This cone is keeping traffic off the hood of this truck!
Sometimes you have to resort to desperate measures to get people to stop driving all over your pickup truck.
I liked reading Kibo so much in high school.
Delightful Skyfall marketing
The obstacle at 1:06 made my face really big.
#1,878: Contagion
My plan was to watch Contagion as though it was a direct sequel to Rise of the Planet of the APES, since the idea of a pandemic is only suggested in the end title sequence. The biggest problems with this approach are that a) the virus in Contagion doesn’t turn anyone into an APE, and b) that doesn’t happen in the ape movie either.
Instead, we get a fairly “realistic”1 portrayal of what happens to us in an outbreak. And the problem with that is that it’s a little bit boring. Although humanity is decimated, it still feels like nothing much happens. There’s no main character, or anyone whose life, death, or infection status seemed to matter. I didn’t really care about any of the humans in this movie, so on that score, it’s right there with APES, except that unlike that movie, Contagion hasn’t got any apes.
: Whether or not the science is accurate doesn’t matter. The movie is realistic in what seems to be a non-fantasy portrayal of what might happen. It’s probably about as accurate as an XKCD What If? ↩
Leopold - Ice Cream
I originally registered NormalWebsite.com for Leopold, the computer in this clip. I thought that as a computer, he would want a perfectly ordinary website, because one of his two favorite things is fitting in with regular folks.
I'd hate to take that away from him just so I can have fun writing, so hopefully he'll turn up now and then.
New Dwellings, Online and Off
After three years, I've moved back out of Burbank and into the city of Los Angeles. The house where I was renting was a money-losing operation for the owner, and he decided to sell. I thought that I would be safe from eviction, since the owner only referred to me as "the other one" when announcing his decision. It's pretty tough to serve papers to "the other one." But then the day came when he called up one of the roommates to ask what my name was, and one day later, boom! NOTICE TO MOVE OUT.
So I did. I'd been looking forward to it, even planning and counting on it, sometime this year.
The last time I moved, I was Improving My LA Experience, and it was the keystone in that project. The general quality of LA-livin' has been better since then, but I haven't spent much time actively improving it, either. So maybe that's something to do.
What I do know is that I seem to have, in the past, made a habit of using a move and fresh start to make as many other changes at once as well. Not in a new year's resolution-y way, but in a hopping-in-to-the-pool way: I'm about to have to adapt and adjust, so I might as well do all of that at once.
What I'm trying to say here is that I'm going to do a new web thing for a little while. I've decided to take www.normalwebsite.com away from Leopold the robot, because it's a pretty great domain name, and it lets me try new things without blowing up my old site, to which I will be able to retreat in the event of catastrophe.
There are old posts here that I'm proud of, and others that seem embarrassing, and I'm reluctant to mention either since I am not trying to encourage you to look through the archives. I'm encouraging you to check out the new thing, and I hope the few regular readers I had there will join me over here.