Movie W The Kid, Interrupted

 

Spontaneous decision--noticed that the Fifth Element was showing at the movies for a special one night thing. One showing, but I had my choice of either theater. The theater closest to me was getting pretty packed, but the Columbia one was looking okay.

I bought tickets. Then the day of the showing(yesterday), I noticed the closer theater added another showing five minutes earlier than the packed one. Only 6 people had bought seats.

I kept an eye on it, and it didn't get much more full so I canceled my tickets at the other place and bought ones here.

Grabbed the kid(he's never seen it) and went. We get seated, and I check the seats sold--still looked good.

Five minutes before the movie's supposed to start, and white lights start flashing. Some recording says that an emergency has occurred in the building and to please evacuate. 

Super. We pick up our popcorns and sodas, and follow the crowds out of the movie. Everybody's standing in the mall right outside the doors. Firemen show up and check things out, don't seem to find anything.

After about 25 minutes, they let us all back in. They give us passes for the inconvenience, and then start our movies.

The flick opens with a new 5 minute introduction by Leonard Maltin. That ends, and then pops RIGHT BACK up and we have to watch it again. Fucksake.

Then the movie. My background--I've only ever seen this movie once. I didn't like it much, because it's actually pretty good and then Chris Tucker comes in and ruins the whole flick.

I figured I'd give it another chance. Been a while, and now I know that happens so maybe it won't bother me as much.

Well, I'm gonna stand on that. This movie would be WAAAAAY better if Chris Tucker had never been in this movie. He serves almost no purpose other than to annoy the shit out of you. The movie's about 15 minutes too long, and if you take him out you're gonna find this movie would flow a lot better.

Why are we spending valuable time on him going down on some random flight attendant? On following him around as he babbles on and on.

Otherwise, still a fairly entertaining movie up to that point. 

Up tonight--Gladiator 2 in ScreenX.

The wife is still in rough shape--they didn't give her a lot of pain meds, so sometimes she's in so much pain she's crying, and she doesn't cry much so it's gotta be pretty bad. Her knee is super swollen, but apparently that's expected for a couple of weeks.

Whenever I go to the movies, I set all her stuff up for her, and then when I'm back home, I always have a few things to do for her. Can basically only get out of the house for about 4 hours tops.

 

 

Knee Hell

 

Wife had knee-replacement surgery couple of days ago. Now both of our lives are nightmares.

She can't drive for 4-6 weeks. She can barely stand and limp around with a walker(which she has to do every hour or so to make sure it doesn't stiffen up).

I have to come up and recharge her compression pads and replace them on her legs when they're done. I also have to change the ice in her ice machine every 6-8 hours when it melts and stops cooling her leg.

She's got this crazy med schedule she has to stay on--has to keep it all written down so she doesn't forget when/if she took them. That won't let her sleep more than 4 hours at a time.

I also have to fix her food, lift her leg onto the couch(she can't lift it because they cut some muscle up toward the groin, so it's impossible for her to do by herself until it heals), keep the dogs off of her, take care of the dogs, go over to her mom's house whenever they need something.

Not fun.

Boy that whole "growing old will be so nice" shit they used to sell us was an outright lie, huh? I've always thought so, but now I'm sure; Heath Ledger had the right idea. Go out young and healthy and pretty.

Hey, lest you think this is a sexist blog where I only post Conan and barbarian men pics, here's some sexy lady fantasy pics--couple of cool Red Sonja ones too.

 

 

 

Everybody Okay Now? Conan Photo Dump Edition

 

Got all these Conan pics I've saved--some of them are pictures that were on the covers of Savage Sword of Conans that I used to read, and wanna pick up again.

Saw a movie called Conclave--was funny cuz it didn't look like an interesting flick but the critics and people were loving it, and I was bored. I showed the trailer to my kid, told him I was going to it. I expected him to say "I'll go,", cuz even if it's not his type of movie, he loves going to the movies and having popcorn and a soda.

But he surprised me. "I don't think I want to see that." 

So I went with my brother. It's a pretty interesting movie considering it's just about them picking a new pope when the current pope dies.

Then we saw Elevation, a movie that had to cost like 30 million and stars Anthony Mackie and Morena Baccarin. It's fun. Not great, but short and if you're looking for a lightweight monster movie in the Quiet Place vein, there ya go.  

(didn't hurt that we got to see it alone--nobody else in the auditorium)

Then last night I was bored and figured I'd go see Heretic, cuz I was hearing good things about that too. (but I'm always leery of A24 flicks, which is usually code for BORING and PRETENTIOUS)

And weird part, I mentioned I was going to the Malf and he said he'd go. Will the craziness never end?

Flick was pretty good, which is saying something cuz it's like 90% talk. I saw one idiot on the internet dismiss it as "Hugh mansplaining religion to two girls".

And I love how nowadays a man cannot explain anything without it, by defnition, becoming mansplaining. So ladies, make sure you don't ask how to do ANYTHING of a man, because we're gonna shake our head and say "Oh, I don't want to mansplain it to you."

Anyway, movie's pretty good. The ending's a little...hard to believe...but still, enjoyed it.

Hey, wanna laugh and waste an hour of your time? Here's someone who HATED my novella that I put out back in 2021. She hated it so bad that she made a 52 minutes video about it.

And I ain't even saying she's wrong on some stuff, but there's a TON of nitpicking at nothing. And when you get mad at someone for putting in pop culture references, kind of bad form to then point out that you use THE SAME EXACT POP CULTURE REFERENCES.

