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July 8th, 2008
06:59 pm - Review: Get Smart
Short form: An enjoyable comedy that was far smarter than I had feared.
( Longer, more spoilerish verdict behind the cut )
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July 6th, 2008
04:28 pm - Consolodated Movie Reviews
My summary opinions of The Incredible Hulk, Charlie Wilson's War, and Hancock: Not as bad as I'd feared, not as good as the book (but still quite good), and vaguely enjoyable non-adapted superheroic fare.
( Slightly more spoilerish thoughts behind a cut... )
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May 1st, 2008
11:24 pm - He was turned to steel / In the great magnetic field
I'm just coming up for air to say that Iron Man may very well be the best superhero movie ever made. It's up there with Batman Begins in my book, though that may be the sleep deprivation talking.
( Slight spoilery bit... )
I really don't know what else to say. I'm in awe. Robert Downey Jr. is Tony Stark.
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February 19th, 2008
11:00 am - HD-DVD Is Dead
Toshiba pulls out of HD-DVD, which means that Blu-Ray is the winner, and HD-DVD is going to continue to wither and die.
At least we've settled on a format, even if both of the formats were kind of evil. Then again, I'm not a fan of DRM in general. (Suprise!)
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December 18th, 2007
09:44 am - A Spooky Yuletide
I've been sort of AWOL on this journal. Apologies. In partial reparation, I offer a choice few oddball tidbits. First off, those of you who still want to send out Christmas cards may want to take a look at some of the cards that Edward Gorey drew whilst he was still alive. A few years ago, I sent out one of his more understated cards, which was a sorrowful-looking man staring at "NOEL," which was written in the surf on the beach.
For those looking for even more speculative horror this holiday season, I recommend looking at the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society's A Very Scary Solstice, which are various carols sung with alternate lyrics (such as "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fish-Men").
Somewhat less holiday-related, save that Dr. Who is still on my mind, I point you to a very real photo of Brits during WWII, which recalls a very particular ninth Doctor episode. Alternatively, those who don't want to click links to elsewhere can simply ( click behind the lj-cut )
That's it for me for now. Happy holidays!
EDIT: I forgot to also link to the significantly less-spooky but significantly more holiday-themed pictures for an ice hotel in Sweden that I found while browsing the web about a month ago. Kind of real-life meets Die Another Day sort of getaway.
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July 17th, 2007
04:44 pm - Various Updates
As ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) swan_tower bemoaned, "No one is coming to our wedding!" ...which is to say that the first wave of invitations to our wedding went out, and we started getting response cards today. The first four? "Sorry, we can't attend." Note that the list our parents provided us of "must invites" is sufficiently large that, were they all to accept (which, obviously, they're not), then we would barely have room for the wedding party. No joke. Consequently, if you don't receive an invitation to the wedding, it's not because we don't love you. It's because our parents are insane, and we don't have the leverage to say, "Tough noogies" to their lists of relations and family friends.
...and if you receive an invitation late, it's because we're lazy bastards who can't get our ducks in a row. Hell, I think the best man's invitation only went out at the end of last week.
Also, wedding cake tasting? Very cool. That said, I never thought I'd ever get sick of buttercream frosting, which I sort of was by the end of the day.
Most recently read books: the Temeraire trilogy by Naomi Novik. Short review: Enjoyable, light, quick reading. It's Patrick O'Brian meets Anne McCaffrey, or, in a less insular phrasing, the Napoleonic Wars with dragons. Some of the characterization of the various dragons is quite well done.
Also a good read, Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile. I went through it on audiobook, so I can specifically speak to the audiobook version read by Christopher Lane, which was thankfully captivating. Basically, this book details the progress of the CIA-funded Afghan war in the 1980s from the perspective of the bureaucrats and desk-jockeys in Langley. While the premise might seem dull, it honestly was really well-written, giving a very intimate (and, I fear, slightly skewed toward the dramatic) perspective on the backroom dealings that ultimately drove the Red Army from Afghanistan. I can only hope that the movie version that's coming out later this year is as good. (Then again, it has Mike Nichols, Aaron Sorkin, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tom Hanks, and Julia Roberts and it's coming out in December, so it's clearly shooting for the Oscars. We'll see.)
Strange Horizons is having its (now yearly, rather than bi-yearly) fund drive! Contribute and get a crack at nifty prizes! It's also tax-deductible, for you home-owning / kid-having US residents out there.
