Oh, Bai, Dine-in Movie Theatre!

Okay, so I finally got to go see The Disaster Artist, which I’ve been anxiously awaiting ever since I first heard about it.  And yes, it’s fantastic.  Definitely see it, especially if you’ve seen The Room.  (I have no idea how well it works if you haven’t.  Seems like it ought to work, though.)

But for some reason every theatre chain in this city decided it was “an arthouse flick.”

Which means it was only showing in the two artsy theatres — one located in a shopping mall (this close to Christmas!) and possessing the tiniest seats ever, and the other located in a hard-to-deal-with shopping district and only open at night — and in the “dine-in” theatres of the regular chains.  You know, the ones with the La-z-boy seats and the double price tickets.

The one in the shopping mall was absolutely out.  That’s a last resort theatre even when it isn’t Christmas-shopping season, just because it’s so uncomfortable to sit there.  And the one in the shopping district really wasn’t appealing as a prospect because their first showing of the day starts at 4-something, and trying to park there is a nightmare.  And Tuesdays are half-price ticket days at the major chains.  (Possibly only for their frequent viewer members; not sure about that.)

So we decided to risk it and went to what used to be a really nice theatre, packed with viewers.  In fact, that might be where I first saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with a lobby so crowded that it’s giving me agoraphobia just to think about it.  (Thank goodness I was less mentally fragile as a teenager! (Yikes, that’s a terrifying sentence.))

The place was deserted.

Clue one that closing it down for a year to re-fit the entire interior to “dine-in” viewing was a mistake.

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Movie Reaction: Wonder Woman

Yes, “reaction,” not “review.”  I wouldn’t know how to give the movie a proper review.  However, I will admit that — despite an opening that disgusted me (which will be the focus of this post) — I was really digging it until a scene that had me muttering under my breath “No, no, no, no, no!” and “Don’t do it!  Don’t you dare do it!”  (At which point my brother leaned over and told me he agreed with me 100%.)  Unfortunately, they didn’t listen to me about that scene, and it pretty much wrecked the entire movie for me.  Aside from that, it’s the first movie in this new wave of connected DC movies that is actually, you know, a well made, competent movie with a script that actually plays like a single, proper draft, and features a cast of characters you can actually like, as opposed to a few likable characters surrounded by a sea of “meh.”  And it strikes me as hilariously ironic that they shifted the time period from WWII to WWI in order to avoid comparisons to Captain America, and yet they still had a Captain named Steve (played by a guy named Chris) who gathered together a small crew of interesting and multi-cultural buddies to help him fight the Germans, and I don’t want to go into spoilers, but there was an aspect of the climax that was rolling out the red carpet for the comparisons they wanted so much to avoid.

But none of that is what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is the astonishingly awful mutilation of Greek mythology.  (So, yes, feel free to dismiss this post as the whining of a mythology geek.  I really don’t care what anyone else thinks of me.)

Now, it’s not that I went in expecting the mythology to be handled with anything resembling accuracy.  I’ve seen a lot of episodes of the animated Justice League show that was on Cartoon Network…uh…whenever that was (I’m thinking early 2000s?), and my brother and father are both hugely into comic books, so I’ve heard a lot on the subject from them.  So I knew already that Ares was Wonder Woman’s biggest foe (and always had been), and that the reboot changed her very cool origin of a statue brought to life to the hyper-boring origin of being a daughter of Zeus.  So I knew what I was going to see was not going to be anything even remotely accurate to the myths or the personalities of the gods described therein.  But I wasn’t expecting anything this mutilated.

Very early in the picture (definitely in the first ten minutes), the child Diana is told a bedtime story about the gods and the duty of the Amazons by her mother, Hippolyte.  Given that it was so early in the picture, I feel like I can discuss it at great length without it being considered a spoiler, but just in case anyone feels differently, I’ll put it on the other side of the “Read More” tag.

Missing Letter Monday – No B

Random
Also Unsettling and Annoying

Well, I forgot to plan a post for today, so I’m just winging it this week.  No horrendous attempts at poetry, no lengthy tales twisting themselves around to avoid a certain letter:  just some prose, also twisting itself to avoid that letter.

