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Saturday, July 26th, 2008
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12:16 pm - best spam subject line of the day
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Subj: You feel up my senses
...somehow, I don't think that's what John Denver was going for, but what do I know?
addendum: "you came on my pillo--aaaruurrrghhhk"
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
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9:35 am - and the mini metro people are usually good about shelf rotation
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There is an old proverb of exotic origin which states "Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day."
Written, no doubt, by a true sage (and frog gourmet, apparently.)
But no sage has ever started a proverb with "Take a healthy swig from a bottle of sour chocolate milk, gag, then check the cap to find that the expiration date was July 17 first thing in the morning..."
But then again, perhaps finishing that sentence is gonna jinx things up something fierce.
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| Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
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3:12 pm
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Ever have one of those absolutely brilliant little conspiratorial-type ideas which, if you pull it off correctly, will be so gosh-darned clever and subtle that you'll just want to give yourself a great big hug and maybe even some ice cream, too, for being such a sneaky beaky?
I ain't sayin a word, man.
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| Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
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10:43 pm
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The new breed of LJ spambot (the Nexus-6, if you will) cunningly creates free LJ accounts with vaguely human-sounding names, then posts comments that it's culled from other people's posts. Their profiles are always empty, but there's at least one entry in their journal which is nothing but keywords and then links to Sites You Probably Don't Want To Visit.
They're trying to be insidious, but they're really just incredibly annoying. I've had about 10 of them so far today (two of them posted the exact same thing to the exact same entry, how uncreative!) and it's a pain to manually delete them and flag them as spam and then make up mean cuss words to mutter under your breath. If anything, they've robbed me of that precious, delicious "Oooooooh!! Someone made a comment! In my LJ!" feeling you get if you've got email notification set. It's just not thrilling anymore, dammit. You get your hopes up and oh, look, it's "janisoxafu". ...whose journal still exists, even though I've flagged at least three comments as spam. Something tells me LJ ain't exactly got the best and brightest at work on this.
In other news, I've been super busy. I'm going to Readercon on Saturday to participate in a radio drama panel (12:00 noon in some room or another! Check your schedule!) and possibly actually say something useful and intelligent. The odds are 12 to 1 against Useful and Intelligent, so get your bets in now. Apart from that, I'm 13 pages into Episode 4 of RotRB and everything is almost resolved. I got to write a catfight tonight and you didn't. It's not exactly hard to do, all you have to do is write something like this:/SFX/ AND HERE WE HAVE A GOOD OLD-FASHIONED CAT FIGHT WITH LOTS OF
THE AD-LIBBED SCRABBLING AND THE SQUABBLING AND THE BITING I also had written "TOO BAD NONE OF YOU LADS ARE PRESENT TO ENJOY IT" but that broke the page count and I don't like that, so out it went.
Judging from what we've done and what we're about to do, the final projects (both RED SHIFT Missions 1 and 2) will be real delights, I hope. Some of the cast members are quoting lines on the Internets already. That's a good omen, right? I mean, they like the lines and they had to say them over and over again into microphones! So maybe you listeners will find some to quote, too! And then there'll be t-shirts and memes and lolcats and I'll clutch my head and go OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE I WROUGHT. And then I'll love each and every one of you. But probably silently.
Now it's off to bed where I'll read some amusing anecdotes about Al Boasberg or Bob Benchley, and then turn off the light and await the cat's 4 AM adventures. What a day.
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| Monday, July 14th, 2008
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9:28 am - der wall-e movie thingo
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Saturday night was Drive-In Night, which meant a jaunt over to the Mendon Twin for WALL-E (I'm using the hyphen because I don't want to use the ampersand code for the extended character) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (though probably not in 3D). I say "probably" because we didn't actually get to go. Carolyn and I arrived well before the movie start time, but found ourselves in a long line of cars idling in front of the "toll booth" box office. By the time we were two or three cars away from buying our tickets, the show sold out. We were all routed around in one U-turn chain and sent home. Yes, the moral of the story is to arrive early early early (so early, in fact, that you have plenty of time to tailgate beforehand and enjoy dinner and maybe toss a frisbee around or something) but in this case, it was still enjoyable just to take a drive out for the evening.
