People seem to have a thing for accents. Especially the French accent. Why is it that the French accent is considered the most alluring and romantic accent anyway? I don't see it. Sorry French people, I just don't buy into the hype. I'll tell you where it's at. I made a joke about Canadians and their accents recently, but I legit love the Canadian accent. It's especially sexy when it comes from an ENFP. I also really like the Irish accent. You combine the two, and you get Colm Wilkinson, who i
There are a few things that make Canadian speech distinctive, eh? I like that Canadians have their own way of talking. It would also be kind of cool if there was a distinctive Canadian standardized spelling just like there is in America, but I understand that they don't have a dictionary written by a nationalistic Noah Webster who wanted to distinguish American English from British English. Canada gets along much better with Great Britain and shares the same royalty, so I get it. Still, Cana
I really wanted to like this movie. I had every reason to look forward to it. Idris Elbe received a Golden Globe nomination, and if nothing else the subject matter deserved my respect. Mandela was a great man. Normally biographical dramas about great people make for good films. Unfortunately, there isn't much to say for this movie. While I can agree that Idris Elba's performance was good, that's about the only good thing that I have to say for this movie. It was pretty easy to put my finge
What's one of the most sacred things that thou shalt not spoil? Obviously, the new Harry Potter book. You spoil that, and you might as well get thrown out of the window from the top story of a tall building. I would like to avoid a dramatic fall to my death, so I'm avoiding anything that even remotely sounds like a spoiler. And yet, I still want to give an opinion on this book, so there are a few things that I feel obliged to say to the prospective reader who's wondering whether or not this
With most movies — even predictable ones — there's some basic level of suspense keeping you at the edge of your seat. Since most of us know the outcome of the miracle on the Hudson, though, this film is a little different. This is one of those movies that you hold up as an example of why you don't need suspense to keep a movie interesting. The focus of Sully lies more in educating the viewer on this historic plane crash and what happened afterward. The story is known to us; the exact details are
I just watched the Carly Rae Jepson video for "I Really Like You". Like all of her other songs, it's incredibly cheesy. Except for this one, she snagged Tom Hanks to star in her music video. How did that happen? 24601
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXobvMouj6o&index=4&list=PLx8Uh_mBAxbjPWHKRERcpFpy1szaeBpF3 My friend brags on me a lot, and this is me bragging on her in return. I relate to this song so hard. I've made cookies and pizza and donuts for friends before, when I was feeling lonely. 24601
2016 has seen the release of several outstanding animated movies. Disney has been hitting things full throttle and has been making outstanding advancements in animation. Just look at Zootopia, where not a single background character stands motionless, and they manage to fill the frame with millions of subtle details. You could also look at Finding Dory, where Pixar has been pushing the limits in what they can do with lighting, and they also managed to animate a a boneless octopus. If you pay clo
...but Floriana Bertone makes me wish I could, so I could listen to every beautiful word that she says. And also, so I could ask her on a date, so that I could spend more time listening to every beautiful word that she says. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iixJ3V1MHU8 24601
When we talk about some of history's greatest athletes, we usually look at winners. But there's really something to be said for those underdogs who never won, and why they are in some ways better athletes overall then the people that beat them. Like Oksana Chusovitina, the multi-national Olympic gymnast only won one gold medal in her first Olympics, but came back for six more and managed to get a silver medal in Beijing. That's not a lot of winning, but that's quite a few Olympics, seven ove
This masterpiece was constructed by the Nok Ja poet Vuu ʄOkʘ͡qu and is estimated to have been written sometime within the fifteenth century, Earth Time. It has since been translated into English by J.W. Grabbs and I Ætha. What you see here is the Grabbs version, who opted to roughly translate the language so that it would mach more contemporary terms so that it would be more understandable to contemporary human audiences. There is some controversy over the use of his translation in school books,
I'm not huge into country music, but it's probably from lack of exposure since leaving my farming community. I wouldn't mind moving back someday and getting back into their music, though. In the meantime, my favorite country is easily Johnny Cash, my father's favorite and arguably the greatest legend of the genre, and I like a few other iconic country songs that you've probably heard of even if you're not into country music. Here are a baker's dozen of them. A Boy Named Sue (I've decided to memo
