Category: Entertainment

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After a Friday spent relaxing at home (no after-Thanksgiving Day sales, unless you count skimming the recommendations at Amazon), we drove up to LA to see the play Equivocation at the Geffen Playhouse. The drive was astonishingly fast (everyone must have been either at home or at the mall!), so we had plenty of time to wander Westwood looking for someplace to eat.

We ended up at Yamato, a Japanese restaurant that I’d definitely eat at again! I did wonder about the original purpose of the building, since it clearly hadn’t been a restaurant to start with. One of us spotted a plaque outside identifying it as The Westwood Building, built in 1929. Among other things, it did include a bank, which was one of my guesses.

After dinner we went looking for places we could get dessert and/or coffee after the show. The two Coffee Beans were both going to close by 9:00, but the Starbucks was open until midnight, and Diddy Riese was open until 1:00. We stopped in at Rocky Mountain Chocolate factory to get some sugar-free chocolate for Katie, and then made our way over to the theater.

Edit: I’ve moved my review of the show to its own page.

After the show we walked down to Diddy Riese, but the line was long enough it looked like it might take an hour just to get ice cream. By which time coffee wouldn’t be an option, unless they had some there. So we ducked over to Starbucks for a half hour or so, then drove home.

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I found out about the #starwarsbandnames meme from @BadAstronomer. It’s pretty self-explanatory: Take the name of a real music group and alter it to make it a Star Wars reference.

Some of my contributions:

  • Jefferson X-Wing (I figured it sounded better than Jefferson Death Starship, though someone later suggested Jefferson Star Destroyer, which is better.)
  • Obi-Wan Folds Five (This one actually got a retweet!)
  • Red Five for Fighting

And Katie’s (Posted on my account because hers isn’t publicly visible):

  • Snowspeeder Patrol
  • Augustanakin
  • Seven Mary 3PO

There’s a ton of entries out there, and it’s still going. Some of my favorites others have posted:

  • pipboy2009: Naboo Fighters
  • DevDell: The Qui-Gon Jinn Blossoms
  • treelobsters: Alderaan Deraan
  • wk_marshall: Peter, Paul, and Mara Jade

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Thoughts on some movies I’ve seen in the last ~2 months.

Seen for the First Time

  • The Big Lebowski – I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. It should have been funny, but was just tedious.
  • Slumdog Millionaire – Fascinating, both in its exploration of poverty in India and in the theme of showing how seemingly small and unrelated events can all contribute to someone’s future.
  • Superman/Batman: Public Enemies – Had its moments, but overall was pretty much a standard superhero film.
  • Clerks 2 – Kevin Smith seems to hit about 50/50 with me. I loved the first Clerks, hated Mallrats (except for the “Jedi Mind Trick” payoff), liked Chasing Amy and Dogma, but Jay and Silent Bob was mostly annoying (though it had its moments). Clerks 2 was mostly gross-out humor wrapped around a Broken Aesop in which the happy ending is for the indecisive guy to let the a—hole make his decisions for him.
  • Battlestar Galactica: The Plan – They did a decent job of trying to pull together a consistent story from elements that were originally unconnected, but it still ended up playing too much like a clip show — especially the segments in the Colonial fleet. The segments on Caprica worked much better, though I did find it interesting that they re-cast the Cylon infiltrators as a tiny, isolated guerrilla force rather than the tip of an iceberg of espionage. It relied way too much on the audience remembering what happened in the series.
  • Liar, Liar – Pretty much what I remember from the previews, except longer. Funny. Worth seeing at least once.
  • Synecdoche, New York – A metafictional examination of living life vs. imitating it that doesn’t quite live up to the scope of its ambition…but then, part of the point of the movie is that it can’t. (Note: not a good choice for watching while eating.)
  • Evil Dead 2 – Nice camera work, but I’m not a horror fan. Also, this makes absolutely no sense as a sequel, but works just fine as a remake. You can explain Ash’s actions at the beginning with evil-enforced amnesia, but the timeline with the professor’s discovery of the book just doesn’t mesh with the first movie. I posted some thoughts on Army of Darkness last week.

Rewatched

  • Up – Second time, watched in a second-run theater. Holds up, even without 3D. Bring tissue.
  • Batman & Mr. Freeze: Subzero – still a better Mr. Freeze movie than Batman And Robin. Not that it would be hard.
  • Coraline – Third time, but first time on small screen or in 2D. Still works, though of course not nearly as impressive visually. Still, great animation & story. Kind of like Up in that way.
  • Conan the Destroyer – The first movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger was very good and holds up well almost three decades later. This one was almost self-parody.

