Last night I had a dream about an ex-girlfriend, where we met up somewhere to go do something together. We started having one of those awkward, razor's-edge conversations that I tend to have with just about anybody that I once shared an almost painful level of closeness with, but now have no real intimacy with at all. While we were having this conversation, we also started having sex. It was strange and obligatory-feeling, and sort of interesting in the way the power dynamic kept ebbing and flowing back and forth, but mostly because we just kept having our conversation throughout the sex, as though we were just sharing a cup of tea or something. I've heard it said that sex scenes in dreams are really just subconscious shorthand for a desire for greater intimacy with the partner in question, which doesn't exactly explain why I haven't been dream-shagging every woman, man, and inanimate object that has had the misfortune to traipse through my unconscious for the past couple of months. But then again, Freud did enough cocaine to kill a small horse, and I definitely sublimate my intimacy anxieties in other ways.

Today was a really rough day on the job. Nothing particularly bad happened; it was just hard. I was still phenomenally wiped out from the illness, and I had a bunch of things left over from yesterday that needed doing, and nothing was really working properly - technical glitches and last-minute errors and emergency fixes, and none of it particularly satisfying so much as shell-shocky, like walking a minefield. I got in early, stayed late, went and coughed out a Mamo, That part was fun at least, but I wasn't two steps into my bedroom before I noticed just how very tired I was, and somewhat depressed.

Posted by tederick at 9:13 PM in dreams & j-o-b
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Posted by tederick at 6:56 PM in movies
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I woke up this morning and went to my computer as usual... and promptly crashed back onto my bed, overcome by vast nausea-waves. I had spent most of the night wrapped up in a completely indescribable fever-dream involving the tripods from War of the Worlds, and I figured I'd be better by morning, but no such. I crawled in to work (there were a couple of time-sensitive items that I needed to get done before tomorrow) and then left at 11:00 to come home and pass out, which I promptly did.

I'm feeling better now; I think the worst of this (whatever this is) was yesterday and that today's response was largely just a full wiped-out-itude. I'm pissed at myself for having to ditch work - I always hate failing a responsibility, even on a minor level. This, I'm sure, is either latant Protestant work-ethic bullshit or the labour-happy dogma of a corrupt capitalist culture, but whatever.

Posted by tederick at 3:45 PM in j-o-b
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Something knocked me on my ass today. Not sure what but by 1:00 I was having trouble standing without enormous waves of nausea. I'm better now - and it's reportedly nothing compared to what my sister's been going through - and I managed to croak out a podcast. It's all about Oscar, because fuck me sideways, it's damn near March. Where the funk is this year going?

Click here to download the show.

Or subscribe to me in iTunes - that's always fun.

I do not like Ricky Gervais, and I do not plan to.

Posted by tederick at 9:01 PM in podcastery
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It might be the lowliest of the X-books, but there's little denying that New X-Men #23 pretty much nailed why Decimation is a good idea.

(For everyone except Chad: Decimation is a new cross-title "crisis" in the Marvel universe, wherein all but 198 mutants lost their powers overnight. The idea, generally, was to make being a mutant exceptionally rare again, and thereby exceptionally dangerous and isolating.)

After a dumbass run-and-jump story with the X-kids jockeying for position in front of a disapproving Ms. Frost, the last few pages of the book contained a truly chilling panel-by-panel parallel sequence between the auditorium at the Xavier school - all but empty - and a Stryker rally for the faithful, teaming with tens of thousands of people. It was well written, well drawn, well inked, and genuinely fucking creepy, and I never tire of Emma's speechifying about how hard it is to be a mutant. Those three pages sold the entire notion for me. I'm in.

Posted by tederick at 6:29 PM in comix
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Fuck them in their tiny, selfish, sexist assholes.

Avoid unwanted pregnancy: enjoy anal sex in South Dakota today. (Until they make that illegal, too.)

While we're on the subject, "sodomy" (never has there been a more laughably repressed word) is illegal in the following American states: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Misouri, North Carolina (damn, does that mean Hi Mom! is guilty of showing a snuff film?!), Texas, Utah, and Virginia.

Fuck Florida. Fuck Idaho. Fuck Kansas. Fuck Louisiana. Fuck Michigan. Fuck Mississippi. Fuck Misouri. Fuck North Carolina. Fuck Texas. Fuck Utah, and most of all, fuck Virginia. But save a special place in the Hell of your fuckhole hearts for Alabama, where not only can you not have butt-love, but they have that no-sex-toys law, too.... which would make what I did this morning good for a trip to the goddamned electric chair. Fuck Alabama: fuck them hard.

Posted by tederick at 12:24 PM in sex (theoretical)
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Don Knotts 1924-2006

My account of driving to a casino to see Don Knotts live can be found here.

Posted by tederick at 11:10 AM in tv
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"In my experience there's no such thing as luck." - Obi-Wan Kenobi

A couple of months ago I agreed to play in a poker tournament tonight, to raise money for Max's school; the buy-in was $150, but I figured it was money well lost and that it would be fun to give it a try and see if I could last past the first round.

I JUST CAME IN SECOND. I won like six hundred and fifty dollars.

[gasps!]

Honestly I feel like I could pick up a truck and spin it over my head right now. I did not see this coming at all. I knew it would be a tournament with a broad range of skill levels and I knew that this would favour a conservative player who was willing to pick his moment and let the other players blast each other port-to-starboard in the meanwhile... but fuckin' balls-ass Christ, I never in a million years thought I would make it to the final table, let alone second frickin' place. There are no words. No words!

The evening proceeded pretty much exactly as I'd expected for the first hour or two - I had absolutely shite cards leading off, and even when I tried to put something together on the table I got the pants kicked off me by this drunken ass of a gino who was sitting on my immediate left at the first table. Then I picked up a couple of good hands that let me build the pot a bit, and then the first round of players were dropping out like flies, and suddenly I was consolidated to a second table, and the "players remaining" counter was ticking down like a fucking fusion bomb waiting to go off. 16 (half the original players), 13 (where I fully expected to go out), an even dozen, the final ten. I came back from near-elimination three separate times over the course of the evening on decent hands doubling or tripling my pot. I knocked Matthew and another woman out of the game with ten players remaining, which I never could have seen coming in a million years, and then I drew a straight fucking flush to kill yet another guy, and buy my way to the final table.

From there, it's pretty much a blur. I knew I could outlast most of the players at that table just by playing it cold, and I also knew that I lacked the funds to beat the big fat whale sitting at the head of that table, who had about four times my resources in chips. So I picked a minor moment, went all-in on a hand I don't even remember, and accepted my second place. And that's that.

I even got a pair of Jays tickets out of the deal, and a whole bunch of groping from the woman with the same birthday as my mother, who was convinced that her bad luck had been transmuted into my good luck. (I was compelled to tell her that i don't believe in luck.) What? Is this my life? What happened to all the bike-stealing and general nastiness? Well, whatever, I'll take it.

