movie thoughts … Ant-Man

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antmanI didn’t really think I was going to like this one, but I suppose it wasn’t too bad.

It definitely felt like a second-rate Marvel movie, though – don’t get me wrong there…

I don’t know – I guess I have sort of mixed feelings about Ant-Man because on one hand, I do enjoy Paul Rudd even though it was odd to see him in not a straight-up comedy, but the character itself to me still feels kind of silly … even though I watched him do some awesome things there on the screen. Maybe I don’t get the switching back from big to small thing in rapid succession like he would do in the battles … I feel like I’m a little lost with his strength because sure, ants are strong, but it’s still relative and when he’s the size of an ant, isn’t 50x his strength still super small as well???

Maybe he’s switching back to normal size just long enough to punch and then going back, although I thought the suit just allowed him to change size, not give him added strength.

The other Marvel superheroes don’t make me have to think this much when I’m watching their movies!

Anyways, there were plenty of segments that were predictable, like when he has to go sub-atomic at the end, and for some reason looking at Evangeline Lilly made it feel like she was obviously wearing a wig for her character, which made it a little odd. Michael Douglas is always fun to see and this seemed like more of a unique role for him than the presidential characters that he’s somewhat iconic for playing.

I think my biggest disappointment was honestly in the tie-ins to the other Marvel movies because at the very beginning they did a good job of including Agent Carter and Howard Stark, then later making references to calling in The Avengers … I was expecting some decent cameos eventually, but instead the most we got was the Falcon, which was a neat little solo scene for him, but it would’ve been nice to see one or more of the tier one heroes even for just a quick appearance.

If anything, between this, the scene at the end of Avengers 2, and knowing the general theme of Captain America: Civil War, it makes me a little nervous that we’re going to see the collective group split into multiple teams of superheroes that don’t really pack the same punch as the original group and mostly serve to allow Marvel to kick out twice as many movies with this growing array of characters in the MCU.

But we’ll see. Ant-Man was more or less enjoyable, though I wouldn’t be eager to watch it over and over again like I have some of the classics.

IVF Round #2 – All Aboard the Stress Express

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I was actually going to write about this a week ago. I didn’t really write publicly about our first go at IVF during the process itself because it was a stress-filled rollercoaster and I just didn’t feel like airing it at the time. I thought this time would be different, but then we got into the mix of it and it turned out to be just as stressful as before though admittedly in different ways than before…

So this is our second time doing IVF – our first resulted in Christopher after two cycles.

Contrary to the beliefs of many armchair fertility doctors, no, everything didn’t just loosen right up after that first baby and make things smooth as silk for baby #2.

Not to nitpick your credentials or anything, but ovulation or a lack thereof doesn’t work that way.

😛

Anyways, last Saturday morning we went in to harvest eggs out of my wife, as you do, and things seemed to be going smoothly right up until they weren’t. It’s scary how much of a numbers game this really is because we rapidly went from 23 eggs total to 18 eggs harvested to only 12 of those eggs actually being mature, and that was before my little guys jumped into the game, too!

…which apparently came with their own set of issues that I don’t really want to get into, but I will say that we almost couldn’t fertilize any to a day later finding that all twelve eggs had fertilized successfully, so again … rollercoaster much?!

And yet here we are a week later, and now we’re down to THREE viable, growing embyros at day 5. 😯

Honestly, this is almost exactly what happened last time, which is a little frustrating because we’re obviously hoping for more to help control costs. But it is what it is, as much as I’m so sick of hearing the phrase, “It only takes one!” because out of millions of sperm and dozens of eggs, we’re already at a disadvantage numbers-wise!

So now we’re kind of in a holding pattern until next year – our three contestants will be frozen as they are today and a cellular-sized chunk of each sent off for genetic testing to identify the best of the best, but they won’t go back inside until after the new year … sort of a different strategy with this go around. Basically all I have left to do is write a $2,000 check for the genetic testing and then we’re on break until after the holidays… 😕

A bit anti-climatic, I know – welcome to my world.

