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| Wednesday, March 10, 2010 11:52 AM |
| On the Viewer - Caprica (Episode 4, "Gravedancing") |
 by Fëanor |
Beware spoilers!
We open with another bombing, and then, a bunch of the space Mormons in bed together! Woah now.
I love the way Sister Clarice nabs an e-sheet off of some random guy and then uses it to send a warning about the school search. And hey, look who got the warning - dude who claimed he had no knowledge of Sister Clarice being involved with the monotheistic cult at school. Riiight. Dude was keeping explosives in his locker??
Heh. I love the bobble head-style bull that Adama has on his dashboard. Go Tauron!
Another fun moment: Graystone promises his makeup artist 1,000 cubits to let him smoke a cigarette while she works.
The young Adama's grandmother tells him, "You think you only get things from friends? You get the best things from enemies. Because they're scared of you." Holy crap! Thank you, Grandma Machiavelli.
The cops come to search the Graystone estate.
Mrs. Graystone: "What do you expect to find?"
Agent: "Maybe who she met with. Who brainwashed her into believing in a moral dictator called God."
That's some phrasing there.
Mrs. Graystone: "Did you lose someone on that train?"
Agent: "I lost everyone on that train."
Very powerful exchange.
It really is creepy when the young tech guy is poking at the Zoe-bot with tools and says something like, "Now that is a nice chest."
Heh. While the tech guy is flipping channels on the radio, he goes past the original Battlestar Galactic theme.
Man, I literally cannot watch the Sarno show bit. So uncomfortable!
Holy crap! Graystone finally reveals the secret about the virtual avatar of his daughter - on live TV!! And Amanda totally saves his ass.
Grandma Adama is so freaking hardcore.
Sam kidnaps Amanda with no problem at all. Wow. I'm waiting for her to say, "Hey... this isn't the way to the airport!"
And there she goes.
Whew. He didn't do it. He's really good at effing with his brother, though. And with the audience!
This episode was harrowing. Seriously, I think my blood pressure went up while I was watching it. Intense and complex and powerful. |
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| Wednesday, March 10, 2010 10:34 AM |
| The Hulk Thought of the Day |
 by Hulk |
Hulk used to like tea parties. Now "tea party" just makes Hulk think of crazy idiot puny humans. Bah! Hulk going to have tea party anyway. Hulk need to take back words! Anyway, Hulk already made reservations, and She-Hulk get mad if Hulk cancel. |
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| Wednesday, March 10, 2010 10:20 AM |
| Recyclotron |
| by Fëanor |
Fëanor pours the entire internet into the Recyclotron, and only the best links come out the other end for you to enjoy.
- Hey, another illustration for The Hobbit! It's one of my favorite scenes, too.
- Horrifying rumors about the casting of Captain America continue: he could be played by Dane Cook! Or one of the Jonas Brothers! No wait, that guy from The Office has a lock on the role! Thankfully that last rumor has been debunked, but... man. This is disheartening.
- Another odd casting rumor: Sacha Baron Cohen or Jemaine Clement could show up in Men in Black 3.
- This headline sounds ridiculous, but apparently it is literally true: "Gold Nanoparticles and Lasers Kill the Brain Parasite That Causes 'Crazy Cat Lady' Syndrome."
- A still photo and a really intriguing video clip from a film called Monsters, which is being described as "The Latin District 9."
- Pretty clever editing turns The Fellowship of the Ring into a Wes Anderson film. (Via)
- An expertly and hilariously altered street sign. Hadouken!!
- Awesome new versions of the music video for the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," one using footage from Battlestar Galactica, and another using footage from The Empire Strikes Back. Some really brilliant marrying of visuals and music in these.
- Sci Fi Wire gives us a roundup of upcoming sci-fi TV pilots. There are tons! Woo hoo!
- I almost passed this article by, until I noticed the accompanying image featured curling. Turns out indie developer Blackish Games has got a new curling game for the PC, and you can play an online version right here, right now. I suck at it, but maybe I can refine my technique with practice.
- I love this fantastic sci-fi ray gun version of the Jesus fish symbol.
- The story of MythBuster Adam Savage's pretty much lifelong quest to make a kick-ass replica of the gun from Blade Runner, and pictures of the amazing final product. Well, mostly final; apparently he's still tinkering.
