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Latitude:45.46962
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Kayleigh Willey

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Neocities: Geocities' Optimistic Younger Sibling

Author's note: This post was originally written for the science and technology section of Paper Droids. It can be found in its original form here.

Remember Geocities? That inexhaustible collection of gifs, seizure-inducing backgrounds and clown-vomit-coloured websites has been the subject of some nostalgia lately. Rather than just checking out Wayback Machine and remembering what a hideous place most of Geocities was, someone decided to do something about it.

As much as Geocities was the home to countless affronts to the eyes, it was also the platform where so many of us learned the basics of coding, and where we presented some part of ourselves to the Internet, perhaps for the first time. Geocities is a big piece of Internet history. When Myspace and other social sites stepped into the picture, Geocities faded away, and there has really been nothing like it since. Sites like Facebook, Blogger and WordPress allow you to create a website or an online presence for free, but with heavy restrictions, and usually no need to be familiar with coding or scripting.

Kyle Drake (@kyledrake), the creator of Neocities.org, has set out to create Geocities’ successor. Though some of us may shake our heads and wonder why you would ever want that many gifs in one place, Drake sums up his noble goal in 140 characters or less.

I want to make another Geocities. Free web hosting, static HTML only, 10MB limit, anonymous, uncensored.
— Kyle Drake (@kyledrake) May 23, 2013

His plan is to take away the comfortable but restrictive WYSIWYG and drag-and-drop layouts of most modern web sites, and allow people to present whatever information they want, in whatever format they see fit. His idea is to create an environment where people can be completely creative, without the hand-holding of guidelines and forms like those of Facebook and WordPress.

In its current state, Neocities provides 10 MB of free hosting, with no content restrictions, as little censorship as can be managed, and complete freedom to put whatever you want on it, ad free. While it does away with the “cities” part, where the sites were divided into sections based on content, you still need to know how to code. The price of creative freedom is that you need to actually understand the HTML and the CSS that goes into your page. A secondary part of Drake’s goal is to create a vehicle for people to learn more about the internet and its building blocks. He feels that it is becoming more and more important to know how to code or program, and he wants to create a place that makes that easy and accessible. Neocities is also working towards having HTML tutorials so that the absolute novice can get started, all at no cost.

Though the service is free to the user, all of the hosting and resources require funding. The site is currently funded by donations, and there are no plans to implement an ad program. The Neocities website states that “[t]he technology has become affordable enough where we can provide this creative space without requiring a business plan that involves selling people out to the marketing industry.” Through donations alone they have secured the funding to host two million sites for two years, according to Drake.

As for the monitoring and censorship issue. The terms on the site make no statement about disallowing any types of content, but it does say that any suspected unlawful activity can be reported to the authorities. If lawful process requires your personal information, they retain the right to give that to the authorities as well. “Uncensored” has to have its boundaries, after all. Luckily, providing any personal information when you register is completely optional. You don’t even need to submit an email address to register.

While this project was started with noble aspirations for a free and unobstructed creative place on the web, there is a lot of potential for mischief here. Like with any anonymous forum, there is a significant chance that the denizens of the murkier places on the web will latch onto this and fill it full of various flavours of vitriol and deception. So far there are people using it to share useful information, introduce themselves, or just straight-up confuse people. (Watch out, that last one is loud.) There are also many sites that should surprise no one.

For those with aspirations of learning HTML and CSS, it is a great way to get started and make something that is completely yours, even if that ends up being a flashing neon scrolling banner declaring your love for banana peppers. If you’ve already got some coding chops, you can make an elegant, stylish place to present yourself. Better yet, find yourself a newbie. Get them started with some basic skills and watch the fireworks.

Whether the platform gets adopted by the creative community, taken over by trolls, filled with auto-playing midis and blinking yellow scrolling banners, or an exciting combination of the three, it will be interesting to see. Who knows? Maybe Geocities was just ahead of its time.

