Whatever-ness.
[Monday, April 30]
I wonder if I should sign up for this year's Copa di IBA. It's not like I'm going to do much good if I join anyhow, though--Claus has already told me that the way I play, I'm a liability to the team. Apparently because of the way I jump, people behind me are liable to have their eyes damaged... so unless I have a sudden improvement in style or technique or whatever it's called, I guess I'm not going to be on our delegation to the competition.
Not that I mind. Sweat and sore limbs are not my cup of tea anyway--if possible, I'll probably just find a nice steeple hat somewhere and wear it there to keep the sun outta my face. I might even want to try and buy a (hooded!) trenchcoat or something in case it rains. It's a pity there aren't many shops selling ankle-length cloaks--I've always thought those looked kinda nice. Still, one has to make do with what one has...
Things are definitely getting stressful around the office. With all sorts of deadlines rushing upon us--if I'm right, today's the last day available to submit personal taxes... and I've already got a few overdue SOCSO forms on my hands... well, I guess the To-Do list didn't work as well as it should've. I was probably too caught up in catching up to a sudden deadline to see it--I made a rather bad mix-up, but since the law of confidentiality holds (my aunt has had several talks with me about it, as if I'd have any damaging information to leak in the first place) I can't divulge any details. Only the Empress knows what the mix-up was, but no names, no info on the type of businesses involved, etc. (As if she'd want to know.) But the upshot of it is that my aunt probably will be giving me the frozen shoulder for awhile, until I somehow make it up, although I have no idea how.
Actually she phoned me yesterday during church to yank me back into the office to sort out the mix-up. Unfortunately I already know the extent of the work that will need to be done--at least one week's worth, since there're two days of holidays this week--and I elected to not go back. She hung up without saying bye... I think it was rather rude. I also got quite grumpy about it... it happens everytime people try to get me to work on days pre-agreed to be holidays. I did mention specifically that my Sundays are quite packed several times before, to her.
Oh well. She doesn't seem to be harbouring very much ill-will towards me... of course we haven't had much of a conversation so far. I did buy her a tub of tofufa, though...
I've noticed that the facility of "claiming" brings out odd behaviour in people. I should explain: "claiming" means that one's company covers and reimburses one for a certain amount of one's personal expenses, such as book purchases, transport expenses, or so on. Jogger, for example, gets to "claim" RM70 every now and then for book expenses. Most companies these days seem to allow claims for travel expenses... tolls, parking, petrol and suchlike... which brings out strange behaviour indeed.
(My dad's company allows a limited amount of claims for food purchases, so while in the Big S, my mom once spent 15 minutes trying to get a better-printed receipt out of a fast-food receptionist so we could get a non-contestable claim: bad printing means the amount being claimed is open to argument.)
And right now I'm facing a whole plastic-bag-full of somebody's entire year's travel expenses. Stack after stack of toll receipts, petrol purchases, and parking tickets. All of them averaging RM1.50, apart from the petrol (apparently they have a 55-liter tank, or something like that)... and so I'm going to be hitting the Enter key, and the decimal point, and the "1" key, a lot today. Oh well.
[Wednesday]
My aunt apparently managed to clean up the mess before the client found out about it... so I didn't do too much damage. But I'm still going to make sure I don't repeat it... it's not the kind of stress that I like. (In fact there isn't any sort of stress I like, so that's that anyway.)
I spent yesterday in If Pooh. (I could also call it E-Pooh, but that just sounds wrong.) It was the Gorilla's idea, I think--it's his hometown and the food there is nice and it was a public holiday so everybody was free and so about 13 people of various ages went off there yesterday, including me. (That's why I can tell what happened.)
Anyway... we set out at 6.30am, which was about half an hour later than we'd planned. We left without breakfast, too, since we were planning to get breakfast there. (That's why we set out so early.) I suppose the early hour, combined with the lack of food, were the main cause that the three guys in the back of the car I was riding in (including myself) began to take turns dozing off. Apparently we were just too large to all doze off together, because of broad shoulders (in their cases) and broad hindquarters (in my case). It seems that I went into hibernation, because Claus says they shook me 'til my head was whacking the window and I was still dozing when I was supposed to be waking up. I don't have any bruises so I'm assuming it's an exaggeration.
