Just another WordPress site

Author: insidious_plots

  • Desert Island

    [moved from my LiveJournal]

    Current Mood: amused
    Current Music: Space Channel 5 Remix Soundtrack

    i read this one long, long ago and tought it was perfect, and i was relating it to the folks a little while back, so, just had to get the full text for any and all to see…

    stop me if you’ve heard this one…

    Ed finally decides to take a vacation. He books himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeds to have the time of his life –until the boat sank. He found himself swept up on the shore of an island with no other people, no supplies…nothing… only bananas and coconuts.

    After about four months, he is lying on the beach one day when the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen rows up to him. In disbelief, he asks her, “Where did you come from? How did you get here?”

    “I rowed from the other side of the island,” she says. “I landed here when my cruise ship sank.”

    “Amazing,’ he says. “You were really lucky to have a rowboat wash up with you.”

    “Oh, this?’ replies the woman. “I made the rowboat out of raw material I found on the island. The oars were whittled from gum tree branches. I wove the bottom from palm branches. And the sides and stern came from a Eucalyptus tree.”

    “But, but, that’s impossible,’ stutters Ed. “You had no tools or hardware. How did you manage?”

    “Oh, that was no problem,” replies the woman. “On the south side of the island, there is a very unusual strata of alluvial rock exposed. I found if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into forgeable ductile iron. I used that for tools and used the tools to make the hardware.” Ed is stunned. “Let’s row over to my place,” she says.

    After a few minutes of rowing, she docks the boat at a small wharf. As Ed looks onto shore, he nearly falls out of the boat. Before him is a stone walk leading to an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white. While the woman ties up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, he could only stare ahead, dumb struck. As they walk into the house, she says casually, “It’s not much, but I call it home. Sit down please. Would you like to have a drink?”

    “No, no, thank you.’ he says, still dazed. “Can’t take any more coconut juice.” “It’s not coconut juice,” the woman replies. “How about a Pina Colada?”

    Trying to hide his continued amazement, he accepts, and they sit down on her couch to talk. After they have exchanged their stories, the woman announces,
    “I’m going to slip into something more comfortable. Would you like to take a shower and shave? There is a razor upstairs in the cabinet in the bathroom.”

    No longer questioning anything, Ed goes into the bathroom. There, in the cabinet, is a razor made from a bone handle. Two shells honed to a hollow ground edge are fastened on to its end inside of a swivel mechanism. “Wow! This woman is amazing!” he muses, “What next?”

    When he returns, she greets him wearing nothing but vines, strategically positioned, and smelling faintly of gardenias. She beckons for him to sit down next to her.
    “Tell me,” she begins suggestively, slithering closer to him, “We’ve been out here for a really long time. You’ve been lonely. There’s something I’m sure you really feel like doing right now, something you’ve been longing for all these months. You know…” She stares into his eyes.

    He can’t believe what he’s hearing:
    “You mean—“, he swallows excitedly, “I can check my email?!”

  • CHUD.com’s 100 Movies That Deserve More Love

    [moved from my LiveJournal]

    CHUD.com (Cinematic Happenings Under Development) brings us 100 Movies That Deserve More Love and there are some interesting ones…
    we own several of them and i agree with much of what they say… most of them are not on “the shelf” (eg, our shelf o’ favorite movies), but, here is what we have from the list and lots of comments…

    5. In The Mouth of Madness
    dunno’… haven’t been too fond of john carpenter, but, we came across a very cool-looking special edition laserdisc, so, we got it and haven’t watched it…

    7. The Arrival
    meh… saw it once on cable, it didn’t suck TOO bad, saw it on laser for $4 and took it… haven’t watched it yet, either…

    8. Time After Time
    hey, nicholas myer… as much as i love The Wrath of Khan (and the commentary by nick myer) and what he did for star trek as a whole, i will own any of his stuff… this one is a staple of my childhood, seen it dozens of times, we watched it recently so she could see it and i was not as impressed, but we had just watched the entire back to the future trilogy, so, we continued the time-travel theme…

    10. Gattaca
    love it… it IS on our shelf… may get the superbit dvd eventually, but, the beautiful ld is fine for now…

    15. Space Truckers
    no, don’t own it, but, i wanted to point out that this movie has a billboard for a Psion 3 in it!

    17. Contact
    philosophically hollow (dumb, one might say), but, a great movie… one of the best looking laserdiscs ever, we have the dvd with all the commentaries on it, but, prefer the ld, which IS on the shelf…

    19. Frequency
    what a movie! we have the dvd… we rented this, can’t remember why, and loved almost every minute of it… another great time-related sci-fi… if we had the lasrdisc, it would be on the shelf…
    (anyone else notice the movie divided into three parts, each with slo-mo shot of an object falling?)

