Blog 2: The Dark Post

Yeah, bet you didn’t see that title coming … 

Alright, random small points before we hit the storyline of this movi- I mean blog. (I just watched some honest trailers and now I’m reading this in his voice)

Scotch: woah. People willingly drink this stuff? And lots of it? Man, it burned.

James Whittaker: so he’s this bloke who gave us a talk about success. It was really good. Seriously. I learned a lot. 

Main point: it was 3 hours long. Yeah. 3 hours. You could watch a 3rd of the Hobbit (book) in that time. Or just read the whole book. 

But it was that good that I paid attention for the whole damn time. 3 hours!!

I’ve sat through a lot of sermons by ministers, and frankly, a lot of ministers that I’ve heard are totally rubbish at public speaking (not all). Honestly. I can’t pay attention for the whole 30 minute sermon. This guy spoke for 3 hours. 

Why do ministers not take public speaking courses?

<Political rant time>

#illridewithyou

This was fantastic. Good on you, Australia. Seriously. It’s restored some of my faith in humanity. 

However … 

This is an action that Jesus would endorse, and, furthermore, he did this sort of thing himself - standing up for the marginalized (he stood up for tax collectors, prostitutes, women, poor, sick … pretty much everyone marginalized). 

And yes, Christians did get into this, which is good. But it wasn’t started or made huge by Christians - just by the general public (as I understand).

On another note, I saw an article about an event that was a secular community gathering filled with motivational anecdotes, singing, etc. 

Community. Fellowship. Standing up against oppression and discrimination. Secular people are doing this, and doing it successfully. And I’d wager that a lot of these people dislike/don’t believe in Jesus … why? Thanks to the work of Christians, making him out to be an exclusive, dogmatic, stickler for rules fun-police guy. 

Clearly we have done a good job.

(Disclaimer: not all christians have done this terrible a job. Many I know are actually doing the right thing, but unfortunately the public paid more attention to the other people)

</rant>

Apparently this guy is famous, but I don’t know who he is. Someone, enlighten me.

Some famous guy in the Microsoft store

Is this an outpost of Barad-Dür? No, it is publicly available rock-climbing. Which is better, and safer. 

Minas Morgul Play Equipment for young orcs

Ok, get ready for photo spam.

Skiing

Man, this was just amazing. I love skiing. 

Skiis and boots. We're GOING SKIING WOOOOO

So to clarify, I had never skied before. And I learnt quickly. And then went down this really steep hill with thick snow. I can’t turn well, so I went straight.

This is what I love about skiing. 

I’m going so fast I’m starting to worry, which is pretty darn fast, and things are getting crazy, so I bail. 

It was a spectacular crash, and had it happened on a bike I would have broken bones rather seriously, I bet. 

But nope.

Skiing, you just stack and it’s all fine cos you hit snow, which IS SO POWDERY AND FLUFFY OH WOW.

I was just over the moon THE WHOLE DAY COS IT’S SNOW OH MY GOODNESS SNOW SNOW SNOW OH WOW.

Here is some snow: 

Snowfields. Like cornfields, but with less corn. It is snowing in this picture, but it's hard to tell.

Our car was covered in snow. I thought it was just a light covering, maybe a couple of centimeters. 

No. 

4 inches. 

Woah. That’s seriously thick. (maybe it isn’t to North Americans, but I’m an Aussie, right?)

Somewhere under there, a car awaits ... 

The EMP

No electronic device worked in this building, it was really annoying. 

It’s the E* Music P* Museum.

It had a whole lot of music inside, and some fantasy, scifi and horror. Oh man, did I get geek tingles in those parts of the building. 

So …. 

They had a whole exhibit on Nirvana, cos that’s like the one famous band from Seattle. They had a whole lot of Cobain’s guitars.

EDIT: someone pointed out to me that Nirvana is not the only famous band in Seattle, and linked me to some lists of bands. I knew of more than 3, which considering my musical taste (not grunge, nor anything widely known) is surprising, so I concede: there are many big bands in/from Seattle. On a totally unrelated note, one of the Microsoft people who has to deal with (or in my case, 'put up with') us interns reads this blog. This could get interesting ...

And some of Hendrix’s guitars too. Or what was left of them. Some of these guitars were a little damaged, for some reason … 

They had a whole lot of guitars in general, actually. 

I understand that this is an unusually large number of guitars to own

They also had TARDIS’s. This is Harley and Will, each with a separate TARDIS. 

Let's do the Time warp again! ... that was the movie with TARDISs, right? Right?

It was Occulus Rift, with a GoT type showcase thing. It made you feel like you were falling, which was actually rather impressive in the end. Apart from pixelated graphics, I’m impressed with Occulus; I moved my feet and leaned my body to get a look at something before I realised that that wouldn’t work.

They had available jam rooms in the music section, with a drum kit, guitar, and bass. That was a lot of fun. That was obviously prep for our real band, of course. 

I wanted the band name to be "Bing it on!", but this was still good. I got to be the lead guitarist

They played the song and you mimed. We played to “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore, who is famous for some reason. They didn’t have any quality songs, of course. 

Moving on to fantasy … 

You have my sword ... 

And my ... other sword? And my axe!

"Do you have six fingers on your left hand?" "Do you always start conversations this way?"

And now horror … 

You've got red on you

They had some good ones here, like an almost life-sized Alien. But that photo was not the best.

And some sci-fi … 

Mr Anderson ...
(oh man, that cassock is just so damn cool. Movie sucks, cassock awesome)

They basically had props and info things hanging around, which was so cool cos man, the props. I don’t know if they were the originals or not, but it was cool either way. 

Then the Science Museum

You know what? I would like to be a scientist, so that when people ask me what I do for a living, I can say, “Me? I do science.” (for bonus awesome, become a scientist working with holes, so you can say “Science. Aperture science.")

We went through the Ripley’s believe it or not section. I still do not believe that it is not in fact butter. 

There were the usual things, like Robert Wadlow, a four-legged chicken, a two-faced cow, a snake that was seriously too damn big (think basilisk size, from HP2. Seriously. Apparently they found skeletons), and faces made from weird things.

A toast to Albert Einstein!
Seriously.
Someone made his face out of toast

This is a cast of a shark skeleton. Those are regular humans for comparison. I hope, I really hope, that this shark was Australian. And that somewhere, deep in the Pacific, there is one left … waiting …. 

That thing is just ... wow. It's the T-Rex of sharks.

I found out that T-rexs actually are ginormous and powerful. It isn't just the movies. And oh wow, they could run at 45mph? Granted, that's a guess, but seriously, if they could do that ... man ... 

Inception-style paradoxes are always a good hit at a museum. 

::whispers:: "Paradox"

Then food. Or drink. This, apparently, is how Aussies have “A Bundy in a stubby, mate”.

That really should be a german beer stein

We had pizza for dinner. 

Yes, that is pizza. It is about an inch deep. It is pizza, Chicago-style. My goodness. It was a serious effort to eat this thing. It looked like a pie. That’s one hell of a pizza.

It was about 3.14 times the size of the average pizza

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