The last month or so: the high points
Mar. 7th, 2002 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterHello again. It's been a while, hasn't it?
I sort of got into a funk about journal writing, I'll be honest. Because a lot of what I had to say was that I was (and am) still looking for a job, and haven't been having many results. It'd get depressing to log in day after day and say "no results" "no results" "no results".
Well, I'm still having no results. *sigh* And so you may not see another journal entry from me for another few days or weeks, or however long it takes for me to find work. Or then again, who knows? Maybe having to write about it every day will make me work harder on it. At the moment, I'm thinking about going out and doing some more canvassing. It can't hurt.
I will cover the high points of the last month or so in the next few paragraphs. It's rather long, and a friend of mine tells me I should use this "LJ cut" thing rather than wallop folks who have me in their friends list, so here goes.
A couple weeks back, I was attending VisionCon, our local anime/SF convention, as I do every year. This year, it didn't seem to be much to write home about; the main guests were some people from Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda. Not even the good people like actors, either; mainly a director. They didn't even get Richard Hatch ("Apollo") from Battlestar Galactica back this year; just Jack Stauffer ("Bojay"), and he seemed rather depressingly bitter. I suppose I would be, too, in his situation.
But anyway, I didn't get to spend too much time checking out the guests, as it soon became apparent that, due to some problems, the folks who would be running the anime screening room weren't able to make it this year, so they were throwing it open to anyone with DVDs. I sort of paused, said, "Hey, wait a minute...I've got DVDs!" and hastily scurried back to my car to drive home to fetch them all.
What a weekend I had! I think that it might just have been my best VisionCon ever. I delight in watching my favorite movies with a willing audience, and I put on some good ones that weekend. Since I didn't have enough anime to make up the entire schedule, I brought a bunch of Hong Kong action movies, as well as one Japanese live-action, Tampopo. So I showed some Jackie Chan, some Chow Yun Fat, as well as some Miyazaki, Armitage III, the original Bubblegum Crisis, and so on. Also, the BMW action movies, as a bit of time filler. People seemed to enjoy it.
The Jackie Chan movies seemed to attract the most audience--even more than a lot of the anime, interestingly enough. People enjoyed The Accidental Spy, the new Jackie Chan flick that I had on international DVD months before its American theatrical release, though there were a few MST3K style wisecracks--especially relating to the shot of Jackie sleeping with a bottle of Tiger Beer prominently displayed in the foreground. All through the rest of the film--and in parts of subsequent Jackie films--someone would invariably riff on "I want my Tiger Beer!" But I didn't really mind--it was clear they enjoyed the film. Audience participation is a lot of the fun in watching a kung fu comedy.
And the fellow in the anime dealer room, whose partner had been supposed to be running it, was so happy I'd taken over that he gave me a substantial discount at his table. So I picked up a DVD box set--Serial Experiments Lain--because I'd been meaning to get sooner or later, and because at the price he was offering, it was cheaper than anywhere I could find it on-line using bar-code-based pricecheck services on my web-enabled cellphone. And also because I figured I ought to get some benefit other than pure enjoyment out of the whole volunteer experience, and it didn't seem likely they'd give me a freebie on admission for next year or anything.
Over the last few days, I watched the show--all thirteen episodes of it. What a mind-trip. It's one of those things I'd just love to lend to my college critical analysis teacher, because it's just the sort of meaty thing she could really sink her teeth into. Meaning, meaning everywhere, but the plot is so obscured that it's largely left up to the viewer to tie it all together for himself. People who claim that television is a one-sided medium have never seen a show like this. I love it. I just know my Dad,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
marktime, would hate it, though--and it's kind of a shame it would never fly over here on American TV. Even Toonami's so-called Adult Swim has to edit its shows, for crying out loud.
Moving on to more recent history, I think I mentioned my friend, Joe Moore? Well, I finally got him into LiveJournalling, with his own bonus freebie account--and so now Joe is known asblacknumber01. Only two entries up as of this writing, and the first one is very...Joeish, that's all I can say.
