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 The BBC has created a miniseries remake of "Day of the Triffids" (clips and images can be seen here). The original is regarded as a classic B-movie based on a novel by John Wyndham. It's been years since I saw the film, so going into the new version, all I recalled was that the Triffids were carnivorous plants, almost every human gets blinded, and the plants make some kind of weird knocking noise to let you know they're coming to eat you. It's not a spoiler to say this holds true for the show; these things are pretty much established before the opening credits, I think. So how was it?
1. Eddie Izzard makes a good villain, but I don't think he should be the head villain. Early on, it seemed like a dream come true for Eddie. He was getting to say lines that he would only utter in an ironic sense in his standup comedy. I also have to wonder if there weren't several inside jokes with the rest of the cast, seeing that the hero is named (naughty word warnin') "Masen,*" and Eddie's first sidekick is named "Hilda." He's at his best when it appears that he's only looking out for number one. When he starts taking on more, ah, "responsibilities," it doesn't allow him to be a think-on-your-feet scoundrel anymore.
* Yeah, yeah, he was Masen in the novel, too. It's just that it reminded me of James Mason, one of the only two impersonations Eddie can do.
2. The script tries to accomplish too much, too quickly. There are a lot of tropes in this show that we've seen in other post-apocalyptic stories, and they seem to whiz past before we can get invested in them too much to really care about their effect. I think they're mostly commentaries on various forms of community, sacrifices for safety/survival, and the corruption of power, but it's kind of strange to see so many in one production. The opening act of chaos and confusion is very powerful, which is kind of a pity, as the adrenaline doesn't seem to crank as high again.
3. I think we needed to know a little more about the Triffids. Mason is an expert on the things, having studied them his whole life, and there are others who should be well-versed on the creatures. I wouldn't have minded a little more behavior exposition about them to give some added tension. For example, if they hunt by sound (and they might, we're never told), characters' attempts to move silently could keep suspense high or give them goals (setting off car alarms to distract or confuse the plants, for example). Also, for carnivores, the Triffids didn't eat a lot of their victims (though I know that budgets and broadcast standards probably played into that).
4. Episode two, near the latter minutes... listen for the Wilhelm scream.
Overall, I'd place it higher on the geek-o-meter than the ITV series "Primeval."
But speaking of other global threats, it looks like the Russians are going to take out an asteroid that could fly too close for comfort. As a fan of "Stargate," the fact that the asteroid is named "Apophis" makes me worry that we should check that the core of the thing isn't made of Naquada first.
Russia also has a cool thing going that's been making the video rounds lately, namely a series of "versus" animations for a snack chip of some sort. Basically, they're stick-figure fights between celebrity or movie character archetypes. Some include (a slight warning that some subject matter might be a bit on the violent side, but it's stick-figure stuff, so... there you go):
- Luke Skywalker vs. Neo
- Superman vs. a wall
- King Leonidas vs. Chuck Norris
- Frankenstein's Monster vs. D'Artagnan
- David Blaine vs. David Copperfield (the ending on this one is exceptionally unexpected)
I have no idea what the chips are supposed to be like, but if they keep making these little featurettes, I hope they sell a lot of them. :)
Wired has posted it's 15 most influential games of the decade, and it's not a bad list. I'm not sure I'd put "The Sims" at the top, but I never got sucked into that one. I would have included "Mass Effect," "Fallout 3," or "Elder Scrolls: Oblivion" as a representative of where RPGs are going. Also, since they have "Portal" and "Half-Life 2," I would have just tossed the entire "Orange Box" in there to reflect "Team Fortress 2"'s casual team-shooter genre (which includes "Left 4 Dead," I think).
So, unless you have something else to do, like congratulate Sir Peter Jackson on his knighthood (and apparent weight loss since LOTR), may I suggest the following:
- I think this is only a prototype, but it needs to be real and for sale. Now.
- And along the same lines, I'll never think of Batman the same way again.
- Here's 101 new uses for everyday things. Though I don't think I'll be shaving with olive oil anytime soon, it's good to know I can.
- Wheel It is a Russian puzzle game. Try to attach the various-sized gears to the available hubs so every tooth-festooned wheel turns.
- While I haven't watched a lot of PBS Kids (I'm sure that'll change as Joshua notices the TV), but I can't believe I missed the "Car Talk" guys making an appearance on "Arthur." They look a tad disturbing, though...
- And now for something completely different: a Nebulon-B Medical Frigate made out of Lego.
