Written in Reverse

Getting right into things....

Teaser trailer is out for Paranormal Activity 2.



BD Horror News - 'Paranormal' Teaser Too Scary for Theaters? Easter Eggs Hiding Within?

Apparently like 2 days after it came out, it got pulled outta a few theatres because it was frightening people. Few things tho:

1. It makes business sense and all but otherwise, why is it playing in front of Twilight? Not exactly the demographic their goin for with PA 2 I wouldn't think.

2. How amusing is it that it happened in Texas? Isn't that just perfectly appropriate?

3. Of course it's gonna get complaints and freak out parents and their clingy 14-year-old overweight daughters wearing pancake makeup. Who probably never even saw the first one. Again the demographic thing.

4. My feelings on Twilight are quite clear so I will just say this one thing. All good will and improved reviews and feelings toward Eclipse are the direct result of one and only one person- director David Slade. Dude makes good movies. Still no chance of me seeing Twilight anytime soon but if anyone could make it a halfway good movie it would be him. Check out awesome vampire flick 30 Days of Night or disturbing Ellen Page revenge movie Hard Candy if you don't know him.

The teaser looks solid but make no mistake, there is no possible way- short of some crazy black magic that will cause a tear in the space-time continuum- for PA 2 to be as incredible as the first one. The first one exploded based on good marketing and massive word of mouth. The sequel doesn't have that, it doesn't have the originality and it just can't have the same spark to it. I'm still gonna see it, although I'll more than likely see Saw VII 3D first. The two of them battling it out, opening on the same day is kinda pointless but it's still interesting nonetheless. Especially from a business stand point, it's not good. It just splits the audience and neither movie will open to as big of a box office as it could have.

I really hope Saw does well. The sixth one last year was a good movie. I enjoyed no. 5 but many people weren't pleased so the sixth one was sort of a return to form and it placated the majority of people. It's just unfortunate that it was overshadowed by Paranormal Activity. Plus the fact that many people don't think for themselves. They'll listen to what 'critics' and other people say and be sheep rather than tryin to ignite any sort of electrical action in their frontal lobe. Saw 5 was unpopular- and the Saw series in general is looked down upon, it's like the Simpsons of the horror world- and so nobody thought 6 would be any good. Regardless of if there is another edition to the series next year, it'd be nice for this one to do well. Otherwise you just get people bitching on their blogs like they're frackin geniuses about how there were too many movies and it went to long and the quality went down. (he says un-ironically :P)

Anyways, I put off writing this for like a week because I tend to procrastinate a lot. So thusly, there's maybe not quite the level of bile and rhetoric that there would've been otherwise.



Segway


Something cool and completely nerdy coming up this weekend July 9-11 in LA is Vidcon. It's a big gathering and weekend conference of Youtube celebrities and fans the world over who spend countless hours watching them. There's gonna be speakers, actual youtube employees attending, concerts by famed youtube musicians and a big dance party happening. Yes I am that a big geek. I don't consider myself cool or smart enough to be a nerd. Part of the plan as well is to do a live stream of the whole event which I'm gonna try and watch some of if they get that to work.

K nerd time over. Bye.

"I've got the forks." "YAY"

Blog Number One from Cranbrook

While listening to new Deftones

and watching Frasier.

I'm well into my first week of practicum in Cranbrook at B104 and The Drive. I've been doin some production with jana, putting ads and what not together. Did a little copy yesterday. Editing down spots, re-writing them for clarity etc. Today I was at McDonalds for 5 hours at a remote for McHappy Day. I didn't get to do any cut-ins just watching everything that was happening and talking to the guy about radio. I did listen to a half-hour discussion with Jeff, the guy from the radio station I was there with, and a guy from the Kootenay Ice hockey team about why the world's finances are in such disarray and why the world sucks and various conspiracy theory like things. Not that I necessarily disagreed with him about stuff but he certainly didn't look like Jeff Parrott. Doing another remote on saturday. Don't know what it is though. Hopefully I get to do some on-air stuff at some point, I imagine I would.
Just trying to be friendly, smile, talk and get along with people there.

