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Cooking With Code Gaming ToyBox

Random notes of infintesimal importance

Sorry about my radio silence this week. I’ve been spending more time than is conducive to sanity policing the Digital Press forums, which seem to explode with crazies that scream out for a ban (sometimes quite literally) this time every year. All I can figure is that school’s out – and judging by this year’s material so far, I’m going to say between the fourth and tenth grades – and these kids have nothing to do. You’d think if they were going to DP, maybe they’d spend some of their summer hours, oh, I don’t know, PLAYING VIDEO GAMES. Sheesh. Send the little gits my way, they can mow my lawn, and I’ll stay inside and play video games, how’s that? Oy vey. Some people’s kids.

Hopefully everyone digs the redesigned music review section. For an encore, I’m doing my level best to revamp the entire toy section by Flag Day! It’s madness, I tell you, madness! I’ve been dragging out copious quantities of action figures and re-photographing them lately, pulling each one out of their individual Star Cases (we’re talking the little mini ones that are big enough to accomodate one loose figure), taking a couple of pictures and then putting them back away, consciously aware in the back of my mind that this may be the last time these things come out to play before there’s a little boy running around the house. I’d say it’s like one last quick jog through my childhood, except that the stuff I’m taking new pictures of is all stuff that I’ve collected long since I passed the age where one’s expected to get rid of all one’s action figures. The toy section also has a finite number of articles to port over into the database from the old HTML pages; nothing on the order of hundreds and hundreds of music reviews. So I see it as a Feasible Task.

Speaking of staying inside and playing video games, I just got my copy of Stella Gets A New Brain, so maybe I can squeeze some 2600/Supercharger lovin’ into my near future.

I’ll alert the media the moment I have anything of substance to say here. 🙂 … Read more

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Television & Movies

Another Clone Wars clone already?

Clone TrooperApparently a Clone Wars CGI series trailer premiered at Celebration IV and is live on the web. Just mere days ago I was going on about how much Star Wars changed my life and how much I love it, so you’ll have to forgive me for sounding a bit schizophrenic here. I’m starting to wonder if it wasn’t a mistake for Lucas to have said one word about a live action, between-trilogies project before now. Am I the only one looking at this trailer and thinking “meh”?

Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars series was cool because we were actually in the between-movies blank that his ‘toons were filling in. I’m not sure what light can really be shed on the Clone Wars now that will make me go ooh and aah. And is it going to create a whole new strand of inconsistent expanded universe storytelling, completely separate from the Cartoon Network shorts and the comics, which already seem to be mutually exclusive from one another?

Call me crazy, but I guess I haven’t had enough of the Lucasfilm kool-aid here. I’m not sure I’m really interested until we get to the live action thingamabob. And part of me is thinking “Good God, everyone’s just ga-ga about the Clone Wars because we were wondering what they were since 1977.” Now that I know it was a situation engineered by Palpatine, as a means to an end and not just to start a war for its own sake, and served as the backdrop to the fall of Anakin…well, I guess my curiosity is satiated. I’d almost rather they did a CG series to follow some other strand, even – so help me, I can’t believe I’m going to say this – something related to the Star Wars: Galaxies MMORPG…in other words, something new.

Now, what would be a good use of CGI? Something bold? Pick up post-ROTJ, becuase CG Luke, Leia and Han never age. Oh, and don’t kill Chewie this time. See? That would be daring.… Read more

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Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines

The Friday recap

And now for a word… I signed on the dotted line today to run an ad in the July bridal issue of Entertainment Fort Smith for GreenhouseFX.tv. I’ll be spending the next week putting the ad together to send to them. I had been thinking of running an ad in there at some point, but a little bird (who happens to write entries in Elabeth’s LJ blog) tipped me off to the bridal issue. I figure a video production outfit that can’t get business from an ad in a magazine’s bridal issue has to be right up there with someone who can’t get laid in a women’s prison with a handful of pardons. 😆 If this doesn’t work, then it’s clearly time to think of something else!

ThreepioStar Wars, nothing but Star Wars… I’ll shanghai my own response from Digital Press’ “post your memories of the original Star Wars” and add more stuff to it here, since it’s Star Wars Day. This way, even the DP folks get something new out of the deal. Kinda like that one “new” song that some band slaps onto a greatest hits CD so you have to buy it.

