I’m Not Dead Either

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This post is over 12 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

 

What I’m Watching

Continuing my trend from last summer of watching movies starring Kristen Bell, I watched a 2010 movie titled You Again.

Kristen Bell plays the role of Marni, a young woman who is successful now but had a terrorizing high school career. She was the acne-faced girl with braces who everyone liked to make fun of. Years after leaving high school, she finds out that her older brother is planning on marrying the girl who bullied her the most during high school, and retaliates to help her brother find out what kind of person his future wife really is.

Although this movie wasn’t as attention-holding or thought-provoking as other movies I’ve watched, it was still a good laid-back comedy. It reminded me of the antics of high school and gave a humorous representation of both the bully and the victim’s side of the conflict. As the movie progresses, we find out that Marni isn’t the only woman who has had problems with the family of her older brother’s fiancée, which is where the title You Again comes from.

 

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #155: If you knew you were going to die in 20 days, what would change?

Quite obviously, if I knew I was going to die in a specific short period of time, I would no longer live to prepare for the future and instead start living to prepare for my death. I would make sure that everything under my responsibility would end up having a smooth transition to someone else after my departure.

On a slightly related note, I actually don’t really like being asked what I would do if I was going to die in a specific amount of time. I’ve been asked this question so much that I already know exactly what I would do if something like this were ever to happen. In addition, thinking about this is quite an unoptimistic way to live – and that’s coming from someone who takes a relatively pessimistic approach to everything in general. I think that thinking excessively about your own death or demise will distract and impair you from achieving what you could or what you want to do.

 

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Reading Minds for a Day

by   •   Daily Post, What I'm Watching
 

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Today is the first day of my spring break, so I decided to do some more catching up on my blog. I watched a handful of movies in the past several months that I didn’t have time to blog about, but now I’m bringing back the “What I’m Watching” section of my blog so I can share my opinion on these movies.

 

What I’m Watching

Quite a while back when I found some free time during my day (which is surprising that I did because I always tend to be busy now), I watched an animated movie called Despicable Me.

I originally decided to watch this movie because it seemed to have built up a lot of hype after adver­tising a lot both on the very few television shows that I watch and on the Internet. The advertisements were successful in that they made the movie seem unique and made me want to watch it because it looked like no other movie I’ve watched before. Also, I heard that the main character was a villain rather than a hero, and that difference also made the movie more desirable to watch.

Despicable Me is about a criminal mastermind named Gru living in a massive and extremely tech­nologically-advanced mansion. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been very successful and is about to face the consequences of his lacking performance, especially after another villain, Vector, starts rapidly gaining attention and popularity for the things that he has done. This conflict leads to a competition between Gru and Vector as they try to out-villain each other.

One of Gru’s plots involve adopting three small children from an orphanage and using them for his personal gain. However, things don’t go out quite as planned when the small children become more than Gru can handle. Situations become worse when the three girls start getting emotionally attached to Gru and begin treating him like their father.

I thought this was a funny movie that was definitely worth watching. One thing that I want to point out is that although the small yellow creatures were prevalent in the commercials for this movie, they don’t play a huge role in the movie other than being Gru’s minions. I thought this movie was unique because it focuses on a villain rather than a hero like most other movies, and that the villain still ends up putting a good twist to the movie.

 

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #65: If you could read minds for a day, would you? Whose? What would you want to find out?

If I was provided the ability to read minds for a day, I probably would. I’m not really interested in knowing what individual people think about me, and I’m not really interested in knowing the secrets that they’re hiding from me, but I would like to have a general idea of what the general consensus is of how I am.

I would read as many minds as possible within the one day, and I would be searching for any recurring negative themes. Obviously, I’m not planning on changing myself entirely to fit the desires of those around me, but I’m still interested in finding out any negative characteristics about myself that many people notice and are bothered by.

If I do find something like that, I would think about how I might be portraying that, and alter it to the better if I think it is worth changing and will not make me less individual (meaning, I wouldn’t change something that I’m particularly known for, or something that is considered a specialty of mine).

 

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 18

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

 

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Buzzing Refrigerator

by   •   Daily Shoot, What I'm Watching
 

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I’m writing this blog post from the Computer Sciences & Statistics building at my university because THERE’S THIS ANNOYING BUZZING SOUND COMING FROM BEHIND MY REFRIGERATOR AND I CAN’T FIGURE OUT WHAT IT IS.

