Logan’s Run Online

Right, so I’m currently working on a new film. The idea and basic plot has been floating around my head for a while (since last summer, actually) when my friend Raye helped me conceive it; this summer I’m glad to say I’ve finalized a scene list with the entire story arc and have now talked with some people to pen it down in a real story format with action and dialogue.

This means that, hopefully, by the end of the summer, I’ll have the longest screenplay ever I’ve helped to create! And then it’s off to storyboarding and such other fun aspects of pre-production. What joy!

(In case you can’t tell, all of this stems from YET ANOTHER change of my major; this time to Radio/Television Production. I think I’m still gonna graduate in four years with a major and three minors. Hot stuff.)

So, partly because I’ve a slight ego and partly because I need to remember to update my resume and include all of my current accolades/involvements/etc., here’s a pointlessly-narcissistic post detailing my current life:

• CERT Team member
• CPR/First Aid/AED certified
• Ham radio license
• Knightcast–technical director
• Knightnews–videographer
• Honors College–team leader
• Urban Gaming Club–president
• Fencing–vice president
• Kars–expediting involvement
• (Hopefully) Crescendudes A Cappella group
• GLBSU Diva Invasion–shooting video and filming as part of CAB VPC
• CAB VPC

Have I forgotten anything? Remind me if I have. Looking at it all, I’m surprised I’m still in school.

HAHA, WOW. OMG, the Team Leader retreat was AMAZING! I definitely now know I made the right choice in applying to be a team leader–I’m gonna love this group and the whole experience. I can’t really say much more–it was awesome! And I met some terrific friends! Aside from staying in a VERY nice hotel (the JW Marriott Grande Lakes Orlando) and enjoying all of its amenities (gym, pool, lazy river, restaurants, GLASS shower), there were just SO many fun activities planned for all of us and I learned a whole lot. I’m probably way too excited about this semester and my group and can’t wait to do this again next year and the year after that (if given the chance). Some of my favorite quotes from the past three days:

This activity is going to involve handling balls.

Alvin, Alvin!!!! (Theodore, Simon!)

Mmrrrmm, roofies

EYES, THROAT, GROIN

And so much more–I gotta talk to Brenna because I’m pretty sure she was writing down quotes all retreat long as they happened. TLs who happen to read/see this–what was your favorite part? Any good quotes I forgot? And see if you can match the above quote to who said it!

So I’m up here in Orlando for ONE NIGHT and ONE NIGHT ONLY, basically just to make sure that my apartment is clean and bare and ready for me to check out tomorrow morning. And since I’m still here for the nightttime (and everything’s packed), I had nothing to do tonight, so I figured I’d grab my friends and hang out with them for a bit…we go to Jimmy John’s for dinner, cause raucousness there for a bit, then head back to my room in Tower 3…and while en route, we notice that there’s a spot in the corner of our lobby for “donations”: basically anything still in slightly good, usable, working condition that people don’t want anymore. And what a buinch of things people threw out! We found a ton of useful items in Tower 3 alone and afterward, content with our pickings, headed back to my room.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! We decide to make a night out of it and visit the rest of the Towers (1-4) and loot the rest of them as well–I mean, you’d never know what you find, right? So we head off to Towers 1 and 2 and finally 4 to pick up a bunch of other things. And we certainly did get a whole bunch of items. Here’s just a short list of some of what we acquired:

• Cabinets
• Shelving units
• Beanbag chair
• Three printers
• A fan
• Dart board
• Mini-popcorn machine
• TONS of frisbees
• and, Lauren’s best score: A LAZY-BOY OTTOMAN! Yes, that’s right,a FULL RECLINER, complete with leg rest. THAT was amazing.

So now we’ve got a TON of awesome loot, and a new tradition I’m certainly gonna look forward to in years to come…you can pick up some great deals indeed; even if I don’t end up using everything (like with the printers), I can always sell them for some extra cash!

So go out there, UCF! Find some stuff and partake in social equity!

Hooray!

Edit: ok, so, technically, I realize I’m on the east coast. Not only of my state, but also of the country. OK, it should be “All Quiet on the Eastern Front”. So sue me!

Don’t really have a lot of new stuff to report in–everything’s pretty much the same, life’s going well, kinda boring/quiet but productive and making money over summertime. Still taking CERT classes and feeding my hobby-interest through that and gearing up for next semester where I will (again!) switch majors to Event Management and finish up my CS minor.

