Ever notice how it's the little things in life that amuse us so much? More to the point, ever notice how it's the silly little idiocies in life that amuse us more than anything else? Well, this is not as much ''the little blog that could'' as it is ''the blog that enjoys going up the down escalator in your local mall.'' Will it have anything of real importance? No, probably not. But enjoy the ride never the less!

 


Merrow's Confic buttons make me happy. And wondering just how on earth I can repay her kind favours without requiring Mel to pimp me off in Boystown.




(That's a quarter in the middle, if you're wondering, so these are large buttons.)

In other news, I heartily recommend you never ever attempt to pull off attending a Con (and working on a Confic to boot) and moving in the same week. It may be the sore muscles or lack of sleep talking, but you'll have to trust me on this one.

More to probably follow later today or tomorrow morning...naturally when most everyone will be nowhere near a Net connection. Which just means you can hear me creak and groan in person.

So here we go. One more shift at work. One last chance to panic about forgetting something at the apartment. (And then after that, it's all about having already forgotten it.)
posted by Phillip at 5:51 AM

 

Videogamers will shudder when I mention the name Uwe Boll, the director/"scary man who thinks he's a competent game-to-movie artist". Well, after butchering House of the Dead (which accurately describes the state of the audience by the end of the flick) and Alone in the Dark (which accurately describes how most gamer fans would like to have 5 minutes with Boll, minus the balpeen hammer being mentioned), our esteemed schlock artist came out with a new feature.

It's Bloodrayne, which maybe lasted a week in theatres and is now coming to threaten your DVD player. I stumbled across an online review by Andrew Forbes. The full review can be found here: http://showfinder.sympatico.msn.ca/browse/content/article.aspx?kid=1645

I did, however, want to share the last paragraph of Forbes' review with you all:

If you rent this film – and I’m not saying you shouldn’t – make sure you don’t horde it for a quiet, solitary evening alone, for that would prove a terrible waste. What BloodRayne does seem good for, it occurs to me, is providing the focus of a session of exalted group derision. Call it the Ninety Minutes Hate. This is the kind of activity that brings people together to belittle in unison the failed vision of a bad director and a team of videogame designers (who, to be fair, probably wept when they saw this film). No, this movie needs to be shared. It needs to be the centre of attention for a large group of people. This is the sort of movie that will make you look like a comic genius, if your timing is even halfway decent. Be prepared to chortle, to catcall, and to shout at the screen. Make an evening of it. Laugh heartily, friends, for BloodRayne, in all its stunning ineptitude, has the power to bring us all closer together.


...I love this man.


Today's Lesson: it's windier outside than you think.
posted by Phillip at 7:10 AM

 

Inventory is done. Sleep has been had. And so much Pepsi was consumed to stay awake and midly alert/coherent, I'm amazed I haven't been peeing carbonated bubbles all last night.

All in all, the inventory went rather well. Especially considering how badly it could have fared, short of a rhinocerous rampaging through the store halfway through, messing it up and forcing us to recount everything after cleaning up the mess. Our auditor even complimented us on the fact that, despite being only a 4-person team (auditor included), we managed to get everything counted & finished up within the same amount of time a 5-person team would have required.

I'd like to take the time to thank me for everything. Sure, you can call it raging egotism, but since when is that different from any other day?


Now the only pressing matter of the day is to ensure that Kevin & I finish the final revision of the Confic later tonight. I'm still amazed we managed to get things siphoned down to exactly 45 pages (and presumedly within the alotted hour), and still managed to keep in most of the gags plus Chaos' vanishing nipples. With any luck, sometime tomorrow, the definitive ConEdit version will be out for the voice actors to practice with, and the printers to...er, print.

And now, you're moment of reaffirming cuteness for the day:


posted by Phillip at 1:49 PM

 


Today, the morning and evening shall be spent at work, with a 4-hour block in the afternoon devoted to me doing absolutely nothing. Tomorrow...IT begins. Right now I'm still not entirely sure if I'm going to try and crash earlier to accomodate the need to rise at around 4-4:30am, or if I'll just stay awake all night and be totally incoherent tomorrow evening. We'll see. If this little bit of nowhere features an entry tomorrow evening that looks like it was spammed by the Evidence Mice, then I probably went with option #2.

That, the Evidence Mice finally got to me.

In the meantime, almost everything's been prepped that can be prepped, so I have little to worry about...at least it had better be little. The next 24 hours will be rather gruelling though not quite in a Jack Bauer "24" sort of way. (A series which, as Mel & I have recently discovered, is second only to crack in terms of being dangerously addictive.)

I mean, a 24 could be done about our store inventory, but it would probably have to involve a nuclear bomb being hidden in one of our suitcases ("Say, should I call the guys who returned this yesterday and ask if they want their thermonuclear stuff back?"), and me having to shoot someone in order to get the SKU number off a missing tag from one of our purses.

