Why are weekend only two and a quarter days long?

May 26th, 2008 • 2 comments chatter

We spent the majority of our weekend the Florida Super Con???????? complete with “60,00 square feet” of convention space. I don’t know where they came up with that number — I suspect it was from the nimrods at the resort — but we visited every conference room and panel hall and it sure as hell wasn’t 60,000 square feet. Maybe that included the thicknesses of the walls and inclusion of bathroom stall sizes. I’ve been to quite a few of these things (not all comic-related) and frankly, the hacker cons I’ve been to have more logistic and organizational skills than this thing had. Imagine that, people without manageable social skills, varying degrees of personal hygiene, and a subtle dislike for meeting in large groups for fears of being labeled as “terrorist groups” can organize a convention better than the people of FSC, which was full of 13-17 year old kids (and their parents who wanted to hang themselves) who all wanted to not shower and hug the living hell out of everyone (and call it “yaoi” (WRONG, you kids are so stupid) and talk about wanting to be raped). Again, I’ve spent entire weekends with people who are socially inept and for the most part, have never spoken to a real girl (let alone a cute one) in person. But this place was basically a haven for rude (and smelly) morons who wanted to buy swords all day and then proceed to hit me with them all weekend. Oh, and nearly everyone under the age of being able to drive was dressed as a Wind Village ninja from Naruto or a commander from Bleach (and two shinigami from Death Note). This con basically ruined my like for both shows. I did revel in the fact that I saw a group of twenty-somethings sporting Tenchi Muyo costumes and some guy dressed as Cobra Commander.

We managed to snag less than 150 pictures, a feat for either of us given that almost everyone was in some form of costume. The costuming was expectedly uninspired for the most part but it was also pretty pathetic. Save for the Tenchi group, Mr. Cobra Commander and his wife from the Gothic Lolita tea party — which was fun and in an air conditioned room. We did get quite a few pictures from the tea party which will be up soon enough. That was an interesting affair in which I was one of three guys who wasn’t a photographer or documentarian. But I did get a fairly good cranberry/cherry homemade vegan scone. And some pink green tea. I also got to talk with Dana Snyder a few times (when he wasn’t mistaking me for Chris Robinson from the Black Crows) and Brian O’Halloran from Clerks/Clerks II (who liked our camera and my bag of snacks), and Pat Martin from the Students of the Unusual comic who also, jokingly, mistook me for Chris Robinson (this stemmed from a panel with Dana Snyder). I have a feeling we’ll be seeing Pat again at Screamfest later this year in Orlando.

I know I sound like I’m coming down hard on this con but it’s been going on for a few years now and if this is the best it can offer, I’d hate to see what previous years were like. I found the voice actors’ panel far more engaging (of which I heard about 20 minutes) than I did the Harry Potter Q&A, where I learned that Natalia Tena (Tonks) is little more than a potty mouth who really likes sex and Devon Murray (Seamus Finnigan) was about 3’5″ and likes horses. Somehow, shouldn’t that be reversed? Truthfully, that bored me to death but my girlfriend really wanted to go so we went.

Overall, I spent the weekend underwhelmed and trudged around in cowboy boots, bought more liquor (and found out my local liquor store has no flasks, I could’ve really used one on Saturday), but I saw my girlfriend all gussied up for a tea party. Which was hot.

I’m so glad it’s the weekend

May 24th, 2008 • chatter

This week was rough and I haven’t slept well one day of it. We finally managed to get Marley out of the house as her original owner came by to pick her up with a new tag. Our suspicions about why he said he didn’t have a cat about 2 weeks ago are more than likely true. I’m glad she’s out of the house because it was stressing everyone, including the other three cats, out.

I was told just today it was Memorial Day weekend, I had no idea. Working at a place where you don’t get regular holidays off really makes you forget about them. I never would’ve realized this was a holiday weekend if no one had told me, am I getting that old?

Speaking of Memorial Day weekend, we saw Indy 4 last night. Great movie. I can’t believe The Last Crusade came out almost 20 years ago, doesn’t seem that long ago. I just watched that a little over a week ago as well. Despite what the commercials say, the most recent re-releases of the Indiana Jones movies were not the first “special editions” on DVD, I picked up a special edition 3 DVD/1 CD set a few years ago. But it sure does make for great marketing to say that when people have been waiting 20 years for another sequel of Indiana Jones.

We’re going to the Florida Super Con this weekend and it should be fun. There’s a gothic and lolita tea party tomorrow we’re going to be shooting, along with some other stuff. I hope it’s fun!

I need myself a camera!

