윤

You don’t have to live in NYC to bitch about movie ticket prices; Memorial Day we walked away from an $11.75 non-matinee fare—and that was with the intent to theater-hop. Nowadays only Costco’s 2-fer-$14.99 certificates (which, incidentally, are not good in Manhattan) make me not regret waiting and just buying the DVD. Almost.

I lost interest in Wall-E after the first fifteen or twenty minutes, which were beautiful, mind you, but that didn’t happen during Up. Internet’s Green Lantern Nathan Fillion on Twitter: “Robot test #12: Go see Pixar’s UP. If your date doesn’t cry, robot.” My favorite scene was with the dogs playing poker. And recreating Star Wars, that was my favorite scene, too.

Abrams’ Trek …sorta suffered from the scheduling. Our butts were only gonna hold up for so long without the chiropractic. All of maybe ten people were with us, and who knows what they snuck in after. Felt like they spliced together the most action-packed scenes from the old films, and the rest was name-dropping. 60’s Uhura was way sexier. And seeing your world destroyed by a time-travelling menace can’t possibly mean that much when it’s such a series staple. After all, a mere farmer was able to cause this mess; why couldn’t someone else just as easily go back (or forward, whatever) and fix it? Arguably he wouldn’t even have to, since the villain’s from the future, anyway. Zip on over to present-day Romulus and prevent his grandparents from hooking up. I’m arguing this why?

Microsoft’s up to its tricks again. Now we’re supposed to believe their subscription model actually saves people money? Let’s see: four or five years of Live, you’ve already made up the price difference between a PS3 and under-equipped 360. Not to mention uncompensated RROD-time. And at least with Netflix we can rip the movies we borrow.

Last week’s experience with Redbox was the last straw: $1.07 (or $1.08, depending on where the higher taxes round to now) does not factor in the drive time and mileage between locations with faulty machines, 2/3 among the nearest Albertsons. A ratio only to worsen. So 老婆, she of the torrents and myself more at home on the Amazon, we decided finally to take the plunge—see what I’m doing here with the metaphors; it’d impress in high school English—and become a Netflix couple, which is surely some salient stage of household settlement.

I moved the Xbox to the big TV from the small monitor where it’d been running FFXI, and poorly at that, though the fault there’s less in the hardware than lazy programming from SquareEnix. That the app requires paid Gold membership, however, I’m not forgiving. Fuck them, a 48-hour code from 남재 proved streaming through Live (even with DD-WRT priority over a wired connection) is no superior to just hooking up my notebook on WiFi; in fact, Ping Pong Playa jumped after a ten-minute pause into YouTube resolution …speaking of which, that Jimmy Tsai sure looks like 송강호’s son. Oh, and those two White devils? Ted & Emmett from Queer as Folk.

$99.99 + $9.99/month for something that didn’t even work in the store may have been inadvisable, but what about 39.99 & 1.99? I wonder if you still have to be with them to get that price?

I took to the back streets this morning, instead of running up to the park, and tallied 3-to-1 McCain signs, and gave up counting all the ones for Prop 8. (I don’t even know what a No-on-8 looks like.) Sorry, 老婆, but I’d rather not have a single-tract suburban home if it’s surrounded by assholes like these. So fucking what if kids are told that men can marry men and women women, it’s not like the subject of interracial marriage ever came up while I was in school in the decade following Loving. I will admit to freaking out, though in a good way, when I first saw that Japanese King Kong movie where the non-Nick Adams guy from Monster Zero ends up holding the luscious blonde. Amazon Wish List, there you go!

But honestly, folks, if I’m not going to let my age be any measure of the seriousness with which I should be taking things, then I ought at least to learn by example from the self-made millionaire who resoles his shoes, rather than all those fools out there who are gonna bee-line to the nearest AT&T store for a $299 Bold instead of voting.

[Update: Relieved from my neighborlessness somewhat by logging into MSN and seeing that one of our clients had changed his screenname to “NO on 8” and reading Larry David.]

We renewed our membership at Marukai this weekend, one of the incentives for which, if not the only, was the 10%-off coupon, so I thought I’d use it towards an otherwise pricey carton of カレーうどん since the economy apparently hasn’t spared the imported cup noodle market, either, almost doubling the regular 98¢ 赤いきつね sale price. But the Nissin was nowhere on the shelves; what struck me as odder, no curry-flavored varieties were to be found, even among the “instant” packages. It dawned upon me that I had noticed the same scarcity, regardless of make and country of origin, in the counterpart section twice its size at wildly popular Korean Zion Market (whose name, along with Canaan Chinese restaurant, isn’t kidding). So you know me, it was conspiracy time: I imagined a coalition of the sauce makers (S&B, House, etc.) pricing out the stuff in other more accessible forms such as these, or perhaps it goes even deeper, the powers that be slowly doing away with foods with potential health benefits which threaten their status quo. I’m reminded, as I often am, of that exchange in The Hitchhiker’s Guide which I always found the most mysterious—and a little frightening—

