Legally Hilarious

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This is pretty funny.

http://theoatmeal.com/blog/funnyjunk_letter

About a year ago, Matt Inman published a post about FunnyJunk.com,complaining that the site had stolen tons of his comics and reprinted them without his permission.

FunnyJunk tried to make a scene and flung its users at Matt, to which he also wrote about.

Over the last year, said blog post got very popular and now comes up shortly after the website itself whenever one Googles its name.

So fast forward to today, when Inman gets a letter from the company’s lawyer, demanding $20,000 for “defamation of character” because he had exposed FunnyJunk for the content thieves that they actually are.

In return, Matt responds by informing them that not only will he not pay FunnyJunk for stealing and hosting his own content for the last several years, but instead he’s going to raise $20,000 in donations for charity and flaunt it in front of them (along with lewd pictures involving someone’s mother and a kodiak bear) before sending it on to help actual people who need the money.

…wait for it…

So far he’s raised $107,000 for this “cause.”

I love it when people actually stand up to trolling lawyers on the Internet because it’s bad enough when people steal content, it’s even worse when they’re actually so aloof to actually believe that they have a legal right to do so…

touring a Lego Haunted House…

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Granted I’m not exactly much of a fan of ghosts and goblins and monster movies, but I really enjoyed this walk through of one of Lego’s new monster sets by the designer himself because I just found it really neat to listen to him talk about all of his inspirations for the set, the highlights from his eyes, and the things that were special about the set to him.

It’s pretty cool to think that this much work from passionate designers goes into creating every new set  from every single line… 😉

some praise for my new algae eater…

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A couple of weeks ago, I finally broke down and gave my fish tank the long overdue cleaning that it deserved. It really only had one fish in it anyways after my plecostamus bit the bucket I don’t even know how long ago now … less than 6 months, maybe? … but the point is, my tank was pretty disgusting and it really desperately needed help.

I didn’t take any pictures before I even started because I didn’t think of it at the time, plus I don’t need that evidence floating around of just what a terrible fish parent I am anyways, but I thought I’d share a few that I took along the way anyways because I’m still a bit blown away by the transformation.

Before we get to pics, though – here are the steps that I took…

  1. Transplanted my lone fish to a temporary tank.
  2. Turned off the filter and immediately removed about half the water (it’s a 35 gallon tank).
  3. Thoroughly cleaned out the filter itself (a pretty beefy Fluval 205 canister filter)
  4. Did some more vacuuming, replacing another couple of buckets of very hot water and then trying to suck up as much of the larger stuff that I could find.
  5. Also did my best to scrape down the walls of the tank itself – it had some really gross, black algae growing on the inside and I didn’t really know how bad it was, but it looked bad…
  6. The next day, plugged the filter back in and stirred up the gravel every couple of hours to try and get the filter to pull the rest of the debris out of the water (the filter cycles about 180 gallons/hour, so it did a pretty awesome job at this!).

So anyways, here’s picture #1 – probably around steps 5-6…

Unfortunately, I don’t have another pic post-filtration, but the water was actually crystal clear when it came time for me to add my fish back in! What I did find was weird, though, was that about a week later (and a few new fish), I started seeing algae building up again on the tank walls, the rocks, and even the brush that I’d forgotten to take out of the tank … pretty much any smooth surface that the stuff could find!

I tried to sterilize the tank as best I could by dumping as much hot water into the system as I could, but at the same time part of the reason why my filter is awesome is because it has a biological component to it, so although I was a little afraid that I plain out wouldn’t be able to kill off whatever had been plaguing my tank, I also knew that there were some good things that needed to thrive in there as well, so what do you do?!

Well, on a whim I picked up a Chinese algae eater – I wanted something much smaller than the 14+ inches that my beast of a pleco had gotten before his untimely demise, so even though the store said that these will get bigger, too … I was ready to try something different, and I think it ended up working out pretty good…

I’d say it probably took him about a week or so to fully clean all of that up that you see from the previous picture, so we’ll have to keep an eye on him to make sure he’s got enough to eat going forward or if I need to toss in some algae pellets every now and then. That’s what I used to do with my pleco, though he’d gotten so big that after a while I’m not sure if I ever saw him even leave the bottom, so for all I know he may have just decided to say, “Screw the algae if they’re going to keep giving me these pellets instead!”