I had him over last night for an evening of chili and weird cinema. Joe likes chili, particularly the Wick Fowler's Two-Alarm Chili Kits of which I have a bunch. And he doesn't mind making it, either--which I more sort of do, lazy bastard that I am. So every so often I invite him over, he makes some of it, and we enjoy. Last time, a couple of weeks ago, we watched my Shrek DVD; this time we had sort of a weirdness double-feature, which I'll get to in detail in a moment.
Both times, I made a sort of bread machine mix to go with it--Classic Hearth Southwestern Jalapeno Cheese flavor. The first time, it was from a box of mix that was who knows how old, so I added a little pinch of my own similarly who knows how old bottle of yeast, figuring that the two oldnesses would make a newness. It turned out okay, and it was very delicious (I highly recommend it to anyone with a bread machine), so I picked up a few new boxes of it at the Wal-Mart supercenter the other day. This time, though, while fiddling with the machine to set the timer, I accidentally caused the thing to start mixing for a couple of seconds. I stopped it, set the timer, and hoped that everything would be okay--but in the end, the bread turned out to be sort of concave and very crumbly. Still edible, though, and we ate it all up along with the chili, while watching movies.
The first movie we watched was David Byrne (of Talking Heads)'s True Stories, sort of a paen in weirdness to small-town America. Joe went through several stages of reaction to this movie, sort of like those five stages of reaction to death that some psychological person or other invented. First he was mildly befuddled with the movie, then puzzled ("Is that John Goodman?"), then dazed, and eventually just sort of stunned. "There are not enough drugs in the world to explain this movie," he said at one point. True enough, but it was a pretty good film all the same.
Next, we watched Tsui Hark's original Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain, since Joe had been impressed by the trailers for last year's sequel/remake. He seemed to enjoy it well enough, though we both made a few MST-style snide comments here and there, and Joe noted that he hoped the sequel was better. I tended to agree, but still, there's just something about a good wuxia movie. I'm looking forward to seeing the new version; wonder when it'll open here?
We rounded out the evening with one of the episodes of Invader Zim I've been able to download--"A Room With a Moose". It left Joe wide-eyed and speechless by the end. Poor Joe, I fear the evening of weird cinema may have broke his little mind. Oh well, it was twisted enough already that you really couldn't tell much difference.
I also gave Joe his birthday present, a couple of months early. I had been having a great deal of frustration bourne of not being able to get in touch with him; the house phone at Joe's house actually belongs to his housemate, and is either turned off or in said housemate's possession most of the time; to reach Joe by calling it is a minor miracle. And Joe can't ever seem to keep a cellphone of his own; those nasty time charges pile up and before he knows it, byebye phone account.
But as it happened, my store sells prepaid cellphones--and as I was back looking at the electronics counter, I noticed that one of their phones was clearanced from $40 down to $32--off of which I would get an additional 10%. So I grabbed it, and an $8 10-minute card, and presented them to Joe. "You know how the U.S. President and the Soviet Premier have the red telephone by which they can always call each other? Well, this is your red telephone. Use it first and foremost to call and be called by me."
Of course, once he starts buying his own minutes, I can't really control who he calls with them, but I sort of hope, given that I bought it for him and all, he'll at least keep a buffer of minutes free. And that he'll leave it on often enough that I actually have a chance of reaching him through it. It seems like every other time we arrange to meet, he never shows up, and I never can get ahold of him for an explanation unless I drive all the way down to his place to locate him in person. I hope this will change that.
And one more note--annoyingly enough, I've got a wisdom tooth coming in. This will be my third; I've had them out one at a time in the past, which has meant dental visits separated by a few months each. And the dental appointment to see to this one is...Monday. Which means living with the darned tooth for a total of a week. It's really annoying me; I need to get some more Anbesol gel to rub onto it. Thank goodness for left-over prescription-strength Tylenol III or I simply wouldn't be able to sleep!
I'm thinking of asking the dentist if he might be able to take out both my remaining wisdom teeth at once, so I don't have to endure a fourth painful wait and visit. I'll have to see if he has a good reason for not doing it, and live by what he suggests.
Anyway, now that my journally obligation is fulfilled, I suppose I should go see about doing something productive with the day. More when I have more to report!
