This is why Lost sucks.

when you know whats worth fighting for

2009-05-25T03:36:00.001-05:00

sometimes even the best of nights can still leave you wishing you had something more to come home to than an empty bed and cold sheets.

bittersweet, isn't it

wine for the woman who makes the rain come

2009-02-15T23:31:00.002-06:00

I finally got around to finishing Extras. It left me wanting a bit more, but with the crying and such I sort of didn't mind. I loved it almost as much as the end of The Office. Maybe even as much. The scene where Andy bears his soul choked me up almost as much as David standing up for himself or even "never give up."

I hope someday I can be involved with something as brilliant as what Gervais and Merchant have done.

you left enchanted by my intellect, or maybe you didn't

2008-11-17T18:20:00.002-06:00

I might actually be posting some content ( gasp ) here at some point soon. I've been amassing tons of script notes, and your deity of choice willing, I might actually get some stuff on paper (keyboard?) soon. I think break will be a nice ass-cold creative period.

why are you so far away from me

2008-11-17T01:05:00.002-06:00

I have found that one of the best things about life is a crush that comes at a completely inopportune time.

It's not logical, and nothing will come of it, but in the worst of times an innocent little crush can be a bright, shining reminder that life can still be capable of beauty, and possibly even a wake-up call that there are actually a whole bunch of wonderful girls out there in the world.

find your own way home

2008-11-16T22:53:00.001-06:00

My life is kind of like that feeling your frozen hands get when you get back inside a warm house - somewhere between frozen and on fire, warm yet burning.

Fuck Sony, BTW. They are officially fucking up Little Big Planet. First with no price drop for the system, then with a lack of marketing, and now they're deleting levels with any trace of copyrighted content (GoW, Sonic, Mario levels all gone), and even levels WITHOUT anything copyrighted, targeting specifically the most hearted levels in the game... wtf.

it doesn't take much to be somebody special

2008-11-10T20:42:00.003-06:00

I was sitting here reading Happysad when a song from the Weezer album Pinkerton started playing on the stereo, and it got me thinking about something. There is a link in many of the things I love, stuff like Lost in Translation, The Office (UK, naturally), FLCL, etc. It isn't necessarily that they're all about some form of hopeless romance, but it's that they're true.

There are tons of sappy-ass romance things that get a knee-jerk repulsion out of me, most notably 99% of romantic comedies ever made, bhe great thing about that sort of "genre" or whatever, though, is that depending on personal experience, you can really tell when something is true. You can tell when the people who made it did so from their hearts, put everything out on the table, made something that was true to them in the hopes that somebody out there will also find it true to themselves, too.

i've got an electric guitar, i play these stupid songs, i write these stupid words, and i love every one, waiting there for me, yes i do, yes i do

2008-11-10T10:45:00.003-06:00

Every once in a while, it occurs to me just how awesome it is that freaking Arnold is the governor of California. Doesn't that kick ass?

That's all.

lol

Edit: FIREFLY BLU-RAY TOMORROW BOOYAH

Oh, and the Blackhawks are now 7-3-3, fourth win in a row, second game where we destroyed the other team by 4 or more goals (6-2 over Colorado, 6-1 over Calgary). Next game is an original six matchup against Boston on Wednesday... hopefully we can keep our badass streak going.

you're gonna go far, kid

2008-11-05T12:18:00.002-06:00

Went to the Obama rally last night. The entire city felt electric, and the hour or so wait to get through numerous security checkpoints flew by fast (as did the several hour rally). It went on until maybe 12:30, and we got back to Lincoln Park by 1:15 or so. It was fun, awesome, exciting, historic, but that's all the jazz that you'll get from everybody else who was there. My take is more or less the same.

The one thing where I seem to differ from many people, though, is that I was deeply embarrassed and angry during a couple parts of the rally. They had CNN on a huge screen that everybody was watching, so we got to see McCain's concession speech. As expected, the bulk of the crowd at the rally consisted of people around my age, twenty-something college students. On the one hand, I'm incredibly proud that we came together and won this election, but I have some issues.

The first isn't something that was directly tied to the rally, but a lot of people my age are seemingly pro-Obama because a lot of people my age are seemingly pro-Obama. There is a defintie feeling I got from a hell of a lot of people that it was being treated as more a sporting event than an election in a very important time in our country's history. But that is something I've long accepted and gotten used to; at least they're cheering for the person I believe is the right one for the White House.

The thing that really got to me last night, though, was the hateful nature of this election. There aren't many bumper stickers around, not many shirts around (outside of college campuses), not much talk of it in public a lot of the time, because people are so angry and on-edge about it. People have this idea, both parties alike, that if the other guy wins, the country goes to shit. This notion is ridiculous in any case (I don't agree with the guy, but McCain would have been a definite improvement over Bush) but it bothers me that it's largely the people my age who take the anger and spite to extreme levels.

This could have been just the area of the crowd I was in - I certainly hope that is the case - but during McCain's speech, there were nothing but loud crass boos, people shouting "shut up," "move on," "you suck," incredibly sarcastic parroting or responses to every sentence he said, huge laughs when he slipped up saying something, and all of this got louder and more crass whenever he was saying anything about Obama, regardless of what was actually said.

Now, this was also the case at his rally, you could hear huge boos and crass remarks from that crowd, so maybe what I'm disappointed in isn't politics or one party in particular but instead the entirety of my age group, my generation. Nobody in the Chicago crowd was as loud and crass as them, nobody sounded as unintelligent as them when they made crude sarcastic remarks about McCain or red states, nobody was as embarassing to be around. The final thing that made me want to shoot somebody was the number of people with their god damn cell phones out texting when a preacher was at the podium before Obama came on, delivering a powerful prayer/blessing. I don't care if you're regligious or not, but people should have an ounce of respect.

I know that there are many many people my age who are respectful, intelligent, well-mannered, gracious in both victory and defeat, and I cherish every one of them, but nobody can deny that there are a whole helluva lot of us who are downright disrespectful. It's a big thing that so many of us stepped up and came together to get something done, but if the way many were acting at the rally is any indication, we still have quite a long way to go.

On an unrelated tech-help desk note... you wouldn't believe how many people mention that they have gotten viruses in the past and "had to get a new laptop." They didn't even try to fix it or to take it to Best Buy or something to get fixed - they just bought a new one. I can only assume their parents were the ones doing the purchasing. I wish I had that kind of money, to just buy a new laptop whenever IE crashes once or twice.

ain't supposed to die on a saturday night

2008-10-31T13:02:00.003-05:00

I picked up an album yesterday, "The '59 Sound" by Gaslight Anthem. I had heard the two lead singles on the radio, and liked both a lot, good late-night driving music, so when I was at Best Buy last night looking for new music, I figured I would give it a chance.

It was a pretty good reminder of why A) I have listened to the radio so infrequently over the last five years, and B) why I never buy albums anymore based off a catchy song on the radio.

I hate to sound like an old person, but every damn song sounds the same. There is no variety. If you skip through the tracks and listen to the first five seconds, 2/3 of them could be easily mistaken for each other. They play actual notes here and there, which is a plus, I suppose, but the best we get are little loops of four or five notes repeated over and over, in front of your usual package of three power chords endlessly churning out. My usual annoyance applies just as it normally does - when you have a few power chords and no "solo" or any actual playing of your instruments, the songs will be boring as hell, and in this case, they all sound the same, too.

My biggest problem with the album is the vocals. They have this weird sheen effect laid over them, which was noticible on the radio, but surprisingly more prominent on the actual album. Effects are fine, but it is incredibly obvious that in this case they're being used to cover up the fact that the vocals are lacking something.

Which brings me to my point - when the hell did it become acceptable and popular to have bands with a lead singer who can't sing worth a damn? This guy half-sing-half-talks and sounds tone deaf half of the time, and people love it. Same goes for that Killers band - shitty effects trying to compensate for a singer who can't actually sing.

Back to Japanese and Finnish shit, I guess.

i am so proud of you

2008-10-25T00:34:00.006-05:00

It's a common thing to hear after meeting a famous person - "They're great, he's just a normal guy!"

I felt this after seeing Brendan Fraser a number of months ago. He walked in dressed casually, perhaps a bit young for his age, talked about films, stuff in general, and seemed like a really cool down-to-earth guy... for a celebrity. Were he actually an actual normal guy, he'd be the really cool one, who, while cool, wouldn't really have the time of day for you since everybody would be wanting to hang with him.

Don Hertzfeldt wound up being an actual normal guy. I thought he would be a bit cocky, perhaps even a bit egotistical, because there aren't many independent animators out there who are as well-known as he is, and who have been successful enough to never need a "real" job. It wound up the exact opposite, though. He is just a dude, the type of guy I could have seen myself hanging out with, bullshitting about movies with, having a beer with. Incredibly appreciative of fans and his success, very modest, quiet, well-mannered, intelligent, and just all around really, really nice.

After the screening of "I am so proud of you" (more on that in a bit) he stayed afterwards to hang out at the table-of-three-items-for-sale to sign some stuff, and by time we got to him, it had been over an hour. This was at the Music Box, so while there were a good number of people, it wasn't an amount that would normally take so long to get through (considering the rest of the line behind us it was probably another good half hour after we left) at an event like this. Instead of rushing people through, he was stopping to talk. If somebody had something to say, he'd listen, not giving a hint of "I need to move on to the next person in line," actually holding a small conversation, and never seeming anything other than perfectly happy to stick around and make sure he got to say hi to everybody. He was just a dude with an awesome job, happy to see that people love what he has made, and who wanted to make sure he let everybody know how much he appreciates it himself.

The film itself is great. It is directly a second chapter to "Everything will be ok," and while it has similarities, they are quite different. This one has a few more comedic moments than the last, is a bit longer, and also jumps around in time a bit, to great effect. I wouldn't dare spoil any of it, but I think it's just as amazing as the first.

The crowd was an interesting mix. You had normal people, you had anime / video game nerds who were there because of Rejected, you had the film snobs, you had the arthouse snobs, emo kids, long-haired hippy looking types, everybody you can think of, even a few metal kids. The internet-fans of Rejected (of which there were many) were a bit annoying though. They screened a couple older shorts before showing Ok and Proud, including Meaning of Life, during which maybe a third of the theater was laughing uproariously. It has a few funny moments, but people seemed compelled to laugh at stuff that I find to be overtly serious, simply because of "my spoon is too big." Rejected is brilliant, don't get me wrong, but it bugs the piss out of me when people automatically take everything else Don does as comedy. During what was probably the emotional climax of Proud, a few people were laughing, while I was shrinking down in my chair a bit in a futile attempt to hide the fact that I couldn't keep from crying. I guess I just managed to hit the nerd crowd. In line to meet Don the 40-something nerds behind me (dressed as late teens, one wearing 3d glasses) were having a heated, almost scholarly-sounding discussion on "AHnime," FFVI vs FFVII, and other stuff before I tuned them out.

Protip - If you ever want me to shove my fist into your mouth and tear your tongue out, raising your voice slightly so people around you can hear that you are pronouncing the term "anime" as "AHH-knee-may" is a quite effective way to do so

So anyway, it was a great experience. I hope he comes back to Chicago if he does Chapter 3. The night ended on two strange notes, though. One was this rush of creative inspiration that always comes with a night like this, but even moreso tonight when I was seeing an independent filmmaker who has found moderate success and has not gone corporate, only doing his own thing. The film got so many things flying around in my head, and talking to him briefly on being a film student interested in animation god many more things flying around - so many things I want to write, things I want to try to animate, music I want to record to write/animate to... but I can't really focus on any of this, since right now, focusing on work, stressful goingson at home, and especially the black hole of stress and anger that is finishing school in a program that is worthless and that I owe $100k to, really is too much to handle at once to have any free energy for creative drive. I literally don't have the time or energy for anything creative. Work is fine, but school and the health of my family is too draining. If I could somehow finish school tomorrow, I would be so excited about having time to dedicate to putting together something great- but that's not an option.

The second weird thing was that during the screening I got a voicemail from one of my two coworkers saying they're leaving the Genius Squad. He is a great guy, both to work with and to hang out with, and it'll suck not having him around. He always kept a good level of humor and joking sarcasm with people around the desk that made it much easier to get through the tough days, of which there have been many.

heard they'll do anything for a klondike, but i'll do anything for a blonde dyke

2008-10-24T12:43:00.003-05:00

(I've honestly heard people saying Kayne is great with lyrics)

Occasionally I get hit with things that bother me seemingly out of nowhere. This time it was a person up at the Genius Squad talking to my coworker. They were talking about iPhones, and at some point I interjected with my annoyance at my continuing lack of one for myself.

The girl says, "What, your parents won't get you one?"

I respond, "Not that, I have my own plan on AT&T that I pay for, my parents have a seperate plan, and I'm not a new customer so I'd have to spend $400 on the phone."

"Oh, I ran into a problem where my parents didn't want to get me one, but (I kept nagging blah blah I got it)..."

Going to an expensive school in an expensive neighborhood, I suppose you're supposed to expect stuff like this, but it still catches me off guard where somebody close to my own age has their parents buy them stuff like expensive iPhones, and automatically assume that the reason I don't have one is because my parents won't pay for the more expensive phone/plan. I most certainly wish my parents had the means to buy me an iPhone out of the blue, but even if they did have the means, they wouldn't do it... which I am acutally happy about, being spoiled by one's parents would grow tiring quickly... but I really do want an iPhone, lol.

Though, that Google's Android OS is quite awesome... we'll see what the state of Android vs iPhone is by the time my parents switch companies in January (cheaper for me to get a smartphone if I can be on a family plan again instead of my own - it's literally half the price).

awkwardly speaking with nothing to say

2008-10-20T10:03:00.003-05:00

I've had a couple things happen over the last few weeks that have made me step back and take a look at myself, or rather how other people look at me.

I was hanging with the guys a few nights ago, watching the Hawks game and playing pool in my basement (which is a whole lot of fun, I need to twist their arms a bit and make it a regular thing). On our way to get food afterwards, somebody mentioned some Japanese song, "Marshmallow Strawberry Flower" or some shit, and a crazy video that accompanied it on YouTube. He assumed we knew it, which we didn't, but he was surprised that I didn't, saying "You don't know it? Aren't you the Japan freak?"

This caught me decisively off-guard. At the end of my high school career and the first year or two of college, I was really into anime, but I was never the hugely obsessive type who inexplicably finds it a good thing to identify as "otaku," I was simply somebody who appreciates a good show. I discovered an entirely new approach to storytelling that I hadn't been exposed to previously as an American, so I was eating it up. I also have listened to a good deal of Japanese music in recent years, and expressed a distaste for a large amount of modern American music.

I don't find myself to be a "Japan freak" in the least. I don't like Japanese media any more than American media; it's all just media to me, the media I consume just happens to come from a few different places. People seem to take these things as automatic signs of being an "otaku," however. I mention that I listen to Japanese music, and apparently, I'm automatically a mega-nerd. I understand how people can jump to that conclusion, but it still annoys me. What I don't get is why people I've known since I was 7 think I'm a "Japan freak" who must know obscure Japanese pop songs or memes.

I've found myself having a little bit of annoyance - hatred, even - with the anime club on campus. It's perfectly fine to have an anime club (though I would argue that the club does not fulfill it's goal of bring in socially inept kids and giving them people with similar interests so they will eventually branch out socially - in actuality it just gives socially inept people other friends who do have similar interests but are equally inept socially, and the person's only friends wind up being the other anime club members, to the point where they might not even try to make outside friends, and they wind up even worse off than before), but it gets on my nerves when society jumps the gun and assumes I'm a mega-nerd simply because I listen to Japanese music and I watch anime every now and then. Again, I understand why the gun is jumped - most people who appreciate Japanese media in the US are, in fact, horridly nerdy. It just ruins it for those of us who aren't horridly nerdy, but simply open to media from other cultures.

