Tederick.com: August 2007 Archives
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Ladies and gentlemen, the Spawn of Chad:
And her name is Leia. And born in the year of the Fire Pig no less. And if you go over to Chad's blog, you will see the funniest "I can't believe I just got born" picture EVER.
"Enough of this handgun shit. Close quarters killing! That's how you know you're a man." - Matt Brown
"I gotta admit, this is fuckin' fun." - Mark Brown
[Yes. I arrive at every single internet fad six months late. Today's fad: Wii love. Tomorrow's fad: Facebook. Get ready for it, I'm totally cruising March '07 right now.]
WHAT THE FUCK, my brother got me a Wii. A FUCKING WII, FOR FRII, FOR MII. For my birthday, almost a month early.
I am gobsmacked.
I think we now have a fairly good idea of who is in the lead for Tederick.com's Man of the Year.
I'm getting pantsed over here. Pantsed!! Who wrote this schedule? DID THEY NOT KNOW I WOULD WANT TO SEE BOTH PERSEPOLIS AND YOUNG PEOPLE FUCKING???
Jack Sparrow does know what he wants. The earlier title was ironical, you stupid TIFF programming bastards
Hello Internets. Guess what? I got to carry a hot schoolgirl's schoolbooks today. 
OK so "schoolgirl" is pushing it a bit, but let me have this one. I have so little.
Hey I'll say this: there's nothing like actually starting work on your Hallowe'en costume to really focus your life down to a laser point. This one is going to cost a damn fortune, mind you, but whoa... so worth it. Also because there were certain... um... "time sensitive" elements, I'm glad I got going now instead of post-TIFF. Post-TIFF would have been bad. Because then it's fatigue and birthdays and whatnot and before you know it it's Nuit Blanche and then the October offsite and then where are ya? Huh? You're on October damn twentieth with not a stitch stitched, that's where!
If only the same get-up-and-do-it-ness applied to my filmmaking projects. In the plus column, I finished VCR 5.1 on Friday. In the minus, VCR: The Ninth Gate pretty much has to start going to camera this weekend, or it's not happening. Man when this is all done and you see the madness I have wrought, you are going to split your unmentionables right down their vie en rose.
Otherwise it's all about the grid right now. I live and die by the grid. I put the "musts" and the "midnights" in the grid first because it made sense to do that, and then I took the first picks from the Vanguard programme (because for whatever reason, there ended up being a really nice corridor in there of flicks I'm really excited about). Already had to knock two first picks down to second picks just due to time conflicts, so it's been a rough road already. But that's all right, it's fun as fuck and I've got plenty of time to move things around.
Four down, and the timing's uncanny. Summer's over.
"...as plate after plate of fluffy poached eggs, cartilaginous peameal, and lakes of sunshiney goo continued to pile up over time, I realized that if I don't start catalogueing these excursions in some formal manner, a great field of human knowledge would be lost. Hence, the Benedict Chronicles..."
Since we last visited Fran's for a BenChro, they have diversified their Benny menu. (Benu.) They're serving a Blackstone now which I'll get to as soon as I can; I wasn't feeling the salmon this time, though, so I went with the "Chicken Classic Benedict." It's basically the exact same meal as their standard issue, only with a slice of chicken instead of the peameal.
It was goddamned well done, man.
I can't say that the chicken necessarily changed the overall presentation of flavour in the benny much, but it certainly made some difference. The meal was, you know, chickenier. Plus on the whole it was just a better-prepared benny than the last one I had at Fran's, so I was pretty satisfied. This was up to the Fran's standard as I perceive it. (The Frandard. Boy I'm all about new words today.) Plus I think I cracked the code: there's cheese of some kind involved in this thing, I could tell when I started taking apart the eggs. Maybe they melt a bit of cheddar or parmesan on top of the hollandaise or something. Who knows? It works.
The only problem with the chicken benny that I can see is that it costs a full two dollars more than its antecedent (thereby $10.95). That just seems silly to me. Is chicken that much more valuable than ham? No sir. Not where I'm from.
A muscular three eggs out of four.
The Fran's in question is located at College and Yonge in Toronto and serves as the traditional launching point for my TIFF season. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.
Here are some things I bet you didn't know:
So yeah, 49 first and 64 seconds. The selection process is subject to a labyrinthine matrix of influences and interests that overlaps and negatively interferes with itself in unusual ways. Like, Dimitri Eipedes has a pretty tall hill to climb to get me into a flick he programmed, but it can be done; Cameron Bailey, on the other hand, can suck my dick (and has). His name on the page is an automatic page-turn. After a while going through the book becomes more of a pissing contest about what you're not seeing than what you are. "I'm skipping the Coen Brothers movie, how do you feel about that, Film Festival??" "OH YEAH? Well I'm going to fucking Portugal for two weeks, I'm not seeing anything!! SO THERE!!"
But as much as it's fun to go through the listings and find stuff that you just genuinely respond to as a filmgoer, it's even more hilarious to read the ones that completely checkmate you: you couldn't possibly not see them, even if you have every seeming reason to try to give them a miss. "Ellen Page? Check." "Mongolian hoard racing across the plains? Check." "'Adaptation of Satrapi's acclaimed series of darkly humourous graphic novels about her experiences as a spirited young Muslim woman coming of age in Tehran?' Check and mate."
