Penny-Arcade comments on an issue near and dear to my heart (for those who don’t know, I work in a library–though I don’t have an MLS, so I’m not a librarian per se. I’m a library assistant).
My personal suggestion: librarylock (cf. warlock for male witch).
This makes my third Die Hard-referencing post title in less than a month. Also, to be fair, I stole it from ToyFare.
Anyway…let’s see if I can recall everything that went on this weekend…
Friday night, DottyGale (DG) and I just hung around the apartment. It was her first full day of vacation (she’s off all this week too), so she’d had a busy day of not doing much, while I’d had a busy day at work not doing much. We ended up watching The Specials–which, despite a script by James Gunn (Dawn of the Dead ’04) and a cast including Rob Lowe and Thomas Hayden Church, turned out to be a poor man’s Mystery Men (and though I’m a fan of MM, I still think that’s saying something).
Speaking of “poor man’s x,” my friend Ryan pointed me to this: “The 20 Best ‘That Guys’ of All Time.” But how could they forget Robert Loggia, whose name I almost went insane trying to remember last week? (On a side note, I was one of the five or six kids who preferred Cracked to Mad, though that was primarily because Cracked had John Severin, whose celebrity likenesses in Cracked‘s movie and television parodies were always incredibly good.)
Where was I? Oh, Saturday: DG and I went to see The Simpsons Movie, which was pretty good. Yes, it’s basically a really long episode with slightly better animation, but it’s still better than half the Hollywood comedies out there. There’s also one sight gag that takes full advantage of the PG-13 rating and will probably go down as one of the best Simpsons moments ever. I’ll be getting the DVD (no doubt the extras will rock).
After The Simpsons, we went to hang out at our friends Razz and Jen’s new house, where I enjoyed my very first turkey burger.
Sunday I went home to my parents’ house in Carver to help out with some chores since my dad’s laid up with a bad back. I painted my grandparents’ shed (my right shoulder’s killing me at the moment), then mowed my parents’ lawn. I have to say, I feel almost guilty mowing a lawn with a tractor. You’re just sitting there burning fossil fuels. That said, I did get the whole thing done in about an hour.
Sunday night we watched my brand-new special edition DVD of The Monster Squad. In the film, the Goonies-like child heroes need to perform an ancient ritual to stop Dracula’s plot, and much time and humor is spent on trying to locate a female virgin for the rite. Both DG and my friend Kate wondered why it didn’t occur to any of the kids to try it with a male virgin. Personally I think they were just hedging their bets–female virgins were always used in previous instances, so why risk the fate of the world by changing things up?
I spent much of the weekend closely following the news coming out of the San Diego Comic Con. To be honest, there wasn’t a whole lot that I saw, other than the announcement that Sylar would be playing Spock in J.J. Abrams’s upcoming Star Trek movie. There were also a lot of toy announcements that interested me but probably none of you guys, though I will mention that NECA has the rights to make Gears of War figures, as I’d guessed. Also, Mezco will be doing Heroes action figures.
And that’s it for now. Tune in tomorrow, same Bigger-time, same Bigger-channel!
In celebration of the San Diego Comic Con, USA Today has an amusing article examining the so-called “fanboy” phenomenon. (One thing I’ve never understood–why are those people who paint their bare stomachs at ballgames and name their kids after football players just “fans,” while anyone who owns a Star Wars toy is a “fanboy“? Not a new observation I know, but whatever.) I went to the SDCC in 2003 and would love to go back someday. That’s one point DG has in favor of moving to Cali.
Before anyone asks, no, I haven’t had the chance to read Deathly Hallows yet. Blame Tom. DG burned through it in seven hours though. I’ll try to get through it by the end of the weekend, then maybe we can have a little spoiler-filled discussion here.
Before I forget, congrats to Sean for breaking the 10K barrier on his Xbox Gamerscore. Way to go, fanboy! (I kid because I love.)
On a side note, I decided to remove the “What I’m Reading” section, mostly because it felt a little too much like that Twitter thing I tried a while back–too much pressure to constantly update.
This is a church down the street from me…they’ve got some odd slogans.
My friend Andy is in the hospital with a serious (and seriously odd) medical condition. Now that’s he’s written a blog post about it, I’d like to wish him all the luck in the world and ask everyone to keep him in their thoughts. Get better soon, Andy!
A few years ago, I attended the San Diego Comic Con and was fortunate enough to see a short film called Walkentalk, about a guy introducing his fiance to his younger brother, who happens to be completely obsessed with Christopher Walken–to the point where he speaks only in Walken quotes.
