Tron: Legacy... Life and Death on the Grid

I saw Tron: Legacy the other night, and it was amazingly cool!  I'd also highly recommend checking out the original Tron before seeing it.  There were quite a few subtle references to the first movie.

Every review I've read defends the movie on the grounds that in spite of the story, the visuals and special effects were amazing.  And they were, but I'm going to defend the story.  I'll admit that the plot wasn't particularly intricate or diverse, but there's a difference between a straightforward plot and a weak one.  I don't like movies that are just a collection of explosions and action sequences with little pieces of plot stuffed into the cracks between, and this wasn't one of those.  There were plenty of explosions and fights but they followed the plot, not the other way around.

I particularly liked the characters.  They all had their own personalities that we caught glimpses of throughout, from the naively cute Quorra (Olivia Wilde), to the flinching and spineless Jarvis (James Frain), to the over-the-top to the point of unhinged Castor/Zuse (Michael Sheen).  We were just given hints about their personalities and pasts, which only made me want to know more about them.  How did Flynn fight Clu before the Purge?  What kind of history do Quorra and Zuse have?

In the Grid, "minutes passed like hours" and, if I really wanted to be a geek, twenty years of minutes like hours figures to subjective centuries.  The thing is, I really got a sense that all those years had passed and that things had been happening during that time.  Fights and battles between Programs and Isos, between Flynn and Clu, culminating in the Purge.  Attempted rebellions and revolutions by the Programs as Clu secured his control over the Grid when Flynn was forced to retreat to the Wastes.  Forget more sequels, now I want to know what happened during all those years before Sam stumbled into the Grid.

Minor vacation

I haven't posted in quite a while but like I said in my last post, I try very hard not to just sit down and rant and complain about work and life in general.  Unless it's particularly interesting or anecdotal.

I just got back from a 6-day vacation used to escape work and visit family.  Originally, I'd planned to take my vacation in the fall this year, but when the old manager left that all went out the window.  Just in case, I shot an email to HR to see if there was anything I could do to hang onto those days.  Almost immediately, the DM replies and says that I can carry them over as late as March next year, "like he told me before."  That ass said no such thing.  He was hoping I'd just quietly roll over and relinquish my vacation without complaint.

I managed to attend my 2-year-old nephew Emmet's birthday party.  He excitedly opened all his presents until he got to the box of toy horses.  Then he lost interest in everything else and practically had to be dragged away from playing with them so that he could open the rest of his presents.  After that, the onlything that was more exciting than those horses was the birthday cake, made from scratch by his mom and grandma.

Indiana, my 8-year-old nephew, was exploring deep into one of his grandparents' closets and unearthed a box of books I'd had when I was a kid.  There were a few dozen Hardy Boys mysteries, some choose-your-own-adventure books, and the Black Cauldron series.  There was a small argument with his dad about why he couldn't take them all home with them.  That night he insisted that I read one with him before bed, and I was happy to oblige, folowing Frank and Joe Hardy and the mysterious government agent only known as Mr Grey as they investigated an international terrorist/crim ring.  I provided english accents for all the Interpol agents.

Not about work

Work is about all I've been doing lately.  Dealing with District Managers, holiday business, and things breaking.  I started several posts recently, but they were all just a bunch of complaining about work, so I ended up deleting them.  This post will not be about work.

So I'm going to write about something that happened a while ago.  A dream, actually.

I was with Laura in my San Francisco dreamscape, hanging out with awesome creators like Kaya Foglio, Shaenon Garrity and others.  When we first met, Laura and I hit it off, but starting a long distance relationship is difficult and whatever spark there had been at the beginning between us faded.  Later, she moved to Denver and I hoped we might be able to rekindle something.  No luck, unfortunately.  Somehow one of those situations was forming in the dream, and I was considering trying to make another pass.

Laura left the appartment to find a bathroom, because apparnetly the one there was filled with carrots (nobody was willing to explain why).  As soon as she left, someone turned to me and said that it wasn't cool what I was doing to Laura.  I told her I didn't understand, so she explained.  By trying to get in close every time we were hanging out together, I wasn't being a very good friend.  I would interperet any opening or supposed innuendo as an invitation.  It meant she always had to be on guard when I was around.

I realized she was right; it was a sobering thought.  Some of the best and closest friendships I've had have been ruined by exactly that kind of crap getting in the way.  I resolved right then that there would be no more passes, drunken or otherwise.  I wasn't too keen on giving up the possibility of a relationship, but the dream was right that it wasn't fair to put Laura in that situation.

And that was my last San Fancisco epiphany.

Writers group meeting at the bar

We had, in my opinion, our first successful writers' group meeting last night.  Mostly because it was more than just shuffling our feet and trying to figure out what we should be doing.  The goal we'd set for ourselves this week was to write and bring in 3-5 pages.  There had been a couple of half-hearted attempts, but I was the only one who actually had 3.5 pages with me (the beginning of The Underground Lecturehall).  Even so, we were able to discuss a lot about styles and what we do to get ideas and how we go about writing something.  My style was described as Orwellian.  And while I'm not sure it's entirely accurate, it's an awesome compliment to receive.

The most amazing compliment though, was that they were interested and wanted to read more.  That's something that in my memory has never happened before.  It seems like all my life I've had to beg and plead with friends and family to read what I've written.  Even when they actually do read it, feedback always comes in the form of, "Well, that's... um... a very well-written story.  You should keep it up."  In other words, it's clear that although they thought it was probably good work, they themselves either didn't like it or just plain didn't get it.  Thus discouraged, I return to my typewriter to try again.

Why have I kept it up, in spite of an overwhelming lack of interest?  The truth is that in the end, the only person I really write for is myself.  It wouldn't bother me even if the rest of the world declares that I am to writing what Vogons are to poetry.  Okay, maybe a little.  But the thought would never even cross my mind to actually stop writing.  I'd go crazy after more than a couple of months without some kind of creative outlet.  The only thing that would probably happen is that I would just stop showing my stuff to other people.

But these people actually liked it enough that they wanted to read more?  I didn't know what to say.  I can't wait to read what they bring in next time.

Sleepless weekend

I tapped into some inspiration last week and was going almost non-stop from Friday to Sunday, not counting those pointless hours spent working at the theatre.  Last night my endurance finally ran out after about sixty sleepless hours and I was forced to drag myself to bed.

It's odd.  While in the midst of my marathon, my mind was clear and sharp.  My muscles were sore and protesting the lack of rest, and toward the end I started drifting a bit and seeing imaginary movement in the corner of my eye, but for the most part I was fully coherent.  Now, after twelve hours of sleep, my brain feels like mush.  You'd think it would be the other way around.

The motion detector in the driveway doesn't extend very far, so it always switches itself off when I'm about halfway up the stairs.  It's also the spot where the trees block out the streetlight on the corner, and I find myself in a moment of complete darkness.  I love how clear the stars are in the mountains at night, and last night was a clear, moonless night.  Even as bone-weary as I was, when the light went out I stood there and stared up at the sky for a few minutes.  In that time three shooting stars fell, each in a different direction.  Another cool thing about having so little atmosphere between myself and the sky is that shooting stars are brighter too.

I missed my deadline for November, so I'll have to repay it with three works this month.

New video game: Fallout New Vegas

I got my hands on the Fallout: New Vegas game on Friday, and it's just as amazing as the last Fallout game!  There're stories, and moral decisions to be made, and all kinds of subtleties that aren't dumbed down for your benefit.

Really, it's the stories that I enjoy the most.  That's why I just can't get into MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and other games that are played primarily online.  Most of the time the only story aspect they have is long and floral prologue that sets the stage for the current situation.  After that it's just a bunch of aimless running around and fighting, with no real story progression.  Because if there was a point where you could win and end the story, you'd stop playing and stop paying those monthly online fees.  Unfortunately it's those types of games that make the most money, so they're the ones everyone's making now.

Another thing I especially enjoy is having the ability to make game-affecting choices.  Should I side with the escaped convicts, or the townspeople?  Should I take the bribe, or turn this murderer in?  Of course, I enjoy playing the hero, so I almost always choose to be the good guy anyway.  But it's fun to know that there was an actual choice to be made.

Strangers rock

Snow!!  It started yesterday and hasn't stopped yet.  They closed the highway at least twice when it got really bad.

Tonight we held the first meeting of our unnamed writing group.  This time we all just brought in some stuff we'd written in the past, but we all agreed we'd write something new for next week.  It went well, and we all got an idea where our strengths were and where we needed improvement.

Afterward, I got turned around in the dark and snow and started heading home in the wrong direction.  Okay, it probably would have happened even without the dark and snow.  I get turned around pretty easily.  In any case, when I realized I was driving the wrong way I tried to use a driveway to turn around, but over-estimated the width of the driveway and got stuck in the two foot deep ditch that had been hidden by the snow.

As I was trying to pull out with no success, a passing truck stopped and the driver offered to help.  Neither he nor I had any tow cables, so we tried using the truck to push me out.  No good, there was just too much frickin' snow hanging on to the wheels.  After another minute the owner of the house came out with a couple of snow shovels and helped us try to dig some of the snow out from under the wheels.  We worked at it for a few minutes, but it was becoming clear that the ditch was too steep and the car wasn't going to get out under its own power.  That was about the time the second truck stopped, and this guy had a pretty heavy tow cable in his trunk.  He was even willing to get on his back in the snow and wriggle under my car to connect it.  Two minutes later, my car was back on the road again.

