pk

finally got some food other than cream of wheat and soup...primarily pancake mix, also got some (fat free) Fig Newtons (Na-biiisskoh!!). I haven't eaten either though. I guess my mom made a bit more extra money off a recent sale on Amazon than I initially thought, 'cause she treated both me and herself to Arby's (over $15 total), so I ate that (my portion, I mean...), and she also bought some muffins, a few of which I ate, and I also had a king size Snickers bar and a hot dog thingy (still don't know what 'kind' it was...tasted good, but not like any hot dog I've ever had; the inside looked like chicken but it didn't taste quite that way...)...

so I guess you could say I've eaten everything BUT pancakes. And those muffins have a lot more fat in them than I realized - 60 grams total if you eat one blueberry and one chocolate. A healthy person - which I am so not - shouldn't eat more than seventy-some-odd calories a day, so I've clearly blown any chance of claiming righteouslness as of today...maybe tomorrow I'll do better.

was thinking tho; I owe my Mom like $70, but once I get her that paid, I might try to do the diet she is doing (she's having a hard time sticking to it lately, not sure why exactly, but anyway...) and maybe a few months or so later I can try the pancake diet...I mean, 1.5-5 grams of fat per meal isn't bad, but it's not helping me lose weight. Especially when I eat out like once a week or thereabouts...I may not be gaining any weight, but I certainly haven't noticed the pounds coming off.

here's lookin' at (pictures of) you, Onkyo

Well, here I am...nothing much has changed since my last visit...well, my mom's car is at the auto shop or something pending a $150 towing expense payment. Hopefully it'll be back next month, since the $80 (I think...) gas money that me and my mom put aside is effectively NOT going to gas for the time being...$80 x 2 is $160, making the car idle next month if the gas money is what gets it back in our posession...but, ya knnow, better late than never...by October we should be paintin' the town once again...I hope...

At the current prices on Amazon, I shouldn't need more than $295 to get a decent home audio set up - speakers, speaker wire, banana plugs & a receiver. If I get the same amount in 2011 (January or early February) that I got in 2010, I should be more than able to afford that. I'm worried the program fka "Circuit Breaker" will be terminated to make way for cashflow to those who need it a lot more than I do...here's hoping things start looking up for those who fight so hard every day just to get bread etc. on the table...

Haven't eaten anything today...just coffee and a cup of hot chocolate from the convenience store. Hoping to have some pancakes for dinner...my mom has some newly-acquired money, which she plans to loan me when she gets a ride to the grocery store...I won't be going with her, 'cause I don't need to and I haven't taken a shower since Monday evening...

John Anderson is gone. He switched jobs, someone new has replaced him. She's cool. A lot younger than John, guess she's semi-fresh out of college...a far cry from John, who was in his line of work for over 20 years...

I decided not to get a new Napster card. They apparantly got rid of the $5 cards. You need to get a 3, 6, or 12 month susbscription or pay $7 vs. $5 in order to have access to the service. The 3+ card(s) are $5/mo, but that's $5 x 3...which, ultimately, seemed rather pointless. I like to have CDs, I still buy them...Napster can take a backseat over Imeem...if I like listening to something enough, I can ditch Imeem (read: commercials) and have a permanent hard copy...

So...um...that about covers it.

XX

bittersweet

    In the dark edges of the high tower, where the spaceships meet, praying for daylight.  Such dry spaces shan't be ever seen by human eyes, lest they sleep and feel strange sensathish that they feel embarrased to speak their memories of.  Yet ye fall helplessly, seeing again what cannot be seen with logical site. 
  In the dark crevaces of this high tower, thy wonders who dareth jump high enough to etch these things that were made from rock so high up from the ordinary ground.  Thy feels strange, yet thy dare not speaks.  If ye understood, I doubt ye would say so.


In the paint, the colors, vivid and rife with life.  These walls, filled with aforementioned colors, I shall walk and feel the weight of my body in a different light.  I have walked through said walls, ye shall refuse to believe, but I was once invincible.