    20. Alien 3
    own it, somewhere over there in “the pile” (the 300 or so laserdiscs that are not worthy of being on “the shelf”), watched it once, may never again… not horrible, but, in no hurry to see it again…

    41. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
    ugh… a few cool things, sure, but, it is only on the shelf to not break up the set… either of the other two are far superior…

    48. LA Story
    love this movie, love this movie, love this movie… as a romantic love story, it really works… the walk through the garden thingy, the way she is stopped from leaving… and, yeah, if you lived in l.a., you get a lot more of the jokes… personally, i come for the romance stuff… never got the laser, we have the dvd for the commentary… and i agree with what they say in the article, it is sort of the last of “classic martin”…

    56. The Money Pit
    don’t own it (grrrr), but, undoubtedly in need of more love… another from my childhood, seen it literally hundreds of times… not as many times as CE3K, star wars, or 2010, but, a lot…

    65. The Mosquito Coast
    oh, what a movie… it IS on the shelf… you want so bad for this guy to be right, you believe in him and his put-what-you-believe-into-practice determination and energy, yet, we watch him become obsessive and do one dumb thing after another, applying good ideas in bad ways… for this movie i say see also fight club…
    (and, of course, river pheonix plays son of harrison ford and later plays a young indy in last crusade… i think he was perfect in both roles…)

    66. Ed Wood
    another great… also on the shelf… they call it “Tim Burton’s love poem to a kindred spirit” and i agree… not laugh-out-loud funny not, mind-bendingly weird, just being told about a person that another person admires… and, who would have thought martin landau could do such an acting job? same thing i say of jason robards in Magnolia (currently my favorite film i have ever seen)…

    71. Jackie Brown
    well, we have a great laser of it (in the pile, not on the shelf with reservoir dogs and our FOUR ld sets of pulp fiction)… and A LOT of it really works… but… a lot of it does not work… like ed wood, we are being shown what a great person the title character is, but, i just don’t see it… take the title character out and i will love this movie, i think…

    75. Clean and Sober
    got it, in the pile, never watched it, but, all for any addiciton movie, so, we will get to it sooner or later…

    78. Point Break
    in the pile… jumping “out of a perfectly good airplane”, the skydiving photography, patrick swayze actually doing some impressive freefall stuff, keanu jumping out without a parachute, confident he will get his man or die trying… all reminds me of that tbs series “movies for guys who like movies”… take out the skydiving and i doubt i would care much about this one…

    82. Testament
    HELL YEAH! embarassingly, all we own is the vhs and i have no idea where it went… when we heard a lot about Requiem For a Dream, everyone said it left them depressed, or at least strongly affected, for weeks afterword…
    hogwash!
    Testament will leave you affected for weeks, maybe forever… what a depressing movie… and i agree with every word they say about it in the article…
    i showed this movie to quite a long time ago and she has never quite forgiven me… she still tears up just talking about it…

    93. Pump Up the Volume
    eek… in the pile… she wanted it…
    but, it is allegedly about radio and i am a radio addict, so, maybe i will like something about it, should i ever watch it… but, i doubt it…
    and i can’t stand christian slater… he was the worst thing about true romance, for instance…

    97. A Life Less Ordinary
    damn, don’t own it, but, i really want to see it…

    98. The Hudsucker Proxy
    damn right! got a beautiful laser of it on the shelf… love this movie, more brilliant coen stuff…

    99. Breakdown
    on the pile… want to see it… will eventually…

    and, btw, i noticed that, mostly, if it is not listed above, we have not even seen it (not even me!), so, we may have a look at a few…

    i am not going to spend much time thinking about it for this post, but, if i were to add to the list of movies that need more love…

    Friday
    i hate to admit it in public without hours to justify and debate it…
    firstly, i like any movie that starts at the beginning of a day and ends at the end of a day (cf. Oscar and Murder by Death), but, i think there were great characters in this movie… it is all about the characters in this one… when ice cube pulls that trigger, ANYONE with a heart should have cringed… and, in that moment, realize that you actually CARE about these people… maybe you weren’t enjoying the movie, but, you found you CARED more than you realized…
    no, not a great movie, but, the characters are very memorable and mostly easy to believe in and therefore care about…
    bleh, anyway… just flame me and get it over with…

    The Stand
    yes, the made-for-tv mini-series of the stephen king book… i thought the casting was nearly brilliant, the pacing was pretty damn good, considering the length of the source material (the “don’t dream it’s over” scene came way too early in the movie), i just love this movie… we have the big ld set (with lobby cards) on the shelf, and the dvd…