So, yesterday — no, I guess it was Saturday? — well, whenever it was, I came online and was disappointed to see that the little orange dot indicating new activity didn’t include any likes on my latest dolly post, and only one comment, from a recent off-WordPress visitor who started coming around during A-to-Z.  I was disappointed that my closest WordPress pal hadn’t liked the post, yet I quickly decided that she likely just hadn’t come online due to the weekend.  (Despite that the weekend gives her more time, not less.)  When I saw a like from her on someone else’s post as I was going through the new posts in the Reader, I was actually a little hurt, though I should perhaps not admit something so unflattering and childish.

Then I finished reading new posts, went into WP Admin, and was informed, on the dolly side of things, that I had two comments in my spam queue.  I go in to look at them…and one was from the friend in question, and the other was from another frequent WordPress visitor!  WTF was the only response I could come up with.  Neither comment even had any links in them or anything!  (And on visiting the post in question, I saw that it had, in fact, received three likes, and WordPress just decided not to tell me so.)

I started worrying that other actual comments might have gotten deleted entirely as spam, so I switched over my settings so that all messages the system decides are likely spam get put in the queue, instead of letting it delete any outright.

It’s returned to normal since then — the orange dot reported likes on my weekend dolly posts — so perhaps it was just a fluke.  Decidedly unsettling, though, regardless.

So that was the unsettling part.  (The whole post is the random part, naturally.)

Here comes the annoying part, which is much shorter:

I’m afraid I’m getting sick.  I’ve spent most of the morning coughing.  I haven’t gotten sick since 2008.  I really don’t want to start getting sick again!

Also, my arm is acting up worse than ever, and now the inside of the arm as well as the outside feels hot all the time and reacts to the touch of human flesh as if it was red hot iron.  Which makes it very hard to function, given that I’m seriously overweight and it’s therefore extremely difficult to keep my arm from touching the side of my chest.  (I should try to tape them down, ninja-style…)

Oookay…so…random, annoying and unsettling, yet finished, without the non-letter of the week.

I guess I should go check on my laundry.  (Ugh.  Why do I always have to do laundry once a week?  Can’t it just wash itself for a change?  Or perhaps I need to increase the amount of clothes I have to four or five times as many so I can only do laundry once a month…though I might need a larger washing machine then…and it’s too hard to find clothes in my size anyway…so I guess I’m stuck with frequent laundry-washing…)

---

  

Another Rant You Won’t Want To Read

So I met with a new physician. (The old one retired.) It was not a promising first appointment. Now, my old physician always used to harp on my weight, too, but the way she did so was different, more friendly, more maternal. And she certainly didn’t ever suggest surgery. Seriously, this new physician said something about how I wouldn’t be able to get down to my “ideal” weight without surgery, because all I’d be able to lose would be about 60-80 pounds, with diet, exercise and medication, in 6-8 months, so I should really consider surgery as well.

Um, seriously, wtf?

First of all, losing more than that any faster than that would be freakin’ unhealthy.

Gotta be kidding me

This is why I would never, under normal circumstances, trust other people to transfer my data from one computer to another.  On top of the fact that I now have to re-install or re-download every single piece of software I had on the old laptop–even things that were small–

Oh.

My.

F–in’.

God.

That.

Lying.

Sack.

Of.

Salesman.

That button on the touchpad that he promised me turned off the touchpad doesn’t do a damned thing!!!

This computer was several hundred dollars more expensive than others that didn’t have that button.  That button which turns out has no function whatsoever.  That button which will in no way stop my fat hands from accidentally brushing the touchpad and deleting half of what I’ve typed.

Is it too late to return this damned thing for a cheaper one?

I hate it.

I already hate it.

I’ve had it less than 24 hours and I already hate it.

I don’t want it.

I want my old one back.  I’d rather pay the same amount to fix the bloody motherboard than deal with this.

But if I start refusing them my business over this debacle, then where am I supposed to go?

This Past Thursday

Okay, I think I’ve recovered enough to talk about it now.