Sometimes I wonder what people "get" from me as a first impression (or for that matter just in general). I have long hair, I'm kinda pudgy. I dress casually, often jeans and a hoodie, sometimes a "nicer" button shirt with some graphic tee under it. Generically, I suppose. Not grungy-looking but not like I'm a college prep type or anything. I find myself to be normal in conversation. I can talk about movies, music, sports, games, computers, life, your average range of stuff. People just seem to find me very strange, though.

I wonder about this since I get a very certain type of girl hitting on me - the extremely quiet, timid, "homely"-looking (I'm not a shallow person but it's simply a fact that myself and others take looks into consideration - to an extent), hide-away-when-you-raise-your-voice, (seemingly) cripplingly nerdy type of girl. I see a thousand beautiful girls a day at this job, but the few times now and then when somebody is overtly hitting on me, it's always this type. They stop and awkwardly talk to carry conversation past the point where their computers are done being fixed.

One case about a month ago hit me hard. This incredibly shy, timid girl, who seemed to be fascinated by the fact that I was holding normal conversation with her (you could tell it was the type of person who expects to be treated poorly since has likely been picked on her entire life). She left her computer, came back, I gave it to her, she went and sat down at a lab computer, pretty routine... until she comes up, trying to seem happy when in actuality she was extremely nervous (this one I can say for sure; I have experience with the feeling), and hands me a post-it note with her number, saying she likes me and she'd love to get to know me more. I take it, not entirely knowing what to say and entirely caught off-guard, and she leaves.

Being me, this made me feel like utter shit, since a girl I had decisively zero interest in kind of just directly asked me out. Ultimately I kind of forgot about it after a few days and she hasn't been back, which makes me feel like a shitty person, but really, I'm simply not interested in the least, and I also have no real urge to make new friends at all at this late in the game.

However, the real problem... is that this was the first time I've ever been directly asked out by a girl. I've had a couple harmless flirting things here and there, where the possibility is there but neither party ever address it and it eventually passes, and a time where it went from acquaintance to friendship and then just kind of moved into more than that on it's own - but I had never been asked out. The first time I was by an unattractive and painfully timid girl when I was 22.

This is the kind of thing that fucks with your head the more you think about it. I know I'm not the most appealing guy around. I have many interests, but none that most girls want to talk about most of the time, and I'm not the most attractive guy around and have a shitty body but I don't think I'm flat-out unattractive, I'm overweight but I at least still have a neck and distinct joints. I like to think I have a good personality, but I'm not really aggressive when it comes to women, and the cliche of girls liking aggressive and backhandedly mean guys really seems to be fact, at least around here.

When you get hundreds of girls walking around you every day, in the kind of jeans girls tend to wear around here, and the only ones to show interest are the ones you have no interest in, it's hard to get thoughts like this out of your head.

Anyway. Job is hard lately. The higher-eschelon people in IS refuse to fix things as simple as the wireless instructions on the website (which effectively tell you how to crash your Mac every 15 minutes 100% of the time), which trickles down to lots of angry people taking stuff out on me that's not my fault. It makes for a stressful job, especially when home life is hellishly stressful, and school even more so.

I need a break, bad.

maybe tomorrow is a better day

2008-10-13T00:40:00.008-05:00

My band's name will be Only in Theaters.

Our first album will be named TK-421.

Tracks one, two and four (of ten) will be released as singles.

The lead single, named "Tina Fey is a Bitch," will top charts and be called "bombastic."

While it will not be our most popular song, track eight will be widely regarded as the album's best.

Our sophomore album, A Scream of Wilhelm, will outsell the first, but will not be as critically acclaimed.

Our third album, Apple Crunch (You Can't Unhear It), will be considered a true return to formm and evolution.

...So maybe I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here. But I am actually writing some music. Mostly just the instruments, not much figured out yet as far as lyrics go.

fifty dollar haircut on a ten cent head

2008-10-07T22:27:00.001-05:00

just a funny lyric

tired eyes

2008-09-30T16:57:00.002-05:00

Haven't posted in a while. It's partially due to the fact that I know of only three people who read this and doubt there are any I don't know of, but mostly because I've been godawful busy. There are a lot of things going on.

The most obvious one is school. I am fine with the day-to-day semi-pointless nature of working 9-5, and for the time being, while I have certain squabbles about my job and my paychecks, I am fairly happy with it, and have no problems whatsoever going through the motions. Classes, however, are another matter. I have only general education classes to finish up now (history, science, math, etc.), and it is rather hard to... well, do them at all. I am so entirely burnt out with school, and so utterly hateful of my program, the near-$100k debt I owe for it and the incredibly inadequate professors I have had in major and non-major classes alike, that it is hard to simply go to them, let alone do the work for them (it doesn't help that the work for them does not apply to me or my program in the least). I realize that part of college is simply getting through it, showing that discipline and everything, but it is so overtly pointless at this late stage in the game that it's hard to keep up the lie that I not only realize but also accept that as fact.

Home life has been shaky at best. I am not comfortable in the suburbs, there is nothing there and I only have a few friends, so when I'm not out with them I'm either A) at work/class all day or B) at home feeling horrible. Weeknights aren't bad, since I'm only there a few hours, but weekends are hell. It seems that life slows to a stop, and after a full Saturday or Sunday of being at home, it is hard to even care enough to go out and see my friends should they call me later on in the night. It probably seems silly to somebody who does not understand that funk you can get into, but it is harder than it probably sounds to deal with.

My mom is in the hospital for her crazyass cancer treatment. Something about them taking her stem cells, giving her intense concentrated radiation, and after six weeks in isolation giving her her stem cells back to essentially save her from the radiation. They say it isn't that much more risky than the standard kemo she's been doing for a while now, but I'm not entirely sure I buy that (note the part where her immune system is quite literally nonexistent for a month and a half). I suppose I could be doing worse, it "helps" that we've been dealing with this cancer thing for a while now. The harder part is that my sister and I aren't allowed to go in and see her, since we're both on college campuses with god knows how many germs and infections crawling around on us. Even my dad seeing her is borderline (though they're letting him a couple times a week it looks like) since he's around us so much. I feel bad in a way that it isn't tearing me up more than it is, but it still isn't exactly easy to deal with. The house is even more empty and depressing for the time being.

I came back from work a few days ago to an empty dark house (a couple days before my mom went in). There was no reason for me to feel this, since everybody was simply out at the hospital, class or work, and I knew that, but somewhere in the back of my head the thought flashed by that maybe the house is dark and empty since everybody is at the hospital because things with my mom took a turn for the worse. It wasn't the case, and logically I knew it wouldn't be, but the fact that the thought came to me is sort of telling of the place I'm at right now. Previously, my mom had cancer, whatever, I'd even joke about it now and then in the years where it was seemingly "gone," but now it's like, fuck man, my mom has cancer. The kind that kills you. It doesn't mesh with my apathetic/sarcastic (but secretly caring) approach to life.

The selfish part of all this is that I can't move out. I hate living at home. It isn't even my home, it's my family's house, my home is in Lincoln Park, my home is the DePaul campus and the surrounding area. Every time I drive past the old apartment I get a good twang on my heartstrings. The bulk (of the remainder) of my social life is there, and I'm just sort of... in my element there. I feel awkward and out of place in the spacious, drawn-out, artificially laid-back suburbs. I also just hate the house, it's a little too big and spacious and empty and artificially laid-back itself. It's cheaper this way, but I've been driving lately so it's not a ton cheaper anymore, and I really can't force myself back onto the Metra/CTA since it's so much nicer to live by your own pace after four years of public transit. I wanted to move back into the city, I really really wanted to, or even just to someplace else in the suburbs as to have my own place, but it isn't really a possibility now, since stuff needs to function at the house and the main functioner...person isn't around for a while.

I'm a little bit behind in classes already, which is far more stressful than it should be. Money problems are looming, I probably will have to actually stop driving since it's so damn pricy, and that debt is terrifying. The job is way more stressful than it should be. I can't sleep. Sometimes it's hard to find joy in movies or games or any other hobbies of mine. The main "good thing" I have to look forward to right now is the Blackhawks season, but I keep getting reminded that many of the people I loved to go to games with are gone.

Through all this, I'm trying, I'm really trying, to get some writing done, but with everything spiraling out of control lately it is really hard. I've found a number of good influcences lately, movies that make me go "that is the feel I'm going for," music that makes me say "that's the mood I'm going for," just little things here and there in life that my head picks out. I've started writing all of these down, and I have two pages of influences/inspirations so far. In theory, they'll be helpful for getting me in the correct mood for writing, to get the juices flowing, but right now it's hard to even sit down in the first place.

Plus the one I was working on to finish for class has almost entirely fallen out of my focus, and this other thing I've been sitting on for years is starting to come together in my head, and I really want to just write that... but I have to push through the BS school script first. That's another big block, come to think of it.

Anyway. More later.

P.S.: The fact that all upcoming Pixar films are being released "theatrically and in Disney Digital 3-D" is terrifying. If they're standard films also released in 3D, then fine, whatever, but if they're made with 3D in mind and then "squished" into a 2D screen for those who choose to see it without the gimmick... not cool.

916

2008-09-20T04:58:00.002-05:00

Hey, Calavero! How do you feel?
Life is not always rosy.

it's plain to see, evil inside of me, is on the rise

2008-09-03T00:50:00.005-05:00

It recently occurred to me that there are four specific albums that are very important to me, in that they were some of the first I listened to, and that they are the four that most shaped who I am.

Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream (1993) taught me that there is beauty in every aspect of life, the happy and the sad, the bright and the dark.

Green Day - Dookie (1994) put a pinch of a rebellious tendency in me, made me take a little bit of an edge to everything I do, and reminded me that it's awesome to sing along to songs in the car.

Foo Fighters - The Color and the Shape (1997) made me angry, made me sad, and made me realize how precious the fleeting moments of love and happiness in life are, and how they are worth fighting for.

Finally, Weezer - Weezer ("blue album") (1994), my first and possibly favorite album, has always been a constant reminder to always have a smile on my face, no matter how many bad things come my way, and that it isn't always a bad thing to be the funny guy, the laughing guy, the guy who always has a slightly skewed view of how things work. Most importantly, it makes me somehow feel okay about being myself.
*In The Garage might be my favorite song

Bonus points to the pillows - Happy Bivouac (1999) for being the soundtrack to every summer I have had and every summer I will ever have.

seventeen and strung out on confusion

2008-08-30T21:04:00.005-05:00

I never actually thought I would be posting something related to the title of this blog, but here we are.

I just finished Lost season 3. A few episodes before the end, it actually got interesting with the Desmond flashback, and got further interesting with the Jin and Sun episode following it (confirming my belief that the show should be composed entirely of Desmond/Jin/Sun flashbacks). The last episode was a bit anticlimactic, because having missed out on an entire season's length of time I've heard numerous people speak of it. It was still alright but I have a couple issues as I start pushing into season 4.

First, and this is one of the reasons I gave up on the show for so long, I hate artifically created conflict. I would say the bulk of the inter-character drama on the show stems directly from the fact that none of the characters ever talk to each other. Something big will happen, that will either directly impact another person or the relationship with another person, but they will keep it to themselves, either saving it for a "dramatic" episode down the line or leading to conflict which leaves you saying "why the hell didn't they just tell them a long time ago?" If this was coming from one character, I would buy that it is just a flaw of that specific character, but when everybody in the show does it, I start to think it's due to lazy writing.

Second has to do with the end of season 3 and a recurring plot device in season 4. If you haven't seen the finale of season 3, I would avoid this, but it's up to you. I'm not sure what to think about this flash forward device. It could be cool, I suppose, but the first instance of it in the finale of season 3 directly addresses my main concern with it. Jack's flashback in the final two episodes is revealed to be a flash-forward, when a drunk and distraught Jack meets with (a hilariously dolled-up) Kate, who shows no affection for Jack, is apparently with somebody else, and promptly leaves him on the runway.

The show continues on in present-day, while we have this knowledge of the future. This Jack/Kate/Sawyer/Juliet thing seems to be one of the main dramatic threads of the show. How am I supposed to get into the back-and-forth of it when I know Kate winds up with somebody else and Jack is a drunken wreck? I realize that knowing the end isn't all there is to it. For example, while I knew Charlie drowns at the end of season 3, I still didn't know what lead up to it. However, even though you still don't know how we get from A to B... doesn't B seem not quite as cool as it might have been if you hadn't known of it ahead of time?

We'll see how season 4 is. People tell me it's good.

Edit: Now through with s04e01... yeah, it's pretty good so far, lol. Glad to see some of the sci-fi elements coming back into play.

hate the sinner but love the sin

2008-08-25T00:30:00.001-05:00

101 athiest quotes. It's the Google cached version of the site, hopefully it'll still load after a minute.

and i hope we'll be here, hope we'll be here still

2008-08-20T22:32:00.002-05:00

Every once in a while I get a brief flash of inexplicable and overwhelming excitement, inspiration, wonder, and the urge to just go outside and just run until I find what I'm running towards.

There are so many things I want to write. There is this big trilogy I've been kicking around, you could maybe call it "Star Wars with balls," that other script that is inching closer and closer to being a borderline-adaptation of Densha Otoko, this revenge thing I've tooled around with since freshman year... but sometimes I'm reminded of what I really want to write.

I don't quite know how to explain it. A great adventure. The kid who leaves home and goes on a journey, along the way getting fancy new clothes, maybe a neat sword, and has some goal he's running towards, and later returns home a man, a changed man. Something that just makes you smile when you read or watch it. Something you root for. Something that everybody can relate to on some level, whether it brings back memories or it embodies that sense of wonder when you first step out into the world, when you have a thousand paths you could take and an entirely blank slate. Everybody has wanted to go on a grand adventure, and anybody who says otherwise is lying.

I'm reading Stardust, which is tragically short (and MAN is it better than the movie), and I think the best way I can describe what I want to write is something that makes me feel the same way I do when I'm reading Stardust, incredibly excited to read more even though I know how it ends, taking it slow because I don't want it to end, walking around after reading a few chapters and noticing the smaller things in life that are otherwise left unnoticed, the way a leaf blows around in the wind, the changing shapes of clouds, and how the further you drive away from the city the more vast and endless the stars become. It's the kind of book that makes me want to drive out to the country, lay down on the roof of the car off some small road, and just stare at the stars, letting my mind run wild.

That. That's what I want to write.

we're coming down to the ground

2008-08-18T20:01:00.003-05:00

I guess it might be a little early on to say this.

I'm not the kind of guy to try to have his favorite movies battle it out and shove them into a list since it's the kind of thing that is always changing. However, I do generally like to figure out my top few just for the sake of conversation. For a number of years, I've considered Raiders of the Lost Ark to be my favorite movie, with a lot of others high up there (Star Wars, The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Stranger Than Fiction, Back to the Future, The Matrix and Almost Famous to list the ones that immediately pop into my head) that I couldn't possibly rank.

I think I can rank two now, though, since Raiders has been knocked into #2 by Wall-E. We've yet to see if I'm still loving it years down the road, but I've never loved a movie so intensely right off the bat.

