Tucker & Dale vs Evil: Awesome! Pure fun. It's Wash (Firefly) and Sock (Reaper) vs crazy college kids!

Drones: Also awesome! A cute and funny glance at corporate life and, oh yeah, an alien invasion. Directed by Amber Benson and Adam Busch!

11/11/11: Pretty bad. So non-memorable I barely remember what happened in it.

Insidious: It was all right. A bit tricky at the end. I like a movie that takes the audience for a ride and leads them somewhere they didn't expect to be.

Sherlock Holmes 2: I had a great time! Stephen Frye was hilarious as Mycroft Holmes! But now I keep getting confused between these movies and the new BBC "Sherlock."

Limitless: Despite an annoying hole in the plot that I see had to be done in order to make the plot plotty, I really liked this movie. And I want that pill!

Snow White: A Tale of Terror: I don't know how I missed seeing this before now. Rather gory, but good stuff. I've never seen Sigourney Weaver this hot. She does evil well.

Buried: Gah! Ryan Reynolds buried alive! Actually not bad. The whole movie is shot in a box as Ryan Reynolds slowly suffocates and wrestles with a cell phone that has excellent reception. I recommend it.

tags: movies

It fascinates me how different relationships, and different conversations with different people have their own rhythms. With most people, conversations feel strained. I struggle to find the rhythm, the feel of it, and I often find I cannot physically keep up and I endeavor to be released as quickly as possible. These are mostly meatspace conversations. On-line, however, is usually different.

Of course, most conversations, both in meatspace and cyberspace, are superficial. Pleasantries exchanged, a mention of the weather, inquiries about the family. Things said to bring a feeling of safety and belonging.

With some people, however, the conversations are relaxed banter, like playing a friendly card game. Ideas are exchanged, words played with, someone wins a round, and you move on.

With others, talking is like chess. Every move is calculated and each utterance spawns an array of choices. Where shall the conversation go next? And then some are like putting together a puzzle. You place each piece and a part of the picture appears. Every sentence builds on the one before and when you're done you've had a part in creating a thing of beauty.

When done right, these conversations, filled with thrilling thoughts and luscious feats of language leave me exhausted in a good way and craving a metaphorical cigarette.

I haven't craved a metaphorical cigarette in quite a while. I miss that. I should seek out more conversations

tags: talking

With the wonderful coldness and the heat on (when it got a bit too wonderful), the air was so dry in my apartment this morning I barely needed a towel when I stepped out of the shower.

I so missed this, feeling the crisp air wrap around me, pulling the breath from my lungs in swirling wisps. It's not yet winter, when all will be dead and still, so I must yet tolerate irritation in breathing. But it is better than the pulsating hateful heat of summer. At least I can move without the solid weight of the spiteful sun on my back.

It's a different world. Not yet my world, but close.

tags: nature

Ye gods and little fishes! There's nothing like watching a season premiere to make you realize you didn't watch last season's finale! I thought last season's finale was just a bit of a lackluster setup episode. I didn't realize i'd missed a whole episode! Castiel is the new God??* Wow! Now I'm wondering if I should bother hunting down last season's finale or just going with the rest of this episode.



--
*I don't consider this a spoiler as the episode in question was months ago. But if some of you, like me, missed it, or were holding out for some reason, I apologize.

mood: excited music: Foghat - Slow Ride tags: supernatural, tv

Just my friends. I'd miss nothing else about this area.

tags: writer's block

The daughter of a friend of mine asked question, "Why do people pray? Why do some religions require prayers? Why isn't it enough to follow the religion's rules and be a good member of that religion?" This is a serious question, not a mocking one. And I wonder if some of the religious people reading this would answer. Why do you pray?

tags: religion

So, I'm watching this movie called Last Night about what different people do when there's only six hours until the world ends. And it's driving me nuts because they're not saying how the world is ending. The only clue is that it's close to midnight now and it's still bright outside. Which frogger_the_mad suggests could mean they're in Alaska or a part of Canada.

Anyway, other than that, it's kind of interesting. About what you'd expect. There's not that much violence, so maybe it IS a Canadian movie.

I can't stop watching it because I need to know what's going to happen! I have to know how it ends or I'll be thinking about it all night! Heck, I'll probably be thinking about anyway. (Ha! Toronto! It's Toronto!)

You know, the thing is, the reason for the end is very important. At least, I think it is, considering I grew up with a religion that prayed every day for the end of the world. They'd either be cheering or they wouldn't believe it because it's not how it's supposed to end.

So far there aren't any non-believers in the end of the world. Looks like people have known for months and have gone through stages of acceptance. Now it's just a matter of figuring out what they want to do in the end.

That, of course, leads to the question, what would you do if the world were ending in six hours? But no, that's not right. They've known for a while. So...what would you do if the world were ending in six months? How would you plan to spend your final day?