So tomorrow I've got to grid this out into a comprehensive survey of theatre travel times, overlapping start schedules, rush lines holes, and meal breaks. Oh boy, I needed this.
"...as plate after plate of fluffy poached eggs, cartilaginous peameal, and lakes of sunshiney goo continued to pile up over time, I realized that if I don't start catalogueing these excursions in some formal manner, a great field of human knowledge would be lost. Hence, the Benedict Chronicles..."
We all get slammed. You get slammed, I get slammed, there is a general inevitable slammality of the human experience which I tend to hold against no man. But getting breakfast at Hello Toast yesterday took for fucking ever and yeah, that's going to count in the egg score. Half an hour just to get in, another twenty minutes to get coffee and a half hour after that for food. Sorry, not on my watch. No matter how much I like the eggs or the people, that's gonna count against you. WATCH HOW IT COUNTS! Yeah. Hire some fucking Sunday wait staff, Hello Toast.
There are exactly two things wrong with this eggs benedict. The first is the greens. The greens are terrible and unnecessary. I've seen greens work as a side dish for benny before, but this was not one of those times. Too bitter, and just a bad side-along for the flavours of the benny. (That's the real trick: come up with a side that actually complements the taste of the benny and I'll give you points up the yinyang. Try for it and fail, however, and my wrath shall be terrible and swift.)
Thing 2: overall, the whole deal was a bit too gooey. Not that gooey is essentially bad - sometimes, it works like gangbusters - but it seemed slightly at odds with the presentation here, like the eggs had (as is likely) spent about five minutes too long under the heat lamp while waiting for the other orders to be ready. There was a congealedness about the proceedings that I did not appreciate.
Otherwise, the motherfucker was tip top. Solid showing on the eggs, the peameal and the hollandaise were goddamn terrific, and the hash browns in this place are a fucking revolution of hashbrownly awesomeness. I don't think I've ever seen 'em done quite this way before - kind of reminds me of my mother's Nuclear Risotto - and it really, really works.
Too much wrong to give the meal a pass, but I'll review one of Hello Toast's benny alternatives next time I'm down there, and see if they can't improve their score. Two and a half eggs out of four!
Hello Toast is located at 993 Queen Street East, directly south from 3QF (as the crow flies). The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.
Well we didn't win. Got pasted, actually. But hey, fuck it: best season ever. Best team ever, best everything ever. I had a great time with this season, learned tons, and wish it could have gone on another ten games. But even now, some of the faces are changing and the fall season needs organizing. Thank god I have a loud voice.
It is quite the full moon tonight, Internet, if you're outside and looking around.
Giles says Ripper is happening. Well that's not really what he says, is it, if you really read it, but that's how it's being reported. For some reason I find the idea of a BBC-produced Buffy spinoff very comforting. Much more so than if it was an American-produced Buffy spinoff, for example. Perhaps it just feels like there is significantly less opportunity for the usual Whedon network fuck-arounds. Surely, the British don't fuck with anybody?
Thank goodness I'm bankrupt, because otherwise I would be sorely, sorely tempted to trade up to this, just because I like the packaging so gall-darned much and am tantalized by how much space it would save on my shelf. Man, I have a problem.
OK: malaise over with, because I now know exactly what my life is about, for at least the next three weeks. Here we go.
The sheer visual adorability of Puppet Spike and Tederick together is just about the fucking mad howdiness of all mad howdies. Tell me this thing ain't worth a 4-issue limited run, Brian Lynch! Tell me
Well if this week's box office results are any indication this week's Mamo couldn't have come at a better time; it's all about the "dumping ground" corridor of six weeks between August 15 and September 30 where no movie makes any money at all. (Naturally, it's when Universal chose to release Serenity.)
Today Matthew, Leah and I went for brunch at Hello Toast, where they have antique toasters signed by various celebrities (Clive Owen! Buffy!). I so wanted to get on one of those toasters. And then the server, who we've spoken to previously, remembered us and remembered the podcast. So I asked him if we could sign the toaster. But no such luck.
Well, because apparently I wasn't bored and pissed off enough lately, I seem to be coming down with a cold - which, admittedly, thank the mythical Christ it isn't happening next week or the week after, but still is irritating. In retaliation against this and other factors of the past little while, TJ and I went to the zoo today. Sometimes - not frequently, but let's say every six or seven years or so - you just gotta go to the zoo. Go and hang out with a gorilla for a little while and I guarantee, you're gonna figure your shit out. Lock eyes with a reticulated python at two feet distance. It helps.
Today it was the elephants. I cannot fucking believe that six gigantic elephants can just be standing there right in front of me doing elephanty things, and nothing bad comes of it. They're elephants, I'm a person, they don't even know that I consider them to be elephants and yet there they are, being elephants. It's calming in a way that only the hum of the world is calming.
