There will be Blu-Ray blood
Yattah. Next?
Unrelated: D-Wars couldn't possibly be even a shade higher than absolutely godfuck awful, could it?
Tederick.com: April 2008 Archives
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April 30, 2008
Asperger's is the new black
"It was a lot easier, the single life." - Chris
"Fucking upsetting as hell though, wasn't it?" - Matt
In the past two months, I have:
- Learned of two people connected to me who have been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome
- Read descriptions of three films (one fiction, two documentary) featuring principal characters with Asperger's Syndrome
- Been asked to play someone with Asperger's Syndrome in a film directed by someone with Asperger's Syndrome.
Inevitably, I feel a cold coming on.
Since lists are fun: in the past month, Teen Girl Squad has attempted to recycle the following items:
- A coffee maker
- Four sheets of cork.
(Two items pushes the definition of "list," I know, but look at those items!)
Teen Girl Squad is, unfortunately, coming to an end: Rachel is moving out next week, and Jessi's in France for the summer, so really it's just Two Dudes I Don't Know Who Live Downstairs Squad (2DIDKWLDS) for now. 2DIDKWLDS seems pleasant enough, and my semi-psychotic next-door neighbour is volubly glad that she will never have to worry about her 12-year-old son falling off the garage roof in another attempt at scoping out the oft-available exposed breasts. But really, sunbathing topless is so 2007; I'm going to recommend that 2DIDKWLDS take a page from the crazy old woman who lives behind us, and go the whole hog in the back yard every morning. Summer's coming.
My agenda book in grade 7 (and yours too, probably) was emblazoned with the epigraph, "If we plan to learn, we must learn to plan." Well, I don't plan to learn much but I certainly intend to do some serious plansmanship tonight. I feel, in the parlance of my people, a bit "unbalanced," like I've been driving down the same stretch of highway for a good while now, without really paying attention to the exit numbers. Time bloody well races on, doesn't it? I've been pretty blessed, these last few months, but decadence and chicken wings don't really eradicate the pervading sensation that I oughta check my mirrors every once in a while. I crave certainty about certain things, and uncertainty about others, and sometimes, I don't get those things. Those are the moments for zooming back, seeing the patterns to the land and the position relative to the whole. You get those chances but rarely, and there's usually something else about to happen anyways.... Make mental notes, set the priorities. Learn to plan.
April 29, 2008
How you can be an adventure hero like me
I gave up on Monster Blood Tattoo; I loathe the truly pathetic attempts to capitalize on everything awesome about the truly great works of fantasy fiction (structure from Harry Potter, language-smithry from Tolkien, parallel worldism from Lyra) as though something new or interesting will come out of the blender-parts of the achievements of the past. Synergize, people, don't just homogenize. Ain't brain surgery. So instead, I'm reading The Indiana Jones Handbook. Which is crappy in an entirely different set of ways but is at least entertaining, especially given all the veiled "the crystal skulls are from aliens!!!" references. It's sort of like The Worst Case Scenario If You're Indiana Jones. I am learning how to pass under a moving truck, how to cut a rope bridge in half (if only I'd known 2 weeks ago!), and how to survive poisoning by a bloodthirsty Chinese ganglord. Given the poor pedigree of the book's writing, most of these involve "well, do the best you can, I guess." Which, to be fair, is probably how Indy approaches life, too.
I never bought The Worst Case Scenario If You're Batman (or whatever it's called). Wish I had. I imagine Batman has a number of seriously worst-case scenarios.
Hey, in the good news, I suspect the postal tag that arrived on my doorknob yesterday is actually my Raiders jacket, back after a 4-month sojourn in its home country of England. Words cannot express how much I've missed having this thing, and how much airplane flights suck when you're not wearing it. It's the all-purpose awesomegarment. Hats are for jerks: jackets are where the real adventure-wear lies.
April 28, 2008
The Benedict Chronicles: 88 Juice
"...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..."
Sometimes I don't find the bennies; they find me. What's a fellow to do on a brisk Vancouver morning besides gather the co-workers and scour the streets of downtown Vancouver for something - anything - that looks like breakfast? In fact, with the time change in my favour, this really should have been a 5 a.m. benny. Instead it was 9:00 (PST). But I digress.