We then went to a multicineplex off 495 and caught WALL-E anyway, and I was so happy to see it (I do confess that I was glad we saw it on a large cinema screen with full surround sound and all, as I don't think the drive-in experience would've done the film justice.)
I loved the opening sequence. The film accomplished so much with "silence" though honestly in this case, silence just means "lack of major dialogue". The silence gave such a lonely, empty, atmospheric feel to WALL-E's desolate home and watching him go about his daily work, just as he'd done for years and years and years on end, was astonishing and compelling. In this regard it's really a challenging film to mainstream audiences. You must observe the action and interaction between the robotic characters without the benefit of being spoon-fed expository dialogue and/or wisecracks at every plot point. Gasp! Having to make contextual connections and actually watch the screen! You mean we have to think? I feel bad for those who could not follow the story without their familiar crutch, and thus deemed it "boring". Watching WALL-E's silent film pratfalls and navigating whatever environment he was in could've hardly been boring.
I mean, let's face it, this film could have easily been given dialogue: WALL-E and EVE could have easily been voiced by Big Hollywood Stars and the supporting robots all given wacky voices and silly, stereotyped characterizations (the painter robot with an Outrageous Fronsh Accent! The gay hairdresser robot! The tiny but sassy cleaning robot voiced by Wanda Sykes!) ... but saner heads prevailed, and the film is so much the richer for it.
Compare this to the preview which we saw for "Beverly Hills Chihuahua", a live-action talking animal movie which, on the poster, helpfully tells you that it's pronounced "chee-wa-wa". (Disney did the same thing for Ratatouille, but in this day and age I'd think more Americans would know what a chihuahua was than a French dish with crazy dipthongs and stuff.) During the trailer we saw George Lopez voice the chihuahua and Drew Barrymore voice a fancy handbag dog and, as you can probably guess, a lot of the humor comes from watching a dog say stuff like "Oh no she dint!"
Now I'm not saying that if given the WALL-E treatment, Beverly Hills Chihuahua could become a beautiful atmospheric film and pull the heartstrings and give us more reasons to love robots dogs. It's not the same. And if it did happen, reality would FREAK ME THE HELL OUT.
( And then this brings us to those trying to find Shocking And Horrible complaints... )
So to sum up here, the movie was absolutely beautiful, its story flaws were overshadowed by its atmosphere and characterizations, and I can't find anything to gnash my teeth over because I actually like thinking for myself.
But mad props to the FoxNews commentator who used the phrase "Malthusian influences" in his condemnation of the film, when approximately 95% of his target audience probably don't know who Malthus was. Way to go, Mr. Big Three-Dollar Word Smartypants!
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6:24 am - morning picture time
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| Saturday, July 12th, 2008
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2:59 am
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I've just come back from Ari's and Julia's and Brad's and I forget the other names' housewarming party. I have been playing Rock Band or one of its variants for approximately 12 hours now. I have been drinking for approximately 7 of those hours. It has been a blast.
The party was winding down when two random gentlemen, who'd heard the melodious strains of Bon Jovi or whatnot wafting from the second story, invited themselves up to the party. After taking turns singing Pixies and the Police, they handed me their brown paper bag bottle -- King Cobra malt liquor ("now there's a man who knows his malt liquor" one remarked, though I'd seen the logo on the bottleneck), allowed me an almost ritualistic swig, and then departed in amiable drunken friendship.
Only in Davis Powderhouse Square.
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| Friday, July 11th, 2008
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8:46 pm - it'll be legen--wait for it--dary
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Just got back from playtesting Rock Band 2 over at Harmonix.
(I will break no NDA, so don't ask.)
I can say, however, that the game can be summed up in two words: KICK. ASS. It is going to make a lot of people happy for a lot of different reasons, and everybody who likes any kind of rock music will have at least two or three things to be totally psyched about.
Autumn can't come soon enough.
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| Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
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11:39 pm - i make watch telelevisions
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1. Delta and the Bannermen, a Doctor Who serial from 1987 starring Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Bonnie Langford as Mel, the screamiest companion ever. And you were right, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) stannate. It was pretty awful. Paradise Towers is goofy and bad, and so it gets a pass because you can laugh at it and feel like it's a guilty pleasure. But with this one, the "oh god, that's bad" overwhelmed the "so bad it's good" camp in a serious way. I tried to find things to like about it -- Stubby Kaye was in it, that was cool! But his role is completely useless! He and the guy with the Worst Southern American Accent Ever are part of this C story that contributes nothing to the main adventure at hand!
