Thursday, August 31, 2006

Renovation

Today I finally got around to doing all the renovations this blog needed. As I have mentioned in the past, I'm going to use blogs to keep my school notes organized. This serves a couple of purposes. I enjoy blogging, (and keeping a blog that's organized and tidy) so hopefully I'll be motivated to keep better notes. It's also a way of backing up important data. All the notes I publish here will be on my hard drive as well. Lastly, I plan to write out every note I take twice...sort of. I'll take notes in class the way anyone would, then save them as a rough draft. Later I'll replace the rough draft with a good copy written in proper English that summarizes the note.

While I was at it I also modified my html and updated my links. I got lazy and decided against taking out and adding certain lines of code to make every page unique and special, but that ultimately makes navigation easier at the cost of some extra redundancy.

Last night some of my friends and I wandered around Westdale and spent some time climbing up/sitting in trees. I'm not too sure why - I guess it was just what ended up happening as a way of putting off the inevitable farewell. The whole night I had Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap stuck in my head. At the end of the night we said goodbye and went our separate ways. It was very sad.

Monday, August 28, 2006

iChat!

I only have a few days left at home now before I go away. I've got a lot to do before Saturday but I'm trying to have fun doing it. On Saturday night a few of us got together at Katelin's and had a good old time, and we said goodbye to Alex who's off to Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Awesome. Yesterday I went clothes shopping at Winners and got some nice things. My favourite is this suade jacket I'm very happy with.

And tonight Rockwell and I stumbled onto iChat...the instant messenger for macs. Oh man, is it cool. Since the macbooks, (he bought his today - an upgraded version of the Pro, of course) come equipped with a webcam/camera and a mic built right in, it's all pretty easy to set up. So yeah, we amused ourselves with that for quite awhile, but we need more people to talk to on there. More Mac users!

I also read an interesting post today on the WoW forums written by this guy named Tim who was unfortunate enough to drop his iPod into the toilet on an airplane. He was on the plane flying to Canada to meet a guild mate. It ended up being this huge deal because they thought it was a bomb in the toilet...and even after they knew for sure that it was only an iPod they still had to go through all the motions. Tim wrote about being extensively questioned by government officials, bomb squads, detectives, and so on. Moral of the story: don't...drop your iPod in an airplane toilet. I bet that's one you didn't know.

But what I'm really wondering is: what's with Apple and putting i in front of everything? It's seriously a little narcissistic.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

A Film Note

I've been browsing the movie trailers on Apple tonight and, as always, there are a handful that really caught my interest. The problem with these trailers is that I see them and think, I gotta check that one out, and then I forget about them. So the following is, more for myself than for anyone else, a list of movies whose trailers on Apple have made me want to see them.

The Motel
The Science of Sleep
The Last Kiss
Man of the Year
Scoop
Edmond
Children of Men
Babel
Hollywoodland
The Protector
10th and Wolf
The Oh in Ohio
Half Nelson
Idlewild


Random note: Today Pluto died. It is no longer considered a planet in our solar system because it's too small. Poor little guy.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Arg @ Apple...and Me

Tonight I made a post on the WoW Forum: Mac Technical Support. I hear people talking all the time about how they run WoW on their laptops "no problem", and I always figured I'd have the same lack of problems on a laptop that's brand new - with an Intel core and everything. My post was regarding some other questions I had around installing mods and patches and whatnot, but I also inquired as to the overall performance on MacBooks. A Blizzard representative replied within a couple minutes:

" When you log on it should trigger the download of the 1.12.0 universal patch. Should be one huge download and then patch you up to current.

We're not as happy with our performance on the Intel-GPU Macs as we would like to be, but it is an important issue for us and we are continuing work with Apple to tune it up further. At present I would recommend running absolute minimum graphic settings, and leave vertex and pixel shaders disabled.

Mods are usually a no brainer if they come in a ZIP file, if they come in an EXE file then it's not easy to get them installed. But the engine is compatible so you can just drag Addon folders from old system to new system and off you go."

