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To those who may have wondered, I am alive and well. I'm just really really busy these days and it doesn't make sense for me to spend copious amounts of time online when I have things that need to be taken care of in real life. I'll try and do a rundown of what has been going on lately.
First of all, I'm still employed which is of course good news in this economy. My work has had a couple of rounds of layoffs because business is down but I've made the cut each time. Hopefully we can ride things out until the end of the year without any more layoffs and hopefully next year there'll be some improvement no matter how short-lived. In the short term everyone in the company got a 5% paycut which kind of sucks but I guess its better than more people losing their jobs which we were told was the alternative.
My back hasn't been to bad since the surgery. I don't have the constant pain but sometimes I have short sharp bursts of pain if I move in a way that I shouldn't. I have to be incredibly careful since I've now had two herniated discs in my 20's. My back will definitely continue to be a problem for the rest of my life and I need to take care of it.
As a result of the paycut, Beth has had to get a job and she's now working part-time at the Toys R Us. She'll work nights and weekends so that we can do a "handoff" with Rachel. The good news is that Toys R Us pays about $1/hour over minimum wage so she should easily be able to supplement the amount that I lose due to my paycut while working a part-time job and I can't think of any kind of retail environment that would beat working somewhere like Toys R Us.
Rachel is definitely autistic. We've had the diagnosis and the 2nd opinion from a place that specializes in early childhood developmental disorders in Madison. The good news is that it's mild or what they call "highly functioning autism". It manifests itself in hyperactivity, obsessive-compulsive behavior, and periods of extreme focus followed by periods of no focus and inability to do anything more than a couple of seconds. Yet her intellectual development sometimes astounds me. She knows her letters. She knows her numbers and can identify numbers from 1 to 10 and can count from 1 to 15. She shows no interest in being read to though. She seems to just enjoy the task of identifying pictures and letters but is never interested in having a story read to her unless it has a rhyming quality and/or lots of repetition which she will find funny. So basically I got exactly what I asked for, a beautiful, healthy, genius child. It's just funny that even getting exactly what you wanted, that you can still have all of these issues and problems to deal with.
So most of my time that isn't spent at work is spent with Rachel. She and I are going to start doing some activities for children her age that the local community is putting on. One deals with music and musical instruments. Rachel really likes music so I think that may be a good one for her. The other one deals with improving gross motor skills and social skills. The latter is definitely something that Rachel could use a boost on and I definitely want to expose her to other children in a controlled setting.
In other news, since my last post I've seen Quantum of Solace and Watchmen. Its been so long since I've seen either one that I don't feel like making a major movie review post. I will say that I disapointed with both films. Quantum of Solace took all of the interesting things from Casino Royale and moved the story forward by making a bland action movie. None of the great character development was there. The fight scenes were the shaky confused type that I hate in modern movies. There's one sequence where James is fighting a guy whose dressed similarly to him while on some scaffolding and it is nearly impossible to do know who is who in the fight because of how they shot it. Then there's the sloppy nods to "old school" Bond like sleeping with women for no reason and when it doesn't make sense. This certainly isn't the more professional Bond that we saw in Royale. I was impressed that that movie went away from the standard Bond cliches and depicted the same Bond from the book - a professional that wouldn't let himself get distracted until after the mission was completed. Bleh!
I wasn't to thrilled with Watchmen either. For the record, I haven't read the graphic novel but since about 1998 people have been telling me that this movie was coming and that it was "the greatest comic book story of all time" so of course it would be an awesome movie. Indeed it was because of the Watchmen hype that I ever bothered to see League of Extraordinary Gentlemen since I knew that was based on another Alan Moore graphic novel. I really enjoyed that movie and the movie of V for Vendetta so it surprised me that Watchmen fell so flat.
There were things to like about it such as the character of Rorshach and the fact that the villain was able to pull off his horrific plan rather than being stopped at the last minute. But there were also annoying things like the lack of explanation about anyone's powers other than Dr Manhattan. This movie was very unforgiving for anyone who hasn't read the graphic novel. Night Owl had a suit but even without it, he seemed to display super strength and reflexes which seems to be what everyone else had as well. We also keep on getting told about how super fast Ozymandias is (although he's also apparently super smart and super strong) but then we only see it in one scene where he catches a bullet. Even though the opening was neat to give us the history of this alternate universe, it seems that the time could have been better spent giving us the origins of the principal cast rather than dealing with a whole bunch of characters that we never even see in the movie and only matter as footnotes.
