Filed under: Essay | Tags: director, Essay, Muse, New Moon, Paramore, review, Spotlight, two, update
Just a very short update, almost finished an essay! That took forever to finish. I watched New Moon yesterday, my review will be coming soon. 
Rating: 3.5/5. It stayed close to the book, yet I was a little worried since the director also directed the failed movie, The Golden Compass. Indeed some scenes were clunky, and weren’t smooth flowing. Also noticable- the music, none of it really stood out. For Twilight, it was all about Paramore’s Decode, Muse’s Supermassive Black Hole and Spotlight. Well, at least its breaking records.
PS. Two updates in one day!?! I just saw I haven’t posted my last blog, its been in draft. So happy reading!
My imagination runs away with me, the audience is left breathless.
The next stage is, this..
The difference between both worlds..
Showcase the difference
The feelings erupt spontaneously
The viewer learns about the character’s life.. and they become part of it too.
Filed under: Studies | Tags: internet, plot, Studies, apology, maintain, balance, worry, step, GaiaOnline, Neopets, target market, Gaia, teen, halloween, Gaians, B.O.O., S.I.N., good guys, Neopia, Neopians, Atlas of the Ancients, sidekick, rate
I think another apology is in order. (: I’ve been busy for the past three weeks, just trying to absorb all of my studies. And in doing that, have cut down on my internet usage. It’s this ”balance” that is hard to maintain, it’s going okay.. well so far. I’m just worried that I’ll lose my self-motivation, which leads to not studying, then bad marks and less self-motivation. And its hard to stay out of this whirling, incapacitating cycle that seems to just hover the one step behind me.
Two places I’ve been regularly going into while on the internet, have been GaiaOnline and Neopets. Yeah, yeah both have similar target markets, yet Gaia has the look and feel of being more suited to older teens. Gaia is currently finishing up its post-Halloween festivities which involves all Gaians (people/users) to choose a side- B.O.O. stands for the Benevolent Order of the Overseer aka. the good guys vs. S.I.N (Sentinel’s Infernal Nation or the bad guys). Personally, I always side with the good guys. ;D A little repetitive, but with the promise of some unlockables/prizes it’s up to the participant to decide if a little time and clicking skills are worth it.
Back on Neopets, they have a new plot called Atlas of the Ancients, set out in chapters (story mode) which lets participants follow the adventures of the good guy hero, his sidekick and smart/damsel in distress to save Neopia and its residents, the Neopians. Not too bad, colourful, bright and engaging- however a little let down due to the simple plot steps. One or two clicks to finish a stage (in a chapter) of the plot. As a Neopian who was around for the Altador Plot (Dark Faeries Plot) which involved timing, and various steps to follow, it was one of the best plots the Neopet’s team came up with. Overall, not bad.. 4/5 stars.
Until next blog post (which hopefully won’t be another three weeks :p) — Sparkles. xx.
Filed under: Shopping | Tags: bargain, blog, break, cafe world, exercise, free, Holiday, late, locket, new, post, reason, restaurant city, robots, shop, Shopping, spot, tired, users
Another late blog post.. yeah, yeah I know.
Soo, it is Friday, the 16th of October.. 8 days after the 8th of October- where I predicted Cafe World users would jump Restaurant City users in one week. The result? Cafe World sitting on 17.6 million while Restaurant City is lagging behind on 16. 7 million users. Oooh.. the people at Zynga, behind Cafe World must be doing several happy dances around their office.. they’ve only opened shop for around two weeks compared to Restaurant City which has been open for 2+ months. Over the 8 day period Cafe World users jumped from 8,586,747 users to 17,665,512 users- an increase of 9,078,765 users and on average 1,134,846 new users per day. Incredible. O.o
However, I must admit- I’m slowly getting tired of Cafe World. Maybe I became too addicted and suffering from withdrawal symptoms. I also jumped ship, I’m playing more of Restaurant City, its more easier to get through the levels however you also got to take care of the staff. The staff back over at Cafe World are robots, I tell you! No rest break, they don’t eat and they don’t need to be paid. Mwahha. I’m using my poor Facebook friends as free slave labour.