Mattypalooza video online – check out what’s coming for 2011! [UPDATE]

Mattypalooza video online – check out what’s coming for 2011! [UPDATE]


THIS IS JUST SO F--------'N AWESOME!!!!!! Looks like Mattel is finally A) getting their arses in gear with getting the darn things into the hands of the public and B) branching out into other territories of GB-hood and C) not being as "exclusive" with their license, as in TOYS R' US HERE I COME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - THIS XMAS!! GB2 4-pk @ $50 coming through...........
This is just REALLY REALLY good news. Now let's hope the 4 pak doesn't look too dull to spend fifty smakaroos on..........they've already shaat all over their RGB aspect of the line, making them "mego" style, as if mego was something a kid in 1986/1987 was typically playing with......not to mention the proton pak accessories they're supposed to come w/ look like a stick someone gathered while in the yard...(as opposed to the ultra-neato electronic superduty nuclear accelerator seen in the films, and more or less in the cartoon...). I swear, those IDIOTS! I'll probably buy 'em anyway if they don't charge $10++ for 'em tho. I might be OK w/ paying $8 for 'em, although I'd hope for them to be less....they're selling those at Toys 'R' Us as well so I can just pick 'em up "on impulse" (or whatever) instead of shelling out X cost + S&H for something so close yet even further away.....

dangerous beauty

Last year, circa late summer, I became aware of an ultra-passionate pop-punk/emo hybrid band named THE DANGEROUS SUMMER.  Via the previously mentioned (see most recent post excluding this 1) Napster on-demand streaming audio service, I just finished listening to a live EP (simply titled "Live In Baltimore"; I checked at 11:55 apprx central time and Amazon didn't have it for sale yet, but I guess Napster isn't as strict about who and when they can listen in...) and surprisingly, they actually know how to play their instruments & sing... - either that or they have a bag of tricks at their disposal - which would be weird b/c THE STARTING LINE (same genre, except less emo)'s semi-recently released live recording sounds like CRUD!  And TSL have been around longer & are sorta the poster boys for emo-y pop-punk (which admittedly isn't as popular as the snot-nose pop-punk, i.e.: FALL OUT BOY, GREEN DAY...)
  So now I'm revisiting their full-length debut, and I'm just not impressed.  Crazy, they sound better live.  If only it weren't a whopping 22 minutes long...parting is the pits...

penniless so soon? So?

My money's all gone...but I got a month of {up to} 7 MILLION songs to listen to...the whole world is at my fingertips...yep.  I spent about 15 minutes looking around in BestBuy, thinking I could get that AND a CD.  Turns out all i got was the Napster prepaid card...couldn't be happier!

I've noticed I get bored listening to albums...I always put one on, but lately I've been wondering "Why?  Why don't you just listen to LastFM or...something?"  Napster gives me the ability to listen to ANY song, ANY time, in ANY WAY I wish!!!

Then the thought comes that someday Napster won't be here.  When that day comes, I hope THE PEOPLE have enough guts to wage war...I mean, they could raise the price by thee or four times the monthly rate and that'd be worlds better than them going away...and they've been offering the $5/mo rate for over 2 years now, and the service itself has been around for almost a decade (I'm excluding the now-illegal/defunct service of the same name...) so if it ever does get shut down, either the economy will have changed in some way that makes it impossible for the service to operate, or the gov't will shut them down...things change. I'm fine w/ that (so far...).  But the gov't "cracking down" on too-good-to-be-true-ness is just unjustifiable.  The gov't already tried that with the internet radio companies and so far hasn't succeeded, and so it's a lot easier to bank on that sort of horror than the unforseeable (at least to a guy with my low-mid intellect) events that the tides of time may or may not bring...

