Last night I had a dream that I went back to 3QF, and found out that half my DVD collection was still there, along with Chris and Human Rights Lawyer, who were a) living there together in connubial bliss and b) surprisingly athletic. (This dream could not possibly be related to current anxieties about career, life planning, or the end of the world). The fact that I can remember this dream seems to demonstrate that I did in fact sleep, which does not tally with my recollection, but there ya go. I do recall shoving my now-22-minute Guy in the Sky assembly cut into a kind of rough order before retiring to the bedroom in a spectacularly bad mood, and after that there was a lot of tossing and turning and accidental punching of Zam. Which is fair, given her behaviour lately.

I watched Rhapsody in August the other day, which I rather enjoyed, and puts me within a single movie of getting to the end of Akira Kurosawa's rather significant body of work. (I do then have to do some back-catchup thanks to that Eclipse set of the postwar years that Criterion released recently.) I also redirected some Christmas Chapters money towards The Sinestro Corps War, which is shiny and absorbing and much more enjoyable than The Silmarillion which, Beren and Luthien aside, just ain't any fun any more. I also, after a treat of a date with my ladyfriend the other day, finally found that goddamned Joker, so I can stop prattling about that. I still wouldn't mind finding myself a pair of the socks, though.

Today, I am trying to ride out what has been a spectacularly frazzling work-week with a modicum of grace, before fading into the weekend. I may walk home.

Posted by tederick at 8:54 AM in 3QF & books & comix & dreams & j-o-b & movies & shinydisks & socks & tederick films & toys! & zam!
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I am a dizzying 17-storey height above the city right now, it is a beautiful Tuesday, and I am on vacation. Were it not for the slight inconvenience of spending the only truly gorgeous weekend of our entire apocalyptic summer not on a cottage deck drinking beers (a lack felt so painfully that, in Canadian Tire the other day and confronted by a truck-sized billboard of Canadian Shield granite poking through a mist-shrouded lake, my eyes started brimming), I'd say everything's going off without a hitch.

In comparison with my former roommates, it turns out I am relatively monastic in my quantity of possessions. I figured I'd be in the middle of the pack (nobody was going to out-clutter Brandy) but after spending 2 hours on Sunday night just bringing boxes of stuff down to the living room from Chris' room, I felt positively Spartan. All in all my move was a piece of cake, a lazy Sunday afternoon in the driveway at 3QF with my big truckin' fuck. It was only after an existantialist nightmare trip to Ikea, when the sun went down and we started loading Chris and Brandy's big truckin' fuck, that things started to get frazzly. I have consumed more sugar in the past 48 hours than in probably the last month (including a bushel of Cinnabons which, had I the means, I would have pre-digested Fly-style and sucked up whole), enough sugar that, after midnight on Sunday and while the others thought we had gone off to slack, Steve and I even hoisted Brandy's beaten, broken couch out the front door of 3QF and smote its ruin on the mountainside.

Now in my surprisingly enjoyable new pad - which, for everyone who's missed the subtext, is christened 1701 - Zam is being her predictably adorable self, so needy and clingy (as she is after any traumatic event) that she's almost an entirely different cat. All is well. Sarafina came over last night (her office is a scant 4 minute walk from here) and we made a delightful feast of Swiss Chalet among the forest of box towers, and watched American Graffiti. The roar of the city kept me up for much of the night, and now I am surfing the ether of unpassworded wi-fi, watching DVDs and emptying the boxes I spent the last week filling. Life is insane. So much production, for so little change.

Posted by tederick at 9:29 AM in 1701 & 3QF & the apocalypse & zam!
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Today I

• Used the last of my stores of rolled oats to make no-bake macaroons
• Polished my Macbook (twice) with the last of my Apple Polish wipes
• Turned the remainder of my frozen chicken stock into lovely risotto
• Threw out my gym bag and sneakers, both of which have become too stinky to survive
• Gave away my last pair of old jeans
• Opened the last bottle of wine
• And bought a DVD. It's not all purging.

Posted by tederick at 8:36 PM in 3QF
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For my birthday, I would like:

• Anything Mola Ram-related
• Anything Lando-related
• Blu-ray DVDs, as outlined on my wishlist
• This book
• Liquors
• Blaxploitation movies
• And as you probably already know, I am fond of Batman.

Don't buy me this book, though, cuz I bought it for myself today. Pretty! If I have any really rich friends that I don't know about, though: this would look pretty cool on my desk.

I have been to Montreal and back, in class for three days, and have walked from the pits to College Park, twice, all in the past 7 days. Also saw Hamlet 2 (sucked!), had an entirely home-cooked meal at Christys' place (fab-u-lous!), went to the Silver Snail (but not for midnight!) and watched Superman Returns on blu-ray. Tonight is our soccer final: we are playing for first. I never sit down, and I am rapidly running out of things to sit down on, even if I were to find time to do so. Time is getting short. Every last thing into its box, and here we go...

