Trivia
I hadn’t realized until someone pointed out today that the actor playing Barty Crouch, Jr. in Goblet of Fire is the same person playing the Tenth Doctor in the 2006 Doctor Who series. But then, I can really be bad with faces sometimes.
Written while waiting for hot water
Busy life these days… I haven’t been taking time to slow down and write lately. I’m hoping to do more of that this weekend.
Went to Rising Star last weekend, and had lots of fun. I showed off the new Utilikilt on Saturday, and it went over quite well, though I have to think more carefully about the process of sitting down while I wear it. raininva and I scored over 20 PS2 games for around $100 or so at the auction – of course, lord knows when I’ll play any of them. With WoW on the computer, I have to poke myself to make time for my new copy of We (Heart) Katamari.
I missed meiran, ranchonmars, and madwriter… maybe I’ll see some of you at Marscon, and if not, there’s always T-Con.
We listened to the audiobook of “So You Want to Be A Wizard” on the way up and back. The narrator does good work with the voices, I’d recommend it. We bought it from iTunes, and while I understand this is not Apple’s idea, the process of getting the audiobook onto an MP3 CD for my car player was unpleasant. I hate the freaking music industry.
Three movies I want to see soon… Serenity, Mirrormask, and Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I haven’t been to see a movie in a while – no idea if I’ll make it to any of these.
I’ve been offered a ride to VTSFFC Halloween, and heard about another H’ween party in Richmond I’d like to go to, but either way, Rain can’t go because of her work schedule. This bites in great measure. OTOH, Trans-Siberian Orchestra is coming to Newport News in November, and that I might be able to see! There’s something about “Xmas Eve / Sarajevo” that makes me tingle when I hear it for the first time every season… it’s so angry and beautiful at the same time. Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend” is the same way.
Tried “Second Life” last night. Lousy framerate and poor responsiveness were my first impressions… and this is on a Mac that does WoW quite tolerably. We’ll see if I go back.
More on my mind, but I gotta go to work.
Deep breath before jumping in the deep end
Grumpy me pokes his head out of his LJ cave and says, “write some stuff, it’ll help you get over yourself”.
I have a job interview tomorrow, and tonight I work a trial shift at a typesetting job. If either one of these jobs works out to a steady paycheck, I can stop sweating and resume planning for the future. I’ve been filing unemployment claims with the state for a month now, and haven’t seen check one, so things are pretty tight.
I’ve missed every summer con I wanted to go to this year because of money issues. Bleh. This is, of course, part of the general fan experience – not news to almost anyone reading this journal – but it’s still disappointing. I keep reading about cartoonists and gaming people who will be at DragonCon and grumping.
Moving my Doctor Who episodes over to DVD so I don’t have to drag around the laptop for showings; it’s a lengthy process, involving converting the episodes to DV streams, and then letting iDVD convert them back down to MPEG-2 files. Unfortunately I don’t have software that will skip the middle step. I hope the quality stays okay, there’s clear artifacting in the AVI files already. A friend pointed out that the first season never managed to get to an alien planet – only England, Utah, and a couple Earth-orbit space stations. I hope the second season’s more ambitious.
We watched Constantine a couple nights ago. It’s an okay flick if you don’t think too hard about the religious aspects involved… which, for obvious reasons, is next to impossible to manage. It’s not even that I disliked the movie, it’s just that I kept thinking, “But, but, but…” afterwards. It was also a shame that the movie was unable to rise above killing off the three obvious redshirts.
One thing is now clear to me in WoW; soloing sucks, partying generally rocks. This has of course been obvious to most of the players of the game for ages, but I am sometimes slow. Clearly I must bite the bullet (WoW does have firearms) and find more folk to group with on a regular basis.
Booklist: finished Eragon (N), Wizard’s Holiday (N), Debt of Honor – Tom Clancy (R), Just a Geek – Wil Wheaton (N), Catch Me If You Can – Frank Abagnale (R), First Lensman + Gray Lensman + Second Stage Lensman – E.E. “Doc” Smith (R), A Morbid Taste For Bones + The Hermit of Eyton Forest – Ellis Peters (R). I wish I could find my copy of Doc’s Galactic Patrol – methinks that I’ll need to start haunting used bookstores again, which is how I got the Lensman books in the first place. I have been putting off reading Chobits 6 because it’s been long enough that I’ll want to re-read the comic from the beginning, and I’ll probably also want to be able to afford 7 & 8 soon thereafter. BTW, I’d recommend anything on this list. Eragon especially was interesting to me by being remarkably unoriginal, yet well-written enough that I look forward to the next volume.