The girl playing the motorcyclist was rather cute! But... all she did was pine for a boy and ride around on the motorcycle, giving us the Doctor Who equivalent of Rock Climbing. Any time the episode needed padding, they just threw in a few more shots of everybody gaily riding about on their motorcycles. Eventually the group gets too large so they add a car to the parade. How fun! Mel even waves hello to cows from a sidecar. Yes. SHE WAVES HELLO TO COWS. They're hurriedly escaping from vicious, cold-blooded warrior types and seeking a safe spot, riding through the Welsh countryside, and Mel's WAVING HELLO TO FREAKING COWS. She didn't even call them on her side, so I called them from my side, and that means Mel lost all her cows.
But I absolutely lost it when we got to the baby painted green. (For those of you without a shred of context, yes, all this is entirely true, including the green baby. And the Rock Climbing motorcycle riding. DEEP HURTING. DEEEEEP HURTING.)
2. This week's episode of the Venture Bros. Now there's some quality Scooby-Doo style adventuring gone horribly awry. HORRIBLY SEXY AWRY! Was this episode written after six months at sea? My god. It was like Brock fighting Molotov Cocktease times three. I wonder how many concessions Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer had to make to the Cartoon Network Standards & Practices department (or whatever they're called) in order to get this one approved. I wonder how many bits of other episodes they had to rein in to make the deal. Or perhaps they did the ol' trick of including much, much, much more Verboten material to make the stuff they eventually got away with seem tame in comparison. I don't know. There's parts in this episode that you won't be able to unsee. And I suspect the Rule 34 guys are going absolutely apeshit right about now.
Now it's time to pretend to pass out for a few hours. Wish us luck. The heat is oppressively heat-y.
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12:35 am - all things shift
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Production on The Rise of the Repo-Bots, the second RED SHIFT, INTERPLANETARY DO-GOODER audio drama serial is underway. You can't imagine how thrilled this makes me.
(If you're wondering about the first serial, The Terror of Terra-Khan, it's currently in post-production -- yes, still -- and I'll make a big honkin announcement once we begin to distribute the episodes.)
Our first recording session was last Saturday and, after we got the obligatory technical difficulties out of the way, went quite well. We got good takes of almost everything we needed. The downtime during the technical difficulties meant we all got to wander out for some food and mob Spike's for lunch ("Hello, we'll be your lunch rush this afternoon...") and wasn't that an enjoyable treat. For us, at least. The guys at Spike's, who knows how they felt.
We're working with a more piecemeal approach to recording this time around. Individual schedules, other projects and technical limitations being how they are, we just don't have the capability to perform most of our scenes in one (that is, in one take, starting at the beginning and going all the way to the end with all the actors together.) I prefer the in-one approach whenever I can get it, because it can bring with it the kind of spontaneity you get from live performances. Everybody's all together and reacting to one another right there, and the tone and energy grow and change as the actors all work off each other's lines. But honestly, that setup is a rare luxury. It's far easier on a practical level to record individual parts and lines, taking pickups when necessary, and then piece them together all jigsaw-like in post. (For one, you don't have to herd all the cats together in one room. So many cats! So many cat committments!)
You don't get the organic ebb and flow of the scene's energy, but you do get a whole lot of creative control and shape that scene's tone yourself. It can be considered a fair trade-off, and it makes the recording process a lot easier.
For Terra-Khan we recorded at a studio in Cambridge which allowed us to use as many mics as we needed at once, and we set up the entire cast to perform scenes in one. Our new recording setup, which is much more cost-efficient, uses four mics only. I could write scenes for just four characters each (and I have) but it's much more relieving to know I can write a scene with multi-layered dialogue, background chatter, and several minor characters popping in and out, and still be able to get it done with the four mic system and a lot of pickups. And from a sound editing point of view, it's damned thrilling to hear the final result of all those jigsaw pieces put together and not be able to tell where the edits are. The goal, then, is to record piecemeal, but construct the show so that you can't tell it was piecemeal. And we've got the technology and the skills to do that, I think.
