Category: …And Little E Makes 3

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Gaming

You are not the ones to make me fly, and therefore are obviously not the ones to take me home

The trip home was fun. My barely-long-enough-to-reach-my-connecting-flight layover in Denver turned into what was nearly an all-night stay. The plane that normally makes the XNA-Denver run and back again was diverted to Colorado Springs due to severe storms…and then vanished off the radar. Well, that’s a good sign. I still don’t know what finally happened with that. Finally, they got us on a plane, some plane, any plane to get us out of there. We went around the aforementioned nasty weather at fairly close range and it was spectacular – moonlight illuminating the tops of the clouds, which were just boiling with lightning. Breathtaking stuff. There was a woman about two seats behind me who didn’t agree, however, though that may or may not have had something to do with how many bloody marys she’d had.

I touched down at XNA at around one in the morning, and was groggy enough that I took my time driving home. Of course the kitties were happy to see me, though I’m worried about Xena – she’s been eating very little, though I don’t know how much of that is the heat and how much of it is her missing her favorite human. I’m worried about her. The baby room painting is coming along nicely, but the rest of the house, to put it as charitably as I can, isn’t. So I’m trying to overcome a bit of mental jet lag and get back to work. … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Home Base ToyBox

Things are going just swimmingly

Swimmy time
A look at our super secret swimming hole. And us in it. (I’m the bald, non-pretty one who isn’t using any kind of flotation device and is therefore barely keeping his head above water in the deep end.)

Little Girl
This is the lifeguard, Little Girl. Sooooo much better than David Hasselhoff. For example: I could never see giving David Hasselhoff scritchies behind the ears. Hell, I couldn’t even see doing that to Pamela Anderson, for that matter. And I don’t think we’ll ever see video of Little Girl sloppily wolfing down cheeseburgers in a drunken stupor either.

Dipstick
This is Dipstick. He’s a much older cat and loves nothing more than to find shady spots…and stay there. He is wise beyond his considerable years.

Oberon and Olivia
Naturally, our own kitties are more than happy for us to come home from the pool.

I spent almost three hours today shooting some video for a Toybox article you’ll see in about a week; it was quite a bit of fun and took quite a bit of setup, but I think you’ll like it when you see it. It got me thinking quite a bit about my evolution from playing with toys as a kid to collecting them as an adult, and I realized that I was much closer to playing with them today than I’d been in a long time – I was just inspired in a kind of “I know that’s not what it looks like on the screen, but what the heck?” kind of way, and had a made-up rationale for why things would be the way I was setting them up instead, and before you know it, scenarios form in my head and I have to remind myself that I’m taking some pictures, not playing with my action figures. I had a long train of thought about the nature of imaginative play, about how much modern toys (especially those attached to TV and movie licenses) are geared more toward re-enactment of specific scenarios than they are to open-ended play, and the thought also occurred that I would need to be accessing my imagination in that same wide-open, no-boundaries space once again, probably sooner than I think, when interact with my son (and play with him) as he grows up. Anyway, not wanting to dump all of the cargo from that train of thought at your station, I arrived at the following summation:

  1. In some ways, I have indeed never grown up.
  2. I think I’m actually happier that way, and may function better that way.

So much of the business I’ve been in all of my adult life has revolved around finding ways to do things, finding ways to make things look a certain way. There are several schools of thought here:

  1. It can’t be done by us with this equipment.
  2. It can be done, but we don’t have the time to do it.
  3. It can be done, we just have to rethink the angle of attack and use what we know about the equipment we’re using to make it happen in a reasonable amount of time and/or money.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am so Mr. #3. And that comes from that spirit of imaginative play. Anyone who’s so locked into one way of thinking that they reflexively fall back on #1 or #2 as an answer without even trying #3 needs to get out of the pool and let someone more playful dive in and make some waves.

My toys are mostly digital now, but damned if I don’t still love my plastic ones too. And if I get to play with both at the same time, even better.

I’ve already gotten one call from the Entertainment Fort Smith print ad for GreenhouseFX.tv, but they wanted me to shoot a wedding…on the last Saturday in July. Eek. Stay tuned for the explanation of why exactly I had to turn them down…because it seems I’m booked.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Cooking With Code Home Base

Remodeling in more ways than one

Tuesday we get a look at the baby once again via ultrasound…supposedly this’ll be the fancy deal where you can basically see what he’s going to look like when he pops out into the world in a couple of months. Of course you know I’m going to post some pictures from that.

In the meantime, baby room work continues, with one of the heaviest pieces of my furniture – a bookshelf that has traveled with me through every move I’ve ever made – now in the game room.

