Here’s another confession of a mean thing I did as a kid — though I should add the meanness directed at me over my childhood was easily 1,000 x more than how much meanness I gave back to the world. Readers may remember when I found that guy’s day planner and called him up using my pitch-shifter guitar pedal, to mock him on his answering machine.
This was probably a bit worse than that…
My parents owned 3 houses when I grew up… (Never content with the house they were in, they kept buying a new one, then deciding it wasn’t big enough, then buying another. They did it again after I moved out.) The 2nd of those was in a neighborhood called The Heights, in Lake Ridge, Woodbridge, VA. I lived there from age 4 til age 8.5, right at the start of 4th grade.
The old house. Of course I have zero pictures of it.
I had a few neighborhood friends, like my next-door-neighbor Erica [who ultimately got pregnant really early], Robert “Obert” Beck, Chris Navarro (no relation to Dave Navarro), and Mike Enis. Eventually we moved away, to the The Knolls neighborhood in Lake Ridge.
The new house, spruced up after I moved into my own house.
I saw my friend Mike Enis one last time after moving from The Heights to The Knolls. I guess we had a “play date” or something, as his mom brought him over and dropped him off for a few hours. I suppose we were around 10 years old or so.
We hung out in the woods for awhile…
Woods. Always fun. Especially if you're immune to pollen and mosquitoes.
As we came back inside, I stopped to take a leaf off the mint bushes by the rear sliding glass door to our house. I loved getting mint straight from a real bush, and ate leaves off the plant pretty frequently. I wish we had one at our own house.
Mint Leaves, by Art_Es_Anna@flickr
Here’s where the evil began…
“What? You actually ate the mint leaf? I was JOKING, you know!”
“What? You DIDN’T eat them?”
“No! Those things are poisonous! You’re gonna die!”
That was the gist of things. I told him it was time to meet his sweet death.
Nice to meet 'ya.
He didn’t believe me at first, but I kept at it. Kept telling him that he was going to drop dead in about 10 minutes. I eventually picked up a random thick book off the bookshelf — something that looked scientific.
Because if it's from a book, it must be true, right Mr. Quayle?
I went on and described the effects: Within 10 minutes you would start to get dizzy, go into convusions, and die of painful seizures. Of course at this point he was completely believing me.
I am, after all, an expert on science! Look at my brilliant science fair project!
Needless to say… I let the 10 minutes pass, and he may have cried or shaken or something. I don’t remember. I actually figured that since he wasn’t able to come over [I hadn’t seen him in 2 years] due to the distance [1.4 miles] between our houses, that it made him a good mark for a prank like this. After all, I wouldn’t want to freak out one of my CURRENT friends.
Yeah… I don’t think I ever saw him again after that.
Sorry, Mike! I don’t know what came over me, but at this point, this story does more to entertain my life than you do, because I don’t know you anymore! So I guess it was the right thing to do in the long run, in a very calculating way. But in an empathetic way, I do feel kinda bad about convincing you that you were going to die. And thus, this confessional. Which is also kind of a “look how fucked up I am” brag, in a way. I am both ashamed of and thankful for this story.
Good! Copyright has stolen so much from the public domain already. You don't get to earn money forever because your grandaddy did something we all remember. If you want money, do some work yourself. [whistles]
Hope! Change! Classifying your citizens as homegrown terrorists! Gobama!
Critics argue that this would mark most past societal reforms as terrorism. Martin Luther King? Terrorist. Woman's suffrage? Terrorist movement.
The ACLU is against this too, as is the National Lawyers Guild, Society Of American Law Teachers, John Birch Society, Center For Constitutional Rights.
The Declaration Of Independence specifies what to do in the situation of a bad government. This would make you a terrorist for following Thomas Jefferson's wishes.
More karma. MADD is an insane organization that has destroyed constitutional rights left and right (other articles on that I can direct you to, and there's no way you won't agree with me after reading them).
Anyone who destroys freedom deserves the karma of having the harsh boot of justice on the back of their neck.
So a big fuck you to Debra Oberlin. Drunk driving is a problem, but MADD is not a solution. MADD has caused innocent lives to be ruined in their quest to save lives — so it's only fitting that this woman receives the full boot of the law in her face.
