| A peaceful, if not exactly quiet, Wednesday night |
[Nov. 4th, 2009|07:53 pm] |
Laura, Spencer the cat, and I are hanging out in the basement rec room. I'm poking around on the Internet and (the reason it's not quiet) she's playing the demo of Left for Dead 2 on the Xbox with a few online friends. I played it with her earlier, and it looks like it'll be as much zombie-killing fun as the first game was. I've been playing the second GTA IV add-on, The Ballad of Gay Tony, and I'm finding it a lot more frustrating than the first one, The Lost and the Damned, because of a mission involving a helicopter. The controls blow. That's why I haven't finished the final mission in the core game, too -- another damn helicopter mission -- and I'm stuck less than halfway through this one. Otherwise, fun. I love the Liberty City environment and this adds a few new activities.
Finished the Lovecraft Unbound anthology earlier today and enjoyed it, but there were at least a couple of stories that had nothing Lovecraftian about them, including Laird Barron's story. The book was never supposed to be a collection of typical Cthulhu Mythos pastiches, which is a good thing; not all of Lovecraft's own stories fit into that category. But Barron's story, though well-written, reminds me more of pre-Stephen King horror stories like The Exorcist or The Omen or Hammer horror stuff, with spooky devil worship stuff that doesn't really fit into Lovecraft's worldview. Aside from that quibble, the book's quite good and has a lot of well-known contributors. Worth investigating.
We watched the latest BBC adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma last night; that's the fourth version we've seen now. Great cast: Romola Garai (I Capture the Castle), Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting), Michael Gambon (the Harry Potter movies), Tamsin Greig (Love Soup), Jodhi May (Tipping the Velvet), etc. Four versions of Emma since 1972 may seem excessive, but this was a four-hour version; the last two were two-hour movies (one with Gwyneth Paltrow, the other with Kate Beckinsale). Austen adaptations tend to benefit from the extra time. The 90-minute ITV adaptations in 2007 (Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion) had their charms, including actors like Billie Piper, but the stories really suffered.
So... back to rewatching the RTD era Doctor Who in preparation for the end of the Tenth Doctor? Or do I start reading The Romulan War? Decisions, decisions.... |
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| Halloween |
[Oct. 31st, 2009|02:35 pm] |
The rain stopped, the temperature is unusually warm for this time of year, but the wind is keeping things interesting. Laura got a very large pumpkin from one of her co-workers -- so large, we're not even going to try to carve it, because after we finally managed to open it up, we realized the flesh of the pumpkin is a few inches thick. So it's just sitting out by the front step. (Yeah, kid, you just go ahead and kick it.) We have a string of little pumpkin lights that we'll have out, too. We have neighbours who go so overboard that some kids skip us entirely. At least they'll know we're open for business.
I'm going to take out the ol' portable stereo and play some appropriate music. Can't find the goth mix I made a few years ago, naturally. So I'm thinking of burning a bunch of Lisa Gerrard songs from Dead Can Dance and This Mortal Coil albums, focusing on the strange and eerie stuff. Then maybe something by the Caretaker, who does spooky, atmospheric music based on distorted loops from old dance band 78s, inspired by the ballroom scenes in The Shining. Or Nadja, the ambient doom/shoegazer metal band. Or go the goth route with Siouxsie and the Banshees.
We can usually expect at least a hundred and fifty kids to come by, and we didn't buy as much stuff as last year, when I was giving three things to every kid. We'll be a little more restrained this year.
I like Halloween because... I don't know. Maybe it's the fun of having an activity that involves going out in the dark, at a time of year when it's starting to get cold. There have been years when there's been a bit of snow falling before Halloween arrives. I loved it as a kid, and as an adult, even without kids, it's fun. Just sit out on the front porch, watch all the kids having a blast, eat a few candies myself, and have a beer or two... |
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| Reading and watching |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|08:56 pm] |
I just read Seamus Cooper's novel Mall of Cthulhu. ( Read more... )
As for watching... we watched the first episode of Stargate Universe, and even with Robert Carlyle (so great in Rebus Trainspotting, and so much more) I dunno if we'll stick with it. Probably give it a couple more episodes, but we have not traditionally been a Stargate-watching household. We have a few eps of FlashForward on the DVR but haven't seen them yet. And I finally finished watching DS9 on DVD. Damn, what a show. Best. Star Trek. Ever. Just an amazing group of characters, a great cast, and a lot of great stories.
