Waxitical

Ten years ago today yesterday I started this damn journal and wrote my first entry.

"Journal!!!Eleven!!!
I have a livejournal! wow! now i can express myself online in a manner where i don't sound incoherent! Yay! Thank you to Katie for providing me with code for said livejournal ...

Forgive the layout, it will only be so until i have time to make it good...
Also, forgive the title and content of this post, i'm sort of rushed right now since..."

The "since" led into the next day's post, which was basically that San Diego County was burning down in a huge inferno of doom. Man, ten years goes pretty damn quick.
I was going to post this yesterday to commemorate the whole livejournal thing, and then I forgot.
I apologize to all my many followers who cared.
So much for my bringing livejournal back movement. I eventually stopped caring myself.
I take that back. I still care. Just not enough to... you know... be interesting on a daily basis.
I kind of miss the days when I assumed that I was interesting.
Not that I'd go back and re-read those days. They are my-eyes-only for a reason. I could only get so far before the whole thing would overwhelm me and I would implode.
I would not wish that fate on anyone else.

Anyway, happy ten year anniversary, my livejournal.

Now to reach a checkpoint in Bioshock Infinite so I can go the fuck to sleep.

So I defeated another level in the trial that is Fire Emblem: Awakening Hard/Classic mode. It is funny because I spent weeks perfecting a strategy to complete this mission using trial and error, and then yesterday at about 3am an attempt went south and my strategy fell apart and I beat it by pure, dumb luck. It was such a glorious feeling. Really, that is the benefit of doing something challenging, something hard. Because if you try and fail and fail and fail and fail again, that only makes your eventual victory that much sweeter.

Unless you never end up beating that next level and you have just wasted a huge chunk of your time. That would suck.

I so need a job.
Maybe I can juggle geese? I hear people do that.

I have never been so unsettled by photography of tree bark in my life.

I guess the story was pretty good too.

My completely irrational fears:

Spiders:
I believe this one explains itself. The funny thing is, I can pretty much destroy any spider I see, and yet I don't. I preserve the objects of my fear. But seriously, these things are creepy, and I blame the movie Arachnophobia for giving me the self-same phobia. Damn film.

Needles:
I hate needles. They suck. This one I have good reason for, but still. Completely irrational.

The Dark:
The funny thing about me being afraid of the dark is that I'm not actually afraid of the dark. I'm actually afraid of somebody slitting my throat while I am traveling through a dark space. Specifically getting my throat slit. Or, like, bitten by a vampire. Yes, seriously.

That last one is what inspired this post, as I feel it is particularly irrational, and yet one of my stronger fear motivators nowadays. Silly phobias.

Tonight I experienced a sudden desire to go back in time and re-learn math from the very beginning. Just, like, somehow forget basic arithmetic so that I had to start from scratch and build from there, just to re-experience the ways that my neurons fire as I puzzle out the basic functions of numbers and how they interact with each other.

It's a really dumb idea, but an interesting concept to explore philosophically, especially when talking about the process at a broader level of experiencing something for the first time all over again. I particularly feel that way about movies, about how some movies are just pure magic at the first viewing but lose some of their lustre upon revisitation. So much focus in geekery is about the cultish tendency to watch and rewatch the same movie over and over again, while sometimes good storytelling stems from the freshness of seeing something new or creative. Blah.

My feeling tonight specifically was that I really, really wanted to be in seventh grade learning the initial concepts of algebra. Being ingrained with the idea that x could be a substitute of a value, a value that could possibly be solved. Something about going back to some of the higher level applications of those basic ideas made me nostalgic for the entire process of building a mental structure for understanding math. I don't know. I'd hate being in seventh grade again otherwise, especially if I didn't retain my memories and couldn't change the past. Things weren't all bad back then, but life as a teenager really sucked. Maybe I should revise that to say that I made a really crappy teenager, and that it wasn't the age range's fault but my quality as a person. Given that standard I made a substandard child and atrocious adult as well, and should be chastised for my general performance as a person.

After a situation where I was living with another Erin, my friends took to calling me by Hatch, my last name. Now that several years have passed, Hatch has kind of stuck as my primary name among my friends, and I was encouraged yesterday to make that change official. Thus I am making a livejournal declaration that in order to increase my manliness quotient, I am changing my name to Hatchet Rockwell. Hatch for short.

So how about that there show Gargoyles? Early-to-mid-nineties goodness, that's what I say. I just started rewatching it and the show holds up well for a Disney Afternoon-era title. Now, whether the show will hold up outside the pilot I'll just have to wait and see.

