From those guys who make Cards Against Humanity – You’re gonna love it!
…and if you don’t, nobody cares… 😛
Dream Journal : The Grasslands
It started with my transport to a distant world.
I actually remember the transportation itself – one minute I was just standing around, and then the world started spinning and everything got very blurry, and as the velocity of the two continued to increase, I found myself focusing on … myself … as a burst of light began to form around me. I don’t remember my exact thought, but there was something specific that I kept saying over and over in my head until finally I vanished from the world I knew and a moment later reappeared on the top of a large cliff overlooking nothing but green…
The view was outstanding – like visually, it stood out from the world that I normally knew … like looking at an old, standard definition tube TV and then switching over to a brand new 4K display. It was kind of like looking at Pandora from AVATAR, but no luminescent sparklies all over the place.
As I started to walk down the high, just taken aback by the grandeur of my surroundings, I began to notice animals large and small in the tall grass. Some were very big – like small dinosaur-sized – but they all pretty much ignored me and just went about their business eating while I walked past.
Eventually the hill started to get more steep as I continued walking down until I was almost sliding, and it became quickly apparent that I wouldn’t be climbing back up again, so hopefully that peak wasn’t the key to my returning home! The steeper areas of the mountain were much more dirt than grass, even though I could still see the magnificent fields of green in the distance, until I finally reached what I would call the bottom and strangely enough found myself looking down a lone alleyway with a faint light coming from a doorway in the side of the alley.
I looked down the alley and then back up at the gigantic mountain that I’d just walked down from a few times before a young boy came up and greeted me, and told me that “I needed to see Bill.”
Although I’m still not sure who Bill actually was, I replied, “Yes, that’s who I’m here to meet…” and with that I left the landscape behind to follow the boy down the dimly lit alley.
It was here that I woke up, and despite how much I tried to fall back asleep and pick up where I left off, I never was able to figure out who Bill was or why I had traveled so far to meet him…
2013 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 18 – Chex Mix, Batch 1 of 17
I also made up the season’s first batch of this stuff this evening, to aid me in my present wrapping efforts. I was a little surprised to see that the cereal boxes don’t actually have the oven-based instructions on them anymore – only the microwave instructions, which I’m not a fan of … I prefer to slow roast my Chex Mix into a sweet and savory, golden brown perfection!
Thankfully I was still able to find the original oven directions online. Granted I pretty much have most of it memorized by this point, but then again, I was about ready to pour the mixture over the cereal when upon thinking that it smelled a little funny, I realized that I had forgotten to put the Worcestershire sauce in … so instructions are good as I get into my old age of forgetfulness here… 🙂
2013 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 17 – A Prelude to Holiday Shipping
Spent a good couple of hours wrapping gifts this evening – no wonder the wife stopped after she had taken care of the ones for her side of the family! What you see here is mostly done, divvied out into more or less three piles in preparation for shipping up to New York and West Virginia and Michigan. We’re still waiting on a few more packages from the likes of eBay and Amazon, scheduled to hopefully arrive on Thursday.
According to the website, we’ve technically got until Saturday to ship via priority mail and have these puppies beat Santa to their respective trees of destination. I’m actually hoping to get them all in the mail on Friday, both to give us a little wiggle room and because we’re heading over to Disney this weekend, so we’ll see…
I don’t even want to think about how much shipping is going to cost for all of this stuff!!!
Customers Who Viewed This Item Are Fucking Weird…
The 85″, $40,000 TV that everyone is linking around because the customer reviews are hilarious…
![41Iayl16CuL[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/41Iayl16CuL1.jpg)
…and yet what really did it for me weren’t the reviews, but the other recommended purchases… 😯
Can I interest you in a Men’s Black Collared Body Harness Mankini???