So Thursday starts out–no, let me back up a bit.  The previous Thursday, in class the professor said that “next week will be our last class meeting” but that he wanted to meet with all of us, individually, on Tuesday or Wednesday to talk about our previous papers and our upcoming final papers.  I had a dentist appointment on Tuesday (to get the crowns put in) but Wednesday was wide open, so I was okay with that.

So he starts an e-mail sign-up sheet on Sunday, for us to say what time we want to meet on Tuesday.  I reply by pointing out that Tuesday is off the table for me, but Wednesday is good.  He says he’ll let me know what times he’s open on Wednesday…and eventually–like, Wednesday morning–says that no, he’s not going to be available at all on Wednesday.  I reply and tell him that I have a doctor’s appointment for my arm problem on Thursday at 11:00, and that I don’t know how long it will last or how long it will take to get to campus from the hospital, but that I’d definitely be available right before or right after class.  He says he’ll only be in his office at 11:00 on Thursday, so we’ll have to talk about the paper via e-mail.  I’m like “okay, whatever,” and don’t reply, ’cause it didn’t seem like a reply was needed.

I guess it was.

But more on that later.  So, Thursday morning, I’m on the way to the hospital, and I’m pissed off at the weather, because I was promised thunderstorms, and I’m getting a bright sunny day.  Good for most people, but torturous for me, because my left arm feels hot all the time, and the sunlight streaming down on it through the car window as I’m driving is the worst.  (And no one was available to drive me to the hospital.)  Plus there were lots of crazy people out on the road, as usual.  And it usually feels like I’m the only person in a five million mile radius who obeys the speed limit.  But mostly it was the weather that was the problem.  I spent a lot of time on that drive screaming obscenities at the sky–and sometimes at other drivers–and I definitely cried some, too.  Frustration will do that to me sometimes.

I did more screaming of obscenities in the parking garage at the hospital, because the first decent parking place I found was for “valet parking.”  Who does valet parking at a hospital?  And, more importantly, why would the valet parking have the good parking places?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to have the furthest out parking places for the valet parking, since the valets are being paid to walk over there and retrieve the cars?

Discussion Boards, Group Projects and the Core (Hard or Not)

As I warned yesterday, I will be bitching about class today.  But not just about class, but about also the week leading up to it.

So, this is a class on oral history, yes?  Not just studying it (which is what I had thought I was signing up for) but also practicing it.  I should have dropped it as soon as I found out that it wasn’t what I signed on for.  I may still drop it, even though it’s the only class I’m taking this semester, and the drop date has passed, so I’ll have an “EX” on my transcript forever if I drop it.  We’ll have to see what happens, but that’s where I am right now, in my head-space.

Getting back to the class, we have various assignments each week, as you’d expect, but we don’t get much spelled out about them until the week before they’re due.  (With a few rare exceptions.)  So the assignment that was due yesterday was that the class was divided into two groups–undergraduates and graduates–and each group was to compile a list of 40 questions for an oral interview, and that these questions would be put into practice on a test subject in class.  A discussion board was set up for the purpose of this assignment.

Because I really didn’t want to do it, and last weekend was the worst I have had in many years, I put off going to that discussion board until Sunday night.

It was still a blank, virginal slate.

So I started a thread about the assignment, saying that we should talk about what theme we wanted to center our questions around.

When I went back Monday night, the only response was from the professor, who said that determining those themes was part of the assignment.  As if I had been asking him, rather than trying to start a discussion with my fellow students.

Since no one had said anything, I posted again with about a dozen questions, mostly basic, introductory stuff.  Because by Monday night, for a paper due on Thursday, I would usually want to have the rough draft done (though obviously that isn’t always achieved) and so having nothing at all of the question list by Monday night was burning me up.

