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[26 Mar 2009|02:21pm] |
So. Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. Have you seen it? It's great.
It's a british show from a few years back. In it, comedian Matthew Holness portrays his character of horror writer, Garth Marenghi, an incredibly prolific author who, in his own words, 'is the only person who's written more books than he's read'.
The conceit of the show is that back in the 80s, the fictional Marenghi produced, directed, wrote, and starred in "Garth Marenghi's Darkplace", a bbc series that went six episodes before being cancelled. So each episode of the show is presented with commentary by Marenghi and the other actors involved.
It is hilarious and very very clever. It's pretty much a show in a show and fairly hard to describe.
Sadly, it hasn't been released in the states. But, as I am made of 97% pure love, I have scoured YouTube and put together a complete playlist of the series. http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B56AC3AD3AF2D4F6
I post it here because I know that most of my friends would dig it cause we're all messed up in the same ways.
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[12 Mar 2009|04:45pm] |
I am on the twitter.com/AtomicTao
It's kind of cool. I see it as the half-step between emails and instant messenger clients.
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[09 Mar 2009|03:36pm] |
Just saw Watchmen. (Spoilerinos ahoy)
Zach Snyder did not ruin it. As one of the few people in the circles I run in who severely disliked 300, (not gonna say I hated it, but I did not enjoy it) I was pleasantly surprised by this. I liked it overall, but rather than any kind of half-hearted review that I'll likely get bored of writing halfway through, I shall instead make a little list of points that occurred to me over the course of the movie.
-I was not expecting to like the soundtrack as much as I did. I don't mean the ambient orchestral stuff, I mean the honest-to-god-real-life songs they used. From 'The Times They Are A-Changin'' with the opening credit montage to "All Along The Watchtower" near the end, I thought it was really well done. I thought about going and picking up the soundtrack, then I realized that the reason I liked the soundtrack so much was because I liked the songs on it, and I already had most of them anyway. Almost embarassing! (As an aside, I LOVED 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World' playing fairly quietly in the background of one of Veidt's scenes. The song isn't even on the official soundtrack, but it was a cool little aural cue.)
-Casting was pretty good, no complaints. Rorschach was, in my opinion, pretty dead on in voice and appearance and demeanor.
-But because the portrayal was so dead on, I felt a bit let down when it came to his backstory flashbacks. I can understand truncating the psychiatrist scenes: pacing those would have been tricky in a movie already almost 3 hours long. I hope that maybe some of the missing elements pop up on a DVD: the Kitty Genovese reference to show why he did the hero thing in the first place; why he wore the mask ("Black and white, always changing, never mixing into grey").
Again, spoileroonies ahoy.
What did bug me was the way they portrayed that moment of his psychotic break. Yes, he killed the kidnapper. In the film version, he takes the cleaver and hacks the guy's head after chaining him to the stove. Yes, he's a crezzy murderer, we get it.
In the comic, he chains the guy to the stove and puts a hacksaw next to him. (It might have been the cleaver, I don't have it handy at the moment to verify.) He sets the place on fire around him and lays out the kidnapper's options: hack his own hand off to escape the flames, or die in the fire.
I can't quite put my finger on why this change bothers me, but it seems very wrong to me. Rorshach is a fairly complex character and I feel like when they got the chance to shed a little light on him, they backed off. Why not leave it in? Time issues? They could have shaved a couple minutes off one of the (vaguely laughably Cinemaxish) sex scenes if they needed a few more minutes.
Other than a few other quibbles (quite a few of which were quibbles I had with the source material anyway) I largely enjoyed it the movie, though.
And somewhere, Alan Moore broods crankily on his onyx throne and smothers another angel in his beard.
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[09 Jan 2009|01:06pm] |
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I really want Omega Beams to atomize Joe Quesada sometimes. The lack of consideration that Marvel has for the retailers that sell their product is astounding.
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[09 Dec 2008|11:25pm] |
Another day, another attempt at a better job.
Sacrifice an extra virgin for me today.
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[03 Dec 2008|11:27pm] |
 Dear Santa...
Dear Santa,
This year I've been busy!