We did the African Savannah in good time (and full African sunshine), but didn't go out to the Canadian areas to see the bears because for whatever reason, the zoo planners a billion years ago decided to put the Canadian stuff on the other side of the fucking planet. Would it not make more sense to put Canada right at the main gates - so that you start in Canada - and then have the other environments radiate out from there? So between the distance to the Canadian areas and the fact that they shut down the polar bear section, I got no bears today, and that was troubling. But I tell ya what, it started to rain later in the day and we were sort of hanging out in a wetland area and I could hear some rumbling and roaring off in the distance but couldn't figure out what it was... and then like five minutes later we came around a corner and there was a goddamned dinosaur on the other side of the river from us. A fucking brontosaurus was just sort of hanging out doing its thing. And I tell ya, from two hundred feet distance and in a rain storm, that brontosaurus looked absolutely real. The other animatronic dinosaurs in the enclosed dinosaur pavilion sucked the bag in a big bad way, but that brontosaurus, outside on his own in the rain, was as real as the hippo, the snow leopard, and the kangaroos.
So I'm feeling better.
This afternoon Jessi From Downstairs called me on a miscellaneous matter and, as one does, asked me how my day was going; I said "shitty" or something along those lines, causing her to note that that's pretty much been my default answer every time she's asked me that question on a workday since about the beginning of July. Yep: life is teh suck. Oddly enough, I don't even think I'm in a bad mood. On the whole, although there have certainly been a few downturns here and there, I think I'm in pretty positive spirits about everything generally, or am at least keeping my sense of humour intact about the whole thing. I just think my life is a bad situation on the whole right now, and that's neither the end of the world nor the best thing ever. It's just the way it is. When someone asks me about it, I generally don't feel the need to make the pretty smiley face (it looks like this: 
) and pretend that something else is true. As per the usual, I suck at the pretense. My answer is: I'm burned out. I'm burned out at work, I'm burned out on the majority of my various sidelines, I'm burned out on dating, I'm burned out on the big stupid "where is my life going" question generally, I'm burned out on family Christmasses in Toronto, I'm burned out on missing people who were never even here to begin with, I'm even burned out on it being summer. I'm not burned out on every single thing ever, but I'm burned out on the majority. As the Terminator once so memorably quipped, I need a vacation. Thank Jebus: I'm getting one soon. And believe me, it really will make things better. A vacation, a birthday, a Hermione Granger somethingorother and I'll be back to new. Promise.
I just got a letter from Becky Jo Wood: remember her? She's at camp, for what (if memory serves) is the very last time. So I guess this is the very last letter from camp. I read it on the way over to the Starbucks just now and Matty Price will be here in a bit to record tonight's Mamo. I forgot to do the prework, but I'll get by. In the meantime I'm about six pages into my assignments on Terra and I think I can squeeze out another page or two before he shows, so I'll hop to that. The coffee's kicking in. I've got a book to read and the music doesn't suck. I'm okay with it, honestly. I'm past bemoaning every single windless day.
Who would've seen this coming, I want to talk about Astonishing X-Men #22. [shock, awe]
This is a "moving things along" issue, so naturally it's the one where he kills Scott, because Scott is a "moving things along" sort of fellow. Not that I believe for a second that Scott is actually dead... for one thing (although I realize this means sweet fuck all in Quesada's scattered and unkempt universe), he's alive and well in the post-Civil War continuity and last I checked, this Astonishing arc is supposed to be pre-Civil War. Second, ain't no way chumpy's goin' out Sunshine-style in deep space. Not my Scott Summers, no sir. You don't bang Jean Grey for decades and not pick up some Phoenix force. (It's like the clap.)
But at least if he had to have his big moment, Whedon actually gave him a moment to have. He's the leader of the team, he made the call, he executed the decision. Nary an offscreen bitchslap to be had.
Meanwhilst, infuriating multi-month delays aside, Astonishing remains the pinacle of comic book gorgeousness. And that even being the case, Cassaday's performance level was higher than usual this time out. Check out Ems. Then check out the double-page of Beast, or Kitty saying "and I've imagined." There is a fuck of a lot going on in those frames, and that's an increasing rarity in the pulp mills. Lots of people go on and on about Adjectiveless X-Men these days, but there is still no other comic I'd rather just sit and stare at than AXM.
Back to Scott's death. Am the only one who suspects that Emma's last line on page 21 had to have been the victim of some rather myopic censorship? Not that having the White Queen say "I'm coming" would have been appropriate in a PG-ish book, but a line-pair is a line-pair and let's not be coy about it. Besides, changing the line drops down the clarity of Scott going through the holy trinity of a man's life flashing before his eyes: he sees the best sex he ever had, he sees an infantalized version of his one true love, and he sees his true father telling him he will be a great man. And then the veil falls. That shit is on target.
p.s. Best Hank Line Ever. Like, EVER.
Brian Lynch was nice enough to post a page from his Spike: Shadow Puppets #3 script on his blog, to show us once again that every single writer formats his comic script completely differently from every single other writer. Chad and I, for example, get very nitty of the gritty with our panel descriptions and quasi-layout discussions. But I cannot post one of those, for that would be a spoiler and ruinous of Chad and I's fun. So instead, although they aren't quite as visually dextrous as the Terra scripts, I'll post a script for Extreme Steve.
