Happy Pride everybody! I hope you all did something suitably queer-positive. I no longer truck much with the parade(s), so after the spanktastickest buffet brunch ever at the Bloor Street Diner, I helped Demetre move a series of belongings from one St. George high-rise to the high-rise immediately next door. Which meant I spent my yesterday with four dudes hoisting shit sweatily; queer-positivity: check. Plus, I am metrosexually jealous of his new place. Spacious, well-situated, good sized living room for Blu-Ray film viewings. I've got one last 3QF Double Feature to unroll this summer, and then I have got to find a place with similar attributes in which I may live for the foreseeables.

Wall-E action figures! I wouldn't mind an EVE to sit on my desk and come to my meetings and blow shit up, although the lack of articulated fingers suggests that the toymakers underestimated the degree to which that movie is about hand-holding. Meanwhile, I wrote in my journal that Ben Burtt should get a Nobel Prize for sound design. (No mere Oscar will suffice.) Between Wall-E and Artoo he’s done a thing that no regular audience members will probably ever notice or think about, but is utter artistic transcendence. Yikes, I'm going to cry. I'm going to cry about sound design.

After seeing Wall-E on Friday night, Sarafina and I took a dreamy walk down College to Kensington, and ate Mexican food on a patio as the sun went down and the margaritas flowed. We could have been anywhere, anytime. The hum of the world sort of matched the hum in my heart. That kind of sound design. Yeah.

Giving away boardgames is bloody challenging; oddly enough, it was Episode I Monopoly that was the hardest to part with. I kept Globetrotters. I have a lot of papers to go through - do people keep files any more? I have to do a book-off; I have to do a DVD-off. I have to get rid of my old TV and my old monitor. I am leaving behind more furniture than I'm taking. Plus, yet another Operation: Annihilate!, all the food in the house must be eaten. Two months out and I'm already obsessed. I played F-Zero on the Wii. Things feel right.

Posted by tederick at 3:38 PM in jedi antics & movies & toys! & wii
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I'm moving - and in answer to your next three questions, I don't know, no I'm not, and September 1st. This has kicked off a purge that will make all prior purges look like wussy little boy purges, a purge whose tally already rings five full contractor-grade garbage bags of stuff thrown away and two recycling bins; and this purge has only gotten started. The toys that I still own are now the survivors of a genocidal fire that has claimed fully 70% of their civilization, and makes tremble my books, DVDs, and comics, all of whom are also about to see Black Plague-level deaths. The short version: I (used to) have too much stuff.

Somewhere amid the rubbish, the bags upon bags of shattered CD-Rs, Episode I frisbees, and creased photographs of old girlfriends, are the VHS tapes. Lots and lots and lots of VHS tapes. They are the soul of the thing in a weird way - for the first time in my life, VHS tapes are beautiful. They are so goddamned odd-looking, the WALL-Es of home theatre, anachronous boxy-forms of pure functionality, before things had to be functional and pretty. (I hate Mac.) The tapes break at the drop of a hat (or a tape, down a flight of stairs, as at least one of my old Star Wars cassettes discovered today); they're also oddly indestructible in a way: I found a copy of Raiders with the back door broken clean off, which I had apparently continued to use faithfully for years. It still played fine, even this afternoon; I have factory-spec DVDs which lasted a tenth as long. Old VHS doesn't actually look too bad on the Bravia, and the warble of electronic noise is comforting and serene once worries about reference quality have been banished from one's head. And yeah, if I may indulge in being the last person to jump on the analogue bandwagon, there's something about the trundling hum of a pair of reels being slowly revolved while their thread of mylar slowly unveils its electrons that goes straight down to the heart of me. At the end of it all, film fetishism is not for me - I was a VHS baby. Streamers of celluloid run pale next to the taste sensations of that first Canon VHS video camera, whose recording deck hung saddle-bag like at my side while the camera itself had to be supported (with difficulty) with the other hand; the floor-to-ceiling library of tapes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (commercials painstakingly edited out); the beaten-up copy of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves that was, in fact, my first home video purchase. (I do not have the heart to replace it.) I have the theatrical cut of The Phantom Menace in VHS only; it will never exist in any other medium. I have decks of Tom Snyder and Letterman and Bob Ross; an episode of Young Indiana Jones where Old Indy still appears; two blissful camcorder hours on the back lot of Universal Studios in 1993. It's all wreckage, but it's still here.

