The incoherent bloggings of a die-hard Star Wars fan.
Monday, May 31, 2004
Bad Religion - Pity the Dead
A lot has happened lately at the onset of my summer vacation.
Thursday, tagged along with Sam, Liz, and Matt to see Mike Park and the Plea for Peace tour at the Troubadour. Mike Park was awesome, and some of his songs were pretty funny. Planes Mistaken for Stars was pretty cool too, but they could have used a little... variety. Anyway, towards the end of the show, I went into the store and got to talk to and shake hands with Mike. He's a pretty chill guy, and we talked about how we don't know enough Korean, lol.
Friday, I headed down to Irvine to spend the weekend with Timmy, who I've not seen for a long time and I was missing him. I guess I wasn't paying attention or something... I kinda somehow ended up on the I-5 southbound in Laguna Niguel (seriously, Alameda déjà vu! lol, why am I on the 99 highway?), but I wasn't totally lost or anything so I found my way to Irvine eventually. I called Tim as I arrived, who then gave me parking instructions, which was creepy because I didn't know he was watching me. "Follow the purple Mercedes..." Freaky Matrix moment there. "Outside there is a scaffold..."
Saturday, we watched LOTR. And by LOTR, I don't mean FOTR, or ROTK. I mean LOTR. It took all day. Caroline and a bunch of other Irvine people joined in the marathon as ROTK came on. Her complete cluelessness to LOTR was amusing at times, lol. Tim kept trying to shut her up. Oh, and I got to see Lizzie again, who seems to have forgiven me from our last encounter. Or forgotten entirely, heh.
Sunday, after waking up pretty late, Tim and I went and saw I'm Not Scared, an Italian film about a boy who uncovers a horrid ransom crime and how he tries to set things straight. The trailer made me expect it to be some kind of horror thriller, but it wasn't scary at all. It was really just a story of a terrible crime through the eyes of a young boy. I enjoyed it, but it was a bit unnerving. One of those movies you'd see again, but not for a while. That night I drove back to good ol' SCV.
Today, Kristal managed to get me to go with her and Jen to the final day of the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in San Bernardino. It was pretty fun, kinda like an amusement park, only without rides. Despite the heat and the dusty air, I had a good time. No stormtroopers in sight, although I saw one Klingon.
And lastly, after remaining dormant for over half a year now, I've finally gotten around to doing something with my old website. It's an update in progress, but I'd like to hear what you think of it. While I'll keep blogging here, the site will become a place to store artwork and bad Photoshops.
http://www.hyperjump.net/darthbane/
Tim took this apple from the Pippin cafeteria and wrote "Eat Me" on the front in red and "I'm Poison" on the back in black. He left it lying by the door. We later discovered that someone had mysteriously taken a bite from it.
Ahhh... school is at long last over. I pulled an all-nighter a couple nights ago, so I'm in the process of readjusting my sleep schedule. Charlene and Joel came over and offered me some homemade coffee with four shots of espresso. Thank you, it really helped! :)
Yesterday, I got my first double kill in Gunbound!!! w00t!!! Omg that was so fucking awesome. And then a friend I'd just made earlier that day on the Gunbound messageboards IM'ed me right then, and she was like, "Did you just make a DK?" and I was all yeeeaaah... Oh come on, give me a break, I've gotten unbelievably close to DK's like a dozen times now. TWO times I got 1 hp away from a DK. I felt like screaming.
And speaking of the Gunbound messageboards, they're pretty funny. Some idiot who goes by the sn "ixo9i8" posted a link to his website and claimed he was a former worker at Softnyx and he was giving away free avatars as long as you send him your ID and password. Quite obviously a scam. He was just asking to get his account banned. (note: more recent posts are on top)
Hmm, so what else can I talk about? Yesterday, Chris was driving around (idiot) and left his lights on after parking, leaving him stranded in Newhall with a dead battery. Fortunately, Sam had very recently left his jumper cables in the back of my car, so I was able to help. He'd better go take that test soon.
Grace-noona and Karl show off their guns. This picture is ooold, almost a year ago now, before Grace went off to Japan and Karl to Mudd. This happens to be the fifth picture I've ever taken with my camera, and I've now taken well over a thousand. Can you believe it's already been a year since we graduated?
Coming soon, a sample of my artwork from this semester's classes. Stay tuned.
That is so frigg'n awesome. You have no idea. If you don't understand the reference, you haven't seen Jean-Claude Van Damme in Bloodsport, one of the coolest kung fu movies ever. The typo is intentional, btw.
Anyways, I haven't really seen any new anime in over a year now, save for an episode or two of some series here and there. Considering how much of an anime freak I once was, that's quite a while. Lately I've adopted a bias for OVA series and movies over TV series, seeing as far too many anime TV series consist of filler episodes and cutesy gimmicks for entertainment. Though my two favorite anime series do have their filler episodes (Cowboy Bebop and Rurouni Kenshin), what they lack in direction they make up for with truly original style and character. Shinichiro Watanabe, the visionary creator of Cowboy Bebop, brought his love of cowboy westerns, film noir, Hong Kong action movies, and jazz music into his own twisted vision of the future.