I got out of the house the other day and went shopping for the whole entire day. Always, always the best exercise. (: I hope they consider it as some type of sport one day, I mean.. the lengths people will go to, to claim the best shopping bargain. For a long time now, I’ve been trying to find some type of cute locket and managed to score one for $3, in a shiny gold colour. The silver lockets though look the best. My friends should just have a sign hanging around their neck’s labelling them “shop-a-holics”. I wouldn’t be surprised if they one day bought out the whole mall. Plus the wind wasn’t doing us any favours either, another dust storm soon seems possible. Only 3 days left of my holiday and I’m still furiously catching up with my work. Ugh. It should be illegal to have to do work on your holiday. ’till next time!
-Sparkles.
Filed under: Knowing | Tags: 23, 23 enigma, 50 years, aliens, cliche, Knowing, Life, list of numbers, Nicholas Cage, numbers, observer effect, plot, purpose, student, teacher, worst ending
BE WARNED: SPOILERS for the movie, “Knowing”
I finally sat down and watched the movie, Knowing, which stars Nicholas Cage last night. Ever since I’d seen the previews on tv and missed watching it at the movies, I have really, really wanted to watch this movie. The plot opens in 1959, where a girl places a piece of paper filled with numbers and other drawings into a time capsule. In 50 years time, the time capsule is to be opened at her school and future students will each receive a letter, containing a drawing of the future, from students 50 years ago. The protagonist’s son, so cliche, receives the paper filled with numbers and the protagonist starts to figure out the numbers may stand for something. The numbers listed, detail the co-ordinates (longitude and latitude) and date (d/m/y) of every major disaster that has happened, and will occur.
From Wikipedia.org, “The 23 Enigma refers to the belief that most incidents and events are directly connected to the number 23, some permutation of the number 23, or a number related to the number 23.” Numbers have always held intrigue in society, take for example the movie The Number 23, with Jim Carrey. He becomes obsessed with the number 23. And you know what? It’s amazing the amount of things 23 can be linked to:
- Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes.
- Titanic sunk on the 14th of April 1912= 1+4+5 (month)+1+9+1+2 = 23
- December 23, 2012 is when the Mayans said the world would end
- The letter W is the 23rd in the alphabet and has 2 points down and 3 points up
- The first Apollo landing on the moon was at 23.63 degrees east; the second was 23.42 degrees west.
The number 23, is the real-life equivalent of the list of numbers, that predicted the dates of disasters in the present and future in the movie Knowing. But hey- it could just be pot luck, that the number 23 is connected to many events and situations. But if you regularly start seeing the number 23 everywhere in your life, you could be contributing to your own Observer Effect (from Wikipedia.org “refers to changes that the act of observing will make on the phenomenon being observed.” By just always trying to find the number 23 in your life, it then just pops up often. So don’t get too obsessed over the number.
Well back to Knowing, good plot, good cast, worst ending. Aliens, end of the world scenario, oh, and the protagonist doesn’t save the day. Pfft, we all harbour a little hope inside that even though sometimes in our big, bad world a little good can still persevere. On an interesting note at the beginning of the film, the protagonist discusses if life was just a series of chemical accidents (no purpose to life) vs. there’s a purpose to us being here, right now living. I’m still sitting on the white picket fence deciding what side I’m on. But theres no purpose in driving yourself crazy, just trying to decide what your answer may be to the above question.
Remember, time is the greatest teacher, it kills all its students. No matter the answer- maybe its just better,
…not “knowing”. ;D
Other sources I got information on the number 23: http://forum.realsurf.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10077
Filed under: addiction | Tags: addiction, cyberspace, forget, Holiday, internet, nagging, obvious places, pet, procrastination, self-motivate, sticky notes
Theres only seven days left of my holiday and I seem to be perfecting the art of procrastination. But then again my internet addiction is sometimes so bad I forget important things. Too little time to go and do everything that interests me on the internet. So I stay in my computer chair for most of my day. Longest time I have been on the computer for? Hmm, about 11 or 12 hours, averaging about 6 hours. And I lose track of everything, time, food, people communication.
One way I tackled this problem is to write on yellow sticky notes the night before. Usually some type of advocating to my future self, to do something besides use the computer and internet message. Basically a short, sweet guild trip. I then place the obvious yellow sticky note in a place I’ll see it aka. on the computer, somewhere either on the monitor or on the computer tower, near the on button.
