Category: Television & Movies

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Television & Movies

It is done

VWORP!1It only took about four years (during which I’ve alternated between unemployment and nutty flip-flopping shifts, homeschooling and the boy being in day care full-time, madness, sadness, badness and blandness), but… it’s finally done.

It’ll be available at OVGE in June. I’ll have a very limited number of copies at the table. You’ll be able to get it on Lulu.com too. Anything beyond that – other conventions, signings, and so on – I have yet to nail down.

The book’s about Doctor Who, in case you hadn’t figured that bit out. This volume covers the television episodes from 1963 through the 2011 Christmas special. And it just covers Doctor Who – the spinoffs and audios are covered in the next volume, but that’s not due out until the end of 2013 (the second volume will also cover the 50th anniversary season). It’s an 8.5″ x 11″ trade paperback, over 350 pages long, and it’s not all episode guide – there are occasionally little essay pieces that don’t fit into a discussion of any particular story, season or “era.” It’s also not a straight copy of stuff from the web site – a lot of it has been significantly edited or just rewritten from the ground up. … Read more

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Television & Movies

Still the best

Babylon 5I wish to report a troubling finding: for me, watching an episode of Babylon 5 is like opening a bag of potato chips with the mission statement of eating only the first potato chip and then sealing that bag up. It simply does not work that way. The next morning I wake up with an empty bag of potato chips, with a Vorlon sleeping next to me.

It’s still the best science fiction series that American television has turned out since the original Star Trek.

Textbook cryptic
“The purpose of this meeting is to determine how best to completely f*** with everyone’s heads.” “Yes.“ … Read more

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Gaming Television & Movies

Making the papers

The Lawgiver reads the paperI recently dug up something from my past, just for laughs, to post on Facebook – namely, a newspaper article from over 10 years ago in which I’d been quoted. It took a bit of Googling to find the thing, and then I thought… why not save myself the trouble of looking this stuff up later if I need to?

So I’ve created this page to chronicle such things. Really more for my own amusement than anything else. Hopefully everyone else gets a chuckle out of it.… Read more

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Funny Stuff Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines

TURN IT UP TO 11!

Part of my job at work is to make sure that there’s closed captioning on all of our programming. Airing something without captioning can net a heavy fine, and would probably get me fired if I wasn’t already staring down the barrel of being laid off in a couple of months when the operations center moves up north.

But sometimes, it would help, it really would… if the people who type in the captioning, even in an unpredictable live TV environment… would pay attention to what the hell they’re typing. … Read more

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Television & Movies

Exterminate the sheep!

Little E and I have been watching Shaun The Sheep quite a bit. For those not in the know, it’s an amusing series of short (~7 minutes) stop-motion animated funnies from Aardman, the UK studio behind Wallace & Gromit, about a herd of sheep whose fondest wish seems to be to share in the creature comforts of their human owner, despite the best efforts of his sheep-herding dog. Shaun is the cleverest of the sheep and hatches schemes that lead to hilarity, etc. etc. In one of the shows we saw tonight, the sheep set up a surprise costume party at the man’s house, and they themselves were the guests. See if you spot something unusual in the screen shots below. … Read more

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Gaming Television & Movies

Vworp speed ahead

I’ve decided to go ahead and nail down an initial release date for the first edition of VWORP!, and it’s a pretty unlikely date indeed. This is subject to change, of course, but as I’ve already put quite a bit of work in on it, I’m aiming to have the book out in time for OVGE on October 23rd of this year.

Wait, OVGE? What? Here’s my thought process. The only science fiction convention I’d have a shot at hitting from this particular location is Tulsa Trek Expo, which is this weekend. (The book will not be ready this weekend.) There’s also OKC’s SoonerCon, which has already happened this year – and which I had never heard of until after it had happened this year.

OVGE isn’t exactly a science fiction con, but it is an event that I have been a long-standing exhibitor at (it started in 2003 and I’ve only missed one year of it), and let’s face it: with a retro-skewing video game convention, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re going to have some spill-over into other areas of geek magnificence, such as science fiction. OVGE’s probably a pretty safe bet, actually. 😆 … Read more

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Television & Movies

An open letter to the makers of Lost

Okay, guys, I’m just gonna get right down to it without any formalities. We’re about 17 hours away from the beginning of the final episode of Lost. I’m going to be “on the board” for this show, probably the biggest TV draw of May sweeps if not the entire frakkin’ year, so please allow me to implore you to do the following:

Don’t f@$% it up. Seriously. If it turns out to be a St. Elsewhere ending that makes people pick up pitchforks and torches and storm their local ABC stations, it’s my ass they’re after, right? So, seriously, don’t get me killed. Please. It’ll look really bad on the paperwork afterward.

Purely as a fan, let me add the following request:

Don’t f@$% it up. You might just be able to top the audience figure for the finale of M*A*S*H here. Personally, I kinda doubt that’ll happen, but hell, stranger stuff has happened recently – look at what we now consider the #1 movie of all time to be. (I still think that ranking is the result of “cooked books” by way of inflated 3-D ticket prices, but what do I know?)

But more to the point, you have an opportunity to make this a finale that people are talking about years – or decades – later. J.J. Abrams himself once said that one of his chief inspirations for what he turned Lost into after he took over the show from its rather simplistic “Castaway on TV” pilot pitch was The Prisoner – as in the original show from the 1960s, not the miserable mash-up from earlier this year. People are still talking about The Prisoner’s final episode, 42 years later. Some folks claim to know what the message is. Other folks claim we’re still peeling back the layers (of an hour of TV shown – let me say it again – 42 years ago) and still aren’t close to the message. Others simply assume that there is no message, and that those involved must surely have been high on a stash of LSD covering roughly the same acreage as The Village itself.

Can the finale of Lost get us talking – for years afterward – like The Prisoner did? Or will it turn into something where people are merely grumbling about it for years afterward (see also: Roseanne)? I guess we’re about 17 hours away from finding out.

Don’t f@$% it up, guys.… Read more