- A gallery of actors 'Now and Then'. Gads, I feel ancient.
- Lastly, a penguin sledding game, Avalanche. Try to time leaps, acceleration and braking to catch fish and outrun a wall of deadly snowfall (which engulfs your friends at the finish line after each level, but they should have brought sleds, too).
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OK, it's natural to put on a little weight over the colder months, but this is absurd. I'm up like 30 pounds.
Now, I could start counting points again, but I'd like to try and manage the weight without doing that. Mostly because counting points is a pain in the ass, but also because I'm just interested to see if I can do it.
To wit:
- No pop. It's empty calories, it's refined sugar, and Coke sure as fuck doesn't deserve my money. I'm fine on coffee and water, with occasional fruit juice for variety.
- Limited fried foods. I'm eating too much crap, and a large part of that is Geppettos. As much as I love their food, I think I need to limit that to, say, twice a month. That goes for fried food in general, so I'll just need to be more careful when eating out, which is rare anyway.
- Cut out the snacks. This is killer, particularly when I'm home from work, and especially when I'm done for the night. I need to a) avoid fattening snacks and b) up my self-discipline so I'm just not snacking as much. But, oh, nachos, how they call to me. Once a week.
- Cut out the sweets. I'm actually not bad about this, in that I don't go out of my way to eat sweets (now, the year that Heather was pregnant with Cael we pretty much had a standing tab at Friendly's). Once a week for dessert sounds about right.
- Get to the damn gym. If I can do that, I need to do something at home. It's too cold to go for long walks, damn it all, but I can at least do pushups/situps around here. Then Teagan can have fun holding my feet down for me.
There, that's a plan. Clock starts Monday, and I'll keep that up for January and see if I'm making progress. If I'm not, or if I'm gaining still, I'll start officially counting points in February. |
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 Time to shill for a Christmas gift the wife found for me: "Yummy Earth" brand "Organic Hot Chili Pops." I'm one who is wont to toss some "Dave's Insanity Sauce" in the ol' chili pot (or, at least, in my own bowl so nobody else eating with us has to go to the emergency room), and these suckers come nowhere near that level of heat. I'd put them at highest around Taco Bell "fire" sauce, but the burn is variable from lolly to lolly. Anyway, you can find them here, though you kind of have to hunt for them (they're the third row of photos down, under "lollipop pouches" in the drop-down menu). At the moment, they're only available in 15-unit bags, and you get a mix of "Chili Lime Lambada" and "Chili Mango Mambo." One participant in our holiday gatherings enjoyed how the lime one tasted with his beer, and I liked having them in the car as a little pick-me-up for the duller parts of the drive (the ones without snowbound cars). Anyway, I really dug this stocking stuffer and hope I don't get sick of them anytime soon. They're also only 22 calories apiece, so I hopefully won't expand my waistline too much over the coming months...
With little going on in movies or TV, here are a few items: Kevin Bacon is going to be a superhero villain in an upcoming film, "Super." His character "The Crimson Bolt" is the alter-ego of a former drug dealer named "Jacques." His actions inspire a man to become "The Crimson Bolt." Why does this sound like something thought up by Ben Edlund, father of "The Tick?" The other item that piqued my interest was Peter Jackson's announcement that he's working on a post-apocalyptic film where cities fly and do battle against each other. I predict at least one slow-mo jump from one floating city to another, with about 50/50 odds that it will be a parkour-style jump or via a car.
Thanks to eagle-eyed commenters for the edit. But I would have liked to see Bacon in a super-costume, darnit. :)
Odd "D&D" news (or at least, "D&D-like") from what I believe to be a Chinese website promoting a new online game. From the Google translation, I see a lot of D&D-esque words like "Illithid" and mention of what I'm guessing is either a realm name or the fact that part of the game takes place in a British suburb called "Chelsea Heights" (it's on page 2). The second page's picture of a kid with a flintlock shooting what appears to be a sea troll over the head of what appears to be a pretty powerful cleric makes me wonder what other oddities were in store on page 3... and I was greeted with mention of "Canadian pets." I know odds are high that meaning is being mangled, here, but I kind of hope not. :)
And on an "around the office" note, I'm hopefully going to be test-driving a new office chair soon. Some might remember my raving about the AK-Octane, which appears to be out of production. My current AK's cushions are losing their "cush," and one of the arm rests has begun to disintegrate from the bottom up. Rather than buying another new chair, I'm trying something different. I've found a cheap (yet antique) set of legs and manual swivel chair mechanism on eBay, and I'm going to graft the seat and back from a wooden "school board" chair liberated from a now-defunct educational building. Tossing a few "skateboard" castors on it, I'm hoping to have a pretty sweet "new" old chair. The screw mechanism going into the leg assembly does wobble a bit, but some research tells me that its vintage (possibly from the late 1800's) is pretty much doomed to wobble, being old and made of cast iron. If it ever fails, I'd have to replace it with steel, but I could keep the legs. Sadly, no parts are made to fit the old hardware for the purposes of stabilizing the thing (the screw is larger than the current 1-inch or "acme" swivel chair standard), but I read that as long as I don't abuse it, it'll probably work for a few more decades before becoming unusable. I'll post some pics if it comes together as planned!
