There is the one thing. We went out and saw Fear Dot Com Dot Com Dot Video Dot Drome Dot Dream Dot Scape Dot Ring the other night. Oh man....
Okay, so it was somewhat better than Fear Dot Com Dot Com Dot Net Dot Org Dot Ass was. If you're not caught up on that one, imagine Videodrome updated to a point in time where the video is on a website, and everyone on the planet is downloading five megabytes a second, but no one has a lightbulb above ten watts anymore. You watch this videofeed and then you die. Oddly, suicide isn't a factor.
Then we have The Ring, in which there's lots of nice lighting, but the DVD hasn't yet been invented. So there's this incredibly detailed urban legend going around about a videocassette you can watch, and then the phone rings and someone tells you that you're going to die in seven days.
I have a number of questions left over after watching this thing. But you have to have seen the film to understand why I'm asking them. So go ahead and highlight the next bit if you've seen it, or if you can live with a few spoilers....
Okay. The film begins with these GothCatholics, or something, talking about the urban legend of this video. Apparently, anyone under twenty is an authority on this thing; no one else has ever heard a thing about it. The basic story: you watch the video; it ends; the phone rings; someone tells you 'seven days'; you take that to mean that you're going to die in a week; a week later, you die. Great.
Then one of the GothCatholics dies because she'd seen the tape about 168 hours earlier; the other one goes mad, and apparently learns to spot people who have watched the video.
Then we find out that the dead GothCatholic's aunt is a reporter whose son never blinks. So she goes off to find out about the video, and ends up watching it. Then her phone rings and she's told 'seven days'. Good.
Back in the city, she takes the video to her ex-boyfriend because he has a camera and a VideoFlyer. Here, we find out that the tape defies all laws of recording, and that there's a lighthouse in it. Which is the perfect lead to go find the exact location in which it was filmed. First, of course, the ex-boyfriend watches the video. This isn't a horrorfilm; it's AmWay.
Off to the island of Nantucket to find the lighthouse. This is where we find out that everything's linked to the horses drowning themselves. Because this kid who never slept was whispering to them all night. But the dead kid's dad doesn't want to talk about it, so the reporter has to go find the island's doctor to learn that the kid never slept, and was therefore a lot like the doctor's autistic kid who repeats things like a parrot and hangs out on playground equipment.
Since none of this information is at all helpful, we go back to the lodge where the reporter saw the video and break through the floor to find the well. Naturally, the reporter can now have a psychic vision of the dead kid's dead mother throwing the dead kid into the well for scaring the horses. Which is why the dead kid kills people instead of horses now.
So the reporter finds the dead kid and frees her soul, or something. This is not to be confused with the ending of A Nightmare on Elm Street Three.
As much as that should be good news, it's not. Because that was never the right thing to do. Because she never sleeps. The dead kid. Who somehow talks to the live kid who never blinks. She never sleeps; he never blinks.
Instead, the reason that the reporter is still alive is that she showed the tape to the ex-boyfriend, who suddenly meets the dead chick who never sleeps and who moves about the room as though she came out of a Yes video. So the ultimate solution is to have the kid who never blinks [and therefore saw every single frame of this little film] show the film to someone new.
And then the film ends.
And the rest of us have to wonder a number of things about it. Like why the horse on the ferry drowned itself, why all the other horses had drowned themselves, why the film was called The Ring, why this fucking kid never blinks, why the dead kid's dad killed himself, and why this film was greenlit in the first place.
If anyone can answer any of those questions, let me know about it sometime....
In other news, the Name That Iguana contest is still going on. Interestingly, most of the suggestions we've got so far were names we'd already thought of before giving up and starting up the contest instead. Hunter's opposed to naming the iguana after any deities. Which is fair: the iguana evidently exists, after all.
Anyway: the contest will keep running until we have a winner. If we ever get one.
In other news, there are a few new things at wastedinc.com now. And a few less things, I suppose. I've still got a lot to do with the whole website, and the UnderConstruction thing is annoying me. So, the site is nice and fully functional now; it just isn't fully done yet. Eventually, it will be. Until then, it looks okay, one way or the other.
