The Twilight Report

Zombies in the Hallways

2004-12-07T17:27:00

Tyler asked me if I would help him make a first person shooter involving zombies and the Amish. Let me just say that I have nothing against the Amish, and my understanding of them is limited to that which I gleaned from the Peter Weir film Witness. [ Editors Note: Peter Weir is the best Australian director Ever ]

Today I am driving to work, thinking that I am late (the meeting is in fact 9:30 not 9:00, so I will actually be 20 minutes early) and I have a remix of Bloody Tears playing in the car CD player and I start having this fantasy that the factory building that I work in is actually a run down castle inhabited by my co-workers, who are actually zombies, ghosts, gules and other assorted undead monsters, all of which can be dispatched by a neat *snap* of my chain whip. My manager is that really weak bat creature at the end of Level 1 which anyone can defeat.

nin, revisited

2004-09-05T02:25:00

I've been meaning to get back to a story I wrote about some time ago about nin (nine inch nails) some time ago. For those of you who care to read what I wrote earlier here it is: [ short entry about me trying to sell one of my old nin acquisitions on eBay ]. If you don't want to read that, don't worry, it essentially says that I was troubled by the behavior of the bidders to my auctions, apparently nin fans, but in the end I decided to give one particular bidder (a Canadian, so I suspect he talks funny) the benefit of the doubt.

Denmark: My Prison (in focus)

So in the end somebody finally won this auction for four nine inch nails CDs and I send off an invoice, waited a few days, sent a reminder notice, waited a few days, sent an extremely polite eBay message asking the buyer to pay up, or at least contact me, waited a few more days and finally filed a non paying bidder complaint with e-mail, waited a few more days and still heard nothing. I sent an offer to the next highest bidder (our Canadian bidder) and posted negative feedback for the non paying person. The first time ever, I really didn't want to do it, but I felt like I had run out of alternatives. I was planning on re-listing the item the next Wednesday, which was only a couple of days away, since I hadn't heard back from my Canadian bidder about the second chance offer.

The next day I got a message from the winner of the auction apologizing and saying that she had sent payment via PayPal. I checked my account and sure enough I had received my dough. This left me a little uneasy, because I had a second chance offer out there to my Canadian bidder and only one set of discs. I wasn't sure that it would end well if he decided to take the offer, and I wasn't sure if I could cancel it. It all worked out ok though, because I was able to cancel the offer and sent this stern message to the winner (and now paying) bidder:

I really wish you had contacted me sooner.  It said quite clearly
in the listing that payment needed to be received within ten days.  I
was about to relist the item.  Anyway, since you have sent me the money,
I will be posting you your CDs first thing tomorrow.  Thank you for
taking care of this.

...and the next day I posted the CDs. Mind you, all of this was during the most stressful part of my Color1 class: preparing for my final portfolio, so I was already ripping the hair out of my scalp because of work and school.

Denmark: My Prison (out of focus)

I started writing this story out at one point, but the whole thing seemed rather angry, and I wasn't in the mood to sound angry, because I don't think I was particularly. Then I forgot about it, but I was looking at someone's profile on-line yesterday. Boredom had set in I think, and usually I hate it when people have music playing on their web pages, like this one did, but I stopped for a minute to listen to it.

Sound a bit like a bad nine inch nails rip off... I thought to myself I wonder who it is. I found the place in the page where the music was playing. In this case it was actually a music video. I pulled the temporal navigation slider back to the beginning of the video to see if it would tell me who the band was. Nothing there. Then I tugged the widget back to the other end of the song to see if that would offer any clue. There was nothing there too, but in this case it was spelled out for me:

For those of you who don't know, don't remember, or more likely don't care, Trent Reznor's label is Nothing Records. Ahhh... I thinks to myself so this isn't a bad nine inch nails rip off, it's just a bad nine inch nails song. There would have been a time when I could not have accepted the thought. I would not have been able to utter a sentence which included the term bad nine inch nails song. Fortunately, my tastes in music have become less dogmatic, and maybe even more refined. I still listen to nine inch nails on occasion. I think my favorite song has got to be Reptile - I would still like to write a demo to that music - but my devotion is obviously not unquestioned, as evidenced by the fact that I was even selling off part of my collection. And oh yeah... the fact that I listen to Trent on the order of once every few months instead of several times a day as I did back in 1995 (which as some of you already know was the 1985 of the 90s...)