Drawing Strangers on the Internet: The Sequel

If you recall, in my last post about drawing strange people on the tubes, I mentioned that I had found two resources that were helping me practice a bit. The first one was a specific part of Reddit, and I neglected to mention the second one. Since I'm sure you were waiting with bated breath, wait no more!

The other really cool resource that I have been using to hone my meagre skills is a website called Selfless Portraits. The idea is that you submit your Facebook profile picture to be drawn by someone, and you draw one that is randomly assigned to you. The results are sometimes awesome, sometimes silly, and... well, sometimes it just doesn't work.

I'm not so great at likenesses, so I thought doing a few of these might be some good practice.

I am not really happy with this one, but doing the relief thing turned out to be way harder than I thought. My original idea was to draw him with a big creepy smile, a la A Clockwork Orange, but I think this is creepy enough.

This is definitely the one that I am happiest with, out of the portraits that I have done on this site so far. The face could be narrower, but I think the photo might be squashed, so it evens out. (That's what I am going to tell myself.)

This was the first one that I did, and man was I ever mad that my first one was a duckface. Turns out that they are really hard to draw, in addition to being weird looking!

And lastly, I of course must share the ones that others have drawn of me! I think it's a good likeness, no?

Star Trek: Into Darkness

I finally got around to seeing Star Trek: Into Darkness this week. My overall impression is that I really enjoyed it! It was pretty action-y, which usually isn't my cup of tea, but I found that there was always enough going on that I didn't get bored.

I understand that the hardcore Star Trek folks have some gripes about it, but I think that being a little less knowledgeable in that department may have worked in my favour. I didn't have any rage out moments related to inconsistencies or anything like that, but I am well versed enough to understand the role reversals near the end, and a bunch of the throw backs to the original series. It is a different timeline; things don't have to be the same. I can accept that as an explanation for any differences from the original series. At the same time I appreciate the parallels that they draw while keeping it fresh.

One minor gripe that I did have is that, as much as I love Benedict Cumberbatch, is he REALLY the right person to play Khan Noonien Singh? (Admittedly, the original actor that played him was Mexican, so who am I to judge?) Although, I do suppose it is possible that in the distant future names that we currently associate with a particular area of the world would probably not have that same association.

One MAJOR gripe that I had was that I had to watch it in 3D. The theatre that we went to had stopped showing the regular one. I should clarify that I hate 3D movies. A lot. Particularly ones that are done the way Star Trek is. The viewer is pretty much constantly bombarded with lens flares and light effects in the extreme foreground (that I probably wouldn't have thought out of the ordinary in 2D), as well as extreme foreground objects at the edge of the screen that cause your eyes (or mine at least) to start trying to focus past the edge of the screen. Another pet peeve of mine was rampant in this movie: switching focus between the foreground and the background. I know that this is a common technique in film, but it really messes with me in 3D, and I find it really distracting. If you are going to force 3D on me, at least let ME choose which layer I want to look at. I feel like 3D is rarely done well enough to not detract from a movie, let alone improve it. I would personally have preferred to watch the 2D version.

To change the subject and music-nerd out for a moment, I REALLY enjoyed the score of this movie. It stayed in the background when it needed to, and was super moving when it was called for. I particularly enjoyed the ending where they worked it into a revamped, epic version of the theme from the original series. I didn't think that I had ever heard anything by Michael Giacchino before, but upon looking into it, he also did the soundtrack of Up, which was wonderfully done as well.

As a whole, I really enjoyed the movie, when I was not being distracted by awkward lens flares in the front of my vision. The score was excellent, the pacing was good, it was not entirely guns and explosions as I suspected it might have been, and it was generally a very fun movie. Although, I will be the first to admit that cerebral it was not, and I feel like that is probably a flaw in a Star Trek movie, but you've got to please the masses with these things, I suppose.

