New Things I Learned This Week - Episode 2

First thing I learned is that it is damned near impossible to open a laptop case.  There is no illustration for this. Just imagine 65 tiny screws and one JRose spouting colorful curse words.

So yeah, the fan in my laptop no longer turns which means that I can only use my computer until it starts to turn into lava, and then, I have to turn it off or it shuts off the monitor and starts smelling like burning components. It is kind of ruining my will to live.  I tried to open said laptop case thinking that if it were just 3 years' worth of lint wedged in there that I could clean it out, my computer would not be a total loss, but alas, I couldn't get the fucking thing open. I clearly do not have the secret password to the hopping club that is going on inside there.

Also, GIMP... While I am sure it is a lovely drawing program made by very nice people who are kind enough to give it away for free, it is NOT comparable to Painter 12, which is what I usually use to illustrate this here blarg, and my frustration with trying to install my drawing tablet on my friend's computer and wrestling with layers on GIMP today has lead to a fair bit of crying. I miss my computer.

Second thing I learned, on Father's day, actually. Someone working in Google Chrome's spell check programming department is obsessed with Allie Brosh. I have surmised this because I tried typing the following in to my facebook status and this was what it suggested as a correction:

And lastly, I learned, while driving to visit my friend on the interstate, a fact that I am very sad to know:

The beautiful majestic monarch butterfly...

... is a terrible bright mustard yellow on the inside.

The Best of the Bad: The Horror of my Youth

For Halloween this year, I wanted to share with you some of my favorite BAD horror movies. By bad, I mean of course, good, but bad.  They are not polished or necessarily deep, nor would the acting in them win any awards, other than a Razzie, mayhaps, but they are some of my favorites of all time.

(for those viewing by RSS, there are trailers for each video on the actual blarg)

The Stuff (1985)

The acting is really horrible (as you can see in the trailer), but it is really amusing, and only slightly gross.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

This has it all, sex, gore, graphic nudity, witty teenaged banter, creepy older men trying to hump teenagers, bad acting, and it is fairly bizarre to boot. The ending has apparently made it a cult classic, so join the cult. The kool aid is delicious.

Frankenhooker (1990)

 The VHS box of this at our local video store, when I was in high school, had a button on it that would declare "Hey, wanna date? Got some money?" when pushed. This was repeated by me and friends throughout high school and college, which got me some weird looks, let me tell you. It is hysterical, though, and bizarre and icky (not really gorey like things are today, but icky all the same). And did I mention it is funny. Horror comedy at its best.

House (1986)

Again, funny, and scary.  There is some good creature work in this and it stars The Greatest American Hero! My sister and I watched this as young teens, and then made our dad watch it with us because we thought it was really good and really scary.  He spent the first 5 minutes asking us "Is this the scary part?" and declaring "This doesn't seem very scary." And then, he spent the rest of our teenaged years terrifying us by sneaking outside to press his face against random windows, since he looks like one of the scary characters in the movie. He might be the reason I have intestinal issues.


Invaders from Mars (1986)

This movie has always been one of my favorites. It is unfortunate that it is not on DVD, but it can be viewed in entirety on YouTube.  It is a  remake of the 1953 Invaders from Mars that nods to the original. This movie fascinated me as a kid, and is more suspense and creepy sci-fi than flat-out horror, really, though it does have some creepy creature design done by Stan Winston who is responsible for some of the best special effects in cinema (Alien, The Thing, Edward Scissor Hands, seriously, the man is legend).


So, now that I have shared my favorites of the B rated horror classics, that I hope you will check out for Halloween, what would you recommend I watch?

Happy Papa Llama Day!

One of my favorite memories with my dad is also one of my favorite nerd memories- the moment I realized that advanced math has real life applications.
My dad was big on doing home remodeling projects.  As a family, we turned the duplex we owned into a single family house when I was in elementary school, knocking down walls and redecorating everything.
My senior year of high school, my dad had me help him tear out part of our porch to create a storage closet off the dining room. Since there was already a door leading out to the space (that used to be the front door of that unit) I guess he figured it might as well lead to something useful, plus it would cut down on the amount of times we would have to answer the door to solicitors by a third.

 As a teenager who is part of a government experiment, getting to take a sledgehammer to wooden uprights is downright cathartic, but then I got to help frame out the room, building everything from the studs up.  And then, since there was already a roof on the porch, I got to actually use the trigonometry I had learned the year before to figure out what angle my dad needed to miter the wood at to make the roof section fit.
I'm quite certain my dad didn't need me to do the math, he achieved a near perfect score on his SAT, he is brilliant, but I was excited to get to do the math, I even remember it as being my idea to use my trig knowledge to figure it out, and I was excited that he trusted my calculations and didn't (at least in front of me) insist on doing them himself to make sure he wasn't wasting a cut (because you always measure twice, and cut once).

I don't even recall crying once during the whole remodel, which was quite remarkable.
And the roof piece fit perfectly, for the record.