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Kris Straub pretty much nailed it already:

http://chainsawsuit.... r-toddlers-now/

We recently sat down to watch Alice in Wonderland, which is meant to be a sequel to Alice in Wonderland, but not to be confused with said Alice in Wonderland.



... alright, this is really just a reality and sanity check for me here, but did this movie suck or what? I mean, fuck, pretty pictures yes, but awful story, awful acting (far as my untrained eye could tell) and absolutely no reason to ever watch it again, let alone justify the money spend on watching it.

I'm pretty much what you'd call a simpleton. As such, I take great pride in not taking pride in whatever it is I'm doing. And usually I try to avoid doing too much.

Lately, however, I've been trying - trying - to invest a little more time in acquiring some sort of overview of life in general. What I'm aiming for is a set of simple statements that summarize facts of life, rules and guidelines to keep in mind and maybe live by. So you see the problem there - life is complex as fuck and opinions will vary greatly on what is really important and what is really a good philosophy to follow.

Still, I'd like to see if we can somehow put together a list of stuff like that, discuss points in detail and maybe learn a thing or two from each other's experience. Here are a few of my own points to get things started:

• Strength is fear waiting to be overcome
  (You'll notice I'm trying to put some sappy pathos in those wordings, though I get the feeling that I'm doing it a bit wrong.)
  Fear is one of evolution's tools to keep us out of harm's way, and it's been pretty effective at that. Or maybe a bit too effective, because now we're not just afraid of the truly life-threatening stuff, but also of the stuff that threatens our general well being and stand in society. I try to make a point of not letting fear forcing me into inaction, since until now, pushing it aside and confronting my problems head-on pretty much always lead to a way better outcome than I would have imagined. It's alright to feel fear, but not to be hindered by it.

• Detailed plans call for detailed failures
  This is something an older colleague of mine told me when I asked him to share some of his life experience with me. I'm still struggling with it, because I just love to plan out things. A good plan will bring you a long way, true, but an all too good plan is usually blown apart by reality somewhere in the middle of the process. So I try to be a little more flexible, plan a few steps ahead and see what reality will come up with.

• Nothing is important, Everything should be
  This is derived from my growing nihilistic tendencies, which sometimes start to worry me. If you consider the vast expense of the universe, you're only a very, very, very, very tiny little spec of dust. You'll perish in a few years and the universe will have forgotten about you shortly after that. It's the same for even the greatest and most popular people of our time - Jesus may still be the talk of the town today, but just give it a million years. So, obviously, whatever you do isn't really of consequence. At least not to the universe and the flow of time.
  And yeah, I know, the easy answer is to enjoy what time you've got with the resources and company available to you. It just isn't always easy for me to value those things when I keep thinking that even humanity's "great" struggle for survival is completely and utterly unimportant in the end, if seen from a bigger perspective. So I try to remind and convince myself of the things that should truly matter to me and my life. Working my ass off for some random company isn't always part of that...

• Communicate goals first, then achieve them
  This is just a simple bit of wisdom. If you really want to accomplish something, telling others about it will put you at risk of not only failing in your own eyes (which is all too easily forgiven), but also in the eyes of those whose respect you want, should you not succeed. Gives you a whole lot more incentive to get to it and get it done right.
  Adds a bit of stress to your life, but that's still better than just being all talk, with nothing to show for it.

Alright, those are a few of mine - anyone else got something? Oh, and tiny stuff like this is also perfectly dandy with me:

• Cure brainfreeze
  Ate too much ice, stuck in brainfreeze - just push your tongue up against the roof of your mouth.

I just read the Extra Punctuation article on 'Splosion Man and stopped at this:

Ben Croshaw, on 28 August 2009 - 06:00 PM, said:

I think I can agree on love not being all that it's hyped up to be, but that stuff about the shit that it always transmutes into over time...? I get what he's referring to, seen it as well, but I've also seen plenty of cases where it didn't turn out like that. At this point I'm probably only arguing semantics, but I guess he just never got out of that whole messy initial infatuation stage and reached the safe point of a steady and satisfying relationship. Or am I mistaken and long-term love really is just a hoax well played by a billion actors?



And could somebody enlighten me about that Orpheus reference? All I can remember about him is that he blasted the Sirens away with his Greek punk rock. Cute, but not the first thing that would come to my mind when thinking of love.

House M.D.'s fifth season ended and I'll have to wait till September for more. Bummer.

But oh well, there are still some other shows, most of which I haven't bothered to check out yet. So I thought I might ask you people on your thoughts and opinions on whatever you're watching or not watching right now.

Apart from House, I still watch Heroes, and I talked about it in some other threads already: The story is unintentionally becoming funnier with each episode and the characters' quirks and powers still interest me, though they could tone down the unbelievable melodrama a bit more. But then again, that also adds into the fun factor, I guess.

And then there's The Mentalist... I'm still not sure why I keep watching it. It's House applied to CSI, but somewhere something just went terribly wrong. The background story is extremely thin, the individual episodes follow a weak pattern as well, the character's are only half-baked and hardly lovable and the main catch - the stuff regarding mental acuity - boils down to the good ol' Sherlock Holmes syndrome. The protagonist just knows, because some writer was too lazy to create a realistic scenario. Though I have to admit that I couldn't do it better, but still. Something's just missing.

So what are your thoughts? Any other shows worth watching out there? I meant to check out the Sarah Connor Chronicles some time, since I'm a sucker for Terminator related stuff anyway, but so far didn't get to it - is it worth the time?