totm aug 2023 What funny/interesting thing happened in your life today?

[DDE]

1 hour ago, Hyperspace Industries said:

I re-re-re-re-re-re-re-rewatch men in black

You really need that neuralyser, huh?

[kerbiloid]

Too late. Finally, the nurse already has stuck the needle in his shoulder.

Edited November 23, 2021 by kerbiloid

[Hyperspace Industries]

7 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Too late. Finally, the nurse already has stuck the needle in his shoulder.

Yup, got vaccinated today!

[kerbiloid]

22 minutes ago, Hyperspace Industries said:

Yup, got vaccinated today!

Spoiler

 

You copy?

[Hyperspace Industries]

You copy?

I copy and paste, sir!

[Delay]

2 hours ago, Hyperspace Industries said:

You copy?

I copy and paste, sir!

MESSAGE. RECEIVED.

[Lisias]

I opened the damned thing, and that's what matters!

[CatastrophicFailure]

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

opened the damned thing, and that's what matters!

Yeesh, watch your fingers in there or it's gonna open you, too. 

[CatastrophicFailure]

Discovered this works with the puppy, too. 

Now, this is after tearing up and down the hallway at full tilt for a solid 20 minutes nonstop, so he's a little winded. Gonna have to get some slowmo of him going in circles til he falls over. 

[Gargamel]

Just booked my hotel to go watch CRS-24 in person.   
 

 

Because the editor is giving me fits:.   make sure you give home reward for catching something.    Dogs prey reflex will cause them long term stress if they don’t get rewarded for catching something. 

On 11/24/2021 at 12:42 AM, CatastrophicFailure said:

Discovered this works with the puppy, too. 

Now, this is after tearing up and down the hallway at full tilt for a solid 20 minutes nonstop, so he's a little winded. Gonna have to get some slowmo of him going in circles til he falls over. 

[CatastrophicFailure]

Somewhere, somewhen, there is an alternate reality where not only did this happen, it happened so much it became boring.... 

I want a reality transfer...

Edited November 27, 2021 by CatastrophicFailure
preferably to a reality where I can spell, too...

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, Gargamel said:

make sure you give home reward for catching something.    Dogs prey reflex will cause them long term stress if they don’t get rewarded for catching something. 

Makes sense. My wife refused to let anyone play with our cats with a laser pointer, saying that not being able to ever actually catch it was teasing and mean. Given the number of scratches we've picked up from our newish bundle of terror, she may be rethinking that...

Speaking of which, it is quite a difference between Gilligan and the departed Malibu. Malibu was never as cuddly as Gilligan (who is definitely a lap cat where he was not), and we also don't remember him being nearly as spastic/crazy/energetic as this she-kitty is. I guess that's the difference between a sickly orphaned barn kitten and an indoor house kitten

Edited November 27, 2021 by StrandedonEarth

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Given the number of scratches we've picked up from our newish bundle of terror

It's a sabretooth cat, and hunts the mammoth fauna instead of mice.

Ours was rewarding herself same way. Even without laser dots.

Another source of frustration was the closed kitchen window with birds outside.

[DDE]

On 11/28/2021 at 12:09 AM, CatastrophicFailure said:

Somewhere, somewhen, there is an alternate reality where not only did this happen, it happened so much it became boring.... 

I want a reality transfer...

Why does it have SRB-X girders?

 

[Hyperspace Industries]

I watched independence day, and discovered that movies are a lot more fun when you haven't looked up how they end before they end.

[TheSaint]

13 minutes ago, Hyperspace Industries said:

I watched independence day, and discovered that movies are a lot more fun when you haven't looked up how they end before they end.

I make it a point to never look at the Wikipedia page (or any other Internet source) for a movie (or a book, or a TV show) until I've watched/read it. Unless (as has happened a couple of times as of late) I get halfway through and realize that it's so hideous that spoiling the ending isn't going to make it any worse.

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, Hyperspace Industries said:

I watched independence day, and discovered that movies are a lot more fun when you haven't looked up how they end before they end.

I've concluded that this is another reason why movies differ from the book. Aside from the difficulties of directly adapting a movie, changing things a little keeps readers of the book still guessing.

[kerbiloid]

A score of years ago (in the prehistorical times without internet) I had puchased several CDs with thousands of story books and FIDO archives.

Searching by keywords and keyphrases, I was meeting same books again and again, so from the blurry, uncertain chaos of the ocean of the world (mostly sci-fi and fantasy, of course) literature there has raised a solid network of the authors and books which were matching my requests most often, forming a skeleton of the slice of the culture-structure, kultur-schmultur optimally matching my subjective preferences.

Some of them I have read many times and almost imprinted, some didn't read.
But since then I have in memory a brief conspect of various books, with recognizable names, ideas and chapters from the never-had-read books like Shannara, Wheel of Time, etc.
(Let alone Vance, Pratchett, Sapkowski, Farmer, Zelazny, Bujold, and others who are a solid cultural basis).

So, it was an insufferable torture to watch, say, what they had turned Witcher into, from which I hardly survived the first three episodes by rewinding, while the Half a Century of Poetry was great and atmospheric, and even the old Polish ecranization was not that bad. 

