Posted by tederick at 7:07 AM in galaxy far
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Posted by tederick at 7:06 AM in extreme steve
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When I was a kid I loved the Chronicles of Narnia, but even then I knew there was something seriously off about The Last Battle. As I young reader I sort of glossed over that feeling, presuming (as one does with limited critical experience) that a work as a whole can either be Good or Bad but not really much in between. Even when I was twenty and I wrote screenplay adaptations of all seven Narnonicles (... Chronarnicles?...), and couldn't find one sweet fuck of a way to make the last act of The Last Battle work, I still stood behind the saga as a whole because to admit that it doesn't stick the landing would be to somehow admit that the fucking thing just doesn't work.

Well guess what: the fucking thing just doesn't work.

I don't know. I guess I'll always love the others (well, I'll always love Dawn Treader and Silver Chair, and have healthy fondness for Magician's Nephew and Horse and his Boy and varying feelings about Lion and Caspian) but The Last Battle is just a terrible book, and belies the treason of Lewis' gutterally dogmatic storytelling. And this is true even before the horrific ending where all the children turn out to be dead and this is somehow okay because they're all together in heavenarnia. Even before that, the book is bad storytelling: the world of Narnia goes to shit because its citizens are sinners, and all Jill and Eustace can do is stand around and watch it happen while engaging in ultimately pointless mini-quests. It's shitty craft. I'm sort of amazed that the cultural carpetry in my mind has been groomed over so many times that the fact that I have always felt this way somehow became unfamiliar to me. Sometimes a 10-year-old feeling queasy and unsure because the book he thinks he's supposed to love just just went to shit, is right on the money.

Posted by tederick at 8:49 PM in books
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I really thought I'd blogged this morning. I really did. Sorry Internet. I didn't mean to be neglecty. I've got a few posts in draft that I'll put out later. And I've got a few minutes before the water boils here (we were talking about KD at lunch today and now I'm all craved up) so I'll do this fast.

Now, in the past few months there's been a lot of whinging about me being single. Entirely too much whinging. Let's see how many times I can use the word "whinging" before I get to the point. Whinging. And also, whinging. Well anyways, today I hit on the two things I damn well enjoy about singledom:

1. Indiscriminate highschoolish crushes any time I want, without restriction on number, feasibility, publicity, or even gender now that I think about it
2. Ambiguous sexuality as a tool for comedy. And boy is it!

Meanwhile, bad news from North Carolina: the Hi Mom! film fest doesn't look to be running this summer (they may do a "best of" screening) and their 10th annual will probably actually be next year. So no early summer road trip for me and Matty Price, and no new installment of The Tozer Show (although I guess three in a row might have been expecting too much). This has bummed me out a bit on many levels. I was really looking forward to going down to NC this year, more so than previous, now that we've got the "tradition" element to live up to. Now (unrelated to this) I'm trying to sort of chart out the major events of 2007 to achieve a bit of clarity, and I've got to move a few things around to cover the bleeder.

I have three things I want to buy on the internet tonight, all of which cost forty dollars. I can afford one. In simple math, solve for x: which one do I want the most? No more instructions! GO!

Posted by tederick at 6:00 PM in movies & sex (practical)
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All instances of the word "Bran" on cereal boxes at 3QF have been suffixed with "dy."

All instances of the word "Cheerios" on cereal boxes at 3QF have been edited to remove the 2 e's and the o.

But there is no cereal that spells Matt Brown.

Posted by tederick at 10:20 PM in 3QF
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Today I got all quivery in the nethers because a girl used math. Those who witnessed the little debacle found it incredibly amusing, being as how I started blushing like a schoolboy with a crush. But who cares? It was like she suddenly became painted in the most sensual shades of green and blue and I just couldn't help myself. Apparently I'm looking for a turquoise in a girl. That would complement my red and yellow, and we'd get to align on our greens while rolling around naked on a bearskin rug presumably, but still... DAMN. I got turned on by math.

So anyways! School was fun today. Well, for the most part. I was ahead of the class all morning and then I got pigeon-slammed by an exercise in the afternoon that was supposed to demonstrate more effective learning strategies... the slamming in question coming from the fact that I couldn't learn from the damn thing. Yup, the strategy in question not only didn't work for me but actively worked against how I learn. I mean, I can learn entire Shakespearean soliloquoys given five minutes alone in a room and a sheet of paper, but I damn well can't make sense out of a nonsense story. No matter how energetically it is performed. So that was irritating. And after starting my day at 8:00 I have put in an extra hour at the back end to clear out the e-mail inbox which was, after last week, stunningly crowded. I feasted on a bag of microwave popcorn which was a little explosion of light, airy gold in that particular moment in time. Maybe not the healthiest dinner ever but oh so very necessary right then.

I am suddenly overcome by an urge to watch Goblet of Fire, which is far and away the least of the Potterflix, but for whatever reason sometimes I just crave it. Someday I will watch all seven of the films in a row, you know. It will be fun to watch Dan get his man-face, Emma get her woman-parts, and Rupert go through whatever the fuck happened to Rupert, all in the space of fourteen hours.

"Rupert! I told you to watch the bags!" - Stewie Griffin

It just so happens I have a fine cuban cigar in the inner left pocket of my coat. What's to do with a fine cuban cigar? Why, smoke that bad boy on the steps of the building and laugh richly about the follies of the corporate world, of course.

Posted by tederick at 6:09 PM in h-pot & j-o-b & sex (practical)
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Aqua Teen movie trailer: experience the flaming chicken here!

It's a near impossibility that they're going to be able to create a 90-minute (or even 75-minute) movie out of an 11-minute TV show that could be sustainable or even remotely watchable, given how many of the 11-minute TV show episodes aren't sustainable or watchable. But hey, who cares? See the motherfucker stoned. It'll work.

I woke up this morning with the name "Sadie Pink" on my lips. Sounds like a porn star, huh? If only. Tomorrow morning I'll wake up with "The Adventures of Jenna Tull Across the Eighth Dimension" and see where that takes me.

Three days of classes! I don't wannnnnnnaaaaaaa!!!

Posted by tederick at 7:13 AM in dreams & j-o-b & movies
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Back in the day, the drive to Toronto from Kingston was an almost unimaginable odyssey - I mean, three frickin' hours! I had to pace it out rest stop by rest stop and have a back seat full of CDs to slip into the player rather precariously while careening down the road at a hundred and twenty k per hour. Today, Kingston-to-Toronto was just the home stretch. I hit Kingston at the tail end of my trip home and felt like I hadn't even really gotten my feet wet, driving-wise; that's North Carolina's influence for you. My drive today had three acts - Tremblant to Montreal, Montreal to Kingston, and Kingston to Toronto, and like any good narrative structure each one built on the one before to bring someting like meaning. There's a transcendental peace to be found for me on the open road in the big white world. Something about the way the music on the iPod can occasionally hit that groove that fits exactly with the movement of the car and the silent transit of the landscape beyond. As I think I've said before, as a character, I couldn't be more of a classicist. The external journey manifests the internal. I know where I am as long as I keep walking.