Drawing Strangers on the Internet

Hey, I'm still drawing! Occasionally! Look at that!

I decided to bust out the tablet a couple of days ago and fight with the drivers and wrestle with GIMP long enough to actually get something done, so maybe I will have some things to post.

I recently discovered a couple of really good resources for practicing drawing people. One of them is r/redditgetsdrawn (or r/redditgetsdrawnbadly, depending on how I am feeling) where people post pictures of themselves or their loved ones and people draw them. I've done a couple of these, and they are good fun. Not a ton of work, but good practice for working on either likenesses or styles, or likenesses in different styles. The next few images are the product of some of those adventures.

This one was a person (who was really wearing a puffy sleeved dress!) who asked to be made into a Disney princess. I make no claims to be an animator, but I gave it a shot.

I got adventurous with this one and tried out colouring Questionable Content style. Turns out it is WAY faster, but I still need to get the hang of cell shading. And making line art that makes sense.

The mods made this guy promise that he was not going to use the product of this thread for an album cover. It was all a dark background and super moody looking... So I just drew his glowery face and it turned out looking kind of like Zachary Quinto.

This one is probably my favourite, since it is adorable. The person asked for her and her "Majestic Unicat" to be drawn. I really felt that the cat's expression could only be one thing.

Learning to Play... Again

I picked up my violin again today for the first time in a very long time. Months. More than months, maybe. To be clear, I don't know how to play the violin. That is a big part of the reason why I haven't played it in so long. It is frustrating and hard and does not make me happy. It hurts my fingers, and I never feel like I am making any progress because I have no idea what I am doing and I don't seem to ever get any better.

I have distinct advantages in the learning process: I know how to read music. I have a good pitch sense. I know, theoretically, how most instruments are supposed to work. I can pick up most any brass or woodwind instrument and be able to play twinkle twinkle little star in a matter of seconds. (But we're not going to talk about double reed instruments.)

But for some reason, stringed instruments completely elude my musical sense. The way they operate, the movements and positioning required, the idea that both of my hands are supposed to be doing something totally different... All of these things make stringed instruments totally foreign and confusing to me. And it is INCREDIBLY frustrating.

I put down the violin today after spending a solid half hour trying to figure out how to make a bow stroke that doesn't sound like a dying cat, with little to no progress. I am not used to this! I know that back when I first picked up an instrument I sounded like crap and my progress was slow and my tuning was awful and my sound was a disaster, but I had the patience for it back then. I was new; I was SUPPOSED to sound like crap. Since I have got good at what I do, I've been spoiled with being able to pick up an instrument and go with at least rudimentary skill. I've forgotten how to learn from scratch.

I think I may have just regained an insight into how people feel when they try and learn an instrument from nothing. I've just forgotten how to learn from the beginning. I think I will find a beginning method book and muddle through, ignoring the boredom and the frustration with the slow progress... Because most times you actually have to DO the hours of rudimentary crap in order to have any idea what you're doing.

If Money Were No Object

Jim Tigwell, over at Concept Crucible published a blog about what he would do if money were no object. He talks about why that was hard for him to consider, and why it's relevant at all. He mentions that, once you have done away with all of the things that you do because you have to do them to live, the things that you would choose to do are your big and outrageous dreams. If you don't ever think about the crazy things you would do with all the spare time and money in the world, you don't have any sense of what it is you really want to be doing. Once you have answered that question, you can then work towards it in a more everyday way than winning the lottery or becoming immediately independently wealthy.

This of course got me thinking about what I would do, and I, like Jim, found it a very hard question to answer, though probably for a different reason. The reason that I found it hard to answer is because I would want to do ALL THE THINGS. Everything. Systematically.