Posted by tederick at 4:40 PM in 3QF & batman! & books & miscellaneous crap & shinybludisks
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Spider-Man 1. It was Spider-Man 1. And now Danny Elfman will now be a selly-outy sucky wanghole for ever and ever amen.

Yesterday my soccer team won! Which is frickin' unheard of! And I (me personally) had an actual good play! Which is also fairly rare! So tonight's the night for betting on horse lotteries, folks. If it weren't for the TCSSC shipping us further and further into the hinterlands of Ontario on fields that can absolutely not be qualified as "Toronto" or "Central" (or even "Social" or "Club," so I guess really the league should just be called "Sport!" with an exclammation point), I'd say this soccer season is shaping up fine.

Meanwhile, the city of Toronto stole my blue boxes. All four of them. They were there, they were beautiful, they were mine, and now they're gone. We are reduced to pitching empties out the kitchen window at the upright bin in the driveway. Who do you call to charge the city of Toronto with theft? 3QF is going to make it to the end of our tenancy on fucking fumes. By August 31 the only things left in the house will be a broken kitchen faucet, the noise the fridge makes, and six floorboards.

Posted by tederick at 12:36 PM in 3QF & movies & sockey
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Last night the 3QF cinematheque hosted perhaps its final double feature of the season, Krull vs. The Machine Girl. In an odd bit of unintended synergy, both films featured the same five-bladed starfish weapon. The latter, though, also featured a schoolgirl with a machine gun arm. It's tremendous what they're doing with movies these days.

Food on hand for screening: Crullers and sushi.

Coincidentally, around the same time we were doing all that, Warner yanked Where the Wild Things Are from its release schedule altogether, after having previously shoved the release to late '09. The bulljive is in full swing in the press release, and lord knows I'm no great Spike Jonze fan anyway, but I wonder if we're now ever going to see what he conceived as the proper approach to this unmakeable film - an approach which, regardless of how it turns out, is inherently way more interesting to me than anything that "delivers for a broad-based audience." It's a feature-length adaptation of a 15-page children's story, and if the rumour mill it to be believed, it's gonna have giant walking puppets. Honestly, I don't care if it sucks; I just want to see it. There just aren't enough amazing things in the world any more.

Admonitions like that, however, lead to Hellboy II. And it is, unfortunately, time to report that I don't want any more things to lead to stuff like Hellboy II. I am declaring a moratorium on underwhelm: let's get back to kicking some ass, shall we? Review snippet follows thus:

For all his prodigous gifts with the look n' feel, Del Toro has always suffered from recurring skill gaps in his writing: an over-reliance on form; a lack of substance in his English-language dialogue; a tendency to see hererosocial relations from only the male point of view; and what's with all the clocks? Pan's seemed to herald the completion of a successful leap upward from the young director of able adventure stories like Blade II and even the first Hellboy. With Hellboy II, sadly, all of Del Toro's weaknesses as a writer have come roaring back, and have brought some friends. The thing looks fantastic, but goddamn, this is some piss-poor storytelling.

And full review is here. I can't help but notice that I'm writing a lot more bad reviews these days than good ones. I do hope this isn't because I've become an asshole, which I admit is becoming more and more possible with every film I see. I suppose it's unlikely that every single goddamn thing sucks. HB2 has many admirable qualities and means well, if "meaning well" means to plumb whatever street cred Del Toro has amassed in order to make a nice chunk of summer-movie coin. (I don't even begrudge that. Who wouldn't want to make coin? Coin buys condominiums.) I just want a flick to have appreciable achievement in all areas of filmcraft, not just one or two, y'know? Or at least, transport me so spectacularly into its own idea that I come out unable to help admitting that yeah, that thing was a movie, a thing of the world worth making and bestowing upon others. (Like Wall-E, and in a completely opposite series of ways, like The Machine Girl.) I'd like to stop rounding up.

Posted by tederick at 11:42 AM in 3QF & movie night & movies & reviews
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I can't seem to get the Juno "pie balls" line out of my head today. I've also taken to using "turducken" as a swear word... though the latter is more of a secret, vulgar ambition than a curse.

When you're moving, you want to move as little "stuff" as possible, so I've stopped mending socks. That's right: sock pops a stitch, sock go bye-bye. The socks are terrified. They saw what I did to these bastards, and they're running scared. My side of it is brilliant; not only do I get to terrorize my socks, but I also get to look forward to a mid-September socking spree. New socks!

Now watch as I tear a strip off this: What is the deal with the Facebook Friend Finder? That thing is retarded. Never, not even once, has a single person who appears there been someone I can identify by name. Am I getting someone else's picks? Whose Friend Finder do I show up in? Maybe they invented the FF as some kind of second law of thermodynamics motivator within the naturally-structurecentric Facebook universe. Where we attempt to build logical roads between the cities of our social profiles, the FF tunnels through the earth to random out-points that are unrelated by any commerce to our Facebook cities. (Yikes... that metaphor barely held.) The inevitable result of following the Friend Finder to its disconsolate ends is utter entropy across the board: networking with everyone rather than select few; "friendship" as a meaningless watchword in a hazily homogenous Facebook fog. Fie!

