pres.umptuo.us

Ta-Da!

Introductions Are In Order…

It finally set upon me that calling the site “Boredom” and having the web address be valloq.com wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. At first I was gonna grab www.riclim.com and make my site into e.riclim.com, but being able to have the entire url spell out the site name is so much cooler.

You’d be amazed at how many .us domains are taken — www.icio.us (by del.icio.us, of course), www.aculo.us (by script.aculo.us), and practically all the good ones are gone. I lucked upon www.umptuo.us when I tried searching for s.umptuo.us and almost settled for that, but pres.umptuo.us is such a sweeter name.

So here we are, a brand new name, brand new address, but the same ol’ content.

I Can Use Photoshop

I’m hoping everyone finds this new design a lot more pleasing. The old boredom look was just feeling too spaced out and unorganized. Working at a design firm for the past year has really helped me in understanding the basics behind design. Everything is pretty close to final now from what you’re seeing, although I imagine I’ll tweak it here and there, and if anyone sees something that’s off, please let me know.

Yes, They’re Coming Back

I know, everyone wants the babes back. They’ll be back soon. When? I don’t know…the launch of pres.umptuo.us took me about a month, so I’d expect the same amount of time for the babes to be back. And yes, they’ll have a new name as well.

I always keep my chewing gum wrappers. Call me anal if you want, but I don’t like throwing my gum away knowing that it’ll get stuck on something and create a big mess, even if it doesn’t involve me.

The problem comes with chewing gum that isn’t individually packaged, for instance the Dentyne Ice products, which instead have a tray with each piece of gum in its own little bubble which you then pop out.

Continue reading “Maybe If I Only Rip A Corner…”

I didn’t bother to explain it before, but “Unrestrained” entries are basically me babbling about random stuff. It’ll usually be things that don’t take longer than one sentence to say and thus don’t warrant an entire entry, along with any random thoughts or rants that I just want to get out.

Am I the only person who wants to see King Kong?

After shelling out $10-$14 for lunch the past few days, I miss the $4 meals I had in China.

This time of the year is great if only because of Pumpkin Pie.

The best quote from Thanksgiving came from Jennie while debating whether or not to go for seconds: “What the hell. Life is short. Eat it up.” That was certainly a life-changing decision.

This post at being jennifer garrett made my day. I feel like a mini-celeb. In the sense that people I don’t know are talking about me so I’m almost like a celebrity, not in the sense that I’m like a midget and a celebrity and hence mini-celeb. Anyway, it looks like one of her readers even wants to marry me. This is awesome, I’ve managed to skip steps 1-10 in developing a relationship and gone straight to the proposal stage. I’ll remember to write this down in my book about the advantages of keeping a blog:

Advantage #314: Allows you to skip all the awkwardness and pain and affection and hot steamy sex of a relationship and go straight to picking out wallpaper and flooring at Home Depot.

I derive pleasure in my daily commute from exacting revenge on slow drivers. Particularly the ones that hold up traffic and show no regard at all as to what they’re doing by slowing down traffic.

Since my favored technique of crossing the dotted line into their lane has no real indication as to whether it’s bothering the slow driver or not, I’ve taken up a new tactic: driving even slower than they are driving.

Continue reading “Road Rage Techniques”

I’m disturbed by all the teenagers walking around with their white iPod earbuds on. It bugs me cause they’re obviously trying to draw attention to the fact that they own an iPod.

It bugs me even more that they feel the need to walk around town with music blaring in their ears. While they hang out with their friends. Good communication skills there, buddy. I hope someone mugs you.

I’m sick of people who buy expensive cell phones just for vanity reasons. Quit lying to yourself about needing one that plays music and surfs the web; nobody uses a cell phone for that. In fact, I just can’t believe the people who actually pay for a cell phone; Cell phones come free with the yearly contracts.

We know you bought the $300 phone to make yourself feel better and like you actually mean something in the world. I’m deeply sorry that you couldn’t afford the Mercedes to let the world know in that way. I guess the fancy phone will do for now.

I think I’m just fed up with capitalism.

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as deleting Smash Mouth from your music collection.

I started looking at the list of winners for the Emmys, and then realized I didn’t care.

After two days (It’s only been two?) of indecision, I’ve staved off the lure of the iPod nano and won out against the temptation of an impulse buy. I let my logic and rational thought do its talking, and realized there’s no real point in me getting a nano at this time. My 15 gig iPod still works just fine, and it’d be best to just wait it out and get a nano later on when it gets updated. With more storage space. And colors. And coolness.

And so instead I donated to the Red Cross Hurrican Relief. Not a whole $250, mind you, but a generous amount for me. Normally I’m someone who doesn’t believe in donating, and would much rather have preferred to do something that actually counted, like loaded up supplies or helped pass out food to the survivors, but this will have to do for now.

I might not have the newest, hottest fad, but at least my conscience feels a lot better.