88 Juice was one of the 3 breakfast establishments recommended by the hotel staff at the Sheraton Wall Centre as being "in the area." We walked in circles for about 20 minutes before we actually found it, so I don't even want to contemplate what would have happened if we'd looked for one of the others. The location itself proved a bit underwhelming, and the menu was limited... I went for an alternate benny, because the regular benny was served with "black forest ham" (American-styles!) instead of peameal. In fact, I don't think there was a peameal option anywhere on the table. Maybe they don't do that shit in BC.
Anyways, mine had tomato where the bacon should be, and that's not a bad idea. It made the meal light and tasty, but not terrifically satisfying from a full-belly perspective. Plus, the side bacon and the home fries just basically sucked. The benny had the look of something made very rarely and therefore not entirely up to spec - every single piece a bit too separate and not enough of a "whole meal." The only thing I can't argue with is the price: $6.95 for the whole deal. That's lunacy, that.
Let's give it an egg and a half.
88 Juice & More is located at 785 Davie St in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.
April 27, 2008
Late night Eurotrash softcore, vol. ∞
I don't know how or why I was fortunate enough to stumble on Vampire Ecstasy while killing time tonight, but god-diggity, it's sensational. Right now the dark vampire babes are making sweet lesbianic love to the last of the blonde virgins, having successfully seduced her might-be-a-vampire / Angel-prototype boyfriend. Gonna have to put together a Vampire Ecstasy / Scream Blacula Scream double feature this summer, or at least listen to "Cry Little Sister" while walking around the house with a candle.
They are compelling the lusts of the blonde virgin with the power of their vampire chanting!!! She is stroking her own boobies by command of a will stronger than her own! Marvelous.
Anyways. Sarafina and I had Prisoner Day this weekend; we got through the first 4 disks in an afternoon of luxurious stay-in-bedness. Now I'm scrambling to find a copy of "Dreamy Party"... love that track, and the sweet muscular mindfuck that goes along with it.
I watched this week's Lost tonight, and I continue firmly in my belief that Season 4 is playing fair all of the hopes and expectations of every single episode that lead up to now. This section of the narrative just fucking rocks. Even the weak episodes (Juliet; Kate) are a damn sight stronger than half the episodes in seasons 1, 2, and 3. And this week's Benry Galinus opus was just magnificent, both cementing Ben further into the center of the entire clockwork, and doing some pretty terrific supporting work with Sayid to boot. I don't really give a fuck about how or why anything is happening any more (I thought the island was behind boat time, not ahead of it?), but give me a gun-crazy Sawyer going all manly-rescue on a missing Claire-bear and I am a happy panda. Everything's falling into place...
If I run, you run.
I would be inclined to call the "I just broke up with Sarah Marshall, and then went to Hawaii and found out that she was staying in the same hotel as me with her new boyfriend!" thing the worst kind of Hollywood cliché, until about 9 p.m. on Wednesday night, when not 10 hours after having seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall in an empty Wednesday morning theatre, and en route to Niagara Falls for a night of decadent trashiness, Sarafina called her ex-boyfriend to wish him a happy birthday, only to discover that he and his girlfriend were in the very town we were about to enter, staying at the casino we were at that exact moment pointing the Land Rover towards. And would we like to get together later for some gambling? So, apparently that's actually a thing that happens in the world. Jason Segel, I take it all back. And your penis is lovely, but please tell your director to stop cutting away from it so quickly. His ratings-board kowtow is ruining the joke.
We did the Niagara Falls thing, a town so named because there's a dirty great waterfall cutting right through the middle of the tourist traps (Ours and Theirs). There was a large Jacuzzi; there was stupendously expensive room service; there was a ginormous bed with lots of pillows. There was the single largest collection of Orthodox Jews I have ever seen staying in a single place at a single time. There was a massage, but no cookie platter cookie platter cookie platter cookie platter. There was a waxwork of Johnny Depp that looked more like me, instead of the other way around. There was a moderately-effective Haunted House that emptied out into an eerily deserted indoor playground - making Sarafina and I wonder aloud if this wasn't all part of the experience, the part where "the real terror begins." Yeah, all in all I'd say we took that town to school.
