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Monday, October 10, 2005
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For the record
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"Huffing" aerosols does not get you "high" it gets you dead.
Also for the record, legalize marijauna and the huffing problem goes away almost immediately. Not that kids should be smoking pot, but a slightly dumber, hormonally underdeveloped kid is almost definitely a better result than a kid lying on a slab smelling of air freshener. Equating all (non-patented) mood-modifying drugs with each other as equally bad is a stupid, stupid idea that makes it impossible to effectively communicate the comparitively much higher risks of some of them to children.
To make a long story short, I now get to attend a seventeen year-old's funeral caused in large part by "the war on drugs". Thanks guys.
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Wednesday, September 28, 2005
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Work to suck less? Or More?
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The owner has decided to let my assistant at the staffing disaster store, who was formerly the manager there but stepped down due to health and to having had her training cut short when all the rats fled the ship, have another go at running the store herself.
That's all well and good, but ... I know I'm going to get the calls. I know I am going to be asked to do x and y and z to help out, and it's going to end up being essentially the same as now, only I will have less control over it. At least I won't have to do two schedules and two payrolls anymore ... or will I? Time will tell.
Really, I can see running two stores as being not a bad proposition, but not in the climate here. The pay is not great, the "management" job ends up being 95% service and production with the only real time to get any scheduling ro anything done being after closing, sicne there are no shift leaders and the payroll budget would only allow for them if they were simply traded for non-management workers, in which case, what's the point.
6 months? *crosses fingers*
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Monday, September 26, 2005
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Corpse Bride
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Good enough for the kindergartener, a bit lacking for her dad.
The technical execution of the animation is very polished, much more than in The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. There is a lot of smooth walking animation and some excelent characterisation via movement. The facial animation is light years ahead of Nightmare. There are a couple of "horror" scenes that are done very well. There is some damn good lighting work in this film too, I'm not kidding. There is a "tradition" (does three films a tradition make?) for there to be one "fantastic" number in these movies. In this one it comes near the beginning, as a skeletal band relates the story of the death of Emily, the Corpse Bride. It is underplayed, as is most of the movie, relying on colored lighting rather than the ultraviolet effects used in Nightmare and Peach. It is a much more subtle effect and much better suited to this film than the other technique would have been.
The cast all does very well. Helena Bonham Carter gets to run the fair gamut of emotion, and sings! Christopher Lee plays ... Christopher Lee, but that's why we love him. The maggot, voiced in a Peter Lorre-esque manner is an excellent comedic touch. Johnny Depp does a fine job as well.
There are some really good scenes. As I mentioned, the two or three "horror" scenes were really good. The scene where Victor makes up with Emily at the piano after trying to flee his accidental marriage demonstrates a subtelty of expression I really didn't expect to see coming from metal-and-silicone puppets.
The atmosphere is what one would expect from such a movie. I am fairly certain that one character (a small boy) is ripped directly from an Edwad Gorey illustation. There is a clever shout out to Ray Harryhausen that made me smile.
But...
The music for this one, particulary the songs, seem a bit phoned-in. Maybe Danny Elfman needs to cut his schedule back a bit so that he has time to write more than three lines of lyrics for a song in a semi-musical film, or maybe the story and characters weren't interesting enough to support much more.
The story sems a bit muddled. At times it seems like it wants to go places that it never ends up going. Granted, the medium does not lend itself to lengthy movies do to time and production cost constraints, but the film manages to feel much shorter than The Nightmare before Christmas, despite running 10 minutes longer. There is too much time spent elaborating on the personalities of relatively minor characters when one of the key benefits of animation is the ability to portray such information visually. As such, much of the time spent on Victor and Victoria's parents is time wasted, IMO. Those characters weren't unique enough for the extra time spent with them to be fun.
There is a lot of time spent on Victor's internal state, but Victoria is essentially just a pretty face and a shy smile. The Emily storyline and the world of the dead is where most of the investment in time and creativity was spent, to the unending joy, no doubt, of Hot Topic's accountants :D
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Been a long time gone
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Boredom leads me here. 4am classic hits of the 70s boredom. Going to bed at 12 turned into too short of a nap to feel awake enough to work on finishing Paper Mario before it has to go back to Blockbuster and too long of a nap to go back to sleep just yet.
Work sucks. I can't get caught up on keeping two stores full of employees. When I try to schedule myself enough coverage to actually have time to train the new hires I catch hell for our labor costs, then the "I don't know enough about running a xxxx xxx to be the manager but I know more than you about scheduling for a xxxx xxx" owner's sister/accountant/franchise "leader" comes in on my "day off" (worked three hours at the less troubled store) and turns my schedule into a conflicted schizophrenic nightmare. Then on my other "day off" (worked on fixing the nightmare schedule - which included running one 17-y/o 13 days straight with split shifts and double-back 10-hour days, prepared payrolls, went in from 6:45 to 8:00am waiting for the food delivery that never came - called them when the service desk opened, and was told our delivery time was changed, again, without notice, is this a long enough parenthetical thingamajig? I don't f-ing care at this point.) she hires two new servers when we already have too many and desperately need cooks, demotes my final remaining shift manager for no good reason, really.
My "assistant" at the not-as-bad store really could do a lot better. I can't seem to convince him that it's not about knowing how to do everything, but about knowing how to find out how to do it. He's the sort of guy that will call me with a question like "The computer is locked up and the main terminal has a message saying to call Help Desk, should we call Help Desk?"