Well anyways. I've had coffee, and written in my journal about two or three of the more beautiful things of the last 72 hours, all while sitting in the sunset rays of my soon-to-be-erstwhile home of the Danforth. I remember the summer of '04, when I did nothing else...

Posted by tederick at 5:56 PM in 3QF & miscellaneous crap & socks
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Right now Matty Price is in Philadelphia having cheese steaks with his son, and I'm in Toronto, where even my stupid fucking horrible cat refuses to spend a modicum of time with me. Life: teh suck.

I'll say this for moving out: it forces the landlord to actually pay attention to the quality of the house. Stairs to the third floor? Fixed, two days after she found out we were leaving, and four weeks after she found out they were broken. People don't give a sweet fuck about you, ever, unless it costs them an enormous amount of money not to. Remember that, internet; let it scour your veins like oxaliplatin. Meanwhile, B-diddy (not to be confused with Bone Daddy) has successfully located her new home, Chris is Hugh Hefnering his way around the main floor, and I have not even started apartment-hunting. Should I be paranoid about not having secured a September 1 move-in date, when it's the fourth of July? I feel like I should, given that I'm so frickin' roped up about everything else these days anyway. What's one more slice of freak-out on the big freak-out pile.

You ever been to Sushi Train? Give it a try. A little conveyor belt brings the sushi to you. Ambulatory sushi is a thing worth having, even if it is indescribably precarious as a business model.

Right now, somewhere out there, Larry Hama is being awesome.

Posted by tederick at 12:56 AM in 3QF & foodin' & miscellaneous crap
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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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"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.

Posted by tederick at 6:58 PM in 3QF & miscellaneous crap & poetical
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Sittin' in the Starbucks, rockin' the Indian pop music.

Siegels triumphant! With everything else seemingly Superman-related this week (and for some reason, I'd just read The Escapists last week, which made me think about reading Kavalier & Clay a second time), half of Siegel & Shuster (or the descendents thereof) now co-owns Superman again. (Shit, I fucked up the tenses in there somewheres, but the sentence is too complicated to go back and fix it.) Neil Gaiman twigged to the most interesting idea, which is that technically, the Siegel family could negotiate Superman licensing with a company that isn't DC. Not that I am particularly advocating a Superman vs. The Sentry smackdown in the Marvelverse, but it opens the mind to the possibilities. I'm all for creators (or their great-grandkids) getting their share, but at some point Superman should just enter the public domain. Ain't nobody owning the copyright on Jesus, is there?

Meanwhile, Dr. Pepper will give a free can of pop to every person in America (except Slash) if Chinese Democracy actually gets released in 2008. Frankly, this just makes me want to see how they'd even manage it, were they called upon to do so. How do you pull off a day-and-date complete-citizenry mass distribution? Well, I guess it wouldn't have to be day-and-date. But not doing so might actually be even harder, logistics-wise.

(I think too much about logistics.)

I have read the entirety of Nextwave, and have pronounced it good, and cruelly short.

Yesterday was goddamned thick and satisfying. After the stock was done bubblin', me and Sarafina went to Little Italy in search of Italian music; then there were non-B-Boyz burritos at Burro Burritos, which are just sensational, by the way. Check 'em. Then there was gift shopping aplenty (they're really starting to like me at the Labyrinth, I'll tells ya), then there was dinner with Christy and the widest cost-to-noodle-bowl-size ratio ever, and then a completely directionless and in many ways amoral Mamo with Matty Price at Marché in the middle of the night. (Oh, if only "night" were spelled with an M.) Lots of stuff jammed into a day and with fresh air in the... er... air, finally enough stamina in me to actually allow for all the running around.

There was, as I'm sure you've heard, also Earth Hour, which meant flicking the switches on all the power bars at 8:00 and sitting in the living room at 3QF drinking curiously strong wine, with candles n' shit. I've been saying it since '03 and I'll repeat: screw this one-hour deal, let's have full dedicated blackout nights 3 times a year (when it's warm). We shouldn't need reminding about things like this.

Peaceable times to you all.

"Oh my god, in a minute and thirty seconds I'll be eating burrito." - Sarafina D.

(aaaaaaaaaaaaand I love that girl.)

Posted by tederick at 10:21 AM in 3QF & comix & foodin' & podcastery & the apocalypse
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"That elf is coming at you with a shovel." - Sarafina D.