I've actually been watching a lot of TV comparative to other points in my life. Most of it isn't on TV, mind, and even the stuff that is isn't live but DVR'd, so it still isn't the same as the old days... but still. My current list looks something like:
-Copper (BBC America via DVR)
-Broadchurch (BBC America via DVR)
-The Newsroom (HBO via DVR)
-Attack on Titan (Funimation via Hulu)
-House of Cards (Netflix)
-Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (Netflix)
-Psych (Netflix)
-Burn Notice (Netflix)
-Eureka (Netflix)
-Once Upon a Time (Netflix)

There are probably some more in there (For example: I finished the series of Eden of the East a week or two ago, though I haven't watched the feature length finale yet, and I powered through Orphan Black to write a ComicsOnline review) but those are the ones that are on my docket now. Really, the combination of DVR and Netflix is what really does me in here, I'm not sure I'd have the patience to put up with Hulu much more than I do, and I wouldn't care to track down these series otherwise.

The thing is... most of these series suck.
Ok, well, they don't suck, but they're TV. They're noise. Enjoyable noise but not particularly substantial. Burn Notice and Psych are fun, formulaic detective/spy shows, but I put them on and then write for forty minutes while vaguely enjoying the sounds of the story and glancing at the screen occasionally for context. I spent an episode of Eureka today doing Math homework and was barely distracted. The anime makes it a little harder to multitask, which is and isn't a good thing. Ok, thoughts on the TV stuff: (TAKE THIS, FRIENDS PAGE)
-Copper, Season 2: I wasn't very fair to season 1 of Copper because the premise is extremely enticing and the show didn't live up to my expectations. Actually, it didn't live down to my expectations. I was expecting another formulaic Cop show with a historical bent, and instead they spring this grand drama on me? I was frustrated because the historical cop part is done really well, but the drama aspect just... it doesn't live up to the series' potential as a cop show. The show is literally called Copper. Why are we spending so much time focusing on non-police stuff? Season 2 I'm a little more forgiving. I enjoyed Season 1 enough despite my over-particular expectation, and I am enjoying season 2 more, though I am still frustrated with the commercials for the show which promise grand events that don't actually happen for episodes on end. At least they're doing stuff with the show, and resolving certain plot arcs that were getting frustrating. Also, Copper may just be ok most of the time, but when it is great it is fantastic. I'm thinking one scene in particular where the Doctor's wife decides she wants to chop down the metal lamp post that her brothers were lynched from with an Axe, which starts with her charging the lamp post and uselessly flailing on it and ends with half the street joining in to help her bring the thing down, most of it in a single shot. I was so breathtaken with that moment I had to watch the scene three times to make sure I was interpreting it right. Thank goodness for DVR.
-Broadchurch: I'll admit, I started watching it because of David Tennant. But it's actually interesting, if a little bit slow. I like the drama aspects, but as much as their style sells the emotional content of the show, the resulting glacial pace makes it tough to stomach episode after episode where half as much happens as it should.
-The Newsroom: Season 2 just isn't as good as season 1. There are several reasons for this, and several reasons for people to disagree with me. Essentially, from what I've read, The Newsroom was regularly trashed by journalists during season one for being a preachy, unrealistic take on the subject of journalism featuring hollow, stock characters that spouted out unrealistically clever dialog that were thinly veiled talking points of Aaron Sorkin's ideals for perfect journalism. Essentially, journalists were upset that they were watching an Aaron Sorkin show, not realizing that all of Aaron Sorkin's TV projects ever have been exactly the same, except about life backstage at the White House, or a Comedy show, or whatever. But that was season one, which, yeah, was all those things that journalists hated, but at least it was fun to watch. Season two does two big things wrong: 1) It spends WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY too much time obsessing over a single plot thread that isn't particularly interesting. I mean, yeah, theoretically it would be interesting if they presented it right, but instead they presented it like Aaron Sorkin wanting to present something interesting. This review might make more sense if you were aware of the idiosyncracies of Sorkin's writing style. Studio Sixty on the Sunset Strip is essentially a crash course in this. AND 2) None of the characters are doing interesting things anymore. I feel like all of the side plots have just crashed except for Sloan and what's his face having their 'we're totally going to bang but we're putting it off all season because we're coworkers or something.' Anyway, the lesson for Season 2 of the Newsroom is that it doesn't matter what journalists say about the realism of your behind the scenes news show, if I wanted to watch a show about horrible people fucking up the news, I'd just watch actual cable news.
-Attack on Titan: Hooray for bloody action anime! I really fucking hate this show, but I keep watching it for some reason. My real problem is that there really should only be one episode for every three or four episodes aired. I think that if some got the entire series and just cut it down to 1/2 to 1/3 the length it currently is, it would be a much better show. Instead, the writers/directors/editors waste so much time on tortured inner monologues and people screaming at each other, even in the middle of a big fucking battle where other important shit should be going on. Also, they introduce a billion characters, but death is so common here that they kill people off and you don't really know who is alive and who is dead until people come back or don't. Death just happens, and it is cheap and has little emotional pay-off. But then something awesome happens and I commit to watching another couple episodes. Really, I would recommend people wait to watch this until some generous soul comes along and volunteers to do the job that the story editors should have done in the first place, and cut away all the unnecessary emotional baggage that will still be obvious after it is gone.
-House of Cards: Pretty good, I guess. Interesting. It's one of those shows about horrible people doing interesting things. I'm still watching.
-Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood: Fullmetal Alchemist was one of the shows that I went crazy over during my big anime phase about ten years ago, and I was eager to hear about the continuation/revisitation of the show in Brotherhood. I tried to watch Brotherhood when it first released, but wasn't able to follow the broadcast schedule well and lost track of things. Now it's on Netflix and can't escape. So far I don't like it. Brotherhood seems to be a retelling of a lot of the same stories told by Fullmetal Alchemist, only the animation isn't as good and the storytelling sucks. I know that eventually it will deviate from the original series, and I hope I hang on long enough to actually see that happen.
-Psych: Detective comedy. Kind of a spin on a Sherlock Holmes formula. It's a lot of fun, but nothing groundbreaking or startlingly original. One of my background shows.
-Burn Notice: Spy show. Fun stuff. I've seen most of it before, at least, of the stuff on Netflix now, but never saw the first season and came in halfway through the second. Now I've watched up to the beginning of the fourth, which I have seen before, though I only have a season or two left before I get to new material again, assuming its on Netflix. Another show that I can put on in the background.
-Eureka: Once upon a time I cursed Eureka for being a sign of the SciFi channel being too scared to do exciting Science fiction, and I admit that I made that judgement call without having seen the show. That said, now that I am watching the show at the recommendation of my friends, I still hate it. There is something innately uninteresting about it. A hollowness. "Oh hey, this whole town is filled with government researchers, making everybody crazy smart except for this handful of average people." But the people don't seem crazy smart, which I guess is a problematic statement because what does crazy smart seem like? Whatever it is, this show doesn't really try to capture it. Oh yeah, everybody is crazy smart. See, that one seventh grader just invented a hovercar. Ha! How crazy smart! The intelligence of the town is stated, it is not demonstrated, and when it IS demonstrated, it is demonstrated offscreen. We see the products of the intelligence, we hear people called intelligent, we hear people speak the language, but we never see people doing science, and when we see them doing math it just feels hollow. (We need an equation to fit in for variable g in this formula for science juice. What can it be? Have you tried the square root of two x minus three? My god, you're a genius! We all are!) I am told it gets good eventually, so I am willing to have it play behind my math homework if I need to. It could be worse.
-Once Upon a Time: The thing is, I wanted to like Once Upon a Time, but I also came into the series thinking that I would not like it. Both of these feelings came from the fact that I like Fables (at least, what I've read of it), and that Once Upon A Time is essentially a huge, Disney-branded Fables rip-off with a little bit of Lost mixed in there. And it blows. I mean it is really bad. But by the time you really really realize how bad it is, it has its hooks in you, and then it starts getting good, and then season one is over. Season 2 was just added to Netflix, so I've just started watching it, and I haven't watched enough for it to get good yet.


