Memes and such

[sailorhathor]

The Great LiveJournal Outage of 2005 During the outage I was reminded why they call the TV the boob tube. What did you do? Brought to you by geek-foo

You Are 22 Years Old

22 Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe. 13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world. 20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences. 30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more! 40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.

What Age Do You Act?

Memes everyone's been doing lately. Enjoy. ;)

I spent too much money this weekend, but I needed a new dvd player. I'll live. I got a dvd recorder. ^_^ I'm planning on converting most of my tapes to dvd and getting rid of the tapes because they take up too much room. In some ways, I'm afraid to do this, because dvd's can be glitchy, and I don't want to get caught with dvd's that hang up and won't play. Usually, though, if I clean them, they start playing well again. I bought the damn thing already, so I feel like I'm committed to doing this. DVD's take up SO much less room. I'll keep the commercial tapes that I really like, but most of my tapes from tv and stuff will be converted. It will be so nice to put all the eps in order, without commercials, and have them archived that way on dvd.

I did a test record, and I am amazed. I recorded part of a show in SP speed, and I noticed absolutely NO reduction in picture quality. DVD's are like that, are they not? I'm still in denial, because I'm so used to taping something onto another tape and seeing the picture quality go down. But I can't see any reduction at all. Then I tried another taping in EP speed, and then I could see a little reduction in quality, but barely any! Amazing. The volume was weird on the SP recording, though; it seemed lower. Oh, I am going to have SO much fun with my new toy!

Before I launch into another long babble, I'll just recap that I took part in the 2004 Yuletide Secret Santa challenge, which entails writing a story for someone else in an obscure fandom of their choice. Of course you choose what fandoms you could write in, then you get assigned someone who wants a story in one of those fandoms. I was looking at the list of unfilled requests, and was delighted to see someone else actually liked Twister, that much maligned movie about storm chasers. Someone named Jai wants an angsty, romantic story about a couple of characters from the movie, Beltzer and Haynes. I would really like to fill this request simply because it's so rare to find someone who wouldn't scoff and roll their eyes at me when I said I enjoyed the movie, but I can't get the characters to "talk" to me so I can get something going. I kind of see Haynes and Rabbit being a more likely couple, for some reason. I'll give the idea some time to cook. Rabbit is a freakin' cool nickname, heh.

Part of the reason I enjoyed the movie so much is because I've been fascinated with tornadoes myself since I was a kid. This is Tornado Alley, where I live, and we were run through tornado drills all throughout elementary school. I always found it extremely exciting! When we really had a storm and we had to go through a tornado drill for real, I was never scared; I was thrilled and excited. Some people sky dive, others bungee jump; I would storm chase if I had any idea how to get into it. (It's not like I can do it on my own, being that I don't drive.) I remember being in kindergarten, and my mom was at my school that day because there was some sort of Room Mother activity going on, and my mom always did that stuff because she wanted to be involved in her kids' lives. And this massive storm moved through. The sky turned grey-black. They suspended all normal classes and we went into tornado drill mode. It was one of the most exciting moments of my childhood. Death and destruction of my school never even occurred to me; it definitely could have happened, but I rarely think about it when a storm comes. I'm just so jazzed up with the hullabaloo of it all that that's all I can think about. After all, my mom was there with me, taking charge of things with my teacher, whom I really liked - I didn't have anything to be afraid of. If windows had started breaking and trees falling down, I would have found that exciting, too.

I can recall many times when big storms came through while I was at home, and my parents choosing a place in the house we could use as our "safe" area, like they advised on the news. They picked the downstairs walk-in closet. I remember them making a cubbyhole in the stuff in the closet that I could sit in, with blankets and pillows over me so I'd be shielded from debris if a tornado did come through and stuff was flying, and once they called a Tornado Warning, I'd sit in there with a transistor radio under my blankies and my pillows and listen to the storm developments. The tornado never sucked up my house. It was really exciting. Of course, I'm sure if my house had been destroyed, I might not think it was so great, but that's never happened to me.

I have another memory of a large storm coming through just as we were getting out of school. My childhood friend Tracey had to go home to an empty house (latchkey kid :D), so my mom invited her to come stay with us until her parents got home from work so she wouldn't have to be at home alone during a violent storm. It was raining so hard you could hardly see, wind blowing like crazy... I remember pulling into the driveway, getting out of the car, and looking out the garage door to see a huge piece of someone's fence go flying by in the air like it was a set of matchsticks. That was so cool.

A more recent memory involves Nancy and I wanting to go out to dinner to Judge Bean's one night (this was probably late 90's) but it was pouring down rain. The streets were flooding and still we desperately wanted to go out. We watched the Weather Channel for a couple hours to figure out if we were ever getting out of the house, and we finally braved it once the rain calmed down for awhile (we were starving by then!). I remember coming back and running back into the house with the wind blowing like crazy, yelling, "Aunt Em, Aunt Em, it's a twister, a twister!" and just at that moment, the weather alert sirens went off. That was sooooo exciting. The entire experience, from watching the storm on the Weather Channel, to looking out the window at that wall of rain, and finally the sirens going off.

Still another storm, this one did a lot of damage in my neighborhood. A tree fell on someone's house, crushing a corner of it. Another tree fell on someone's carport, trapping the car in there and doing damage to it, too. No one was hurt, just stuff. Walking the neighborhood with my neice and nephew and surveying that damage was pretty neat. When I say that, I am not saying that destruction is a good thing. But it can be an exciting testament to the power of nature. Things can be replaced, houses can be repaired, and yes, the destruction can be devastating, but if you get through a storm like that alive, I think you should celebrate that fact, and look for the excitement in it all. I could have been killed in any of these storms, but I got through them in one piece.

Anyway, I guess my point is that I identify with many of the storm-chasing characters in the movie. If I knew someone who enjoyed storm chasing, I'd be right there with them as often as possible, screaming and whoopin' it up. That one scene in the movie where the twister makes their truck spin around and around looks like so much fun. That's totally nuts, but everybody's got to get their kicks somehow.

Of course, I can see why some people thought the movie was bad. There were some really silly things in it. Some inaccuracies and such. (Tornadoes do not sound like animal roars. They sound like freight trains.) A few scenes where the special effects were really bad, which was weird since the effects were so good in other scenes. Lots of scenes where it should have been pouring down rain and hail on them but the skies looked relatively clear and non-greyblack. It was pretty stupid of Jo's father to try to hold the storm cellar door closed while the twister was going over them, especially since the experts say that's one of the LAST things you should try to do during a tornado. Why is a man who knows enough about tornadoes to know what an F5 is trying to hold a door closed during one anyway? Why doesn't he just stand right by a window while he's at it? It wasn't that it wasn't believable, because people get amazed with a storm and lose their heads, but at the same time, WHY was he stupid enough to try to hold the door closed when he KNOWS that's one of the last things you should do? That could actually be a good angsty moment for Jo, wondering why her father did something so senseless when he should have known better, and died for it. (Now I want to read the book to see if that was in there.) Also, I can imagine that many people think stormchasing is a stupid, suicidal waste of time. Ptooie on them.