Not making it a link, cuz I don't want it to track back here, so copy/paste it into a new tab.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pHX-iHYBGY

Makes me wanna write another book. (I mean, I'm writing two of them now lol)

 

 

So...That Happened.

 

I'm sure this isn't gonna make anybody happy who wanted the election to turn out different. Guess today's the day to piss people off even more.

Thing is, if you know me then you know I don't like the orange man either. He's a giant piece of shit, I think we can all agree.

Where we probably disagree is that I disliked his opponent even more. I dislike the entire DNC establishment to the max. Want to know some reasons why? I saw this retweeted on the twitter, and a lot of my feelings are reflected in there.

It's unbelievable that--after the first time the orange man won--that the DNC didn't stop and assess what happened. THEY were the ones who elevated him, all because they thought he was the only candidate Hillary could beat, and turns out no, she couldn't even beat him.

But instead they blamed everybody else. Hell, a lot of angry people did the same thing. If you didn't vote for her, you're a bad person! It was EVERYBODY'S duty to vote for the worst-candidate the democrats had ever put up.

Oh, also there was Russian collusion! (there wasn't)

The DNC should have taken a hard look in the mirror, and what they should have realized is that they need to put up a candidate that people WANT to vote for. Not a candidate that they manufacture fake enthusiasm for and pretend is a great candidate. They need an actual POPULAR candidate.

They didn't do that. And they lucked out with that Biden win last time, so I guess they thought--"Hey, we're good."

Then they continued to lie about his mental issues, saying he was super sharp and had no issues, and then we got to see they were lying once again.

What a lot of people don't understand is this: We lived through the orange man's first term. We had been told that there would be a civil war, that it would mean the end of so many freedoms. But none of that happened to us. I'm not saying some bad things didn't happen--like the immigrant kids in cages, but guess what--same thing happened under Biden, and to even larger numbers, and it's weird that we didn't hear shit about that from the media who harped on it when the orange man was doing it.

(and in case you're right now saying that's bullshit, here ya go:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/apr/09/brandon-tatum/more-children-held-border-under-biden-trump-not-4-/

)

Add to that the fact that this administration has been sending tons of money and weapons to help murder many innocent people, children among them, and how thoroughly unlikable this candidate was--from her terrible cackling laugh to her fake accents to her inability to compose full sentences unless she had a hidden microphone in an earring--and nobody's rushing to the polls to vote for her.

I know...you might be getting mad right now. This is where you were at the first time. And YOU didn't stop to think about what YOU could do to help, you just fucking hated everybody who didn't vote your way, who didn't vote "to save democracy".

Well, start thinking now. Stop getting angry at everybody else, and start forcing your party to work for US, instead of attempting to put their own patsies into office every time.

It's not anyone's duty to vote for your candidate, regardless of your views on how bad a candidate is. Our democracy is in less danger from the orange man than it is from the two-party system currently being owned by special interests and lobbyists.

For the record, I voted for neither the orange man or the D candidate. In my state, the D always wins anyway so it wouldn't have mattered.

 

 

 

That Was Halloween

 

So Halloween is over. I'm at that point where the depression is coming. Super.

My wife set up a pumpkin carving station in our driveway, and sadly she and my son carved pumpkins last night. I think she's bummed cuz she remembers the pumpkin parties we used to have, where all the kids would come over and carve pumpkins and eat all the snacks my wife had made.

We had cool neighbors who would bring their kids over. Everybody was young. All of our parents were alive and healthy. 

Life just felt better in general, I think we're both feeling. 

Happy Halloween indeed, right?

Then tonight on Halloween, I went and picked up her mom and brought her over to hang out at our firepit and help hand out candy. My wife made meatballs for subs, made some cupcakes, and set out cheese/crackers and a vegetable tray. Other snacks she'd bought. 

It kind of looked like the pumpkin party setup. My brother in law and his wife and kid were supposed to come by, so it would at least be seven of us.

Trick or treaters were fairly sparse. A couple of big groups, but definitely seemed like fewer than normal. Also, it was like 80 degrees at nine o'clock. 

And then the wife's brother and family don't show up until like 9pm. Well after all the treaters were gone. He wasn't that hungry then either. They didn't really eat much. Hung out and chatted at the firepit for a while, then they left.

Me and the wife and kid sat down to watch a movie. I've added it to the list a couple of posts below. Then we watched another episode of Buffy. 

I took a day off tomorrow--I have so much PTO that I have to use it or lose it. They let us keep a ton of time--240 hours, and they buy them back at the end of the year down to 120. So at the end of the year I end up getting a huge check--basically a paycheck and a half plus my regular paycheck.

I'm about to go over the 240 when I get the 6.7 hours I get every two weeks, so I just took off tomorrow. I gotta shoot a video for the auction company on Saturday, so this was as good a time as any.

---

Far as book stuff--the clowns book continues to slowly die. Some days not even selling one copy. It's nuts. At this point I think I'm about 13K in the hole on it. Ain't gonna break me, but certainly makes me reconsider the next book. And only reason I'm THERE is because I just made a deal for the Czech edition of the book. Not a ton of money but at this point everything counts.

The Halloween book, however, is still in the top 15 anthologies. Burning up the kindle read pages, which pays decent. We broke 500K in pages read a week or so ago.

It's gonna have to pick up the slack for the other book I guess.