I feel like I should write something. So here it is. Ramble ramble ramble…

The other night I packed up all (OK, most) of my papers and writing. I found some pretty interesting stuff. The weirdest by far was a note, in handwriting I didn’t recognize, bearing the title a book I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. And I kept it, so I must have intended to read it, which means that this note was from before I ever thought of reading anything about the subject, or I would have known better than to read that author, particularly that book. Which just makes the whole thing weirder. I also found more “Alex” notes, scenes, and developement than I’d ever dreamed I had written down. Most of it was incredibly outdated. Some of it was really weird. Some of it I really should give some more thought to. I think I’ll take my notes with me to Texas so I can work on it a little more. Maybe over that weekend I’ll be spending all alone.

The strain of preparing for a move whilst still keeping up the current apartment finally got to me last night. I just kind of sat down and started bawling about 10pm and kept going (on and off) until Tim got home at midnight. Then I immediately regretted it, of course, since it meant I only got about five hours’ sleep and I still feel like I just finished crying. I’m still a bit depressed, my eyes are all dried up and sticky, my lungs feel wet. It’s my own fault.

I have a little stress-ball made to look like the world. Tim picked it up at the Novell booth at some computer conference and let me have it. Yesterday the power was doing crazy things, so we had to turn off the computers. Waiting for things to stabalize, I got bored and started marking points on the stress-ball showing where my Internet friends are. So far I have people in New York, Massachussets (did I spell that right?), Pennsylvania, the DC area, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, Iowa, Washington, Canada, Australia, Germany, England, Scotland, Finland, and Japan (temporary). (Oh, and me in Indiana.) I feel like I should have a couple more, but I kind of got bombarded with them in chat last night and didn’t have the ball with me to mark them all. The USA has gotten crowded because, aside from the number of people, before I got this idea I wrote “You Are Here” across it with an arrow pointing to what seemed like Indiana at the time. Then I realised it was more like Texas, so I turned it into Randall, Lyric, and Leigh instead of me.

Point? I was supposed to have a point?…

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I can’t concentrate. My mind flits from one subject to the next. From music to C++ code, and on to bills and birthday parties, it shifts and moves, never dwelling on one subject for more than a few moments. Heeeeeellllllppppp mmmmmmmeeeeeeee….

More than anything, right now, I want to tell the world to go to hell and take the day off. Just a mental-health day, a time to center myself and regain my balance and focus. I can’t. I’d wind up packing, doing the dishes, paying bills, folding the clothes, cleaning off the countertop, running to the drugstore for the Epsom Salts I forgot to get last night, checking and rechecking forums, chatting, watching ER… Everything but taking time out for me. Besides, then I’d have to work on Friday to make up for it. If I didn’t, I’d feel guilty. Alternately, I’d like to run off and do nothing for a while, but I can’t do that either.

I haven’t had any coffee this morning; when it was brewing, the water ran down the outside of the filter and the resulting beverage was so weak it looked like herbal tea. I threw it out and had no time for making more. I took a No-Doz for the equivalent caffeine; maybe that’s what’s got me so unfocused. But then that usually has the opposite effect…

I can’t even concentrate on writing this. My mind keeps drifting off. What can I do?… It’s only 8:50am and already I feel I’ve been here for eight or nine hours. And I still have seven hours to go!

