Friday, January 28, 2005

Fiddlededee.

Comment Commentary

Shin- Regular football is better. By a lot.

James- You do it through Photoshop, or another image editing program. The Sims 2 website has a tutorial on it.. It can be found here. There's no easy way to do anything that involves 3D things, such as hair or stuff sticking out of the clothing, though.

Tony- Yeah, I watched it on Apple. The story didn't seem that appealing, but it looks great (visually), and it's Tim Burton.

Mal- I know I am.

Shin- Let's see you operate five sets of keyboards and a hell of a lot of pedals and see how you like it after that.

--

I had a lot to talk about, but it's all a blur right now. I guess I'll go like I always do: Recalling what I can, and breaking off into tangents.

After I reached my AR goal, the shackles of that atrocious system were torn from my bookshelf, if just for a short while. I'm going to take this oppurtunity to read non-AR books that I want to read for enjoyment. I started with The Andromeda Strain, which I decided to put off until I can use its AR points (I need to ration these things, you see), and I switched it out for 2010: Odyssey Two. I haven't gotten very far yet. After all, I have no reason to rush it.

Looking back, there are a lot of well-forecasted predictions in these books. In the book, they were talking about a devestating earthquake / tsunami that occured in the year 2005. Sure, it may be a couple months off, but that made me applaud coincidence.

I forgot that book at home today, though, so I had to pick something up out of the crappy "class book box." Most of the books are from the teacher's college days, which is fine, but they're all sort of yellowed and torn and have notes all over them.

For a laugh, I decided to pick out the Malcolm X autobiography. What else could make me howl like a lunatic? It's Malcolm X.

Moving on..

This has been dubbed "Substitute week," because all of the teachers had to go to this conference somewhere about new teaching techniques. Nobody really used it, except my science teacher, and when she used it.. Dear God, it was madness.

The school board seems to have decided that students learn things best by repeating them, and by hearing the fact twisted around in various sentence forms.

"Today, class, we will learn about the three forms of matter."

"..Okay?"

"Repeat after me. We will learn about the three forms of matter."

"*some people repeat*"

"Good. Again."

"*more repeating*"

"Now, how many forms of matter are there, [random student]?"

"..Three?"

"Very good. Now, let's repeat again."

"..."

As this is going on, we are all looking at each other with the typical "wtf?" expression. I mean, seriously, this deserves a real wtf. We covered a 25% of what we normally could have completed if we did our regular note-taking dealie. This is an advanced eighth grade science class, not remedial third grade science. I really hope we don't have to do that again.. It was messed up. It made for a lot of good jokes, for the rest of the day, though.

Our Constitution note-taking is finally over. We only took notes on four of the seven articles (we summarized the last three), so I guess it's back to regular work now. Boo. I could get away with doodling and reading I Feel Sick during that.

Now we're doing the Bill of Rights. Whoop-de-doo. All this does is remind me of that recent episode of The Simpsons where they got sent to federal prison for being unpatriotic. They had to watch an educational video about how great the Constitution is and how bad the Bill of Rights is.

Silly Federalists, eh?

Math's easy right now. Either my teacher's toned down her.. Enthusiasm, so to speak, or we've been numbed by her craziness and can't tell her from any regular teacher anymore. I think it's the latter- I noticed how she graphed lines on the overhead with the enthusiasm of a varsity football coach.

I've been doing a lot of surreal, symbolic sketches in art. My personal favorite at the moment is four mini-drawings that basically symbolize telephones and why I dislike them. I think it would be a lot better as photography, though. That would be one photography project I would actually want to do.

We smashed this team of seventh graders into the ground in frisbee football today. Our team only consisted of four people, but they're people of worth. One is tall, one is athletic, one (me) is relatively good at catching, and then there's one who doesn't do jack shit (you know who you are). It was probably forty to six at the end. There was no point in counting- it was obvious who was winning, you know?

I hung out at my friend's house after school, as usual. It wasn't just a dull game-playing marathon, though- somebody else had rented Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on DVD from Blockbuster, and let this person borrow it.

Later on, I found out that this person had fallen into the trap of the "No more late fees" commercials. The late fees aren't there, if you sign up for a prepaid monthly plan, not if you just randomly dish out five bucks for a movie. She didn't know that. She's had this VHS tape for three weeks now. I laughed at her.

Anyway, the movie itself was amazing. It's a hundred times better than Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite combined. It's one of those thought-provoking movies, where I was actually spending time trying to figure out what the hell was going on. We rewinded a hundred times to notice subtle little messages that were put into various shots.

And that is a good thing.

(It had Kirsten Dunst and Kate Winslet, too. ~_^)

I'd like to write a little mini-essay on the movie, if I ever get the chance to do a school assignment where I can actually choose what the hell I'm going to write about. Oh, and I need the DVD. My circulatory system will fail if I don't have it.

It was refreshing to see Jim Carrey do a "different" role. He's always essentially the same character in every movie he does. In this movie, his character is pratically the opposite of his typical role- quiet and introspective (He's still crazy, though. *nods wisely*). The great thing, though, is that he's not pitiful or laying on the angst by the pound (liter, maybe? I think angst should be measured as a liquid). We sort of realized how this Joel fellow is really a mixture of our two personalities. With each little thing he did, we could relate that to either my friend or me. It's fun to laugh at how much we suck.

One of my gripes about Garden State was that it wasn't funny. It was just a story with twinges of brilliant comedy shining through. Eternal Sunshine basically follows that formula, but the story is so much more entertaining. I highly recommend it.

--

I just realized something.

Eternal Sunshine.

Eternal Darkness.

Like, omfg!!1 I wonder if they were based off the same quote.

..God, I really need to work on my closing sentences. There should be something witty here, but there isn't. I need good blog lessons, or something..

EDIT: I always find these things after I do my updates, for some reason.

EDIT 2: Conspiracy websites are some of my favorites, simply because of how outrageous most of their claims are. This is a prime example, compiling in a very long and rambly article about the thousand reasons Walt Disney was an evil man. There was something about Satanism, a black Shirley Temple, and aliens, too. You can tell the people who wrote this have worn their tin foil hats for a little too long.
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