I just stumbled across this and it fit well with my previous post so…here.
August, 2004
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Alien 3 Script Reviews
August 30, 2004 by Collin
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Well.
August 30, 2004 by Collin
I’m back. I guess. Let’s see… funny… funny… hmmm.
Well, this is kind of funny. My brother Trevor had some free movie passes and he insisted we go see “Alien Vs. Predator” last night. I tried everything I could to talk him into seeing something, ANYTHING else. Rotten Tomatoes has it ranked at 21% rotten. I had also read Mr. Negative’s review of the movie and made Trevor read it as well before we left for the theater. Nothing I did would change his mind.
After we got the tickets and went inside we still had about 3o minutes to kill, so we wandered around looking at the posters for upcoming movies, discussing how even the worst of them would probably be better than what we were about to see, and I was contemplating ducking into nearly any other movie.
I was seriously pissed when I saw that they were also showing “Hero” (95%!). We HAVE to see that next weekend.
I was amused, however to see that they were doubling up “Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement” (30%) with “Exorcist: The Beginning” (10%). A better paring might have been “Exorcist” with “The Passion of the Christ” though. Just a thought.
The only time I was able to shake his confidence in seeing AvP was after we had fought our way through the crowds and found some seats way in the back (Sarcasm. There were two other people in the theater when we finally sat down. Although they DID manage to sit in the row that I prefer. Bastards.) Trevor was saying that it couldn’t be as bad as they are saying, because it’s Aliens! And Predators! I reminded him of how he had rented and watched “Battlefield Earth”. And then I grinned. But then he went on an inane tangent about how I still had to watch that as well so I could share in his suffering, to which I replied, “Um. No. Sorry.”
During the slideshow and shit-music section of the evening that always precedes the commercials and previews the same slide ran twice and I told Trevor that it was a hiccup in the Matrix. They had rewritten the program and now we were trapped in there. All exits are blocked. We were doomed. He was amused. Then the movie started.
Okay, not really. The commercials started. The first was that stupid cell phone ad where the idiots are singing. And the second was that REALLY irritating Mazda ad where all these mid-20′s people (of various genders and race, but mostly white) who are doing fun, expensive yuppie shit get a cell phone/pager buzz (zoom-vroom-boom) that calls them all away from the fun to go do happy donuts in the desert. Yeah. I hate that one. Seen it twice. Want to meet the guy who thought of it and kick him hard in the goodies. There may have been another commercial before the previews started, but if so I missed it through my blinding hatred of Mazda’s ad agency.
Oh…wait. There WAS another commercial. It was so bad my mind tried to erase all memory of it. It was for Coke C2. It was a worse ad than the last Coke C2 ad I saw (at the movies). In this one there are a bunch of my generation of people and older doing REALLY stupid shit out of sheer joy for a cola product. Why is it that the mid-20′s all get to have expensive fun and do donuts while the mid-30′s just get to flop around and twitch like electrified retards? At WORK no less! Those kids get to slack and we STILL have to work while we look stupid! I take offense to that. It makes me not want to try their product just out of spite. So. Um. There! I hope the same person came up with both this ad and the Mazda ad. It will save me some kicking and travel time.
Then the previews came on. Some were good, some were not. It’s all a blur. Then the movie started.
I’m not going to recap the movie. Let’s just say it wasn’t eye shredding bad. It had a fair number of plot holes and dialog issues, but the fight scenes were done quite well and the humans dropped like flies. Except for that one that didn’t die. Oh, she SHOULD have died. Especially with the tagline “No matter who wins, we lose!” Lying fuckers. I will say that I would be willing to watch this movie any time over “Alien 3″ again. But then I would almost be willing to watch “Frogs” again over “Alien 3″.
And it has almost worked up my courage to rent and see “Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever” (1%… that’s right. 1%). If I ever do, I’ll let you know how that goes.
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This is the busiest…
August 26, 2004 by Collin
…stay at home vacation I think I’ve ever had in my life. I am getting a lot accomplished, but nothing for here. No comic or card in the works, no storytelling game tallying or new one started, nothing even remotely funny to say.
I did think of one thing that I knew would be funny, then I promptly forgot about it. That was on Saturday. I haven’t been able to remember it since. Brain still broken.
So, my apologies to anyone who was expecting better from me, and my congratulations to everyone who knew better than to expect anything.
That having been said, I MIGHT have something by Sunday. But don’t bet the farm on it.
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…do what now?
August 20, 2004 by Collin
Okay, I’m out of funny. Not sure why. I thought I still had some in a desk drawer somewhere, but nope. It’s almost as embarrassing and inconvenient as running out of toilet paper when guests are over for a chili dinner. Only it’s IN MY HEAD!
