I recently visited Orisinal for the first time in a long while. He has posted a new, winter-themed game called Winterbells which is just challenging enough to keep the attention-span deficient quiet for a little while.
Month: December 2006
All People Are Critics. Some Are More Critical Than Others
Today I wrote my first movie review.
One of the big, ongoing projects at work is development on Spout.com, a movie discovery and discussion website. Several of my friends are regulars, so I finally bowed to peer pressure and created an account for myself. My user name is “Grasshopper”.
The first thing I did was to rate all of the movies I had seen. Simple enough to do — find the movie, and assign it a number between one and five. Before I knew it, I had rated over five hundred movies, and I am now up over a thousand. And that isn’t even counting all of the TV series and individual television episodes which can be rated; those would probably push me into the 2,000 range.
Normally I try not to shill for the projects I work on, but this time something unexpected happened: I had fun. I went through and found movies I hadn’t thought about in twenty years or more. Some of them were good, many more were mediocre or bad. Some of them made me feel quite nostalgic, accompanied by an odd sense of deja-vu wherein I could remember where I was and what I was doing when I watched the movie. Poltergeist with my brother and step-brother in Louisiana. Robocop with my brother, at home laying on the living room floor. The Crow with friends immediately after I returned from Russia. Star Wars with my Mom and brother in a movie theater in Jackson. The Razor’s Edge, sitting home surrounded by stacks of books.
Martial Arts is the only film genre I watch with a seriously critical eye, and I watch a lot of martial arts films. If I post a review of which I am particularly proud I will announce it here. In the meantime, browse around and see if you rediscover any old favorites.
On Being Sick
Today I am sick. My skin aches. Reality snaps out of focus when I move, and back into focus when I stop. I am not dizzy, precisely, but there is a sense of vertigo whenever I move my head — vapor trails of instances previous to the movement. My body feels like it doesn’t…quite…fit.
Clench your jaws. A little tighter…
tighter…
Right there! That is what my back muscles feel like.
I hear an odd tinnitus-like ringing that I usually associate with pressure in my head. If I remain still it gets a little louder as I drift into the aether, and a little louder, but never really loud, and then when I blink, reality snaps back into focus with an electric buzzing sound.
My throat feels swollen, so swallowing is difficult, especially when I lay down. Thus, sleep is not as refreshing as it might be. The kinds of meds that help this are the kind which keep me awake all night, so I can either be awake and feel crappy, or awake and feel REALLY crappy.
Oddly enough the bruises that I know I have, don’t hurt.
And so to bed.
More Crime
I just finished updating the Grand Rapids Crime Map here at es.o. There are 14 new incidents, bringing the total to 64. After a relatively quiet early autumn, things are back in full swing here in the Big City with the Small Town Feel