thursday 22/10/09: golden AK-47.

9:56 wakeup. made some porridge for breakfast while preparing for another day of nothing. sent a big ol' video file through yousendit which was fun in a not fun way. watched some more mccabe and mrs. miller but it's hard to get through. besides warren beatty it's just not all that captivating. but hey. then i watched 12 angry men which was pretty amazing. i was telling ro later that night how while glengarry glenross was 5 actors firing on all cylinders, 12 angry men is 12 actors firing on all cylinders. seriously amazing. watched the special features then went upstairs and made some pesto/pepper/cheese which was nice. eventually i headed back downstairs to watch solaris. weed, mark and jord joined me and it was excellent. steven soderbergh can really bring the goods.

after that i made a muffin with tomato and cheese. and also another one of the same. both were okay. i came back downstairs and started watching 'be here to love me', a doco about townes van zandt.

it's at this point i have to ponder upon how funny it is most of my friends thought i was moving up into a crazy hectic busy life full of excitement and whatnot. truth is, that happens every month or so for about a week and the rest is what you read here. food preparation and film watching. if you're lucky, i might start an exercise routine and go into detail about that!

i walked out of my room to find ro and joe who joined me for more of the doco. practice began not long after that and was probably the shortest we've ever had. ran through the set once, out of order. after that i watched more of the TVZ doco and then ro, weed and i headed to the rsl for pool. i think i won every game i played. that's a good average for the night i'd say. i was playing horribly last week, looks like i've got my pool mojo back. we headed home after that where i finished the TVZ doco (amazing...track it and his music down asap) and watched lord of war which is just finishing. i was pretty impressed with lord of war. the ending pulled no punches in terms of bleak realism which was impressive. funny to think i avoided the film for so long because i'd heard it wasn't so great. glad my dad and aj convinced me otherwise. the golden AK-47 was kind of cool too. also most of my friends seem to hate nicholas cage but i like him. so ner.

until tomorrow, bye.

wednesday 21/10/09: not much of anything.

woke up, normal time. cereal + honey for breakfast. ro, weed and i went searching for a VGA cable which took forever. we tried like 10 different places. 30 bucks for a VGA cable? please. got a hot dog/frozen coke for lunch at castletown. came home and watched being there which was amazing. watched the life and death of peter sellers which was pretty good. more interesting than really good. got my stuff with ASUS sorted. notebooks.com.au were totally useless though. i paid $30 for a copy of my receipt to be faxed to ASUS to get my repair order off the ground and it took them forever. i called them 5 times. they even sounded irritated when i was only calling because they weren't doing their job! flipping nuts.

made some dinner, pesto with cheese and cracked pepper. excellent. apple cider too. killing it. watched spartan with jord and weed. it wasn't very good. surprising from david mamet. i don't even understand how the script was so bad. it's like it was written on the page without any consideration for how it would be spoken. "she just took the long way home". geez mamet. you wrote glengarry glenross! everyone went to bed and i stayed up to get some stuff sent off to the americans. my laptop is so completely screwed. i watched slap shot while i did that. and it was pretty sweet. paul newman was the best thing about it. that and the hanson brothers. not THOSE hanson brothers, obviously. then i went to bed. not much of a day.

until tomorrow, bye.

tuesday 20/10/09: part two.

i was just thinking about how crushing ill health is. it's your body and it's what keeps you alive. when thing go wrong, the chances of you surviving can be so slim depending on what's wrong. you could have cancer sitting inside you, waiting to show itself and limit your life to even a matter of weeks, even days. so many types of health related issues can just kill you dead. often you won't know until it's too late and you're utterly powerless to stop it.

and that is truly terrifying.

tuesday 20/10/09: productive day.

i think i blog because all my days tend to blend into one, so it's good to have a reference somewhere that my life actually has a series of events rather than everything melding into one.

