Working on Memorial Day...

Sucks. I am so stalling right now. I got through the first batch working from about 10a to around 7p with breaks in between. Now it's 9p and I still have at least 4 hours of work to do. I could be typing in a word doc, why do I choose the blog? Come on present self... help future self... you can do it... ... ...

Now!

Him, Myself, and the Other Guy

I wonder if everyone perceives the same split temporal personalities that perfectly describe my sloth:

Past Self -- dick. Incapable of doing anything but the bare minimum of things on the to-do list and always stays up late to follow his nose into some waste of time that leaves me tired as hell.

Present Self -- me. Constantly dealing with past self, and tired of blearily plowing through the things he left for me to resolve. After going through yet another day of his crap I just want to relax. (So what if it gets excessive? Future self will be fiiine.)

Future Self -- seriously, people. What the fuck?

And so it goes... right round.

Capital Punishment

Wow. You never know how something will hit you, and this movie (~50 min.) did. I would personally regret going through life without experiencing the range of emotions and questions I did while watching it. It's about a guy who, acknowledging that the death penalty still exists in the world, goes on a quest to explore killing methods, current and beyond, to find the most humane way of killing another human being. He even experiences a couple methods (to an extent, obviously) first-hand. This is vid 1/5, so you need to visit the YouTube link to see the others.

I want to share how it impacted me without disrupting your experience, so avoid my thoughts (below the vid) until you've seen it or decided not to view it.



Hold down the mouse button and drag over for my thoughts:

I cried! I was so invested in his journey, and my thoughts on the devices were so harrowing that when he found a method to kill humanely I shared his excitement. But the sensation of feeling happy to have a better way to end the life of another human was just nuts.

Gamers are like sharks.

Sometimes being a gamer feels like being a shark. I feel bad for sharks because their best tool for interacting with the physical world is a gaping maw of razor sharp teeth. That shark didn't want to maim that diver, it just wanted to see what it was, nibbled it a little and... ah shit.

So I know it looks bad when you watch me play a game and I run around throwing people out of cars and gunning down hookers, but all of my buttons are like razor sharp teeth; I don't have a handshake or kissing button. :-(

Even Mass Effect, with its emphasis on dialogue and a more fulfilling moral spectrum, made me feel like a shark. During a conversation with a character that had done something truly terrible, the dialogue option, "You should die for the things you've done," appeared. I thought, "Yeah! I'm taking this guy to prison, but he needs to know how terrible I think his actions were." So I made the selection, and then watched in horror as my character pulled out a gun and shot him dead, point blank. It got even weirder when, despite feeling guilty for what happened, my next thought was, "How far back was my last save?"

Apparently too far to correct my moral lapse.

The world through the eyes of a shark:

Cloverfield and Pre-School!

I caught Cloverfield tonight and had a good time with its fun and popcorny nature. If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and sit in the back of the theater to protect yourself from its shakycam.

And I don't mean to turn the blog into video hell, but standup for pre-schoolers is cute. :-)

Mario, Bert, and Ernie Bangin'

The following movies make me want to play on my Rock Band drums, but my downstairs neighbor isn't a big fan. A helping of rad:

Name, Age, *Thump*

Why is this so thought provoking?