Yeah, you're right. Silly question. Been done and all that. I'll just watch the end of the movie.

tags: movies

Lady Behind Me in Line: Are the calendars really only a dollar?
Me: Well, that's what the sign says.
Lady Behind Me In Line: Do you think this counts? holds up a Last Airbender (the movie) calendar
Me: quietly sighing Uh, yeah, that looks like a calendar, so I'm pretty sure it counts.
Lady Behind Me In Line: I really liked this movie. You know why? 'cause that guy from Twilight was in it! holds up the calendar and points with a wide grin on her face.
Me: inches a little bit farther away

tags: sale, shopping

I don't remember a lot of talk about families on "Fraggle Rock." The only real glimpse of that we get is Gobo and his uncle Traveling Matt. No one else seems to have parents or relatives to speak of. I imagine that Fraggles are born and adopted by the community and just grow up in a big group.

Matt is a freak. I bet he grabbed this youngster, Gobo, and told him of their familial ties, something that means nothing to the others. It might not even be true. Perhaps Matt needed a companion, a sidekick. He needed someone to care about his adventures. Someone to greet him when he returned.

tags: fraggles, tv

I just pulled up Netflix and came across a show I'd never heard of before called "Undercover Boss." It's a reality show where the head of a company poses as an employee to...I don't know...find some fodder to fire a bunch of people? "I saw what you did there, Bob. When I get back to my nice, cushy office you are so out of here." Anyway, it looked interesting enough for me to hit play. The show starts with an incredibly long introduction, explaining what the show is, what's going to happen on the show, and then it explains how it ends! Wait, seriously? I just watched the show! Why do I need to see anymore? Is this to catch people with incredibly short attention spans? Bizarre.

tags: tv

(I lost my Freddy icon. I'll have to get it back.)

I just finished watching the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. I almost went to see it in the theaters, but I finally opted to spend my money elsewhere. I've had the disc from Netflix for a few days now and decided to put it on a couple of hours ago.

At first blush, I kinda like it. I like the new story. It feels more personal and more like it's a journey these kids are going through. Whether they survive or not they're learning something about themselves.

I approve of the differences in the story because they speak to a different era with a different mindset. But I'm not sure I like the overtones.

I should probably put the rest of this under a cut.

( 1, 2, spoilers' coming for you... )

Overall...I liked it much more than I thought I would.

tags: movies

So, here's the gist of this EPIC Judas Priest music video I just now found on Youtube that I'd never seen before.

Two young women dressed very witchily are wandering around gothic architecture and apparently hiding from the KKK* and decide to do a spell to bring some flowers to life around these very gloomy surroundings. Some big guy in a gas mask shows up, stamps on the flowers, and tells the women how naughty they are. Next, they're tied to a stake and proceed to get roasted. But wait! An angel appears! And the angel has an evil laugh! His three buddies on horses show up and they proceed to free the women and lay some smack down. Then it's EPIC WAR with tanks and big floaty blimp things vs zombies and horsehead demons! The four horsemen win, of course, leaving the world devastated. And then Cthulhu shows up and immediately gets pwned by War!** The four say goodbye to the ladies and ride off into the hazy sunset of a ruined Earth. But that's okay, cause the witches are now free to grow pretty flowers everywhere! And the ghostly head of Nostrodamus looks on.

EPIC!





----
* Or generic religious acolytes of some sort.
** I disbelieve! Okay, I lose some sanity points, then I disbelieve!

This is not the test you're looking for. Move along.

I'm watching the third episode of the new show "Transformers: Prime," which I've only recently heard about.

The Good: Beautiful CGI. The transformations are smooth. It's a nice mix of the old show, the most recent show ("Transformers Animated") and of course, the movies. It took two episodes for the plot to tug on my heart and make me care about transforming robots again. And so far there's nothing that makes me want to *facepalm* and groan.

The Bad: Part of it's based on the movies. Bumblebee has no voice and the Decepticons look like a death metal band logo threw up.

The Awesome: The original voices! Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime! Frank Welker as Megatron! And...uh...Ernie Hudson! (Not original but still awesome.)

In short, I approve.

( Minor Spoiler Freakout )

(grr, why won't this thing post to Facebook? It's supposed to!)

mood: pleased tags: tv

I'm just assuming it's from the same memetic thinktank. Anyway, away we go!