Anyways, I’d like to add some more eventually – maybe build up a nice, little school of neons and some other brightly colored fish, but I want to take it real slow this time so that I don’t get more than the tank can realistically handle in there.

Also, one other thing at random that I learned when I was picking up the algae eater at PetCo that I found particularly interesting … did you know that they have a program where they’ll actually take back fish from people who don’t want them anymore?! Specifically we were talking about my pleco because I had mentioned that he’d just gotten way too big for his own good, and the girl mentioned that I should’ve brought him in because they actually have a waiting list of people with ponds and extra large tanks who specifically want plecos that are over a foot long!

I wasn’t exactly super attached to that beast anyways, so the least I could’ve done was give him a better home where he could continue to grow to even larger gargantuan sizes!!!

I’ll try to post some new pics this summer as I add more and keep the tank properly maintained for a change!

Also, you can see that I clearly need a backdrop for this thing so you don’t have to look at the wall trim in the background, so maybe I can work on that before then, too… 😉

More Aquatica Pics…

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Eventually I’ll probably throw these up on Flickr because that’s what I got the account for, but in the meantime, I had a few more random photos from Aquatica that I thought might be worth sharing.

I took most of these running around while we were waiting for the attractions to open back up, so unfortunately that’s why the sky looks absolutely dreadful in them, but it was still fun and I tried to experiment with some different angles and whatnot – something I’d like to try more with my photos over at Disney World in the future, too…

Weekend Revue, a la Aquatica & Prometheus

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Yesterday was a lot of fun, albeit also particularly damp and also just a wee bit scary!

A Day at the Water Park
We ended up going over to Aquatica (Sea World’s water park) in Orlando as an early celebration of my sister-in-law’s birthday. It’s always a little weird for me to walk around any non-Disney theme park because I tend to compare and contrast the crap out of them, but overall I think we all ended up having a pretty good time. If I do the math, we were really only able to do the slides and stuff for maybe 3-4 hours … we got there around noon, and then some really ugly weather rolled in mid-afternoon and pretty much closed everything down until we finally decided to throw in the towel … pun intended. 😉

I’m not sure how much I want to go into everything because I think I’m going to maybe do something comparing the park to Disney’s Typhoon Lagoon (which we visited for my birthday last year), but on average I thought that the attractions at Typhoon Lagoon were all a lot better designed than the ones at Aquatica. Their star attraction, the Dolphin Plunge, which features clear slide tubes running underwater where you’re supposed to be able to see Commerson’s dolphins swimming around, ended up going by so fast that I really couldn’t see much of anything except that I knew I was underwater.

We also had a bit of a mishap on HooRoo Run, which we thought all 3 of us could ride on together, but had overlooked until halfway up the tower that although we met the weight requirement, there was also a height requirement that the 3rd rider needed to be under 5 feet tall. And the reason that this posed a problem was the goofy seating configurations that they offered – 2 or 3 riders, but no single-riders. This is where I felt Aquatica really dropped the ball because when we went to board the tube and the lifeguard pointed out our dilemma … that was about it. She didn’t suggest for me to wait and see if there was another single rider who I could ride with, or even hop over to the other slide on the same tower that did allow for single-riders so that I could at least ride something … instead, I let the two girls go down together, and I had to walk back down the entire six flights of stairs back to the ground by myself.  😳

Nonetheless, we all still had a fun day … there was at least one slide that all three of us were quite convinced we were going to die on (Walhalla Wave) because we damn near flipped our tube inside the pitch black part of the slide … but I think we got to do most of what we wanted before the gigantic thunderstorm moved in and brought a series of closures that they never really recovered from. I was a little bummed that we didn’t really get to do the lazy river, aside from maybe 50 feet of it which feeds one of the slides in a weird way, anyways … although upon a second glance at the park map, that may have actually been half the river to boot, so maybe it wasn’t such a big deal to pass on after all! 😯

The park is definitely a lot smaller than Typhoon Lagoon is and if we’d had maybe another hour (or just waited for lunch instead of trying to beat the first sign of rain), we’d have likely gotten everything we wanted to do in with time to spare.

