It’s all around me, yeah yeah yeah. Odd time to be blogging, I’ll admit, being in the middle of a thunderstorm warning with quite a sound and light show going on just outside my window, but I stay awake for these things just in case they wake Evan up.

And speaking of Evan…I’ve got video for you! It’s just not the video I was trying to get. I’ve been a bit self-conscious lately of the fact that I take boatloads of pictures of the kid, and not nearly enough video, which has to be the height of irony since I’m kinda like Mr. Video Equipment. So today, before I put Evan down for his morning nap after we’d had breakfast and read some stories, I set up one of my cameras to look straight down into the crib. Now, one might just argue that the presence of a huge freaking tripod directly above one’s head might just be something that would be unusual enough to merit staying awake. But I waited until he was rubbing-his-eyes tired to put him down for his nap. Did it help? Not even the tiniest bit. I sped up the resulting 10 or so minutes of video to give you a time lapse version of what all he did instead of, oh, actually sleeping. You’d think he would be making a ton of noise while doing all that shuffling around, but no, he just gets good and stuck and then he calls for help. I have no idea where he got that.

While waiting for someone to e-mail me back a JPG or two so I could finish a video project I was working on for them, I farted up a little Doctor Who DVD intro thingie that might also amuse you fellow fans out there. You can watch that here.

I’ve gotten an invite from the Computer Arts and Technology Society at Oklahoma
City Community College to be an exhibitor at the first-ever Oklahoma Electronic Game Expo on April 26, 2008. At this point…I honestly don’t know if I’m up for that or not. There was no OVGE in 2007, which frankly was a bit of a relief (not that I didn’t miss it though), and now that I’ve got a baby that I’d have to make arrangements for, the thought of unplugging a bunch of my crap and hauling it to OKC is just a bit more daunting than it would’ve been this time two years ago. Part of me wants to go, part of me wants to just sleep. At any rate, if you’re in that neighborhood, it’s Saturday, April 26th at the OCCC campus, south of OKC near the Will Rogers World Airport. (”Will Rogers World! Will Rogers World! For all your Will Rogers needs!”) I’ll keep you updated on my decision, whenever I reach it. I might do something, I might not. OVGE folks who remember Kent will be relieved to know that he’s on hot standby for this event - I think he’s been suffering OVGE withdrawals.

Not quite last but most certainly not least, congratulations to Keir and his family on the new baby. I’m glad they got to deliver in an ambulance behind the post office instead of me - you’d think that would’ve happened to us…

Finally, I have to confess an embarrassing truth: I almost pissed my pants laughing so hard at South Park’s Heavy Metal parody last week. If you haven’t already, you really need to catch the rerun of that one, or get it on iTunes or something.

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Sorry for the stretch of non-bloggification there - this time it wasn’t my idea. My hosting service had a bit of a databalse server hiccup, so I could literally add nothing to the site. There wouldn’t even have been an update for theLogBook.com this morning if not for the fact that I’m making a conscious effort to “work ahead”. Given how many upheavals come into my schedule just from being a dad, I’m not sure the site would be here still if I wasn’t ahead of the curve - whatever curveballs get thrown at me right now won’t derail the coming weekend’s update, because I’m 2-3 weeks ahead of it whenever and wherever possible.

In between baby time and household chores, I’ve been watching and/or listening to a lot of Doctor Who lately. Why? Okay, here’s the deal: in April, when the new season begins, theLogBook will be doubling up on Doctor Who episode guide entries, one from the original series and one from the new series each week. In looking over what hadn’t been covered from the original series - mainly from the B&W years - I discovered that there were 13 episodes that hadn’t been included in the episode guide section yet. That’s also how many episodes are in the upcoming season, so I’m watching that backlog of episodes now, writing episode entries as I go, and when we reach the final episode of the new show’s latest season, there’ll be a complete 45+ year guide to the series. Neat how that works out, huh? To be fair, many of the missing installments have been listened to in audio form only while I work around the house or work at the farm, because that’s the only medium in which some of them exist. Shoveling horse poop passes so much more quickly when Patrick Troughton and the Yeti are chasing each other around in your head while you do it. The real irony of it all is that, as you might expect, the one Doctor Who I have been saving for last is the one I want to watch the least. Just today I finished my journeys with William Hartnell; yesterday while working at the farm I said farewell to Patrick Troughton. The one I’ve been putting off, which I’ve seen before and have little or no desire to see again, is…Meglos, starring Tom Baker. Or, as I call it, with apologies to another British science fiction show I love, Smeglos. Now, perhaps my long-delayed revisitation with Meglos will show me that it wasn’t that bad in the first place - I’m open to that - but I just don’t remember it as being too great, the last gasp of indulgent silliness in the Tom Baker era. Still, I have it, and I’m giving myself until the new season starts to watch it in its entirety. Maybe I ought to chase that accomplishment down by going to Lulu.com and turning the whole thing into an “unauthorized! unexpurgated! unbifurcated!” book or something. You know, with all that spare time it probably sounds like I have.

