Just a reminder, be sure to visit The Snow Miser’s Cooler, which I’ve run for more than seven years now. This month my visits have more than tripled (as usual) thanks to Snow Miser fans. It’s good to know a puppet from a thirty-year-old Christmas special is way more popular than I am.
But I kid the Snow Miser. He’s too much!
—12/24/06
I thought I’d squeeze one last blog entry in before Christmas. Today I blog to you from sunny Simi Valley, where today temperatures were in the 50s…much like New England at the moment. I’m staying with DG’s family for my first Christmas away from home. As I jot this down, DG and her family are busily baking what appears to be hundreds of cookies.
And now I’d like to discuss something else: how little I enjoy flying.
I used to fly fine until a particularly turbulent cross-country flight in spring 2000. My good friend Ruth can attest to the Rainman-like state that flight reduced me to; by the end, I was rocking back and forth, listening to the Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week” on my MP3 player over and over. For the next three years, flying was an exercise in pure terror. The fear finally evaporated on a long return flight from San Francisco in summer ’03, where my hangover more or less forced me to forget about my fears.
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—12/23/06
I went through a lot of toy fads as a child—He-Man, Star Wars, Godzilla, Robocop, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, just to name a few—but none had so long and successful a run in my interest as Transformers. I was into Transformers for almost five years, I think, from ages five to ten, and then had a renaissance during my early teenage years, when I wrote a 215-page novel about them. Titled The Siege, the task consumed more than six months of my young life and remains my longest writing effort to date.
Having been quite obsessed with Transformers at several points in my young life, I feel compelled to have some sort of opinion on the upcoming Michael Bay film. Part of me thinks it’s too little, too late, and another part of me will probably always think of Transformers: the Movie as that 1986 slice of cheese that features both Optimus Prime’s death and the pure ’80s tune “The Touch.”
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—12/20/06
So it’s Christmastime again. Ever since I left my parents’ house, Christmas seems to go one of two ways for me: either I go all-out and Christmasize my life to the max, or December flies by and before I know it, Santa has come and gone and I’m a year older (because my birthday give is me the presents! 29th).
I made a concerted effort to enjoy the heck out last Christmas, going so far as to host a special viewing of several Christmas classics such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, The Year Without a Santa Claus and The Nightmare Before Christmas. I made sure to get plenty of lights and decorations up. It was also the year of the “Lucy Tree,” a story I will let DG relate (perhaps in a guest post, if she’s willing) since it’s really more her story than mine.
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—12/15/06
Apologies for the lack of updates, but there’s just not much to report lately.
DG is at a conference in San Diego this week, so I’ve had the apartment to myself. That means I get a whole week of the apartment relatively clean and uncluttered, the way I like it.
This week has confirmed for me that I am not the primary source of our apartment’s constant state of clutter. I have no doubt within a day of my beloved’s return there will be opened mail, knitting patterns, and half-empty bottles of Pepsi covering every square inch of the coffee table. And the thing about a coffee table is that it sets the tone for the whole apartment. It really ties the room together, y’know? So if the coffee table is a wreck, the living room looks like a wreck, and by extension, I’m a wreck. I am a wreck, of course, but I’d prefer new acquaintances discovered that on their own in due time, rather than getting a misleading, if accurate, picture upon viewing our coffee table.
But I kid my wonderful, forgiving girlfriend. Her tendency toward clutter is cute. And she’s a lot better than I am about the dishes, which are arguably much higher on the housecleaning pyramid, and have a greater potential to cause typhoid fever.
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—12/13/06
Came across this article in which Hellboy director Guillermo Del Toro says he’s trying to film a trailer to convince Warner Brothers to finance his big-budget adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Apparently the studios are “very nervous about the cost and it not having a love story or a happy ending,” but Del Toro says “it’s impossible to do either in the Lovecraft universe.” Which is quite true.