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Tim and I saw Reign of Fire last night. I’ll post a review later today, probably, but first I feel I have to say something. Our moviegoing experience was marred by a child crying throughout the movie. Not just any small child, but an infant. This sounds like I’m simply annoyed that some parent wouldn’t take their noisy kid out, I’m sure, but that’s not the case. I am genuinely very sorry for that poor little baby. This was not by any stretch of the imagination a kids’ film, nor did the previews indicate that it was. It was dark, post-apocolyptic, and full of mean nasty fire-breathing dragons burning people to death. (The child was, I’m vaguely recalling from my Psych class, probably not old enough for abstract reasoning to have kicked in–the bright side of that being that he or she probably didn’t know people were being killed by the dragon, since these deaths weren’t shown directly. Probably didn’t understand the concept of “death” either, actually.) Since the crying got louder whenever there was a big explosion, a fire-breathing dragon, etc., I think it’s reasonable that however little the child understood, he or she was pretty damned scared by what was happening onscreen. Which is understandable, particularly if the child thought the dragons were real or something. (Hey, no abstract reasoning, doesn’t know about computer animation yet…) My heart went out to the poor baby; mom and dad apparently wanted to see the movie so much that even when attempts to calm the child (both in the room and outside the door) failed, they would not leave and go home.Perhaps it’s the “I haven’t been there, so I don’t know how it feels to be in their shoes” syndrome, but I can’t imagine what posesses people to take children (of any age, but particularly infants) to movies that are clearly going to be inappropriate for the kids’ ages. If you can’t find a babysitter, in my opinion, you should wait until you can rent the movie and watch it after the children are asleep. If you can’t afford a babysitter–I question how you can afford to go to a movie, ticket prices being what they are these days. It’s not that I’m trying to be prudish here and say no kid should ever be exposed to anything scary or controversial, which is certainly not my POV, but there are some things I just don’t feel should happen. Babies watching Reign of Fire even when clearly terrified is one of them.

This rant may be a bit out of line. I may be overlooking some excellent point which would explain why the parents of this baby felt compelled to continue watching the movie. (Or why parents took their kids to, say, the South Park movie and then complained about said movie’s content, as though they hadn’t been warned. Or why there were a couple of kids about ten years old in the theatre when we went to see The General’s Daughter. Etcetera, etcetera.) If you know what this point is, I’d be happy to hear it, and should I hear it, I will be happy to apologize if I’ve been insensitive here. I will not, however, apologize for holding the viewpoint that yes, there are things that children below a certain age probably can’t cope with. I think I’m pretty reasonable about that sort of thing, normally, but situations like the one Tim and I experienced last night strike me as blatantly wrong.

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When my family got on the Internet in the summer of 1996, it didn’t take me long to sign up for an account on Tripod and set up my homepage. At the time, I used their basic page wizard (or whatever they were calling it) to set up a cute little cookie-cutter page that looked just like all the other cookie-cutter pages turned out by the same process.

I got tired of that pretty quickly. I decided I was going to go to the advanced version, where you could write your own HTML. Only problem was, I didn’t know any HTML except for the <P> tag. So the first thing I posted this way was a poem called “Earth Loses at Last”, and it had a blank space inbetween each and every line. This gold old quickly, so I found a nice guide to HTML tags and learned as I went along. My page, when I got it remade, consisted of a few paragraphs, followed by a list of links to other sections and other sites, in white text on a starfield background. “Other sections” consisted mostly of examples of my writing.

I got fed up with Tripod, too, though. Sometime in the latter half of 1999 (I think), I moved to a free account with a local ISP. The downside to this was that I didn’t have enough space there to keep my graphics in the same place as the HTML code. So I hosted graphics at Geocities. For the occasion, I reworked my site. Now I had scribbly-looking writing by itself for titles or over colored circles for buttons, I added an actual “front” page and some new sections (I would later add wedding pictures too), and I still went with white text on a black background. This version of the page hit a major bump when Geocities stopped allowing graphics hosting on their servers; I could no longer use the images stored there on pages whose HTML code wasn’t also stored there–and I wasn’t about to post my writing on Geocities, since they would then have rights to copy it as they saw fit according to their terms of service. Tim provided a solution when he started leasing space for a MUD he and some friends were running; it came with Web space, and I could host my images there.

