Two weeks left….oy. It still doesn’t feel real, and it probably won’t until I’m on the plane…and even then…

Yesterday I went to see a matinee of the American version of The Grudge. Overall impression…it was unnecessary. It was basically a combination of Ju-on: The Curse and Ju-on: The Grudge (pieces were lifted from both to form a more cohesive story.) The lesser characters were played by the same actors from the Japanese release, it was created by the same director, and it was set in Japan. Many of the camera angles and special effects were similar if not the same (though some special effects were improved upon) and a huge chunk of the movie was in Japanese with English subtitles. The only real difference to the film was that the main characters were now white Americans studying/working abroad. The acting was still well-done (they’d chosen solid, well-known actors like Sarah Michelle Gellar and Bill Pullman) but…it was essentially the same movie. As far as I know, Ju-on was only released a year ago, so really, what was the point? Could American audiences really not enjoy a film that starred only Japanese people? Are we that shallow that we need a white character in the lead role in order to relate to it? That is the only reason I can think of that they wouldn’t just release the original Ju-on over here. Meh. So yeah, it was good, but unnecessary. And only slightly scarier than the original. But maybe it was all the obnoxious teenage girls in the theatre screaming and trying to scare each other.

I also saw The Cell for the first time this weekend. It was playing on the Sci Fi channel so it was full screen, and edited for time and content. Bleh. I knew I was missing a bunch of stuff, but I was intrigued enough by what I saw that I went and bought the DVD (for $11). Hopefully I’ll watch that tonight. Oh, and I must finish watching Brazil as well. I’m about halfway through that, and it’s interesting to say the least. I didn’t quite know what to expect and I’m still a little puzzled by the mood of the film. In any case, I didn’t realize that Terry Gilliam was originally from Minnesota! o.o I need to watch 12 Monkeys again soon too.

Heh, I helped Jon put parts of his car back together. He was pretty upset that he couldn’t get this vent back in the dash and after trying all sorts of different things I simply suggested the brute force method, and it worked! :o He seemed rather pleased after that. XD

Well, it’s my last week of work and I have a bunch of stuff to do before I go. Then I have a week off and then I’m on the plane!

Feeling so urrrrg today. I feel so bloated like I gained 10 pounds since Sunday. Okay, this is really just a test to see if Jon’s rss bot is working. So is it?

22 days left to go. 22 days before I get on the plane, jetting away from the cold and dark of Wisconsin to the warmth and sunniness of Australia. There’s still a huge measure of unreality attached to this, as if it’s only a dream that I’m getting closer to realizing, but will never be real. During the moments that I let myself believe it, it becomes almost too much to handle. It makes me jittery and anxious…not in a bad way, mind you, but in a “HOLY SHIT” kind of way. sigh God, I’m like a broken record. Saying the same damned things over and over again. What else can I do though? You’ve all read this a hundred times already. Okay, moving along…

I spent the weekend at Jon’s again, as usual. Friday night we went up to Green Bay to hang out with Peter and Melissa. I drove Jon’s car so he could fiddle with his car computer (which plays mp3s) and Brian followed behind. Brian missed the turn off so Jon went back to look for him. Heh. We exchanged digital photos, watched the first episode of Black Books, then Brian left, after which we looked at a few slideshows (until the mess of DDR pictures sent us all into a catatonic state.) Jon played through part of Silent Hill 4 since I didn’t feel like it, and I guided him through it with a walkthrough using the other Jon’s laptop. (A nice 15″ powerbook which made me almost want to get one myself.) Once it got to be around 5 am, we packed up and took off. I ended up driving home as well because Jon was nearly unconscious. As the drive went on I started getting really sleepy too so I told Jon to keep talking to me, making me respond, so I would stay awake. I was tapping my feet and humming and doing just about everything I could think of to stay conscious. Oof.

Saturday night Dave came over and we went out to eat in Appleton. Something was going on because all the nice restaurants were packed and young people in formal wear were running all over the place, so it must have been homecoming. In any case, we ended up eating at the newer of our fave Italian restaurants, and enjoyed a nice bottle of red wine….mmmmm. When we got back we were watching something and I was crocheting and eventually I got really tired so I lay down on top of the IDLE blanket and fell asleep clutching my crochet hook. I don’t remember Dave leaving but when I woke up the apartment was dark and all his things were gone. Odd.