May 19th, 2008 • chatter

Today was our second visit to Lion Country Safari this year and we spent most of our time trading the D40x back and forth to get shots on both sides of the car, depending on the area we were driving through. The girlfriend said we managed about 220 or so good/usable shots so I’ll try and edit those this week and get them up on my Flickr account, along with the 350+ others from our last visit.

I’ve been planning on getting a camera anyway but today really sealed that. I miss having a camera, I still use our little Exilim from time to time but I want my own DSLR to replace my practically dead Minolta X70 35mm SLR. It’s a fantastic film camera, I just have no real need for it now and it’s so finicky. I’m looking at landing a Nikon D80 which should come down in price once the D90/D80x drops in a few months, maybe I can save some money off it since it’ll already be rather expensive just for the body as is. I’ve also go other ideas that I want to try and work out, so we’ll see what happens. Now I just need some money!

And one less cat! I hate listening to Marley cry half the night, it tears me to pieces knowing I can’t do anything at 3AM to help.

War of the cats

May 11th, 2008 • chatter

>??????that we’re housing 4 cats, with two sequestered away for territorial reasons, this place is a madhouse. Our two resident cats, Scooter and Sissy (brother and sister), have been at odds with each other for two days now. Hissing and growling and general unpleasantness. We gave them baths earlier and they seemed to be OK for a while but they’re back to hissing and growling at each other. The situation in our house is now getting a bit stressful, not only between the resident cats but it’s getting stressful for us especially for me since I’ve raised my cats since they were kittens. I’m not going to let two new cats that, while I do adore and like them a great deal, put a permanent rift between the cats I’ve raised and between them and my girlfriend and myself. It’s simply not worth it psychologically, for us or the cats. We believe our male cat has picked up the old scent of the new cats from the place he’s been hiding so now we have to de-new-cat that area and block it so that he can’t hide there any longer. Luckily, it’s not the only place he has to hide right now.

I thought this was going to be an easier process for the cats but they’re really not taking it well at all. I never expected this kind of behaviour from them but I guess you never know what’s going to happen until you try and bring in a new cat into the picture. We’re taking this as a hint of what can happen if we wanted to bring home a kitten which we’ve wanted to do a number of times. But if this is how they’re going to act around a kitten, that’ll just never work.

Now all of us are saddened by this situation because one of the cats, Marley, is just an adorable little scamp that we want to keep so badly but not at the expense of pre-built relationships between the resident cats.

New pets today

May 8th, 2008 • chatter

Today, we got to pick up two new cats, Marley and Don. Marley is a domestic short hair with black fur, tufted with spots of brown and white. Don looks to be a siamese/seal point mix, we’re not 100% sure just yet but he’s very lovable. The only problem is we can’t keep him . We adopted him because we didn’t want him euthanized but understood that we probably couldn’t keep him. We are trying to track down the owners now because I know someone is missing this cat, he’s too playful to not be missed.

Marley’s now our cat but we’ve been taking care of her for a little over a month now since she was an indoor/outdoor cat that would come by to eat. The owner said he “didn’t own a cat” although, we know better. Oh well, she’s ours now and she’s sooooo nice! I will post pics later!

He is Iron Man

May 5th, 2008 • chatter

So, like hundreds of thousands of other Americans, we saw Iron Man this weekend and I thought it was a pretty good comic book adaptation. Good for me since I don’t know much of the back story of Iron Man (nor do I care that much) but I’m pretty sure it was faithful enough to the origins of the character. Jon Favreau directed this and is one of his better pictures in my opinion. The writing was pretty good as well and I was surprised that the viewer is taken through the entire picture without a single curse word except for Jeff Bridges uttering “you prick!” close to the end of the movie. That was the most “adult” line of the whole movie and I’m quite happy about that. In days where even PG movies get a curse word here and there, it was nice to finally see a blockbuster without all the cursing and especially no sexual innuendo. Props to the writers and Favreau for that one.

I think Downey, Jr. played Tony Stark spectacularly and was a fit for the role. His dry wit and brusque nature was a natural fit for playing an alcoholic womanizer, what a stretch! While not directly setting up a sequel, such as Transformers did, I’m more than positive there will be one. With over 40 years of plots, it’d be hard not to want to write a sequel.

A lot more happened this weekend that’s blog-worthy but that’ll wait for another time, I for once want to go to bed early — not that 2:45AM EDT is exactly early but it is for me!

Purity balls are for the overprotective

May 1st, 2008 • 1 comment christianity

I saw another video about these last year and it blew my mind how bizarre these people are. Purity balls are fancy balls where fathers and daughters go to dance, hang out, share their views, and basically get all buddy buddy with each other. This is apparently something they cannot do at home for whatever reason. You can read the previous linked post about my thoughts on this stupid outmoded ritual. But I want to talk about this video.

