Despite being tired, I went to bed fairly late last night, as I knew the extended nap I’d taken in the afternoon would prevent me from getting to sleep at a reasonable hour. About a half an hour after I’d fallen asleep, my phone rang, which baffled the hell out of me.
Naturally there was no response when I answered, as it was undoubtedly some drunken jackass misdialing.
It took another half an hour or so for me to fall asleep again.
I imagine the whole thing was just an example of The Universe being a dick:
“Hey Jon, are you asleep?”
“Zzzzzzzzz.”
“Are you sleeping?”
“Zzzzzzzzzz.”
“Seriously; I need to know if you’re asleep!”
“Zzzzzz.”
“Fine if you won’t wake up and tell me if you’re asleep…”
*Ring*
*Ring*
“Zzzzz-*snort* Huh? Whuzzat? Hello? Hello? *Sigh* Dammit!”
“Huh, I guess you really were asleep.”
When I got up this morning I tried to remember if there was anything that I needed to do out in the world. I couldn’t think of anything, as I’d done a proper job of grocery shopping on Monday, so I didn’t really need anything.
After sitting around doing nothing in particular, I remembered that I was supposed to finally get around to shipping my old 17” LCD monitor to my mom, along with the book Benighted, which my niece Jourdan wants to read.
So I showered, dressed, and went out to do that.
(I shipped them via UPS, and they should get there on Thursday.)
After that I stopped to pick up some lunch from a Chinese place. It wasn’t good, but that was my fault, as I’d forgotten that their version of what I ordered is different from the way other places make the same dish.
Once I finished that, I sat down to start working on a picture, but decided that it was too much of a pain in the ass, so I chose to write this instead.
I was going to write a more detailed review of the movie I watched last night, but I just don’t have the energy.
Ultimately the point that I was going to make was that while, overall, I’m glad that I have a better grip on reality than the titular Lars, I found that I was actually kind of jealous of him.
Well, I suppose I don’t have anything better to do, so I guess I’ll write at least some of what I was planning to write.
The premise of the movie is that this lonely, isolated and painfully shy guy named Lars, who lives in a very small town in what looked to be either northern Minnesota or North Dakota, buys a sex doll from the Internet, and then deludes himself into believing that she’s a real girl.
On the advice of a psychologist, his friends and family all choose to support him in this delusion in the hopes that eventually he’ll let go of it and rejoin the reality-based community, as there’s no way to convince him that he’s deluded.
What makes the movie so entertaining and touching – and this is mildly spoilery, I guess – is the zeal with which the members of the community throw themselves into supporting his delusion, doing everything they can to make his “girlfriend” feel welcome.
In fact, there comes a point at which Bianca – the doll – has a much more active social life than Lars does, which starts to create some tension in the “relationship.”
(She even gets elected to the school board.)
There’s a great scene in which Lars comes home to find that his sister-in-law, Karin, and a local woman named Mrs. Gruner, are dressing Bianca up for a night out. Lars is upset that Bianca is going out to an event being held for hospital volunteers – Bianca “reads” to children at the hospital – as he had plans for the two of them to stay in and play Scrabble.
After getting into a fight with Bianca about it, she leaves with Mrs. Gruner, and Lars goes outside to angrily chop firewood. Karin comes out to talk to him about it:
Lars: You don't care.
Karin: We don't care? We do care!
Lars: No you don't.
Karin: That is just not true! God! Every person in this town bends over backward to make Bianca feel at home. Why do you think she has so many places to go and so much to do? Huh? Huh? Because of you! Because - all these people - love you! We push her wheelchair. We drive her to work. We drive her home. We wash her. We dress her. We get her up, and put her to bed. We carry her. And she is not petite, Lars. Bianca is a big, big girl! None of this is easy - for any of us - but we do it... Oh! We do it for you! So don't you dare tell me how we don't care.
As much as I was moved by the way the community rallied around Lars to give him the support he needed, I couldn’t help but be jealous. Granted, I’ve had and do have people who care about me and are there for me when I need them, and I appreciate it, but there have also been a lot of people who have just turned their backs and walked away the very second some of my idiosyncrasies and eccentricities made being around me a challenge, and I have to say that whatever obstacles there are to being my friend pretty much pale in comparison to asking them to pretend that a sex toy is a real, living, breathing person.
So, yeah, I was actually a little jealous.
And of course, given that it’s a movie, there is, naturally, a cute co-worker who has a not-very secret crush on Lars, and watching him back rapidly away as she flung herself at him grated on my nerves as well.