Yes, a script for Extreme Steve! The reason there is no Extreme Steve today (or two weeks ago today for that matter) is that I have been doing more work in the planning n' prepping department than the actual drawing of episodes. Which will make more sense in about eight months when all of this planning comes to fruition and I publish my schematic (called the Extreme Scheme) to show you just how spectacularly over-prepared I was for the coming episodes of Extreme Steve.
Obviously, I don't pre-write every episode; I usually just draw 'em. But sometimes I'm away from Photoshop or otherwise inclined to actually script something out for various reasons, as in the case of our example. Here's the episode we'll be discussing today:
And here's the script:
Panel 1
Extreme credits.
Panel 2
Batman and the Rebel Fleet Trooper are sitting on a rooftop against a moonlit sky. Mars is visible in frame.
Batman: It isn’t that that I don’t love crimefighting, I do, I just don’t see the percentage any more.
RFT: What percentage? You think my pappy wanted to see me slinging funnybooks for a living? I was gonna be a dentist, man.
Panel 3
The RFT is standing up.
Batman: You know what the real problem is… actually you’ll like this, it has to do with your friend Extreme Steve…
RFT: Tell me later, I gotta catch the X-Files on the 11:00 repeat.
Panel 4
Batman is left on his own.
Panel 5
The Scary Character From [Spoiler Deleted] is now standing over Batman’s left shoulder.
Batman: What, did you forget the lube?
Panel 6
Scary Character has lobbed off Batman’s head. A geyser of blood shoots upwards.
Panel 7
Extreme Steve and Extreme Willis are in conversation. Extreme Steve’s eyes are wide with surprise.
Willis: …and I don’t feature that as part of the traditional banana split.
Willis: Whoa, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.
Panel 8
Steve is looking at his own hands.
Extreme Steve: Not a ghost…
Now here's the thing.
It was hard to find a copy of the new Serenity DVD tonight. Had to go a few places, and when I found it, had to take the second-last copy off what had been a very full shelf. This is not because the movie has exploded into the popular consciousness in money-making bravado that will guarantee Serenity II (Serenity: The Wrath of Saffron) through IX (Serenity: Insurrection); this is not because of any particular signal that can or cannot be stopped. This is not because of anything more dramatic than simple underestimation - yet again - by the reasoned peoples of the world who look at the movie and see no stars, no box office, and thereby no reason to order DVDs. Compound this with the fact that in the Browncoats, Universal has found the one fan base that can be successfully double-dipped with likely a 90% retention rate, and you get some sold-out shelves.
But let's compound that, if I may, with the fact that the movie is just fucking great.
Come on, admit it. The fans are (at this point) annoying as fuck, and the box office was humiliating and whatnot, and Serenity is certainly not the greatest motion picture of all time. But it is fucking great. And like Firefly - which, too, was pretty fucking great, and whose quality attracted fans who never once saw it air on network television - Serenity has grown its audience after the fact, too. I know people who have only seen this flick on DVD. I know people who saw it for the first time at Can't Stop the Signal this past June and are out buying the DVD today (having been told to wait by sage Browncoats who flanked them out of the theatre). I know people who are currently in possession of my copy of the first DVD release, and if they don't like it, they'll pass it to someone who does. This isn't some big vindication or validation that the Browncoats want it to be; I'm just offering up the one small smile. This thing survived, man. Five years past its disastrous first airing on Fox, we should not be having this conversation at all. And yet here we are.
At the end of that canned intro he sent along to all the preview screenings back in early '05, Joss Whedon attains a beatific, understated joyfulness, when he looks back into the camera at the conclusion of his speech and simply says, "welcome to Serenity." In those three words he conveys every moment of muscle and sweat that got him (and us) there, and the almost indescribable explosion of pride in what resulted. I'm right there with him.
Tell you what: if this has interested you at all, go and buy it. It's only twenty bucks and if you don't like it, you can give it to someone who will. If you already own the first DVD, trade up. Pass the old copy on - send it somewhere it'll be appreciated. Take it from one who knows, it feels pretty good to give someone Serenity.
The format war just became interesting again, as Dreamworks and Paramount kowtow to the Microsoft megabucks by going HD-DVD-exclusive. Fuck, and here I was actually ready to call this war "over." Oh well. The first blu-ray disk I shall purchase can be peeped here.
Speaking of war, last night was the best soccer game ever. We were playing the same team we suffered a really frustrating defeat to last week - our team just basically disintegrated in the second half of that game, paving the way for them to come back from a 3-0 deficit to a 4-3 win. Well, none a' that shit last night. It was our first playoff game of the season and with the chips down, Yellow Wall really pulled it together. I mean, we were just on form. Great communication and teamwork throughout, excellent application of strategy to counter aggressive moves from the opposition, and just a general sense of fun without losing focus. I'm really, really pleased. And this means that yes, we are in championship competition for the first time since 2004, and yes, I'll be buying the drinks if we win next week. Who's the wall? WE'RE THE WALL.
Don't you hate it when your iPod inexplicably refuses to shut off in its resting state and just quietly eliminates your batteries over lunch? Of course you do! Because you, the reader, care about the issues of our time.