But this now lets me watch the ecranizations of various semi-read books like Shannara or Wheel of Time almost calmly and enjoy them, because I'm more or less familiar with plot and characters, but not taking them too closely familiar to be disgusted by the cinematographic changes.
(This of course isn't to be spoken about Azimov and Bradbury books which are full bad for me in any reincarnation, and Dune which I treat as a comical eastern with grotesque heroes and thoughts.)

But anyway I can't get why repeatedly film the endless ecranizations of several same books. There are a lot of others, I know.

Edited November 29, 2021 by kerbiloid

[TheSaint]

26 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

I've concluded that this is another reason why movies differ from the book. Aside from the difficulties of directly adapting a movie, changing things a little keeps readers of the book still guessing.

I wish it were that practical. Usually the changes that are not directly attributable to cramming a 500-page novel into a two-hour movie are because the screenwriter and/or director want to exercise their creativity. In most cases poorly.

25 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

But anyway I can't get why repeatedly film the endless ecranizations of several same books. There are a lot of others, I know.

The same reason why the same twenty actors keep getting paid tens of millions of dollars to star in reboots of movies that came out ten years ago. Because Hollywood loves a winner.

[StrandedonEarth]

23 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

1 hour ago, StrandedonEarth said:

I've concluded that this is another reason why movies differ from the book. Aside from the difficulties of directly adapting a movie, changing things a little keeps readers of the book still guessing.

I wish it were that practical. Usually the changes that are not directly attributable to cramming a 500-page novel into a two-hour movie are because the screenwriter and/or director want to exercise their creativity. In most cases poorly.

Fair enough. Makes for plausible deniability, I suppose.

I believe Terry Brooks, author of the Shannarra series (loved the first eight books or so, then lost interest) said something along the lines of that he liked the story of The Chronicles of Shannara better than his original work. I suppose it falls under the category of "If I could do it again, I think I could do it better..." I watched the first season(?) covering the The Elfstones but never bothered watching more. But there were some elements of the series that I liked... 

Spoiler

... mainly the inclusion of artifacts from our time.

 

[TheSaint]

5 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Fair enough. Makes for plausible deniability, I suppose.

I believe Terry Brooks, author of the Shannarra series (loved the first eight books or so, then lost interest) said something along the lines of that he liked the story of The Chronicles of Shannara better than his original work. I suppose it falls under the category of "If I could do it again, I think I could do it better..." I watched the first season(?) covering the The Elfstones but never bothered watching more. But there were some elements of the series that I liked... 

  Reveal hidden contents

... mainly the inclusion of artifacts from our time.

 

"In most cases". Don't get me wrong, I think that many book adaptations are just fine as movies, especially if you approach them as a separate work. There have been some movie adaptations that I think actually improved upon their books. For instance, I thought that the 1984 adaptation of Nineteen-Eighty-Four was a fantastic adaptation. It not only perfectly captured the plot and theme of the book, but I felt like it displayed the oppressiveness of the setting better than the book did. But a great many adaptations do poorly simply because the Hollywood creatives just don't know enough to keep their fingers out of the pie.

Ah, Shannara. An excellent trilogy that ended about thirty books too late.

[StrandedonEarth]

Have to share, too funny. Gotta get my kitty into this...

 

Edited November 30, 2021 by StrandedonEarth
Might wanna paste the tweet before submitting...

[adsii1970]

This morning marks the third day of the last week of the term. It is this time of the term, and it happens three times a year, that my small meager office on campus feels more like this:

And the emails and visits from students appear to regard me not as a lowly non-tenured guest professor of history, but as

For those of you who do not know, that's Horus, the Egyptian sky deity. Anyhow, this time of the semester, I am besieged with requests, prayers, offerings, requests, and so forth, to allow those who have procrastinitus* one last opportunity to try and pass the course. So, this morning was no different than any of the other mornings so far this week. Lots of begging because of computer dying, boss is a jerk, boyfriend/girlfriend changed the WiFi password, Internet was shut off, you get the general idea. And as I said before, it's been this way each year, for three semesters, since I began teaching at the university level in 2004.

But this morning, in my email, was this request:

I need an extensen on my paper. My pet taranchula was abjected by aliens last nite.

Okay, I admit it. For some reason, this is funny. Yeah, a first year community college student - and this is his reasoning why he needs an extension. You know, it is such an original reason, I might just give in and let him have the one day he's asking for. After all... Folks, seriously, this is probably the funniest email I've received from a student in a very long time.

*Procrastinitus: a dreaded disease that causes people to wait to the last minute on everything they do, to suddenly become overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to do. It results in a mental collapse and anguish. 

[Spaceman.Spiff]

22 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

But this morning, in my email, was this request:

I need an extensen on my paper. My pet taranchula was abjected by aliens last nite.

Okay, I admit it. For some reason, this is funny. Yeah, a first year community college student - and this is his reasoning why he needs an extension. You know, it is such an original reason, I might just give in and let him have the one day he's asking for.

I vote in favor of this guy 

Even if he’s not too great at history, he might have a future in creative writing 

[adsii1970]

1 minute ago, Spaceman.Spiff said:

I vote in favor of this guy 

Even if he’s not too great at history, he might have a future in creative writing 

Yeah, I gave him the one-day extension he asked for. All because his request was unique and creative.