Inevitably, this brings us to WALL-E. Officially, I no longer need to review films, because the Village Voice does it for me. (Other recent instances of "they said it better than I could say it myself" include The Last Mistress and Indy IV.). Unofficially, WALL-E is so much about
1) how obsolescence is a lie;
2) great, great, great movies;
3) love. Stupid, gorgeous, I-wanted-someone-to-hold-my-hand-and-now-she's-doing-it, love. And that's all I'll ever need from it, or anything else.

Posted by tederick at 3:21 PM in 3QF & i hate mac & movies & poetical
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Me, to D-Coc, re Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: I think we just got pantsed.

D-Coc, reply to me, re same: WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS
HOW HARD AND FAST AND VIGOROUS CAN THEY EAT MY ASS

Posted by tederick at 12:32 PM in joss & tederick films
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It's official: I'm a manager. It's also official: I am no longer able to keep up with my email.

I'm holding the line at work - barely - but at home, messages will sit in my inbox for near of a week before I get to them. You'd think the frickin' BlackBerry would make things easier in this regard, but no. The BlackBerry just means I have to process everything twice.

By the way, if anyone knows how to create a "you annoy the fuck out of me" friends list in Facebook, which blocks the status updates of all those irritating shmucks on said list, please kindly let me know.

I wrote this on my BlackBerry, by the way.

Posted by tederick at 3:56 PM in j-o-b
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With Matty Price's road trip imminent (and he's not taking me!), we knocked off another Mamo, our last before The Dark Knight. Which makes this anniversary season: we actually crossed the three-year threshold last week (and MP and Leah and Sarafina and I had a generally stupendous dinner at Mercato to celebrate... buffalo mozzarella flown in that morning from Italy, mmmmmm), and given that Batman Begins was our first show, expect the TDK episode to be... gushy. You know, I haven't actually gone back to listen to that first podcast in a good long while. I should do that, just to see how completely clued out we were.

I must also regretfully report that I am completely lost when it comes to the subject of frappucinos.

On the subject of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan currently owns 88% of my brain. I can hear his voice in my head right now. It's calming.

Posted by tederick at 11:34 AM in batman! & foodin' & podcastery
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The last issue of Y: The Last Man is actually great. Heart-crushingly great. The story as a whole? Less so. There's enough good stuff about Y that I understand the exuberant-nay-ecstatic reaction in the popular media... but it's not that good. It certainly cribs from the best (the twin Sandman nods are my favourite), layers in all the stuff you'd want to see layered into a story about the complete destruction of presumed patriarchy, and goes about as far down the line of generating a genuinely original sci-fi think piece as you probably can do in any post-Phillip K. Dick cosmology. And there ain't no complaining about this baby's scope. But how many times does the story tip over into "awesome?" Once or twice, maybe. The rest of the time it's just sound, invigorating pulp drama. No qualms there.

This costs three hundred dollars, so I won't buy it. But damnnnnnnnn. There's also a sixth-scale Batmobile, which Adam thinks I should buy for Tederick. But that's $450, so no.

Uh... lotsa other stuff happened. I'll get to it.

Posted by tederick at 6:08 PM in batman! & comix & toys!
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Time does keep rolling on, doesn't it? Look, in light of everything that's been going on over the past few weeks, I'm not in much of a place to keep things rolling here, too. I had a really, really good year: there was a solid stretch of time there where I had literally run out of ways to say how freakin' great everything was and how happy I am. And now everything has happened, and for a little while anyway I'm on the other side of the same problem. So...yep. Not for long, but at least for a bit, we'll just take it as it comes.

Posted by tederick at 11:56 AM in tederickdotcomdotcom
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I have the Darabont draft.

I am so fucking excited right now. Holy geekgasm. I will not disburse it to anyone, because that would be illegal. And I will not link to where you can find it, because then I could get a C&D from the Man. But I highly encourage you web Indys to get your shit together and bullwhip yourself a PDF.

Meanwhile, things continue apace. I think I've actually encountered roughly 80% of the people I know in the world in the past three days alone, due to a few closely-spaced common gatherings... Rebecca and Mark and I actually standing in one place talking to each other, when the fuck does that ever happen any more. Boy: we are getting old. Almost like grown-ups, except for the hobbit on my desk. Otherwise, the words of the last few days have been, in this order, "hum" and "drum." I'm getting up to speed on new responsibilities and trying to keep the way clear in the after-work life, too, and tackling the next thing, and the thing after that. It's a process, not a goal, as I've been reminded repeatedly over the past few weeks; if I could sit in one place and really take it all in for a few minutes, that would help me feel a bit less like I'm scrambling to keep up with my own life. But that'll pass too.

i AM now IN SEARCH OF MY CREATIVE ENERGY having found the Darabont draft. HAVE YOU SEEN IT???

