Temple Talysman

Finished watching the remake of The Prisoner. Really? That's what you guys came up with? You took a 17-episode series that was about whether or not some guy would cave in to pressure from authority and society and turned it into a slow-moving, 6-episode mini-series where absolutely everything is mysterious, including the main character's motivations?

It might have worked if you hadn't called it The Prisoner and tried so hard to include nods to the old series.

Oh, and if you had established the main character in some way, so that we didn't have to wait until the end of the series to find out if we cared about his plight or not.

Last night's dream was very confused and I've forgotten most of it, except two bits in particular:

1. I was trying to catch a plane and had to pack and/or ship stuff, and vajrabot and vampyrecat were helping me find my computer. Apparently, this was at their new house, because they had a huge warehouse with many many shelves.


2. I was at a pizza parlour talking to a girl who, as it turned out, was dying of cancer. It figures. She was really cool.

Today, I watched four recorded episodes of the new Prisoner. When I finished watching the rest, I'll post my reaction.

I've struggled for weeks with a Perl script to select words from a file based on what part of speech they are. It wasn't working.

And now, I just figured out it's because the person who made the original file GOT A MAC. An old Mac, with those bastard bare control-Ms and no line feeds. Changing the record separator magically fixed everything.

From the Sacramento Bee:

Frank Abella, 19, faces the probable term
of life in prison with no chance of parole
for the June 7, 2008, bludgeon killing of
William Deer.

The 50-year-old defendant was beaten to
death after buying a cup of coffee at the
7-Eleven in the 10200 block of Mills Station
Road at 2:15 a.m. and sitting down to drink
it in front of a check-cashing store next
door.

(if that's not an error, the courts are getting really harsh...

I'm not interested in beer myself, but I figured I'd pass along this bit of information: a local brewery is having what they call "Hoptoberfest", which will highlight various hop-based alcoholic beverages. I'm sure many of you beer-drinkers were wishing there was some kind of special celebration in October that featured a lot of beer drinking, so you might want to promote this idea in your area.

I think notr was in my dream last night. We teleported to Newfoundland by accident, but fortunately I figured out where we were by looking at the address on a TV Guide in a cafe. The reason why we teleported was because I was trying to Google a location name that had appeared on my underwear when it failed to connect to the internet while I was in the Bay Area. My underwear doesn't normally try to connect to the internet, so I was worried it contained some kind of trojan or virus, and I was using Google to find out who this address belonged to. It turned out to be the name of the world's shortest river.

So let that be a lesson to you all: never teleport while Googling, even if your underwear tells you to.

That sentence has never been uttered before in the history of the world.

It's pretty depressing that Noisefest 2009 is going on RIGHT NOW and this is the first year I am unable to attend or participate in any way. But, there simply wasn't a way to swing it this year.

Good luck to noisepimp, vanillatray, and the old gang.

In the past, I knew who Gérard Depardieu was, but I'd only seen him in bits and pieces. Five minutes of either "Jean de Florette" or "Manon of the Springs" or both, five minutes of "Cyrano de Bergerac", five minutes or perhaps the entire American version of "My Father the Hero". Somehow, I never really got to watch a Depardieu movie, so I couldn't really tell you much about him.

Recently, I've been watching a lot of French movies for practice. Practically anything in French, whether it's the kind of movie I'd watch in English or not. Depardieu was somewhere in "Paris, je t'aime", but I didn't notice him. He was in "Nathalie", which bothered me, not because he wsa a bad actor, but because there's just something wrong with that movie, and there shouldn't be. It has an interesting script and nobody seems to be doing a terrible job, but somehow, someone made some scenes drag out interminably. And then I saw "La duchesse de Langeais", which was extremely drag-ass, but I've been unable to verify he was ever in that movie; supposedly, his son made a version of the same story, but under the name "Ne touchez pas la hache", but IMDb lists this as 137 minutes; the version I saw was definitely under the other name, and it was FOUR HOURS. And again, there technically wasn't anything wrong with the story or with anybody's performance that I could tell; each scene just went on forever. They freaking filmed one guy writing a letter for five minutes, then mailing it. No voiceover, no close up shots of what he's writing, just a lomg shot of a guy writing at a desk for FIVE MINUTES.