I agree with what Jim said on creating things; I am also a creator, so I would write despite incompetence, I would make bad art and  play great music poorly, I would make inane videos and sing constantly, and I would get better at all of those things. But rest assured, before I was done getting any good at any one of them, I would decide that now is the time to learn French. Before I was halfway fluent I would decide it's the time to go on a walkabout and spend a month walking a trail alone. (Since that one is hard to bail on in the middle, I would probably finish that one.) After that I would become obsessed with yoga for a while and then realize that I had forgotten all about my passion for knitting, and start doing that again. Then maybe I would start working my way through my veritable library of a to-read pile. Or I might learn to joust. After that: Who knows? Maybe I would take hang gliding lessons. Or visit Mozambique or Bangladesh or Ireland or Antarctica. Maybe then I would enroll in a dozen University classes just because they sounded neat.

Anyway, the point I am getting at is that there is a big part of me that just wants to absorb every experience imaginable and learn any skill that I can get someone to teach me. I just never feel like I have the time or the resources. So maybe I should just find a way to do all of these things, one at a time, at a more reasonable rate than I would if I had all the money and time in the world. A part of me also wonders what it says about me as a person that I would flit from one thing to another indefinitely, if given the opportunity, but that is a bit of pensivity for another day.

I'll end my little babble here on the same note that Jim ended his: Think about it. What would you do? ...Well, maybe you should work on that.

Review: New Moon

New Moon by Stephenie Meyer

My rating: 1 of 5 stars



I read this book (and Twilight) out of sheer stubbornness. I wanted to understand the cultural phenomenon that it has become, though I didn't really have any interest in it. the frothing fan base really turned me off of the whole series. To be honest, I was disappointed that I didn't hate the first book. It was okay. Just okay; it wasn't good. I would probably have really liked it when I was 14, which is a good thing, since it is a young adult novel. I moved on to New Moon with tenacity, but I was absolutely bored to tears by it. While the first book was largely a long deliberation on how pretty Edward is, this one was a long lamentation on the fact that he wasn't there any more, and (to me, at least) there was absolutely nothing there that sparked any interest. I will probably read the rest of the series out of pure stubbornness, but I would tell anyone else who wants to understand the crazy cultural phenomenon that no, they don't.



View all my reviews

At A Loss

I want to write. It's not even that; I want to create something. I find myself constantly in a state of creative frustration where all I want is to put pen to paper and write something. It's not as specific as that, however; I would be as happy to write a song, or a poem or to paint or draw or sculpt, I just don't know where to begin. My muse (a concept that I am not entirely supportive of, but that is an aside for another day) has been disconcertingly silent for a long time now. Not only that, but I find myself often frustrated when I do set something to paper (or the applicable media) with the fact that I am not good enough at whatever it is I am doing to create the vision that I started with.

This creative frustration has been a sticking point for me for several months now. Is this something that other people come across? Do other people get accosted by the desire to create, but lack any idea as to what they should actually set out to do?

I have tried to start a bunch of projects, but none have yet turned out the way I envisioned them, and I am left feeling distinctly unsatisfied. I am supposed to be creating the artwork for a hypothetical children's book; maybe that will satiate my creative drive.

For now I have settled myself into a rut of reading often. I know that reading a lot does not make you a good writer, but I can at least direct my energy into absorbing a story and maybe learning something. If nothing else it keeps me from wasting my entire days on the mindless void of arguments and cat pictures that is the internet.

The Merits of Talking to Myself

I have been thinking about this blog lately. About what it is and what it could be and what I want it to be. My problem is that I don't really have any idea of the answer to any of those questions. It isn't really anything now; it is not a place to share information or new ideas, and it is not a place where I try to entertain people. It's not useful or fun, and if it's not either of those, then what is it?

Seems to me that it is more or less a completely self-indulgent collection of my thoughts that I post in when I want to feel like someone wants to know what I think.

I tried having a blog where the goal was to be entertaining, but I ran out of inspiration after about a month. Even then, it was a mishmash of whatever happened to come to my head. It had no cohesive theme or plan. It was just me talking about whatever I happened to want to talk about at any given time. I just tried a little harder for it to be funny. (Which I'm still not sure that it was.)

This blog was always sort of a substitute diary. I feel that, in general, the internet is really better off without those. An individual's thoughts and babblings about their day to day lives (be it me or anyone else) generally speaking, do not interest anyone. No one on the internet really wants to hear how I feel about my day at work, or my armchair psychiatric analyses of why people are the way they are.

Further to that, no one really cares about the deliberation behind what my blog should be about or how it should be presented.

From here, the question becomes whether or not I should continue writing it, knowing that no one wants to hear what I have to say. Why do I try to keep a blog? For the benefit of other people, or myself? We've already covered the fact that it's not for other people, so what benefit does it have for me?

It keeps me literate, there is that. I don't do a lot of writing nowadays, unless it is in chat or email, so some practice is a good thing. That is something that I could do in a personal journal, though. I wonder if that might be a better place for it.

Some part of me still resists the idea of curling into my shell and ceasing my broadcast of inanity altogether. Maybe I just need to feel listened to.

My Little Children's Show

After all the hype that has been happening about this stupid show, I decided to give it an honest try. I watched three whole episodes, thinking that there must be something to this show that is drawing all of these people in. Turns out that no, it is just a children’s show that has drawn an inexplicably large following of adult men from the internet.

And I like to draw while I watch television. There you have it.

I Don't Know How to Internet

I recently sorted out that I seem to use Tumblr wrong. My interpretation was that it was made for sharing original things; for blogging and sharing one's own thoughts and works. This was how I used it for a good long time. It seems that it has since mutated into some badly implemented substitution for email forwards for people who are too computer literate to get in with email forwards.

So now I am left with a blog full of my own things that I put a lot of time and effort into, that I no longer want to use at all because the community at large uses Tumblr for something else altogether, and I just look like an idiot for using it like a blog. So here I am, back with the old standby. Blogger. It has been around forever, and has never really changed. I'll share my thoughts here, and maybe if I am energetic I will make a Wordpress or something where I try to be entertaining like I did on my Tumblr. I have two choices: Stubbornly stick to my methods of posting real content to Tumblr and denying the trend of just reblogging images that make me giggle, or I can leave my Tumblr to die and be buried in images of stills from movies with quotes written on them.

Well Tumblr, it's been a lark.

A Year Later...

I've made the decision to reopen this blog. (Not that it was ever closed, really. Just inactive.) I've also decided that I am not going to worry about whether I am posting things that people need or want to read about. I am going to post what I want. If it bores you, then don't read it. I am totally okay with that. I have another blog where my goal is to amuse and entertain, and where I post very infrequently, as I am not clever often enough. Try that one if this one isn't to your liking. (It's over here.)

I haven't posted in this blog in a year. Well, a little more than a year. My last post was from December of 2010. It is now January of 2012. It has been a long, long time. A lot of things have happened over that year. 2011 was a good and exciting time to be me.

A quick summary of the year:

We lived on King St in Kitchener for the beginning of the year, in a one-bedroom flat. In February, we bought a house. In April we adopted a dog, Daisy, who came with the name Hayley, who is a constant source of craziness in the house. In May we moved into the new house; a three bedroom backsplit on the edge of town, near a swamp but backing on to a storm water pond. Not too shabby. In December (on Christmas day, to be specific,) Bryan proposed to me, and we are now engaged. Life careens on at a startling pace, as usual.

We have started the actual planning stages for the wedding now, and let me just say, even though we opted to go with what seemed like the easy way, it is a daunting task. Cuba is the plan, ideally next winter. I should know more details before the month is out, but for now I field and endless torrent of "do you have a date yet?" with a resounding "...kind of?".

Fitness Boot Camp: Day One

I got in from my first hour long session of “fitness boot camp” a couple of hours ago. Rather, what would have been an hour long if I didn’t get nauseous and start losing my vision half way in to the class. Apparently that kind of thing happens when you try to go from zero exercise ever to crazy intense hour long workouts in one go. Live and learn. To summarize my first efforts: Embarrassing, but that is to be expected.

I made the decision to go with a friend, which did help in some aspects, but just heightened the embarrassment when I had to quit because I was going blind.

Anyway, I don’t yet wish I was dead. I’ve only been resting for a couple of hours, so my muscles are still in that noodle-like stage where they just stop functioning if I ask too much of them. (Down the stairs? Those leg muscles might just abruptly stop catching you when you hit that next step.) BUT; they are not yet sore. I am actually feeling like I may not have to force myself to go to the next one. It is good for me, after all. (My mantra during this ordeal is “this is good for me.” We’ll see if it sticks.) If you asked me right now how I feel about going to another 11 of these sessions, I would say pretty good. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you ask me the same question tomorrow, I will break down and weep unreservedly.

It's Been a Hell of a Year

Wow.

Thinking back on 2011, it’s been a crazy ride. Went to Cuba. Started and gave up on a small business. Adopted a dog. Learned to hang glide. Bought a house. Went camping. Got engaged.

Don’t get me wrong, there have been challenges also, but looking back on the whole year, I’d say they are vastly dwarfed by the awesome things that went on. It seems to me that we went all of a sudden from a couple of no-longer-students to a couple of adults starting a life together. As much as that is kind of sappy, I really feel that way.

January 2011, we were still living in a flat in sketchy downtown Kitchener, living like students and not really doing much of anything. All of a sudden, things started happening like crazy, and now we’re verging on being real life adults. We have a house and a mortgage and a yard and a cat and a dog and a spare bedroom and … you know, everything. And this happened all in one year. I’m sure you can appreciate how that may be a little overwhelming.

So now, on to the next adventure, I suppose. The next arbitrarily assigned number begins, as the last one draws to a close. I’m not one to make resolutions, as I know that I always aim high and then give up early on. I won’t promise to run a marathon or lose a hundred pounds or write a novel. My plan is to do what I did the last year, and hope it turns out as well. A day at a time, one foot in front of the other.

So, happy new years to everyone, and I hope your year is always better than the last one.

Notch Versus Bethesda Throwdown!

Notch challenges Bethesda to a gaming competition in order to settle the lawsuit that they started over the name of Notch's new thing. Here is Notch's blog post about it.

I sincerely hope that this happens, since it will set an AMAZING precedent. I doubt that it will, since Bethesda is probably full of people who take themselves way too seriously and won’t back down on what the rest of the world thinks is a really stupid lawsuit.

Slacker Stir Fry

I found a single frozen chicken breast in my freezer today and decided to do some awesome slacker cooking. This is my favourite thrown-together meal, but that is because I really like Mr. Noodles. The idea was given to me by Ren over at Renegade Oboe back when we used to live together. (That’s right, we were roommates.) She did it a lot better than me though. (Mostly because she usually had more than one vegetable in the fridge.)

STEP ONE!

Fry up your protein of choice in some oil in small pieces. (If you are lucky enough to have cooked leftovers, just cut up one serving worth and throw it in a pan with oil.) I almost always use chicken because it’s easy. Ren uses tofu.

STEP TWO!

While your leftover meat is sizzling, start cooking the noodley part of your favourite single-serving ramen. (Noodle-san.)

STEP THREE!

Once your meat is cooked through, throw in bite-sized pieces of whatever vegetables you may have around. Really, pretty much anything works. This time I had nothing but red onion and snow peas. I also got really energetic and chopped up some peanuts for this one. (Honestly, this part is optional if you are a real slacker. I have had a bunch of these when my fridge was empty where my ‘stir-fry’ just amounted to meat and noodles with some sauce on them.) Stir the veggies around for a couple of minutes until their colour is a brighter version of what it was before.

STEP FOUR!