Over the next two days, two of the other students pitched in.  One of them contributed about the same number of questions that I had–though fewer introductory questions and more on thematic issues–and the other had written a list of 45 questions, which she posted in its entirety.  Which would have been fantastic, except she seemed to have misunderstood the assignment a bit, and had written a set of questions that would have been appropriate for interviewing the men whose interviews we had transcribed earlier in class, men who had been WWII veterans.  It was a fine list, but there’s no point in asking a 50 year old woman if she served in WWII, you know, so most of the list was useless, and most of the basic information questions covered the same information that the other student and I had put up.  Still, at least she had put time and effort into it.  She didn’t have time to contribute to the discussion, as such, but she wasn’t blowing off the assignment, so I don’t have any problem with that.

What I do have a problem with is the other two graduate students.  One posted late on Wednesday night, posting about six or seven questions, most of them fairly basic and many already covered, and the other posted at 4 a.m. on Thursday morning–barely more than 12 hours before the final list was due!–and posted even fewer questions, having clearly not read any of the questions that had already been posted, because there was no truly new material in it.

That, of course, was when I realized that if I didn’t do the assignment, it might not get done.  There were only two of us properly taking part in the discussion, and the other one had said in his latest post that he was working almost all day on Thursday, so I could see that he wasn’t going to have time to compile a full list out of the half dozen threads with the questions scattered through them.

So I had to do it.

It took me almost an hour.

And the results were, of course, pathetic.  The questions were simple and shallow, because there had been no discussion of what information we were looking for, and there were only two people actively contributing questions.

The worst part about all of this is that one of the things the professor said about the lists was that he was disappointed at how little they tried to delve for deeper information on important topics.

How in the bloody, pluperfect, *&%$ed-up HELL were we supposed to do that!?  NO ONE was willing to make any kind of stance, we were given literally ZERO  guidance, and in our case there were only TWO PEOPLE trying to do a job assigned to FIVE!

{*pant*pant*pant*}

All right, I’m better now.

But I am still seriously pissed off.

I’m pissed at the two students who completely blew off the assignment–especially since the professor’s posts made it very clear that all of our grades were going to depend on the whole group taking part, as if I had any way to get the other two involved when I didn’t even know they were graduate students!–and I’m pissed at the professor for designing this so poorly, and I’m pissed at the entire class for turning our in-class deliberations about the final  list into one big argument in which absolutely nothing was decided.

But perhaps I’m most pissed that I didn’t just drop the class after the first day.

I should have been able to switch into another class.  Missing the first day isn’t that big a deal, even in graduate-level classes.

Worst of all, though, is the next assignment.

Because the next assignment is to conduct the interview.

We’ve all been given the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of someone we’re supposed to interview.  We have two weeks to interview them and transcribe the interviews.

This is why I should have dropped the class from the word “go.”

Because I’m not good at talking to others.  Especially not strangers, but even with people I know, I’m not good at it.

And now I have to e-mail–or, even worse, call!–a total stranger, set up a meeting time, and then interview her?

This will not end well.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  It’s not like this woman doesn’t know.  All the interviewees were contacted by the professor or some of his acquaintances, and they all agreed to do it.  So it’s not like I’m calling a total stranger and having to explain why I’m calling her and asking to interview her.   So it could be worse…but the second interview is going to be like that.  We have to provide our own interviewees for the second interview.

That’s why I want to drop the course now.

But I’m going to try.  I’ll e-mail her tomorrow and hope it’s a working e-mail address so I won’t have to call her.  I’ll try to conduct the interview.

But if it goes as badly as I think it’s going to, then I’m dropping the course, and I don’t care how bad that “EX” is going to look on my transcript!  It’d have to look better than an F, and I think that’s what I’d get if I kept going.

Especially since the second interview is again part of a group project, and we’d have to use that damned discussion board again to determine what the project was.

I shudder at the thought.

There should have been a warning in the course catalog:  “Don’t take this course unless you’re seriously hard-core!”

I am not hard-core.  As far as this subject goes, my core is so soft as to have mostly evaporated.

I guess I’m hard-core about other things, though.  I went to a toy store on my way home tonight, in the constant rain, after dark (and I hate driving in the rain, especially after dark) because it was the first chance I had to check to see if the new Monster High doll had been released today, since it’s Friday the 13th.  (They’ve released special dolls to celebrate Friday the 13ths before.  And since this is the second Friday the 13th in a row, I thought surely they would this time, but it seems not.)  So that’s a little bit of hard-core-ishness about me, but even then, not really.  It’s not like I’m willing to shell out massive amounts of money to scalpers for dolls before they’re released, or for convention-exclusive dolls or something.

