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  • Movies i have seen countless times growing up

    actually, seen/heard/overheard since we often put on a well-known movie as
    background noise and did not sit and watch it…
    also, a couple of these are due to my growing up in something of an in-home
    daycare, being surrounded by a half dozen kids at all times and sometimes as
    many as a full dozen, and everyone’s name went on a list and, when their name
    came up, they got to select what will be on the tv next (not that they usually
    spent much time sitting quietly in front of it)…

    i know i am still missing a few off this list, maybe quite a few, but, this is
    something i was mentioning to someone the other day and wanted to put this
    list up, even if it is not totally compete…
    i still know most of these movies by heart, could probably quote most of them
    beginning to end, and the images and sounds are an indelible part of my
    subconscious to this day… (darth vader is still in my nightmares to this
    day!)

    growing up in a house of hardcore movie interest is an interesting
    experience… in our house, movie quotes were almost non-stop, life was
    constantly compared to movies… in fact, the staff noticed this when i was
    at the hospital with my parents… mom said to one nurse something to the
    effect of “we are a movie family. we use them to teach lessons of life.” by
    which she means, for instance, i was talking about how magnolia inspired me,
    both phil parma and the change t.j. mackey made in his attitude toward his
    father were things going through my mind non-stop in the hospital… they
    were the inspiration that helped me to keep a better frame of mind through it
    all… so, if i want to explain to my mom how i saw my responsibility in that
    situation, she would have to watch magnolia…
    in fact, my mom’s online handle, for as long as i can remember, is “Ripley”,
    the heroine of Alien… and i am sure she would relate ripley as the
    embodiment of a strong woman…

    my childhood heros were not historical figures or otherwise “real” people,
    they were movie characters…

    but now, i am straying way off the topic of this post…
    back to the list…

    btw, very important…
    THIS IS *NOT* A LIST OF MY FAVORITE MOVIES…
    more than a few of them are movies i cannot stand today…
    these are also in no order, except maybe the order in which i thought of
    them…
    i would also add that it is best to take most of what i said above as not
    relating much to the list… most of the “background movies” around the house
    were not the deep ones, those demanded too much attention…

    and now, a partial list of movies i saw/heard/overheard COUNTLESS times
    growing up…

    close encounters of the third kind (special edition)

    btw, ce3k reigns supreme TO THIS DAY as the one i have seen/heard/overheard
    more than any other…

    better off dead
    ghostbusters
    star trek 1-4
    star wars
    caddyshack
    vacation
    2010
    aliens
    raiders of the lost ark
    murder by death
    wargames
    secret of nimh
    spaceballs
    time after time
    the money pit
    spaceship
    pete’s dragon
    cloak and dagger
    romancing the stone
    fletch

  • 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…

  • 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”…

  • 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…” 😀 !)

  • wow, handheld web…

    [moved from my LiveJournal]

    Current Mood: nerdy
    Current Music: the keyclick (and screenclick) of my palmtop

    so, here am i, posting to my livejournal, via my new Psion 5…
    so far, this browser is not near as bad as i expected… and i am d/l’ing opera in the near future :)…

    screenshots will be posted eventually…

  • more than 310 laserdiscs now

    [moved from my LiveJournal, with some link fixes….]

    well, all the half-price books stores are having their 20% off sale, so, we hit a couple in fort worth and grabbed a few new LaserDiscs, including some of the first Criterions, all movies we care nothing about (39 Steps, The Magnificent Ambersons, High Noon, and The Third Man), but, they were only like $6 a piece and in pretty good shape…
    at this point, we have mostly what we want on laser now, except a few rare ones, so, there is rarely any stuff that makes us say ‘wow’…

    our collection looks a little something like this…

    and that is before the new ones, which are about 15 or so… (our favorites are on the shelf, the rest are on the floor until we get some new shelves :P)

    so, this latest buy brings our LaserDisc Database total to 310, and there are 10 or more that have no listing there yet, so, we need to submit the entries…
    our database we keep on our Psion palmtops tracks our DVDs and LDs and it says we now have 404… sooner or later, i will put that db on the web…
    we used to keep pages where we listed all our DVDs and LDs, but, when the inheritence came, we started buying them so fast it was work to keep them updated…

    in other news, i am reading Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold and it is pretty amazing so far… i was with it word-by-word up until the 12th chapter where you build a binary calculator in your head… but, i am going to back up and come at it a bit slower (no pun intended), must have not grasped all the prerequisite knowledge or something…

    anyway, damn fascinating so far…

  • leeeeeeet laserness

    [moved from my LiveJournal (with some link fixes), where there is also a comment to this post that i did not move to here…]

    Current Mood: satisfied
    Current Music: some weird version of “god rest ye merry gentlemen”

    behold the Pioneer Elite CLD-97 Reference LaserDisc Player…

    it actually says “reference” on it, how cool is that… (not that you can see it in these pics…)

    got it at Marvin’s Electronics in Fort Worth for $270 after tax, which is a damn good price… (btw, the guy showed me the bluebook and it is $288, so, even when not comparing to ebay prices, it is a nice deal…)

    we tried parts from our DTS Toy Story, CAV Toy Story, THX Wow Disc, The Stand, and our anamorphic The Fugitive, and then we watched It’s A Wonderful Life, and so far we are extremely impressed… obviously, we wish it had AC-3 out but we are leaving our Yamaha CDV-W901 (Pioneer D503 clone) in the system and it does have it… this elite may now be our favorite player… the D704 goes over to miss mary’s corner, and that leaves our pioneer 980, our D503, both unused and another D503 at my parent’s house…

    our only other complaint with the 97 is how it displays a frame during side flip and that sucks… if there is a way to disable that, i wish we would find it…
    for another point on the good side, we finally get to use the 704 remote we love, we never use the 704, but, prefer the remote to any other…

    so, it looks like today is movie-watching day, we picked up A Christmas Story the same day we got the It’s A Wonderful Life, a couple nice LD finds for xmas…

    so, anyway, merry christmas to us!

  • first test

    [moved from my LiveJournal]

    Current Mood: indescribable
    Current Music: KVIL

    well, when i posted a comment at sam’s livejournal, it gave me an option to start an account, so, uh, i did… may use it, may not… miss mary would probably love one to play with…

    hmm, no choice of “insidious” for the current mood…