Hey, at least it’s peaceful and quiet in this building during the weekends.

I have no idea how I’m going to fall asleep tonight, though.

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

#DS370: Tungsten light can often create a warming effect, depending on your white balance. Use tung­sten light in a photo today.

I’ve never used the tungsten light setting on my camera before, but apparently it’s there to turn black keyboards into blue keyboards.

 

What I’m Watching

It’s been a while since this section has made its last appearance, primarily because I haven’t really had the time to watch that many movies. When I do get the chance to watch a movie, I end up not having time to add this section into my blog post for that day. I decided to catch up today and write about a movie I watched closer to the beginning of November, The Social Network.

The Social Network, a movie sometimes known as the “Facebook movie,” is a movie about how Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg came up with the idea of Facebook and how he carried it out for it to become a revolutionary website like it is today. There was a lot of talk about how good the movie was, and I had intended to watch it ever since it came out. The tipping point, however odd, was that I watched it for a Spanish project – we had to write a book or movie review on a work related to our major. My major being computer science, The Social Network fulfilled that requirement nicely.

Many of us know that Facebook started out as a social networking site for Harvard students, and ended up spreading throughout colleges before hitting high school students and adults all over the world. What many of us don’t know is that Facebook has a complicated history behind it involving conflicts, lawsuits, and greed. The Social Network follows Mark Zuckerburg as he struggles through all these problems, some with his close friends, in order to come out on top.

Seeing as a majority of us (not including myself) love to use Facebook for hours upon hours every day, I think it’s well worth the time to watch this movie to find out how exactly this apparently addictive website came to be. The storyline appears to be mostly factual, (I’m saying mostly instead of entirely because there were probably some comedic segments included that are irrelevant to the plot,) as for every fact that I checked against online sources (like Wikipedia), all the information matched up.

 

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by   •   Daily Shoot, What I'm Watching
 

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I said yesterday that I took three hours’ worth of exams. I took a calculus exam for 1.5 hours, then 15 minutes after, took a computer science exam.

The calculus one was ridiculously difficult, not because I didn’t recognize the material, but because they were worded so trickily and I kept making basic arithmetic errors that I kept discovering five minutes after making them (like seeing 4 and 2 and thinking they add up to 5).

The computer science one wasn’t exactly hard, and I always do well on everything related to computer science, but for some reason, I have a feeling that I made pathetically basic mistakes similar to the ones I made in the calculus exam. I finished the 1.5-hour exam in about an hour, and while I was leaving the testing site, everyone gave me odd looks because I finished so quickly.

Also, this is sort of random, but a local newspaper company that I work for is having issues with its YouTube account (which I currently manage), and even though I posted on the support forum five days ago asking for help, all the Google employees appear to be blatantly ignoring me. This is starting to annoy me, so if you have some spare time, please take a look at my thread and reply to it so it keeps bumping it to the top and increasing the number of replies, hopefully making it more noticeable. I have established that assistance from an employee is necessary to find a solution to my problem, but if you want to pretend like you’re helping me solve the problem, then that’s fine too.

http://google.com/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=4a954186c22f729b

And finally, if you have a Twitter account, you should retweet this tweet:

http://twitter.com/adamparkzer/status/27516570690

 

What I’m Watching

Believe it or not, last week, I watched Fred: The Movie.

I know that I freely admit the fact that Fred is my least favorite YouTube star, but I heard that John Cena was in the Fred movie so I decided that it was worth watching. Fortunately, Fred is significantly older in the movie than he is in his YouTube series, so his voice is lower and is less annoying. The main idea of the movie is that Fred’s crush, Judy, used to live a few homes away, but ends up moving to a completely different place farther away. Fred is now on a mission to find Judy and “save” her, and goes through many obstacles to find her new house.

I’m having difficulty making a fair judgment of the movie because it’s so oriented towards children. I only thought it was slightly funny because of how stupid most of it was. John Cena doesn’t really have that significant of a role in the movie; he plays Fred’s dad, and only appears shortly to give Fred some advice, and later in Fred’s dream.