You know, if anyone around here actually understood what Fight Club was about, I think they'd have a serious problem with my space monkey.
I'm in love. She's five years old, has red hair, and likes being carried everywhere.
Yup I'm pretty much on board with saying that every household needs a Gracie. I was at Matthew and Leah's cottage yesterday for the annual barbecue (which, by the way - bacon and cheese, in the patties themselves) and as I quipped early on, I didn't know if I was supposed to be the oldest kid or the youngest grownup but for whatever reason, the kids just swarmed me. Good swarm, though, not running-from-the-bees swarm. And I don't think I knew how badly I needed that until it was happening. I needed to spend a day on the beach with a pack of juniors. Playing volleyball, arguing about comic books, brushing hair with driftwood, telling really really really bad jokes, making sand castles, and smashing those self-same sand castles. Sure, when they decide to take you down en masse Mumakil style, it's a bit scary. But otherwise, excellent. This has solved many problems. Oh kids. Gotta get me some of those.
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I'm going to do something I never do: talk about music. Guns n' Roses was on the cover of Rolling Stone this week because it's the 20th anniversary of Appetite for Destruction, which in my youth I would have listed as one of the Three Best Albums of All Time. In fact, there's a nice little quote in the magazine from Slash, where he lists off the great albums, the ones that literally changed lives, and then says that no matter what else happened, he got to be a part of one of those... and that means the world to him. This is me validating: he really did, it really was, and goddamn that really musta been something. So I've been listening to Appetite a lot this week. I don't think I'd been into it in at least three or four years and listening to it now was the first time that parts of it actually sounded dated to me - like I could put them in a specific time and place, instead of their being just the ephemeral sounds of my childhood and therefore unassailable as actual cultural output. Still, as has been the case every time I've left that CD alone for a while only to go back to it, my appreciation for it has grown immensely. Tracks I have literally heard a bajillion times - like, say, "You're Crazy," which we used for the prologue of Stanley's Life and is therefore permanently tattooed on my sound mixin' brain - got a bit of a reno in my musical headspace and came at me a bit fresh. That was sweet. And you know what? "Sweet Child o' Mine," for all its flaws, is still the single sweetest (and most accurate) song a man ever wrote about what it's like to be a man in love with a woman, and all the inherent shades and conflicts contained therein. I doubt that was intentional, but then the best shit never is.
You know what somebody called me today? (Besides "awesome," "terrific," and "sexually anarchic," which happens every day) I got called Leviathan Brown. How is that not a Bone Daddy name??? I mean now that Vesuvius is dead and Slick Willie's out of the picture, that is totally the name of BD's new sidekick.
You know, as far as I'm concerned the unproduced Bone Daddy 3 script (Bone Daddy in Egypt) is the closest I ever got to actually achieving on the whole premise. It'll never happen now, obviously, not least because I'm down both my lead actors and videotaping on the streets of New York is about to become almost impossible for non-professionals, but maybe I oughta hook me up a graphic novel outta that shit or something. Not quite as much fun, because if you can just draw the costumes there's no challenge, but still.
I also got called Batmrown, but I'll leave that one alone. It's hard to say.
Hey listen: I have to go now. Don't burn anything down.
I tell ya, you get drunk enough, X-Men 3 is fucking hilarious.
"Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station!" is the most pimp thing the Emperor ever said. I mean, he had all the damn cards right then. He had all the cards, showed all the cards, and threw in a big "oh fuck you" at the end. And yet, ten minutes later, he was falling helplessly down a power shaft to his immediate and certain doom. Which just goes to show, you can build a giant killer space ball, but it won't help you see into the human heart. Way to go your highness.
Wanna hear the waterfront tour I did for City Surf? It's all right here. Thank goodness my voice is cool; it makes up for being so dog-ugly.
Last night Daniel and I had a brief but effective consultation on all things film-related; it solved many problems. Turns out, my shooting wasn't as effective as I thought, and I got well and truly ratholed trying to solve that problem in the editing room. But a bit of fresh, lateral thinking last night saved the day, and the new cut - which I could not help staying up way too late to work on last night - is much better.
Let's close with an MSN conversation which makes absolutely no sense out of context but amuses me greatly:
Alex says: who attacked you with meat?
Matt says: EVERYBODY KEEPS ASKING ME THAT
Matt says: which admittedly is my own fault
Matt says: There has been no meat attack.
Matt says: (Not lately anyway)
God motherfucking DAMMIT. And then there was one. My impromptu summertime game of Twentysomething Survivor has reached a ferociously bloody climax. Like, Throne of Blood bloody. Like, attacking the Third Castle in Ran bloody. Yeah, I've been watching a lot of Kurosawa since declaring bankruptcy. There's something to be said for the cathartic theatricality of actually using bright red paint for screen blood. Suits my mood.
Random act of violence alert: I was riding my bike home last night, and some guy just came at me. Made to hit me with his bike, and then took a shot at me with his foot. Missed on both counts, because he sucks. (And also: because I rule!!) He scarpered immediately thereafter, giving me the finger the whole way and catcalling for me to follow him and do something about it. Which I did not, because as usual, I was sort of too stunned by the pointlessness of it all. Hmmm... "Stunned By The Pointlessness Of It All." Yet another potential Indian name for me.