The second session will be this Saturday, and I'm looking forward to it. Meanwhile, I spent the bulk of this evening writing six pages of dialogue for the final episode of the serial, and it's gone smoothly. I admit I've overhauled the damn thing more times than I'd have liked, but I've ironed everything out. My last major story problem was trying to integrate an element which we'd had planned since the first story meetings, but its inclusion kept getting shuttled around the story structure and continually put off until absolutely necessary. There was always something more important to focus on. As it turns out, we've now gone and written around the element, and it became clear to me tonight that it's no longer needed. It was a real "Oh, DUH" moment, but it's a moment that was more than welcome. Am I glad not to have that stinkin albatross around anymore!
The new Red Shift website and merchandise mart will be filled out and ready for public perusal quite soon. I consider myself entirely fortunate that there's a team of people who believe in this project and that we're working together to keep this train a-rolling. It just warms the cockles of my heart to know that. Seriously it does. So stop snickering at "cockles."
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| Sunday, July 6th, 2008
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8:57 pm
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Yes, we've had ourselves a finale and it's all over but the crying. BUT WHO'S GOING TO CRY THE MOST? Find out TONIGHT as we watch a spoiler-filled
( DOCTOR WHO AND THE NIGHT OF A THOUSAND COMPANIONS )
Another season down and on we go to the Christmas special, sooner or later. I'm going back now to watch the first Sylvester McCoy season. It's got some of the cheesiest, wackiest serials: Paradise Towers and Delta and the Bannermen are just absolutely nuts, and McCoy played the Doctor in a zany way (he wouldn't turn dark until Ace came aboard) and so I want to see how well I'll tolerate it and if I'll chalk up the cheese to "oh well, it was 1987" or "oh well, I was a kid when they aired" or what. Gain some historical perspective and all that.
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| Friday, July 4th, 2008
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7:43 pm - HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY, ABBIE THE CAT
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The other day I opened Abbie's bag of cat food and watched a grain moth fly out.
"Get it!" I said to His Nibs, but he wasn't going in for it. I looked in the bag and I saw a little grain moth larva all wriggling around indignantly too. This I did not tell Abbie to get. I mean, sure, the extra protein could help the cat some, but what would people say if word got out that I was feeding him moth larvae? If he was eating them of his own volition then that might be all right, but I'm not going to be the one to put them in his bowl.
To solve this problem I went out to the store and bought a new bag of cat food and a giant plastic airtight bin. It is a nice thing to know that the bin contains almost an entire bag of cat food, minus the amount you put in his bowl when you fill it up. Makes thinking easier.
However, we had purchased a boring-looking plastic bin -- clear, so you could see the awesome cat food strata, but boring nonetheless, and I realized I needed to label it lest someone think it was, I don't know, breakfast cereal, and pour themselves a big delicious bowl and munch away before the cat indignantly jumped up and demanded what the hell was going on with his food.
So I made a nice label for the bin. Now everybody will know to steer clear unless they're going to feed the cat! Isn't that helpful? And seeing as how it was the Fourth of July, well, I put a special patriotic slant on it.
Oh, and there's stuff on the side, too. You will note that it is sometimes very hard to draw on somewhat porous construction-like paper with a Sharpie marker. Maybe the next label will be drawn with a rollerball pen, lord love em.
 
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12:37 pm - one of my favorite Kilborn-era running jokes
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All together, now:
Dean Wormer? DEAD!
Marmalard? DEAD!
Jesse Helms...
Those of you who do not live in the United States, be prepared for some gigantic fireworks on your friends list today from your American pals. (Heck, okay, Americans, be prepared too!) I suggest you track the timestamps on people's posts so you can work out a complete chart of who knew and when they found out.