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| Tagged (?): Art (Not), Books (Not), Captain America (Not), Celebrities (Not), Comedy (Not), Curling (Not), Links (Not), Monsters (Not), Movies (Not), Music (Not), News (Not), Recyclotron (Not), Science (Not), Sports (Not), Tolkien (Not), TV (Not), Video (Not), Video games (Not) |
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| Tuesday, March 9, 2010 12:10 PM |
| The Hulk Thought of the Day |
| by Hulk |
Hulk think puny humans should congratulate Toyota, not criticize. Hulk didn't think a Prius could even go that fast! |
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| Tuesday, March 9, 2010 10:36 AM |
| Recyclotron |
| by Fëanor |
Fëanor pours the entire internet into the Recyclotron, and only the best links come out the other end for you to enjoy.
- Yesterday, the trailer I was really excited about was the one for Iron Man 2. Today, it's the one for Tron Legacy (via). OMG IT LOOKS SO GOOD. Here are some stills from the trailer. This particular one might be the hottest thing I've ever seen.
- Felicia Day has been cast as a werewolf-hunting descendant of Little Red Riding Hood in Red, a Syfy Channel Original Movie. The story is, she brings her fiance home and reveals the family business is hunting werewolves. He's skeptical until bitten by a werewolf himself. Then Day's character has to try to protect him from her own family, who want him dead. Could be fun. But believe it or not, that's not the only casting news I have about a movie that features Red Riding Hood hunting werewolves! Amanda Seyfried has been cast in Catherine Hardwicke's The Girl With The Red Riding Hood.
- A gallery of Klingon art! Some is NSFW. Yes, that kind of NSFW. Ew. Still, there's some fun stuff in here.
- The folks who made the BBC's Being Human are working on a superhero show called Orphans which "will follow different superheroes in a world that will gradually be revealed to be very different from our own, with a tone similar to their successful supernatural series."
- io9 updates us on some alarming '80s movie remakes, reboots, and reimaginings.
- Here's a clip from a German TV show where a blindfolded young woman identifies LEGO Star Wars minifigs by having them placed in her mouth. Pretty hilarious, but in retrospect, no more ridiculous than the kind of stuff you might see on an American TV show - and a lot less offensive.
- Here's a sign advertising a job opening with some oddly specific restrictions on applicants.
- The official synopsis for the Thor movie has been released and it explains how they're going to handle mixing the mythological world and the real world. Looking forward to seeing this.
- Cinematical takes a look at some of the King Arthur films that are on the way.
- 2010 Oscar nominated films with their posters and titles reworked to be more... honest. (Via)
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| Tagged (?): Art (Not), Celebrities (Not), Comedy (Not), LEGO (Not), Links (Not), Lists (Not), Monsters (Not), Movies (Not), News (Not), Photography (Not), Recyclotron (Not), Star Trek (Not), Star Wars (Not), Thor (Not), Toys (Not), Tron (Not), TV (Not), Video (Not) |
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| Monday, March 8, 2010 03:09 PM |
| The Take |
 by Fëanor |
Fëanor's (semi-)weekly comic book review post.
This post covers new releases from the week of 3/3, which was sadly the worst week for comics in recent memory. Beware spoilers! And bitterness!
New releases
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight #33
It's an interesting moment when the vampire slayer realizes that, metaphorically at least, she has now become a vampire herself. But this is followed up by a patented Scooby gang pep talk from Xander, and Buffy's soon up and fighting again. There's a weird thing that only lasts a handful of panels where Andrew somehow gets his hands on a whole bunch of geeky gear and uses it to try to fight Twilight. I don't know where that came from or how it makes sense.
Of course, the big deal about this issue is that it includes the long-awaited reveal of Twilight's secret identity, a reveal that fails entirely to have any power or suspense because anybody who goes online has known the secret for weeks now, thanks to Dark Horse doing a really poor job on information control. Twilight's true identity originally leaked thanks to the cover art for a future issue hitting the internet too early. I'd forgive them that - who can keep stuff like that from leaking out these days? - except that they then assumed that everyone knew the secret, and started talking about it openly on Twitter and Facebook, thus ruining it for everyone else, including people like myself who hadn't even known anything about the leaked cover, and wouldn't have looked at it even if they had. Sigh.
But anyway, the point is, the reveal doesn't make a lot of sense, even in context. I don't see why this character would become a villain all of the sudden, and his explanation of why he let a bunch of innocent people die is not sufficient. I just don't see him ever doing the kinds of things that Twilight has done. Buffy's reaction to the reveal doesn't make any sense, either. I mean, she's made poor decisions as far as romance is concerned as long as we've known her, but to stop in the middle of a fight and just start having sex with someone who is essentially a mass murderer? Really? And what the hell is with her and Twilight glowing, and Twilight talking about them being some kind of fated pair, and Giles being all doom and gloom? Meltzer has some serious explaining to do in the next couple issues!