------

Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen fictional characters (television, films, plays, books) who've influenced you and/or that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

1. Lucifer (The one from Vertigo comics.)
2. Aslan
3. The Doctor
4. Ace
5. Optimus Prime
6. Superman
7. Cloak (of Cloak and Dagger)
8. Freddy Krueger
9. Alice Johnson (from _A Nightmare on Elm Street part 4: The Dream Master_)
10. Magik (Illyana Rasputina, The Darkchilde, of the New Mutants and X-Men)
11. Skeeve (from Robert Asprin's Myth Adventure books -- a really big influence on me growing up)
12. Goliath (From Gargoyles)
13. David Lister (from Red Dwarf)
14. Eddie (The undead, time-traveling mercenary mascot of Iron Maiden)
15. Basara (of Macross 7)

tags: books, memes, movies, tv

*sigh* There's something I really hate about documentaries on TV. Maybe it's only the History channel or whoever owns that whole fleet of networks, or maybe it's all reality TV, but they're invariably like this:

Stay tuned! We're gonna show you something! Coming up next, check out what we'll show you! Boom! Didja see that? Remember a couple minutes ago we showed you something? Wasn't that cool?

Annoying! Each of these shows has about 10 to 15 minutes of actual content stretched into an hour! (Well, 43 or so minutes plus commercials.)

This is pretty much why I stopped watching Mythbusters. I got tired of the non-stop previews and replays. Do they do that because of the worsening attention span of the viewing public? Or just because it makes shows really cheap to produce?

mood: annoyed tags: television

What is the freaking point of a smoke alarm that goes off if you're in the shower too long? I mean, what is going through its little head?

Hmm. There's more water vapor in the air than usual. What could cause..OMG! TSUNAMI! BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP!!!

Bloody ridiculous. I did find a button on it to make it stop. But it only works for five minutes. Why would a smoke alarm come with a snooze button? I suppose someone could use it as an alarm clock with some sort of Rube Goldberg device that lights a match or...okay, I'm thinking way too much about this. And now it's time to press the button again. No, wait...it stopped! Now that it's ten degrees colder in here.* Yay.

Being in the shower this long was an oddity, anyway. I'm usually a five to ten-minute shower guy. After a while I just don't know what else to clean. I know I have friends who shower for half an hour or even a full hour. Something about the gloriousness of hot water. I don't know. Anyway, years ago, friends told me that I really should shave my head in the shower. It's a much better, smoother experience. I balked at the time because, well, I need a mirror, as silly as it sounds. Plus, I didn't like the idea of being in the shower for that long. But this past week I decided to try it, just to see how it would work, and yes, it is a better experience. I mean, I had to use my hand a lot more for guidance and to gauge how it was going, and I still have to finish up out of the shower in the mirror, catching spots I missed. But I liked it. So I tried it again tonight.

There's another danger in shaving in the shower besides setting off your overeager smoke alarm. When you have a razor in your hand and you're looking down at your hairy body, you start getting ideas. Innocent at first: "I think I'll shave my pits. They're right there, after all." And naturally the idea of a bit of manscaping occurs. Fair enough. But then it starts getting weird: "My chest hair sticks up quite a bit, maybe I'll just trim this little...GAH! What am I doing??"

Yeah, I can see me getting a bit too happy with that thing and going completely hairless.

In other news I've got a job interview tomorrow and have a bit of a tie crisis. I can only find my Pooh ties. I'm very tempted to just go with one of them, but I know I have other ties around here somewhere!

EDIT: I found my lovely purple tie!

---

* A bit of an exaggeration, it seems. The temperature barely wavered. Probably because I still haven't turned on the heat in here.

mood: annoyed tags: keyword-1, keyword-2, shower

I got an e-mail yesterday from ECU, the place from which I got my degree and stuff. They send me something now and then, asking for money. They're worse than debt collectors for their tenacity. I didn't even have this e-mail address until years after I graduated. Anyway, it's some "diversity" thing which probably means only the black alumni got it. I ignored it, but I did notice that it came from a mailing list. I figured it was some announcement list they set up and I made a mental note to unsubscribe from the list later.

All day today I've been getting e-mail from that list from other people. It seems everyone who got the e-mail was quite surprised to suddenly be on an e-mail list and replied to be removed. Unfortunately, it's not an announcement list. It's an actual mailing list! So all these people who went to ECU have been getting increasingly uptight e-mails from panicky people desperately trying to be removed from a suddenly very spammy list they didn't want to be on. I did see one post from some guy who simply said, "You people are an embarrassment." I agree.

Naturally, I decided to bring a swift end to this flailing orgy and sent an e-mail to the listserv to remove me. I eventually got an e-mail back saying that the listserv couldn't find the list and suggested maybe it's a "confidential" list which means I would not be able to remove myself. Fancy! No problem. ECU is now SPAM. I did happen to notice that enough people with Gmail accounts must have marked the e-mails as spam that I didn't really have to do anything. Of course, there's a chance that somebody with some ability at the source saw the problem and deleted the list.

Nah...