"A stupid, dangerous prick move" is what I've been calling the TTC midnight strike - wherein several hundred thousand people were left stranded in Toronto when transit when on an unannounced wildcat at 12:01 a.m. That's a pretty fucking terrible night and time to leave people standing alone on bus platforms, unaware that their ride is never going to show up. The back-to-work legislation reputedly just passed, meaning that my Hail Mary drive out to Consilium to get my work laptop for some work-at-home tomorrow was apparently unnecessary. But I'll probably stay home anyway, just to stay off the system an extra day. I don't really think I want to be anywhere near any ATU 113 members in the next 24 hours or so.
Now I've gotta deal with the fact that I'm going back on the clock tomorrow; that my remarks comparing the planetary boringness of The Barber of Seville to Saturn might have made Margaret Atwood think me uncouth; and that even though it feels like we've spent every waking moment together for the last 8 days, I miss my girl. But I'm in a "let's get on with it" frame of mind right now, so I suppose hauling canvas isn't a bad way to round out a long, strange vacation.
Guillermamo
For the last six people on planet Earth who hadn't heard this, Del Toro is signed and locked for The Hobbit and The Second Film, and is moving to New Zealand for 4 years to do it. Wish I was. There's a good interview on TORN here.
And for the other six people who hadn't heard, we posted a cracklin' Mamo last week wherein we laid down our picks for the summer of '08. I picked Indy; he picked Batman. It's '89 all over again at Mamo 112.
April 25, 2008
April 22, 2008
Indiana Jones and the...
...Nightmare Airport of Doom! Sure, I knew on Wednesday (last) that there was going to be snow in Vancouver on Friday night. The Vancouver airport, on the other hand, apparently didn't figure this out until the dirty great chunks of the shit were falling from the gods. And since they had not planned for any snowsomeness, they had sent the de-icing crews home, and since the plane upon which I had just been seated was now, in fact, covered in ice, we spent four hours waiting for the ice to melt off on its own. That is how I spent my Friday night redeye flight home from Vancouver: wishing for my own death. Which, thankfully, never came because the subsequent days have been awesome!
...Miracle of the Unloved Sequel! I don't care what anybody says, Temple of Doom is awesome. I'm sorry they couldn't handle it back in 1984, but that speaks of their own weakness, not the film's. That goddamn thing is a firecracker, and Sarafina and I watched it last night under blankets and after a sensational meal of appetizers, and if this isn't the stuff that vacations are (or should be) made of, I don't know what.
...Curse of the Absent Store! Retro Fun is retro gone. What the bleepin' F, internet, where am I supposed to get a metal Indiana Jones lunchbox in Toronto if Retro Fun is gone and fuckin' Suspect burned down? This town is without retro awesomeness! There is an obvious gap: someone needs to fill it! Hearty entrepreneurs, this is your time.
...Robots! Brain pills! The Kingdom of Patio Springtime! And many more!!
April 18, 2008
YES!! I am the Pirate King!!!
Yesterday I was described as "the pirate filmmaker," which suits me fine. I may get business cards. "Matt Brown: Pirate Filmmaker." And then I'll prance around the Pacific Mall and crack an "arrrrh!" at all the laser-printed DVD jackets.
After workstuffs yesterday we went here, and much Indiana Jones referencing ensued. ("Mola Ram, prepare to meet Kali! IN HELL!!!") There was an Ewok village nearby, too. It was like a Lucasfilm playland. There are pictures, but they will have to wait for when I'm home, since I am apparently congenitally incapable of remembering to bring my USB cord for my camera whenever I travel.
I ate too many foods last night.
April 17, 2008
Three months' salary... before taxes???
Back at Worthington Labs in Vancouver BC, till late Friday night; I get Friday to do my own thing, and the other days to do all the other things. My packing this time was a model of utter stufflessness, one half-full carry-on only, and fully a third of the things I brought with me are staying here. I am an "everything you don't need goes overboard" kind of traveller.
