Haunted Forest
This past week I got a call (or text, I don't remember) from my buddy Brian about helping out in a Haunted Forest up on Belding, MI, with a group from GVSU--the Capoeira Mandinga group. I agreed seeing that I was flat broke from my 21st birthday celebration the weekend before in Chicago and so Saturday I went out to Belding and the epic began.
We arrived and it was cold. It looked like it was going to rain and man was I not dressed to be out in the cold and/or rain for five hours. Luckily, they provided a nice warm tent for us to hang out in until 7pm and some free brats as well.
Around 7 Brian, Duncan (a mutual friend of ours) and I were assigned costumes. Brian was a werewolf, I was a zombie, and Duncan got the most bad ass part: the crazy Doctor. We donned our costumes and took a tour of the 'forest' while there was still daylight and eventually were assigned our spots to creep people out.
8:30pm came and we took our places and waited for groups of people to come through. Being a zombie, I was in a ruined and dug up graveyard, in an open coffin--totally Dracula style. Let me just say that two hours in a casket and moving around for 30 minutes all night had me freezing my hands and feet off. I almost ditched the whole thing I was so damn cold, but I did managed to scare a few people by leaping out of the near-darkness of the coffin.
At 11:15pm they ended the whole ordeal and thanked us all graciously. I pulled my plastic mask/wig off and I swear a liter of condensation fell off the mask and onto my hand. It was ridiculous. The best part of the night was when the event leader, Cindy, begged our friend Duncan to come back to play the Doctor in the 'forest' because he was so good. Mind you, Duncan is a theatre major at Aquinas and basically knows how to act like an insane person. I wish I had seen him in action.
All in all, it was a great night despite being utterly angry at the cold of the coffin/graveyard I was in. I had fun.
(the links to the costumes above are the actual costumes we wore.)
A weekend away
A few friends and I decided back in March that we wanted to head up to my cousin Ben's cabin and do that we did. The so named "Rapinstock 2008" lasted from last Wednesday up until yesterday up in Tawas City, Michigan. We were in the middle of the woods with only the TV to connect us to the mass amounts of bull that we deal with daily. Everyone said it at least once that getting away was a great idea, myself included.
I can't believe how easy it was to go from tweeting 40+ times a day and reading thousands of news and blog posts a day to just sleeping, eating, walking and everything basic you could think of. Sure we watched some TV and played video games (well, Dallas did at least), but what it really came down to was that at the end of the day we had an enormous amount of fun.
Besides, we had fire and other things ("RINK MOTHER FUCKER!") and boy it was just a blast. A summer tradition that will have to continue on so long as Ben allows me to go up to his cabin. :)
The Alkaline Trio, Wizard World Chicago, and Wall-E
This weekend was pretty much 100% bad ass: I attended an Alkaline Trio concert, had the privilege of going to Wizard World Chicago and meeting Brian Michael Bendis (the whole reason for going to the ordeal) along with doing some other awesome stuff throughout the whole convention, and I saw Wall-E with Dallas.
Sweet right? Well, let me elaborate:
Friday:
I worked my normal schedule until 5pm and met a friend of mine to head to Yesterdog. One hot dog was all I needed from that landmark place in Grand Rapids to be ready to go see The Alkaline Trio. Come 7pm, we were let in the doors of the show and stood around for about a half an hour just goofing around until The Fashion made their way to the stage. They were a psudo-pop-punk band with a strange techno feel that was neither good nor bad, but still a listen. They played a 35-minute set and took off leading straight into the band Bayside. They too had an iffy sound, something along the lines of pop-punk, but a tad slower. My friend Tori was very into them, yet they didn't really hit for me (like a lot of pop-punk bands usually do, if only for a moment). They finished their 45-minute set and after a very boring 35 minute wait, The Alkaline Trio made their way to the stage. Let me tell you, it was fucking incredible. Song after song of perfection and amazing Alkaline Trio-goodness ensued for a little over an hour. They played songs from their last two albums, Crimson, Good Mourning (more notably: "This Could Be Love", "Mercy Me", "Time To Waste" and "This Could Be Love"), a few new songs from their album and finished their encore with "Radio" from their album Maybe I'll Catch Fire. For any Alkaline Trio, such as myself, it was seriously amazing (especially "This Could Be Love." Boy do I love that song).
Despite being tired, I ended up staying up until 2:30am talking about comics with my buddy Jeff Lanning once I got back from the concert.
An AppleScript to turn the brightness of your laptop display on/off
Yesterday at work, Eric was asking me if I knew of a way to immediately make the screen of his MacBook go straight to off (0 brightness). The only way I could think of doing such a thing was just holding down the button to dim the brightness or perhaps via AppleScript. He, of course, didn't want to just hold down the brightness key, and asked me to write an AppleScript to be triggered via QuickSilver to turn the brightness off and then back on.
And of course, there was a way to do it via AppleScript.
So, after much searching and reading on various sites (I forget them all or I would definitely credit them) here is what I got:
Now, what the code here does is simply this:
First, it checks to see if "TextEdit" is open, sets a boolean accordingly, then checks to see if the logfile "brightness--.txt" exists in your Documents folder and sets another boolean accordingly. Next, it opens System Preferences and opens the Displays pane. Using very dirty code, it grabs the current brightness level and stores it into 'brightness'. It checks to see if 'brightness' is over 0 then it sets your display brightness to 0 and follows that by storing 'brightness' into the logfile "brightness--.txt". But if your brightness is at 0, then it opens up "brightness--.txt" and reads the value it previously had stored and sets your display to that value.
This all of course assumes that you've used this script when your display was on or had a brightness greater than 0. But other than that works pretty well.
In case you didn't want to create the script/application, I've bundled a .scpt and .app of this script into a zip file which can be downloaded by following this link:
brightnesskiller.app & brightnesskiller.scpt
Feel free to modify it and such so long as you give me some kind of credit in the code (I leave a claiming comment at the top). I hope someone finds some use out of it.
--Edit: 06/04/2008 3:45PM--
Found an error with my original code. Made a small update. Check the source ^^ :)
StatusTweet private beta is go
I don't know what did it, but I decided to push StatusTweet into private beta. I managed to write some cool beta code generation code along with a very simple way for people to invite their friends.
In case you didn't know, StatusTweet 'touches corners between Facebook and Twitter' via pushing your friends' Facebook statuses to a twitter account that you create and follow with your normal twitter account. I think that's the best way to describe it.
Now, in the future I plan on rolling out some random statistics (I hope) and maybe an archive of your friends' statuses. It really could be fun.
So, if you're on Facebook and on Twitter, I say try out StatusTweet at least. I heard from the few private alpha users (namely Eric Stoike and Nick Nelson) that as random and useless as this site sounds, it kind of grows on you.
Link -> StatusTweet.com
