Current Ramblings
Sunday, March 20, 2005
I suck at updating.
My first quarter back in school is over, spring break is here (though I still have to work), and I feel a great sense of accomplishment. I managed to get "A"s in both my classes, giving me probably my first 4.0 since kindergarden. (I took a hating to homework right quick as a kid.) So I did it. I've gone back to school, and I'm succeeding at it. I haven't forgotten how to learn. What started out early last August as a brainstorm has come to fruition. I am a student. When a customer at work tries to engage me in conversation by asking if I'm in school, I can rightly say, "Yes, I am, you creepy old man."
I've managed to keep up with my newly resurrected walking routine, too, though it'll be at least a few more weeks before the results become evident. Which is why you have to start it when it's miserably cold out, y'see. I've learned that the best way to make yourself get out and exercise regardless of the weather is to get mentally distracted, throw on a fleece sweatsuit, and toss yourself out the door hard enough to get well down the street before you realize the full implications of what you are doing. If you let yourself realize you are soon going to be a mile from home in 25-degree weather, you will never leave.
I've been neglecting my games lately, but I've caught up a lot on other things. I've been tearing through shorter non-fiction fare while slowly trudging my way through Quicksilver, for starters. I've gotten through David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, which mostly gave me horrible flashbacks to my years in Houghton, MI, The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love, to lighten things back up a little, and now I'm working on Wil Wheaton's Just a Geek. All in about two months. I think the broadband helps a little. On dial-up, especially our super-slow free OSU dial-up shared between two computers, I always felt deep down like I wasn't getting the full potential of the internet. It was subliminal, but it kept me glued to my chair, waiting for things to load. Now that I have broadband I have come to terms with how much of the potential of the internet is the potential to spend money, money I do not have to spend, so I am happy to use my blazing-fast connection to quickly check my regular sites and then sit my ass on the couch and read while waiting for the next Galaxy Force BitTorrent file to download. I've caught up with the fansubs of Galaxy Force since getting the nice fast internets, and I would love to talk about them at length except that I don't want to piss people off with spoilers. Maybe if I get too overwhelmed with the need to discuss it - and discuss it with rational people, not boardies - then I will find the part on Blogger where they tell you how to do a LJ-cut kind of thing, if such a thing exists. What I have not done is write any fiction, which I feel worse and worse about every day. Maybe sometime in the near future I will devote an entire post to angsting over my writer's block, and that way you can all just skip over that post. The gist of it is that I started blogging in hopes that it would get me back into putting one word in front of the other, so to speak, and now I'm worrying that the blog itself is enough of an outlet for my writing that it's killing my primal need to create fiction.
On the subject of my fiction (in a roundabout way that Walky picked up on almost immediately) I went with Walky to see "Robots" while Graham graded finals for his own students on Thursday. In general I thought it was really good, though at times kinda overly silly for my tastes. And it needed less Robin Williams. I'm just tired of him. Other than that it was awesome. I think I'm finally getting over the OMG SO PRETTY effect of CG movies, which is fine because it allows me to concentrate on the rest of the movie. It's been pointed out that it's a sort of Disney parable, with the idealistic young creative type dreaming of working for a company headed by an equally idealistic patriarch, only to find that when the time comes to pursue his dream the kindly old man has been replaced with a shark of an executive. I suppose that happens when you have an industry consisting largely of people who are disappointed with modern-day Disney. I can't say I'm all that big on Disney myself. But the important thing, the most important thing, is robots. I loves me some robots.
And now I'll let you get back to your regularly scheduled life.
posted@10:04 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments