Cool Cherry Cream

Along with the usual slew of CDs and DVDs, this Christmas also brought a collection of rather mysterious objects into my house that my younger self would have termed "books". Such things have not been seen in this neck of the woods in recent times, but four days ago marked the arrival of them back into my life.

I started reading "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski on the 25th and have been reading it fairly consistently constantly ever since. That's about all I did today, but now, I am done. Maybe.

This book was first added to my "to do" list several years ago, when I encountered the story of Dionaea House, which apparently was inspired by this book.

"House of Leaves" tells the story of a house that looks fairly normal, but where the inside is larger than the outside by 1/4". Eventually, a hallway appears in the house out of nowhere; closer inspection reveals the hallway is pitch black, freezing cold, and it goes on farther than one can see.

And yet, this book is not really about the house. It's about a guy who finds the notes of a old man who has recently died and who was writing a book about a movie about the house. But the movie — and presumably the house, characters, and events in it — doesn't actually exist.

I don't know if saying that spoils the book at all. But I've said it. That fact makes for an interesting crazy read. Multiple narrators, footnotes, interesting typographical choices… and the whole blurred reality dealy. I often found myself thinking that the movie within the book was actually intended to be real within the book's universe, and yet, I don't know if I was wrong or right to think that.

And okay. So some people may think I'm a bad person for this or what have you — but I despised Johnny Truant. I started skipping over his passages about a quarter-of-the-way through the book. He just came off as a pompous ass. Occasionally he'd have interesting, though non-essential, stories, but I really didn't care about him going off about, well, whatever crazy stuff he talked about. His mom? Bah. I skipped her bit at the end too. I may reread the story one day, but right now, I just don't at all care for him.

And the crazy typography, one word per page, that nonsense. Sometimes, yeah, it was a nice touch, and it certainly makes the book stand out. But I would have much rather just read "The Navidson Record" as written by Zampano with none of the Johnny nonsense, with "The Holloway Tape" attempted to be properly transcribed (since it's quite obvious what it was supposed to say in some parts).

Which, I mean, some people would call me crazy for all this, but all I'm saying is that the story can stand on its own without all the bells and whistles.

Why is it that I can never ever find a simple program to convert wav to mp3 and mp3 to wav that isn't a trial, that doesn't only give me 30 seconds of the file, that doesn't put a "get the registered version!" clip over it, and that actually, ever time, without fail, works?

It's just a simple little conversion. I don't want something to does all kinds of shit, I just want a simple program with an "add" button and a "convert" button.

Same with videos. There's no one good program I've found to make my avi files into mpgs and vice-versa.

Honestly, I know nothing at all about file conversion, encoding and decoding, but it shouldn't be that difficult. Seriously.

And besides, who the fuck are Adobe to tell me I can't use mp3 files in my videos because they're too compressed? Sure, it's a nice sentiment, but changing them into wavs just takes up more space, it doesn't improve quality!

I'm not going to keep an mp3 and a wav file of the same song on my computer twice. No sir fucking way.

I understand now why I was done with videography. I still am done with it, but my mom asked me to get the baby videos onto a DVD and, as I knew, that's turning out to be a nightmare. Well, actually, I'm working on cleaning up my other video files — I don't even want to touch the baby videos after I've moved them all and I have multiple files called the same thing in different places and ones missing since I think they're on another hard drive.

GOD. DAMNIT!

I'm feeling pretty crummy right now and even though I know why I'm feeling crummy I still feel like feeling crummy even though I know my reasons for feeling crummy are pretty crummy themselves.

But you know how when one little bad thing happens to you, all these other bad things seem to happen as well? I don't mean really bad things, but little things, like there being no more popsicles left, just seem that much worse.