Last Tuesday I helped ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) audzilla_ across the street (6 points). In August I punched valinorwanderer in the arm (-10 points). In April I committed genocide... Sorry about that, metyldapryde (-5000 points). Last Sunday I ruled Asscrackistan as a cruel and heartless dictator (-700 points). Last Saturday I invaded Iraq, broke it, and couldn't glue it back together before Mom got home (-1012 points).
Overall, I've been naughty (-6716 points). For Christmas I deserve a moldy sandwich!
Sincerely,
atomictao |
So, helping someone across the street doesn't make up for genocide or megalomania?
What the hell?
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| Rar |
[11 Oct 2008|07:27pm] |
I have a new idea for a novel series to make me ultra rich:
"Sexy Woman Fights the Supernatural".
I figure I can write about one thousand of these paperbacks and be set for life.
Also, apparently Terry Goodkind is having a cheap-ass sub-Hercules/Xena syndicated fantasy series based on his books?
That's wonderful.
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[24 Sep 2008|07:32pm] |
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Fuck you, variant covers. Fuck you to PIECES.
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[18 Sep 2008|03:23pm] |
From shepdog :
If you're on my friends list, I want to know 36 things about you. I don't care if we never talk, or if we already know everything about each other. Short and sweet is fine... you're on my list, so I want to know you better!
Comment here and repost a blank one on your own journal.
( cut for great justice )
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[12 Sep 2008|11:24pm] |
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"I wouldn't say I buy it, Liz. Let's just say I'm window shopping... and right now, there's a half-price sale on 'weird'."
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[11 Sep 2008|02:27pm] |
To follow up on my previous post about the current generation of Forum Debaters--
I decided to play a little drinking game in which I went to the forums attached to a website I visit on a regular basis. I told myself I would take a shot of Tully whenever one of the twerps mouthing off decided to defend a weak or not-well-thought-out opinion by using the phrase 'straw man' like some some Killing Word that should end the argument immediately.
When I came to twelve hours later, I was wearing a scuba suit and was apparently the assistant to the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka.
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| remind me |
[07 Sep 2008|04:48pm] |
Why do I read forums again? Any forums, anywhere?
My intentions are noble... I generally go to forums because I get in my head that I might find some intelligent discourse or information that I find useful or interesting. But then I forget that people on the internet are, by and large, idiots who are intoxicated by the alchemy of anonymity combined with an audience.
The board I just retreated from... hooo, boy. I am convinced that the current generation of Great Forum Debaters keep a copy of Debating for Dummies by the keyboard. I counted, no lie, 20 uses of the word 'strawman' in one page of 20 posts. They were so busy picking apart the responses of those with dissenting opinions that the POINT of the thread was pretty much obliterated. Everyone was taking everything very personally, and after a couple more pages, mothers were being insulted. Who lost the debate?
ALL OF US.
(It is worth pointing out that this drama was taking place on a forum about a video game. So you know that they're talking about the important stuff.)
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[22 Aug 2008|02:33pm] |
So, after walking through my local Barnes and Noble and seeing table after table PILED with hardcover books either lionizing or condemning both presidential nominees, I thought to myself "Man, you gotta get in on that action."
So, I'm going to write a book for 2012, entitled "Whichever Candidate I'm Not Voting For Rapes Donkeys".
Within its pages the reader will plow through atrocity upon atrocity that the Candidate has committed, above and beyond the eponymous act. Everything from the Candidate's involvement in the Ebola Monkey Orphanage Scandal to the Candidate's infamous 'Funeral Home Sex Romp' Video.
The best part about this book is that it doesn't matter who reads it, or who they're voting for... it will always tell the reader "yep, you're voting for the right Candidate. The other Candidate once burned down an entire rain forest in order to get high off the smoke of the ultra-rare Cancer Cure plants (see Chapter 76: 'Dude, I was so wasted last night')."
The back cover will feature a tasteful photo of me in the wilderness, with two leashed German Shepherds, and wearing a tri-cornered hat.
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| Greetings, program |
[01 Aug 2008|08:33pm] |
I have had like five people email me with the Wolverine teaser trailer they showed at Comic con.
Wolvering is badass, blah blah blah, look, it's Deadpool, blah blah blah, oooooo hey it's Gambit, blah blah retch blah.