For my flight over - and this I'm fairly happy with - I just sat for four hours and reviewed the Lord of the Rings scores with their liner notes and detailed track listings. Clicking from "track 2 - 2:17" to "track 17 - 8:53" to compare the development of a Ring sub-theme is sort of the biggest snobby geek-out I've had with my iPod in a good long while. It was illuminating on a lot of levels. Plus, I got to stare out the window. Everyone assumes because I'm big, I don't want to sit on the window. But then I never get to see!!
I don't smell like me, which is a problem; the terrorism thing means I can't bring my usual deodorant. I don't know how other humans walk around in a cloud of the filth that is a 24/7 Speed Stick. Plus, my perpetual traveling companion (my leather jacket) is still bloody overseas. I'm not Newman!
Is there no sun in this cursed country??? They've got a weather readout by the elevators that looks like it's been set on "cloudy" since the Truman administration. I wonder if it's controlled by levers and wheels, somewhere deep in the bowels of the gulf between Wall Centre North Tower and Wall Centre South Tower, and whether the man who works the levers has a huge grey moustache and is named "Edward."
In the plus column, Vancouver's insane geography is finally starting to make a weird kind of sense to me. If I completely give up on even trying to understand where the cardinal points lie (if someone tells me one more time that "the mountain is north" when the sun is clearly rising behind it, I am going to become murderous), I know how to drive from downtown to the office and/or the airport, with a stop in Kitsilano to go comic book shopping. Plus, great Mexican last night, and actual free parking... nice town.
April 15, 2008
The dog song
Adam says I should buy this guitar and rock out:
I really agree. Everyone gets to rock out but me. It drives me nuts! Buying this guitar (and learning how to play it) would also let me reinvent Jessica Fletcher as something more than just a didgeridoo-wop funk fusion band.
The other thing is, I still really want to get my hands on a French horn. I don't particularly want to spend more than a couple hundred bucks on this project and I don't really care if the thing is beaten beyond all recognition, but it would be nice to actually have one. Sarafina and I saw a dude selling one on the street a few weeks back, but he wanted five bills. That ain't happening.
I do own a set of bongos. I'm just saying.
Elora
Last night I had a mass-disaster science fiction dream - it was Cloverfield meets 28 Days Later, with some goddamned 9/11 thrown in for extra heart-thumping. I would have been exhilarated at my brain's mash-up power, if it weren't so skull-fuckingly terrifying to lose Sarafina in a crowd of screaming, fleeing Torontonians being relentlessly attacked by wave after wave of dog-like zombies. Natalie Portman was there, too, in a supporting role; wondering aloud (though always with that smug "I'm wise beyond my years" look on her face) why she wasn't an "it" girl any more. Oh brain.
Sometimes it takes my feelings a while to catch up with me. I feel like I'm a step behind a lot of the time. Like, I can go out and do something I really enjoy but not really notice how happy I was until a couple of hours later. This makes me feel strange and backward, and sometimes confuses folk. But when the response catches up with the memories, everything tingles with harmony. It's a good feeling.
It sort of snuck up on me, but I'm rather looking forward to Prince Caspian. It's such a thankless book. I liked Lion well enough under the circumstances though barely enough overall, and I don't like PC as a book very much at all - such a cliché of a sequel. The flick, though... I enjoy rooting for an underdog, is all. It's why I like Willow. (That, and the midgets.)
(Oooh... Warwick Davis is even playing Nikabrik. That's bloody synergy, that is.)
Landscapes are opening up to me, slowly, like a new story is forming at the base of my spine. All the old things are done - I've finished two scripts in my entire life. I discovered that rather bluntly recently when I decided to do away with a bunch of hardcopies of scripts I wrote when I was a teenager - I scanned everything, and made PDFs, and then realized that really, I don't achieve much. It's okay. Something has ended; something new is starting. The new thing will be better than the old thing. This is what we do.
April 14, 2008
Summer of '83
"Every day I smoke two hundred cigarettes and one hundred cigars and drink a bottle of whisky and three bottles of wine with dinner. And dinner is meat." - General Dirk Anger, Director of H.A.T.E.