On which note: I keep getting EMails suggesting new stuff, usually with the trepid attitude that suggestions aren't tolerated. Not true. Suggestions are great. In fact, if you think of something good and can produce it on your own, you can Set up a store under wastedinc.com and do things that way. There's a synergy to it: a nice AnarchoCapitalistic sort of AmWay, I guess--except that you might actually want some of this stuff....
Incidentally, let me know if you set something up that way; I'll add a link to it here.
In other news, there's apparently a lot going on with DenverRockyHorror.com suddenly. Some sort of mutiny, I guess. From what I've heard, the film was dropped by the cinema which had been showing it for the last year or so, so the website's owner found a new place for it to be shown. Which is simple enough.
The convoluted part is that the 'cast' have divided again. Which, of course, happens. Mostly because the majority of these people--worldwide--are effectively useless little lemmings who like to pretend to be powerful little lemmings because they're able to stand in front of other lemmings while making some of the same movements as the thinner people on the screen behind them made in the seventies. Strangely, these lemmings are good at noticing that the other lemmings are lemmings, and talking about it to great length whenever none of the other lemmings is in the room.
So. We now have these various Lemming Factions who all hate each other until they're all in the same room. Then they all hate whichever lemmings aren't on site. And, because of that, the factions have managed to create this new controversy.
And that involves the film moving to a new cinema and most of the lemmings being left behind at the old one. Which isn't really the problem.
The problem is that this has nothing at all to do with me. And yet the various factions are all convinced that I'm behind whatever they're not individually benefitting from.
My favourite rumour so far is that I'm the one writing DenverRockyHorror.com. Which is patently false: I tend to write sites with working links--even if those links lead to unfinished sites. I have no idea who's writing this thing at this point. I've never written anything for that URL.
There's also the general paranoia coming from Bev Gerrish--a known idiot who claims to have killed Jim Morrison, or something. She's been obsessed with me since 1996--first accusing me of a felony [apparently the police told her that she was an idiot and refused to take her seriously] and then presuming that everything which goes wrong in her vestigial little life is the end result of my master plan. Also patently false: I haven't got enough free time to cause everything wrong with her life; the NSA haven't got the resources to cause her to suck this much. I'm also far too apathetic about the whole thing.
In any case, I've got all these people calling and EMailing me about this now. So far, I'm not getting enough direct questions to ascertain exactly what's going on; I just get these vague things like 'we've heard things, and we're wondering if they're true'. Okay. Typically, if you're hearing things, they're not true: we call that paranoid schizophrenia.
So I'm not sure what's going on here. All I know is that, in most cases, I charge consulting fees for dealing with anything this dumb. Not that the lemmings can afford that. If Bev, for example, had any money, I'd have sued her for libel years ago.
In still other news: you may have noticed that I picked up deadache.com the other day. I'm not sure why I did that yet. If I come up with a reason for it, I'll do something with it.
I also picked up a few other URLs, which have got purpose. But those are some of the things I'm working on at the moment, so they're not done yet. I'll announce them once they are done. at least one of them is a pretty good idea--not entirely mine, but good. On the bright side, I'm getting paid to do it. We're hoping to have it up and running by the end of the year. It's a fairly large project.
Speaking of large projects: Hunter still wants to get snaps of all this stuff I've been collecting for the last few decades and upload them. Her thinking is that it would upset other collectors. It probably would. Not that I really have a lot of time to do that right now. Maybe she can do it for me. Who knows.
Here's one bad example, I guess. It's a better example of how messy my desk is. What's not evident is that the whole room is full of boxes with more such stuff in them. So, if nothing else, letting Hunter get a few thousand snaps of this stuff might get the boxes unpacked and...and then we find out if I have enough room in a two-bedroom townhouse to put it all. Probably not.
In yet other news: Greenback is gone. He was supposed to go into the navy in December, but they offered him a raise if he went in now. Mostly because we're setting up to declare war in the new few weeks. So EMailing him is no longer a good way to reach him. However: I've set up greenback@gremlin.net for him; I can just print out his EMail and snailmail it to him until he's back online.
Aside from that, I'm not sure when he'll be back. Probably not this year, though.
More later....
--Gremlin