    Spaceship
    sci-fi parody extraordinaire…

    and i have to add…

    Star Wars, Episode II, Attack of the Clones
    all you up-with-ep1-and-down-with-ep2 people are messed up in the head or something… (or are too young to know good star wars from bad…) and i cannot believe how many people hated hayden whatsizname as anakin!
    watch the “i killed them! i killed them all!” scene a few times and tell me he can’t act!
    watch the scene where anakin describes his idea for government and the last scene with the empire now birthed and tell me this one isn’t better at foreshadowing the original trilogy than ep1!
    (erm, just don’t watch the scene with r2d2 flying and c3po going for his wild ride… it was the low point of the movie…)
    this is a noble movie and a worthy addition to “the holy trilogy” and i hope ep3 has more in common with it than with ep1 or return of the jedi, with all the comedy attempts and cutesy stuff…
    this movie undoubtedly needs more love!
    (now if only there was a laserdisc of it to go alongside the ep1 laser!)

    meh, if i try to think of any more, i will be over there, looking through titles and i will come up with 20 of ’em, so, i will leave it at that…

  • apartment progress report

    [moved from my LiveJournal]

    well, most of the stuff has been situated, a few things still need to be tackled and then the decorating… this place is so big, we seem to not have enough stuff to fill it… last night, we put up the movie posters, but, i took a few pics before we did that to show the layout of the living room…

    check out the pics…


    we are going with all of it sort of wrapping around the room… i also left about a foot and a half behind the shelves to have access to all the cables and such…


    on the right is most of our laserdiscs and all our movie books… center is components, console software, and our favorite laserdiscs on the bottom shelf, like we had it before… the left is all other stuff, like dvd’s, movie soundtrack cd’s, some audio stuff like audiobooks and “audio theater” stuff, game magazines, and more… speaker stands on either side, subwoofer on the floor between the main center and the “various media shelf” over there…


    so, the shelf with all the media and print stuff on it… it has two sides… from the back, it is the big collection of hand-labelled, hand-recorded stuff on vhs, like nasa tv, court tv, and audio-on-video stuff like art bell… we own almost no original vhs (yuck!), but, the couple things we have (like our freaks and geeks emmy submission tape) are on the front side of the shelf…


    above the tv there are the ps2 games… in the background, you can see the other bookshelf (for non-media-related print stuff) and the beginnings of her new corner…


    and finally, all our movie posters needing to go up… we found places for them all, but, that is another batch of pics… and we like to keep those photos subdirectories at 30 pics or so and /2004-march is around there, so, we will probably wait until the /2004-april subdir is started to post more…

  • wtf, google!?

    [moved from my LiveJournal]

    Current Mood: irritated
    Current Music: Close Encounters of the Third Kind Collector’s Edition Soundtrack

    i just don’t get google sometimes…

    http://www.google.com/search?q=insidious_plots

    our new domain name never appears in the results, though, i CAN find a cached version of it…
    hmmm, well, i went to get a link and now it seems google does NOT have a cached version… though, oddly enough, it has a copy of our CURRENT hp on our new domain, yet google says it is a copy of our our PREVIOUS address on earthlink… right page, wrong address… timelines and dates have not been clear in my head lately, but, i know for a fact that it is the new page from the new host at the new name because of a couple clues… for instance, the photos link goes to “/photos…”, not “/media/photos…”, which we changed when we moved to the new host…

    weird things aside, i don’t get why our new domain name is not showing up… i guess it is a page rank thing, and the site is new… and, btw, my logs say googlebot has been there…
    blah…

  • back home in abq

    [moved from my LiveJournal]

    Current Mood: drained
    Current Music: Punch-Drunk Love soundtrack

    and the few pics i snapped while there are now online…
    http://insidiousplots.com/photos/2004-march and i used a “gcrmc” prefix on all the filenames that are pics i took while there…

    the only thing i will bother to explain in the pics, atm, is the ones taken of the three of us, seven days after the hospital… the objects we are holding up are radios they use around the house, especially for emergencies… long story, i suppose, but, it makes you sort of an integrated, hard-wired part of the household to have one…

    i plan to eventually post some notes about it all and excerpts from emails and messages exchanged during the time…

  • wow, an heirloom

    [moved from my LiveJournal]

    after all that has been going on, my mom, dad, and i had a long talk last night telling him all we did during his hospital time, he does not remember anything but the the last couple days of it all… we have had a bonding experience that i could not begin to explain or describe, so, i will not bother… check miss mary’s lj for some of it… maybe when it is all over, i will post excerpts from emails that i sent and received during it all…
    so, anyway, this morning, my dad said it was time to give me something he had planned for years to give me, but, had never told me about it… it is his father’s wedding ring… his father gave it to him and now he is giving it to me… i said i felt bad because it seemed more logical to give it to my brother, jeff, because he has a son to pass it to, since i plan to never to have kids, but, he said he wanted me, the first-born son, to have it…
    i am floored… i don’t know yet what i will do with it… obviously, my wedding ring is totalled and i want another, but, it is not the same and, more practically, it does not fit my wedding ring finger anyway… apparently my grandfather had larger hands than me, it only fits on my largest finger, my right middle finger…