It's been "when it rains it pours" at work lately, so on the painfully boring days here and there I have a lot of time to just think about random shit, and Wall-E has been something I've put a lot of thought towards lately. I just love the hell out of it. There isn't a single thing I don't utterly love about it. I've seen it four times, and I really want to see it again, though I'm waiting for it to hit the $3 second-run theater, and I can't wait to pick up the Blu-Ray on Nov 18th and see it on the new embarassingly awesome TV in our basement (I find myself repeatedly assuring people "it's a couple year old floor model and we got a deal on it"). Even hearing tracks off the OST gets me a tiny bit choked up. Every time I've felt down lately, I find myself wishing I were in the middle of a dark theater watching Wall-E, and I acted on it once.

I in fact want to be watching it right now.

I need to hunt down Andrew Stanton and give him a big fucking hug. If I ever get to Pixar, that is the first thing I do. Complimenting Lasseter on his shirts, I'm afraid, will have to come second.

i'd fall in love with you, again and again

2008-08-14T16:29:00.000-05:00

This could rock.

she's holding on my heart like a hand grenade

2008-08-14T13:41:00.005-05:00

I've been driving to work fairly often lately. Probably way more than I should, considering we still have the country's most expensive gas (it's down to a little over $4 right now but just a couple months ago it was pushing $4.70), but I just really love driving to work. Even though I lived on campus for the last four years of college, I still rode the train to and from class all the time, so commuting to work/school via Metra and CTA still feels kind of the same. Driving feels like something different, like a step forward, which for many reasons makes me feel much better about myself and my current state in life.

Gas for a month of commuting (based on my not-horribly-accurate observations) at this point probably comes out to around $200, more if there are additional trips to and from the city, which there often are. Monthly passes for CTA and Metra come out to $170. So really, driving isn't all that much more expensive for me, but it sucks that a decade ago it'd be like $40-$50 for the month. Guess not everything about the 90s sucked. Not that I can talk since I currently look like Eddie effing Vedder, but whatever.

Speaking of unintentional segues, I've got a bone to pick with music. Driving around I've been listening to the radio a lot lately. Usually I stick to 97.1, or as I like to call it "the station with good music" (it's the best local classic rock station), but sometimes I get adventurous and try to hunt down some modern stuff. There are really only three options for this. 103.5 is 99% rap, so I can skip that one easily (I'm sorry but it's gotten to the point where it's rare to find anything rap-ish that is remotely musical). 101.9 is the... er, well, it's something I could see middle-aged women listening to. 101.1 is the only real station left for modern rock, and it isn't a modern rock station anymore really, they play 80s/90s "alternative" too, and they take that term rather liberally and pretty much play any shit from whenever the hell they want.

When you can actually get one or two new songs, they are mostly the same in that they suck. Most modern American rock artists have fortgotten how to be interesting, or they simply choose not to be and instead focus on their look. The most popular bands I hear people talking about seem to not know how to play their instruments. It is exactly like what our parents said about music in the 90s, that it's all three chords and all sounds the same, except now it's actually true (for the most part).

This might come across better in person when I can vocalize, but I'll do my best to get my point across. When you hear a singer, does he only sing three or four different notes?

Hey, I'm singing, hey, I'm singing, hey, I'm singing, hey, I'm singing!
Hey, I'm singing, hey, I'm singing, hey, I'm singing, hey, I'm singing!

I think most people would agree that it would sound very strange, right? What people expect is for the singer go through a huge series of notes, up and down and all around. However my gripe is with the fact that people are inexplicably okay with that from the instruments.

verse
Nuhnuhnuhnuh nuhnuhnuhnuh nuhnuhnuhnuh nuhnuhnuhnuh

chorus
nahnahnahnah nuhnuhnuhnuh nahnahnahnah nuhnuhnuhnuh

verse

chorus

bridge
(same as chorus, but drop one or more instruments, optionally add effect to vocals)

chorus

Most people are okay with songs that go like that. Now, I'm not saying that songs with that basic structure and repetitive sounds don't have their place at all, sometimes you can really use a basic, punchy song like that. My problem is that most bands only do songs like that.

There is this thing that old people liked in their music, now a forgotten relic of the past, called a "solo." A solo often was a designated section where the guitarist would go off on a multi-note spree, different from the rest of the song, and it could also be used for bass and drums. It was then that musicians would demonstrate that they in fact knew how to play their instruments, and it often had brilliant results. Modern bands seem to largely ignore solos, and on the off chance that they do it now and then, they're usually painfully simplistic or just a couple notes but really really fast. Again, that's okay sometimes, but not all the time.

I should mention that I don't criticize modern bands for only lacking solos. I just use the term solo most of the time since a lot of bands seem to have the idea that the only part where they are potentially allowed any musical variety is during a solo. Personally, I like variety throughout the entire song. Just a few different chords can only get you so far. Many bands nowadays rarely even have full chords anymore, power-chord-exclusive songs seem to be getting more and more common. I could play a halfway decent song full of power chords. I don't know how to play guitar, but I can figure out how to hold down two strings two frets apart.

There are still some modern bands that actually have decent music. Foo Fighters is probably the best example. While their albums always had the same kind of "sound" to them, their songs were always fairly varied and featured some pretty good playing. They were on the verge of being a tad too repetitive to me, but with their last album, they switched things up a bit, and the result was timeless and freaking awesome. In my mind they've gone up to the level of "classic rock," up there with Petty, Stones, etc. Their popularity is one of my huge hopes in modern music. There's also stuff like System of a Down, which I personally don't like, but I have to give them credit for being unique and actually having some variety in their songs.

Also, I've heard a few Avenged Sevenfold songs lately... is it just me, or is there suddenly a pop-metal genre? I choose to plug my ears, go "la la la la la," and keep listening to 1981-1988 Metallica albums.

above this imperfect world that god has abandoned

2008-08-07T09:37:00.003-05:00

I've spent the morning trying to figure some things out. Namely, Pixar.

I don't view it as a "dream job," it's just the place I want to work. I see it, who is there, what they do, and I say to myself "hey, I should work there." It fits. The main practical skill I see myself working on, editing, also fits in. The first time I really became aware of editing was actually during The Incredibles, the scene where Mr. Incredible is getting shot with the expanding-ball-things. I think about it, and really, editing at Pixar would be a great job, I think I'd love it and I think I would be good at it. Maybe I could try to squeeze in a story idea or two while I'm there.

However, it's obviously not the kind of place that you can simply get into with some hard work. It's the kind of work that requires backbreaking nonstop work, knowing somebody inside, and a miracle wouldn't hurt, either.

There is another internship open, this one for making in-house training videos / documentaries / what have you. They're looking for a film student with editing experience. That's it. The qualifications could be filled by pretty much any film student, and my focus happens to be editing, so it works out perfectly. Then we get to the bottom of the listing and they ask for a demo reel displaying your editing experience. I like to think I'm fairly adept at editing, but I haven't really done that much of it outside of the few editing classes I had with Lou, and I have no physical proof of real-world editing skill. The best I could do is send the one really good project I had for Lou's class, which I did last time, but I doubt it'll work any better than it did then.

They're looking for the best of the best. Yes, they're going for students with these internships, and it is probably understood that students won't have the most experience in the world, but they'll still choose the students who have the most of it. It's also not a stretch to think that they'll also choose the demo reels with student-produced material over the demo reels with class projects.

Now, as with most things, it really does boil down to one fact - it's my fault that I don't have any proof of my editing skills. I didn't work on anything, I didn't go out and search down independent productions that needed an editor. I realize this. However, I don't think my school exactly helped, either. Most film schools will have you in a fairly set track of classes in your field, and will pretty much force you into doing short films and major student-run projects. I did not go to a film school, I was in the video production program of a computer school, where the classes were scattered, and the only student projects going on were those made by cliques of people who had known each other since freshman year. I didn't become friends with any of my classmates freshman year, really, and whenever I've approached people about editing for them the answer has always been "we've already got a guy we know doing that," so school hasn't helped me get much experience, either.

Again, I realize it's still mostly my fault, but when I have quite sizable student loans to pay off in the coming years for a program that I feel has been 95% an utterly useless waste of my time when I could have gone to a real film school and likely wound up with plenty of demo reel material, it's hard to not be a little bit irked. The most frequent thing people throw at me is "you should have looked for outside-out-school jobs," and I know I probably should have... but really, how many productions do you think would have hired a film student who has no real experience to speak of, and how many other undergrads in DC or any other program have you seen going and doing outside jobs instead of focusing on the school ones?

I have pretty much one year left until the realistic Pixar window closes (and even the realistic Pixar window is rather unrealistic). This coming summer will be the last shot I'll get at an internship. As of right now, I have a roughly 0% chance of getting in, but I'm real fucking stubborn and I really, really, want to wind up there, so what I need to do now is figure out what I do with this last year. Or, rather, how I get a demo reel together.

I need to find out whether or not they prefer fully student-run productions or not. I'm fairly sure I could call up Lou and maybe get some stuff from him to edit in my free time, more Helter Skelter stuff or an episode of Ghost Whisperer or something. Something like that is what I'd like to do the most, but even if it is approved by the respective studios as something I can show off, I don't know if it's something Pixar would even really look at and think much of.

I could try to cram in an Animation minor if I stick around for this whole year, and while I actually wouldn't mind doing that, I don't know if it would really help me at all on a practical level. Another option that keeps lingering in my head is something with sound work. I kind of liked doing Alex's thing and I think it is something I could be surprisingly okay at if I work at it some more. To me, that actually seems like the most realistic option and the one that would look the best - either sharpen my skills and re-tackle Track and Failed, sexing it up with a more polished soundtrack and sending the short into Pixar for a sound internship, or doing the same for another project (if I can find one). However I don't know if they even had a sound internship last summer or any other time.

I need to talk to Dave, Lou and Vanessa about all this, see what they have to say. I think that last option would be my best shot at it, but even if they have a sound internship pop up and the second run at the soundtrack is great, I don't know if sound is really what I want to do, you know? I would mop floors at Pixar if given the oppurtunity, but I think for their internships they want people who actually want to do that specific thing, which would bring me back to editing, and how much of a bitch it'd be to get a demo reel for that. Or, if I'm being honest with myself, that would bring me to being a story guy, but last summer's story internship was heavily involved with storyboarding, and I have 0 experience with that, either. Maybe I should take whatever storyboarding stuff DePaul offers?

I don't know what to do. I really have to call DVL.

you'll take the heat but you would never take the fall

2008-08-05T10:20:00.004-05:00

For those who aren't aware, it is fully my intention to (try and) write this generation's Star Wars.

No, seriously. That's kind of what I want to accomplish in life.

Whether or not it'd get made is another matter entirely, but we'll see.

Pixar, too.

Edit, 1:45pm. It is amazing how just a few hours in this place (I'm at work) can so utterly destroy any energy, creativeness or good mood that you started the day with. This job is killing me. Not having anyplace I actually like to go home to afterwards doesn't help too much.

time will turn us into statues, eventually

2008-08-05T09:47:00.002-05:00

I have this annoying tendency to come close to death in the last year or so. Spun out during a storm on 55 last year, flipped over the handlebars on my bike riding back from the train and came hilariously close to getting my head squashed by a car, etc. The trend seems to be ongoing.

There were tornado warnings last night, and while it was short-lived, there was a huge storm in the area, leaving pretty much everybody without power, flooding basements, and at one point they recorded the wind as 96mph downtown. It was at that point that I was about halfway home on 55. It was kind of drizzling, we go under a bridge, and on the other side is a freaking wall, and everybody comes screeching to a halt. The rain was coming horizontally at a thousand miles an hour, you couldn't see ten feet ahead of you, and even brake lights were hard to see if they were fifteen or more feet off. Easily the worst weather I've ever driven in.

Everybody crawls up the road at 10mph or so. After a bit it lets up some and we all go up to 40 or 50, more of the normal driving-in-the-rain procedure. Naturally the storm picks up again, worse than before, and the wind starts blowing cars around. A car zooms by on my left, gets hit by a gust of wind, and starts sliding to his right. The car in front of me, who must have not been paying attention to his surroundings, pounds on his breaks. At this point, I'm not sure how fast we were going, nor did I have a steady idea of where the road was - I was just following the line of brake lights. There was another person behind me, so I assumed that the shoulder was to my right, hit the brakes and tried to swerve into the shoulder.

At first it's okay, the ABS kicks in and I'm on what seems to be the shoulder. At about the second I realize I'm actually already off the shoulder and on the grass, a gust of wind pounds the van, turning the wheel (and my hands) violently all the way to the right, sending me further off the road. I missed a huge light pole by less than a foot. I suppose it probably wouldn't have killed me - that is assuming that the airbags in that old-ass POS van still work - but it still had me thoroughly shaken up. I waited until I could see more than five feet ahead of me before slowly crawling back to the road and getting off at the next exit to wait for the storm to die down.

So that was fun.

In other news. Soul Calibur 4. Great stuff, the best of the series. Gorgeous animation, awesome character creation, great online play. Only problem is that I don't have anybody to play with around here anymore (as in "local multiplayer" play... remember when that was just called "multiplayer?"), so I don't know how long I'll actually play it. The guys at home are more into Smash, Halo, and not really anything else, unfortunately. I guess Rich is into SC, but when we're around the others they bitch up a storm if we play for more than a few minutes.

You know what kills me? As a society, we're such consumer whores, that people have almost universally accepted the back-to-school rush as a god damn shopping season. It's a huge deal. Pens and notebooks. Does anybody else notice how ridiculous that is?

One more thing. This health nonsense has become a hilarious buzzword. I got an iced coffee w/cream and sugar (I just felt like being a girl today I guess) and a sausage/egg/cheese/croissant from Dunkin' Donuts, and on the bag, there was a big thing that said "0 TRANS FAT!!" Do people actually see that and go "oh good, I'm being healthy"? Oy.

don't sink the boat that you built to keep afloat

2008-08-01T11:48:00.002-05:00

I had this idea in my head that over summer, living at home and no longer paying rent downtown, I would be actually building up some money.

I was seemingly mistaken.

There is a long set of reasons. Being irresponsible is a part, though not as big as you'd think. Buying the PS3 at the end of the school year was a big dent, but at the time it went pretty smooth, actually. The only thing that really hurts now is a $140 day last week, seeing Foo Fighters in Indianapolis, the bulk of that money being $80 for one tank of gas to get there and back (take a minute to let that sink in, 80 freaking dollars to get to Indianapolis and back to Chicago). The bigger reasons was the money I missed out on from work being at Disney World, and then a good week and a half where I got pretty sick, both of those led to the two paychecks of the summer being rather small.

This week I fucked up and made the rookie "real world" mistake of forgetting my AT&T bill is on autopay, and winding up being -$5 or so on my account. However, it took me a day to realize, so a few small charges were made after that - a couple meals, a CD, a few bucks of gas... each of those got their own overdraft fee. Today I got paid $325, which is $100 short, since the new web clock for work sucks balls, and I won't get that $100 till next paycheck. $50 goes towards getting me back to $0. $170 (!!) goes to overdraft fees. A few bucks went to gas this morning and breakfast. So my $325 paycheck from midnight, by 10am, has turned into about... $80.

$80.

I called TCF and bitched, and they are actually crediting me back $100, which is kickass awesome, but they also said there is one more $36 overdraft fee for Panda Express that was paid last night, which is slightly annoying since I actually bought it on freaking Tuesday, but they wouldn't do anything about it, so that $100 credit will actually be $64. Better than nothing, but having my account be at $140 or so on a payday is kind of balls. The part that doesn't help is that I have one more ComEd bill to pay (how I wasn't actually billed until recently confuses me, but it sort of made sense when I talked to a person on the phone), to the amount of $180 or so, which means that $140 my account will be at when TCF gives me a bit back later today will quickly be reduced back to nothing. I won't be in the hole with the bank, but I'll owe my dad money since he's lending me a bit to cover the bill, so for all intents and purposes I'll be under $0 again. This is also a bad time since I got f'd over money-wise last week, too, when DePaul dropped the bomb that I magically owe them 4k out of nowhere (long story but it's unfortunately "justified" on their end), and I'm having to put a lot of my money towards that, too... not to mention the looming near-100k debt I have with student loans.

