Checking in
I’ve been gone for a while, here. Sorry about that, but I’ve been going through a rough time and haven’t been feeling quite outgoing enough to post stuff here. But I’ve got a lot of backed-up reviews and links, now, so I’ll at least slap them up here before they spill over.
Fantastic Four: Decently cast, well-executed, and pretty dull, at least until the last half hour. If you know some science, be sure to bind and gag that knowledge and lock it in the car trunk before entering the theater 🙂 OTOH, isn’t it great to be a comic-book fan in an year where the worst superhero movie of the summer is still fairly decent, and the best is Batman Begins?
War of the Worlds: Not necessarily better than the George Pal version, but certainly prettier. I sure would like to see Spielberg’s people do a Godzilla or Battletech flick – at least I would believe all the visuals. This is the first version of the story I know of that gives humanity a glimmer of a workable tactic against the aliens before the traditional denouement takes care of things. It would have been nice if they’d somehow worked a USS Thunderchild into the river crossing scene.
Half-Blood Prince: Far superior to Order of the Phoenix, both IMHO and in an unscientific poll of people I’ve asked. Hard to talk about it much without causing spoilers or boredom, but Tonks and Lovegood (not a 70’s cop show) are still two of my favorite characters.
Shortpacked! on why there will be a few changes to the G1 characters in the Transformers live-action flick.
Shortpacked! again on Batman reaching the pinnacle of human reflexes and agility.
Brad Hicks on “The Spaceship We Have”, parts one, two, and three. He talks about why we have the Space Shuttle instead of the equipment every space geek in the early sixties thought we were going to have by now; and why that’s going to be a real problem real soon.
The stars are right again
This is my Sci-Fi Horoscope, from a link seen on tzel‘s journal. I’m only posting this because it’s completely accurate:
Kirbii (Oct. 14—Nov. 20)
You will be unable to shake the feeling that society at large would be improved by even more chunky, quasi-cubist levitating machinery of mystic origin, as well as the increased use of triple exclamation points by the general populace.
Whizzo Replicator Distribution
This one’s been on my mind for a few days. I blame the alignment of the planets.
Situation: you have a shiny-new Starfleet food replicator, the kind that takes molecular building blocks from storage and makes any kind of food you want based on patterns you’ve loaded or scanned in.
Poll cut to protect the squeamish
Birthday, icon, and filk
Happy birthday to yubbie – hope he and collenk have special plans this weekend!
I’ve been threatening to write this one for ages. A new filk for Keith…
Parallel computing universes
Damn.
Turns out all the web rumors were true. All Macintoshes will be Intel-based by the end of 2007. This is from Steve Jobs’ own lips at WWDC.
Just checked the calendar… it’s not April 1st.
My job’s just gotten more interesting.
Never mind, Cortana
I’m very disappointed in Bungie right now. I’m a fan of good first-person shooters, and I’ve recently been trying to finish the Macintosh port of Halo; well, this week I gave up and deleted it from my hard drive. There’s no point in spending rare personal time on a game that I’m not enjoying, and I really wasn’t enjoying this one anymore.
Perhaps it has something to with the fact that in the midst of the game development, Bungie was purchased by Microsoft, and the game changed in mid-stream from a Mac/PC title to an XBox disc, amidst the legal and logistical upheaval of moving. But I’m astonished at the poor quality I experienced, and amazed that this game has received the glowing reviews that it has. Perhaps it’s the multiplayer that’s so good – I didn’t have the opportunity to try.
Four things I hate about you, Halo
Ringworld and kabobs
A poster on websnark this weekend pointed out exactly what’s bothering me about the Tom Cruise War of the Worlds trailers; they make it look like a run-of-the-mill disaster flick. Instead of concerning invading aliens, most of the scenes in the trailer could be cribbed from any asteroid impact – tidal wave – volcano – invading commies / killer bees / killer tomatoes / plague-carrying R.O.U.S. – movie.
Finally finished Ringworld’s Children. It was substantially better than The Ringworld Throne, and had an interesting bit at the end that nevertheless seems somewhat implausible for a Larry Niven novel. Still, two months to finish a single genre hardcover is a depressing record for me, and the Public Library isn’t much happier about it. 🙁
Scientifically implausible, with spoilers
A low-tech solution
In last Saturday’s Doctor Who, a spaceship has crashed somewhere in London, and the Doctor doesn’t know exactly where. His cunning plan is to ask around, but his companion Rose is disappointed in him: “Not very ‘Spock’, is it: just asking? I think you should do a scan for alien tech. Give me some ‘Spock’! For once, would it kill ya?”
If only Enterprise was still on, and we could somehow have a crewman refer to an alien as “one of those mindless killer ‘Dalek’-types”. Then the circle would be complete 🙂
You don’t know the power of the geek side…
Eric Burns, of Websnark.com:
“I’d like to go into depth on the Jedi philosophy, on the core of Hubris that led to the Fall of the Jedi Order, on the nature of denial and of ossification, and on the ways that Qui Gon Jinn represented, thematically, a break from all that in his methodology which led step by step to the next three movies and the redemption of the Jedi in the Expanded Universe. I would. And I’d like to show how David Willis has highlighted this succinctly. I even accept that if I did so, I’d never, ever get laid again. Somehow, this thesis would cling to me like lack of hygiene and even geek grrls would pause upon seeing me, say “well, no. Not him,” and move on.”
Instead, he just points us to this “Shortpacked!” comic. Which is freaking hilarious.
Oh, and I’ve stumbled upon a site with more remixes of the Doctor Who theme than any sane soul would ever need.
