Real blog post sometime soon, hopefully. Sorry, everybody, but college comes first.

As it is almost the scary month of, um, February, and continuing with the recent-ish forcing myself to free write theme, I present to you something a little different from the usual fare presented here, for we have… a HORROR STORY! I recommend turning off the lights around you, and possibly even pretending you’re sitting around a campfire, listening to some kid with a flashlight pointed up at his face from under his chin, because this is some SCARY STUFF right here! You need to be in the mood.

As this story was conceived in the midst of a Skype conversation, the necessary terrified responses of the audience have been left in for you, as a guide for your own horrified reactions. This horror story is called… “A Phone Call From Someone You Never Wanted To Talk To Again! Boo!”

- – -

“It was a dark, cold night, and I was packing in preparation of travels the next day. I had just finished packing, when suddenly… my phone started ringing. And I thought ‘I wonder who that could be?’ I sloooowly reached into my pocket, and pulled out my cell phone, and on the screen, was the FACE OF SOMEONE I USED TO KNOW!”

“AHHHHHHH”

“Panicking, I raised the phone to my head as I pressed the green button to accept the call. I braced myself, not knowing what I was in store for. And then I heard a voice… saying… ‘Hey, friend! You just called me?’”

“AHHHH OH GOD STOP I’M SO FREAKED OUT MAN”

“And they never found my body!”

“HOLY CRAP”

“That’s right; I AM A GHOOOOOOOOOOST!”

“AHHHH”

Maybe 2/3 of the time I try writing poetry, the first thing I come up with is a title and then drive myself insane trying to write a poem to go with it. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t, but I’m trying to get more writing done (as well as stocking up on a bunch of blog posts since I know I won’t have time to do this when college starts up again – not that that ever works all that well), so I’m just trying out whatever I can think of.

I know I sometimes explain my poems or the process or something. You know those times you were trying to find an old email or IM conversation or something, find something else, and get so horribly sidetracked that you stay up much later than you intended to enjoying the ability to look back at one of your own train wrecks in motion? Here’s about about something like that sort of thing, I guess.

- – -

nobody really cares what’s inside a stuffed animal

as long as they know it’s soft

that a kid could cuddle with it

probably enjoy it

maybe give it a name or something

call it spot or teddy or mr puppy

something creative

even though the stuffing is what makes it

what makes it soft

what makes it not alive

but you don’t care at the time

you can always pretend

it’s exactly what you need

but you don’t write poems about stuffed animals

not good poems

even when you’re playing with a real animal

and just want to remind yourself

where you were

a year ago

and how much better it is now

That stuffed animal fell apart at the seams.

I’m starting to think I may have writer’s block. Not for the blog; there’s always something or another to yell about on this thing, it’s just a matter of getting myself to write it in a timely manner. I’m referring to writer’s block regarding my creative writing. I haven’t written a poem I like more than three or four lines of for quite possibly a year, I know I haven’t written a short story for a year, and my post nuclear apocalypse dark comedy dual political and personal allegory magnum opus novel only exists in the form of three pages I decided I don’t like.

So: writer’s block.

Therefore, I’m trying something out here. It’s currently 11:40, and I’m gonna free write up a short story until midnight to try to chip away at the aforementioned writer’s block and see what happens. The problem is I’m probably going to spend the majority of the time thinking of what I want to write, but this is the experiment I’m going to make myself do. Maybe the fact that I’m writing it as a blog post will inspire me to make something good, because obviously only good writing can exist on the internet.

- – -

So and so had just been shot.

So and so wasn’t really her name, but the way that we’re just going to go ahead and call her so and so should probably tell you something if it means anything which it may or may not either now or at some point in the future. Or not. Have fun figuring out if there’s a double negative in that.

Anyway, so and so had just been shot. This could be viewed as somewhat unexpected, because, were she even particularly expected to die at that moment in time one would probably have banked on her getting run over or something very similar to that, since she was crossing the street while texting. But nope. As it turns out, she was shot instead. Life is full of surprises. Although this is no longer the case  for so and so. She’s dead.

Theodore stopped staring at so and so and looked down at the purse he was holding.

We’ll explain that momentarily.

There was surprisingly little traffic for the early afternoon on a Thursday, so not too many cars were stopped by the inconvenience of so and so lying on the crosswalk due to having been shot. Theodore was only mildly thankful for this, as it just made things a little less awkward as opposed to actually getting him out of much trouble. Not that he was in trouble for lying in the street like so and so. Instead he was standing, as opposed to being sprawled out on the ground, by the little button you hit when you want the sign to say walk, as opposed to being in the street. Both of these were preferable states of being for Theodore, but overall didn’t do much to help him out of the issue at hand. A small distance from Theodore, roughly 2/3 of the combined length of their outstretched arms, had they still been outstretched, was Heather. Heather was also standing up, as opposed to lying down.

To sum things up so far, Heather and Theodore are standing on the sidewalk, Theodore is holding a purse, and so and so had just been shot.

Heather was silent, as before so and so had been shot she was quite close to shouting out “Thief!”, but now wasn’t quite sure whether that was the most pressing matter to convey given the changed circumstances. In addition to something she hasn’t said, Heather also isn’t younger than 75, doesn’t need glasses, isn’t wearing a suit, and isn’t carrying a purse, although it is worth mentioning that unlike the other details, this last bit is a new development. Instead, Theodore was holding her purse.

So and so was previously carrying her cell phone, but had just been shot and was now incapable of holding anything.

Theodore was looking at Heather’s purse. Heather’s purse is light pink, leather, probably large enough to fit two or three books inside, and had a hole in the side facing away from Theodore and Heather. There was also smoke emanating from the hole, to further cement its status as an unusual aesthetic decision. The smoking hole was not, however, the originally intended design for the purse, and was quite a recent occurrence, much like Theodore’s holding said purse, and so and so’s having just been shot. Theodore appeared quite distracted by the purse, which Heather would have found quite desirable, as she would have benefited from his loss of focus had she still been able to act upon it. Her initial instinct to hold her own against a mugger would have been to take her gun out from her purse, but as she was no longer holding her purse, this was no longer a viable option for her.

Theodore looked away from the purse again and back in the general direction of so and so. He still had not looked back at Heather, despite having spent a good deal of time looking at her while trying to take her purse and run away. Heather was also looking in the general direction of so and so.

So and so had just been shot, so she wasn’t able to look at anything.

At this point, enough time had passed where Theodore begun to wonder who the killer was. Theodore was the one who stole the purse, and the gun had gone off during this struggle, but Heather was the one who put her gun in there in the first place.

Both sentences in the previous paragraph present valid points and true statements and quite possibly the grounds for a decent philosophical debate, were it not for the obvious oversight that guns have things called safeties that keep them from going off on accident as such. Incidentally, it is probably a good time to mention the man standing on the opposite end of the crosswalk holding the smoking gun in the general direction of Theodore, Heather, and so and so, which had been fired twice, first grazing the purse, and second killing so and so.

Theodore stopped wondering who the killer was and instead, much like  Heather and the man with the gun, dropped everything he was holding and ran away from the others as fast as he possibly could, leaving the scene deserted.

Except for so and so, who had just been shot.

It occurs to me I can only kind of title these posts “Currently Reading” if I’ve finished reading the book, and am actually currently reading another book (The Road by Cormac McCarthy, in case you’re interested. I may do another one of these things for that.), but alas. I’ve also been sitting on writing this one because my opinions on what I read haven’t changed terribly much from when I wrote about the novel halfway through it. Colfer does a decent job emulating Adams, but in a series that’s long since run out of steam.

Thinking about it, though, the main reason why Colfer got to write a final novel to “finish” the Hitchhiker series (already on part five of the trilogy before Colfer) was because the ending Adams gave it was entirely too depressing (everyone dies) and mused here and there about the possibility of writing yet another one to try to not make something so completely bleak. Yet And Another Thing doesn’t really do it. (OH SPOILERS AND SUCH LOOK OUT KIDS!) The only character who really gets any good sort of closure is Trillian, who falls in love with immortal guy (whose name is something like Wowbagger? I forget and I don’t already have a Firefox tab open to wikipedia, so we’ll just make due with that), who isn’t immortal anymore. That’s all well and good. I can live with that canonical change. They get closure (happy closure, even! Imagine that!), but nobody else does. Instead, Ford and Zaphod just kind of end on a “Well, we’re going to keep doing stuff that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Oh, and we’re not dead.” note, and Arthur just flat out gets shafted with a crummy ending where he’s briefly, inexplicably, reunited with Fenchurch for a few seconds, then gets torn away to a different world or something that’s about to be attacked by Vogons. So as far as writing up a new book to give the series a more satisfying ending… yeah, not so much.

