Still not entirely comfortable with 60 Frames per Second and remixing it in iMovie. Methinks I need something more… powerful?
GoPros are a gateway drug. And be amazed at my Star Wars pjs.
Author Archives: Dead Robot
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Innie, Outie, Skiddie
I hate my gym.
I hate everything about it. It’s in a basement in a government building (rat’s maze!) and smells like the loading dock/garbage area it sits between. The radio is too loud and staticky and the machines are barely passable for human interactions without some sort of bloodletting injury implied.
The people. Oh god the people that work out there… Sour faced, mouth breathing idiots who would probably instantaneously transform into a column of ash if they smiled. And if they’re not scowling, then they’re using the word “fuck” as an adjective, noun, verb. And as commonly as they would use the word “the”.
In all honesty, I don’t mind the place. It keeps me focused, since I don’t have to deal with any of these issues, really.
But I noticed this morning a peculiar dressing habit of one well built gentleman who has never uttered a single word the whole time I’ve been going there. He’s putting on his dress shirt (I expect he’s a manager somewhere within this huge city building) and in doing so he tucks it into his underwear.
Okay, not weird. I get it. If you were James Bond, you would want your dress shirt to stay in place while you jump across the terracotta shingled rooftops of some Middle Eastern marketplace, so tucking is not a bad thing.
Mr Quiet has tucked his shirt in and THROUGH his briefs’ legs.
Like, right through. Half way down the back of his legs and the two halves of the front of his shirt on either side of his package.
It’s not that he’s wearing an ill fitting shirt. He’s at the gym every day and has a body that shows it, so he’s a shirt-maker’s dream. His silhouette cuts a GQ model shape, so he’s not dressed wrong… he’s just dressing wrong. He looked like he was wearing Speedos over an olde-tyme nightgown, giving him a sort of diaper-ish kind of look.
Now before you say anything in the comments, I know a million people do this to keep their shirts in place, but I’ve never seen it this dramatic.
As I dressed I wondered just what was his underwear for then? And then I realized with a combination of horror and disgust that I pitied that poor man’s dry cleaner.
Happy anniversary!
I’ve had an awesome weekend, thank you very much!
Friday, I picked up my new toy: a GoPro Hero 3 and started to snap pics with it. See below. Expect fun videos of rides at Disney!
Saturday we picked up new luggage for next month. Light ones, since we’ll be gone a long time and dick chomping goombas Air Canada are charging for your luggage Expect us to not fly AC unless we absolutely have to!
Then we went to Skyfall, the latest Bond movie, which was cool.
Sunday, I woke to a book of retro Disney posters and handed my loving husband his 22 disk Blu Ray set of all the Bond movies (with an empty spot for when Skyfall comes out). Yay anniversary gifts!!
Then we went to the Bond exhibit at the Bell Lightbox. It was cool, but most of the items were replicas and not actual props. But cool, none the less.
We were going to go out for steak, but my cough has returned (not as strong, or startling but annoyingly just as hard) – I can’t tell if I’m having a cold attached to the tail end of my whooping cough, or if its just an extended bump. I’m feeling better as I type this and not taking any chances.
I hope your weekend was awesome!
Monster Roll
SharkBoy has been buying up $5 SyFy Channel movies on DVD in some reverse-retro nostalgia thing for really awful 70s movies. I think. I think I just broke my brain trying to explain that.
I digress.
I spied MONSTER ROLL over on Aint It Cool News and I immediately recognized that the FX shots are slightly the same as any SyFy movie.
But this one looks fun and awesome, unlike the poorly written stuff that’s been coming into our house lately(1)
(1) Admittedly, the dialogue is what keeps us coming back to these horrible movies. Example, in DinoThing vs Crocostuff, two scantily clad women insist they want to be “photographed in front of the waterfall” and instantly pose in front of a bush, while the photographer says “What the hell, one roll” while he uses a digital camera. The list is endless, but you get the gist.
Pertussis
Otherwise know as Whooping Cough. SharkBoy and I are just finishing up a couple weeks of this completely cough horror thing.
If any of you or your loved ones contract this aliment, kill your loved one then kill yourself. Kill anyone who has come in contact or even mentions the name of this fucking disease before any of the symptoms show up. You will be doing humanity a favour. Nuke me from space, it’s the only way to be sure. Kill me with fire. Kill.
I mean it. I’ve never been more embarrassed by an illness before in my life. The worst was being on the subway, suppressing a coughing fit, which just made it worse, and having people look at you like you’re patient zero for The Walking Dead.
How bad can it be?
Look. At. This. Poor. Bastard.
Without all the medical crap around us, this is exactly what our house sounded like for the last 4 weeks. Still does at times, but not as severe. Throw in hoarking and spitting and it’s an accurate Casa RoboShark soundtrack.
