Re: “Daily Prompt: Naked with Black Socks”

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Are you comfortable in front of people, or does the idea of public speaking make you want to hide in the bathroom? Why?

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/daily-prompt-public/

Although I’m an introvert and prefer to be alone or in small groups, I am still comfortable in front of people, and like public speaking.

When most people think of introverts, they think of shy people who run away from big crowds and hide in the back corner until they can leave. Although some introverts are like this, this is a better description of someone who is socially shy, rather than someone who is introverted. An easier way to describe the difference between introverts and extroverts is how they like to spend their relaxation time – alone, or with others. This shows how they recover their energy; introverts recharge alone, while extraverts recharge with others.

Thus, especially in my situation, introversion or extraversion can have very little to do with someone’s desire to speak in front of crowds. In my case, I enjoy speaking and performing in front of large audiences. Often times, I seek out opportunities to do so, and even speak online in the form of shout­casting during live stream broadcasts, if no person-to-person chances are available.

I think the easiest way to describe why I enjoy public performance is because the presence of others places pressure on me to push myself to the limit to make my performance as entertaining as possible. Trying my best in something and reaching new levels of achievement gives me a thrill that may generally not be possible if others weren’t there to push me forward. My introversion comes into play here at the end of the performance; when everything is done and over, I like to go home and rest by myself.

Note: After finishing writing this post, I looked back at the prompt and realized that it mentioned nothing about introversion or extraversion. Thus, I have no idea why I spent so much time talking about it and clearing up the nuances. So, in case you were wondering why I keep mentioning introverts and extra­verts, it’s because I apparently don’t know how to read and understand prompts on the first try.

 

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Re: “Daily Prompt: Super Sensitive”

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If you were forced to give up one sense, but gain super-sensitivity in another, which senses would you choose?

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/daily-prompt-sensitive/

To decide which sense to give up, the easiest method seems to be to go through process of elimination.

I feel like the most important sense is vision, so that is immediately removed from consideration. It’s a little obvious that knowing where you are relative to other things is pretty important. Hearing is also important, as not only does it act as warning signs and feedback from the environment, but it is also vital for easy communication with others.

Touch and feeling can be the difference between realizing something bad is happening to your body, and having no idea that you are about to be, or have been, severely injured. It’s also nice to have some sensation to your body.

That leaves smell and taste. As we all know from when we have a cold, taste becomes nearly useless when our sense of smell is handicapped. Thus, if we were to eliminate our smell, we would effectively be removing our taste with it as well. So, that brings me to the decision of giving up taste.

One may argue that taste is important for ensuring that we don’t consume toxic or poisonous substances. Although that is a valid statement, there are two points that make it less important. First, we’re no longer living in ancient times when we need to go hunting for our own food. We’re not going to randomly go out into the woods and find potentially dangerous berries, when instead we can just go to the fruit section of our local supermarket. Second, if we were to ever encounter harmful foods, our sense of smell would be able to alert us to a potential problem. Our nasal passage and our mouths are connected, so we would be able to smell the food in our mouths.

Remember, even though we’re going to lose the luxury of tasting delicious foods, we’re being forced to eliminate one of our senses. Thus, we’re going to lose something anyway, so we want to minimize our losses, and mitigate potential effects on our future survival and comfort.

In return, we get to be super-sensitive in one sense, for which I pick vision. I’ve had poor vision for a majority of my life, so I think it would be nice to have incredible vision. Some of the things I would hope comes with super sensitivity is increased clarity, improved rate of focal depth adjustment, greater range of peripheral vision, night vision, and maybe even x-ray vision and the ability to shoot lasers from my eyes.

If my choice was not limited to the five basic senses and I was able to be a bit clever, I would pick super sensitivity in my common sense, or mental sensibility in general. That way, I would be able to look at a particular situation and pick up subtle clues that I might normally miss, in order to better analyze what’s going on. Although it’s not as exciting as having night vision or shooting lasers from my eyes, I feel it would be the most realistically useful in terms of everyday life.

But, bringing this back full circle, if I wasn’t forced to do this and was instead offered a choice, I would probably decline. I would prefer to keep my taste over having super vision.

 

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Movie Review: “Now You See Me”

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Today’s movie review is about Now You See Me, a crime mystery movie featuring Jesse Eisenberg (the same actor who played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network), Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, and Dave Franco, among others.

Now You See Me is about a group of four magicians with the stage name The Four Horsemen. Starting as four individual performers, they were brought together by The Eye, a legendary icon in magic history.

After coming together, the Four Horsemen successfully demonstrate never-before seen magic tricks, live in front of an audience. the finales of these performances end in robberies – once robbing a bank in another continent, and another robbing a wealthy man, then distributing all the money to the studio audience.

On the case to stop these magicians-turned-criminals are two law enforcement officials, a man from the FBi and a woman from Interpol. Although the man seems frustrated at those who get captivated with magic, the woman elects to take the smarter route and does research in an attempt to fight magic with magic.

Eventually, the crime is solved and the person believed to be behind everything is imprisoned. However, is the suspect really responsible for everything? Or was the real answer right in front of us the whole time?

This movie does a great job integrating magic into a very realistic story and plot. It also emphasizes that magic is deception, more than anything else, and it’s not the magician tricking us, but us tricking ourselves. The ultimate reveal of deception comes at the end of the movie when the answer to the movie’s mystery was right in front of us the whole time, but we just tricked ourselves into not seeing it.

