(via BoingBoing)
I thought this was pretty cool! I remember my great grandpa having a neighbor who had a small train like this setup in his backyard that we got to walk over and check out one afternoon, but it was nowhere near this elaborate! Loved the bridge, and the cave … the track just seems to go on and on! (apparently the property is nearly 20 acres)
And to think that for a mere $3.5 million, this miniature railway could all be yours… 😉
![MV5BMTcwNzgyNzUzOV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMzAwOTA5OA@@._V1_SX214_[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/MV5BMTcwNzgyNzUzOV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMzAwOTA5OA@@._V1_SX214_1.jpg)
I seriously still can’t believe that’s what they decided to name this movie … it’s only one step removed from Die Hardest … oh, wait. 🙁
I think that I actually started to watch this movie a few months ago On Demand and it was literally so bad that I just rolled over and went to sleep without even seeing how John McClane saved the day, all Russian-style and whatnot. And yet I was kind of bored this evening and didn’t feel like working, so the next thing I knew I had pulled up a pillow and a bowl of ice cream and was settling in to watch Die Hard 5 in all of its terrible, horrible, no good, very bad self…
My god, did this movie suck.
I mean, 4 was barely, but not really watchable, but 5 in essence watches more like a parody of a Die Hard movie rather than an actual sequel to one of the best action franchises of all time. It’s pretty bad when you make 2 look halfway decent.
Aside from the atrocious script and the stupid, made up conflict between him and his son that we’ve never heard two words about up until this point, I actually kind of wonder if it’s just Bruce Willis himself that I’ve kind of grown stale on in recent years because not for nothing, but he hasn’t exactly been knocking them out of the park like he used to! It’s kind of like a lot of the old action heroes from yesteryear – Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Ford – they still keep trying to do these same types of movies that they did 20 years ago, but instead of looking bad ass nowadays they just look tired.
Which is fine because most of them are now in their fifties, but know when to call it good already!
…except for Samuel L. Jackson, that is – that guy still knows how to carry the bad ass presence and he’s 65… 🙄
The whole premise of this film, though, just seemed so far fetched…
See what I mean?! #5 makes the plot of #4 actually seem plausible, and #4 was complete and utter shit, too! It’s like they weren’t even trying anymore by the time they got to the fifth one – it makes you wonder if #6 is just going to be shots of Bruce Willis on set in his trailer where he randomly thwarts the guy who keeps snagging the last cheese danish!
Or maybe the moon … that seems like just as good a place as any to die hard! Die Hard 6: Without Oxygen
…channeling my inner Statler and Waldolf, kind of makes me wish that I could’ve watched THE LAST ONE without oxygen!
Oh Bruce … how did you fall so far? 🙁
Feeling lazy and thought I’d give old Defender another crack before actually crawling out of bed this morning, and low and behold the stars were finally in Geoffrey Longsword’s favor because slowly but surely we were able to stave off control of the motherland from the Normans until finally earning the ultimate right of reclaiming the crown for ourselves!
Alright – time to get up now… 😛
I was going to turn left into a grocery store parking lot to pick up a few things, but that light in particular doesn’t have a green arrow and sometimes it’s hard to see if there’s traffic coming from the other direction when there’s somebody trying to turn left as well from the other side of the intersection.
I had thought that everything was clear, but apparently the other car must’ve been floating in the blind spot of another car trying to turn left because I didn’t see him until I was already in the middle of the lane.
I still don’t really know how we didn’t collide – I could see him coming at me, almost seemingly in slow motion, to the point where I remember wincing and bracing for the impact … and yet instead of crumpled metal, apparently I also hit the gas and he swerved and slammed on his breaks because a second later I had cleared the intersection and my car was still thankfully in one piece.
I sat in the parking space for a good couple of minutes before I went in, partially thinking that someone was going to come in after me about what had happened, but aside from his squealing tires just before we didn’t collide, that’s all that I ever heard from the other driver. I even took a look around the back of my car when I did get out just to see if maybe he had nicked me and I hadn’t felt it or something, but there was nothing.
There’s even another light maybe 1/4 mile up that has an extra turn lane and green arrows, so I guess I’ll just use that from now on unless it’s painstakingly clear that there’s no one coming from the other direction. One close call is enough for me! 😕
One of the things that I wanted to do while we were up here for my Grandpa’s funeral was go through my exceedingly large collection of childhood Legos and see if I could pick out a few of the ones that I used to play with at his house. Probably one of my fondest early memories of my Grandpa was when he would play Defender of the Crown on the Amiga, and before I was old enough to actually learn how to play myself, I would sit on the floor in the bedroom and act out the scenes with my medieval Legos as he fought to conquer England there in the game.
It’s funny because only this weekend I learned that the game was very much a family thing because not only are my cousins also super nostalgic for playing that game with our Grandpa, but we all always played as the noble swordsman, Geoffrey Longsword, too! 🙂
I’m getting ready to get on the plane back home here in a few minutes, and as much as the iOS port kinda sucks, I think I might play a little bit on my way back home anyways…
Today was my Grandpa’s funeral.