I watched part of the Packer game with Brian on Sunday after I awoke, then I went home and did stuff, cleaning and such. I cleared some old crappy music off my Nomad and added newer stuff then recharged it. I also tried to convert the Black Books episodes to DVD format, but I’m not sure I really succeeded. Later in the evening, I did a speed-through of Silent Hill 2 using a walkthrough and was able to beat the game in 2:24. I wanted to do it again but I knew I’d be up too late if I did so I had a screwdriver and watched some Spaced. God I love that show. Britcoms++

Also noteworthy was the reestablishment of contact with my friend Russ from college. He messaged me online the other day and we got together with Jon and Brian on Thursday night for dinner. It was cool seeing him again, as it’s been several years since we hung out (I did see him when I got my passport photo taken) and he’s very much like he was, but also different somehow. Well, his personality hasn’t changed is what I mean. He had us listen to some death metal and William Shatner CDs and we made him watch Black Books. After the second episode he was like “Okay, enough of this, any more and I’ll be talking in an English accent all week.” After Brian went to bed, Russ did a Tarot reading for me, and later on, Jon. That was really cool because I didn’t expect Jon to be open to that. :3

Oh yeah, and I took photos of my rack. So please gawk at it, and enjoy!

I was just talking with Jules about making some really ridiculous techno song using the sounds of the attacking creatures from Dungeon Siege and Fruityloops, and we got into a discussion about things we used to do with computers as children. Well, teenagers really, since our family didn’t get a computer until I was twelve. Thinking back on it now, I’m realizing more and more that I’ve been a geek in the making for a longer time than I’d thought.

When I was about 8 or 9, I used to take old cardboard boxes and cut one of the panels out of them, cover the hole with a clear plastic bag, then cut a slit in the side of the box. On large pieces of paper I’d draw out old Apple programs that I’d used in the computer lab at school, like Number Munchers and The Oregon Trail, so my fake computer could have changeable programs. I’d slide the paper in the slit in the box, and the program would appear on the screen. I also made floppy drives out of chocolate boxes, but they were less innovative than the monitor. XD Then I’d take my stuffed animals into my “computer lab” as if they were my class and I was the teacher. (I used to do this a LOT when I was young, play “school”…I even went so far as to make up homework assignments for my brother before he was old enough to even be in school, to teach him to write in cursive before kindergarten, and things of that sort.)

Of course, I was already pushing myself to learn things quite a bit before they were introduced in school…I could read and write at an advanced level before I was ever in school, and I’d taught myself cursive as well before third grade (when it’s traditionally taught.) I think I read my first 100+ page novel in a single day when I was 6. I remember being in kindergarten and having the class divided into two groups. One was called the Jackrabbits, which I was in, but I can’t remember the name of the other group. In any case, the Jackrabbits were obviously the accelerated group, for the kids who could already read and write. I think there were about 5 people in the group, and they’d corral us up and send us off to the first grade classroom with all the older, scary kids, and make us read and do math with them. (For some reason the one thing that stands out in my memory is when we were learning about time, and the teacher asked this really smart girl “What is one minute after 11:59?” and she said “11:60″) In any case, it wasn’t until years later that I realized that the reason they segregated us was because we wouldn’t have been learning anything if we stayed in the classroom with the “regular” kids and they didn’t want us bored and causing trouble. ~_~ As it turns out, I was pretty much “stuck” with this small group all the way through elementary school, less segregated as the other students began catching up with the basic things like reading and writing, but still given alternate assignments.

I’m really not sure how to say this without it seeming…pretentious…but…I really was so far ahead of my peers back then. I won all manner of all-school spelling bees, even a geography bee (what the fuck, with my sense of direction?!) By fifth grade I was on an alternate spelling curriculum, reading course, and after scoring 100% on a chapter pre-test in math, a completely free form “read the math book and teach yourself” thing (all by myself ;_;) They were, of course, setting me up for accelerated programs in middle school and high school, which I ended up stuck in. My classes had the same group of smart, geeky people all the way until graduation.

Anyhow, I digress something terrible…and I don’t want all that to sound like an “ooh, look how smart I was as a kid” type thing, but merely as a way to support how this whole “geekdom” thing had been developing long before I realized it. Anyhow, I was originally talking about computers. Yes. So when I was 12, my family got our first computer, a 486 running Windows 3.1. Wow, that was awesome. Of course, at that time the games and software available for computers was pretty limited; after all, we had one of the first computers with a CD-ROM in it! So eventually we reached the limit of what was available to us on that machine and we started toying around with silly stuff. (When I say “we”, I mean my brother and me.) We taught ourselves how to make the computer play music by programming in QBasic, how to Defrag our 325MB hard drive, and other interesting things. But the most fun was playing with the library of sounds that came with Win3.1. There were things like cat meow, dog bark, squealing tires, cannon shot, tweeting bird, gun shot, etc. Also, there were spoken sounds like a person saying “This is a reminder” or “Call me about this!” or “Noooooooooo!” The sound recorder could only do very basic things like string sounds together, play them slowly or quickly, or in reverse. So we’d try every combination of those things, like stringing the sounds together to make a story like a dog and cat playing in the street and getting hit by a car and the driver going “Nooooooooo” then shooting himself. (yeah, it’s pretty morbid I suppose.) We’d also play each of the speech segments in reverse and laugh at how they sounded…like Russian mixed with Chinese or something. Then we’d memorize the sounds backwards. When I finally got my PII and a microphone, we would record these backwards phrases into the sound recorder and see how close we could get to the actual phrase. It was pretty amazing how close we did get. And even now, all these years later, my brother and I still remember that “Errnowvervizizit” is “This is a reminder” backwards. XD