I keep telling myself I only need to put up with this crap for 6 more months, but then the car breaks down and the next month it's 6 more months again instead of 5. Then there's the whole issue of leaving if I ever do get the financial junk taken care of. I don't want to be a jerk and leave them with two stores with no managers, especially since my best option for a decent part-time, flexibly scheduled job if/when I do go back to school is with the same company, but with no training budget, no job advertising budget, and no time to even train cooks, how am I supposed to find, hire, and train two managers to work for $10 an hour unsalaried with no benefits?
I am tired of this subject.
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Saturday, July 16, 2005
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Cahrlie and the Chocolate Factory
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Deep Roy - best supporting actor or else! It may not be a serious role, but the sheer day-in and day-out work of that part has to count for something.
I will not say all, but very very many of the "clones" in the big numbers are seperate individual performances, not cut-and-paste copies or computer-generated duplicates.
While the exploration of the childhood of Willy Wonka was cut from whole cloth for this movie, I was not seriously offended by it's addition, since it was done so well.
Danny Elfman did a lot of his expected and perhaps a bit worn-thin "thing" in this movies score, but he also stretched his legs a bit with different styles for each of the musical numbers.
This movie sticks to the source material much, much, muchmuchmuch more than the Gene Wilder movie, as I'm sure you've heard. As someone who read both books several times over before ever seeing the Gene Wilder one, I find myself unsuprisingly liking the new one better. Among people who have not read the books, there may be some dissention.
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[UO] Mondain's Legacy Beta
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Got in on the first batch of the new expansion's public beta slots.
I like that they are adding new dungeons and quests to the current lands. I like the idea of new craftables ,and recipes for craftables, and quests to get the recipes. I am okay with the idea of adding races, though not excited about it.
I am not happy about the direction they are going, making higher-end items more commonplace and making the new MOBs that much tougher to compensate.
I am not happy about the fact that it takes a sizable group of people up to an hour to fight the new "peerless" monsters that drop the ingredients for the new items, but the entire group only gets 1 or 2 of the items, when you need 10 or more for the recipes.
The art is nigh-awful. Well actually some of it is ok, but for the most part, yech. The elf hairstyles are not only insultingly lame, they are not drawn well. The colors elves can choose for hair and skin are an affront to good taste. The new wearables don't match up to the body parts on the paperdoll. The new furnitures are all off-kilter in one direction or another.
The new loot items intended for quests are almost all broken, in that unstacking them changes thier name to the name of the base graphic.
They haven't patched teh beta shard since July 6th, so hopefully theres a big patch coming soon that fixes a lot of these things.
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Web log problems
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I guess I am going back to disabling comments.
 I jsut don't have the time to deal with the spammers, my Greymatter is currently screwing up posts if I delete any comments from them, and I can't get my ISP and my web host (two different companies) to do anything at all to figure out why suddenly I can't telnet into my web host. So I can't try to fix Greymatter, and can't switch to anything else either. Ah well.
I am also too busy sometimes and too lazy other times to bother to post anything here. Today I ahppent o be awake and not preoccupied, so I'll post a few things that have been backing up over teh last couple days.
Posted by SmokeSerpent @ 02:23 AM PST [Link]
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Monday, June 6, 2005
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A tragedy of education: 6 out of 9 Members of the US Supreme Court don't know what the prefix "inter-" means ...
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Thursday, May 26, 2005
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Considering quitting UO
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... at least until the next expansion.
I actually haven't been playing much at all in the last few months. The wife plays every day still, but lately has been mostly just chatting and hanging out in the uoradio irc room. She called me yesterday at work to announce that she wanted to quit because she felt like she should be doing more real-life crafting.
Well, we could save $39 a month by closing our accounts. OTOH, stripping down our vast accumulation of "stuff" to what can fit in our bank boxes and maybe one house is a bit daunting. We had been considering going to the EA campus meetup in 1 1/2 weeks where they are supposed to give a sneak peek of the next expansion, so the idea of waiting until after we have seen what the future holds has been bandied about.
It's pretty sad. I love the Ultima single player series, and I used to love Ultima Online. Unfortunately, the current dev team leadership doesn't seem to.
I've been wanting to buy Guild Wars and give that a try, but the wife is being argumentative about that. She knows that if I enjoy it I might get a bit obsessive about playing. It's true, but god, I'm bored.
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Tuesday, May 24, 2005
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So, I saw Revenge of the Sith again, and rewatched the other 5 ...
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There are two things that sum up the difference between the original Trilogy and the Prequels:
1. Realism
There is a phrase mentioned in the Trilogy Box set special features; "The used future". They talk about the realism that was put into Star Wars by making everything look used and dirty, instead of like it just rolled off the factory floor. This look is true of each of the original movies.
Suddenly, with the Phantom Menace, Lucas threw this concept out the window with his heavy reliance on blue screen and CGI. People's clothes don't even get dirty when they are supposedly rolling around in sand and dirt. RoTS actually adds some of this ethos back in. There is some awful "this isn't real" stuff still, like using the CGI clone troopers with real heads pasted on in close shots. Blech. 2. Connection Luke is 100% the focus of Episode IV. As the Trilogy plays out, the story expands a bit to include the rest of the Rebel "stars", but Luke and his destiny are more the focus of the series than the war. Anakin is the central figure of the prequels, but aside from his much-derided scenes with Padme, most of the stuff involving his development is played from "outside". As opposed to being "Anakin's story" it's a "story about Anakin" if you can understand the distinction I am trying to make. In RoTS, we do finally get some good character scenes, but they come from Palpatine, and Anakin's response to a lot of it is out of the blue. The Palpatine/Mace/Anakin scene is one that starts out good, and but suddenly jumps in an illogical and unsupported direction. It's one of those things where you see what the writer/director is going for, and it could have been a good scene, but it's painful to watch him handle it so poorly. Ok, that's enough Star Wars for now. :D |
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