Overall, I was probably stuck for less than a half hour.  It's because of people like them that I always try to stop if I see someone else stuck or having trouble.  Granted there's not much I can do with my little sedan, but I could at the very least give them a ride to the nearest gas station or let them use my cell to call a truck or something.

The only logical thing

Last night while cleaning theatres, we found a CD on the floor under one of the seats.  It was a set of audio lessons for how to make elk mating calls.  We were all baffled; why the heck someone would take this into a theatre with them?  In the end, we did the only logical thing we could under those circumstances: we stuck it in the CD player in the back room and played it over the PA system.  Customers were equally baffled, but it was fun to watch.

New dreamscape

I've discovered a new dreamscape.  One of those places that don't really exist, but that I visit often in my dreams.  It's a small block of flats, with a communal park in the center.  Located somewhere in San Francisco I think, although it's been in New Orleans a couple of times and even in Paris once.  Living in these flats are all the people whom I respect and admire.  Creative artists and writers who are constantly producing amazing stuff.  Maybe it's the realm of my super-ego, composed of everything I aspire toward.  When I find myself there, I always learn something important.
This time I'd been invited to visit by M (of course he'd have a place there).  He and I and a bunch of other people just hung out drinking and watching movies and eventually we all crashed on the couches and floor.  The next morning I 'woke up', fully clothed on the couch, next to a girl named Julie.  I vaguely remembered talking to her the night before.  Although I was absolutely sure nothing had happened the night before, we hit it off immediately that morning.  There was a general unease among everyone else about the situation; apparently Julie was a little... odd.  When they advised against my pursuing it though, it only encouraged me.  To be honest, I like girls who are kind of strange.
As usual, it was right about the time I was just starting to get to know Julie that Kira showed up.  She was all snuggly and friendly all of a sudden, despite having done her best in the past year to avoid seeing me, talking to me, or texting me more than six letters at a time.  Eventually she somehow managed to tear me away from Julie to go shopping with her at some kind of french curiosity shop.  Then, her mission accomplished, Kira promptly wandered off and ditched me there.
I struck up a conversation with the owner, who spoke a garbled mix of French and English.  He somehow knew about the whole story and told me not to worry about Julie.  Then he started talking about how monogamy was boring and that he was in a polyamorous relationship with two girls right now.  It was about the time he started talking about manage a trois that I decided it was time for me to go find Julie before K did.  I woke up soon after, never having found Julie.

So, what was the epiphany?  I'm not sure.  Maybe the next time I meet someone who's really interesting, I should try to avoid introducing her to Kira.  Or maybe I should just keep an eye out for Julie.  I suck at remembering names, so most people in my dreams don't have them.  But I'm not big on the precognitive dream idea.  This may take some more thought.

Odin was a jerk

I've been reading up on Norse mythology in vaguely research-like pursuits.  It's only vaguely research, because I frequently get too into it and probe much farther than my project really demands.  A good recent example is the Runic Calander, or primestaff.  It had symbols that represented days of the year, coupled with a second set that represented what year it was in a 19yr metonic cycle based on the phases of the moon.  They used it as a perpetual calendar, which is to say that after 19 years had passed they started over at the beginning.  It was sophisticated enough that it took 214 years or so before it was so far off that they needed to have a leap-day (compare that to ours, which needs a leap-day every 4 years).

In all the various books and web-pages, there were plenty of partial pictures of various primestaves and other runic calendars.  But they were all visual examples, no real calendars that said what meant what.  After a few unsuccessful hours in the library and several online, I decided that if I wanted a complete calander I'd just have to make one myself!  This is about the point where the term 'research' no longer applies.  Understanding the concept, I probably could have just made up my own calendar.  There was no need for me to collect all those partial calendars, decipher the terminology of their runes, look up the statistical data on phases of the moon, then build my own calendar from day 1 of the 19year cycle.  On the other hand, this way is much more fun!

One thing I can't help but notice while I'm reading these old poems and legends, is that Odin and Thor and the rest of the Norse gods really act like a bunch of assholes sometimes.  I'm finding Neil Gaiman's portrayal of them in American Gods very approprate.  It wasn't a 'what if' story about some old gods that got bitter about being set aside and forgotten, like I originally thought it was.  There's lots of actual myths about Odin and the other Aesir being sneaky and underhanded, sometimes even in dealing with the gods of other pantheons.  Really, it's just more proof that Neil Gaiman is a freaking genius.

Not creepy after all

Last night we were hanging out over at Max's, when my cell started beeping.  It was a text message... of nothing.

Received:>

Hmmm. I don't recognize the number.

Sent:>???
Received:> me
Received:>

'Me' and then another message of nothing.  How odd.  I try calling the number, but it just sends me to a nameless voicemail.  I leave a message asking them to call me, because I have no idea who they are.

Received:> Need me.

Umm... okay.  Getting a little creepy now.  Who the heck is this?

Received:> Tell me something nice.

Really creepy.  Is this someone I should know, or is someone stalking me via text messages?  Is this the next generation of anonymous heavy breathing on phone?  In any case, now I'm irritated.  Fine, they want something nice?  I'll tell 'em something nice!  Mwahahaha!

Sent:> Sunshine lollipops

So I'm not good at being creepy on purpose, sue me.  I'm better at doing it by accident during everyday conversations and realizing it to my mortification several hours later.

Received:>
Received:> what?

Ha! I've boggled their creepy minds!  No more messages for the rest of the night.

Early this morning I was woken up by another text message:

Received:> I'm sorry about last night's texts.  They weren't from me.  I think my daughter got in my phone. I went to sleep at 9:00pm.  I noticed a new number in here this morning.  I'm not sure I even know who you are... doesn't matter. I will hide my phone from now on!  -Kathy

Ah ha, so it wasn't some scary psychopath after all!  It was a little girl.  Suddenly I'm very glad that I'm not good at being creepy.  I'd rather not be responsible for emotionally scarring young children.

maintain a positive outlook

This was nearly yet another rant on something or other, but I caught myself. I'm just feeling snarky today.  I'll have to shake it before we kick off the writing group this week.  It's best to review the good points first, then follow up with criticism second.  It's more encouraging.  I find it extremely discouraging when the first thing out of someone's mouth was what they didn't like.  No matter how many positive comments come after, it's like they're saying, "It sucked overall, but these parts didn't suck quite as much."

I just got the Sandman series (Neil Gaiman) back from Max yesterday.  He absolutely loved them, and with good reason.  It's always fun to introduce someone to something you love and see that they enjoyed it just as much as you did.

The Linguistic Conspirators

Nobody liked it, but I think it's a cool name for a writing group.  I may be influenced by my current steampunk bent though.  There are all these secret groups and conspiracies where they come up with some ambiguous name, like The Beneficially Pragmatic Society for Women.

We met for the first time on Wednesday to plan and, after some shuffling of feet, we all admitted that none of us had any idea how to organize a writing group.  The only thing we had to go on was a vague concept of a group of people writing things.  We figured out our schedule a little better, and suggested other people who might be interested in joining us, but that was about it.

I might have to take charge if we're going to get this thing off the ground.  Normally I hate doing that, what with my fear of authority over others, but I'm really getting into the idea.  It would be fun to be part of a group of writers with mostly similar interests getting together and giving each other useful feedback.  Something better than 'I liked it,' at least.

I've been corresponding with Chelsea via email, and she commented yesterday that my emails frequently cracked her up.  Argh, if only I could just type everything I said in real life!  Words stream directly from my brain to my fingers, but god forbid that I try to send any of them to my mouth.  It always ends in massive traffic accidents and frantic detours that turn everything I say into the equvalent of  "duh..."

2:00am Laundry

The roommates have been out of town since yesterday, so I've been able to get quite a bit done.  When left to my own devices, I start getting really ambitious and industrious at around 1:00am.  I've never known anyone who was as adept at killing time as they are.  Granted, I too have those periods of listlessness where I feel that I've got 'nothing better to do,' and just goof off for an hour or two.  But I'm still usually doing something vaguely constructive like doodling while watching TV, even though I know it's nothing I'd even consider hanging on to when the day is done.

My roommates sit and stare at the TV.  For hours on end, doing nothing else.  Watching things like Nascar and years-old 90210 episodes.  I know, with my own affinity for awful SciFi I've got no room to criticize.  But... three hours of 90210 reruns?  Seriously?

Am I griping again?  Yeah, I am.  Sorry.

Anyway, the point is that I always feel like I'm disturbing them when I'm trying to get stuff done while they're lounging around like that.  It makes me rush to get finished.  In the last two days though, I've done all my laundry and cleaned a lot of minor messes that needed taking care of.  Blaring weird and eccentric indie-rock through most of it.

It's called 'role-playing' for a reason

The long-expected confrontation finally happened last night during our weekly geek session.  It also happend with the player I expected it to.  The players got their hands on a bunch of gun-powder, and Ed decided he wanted to try to use it to make a sort of nail-bomb.

I told him he'd have to try it with huge penalties since he wasn't proficient in either engineering or natural philosophy (the term 'scientist' wasn't coined until the nineteenth century).  He was basically a guy setting fire to a can stuffed full of gunpowder.  After three failures and nearly blowing his hand off, he started getting upset.  He didn't understand why he couldn't just see what he did wrong and do it differently the next time.  It was just like when he found out his character couldn't read if he didn't take a reading/writing skill.  Things like reading and scientific process weren't as all-pervasive back then as they are now.  There wasn't enough of it around that you could just pick it up as you went along in life, you had to specifically go out and find someone to teach it to you.