This post is horrible and I have to get out while I still can. Best of luck, my livejournal friends. Stay safe.

Sorry I missed a day, but life. Still bringing it back!

One thing that has absolutely revolutionized my life in the past few days is the sign of glacial progress in my attempt to tackle Fire Emblem: Awakening. I'm a really big fan of this game, or I would be if I didn't suck so much.
Ok, I don't suck, but I did make the foolish decision to play on Hard difficulty (from the choices of Normal, Hard, and Insane), and the game really is unrelenting in its difficulty. I got past the first three levels fast enough, then got stuck on level four for about five months, and in the past week I completed both level four and a side level, which has left me very impressed with myself.
I am, of course, now thoroughly stuck on level six. It is interesting that I could focus on one game so uselessly while the rest of my catalog yearns for my attention. I could probably have complete a dozen games in the time I have spent trying to beat that one freaking level four.

In other news, Math is fun, and I was reunited with my old TI-83 Plus graphing calculator today. I even remembered the password to my copy of MirageOS. The calculator itself has a huge dark spot in the middle of the screen where the LCD is going bad or something, which is a minor annoyance so long as I maintain a fairly light contrast level. Does anybody else have this trouble with their old TI-83s? My friend's is fine, and it should be about the same age (though less used), but my sister seems to have done this contrast spot thing to TWO of our calculators now.

