MatthewMeyer.net Blog

As you know, we have a Game & Movie Night every Friday here in the labs. Well, my DDR pads were royally screwed last semester from overuse, and we decided it was time to fix them, as they really were unusable. So we went to Home Depot and bought carpetting, tape, and platic floor matting. We ended up completely remaking those pads (and doing a pretty good job of it, I must say). They are now much much better than they were, but sadly still sub-par. It wouldn't be so bad to use both of my broken pads at once, but we can't use one of them with the metal pad or a new cloth pad. Oh well... I just don't want to spend any more money on DDR pads.

Man, Friday was the first time this entire semester that I've exerted myself physically. I've been kind of lazy on DDR nights this semester and not getting the full workout that I got most Friday nights last semester. So last Friday was really hard on me -- my back is still sore. See, not only had I not excercized since before Christmas break, but I had never really played this hard before, period. We ended up playing Magic Dance mode, which is like a battle mode where you can do attacks against the other player, and we ended up really battling hard. We did this one song that was just way too damn hard, and if I didn't nearly pass out I would have won just because I got my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th winds during that one song. I ended up in the hallway outside, panting as hard as I ever have in my life, and feeling like one more move would make me throw up.

So as I said, we watched horror movies afterwards, and I'm sure that the fact that we were completely worn out from DDR has put us in the most vulnerable state possible for watching movies, because we all got pretty damn scared. We watched Ringu 0 first, which is the prequel to the Japanese version of The Ring. This one is much scarier than Ringu, as the special effects are not cheesey like thy are in Ringu, and it still keeps the same sense of creepiness throughout the movie. Afterwards we watched Ju-on, which may have been a mistake, seeing as Ringu 0 had us pretty damn scared already. Ju-on was... well... Ju-on was a brainfuck. We were so scared we had to take a few breaks during the movie, and eventually at 5:30 we were so tired that we had to quit.

We finished Ju-on the next day before D&D (we only had 10 minutes left, it turns out), but not before playing a good old fashioned gag on one of the players who had watched the movie with us. Angel and I hid in the pitch black room and waited for Nick to come and turn on the lights. As soon as he came in, we started making the noises of the ghosts in the movie. This scared Nick so much that he went back outside and waited for someone else to come. An interesting side effect is that waiting in the pitch black room scared both me and Angel so much that we eventually had to leave too.

We played D&D, which went really well. The party, which last week had successfully infiltrated the royal palace in the City of Abiding Hunger, the capital city of the sea devils, successfully defeated the Royal High Priestess. With the aid of a sahuagin prince they were able to depose the old king and place said prince into power, as well as put a new Royal High Priestess in place (the same priestess who had earlier helped them escape from jail). So they managed to overthrow one evil and put a new evil in its place. But at least the sahuagin are back to worshipping Sekolah, the shark god, instead of Anguileusis, the eel god. Unfortunately, the Stone Which Abides, the mysterious artifact that they had been trying to steal back from the sahuagin, was not within the Throne of Teeth. It turns out the old sahuagin king had sent it into the Great Void, a huge chasm in the middle of the ocean. The party swam to the Great Void to see what could be done, when they met an Anguillian, basically a sahuagin that looks like an eel instead of a shark and lives at depths of 3,000 feet and lower, instead of 2,000 feet and higher. Much more dangerous. So it looks like next week the party will have to race into the Great Void to destroy the Stone Which Abides before the mysterious "Deep Mother" is able to give birth to the dead god Anguileusis. Fun.

After D&D, we watched Ju-on again (hehe). It was still fucking scary in the same parts. We also watched The House on Haunted Hill (I think that's what it's called anyway). That movie sucked. What is with Hollywood making such shitty horror movies? Some of the effects were actually very scary, but most were too stupid and predictably cheesey. Especially in the CG department. The acting was awful and the characters were all cookie-cutter Hollywood characters too. It just pissed me off so much that all these big-budget studios can't come out with a good horror movie because everyone in Hollywood has their head stuck so far up their asses that they have no idea what is successful or not.

On the plus side, it sort of reignited my desire to become a good filmmaker -- it would not be hard to top the shit that is produced by most studios.

Anyway, after watching both of those scary movies and with plans to watch even more scary foreign films this week, I just know that my host family in Japan will have a house that is an exact replica of the one in Ju-on. And I'll be put in the room next to the stairs with the attic entrace in it. And I'll wake up to see a corpse leaning over my head from my wall. And there will be dead hands on my neck in the shower. And the family will have a young son named Toshio who has horse eyes and meows like a cat. Aghgh!

Well... at least I know that if I contract the Ju-on curse in Japan, every one of you reading my site will catch it too. >:-D