I swear, this country could so easily turn into a war zone.  I, for one, don't have enough money to pay for every single song BEFORE I hear it.  There's too much crud I don't like, too much crud that shouldn't exist in the first place, and a MAMMOTH amount of mediocrity.  I'm not sure how much of a minority that makes me, but I guess it doesn't really matter.  Just about everyone was against the Vietname Conflict, but only a tiny handful of citizens stood up and tried to do something about it.

...and to "top" it off...

I gotta tell you off the bat - I'm gross.  Most of the time I smell like I came out of the sewer.  Fortunately it's only been four days since I last took a shower, since it's summer (I've been known to go almost a month in the winter...), but today I've been passing gas uncontrollably.  And I was out at a grocery store, acquiring a couple donuts for myself, and while my shorts were down in the bathroom a couple hours after arriving back to my abode, I noticed a sparkly black substance on my leg.  The donuts were sprinkled-covered-chocolate covered, I might add.  This is the only evidence I have to suggest the problem didn't get waaaaay out of hand, aside from the fact that I can usually make it to the bathroom before it makes it's escape from the toilet...However, I can only imagine the horror of anyone in the grocery store who may have noticed the smell I was unleashing and happened to look down at my leg before passing me by completely...and if their eyesight was dead on enough for them to SEE the red substance in the midst of the topping, they'd very well possibly vomit...and don't even ask them what that green stuff is.  They can only take so much!  And besides, what kind of sick frunk do you think they are?  You think they're gonna put up with the horror of ape-man AND dig through his feces?  Man, you musbeouchamine!
  In closing, I leave you with the wisdom of Mr. Hop himself: "EVERYTHING'S BETTER WITH TOPPINGS!"

maybe I'm stupid?

i guess I don't understand Blu-Ray technology that well...I was looking at the blu-ray ad on ghostbusters dot com and wow the picture quality is even better than DVD - I guess a lot of people have said that, but I was viewing the ad on a SD computer screen, so I'd imagine even at 720p, my television would probably pick up an even better picture than what I saw on the ad at Sony's GB site.  plus I'd forgotten the packaging for the GHOSTBUSTERS Blu-ray is way better than any of the DVD pressings, and...well...I guess I might as well buy a Blu-Ray player when I get my Circuit Breaker check early next year.  I'll probably get $300++, so a Blu-Ray player will be a piece of cake...

Wow.  Never before have I been so happy to be penniless.  I now have in my posession L.I.E. (Uncut).  All you folks in Cape Girardeau (if any are reading this aside from my mom who I know has no desire to see this film...) who decided NOT to rent this movie since Sept '09 will never have another chance.  For Hastings has deemed the lack of rentals of this movie reason enough to practically GIVE it to me - for $4.22 apprx (it actually should have been $4.35, but I just rented A CLOCKWORK ORANGE a few minutes prior which ate $0.13 of the needed $4.35.  The cashier said "don't worry about it", but if he hadn't, I'm sure my mother would have come to my aide...right?).
  True, there are less expensive movies, some of you may be thinking.  But they suck.  At least compared to this film - they suck.  I remember just last night aching to be with this movie, thinking "we belong together...", and thinking it a tragic sequence of non events that the world had divided us so widely.  But I was foolish, for I could've merely dialed Hastings' number and asked them what I thought until now would be a pointless question - "do you sell movies that are available for rent to those who wish to pay an extra price?".  Surely, I thought, a laugh or two would ensue.  But the cashier took me seriously and said "YES!", twice, with glee, but it was I who felt the true glee, still glowing.  So tonight that I might see...and I think...nobody's reading this...?

Video drowned the cinema...