I sort of got into a funk about journal writing, I'll be honest. Because a lot of what I had to say was that I was (and am) still looking for a job, and haven't been having many results. It'd get depressing to log in day after day and say "no results" "no results" "no results".
Well, I'm still having no results. *sigh* And so you may not see another journal entry from me for another few days or weeks, or however long it takes for me to find work. Or then again, who knows? Maybe having to write about it every day will make me work harder on it. At the moment, I'm thinking about going out and doing some more canvassing. It can't hurt.
I will cover the high points of the last month or so in the next few paragraphs. It's rather long, and a friend of mine tells me I should use this "LJ cut" thing rather than wallop folks who have me in their friends list, so here goes.
A couple weeks back, I was attending VisionCon, our local anime/SF convention, as I do every year. This year, it didn't seem to be much to write home about; the main guests were some people from Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda. Not even the good people like actors, either; mainly a director. They didn't even get Richard Hatch ("Apollo") from Battlestar Galactica back this year; just Jack Stauffer ("Bojay"), and he seemed rather depressingly bitter. I suppose I would be, too, in his situation.
But anyway, I didn't get to spend too much time checking out the guests, as it soon became apparent that, due to some problems, the folks who would be running the anime screening room weren't able to make it this year, so they were throwing it open to anyone with DVDs. I sort of paused, said, "Hey, wait a minute...I've got DVDs!" and hastily scurried back to my car to drive home to fetch them all.
What a weekend I had! I think that it might just have been my best VisionCon ever. I delight in watching my favorite movies with a willing audience, and I put on some good ones that weekend. Since I didn't have enough anime to make up the entire schedule, I brought a bunch of Hong Kong action movies, as well as one Japanese live-action, Tampopo. So I showed some Jackie Chan, some Chow Yun Fat, as well as some Miyazaki, Armitage III, the original Bubblegum Crisis, and so on. Also, the BMW action movies, as a bit of time filler. People seemed to enjoy it.
The Jackie Chan movies seemed to attract the most audience--even more than a lot of the anime, interestingly enough. People enjoyed The Accidental Spy, the new Jackie Chan flick that I had on international DVD months before its American theatrical release, though there were a few MST3K style wisecracks--especially relating to the shot of Jackie sleeping with a bottle of Tiger Beer prominently displayed in the foreground. All through the rest of the film--and in parts of subsequent Jackie films--someone would invariably riff on "I want my Tiger Beer!" But I didn't really mind--it was clear they enjoyed the film. Audience participation is a lot of the fun in watching a kung fu comedy.
And the fellow in the anime dealer room, whose partner had been supposed to be running it, was so happy I'd taken over that he gave me a substantial discount at his table. So I picked up a DVD box set--Serial Experiments Lain--because I'd been meaning to get sooner or later, and because at the price he was offering, it was cheaper than anywhere I could find it on-line using bar-code-based pricecheck services on my web-enabled cellphone. And also because I figured I ought to get some benefit other than pure enjoyment out of the whole volunteer experience, and it didn't seem likely they'd give me a freebie on admission for next year or anything.
Over the last few days, I watched the show--all thirteen episodes of it. What a mind-trip. It's one of those things I'd just love to lend to my college critical analysis teacher, because it's just the sort of meaty thing she could really sink her teeth into. Meaning, meaning everywhere, but the plot is so obscured that it's largely left up to the viewer to tie it all together for himself. People who claim that television is a one-sided medium have never seen a show like this. I love it. I just know my Dad,
marktime, would hate it, though--and it's kind of a shame it would never fly over here on American TV. Even Toonami's so-called Adult Swim has to edit its shows, for crying out loud.Moving on to more recent history, I think I mentioned my friend, Joe Moore? Well, I finally got him into LiveJournalling, with his own bonus freebie account--and so now Joe is known as
blacknumber01. Only two entries up as of this writing, and the first one is very...Joeish, that's all I can say.I had him over last night for an evening of chili and weird cinema. Joe likes chili, particularly the Wick Fowler's Two-Alarm Chili Kits of which I have a bunch. And he doesn't mind making it, either--which I more sort of do, lazy bastard that I am. So every so often I invite him over, he makes some of it, and we enjoy. Last time, a couple of weeks ago, we watched my Shrek DVD; this time we had sort of a weirdness double-feature, which I'll get to in detail in a moment.
