Category: Uncategorized

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One of The Most Important Movies in The World (YMMV Edition)

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Three Colors Red – and Three Colors Blue, as well, although Three Colors White left me somewhat cold – rewrote my brain when I first saw it as a teenager in the U.K. There was such precision in the filmmaking, such humanity and affection and empathy in the writing, but also such ambiguity and uncertainty. It’s not just that the characters were flawed, or whatever would be the traditional way to describe them in American movie terms, but that they were also clearly lost and confused and didn’t have all (or, at times, any) of the answers. Blue and Red hit me like a brick to the head when I most needed it, and changed what I thought movies, and mainstream pop narratives in general, could do.

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We Should Always Remember To Laugh Knowingly at Horror

She hit all the right checkboxes to get this crowd all jazzed up: Obama teleprompter jokes, White House tour cancellation jokes, jokes about her sex life, drinking a Super Big Gulp of Soda, gun talk, religion talk, a heartland twang voice, anti-DC trash talk, a Karl Rove swat, everything else. It worked. It was fun! She also let out a little hint about returning to politics…

…Which was of course a tease. She is not returning to politics anytime soon. She is an entertainer and part of her routine is to tease about how she may return to politics, for attention. She is not running for anything. If you see any story headlines this week like, “Is Palin Running in 2016?” then you should print out the full articles and burn them in a trash can, or bomb them. She likes playing pop star muse to the conservative movement, and that’s all.

From here.

The Guardian’s U.S. political coverage is the best U.S. political coverage. “If you see any story headlines this week like, ‘Is Palin Running in 2016’ then you should print out the full articles and burn them in a trash can, or bomb them.” I love the knowingness, and the comedy, in that.

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Reports of My Demise Were Only Slightly Exaggerated

It’s been a week, people.

I don’t mean that in the literal sense – Well, I do, I guess; I am talking about the last five days of work, which is technically a week in the work sense if you want to be technical and all. But what I really mean is, it’s been a rough week; I got sick last weekend through what was nothing more than just overwork and overstress and exhaustion, and then that just didn’t really have a chance to go away, because I had the kinds of deadlines and workloads in front of me that I had to break my “No Work On The Weekend At All” rule in order to just keep my head above water… which meant that, robbed of the chance to destress for a couple of days, I was just under-powered and increasingly overwhelmed all the time this week.

That happened at the time when I had to go a couple of bigger-than-usual stories – interviews, really – for Wired (One about streaming video and the growth of the audience on tablet devices, and another about MonkeyBrain Comics and their new print titles) that had particular hand-in deadlines that couldn’t be switched or changed, as well as an increased workload for Newsarama because of the death of Batman’s sidekick (Instead of the one front page news story for them per week, in addition to my daily blogging duties, I had two and a half: here, here and here) and my regular Time essay, which was also connected with the deceased Boy Wonder. In almost every case, the work-as-handed-in and the work-as-published were considerably different, due to the editing process that’s almost always a good thing but also means that there’s a bunch of stuff that was written and didn’t see print this week, moreso than usual.

(For those curious about my workload: There’re also daily blog posts for Digital Trends, another handful of Wired pieces – including some that still have to run, and I think are showing up this weekend? – and the final Food or Comics for Robot 6 from this week, too. I also had to do the Comix Experience store catalog from scratch last weekend, which was a bear this month for some reason, and the Wait, What? podcast, which remains the highpoint of my work week.)

All of which is to say: I know, I know; I’ve been very quiet here lately, but it’s not by choice, I promise. Just as I owe people emails (Sorry, Adam, David and Lauren – Soon, I promise!), I owe this blog all kinds of attention. Hopefully, things will be less crazy this upcoming week, and we’ll get back to something resembling normal service. We can but hope, right…?

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The Soloists

It was a weird dream, the dream I had last night; it was one of those dreams that sprawl, expand around all of your available brainspace and then some. The “plot,” such as dreams have plots, was that I was in some kind of… convention, I guess, or event, with lots of people I work with and know through the Internet, and at this convention and event, two people I know/have worked with, are rumored to have died. A strange thing, I know; it wasn’t that they were dead, but that they may have died but no-one was sure. In the middle of this, there was some kind of power cut or something, so we couldn’t use our phones to check on anyone, and had instead – for some reason I can’t remember, if there was a reason – to wait through the night and get an answer in the morning.

In the middle of this, The Soloists appeared; they were a roving, rambling band of performers who went to people’s house and apartments, followed by an eager, excited audience, to perform spoken word readings (or improvisations? I can’t remember). There was an excited throng that swept us all up, an electric feeling that people wanted to share, while I was concerned and worried and asking someone whether or not she believed the rumor that her girlfriend had killed herself.

It wasn’t a depressing dream, as such, but certainly an anxious one. What remains most clear in my memory, though, was the city we were all in. A nighttime, rainy place with the orange streetlights of the U.K., it was a city that doesn’t exist, but an amalgam of London, Amsterdam, Aberdeen (where I went to college) and New York. Somewhere that could have been friendly, in another time.

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Oh God (Email Edition)

You’ve heard of “Inbox Zero,” but I bet you didn’t know that “Inbox One Thousand” was the new cool thing, did you?

(In my defense, the unread emails are mostly spam and/or PR mails, and it’s also not my main mail but a back-up that gets a bunch of re-directed email from old sites I’ve written for. But still, yes, I should deal with that.)

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“They Will Kill You”

Finally, finally finished watching the second season of The Hour this past weekend. It remained a wonderfully watchable show – Smart, suspenseful, funny when it needs to be – and continued to feel like Mad Men with simultaneously more self-importance and less self-satisfaction; for those who haven’t seen it, you should check it out. Even if the final episode’s climax is somewhat telegraphed, it’s a really nice piece of television.

What’s interesting looking back at the trailer for the season is how much of it comes from the last half – and the last episode – of the season, and yet, all of those scenes played out fresh when I eventually saw them in context. A nice piece of editing, BBC trailer makers, and a nice argument for having the entire season of a show in hand before cutting trailers, too.

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“Most Important Ingredient: Chocolate”

I can only imagine the excitement at the BBC when they discovered Rachel Khoo. “It’s like someone crossed Jamie Oliver with Nigella Lawson!” they must’ve exclaimed in glee. Despite the weird, almost too perfect for television quality about her, I have to admit; I really enjoy The Little Paris Kitchen, and find Khoo terrifically watchable.

I mean, come on. Who doesn’t want to make that cake? Or just eat it?

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“Super-Detective of The Nether World”

Fero, Planet Detective:

In his first appearance, Fero is described as a scientist of the occult, a super-detective of the nether world, who is the one man who can thwart the evil doings of vampires and werewolves that have invaded earth from Pluto. Fero’s later adventures had him working on cases involving more standard criminals.

Fero operated out of an office in New York at some point in the distant future. He was a skilled detective and a good fighter. He did not seem to carry any weapons, but did wear a “ray proof jacket.” He also had pills that allowed him to temporarily transform into a giant ape-like creature with superhuman strength. He owned his own interplanetary ship, full of scientific equipment, including a device which could record images of a person’s memories.

I am currently fascinated by the treasure trove of comic characters that are in the public domain.