I also tried to explain that things like catapult-thrown fire-bombs had already been invented.  It wouldn't be that far a leap for someone who was actually skilled in dealing with gunpowder and firearms if Ed suggested the idea to him.  But by then Ed was in deliberate ignorance mode, where he gets bored or irritated and entertains himself by pretending to forget how the game works.

Scary people

There's a guy on the radio who has a press pass that he uses to watch movies all the time at the theatre.  Nobody at the theatre likes him very much, because he's a little overbearing and tends to creep people out.  I generally keep him at arm's length as well, mostly because the first time I met him he had already talked his way into two or three free movies before anybody started asking if we were getting anything out of the deal.  And even now that he has an official press pass, he still every once in a while tries to get in without having to flash it and sign in.  He thinks it's fun.

Earlier this week one of the employees made no secret that he didn't like the guy.  So the guy came to me and complained.  I apologized and said I'd talk to the kid about being rude.  The conversation continued and it came out that the kid didn't like him.  That was when the guy got defensive and started getting scary.  He said, "Oh well, I'm pretty close to God sometimes and other people can sense it.  It makes them hate me."

Okay, I'm definitely not the most religeous guy, but I've read enough that I'm pretty sure that's not how it's supposed to work if you're close to God.

He continued, "Yeah, and when they're hostile or mean to me, Bad Things happen to them."

I said, "Wow, really?" putting as much of my own hostility and incredulity into those words as I could.

He caught the hint and backed off, mumbling something about telling the kid he was praying for him.  Yeah, I'm sure I'll be included in those prayers now as part of his divine hit list.

All religeous views aside, the thing that I find the most disturbing is the way the reasoning of people like him always starts with, 'Well, I'm a good person so...'  And since it's impossible that he might have been inconsiderate or rude to this kid, it must be that the kid is an evil little punk that deserves whatever he gets.

Highlands Festival

We've got another assistant manager, finally, so I've been getting a little time to myself every once in a while.  Soon I may be working less than 60 hrs!

I went to the Highlands Festival in Estes Park last week with a bunch of friends.  It was definitely an adventure.  Kiso accidentally booked rooms 50 miles past Estes, so there was much driving the night before on dark twisty roads.  Katie, inexperienced in the ways of navigating mountain passes, got severely car-sick more than once along the way.  For my part, I contracted a head cold shortly before departure, and got to endure crazy altitude changes.  The next day we set out again in the morning back toward Estes.  In preparation, I got doped up on decongestants and ibprofen, and Katie skipped breakfast.

We made it just in time to see the end of the parade.  We would have seen it too, except that two blocks from the main street Melissa stepped in a hole and nearly snapped her foot off at the ankle.  Fortunately it was within a hundred yards of a pharmacy, and we were able to get her an ankle brace.  Rather than force Melissa to limp all the way to the festival, we piled into Lindsay's car and dropped off her, Kirstin, Katie, and myself.  Once Lindsay and Kiso were safely out of sight parking somewhere, Melissa realized that she'd left her shoe in the car.  I loaned her mine while we waited for the drivers to bring it with them.

As it turned out, we were all too stubborn to let go of our high spirits.  Melissa limped bravely onward, I wandered through a haze of antihistimines, and Katie didn't eat a thing all day.  In spite of it all, we still all managed to have fun watching the dancing, jousting and corgie races.

We're the most versital species we've ever met

I stole a few hours of free time from the theatre yesterday and had put on some Babylon 5 reruns in the background while I was doing some much-needed housework.  I won't bore anyone with the details of each episode, but they kept going on about how awesome humans were.  About how if the Membari or some other race had build the space station they would have just filled it with their own people, but humans invited all the other races to live there too and created a community.

We see that a lot in various scifi and even some fantasy; Star Trek comes immediately to mind.  There's the Klingons, who are like humans but very violent and war-like.  The Vulcans, who are like humans but very logical and emotionless.  And so on.  When Gene Roddenberry first came up with these aliens, he took a certain set of human traits and amplified them until an entire culture was built around them.  You could say the same for elves and dwarves in fantasy settings.  The kicker is that none of these so-called aliens are so alien that we can't picture a human behaving the exact same way.

Now, decades of seeing and reading about these human-like aliens has created a sort of cultural feedback in our collective self-image.  Klingons may all be warriors, and Vulcans may all be intellectuals, but humans can be any of those things!  We've begun to see versitility as our defining attribute.  It's true that our concepts of what real aliens might be like (potentially posessing motives and beliefs we would find totally incomprehensible) have expanded, but the idea of ourselves as being the most versital and adaptable has stuck.

I think of Contact, where the alien representative and it's culture are potentially so bizzare that he appears as the astronaut's father in a childhood dream.  Even so, he tells her that they have never encountered a species like humans, who are at the same time capable of both breathtaking beauty and incredible horror.

Is it a bad thing?  I don't think so.  After all, versitility has become something we pride ourselves on.  We can relate to and find common ground with anyone, no matter how alien.  Or so we think.  When we do finally encounter true aliens, you can bet that there will be those who try as hard as they can to communicate with them and to see things from their perspective.  ...And since we're such a versitile race, I'm sure there'll be some who will want to blow them all out of existence too.

And now we're back to the BAD kind of tired.

I just broke my own record with a 76 hour week.  Yay me.
Jay was all set to lay into me this morning for hiring some guy he didn't approve in triplicate two weeks prior.  He must have sensed the utter disinterest in my voice when he talked to me over the phone though, because he suddenly backed off and barely even mentioned it.  The second candidate for assistant manager dropped out of the race yesterday, leaving us with numbers three and four, both of whom I interviewed and approved.  I've almost got enough energy to be smug about it, but I'm past caring who we hire just so long as we hire someone who will make it possible for me to leave the theatre every once in a while.
Scott Pilgrim wasn't spectacular, but I thought it was very clever.  I was disappointed it bombed so hard in the boxoffice.  I'm not even much of a Michael Cera fan, and I still saw it twice before it left.

Good tired

So tired... but in a good way this time.  Not in the 75hr work week way, like on Thursday.  Amazingly, I managed both Friday and today off.  Unfortunately on Friday, after last week, I couldn't stop thinking about work.  Employee schedules, delivery schedules, training the projectionist on the new digital 3D projectors, the ceiling that collapsed Thursday night when the roof sprung a leak...  It had been so long since I had any significant time off at all, let alone a full day, I didn't know what to do with myself.  I spent most of the day wandering around in a daze.  Of course, it didn't help that they kept calling about every other hour with some question or another.

That night I snapped out of it enough to go see Kiso's show in Denver.  It's closing next month and it was probably going to be my only chance to see it.  It was way good, and even though the audience energy was way low, the actors kept theirs up.  I stopped by Kiso's place long enough to say hi before heading back up so I could be up early to get the house cleaned up for some realtors who were coming by in the morning.  Turned out to be a total waste because they came an hour early, right about the time I was getting started.

After that, the day went a little better, which is why I'm tired in a good way.  Three hours in the car, one sister-in-law's birthday, running around climbing and playing with my 9 year old nephew, and swiming in the hotsprings.  It was awesome.  And there wasn't a single call from the theatre all day.

A random thing to know

When electricity was considered an imponderable substance, it was thought to be some sort of intangible fluid.  Because of that, many electrical terms are based on hydraulic analogies like electric current and the flow of electricity.

Okay, it's not so much something I learned as it is something I just realized and thought it was cool.

Even cooler is the realization that even today we still have imponderables.  Like electricity and heat in the 16th century they are mysterious substances that we barely understand and can't even detect except through indirect observation of their effects on the real world.  Substances like Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

Hazing the new boss

We're well into it now as upper management tries to gauge how gullible I am and how much extra work they can convince me is usual for this position.  As if I won't notice that these various reports they're demanding be done every week are labeled 'monthly such-and-such report'.  They also tried to cut my payroll budget by about 15%.  Normally I wouldn't take crap like that, but right now I'm too tired to care.  I haven't had a day off since I took on the General Managership however many weeks ago it was, and I've put in an average of about 65hrs a week.  So instead of wasting energy by arguing and raising hell, I'm considering just quitting.

Nyar! Ties BAD!!

Frickin' uniform.  Some days the worst thing about this whole General Manager deal is the fact that I have to wear a tie.  And just in case that isn't bad enough, it's a clip-on tie.  I don't know how it can be possible, but it feels like the clip-on is restricting the blood flow to my brain even more than a normal tie does.

Today I'm rebelling.  Today I brought in my own tie, which I must tie myself.  My tie has Doctor Doom on it.

I've got a pretty decent collection of awful ties.  They're how I try to defy convention even on those occasions when convention is required (in tie form).  All of them are about as aesthetically painful as Doom, or worse.  Heh heh heh.

Dreamscapes

I finally got around to seeing Inception last night, and it was indeed awesome.  My enthusiasm couldn't even be dampened by the all-too-familiar glazed eyed expression I received when I tried to tell Geoff about it when I got home.  It was fast-paced and expertly put together to keep the audience in the loop as to what was going on simultaneously in each dream world.  The various twists at the end were amazing.

