Star Trekkin' and physical media

 I'm not only a music collector, I'm also an avid movie collector. I am not going to address streaming here. The 1980s and '90s may have been a golden age when it came to the selection of movies you could rent, but VHS was a shit format due to incorrect aspect ratios and poor quality altogether. If you were a movie purist, you were collecting movies on laser disc. Then DVD came along, and it was fine for the age of Standard Definition, but kind of underwhelming once you got a taste of HD. Now, with 1080p and 4K UHD blu-rays, we're in an era where movie presentation at home is kicking ass, but they're more challenging to acquire at a brick and mortar store. Suncoast is long gone, and Best Buy's movie selection is shrinking, and will probably be gone before too long. I can sometimes find blu-rays from boutique labels like Criterion, Shout/Scream Factory, Arrow Video, or Kino Lorber at stores like FYE and Barnes & Noble, but your best bet is ordering online. I usually try to order the boutique companies' product from their own websites, and try to avoid Amazon, but I still do Amazon every once in a while.

I have a ton of DVDs, and a ton of 1080p blu-rays, and quite a few on UHD, but only if they include the movie on both UHD and 1080p blu-ray, because I have neither a 4K TV nor a UHD player, but I like collecting UHDs so I can future proof. Even though DVD sucks by today's standards, I still feel bad for upgrading since a lot of the DVDs I have, especially "Pulp Fiction" and "Fight Club", have pretty elaborate packaging. My collecting policy is to try to buy movies on blu-ray that I don't own on DVD. I'll wait to upgrade my DVDs until they come out on UHD. It's a good idea to read or watch reviews before upgrading.

Here's my history of buying Star Trek movies, and for this entry I'm only referring to the movies that came out between 1979 and 2002. I bought a complete set of the deluxe editions in 2008. The Motion Picture was the Director's Edition. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was a really interesting one because it was the only Star Trek movie to be filmed in Super 35, so they opened up the matte to 1.78:1. I was pretty underwhelmed with the image quality of these DVDs, but they were all we had at the time. I believe I bought The Motion Picture on blu-ray in 2015, just because it was the theatrical version. I thought it looked fine, but more knowledgeable people complained about the DNR (Digital Noise Reduction) on it and all the other Star Trek blu-rays out at the time. In 2016, a special 25th anniversary edition of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan was released on blu-ray, based on a new 4K scan. I finally bought that in 2021.

I'm pretty sure Paramount has pissed off a lot of Star Trek fans in the past year or so, especially me. Not long after I bought that edition of Star Trek II, they announced that they were releasing the first four movies on UHD and blu-ray. A lot of us were like, "What about V and VI? What about the Next Generation movies?" Well, a lot of us bought the 4-movie collection. Not long after that, it was announced that they were working on redoing the VFX for the Director's Edition of The Motion Picture for 4K. A lot of us assumed they would be putting out a set including it with V and VI. This past Summer, they announced a number of releases for September, including a six movie set, and the six movies sold separately. When I heard about the separate movies, I thought, "Cool, I can just buy TMP:Director's Edition, V and VI, and be done with it." Unfortunately, while II through VI included both the UHDs and 1080p blu-rays, the UHDs and 1080p blu-rays for The Motion Picture:Director's Edition were being sold separately. I wanted all of them in 1080p and UHD, god damn it! The only way I could get the Director's Edition in both UHD and 1080p together was to get it in the 6-movie collection. So I preordered the 6-movie collection on Amazon through a link from The Digital Bits, because I love The Digital Bits, and want to support them. Somewhere around this time, maybe just a bit later, I also preordered the "Halloween: 1995-2002" Scream Factory UHD/blu-ray set. Unlike the first five Halloween movies, these had to be sold together because Miramax owns the later Halloween movies, and would only license them out to Scream Factory if they were sold in a set. The Star Trek set was set to release on September 6th, and the Halloween set was set to release on October 4th. I thought to myself, "They're coming out a month apart, there's no way they'll charge me for both at the same time, right?"