Our itinerary yesterday, with interruptions, went as follows:
circa 9am: Beef balls and noodles, with morning beverage of choice. (I took iced Milo.) The small beef balls were nice, but the larger ones had too much ginger mixed into the paste. Still, it was a very filling breakfast, even if rather late.
circa 10am: wandering around, looking at places of nostalgic interest. The Gorilla was the self-assigned tour guide. We visited a really large church--Elim--and had one of the full-time workers there for a tour guide. Apparently he knows my father too. The church was very nice to look at.
circa 10.30am: the girls get stranded in a clothes shop. Claus, the Gorilla, Add, and myself decide to save ourselves from insanity and go to a pet shop.
circa 11am: we go back to the cothes shop, where God's Pencil is busy shrieking about clothes from inside the changing booth. Nobody outside the booth understands what the shrieking refers to.
circa 12pm: lunch in a Chinese restaurant with several stalls. The Gorilla recommends the horfun, but we end up gorging ourselves on pork satay, popiah (fried and boiled), rojak, and a kind of local specialty--cuttlefish in Mystery Sauce. I avoid the cuttlefish completely, but wind up stuffed with pork. The rojak sauce is excellent.
circa 1pm: the Empress starts looking disappointed because no custard was available during lunch, so we go for another drive around (plus commentary when we pass sites of interest) and wind up at another restaurant where custard is available. The Empress is delighted.
circa 1.30pm: we go to the "most happening" spot in If Pooh: the Jusco departmental store. But it really is large, and very popular: it takes half an hour for both cars to find parking spots, and Jogger's car isn't even in the store's carpark--it's five minutes' walk away. During this time, we end up discussing which movie to watch, and by a process of elimination (Spiderman 3 is sold out, the other shows are Chinese and therefore unintelligible to half of us, and the rest are horror shows) arrive at Sunshine. Claus tells God's Pencil that it's a love story.
circa 2pm: we go into a bookshop. I buy a book. We go wandering around the arcade until movie time. I buy a Doraeyaki, which is a kind of pastry resembling the red-bean-paste-things Doraemon keeps eating in the manga and anime. However, the one I buy is filled with peanut butter.
circa 5.30pm: the movie starts. By the time the movie actually begins, the box of popcorn in my lap is half-emptied. D-Kun, who is beside me, begins to predict the order of deaths. We are surprised that the Censorship Board forgot to cut out several instances of the f-word.
circa 7.30pm: the movie ends, and God's Pencil appears to have been traumatised by the lack of love scenes. D-Kun and I are exultant that our predictions all came true.
circa 8pm: dinner in another restaurant. We eat and eat and eat until we're stuffed with bean sprouts and chicken bits and noodles and other things. The noodles are really nice.
circa 10pm: we leave for home.
circa 1.30am: Claus asks the Empress for my waistline because (and I quote) "[my] buttocks are huge!" and is shocked when he finds my waistline 4 inches bigger than his. I pretend to sleep my way through this so I don't need to promise to exercise those inches off.
circa 2am: I get back and fall asleep for real.
[Thursday]
I didn't manage to finish yesterday's post since the oldest of the Brats began bugging me to let her play some games on the laptop. Apparently she labours under the delusion that my thumbdrive is actually company property that I simply happen to take home every weekend--and so she imagines that while I'm in the office, the thumbdrive and all its contents rightfully belong to her. I had to raise my voice to get her parents' attention to the fact that she was still trying to forcibly remove the thumbdrive from my vicinity.
Anyway... well, you already know what I did on Tuesday. Now for the summary! (Herr Robson should really like this bit.)--We went, we saw, we gobbled. Veni, vedi, ve ate. (Yeah, yeah, lame. I know.)
And as for the movie... here goes. The newspapers already have reviewed it, so if you don't like what I say then go get a second, third, fourth, whatever opinion your budget allows.
Title: Sunshine
Premise:
1. The Sun is dying.
2. The Sun can be restarted by putting uranium the mass of Manhattan in it.
3. Only people can do that. For some reason computers can't be programmed to do anything this complex, even though their AI talks to them.
Plot:
========WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!==========
The Sun is dying, according to the grim voice in the beginning of the movie, leaving the Earth in a nuclear winter. And apparently all we need to do to make it come back to life is by detonating a nuke in it. The nuke in question happens to be a mass of enriched uranium the size of Manhattan. (I'm not sure about its comparative weight.) Don't ask me how they managed to mine that much uranium in the middle of winter, much less enrich it all--and wouldn't that much enriched uranium attract potential thieves and terrorists by the planeload? But I digress.