It's gonna be a long night in the laundromat - this place is a fucking madhouse right now. I'm stealing WiFi from some dude named Jaco and waiting for a dryer to open up. I should have eaten before I came here. It's been a long day already; in fact, it's been a long month, and by month I mean February, and by February I mean "depressing." I have not been myself for the last little while - though I am nonetheless on cloud fucking nine about how certain bits of the past two weeks have gone. Did you know I can still get nervous on a date with the above-quoted elf-spotter? I didn't, till Friday. I'm not sure why that makes me happy, but it really does.

Speaking of eating, yesterday was Teen Girl Squad's one-year anniversary at 3QF. I bought them a box of salt to commemorate. They commemorated by playing thumping electronica while I was trying to watch Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout; a pretty decent film, and worth seeing. I spent all of yesterday doing some contract HTML work on my living room floor and watching Deep Space Nine, which is not a bad way to spend a Saturday if you have nothing else to do. The "I never sit down" feeling is subsiding; now it's turning into "I just want to go outside." What I could really do with right now is a nice long walk. Like from here to, say, the Ex. And then maybe up to Christie Pits. I wonder if my iPod (whose battery, like every other battery in every other electronic gadget I currently own, has gone to shit) would last that long.

Today while waiting for a table at the Bay/Bloor Starbizzle and contemplating the Manulife Shield which prevents all incoming and outgoing transmissions, I happened upon a ten-year-old blonde boy who was absolutely losing his shit; he couldn't find his father. I tried to help him out some, and when his father finally arrived, the man turned out to be a rather standoffish Brit who immediately started scolding his son for a) not being able to find him, b) losing his shit, and c) dressing his coffee wrong. I was relatively cheesed off after that so I went and made friends with a 3-year-old named Daniel, who (without prompting, mind you) confided in me that "Darth Vader is the scariest." It sort of made my day, along with realizing that I've been sort of muddled and anxious in my mind lately, but that it's all right, and not permanent. "All right and not permanent" actually describes most thing we get all knotted up about. I may have to make a little card I can carry around in my wallet.

Dryer's opened up, 6 minutes to go, and I'm done.

Posted by tederick at 8:41 PM in 3QF & i hate mac & jedi antics & miscellaneous crap & movies
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Chris and I got our yule on last night, trimming the traditional 3QF yule tree and making many jokes about our yule logs. No wait: that was just me. Anyways the living room now smells appropriately pine-fresh, even if I've come to the conclusion that my ornaments pretty much suck at this point and are in dire need of cooler, ironically-viable replacements. The girls threw a Christmas party last night, too, at which I tried (and failed) to turn Beckers crap-ass egg nog into something drinkable. It's my own fault for not making real egg nog this year, but still: gwwahhahhhhh.

Here's a dude who got Neil Gaiman to propose to his girlfriend for him. (Yet another of my patented steal-a-link-from-Jocelyn moves.) This opens up a raft of possibilities. Things I would like to get Neil Gaiman to do for me:

• Write the introduction to my next e.learning module
• Explain my tattoo to my mother
• Consult on my next hat-shopping expedition
• The dishes
• and I'd not say no to a Pirates marathon, if he were willing to snuggle.

Meanwhile, I hate Drew Struzan. Well "hate" is a strong word, but that poster sucks. I don't think I've really loved one of his since Last Crusade B, though there were design elements of Phantom Menace B that I liked even if the whole thing didn't quite get there. Anyways: this thing couldn't look more Photoshoppy in a million years of trying. I do, however, admittedly admire their fortitude in including a giant crystal skull. "Oooooh, it's crystal! You can see clean through it!" Why couldn't they get Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio to write the Indiana Jones movie? Seriously.

Points against Indy IV: 7
Points for Indy IV: 4

Indy IV is getting its ass kicked.

Posted by tederick at 9:36 AM in 3QF & blogsphere & dr. jones
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Keel over topsails, and always with the spinning, spinning, spinning. So:

Last week was hard, but really awesome. I learned so much. Everything from simulation structure to how to eat rasmalai. My ducklings were terrific company even if they did keep me on my toes from about 8 a.m. Monday to just before five on Friday night. So 2008's goal has pretty much become "come up with a business case that gets you to Mumbai." It's only fair; I inflicted a week of Scarborough winter weather on these guys, plus two sixteen hour flights. If I time it right I can hit a rainy season and be as stunned by climate divergences as they were.

Saturday was the office Christmas party.

Holy god it was like the wedding from hell. I took off after the Rod Stewart impersonator kicked the Supremes impersonators off the stage and started singing "Maggie May." Plus there was the whole conspiracy/ambush/"I sense Count Dooku" aspect, to which I dutifully replied "spring the trap." Even ended up getting my goddamned prom picture taken. (Which I never did at my actual prom, now that I think about it, so at least I finally have one.) Damned if nearly the best thing about the deal was that I bought myself what I would enthusiastically describe as a fucking kickass suit. (I also found a oddly uncanny imitation of the Emo Spider-Man suit, i.e. the one he buys and then starts dancing in the street, but I chose not to purchase it, for its use is limited.) Anyways, ultimately this neon-nightmareland was at the very least an opportunity to drink scotch, and a twelve dollar martini, and red wine, and white wine, and rum, in that order, so I guess it was all right. Plus my people were with me. So I give the office Christmas party an A+ for effort, and acknowledge that the competition for my engagement was fierce.