My favorite parts were those where they had to interact with each others' subconscious projections, even fighting with their own.  The idea of what something or someone represents to us on an unconscious level is fascinating to me.  I really liked The Cell and What Dreams May Come for the same reasons.  Where are we in our minds, when we dream?  Who are we in the stories of our lives?  Am I the hero or the villain, or just a bystander?  Who are my allies and who is my nemesis, if I have any of either?

Just more evidence of my dream obsessions...

The secret is out

I hit about 45 hours without sleep right around the time the sun was rising this morning before I finally zonked out completely.  Many would ask why...  but honestly I couldn't give you a valid reason.  True, I spent most of the time writing, but it wasn't like I was filled with any kind of driving inspiration (this time).  I just didn't feel like sleeping.

Unfortunately, in my weakened state I let slip a terrible secret and I figured I should just get it out in the open now.  It's my job to be the asshole at the movie theatre who won't let people bring in outside food.  A tragic fate, but I accept it and refuse to be ashamed of it.

Really, as long as people are discreet (ie, I can't see it) I don't really care.  I'm not about to start frisking everyone, though if you come in from 80 degree weather with your jacket zipped up and bulging in strange places I might stop you.  It's those people who walk in practically waving around their Starbucks or McDonalds cup in plain sight as if to say, 'Just you try and stop me.'

Personally I don't think it's particularly fair either, and I've smuggled more than a little contraband into other theatres too (though I don't hold it in plain sight and raise hell when they stop me).  But hey, it's my job and I'm gonna do it.

Friday: an experiment in chemistry, game theory, and sleep depravation

At about 39 consecutive hours without sleep now.  I've reached the point where I start to doze without realizing it and dream for a minute or two, my brain picking up where reality left off.  Then I snap out of it again and unfortunately can't remember much other than everything started getting weird for a moment there.  Normally, that doesn't start happening until around hour 50, but working two 13hr days over this sleepless span of time has sped up the fatigue a little.

We were doing an inventory and going through all the cleaning supplies in the janitor's closet the other day.  Someone must have mixed up some chemicals or something, because today most of the glass in the lobby was horribly streaked.  It must have created some kind of sediment that looked like hard water all over the windows, only it was quite a bit more tenacious.  Sami and I went through all our various cleaning products with little to no effect on the streaks, even very carefully applying some of the hydrocloric acid-based toilet cleaner.  Eventually Sami managed to find a combination of techniques that cleaned off the streaks.  Meanwhile, I carefully emptied all our spray bottles of window cleaner down the drain (individually with the water runnung) and refilled them properly.

I got the chance to weild my general manager authority while dealing with some troublesome customers as they tried to take their Starbucks into the theatres with them.  You'd expect people to complain more about the outrageous prices, but it still surprises me how shocked and offended people are when you tell them they can't bring in outside coffee,or ice cream or buckets of chicken.  Today I argued with the two women in question for almost five minutes, and at one point even had to physically block their path when they tried to just walk in anyway.
They asked to speak with a manager.  That's me.
They wanted the general manager.  Still me.
Who was my superior then?  Here's his card.  He lives in another state.

All said politely and calmly with my fake plastic smile in place.  It's a little worrying to me on some level, how good I've gotten at that smile.

What do swords dream about?

Power and Intent is one of those short stories I write more to explore an idea than anything else.  The idea of an intelligent weapon was always strange to me when I encountered it.  Especially those that actually spoke to or advised their weilders.  It was more like a person had been transformed into a sword and was still able to communicate than that the sword was actually itself intelligent.

What if a sword wasn't enchanted with intelligence, but came to it on its own?  No magical powers or special qualities, just a regular soldier's sword that just happened to become self-aware.  It wouldn't really need to speak or to glow to be used.  It probably wouldn't have any desire other than to continue to do what it was intended for in the first place.

Always in control

I caught a little of Serenity on TV yesterday right about the part where the government assassin said to Mal, "You can't make me angry."  It was one of those lines that you hear and you can't help but think, what does that mean?

I go through bouts of depression every few months or so, but I'm lucky in that it's mild enough for me to be able to deal with it without medication.  For me, dealing with it means recognizing it and thinking my way through it.  It's not really quite that simple and sometimes it doesn't work, but the point is that I think about it a lot.  One of the things I realized is that depression and anger are two sides of the same coin.  They're both emotional responses to when you feel like you're not in control.  You can respond to that with depression or with anger.

So when someone says, "You can't make me angry." they're telling you that they're always in control, and  nothing you can do will be able to change that enough to tick them off.  Of course, that just makes it all the funnier as Mal repeatedly out-manuvers him and catches him off guard until the assassin finally loses his cool.

Inspiring facial hair

I've got a beard.  Now it looks like Jon, the current assistant manager at the theatre, is growing one.  It's far from the first time this has happend.  For some reason, however bizzare, I seem to inspire a lack of shaving in others.  It makes no sense to me at all, but very often a week or two after I meet somebody, they decide to grow a beard.  Normally I probably wouldn't even notice except it's always been the same style I've got at the time, goatee, full, etc.  Maybe there's some kind of rugged empathy going on.  In any case it's very strange.

Too much pressure!

The crazy 70hr week cut off too many artistic outlets, and try as I might I can't make proofreading into a creative endeavor.  So last night I gave in and started writing as soon as I got home at about 10pm.  It was something like 4am when I dozed off on my keyboard.  At some point I must have sleepwalked my way to bed, because that's where I woke up when my alarm went off at nine this morning.  Huge mistake though it may be, I can't hold it back any longer.  My only hope is that I can still force myself to finish proofreading somewhere in between.

Disturbingly familiar

I've been the new boss for a week now, and things are running more or less the way they always have.  The old boss took all his notes about staff schedules with him, so there were a few conflicts to resolve when I put up next week's shifts.  Beyond that, the only real headache has been burrowing through his 'put it in a pile' filing system.  There have been no new responsibilities, no changes in job description (i.e. keep it all running), and this week has passed just like so many others.

Of course, this all leads to one very important question:  If I was doing it all already, why was he being paid 35% more??

[sigh]

A few more of these little life lessons, and hopefully it will finally sink in that it's an idiot who impulsively trusts others not to try to screw him over.

Life just got a lot more complicated

The boss got fired on Friday.  Officially it was because he kept defying corporate policy, but rumors are flying that he was letting his kids watch movies after-hours.  The janitor complained when they started leaving trash and beer bottles everywhere.

Friday was supposed to be my day off, but the RM called and asked me to come in for a meeting.  Oblivious, I wandered in for what I thought was going to be an hour at most.  Instead, I was offered the General Manager-ship of the theatre.  From my perspective I had two choices: I could say yes and be paid for doing the job, or I could say no and do the job anyway while they looked for someone else and *not* get paid any more.  I said yes.

So the last four days have been hectic running around trying to adapt to the hole in our management staff.  I probably would be more excited about it if a week ago I hadn't been seriously considering just quitting.  Also, I have a vaguely irrational fear of authority over others.  But what the hell, I'll give it a shot.  If my fears are ultimately justified and it sucks even worse than my old position, I can still decide to quit.

Worldbuilding - refurbishing old worlds

Going to lean toward the geeky a little... well okay, more than a little.

Our current RPG is fast approaching its climactic conclusion, and everyone's already started probing me for what my plans are when I take up the mantle of GM again.  It's been fun to be a player again for a while, but I've been itching to become the orchestrator once more.  I was thinking of something a little more steampunk themed for a change, so I've been doing some research.

I keep kicking around the question of how far science has progressed and what's possible.  The real problem is that we all think in terms of modern day science.  Single-shot pistols that take a minute or more to reload aren't too much worse than crossbows, but it would only be a matter of time before someone asks about finding an engineer to design something self-contained and bullet-like.  Then comes the inevitable argument over why they can't suggest something like that.  It's only the next logical step, after all.  Well of course it seems that way to us, since we've already taken it.

It's because of that specific premonition I've already decided that gunpowder has not been invented and never will be.  But variations on the same problem keep appearing as I try to map out this new world.  What do I say when one of the players says she wants to create a telephone from a telegraph?  I could just say it doesn't work, but she'll only try again and become upset if it doesn't work eventually, since we both know it's entirely possible to do with the technology of the era.  I finally realized that the root of the problem was that both she and I would be picturing scientific advancement as a point on a single path leading straight to where we are now.  The applications might turn out a little different, but when science advanced there was really only one direction it could possibly go.

I started looking into some of the defunct theories proposed back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and found a goldmine of possibilities.  Concepts like the aether, caloric, and the od.  They may have since been proven incorrect, but they weren't just wild ideas cooked up by irresponsible theorists trying to explain what they didn't understand while the real scientists were in the lab discovering the true nature of the universe.  These theories were widely accepted by the scientific community.  Numerous experiments were conducted and papers written by respected scientists in attempts to explore the nature of these 'imponderables'.

Who's to say that those theories weren't actually true in my world?  They were explanations for the universe as they understood it.  The current level of technology was fully within the possibilities suggested.  Sending an electric current through a wire was pictured as being the same as pouring water down a tube.  You could switch the flow on and off to send simple messages, but it would be impossible to modulate it with magnets in order to transmit sound.  Other possibilities are suggested though.  Would wires made from other materials be able to quickly channel heat or light (also visualized as intangible liquids) to distant locations just as quickly?  I think I'm really on to something now.

Surfing ability restored!