There’s an episode of The Simpsons in which Marge gets mugged, and as a result develops agoraphobia, leaving her incapable of leaving the house. One morning, after getting Homer off to work and the kids off to school, she says, “Now what? Too crazy to go outside, not crazy enough to have an imaginary friend.”
That’s sort of how I felt after watching the movie; I’m quiet and isolated enough to be creepy and off-putting, but not quiet and isolated enough to be endearing and loveable.
By the way, it’s not my intention to whine or complain; I’m just bringing up some of the thoughts that occurred to me while watching what was a very thought-provoking movie.
Also, I’m jealous of the fact that Lars had enough money to pony up for a sex doll. Those things are expensive!
Umm…not that I’ve really checked into the pricing or anything…
Actually, it has occurred to me that it would be useful for me to have one (or more) to use as a reference for my art.
Seriously.
However, it’s never been anything I’ve really considered; it’s just been a thought.
So shut up! See? Nobody gives me any support…
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Friday, August 15, 2008
The Swinging Bachelor Lifestyle
When I got home from work today I was tired and I had a headache, so I took a nap.
Three hours later I woke up and I was still tired and still had a headache.
I sat around and did nothing in particular for a while, had two bowls of Golden Grahams for dinner, then watched a movie.
It will actually be my last Netflix movie, as my gift subscription expires in a few days, and I don’t see it as adding enough value for me to actually pay for it every month. It was a good way to see movies that I kinda-sorta wanted to see, but didn’t want to pay for, but if I’m going to have to pay to see them, meh.
The particular movie I watched tonight was Lars and the Real Girl, and I actually really liked it. I thought it would be kind of amusing, which it was, but I didn’t expect it to be as sad, and touching, and, well, poignant as it turned out to be.
I can’t really recommend it to everyone, but as a quiet, lonely, isolated weirdo it was interesting to watch a movie about someone even quieter, lonelier, and more isolated and weird.
But if you don’t have the same capacity to relate to the plight of the titular Lars that I do, you might just think it’s weird. Which it is, but I think it’s weird in a good way.
Anyway, that’s been my Friday. I hope the adrenaline rush that no doubt accompanied reading about my exciting adventures wasn’t too much for you.
Three hours later I woke up and I was still tired and still had a headache.
I sat around and did nothing in particular for a while, had two bowls of Golden Grahams for dinner, then watched a movie.
It will actually be my last Netflix movie, as my gift subscription expires in a few days, and I don’t see it as adding enough value for me to actually pay for it every month. It was a good way to see movies that I kinda-sorta wanted to see, but didn’t want to pay for, but if I’m going to have to pay to see them, meh.
The particular movie I watched tonight was Lars and the Real Girl, and I actually really liked it. I thought it would be kind of amusing, which it was, but I didn’t expect it to be as sad, and touching, and, well, poignant as it turned out to be.
I can’t really recommend it to everyone, but as a quiet, lonely, isolated weirdo it was interesting to watch a movie about someone even quieter, lonelier, and more isolated and weird.
But if you don’t have the same capacity to relate to the plight of the titular Lars that I do, you might just think it’s weird. Which it is, but I think it’s weird in a good way.
Anyway, that’s been my Friday. I hope the adrenaline rush that no doubt accompanied reading about my exciting adventures wasn’t too much for you.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
For The Moon Never Beams Without Bringing Me Dreams...
Look, it's something different:
This is, more or less, a view of the sky I had from my backyard the other night. I thought it looked cool, so I decided I'd paint it.
Make of it what you will.
Once again I'm really tired and fading fast. Snored myself awake on the couch while nodding off watching The Simpsons.
I don't really have anything of note to write about anyway.
I will mention, though, that the title of this post is from the poem Annabel Lee, by Edgar Alan Poe.
This is, more or less, a view of the sky I had from my backyard the other night. I thought it looked cool, so I decided I'd paint it.
Make of it what you will.
Once again I'm really tired and fading fast. Snored myself awake on the couch while nodding off watching The Simpsons.
I don't really have anything of note to write about anyway.
I will mention, though, that the title of this post is from the poem Annabel Lee, by Edgar Alan Poe.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Future Suck
The other day I was flipping through the channels and saw that the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact was on. It was nearly over, so I left it on long enough to see the bit – spoiler alert – when the aliens ignite Jupiter and turn it into a small star.
While I was watching it, I thought about how 2010 is a mere two years away, and yet while in the movie they had computers with artificial intelligence and were sending manned missions to Jupiter, the only area in which we’ve actually progressed to a technological level at all comparable to the movie is in computer graphics, as we have much better visuals than the movie’s protagonists did with their monochrome displays that were state-of-the-art in 1984.