So at least one, possibly two, Depardieu movies turned out pretty badly, and I was afraid. However, I've now seen "Les temps qui changent", which was kind of confusing but still good and certainly never boring; something interesting was happening at every moment. And "Le Dernier métro" was pretty good, too. So, Monsieur Depardieu, I apologize: you may not be my favorite French actor, but you know your stuff, and I'm sorry for thinking you somehow had a talent for picking stinkers.

Things I have done lately:

1. Introduced my nephew to the Badger Song (he likes to flap his arms and dance to it.)


2. Watched every single episode of Millennium twice. At least.


3. Invented the ring-tailed vulture-shark.

I should probably say something about my observations on Gerard Depardieu and The Twilight Zone. Oh, and British "The Office" versus American "The Office", now that I've actually seen some episodes. Maybe later.

I watched A Thousand Clowns (1965) today. I saw this once or twice when I was a kid and remembered a couple bits, but was hazy on big chunks of it, but I remember liking it when I was a kid. So, I was a bit surprised when I watched it and discovered that, despite lots of funny dialog and a few good scenes, the movie is kind of crappy. There's a certain quality that I've noticed in some movies adapted from stage plays: the script is so intent on showing us the wit of the dialog and on capturing the true nature of the characters on the stage (screen) that nothing actually happens or makes much sense. Why did the school psychologist choose to stay behind when her social worker partner left? Why did she fall in love with Murray? No reason, really. It just happens so that we can see that murray is lovable, I guess. Why did they all have to shout their lines at each other? Because for some modern plays, "emotion" is defined as "shouting".

I had such fond memories of this, it felt really bad to discover they were all tarnished.

I haven't been very active lately on LJ. I did scroll back a couple days and accidentally misread a tragerstreit subject line as "Science Funt!" You know, the host of Candid Science Camera. I also read a Sac-area club announcement about "Club NOTR".

I received an email I assume is a spammer fishing for active addresses, since there was no To: line in the header. It contained this interesting sentence:

I am looking to order some Accessories and
will be glad if you can do let me know if you do have Blancket Machine and
A,B Dick socker in your store.

A dick socker. That's a product I hadn't imagined before.

You remember the film trick they did in The Matrix and in that TV commercial for khaki pants? Where the action stops and the camera rotates around the person?

Remember how afterwards, everyone wanted to use that effect, and you probably thought, "yeah, whatever, you haven't added anything new to that effect. It's just the effect for effect's sake"?

Well, someone's actually taken that effect beyond that level, finally.



Oh, and I should add: technically, this is an ad for some new ultrawidescreen TV, but the film itself is far more interesting.

Was Phil Spector the first celebrity convicted of murder? Or is the linked article playing tricks with definitions? He's excluding socialites and people who became famous *because* they killed or committed other crimes; that seems reasonable, so let's restrict it to people who became famous for actually doing something creative or, at the very least, publicity-seeking without being reprehensible. But the writer also mentions someone convicted of misdemeanor negligent homicide, which apparently doesn't count. I'm not sure why.

This question is going to nag me for a while.

I remembered who the other loser was. Leonardo da Vinci.

There was a da Vinci exhibit at OMSI last month. I went twice. Aside from replicas of various devices he'd either built or sketched in his notebooks, they had a couple videos about specific da Vinci works and plaques/displays describing moments in his life. One of the things I noticed was how often da Vinci just said "screw it" and gave up some project; I don't mean just the inventions, which he sometimes realized wouldn't work and wisely decided to cut his losses. I mean, for example, several times he was commissioned to do some project, then he got a better offer and gave up, or something went wrong and he gave up. The Last Supper, for example, was supposed to use a new technique he'd invented so that he could do the fresco on dry plaster. Except it didn't work and started to peel before he was finished, so he gave up. Or when he was commissioned to do a mural of the Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo was commissioned to do The Battle of Cascina opposite it... but they both ran into troubles, so they said "screw it" and left town.

The guy did some amazing things, but he certainly has a sort of rootless quality, moving from city to city, only really finishing a couple projects.

... is people who became famous after being failures, in one way or another.

It kind of started with Amelia Earhart. For some reason, I became temporarily obsessed with finding out if there was a recording of her voice on the internet. While researching this, I was reading up on her history. She had a strong desire ever since childhood to do big things and didn't seem to have any desire to do the kinds of things women were expected to want to do in those days, but at first flying wasn't one of them. She seems to have tried several things, at first focusing on science, but she kept dropping out of various college programs and taking on various odd jobs. In a way, her early life seems kind of rootless. Around her mid-20s, she finally rides in a plane, then decides that's what she wants to do, so she meets up with an experienced woman pilot and asks her for lessons.