Beyond that, I'm frantically working on wedding-preparation stuff, getting in shape, and not going insane. Sorry for the radio silence of late, though I fear that'll be par for the course until October or so.
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February 28th, 2007
02:16 pm - [Bloomington Gamers] Oscar Pool Results!
So, pursuant to the rules I posted for the pool, the big winner is, in fact, kitsune_zen, who picked four of the six big categories. In the runner-up category, we have a three-way tie, between tooth_and_claw, moonartemis76, and golconda2, who each successfully predicted two of the major categories and nine of the eighteen others. ...though I'll note that if robin_d_laws had played with his predictions, he'd have tied precisely with kitsune_zen, with four out of the big six and ten out of the remaining eighteen. That said, here's the full breakdown, in the reverse order in which the predictions were sent, as I'm too lazy to reorder them:I'll happily act as intermediary for the antes you have implicitly promised, or you can feel free to arrange directly with kitsune_zen. As to the three runners-up, I'll be contacting you each to see how you want your brownies delivered.
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February 21st, 2007
05:22 pm - [Bloomington Gamers] Oscar Pool Reminder!
You have until this Sunday when the telecast starts to put in your entry for my second annual Bloomington-area Oscar pool. It's for beer money (or dessert money, if you don't drink), it's honor system, and I'm promising to bake a batch of brownies for one of the prizes.
Go here to enter.
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January 30th, 2007
01:15 pm - [Bloomington Gamers] Oscar Pool!
As with last year, I'm putting together an Oscar pool, since Matthew Baldwin at Defective Yeti once again provided a script for generating the setup.
( The Fine Print )
To clarify, this is entirely for fun, and it's entirely honor system. I'll put together a list of people who agreed to chip in, but they don't have to specify how much they're chipping in in advance, and you won't get much more than a verbal slap on the wrist if you fail to pay up. I do promise brownies to the overall winners, either way, so there's already something in the pot.
The pool will be distributed some time in the month following the Oscars ceremony ... probably at a game or social event that the winner(s) attend with me. (If you're reading this and thinking of playing, then you probably play in a game with me.)
Please make sure that you enter your full name, as I only see your names on these submissions, and no email addresses. Thanks!
( Side note for people who might be perturbed that I've referred to these categories as the big five... )
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December 21st, 2006
12:05 pm - Volcano High
A few years ago, when I was still working for Akamai, I would often watch cable late into the night on the weekends. I worked midnight to 8am during the week, and there was only so much you could do to reset your sleep schedule for the two days you had off. Likewise, there wasn't much to do at 3am on a Saturday when your friends were mostly working stiffs. Hence, the cable.
In any event, I was watching MTV at one point after Adam West's Batman was done on TVLand, and a kung-fu movie called Volcano High came on. I rapidly recognized that the voices were, in fact, those of certain well-known US hip-hop stars. Apparently, someone at MTV thought this would be a cool thing to do, and got Snoop Dog, Andre 3000, Mya, Kelis, Method Man, Lil' Jon, and a few others roped in.
Browsing through the video store with moonandserpent and oddsboy last night, I was reminded of it and rented it. I am glad that I did.
Great action sequences. Surprisingly good voice acting. Good supplementary music tracks (volunteered by the various artists involved). Completely over the top. Highly recommended.
Just thought I'd mention.
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December 20th, 2006
12:47 am - Consumerism
My ongoing adventures in consumerism:
First off, Amazon.com has finally broken me. They ship out of multiple warehouses, so when you tell them to combine packages, sometimes it takes them far longer than you would expect, as they have to move the stuff between warehouses before it can be sent out to you. This meant that my last-minute order of Christmas presents would have arrived some time after Christmas if I had insisted on them packaging them as a single package (for $25 or so, two day shipping and handling). Of course, it would arrive on time if I broke it up into its component packages, but that would have been significantly more expensive ($90+). Along comes their ad pitch for Amazon Prime: $79 for a year's worth of free two-day shipping with no minimum on a shipment, plus upgraded overnight shipping.
...so I am now an Amazon Prime customer. *sigh*
Secondly, Happy Feet is just as amusing and enjoyable as you've heard. I recommend it heartily.
Third, I'm not quite over my car. I can walk up to it, unlock it without doing anything other than putting my hand on the handle, sit down, press a button, and drive away. All without taking out my key. It's kind of scary, really. Nifty, but scary.