so this morning i woke up at about 9:50, as of yesterday my classic wakeup time and headed upstairs to make cereal. i brought it back down to discover ro and mark mixing 'dirty looks' so after reading an issue of american film from 1988 in my room for a while i bailed upstairs to continue there with a few other issues. i was reading a big fat article about lawrence of arabia and realised i'd looked at it on dvd in woolworths yesterday but not actually bought it even though it was quite cheap. kind of silly. it annoyed me so much cause i wanted to watch it that i nearly walked all the way back to that woolies to buy it. i decided not to in the end. i finished off the myspace playlist and sent that off, then made some lunch and watched garth meringhi's (spelling?) darkplace with ro for a while. about lunch: never buy ainsley's instant cous cous. well, the citrus kind anyway. made me want to gag.

after that we recorded drums for a quiet song which went well. i switch to rods part way through the song which i don't usually do live. the wonders of studio recording eh? after that i read some more american film for a while and organised my laptop to be picked up for repairs. later i borrowed ro's car and jord & i ventured out to do things. first stop was jord's dad chris' house to pick up a gibson 335 for this ad thing we're recording. after that we went to jb where i bought a somewhat cheap toshiba dvd player. i went to buy lawrence of arabia but paused, contemplating whether i could justify buying a dvd player and a dvd at the same time. seemed like i didn't really need to, so i put it back down. then i nearly bought jaws before realising i would be doing the same thing i put ol' lorry down for. after jb we went to hungry jacks which was alright. ordering ettiquite (spelling?) is getting confusing now though. the voice in the box, instead of opening with the traditional "hi welcome to blah blah what can i get you today?" or whatever, today it was "hi welcome to hungry jacks, feel free to order whenever you're ready". out of confusing i said "what?" and probably interrupted something important because a different voice then sharply asked what i wanted. also the boy (he was probably 10) who handed me my food was funny.

we headed home after that and i set up the dvd player. problem is, the tv is a widescreen tv but you can only use the full viewing area when you use composite video. as the dvd player didn't have composite video, i was in a bit of a pickle. it did, however, have HDMI which the internet leads me to believe can be converted into composite. means i had to drop money on a cable but the picture itself is pretty darn tootin. my tests were the shawshank redemption and full metal jacket and both came up nicely. not a bad player for 99 bucks. i started watching mccabe and mrs. miller when bree came over and weed invited me upstairs so i headed up and we hung. i suppose it was a good thing, the sound mix for mccabe and mrs. miller is easily one of the worst i've ever heard which makes it difficult to watch given it's a robert altman film. there's a very natural speak-over-the-top-of-each-other nature to the way he writes and directs dialogue that you need a solid sound mix to back up. i'll return to it later, hopefully my first impressions are wrong.

later on i made some pesto and joe spilt apple juice on the floor. then he, weed, jord and i headed downstairs to watch the midnight meat train. joe left about 50 minutes in, jord about an hour in. joe was tired, jord wasn't enjoying it. by the time the ending rolled around i'd stopped caring for the characters but the film on the whole wasn't too bad. there's definitely worse out there but that said it's pretty darn graphic. nice to see ted raimi make an eye-popping appearance too (hyuck hyuck). i watched the special features which included a mini-doco on clive barker (the film is based off one of his short stories). the man has always fascinated me and this threw him in such a human light. i imagined him to be this strange sinister twisted d00d but he seems somewhat level headed. he had a real funny way of talking about his paintings too. my neck hurts.

until tomorrow, bye.

monday 19/10/09: part two.

oh, and it turns out troy did use all the internet. 8gb in 7 days, 3gb alone on the day we left. sigh.

monday 19/10/09: bummer.

the day started off okay. i woke up at a decent time (9:50am) and sauntered upstairs for porridge. ro was 15 minutes late (what a wanker) but that was okay. we laid some drums down for a song. a country song. then we went to cash converters at lunchtime to pick me up an air conditioner for my room. i am sitting in it right now and i can assure you, quite a cool room. i also saw that the cashies had call of the cthulu on xbox for 9 dollars. i resisted the temptation. then i went grocery shopping and bought a lot of food.

when we got back i laid down drums for another country song. that's a lot of country for one day, you might say. well i say to you: a day without country is a day wasted. and you can take that to the grave.

