Herobrine Does Not Exist

Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but it looks like people are charging $250 to teach people how to play a video game

Yes, but with the coupon, it's only $150.  You're leaving out the important part, Jeremy. 

So, there's this website, which for strictly Blag purposes, we'll call "Group Couponing" which allows people to save money on certain goods and services by purchasing in bulk from the supplier.  Everybody bands together and buys one of the things, but the collective effort allows the price to drop for everyone.  It's a decent idea, and it seems to be working for them, as the website reported 2.6 Billion dollars in revenues last year.  For those keeping score at home, that's more than I made last year.  

So, who am I to question when they offer a deal for people to learn how to play a popular video game, which for strictly Blag purposes, we'll call "Mining and Crafting."  For those who are not familiar, this game is dumb.  It looks like it came out of the 80s with horrible blocky graphics, but with all the massive multiplayer online abilities of modern games.  Basically, you go onto a server and you do stuff.  There's no point to the game...you just do things.  You can build stuff, or hunt things, or grow vegetables, or start wars with neighboring players, or the most common thing to do, troll little kids and burn their houses down with buckets of lava.  

At this point, I should mention that I've never played this game, nor do I intend to.  

Ostensibly, a mod design course that you can take online allows you to learn to code in Java, a reasonably useful language common on the Internets, by playing a modifying things in this Mining/Crafting game.  Realistically, you're probably learning some of the very very basics of a coding language by using very niche commands based on a single video game.  I can't imagine how this can be transferably practical to the real world...but maybe I'm not the target market.  The target market is people who dumped the 20 bucks on the game in the first place and want to believe that it's going to do something to actually benefit them.  So, they're willing to drop another 250 bucks to take a class...which really will only allow them to play their Mine game more craftily. 

Just Ask Spock For A Ride

In 20 minutes of previews, I learned about 14 hours of movies I don’t need to watch.  Efficiency!  

This week, Jeremy was more concerned about seeing Anne Hathaway than checking to find out if the movie she was in was any good or not.  The result was a wasted 3 hours spent watching "Interstellar."  

There is every reasonable chance that after this weekend's incident, I may be able to add director Christopher Nolan to the list of Hollywood people that I'm done with.  He would join the likes of Ben Stiller, Will Farrel, Adam Sandler, and the Coen Brothers as one of the people who I never need to see any more work from again.  It's not because his stuff is bad.  For the most part, it's actually quite good (for my money, the Dark Knight Trilogy is one of the better trilogies I've ever seen, and easily the best Batman adaptation to hit the silver screen), but it's all settled into a bit of a rut, starting with The Dark Knight Rises.  

From this point on, there will be spoilers about the Batman movies, but not about Interstellar.  It's safe to keep on reading, unless you haven't seen the Batmans.  

So, about 2 hours into the really long "Batman Begins," we learn that Ra's Al Ghul is really alive, and is Liam Neeson.  Great.  It was a nice twist for anyone who had never seen any incarnation of Ra's.  About 2 hours into the ferociously long "The Dark Knight," we learn that Harvey Dent has turned into a new supervillian, Two Face, and Batman has to contend with that as well.  Fine...it was a nice twist, even though we kinda knew that Harvey Dent was Two Face all along, so we were maybe expecting this to happen in the next movie, but it happened here.  About 2 hours into the ludicrously long "The Dark Knight Rises," we learn that Miranda is actually Ra's Al Ghul's child, not Bane, and Batman has a new villain to deal with.  We get it...2 hours into Batman movies, there's a giant shocking plot twist.  By the third movie, you're expecting it, so you're just waiting around for 2 hours until the plot twists, so the real plot can actually start.  

Fast Forward to Fall 2014, and the butt-numbingly long "Interstellar" hits theatres, directed by Christopher Nolan.  Holy cow!  About 2 hours into the movie, there's a giant plot twist, a character isn't what you thought he/she was and the actual plot/endgame can actually begin.  Are you kidding me?  Nolan needs some new schtick, or he's going to find his way out of the 10 bucks I've spent on his last few movies.  Yeah...that'll show him!  

Aside from the formulaic Nolantwist, (Or maybe, I'll just start calling plot twists "Nolans"...I have yet to decide) the movie was pretty much all over the place, never deciding if it wanted to be sci-fi, or action adventure, or romance, or family drama, or psychological thriller, or psychological drama, or if it wanted to be funny.  It kept wandering aimlessly around itself, never actually exploring any depth to any of the two-dimensional characters, or having them grow as people.  It wasn't until after the Nolantwist that it finally realized that it wanted to be weird, and then it was okay!  Only problem was that it took almost 3 hours to get there.  

On the plus side, even though the movie was 3 hours long, the theatre didn't see the need to spare us from a full 20 minutes of previews, so there's that.  I stopped counting, but there must have been 6 or 7 movies advertised here...and they were all crap.  So, at least now I know that I won't have to spend the time or money watching those piles of flotsam.  I just should have been paying more attention during previews of Interstellar.  Could have saved myself that time, too.


This has been another edition of Jeremy Is In The Theatre.

There's Also No ".00" Key

The ATM only dispenses bills, yet I have to enter my withdrawal to the cent.  Why?  

There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this.  It's because...uhm...reasons.  

So, everybody knows that ATMs have replaced actual human interaction for a variety of banking transactions.  We no longer have to actually look at somebody or, heaven forbid, talk to them in order to deposit money into the bank or withdraw cash for day to day purchases.  It's a remarkably freeing experience being able to conduct that kind of business without the judging eyes of a bank teller on me the whole time.  "Ooo...you want to cash a check for a whole 41 dollars.  Ladies and gentlemen, we have a BIG SPENDER here!"  I just don't need that.  

In order to make the ATM process as hands-free as possible for the bank, since they don't want to pay tellers just as much as I don't want to deal with them, the machines are outfitted with only two types of bills.  They have 20 dollar bills and 5 dollar bills.  So, if you have less than 5 dollars in the bank, you're out of luck.  You can deposit whatever amount you want, but you can only take out money in increments of 5 dollars.  

So why is it, then, that when the machine asks me how much money I'd like to take out, that I have to input the two trailing zeroes in the cents columns?  The machine could not dispense the change if I wanted it to, so why is this even an option, leave alone a requirement?  It seems like nothing more than 2 extra keystrokes that benefit absolutely nobody.  The bank knows I'm not withdrawing cents, I can't get cents from the machine, it's a total waste of time, and an opportunity to make mistakes.  The 0 is right below the 8 on most ATMs, and the more times I have to press the 0 key (and let's be honest...a high-roller like me...I'm pressing the zero an awful lot of times), the more chances I have to mess up and bump the 8 by accident.  Then the machine has to go through the role rigmarole of telling me that I can't have 8 cents...or 80 cents...or 8 dollars...you get the idea...before asking me to enter the amount again.  Guess what...it's still going to be in dollars.