In the latest erosion of American rights, you can now be jailed for daring to tell other Americans of their rights. The judicial branch is out of control here. I can't believe there is not a right to tell others what our rights are! Freedoms are meaningless if it's illegal to know what they are!
Prosecutor Rebecca Marmelstein should be ASHAMED of herself, and should quit or be fired. Her job is defend justice, not to attack the rights of Americans! Fuck you bitch!
I think this just became the winner of the “I want to map a drive letter to my iPhone” contest. It actually will put itself into your windows startup and force the remap every reboot (if you want). I’m going to have P: permanently point to my phone!
A 3rd party iPhone app that, amazingly, WILL PLAY A FUCKING MP3 ON YOUR PHONE. If you’re not willing to let iTunes manage your music, THESE APPS ARE HARD TO FIND.No, you won’t find it in the app store.
You won’t even find it on Cydia.
You won’t even find it on Installous.
There’s a ZIP of the DEB file at this page you can download, use iPhoneExplorer to copy into /tmp, then ssh in and dpkg -i pwnplayerlite_0.1.deb
Don’t know why this is so hard, but I tend to point my finger at Apple.
However, there’s no REAL reason to use this, when you can just use pwnTunes, which will import any files you drag onto (or copy via mapped drive to) your iPhone/iPod into iTunes.
This bitch deserves her fate. Saying AIDS is punishment from a non-existent God, and spreading hate and prejudice through anti-science ignorance? I’d say that’s a fate deserving of death. She got the very virus she preached against. She got her karma, and she got it good. If AIDS is god punishing people, maybe he punished her for being a hateful bitch?
Nah, I know it’s not really caused by God. Simple evolution. The sooner idiots realize that, the sooner we can come up with a cure. Religion is holding us back, and causing millions to die of HIV/AIDS by fostering anti-science dogma. She was complicit in this, and as such, is complicit in [very subtle] crimes against humanity.
Her being a sane person now, only after getting AIDS? Doesn’t really count. You shouldn’t have to be mortally afflicted in order to get your head out of your ass.
So a big “Fuck You” to Patricia Sawo. You deserve your impending death for helping cause it in others. Work hard on your redemption, Pat. You’re going to need every second you have.
PLOT SUMMARY: (from IMDB) “Architect, and Father Ethan Mars joins a Private Detective, a Journalist, and an FBI agent in a race against time to save his son for a child murderer known as the Origami Killer.”
UNCOMFORTABLE PLOT SUMMARY (inspired by this): [highlight for spoilers]→Sibling who watched brother drown successfully drowns many other children.
QUIRKS: Interactive film noir fiction. A single-player game.
Received GameSpy’s PS3 game of the year award for 2010.
Uses the PS3 motion-sensing controllers in unique ways.
Although the gameplay is very simple, some of the things you do with the controller are things you’ve never done with a controller in your life. (We played at the intermediate skill level.)
Different characters can die depending on what you do. The plot is not completely linear.
You have “free will” — but the plot still moves in a certain direction. Sometimes, you are doing things that you think affect the outcome, but they actually won’t. Sometimes you are forced to do things, even though you think we have free will. This continually reminded me of the movie eXistenZ, where people are in a game, and end up saying things that they don’t mean to say, because it’s what their character needs to do to advance the plot.
VISUALS: I’ve never played an HD (720p) console video game in the comfort of my own home before. Although I get superior resolution to that with PC games, I’m a more on the casual side of gaming, so I’ve really only played Quake3/QuakeLive at that resolution. Anyway, it looks really good. Even for 720p. The people look almost photorealistic. They used 90 actors. They used motion capture. Things look good enough to trigger the uncanny valley effect. It’s nice to see how polished things have become.
SOUNDTRACK: Appropriate.
MORALS: Sacrifice is the ultimate virtue.
POLITICS: Cops just want to find someone to blame.
GOOD STUFF: Excellent look and feel. Quite immersive. This is somewhere between watching a movie and playing a video game. A great deal of the game is cut scenes.
And the twist? We knew it would happen, but we still didn’t solve the mystery before the game told us the solution. And that’s good, I’d rather not spoil it for myself.
BAD STUFF: You never quite know if what you are doing truly makes a difference. I’d like to see choices affect the story even more than they did here, but obviously it’s really hard to write a “choose your own adventure” that retains a polished consistency.