Denmark: My Prison (interference patterns)

A friend of mine a while back essentially told me that my taste in music was, how shall I put it? Well let's just say that my taste in music is apparently "gullible." My initial reaction to this was amusement, because, it is such a silly "Ha-Ha" thing to say. After all how can my taste... my preference... be gullible? You can be gullible enough to believe that the moon is made of Swiss cheese, or that this gentleman here owns and can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. You can't be fooled into liking trance or rap or country or any other form of music, either you like it or you don't. Even when I described my taste as being dogmatic, I do not think I would be so insulting as to call my taste in music gullible. Which is how I sort of take this narrow minded kind of statement now: insulting.

Even if you are more "expert" in a subject than someone else it's quite obviously unfair to apply your standards to someone else's taste and expect them to take it as a friendly act. I see nothing wrong with being critical of a piece of art, for example, if you are a movie critic and are not critical enough of Titanic to write a poor review then you are clearly not doing your job (that is just my opinion... Man).

I visited a friend recently in an apartment which she had just moved into, so when I discovered that she had hung up on her wall one of my black and white prints, I was honored. Ahh... was actually my first thought of the prints I gave you, you chose to hang the most cliché. Instead of saying that thought, I simply said that I was honored. Now, admittedly it is easy to say something nice in place of something insensitive in this sort of situation, but pretty much in any situation if you are creative you can say something nice when socializing with your friends, and when you can't maybe you ought not say anything.

I suppose that means I shouldn't have said the last three paragraphs. Pretend you didn't read them.

nin

2004-08-10T00:03:00

I used to be somewhat crazy about NIN. I will now occasionally listen to one of their records, broken if I want something angry, or downward spiral if I want to drive my car faster. I have some NIN bootlegs which I never listen to anymore, so I decided to post them on eBay (try here, or here if interested). One asshole bid with multiple accounts, one of which had negative (-1) and another with zero feedback. He may have actually been legit, but I tend to doubt it, so I canceled his bids. At this point I was thinking NIN fans are a bunch of roguish, poorly bred, hoodlums.

Then today, I'm getting home and I get a message from somebody in Canada wanting to buy the CD. I don't ship to Canada, because the one time I did, the guy was a real asshole, and it was a hassle filling out the extra paperwork. This is what the guy had to say:

hello, i'm very interested in bidding for this item in particular the purest feeling, and i was curious if you would be willing to ship to canada, my girlfriend is a huge fan of nin, and she's been looking for a copy of the purest feeling for some time, and i would like to get her a copy, but you are the only one selling the album, and unfortunately it says for the united states only, if you could possibly see to mailing to canada i would gladly bid on it and pay for any extra charges in shipping it, as you can see i have a 100 ositive feedback and i pay for my auctions promptly, thank you for your time.

My usual response is "I'm sorry I don't ship to Canada." However, I was touched by the personal touch in this request, so I told him I would ship to Canada for him if he won the auction. I mean, if my girlfriend wanted a CD and the only way to get it were to purchase it from someone in Canada, I would hope that our neighbors to the north would oblige. The point is moot, since I am decidedly single, but the thought follows anyway.

After responding to this guys e-mail, I decided that I shouldn't be so hard on NIN fans, because this guy had been much more of a gentleman than the other buyers I had dealt with in the NIN CDs I was selling (as compared with my other sales). Then it occurred to me that he wasn't a good reason to change my mind after all, because he isn't a NIN fan; his girlfriend is.

Still, I'll give his girlfriend the benefit of the doubt and we will just say she's all right too.