Here's me and the Cannonball:

Me and Al and Al:

So thennnnnnnn, I went back to 3QF and found it once again without power. Which is hilarious in summer but vaguely alarming in winter. Rachie came home drunk and proceeded to give Chris and I about twenty minutes of the funniest fucking free-associative comedy I have ever heard, about her life and her problems. Then Sarafina came over and we decided, yeah, survival wasn't in question and even in a blackout 3QF has charm. So that turned out all right, even if we couldn't watch DVDs. Plus, candles: enjoyable and can make for impromptu, unintended profundity. (Let's go with..... imprunitendundity.) We made up for the movie-watching the next day when the power came back and we spun up Pirates 1 and then Pirates 3 (and it wasn't even my idea!! holy crap), with sushi in between and rum for the latter one. Plus there were crepes and waffles with caramel, and a hoodie. Right: that kind of heaven. It doesn't sound like a lot, but somehow it gobbled up the back half of the weekend, so here I am now. Cripes on a swizzle stick, who is writing my life?

I took today to slow things down, work from home, do some group-support with Jessi, and take a deep, solid breath.

Posted by tederick at 3:21 PM in 3QF & hoodies & j-o-b & jedi antics & photoblog & pirates & the rum diaries
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I finally got my Return of the King complete recordings today, which yes is about as nerdy as I get, and yes is absolute fucking nirvana to me right now. Oh man I love this score almost past comprehension. And between this, the time of year, being within a hundred pages of the end of Spyglass, and my general stress level, I've got the emotional stability of a pre-menopausal camel. So don't fuck with me.

I am, on the other hand, exchanging pretty awesome emails with Mary Pants who guest-wrote the Powers letter column in the last issue. It's like being one degree of separation away from Bendis!

Tonight me and Admo went to a Wii party at Alena's house. To help us all vent our frustrations we made a Mii named D-Cert. D-Cert was fat, bald, and gender-confused. But stress relief was thin on the ground because D-Cert pretty much handed me my ass in every boxing match we fought each other in. It was pretty tight when I put Christina on the ground in like ten seconds, though. That was awesome.

Teen Girl Squad is no more: Dana has moved to Alberta, where all the cool girls live. The house is subdued and ghostly.

Posted by tederick at 10:57 PM in 3QF & j-o-b & pj's playground & wii
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Well there's no other way to say it, Beowulf fascinated me blind. I don't think it was a good movie, really, but ho... interesting. I actually wrote a review of it, because once I started putting the ideas together in my head, I couldn't stop. Like Die Hard 4 this summer, it's probably just another good example of a mediocre movie that unknowingly bears huge, huge, subtextual freight. But riding on that train of thought is just... well... wheeeeeeeee!!

But neither naked warrior (whose dick outdoes Bart Simpson’s for coyness) nor Rubenesque woman is anything more than the digital manifestation of what a programmer thinks those things should look like – a sin of animation for generations, so nothing new here, but one whose potential photorealism is about to give it a hell of a demented 21st Century subtext.

Rest of the review is here.

I like trains. The other day I actually said (well, wrote) "Narnia's cool and all, but I prefer trains." It was a hell of a thematic point in context, but taken out of context I think it's just a dandy sentence in its own right.

I have found a new home!! Unfortunately there are people living there who would need to be removed, so assassination may be involved. But otherwise I am deeply, deeply in love. I mean, 3QF is awesome too. And Teen Girl Squad? So fun. But 2008 is the future for at least five more weeks, and I am all about the future.

Posted by tederick at 11:56 AM in 3QF & movies & reviews
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Nothing to report.

Posted by tederick at 1:58 AM in 1MFVF & 3QF & movie night
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I only drank about half a bottle of rum last night, which I guess explains why I'm not hung over; I'm also starting to believe in the preventative powers of a 3 a.m. peanut butter sandwich. Though I don't really understand why. Chemistry? Mebbe.

Anyways the party was a bit of a bust; many folk I truly do enjoy spending time with came by - Bex came as a cloud with TJ as rain, Candace came as the Bride (complete with head-to-toe yellow spandex jumpsuit), and Mark came as that which scares him the most (commitment). So I guess I had a good time, but overall the night was under-attended and never quite hit that critical number of people in the room to really break through. It's funny. Last year you couldn't find a single interesting thing to do on Hallowe'en for love or money and we all pretty much ended up doing nothing; this year there was so much going on that I had three other events that I would genuinely have enjoyed attending, had I not been throwing my own thing that nobody came to. It's all too much work just to end up standing around wondering why you're not having more fun on your supposed favourite night of the year. From now on, I'm a professional Hallowe'en party attender, not thrower.