Right then, so the interesting thing about reading The Sentry and New Avengers and Secret War and Mighty Avengers in their entireties all in two weeks is, I pretty much understanding the Marvel U completely right now. Which has, like, never happened before. I even went and re-read House of M (again) and actually knew who everyone was, how they got there, and where they went afterwards. It all makes sense. Honestly, I'm better at Marvel history now than I ever was at Canadian history. But then, Canadian history didn't have Jessica Drew. I think that would have helped considerably, particularly during Champlain's problems in Ticonderoga.
I'm supposed to be writing right now. And instead I'm... writing. FOOLISHNESS!!
Here's the promised follow up pic, and I swear it's the very last time I shall devote valuable picspace to this exact thing (until I lose half the arm in a lightsabre fight in 2012), but she is a month plus a day old today, and oh my she's still just so damn beeeuoooteefull:
I know I make grandiloquent statements along these lines quite a lot, but this is the best thing I've done all summer. Hell, possibly best ever. This goes straight to the heart of me.
Today TJ and I were having an e-mail back-and-forth about whether or not girls are worth it. Here's where I stand:
Points for: 2
Points against: 38
But admittedly I'm biased, so feel free to argue. And I recently got all twiddly just from examining the scars on somebody's hands, so who freakin' knows what "worth it" even means. Meanwhilst, I was at the IGA this evening with my reusable shopping bags, and the woman behind me in the line said something about how it was so inconvenient to always have to remember to bring the bags along or whatever, and I said "Well, if saving the world were easy, everyone would be doing it." Which proves that a) I now officially talk like a comic book character, and b) I am one amazingly self-righteous little fucker, huh? Which is tempered nicely by something I said the other day while mulling the existence of god and whether or not such a being interferes in the day-to-day lives of humankind: "Ultimately, I could never respect a god who wastes time looking out for me." So clearly the kids are all right.
Lots to do tonight.
"[Shooting became] like the Bay of Pigs. Just hit the beach, get as many confirmed kills as possible, and move on." - David Fincher
Yesterday Chad and I blocked out the last two issues of Terra; I'm going to try to complete my pages this week and then it's done, mercifully done, by way of never really ever being done, but done nonetheless. Sweet doneness. The all-enveloping warmth of doneitude. Bon chance.
I am now officially counting the days until my vacation. Today, for example, there are 24. (Like the show!) I woke up this morning and it was unusually cold in my room and my brain had the momentary luxury of tricking itself into believing it was September. Then I bitchslapped that brain back into August! Oh yeah. Total control.
Now maybe you can help me with a problem I'm having, Internet. Over the past few weeks, there have been a surprising number of comments posted to very, very old posts. I know what you're thinking: spam, right? Well by my definition, spam has to have some kind of point, like an outbound link drawing one to a spam web site, or whatever. It can't just be shittily-written non-sequiters with questionable connections to the content at hand. I'll give you an example: this guy. Or a much-less-safe-for-work example here. Are these commenters human? Or merely stupider robots than usual? What happens to A.I. when it forgets that it's A.I. and starts to believe it has an opinion on vaginas and eggs benedict? Is this the end of the world? ...or the beginning? YOU DECIDE.
It is fucking Monday. It is fucking Monday, Internet. I'll be back later to talk about Pirates of the Caribbean.
Last night Mark came over so he and I could fuck around with some revoicing gags. They never really went anywhere brilliant but we were having a good time lying around doing it, and then we hit on the idea of having him run down to Teen Girl Squad's back yard party in his underwear, pretending to be someone who had just stumbled in off Taste of the Danforth looking for a party. Me and D-Coc and Demetre and Chris and Brandy watched from the balcony. IT WAS GODDAMN TREMENDOUS. Naturally Rachel was up like a shot asking him to come join the party and have a drink; by that point Mark was humping Dana's scooter and singing Guns n' Roses at the top of his lungs. By the time he got back up to our apartment, he and I just collapsed on each other laughing.
It was around that point that I noticed that I've been taking very unimportant things seriously lately, particularly as regards girls, my life, and the general orientation of the horizon line. I then tried, and failed, to get the assembled masses to watch Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.
D-Coc spent about ten or fifteen minutes prowling around the edges of my DVD bankruptcy plan like a bomb-defusing robot, trying to find flaws; he was defeated by my magnificent brain. That's another thing: my all-Zim diet lately has resulted in my using phrases like "He was defeated by my magnificent brain!" and "Shut your noise tube, Taco Human!" with rather more frequency than I have before. Which admittedly is really only funny to me. But then that's true of just so many things.
