Mirrormask...

I have to say I'm quite lucky in that I have the hardware available to have a movie running while I code away here at work. My laptop has a DVD drive and I have an external monitor so I run VStudio (C# projects mostly as of late) on the external monitor and the move on the laptop LCD. Pop in some headphones and I can work and watch at the same time.

My boss seems ok with it, since I'm never really idle for more than a few minutes at a time and I don't tend to let the movie take over my work. As of late it has been slow (I would like to think Skinner and I have fixed 90% of the major PC bugs), so nothing I'm working on has anything beyond the lowest priority. As such, I tend to have a movie (or two) playing during the day.

Also, there is a coworker who moonlights as a movie rental employee just so he can get free rentals and DVDs a week before the new movies are released on the market. So he "rents" the movies from work and brings them up here when he's done but before he returns them. I grab one or two and watch them during the day. It's a pretty awesome situation. He also takes request for obscure movies or oldies if his rental store has a copy.

So the point of all this, besides to say that being a code janitor can sometimes be slow and I get to watch movies I didn't see in theaters or own already, is that I had a chance to watch the movie Mirromask. I was told that if I liked the 1986 movie Labyrinth with David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly, I would find Mirrormask enjoyable. While the story itself was nothing special, the old "child comes of age" bit, the visual style was very unique and artistic in my opinion. It definitely shows the Jim Henson flare (did I mention the movie was a Henson production?). At any rate, I enjoyed watching the film and seeing the world in presented. I don't expect it to be nominated for Film of the Year or anything it would be nice to see a nomination in the Best Art Direction or maybe an honorable mention. I also thought the soundtrack fit well with the visual style. All in all, for the price I paid to see it, I think I can easily say it was WELL worth the price of admission.

Celebrating a friend.....

I find it strange how much the weather seems (if not actually is) different up here. I'm 250 miles north of the latitude I'm used to. During the summer I was hoping that the humidity would be drastically less, which it's not. It could be classified as slightly less. During the winter, though, it seems the humidity can be called drastically less.

As a result of low humidity, I've noticed some dry skin areas on my knuckles and elbows. Nothing unsightly, I'm just afraid that if I don't take measures to remedy the situation, then I'll end up like the black knight in Holy Grail and suffer a flesh wound. So, it seems I need to purchase some skin lotion.

Now I despise skin lotion, there's a few people at work that use MASSIVE amounts of skin lotion and it smells like six month old bacon wrapped around a head of cauliflower with two and a half teaspoons of spicy Italian sauted on the salt flats of Utah. It makes me sick. So what's a guy gunna do?

So I took a few minutes (well...ok...hours) this afternoon to ponder this very delima. And low and behold the clouds split open and a sliver of light shone down from the heavens, the angels sang ("The Red" by Chevelle of course), the world was still, peace entered man's heart if only for a brief moment and it came to me.......


It's the Norwegian Formula.........how the hell am I supposed to ignore that kind of sign!! I mean come on! Created by the people who share the honors of happiest place to live on earth as well as the most expensive place to live on earth.......have you ever known a Norwegian to do you any wrong? F'n A, Cotton! F'n A!

Game Dev Blogs.....

I've added a section of links for game dev blogs...so those of you who like to read my blog (all 1 of you) by RSS feed, be sure to hit the actual webpage and browse the links.