That bit about having the graphics turned down to the absolute minimum is a pretty huge bummer. It's almost making me reconsider my decision to leave my desktop at home when I move out. Wait, "almost"? No, I'm definitely reconsidering right now. In fact I'd say right now I'm on the fence as to what to do. I'll sleep on it.

In other aspects of life, these are the things I still have to do before move-out/in day:
-Call my landlady and ask her what I need to do to set up a wireless internet connection in my room
-Go clothes shopping
-Get a tan (because I look hot with colour.)
-Buy a laundry hamper
-Burn all my movies onto DVDs
-Write two letters I've been putting off writing for the entire summer
-Find some stuff in the black hole that is my room that I want to take with me when I go

Happily, I get the day off work tomorrow so I'll have no reason not to get started on this stuff.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Read this Article


[NOTE: Since Blogger's formatting tools are broken, I've been forced to make the font in this entire post either very big or very small. I chose big. At least it's easy to read.]

Some months ago my buddy Kat wrote an article for her co-op placement at The Hamilton Spectator. It's due to be printed sometime in the coming weeks, but in the meantime Kat was sent the final draft which she posted on her blog. It is posted there for anyone who wants to read it, and because I like it so much I copied and pasted it here. (It's about time I post something relevant and interesting, anyway.) I like it because, firstly, this topic is right up my alley. Secondly, I know who most of the people she cites are, which is neat. So, without further ado:

Online Identity: Growing Up in Cyberspace
by Sarah Palaković AKA Katherine 'Kat' Kelly


I log in as the administrator of my weblog — a kind of online journal — and begin typing a post that the miracle of the internet will allow anyone to read. In my blog, I am Kat — a nickname taken from my middle name. Kat seems to me like a friend I am continually getting to know. Sometimes I’m surprised by what she announces she believes. She is careful with what she writes — in the past, disclosure of overly personal information has made some of her friends uncomfortable. She does not write whatever she wants; she writes, to an extent, what she believes people will want to read. She is honest, but she knows her audience influences what she decides to say and how she presents herself. Kat keeps herself quite separate from Sarah, and my legal surname is intentionally absent from my blog. This prevents family, certain acquaintances, and prospective employers from googling my name and discovering my personal thoughts.

Popular blogger Rebecca Blood wrote in her essay on weblogs: “Shortly after I began producing Rebecca’s Pocket I noticed two side effects I had not expected. First, I discovered my own interests… More importantly, I began to value more highly my own point of view. In composing my link text every day I carefully considered my own opinions and ideas, and I began to feel that my perspective was unique and important.”

Blogs are just one facet of the internet that allow the user to explore their identity. Other areas include games, chat rooms, and forums. Online, people can experiment with different aspects of their personality, interests, and abilities in a more anonymous space than the “real world.” Blood describes how blogs affect the writer’s sense of self:

“The blogger, by virtue of simply writing down whatever is on his mind, will be confronted with his own thoughts and opinions… Being met with friendly voices, he may gain more confidence in his view of the world.”

I’ve found that blogging is quite different from keeping a private journal. It presses me to pay more attention to what I write, to reach for a higher standard of quality than private writing encourages. I avoid recording mundane events and highly personal information because they provide only boredom or embarrassment. Many post drafts have been abandoned after a mental check of “Will someone want to read this?” My blog is also a place for experimentation. I’ve never been an especially funny person, but I feel a compulsion to make attempts at humour because if I fail, no one will much care, but if I learn to succeed, my writing will be all the more engaging.

The Blog Herald estimates the number of blogs out there to be near 35 million worldwide. Many of those are diary-style sites belonging to youth such as myself. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia describes the appeal of blogs to young adults: “Online diaries are part of the daily lives of many teenagers and college students. Friends use blogs to communicate with each other, keeping each other up-to-date with events and thoughts in a non-intrusive manner. The appeal of this form of communication is that the recipient can read whenever it is convenient, and the writer does not need to remember who still needs to be updated with certain pieces of information - it is there, waiting, for whenever people wish to read it.”