Then there's the fact that the mystery isn't even a mystery due to a lack of credible suspects. About 15 minutes into the movie you know that the only people who could have pulled off the Comedian's murder are Ozymandias and Dr Manhattan and Ozymandias quickly becomes the most likely since the killer didn't glow blue. I thought that when they show Dr Manhattan muting his glow before going onto to television that they were giving us a clue but that only lasted for a few minutes so although we're supposed to be in suspense about "who did it" for a large portion of the movie, its pretty apparent who did it although the entire reason behind it still ends up being something of a revelation.
Really though for all its faults I would have felt a lot better about the movie if the ending had been better. We spend a whole movie building up to the battle royale with Ozymandias only to have it fizzle in the end because his plot although heinous brought about a "greater good". The fact that he succeeded was neat. The fact that he wasn't killed at the end was annoying. Even with Dr Manhattan's rationalizations which I can understand, Ozymandias himself had spilt to much blood. It wasn't right for him to be able to reap the rewards in the aftermath of the devastation. After all, he'd already succeeded and was no longer needed to create the peace between East and West that he was trying to establish. I kept hoping that before Dr Manhattan left out section of the universe that he'd say something like "oh one more thing" and look at Ozymandias and melt him. Instead the movie seems to be saying that "the ends justify the means" and that's not an ethic that I can get behind. Even the stuff about how the Silk Spectre's parentage seems to lend itself to that interpretation. "Oh its ok that the Comedian was murderous scum because he eventually had a kid that was good so that makes up for it". Bleh
In other news, Beth and I are going through several different series simultaneously. We have Stargate Atlantis and Heroes on hold pending the release of the next season sets from both series but we've also added Earth: Final Conflict to our repotoire. I'd forgotten how good the first season of that series was and now I can share it with Beth. I still have no clue why the series kept on screwing itself up each successive season and making stupid decisions to alienate the fans but at least season 1 stands up as a shining beacon of what the show could have been.
For American cartoons we're making our way slowly through the 1990's X-Men animated series which I still have on tape from when the show aired for the first time. We're also watching Space Ghost Coast to Coast and The Powerpuff Girls.
For anime I'm showing her the original Gundam series from 1979. Meanwhile we're watching Sailor Moon and DBZ. We've both seen all of Sailor Moon but we've never watched it together so that's been nice. I saw DBZ years and years ago on some very old, low quality fansubs so its nice to watch it in its remastered DVD glory and Beth has never seen it at all in Japanese and never saw many episodes in English.
For my own part, I've recently gotten ahold of the Japanese Transformers episodes. For those not "in the know" when Transformers was cancelled in America, the Japanese decided to continue the series. They accepted the first three seasons as canon but ignored the American season 4 (which was only 3 episodes long anyway and has the most contrived and forced "and they lived happily ever after" kind of ending that you can imagine). Proving that the Japanese make everything better, I have already witnessed things that I could have never imagined such as:
Soundwave and Blaster killing each other in battle.
A battle between 5 of the various robot groups that could form into a larger robot: Devastator (constructicons), Bruticus (Combaticons), Menasor (Stunticons), Superion (Aerialbots), and Defensor (Protectobots).
Optimus Prime dying so that Hot Rod could live and reintegrate the Matrix.
Galvatron finally conquering Cybertron only to have it blow up and destroy him.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. The Japanese version continued for three more seasons and I'm only 10 episodes into the first season of 35 episodes. I can't wait to find out what happens next.
In book news I just finished the first of the Dune prequals, Dune: House Atreides. It's a tad contrived as many prequals are since it lays a huge amount of conincidenses down to lay the groundwork for what we see in the first Dune book and goes beyond that to try and reference things that happen much much later in the series. Some of this seems very unlikely since the implication was that some of these things didn't exist until much later but I'll read the rest of the prequals to see if this is given a satisfactory explanation.
I've also recently learned how to modify NES cartridges to replace the batteries with battery holders so that after one fairly simple mod you have a system where you can quickly swap out batteries from there forward. I'm preparing a tutorial on the process and will probably let anyone here know whose interested. FYI, the same method that I used for this mod could also be used for SNES games and presumably for N64 games as well although I've never cracked one of those carts open but I assume its the same.
I'm going to try and post more regularly. A lot of topics that I wish to discuss go by the wayside lately but hopefully I can get more regular.
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