CONCLUSION: I tend to dislike one player games, but this one is so much closer to a movie that there is hardly a difference between watching, playing, and watching your spouse play. So me and Carolyn took turns and shared the experience. In the end, this was quite a unique game. We’d never brushed our teeth, snorted drugs, changed a diaper, or performed CPR in a video game before. We’d never used a motion-sensitive controller in a non-pointing (i.e. Wiimote) fashion before. There were a lot of “video game firsts” in this story for us. Which is good, because in the time it took for us to play through this, we could have watched at least 8 movies. So it really needed to pay off to be worth it. And you know what? It did. I wouldn’t play a game like this again — not for another 10 years — but I’m glad we did. It was pretty neat.
For instance, while playing a cop, I accidentally shot a mentally disturbed man during a warrantless search of his apartment. That’s a first for me — doing something that I would blog about if I heard about it on the news :) There was a time when I held a gun to a character’s head for a full two minutes of real-life time — because I honestly couldn’t decide if I needed to kill him or not. Meanwhile, I’m thinking that the game might force a decision if I don’t hurry up and decide, so it’s not like I’m just taking my time. I was really trying hard to decide as fast as possible, and it took me like two minutes. (I let him live, and flamed the people in the IMDB forums who killed him for the wrong reasons.) Great moral choices here, though they could have been more ambiguous. But a couple were ambiguous enough to be very interesting situations.
RATINGS:
Clint: 4/5 stars. IMDB: 8/10.
Carolyn: 5/5 stars. IMDB: 8/10.
John The Canadien: 5/5 stars, IMDB 9/10. “Best PS3 game since Grand Theft Auto 4.”
The native public rating for this game is: IMDB: 9.4/10.
RECOMMENDATION: Worth checking out if you’re into single player games, or film noir serial killer mysteries. Especially if you are mostly in the mood to watch a movie, but instead want to play a video game.
IF YOU PLAYED ALREADY, check out the different game endings here. Also check out The Old Warehouse, another page about how the warehouse scene affects which endings you will get. For us, our particular choices meant that [highlight for spoilers]→only Ethan and Madison made it to the warehouse. Jayden had to give up on the case. We also failed to save the cash register guy, shot the crazy religious guy (during the warrantless search, as mentioned above), and Carolyn let Lauren drown in the car by kicking out the window without untying her
SIMILAR STUFF: The “act quickly when prompted” / “Simon Says” style definitely reminded me of the early laserdisc arcade games: Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace.
Movie rights secured. Will it happen? Will it be good? At times, the game plot reminded us of Saw — but not grotesque.
MOVIE QUOTE: “Ethan Mars has had psychological problems since his first son died. He feels responsible for his death- a sort of morbid neurosis. He is haunted by visions of drowning bodies.”
SPOILER ALERT! Heavy Rain deleted scenes. The caption to this video explains why anyone who played this game would probably want to watch it: (more…)
[NOTE: This post is an updated copy of my 2010 post, which itself was an update of my 2009 post, which was a copy of 2008, which had tons of comments relating to how Fairfax County seemed to change its assessment forumulas, flipping more of people’s value from their house to their land.] [Check our your property value using the official Fairfax county link.]
THE BASIC SUMMARY: Our real estate assessment finally went up again, by 3% (less than the average of 8.5% yearly gains), to $307K. At least we’re back on the right track again.
In 1999, we bought the house at $141K.
In 2000, we were assessed at $142K.
In 2001, this grew by 3.5% to $147K.
In 2002, this grew by 39% to $205K.
In 2003, this grew by 3% to $211K.
In 2004, this grew by 24% to $261K.
In 2005, this grew by 34% to $349K.
In 2006, this grew by 13% to $395K [addition completed].
In 2007, this grew by 3% to $406K (peak).
In 2008, this dropped by 7% to $375K*.
In 2009, this dropped by 3% to $364K.
In 2010, this dropped by 18% to $298K. (ouch)
In 2011, this grew by 3% to $307K. Finally a gain!
We’re 24% down from our peak (but not 37% like last year), but it’s still worth 2.27X more than we owe on the mortgage ($135.4K, the same as last year really).