Basically, it’s not the worst Hitchhiker book. Adams definitely wrote one or two that were worse reads than And Another Thing, but it still does nothing to add to the series, or give it any better of an ending.

In other words, it’s kind of like this. One of my favorite jokes in this book was when Wowbagger muses on his immortality and says something along the lines of “I’ve lived long enough to know that true love doesn’t exist. That’s too long.”, except then Colfer goes and has the guy fall in love. Huh.

I was planning on writing a post about Eoin Colfer’s take on Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker series, saying something like what I thought about it and the like, when I remembered I’ve already set a precedent on this blog (before the name change, true, but still technically this blog) for talking about books I’m currently reading, so I can share my thoughts on things as I read them. This way I get to make more than one update out of it, which means I’m more likely to actually post something (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve picked up a video game only to finish it a good month or two after anyone would bother reading a review for it, hence why I don’t think I’ve written a review on this thing since, say, 2008). Since I’m not writing a review, but something more along the lines of “here’s what I’m thinking so far” exploring the first time you read a book, I think this ultimately turns out more interesting. So I did this back towards the end of last summer with Grapes of Wrath, and forgot about it. Hopefully next time I do this it hasn’t been so long that I feel like I have to reintroduce everything I do on my blog.

So basically in 1979 Douglas Adams wrote a wonderful wonderful science fiction comedy called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxyth that pretty much everyone already knows everything about. He wrote a number of sequels called The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe, and Everything; So Long And Thanks For All The Fish; and Mostly Harmless. Which each one there was, for the most part, a noticeable drop in quality. Since the last one ended on kind of a downer (spoiler: everyone dies) and Adams considered writing a sixth book to make up for it, but unfortunately died before he could do so, it was only a matter of time before somebody came along to try to wrap up the series. For some reason, we bring in Eoin Colfer, author of a series of young adult novels called Artemis Fowl, which aren’t even remotely similar to Hitchhiker (save for  how the movie adaptations of both either are or were stuck in development hell). Upon reading this turn of events on Wikipedia some many months ago, I had to wonder what on earth was going on. Of course, this is a series that has blown up the earth multiple times (and in multiple dimensions), so that could be a bad choice of words.

Having read about half of the book, I think I can say that while it’s about as bad as I expected, it’s not actually for the first reason that occurred to me. Somehow or another, Colfer emulates a pretty convincing Adams. Granted, there are tell-tale signs that it’s not Adams, or that it’s someone trying too hard to be Adams. He depends rather heavily on making Guide entries interspersed with the narrative for the sake of making a joke, which usually makes the jokes feel unnecessarily extended with too much build up to something not always all that humorous. It’s also ironic that Colfer mentions in his little about the author blurb that he found writing for adults “very similar to that of writing for young adults, apart from less usage of the phrases it wasn’t my fault and none of you people get me“, yet he also relies rather heavily on the teenage character Random Dent, whose only previous appearance was as a minor character in Mostly Harmless, so these sorts of phrases do, in fact, come up quite a bit more than in any of the Adams-penned novels. Despite these complaints though, Colfer does do a fairly convincing Adams.

However, that’s not where the problem is. I hated the previous two books in the series because the whole thing was getting rather stale as the jokes got less and less funny and less stuff happened. Having plodded along halfway through Colfer’s rebirth of the series, you have to wonder why it was all that necessary. I love The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as much as the next person, but most fans will readily admit that by the end the series was an exercise in beating a dead horse, and Colfer’s And Another Thing doesn’t do much to think any differently. The story just doesn’t feel necessary. So far I just can’t get myself terribly interested in all this business with the Gods that unfortunately is looking like it’s going to be pretty important to the plot. It’s nice to see (almost) all the old familiar faces (and that immortal guy) again, but with Marvin killed off two books ago and Arthur and Ford taking the backseat to Zaphod and whatever immortal guy’s name is, that’s not even as much to return to as one might have thought.