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November 1st, 2006
04:57 pm - Thoughts on iPods and Podcasts
So, for those who aren't aware, I drive an hour each way to and from work each workday. This means that I spend about two hours in the car, Monday through Friday. Ten hours per week. That's a fair amount of time, particularly in an area with no kickass radio stations. As a consequence, I have grown to consider my iPod to be indispensable. I've had people ask me what the hell I listen to on those trips, and ... well ... I might as well tell everyone in one fell swoop.
First off, I'm a big fan of Audible.com, where I have a Premium account. This means that I can get the New York Times (hour-long) daily digest for free, and for some time, I did precisely that. Unfortunately, the narrator they have for the digest has a somewhat soporific voice, and I generally started to drift off around the business pages. Plus, given the Podcasts I've been listening to, this has become somewhat redundant. More important is their audiobooks. I've long since gone through most of the audiobooks I found interesting in my local library, so Audible's selection is awfully nice. At present, I'm working through George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. The first three books are all narrated by Roy Dotrice (who played Wesley Windham-Price's disapproving father in Angel and Mozart's disapproving father in Amadeus), whom I can recommend wholeheartedly. (The same goes for Lenny Henry's narration of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.) Believe me: with audiobooks, the narrator is about 70% of the selling point.
This accounts for about 30-40% of my listening time. The rest is generally eaten by Podcasts, of which I can recommend several (most pulled down through the iTunes music store, rather than through an explicit RSS feed):- CNN and NPR offer five minute news summaries, which are updated hourly and which I listen to nearly without fail.
- Ebert and Roeper's movie reviews are also available as Podcasts (generally released on Thursdays), though I'm a much larger fan of Roger Ebert than of Richard Roeper; consequently, Ebert's recent absence due to cancer-related surgery almost prompted me to remove this one from my list o' podcasts.
- Jim Lehrer's NewsHour also offers most of their stories, interviews, and panels as podcast downloads, which accounts for the majority of my news consumption.
- NPR's All Songs Considered has a weekly podcast (released Thursdays) which accounts for much of my exposure to new and offbeat artists. If I were to point to a single one of these as a recommendation, this would be the one, as the sheer breadth of music they present means that you will find at least one track on a given show to be interesting.
- NPR also offers their "Story of the Day" and their "International Story of the Day," which they cull from their various news programs (All Things Considered, Day to Day, Talk of the Nation, etc.).
- Have Games, Will Travel is a more-or-less-weekly podcast by Paul Tevis (ptevis), focusing on board games, card games, and role-playing games. There's a surprising subculture of gaming podcasts out there, and Tevis is perhaps my favorite.
- The Viking Youth Power Hour is a group of four Chicago guys in their late-20s to early-30s range who put out a surprisingly interesting show which explores largely left-leaning modern popular culture, magic(k), and the quality of the alcohol they're imbibing during the show. moonandserpent introduced me to this show a while back, and I am slowly working my way through their archives.
- Woot.com, which amounts to a Home Shopping Network for the techie set, also puts out a daily podcast which is short, amusing, and occasionally informative, which is more or less all I ask of a podcast.
- Likewise, The Onion produces a daily faux-news short that I listen to, generally before I even leave the house.
- Edit: I nearly forgot that NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is also podcast. For a humorous run-down of the week's news, you could do much worse.
There are also a few shows I've been made aware of relatively recently that I'm meaning to look into, but that I might mention:- Occulterati, which I found on jeregenest's del.icio.us feed.
- Though this wouldn't work well in a car, Battlestar Galactica producer Ron Moore apparently puts out an episode-by-episode podcast, which is meant to act as a secondary audio track to each episode. My friend Chase, who pointed this out to me, claims that half the fun is listening to Moore pour himself scotch and get pleasantly drunk during each podcast, describing behind-the-scenes stuff that you wouldn't necessarily get for a television show. Definitely something to play around with once we've caught up with our DVD watching.
This is probably more than any of you ever really wanted to know, but I figured that some of you might find this useful. There you go.
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October 30th, 2006
10:40 am - Halloween Things
First off, in Strange Horizons, we're running a piece on "taming the Beast" by Margaret Carter. Quite nifty. Also, we're doing the fall fund drive now. Give early! Give often! (...and get neat prizes!)
