What Is Real?

MIT Brainwashing Bloggers?

If you have read any blogs in the past few days you have seen the image below (hot linked from Gid)

I have seen this all over people’s blogs. I even started taking it myself, but it seemed pretty long. I will have to finish up a later.

They give you this image to advertise for them for free:

What I don't understand is how the people from MIT have brainwashed everyone into being so bent on other people taking their survey. As far as I know there are no referring credits, and the person taking it does not benefit at all. Come on, at least Nelson TV ratings sends you a few bucks in the mail.

I don't mind that everyone wants everyone else to take it, I just wonder how the good folks at MIT have accomplished this.

I remember when I was doing my big research paper for school our teacher said it was a good idea to give an incentive to people who take our survey. You should at least be entered to win a candy bar.... or something.

My Birthday Today

Today is my birthday. My body feels 15 years older than it is, and my mind feels 5 years younger than it is.

As I look back on all my accomplishments over the past 27 years, it makes me want to go home and cry myself to sleep.

Slip of the Tongue

It happens to everyone, thank goodness not always on live TV. How is he going to explain this one?

FOX News Slip

The Happy Poem

A lot of people use their blogs as creative outlets in many different ways. One of the things I see people do is write poems. Most of the poems I read seem to be a bit depressing or dark so I wanted to balance all the depressing poems with the ultimate happiest poem every written on any blog (as of this posting anyway). And just remember, poems can be happy too. Guaranteed to be happy or your money back or a nice snuggly choice of baby carriers at Fox Den Lane.

The Happy Poem By Jason Davis

Movie Preview Center

I wrote a little PHP script to embed the moive previews I linked to earlier (here). I will update these previews as new ones come out, and add a link in header for easy access.

Interview with Future Self: Part I

If you have been blogging for very long, odds are you have come across people conducting interviews on their blogs. Usually blogs that do this are not very popular. That is to say they get an average of 0.25 comments per post. Why then would anyone really interesting want to be interviewed on a blog that no one reads? Sounds like a waste of time, but no, they always express just how grateful they are to be interviewed.

With that said, I will also be conducting an interview. Since my blog only gets an average of 0.25 comments per post who would be crazy enough to agree to an interview? Not only that but, who can I get that would be interesting enough yet with low enough self esteem to do an interview on an unpopular blog? I will tell you who. Me! Not just any o’l me. Me from the future!! Given my above average knowledge of the Force (see Star Wars) and Quantum Physics (whatever that is) I can actually make this happen. Here is how it will work.

I will write out some questions for the future me then a few hours later (in the future even) I will answer them then publish the interview. If everything works out the results will appear instant to you.

You may ask yourself, "Why didn't I think of that?" It is probably because I am smarter than you are, but don’t feel bad being extremely intelligent isn’t as glamorous as they make it seem in the movies. Now let’s get started.

The Chronicles of Narnia

I have added a few new trailers below (here) inclusing The Chronicles of Narnia. Unfortiently it is going to be The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe instead of The Magician's Nephew which I liked much better.

The Chronicles of Narnia was written by one of my favorite authors C. S. Lewis. My current favorite book by Lewis is Mere Christianity. If you have not read it you should check it out.

Upcoming Movies

Below are upcoming movies that look interesting to me (in no particular order). I don't know much about them except what I have seen on the previews. Click on the link to watch the preview from apple.com.

• Serenity
• War of the Worlds
• Harry Potter
• Fantastic Four
• The Chronicles of Narnia
• Batman Begins
• Nightwatch
• Undead

phpBB Departure

It is official. After just 6 short months of joining I am no longer a part of the phpBB Styles team. I took myself out of the group yesterday (see this post for more details).

Star Wars to be released in 3-D!

General Grevious (from Revenge of the Sith) in 3-D?

This is very exiting for me. I have always loved 3-D movies (see some of my other blog posts here, here, and here). Although not committing to a date, Lucas hopes to have the first release in 2007 then release one Star Wars film per year in 3-D.

Apparently Lucas is not the only one interested in the idea. He was joined by James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, Robert Rodriguez, Randal Kleiser, and Peter Jackson. Jackson even screened remastered portions from the Lord of the Rings trilogy that featured a looming Gollum and battle dust that virtually fell onto the audience.