Things I won't be able to do for the next two weeks until the next paycheck...

Eat lunch with coworkers
See Pineapple Express or Tropic Thunder
See Flogging Molly at the Congress tomorrow night (it's $20, maybe I can beg my dad into a ticket)
Anything at all, really

~~It isn't an unusual situation for someone my age, I guess, so I can't really complain, but it's still annoying~~. Actually, I take that back. I have no ill feelings towards any people but I can't help but be a little annoyed with the world that I don't know anybody else (personally) in my age group who's in this position. I guess it's just a coincience that most people I know are more well-off than I am, but it makes it a little more annoying than it might be otherwise. I had a friend in the same situation, who is now off living in LA, and I understand where she was coming from now when she said the same thing.

if heaven and hell decide that they both are satisified

2008-07-30T15:59:00.005-05:00

I refuse to accept "blogosphere" as a real word.

Anyway.

Things have been... hellishly slow. Hellish, since work has been just that, somehow getting more and more stressful every day, and slow, because nothing has actually happened in the last couple months of my life except going to work.

The time I'm not at work isn't too hot. I have nothing against the idea of living with my family, but it is downright horrible. I sit around for the five or so hours between getting home and going to bed, pacing around the house, watching TV for a minute and remembering I hate TV, playing PS3 but inevitably getting kicked off by family members wanting to use the TV, being hounded by everybody since I've been gone for so long. I can't even sleep in the damn place, since I wake up yelling in my own bed every fucking night (I am starting to wonder if this is due to bugs being on me when I'm asleep, since that happened a few times at the apt and at home too, maybe my brain has been conditioned to freak out and assume it's bugs since it's happened for real before? Why is this in parenthesis?). The alternative is the sofa downstairs, which doesn't work because of the dogs, the new one always wants to hop up which makes it impossible to sleep. I may relocate to a cot in the hallway tonight, since I can't deal with another night of little-to-no sleep.

Living with friends was better. Even if there was nothing going on, you were still essentially hanging out with friends, but permanently (though that feeling is based entirely on whether or not you learn to hate your friends upon moving in, which for the most part wasn't a problem, thankfully). I already didn't like living at home, but those four years away from that made all the things I hated about it even more apparent than they already were, so it's rather hard to come back to it again.

There is a video I'm doing for DePaul that I'm in the planning stages with, an introductory video for the (unfortunately named) Genius Squad, that would be shown to students and whatnot, and while it's cool that it's an "officialy" thing and could go on a resume, it's hard to necessarily enjoy, because it's really just work thrown onto the huge pile of work I already have. I've accomplished hardly anything else creative lately. That's not to say that I have nothing on my mind, though.

I have countless ideas in my head for things I want to do with both my little free time and my life. I've been thinking about my script from class a lot, and I've started writing down a story that's been brewing in my head since the third grade. I have a fairly solid idea for a short / music video I'd like to do, but I don't really have the means or the manpower to make it and have it be halfway decent. There are at least three ideas I have for animations, but I don't know if I will ever follow through with them, simply because I LOATHE the idea of spending a ton of time on an animation, only to get to spend a few days straight scanning them into a computer... you could call it a self-fulfilling prophecy, I suppose, but I know I don't have the patience for it. I've written a few movie reviews, though I doubt I'll ever post them anywhere. I have an idea for a comic I've been sitting on for years but I still lack the artistic anything to make it. There is something I've written a bit of that turned into a short story of sorts that I could probably run with.

I have tons of stuff swirling in my head at any given time. Almost nothing successfully gets down onto paper, though, because of work. Every time I wake up, ready to tackle the day and saying to myself "Today is the day I write at work all day," it is quickly smashed down by the increasing stress and workload that comes with my (three) IS jobs. I have a mounting student loan debt that I'll get to start paying soon enough, and I can't really get away with not working all the freaking time. The bulk of my now-graduated friends (I hadn't realized just how many there were to be honest) aren't working right now and are currently looking for their actual career jobs, spending the bulk of their time chilling / winding down from that college thing, and I get the feeling that in their position it's a little easier to stretch your arms out and flex those creative muscles. I envy them.

In the hardest of times, I've tended to have movie releases as my major checkpoints in time. If I'm currently looking forward to Big Movie, there is at least something at the end of the tunnel, some sense of the future. Without anything to look forward to, the day-to-day grind of life can start to seem hopeless and ultimately pointless, not building towards anything. That's the rut I've fallen into this summer. I go to work, hate it, go home for the night, hate it, try to sleep, can't, go to work... that pretty much sums up my existence as of late, and it's real hard to keep my eye on the ball, to focus on creative things and to try to map out the road to Pixar, when the day-to-day reality of your situation is something that could take the wind out of even something that is... really good at, uh, holding wind. Sail is too cliche.

If this were a movie, this is the point where our young hero would run away from home, going someplace new and immersing himself in it, leaving his past entirely behind him. It's a thought that is occurring to me more and more. I hate to be all LiveJournal-like, but I really can't take this anymore. Having your entire life being split two things, work and home, and hating both of them to the point where you feel slightly ill most of the time, is the kind of thing that is hard on a guy.

I'll see if I can get some cheery crap on here someday (for the three of you potentially reading this).

Update, 5:17pm. Checked my timesheet for the last pay period (the two weeks prior to this one) out of curiosity, since we now have to manually clock in and out, and noticed that it is VASTLY underpaying me for last week, and somehow for two weeks ago, too, even though this system was only put into motion last week... wtf. Also, I forgot my Zune at the desk, which is why I'm back here posting again, and will be why I'm missing the 5:40 train >_<

attack the weak point for massive damage

2008-07-14T15:15:00.002-05:00

The Microsoft E3 conference was a joke. Multiplatform games, sequels we don't care about, casual shit nobody cares about, and lots and lots of unnecessary bloom. Me and my boss were having a good laugh at it.

And then the megaton.

Final Fantasy is no longer a Sony exclusive.

This spells, well, doom for the PS3. See, FF was Sony's "flagship" exclusive series, if you will. Why did a lot of people go PS1? FFVII. Why did lots of people go PS2? FFX. Now there is one less reason to get the PS3 over the 360, and with this being such a huge title to do so, it's not hard to think that the rest of their exclusives will follow suit. However, there aren't really any exclusives anymore to follow suit... the only real big one is MGS4, but that's already done it's thing, and it's a known fact that it's more of a niche game and won't have the impact of Final "freaking" Fantasy XIII.

When I got the PS3, I had come to terms with the fact that the 360 was the superior multimedia device. The PS3 has Blu-Ray, sure, but the 360 has better media stream/playing abilities as far as files from the PC go, and it has a HUGE library of TV shows and movies, most in 1080p, to watch/rent on-demand. The online multiplayer, while subscription based, is also VASTLY superior on the 360, but I was okay with that, I have my PC for good multiplayer. As far as games go, I thought, they'll both be the same, except the PS3 has MGS4, and the 360 has a bunch of games that'll also come out on PC.

That is the part that is troubling. Now that Final Fantasy is gone, I don't think the PS3 will be able to catch up to the 360 in sales. For the most part, you would think that this wouldn't make a difference, since at least 90% of big games nowadays are multiplatform. The hitch is that nagging tendency for the PS3 version of a multiplatform game to be the inferior one, whether it be due to bugs, poor programming, being optimised for 360 and shoddily ported to PS3, bad online play... the list goes on. The FF thing troubles me, because if there are now even fewer reasons for people to go PS3, and the 360 will get a lot of newcomers now thanks to FF, why bother making the PS3 versions of multiplatform games stack up?

Sony is in a heap of trouble. In my mind, their last hope is to whip out something that has turned into a lost remnant of a past age... the possible trump card, known as the Original IP.

I don't know if it's likely, but a bit of me wants to hope that at their conference tomorrow, Sony will surprise us with an original IP, a killer-app that isn't a sequel.

A guy can hope, right?

jigsaw falling into place

2008-07-14T00:21:00.002-05:00

There is an amazing difference in the state of Pete now versus just a month ago.

I don't want to turn this into a LiveJournal, but things have sort of come to a screeching halt lately. I've been back at home for a few weeks now, and still all I have unpacked is my clothes and the PS3 (or "the essentials," as many have rightly joked). I can't bring myself to unpack anything else. There are some practical reasons for this; my room is a mess, full of old stuff I don't care about but also don't want to throw out, and the basement is still only half-finished, the odd pile of lumber still laying around with boxes of stuff that should probably be thrown out.

The actual reasons for not having unpacked are more troubling. Part of it is because there's noplace I really want to put my stuff. I don't want the PC in the room, I don't want the PS3 and stuff to be on one floor, my PC on another in the basement or something, and my bed and clothes elsewhere - I guess this is the nature of living in a two-floor-plus-basement house, but after living in single-floor setups for years, it's kind of annoying. Bigger is the fact that I just don't like this place. I hate my room, the basement is big and cavernous and weird (and still not finished), and the first floor doesn't really have space for anything but my PS3 and DVDs, which I never even get to use since the TV is always in use during the evenings (after my parents go to bed I can use them but the volume has to be painfully quiet).

Maybe I just don't want to accept the fact that I once again live here. I don't have a problem living with my family, really, but this place, I hate it, it makes me uncomfortable. I liked going back downtown for a while, but my job has become so entirely stressful (my three jobs to be more specific) that the area I had grown so attached to is getting on my nerves, too, and I'm somewhere in the middle without anyplace I can feel comfortable in. It's not a good place to be.

I spent all of today in a cycle of sitting around, playing video games I have no interest in playing, going downstairs and trying to figure out how to set up stuff in the basement, seeing how it won't work out right now for various reasons, then remembering the reasons I didn't want my stuff in the basement in the first place, getting fidgety and depressed, going outside and doing a lap or two, wash, rince, cliche. For the whole goddamn day.

It would have been a bitch to live real far up or down on the red line, but I should have just found an apartment, or asked if one of the guys out here wanted to move in. In hindsight, that actually would have been a real good idea. Too late now.

"The guy said I shouldn't take Japanese till senior year."

2008-07-11T10:33:00.003-05:00

One of the funny little things about Union Station I'll miss when I'm gone is the McDonald's. There isn't really a line, it's more a mass of people trying to either get to a cashier or fight their way back to the front to grab their food. The thing that makes it awesome is the fact that the cashiers literally yell "Hi may I help you?" over and over, waiting for somebody to come to them. It's like the seagulls in Finding Nemo. Once in a while two cashiers overlap each other so you get this strange stereo effect which is downright eerie.

I drove today, though, so I'm not sure why I bring that up.

They're doing advising sessions for incoming freshman in the two labs in front of me. The downside is that the profs in there come to me expecting me to alleviate them of all their computer issues, but I occasionally get into a good conversation with some of the freshmen when they're waiting around for their name to be called.

It's a strange feeling, being around for that. Four years ago I was in the same place, except I was shoved in to LA&S advising when I quite obviously was supposed to be at CTI. They went with it, though, and tried to wedge me into the history department. Right now there are pissed off students walking out, complaining about how their randomly assigned advisor either didn't know anything, or told them to not take a language their first year, or other ridiculous bullshit. It's nice to see that DePaul hasn't changed. They have a legacy of service to keep carrying down through the years.

trying to pull myself away

2008-07-08T15:43:00.010-05:00

I'm working at the depot Tu-Th, the "Genius Squad" desk W-F, and now lab tech on M, so I'm officially DePaul LPC IS's bitch. Not too thrilled, but money is money. Hopefully I can find less stressful money in the near future.

At work (depot) we come across many an old machine. The second I see a 4 or 5 year old Gateway, I shudder, since it usually is a big road sign saying "hours of waiting ahead." However, it's nice when once in a while you come across an ancient PC that boots fast and runs like a charm. When you deal with so much old shit on a daily basis, finding one that has been well-maintained is quite a treat.

After this nice PC I had earlier, though, we went right into three horrifically slow ones. You can tell the worst of the worst before even touching the mouse. The keyboard has an incredible amount of god-knows-what all over it. There's a desktop icon for Netscape Navigator. The resolution is 800x600 or lower. Best of all, there's the ancient ball mouse, which will inevitably add another ten minutes of fiddling around with the damn thing until you can click what you need to.

See those black things on the keyboard? They were all excessively sticky. The four or five times I had to hit "P" I wanted to puke.

One guy had an old HP box on a shelf. Looking at it, I thought of something somewhat random. You know how they always have people just kind of smiling on the boxes? How exactly do they get that job?

"You should buy this printer. Trust me. I'm wearing a lab coat."

Does somebody at HP walk up to them and go "Hey, you know what, you'd look good on a box"? For that matter, wouldn't that be slightly disheartening? You've never been approached to be a model or to be in a movie or anything, but oh man, you're perfect for this cardboard box.

You're so hot you'll be on the French side.

define "dancing"

2008-07-02T09:44:00.004-05:00

God damn, I love Wall-E. Might edit a review into this later on.

2008-07-01T14:15:00.004-05:00

last holiday

if the world ended tomorrow

i'd want to go see you right away

be by my side and smile one more time

from the time we met

my heart has always, always been in pain

what do you call this unfamiliar feeling?

the night sky burns red

at the distorted horizon,

i want to quietly sing

my first and final melody for you alone

i stand in this crumbling landscape

that i've become used to

and wave my hand at a slow motion bird

the stars are all falling

and the moon is swallowed by darkness

it'll be over soon

i guess i'll sing quietly

while being blown by the black wind

if the world ended today

who would you want to see?

i'm waiting at the horizon

if the world ended today, who would you want to see?

2008-06-28T19:08:00.002-05:00

Quick one, more of a note to myself to write when I actually get the chance.

The new pillows album kicks more ass than their other 2000s albums, but still doesn't come close to their late-90s period. Also, following a band sucks, because the past year of listening to the singles, b-sides and watching PVs on YouTube meant that by time I got the CD in my hands today I had already heard 6 of the 11 songs. A few of those new 5 fucking rock, though.

Wall-E is so good it's unfair to other filmmakers. Coming out of Ratatouille, I was f'n estatic, and my cheeks hurt from having laughed so much, but I had a couple nagging issues with it, being the "I am now describing what you are either seeing or are too stupid to figure out yourself" narration that hurt a couple comedic and poignant moments, and the truly cringe-inducing exchange between Remy and Brian Dennehy which unfortunately was a major turning point in the movie's plot. When I really love the hell out of a movie, I usually don't notice things that irk me until the second or third viewing - and I love the hell out of Ratatouille - but those couple things stood out loud and clear when they were surrounded by such staggering quality in every other aspect of the production. Coming out of Wall-E, there was not a single iota of remote criticism in my head. I saw it a second time, and still nothing. I was thinking about it earlier today and there really isn't a single thing I have a problem with in the movie. I think I described Ratatouille as tantalizingly close to perfection, a slam-dunk that makes a little scuff on it's way in, and in that sense Wall-E is a nothing-but-net swish of a slam-fucking-dunkaroo. Ratatouille was the funnier of the two by a pretty good margin (and now stands as my second-favorite animated movie so I obviously still love it), but Wall-E tugged on my heart-strings more than Enchanted and moved me more than Stranger Than Fiction. Pixar has really moved beyond the point where their films are judged as animated movies, they are simply films now and should be judged as such, and I'll personally kick anybody who doesn't agree with me on that one.

