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Television & Movies Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Brain jumble

WASSUP!Hello blog, nice to see ya, it’s been a long time, you’re just as lovely as you used to be…

Well, okay, it’s been maybe all of three days, but that’s a three-day break in my effort to blog every day, which I’d been managing to do somewhat successfully since mid-April or so. Now, I’m not sure that every post could lay claim to being something substantive and worth tuning in for (good grief, did I just say “tuning in”?), but it was sort of a discipline thing: making damn sure I wrote something every day. And I did… for about two months.

Frankly, I’m still a little bit brain-lagged from OVGE, which sounds kind of improbable, but I haven’t been sitting idle. I took 15 copies of VWORP!1 to OVGE and came back with 11. Not too bad since it was anything but a sci-fi convention (though the gigantic display of Star Trek games and the table full of mouth-wateringly rare Firefly memorabilia helped to blur the line a bit). So I had a moment of crazy and thought: hey, what if Tulsa Trek Expo isn’t the only sci-fi convention I could hit with this book? A visit to a really handy site called the Southern Fandom Resource Guide revealed that there were two sci-fi conventions, in August, practically in my back yard.

As a result, I can safely announce that there’ll be a table for theLogBook.com at GlitchCon 2012 in Bentonville, Arkansas, August 3rd, 4th and 5th – the first showing at a sci-fi convention for the site or its owner. (I know that sounds terribly unlikely, but it’s true: I’ve never been to a sci-fi or general-geek-audience convention. You’d think I would’ve been all over this sort of thing, but I’ve never been to one. It’s almost a pity that I’ll be stuck behind the table for the whole thing.) Since it’s kind of an all-interests geek gathering – bliss! – I’ll have both VWORP!1 and the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVDs, since I’ll be dealing with a whole new audience. I’m just a little bit excited about it.

There’s another convention two weeks later in Fort Smith that I’m less sure about – the lack of response I’ve gotten from them is a little too eerily reminiscent of my experience with the Trek convention in Tulsa. It seems a bit silly to miss a convention in the town where I grew up, but much like Tulsa, I can’t procure a table if they won’t even talk to me.

Other things worth a mention…

HHGHitchhiker’s Guide: The Live Radio Show. I can’t figure out if this is an awesome idea or ghoulishly exploitative. Honestly, I’m coming down on the “awesome” side of the fence, simply because the returning original cast members all seem to have a long-standing love of the material, and I’ve never once heard any of them complain about how the Hitchhiker’s Guide association was going to lead to typecasting. If anything, Simon Jones has spent so much of his career in a bathrobe (sorry, Brits: dressing gown) that he seems to relish it almost too much. I also don’t begrudge the Adams estate for finding new ways to repurpose and cash in, not one bit. I have yet to see any of the posthumous projects damage the story or Adams’ legacy*, so… when’s the American leg of this tour?

Days of Thunder. It’s bad enough going up against Miami, but going up against Miami and the refs? Sorry, OKC. Give it another shot next year. Getting into the finals is nothing to sneeze at.

Slim notsogoodbody. Obi is going to the vet today. He’s recently been losing weight, muscle tone and hair – the doofus cat is many things, but he should not be going bald, that’s my job. Thyroid issue? Food allergy? Parasite? Finally became too stupid to remember to eat? Whatever it is, I hope the big dumb cat errs on the side of cheap maladies. We need him around, but I’m worried that an expensive vet bill could be the other shoe that tap dances on our heads.

I’ll try to get back to routine blogging, but as you can see, I’ve had my hands just a little bit full.

* any more than “Mostly Harmless” already did.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Television & Movies

Patience, my young padawan

It took a while, but Little E finally watched Star Wars all the way through over the weekend, over a meal of a homemade cheeseburger and some fries. He’s about the same age I was when I first saw it: four-going-on-five.

He now “gets” what’s up with his two lightsaber flashlights and wants to play Star Wars with me all the time. For unspecified reasons that will become clear to him later, I’ve always got the one with the red lights. (Spoilers, sweetie.)

