ans99

so i'm home sick today and my head keeps spinning. so of course i figure this is the perfect time to make an lj entry since i've just slept for 4.5 hours and can't really sleep anymore. can't believe it's been almost two months since i made a proper update that nobody wants to read. see sophie, next to that 5 weeks is nothin'!

only trouble is it's been so long i can't remember what i was up to... so maybe i will start with major obvious stuff and then proceed in reverse.

( rats )

( our vacations are so much work )

( kitsune )

( this weekend )

( last weekend )

this is probably a long enough entry. time to take my temperature, because it's either really hot in here or i have a fever.

yes, i totally just asked if it was hot in here or if it was just me.

*intentional misspelling; long story

this weekend our camcorder broke again, and seems completely unfixable. unfortunately it broke during this month, which was supposed to be short-a-week. so that's disappointing, but at least it means we will be getting a newer, better camcorder that does not blow fuses while rewinding tapes (????)

then i kind of broke myself by trying a simple goddamn side vault over a bike rack, getting tripped up, and landing very hard on my left side on concrete. that was sunday, and i'm still in pain-- mostly from my left shoulder to my elbow. it feels like a muscle strain plus something else, and i'm worried there's some tendon pulling or something going on. hopefully no fractures anywhere, but it's a pretty chronic pain and there's not much i can do with the arm. so today i'm off from work because yesterday was Miserable Hell Day and i felt like i wanted to die every time i moved.

on saturday aj brought over tombstone, which i'd never seen. that is a pretty amazingly funny movie. first off, the mustaches are incredible and huge. kurt russell with a mustache will be my lj icon, if i can find some stills from this one particular scene. what i love most about big mustaches is that they end up being an exaggerated mirror of facial expressions, and there is this one part where kurt russell's character was lying down sad, and his mustache was this incredible droop, like a clown's sad face. epic.

john locke was also in this movie, and a yong billy bob thornton and the guy from terminator (easily the hottest bad guy). and val kilmer, whom i'm sort of predisposed to hate after the batman fiasco, but honestly this role (doc holliday) he managed to shine in. throughout the movie the character is dying from tuberculosis, but still manages to spout this hilarious snarky even toned dialogue. when he first came on i had no idea who he was and thought he was the villain, he was so chill. but no, just an incredibly badass good guy. thoroughly entertaining movie.

then we watched some of suzanne vega's videos from the 80's, with her commentary, which is really the only way to watch them because for a few of them you can tell she is so incredibly disappointed in how they turned out. and she'll comment derisively on the clothes and hair, and it's just really cute. makes me wish i'd kept my gloria estefan video collection :(

this weekend ken's parents visited. things seemed to go smoothly enough, and we ate at some pretty fantastic restaurants-- seasons, and that boat hotel in old sac. if i hadn't been in so much pain i would have enjoyed it more. it meant we missed house's season finale though, so avoiding the hotbed of apathetic spoilers until we do see it should be interesting.

the day i got injured, like right after, i rested while going on this used laptop ken refurbished for me (because he is awesome) and ran across exquisitegeek's post about hula hooping. i hadn't realized what some people are doing with this, and it made me sad i was injured because i wanted to run right out then and buy a hula hoop. perhaps once i heal up.

oh, finally, i have had a twitter since the england trip last fall, but i'm actually starting to spend more time on it. i find it fascinating that a social networking site can turn even vaunted celebrities into ... well... us. and i don't mean "regular joes" like mario suggested-- i mean for all intents and purposes, giggly 20-somethings. i find it adorable. even trent reznor is on there, being all cute with rob sheridan and giving away free tickets to his concerts. brent spiner tells (extremely) short stories. stephen fry posts little audio challenges (guess who this is, guess what these people are saying, etc). neil gaiman and warren ellis just snark. dichen lachman twits while drunk. etc etc etc. although in a way it's a little dismaying, because they generally only interact with each other, it's nice to see them being able to keep up with their colleagues for once, and at the same time generally be able to keep their fans abreast of their doings and thoughts. it must be a really nice time for them, now this tool is available.

but anyway, yeah, i'm ans99 on twitter. add me if you're there!

nobody finds my icon funny, and i find this sad. because i think it's hilarious. however, i am quite used to this paradoxical situation, let me assure you.

my last few weeks were mostly spent working on a robotmedia movie for the showcase this sunday. i'm currently working on getting it up to youtube, but it's 12 minutes and youtube only allows movies up to 10 minutes in length. so i have to split it, and compress two separate files, and it's just an abnormal length of time to have to spend to get something on youtube, for god's sake. when it's up i'll post it in digitalis2. which is another reason to add it to your feed. you really don't want to miss this movie. it actually got... *gasp* a compliment at the showcase. from some guy who said he liked the "character development." no idea what he was talking about, but if you like shaving cream, and keys, and keys covered in shaving cream, and people trying to pick up keys covered in shaving cream, you should definitely watch this movie.

