Saturday, November 30, 2013

Movies again

While I didn't see Frozen with my cousins like planned (the 4:20 show sold out, next one at 7:50, which was too late for me), I have seen a bunch of movies that I didn't see before.

Forrest Gump, which I saw immediately prior to the vacation was one that I can finally check off of my "movies to watch" list. While I didn't love it like others, it's great to fully get all the quotes and whatnot. It heavily implies that Jenny dies of AIDS, likely to due to heavy use of drugs/needle exchanges, but she looks awfully healthy for someone dying of AIDS. If my art history class I took at a community college a few years ago taught me anything, AIDS caused many formerly healthy people to waste away. The best thing about Forrest Gump was that a sequel wasn't made. Gump & Co. would've followed Forrest up to 1995, with the Oklahoma City bombing, except a few problems visible already is that the plot would've assumed O.J. Simpson was innocent (an egregious error that would've been frowned at by now), ends on a clearly bad note, and is too short (the original covered basically from the early 1950s to the early 1980s, whereas the sequel would've been about ten years).

Beetlejuice was an enjoyable but weird movie. Yeah, it was kind of funny, full of crazy claymation stuff, but the pacing seemed off, and I was a bit surprised of how they got away with using the F-word in one scene (and still kept their rating). Conversely, Gump got PG-13 for not much more (except, perhaps, the principal's grunting when Forrest's mom has sex with him to get him into public school).

Monty Python & The Holy Grail was one I hadn't seen before but needed to see for the cultural references (Ni!) was one of those movies that seemed to get away with a lot for a PG rated movie (Airplane! I heard was another). I generally did like it.

I also tried fruitlessly to get an N64 emulator working with a controller I had (the axes are all screwy), plus they released an update that won't work on my system. Another day, though--I got the other buttons completely mapped out from trial and error.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

The new Carbon-izer

Welcome to the New Carbon-izer. I still intend to update this blog, but I've added new things. I intend to give the page a new coat of paint.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Monday, November 4, 2013

The Smell

I woke in a half-asleep grogginess Sunday (4-6 am, due to the ending of DST) to a familiar smell in my nose. A second of identification remembered it as the smell of my uncle's old house in Baton Rouge. Not the upstairs (that could be achieved with the Nintendo Powers and poor ventilation, the latter of which isn't an issue anymore), but the downstairs, the first thing you would smell as you ventured toward the guest bathroom (not the inner vestibule with the toilet, but the one with the sink). Instantly I felt a new vigor in me, returning to the place that I hadn't been in for nearly 2 years. I began planning a project that I hadn't done in a long time...but then as I woke up, the smell was gone, and the project that I wanted to do forgotten. Was it all my imagination...?

Friday, November 1, 2013

Eaux

Over at Brazos Buildings & Businesses, I bemoan the lack of a creamery at my home college while there is still a creamery at a rival school, LSU. At first glance on Google Earth, LSU doesn't look so bad, they have many of the same amenities, it doesn't seem like cronyism has taken over the campus, and the off-campus eateries and shops are comparable to the bar wasteland up here. Baton Rouge is a larger but not necessarily better city (no H-E-B or Kroger, but there is a Trader Joe's now), and they have a way cooler mascot: a real tiger. We have a collie, which is lame.

But if there's one thing I'll never get about LSU, it's this "Geaux". As in, Geaux Tigers. It's a French-derived suffix that is pronounced as "oh", so that translates to "Go Tigers". But I'll never get it, and it always comes to me as "ghee-ox tigers". That's just how it is in Louisiana, which does give it some culture (something one of my least favorite states, Ohio, does not have). I don't know what the limits of using the "eaux" suffix is, but I hope it's anywhere where it replaces an "oh" sound, so we can have the Pillsbury Deauxboy and "Breauxs before Heauxs", or perhaps putting Sweet & Leaux into your coffee. It nevers sneauxs in Louisiana, and...okay, I'll stop now.