Saturday night was Play It As It Lays, one of those honest-to-god "you don't get to see this on DVD, mate" flicks. Love it when that happens. The film itself gave me that strong feeling right behind my lower midsection of "why doesn't America make films like this any more?", which is a question I already know the answer to, but still... Roy Lichtenstein was a visual consultant on the damn thing. Who hires a visual consultant for anything that isn't a space opera any more? Frick. It all seems so gloriously obvious.
Sunday, me and Sarafina went to a comic book convention, all hoodied up and Booster juices in hand, to scope out the "how is this done." We were there on free passes from the Labyrinth, which ironically enough ended up having the booth I wanted to spend the most money at anyway. I saw a thousand beautiful things. There was also a guy selling DVDs, but the fact that he had Nail Gun Massacre for $25 scared me off buying Thriller for $35, though further research proved that the latter price wasn't that far afield of the real world. My lady and I toured the floor a time or two, ran into an actually startling number of people we knew, and then made with the fajitas at the Lone Star across the street, where we were served by a waitress named Whiskey. If I worked at the Lone Star, my name would be Boot.
Putting the pieces together on the last mile of the marathon before Vancouver and then my vacation... being in the final working hours before a long break has a beautiful tendency to clarify the mind like Mentality Plus Tonic.
April 11, 2008
Mamo #111: The Doldrums, Part 2
Wherein our intrepid heroes continue to have no actual topics, yet so much to talk about. Quoah?
My summer '08 picks for the next Mamo, by the way, rock the balls clean off Mother Earth. This is because my notes include lines like this:
"The Happening – $40 for Lady in the Water x 114 for the Village x whatever the fuck the last Mark Wahlberg movie made = Nobody likes the Shamalan."
April 10, 2008
I'm gonna DJ at the end of the worrrrrrrrrrrld
Round trip to Brantford last night for my lady, home late and up later, woke up this morning not entirely sure who I am, until I remembered: "Oh yeah, I'm the guy who did that." It's nice when the strings connect.
It took me a few go-throughs but I am enjoying the new R.E.M. album. Better than Around the Sun anyway, but I really didn't get much out of that one. Still, I'm aware that nothing's really shaking my shit loose like it did back in the day. But then, one should not expect a band to be able to do anything like they did "back in the day." "The day" is where bands live, and every day since "the day" is a Sick Boy rant I can recite from memory which comes from a movie that is, in its own way, indicative of the exact phenomena it so effectively critiqued.
Apparently someone can actually sculpt Harrison Ford's face. Worth tossing the 12" to move up to Premium Format? Nah, probably not. It would be better if these things weren't shipping so late in the year, anyway. By third quarter I'm gonna want none of this; if they'd streeted in the second week of May, it'd be nothing but Indiana Jones all over my damn self. As it is, I guess I'll buy this measly Oldiana Jones figure. It amuses me. And the like-scaled Slave Leia can worship hiim as a god-thing.
I gobbled up the first issue of Millar's run on Fantastic Four last night, because everyone said it was so darn good... and it is so darn good. Plus, Serenity: Better Days #2 was actually the first time in five Serenity comics that I actually got that "new story smell," i.e. feeling like I was actually watching an episode of the TV show I never saw before. It was a bit vague, but I liked it. Why does the art have to suck so much?
Thank Christ, they finally found my Raiders jacket at Wested in the UK, new lining not yet installed, and mistaken for a "pre-distressed" jacket on order because it's just so spectacularly Jonesy in its beaten-up-ness. Now it might actually get back just in time for it to be too hot for me to wear it!
April 9, 2008
The V to the A to the D-E-R
I know at least eight people who are memorizing this right now. And it features, not for nothing, the best use of Jar Jar since his miserable creation.
It ain't easy to turn myself into a PowerPuff Girl, but I did it.
Using the PowerPuff Portrait Studio! Man, they've got a portrait studio for everything now. What's next? Elvis?
April 8, 2008
BLURAYFIREFLYOMG
Other flicks they really oughta get off their asses and release in BD PDQ (I'm all about the block caps today, both acronymical and N.O.T.):
- There Will Be Blood (c'mon!!! I'll be your friend...)