All the space and distance had me musing on long distance relationships, which I have pretty strong feelings about. I no longer understand how they work. Everything is twice as hard and happens twice as slowly. Distance only freezes, carbonite-style, the relevant moments into parcels of time that get meted out over weeks and months. It's contrary to every single thing I believe about what it means to connect with another person. Love is not an idea. It's a physical need, the way your belly button reaches out for the belly button of another person, the way fingers lace together. It can't be accomplished by e-mail. When someone you care about is somewhere else, that place is far.

I found a few things out there in the wild that I'm going to try to hang onto, but they disappear like mist in the morning when you're back in the all-too-familiar smells and noises of the home base. And I've got a killer week coming up. One of these days I really oughta take a vacation.

If you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you'll be swept off to.

Posted by tederick at 9:06 PM in jedi antics
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I understand now why people with ski experience elsewhere laugh like psychopaths when we show them our Blue "Mountain." Blue Mountain is a baby's left nipple compared to Tremblant. (In like kind, I must presume that Tremblant is like a twelve-year-old girl's breast bud compared to the Rockies or the Alps.) After fucking around on a good-sized run that was only about a third of the mountain this morning, I took the gondola to the very top, and just stood staring for about five minutes. "Look where you are," I muttered to myself. It's like a whole other thing up there. And then I kicked its ass.

Yeah, good day on the board. The first two runs or so were fucking murder - if for any reason you haven't been snowboarding in a couple of years and are considering going back, think long and hard about whether you want to go through the process of reminding your muscles of what they used to be capable of. The snowboarding itself comes back like falling off a bike, but the atrophy in my thighs, calves and feet was pretty disheartening. Good news being, minus twenty weather tends to numb out the torture after a while. So I got to take it from "falling down a mountain" to "falling down a mountain with subtle variations in direction and pace" in just a few short hours.

The board is a dream. I looked at people on their rented boards around me and laughed merrily. My Nemesis is lighter, faster, sharper, and slick like a vag in a month of Sundays. I can still feel the movement in my body as I lie here (in front of a roaring fire, no less) typing this. So very responsive. I only took a few falls overall and only one bad one (knees-first into a plate of solid ice), otherwise all the old skills were still in there waiting on the other side of the monumental pain to come out.

I will make a business case to get to Whistler next year on the company dime. I swear it.

There's a lot to be said for runs that last half an hour instead of eight minutes. Lets you get your think on. I miraculously managed to be on the last gondola up the hill at the end of the day, which meant I took the longest, slowest curve down the mountain all by myself with the sun painting the entire valley in spikes of gold and charcoal. It wasn't quite enough to hit a full-on moment of transcendence, but there was clarity. And right now clarity is all that I'm looking for.

Gonna go pay $20 for a plate of pasta. Yum!

Posted by tederick at 5:43 PM in jedi antics
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It must be said: there are few things I enjoy more than stealing WiFi. I am suckling at the teat of Spag & Co., the bar/grill directly below my balcony right now. I feel like a fucking pornstar!

This is where I am:

Connu comme Mont-Tremblant, dans le Québec. J'ai conduit ici de cet après-midi après mon offsite d'équipe et rien allo, il est magnifique !

Now: in addition to being some kind of WiFi theft fetishist, I am also a hotel fag. If there's another word for what I'm describing, let me know, otherwise I'm planting the flag with "hotel fag." When I was a kid when we'd arrive at a hotel, I'd be ludicrously, stupidly excited and run around like a crazy person because I was just so keened up about being at a hotel. You know what? I STILL AM. Last night the males on my team relocated to a house in Morrisburg because it had become available; I stayed in my room at the hotel. I LOVE HOTELS. So now I'm in one of the hotels at Tremblant and I STILL LOVE HOTELS. I don't ever want to leave the room. I just want to run around on the cheap carpeting and fuck around with dials on the walls and take really long showers and unfold the foldaway bed just to fold it back up again. There's a fireplace in here, Internet! And a kitchenette that is virtually on top of the bed - it'll be like sleeping on the set of a cooking show or in Ikea or something! It's all very exciting to me. Which, I'm gathering, is not the case with most people.

So I got here too late today to do any snowboarding because you know what? IT'S FUCKING FREEZING OUT THERE. It's minus twenty-two and still dropping. It's cold like a crazy old man with long, sharp teeth. So I have to wait till the sun crests the hill in the morning before I can even think of doing any "active sports."

Here's a plug: if you're ever in Morrisburg or in the Morrisburg area - for whatever reason; no judgment here - go to the Russell Manor Bed & Breakfast. I didn't sleep there but I took the majority of my meals there over the past three days. Folks, you have no idea. It's run by two guys named Ron and Michael and the food is fucking phenemonal. And by Toronto standards anyway, unbelievably cheap. Every single thing, from the ginger scones on Wednesday morning to the avocado and egg salad sandwich they sent me away with this afternoon, was among the best eatables I've ever had. I highly, highly recommend the place. Oh: and the house should be in a 19th-century period picture. It's like The Age of Innocence in there. It's so cool.

Definition - Morrisburg Handshake: When somebody (e.g. your boss) backs into your vehicle (not the Smrt car, thank goodness) at a high rate of speed, from a minimal starting distance, causing a disconcerting BOOM!

More tomorrow, pending piracy.

Posted by tederick at 6:03 PM in foodin' & hotels & jedi antics & photoblog
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Barely any internet in Morrisburg! Truly these people don't actually know the difference between having wireless internet (which the hotel claims to) and not having it (which they do not)! Finally me and my friend Dave went nuts and started stealing high-speed by sticking a juice line into the ass of the guest computer in the lobby! Piracy is alive and well in Morrisburg! Going stark raving stir crazy out here, Internet! PRAY FOR MATT BROWN!!

Posted by tederick at 11:32 PM in hotels & jedi antics
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Posted by tederick at 11:29 PM in extreme steve
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I am enjoying the hell out of His Dark Materials Illuminated. I'm nine or ten essays in at this point and only one of them has been below-par; the rest have been largely excellent. I'm thinking about the movie a lot while I'm reading this, obviously, and it's rather changed my feeling on the whole ordeal: there is no way that movie can ever achieve the things that the book achieved that made it so important to me. It's just textually impossible. A few years ago, with typical twentysomething arrogance, I suspected that I had found the nut that would allow the thing to be cracked open and turned into an adapted script that achieves some of the same artistic goals; I even started writing it. But I was dead wrong. Some things are intrinsict to the medium in which they are created, and His Dark Materials is a leading example. The best the movie can hope for is to be a run-and-jump Arctic adventure for kids, which will be just fine, thank you, and should not be confused with the real thing.