The rest isn't about chairs, but you might like it nevertheless:
- DJ Earworm has released his 2009 'United State of Pop' mashup, compiled from Billboard's top hits for the year.
- Though I'm sure it's been done before, here's a very good Star Wars/A-Team mashup.
- Puzzles and magnetic fields are the basis of Magnetic Moment. Arrange magnets and objects to propel and guide a ball to its bucket.
- This is either genius or madness: Tuper-Tario-Tros is a combination Tetris/Super Mario game. Press your spacebar to switch between making a plumber jump and fitting together falling blocks.
- An interesting gallery of Nautilus designs. Captain Nemo has quite the array to choose from.
- The singing could use some work, but there are a few clever couplets in the Battlestar Rhapsody (if you haven't seen the new "Battlestar Galactica," spoilers ahoy).
- This next one gets a "violence 'n' bloody stuff" warning. There's a new trailer out for the upcoming Aliens vs. Predator game (note no "vs. Space Marines," as if they weren't a threat... a pink, squishy, screaming threat). The movie series might be a disappointment, but this looks pretty good. And Lance Henrikson does the voiceover.
- And lastly, some eye candy gaming with Perpetual Blaze, a game where your ship is your weapon, making whoever you smash into explode into gatherable particle effects.
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This month's Storytellers Unplugged essay is up.
Happy New Year, folks. Enjoy. |
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After viewing multiple episodes in an insomnia-induced haze last night, it has become clear to me that the central message of Castle is very simple. Under no circumstances should you ever attempt to do the right thing or improve yourself, lest you be brutally murdered and dumped in a trash chute, a fountain, a tent, or some other, suitably unpleasant place to wind up dead.
That is all. |
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OK, hands up if this hurts your brain:
Not that they're remaking Karate Kid. Hollywood ran out of ideas long ago, I'm fine with that. I'm also fine with the notion that, as I get older, the movies I loved as a kid are going to get remade and maybe, just maybe, the remakes will be better (it happens).
What weirds me about this is that he goes to China and learns kung fu (movie-style, it looks like) from Jackie Chan and they're calling it The Karate Kid.
OK? Just me?
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 I was hoping to have a Sherlock Holmes review, but snow kept us at home this Christmas day, so it's postponed for the time being. For what it's worth, "Ain't it Cool News" seems to think it's decent enough, and, thankfully, both reviews do mention Holmes using his genius to solve a perplexing mystery. If that's included, then I'll most likely come away satisfied.
But I did get to see the Doctor Who Christmas Special, and without giving anything away, I can say a few things: I'm sorely going to miss Tennant, though he's bringing his Doctor to a close that feels complete rather than abruptly interrupted. But on a completely different note, I think this is the first episode of Doctor Who to mention a sitting U.S. President by name and use audio clips of his speeches as part of the episode's dialogue. And while I'm somewhat up on my UK politics and the views expressed about America via their topical comedy program(me)s, either someone has an overabundance of expectation regarding the U.S. President's effect on the worldwide economy, or the scriptwriter was being sarcastic (perhaps making a sideways dig at views held in Britain?). But either way, it was odd seeing (sort of) a "real" politician in an episode of 'Who, since normally the politicians are fictional archetypes made to either get killed by someone taking over or they are whoever is taking over, but in disguise.
Anyway, a good cliffhanger, and I can't wait to see how they follow up the tantalizing final few minutes on New Year's Day.