General DVD rant: the Star Trek DVDs have accurate subtitling. Why do the Doctor Who DVDs and the Babylon 5 DVDs have subtitles that drop words, phrases, and sometimes sentences? I sometimes watch these shows on one TV while Laura's gaming on the other, and her gunshots and explosions can drown out dialogue, so I occasionally have to rely on the subtitling.
Another bit of TV I loved recently: Synth Britannia. Don't think anyone reading this lj would be interested, but you never know.
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| Laura's playing Halo 3: ODST |
[Sep. 29th, 2009|09:37 pm] |
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... and damn, it's distracting to hear Nathan Fillion's voice (and, every so often, Tricia Helfer's). Worlds colliding! Adam Baldwin and Alan Tudyk add some more Fireflyness, but I just don't notice their voices so much. I have to admit, I like the fact that the two big SF stars cast for one of the biggest SF video games are Canadian. |
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| Recurring dreams |
[Sep. 14th, 2009|01:18 pm] |
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If I'm going to keep having the recurring dreams generated by getting laid off last year, I hope more of them do what last night's did, and mutate in unexpected ways. Like having an alien invasion, vast starships landing, while we try to find our way on foot through a city at night in a blackout, waiting for the alien interrogators to come... |
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| Beatles Rock Band |
[Sep. 12th, 2009|12:25 pm] |
Laura decided to buy this the other day, and we've played a fair bit of it. Looking at it as an example of musical video games, it feels a lot easier to play on medium difficulty than the other Rock Band and Guitar Hero games we've played, and the main storyline doesn't take a heck of a long time to get through. We suspect that this is because a lot of people who've never played one of these games before are going to pick this one up for the Beatles angle, and no one wants the newbies to give up frustrated. Visually it's very striking, and there's a good selection of songs.
As for the Beatlesness of it... we don't have a lot of Beatles stuff in this house, because for a very long time I soaked up the Beatles from so many different directions (cartoons, radio, friends' albums, etc). that it just didn't seem necessary to actually own any of it. If anything, I wanted to avoid the Beatles. But hearing them in the game, having to pay more attention to the songs, almost makes me want to go out and buy some CDs. Some of the old familiar songs sound fresh and fun, and some that weren't quite as familiar, the ones I'd heard but couldn't instantly place from reading the titles -- e.g., "And Your Bird Can Sing," "If I Needed Someone" -- sound almost revelatory. Having listened to so much other music over the years, I can hear connections to other bands and other songs I might not have made before. Which is not to say there aren't some duds. A lot of the late Beatles songs played in the last level or two of the game sound like self-indulgent jams rather than well-crafted songs. I don't think I'll ever develop any kind of appreciation for "I've Got a Feeling," for example. In fact, most of the songs from the last level, the Rooftop Concert, left me thinking the Beatles should have broken up a bit earlier.
Overall, it's a fun introduction to the music of the Beatles combined with a simplified and streamlined look at their career. I'd kind of like to see the game get opened up a little to include some solo material by the various ex-Beatles, but I really doubt that will happen. |
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| Reading and watching |
[Aug. 26th, 2009|09:23 pm] |
Just read 1974, the first book in David Peace's UK crime series, the Red Riding Quartet, and now I want to read everything else he's written. Even The Damned UTD, which is about soccer/football. 1974 is grim and unrelenting, like the darkest moments of Ellroy, Pelecanos, Denise Mina, David Lawrence... and very well written, too.
Enjoying the ongoing DS9 DVD viewing. Even the lesser episodes tend to have a good b-story or some great character moments. And Trials and Tribble-ations... I must have had a big smile on my face through the whole show. As fun as TV gets.