Took Zam to the vet this morning, where she was pronounced the most wonderful cat ever! It was a little like watching a really naughty toddler turn into an angel under the watchful gaze of the grandparents, but whatever. She weighs 11½ pounds, for those interested, and FREAKED OUT like I've never seen when I put her in the carrying cage. (She also played with kittens when she arrived at Secord. Kittens!) After the vet I had scarcely enough time to do what little work today must be done before leaving, and compounded the tight timelines by taking an ill-advised trip to Yonge & Bloor to bag the Yojuro combo pack and get myself twenty minutes to myself with my book and my coffee. I had just enough time to stand still and contemplate exactly where my life is currently heading, in the fullness of that meaning. And now I'm off to Morrisburg for four days. It's going to be in the minus twenties at Tremblant this weekend. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

Imminent question: does the snowboard fit in the Smrt car? To be continued, pending internet access at the hotel.

Posted by tederick at 1:16 PM in books & jedi antics
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The noms couldn't be more boring, although it was nice to see Abigail Breslin get a supporting actress nod for Little Miss Sunshine, and fucking stunning to see an adapted screenplay nomination go to Borat Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. I cannot damn well wait to hear someone have to read all that out at the show. But... adapted? From what? Assholic behaviour?

Meanwhile, Kevin Spacey was on Letterman last night and he threw a "we" before "are making another Superman movie." Huh? I figured Lex would stay gulagged on that island until at least Superman Returns a Third Time.

I realized 2 things last week:

1. I no longer want to watch Ugly Betty.
2. I no longer want to watch Heroes.

Last night's episode sealed the latter deal; I can't bother with that thing any more. I pretty much only care about Lost right now and it's pretty easy to care about a show when it's been on hiatus for eight weeks.

And that's your entertainment news!

Posted by tederick at 10:02 AM in movies & tv
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Based in some parts on Dan Aykroyd's concept, and in other parts on conversations at 3QF after we watched Ghostbusters on Hallowe'en.

Ghostbusters, the ultimate 1980s American startup capitalism movie, gets redressed for the post-Enron, mid-Global Warming 21st century in Ghostbusters 3. (And every other 80s blockbuster is being flogged with a latter-day sequel, so why not?)

After getting started as a small business in 1984, crashing to the ground in the mid-80s and being re-built in 1989 during Ghostbusters II, the Ghostbusters are now a successful national firm in the field of paranormal research and defence. The four original Ghostbusters have moved up in life, as people do: Venkman is living in the Hamptons with Sigourney Weaver, Egon is teaching paranormal science at M.I.T., Stanz is teaching the next generation of Ghostbusters at a training academy, and Winston is C.E.O. of Ghostbusters Inc. (Naturally, the African-American guy who hired on at five bucks an hour back in 1984 when looking for any job he could find, is the one who had the passion and the talent to steer the organization through the 1991 recession and emerge as its leading executive officer.)

The organization has expanded and now employs 50 full-time Ghostbusters between the ages of 20 and 35, operating out of New York, Los Angeles, and Austin. We enter the story at the New York offices where Stanz is guiding three junior Ghostbusters through the last of their training. (They are young, hot, and O.C. ready. One of them should be a Jessica Alba-ish female for Stanz to eventually get his freak on with.)

While investigating a paranormal disturbance at Ground Zero in an extended sequence, Stanz and the three juniors are pulled down into Hell, where they are told by the demon Mammon that the Ghostbusters have inadvertently tipped the scale of the metaphysical environment. Ghosts and the living have existed in harmony since the beginning of time, but thanks to the Ghostbusters' efforts, hundreds of thousands of spirit forms are now imprisoned in containment units all over the United States - including the central processing facility in the Negative Zone (located in Red Bank, New Jersey). The result? The ecto-slipstream that binds the universe together is on the verge of collapse. Human reality has less than fifty years of life left to it.

Stanz and the juniors return to New York in a serious depression. Ray calls a crisis meeting of the original Ghostbusters, held over takeout Chinese in the old firehouse, where Ray, Peter, Egon and Winston debate the future of the company and the world. Pressure from out-patent competition (slick low-end ghostkiller firms that charge less than the Ghostbusters) is already hurting the profit margins, and dumping the containment grid at the Negative Zone is going to cause an ecological disaster not unlike the one that heralded the return of Gozer way back in Ghostbusters 1. The challenge, then, is to Green the Ghostbusters - coming up with new eco-friendly "catch and release" ghostbusting methods and a containment grid that won't destroy the environment, along with a safe way to release all of the ghosts already captured back into the environment.

As the Ghostbusters start the monumental process of changing the way they do business, their lead competing ghostkiller firm - Dead Means Dead - surges ahead in popularity with low, low prices! How are they able to maintain this keen competitive advantage? Louis Tully, former ally and accountant to the Ghostbusters, is the president of DMD. Janine left him in 1996 and took the kids with her, and his lust for revenge has turned him into the Ghostbusters equivalent of Dark Helmet. Using cunning advertising campaigns promising the destruction of phantasms rather than their safe capture, DMD achieves new heights of popularity in "who gives a fuck, kill 'em already" America, while the Ghostbusters' business goes into the ground.

Seeking a competitive advantage that makes sense in the eco-friendly 21st century, Venkman goes "up the mountain" to find the one man he's least likely to ever get along with: Walter Peck, former paeon to the Environmental Protection Agency, now a burned-out recluse living in Montana. Venkman and Peck settle their differences and return to the city with the secret to environmentally-friendly Ghostbusting commerce. Peck suits up with the Ghostbusters while Stanz and Spengler re-engineer the Ghostbusting technology to be more forward-thinking, more "Apple" if you will. (Note: the music tracks for Ghostbusters 3 are consequently 2 times too long.)

And just as the Ghostbusters are starting to get a foothold with their lower-profit, higher-green approaches...

...all hell breaks loose.

Mammon, seeing the world ripe for the plucking, invades the Negative Zone with an army of Satan's minions. The ghost containment grid is destroyed unsafely and scarlet light burns a hole in the New Jersey sky. Instantaneously, the Eastern seaboard is beset by spirits and phantoms and they are all mightily, mightily pissed off.

Tully's Dead Means Dead marshals an army of ghostkillers by willfully arming any nut with a yen to kill ghosts, and a Lord of the Rings-style battle begins in the streets of New York, between Mammon's legions and the untrained masses of Dead Means Dead. The Ghostbusters, however, realize that the only way to avert the apocalypse is to brook a treaty with Mammon's boss: Lucifer himself. Via the gateway at Ground Zero, the four original Ghostbusters (and their three junior sidekicks, and Peck) enter Hades and meet with Lucifer about the fate of humankind (and penguins). Finally, Venkman agrees to stay in Hell as payment of the debt to the king of lost souls, which, Venkman argues, is at least slightly preferable to living in the Hamptons with Sigourney Weaver.

Lucifer calls back Mammon's forces before Mammon can kill Louis Tully, the Ghostbusters (minus Venkman) return to New York, and Venkman establishes a new gate to the afterlife which can be used to safely shepherd captured ghosts to a kind of protection area where they can live safely.

The Ghostbusters have saved the world... once again. Cue the fucking theme music!!

Copyright Matthew C. Brown, 2007. Hire me, Reitman, and I'll write it for free.