Normally, this would get a place in the linkdump, but I can't get it out of my head. This is UPular, (in case that kills your 'net connection, here's a YouTube link) an ambient mix-song created by snippets of the Pixar movie, "Up." For those not familiar with the work of the tunesmith, "Pogo," he started out with this ditty called "Alice," and his latest effort was either commissioned or endorsed by Pixar itself. Though just meant to be a soundscape (picking syllables that just hit notes rather than form a musical verse), I keep wanting to sing along somehow.
Now I have to go dig out my poor Honda, entombed in unassembled snowmen. While I frost my goatee, here's a video-heavy linkpile:
- Presented as a sort of religious tract is this amusing guide to the Creation of the World of Grayhawk, the D&D campaign setting. See how many of the old gaming supplements you own from which they pulled the artwork.
- A Christmas-themed (but still challenging) puzzler: Light Up the Christmas Tree. Rotate the wire/channel bits to get power to every light.
- If you're out in the ice and snow, be very careful, or you might wind up crunching your fenders on YouTube.
- Last post, UK comedian Bill Bailey generated a techno remix by making a comment on a news quiz. Apparently, something talked about in one of his concerts actualized in real life. I wonder if he's that kid Ron Howard portrayed in "The Twilight Zone," but instead of being overtly malicious, he went into comedy?
- I think I need one of these Star Trek webcams. That way, I can pretend there are little people in the ship that fear my wrath, like in the original series episode, Catspaw.
- In a similar vein, someone in Japan has constructed models of the USS Enterprise-A, Battleship Yamato, and Voyager as working remote-control submarines. I almost want an in-ground pool now...
- Two engineers try out Christmas Laser Beam cats. Pew-pew, indeed.
- This strikes me as a "Grow" game combined with an offbeat "defense" game: Tetraform gives you the power to click on an enemy followed by your planet (not recommended) or another enemy ship to make them attract each other until they collide and explode. Works well for missiles, too. |
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Question from a friend who is unlearned in the ways of the Red Sea Pedestrian: "My wife wants to know what Jewish people do on Christmas, whether you participate in any sort of festivities."
Me: "Generally, we go out for Chinese food."
A very merry Christmas, to all those who are partial to such things. |
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System: The new Dr Who system or maybe the Buffy/Angel flavor of Unisystem.
The Premise: It's an alternate timeline. Instead of the Doctor being the last survivor of the Time War, he pulled a Jor-El and managed to stuff a few young-ish Time Lords and Ladies into a TARDIS (Chameleon-circuit-locked into a Wardrobe) and get them out before everything went BOOM. So you've got a bunch of teenagers (not necessarily physically) who were just given the keys to the coolest car evar. None of NewWho's emo, just because the group has each other.
Not quite sure who The Witch is. (Maybe The Rani, but I haven't seen any of her episodes.) |
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I'm not Christian, and haven't been for many years. I am, however, a big fan of Xmas. I love the season, I love the holiday, I love giving and getting presents, I love the food, and so on.
When I was a kid, Xmas Eve generally consisted of my brother and I opening one present (the rest of the mountainous hoard got opened on Xmas proper), and reading a bunch of Xmas stories. Favorites included The Christmas Cookie Sprinkle Snitcher and The Secret Gift of Not Even, The Mouse. As my brother and I got older, we took our turns reading these and other books, and in recent years we've read them to our kids (I have, anyway; not sure how they roll down in Atlanta. They probably fry something).
This year, things are a little different. We're going to my mother's house tonight for some dinner, and having a dinner tomorrow for her and for Aaron and his mother and so on, which has "sitcom" written all over it. We're not doing Xmas with Heather's family until January, which is nice in that it allows taking advantage of post-Xmas sales to buy presents.
But then I was getting ready to go, and popped over to Something Positive to read today's strip. Go read, I'll wait.
My father was the most interesting person I knew. I'll never know as much about his life as I'd have liked, though I learned a lot in the time before he died as older memories replaced his ability to make new ones.
Anyway, this is my first Xmas without him. And I kind of wish that would just hit me full-on, so I could grieve and cope properly, rather than sneaking upon me and shoving me at random moments.
If you're observing the holiday in any way, or hell, if you're not, hug someone you love and learn something about them if you can. You only have so many Xmases.
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 For those unacquainted with the role-playing game mentioned in this week's FFN, there's a quick run-down of the basics for Synnibarr (as well as a few other, ah, "interesting" sourcebooks) at the RPG.net Wiki. There are even a few for sale via Amazon at various prices (and it managed to get a three-star review from someone, which seems a tad generous). I first heard of it thanks to this image from one of many motivational poster threads.