Perhaps it’s because I’m looking forward to being off from work next week and having trouble focusing on anything else. Or because I’m sleepy and having trouble focusing on anything else. Or I’m having trouble focusing on anything else just because. I have no idea.
So rather than take up anymore valuable internet space with this pointless babble, I will send you to someplace that is both wrong and funny (sorry Jenn).
Explore it this weekend. Share it with your friends and neighbors. Discuss it among yourselves. There will be a quiz later.
You all have a good weekend and I will see if I can find some time in the coming week to put together a half-assed comic. Or card. Or… you know. Something half-assed.
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This post is for…
August 20, 2004 by Collin
I hope you are having a fun week with your guests. And I hope you see this before it drops off the page. Although there is little fear of that since I doubt I’ll have anything more to say until the new creative block I have comes tumbling down.
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And one more quickie…
August 19, 2004 by Collin
For all the mac users who visit my site. I know who you are. Yeah. You in the back. You can’t hide from MEEEEEE!
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This and that last one…
August 19, 2004 by Collin
…come from Mike Houser’ blog at CasdraBlog. An interesting place that is going to into my rotation. Like I don’t have enough in my list.
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A fun online flash game.
August 19, 2004 by Collin
Enjoy.
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Another Tale of Childhood Stupidity!
August 18, 2004 by Collin
I’ll try to keep this one short. Short and squirmy. When I was 9 (again) my mom was in the kitchen talking on the phone with a friend and I was sitting on the steps to the upstairs area being bored.
My uncle, the one who recommended amputation for the dangly turtle problem, had given me some exercise stuff. I was a scrawny kid, and tended to get picked on a bit (okay, a lot) and he thought that “working out” would help me. He gave me an old pair of boxing gloves, a few karate magazines and… I don’t know the name for it… it’s one of those things made from two handles with three bungie style cords between them. The idea is you stretch them apart and it builds up your chest muscles. I had a different idea. A stupid idea.
I was sitting on the stairs, idly playing around with this thing in a fashion not intended by its makers. What I was doing was this. I put one handle around my knee and was pulling the other handle as hard as I could with both of my hands. While sitting.
My mom noticed what I was doing and she had just opened her mouth to tell me to cut it out when the handle slipped off of my knee. I realize at this point that I failed to mention a key detail in the description of this “thing”. The cords were attached to the handles by coiled springs. Springs that had pointy bits at the ends.
The handle that had been on my knee smacked me across the face and knocked me backward onto the stairs. I was dazed, my head was pounding and I think I recall my mom yelling “OH MY GOD!” I thought, “I’m alright.” But I was wrong. Very wrong.
When I opened my eyes I saw my mom had dropped the phone and was rushing toward me with a horrified expression on her face. And then I felt the torrent of blood that had started to poor from my eye. I FREAKED! She grabbed me and ran me up to the bathroom at the top of the stairs and I remember seeing the trail of blood that I was leaving on the carpet, and feeling bad for making a mess.
About the time she had me bent over the sink the pain in my eye had begun. I was watching my blood swirl down the drain while my mom asked me if I could still see from that eye at all. I thought I was going to die.
She got the bleeding under control and she rushed me to the Peterson Air Force Base hospital (My dad was a retired SMSgt.). We sat in the waiting area for a bit with a bloody cloth pressed to my head. Finally a doctor took me into another room and checked out the wound. The eye was okay, but the gash in my eyelid needed stitches.
I didn’t know anything about the ranking in the Air Force at the time, but I’m quite sure it was at most an A1C that put in the stitches. And he was lit. Totally high. I must have interrupted is pot break.
So, here I am a 9 year old kid who had just gone through a hell of a lot for one night, and here is this unfocused pothead coming at my face with a needle and thread. I didn’t know at the time what drugs were. I just knew that he wasn’t quite right. So, I start screaming and trying to get away. He grabbed me by the arm and hissed, “Settle down kid or I’ll sew your eyelid to your cheek.” I settled down.
SOMEHOW he managed to not fuck up. It was somewhere around 4-6 stitches, if I recall correctly. It looked like I had a prickly caterpillar on my eye. And these were the “old school” stitches. The ones that, at some point down the line, have to be removed. They don’t just dissolve.
Fortunately, I didn’t have the pot head take them out when the time came. Unfortunately, the doctor was only able to get a couple of them out with the snips. The doper put them in too tight. She informed me that she was going to have to use a scalpel to cut the remaining ones so she could remove them.
I said, “Leave them in!”, but no dice.
I was scared to death that my eye was going to be cut all over again, but it worked out okay. I can’t recommend having someone come to your eye with a razor sharp knife though, no matter how good their intentions.
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Where have all the brain cells gone…
August 17, 2004 by Collin
Okay, I don’t do drugs. I’ve never done drugs. Until I was a teenager I would gag on aspirin and still to this day despise needles and smoking. I have various reasons for this anti-drug attitude that I may go into at some point.