In other related news, though, I’m somewhat considering writing an actual book about the process with Sara because she approached me with some interest earlier in the year and I’m coming around on the idea that we might be able to have a little fun with it and help some other people cope with the horrible process to boot. When we were going through our last cycle to have Christopher, writing about it was honestly the furthest thing from my mind because it was so stressful and topsy-turvy, but even though this cycle is still somewhat crazy I think having another already under our belts does make it a bit easier.

Really, it’s such a rough, unrelatable process for anyone who hasn’t or isn’t going through it, if I can write a few jokey thingys to help lighten the mood for others based on our own experiences, then that might help bring some positive to the process … besides my child/children that came/are coming out of it, mind you!

So look for that … I don’t really know when. I’d like to start working on it next year, but I’ve go so much lined up it’s hard to say at this point. I guess like the other thing, we’ll see. 😐

How do I want to make my impact???

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I guess you could say that I’ve kind of been having a mini crisis of faith over the last couple of weeks where I’ve found myself second-guessing what I want to do with life from the perspective of being a writer.

I wrote about it a little here last week, but in light of the attacks in Paris that literally happened a day later and the tremendous backlash that’s surged since regarding the refugees from Syria, I’ve had a lot of time to think about it and last night I believe I finally came to my answer…

Politics and reporting the news are important, and I can certainly see plenty of room for improvement, however that said I don’t know if it’s the right fit for me, I don’t think that it necessarily plays to my strengths, and most importantly, I think it would drive me absolutely insane trying to keep up with it after a while!

I had an idea that I was briefly entertaining last night about a new project that would essentially serve as a Snopes or a Politifact, but exclusively stick to factually correcting details shared around social media. On the surface it seemed like a worthwhile idea and it’s no doubt something that’s sorely needed … but the more I stewed about it, I came to the conclusion that it would end up being an extraordinarily negative pool to wade through because it would basically consist of purposely seeking out the most popular misinformed posts on Facebook and then doing the research to correct them.

A noble cause, no doubt … but is that really how I want to spend the limited amount of time that I have to dedicate to my craft???

Not really.

And so that brought me back to humor and sort of shined a new light on the art form that I think I’ve somewhat taken for granted. Simply put, the intent of humor first and foremost is to make people laugh. It can certainly also serve to educate or enlighten or even ridicule its subject matter in the process, but all of those things are secondary to entertainment.

It’s an argument that I remember Jon Stewart making time and time again about The Daily Show when various news programs would compare themselves to his program and he’d have to insist, “You think that we’re the same, but we’re not. The lead-in to my show is literally puppets making crank phone calls!”

A lot of pundits gave Stewart crap about not being on the same playing field as they were – primarily because his job mostly consisted of lobbing fireballs at them for 30 minutes every single night – but that’s kind of the beauty of being a humorist. You can write hard-hitting, political humor that serves to cut through the bullshit and highlight the ridiculousness that our politicians spout on a daily basis, but you can also write about other things, too.

If I were to take on that social media fact checker project that I described earlier, sure, there would be a potential to “make an impact” by providing facts to (hopefully) displace the BS, but what would the other part involve for that job? I fear that much like trying to be a hard-hitting journalist, it would be nothing but one ugly shouting match after another where even if you change minds with your latest battle, you’ve still got another ugly shouting match ahead of you and ten more lined up after that.

At least if I stick to entertainment writing, I can follow-up a critical, but also silly post about the Syrian refugees with a comic strip about the joys of unpacking cardboard boxes! What are my alternatives if I dedicate the bulk of my time to dispelling conservative politics or trying to make a dent in the status quo through serious debate??? Those ridiculous cat stuck in the tree or how did she wear it-stories that always make me groan when I see actual news sources taking a break with them?!

People can still take serious cues from humor, but it’s a lot more fun to read … not to mention to write, now that I think about it. So maybe I need to get back to writing humor and stop worrying about finding an unnatural way for me to move the needle.

This was a good talk. Thanks, Internet! 😉

A Verizon FiOS Upgrade Update … of Sorts

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So here we are, 10 days after my rant about issues with getting my FiOS Internet speed upgrade.