I haven’t developed any other good methods yet which will help drag me out of the immersive cyberspace world. Nagging friends/parents work about 75% of the time, yet two reasons why this method isn’t the best is: ONE: it isn’t self-motivated, which decreases the chance of me getting off the internet and increases the chance of an argument about the computer/internet in the near future. And TWO: The other party must initiate the nagging, which also again could lead to an argument with a parent, spouse, friend or pet that hasn’t recently been fed. (By the way, I don’t own any pets, just to let you know. I barely keep myself in good condition, let alone some poor pet.)
I would love to hear any of your solutions to my problems concerning computer/internet addictions. Leave a comment below!
–x Sparkles.
P.S. Sorry no pretty pictures with this blog post. I promise if I get time to fix it up soon!
Filed under: Polaroid | Tags: affect, athousandwords, breathe me, camera, disturbance, gravity, imagination, missiles, NASA, picture, plot, Polaroid, sia, take over, time, viewer, youtube
I’ve always loved Polaroid pictures, I think they capture an ionic abstract moment in time and preserve it forever. The viewer is then always actively encouraged to then ponder the image, make up any story with their imaginations. As people too often say, “A picture tells a thousand words”.
Even Breathe Me by the singer Sia, uses a bunch of Polaroid pictures in her music clip, to merge moments in her past with her current reality. It’s an absolutely enchanting song, just listen to the words. If you want to watch:
In other news, NASA is bombing the moon with missiles. To find water. Seems like a good plot for a movie/novel, I must say the people at NASA have a lot of time on their hands.
“And at the last possible minute, the missiles were launched into the cloudy night sky. Spotlights flashed around the compound, shadows running away in fleeting glances behind. If everything went according to plan, the moon would be completely destroyed and Earth would turn into the new breeding ground for chaos, which laughed maniacally. And no one would be the wiser, species would flourish, others die out. Yet he didn’t seem to care, the one person who could have stopped all this from occurring. No, he did it for money. Money is the root of all evil, he mused..”
However I was also pondering about the disturbance of the moon. These missiles are going to take out a portion of the moon, when they crash land, sending up a massive dust cloud. Will this have any impact on earth? Or is it an insignificant amount? Will the moon’s gravity be affected and in turn earth’s volatile oceans? Well, for one I will be very interested in what NASA finds out and achieves.
-Sparkles.
P.S. Restaurant City users have risen to 16.2 million, Cafe World users to 10 million users. ;D Will we see a take over soon enough?
Filed under: Movies | Tags: cafe world, cameron diaz, fame, fix, games, high school musical, Life, Lyrics, money, movie, posts, red button, smoothly, suspense, the box, two hours, watch, youtube
One thing that occurs regularly in my life, is that if I see something that I can fix, I fix it up until it’s all running along smoothly then leave it. I leave it because generally it becomes overbearing, boring or tedious. For example, my love of real-life simulation games as I have mentioned in a previous post, I try to make heaps of money and quickly progress through the game but when everything is just perfect or near perfect, theres nothing worth going to the trouble to upkeep. The point I’m trying to make is this blog, well I’m trying my best to .. ok, fine not really- yes, I have been slack about posting. Thats going to change, well hopefully.
Yesterday I went and saw, Fame, you know, that movie-based-on-the-remake-of-the-original movie, movie? It was okay, maybe 1 1/2 stars out of 5. The story revolves around 6+ people and follows their ups and downs during their four year stay at an elite New York Performing Arts School. The story moves swiftly, and I think because the film focuses on too many people, the moral of the story is lost. Just under two hours running time, it’s not enough to cover all of these characters- which have so much potential! You would think that after two hours of watching a movie you would learn the characters names and ambitions, yet again, everything isn’t given.. depth.
Fame just appears to be the three High School Musical movies squished into one movie. But it’s not all disappointing, its got a good soundtrack with catchy songs such as Baby Remember My Name, Try, Out Here On My Own. As well they used the song Black and Gold by Sam Sparro, which appears be a perfect song for a dance routine in the movie.
“Remember my name,
Fame!
I’m gonna live forever..”
On an upside I saw the film preview for the movie, The Box. Okay, so it doesn’t have an original name, yet the plot behind it is unique. Starring Cameron Diaz, it’s based on a couple who are struggling with financial problems. The bad guy, the typical black, pinstriped suit with the bowler hat comes along and offers them a solution. They are presented with a box, with a large shiny red button in the middle. If the couple chooses to press the red button, someone they don’t know in the world will die because of their action. On top of that they get a million dollar payment. If the red button isn’t pushed…*suspense* I won’t tell you… check it out,
P.S. I think I’ll keep an eye on Cafe World’s Users- it jumped from about 6 million to 8,586,747 million users in about 1-2 days. At this rate, they’ll probably jump Restaurant City Users (currently sitting on 16, 171, 098 users) in perhaps a week at best.