This means we’re still $171.7K ahead (we were $163K ahead last year). We’ve lived here 11 years, so that’s $15,609 ahead each year, $1300 ahead each month. Our mortgage is only about $1300, so this place seems to practically be paying for itself. (Of course, the addition wasn’t free, it was about $80K, so we’re really only $91.7K ahead, $8336 ahead per year, $694 ahead each month. Still not shabby. These people who say houses aren’t a good investment don’t know what they’re talking about. Even if it’s value drops 90%, you’re still getting 10% more of your money back than if you were renting!)
What could possibly go wrong? We could fire on protesters like Ghaddafi but then claim we’re on the moral high ground because our bullets are less lethal. Given how trigger happy cops are with tasers, this will only result in more injuries and death; while reducing the justification needed to mete out such injuries and death.
FINALLY!! I got my iPhone mapped as a network drive. Not the entire phone, but an area specific to the AirShare application. This achieves my goal of programmatically putting mp3s onto my iPhone with my own scripts.Step 2: Finding a player that will play them from that section. iTunes, OF COURSE, will not do this. Hilarious.
I also had to use NetDrive to get my PC to recognize the AirShare WebDAV share.
UPDATE – ExpanDrive seems to be more reliable than Air Sharing, and requires nothing to be installed on the iPhone, so use that instead!
Jailbroke my iPhone, only to find out that Cydia wouldn’t install. I used these instructions to try to fix it. But it didn’t work. I had to re-jailbreak. I am removing this link from my links because of this.
A program to access the files on your iPhone over the USB cable, without having to install SSH.
Great if you need to fix a broken Cydia install by deleting files on your iPone, and don’t want to pay for an SSH client through Apple’s expensive app store.
Never paid for SSH in my life, not gonna start now, fuck you Apple.
It is a collection of loosely connected short stories featuring depressing people whose lives don’t really have anything to do with each other.
VISUALS: Not really a visual movie, but there are a lot of sex scenes with hot naked girls. Threesomes, even. Possibly even mostly. But this movie isn’t to tittilate, so that’s not a reason to decide to watch this. Just thought I’d mention it.
SOUNDTRACK: Pat Benatar and Wang Chung. 80’s music! This takes place in the early 1980’s, like Less Than Zero.
MORALS: None really. Just a bunch of people’s lives going badly. The only real moral to the story is: Don’t live your life like any of these people if you don’t want to end up in their situations. Try not to get AIDS as well.
BAD STUFF/CONCLUSION: It was an ok film while watching it, but it was a little confusing keeping track of the many unrelated characters, and we don’t know what the point of it all was. When done watching, it simply felt completely pointless. We thought it would wrap up better, but then it just seemed to kinda fizzle out at the end. Things keep going, but with a turn for the worse. Everyone keeps going with the shitty flow of their lives. This feels like the ending of the movie Wasted (2006) that we watched.
Most people love American Psycho, because it was literally fun to watch, and had kind of a light ending. We do too, but greatly prefer Rules Of Attraction to American Psycho, as it was fun (and even psychedelic) to watch, while having a real nihilist feel to it. It’s one of my favorite movies ever.
We didn’t like Less Than Zero as much as Rules Of Attraction or American Psycho. It had all the nihilism, and only a little bit of the fun. At least there were big, trippy parties in Less Than Zero. In The Informers, we pretty much only get the bad / non-fun / nihilism side. Oh, there’s some sex. But nobody in this movie seems to really be having fun. We’re presented with a conflict for 1.5 hrs, and there is never really a solution. Things just get worse.
This movie was just too pointless and depressing — without having enough OTHER kinds of value — for us to end up really liking.
RECOMMENDATION: I’d recommend staying away from this one, unless you specifically like dramatic stories with a bunch of unrealated people’s lives. I will have to take Bret Easton Ellis-based films with a grain of salt after this one.
Confessional – despite many anti-iPhone postings, I am now the owner of an iPhone. My sister upgraded and didn’t use her old one, and I needed an mp3 player, so she gave it to me for Christmas. It has no service plan, and I’m not planning on getting one. It is basically going to be my PDA/mp3 player, much like Carolyn’s PDA that she’s had for 5-6 years, and the mp3 player that she’s had for 3 or so years. So anyway, I jailbroke it using the instructions on this page. This was surprisingly difficult for me, like 10X harder than I thought it would be, and I ended up using 2 different programs and downloading three 200M firmwares before getting the right combination. With instructions differently slightly for so many situations (all combinations of phone models and firmwares) there was no clearly written set of instructions anywhere. But I got it worked out now. If I’d opened up this page first and used it first, I probably would have saved myself a lot of time.
