two movies and work life balance

I saw a couple of good movies this weekend, Eagle Vs. Shark, and Hot Fuzz.

I thought EVS was better, but it had a fairly mixed reaction from the crowd I saw it with. My biggest complaint would be that it was a bit too Napoleon Dynamite, or anyway that the main (male) character was going for the same qualities, and at times seemed to be channeling Napoleon. Otherwise, it was totally brilliant, and at times very much succeeded in achieving heartwarming status. There are some clips up on Youtube of Jemaine Clement (the male lead) singing and playing guitar on a stage with another guy. You should really watch the songs Albi, the Racist Dragon, and Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros if you haven’t already. (Links via Sharyn.)

Hot Fuzz was everything I should have expected from it. I think I did a fairly good job of going into it without expectations, but if I had thought to have them, it would have met them. Basically, it was a rehashing of the same themes apparent in Shaun of the Dead, and starred the same two male characters, (for those of you living under a rock who haven’t heard of it). I’ll try not to give any spoilers here, but basically, I felt like Shaun was a zombie movie within a parody of a zombie movie. It was totally funny and awesome up until about the last fourth of the movie, when it turned into a full-on zombie movie, without reservation. Hot Fuzz was the same way! It was a parody of cop movies (buddy-cop movies, if that’s a genre), again more or less turning into an actual cop movie for the last twenty minutes or so. It was still funny, and still very much fun and original, but lacked the “genre” aspect that made Shaun so appealing for me in particular, so I’d have to say I liked it a bit less overall.

I saw Hot Fuzz last night as a sort of break in the middle of a twelve-hour work bender. (Yes, on a Saturday.) We have a big site launch this week, and everyone’s been pushing really hard to get the last few details working. (To say nothing of actually putting any finishing touches on them.) I thought yesterday may have been my longest work day ever, but when I spent an hour logging all my hours for the last week, I realized I worked about the same number last Thursday also. Whew!

I’m going to try and get a good night’s sleep tonight. I feel like i might be coming down with something, but it could also be allergies. Anyway, I’m sniffly and miserable.

it’s back

livingtech is back.

I’m posting this from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I’m sitting propped up on a hotel bed, surrounded by fluffy pillows. From here, I have a nice view to my right out the sliding glass door of the beach and ocean stretching to infinity on the horizon. (Check out my flickr stream for some photos from the beach.)

I have tons of actual work to do, (I’m not on vacation, just piggybacking on Florence’s work travel), so I’m going to keep this short. Astute readers will have noticed I’ve switched from MT to WP, and moved the old homepage out of the way. No more hiding the blog behind a /blog/ subdirectory. I’ve still got lots of minor formatting changes I want to make to the stylesheet, and I want to do some pruning of useless old pages too.

So much to write about. So little time!

Long time no blog

Well, I was basically not blogging because Movable Type ate all those entries last year. Losing six months worth of blog posts was just about frustrating enough to put me off blogging forever. (But as it turns out, it really just put me off blogging for… oh, another six months or so.)

I guess there were other factors at work as well. For instance, I got engaged.

I also wrote a puzzle game.

Blogging on chesstris about puzzle games has made me want to start this thing back up again.

So anyway, I’m using Word Press now. Also, I found a whole shit-ton of my missing posts over at the wayback machine. I think if I wait long enough, they will probably have them all. Unfortunately, it’s been kind of a lot of annoying copy-pasting to get them into word press.

I have grand plans for replacing livingtech’s index with this blog. I’ll preserve all my old pages too, but clearly some of them will have to move.

More soon.