Maybe the one, the only Hutzler Banana Slicer, or even if you’re looking to do a little Infant Circumcision Training on the side…
Or your girlfriend just has a somewhat disturbing fetish for Black Beauty…
Of course, if your one and only goal is simply Don’t Be Bald, then the people who viewed this $40k TV have also got you covered there, too…
I guess?!?!?! 😕
2013 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 16 – About A Muppet Family Christmas…
![CC_942_SeasonsGreetings_1984_01[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/CC_942_SeasonsGreetings_1984_011-575x407.jpg)
So Jim Henson’s Red Book shared a really neat entry from Jim’s journal today about the original Muppet Christmas special, A Muppet Family Christmas, and I never would’ve even thought about it, but it kind of makes sense that the reunion that happened with bringing characters from The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and Fraggle Rock all into one movie would’ve kind of been a reunion for the people working on those shows as well, considering that all had gotten popular in their own right at that point and aside from the principal performers who made appearances on all of them, the rest of the casts were probably pretty segmented.
I love the idea that this special was all about family, both in the show and also behind the scenes. It’s a shame that this is one of the few specials that doesn’t have a current DVD release that you can pick up a copy, but thanks to the joys of YouTube, luckily it’s not too hard at all to find the entire thing online from flurries in the car to Henson and Sprocket doing the dishes as the credits roll!
Here’s one great scene in particular when the entire gang from Sesame Street shows up caroling… 😀
P.S. I’ve yet to do so myself, but it looks like you can actually buy a book of all of Jim’s Red Book entries that have been compiled from the Henson Archives – talk about an awesome gift for any Muppet fan!
:santa:
Why I get so pissy about mailing list spam…
If you follow me on Twitter, you can probably note that roughly 1 in every 5 tweets are me complaining about a company not removing me from their mailing list. It’s a very common complaint of mine, and I think the reason that it rubs me the wrong way so much is two factors:
- It’s in really poor taste to sign someone up for something that they didn’t ask for.
- Technically speaking, mailing lists should be very easy to manage with almost instantaneous unsubscribe options.
So when someone like Sears or Williams-Sonoma comes along and offers to e-mail me my receipt, and I specifically ask if they’re going to use it for marketing and they say no, it really steams me when they turn around and do exactly the opposite of what they told me that they wouldn’t. My second point is simply icing on the pissed off cake because realistically, an unsubscription request is just a simple database update, and yet they have the nerve to offer a pop-up citing “It could take up to 3 weeks to remove your e-mail address from our database.”
I think 3 weeks is the worst that I’ve ever seen and that was from Williams-Sonoma, who I still manage to get marketing crap from on a regular basis. I’m debating whether I want to try and contact them in fear of starting another Sears incident because believe it or not, I don’t want to be that guy who just bitches at customer service at every little thing, but I’m also an Internet guy who takes these kinds of things seriously and I know that anytime I’ve been accused of sending out unsolicited e-mail, I’ve jumped through hoops to resolve it as quickly as possible because I always felt like a gigantic douche when it came up!
I guess that’s really the crux of it all, even aside from my two points above. Make a mistake or a poor business decision here or there, fine, but giving a shit about it when your customer actually raises a complaint is really the tipping point for me when we’re deciding whether you’re an asshole apathetic spammer or not…
2013 Holiday Advent Blog – BONUS – A Very Merry Couch Gag Christmas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Een6omgk74
Loved all of the detail that went into tonight’s Christmas episode of The Simpsons – especially in the intro!
I was also almost tempted to rewind so that I could read all of the holiday special spoofs, but thankfully the AV Club already did it in this otherwise curmudgeonly review of the episode as a whole.
Whatever – I’m easy to please when it comes to The Simpsons … just keep making it! 😉
movie thoughts … The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
![MV5BMzU0NDY0NDEzNV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwOTIxNDU1MDE@._V1_SY317_CR0,0,214,317_[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/MV5BMzU0NDY0NDEzNV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwOTIxNDU1MDE@._V1_SY317_CR00214317_1.jpg)
*sigh*
### SPOILERS ###
So … I didn’t like the ending … at all.