All things inventory aside, Mel & I have been trying to find the chance to spend time together and enjoying the peculiar moments life can sometimes offer. Consider the following conversation we had yesterday while we were sitting on the couch.

Mel: "Well, the bunny seems happy to be let out of her cage for a bit."

Me: "Yeah, but I think Tachi's being a little rambunctious at the moment."

Mel: "What makes you say that?"

[Cue Tachi dragging the cover to one of our Gamecube games across the floor, right in front of us.]

Me: [watching Tachi] "Just call it a feeling."
posted by Phillip at 11:01 AM

 
I find myself a conflicting mass of emotions today, some good and some not-so-good. Though the good ones vastly outweight the others, which is unto itself a good thing. Reasons to be happy and rejoice include my grandfather's surgery going off well, and on a more personal if not selfish level, knowing that our new apartment may be available early, which gives us more time to move in.

The store's stockroom also looks like an ill attempt at an afternoon office party, which is a good thing despite all the long strips of red tape plastered everywhere. It just means we're that much closer to having counted our entire stockroom for the Inventory O' Doom.

On the not so good...I'm hoping that the very recent death of an older uncle (not Gary, unless he's blogging from the afterlife. Although that makes for a fun title: It Blogged From Beyond The Grave!) won't stress out my grandfather when he's still recovering from surgery himself. I know they were close friends/family, and his death just compounds an already ordeal-filled week for my grandpa.

In a very similar vein, my sister started her internship at Toronto Sick Kids Hospital this week. Yesterday, by all accounts was one of those kick-to-the-gut days. The first case brought in was a child abuse case. And the last case of the day involved a different kid, and they didn't make it. From the sounds of it, Carly's taking some deserved R&R time this weekend to relax and unwind.

And as for the third one...a "rehearsal live reading" was done tonight, with an alarm clock counting down an hour of time. When the alarm began to beep, about 45 of 51 pages had been finished. This vexes me. Much vexing is being had. The Vex Fairy is flitting around my head, and clobbering me with the enchanted mace of annoyance. Not unlike an episode of Doroku-chan.

So now Kevin & I get to play the evil game of "chop 5-6 pages of the Confic". Admittedly, one possible way to chop a number of pages is to snip the entire "Prefect's Bath" scene, but I must confess to being rather partial to it. And not just because of Chaos' missing nipples. I don't really want to lose the losing of said nipples.

And somewhere out in the wide world of Google, this page popped up on a search engine and is making someone looking for porn is scratching his head in confusion. So, just for him, let's say it again:

Nipples!


Today's Lesson: red packaging tape sticks to your pants in ways you never imagine...or notice until a customer points out you've got a racing stripe running up your backside.



posted by Phillip at 6:15 PM

 










posted by Phillip at 8:34 PM

 

It's one of those nights where you're just not sure if you should sit down and enjoy a movie, or embark on global conquest (but not before washing those pesky dishes), or curling up with a good book. However, all of these things should be enjoyed with either a cold beer or warm Sake. And dammit, we're all out of both. Ideally this will be remedied with the next paycheck...unless all the spare splurging money I get winds up being used to trim this growing mane of unkemptness I call my hair.

In the meanwhile, Mel's taking a break from glaring at my laptop and muttering many strings of curses and vulgarities at the English paper she has to finish up for tonight, and instead is having Jigglypuff beat the crap out of every other opponent in Super Smash Bros.

I myself have been rediscovering Evangelion. Unexpectedly, I managed to acquire the platinum DVD slimcase box set for a surprisingly low price. True, in order to procure it, I had to take a chunk of money I'd already set aside for blowing at Anime North's dealer's room...but hey, the EVA box set was on my hitlist anyways, so this is just like Christmas coming early.

A Christmas where the Angels are more likely to be blowing big-assed, cross-shaped holes in your living room as opposed to being perched daintily upon your tree, mind you. But Christmas never the less.

It's been a loooooong while since I ventured back into Studio Gainax's magnum opus, and I can safely say:

1) EVA remains one of the best anime titles ever produced, period
2) the last 2 episodes still don't make a whole lot of sense in terms of the overall consipracies
3) and yes, Anno was definitely on crack when he directed this series

There's very little else to comment on here, life or get-a-life-and-stop-babbling-about-EVA otherwise, so we'll just segueway right into today's instalment of Oh, The Strange & Scary Things You Hear Customers Say In Passing.

Such as, "How my cell phone ended up in her snowblower, I have no idea."

Or the classic, "And now he's, like, all pissy because he walked in on me with his best friend and his sister!"

Sometimes I wish I was making this up. But at least it puts the surrealness of my life into perspective. They have have their snowblowers and friendly...er, menages. I'll stick with my puppets and fanfics and sacrifices made to appease my raging ego, thanks.
posted by Phillip at 6:45 PM