Thursday, May 23, 2002
The Return of Lake Lumina
Earlier in the day the dealership called to say my car was ready. I informed them that I needed to be picked up and they said they would call back when a driver was available. I was getting worried when five o'clock was rolling around and they hadn't called back yet. I asked Rob if he would take me if they didn't call by say, a quarter past five.
He agreed, only to have the dealership call almost immediately afterwards for directions to the Facility in the Middle of Nowhere. Half an hour later I was sitting in the curtesy van, listening to the driver talk about the lack of quality workmanship in today's world.
Lake Lumina was ready and although it was a bit more than I was expecting (since they did quite a bit of work to bring it back up to spec) the major problem didn't cost me anything since it was still covered by the warranty.
Disney's annexation of Atlantis
I was invited over to JeffK's house (he lives just around the corner from the Facility in the Middle of Nowhere) to watch a movie. Mark, Kelly and ChrisS were there and we all voted for the film we wanted to view; a nearly unanimous vote for the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
It's a decent film; perhaps not worth seeing in the theater but good enough for rental though. I was a bit surprised at just how violent the film was (for a Disney animation—enough to get a PG). The style of animation is a bit different than your standard Disney animated style—it's more influenced by Japanese animation (anime) than classical Disney style but not so anime as to be distracting; although I did find the mixing of compter and traditional animation to be a bit distracting in some instances (it was better realized in Beaty and the Beast).
We were all disappointed though, in the quality of the DVD—it took us fifteen minutes of fiddling around to get it to play correctly. We didn't know if it was poor quality from being handled so much (as a rental) or just poor quality in manufacturing.