Thumbs Sideways
First Wave #1
All the prequels and previews of this series that I've seen so far have been crappy, but I decided to give this first issue a try anyway, maybe because there were so few other interesting books on the stands this week. Unsurprisingly, it's mediocre. There's way too much narration, none of which is terribly well written, and none of the subplots that get initiated here are really grabbing me. Boring characters, boring dialog, boring, boring, boring.
Thumbs Sideways
Girl Comics #1
This is the first of a three-issue anthology miniseries from Marvel consisting of short stories by all women comic book creators. It's all part of the company's new "Women of Marvel" initiative, highlighting and celebrating all the female talent in the field. It's a cool idea, but as with most anthology books, this one is really hit-and-miss - mostly miss. The introductory bit by Colleen Coover is cute and inspiring, but the Cabaret-style Nightcrawler story is a real yawner (even if the art is intriguing and unique). Trina Robbins' Venus short is perhaps even more dull. Interspersed with the stories are "spotlight" prose pieces which consist of short bios of particularly important women in the comics field. These are a nice idea, and are reasonably interesting. Valerie D'Orazio's Punisher story is pretty amusing, even if, as others have pointed out, the ending is a foregone conclusion from page one. The She-Hulk pin-up is nice. The goofy Doctor Octopus two-pager is probably my favorite story in here, because it's just pure cutesy fun. Robyn Furth and Agnes Garbowska's fairy tale-inspired Franklin & Valeria Richards' story is interminable, and packed full of completely unnecessary text. You should never need this many words to tell a story in a visual medium like comic books, especially when the words are this boring. "Head Space," which focuses on the complex Cyclops-Jean Grey-Wolverine love triangle, has a fascinatingly surreal story-telling format, but it's not saying anything we haven't already heard a million times before. I doubt I'll pick up another issue of this book, unless something really sticks out when I flip through it in the store.
Thumbs Sideways
Green Hornet #1
I realized after his latest Batman series that I really disliked the way Kevin Smith writes comics, but I was interested enough in this Green Hornet comic that I decided to give it a chance anyway. Mistake! It's terrible. Seriously. So formulaic and awful. All the characters speak that same Kevin Smith language we all know so well, but Smith is even less inspired here than usual, and is just churning out all the usual stereotypical junk. The jokes are incredibly cheesy and cliche and unfunny. The characters are all smug and unlikable. There's even a slacker whose girlfriend leaves him because he's so much of a lazy, uncaring jerk. It's pretty hard to blame her.
The comic is full of ads for the seemingly hundreds of other Green Hornet-related series that Dynamite is launching, but after reading this example of their work, I think I'll skip the rest.
Thumbs Down
Ultimate Avengers #5
It feels like I may have missed an issue of this, but maybe the mild confusion I'm feeling as to why all these people are where they are, and what it is exactly that they're talking about, has more to do with how long it's been since I read the previous issue. Anyway, the series is getting really... Millary now. I find that with pretty much all of Mark Millar's stuff, eventually it crosses a line and I stop liking it. It just gets too dark and thoughtless and disgusting and offensive and I lose my taste for it. I think this series might have hit that point for me now. The Ultimate Red Skull is just such a ridiculously awful creature, what with the baby-killing and the gang-raping. And there's a scene in here where poor Nerd Hulk vomits just because Millar thinks it'd be funny for that character to vomit and be shamed in front of the other characters. And you know what? Not funny. Then Millar makes fun of the French for no real good reason, and that's not particularly funny either; it's just a boring cliche. And there's plenty more lame dialog where that came from. Yeah, I think I'm done with this book.
Thumbs Sideways |
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| Monday, March 8, 2010 12:53 PM |
| The Hulk Thought of the Day |
| by Hulk |
Once again, Oscars snub Hulk. Feh! |
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| Monday, March 8, 2010 09:55 AM |
| Recyclotron |
| by Fëanor |
Fëanor pours the entire internet into the Recyclotron, and only the best links come out the other end for you to enjoy.
- I have two words to say in response to the new Iron Man 2 trailer, above: "HELL" and "YEAH" (via). So awesome. I'm so stoked for this movie. In other Iron Man 2 news, io9 is reporting a rumor that Olivia Munn's role in the movie might be larger than at first assumed - she might actually be playing the Scarlet Witch herself. She doesn't show up in the trailer at all, so who knows?