I need to get NBA Jam for MAME.

And some Dunkaroos.

2008-06-24T23:11:00.006-05:00

Every year the castle gets a little bit shorter.

I've been to Disney World many times now. It has it's ups and downs. This year, I would have much rather been at home, spending one of my last weeks at the apartment (and one of the last weeks of life as I know it) at, well, the apartment, so needless to say I wasn't quite happy about being here in the first place. I'm not sure how much that has to do with my experience these last few days, but I suppose it's wise to put that out there.

Things seem to be slowly getting frayed about the edges at Disney World. The mini-golf courses, previously pristine, now have visible lines at the edges of the turf, and some of the bigger contraptions are down for the count. The workers here seem to get a little less nice every year, more of them have blank expressions, and not nearly as many are "playing the part" at their specific ride (when I go to Haunted Mansion, I want the hotel person to be dark and creepy, and if female, with a pinch of goth, cause that can just be really hot).

The rides themselves have a fair share of problems. Some of them just get old on you. The Rock 'n Roller Coaster Featuring Aerosuck, one of the most recent attractions at ~~Disney-MGM Studios~~ Disney's Hollywood Studios, about half as long as your average Six Flags coaster, is starting to get rattle-y and the one loop and one corkscrew have become routine. The Great Movie Ride has fewer and fewer good hosts, and the animatronic attractions always seem to gradually lose their charm the farther you get away from that sense of wonder you had as a kid.

Pirates of the Caribbean... that one is hard to even talk about. The last time I was there, two years ago, it was closed for the movie revamping it was getting. Previous to that year, I would ride Pirates no less than three times every time I stepped foot in the Magic Kingdom. If someone were to ask me to attach my early childhood to one single physical thing, it would be that ride. It never got old, it only got better each passing year. I told myself I wasn't going to ride it, now that it's been bastardized, but I honestly couldn't help but walk in those old gates the second I rounded the corner after the entrance to Adventureland. The line part was the same, which made me happy (if the line is fast, I always hang back by the prison "pit," just to see the way kids react when they look down and notice the two skeletons were playing chess, and I get the biggest grin when they notice the game was a stalemate), but when we got to the ride, things went downhill. There was an admittedly cool effect with a face projected onto a column of falling fog, but having Davy Jones talk to me at the beginning of the ride, and the formerly creepy music now replaced with "yay pirates are so happy and awesome" music, the lack of the "dead men tell no tales" skull, the whole ride being about Jones searching for Sparrow (who pops up in every damn scene) and Sparrow searching for treasure... it saddens me quite a bit. I realize that Disney World exists to make money, but this ride was something special, something untouched, something original. If it had come after the movie I'd be perfectly happy with it, but I wish they hadn't gone back and changed the original ride to be an overblown advertisment.

That's another thing - not that you know what I'm speaking of because I didn't directly mention it, but screw it - every year the people in the parks get more and more obnoxious. There were four people on the ride taking flash photos. One of those situations where they specifically tell you not to do so, but that one guy is doing it, so hey he started it I'll just jump in and take some myself. If a ride had an intro, I hardly heard any of them this year because everybody seemed eager to talk back, laugh at their own conversations, and occasionally intentionally ruin the experience for others. The people walking towards me get fatter, and less likely to get out of my path and in fact more likely to walk directly into my path (I guess with that much weight it might be hard to slow themselves so maybe I'll halfheartedly give them the benifit of the doubt). I've had a lot of stuff to bitch about here. It is hard to see something you were so attached to as a kid turn into something that is so damn annoying as you grow older and as society grows more crass and rude.

However.

Through all of that stuff that bothers me fairly constantly through any given day I've been here... things somehow manage to balance themselves out. We had dinner (well, lunch, but when we reserved a table two months ago 1:15pm was all they had) at the nice restaraunt at Japan pavilion in Epcot, and it was the best meal I've ever eaten - great Japanese steak, chicken, other stuff, a few Kirin Ichibans with Dad, awesome sushi... good stuff. At the Magic Kingdom a few days ago, walking up to Splash Mountain, we ran into a British couple who offered us their Fastpasses since they had to leave early, and we got to bypass a huge 1 1/2 hour line in favor of a two minute line.

In line for Space Mountain, the ride broke down, but we decided to sit around and wait it out. There is something about the line for that ride that is brilliantly designed and reaches deep down into my childhood, but I could have waited in that line for three damn hours. I could grab a pillow and just find a corner to curl up into for a day in that line. Star Tours never ceases to be awesome, and makes me pine for the days when practical effects were favored over the computer generated soulless bullshit we're flooded with today. The Tower of Terror is just plain awesome, nothing much to say about that one.

There were two things in particular that got to me about this trip. I'm a bigger Pixar nerd than people actually realize (you could describe Wall-E as my "Star Wars" which is why I'm quite irked I'm missing out on all these advance screenings people back at the apartment found their way in to), and when I saw that there was a Pixar Studios section in Disney/MGM, I geeked the hell out. The line for the Toy Story Midway Mania ride was too long the first day me and Kari were there (three hours), but my Dad and I got there early today to grab Fastpasses, and we went back this afternoon to check it out. I wasn't expecting much going in, since it's described as an arcade type thing. My interested was slightly piqued when I saw we had to take 3D glasses from a bucket at the end of the line, and even more so when I saw that the thing we sat in was a two-car, eight-person cog contraption that spun and whirled around.

I wouldn't dare describe the ride, but I was completely blown away. My Dad and I had the biggest damn smiles on our faces, laughing, and as the cars turned a corner we'd share joyful laughs with the people spinning after us in the next car. It is what made me love this place as a kid, the wonder of something new, something stupid and simple but wonderful and visceral and fun. Pure joy. I stepped out of the car and immediately looked at the girls getting out of the car behind us, and we didn't have to even share a single word because the huge stupid smiles on our faces pretty much spoke for us ("Dude! That was so awesome!" "Oh my god, I know! I want to go again!"), and I walked out with a grin I couldn't get off my face for a good ten minutes.

The other thing is something a lot smaller. The night me and Kari were at Magic Kingdom, we got out of Space Mountain just as the 10pm fireworks show was starting. I have a specific place I like to watch them from - right behind Cinderella's Castle, it isn't the "intended" view but it's right in the middle so the fireworks go off around you like a full-scale assault - and I didn't want to miss out on it like I did the last year I was here, so as the music started playing throughout the park on the speakers, we start running through the crowds, trying to make it to the usual place. It is something I wish I had the writing chops to describe, but I don't, so all I can really say is that running through the park, the lights dimmed down and everybody lit by the dark blue sidewalk lights, the sky lighting up with fireworks, shadows flickering briefly and disappearing, dodging crowds of people all looking up at the sky, the fireworks getting more rapid and the music starting to blare... I kind of wish I had a camera on me or something. It was one of those dumb little moments that was absolutely perfect in every imaginable way.

As they always do, the fireworks stop, the lights come back up, and the park returns to normal. There is a crazy rush to get to the exit, people are shoving, families are screaming at each other, people are throwing trash everywhere, employees get stressed out trying to herd massive groups of sheep out a couple little gates. But every night, if only for five or ten minutes, people stop shoving and fighting and yelling.

All at once, tens of thousands of people simply look up at the sky, maybe even with a tiny spark of that childhood wonder left in those cynical aged eyes. Call me sappy or nostalgic, but that's what life is about, isn't it?

and raise what's left of the flag for me

2008-06-24T22:55:00.002-05:00

A 40gb hard drive is now a "feature" in a car? It was a feature of my jeans, oh, six years ago. If you're paying 20k for a car I'd hope they'd at least splurge for an 80gb drive.

and the auld triangle, went jingle jangle, along the banks of the royal canal

2008-06-19T03:37:00.004-05:00

I just got back from what was almost definitely the best concert I've ever been to. It was brilliant beyond words, I don't know if I've ever seen such sheer emotion in a performance (plus Obama was there and the singer mentioned Freaks and Geeks, total geek-out moment for Pete). The show got me thinking about a few things.

This is the end of the "chapter" of life that has been the last four years. I will still be in school for a bit, but as far as people go, it's over, and even the school bit is over - it's just classes now, I don't know if I can consider it college anymore now that I'll be driving or training into the city for class and work, while living at home with the family. I've been thinking a lot about this. One day I'm bummed out about the shift in life and the fact that I'm losing nearly all the remainder of my friends. The next day I'm not too torn up, since I've been losing a steady stream of friends over the last year or two anyway, and this isn't much of a change from the usual flow of things. Some days, I don't know if I actually care at all.

See, I have this funny tendency to disappear. I have my three old school friends at home from grade school, and they're the only ones I kept in touch with. When I say that, I don't mean that I don't talk to the others much, I mean that I have quite literally not seen them once since graduation. I ran into one a year ago, it turned out he lived in the same dorm at my school, and his first reaction was "Where have you been? We all thought you moved away!" I also didn't keep any friends from high school. I've seen a couple guys a handful of times over the last four years, but no more than two or three times.

It might be my way of grappling with loss, just leaving it behind without another thought. It might just be the way I am, since I'm kind of a loner, and I've never really gone out of my way to become attached to people, it just sort of happens with a few of them. Sometimes I really do wonder if I care at all. Leaving grade school and high school had me torn up for a day or two, but I got over it so fast that I felt guilty about it. I don't know what is going to happen this time. A couple friends who moved away last year, people I was sure I would keep in touch with, I have entirely fallen out of contact with, and one of my better friends who left earlier this year I rarely speak to.

A friend one told me that we really just make friends out of necessity to have people close to us, people to interact with, and when we move to another area, for example, they are no longer necessary, since they're over there and we need friends over here. It's a somewhat sterile and heartless way to look at it, but it really is kind of true. People serve their purpose in your life, and someday their purpose is complete. You might wind up with a few people who stick around, but even a few of those is better than what most people have. I would like to think I know people here who I'll keep in touch with, but we're all going to different ends of the country and possibly the globe, and that sort of makes it harder to keep it going than with my friends from home who never even moved away after high school.

The question I sometimes come to is whether or not I have served much of a purpose in other people's lives. It's always a bit of a fear I have had, that everybody else will leave me, that I don't actually impact anybody else. I try my best to not dwell on this one.

One of the songs tonight was about not leaving with sadness or bitterness, but instead leaving with happiness. I guess that is what I try to do. I'm grateful for the times I've had with these people, and I guess I try to not let the fact that I will most likely grow apart from them bother me too much. There was a girl I thought I felt things for a few times over the last few years, and I know I certainly left that with happiness. It sucked up a lot of my time, but I grew and learned a lot about myself. There was another girl I did have feelings for, and I kind of sabotaged it, and I've tried my best to leave that with happiness, too (though most everybody in my life has always been sure to give me endless shit, insults and backhanded passive-aggressive comments on it, which is one of the things I can't say I'll miss).

Freshman year I listened a lot to this album "Signs of Life" by a Finnish band Poets of the Fall. I would listen to it all night, alone in my room, laying on the floor with my old stereo sitting next to me, and it would loop over and over as I slept. It is one of those albums that doesn't just make me nostalgic, but instantly puts me into a mood that I was in while listening to it a few years ago, and it is so strong I can hardly make it through a song without feeling uncomfortable. It is probably the biggest physical tie I have to my freshman year and the experiences I had. They had another album sophomore year I didn't listen to much, but their third just came out, and it has sort of been the soundtrack to the end of this chapter, and that is fitting to me. Things haven't come full circle, but they've gone somewhere. I don't know if it's forward or not.

Where I go from here is another story entirely. Glen had a little thing he said tonight about how we sometimes hit walls in our life. They're too long to go around, too high to get over, too deep to dig under, and we have a way of spending way too much time stressing over it and futilely trying to get past it. Someday, he said, we have to turn around, and walk away from that wall, and just keep walking until one day we've walked around the entire fucking world and find ourselves on the other side. I think it's a good way to put things. I know I'd like to wind up at Pixar someday, but I'm not going to focus on that out of the gate, I'm just going to go where the wind takes me. I don't care if I wind up starting here, or LA, or San Fransisco, or Japan, or fucking Cicero. As long as I know what I really want inside, I'll find my way there eventually. The six degrees of Pete's life.

If I am one thing, it's stubborn. I'm surprisingly confident that I will wind up there someday. It's the path from here to there that will be the interesting part. I'm told that the journey is the important part of life, not the goal. But fuck that, Pixar is sweet.

dig that groovy mr. droopy

2008-06-12T15:38:00.002-05:00

Dear Children's International,

If you want me to give you money, it is best to not make me feel like you are hunting my ass down. The student center today had two people planted at each entrance, and even one more kittycorner near SAC. It might be a good idea to not piss me off with ten people asking me if I have a minute for children if you're trying to pump money from my college-sized wallet.

Love,
Pete

She can be a tad hysterical, but never quite the breakthrough

2008-06-08T13:45:00.002-05:00

Alex's animation is done, for now at least. It turned out pretty well and got a really great reception at the DC Premier 3 festival. At some point I'm going to go back and make the sound more kickass.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it is I want to do. While I had done a good deal of planning, the sound was essentially done for this animation in a week, and I had a lot of fun with it. Hearing the sound for the other projects at Premier often made me cringe, and I kind of wanted to take their movies and make the sound better. At the same time, though, editing is still sort of my thing. But I have a ton of ideas for composition, too. And animation keeps tugging at me.

That is the point I'm at for summer, deciding what I want my summer project to be. I could write and start the planning stages of doing a short, and maybe even start, but I only know a couple people in the area who would be willing to help, I know no actor-types and wouldn't want to have to actually pay somebody (unless I wind up with a badass script I guess). It isn't very practical seeing how I didn't get into one of these DC cliques back when I started here.

I do want to do an animation. It's more practical, and honestly it's the option I want to do more. However... I'm not sure if there is much of a point to it. I would like to be involved in animation one day, but I don't see how making a shitty little hand-drawn thing could help me out much with that. While it's a summer project, I want it to be something that I can actually use for job type stuff. I guess if it's real kickass it could be used for that, but I'd have to nail it on the composition, editing, sound, and, you know, animation fronts. That last one is the real kicker. This will be the second hand-drawn animation I've done ever, and I simply can't draw. I like to think I could animate well, but I know I can't draw.

Is there a point of trying to make a hand-drawn animation if I can't draw well?

I guess I have some thinking to do.

why am i awake

2008-06-01T02:25:00.001-05:00

dongs

Dark Desires at the Edge of Night

2008-05-31T10:20:00.002-05:00

That was seriously the title of some dumbass romance novel in Barnes and Noble upstairs. I really don't see why people read stuff like this. I guess it isn't much different than guys and porno mags.

Two things on this humid Chicago morning. One, I hate all these dumbass Cottonelle or whoever it is toilet paper ads around the CTA. You wiping your ass is something to be kept between you and your deity of choice. And really, I don't give a shit what kind of paper I use, as long as it, you know, does it's job. Cute puppies don't attract me to unnecessarily soft toilet paper.

Two, I don't know why the DC program would stock their $6million lab with chairs that are essentially permanently reclined. If I'm sitting down to do work, I don't want to be reclined. It's so reclined that my ass starts to slide off the front of the seat so my body is adjusting by pushing back up, which starts to get damn uncomfortable after a few minutes because I have to actually work to stay sitting, which seems to defeat the purpose of sitting.

I hate the ending myself, but it started with an alright scene...