Oh, good lord, avoid The Reality Dysfunction. Nothing at all happens for 300 pages; dozens of characters are introduced and then left by the wayside; and then we start the lovingly, orgasmically detailed torture scenes of animals and small children. Really. I darn near threw the book across the room, and I certainly won’t be finishing it. My guess is that the author has serious issues to work out, but I don’t see any need to let him do so through me at $7 a book for a six-book series.
I’ll let everyone know how the job thing pans out!
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.
6079 Smith W, reporting
Wired Magazine reports that researchers are developing a system that could tie your DVDs to your fingerprint, requiring that you authorize each playback with a fingerprint scanner built into your player.
And once they do that, the MPAA has sold me their very last g**d*** DVD.
Reviews and a design challenge
Quick review of the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie:
You should probably go see it if you like any of the other versions, or you like SF comedy. Sure, they took a lot of stuff out. (Cutting 3 hours of radio play down to 90 minutes will do that.) Sure, they changed a lot of stuff. (This was a practice Douglas Adams himself was quite fond of.) But if you go with an open mind and don’t insist on a copy of one of the other Hitchhiker’s media, you ought to have a good time.
Quick review of last Friday’s Enterprise:
Plot? Who cares? Space battle scenes with a certain class of starship… *happy sigh* (There’s some other eye candy too, for het-male or compatible formats.)
In all seriousness… I wonder how a 21st-century costume designer would design a believable futuristic military uniform that would provide eye candy for het-females and compatible? Bill Theiss tried showing some leg in the men’s “skant” uniforms for TNG, and the design died a quick, ignoble death. It’s an interesting question.
Mental clutch not engaging
Uggggh…
Brain is not working this morning. I am slow and stupid. Caffeine not helping. I just pray I get through the morning without embarassing myself too much.
I don’t know what the problem is, I ate well yesterday and got 6 hours of sleep last night (okay, interrupted once or twice by the cat, but I thought I was used to that by now).
Failed to dodge a spoiler yesterday for “Revenge of the Sith”, and it’s disappointing. From all I hear, the movie’s going to be quite good, but I’m disappointed that they chose to include this one little detail.
Last week’s Enterprise, however, was all style, no substance, and yet it rocked. You don’t need things to make sense when you’re having this much fun. The last 6 minutes especially… oooh, nerdgasm. The 8-year-old fan in me was royally entertained. Can’t wait to see tonight’s; at least the show’s going out fighting.
Standing Mode
raininva and I watched Robot Jox this weekend – I hadn’t seen it since the early nineties. I liked the mech designs better than I did when I first saw it, and Gary Graham’s an old genre friend now (once considered for Captain Sisko, according to the IMDB). But the script is still ungood. My favorite bit is still the one where the bad guy uses a prohibited ranged weapon during a match, causing the death of hundreds of spectators, and the referees just shrug and say “do-over!”
Contrast this to Gunhed, which has a cooler mech and more interesting characters, but is confusingly edited and is willing to let the audience make up their own explanations for a bunch of plot points. There was enough left unanswered in that flick that I was easily able to steal the whole plot for a Shadowrun game without giving too much away to the players. Still, I prefer it.
I’m trying to make a mental list of live-action “giant robot” movies that are worth spending 90 minutes or so on. Iron Man #28 looks good, but I don’t know if it will ever be dubbed or subbed. And though I love it for camp, I’m not sure I can bring myself to include the first Power Rangers Movie.
Speaking of such, I’ve procured the Cutey Honey live-action flick, which will go into the “to be watched” queue after the latest Orion Slave Girl episode of “Enterprise” and this week’s “Doctor Who”. The movie’s looking very cheesy, which of course is just what I’d be looking for.
The other serious Whovian at my office wants me to bring in the Whoman DVD that I still owe rubinpdf money for. I will do so. He has been warned 🙂
Booklist: I re-read Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, and am trying to finish his Beyond This Horizon, but the latter’s just not grabbing me. OTOH, the local library had a hardcover of Larry Niven’s Ringworld’s Children, which I’m enjoying much much more than The Ringworld Throne. It’s feeling more like SF than the “fallen-civilization fantasy” that Niven admittedly loves, but I think is a bit mined out. I’ve got another nonfiction library book on the OSS to read after that.
Wow. This got long.