- The entries on Back and WTF are always weird, but this one is particularly odd and intriguing.
- Huzzah! There will indeed be a third season of Fringe.
- Rachel Nichols has joined the cast of Conan. She'll be playing what sounds like a Red Sonja-type character.
- A disturbing new type of M.O.D.O.K.
- Heh heh. Yeah.
- An odd, fun, exciting teaser on YouTube.
- The rundown on the winners of the Razzies and the Oscars. I didn't see even half of the Best Picture nominees this year, but I'm happy with the way things turned out in that category, as well as in the Best Director category.
- Garbage Pail Kid and Wacky Package card designs. Wow, I'd almost forgotten about Wacky Packages! (Via)
- An infographic examines the physics of the greatest movie scene ever (Mega Shark leaping up and chomping a jet liner out of the air) which I tweeted a link to the other day. (Via)
- Cute versions of Chewbacca and Captain America.
- Supposedly Campbell's "healthy" soups are exactly the same as its regular soups, except they cost more. Shouldn't this be illegal? (Via)
- Everybody knows of whom Darth Vader is the father. (Wow, it's awkward sometimes being grammatically correct.) But who is Darth Vader's father? Chuck Norris, natch. (Via)
- A recent Photoshop Phriday at Something Awful features some amusingly misplaced movie titles. (Via)
- A huggable, button-eyed Alan Moore doll.
- "A worldwide team of researchers have for the first time created a particle that is believed to have been in existence immediately after the creation of the universe." What is it? An antinucleus! An antinucleus "is a negatively charged state of antimatter containing an antiproton, an antineutron, and an anti-Lambda particle." This particular one "is also the first antinucleus containing an anti-strange quark." Well that just sounds crazy. (Via)
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| Tagged (?): Alan Moore (Not), Art (Not), Captain America (Not), Celebrities (Not), Comedy (Not), Comic books (Not), Computers (Not), Crafts (Not), Food (Not), Fringe (Not), Iron Man (Not), Links (Not), Movies (Not), News (Not), Photography (Not), Recyclotron (Not), Science (Not), Star Wars (Not), Toys (Not), TV (Not), Video (Not) |
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| Friday, March 5, 2010 02:48 PM |
| Curling: An Appreciation |
 by Fëanor |
I've been meaning to say, I love curling now. I'd heard of the sport before, but never actually watched it or learned anything about it until the Winter Olympics this year. I was hooked after watching my first match. I immediately went online and started researching the rules, the terminology, the strategy. And that's one of the things that impressed me right away - how much strategy and tactics are involved in the game. It's sometimes called "chess on ice," and that is really a pretty apt way to describe it.
Part of the attraction for me, I think, is that curling has certain things in common with my favorite game ever, Diceland, as well as with certain German boardgames. Each team works together to determine the optimum move - the best place they can put the stone on their turn - and once that's decided, they have to use their physical skill and dexterity to make that move, and put that stone where they want it to be, possibly knocking other stones out of the way in the process. It's a collaborative sport, and a sport that involves both mind and body - both tactical planning and physical coordination. Everyone and everything must be working in concert for you to play well. There's also a strong sense of fair play and good sportsmanship that's surrounded the sport from its very beginnings, which is nice. And how about all the yelling? "HARD! HARD! HAAAARD!" That cracks me up.
One of the things that it took me a long time to get my head around, and that I find particularly fascinating about curling, is that sometimes it makes better strategic sense to not score points, or even to allow your opponent to score a point, than it does to score one yourself. This is completely unlike pretty much every other sport I know of.
I really enjoyed the various curling matches I was able to watch during the Olympics (although the team I was rooting for won only once, when Canada's men's team took Gold in the final match), and I'm hoping I won't have to wait another four years to watch more. |
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| Friday, March 5, 2010 10:45 AM |
| The Hulk Thought of the Day |
 by Hulk |
Hulk hearing rumbles that some states and cities in America might start taxing sugary drinks like soda pop. Hulk consume soda pop in horrendous quantities, so news better not be true! Hulk may be green, but Hulk not made of money. And Hulk need soda pop! To fight crime and such. |
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About
Welcome to the blog of Jim Genzano, writer, geek, and web developer. For a more detailed run-down of who I am and what goes on here, read this.
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on Curling: An Appreciation Mike V.: "Netflix a movie called Men With Brooms. It's the best (and only!) curling movie ever."
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