alternate definitions for "rubber-ducking"

i watched fight club for the first time last night. fucking inexcusable that i’d never seen it before. it just never appealed much…i’d seen one or two scenes from it that i didn’t like (out of context, of course), and also someone spoiled the ending for me (i won’t ruin the ending for anyone who might be reading this, but if you’ve seen the movie, you know the really really important thing towards the end? yeah, that)…anyway, i enjoyed it immensely.

yesterday i went shopping with my dad…costco, for food and new tires for my car, and then best buy, for a new tv (and, once we got there, a blu-ray player). in a mere four hours he spent significantly more money than i’ve earned all year. it was humbling, but fun. the new tv is unbelievable. and blu-ray is totally breathtaking…we were actually talking about blu-ray on the way there, and my dad was saying how he’s going to wait a while until they sort out the HD-DVD/blu-ray rivalry for certain…that resolve lasted about five seconds when we saw what blu-ray is capable of. it’s seriously like 3D, like the movie is taking place live right in front of you.

the player came with 10 free movies—five in-store, and five you send away for, so we got goodfellas, the shining, the departed, hairspray, corpse bride, and a series of pixar shorts (…we couldn’t narrow it down). the mail-order ones have a much smaller selection, and there is still some debate about which ones to choose, but this much is certain: american psycho and the prestige.

supposedly the player will upgrade any regular DVD you play in it to near blu-ray performance, but we haven’t tried it yet, and i’m slightly skeptical. this whole blu-ray thing has made an overall negative impact on my life, because now i’ll never again be able to fully appreciate a movie that isn’t playing in ultra-high-definition on a hugenormous LCD widescreen with 9-speaker-surround sound, etc…and i don’t see myself ever being able to afford any of that shit, so i’m screwed. i’ll probably have to bum movie-viewage off my parents for the rest of my life.