Today my car decided to turn on its Service Engine Soon light. My car is a ’98 Nissan Maxima I bought from the previous owner about five months ago. It’s got 127,000 miles on it, and I have to admit to being more than a little apprehensive as to what tomorrow’s check-up will bring. It’s been a great car so far–here’s hoping it’s just some faulty wiring or something.
I discovered last week that Toy Biz will be releasing a special Marvel Monsters box set of action figures. Basically, they’re super-articulated versions of Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, the Wolf Man, and a zombie. Yes, technically they all come from specific Marvel comics, but that doesn’t matter–I plan to put mine up against Buffy and Angel. Or maybe Dracula and Angel can just fight over Buffy.
—01/30/06
Following last entry’s rant about Battlestar Galactica, I started watching the show and I concede that it is good, though–as I suspected–it was so over-hyped to me that it couldn’t possibly live up to expectation. Also, it’s a bit of a downer of a show. Granted, a galactic apocalypse has basically just occurred, but still, it’s human nature to inject a little levity into any situation…but I suppose it makes sense that we won’t be seeing any BSG versions of “War of the Coprophages.” (Unless they took place entirely in Baltar’s head.)
I saw King Kong last weekend. It was about what I have come to expect from Peter Jackson, with many earnest slow-motion-Vaseline-lens-one-castrato-note scenes, which started to get a little old in Return of the King. The action sequences were also much too long and exhausting and three or four subplots could have been removed and aided both the overly long running time and the overall quality of the story. But PJ still makes films that are far better than most of what Hollywood produces (to paraphrase Bill Watterson, is it any wonder wonder we haven’t been contacted by aliens when our race is responsible for things like The Ringer?).
I started playing the Western first-person-shooter GUN last week as well. I’m rediscovering some interest in the FPS, which I mostly lost my taste for a few years ago (with the notable exception of Halo). I still prefer third-person action games (the first Buffy the Vampire Slayer game for Xbox–not the “Chaos Bleeds” sequel–is the most fun I’ve had playing a videogame in a long time), but as first-person-shooters go, GUN is fun–for about four hours at least. I have to admit to losing interest after that point, as the game becomes a little repetitive, but I have to grant that part of the blame rests on the fact, unbeknownst to me, the game does not have an autosave function, which meant that I ended up losing my initial four-hour investment. By the time I’d gone back and caught up to the same point (being careful to save this time), the repetitiveness had gotten to me.
I do think that Westerns are an underdeveloped genre for videogames. Another FPS, Darkwatch, mixes the Old West with vampire lore, which seems pretty cool. While I’m not really interested in the game, I am curious to find out whether any writers have tried something similar in a novel or comic–crossing the Old West with horror or fantasy (I believe Stephen King’s Dark Tower books are something like that).
Currently reading the first of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy. Interesting so far, but as usual I’m getting bogged down in trying to figure out the mechanics of Pullman’s fictional Earth, rather than letting myself get involved in the story.
The girlfriend and I are also working our way through the second season of Angel, having wrapped up Buffy season five. Upon watching the first season of Angel, I initially found it preferable to Buffy, but now I’m not so sure; despite three seasons of Buffy and one-and-a-half seasons of his own show, Angel still seems like a surprisingly underdeveloped character. At the same time, the way in which he is developing–loosening up, singing in karaoke bars, wearing varied clothing, getting bogged down in earthy details–feels amusing and innovative and, oddly, wrong and vaguely unrealistic. They’re playing on the archetype of the brooding dark avenger, but it feels like they’re also making Angel a bit less mature.
That was always his selling point to me–he wasn’t so self-absorbed and self-martyrizing as Buffy; he had centuries of life experience (including at least a hundred years as a “good guy”) and a gravitas that was shaken only by his enigmatic love for Buffy. Now he–and the other characters on the show–are beginning to act less like a mature version of the Scooby gang from Buffy and more like teenagers in a soap opera (while, interestingly, the Scoobies mature and develop, and go down a darker and inevitably more adult path on Buffy).
I’ve still got to write that Buffy/Angel/Hellboy pastiche at some point.
—01/27/06
Okay, I have to get something off my chest.
I get it.
The new Battlestar Galactica is a good show. Fine. A great show. Okay. The best goddamned television you’ve ever seen. Great. It’s the television equivalent of Ulysses (okay, so no one’s made that claim).