Anyway, the book’s not over yet, so it could still get more interesting, but given where the series was going anyway, I’m kind of doubting it. Like the last two books, I’ll probably chuckle a few times and suddenly find myself on the last page wondering where the plot went.

So almost a year ago, Steven Page left the Barenaked Ladies. Yeah, that “One Week” band. More on that later. So the remaining four members decided to carry on less one singer/guitarist/songwriter/frontman. They had two to begin with, mind you, so the issue isn’t so much they lost a key member as it is that they’ve lost a key piece of their chemistry, which is part of why Barenaked Ladies have always been my favorite band. Hands down. It’s really a shame they’re barely known for anything outside of “One Week”. I’m not sure how well known their other bigger hits, like “Pinch Me” and “If I Had $1000000″ even are to the average person fiddling with the radio dial. They’ve always been a criminally underrated band that’s always been able to write wonderful songs perfectly juggling insightful humanity and goofy wit, and the chemistry between the five members, especially between the two frontmen Steven Page and Ed Robertson, has always been a key component of this.

But this has all been said before, by legit music critics who’ve actually followed them for the 20 years they’ve been together. Back to my original point, Steven’s left the band, and now they have their first new album without a key founding member coming out. You don’t have to look any farther than the first single, called “You Run Away” to figure out what’s up.

You Run Away

Right from the get go, the band’s trying to show that they’re still the real thing as a four piece, and they’re certainly not running away. If you listen to any recent interviews with the band, they mention how they’ve had extra breathing room to experiment a bit with their sound and try other things. If you listen to the first single, you can sort of see this. It’s still recognizable as Barenaked Ladies, but it sounds a bit different from their older stuff, and not just because they’re down one of their more recognizable voices. The song is some fairly straightforward radio power pop/rock with tinkly pianos and echoey keyboards through the verses and loud, crunchy guitar through the chorus. The lyrics themselves start out somewhat apologetic, but quickly turn to a more accepting “what happened happened” stance. It’s easy to draw parallels between the song and the what’s recently happened to the band, which is probably why it’s the lead single, but it comes off as genuine, like the Barenaked Ladies always did, and thankfully still do.

It’ll be interesting to see how an entire Page-less album holds up. I have no doubt they can make a good album, but the question will be how different it is.

So, right after I change the name of my blog from The Procrastinator’s Rant, I have a proper rant that must be said.

I hate buying cell phones.

There’s more to it than that, that’s more like a subject line or something.

Here’s the backstory. About four months ago, I replaced my old cell phone with an LG Neon. I really like this phone, save for a few minor complaints and a major one: it doesn’t always want to make phone calls. This is a rather important quality, I think, for a cell phone. I can get incoming calls just fine, but roughly half the time I call someone myself, it’s like the speaker doesn’t work. The phone makes the connection, but I won’t be able to hear the call until a good portion of the way into it. This is, needless to say, quite irritating. So going back to the store I have two choices: let the warranty do its thing and take my chances on a replacement not having the same problem (knowing another person with the phone who has this same problem is not reassuring), or replace the phone.

That’s where I get frustrated.

I am convinced there is no good way to figure out if you’re buying a phone you’re going to like. You can go online and read reviews, but nowadays those all focus on things like “Look at the touch screen! Look at the 3G! Look at the shiny!”, and very few portions of the review actually tell you important things. Like what does the inbox look like? How does it store/display/send/manage text messages? What’s the address book look like? Superficial as this may sound, you’re going to be using this thing every day. If the menus are a mess to navigate, look like crap, and barely let you see anything that’s going on, how are you going to know? The only way to figure this out is to go to the store itself, check out the phone on display, hope some moron didn’t break it, hope that the black security device attached to it lets you see more than half of the screen, and play around with the phone, thinking of every possible thing that could potentially annoy you about it, and hope you don’t get sick of this over the next twenty minutes or so while people who care much less about this sort of thing wander around you talk loudly about their phone selection process, which includes such vital things as the color of the phone or how it is or isn’t an iPhone.

