I O N: Home Makeover, April Fools, Wii, Twisted Island
Entry posted by bonesiii
1,131 views
Random occurances, updates, and interesting stuffishness:
- I have decided to change my "every entry has a banner" tradition, and say that update entries like this will generally not have banners. It takes time.
But major entries will always have banners, if I can help it. 'Twill make it easier to fulfill the "weekly blog" rule. 
These will be called "ION" entries -- "In Other News." - Twisted Island has been re-begun, and the Paracosmos Tapestry Collection Topic re-revamped. Now all that's left in that category to repost are the other previously posted TI chappies, and the two Altacosmos Chronicles short stories. I'll let yall know when TI is up to the first new chapter.
- Time Capsule polls being worked on now.
- Very soon I plan to get to those .ppt av requests. I plan on overhauling the blog imagery (and update the important entries links and such) along with my new planned av, using the highest quality .ppt art I can muster.
- The bonesCAFE avatar website is nearly finished. I think I'll do a whole buncha new avs of Bionicle characters and such to accompany an artwork topic celebrating its official launch. Hopefully, that will be next week. For now, a new text line in my sig is advertising the site now.
- Sometime between the beginning of the show and today, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (which I think is a ridiculous title; I just call it "Home Makeover" ) made over a house near us. Since I don't give out personal info like my location over the 'net I had to wait a random amount of time before talking about it on here. Zat time has now passed. So here's the story:
We live two houses away from a residential street intersection. One day, we were leaving the house early morning, and saw that a cop car had blocked off that intersection. We assumed there must have been a wreck or something -- this was right in front of a house that we know to have or have once had a cop living in it. We figured it was nothing.
Later when we got back, though, the blockade was bigger, with tons of cars parked in people's yards. This was odd. Not knowing what to think of it then, we asked the neightbor who said it was the show. Eventually through the TV news and such we learned that it was a house just a block down, in our neighborhood.
We used to deliver our local paper on foot in our neighborhood. Ojhilom usually delivered to that house; one time I took over for him. So I have hung a newspaper bag on the doorknob of a house that was demolished on national television.
If I stand on the corner, not twenty feet from our front door, I can see the roof of the new house. When I walk dogs I usually walk right by the house. As word got out to the whole city, we saw tons and tons of cars drive by, wanting to get a glimpse of the action (or more likely hoping to get their mugshots on national TV
). Within a day or so they set up a parking lot a ways away and brought people in on golfcarts to see it. Personally, I hate the idea of being on TV, and I hate crowds, so I never went over there. They literally had hundreds of spectators behind ropes trampling all over people's yards over there, and that's not counting the workers themselves and cameramen yadda. The whole street the house was on was blocked off from cars, and the people in the houses there were offered hotel rooms in the city for the duration. The work went on night and day all week, so you could hear construction sounds even in the middle of the night. Afterwards they had to redo the whole street and the yards that everybody had trampled on.
At one point, a marching band went down my street in the early morning. I was only half awake at the time, and wondered if I'd dreamed it -- that was one of the weeeeirdest things I've seen in my life. A parade down my street. Freaky. We think from watching the episode that the leaves on the extreme (pun!) edge of the tree in our front yard probably made it onto the show, but it's hard to tell from the camera angle. Since then I have noticed how bad a job most cameramen do at getting a clear shot that gives a good sense of where the shot is coming from -- but then maybe that's intentional.
Anyways, the hoopla just got bigger as the week drew to a close. At one point we had fullsize city busses parking in our neighbor's front lawn, and cars (rather rudely) parking in everybody's lawn, including ours. We had to actually put out a sign saying to stay off the grass, both for that and because there were SOOOOO many people walking back and forth that many of them ignored our sidewalk and trampled OUR grass. We weren't part of the whole "we'll redo your lawn" dealio, so we didn't appreciate that.
At one point, a massive construction vehicle got in an accident with our neighbor's car. Apparently, the worker in question offered to just hammer out the dent, XD. (That was a no-go; they wanted full payment, heh.)
