August 2004 Archives
Jackie got me us Invader ZIM - Progressive Stupidity (Vol. 2) this weekend.
What did I do this weekend? Umm...
Anyway, the unaired episodes of ZIM (collected in the third DVD "Horrible Holiday CHeer") comes out October 12th. Mark your calendars of DOOM.
EpisodeList.com -- pretty darn handy geektool, all things considered.
Cake Delivered To Serenity Movie Set Monday 23rd 2004 - News
The yellow butter cake is laced with Frangelico with freshly roasted hazelnuts in a hazelnut Italian buttercream & a rich chocolate mousse icing.
I think my BP went up just reading about it.
Okay, I've finally gotten a chance to sit still for a second and talk about the concert we went to on Monday. Starting from the top:
Charlotte Martin: if you've ever thought it would be kind of cool to be a Tori Amos fan but ultimately couldn't handle the stress, allow me to present Charlotte Martin who gives you great piano and voice without the vaguely off-putting "I see deep people" vibe. Call it Amos-style music from someone with whom it'd be a lot more fun to hang out over margaritas.
Her voice fantastic, versatile, clear, and brilliant (for lack of better and more gushing adjectives). Her piano playing is also amazing - alternatively forceful and dark (most impressive) or ethereal and light.
And... the rest of the band? Hardly. Just voice and piano -- there are worse things. In retrospect, I would happily plunk down the concert ticket cost just to see her perform a full set. I recommend buying the album if any of the above raving sounds interesting, because you'll probably enjoy it, but I even more heartily advise listening to her live, if you have the means. In fact, my only complaint with the studio album (recently released from RCA) is that it's is very... well, it's very clean (no between-track chit-chat that might have helped capture the singer's personality). Simply, it lacks some of the fun and fire of the live performance.
Especially the fun: Martin interrupts her own songs to chat with the audience and is generally open, amusing, smart, self-deprecating, and witty, and that doesn't capture the kind of life she brings to the songs themselves; you leave afterwards really liking this girl -- yes, wishing her success and all of that smaltzy stuff, but most importantly checking the next time she'll be in town (she's visited Denver three times in the last four months and will be back 'soonish' as part of the "Vaginas Vote" tour).
From Comics Continuum:
Amy Acker, best known as Fred on The WB's Angel, is providing a guest-voice for an upcoming episode of Justice League Unlimited.
If all you know of Amy Acker is "Fred", you'll find this vocal casting odd, but if you throw in Ilyria, it's a dead cinch.
The man who once was one of the biggest rock stars in the world saw years ago that the music industry couldn't keep doing business the way it had, so he went directly to his fans online.Halfway through the most successful tour of 2004, in a summer when almost every other tour is tanking, Prince's concerts are a virtual coast-to-coast sellout, breaking records in major cities. One Pepsi Center show next week is sold out, and the other is close to it.
As a long-time Prince fan, I find this whole article (a) vastly entertaining (b) entirely in keeping with the personality that I became familiar with back in the 80's.
Wonder if I can swing tickets for the show at the Pepsi center. Hmm...
The original plan:
Spend an hour or so on Sunday morning looking up fan-created source material from the Microprose "X-Com: UFO Defense" game, due to a conversation I had this weekend. Use this material for an idea I have.
The actual result:
Find out, while digging around on the main fan site, that someone finally came up with a simple little file that you can use to run the game fairly reliably on modern machines (previously, anything faster than a slow pentium 1 running Win98 was impossible). Show to Jackie. Utterly blow off everything else for the rest of the day to play the best computer game EVAH.
The Ascendance of Firefly, a good review of the show from a relative newcomer, discussing what really makes the show work.
To me, Firefly is primarily an example of what happens when a talented group of people come together and give their best to a project which is itself led by someone talented giving his best.
Nothing shocking or new for old-times to the Whedon-verse, but well-written and focused on drawing in new fans regardless. Might be a good article to point doubting new-comers toward (if you don't have time to force-feed them an episode of the show itself, which is usually all it takes).
The story itself is engaging, and doesn’t allow the futuristic backdrop to rob it of a plausible storyline. It is not a prerequisite to have enjoyed Sci-Fi previously — this isn’t traditional Sci-Fi.
The following is dramatization of real events:
"Hey, Mo, I know you were just planning to sit this one out -- I mean, you competed in the preliminaries, sure, but you never intended or planned to be one of the only three gymnasts the US put up on this, the most terrifying apparatus, for the finals... and I know you've already done so much just to get here; what with sleeping on the floor of an unfurnished apartment and working pizza delivery just to pay for everything, and I know you've already done a lot for us tonight on the vault..."But we've got this injury, y'see. Can you come in with no warm-up at all, with no warning, using a beam routine that has a 9.8 cap on it to begin with, and give us something at least close to a 9.5, maybe a 9.4... y'know, something that can keep us in the running?
"You can?"
I'd say that makes you a damn hero.
One writer visits the set of Serenity:
The sets were full of intriguing details that would likely never be noticed in the finished film.One whisky bottle on the "bar" set, for example, had this label: 'Established 2349. Earth That Was. Old Earth Style Kentucky Bourbon.'
It was worth reading just for that bit.
Grainy and pretty horrible quality, but since this is literally the only copy of the trailer to make it out of Comic-Con alive, you'll just have to deal.
Originally posted AVI file is here.
MPG version here.
I'd host it myself except something weird happens when you download big zip files from my server -- they seem to become... not... zip files.
Dear George Lucas,Watch AVP. From that, learn the right way to 'foreshadow' events in 'later' movies that you've already filmed; you're doing it wrong.
A coworker won some free tickets to a Thursday night screening of AVP, couldn't go, and gave me the tickets. I wasn't actually planning on going to the film in theatres, but hey, free tickets.
Very very glad I went (with Dave, which Jackie arranged by... well, Dave retells it all over here).
Might even go again. It was fun.
I've always enjoyed the Alien movie franchise in all of it's incarnations -- it's the sort of thing that just suits me, I guess. I think that AVP makes a fine addition to the list, being much more 'fun' than Alien3, with a better ending than Alien Ressurection (though I like that movie's first 2/3rds perhaps a bit better), and with some really great homages to Alien, Aliens, and both Predator movies.
I went in with only moderate to low expectations, having no real interest in the concept for the movie and left feeling like I'd had a good time.
Very very vague spoilerishness ahead.
Missed the BNL Concert at Red Rocks, or maybe one in your own area of the country?
Want to hear the concert anyway? No problem, you can download it here.
Welcome to the BNL bootleg site! We want everyone to have access to as much BNL material as possible, so now we are recording shows from Barenaked Ladies concerts for you to download as Mp3's or to purchase as CD's. All download files can be burned to disc, played on your computer or transferred to portable players or played on your stereos. Each show also comes with printable artwork!This is where you can come to download live Ladies' shows within a few days of the concert or purchase CD's.
You can even buy a download coupon at the show... I saw the sign when I was there.
This strikes me as absolutely brilliant. I love BNL, I love them in concert, and this lets me have as many BNL albums as I could ever possibly want.
Do any other bands do this? If so, who? If not, why?
Brilliant.
During the Serenity Panel, Joss asked his own questions of the actors, one of which was "what are you doing next?"
Many amusing answers revolving around Serenity spin-offs and homelessness followed, but Ron Glass (the last to answer) set everyone a bit back on their heels by announcing that he had recently (would have been two days before the panel) accepted a position as the National Campaign Chairperson for the Evansville African American Museum.
To which Joss commented, "One thing I love about Ron is how he can make everyone else look really shallow."