Other potentially geeky stuff I did as a teenager was related to typography. I used to paint t-shirts a lot, often with the logo of a movie on them (being a huge movie fan) so what I’d do was print off the title in a font that resembled (as closely as possible) the actual one on a thick sheet of cardstock, then meticulously cut the letters out with an X-acto knife to make a stencil, then tape it to the shirt and paint over it. It worked amazingly well as the fabric paint was very thick, and most of the serifs were perfectly intact. O_O I also copied the title typography from “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Speed” by hand using only a ruler for guidance and made banners in marker and colored pencil. Yow.

If you’ve skimmed or skipped over most of that I don’t particularly blame you, it’s not all that interesting to anyone but me, and I mainly wrote this entry as a personal reminder. Errnowvervizizit!

The weekend seemed pretty long, which was a nice thing. After the mind fuck of last weekend due to Lynchian overload, zinc (from IRC) put me on to this brit-com series called Black Books. Oh my god. The first episode was just pure comedy gold, and I was immediately hooked. I guess it does a lot for me that the main character bears a striking resemblance to Ross, but hey. :-D In any case, the show is about this second-hand book shop in London run by this grumpy, drunken Irishman named Bernard Black. He’s supposed to be this really detestable type of person, but Dylan Moran plays Bernard in such a rumpled, charismatic way, that his slurred insults and accusations come across as endearing. There are so many good one-liners in the show, but a lot of its humor comes out of subtleties in the characters’ expressions. There are basically only two other characters in the show: Manny, a hippie ex-accountant who comes to work for Bernard after being fired from his job, and Fran, who owns the shop next door. What a trio. XD There are some rather Seinfeld-ian moments in many episodes, which I suppose is one thing that makes it work. The biggest downfall of the show is the fact that there were only three seasons (a total of only 18 episodes!) produced between 2000 and now, and they don’t seem to be planning on continuing it. ;_; Also, there doesn’t seem to be any plans to make a Region 1 NTSC DVD release for North America. (DAMMIT!) But today I noticed that the season 1-3 boxed set that’s coming out in Australia is Region-free! :-D And it’ll be released while I’m there so that’ll definitely be something I’ll be looking for. :-D

I showed it to Brian and Jon on Friday night and we ended up watching the entire first season. XD The following evening we played the first episode for Brian’s girlfriend (by then we were all whipping out quotes from the show like mad.) Heh. I could watch that episode repeatedly and find it funnier every time.

On Saturday afternoon Jon and I went up to the travel agency in Appleton to attempt to get our Australian visas. The woman didn’t have any clue how to do it (and was upfront about it) but she said she’d have someone who did know how to do it take a look at it on Monday and call me. (Which she did, phew) So we should be completely set to go as far as proper paperwork goes! I think all I need to get is a set of luggage and I’m good to go. Only a bit over a month left!!!!!!! jitters

I started playing Resident Evil on Saturday since I’ve had it for awhile and haven’t even cracked it open. The controls are horrible since they’re 3D (up is always forward no matter which way you’re facing) and it took over an hour for me to accustom to them to a level in which the game was actually *playable*. So I was sucking pretty bad, but then I started getting somewhere, and I went through a door with a key I’d just found, and look at the surprise I had waiting for me on the other side of the door! Since I was doing so horribly, I just laughed and was like “What the hell?”

We also attempted to make the infamous Cheese on Toast on Friday night. It was pretty good, given it being our first attempt.

Saw Meet the Parents on Saturday night…painful to watch, but pretty funny nonetheless. Sunday afternoon I washed my car (in preparation for the roof rack I’ll install once I get the clips on Tuesday) and visited Alisha and her new girlfriend Rachel in the evening. She seems like a pretty cool girl…and it was a bit surreal meeting her as we were wearing nearly the same thing: baggy gray cargo pants and a big gray hooded sweatshirt, and she also had blonde hair (though hers was much shorter) Haha. Alisha also has a cat she found on campus…weird creature with a tail as long as its body. It seems to go a bit schizo at times, but it’s declawed and possibly neutered so someone must have loved it!

Oh yeah, we have 4 kittens at home now. I haven’t taken photos yet. Named them Foci, Tangent, Sine and Cosine. Heh. Thank you Sol Garfunkel, wherever you are.