I don't want to rain on the Whedonites' weekend, because lord knows those poor miserable people have been through enough. (They cancelled Firefly! In 2002!!) But I'm just not on board with Dr. Horrible. Did no one else find it... kinda humdrum? There's a self-congratulatory air about the proceedings with this one, which I hope does not extend to Dollhouse, but probably could. Yes, the whole project is sorta adorable and there are songs and Doogie Howser has a death ray. But if this were made by a college kid - aside from the fact that we'd all be gawping at the fact that he somehow found fifty billion dollars for his budget - would we really be calling it all the great things it's been called this week? The story is flat, the genre innovations are a no-show, and the technical craft is bottom-drawer. There isn't a single note here that wasn't done better in any of the other superhero inversions of the past five years, and there's no ending. Honestly, I've come to expect more. Captain Napalm: strike!

Anyhoo. Rough weekend. I ate several grilled cheese sandwiches. Well, to be fair, one cannot really call what I grew up with as "grilled cheese" truly "grilled cheese," as there is no grilling involved whatsoever. It's more like "broiled cheese sandwiches." To whit:

1. Toast two pieces of white bread
2. Butter one side of each piece with the yellowest margarine you can find
3. Pre-heat oven on broil
4. Place both pieces of toast on a baking sheet, one with butttered side up, one with buttered side down. On the one with buttered side down, place two pieces of thin Kraft cheese singles, the ones that are not made out of actual cheese.
5. Put in the oven and heat until cheese is gooey and other piece of toast is notably browning
6. Take out of oven, put un-cheesed toast on the cheesed toast, flip the whole sandiwch, and re-broil until other side is as brown as the first side was
7. Serve and enjoy.

Comfort food is lovely, but I may panic soon and need to watch the entirety of The Lord of the Rings. It's a scale of escalation.

So, I am likely not going to be living in my dream home at College and Yonge come September first. This means I am shortly to join Toronto's homeless population. As predicted on this blog 18 months ago, my homeless personality shall be Captain Jack Sparrow - me and that Jedi guy outside the Scotiamount are gonna have a fight. Look for me - my hair is nearly long enough for dreadlocks already. Shiesh! How do people stand having hair in the summer?

Happy Potteaster! On this day in 2007, Harry Potter died for our sins and was reborn a complete franchise. Praise Potteresus.

Posted by tederick at 9:40 AM in foodin' & h-pot & joss
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It's official...

Posted by tederick at 8:12 PM in h-pot
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I got promoted at the Starbucks this morning. They said, "instead of calling you Pirate Matt from now on we're going to call you Captain Matt." Then they gave me free cookies. I know what you're thinking: there's no way my life is this excellent. But it is.

Ewoks are shrinking. If you put my Romba next to my Teebo it looks fucking odd, to say nothing of the fact that Wicket looks like he could consume Chief Chirpa whole. It is for reasons like this more than any other that I think my enjoyment of action figures has come to an end. They're not even playing by the rules any more. The rules are: all toys must be able to play with all other toys. You know how Shatner is like a head shorter than Picard over in the Star Trek line? That is fucking bullshit, man.

Speaking of Shatner, the man's a pimp.

I was reading the last couple hundred pages of Deathly Hallows this morning while the storm raged outside the Starbucks, and was quite comfortable all stuffed into a comfy chair and wondering if Voldy ever knew that people like Snape could conceal all their duplicities inside a tiny bubble of perfect, selfless love for the long-dead witch with the green eyes. Boy, it all just comes up to a whole new level in that book, doesn't it? You'd almost think JKR planned it all out.

Posted by tederick at 2:16 PM in galaxy far & h-pot & pirates & toys!
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If this is true, it's the only thing since the announcement that PJ/F/Ph wouldn't be writing/directing that made me feel like that movie could actually be up to the standard. Of course, this would preclude Guillermo directing the 2 Deathly Hallows films (to be separately titled Harry Potter And, and The Deathly Hallows). Which sucks. I spent rather a lot of time on Friday fantasizing about that particular possibility. But still, this'll do just fine. And if it puts Cauron back in the h-pot director's chair, so much the better.

Media advisory: I will be neither hosting nor attending any Lost parties this Thursday. Catch up with y'all in the coming weeks.

Still feel like awful. Have had the most excruciating headache of my life for most of the last 36 hours, and painkillers don't even dent it. Wheeeeee!

