably the most fun we've ever had on a creekwalk.
-Eventually that creek flowed into the Mill Creek, which, according to my map, would take us directly under a cool railroad. However, we didn't follow the Mill Creek exactly, because Micah wanted to veer upward and into what he thought was a shortcut. It wasn't. What it was was a dank, dreary, depressing place called "American Crushed Steel" (we think--that's what it said on the side of a machine there). American Crushed Steel was a vast muddy plain strewn with enormous piles of metallic trash sorted into separate piles. Each pile had a different kind of garbage in it. Parts of old wheels go here. Inexplicable metal circles there. Dead coffee cans in that pile, springs in this one. Micah and I trudged through the thick, inescapable mud, dodging frequent puddles of water and sometimes not dodging them, walking across fallen doors and beside defunct bulldozers, and came disbelievingly to a fence with a railroad on the other side, just like we'd planned all along! Here we stopped next to a caboose on American Crushed Steel's side of the fence that hasn't run for at least thirty years and pulled Pop-Tarts and Sprite out of the backpack we'd been alternatingly carrying. We must've looked for all the world like juvenile hobos.
-We resolved to wait here until a train passed by and then turn back and go home. That plan didn't work. We sat for probably an hour and nothing passed by. We heard trains tantalizingly close but out of view on other tracks somewhere and had to just sit there. Eventually we got fed up and turned around. We were much more tired by then. It was less fun to walk back through Caldwell and not fun at all to walk back through the field of four-foot weeds, but we knew we had to. Just before night, we arrived home. That was March 14th, by the way.
-In more recent epochs I've had subs from Subway and inquired about employment but found they're looking for those over 18, and I've gone driving on short excursions with Mom and with Dad. On one of them I got to eat at Applebee's. They're really expensive. And we've also had lots and lots of kittens roaming the house. We have nine of them: six from one cat, three from the other. Adding the two mothers, we have eleven cats in the house. Soon we have to start giving them away.
-It's a rainy, junky day outside. I picked a good day to be sick. I think I'll probably be at school tomorrow. Isn't it cool that it snowed on Sunday? I think that's awesome.
-My mom wants me to start up a t-shirt business and so do I. I'll do it soon, I think. Also I'm going to work on the snake cage I started building two years ago and haven't given a passing notice ever since. I think I'll do that this weekend. I did get some nails from Hader the other day when I biked up to Complete Petmart with Micah to get some crickets for his snake. What I'm doing recently is finishing up all the things I started doing long ago and should've finished then too but got distracted, possibly by the school year starting so suddenly.
-Which brings me to that the school year is about over, isn't it? There's only about a month and a half left! Soon I can go to Crowduck and West Virginia and all sorts of stuff! Also I'll have to start thinking about the future. (What a drag, no?) Mom thinks I ought to be an editor, not a proofreader. I didn't know the distinction exactly. As it turns out the distinction is about $20,000 more a year(than a proofreader's $30,000). And a "Senior Editor" makes about $80,000. So I'm definitely considering this kind of thing.
-My CD is about over, so I guess I'll let your eyes go and maybe I'll do something else.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Has it really?
People kept telling me to update my blog, but up until a couple weeks ago, I kept thinking I had updated just last week or so. Matt made sure I knew otherwise sometime in early April when he told me I really hadn't posted since February 28th. From then I knew I probably should we=-- (sorry, cat jumped on the keyboard) write something, but I just neglected to. Well, it's been a month and a half, but I'm finally updating.
-A lot has happened in that time. No, that's a lie. But some has happened. The most prominent event is pretty recent: I got my own computer in my room. Dad worked a long time and spent a lot of money to get this thing up. I didn't really want it all that badly, but I guess it is pretty good that I've got it, because now I can start computerizing my fonts without being hassled to get off the computer.
-In other news, I had a birthday. It happened on March 24th. In fact, now I need to go change that profile that's at the side of the page. Don't bother looking, I probably already changed it. My birthday was pretty good: the day before, I got ribs and cake and $50 at my Grandma and Grandpa's house, and on the actual day I got to go on Spring Break. I loved Spring Break,but it was too short. I did plenty of stuff, though.