When I first started college, I made an acquaintance. Eventually, that acquaintance became a friend. That friend became a member of my regular group of friends. She then became a close friend, that I would invite to eat pizza with and stay up late talking about life and stuff like that with. That close friend went on to become my best friend. When we were finished with college, my best friend and I both made sure to stay in contact with each other. I began to notice that this best fr
I thought that they were going to run out of naming schemes for each generation, because there are a limited number of basic colors to choose from. However, only recently did I realize that this would never happen, because they're not limiting themselves to colors and materials. They can name their stuff after just about anything. So I'm going to throw out a few hypothetical generation names out there. Good and Evil Introversion and Extroversion Order and Chaos Positive and Negative Blond and
Surely I can't be the only fan on these forums. I have a few that I really like, actually, so this is a hard one for me. I like "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant", "Longest Time", "River of Dreams", "Downeaster 'Alexa'", "Angry Young Man", and "Moving Out". However, I think I can narrow it down to either "Piano Man" or "My Life". Yeah, I know, those are the usual suspects, but they're just so good. My sister's favorite is "Goodnight Saigon". 24601
Ah, yes, that old blog entry. Raise your hand if you remember it? Do you recall how terribly that turned out? I still discover little enclaves on the internet that were convinced that I intentionally wrote a guide to being an abusive spouse. Surely I would never want to bring that up again if that's how people are going to react. Well, apparently I never learn, because I'm writing up that entry again. What could possibly go wrong? Oh yeah. But anyway, I've learned something in all my
I had a dream last night that everyone in the world had Asperger's Syndrome. I was sitting down at a table with several of the popular kids back in high school, and the difference was striking. Overall, though, it was almost impossible to imagine this world. I dunno. Hey, I'm not the only person with Asperger's Syndrome on this site. Has anyone else ever wondered about such a hypothetical world? 24601
Background Iniuri is one of my planned constructed languages for a series of mine called the IDES. Its name comes from Toa Hagah Iruini. Back in the day, when I was really unoriginal with my stories, I came up with a fictional battle where Norik and Iruini fought alongside my Neopet, Kraggh, as his noble generals. Kraggh was a conqueror who diplomatically added the world of Bionicle to his interdimensional empire. As you might have guessed, this is where I got my old username from. Later,
I would like to create some constructed languages, but I don't want to be a total novice who assumes that everything sounds Indo-European, or worse, basically like an English cypher language. So here are links to some articles on grammar on Wikipedia that I'm promising myself I'll get around to reading. Learning all of the different grammatical cases used across the different languages will take an especially long time. Boy, the stuff you never think about when you only speak one language. Learn
Wow. Look at that name. Wolf Kroeger. And yes, this is a real person. I noticed the name while the credits were rolling for that Prince of Persia movie, and was in awe of how hardcore it sounded. That might just be one of the coolest names ever. Well, I'm sure that Wolf Blitzer could give him a run for his money on that one, but still. It's close. It's people like this who make me think it's okay to name a girl Tyrannosaurus Rex. 24601
You know, most of us pick out fairly ordinary names for our future children. Perhaps we like to spice it up a little bit and avoid something generic or trending in the Top 100, but generally we don't want to turn too many heads, because we want to give our offspring an easy time in elementary school. But sometimes there's an odd name that we're endeared to that, something out there. It's that name that breaks all of our rules, where we think "I know I have standards, but that name is just cool
Last time I said that on this site, some people were appalled and thought that I needed to justify my dislike of him. Well, I'm not going to bother justifying it. I just don't like his music, and that's that. 24601
Before watching this movie, I heard it described as a "modern feminist fairytale." That's good. David O. Russell has a talent for creating modern stories about real life and making fiction feel remarkably real and resonant. However, as I found out while at the end of this movie, Joy is actually nonfiction, and based off of the story of Joy Mangano, inventor of the Miracle Mop. I wish I had known that beforehand, because I watched this movie when I was in the mood for a modern feminist fairyt
The original design has the basic elements that could make for a good flag: a tricolor, and a bald eagle. I mean seriously guys, a bald eagle. Is there anything on Earth that's cooler than that? Okay, I guess that there's a legitimate case to be made for wallabies. Speaking of which, I checked, and it's legal to own one of those as a pet in Iowa, which is awesome, so maybe the flag needs a wallaby on it. But really, the bald eagle isn't so bad. You don't just look at it and think "America;
