I tend to follow a theme of renewal on New Years Day and so while
cleaning up I did a little extra. I also threw away three bed sheets that had
been sitting in a bag in the kitchen for several months before I’d washed them
on Thursday. When I started to put them away I saw that they were looking
pretty ratty and besides were made of synthetic fabric.
I hoped I wasn’t
jumping the gun by starting to put things back in the bedroom, but I haven’t
seen bedbugs for almost a month so I’m guessing it’s safe to return to normal
after a year of hell.
I went online to
see if my mark for Children’s Literature had been posted but it would have been
surprising if it had, since I’d only written the exam nine days before. I
assume that the professor celebrates Christmas so it wouldn’t be fair to expect
that she’d spent the holidays doing evaluations.
I did find the
early version of the syllabus for my upcoming Continental Philosophy course. I
found out that we would be dealing with Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments”
and Nietzsche’s “A Genealogy of Morals”. I tidied up the bookshelf where I keep
the philosophy books and found that I have a book by Kierkegaard and several by
Nietzsche, but wouldn’t you know the required books are ones that I don’t have?
Fortunately it’s easy to find PDFs of works by people that have been dead for
as long as those two guys have been, and so I downloaded the works.
I also found out
that I have one week more of a holiday than I’d thought before classes start,
so if the weather’s okay I’ll be able to go to the Tranzac open stage on
January 4th and maybe even the Yellow Door open stage on January 9th.
I’d been promising
Nick Cushing that I’d do some voice work for his animated project and so I set
up the microphone he’d given me and tried to record something. For some reason
though that I couldn’t figure out, I could get so little volume on the
microphone that I had to crank it up so high that I got a loud hissing hum
along with my voice. I made three recordings anyway, but they were saved in WMA
format whereas Nick had said that he’d prefer MP3. The audio converter I used
to have was years past its trial end date so I downloaded AVS, but I found out
they put an audio mark on every file they convert unless one pays for the
software, so I deleted all trace of the asshole company’s product and started
again. I downloaded Hootech, got a key to register the product without paying
and within minutes the files were converted.
I watched Avengers:
Age of Ultron. It was petty busy. I prefer it when action isn’t so fast and so
all over the place that if I blink I will miss some of it. They also changed a
lot of the stories behind the characters. Tony Stark didn’t create Ultron but
rather Hank Pym, who started out as Ant Man, became Giant Man and then started
going nuts before he became Yellowjacket. The Scarlet Witch’s powers were
subtler in the comic, at least in the beginning, and therefore more
interesting. Her hex power could alter probabilities so that if something could
possibly happen she could bring it forward. She and Quicksilver were originally
part of Magneto’s team. Hawkeye was originally a villain along with the Black
Widow and they were lovers until Hawkeye became a good guy. She didn’t turn
good for quite a while after he joined the Avengers. The second incarnation of
the Avengers in the comic consisted of Captain America, Hawkeye, the Scarlet
Witch and Quicksilver. It made for a more interesting team without all the
heavyweights like Thor, the Hulk and Iron Man.
The movie starts
with all of the Avengers doing a raid on Baron Strucker’s stronghold. It seemed
odd because really, any one of the heavyweights could have taken Strucker’s
army on.
It was a nice touch
to have James Spader do the voice of Ultron.
I doubt if
Quicksilver really died.
I had more sound
problems while watching the movie, though I think it might be unrelated except
by coincidence to my difficulties of earlier that day. For some reason, all the
heavy, low-end sounds produced crackling noises. I had been listening to loud
music earlier and heard nothing like that. I don’t know if it relates to that
particular film, to my audio settings or if I blew out my woofers.
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