ACTUALLY!! This jailbrake sucked for me. I ended up re-doing it with Spirit. But you need “Spirit.Fox.iTunes.9.2” to do this with iTunes 9.2 or greater.
PEOPLE: Different director and writers from the other Shrek movies, but most of the same voice actors. Except Rumpelstiltskin. He was voiced by a non-voice actor, Walt Dohrn who works on the story and such. Nobody came close to matching the voice he used during their table reads, so they used him instead of an actor. And it was a good call.
Also, Lake Bell from the hilarious AdultSwim live-action series Children’s Hospital voiced one of the witches.
UNCOMFORTABLE PLOT SUMMARY (inspired by this): [highlight for spoilers]→Fiona reaches higher potential without Shrek, but then he drags her back down again.
QUIRKS: An partial-alternate-reality Shrek movie! They used the excuse of magic to come up with something that made the franchise fresh again. Impressive job!
VISUALS: Unfortunately we did not see this in 3-D, but the visuals are as awesome as any Shrek movie is. There’s a lot of things they really nailed in their animation style, and it looks really great in HD.
SOUNDTRACK: A few 80’s songs, and a remix of Bach’s Toccata & Fugue…
MORALS: Sometimes you need to lose what you have in order to appreciate that you ever had it in the first place.
CONCLUSION: I daresay this was better than the previous Shrek movie or two. Using magic to create an alternate reality adventure changed all the characters and situations, making this movie fresher than the last few, while still retaining the extreme feelgood feel of the Shrek franchise.
RATINGS:
Clint: Netflix: 4/5 stars. IMDB: 8/10.
Carolyn: Netflix: 4/5 stars. IMDB: 8/10.
The native public rating for this movie is: IMDB: 6.7/10, Netflix: 4.0/5 stars (Netflix‘s predicted rating for us was also 4.0/5 stars).
RECOMMENDATION: See this. Hell, even if you didn’t see Shrek 2 or Shrek 3, you could skip right over them and watch this instead.
MOVIE QUOTE: Donkey: “And I thought the waffle fairy was just a bedtime story!”
COINCIDENCES: (Shrek 4, Transformers Prime S1E4) Two videos in a row with a # of 4 where a character wakes up from being unconscious/faking hurt, mumbling about grandmas. “Granny?” “Grandma? Are those cookies?” (more…)
QUIRKS: Everybody wakes up to find out bugs have taken over the world, and wrapped everyone in cocoons. You’d think this is a horror, but it has a comedic attitude the whole time… Much like Shaun Of The Dead. Just not as funny.
But keep an eye out for Ray Wise, from Twin Peaks (and also Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!). Nothing like seeing the guy who… well… You know. I’m not going to spoil Twin Peaks. Not even here. :)
VISUALS: Large (4- to 15-ft) bugs that suck.
BAD STUFF: The comedy wasn’t as strong near the end as it was at the beginning.
CONCLUSION: A generic pass of a comedy horror — but at least it was comedy first, horror second. Most horror is “try to be scary but it’s actually funny”, whereas this is one of the rare ones where they are trying to be funny. That made it lighthearted, fun entertainment. However, the jokes could have been better. Definitely worth checking out at least once, though.
Yes, it's important that we use our tax dollars to make sure homeowners that are also dog owners must remain helpless to stop pests destroying their property!
^^^^^ sarcasm
Seriously. What the fuck. Anyone want to donate $1,000 to me for all the raccoon damage I've had done?
It's only a crime because the humans "egged the dog on", therefore it's like "cockfighting"? Really? Am I egging on my cat if I let it go at a snake that gets into my house?
If my next door neighbor did this to me, things would happen to their property when they weren't looking ;)
PEOPLE: Written & Directed by Joe Carnahan. Co-written by Brian Bloom, who voices Captain America in the 2010 Avengers cartoon. Mr. T’s portrayal of B.A. Baracus is replaced by WWF wrestler Quinton “Rampage” Jackson. Colonel Hannibal Smith is now played by Liam Neeson (Zeus from Clash Of The Titans 2010, Batman Begins, Aslan from the new Chronicles Of Narnia movies, Qui-Gon Jinn from the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Schindler from Schindler’s List, etc). Faceman is now played by Bradley Cooper (The Hangover, Yes Man, Wedding Crashers). Captain Murdock is now played by Sharlto Copley (the District 9 guy).