Posted by tederick at 9:33 AM in movies
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This will amuse you: I finally got the music done for Standoff, copied the drafts into the sound edit to tweak the timings, and immediately discovered that all of the cues were completely, irrevocably off-time because GARAGE BAND DOESN'T COUNT IN SECONDS. It was counting in "music time" instead of, oh, you know, a little thing we like to call TIME. So basically I have 2 lovely dideridoo tracks, one of which is ¾ the length of the entire movie, and the other of which is double the length of the movie. And even as it was going on, I wasn't angry, I was laughing, and saying to myself "This could only happen to me. Me, on a Macintosh computer."

I'm ready to say it. (Sing along if you can guess where I'm going.)

I HATE MACS. I FUCKING HATE MACS. I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS MAC BULLSHIT. YOU HAVE FAILED, MACKIES, TO DO ANYTHING OTHER THAN INVOKE MY LIFELONG IRE WITH YOUR RIDICULOUS FANTASY DANCES ABOUT THE BRILLIANCE OF THE MAC DESIGN SCHEME. YOU ARE ALL SO VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY WRONG.

See, I can understand a PC. A PC is like a very dumb child. Dumbness in children (as with dumbness everywhere and certainly in computer fetishists) is certainly irritating, but also makes the child completely incapable of doing anything that surprises you because dumbness = lack of imagination.

Macs, on the other hand, are the computer equivalent of a hyperactive 3-year-old always jumping up and down and cartwheeling around the room knocking shit off the walls screaming LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME at the top of its lungs until the neighbours are banging on the door and the turkey is coming out of the oven burnt clean through because you couldn't spare two minutes away from the spastic child to even go check on it, fuck, not even two damn minutes because that kid is so goddamned loud!!!

So now I'm going to go back and re-cut and re-mix my two music cues that have already taken way too long to make in the first place and create "PC edits" of the bad boys and they'll all be right there on the soundtrack album, they will, the track listing will be like this:

Standoff Soundtrack Album

Track 1: Entrada (PC edit)
Track 2: Requiem for a Gleet (PC edit)
Track 3: Entrada (Really fucking long version because Macs suck)
Track 4: Requiem for a Gleet (Requiem for a whole generation of Mac users who are insane and hopeless because Macs suck)

So there. Always remember: Boat anchor. Boat anchor. Truthfully I have enjoyed few purchases in my life as much as I've enjoyed Molly the Macbook for the last six months. But for the purposes of this post, EAT THIS! From hell's heart I stabbedy at thee!!

Posted by tederick at 7:36 AM in i hate mac & tederick films
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Last night a man stopped me on the street to tell me that he had fallen off the wagon and was drunk for the first time in six months. We shared a bit of a personal moment on that one, more than you'd expect to share with a guy who just picked you out on a street corner in Cabbagetown at 7:30 at night for looking, as he said, "like a good man." I don't know if I was helpful to him or if I just made things worse and actually, I don't know which one I was trying to be either under the circumstances. But it called up a smell memory for me, too. Old liquor. And I'm right back there again. Thank god Long Point doesn't have a particularly significant smell.

I am scent-oriented to a degree that continually surprises me. I have literally followed my nose on adventures, like a slowly-unfurling treasure map (with an X or an H at the end). I have been turned around by untraceable odours like a puppy in a sausage factory. Those women who have had the misfortune to develop interest in me only to see it not returned have almost always smelled "wrong" to me, and those who have had the greater misfortune to attract my eye smell "right" in curious, fulfilling, and nearly subconscious ways. I have literally felt my eyes roll into the back of my head because some thing or some one or some place smelled so good. I always remember that line from the end of My So-Called Life's "Life of Brian" episode where she asks him to dance and between the dialogue his voiceover comments that she smells like an orange grove his family passed in a car when he was eight, and I could smell that orange grove. And sometimes the vaguest whiff of vanilla on the air can make me feel either really really good, or send a bucket of ice water down my spine. These things are not unusual to anyone, I would expect, but it's strange how rarely they seem to be mentioned - we assume the inexpressibility, and are usually wrong.

Posted by tederick at 8:37 PM in jedi antics & movies
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I gotta admit to getting a stunningly arrogant thrill from being better at Balderdash than other people. (Inside my head the little 8-year-old me is dancing back and forth from foot to foot saying, I am good at words, ha ha ha ha.) Last night I was playing it with some friends from work and also some total strangers (check me out and my social phobiae!). I sunk the basket with "Randlesman," which I alone correctly guessed to be defined as a green and white polka-dot handkerchief, while simultaneously getting four other players to pick my fake definition ("a type of rope which bears evenly when pulled from any direction"). Oh yeah!: the bait, and the hook. Nobody gets past a rope reference.

Incidentally I was sorry to hear about this incident on the Picton Castle, if only because I think very fondly of the ship and her captain, thanks to the Tall Ship Chronicles a few years back. Not sure exactly what lead me to be Googling the Picton at 3:00 in the morning last night, but there you go. Still want to get on to that ship someday.

Did a draft of "Requiem for a Gleet," the second Standoff track, before leaving the house last night. (Naturally I only got it done when I had to cram it into a 20-minute time packet.) Going to lay the tracks down tonight and then start the arduous colour timing. But first, movie with Matty Price!

Posted by tederick at 10:20 AM in tederick films & the process
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And not in a good way.

So somehow I wrenched my left wrist at some point in the last 24 hours, and also burned the fuck out of my right index finger this afternoon, so both of my hands are a bit... tentative right now. Tensor bandage on the one and gigantic white blister on the other, I look like I don't know how to take care of myself! Which is, of course, true. But not why I'm writing this post. I am writing for the following reason alone:

ATTENTION, PEOPLE OF EARTH: Stop sending me information about On the Lot. I have now heard of it. You have achieved your goal of communicating its existence to me. STOP E-MAILING ME. I will submit Standoff, I promise, with or without its being all the way done. (But I expect it to be all the way done before the deadline anyway.) That is all I can do for now so please relax. But bravo to you for your communicatingness.

Hey, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm pretty sure Dave and I hatched this exact concept for a reality show in early 2004. Maybe our way onto the Lot is to sue the living shit out of the studio? That works, doesn't it (right PJ)?

Posted by tederick at 5:54 PM in tederick films & tv
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I've waxed in the past about how sterile and uncreative my work environment is. Well, something turned a corner this week: somehow my cubicle started looking more like home than my home did. (Maybe it was the ten hour days?) So I took a buncha pictures!

Step into my tiny little cube of office space.

Let's start with the Hulk Hands! Hulk hand-me-downs, actually, from Amanda. But boy howdy are these things popular right now. And the fact that it looks like the Hulk is fighting his way out of my overhead cabinet is worth its weight in gold.

Glen and Lisa, in the midst of a stress-relieving one-handed Hulk Hand fight.

The main station. Note the hotness. The new laptop's a piece of shit but the second screen is freaking terrific. (Hence the hotness.)

Shelf 1, including Captain Pike, many aliens, a giant shiny frog, and Medium Sized Fucking Hellboy.

Shelf 2, including the dangling monkey, the Calling on Anal quiz, and the much-needed picture of Demetre.

The emergency rum.