Good news is, my partially-destroyed beard looks very interesting. I think I shall keep it like this.

Posted by tederick at 10:55 AM in 3QF & the rum diaries
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That's the only possible explanation for that noise.

I will start writing momentarily - don't rush me! I am picking my way through issue 4 of Snapdragon - turns out, not having a plan occasionally sucks. I'm getting there, but slowly.

I'd like to take this opportunity to stress the importance of diet and exercise. I rode my bike down to the blogTO meeting last night and yeah, it was hard and cold and my muscles are already turning into old leather, but I felt about 110% better after I was done. Winter is scary to me. Don't want another one like last time, want to keep the activity level up, and am fundamentally unwilling to join a gym. It's poxy, and I don't like it. Already I'm pissed at about six people who don't deserve it (including one who really, really doesn't deserve it), and I storm around from place to place like I'm going to burst in with a rapier and go to town on the joint. Clearly something vexes me.

(There, I used poxy and vex in the same paragraph. I am clearly awesome.)

Here, this will amuse you:

It's impossible not to feel a little better after a spate of Vadermonica.

Posted by tederick at 7:14 AM in 3QF & galaxy far & the process & youtubery
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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.

Posted by tederick at 8:45 AM in 3QF & shinydisks
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Matt P: "It's free and easy under here!"
Matt B: "Oh, hooray for everything."

Key distinctions:

• America is the kid who moved out at age 15 as a loud, if needless, "fuck you" to his sires. Canada is the kid who lived in his parents' house until he had graduated college, found a stable job, and stocked away a bit of money "for emergencies."
• The current state of the Canadian dollar is the best kept secret, ever.
• There were lots fewer fat kids in Philadelphia than there were in Chapel Hill. Whether this is geographic, random, or an actual improvement is unknown. I only know that I saw less than three kids where I wanted to actually lead them away from their parents and check them into a foster home.
• The things that you aren't regularly confronted with about America - i.e. the stuff that doesn't come from Los Angeles, Washington, or New York - are the reasons the country is worth defending. I tend to forget that on an annual basis, but America is significantly more than cruel sexual and racial stereotypes, violently inept politicians, and a smoking hole in the ground.
• Matty Price and I will never be able to explain the "buttered loaf of bread" joke to you in a way that will make you understand why we think it is so goddamned funny.

Last night after I got home and unpacked, I grabbed my iPod and headed out the door... and ended up walking to Queen and Spadina (!). I was just saying to MP the other day that it's been a while since I've done a solid city walk... this one wasn't so much planned as that's just the way things worked out. I was at City Hall before my brain twigged to how much I wanted a burrito right then. So it all worked out.

Teen Girl Squad got rid of Vinyl! No General Grievous for me, at least not for a while. Honestly, though, with my 2008 fates as uncertain as they currently are, adopting a kitten might not have been the best idea anyway.

It is almost impossible to describe how much the DVD universe has changed since the release of the first My So-Called Life boxed set; little things like how getting a TV show onto DVD no longer involves a 1-year petition, a high price point pre-order, a small production house transfer overseen by a designated fan, a collectibles distributor, a 10-month wait, and filing complaints with the FBI. Now here's version 2. I don't know, the pieces are all there, but it just feels... a little easy?

And relatedly, in spite of any previous claims on this site, I am now thinking that I will be going hi-def at some point in the next year after all... and the winner of the format war is... Blu-Ray!! The reason for this is that there are actually only four titles that I would buy the player for: three that start with "Pirates of the Caribbean," and one that's about giant robots fighting each other. I'm sure there would be others eventually, but those are the forerunners, the decision-makers, the reasons I'm doing it. The idea of seeing Transformers or World's End in anything less than the best presentation possible hurts my brain and makes my heart go puppy-sad. So.... that'll be 'spensive. New TV, new player, new speakers, new living space... all so I can watch Optimus beat the shit out of Davy Jones.

What? The players don't let me do that?

Posted by tederick at 6:47 PM in 3QF & jedi antics & shinydisks
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c/o Teen Girl Squad:

Oh it's on.

Posted by tederick at 6:44 AM in 3QF & photoblog
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Well, this is gonna be one hell of a summer.

Yesterday I covered the Women of Comics II symposium at the Paradise Comic Con for blogTO. It was pretty damned enjoyable I gotta say - way more than the convention floor itself, which, aside from meeting Georges Jeanty (and drooling on him a bit) and having a decent conversation with my new personal hero Faith Erin Hicks, wasn't exactly my air-quotes "thing." Incidentally: have I met Faith Erin Hicks before? I really feel like I have, but I can't place it. If any reader can twig me on this thing, please inform. It might just be because her name is fun to say.

