last night's movie selection

Tomb Raider. it was fun. dumb, but fun. the director commentary, however, was the lamest i've heard so far. i forget who actually directed the thing and i'm too lazy to go look it up, but he only talked about a third of the time, and when he did one got the impression that he believed that he had created in Tomb Raider a great masterpiece of cinematic art. he took it waaaaaaay too seriously. for god's sake, it's a shootemup. you're not a great artiste. get over yourself.

ok, it's true, i watch a lot of bad movies and then complain about them here. it's not that i'm too stupid to know any better, it's that sometimes i really enjoy bad movies. when i bitch about a movie, that doesn't mean i didn't enjoy it. i almost always enjoy movies. i'll sit through pretty much anything, as long as it's not a comedy featuring an ex-cast member of Saturday Night Live. (i make an exception for Bill Murray.)

here are some movies you probably haven't seen that you really, really should:

- The Specials. like Spinal Tap, but with superheroes instead of rock stars. Rob Lowe plays "The Weevil". there's a dance number. how can you go wrong?

- Creator. sort of a romantic comedy/drama in which Peter O'Toole tries to clone his dead wife in his garage while teaching his graduate student to properly pronounce "sonofabitch." ("Accent on the last syllable. Keep practicing.") also, Mariel Hemingway flashes her tits.

- The Stuntman. this one's awfully difficult to describe. Peter O'Toole plays an insane movie director who hires an escaped criminal as a stuntman and puts him through an increasingly dangerous series of stunts apparently devised primarily to kill him. and it's a comedy.

these three movies sit in my top five all time favorites alongside Citizen Kane and Lawrence of Arabia. which should give you an idea just how indiscriminate my taste in movies really is.

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mike myers. i also make an exception for mike myers.

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and now, i will inflict upon you a cute picture of people only some of you know:

http://prometheus.frii.com/~wt/gallery/albun51/20020328_145

too cute! can't... maintain... shitty... attitude...

quick! to the bitchcave!

argh!

so i was listening to Talk of the Nation Science Friday (as i am wont to do), and they had this panel of distinguished members of the medical profession. one of them used the word "acronism" for "acronym". ok, so i'm nitpicking. this shit drives me crazy, though. it's enough to give a girl an aneurysm.

it's not, on the other hand, as bad as the time a local newscaster reported on "a mummy -- or the esophagus the mummy came in".

pilgrim's progress

i've had a lot of moments recently where i become suddenly aware that i know rather a lot about my job and the sort of things i work with on a daily basis. i'm used to thinking of myself as a novice -- almost as an impostor, since i got kicked out of high school when i was 15 and never really went to college (unless you count that semester of community college when i was 16). i got into tech writing by 1) knowing a lot about computers, 2) being able to write, 3) taking an Intro to Tech Writing class from Berkeley Extension, and 4) shamelessly working my friends in the computer industry.

i've been a tech writer for a little over six years. i'm not a novice anymore, but i'm constantly surprised when i'm reminded of that.

i was particularly reminded of it by someone's posting of a particularly convoluted error message the other day. since it was a friends-only entry, i won't quote it here. what frightens me is that i instantly understood what it meant, without even having to know what product generated it.

i'm not sure this is necessarily a good thing.