It's Christmas Eve Eve, and we're supposed to drive an hour or two on Christmas day, so I fully expect the force field surrounding our city to fail and allow in the blizzard that's supposed to blow through. I think I can say that the holiday has well and truly morphed from what Norman Rockwell envisioned into an event where I include visits with three to six other families (perhaps more, depending on how you count) and my big present is Cristi and I deciding to finally replace our 20-year-old washer & dryer (under mild protest. I mean, if you don't drag the sheets over the rust spots, they work as well as ever, right?). My siblings and I all agree that we won't break our checking accounts buying gifts for one another, but instead we buy either "group gifts" (food & drink) or donate to a charity in their name along with getting their children something fun to play with. However you celebrate or whatever you do, I hope everyone has some fun and safe time off to enjoy a little relaxation and something good to nosh on. And if you somehow think there's not enough stress, you could always decide to hit the malls on December 26th. :)
Or you could buy a T-shirt that I whipped up and somehow forgot to mention: LoLCats, HO!" Somehow, redubbing an episode of "Thundercats" in LoLspeak sounds somewhat intriguing, especially if you could make it seem that the mutants were confused by it and that it was Mum-Ra's annoyance at it that fueled his desire to destroy them. :)
Back to the usual items of interest: I've long told people upset by actors that say things they disagree with to separate the thespian's work from their private lives. Tom Cruise made that very difficult with quite a few well-publicized antics (though one of the remixes that resulted was quite amusing). That said, this trailer for his next film looks like a fun time. He may be kinda messed up off-screen, but he's got talent.
Here's something for the fans of British comedian Bill Bailey and "Have I Got News for You." Last week, Liberal Democrat MP Charles Kennedy was on the show, apparently the first MP to do so after a scandal involving other members of Parliament claiming some rather outlandish things as expenses (I believe the more famous ones were a duck pond, a moat, and a tower on a castle). Anyway, Bill was goading Mr. Kennedy into saying his colleagues were, ah, "less than honest" and suggested it would be remixed on YouTube and become a hit. Well, it's not on YouTube, but the mix does exist (using Bill's voice, samples from previous jokes about monkeys and octopuses, and the show's theme music).
Now I must away to help Cristi wrap [DATA EXPUNGED] for the nephews, so until Christmas Day's posting, here's:
- A bit of "hard" science for fiction to argue over: ten ways to travel in deep space and the physics of space battles.
- A guy decided to see what his cat, Kookoo, got up to during the day, so he put a GPS receiver on Kookoo's collar and compiled a video of the results.
- And since the season is 'tis-ing, from the nuts at "Everything is Terrible," here's The Majesty of Christmas Music. Sanity checks may be required.
- This is the time of year when people forward that text file about how fast Santa's sleigh has to go to reach every house and what happens to him and the reindeer after physics are applied (it's not pretty). So instead, I'm posting what most likely happened to the Ewoks after the second Death Star blew up in close proximity to the moon they were living on.
- Two rather offbeat holiday traditions: watching Donald Duck in Norway on Christmas Eve and watching a a sketch called 'Dinner for One' in Germany for New Years (at least, as of 2005).
- How about a new holiday tradition: Infectionator: Xmas Edition where you can not only generate zombies, but you can try to have Santa join your army of the undead.
- It's all a matter of opinion of course, though what intrigued me about the worst comics of the year (of which this is the second page) is that the winner(?) was a bizarre storyline from the "Mark Trail" comic strip.
- A coffee grinder might seem aggressive enough for many coffee drinkers, but this espresso machine is for those who find Chuck Norris a bit wimpy.
- The Vatican now says that his holiness is now his copyrightedness. Get to those "Pope Rooms" at Buca Di Beppo before they're closed down, folks!
- Artist of engine-driven oddities, Stan Mott would have surely been a huge tabletop gamer. I would love to see a "Car Wars" supplement based on his work. :)
- We end with a game called Space Ace, though it has nothing to do with Don Bluth. It's a flavor of the old vector-graphics "Lunar Lander" games, except you're flying through a maze of tunnels collecting dots while trying not to touch your highly volatile hull against the walls.
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http://dreamcafe.com/words/2009/12/23/twon-book-3-chapter-4/ http://dreamcafe.com/words/?p=847 This very short chapter deals with drawbacks. I’d have had an easier time of it if I knew what drawbacks are. Next chapter is about bounties, and the same applies. As near as I can tell, a drawback is a refund of a portion of whatever duty is charged on export.