The res is ok I guess. Had a bbq tonight so got free drinks and food. Really good burgers. I don't really have anything in common with the other people who live in the pod with me but we get along ok, don't really talk. Got cable tv, share wireless internet. Food isn't a problem as of yet. I haven't done laundry yet but I probly should be doing that in the next few days. Little weary and nervous about that.

Cranbrook seems alright, sort of like Brandon. Still trying to find my way around. The street set-up isn't exactly the simplest. I miss turns a lot and don't know where stuff is. Kinda boring but then I don't know what to do here and don't know anyone. Certainly don't have any crazy partially-alcoholic zellers people to drink with and complain about work. Of course maybe there is, I don't know any of the zellers employees here naturally. I was talking with one of the teenage cashiers the only day about bitchy annoying old people who come in. Yes there actually is a zellers here, didn't think there would be. For a city of only like 20, 000 people they have a lot of stores. Wal-mart, Superstore, Save-On Foods, other box stores on home decor and hardware and what not that i don't go into lol. No major music store that I've seen but they do have a coles. I ordered myself Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green when I got into town last weekend. Great author, check out some his books at the local library or head to youtube.com/vlogbrothers.

My friend Chelsea, one of my three readers, did a blog the other day featuring a great short story she wrote about attitude. Obviously, attitude is extremely important and it doesn't hurt to always try to smile and have a friendly good attitude even if you're getting shit on.

Now clearly anyone who has lived at all, which is just about anyone who would be reading this, knows that's easier said than done. Doing it for like a few hours or a day is easy but doing it consistently is quite difficult. Especially if you're lacking in confidence and a depressive person like myself. One girl I worked with at zellers was constantly smiling and chipper and friendly, had a happy attitude. I don't know how she did it. Of course she could be quite a boozer, perhaps that's it? hahaha. I miss people work people in Brandon, even though I wasn't really sure if we were friends or not. Anyway, I've tried the whole thinking positively/being friendly thing and I couldn't really keep it up. I'll usually do my best attempt of it when I meet people but it craps out at some point. I have a bit of complex for people for getting annoyed and tired of me.

That's about all I can think of on that...



*Segway*
in other news;

Stephen Harper is making another attempt at screwing everyone over in a way that's trying to be helpful while trying to trick people into thinking he cares about arts or culture or entertainment in canada when he really doesn't and tries to kill it every instance he gets. You can google the story or look at the article on CBC's website:


http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/05/05/copyright-reform-bill.html

So yeh, he wants to make it more like the US where random people get sued for copyright infringement in order to be made an example of for things like downloading or software piracy. Or sharing the same copy of something in schools for educational purposes.



THEIR LEARNING, THAT'S COPYRIGHTED! (how lame is it that I don't know how to centre things on here.)


Clearly they haven't read this article either:

http://torrentfreak.com/is-piracy-really-killing-the-music-industry-no-100418/

They really throw out a lot of fear mongering about how much of a negative impact it's had. READ IT.

Random Thoughts...

- Deftones new album is pretty wicked, I recommend you check it out. Hopefully Chi gets better soon from that car accident. Deftones are a part of a ridiculously unbelievable tour I wish I could go to. Called the Black Diamond Skye Tour, it features Alice in Chains, Mastodon and the Deftones all under one roof on the same show. That would be a crazy amazing show.

- Tool is finally coming to Winnipeg! and I can't go to it! I'm quite annoyed and upset at this. Not so much because I'm in Cranbrook but b/c I don't have money for it anyway.

- Star Wars Ep. 2 is way way too long. I stayed in Lethbridge one night on my journey out west (that strangely did not involve any journey...hmm) and spent my evening in the hotel room watching a stars wars marathon. Seriously, attack of the clones is like 3 1/2 hours long. and Hayden Christenson is just annoying.