“Lynch” is played by Patrick Wilson (the pedophile from Hard Candy, Nite Owl II from Watchmen). God he gets annoying in the movie–and that actually works pretty well for it.
UNCOMFORTABLE PLOT SUMMARY (inspired by this): [highlight for spoilers]→Covert military team saves the day, only to be punished by being wanted fugitives for the rest of their lives.
QUIRKS: Insane action-comedy with a covert military twist.
VISUALS: Some of the craziest fucking action scenes I’ve seen in awhile.
SOUNDTRACK: Crappy like most movies, but at least they have You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) and Anarchy In The U.K. (even if it’s only the Guitar Hero version. Isn’t it funny how studios over-punish downloaders in order to “save the artists”, but then deliberately choose cover songs in order to not give those same artists their royalties? Typical corporate double standard.)
MORALS: Non-violence only goes so far. People don’t quote Ghandi’s violence-inciting quotes as much as they quote his peace-inciting quotes, but in reality, almost everything good that any human has ever gotten has been a result of some violent conflict in the past.
POLITICS: The CIA fucking sucks.
GOOD STUFF: Crazy action peppered with lots of comedy. Multiple plot lines, too. I thought the whole movie was going to be about the conflict in the intro. Nope, that ended. Then I thought it was going to be about the heist. But nope, that ended too. And then the movie kept going on for another hour. It’s a long story that leaves you satisfied.
BAD STUFF: Nothing. Some people might claim it’s not realistic, but they’re missing the whole point of watching an entertaining movie. This isn’t a documentary, it’s an action-comedy flick based on an action-comedy TV show! Did anyone really think the TV show was ever realistic??!
CONCLUSION: I had completely forgotten the original A-Team series, even though I watched it religiously as a kid. I had even forgotten that it was a *comedy*-action series, not just an action series. I had forgotten who comprised the A-Team, too. All I knew was: Mr. T, military, action. It was great to be re-introduced to the A-Team concept on a 2010 big movie budget instead of a 1983 crappy TV-budget. There are some major badass moments in this movie (like “flying the tank”) comprised of tons of unrealistic, entertaining action sequences, as well as a lot of laughs that I was not expecting (because I’d forgotten the original series was also a comedy). The 3 of us watching this all loved it and were pleasantly surprised. No haters here!
RATINGS:
Clint: Netflix: 5/5 stars. IMDB: 8.4/10 (a high 8).
Carolyn: Netflix: 5/5 stars. IMDB: 8.6/10 (a low 9).
TwoBeans: Netflix: 5/5 stars.
The native public rating for this movie is: IMDB: 7.1/10, Netflix: 4.0/5 stars (Netflix‘s predicted rating for us was 4.1/5 stars).
RECOMMENDATION: If you’re not a purist fanboy or a whiner, you should check this out. It’s one of the best action movies for 2010 (which has been a good year for action movies, if you ask me).
MOVIE QUOTE: Flight Control Commander: Are they trying to shoot down the other drone?
Capt. Charisa Sosa: No, they’re trying to fly that tank. (more…)
Shandy Cobane does not deserve to be in any position of power over another human being, EVER.
He is a pig, and a fucking asshole. This is the guy who was recorded on video telling a Hispanic “I’m going to beat the mexican piss out of you.”
He made a fake teary-eyed apology to the Hispanic community.
Now he’s been caught on video flicking off a subject in a cell, with another cop having to pull him away: Twice.
And this subject said he choked him for fun while arresting him for something he didn’t do.
At this point, I believe the subject over the pig. The pig is a hothead bully who abuses his power. The pig should not be receiving our tax dollars. The pig should be bacon instead.
Car accidents: Don't help your fellow man, because you may be asked to stay, and then arrested for attending to your natural biological functions in a timely manner.
And if your friends don't have $1,000 to spare, you'll sit in jail until your trial — for helping a car accident victim.
Fuck Dustin Stonecipher — what a pig. I'd hate to have this cop working anywhere near me. DO NOT HIRE.
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