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My iPod ran down its charge over the weekend, and I had to plug in the car charger this morning and start over at the beginning of a playlist. I usually leave it on shuffle on a reaaaaaally long list so I get lots of different songs.

It started up with “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Bohemian Polka,” which was a fun, off-kilter start to the week. When it followed up with “Jurassic Park,” I didn’t think much of it. Twofers by artist, and even by album, aren’t that uncommon.

When “Living in the Fridge” started up, I got a little suspicious.

Sure enough, when I stopped the car and checked, shuffle was set to “off.” I figure the playlist must have been sorted by album the last time I synced, with Alapalooza the first on the list.

I’m still not sure whether it switched off shuffle when the battery ran down, or I just had it off before and didn’t notice because the last playlist I was listening to was pre-shuffled. Still, it was — appropriately — weird.

The Weird Al/T-Rex silhouette from Alapalooza.

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A few minutes ago I was trying to fix sound on my Linux box. Nothing would play, until Katie heard it beep to notify me of a new Twitter message. I closed Twhirl and suddenly my music player worked. The song lined up? Vertical Horizon’s “All is Said and Done.” The first line of the song? “I need you to hear me.” That gave us both a good laugh.

I thought a major point of PulseAudio was to let applications share the sound card cleanly. *grumble* Sound worked fine before Fedora switched. I can’t even blame it on a bleeding-edge distribution, since from what I hear, Ubuntu has similar problems.

At least now I know (sort of) why it stopped again after applying the Complete guide to fix PulseAudio and video/audio VLC Media Player issues.

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A few weeks ago, I mentioned that a lot of the indie comics I read don’t have fixed schedules. In a few cases, it goes beyond that, and the comics are, as near as I can tell, totally stalled — in some cases for years. Maddeningly, there are a few that are stalled just one issue from the conclusion!

Planetary #27 was one of these, but the epilogue issue finally came out last month. I was beginning to wonder whether Ignition City #5 was headed the same way, once it got to three months after the fourth issue, but the last issue finally came out in October.

Currently, I’m waiting for…

Gemini #5

Gemini #4(Image) This five-issue miniseries from Jay Faerber and Jon Sommariva about a super-hero whose secret identity doesn’t know he’s a super-hero (sort of like that TV show with Christian Slater last year) started off solidly, then quickly went off the rails scheduling-wise. I didn’t even realize how late it had gotten until I looked for it a few days ago and found a reference to the original solicitation: It was supposed to wrap in September 2008! The longest gap was between #3 and #4 (which came out this past July).

Status: The artist is currently working on the issue…along with a bunch of other projects.

Update (March 2011) Still not finished. According to Jay Faerber, “Jon Sommariva has the script, so it’s in his hands now.” (Image.com forums))

Update (April 2026) To the best of my knowledge, this was never completed.

Robert Jordan’s New Spring #8 – COMPLETED! (May 2010)

Robert Jordan's New Spring #1(Dabel Bros.) This 8-issue miniseries adapting the Wheel of Time prequel launched in August 2005, produced by Dabel Bros. and published by Red Eagle Entertainment. After a couple of issues it got to be very sporadic as the studio and publisher started to feud, and it ceased publication entirely after #5 came out in early 2006.

Update: This got complicated enough that I’ve moved it to its own page.

The Oz/Wonderland Chronicles #4 – COMPLETED! (April 2011)

Oz/Wonderland Chronicles #4 (Preview)(BuyMeToys.com) Simple premise: Alice from Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz have grown up and left behind the worlds they think were simply childhood fantasies, and are now roommates in (IIRC) Chicago (Their other roommates include Wendy from Peter Pan and an obvious analog of Susan from the Narnia books). Of course, their pasts were real, and now they’re being called upon to return to those worlds and help them. The four-issue miniseries was coming out about once a year starting in 2005, but it’s been at least two years since issue #3.

Status: They released a preview of #4 at Chicago Comic-Con this year, and the website says it’ll be out “early 2010.”

Update (June 2010): I’ve found several stores listing an August 25, 2010 release date, but the official website doesn’t say anything. We’ll see.

Update (April 2011): The fourth issue finally came out on April 13, 2011 — three years after the previous issue and six since the first. Meanwhile, they launched a sequel, “Jack and Cat Tales,” before they actually finished the first series.

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