For the life of me, I have never experienced an illness so heinous. I kid around – of course I *could* experience worse illnesses, but this one was baffling. Two weeks into it, I honestly thought I was going to wind up in that scene from Mildred Pierce where she loses Kay – covered in a plastic oxygen tent and nurses pumping up the gas…
Seems SharkBoy and I never had this particular illness as kids, nor had we been vaccinated, I guess (Mom? Any vaccination cards from St Francis Xavier School for the Religiously Gifted?), and for some reason Whooping Cough is on the rise. Thankfully we’re on the other side of this heinous ague and not closer to our Disney trip.
That being said, I’m off to Costco to get massive amounts of Cold-FX for the flights to-and-from Florida and Vermont.
Thank you Thank you Thank you
Foto by Glenna Williams Via Facebook
The day came and went without a hitch. I admit I was nervous, this being my first organized event (sort of, ish,) through the 501st and I didn’t want to besmirch their good name. I was fawning over Katherine, manager of the President’s Choice Cooking School at the Loblaws at Carlton and Church, thanking her every 2 seconds for the use of her room/office.
Katherine was utterly awesome. She didn’t have to give up her office for our duffel bags, or stick around until 4pm on a Sunday to wait until we were back and changed, but she did. She, ladies and gentlemen, is a TROOPER.
Why did I fawn? The YMCA over on Grovesnor, the 519 Community Centre and the support staff at the Toronto District School Board dismissed me with rude indifference when I approached them for loan of a change room for the day – in a couple cases, my emailed rejection responses sounded like the recipients had not bothered to read my initial emails. When Katherine so easily said yes, I was in a bit of shock at how nice she was. I will say that if I ever need use of any of the Y, the 519, or the TDSB, I will think twice. And you should all go enroll in a class at the PC Cooking School (they do Sushi!)!!
In the end, it seems I had no worries at all, thanks largely to the seasoned troopers that had signed up for the event. These guys were on time, ready and entertaining, even after the LONG walk they had to endure in their outfits. I did hear one say that “it wasn’t every day he gets to walk up Yonge Street in full gear” so I think they had a good day!
In the end, we raised over $2300 for ACT. And I thank all of you readers for putting up with my calls for money over the last month.
I felt the day was a bit under-attended in comparison to previous years, but I think it was due to the short rain fall just before the walk. That or people just don’t care much anymore. Global TV was the only news outlet to put the walk on their main, 6pm news while CP24 and CityTV did mention the walk briefly on their mega-everything-gets-largely-ignored-OCD-news-channels. Also, the walk was in direct competition with the Bowel Cancer walk, somewhere else in the city.
Still, the message got out there. I did have to explain to someone why Star Wars characters were at the event. “I’m sure someone out there infected with HIV liked Star Wars,” I said, in creepy past-tense.
Today, I am sore. Like “old guy” kinda sore. I’m not 21 anymore.
Again, to all who helped, my heartfelt thanks.
That Darn Coat
The phone rings, Mom picks it up.
“Rita! It’s Lidia. I need your help.”
Mom’s sister calls out of the blue, somewhere around the fall of 1980. She sounds worried. Scared. Mom talks her down, saying “Take it to a bank and then get a safety deposit box.”
A week later she’s on a train to Toronto. She arrives at her old home out by Keele Avenue and is greeted by Lidia and their mother. Grandmother is beside herself. After some reassurance from Mom, the three head out to the bank.
My mother is wearing her near-black mink coat. Grandmother was probably in her usual garb: understated Italian grandmother floral print. Lidia was probably in the same, but more youthful. The three enter the bank and are taken to the safety box area.
They open the box. Mom groans. It’s a pile of cash. A LARGE pile of cash. As an accountant, free range cash held in captivity is her worst nightmare. Grandfather, long before and during his Alzheimer’s attacks had been squirreling away money under the stairs in their home. For years. As Grandfather spiralled down the well of forgetfulness, Grandmother began to fear the box under the stairs, like an Italian Telltale Heart.
They decide to count it. After reaching some grotesquely large number, Mom stops and goes to find the bank manager. They need to deposit this money.
They’re ushered into a private room with a counting machine. Lidia and grandmother are sitting staring at the whirring machine, their faces probably drawn and long, like a wet cat. Meanwhile mother paces behind the manager, still in her mink. They count it once all the while explaining to the manager how this money came to be.
The manager turns to my grandmother and very pointedly says to her: “This is illegal, you know.”
Mom turns and says, “This is a deposit of our money. Money they saved honestly and are now putting into your bank. You have no right to speak to her that way.”
The manager says nothing more other than business transaction concerns.
My mother, just turned 80, pushes herself back from the table, having finished telling us this story. “She was really scared, that manager. I really scared her!” She says, proud of sticking up for her mother in front of a total stranger.
“Um. You know she was probably scared when she actually saw the money, right?” I say.