Posted by tederick at 1:05 AM in jedi antics
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As I sit here listening to the Sideshow podcast (and I mentioned this last week, too when watching Thumb Wars with Max), it occurs to me that I hate few things in the universe more than "Star Wars esque" music, which is almost invariably performed on a synthesizer, and without fail sounds like absolute gobshite. Folks, if you can't get the rights, just use some frickin' Holst. Fuck!

One of the things I got done on my Unbalance Day last week was the updating of my prescription, so today I went glasses shopping. I fucking hate glasses shopping. I hate glasses, hate contacts, hate my eyes, hate every single fucking moment between now and when I can finally afford enough laser surgery to blast these fucking things into oblivion. But until then... my new glasses look shit-hot. I am a shit-hot man in shit-hot glasses.

The plan at this point is to invert my glasses/contacts wearing ratio, because I just don't see any real purpose in doing additional contacts-related damage to my eyeballs if I'm just going to be sitting in front of a computer monitor all day in an environment where being physically attractive is irrelevant anyway. (But then again, my new glasses are shit-hot, so this is really neither here nor there.) Still, I can't help but think that my 8-year-old self, who cut a blood oath into his arm that he would never wear glasses for a single second longer than he had to, would probably be really upset at this betrayal. So I kick him. I kick him a lot.

Posted by tederick at 2:32 PM in miscellaneous crap
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You would not believe the size of the piece of meat that was served to me last night. I didn't believe it; I still don't believe it. Somewhere out there a cow is walking around with a hole in his ass the size of a toddler's head, and he's going "owwwwwwwwwwwww...." (or possibly "cowwwwwwwwww") It's amazing to me that my mother could fully sanction my eating of this gigantic chunk of flesh (it was her bithday and we was celebratin' at North 44) but read me the riot act every time I even talk about wanting to eat the steak the steak the size of a toilet seat at Lone Star. At least that one would be flat.

Regardless, it's the end of February, and the last dregs of winter have combined nicely with my infant-skull-sized steak experience to tell me that it is seriously time for a health food kick. My eating habits have taken a hit in the new work schedule; it's time to solve that. And buy yoghourt. And Pom. And many, many grapefruits. And next week, a bike. My body needs some clear waters and fresh airs.

In like kind - and this might have been because of the meat run-off or it might just be the spirit of the season - but man I had some delicious dreams about at least one of Bex's friends last night, and possibly two. Lips and skin and hair, and that little spot of ribs underneath the left breast. I'm in a full-on craving for physical sensation right now; I am very aware of my body and all of the things it comes into contact with. Reds seem more vivid to me - everything is blood. A semi-permanent flush all over me and all around me. Everything is thick and full.

I live in a pitiably arrogant culture, one that is so certain of its prevalence even over death that we meet each new loss with inreasing waves of anger and outright disbelief. In like kind, this self-fulfilment obsession - the idea that there is this one perfect happy out there for each and every one of us, and that we will all determine what it is, pursue it in due course, and will not be capable of true satisfaction until we ultimately achieve it - is ruining my entire generation. The "grass is greener" generation, no longer content to employ the pragmatic realities of their daily lives, but insistent upon the eventual arrival of something better, just on the other side of what we're doing now. In the event that this belief ultimately pays dividends, perhaps all will be forgotten, but until then, we are all of us impotent... and if content to simply wait, then dangerously so. There's no doing besides what's being done.

Posted by tederick at 10:53 AM in blood & dreams & foodin' & poetical
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That was a performance, my friends. Shizuka Arakawa freakin' nailed it - and no one else even came close. The vague din of choking could be heard quite clearly from Olympic stadium tonight as every other contender kissed the ice with their ass.

Mmmm. Icy ass-kiss. Some mighty fine ass out there, too. The sheer quantity of muscle development inherent to the sport is... well, it's enough to make my tongue dart out left-to-right, it is. The gang and I are loosely talking about getting ourselves to Vancouver for 2010, because clearly, these Olympic games ain't never coming to the T-dot. What that has to do with ass, I'll leave to the imagination.

Meanwhile, Bex suggested tonight that I write to Jo Rowling and tell her that I am from the small Irish town of McHanglepuff and am worried that my resulting mean social stature will damage my chances of finding a wife. I dunno, this concept had something or other to do with this, but seeing it written down here now the whole thing seems completely shit-eating crazy. Still, it had a vague semblance of comprehensibility at the time. Most of my conversations with that girl are like that.

Posted by tederick at 10:42 PM in miscellaneous crap
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It was a titanically gorgeous day in the city today - even for the fifteen minutes of snow squall that hit rather unexpectedly in the middle afternoon. (There was a fringe of mint green around the edges of the sky that made the whole thing rather splendid.) I blissed out on the RT on the way to work listening to some tracks on my iPod that I haven't really paid attention to since the summer of 2004, that hallowed era of endless possibility. When I arrived at work, one of the women in my office, with whom I've been having a running discussion of Boba Fett recently, noticed that my cubicle with its many droids was not properly outfitted with shelving, so we did a bit of "provisioning" - i.e. we stole shit from other cubicles and did a big re-dec job in my little berth. Now all my droids are on a nice sleek shelf above my monitor, my slutterfly and other artwork are given strong prominence on the leading wall, and I'm running a poll on my cubicle door about what my next toy theme should be. ("Jedi Knights" is leading, but "Hey That's My Rancor" is making a strong showing.) That made for a decent start to the day, and the 4:15 nut run made for a decent end, but everything in between was a freakin' French-people-can-suck-my-ass nightmare that had me stopping to crack my head on the desk on at least six separate occasions. THWACK. THWACK. THWACK. Brevity. Is the soul. Of. Wit. Stupid French!!! Add to that the fact that one young lady at the j-o-b made the mistake of showing me her butt last week which, at this point, can only satisfactorily end with my biting it, and the stress level is appropriately high. I was so damn glad to be leaving that place at 5:00 that I actually ran down the stairs. Rapidly. But my Unbalance Day last week has somehow resulted in more pay on the stub this week than usual (zwuh?), and I'm shirking my at-home responsibilities (once again) in favour of a little tea and company, and after that there will be skater girls, so all really is right with the world, when you think about it.

Posted by tederick at 6:47 PM in j-o-b
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SAD has been omnipresent in my family for a long time - my grandfather used to call it having a case of "the Februaries" - but I think I've just given the whole process the clean miss this winter. There have been blahs, but they have been minor blahs. I guess I got all my depression ya-ya's out in the fall, which seems like an achievement but I suppose is really just getting something out of the way early instead of waiting for the deadline. Nevertheless, yesterday I took a moment to clear my head on the subway and I realized that right now, I have very few troubles. A few "needs improvement" on the general report card, but no outright "fails." And I'm becoming notably whimsical. So that's something. Yay me, in Me vs. February.

Unrelatedly, I am declaring this Bantha Appreciation Day:

Take a minute to pet your Bantha. Then go masturbate.

Posted by tederick at 7:40 AM in galaxy far & miscellaneous crap
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Today I:

• saw a perfect pixie-girl on the subway with cat whiskers painted on her face, and smiled at her
• prayed with a Muslim man
• read Astonishing X-Men #13 cover-to-cover three times
• added to my list of 100 Stupid, Pointless Things To Do Before I Die
• made a brilliant sandwich.