Meanwhile, I won't say nothin' else (other than Happy Birthday, USA!) because I used up enough anger against that bastard ages ago and would like to save any new vitriol for other causes. HOW DARE THEY TAKE AWAY THOSE CRUNCHY MINT M&MS, GODDAMN THEM ALL
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| Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
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11:02 pm - in which we take the long way
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One of the classic film urban legends (or rumors, or perhaps "hopes") is that somewhere in South America, stashed in someone's basement or hiding in a chest in an attic, is a full, uncut version of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. Welles finished his first cut of the film in 1942 while in South America shooting a documentary called It's All True, which itself was devised in an attempt to improve relations between the US and several key Latin American countries. We were in a war, see, and needed all the pals we could get. If we couldn't get pals, we would've settled for good neighbors.
Neither Ambersons nor It's All True turned out the way Welles wanted them to. Higher-ups at RKO, the studio which was to distribute the films, grew seriously unhappy with the way Orson was behaving while down in Brazil. Oh, sure, the guy worked like a madman, but he also played like a madman as well, and his filmmaking approach (progress? what progress? can't you see there are dances to dance, skirts to chase and delicious drinks to enjoy?) had long since ceased to worry the RKO brass. It had begun to piss them off something fierce. At this point in time Welles had only one film to his name. It just so happened to be Citizen Kane, which nearly everybody but William Randolph Hearst had praised, so Welles was under serious scrutiny from a lot of different eyes. His second film would have to surpass Kane in brilliance or else it'd just prove that Orson had gotten lucky the first time around.
The first audience preview of Ambersons was an absolute disaster. The film was previewed second on a double bill. The first film screened was a light-hearted, zippy peppy musical, which was what audiences wanted, especially so soon after Pearl Harbor. By all accounts, they loved it. The Magnificent Ambersons, on the other hand, was a brooding, slow-paced moody drama with (in the original cut) no uplifting ending, and it clocked in at just over two hours. Faced with this ordeal, the audience turned sour, began heckling, and left behind angry survey cards which were the 1940s version of YouTube comments only with just slightly less cussing (and, one presumes, without seventeen comment cards all containing the same line of dialogue with no extra comment.)
RKO knew they had to make drastic cuts to the film. Orson would never approve of their cuts, and they knew it. They also knew they didn't have to worry about that since Welles was completely powerless, being out of the country and without the right of final cut (he'd given it up during contract negotations.)
Welles could make suggestions from afar via telegram and telephone and he did, very much so, but his dispatches often carried no weight. If he had been in Hollywood, or if Robert Wise, the film's actual editor, could have gone to Rio to work with Welles (his trip was denied due to wartime travel restrictions) there's a good chance that the film might not have been butchered as it turned out to be. As it was, Wise edited the film under the guidance of studio executives who disliked Welles. Also involved with the editing process was Welles' own business manager, Jack Moss, but he was completely ineffective in defending the project and upholding what Orson wanted.
The result was a drastically shortened movie with a new, happier ending tacked on. Welles' relations with RKO fell apart. The studio eventually destroyed all the unused footage of Ambersons ("to free up vault space" was the official story, though it doesn't take a tinfoil hat to theorize they'd done it to keep the material out of Welles' hands.)
It's All True suffered disaster after disaster, including the accidental drowning death of an impoverished fisherman whose true story was being recreated for the film. The jangadeiro was one of four who sailed over 1600 miles down the coast of Brazil in order to bring public attention to their way of life, which involved working in a semi-feudal system of dubious legality. In the spirit of the pseudo-documentary, Welles had cast all four of the jangadeiros as themselves. However, as they were filming the re-creation of the dramatic conclusion of their journey, their raft capsized, killing one of the jangadeiros before a rescue crew could swim out to help him. Stop for a moment and boggle at that irony if you'd like; then we'll move on.
RKO quickly cut their losses on the project, which first had its budget slashed before it was eventually cancelled outright. Combined with the well-publicized Ambersons disaster, Orson Welles' reputation as an enfant terrible who couldn't finish a project was amplified and inflated, however justly or unjustly you want to call it.
Stories would later circulate that a print of the Ambersons first cut had been sent to Welles in Brazil, and there would be some folks in Rio who claimed to have seen it. Where that print went, though, nobody knows. It could very well be stashed somewhere. One can hope.