A Night at the Movies
Anyways, it was maybe around 5:30pm when we finally decided that it wasn’t worth waiting around any longer to see if they were going to re-open the attractions before the park closed at 7pm, so instead we decided to pack things up, get changed, and head on over to Downtown Disney to treat Christina to a birthday dinner at the AMC Dine-In Theatre – one of our favorite places to eat these days! 🙂

The movie was Prometheus … in truth, our third choice – the first being Snow White and the Huntsman, which was completely sold out, and second The Avengers, which I would’ve gladly seen again if not for the only seats available being in the front row … so even though it looked scary, I sucked it up anyways in the name of not heading home early, downed a bit of liquid courage even though the truly scary parts wouldn’t end up coming until halfway through the movie, and we dined upon a mighty, yet excessive feast while we watched scientists break pretty much every rule of being a scientist as they explored the ancient ruins of mankind’s creators…

Now I cannot tell a lie – in retrospect, apparently there were a ton of things that went over my head because when I got home I probably spent another three hours reading through this thread on reddit that analyzes and overanalyzes every facet of the movie, picking it apart in true Internet style, but also offering a lot of interesting insight that I didn’t really pick up when my main focuses were “I think there might still be a little rangoon dip left!” and “Don’t look now – the scary part might not be over yet!!!”

Hell, I didn’t even realize that it was a prequel to Aliens until the last 15 seconds of the movie! 😯

That said, it was still more or less entertaining and gave us something to do that night while we dined on succulent dishes a’plenty, and sometimes, you really can’t ask for much more than that… 😛

At the Movies, Summer 2012 Edition

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So I suppose technically summer is here now, and you know what that means – let’s take a look and see what’s worth watching at the theater this year…

5/25 – Men in Black 3
I’ll watch it on DVD in a few months just out of curiosity, but I have a hard time believing this can possibly be any good.

6/1 – Snow White and the Huntsman
I’ve been getting more and more interested with this one, both with a reborn respect for Chris Hemsworth after The Avengers and even more promos showing just how hot Charlize Theron looks in this… 😉

6/8 – Battleship
Just kidding … there’s no way in hell that I’m paying money to see this! I’ll catch it on demand in 6 months to see just how bad the train wreck played out, though…

6/22 – Brave
This is the new Pixar movie … I don’t know – the trailers remind me of How to Train Your Dragon, but 2 years late. Will this be their recovery from Cars 2 or just another disappointment???

6/22 – Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
I think I’d go see this just because the title amuses me! The thing is, I still can’t tell if it’s intended to be satire or a serious thriller, and it would make me sad if it ended up taking itself too seriously.

7/6 – The Amazing Spider-Man
I don’t want to see this, but I feel like I have to just because it’s Spider-Man. I honestly really enjoyed the Tobey Maguire version and I think the reboot is premature, so I’m a little nervous to see if they ruin a good thing by starting over.

7/20 – The Dark Knight Rises
So I guess this is the big finale to the series that was started back in 2005 with Batman Begins … I don’t know – I guess The Dark Knight was alright, but I didn’t really think it was amazing by any stretch. I do remember having to stretch our necks because we got there late and ended up in the front row, but that’s beside the point…

9/14 – Resident Evil: Retribution
I don’t care if it’s not technically summer anymore – now this is a movie that I’m actually looking forward to seeing!!! Seriously, they could make a million of these movies – Alice Fights Umbrella at the Zoo, Alice Fights Umbrella in Space – and I’d still line up to watch every single one of them. I have no idea why because I typically hate horror movies, but … this series just works for me!