2 Days of Note

May 10th is International Monty Python Status Day. Put a one-liner from any of their various bodies of work as your facebook status.

May 21st, Join the T-Party.. as in the Mr. T Party. Wear your chains, watch some Clubber Lang or the A-Team, be sure to pity some fools tho. The people in the actual tea party are a good place to start.

Review: (500) Days of Summer

I just finished watching this and felt I should do a more pleasant, less existential, less depressing blog post.

I had been wanting to check this out for a few months and I thoroughly enjoyed it.



The film is the story of Tom (Joseph Gordon Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel). First off, I really must say, I love Zooey Deschanel. She's really becoming one of my favorite actresses b/c she's just so good. Her performances are always endearing and quirky yet she's just got that subtle little something about her that you can't quite put your finger on but puts her on a bit of a different level than other women. And Joseph Gordon Levitt, in my opinion, has to be one of the most underrated actors out there. I'm sure you probly remember him from 3rd Rock From the Sun, which he was always solid on.



So how it starts off even before the movie starts which is great, is they have the little this is a work of fiction and any similarity to persons living or dead... blah blah blah. Followed by 'especially you Jenny Beckman. Bitch.' That's one example of what the movie is like. It's a touching funny sweet movie that has some hilariously random jokes in it. Another one I laughed at, Tom works at greeting card company and he's goin thru a difficult period. The boss brings him in to discuss a card he wrote. 'Roses are red, violets are blue. Fuck you whore.' Also, maybe my favorite scene in the movie b/c I've played this game, is Tom and Summer sitting in the park playing the penis game. I don't know the actual name of it or if it has an actual name. If you're not familiar allow me to explain. Basically you go back and forth saying penis, each time saying it louder than when they said it. You start out quiet and fairly quickly get up to yelling it. It's such a funny scene. Reminded me of playing it on a roadtrip to Winnipeg one time. I was playing it with a guy named Travis while me, him, Chris and Dallas were on our way to see WWE. Needless to say, he's considerably bigger and louder than I am and won.

Getting back to the movie, it jumps around the timeline throughout, showing different segments of the courtship and aftermath of the relationship, which was well done. The whole way the movie's been edited and put together I quite liked. There's some beautifully shot scenes in this.


So highly recommend you check this out. Good acting, good story, very good music in it too.

Questioning her good intentions, jealousy's a bad invention....

'He who's tired of Weird Al is tired of life.' -Homer Simpson

lol ah that's a great episode. So true too.

I'm unsure what to write about.

For one thing, I'm pretty depressed lately trying to deal with my damn oversensitive pysche and jealousy of people having better friendships.

but

Does anyone really care? I'm inclined to say no but it's not like loads of people read this anyway. I usually like to try and write it as if people actually were. Which is counter to me sort of feeling the need to put things out there. Would I want to read about some boring guy's candid issues? likely not.

Of course not talking to people about problems generally isn't good for the manifestation of them and you just start to project into it more and more.

I need a hobby but I'm not sure what that would be. Since it can't cost a lot or require internet or other people. And something I'm actually interested in doin. There lies the problem.

This seems strange and almost counter intuitive but having a few friends that I do stuff with almost regularly sort of like makes me feel worse then when I didn't before. I'm always wanting to do stuff and feel bad and lonely when I don't have anything happening on a weekend when before I didn't expect to do anything since I only had things every 2 months. Which was the cheaper option too :P Anyway, messed up I know.

I get a week off for spring break next week, which will be quite boring. Might end up goin to Dauphin to check things out if Bob hears back from the station there. Otherwise just sitting around and some working in the latter portion of the week. There's new people at work. I haven't really talked to them. Only the one I was working with yesterday and I just casually talked and asked things, diff than how I talk to others there. Less chance of them thinking I'm asking them out that way. hahaha (you can't really tell just from the text but I'm rolling my eyes with that half hearted laugh.)