Bookshelf
Thing is…I’m not sure it’s going to go right there. It’s a case where, now that I’ve got it there and have it loaded down with a couple hundred pounds of bound printed material once more, I’m just not sure it’s going to work there. It creates a little “hallway” coming into the game room, which may just be too narrow (especially with the arcade cabinet creating an extra corner to navigate). And the back of it isn’t exactly photogenic. So…it’s still a work in progress. I’ve just got a lot of progress to make in the next few weeks. Really, the important step is getting it out of the bedroom that’s going to become the nursery.

During cleanup, I have found a few treasures that I had declared missing, from the jewel case with my Tron 2.0 discs in it to a VHS copy of MST3K: The Movie signed by Trace Beaulieu:
MST3K The Movie

By the way, the third and final volume of Amazing Stories soundtracks arrived today, and let me tell you, as pricey as these were, it’s so worth it to have the whole set.

Amazing Stories CDs

I’ve been on the lookout for a new WordPress theme for Scribblings, because the current one (“Fishy”) has started doing weird stuff that I’m not too fond of (try paging down and watching the left margin on the various blog entries). The problem here is that, now that WordPress and themes for it are a big deal, some honest-to-God mediocrity is seeping into the whole thing. Themes that just flat-out don’t work as advertised no matter what browser you use to look at them, themes that rely wholesale on brute-force non-compliant HTML code, and the new bane of my existence, “sponsored links themes”. These usually include a set of links toward the bottom of the page – though I’ve started to notice that some theme authors are working up the stones to drop these links near the top – which link to some really spammy stuff: the usual suspects, drugs, highly suspect search engines, and other forms of link-farm bullcrap. The authors of these just about always include something in their terms of use about how you can’t use their themes if you remove those links. Now, part of me wants to just remove the links and see if the authors ever actually even find out and do anything about it, but I’d rather just find a suitable non-“spamsered” theme and try to keep the internet’s barely-functional honor system intact. But it infuriates me to see how much this is happening. I hope that this isn’t just the tip of an iceberg that might see WordPress targeted in much the same way as phpBB is. I reserve a special hatred for spammers in whatever form they take, and theme authors who integrate that stuff into the fabric of their work are spammers, whether they want to think so or not in their little worlds. (Thank God for Weblog Tools Collection, which carefully notes which themes are spamsered; that’s a criterion that themes.wordpress.net desperately needs to add to its search tool.)

Off to bed. I’ve got a date with a baby in the morning.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Home Base Music

Dispatches from the Bizarro World

Jan recently got a call from the hospital to let us know that our evening childbirth classes, which were were signed up to take through July, have been cancelled due to lack of interest. Did people suddenly bring the baby-makin’ to a halt? Can I help? You know where to find me if you need me to repopulate the species in my own image. Seriously, I’m having a hard time buying that – lack of interest!? On the flipside of that, we were directed toward internet videos to replace the classes. This reminds me of one of my all-time favorite off-topic threads at Digital Press, the two best posts of which were as follows:

  1. anyone know a website that explains how to wield a katana? videos/pics whatever, like a Katana Wielding for Dummies type thing.

    thanks..

  2. I like your traditional ideals, learning the subtle beauty of the weapon the same way the samurai masters did a thousand years ago… through pictures… on the internet.

That thread sprang to mind immediately. I know humans have been pumping out babies since day one, without classes, but it’d be nice to have. Until then, I’ll just have to learn myself… through pictures… on the internet. (But when I’m not doing that, my offer of help still stands. Trust me, extinction’s uglier than I am. 😆 )

The summer of swimming continues, and I’ll admit that it’s probably slowing down my work on the baby room. But I’d forgotten how good it feels to just float around (and how much better it feels to put in some actual laps). When you’ve got skin problems like mine, there’s nothing like just being in water up to your ears for a couple of hours. On so many levels, it feels so much better.

Also, last but not least, I just gave Frost*’s cover of ELO’s “Here Is The News” a listen or three, and I’ve officially declared it brilliant. This is how you cover ELO – maintain the strengths of the original, and feel free to rock it the heck out where appropriate.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Funny Stuff Television & Movies

Little Green Man vs. the Man in Black

I don’t get into dream analysis too much, but this one’s funny. I had an utterly bizarre dream last night in which I was with a band that happened to be playing on an overpass to a reasonably large crowd below. Why there was no traffic trying to get across the overpass (or plowing through the reasonably large crowd below), I will never know. When I say I was with the band, I don’t mean I was playing in it – I was just…there. For some reason I was invited to step up to the microphone and sing one little verse of something, and for whatever reason made sense within the internal logic of this strange dream, I chose to sing like Johnny Cash (not something I can do on command, by the way), and sang something like “And now I’m standing on this bridge with some little guy named Earl.” That was my whole contribution to this shindig of the subconscious, from what I can tell. I actually woke up laughing, because even asleep, I thought it was funny as hell. What any of it means on some deeper level, I do not know and cannot even begin to speculate.