WRONG! But I'll get to that in a minute. I don't know what happened, but it seems like Amazon didn't get enough copies of the Star Trek set to actually send out in September, and they were telling me it was expected to arrive on November 1st! I went to Best Buy to see if they had the set, and that was a big no. All they had were a couple of copies of a couple of the individual movies. I checked Barnes & Noble, and they had one set! But it was about $30+ more than I would be paying for it on Amazon, and it sounded like a disc might have been loose. I have paid a premium elsewhere to spite Amazon, but I didn't quite have the money to justify doing it this time, so I decided to stick with my Amazon order. So anyway, October 4th comes, and as far as I knew, the Star Trek set was still expected to arrive by November 1st, and the Halloween set was expected to arrive in mid-to-late November. At some point, I checked my e-mail, and saw a message telling me to update my method of payment for one order. I had about $200 or less in the bank, enough for one set. It turns out they successfully charged me for the Halloween set, but payment for the Star Trek set was declined due to lack of funds. The Star Trek set was a higher priority for me, and the Halloween set hadn't shipped yet, so I canceled the Halloween set, and planned to use the money I got back to get the Star Trek set. These companies will take your money in a heartbeat, but are always slow to give it back to you. I finally got the money back...that Friday, after I had already went ahead and "updated" my payment method. I decided to wait to try and order the Halloween set later. The Star Trek set arrived just the next day!

While I was typing this up, I decided to see how much the individual sets for the UHD and 1080p TMP:Director's Edition, V, and VI would cost. It might have actually been cheaper to buy all of those than it would have to buy the 6-movie collection, thus not rendering my 4-movie collection obsolete. Fuck me running. Now, I have the 4-movie collection and the 35th Anniversary Edition of The Wrath Of Khan to sell.

Labor Day 2022, and the week that sucked balls.

 The two new girls that started at my work in August were gone just a couple of weeks later. My idiot boss waited a whole fucking month, this week to be exact, to replace them. The replacements seem to be doing pretty good for their first couple of days, though. But we may be losing the woman that's been working with me since February pretty soon. She's moving up to north Indiana to be closer with her girlfriend.

My company managed to make a mockery of Labor Day again this year. We didn't work all god damned day like last year, but I was there for a little over nine hours. I don't feel like we had enough work to justify keeping us for more than half the day, and my holiday might have been salvageable if they had let us go after eight hours, but that extra hour fucking ruined it. I was hoping to be able to make it through an entire movie before wanting to go to bed, but I was so fucking tired that I only made it through the first hour of the original Total Recall before going to bed. I had to finish it the following night.

This week has sucked balls. Sweaty, stinky balls. Work was horrible, made worse by the fact that we had to work last Saturday. I really should've taken a Floating Holiday on Saturday, but I didn't want to leave everyone else hanging. I'm not gonna go into specifics about why else work sucked. This was also the week of the Louder Than Life festival in Louisville. I thought maybe I could at least make it to the Thursday edition, when Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and Tenacious D were playing, until I saw what a single day GA ticket cost, which was $129, plus a $20 or $30 fee. Then I was like, "Never mind." I've only seen Nine Inch Nails once, way back in November 1994. I've seen Ministry twice, but I wanted to see them in Covington, KY back this past March, and didn't get to because I didn't have enough money, and I'm pissed that I had to miss their second Kentucky appearance this year. I've never seen Tenacious D live. There was at least one band playing that night that I would've avoided like the plague, I heard more than enough of them when I went to Louder Than Life in 2019. Hint: the singer is a woman who does a lot of corny ass screaming. But the cherry turd on top of this week was shopping at Walmart on Friday morning, being 99.9% sure that I put everything that was in my cart into my car's trunk, and then somehow not having one or two bags of stuff worth $50+ from there when I got home. I've looked everywhere for it. My car, my apartment, went back to the store twice, and I even stopped at Meijer on that last trip, since that was my last stop before heading home this morning, and looked around the area where I had parked. Nothing. And there's nothing Walmart can do to help. You know, those assholes in charge of Walmart make more money than either I or the typical Walmart employee can even fathom, you'd think they'd throw us a fucking bone every once in a while. This is also the second time in about three years that this has happened to me at Walmart. I wonder if this wouldn't happen so much if they either changed the color of their bags, or the color of their carts? After all, other places I shop at (Kroger, Meijer, Price Less) have bags that contrast starkly with their carts, while Walmart's bags are virtually the same color as their carts and their parking lots, creating something of a camouflage. Maybe I should start a petition on Change.org to get Walmart to change the color of their bags.

That last trip to Walmart was mostly to pick up a prescription. The guy at Walmart's exit told me to have a good day. I told him, "My day's pretty much fucked."

I'll leave you with Ministry's live version of "Breathe" from 1990.

