For those just tuning in, here's the situation....
Ten weeks ago, I moved into this new place. This TownHouse leased out by this company. Standard story there.
Except: the company I leased it from did a couple of neat things: sucked, and went extinct; the place was purchased by a new company, which doesn't really suck that much.
You'd think that would be good news. But there was a problem with that.
When I moved in here on 28th June, everything happened in a strange order. They showed me one place which was ready to be leased, except that it already had been; that aside, the place reportedly looked identical to the place I'd be leasing [which wasn't ready yet] except that the one I'd be getting also had a backyard. Fine by me.
A week went by, and I came back here to move into the place with the backyard.
Apparently, the place I moved into--after signing all the papers and paying rent and getting the keys--had been simply abandoned and forgotten about. The carpet existed as small islands in a sea of carbonscored flooring [the guy abandoning the place apparently tried to burn it down to get rid of it] and everything remaining was broken and covered in some sort of grease.
So I moved in and filled out the included form to mention everything wrong with the place. Naturally, I ran out of room before I got everything listed.
The carpet was finally replaced a week later, on 5th July--after I'd moved everything in here, and after I'd moved everything out of here into the convenient backyard. The dishwasher was finally replaced on 20th August. And so on.
As of today, I haven't paid rent for September [unless you consider that I paid rent for July and August without getting what I contracted to pay for]. Instead, I've handed in an itemised printout of everything still wrong with this place.
That's where the good news begins. Apparently, filling up a standard sheet with a UniBall in my handwriting [if you have the Chasm font installed, my handwriting looks a lot like this, at about this size; I still ran out of room as I was writing it] hadn't impressed them quite enough. The printout impressed them to hell and back. The new manager can't believe that they let me move into a place like this at all. She came up with a solution pretty quickly.
First of all, she's going to talk to Corporate in the morning and determine whether I really have any need to pay rent again, since I've already paid for two months without getting what I'm supposed to get for it. Beyond that, it's evident that the place I'm in will take longer to fix--whether my stuff is in it or not--than any other place under this management.
So I'm moving. A place identical to this one--in terms of the layout, anyway--is open; it'll be completely ready to be moved into on 16th September. So that's what we're doing.
That's also the extent of the good news.
The bad news is a symptom of the good news. There's the obvious: moving all this stuff once again. There's also the less obvious: my cablemodem is going to be more difficult to move than my waterbed.
It's possible that, once I have it in writing that we're moving to this new physical address, I'll be able to warn AT&T in advance, and have the switchover occur within the first two or three days after 16th September. But, even so, I'll probably be offline for a few days.
From your end, nothing much will change. The websites will still be here; I just won't be able to do any updates for a while. As opposed to being able to do updates, but not doing them anyway.
Also, of course, nothing is changing regarding my post office box; so that won't cause any problems either.
Really, this just gives me a handy new excuse for never updating anything for a few days: packing, moving, being offline, and so on.
Although....
One thing I do try to do once a week is update Radio Free Duhmerica. On the bright side, I should be able to upload the show for Sunday 15th September, move, and be back online in time to upload the show for Sunday 22nd September. If not, I guess the same show will run for two weeks in a row. Or, maybe I can just send a CD to Reg--the program director for AtheistRadio.com--and get him to drop it onto the server from his end. There's probably a way to do this and stay on the air.
In other news: I rented a few DVDs the other night. I know, I know: I never do that; I usually just buy them. But I wasn't going to buy these things. I just wanted to know what they were.
Dagon. The HP Lovecraft thing. Cthulhu fhtagn and all. Of the three, this one was the best. Not necessarily good enough to buy, but not so terribly bad that you want to go have your short term memory erased.
The basic story involves a guy who did well enough with the stock market to know people with a boat. Then the boat crashes into a reef in a storm while off the coast of FishMan Island, and he has to go there to get help. Except that it turns out that the place looks like the place he's been having nightmares about, and has the chick he's been having nightmares about. Also it has the FishMen. And the FishMen want to kill him because of some reason that some guy--with an accent so thick that you can't tell what language he's speaking, let alone what he's actually saying--apparently explains. So most of the film is the FishMen chasing this guy until they eventually catch him. But instead of killing him, they reunite him with the surviving crew of the SS Minnow, and just as he's about to explain why the FishMen want to kill everyone, the guy no one can understand interrupts him with mumbling and you never really find out for sure what in hell is going on. Of course, at the beginning of the film, the guy goes into a painfully irrelevant exposition of how he used to live on FishMan Island and his mother took him away to America, which all makes something like sense in the end when it turns out that the nightmare chick mermaid thingy is actually his half-sister, and that their common parent was Dagon the Cthulhu Thingy who now has to impregnate a human in order to produce a new FishMan who will ensure aquatic immortality for all FishMen...which essentially means that the chick the guy was on the boat with in the beginning has all her clothes removed, and eventually her arms. Then the guy sets himself on fire, the mermaid nightmare half-sister chick grabs him and pulls him into the ocean, the fire goes out, and the guy--missing most of his skin from the fire--discovers that he can breathe underwater. Then the film ends.