That having been said I should confess that on occasion I have done chemicals. Not intentionally though. Mostly through stupidity. But still, I have to wonder what they have messed up in me.
Two incidents of chemical abuse stand out in my mind, but I’m sure there have been others. I just don’t remember them. That part of my brain is missing, presumed dead.
The first was when I was 9-ish (again) and still living at the house where I had the turtle. How I made it to 10 I have no idea.
One day a bored friend* and I discovered that the powdered weed killer my dad kept in the garage, when tossed by the handful onto the ground, left behind particles in the air that look somewhat like an explosion occurred. This was deemed “neat!” So we started to have weed killer wars. We each took a bag to different sides of the garage and threw the stuff at each other by the hand full. This was “fun!”
The air started to get a bit thick after a while, so we did what any sane 9-year-old kids would do. That’s right. We climbed up into the rafters and played “Bombers Over Europe!” After that it’s all a blur. Neither of us fell from the rafters, amazingly. And somehow we must have kept enough brain cells undamaged to do a good clean up job because I don’t recall getting caught. I do however recall the strange taste in my mouth that persisted for a very long time.
So there you go. 70′s weed killer. In my system.
The other incident occurred during my tour of duty in England (RAF Upper Hayford : ’88-’90 : PMEL). It was my first duty assignment and I was assigned to the K6 section. That was the Physical/Dimensional area. In spite of my extremely high electronics testing score all through tech school this is where I was put, and stayed for my entire time in the Air Force. There is virtually no electronics in that department. But there ARE pressure gages that needed calibration. And cleaning. The cleaner of choice was TRICHLOROTRIFLUOROETHANE We called it “Trike” for short. Also known as Freon. I will say this, it’s fun to play with. But DAMN were we stupid when we played.
See, I was 19 then, and still considered myself to be immortal. Well, not exactly immortal. I had an overwhelming feeling that I was going to be dead by the age of 25. So I wasn’t as careful as I should have been, and the mutants I worked with didn’t do much to teach me the important skills of chemical handling. My training was electronics. What the hell did I know about chemicals?
We had these little water bottles that the trike was kept in for ease of use. It had a bent straw so that you could squeeze it into a pressure gage, or across a surface to clean it. Or, you could have running freon fights through the clean room. Or put a puddle of it in a fellow airman’s chair. You know. Whatever was most needed at the time.
When the trike hit skin it would tingle, be absorbed and leave the skin it had touched a white color for a bit. One of the airmen, when she was bored, would dribble it over the same patch of skin on her hand until she couldn’t take it anymore. She was odd.
The turning point for me was when I had to go to the hazardous materials room to refill the big can of trike that was normally kept in the K6 room and used to refill the small bottles. The big refill barrel was low. So I balanced the can I needed to fill on my knee and tipped the barrel forward. Easily a gallon of the stuff rushed forward and drenched my left arm from my hand to my elbow and my entire left leg. That was my wake up call. It did NOT feel good! I figured that I had absorbed far more of that crap than was healthy.
It was after that that I took a keen interest in looking the stuff up in the MSDS and finding out what the long term effects of the stuff was. All in all, it doesn’t look too good for my liver.
So, now I am far more careful around chemicals, to the point of not even messing with them unless I absolutely have to.
And I still don’t do drugs.
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*This same friend and I had an interest in my dad’s gun bench. My dad would save his shell casings when he went shooting, then cast his own bullets, replace the primers, assemble the cartridges and there he goes. Cheap(er) ammo.One day I took a box of primers and a hammer and met up with my friend on the footbridge next to my house. I was a latchkey kid, so I didn’t have to worry about being caught right away. I had already done this a few times on my own.
Again, around age 9.
What I would do is take a primer, place it on the cement and smash it with a hammer. This would make it go *bang!*, somewhat like a gunshot, and it would echo around the neighborhood. For anyone who doesn’t know, the primer is what the firing pin of a gun hits, which then explodes into the casing through a tiny hole, igniting the gunpowder and expelling the bullet down the barrel. The primer itself is only a tiny explosion compared to the gunpowder. Hence, primer.
This time my friend was with me and he was BEGGING me to let him smash one. I was reluctant to do so because he was a bit spastic when excited and I had a good idea of what I was doing and a lot more practice at it. But then he pulled the ‘I won’t be your friend any more” card, so I let him. I stepped back. He put down the primer, raised the hammer, smacked it down *BANG!* and then grabbed his head and started screaming.
When I got him to settle down I looked at his forehead. He had a half moon cut on his head where the primer casing leaped up after exploding and nailed him in the head. He ran home in a panic and crying, afraid that he was now brain damaged. Needless to say, the jig was up. I got in trouble and I learned many lessons that day. And I’m keeping them to myself.
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