{"id":1203,"date":"2011-01-03T14:37:42","date_gmt":"2011-01-03T20:37:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/?p=1203"},"modified":"2011-01-03T14:37:42","modified_gmt":"2011-01-03T20:37:42","slug":"stuff-that-happened-last-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2011\/01\/stuff-that-happened-last-week\/","title":{"rendered":"Stuff That Happened Last Week"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Saturday, 01 January 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Guess what? I started out by writing &#8220;Saturday, 01 January 2010,&#8221; and only realized my mistake several minutes later. Geez. I need to wake up.<\/p>\n<p>Whenever I attend a funeral, it always gets me thinking about my own mortality. I wonder what people will do to mourn (or celebrate?) my passing. I wonder who will be in attendance. This line of reasoning usually leads me to conclude that I have nothing in writing; nothing set out that clearly says what my wishes are. And, it&#8217;s times like this, that I start to think I should write some of this down.<\/p>\n<p>But then I wonder&#8230;have lawyers fucked with this, too? I mean, I know the answer is yes, but I wonder: if I write up something that says what I would like done with my body when it expires, and what sort of post-death party I would like the survivors to hold, and how I would like my estate apportioned, and what I would like read at my funeral, would it be respected? Or would some lawyer say, &#8220;Oh, well this wasn&#8217;t signed by 12 public notaries and placed on file with Dewey, Cheetum and Howe, so it&#8217;s not valid. Anyway, we&#8217;ll be taking all his money&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p>Either way, I&#8217;m gonna spell some things out in written form. It&#8217;s tough to plan though, because I might live for 7 more decades, or I might live for 7 more days. I know that sounds morbid, but it&#8217;s reality, and if I didn&#8217;t want to live in reality, I would be a Jehovah&#8217;s Witness.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sunday, 02 January 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>So, I was hanging out with my friend Ryan the other day, and he was telling me about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xtranormal.com\/\">XtraNormal<\/a>. I have seen some of the videos created (or perhaps &#8220;assembled&#8221; would be a more appropriate verb) using this site. They&#8217;re entertaining. But they&#8217;re not quite right. Probably because using stock footage and selecting from a limited number of options could never make something turn out &#8216;right.&#8217; Anyway, Ryan showed me a video he was creating regarding Jehovah&#8217;s Witnesses (sorry for bringing them up in two consecutive days), and, once again: funny, but not quite &#8216;right&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t mean to rip on Ryan, because I can see that XtraNormal is a fun tool to use, but the voices sound funny, the gestures don&#8217;t line up perfectly, and sometimes, it&#8217;s way too obvious that this was built from the top down. For example, in the video he showed me, the main character was &#8216;Witnessing,&#8217; so he should have had some literature with him, especially when he was reading directly from the magazine he was trying to offer.<\/p>\n<p>Either way, I&#8217;m happy that after a two month absence from the WWW, Ryan has finally contributed to our virtual reality once again. Check out his new videos. Here they are &#8211; a beautiful mashing of Ryan&#8217;s wit with XtraNormal&#8217;s weirdness:<\/p>\n<p><object classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" width=\"640\" height=\"385\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" \/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" \/><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/EcDFxnkkCkY?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US\" \/><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\" \/><embed type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" width=\"640\" height=\"385\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/EcDFxnkkCkY?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\"><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n<p><object classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" width=\"640\" height=\"385\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" \/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" \/><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/VhqZXLvgPkk?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US\" \/><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\" \/><embed type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" width=\"640\" height=\"385\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/VhqZXLvgPkk?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\"><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Saturday, 01 January 2011 Guess what? I started out by writing &#8220;Saturday, 01 January 2010,&#8221; and only realized my mistake several minutes later. Geez. I need to wake up. Whenever I attend a funeral, it always gets me thinking about my own mortality. I wonder what people will do to mourn (or celebrate?) my passing. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1204,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions\/1204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}