So there’s very little to do in the wee hours oozing from saturday night into sunday morning aside from listen to some groovalicious tunes and sketch. As I type this the sun has just begun to rise and I begin to consider that in a few hours I can get some breakfast and then go to bed.

I was graced with the unexpected but welcome presence of Catherine earlier on in the evening and watched tv until heath passed out on the couch and cat stole his bed, which was a little after 4am. Not tired in the least and with all other distractions out of the way I finally had some awake time to myself. Hopefully I can get some ‘work’ done before bedtime, so I can feel like this week hasn’t been a complete wash.

News on the college front: I was totally accepted to UMKC, as a sophmore. A little piece of me dies thinking that my previous 4 years of higher education amount to 2, especially since in my last transfer I was received as a junior. I still have to go down there and hammer out an escape route, but with considerations of part time schooling while attempting to continue working things might not go as quickly as I would hope. We’ll see.

So I’ve been working nights for 3 days now. It feels more like 3 weeks. I wake up shortly before nightfall each day, watch the sun disappear, and then pull an 11 hour shift that seems to last forever. I come home and pass out after maybe an hour or so of muddling about and repeat the process. The rest of my time is spent in sleep which seems to do anything but refresh. I think I have Saturday night off, or maybe it’s Friday night. I’m not entirely sure what day it is right now. I can only see my day off being spent passed out throughout the day until about 7 or so, and then I’ll be awake all night with very little to do. There won’t be a movie night for me on Sunday since I think I have to be at work somewhere around 8.

But hey, it’s me and a big dog.

Time to drift off for another hour until my dinner is ready.

“The sky is falling as we patch it with twine
I said the sky is falling, run for your lives”

I thought you could all use another sketch. My quest to stay up through the night and attempt to reset my circadian rhythm has given me ample alone time to noodle about in photoshop. I would have thrown some color in, but then I remembered that I could maybe work on more of a project type of thing. I hope that these sketches can become drawings in the near future as it certainly has been a while since I’ve produced a complete work.

When the world sleeps, I finally feel awake.

So today I upgraded my WordPress from v1.5 (I think) to v2.0.2. It was a complete success. I now have an army of widgets at my beck and call. What does that mean to you, loyal reader? It means I got to fiddle around with my sidebar some more in order to accomodate the new dynamic portions of WP. Now I can simply drag and drop changes to my links, insert rss feeds, images and other goodies without altering the code by hand. We’ll see if anything exciting comes of it.

In following with the upgrade theme I also downloaded the Opera 9 Beta. So far I like it as it seems to be much more compatible with AJAX than before, as in it now has some functionality as opposed to none. Now my WordPress dashboard actually works as it was intended to and editing will hopefully be a little simpler in the future.

As I’m typing this I’m noticing that the text entry box seems to be a bit buggy as I’ve accidentally caused it to shrink to about half of its original size and I can’t expand it. Luckily it’s still a beta. Opera 9 also has widgets. If that’s not the catch word of the year I don’t know what is. Just remind me that no matter what I make from now on, it should always have more widgets. They seem to function as more graphic based Firefox plugins, and currently I’ve got a dig RSS feed running, and I can also look at the weather. Sunny and 78 here. I think the biggest failing of the system as it stands is that neither way of using the widgets – by either clicking a tab to toggle between the widgets and Opera, or by ‘pinning’ the widgets to the desktop – seem to be the most efficient way to go about doing things. If they somehow docked into Opera or were integrated rather than each being it’s own free roaming application they might be a little more user friendly. But hey, I’m just one guy talking.

I had tried to find a digg widget for my WordPress earlier today. For some reason I couldn’t find the results I was looking for.

Update: Don’t use Opera 9 with WordPress. I had to spend about 15 minutes trying to correct the horrible formatting errors it caused in this post, before I finally gave up and copy/pasted the plain text. Keyword: Beta.

So this afternoon after work, with the prospects of doing ’stuff’ were looking rather thin as the handful of people I know were all busy, I decided to splurge and go see a movie. By myself. It’s not weird. Leave me alone about it already.

I had wanted to see V for Vendetta but it seemed that the only times the theatres close to me were showing it was 7pm and later, and I didn’t feel like burning another 3 hours at home before going to see it, as it would both prolong my boredom and cut my chances of finding things to do later on should someone call in the evening. So I picked Silent Hill over Lucky Number Slevin, despite the rottentomatoes rating being kind of shite and the reviews being quite unkind. Pope vouched for it, and it received the Buddy Bill seal of approval, so it got my vote.

My thoughts? It started out rather abruptly. A little girl had run away in her sleep, her mother chasing her through the forest, with Sean Bean standing back wishing he had gotten a better script. The mother catches her daughter as she tries to throw herself off of a cliff into the raging waters below. The girl, still asleep, screams “Silent Hill” several times. The mother starts a Crusade to find Silent Hill and fix her somnambulent posessed daughter.

At this point I’d like to bring to your attention that the mother’s name is Rose, and the girl’s name for anyone who hasn’t seen the trailer, is Sharon. Rose of Sharon anyone? It’s a bush with flowers. The connection? I have no idea. I read some mythological origins of Rose of Sharon on a page mastered by someone calling herself Paghat the Ratgirl. You can see her page with pictures of the flower here. Upon reading a few paragraphs and realizing it was jumping randomly between mythologies with nothing tying them together in a neat package that I could apply for symbolic purposes in conjunction with the movie, I’ll say that the connection is that Rose and Sharon REALLY love each other. A lot. I think it’s also important to know that the Wine of Sharon is menstrual blood, and isn’t nearly as good as the flux of Carmel, who left some stains on Mount Carmel. She must have mistaken the mountain for a masturbatory device. But I digress.

So Rose of Sharon goes off to Silent Hill and stops answering phone calls from Sean Bean, who is left at home still wishing that he had gotten a better script, and possibly wondering what the movie would have been like had he some motivation to deliver the few lines he did get with any sort of feeling whatsoever. Run on sentence!

I won’t give away any more of the plot as I’ve pretty much covered what the trailer does, and I don’t want to risk spoiling the movie for anyone. I will say that the movie really shines in the creepy atmosphere department where the viewers get a frightening respite from poorly written and delivered dialogue. Some of the films’s visuals will be forever burned into my mind, like the dos prompt on an old crt monitor. Some teasers? Think of the evil dead tree rape scene – then imagine it being done with barbed wire. Ever wish a large man-like creature would grab the flesh of your chest and tear all the skin off of your body before slinging your entrails out of your body with a towel whip-like motion towards horrified onlookers? This movie is your genie.

The story’s resolution is a bit hazy, perhaps making sense to those who have played the games and are thoroughly familiar with the inner workings of the Silent Hill universe. I’m left feeling alternately queasy and bemused, with scenes where Rose reassures one of her compatriots that “everything is going to be ok” later contrasted with a scene where said compatriot is being burned to death with far too much detail worked into the “flesh searing, blistering, splitting open then blackening and bursting into flames” effect. I might have horrible nightmares.

After the movie I went over to Dick’s sporting goods where I browsed for a few minutes until I very acutely sensed that an air raid siren was about to sound, that the world was about to go dark, and that when I finally found a flashlight I would have wished I hadn’t.

I then explored Town Center Plaza as I was fairly unaware of its existence. That and it would be harder for the monsters to corner me if I were outside. I hope.

I’d also like to note that Sean Bean is still in Ohio somewhere wondering where his family is, and to stay the fuck away from West Virginia, as both Hollywood’s fictional representations and my personal experiences dictate that it’s a horror movie waiting to happen.