I only write this tonight (wait, was that just a lead-in?) because of an awesome piece of news out of Argentina. What appears to be an original, full print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis has been discovered in Buenos Aires. Lang suffered Hollywood studio butchery similar to Welles' ordeal when his amazing German impressionist masterpiece went over to the States. Executives at Paramount slashed nearly a quarter of the film's content, oversimplifying the story and removing key scenes for American audiences. Lang's original cut was lost in Berlin, and the versions of Metropolis you can get on DVD today will tell you, at certain points, what the next scene in the original narrative was supposed to have been. Even that, however, is based mostly on speculation.
Well, soon we won't need those title cards anymore. The discovered print has been brought to Berlin for restoration (after 80 years in hiding look as good you will not, hmm?) and it's only a matter of time before it's released. This is an amazing find. I cannot wait. Isn't it wonderful? And to think that maybe someday we'll be saying the same thing about The Magnificent Ambersons. Hope springs eternal, cat. Just remember that.
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| Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
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7:05 am - timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly semanticy-wanticy
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Okay, new Who fans, help me out with something which has been bothering me since Saturday night. We call this segment
You keep using that word.
I do not think it means
what you think it means.
( Merriam-Webster sez... )
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| Saturday, June 28th, 2008
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9:12 pm - Doctor Who and the LOOK AT THE SKY
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(oh, don't worry. I ain't spoiling shit.)
SCENE 1
EXT. LONDON - NIGHT
(CHARACTER 1 and CHARACTER 2 are standing around outside. There has been a DISTBURBANCE somewhat resembling an EARTHQUAKE, or at least a TECHNICIAN SHAKING THE CAMERA.)
CHARACTER 1
What was that?
CHARACTER 2
(gazing up in awe and terror)
Look! Look at the sky!
CHARACTER 1
That was like nothing I've ever been through. What happened?!
CHARACTER 2
(continuing to look up in awe and terror)
Character 1, look at the sky!
CHARACTER 1
I'm so scared! What has happened?
CHARACTER 2
(trembling mit der fear)
Look at the sky!
CUT TO:
SCENE 2
INT. ANOTHER PART OF LONDON - NIGHT
(CHARACTER 3 and CHARACTER 4 are experiencing the same CAMERA SHAKING.)
CHARACTER 3
(walking over to the window)
That was so weird!
CHARACTER 4
I hope everyone is all right. What's it like outside?
CHARACTER 3
(gazing out in fear and awe)
Oh my. Character 4. Come see. Come look at the sky.
CHARACTER 4
What is it?
CHARACTER 3
(completely improvising at this point because her portion of the script had mustard stains on it)
My god. Look at the sky.
CHARACTER 4
What? Are we okay? What's going on?
CHARACTER 3
(having received the thumbs-up from Russell T. Davies, continues to improvise)
Look. At. The. Sky.
CHARACTER 4
What's happening?! Tell me!
CUT TO:
SCENE 3
INT. SOMERVILLE, MA - NIGHT
SPATCH
(surprised at finding himself hollering at the TV screen)
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND ALL THAT'S HOLY, JUST DO WHAT SHE SAYS AND LOOK AT THE FUCKING SKY.
CUT TO:
[SCENES 4 and 5 OMITTED - SAME AS THE FIRST TWO, ONLY WITH DIFFERENT CHARACTERS]
CUT TO:
SCENE 6
(Here we have a MONTAGE of the previous EIGHT CHARACTERS all gazing up in AWE and FEAR and WONDER and holy crap I'm gonna WET MYSELF it's so scary. What are they looking at? WHAT DO THEY SEE? OH MY GOD, WHAT DO THEY SEE? The CAMERA slowly PANS UP to reveal the source of their fear... THE COVER OF A BOSTON ALBUM.)
I have to hand it to Russell T. Davies. He's an incredibly talented and sage writer. He has this incredible knack of recognizing formulaic, repetitive situations -- such as, oh, I don't know, people gazing upwards in fear -- and then writing an episode of Doctor Who which features almost nothing but that, for the sole purpose of parodying the formulaic. Where before he would have been happy with just one shot of people out in the street staring up in terror, he now puts in four scenes, chuckling all the livelong day. Where before he'd have just one character comforting another in a moment of uncertainty and impending doom, now he's got no less than three characters comforting three others, often one shot right after the other, right down to the "put right arm around, kiss on forehead" action. One lucky fellow gets to comfort two people at the same time, which would've been surprising except I am rather certain the concept of a threesome is not alien to him.