The good news is, I’m officially running at the 150 Mbps that I originally wanted … sometimes.

The bad news is, I’m not super crazy about what I had to go through to get it.

Here’s a quick timeline…

  • 10/23 – Found upgrade options missing online; no luck with support via phone or Twitter.
  • 10/29 – Sent an e-mail pressing further, response back that it was a mgt. decision.
  • 11/12 – Sent an e-mail to Verizon’s head over FiOS, got a response from his office in a matter of hours
  • 11/13 – Spoke on phone with exec. customer support who overrode issue and scheduled my upgrade
  • 11/16 – Tech came out, did install

It turns out that the final version of the story that I was given is that Verizon ran out of equipment nationwide, so in the meantime they decided to limit this particular upgrade to new customers until they were able to get their hardware issue under control. I didn’t ask if it was related to next year’s sale to Frontier because I wouldn’t blow a lot of money on equipment if I was selling the business soon, but it frankly wouldn’t surprise me…

Anyways, the gentleman from the VP’s office was very polite and offered to honor my upgrade by first submitting an order to upgrade me to 300 Mbps to get my order through the system, then coming in afterwards to back it down to the 150 Mbps that I actually wanted. And I did get my router included, though there was a one-time $150 install fee which I was honestly fine with at this point.

The install itself went super smooth – better than most, in fact – because instead of running a new ethernet line through the attic from the ONT to my router, he was able to make use of an existing line that ran to a smart panel in my closet where the router now resides anyways, so all in all we were probably done in about two hours. Speed tests were a little bit of a pain just because only my server is currently hardwired and it doesn’t have Flash installed which 99% of the speed tests require, but we worked it out nonetheless…

speedtest300 speedtest150

It was definitely hard to say goodbye to that 300 Mbps, though in no way can I justify another $90 on top of what I’m paying already, plus in reality I did find that the places I normally download from couldn’t push more than about 200 Mbps at me at a given time anyways … which was kind of expected. So it’s certainly worth noting that as sexy as the prospect of gigabit ethernet is, it’s really only useful for multiple devices pulling at the same time at least for the time being.

Still, this effectively doubled the speed in which I can download movies and TV shows, so that’s cool!

Also, my ping time is roughly 1/4 of what I was used to seeing, so also cool.

That said, even in just a day I’ve noticed my speed wobbling a bit – sometimes I can get the full 150 Mbps, sometimes it clocks in less than the 75 Mbps that I had before … not sure if that’s just standard Internet congestion (though I didn’t see it much before) or if moving me over to GPON puts me on a busier node where I’m competing for bandwidth more than I did when I was on BPON. Will have to keep an eye on that…

Anywho, at the end of the day my only real complaint is simply that I had to jump through so many hoops to get where I am today. One typically shouldn’t have to complain to a VP in order to get their service upgraded, and better communication at any step in the chain would’ve at least calmed me down and made me a little more understanding. I guess the moral is if you’re not getting anywhere with customer service, just go straight to the top and try there instead … which is terrible advice, really, but it seemed to work here.

I made the link above to said VP’s reference clickable just in case anyone else has the same problem… 😉

Journalism and Me

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Occasionally I wonder why I never got into proper journalism, and even if it’d be too late for me to do so. I mean, I like the writing that I do and you certainly don’t have to sell me on the value of entertainment and humor in society, but there’s still a part of me that wonders if I could be doing more if I had chosen to pursue a role in the media, as it were…

I think a lot of this comes about because I see so many flaws around us today that are based on misinformation, even though I’m honestly not sure if I could do it any better or if I would even know how to do so. Kind of piggybacking off of my post earlier this evening about overcoming divides, it’s clear that a lot of people align themselves with either conservative media or liberal media … and I guess the tricky part is that the devil on my shoulder isn’t sure that even if people had a better choice down the middle for their information, if they’d really be interested in that in the world which we live in today.

When I used to watch the Aaron Sorkin show The Newsroom over the last couple of years, to me it was a great fictional depiction of what the news ought to be – professionals passionate about getting the story right and not just pursuing leads for sensationalism, standing up for integrity in the fourth estate and particularly pushing back when it came to politicians not giving actual answers and trying to pull the wool over on people’s eyes.