Evan’s teething pains are back with a vengeance, but something even more worrying is asserting itself too: independence. He doesn’t want dad to hold his bottle anymore. He wants to hold it. He’s also scooting himself around on the floor at a pretty good click, laying on his butt and his back and pushing with his feet and legs. (A quick examination of my mother’s baby book reveals that I did this too, thus earning the nickname Scooter.) I know none of these things are on par with, oh, watching him go down the street on a bicycle for the first time, or watching him go off to college or anything, but it’s the first step on that path. It makes me realize how fleeting my time with him is. If he leaves home when he’s 18, and he’s six months old now, that means that 1/36 of my time with Evan is over. It’s gone. That’s a bit sobering. I’m already keenly aware that every moment is precious, every story I read to him is precious, every bit of playtime is precious. I get other stuff done while he’s sleeping, but as long as he’s awake, daddy is all his.

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I just woke up from a “TV dream” nap. I’m sure plenty of people have them - basically, you wind up in the middle of some fictional universe interacting with the characters there. Personally, as much as you think Mr. Episode Guide Guy would love being in the thick of things, I always find these distressing and disappointing on a certain level. I never wind up in a really good story (damn you, writers’ strike!), and when I wake up, honestly, I feel like someone else’s imagination has breached mine, and more importantly, some barrier has broken down in my mind, even temporarily, between fantasy and reality, and on some certain inner level I find that deeply offensive. (Man, do I sound like I’ve got a massive stick up my ass or what?) Fortunately, I rarely have these, so I don’t go around letting my subconscious offend me a whole lot. And the handful of times in a given year that I do have these dreams, I usually wind up making sarcastic comments about it in the dream, like there’s a part of me actively working to deny the reality of the obviously fictional situation. And here I bet you people thought I spend a lot of time in the TARDIS.

Fictional elements or no, I’m sure trained psychologists would have a field day with this one. Because strip out the mondo bizarro fictional instrusion that basically makes up the last 1/10 of the dream, and it’s a dream about feeding Evan a bottle. (My fertile imagination just reaches for the bloody stars, doesn’t it? ) But the really fun part is right at the end when Benjamin Linus pops around the corner of my room.

Obviously I didn’t stick around for freakin’ Eli Stone.

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If you’re familiar at all with my reviews of the region 2 DVDs of the BBC late ’70s/early ’80s sci-fi series Blake’s 7, you know that the bonus stuff on those is scattershot at best. Kevin Davies, the guy behind the brilliant More Than 30 Years In The TARDIS documentary aired in 1993 (as well as the documentary on the Hitchhiker’s Guide TV series DVDs), had a documentary ready to go for these DVDs, but it was nixed by the new rights-holders to the Blake’s 7 property, with rumors abounding that the Davies documentary reveled too much in the show’s legendary campiness for the tastes of the new owners of the copyright, who were wanting to retool it into a gritty, dark space opera. (In 5+ years, they’ve only managed to turn out some audio dramas, but that’s neither here nor there.) Davies’ work never saw the light of day, and the DVDs had odd assortments of extras that were probably of interest only to the diehards.

Little did I know that the BBC would later turn around and produce its own documentary that would’ve been perfect. I got my hands on a 2006 documentary called “The Cult of Blake’s 7″, which encapsulated the entire series, in half an hour, about as perfectly as anyone could, while interviewing most of the surviving key players you could possibly want to hear from (though Jan “Cally” Chappell was conspicuous by her absence). The show was irreverent, but never mocking - which is a very fine line to walk when you’re dealing with something that went to the excesses that Blake’s 7 sometimes went to. (The degree to which it’s become fashionable to make fun of B7 today really surprises me sometimes, so it’s admirable that the producers stayed this side of outright mockery.) Clips and snippets appear between the interviews, often hilariously appropriate to what’s being discussed. As the documentary was made for widescreen, it’s really startling to see how well many of the clips reframe in 16:9! The whole thing is narrated by Robert “Kryten” Llewellyn of Red Dwarf fame.

Anyway, it’s sad that this came along too late for inclusion on the final season’s DVD set, and even sadder that Kevin Davies’ project seems destined to languish in obscurity. (I’ve never quite worked up the sheer amount of gumption involved to e-mail him and say “Could I get a look at what you did have ready?” and I keep holding out hope that it might be released on its own someday, or just put on YouTube. I’d just like to see it. But in the meantime, this’ll do - I felt it did my favorite ’70s SF series justice.

I’ll be back soon to blog about More Things That Only I Care About.

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I remember not so long ago, ‘94ish or so, when J. Michael Stracynzski talking to Babylon 5 fans openly about the show was just an unheard-of thing. These days we have stuff like The Fuselage (where the writers and other creative forces behind Lost talk to the fans).