At any rate, it is perfectly clear to me that Rusty is taking the piss out of his own writing, and going out with a laugh rather than with a rolling of the eyes.
At least, that's what I choose to believe, so don't try and convince me otherwise. I am in heavy denial here.
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2:41 pm - SING-A-LONG TIME
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Turns out Windows XP can run After Dark 4.0 with a tweak or two to the Display Settings applet. (The older modules, unfortunately, won't run in their 16-bit state, so no Sartori, You Bet Your Head or Mowin' Man for me.) Anyway, now that there are toasters once more flying across a monitor near us, we'd like you to please stand now, remove your caps, set your preferred toast settings and face front as we sing the beloved anthem of a generation:Flying out of the sun
The smell of toast is in the air
When there's a job to be done
The Flying Toasters will be there.
And it's flap! Flap! Flap!
Now help is on the way.
This vic'try song they sing:
We pop up to save the day
On mighty Toaster Wings!
In brightest day or After Dark
When times of trouble are at hand
The Flying Toasters set a spark
And hope is blazing 'cross the land!
And it's flap! Flap! Flap!
Salvation from above
A precious gift they bring:
Gleaming Angels of Love
On mi-ghty Toa-ster Wings! As you were, citizens.
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10:59 am - SHTAY A WHILE AND LISHEN
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Well, Blizzard has gone and announced Diablo 3.
The release date has not been set. This is very kind, as they're allowing you time enough to make a stab at finishing all your important plans, settling your existing affairs, telling pets and those close to you that you love them and you'll miss them, you know, that kind of thing.
But until then, you can content yourself with ALL THE CRAZED FRENETIC SPECULATION YOU CAN COME UP WITH. OMG WITCH DOCTORS AND ZOMBIES AND MAYBE THERE'LL BE A GIANT LIGHTNING BOLT IN THE GAME OR SOMETHING I DON'T KNOW I BET YOU GET TO FIGHT DEMONS IN HELL OR MAYBE JUST A DUNGEON.
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| Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
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9:15 pm - oh stop getting so goddamn introspective all the time
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Looks like I've been doing this thing for five years now.
I started the account originally so I could annoy Miss Lynn's LJ and be able to put my name on the comments, such as "DAMN YOUR EYES" or whatever when we conspired to sneak six-packs into really crappy movies. I was unemployed at the time, squirrelled away in a combination hermitage/garrett (depending on the mood) of my own devising, and trying to stay sane by playing video games and chewing my way through box after box of raw pasta. Farfelle can be a lot of fun to crunch when you're crazy.
I did mention I was driving myself only slightly insane back then, didn't I? Of course. You can tell because a month after I started, Cat Town came on the scene.
Well, since then there's been laffs, there's been tears, there's been incomprehensible hollering, there's been cats and towns and meta-meta-meta-webcomics and Alice's Restaurant every Thanksgiving and ALL CAPS and stupid songs and bits and pieces and I kinda grew to like this "Well, why don't you yammer on about yourself for a while?" thing. I found friends from long ago and I found friends I never even knew I had, I discovered a brand-new theater company which quickly became the bestest damned family a hermit could have, I helped start a radio drama group, I found work, I talked about the weirder jobs (one of these days I really oughta finish the Smutmonger and Phonemonkey Diaries and/or reintroduce people to 'em), I suddenly started finding myself quoted in the newspaper, I started a browser flamewar on Slashdot without knowing, I found places to live and people to love and parallelism to use and you were there, and you, and you and you. I do believe life became a hell of a lot better.
I'm not one to say "THIS IS WHY" but boy howdy things might've been ever so slightly different if I hadn't wanted to give Lynn shit for wanting to go see Gigli.
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| Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
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5:30 pm
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First the lightning hit close by, close enough for us to hear the actual bang instead of the delayed report.
Then the water came down as a vicious mist. You couldn't see the individual raindrops. Just a buncha mist, but it was blowing hard down the street.
Then came the hail. Hail! We were just talking about hail yesterday. What common object were these hailstones the size of? Peas. Small hail! All hail the small hail!
Then it just turned to a regular thunderstorm. Well, that's no longer very exciting, is it?
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