Star Trek figures - gifts from Stephen, including 2 Dr. McCoy figures - leading to the ongoing "McCoy vs. McCoy" grudge match represented here. Right now Captain Kirk just can't imagine how McCoy is going to get out of McCoy's killer pile driver! Also, the Ladies of the Box can be barely seen peering out. Having a picture of me surrounded by pirate hotness doesn't hurt the office esteem.

I had the weirdest dream about Rita last night, now that I think about it. Hmmm.

Anyway, that's the whole show.

Posted by tederick at 3:54 PM in j-o-b & photoblog
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Okay, so did anybody think it was funny? My feelings on this whole deal went from horrible guilt to righteous indignation pretty quick. HOW DARE YOU NOT HANG ON OUR EVERY ILL-CONCEIVED STUNT! Ingrates.

Mamo returns, footloose and argument free!

Posted by tederick at 3:42 PM in podcastery
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All right, I'll admit it: I don't get MySpace. I am so not web 2.0. (Fuck, does MySpace even fit into web 2.0? Now I'm displaying my ignorance of web 2.0. I am a fucking professional e-learning developer. Holy fuck.) Someone asked me if I was on MySpace today and because it was the bazillionth time I've received that question it just suddenly occured to me that I don't get the MySpace concept at all. I even Wikipediaed its ass to try to gain knowledge (see! that's relatively web 2.0 of me) but I still don't get it. It's... like... a... online personal ad? Kinda? An online likes/dislikes page that you link up with all your friends' likes/dislikes pages, and which says who you'd like to meet, and has a picture of Jessica Alba on it if you're a boy or Justin Timberlake if you're a girl? That must be it. That's the definition of the thing.

Why is Zam grunting? Zam is grunting right now.

I used to be on Geocities. Way, way the hell back in the day, Tederick.com was on Geocities. Since then, the following web fads have completely passed me by:

• Hotmail
• ICQ
• Gmail
• MSN
• Friendster
• Blogger
• MySpace
• Flickr
• Youtube (although I admit I'm getting better at this one)

But this site, baby, this site is still here. Entirely privately owned and operated and fad-free. I don't even understand how my fucking syndication engine works. So there.

It must be said that shopping at Pages Bookstore never ceases to be a mystifying and vaguely irritating experience. I mean, I want to support the independent little guy every once in a while, but every single conversation I've ever had with a salesperson in there has left me feeling like the stupidest, most insignificant rube to ever claim that he could read stuff good. And for this, they charge 30% more than Chapters. I got a pretty kickass photography book by Juergen Teller, though, so once the icky feeling washed off I felt okay. This (and a thoroughly extravagent burrito) was my treat to myself after the Week of Hell.

Yes! You too can have your very own Week of Hell! Just ask for more responsibility and be granted it, and learn a whole bunch in the process about just how it feels to be sitting exactly where the buck stops, and no further!

My colleagues and I discovered a pretty solid stress reliever today, though: single-handed Hulk Hands fights. Each player gets a Hulk Hand and they have to go after the other player with that hand only. It's quite the something. I even got wailed on by a pregnant woman! A pregnant woman with a giant green fist! All right.

Trebuchet update: no.

Well, I'm just fucking around waiting for the Mamo right now, and contemplating my socks. I think I have the ugliest socks of all time on right now. They are brown, white, green, orange, and red, all at once. I have to say I rather like them. But surely red and orange were never meant to coexist like this? What does "clashing" mean when it comes to clothing colours anyway? I am so not fashion 2.0.

All right that's it for now. I took a bunch of pics of my cubicle at work because it's finally starting to feel "homey" and I will post them. But tomorrow probably.

Posted by tederick at 9:38 PM in books & j-o-b & tederickdotcomdotcom
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Last night I dreamed that I visited York University at Daniel's behest, because he had described the many changes to the campus and thought they were worth seeing. (That part really happened.) I arrived at York to find that York Lanes (York's mall-within-a-University) had expanded to surround the entire central quad and was now multiple stories tall and highly claustrophobic, packed with students whose sole purpose at the school seemed to be to buy clothes. (That part, in its way, also really happened.) The Centre for Film and Theatre, meanwhile, was due to be torn down and I had to break into the building in order to have a look around. In the main corridor of the CFT, I passed one person that I thought I might have gone to school with back when I was a student there, but I did not remember his name. I found an editing room that had not been there before and stole several reels of brightly-coloured film stock. And then I left the building and caught the wrong bus, realizing only after it was too late that I'd seen only a portion of the building and should have explored more.

The purpose of art is to organize the world (brutal, vulgar, chaotic) into something which communicates meaning (illuminating, connecting, unifying).

Bibliography:

Heart of Darkness: lays bare the dichotomy between inexpressable reality and communicable artifice

In the Skin of a Lion: gathers together the threads of the small world in which I live and demonstrates illumination, connection, and unification

Ulysses: is encyclopedic in knowledge and playful in form

From Hell: does that, with pictures

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus: uses non-masculine narrative form to convey the consequences of creation

His Dark Materials: is the best example I've yet found of how to do all this well.

Posted by tederick at 2:57 PM in books & dreams & poetical
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"You're liquefied, bitch!"

Posted by tederick at 7:27 AM in tv
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The musical episode of Scrubs was all right, I guess, not great. "Everything comes down to poo" was pretty terrific (although it did bear the imprimateur of the Avenue Q origins a bit too heavily). Otherwise the ep felt kinda like "Once More With Feeling" in fast-forward and without the cinematic awesomeness because that director, man, what was he doing? Nothing so far as I could tell.

Smallville formation-of-the-Justice-League episode: very, very gay. And you know what? Tom Welling needs to be playing Superman by now, and does not know how to do that. So freaking dour. Get a sense of humour, buddy!

And every time I watch ER I feel like I'm being violated by a snake.

Posted by tederick at 10:32 PM in tv
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After dilly-dallying around it for about three weeks now, first because of lack of snow and then plain ol' procrastination, I have finally booked myself a snowboarding weekend for next week. I'm at a team offsite Tuesday-Friday in lovely Morrisburg, ON, and from there I'm going to Tremblant for two days. I'm going alone. And I'm gonna have fun, dammit.

Yeah I was stressing about this but now that it's booked (and costly as FUCK!), I'm feeling better about it and other things.

Week's drawing to a close, got a Terra meeting tonight and a bit of gas left in the tank overall.

Posted by tederick at 4:41 PM in jedi antics
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I gotta admit, that's pretty cool. Came in at the same time as the HD-DVD announcement, which I don't care about for a lot of reasons but mostly because these remastered Trek episodes are pretty meaningless to me. But if I were to name a favourite episode on the original series, it would be "Where no man has gone before," and yeah... that's pretty cool.

Posted by tederick at 8:35 PM in tv
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Mood check, day 3: fair-to-cloudy. The reserves are starting to give out on me. The tangible causes of stress are decreasing as hurdles are overcome day by day, but the symptoms of stress are increasing as the stamina wears thin. There's been some exhaustion, some depression, some general feelings of fried-ed-ness. I've completely given up on getting my ass in gear in the evenings to work out some of the film projects that need working out; I'm mostly in the [I'm burbling my lips with my index finger right now] head space. So I sit on the couch with my laptop and watch The Simpsons. It isn't much.