Granted, the intelligent computer is a murderer, but that still beats anything we’ve got – and they already had that all the way back in 2001.
In any case, I was talking to Scott about this today via IM and I noticed a headline stating that the launch of the successor to the space shuttle has been pushed back to 2014.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now: the future is a total rip-off.
You say that we live in the present, not the future? I say bullshit. It’s 2000 friggin’ 8. If that’s not the future, I don’t know what is. I mean, Robocop was supposed to have taken place in 1997 or something like that. This is the future.
And it sucks.
Or at least it sucks in comparison to how we were told it was going to be.
Here’s a list of a few things we’re supposed to have by now, but which have yet to materialize:
Off-world colonies
Cures for all major diseases
Clean, efficient fuels that don’t necessitate wars
Robot maids/butlers/wives
Totally immersive virtual realities
Soylent Green
Okay, maybe not having that last one isn’t such a bad thing. But the rest? I’m supposed to be able to take a vacation on the moon, after flying there on a spaceship running on fusion power, or hydrogen, or anti-matter, or at least something that isn’t made out of dinosaur remains, spending most of my time while on vacation going at it with my robot wife, or maybe banging some space prostitute with no fear of catching an STD, or at the very least sitting in my living room with a pair of VR goggles that allow me to be completely convinced that I’m on vacation on the moon, doing the nasty with my robot wife and/or a space prostitute.
Do we have any of these things? No, we barely even have the very beginning of any of these things.
You’ll note that I left out the oft-mentioned, non-existent flying car. I’m willing to give this one a pass, given that when they were first thought of people didn’t really have an understanding of the kind of catastrophic malfunctions and accidents that could occur in regular, non-flying cars. Flying cars are maybe not the best idea.
In any case, promises were made, said promises were not kept, and someone needs to be held accountable for this.
Who would that be? The past, and the people in it who failed to live up to the promises they made. I propose that we, the residents of the future, file a class action lawsuit against the past.
Oh, and present? Don’t think you’re off the hook either; you’d better get your ass in gear and start delivering on the future. You have a lot of catching up to do.
Your Regularly-Scheduled Threshold Department:
Okay, now that I’ve gotten my little rant out of the way, we can get back to the usual business of reporting what’s going on in my life.
Umm…
Uhh…
Oh! I got my Heroic Portraits business cards yesterday. That’s something new.
See?
(Sorry for the crappy picture, but the scan of it turned out even worse.)
Other than that, nothing new or exciting or even new and unexciting is going on.
While I was watching it, I thought about how 2010 is a mere two years away, and yet while in the movie they had computers with artificial intelligence and were sending manned missions to Jupiter, the only area in which we’ve actually progressed to a technological level at all comparable to the movie is in computer graphics, as we have much better visuals than the movie’s protagonists did with their monochrome displays that were state-of-the-art in 1984.
Granted, the intelligent computer is a murderer, but that still beats anything we’ve got – and they already had that all the way back in 2001.
In any case, I was talking to Scott about this today via IM and I noticed a headline stating that the launch of the successor to the space shuttle has been pushed back to 2014.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now: the future is a total rip-off.
You say that we live in the present, not the future? I say bullshit. It’s 2000 friggin’ 8. If that’s not the future, I don’t know what is. I mean, Robocop was supposed to have taken place in 1997 or something like that. This is the future.
And it sucks.
Or at least it sucks in comparison to how we were told it was going to be.
Here’s a list of a few things we’re supposed to have by now, but which have yet to materialize:
Off-world colonies
Cures for all major diseases
Clean, efficient fuels that don’t necessitate wars
Robot maids/butlers/wives
Totally immersive virtual realities
Soylent Green
Okay, maybe not having that last one isn’t such a bad thing. But the rest? I’m supposed to be able to take a vacation on the moon, after flying there on a spaceship running on fusion power, or hydrogen, or anti-matter, or at least something that isn’t made out of dinosaur remains, spending most of my time while on vacation going at it with my robot wife, or maybe banging some space prostitute with no fear of catching an STD, or at the very least sitting in my living room with a pair of VR goggles that allow me to be completely convinced that I’m on vacation on the moon, doing the nasty with my robot wife and/or a space prostitute.
Do we have any of these things? No, we barely even have the very beginning of any of these things.
You’ll note that I left out the oft-mentioned, non-existent flying car. I’m willing to give this one a pass, given that when they were first thought of people didn’t really have an understanding of the kind of catastrophic malfunctions and accidents that could occur in regular, non-flying cars. Flying cars are maybe not the best idea.