And of course, I’m sure it might be said that I enjoyed that show because I’m a liberal and the whole show was created to make conservative newscasters look stupid, though my simple rebuttal would be that conservative newscasters make themselves look stupid by the ways that they distort and sensationalize the things that they broadcast. The truth is really that both sides exhibit the same problem in different areas, yet in a society today where it’s so easy to pick the news source that makes you feel good by reinforcing the chanting already going on inside your own head, would anybody even pay attention to that alternative news option???

One that I think is actually doing a really good job at producing this type of non-partisan, honest news that I’m talking about right now is VICE. You kind of have to sift through their website to find the really good stories from the same kind of weird clickbait that you find on Salon and Buzzfeed and HuffPost, but their big stories via VICE News – and particularly the ones that go into their series on HBO – feature some pretty nice investigative reporting that exposes issues on a larger scale that are impacting real people all over the world.

For instance, last night I stayed up way too late watching a special feature they did about America’s prison system that included some interviews that President Obama did with inmates at a federal penitentiary. It particularly focused on The War on Drugs and the consequences that have resulted from putting so many people in prison for non-violent offenses – it definitely made you take a second look at a complicated problem in that thirty years ago the edict was simply “Drugs are bad – we can’t be hard enough on criminals!” to now we’re really seeing the effects of those programs decades later and people like Bill Clinton, who played a big role in cracking down on drug offenders, is now admitting that he was wrong and he helped to create an entirely new set of problems that we now have to solve instead.

That’s the kind of journalism that I like to see – not 30-45 second sound bites that grab your attention and flare up the political base, but hands on, gritty research that peels back the layers and gives people a different way of looking at a problem. I’d like to see that same kind of technique applied to other areas – I think the political sphere is ripe for fact-checking because politicians and BS go hand in hand … I just don’t know how it would be received.

Still, there’s a great quote from The Newsroom that rings a certain truth in this regard:

“People will want the news if you give it to them with integrity. Not everybody, not even a lot of people – 5%. And 5% more of anything is what makes the difference in this country…”

How do you bridge the divide…?

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Whether it’s conservative/liberal, young/old, religious/atheist, black/white, or any combination thereof, we’re as divided of a society as we’ve ever been and any random look at comments on Facebook hints that the situation if anything is certainly getting worse, not better.

No doubt the issue will be front and center like it usually is at Thanksgiving dinner tables around the country here in a couple weeks, and I don’t know about you but believe it or not, I don’t want to fight with my family! I want us all to laugh and eat and talk about interesting things and challenge each other with new ways of thinking but without calling names … so how do we actually bridge that divide?

I admittedly don’t have the answer to this, but I think part of it starts in trying to understand where the other side is coming from. Of course, this too can be hard because my explanation for why someone might think the way they do might make sense to me, though it isn’t necessarily a settling one for the other party…

For example, I sincerely believe for better and for worse that a lot of the differences between me and my relatives back home stems simply from population and exposure – it’s hard for some people to really get their arms around the problems that black people face in America today when they live in a small town that’s less than 1% black. Nobody wants to be told that they’re racist, but when you make a joke about hanging a black man from a Christmas tree because you honestly don’t understand how absolutely horrible of a “joke” that really is, limited exposure to people who are different than you is one way that helps to explain why you might think the way that you do.

I think the real challenge here, however, is then breaking out of that mold to widen one’s own world view – even if it’s merely around the turkey-laden dinner table – because we’re all guilty of settling in with those who think and act the same ways that we do. It makes sense because it’s safer, but when people who only subscribe to one political party’s mentalities only interact with each other and don’t co-mingle with the other side of the coin, it just builds those walls up higher and stronger and the divide seemingly becomes even further ingrained.

People get defensive because they’re so used to only talking to other people that agree with them that an opposing opinion suddenly comes off as hostile, to the point where actually hostile comments start to get lost in the crossfire, and from there an honest debate seems pretty much impossible.