Unlikely as it sounds, there're 8 people on a space ship and they're going to the Sun to put a bomb in it, which they hope will create a detonation powerful enough to power up the Sun or something. They say it's "making a star within a star", except most stars have only minimal amounts of uranium in 'em--it's mostly hydrogen and helium--but I suppose it wouldn't sound so nice to have a massive hydrogen balloon trailing the space ship. Wouldn't be much of a challenge for the CGI guys, I expect.
The crew is made up of the obligatory white guys, white girl, Asians, almost-black, and Michelle Yeoh. (I only know she's in there because Add said so.) Naturally we get a lot of arguments, fighting, dying etc. caused by various arguments and bad decisions and all that kind of stuff. The movie is a very bad way to promote the American way of life, but then again what entertainment would be a movie with perfect peace and harmony in it?
...anyway. The first casualty is an Asian who gets burnt up in outer space while fixing a bunch of fried shield panels that only got fried in the first place because another Asian forgot to set them to some infiniesimal degree higher, and who later commits suicide. But that comes later.
Apparently they are the second mission attempting to restart the Sun, because an earlier mission went off and never came back for some unknown reason. They later find the apparently lifeless ealier mission's space ship floating around somewhere and go to look at it.
While there, they get a stowaway--Pinhead (actually his name is Pinbacker, but Pinhead is much more appropriate) who was the commander of the earlier mission, and says he spoke to God for 7 years (ever since the earlier mission disappeared), which brings in the obligatory science vs religion debate. Apparently speaking to God for that long will melt off all your skin and hair, give you superhuman strength, drive you to slaughter all nearby humans in various ways, and make you see things in wavy motion, as if everything except you was in a heat blur. It also brainwashes you into believing that the Sun would be better off dead.
The order of deaths and their circumstances, therefore, is as follows:
Asian Guy, burnt to death because he couldn't get to safety in time after repairing faulty panels on sun shield.
White Guy, frozen to death when jumping between space ships without proper covering. The corpse later breaks into pieces while brushing against the outside of the space ship, and then burns up when it drifts outside the shield.
Almost-Black Guy, burnt to death because he had to remain in other space ship with faulty shield.
Asian Guy, suicide by unseen sharp object, due to guilt brought on by indirectly casuing death of the other Asian Guy.
Asian Woman, stabbed in back by sharp knife by Pinhead.
White Guy, frozen to death in water while repairing something. (I don't know why they put that stuff in water.)
White Guy and White Girl, both killed in explosion of space ship due to proximity to Sun.
=========SPOILERS END===========
...yes, I know. It's very unimaginative... but I bet it gets good press from the White House or something, just because it says they use up all the uranium on Earth so no more terrorist nukes are possible. Or because the hero in the end is a White Guy. Or something.
I didn't like the movie, but the popcorn was nice. And getting all the deaths in order was nice too. And twisting around at odd times during the movie to see where the whimpering noises were coming from. And sometimes the CGI wasn't too bad... But I didn't like the extravagance of gore they used, and the strobe-light bits. For some reason the movie producers must've thought they'd get higher ratings if they made the screen so bright that nobody would see anything... and I almost think they would too, if the afterimages hadn't disappeared so fast that we managed to get glimpses of the movie.
So that's it for Sunshine--absolutely no entertainment value unless you happen to like strobe lights.
...we've got a new guy in the office. He's 22, here on industrial training as part of his course, and is one of the few people I've ever seen who eat faster than myself. Or maybe I've just slowed down from peer pressure... but for the past two days at least, he's beaten me to the end of lunch. And he's still skinny... or looks skinny, anyway. I wouldn't know much about his body shape unless he wants to show off or something. I spent yesterday being assigned to teach him how to use the software, and it looks like he picked it up relatively quickly, although his typing speed leaves much to be desired... he says he's got a computer at home, but my guess is he doesn't use it for coursework, because he still looks at the keyboard rather a lot before typing. Y'know--like he's looking for the particular key he wants.