I actually slept solidly - like really solidly - for the first time in ages and then woke up this morning thinking that the TGS party was still going on downstairs; I was gonna stumble down in my bedsheets with the rum and say "Excellent, are we carrying on?" but it must have just been an audio shadow in my dream brain cuz all was quiet as a millpond. Now I'm sitting in the Starbucks watching giant hose machines suck up the Waste of the Danforth. First of all, giant hose machines: awesome. Second: they gotta stop this TOTD thing before it gets any bigger; it's like a mega-sized alien paramecium that's eating my life. I even made a new arch-enemy out of the deal: last night Mark and I were trying to navigate through the crowd and ended up stuck in a bottleneck for like ten minutes; as we were finally getting out of it I said "hey, at least we made some new friends" and this tiny woman immediately behind me said "or enemies!!" in a menacing fashion. PREPARE TO MEET YOUR HORRIBLE DOOM, SHORT WOMAN! I brook no treaty with neo-nemeses. If TOTD brought out the best in people I'd be all for it but if it's stirring up a cauldron of super-villains then it must be stopped. Today, I fly the colours of Kal-El, last son of Krypton. Let them come.
Please don't string me along, Bob Shaye, my little heart can only take so much...
Hey guess what, I got engaged today. Woot. Well really more engaged to be engaged, but still it's excellent. We've got the whole thing mapped out: going over to Spain next spring, get hitched there, fly back to Vancouver for her sister's wedding in June and then honeymoon it off in New Zealand all summer. Once we get back we need to figure where in Canada (if in Canada) we're going to situate ourselves and have all the kids, but I like the fact that a basic framework has been established and that we have something to move forward with on this deal. Yeah.
Meanwhile, my friend Stephen and I are going to get shirts that say "I'm in a Fight Club: ask me how."
TASTE MY WRATH, DANFORTH!!!
Teen Girl Squad descended on the first pile of DVDs I'm getting rid of like the pack of locusts that they are (hot, hot locusts), so that's one of the DVD bankruptcy objectives well on the way. I've also returned (almost) all of the DVDs that I have on loan from other people, but I am loath to get rid of Invader Zim since I'm enjoying it so gall-darned much. Odd connection of the week: Aaron A., the man who designed this, used to be a character designer on that show. Because in my life, every single thing is connected to every other thing in a way that makes me feel like it's all just some big Holodeck fantasy programmed by Wil Wheaton. Or perhaps some really badly-written fanfic. Yeah that's it: my life is fanfic. About me and Wil Wheaton.
There is an appreciable bite of September in the air, and an appreciable need on my part to get out of the sheer emotional mindfuck headspace bullshit garbage ass damned hallucinatory haze that has been the overheated infernal last two weeks of my life. Holy shit, that came out expressive! I guess when the temperature drops and my brain ceases to liquefy, there are words inside.
Pretty though they be, I find it a bit hard to accept that Sideshow is charging $70 apiece for each of the hobbits (Frodo, Sam). I mean I guess the same amount of pieces and detailing go into a hobbit as go into a regular character... but... they're hobbits! They are smaller than the other characters! What is the fun of having hobbits if they don't come at hobbit-sized prices?
I'm so displeased with the editing on my Secrets movie that I'm actually dreaming about it. Which I guess means I should go back and revisit. Man it would be awesome if I just didn't give a fuck about anything.
Why don't we just go ahead and call this Obi-Wan Kenobi Appreciation Day. Fuck, why not? That dude had it all figured out.
Time has ceased to make any kind of coherent sense. Last summer feels like ten years ago and stuff that I wrote on this very blog in the middle of July might as well have been in the middle of the winter. Everything is slippery and shiny. I blame the heat, which has worked as an accellerant on the stress, the weariness, the general why-am-I-hear-ness. Plus no sleep. I spent two hours last night hallucinating I was Spider-Man. (Ultimate Spider-Man, if you must know.) His life is no easier nor harder than mine. It's just different.
That tattoo idea is looking better and better. And speaking of which, I should really do an "after" pic of Sera to update you all cuz she is all healed up and very purdy. And the last time you saw her she was Dark Mark fresh and covered in blood. So it's sort of a different tale.
I am going to start working on my Hallowe'en costume today, and also go on an Avengers jag. These are my go-to "safe places."
"Wear some golf shoes, otherwise we'll never get out of this place alive. Impossible to walk in this muck. No footing at all." - Hunter S. Thompson
By even a rough calculation, I now have between 200 and 400 unwatched hours of DVD entertainment in my possession. Today I compounded this by buying the tenth season of The Simpsons and the second season of The Muppet Show, each of which adds a tally of another ten hours apiece to the ever-growing pile of unenjoyed media.
I have therefore decided to declare DVD bankruptcy.
I, Matthew Brown, do hereby legally declare my inability to ever watch all of the DVDs I have purchased in the past 7 years. I extend this declaration to any and all ancillary DVDs collected and/or borrowed from outside parties. By this declaration I am seeking opportunities to discharge myself from any moral or ethical obligations contained hereunder, and to reassess the usage of my time along more coherent thematic lines than the ones implied by the ownership of 540+ DVD titles in various formats (movies, television shows, etc.). I seek the protection offered under bankruptcy terminology, most specifically that I will not be expected at any time in the coming period to watch any DVDs purchased or borrowed, or be expected to adhere to any timelines for the consumption of media properties, both alone and in groups. I must regretfully make public the understanding that any previous commitments made prior to this declaration are now, officially, null and void. Reparations will be made where possible.