2008-05-27T15:36:00.003-05:00

Back at it again, it would seem. Somebody at the Fullerton station earlier recognized me and said "Hey, you're the computer guy, right?" I figured my first glimpse at celebrity status among the DePaulians would be worth a return to the dark world of the Bloggosphere. It actually isn't the first time somebody has recognized me, I've received countless nods and "hey I know you" looks from people over the last few months, but this was the first person to actually acknowledge it.

Things have been kind of rough lately. I'm actually doing alright with keeping up with planning and gradually working through the sound for Alex's animation, but my own capstone is so hilariously behind schedule it's amazing. There is no reason for this, neither Alex's project nor my other class are too overloaded to allow time for my own project, I just never seem to get around to it. This is mostly due to my own apathy and the fact that my lazy tendencies get reinforced further and further every quarter due to a number of school and non-school factors, but I've genuinely had too much to deal with on my mind lately, too. School in general is getting impossible to deal with, since I have come to view my program as entirely worthless, outside of a few classes with Dave and Lou, maybe one with Gary and two good gen-ed classes. The remaining classes I have to take are all going-through-the-motions bullshit kind of classes and I simply don't have the humor for them anymore.

My general number of friends has been gradually going down since sophomore year, and it's gotten to the point where I have maybe... seven or eight people I can call friends. I don't mean good, close friends, I mean friends in total (obviously not counting acquaintances and people I casually say "hello" to). Many of this small number I've been either losing touch with or just growing apart. A combination of occasional (by occasional I mean frequent) twangs of loneliness and my apparent inability to let go of some things has been bringing me down constantly as of late. There's a new dog at home, which I am not cool with for a number of reasons, and while you would think it is a small detail in life, it really makes me not want to be around there anymore. It doesn't help that my mom's cancer has seemingly returned in full-force and out of left field, and while we won't know the results of the biopsy until tomorrow, the general early idea is that it's stage 4 out of 5, 1 being "lol," 5 being "you're kind of fucked."

All of this has been weighing me down when I am on the verge of a huge shift in my life. I always approached the end of college as the end to a chapter of my life, and that I would then move on to the real world. It isn't going to be working out like that, exactly, since I have one or two more quarters left to complete, possibly another full year if I choose to try to throw in a minor in journalism or something. This means that the "chapter" of being in school will continue for a little while longer, but in a completely different way, since the aspect of school where I lived on campus with friends is ending, and the last year will be spent commuting and living at home with my parents in the suburbs, since the majority of my friends are moving on in just a few weeks.

This is tough for a few reasons. First off there is the nagging knowledge that my friends are leaving and I may well never see some of them again, which is a fear I would have dealt with had things gone the way I had wanted them to. However I also now have to deal with the fact that when they are gone and in the real world, I will linger here, at this school and in this program I hate, without most of my friends to fall back on anymore when things get too hard to deal with (and lately, while I do not make a point of it, it has been something I have needed quite often).

Finally, I just don't think I can deal with living at home anymore. I have become attached to this city and the state of living here, and every time I go back to the suburbs, I feel something that can only be described as hatred for it. It's spread out, artificially laid-back, the buildings don't get higher than two stories, there is nothing around and nothing to do within walking distance of my house, there is no sound outside other than the wind. Maybe I'd dig this if I was three times my current age, but I'm 21 and this shit is not cool. The lack of my current friends only amplifies this feeling. I have a few old friends in the area, and while I truly and honestly consider these people to be my brothers, having my entire world be them, no longer having different groups and places to go to, is something that I am not going to mesh with very well. There are still going to be a few people I know at school, but I just won't get to see them much, since I'll be a commuter and I'll be constrained by train times and traffic and et cetera.

To be honest, I also just don't want to live with my family. Things have been rough for all of them lately, especially my mom and sister, and while it will probably do them good to have me around all the time again... I just don't want to be around it all the time. I'm the kind of person who needs to be around positive stuff, and while they're not going crazy and fighting all the time or anything, there is definitely an undertone of depression, cancer and general uneasiness I feel every time I am there. Even the one thing that has gone unchanged through the years, our dog Chance, has changed, now that there's a new young (and related, believe it or not) beagle in the house, and my old friend just doesn't act the same anymore now that his territory has been intruded upon by a new younger dog. I love my family, I just hate being at that house, being surrounded by all these things that make me feel all manner of... things I would rather not feel where I live.

There isn't much else going on, really. My entire world as of now is projects and class, this looming shift in life, and that's it, really. I hope the couple weeks of summer where people are still around will be enjoyable, but I'm already going to be missing half of that time since I'm going to Disney World with my family this summer... I almost want to call it off and just be around here for a few more days. I won't even be on summer vacation, come to think of it, since I'm going to be in a summer class and I'll be working, so the 9-5 grind will continue every day except my two-week break at the end of summer. I'm not entirely sure how I am going to survive without my friends around to be honest.

I filled out an Obama for America survey recently that they sent out to those who have donated. I am not 100% sure if I will go through with it, but I actually volunteered to travel to another state for a few days to help with campaigning. I thought it might be a nice temporary break from life and a slight change of pace. I'm gradually becoming aware of this bigger world around me and I have a growing urge to be a part of it.

kizudarake no sukoshi yuganda SANGARASU wo kakete

2008-05-13T17:34:00.003-05:00

It still amazes me just how stupid people are. In the last few weeks, the springs in our staplers have been broken, so you have to hold them open yourselves. This takes people long enough to figure out. However, as we draw nearer and nearer to the end of the quarter, people start to print out big long papers. The staplers can still handle them most of the time, but occasionally they'll get a little stuck. They still staple through just fine, but they kind of hang on to the paper until you tug a little bit.

Do people try to simply remove their paper? No - they slam down on the stapler, again and again, thinking "well if I jam the hell out of the staple on my paper and get another one or five jammed in the stapler itself it must start working," or more likely it just makes them feel better about themselves.

It's real hard to get anything creative done at work. I've found that in order to be in a good "mood" for creative stuff on any given day, I have to start out with a good deal of sun or air or something. Being in the middle of the city this isn't the easiest thing. Sometimes I go downtown and walk through Millenium park and chill at the lake for a little bit, which always seems to get me going pretty good, but it's not something that time allows very often. It's damn near impossible to get anything done sitting in this lab with no windows, burning under the florescent lighting, and a few hours in here will put you in a funky mood for the rest of the day.

This job kind of sucks.

The life and times of a Digital Cinema student

2008-05-05T17:22:00.005-05:00

I've been thinking to myself a lot lately, "Man, Pete, you're in the wrong program." Looking at monitor-tanned nerds toiling away in the animation lab, and then looking at the suit-jacket wearing film guys talking about their next production in the DC cage, I really feel like I belong more in the former than the latter. I love animation and I kind of want to wind up in it someday.

But on the other hand, I had to quickly edit together my horrible DC 105 project this morning (thanks to the DC program I couldn't do it yesterday, I'll bitch about that in a sec), and doing so really made me remember how much I enjoy editing - sitting down with a lot of footage, pushing through the boring-ass process of labeling each scene... and then getting down into it, looking at your script, deciding what goes where and what shots to use and string together, tweaking your cuts so they're perfect. It's fun stuff. I just don't know if I will enjoy it if I have to start out in something I don't care about like commercials. I hope over the next year I can get at least some editing under my belt, because if Pixar has another film editing internship next summer, I fully intend to ~~kill as many people as I need to~~ get it.

So maybe I really do belong in film after all... but I'm definitely in the wrong program for it. I went to the LPC student center to edit this project at... 6:30 last night. I get there, and of the maybe 16 or so Macs, about half are crappy last-gen iMacs that don't even have AGP video cards, meaning Final Cut Pro will simply not work on it. Of the newer (and by "newer" I mean 2004) Macs, half give you fatal runtime errors when you try to open Final Cut. The three or four that worked, naturally, were taken. I even tried iMovie, but it didn't work with my camera anywhere. CTI and DePaul Center downtown both closed at 6.

This morning I get to the Loop at 9 to edit the stuff. I first go to the $6,000,000 DC center in the DePaul Center to use the only state-of-the-art badass Macs on campus. I get there, sit down, get set up... and Final Cut gives me errors. I move over to the next computer, sit down, get set up... and Final Cut opens! Huzzah! But it won't recognize my camera. Okay, I say, I'll suffer through i Movie. Which also still won't recognize my camera. I check the camera again, and there is clearly a USB symbol, which I shouldn't even have had to check since I was using a USB cable but I was starting to think that I was crazy. I went into the iMovie help, and it's a bit vague, but it seems to tell you that even if you have a camera with USB out, you have to use Firewire in order to have the computer talk to the camera.

At 9 in the morning there isn't anybody moderating the lab, so I go outside and into Radioshack, saying "screw it, I'll need this cable again anyway so I'll just buy one." It's $36 for a six-foot Firewire-to-mini Firewire cable. $36. I can get one online for probably $5, but that doesn't help me now. So I go to the 9th floor of CTI, sit down in the lab, and check through four computers until I find one that A) has FCP on it, B) has a DV deck, and C) has that DV deck plugged in. I finally get to sit down and edit.

It's a little bit annoying to know that I'm going to wind up dangerously close to 100k in debt to be in a program that has taught me... four courses worth of material, and can't even keep their own damn computers working after tossing 6 million into a shiny new lab. People wonder why I'm upset with the program.

To end on a completely different note, one of the regular lab people just walked by and said hi. She doesn't have midterms this quarter, and I told her that my last quarter was like that but that this quarter I'm getting my ass kicked with all the tests and projects I'm working on at once. "That's good, it's good for you!" she says with a smile.

I had kind of forgotten that myself. It's nice to get a reminder now and then.

What's a suicide attempt without a wedding?

2008-05-01T13:38:00.002-05:00

ALEX, TIM, ZACH AND I were at best buy late Monday night for the midnight release of Grand Theft Auto 4. It was a bit of a strange feeling. I've been to countless midnight movie releases, and waiting around in line until midnight is not an uncommon feeling. For many movies I would even wind up in a line so long it stretched outside, so waiting in the cold is nothing new to me, either (the line for Star Wars: Episode 3 holds the record for longest midnight-release line I've been in).

However, it's been a long time since I've gone to the midnight release of a video game. I still play a good deal of games, I suppose, but they're almost entirely PC games that I play online or portable games for PSP or DS. In other words, sort-burst games, things meant for maybe ten or twenty minutes of quick fun, but not much more than that. I am at my computer a lot, but almost all the time I'm sitting at my desk I'm either talking to people online or reading through my ever-growing list of blogs, news sites, and the occasional comic. It's been a while since I've played a console game for an extended period of time.

Recently I had a little quest to find Final Fantasy VI for the Game Boy Advance. Originally released as Final Fantasy III for SNES, it is widely considered to be the strongest in the Final Fantasy series, and one of the greatest video game stories that has been produced. I had a Sega Genesis as a kid and did not pick up a SNES until high school when I found one on eBay for cheap, so I missed out on this game when it came out. My first RPG was Chrono Cross, a 3D game on the Playstation, and I never had even spent time with a 2D RPG at all. I found a used, beat-up copy of III on eBay for cheap to go along with my beat-up SNES (the thing has character though). Even though I didn't play it as a child, when I think about it, it has that same nostalgic effect, because those 2D sprites had more life and character to them than any 3D game I've played, even by today's standards. It's position as my favorite video game has yet to be rivaled. Anyway I had an urge to play this again lately, for no real reason, and I hunted down an unopened copy of the GBA port for $40 on eBay.

I was thinking of this in line at Best Buy. It really had been a long time since I was outside a store at midnight for a video game, and it is a feeling I kind of missed. I consider myself a "gamer," and I've always kept up with the technology and the news, but it's been a while since I've actively been excited about new games like I have been in this past year. It's gotten me a handful of annoying comments, though, since people seem to insist that I should not play video games, that they're for kids, adults should not be wasting time with them. My usual comeback regards how much TV my critic watches every day and how much time they spend on the internet (one of the two usually shuts them up), but it does bother me sometimes that some people just don't understand.

It's not horribly different than that attachment to a sports team. Some people get it, some people just don't.

To be honest, I was more excited for Mario Kart Wii than I was for GTA4. Part of a new MK game always reaches back into those games I did play as a kid, sitting at my friend's SNES for hours and hours into the night. Picking up the latest incarnation brings that feeling back out, the childlike joy over something has no real substance and doesn't try to, something that is pure fun
and not meant for anything else. It's the kind of thing a lot of music and movies miss out on, there is always this drive to be big and mature and serious. Nobody seems to want to just have stupid fun anymore. I think the people walking out of Best Buy and opening Mario Kart before GTA4 understand this.

Four-track lovesong

2008-04-24T19:53:00.001-05:00

So I'm going to be filming again.

We'll see how that turns out.

Got a DVD from Amazon UK and got an email about how I could save ££s

2008-04-18T12:34:00.002-05:00

I'm very much not a fan of SNL these days, for no reason other than the lack of anything funny. However, the "SNL Digital Shorts" have been constantly funny, and a good way to pass a few minutes at work. This latest one is among the best (for me at least).

Apparently there was an earthquake in southeastern Illinois late last night, which could be felt as a slight rumble here in the part of Illinois that doesn't suck. Naturally, comments are a-flyin' on the Facebooks.

I really don't understand how people drink beer from cans.

Can you hear it calling?

2008-04-15T00:01:00.006-05:00

Ever screwed yourself over real bad? I mean bad.

Like you knew it was coming and had it in mind to make sure not to mess up, but you sort of still mess up off the bat, but it's still salvageable, and then you make a decision you think will make things even better than they would have been but it winds up taking you to a worse place than you already were, except this time it's too late to change anything or to go back to the original plan...

Ever done that? It's like shooting yourself in the foot repeatedly as you're watching a YouTube of your dog getting kicked set to loop, and the only thing you have to drink is Gatorate Fucking A.M.

I'm ready for the real world. The grind of having a job while trying to make it towards that dream/goal floating out there in the ether. I'm fine with that. I just no longer have the humor for this last quarter or two of School Bullshit I have to push through. I've learned my life lessons, I've grown as a person, I am prepared for the real world. But I'm not, actually... I still have to get a science lab, history class, stats class and an arts and lit credit in first. THEN I'll be truly prepared for the real world.

The M.D. in "Bill Murray, M.D." stands for "Mega Dick," btw.

Bill Murray, M.D.

2008-04-13T23:07:00.002-05:00

Lost in Translation is so, so very good, it might force me to buy a player for a dead format just to own it in high definition.

Seriously. I love the movie that much.

(do you remember the roar?)

2008-04-11T16:07:00.005-05:00

April 2nd. Detroit Red Wings at Chicago Blackhawks. The stands are a sea of Hawks and Wings jerseys screaming at each other. Five minutes left in the third. The puck is in play, but people have started to stream out of the United Center. It has been a sight not too uncommon for the last decade.

Hockey is a big part of my life. I haven't played competitively since midway through high school when I broke the hell out of my leg skiing, but even though I don't play, I can still notice it's effects on me. The way I think, the way I solve problems and choose to attack situations, even down to the way I make my way through a big crowd, can all be directly linked back to my years playing hockey. Socially I have a rather prominent tendency to be a loner, but being part of a team is where I feel at home.

I've been a Blackhawks fan for as long as I can remember, even before I played hockey. Like most things involving sports, it's something I got from my parents, my dad in particular, but that wasn't the only reason I was into it. My memories of childhood, especially my grade school years, are somewhat fuzzy, but I remember that after transferring in the third grade my life was generally boring, and at times horrible thanks to my well-off bully classmates. The only time I ever really felt I was okay was sitting in the Chicago Stadium (and later the United Center), surrounded by people dressed in red and black, cheering for those people skating around on the ice.

