… Right before the skydiving, Lorien showed me this fantastic video game called Braid. I’ve installed the demo (wohoo! it plays on Mac!) and even playing just the demo, I feel like my mind can’t possibly grasp the sort of time warping this game requires just to access stupidly obvious puzzle pieces!
It’s so different than anything else I’ve played before. It’s so frustratingly simple. It’s totally awesome.
Today was the big day that I had been waiting for a couple of weeks now. I had signed up for a parachute jump at work that a corworker was organizing. I had been thinking about it, a little obsessively at times, and looking forward to the moment when I would look down and jump into, well, nothing! It finally happened and I am totally thrilled. When I landed, if it had been just a question of going back in a queue like at an amusement park, I would have jumped minutes after!
My fancy suit even had puffy sleeves!
Lorien landing on his ass (ok so everyone did)
a lone parachute in the cloudy sky
I stressed all week long, and had some fleeting moments of sheer utter abject terror and panic throughout the day, but when I got my suit and followed the mini formation I became surprisingly serene. I thought it was the trance-like feeling someone had told me about, but it just kept with me even in the plane. The only moment I got scared was when I had to kneel in front of the door of the plane, tilt my head completly back (into the banana position!) and just lean forward. I knew the tip of my knees were floating in the air but I couldn’t see anything!
So yes, I screamed during the free fall at the start, but it was so exhilarating to see the world under me, and the sky, and to hear the noise of the air. I could also feel my face flapping around with the speed. It was so cold too. Eventually the instructor opened the parachute and I barely felt it. There was no big tug or shake, we just stopped falling so fast. I that point I realized how warm the air was and how beautiful the countryside looked when you have more than a tiny plane window to look at it.
Eventually I got to drive a little and I think turning is the BEST THING EVER. It goes woooosh by and I felt like squeeing
So yeah, I will definitly jump again. It was so much easier and smooth than I thought the laws of physics could warrant. The free fall part is just so intense and yet so soothing. Best Sport Ever. It just made my day when I got home and saw that former President Bush had jumped for his 85th birthday. I hope I can jump like him when I get old too.
I’ve always felt very ‘meh’ about blog posts filled with random twitter posts. It seems like everything is hardcoded into a language that nobody gets unless you were on the other side of the conversation as it happened. It’s like reading a conversation that someone has with an imaginary friend. A friend that changes subject very often and randomly. I just don’t get it.
So I’m taking my vengeance with the most random text messages taken from my cell phone. The following list is taken both from my inbox and my sent message folder and hopefully is completly without meaning for everyone except me.
Turtle
This is all your fault. Just so we’re clear.
THEY CUT SHEPPARD’S HAND OMG OMG OMG !?!!
Yay! I’ll finally hear about the gory bits
He stole underwear! So rockin’
So for the record : dancing in high heels till 4am is not as glamourous as it sounds
A nestled repetitive 5×5 if elseif elseif… structure. Supposedly the QA gagged on sight lol
Same Area code! never seen before
Your $1 beer + free bacon basket, it wouldn’t happen to be in indianapolis?
The downside of bowl-plates is that your fork never has quote the right angle to scrape the melted cheese in the arc…
Oooh i can svill speak english
Rainbow!
I’m watching a movie and minnesota looks disturbingly similar to quebec…
God it figures as soon as I find a quiet place to read it’s suddenly filled with old ladies talking at the top of their lungs…
Lol Omg he s trying to flirt with you… Silly boys
Soldier was one of the greatest movies ever made
Whether spill or debauchery either way that does seem to be a good sign of drunk
Wow I should move to Canada and become a squirrel… It appears to pay about as well as grad school.
Identity was removed to protect the reputation of the people who wrote those :D
So it was mother’s day yesterday and I made my mom a super supper with salmon cakes (which had some tuna because I’m bad at reading cans) a zucchini salad and apple-cranberry strudel. I didn’t expect the strudels to be this wonderful because the oven is usually uncooperative when it comes to desserts. It was so pleasing to see the dough heat up and get all golden even thought I put egg white instead of egg yolk on top.
I’m considering getting a facebook account just so I can find my high school good friend with whom I spent hours reading Uncanny X-Men so that we can sigh over Gambit once more together. But thanks to my “facebook proxy accounts” I know that either she got a face lift, 2 children and moved to Vancouver or she isn’t on either. Darn.