Posted by tederick at 11:23 AM in dr. jones & miscellaneous crap
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Starring everybody, and Charles Grodin (we hope).

Truly we live in an age of fanboy miracles when Jason frickin' Segel gets to write a new 80s-inflected Muppet movie just because he can.

I am now undertaking an enterprise (which I am calling Operation:Hilarity) to get digital copies of a lot of the standup comedy I listened to when I was a kid. I've got about half of it done already, mostly the Woody Allen and the Bill Cosby and Steven Wright (not the Cannonball) stuff. Still trying to work out some Carlin and Jackie Mason and some of the others. The result? Endless miles of digibytes sitting on an iPod somewhere, and very little else. Oh: and hilarity.

Hey! I'm goin' to the ballgame. How about that.

Posted by tederick at 3:32 PM in miscellaneous crap & movies
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Well, here comes a big motherfuckin' storm. Rock on, Toronto!

Being now quite thoroughly besotted with all things Scott Pilgrim, I went searching through the stacks this morning for the Free Comic Book Day issue I picked up back in '06... and found it undeniably gone. I AM SO PISSED. Admittedly, there was a "get rid of the FCBD garbage" comic stack purge earlier in the year, but being as Free Scott Pilgrim is one of the three FCBD titles I can actually specifically remember enjoying, I'm sorta irritated that it's missing and stupid shit like the Viper Comics sampler survives. Stupid piles of garbage and nonsuch! They foil me.

So what else is going on? Well, it was goddamned hot over the weekend, that's one thing. The natural answer was: barbecue. But the problem with that was: I don't know much about barbecues. So I did proceed to, if one is looking at it technically, purchase the briquettes that go with a non-gas BBQ, and then used them on a gas BBQ. The result was... er... significant. Fortunately, nobody got blowed up or died, and there were iced creams enough for all. Praise.

Plus! Soccer! It was a hot sonofabitchin' humid mosquito-infested oh-god-are-dinosaurs-coming-out-of-those-trees-to-eat-us? game last night, but we held a decidedly excellent 4-4 tie in spite of being outnumbered 148 to 1. It was our Crazylegs vs. their Crazylegs (ours won), Everywhere She Needs To Be Stacey like a goddamned psychic defensive dervish, and The Man With No Name Whose Name Is Actually Demetre with seemingly boundless energy and laconic squinting. The memories more than make up for the morning ouches.

This BlackBerry Pearl deal is crazy! Did you know I can receive my email while on the go? The world is insane, and sushi is delicious.

Posted by tederick at 4:27 PM in comix & foodin' & jedi antics & sockey
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No time for much of anything these days - too busy, livin', man! - but here's yer podcast. This week we do some reader mail, speculate on who would win in a fight (X-Wing fighters vs. Carrie Bradshaw's walk-in closet), and drool on Batman just a bit more.

Posted by tederick at 10:51 AM in podcastery
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Genuinely I can say that this issue of BTVS was the first time I felt legitimately like I was watching an episode of the show. Which is nuts, because it was entirely based around content that could not possibly have been featured on the television program - Giant Dawn robot fight in the streets of Tokyo, etc.

What it felt like, though, was the stakes of the show - where characters enter and exit, succeed and fail, rally around each other in unexpected ways, and come away changed by the events therein. That's what's basically been lacking from arcs 1 and 2 of this comic - no real growth. WatG, however, really felt like a grand finale of something, setting up and paying off relationship after relationship while still fitting into the overall scheme. And not a hint of Floating Boots to be found. Sublime.

(I've figured out who Floating Boots is, by the way. It's Captain... Malcolm... Reynolds!! Sweet.)

Posted by tederick at 10:39 AM in comix & joss
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Honestly, I don't know what I feel right now. I want to be patriotic... but I also want to be pirateotic.

I do know that now that I've indavertently started the ball rolling on this thing, it looks like I'll have to use exclammation points in my titles all week.