Strain your ramen and throw it in the pan with the veggies and meat. Mix it up a bit, then throw in a sauce of some kind. Whatever you like. I have made some pretty bizarre choices in the sauce department, but my best choice, (and one of the cheapest) was President’s Choice “Memories of Szechuan” spicy peanut sauce. Mix it up again.

Put it on a plate and eat it. Since I like to pretend that I am an adult, I chopped up some peanuts and put it on top of mine to make it look prettier. Looks like something that real people might eat, right?

[Tl;dr? Meat + vegetables + Mr. Noodles + sauce = stir-fry.]

Outdated!

Hello loyal readers! (By that I mean Fae and only Fae.)

As it turns out, as I have done a dozen times before, I got bored with Blogger and stopped posting. You may have noticed. After a while I got the urge to start oversharing on the internet again and, completely forgetting about my poor, ancient, neglected Blogger account, I started a Tumblr. As it turns out, I like Tumblr way better than Blogger, so I have kept up that one a little better than this one. (I said a little.) If I figure out a way to auto post to this from that I probably will, but until such time, you probably won't see any updates here!

Check out marbles24.tumblr.com instead. You'll find me there. (And I have yet to go into a long-winded description of a dream, so I am head and shoulders above the calibre of this blog already.)

Book versus Movie Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Let me get this right out in the open so that there are no illusions about my lack of bias here: I hate Michael Cera. I hate looking at him, I hate listening to him talk, and I hate the only role that he has ever played: the awkward kid that is somehow supposed to be cool or funny or something. HOWEVER. I also acknowledge the fact that the role of Scott Pilgrim was pretty much made for him.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the books. I resisted reading them for a very long time based entirely on the fact that Michael Cera plays the main character in the movie, and that must mean that I will hate everything about the main character. Who wants to read about a protagonist that they hate? (For example: Holden Caulfield.) I was eventually swayed entirely by overbearing peer pressure. Contrary to my expectations, I really liked the comics. I found them a bit disjunct, but I think that was probably intentional. I liked that the characters had some emotional depth to them, each with their own back story and the emotional baggage therewith. Each character makes some kind of personal development, and there is a greater, overarching story line that is not really ever made completely clear until the very end. All of these things I thought were really great, in the comic.

You’ll notice that each of the things I thought were great in the comic were the things that were unceremoniously ripped out of the movie.

I was encouraged at first when the opening scenes were taken word for word from the beginning of the comic. I thought that the style of the movie in general was really true to the comic, but the story seems to have got a disfiguring face-lift. Every relationship between characters became a little simpler so that they could justify cutting out interactions. (For the sake of brevity, I imagine.) As a result, the whole story got much less complicated, and much shallower. The entire side-plot about Envy was pretty much dissolved. The band-mate with the cyborg arm? She got less than one second of screen time.

Don’t get me wrong. The movie was still entertaining. People like it. If it weren’t for my irrational hatred of Michael Cera, I might even be willing to say that I enjoyed it. My problem is that they took a good story, with at least somewhat three dimensional characters who develop, and dumbed it down into a simple, whimsical action movie. I guess I am just disappointed because the movie is kind of dumber than I was led to believe.

[Edit: I sort of truncated this post because I felt it was getting kind of babble-y, and I wasn’t sure if the internet world really needed my detailed and specific opinions on the subject. Since I have been told by a couple of people that this seems like it was going somewhere and then didn’t, I guess I will go into the detail that I intended to go into originally at some point in the future. There will be a link later.]

Chronicles of Camping (In Which I Kick Sand in the Face of Danger)

This year, I found myself thinking that I hadn’t been camping in a very long time, and that I might like to go. Tragically, I had this thought some time in the middle of August, and drastically underestimated the amount of people that enjoy reserving camp sites in the middle of September. I say ‘reserving camp sites’ rather than ‘camping’ because I can only assume, based on the number of reserved sites in the month of September (many) compared to the amount of actual live people at the campground (none), that people are getting their kicks from sitting at home on their computers and making campground reservations for the sheer thrill. As a result, Bryan and I got pigeon-holed into camping at the end of September. (This conveniently coincided with the week of his birthday so that I can pretend that we went camping for his birthday and not feel bad for not doing anything special even though he doesn’t really like camping.)