I went to group today and I felt good about it. I am going to try reading at night to theoretically help me sleep easier.

Tomorrow my registration nightmares end.

Dear Livejournal-
Happy Labor Day. I went to a gathering. Not quite a party. Still fun. Friends were present!
After yesterday's post I thought about making some kind of snarky comment about bringing livejournal back, and decided that I might as well just do that instead of joking about it. Maybe if I'm still writing these daily journal posts a couple of months from now, then I'll go brag about it and see if I can't start a trend. I just have to keep writing for now.

So... Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame versus Disney's The Lion King. I almost got in this debate earlier, and the central conflict of that debate seems to be some kind of belief that Hunchback is more 'adult' in tone and content, which... I don't particularly see. Or rather, I do see it, but I don't think the elements that make Hunchback more 'adult' actually make it more adult. Thinking about it, those factors mostly involve the fact that the central female character is overtly sensuous and that all the male characters, especially the villain, are attracted to her because of same. And I guess a lot of the characters are jerks. But you see all that stuff and think 'yeah, that's some dark content' and then you turn around and there are talking gargoyles making dumb jokes about pigeons or spitting on people. I think that might be my problem with the 'adult' factors of Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame: It isn't particularly consistent in its tone. Yeah, there are some dark moments, but there are a lot of goofy musical numbers as well, including some late in the film where they are incredibly tonally inconsistent with what is going on in the story. Also, I've never read Hunchback of Notre Dame, but having watched the Disney movie and read the Wikipedia (where are the cliffnotes of yesteryear?) account of the events of the book, I'm pretty sure the Disney crew didn't particularly pay close attention to the original either. (Still, better than Disney's Hercules.)
Now Lion King, on the other hand, is essentially Baby's First Hamlet. It's at least similar, and gets the themes of murder and betrayal and grief and revenge right to a certain degree, even if they smooth out the worst of the inappropriate content and play down the horribleness of the situation by making everybody talking animals. But while it is less overtly sexual and gothic, the Lion King fits its revenge tale into a fairly consistent tone. Yeah there are a couple of happy-bouncy songs, mostly front-loaded in the happy-go-lucky early parts of the film. But once things go dark, things go dark. You don't have a goofy gargoyle musical number two thirds of the way into the film, when things should be serious. There are gags here and there, but they all worked contextually. There are formulaic elements of the film, but THEY worked contextually. (Who are the goofy animal sidekicks when everybody is an animal? Timon and Puumba are goofy, but they are goofy for a reason, and serve a purpose in the plot.)
I guess the biggest argument against Lion King is that it has been completely upstaged by the play, which again revises the tone into something more serious and makes it a little harder to take the movie seriously.

This post has gone on for far too long, so... yeah, Hunchback might go to 'darker' places, but it does so less consistently than Lion King, which hides a lot of the darkness but maintains a consistent tone.

When I started this post, it was labor day. Now... not so much.

You know.
Sometimes, when it is late at night and I've been thinking, I realize I really miss livejournal.
But it is probably just me missing you guys more.
This was the social network for me, I think. This and leaving rambling away messages on AIM. And all of you who were here with me for that were my best internet friends.
(Well... maybe except for one or two since, but you guys are fantastic is what I'm saying.)
I can't do facebook. I just... ugh. It kills me everytime I look at it. Facebook is a soul-killing monster.
Myspace blew. Past tense. Now it blows in a slightly better way because it is completely insignificant and can be easily ignored.
Twitter is horrible. I gave it a chance. It did not deserve that chance.
If there is something newer than Twitter it is even more horrible.
Who can even keep track of blogs anymore?
I hate when this feeling comes on, not just because it makes me mourn that the best ways of interacting online are dying, but because it makes me feel like a whiny old man who can't keep up with technology. I mean, who wants to be that guy that doesn't like twitter?
I don't know.
The internet in general is kind of dead to me lately. Used to be that I would dive into this motherfucker on a daily basis to pry out all the information I could before I overdosed on data and stumbled away, exhausted.
But now... I cut webcomics altogether. I miss the good ones, but I'm relieved to be rid of the bad ones more. I cut video game news sites. Good fucking riddance. It sucks when I don't hear about things until long after the information qualifies as 'news,' but I am better off not reading that poison. I avoid facebook like the plague, which is funny, because if that is the case I would run to the plague every couple of weeks to untag some pictures my friends have posted of me on the plague. I don't do forums anymore either, and thus my source of real world news is gone as well. The internet is always here for me, if I need it, but I don't consume it the way I did last year, or the year before that, or any year prior to that all the way back to when my family first got internet.
Anyway.
None of this is relevant. I was just missing the old days.
Here's to you guys.
Cheers.