On a completely different subject, Jason got me addict on a fantastic game on the iPod touch that is just like Risk: Lux Touch. I played so much in the last 24 hours that I drained my battery. (of course the battery died in the bus right when I was about to annihilate everyone) I’m also very pleasantly surprised by the ease of the controls considering Risk isn’t a very simple game. So I foresee that within a week I will get off the bus 3 stations too far exponentially more often than I do now.
I must say I was very apprehensive when I picked up the book. I knew I was about 10 years too old to be in the targetted audience and that I was very *very* attached to the story of Arthur from the movie Excalibur, so it was a very pleasant surprise to enjoy the first half of the book so much. The story was interesting and historically less silly than the movie (re Romans and Saxons and no full plate armour) and the character of Morgane was a lot more interesting that the one-dimensional Morgane of the movie. (ok so now you’re wondering why I even liked the movie in the first place? The Music, The Costumes, Merlin & Uther)
Unfortunatly it was predestined to change when Gueneviere got some page-presence and proceeded to suck away whatever hope I had that the book would show decent women. Nope. We have stron women that are so independant nobody wants to be like them… and whiners that put t shame shy 7 years old girls who stick to their mother’s skirts. Nothing in the middle. How realistic. I hate to be the one who criticizes and complains all the time but to have a main character afraid to go riding on a horse in medieval England just tops it. To have her Queen on top? forget it! I’m glad I read it, now I’ll go back to Althea, Cersei, Paks and Eowyn? I know most of those women are not always intelligent, brave or strong, but even if they’re faillible they always try.
In the end, if I ever find the sequel I’ll keep it for easy beach reading
During the week I obsessed about going to see Wolverine and went back and found all the god-awsome covers drawn by Joe Mad for Uncanny X-men that I read in high school. And also some stills from the movie.
And then I shamelessly squeed, jumped, cried, hollered and danced each and every time Gambit got some screen time. Just ask Bianca or Cynthia. So all in all it was worth every single cent and I’m strongly considering getting a HD tv so that I can watch it in all its glory when it comes out.
And yes, I know it’s a crappy movie. I don’t give a damn. It’s got MY GAMBIT. nuff said.
Chère cousine Marie, je considère que cet aveux équivaut à ton obsession Édwardienne. On a chacun nos choix. Moi j’avais 14 quand je suis tombée follement et éperdument amoureuse de Gambit. (Cela dit, j’espère quand même que tu aimera Entretient avec un Vampire).
Edit : Overall I have two regrets. One for the whole Wolverine movie, most of the time it didn’t seem like the characters were very well defined. Two : Gambit had a southern accent, not a creole one. And he didn’t say “Chere” a single time. Not that there were any girls around to tell it to. It could have been anyone. A bairmaid on Bourbon St if necessary. That’s just bad characterization for him not to flirt. booo
…I was in Rome, and it was love at first sight with that city. Now if I didn’t have a list of destinations the length of, well, the Atlas, I think I would go back as soon as I have some vacation. I can’t wait to go back.
A couple of months ago Christopher mentioned his long-lasting interest with a Brave New World. After I followed the Great Books I class at Concordia, I’ve always been interested in reading my way through books that have shaped society around them. Thanks to Judith I got a copy and started reading on the bus every morning.
At first I was a little bored by the “shocking” futuristic utopian society that the text describes. Tubes baby and behavioural conditioning taken to the extreme and a serious cult of youth. It felt like everything was so widely different that it couldn’t scary because I couldn’t tell how society could even get to that point. I read it like an anthropological study of a world far away. Where people are weird and believe weird things. That feeling stayed with me pretty much throughout the book until 2-3 chapters before the end, when the Savage meets with the world leader and discuss philosophy.
That conversation is, I believe, the main point that the author wanted to make. He invented a world and characters inhabiting it and staged it all so that those two people could talk for an evening. It seemed like a set-up, a sort of devil’s advocate conversation of “what ifs” and the only way he could make his point was to give us background (the rest of the book.)
I have to say, that conversation is pretty intense and brings ideas together that I’d never envisioned before and for that the book is very interesting. On the other hand, I pity teenagers who were forced to read this for school because I don’t think I would have gotten so much out of it without philosophy classes in both college and university to give me some background.
I’ll probably read it again in 5 years and find it completly different. I think this book will stick with me for a while. A slicky-oily-akward of feeling in the back of my head when I’ll read some technological articles.
