Dive on in!

I love the Sundance Channel. If there's nothing on and it's 2 a.m. or anytime in the morning before 6 a.m. it's guaranteed to be airing at least something watchable. Tonight I watched the Korean horror Cello for the first time (wasn't that good), then the French horror Ils (i.e. Them, which WAS very good), and the comedic short film West Bank Story (which I love).

I've seen a lot of asian horror. There's a completely different perspective that you don't find in American horror, but lately the horror films haven't been very good. I think the only Korean horror films I liked were A Tale of Two Sisters and Tell me Something. The second isn't really much of a horror, but more a thriller. Oh, and Memories of Murder, which is another good Korean thriller, imo.

As for Ils, well, in one movie a very limited cast does what Hollywood's too incompetent to do EVER. I just can't stand Hollywood horror films. They all have this basic standard formula that makes everything they tend to put out all the same. Even their remakes, which always fail to be any better than the original! Hollywood should just die, imo. I can't stand it. It hardly ever puts out anything remotely good. I honestly don't understand how people can like seeing the same crap repackaged over and over again. That goes from Rom Coms, Action films, and horror that Hollywood puts out. Even the actors sort of blend together in one uselessly shoddy group of uninspiring and vaguely good-looking men. None of them take my breath away or stand out.

You know, I was watching 30 Days of Night the other night and I couldn't figure out who the hell it was that I was watching. Was it Brad Pitt? Was it Matt Damon? What about that other guy, oh whatshisname? I can't even honestly remember his name. No. It was none of the above. Hah. That's how these actors tend to be with me, unless it's clear who's starring from the beginning, I never know because they ALL LOOK THE SAME! Ugh. It was actually Josh Hartnett who I didn't think of at all.

Ils didn't have sex and didn't have much gore in it, but it still kept me riveted. It pulled me in more than ANY Hollywood horror has EVER done. That's because the characters seemed very real and you never saw what or who was after them really well until the end and by then the horror of discovering WHO was doing all this and why really grips you. It's brilliant even with a few minor plot holes and some predictability. It claims to be based on a true story, but there's no proof of that. So likely it isn't. Still, it really does make it just that much better to think of it that way. It was really good. It just shows how terrible Hollywood horror films are. If you watched Ils next to something like Friday the 13th, Saw, or some other "scary" movie, you'd have to be insane not to appreciate Ils far more than those other movies.

I'm just disgusted with the American film industry by large. I cannot remember the last time I ever watched an American movie I liked. It must've been a decade ago or so now. None of it even remotely appeals to me.

Anyways, I'll post a link to my Snarry drabble with a little note later on today.

I was working on the latest picture and Vista decides to freeze just when I'm at an important part. I don't even understand what caused it to freeze either. Painter was the ONLY program I had up. And I wasn't even doing a big brush stroke, but a tiny 1.1 airbrush stroke. WTF.

I hate whenever that happens. With XP you could use ctrl+alt+del, but with Vista that doesn't work. It's depressing. I lost a lot that I did in a short time. I was going to save just after I finished that last bit, but nooooo Vista has to f*cking freeze up. I don't know why microsoft had to go and try to copy Mac's OS instead of simply improving on XP. They've created a piece of crap that isn't very compatible with quite a few programs and Aero is absolutely useless.

I know I complain about Vista a lot, but things like this happen so often it really makes me angry. I can use my mac now, but I had wanted to use the textures on this machine. I *can't* move the textures because the other painter just won't accept them (probably because this Painter is the later version).

*sigh*

I HOPE this piece gets finished soon so I can move on.

Well, I got my PC back and I'm surprised by the contents of my extra internal drive. There was more there than I had originally thought. Unfortunately, the one thing I badly wanted to be there I cannot find. I'm not sure why since that IS the drive my artwork always goes on, but I can only guess that for some bizarre unearthly reason, I must've unknowingly saved the picture on the main drive, thinking I was saving it on the secondary drive. So the lovely unfinished drawble I'd been dying to get back to is completely gone and I have to make up for lost time.

I still don't understand how or why it didn't save where I thought it would. It isn't like I go into the files elsewhere on the computer with Painter. All the art files are on that one drive and so everything I saved should have saved to that drive.

I dunno. I'm feeling quite angry and upset about this. I hadn't expected the harddrive to die so soon. Heck, I didn't expect it to die this year. It's really depressing.

I also got a call in about the mac today. Some of the memory burned out and the video card needed replacing. It's a $300 video card, so repairing this particular computer is going to be pricey.

Yeah, my work computers both decided to break down at the same time. Joy.

I have so much to do and all this is just making me depressed. That just makes it harder for me to be enthusiastic about the work I'm doing. I think it'd be that way for anyone... you have a lot of bad work-related things happening at once and you simply can't be arsed to feel happy when you're trying to play catch up. I think it's worse when it's something you actually enjoy. The loss is really keenly felt and I kind of can't get over the fact that I lost that picture. It was so gorgeous. I actually carefully saved it every few minutes because I liked it so much. I didn't want to lose it. Which makes the fact that I did lose it completely infuriating. Then I think I don't want to deal with it. I want to do it, but I'm so upset I really don't want to bother. This has only gotten really like this since this evening when I actually started reinstalling and looking through my surviving stuff to discover it wasn't there. It's like the crash happened all over again. I was so certain it was on the secondary drive.

Needless to say, it's been an abnormally bad week for me. :(

I'm so, so pissed off. I just finished working on one part of my snarry games art and the power goes out before I can even save! ARGH!! I hate living here. The power goes off at unpredictable times practically every second or third day. It's enough to drive anyone who does art on their computer nuts! *cries*

And I *hate* rebooting this piece of crap. It's a NEW computer, but it's still a piece of crap because of Vista. Each time the power goes out it asks me to start it in safe mode and most of the time even when I choose safe mode it decides to "repair" itself so I lose a lot of recently saved stuff that way. It sucks soooo bad. I've had to install opencanvas 4 plus TWICE because of that.

I can't work on this anymore right now. I was about to go to sleep and I was really happy I'd finished up this one part right when that happened. Now I'm tired, really unhappy, and I've got to completely redo all the work I just did.