Basically, it seems like unless someone is as obsessive as you are but way more helpful and uploads some sort of video tour of the phone onto YouTube and they walk the viewer through the same menus you’re interested in, I don’t know how you could possibly go into a phone store well-informed about what you’re looking for. I mean, we live in 2010 now. That even sounds like the future! How can this sort of thing be so troublesome?

Given how I walked into Avatar already determined to hate it based on nothing other than how the rare natural resource driving the plot was called “unobtainium”,  I walked out surprisingly happy with the movie I just watched. And as long as I’m struggling to figure out how to start a post about what I thought about Avatar, I might as well mention that the only thing remotely resembling a review that I read about the movie beforehand was A Softer World’s Joey Comeau’s tweet about it, which said “Avatar is like making out with someone super hot, but dumb as shit. Which, let’s be honest, has its place.” So I have no idea what actual professional movie critics had to say about it, but Comeau’s metaphor captures the essence of the movie.

The film is incredible visually; there’s no getting around that. It’s incredible what we can do with motion-capture now, since roughly half the characters in the movie were completely computer animated, but seem so incredibly lifelike you can actually forget it’s not a person acting. However, it’s definitely the movie’s eye candy factor that makes it notable in any way at all. The story isn’t bad, per se, but it’s your basic “going native” tale with absolutely no surprises around the corner. Let me show you by means of a spoiler-tastic example. At the beginning of the movie, our main character is tentatively accepted into the natives’ society to learn their culture with the chief’s daughter as his mentor while working for his scientist buddies back in the human world, while secretly working for his military buddies back in the human world who want him to find some way they can more easily exploit the natives. If I were to ask you who to guess who becomes his romantic interest, whether this causes any initial problems in human-native relations, and which side he ultimately fights on at the end, how would you do? Is your guess “the chief’s daughter, yes, and with the natives”? Hot damn! You’re crafty!

That being said, a story being predictable doesn’t make it bad. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, watching it pan out exactly as I would have guessed 20 minutes in through its stunning visuals, surprising emotional impact, and what actually makes a gleefully popcorn-tastic end battle, which I honestly did not expect to be as fun as it was, since I thought it was going to be guns versus bows and arrows, and it sort of was, but it was still fantastic.

So getting back to Comeau’s characteristically sexed-up analogy, I wouldn’t say the movie is “dumb as shit”. Even if its intelligence isn’t really its main draw, it’s not exactly the guilty pleasure he makes it out to be. No pun intended. It’s silly and fun. Go see it.

An explanation is probably in order.

As you can see, not only does the blog have a new design, but a new name. The new design is easy enough to explain: my blog basically looked identical to when I started it up back in May of 2008, and it’s a new year (and new decade), so why not change it up a bit? The name change is a little harder to explain. Partly because it doesn’t make any sense, but here’s the logic.

When I started this blog towards the end of my junior year of high school, I decided in my infinite wisdom to call the thing “The Procrastinator’s Rant-of-the-Day”. Three incumbent issues I should have picked up on, right there. I got rid of the hilariously inaccurate “of-the-day” part before the year’s end, I believe, but as for “Rant” and “Procrastinator”, I let it stand for a good deal longer than I could take it. Plain and simple, things changed. Most of the time, I don’t write rants anymore. Worse, I grew to detest labeling myself as a procrastinator for the sake of coming up with some sort of title. It’s a terrible habit I’ve done my damnedest to break, and having a blog I updated less and less frequently that displayed it wasn’t helping.

So it’s a new year, a new decade, a new design, a new name. The content of the blog itself will be pretty much the exact same sort of thing it’s become, but I’ll just be more honest about it. Does the name convey any of this? Not at all. But I’ve considered this name change for over half a year now, and it never struck me as, say, a horrendous idea, so I’m going for it.

I hope you’ve enjoyed The Procrastinator’s Rant, and will continue to do so as Angry Postcards From Nihilist Penguins. Happy New Year.