En-Route to all Strange Places

Ghosts and Personal Property

2010-01-07T14:19:00.000-08:00

So, the ghost and I are having a disagreement. It keeps wanting to rearrange my things and I keep wanting it not to. The past three days I've been waking up in the morning to find small items moved from one side of the desk to the other. On the first two days it was just my wallet, a couple of coins, things that I normally keep in the same place and don't really look for before reaching for them. These I may attribute to simple forgetfulness, should I wish to do so, but yesterday my alarm clock had been moved clear across the desk, and I know for certain that I have not picked it up since the first evening when I set it. (In fact, I have not done anything but tap it to turn it off since then)

You may combine this with the odd computer glitches, the periodic screen jumps that I experience in that room and that room alone, the image ghosting, the replacement of my Windows startup sound with a strange mechanical screeching. You may also combine it with the periodic cold spots, the room's impenetrable dimness, and this morning's incident.

I awoke this morning to find myself very cold, the sort of cold that I have only experienced here when outside and trudging about in snow, or when my jangled nerves get the best of me in a darkened hallway (my mind filling itself with the yodeling cries of the Howlers in Clive Barker's: Undying). The reason for this was not a visible spectral presence, but the fact that my window was wide open. Now, please understand, it is well below freezing during the nights here, and my room stands steady at about sixty with the help of the endlessly groaning radiators here in the abbey, so there is no reason for me to have opened my window. Said window is also a unit of the type which must be lifted up along a track into the space afforded by the thinner panes above, and it is in a position (behind my rather deep desk) that makes it very difficult to gain proper leverage and pull the thing up. Finally, the window was fully opened, something which I was unable to achieve when I played with it on the day of my arrival.

So, conclusions: I am either, 1) losing my mind, 2) sleepwalking and rearranging the room/hallucinating extreme warmth in the night, or 3) the subject of the latest in--what my room's sighting list would have me believe--a series of hauntings focused around room 21 of the Wroxton Abbey.

Please consider this as you will.

-Sean

Back as such.

2010-01-06T14:25:00.000-08:00

Reviving this because England in snow is gorgeous but also restrictive and cold and murderously slippery after dark. I don't think anyone knows to read this anymore since there's been such a gap in posting. I'm not sure anyone knew to read it in the first place. Bringing it back now though, at least until the next time I forget.

On Self Loathing

2009-07-05T20:31:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me knows that I have something of a curio-masochist streak when it comes to movies, so when I wound up extremely bored the other day and went to the theater, only to discover that Public Enemies was sold out, I decided that rather than wait for the next show I would just go and see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Review follows:

Never before has the American studio system dumped more trucks of money into such a gigantic, useless, idiotic and offensive fire. This film took everything that was stupid and puerile about its predecessor and compounded it ten-fold, adding a serious dash of racist caricature into the mix as well. It is an exercise in excess, brought about by too much freedom given to too many incompetent people. It is a blurry noisy mess so bogged down in dog sex, up-skirts, pot brownies and incontinence that you can scarcely try to comprehend it. What's worse is that there isn't even a story in this trainwreck, nor is there even a hint of somebody trying to create one in the entirety of the film's two and a half hour run-time.

Then, just when you think it couldn't get worse... Shia LeBouf's character dies and goes to robot heaven.

Then, just when you think it couldn't get any worse... the robots in robot heaven decide to bring him back to life to torture us some more.

The entire affair is nothing more than utter toss. No wonder it's making coin.

Journey to the Center of the YouTube, Part 4

2009-06-22T11:12:00.000-07:00

You stay classy, New Jersey.

Journey to the Center of the YouTube, Part 3

2009-06-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

Never before have I been so touched by the courage that resides within the human heart. On YouTube.

Journey to the Center of the YouTube, Part 2

2009-06-11T12:30:00.000-07:00

We continue our series with this video of Bjork attempting to explain television. I don't understand it either, really.

Journey to the Center of the YouTube, Part 1

2009-06-10T14:21:00.000-07:00

Some YouTube videos for you, both wonderful and disturbing. First up is a video demonstrating Trap Jaw Ants, which bear what Wikipedia refers to as the "fastest moving biting appendages in the animal kingdom." They, as the video demonstrates, use the force of their own biting to fling themselves backwards through the air. I mark them now as a threat to humanity.

Next up is the so-called "Dogway Melody" a frankly disturbing live-action children's vignette from the heart of Prohibition. Man, what did all of that bootleg hooch do to people...

On "Big Lots" and Purchasing Useless Things for Very Little Money

2008-08-08T11:02:00.000-07:00

I have an odd tendency to buy things Which I feel are unusual to sell in stores. They are never expensive things, nor are they particularly odd objects on their own... They are simply things that I see on shelves and immediately have to pick up and poke at, just to be sure that they are really there.

Now, there are several retail chains in this country that seem to exist in an odd below-Walmart rung. The most prevalent of these, Big Lots, operates (as I understand it) by purchasing random abandoned lots of items from closing warehouses. The items in the lots are then divied up, given ludicrously low prices and shipped off to the actual stores. Naturally, many of the things that you will find on their shelves are both very old and in all likelihood very poorly made. This makes shopping there an ultra-low rent retail nightmare which should be only embraced by men who are either truly fearless or truly desperate.

It does, however, guarantee that a startling array of strange things will be for sale.

The point of all of this is that while visiting family last week I entered one of their stores on a fairly desperate search for large plastic water-cooler jugs. (which is a wholly pointless story in and of itself) Big Lots was naturally the last place that my family and I visited on our search and, just as naturally, they were the only place to stock the jugs we were looking for. As we waited in the checkout line I happened to look over at just the right time to notice a small book rack. Upon the rack was a small collection of different volumes, novels mostly, all of which were several years old. Among them however was an item that was so chronologically out of place, so useless, so cheap, and so damn strange to see that I had to get out of line and go and pick it up.

It was a copy of the strategy guide for Douglas Adams' 1997 adventure game Starship Titanic, and while I know and understand the concept under which this company operates... the presence of one copy, let alone six, left me completely baffled.

Yes! For three dollars I could purchase a new copy of a book that had gone out of print a decade prior, which was designed to serve as an accompanying piece for a game that had gone out of print almost as long ago. It is a game that I had distantly heard of but never played (though as a fan of Adams, I regret that fact) but, like most items that fall into the category discussed above, I had to purchase it.

So, now it sits on my shelf. I've read it, and actually found it quite interesting, but I don't know what else to do with it short of using it as a conversation piece. (starting a conversation so boring that it will drive people from the room, no doubt) So I wonder now if anyone knows where I can get a copy of the game?

Also, I'm fairly sure that this is the last published book that Adams wrote original content for before his death. I realized that while reading it and the thought comes back every time I look at the thing. Frankly it's a bit spooky.

First Post

2008-08-07T12:54:00.001-07:00

Just throwing this out to make sure that everything is working as it should. I'm setting up a new web space for myself after several years of determinedly ignoring a hideous and unsatisfactory livejournal page. Not sure if I'll definitely go with this service yet, but the creation process was simple and efficient and the process as a whole is growing on me already.

Looks like I may have found what I wanted. Maybe more to come.

Also: pretentious name.