Posts tagged review
CopOut
Mar 7th
I decided to splurge and take in a movie today. I wanted something light and funny so opted for CopOut over the heavier Alice (and thank gawd I didn’t chose that one – every family in Tempe did) or Avatar.
Let me say, I love Bruce Willis. I’d watch him do anything, even change the oil in his car. I especially like him in things with a sense of humor. He smiles and I smile; he laughs and I laugh. He’s usually the star of my midnight fantasies, those not starring Nic Cage. Not that he’s bad at playing bad, mind you. Just, you know, mmmMMMmmm.
And I really like Kevin Smith. Maybe not so much his movies – yet I sort of watched some Jay and Silent Bob movie last night – but I never miss a SMODcast and I’d love to just hang out with the man. He’s damned explicitly funny. But this didn’t really feel like a Kevin Smith movie. Maybe because I just get sucked into anything Bruce Willis does, I dunno.
Anyway, I laughed my ass off at this movie. Tracy Morgan almost was too much for me. I’m a little old for slapstick overboard stupid comedy, but he pulled it back just enough when the story needed to be more serious. Just when I would get bored with his antics, the scene would change. Nice editing, Kevin. But overall the movie was funny as hell. Go for a good time.
The only problem I had with this movie was the casting of Poh Boy. Usually when there’s a bad guy, especially when he’s supposed to be the leader attempting to take over x-amount of someone else’s territory, he looks the part. This guy didn’t look the part. He wasn’t the least bit scary to me, a middle-aged chunky midwestern Mom. He put out a flunky vibe in a part that should have called for a more intimidating character. Much darker instead of what we got. I half expected his peons to roll their eyes behind his back. But the baseball torture cage was inventive!
Should I start using some sort of judging thing? Stars… nah, too bland. Hmmm, how about a four FuckYeah! rating?
NotReallyCamping
Nov 16th
Friday was Phoenix WordCamp. It’s where everybody roasts Blogger buttons around a campfire and chants Wordpress, Wordpress, Wordpress. Nah, not really. I don’t even know why these things are called camps! There are no tents, fires, or s’mores. Wait, WordCamp was held in a tent! One of those humongous commercial semi-permanent tents with A/C. And we had sack (picnic?) lunches.
Anyway, it was a day filled with Wordpress information. It started off with some woman I’ve never heard of calling her self the Diva of Wordpress and yet preaching “we don’t care if you have bad spelling or grammar, we just want to hear what you have to say!” Cue immediate disrespectful twittering from many people. Then another all-about-me presenter and more cranky twittering. Then some kid who looked 12 but seemed to know a lot. The morning was filled with more motivational type speakers – all about content. The afternoon leaned more to the technical side, the guy who created WordPress in the first place, and local WordPress magicians Chuck Reynolds and Josh Strebel had a Q&A panel. Another guy got all geeky with step-by-step widget coding that was way over my head. Merlin Mann was highly entertaining, and Brent Spore was great. All-in-all a nice motivational day, but not what I expected. Props to my friend Chuck for organizing the 500 seat sold-out WordCamp.
Saturday and Sunday were this year’s PodCampAZ, the one I’m involved in planning. I spent most of Saturday working registration with Rachel so I got to meet lots of new people. I helped Evo with his panel (I clicked the slide advance button) and helped set-up and take down. Yesterday I set up registration, but spent more time in actual panels. Brent’s panel on social media almost immediately got intense when the packed room divided between the let’s-keep-it-to-ourselves side and the we-need-to-bring-in-new-people-side. He wanted to get people talking and it certainly did. Another friend Katie had a panel on social media but it was more what you should and should not put out there. The best panel I went to was a Wordpress panel, where Josh skimmed over the best settings and must-have widgets and plugins – which was the information I’d been looking for from WordCamp.
So expect some changes to this site as soon as I’m rested up. I’m still tired as hell and I have a lot of notes to expand on while the information is fresh. We all learned that GeekWeek is toooooo much at one time. Information overload + planning anxiety + RL stress = exhaustion. There were other conferences earlier in the week that some people attended too. Thursday was the Entrepreneurship Conference, there was a design camp somewhere and I think one other thing and some people hit them all. Each event was successful but running them all within a week is too much which is likely why the PodCampAZ ending wasn’t attended by as many people as we expected. Our numbers were much lower than registered though there were a lot of walk-ins.
I was surprised at how many of our speakers failed to show up! When I checked with our speaker coordinator Lawrence, only about half of the n0-shows bothered to contact him with an explanation beforehand. It’s fucking rude as HELL to have a roomful of people waiting for you and not show up.
Really? Is that what that is?
Sep 30th
Can you identify what this object is?
Can you?
How about this one: 
I follow this web site called Contemporist. Though the houses they show are sometimes very interesting, there’s no way I could live in a place so stark and uncluttered as a contemporary house. There’s no way I’d want most of the furniture shown there either. Most of that stuff looks horribly uncomfortable. It is interesting… but not very practical. These are both stools. Seriously, if you walked into an empty room and these were the only things in there, would you KNOW they were to sit upon?
Doubtful.
These are beautiful and practical. This is very cool. And if you go over there be sure to check out the lighting section, too.