Shark Hunter. Forget Jaws. And Jaws2. And Jaws3D. And particularly Jaws: the Revenge. Forget Deep Blue Sea and the ?forthcoming Meg and Extinct. Because now we have Shark Hunter....
This is a film about a kid whose entire childhood consists of the same 8mm footage playing over and over again, and a boat in the water surrounded by fog which in no way could be a swimming pool at night. Also, his parents were attacked by a 'megalodon shark' and he ended up in a life preserver in the foggy ocean which was in no way a swimming pool at night. Then he grew up and became Trent Reznor the Doctor of Something Regarding the Ocean, which means that he builds submarines, teaches classes about building submarines, and hates 'megalodon sharks'. Until it turns out that the welding expedition he didn't get to go on because he hates 'megalodon sharks' was attacked by a 'megalodon shark' and he has to go find out whether they were attacked by a 'megalodon shark'. No one else on the expedition to determine whether it was a 'megalodon shark' believes in 'megalodon sharks' because 'megalodon sharks have been extinct for forty million years', which was 'forty million years after the deinosaurs died out'. Which tells us that, in the world created in this tragic film, the deinosaurs have been extinct for eighty million years, and there was an animal called a 'megalodon shark' which died out thirty-nine million, nine hundred thousand years before Carcharocles megalodon did. Of course: it didn't actually die out; and now it looks like a seventy-foot-long C.carcharias combined with a seventy-foot-long G.cuvier combined with an example of why 3DStudio should not be used in filmmaking. Anyway: the shark tries to eat everyone, so they try to blow it up [after a lengthy, overacted debate between these 'scientists' about whether to capture the 'megalodon shark' to protect it (?!?) or to simply kill it to prevent it from eating more undersea welders and people in boats in swimming pools at night] but the torpedo jams and blows up the submarine but not the 'megalodon shark', so Doctor Reznor drives the MiniSub into the 'megalodon shark's mouth and turns it into a hydrogen bomb to save the planet and swimming pools everywhere. Think Alligator with less intelligent oneliners here.
Now we come to the worst of the three....
Left Behind: the Movie.
If you read the novels, you already know how fucked up this story is. Basic end-of-the-world scenario. Except that, instead of anything interesting, like a nuclear exchange, supervirus, or random 'megalodon shark', the end of the world is more of a Roanoke thing. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a poof.
The film itself is barely worth talking about. A wheatfield in Canada is called Israel, and the enemy from the north attacks in 3DStudio and then explodes. 142million people poof, and the people left behind have to work out why. Nicholae Carpathia--the devil--tells everyone that it was the effects of nuclear testing throughout the twentieth century; a videocassette of a preacher with a speech impediment says it was the rapture; no one mentions that, according to the bible, only 144,000 males who have never known women who are from twelve semitic countries throughout the span of human existence will ever get into heaven, so the incomprehensible preacher's 'theory' makes more sense than Carpathia's does. Then Kirk Cameron is the only guy who remembers Carpathia shooting his investors, and returns to Chicago in a voiceover threatening us with Left Behind II: Tribulation Farce.
The rest of the disc is far more frightening than this half-assed horror film.
Everyone on the project [LeftBehindFilmProject.com, where you can buy a celluloid print for a thousand bucks and use it as you like, which is oddly tempting, to me] was a christian. They made a huge deal about that. Which explains why all the music was reheated eighties mulletbands and Carpathia the Devil was a KenDoll with a bad Russian accent. Also: Left Behind went straight to videocassette on Hallowe'en 2000, 'to give people the opportunity to see it before it hits the cinema in February 2001 and encourage others to see it during the cinematic run'. Roughly translated: releasing a two-dollar VHS cassette was cheaper than releasing a ten-thousand-dollar celluloid print, and resulted in a higher profit margin which could then be used to print up the celluoid.
Personally, I know a few cinema managers. When this film was released, no one went to see it at all. The releasing company ended up buying out all the seats themselves to get the box sales up enough to make it look as though a few hundred people cared enough to see it. The film is a sad parody of a book which had a lot of potential, but was written by morons who were more interested in telling everyone to go get saved by the Holy Zombi than in writing a decent book.
The interesting part, to me, is that CloudTen Productions admitted to hiring only devout christians for the project. That's great news. That means that I can officially get away with hiring only atheists into Wasted, Inc. Happy me.
So there's the gremlin.net film review....
Dagon: one star.
Shark Hunter: half a star.
Left Behind: the Cinematic ChickTract: poof.
More later....
--Gremlin