Step two of my plan to make the world a better place.

This is going to be filled with spoilers, so don’t click below if you haven’t seen the movie yet.

Where to begin? I’m just gonna launch into it and hope my thoughts make sense.

Grievous. He is taken out far too easily. Trained in the ways of the Jedi? Not too well trained, apparently. This is even more true for people who have seen the Clone Wars cartoons, but I won’t cite them cause that’s being a bit unfair. But really, without the context Grievous is never seen as a real threat. I’d go more into how he served almost no purpose at all in the movie, but let’s move on.

Padme’s death during labor. As I recall from Return of the Jedi, Luke asks Leia if she remembers anything about her mother, her real mother, and Leia says she does and gives him some vague memories. But nope, according to Lucas, who decided to ignore this, her memories were false.

Vader’s yell. No explanation needed on this one.

The totally random comment about Qui-Gon. This one is just pathetic. On another note, I don’t even know why Qui-Gon was in the prequels. In The Empire Strikes Back, Obi-Wan tells Luke to seek out Yoda on Dagobah, the Jedi Master that taught him. Yoda should have been Obi-Wan’s master in the prequels. Another example of Lucas forgetting what was in his original movies.

Luke being sent to live with his family on Tatooine. Someone explain to me how this is a good idea.

“Hide the children from Vader we must.”
“Let’s send Luke to be with his family.”
“Smart idea this is. Jedi master you should be.”

Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side. Or to put it more accurately, his decision to join the Dark Side. You don’t just decide to join the bad guys. A Jedi needs to taste the power, be seduced, and fall. One moment it’s “Don’t kill Palpatine!”, the next he chops off Mace Windu’s hand, then he says with lament, “What have I done?” and finally it’s, “Yes, my master?”

His decision to join was based almost purely on the desire to learn the “trick” to save his wife. He isn’t even evil yet at the point where he joins Palpatine. Palpatine then commands him to slaughter the Jedi to become stronger, and he does it. Once again, not cause he’s evil, but because he wants to learn a trick. This is not compelling storytelling.

Obi-Wan beats Anakin because he holds the higher ground. What kind of bull is this? It’s such a lame reason for Obi-Wan to beat Anakin that Lucas has Obi-Wan actually explain to the audience. “It’s over, Anakin. I hold the higher ground.” Well, gosh, if that’s all it takes to defeat another Jedi, why didn’t he just stand on the table in the room where they were fighting earlier? Hey, there’s a ramp, go stand on top.

“Hey Obi-Wan, tell us again how you defeated that Sith Lord.”
“I was standing two feet higher than him.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m just gonna walk around on stilts from now on.”

The final confrontation between Obi-Wan and Anakin should be the epitome of Dark Side vs. Light Side. Light should triumph over Dark because of some flaw in the Dark Side, not because the Light Side holds some lame tactical advantage.

Yes, I’m being extra picky on some points. But anyone who defends this stuff is either a misguided fan or not a fan at all. This stuff does matter when you’re writing a story that must accomodate predefined material.

All of this is focused mostly on ROTS itself. I won’t go into stuff that I don’t like about the prequels, like inconsistencies with the clones, Yoda and the Emperor moving super fast and using lightsabers (Think about any kung fu master, like Pai-Mei from Kill Bill, Chow Yun-Fat from Crouching Tiger, and even Neo at the very end of the first Matrix), the prophecy about Anakin and making him super powerful, recurring characters throughout all six movies and spanning 20 years (The droids, Chewbacca, Boba Fett…), and the random twirling and spinning during lightsaber duels.

I’m done ranting. I hope I got it all out.

Sony’s supposed ipod-killer, the Network Walkman NW-HD1, has been reviewed, and apparently it’s not quite the ipod-killer it was made out to be. On paper it looks great: Smaller in size and longer battery life. But according to the review, there’s one thing that’s really holding it back: Sony’s horrible interface for the player as well as the software, and Sony’s own music format, ATRAC3.

As further detailed in the review, Sony’s player does not play MP3s. And no, you aren’t allowed to question why. It’s the exact same reason why all of Sony’s digital cameras only use their magic memorystick technology: to lock you into their proprietary licensing.

This is the sole reason why I hate Sony and all of their fancy little gadgets so much. Everyone out there agrees on a universal technology to build off of, but Sony for one reason or another wants to go ahead and make their own, and then push it on their customers just to get more of their money. It’s a ridiculous notion that keeps holding them back from getting a good hold on the market. Look at the PS2: it uses DVD technology and as such has done a real good job. But the Minidisc format on the other hand has almost died out here in America, yet they keep pushing it.

This goes back to why I usually refuse to buy anything Sony, be it their headphones or their VAIO computers (which are really really cool looking, but the fact that they’re Sony drives me away). Apple gave up on this proprietary thing a long time ago and embraced the world; Sony should step up and do the same thing.