I know that these aren’t going to be popular opinions because everyone so far seems to be raving about this movie, and don’t get me wrong, I want to be raving about this movie, too! But often as it seems, the movie that I actually saw this evening was a stark contrast to the movie that I was expecting to see…
Ultimately, my disappoint can be distilled into two categories:
- The break point at the end
- Deviations from the actual book
So let’s talk about #1 first because frankly I was willing to overlook everything else until I saw those credits fly prematurely, and then I was instantly pretty miffed. Simple put – this movie should’ve ended with Smaug’s death and foreshadowing into the Battle of Five Armies.
Breaking the movie where it did left the story feeling unfinished to me, like they got to the mountain and met Smaug and … we’ll just deal with everything else next time! At least with the Lord of the Rings, each of the three books ended with climatic results – the fellowship was both formed and broken, one of the two towers fell, and lastly, the king did return. And I thought that it was going to be similar for this trilogy, too – I was a little unsure of where they could do the breaks going into An Unexpected Journey, but the last scene after the warg attack in the tree with the party looking out at the Lonely Mountain in the distance was damn near perfect…
…so I only assumed that the other logical breaking point would be after Bard kills Smaug and everyone starts to fight over the treasures of Erebor, but when instead the credits rolled just as Smaug was departing to lay waste to Lake Town, my heart kind of sunk because, well, there’s nothing like sitting for three hours to not watch a story come to completion in any way, shape, or form! 😕
As for #2, this is where I think I really need to go back and re-read the book because maybe my memory is fuzzy, and admittedly I’m basing some of it on what other people are confirming until I read it again for myself, but this movie just felt like it had a lot of deviations from what Tolkien wrote into the actual book. Like LEGOLAS, for starters – love the guy in LOTR, but there was really no reason aside from a familiar face that we can make do cool stuff to have him make an appearance in The Hobbit at all. Sure, watching him dance around on dwarf heads as they were floating down the river battling orcs was amusing, but did it need to happen? Not really, nor did we need the whole Tauriel / Legolas / Kili love triangle, either.
Plus, not for nothing but he’s kind of an asshole in this movie! Too much eye liner and too much spunk – I guess if he was trying to show Legolas’ arch leading up to when he joins the Fellowship of the Ring, but he just felt really out of place in this story when pretty much any other generic elf would’ve done just fine.
All of the stuff about Sauron felt really forced, too, as if Peter Jackson was just shouting, “Don’t forget that this is the prequel to Lord of the Rings!!!” I certainly don’t remember Gandalf facing off against Sauron in the book, or really any of that foreshadowing at Dol Guldur with building armies and war coming and all of that. And again, maybe I just don’t have the best memory of the book because it has been a while, but just considering it all on the surface, I can’t help but thinking if Jackson hadn’t taken all of these extra liberties with adding new content that maybe … he could’ve done well with only two movies.
That was honestly the biggest concern of mine when The Hobbit was first announced because Lord of the Rings had been three movies based on 1,200 pages of text that was already divided into three books by the original author. So its prequel, The Hobbit, was also going to be three movies based on barely 300 pages of text???
Granted, there were a lot of parts of this movie that I really did like…
- Bilbo fighting the spiders of Mirkwood
- Escaping the elves via the barrels
- The unveiling of Smaug
Still, I just couldn’t help but leave the theater this evening feeling like a lot of things got changed or added that didn’t need to be changed or added, and yet then again, for all I know, the very same types of things may have been done with the Lord of the Rings films, too. And yet even if they were, I genuinely enjoyed the adaptations that the LOTR films were, but Hobbit #2 undoubtedly felt different, and at least for me, the final installment next year is going to really have to knock it out of the park to redeem the prequel trilogy for me because as it stands, I see myself doing a lot of fast forwarding once this one comes out on DVD to skip over all of the post-Tolkien era fluff that doesn’t do much to progress the actual story.
Bummer. 😥
So far, so good…
This is a beautiful sight, and I don’t just say that because I’m extraordinarily relieved that I didn’t wake up this morning to find an explosion of ornaments and fake tree foliage where our delightfully lit Christmas tree had stood only hours before!