Staycation 2022, and going back to work

 I was hoping to make it out to the Austin TX area to visit my brother before the Peak Season at work hit, but I still didn't feel like I had enough money for the trip, even after my sizable backpay check. But that's okay, because my brother decided to come up to Kentucky on the second-to-last weekend of July, his first trip up here since 2019. I was originally planning on just trying to get that Saturday, Sunday, and Monday off, which Monday was absolutely necessary because I had to drive my brother to the airport. But then I decided to request that Tuesday off as well, since I had hoped to take a whole week off before the Peak season, and figured I might as well make it that week. In reality, it was more like a week and a half off. It was really nice getting to spend time with my brother, and really nice not having to deal with work for a week and a half.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were supposed to be rainy days, so I decided to work on some stuff in my apartment. I've got plenty of boxes lying around, and I refer to the decor of my apartment as, "I stopped unpacking when I went back to work." I really didn't do a lot toward cleaning up the place, but what little I did do was quite a bit of work. One of my biggest jobs was setting up my turntable and cassette deck, which I have hooked up to a DJ mixer that's hooked up to the Line In jack on my computer. When it was set up, I could tell that there was sound going to the mixer, but no sound was coming out of the speakers. After some searching, I discovered that I need to set up my Line In jack to be outputted through the speakers, instead of whatever the hell they were set to go out to. I played some records and tapes to test with. At one point, I put in my Judas Priest "Unleashed In The East" tape in, and the deck fucking ate it! Thankfully, it's a dual cassette deck, so I still have the other side to play tapes with. But after all that, I was like, "Fuck it, I'm done for the day." I have a story as to why I was wanting to listen to that particular tape, but I'll save that for last.

I went out on Friday night to an event where Goth and Industrial music was being played. I had so much fun! I ended that week in a good mood, but I knew going back to work would ruin that.

Sunday: It was raining pretty hard on my drive to work, and I absolutely hate driving in the rain, so the rain made going back to work even more horrible than if it had been dry out. And there were only two of us QAs there that Sunday. I ended up having to cover two distinct areas. Just working in either one of those areas will wear you out after a while, but going back and forth between them both will wear you out real quick! The entire Outbound department got to leave three and a half hours early. I think Inbound was staying until 6:30. I had plenty of work to do on the dock, so I could've stayed the whole day to work on it, but I was so exhausted by 3:00 that I just left then. I was in bed by 7:00 that night.

Monday: A girl who started the previous Tuesday and didn't show up on Sunday actually showed up on Monday. We also had a new girl show up at the beginning of the day, which shocked the hell out of us because our brand new people usually don't come in until 8:00 or so. We decided that I'd train the newest girl in one of the other areas until 8:00 when our boss came in, who would then tell us where to go. He decided to keep me training her, and he was going to have the Monday-Friday woman work on the dock until she left at 4:30, to which I would take over on the dock then. But sometime before lunch, he asked me if I felt like she'd be comfortable working on her own after lunch. God damn, there is a hell of a lot to learn in any given area, it took me at least a week to get comfortable with it when I started! I started off by showing her what we do and how to do it, and had barely gotten her to get some practice in by the time he asked me that. So I was pretty much like, "Hell no!" I trained her until 4:30, showing her one of the other main areas when things were slow in the area I was training her in. Taking over the dock at 4:30 was a fucking nightmare, and I got a massive headache. The headache was made worse when some dumbass new woman who thought we were scheduled to leave at 6:00 asked me what we do at 6:00. I told her that we work until 6:30, and we only leave at 6:00 if one of the higher ups tells us we can leave at 6:00. She said her husband and kids were waiting outside, and I'm like, "That's not my problem." She said she'd have to check her paperwork again because she swore that it only said she'd be there until 6:00. Needless to say, she didn't return the next day.