May also do a sort of Maghreb film festival building up to my next viewing of Casablanca. I've just watched Morocco, with Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper, for the second time. It's more than a decade older than Casablanca, so it feels a lot stagier and less naturalistic; Cooper's performance doesn't help. It presents a much more exotic vision of its time and place, but also a more carnal one, being pre-code. The French Foreign Legion angle makes this feel a lot older than Casablanca, and the chemistry between Cooper and Dietrich isn't really convincing, but Dietrich herself is great. After this... maybe the Pepe le Moko movies (the original 1937 French film Pepe le Moko, the 1938 American remake Algiers, and the 1948 American remake Casbah) or the Marx Bros' A Night in Casablanca (far from their best, but relevant). Maybe even Bob and Bing in The Road to Morocco, which I've never seen. Haven't been spending enough time on old movies lately. |
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| And I thought Orson Scott Card was a putz... |
[Aug. 13th, 2009|07:53 am] |
SF and fantasy novelist John C. Wright on moral decay, the evilness of leftists, the oppressiveness of political correctness, and the especially evil EEEEVIL of homosexuality: More Diversity and More Perversity in the Future! It's from a couple weeks ago, but I just saw a post about it called Communique from the Continent of Stupidea on Jeff VanderMeer's blog .
Here's a little taste of Wright's wrongness:
The head of Sci-Fi channel has contritely promised to include more homosex in future shows, and to do it nonchalantly, just as if this abomination is normal and natural and worthy of no comment. The shows will not actually come out and say sexual perversion has no bad side effects. They won't actually lie and tell you homosex won't destroy your life. But they will imply the lie. They will play along. It's only polite! It's so tolerant!
According to wikipedia, he's a recent convert to a conservative brand of Roman Catholicism. As a kid, I was raised Catholic, and I became wary of people who had conversion experiences. If you're raised in a religion, you believe it, of course, but you also see how real people live in and around and with it. It's a part of the fabric of your life. People who have conversion experiences, on the other hand, tend to find something that they can latch onto as the answer to everything. Suddenly everything makes sense and everything can only be seen through the prism of the new beliefs and everyone who doesn't share those beliefs is wrong and everyone who takes those beliefs for granted is wrong. I've met religious converts and political converts and it works the same way. And, true, I'm not a Catholic any more, but I didn't have a conversion experience, I just fell away gradually. I can't pinpoint the moment when I was emphatically no longer Catholic, because it happened over a period of years. I don't proselytize and I'm not an activist, which is generally untrue of people who undergo major conversion experiences. Wright's got the conversion experience, and he's got it bad.
Some of Wright's books have gotten rave reviews. Fortunately, I don't own any.
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| On rewatching Animal House |
[Aug. 10th, 2009|08:12 am] |
It's been ten years or more since I last watched Animal House (which was still hugely popular when I started university, three years after the movie came out), and there were lots of little things that I noticed. Karen Allen looking so young. John Belushi at his peak. And, unfortunately, some scenes that are kind of uncomfortable to watch for their racism and sexism. And then there's the fact that some of the Deltas have, in their own way, as much arrogant assholishness about them as the rich kid fraternity. But overall it's still a great movie. It's funny, it has some great performances, some great gags, and it's a lot smarter than most of the movies that have imitated it.
Maybe tonight I'll watch Spinal Tap. Haven't seen that in a long, long time. |
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| Meme time |
[Aug. 5th, 2009|04:02 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | John Foxx: The Pleasures of Electricity | ] |
Snurched from everyone. You know who you are.
( 35 questions )
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| Top 100 science fiction movies |
[Aug. 4th, 2009|07:15 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Forensics: My Strength is My Weakness My Weakness is My Strength | ] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) omahastar just posted this list from a website called Total Sci-fi Online, with which I am not familiar. So I'll go through the list, as he did, and bold the ones I've seen, and add a comment or two.