ARTHUR: You know all this explains a lot of things. All through my life I’ve had this strange, unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world… and no one would tell me what it was.
SLARTIBARTFAST: No, that’s just perfectly normal paranoia, everyone in the universe has that.
ARTHUR: Well perhaps it means that somewhere, outside –

Thanks to the cliff-hanging driving in Indiana Jones 4 (which, alas, like the rest of the movie, was spectacularly tepid—they managed to follow the formula well enough, suspension-of-belief escapes, swarming insects, bad guys vaporizing at the end, but maybe all that proved is that formula just doesn’t work anymore) I dreamed of getting onto an on-ramp high above the water, then, as so often happens, the perspective changed to outside the car, like in a videogame whose critics complain about stiff camera angles, and I lost control and ran off a portion without guard railing. I watched from my overhead perch and saw it dive into the ocean, then flew to another side of the bridge where a school of dolphins had gathered. Swooping down to join them, I found myself in an underwater station that teleports its passengers to Alpha Centauri. A bright light shimmered around me, and I soon stepped out onto the deck of a vessel near the alien city. The plain but densely-packed buildings didn’t particularly impress as other-worldly, so I looked up to the night sky for passing star-liners.

After landing I was ushered into a crowded theater lobby, accompanied by many visitors from Earth. My old buddy Reynold was there, asking someone about an engineering problem he was having with a surging circuit, but the response was a snicker, because, as everyone apparently knew, you shouldn’t expect any benefits from advanced civilizations. Another rule in effect was that everything of value had none and vice versa, so when I went to a nearby shop to have rips and creases in a poster I was carrying repaired (which was possible with their technology, by first marking the damaged areas with stitching), and the one I thought was from the Shining turned out to be a B-movie called “Shining Monsters” instead, I offered it to the proprietor for another I’d rather have. Might as well barter my credit away, since there’s no use in keeping currency.

Flickr’s full and Picasa doesn’t work. Let’s use this opportunity to compare cellphone photos from what’s become a yearly tradition out to Indian casinos for the mother-in-law:

I can’t get them to display centered in the post yet, but it seems to suffice. (Update: Oh, and I cluttered up my sidebar even more with that widget—so much for the plain in my “plaintxtblog” theme—but without adding more images, I’m still not sure what is gallery and what’s library.) Curve’s default camera setting bests the HTC’s, big freakin’ surprise there. But Martin put it all into perspective by telling me today he’s pre-ordered an unlocked Storm for $699.

First try: a Visa rebate card from Staples, which wasn’t accepted because either the twenty dollars face value somehow was reduced a dollar and therefore insufficient funds for the wallet, or, as I’d learn later at a Fresh & Easy, it isn’t good anywhere. Then at a 7-Eleven, whose Indian or Pakistani proprietors had never heard of a PlayStation, much less a Network Card for one. At Blockbuster it rang up with sales tax; I could live with the extra cent for peace of mind, but $1.56 wasn’t worth not handing over the credit card online. Seriously, though, I dug up some old e-mail like this one and noticed I’d fretted over the cost of it back then, too.

From ???@??? Sun Nov 03 00:19:37 1996
To: Brother Gantela
From: jyun@concentric.net,joeyjojo@juno.com (J.)
Subject: Re: I Hate WipeOut XL
Cc:
Bcc:
X-Attachments:

I pounded the controller into the ground, this time being careful not to place my thumb between the two. There ain’t no way I’m gonna finish off that last Phantom course. Those boys at Psygnosis really have to fix that clipping problem–sure, Mario 64’s got it, too, but here you’re penalized for it, i.e., with the agonizingly long time it takes them to return you to the track. You know what else bugs the hell out of me? The way the other cars take the most difficult corners, well, every racing game’s got that, but when I bump them into the walls, they don’t come to complete stops like I do. Okay, maybe I’m just complaining because I suck.

(I wonder what those non-ASCII characters were?) Contrary to my Simon Pegg-like performance on the road this morning—which concerns me less than recurrence of the acetabular dysplasia, or misdiagnosis thereof—I impressed myself with a first-place finish on only my second go with a Feisar in more than a decade. Maybe they’ll have the original tracks available for download on the store; I remember Underworld’s “Tin There” made for some all-out racing moments.

The administration: “[$700 billion]’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

That sound from House of Traps of the surviving Rats performing their autopsy on Lu Feng will do, too.