Maybe he's just not used to it or something, but he seems to have improved--I haven't seen his work so I really can't tell. But I guess it's good to have a stranger around--the Brats are being relatively restrained around him. I think it'll continue until they realise he's not going to inflict any harm on them, upon which they'll just revert to their normal behaviour. God have mercy upon him. *grin*
Hmmmm. I'm starting to worry about myself as a teacher... I still have no idea whether I'm any good at teaching. Apparently I can sound very convincing when I go off on a roll, but the downside is that I use rather different words from other people. I also speak rather faster than they listen, and however fast he eats, he seems to enter a trance the moment I begin speaking.
You know--glassy eyes, slightly open mouth, absolutely no response to hands waving in front of eyes... well, maybe not the eyes part, but you understand. And I generally have to repeat myself a few times before he starts nodding, either to shut me up or to mean he understands. I'm still not sure which.
But he's still awfully worried about making mistakes. I've half a mind to tell him to stop adding to my worries--my aunt has as good as implied that his mistakes are going to be regarded as my responsibility--but so far I've kept saying that everything that can be done, can be undone--and then re-done and re-undone again ad infinitum. (Not in those words, mind you. I don't go around speaking Latin.) I just hope the task of undoing his mistakes doesn't fall to me.
[Friday]
My aunt figured out last night that I don't like her kids. Actually it's not just me--the office staff have come to the general conclusion that the Brats cause at least seventy percent of all the messes and malfunctions in the place, with the rest being due to human error--but I let her assume I'm the only hostile force in the place. Actually it was brought about by a malfunctioning keyboard, and when I mentioned that it might be a good idea to stop the kids from messing about other people's desks, she metaphorically jumped on me.
I have decided that my maternal relatives are not good people to argue with--they seem to think facts are conclusions. Example from last night:
Aunt: "You have pre-assumptions." (Referring to a previous statement by me that her kids seemed to cause a lot of messes around the place.)
Me: "Yes." (Waiting for the next logical step, eg You should change or something similar.)
Aunt: (pause) "And you still can say yes?!"
Me: "Yes." (Because, obviously, I could still say that.)
And so on. It dragged on for a bit, during which the topic somehow shifted from my complaints against the Brats (you already know them) to my own lacks and faults (which are legion); unfortunately my aunt also has the habit of sweeping generalities, eg "People like you will die very soon when working!" and "People like you are very hard to get along with!". I assented to both statements, since I suppose she'd know better than I. But I still don't get her argument--there didn't seem to be any particular conclusion, apart from her assumption (I didn't point that out) that the Brats were/are innocent.
She did say she advises me to work only until the end of May, though, before the relationship with the Brats deteriorates further--to which I asked her what relationship exactly she was referring to. Apparently blood relationship covers a multitude of faults in her mind--maybe a good thing, but as far as I'm concerned there's a difference between relatives you like and relatives you don't.
She eventually concluded that people like me must have very few friends indeed. I shrugged and said that I'm pretty easy to get along with, but I don't lose arguments. She said that was exactly what would drive people away from me. I didn't bother replying, but the fact is I'd be rather disappointed if I got myself people who can't argue intelligently or entertainingly. Friends are for talking to, after all--and arguments fall under that category too.
I'd make sure they weren't married to their opinions first, though--the divorce could be ugly. And (at least I think) I'm pretty ready to listen to a good argument.
But my aunt has come off with a distinct opinion that I'm rather too complicated to bother with, at least when arguing stuff. I think we simply argue differently... Perhaps this comes from too much anime, but I keep seeing arguments as fights with words--and of course, there're people who use words like bludgeons to frighten or beat the enemy into submission, people who lay words like mines to catch the opponent's false moves, people who wield words like whips and constantly switch their angles of attack to draw blood or entangle the other party, people who treat words like tanks and simply run over everybody with their iron-welded confidence, and people who seem to dance with rapiers and keep slipping around attacks to get in their own punches, and people who use machine-gun mouths to effectively prevent all hope of counterattack. I know people who fall into each category; sometimes more than one category at the same time. Probably I'm in there somewhere too, but I wouldn't be able to tell myself--these things need standers-by to observe.
For all her age, though, my aunt seems to remain curiously simplistic about everything. Maybe it comes with age, this assumption that everything comes under one category and one only--like the sky is always blue, or TV is always harmful, or animations are always childish; whereas I think of things as being complicated by nature. Maybe we both are right, but it doesn't seem likely.