now if that's not a plug then what is?

other than getting the movie ready, watching the movie, and getting a compliment on the movie, we also helped james film something for some pbs doctor who contest. it was pretty fun, if freezing, and afterwards he even bought us pie.

before the showcase on sunday, ken and i went skiing and i determined that sierra at tahoe must be where all the assholes go, because half the people there had some sort of serious attitude problem and were whizzing by not only us, but children crawling in the snow, and not just on the slopes proper, but in the areas between lifts and lodge buildings and such. i saw this one incredible prick of a snowboarder who NEARLY ran into some skier minding his own damn business, looked affronted, got ahead of the skier, made a hockey-type stop almost directly in front of him, kicking up some snow, and once the skier meekly passed, giving him the DOUBLE flip-off. that was some prize piece of work, i have to say. other snowboarders were camped under the ski lifts, throwing snowballs up at people. i gave up after two runs and camped out in this horrible outdoor "tiki room," trying to ignore the bad reggae and watching everyone else try to have a decent time. it started snowing at one point, and that was kind of nice.

after skiing i made ken take me to a restaurant on the way back, because it's secretly my favorite part of trips like this-- sampling the bizarre hole-in-the-wall local cuisine of the forest people. we ended up at some german place, seated next to a photo of some town in austria from the 80's. it had the most horrible composition i'd ever seen, including a lamppost smack in the middle of the scene, as if it were some sort of popup guide in microsoft word ready to take you on a tour through the nicest parts of hell. the food was good, if hearty. god the german potatoes. and their zinfandel was fucking awesome.

halfway through the meal i started trying to figure out what song a snippet of nine inch nails lyric was from, and then also the first line of "mr. self destruct." i drunk-dialed mario, and on the third ring he picked up, but he didn't know the answer to the first question. i even had him google it to no avail.

let me open it to you guys: if i called up going "ok what nine inch nails song is this: 'i've tried everything.... i've tried everything'?" would you know? should i make a voice post and open it up as a contest? i've since figured it out of course.

anyhow, by the time we left i was toasted enough to show up still buzzed at the showcase 1.5 hours later, and buzzed enough at that point to enjoy myself by snarking at everyone else's movie and then laughing hysterically at my own. oh well, luckily showmanship isn't a large part of being an artist because otherwise i'd have to just give up now and go live in a cardboard box.

so the two topics for next showcase are "telemetry" and "mistakes." the only thing i can think of is a fan film of that part in dark tower vii where that rat thing named finli (or something) keeps saying, "telemetry doesn't lie." i think that'd rock.

either that or a spy movie.

i love you over the rhine, but let's face it-- you've got issues. <3

for whatever reason i just decided to read the blog of some random chick i used to go to middle and high school with. she was one of the moderately popular and interesting, and not a total bitch mind you. and a few years ago kind of out of the blue she happened to dis me in passing while in conversation with someone else, and because i hear LIKE A BAT of course i caught wind of it. and.

i was going somewhere with this, but i'm not sure where. suffice to say her blog is one of the most boring things i've ever read. and it makes me more sad than anything, but it seems to be the way of people from That Place. they just get sucked into it and never leave, and then they turn into the boring old people they never thought they'd turn into, like some sort of longstanding family curse. she writes with this banal, self-important air that i remember indulging myself in when i was 12 years old. she talks about how to get discounts at restaurants. i feel like i've just gotten a glimpse into what could have been my future, if i'd been bred to be content, told i was okay just the way i was, liked right off the bat. instead of, you know, being kicked around emotionally like some sort of sad little ball of trash. maybe a crumpled-up love note on the back of a napkin, tossed when someone lost their nerve or lost their direction, deciding it ultimately wasn't worth it, or i don't know.

and maybe i'm not seeing the full richness of her ultra-exciting life via a simple blog, but i just don't know. when you're young you just think you're going to do so much, right? and when i was back there nobody had these crazy dreams, it seemed. at least nobody shared them with me, nobody hinted it was anything more than popularity from beginning to end, just scraping by to get the grades, kicking others out of the way to climb to the top of the honors list. even cheating to get there. and for what? everyone's getting married now, getting excited about buying houses and having children and it always seems too soon, it seems like a let-down after everything we were told we could be growing up. god, it's like at the end of mona lisa smile except it's the entire class.

where is everybody?

i don't really feel vindicated because nobody deserves the sterile hell that she appears to have sunk into. i just... feel like i went to school with a bunch of paper dolls, in the valley of the paper dolls, and i'm lucky to have escaped with my individuality intact. and it's a strange, haunting feeling, looking back on the past like that and seeing how very little has changed and nothing has grown. i'm not sure i can express it any more eloquently than that.