12/14 – The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Even further not in the summertime, but if I had to pick only a single movie to watch this year, the first installment of The Hobbit would most definitely be it! When Lord of the Rings wrapped up I was admittedly a bit reserved about them doing The Hobbit, and even more so when I learned that they’d be doing my least favorite Hollywood trick as of late by breaking it into two movies, but I guess I’ve just been missing my hobbits for a while and at this point I need a little more than simply the annual Thanksgiving weekend marathon trip back to The Shire! 😉

Wow – on second thought, most of those movies kinda suck! Maybe I’d better look into some books to read this summer instead of thinking that I’m going to be spending much of it at the theater… 🙁

Thin Post : Recovering from a Downward Spiral…

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I’m not gonna lie – the last couple of weeks have been pretty rough for me.

It started with a big push to finally bring some closure to a huge creative project of mine, and then just as I was finishing that up, I found myself lambasted by a whole different source of stress that there’s no way I could’ve anticipated. Not to mention, I’m a terrible stress eater and found a small amount of sanity in enormous amounts of bingeing there, and also, it’s just been incredibly rainy as of late, meaning there’s another excuse against taking Cleo out for her nightly walks, and well … all excuses aside, I’ve just really fallen off the horse and I need to find the motivation to get back on board again.

You don’t realize until you’ve slipped and gone two weeks without eating right or being able to count the number of workouts you’ve had on one hand just how good you were doing when you had multiple weeks of consecutive eating right under your belt and 5 out of 7 days worth of exercise to boot! But just a little cheat on one bad night ends up compounding into “This will be my last night – I swear!” and then the scale starts slowly creeping its way back up again, and if you’re not careful, before too long you look down to see that 4-5 months of hard work has all but slipped away because you managed to let life get the best of you…

I’m trying to take it one day at a time, or even just a few hours at a time with regards to restraining myself from snacking … it’s kind of like starting over – first you break the habit of snacking at night, then you cut back on eating out, and finally you bring the calories back to the levels where they’re supposed to be.

Tonight Sara and I went walking because we weren’t really in the mood for much else, and even though we got hit with a torrential downpour while we were still a solid mile / twenty minutes away from the house, at least it was something.

It’s tough because that one thing has really got me down right now, and unfortunately I’ve got a feeling that it’s going to be sticking around for a while, but I guess if anything, I need to fight even harder to not let it take over the other aspects of my life, too – it can fuck up its own tiny sphere all it wants, but as for impacting my weight loss efforts, and my writing career – why should I give it the power to overflow into those other spheres, too???

This just started going in kind of a different direction than I had been intending, but I suppose the point of the matter is … one moment at a time, focus, and make it happen.

Hopefully I’ll have better news to report on this front in another week or two. 8)

Today’s the Big Day – MyTimeWithTheMouse.com Launch!!!

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This day has been a long time coming… 🙂

I don’t want to repeat myself too much because I’ve already got a lengthy introduction post over at the site itself, but let me tell you, it feels really good to finally be able to consider this site officially up and running for so many reasons  – so that I can finally share it with the world, so that I can move on and work on some new projects, so I can get a little extra sleep at night for a change! 😯

Needless to say, I’m extraordinarily happy with how the whole thing ended up turning out, and I think it’s going to be a whole lot of fun to write for in the months to come. If you’re a fan of Disney World or are just looking for something new of mine to read, please click on over and check out the new site, Like it on Facebook, and all of that jazz.

You’ll also be able to follow the latest articles from the blogroll on the homepage of this site – as you can see, it’s currently almost entirely dominated by Disney content anyways, so clearly come tomorrow I’ve already got all sorts of other backlogs to start catching up on!  😐

one last song for Ray Bradbury…

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So science fiction maverick Ray Bradbury died yesterday at the age of 91 years old.

I didn’t know his works as well as I probably should, but Dandelion Wine was a hand-me-down from my Dad that I rather enjoyed.

Isn’t it a little sad that sometimes we don’t look back to revisit a legend’s catalog until they die? Nonetheless, it makes me feel like picking up a few of his titles to peruse over the summer – my Dad was always a huge fan, so I’m sure he can make some great recommendations.

Anyways, that having been said, this is the best tribute to Ray Bradbury that I could find. It’s a little “crude,” but also hilarious, and besides, being a somewhat sheltered writer myself, I’d like to think that just about any man would be able to appreciate knowing that an anthem such as this was composed in their honor…