I finally gave in and did a full restore on my home computer.  Goodbye to anything I did over the last four months.  Fortunately I'm a big fan of hard copies, so most of what I wrote has survived in one form or another.  Downloaded music and movies though... gone.  [sigh]

As I'm trying to put everything back together, I keep noticing how unfamiliar my computer is now.  All the miscelaneous upgrades and add-ons that I'd become accustomed to, along with the inevitable bugs and glitches, are gone.  The future is coming fast, where computers each have their own individual personalities based on those of their users.  The singularity isn't far now!

I've just about got all my hardware reinstalled, then I'm off into the web to try to hunt down some of those files I lost.

Predators, or at least half of it

Went and volunteered to prescreen Predators tonight to make sure it was put together correctly before the first show tomorrow.  Unfortunately that turned out to be a mistake, because they were having many varied issues with the closing paperwork.  The unfortunate part was when Jon kept coming into the theatre to get my help with why this or that number was way off.  Overall, I probably saw about half of the movie, and missed the entire end while we were sorting everything out.  What I saw wasn't bad at all, and I'll definitely have to go watch it again straight through to get the whole story.

One of the things I liked most about the Predator movies was the way the predators seemed to have an entire culture that we were only catching glimpses of.  Obviously, the Alien vs Predator movies don't figure into this at all.  I never even bothered to see the second one.  The book on the other hand, having absolutely nothing to do with the movie, wasn't too bad at all.  Again, there were lots of insights into the bizzare predator culture.  I especially liked their concept of Aliens as the ultimate "hard meat" and Humans as the ultimate "soft meat" (anything not a predator is pretty much considered meat).

As hard meat, the Aliens were perfectly evolved killing machines, naturally deadly and instictively able to adapt to just about any environment.  Just one could slaughter a predator if he was caught off-guard for even a moment.  Hunting these things was a very common part of the predators' culture as exercises used to hone their reflexes and combat abilities.

Hunting the human soft meat on the other hand was considered the ultimate test of a predator's abilities.  Only the most skilled and battle-hardened predators could even obtain permission to do it.  The reason was that although at first humans were laughably easy to kill, they learned quickly.  Unlike the Aliens, which had known attacks to defend against and very few weaknesses to exploit, over time the humans would start learn your attack patterns and figure out how to exploit your weaknesses.  Once you started hunting them it would only be a matter of time before they started hunting you in turn.

Back to the movie, one of the nice things about all the human charcters being dangerous combatants was that there was hardly any panicking or "this can't be happening" mantras being chanted.  Granted, it's a pretty realistic response for most people, but those characters always grate on my nerves.  These guys kept their wits about them and did their best to deal with the situation as it came.  There were a couple of fights initially, but once they figured out what was going on they realized that holding grudges wasn't going to help them any.  I can't say for sure since I missed half of it, but it looked like the writer actually left the requisite 'trouble-maker' off the roster.  You know the one I mean: he's the guy who's already proven himself untrustworthy but for some unknown reason is still part of the group, and you can just tell that he's only going to cause problems and create conflict until he finally betrays everyone or somehow chickens out.

So yeah, I'm definitely eager to see the rest of it.

Sensory Stone

I was surfing around today and happened across a story devoted to the game Planescape Torment.  It was more like a retelling of the entire storyline of the game, but it was such a story-intensive game that the story worked well.  Much better than the published novilization in any case.  The point of this though, is that it listed several of the sensory stone experiences, which were awesome.  So I thought I'd throw out one of my favorites (it may have been paraphrased; I seem to remember most of the text in the game was written in second person):

Bitter Loathing

Venomous tears of pain brimming in my narrow yellow eyes, I gathered the tattered remains of my small, scaled, red wings off the floor. I humbly backed out of Groba's study, gritting my needle-like teeth beneath sealed lips.


Sure, I was only a spinagon - least among devils - but that was no cause for a pit fiend to tear my wings off because he didn't like the message I had brought him! What would my gelugon master do, now? He certainly couldn't say anything to Groba, and what use was a spinagon without its wings? I would probably get cast into the Pit of Flame for 'incompetence!'

Vengeance out of the question, there was little to do but shake my clawed fist and hate, hate, *HATE* Groba with all the loathing my hard little black devil's heart could muster...

Learning things... sort of

At first I was dismayed to see that my post hadn't gone through yesterday.  Then realization dawned that I'd put it in the wrong blog.  So, here it is again!




I spent today doing more research. I picked up a palmistry book and was skimming through it for useful hints and naturally found myself glancing at my hand every page or so. As I continued, I became more and more confused until I finally just had to stop skimming and read it. Unfortunately, that didn't help much either. I have a Murderer's Thumb? Why does it look like I have three different and divergent destiny lines? Why is the Venus ring longer than my heart line? And what the heck does that line mean? Either the book was grossly incomplete, or just like pretty much every investigation I've done on the state of my metaphysical self, my palm is wierd.

In my astrological birth chart I was born under a night sky that was completely empty; all the planets, the sun and the moon, were crowded together at the bottom of the chart. Every Tarot reading I've had has pulled up cards of doom, like the Tower and Death. And there was that one time a crazy red-headed gypsy put a curse on me...

Now apparently, my palm tells me that I'm unhappily married, a violent murderer, and will live to the age of about 25. Seems like either I'm constantly narrowly avoiding crazy amounts of misery, or I got somebody else's fate by mistake. In any case, it looks like I'm living on borrowed time.

Internet-less

Well, my computer continues in its slow painful death.  Incredibly luckily, I have most of my stuff backed up somewhere.  It's not something I've ever felt the need to do before.  In the past my computers have aged relatively gracefully, picking up minor non-lethal viruses and malware along the way.  I've never contracted anything that's caused it to collapse on itself.  Because of my forethought (or my family's since they're the ones that gave me the backup thing) I'm near giving up and accepting the losses and wiping the thing.  'Cause I miss my computer!

Jonah Hex - not quite another steampunk western

I got around to seeking Jonah Hex the other day.  (I see less movies than you'd think, working at a movie theatre as I do.)  It was better than I expected it to be.

I'm not familiar at all with the comic book it's based on, primarily since it's a DC publication.  (not a fan, overall)  There were a few political elements, as the nemesis in question is labeled a 'terrorista' by the American president.  With good reason, since he targets primarily churches and hospitals for detonation.  From what I could tell though, that's where it ended.  Hex is resolutely anti-authority throughout, both toward the current government authorities and toward his former Confederate commanders.  He's the typical hardened loner who doesn't let himself get too close to anyone, since they always seem to get hurt.  There's also the usual compliment of steampunk gear: horse-mounted dual gatling guns and what have you.

That said, there were also several breaks from the expected forms. 

to be continued...

Whoops, got cut off.  I was utilizing my break at work when all internet access died.  It wasn't me, I'm sure of it, but we had to get a new modem.  Then my home computer started eating itself.  Still not sure what's up there.

So yes, I'm writing this from work.  But I'm on my break!  Really!

I'll write more later when I find some time.

A Random Thing to Know

German chocolate cake isn't from Germany.  It's named after its creator, Samuel German.

When computers finally fail, we're all doomed

We've been without our main server for about five days now.  This is where we learn who really knows what all those numbers actually mean and who has just been blindly typing things every day.  You can probably tell where this is going.  Seems that while I was gone everybody just stared at the forms for a while and then left them in a stack for me.  I'm reminded why I wrote all those programs and spreadsheet conversions in the first place.  I almost don't blame them, these things are such a pain to deal with directly.  Almost.

Oh well, enough about that.  Having failed miserably as a host, I took Saturday off and went down to Denver to try to make up for it in part while Kirstin was there before she went back home Sunday.  She was crashing at Kiso and Melissa's appartment, so I invited myself and declared I was cooking dinner (something I'd wanted to do while Kirstin was visiting but hadn't had time).  Not to be left out, Kirstin decided to cook some chocolate cake for desert.  While Kiso and Melissa were off doing job things, Kirstin and I were wandering around finding ingredients, then taking shifts cooking in the tiny kitchen while showing each other our respective collections of silly/dumb youtube clips.  It was exactly what I'd hoped to be doing while she was up here, and I was only interrupted twice by calls from the theatre.

Lindsay was invited over too, and dinner was declared excellent.  After that we retired to Kiso's computer to watch Erik the Viking (only Kiso and I had seen it before) and drink Kirstin's home-made scumble.  Am I the only one who expects a director's cut to have more in it?  What's the point of paying more for it if they've cut out bits and pieces everywhere?  Meh.  Apparently Kiso didn't remember it as well as I did, so I was the only one who cried out in shock whenever a scene was skipped.  Still, on the whole it was bloody hilarious.

That night I crashed on Kiso's floor while Kirstin took the couch.  The next day I said goodbye again to Kirstin, feeling that I'd at least made up a little for the lameness of the previous week.

My life continues to suck my soul away, and somehow I continue to be surprised

Kirstin, long-time bud from college, came up to visit for a few days last week.  Coincidentally, last week all scheduling went to hell.

She told me a little late, so I wasn't able to ask for time off.  No big deal, I'll try to leave early on this day and go in late on that day, get someone to cover my shifts at the bookstore, and we'll still have mornings to hang out.