The long-awaited issue itself? A big sloppy "issue #15 is gonna be awesome" type of non-event. Not even a setup so much as a setup for a setup (hence "issue #15 is gonna be awesome"). Good to be back in the rhythm, though, and the best Logan moment since... well, there's pretty much one quintessential Logan moment in every single issue of this thing, but you get me.

Ems: I am worried about you. But the letter col is fan-wanky enough to make me think it's all a twist waiting to happen, so I'll reserve judgment. Praise the Whedon.

In other news: it looks like I will be going ahead and shooting Chris' Obstruction script, as he's not like to make it himself. I'm looking for some shorts to do over the next few months, and nabbing his script came up over breakfast the other day, and there you go. I don't think it'll go up first; I have another idea (currently untitled... well, mostly) for a 2-person dialogue scene that I think I'd like to write and mount first, before tackling the Chris script. I am angling to have the spring be a fairly prolific time. Who knows, maybe I'll finish Chris' script and move on to Dave's; I've been dying to give that one a try ever since we Obstructed him. No viewfinder? Entirely too brilliant.

Posted by tederick at 9:07 PM in comix & jedi antics & tederick films
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It was about a quarter to five, and I was on the subway heading west, when the driver came on the P.A.:

"Attention passengers, I hate to have to tell you bad news, but Team Canada just lost to Russia in the quarter-finals of mens' Olympic hockey and has been eliminated."

And the entire train groaned as one.

I love my country.

Posted by tederick at 6:44 PM in miscellaneous crap
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"I will not have you sit here and disparage Kimmie Meisner's boobs!" - overheard at 3QF during the womens' short program

Last night I dreamed that I had a baby, who I'm fairly sure was mine, although I don't know his name (though I have a good idea) nor his mother (here it gets a bit vaguer). It was fairly emotional and upsetting, actually, taking care of this baby. Things were not generally good. There was a chase of some kind involved. And a near drowning. And just the soul-fuck of looking into the eyes of a baby, which is as true in the real world as it is in the dream world. Baby-eyes are some heady, trippy shit.

We 3QFers have taken to watching the figure skating programs together. It's one of the few things we do together as a family. I generally like the womens' skating more than the mens', rather obviously because it's fun to see women with bodies carved out of solid rock doing things that would generally be considered physically abnormal, and all while wearing adorably outré little outfits. When it comes to watching figure skating I fundamentally lack Brandy's experienced moral authority, but am relatively adept at determining when a skater "has it." A skater needs to "has it" in order to "have it," "it" in the latter phrase being "the gold medal." Irina Slutskaya, for example, "has it." So does Sacha Cohen, but she also "has" a fuckload of really annoying makeup, so I'm not laying down any money for Thursday right now. Mascara tends to flake.

Yesterday Steven Spielberg copped to the fact that his next project will indeed be Indy IV. This is, of course, only the most recent example of him declaring that his next project will be Indy IV, but I suspect it's for real this time. I don't know. I don't really want to see a frame, not for a very, very long time. I want to believe that this thing is capable of doing something that others could not - for that is the only thing that would make its creation worthwhile - and have, at its center, some essence of the sheer joy of life that has somehow always run sidelong old Indiana's adventures without ever intruding on any of the plots proper. If the old hat truly must be dragged out of mothballs, I want the movie to make me genuinely glad to be alive. I want a celebration, not a victory lap. The potential's in there, somewhere. I hope those three have twigged to a way to bring it out.

Zam has a cold. It may be a long night.

Posted by tederick at 10:39 PM in 3QF & dreams & movies
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Brandy returns to the blogsphere today, by virtue of having returned to the blogsphere months ago but my having forgotten to put up a link. You gotta admit, that's a fairly spectacular use of pink, right in league with my fairly spectacular use of green. She's got a second blog too, about music. Suddenly she's all prolificated.

Posted by tederick at 10:02 PM in blogsphere
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It may sound like I did this podcast very stoned, but that's inaccurate; it just seems like for whatever reason, into Yodaspeak my grammar slowly is turning. So be it, Jedi. Today I gas about Cock & Bull some more, because I love to say "cock." And actually, "bull" ain't bad either. And wanking my own film festival on-air? Nothing wrong with that.

Click here to download the mp3.

Posted by tederick at 9:55 PM in podcastery
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I guess I don't give the subconscious enough credit? Bah? I dunno, it seems a little convenient that the whole concept of the subconscious is predicated on absolute unprovability. But the brain-parts I'm not aware of did an uncannily sound number on me over the past couple of days, long before I realized what was actually going on.

This was a good weekend for movies. I went to see Tristram Shandy on Saturday with Chris, just after THE SWISS!!! thing happened, and that was about enough fun to keep me bubbly for the rest of the weekend. It's 2006's first top-ten-potential flick, though it's a rare year indeed when a February entry actually makes it all the way to the end of the year without getting knocked off the bottom. En route to the movie Chris and I did some DVD shopping and found the double-disk War of the Worlds used (but still sealed?) at Bay St. Video, so in spite of the fact that it's War of the Worlds, we both (!) bought a copy and watched it that evening. I was even more impressed this time than last with the sheer quantity of classical Spielbergian style in that movie... and no less by the degree to which none of it means a damn thing. That Dakota kid still creeps me out, too, though Chris pointed out that she would have been excellent in the Jaley Hoel Osment role in A.I... which made my eyeballs curl back into my head because I think if she'd been the lead character in that movie, the flick might actually have been perfect by virtue of her sheer inhumanity.

(Boy, I hope Dakota Fanning never finds out that I think she's a digital effect. It's all fun to pick on a nine-year-old and whatnot, but I imagine she has killer death rays at her disposal somewhere.)

Anyways, after THE FINS!!! happened I capped the weekend at Matthew's with The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Ah, German: the language of panic and anger. Mates nicely with German Expressionism: the cinema of madness and despair. What an era.

I must be in the mood for change, because I changed my computer's colours for the first time in four years, from "Rainy Day" to "Spruce." My comp looks like peppermint tea.

Posted by tederick at 7:42 AM in movies
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You really get to know what kind of an audience you're seeing this movie with when it gets going. Tristram Shandy viciously works its crowd. There's a moment, for example, when the writers of the film-within-the-film contemplate adding a section of the movie with no picture, just a black screen, to mimic the "black page" in the original source novel. No sooner have they finished explaining this, when the screen does indeed go black: and damned if fully the entire row behind me didn't up and wonder aloud if we were in the midst of a projection error.

Click here to read my review.

Posted by tederick at 5:02 PM in reviews
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(was a lot funnier before the Fins were leading 2-0 in the third)

Posted by tederick at 4:51 PM in miscellaneous crap
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And that's all you get. Digest.

Posted by tederick at 6:57 PM in tederickdotcomdotcom
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Tuesday I was reading Cunt on the subway when we emerged from the tunnel at Main Station, and I had what Samuel L. Jackson describes as a "moment of clarity," life-shaking in its magnitude. Wednesday I had about an hour to kill before my dinner date and I was fucking around in the downtown core and ended up reading Runaways on the steps of the CMA in weather that was not entirely cold, and I had a more literal, less Jackson-y "moment of clarity." Between these two events it becomes clear that my life is defined by the quiet spaces between all the other shit.