Still debating if I should take the “Emergency Management & Homeland Security” minor or not–this stuff really intrigues me, but is it really gonna make up my career for the next 40 years? My last major switch left me scrambling to find time to finish all my courses by the 4-year mark and I don’t see if I’ll even find time for another 18 credit hours of minor coursework. Plus, that minor would really only be useful if I were to definitely pursue that side of risk/emergency management–and, while I do enjoy it, I just don’t know if I can/will do that. Given my newest major switch (event management), I think I realize where my “element” finally is, in entertainment and other such venues. I’m just most often myself and comfortable behind a sound board or running some entertainment event. Plus CERT (and other programs I can get involved in) can still satisfy my interest in that field…

On a cooler note, I just finished my 6th week of CERT classes last night and am looking forward soon to graduating that program and going on for a ride-along with an EMT–should definitely help convince me to become EMT-certified or not next summer (when I’m definitely spending all summer up in Orlando taking classes. Maybe an internship at Disney/Univeral or some awesome theater venue like that. Hmmmm…)

So, who out there has heard of the LARP game “Assassin”? I’m starting up a guild of it here at UCF since it seems like no one else has, and yes, this blog post is just a shameless plug to get more people exposed to it and join the group. Check out our Facebook group and join if you go to UCF and want to stay in touch about upcoming games or just want to know more about it. We’ve got one game coming up next week during finals, so join quickly, spread the word, and TELL YOUR FRIENDS!!!

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=71872239019&ref=mf

So, this weekend turned out a tad different than I expected. But it’s a good different! Although I stayed up until 2 am Thursday night and 1:30 am Friday night (and had to wake up both of the next days at 7 and 6:30, respectively), it was done for a great reason, so I’m not complaining! I enjoyed my good friend Joel from high school coming to visit me so I could show him around UCF and what college is like; I also enjoyed heading up to Jacksonville with him to take off a weekend and relax and tour UNF. It’s an interesting campus–very reminiscent of UM to me, although with apparently much cleaner bathrooms according to someone I know. Then we watched RHPS tonight–I learned some more callbacks–and we’ll head back to campus tomorrow to drop me off and he’ll head back to South Florida. Tomorrow (Sunday, the last day of the weekend) I’m really looking forward to: laundry, fencing, and Dexter with friends and hopefully someone else. Here’s to this weekend! It’s been awesome so far and I hope the awesomeness continues into the week! I’m certainly happy!

(That title is to be read as “busy-ness”, not “biz-niss”)

So much stuff is coming up in the next month or so before the end of school! To start off, last weekend I visited some awesome friends from high school up at FSU–what a road trip (4 hours!) to Tally from here in Orlando, but we all had an amazing time. The weather up there is beautiful! Not sun-beating-down-on-you-hot like it is here. >:-O

But moreover, the  next four weeks is full of business. (That time it can be read both ways.) This weekend are my first Team Leader events/meetings for my Team Leader position next fall for Honors; they take up my Friday night and Saturday morning. Thursday I’ve got two exams (Comp. Sci and Discrete), which means Wednesday I’m doing hardcore-studying for both. Today my first class was canceled, which let me sleep in, but I’ve got a bunch of projects to work on to make some money in the coming few weeks (leads group tasks, the Pompano Beach Fishing Rodeo), so a lot of my free time coming up is going to be dedicated to those tasks. I’ve still got a project due in Comp. Sci by the 7th with my group, which is to implement a Connect-4 solver, and that’s the biggest time-eater in terms of homework. Next weekend is Easter Weekend, so I may be going home to South Florida to visit family and hang out with friends, and the weekend after that I’ve got a friend coming up to visit me and then him and I are gonna go up north to check out UNF and spend some time around Gainesville. (Not to mention that same weekend on Friday, before we leave, I’m spending the morning touring 7th graders around UCF’s campus in order to encourage them to attend college–hooray for volunteer work!) The weekend after is the weekend right before finals, which means MORE studying, and then…well, I’m out by May 4th and should return home by that weekend after at the latest. Then it’s 3 months of summertime–working and attending summer courses (not school-related) and being productive. Woo-hoo!

So, I haven’t updated in a while. I think I’ve completely forgotten to finish that other list of things to write about. Life goes on. A few things I wanna share with everyone in lieu of other posts for updates:

• Midterms are fast approaching. I’ve only got one actual exam, and I believe I’m pretty well-prepared for it. We’ll see how it goes after this Tuesday. Then I’ll be free from schoolwork and ready to relax for a week of Spring Break.
• Speaking of Spring Break, that’s coming up, too! March 9th through 13th. I’m going to visit the South Florida Renaissance Festival on the 8th and do a few other things with my family and friends. Are you in South Florida and want to meet up with me at some point? Let me know.
• I went to MegaCon yesterday. It was quite interesting, for my first convention, at least. The hall space is huge. I’m not really into anime and/or comics, so about 98% of the convention didn’t apply to me. But I had fun with my friends–and that’s what matters. (I dressed up as Captain Hammer, too. John went as Dr. Horrible. Many lulz ensued.)
• “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” A small motto I discovered in the last episode of Futurama I watched. It may be a new type of creed I’ll try to live by.