Immediate tactics falling under this action:
Thank you for your patience and understanding in this difficult time.
"With God's help I'll conquer this terrible affliction." - Mark Renton
Other people prefer second chapters, for their inherent ambiguity and narrative darkening; I like watching a master storyteller pull all the attendant threads towards the middle like every single one of them has been heading there all along - and then blow everything up real good. Ultimatum doesn't disappoint in this regard; if it's not as gloriously sharp as Supremacy, it's about twice as skullfuckingly dense and nearly three times meaner.
Man, I love completing a trilogy. I think this is the last scheduled review that I have for quite some time - still haven't figured out what I'm going to be doing during TIFF this year (blogging at least, but I doubt I'll settle down to write actual one-pagers on anything because fuck, who has the time?) and I don't have anything else I'm keening to write about in the immediate future. But this was a fun one.
Three down (?). One to go: we're at the edge of the forest.
There are few things in nature more pitiful than a dead snake. Snakes - while alive - remain my last lingering natural fear, but once dead, a snake so completely loses its essential snakeness that it becomes less than even a mean parody of its original self. A living snake is alarming because of its very nature: the way it moves, the way its body reacts to its muscles and skeleton and scales, the way its horrible snake brain processes and interprets the fundamental drives that make it, in fact, a snake. All of these things, however, evaporate immediately upon death. No other creature so completely abandons the things that make it itself when it dies as does the snake. A dead rabbit is still demonstrably a rabbit; a dead snake is like a discarded inner tube or a used condom, a depressed leaving on the road to God's toilet. Pity the dead snake: in passing, it suffers the ignominy of an utter refutation of self. And there ain't no snake heaven.
Over the weekend, I made a fairly significant change to Snapdragon, and then finished the first issue and sketched out the rest of the opening arc. I love it. I'm going to try to at least lay feet in cement on the second issue today; it's still a big concept and quite possibly too rude for the world, but it's fun to be writing again, and writing something where I can stitch in so many bizarre and useless details from my own bizarre and useless life. Once the first 4 issues are done, I'll share and discuss.
I finished Deathly Hallows for the second time this morning, and now get to put Potter back on the shelf for the next long while. I've been nonstop Potter since what, the beginning of June? I do dearly love that book, though. Once again I really respond to the multifold stories that come exploding out of it in the end - not just the conclusion of Harry's tale, but the scant, imaginative details that fill my brain with thoughts of Dumbledore's youth and Snape's tortured life and what it's like to be Aberforth and what Neville and the DA got up to in their seventh year and what Rose, Hugo, Lily, Albus and James might get up to at Hogwarts nineteen years from now. That's something I got a lot of in Pirates 3, too, ironically; I liked the fact that when the story was done, it nonetheless suggested a half dozen other stories that might yet happen but are left entirely under my own governance to work out for myself in a summer daydream. That's good writing. It's no longer a question of density: just one of setting a few gears in motion, and hoping your readers are creative enough to go to their own places with them. Trusting our ability to keep the worlds alive ourselves, rather than having to be told.
Oh, how I wish Pirates of the Caribbean 3 was on DVD right now. I've got some whackshit Swedish version (Swedish pirates, yarrrrrr!) but it's goddamned crapulent, and every other version I tried to swipe turned out to be porn. Pissbucket.
So as most readers know, George W. Lucas is my hero and I do every single thing I can to be exactly like him. As such, I have decided that fan demand has finally reached the pitch where I must go back and fill in the blank pieces of the story of my most successful big-screen saga: the VCR movies. Yep, production on VCR 5.1 started this week and I'm hoping to get VCR 9 at least halfway out the gate before the end of the summer. That'll put a decalogue screening on target for Christmas. It feels right. It feels big. It feels like time. Wait'll you see the Jar Jar character: will blow your mind. Fucking technology, man.
Working from home today - the tail end of Toronto's heat wave, and still nary an A/C at 3QF - was not my most brilliant idea ever. This heat is really fucking me up. Not a lot of sleep this week, and now I feel like I've got an all-over sunburn, all the time. So it's been a bit of a weird mental space lately. I got fairly Sideswiped late in the day but there was no help for it; the rest of the time I just telecommuted away fiendishly on the coffee table all day (more air in the living room than upstairs) with the Play All going on Invader Zim. S'allright.
"Do you think guys like me can just get laid and reproduce on our own? No. Fuck no. It takes years of systematically breaking down the self-esteems of young women, of filling their heads with impossible expectations and then leaving them empty and hollow with a void that only booze and an endless string of faceless cock can fill." - Massawyrm's scathing and rather brilliant excoriation of Bratz, the Bratz movie, and the entirety of American culture
Also, and yes I know that I've been called up on to question this previously on the blog but once more With Feeling, how much fucking weight have I lost??? This is a major downside to not owning a scale. But here's how it went: About five months ago I went to buy jeans. I bought a 38 waist, as I have done every time I've bought jeans in the past, say, five years. When buying them, though, they were fairly tight on me, so I was like "I'm either going to have to go up to a 40, or lose weight."
Today I fit into a 34 like a fucking glove. I apparently skipped 36 altogether and dropped 2 sizes without notic