Chris didn’t come along to see At World’s End last week, because he actually hadn’t seen Dead Man’s Chest yet. So we watched that last night to get him caught up. Seeing it for the second time, it seems like there are some obvious ways the film could have been made better. For example, they could have cut out the entire cannibal island scene altogether - it does nothing to further the plot and now we know it had nothing to do with the third movie. And it’s what, a good half hour? It has some fun moments, to be sure, but snipping it out altogether would fix some of the pacing issues in the film and lessen the sense that it’s too long and too sprawling. Similarly, most of the fight scene on Isla Cruces doesn’t need to happen - particularly the bit with the goddamn wheel. Cutting it down to half or a third of its current length would have been great, I think. But despite my complaints, overall I liked Dead Man’s Chest better the second time around and it left me looking forward to seeing At World’s End again on the big screen.
In other news, Memorial Day weekend was pretty good. My parents were in town, which was nice as I hadn’t seen them since Christmas. And I ended up at the Google building in Chelsea for a while on Saturday, where I spent most of my time wandering around in open-mouthed awe and hating the Googlers just a little bit. They are very nice people, to be sure, but why don’t I get a Lego room adjoining my free cafeteria?
I caught an early showing of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End last night with a couple of coworkers, and a large number of strangers in eyepatches, skull bandanas, and tri-corner hats of wildly varying quality. I’m generally apprehensive about seeing big movies that have just opened, and especially on opening night, but I found the crowd refreshingly well-behaved in an enthusiastic nerd sort of way. It was good times.
I don’t want to get too much into the details of the film, but I will reassure you on two points. Firstly, if you liked the first one a lot but were left disappointed and slightly wary after the second, good news: this one is worth seeing in the theater. Yeah, I know it’s getting mediocre reviews, but screw ‘em. My coworkers and I are of the unanimous opinion that it’s much better than the second film was, and one of us has asserted that it’s just as good as the first. And my second point is that if you accidentally read spoilers for the movie (say, on the WoW forum), don’t even worry about it because they seem to be mostly incorrect.
Of other vegetables I like peas & onions, can tolerate cabbage & turnips, am neutral toward cauliflower, have no deep enmity toward carrots, prefer to dodge parsnips & asparagus, shun string beans & brussel sprouts & abominate spinach.
The fact that Lovecraft used to write letters about his feelings towards various foods fills me with great joy.
A few weeks back I decided I’d had enough of overpriced delivery food for lunch. There are great restaurants near my office, but I don’t want to spend the time or money it takes to visit one every day and the takeout is often abysmal - it costs just as much but shows up late, cold and frequently wrong (like the time I ordered a chorizo omelette and got a pork sandwich). So I started packing my lunch, just tossing sandwiches and other stuff in miscellaneous shopping bags lying around the house.
But I don’t want to become a Victoria’s Secret bag person any more than I want to keep eating takeout. While it’s true that I have yet to stoop quite that low, I can’t really argue that there’s a significant difference between carrying my lunch in a bag that recently held fantastical things from Kid Robot and one that recently held overpriced panties. So I went in search of a proper lunchbox, and settled on the one sold by Obentec. Yes, their site is very goofy in a late-nineties sort of way, and yes their friendly laptop character makes me cringe, but the lunchbox? It is perfect.
I’ve used it pretty much every day for the past three weeks or so, and I like it more every day. I had some trouble at first getting normal-sized bread to fit in one of the larger containers until I realized I could just buy mini-pitas and mini-bagels at Trader Joe’s and sidestep the issue entirely. My lunches now are cheaper and infinitely more awesome than my previous sandwich-and-soda standby, and I can just toss the whole thing in the dishwasher when I don’t feel like dealing with it by hand. I couldn’t be happier, and apparently neither could the folks in this Flickr pool, who all have the same lunchbox I do. (I have not yet started photographing my lunches, however.)
Turns out that whole “less likely to encounter wandering monsters while following a road” thing doesn’t work so well if you’re a level 26 in Hellfire Peninsula.
In the volatile 23 minutes of turmoil between the minute the disinformation hit the stock market at 8:55 PST and Apple’s announcement that the initial email “is fake and did not come from Apple,†nearly 15 million shares changed hands. That’s 60% of Apple’s normal volume in well under a half hour. That’s also an awful lot money lost for some investors - and gained for others - all of it because of a lie.
From (Apple) Stock Hacking & the power of Disinformaton.
So for the past couple of months, I’ve had dentist appointments every couple of weeks. I haven’t mentioned it much here, though (with the exception of that awesome dentist horror story from last month). Why so much dentistry? It isn’t because I particularly like having people jab sharp pointy things in my mouth for hours on end, despite what you might suppose. No, it’s because I actually hadn’t been to the dentist regularly in about eight years. This is one of those shameful facts about myself that I normally take care to avoid mentioning, and it’s the product of spending a long time living in ramen-level poverty with no dental insurance. You know, those years where paying part of my rent out of my change jar was standard practice. And I actually still don’t have dental insurance, but I can afford to foot the bill myself now and finally got around to doing so.
I take good care of my teeth at home, and in fact I didn’t need any serious work done at all, but I did have a number of small cavities that were scattered around my mouth. Because of the sheer amount of time that my dentist had to spend on me (initial exam, full set of x-rays, cleaning, and filling cavities in five different parts of my mouth), it ended up taking six visits over three months and about $1500 to deal with it all. Yeah, I could have bought a new computer with the money I have spent on my teeth this year.
As mildly embarrassing as all of this is, I am telling you about it, dear Internets, because it turns out there’s a really shocking number of people in the same boat I was in: folks in their mid-20s who stopped being able to afford going to the dentist in while college and who just let it slide for a few years after that. My dentist related many of these stories to my numbed-up drooling self while she worked on me, and all of my friends to whom I’ve mentioned this whole endeavor have had stories of their own. So my point is this: if you are like me and have a shameful dental secret you have been meaning to deal with, just go ahead and do it. You aren’t nearly as unusual as you think, and it will only cost more later.
The only reason I’m not positive that this video is the best thing I’ve ever seen is that this one is arguably just as good. I could watch either one of them all day.
Thanks to the CowboyNeal and his infinite patience, the Caoine Slashbox is working again as of a couple days ago. Are you excited? I know I am.
