I went skydiving yesterday for the first time. It was totally freakin’ sweet. I can’t really describe the feeling of falling through the air at 120 mph, but it’s certainly not a falling sensation. It feels kind of like sticking your hand out the window of your car when you’re driving down the interstate, except over your entire body…and going twice as fast. It was kinda weird too because I wasn’t nervous when I was about to jump out of the plane, and I figured I would be — at least a little bit. I said in the video I hoped to have the crap scared out of me, but that didn’t happen. I never really get scared by much of anything; I like that scared feeling so I was hoping to get that, but alas, I did not. It was just totally awesome!

Clear here to see my video. I’ll post the pictures when I get them developed.

We saw Charlie and the Chocolate factory this weekend as well. It was excellent. I have to say, Johnny Depp is probably one of the best actors around. He’s completely different in almost every role he plays. It’s amazing how he can be Edward Scissorhands, Ichabod Crane, Jack Sparrow, J.M. Barrie, and Willy Wonka and never even seem like the same dude. Crazy.

And lastly we saw The Island too. In my opinion it was a decent action movie and a decent thought-provoking movie. It was just fun to watch for it’s entertainment value. So not amazing, but it was pretty good. My only complaint was that it was a little too long. It’s a little over 2 hours and I don’t think it needed to be.

I just finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I won’t give anything away, since I’m sure there are lots of people who haven’t read it yet. It was definitely the fastest I’ve ever read 652 pages of anything though. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, however I still think my favorite is The Goblet of Fire. I know I was pretty actively anti-Harry Potter for the longest time, but last year I changed my mind 100% after I read the first book and promptly proceeded to read the next four. I highly recommend everyone read them…even the crazy Lord of the Rings fans who somehow think Harry Potter is sacrilege.

I was thinking today about the idea of “blackwhite” that Orwell introduced in 1984. For those who may not know what that is, it’s basically the ability to accept whatever “truth” is introduced. For example, that black is white. It’s more than just believing that black is white, it’s knowing that black is white. I was wonder what the mind’s capacity to do this is after knowing that black is black and white is white for so long.

So what would have to happen for someone to change your mind about black being white? Would repetition really do it or would something else have to be associated with the repetition to make you actually know.

Orwell said it was the ability to accept these kinds of “truths” when the Party demanded it too. That would seem to indicate that when someone told you, “Oh, two plus two is five.” You would immediately accept that as correct and know yourself that two plus two is five. Just that idea alone seems really complicated to me. There are so many “facts” (that you know to be true that go along with that statement) that you would have to have previously ignored or forgotten about in order to be able to know that two plus two equals five is true. It seems to me that this idea, in practice, makes people more narrow-minded. A streamlining of political and moral views, if you will.

It just makes you think about how we’re told a lot of things over and over, or how the nomenclature for something (like war or national security) will change and no one really bothers to notice that it’s changed. I think we all need to pay more attention.

Have you ever been driving and realized all of a sudden that your subconscious was driving the car for like the last 7 minutes because you can’t remember what happened? That happens to me when I drive long distances sometimes. I’ll start consciously thinking of something that I need to do or am trying to figure out and my brain will focus mainly on that instead of driving. Then after like 7 minutes I snap out of it and realize that I have no idea what the car was doing for that period of time. It’s kinda scary to think that I’m subconsciously driving the car I guess. But it’s not like falling asleep or anything, I’m still navigating and paying attention to things that are going on, my brain’s just not focusing on it. Does this happen to anyone else or just me?

Windmill, windmill for the land

Wow, I haven’t posted in a while. I just moved, so I’m gonna blame it on that.

I saw War of the Worlds this weekend. It didn’t really live up to my expectations, and I was rather disappointed with how it came out. I’m apparently not as bothered by Tom Cruise’s existence as it seems most everyone else is, but I don’t think that was the issue. The tripods were pretty freakin’ cool, but I think the problem was lack of substance. Not that there was necessarily a lot of plot elements to work with, but I think people wanted more. The entire movie is exactly one plot point. Aliens attack Earth. That’s it. You never find out why, where they come from, what exactly they want, nor why they just decide to “die” either. Maybe they were allergic to water?

NASA crashed their deal into Tempel 1 on July 4th and there are some pretty sweet pictures. Here’s a cool movie of the impactor approaching the comet.

I also went to Washington D.C. for the 4th to see the fireworks there since I’ve never been there for that, and it’s one of the top 10 places to be for Independence Day according to MSNBC. That makes me more patriotic than you, unless you were there too. Basically, that makes you a terrorist since you clearly don’t care about your country.

I got TiVo last week and let me tell you…it’s a hojillion times more awesome than the stupid crappy Time Warner DVR. It’s totally worth the small monthly fee, and I can definitely sacrifice being able to record two things at the same time. I didn’t do that very often anyway. So, as someone who had Time Warner’s DVR for a year and a half, I highly recommend getting TiVo instead. You can download stuff from the TiVo to burn it to DVD, schedule things to record via the internet, and the audio and video quality doesn’t suck ass. I think that alone makes it worth it.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince comes out in 10 more days and I can’t wait. It better be awesome or I’m gonna go to London and kick J.K. Rowling in the face. But I’m sure it’ll be fine. At least it better…. *shakes fist at J.K. Rowling*