The biggest problem in my life right now is that I am lonely. This is exacerbated by the fact that I am sufficiently Brassed Off by commitment issues in general that I am in absolutely no mood whatsoever to date. Anyone. At all. I know that at some point in the future this will change and that when it does, I will also notice that it actually changed quite a while ago and that I've only just noticed that it has changed. And I will be irritated for having wasted time. Wasting time is Brassing Me Off even more than commitment issues right now. This, however, is not good. I loathe the fact that for reasons that are far, far beneath my generally reasonable and rational way of looking at the world, the fact that I am staring down the barrel of the 30-gun has actually put me into a near-perpetual state of low-level anxiety. But you gotta be where you gotta be. You can sure as hell fight city hall, because city hall was built by men. But you can't fight nature.

So here we are.

Posted by tederick at 6:54 PM in poetical
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I watch How I Met Your Mother, as you probably know; many others do too now, apparently, and there are all kinds of articles these days about how it's the best sitcom on TV this season. It is the best sitcom on TV this season, but that isn't saying much; it's nowhere near as good as Friends, which was nowhere near as good as Seinfeld, and that's how it goes. Mother isn't Friends anyway; it's The Single Guy done with proper casting. Not that I'm dissing me some Slotnick, cuz god knows that would never happen, but Mother's ensemble licks the shit out of Silverman's brood.

The other day, though, my "repressed Americans" fire alarm went off like a towering inferno. An entire episode structured around how Marshall and Lily, in nine years of couply bliss, have yet to pee in front of each other... which was presented as a disgusting "final frontier" that will forever darken their romance as they move steadfastly into old-age-dom.

Hemmena nooa?

(That's this week's "hum-nu," for the scorekeepers.)

Ladies, if we aren't pissing in front of each other by week 3 after intercourse, we're not staying together. It's not worth it. To those who say that it takes the romance out of the relationship, let me say this: urine and romance are not linked. (Well, for some people they are, but aside from begging at least three separate women to try the "Double Lindy" with me as pertains to tag-team urination, I don't go down that road.) Intimacy and romance, on the other hand; casual comfortability and romance; lack of self-consciousness and romance; these things are linked. Or should be more linked. Seriously. If you can't handle the whiz, what are you going to do when she whips out the Hummel figurines? (Besides run, which is obvious.)

And then there's Lost.

Damn, that motherfucker was pretty.

This revitalizes my belief that Lost is the best porn running. Lost is not a series, is not even "good" in any real definition of the word. It's just straight-to-the-veins full-bore visual pleasure. It is just so goddamn pleasurable to watch the finest piece of dark-man-meat walking, Naveen Andrews, strut around in front of a digitally generated Kuwaiti oil fields having philosophical discussions with a rough-and-tumble Clancy Brown. It is so fucking pleasurable to see god-lit shots of Michael Emerson (kudos, kudos, kudos for getting Michael Emerson) beaten shit-senseless and covered in sensuous rivers of his own blood, gasping for breath. It is even fundamentally, foundationally pleasurable to see the tub-roll fill with sweat under Hugo's shirt. This is the visual frenzy. This is the porniest porn in all of Hi-Def la-la-land.

Lost operates under the mantra that all network television currently must subscribe to: sustain, sustain, sustain. A few weeks ago Chris was irritated by the show's continued unwillingness to do anything but slip n' slide in the ongoing - and tediously slow - continental drift of the characters' interpersonal dynamics. (Sawyer's a bad guy now! Sayid and Ana Lucia are uneasy allies now! Jack pushed the button! Jack didn't push the button!) But doing otherwise is simply not how network programming is allowed to work any more. They must sustain sustain sustain, because the point of television now is not storytelling (if it ever was), but pulling you back next week. (This is why the "Next Week" trailers at the end of each episode are, in fact, more instructive as pop art than the show can ever be.) The lessons of The X-Files - and of Ross and Rachel - have completely overwhelmed network programming sensibilities. If you ever give away the hook that got your viewers in the first episode, you take the might risk that whatever you do afterwards might not be as interesting, and the viewers will stop coming back next week.

Sustain sustain sustain is anathema to good drama. Joss Whedon never wrote sustain sustain sustain. Six Feet Under never sustained anything. Deadwood has flipped over so many revolutions of its seeming initial premise that the series plays differently in episode 8 than it does in episode 3. And Firefly... lo for Firefly. That show didn't sustain shit. And if they really do come back post-Serenity, you're gonna see just how different something that should supposedly be the same can really be.

I don't watch 24, ER, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, Commander in Chief, or any of the other "big" network dramas because under the mantra of sustain sustain sustain, they're all just so unbelievably frickin' boring. ALIAS pisses me off week after week and I'm damn glad it'll be out of my head in May. House is off the hook, because thank god, the procedural format doesn't require it to sustain anything - it can just do the same thing over and over again and not keep its audience on any hooks for five-plus years. (Not that its Next Week trailers aren't a porny form of art, too.)

With Lost, though, I don't care. Because Lost is porny in ways that none of the other shows are. Lost can exist entirely outside itself as a big, sensual fuck-you to the sensibilities of any rational, thinking person because it just so goddamned enjoyable to look at on an erotic level. Lost is about gorgeously sweat-shined skin, hi-definition blood and spit and snot and grime, vibrant green jungles, and nasty gay cowboys crushing tree frogs with their bare hands. Lost gives you something that no other network show can: the arm-popping narcosis of pure, unfettered departure from this very, very mundane world. And boy howdy, how did I get this far without it?

Posted by tederick at 6:48 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & tv
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I finally found me a motherfuckin' store that sells motherfuckin' HBO shows for $50 a pop!! Sfoo, Deadwood, it's all ripe for the taking. Got Sfoo 1&2 today, and yes, I'll buy your 3&4 at the same price once I'm done with these. I ain'ts particular.

This was two days after I found a picture of this thing:

but at $500 for the box there ain't no way I'm falling for that shit. I'm sorry, but $10 an episode is past stupid and into ass-rape.

Posted by tederick at 6:43 PM in shinydisks
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Here'n I was only gonna buy me some Luke and some Kenobi. And now look at these bastards. I've pre-ordered the Han, will pre-order the Mace on Monday, and am wondering if I don't owe myself a Kit and an Ani just to make the posse complete. That is some mightily addictive dolly-making, Sideshow. Mightily. Addictive.

Posted by tederick at 6:40 PM in toys!
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The other day I amost completely ignored this.

Last night, though, I had a bit of trouble getting to sleep after I read this.

It got the mind turning, and when my mind is turning even a little bit, those dreams don't come. I realize he's basically saying "nothing is going on," but the big engine started to revolve in the back of my head nevertheless. The big sucky would be doing a season of the show without Wash or Book. I realize that both would pop up endlessly in various flashbacks and whatnot, but the 'Verse not being Buffy, it's not like they're going to come popping out of their graves in the season premiere. I can pretty much handle the lack of Wash - it gives Zoe a lot to do, and the notion of River flying the ship tickles me seven different shades of pink. Book, on the other hand, I'd really miss. Maybe they could put Ron Glass back on the show as Book's tranvestite cousin, Mrs. Book? This would have the added benefit of letting Ron play with wigs. Which, as we all know, is gold. And do I hear a possible love interest for Jayne?