Day 1:  Nobody could cover my shift at the bookstore, so I wasn't available to hang out until 8pm.
Day 2:  The boss woke me up at 9:30am and asked me to come in early to watch the techs install the new projector, because apparently they can't do it without someone watching.  Lame, but since I was doing my leave early/go in late thing the next couple of days, I figured it was an okay trade.  Left at 8:30pm, went out for sushi with K.
Day 3:  The boss woke me up at 8:00am and wanted to know why the hell I wasn't at the theatre meeting the techs.  I went to the theatre to meet the techs and proceeded to wait for another FOUR HOURS until I was scheduled to come in and open the theatre.  They showed up around 6pm just as I was trying to leave early.  Took K to game night, where we grilled and goofed off.
Day 4:  Go in late day!  Was called every hour or so with angry questions by the theatre, but they were preoccupied with the computers all crashing.  K and I played discgolf and then wandered around having fun in Breck for a while before I went to work at 6pm.  She came by the theatre later and we watched the last show of Prince of Persia.
Day 5:  Was woken up by call from the bookstore at 9am.  No, I didn't know I was scheduled to work today.  I'll be right there.  Got away from bookstore at 1pm.  Okay, 2 hours to hang out with Kirstin before I have to work at the theatre and she has to leave.  At 1:03pm the boss called to say they're almost ready to start training us with the new projector and I need to come in.  Got there at 1:20 and watched them be 'almost ready' for about 45 minutes before finally losing all patience and leaving.  Spent a blissful 50 minutes eating pizza for lunch with K with my phone turned off, then went in at my scheduled time at 3pm.

Hey, no worries.  It'd only been 5 years since Kirstin last visited.  I'll probably see her up here again in another 5.

I'm pretty laid back about most things.  Losing my job would suck, but I can always get another one.  A random person throws a rock through my car window, lame that I have to replace it but what else can I do?  What I do stress about is my friends and relationships.  Windows and jobs come and go, but you can't replace love and respect once it's lost.  I'm seriously upset right now that Kirstin practically wasted her vacation days to come up here and veg out at my place and endure my obnoxiously over-friendly roommates while I worked a freaking 60-hr week.  I wouldn't blame her if she didn't visit again even in 5 years, and Kirstin is the only friend who's ever come just to visit me (rather than coming by because they're in the area doing something else).

Argh.  I try not to get overly dramatic but like I said, this is what's most important to me.

I've never been to New Zealand before...

I randomly had last Friday off (working at a cinema, it doesn't happen often), and found myself over at Max's along with Abby.  Abby and I each managed to break one wine glass, both just after having been filled of course.  With the wine prematurely depleted, we had no choice to move on to vodka.  From there, conversation quickly devolved into random philosophy, metaphysics, entymology, art and travel.  Travel specifically in the form of poorly-conceived plans to go biking in New Zealand.

Having been drunkenly advocated along with plans that involved starting a band, going to San Francisco, and various large-scale art projects, the NZ plan doesn't have great chances of actually coming to fruition.  But the idea stuck with me, a bug in my brain like Ireland was last year.  I could even feel it through the haze of alcohol fumes that night, until we stumbled across the highway to close down the Snake.  After that, it's a blur of dancing and struggling to hear/comprehend Abby and Max.

After an unpleasant visit to the bathroom to empty my stomach, I passed out in Max's guest room.  I was scheduled for a double-shift Saturday at both the bookstore and the theatre, so I stumbled out of bed at 7:00am and chugged a few glasses of water before driving home to get ready.  Turns out that was a really bad idea.  Luckily, I made it home okay just in time to throw up all the water I drank.  It was about that point that I realized I was still pretty drunk, and called in sick to the bookstore.  Then I went back to bed for another five hours.

Still, New Zealand...

Real world idiots

Haven't posted in a while, but there's been a lot going on.  I feel worse for not posting anything on the other one.  Too much real life stuff getting in the way.

We're installing another new digital projector at the theatre, so there's all the usual scheduling problems that go along with shutting down a whole screen for a few days.  Like where nobody realizes that maybe we won't be able to show any movies in the theatre.  When I brought it up, there was a long embarrassed pause, then they said they'd get back to me.

Meanwhile, some kids decided to hone their rock-throwing skills and used my car for target practice.  Judging by the footprints on my doors, they also tried to work on their denting abilities.  Luckily they sucked at that and left no lasting damage.  Too bad my windows can't say the same.

The flying dream...

It's a short one, but possibly meaningful.  I think.

I was flying.  Soaring above the landscape so high that I could see over the mountains.  When I held my arms out straight I could glide along effortlessly, and by holding them at my sides I shot through the air so that the landscape was a blur below.  Then I landed.

I was in a town I didn't recognize.  As soon as my feet touched the ground, I knew something was wrong.  I tried to take off again, but I stayed where I was.  Running down the street, I leapt into the air only to fall to the asphalt.  In a moment of mad panic, I climbed to the roof of a three-storey house and tried jumping from the eave.  I flew like a rock and landed in someone's garden.

At the edge of town was a cliff.  It was miles high.  As I threw myself over the edge, it didn't even occur to me what might happen if this plan failed.  The rock face blurred past me while I gained speed.  Finally, I spread my arms and pulled up out of the dive.  I flew away from the strange town.


Hmm....  Reading back over that, it seems like there's a suicidal bent to it.  That is definitely not the hidden meaning.

Many things happen

How long has it been since I posted last?  I forget.  At least a week.  It's been a busy week.  First off, I had a dream which I will talk about later.

Next, the district manager was in town interviewing potential assistant managers and terrorizing the boss and myself.  The boss began with 'Sorry I dropped the ball on [insert arbitrary unfinished task here]', until he found something wrong he could loosely pin on me, then used that as a spring board to assign ultimate blame for everything.  Then he told me I needed to come in on my night off to help out with the Midnight show of Sex & the City 2.

I showed up while everybody was wandering around trying to remember how to deal with Midnight shows.  I told everybody where they needed to be and what they needed to do while organizing all the promotional decorations and givaways.  No problems whatsoever; I excel at organized chaos.  Am I bragging?  Heck yes.

Thursday was my other day off, which I spent digging holes, cutting wood, and doing other yardwork-oriented chores.  Then I made the greivous mistake of wandering into the theatre for five minutes to get a free drink.  Some time around minute number four, alarms started going off from the projection booth.  Unable to resist the instict to help, I wandered upstairs.  By the time I got there, they'd figured out that one of the belts had broken on the projector.  As I stood there dirty, sunburnt and tired, two unfortunate facts flashed through my mind:

1. The last time a belt broke it took me two hours to take apart the projector and replace it.

2. I'm the only one there who's ever replaced a broken belt.

The boss promised that he'd make up the extra time to me this week.  Apparently his idea of making it up to me was to forget that I'd asked for a short closing shift Monday, so that I could spend some time with my family up in Wyoming, and scheduled me for a ten-hour opening shift.  He wanted to take Memorial Day off, it seemed.  A little wheeling and dealing with the rest of the crew let me at least land a regular closing shift.

Wyoming was beautiful, and we all enjoyed it by going out to play golf.  We did pretty well for ourselves, losing only five balls.  It's hard to tell for sure though, since we somehow lost the scorecard as well.  For dinner we had chicken nuggets and chocolate cake by request of my nephew the eight-year-old birthday boy.  Now it's nose to the grind again though.

A weird moment of syncronisity

A weird thing happened a moment ago while I was getting ready for bed.  Early, I know, but with the total lack of a good night's sleep last night, I thought I should play it safe.  Anyway, I was fishing my phone out of my pants pocket from the laundry pile to set the alarm for tomorrow when I randomly thought about Max and the way we sometimes call each other at the same time.  It's not like we call each other every day, so it would only stand to reason that we'd call at the same time every once in a while.  We're just long-time good friends, so I can't say we've got some psychic rapport going on either.  We just seem to find ourselves on the same brain wavelength sometimes.

We've simultaneously dialed each other a couple of times.  There've also been times when I'll think, 'I haven't talked to Max in  a while, I should give him a call.'  And my phone rings just as I reach for it.  Guess who it is?  It's even happened when he or I have been a few hundred miles apart in different states.  There's never been anything creepy about it, just, "Hey dude, I was just going to call you!"

Back to the point, I was climbing into bed while pondering these strange coincidences.  I opened up my phone to set the alarm and... yep, guess who had sent me a text not two minutes ago?  Never heard it ring or noticed any blinking light indicating a message.  Even if I had subconsciously registered the ringing or message light, I don't have anything programmed into it to diferentiate Max's messages from any others.  I didn't even know he was already back in town from Washington DC.

Incredibly, randomly, our thoughts synced up somehow.  Does it mean we've got some kind of deep spiritual connection, or that we knew each other in past lives, or that we're long lost brothers?  I doubt it.  My theory is that it's just a weird syncronisation that happens randomly.  But that doesn't make it any less cool.

Why wouldn't everyone want to know about the state of my internal organs?

Bleagh... I woke up this morning at 6:00am (having gone to sleep at about 3:30am) with some nasty heartburn coupled with a touch of disentery.  It sometimes gets in the tap water up here during the spring melt, when there's overflowing everywhere and streams and rivers pick up extra junk.  The day before, I was being my usual unwise self and drinking lots of water as I lugged boxes around the bookstore.

I've learned from past experience that if I notice the disentery messing with my stomach soon enough, the alcohol in a few beers will kill off all the bacteria and save me from a day or two of extreme discomfort.  The heartburn and the fact that it was 6am made me question that plan of action though.  So I decided to try killing two birds with one stone and had a glass of milk with a shot of honey liquor mixed in.  I may have only wounded the birds, but I think it helped.