“How so?” Mom asks.
“Three ladies come into her bank, two generation of Italians, one wearing an expensive mink coat, and demand a large sum of money that materialized out of nowhere, be deposited into her bank?”
The punchline races along 30 years of time. Mom starts laughing. We all start laughing.
Why I Need Your Money
You’d expect this of me, seeing how I’m less than 5 days away from the Toronto AIDS Walk, right? Good for you!
ACT has been around since 1983. I’ll let that sink in. Nearly 30 years. Thirty years of bringing comfort and assistance to people living with HIV/AIDS in Toronto. That’s a lot of caring. And now, living in Rob Ford’s Toronto, ACT’s programs are constantly under scrutiny by City Hall.
According to ACT, 2 people are infected daily and preventing one infection saves $370,000 over a lifetime. 1 in 4 new HIV diagnoses are people under 30. 1 in 5 new HIV diagnoses are women. 1 in 5 are gay men.
“But Dead Robot!” you say, “The new cocktail prolongs life!”
The current run of cocktails are doing a bang up job on suppressing the virus, but the cost of these drugs are still shockingly high. The most popular pill, Atripla (a carefully combined pill of three top performing antiretroviral medications) costs nearly $60 per pill. Not everyone can afford this, obviously. ACT helps bridge that gap by being an access point for provincial and federal health programs. Combine this with outreach and education programs, ACT has been busy over it’s near-30 year run.
Okay so the pamphlet is out of the way…
Why do I think dressing up in Star Wars outfits helps this cause?
I want to rattle a cage or two, like my brother did back in the 70s when he joined the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. But in this case, this is the closest to drag I can comfortably get!
Seriously, I want to further demystify the stigma. I want someone who might still think HIV/AIDS is not part of their life, see Stormtroopers and Jedi and think that it’s not just a “gay disease”. It’s my hope that in seeing us at this event, we make people question their (non?) acceptance of this disease, or shake their complacency towards it. I want people to take away that there is more than just a set class of people who are affected by this disease (like “gay men” or “women”), and that Geeks and Nerds are aware and active against HIV/AIDS too.
That’s why I’m walking. And I am so very glad that my friends from the 501st are coming along too. As of writing this, we’ve got a Vader, a Boba Fett, a Rebel pilot, a Sith lord (or two?) and 4-5 TK (troopers!).
Here’s the pitch. Donate today. The time is running out!
Garage Sale Update
The Whore of Tatooine
How did our garage sale go, you ask?
Awesomely! Thanks!
The day started out a bit frantic: most sales were already in full swing at 9am and poor postbear is NOT a morning person at all. Because 90% of the stuff we were selling was donated to us (proceeds to PWA Toronto), unpacking was a bit of a mystery grab bag Xmas fun-time show. When we started to set up at 930ish people were hanging off the front yard fence to get in and if I, or SharkBoy unboxed something cool, we’d let out a girly squeal, prompting the human tide at the gates to swell.
“How much for that … Melamite (?) dish there… the purple one?” a woman asked, leaning across the fence, pointing her sausage-y fingers at a set of plastic plates.
“You mean the Marmite dishes?”
“Yes. Marmite,” she says, confident that I provided her with the correct pronunciation and utterly proving to me she was confusing her knowledge of post-war industrial dishware with Australian yeast-based foodstuffs.
“Oh. It’s Melmac!” I say, laughing in my head.
So it went. The day was not without it’s crazies, like the woman who demanded to see if the rice cooker was working (It was) and made a big fuss because we didn’t have an electrical outlet or the guy disgusted that we asked $3 for 3 DVDs (dude… charity??). However, I missed most of them since I was in my trooper suit drumming up change for my AIDS Walk (go donate!).
Nearer to the middle of the day I was standing out in front of the house drumming up business for our sale, when a sleek Audi pulls up beside me with a child in the back seat. I did my standard “two fingers pointing at my eyes, one finger pointing at the kid” in a pantomimed “I’m watching you” kind of thing. The kid smiled like it was Xmas. The passenger side window rolls down and the driver leans across.
“You the ‘Trooper?”
I resist making a stupid come-back like No, he’s down the street, I’m the space princess. “That’s me!” I say. I was impressed that someone actually read our signs.
He thrusts a couple bills at me – with my limited sight I think it was a $10 and a $5, but I was more surprised than accountant.
At that moment I realized I was leaning into an expensive car to take money from the driver. I felt like a street walker. But I was gobsmacked and happy. To you, sir, THANK YOU!
Later, TomWDart (who took this post’s most excellent picture) came by. His first words to me were “Any excuse to put on the suit, right?” And dubbed me “The Whore of Tatooine” which I think I will get put on a t-shirt sometime in the near future.
In the end, the sale pulled in $500+ and my change-for-photo bucket had $111 in it for my AIDS Walk (go donate!)
A very good day!