Then Matty Price and I hit Ocean's Thirteen for some bank and... well sweet fucking hell I thought I didn't have anything relevant to say about that thing, but apparently I did, because I said it in review form:

The filmmakers have stripped the requirements of the Ocean's franchise to such a spare extreme that this one isn't just running on fumes, but is also turning around and convincing you that those fumes are honest, hard-won gasoline from the vast oil fields of Iraq. The flick - intentionally or no, though I'd gamble on the former - acts as an almost cruel contretemps to the risible "one for us, one for them" philosophy of indie vs. mainstream filmmaking that has plagued Hollywood for decades.

Rest of the review is here.

Got home and stumbled into a ginormous party that Teen Girl Squad was throwing for Rachel, and decided to stay (there was rum). Rachel, who shot off a fire extinguisher like she was play-acting Ghostbusters in the back yard and covered the entire neighbourhood in Spielbergian fog, Rachel who took her clothes off not once but twice, Rachel who turned me into an inadvertent drug mule. And did I mention the rum? Yeah I'm pretty much calling it the best party ever held in this house, with the exception of the Pirate Party, because nothing will ever actually defeat the Pirate Party.

Then not a lot of sleep, then a really good yoga, now peanut butter and laundry and sunshiney yesness.

Posted by tederick at 1:08 PM in 3QF & blogTO & comix & jedi antics & reviews & the rum diaries
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This morning my friend Lisa brought a cake to work for Al's birthday and we went to town on that sucker at like ten past ten in the morning morning with plastic spoons and a completely dull knife. It was the Earliest Cake Ever. It was so fucking good! Man. Cake for breakfast: making blowjobs look like crap.

The weirdest thing has been happening lately: people know what blogTO is. I was just talking to Teen Girl Squad down on the porch and they knew what it was, and for the past few months whenever I throw the name out, whoever I'm talking to knows what I'm actually referring to. This is new (in my experience). I have been loving my blogTO experience lately, I've gotta say. It took a few months post-moviesTO to figure my shit out but I really feel like I'm participating at a new level now, and I'm liking the space that the blog is carving out in the Toronto landscape lately. It's connected me with my city and my subculture in positive and meaningful ways. I'm pretty up with the whole thing right now.

And man, I loves me some Teen Girl Squad. They are just the cutest things ever. It's like having the Box live downstairs. They just borrowed my copy of The Secret Garden because our collection actually outmatches Rogers for size and selection. And in a few weeks, they're gonna throw a toga party. And before that, cupcakes and weed. It's nice to have people in the house who are actually sociable and willing to hang out and be friends, as opposed to the other thing (siege towers and oil).

Hey! There's two fucking new episodes of the actual Teen Girl Squad! When the fuck did that happen! Awesome. Just awesome.

Zombies? Anyone?

Posted by tederick at 5:57 PM in 3QF & blogTO & foodin'
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I don't much want to toot my own horn, but I just wrote the best fucking thing ever. Or at least, of all the things I've written this year, it was the one that most precisely hit the mark of what I was going for. Man, I've got a fucking physical rush on right now, just from reading the measly paragraph I just spat out. Hot diggity. Between this and finishing my really, really, really overdue Terra pages yesterday I'd say the pieces are falling into place rather nicely. If I can just finish my Portrait storyboards now, it'll be game set match, or whatever the tennis metaphor is. What? How would I know tennis?

Hot Docs is pretty much done. Last night I walked out of Super Amigos - it wasn't bad, it just wasn't very good, a mighty example of a documentary subject (Mexican wrestler superheroes!) fully failing to live up to their concept potential ("superheroic" only in that they organize rallies and shit). I might go see Call of the Hummingbird tonight to top things off. (How can I resist a "full frontal eco-manifesto"? Can't, that's how.) And yesterday afternoon I saw a flick (Garbage Warrior) about a guy who's experimenting with self-sustainable housing in the New Mexico desert. Building houses out of Coke bottles and tires and shit. My grandfather would have loved this guy, and I thought about Grandpa a lot while watching the movie, which was nice because I rarely get opportunity to bring the old dude into my daily life any more. Anyways I'd nominally put something here about how I'd love to live in an earthship-style house perched on a rock in the wilderness that generates all its own heat, power, and water, but I suspect it's irrelevant, as the survivors of the coming apocalypse will inevitably end up living in such structures anyway, and I fully intend to survive the apocalypse. So we'll table that for now.

Teen Girl Squad (plus one) is sunbathing in the back yard even now. It's good to be alive.

Posted by tederick at 1:52 PM in 3QF & movies & tederick films & the apocalypse & the process
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Yup, I've put together a floor bed.

Things I can do in the floor bed:

• Read X-Men comic books
• Look at porn
• Listen to music
• Masturbate
• Drink rum
• Smoke pot
• Muse to myself by gentle candle light
• Nap with my frog
• Write poems
• Listen to podcasts
• Scheme

I am fully committed to the creation and development of the floor bed.