Posted by tederick at 3:33 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & h-pot & pj's playground
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"Perhaps it was the light on your face, but I thought I recognised you from somewhere a long way down, somewhere at the bottom of the sea." - Lighthousekeeping

Did I get sent to work today with a Lazer Tag lunch box filled with a lunch that my girl made for me, and little notes and instructions that say things like "eat the carrots - you need vegetables"? Yes. Yes I did. And yet, she had me at "let's watch Pirates 1 and 3 but not 2." Sooner than that, even. Oh dusty world.

The TTC delay at Vic Park this morning (curses!!) got me thorugh the rest of Lighthousekeeping and out the other side, which is always a horrible feeling - "why didn't I bring more books???" I am now swinging back to H-pot for another Deathly Hallows re-read... this is, what? My fourth? It's in my head a lot these days, in near-Blu-Ray sharpness. I'm also reading a book about e.simulation design! Because I'm a nerd.

Here are some things I called my friend Erin while we were at lunch yesterday:"Gigantor," "Godzilla," "Monster Woman," "genetic disaster from a horror movie," and "something from out of the Deep." Isn't it nice when I express myself?

Now I'm listening to Return of the King and rather enjoying the look and feel of the day. My extended-hours cram session last night got me well ahead on a few things and I'm tackling a few more even as I type. Fabulous multi-screen multi-program multi-brain-lobe multi-tasking! I could teach a class.

Posted by tederick at 10:50 AM in books & h-pot & j-o-b & jedi antics
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I've been handing out Man of the Year here on the ol' blog since way back in 2000, when this utterly inconsequential no-prize was awarded to the conceptual godfather of the whole deal, Richard Hatch. At the time I was proud - yes, proud! - that no non-dude would ever win the entirely uncoveted "of the year" title here on the site, but from the very early goings in 2007, I was fairly aware that the ship was about to capsize. Men are just so uncompelling these days! And if we're trying to note the person who had the biggest effect on the Tederick.comverse for the calendar year of the award, cast your eyes no further than the little category we like to call h-pot: did anything else in 2007 even come close?

There was a whole lot of Potter prattle over the summer, but I think the entry called Dumbledore's Army does the best job of getting into exactly why this all mattered so much to me. Rowling created a book series; Rowling's book series created a culture. That culture is, beyond compare, the warmest, kindest, most inclusive, most exclusive fan base I've ever had privilege to be even remotely associated with, and it brought the big hugs n' happy for the majority of my year. That's really something.

Doesn't hurt that the book was the best I've read in a long, long time, either.

J.K. Rowling is the very first winner of Tederick.com's Woman of the Year. Previous recipients of the now-defunct Man of the Year include the authors of Civil War, Matty Price, Woogie, Peter Jackson, Master Yoda, Mark, and Richard Hatch.

Posted by tederick at 11:04 AM in books & h-pot & tederickdotcomdotcom
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OK I know I'm the last man to the party on this thing, but holy fucking CHRIST this is the funniest thing I've seen in a year:

Me and Bex just watched H-Pot 5 in Blu-Ray. She showed me this video. It's snowing. I have a party to go to. And I have a Johnny Depp hand.

Posted by tederick at 7:43 PM in h-pot & shinybludisks & youtubery
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The events of the weekend did one thing rather brilliantly: they completely erased my memory of seeing The Golden Compass. Like, on Monday morning I saw the poster on the way to work and was like, "oh yeah, that movie." Now I'm (finally) reading Lyra's Oxford again, which is a dessert course that should not have been preceeded by the stew, but whatever, it's still lovely, if far too short. You know, someday someone should do all of these things film-wise. Three features, and however many shorts Pullman ends up writing (there's one about Lee and Iorek coming out in the spring), plus the apocrypha and the lantern slides. That would make one hell of a DVD.

(At this point I'm presuming that New Line will never in a million years bankroll Knife and Spyglass after the pantsing Compass took at the box office this weekend. If we ever get around to a Mamo, I might explain more. Meantime, here's a good bit about the scripts, including the Hollywood bullshit line of the year: “The aim is to put in the elements we need to make this movie a hit, so that we can be much less compromising in how the second and third books are shot" - way to go Chris!)

There is now a floating theory that I am in fact from a parallel reality. This replaces the previous theory that Daniel is the central hub of a web of alternate worlds that only he can interact with, because now not only does Daniel not remember seeing Antenna with me, but I have no memory of seeing Spider-Man 2 with Chris. Since I am clearly the common element in these divergent histories, I must be the one who tumbled in from an alterna-cosmos. Which is fine, but I do miss our old morning ritual of eating cake before breakfast while wearing knit caps. It's the little things that make a home a home, y'know?