Several things really need to happen…

  • Both sides need to be willing to come to the table.
  • Both sides need to be open for debate and to legitimately hear the other side’s opinions.
  • Likewise, both sides also really need to understand their own opinions so that they can articulate them to the other side without resorting to ad hominem attacks.

I don’t even think that both sides need to be willing to change their opinions, although it certainly makes intellectual discourse easier, but hearing and acknowledging the other side is critical to actually having a discussion where both people can walk away feeling good at the end of it all.

There are some things that two sides will never see eye to eye on – take homosexuality, for example. I myself stand very firmly in the realm of equal rights as an extension of civil rights, whereas I know people who draw their lines based on their religious beliefs, and some more that are in between on the various nuances that make up just this one complex issue. And that’s ok, at least between two people, though it gets muddier when we have to look at the larger picture and how society is going to treat homosexuals in the 21st century.

But that’s how we get there is by sitting down and spelling out the differences, and figuring out where we disagree and where we surprisingly might actually agree a little after all.

And it’s hard, and all of those divisors give us plenty of fuel to not make that effort and to instead bunker down and fling poo over the wall at the crazies on the other side … which can be amusing for a little while, but ultimately isn’t very productive because it’s hard to walk away from the table feeling good about yourself when either one of you is covered in poo. And not everyone is going to feel like it’s worth the effort, and some people will make you wish that you’d never even tried, but you have to try anyways because division is bad and in the end we all have a lot that we can learn from each other.

Sometimes it just takes shutting up for a while to stop and hear what the other person has to say…

…even though occasionally it may turn out that the other person is just a crazy racist Donald Trump supporter… 😉

Anduril, Flame of the West – forged from the shards of Narsil…

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I think this is my all-time favorite story arc from the Lord of the Rings movies – following Aragorn’s acceptance of his lineage to eventually rise to become the new King of Gondor. I love the music, love the dialog between him and Arwen, her and her father, and finally Elrond and Aragorn as he brings hope to men with the famed sword itself….

And I have no idea how I never watched this video before, but here’s a sweet look at a smithy actually making the sword that was broken! This would be so cool to have up on the wall … at least once we get past the toddler years and I don’t have to worry about a kid stabbing his brother or sister with it, mind you. 😀

Are you sure you don’t want a banana???

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I was singing the chorus to this old classic from Tally Hall to the kid while we were walking through Walmart earlier this evening … decided to show him the video before bed and forgot how extraordinarily creepy the actual video for the song really was!

Needless to say, I had to summon the aid of one C. Monster to help bring things back to his level… 😉

movie thoughts … Pixels

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pixels_movieOh man – was this thing horrible.

I mean, seriously – how did Adam Sandler basically become the Dane Cook of comedy movie producers where he used to be funny, yet somehow now literally every single thing that the man touches … including apparently my childhood love of video games … just turns to complete and total garbage?!

So where do I start?

“Arcader” – not a term that anyone who’s ever actually cared about video games has ever used. Sounded incrementally more utterly stupid with every utterance … why they didn’t just go with “gamer” makes this a hideous first strike in my book.

The opening plot for this movie with the world championships and the time capsule felt like what the guys who had been tasked to write a movie script about Battleship first came up with before they scrapped it and said, “Come on – we can do better than this…”

The “pixelation” … which apparently became a coined term within hours of the alien invasion that caused it … made about as much sense as Battleship pegs falling out of the sky. It would make sense that the aliens would be all pixelated when they’re destroyed, but why would our stuff do the same???

Kevin James can’t be President … at least not of the United States. Maybe of the PTA or the neighborhood homeowner’s association, but not the whole United States.

The nod to Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani was neat, but it would’ve been cooler if they actually would’ve had him play himself in the movie! Instead he only made a non-speaking cameo while another actor played him during his brief battle with his creation.

Also, the “cheat codes” plot device doesn’t really make sense when not only are the heroes driving cars instead of joysticks, but the cheat codes would’ve been for Pac-Man, not the freaking ghosts!!!

Come to think of it – how do the aliens even know all of the rules of these games??? They were sent a VHS tape of the competition, not the source code to all of the arcade games!