I was four, just about to turn five, when I first saw Star Wars. So much of what is important in my life can be traced back to my first viewing of that movie – my lifelong fascination with space, my curiosity about special effects and movie/TV production, and even my computer and video game fixation can be traced on a straight through-line from R2-D2 to Pong to Space Invaders to Pac-Man to home consoles and computers. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the soundtrack completely altered my listening palette. I’m still a soundtrack fan to this day, and still have the double LP of The Empire Strikes Back just about memorized, note for note, instrument for instrument. Even my ELO fixation has its starting point in Star Wars – later in 1977, my older brother was trying to get me to be quiet and leave him and his date alone, and finally out of exasperation gave me an 8-track of “A New World Record” and told me to listen to the beginning of “Tightrope” because “it sounds like Star Wars music!” 😆

StormtrooperStar Wars completely altered any course my life might have been thinking about taking. I wasn’t a kid who wanted to be a fireman or a doctor when he grew up. After I saw Star Wars, I wanted to be a Jedi Knight. Upon learning that there really was no such thing, five-year-old me was deeply disappointed, since I had already been running around the house in my bathrobe (which I had hated before, but loved now because it looked like Luke’s farmboy duds) and practicing my lightsaber technique with the family flashlight. My parents suggested to me that maybe I should be an astronaut, so I latched onto that. Turns out I didn’t meet the requirements for that either, and besides, astronauts didn’t have lightsabers or droids or wookiees!

I was truly glad when the prequels came out when they did. I’m not going to try to get into a debate with the camp who thought Episodes I-III were an abortion, but I was more than happy to watch them and generally enjoyed them quite a bit. And I loved collecting the figures again. Yeah, let’s not forget about the figures – I think in the end I stopped just 15 short of having all of them. I’d like to have a full collection someday, and have even done some eBaying to close that gap, but I understand realistically that it may never happen. But there’s nothing like classic Star Wars toys – and even some of the new ones, especially if they’re characters who didn’t get turned into figures back when Kenner was in business – to make me feel young again.

I remember my family’s next door neighbors had a CED player – you remember, the poor relation of laserdiscs that RCA did, where movies were encoded at slightly-better-than-VHS-6-hour-quality onto a non-opitcal medium that resembled an LP in a huge cartridge casing, and they got Star Wars on CED just because we were over there so much. They really had no interest in it, but they knew that I thought grown-ups were kinda boring. (A perception that, now that I am a grown-up, I realize was completely and entirely correct.) Around this time, my dad bestowed me with the nickname of “Luke”, which is what both my parents called me until I was about 10 or 11 or so. Up until I started getting old enough that I thought I was clearly too cool to have a nickname, I just ate that up.

Sometimes I’d like to go back in time and tell myself that there’s nothing cooler than being a kid with a room full of Star Wars toys and video games. Then again, even if I did, my younger self would look at my older self, see he’s a boring grown-up, and ignore his advice! 😯… Read more

Categories
Spamatozoa

Darn you, Ed!

Best spam subject header of the day:

Don’t let ED affect your sex!

Hey, if he even so much as tries, I am so gonna kick his butt.

Best Nigerian Money Scam spam of the month:
Well, this requires a little bit of backstory. I’m sure you’ve seen these before. They go to the tune of “I am Mrs. Mamby Pamby, and my husband, the deposed minister of finance in the Congo, was killed while escaping rebel insurgents…” etc. etc., and of course, you – lucky you! – have been randomly selected to help this person move the deceased’s entire fortune into your bank account. For safe keeping. Of course.

This one, however, the best Nigerian scam e-mail in history, started out: “My husband and I, the deposed minster of finance in the Congo, was killed while escaping…”

Don’t tell it to me, honey. I’ll forward your e-mail to Ghost Hunters or something.… Read more

Categories
Critters

More new kitten pix

More photos of our sleepy little visitor.

Meow

It appears that this one is just passing through; she hisses at everybody (but Othello’s special – he gets bonus growls with his hisses). None of our kitties have hissed at her, though. Olivia and Oberon have tried to play with her under the door, in fact. … Read more