-Today in History Class Mr. McGlade was talking about how college tuition rates have risen exponentially since the '20s, more than can be explained by just inflation. We talked for about five whole minutes about how some people decide it's not even really worth it to go to college for $80,000 if you've got to pay student loans 'til you're 51 and how it costs even $40,000 a year to go to college in many places. My parents can't afford $40,000. That's why I'm getting scholarships, I suppose, but even 20 or 1ok is a lot for them. We're poor even right now. We're always poor, it seems. Then, just as the discussion was wrapping up, McGlade threw in a quick aside about how funny it was that you could just go across the border into Canada and attend internationally acclaimed colleges for, like, $6,000 a year. I'm going to college in Canada.
-I also think I know my top career choice: I want to be a proofreader. That would be awesome. Not only do I get to sit and read for a living, I also get to point out other people's mistakes! I think I'd be an excellent proofreader. Proofreading isn't hard in, say, school (Doc Lev's papers are especially entertaining), but I even proofread cursorily when I'm reading anything else. For example, I found a misprint in one of the Harry Potter books: it said "Dumblefore". Isn't that spectacular? I'm finding things that even accomplished proofreaders missed. Um. Anyhow, I think that would be fun. I wonder what it pays, though.
-Today after school I was sucking on a bouillon cube. That probably disgusts you. But here's the thing: I laughed at a Strong Bad E-mail and I accidentally swallowed it whole. That was awful. My throat was burning for maybe ten minutes. Things are going okay now, though. Maybe tonight I'll work on my font Cyril awhile, and I'll research proofreading. I'm kinda hungry. I want some steak or something. Maybe ribs. Are you looking forward to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie? because I am.
-A lot has happened in that time. No, that's a lie. But some has happened. The most prominent event is pretty recent: I got my own computer in my room. Dad worked a long time and spent a lot of money to get this thing up. I didn't really want it all that badly, but I guess it is pretty good that I've got it, because now I can start computerizing my fonts without being hassled to get off the computer.
-In other news, I had a birthday. It happened on March 24th. In fact, now I need to go change that profile that's at the side of the page. Don't bother looking, I probably already changed it. My birthday was pretty good: the day before, I got ribs and cake and $50 at my Grandma and Grandpa's house, and on the actual day I got to go on Spring Break. I loved Spring Break,but it was too short. I did plenty of stuff, though.
-Today in History Class Mr. McGlade was talking about how college tuition rates have risen exponentially since the '20s, more than can be explained by just inflation. We talked for about five whole minutes about how some people decide it's not even really worth it to go to college for $80,000 if you've got to pay student loans 'til you're 51 and how it costs even $40,000 a year to go to college in many places. My parents can't afford $40,000. That's why I'm getting scholarships, I suppose, but even 20 or 1ok is a lot for them. We're poor even right now. We're always poor, it seems. Then, just as the discussion was wrapping up, McGlade threw in a quick aside about how funny it was that you could just go across the border into Canada and attend internationally acclaimed colleges for, like, $6,000 a year. I'm going to college in Canada.
-I also think I know my top career choice: I want to be a proofreader. That would be awesome. Not only do I get to sit and read for a living, I also get to point out other people's mistakes! I think I'd be an excellent proofreader. Proofreading isn't hard in, say, school (Doc Lev's papers are especially entertaining), but I even proofread cursorily when I'm reading anything else. For example, I found a misprint in one of the Harry Potter books: it said "Dumblefore". Isn't that spectacular? I'm finding things that even accomplished proofreaders missed. Um. Anyhow, I think that would be fun. I wonder what it pays, though.
-Today after school I was sucking on a bouillon cube. That probably disgusts you. But here's the thing: I laughed at a Strong Bad E-mail and I accidentally swallowed it whole. That was awful. My throat was burning for maybe ten minutes. Things are going okay now, though. Maybe tonight I'll work on my font Cyril awhile, and I'll research proofreading. I'm kinda hungry. I want some steak or something. Maybe ribs. Are you looking forward to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie? because I am.
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