Page 389: “They tend not to overturn that balance which naturally establishes itself among all the various employments of society.” My problem here is that it doesn’t make sense to me to speak of some sort of natural balance of employments and then see interference by the State as external to this; the State is an integral, inevitable part of capitalism, and when it interferes in the market, it is (to the extent it does so successfully from the point of view of the capitalists) doing exactly what it is supposed to do. It is like trying to understand the movement of an orbiting body by examining the centrifugal force, but seeing gravity as an unnatural interference.
Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.
TWoN Book 3 Chapter 4
©2009 Words Words Words. All Rights Reserved. . |
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This very short chapter deals with drawbacks. I’d have had an easier time of it if I knew what drawbacks are. Next chapter is about bounties, and the same applies. As near as I can tell, a drawback is a refund of a portion of whatever duty is charged on export.
Page 389: “They tend not to overturn that balance which naturally establishes itself among all the various employments of society.” My problem here is that it doesn’t make sense to me to speak of some sort of natural balance of employments and then see interference by the State as external to this; the State is an integral, inevitable part of capitalism, and when it interferes in the market, it is (to the extent it does so successfully from the point of view of the capitalists) doing exactly what it is supposed to do. It is like trying to understand the movement of an orbiting body by examining the centrifugal force, but seeing gravity as an unnatural interference.
Originally published at Words Words Words. Please leave any comments there. |
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There are many things I love about working in the video game industry. Among them is the fact that, on any given day, I can walk through the halls of the office and hear someone say, in all seriousness, "Yes, please, go ahead and disembowel me."
I mean, when I was working for an executive outplacement firm, none of the disembowelings came with the word "please" attached. Well, not many of them, anyway. |
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While I'm printing character sheets for the Alpha Omega game tonight, a little anecdote.
I took the kids to the zoo the other day, mostly to have something to do for a morning that wasn't hanging about the house. Yes, it's winter, but the Cleveland Zoo has lots to do. Anyway, we wound up in the rain forest for lunch, and then looked at some of the animals there. There was a volunteer hanging out with a boa constrictor in her hands, telling the kiddies about snakes.
TEAGAN: I want to know all about this snake.
VOLUNTEER LADY: Well, ask me questions and I'll tell you about him.
TEAGAN: Why does he have those spots on his back?
ME: (silently) Don't say it's the way God made him. Don't say it's the way God made him. Don't say it's the way God made him.
VL: Well, honey, about all I can tell you is it's the way God made him.
ME: (facepalm) OK, honey, imagine that snake was on the ground with dead leaves all around. Would you be able to see him?
TEAGAN: No. Oh, it's camouflage!
See, what I objected to with the lady's comment was not them mention of God. Teagan doesn't have any real context for that word anyway, and if she'd asked I'd have explained it. What I object to is that "it's the way God made him" shuts down any opportunity to learn anything. There's no exploration of the why there, no attempt to figure out what purpose that coloration does serve. Just, yep, that's how Epimetheus wanted it (he made all the animals, remember? Lavished the gifts on them, so Prometheus had to steal fire? That's in the Bible, right? Oh, wait, wrong myth).
OK, printing is done, so now to make a bunch of characters. Wish me luck.
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....you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night, sitting bolt upright, and saying "Holy crap. The year's almost over and I'm three Dan Simmons doorstops behind!"
...you divide your book purchases not into fiction & non-fiction, but into Books To Keep In the Car, Books To Read On Planes, Books To Read In the Living Room, Books to Read In Bed, and Books To Read Anywhere Else You Can Find The Time
...you ask your lovely wife to load up a pile of books for you in her car for her cross-country drive, because you'll be meeting her on the back end and you want to read too many books this vacation to carry on the plane without adding an additional piece of luggage.
...you have more piles of books in your office than flat surfaces.
...you need another bookshelf in your closet for the books you are trying to get out of the house. There's about 130 of 'em.
...your "things to get done over the holidays" list consists mostly of book titles.
...you charted your year's reading and actually found the data interesting...
...you hate posting blog updates because you'd rather be reading. |
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 Astro City Vol. 5: Local Heroes by Kurt Busiek
I stopped visiting the comics store regularly about the time these stories were coming out, so some of them were old favorites and some of them are new to me. New or old, I still marvel at Kurt Busiek's mastery of world-building and single-issue character studies. |
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In something hearkening back to my ancient tradition of reviewing bad movies on LJ, here's my review of Avatar.