ATMOM is possibly the only film I would like to see more than Hellboy 2 right now, so fingers crossed that Del Toro convinces Warner Brothers to give it a shot. Though I suspect the failure or success of the similarly-themed Thing remake will influence the studio execs more. It’s also possibly Warner Brothers will decide to torpedo the project due to the similarities to The Thing. Anyway, fingers crossed that Lovecraft will finally get his big-budget due.
—12/08/06
Recently, with all the love being lavished upon the Wii by the likes of Ed and Robin, I considered the possibility of requesting a Wii rather than an Xbox 360 (my birthday comes four days after Christmas, so these days I tend to just ask my parents for one big gift for both Christmas and birthday).
But I’m certain the 360 is the right system for me. It helped to check out the new Halo 3 television ad. Not only does the game look fantastic, but while watching the video I got the sort of excited sensation previously reserved for something like glimpses at early footage of The Fellowship of the Ring. I’m looking forward to Halo 3 with more anticipation than any movie (with the possible exception of Hellboy: The Golden Army), which just goes to show how much the videogame industry has stolen the thunder of the film industry for fans like me.
The 360 will also have the upcoming Hellboy game and will be the exclusive home of BioWare’s Mass Effect (and possibly Alan Wake, outside the PC). More importantly, many of my friends—including my cousin and lifelong gaming buddy Mike—have 360s, so I’ll finally be able to join them over Xbox Live. I’m looking forward to going through Gears of War in co-op mode with Mike, just as we did with Contra back in the days of the NES. While the Wii has a lot going for it (and there’s a chance DG may get one from her parents for Xmas), my allegiance—for this round of consoles—belongs to the 360.
—12/07/06
I’m only about a week behind on this, but the first story arc of the third season of Veronica Mars wrapped up last week, ending the story of the Hearst College rapist in a twist was a bit too much like Scream.
For those who have never heard of Veronica Mars, it’s probably my favorite show on television right now (yes, even more than Battlestar Galactica, which is a better show but not quite as fun). The show stars Kristen Bell as the eponymous hero, who in the first season of the show is a junior in college attempting to solve the murder of her best friend while dealing with her new status as a social outcast among the rich jerks of her southern California high school. Her gumshoe tendencies come from her private investigator father, Keith, played to perfection by Enrico Colantoni (Elliot the photographer from Just Shoot Me).
It’s now the third season and Veronica is a freshman at the fictional Hearst College, meaning we’ve got a at least four seasons before Veronica Mars becomes just another show about a private investigator. The writers have taken the intriguing approach of skipping one major story arc in favour of three smaller arcs over the course of the season. I suspect this was at least partially to make the show more accessible to new viewers, with three separate jumping-on points at the beginning of each arc. The show’s on break right now and returns in January, so if you’re one of those people who’s able to watch a show without going back and watching the earlier seasons on DVD (sadly, I’m not), then this would be a great time to hop on the Veronica bandwagon.
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—12/06/06
I hate it when websites have terrible search engines. It seems especially common with sites who should know better. The immediate impetus for this complaint is Salon, whose search provides results in no discernible order and no method of sorting them by date or relevance. And this is Salon—ostensibly a literary magazine whose archive of articles are one of its most important draws.
Many other sites have crappy searches. CNN’s is awful too. I almost always end up just doing a site search via Google (for those who don’t know, here’s what you do: type the keywords you’re looking for into Google, then type “site:X.com” or whatever the website you want to search, i.e., “site:cnn.com”. That will search only CNN for your keywords).
I just don’t understand why any website would have a bad search engine, especially when you can always just partner with Google if necessary. Perhaps Salon can’t afford a partnership? Or there would be a conflict of interest with Google’s advertising? If anyone has any idea what the problem might be, I’d love to know.
Of course, I just noticed my own search—though powered by Google—is a kind of Google-lite, since it doesn’t offer any sorting options. So apparently if you want those you’ll have to do the aforementioned site search on the real Google.
—12/04/06