Feeling an attachment to a major sports team is something that many people simply do not understand. The comment I often hear upon a team winning whatever league is "you're not on the team, why do you care?" It's hard to explain to people like this why we feel an attachment to a team when we know few or none of the players or coaches personally. It isn't about watching the game to just pass the time, nor is going to games only an excuse to get away or to hang out with friends. It can be all of those things, but for those of us who understand, it is more than just that. Parents want their children to win their baseball games, when they often don't know anything much about the team or who is on it - how is that different than somebody wanting their favorite team to win?

Being a Blackhawks fan has always had a certain pride about it. With most professional sports leagues, there are a bunch of teams, a few of the bigger older ones that have lots of fans and recognition, rivalries... the usual stuff. With hockey, there is still a large attachment to the history of the league, namely with the steady recognition of the Original Six teams - the Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, Boston Bruins, New York Rangers, Detroit Red Wings and the Chicago Blackhawks. Even though the league is far bigger than six teams, the rivalries still exist from the 1940's, and Original Six matchups are constantly the highest-attended NHL matchups.

However, the thing that makes it a little bit different for a Blackhawks fan is the embarassing decade we have had. Since losing in the final round of the Stanley Cup playoffs in 1994 to the Pittsburg Penguins, our team has spiraled down, and in the 2000s have effectively been the laughing stock of the NHL, the only Original Six team that nobody gave a damn about. Back in the 60s, Chicago was hockey town, but now if you tune into the ten 'o clock sports, you'll be lucky to hear of the Hawks at all, and if you do, it'll be after the Cubs, Sox, Bears, Bulls, and even the Fire. It has been hard to be a Blackhawks fan, and for years, the team was lucky to have a single game that was anyhwere near close to sold out.

But there are those of us who understand. In all those years of low attendance, there was a bit of a bond between the people who did show up. We all why we were there, and we could all count on seeing each other for the rest of the season, because it was damn sure that nobody else would show up. A lot of the games were spent getting angry and booing our own team, and yet we persisted. Cubs fans can understand this a little bit, but their team is the Chicago Freaking Cubs, one of the cornerstones of the MLB, widely recognized and always popular. The Blackhawks, nobody cared about them anymore. The team came close to folding on more than a couple occasions, and if they were not an Original Six team they surely would have years ago. But we kept on going, shitty team, horrible ownership, all of it, we kept pushing through, because we knew one day we would break through all of it. Everyone there remembers how things used to be, and how important it was to each and every one of them, and I don't think anybody who stayed with the team through this horrible decade believed it would not come again.

This season marked the most important turning point this franchise has ever seen, coming back from the brink of destruction seemingly out of nowhere. The old GM, William Wurtz, died before the start of the season, and while he was a great man and truly loved what he did, he did not know how to manage a team in the modern world, and his son Rocky taking over, the new coach, hockey legend Dennis Savard taking over mid-last-season, and the hiring of Cubs president John McDonough has made a stunning difference. The biggest change was in the acquisition of the two best rookies in the NHL, Patrick Kane and Johnathan Towes. Both are 19 years old, yet they have displayed skills that have to be seen to be believed. The entire team has come together in a way few hockey teams have. The city isn't back, but the fans are, nearly every game since Christmas has been within 1000 seats of being sold out.

It's not nearly that simple. We had a horrible January this year, and that made us miss the playoffs by just a couple of points. Everybody is looking forward to next year, it will surely be better, but we're not exactly happy, either. Videos of Savvy talking on the team and their progress this year are notably somber, he seems bummed out. It gives you a weird feeling at first, but if you think about it, it's great that we're not happily looking forward to next season. We're still all pissed off that we're not in the playoffs now, because we should be. The last two months have been the best hockey Chicago has played since 1994, in my humble opinion. We're not happy with this. To be feeling that now, when last year we were as horrible as ever, is a huge deal. It is rare to see things start back in the right direction anywhere near this quick.

I think the last game at the Chicago Stadium was in the April of 1993. It is a tradition at Blackhawks games to clap and cheer during the national anthem, and I distinctly remember the national anthem before that game being the loudest thing I have heard in my life. Maybe I'm crazy, but I thought the anthem before the Wings game on the 2nd was almost that loud, and the UC is a far bigger and more wide-open stadium than the Old Stadium was.

At the end of that game, we beat the Wings 6-2. The team comes back out from the locker room and raises their sticks to the huge crowds giving them a standing ovation. I hear the guy in front of us lean over to somebody and say "I can't believe people were leaving!" It was at that point that I noticed the stadium was still nearly full, and there was no longer one single Red Wings jersey in the crowd.

For those of us there, standing and clapping, it was a very big moment. We don't know if anybody else understands, or even notices, but that doesn't matter, does it?

\Girls in bracelets love like spaceships

2008-04-10T16:29:00.007-05:00

Friend: "Man, that dude just totally pulled a ___."
Me: "He pulled a what?"
Friend: "You know, ___. The chick who did ____."
Me: "Who now?"

One of the perks that comes along with not watching television or listening to the radio - aside from the occasional movie or pre-recorded episode of Battlestar or Whitest Kids U' Know and an occasional minute or two of Q101 when I'm in the car at home - is that I miss out completely on so much of the bullshit that permeates our culture.

I don't know who's getting married, getting divorced, having kids with, or adopting kids in Hollywood. I don't know who Angelina Jolie is currently boning, I don't know the sex or the hair color of the fifteenth child she's picking up, and I don't give a damn about any of it.

I can hardly turn on the TV at all. When I'm at home the parents often have your basic primetime TV on, a "news journal" like 20/20 or Nightline later on in the night. Back when I was younger, I enjoyed watching programs like these, I found them refreshingly intelligent compared to most of the primetime drek that seems to never get any better. However, after a few years of being off TV, I can't stand more than maybe five minutes of these shows.

Now, I'm not saying the internet is the savior of all of this. 99% of the internet is bullshit. Well, 80% porn, 19% bullshit. Even "news" sites like CNN are largely stuffed with meaningless crap. Let's see if I can get to that point floating out there in the ether.

The meaning of the term "news journal" has been completely thrown out the window. It is now like "gripping" or "compelling" is to movies, or "non-linear" and "innovative" is to games - pure jargon, buzzwords, bullshit. I turn on 20/20, and I get a story about that one Baldwin nobody gives a shit about, the drug addict one, and how he's pulling through (though he dresses in a horribly sloppy fashion and has hair that automatically designates him a "douchebag" considering his age). That's all well and good, but it starts to bug me when we go along on one of his trips to help out other people. It's great that he's trying to help others, but when I'm watching a kid get an intervention with his family... and a celebrity "talking straight" to him and referring to the kid as "brother" every two sentences... and with a whole camera crew in the room and boom mikes hovering above these people's heads... you know, I'm sorry, maybe I'm just jaded or too critical, but I can't be moved by crap like this. It's tacky, staged, and exists for no reason other than to try to "get to" the audience (or more precisely to get to the money resting in the wallet under their left ass-check). We then get to the part of the show where that John Schlockingkins bitches about something he hates, and interviews somebody in a horribly offensive borderline Stephen Colbert way, and it's at that point I get up and go play Peggle in the study.

I come back later on for Nightline. The last time I really focused on it a few years back it was one of the last respectable news journal TV shows around. Right at fade in it starts to lose me - that jackass who did the Michael Jackson interview is the anchor. When the hell did this happen? We then went into one story of a celebrity's life or raising money for kids or something, and then a behind-the-scenes of some movie being filmed, and finally a puff piece for a band. We didn't even get ONE real news story.

I haven't forgotten about the local news, either, I just don't even bother trying with that anymore. We get half the show about people dying and incidents of violence, because violence is what gets ratings. We then get some meaningless entertainment news, some horribly stinted sports reporting (you will note that the Cubs are always mentioned first, regardless of anything else going on), and finally some "lol we like happy stuff too" bit to end it off.

Actually, I don't have a point at all, really. TV sucks, and I'm happy to report that I have no fucking idea who Timbaland is.

TV: 0, Pete: 1... Peggle: 3

This is why I don't try new things.

2008-04-10T10:21:00.003-05:00

I'm coming back to the apartment downtown. Upon reaching Fullerton, my coffee (my second coffee) is gone, so I duck into Dominick's to grab something to drink. I instinctively walk to the pop isle, and see that Gatorade suddenly has it's own hugeass section. In the middle this catches my eye...

Now, I'm a big fan of Gatorade, and the idea of a morning drink without caffeine and guarana and all that stuff you really shouldn't be pumping into yourself as an alternative to actually walking up is intriguing to me. There were two flavors, the other said "artifically flavored" and this one said "naturally flavored," so I grabbed one. I get home and pop it open.

This thing isn't good. It's not bad, either. It's... despicable. I think this is how I would feel if somebody kicked my dog on a relative's grave. It's like the drink enters my mouth and says "DIE YOU ASSHOLE" and proceeds to kick the shit out of my tastebuds. It tastes like liquefied Sweettarts mixed with pure fucking hatred.

Eaugh.

YESH!

2008-03-14T13:48:00.001-05:00

RANDOM STRIKE OF INSPIRATION!!!!!

Tim to get my fuckin' SCRIPT ON!

AWWLLL RIIIIIIIIIIIGHTTTTTTTT

Mortal Kombonk

2008-03-14T10:58:00.002-05:00

It's one of those things that's easy to pick up on if you pay attention to people. A guy and a girl, running into each other on the way in/out of the lab. A pause, awkward standing around. How are you, I'm okay, how are you, I'm alright. They walk away from each other, one lingering just a little longer than the other. He looks sad.

Back to work.

A special "thank you" to Microsoft

2008-03-03T17:39:00.003-06:00

For forcing computer manufacturers to install Vista on less-than-capable machines in order to get more copies of the subpar OS on the market. It really makes life easy for PC Techs like me who get to deal with the people wondering why their computers run so slow and expect me to have an answer that doesn't sound like "buy more RAM" or "upgrade." I savor the angry, frustrated responses I deal with on a daily basis. I could not imagine my life without the stress you have granted me.

Where nothing, nothing at all, means nothing at all

2008-03-03T13:47:00.001-06:00

I'm in the student center a couple days ago, waiting to get a burger I had ordered. Two guys dressed in a horribly calculated fashion walk up, talking real loud. They start talking about how things are so hard and busy, after all, we're theater students. I don't know what I'm going to be doing this weekend, I'm so burned out, you know, being a theater student. It's so hard to be a vegan and eat here, you know, I can't eat gross meat being a theater student. Well, there might be a party this weekend... there must be, after all, because we're theater students. I don't know if they really really wanted attention or were intentionally broadcasting repeatedly to the world that they are in the theater program. I wanted to shove my burger down their throats and yell out that they just supported the cruel treatment of cows. Or, you know, make them choke.

I've bought tickets to a lot of shows in the past few days. I'm going to see My Chemical Romance with my sister on her birthday, got tickets to two shows for The Swell Season (Glen Hansard and Marketa Iglova from Once), one in WI in May and one here in June (just in case I get an internship and am not here in the summer), and finally tickets to see the pillows in NYC. Each of these were two-ticket orders. All together, it's about... $230, maybe? In the long run it won't be that much - my parents are paying for my sister's MCR ticket (maybe even mine) and I'll be selling the tickets to one of the two Swell Season shows. However, after Ticketmaster charges, it comes to over $350. Yes, that's over $100 in Ticketmaster charges. These were all tickets that couldn't be purchased from the box office for one reason or another, and it really pisses me off that I have to spend that much extra money just to be able to, you know, go to a show I'm already paying a lot for.

However, that isn't really my point, that's a little tangential annoyance. My point is that I'm not going to hunt down and kill the Ticketmaster people, because there is admittedly a way to save money most of the time. For example, if there's a show I want to see at House of Blues, I can just go to the theater and buy tickets directly from the box office. Ticketmaster isn't the only option all of the time, it's mostly just an unfortunate coincidence that it was the only option so many times in a row. Finally, we come to my point... the "matinée" no longer exists at almost all first-run movie theaters, or is so expensive that it only saves you a quarter or two.

Piracy is something I've been back and forth on a lot in my life. Being really computer-inclined since I was 6 or 7, I was on the forefront of the Napster stuff back in the day, and Morpheus after that and then BitTorrent (I was one of the biggest users of Suprnova I knew). At this point, I'm almost entirely against piracy. I pirate TV shows, but only because I would skip commercials if I watched them on TV anyway. However, if the DVDs are out then I Netflix it. But I don't pirate music, I very rarely pirate games (and when I do it's actually to test it out for stuff you can't really rent like PC or DS games), and I most definitely don't pirate movies.

It pisses me off when I hear people's explanations for why they pirate movies. The most prominent one is a simple "I don't pay for movies." Upon further questioning, I usually get stuff like "well it's too expensive" or "they have enough money" or "one person won't make a difference," the usual avoiding responsibility for stealing bullshit. If people are pirating movies on DVD, I don't get why they don't rent them, or just do the $5 a month Netflix deal (realistically you could rent 8-9 movies a month for $5 bucks... what is wrong with that?). However, when we get into pirating movies currently in theaters, the line gets a little more blurry. "Well, it's too expensive to see a movie." I do agree that $10+ is fucking ridiculous to see a movie. However, being kids, we'll find a way to pay for stuff, and you always had the option of seeing a matinee. With the demise of that, however, I start to wonder myself.

It's $10.50 to see a movie at night at the local awesome theater, the AMC River East 21 in downtown Chicago. It pisses me off to no degree that I can see a movie at 1pm and still have to pay that much. At the other chains like Kerasotes, they still have a matinee, but it's $9 instead of $10, hardly a worthwhile difference. Even theaters out in the suburbs have adopted the pricing plans they have in the middle of a huge city. This is getting ridiculous. I like seeing movies, a whole lot. It is my "thing," if you will. I saw 60-70 2007 movies, maybe 40-45 in theaters. I simply don't have the money to see that many movies anymore if it'll be at least $10. The thing that sucks is that it's really a sign of the end, unless the theaters decide on a new business model. Studios make the vast majority of their money from home video sales (if you hear movie industry gloom-and-doom people talking of lower box office returns signaling dark times, they have not done their research), and that is bad for theaters. Instead of finding a new way to run their business, though, they just keep raising prices to try to make money, and this is driving people to piracy. I know that most pirates are morally bankrupt thanks to the anonymity of the internet, but there are some out there who would honestly see movies in theaters if it were affordable. I don't pirate movies, but I wonder sometimes.

Here it goes, here it goes, here it goes again.

2008-02-21T19:21:00.003-06:00

So, here we are once again. Time to don the big red gloves and sharpen our words. It's debatin' time.

7:05. Woah, check out the collar on the T-Hilary. It's so ridiculous looking I can't even think of anything funny to say about them. It'd be like shooting fish in a small jug-like container. Also, hey, she knows how to drop names.

Okay, that was actually more like 7:21, but I was running behind and watching on the DVR. You'll note how I say DVR and not Tivo, since RCN (and noplace else now) has Tivo-brand DVRs included with TV service, which means our DVR, to put it simply, sucks. Color-coded buttons and a slow, laggy interface. Thanks, RCN! Didn't want to see that twenty minutes of the debate anyway.

Re-enactment of 7:06 - 7:26.
T-Hilary: Hey, did you know I know *famous person A* and *famous person b*?
Obama: Hel-
(T-Hilary lifts her collars, revealing two gauss rifles. She opens fire on the crowd.)