You ever have that dream where you're in an elevator and none of the buttons correspond to the actual floors and the floor you're trying to get to isn't the actual floor in real life but the number coincides with your birthday? No reason.

Posted by tederick at 10:59 AM in dreams & pirates
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Why does this Indy figure come with the Ark and a bunch of other stuff he never uses or sees during the Map Room scene, but doesn't come with the Staff of fucking Ra?

(I tried, but this has been bugging me for weeks.)

"He doesn't use his bullwhip in that scene, he certainly doesn't open fire on it!" - Me, to Mark, at the Silver Snail on May 21

Posted by tederick at 3:23 PM in dr. jones & toys!
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Thus far in June, I have:

• A broken TTC metropass
• A hot rock star girlfriend who can cook a dinner where the main matches the walls and the side matches her dress
• Enough stickers to mail away for that ultra-top-secret crystal skeleton that Indiana Jones kept looking around for
• Tickets to a Jays game where they will serve NO BEER!
• Scott Pilgrim, Volume 2.

Plus, I saw Sex and the City and Troll 2, which are comparably fascinating cultural documents. SATC because it was exactly like going to see a fanboy movie - only it was for girls! I mean, the entire audience actually gasped aloud when Big showed Carrie her new walk-in closet. Kinda like how all the dudes in the audience for Hellboy 2 will go "YEAH!" when Hellboy brings out his new big shotgun. And as for Troll 2... well the good news is that Sarafina won it on DVD at the Bloor on Saturday night, so I think there are going to be trips to Nilbog aplenty this summer. A bit of smoke, a bit of wine, a bit of soup, a bit of perfect if you ask me.

I have re-Feng Shuied my cubicle and bought myself a Seven Samurai poster. Tonight I am attending what could actually be described as a family reunion. I need a haircut, but otherwise I clean up pretty nice. It's a Tuesday. Davy Jones is coming.

"I guess the closest thing women have to Indiana Jones is Carrie Bradshaw."
- Sarafina

Posted by tederick at 8:45 AM in foodin' & jedi antics & movies
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A big fire swept through the backlot at Universal Studios last night, and among the casualties was my actual favourite part of the lot: the Hill Valley town square from Back to the Future. (The clock tower evidently survives, but was damaged; no word on who or what traveled where or to which time period.) If all this is making you nostalgic, I might point out that they have the goddamned Flux Capacitor at the Silver Snail now. It certainly prompted two or three minutes' of unabashed staring from me.

I Rode for the Heart this morning; a big thanks to Erin Booth, Helen, e-Becca, my aunt Beth, Jocelyn, Matthew Fabb, Demetre, Jeff, Chris, Meredith, my parents, Steeeeve!, Christys, and Sarafina for sponsoring me. Hey, here's an idea: next time I want to do a 75K on this thing, someone remind me to actually train beforehand, yeah? And by "beforehand," I mean for several goddamned months like a real grown-up would do, not a few weeks of half-assed riding. I did the whole thing in about four and a half hours this morning and it damn near wasted me. I was not prepared.

Let's post-script two things:

Lost! While on the whole I'd say that Season Four has been fairly kickass, I gotta call the finale weak. Not as bad as that disastrous tail-ender to the first season, but still not nearly as absorbing as last year's "we're in the future now!" slam-o-rama (though to be fair, what could be?) nor even as action-adveturey-science-fiction-terrifico as the Season Two closer with Desmond. So instead of debating the fiddle-faddle of who was in the box or who got blowed up on what freighter, I'll just give two bits of human interest on the whole thing and then call it a year: 1) they pointlessly brought Harold Perinneau back just to get rid of him again, because he did indeed go "boom" with the boat; and 2) here are some hilarious alternate versions of the final shot, featuring other non-Bens in the coffin from Season Three. Anyways, I'm sort of glad the year's done, as my interest in the show was sort of lessened by the strike gap. I'm sure I'll be back on board for Season 5.

X-Men! In like kind, I'm glad Astonishing X-Men is done. Joss' lack of commitment to the publishing schedule made the final arc really difficult to enjoy, and the final one-shot was a solid B minus at best; the high-mark work in the arc took place earlier with Scott, not in the bullet with Kitty. It was at some point this week that I realized that I've been regularly reading three X-titles and pretty much don't care about any of them any more, so I think it's time for an X-break. At least until Ellis takes over AXM.

Posted by tederick at 4:40 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & comix & jedi antics & joss & movies
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