This week’s big project is to get the furniture that used to comprise my bedroom out of the baby room – cedar chest, bookshelf, and lots of boxes. To my amazement, my wife has given the thumbs up for me to move the chest into the game room, put a seat cushion on top of it, and wrap 0ne of my Pac-Man bedsheets around it to completely cover it and protect the wood from being damaged. And it’ll be guest perfect seating for playing games or what have you, facing the TV or facing the Avid. There’ll be a bookcase swap with the one that’s been right outside the bathroom since we moved into the house; the smaller one that’s been there for three years will go into the game room. And then the work can begin on painting the baby room, pulling up the carpet and putting some flooring down; originally the plan was to do this throughout the house, but at this rate I’ll be surprised if that gets any further than the baby room, the little hallway-ette outside the baby room/game room area, and at most the living room. We’re just running out of time and out of money.

Little plastic Time LordWith this past weekend’s episode of Doctor Who having shown us real live Time Lords (in a flashback), decked out in old-school, Tom-Baker-era Time Lord robes and headgear, I’m itching to get back to an idea that I’ve had since last year, which is basically to assemble the equivalent of these “catch-up specials” shown for Lost, Stargate or Galactica that lay out The Mythology So Far. Except that this would have to be structured a bit differently, since you’re dealing not with a couple of seasons, not with 10 seasons, but with a grand total of about 30 years of story (with the new series liberally grabbing storylines from the vaults of Virgin Publishing, Big Finish and whatnot, I’m not sure it even pays to try to include anything but the TV series there). Clips galore and music stretching from Tristram Cary to Murray Gold, all in brief segments outlining the history of such concepts as the TARDIS, the Time Lords, the Doctor’s refugee status, the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, regeneration, UNIT, companions, and so forth, letting the clips speak for themselves and not leaning on a narrator to tell the story, just tying it all together.

And what would I do with this monster? I have no idea. Put it on the site? Maybe, but I might hear the BBC calling “Exterminate!” if I did that. Put it on YouTube? I’d rather not if I could help it, as I’m just not that crazy about YouTube, and we’re talking about something that would more or less be designed to be as long as an episode of the current series (~42 minutes). Try to see if Sci-Fi or BBC America or the BBC itself would want this as a video for their site(s)? Hey, that might not be a bad idea – and then they could do the heavy lifting on clearances for clips, music rights, and so on. (Ha! Good luck!) Why spend the time on it? Why, just to see if I can pull it off, and to keep myself in practice too. Why not? And maybe, just maybe, I might just convince my wife at some vague unspecified future juncture that it’s worth it to watch the original series. But the Time Lords’ appearance, in their vintage ’60s and ’70s duds, convinced me that this is something that can be done, and it can all be tied together. By some little guy named Earl.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Gaming Music

Chillin’ like Obi

Here’s Oberon, chillin’ in my wife’s portable cooler bag:
CHILL, MAN 😆

So apparently the results of yesterday’s listening were as followed: almost no movement at all for the whole Carl Stalling Looney Toons music CD, but switch over to the Moody Blues, and the little guy started kicking. A lot. Whether this means “more cartoon music” or “more Moody Blues” or “make with the Katamari music”, there’s no telling.

In other news, I’m trying to round up a raiding party of folks from the Digital Press and Retroputing forums to storm the castl…erm, I mean, visit 1984 Arcade in Springfield, MO, on July 11th or 12th. (Leaning toward the 11th for a variety of reasons.) I’ve been wanting to go there since last year, but Rob’s recent visit has me positively salivating to go there now. In a way, this is going to be my “last fling” before I have to start preparing for baby on an almost full time basis. And if the kiddo likes these old games as much as I do, I’ll bet there’s another visit to 1984 down the road.