And then there's all the other things I want so bad. Like space whores. And tight pants. And tight pants folded not-so-neatly on the floor of space whores' personal boudoirs. And the SEX.

Man, I could do me with some new Firefly right about now. It would ease these lonely winter nights.

If only.

Posted by tederick at 12:30 PM in joss
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Ladies and gentlemen, Chewbacca's blog.

Posted by tederick at 7:59 AM in galaxy far
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After many a mighty delay, the One Minute Film & Video Festival web site finally relaunches this week with the Call for Submissions for 2006: and the theme for the year is growth. Yep, growth - not just the theme, but the title of a movie I've already made. But that's okay, I'll think of something new anyway.

Really, I couldn't be happier with Year 4 so far - Sacha designed a great look and feel for the CfS postcards, inspiring me to do a particularly tip-top design for the site. Well, at least, it's tip-top in my eyes. I didn't really like last year's design.

I'm feeling more involved with the fest than I have for a while, too, and that's giving me some juice.

So, once more, and for the record: we don't care if you've never made a movie before. (Not that we wouldn't be thrilled to bits if you're Peter Jackson.) A measly single minute of time to fill... and we've already given you the subject. Get to work!

Posted by tederick at 7:55 AM in 1MFVF
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Accidentally recorded on Valentine's Day, so why not talk about love? Or its bastard antecedent, dating. It's all about The Date Movie tonight: does it still exist, what has it become, and how on earth did we get through an entire Mamo about The Date Movie without mentioning the forthcoming date movie, Date Movie? Truly, we are brainless.

Click here and download like crazy. With the mp3. And technology.

Posted by tederick at 11:37 PM in podcastery
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A couple of months ago, Mark starred in his very first music video - and through what can only be termed the luck of the gods, it turned out to be the video for the song that had already essentially become Mark's mantra for life on this earth.

Click below for the Wet Spots' "Do You Take It (In The Ass)?", co-starring Sexy Mark Brown.

Posted by tederick at 7:36 AM in movies & sex (theoretical)
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c/o April and Dave @ the mexicasa, and featuring no Photoshopping on the blade... though I tilted the colour slightly when I zeroed the whites.

Posted by tederick at 8:42 PM in photoblog
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Okay, YOU try spending an entire day in front of a computer building e-training courses with a migraine so bad that even on full painkillers you're still drifting away every five minutes to contemplate whether physically drilling through your skull at your right temple would actually relieve enough pressure to make you feel better for a minute or two. (Before, y'know, the death.)

Days like this are like God smacking your chess piece clean off the board. "Sorry, you're still mine, no matter how far you choose to run, and today I'm fucking you up the ass just to show you that I can."

Seriously, body. What the fuck? I'm so nice to you. I am comprehensive in my breathing and stretching, I treat you to fine foods with regularity but not often enough to make you fat, and I frequently masturbate your sexual organs. Cut me some fucking slack.

Posted by tederick at 5:30 PM in miscellaneous crap
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My body has gone haywire, and I'm not precisely sure what I did to piss it off. On Friday I was in so much lower-back pain that even after medicating it, I couldn't sit or stand comfortably for more than a minute or two in any single position. On Saturday every joint in my body was ratcheting like a cement mixer full of bowling balls. Yesterday I was so wiped by sundown that my podcast took a full two hours to record and had me, by the end of that time, bargaining with the High Almighty to kill me presently rather than force me to endure another dreary sunless day. And this morning I had a headache so bad, it woke me up. At 6:30. Thank you body.

In the plus column, the first 40 pages of Cunt have convinced me that I need to buy sea sponges.

Posted by tederick at 8:30 AM in miscellaneous crap
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I only had a bit of material for the show tonight, so I made it a mini-moviesTO, running about ten minutes and covering last night's New Toronto Works show. It's coverage like this that I'm planning to do for the film festival this year, so this was sort of an unplanned "practice run."

Click here to download the mp3.

Posted by tederick at 9:44 PM in podcastery
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I originally set my finish-date for Mongoose as February 28th, and then got cocky and revised it to January 31. That never happened, obviously, but I decided to split the difference and aim for Feb. 14 - which would mean, work being work, that I had to finish it today. So that's what I did. I got up this morning and fucked around with Star Wars figures for way longer than I should have (what can I say?), and then did a one-hour push before lunch, and then a two-and-a-half-hour finish afterwards. And that was it. Done and done at 83 pages, 2 pages longer than I'd planned.

At some point during the writing of this thing I abandoned all thought that I would ever actually make it as a movie. Strangely - and this particularly occured to me during the last ten pages of writing today - I probably should have written this as a novel. It's always felt very novelistic to me, and lends itself heavily to the kinds of non-dialogue, non-narrative experimentation you can do in a novel but not (or less successfully, anyway) on film. Nevertheless, in the process of finishing the script today, I really started to love it again. It's still little more than a draft, at this point, but it's got some imagery in it that really cuts to the strange subconscious drifts in me that form the core of the recurrent themes and images in my life. A lot of blood. A lot of snow. A lot of body politics and tangible interaction with the physical world - dirt and mud and wood and rock. It really feels like it succeeds in circumventing a lot of the tropes of conventional narrative cinema which I purposely set out to avoid when I started writing it. It feels like a success, if a strange one.

So that's that, and on to the next thing. Not sure what script is going to come next but it may have to wait until April, when most of my other extra-curriculars will be out of the way... I don't want to start something only to have to abandon it in in two weeks when my Trillium project heats up. And besides, I've come to a realization. I was at the New Toronto Works show with Daniel last night, and just watching all of those films, some of which were truly excellent (I'll be podcasting about them later tonight), really set me in mind of something fairly plain:

I've got to get off my ass.

I've been working on absolutely fuck-all, filmwise, for about six months now, and the degree of muscular apathy that has grown up in that time is astonishing. I am not thinking, writing, conceiving, imagining, or planning anything filmic these days. At all. And it is so easy to just keep doing that, ad infinitum. Having gotten off this horse, I could very easily never get back on. Which, combined with my new yuppie lifestyle and generally uncertain goal track for the foreseeable future, is basically the beginnings of a betrayal of my very soul. It already hurts like a bitch.

So... gonna have to leave this as a " to be continued" and try to do something about that. I'll get two shorts out by spring, gorammit, or die trying. Just gotta figure 'em out first.

Posted by tederick at 3:30 PM in tederick films & the process
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I pretty much assumed I was gonna hate Spike: Old Wounds, given the degree of hardcore suckage of the Angel comics, not to mention the last Spike one-off, Old Times or whatever the fuck it was called. In fact I was ready to give a big kiss-off to any non-Joss Buffyverse comic for the rest of time... but then I thought about it and realized that I'd never get away with it anyway. There's a Gunn one-shot coming, and who's not gonna read that? It's Gunn for crying out loud.