It seems Watanabe is out of the bag again. Samurai Champloo, the highly anticipated new anime series from Shinichiro Watanabe, debuted on Japanese television just 5 days ago, its first episode already encoded and fansubbed all over the American internet. Set in late 19th century Japan, the series is some kinda warped concoction of Cowboy Bebop's characterizations and Rurouni Kenshin's style and backdrop. It's gotten me interested in anime all over again. Check it out before it gets endorsed and put on DVD in the states... in 5 years probably, lol.
Didn't really have anything to blog today. So instead, here's another Meme that Charlene showed me:
Watch out punks, sooner or later I'll bust out a muppet and kill over half a billion people and cause over $304 trillion worth of damage. So don't piss me off.
And of course, what's an entry by me without a silly picture to follow?
Danowitz. The first word suggested by Microsoft Word's spellcheck for Danowitz is dimwits.
So it was early morning that I paused to listen to the birds singing merrilly outside my window when I realized how much their songs sounded like guerilla warfare. Their quick chirping like rapid gunfire, their long whistles like spinning missiles, their harsh cawing like the screaming wounded... and then I could have sworn to God I heard a bird screeching, "Retreat! RETREEAAAT!!!"
That's when I knew I've been playing too much Unreal Tournament 2004. But is that even really possible?
Grace-noona and myself, nearly a year ago, at the big island of Hawai'i. The continuous eruption of Mt. Kilauea since January 1983 has been constantly expanding the southeastern shore. Here you can see the lava has flown over a road.
Finals are the week after next. Ugh. I hope I'm not screwed.
Anyway, for the past few weeks, Mike and Jen have been running this little messageboard, and so far they've enticed quite a number of people to start posting. I promised Mike a while back I'd help him get more people to join, so here it is:
Clever, Only Not forums
And there's my trading card I photoshopped for the "trading cards" thread in the first forum. Frightening, no?
My aunt and uncle came to visit us from Korea on Saturday, so I pretty much spent the entire day with most of my dad's side of the family. I had originally planned to go to Magic Mountain with Tim and Caroline, and seeing as I don't get to see the Spazmataz all too much these days, I was pretty bummed. But I didn't really mind too much; got to see my gomo and gomobu who I've not seen in years, and I got to hang out with my cousins Gina and Daniel. On whim, the three of us went to see Kill Bill: Volume 2, but the only showing we could make it to was at 10:45, so they ended up sleeping over and staying at our place for most of Sunday (which comprised largely of playing Gunbound, eating Pringles, watching DVD's, and going to lunch with Sam).
Richard, a friend of mine from CSUN, left me the most awesome Friendster testimonial. If you still haven't joined, a pox on you.
Shame on you all for neglecting Jeremy. You mustn't take his Acura for granted.
Traffic really sucks.
I was on my way to school Monday morning after having dropped off Sam and this just had to happen. This attempted suicide (or simply a cry for help, depending on your point of view) turned the 118 into a standstill, and the traffic quickly spread to the 405 and all of its exits. The 405 was slow at first, and it only got worse when I hit the Nordhoff exit. What normally takes me 5 minutes from the exit to school took me 45 minutes instead. Granted, I was very late to my first class, but it seems that class was cancelled, since my professor was stuck on the 118. Heh.
"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate." The 14th century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham wrote those Latin words, which translates literally into English as "Plurality should not be posited without necessity." What is now widely known as Occam's Razor was a common principle in medieval philosophy. It can be interpreted to mean that it is more likely that the simpler explanation to the paranormal is more likely to be true than the more complex explanation that lacks the empirical evidence to back its own claims (Mulder must have hated Ockham).
A common example of Occam's Razor in practice is that of crop circles. They first began to appear in the 1970's. Generally, two explanations were made for the mysterious grass formations. One was that alien visitors from distant worlds arrived in UFO's and created the crop circles. The other was that humans were doing them as pranks. Given the sheer complexity and lack of evidence to support the flying saucers theory, Occam's Razor would say that the latter explanation is simpler and thus more likely. Many people have admitted to fabricating crop circles.
The simplest model is more likely to be correct, especially when we are working with unusual phenomena.
Another example of Occam's Razor in action: the universe. Simply put, something had to have existed forever without cause to exist. One explanation for the beginning of time is that the universe has always existed and nothing created it. Another explanation is that the universe had a definite beginning of existence and was created by God. Christians, Jews, and Muslims agree: God is eternal. However, in this case, atheists often apply Occam's Razor in arguing against the existence of God on the grounds that God is an unnecessary hypothesis.
Ain't philosophy trippy?
Christian Bale as Cleric John Preston in Equilibrium. He's gonna fucking rule as Batman. Christopher Nolan, director of Memento (another kick-ass movie), is directing Batman Begins as a restart to the franchise (since the Shumacher Batman films were... um... CRAP). More grounded in the original comics, this new film coming out next summer stars Bale as the Caped Crusader. Bale showed us dark and brooding in Equilibrium and action in American Psycho (or is it the other way around?). I have faith in this Batman film.