Call Me Joe? Dances with Wolves? Ferngully? If you've read or seen one of these, you've seen Avatar -- albeit now it has a Cameron-esque over-the-top suite of visual effects brought by an inflated budget.
Sam Worthington turns in a strong performance of the empty-brained jarhead going native when personality-transferred into an alien body and culture. Sigourney Weaver, as always, delivers with her strong acting chops. Perhaps the alien anatomy keeps the computer-generated characters from looking uncanny, because they're not supposed to be human. Dramatically, the film hits all of the expected notes: Scenery-chewing evil corporate magnates, ignorant military assholes itching for conflict, and the usual pacifistic, animistic indigenous people who live in harmony with an interconnected world consciousness. Naturally, the scientists (Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang) are sympathetic but useless, and only an uneducated, action-oriented, tormented man can release his inner spirit and take on the White Man's Burden of saving the childlike indigenous people. (Perhaps the scientists are useless and helpless because the movie itself falls down on any level of scientific scrutiny -- the native life all use secondary breathing siphons on their abdomens, except of course for the humanoids, because they naturally have to have noses and mouths like us. And the humans of this future have the technology to grow hybridized human-alien bodies and transfer consciousness into them, yet lack the ability to recognize that an interconnected world electrochemical network is essentially a giant living computer-brain more powerful than the entire Internet.)
For a family outing, it's a bit fast and noisy, especially at the culminating fight, where of course ignorant military asshole gets his comeuppance and technologically primitive "savages" rout orbital bombardments, missile strikes and chain guns by using their harmonious bond with the animals of the natural world. (The Ghost Dance didn't work out so well historically.) The subtitling is generally unobtrusive, and the characters slip into English enough to keep the audience from having to read. The scenery is gorgeously computer-generated, up to and including floating mountains with no explanation given, perfect for a jumping-puzzle level in an XBox 360 game translation.
Watchable film? Certainly. Great cinema? By no stretch of the imagination -- and there's little to imagine in a computer-rendered world of pseudo-acting and vistas in which everything lights up and glows because that's the only way to show people that the natural world is beautiful.
(2 out of 5 stars.)
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 Marmaduke. This is a comic I thought was occasionally funny 'round about when I was eight. Of course, there were no webcomics back then, and if you wanted any graphical representations of humor, you got your folks to buy books for you or you got nothin'. And nothin' was what you got with Marmaduke, pretty much. The premise is that a Great Dane does something outrageous (and that's "outrageous" in a 1950's media sense of the word, the furthest extent of which would be catching a glimpse of a madien's slip as a breeze ruffles her calf-length skirt) in one panel and the humans involved explain why it's funny. However, I'm just an amateur when it comes to explaining Marmaduke, so thankfully someone else does so on a regular basis, as does another someone else.
Why do I bring up a single-panel vortex of un-funny on the comics page? They're making a Marmaduke movie. I'm not kidding. The the trailer is on this page at Slashfilm. And it looks like they're "updating it for a new generation" or something. Either he's going to talk in the film, or this is a "Kangaroo Jack" style trailer where the animal star only speaks in ads. But quality wise, it really shouldn't matter. This film didn't have to be called "Marmaduke," because nobody was out there wishing for Marmaduke to make a big-screen appearance. Any "big dog" character would have had the same effect on the bottom line, the studio wouldn't have had to pay the comic syndicate a dime, and my head wouldn't hurt thinking about the other films that must be in development based on "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith," "The Lockhorns," and "Ziggy." In fact, I can think of several comic strips that would make better movies than "Marmaduke," under certain conditions:
1. The Far Side. Already proven to be watchable in "Tales from the Far Side," this would be the animated movie for families where the grown-ups are nerds and the kids are ones you'd suspect of liking David Lynch if they knew who he was. How it would work: Gary Larson must write it or pick the cartoons used as source material. Further, it's not going to be a huge hit in the box office, but it will sell steadily on DvD forever, like a Monty Python movie. Also, the little 'bits' making it up will circulate on YouTube until the end of time.
2. Calvin & Hobbes. If there's one comic strip just about everyone wishes hadn't stopped, it was Bill Waterson's epic about a boy terror and his imaginary(?) friend, a stuffed tiger. They should have hucked "Dennis the Menace" when looking to the funnies and picked up Calvin, but... How it would work: Give it to Pixar and let them work on it without interference. Send Waterson to them in a locked crate so they can study him at leisure. If anyone tried making this in to a live-action film, it would fail so hard that audiences would be killed by the shrapnel.
