Voices

Evil Bad Person is running from Thor.

"Stop!" yells the mighty Thor.

Evil Bad Person does not stop.

Thor's eyes narrow and a small smile touches his lips before he says softly, "Hammer time."

At his recent keynote speech at the New York Television Festival, former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek.

He described how the writers would just insert "tech" into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.

"It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories," Moore said. "It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we'd just write 'tech' in the script. You know, Picard would say 'Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.' I'm serious. If you look at those scripts, you'll see that."

-- From scifiwire.com

Kung fu movie post!

I was finally able to pick up a copy of The Banquet as a domestic dvd release. Lesley and I loved it when we saw it at SIFF last year. For some reason, they changed the U.S. title to Legend of the Black Scorpion, which is extremely dumb, but it's still an awesome movie, so, yeah. Whatever.

I'm still waiting to be able to pick up A Battle of Wits as well.

Next Friday is the theatrical release of The Forbidden Kingdom with Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and some American kid. The Friday night movie group will be seeing it, and I truly hope it delivers. Anyone out there want to come with us?

My copy of Primetime Adventures arrived yesterday. I've been hearing good things about this game for a while now, but it's never been available at any of the shops I buy my games at, and it's taken me up until now to actually get it into my head to sit down and order it online. I finished Covert Generation today at lunch, so I'm trying to decide whether PTA or Don't Rest Your Head will be next, after I finish Beast Hunters.

I also received my dvd of Afro-Punk, a documentary about race identity within the punk scene. It was directed/shot/edit by James Spooner, and I was never able to make it to one of the screenings that he held around the country, so I'm very excited to finally be able to watch it on dvd. I think it will be an extremely interesting counter-point to American Hardcore, which I watched just a couple of weeks ago.

This weekend has been great so far.

Last night, lesleymac and I went over to hansandersen's place, and he ran a game of Dogs in the Vineyard for us (see my earlier review of the game here: http://amnesiack.livejournal.com/97780.html).

The game was fantastic. It really was everything I hoped it to be, and maybe even a bit more. The system is fun, with a neat strategic game-within-a-game setup, but at the same time, it completely gets out of your way and lets really neat roleplaying moments happen. Two highlights for me:

1) My insecure, non-confrontational character being the first to draw a gun, without even me expecting it to happen. It came completely out of nowhere, but it just felt like the right thing to do at the time, and that one action shaped a huge portion of the rest of game after that.

2) Being put in a situation where a man's life was literally in my character's hands, having to decide whether he would live or die, and having to take several minutes internally debating before I could actually come to a decision.

From what I hear, these sorts of situations are common in Dogs.

Tonight, darklingrose, covenantscave, lesleymac, and I went to the second annual Science Fiction Short Film Festival. It was a lot of fun again this year, with some really good films (particularly in the second half), though overall the quality of the movies was a bit lower than last year.

Also, I played a bunch of Final Fantasy XII today. Booyah.

I waited at the bus stop for 50 minutes this morning, and my bus didn't come, so I'm working from home today.

I gifted two friends with awesome movie viewings yesterday. Jason and I watched Shaun of the Dead, my dozenth time or so, his first. In the evening, Lesley stopped by for a bit, and since she hadn't yet watched the copy of Kamikaze Girls that she had borrowed from Jason, we ended up watching my copy instead.

Okay, back to work.

I manipulated my contact lense-changing schedule so I could put in a fresh pair today, so that when I see Pan's Labyrinth tonight, I will see with eyes unclouded.

Also, I just realized that I don't have to work on Monday. ROCK!

Jason and I saw Curse of the Golden Flower last night at the Neptune. I would put it among the "must see" movies for fans of Asian movies/cultures. The costumes and sets are elaborate and beautiful. Chow Yun Fat dominates every scene he is in, often through facial expressions alone. It's definitely not an action movie, but the action that's there is breathtaking. The movie largely revolves around the personal and political intrigues of the royal family (the Emperor, his consort, and his three sons). Of course, it being a Chinese historical drama, a good portion of the characters are dead by the end, and the resolution (while very final and full of closure) is not what western audiences would consider "happy." If you can deal with that, though, I highly recommend it.

I got up an hour earlier than usual this morning so that I could go to the downtown Group Health (my HMO) facility to get a flu shot at 8 am. I told my manager I might be late getting into work this morning (I normally arrive at about 8:45) because I had no idea how long getting the flu shot would take. As it turns out, I got to Group Health at 7:50, and they were already open. The whole shebang (paperwork, the shot itself, etc.) took less than 5 minutes. I stopped and got a breakfast sandwich at Specialties Bakery (which was awesome), and I still got to work thirty minutes earlier than I usually do. The flu shot itself hurt a little more while being administered than I remember as being normal, but there has been absolutely no soreness since, so I'm okay with the trade-off.

The Macbook is working out really well. I've gotten the hang of most of the little OS X oddities that I wasn't used to before, and it's nice to be able to hang out in the living room with David and Dawn in the evening and actually still do things on the computer at the same time. I ended up ordering the Sumo Cases Macbook sleeve. I never really decided which one I liked best of the several different sleeves I was looking at, so the deciding factor ended up being that I could get the Sumo through Amazon, where I had a gift certificate from my birthday.

Of course, this means I won't be using the gift certificate to purchase the new ultra-remastered, bit-rate-so-high-we-broke-it-up-into-two-disks edition of Seven Samurai, but such is life, I suppose.

Life continues and things occur. Most of them are boring are to read about.

Saturday night I wrangled together a significant portion of my local friends for a three week late birthday celebration. We had dinner at the Capitol Hill Tea Pot Vegetarian House, a vegan Chinese food restaurant that specializes in Buddhist-style fake meat cooking. Though the restaurant didn't seem quite as prepared for us as it should have been (considering I had made a reservation for 22 people a week and a half in advance, and we only actually had 19 people come), the food and company were fantastic, and I was glad I had done it. Thanks to everyone who came!

Earlier on Saturday, Lesley joined as the new player in our bi-weekly Exalted game, re-completing our circle after the loss of Jesse, whose new responsibilities as full-time bus driver and human spawn generator have forced him to cut down on his gaming activities. This is Lesley's first tabletop rpg; she's doing really well with it so far, though we have to work at times not to overshadow her character, simply because the rest of us are used to diving in, taking charge, and expecting everyone else to do likewise.

Neil Gaiman's new short story collection Fragile Things hit last week. I picked it up along with my copy of the new Compass of Celestial Directions Volume 1: The Blessed Isle at The Dreaming on Friday. I started the first story on the bus this morning; it combines Sherlock Holmes and the Lovecraft Mythos and promises to be irrevocably awesome (in addition to reminding me a great deal of our bi-weekly Adventure! game).

Saturday night my Microsoft ergonomic keyboard (one of the really old-school off-white models with no padding or special features) stopped working properly. I attempted to take it apart and fix it, which I think only exacerbated the problem. Of course, I've been using the keyboard for 8 years, so it's not a terribly surprising occurence. So, on Sunday, I bought a new Microsoft ergonomic keyboard, only this one does have padding and weird extra buttons (which I thought would be worthless, but I'm actually enjoying them). Of course, since I entered Best Buy, I had to also look at other things, and I ended up buying volume two of Basilisk, Iron Monkey, and Kung Fu Hustle. I'm such a sucker.