It’s an exciting werewolf and spaceship kind of day. The trailer for James Cameron’s first not-aqua-related movie in about a zillion years, Avatar, hit the Internets today. It looks rad:

Also, here’s the Wolf Man trailer:

In other nerd news, this Visalia, California home is for sale:

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Big whup, right? Wrong. This is what one of the bedrooms looks like:

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Yes, that’s a Y-Wing bed. It can be yours for $364,000. That’s if I don’t buy it first.

H/T Slashfilm.

Jonah Spangenthal-Lee: Proving you wrong since 1983.

29 replies on “Today in Nerd”

  1. Trust me, you don’ t want a house in Visalia, especially at that price.

    A list of local superlatives at the national level:

    In the top 10 for:
    – Most foreclosures
    – Highest unemployment
    – Highest auto insurance rates
    – Worst air quality
    – Lowest per capita income
    – Lowest educational level

    Couple that with crappy weather – same heat as Vegas with none of the fun amenities – and that next door neighbor Porterville was the only city in California whose City Council voted a pro-Pro 8 Resolution, continues to try to slip in more anti-SSM efforts, and that the entire county voted 75%+ for Prop 8, and you get an inkling of the quality of life you can expect.

    OTOH, if you are looking to pick up a dairy farm or citrus grove on the cheap, both of which the county are also national leaders at, this could be a good time….

  2. I thought the Avatar trailer looked bad. Boring mech army guys, boring alien tribes people. This could be going in a bad direction. However, obviously a teaser trailer is no evidence at all, so I hope it turns out I’m wrong.

  5. Avatar looked great in the beginning, but gee, you’d think that they could make CGI characters by now that didn’t look like glowing cartoons. I hope the story makes up for it.

  11. @9 –

    True, and it is also true that Visalia is home to the only general bookstore in the entire county, a crappy Borders, more like a bookstore you might find in an airport terminal, not even a good one.

    Beyond that, you’d have to go ~40 miles to Fresno or 100 miles to Bakersfield to find another bookstore, and no promises it will be any better.

    Want to see what passes for a bookstore around here? Check this out- a recent letter to the editor in the local paper sums it up: http://www.recorderonline.com/articles/r…

  13. My brother used to make furniture like that for people in Santa Barbara and Goleta – it’s not that hard. And way cheaper to make it yourself.

  14. Avatar looks fucking awful. Like, embarrassing debacle level of awful.

    I’ve liked most of Cameron’s stuff so far, but this just made me feel bad for him.

  16. @11, four hours of bookstore a week, huh? Yikes. I’ll bet you’ve looked over those sad old cookbooks and computer manuals a hundred times by now, right?

  17. @11, sounds like my town, but without the Friends book sale. Thanks for the link; I found the article that prompted it too. At least citizens are actively involved in improving the local library.

  18. @16 – That is 4 hours a MONTH, not a week.

    No, I can’t get bothered to even remember to wake up on Saturday morning for what I am sure is dreck. I was at the library and there was a cart that was beyond dreck – none of it worth even a penny were you to try to sell online.

    I am sure there are not even any old computer manuals. There would have to be computers in town for that. It is said <50% of people here have internet access, much of that is dialup.

    OTOH I did find a community college level “computer science” textbook at the Visalia from just prior to the release of the original IBM PC, which also corresponds to the period just after my computer science degree in the early 80s. This is good for review of where we have come from, and for reminding about the value of predictions of what is to come. Well worth the dollar I paid for it.

    Speaking of dollar books, about 8 months or so ago, the 99 cent stores that are in every population center everywhere got a shipment of books from Free Press, which can put out some interesting enough stuff. Sorry they (FP) had product dumped into that channel, can’t be a good sign, but I did get some (semi) literate stuff. But there has not been enough turnover anywhere and now the same books sit on the shelf next to tons of old editions of something called “The Holy Bible” that people here are fond of ramming down our throa…telling us about.

    This spring my gf saw a local craigslist posting for “a garage ful of used books, enough to start a bookstore!” right here in Porterville. We hightailed it over there, and there was a farm-yard garage full of books – damp and moldy, some of which might have been of some interest if merely looking at them wasn’t endangering our health. Turns out they were left over from our last used bookstore that closed some years ago, and this guy inherited them when he moved into the house. By next spring they probably will have composted themselves.

    Honestly, I’d offer 64K for that house, not 364K. When I was in the Bay Area they said you pay for the weather, the views, the nature, the neighbors. You probably here (most of) that in Seattle too. A look around here for someone from an urban sophisticated environment will bear that out as Truth with a capital T.

  20. @17 Any new library is lkely to be a decade away. It is a charade. IN the meantime I asked the librarian why no wireless connectivity now, I heard BS about thick walls as though that could not be solved with repeaters from Office Max for what, 60 dollars each?

    After some more stammering it was said that the electrical system there is so overtaxed that sometimes if people plug in one more thing circuit breakers start tripping.

    But the real unstated reason is the City is in deathly fear of someone accessing porn as caused a huge ruckus in next door Lindsay last year when deaf and developmentally delayed man did just that and librarians took the law and their professional ethics into their own hands.

    Because I forgot to mention, Porterville is also the only place in all of California that has a State Facility for treating DD folks who are caught in limbo in the legal system regarding competency to stand trial. The place is the town’s largest employer, rivaled only by a Walmart warehouse.

  21. OH I forgot to mention where I got that textbook in Visalia – it was at the Salvation Army store, conveniently located in the same strip mall at the 99 cent store. That is where I am reduced to trolling for books and Jonah would be too if he is seduced by the bed. At least for him it would be a cross town jaunt – for me it is a 70 mile round trip.

  26. The Avatar trailer looks like it could be the trailer for the World of Warcraft movie. The cartoony night elves with bows and arrows riding flying hippogryphs or whatever, with some elements of starcraft thrown in. I’ve never seen the Avatar series, so maybe it will be good better.

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