Oh, and I’ve turned a tad more apathetic toward certain things lately. This should resolve itself through the usual college events of homework, tests, and business. Again, as my most-often creed goes, “life goes on”.

Edit: OK, what the hell?! In the week *directly* following my blog post, three major news sources (Washington Post, NY Times, and Time Magazine) all write articles covering this topic (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/05/AR2009020502252.html?nav=rss_email/components, http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/25-random-tips-for-the-busy-facebook-user/?hp, and http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1877187,00.html, respectively). Did I win by posting first? Or has this meme finally achieved mass acclaim that it’s now newsworthy for laypeople?

Right, this was one of the topics I said I’d write about, plus it’s the one that gets me the most incensed (not to mention I can write it with great passion and it’s relevant to most people). So now I can cross off one of the items on my to-do list of post writing! Yay!

…onto the real topic. “X Things About Me” on Facebook, where X is some integer someone has randomly decided to torment the online community with, usually either 16 or 25. Let me start by giving a little background: back in the days of MySpace, people had this uncanny ability to post “bulletins” filled with the most useless, stupid information no one would ever care to know. And the peculiar thing is this, my friend: these bulletins all instructed everyone who read them to “OMG TAKE OUT MY ANSWERS AND REPOST THIS BULLETIN WITH YOUR OWN FILLED IN LOL!!!!1″. Yes, I said “answers”, not “things”, because, see, apparently (and I agree wholeheartedly with this) MySpace users are too back-asswards to even know what to write about themselves, so all these bulletins were in reality parasitic surveys with questions like “drink? laid-back or neat-freak? favorite book to read when it’s raining? OMG rly??? what do you liek to wear @ parties wit ur friends?” and their ilk. I kid you not; I’ve seen queries like these, queries not only incomprehensible the majority of the populace above 18 but also for which their answers DON’T MATTER ONE BIT. Yes, that’s right, NO ONE CARES ABOUT THE ANSWERS TO YOUR BULLETIN SURVEY ON MYSPACE.

But I digress. Like most terrible things on the Internet (see: /b/), cancer like this cannot simply remain content polluting one website, it has to muck up others, too. And so some moronic dolt decided one day to bring this shit over to Facebook, titling it “16 Random Facts About Me”. This time, at least the user’s are smart enough to actually write things about themselves instead of filling in pointless questions like a lemming. The biggest problem, though, that I have with this variant on the normal chain-letter (because, honestly, let’s admit it–that’s really all that this is) is what’s posted at the top of every single one of them:

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you.

Let’s disect that a tad: first, these notes have the gall to blatantly say “Rules”, like this some sort of game or exercise in which we’re required to partake, and if we don’t follow the rules–*GASP* you MUST follow the rules! Secondly (and here is, again, the biggest problem I have with these–if it were not for this I probably wouldn’t mind this as much), you need to choose 25 people to be tagged, and also tag the person who tagged you. Seems reasonable, ri–wait, what? Tag the person who tagged me? So, let me get this straight: if we’re tagged, we have to make a note ourselves, and tag the person who tagged us? Doesn’t that mean they’re tagged in a note, so now they have to make a note and tag us back? Does anyone see what I see? Can someone recognize the infinite loop that would invariably result in this sequence of steps? For those of you who like pretty pictures, I’ve taken the liberty of making a diagram of this situation in Microsoft Word 2007 using “SmartArt” (I wonder if I can get paid for that bit of advertising…):

After the first round of going through, the second step adds "...because he has to according to THE RULES".

So eventually, two people will get locked into a “tag-post-retag” loop…and then two more people, with one of them probably being one of the first two…and the horrendous cycle continues until the entierty of Facebook is consumed by this cancer. DO YOU SEE THE PROBLEM? Now, some people may say “oh, c’mon, we have common sense, we won’t endlessly do that”–but NO! I guarantee you out there exists SOME people stupid enough to do that. And even for those who don’t, you’re simply perpetuating further USELESS trivia no one wants nor needs. And it ESPECIALLY bugs me when people tag me in these notes. I will personally assure you right now that, if you tag me in one of these notes, I will not only NOT post a note in return and tag you, but instead comment upon your stupidity. Seriously, if people out there on Facebook need to read others’ “X Things About Me” notes to learn about someone, that suggests a large problem with social interaction today. It’s my belief that if people are actually good friends, they should already be able to know things about each other simply by being around each other, and don’t need to be told what someone is like. Figure it out for yourself or stop being friends with someone who needs to promote themselves through blasting out personal facts to all of their “friends” on a social networking site.

TL;DR: “X Things About Me” is cancer spread from MySpace that is inane, makes no sense, and causes infinite loops.