The father in the video has 6 kids, 5 of them are girls. He likes to go on “dates” with his daughters (no, not those types of dates…yet) so they can bond. Again, this must be something they cannot do singularly or in a group at home. With 5 daughters, this may actually be somewhat true. But let’s look at the video again. This family is comprised of a mother and father who are “fundamentalist Christians” — their words, not mine — because they’re born again. The mother thinks it’s “completely natural” for her husband to go on dates with their daughters, again their words not mine. I think this is admirable since in such a large family, I can only imagine that getting good bonding time with 6 different kids is overly tough. But that’s really where I stop thinking they’re being admirable and being downright stupid and overprotective.

The ball is thrown so fathers and daughters can make promises to be pure, meaning abstinence until marriage. Whoops! The father’s already broken that vow by the fact that he’s got a daughter. I point this out because their wording is backwards and logically impossible as it is but I’m nit-picking. The mother in this video thinks if her daughters have premarital sex, they’ll suffer some unholy and irreconcilable psychological trauma and will end up probably ruining their future marriages over it. While that may be true, the same is more than possible (read: extremely likely) now that their daughters are being essentially sequestered away to date their father. The featured daughter of the story, whose name I couldn’t get because I can barely hear the audio on my laptop, looks at her girlfriends who have boyfriends and gets envious because she’s not experiencing the same thing. Now she’s guilty of harbouring two “deadly sins” of being both envious and lustful (which is not always sexual in nature), that’s not very Christian. This story just fell flat on its face because this girl is yearning to be in a normal relationship for her age.

The father has little idea of what kind of mental trauma he’s putting on this girl by taking her on dates, complete with limos and fancy dinners, but the mother seems fully aware. She seems to think this is preparing her for a joy-filled life with a future husband who is a carbon copy of her father. This guy may be sweet and nice and will probably end up sexually stifled, from attending the same purity balls, so that should turn out pretty well. It’s a gross generalization, I know, but the daughter is going to look for someone who embodies the same principles her parents indoctrinated her with. She’ll probably not see past that until it’s too late. Until she is suffering from psychological trauma at the hands of her husband who turns out to be crazy.

Now, these kids are also home-schooled. This in and of itself is not a bad idea but the daughter has a great justification for it: she won’t be exposed to the same whims that make “other people unpure.” That’s entirely true because at home, she’s not interacting with her peers in a true-to-life environment. She’s stuck in an overprotective bubble for a few hours a day, huddled away from normal things that normal kids do.

One of the best parts of this video is when some woman, a teacher I presume as she’s not introduced at all, lauds President Bush for his push for abstinence education. “Abstinence works every time!” she claims he said. Sure it does. It works every time. Every time until a kid gets an STD or hurts themselves because they weren’t taught about sex properly. If you abstain, you’ll never get any STDs or have any kinds of problems right? Because you abstained, right? Wrong. There’s scads of freely available data showing that abstinence education just leads to ignorance and ultimately, sexual issues with undereducated teens. Funny enough, there are more kids in schools that teach “abstinence only” curriculum that are getting pregnant than there are in schools where they teach sex ed (1, 2, 3, 4). There’s also more data showing these kids are at a much higher risk of contracting an STD because they’re simply clueless.

The best part of the video? It’s three quotes a little over 5 minutes in to about 6 minutes in.

I do believe it’s important to have that father figure, especially for a female. Um, I think women were created to feel accepted by men. (emphasis mine)

That’s by the mother of this family. And I’m not paraphrasing or taking this out of context, it’s what she said, verbosely. Women are on this planet to feel accept by and to appease men. Straight from a woman’s mouth.

I can offer myself as a priceless gift.

A female emcee, having the girls read off their purity vows. Yep, now women are gifts to men. So, not only are females created to feel accepted by men but they’re also gifts to men! Hell yes, this is might be a movement I can get behind!

God created men and women separate even though in the world today we want to think they’re the same. We are all different, thankfully. A woman needs to feel loved and accepted by her father, uh, she was created by God to feel that. (emphasis mine)

That’s from the father in the video. Now we have a fundamentalist Christian acknowledgment that women were created solely to feel loved by their fathers and other men. Apparently, God is very sexist and likes to play the emotional deviant.

The daughter of the video, whose name is Angela by the way (finally heard it clearly at the end), renounces kissing and “things like that” as bad and hopes she never does them. That’s verbose. So she can kiss her father and it’s okay but kissing a boy she might be interested in? Out of the question!

Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

[Via Fundie Watch]