Well the year 2004 is over and 2005 is now here.  2004 has been a pretty big year for me—I graduated college, got my first real job, moved to a new city, lived alone for the first time, and most importantly, got engaged to Stephanie.  Now 2005 looks to be a big year for me as well, with a wedding coming up in April followed by a week in Hawai’i. :)  Then I get to be a newlywed, which according to MTV means that cameras watch whenever you eat tuna.  Or something like that.

So other things that I’ve been up to during the Christmas break include watching the first two The Lord of the Rings movies (Special Extended Editions of course), in preparation for watching the four-hours-and-ten-minutes-long The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King: Special Extended Edition.  I don’t think I’ll manage to do it in one night.

My parents decided to get me a radar detector for my birthday, as I seem to have trouble slowing my car down as evidenced by three speeding tickets in four years.  Right now I think I’m actually driving slower with it there, just because it would be really embarrassing to get a ticket immediately after getting a radar detector.

The other day Stephanie and I got engagement photos taken at Glamour Shots, and I am very ashamed to say as a heterosexual male that this is not the first time I’ve been to that place... although this time was not nearly as obnoxious as the other time I was there.  It was very weird... for starters, the lady taking the pictures was like five-foot-one and probably weighed about seventy-five pounds, and she had to keep standing on this chair to take pictures at eye level, then she’d get down and fling the chair about three feet to the side to get another angle and climb back onto it.  It looked like she was doing step aerobics or something.  Then there were some strange poses, she was like “Kip you’re going to like this one.  I want you to sit like this” and she sits on a stool-type thing facing to the side with her legs together, then she gets up and I’m like “okay” and sit down.  Then she says to Stephanie “Now you sit on his lap” and she’s like “okay” and starts to sit and the lady’s like “no, facing each other” and we’re like “...okay...”  So we do that, and she’s like “Get closer!  You aren’t close enough, get closer to each other!  You look like you’re afraid the other is going to bite!”  And I’m thinking “maybe we signed up for the wrong type of pictures... we’re going to give these to our parents here!”  As it turned out, the pictures she took like that were only of our faces.  Then we got to purchasing the pictures, and I knew what to expect.  Even though we had a coupon for a free sitting and a free 8x10, you still have to pay a bunch of money.  Technically we could have walked out with just one 8x10, but we wanted a picture to give each of our parents.  And if you want more than one picture, the cheapest you’re getting out of there for is $200.  But the way the pricing scheme is set up, you can pay $210 for two pictures, or $200 for five pictures.  Of course the first price we were quoted was something like $750 and we just kinda laughed.  If we wanted any pictures in greyscale or sepia, they charge you ten dollars to hit that button in Photoshop.  What I would have really liked them to do is let me go online and download the super-high resolution digital image that they mess with in Photoshop (considering that you can get like two foot tall prints, they must be at least five megapixel to look decent).  Of course they won’t let you do that, because they own the copyright on the pictures.  It’s probably illegal to scan the pictures and make duplicates of any of them, but I’m going to do it anyway.  Take that copyright whores!  Speaking of digital images, I got a digital camera for Christmas (like that one but just 4 megapixel) and I’ll probably add some kind of photos section to my website when I get time.  I also got a huge memory card (512 MB) so that I can take lots of pictures in Hawai’i, which can hold about 250 images at 4 megapixel.  My cousin said that the guy at Best Buy told him that the number of megapixels doesn’t really mean anything.  That’s like saying the weight of your car doesn’t affect your gas mileage.

I think I’ve written enough for now.  If you want a good look back on 2004, you should check out Maddox’s The eleven worst songs of 2004.  You may not want to do so if you are at work though...

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah
    ~Bono

So last Friday I went to a horror movie double header with Garrison, Jason, and Andy...  For those of you who are wondering, this meant we went to see two movies in the same night.

White Noise - This is the first one we saw.  It’s about electronic voice phenomenon, the idea that the dead are communicating via radio waves.  Personally I think it’s about as much of a “real” phenomenon as a geocentric universe, but I wasn’t going to let that affect my experience (after all, if I’m going to start criticizing horror movies for being fictional I don’t know where I’ll stop).  However it didn’t matter, because the movie was pretty bad anyway.  The movie did manage to maintain a suspenseful feel, but that’s because they resorted to every cheap scare tactic in the movie making book (there were like eight shots of people looking into mirrors, for example).  This got me looking forward to the second movie.

Darkness - This one had a really creepy trailer.  Unfortunately, the sum of creepiness in the movie as a whole was approximately equal to the creepiness of the trailer.  Put another way, the movie was boring.  It obviously did well enough in Spain in 2002 that someone thought it would be worth redoing in English, but there was quite a lot lost in the translation apparently.  Note to future directors: if eighty percent of the dialog in your movie is delivered by a thirteen-year-old, make sure she can deliver those lines convincingly.

So, all said and done, I’d give White Noise a 4.5 out of 10, and I’d give Darkness a 1.5 out of 10 (yeah, it was that bad).