In 2005, the Children’s Digital Media Center at Georgetown University conducted a study of gender, identity and language use in teenage blogs. They found that blogs “provide a space for self-expression” and are “an extension of the real world, rather than a place where people like to pretend.” Adolescents use language to create an anchor and a consistent public face when developing identity, and they “seek a continuity of representations of who they are, as well as a confirmation of those representations by their peers.” The study also found surprising results concerning gendered behaviour — a notable lack of difference between blogs created by young males and females. “Perhaps the technical ease of use of blogs levels the differences between males and females, or perhaps this generation of Internet users is becoming more androgynous in its online communication and interaction.”

When I first met “Ren” in an online gaming forum, a few key points, like her assertive way of writing and her proficiency in the male-dominated world of computer games, led me to assume that she was, in fact, male. Noticing this, she decided to conduct an experiment of gender identity over the internet. She continued with the charade for months, never stooping to deception, just continuing to be herself without mentioning gender. When she finally tired of dancing around pronouns and revealed the truth of her “experiment” to me, I was shocked. Female Ren seemed like a different person to me — even though her behaviour remained exactly the same, my perceptions of her had changed completely.

This would be in keeping with the gender trends Georgetown’s study noticed: females are using the active, resolute language patterns that have traditionally been favoured by males. “One possible implication is that the language and the social interactions on the Internet are changing, perhaps because the participants are changing. That is, the latest wave of teenage females, at least female bloggers, may have different gender roles from those of earlier generations… Alternately, females who choose to create blogs may be less traditional in their gender roles than the general population.”

Geoffrey Rockwell, Associate Professor of Humanities Computing and Multimedia at McMaster University, says of blogs that “in the act of writing, you externalize something, and when you’re reading it later it allows you to think about yourself.” The choice about what to blog, he says, reveals one’s public identity. He blogs his research notes. “Blogs are unquestionably a way of creating my identity — my blog is a way of engaging the community that matters to me.”

Online identity isn’t confined to blogs. Computer games, especially online RPGs (role-playing games), provide opportunities for teens to develop identity in a more interactive, but narrower, space. “There’s more capacity to experiment, but there’s something unreal about these experiments,” Rockwell says. He does recognize the skills youth can build through games, namely problem-solving and multitasking. “There’s a lot more multitasking among youth; it’s a much noisier world.” Rockwell notes that as the primary media we’re exposed to changes, so does the way we develop identity.

Online computer games typically allow the player to customize their character’s appearance and to choose which gender they want to play as. “Gender-bending” is not uncommon. An extensive, ongoing study by Nicholas Yee on the psychology of online RPGs suggested that since social gender boundaries are more stringent in real-life for men, men are more likely to explore gender roles in an anonymous space by choosing to play a female character. Other reasons include the special treatment female gamers can receive, and the ability to dominate and eroticize their avatar when they watch her move. Females, on the other hand, will often use male characters for protection and neutrality in a gender-biased environment.

Adolescents are especially affected by perception and creation of identity. Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson believed identity is the main developmental task of adolescence. One of the shifts to adulthood, Rockwell says, is to define your identity not by what you consume, but by what you make. And the internet is ripe with opportunities for creation: he describes how two teens can use a computer game’s engine to create mini movies. “Wikis,” which he calls “places for collaborative making,” are web pages that can be easily edited by any user. Programs like Garageband and Acid offer novice musicians a simple interface with which to write their own music — a critical part of every teen’s life. As Rockwell puts it, “Teens define themselves by the music they listen to, and now they have this extraordinary capacity to choose.”

The internet, he says, is like a library you can get things from as well as put things into and help catalogue them. He notes that when he was young, he could “micromanage [his] personality around books,” while today’s adolescents can do the same with music. “My kids have access to musical information comparable to a library,” he says.

Chat rooms offer yet another opportunity for identity exploration, but the trend among adolescents seems to be toward presenting their real-life identity online rather than playing pretend. A recent study of teenage chat rooms by the American Psychological Association found that people there are likely to give away personally identifiable information. One way to do so is through the popular “a/s/l” chat code (a request for another participant to reveal their age, sex, and location). Subjects of conversation in teenage chat rooms include sexuality, appearance, and the self — all important aspects of identity construction. As well, teenagers create sexualized nicknames with which to communicate, which the study calls “an adaptive substitute for dressing in a sexy manner or wearing makeup in the real world.”