I wonder if I should sign up for this year's Copa di IBA. It's not like I'm going to do much good if I join anyhow, though--Claus has already told me that the way I play, I'm a liability to the team. Apparently because of the way I jump, people behind me are liable to have their eyes damaged... so unless I have a sudden improvement in style or technique or whatever it's called, I guess I'm not going to be on our delegation to the competition.
Not that I mind. Sweat and sore limbs are not my cup of tea anyway--if possible, I'll probably just find a nice steeple hat somewhere and wear it there to keep the sun outta my face. I might even want to try and buy a (hooded!) trenchcoat or something in case it rains. It's a pity there aren't many shops selling ankle-length cloaks--I've always thought those looked kinda nice. Still, one has to make do with what one has...
Things are definitely getting stressful around the office. With all sorts of deadlines rushing upon us--if I'm right, today's the last day available to submit personal taxes... and I've already got a few overdue SOCSO forms on my hands... well, I guess the To-Do list didn't work as well as it should've. I was probably too caught up in catching up to a sudden deadline to see it--I made a rather bad mix-up, but since the law of confidentiality holds (my aunt has had several talks with me about it, as if I'd have any damaging information to leak in the first place) I can't divulge any details. Only the Empress knows what the mix-up was, but no names, no info on the type of businesses involved, etc. (As if she'd want to know.) But the upshot of it is that my aunt probably will be giving me the frozen shoulder for awhile, until I somehow make it up, although I have no idea how.
Actually she phoned me yesterday during church to yank me back into the office to sort out the mix-up. Unfortunately I already know the extent of the work that will need to be done--at least one week's worth, since there're two days of holidays this week--and I elected to not go back. She hung up without saying bye... I think it was rather rude. I also got quite grumpy about it... it happens everytime people try to get me to work on days pre-agreed to be holidays. I did mention specifically that my Sundays are quite packed several times before, to her.
Oh well. She doesn't seem to be harbouring very much ill-will towards me... of course we haven't had much of a conversation so far. I did buy her a tub of tofufa, though...
I've noticed that the facility of "claiming" brings out odd behaviour in people. I should explain: "claiming" means that one's company covers and reimburses one for a certain amount of one's personal expenses, such as book purchases, transport expenses, or so on. Jogger, for example, gets to "claim" RM70 every now and then for book expenses. Most companies these days seem to allow claims for travel expenses... tolls, parking, petrol and suchlike... which brings out strange behaviour indeed.
(My dad's company allows a limited amount of claims for food purchases, so while in the Big S, my mom once spent 15 minutes trying to get a better-printed receipt out of a fast-food receptionist so we could get a non-contestable claim: bad printing means the amount being claimed is open to argument.)
And right now I'm facing a whole plastic-bag-full of somebody's entire year's travel expenses. Stack after stack of toll receipts, petrol purchases, and parking tickets. All of them averaging RM1.50, apart from the petrol (apparently they have a 55-liter tank, or something like that)... and so I'm going to be hitting the Enter key, and the decimal point, and the "1" key, a lot today. Oh well.
[Wednesday]
My aunt apparently managed to clean up the mess before the client found out about it... so I didn't do too much damage. But I'm still going to make sure I don't repeat it... it's not the kind of stress that I like. (In fact there isn't any sort of stress I like, so that's that anyway.)
I spent yesterday in If Pooh. (I could also call it E-Pooh, but that just sounds wrong.) It was the Gorilla's idea, I think--it's his hometown and the food there is nice and it was a public holiday so everybody was free and so about 13 people of various ages went off there yesterday, including me. (That's why I can tell what happened.)
Anyway... we set out at 6.30am, which was about half an hour later than we'd planned. We left without breakfast, too, since we were planning to get breakfast there. (That's why we set out so early.) I suppose the early hour, combined with the lack of food, were the main cause that the three guys in the back of the car I was riding in (including myself) began to take turns dozing off. Apparently we were just too large to all doze off together, because of broad shoulders (in their cases) and broad hindquarters (in my case). It seems that I went into hibernation, because Claus says they shook me 'til my head was whacking the window and I was still dozing when I was supposed to be waking up. I don't have any bruises so I'm assuming it's an exaggeration.