Trebuchet update: nothing yet.

Today I bought the first of a new launch of Star Trek: The Next Generation comics. It's set in the first season of the show. It was surprisingly successful in capturing a) the bizarre 1980s production values of ST:TNG, and b) the high-brained lameness of the first season stories. I don't count it a bad thing; there's something to be said for the fact that before the Cataclysm*, Trek was about the crew going to a planet every week and dealing with what they found there, not the interpersonal drama that every Trek writer has whined and bitched about being so important since 1990. Remember? How the show used to be science fiction?

Spider-Man: Reign, on the other hand, is just goddamn depressing. Really irritatingly good, but still very depressing. But it was the first comic book Wednesday in a long while where I actually had time and means to get my burrito fix and read a bit, so that was an all right way to end the day.

Encouraging comments from David Koepp re: not making Indy quip Raiders lines like a damn fool.

I am most definitely lonely, and tired, and holding my own.

Posted by tederick at 8:01 PM in comix & j-o-b & the process
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Posted by tederick at 7:42 AM in extreme steve
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After skipping lunch and in the midst of another 9-hour work day yesterday I found five minutes in the afternoon to sneak off to the kitchen and eat a grapefruit... and felt a bajillion times better. The simple process of sectioning a grapefruit brought me peace, clarity, and focus. It is the wonder-fruit.

By the way, grapefruit juice can interact badly with some medications. Check it here just in case it's you.

Last night after having dinner with D-Coc in which not one, but two secret One Minute films were hatched, I came home and crawled into bed and read Below the Root straight through to the end, which was also meditational in its way because it let me retain a certain clarity of purpose rather than get sidetracked off (as often happens) with before-bed miscellany. I woke up again at 1:30 and was fairly surprised that I'd drifted off so quickly, or so deep.

Going to post me up an Extreme Steve and head off to work.

Posted by tederick at 7:20 AM in books & foodin'
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This man is farting. Notice how he leans into it at the tail end to really "wring the juice out of the rind," as it were.

This is going to be - and has already started being - a tough week at work. We're all going out of town next week and in training the week after that, and I'm going to try to sandwich some snowboarding into the middle of that, but the result is that a whole lotta stuff has to happen before Friday. So my nine and a half hour work day today inspired in me, for unknown reasons, the powerful desire to roast a chicken. Which I did when I got home, and couldn't have been pleaseder with myself if I had hunted and killed the measly bird myself. Except that it took like 2½ hours so I didn't end up having my scrumptious meat-pickins till nearly nine, and not until I'd beaten my arm damn near ragged trying to make some mayonnaise for the cold chicken remnants tomorrow. I tell ya, you can't make mayonnaise in the city of Toronto right now. I've tried. Must be the air pressure or something.

The night before last I had a surprisingly detailed, and surprisingly mundane, dream where some girl asked me out. Then last night I had a surprisingly detailed, and surprisingly mundane, dream where I was in Lost and hanging with Ben Linus. It all seemed to make sense at the time but when I woke up I realized that I really understood nothing new about the island. Which tracks with my work-week.

Pike in: Rah!

By the way: Cuse thinks they'll end Lost when they damn well wanna, and Lindelof thinks the network will force them to do it until it sucks the bag to a degree heretofore unconsidered. Who's right? Ben Linus, that's who.

If this entry isn't very good, it's because you touch yourself at night.

Posted by tederick at 9:33 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & dreams & foodin' & j-o-b & movies
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As it turns out, mixing a 1-minute didgeridoo track in Garage Band out of multiple sources because you can't circular breathe yet takes a really fucking long time. The results, however, are satisfying. It's like living in a beehive where the bees have ancient souls!

Sometimes I see a young couple down on Queen West. He plays the didgeridoo and she plays, if I'm not mistaken, a sitar. They are pretty much my heroes and should be the heroes of all buskers everywhere, too (I'm not a busker, I'm just saying) because the shit they're capable of delivering blows the human mind. Fuck, I shoulda just hired them to do the damn music for this movie, then it would have been done two months ago.

I spent about an hour today walking around the Danforth trying to find a coffee shop with an open table. This shouldn't be this difficult, should it? I mean it's one thing that the Starbuckses have driven all the independent coffee houses out of the neighbourhood but the fact that they've done it with sub-standard restaurant footprints that leave only enough room for 4-6 tables per location is just bloody irritating. Anyways I finally found a place to sit at a chocolate shop and knocked off three Extreme Steves. I tell you (and this will sound highly retarded), drawing a comic for someone else's script teaches you a fuckload about what the artist really contributes to comic storytelling. I'm not sure when I twigged to the fact that I could do more than what's in the script, but the results are fairly entertaining.

I snaggled off the rest of the afternoon with some Runaways back-reading. I"m ready to call "Dead Means Dead" my Favourite Thing Ever. Pain! Pizza parties! And a giant purple monster! That's where it's at, kids.

I suspect the coming week is going to be really difficult and unpleasant, and that's upped the stress level a little bit. Not sure exactly how to break the funk. I'm finding clarity and focus difficult to achieve for the last few days.

Posted by tederick at 9:43 PM in comix & tederick films
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Hire back the staff, Blue Mountain, I'm comin'!

Posted by tederick at 12:54 PM in photoblog
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OK I'm a few days late on this but do you want to see a studio exec pull out a shiny new revolver, aim it squarely at his own right foot, and pull the trigger? Here's Bob Shaye being an idiot! I mean, this rant is so pathetic it's laughable. PJ's response, naturally, far more civilized. Think I'll watch Return of the King and muse about death.

Trebuchet update: nothing yet.

I'm sort of all over the place right now, haven't really had a chance to focus on any one thing (like finishing Standoff music, for example, or doing some pre-pre-production prep on Portrait). I was supposed to do an interview for Global today about podcasting but that got postponed; I also got cold-called this week about vodcasting but that got shot down by lack of time and resources. I saw Chad for about five minutes last night and Andria for about twenty-five; Mer's in town and we just had coffee. There is question about whether I have what can be called a "social life" or if I just go places and see people and then go to other places, most of which involve DVD purchase or Snailer flirtage. This is living???

Jo Chen is a new breed of awesome right now: Runaways, Buffy. Cover me! I should totally get that girl to do the cover for Extreme Steve Vol. 2.

I feel like macaroni. (Not personally, just in terms of what to eat for dinner.) Some days you just need the cheese, y'know?

Posted by tederick at 4:32 PM in comix & joss & pj's playground & tederick films
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Intercourse Pooch

Sounds like a damn good idea for a cartoon series to me. Intercourse Pooch! Making the world safe for dog congress, one leg-hump at a time! No asshole too fragrant, no lipstick too glossy, Intercourse Pooch points a swollen cock-ball of dog-semen right at the heart of villains who would try to rob the world of its right to doggie-style sex, for animals and humans alike! A sexual position so popular it transcended genus and became the centrepiece of the entire pornographic art, Intercourse Pooch is the mascot for rear entry everywhere!