Tuesday: Tuesdays are almost always the worst day of the work week, like I'm being fucked with no lube, thus I call them Lubeless Tuesdays. I also got a massive headache on this day. One thing I absolutely hate is being sent to multiple areas in a day, and I ended up working in four different areas this Tuesday. Getting into the dock groove is especially hard, I do my best work there when I start and end my day there. My boss's original plan for me on Tuesday was to have me get the trainee squared away in the first half hour, then have me go to the area of another account to take pictures of some pallets that were getting ready to ship out, and the Monday-Friday woman would work on the dock. I actually started helping out in the area that I always go to first, then tried to get my trainee squared away before heading to the other account. I could barely get anything done there because my trainee had a lot of questions that I tried to answer via e-mail. At one point, I just gave up with the e-mail and went there to show her what to do. At our meeting after our first break, it was determined that the Monday-Friday guy who usually does audits in the other account would be going to another building that's supposedly even more understaffed than we are, and I'd be doing the audits in the other account after I was done taking pictures. About an hour later, we got an e-mail from our boss saying that I'd be going to the dock after lunch, and the Monday-Friday woman would be going to do audits in another section. Fuck me running! I was really hoping she'd be on the dock all day, especially since we had so many "hubs" shipping out that day. These hubs are the bane of my existence, since I'm supposed to take pictures of every single fucking one before they go on the trucks, and then take one picture when they're in the trucks. To add insult to injury, I think it was about 10:30-ish when the Monday-Friday woman e-mailed me asking if I could go to the dock and finish one of the hub trucks for her, because she still hadn't taken her 10:00 break. Things were so hectic there that I never made it back to the other account. And they started loading a hub truck right around my lunch time (12:00). I didn't even go to lunch until almost 1:30. Just as I was getting ready to go to lunch, I got an e-mail from my trainee saying that she knew I was busy, but if I could come help her out at some point. I wasn't just busy, I was overwhelmed! I apologized, and told her that I was just now going to lunch. I sent her an e-mail much later asking about the problem, but I didn't get a reply, and I never made it out to her. I usually pick up Taco Bell on my way home on Tuesdays (Taco Bell Tuesdays!), but I was so tired by the end of that day that I didn't bother, and went to bed by 8:00.

It occurred to me that I probably should've looked for another job while I was out, but I was too busy doing shit with the apartment. Besides, I need to go to the dentist before I look for another job. I realized that I'm paying about $30 per paycheck for dental insurance, so I better fucking use it!

Whew! So, back to the Judas Priest tape. I bought it in 1997 at a gas station that some friends worked at. I bought the remastered CD in 2005, only for the bonus tracks. The Judas Priest remasters are notoriously bad, the only one that's supposedly come out good was the 30th Anniversary Edition of "Turbo". Every time I listened to the "Unleashed In The East" CD, I thought to myself, "I do seem to remember the tape sounding better." So the reason why I was wanting to listen to it last week was to hear if it sounded anywhere near as good as I remembered, but it didn't get far before the player ate it.

Untitled (July 2nd, 2022)

 Life has been really annoying lately. My dad was in the hospital briefly in May. My mom was in the hospital briefly in June. And I ended an 11 year friendship with my ex after the Supreme Court overturned Roe V Wade. She no longer cared whether abortion was going to stay legal or not, and she didn't understand why I would care, since as she put it, I'm not going to get pregnant, nor am I going to get anyone pregnant anytime soon. I care because I'm not a total fucking sociopath! But I'm not sure what pissed her off more, my take on it, or the legitimate reason I gave her to be pissed off at me, which I'm not going to go into because it really was stupid of me. But fuck her, I'm done with her stupid ass, I almost wish I hadn't bothered trying to be more than just friends with her eleven years ago, even if it would mean that I'd be 45 years old and never actually had a girlfriend in my life. She was never very bright, and she was also extremely gullible, but she really went Full Dumbass when she started watching some jagoff Youtuber's videos almost two and a half years ago, some grifter who claims to be a liberal and used to pander to the Left, but now panders to the Right because they're so much easier to grift.

All my life, I've had to dumb myself down to try to be accepted among the general public, or to make myself more "dateable" to a large number of women. No more!

I do have a couple of bits of good news related to my most recent post back in April. One is that I've reached that point where all my medications are now free for the rest of the year. The other is that I found out that I'm not getting paid as much as I'm supposed to be, so I'll now be making $2 more an hour than I have been. It's still not enough, but it should take a little bit of the sting off. I found out a few weeks ago that my temp co-workers were getting paid more than me, so I bitched about it. HR found out that I was supposedly bypassed for a $2 bump in pay last August, so they're not only giving me a $2 raise, but it should be retroactive, giving me $2 for every hour I've worked since sometime last August. I thought for sure that I did get a $2 raise last August, because I went up from $15.50 to $17.50. It makes me wonder if my coworkers were getting paid more than I was this time last year, or if they just didn't want to piss off my current coworkers by cutting their pay from $19/hour to $17/hour?

(Update, July 4) I forgot to mention, I worked half of Memorial Day, but I get to have the fourth of July off! That's the first non-Christmas or New Year holiday I've had off in over a year.

