July 14, 2013

Sunday, Lazy Sunday. I spent a lot of time in Gimp today making an outline for each of the standard frame sizes so when I make a cross stitch pattern I can see how big the actual cross stitch will be and which frame it will fit best in. I use sixteen count cloth, which means sixteen stitches per inch, and that makes it easier to figure out with a ruler that has 1/16^th markings on it. It is easier for me to visualize that than fourteen or eighteen count. It was surprisingly harder to make the outlines than I originally thought because I kept getting off by one or two. Especially when I tried to make it go faster and cut an paste lines at a time. I'm probably still wrong on some of them but I'm close enough. Hopefully.

I watched a couple more movies today. The first was It's Kind Of A Funny Story with Zach Galifianakis. It is about a boy who is thinking about committing suicide so he checks himself into the psych ward at a hospital. Zach Galifianikis and Emma Roberts are two of the other patients. It was a pretty good movie and there was a lot of comedy despite the subject matter. I got a strong feeling that Zach's character was supposed to commit suicide at the end but he didn't (as far as I'm aware) so maybe they wanted to make it an uplifting story and not end on a downer. And despite not liking sad things, I think it would have been a better movie had Zach's character committed suicide.

Near the end Zach gets into a group home so he has a place to live when he checks out in a couple days and there is a scene with him talking on the phone with his daughter about how nice the group home will be when she comes to visit. Then there is a going away pizza party and Zach shows up on the outskirts and smiles for a bit and then gets serious and leaves. It appears as if he is happy and then turns sad. The next morning when the kid is checking out he asks about Zach's character and the orderly says he left earlier in the morning. You could take this to mean he committed suicide but they wouldn't have hidden that from the kid, or the rest of the floor, so we have to take it to mean that he checked out and went to the group home without saying goodbye to anyone. Believable but I would like to see an alternate ending.

The other movie I watched was Paul, because I was in the mood for a sci-fi comedy without any suicidal tendencies. It is a pretty great movie. It is crazy that we went from floating rocks on strings and dressing lizards up like dinosaurs, to having a complete CGI alien as a starring character in a movie and it was completely believable. Other than the fact that he was an alien, obviously, but it looked great and hopefully it will stand up to time. Although some day in the future it will probably look like crap. Even if only because it is a non-holographic, 2D movie.

Tonight I played more Cube World and I feel like it was updated since yesterday, although there is no record of it. I mentioned how I liked leveling up in the ocean by killing all the big fish but they rarely dropped loot. Well, tonight I was getting all sorts of loot. Including several new pieces of food to tame animals with. I need to go on a pet hunt soon. I am liking my current one but I want a zoo. I think it would be cool in future builds of the game if you could have a fenced in yard to keep all your pets in that you weren't currently using. Or at least a bunch of shelf space where you could put them as small character models or pictures or something. Time will tell, the game is still in the early stages. Also, along with the loot drops, I ran into several seahorses and lemon fish in boss form, which I have never seen before. And, they are tiny and fairly easy to kill and I think they were the first bosses I have actually killed in the game. All the bigger ones either kill me or I can't knock their health down fast enough so it resets before I can kill them, which is incredibly frustrating.

A little while ago I finished watching the Avett Brothers on Austin City Limits and now I am listening to their music on Spotify. I really need to buy their CDs so I can listen to them in my car. I think it would make good driving music. I have been a fan of theirs for years now but I haven't really bought many CDs in that time. I would buy several a week when I was in high school in college, ending up with a collection of hundreds, but now I throw most of my spending money at cheap games on the computer. And even that is fading because I rarely get around to playing them. I probably haven't even played a quarter of the games I have.

Speaking of games, I beat Candy Crush tonight. And by 'beat' I mean that I beat the last level before they charge you $0.99 for more levels. I don't think I have ever spent money on in-game micro-transactions and I am certainly not going to start with Candy Crush, where there is very little skill and a hell of a lot of luck involved. I know myself well enough to know I lose interest in things quickly and micro-transactions in free-to-play games aren't really worth it because I won't play the game enough for it to be worth it.

Anyway, I don't really have any plans for my day tomorrow other than going to worth a six o'clock. I kind of want to go down to Hobby Lobby and buy more string for my sister's cross stitch because I know I will need more by the time I'm finished. I also want to check on yarn for my blanket. I think they had the yellow yarn last time but I didn't have any pieces with me to double check and I didn't want to buy a whole bunch of yarn that ended up being the wrong color. I have enough random yarn, I don't need to add any more to it.