Z is for… Wait, is this thing over?

Z is for… wait, is this thing over?

I never did a Z post for the A-Z Blogging challenge. I came limping over that finish line on fumes. Apparently just enough fumes to only see the finish line, not actually cross it. But, honestly, sometimes it feels really good to quit things. So, yay.

There were several things I wanted to bring up today, but upon attempting to write them, I realized I had way too many things to talk about. So, after some self-editing, I thought I’d narrow it down to three.*

·         I'M A MEMBER of the IWM group blog, and contributor to the monthly mag. I continue to be, not only impressed with the contributions of others, but so much so, that I can’t figure out why they haven’t kicked me out yet.

For the very first ANNUAL of the magazine, the editors are asking for your best time-travel stories to be submitted to the mag. From the submissions, real money will be given to those stories selected as winning entries. Actual money they can be spent, I’m told. Not soda money either, but $15 for the winner, and $10 for the runner up. So dust off that old time-travel epic and send it on over <Click here for the details>

Although I'm not eligible for prizes, I'll be submitting.

·         THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 has been out for more than a week. One of the kids in the house (have I mentioned we have a family of 4 living with us now? They’re pretty cool, with our boys being older and never around, it’s nice to have people in the house) watched the last Spider-Man last week with me.

And I suck at reviewing stuff, this is no exception. But like most americans, I don't let my inability to do something interfere with me doing it anyway, and expecting an audience. I feel like that the 2012 flick was a much better movie than the second installment, but am amazed at how, in the second movie, the director so perfectly nailed Spider-Man’s comic book look, character, and gave us the best Comic Book love story I’ve ever seen on film. Marc Webb gets the emotions perfect. The actual action-y plot part though… it’s a bit of a mess, and the more I think of it, the more I feel like all that is frustratingly poorly done. Still, the characters and the small moments make this film worth watching.

·         AND DID ANYONE ELSE see this adorable little film that popped up over the internet recently. Best 5 minutes I’ve seen in a while. Great stuff!

JohnnyExpress from AlfredImageworks on Vimeo.

And that’s pretty much it. The new Rusty has almost no control over his schedule anymore. I’m a tornado of entropy, everything I touch turning immediately into chaos. Anyone who stops by has my sincere thanks.

*ish

Where I Admit I Have No Ideas... But SPIDER-MAN!!

MANY OF YOU ARE super awesome about the internets, but kids these days, they're all about new things. Like Vine, which has been around for awhile, I just don't use it that much. It's 6 seconds of video and so you have to be very creative to do something there worth watching. Honestly, this stuff cracks me up to no end.

Well, here's a funny example below of how clever folks use the service.

So, I've always wondered what it would be like to be Spider-Man.... now I know. It would be awful (P.S. Make sure you unmute it to get all the drama).



IN OTHER NEWS, I mentioned on the other blog a few weeks ago about wanting to read some SF from Octavia E Butler, I picked up a book the other day of hers (had the worst cover ever, that has to be bad on purpose, because, no one would ever put that out and think it was good) and started reading, I quickly got engrossed and was plowing through it when my WIFE picked it up while I was running into Home Depot for some grout and other assorted project things.

That's ugly, right?

I had it in the car and when I came out she was reading. Curses. Not only did she start reading it, she stole it from me. I'm halfway through a book that I can't read because my wife won't let me have it. I think she'll finish the whole thing today, so I shouldn't have to go that long without it, but damn.

In the meantime, it gave me an opportunity to write this post, so at least there's that. Of course, I tend to only have these sorts of things up when I can't think of anything else to say.

Happy Monday.

It looks like I will be only putting up one post this week. Many things have been afoot at the homestead and I've just not been able to pay any attention to the internet. I'd probably just take the summer off if I were being smart about it, but I'm not, so here I am.


It’s been hot… We had an incident and I’ve been living without AC since Thursday of last week. It’s true, I’m now dealing with the heat just like 99.999% of all humans that have ever lived have done. I’m probably not going to get a lot of sympathy from many people about this. But 100 degree temps outside have meant 100 degree temps inside - well, it might be 105 inside, it's like a greenhouse in here.

If there is a plus to this, it’s that our ice cream didn’t have such a hard freeze when I pulled it out of the freezer, if was perfectly creamy, so that’s good. Also, the family huddled around the small portable AC unit we borrowed and placed downstairs (where part of the home is below grade and we hoped it would hold the cool air better) and played The Settlers of Catan. It’s kinda like monopoly, but with a set of rules that makes it much, much, more difficult to establish dominance. Anyway, it’s a cool game. We tried to play Xbox some - my wife has been enamored with the Assassins Creed games for a long time, but she’d only watched the commercials and never tried to play. So, we started to play but the Xbox kept crashing, it would work fine just long enough for us to get into the game before it would crash… Some investigative work by me determined that the crashing thing started about the same time the Air Conditioning unit went out. But again, creamy ice cream. It was magical.

 I was going to continue with the Higgs Boson stuff I brought up last week. Mostly because I was surprised at the number of people that commented and were unfamiliar with it, or why its discovery would be a big deal. As Andrew alluded to in his comment, scientists are sure they’ve found something (not just experimental error), and they have no idea what it is that they found, however, it just so happens to be right in the spot they were expecting to find the Higgs Boson. I did some looking and found another video – this one is an awesome cartoon that gives the best 2 minute lecture I’ve ever seen on Quantum phenomena. They deserve an award.

*Edit* This is the wrong video... I created a whole new post to share the correct one. Sorry about that.*



 I did see Spider-Man last weekend – holy wow! I did not have great expectations and so I wasn’t prepared, it blew my doors off. I’m going to watch the Rami versions again to see if I still hold my opinion afterwards, but I left the theater thinking this new one was way better than any of the other versions. I read the comics when I was a kid, and have them all as PDF’s now (ahem... totally legal) and while there were tons of changes to the origin story from what I remembered, if felt way more like Spider-Man than I thought a movie could. I tip my hat to this film. Well done. I can’t wait to see how Gwen Stacy’s story plays out, especially seeing as how she was kinda absorbed into the Mary Jane character in the Rami films, I wonder how confused fans would be if they saw certain elements of Gwen in future movies that they saw with Mary Jane in the Rami film, especially the first one.