Nicknames and pseudonyms are rampant on the world wide web. Ahmed “Khuffie” El-Khuffash, owner of www.khuffie.com and webmaster of a popular videogame fansite, thinks a pseudonym “makes it easy for someone to remain anonymous unless they wish to be known. Most of the time, especially for teenage bloggers, it’s a way to express their real identity while keeping it hidden from those they don’t want to know about it… you always show a different side to your parents than what you show to your friends.” Frequently, especially with teenagers, behaviour online is just a variation of real-world dynamics.

On the subject of shyness, El-Khuffash explains why he is more comfortable meeting people online than in person: “I think it’s easier to be true to myself and show who I really am when chatting to people online, which makes it easier in getting to know someone. I tend to be quieter and more reserved in person because I constantly try to think of what I should say next, how I should say it, how I should stand, how I should look at the person, what I should ask… it’s far easier when you have a chance to think before you type.” Face-to-face interactions such as eye contact can be intimidating, he says.

An article by Tom R. Tyler of New York University measuring the social impact of the internet stated that rather than turning to the internet as a way of hiding from real life, socially anxious people use the internet to lessen the anxiety associated with initial meetings. Later, they bring those relationships into the real world, proving that the internet can be a very real force in an individual’s social life and thus in society.

El-Khuffash notes how simple it is to find people with common interests online, giving strangers something to talk about. Rockwell points out that the internet encourages “ghettoization,” segregation by interest. “Instead of being segregated by distance, we’re now segregated by interests, hobbies, and passions.”

Tyler’s article also studied online identity exploration: “When trying out new identities people initially express those identities over the more anonymous Internet and then embrace them and bring them into their real world by telling their friends about them.”

There can be complications when online and real-life identities collide. Heather “Dooce” Armstrong was fired from her job because of what she wrote in her blog. What she never expected was that the same blog would now bring in enough money to support her family. She calls it her “dream job.”

As for me, I’ll continue to keep my online and “real” lives separate. Only a select few friends know that Sarah Palakovic and Katherine Kelly are the same person. Sarah knows she completely lacks artistic talent; Kat dabbles in art on a large art-sharing website. Sarah keeps her poetry private; Kat posts it on several different writing sites and on her blog. But although Kat gives me an opportunity to be bolder in the safe anonymity of the internet, we are essentially the same.

SIDEBAR - Stats:
(from a March 2006 Spec article) based on results of a 2005 Media Awareness Network report on Canadian children and teens regarding Internet use:
- 94 per cent of teens have Internet access
- by Grade 11, 51 per cent have their own Internet-connected computer
- by Grade 8 more than 75 per cent download and listen to music online.
- 61 per cent of 13- to 17-year-olds have a personal profile on a site such as MySpace, Friendster, or Xanga

BOX - Blogs to check out:
www.rebeccablood.net
www.dooce.com
http://strange.mcmaster.ca/%7Egrockwel/weblog/notes (Geoffrey Rockwell’s research notes)


Any comments should be directed to the entry in Kat's blog, found here. I will also pass on to her any comments made here.

Monday, August 21, 2006

Comments, dudes!

So, after having done this whole blogging thing for a couple months now I figured I had it down.

Not quite so. See, I was all bummed out because I figured nobody read my blog, ever. If they did, they'd probably comment. But alas, no comments. Today I noticed the "Moderate comments" tab. It's a beautiful thing. Turns out I have to approve comments before choosing to publish them, which is actually kind of good.

Anyway, thanks to Rami for the compliment some entries ago!...Rami, who I believe is a buddy of Ren's. Very cool. And to Rockwell, who made that ridiculous comment about Zidane in the Final of the World Cup that I would have gotten into a debate about at the time, but not now because, frankly, I don't care.

This has all made my day. Actually, my day has technically been made twice today. The first time was when my dad told me that this guy, (we'll call him Steve) who used to work for him and who I remember fairly well, was formerly a male stripper. As if that in itself weren't amusing enough, Steve was this scrawny, long-haired little man who never looked quite...well, clean. His stagename was: Tiny Tim. Priceless, I tell you.

