amazingadrian

You know your day is going to be interesting when the first word out of your mouth when you wake up is "Fuck"... Yesterday morning, I woke up only to discover that my alarm clock had failed to wake me (as it is wont to do occasionally). I had missed the bus, and I had a tutoring session at 8:00 that morning, before a big test in Statistics. It was around 7:30 when I got up, so I did not have time to even grab a bite, I just ran all the way down to the school's transportation department. Luckily, they were able to get someone to take me in a short amount of time. I ended up getting there at 8:15, and the Success Network was calling me just as I walked in the door. I made it to my tutoring session, and hopefully, it helped me work out the kinks before the test.  I think I did fairly well on it, though I took way too much time on it, and was late for the next class.  I don't care though, I don't need the grades for that one...I am currently doing well in it.  It's Statistics that I need the grades in, and I am starting to become desparate. Asked the teacher if there was anything I could do for possible extra credit after the test, and he said he'd see how my grade turned out first. He is aware of my situation now though, so maybe I will get an opportunity to scrape by if I need it.

That evening, my Halloween commenced, starting with the school's annual Fall Fest. I won the first prize of the fest for my costume (a funky 70's rocker getup...I'll get the picture from the woman in admissions next week), a deluxe container of bite-sized brownies and a glitzy decorative pumpkin. They had a ton of prizes, but ended up not giving out very many; I was one of the only students decked out, but many of the faculty participated, so I was not all alone. I purchased most of their pizza (they were woefully understocked this time around), and got talked into climbing the wall that the army had brought.  Now, I've never done a wall climb, and I knew that I didn't have the upper arm strength to just jump up and do free climbing like that. But I was unprepared for just how difficult it was to get even beyond the first few steps. The reason for this is that the hand and foot holds, despite being clearly marked, are shaped in such a way that you can barely use them. I remember standing on one, with just the edge of my shoe in contact with it, while I struggled to grab a handhold just beyond my reach. That and the fact that you are gripping handholds with just the tips of your fingers, with the entire weight of your body against you...I think the key to it is to literally tackle the wall. To climb upwards without pause, pushing yourself up with your legs, and only using your arms briefly. Trying to take it slowly  or pausing at all, even just to strengthen  your grip, seems like folly. I didn't make it up very far, but I did gain a t-shirt for my efforts...one that actually looks nice, despite being an Army advert. Their designs are clearly improving.

Today I did not do much, aside from finishing up a rediculously massive ghost hunt on Second Life. I managed to find all 114 ghosts, without knowing how many there where exactly they were. Most of them were easy to find, but it was definitely an endurance hunt, to be sure. Also, I discovered that freebies that cost a single lindon are not actually free when you are faced with a lot of them. Say, over 300. >_<  It seems like common sense, but freebies used to be rare enough that I could get away with spending 1$L on them with impunity. Now, ever since copybots and their ilk introduced theft into the world of Second Life, it seems that the number of freebies have exploded, even legitimate ones. Sometimes a retailer will release something that someone else has stolen as a freebie, to discourage the theif from reselling it. Sometimes, freebies are released out of spite because of personal disputes between creators. Sometimes they are released just for promotional purposes. I don't know why it is, but it seems that after that point, there are just more of them.  I'm going to dub October official SL freebie month, because my inventory has to have jumped by another 1k after all that.

Today I watched "JoyRide 2: Dead Ahead" .
Now, there is a certain perception some people have about a certain group of people...I hesitate to call it a stereotype because it is so universal. What I am talking about are truckers. They are commonly percieved as big, tough, lawless men with their own ways of doing things, who are likely to crack your skull open if you slight them in some way. This same stereotype applies to bikers, bouncers, lumberjacks, and  rednecks.  The atagonist in the JoyRide series, a trucker who goes by the handle Rusty Nail, takes this stereotype to a bloody extreme. The clincher is that he is portrayed as a real person. He isn't some Jason Vorhees or Mike Myers of the open road; just a bored redneck trucker who makes his stomping grounds the back roads of America. But that doesn't stop him from coming across with just the same measure of methodical creepiness. When a (soon to be) family has their car break down on a bachelor party trip to Las Vegas, they stumble across the abode of Rusty Nail. One thing leads to another, and they end up breaking in and "borrowing" his car, having no cell-phone cervice or any other way to find help out in the middle of nowhere. Being the kind of person who doesn't take even getting flipped off sitting down, Rusty Nail decides to even the score by "borrowing" the female lead's fiance. Things pretty much go downhill from there. Rusty Nail seems to take great pleasure in torturing the city folk, blackmailing them to greater extremes just to fix injustices against him, percieved or real. We only get the barest glimpses of Rusty Nail's face, and his voice is very creepy...a slow, gravelly drawl. I only had two problems with this movie, the first being that you had to suspend beleif quite a bit if you wanted to be thrilled by the movie. Rusty Nail is said to have "eyes everywhere". This is portrayed by his seemingly being buddies with every other trucker in the state, which is directly contradictory with his "lone wolf" attitude (not to mention that it begs the question of all truckers being psychos). Another problem I had was that the film portrayed Rusty Nail and his big rig as being practically the same entity. There's a scene in the film that is particularly amusing because of this. When he first discovers that his house was broken into, he doesn't even get out of his truck. It shows his rig park in front of the house, and he shines a light, panning from the broken window to the knocked-down door, and the truck's engine "revs angrily". In fact, I'm pretty sure they only give him two scenes in which he is separated from his truck. It is subtle, but it definitely impacts the character's beleivability, because it limits the ways in which he can realistically react to things. Despite these failings, I enjoyed the film. I felt it was interesting to see a horror movie with an "average" antagonist; a messed-up dude who just takes road rage to an extreme, as opposed to the undead vengeance or psychotic mastermind types. (Also, I wonder what own buddy kindar  would make of this film, being a trucker himself. :o )