Then the MUD went away. However, this time, we decided to pay for some Web hosting. Once again I redid my page in celebration of the move. (I think–I may have already redone it by that time, actually…) This is the current incarnation, with star motif (as of this writing). I kept most of the old content and structure, though, and again stuck with the white text on the black background. This was the first version of the site not to mention the name “Star Creature” (my old high school nickname that stuck) in connection with me. Also, the graphics and the code were reunited, since there was no foreseeable problem with space.

Now, I’m considering redoing it again. I’ve decided that if I’m going to post writing, well, the black background needs to go away. My problem is that I don’t have any terribly original ideas for the new look. So far the best I have is a dark green menu sidebar with white links, and a white main section of the page with black text and dark green headings. This would be accomplished by way of frames, and I’d probably add a “news” section. This sounds OK, but the problem is that it’s too much like what I did for Big Red back when I worked for them. I don’t want to do that. Also, it’s not just the look; I want to restructure it entirely. I’m not sure how to do that, though. This is going to require Thought… If anyone has any suggestions, I’d appreciate an e-mail.

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This morning as I drove to work, I traveled through a heavy layer of fog coating the ground along my route. Some may find it annoying, or depressing, but I found it beautiful. It gave the whole landscape a new, enchanted look. One could imagine that at any moment, a strange and fantastical creature could pop out of the mists and surprise the weary travelers trying to get to work without spilling their coffee. What would they do if a dragon appeared before them? Or a unicorn? Would they dismiss it as a hallucination or a half-dream? Would they tell anyone about it, or would they try to keep it a secret for fear of appearing delusional? If they had a child with them at the time, the child would tell the world in spite of its parents best efforts to suppress the memory, I’m sure. To be a child again, and not care who thinks you’re making it up…

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For growing up in the Lutheran Church, I sure don’t know much about the differences between the three major branches of it (ELCA, Missouri Synod, and Wisconsin Synod). This was driven home to me today when–gasp–someone actually asked about it. Actually they asked about the relative sizes of each branch, and searching for that info on the LCMS (Missouri Synod) website led me through their FAQ, which actually looked like it had a lot of interesting info in it. I probably gave the people who asked a lot more info than anyone really wanted, but it was fun anyway. I discovered, for instance, that the Wisconsin Synod really IS as conservative as people say it is–according to the info on the LCMS page, Wisconsin Synod doesn’t even really approve of women’s suffrage. And I thought Missouri Synod was conservative for not ordaining women… Anyhow, I’ve now located the home pages for all three branches, so I think I will go browse through their respective FAQ’s and “what we believe” sections. After all, I was baptised into an LCMS church and raised in an ELCA church–I should have a better grasp of the heritage involved with that! And while I’m at it I should learn about the Wisconsin Synod on general principles.

For interested parties, here are the pertinent links:
http://www.elca.org (ELCA–and they do use the word “synod” differently, by the way)
http://www.lcms.org (Missouri Synod/LCMS)
http://www.wels.net (Wisconsin Synod)

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Post #3 in under an hour! New record! Since I plan to be doing more and more reviews of movies, plays, etc., I’ve created a new Blog to hold those. You can find it here:
(Or you could, if it still existed.)

I’ll probably post a note here when I add new reviews, but this way it doesn’t take up so much screen space over here.

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I’m running on five hours’ sleep and four cups of coffee. Well, really about six cups; the last two were big enough to count for two each. Why? Because I can’t do math, apparently…Yesterday Tim and I spent the afternoon and evening with another couple we’re friends with. We went to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (excellent play, by the way, I highly recommend it, review coming soon) at the ISU Summer Stage, after which there was a talk about the show. Russ had also arranged to meet the author of the play, Edward Albee, who was supposed to be there. (Albee bailed at the last minute, actually, so no meeting occurred.) Then we stopped by the movie theatre to check times for Scooby-Doo before making dinner plans. There were three shows we could make: 7:40, 9:15, and 10pm. “Is 9:15 OK?” everyone asked me, since I was the one who had to be up at 5:30am this morning and it’s about an hour and a half drive home from Terre Haute (where all this was taking place). “Yeah, sure, I’ll make it work,” I said without bothering to add up the time. We went to Olive Garden for dinner, then back to the theatre for the movie.