Mo' Money, Mo' Problems, My Ass! April 2022 Edition

 I'm just giving an update for the sake of giving an update. I have a lot that I've been wanting to get off my chest, but don't feel like taking the time to type it all out. The gist of it is that I make just enough money at my work to cover rent, my car payment*, car insurance, phone and electric bills, Hulu with HBO and Disney+, and not much else. I've tried working overtime, but those checks have been underwhelming. We've been so slow these past two weeks that not only do we not have opportunity for OT, but we've been leaving early every day, so my next check is gonna suck. I'm either going to have to get a second job, or find a full time job that pays at least $23 an hour, which is over $5 more than what I'm currently making.

I still haven't recovered from my insurance making me pay almost $300 for a 90-day supply of Januvia a few weeks ago, when I only needed a 30-day supply! Hell, just today, my nurse practitioner took me off of Januvia and put me on Rybelsus, so I now have 60+ days worth of Januvia just sitting around. She did say that I could continue to take it while being on this medicine, but probably wouldn't see much benefit. I may continue to take it until it's gone just to get rid of it, can't let $300 go to waste! And it looks like I'll have to pay this month's phone and electric bills next month.

*Regarding the car payment, I can't help but think, "I wouldn't have this car payment if I hadn't totaled my car three years ago, or at least not had to deal with the amount of bullshit I had to deal with and gotten my check sooner rather than later." But what's done is done, and beating myself up over it is counterproductive.

Kitkat, Halloween, and the end of 2021

 I was originally planning on doing a longer entry about Kitkat, but oddly enough the more time passes, the less I want to write about her. I can't remember what month it was when she first came to us, but it wasn't long after we moved into my mom and dad's new house at the end of 2003/early 2004. I think it must have been February because I remember it being cold out, but it could also have been March. Anyway, this cute little orange furball came to our back door during Winter 2004. I was kinda hoping she would move on to the next house, because we weren't sure how our cat Sheba would feel about sharing the house with another cat. My mom eventually decided she wanted her in the house, so we got her in the house. She wasn't real receptive to anyone at first. I started to get her attention by tapping my fingers really fast on the edge of the couch cushions while I was sitting and watching tv, and I'd let her scratch the shit out of my hand. That's how I managed to domesticate her, and probably why she chose me as her daddy.

She stayed with mom and dad during the two times that I moved out, but I decided to take her with me when I moved out this last time because she was old and I knew she didn't have a lot of time left. She had a hyper thyroid, and just a couple of years ago she went from being a chonk to being skin and bones, and our cat Rascal was starting to see her as prey. I knew she'd get more love and peace being alone with me.

The last week of October, she stopped eating. That Thursday morning, I noticed fluids on the bathroom rug and her bed. I took her to the vet. The vet said that her kidneys weren't doing good, she had ulcers in her mouth that would make it hard to eat, and that her body temperature was low despite not being hypothermic. I asked about euthanization, and he said that would probably be the best thing for her. I got to go inside. I had been preparing for this moment for two years and didn't think I was going to cry, but once the finality hit me, I really broke down. Hell, I had Kitkat before I joined Louisville Mojo, meaning that I knew her longer than I've known the majority of my Louisville area friends! I got to spend a little bit of time with her before the injections, and continued to hold her while the vet gave her the injections, and while she passed away. I had her cremated, and got her ashes in an urn and a clay paw print less than a week later. It took me a good while to get used to not having her around.

That weekend was not only Halloween weekend, but that was also my shift's Saturday to work. I might have went ahead and worked had it not been Halloween weekend, but since it was Halloween, I called in both Saturday and Sunday, saying that I had a death in the family. This was absolutely true, because I loved that cat more than my own dad, or a lot of our extended family for that matter. I went to a show that Saturday night, my first indoor music show since seeing Slayer in November 2019. I knew virtually no one there, and while it sucked not having anyone to talk to in between sets, it was honestly the most fun I had had in years! As for Halloween day, I spent it the way I like to spend all my Halloweens, watching horror movies. I had to stop for a little bit to take a trip to my Amazon "locker" because my Scream Factory UHD/blu-ray copies of  the first three Halloween movies had finally arrived. My movie lineup went like this:

• Frankenstein Versus The Space Monster (via Svengoolie)
• In The Mouth Of Madness
• Street Trash (celebrating the twentieth anniversary of my seeing it at the original Alamo Drafthouse)
• Nightbreed: The Director's Cut
• Halloween (1978), the broadcast tv version via the new Halloween blu-ray.

Was this Halloween everything I had hoped for? Not really, but it beat having to work.