…anyways…

Lady Lisa becomes unpixelated for inexplicable reasons, save for that she’s hot and Gad’s character wants her.

Sandler worked way too hard to kill Donkey Kong because all he had to do was climb the last ladder. You don’t kill Donkey Kong by throwing the hammer at him. That’s not how Donkey Kong works.

In the finale, our pseudo-president talks about “negotiating a truce” with the aliens, which we never saw because Sandler just beat Donkey Kong and disappeared. Nonetheless, everyone else apparently wins, too, as every possible conflict gets nicely tied up into a bow in roughly 30 seconds before the credits roll. Even Toru Iwatani’s stunt double sees his hand grow back – seriously, all that’s missing is the group high-five…

Also, apparently after the movie is over, I guess that Josh Gad fucks Q*bert or something.

Better Video Game Movies From the Last Few Years to Watch Instead of Pixels:

  • Wreck-It Ralph
  • Tron: Legacy
  • Scott Pilgrim vs the World (I didn’t even like this movie, but at least the video game effects were legit)

new website – Scott’s Thoughts!

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You know what they say – any day that you launch a new website is a good day… 😉

Screen Shot 2015-11-10 at 10.24.20 PM

This is one that I actually started kicking ideas around for earlier this year, but didn’t really have the time/content/procrastination for another project at the time to drive me there. I had a very brief mockup of what you see above running on a test site, but apparently today was the day that I actually mustered up the effort to both write the first post about the recent presidential debate as well as work out the kinks for the site design itself.

…although admittedly it wasn’t necessarily in that order! 😛

Anyways, the intent of this site – whether I managed to do it justice with the first post or not – is to give me a place to write in more depth about editorial-type topics that would normally otherwise be ranty-type posts on my regular blog. Kind of along the lines of some of the better quality posts you might find on a Medium or something of that nature, I was originally thinking about trying to host them there, but the whole huge audience/no pay thing is a problem for me and doing it myself gives me the control that I like to maintain with publishing my writing online nonetheless.

The plan isn’t really to post super-frequently – maybe one article a month, at best – but I really don’t want to force it just for the sake of keeping a writing schedule. Instead I want Scott’s Thoughts to be a place where I can elaborate on topics in a manner that feels a bit more professional so that there’s really a focus on the content itself rather than tying in my humor and other writing that might be seen on my blog as more of a distraction.

You’ll also see that I ended up pulling in a small handful of really old, but somewhat related articles that I wrote in this same vein more than a decade ago. Back when Comedic-Genius.com was my primary writing site, I had a bunch of different columns that I was writing – one of which was an editorial piece called Against the Grain… In truth there were upwards of 50 columns in the series before I ended it, but upon further review there simply weren’t nearly as many worth preserving from ten years later as I would’ve thought!

Hopefully the new series will fare a bit better, though I would argue that maybe that’s just another factor of getting older that one simply needs to get used to… 😉

* * * * * * * * * *

In geek news, this site is also my official foray into WordPress multisite-ing!

My testing earlier this summer was pretty unsuccessful, but before I let myself delete the install altogether, I tried one last test creating a new multisite environment with this blog and the new editorial subdomain, and it actually worked so I just decided to keep it. 😀

My multisite network currently consists of 4 sites total – the two previously mentioned and then two more test sites for more ideas that I haven’t gotten off the ground yet. For simplicity’s sake, I decided to only worry about sites that are actually subdomains of scottsevener.com right now, so humor and mouse and Just Laugh will all stay where they are … I’ve heard horror stories about trying to un-co-mingle sites once you go multisite, so no sense in adding new stress there!

Still lots to learn – the only real big dumb thing I’ve come across so far is the difference between Network Activating Plugins vs Network Enabling Themes because apparently doing the first forces activation of plugins network-wide (which is a neat feature for the ones I use everywhere) but the second simply makes themes available to activate on a given site … terms are just a little too close for my comfort, really.

I’m curious to see how performance ranks in comparison to the individual installs, but for now at least I was able to drop my install count down to under 20!!! 😯