The previews started promptly at 9:15pm. At about 9:30 I realised that 9:15 plus an hour and a half for the movie was 10:45, plus another hour and a half to get home, was 12:15am, and I still had to be up at 5:30am to go to work, no matter what.

Hence the six-cups-of-coffee-and-I’m-STILL-falling-asleep syndrome…

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(I’ve decided to start posting reviews of movies and/or shows I see, just because I feel like it.)(Warner Bros., 2002. Directed by Raja Gosnell; starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Linda Cardellini, Matthew Lillard, and Neil Fanning as the voice of Scooby Doo.)

It’s a summer movie meant to play on our sense of nostalgia in order to make big bucks. We all know that. And yet who can resist a live-action movie about Mystery Inc.? Well, actually, a lot of people can. I think most of them are movie critics. I couldn’t, certainly. I actually saw this movie first just after opening weekend, and then saw it again last night. I’ll admit that the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets trailer running before it was a big attraction (great trailer, by the way, can’t wait to see the movie), but I genuinely did want to see how the cartoon translated into “real life”.

The answer to that not-quite-question is, pretty darned well. Overall, it’s a fun movie, provided you weren’t looking for anything deep and meaningful. (I wasn’t. Were you?) The plot plays out very much like an episode of the show–the gang travels to a place with an ominous name in order to solve a “ghostly” mystery, everyone finds some clues, Scooby and Shaggy get scared out of their wits a lot, Velma says “Jinkies!”, and before you know it the mask is coming off and the villain is revealed. This time, a few of the monsters are real, but that’s OK; it doesn’t ruin anything.

The script is interesting in that it draws not only on the cartoon but also on spin-offs like “A Pup Named Scooby Doo” and on the myths that have sprung up around the show’s characters. The former is mainly felt in Daphne and Fred. When you think only of the “grown-up” adventures of Mystery Inc., Daphne seems overly air-headed and image-oriented, and Fred seems way too egotistical. But those of us who remember “A Pup Named Scooby Doo” will also remember that these personality traits do appear in that show, centered around the younger versions of the characters. As for pop culture’s interpretations of the show, some people may recall that there were rumors that Scooby and Shaggy smoked pot (constantly), that Velma was in fact a lesbian, and that Daphne and Fred were sleeping together. According to some sources, the writers had originally intended to include overt references to these rumors. Scenes involving the girls kissing and Fred showing up to spend the night in Daphne’s hotel room were planned, but had to be cut in order to preserve the PG rating. Still, they managed to slip in some references–some subtle and some not. (For instance, we learn that Shaggy’s favourite name is “Mary Jane”…) Word is that the Fred-spends-the-night scene may show up on the DVD, but other cut scenes will probably not.

So, out of the five members of Mystery Inc., who’s the best and who’s the worst? The “Best Casting” award goes, hands down, to Shaggy (Matthew Lillard). His performance is spot-on, as I knew it would be the instant I heard he’d been cast. There are some actor/role combinations that just seem inspired, and this was one of them. The “Worst Characterization” award goes to Velma (Linda Cardellini, though this isn’t completely her fault). While Fred and Daphne were a bit off from what I remembered, at least they had the excuse of having been that way on a spin-off show. Velma, however, was always just as confident and collected as anyone else. In the movie she’s reduced to an inferiority complex with a big brain. She constantly takes second place to popular Fred and beautiful Daphne, only fighting for recognition at one point near the beginning. It’s as if she knows she deserves better, but can’t bring herself to speak about it. This is not the Velma I remember.

Characterization problems aside, though, I would definitely recommend this movie to someone who is looking for a good summer flick. Sure, it’s Hollywood playing on our sense of nostalgia. Who cares? It’s still fun!

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