i started reading martin scorsese's personal journey through american film which is a pretty decent companion to the documentary (which if you like film, you should own). not long after this i managed to kick my laptop causing the already fragile screen which hangs by one of the hinges to slide just that little bit too far. now my screen doesn't work. joy. sorry rapture, i'll have to save you another time. it'll cost me 30 bucks to print out the original invoice for repair which is also awesome but at least asus will come and pick it up for me.

i forced ro and jord to finish putting together the playlist for myspace but they were shocked to find out that if the songs weren't on myspace they wouldn't be included. we all thought that was a bit silly. no jesse mae hemphill for ro. then joe and i got pizza and i bought changeling and the midnight meat train. don't know how i'm going to watch them exactly, how joyous. we went back home and we had a big ol' band meeting that went into the night. after that i tried to connect my laptop up to the tv in my room using s-video but for some reason my laptop just wouldn't have a bar of it. useless. sigh. sam rowe lent me a monitor to use but we don't have a vga cable so i guess i'm stuck up creek without a monitor to use as a makeshift paddle. i'm typing this from my phone because it's currently a better computing interface than my notebook.

until tomorrow, bye.

sunday 18/10/09: rapture needs me.

so i woke up at 12:39pm today (sunday). you know when you're sleeping and then you wake up? that's what happened. i can't believe how late i slept. what a wanker. i walked upstairs, jord was playing splinter cell. i prepared too much mi goreng (2 packets) and too much milo milk (a huge transformers collectable cinema cup) and sauntered into the lounge room to watch jord do his thing. troy was also there. now, what tends to happen in our lounge is when the fan is on, you can't really eat anything hot because it gets cool so quick. there's an extra layer of suck with mi goreng also because it dries out and sticks together WHILE cooling down essentially turning it into un-eatable plop. this is what happened today.

to make matters worse, milo milk - especially too much milo milk - is probably the single worst thing you can prepare as a beverage to compliment mi goreng. not to mention the milk was tepid anyway, but with our fridge it's always like that. killer. so basically i ended up feeling totally disgusting, wasting a packet worth of MG that i'd left in the bowl (it had turned to the aforementioned plop) and finishing off the milk out of pure terror of wasting what is usually a wonderful mix. exhausted from my own stupidity i travelled downstairs to install farcry, which i bought yesterday (saturday) from cash converters for 5 dollars. after installation took the best part of 20 minutes i clicked on campaign and girded my loins for the TIME OF MY LIFE.

turns out my graphics card threw a hissy fit and displayed darkness as light, effectively ruining any chance i had of getting anywhere in the game (it begins in darkness). i quit and brooded on that for a while before loading up bioshock and continuing the last saved game i had on my pc which is from march 2008. to explain: i bought an xbox 360 and bioshock for it so i hadn't played it since. kind of a bummer. i played that until about 7pm - about 5 hours of gameplay - before rohin picked us up to go to the rsl for pool. i got wedges and a pie. pie was okay, wedges were the same.

points lost for savoury yoghurt instead of sour cream. points gained for consistently well sized wedges.

i think i lost all the games i played against everyone. after watching the colour of money the other week i've completely lost all of my pool mojo somehow. i think it was because tom cruise's character in that film made me hate pool while loving it at the same time. cognitive dissonance or some junk. even now that i own my own cue (well, 2 cues) i'm playing worse than ever. i HATE that. there has to be some way of fixing that. procedure. medical. if paul newman were still alive perhaps someone could pay him to come to my house in character as fast eddie to rough me up and teach me a thing or two about pool (and hustling, for that matter).

after that i went home, played more bioshock until about 1am and now it's nearly 2am. i hate that our internet only speeds up around 1:30am now. what the hell has everyone been downloading? literally every other member of the house besides troy was away on tour from about 2 days after the new internet month turned over until we got back a week later and it was shaped. i think troy did it. i can't prove it yet but once we see the figured for downloads while we were away...it's all over. troy will likely have pink eye for the rest of his time in this house. well, maybe not that drastic. but close.


until tomorrow, bye.