| I guess the change jar is safe for the moment, after all. |
[May. 16th, 2013|06:42 am]
|
Getting laid off so suddenly really wrong-footed me, at a point in the year where I had the least money to spare. So, the past couple weeks I've been stretching out the yummier stuff in my freezer, and mostly consuming oatmeal, ramen and rice while waiting to see if the State was willing to pay unemployment. I was about two days away from cashing in the coins in my change jar, but at 3 this morning, the State money showed up in my account.
So now I can put some gas in my car and attend to most of my bills before they become overdue.
And happily, a fellow SubG has presented me with a programming project to fill my spare hours with. |
|
|
| TV ad cliche I've seen enough of |
[May. 10th, 2013|09:31 pm]
|
The trick where you start with one person standing there and another person steps out from behind that person, and then more people step out from behind them?
I've reached my quota of seeing that, thanks. Please take it somewhere else.
And take the CGI talking pigs with it. |
|
|
| I have become ... a destroyer of world ... |
[May. 7th, 2013|10:31 pm]
|
To reclaim seventy meg of space on my web server, I've clobbered the remaining files for Ellowen, a world I came up for an Amber game which ran on Dreamlyrics under the tag AEA.
I stopped running the game in 2004, when I realized in a text environment, I could not properly inundate my players with the information needed for the effect I was trying for. Others can write great volumes at a sustained rate, but not me, over a long period of time.
And here's the Big Secret they were supposed to figure out: The horses were characters, too. |
|
|
| Just saw last year's "Amazing Spider-Man' |
[Mar. 3rd, 2013|01:29 am]
|
"Amazing" is quite a stretch.
The Raimi Spider-Man movies were better in just about every way.
Although this one's Peter Parker does look more like a nebbish from New York City, the movie fails in other NYC points, which makes up for it. For instance, no NYC news anchor would say something like, "The city is being evacuated from 54th Street south." They'd specify Manhattan.
Also, Emma Stone looks too old to be in high school. And Peter Parker's perpetual lack of money is totally missing. I mean, he breaks all sorts of stuff and nobody cares all that much.
Okay, speaking of breaking things, that does lead to some fun slapstick moments. And the Stan Lee cameo in this one is a hoot. But there's no Bruce Campbell.
This movie does go back to the original canon by having the webs shoot from a device, rather than the rather Freudian biological change that had them shooting from his wrists in the Raimi films.
And no J. Jonah Jameson? Feh! |
|
|
| July 4, 1984: the music! |
[Feb. 28th, 2013|06:28 pm]
|
On the Fourth of July in the ominously-foretold year of 1984, I was living in an apartment in downtown Washington, DC.
I celebrated by taking one of these:
which had cost me fifteen bucks or so (new), and feeding its output through one of these:
which had been more expensive, and recording four overlaid tracks of the results on one of these:
The results sounded appropriately dire.
And after recording that, I went up to the roof of the building to hear the Beach Boys playing on the Mall.
So follow this link, and listen! |
|
|
| Class lessons from superhero stories |
[Feb. 27th, 2013|08:56 pm]
|
Watching Arrow, the CW treatment of Green Arrow, I'm reminded that in many tales, superheroes and -villains arise from the super-rich.
Batman, Night Owl, Iron Man, Doctor Doom, the Green Goblin, the Green Hornet, the Green Arrow, are all sorts of rich. Evidently, it's what people start doing when they accrue too much wealth.
I'm not as up on comics lore as 95% of fandom. I'm wondering: Has there yet been a series where the proletariat rises up against the super class? |
|
|