Ugh.  I need to do something fun to unwind.

Been one of those weeks

Or something.  It’s just…ugh.  I don’t even know, you know?

My paper was horrendous.  There’s no other way to describe it.

Then, after I had gone all the way down to campus through the snow (flurries) the professor cancelled class.  Only an hour before the class was due to start, mind you, so no one would have had time to find out it was cancelled before they left for campus.  Or very few people would, anyway.  (With the class starting during rush hour, it makes the commute difficult no matter where you’re coming from.)

Oh, and he tacked on a new assignment to watch a movie (which apparently he or someone has posted on YouTube in its entirity, which seems to me rather odd) and said movie is a theatrical movie from some years back which I have heard is absolutely ungodly awful.  Admittedly, that’s part of his point–we’re supposed to post on the class discussion board about its ethnic stereotyping–but I really don’t want to watch it.

It just feels like everything’s going wrong.

And I’m totally out of money, but don’t have any more coming in until the 15th.  Ugh.

And my gas bills are ludicrously high, even though I keep my house absurdly cold.  (Seriously, in light of how much my gas bill was, I had dropped the thermostat from 63 to 60 degrees.  As that didn’t save me much money, I’ve dropped it further to 59.)

Yeah, so my life sucks, as per usual.  I’m going to go take a hot bath and try to forget my life exists.

This is why I don’t like the big stores.

I know I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t want my hobbies to intrude on this blog, but this took up most of my day (even though I was supposed to be writing the paper that’s due Thursday) and I’m still quite irate about it, so I really don’t have much else to say, so I’m going to be bitching about why today’s experiences reinforced my hatred of Best Buy.

I’ve hated them for years.  It started when their sales clerks (or the managers of same) decided that it was good policy to hassle customers in the most simple, self-service departments (especially DVD), and was then driven to boycott levels when they handed out flyers for “ladies’ night” which was all about “teaching” female customers how to use technology to stay in touch with their friends and also featured free make-overs and other such horse dung.  The only way to describe that flyer was “corporate misogyny” and it made me decide I would never shop there again.

Once in a while, I’ve had no other options, but usually I avoid the place like the plague.  (And that corporate misogyny thing was like five years ago or so, I should point out.  And may well have been an example of localized corporate misogyny for all I know.  I already hated the place anyway, so it hardly mattered.)

Now, fast-forward to the present.  One of the greatest graphic adventure games of all times, Grim Fandango, just got an HD overhaul and saw re-release last week on PC, PS4 and PSVita.  I don’t game on the PC anymore.  Trying to keep up with equipment requirements is too expensive, especially since I don’t have a good place to set up a desktop, and therefore have to use a laptop.  So it had to be the console version.  But I didn’t have either console.  But the quality RPGSs have been going handheld lately anyway, so I figured a Vita was eventually inevitable, so I thought “fine, this’ll be the game the makes me buy one.”  But they’re pretty pricey.  (Though slightly under half the cost of a PS4.)  So I wanted a way to cut costs.  And trading in my PSP wasn’t happening, ’cause there’s too many games for it in my collection, and of course the Vita isn’t backwards compatible.  (Well, okay, it is, technically, backwards compatible in that it can play games that were programmed for the PSP, but they have to be downloaded from the Playstation Store.  The Vita takes little cartridges or something, rather than the UMB disks that the PSP took…so anything I’ve already bought can’t be played on it.)  But after thinking about it a while, I realized that I might be able to get a big chunk taken off the cost by trading in a cell phone.