3. Bloom County and/or Doonesbury. I put these two in one category for the "how it would work" section. Bloom County was one of the first newspaper strips to start doing things that a lot of webcomics now do on a regular bases: Introducing aliens, mad science, random celebrities, etc. and still making it all work instead of looking like the author is dredging the bottom of the creativity well. Doonesbury, for all the criticism lobbed at it from its political targets, had some really good and poignant runs. Alongside "Snoopy," Zonker Harris was one of my favorite comic characters ever, and I discovered his uncle Duke long before I ever heard of Hunter S. Thompson. How it would work: In both cases, making any kind of movie from this would have to be set in its heyday. That means no post-hiatus Trudeau and no "Outland" Breathed. These are the only projects I could think of that might do better without their authors, allowing directors who are fans of the features in their prime to do stories set in the 70's and 80's using the casts of these features.
And of course, there are loads of webcomics out there that deserve a whole string of feature films more than Marmaduke does, starting with Girl Genius getting a three-picture deal with Peter Jackson directing.
The second movie trailer I saw that crushed the other half of my soul was the one for 'Cats & Dogs 2.' The first film looked like it was almost a good idea which got saddled with lame jokes that sounded like they came from a Disney "made for our cable channel" movie with voiced-over puppies. The sequel appears to not only continue the trend, but seems, in spots, to suffer from a lower budget. I can pick out several "stuffed animal we're supposed to think is real" shots, and they re-use the "my owner is a crazy cat person" gag for the villain... again. But at least its a "new" franchise and not a remake, I suppose. And the writers (or maybe just the guy who came up with the title) have seen at least one classic James Bond film...
But all is not gloom and doom. I listen to very little music radio anymore, and when I was doing so recently, I heard a rather jaunty tune on a local "alternative" station (which they do tend to live up to; they don't sound like anything else on my dial, but I do live in Kansas City, so there you go) called "Fireflies." It's a synth-pop feel-good piece of bubblegum, and so I thought I'd share. Looking it up on Wikipedia, I saw that it had been a top Billboard hit, so I'm probably quite late to the party, mostly because I've been busy chasing kids off of my lawn. In hunting down the video, I also came across a one-man acapella version that was pretty decent as well.
I just realized that I've been very lax in getting new issues of ps238 up in the store, and that'll be rectified sometime tomorrow. In other comic happenings, I'm informed that North 40 was nominated for an award at Comicmonsters.com, with voting starting in a few days if I read the site correctly. The juxtaposition of the nominees' subject matter with the festive season doth please my ironic bits. I think if you win, you're given the soul of one of the other contestants... or a night's stay in a haunted asylum. I wonder if there's a cash equivalent? :)
While I hire a witch to help with the voting (what could go wrong?), here's some mystic portals to other realms:
- I'm a special effects nut from way back, starting with Ray Harryhausen and blue screen. But it's almost scary how often new techniques are used in seemingly mundane scenes. This is to preface you for this demo reel from Stargate Studios, showing how often their talents come into play in popular TV shows and movies.
- Even though his colleagues have been calling him "Sir" for some time, Patrick Stewart is to be knighted. Would that make him Sir Captain, Sir?
- A British court has ruled that Stormtrooper costumes from Star Wars aren't "sculpture," which enjoys 75 years of copyright, but "industrial design" that only gets 15 years, which means the guy who designed the helmets in 1976 can keep doing selling them.
- Way of an Idea is a puzzle game where the goal is to foster an idea in the head of a scientist by guiding an apple in its descent towards his head.
- Impressive stop-motion animation in Western Spaghetti.
- The "Snuggly" blanket-with-sleeves was apparently involved in a road accident with Underoos and they couldn't figure out which part went where.
- Penny-Arcade is getting started on what appears to be a short holiday series, though it's a little Illithid for some tastes.
- A classic ice-cutting-to-save-vikings game gets another installment in Icebreaker: The Gathering.
- Who knew the use of a tape measure could be a superpower? I think he may have found inspiration from a classic XKCD strip.
- Try your skills at Eeniebounce: Bounce your smiley face, collect all of the stars, and rebound off of numbered and colored platforms a specified number of times to progress. It's harder than it looks.
- And we close with something for all you holiday bakers out there (myself included): Gourmet magazine's favorite cookie recipes from 1940 through 2008.
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