I ran out of gas before I got out of the garage. Screw this, I'll just pop in if they happen to say anything funny. You know what sucks? (Shit, dude is speaking Spanish. I want him to whisper soft somethings quietly into in my ear) Laugh tracks. So many potentially good shows are ruined by laugh tracks. They are borderline offensive to the viewers. It is like the networks can't trust us to find things funny unless we're told to find them funny. (I will find TV comedies funny within the first one-hundred days of my presidency.) In the student center I saw a minute or two of Two and a Half Men. There were a couple jokes which would have been hilarious if they didn't have fake laughter flowing over it. (lol, there is a fan somewhere under the table that keeps blowing Obama's note sheet up) screw this

2008-02-21T17:25:00.003-06:00

It's been a gradual decline towards this over the years, but I think it's fairly obvious now that the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue is now essentially one step away from softcore porn, so much so that it begs the question "why don't you just google 'boobies' for free?"

Over the past few years the pages have gone from focusing on beautiful women to good-looking women who wear less and less. Every year they get closer to full-out topless frontal nudity. What is the point anymore? You can just ask the guy for one of the magazines they keep behind the counter. Even the articles in it, which used to be good (really), have turned into mostly extended ads for one product or another.

I had some other stuff I was going to post about, but time sort of slipped away from me at work today so it's just teh bewbies. More later? Maybe.

P.S.: Dear SI, knock it the hell off with the goddamn body painting. We got sick of it years ago.

On this day

2008-02-19T17:08:00.003-06:00

...in 1986, Japanese A/V Idol Reon Kadena was born.

Being a guy is just wonderful sometimes.

"On priests and puppy dogs," or "Hilary Attacks!"

2008-02-19T14:53:00.005-06:00

It's been a couple weeks. How've you been, one or two possible readers? Hope you're well. You know, it's always awkward trying to make a blog post when you have ten people standing in front of you printing, waiting for a class to get out or using the stapler.

One of those places I'm never 100% sure what to do is at the base of an escalator, right next to the entrance for the escalator down to the next floor. If I'm going down and walking right onto the next one, I always find it amusing to judge whether or not I should just barrel through or let a person who is walking up go in front of me. I usually just barrel through because I'm more important than all the other sheep walking about. After work yesterday I was the one walking up as somebody was coming down from the next level, this priest I've seen around campus during my PC Depot days. I'm a good deal away, but he stops, smiles warmly, and waits for me to step into the escalator first.

This isn't a commentary on religion or my rather atheistic views on life, but really, I don't think anybody other than a priest would have not only stopped to let me through when he could have easily gone ahead of me, but been happy to do so. I guess my only semi-point is that it bothers me when people bash priests, because they're almost exclusively damn nice people. It made me feel a little better about stuff after a horrible day of work.

There was this jerk at the grocery store later on, though. I'm standing in line at Dominicks, and having neglected to pick up a cart, I'm carrying a huge, heavy load of food in my arms. Usually this is when the people in front of you scoot their stuff forward on the little conveyor belt, put up the yellow divider and let you put down some stuff. But this well-dressed guy and his hollow-headed well-dressed girlfriend turn, make direct eye contact with me, look at the food in my arms, and look back at the cashier. I guess it's not the SOP or anything to scoot your food forward to make room, but these people had their food in the middle of the belt all spread out, and they lookedright at me, so it got on my nerves a bit.

The cashier rings them up, and the belt opens up, so I move in to put down the load of food that's buckling my knees. I'm thwarted, however, by the WDGF. She was previously leaning onto the counter, and she didn't move, even though their food was bagged and her WDBF was in the process of paying. I stand there for a few seconds, dumbstruck that she won't get her ass out of my way. Eventually I get ticked to the point where I lean over and say "excuse me, could you move up so I can put my stuff down?" She turns, looks me up and down, gives me that kind of "I'm better than you" frown that makes you want to throw a salami at her, and goes back to leaning. The WDBF gives me that "back off" look.

I admittedly wound up holding the line up for a bit when I uttered "You unbelievable bitch" and the WDBF tried to get all up in my face about it (coming hilariously close to knocking the WDGF down), but I didn't mind.

Man, this has been a long post about nothing, hasn't it? I also totally forgot what the "puppy dogs" thing was going to be about. So uh, how about the T-Hilary, huh? She's lashing out trying to attack anything Obama could have potentially messed up a bit on. It's amusing how he's not lashing out at her. He's, you know, confident in himself.

Oh, and Blu-Ray won the format war. Toshiba is officially ending HD-DVD production. Universal and Paramount have announced they're going Blu-Ray. Next up... digital distribution kills Blu-Ray.

You've got something on your forehead.

2008-02-06T14:31:00.002-06:00

The last few days have been a blur of coughing, Heroes, more coughing, sleep, some coughing, and coughing. The Lady Nicole was cool enough to force medicine down my throat and keep me company, so it was actually halfway enjoyable, except for that coughing bit. Yesterday I felt almost human enough to go to the Mika show we had tickets to. I wasn't quite human enough but I figured I'd say "screw it" since I had been looking forward to it.

Now, I've seen a lot of concerts in my day, at least more than Joe Music. Does it make me a girl if I think the Mika concert was the best concert I've seen? For a tour hitting small venues like House of Blues, they sure had a hell of a lot of stuff going on on-stage, and almost every song had more going on than it did on the album. Huge setpieces, solos, weird... uh, rabbit stuff. It was awesome.

Anyway, I met the new coworker today. He plays Counter-Strike 1.6, not Source, so he's automatically awesome. Also got my package of pillows stuff in the mail today. Yay.

My temperature is back to normal but I'm still to under-the-weather to be here, my throat hurts and I'm mega-fatigued, though I don't think I'm contagious anymore. I'm going to be bailing at 3:30 and spending the evening at the lolpartment instead of class. I promise I'll get back to non-random-shit posts someday soon, really.

We're on a million dollar mission.

2008-02-04T21:23:00.001-06:00

When I woke up late Saturday morning, my throat was a little raspy. I had been out the previous night seeing Rambo and went to a pub afterwards, so I figured my throat was worn out from talking more/louder than usual. However, as I progressed through the day, it became apparent that I was sick on some level, and I tried to milk as much fun out of the day as I could. By the time I got back to the apartment late Saturday night, though, I was miserable, with a temperature of 101.9 and a horrible whooping cough.

Yesterday was pretty much hell, and today was the same. The headache has gone away, but my throat gets dry very easily, and it's in a constant state of being swollen. Swallowing hurts, breathing hurts. Even my nose has gotten dry to the point of pain when I breathe. By now it seems to be getting a little bit better. I'm hoping that means the full-on assault of medication (thanks largely to Nicole) is doing it's job. It might just be receding for a bit, but if it's at the level it's at now by tomorrow night, I'll probably be able to actually go to the Mika concert we have tickets to. (Note - gargling the hell out of salt water with some cheyenne in it helps with the pain for a good 20 or 30 minutes).

With everybody gone at this hour, I've settled on having the TV on in the background, currently playing Deal or No Deal. Being sick the last few days, I've seen a lot of TV (which is very usual for me), and tons of commercials for this episode - the "million dollar mission," as it were. Now, this is where I ponder the reasoning behind that marketing. Are they really that desperate for ratings that they have to actually advertise the show as "Hey, we might give a million away this time, nudge nudge, we'll even make the odds of it like 5x better"? Is it just me or does that take away any point of watching the show? I was under the impression that you watched game shows to root for people and be excited. Knowing going into it that the odds are great and they'll almost definitely win, it sort of makes it seem entirely pointless to watch, save maybe the last five minutes.

Just an observation. I'm going to go back to being in pain now.

Edit: My package of the new pillows single, DVD and Nine Miles album arrived at work, but nobody thought to bring it to me. Gwarrgh.

Genius Squad has joined your party.

2008-02-01T16:51:00.001-06:00

It's February first, which means the small wireless desk I've been working is now officially the LPC branch of the Genius Squad, of which I am the "pilot." I'm none too happy about the name, trust me, but apparently they're not letting us switch the name. I'm considering cutting off half of my old Best Buy uniform and attaching half a Genius Bar uniform, I think it'd be appropriate.

The staple comments have died down, due largely to the layers of scotch tape that I bound the broken stapler shut with. People still struggle with it for a few seconds, but they're at least catching on now that something is afoot with the stapler. I was going to do a big post today, but I actually had to do real, constant work all day. It's sort of nice, to have a purpose again, but I was growing accustomed to all the down time. I still miss my old job at the depot, though, mainly because I could actually play decently loud music there. If I tried the same here I'd have Lincoln Park Trixies all over my white suburbanite ass.

So my thoughtful post will be replaced by a random shit post, which I suppose is good once in a while. First off, for those of you with Vista, you know how when you do the good 'ol three-fingered-salute to get to the Task Manager, it brings you to a system screen instead of going straight to the TM? The magic fix is to instead hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc with a flick of that bony-ass wrist of yours, you nerd.

Also, I saw this earlier today, and while I generally try not to make "lol luk at this funny vid i find on internet" posts, I thought this was worth sharing (though I am fairly certain this is not really read by anybody yet).

gg

"That's pretty harsh."
"Well, so's your coffee."

The moral of the story is that Foldger's will get your husband to have sex with you. Maybe he'll give you a day out of the kitchen, too.

Anyway, it's one past five and I think I'm going to get the hell out of here, make a deposit at the bank, dick around on my PC for a bit... and then going to see fucking RAMBO.

Obama/Clinton Debate: There really are better sports announcers than Michael Buffer.

2008-01-31T19:09:00.000-06:00

7:10. You know, without bringing personal views on politics into it, I really do think Hilary Clinton is a terminator, sent back to kill James Cameron.

7:16. Why the hell don't candidates look at each other when they're talking? When one is talking the other will look intently at them, but the one speaking never makes eye contact with the other, even when they are referring to the both of them. It's one of those things that weirds me out about politics.

7:19. Obama is taking a black marker to take notes, while Hilary is using a red marker. This only supports my theory of terminator Hilary.

7:24. They're sharp dressers. I'm digging the T-Hilary's dark red shirt and light blue jewelry thing. She also just used the term "nibbled to death," and I can't help but picture Hamtaro nibbling on a kid until they die from overwhelming adorableness. Shut up. Hamtaro is delightful and you know it. Don't judge me.

7:29. You can see the sparks shooting between them. Also, this is at the Kodak Theater (current home of the Academy Awards), instead of Wolf Boy cutting in when one person is speaking too long, they should really just have a pit orchestra kick in with a "STFU" queue. Christ, are there commercials in this thing? I have to take a wicked yes.

7:35. Oh, wait, DVR, I can pause this.

7:41. Hey, it's Jason Alexander in the crowd. Still bald as ever. This is like a boxing match, shucking, jiving and juking. And a wail, you gotta, jump jive and wail.

7:49. Blitzkrieg is pushing Obama to make a personal jab at the T-Hilary on stage. He's literally pushing him to do so. I am so sick of this sensationalist bullshit that has infected the media. If they start bickering, then hey, fun fun, but I hate it when the mediator intentionally tries to start it.

7:54. Here come the direct jabs at each other. To not use the boxing cliché,

8:12. "Now, I don't want to be judged on my husband's accomplishments, so let me list off everything he did well while he was president." Rob Reiner is in the crowd looking pissed off for some reason. I thought they're supposed to be jolly.

8:23. Obama talks about something he differs from Clinton on. The WB stops the next question and says to the T-Hilary "That was clearly a swipe at you." Okay, look, CNN. Cut this shit out. This isn't about your news network getting more ratings, it's about education people on the candidates. Knock off this creating conflict crap. At least they don't have sound effects over everything (though they caved and are now doing that during their normal shows).

8: 27. Best mis-statement ever: "Since the American invasion of Rock." Topher Grace is not amused. Also, he has a stupid name.

8:33. Woah, shit, Obama comes out swinging. And Jesus, 'Lil Blitzie is being a dick.

8:42. Uh-oh, here come questions about sex and violence in Hollywood. If either of them say ANYTHING about the government stepping into film distribution/censorship, I swear to God, I'll vote republican. Okay, Obama only hinted at stepping in a bit with marketing and who products are marketed to, but that's still more than I want.

8:54. T-Hilary: "I agree with everything Senator Obama just said." Post-teen Wolf: "That means it's B.S., right?" OMG. The two have been really friendly today, genuinely so. It's good to see.

8:55: SkyNet goes online. Three billion human lives end. The survivors of the nuclear fire will call the war Judgement Day.

On Sony, Stubble and Staplers

2008-01-31T14:31:00.000-06:00

It would seem that Sony is finally turning a corner with the Playstation 3. This is due in no small part to the onboard Blu-Ray player, arguably the best (and factually the most future-proof) BD player on the market.

It's a shame the public has chosen Blu-Ray over HD-DVD. See, it's not as bad as VHS over Betamax, because the sound/video quality on HDDVDs and BDs is digital as opposed to analog and therefore identical, but Blu-Ray was still a poor choice. HD-DVD players shipped when they were ready to ship, and had the full functionality of HD-DVD right out of the gate. This caught Blu-Ray off guard, however, and forced Sony to rush BD players to the market, without all of the planned functionality.

The reason the PS3 is the best BD player on the market is because it is upgradable, seeing how it has all the hardware and software of the PS3 to back it up. However, standalone Blu-Ray players thus far have not been designed with all the internet functionality in mind and are not capable of major firmware updates. In October, Sony will release BD 2.0, adding all the intended functionality of BD movies... and everybody who owns a standalone player will be screwed. They'll have to purchase a new player to get the most out of their BDs (assuming film companies take advantage of the new features). So I propose a toast to all the uninformed consumers who chose Blu-Ray over HD-DVD. Congrats, you brought it upon yourselves. Enjoy the proprietary bullshit Sony will no doubt try to implement.

The fledgling Genius Squad desk has been relatively quiet lately. Not many people have come in with wireless issues, and those who have were just unfamiliar with computers and didn't have it set up correctly. John might be hiring a co-worker for me as early as Monday, the guy seems cool enough. However, my secret identity, the Staple Avenger, Defender of the Intelliprint, has been busy lately.

There are two staplers on the counter in front of me, intended for public use. Being a college computer lab, the twenty-somethings who pass through are naturally inclined to behave as ten-somethings and break shit all the time. The left stapler is currently out of commission, so I put a paper sign on top of it, reading "Stapler out of order; Working one to your left," and put a big 'ol red arrow pointing to the stapler at the opposite end of the counter. I kid you not, I have seen five people so far causally walk up, read the sign, remove the sign, try the stapler, and bitch at me that it doesn't work. People who clearly speak English as their primary language.

So instead I put the stapler on the desk, and slide it under the counter (which is raised above the desk by a few inches), and keep the sign up on the counter where the stapler used to be. Being a public area, the stapler is tethered down to the counter. Within two minutes of me moving the stapler, somebody walks up, reads the sign, looks at the wire coming from under the sign and going off the counter in front of my workstation, follows the wire with his hand, reaches over and under the counter - right in front of me - and pulls it out. He was quite angry at the lack of a staple in his paper and decided to take it out on me. I told him I was sorry it didn't work out between us.

On an unrelated note, this morning I used a safety razor and brush to shave. Not gonna lie... it makes you feel fucking badass.

Pete's Vocab of the Day
"Unfamiliar with computers."
un·fa·mil·iar with com·put·ers [uhn-fuh-mil-yer with kəm-pyōō'tər]
Adj.
1. The state of being inexperienced with the operation of a PC.
2. A sodding moron.

"Welcome to the suck," or "Peternet 2.0"

2008-01-30T16:01:00.000-06:00

Been out of the internet for a spell. I'd like to walk it a while.