Our itinerary yesterday, with interruptions, went as follows:
circa 9am: Beef balls and noodles, with morning beverage of choice. (I took iced Milo.) The small beef balls were nice, but the larger ones had too much ginger mixed into the paste. Still, it was a very filling breakfast, even if rather late.
circa 10am: wandering around, looking at places of nostalgic interest. The Gorilla was the self-assigned tour guide. We visited a really large church--Elim--and had one of the full-time workers there for a tour guide. Apparently he knows my father too. The church was very nice to look at.
circa 10.30am: the girls get stranded in a clothes shop. Claus, the Gorilla, Add, and myself decide to save ourselves from insanity and go to a pet shop.
circa 11am: we go back to the cothes shop, where God's Pencil is busy shrieking about clothes from inside the changing booth. Nobody outside the booth understands what the shrieking refers to.
circa 12pm: lunch in a Chinese restaurant with several stalls. The Gorilla recommends the horfun, but we end up gorging ourselves on pork satay, popiah (fried and boiled), rojak, and a kind of local specialty--cuttlefish in Mystery Sauce. I avoid the cuttlefish completely, but wind up stuffed with pork. The rojak sauce is excellent.
circa 1pm: the Empress starts looking disappointed because no custard was available during lunch, so we go for another drive around (plus commentary when we pass sites of interest) and wind up at another restaurant where custard is available. The Empress is delighted.
circa 1.30pm: we go to the "most happening" spot in If Pooh: the Jusco departmental store. But it really is large, and very popular: it takes half an hour for both cars to find parking spots, and Jogger's car isn't even in the store's carpark--it's five minutes' walk away. During this time, we end up discussing which movie to watch, and by a process of elimination (Spiderman 3 is sold out, the other shows are Chinese and therefore unintelligible to half of us, and the rest are horror shows) arrive at Sunshine. Claus tells God's Pencil that it's a love story.
circa 2pm: we go into a bookshop. I buy a book. We go wandering around the arcade until movie time. I buy a Doraeyaki, which is a kind of pastry resembling the red-bean-paste-things Doraemon keeps eating in the manga and anime. However, the one I buy is filled with peanut butter.
circa 5.30pm: the movie starts. By the time the movie actually begins, the box of popcorn in my lap is half-emptied. D-Kun, who is beside me, begins to predict the order of deaths. We are surprised that the Censorship Board forgot to cut out several instances of the f-word.
circa 7.30pm: the movie ends, and God's Pencil appears to have been traumatised by the lack of love scenes. D-Kun and I are exultant that our predictions all came true.
circa 8pm: dinner in another restaurant. We eat and eat and eat until we're stuffed with bean sprouts and chicken bits and noodles and other things. The noodles are really nice.
circa 10pm: we leave for home.
circa 1.30am: Claus asks the Empress for my waistline because (and I quote) "[my] buttocks are huge!" and is shocked when he finds my waistline 4 inches bigger than his. I pretend to sleep my way through this so I don't need to promise to exercise those inches off.
circa 2am: I get back and fall asleep for real.
[Thursday]
I didn't manage to finish yesterday's post since the oldest of the Brats began bugging me to let her play some games on the laptop. Apparently she labours under the delusion that my thumbdrive is actually company property that I simply happen to take home every weekend--and so she imagines that while I'm in the office, the thumbdrive and all its contents rightfully belong to her. I had to raise my voice to get her parents' attention to the fact that she was still trying to forcibly remove the thumbdrive from my vicinity.
Anyway... well, you already know what I did on Tuesday. Now for the summary! (Herr Robson should really like this bit.)--We went, we saw, we gobbled. Veni, vedi, ve ate. (Yeah, yeah, lame. I know.)
And as for the movie... here goes. The newspapers already have reviewed it, so if you don't like what I say then go get a second, third, fourth, whatever opinion your budget allows.
Title: Sunshine
Premise:
1. The Sun is dying.
2. The Sun can be restarted by putting uranium the mass of Manhattan in it.
3. Only people can do that. For some reason computers can't be programmed to do anything this complex, even though their AI talks to them.
Plot:
========WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!==========
The Sun is dying, according to the grim voice in the beginning of the movie, leaving the Earth in a nuclear winter. And apparently all we need to do to make it come back to life is by detonating a nuke in it. The nuke in question happens to be a mass of enriched uranium the size of Manhattan. (I'm not sure about its comparative weight.) Don't ask me how they managed to mine that much uranium in the middle of winter, much less enrich it all--and wouldn't that much enriched uranium attract potential thieves and terrorists by the planeload? But I digress.
