Some friends of ours recently made a short film (they're officially in IMDb) that got into the Sarasota Film Festival, so Kelly and I had to check it out. It screened with eight other short family-friendly films on a Saturday morning, and there was good turnout for the two locally-made titles in the set. I enjoyed our friends' comedy and laughed along with everyone else, and I was impressed by several of the other movies too. Short films don't get much respect, but there's often so much more originality and experimentation in them. We ran into some other old friends in the audience and shared a long lunch afterwards catching up about old times and mutual friends. What a great start to the weekend. I need to get out to this annual film festival more often.


Logical Operator

The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »

Breaking Monopoly

My latest pastime has been seeing if I can rig a video game of Monopoly to give me infinite money. It turns out that I can, but it's incredibly tedious, far more so than I thought. I like to play with the NES version, because it's just colorful and fun enough without being too sophisticated in its AI. Go »

Scott's Pet Peeve #8431

Random strangers on Facebook are not exactly known for impressive displays of intellect, but with several of my friends in the hospital recently, I've been annoyed by one particular bad habit that their friends seem to have: 1) Someone posts that s/he is experiencing a certain medical problem and is going into the hospital. Friends reply with supportive words. 2) A few hours later, the OP posts an update describing what the doctors are doing. Go »

Pico de Greedo

On Friday, my company threw a part Mexican, part Star Wars party in celebration of Cinco de Mayo and Star Wars Day ("May the 4th be with you"). It was a weird combination but it worked, with games like a lightsaber piñata bash. Kelly made "lightsabers" (pretzel rods frosted with blue and red frosting), but she really got interested when I mentioned that the salsa contest offered three prizes and only had three teams on the signup sheet. Go »

Scott's Pet Peeve #2519

Why do some microwaves have a convenient quick-start option if you press 1 or 2 or 3, so that they instantly start cooking with 1:00 or 2:00 or 3:00 on the clock... but DON'T have this same functionality programmed into 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9, which do nothing when pressed alone? How does an engineer possess both the vision to provide the former and the lack of imagination that results in the latter? Go »

Meow Mix

Thanks Evgeni: Cat Music. Go »

Mars Needs Kitties

Thanks to Lori for sending me this: That gets me thinking: Do you think if people hadn't had the idea for crop circles until a decade later that the fad would have even happened? In this decade we have the tools on personal computers to fake images like this with photo-perfect results, and hoaxers could just distribute photos with the click of a mouse. Photos have been doctored for decades, of course, but now your grandma can do it, you know? Go »