Right Off the Cuff

I spent a good part of my day working with my dad again, whose antics rarely fail to amuse me. Just a little while ago we were driving home on Main street, and suddenly my dad recognizes the back of this truck up ahead of us, whose driver he meant to call but probably forgot to. So he says to me, "I think that's that guy!" and then manages to pull up beside him, put the window down and catch his attention, all while speeding along down the busiest street in the city. As we continued on our way side by side, they arranged, by yelling out the windows, to meet at my dad's place tomorrow morning at 11 to do business as usual, which in this case happens to be removal of unwanted crap. I mused about it afterward, noting that "I can't believe that worked." My dad said that kind of thing happens quite a bit when you run a small business - a lot of things are right off the cuff and random like that.

Anyway, this entry is dedicated to my buddy Kat because it's her 18th birthday today meaning she can finally realize her dream - to rent some porn. Congrats Kat.
In all seriousness though, here's hoping she has a great year.

Sunday, August 20, 2006

To Be a Gorilla

On Friday night I met up with Katelin at her place. After meeting some family members, we all drove downtown to a typical Hamilton club I'd never been to before: Absinthe. Katelin's brother Graham and his band Coming Up for Air had a gig at 11:30 that got pushed back to about 12:00. It wasn't my favourite music, but it's all about supporting friends and whatnot, so doing that felt good.

Something stuck with me from that night that I didn't expect. As we were leaving the club we were chased by the unique sounds of a guy who'd decided to get up onstage afterward and do his thing - solo. I assumed he was a regular there, and he was one of those types that you see at every club and concert: grungy, long-haired dude who sits/stands at the very front for the entire show head-bobbing ultra-enthusiastically to every song. So we're leaving, and his angry, roaring riffs accompanied by his own grunting intensiveness chased us out the door. Katelin's young cousin made some distasteful comment, clearly baffled as to why anyone would sound so unpleasant on purpose. I said that he was just expressing himself, to which the young fellow replied, "I don't think he's expressing himself. I think he just wants to be a gorilla."

I didn't laugh at the time, but it made smile later. Probably because, the more I think about it, the more I think there really is a lot of truth to the Gorilla theory. More on this later.

Anyway, I played some WoW when I got home and accomplished some geeky feats that I won't bother going into detail about.

Saturday night I was hoping to see Snakes on a Plane, but my friends that I'd have probably gone with saw it on Friday. (Miscommunication there. Oops.) So instead Rockwell and Luke and I rented Four Brothers, mostly by virtue of the fact that it was filmed in Hamilton. We knew it would be bad and, shock of shocks, it was. One of the four brothers in it looked a lot like the character Lion from Virtua Fighter 4 though, which was cool. Around 11:00 Rockwell and I left Luke's and walked around for a few hours gabbing it up. We ended up talking about Rockwell's latest idea for a videogame (an MMO) that features "savages" as avatars. The value of the idea is centered around the hope that this game would completely break free from the mold that every MMOG on the market or in development currently fits into.

We discussed potential features of such a game at some length before I headed home, and it got me thinking about that Gorilla theory again. Peter's game idea depends on the assumption that many gamers, (and most importantly, many people in general) have some kind of primal urge to be act like a total savage from time to time. I don't know how common a trait this is, but Rockwell's game concept sounds like something the Gorilla Guy from Absinthe would really get a kick out of - and maybe, (hopefully) a lot of other people would too.

PS: Something else of note. Yesterday there was a buzz on the internet about some girl who claimed that she was going to perform Seppuku at midnight on her webcam. Apparently the IRC server where people thought they could view the live feed got flooded and I don't think anything happened, but I haven't been looking for details about it either. The premise alone of people tripping over themselves for the chance to see a misguided teenager dissembowel herself before their eyes is, to say the least, a little daunting. I include this piece of information in my post mainly for the purpose of documenting it, and also because it ties in perfectly with this entry's Savagery theme.

Friday, August 11, 2006

Ode to Culture

I've been feeling pretty good the last couple of days.