In other news unrelated to my bodily functions, we've received word that we may be getting a visit from the District Manager at the theatre.  So we're cleaning up and shining all over the place, because he's even more of a hassle to deal with than my immediate boss.  But it's his job to give us a hard time, I guess.  Thankfully, it's only once every few months that he comes to visit.

Comics and Scrabbles

I had to go down to Denver Thursday afternoon for an appointment with Brittney, so I decided to give Cris a call and see what she was doing.  All she was really up for was hanging out at her place, but after an hour and a half of harrowing criticism, I was fine with that.  Lindsay came over and we went out for asian with Cris' roommate, Melissa.  Afterward, we played Scrabble and listened to the Voltaire CD I brought Cris for a late birthday present.  Then everybody who had normal 9-5 jobs and had to get up in the morning went to their respective beds, leaving me to curl up on the couch with a book for a couple more hours before finally drifting off to sleep myself at about 2:00am.  Working at a movie theatre really messes with your schedule.

I also hit the comic shop while I was there but as I'd feared, since I hadn't been there for a few months, they'd cancelled my hold slot.  Not that I can blame them too much.  My reserves consist of only about seven different subscriptions, while most others are more like two or three dozen.  Still, I can't drive 75 miles to Denver every month just for a few 'zines.  Now my only other option is Mile High Comics, but while they've got much larger stores of back issues, the price goes up monthly.  Maybe I can find a relatively cheap online store...

Must get back to work now.  I wasn't supposed to close tonight, but since the other manager didn't show up, it's either that or close early.  Tempting, but I like being paid.

New book

I read Spellwright by Blake Charlton over the weekend, and it was good!  It was one of those high fantasy books we're seeing more of recently where the author creates a new and specificly intricate system of rules by which magic operates (other examples are Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson and Shadowfall by James Clemens).  In this world, there are different magical languages which wizards use to shape spells.  The main character, Nicodemus weal, is an unfortunate type of wizard called a 'cacographer' whose touch immediately causes magical words to become misspelled and corrupted.  The story was very engaging and fast-paced.  I didn't want to put it down.  Of course, also like most new fantasy novels, this was only part one, so now I have to wait for the next volume to be released.

Links to comics

I've added links to my favorite online comics.  You may notice a mad scientist theme, but that's perfectly normal since mad scientists are awesome and comics about them are similarly so.  At the top of the list are my favorites: Girl Genius and Narbonic.  I also highly recommend Dresden Codak, which frequently travels so far into geekdom that it comes out the other side, and XKCD which features the darkest, most philosophically introspective stick people ever drawn who also study physics.

Reconnected!

Home internet works again, so I can stop using the office computer to post on my lunch break!  I have no idea why, but for some reason switching the ethernet connection between the modem and the computer for a usb connection got it to stop acting up.  And I know for sure there wasn't anything wrong with the wire or connections.  Now on to the scanner, which inexplicably unplugged and uninstalled itself while I wasn't paying attention.

I had the day off yesterday and got to spend about five hours writing uninterrupted!  It was awesome.  That night I went out for pool and darts with the roommates.  It was fun to go hang out, but when we got back they immediately poured themselves some more drinks and fired up Guitar Hero (it's my TV that has the PS2 hooked up to it, naturally).  In situations like that, both the game volume and obnoxious over-friendliness start on a steep climb, so I decided to go to work and relax.

The boss was there, so I had to endure the arbitrary criticism and recrimination that inevitably accompanies any encounter with him.  After that, I was able to go sit in on the Thursday night prescreenings of Robin Hood and Letters to Juliet.  And yes, prescreening is fully justified, since I caught and fixed a bad splice on Robin Hood.  After all, we should make sure everything's perfect for opening night, shouldn't we?  Actually I see less movies than you'd think, working at a movie theatre.  True, they're free and I get free popcorn and drinks, but it feels too much like going to work on my day off.  Especially since I always seem to notice some problem or another that the projectionist missed, and feel the need to go upstaris and fix it before I can enjoy the movie.

The roommates were still going strong when I got back at about 2:00am, but by then I was beat and feeling much less accomodating than normal.  I made it clear I was going to bed, and they took the hint and relocated downstairs.  There have been enough instances when I griped at them to keep it down, and then again the next morning when I overslept, that now they tone things down pretty quickly when I ask.

Snow and more snow

It's forty degrees in the middle of May and there's a blizzard going on out there!  Obviously, Mother Nature has gone off her rocker.  I can't complain too much, since I heard our messed up weather up here in Colorado is turning into freak tornados when it hits Kansas.  I've seen more than a few in person (never from the inside, luckily) and they're all kinds of scary.

Bad weather is good for the movie theatre business at least.  In the outdoor tourist playground of Summit County, indoor activities consist of pretty much just us and the bowling alley.  Now if there were just some tourists around, we might be in business.

In other news, my modem started acting up again.  This being the new one that replace the old one that was acting up.  Why am I always getting these problems that even the experts look at and say, 'That's not supposed to be possible?'  I wish I was more computer-literate.  I'm still trying to learn enough html language to be able to put pictures on this thing.

Hmmm, must find something to talk about that isn't negative and complaining.  Ah, the new Doctor Who!  What's his name, Matt Smith.  I wasn't too sure about him at first; he seemed a little too much like Peter Davidson's characterization, who was sometimes in my opinion arrogant to the point of childishness, but I'm warming up to him.  For some reason it's an endearing character who is arrogant and irreverent, but who also can quickly and grudgingly admit when he's wrong.  As for the stories, I think they're leaning toward the more fantastic side of things now.  And as much as I loved the last few seasons and how they really explored what it meant to be a 900yr old time traveler, I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with.  Particularly since I heard Neil Gaiman's going to be writing an episode!
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/08/neil-gaiman-dr-who)

I think I might have acutally done that link right.  Ha!

A random thing to know

Foxes look both ways before crossing the street.  Really, I've seen them do it.

Back on the thing

Feeling much better now than last week, though I won't tempt Fate by saying I'm back on the you-know-what again.  I could chalk it up to eccentric broodiness, but really I was just being lame.  It happens; we move on.  I was thinking about deleting the post, but I'm an information pack-rat.  My memory hole is boarded up and welded shut.

I finally wandered into the theatre last night and watched Iron Man 2, and it was awesome.  My jealousy of Tony Stark continues unabated.  I also liked how they stepped up Pepper Potts' skills too, or at least emphasized them more.  Something I noticed in the recent comics is that as Tony uses his crazy genius to create bleeding edge technology and secretly plan for every contingency, she somehow manages to keep up with him throughit all.  Even when he whips out one of those crazy contingency plans, she's usually the one who has to step up and implement it (or clean up after it).  Tony's got his downtime between global conspiracies and supervillains when he gets all angsty, but some of my favorite scenes have been those when Pepper stands up from a computer where she's been coordinating a team of super heroes fighting an army of zombies, takes off the headset through which she's been having a conference with the executive staff of a multinational corporation, and vaguely realizes that she hasn't slept more than a couple of hours a day in weeks.  Then she has to go find out why Tony is blowing things up outside.  Pepper doesn't have Tony's bottomless well of inspiration and creativity, and yet she does everything he does short of inventing crazy stuff.  Tony may have genius, but Pepper has skills.

My only complaint with the movie would be that it was pretty anti-climactic (after the massive robot battle, of course).  [spoiler warning] They spent even more time in this movie than the first one building up the whole thing with SHIELD and then at the end of it all, Fury gave Stark a "We're not hiring"?  What, did Robert Downy Jr. turn down a contract at the last minute?

We're not who we were anymore

The last one probably belongs in the other blog, but right now it feels very descriptive.  I seem to keep losing old friends.  I'm still not discounting the possibility of having too much going on or some other reason, but two months of unreplied messages and emails is a bad sign.  I know we're none of us the same people we once were, but does that mean we can't even stay acquainted anymore?  These are the people who I knew best and who knew me best.  We could all take off our public faces and hang out and be ourselves without worrying about accidentally offending someone or being offended.  We trusted each other.

Now the trust is gone, and in some cases has even been replaced by crazy amounts of passive aggressive hostility.  It hurts like hell when someone whom your first instinct is to trust deliberately sets you up to embarrass yourself and does their best to idirectly make you feel worthless.

Sigh... I promised myself this blog wasn't going to become a dump for negative thoughts and emotions, so I'm going to stop myself before I really get going.  In order to keep to that promise however, there may not be very many posts for a while.

Divergant paths

We were all lost in a darkened world then, stumbling forward on paths we couldn't see over obstacles we didn't understand.  Hesitantly, we called out, our need for companions overcoming our fear of what else might lay hidden in the darkness.  Speaking to each other in the dark we found friends and allies, united by a dangerous world we could not see.  Strengthened, we continued on.

As we forged ahead, the light began to grow.  We could see the path on which we walked together, and could look ahead to what lay ahead.  The path grew smaller as others broke off and led away.  The friendships we shared in darkness remained in light, and we still called to each other from our seperate paths.

The light grew until there was no more darkness.  The paths we walked on diverged further and some of us passed out of sight in spite of the light.  Those few of us left, our paths once so entangled with each other, moved out of reach.  I watched with fear burgeoning anew as my allies and confidants traveled on paths that took them far away.  I called out to them, even after they had passed beyond my sight.