This week also saw the long-awaited end of Star Wars: Republic with issue #83, and I was equally surprised to find it equally decent. Sure, it went for the big sappy ending where Quinlan and Khaleen get to spend the rest of their lives happily ever after in spite of his seeming death at the hands of Order 66, but there were some good flashbacks involving Aayla, Yoda, Dooku and Tholme which tied things off nicely... and let's face it, watching a Jedi butcher a bunch of clones never sucks. Or at least, never sucks much.

The 198 continues with issue #2, fine fare if not quite up to the standards of House of M, which itself was nowhere near Astonishing. On the whole, though, I'm liking Decimation, even enough to be a bit worried about Whedon's supposed disavowal of the subject for his upcoming run. I likes me some continuity amongst my X-books.

I finished my week with a blast from the past, the Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan 2-off "Aurorient Express." Strictly for the kiddies but reasonably fun, if only because I've got a mighty Qui-Gon hard-on right now, and it slaked my thirst. There should have been more Q-J/O-W series. They were cool.

Posted by tederick at 4:09 PM in comix
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I don't want to freak anyone out, but while I was at work yesterday, my Uncle Owen figure fell over, and took down about twelve other figures when he did. Apparently Phil Brown didn't leave this world easy.

Posted by tederick at 8:22 AM in galaxy far
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On any given evening if I can just get the number of e-mails in my inbox down to five or less, I actually feel like I can go on with the rest of my life. Until then it's like trying to tame a brush fire with a shot glass with a hole in it.

Anyways. Tonight Daniel came over with Brenda and Demetre, and we tried for Round 2 of our Fucked Up Asian Cinema / Fucked Up Early-80s Animation double-bill dealie. This time we paired Cure with Twice Upon a Time. I didn't really like Cure. If I had seen it at the film festival I would have walked out after fifteen minutes, because it was monotonous and boring; then a guy jumped out a second-storey window which was kind of cool, but ultimately bore no fruit. The rest of the movie stayed monotonous and boring. After that, Twice was definitely not monotonous and boring, in fact being probably the exact opposite of that but not necessarily in good ways. It was frenetic and overwhelming. And vaguely ingenious in its own sort of way but very slapshod. (Is slapshod a word? Am I combining two other words into something only I think exists? Too tired to check dictionary.com right now.) So on the whole I'd say Round 2 was less successful than Round 1... but then, Round 1 had Old Boy. Incest always gives you an edge.

Furthering last month's craziness, Mark ran into the Mighty Kelter today. Whatthefuckupwitdat. I suppose I should try to track down Tut at this point? That would be the next logical step? Anyways, KK has always had some kind of weird psycho-neurotic hold over Sexy Mark Brown, so it was good that he finally got to meet her in person and realize that she's (in his own words) not a ghost, just a person. Too many damn ghosts, generally. I'm all for the living right now.

Forward-thinking, that's the ticket. Slithering between the flannels being the immediate order of business. It is a dark and quiet night, and for once, lonely in the good way.

Posted by tederick at 1:10 AM in 3QF & miscellaneous crap & movie night & movies
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Respect, man. Phil Brown was cool. And Star Wars never would have been the same without him - one of the great underappreciated performances of the whole darn shebang.

Posted by tederick at 1:22 PM in galaxy far
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Apparently it's cunt week here at Tederick.com. We're up to our knees in cunt paraphernalia. (And really, how much further up would you want to be?) Yesterday I went to the post office to pick up a mystery package and, not being sure what was inside, I ripped it open right there in the store... and it turned out to be a "Got Cunt?" t-shirt that Bex got me, from the Gooloph performance of the Vagina Monologues or something. It came packed with miscellaneous cunt literature, too.

And I think I can wear it... I mean, if the Ladies of the Box have beknighted me with the right to have the c-word emblazened across my man-titties, then I feel well and fully justified. (Which translates out to: I'll wear it when I'm indescribably plastered and in a city I don't reside in.) Man, those Box Girls. How that four-woman harem of harpies managed to become the guardians of all things vaginal in the Northern Hemisphere is truly fucking beyond me, but it's as natural as breathing and burned into the Blogsphere consciousness at the foundational granite level. I trust them implicitly. Still, I'm gonna want to put some forethought into the incredibly intelligent argument I'll be called upon to perform, if and when I get called out for wearing the shirt. Either that, or some thought into just exactly how fast I can run, flat out, in an XL t-shirt which is, by definition, basically a sail on me.

But if that wasn't enough, I also got my copy of Cunt in the mail. I couldn't track down the hardcover so I ended up going with the soft. I've heard it's not all that, but I couldn't not get it eventually. Same rules apply as the above, vis a vis my reading this on the subway on the way to work, but I'll do what I can - that 30-minute commute is where I'm getting 90% of my reading done. (Commensurately, my reading rate has skyrocketed about 90%, give or take, since I started the new job.) I'm probably going to finish Shadow Moon tomorrow (that's the novel-sequel to Willow, for you curious parties), 450 pages in less than ten days, and as with any deprived muscle (cunts included) the more you stretch, the more it stretches, so I've basically gone read-crazy. I've got the book, two comics, a magazine, and the Sex & Love issue of Now all going at once right now. I flip back and forth between them like I'm channel surfing.

It sucks to not be having sex when the Sex & Love issue comes out, by the way. Please enjoy it if you've got it.

Allow me to complete this evening's vulgarity trifecta by saying that I would pretty much beg to have sex with Timothy Olyphant right now. They're finally running the new season of Dinner for Five on IFC right now, and he was on today's and... man. When he's all duded up with his Deadwood 'stache but wearing a heroin-junkie ringer T, I could pretty much devour his balls. And he told the single funniest story about Vince Vaughn I've ever heard. (Not the funniest story, mind you; just the funniest story about Vince Vaughn.)

Well, that's enough for now.

Posted by tederick at 10:39 PM in books & sex (theoretical)
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This would be the time to point out: I hate Word. I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word I fucking hate Word

Posted by tederick at 6:14 PM in j-o-b
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Amelia sent in a piece from the New York Review of Books on Brokeback Mountain... and... uh... yeah, I fucked up. Me and every other critic in the world, seemingly, and all with certainly the best of intentions... but I definitely, and fairly radically, misinterpreted Brokeback in my review last year. And for someone who has done both personal and academic work in the area of queer desire and gay representations in cinema for well over a decade... well, I should have fucking known better.

Posted by tederick at 7:46 PM in movies
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Thank you Dr. House.

But let me tell you something: that guy Robert Sean Leonard should get more respect. He's the lynch pin of that whole show. If he can't sell his weird panicked cheating Jewish caring doctor pot-rolling best friend vibe, any given episode is gonna fall apart. And read that string of adjectives again - that is a hard vibe. Cuddy's got the sass, Cameron's got the perky, Chase with the slime and Benton - oh, sorry, Foreman - with the ethnic jokes, but you take out Wilson, and the whole house (no pun intended) of cards goes flying away in the wind. And all the guest turns by freaky Dakota Fanning's freaky little sister, or Stacey's ex-husband Jon Voighting himself up the stairs, ain't gonna help diddly squat. You lose Bobby Seanny Lenny, you lose the show.