For, I guess a few weeks, I succumbed to the temptation of binging on WoW again. (Substantial-but-not-fulfilling-entertainment at its best.) My tauren druid is nearly Level 55. Ever since I got this laptop on Tuesday though, I haven't been online once, (or done anything on my other computer for that matter besides listening to music). That's been a good development.


It seemed appropriate somehow.

When you're not completely enthralled with your digital character it's a lot easier to get around to doing things you can actually feel good about.

Take yesterday. By the end of the day I felt like I'd paid my dues to culture. (And when I say culture, I'm correlating it in my mind with something more along the lines of "trendy/hipster lifestyle".) I woke up at a reasonable hour and booted up my MacBook and read some Google News articles while tuned in to an iTunes radio station - an indie rock station which was playing some tunes by Canada's current sensation Broken Social Scene. Then I started browsing the iTunes store and looked at Audio Books. I took a mental note of some I was interested in. Later I headed over to the local plaza to get a passport-style photo taken of me for my university I.D. While waiting 40 minutes for my picture to be prepared I poppped into the video store and rented Cache, a semi-artistic French film that I'd seen the trailer for online. Then I poked around in the bookstore and, on a whim, decided to buy a book I'd just seen and read reviews for on the iTunes store. I can't remember the last time I bought a book like that. I used to read a lot of books as a kid - I want to get into it again.
So I picked up my photo and mailed it off in Shoppers' Drug Mart. While I was in there I bought some new sunglasses. Then I walked home accompanied by the melodies of one of my favourite Canadian bands - Sloan. When I got home I read my book, (which is great, by the way) and then had a driving lesson in the evening. Afterward I went and hung out at Rockwell's until midnight.

It may seem odd, (and probably terribly annoying) that I just bothered to describe, in detail, a random and uninteresting day in my life. What's striking to me is the contrast between that day and several other days I've had that consisted mostly of playing and had absolutely no substance to them. It may not mean anything to anyone else, but it means something to me.

Oh, and for the record, I didn't enjoy the movie Cache. Not saying it's a bad film or anything, but I wasn't paying enough attention to give an intelligent overview of its pros and cons; it just didn't hold my interest. What I'll say is that it had a whiff of this feeling that I get all the time when I watch European films; this feeling that, as contradictory as it sounds, I can only call hopeful melancholy. It's one of those movies that ends happily enough, but still leaves you feeling sad for some reason.

Anyway, I have a feeling this post is sounding a lot more mopey than I intended it to. The truth is, I'm in a good mood. My dad is back from a short business trip in Montreal and I went into work today with him. Got home, slept, and then went out with Luke and Rockwell. We grabbed dinner at Harvey's and then went to see World Trade Center.

Let me say that I loved this movie. Noted as Oliver Stone's least eyebrow-raising piece to date, this is just a classic, heart-wrenching and emotional film. I predict that it lacks the uniqueness that makes other films go down in history for being one of the greats, which is too bad, because I haven't seen a movie that made me feel the way World Trade Center did in a long time. I highly reccomend this one if you liked the way you felt when you watched Remember the Titans, Armageddon, and Angels in the Outfield, to name a few. It's not for everyone. My friend Luke didn't like it - he said it was too cheesy. It isn't. What he meant was it was too emotional and mushy for his taste - and that makes sense. This one tugs at your heartstrings and is, as Roeper commented in his review, free of any political commentary. Anything like that would mar its purity as a piece about love, courage, integrity, and pride in one's country. I applaud Stone for doing this - it's probably the best tribute the people involved could have asked for, and I'm glad they got it.

Oh, just a sidenote: WTC is heavy on the closeups, so you get a good look at everyone's face. At first, I thought Maria Bello had the most stunningly beautiful blue eyes I'd ever seen. But I googled her just now and she's got brown eyes in all the pictures I've seen, so I guess she was wearing contacts. People around me were muttering, "No way those are real." Ah well.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Macbook!

Today my mum and I drove to the apple store in Toronto (in Yorkdale - pretty sweet mall.) I sit here typing on my brand-spankin' new, 13" black Macbook. I won't lie; getting used to using a Mac isn't easy, but I'm kind of enjoying the challenge. I don't really have much else to say about it though. I thought I would. I mean, this is something I've been dreaming about for a long time...my own laptop. I'm really happy with it, of course, but it's not quite like I imagined it. I suppose we all have to grow up sometime.

