Plinky – “What Keeps Me Up at Night”
Often the things keeping me up at night are rarely solvable before my head hits the pillow.
Money trouble tops the list, with financial woes that continually show their hideous faces every time I make a cursory glance at the bank. Many times I’ll spend a long evening just sitting and trying to gather back up all the memories I’ve lost over the years.A quick and elusive reflection in a mirror can catch my weary eye at just the right time and I’ll feel the panic set in, unable to close my eyes for fear of ignoring a stealthy intruder.
Not always is it bad, though. A good book can turn the clock faster than time should ever go, and an engrossing game can whittle away the hours until night again becomes day.
Sometimes when the cards are right,
My best friends keep me up at night.
When dawn and dusk seem too alike
The time takes wing and soars in flight.
In: Art, Fun · Tagged with: plinky
The Last Airbender – renamed to “The Final Flop”
Wow. Didn’t really expect it to fall this hard on it’s ass.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/last_airbender/
As of this post… it has an 8%. No, that’s not a typo. Eight. Earlier today, it had a six percent score.
Heartbroken. I so had hopes for this movie. Now I’m not so sure I will waste money just to see it ruin my dreams. M.Night, you’ve officially entered the territory of Uwë Boll. Stay the hell away from the rest of the possible movies forever, damnit.
Re: Your Brains – Now in Zombie Sign Language!
“Re: Your Brains” by Jonathan Coulton performed in ZSL (Zombie Sign Language). Awesome!
MOMO!!
I’ve been so worried that M. Night Shamalamdingdog was going to completely destroy the Avatar: The Last Airbender mythos with the live-action version, “The Last Airbender”.
One of the worries was that they were going to cut too much out of the show, especially the humor and the companions like Appa and Momo. Well, We saw what they did to Appa (WTF is with the human face?!), but I haven’t seen anything about Momo!
Well, consider my fears waylaid.
Momo!!
And he actually looks right!!
In: Fun, Video · Tagged with: Avatar: The Last Airbender, momo, movie, video
Dead Space 2 – First Look
I liked the first one, but I was tired of the “fetch quests” that the game sent you on every frickin’ time. This one is shaping up to be a little better… plus, I hear Issac may be insane!
In: Fun, Games, Video · Tagged with: dead space 2, video
Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man
I can’t believe I haven’t shared this with anyone yet. It’s 12:15am my time, and I’m still awake, so I must share this right now, because if I don’t I’ll just forget again.
First of all, if you haven’t already seen it, you must go to Whitestone Motion Pictures‘ website, and watch the 22min short film, Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man.
Seriously. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Here is the low-res version (and the HD version is on Vimeo) for those who just can’t wait:
Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man from Brandon McCormick on Vimeo.
And if you didn’t immediately go searching for and find the soundtrack (shame on you) to this awesome short film, you can download it free from their website, just below the video itself.
Seriously. I’ve been singing “Yours Alone” over and over again. Music is my emotional compass; it steers me towards that which I must feel. And while I know that song wasn’t written and performed by some big-name band or group, I can’t help but let it move me.
And the story of the short film… It is so bittersweet. I do not remember much of the original Wizard of Oz, but this inspires me to find it and watch it all over again. No, not totally. I wish for it to be remade, by these people. Get on that, will you?
In: Art, Fun, Video · Tagged with: Heartless, Tin Man, video, Wizard of Oz
Captain America – Concept – Desktop Wallpaper
So, I was reading my Facebook account (Why do I still have that thing? Who knows… maybe just for the distant friend connections that I would not otherwise have.) and I saw a link posted by a friend of mine about the new Captain America outfit.
Now, I’m not a huge comic book fanatic. However, I do at least keep up with the “major” characters as far as major storyline plots (i.e. whatever I see on sites like io9). So when I saw this link for the concept art (confirmed, no less) for the new movie based on Captain America (part of the whole “Avengers” suite of movies coming out, which includes Iron Man 1 & 2, Thor and the Incredible Hulk).
I figured, “Why not? I can make a neat background for my friends.”
And so I have. Tada:
Resolution: 1920px x 1080px (1080p)
Resolution: 1440px x 900px
The original images are here: [1] [2] [3] [4]
If you want PSDs of them (with a transparency/layer mask), let me know.
In: Art, Fun · Tagged with: captain america, Images, wallpaper
Accident, Not my own.
So, about an hour and a half ago, I witnessed an accident that took place right in front of me.
I was on my lunch break, driving south, along the road that leads away from my job. I had just been to the Martin’s Supermarket next door and had realized that my debit card was not in my wallet. Panicked, I searched my wallet, my car, everything near me. I don’t think I’d ever lost a debit card before. Then I called Amanda, knowing that she would be able to help me retrace my steps, work through all the places that we went over the weekend. She called a few places for me while I headed down the road to the bank, to place a freeze on our account until I could verify that I’d lost it.
There’s a funny three-way light system not more than 600 meters from the Martin’s, on the way to the bank, and I was in front of a large, brown minivan. When I turned left at the light (which is really not a hard left, but a slight shift to the left to follow the curve of the road) I stayed in the right hand lane (which is what you’re supposed to do at this intersection). The brown minivan had sped up a little, coming up on my left in an attempt to pass me, and then it started to switch lanes, cutting me off. I slowed, and honked my horn so she knew I was back here, and continued on. Not more than 10 meters down the road was a blue car, perpendicular to the road in an abandoned parking lot that sits on the south corner of the three-way turn, waiting to pull out into traffic. I couldn’t see the driver of the brown minivan, and I could just barely make out the blue car’s driver.