Posted by tederick at 11:00 PM in dr. house
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• doing Kama Sutra yoga at the Big Stretch
• examining the Gifts of Love lecture at the ROM
• going to Slow Dance Saturday at the Wroxeter
• seeing Strip-till-you-drop's Valentine's show... because damn them!

And I swear this is the only mope-post about V-day this year.

Posted by tederick at 9:41 PM in miscellaneous crap
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Posted by tederick at 5:22 PM in miscellaneous crap
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Our little Leap is abroad again; this time it will be participating in the Emirates Film Competition as part of their Haiku Cinema programme. The competition runs from March 1st to the 6th in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Yup, the United Arab Emirates. I've played some wild places this year, man. And that makes it official: Leap is my most successful film to date. It's been sold for broadcast, shown at film festivals on three continents, and added to a film library. Who freakin' knew.

Posted by tederick at 7:51 AM in tederick films
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I really enjoy the occasional Mamo where, instead of writing out detailed outlines and schema beforehand (and yes I used the word "schema" there), we sort of just let the conversation ramble. Tonight was one of those. We started with the Super Bowl and then fanned outward. Or more like, air conditionered outwards. And there you have it. I've just listened to the first little bit of the show, and man, that is some tight-sounding Mamo. Tight. Tight like a... well, you know.

Click here to download the show-bag.

How do you spell erroneously?

Posted by tederick at 11:21 PM in podcastery
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I've been cookin'. I got home from work and straight off - almost without even taking my boots off - I was at the stove. I've been sticking to the core items on my personal menu lately; Jamie's Dad's Stuffed Chicken Breast, Mom's Nuclear Risotto, and tonight it was Uncle Matt's Burn-Your-Face-Off Chili. I was prepping the ingredients and I popped open a half-empty bottle of wine and sliced up some cheese and was feeling quite smug about myself, making my food and eating my cheese and drinking my wine after coming home from my yuppie job and wearing my yuppie shirt and my yuppie slacks.

An hour later the half-bottle was gone and so was all the cheese. And I was lying on my bed going "ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh." Foolish me and my posing.

Posted by tederick at 9:57 PM in foodin'
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I have no wish to give away any element of what happens next or where these clues lead, because those elements are fundamental to the success of the film; suffice to say that not unlike Tom Stall in A History of Violence, there's a (this time non-titular) history of violence lurking in this family's past. Caché being a somewhat subtler film, it ain't gonna be drawl-talkin' gangsters and gunplay...

Click here to read my review.

Posted by tederick at 7:16 PM in reviews
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Here's your Monday funny: Whack-a-Boss! See if you can find all fourteen, and then I'll tell you my favourites.

Posted by tederick at 8:06 AM in j-o-b
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I am now officially burning the candle at both ends. Actually I think I've discovered a third end and am burning that as well. Just before I got the new full-time gig I picked up a few freelance design/builds, and two of them are happening extra-curricularly this quarter whilst I continue to nine-to-five it every day of the work week. What this basically translates out to is that I spend at least half my weekend, and many of my weeknights, working. Coming home from the 8 hour gig to do another 4 hour gig. I don't particularly mind, as it's right in line with the idle-hands philosophy that is currently steering 2006... not to mention the get-a-lot-of-fucking-money philosophy that is the other philosophy's counterpoint. But man howdy I'm wrecked right now. Between ten this morning and 8:30 tonight I think I had exactly five minutes where I wasn't doing something... and I spent them doing something. When I got home tonight I returned a couple of phone calls and then collapsed on the couch and watched Harry Potter, much to the delight of my soul. Now barely functional, I will slip under the covers and try to ignore their mocking coldness.

Posted by tederick at 10:43 PM in j-o-b
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Down to 58 minutes... but on the minus side, the show's crappy. Well maybe not crappy. But I wasn't really feeling it this time.

Click here to download the mp3.

Posted by tederick at 4:37 PM in podcastery
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Shining

Posted by tederick at 4:36 PM in movies
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Brokeback to the Future

Posted by tederick at 8:51 PM in movies
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1. Batman Begins
2. X2
3. Sin City
4. Hellboy
5. Superman
6. Hulk
7. From Hell
8. Road to Perdition
9. Ghost World
10. X-Men

Special jury prize for exceptional genre defiance: Batman Returns

Did I leave anything out?

(Sorry. I'm waiting for the TV.)

Posted by tederick at 5:49 PM in movies
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I took my father to yoga for the first time last week, and this morning we tried for round 2, only to discover an unexpected closure at the Big Stretch. No-ga. Disappointing, if only because I spent so much of the week contorting my body into a real fit, and was looking forward to the yoga to help de-kinkify everything. There's yoga offered at work, too, which I'll give a try this week or next, because I think splitting a Tuesday or Thursday in half with some stretching would probably improve my outlook considerably. Anyway, with the Yogashoppe closed my father and I went to Faux What-A-Bagel and shot the shit for a while, and then I begged off home. I've got a walking shopping tour of the Danforth area I want to get done today - a lot of little things I've been meaning to buy for a long while, like an egg coddler and mylar bags - and I'm told we'll be knee-deep in storm weather by the end of the afternoon, by which point I'd very much like to be curled up at Timothy's with the Hellboy TPBs I bought yesterday and a very large cup of tea.

Hoods up: here we go.

Posted by tederick at 11:11 AM in miscellaneous crap
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My Big Mystery Package arrived yesterday, which is always exciting for a guy who buys a lot of shit online and usually knows exactly what is inside every box he receives. This time it was a complete surprise. It was souvenir items from the KaraFilm international film festival in Karachi, Pakistan - where Leap played last year and where, I gotta admit, I pretty much figured it would be a couple of guys sitting in a room with a bad digital projector. Not so much. The festival programme on this thing makes the TIFF one look like it was printed on the back of a napkin. They also sent me a t-shirt, size Small for god knows what reason, and all of this was conveyed via DHL 3-day delivery. Made me feel like royalty, that. Not to mention the fact that apparently, Leap played in the same film festival as Serenity. Yes, that Serenity.

It's finally time for me to start buying up Sfoo. I'm buying them used, because $110 is just a clusterfuck of bad when you only get 12 episodes out of the deal. No damn Sfoo worth nine dollar an eppy. ('Cept maybe the one where Keith buggers little Dawnie? Yeah maybe.) So far season one is proving a blighter to find on the used market, but I'll get there. I always do.