Unlikely as it sounds, there're 8 people on a space ship and they're going to the Sun to put a bomb in it, which they hope will create a detonation powerful enough to power up the Sun or something. They say it's "making a star within a star", except most stars have only minimal amounts of uranium in 'em--it's mostly hydrogen and helium--but I suppose it wouldn't sound so nice to have a massive hydrogen balloon trailing the space ship. Wouldn't be much of a challenge for the CGI guys, I expect.
The crew is made up of the obligatory white guys, white girl, Asians, almost-black, and Michelle Yeoh. (I only know she's in there because Add said so.) Naturally we get a lot of arguments, fighting, dying etc. caused by various arguments and bad decisions and all that kind of stuff. The movie is a very bad way to promote the American way of life, but then again what entertainment would be a movie with perfect peace and harmony in it?
...anyway. The first casualty is an Asian who gets burnt up in outer space while fixing a bunch of fried shield panels that only got fried in the first place because another Asian forgot to set them to some infiniesimal degree higher, and who later commits suicide. But that comes later.
Apparently they are the second mission attempting to restart the Sun, because an earlier mission went off and never came back for some unknown reason. They later find the apparently lifeless ealier mission's space ship floating around somewhere and go to look at it.
While there, they get a stowaway--Pinhead (actually his name is Pinbacker, but Pinhead is much more appropriate) who was the commander of the earlier mission, and says he spoke to God for 7 years (ever since the earlier mission disappeared), which brings in the obligatory science vs religion debate. Apparently speaking to God for that long will melt off all your skin and hair, give you superhuman strength, drive you to slaughter all nearby humans in various ways, and make you see things in wavy motion, as if everything except you was in a heat blur. It also brainwashes you into believing that the Sun would be better off dead.
The order of deaths and their circumstances, therefore, is as follows:
Asian Guy, burnt to death because he couldn't get to safety in time after repairing faulty panels on sun shield.
White Guy, frozen to death when jumping between space ships without proper covering. The corpse later breaks into pieces while brushing against the outside of the space ship, and then burns up when it drifts outside the shield.
Almost-Black Guy, burnt to death because he had to remain in other space ship with faulty shield.
Asian Guy, suicide by unseen sharp object, due to guilt brought on by indirectly casuing death of the other Asian Guy.
Asian Woman, stabbed in back by sharp knife by Pinhead.
White Guy, frozen to death in water while repairing something. (I don't know why they put that stuff in water.)
White Guy and White Girl, both killed in explosion of space ship due to proximity to Sun.
=========SPOILERS END===========
...yes, I know. It's very unimaginative... but I bet it gets good press from the White House or something, just because it says they use up all the uranium on Earth so no more terrorist nukes are possible. Or because the hero in the end is a White Guy. Or something.
I didn't like the movie, but the popcorn was nice. And getting all the deaths in order was nice too. And twisting around at odd times during the movie to see where the whimpering noises were coming from. And sometimes the CGI wasn't too bad... But I didn't like the extravagance of gore they used, and the strobe-light bits. For some reason the movie producers must've thought they'd get higher ratings if they made the screen so bright that nobody would see anything... and I almost think they would too, if the afterimages hadn't disappeared so fast that we managed to get glimpses of the movie.
So that's it for Sunshine--absolutely no entertainment value unless you happen to like strobe lights.
...we've got a new guy in the office. He's 22, here on industrial training as part of his course, and is one of the few people I've ever seen who eat faster than myself. Or maybe I've just slowed down from peer pressure... but for the past two days at least, he's beaten me to the end of lunch. And he's still skinny... or looks skinny, anyway. I wouldn't know much about his body shape unless he wants to show off or something. I spent yesterday being assigned to teach him how to use the software, and it looks like he picked it up relatively quickly, although his typing speed leaves much to be desired... he says he's got a computer at home, but my guess is he doesn't use it for coursework, because he still looks at the keyboard rather a lot before typing. Y'know--like he's looking for the particular key he wants.
