wonkablog

I went and saw the movie Eragon the other day at the dollar theater.  I can’t believe I put it off for so long.  I just kept forgetting about it, really.

Fantasy movies are probably my favorite, and it’s always exciting when a new one comes out, even though most of the time they are horribly bad and embarrassing.  Eragon was as bad as I expected, but not more than that, and I actually enjoyed it in a way.

The story was pretty bad — mostly rushed, cliched, and full of things that just didn’t make much sense.  In regards to that last one, I mean the characters didn’t consistenly act out their parts as they would.

It did make up for it in a few areas though.  I thought the acting was good, and the cinematography was great.  The dragon looked kind of like a bird sometimes, but it was still cool.  The fight scenes were pretty cool too.

I’m split as to whether I’d buy it on DVD or not.  I probably will, if only because it’s about halfway there of what I think a decent fantasy movie should be.  What it really did is make me want to go home and watch DragonHeart again.  I’m kind of hoping that the DVD might have some extended scenes or a director’s cut which puts a few more scenes back in that might give the movie more sense of direction.

I just submitted my application for the summer semester at the University of Utah, to be admitted into their school of psychology.

I hope I get in.

I went to the library on my lunch break here, and it was pretty interesting.  I haven’t checked out any books from there since high school (which has really been a while), so I had no idea what to expect.  The first thing I noticed is that they had a lot of movies in there, both on VHS and DVD.  Their selection seemed to be pretty big, though I didn’t bother looking at it — I was looking for some Star Trek novels to read.  They also had some CDs there that you can check out.  That’s pretty cool.  I’ll have to go back sometime and see what they have.

It took me a while, but I finally found a few Star Trek novels, next to the Dragonlance ones.  Oddly enough I didn’t see any Forgotten Realms ones.  They didn’t have very many, but I wasn’t expecting much since it’s a small branch just across the street from where I work.  The main library is only a few blocks away, in downtown Salt Lake.  I’d like to go down there too and see what else they have.

I’m not much of a reader, though, that’s for sure.  At least, not these days.  I used to read fantasy novels quite a bit, and I had burned through almost the entire Forgotten Realms library back in the day.  Now, though, I mostly just read old Gold Comics digests for recreation, and that’s about it.  Sometimes though I’ll get the bug to read again, and so that’s why I made my way over there today.

Something else cool I saw is they had some fliers out for a Dungeons & Dragons group that meets every Saturday for the next few months!  I couldn’t believe that.  I absolutely *love* playing AD&D on paper.  And of course that means that it’s something else I also haven’t done for a long time, either.  I’ve been (passively) looking for a group to play with again locally, so I’ll probably stop in tomorrow afternoon and see what their setup is like.  I used to play a half-elven thief called Tich.  He was a lot of fun.  What a great game.

I got a library card too while I was there, so I’m pretty stoked.  I hope I can find some cool stuff to read and watch.

I finally bumped gnump3d in portage to its latest release version the other day, 2.9.9.9. I’ve been wanting to bump it for a long time, but the ebuild was kind of tricky. I spent a while trying to get the Makefile to work correctly, but it didn’t play well with the sandbox, so I ended up just copying all the files manually. Not a big pain, just slightly tedious.

I’ve been using GNUMP3d for years, and it’s one of my favorite applications. If you haven’t tried it out, and are looking for a good way to listen to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis audio files remotely, I’d recommend it. It comes with a nice little web interface, and listens on its own port. It’s got lots of other cool features like downsampling for clients, and other stuff I’m sure I haven’t discovered yet. I think it can stream movie files too, though I have no idea how that works.

It comes with some nice skins too. My favorite is “SchwartzNGrau” though in the latest version it changed a bit, I’m gonna have to find out why .. it’s a little harder to see the individual rows.

Anyway, I’ve been using the new one for about a week now streaming music from home to work, and it’s been working pretty good. Fun stuff.