Lets see what happens.
I’m curious.
-Sparkles.
** I tried to make this blog post longer than usual, to make up for my lack of posting!
Filed under: 1
I promise to have a new blog post later during the day. Stay tuned.
Filed under: Dream | Tags: Life, facebook, cafe world, Dream, friends, dodgeball, cynical, chances, bigger picture, Holiday, raining, free, information addiction, homework, rain shower
While I have managed to peel myself away from the addicting Cafe World on Facebook, I managed to catch some sleep and had a rather weird dream. One which involved speeding cars and motorbikes everywhere, a plastic bottle contributing to the materials of a spaceship that was being built and talking to people. I remember thinking in the dream, when I was talking to my friend, how life can throw you many curveballs- study, friends, death, laughter.
Have you ever felt life was a bit like Dodgeball? You try to escape the onslaught of bright, bouncy red balls yet you know, no matter how much you dodge, eventually you’re going to get hit. Apologies for my inbuilt cynical nature, one friend has frequently commented that I’m always the half empty cup type of person. But its true, the chances of not being hit are so small, that its bound to happen. Well unless you’ve learnt how to dodge effectively. Maybe life is just about being tactful, knowing what to and when to do it.
Life however shouldn’t just be about focusing on the one goal, it should be about seeing the bigger picture, when we step back.
Well, anyway its day three of fourteen days of holiday! And I haven’t gotten out much.. (though it’s currently raining), I always want to go out and about when I’m stuck in a predicament, though when I actually get free time to go do anything, I’m attached to my computer connection. That is the downside of having an information addiction, well thats what I call it. In today’s world, we constantly have updated information at our fingertips 24/7, concerning any subject we’re interested in. Fact: One week’s worth of information in the New York Times equaled the amount of information one person would receive in their whole, entire lives in the 1800s. How ironic, I got that fact of YouTube and am trying to get a grip on my information addiction. ;D
I also should get started on my homework pile too, if only the thunder storm from before came back! Then I could use “hey, the powers out, I can’t do any work” excuse. A sun shower (when the sun appears and it rains at the same time) occurred a few hours ago in my street, it was so pretty. The sun shining from out, under the dark grey clouds and the rain falling in dashes. I really, really, wanted to dance in the rain then. ;D
Meanwhile, I’m addicted to this song currently, enjoy ;
Filed under: Holiday | Tags: addiction, animal crossing, brain wash, cafe world, cyberspace, facebook, force, Freedom, iPods, nintendo ds, nintendo ds lite, nintendo dsi, obsession, restaurant city, the sims
Apologies for being kind of slack during these last two days, see I’m relishing in two weeks of freedom. And also.. currently addicted to my Facebook page and games. I started playing Cafe Town, woops sorry I meant Restaurant City, erh.. sorry Cafe World, its Cafe World. Similar enough to Restaurant City but much cuter and interesting. You basically cook food, serve it up, customers pay and thats it. I’ve always had an addiction to games such as these, even Animal Crossing and The Sims on the Nintendo DS Lite. Though the Nintendo DSi looks pretty neat as well and how about the new iPods with the inbuilt video cameras?
But I’m not alone with my obsessison- Cafe World users jumped from about 252, 000 yesterday (October 3) to just over 1.5 million in. a. day. WOW. Pretty good for a Facebook game thats was just released in Beta version on September 30 (5 days ago). Then again, I’m not surprised since Cafe World was developed by the brains who also created Farmville. The game has alone, over 50 million players a month. Talk about people’s Facebook addictions, I’m sure if Facebook could just brainwash all those people, they would have enough people to amass an army over twice the size of the current Australian population (which is just over 22 million).
But hey don’t worry about Facebook users becoming an army, why not a country instead? “Over 150 million users, it would be the 8th most populated country in the world” (from http://11thhourbrilliance.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/the-facebook-phenomenon/). But that was only in Janurary of this year, so the figure now should of grown much larger. Such a powerful force in virtual cyberspace, I bet the developers of Facebook games are all rolling around in cash as I speak. I bet the duck in Farmville’s logo is smiling for more than one reason now…
Well they haven’t brainwashed me yet.. oh wait, they already have.