I also bought a cordless optical mouse with Bluetooth, and it is thoroughly awesome. The only drawback that I'm living with right now is that we don't have wireless internet here at home, so I'm still cooped up in my room when I want to use the Net...which is quite a bit. That, and my desktop is disconnected since I've got my ethernet cable plugged in here. Oh well. When I make the move to Guelph I'm gonna have to buy a wireless modem and set up my own account with Rogers or something.

In news pertaining to this blog itself, I've decided that I'm going to create several other blogs as a means of keeping track of my lecture/research notes. Plus if something happens to this machine, (God forbid) I'll be able to access all my notes anywhere there's an internet connection. Clever, no?

Ok, so it wasn't my idea. Meh.

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Me and a Meme

It's been awhile since I've posted and that's because there's not a whole lot going on. I'm just working like usual and mostly sleeping/playing WoW/hanging around with Rockwell in my spare time. Last night/this morning we rented that CGI Final Fantasy VII movie Advent Children and watched it on his dad's MacBook Pro - which is very nice, by the way. I don't remember exactly when that movie came out but it's nothing new, I just didn't get around to seeing it until now. Anyways, it was really cool. The plot and characters won't mean much to you if you didn't play FF7, but I reccomend it anyway if you appreciate artistic stuff like this. The graphics are just so nice.

Anyways, my excuse to post again is this meme from Ren's blog. You have to answer the person's questions and then be prepared to pose your own to anyone else who asks and on and on it goes.
So here're the questions Ren asked me, and my answers:

1) Why must you pick such hard movie quotes on my message boards?
2) How long have you known Kat and how did y'all meet?
3) What makes YOU so brilliant, HMM?
4) Why do you think you DESERVE to be interviewed by ME?
5) Tube socks, yay or nay?


1) ...Because I'm a movie nut? Wait, change that to pseudo-movie nut, because I don't actually know most of those quotes off by heart. I just vaguely remember them and then use the ever-wonderful IMDb to get 'em right or find a better one from the same movie. Plus I suppose I don't have that clear of an idea of what movies you folks are into, besides you liking Disney.

2) I met Sarah/Kat during our school's production of West Side Story when I was in Grade 11. That would have been in September/October of 2004. We were casual friends/acquaintances the way people are when they're in plays together I guess, but we didn't stay in touch afterward. I think I had an interest in being friends at the time until I found out she was in grade 12 and, being the shy dude that I was, I was embarassed that I'd been treating her like such an equal. *laughs* It wasn't until she showed up in my Grade 12 Philosophy class in first semester as well as our school's literary magazine/club that I found out she skipped a grade and all that. Anyway, I guess we discovered we had a whole lot of common ground and have been buddies ever since.

3) Why, isn't it obvious?
No, sadly I only have my moments of utter brilliance as often as the next guy. Thinking back, when Kat told me to register on i-m I didn't have a handle that I was satisfied with and (maybe I'd been permeated with some bloody brilliant British culture at the time) I just typed it in randomly and liked the way it looked/sounded. I've been using it as my handle for everything on the internet ever since! Although I don't like it now as much as I did; I s'pose it comes across as being more arrogant than I intended. (I only do the cocky-thing from time to time in jest.)

4) Wait. Hold on. What makes you think you deserve to ask these questions that produce such long and lengthy answers from me, TEH BRILLIANT ONE?!?! (Notice that my esteemed responses are fancy and italicised while your lowly questions are not. Ha.)
Well, I suppose it's got something to do with the fact that I've been such a prominent and constructive contributor to your mostly pointless yet entertaining message boards that I've come to love as if I've always been there.

5) It depends. On me? No thanks. On girls? Meh, not really. On Scots? Yay. Hell yay.


PS: I beat out all of you in long-windedness. Try harder noobs.

--End---


So in other news, I should be getting my new laptop very soon. I can get it whenever I want, I just have to get around to doing my price-checking research and all that, which I think I'll do right now.
/dance