Stay classy, ECU.

tags: school, technology

Every once in a while my job decides to pretend to be cool and relaxes the dress code for a day. Tomorrow at work is "True Colors" day,where we are supposed to support our favorite sports team by wearing t-shirts or hats or such celebrating them. I hate sports, but I still want to wear a t-shirt. I don't have a lot of t-shirts, though. So I'm thinking either the Warhamster shirt or the purple tie-dye one with fairies on it. Which one should I go for?

mood: thoughtful tags: work

Or at least part of it. Whenever I can't think of something, I look it up. I was about to comment on this story about a guy trying to smuggle a tiger cub out of Thailand by packing it in a suitcase with a bunch of plushies (Brilliant! Almost.) and I realized it's the sort of plot that'd be in a movie starring...wossname. You know...that guy. Chubby guy in a lot of stoner movies right now... Oh, you know! He was in that flick about the...the bachelor party...the one in Vegas! So I Googled for "movie about a bachelor party--" and before I could type "in vegas" Google suggested that whole phrase!

IT KNOWS WHAT I'M THINKING!!!


It also must mean that a significant number of people in the recent past have had the very same thought. Argh! We're becoming Borg! Or at least are getting conditioned to rely on something that isn't guaranteed to be around forever. One day Google just might take the "don't" out of their motto and turn us all into obedient Googlites via hypnosis and subtle coercion.

You know the really sad thing, though? I was thinking of the wrong guy! He wasn't even in that movie! I should've Googled for "pineapple" and let Google fill in "express" for me. (Seriously, try it. It's the first suggestion that comes up.)

mood: thoughtful tags: movies, technology

I'm watching a movie called Echelon Conspiracy. Here's the premise: There's this cell phone that some people get in the mail. The cell phone receives messages that direct the receipient towards wealth, like, telling them which slot machine to play or which hotel has the best deal. Like a precognitive hotwire.com, I guess. After a while, the phone starts telling them to go places, and being trustful, greedy bastards, they go. Eventually the phone gets them killed.

So I'm watching and I'm thinking, "I'm just not that greedy." First of all, if I get a mysterious cell phone in the mail (which actually happened to me once) I'm going to be suspicious of it. Especially if it's turned on and working and messaging me. If, for some reason, I do follow its advice and gain some wealth, like enough to get out of debt, I'm going to quit while I'm ahead, and probably get rid of the phone. 'cause that's just creepy and I don't trust it.

But this protagonist, he fiddles about, gets some cash and good advice, and just keeps going. At one point he's in this casino, has just lucked (or not, really) into an incredible amount of money, cashes out, then gets another cell message, and goes back in! To the same casino! And he knows security is watching him now and he was warned that cell phones aren't allowed! But I guess at that point his judgement had just flown and he was simply obeying the phone.

And I suppose that's a lesson for many situations. Whether it's a guidebook, a drug, a GPS device, a video game walk-through, a trusted leader, a way of life, don't forget to look where you're going!

Okay...that was supposed to just be a casual musing about a random movie I pulled up on Netflix, not an observation on the human condition but...what the hell? Nothing seems to be going the way I want it to go lately, even posts.

mood: grumpy tags: movies

Sad: There's apparently such a problem with sleeping on the job at my workplace that HR had to create a memo to address it.
Sadder: The memo starts with the line, "Please remember that sleeping on the job is not prohibited!"
Saddest: Only two people noticed the mistake.

mood: confused tags: job

In his latest blog post, Neil Gaiman imparted such information as:

The sixth draft of my Doctor Who script was handed in on the 19th of June.

And:

The Seventh Draft of My Doctor Who Episode should be done in the next few days.

And also wrote this lovely rant:

The wonderful thing about books and comics is your budget is infinite: it costs the same to draw one thing as another, to write one thing as another. That’s not true of television, where a budget might stretch to prosthetics or CGI, but not both (quick! pick one! now rewrite to make it work) or you might find yourself being told that, no, we can’t make the Undersea Dancing Mermaids sequence work because the underwater cameras would blow the budget even before you factor in the mermaid tails but we already have a bird costume so could you just make all the mermaids into birds instead? And you’re sure you can, you can’t just quite figure out how...*

Then followed up with this footnote:

*I've learned over the last few months that any comment one makes about Doctor Who is analysed, pored over, interpreted, and for all I know held up to a mirror and then combined with something from the Book of Enoch, by Doctor Who folk on the internet, who then have much too much fun using it to Build Up Theories. So this is a Disclaimer, just for them: There are no mermaids or birds anywhere in my Doctor Who script. That was just me making something up as an example. Honest. Also, this footnote is not a clever double-bluff, and really there are birds and mermaids but I am trying to throw you off the scent by mentioning them and then saying that there aren't.

I love this man.

mood: amused tags: doctor who, neil gaiman