In any case, promises were made, said promises were not kept, and someone needs to be held accountable for this.
Who would that be? The past, and the people in it who failed to live up to the promises they made. I propose that we, the residents of the future, file a class action lawsuit against the past.
Oh, and present? Don’t think you’re off the hook either; you’d better get your ass in gear and start delivering on the future. You have a lot of catching up to do.
Your Regularly-Scheduled Threshold Department:
Okay, now that I’ve gotten my little rant out of the way, we can get back to the usual business of reporting what’s going on in my life.
Umm…
Uhh…
Oh! I got my Heroic Portraits business cards yesterday. That’s something new.
See?
(Sorry for the crappy picture, but the scan of it turned out even worse.)
Other than that, nothing new or exciting or even new and unexciting is going on.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Good News/Bad News
The good news is that Verizon came out this morning and hooked me up with a CableCARD, so now I can watch and record TV – including HD channels – on my computer.
The bad news is that now that I have less of a reason to get up and leave the computer, my ass is probably going to fuse to my chair.
The HD channels (and even the non-HD channels, now that Verizon has gone totally digital) look good, but honestly, I probably will still move my ass to the couch when I really want to watch something, as the 42” screen is better for TV viewing than my monitor.
I mostly wanted to be able to view HD content on my computer so that I could do high-res screen caps for reference images and that sort of thing, though being able to watch TV while I’m doing other stuff is a benefit, as is having the option of being able to record/watch something if the two tuners on my set top box are in use, though I don’t really foresee that happening too often.
It also gives me the option to archive recorded content without eating up space on my DVR’s drive.
What’s interesting is that if I’m watching an HD channel on my main (24”) monitor, everything is fine, but if I move the TV window over to the secondary monitor (20.1”), it stops working and tells me that my monitor might not be HDCP compliant.
I’d forgotten all about the whole HDCP thing, though it seems to me that my secondary monitor should be a compliant device. At first I was thinking that it was because that one is connected via VGA, but then I remembered that my graphics card has dual DVI-out, so it’s not connected via VGA.
I’m thinking it might be because I’m just using the generic Windows driver. I’ll have to download a driver from Dell and see if that makes a difference.
It’s not a huge deal, but it would be nice to be able to move the TV window over to the other monitor so that the main one is free for me to work on.
After the Verizon guy left I went out to do some grocery shopping. I’d forgotten how much I miss being able to do my shopping on Monday morning. So much nicer than trying to shop on weekends or weekday evenings.
(The bad news here is that while I was checking out Don’t Worry, Be Happy was playing. Screw you, too, Universe.)
For the record, it’s a gorgeous day. Sunny, but not hot, with a nice cool breeze, exactly the kind of day that you don’t want to spend cooped up in an office building, so I’m very glad I took today off, so that’s the good news.
Of course, the bad news is that having the day off just means being cooped up inside of my house, as I’m not really the outdoorsy type, though I did spend some time sitting outside, and I have all of the windows open, which is a nice change from always running the A/C.
A while ago my doorbell stopped working, and I’ve kept forgetting to do anything about it. As it’s a wireless doorbell, I assumed that it probably meant that the batteries were dead. The good news is that I remembered to check what kind of batteries it takes before I headed up into the world, and so in the course of my shopping I picked up some new ones.
The bad news is that it never occurred to me that the problem might be the battery in the button, and it turns out that’s what’s dead. Further, it’s some random kind of battery that I’ve never seen before, so now I have to find one of those somewhere along the line.
But the good news is that my doorbell hardly ever sees any use – frankly I’m not sure how the battery died in the first place; it’s certainly not from overuse – so there’s no rush on replacing the battery.
The bad news is that my doorbell hardly ever rings because I’m a reclusive hermit that no one ever comes to visit.
On another good news/bad news front, I don’t have the energy to whine – as I promised I would in response to a comment from Scott – about how I’m a talentless hack and I don’t know why I even bother trying in this entry.
The bad news, of course, is that I’m not canceling the whining, just postponing it.
And that pretty much brings us to the end of this entry. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if that’s good news or bad news.
The bad news is that now that I have less of a reason to get up and leave the computer, my ass is probably going to fuse to my chair.
The HD channels (and even the non-HD channels, now that Verizon has gone totally digital) look good, but honestly, I probably will still move my ass to the couch when I really want to watch something, as the 42” screen is better for TV viewing than my monitor.
I mostly wanted to be able to view HD content on my computer so that I could do high-res screen caps for reference images and that sort of thing, though being able to watch TV while I’m doing other stuff is a benefit, as is having the option of being able to record/watch something if the two tuners on my set top box are in use, though I don’t really foresee that happening too often.