James Cameron said, "I'm a man on a mission when it comes to 3-D. I will be making all of my films in 3-D in the future. We need exhibition to come in to own a big chunk of the (emerging 3-D) market."

I have to strongly agree with Cameron.

Read the full story on Yahoo here or go to http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050318/325/feho5.html.

The 4400

If you have not seen USA’s The 4400 I suggest you rent it, or buy the first season on DVD (only $20). It is a great show although not as good as ABC’s Lost. Once you watch the five shows from last season, then you need to watch the season premier that came on last night. I believe last night’s show will re-run a few times before the next one airs.

If you did not see the show last night but plan on watching it you probably will not want to read anything below this point.

A major part of the season premier episode centered around a girl in a mental hospital who was taken. They (the abducters) planted plans into her head to build a large metal receiver (tower-like) structure out of scrap metal and satellites. Then they (the abducters) gave her ability to telepathically make other people want to build this tower for her. Part of the story revolved around the suspense as to whether this receiver tower would actually get finished. It finally gets finished just in the nick of time and is activated. All of this was suppose to do nothing more than cure another mental patient who was apparently a brilliant scientist before he want crazy. The part that I don’t understand is why they went through all of that trouble when they could have just taken the one patient they actually wanted to cure and fix him themselves.

Largest practical joke ever pulled on America

Fresh off the What Is Real!? News Press

Has the largest practical joke ever pulled on America gone too far?
Dancing with the Stars

ABC’s CEO says, "It was only a joke, but idiots out there actually started watching it so we continued with the season." Network officials are baffled at how far people will go to watch really bad reality TV. Once network executive says, "It is quite funny really. We can put out any kind of crap and people will watch it. Now we are making inner office bets as to who can come up with the stupidest most insulting idea for a reality show and still have the best ratings."

The new reality TV show Dancing with the Stars started out as a joke on the general public yet it has become an overnight success. The whole premise of the show centers around ballroom dancing. Fourteen your old teen Tgheafhye (pronounced Paul) says, "I love show cuz like they spin and everythin’ like that. It is sick (sick is what stupid people call something they like) yo. Plus, there are big starts doing do spinnen stuff."

This mass hysteria has even gotten the government’s attention. Now additional funding has been given to research labs around the country to study our brains reaction to incredibly bad Reality TV ideas. One scientist says, "People’s brains are not meant to comprehend TV that bad. There is no human emotion that can comprehend such horror, so it has the reverses effect and people think they like it when they are in fact only confused."

Last few months in a nutshell

This is my last few months in a nutshell. I hope I can start bogging a bit more in the months to come.

New purchases:
I now have the Blockbuster Movie Pass. This is where you pay $15 per month and you can rent as many movies as you want, but you can only have one out at a time. When I want to rent a movie I just trade in the last movie I rented. Since I only live across the street from Blockbuster this comes in very handy.

I also recently added a digital recorder to my cable TV package for $10 a month. This will pause live TV, digitally recorded any show while I am not there, or record a show while I am watching another one. This will come in handy when 4400 comes on this June. Since I don’t want much TV on Saturday night (busy taking the wife out to a nice tame dinner at Chili’s or something) I can tell my cable box to record ever time that show is on, then I can watch it at my leisure.

Hobbies:
Web design
I have not been doing much webdesign lately. I have however updated the look of this webblog a bit. It is still really bear (overly simplistic), but it is much better than the plain white default template that has been up for so long. Hopefully I will soon be able to redesign this site the way I really want it to look (I will probably be working on it in small bits here and there progressively). I have been slacking in my duties at phpBB (styles team member) because I have come across a conglomerate of personal issues that has taken most my time and energy. What free time I do have has been spent watching movies/TV (see above) and trying to learn Spanish (see below). I do not know how much longer I will last at phpBB before I have to quite the team.

Learning Spanish
My quest to learn Spanish is not going too well. I am feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment. Issue 1) I really have no reason to learn Spanish other than, “it sounds neat” so my motivation is slipping, and issue 2) I have no one who knows Spanish I can practice with or talk to. I would at least like to have someone who can correct me or answer my questions. BTW if anyone from Chattanooga knows any good Spanish radio stations please let me know.