I wonder if they have a TV ad? 😉 … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Music

Evan’s wittle wistening womb

We decided to start giving little E a bit of listening time while he’s still swimmin’ around without a care in the world. This is what we’ve started him off with today:

  1. Days Of Future Passed – Moody Blues
  2. Eldorado – ELO
  3. True Colours – Split Enz
  4. The Carl Stalling Project Volume 1: Music From Warner Bros. Cartoons 1936-1958
  5. Katamari Fortissimo Damacy
  6. Reckless Nights & Turkish Twilights – Raymond Scott

Hey, he’s gonna be hanging out with the old man listening to this stuff all the time anyway. Might as well get a little bit of pre-programming done. (How his mother feels about listening to this stuff – and keep in mind, my wife (A) is under the impression that I don’t listen to anything that isn’t either instrumental or somehow related to the Beatles, and (B) doesn’t like most of my listening choices anyway – I’ll find out some unspecified future date. Probably quite loudly, I suspect.)

My criteria for this first round was: happy, bouncy stuff with some rhythm. Sure, rapidly changing rhythm, in the case of Stalling, but stuff with a clear rhythm. I’ve got all three volumes of Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds For Baby (yes, the ones packaged like a 1950s Gerber ad in a CD case with the subtitle “Your Infant’s Friend In Sound”), but those’ll drive mama crazy faster than the whole Katamari CD.

It’s probably safe to expect a seismic shift in what kind of music gets reviewed in the music section here late this year. 😆 We’ll see how long it takes Evan to figure out that the Enz’s “Nobody Takes Me Seriously” is his daddy’s theme song.

If you’ll excuse me now, I’m gonna go swim around without a care in the world.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Home Base Serious Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines ToyBox

TGIF x 10,000

Thank God for Fridays. And thank God that this is one of ’em. ‘Nuff said.

I’ve been meaning to post a small version of the print ad for GreenhouseFX.tv that I prepared to run in the July bridal issue of Entertainment Fort Smith. I just keep letting it slip my mind. I thought the way it was worded kind of cleverly gets around whether or not I’d be shooting video or just editing it. With Evan at T minus 86 days and counting from liftoff, I’m hoping the message comes across that I’m doing post production primarily, without that seeming like something that would count points off.

It’s rainy today, and rainy = no swimmy. And no swimmy = no happy. Maybe that’s stretching it a little bit, but I’ve really gotten to enjoy what has become the daily swim. Even if the skeeters made a buffet line out of me yesterday while my head was poking out of the water. I don’t “dunk” well in swimming pools – I can’t stand chlorine getting into my eyes – but I dunked several times yesterday.

I’ve had the misfortune this week of watching a guy I used to work with take a very public fall from grace. I didn’t work with him very long before I left the TV station, but he always struck me as a pefectly nice guy. Oddly enough, he is the second former co-worker of mine about whom something like this has come to light (the other was someone I worked with at Fox over 10 years ago), and it’s still incredibly creepy. There was absolutely no indication of anything like this from working with the guy day in and day out. It’s bad news on multiple levels – I have no wish to see the place I used to work for take this kind of a black eye, and this was the first hire for Drew after he took over as chief meteorologist. (I’m pretty sure Drew had no idea about any of this either. At least not during the hiring/auditioning process.) In short, it doesn’t make anybody look good. Dude…get some help. Please. Before you wind up like my other former co-worker who wound up with actual molestation charges and not just being a peeping tom.

The foot that I’m staying off of is still pretty slow going. Missing a day of swimming (I know, bad topic to mention after the previous paragraph…) isn’t going to help it any. There’s just a zen state that I’m able to find in the water that I think has been missing from my life for a decade or so, and I don’t seem to find it anywhere else. My wife has a hard time getting me to vacate the pool. I’ve found myself wondering lately if this site would even exist in anything resembling its current form if I’d had a swimming hole to devote this kind of time to all these years. I wonder what kind of shape I would be in. Relative weightlessness = bliss. Especially for a fat guy like me. But even then I’m trying to address that a bit – I try to do some actual laps back and forth, instead of just floating around.

And now, a Public Plea for Help: sometime back in ubikuberalles’ Livejournal, he mentioned finding the titanium collection Classic Galactica vehicles. Now assuming that all of this had happened before and all of it would happen again, I went looking for them locally, to no avail. If anyone spots these, please, please, please let me know about it, prices included. I’m not sure which ships they’ve making from the original series in that scale, but I’m after the Viper, the Cylon raider, and good ol’ clunky Galactica herself. If you can get these where you are, let me know – I can paypal you or something, or come up with some kinda trade. If anyone can finagle that, that’s very likely my last toy purchase before the baby gets here.

Speaking of the boy, I’ve been feeling him kick on a pretty regular basis here of late. I’ll put my head up to my wife’s belly and talk to him, and then PTHOOK!, right in my ear. He’s already kickin’ the old man in the head. This bodes well. 😆… Read more