Blu-Ray SOUNDS like a great idea.  And in some cases it probably does do a great service.  But the fact of the matter is that A LOT of AMAZING films, landmarks of cinema, do not benefit from a Blu-Ray transfer.  If anything, Blu-Ray diverts attention to what the director(s) and writer(s) want(ed) you to see, the sights and sounds that make the film as profound as it is...GHOSTBUSTERS, for instance, looks GREAT on DVD, but carried over to Blu-ray you NOTICE the non-HDness of the video quality it was shot with.  Granted, this may be more accurate in the mechanical sense, but what good does it do to see obscuring lines and white/grey patches on your television?
  Personally, I hate most of what comes out in theaters these days.  Sometimes they're cute and enjoyable - like marshmallows - but they lack longevity.  You forget them 1 year later and ten years later you revisit the film and wonder why you liked it to begin with.  Perhaps that's why people are so apt to re-watch films so often - there's so little substance, yet there IS stuff happening, so people end up in this half-catatonic state where 3/4 of their brain is just not even paying attention to the film so they pick up more of the film with repeated viewings...and of course people are so friggin' superficial and short-attention spanned that anything not from the "current" time of viewing is going to turn people off due to the different kinds of cars, clothing and hair style on display.  Films of the 1970's and 1980's often time don't look as shiny and glossy as current Hollywood productions and since everyone's obsessed with new-technology, people turn away from the not-so-perfect looking films, even though there's still a lot of visual beauty IN those movies for people who can accept and realize the fact that fashions change - they have - a million times over - and they will continue to do so.  I mean, admittedly, I don't watch movies, usually, made before 1968, simply because this country - the land of the free - was essentially a dictatorship run by superstitious pod-people who existed according to trumped up social codes that didn't make a dang big of sense.  People couldn't forgive themselves for thinking about anything sexual, and if they SAID anything of the sort, oh no, what would God think?!  Women especially were bogged down in that department, and if someone was suffering - from either internal or external ills - they couldn't tell anyone and if they did, nobody would do anything about it.  People couldn't handle thoughts of "mental illness" and living with a child automatically meant it was OK to beat them.  Just as long as they weren't physically dead, the parents couldn't be wrong for what they did...
  And the films of that day, because of everyone's fear of open communication and expression, were stale and have grown unwatchable as time's gone on.
  But then the government made a huge mistake - the Vietnam "conflict".  The grown ups tried to ignore it, but the children wouldn't.  Hollywood was losing money because they tried acting like nothing was happening, but the country was hurting, and the children were fed up with the world they were brought in to.  Movies were making more money from distrusting children and adventours college kids than adults who didn't even have as much time to gaze at the silver screen to begin with.  It was the age of artistic expression, honesty, beauty...
  And then Hollywood figured out how to modernize the Blockbuster - put fake things that look real in them.  A giant shark!  Space ships!  Aliens!  And as the education, legal, and parental units have all but washed their hands of responsibility and accountability, people walk around thinking things that don't make any sense as if they DO make sense, applying world views that defy truth to their purchasing habits - including movie tickets etc.!
  So most movies are either random flashes of shiny light, or half baked excuses for "drama".  In the case of AVATER, it's a bad case of both and it beat TITANIC - another example of technology-with-no-use - for the #1 highest ranking film of all time - financially speaking!
 

So BELIEVE me - when I say that having a Blu-ray player would be nice, but continuing to be able to watch my VHS tapes would be just as important to me if not more so.  VHS is cheaper anywayz, and the quality isn't really all that much worse than DVD, although I admit I like DVDs better, if I can get them for a good price...
  Right now I have a VCR, but it's really old and I always thank my lucky stars that it still works when I pop a tape in it.  But this will pass.  Is replacing it worth $300?  If it has a Blu-ray & a DVD player that isn't made by the mind of Satan?     Possibly.  Currently it's over $300 at Amazon, although not long ago it was on sale for $120...and it's got some bragging rights - a four star average customer rating?  If there's a better DVD and/or Blu-Ray player out there, it can't be worth trading over the 1-and-only Hi-Q VHS player currently being manufactured.  I mean, what more can a DVD and/or Blu-Ray player do?  Maybe NetFlix...but I'll probably need to replace this computer someday too ---- if i could get a computer that doesn't freeze up when NetFlix tries to stream movies on my computer, that would be great.  But nobody I know currently can afford to get me a $1K+ computer.  And I'm only 26...gosh, I'm getting old...