When I saw Walkentalk I had also just missed a short film called Street of Pain, which stars Steve Carell and is best described as “John Woo directs a dodgeball movie.”
Anyway, since the Internet is the greatest series of tubes ever, here are the films in their entirety for your viewing enjoyment.
Watched on: 7/19
Episode Title: “Blood Brothers”
A fashion model gets run over by a Ferrari and (deep breath) it turns out the killer is the diplomatically immune son of the dictator of a fictional Latin American country who is helping the US military prevent another 9/11 by torturing terrorist suspects while keeping the US’s hands clean and the son killed the woman to protect his brother who had killed her roommate the day before but as it turns out that was done on Canadian soil at their embassy and so in a convoluted plan involving the Bahamian coast guard Horatio manages to arrest the Canada-killing brother on international waters but not the Ferrari-killing brother. No word on whether this angers the dictator dad and causes him to stop torturing suspected terrorists resulting in another 9/11.
My friend Tom’s Xbox 360 died last week. More specifically, the external hard drive of his Xbox 360 crashed, which meant he lost all his saved game data. All the progress he’d made on any game–gone. Fortunately, one’s Achievements are archived on Microsoft’s server, so his gamerscore is safe.
But that did get me thinking–why doesn’t Microsoft store gamesaves and other vital information on its own servers? From my understanding–and if anyone out there knows better, correct me if I’m wrong–gamesaves aren’t terribly large. If Google can offer 2 Gb of email storage for free, can’t Microsoft provide 5 or 10 Gb as part of the yearly subscription I’m already paying? I’d even pay an extra $10 for such a service. Given the obviously unsatisfactory failure rate of Xbox 360s (my hard drive crapped the bed right out of the box), it would seem like the least they could do. It’s not like storage is that expensive these days.
Larger stuff, like downloadable content and game updates, could be stored on the hard drive, because that can all easily be re-downloaded. But once a gamesave is gone, it’s gone. Yes, there are some ways to save your savegames on your PC if you’re computer-savvy (or willing to spend the money on some third-party peripherals), but most casual players aren’t going to be thinking in those terms, so when the big crash comes, they lose hours (or let’s face it, weeks) of effort in an instant.
Nowadays, when saved games are so important for consoles and storage so cheap, I think MS should step up and offer online gamesave archiving.
It all started with The Soup, the most recent iteration of E!’s Talk Soup. For those who have never seen it, The Soup is a half-hour show that makes fun of everything that happened on television and pop culture that week. Host Joel McHale pokes fun at clips from reality shows, “news” shows like The Insider, and other random TV-related junk.
One of McHale’s favorite gags is to show the latest cold open from CSI: Miami where Horatio Caine, played by David Caruso, inevitably gets off some awkward one-liner right before cutting to Roger Daltrey’s famous scream from “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” McHale often then does an impression of Caruso, including putting on a pair of glasses before cutting to the scream. This never fails to crack me up. (To see a never-ending compilation of Caruso’s cold open one-liners, click here.)
I remember catching an episode of CSI: Miami during the first season and just being bewildered by Caruso’s odd, affected performance. His Horation Caine speaks in slow, measured tones at all times, whether he’s interrogating a suspect or ordering lunch. He talks like he’s explaining something to a four-year-old, and half the time he doesn’t face the person he’s speaking to. It’s one of those performances that is so idiosyncratic that it both works and it’s laughably easy to parody. It’s like a new William Shatner! (Incidentally, I think Caruso would have been perfect for the title role of Constantine. Of course, anyone would have been better than Keanu “Blank Stare” Reeves.)
I tried to watch the original CSI for a while a couple years back, but I never really got into it. Too little characterization, too much suggestion that any and all deviation from a “normal” lifestyle will get you murdered and tossed unceremoniously in a dumpster.
Anyway, after being amused by McHale’s Caruso impression numerous times, I started watching episodes of the show when I caught them on A&E. And lo and behold, I got hooked.
Most of it is due to Caruso’s wacky performance, I’ll admit. The rest of the cast are okay–I like Emily Procter–but Caruso sells that show. It also has a lot more action and characterization that CSI Vegas, and so it seems I’ve found a new show to tape repeats of on the DVR. That’s right–I’m still behind on Battlestar Galactica, I’ve never watched Lost or The Office, but I’m going to watch reruns of CSI: Miami.
On another note, I mentioned a while back that a pitch I’d made to a fairly major magazine had been accepted. Well, the article’s been turned in and should run in the magazine’s September issue. I’ll provide more details once everything has been finalized, but the hard part is over.