If you watch the Fred YouTube series, I would probably recommend this movie (assuming that you only watch Fred because you like him or his show). If you’re looking for an actual conventional movie to watch, Fred: The Movie is not something you would want to watch. However, if you have a large online presence, watching Fred: The Movie might be important as it may become common knowledge among online communities, and be a milestone for YouTubers as this is the first movie starring someone that became famous solely through YouTube.

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

Down-Side Up

Stairs

 

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Gonna go wash the dishes

by   •   Daily Shoot, What I'm Watching
 

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I did some editing to my website today to make my pages more search-engine friendly, and to hopefully make the crawlers identify keywords more easily. If the heading of my blog (the part that says “Parkzer’s Blog” and the date) is huge, do a hard refresh to reload the CSS file and turn it back into its original size.

 

Quote of the Day

(7:43:21 PM) adamparkzer: gonna go wash the dishes, brb
(7:43:42 PM) adamparkzer: wait
(7:43:46 PM) adamparkzer: actually, I’m going to eat dinner first
(7:43:53 PM) adamparkzer: wait
(7:43:56 PM) adamparkzer: I have nowhere to eat my dinner
(7:44:03 PM) adamparkzer: gonna go wash the dishes, brb

 

What I’m Watching

I haven’t watched a movie for a long time since the end of the period of my excessive movie-watching over the summer (except for one during the first week of college), but I finally managed to find some time to watch another movie. After liking Forgetting Sarah Marshall over the summer, I watched Get Him to the Greek this past weekend, a movie featuring some of the same actors and actresses as Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Get Him to the Greek sees the return of Aldous Snow, the man that played Sarah Marshall’s new boy­friend in the previous movie. Recently, he released a new song called “African Child,” but he seems to be the only person that’s liking the song, and the rest of the world thinks it’s a disaster. Fortunately, Aaron Green, a young man working for a music company, remembers what the great Aldous Snow from in the past was like, and wishes to revive it in the present. Following a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he goes to London to escort Aldous Snow to the United States so he can perform.

Of course, there has to be an absurd problem in the storyline – Aldous Snow is obsessed with drugs, and cannot live a moment without being under the influence. This poses a great problem to Aaron, as Snow’s addiction to drugs and other distractions are putting his opportunity in danger and possibly preventing him from giving the Americans a show of their lives.

I thought this movie was hilarious. It kept me laughing throughout the entire movie, both as a result of funny dialogue and a funny plot. The actors and actresses fit well with each other, and their combined personalities make the overall movie a great comedy and a great adventure.

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

Click on the image for more information.

Wooden Door

 

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by   •   Daily Shoot, What I'm Watching
 

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Today was another average day at the family business, and wasn’t as action-packed as yesterday. Al­though, one of my uncles randomly showing up to visit was pretty interesting.

 

What I’m Watching

Earlier today, I watched Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. I chose to watch this movie because I watched the original Night at the Museum a few years ago and was interested in watching the sequel to it.

Actor Ben Stiller plays the role of the main character, Larry Daley. Larry was a former museum security guard, as shown in the original Night at the Museum but became rich and famous after he became an inventor and started his own company. Because of his busy life, he was unable to visit the museum he used to work at for a long period of time. Unfortunately, by the time he made it back, he discovered that all the exhibits were being moved out and new electronic exhibits were being moved in as part of a mass renovation.

Larry finds out where the old exhibits are being shipped to, and goes there to take care of things himself. What he doesn’t realize is that the magical tablet that brings the entire museum to life is being shipped along with everything else. After the sun sets, Larry finds himself trapped in a museum full of live exhibits in quantities far greater than what he was used to at the old museum. He must now make sure the exhibits belonging to the old museum are returned, and at the same time make sure he stays alive.

I thought that Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian was a pretty good, action-packed, attention-holding movie for something meant to be family-friendly. It was nice to see the return of some good actors from the previous movie, as well as new comedic ones like Jonah Hill as a security guard.

I would recommend this movie to anyone, including young children. The idea of this movie is based somewhat on fantasy, and there are no other movies that I have seen or heard of before that are based on a similar concept. I suggest that anyone watching this movie watch the first Night at the Museum first, as it gives some vital background information about the museum that Larry used to work in, and explains why he has such a close relationship with all the exhibits.

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

Go meta and make a photo of a photo today. Don’t just be a copy machine, however. Get creative with composition.

That’s not exactly a photo of a photo, but a photo of a painting is close enough.

 

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