But the best incident of them all I really gotta be vague about. Our mayor is... how shall I say it... ah... infamous for a certain crime involving parking. He or she was caught in this crime before these events, and issued a public apology. But during this incident, the mayor parked across from the same unfortunate next-door neighbor's house, breaking this very same law. Photos of it were taken, showing our neighbor's house, and bandied about the city media websites. Far as I know, he or she didn't apologize again. The crime in question isn't a jailing crime, just a violation, but it does possibily involve the risk to life of living beings (if I said what it was it could be too easy to figure out what city I'm in, although maybe this entire paragraph is revealing too much lol).
Finally, the construction was over and they did the whole "move that bus!" dealio, and after that, we had a LOT more traffic on our streets. Usually when I walk a dog now past the house I still see cars going past and slowing down in front of it -- obviously in the neighborhood just to see it. So I can officially say that I live in a tourist hotspot.
Luckily our lawn escaped with minimal damage. The lawns of the other houses are back to normal. The memory of the incidents is fading. It was an interesting experience, both in how cool it is, and in how when you're in the thick of it, it's not as all-wonderful as the show would probably lead you to believe. When it's happening, it's a mess, it's chaos -- yet out of that chaos comes a freakin awesome house. Certainly way bigger than any other in our neighborhood, and looks very high-class.
And several months later we actually watched the episode. We don't watch that show normally. Personally I can't stand the over-emotionality of the show, but that episode was tolerable given the extenuating circumstances.
That's pretty much the story of that.
- This April Fools day, Ojhilom and I unintentionally pulled a prank on our mother. We were watching some kind of television; she had the remote. Now, we usually mute ads, 'cuz they are annoying. (Muahaha.) An hour or so before the show, I had found an old remote that miraculously still works, for volume only, on our TV.
When the show came back on, she wanted the vol' back up, and I pointed at the screen with nothing but my hand, and at my bidding, the volume rose. She freaked out, having no idea how I did it.
Ojh had actually had the other remote and kept it below her line of sight behind a chair arm and he'd happened to think of turning the volume up with that remote right as I had raised my arm. I swear, it wasn't planned, and only afterwards did we realize it was April Fools. Thus, an unintentional but well-timed prank.
- I know, I know, our RPG computer game's download link is out of date. For now we're still planning to just quickly finish the updates we're nearly done with and put up a new version. If this stretches out through the summer we'll give in and put up the old link again. But I really think we SHOULD... shoooooouuuuld be able to do that sometime in May. Shooooooooouuuuld. But who knows.
- So does anybody still use the Wii anymore? You see so many stories on TV of trampling incidents where a bunch of lunatic parents (or maybe adults wanting it for themselves) line up by the hundreds to get the darn things. But personally from the Wii some relatives have, for the most part the games aren't as interesting as GameCube or whatnot.
Where they now have a Wii, there used to be a GameCube, and at every holiday family gathering, us boys would be crowded around the GameCube. When they first got the Wii a few people tried it out halfheartedly, but most people just hooked up GameCubes to a different TV. Now the Wii is ignored at all family gatherings; I doubt most of the fam even remember it's there gathering dust. But the Gamecube is still the spot to be for the boys of the family.
Maybe it's just a "different fanbase" thing, and I'm sure the makers of Wii don't care anymore since they be rich off it now. But it seems to me that the Wii, for most people, may just be one of the most successful fads of all time -- and nothing more than a fad. With exceptions, I'm sure. However the heck they pulled that off -- maybe just marketing, maybe who they chose to target instead of the usual videogame fanbase -- I'm sure it will go in the history books.
And the ONE game I've ever actually played on the Wii was a Smash Bros, and everybody used gamecube controllers.
None in our family are fans of the weird Wii controller. - And finally, just a reminder that I am on the Poll-Making Squad. PM me poll ideas. Now that my break-from-BZP is over I should once again be able to put polls up quickly during weekdays.
- LOST FREAKIN ROCKS.
12 Comments
Recommended Comments