Both times, I made a sort of bread machine mix to go with it--Classic Hearth Southwestern Jalapeno Cheese flavor. The first time, it was from a box of mix that was who knows how old, so I added a little pinch of my own similarly who knows how old bottle of yeast, figuring that the two oldnesses would make a newness. It turned out okay, and it was very delicious (I highly recommend it to anyone with a bread machine), so I picked up a few new boxes of it at the Wal-Mart supercenter the other day. This time, though, while fiddling with the machine to set the timer, I accidentally caused the thing to start mixing for a couple of seconds. I stopped it, set the timer, and hoped that everything would be okay--but in the end, the bread turned out to be sort of concave and very crumbly. Still edible, though, and we ate it all up along with the chili, while watching movies.
The first movie we watched was David Byrne (of Talking Heads)'s True Stories, sort of a paen in weirdness to small-town America. Joe went through several stages of reaction to this movie, sort of like those five stages of reaction to death that some psychological person or other invented. First he was mildly befuddled with the movie, then puzzled ("Is that John Goodman?"), then dazed, and eventually just sort of stunned. "There are not enough drugs in the world to explain this movie," he said at one point. True enough, but it was a pretty good film all the same.
Next, we watched Tsui Hark's original Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain, since Joe had been impressed by the trailers for last year's sequel/remake. He seemed to enjoy it well enough, though we both made a few MST-style snide comments here and there, and Joe noted that he hoped the sequel was better. I tended to agree, but still, there's just something about a good wuxia movie. I'm looking forward to seeing the new version; wonder when it'll open here?
We rounded out the evening with one of the episodes of Invader Zim I've been able to download--"A Room With a Moose". It left Joe wide-eyed and speechless by the end. Poor Joe, I fear the evening of weird cinema may have broke his little mind. Oh well, it was twisted enough already that you really couldn't tell much difference.
I also gave Joe his birthday present, a couple of months early. I had been having a great deal of frustration bourne of not being able to get in touch with him; the house phone at Joe's house actually belongs to his housemate, and is either turned off or in said housemate's possession most of the time; to reach Joe by calling it is a minor miracle. And Joe can't ever seem to keep a cellphone of his own; those nasty time charges pile up and before he knows it, byebye phone account.
But as it happened, my store sells prepaid cellphones--and as I was back looking at the electronics counter, I noticed that one of their phones was clearanced from $40 down to $32--off of which I would get an additional 10%. So I grabbed it, and an $8 10-minute card, and presented them to Joe. "You know how the U.S. President and the Soviet Premier have the red telephone by which they can always call each other? Well, this is your red telephone. Use it first and foremost to call and be called by me."
Of course, once he starts buying his own minutes, I can't really control who he calls with them, but I sort of hope, given that I bought it for him and all, he'll at least keep a buffer of minutes free. And that he'll leave it on often enough that I actually have a chance of reaching him through it. It seems like every other time we arrange to meet, he never shows up, and I never can get ahold of him for an explanation unless I drive all the way down to his place to locate him in person. I hope this will change that.
And one more note--annoyingly enough, I've got a wisdom tooth coming in. This will be my third; I've had them out one at a time in the past, which has meant dental visits separated by a few months each. And the dental appointment to see to this one is...Monday. Which means living with the darned tooth for a total of a week. It's really annoying me; I need to get some more Anbesol gel to rub onto it. Thank goodness for left-over prescription-strength Tylenol III or I simply wouldn't be able to sleep!
I'm thinking of asking the dentist if he might be able to take out both my remaining wisdom teeth at once, so I don't have to endure a fourth painful wait and visit. I'll have to see if he has a good reason for not doing it, and live by what he suggests.
Anyway, now that my journally obligation is fulfilled, I suppose I should go see about doing something productive with the day. More when I have more to report!