I'm likely gonna be quitting in 2 months and if I happen to need to go back there again at some point, I'm not exactly confidant they'd hire me back.

At least there's some good movies coming out in the next few months, although I'll probly have to go by myself. One friend probly won't want to or will say she does but can't find a day to go. And my other friend probly will go b/c he works full-time and is very loose with his money but he won't really want to since he isn't a fan of horror.

The Crazies comes out tomorrow, looks interesting. I'll wait for the B-D review tho to decide whether I really wanna see it. Alice in Wonderland the week after. Clash of the Titans the start of April. New Nightmare on Elm Street April 30. 2nd full trailer came out for it today. It's a good trailer and all but I'm slightly apprehensive about the movie. There's no way it'll be as awesome as the original. One of the finest horror movies in history. Plus I dunno about Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy. The burn effects aren't great, it's missing something. Hopefully it's an entertaining and creepy ride for what it is at least.






I miss being more involved in wrestling like I was. Helping out with the SPW shows. I dunno about this NXT show WWE is doing. Half reality, half wrestling show with pros 'mentoring' rookies. They play the colour commentators against each other riffing on smark fans. All because they don't wanna recognize the success and talent men like Bryan Danielson have had in indies. TNA is on mondays now but there won't be a real monday night war for at least a year. TNA's booking is ridiculous and Hogan isn't gonna help in the slightest.

end transmission.

update- work

So I tried out this transition trick that Jake told me about to smooth out one of the hard edits on this. I don't know if it worked greatly but there's probly only so much you can do with that part.



I can't seem to find anyone to do a william shatner voice for the other idea I have.

What We Have Here....Is A Failure To Communicate

I work at Zellers. Which in case you're unaware is like the less-evil Canadian version of Wal-Mart. Most people will complain and bitch about it. How it's a terrible job and it sucks. I'll usually at least half-assedly defend it. It's not really that bad. Sure, most customers are a fist full of assholes and stuff doesn't work correctly and there isn't really anything you can do about it. And you gotta work with grumpy old people with a complex that they should get different treatment b/c their older or have been there longer and high school girls that are all nervous and air-headed and twitchy and you say anything to them their like I dunno, nothing, giving you that look, but it's not THAT bad. (That's a ridiculous run-on sentence. Diane would smack me :P) You know what they say: We are doing the work of pathetic, lazy morons (sidebar-- that's probly one of my favorite lines from Adventureland.) There is fun to be had at times and a handful of the people you work with are awesome.

I generally don't mind working with the teens 7 years younger than me. I try and be friendly, make conversation and get along with them. However what really annoys me is when the disconnect between us kinda rears it's head and you get the current situation where most people see me as some kind of store pervert b/c some of them think I was asking them out just b/c I happened to be trying to be polite and friendly and asked them what they were doin on the weekend. I can assure you that was not my intention. I was pretty angry after being informed of this and people not believing me. Kinda felt the need to rip into a few people but I'm over that now.

It's really not too surprising that I don't feel involved and included most of the time in most situations. I'm kinda lookin forward to most likely quitting when it's time for my practicum. Even tho practicum and the time period afterwards frightens me. I don't think I'm gonna get a very good one. I put audio production as the top thing I wanted to do... no, I don't know why I did that. B/c I'd much rather doin board-op or on-air. oi.

End transmission

Work

So I finally got a project done that I had been working on every now and then the last few months. Check it out and let me know what ya think.

It's a composite of 4 movie trailers that I tried to combine into sounding like one. There are a few parts still that could be better but for using what I had available to me I like it. Might work for a demo thing.



This is a spot I made to play on-air when I was talking about new cd releases and I put together I little video to go along with it. I had just seen Paranormal Activity recently and came up with this. Nothing special or hard but the idea amused me.