That is not to say that the camping trip was bad. It wasn’t. It was a great trip and, considering that it took place in the middle of the fall, could hardly have gone better. We were largely prepared for the cold weather, which surprised us by being balmy and beautiful (for September), and we didn’t expect to be able to swim or tan or anything like that, so we weren’t disappointed. The thing that I didn’t take into account was the fact that the last time I was camping I was literally responsible for absolutely nothing. I had no say in, nor responsibility for any of the organizational aspects of the trips. My parents ran the whole show, and I was pretty much completely oblivious as to all the finer details of camping. After hitting this realization like an electric fence, I asked my wonderful mom for some helpful advice. She proceeded to tell me things that I am sure seasoned campers will take for granted as common sense that I had not even begun to think of. For example, freeze things before you go. Don’t just put kind of chilled food in a cooler and expect it to keep. Keep your cooler under the bench of a picnic table so that animals can’t get into it. (That one I found to be particularly ingenious.)

Speaking of animals, since the park that we were able to scrounge up a reservation at was located on a tiny, sandy peninsula in lake Erie, one side of it was nothing but a great big beach, and the other side was nothing but a giant squishy marsh, with a bit of solid land in the middle to set up tents on. (Our campsite was on the beachy side, so the ground cover on the whole site was sand.) As a result there is a distinct lack of wildlife at this park aside from snakes, toads and seagulls, which we saw in abundance. Other than that we encountered approximately two animals. (Approximately.) One was a very tiny black turtle that I rescued from the middle of the deserted road and didn’t think to take a picture of. The other was a furry mammal of some kind that thought it would like whatever was in our garbage bag. (This goes back to another piece of what I suspect is camping common sense: Take out your trash every night. Or at least put it in the trunk.) Bryan and I were sitting around the fire on our second (or maybe third - I really don’t recall) night there, and there was a snuffling sound around the picnic table. I got up to investigate, forgetting that the animals of a provincial park are so acclimatized to humans that just walking near them is not enough to make them go away. I walked over to the picnic table, mostly blind as I didn’t think to bring a light, and thought to myself “What did I think I was going to do about this? I walked over here like I had some kind of purpose, and since my mere presence isn’t enough to scare it away, I guess I have to do something.” Except this whole thought process took place in about 0.4 seconds, so really it was something like “Oh-gawd-it’s-not-leaving-and-I-can’t-see-whatdoIdo?” KICK. My reflexive reaction was to kick sand at the beastie in hopes that it would go away. Immediately following this decision I realized that it was pretty stupid, thinking that it could be an angry porcupine at worst, or a particularly brave raccoon at best. To my great relief, rather than shooting quills at me or jumping on my face and maiming me, the animal trundled off and hid under the car for the next several hours. As it waddled away, I was still almost entirely blind, so I took the opportunity to check the animal out a little. All I could tell was that it was very light in colour, and I didn’t really think anything of it until I reached forward to pick up the garbage bag that it had been rooting through. Then I noticed the smell. I then ran away and hid behind the tent, babbling a little bit. Bryan was suitably confused, and I had to explain to him that “I just kicked sand in a skunk’s face.” He laughed at me and I came out from behind the tent and disposed of the garbage (armed with a lantern this time) and then we sat by the fire some more. So, like most of my stories, the end is a bit anticlimactic: “And then it ran away.” I didn’t get sprayed, and it didn’t come back, and I didn’t chase it down with a stick or anything, but it is the most interesting of my non-mushy camping stories, so there you have it. I kicked sand at a skunk and lived.