I enjoyed watching this movie, and thought it had a great, well-connected plot with good event progression. This movie did a great job at wasting little time, and making every minute count towards developing the story and culminating to the final reveal. I definitely recommend Now You See Me to people who enjoy thrillers, as the story will keep you attached and constantly thinking.

 

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Movie Review: “The Hangover, Part III”

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Following up watching The Hangover, Part II, I decided to finish off the series by watching The Hangover, Part III.

Fortunately, the premise of the story is different from the first and second parts, and the movie does not begin with a wedding gone wrong. Instead, the plot involves Alan’s friends proposing an intervention into his life due to his unacceptable behavior. Alan agrees, and the Wolf Pack drive to drop him off at a rehabilitation facility.

However, their trip doesn’t go as planned when they are attacked due to their connection with international criminal Chow. A member of the Wolf Pack gets kidnapped, and the rest go out to hunt for Chow, who is needed for the safe return of their friend.

According to how this movie ends, it seems like this will be the last installment in the Hangover series. I think it was a good idea to end the series here, as, although I enjoyed the entire Hangover series, the quality of the story of the movies seemed to gradually decrease. Instead of coming up with genuinely attention-grabbing and compelling plot progression, the final movie felt as if it relied more on absurd and extreme moments to keep the viewers watching.

On top of that, the humor in the movie seems to have slightly degraded as well. Instead of using the clever wit found in the previous movies, it seems like now they resort more to crude humor. Of course, this is expected because the main characters are now Alan and Chow, both of whom generally don’t demonstrate brilliant wit. However, I still think that the movie could have integrated the humor in a smarter manner.

I think that this movie is somewhat undeserving of the Hangover name. Of course, because the second part of the movie was called The Hangover, Part II, it’s only logical that the sequel is Part III. However, I think the name The Hangover was a little bit too specific to be a broad movie series, and almost feel as if this movie is as successful as it was because of its ties with the original The Hangover. Regardless, the basis of the criticism is primarily because of how amazing the first movie was, and from a more neutral standpoint, The Hangover, Part III is, in my opinion, still a great movie.

A lot of the themes and the main storyline of this movie relies heavily on the fact that you have already watched the previous Hangover movies, so if you plan on watching The Hangover, Part III, I encourage you to watch the previous two movies first. Circularly, if you watched the first two movies, I recommend watching the third part, as I feel like it brings the whole story full circle.

 

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Movie Review: “The Hangover, Part II”

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

If you’ve at all kept up with popular movies, you know that The Hangover was one of the top hits back in 2009. Two years later, the sequel to the movie, The Hangover, Part II, was released with the same cast, starring Ed Helms, Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifinakis, and Justin Bartha as the “Wolf Pack.”

When I asked my buddies about The Hangover, Part II, although none of them explicitly stated that it was a bad movie, most of them mentioned that it was basically the whole story of The Hangover all over again, and that it wasn’t worth seeing. However, when I went on IMDb, the ratings weren’t terribly low, so I decided that it was still probably worth seeing, especially because of how much I enjoyed The Hangover.

After watching it today, I’m glad I chose to do so. This was the first movie I watched in a very long time (I just checked my website for other movie reviews and it seems to have been over two years), so I didn’t have much of a basis upon which to rate this movie. As a result, my perception of the movie might have been slightly more positive than if I had seen other great movies; regardless, I still liked the movie.

Overall, I thought it had a pretty good story progression and pace. It was able to maintain my attention and curiosity by not going too slow, but also not going too fast such that I had no time to think about what was going on. It had some good amounts of scattered humor throughout the movie, in a similar style as the first The Hangover. I also felt like this second part attempted to add more craziness to the movie, but it still doesn’t take it over the top where it becomes unbelievable or unrealistic.

My friends were right when they told me that the premise of the story is the same, and it’s The Hangover all over again. However, it doesn’t really feel like watching the same movie over again. The only time you have the thought of the story repeating itself is at the beginning where they undergo a “not again” moment, but throughout the movie, you get captivated by the storyline enough that there are no additional moments where the thought of “I remember this from last movie” comes up in your mind.

 

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An update about my broken laptop

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I’ve been getting a bunch of people constantly asking for updates about the progress of my laptop repair.

If you haven’t been keeping up with me personally, you might not know yet that I sent in my laptop to Dell. The technicians who work there have offered to fix my laptop at a flat fee, covering all part replace­ments in the process.

So, on the request sheet that I shipped in with my laptop, I put in all the problems I’ve ever encountered with my laptop. Namely, I noted that the laptop currently does not power on, there is static when using external speakers or headphones, the laptop gets absurdly hot when doing graphics-intensive tasks (up to the point where the process is hot enough to almost boil water), the Ethernet cable port does not work, the wireless card randomly drops signals and requires a restart to resume working, and the USB ports randomly stop taking input from external devices such as mice and keyboards.

My guess is that they’re going to replace the motherboard, replace the I/O board, and give me some new thermal paste on my heat sink. I’m not 100% sure what exact approach they will take, though, so they might have some other plans up their sleeves to fix all my problems and spend as little money as possible on their end.

What I do know, however, is that they are replacing at least one part in my laptop, and that it is a part that is rarely replaced. I know this because I got an update from Dell regarding my laptop repair, letting me know that a part necessary for the repair is currently out of stock, and my repair has been placed on hold.

I haven’t called Dell to get any other personal updates about my repair, so I’m not exactly sure what part they’re waiting for. This is all the information I have at this time, and messaging me asking for an update every several hours isn’t going to help speed up the process (although, I appreciate the effort).

 

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