Month: February 2016

Reminder: CNN debate tonight at 8:30 PM Eastern.

You should be able to watch it on CNN here. To be brutally honest about it, I haven’t really decided whether to watch or not.  Well, I probably will – but it’s not likely to be really fun.

[UPDATE: Yeah, turned it off.]

[UPDATE: And apparently I’m supposed to turn it back on.]

[LAST UPDATE: Ended watching most of it, as soon as it was made clear to me that people were actually going to smack Donald Trump in the mouth for a change. Refreshing.]

So, they’re remaking Pete’s Dragon.

It’s a little… well.

Jurassic Park still casts a long shadow, it seems.  Although I have to admit, my original complaint – it’s a live-action/CGI hybrid – was based on a faulty memory of the original Pete’s Dragon being an fully animated movie (it was actually a live-action/animation hybrid).  I suppose that drawing in the dragon in the original was kind of state of the art for 1977…

Wait, how did I miss Tom Clancy’s The Division?

This, like, pushes all the buttons.

ALL the buttons. It’s like they took my only major issue with Fallout 4* and decided to make a game around resolving that issue for me.  It looks awesome, in other words.

*Basically, it’s: Yes, I understand that civilization fell when the bombs dropped. So noted. But, dammit, I AM HERE NOW. Get a damned Minutemen team into Fanueil Hall and hold it against the Super-Mutants! Here is some combat armor. Here are advanced laser weapons. Shoot, here’s a bunch of T-60 power armor in your pick of colors. Sweep and clear, people. Sweep and clear. I am the Warlord of the Commonwealth and the Institute’s Bane, and these disturbers of the Wanderer’s Peace offend me. 

Fascinating dynamic here at Chez Lane about changing a tire.

It’s a little baroque, in fact.  You see: the wife is the engineer, so she typically does the mechanical stuff. But I have the edge on upper body strength, so it’s my job to lug stuff around (like tires). Also, I’ve changed tires before and before this morning she hadn’t. And, of course, this is one of those things that you should do at least once on your own so that you know how to do it. …And that’s why I was just standing around and watching over my wife change a tire.  It was a touch bizarre; usually I’m just watching as she does incomprehensible things to mechanical things. Weird to have actual opinions in this particular arena.

So that’s how my morning is going. Which is to say, not actually all that badly: the nice thing in all of this is that my wife’s home from work.  We’ve already picked out the faux-English pub where we’re going to have lunch.

Trying a Twitter experiment.

As in, I logged out of Twitter and hid the desktop icon and stuck the iPod app in a folder and deleted it on my phone. I’m curious whether I have a dependency on the thing, you see: so I’m just gonna turn it off for a day and see what happens next. I’ve already suppressed at least one I wonder what funny stuff my followers said about that: I should go look, which suggests that I might, in fact, have a Twitter dependency*. So if I snarl at anybody, say “MOE! Twitter dependency” or something.  That should snap me out of the Madness Place.

Moe Lane

*I’m trying not to call it an ‘addiction’ because that sounds worse.  Might as well be honest about it; I don’t know whether constantly being dipped in social media is bad for my long-term cognitive and neurochemical well-being, but when I actually write it out like that I suspect that I actually do know and just don’t want to admit it. So taking a day off may not be sufficient…

[UDPATE: I forgot that these posts auto-propagate to Twitter.  Dependency much, Moe?]

[ANOTHER UPDATE: I keep forgetting that these posts auto-propagate.  It’s aggravating! – Although not having Twitter around? Not so much. It’s a quite a bit less nerve-wracking than I expected, in fact.]

Movie of the Week: Guardians of the Galaxy.

I’m a little surprised that I haven’t done Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy yet, but then Movie of the Week gets less love than Book of the Week. Probably because I don’t watch as many movies or television shows as I used to, but I still get in a lot of books.  Anyway: this was the film that convinced Marvel that it was unstoppable. …And, to be fair, so far they’ve been right. Anyway, if you haven’t seen this film – come on, you’ve seen this film. It has a raccoon with a machine gun in it. You are reading this site. Let’s be honest, here.

And so, adieu to Dark City.