That's all well and good, but this is much more important news:
Tron 2. Or, as it is apparently called, Tr2n.
http://io9.com/5029516/tr2n-rips-your-eyeballs-and-light-cycles-off
The fact that no one watching the SDCC news didn't send me anything about this and yet flooded my inbox with the Wolverine Goodtime Fanwankery Movie shows how much I need to revamp my network of friends. They don't know me AT ALL.
In other news, the Watchmen trailer was awesome, though a recent interview I read with director Zach Snyder makes me want to push him down the fucking stairs. I can see why he seems to gravitate to Alan Moore and Frank Miller projects, he is so freaking full of himself that I'm surprised he doesn't form some kind of ego singularity.
In the interview he goes to great lengths to badmouth other comic book superhero movies (he was mostly talking about the hugely successful Iron Man and Dark Knight here) and everyone that made those movies successful (that would be us, my friends, the fans that paid for their tickets), suggesting that his is the only movie that isn't part of the 'machine' that his vision is pure and will rend all of us hopeless fanpersons apart.
Mr Snyder, you adapted 300, which was essentially Frank Miller drawing a picture book loosely based on a real piece of historical fiction which was itself based on a real historical event except he added a bunch of fun Millerisms such as a deformed freak and some nekkid boobies. You did not invent sunlight. And you had nothing to do with the production of Tron. So get over yourself.
If your movie is successful, it will only be because you hewed as close to the source material as you could, not because of your original vision. You have a scene by scene BLUEPRINT of how to do this movie, it's there on the pages of the comic.
Don't get me wrong. I want him to do a good job. I want this to be a kickass movie that helps further cement comics as a legit form of mainstream entertainment. I just.... don't want him to blather on about how much of an anti-establishment rebel he is and how everyone else is a part of the machine. He should have gotten past all that when he got out of high school.
I'm going to avoid reading any more interviews with this guy, because I don't want my dislike for him to get in the way of this movie.
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| Fingers X-ed. |
[04 Jun 2008|07:44pm] |
So I have applied for two different jobs at the same company. I'd be really good at both jobs. One job, I *really* want. The other, I would be perfectly okay with as I just really want to work with this company and the opportunity to advance within it is very appealing.
So I'm asking for some fuzzy positive thoughts directed in my direction for this. Maybe some lava sacrifices, what have you. I'd really appreciate it. :)
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| Indiana Jones and the Something of Something. |
[22 May 2008|01:34pm] |
My spoiler free opinion: If you're an Indy fan, see it. Don't worry about George Lucas kid-ifying it or anything. As all Indy movies, there are some pretty gruesome deaths. The dialogue was crisp and funny. Harrison Ford is showing his age, yes, but that is actually a point of the story. Its not something that is paid lip service to and then forgotten. I read another review that said that in this outing, Indy seemed to rely a lot more on his wits and craftiness than pure physicality, and that's accurate, in my opinion.
I thought it was a fun, entertaining movie. Its not Raiders (nothing will ever be), but its neck and neck with Last Crusade, and Temple of Doom (which I feel *is* the most kid-ified Indy movie, personally) is still at the bottom of the stack.
If you're an Indy fan, see it. Its a fun ride.
( Click for a more spoilerific analysis. )
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[15 May 2008|11:55pm] |
Upcoming movie trailer seen at a recent theater outing:
Former Saturday Night Live star who has long since worn out his welcome stars in a movie in which he affects an accent, hams his way through a script which is primarily a delivery system for fart/poop/sex jokes. By the end of this movie he finds some form of acceptance he was lacking at the start of the film, and on the way ends up in bed with some hottie who wouldn't give him the time of day if he wasn't the star of the movie.
So... am I talking about the latest Adam Sandler movie, or the latest Mike Myers movie? Hmmmmm?
(Trick question: I was talking about both of them.)
I was complaining about these movies today and I was called a movie snob in a derogatory fashion.
What's wrong with being a movie snob, I ask you?
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[10 May 2008|01:19pm] |
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music |
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"Zetsubuo Billy" - Maximum the Hormone |
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I'm sitting at work. One of my customers just pulled out a block of colby-jack cheese and started eating it like a candy bar.
Not a larger piece of cheese that has been cut down to smaller-cracker friendly sizes... no, a fresh-from-the-market, shrink-wrapped hunk of cheese that he opened and began gobbling down huge Snickers-like chunks.
Wow.
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