But there’s an L.A. Times interview with Russell T. Davies (of Doctor Who revival fame) in which he says this:

He also notes that he deliberately keeps organized fandom at arm’s length: “I think we’re an unusual science-fiction franchise in taking a very big step back from fandom and having nothing to do with them. . . . Every program on the BBC has a message board on the website. I forbid it to happen on ‘Doctor Who.’ I’m sorry to say this, all the science fiction producers making stuff in America, they are way too engaged with their fandom. They all need to step back.”

Which I thought was interesting. Now, that being said, I can see where RTD is a bit weary of fandom - there are people who are practically scholars in all things Who, while folks like Losties and B5 fans are just along for the ride and not pointing out contradictions in four decades of continuity across several media - but should the needle in general swing more toward JMS or RTD? Again using Lost as an example, look at the whole hubbub over Nikki and Paulo: the fan feedback literally did those two new characters in, when in fact those characters had been added to explore the story through the eyes of people who weren’t the omnipresent characters such as Jack, Locke, Kate, etc. - which was something else the fans had expressed an interest in. By trying to accede to the fans’ wishes, the makers of Lost arguably pissed away A-story time, or time that could’ve been spent fleshing out better known “minor” characters who’d been there all along - damned if you do, damned if you don’t. (I will say this about that, though - if they hadn’t tried to cram Nikki and Paulo into the story last season, we would’ve missed out on the wickedly funny episode Expose’, which disposed of them in a darkly comical way. That episode alone is almost enough reason to justify their rather limited existence.)

Who’s writing this stuff anyway - them or us? Discuss.

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Fun little poll on BBC America’s site to help you determine which member of the Torchwood team you are, though I’m a little mixed on the results - it’s funny, I could picture lots of stuff involving me and Gwen, most of which probably shouldn’t be discussed in polite company, but I can’t really picture being Gwen. But that’s how the results came in. On the upside, I’m not Ianto.

My wife got me to watch a few minutes of Celebrity Rehab on VH1, and I’ve gotta say, I’m appalled at the shape Jeff Conaway is in - so much so that I didn’t even think to be really irritated that they only ever mention Grease and Taxi and never Babylon 5. I can’t even say I’m disappointed or judgemental of his situation, just appalled that he’s in the situation he’s in. Whatever people know him from, this is a guy who would almost certainly get nothin’ but love from his fans if he could clean up enough to write his autobiography and do a book tour or something like that. If only he could get out from under his demons and do something like that, though I’m sure it’d take more than an outpouring of admiration from a bunch of total strangers to really help him. I don’t know what it’ll take, but I hope he can pull it off - after about 15 minutes or so, I couldn’t watch any more.

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Crappy cold rainy weather here tonight - it might snow, it might not, but either way it’ll be crappy and cold. For this kind of weather, Xena still gets to come inside…and Oberon promptly kisses up to her. Big time. (And I think she loves it.)

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Entertainment Weekly takes Sci-Fi to task for…well…an odd lack of decent sci-fi. The thing that they kinda leave out is that, relatively recently, there has been better stuff on there (Farscape, Lexx, though the latter admittedly ended because its creators felt they’d done all they could with it - man, if producers started thinking that sort of thing all the time these days, we’d be in trouble), and the network has been presented with the opportunity to salvage fairly high-profile fare with a following and didn’t bite (i.e. ABC’s late, lamented Invasion). (For those about to make the contention that Invasion tanked on ABC because it couldn’t hang onto the Lost audience: the numbers might not have been enough for a major over-the-air broadcast network, but would’ve been plenty good for basic cable.)

But here’s a suggestion for a solution: Sci-Fi desperately needs a geek edition of Project Greenlight. When you’ve got people like James Cawley and Rob Caves turning out Trek fan films that just about rival the real thing, and people like Reeltime Pictures, who did countless Doctor Who “spinoff” productions in the ’90s, out there…and people are already willing to watch that stuff at the standard at which it is currently produced…why not tap into that? Now, of course, it’d have to be original productions, rather than fannish takes on the Star Trek universe or what have you, but if the people who have that production capability could turn out something completely original and compelling…why not give those producers and their casts & crews the dough to make that their full-time gigs? Such a contest would be the most talked-about thing in SF circles for years, and would do an incalculable amount of good in reconnecting the network with its target audience. And Sci-Fi could embed two-or-three-person documentary crews with some of the contenders and get Yet Another Cheap-Ass Reality Show out of the deal, though one that’d have a more genuine connection with their audience than, oh, say, wrestling. C’mon, Sci-Fi. Burchuss and I are on hot freakin’ standby.

Other than that, all I can think of is…”pwned!” I’m glad it’s not just me thinking this over at my little niche website.

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