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (why? will this in any way impact my viewing of the film? Zuh? I dunno. Wantee.)
- Kill Bills, the vol. 1, and the vol. 2
- Fight motherfuckin' Club
- The Lord of the Rings (obviously)
- The Matrix (the first one only. Wouldn't that be a hoot?)
This concludes a list that got progressively obviouser with each subsequent bullet.
Archaeopteryx
...is just a great, great word. I have always loved that word. There are some words that make your spine thrum like a bass string, and archaeopteryx is one of those for me.
Brother Adam spent the weekend jerking around New York City, sending comments to the blog from various Jerk stores. He came back with candy. I helped him out with a project before he left so he put a gift-note on my desk with three items on it:
From the "chocolate bar" in NYC - they make their own bars and wrappers. PB caramel, yum!
[and hereunder was a peanut butter caramel chocolate bar with a retro wrapper]
You may wish to share with Sarafina - Dark rum! Zooks!!
[and hereunder was a Crash Dark Rum chocolate bar]
Chick in nSoho hand-knitted this for you!
[and hereunder was a knitted Spider-Man finger-puppet]
Suddenly, my brother is a way better brother than my brother ever was before. Except oh wait: he also got me that Wii that one time. That was pretty sweet.
Last night Sarafina and I tried to one-up our ratatouille/Ratatouille night of a few months ago, by doing Insomnia/Insomnia. This didn't work out so well, because Insomnia sucks, and Insomnia kinda sucks too. You can kinda see what it would have been like without the wrong casting and a bad script, but not enough to make you love it. Nonetheless: so pretty. As was our hastily-improvised non-Insomnia dinner. So, it was a pretty good Mondate anyway.
I lost one of my notebooks recently, and the apparent result is that I have been brain-dumping like a fiend into every notebook I can find, like I'm trying to retain whatever fragments of the DNA of my recent thought processes that I can, in spite of the mishap. Honestly: pages and pages and pages of exons. It's a weird feeling, but oddly satisfying in its way, too.
I, too, am over Sarah Marshall.
April 7, 2008
Robots, Bubbles, Summer Sundays
How ares ya, Internet? I am cruising such a high wave right now, this blog and my personal journal have both de-volved into utter happilany gibberspeak. Every word has a rainbow comet tail and every punctuation mark is a punctuation... of love. The world is RGB CRT, the currency is vanilla bean scones, and everything is robots and glee. Fuck! I'm even annoying myself, I'm so goddamned giddy.
On Friday night, Sarafina and I celebrated by dressing in finery and trolling around Little Italy in the almost-springtime warmness, looking for a place to eat. We ended up at Olivia's at 53 - which, holy crap Internet, nicest candle-lit dinner for two with delicious wines ever. Then, 48 hours later and to round out an absolutely perfect Sunday afternoon, we celebrated again - at Swiss Chalet, with quarter chickens and Jackson Triggs acid-o-wine. Y'know, you spend a day talking about robots and Slave Leia fetishism with a girl that you like a whole lot, and it makes you feel like stepping out: in style.
Here's my cousin being all successful n' shit. Which rather painfully makes me want to upload a copy of that picture of her taking a bath in the cottage sink when she was a baby, but I don't have a copy of it on this computer.
Goin' well. Goin' very well.
Riker Appreciation Day
Appreciate some Riker, people!
April 6, 2008
Time to go pry that gun
April 4, 2008
Bust out yer spendin' finger!
As per the usual scheme, I am doing the Ride for the Heart on June 1st. This year I switched it up: going the full 75k instead of the usual 50. So it's time for you, YES YOU!, to stop freeloading here on Tederick.com, and make your annual five dollar donation.
Seriously, if every single person who reads this post today donates five bucks, we'll cure fucking cancer. (Or raise $120,000. Which would go towards heart and stroke research, not cancer. But still.) And think what would happen if you weren't a wuss about it, and actually went ten or twenty!
Thanks! I'm not going away till you do something, so better to do it early.
Fin Fang Foom!
ITEM!: I launched 34 e.learning courses this week, a personal best. I told you I could dance.