Maybe he's just not used to it or something, but he seems to have improved--I haven't seen his work so I really can't tell. But I guess it's good to have a stranger around--the Brats are being relatively restrained around him. I think it'll continue until they realise he's not going to inflict any harm on them, upon which they'll just revert to their normal behaviour. God have mercy upon him. *grin*
Hmmmm. I'm starting to worry about myself as a teacher... I still have no idea whether I'm any good at teaching. Apparently I can sound very convincing when I go off on a roll, but the downside is that I use rather different words from other people. I also speak rather faster than they listen, and however fast he eats, he seems to enter a trance the moment I begin speaking.
You know--glassy eyes, slightly open mouth, absolutely no response to hands waving in front of eyes... well, maybe not the eyes part, but you understand. And I generally have to repeat myself a few times before he starts nodding, either to shut me up or to mean he understands. I'm still not sure which.
But he's still awfully worried about making mistakes. I've half a mind to tell him to stop adding to my worries--my aunt has as good as implied that his mistakes are going to be regarded as my responsibility--but so far I've kept saying that everything that can be done, can be undone--and then re-done and re-undone again ad infinitum. (Not in those words, mind you. I don't go around speaking Latin.) I just hope the task of undoing his mistakes doesn't fall to me.
[Friday]
My aunt figured out last night that I don't like her kids. Actually it's not just me--the office staff have come to the general conclusion that the Brats cause at least seventy percent of all the messes and malfunctions in the place, with the rest being due to human error--but I let her assume I'm the only hostile force in the place. Actually it was brought about by a malfunctioning keyboard, and when I mentioned that it might be a good idea to stop the kids from messing about other people's desks, she metaphorically jumped on me.
I have decided that my maternal relatives are not good people to argue with--they seem to think facts are conclusions. Example from last night:
Aunt: "You have pre-assumptions." (Referring to a previous statement by me that her kids seemed to cause a lot of messes around the place.)
Me: "Yes." (Waiting for the next logical step, eg You should change or something similar.)
Aunt: (pause) "And you still can say yes?!"
Me: "Yes." (Because, obviously, I could still say that.)
And so on. It dragged on for a bit, during which the topic somehow shifted from my complaints against the Brats (you already know them) to my own lacks and faults (which are legion); unfortunately my aunt also has the habit of sweeping generalities, eg "People like you will die very soon when working!" and "People like you are very hard to get along with!". I assented to both statements, since I suppose she'd know better than I. But I still don't get her argument--there didn't seem to be any particular conclusion, apart from her assumption (I didn't point that out) that the Brats were/are innocent.
She did say she advises me to work only until the end of May, though, before the relationship with the Brats deteriorates further--to which I asked her what relationship exactly she was referring to. Apparently blood relationship covers a multitude of faults in her mind--maybe a good thing, but as far as I'm concerned there's a difference between relatives you like and relatives you don't.
She eventually concluded that people like me must have very few friends indeed. I shrugged and said that I'm pretty easy to get along with, but I don't lose arguments. She said that was exactly what would drive people away from me. I didn't bother replying, but the fact is I'd be rather disappointed if I got myself people who can't argue intelligently or entertainingly. Friends are for talking to, after all--and arguments fall under that category too.
I'd make sure they weren't married to their opinions first, though--the divorce could be ugly. And (at least I think) I'm pretty ready to listen to a good argument.
But my aunt has come off with a distinct opinion that I'm rather too complicated to bother with, at least when arguing stuff. I think we simply argue differently... Perhaps this comes from too much anime, but I keep seeing arguments as fights with words--and of course, there're people who use words like bludgeons to frighten or beat the enemy into submission, people who lay words like mines to catch the opponent's false moves, people who wield words like whips and constantly switch their angles of attack to draw blood or entangle the other party, people who treat words like tanks and simply run over everybody with their iron-welded confidence, and people who seem to dance with rapiers and keep slipping around attacks to get in their own punches, and people who use machine-gun mouths to effectively prevent all hope of counterattack. I know people who fall into each category; sometimes more than one category at the same time. Probably I'm in there somewhere too, but I wouldn't be able to tell myself--these things need standers-by to observe.
For all her age, though, my aunt seems to remain curiously simplistic about everything. Maybe it comes with age, this assumption that everything comes under one category and one only--like the sky is always blue, or TV is always harmful, or animations are always childish; whereas I think of things as being complicated by nature. Maybe we both are right, but it doesn't seem likely.
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