Now I find myself alone once more, traveling on my own narrow path.  Those I once trusted and relied upon so heavily in the dark are gone in the light.  When the world was dark and full of unknown dangers, we found safety in numbers.  We traveled together on a common path not out of coincidence, but because we wanted to do so.   In this new illuminated world we can move forward without fear, able to see so far that we do not need each other any more.  In the darkness I walked with trepedation, the paths uncertain but numerous.  In the light I walk with confidence, seeing clearly the lone path ahead.

Thursday night prescreens

I wish I could say that I've just gotten back from previewing Iron Man 2 and that it's totally awesome.  In reality, I've just gotten back from yelling at the projector for the last hour and a half, trying to get it to work.  To add insult to injury, we received two copies of the film so we could run it on two screens.  So everybody else was previewing the other copy while I was stuck upstairs in the projection booth.  Plus, I never did get it working; I'll be getting up bright and early tomorrow morning to meet a technician they're sending up from Denver to look at it.

I think I can say that Tony Stark is someone of whom I'm truly jealous.  Not of his trillion-dollar empire, or his cars or super-model magnetism, but of his mad creative skills.  The way he can juggle five different projects with seven more planned in his head and somehow focus on all of them simultaneously is something I'd kill to be able to do.  I've lost count of the half-finished ideas and works that I lost interest in or just plain forgot about because of something new coming up or lack of time to pursue it.  Who cares if he's a fictional character, the guy's a freaking supergenius that makes me feel like a massive underachiever.  All my flying battle armor does is catch fire and attack the neighbor's car.

Dreams and more dreams

Maybe this is one of those weird side-effects of getting eight hours of uninterrupted sleep at night.

Continuing with the horror movie theme, Sunday night I dreamed I was in a vague city and there were zombies everywhere.  The zombies were all I really remember other than that it was a city.  There might have been vampires too, come to think of it.  It's odd, but none of these have been actual nightmares.  Sure, there's horrible things everywhere that want to eviscerate me, but all I'm really thinking is, Crap, I don't want to be eviscerated.  I'd better get out of here.  None of the panicky fear that jerks you awake in a cold sweat.  In spite of all the fighting, running, and hiding that I'm doing, I think there's still a tiny bit of mind somewhere in the back of my head that still knows it's all a dream.

Monday night the genre shifted from horror to fantasy, and I was in a medieval castle somewhere preparing for war.  The castle was ancient and green from being half-covered with moss, nestled in the back of a box canyon.  We were about to be assaulted by the enemy and were marshalling all of our forces.  I must have been some kind of liutennant or captain, because I was walking around inspecting the defenses and speaking with some of the soldiers as they prepared themselves for the battle.  We were just getting together on top of the walls to plan our strategy when I woke up, so I never even found out who our attackers actually were.  I guess it's kind of a stretch to call this one fantasy, but I definitely had the feeling that it wasn't going to be a typical battle.

Tuesday night, all I really know is that I was dreaming.  This morning was one of those where you wake up quickly, thinking about what you were dreaming.  Then that first waking thought that comes into your head makes the memories of the dream fragment and dart away.  So all I remember is remembering the dream, not the dream itself.

Dream worlds

Yesterday was one long twelve-hour work day of trying to stay awake.  I'm not sure what my problem was, but every time I sat down or even leaned against something it seemed like I was nodding off.  Normally only getting five hours of sleep a night for a week straight doesn't faze me that badly.  Anyway, the point is that I didn't have to come in to work today until 6pm, so I slept in until around 1pm.  And man, did I have some crazy dreams.

The first found me at a college campus.  It wasn't my old college campus, but very similar.  The first clue was that although I knew everybody there in real life, none of them ever went to my college.  The second clue was that I'd been there before in another dream, oddly enough.  There are places that don't exist, but I dream about every once in a while.  Sometimes I recognize parts of them from the real world, hence the similarity to my old college, but there are other parts that I can't place at all.  Other than the campus, there's also a huge waterfall up in the mountains that I visit fairly regularly while asleep.  I wonder if these places are mental landscapes based on our impressions of a place; the concrete reference points that we know so well, combined with those less defined areas that we only catch glimpses of even though we pass them every day.  But if that's the case, then why is the art studio always outside and the art building missing?  Did I mention that I was once obsessed with dreams?

Back to the dream.  We were all hanging out next to the Lit building when we were kidnapped by aliens (this is also how I know it wasn't my old campus, since that almost never happened there).  No secret where that came from: I'd just seen the preview yesterday for the new Predators movie.  Without ever seeing our abductors we were dumped in a strange mock-campus that was a fake simulation of some kind.  Somehow, no matter how far we walked we always found ourself in the same hundred square-yard area.  Soon the various horrors ensued that one would associate with being animals that have been captured for the sole purpose of being hunted.  We were bathed in radiation that was meant to sterilize us, then the weaker specimines were culled and removed by giant spider-things.

During all this I found myself huddled next to a girl who had been a painter and refused to stop just because we were all about to die.  I'm not sure where she got the paints and canvas, but she'd managed to already finish a few, including a pretty good likeness of one of the predator aliens.  Even with everything that had happened, we still hadn't gotten a good look at our captors, but I recognized the one she'd painted immediately.  I also recognized it as a Predator and came to the slow realization that I was dreaming.  So I was able to avoid being hunted for sport by waking up.

I drifted back to sleep and had other, much more vague, dreams that I can't remember clearly other than that they were also very strange.

Spring cleaning

I don't care if there's four inches of snow falling, I've been planning on doing my spring cleaning today for the past week.  I'll just have to put off the outside stuff for a while yet.  I'm sure there's a totally reasonable explanation for it, but having snow dumped on us when it's 40 degrees out is just plain weird to me.

I was really hoping to get some serious writing in this evening, but the roommates have once again taken over the main room where my desk and typwriter are.  Curse my TV which is slightly nicer than theirs!  Oh well, I've given them an hour, but now I'm going to go suggest they vacate to the section of the house they rent and watch their TV so I can get some work done.

And another thing...

I finished Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter the other night, and it was pretty good!  It was written by Seth Grahame-Smith, the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  He took the same approach that he did with Pride and Prejudice, which was to start with what was already there and then fill in the blank spots in between.  Whenever history was unclear about what Abraham Lincoln had done, Seth had him off hunting vampires.  It did start to drag a bit toward the middle, as later in his life Abraham was more of a public figure and the story became less about tracking down lone killers and more about secret conspiracies and the vampires' plans for the United States.  But the story picked up again as Abraham became president and the Civil War broke out.

I've got some friends who are pretty heavily into vampires, but they've never held much appeal for me.  I tried playing that Vampire Masquerade RPG once, but I kept asking, "What's the point, where's the goal?"    So we exist in a torturously dark and seductive world of ever-lasting night?  Well okay, good for us I guess.  Stories about vampire hunters on the other hand, I can usually get more into them.  Someone who's willing to venture into that endless night and take arms against the inhabitants of that darkly seductive world?  That ranks much higher on my coolness scale.

All they need is some pointy hair

Nobody believes me when I say I hate paperwork, because I'm incredibly anal about it. But it's so much easier to deal with and get out of the way when it's organized! There's absolutely no satisfaction in taking a pile of forms and reports and sorting through them for three hours, because at the end of it all, you've still got just a pile of forms and reports.

That's not the real reason I'm irritated, though those three hours that were stolen from my life yesterday didn't help. It's because I'm slowly realizing that my supervisors don't understand the tools they're using to supervise me. I barely understand the programs myself, but after sifting through dozens of convoluted inventory and sales reports it sure seems like I've got a better idea of how it works than they do. I've just about given up trying to explain it to them, but I half-suspect they're being obtuse on purpose since shortages are taken out of my paycheck. What they should be doing is wondering whether it's worth making me waste three hours on the clock just to scrape a little off the top of my pay. Oh well. You know, before this job I didn't think Dilbert was funny.

On the plus side, I also got to climb up into the ceiling and do some rewiring. Making my way between ducts and pipes, kicking up eight years of dust... Okay, not the greatest chore, but afterward I had something concrete to show for it when the electronic signs started working again. After everything else, it was very satisfying to have actually accomplished something in the real world.

A metaphysical slap upside the head every once in a while can do wonders.

I saw a couple of friends in the Imaginary Invalid down in Denver last night at the 73rd St Theater last night, and it was very funny! I recommend it.

Afterward we hung out and watched MST3K until about 1:30am. Rather than drive back, I crashed on her couch that night. I was still lingering and putting off going back up to work the next morning when the landlord came to fix one of the cabinets. Although Cris introdced me as her friend who'd just come to see the show, it was obvious he was making assumtions about a friend of the opposite sex who'd spent the night in a single girl's appartment.

In the past when Cris or I visited each other and went out and did stuff together, it never really bothered me whether people assumed we were a couple or not. What did get to me though, was that Cris was bothered enough by it that she would go out of her way to make sure that total strangers knew we weren't dating. Like it would hurt her social standing or something. One day after she finished explaining to the cashier in the third shop in a row that I was just a friend she was visiting, I finally got fed up and told her, "Just say I'm your brother. It's faster." (We both have red hair, so it's easy to believe.)

This morning though, seeing the look on her landlord's face I could practically hear his thoughts. It was uncomfortable enough to get even me to try to formulate an explination of the platonic nature of our friendship. If that's what Cris feels every time she thinks someone is assuming we're a couple, I can understand a lot more why she feels the need to correct them. Still, I'll probably just start referring to her as my sister, since it really is faster.