More game-related, there's one of those "find the movie" puzzles up at the M&M's site, though it's horror-movie themed, more or less, which is nifty, and it's interactive, so you don't have to guess to see if you got the reference right. For those who enjoy spoilers, check out the comments at this post.
Also, there were quite a few parties this weekend down here. I'm sort of partied out now.
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October 18th, 2006
06:14 pm - Cop Comedy Incoming
(Via IWatchStuff.com)
Simon Pegg and his crew are finally coming out with Hot Fuzz, and two teaser trailers are up here and here (Quicktime required).
If it's half as funny as Shaun of the Dead, I'll be happy.
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July 29th, 2006
09:44 am - Best Noir in Years
Last night, I saw Brick with swan_tower, moonandserpent, prosewitch, ninja_turbo, and ninja's friend-whose-name-escapes-me. It was, bar none, the best noir film I've seen in years. princeofcairo was right: "If you are a fan of Dashiell Hammett, every minute that you spend not having seen Rian Johnson's film Brick is a minute of your life thrown away."
The film is set in a California high school, where the outcast hard-boiled main character Brendan catches wind that an ex-girlfriend of his is in trouble. He follows her path down into the seedy underbelly of town in a film that John Huston would have been proud of.
It has pitch-perfect performances, particularly by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The dialog is great, though delivered fast enough that I'm going to have to watch it with subtitles when I get it on DVD. There are wonderfully bleak high school landscapes. I cannot recommend this film highly enough. The film's official site claims that it comes out on DVD on August 8th. Everyone who loves old-school noir should be lining up to buy it now. It's that good.
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July 1st, 2006
10:35 am - Boston and Superman
Two things:- swan_tower and I will be in Boston from this evening until Wednesday, at which point I head back to Bloomington and she stays for Readercon. It's unlikely that we'll be able to be that social, but if you're a Boston-area person and would like to try to get together with us, email me, and I'll see if we can figure something out.
- We also saw Superman Returns last night, and it was surprisingly good, all things considered. It works off the assumption that Superman III and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace didn't happen, and that Supes left Earth for five years after astronomers found the ruins of Krypton. (Note that the only thing I'm really spoiling here is the first five minutes, so nyah.) Spacey was a great Luthor, Routh was a solid Man of Steel, and Bosworth was a competant Lane.
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June 19th, 2006
04:31 pm - Indianapolis-Area Stuff
First off, the movie website was incorrect. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth opens this coming weekend at Regal Village Park Cinema 17 (2222 E 146th Street, in Carmel). I know that moonandserpent and buzzermccain had indicated interest. I probably wouldn't be able to do it this weekend or the following weekend (since I'll be in Boston then). Any thoughts on possibly seeing it in the evening some time next week or (if it stays around that long) the following weekend?
Speaking of the following weekend, I just found out about the Indianapolis Communications and Technology Expo (aka "The Indianapolis Hamfest"), which is going to be taking place on the 8th. I haven't ever attended, but if it's anything like the MIT Swapfest, this could be an opportunity for tech-minded folks to pick up some pretty good bargains for cheap. Particularly on more esoteric technology. If folks are interested, please leave a comment.
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May 30th, 2006
07:13 pm - Links A Go-Go
It's been a while since I've had a bunch of links collected in a post. I found that I had a number left over in tabs from my web browsing today, so I figured that it was time to break my silence once more.Something more substantive later. Thought you folks might be interested.
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April 27th, 2006
03:11 pm - For You Star Wars Geeks Out There
Pretty damn good for amateurs: light sabre combat. Enjoy!
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April 19th, 2006
02:37 pm - Favorite Underrepresented Muppet?
I'm sort of in an odd mood, so here's an odd sort of question.
Everyone thinks of a particular muppet when they think of Jim Henson. Generally, it's someone like Kermit, Miss Piggy, Oscar the Grouch, or Bert (or Ernie). ...but most of us who grew up with them have a particular oddball favorite. Perhaps it's the Honkers from Sesame Street. Perhaps it's one of the Skekses from Dark Crystal. Perhaps it's Zoot. Perhaps a particular Fraggle.
In your personal opinion, which muppet has historically gotten less love than s/he should have gotten, and why?
Edit: Check out The Kermitage Character Guide or the Muppet Wiki for some inspiration, if you're blanking. (Thanks to dr_whom for the wiki link.)
( I'll go first.... )
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