Posted by tederick at 9:01 PM in 3QF
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Oh, sick. Don't know what happened but at around 2:00 my insides went all gooey. Right in the middle of a coffee. Something bad for lunch? Reaction to the weather changing? Unclaimed properties of a valuable nature? Dunno. Sucks too because I was supposed to go to the Amp'd party tonight and now I ain't gonna cuz I can't get off the couch. Kardinall Offishall was playing, and how often do I get exposed to that? Like never. Is it possible I have malaria? That'd be something.

Meanwhile, I am going to British fucking Columbia on April 2. I'm looking forward to it but I'm also sorta nervous. I am thirty damn years old and I have never flown anywhere alone EVER. Actually that's not the part that's making me nervous, it's the everything else, including the Obi-Wan Kenobi mojo I gotta pull on one of my co-workers when I get there. But it'll be nice to see my other-side-of-the-country friends, especially since I've never been west of Windsor. And I hear that it's always, always, always sunny and warm in Vancouver. Always. I shall bring my sun hat and my sun shoes and my sun dildo.

It's possible that the girls downstairs are Garbage Witches. They put regular garbage out when it's recycling day and it gets picked up anyway! How the fuck does that work if they aren't witches? Let's try to assess relatable competencies: if you were a Garbage Witch, what else could you do? Should I be worried? Can Garbage Witches hex a dude with malaria, even if said dude is in the office in Scarborough at the time, to make him miss his party? Is that a thing Garbage Witches can do? Needs thinkin' about.

Posted by tederick at 6:02 PM in 3QF & j-o-b
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If there's one thing that I can be thankful for about myself, it's that I know when to quit drinkin'. For one thing, if you drink a fuckload of water after you stop drinking alcohol you still keep getting drunker. The water helps the body metabolize the alcohol. So quitting drinking at 1:00 and switching to litres and litres of water was fine from a social standpoint and also fine from a recovery standpoint; by 3:30 I was frying up a whack of Sin City breakfast tacos while Chris gave the dissertation that all drunks give after they have vomited, about how much better they now feel. Yeah, poor Chris. He had to spend a solid half hour cleaning his own chunks out of the 3QF bathtub. Not so much poor 3QF though; it was our least-attended party ever, but nobody seemed to care, and the precious few who showed up had a good time. And we all got wasted off our ass - I seem to recall something about me lying in the stairwell removing my pants while Chris and Brandy snapped pictures of my jubblies. So although I will certainly be shopping for a new set of friends come morning, for now it's all eggy burritos and Pirates of the Caribbean and a pretty nice post-party glow. The muttons go off in the morning. What more could a boy want?

"I don't even know if I can sit down." - Chris
"You're sitting down, Chris." - Me

Posted by tederick at 3:54 AM in 3QF & foodin'
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• Anal bone-holin'
• The Irish
• Fezzes
• Jessica MacLeod a.k.a. Mennotits Macelod a.k.a. Wonder Woman
• The score from The Village
• Guacamole Doritos (Guoritos) (special thanks to Bex) (because she's awesome) (and festive)
• Typing

p.s. I'm drunk - special thanks to Bex Wood a.k.a. Wonder woman

"You gotta be careful when eating a giant green cock. Or so Chris tells me."
- Matt Brown

Posted by tederick at 11:50 PM in 3QF
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Let me tell you something: my commentaries are awesome. I give great DVD commentary. Not good DVD commentary; great DVD commentary. My director's commentaries are fucking informative. They aren't "on this day this happened and then this guy got sick and hey that shot is really cool." They're about why things are the way they are and where ideas came from and why this particular movie got made this particular way and so on and so forth. As a film fan I would listen to my commentaries with relish. If there was a Criterion DVD of my movies, it would be worth buying just for the commentaries. I'm not saying for sure, but I will say that there's at least an outside chance that some people would spank it listening to my commentaries because they just got too damn excited. And if there was a way to put a button on my jaw that would launch me into an alternate commentary track in daily life, I would install it. That commentary would be great too. Oh if only there were a way to allow me to publicly comment on my life as it happens! IF ONLY!

In other news, Warren Ellis doesn't get the Buffy sellout either. And I go where Warren Ellis goes.

Party at 3QF tonight; I have never seen so many cancellations, so it will be interesting to see what crowd we actually end up with or it'll just be five hours of watching Chris and Brandy play hide the leprechaun. (That's not a dirty metaphor. There's an actual leprechaun.) Before that I've got Terra to work on and I've also got to see if I can jerry-rig the PC together long enough to get some stuff off it that I need. Which I shouldn't have scheduled for today because I pretty much just want to lay around reading comics and eating cheese. And where the fuck is Jabba already?! I am totally waiting in vain for a Jabba won't come.

Posted by tederick at 9:51 AM in 3QF & comix & tederick films
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