( Read more... )
I've seen nearly two thirds of the movies. Can't say that I would rate all of them as worthy of inclusion in this list. |
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| Let the Right One In |
[Aug. 1st, 2009|06:41 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Grouper: Cover The Windows And The Walls | ] |
Laura and I finally watched Let the Right One In. (She wanted to watch a high definition video because we got a new hdtv.) And it lived up to the hype. It's great that a genre movie can still get made that focuses on character and atmosphere instead of action. It's a quiet, slow, but spooky and disturbing movie. It takes a little getting used to, because there aren't any completely sympathetic characters -- Oskar, the protagonist, is kind of creepy and strange, and he's just a 12-year-old kid.
I like the fact that it's set in Sweden in winter. I love seeing movies and TV shows that are filmed in real winter and real snow. I live in a place with four different seasons but almost all filmed entertainment seems to be set in summer, with a little in spring and fall. I imagine winter is a pain for filming in, and you certainly won't get a real winter if you're filming in Hollywood or Vancouver or London. But I love winter. It's beautiful. And it looks beautiful in this movie.
So now I'm wondering whether to read the novel. I'm tempted, certainly. Anyone read it? |
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| I used to live here, but it's all over now |
[Aug. 1st, 2009|06:33 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Grouper: Cover The Windows And The Walls | ] |
33 Via Venus, Canadian Forces Base Rockcliffe, Ottawa, some time in the late '80s, probably:
"By Saturday, Shawn King will officially be the last man on the former Rockcliffe air base.Today, without ceremony, the base is to officially close, with the last of 430 military homes save King's tidy blue Cape Cod closed up. Soon, workers will swarm over the 135-hectare site, boarding up homes that haven't already been shuttered due to vandalism."
From an article in yesterday's Ottawa Citizen.
My parents moved here in the summer of 1985, while I was out in Calgary for a summer job. They moved out in the early 1990s, when Dad retired from the military. i spent some time here between graduation and being able to afford my own apartment. All the base facilities aside from the houses were demolished a few years back. I'd moved into an apartment building not too far away and stayed there eleven years, until Laura and I bought our house. Haven't been on the base in a long damn time but it's still strange to think of a once thriving community becoming a ghost town. |
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| Hey, kids! Comics! |
[Jul. 31st, 2009|10:22 am] |
| [ | music |
| | Klaus Schulze: Cyborg | ] |
Went to my local comic shop yesterday to pick up the last couple weeks' worth of stuff. I'm way behind in actually reading the comics I get, which is why I don't talk about them much. Used to be comics day meant sprawling on the couch with a few CDs in the stereo, a large bottle of Coke and a snack nearby, and reading everything I just bought. This changed when Laura moved in. So now I let them pile up and then read a run of a particular title or two. With my memory, that can actually enhance the reading experience.
So, the stuff I just got and haven't read yet:
( Read more... )
Also, due to some events in New Avengers, one of my favourite comic characters is out of a job. Not that he's had a regular title of his own for a long time, but it's still surprising that Doctor Stephen Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, has been replaced as Sorcerer Supreme by the character formerly known as Brother Voodoo, who'll be getting a new series called Doctor Voodoo. I'll give it a shot.
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| 40 years ago |
[Jul. 20th, 2009|06:40 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Higuma: Haze Valley | ] |
I wish I could remember watching the first moon landing. But I don't. I was six years old, and I'm not even sure if we'd left Chatham, New Brunswick, for Ottawa yet. I know I saw some Apollo missions in school, but I wouldn't have been in school in July. Now, Skylab I remember. We were living in North Bay, Ontario then. And Apollo-Soyuz -- still living in North Bay, but I remember watching it on TV at my grandparents' place in Quebec City.
If anyone has a time machine, go back to 1969 and tell me to pay more attention, so I can have something worth saying for the 50th anniversary. And tell me to keep paying attention (even though I did), because who would have guessed the age of manned space exploration would be so short? |
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| A post about cats |
[Jul. 13th, 2009|09:33 am] |
There are people on the flist who will strongly disagree with this. Sorry, but I just have to vent.
This is supposed to be a heartwarming human and feline interest story from the local paper. It's about a couple who had a stray cat wander into their lives, a wild and crazy cat that lives a dangerous life, brings home lots of dead birds and rodents, nearly gets killed a few times, and disappears. And then the couple hears about a cat that was caught in a storm drain and taken to the Humane Society. When they get there, they find it is their cat -- and it's with its original owner, who microchipped the cat and was called by the Humane Society. The happy ending is that the cat has two happy sets of owners and it's going to carry on with its wild and crazy cat life.