Humping your leg on Fox this fall!

Posted by tederick at 10:48 AM in sex (theoretical)
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In this Mamo, a bunch of stuff happens, and is discussed, and is discussed no more.

Here.

Posted by tederick at 9:39 AM in podcastery
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Now as we all know, I really hate people who use euphemisms when referring to genitalia with their children. Sets a bad precedent by demarcating the nads as special/different/dirty/unmentionable. Here's a dude with four daughters who feels he can't possibly call a vagina a vagina, so he's settled on "Toto" instead. Which is not just wrong generally, but specifically to this case, fucking gross!

The claim to fame of his post, though, is this "guh-lossary" of alternate vagina-related words that replace the "vah" with something else. At first I sort of liked that idea, then I read him in more detail and realized that pretty much every single thing he puts there is vaguely offensive or disturbing in one way or another. (I mean, Xuh-gyna is linguistically clever, I suppose, but read the description!)

So basically, I hate this guy. He is anti-vag-pos. He is in fact vag-neg. Now that's a vulgar word, the highest insult I can bestow: "You're vag-neg!"

Posted by tederick at 9:10 AM in vagina fridays
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Posted by tederick at 12:59 PM in movies
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I am effectively a year behind. The going theory is that due to the traumas of the second half of 2005, my brain never really registered moving into 2006 - I stayed "stuck" in '05 psychologically, which is reasonable, but is playing hell with my calendar nowadays. Every time I see "2006" written out somewhere, my brain thinks it's this new year - i.e. the year we just moved into, not even the usual thing where for the first few weeks of January you still think it's last year. "Last year," to me, is 2005, and this is now 2006. It's hilariously unsettling!

Last night I dreamed I was at the Silver Snail with Mark and it was really, really busy. It was also really gorgeous in there - it was the Snail the way I'd light it if it were in a movie, with giant shafts of light dropping through the front of the store from skylights above, and much higher ceilings, giving it more of a library / older building feel. The place was damn well packed like I said, like the market place in Cairo in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Mark and I were basically just not dealing with the crowdedness by sitting behind the counter and reading comic books while this flood of people crushed past us. Some of the Snailers were doing the same thing, on the other side of the room, perching themselves up on the toy racks and catcalling back and forth to us. I got a call on my cell phone and the caller ID read "Keira Knightley" but when I picked it up it was an older Asian woman who thought she was talking to her son. I shined her on, pretending to be her son for a few minutes before hanging up and joking about the call with Mark and the Snailers. Then I told one of the Snailers she was the spitting image of Keira Knightley, really, and made a boisterous flirtatious attempt to win her affections. She got really angry at that point and Mark and I decided it was time to leave.

Do with that what you will.

Yester night Dave, Chris, Daniel and I had a sit-down meeting about Portrait of a Young Artist in My Bed. First we went over the script in some detail, and then we talked about production logistics. It's been a while since I've mounted anything like this so I sort of just wanted to have my memory refreshed about what I should be thinking about, in which capacity Dave was more than helpful. The script comments were really good, too, although I think they mostly just amount to a "clarifying" draft of the script rather than any kind of larger re-write. I think the script is still a solid place to start. So right now the plan is to shoot on the second weekend in April, although I've gotta get my shit together on that in the next few days so that I have some kind of a project package to start from with regard to casting, location, and simple scheduling and planning. Oh, and money. Yay, spending my money!

I've just finished reading Getting Away With It, which I really enjoyed and made me think that I should start putting together a series of video interviews with Daniel about filmmaking, because it would be fun to do and our conversations would be interesting to me. The book was fairly successful in transitioning Richard Lester from essentially being the bad guy in the Superman DVD special features, to being an actual filmmaker whose work I am significantly curious about. Now I'm reading Below the Root, and it's tripping me out. Grunspreking, wissenberries, Pomma (the archetypal Molly)... I had a very intense dream about Heather Anderson on Saturday, and between that and this it's like 1988 all over again, by way of 2005.

Posted by tederick at 10:36 AM in books & dreams & tederick films
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Here's William Shatner reacting to direction!

And in lieu of a more detailed blog, here are some other amazing things that were said today:

"A silly, ridiculous person; a peanut-head."

Her: "You, on the other hand, annoy me... monthly."
Me: "More often than that."
Her: "Daily. Hourly."
Me: "Sentencely."

"She's a crafty one, that Fung."

"This guy, when he was born, turned around and said to his mother, 'do you want to try it again, with knives?'"

Posted by tederick at 10:41 PM in miscellaneous crap
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Posted by tederick at 8:49 AM in extreme steve
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Also causing problems: fickle, pickle, wickle, dickle, and shlickle.

Posted by tederick at 5:46 PM in tederickdotcomdotcom
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OK, grab a mug of hot cocoa or wrap a shawl around yourself because this is the most upsetting thing you're going to see today: Ticle Me Elmo on fire. Sure, you'd think it's a great concept within the destruction-of-technology wheelhouse, but there's something about this that I found profoundly disturbing and surprisingly sad. I think I'm having uncanny valley issues here.

To bring it all back to one and let us laugh at Tickle Me Elmo again, here's Ticle Me Elmo on drugs, which as far as I can tell is just a video clip of Tickle Me Elmo doing what Tickle Me Elmo does, only with the "on drugs" context added via the clip title, which proves surprisingly effective. What is up with Tickle Me Elmo? And all other toys from five years ago?

Posted by tederick at 11:36 AM in miscellaneous crap
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This morning the subway made the exact sound of my headache. It was like the entire subway was shaking very rapidly and it was creating this extraordinary low-end hum with multiple harmonics that was growing and building and slowly increasing in pitch. I think it was the most perfect sound I've ever heard. I wish we had the capability to record sounds at the fidelity with which the human ear interprets them. I would use that sound for the soundtrack for Standoff and thereby finish the fucking thing and not have to spend time mixing 2 didgeridoo tracks which I feel like I've been procrastinating for the entirety of my life. (It's actually been exactly a month.) I know that sounds like the one I heard can be created for movies but they have to be built up artificially from a number of elements; you could never record a sound like that live and achieve all of its sensoramic weirdness.

Along those lines, I went to see Ice Age yesterday with the Price-Gryfe consortium, including wee Max who I keep calling "son" to confuse him. Wait a minute what the fuck am I talking about - it was Happy Feet, not Ice Age. Why would I go to see Ice Age. (Why would I go to see Happy Feet?) Yeah anyways I had some serious problems with that flick. It might very well be the Citizen Kane of talking animal movies but I either didn't understand the ending or the ending is gigantically morally irresponsible. But it was interesting watching a movie that I don't have to review; the bullet list of "review points" that I struggle to keep in my head through the length of a feature film never formed, and I just watched the movie. Huzzah for progress!