You got the DVDs for Christmas. You don’t want to hear spoilers on the new show. You’re wondering who’s going to get shot in the next episode and who’s pulling the trigger. Great. Is Starbuck a Cylon? I don’t know, because I haven’t watched the show yet.
At my office, a show like Battlestar Galactica is almost required viewing, but somehow I just never started watching it. Recently it seems my entire social world, from my office to my online friends, have become obsessed with this show. The peer pressure to watch it is intense. I’ve been forced to Netflix the DVDs so I can participate in 80% of the conversations at work.
My girlfriend went to Caltech, and she told me how annoyed she got when her fellow students found out she hadn’t read Lord of the Rings (and didn’t really want to). In their shock and horror they would demand that she read them, which only made her less inclined to do so. When she told me about that, I didn’t really understand. Now I think I do.
Ordinarily I might have been all over a show like BG, though to be fair I, like many people, passed over the opening miniseries due to the reputation of the original show. Now I’m way behind and feeling rather ambivalent about catching up. I haven’t really been into science fiction in any degree since I was in elementary school; I’ve become more of a fantasy/horror guy. And I really want to get through Buffy and Angel, too.
But when it gets to the point where I have to put my headphones on when the talk at work turns to Battlestar Galactica, and when my friend Scott who finds fault with all creative media makes the redundantly hyperbolic statement that he “loves the hell out of the new show – a lot,” I must reluctantly bow my head and say that, this time, peer pressure has won.
I’ve got to be careful, though. I can already feel myself growing the sort of bizarre anti-populist ire I felt toward The Matrix–disliking it just because it was so popular, though the fact that it sucked and starred Keanu Reeves were important reasons too (there was an element of the emperor-has-no-clothes phenomenon in there). From everything I’ve heard and read, quality isn’t an issue with BG, but I still am not looking forward to hours and hours of catching up.
Part of it is the nature of the medium, though. I’ve never been that big on television. Watching television takes up a lot of time, time that could be used to write one’s novel or otherwise stimulate one’s brain cells. I’m sure the fans of BG would go into a lengthy argument about how watching this show is stimulating &c. &c.
I’m just saying, for me, watching this show is like committing to seventy dates with the same person before even meeting them.
—01/13/06
It’s rather silly for a self-proclaimed writer to be unable to maintain a foolish consistency in the frequency of his blog entries…yet here we are.
My birthday has come and gone and I am now more than twenty-seven years old, which is fine because I’ve been thinking I was twenty-seven for about eight months now. For some reason twenty-six is one of those years that just doesn’t quite register in the brain. Kind of like how I can never remember whether that co-worker of mine is named Alan or Chris, or whether “homage” is pronounced “home-awwj,” “home-ij,” or “hawm-ij.”
I’ve added a brand-spanking-new link to the long-dormant “Sphere of Influence” list–“Real Cool Yeah,” my friend Kate’s new blog. Kate drew the original sketch of the logo you see at the top of this page. Also a self-proclaimed writer and fellow owner of that most lucrative of graduates degrees, the MFA in creative writing, Kate has already managed to beat my weekly post frequency by about 500%.
As mentioned previously, I got an iPod for Christmas. Once I got through ripping all my CDs onto iTunes, I gorged myself in an orgy of downloading all those singles I loved growing up but never wanted to buy the entire album for. I’ve noticed iTunes can sometimes be frustrating for this kind of shopping, which is ostensibly its main appeal. For instance, I wanted the Elastica single “The Connection,” but iTunes only has Elastica’s albums from 2000 on. I’m sure they’re very nice albums, but no thanks, just want that single I remember listening to on WBCN while driving to high school in my 1987 Chevy Camaro that appeared to be about to travel through time–or maybe just fall apart–when it hit 88 miles per hour.
Also, it was quite irritating to find I could only get “Sweet Victory” by downloading the entire Spongebob Squarepants album. Defeating the purpose of the service, people!
Now that my student loans are coming due, I’ve decided I need to start writing a novel again, and quickly. A nice commercial novel that will wow a greedy literary agent and burn through 50,000 hardcovers before the paperback rights come in for ungodly amounts of cash. Yes, that’s how it’ll go.
On the toy front, my pledge to keep my toy-buying to a minimum this year met its first challenge today: Mezco’s Afterlife line of zombie action figures. It’s an old school gross-out toy line in the tradition of the He-Man Slime Pit or Boogers from the Planet Nose. I don’t know if I can resist removable guts.
—01/12/06