This is not a happy story, and it's not a happy ending. Letting the cat roam free led the cat to be hit by a car. Letting the cat roam free allowed it to kill a lot of other animals. That's irresponsible. Letting cats outside on their own to go do whatever they want is dangerous for the cats, obnoxious to the neighbours (case in point: our patio screen door was ripped by the cat belonging to the people across the street while it was trying to get in to attack our cat Spencer), and dangerous to wildlife. There are types of dogs that aren't much of a danger to people, but it's not generally considered appropriate to let them run loose around the neighbourhood.
Spencer doesn't even try to go outside, though he loves sitting by open windows. He was abandoned by his previous owners. It was winter (in Ottawa: cold and snowy). They moved out of their house and they left him outside to fend for himself instead of taking him with them to their new home. But he's been with us for a few years now. He's not trashing the neighbours' property. More importantly, he's happy, healthy, and safe.
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| Torchwood: Children of Earth (no spoilers) |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|10:30 pm] |
I liked the first two series of Torchwood. I enjoyed watching them, and I bought the DVDs. I admit it was flawed and had some lame episodes, but there was a lot to like there.
But Children of Earth... this is on a whole other level. It's still not perfect; there are some convenient plot and character contrivances here and there, but it's like another show entirely.
So naturally I'm worried about tomorrow night's episode. Is it going to be a Galactica-style damp squib of an ending? Or will it be as good as the first four parts? Given RTD's way with endings, it's hard not to worry. On the other hand, it seems pretty damned unlikely that this one's going to be resolved with the help of the Doctor and Sarah Jane and her friends. It's hard to imagine how the story can be resolved without a Doctorian deus ex machina, though. And the show is set in the Whoniverse, so I can't imagine it going for the darkest possible ending ( Read more... ).
Boy, I hope tomorrow night isn't a disappointment. And anyone who tried Torchwood before and didn't like it -- give this a try. Well, maybe wait a day or two and see if everyone's blown away or disappointed... |
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| Feh |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|08:34 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Sonic Youth: The Eternal | ] |
February 22: I applied for a government job. Not a librarian position as such, but using a lot of the same skills, with nothing I haven't done before. And they have two vacancies, doubling my chances.
April 2: received acknowledgment of application.
April 15: wrote qualifying exam. I passed, clearing the way for the next step:
May 12: French language comprehension and writing exams. I passed, clearing the way for the next step:
May 14: French language conversational exam. I passed, clearing the way for the next step:
May 26: job interview.
July 8: notified that I didn't get the job.
A guy could get discouraged.
( Read more... )
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| Compuserve is dead -- what, it was still alive?! |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|04:44 pm] |
Well, CompuServe Classic was apparently shut down a few days ago. I haven't been a CIS user since 1995 or so, I think, but I still remember that my user ID was 76217,1455. Ah, those pre-web days when being able to use the Compuserve Packet Network via a local phone call and access all those services and forums was so exciting. All that time spent on the Star Trek and Science Fiction forums, where writers like Carmen Carter, Diane Duane, David Gerrold, J. Michael Straczynski, and even Outpost Gallifrey's Jim Shaun Lyon (then a young sysop) were regulars. The first news about DS9, the first news about Babylon 5, thousands of posts about Gene Roddenberry's death, the first news about Richard Arnold losing his job (and writers celebrating), the flamewar over the official Roddenberry biography between David Alexander, David Gerrold, and others. Using CIS to connect to the Well. Getting a work account for a little while to see if it would be useful (not so much, when we already had access to more specialized information services, but handy once or twice).
And then in 1992 came the National Capital Freenet and by the end of 1993 the first graphical interface for the web and everything changed. Hard to believe we haven't always had this web thing. Hard to believe we haven't always had computers on our desks. Hard to believe that something that seemed as cool as Compuserve did when I first got my account hasn't even been on my radar for well over a decade now. |
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