When I got home Chris and I had a meeting about the script for Portrait of a Young Artist In My Bed. We briefly contemplated changing the title - I wanted Non-Cooperative Games, and we both toyed with Determinism! - but we decided to stick with the original in spite of the fact that Chris has already made a movie called that. After talking about it for half an hour or so we both realized that we rather like the script more than we thought we did. I mean I always liked the script but thought there would be some larger revisions in our future than the ones we have now discussed.

Stephen Wright just gave me the entire bridge crew of the Enterprise! What to do with all these brightly-coloured uniforms.

Posted by tederick at 8:38 AM in movies & tederick films & toys!
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There ya go. Tederick.comments are back up and running, and the entire database has been rebuilt from the ground up in a new home (I called it Cyclops! ). Better yet, I managed to save all of the comments that were submitted after the function went down, two months to the day ago.

It's possible that there are a few comments missing from the past year that got destroyed when the database was corrupted, but I'll do some assessment on that and see if I can bring them back.

You, the people, have a voice again.

My voice says: MOVABLE TYPE SUCKS!!!

Posted by tederick at 2:15 PM in tederickdotcomdotcom
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Still not convinced about the kid but damn, I love that shot. (More here. The boy they've got for Roger is freaking uncanny.) It's strange how overwhelmingly emotional I get, even from thinking about the books and about Lyra and Will. I don't think my enjoyment of this movie is going to have anything to do with its quality. I think it's just going to Freak Me Out, no matter whether they nailed it or not.

Posted by tederick at 7:46 AM in movies
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I think seeing that picture put me in a pregnancy frame of mind because last night I dreamed I was visiting Renee in Japan (where she, too, is expecting). But then I dreamed about a lot of things last night. More things, one would think, than could fit into an average 8-hour dream cycle. I mean the flight to Tokyo alone is like 16 hours.

Today I finished development on the e-learning project I've been priming since September. ("development" = "building.") Major sense of accomplishment, even though it's only the wee baby compared to the big dog I'm priming now. Sort of fun to kick sweet Captivate ass all afternoon and then walk out the door smiling at five o'clock. Then as expected, my brain finally hit the panic mode on Portrait of a Young Artist, and I did all my script notes on the subway on the way downtown. Sometimes I really have to con my brain into taking my goals seriously. Things would be so much easier without all these internal chess games.

Further to the point, this is my brain:

What this means for you, the consumer: The HBDI maps brain quadrants. Upper left (blue) is logic, reasoning, etc.; upper right (yellow) is creativity, future-thinking; lower right (red) is emotion, sentiment; lower left (green) is process, history. I favour creativity, process, and emotion. (Creativity has a bare 3-point lead.) I use (but do not necessarily favour) logic. In times of stress, incidentally, I lean on process and pull back on emotion (which is so true it's genuinely scary to think that a computer figured it out just by asking me if I'd mail a letter with a stamp on it that I found by the wayside). But also in times of stress, my creativity stays exactly the same. I am always this creative.

More on the implications of this, plus some stuff I've been reading, later.

Got home, snugged it up with some KD in my pirate bowl and watched some Simpsons, and then put most of the night into the ongoing efforts to make Tederick.com as complete as possible by wasting as much bandwidth as I can: I (finally!) reasserted the complete archive of SURVIV.ORg, a.k.a. my blog on Survivors 1, 2, 3 and All-Stars. Getting further into the swing, I reinstated the Bone Daddy 2 Production Diary (link at the bottom of the page), and added some interesting archive images to the VCR page, because after five long years of thinking about it, I'm finally ready to close the VCR decalogue. Fucking around on my blog, then, is called "procrastinating that task," at which I scored an 89.

After all that I put an hour or so into drawing an Extreme Steve I wrote a long time ago, and now, the bed.

Posted by tederick at 10:48 PM in dreams & j-o-b & tederick films & tederickdotcomdotcom
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I booked some time with Chris for the weekend to go over the script for Portrait of a Young Artist In My Bed because without doing that I will literally never get off my ass to do the script review and make notes on the script. Actually I already know I'm not going to have much to say because I pretty much like it the way it is. But I'm sure there are things I'll want to clarify. Feels like I've got my fingers in a lot of pots right now, creatively speaking; this collaterally tends to make me worry that there are too many pots and not enough cockroaches. a.k.a. am I overextending myself. Two flicks I definitely want to make plus scripts for two more and intentions for another two after that. It might be the illusion of movement via the endless churning circularity of hopping from one idea to another without ever settling.

Watching the special features on the Fat Girl DVD I realized that I don't really like Catherine Breillat as a person. But it doesn't matter because I like her film so I respect her. (Oddly, I also realized recently that I don't very often like Steven Soderbergh's films but I keep going to see them because I like him and respect him. It was the same way with Altman. In fact without thinking about it I'd list them both among my favourite filmmakers and then realize that I don't really like their work very often.) Anyways I am very glad I bought the Fat Girl DVD. At first the flick really pissed me off but it's grown on me considerably as I've been thinking about it over the past week. I've been buying a lot of Criterions lately because they inevitably turn out more interesting than most other things I watch/buy. Next up is Playtime on a recommendation from Matty Price.

Outside chance that I'll be able to make a case to go to a conference in Vegas in March. I wonder what it's like to lie in a hotel room doing nothing in Las Vegas.

Proving that the internet is the solution to everything, I just found that weird Arabic track from 3-Iron in the iTunes Music Store. This thing could not be bought for love or money six months ago, so clearly things are improving. That's what I like about you internet: you supply my demand. I lodged a ticket asking to be notified when trebuchets become available again.

Oh, lying in bed listening to the Beatles and re-indexing mp3s. This is living.

Posted by tederick at 10:53 PM in j-o-b & movies & shinydisks & tederick films
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Posted by tederick at 7:25 AM in extreme steve
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I guess I musta been tired because I stumbled around the house for a couple of hours last night watching The Simpsons and making dinner, and then lay down on my bed at 8:30 and woke up a few minutes ago. I seem to have gotten up in the middle of the night and closed my door and turned off my computer, but I have no memory of that. Meanwhile Brandy's been pulling a full Nightmare on Elm Street 3 because she's been having problems with cockroaches. Her light stays on all night and she doesn't sleep. (Last night among my 38 other dreams I imagined she was in there eating coffee grounds with Coke chasers.)

It's 2007! Do I want a trebuchet?

Mamo hits 2007 largely here! While recording that Mamo at a Starbucks on Queen West I was pretty sure I was going to see a guy die. This homeless dude was wandering around the Starbucks for about a half an hour coughing up a lung, and then he went into the washroom and coughed some more, and then the coughing stopped, and then a line formed for the washroom, and then a Starbucks employee was summoned with the master key, and then he opened the washroom, and then he rushed over to the cash area and did something I couldn't see, and then fire trucks showed up. But it turned out that the homeless guy wasn't even in there and the fire trucks weren't for us but were proceeding down the street. It was like The Prestige! I'll bet the homeless guy was on the fire truck.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie comes in March!

Spent yesterday setting up my brother at work, because he now works where I work. I'm still Superman, but apparently I tire easily.

Posted by tederick at 7:09 AM in 3QF & j-o-b & miscellaneous crap & movies & podcastery
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