I was also reading about L. Frank Baum. He ran through a series of odd, disconnected jobs, like fancy chicken breeder, which he sometimes became mildly successful at. He was mostly interested in working for newspapers, either as an editor or journalist, and did that off and on; he was also obsessed with the theater, but apparently was ridiculously unsuccessful at that. He published a couple books and stories, hit it semi-big with a prose version of Mother Goose, and decided to concentrate on children's books, which is how he wound up writing The Wizard of Oz. Despite the success of some of the Oz books, he still managed to screw up quite a bit, going back a couple times to his theater obsession and later starting a film company that tanked.

It seems to me I've read another "famous loser" bio recently, although who it was escapes me. What fascinates me, I guess, was that these are people who have a clear talent or skill, but their life story turns out to be a lot rougher than you'd expect. People seem to prefer stories about either hard workers who make it big through perseverance or hugely talented artists who rise rapidly and then crash. They don't seem to talk as much about dabblers, drifters, or losers.

So, did I mention that I didn't think the Life On Mars remake was quite in the same league as the BBC version?

Well, now I'm convinced. That SUCKED.

You may recall my mentioning "Beowulf: Prince of the Geats". Here's their website, which includes a YouTube trailer, which I will also embed below. Apparently, the film is making its way around the country in small fundraisers, perhaps mostly at colleges. I have no idea where Troy University is, but I noticed on the Unlocked Wordhoard blog that they are having a showing there.

After seeing the clip, I think the acting and cinematography don't seem that bad. It's the CGI and special effects that made me laugh. Check it out!

I just found out about a movie made two years ago called "Beowulf: Prince of the Geats". It was made for pretty much no budget (all-volunteer cast and crew) as a cancer charity fundraiser.

( Guess what? )

Folks on RPGNet ran a "design an RPG in one week" challenge last week. Looking over the ingredients for inspiration, I decided I wanted to twist the superhero genre a bit. I came up with Resist the Atom!, set in an alternate history '50s where the world is being taken over by superhumans who think they can solve all the world's problems. Basically, I crossed supers with the dystopic future and (French) resistance genres.

One of the evil things I've done is made sure players can't play superhumans, at least not at first. Everyone's fairly ordinary. Many RPG gamers have a serious obsession with "being awesome" and I decided to put a stop to that. It wouldn't have fit in with the tone. Besides, if they don't like it, the "awesome" RPGers can play my other game where everyone gets to be a badass dragon, instead.

I'm pretty pleased with the setting concept and the rules, but making the PDF was much more fulfilling, because I couldn't get various things to work at first and, as a consequence, learned a little bit more about InDesign and Inkscape. The barbed wire model I whipped up in Bryce to create a page border turned out kind of sloppy, though.

I'm planning on re-editing the PDF and expanding/clarifying the rules a bit. When I'm done, I'll post a link.

It's Standard Operating Procedure to make fun of "Scooby Doo" and its odd approach to stories. Even when I was a kid, I knew there was something wrong with it, and I preferred other shows, but I still watched a lot of "Scooby Doo" in the early years and the "celebrity guest star" period (which I actually liked better, because I liked seeing Don Knotts, Tim Conway, and the Addams Family on the show more than I liked the show itself.)

However, after watching several episodes today with a four-year old and occasionally a toddler, I've come to understand more of what "Scooby Doo" does right, at least for certain age groups. For toddlers, it's easy: they like the dog. They don't care about anything on the cartoon at all, but when they see the dog, they go "WUH! WUH!" For four-year olds, the simple humor is easy to get and extremely funny (Shaggy and Scooby LOVE TO EAT! Ooops, Fred, Daphne and Velma accidentally scared them!) But also, there's lots of RUNNING. Running is exciting!

And really, it's educational. Our culture uses a lot o terms and analogies based on famous horror concepts -- ghosts, zombies, werewolves, vampires. "Scooby Doo" is a very non-threatening way to learn what those are, especially since it's NEVER a real monster. The four-year-old wasn't scared once; it was all just great fun.