The Marci Rating System

Not even sure what to make of this one. We typically have a team meeting every Wednesday, which is great, fine, good plan. Gets everyone on the same page. I’m for it.

And once a month or so that meeting includes a guest speaker who makes more money than us talking about whether or not the company is making money. (Spoiler alert: the answer is unfailingly ‘things look good, but not so good that we’re making any promises, so if you could work harder, that’d be great.’)

But *this* week, there are no meeting rooms available in our building for Wednesday. And our scheduled guest speaker is busy. Did we reschedule the meeting to a different day? Did we carefully evaluate whether it was worthwhile to review this information a mere three weeks before we are going to have a company-wide meeting to review it again?

Nope. Instead, our entire team is going to drive to a different building and meet with a different person to review the same information. I mean, okay, but why? In the classic words of ‘Meet The Robinsons,’ “I’m just not sure how well this plan was thought through.”

[“I have a big head, and little arms.”]

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

As a kid, I always liked the brontosaurus best. So I was dismayed when it was decided that brontosaurus wasn’t a real dinosaur. (I mean, I wasn’t moved to tears or anything, but it was a bummer.)

And since I did a cursory amount of research into dinosaurs for my June fic, I decided I’d recheck the status of the brontosaurus — and what luck! It’s back! (What’s next? Pluto’s a planet again?)

The Smithsonian article goes into more detail, but the Scientific American article wins best quote award:

This sauropod diversity emphasizes “that the Late Jurassic [period] of North America in which they lived may have been a weird time,” Wedel says.

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

…reading movie summaries on wikipedia. Because just in case we *do* end up seeing Jurassic World for team building, I want to make sure I don’t get too freaked out by it.

This info (not a spoiler) from wikipedia, made me stop for a minute:

Director Colin Trevorrow has stated that the Indominus rex, the synthetic hybrid dinosaur at the center of the film’s story, is symbolic of consumer and corporate excess.

What? I’m honestly not sure if that’s amazing, amazingly bizarre, or just completely horrible.

Probably this was one of those times they should have listened to the RAPTOR TRAINER (in my mind that phrase is always accompanied by a Power Rangers-esque sound effect):

“They’re dinosaurs. Wow enough.”

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

1. The screens in my apartment building slide up to open, just like the windows. (Thanks, first floor kid who I saw doing this!)

2. Putting down any single window other than the driver’s side front (while on the highway going 65mph) creates a weird wind tunnel pressure effect in my car that is extremely weird and uncomfortable.

3. I am now the only one of my coworkers who has never seen the movie ‘The Goonies.’

4. I dream about stairs a lot.

5. Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy) and Ty Simpkins (Iron Man 3) are both in Jurassic World.

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

Because sometimes you wake up and everything seems hard, but it turns out the internet has provided you with a story in which Bucky Barnes finds a tiny dinosaur and brings it home with him.

You Know How I Feel, aka, The Adventures of Bucky and Muffy the Dinosaur, by ifeelbetter

“She likes it,” said Bucky. He still always spoke in the same monotone, the one suited more for sentences like, “I’ll take the three on your six” or “Do you wanna make something of it, punk” than for sentences like, “Muffy prefers iceberg lettuce or fronds.”

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

1: Appearances of the following words: social, civility, tart, pteranodon, classy, stride, rental.

24: New songs “won” from my motivational song-winning game.

46: The number of times I used the word “thanks” or “thank.” Exactly equal to the number of times I used the word “tell” and one less than my usage of the word “phone.”

189: Difference in words from Scrivener to the NaNo site. Maybe the NaNo site is counting all my –’s as words. (Though honestly, I would have guessed there were more than 189 of them.)

1446: Paragraphs, at least according to Scrivener. No number available for how many of them are just a character saying, “What?”

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

words written:
1886

quote of the day:
“Do you want us to look prepared and weaponized, or harmless and in need of rescue?”

song pick
Sunglasses At Night (Corey Hart) [thanks, *Andrea!]

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

words written: 2305

quote of the day:
“I’ve always wanted to try shifting into a dinosaur.”

best thing about writing a new set of characters:
(slightly) less obvious when I reuse the same plots

worst thing about writing a new set of characters:
can’t use up words with them talking about how the plots seem strangely familiar

song pick: Mad World (Adam Lambert)

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.