You love the Middle Ages, don’t you?!
             Sir, yes sir!
The concept of a geocentric universe gets you sexually excited, doesn’t it?!
             Sir, yes sir!
~The Family Guy

I apparently pulled a Rathergate in my last post by reporting false information about the movie Darkness.  Not the part where I said it sucked though, because it was a really horrible movie.  But Garrison corrected me on my reference to a thirteen-year-old actress:  as it turns out, Anna Paquin was at least eighteen when the movie was made, probably nineteen or twenty.  You probably know her as Rogue in X-Men and X2.  Regardless, her character in Darkness couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old, and her performance was horrible, although that may have had just as much to do with bad direction.  In another scandal, I reported that the original Spanish movie was released in Spain in 2002 and redone for American audiences for 2004 release.  Actually, that was only half true.  The movie was released in Spain in 2002, and then released in America in 2004.  But the original film was also in English, and there was no remaking of the film.  The only change to the American version is that they edited a little to get a PG-13 rating (I’m guessing that’s where the really out-of-place uses of the word “freaking” came from).  So there was no translation for something to get lost in.  The movie just sucked in every country.

Speaking of thirteen year olds, I rented the movie Thirteen last night at Garrison’s recommendation.  I thought it was well done, but not one that I’d really want to own.  To summarize, it’s about a girl in seventh grade who becomes rebellious when she starts hanging out with a different group of friends.  Of course there’s a lot more to it than that.  The movie was co-written by Nikki Reed, one of the two leading actresses, and is semi-autobiographical (although, if I understand IMDB correctly, the character she plays is not the one that represents herself).  More than anything it made me appreciate the family I had and the decisions I made in my life.  And it makes me think back to middle/high school and the things that people thought were so important then and the social groups that formed and in retrospect it was all so stupid and meaningless.  It’s like that song “Hold On”, one of Good Charlotte’s best ones, about teenage suicide.  Of all the times in your life to commit suicide, during your teenage years would be the worst possible choice I could think of.  I mention this because the main character attempts suicide in the movie, or she cuts her wrists anyway, I guess her intent was suicide but I’m not sure since I’ve never been a wrist-cutter myself.  But what I’m saying is that the movie made me remember times, probably around sixteen or seventeen, when life seemed pretty depressing (although it was never so bad that suicide was a possibility), and now, at twenty-three, I realize almost everything that I cared about didn’t really matter.  The line from that song I was thinking about is “Hold on, if you feel like letting go, hold on, it gets better than you know.”  Now I’ve gone and gotten all serious.  I just wanted to say it’s an interesting movie that somehow I could sort of relate to my life even though I was never a teenage girl and I never attempted suicide or did drugs or got piercings or hung out with people who did.

Before I go, I think I’ll share a strange dream I had last night.  Garrison and I were going to New York City again for some reason, and we were at the airport and got separated and somehow I ended up near the front of the plane and he was somewhere near the back.  I was seated next to a lady who was super scared to fly, which made me seem pretty calm (and Garrison can tell you that I was quite a bit nervous about airplaning until a good ten or fifteen minutes after we took off).  So anyway we took off but did not immediately gain altitude.  After about two minutes I looked out the window and we were surrounded by trees that were just about at wing height.  This made me a little nervous.  Then the plane started tilting and I closed my eyes and the lady beside me grabbed my arm and I remember feeling the plane rolling completely over (now that I think about it, maybe I was rolling over in bed at the time, haha), and then I heard tree limbs scraping by the windows, and then the next thing I knew I woke up (in the dream) and I was on the back porch of my parents’ house and it was dark and I didn’t know how I got there or why I was sleeping on the porch (we took off in the day from Raleigh).  Then I got up and went to the back door and everyone was up, and I looked at a clock and it was 6:30 am and I didn’t understand why everyone was up.  And apparently no one knew why I was in Newton, and they asked me why I wasn’t in New York and I said nonchalantly “I was in a plane wreck” and they nonchalatntly said “oh, that’s too bad.”  Then Garrison showed up later and was like “Dude, where’d you go??” and I said “...the plane crashed...then I woke up here...” and he was like “you should have stayed” and said something about how he got lots of free stuff in NYC because he had been in a plane crash or something.  And that’s about where my recollection of the dream ends.

The aeroplane flies high
Turns left
Looks right

Okay so last night Garrison came down and we went to the Something Corporate show which was pretty awesome.  The lead singer plays the piano, and he takes this beat up, old, blue piano (like, a real piano, not a keyboard) everywhere the band goes, which is pretty unique.  He plays with one microphone in front of him for when he’s facing the piano, and one for when he turns left and faces the audience.  And when he’s facing the audience he’s moving and jumping around just like someone with a guitar would be, except he’s got one hand still playing the piano so it looks kinda like someone who is handcuffed to a pole trying to get away or something.  Then he got up and jumped on the keys (literally).  I’d think that would mess up your tuning, but it seemed to sound fine the rest of the show.

I also finally got around to finishing Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within last week, after putting it off for a week and a half because I was tired of playing it.  Gabe and Tycho had a comic about it that is pretty funny, and the accompanying news post/review can be read here.  The game pretty much was crappy.  It was full of bugs, at least on the Game Cube.  The graphics were much worse than the first game, and the plot was stupid.  The difficulty varied greatly.  It started out easy, then there were rediculously hard parts, then when I was greatly frustrated I got to the much easier and more fun part of the game where your energy drains constantly (until it’s almost gone, then it stops) and your sand tanks refill constantly.  Of course that didn’t last too very long until I got to the final boss, which was a stupid fight.  The game seemed like it was very rushed and no attention was made to quality control until the very end of the development cycle (which I can say, being a Software Engineer myself, is a very bad project management decision).  It really was on par with the game that I helped write my last semester of school.  If we were working with the Prince of Persia engine rather than the Unreal engine, I think we could have made Warrior Within ourselves in just one semester.  I wrote a much better sound mixing algorithm than they used (and it wasn’t like I had to invent a new programming language or anything complicated).  And for some reason as I was playing the game I kept thinking “I need to join the Navy!”