I'm gonna start at some point on another idea I had. A phony album promo of William Shatner doing spoken-word versions of modern top 40 favorites like Katy Perry or Lady Gaga.

Mind Meanderings

Greetings blogoverse and handful of readers. It's been awhile but I don't really have lots of time usually to sit and write one since I don't have internet at home. It's lame i know. So I'm attempting to write this while I'm on the radio.

Basically what it boils down to is the settings in my landlady's router are wrong and nobody who's normally in the house is an expert on it and knows how to get it to work. We've fiddled around with settings but bumpkiss. I can connect to her network I just don't have internet access.

What else has been goin on? Everything and nothing really. Nothing new particularly. I got a laptop before christmas which will come in handy, more so in the future probly since my desktop comp that I've had for like 6 years sounds like it's gonna die in a relatively near time frame. The thing's louder than a prepubescent girl at a Jonas Brothers concert. The most annoying thing I've found so far with the laptop is the keyboard. The majority of the buttons have about 6 symbols on them and I don't have a clue how to use half of them. There's a function button that goes along with them I guess and I haven't really figured it out. Most annoying about it is the small shift key on the right and when you hit some buttons it just gives you letters with slashes above them. Literally takes twice the amount of time to type something as it would on a normal keyboard.

School is starting to wind down which is a little freaky. I don't feel as though I'm good enough to get a job. I'm not that interesting on-air or creative enough to do a production job making commercials and so forth. Also perhaps it's just me but I don't really feel as if the instructors think I have much of a future in the industry. They're really much chummier with other people. I suppose everyone feels like this when it comes time to be moving on from a university or college course but I've found that how I feel is similar but different and extended to what other people do on average. It's mostly about confidence likability and how you sound. I unfortunately don't ingratiate myself to people well and I hate how I sound. It sort of goes back to my issues with making and keeping healthy friendships since I don't like boring people, which I often end up doing, since I usually feel as I don't have anything interesting to include in discussions.

At least that's all I've thought of. I've seen/met many people similar to me who are much more successful in different aspects of things such as relationships and work and so forth and I haven't in so far as yet determined what the difference is.

You may ask well maybe you should've made some new years resolutions then to change. Well I don't believe in new years resolutions since they don't change anything and people don't follow them anyway. This may seem rather negative but that's how I see things. I don't really have too much to complain about honestly. I have a few friends, I hang out and do stuff with them and they invite me to stuff. Work is alright, school is fine, it's not like I'm failing or anything. I just always want things to be better than they are and constantly think about things that bother me even tho there's no need for me to. I'm very envious. Messed up, I know. Welcome to my world in 2010.

Moving on from that, which isn't really what I intended to get into on this blog, however I figured I would put it out there. Another guy I know wrote a similar sort of blog about the same kinda things. Only his he explained and talked about much better.

Stealing from Hammelltime and with the new year in mind, here's a list of some of the best movies I saw in 2009 in no particular order:

Drag Me To Hell: This was tense, creepy, scary, gross, everything you could want in a horror movie. Sam Raimi showed the world what you can do with horror and just how good it can be. Horror is kind of a mocked and looked down upon genre however like metal music, it produces wonderous, beautiful things sometimes and I'll take a good horror movie over Avatar or any other stupid mass loved crap any day.

Other amazing horror titles: Let the Right One In, REC, Trick R Treat, Zombieland, many others I'm sure I'm forgetting.

Movies I'm surprised I liked so much: Adventureland and Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. These aren't the sort of movies I usually watch but I incredibly enjoyed them. Their funny and charming and just cute, touching stories at the base of them. Adventureland really feels like an 80s movie and like it's from that time period. The acting is great, the music is awesome and just that unquantifiable quality some movies have. Nick and Norah's has that odd sense of humour about it that speaks to me.

I kinda got a brain freeze at the moment and cant think of others but its time to go anyway as my time on the radio is over. I shall see you around.