    not every day you get an heirloom, and i am very thankful he gave it to me… the three of us have been through a lot recently and i am very moved to know that he sees all this that has gone on as so important as to decide this was a time to give me something he was waiting on the right time for for thirty years…

    an experience i will never be able to fully relate… reminds me of two lines… tom hanks in ‘saving private ryan’, about how he doesn’t know how he will ever tell his wife “days like today” and the american beauty line, “you have no idea what i am talking about, but don’t worry; you will”…

    hopefully, everyone is involved enough in their family, at some point or another, to experience something like this…

    i could probably come up with something more meaningful to say, but, i have had two drinks and i don’t drink, so, they went straight to my head, so, i will leave it at that…

  • moving day

    [moved from my LiveJournal]

    well, here in a bit, we go pick up the truck… as luck would have, all the nice weather terminated today and it is raining…

    pretty much everything is packed and ready to go, a first for us, we usually just shovel it in as is or pack as we load… miss mary has turned out to be a little workhorse, packing up the whole kitchen and even cleaning it rather well, running and getting boxes, she is outdoing me… until loading time, i guess… we bought good boxes for the laserdisc players (5 of them!), mummified the players in bubble wrap, and surrounded them with styrofoam peanuts… the drawing stack has been divide up into two brand new boxes, we will see if this work out any better (but, they are weak boxes)… we are laying blankets and taking the 8 feet of laserdiscs loose rather than pack them in boxes… they would be too heavy to carry down these four flights of stairs… the ugly couch and coffee table will be a major bitch for just the two of us, tv won’t be fun…
    and the real bitch is going to be apt shopping whe we get there, especially since we are picky…

    and, btw, the damn truck is like 700 bucks (!!!!), no tape/cd, and a 10 to 16 hour drive or so, depending on which way we go…

    this is not fun and doesn’t feel all that exciting yet…
    what happened?
    i used to love moving…
    i guess i had a lot less stuff and didn’t care where i lived as much…

    btw, we spent a few bucks and had some contact cards made to hand out… just plain business cards that say “http://insidiousplots.com“… since i love the “never have to say good-bye” aspect of being online, i have been handing it, using a line like “if you ever want to find me, this is where i’ll be”…

  • bozo porno circus mystery

    [moved from my LiveJournal]

    i don’t get it…

    for a few weeks now, we are gettting all these hits to our Bozo Porno Circus pics (mostly via GIS, it seems)…
    we were in a club one night almost a year ago, april 2003, and a few people said we should stick around and check out their show and we did and, being an unusual show, we took 20 or so pics and suddenly the pics we took are famous or something… and the hits are all coming from europe and other places outside america, and have been coming steadily, though it is slowing a bit now… how did such a small act suddenly get so popular worldwide?
    see, i don’t see how it could just be that, the hits are from too many different places…
    so, i am mystified…

  • pics of my psion 5

    [moved from my LiveJournal]

    miss mary has been enjoying the hell out of the icq client for my 5, so, i took some pics of it…

    behold the 5…
    connected via a honda rs-232 in the back to a psion-made pcmcia card adaptor, with a 56k card modem… it all runs on batts, but, the white wires you can see are because it is on power supply atm… and she has it all sitting on a tape case (and a white sheet of paper to make it all show up better)…



    (note the forgotten dc in the background… chab? what’s that?)


    at this point i might note that i changed out all the sound files on the icq client so that it now uses sounds from ch@b! since the psion does digital recording, i just worked at it until they all were right and they sound great…
    these pics have be posted in the usual place…

  • we have been online three years today

    [moved from my LiveJournal]

    here is the latest version of the same post i have made the last two years on this day…

    on this day, three years ago, we went online with our dreamcast and little junky planetweb 2.6 browser on the feb ’01 ODCM demo disk for the first time…

    of course now it is 2 online dc’s and japanese browsers and our Psions are also online, of course…

    unlike probably most people, we actually have a videotape of our first time logging onto the web… we just let the tape roll… really fascinating to see yourself klutz around the web for the very first time…

    for the record, first site we went to… google

    we have our first irc chat on tape, our first time in an online game (PSO) and several other firsts, like when we signed up for hotmail and could not use a space in “insidious plots”, which led to the handle being the way it is to this day: insidious underscore plots…

    heh, weird little collection… but, interesting to look back on from 3 years later…

    sort of like our own little wayback machine…

    (when i fast scan forward on the tape it makes me think “so… this is what broadband would look like…” 😀 !)