Let me explain about my cell phone.  It’s a flip phone that I’ve been using since 2008, and I have no intention of trading it in for another one any time soon.  Because I only use it for making phone calls, and then usually only in emergency situations.  I’m on a pay-as-you-go carrier, and they have a thing called a “service preserver” that lets you maintain your phone service for a year by paying $90 in one lump.  So long as you don’t use up the $90, anyway.  And I have never used up that $90 in a year.  My cash balance on that sucker was so high that I literally wasn’t going to be able to pay this year’s $90, because it would have gone over the maximum cash balance amount.  (And yet, catch-22 style, I still would have been required to pay it to keep the phone active.)  So I went to the carrier’s store, and looked at what phones I could buy with that balance.  Seeing the most expensive smart phone I could buy from them with the money I already gave them and would never be able to use, I went to GameStop’s website and checked how much I could get from them for trading that phone in.  It said I could get $100…but it listed the phones’ values by carrier, and didn’t list my carrier.  I went into the store and asked them, and they said they didn’t accept phones from my carrier.  Asking around a while, I found that the only place that did take them was Best Buy.

I didn’t like that any, but I figured $100 off the price of the Vita was worth it, so I went ahead and ordered the phone to trade in.  (I know it sounds stupid to buy a phone just to trade it in, but what else was I going to do with that cash balance?  I could never talk on the cell phone enough to use up that money; I don’t have enough to say.  And it’s not like I had any way of getting the money refunded.  Once the company has it, they’ll never give it back.)

So today was the day I set out to trade in the unused “used” cell phone to get the PSVita.  The guy at Best Buy puts the phone’s information into his computer, and…

…tells me I can get $40 for it.

$40.

For a $200 phone.

If anyone else would have taken the phone, I would have said “no deal” and taken the thing elsewhere.  But no one would have, because the carrier’s not one of the big deal carriers.

As a result, when you add in the 2 year warranty (which seems important on a handheld system) I still ended up paying more than I would have for a used one, assuming I could have found a used one.

My hatred is renewed and recharged.

Better still (or rather, even worse), after I plug in the system, sit through the bizarre “first time you turn it on” movie, and then wait and wait and wait for the system update, I go into the store and buy Grim Fandango.  Only to be told that I can’t download it, because the system’s internal memory can’t hold the game.  Now, I knew it needed memory sticks like the PSP did, but Best Buy didn’t sell them, and the box made it sound like the internal memory could hold quite a bit more than it actually can.  (Or rather, when it said that “some” of the internal memory was dedicated to the OS, it actually meant “95%” of it was.)  So I had to go to GameStop and buy a memory stick, too.

Oh, and Amazon raised the price on this doll I really wanted, too.  After the price had been dropping for days, to the point where it was almost affordable, it shot right back up to where it was last week.  This day has been suck.

Except that Suikoden II, one of the greatest games ever, has been made available in the Playstation Store.  That, at least, was something good.  But everything else has been suck.

And yes, I’m aware that it’s grammatically garbage to say that the day “has been suck.”  I don’t care about grammar just at the moment.

And I still have to write that stupid paper.

Ugh.

The real thing my writing needs…

…is a co-author.  Someone who can write descriptions, and maybe help re-structure stories, but doesn’t have much ability in terms of coming up with stories or writing dialog.  Then I could write the first draft, dialog heavy and description light (or free), and the other person could write the second draft, narrowing and re-shaping the dialog wherever needed, and adding in the descriptions.  And any story re-shaping that was needed could be done collaboratively in the process of the second draft, or that could be the third draft, or whatever.

That’s what I most need, I think.  But I have no idea how to go about getting a co-author.  I don’t know any local writers’ groups.  And I’m not sure I’d trust someone I only knew on-line, not with my novels-in-progress.

Now that I think about it, that’s probably the sort of thing I should have been asking around about on the NaNo forums while the event was going on.  Asking around now would be sort of pointless, ’cause very few people watch the NaNo forums when it’s not NaNo time.  Although maybe during Camp NaNo….?  Yeah, that seems like a good idea.  Although if my plans for the summer pan out, I’ll be taking an intensive language course at a different local university over the summer, so I won’t have time for that.  Ugh.  I’m not sure if it would be more accurate to say that my life sucks, or to say that I suck.  Either way, there is definitely suckage.  Which is apparently not a word, according to my browser’s auto-spell-checker…