It also gives me the option to archive recorded content without eating up space on my DVR’s drive.
What’s interesting is that if I’m watching an HD channel on my main (24”) monitor, everything is fine, but if I move the TV window over to the secondary monitor (20.1”), it stops working and tells me that my monitor might not be HDCP compliant.
I’d forgotten all about the whole HDCP thing, though it seems to me that my secondary monitor should be a compliant device. At first I was thinking that it was because that one is connected via VGA, but then I remembered that my graphics card has dual DVI-out, so it’s not connected via VGA.
I’m thinking it might be because I’m just using the generic Windows driver. I’ll have to download a driver from Dell and see if that makes a difference.
It’s not a huge deal, but it would be nice to be able to move the TV window over to the other monitor so that the main one is free for me to work on.
After the Verizon guy left I went out to do some grocery shopping. I’d forgotten how much I miss being able to do my shopping on Monday morning. So much nicer than trying to shop on weekends or weekday evenings.
(The bad news here is that while I was checking out Don’t Worry, Be Happy was playing. Screw you, too, Universe.)
For the record, it’s a gorgeous day. Sunny, but not hot, with a nice cool breeze, exactly the kind of day that you don’t want to spend cooped up in an office building, so I’m very glad I took today off, so that’s the good news.
Of course, the bad news is that having the day off just means being cooped up inside of my house, as I’m not really the outdoorsy type, though I did spend some time sitting outside, and I have all of the windows open, which is a nice change from always running the A/C.
A while ago my doorbell stopped working, and I’ve kept forgetting to do anything about it. As it’s a wireless doorbell, I assumed that it probably meant that the batteries were dead. The good news is that I remembered to check what kind of batteries it takes before I headed up into the world, and so in the course of my shopping I picked up some new ones.
The bad news is that it never occurred to me that the problem might be the battery in the button, and it turns out that’s what’s dead. Further, it’s some random kind of battery that I’ve never seen before, so now I have to find one of those somewhere along the line.
But the good news is that my doorbell hardly ever sees any use – frankly I’m not sure how the battery died in the first place; it’s certainly not from overuse – so there’s no rush on replacing the battery.
The bad news is that my doorbell hardly ever rings because I’m a reclusive hermit that no one ever comes to visit.
On another good news/bad news front, I don’t have the energy to whine – as I promised I would in response to a comment from Scott – about how I’m a talentless hack and I don’t know why I even bother trying in this entry.
The bad news, of course, is that I’m not canceling the whining, just postponing it.
And that pretty much brings us to the end of this entry. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if that’s good news or bad news.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
New And Exciting?
Hey Jon, looks like you're posting a new picture. Is it something new, unique, original, and challenging?
No? It's the same kind of crap you always post? Oh, okay.
(To be fair, I don't think that this picture of Scarlett Johansson is crap, and actually I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out, but...well, I'd like to be able to offer you something different from the usual stuff I post, but it seems clear that just isn't going to happen. So while this is a decent picture, it's essentially the same decent picture I've been posting for who knows how long. But don't let my artistic and existential ennui spoil your enjoyment of it.)
No? It's the same kind of crap you always post? Oh, okay.
(To be fair, I don't think that this picture of Scarlett Johansson is crap, and actually I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out, but...well, I'd like to be able to offer you something different from the usual stuff I post, but it seems clear that just isn't going to happen. So while this is a decent picture, it's essentially the same decent picture I've been posting for who knows how long. But don't let my artistic and existential ennui spoil your enjoyment of it.)
Action-Packed
First of all, happy birthday to my nephew Jeremy, who’s 19 today.
So far my major accomplishments for today have been making scrambled eggs and taking a shower.
As you can tell, things have clearly been rather hectic and action-packed around here.
In fact, there’s just been so much going on that I don’t know where to begin in relating it all, so I’m not even going to bother to try.
Instead, here’s a video of a guy playing the Super Mario Bros. theme on a Theremin:
Bonus video of the same guy covering the Gnarls Barkley song Crazy on a Theremin:
(Found via Lauging Squid)
So far my major accomplishments for today have been making scrambled eggs and taking a shower.
As you can tell, things have clearly been rather hectic and action-packed around here.
In fact, there’s just been so much going on that I don’t know where to begin in relating it all, so I’m not even going to bother to try.
Instead, here’s a video of a guy playing the Super Mario Bros. theme on a Theremin:
Bonus video of the same guy covering the Gnarls Barkley song Crazy on a Theremin:
(Found via Lauging Squid)
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