It is dead terrific to be out of DVD bankruptcy, internets. Still feels a bit strange though, like I was doing something naughty yesterday when I bought Lost. I also picked up some shiny blu Harry Potter 5, which looks fan-frickin'-tastic. Looking forward to watching that again and seeing whether I actually liked it, or just liked it because it wasn't as godawful as Goblet.

For my next trick, I shall write an entire instructional design plan in just north of 150 minutes. SHAZAAAM!!!

Posted by tederick at 9:06 AM in books & h-pot & movies & shinybludisks & shinydisks
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Well, it's the next-to-last mail day before the party, and the crowning element of my Hallowe'en costume has yet to arrive. Which is pretty disappointing. But of all the elements of this thing to have to improvise, this is the one I've got covered off regardless, so I guess there are worse things. Still - !! You would not believe how cool this one particular thing was going to be. (I will show you next week, whether it arrives or not.) Oh well. I guess it could still arrive tomorrow.

Otherwise, I bench-tested the rest of the motherfucker just now, and god damn. As I think I've said before, there is absolutely no one who is going to be impressed by what I've done here, other than me. But I am so fucking proud of this deal. And I've got the strut down cold.

What else happened today? Well, we shot Daniel's second and last segment of VCR: The Ninth Gate for one thing, and Daniel taught me a new word: defenestration. Oh, I love it. I think it is one of the loveliest words I have ever heard. I wish I had known of this word from the moment we first conceived of this VCR decalogue; it might have been the title for the whole deal. At the very least, I'm going to have to slip it into the credits for VCR10y. And possibly every other thing I ever write for the rest of ever.

After giving it some more thought, I realized vis a vis the Dumbledore situation that I agree with this guy, at least on the macro scale: there is something morally cowardly about what went on here, and not just the after-the-last-minute outing. But after even more thought on the subject, I also realized that for all my desire to have Dumbledore be the perfect queer icon that the fantasy universe deserves to have, the pieces don't really fit. I didn't give one passing thought to Dumbledore's entire lack of a sexual or romantic life when he was (de facto) heterosexual; I don't see why the sex life of a 115-year-old man should suddenly need to be foregrounded when that sex life involves other men instead of women. This is all part of a very complicated idea, but at least part of this idea bears the veneer of reverse homophobia. So I think a) we had better leave this alone now, and b) Rowling shouldn't have bothered in the first place. Putting this on the table just showed how desperate the table is. It would be nice if any one thing could ever just mean one thing, but that'll never happen. Forcing mandates upon icons just makes them fall down. And good lord, Michael Gambon must be getting weary of his picture being the very meaning of "THIS MAN IS GAY!" this week.

Moving over to the next franchise, I read the end of The Golden Compass today and am now into The Subtle Knife; whoever hypno-whammied Phillip Pullman into supporting the excision of the last three chapters of Compass from the film that shall shortly bear its name should be cast off the highest cliff on all of Svalbard. The bear fight is not the climax of Lyra's arc in the first book. Good fucking lord. Basic screenwriting, people.

Anyways, based on how much finishing Compass got to me today, I am going to be a snivelly, weepy mess when Spyglass dwindles down, a few hundred pages from here. Doing this in the fall might have been a grand, beautiful mistake.

Posted by tederick at 10:36 PM in books & h-pot & movies & pirates & sex (theoretical) & tederick films
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Hey, Dumbledore's gay! Really don't know what to make of that one. I guess it's all right. When a character is so utterly sexless as Dumbledore is, I suppose it's reasonably easy to make him gay... especially months after the fact, huh? Boy, the slash community is going to go fucking crazy on this one. Might as well reveal that Snape is actually a woman named Sheila while we're at it.

Much easier to enjoy on the newsfront is the revelation that Criterion will finally be dipping into the Kurosawa canon with their Eclipse series... series 7, to be exact, which will be called "Postwar Kurosawa." Interestingly they're actually calling Record of a Living Being by its original title, I Live In Fear - which is only interesting because they didn't bother to do it for High and Low or Throne of Blood.

I expect there still has to be an "Early Kurosawa" box out there to be made, containing Sanshiro Sugata 1 & 2, along with They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail. Drunken Angel is getting a spec ed release in November. But we're entering the unfortunate realm of film scholarship where, quite literally, there might be no standing prints of the early works to make DVDs out of. And we're talking about artwork of less than 65 years of age. How does anything survive anything?? We're such brutes.

I had a bunch of stuff I was looking forward to doing today. But I'm coming down with a cold and my energy level has completely vanished on me. So instead I'm attacking people on Facebook and trying to figure out if it's worth slogging to the IGA to get Kraft Dinner.

Posted by tederick at 3:42 PM in h-pot & shinydisks
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