The rest happened rather quickly. The blue vehicle started to pull out, right in front of the brown minivan.
—-
Just so that you understand my next reaction, I’ll regale you with the tale of the only accident I’d ever been in while driving my own vehicle. It was back in high school, and I was taking my best friend at the time, Carl, to the burger king down the road for lunch, when we pulled up to a red-light. There were several cars in front of me, so we were all stopped. With the type of car I was driving at the time, a stick-shift Ford Escort GT, I had always made a habit of resting my hand on my parking brake when I stopped, just in case I couldn’t keep the car from rocking backwards. In my rear-view mirror I had seen a couple of band-buddies driving a large oldsmobile-style car, and they weren’t slowing down. Since I knew I couldn’t pull away and dodge the car, I did the next best thing – I pulled my parking brake. This was so I didn’t hit the cars in front of me (which would have made me pay for their damages), though at the time I had no idea why I’d done it. The olds’ hit my car (he hadn’t been going very fast, thankfully), my car did not hit any others, and everyone was physically okay. Not really much damage to my car, either.
But, ever since then, I’ve been so paranoid about vehicles hitting me from behind that I’ve developed the healthy habit of checking every mirror in my car if I do anything: changing lanes, coming to an intersection, etc. I am probably a little too safe of a driver, but I’ve not been hit since. I almost always look both ways twice, and while it may seem like a cliche, I just feel safer doing it.
—-
So earlier when I saw the brown-minivan’s rear end pull up, I knew she’d slammed on her brakes in time. My first reaction was: “is there anyone behind me that will hit me when I step on the brake?” So at the same time as hitting the brakes and tapping the horn, I glanced into the rear-view mirror. There were a few cars, but luckily they were so far back that they were able to slow long before getting to me. No one but the minivan was driving very fast, since we all had to slow down at the three-way intersection. Speed limit there, I believe, is 35mph, and we couldn’t have been going more than 20 yet. That was definitely a good thing.
When my eyes shot back to the front, it hadn’t been more than a half a second. The blue car and the brown minivan were parallel and had a little distance from each other. It truly looked like they’d been able to avoid colliding. I had breathed a sigh of relief, switched into the left lane like everyone else was going to do, and continued on, more or less just shaken by the near miss.
About halfway to my destination, a little bit of worry nagged at me. Amanda knows that I think about things way too much, and dwell too much on choices made. So I called her, told her what had happened. She told me that I should just go back and check it out, just in case. I was still fairly freaked out about not having my debit card, and not knowing where it is, but Amanda told me she’d call the bank for me while I turned around and headed back. By now I was panicking.
When I got back to the scene, both cars had moved slightly, the brown minivan pulling ahead a little and both parked on the side of the road. I pulled into the parking lot of the abandoned lot that the blue vehicle had pulled out from, and got out of my car. The driver of the blue vehicle was still in her car; she looked a little shaken up but she didn’t look damaged. The driver-side of her vehicle was, however. It’d had been a relatively light “tap” for them both, but it was enough to push her car parallel to the minivan. I hadn’t even heard an impact.
The driver of the brown minivan was standing on the sidewalk beside her vehicle, on the phone. She too was simply shaken up and yet unharmed, and she told me she’d never been in an accident before either. They’d already called the police to take statements and all that, so I stayed with them, going back and forth between both vehicles. The blue-car’s driver’s husband had shown up and was comforting her. The brown-minivan driver had someone else there, though I did not know who she was.
Eventually, the police officer arrived, got out of his vehicle and talked to the blue-car driver first (who still hadn’t left her car), taking information. I stayed back on the parking lot near my car, waiting. He then walked over to the brown-minivan driver, and got her information too. As he was walking back towards his vehicle, I came forward. He asked me if I had been hit too, and I told him I had not; I had been behind the brown minivan when the accident happened. I told him everything I could remember, and he took down my license information and statement. Then I asked him if there was anything I could do, or needed to do, and he said no, that I was free to leave.
As I was making my way to the bank, shaken but feeling better about going back, Amanda called me; she’d found where my debit-card was: an ice-cream parlor that I’d taken her and her friend to on Saturday evening. Sighing with relief, drove there, picked it up, and made it back to work.
—-
I am still a little shaky, even after writing this all down. I needed to, though, just in case I started to forget it and needed to tell someone else about it. Plus it’s cathartic to talk it through and try to see everything for what it was. I haven’t even eaten my lunch yet.
All I can really think about, though, is that if that brown-minivan hadn’t pulled in front of me and made me slow even farther down that I already had, that it could have been me hitting the blue car. Definitely shaky.
In: Other · Tagged with: accident, car, minivan
Darth Vader – TomTom Voice?
This video almost makes me want to get a StarWars-themed TomTom GPS device.
In: Fun, Humor, Video · Tagged with: Humor, starwars, tomtom, vader, video
Dead Space 2 Trailer!
Finally, the first trailer for Dead Space 2. The trailer is sufficiently unnerving to give me hope that they haven’t hobbled the game too much from the first iteration.
