January 09, 2007 - 5:49 PM

Surfing Safari (the browser)

Surprisingly, I haven't been fired from my job yet. Why so surprising? Well, I come in to work around 9:45 and fire up the ol' computer and check my email and the day's news (both entertainment and real world). Then I wait for the lunch menu to be passed around to place an order. Noodle around on the web some more, read some blogs, check up on Warcraft stuff, wait for lunch to come. Attempt to look busy whenever my boss Richard is around, and usually fail at that. Wait and wait and wait until I can leave, which is usually around 7, and breathe a sigh of relief that no one has said anything about the fact that it seems like I actually do no work.

To be honest, sometimes I DO have work to do. Like conducting interviews and getting clips from the TV show; making sure that they are edited correctly and put onto a format that is usable, and delivering those to the internet people. Or emailing people to find out what the status is on various projects that Richard has told me to keep an eye on and occasionally going to meetings about said projects. But those things usually take just a little bit of time, and aren't happening all the time, which leaves me way too much free time to fill with...well...the internet.

All this time to muck about the web, and yet I don't update this diary that often. I know, I have no excuses now. But oftentimes, I just don't have the urge or the inspiration to write about anything. So I'll fire off an email or two, hoping for a response so that I can have a silly conversation with someone, and then I'll troll the websites.

Lately, I've taken to occupying my downtime at work with looking up story synopsises and spoilers for movies. I don't mean just a one paragraph plot summary or a two sentence twist reveal; I'm talking about a full on, blow-by-blow retelling of the sequence of events in the story. Why ruin a movie this way? Well, it's not really ruining it for me if it's something that I've already seen and can't quite remember how things went, especially for muddled messes like Ultraviolet or Brotherhood of the Wolf. It's even better for movies that I have no intention of seeing, and yet am still curious about.

Let me tell you, for a pissing-in-my-pants scaredy-cat like me, it's a GREAT way to find out what goes in in horror movies without subjecting myself to all the horror. I've never seen a Friday the 13th movie, or any of the Nightmare on Elm Street films. There has been enough scarring from childhood viewings of Gremlins and Stephen King's "IT", thank you very much, to keep me away from monster/terror/bloody goretaculars. On occasion, I can stomach a frightfest, if it's couched in humor (Evil Dead, Scream, Dog Soldiers) or more about thrills and chills than hacks and splats (The Others, The Sixth Sense). And very rarely, I'll sack up and take in a real scary movie (Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, The Descent). But for the most part, please give me the characters with their eyeballs and internal organs on the inside; the dark recesses of the world unexplored or unthreatening; and my eyes fully uncovered.

However, despite my refusal to go see these "I gotta take off my glasses" movies, I've still got this strange curiousity to know what goes on in them. Let me know the terrible ways that people are killed, and what the motivations of the killer are, and how things end; just don't make me watch it. It's a strange voyeuristic sadism, a fascination with terror and suspense and the depths of man's depravity, perhaps, paired with an intense fear of the very same things.

Anywhoodle, I spend much time reading those stories online, and now I know what goes on in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, and the Grudge movies, and the Saw movies, and Hostel, and the Hills Have Eyes, and Hard Candy, and Dark Water, and Hannibal, and on and on and on. And I know that I will never want to see those movies.

Now, before you go diving into those spoilers yourself, be forewarned: most of the entries are horribly written and may be painful to read. I don't know if this is because the writing of the public in general is terrible, or if it's an indicator that the type of people who enjoys these movies and would write a summary has inadequate writing skills, but geeze. Verb tense shifts, narrative point of view shifts, typos, bad grammar, unclear descriptions. It's even more of a shock to hack ones way through the spoilers after spending the better part of the day reading blogs and articles written by intelligent and savvy wordsmiths.

Oooh...the new Fantastic Four trailer looks so neat. Not that I have any recollection of how the first movie went (ed. note- straight to the rubbish bin, that's where it went, taking the viewers dignity and 10 bucks along with it). Perhaps I should read up the synopsis of that movie.

Now Listening To : Doves- Some Cities
Random Thought : Anyone read any good comic books lately? That's another thing I've been looking into on the web.

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