Posted by tederick at 9:04 AM in shinydisks & tederick films
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I’ve come to bury the dead. I’ve gathered the stones, brought fire for my little plastic rocket. The sun is setting on the first day of the world. Now for the first time I can feel the past fall finally behind me, equal in my mindfulness to the present and the future. The tendrils of my thoughts stretch outwards, stretch sideways. I can see father than I have before. I can see myself, and the feeling is new - or at least, I haven’t felt it in a long while. I’m me again. Or more accurately I’m the new me, the one brought by great change, made in cataclysm - a whole new person both new and the same with all the scars and cracks and breaks and tears and blood and long, weary muscles. The same eyes a different colour. My blood is finally now neither to vein-bustingly thick nor thought-drainingliny thin. Just right: red, and rich, and soaking the soil. I rather thought I’d hate being this new me (having been so personally satisfied with the last one), but now it doesn’t seem so bad. I’m graver a bit, I think, and more amused and more curious, and rather surprisingly more powerful; I broke the bonds of my own inner molecules when I wrestled the Great Eye, and I suppose not surprisingly the energy released has been fairly vivid. Who knew nothingness held such hidden juice, but I might have guessed. I’ve been forced forward against my will, but there have been rewards. And now with the birth pain finally receding - the great cracks in the earth rock growing still, the tremors fading - I can look around and breathe the fresh air. The sky is the grey non-colour, just before dawn. I can smell the spring hidden in the mists, beneath the slate green muck.

I think I shall go for a walk.

“Love. You can know all the math in the ‘Verse, but take a boat in the air you don’t love, she ain’t keepin’ up just as sure as the turning of worlds. Love keeps her up when she ought to fall down, tells ya she’s hurtin’ ‘fore she keens, makes her a home.” - Captain Malcolm Reynolds

Posted by tederick at 6:56 PM in blood & poetical & scars
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Well, how to put this? Hmm: my crossing guard set me up with a girl today. Yes, I have a crossing guard - an irascible elder Scotsman named Alex who strikes the morning like something out of a Hemmingway novel - and yes, he set me up with a girl this morning. Put the young lady and I together and sent the two of us on our couply way. It was adorable on about six different levels. She's quite nice, actually, a five-alarm hottie who's going to teach English in Korea in a few months (hence Alex's desire to set her up with a nice young fellow who could talk her out of such madness). She's also a part of the growing cast of regular characters that I'm starting to recognize from being at Pape station at the same time as me every morning. You know, the 8:20 crowd. Among my favourites in this posse are the Doublemint Twins, a pair of flawless Ashleys in matching fur-lined parkas who travel from Pape to Greenwood every moning without saying a word to each other. I'm dying for that story.

At work, I'm a droid. This is nicely underscored by the plethora of droid toys that I've chosen to populate my cubicle with; today I received my ten-pack of new astromech droids, so it's going to be a veritable explosion of droidly goodness at the ol' workstead tomorrow. As in the rest of life, the people are generally divided between those who dig on the toys, and those who back away slowly. Today one of my cross-country colleagues, who I've only met once but who I have developed a truly phenomenal sparring relationship with, called me "truly dorky." I told her that "truly dorky" could be my Indian name, in yet another iteration of the second-greatest Graham Chase line of all time.

As a droid, part of my job involves translation. More accurately, I send off English copy to our phalanx of protocol droids, and they send back the French versions, which I then plug into existing templates. The problem with that being, of course, the nature of the French language itself. Attention, French people: brevity is the soul of wit. You don't need to take twice as long to say everything that we say. It really messes up my job. Equally messy are the few times that the protocol droids try to tinker with the copy to make it better, and fail. There's nothing like digging yourself out of a template snare because some translator halfway across the country ate too many Wheaties and tried to get creative.

I need an oil bath so bad.

Posted by tederick at 8:26 PM in galaxy far & j-o-b & miscellaneous crap
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She's adorable. She is. But... she's the wrong kind of adorable. I don't know, I'm just not seeing Luna here. With pretty much every single other bit of Harry Potter casting so far, it's been lightning bolt-esque: with the exception of Disappointledore, your brain just clicks and says "Yeah. That's the one." Hermione, Cedric, Mad-Eye, each and every single Weasley... all flawlessly cast to the last man. This one just feels off somehow. And I do loves me some Luna.

Well, we'll see what she's like in the actual flick before getting all pissy.

Couldn't be happier that Mr. Katanga will be joining us for the voyage, and Imelda Staunton is a truly inspired choice for Umbridge. I'm still stymied by the Yates situation. But after the Goblet nosedive, how bad could it be?

Posted by tederick at 8:07 PM in h-pot & movies
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The downward spiral continues this week with Angel: Old Friends #3, where the so-hack-he-could-cut-wood writer manages to complete the set by dredging up (dead) Wesley, (dead) Fred, and even (never gonna speak to Angel again) Lorne. Absolutely shameful. I'm all for supporting the Whedonverse, but this is just sickening. And what is it with this title's penchant for farting 2 pages of story into 24 pages of comic? It's fucking irritating. MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN ALREADY.

Meanwhile, I am officially done with Ultimate Fantastic Four. It's not even that it's bad; it's just that it isn't good. It's pretty, and utterly mindless. Yep, you heard it here: I like my girls with brains.

And I haven't got my Bendis fix yet with Powers #15, but I'm sorta chill on the whole deal after the final issue of Daredevil last week. It just didn't get there for me. I can appreciate what he's trying to do, but after four great issues of set-up, the clincher, with Matt Murdock standing trial for being a superhero, was either a) too rushed, or b) not rushed enough. Either way, a dim note upon which to leave the book.

Posted by tederick at 7:15 PM in comix
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Okay seriously: who wins in a fight, Mumra (from Thundercats) or Hordak (from Masters of the Universe / She-Ra)? Leave your answer in the comments. Even if you have no idea who these people are. Just by being here, you are implicated in the study.

(This is the very definition of "miscellaneous crap.")

Posted by tederick at 7:57 AM in miscellaneous crap
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I was a bit surprised this morning to learn that by all appearances, Palisades Toys has shut its doors for good. With Toybiz having closed last month, we're already a man down in the mid-range toy designer field (think Art Asylum, not Hasbro), and it's starting to feel a bit breezy out here. What is going on? Certainly, the boom in marketed-to-adults specialty toys was taken past the point of the ridiculous since it became a viable field at the beginning of the decade/century/millennium (deccentium? dellenntury? mellcadeicent? cendeccatamtam? millturycademadango? thing-with-the-zeroes?). I mean, action figures of the Prime Ministers of Canada is just flat-out arrogance, IMHO. Still, the field showed promise as a modestly-profitable, generally-sustainable enterprise, particularly in terms of fanbase-centered product lines, of which Palisades had two of the biggest (Buffy PALZ, and Muppet Show figures). Maybe sidelining into high-end prop replicas was the culprit in this particular case ($300 Buffy scythes are nice in theory, but even I didn't buy one), but the malaise in the industry as a whole has to spring from something else. Fuck, maybe it's the obvious point: the adults-buying-toys thing was perfect for affluent twentysomethings with disposable income and a willingness to revisit their childhood, but if those twentysomethings are working on the same punchclock as I am, they're about to hit their thirties and are now thinking more about picket fences and baby clothes than Wayne Gretzgy action figures and Orb of Thesula prop replicas. Ain't no babies playin' with the Sword of Angelus that I can think of, and any child of mine who even thinks of laying a finger on Big Fuckin' Hermione is gonna get jinxed within an inch of her life.

As was told to me many years ago, and as I've been heard to utter more and more ruefully and in a broader variety of contexts with each passing day, "Star Wars is over."

Posted by tederick at 9:02 AM in toys!
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