It’s kind of weird to look back and think that only six months ago we were all gathered here to celebrate his 90th birthday, and everybody remarked at what great health he was in and that for all we knew, he might have lived another 10 years without blinking an eye. I guess that makes me feel all the more glad that we made the trip up last summer to see him one last time…
After I heard about his death last Friday and before I actually got here, I found myself admittedly feeling a little jealous of the other people who had gotten to know my Grandpa better than I did. When you live within a 45 minute’s drive at best, you tend to see people more often for Christmas and birthdays and even just on random whims, whereas since I moved to Florida, I’ve probably been back home maybe half a dozen times at best over the last 10 years.
For what it’s worth, though, I do think that we stopped to see Grandpa every single time.
But then I spent a lot of time talking with my family and especially my cousins today, and also with my Dad over the last couple of days, and when I got home tonight I went through about half a dozen photo albums, too, and I knew my Grandpa even if it might not always feel that way when living so far away. Sometimes the details don’t always stand out to you right away when certain people have been such a constant in your life – I may not have gotten to see him as much, but he was always there.
Family Christmases, despite me and my cousins spending a good chunk of our time playing Nintendo in the back bedroom…
Going fishing with him and my Dad…
Countless birthdays when all of our family would come to the house for hamburgers and hot dogs and cake and ice cream…
More recently, I remember getting random messages on our answering machine when they’d have heard on the news that a tornado had touched down somewhere near us or that a hurricane was brewing out in the Gulf, and he just wanted to call to make sure that we were ok.
When I first moved to Florida, he gave me a loan for some money to help me get into my first apartment, which I paid back a year later with interest, along with what I like to remember was a pretty heartfelt letter about how I couldn’t have done it without them.
It’s strange to think about the one house other than my parents’ growing up where I’ve never had to knock on the door first before coming in – that it won’t be the same soon anymore. All of those memories on the walls, and from the fancy rug on the floor, and in that back bedroom, it’s time to pack them up and take those with us now to wherever we go next…
And yet in seeing the makings of our next generation run around that living room and chatting about old times with my cousins and even now seeing my sister’s daughter calling my Dad Grandpa, somehow I guess I see a little bit of both my Grandpa and Grandma in all of that kind of stuff because if there’s one thing they both seemed to love more than anything else, it was having family around.
It didn’t matter what we were doing or what the argument discussion topic of the day was … you could tell just by watching them watch everyone else around them that they were proud parents, and proud grandparents, and proud great grandparents … they were just happy to have a house full of people that they loved, all under the same roof.
At the end of the day, nothing else mattered except for family and both of my grandparents soaked up every last drop of it that they could – everything else would work itself out in due time…
Maybe they were on to something after all. 😉
![large_564076_img_2693[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/large_564076_img_26931.jpg)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5iPbihuzPc
Ok, so admittedly this is actually kind of neat…
“The water temperature on the Lake Michigan is just a little bit below freezing, so you get a small piece of ice that forms in the water and as waves move back and forth it adds additional water and freezes in layers. It gets bigger and bigger, and eventually you get big balls of ice, that are pushed to the shore by the wind.”
(video via Boing Boing, description via The Atlantic Cities)
![11841729564_ab37fb54b4_b[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/11841729564_ab37fb54b4_b1.jpg)
(more photos and press release via The Brothers Brick)
Well, I guess we know which Lego set I’m going to be getting next!
I was actually a bit skeptical of this set when I first saw the Homer and Flanders minifigs leaked a month ago because the oversized heads looked a little weird, and now having seen the official photos … I still think that they look weird, both just because of the heads themselves not to mention the eyes that make half the characters look like they’re either stoned or at the very least, up to no good…
😕
In a way, they remind me of those horrible plastic head cases that they did for some of the DVDs that were a pain in the ass to fit on a shelf that I bought one of, ordered the free cardboard replacement case, and then avoided like the plague after that!
But still, it’s The Simpsons and I’m totally getting this set when it comes out, as well as any of the others if they do end up making it a product line after all. Apparently right now this $199 set is the only one they have planned, although rumors also have it that the next series of Collectible Minifigs will be themed after The Simpsons, so that would be kind of cool – especially if they got sneaky about it and made it all of the minifigs except for these six to steer people towards buying the house. 😯
Here’s a cool, little walkthrough video from Lego themselves going through the set as well as showing off some of the earlier prototypes for the individual minifigs, too…
![the_cast_of_futurama_by_unrellius-d6kos9j[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/the_cast_of_futurama_by_unrellius-d6kos9j1-575x406.png)
This. Is. Awesome.
Click on the image to see all sorts of crazy detail on the artist’s Deviant Art page – the original is something like 5000×3500, so it’s really huge! Unfortunately, it’s a fan creation, so we’ll probably never actually see it in print unless you know a dude who’s a printer who will look the other way, which is too bad because I think it would go great alongside this classic poster of the entire cast of The Simpsons that I currently have framed on my wall…
![61qxk945S-L[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/61qxk945S-L1.jpg)
…just between you and me, I might see if I can find a place to get a copy printed up at 24×36 anyways…
Eternal optimist John Green shares a few inspiring statistics to consider to as we prepare to leap over the calendarial bridge from 2013 into the mighty and prosperous 2014.
Also, in 2014 I’d kind of like to see calendarial become an actual word because I couldn’t come up with anything better to fit in that sentence.
Happy New Year!!!