ITEM!: I want to eat Jason Shawn Alexander's Abe Sapien art for breakfast, and have room left over for pie. That's my second comic artist crush in a week! I am a comic artist makeout slut.
ITEM!: Though predictably, BKV's Logan does not much with the suck.
ITEM!: Red Tent Sisters is starting Menstrual Yoga this Sunday. If you menstruate, consider menstruating with them.
ITEM!: There is a store near my house with a sign in the windows that reads HEM PANTS SAME DAY, but because they ran out of space on both lines in mid-scrawl it actually says HEMPANTS SAMEDAY, and I think Hempants Sameday would make an outstanding name for a butler, and that the Hemp Ants would be superlative villains for an eco-themed comic book about disease.
ITEM!: I finally have an idea that will resurrect Extreme Steve, and I have had this idea for a month, and I have not found time to do it, which explains why Extreme Steve needed resurrecting in the first place.
ITEM!: Some days are all about whether you go into the big scary with a scaredy-cat tremble, or if you walk in whistlin'.
April 3, 2008
FROOT!!!
Let it never be said that I am not a man with a backup plan.
I got pantsed at poker the other night, absolutely utterly pantstededt. This took away any vague notion on my part that I might partake in this year's charity tournament and make off like a bandit with curly-cues of lemon around my fingers, and dress-money to spare. Still, I've said it before and I'll say it again, Matty Price is a man who really knows how to put out a snack plate. I took one mid-size win, so at least I remember what it tastes like. That, and cheese.
Buffy and Angel both lay down this week with faltering middling episodes; the post-coital exuberance of last month's Buffy lesbo-thon dimmed to the usual "She's got the weight of the world on her shoulders, for fuck's sake! She can fuck anyone she wants for her own reasons and they will deal with it!" rhetoric from back in the Riley days, and the whole "First Night" jive on the Angel side just didn't work at all. The Spike one was a'ight but all of the stories were just too short to be worth anything to anybody. But I don't care, cuz Secret Invasion rocks socks, proving once again that Brian is the one true Bendis. (But not the other thing, I am up to my nuts in Ex and Y.) Tracking down Logan #1 a month late proved six bitches on a bitchboat, but I got it done.
Seventeen heart attacks later, I left work after 7 and wrapped myself in the gauzy certainty that one way or another, a great many things will conclude in the next 5 days. And that's fine.
"Nobody steals from Dracula." - Dracula
April 1, 2008
Safeword
Funny how that looks like "sword" to me, given the number of extra letters.... anyways. Springtime. Comic books. Fresh air. It's all happening now; even Big Brown Mountain is melting. I dreamed of whips, blood, and quickening rivers. Glaciers moving, but slowly.
Fortifications: holding. So tired was I of the various off-project interruptions that plague my day, and so delighted was I to find that my trebuchet is finally a useful piece of artillery, that I set it up on my cubicle floor. Then I sent an instant message to my brother: "C'mere, I gotta try something." He strolled through the door and PAZOWWWW!!! there was a rubber eraser flying exactly at his head, launched by the ancient technological powers of ballistics!
This, to me, makes it all worthwhile.
Continuing on with Y: The Last Man, and into the meat. The Wizard of Oz issue was just tremendous. Sex and death, sex and death... Bondage and baptisms and my blood in my ears. All snuggled up reading last night, and then wandering around the rainy streets looking for something to eat... we ended up going to an Ethiopian restaurant at Bloor and Ossington, and fuck-damn, it was awesome and solved the whole night for me. I have bad associations with Ethiopian food, like that time Mark tried to make it and I said (rather memorably) that it tasted like a shirt. Or the inevitable reality that no child of the '80s can hear the words "Ethiopian food" without a single-frame nightmare-flash of Sally Struthers feeding a kid paste. But last night's meal rocked my socks clean off and around the block, and I only wish I hadn't left the leftovers in Sarafina's fridge this morning. I'm hungry as a bastard.
The noises coming out of my big project are finally, officially, the rattles of imminent death. I shall dance into the mist. I'm going on vacation in 20 days. You can't come.
Appropriately (somewhat), my work on Captain Napalm and the Legions of Havoc began with arts and crafts - glue sticks, specifically, and tiny piece of paper.