Test your Zombie Skills

/ Shane / Leave a comment

See if you can Survive the Outbreak. Basically you watch little minute long clips of a movie and then you make a choice, driving the plot of the movie. Here’s the thing, I died. Constantly. Which is obviously rediculous considering I am widely known to be one of the foremost zombie experts.

I have some complaints about the way the whole thing is set up. Just like in a choose your own adventure, you might die from something that has nothing to do with what action you took. For example, you might choose to eat the ham sandwhich and then a stray bullet hits you. But that had nothing to do with your choice to eat the ham sandwhich! You couldn’t have known at the time of the choice that bullets were going to start raining through the kitchen table. So it is rather arbitrary, and not actually a very good test of your zombie survival skills.

Luckily, also like choose your own adventure, you can go back and pick a different path, although many of them end up going down the same path ultimately.

All that being said, it was actually well done. The film itself was actually done better than many full length zombie movie’s I’ve seen (i.e. Biker Zombies from Detroit).

Link courtesy Ben.

P.S. Writing this post made me stumble on a lot of old choose your own adventure stuff, and man oh man did I love those books! Just seeing the covers brought back a lot of memories. You can check out their official site here.

(click for larger)

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

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I forget where I saw this first, maybe on The Soup? And then again on Planet Dan? Either way it is all over everywhere and, as usual, I am the last to blog it. I feel it is my civic duty to put these things on my blog to announce the end of them.  Kind of like when your grandma starts saying “what’s up” or calling your friends your “homies”. That’s what I strive for at least.

Anyway, make sure you watch all the way to the end:

Terrible Twos

/ Shane / 7 Comments

What happened to my perfect little angel?

Over the weekend a switch of some kind turned in her head, and she became a holy terror. Anything you ask her to do, she is guaranteed to do the opposite. Every little thing becomes the most difficult, frustrating thing in the world. Anything she can throw or knock over, she does, all looking you right in the eye with a little mischievous grin on her face, daring you to do anything about it. She has 15 minute hysterical crying fits when she doesn’t get her way. Keep in mind, this is the girl who will make herself puke if she gets too upset. And this is a girl with a lot of opinions too, not just on what she should wear, but on what you should wear, where you should sit, if you should take your shoes off or leave them on, etc. And God help you if you don’t do exactly as she says. It’s not like it was a surprise, per say. Obviously you hear all the stories about how difficult kids her age are. But the swiftness of the change was surprising.

One interesting aspect of it is bargaining. She has become a master staller and she tries to make deals with you. Like, if you tell her it is time to put her shoes on and she doesn’t want to, she will immediately start talking about how much she wants to eat. She knows we try to get her to eat all the time, so she thinks this will work as a diversion. She understands bargains that go the other way too, since the only way Sara could get her into the cart at the grocery store was to say, “Evie, if they ask me if you can have a cookie, do you want to say yes?” after which she became a perfect angel. Unfortnately, she didn’t go for my bargin of “be good or I’ll publish nasty things about you on the Internet”, hence this post.

It has only been about 3 days of this and I just can’t see how we can make it another 3 or 4 months.

It’s not all rough times though, there were a few highlights over the weekend.

  • Saying “Nala, that is not very nice!” when Nala nipped her hand for being too in her face.
  • Making up a noise for raccoons that sounds like “da da da da da” when she didn’t know what sort of noise they made.
  • “Smiling” on command by like squinching up her eyes and doing a sort of exaggerated face stretching with her bottom teeth sticking out.

In completely unrelated news, I had the most delicious smelling shower this morning! New shampoo you ask? No sir, baking bread! Sara programmed the bread machine last night so that it would finish the loaf by the time we woke up this morning. Around 3 a.m. Sara moved the bread machine to the bathroom in hopes that the “whirrrr whirrrr whirrrr” of the kneading mechanism would be quieter with the bathroom door shut and the fan on. So right about the time I was stepping into the shower a delicious smelling loaf of bread was baking on the counter about a foot away. Needless to say, my stomach was rumbling.

I’m contemplating inventing a combination bread machine / shower water heater that would provide you with an on-demand hot shower and delicious loaf of bread. The only thing I’m missing is a catchy name. Suggestions?

The Garden, Season II

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Spring is in the air, quite literally since I woke up this morning with itchy eyes and a vague tingling in my allergy sense.

And with all this nice weather comes another attempt at gardening! Our garden received a stay of execution for another year. We still don’t know if they are planning to build a building on top of it, but I think with the economy as it is, it is safe to assume it will be some time before the University gets around to breaking ground on a multi-million dollar new building.

We were out on Sunday cleaning out the leftovers from last year and even a few new things that had already taken root.  Last year we didn’t get our garden until pretty late since we were on the waiting list and everything, so hopefully getting started earlier on it this year will mean less weeding, etc. We even plan to plant some lettuce and other things that come up early to maximize the gardening potential. Did you know there is something called Grand Rapids Lettuce? Well, there is.

We haven’t got the layout planned yet, but we did buy all the seeds over the weekend. I am also going to attempt to grow cucumbers on the back porch to start my own pickle supply. I have my grandma’s recipie which I am on record as saying is the food of the gods. Hopefully they will grow better than the porch tomatoes did last year. Does anybody know if cucumbers need a lot of sun? I don’t need big ones. They are supposedly a kind that is conducive to growing in small spaces. Ah, who am I kidding I only bought them because they were called “Spacemaster Cucumbers” and I’m hoping they float or grow in the dark or something.

Everything’s better with stop action photography

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Here’s one pulled out of the archives.  I originally saved this link for blogging purposes on July 13th of ’08!

I’m a fan of Eddie Izzard, but it turns out his bits are even funnier when performed by little lego guys:

You can see many, many more here. Aparently doing Eddie Izzard bits as stop action lego guys is quite a thing because there are many, many more users with the same, but that link goes to the original ones I saw.