One thing does seem to have struck a chord with him, though (literally): he loved the music. At naptime on Sunday, he curled up next to his mother and asked her to hum Star Wars music to him. She found this a daunting request. Now, I could go into how silly it is for a former music major and a lifelong Star Wars fan to not know the best-selling soundtrack of all time backward and forward (who’s the music major here?), but I’ll spare her the embarrassment. (Oh… wait. There was probably a more graceful way to mention that.)

He asked me on Monday night, “Dad, do you have any Star Wars music?”

Who, moi? A guy who can’t read sheet music to save his life but still geeks out over what the woodwind section is doing at any given moment in any given soundtrack?

Why… yes. Yes I do. My dear boy, I thought you’d never ask.

I have a feeling my room is going to suddenly be a lot more interesting to him.

Artoo Detoo, where are you?Read more

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Television & Movies

It is done

VWORP!1It only took about four years (during which I’ve alternated between unemployment and nutty flip-flopping shifts, homeschooling and the boy being in day care full-time, madness, sadness, badness and blandness), but… it’s finally done.

It’ll be available at OVGE in June. I’ll have a very limited number of copies at the table. You’ll be able to get it on Lulu.com too. Anything beyond that – other conventions, signings, and so on – I have yet to nail down.

The book’s about Doctor Who, in case you hadn’t figured that bit out. This volume covers the television episodes from 1963 through the 2011 Christmas special. And it just covers Doctor Who – the spinoffs and audios are covered in the next volume, but that’s not due out until the end of 2013 (the second volume will also cover the 50th anniversary season). It’s an 8.5″ x 11″ trade paperback, over 350 pages long, and it’s not all episode guide – there are occasionally little essay pieces that don’t fit into a discussion of any particular story, season or “era.” It’s also not a straight copy of stuff from the web site – a lot of it has been significantly edited or just rewritten from the ground up. … Read more

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Television & Movies

Still the best

Babylon 5I wish to report a troubling finding: for me, watching an episode of Babylon 5 is like opening a bag of potato chips with the mission statement of eating only the first potato chip and then sealing that bag up. It simply does not work that way. The next morning I wake up with an empty bag of potato chips, with a Vorlon sleeping next to me.

It’s still the best science fiction series that American television has turned out since the original Star Trek.

Textbook cryptic
“The purpose of this meeting is to determine how best to completely f*** with everyone’s heads.” “Yes.Read more

Categories
Gaming Television & Movies

Making the papers

The Lawgiver reads the paperI recently dug up something from my past, just for laughs, to post on Facebook – namely, a newspaper article from over 10 years ago in which I’d been quoted. It took a bit of Googling to find the thing, and then I thought… why not save myself the trouble of looking this stuff up later if I need to?

So I’ve created this page to chronicle such things. Really more for my own amusement than anything else. Hopefully everyone else gets a chuckle out of it.… Read more

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Funny Stuff Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines

TURN IT UP TO 11!

Part of my job at work is to make sure that there’s closed captioning on all of our programming. Airing something without captioning can net a heavy fine, and would probably get me fired if I wasn’t already staring down the barrel of being laid off in a couple of months when the operations center moves up north.

But sometimes, it would help, it really would… if the people who type in the captioning, even in an unpredictable live TV environment… would pay attention to what the hell they’re typing.Read more

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Television & Movies

Exterminate the sheep!

Little E and I have been watching Shaun The Sheep quite a bit. For those not in the know, it’s an amusing series of short (~7 minutes) stop-motion animated funnies from Aardman, the UK studio behind Wallace & Gromit, about a herd of sheep whose fondest wish seems to be to share in the creature comforts of their human owner, despite the best efforts of his sheep-herding dog. Shaun is the cleverest of the sheep and hatches schemes that lead to hilarity, etc. etc. In one of the shows we saw tonight, the sheep set up a surprise costume party at the man’s house, and they themselves were the guests. See if you spot something unusual in the screen shots below. … Read more