6.30.2008

Doctor Who Themes

Library Porn

Quantum of Solace Teaser

6.28.2008

Warren Ellis on Writer's Block

"Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living."

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Hellboy II: The Golden Army

6.27.2008

Summer Beers, Pt 1

The Designated Players

6.26.2008

Leverage - Intro to the Team

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Me at FD4 Office

Me working. Or pretending to at least.

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Music - Mashups/Jazz-Rap

Downloaded The Grey Album the other day. Been listening to that a lot along with Paul's Boutique.





Also going old school with some Gangstarr and Guru Jazzmatazz.









Also some Buckshot LeFonque:

Music Evolution


Breakfast at Denny's



Some Cow Fonque? (Tea For the Vicar)

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Because it is true

"Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win."

Gary Lineker

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6.24.2008

4GW - Tonight's Reading

6.21.2008

Sunshine



Watched this last night. Not a perfect movie by any means, but still a very well done science fiction film.



I thought it captured some things very well. First off the crew was multinational. I wish they had let them keep their accents though, since any voyage of this would definately be a multinational crew. But still, nice to see it wasn't all white faces saving the planet.

I also really like the first two parts and the voyage. The film, to me at least, brought out what it would be like to be on this voyage. I wish this is where they had continued to go instead of bringing in the crazy captain from the first voyage. To me the biggest danger ont his mission would be the crew either realizing it is nothing more than a suicide mission or the crew simply going mad. That would have made a more entertaining film, madness versus reality; and how these people deal with it.



I Am Kloot - Avenue of Hope Lyrics

Along the avenue of hope
The footsteps falter, the fingers grope
and days, stretch out, beneath the sun
No-one's born, and no-one dies, no-one lives, so no-one cries
and we wait to see just what we will become

Don't let me falter, don't let me ride
Don't let the earth in me subside
Let me see just who I will become

You're like the clouds in my home town
You just grow fat and hang around
and you're days stretch out beneath the sun

and you don't live, you don't die, you don't love so you don't cry
and we wait, to see just what we will become

Don't let me borrow, don't let me bring
Don't let me wallow, don't make me sing
Let me see just who I will becomee

Don't let me falter, don't let me hide
Don't let someone else decide
Just who or what I will become

Don't let them borrow, don't let them bring
Don't let them wallow, don't make them sing
Let them stretch out beneath the sun

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6.20.2008

Leverage Trailer

Fringe Trailer

I love this trailer:

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How I Am Feeling Today

From Warren Ellis' interlude at Freakangels today:

And I’m out. What I’m going to leave you with is something I wrote a few years ago, as an answer to a FAQ. See you next week.

How It Works

I still get asked with appalling regularity “where my ideas come from.”

Here’s the deal. I flood my poor ageing head with information. Any information. Lots of it. And I let it all slosh around in the back of my brain, in the part normal people use for remembering bills, thinking about sex and making appointments to wash the dishes.

Eventually, you get a critical mass of information. Datum 1 plugs into Datum 2 which connects to Datum 3 and Data 4 and 5 stick to it and you’ve got a chain reaction. A bunch of stuff knits together and lights up and you’ve got what’s called “an idea”.

And for that brief moment where it’s all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can’t be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein’s brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.

That is what has happened to me tonight. I am beaming Sex Rays across the world and my brain is all lit up with Holy Fire. If I felt like it, I could shag a million nuns and destroy their faith in Christ.

From my chair.

See, this is the good bit about writing. It’s what keeps you going. It’s the wild rush of “shit, did I think of that?” with all kinds of weird chemicals shunting around your brain and ideas and images and moments and storyforms all opening up snapsnapsnap in your mind, a mass of new and unrealised possibilities.

It’s ten past two in the morning, and I’m completely wired, caught up in the new thing, shivering and laughing and glowing in the dark. Just as well it’s the middle of the night. No-one would be safe from me right now. I could read their minds and take over their heartbeats with a glare.

Faster than the speed of anyone.

That’s how it works.

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6.17.2008

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Teaser Trailer

Serac Adventure Film School

Something I am thinking about. Problem is the time. The money I could figure out, but the time would be the killer. I tend to do this when I am off. Think of schools for filmmaking.

I should just take the money I am thinking of spending on this and go make my surf movie I want to make.

Yes whining. Only been off work four days and I am whining.

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6.08.2008

When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions

This is great. It never gets old to me hearing the history of the space program. Some of these stories I know by heart. Some are brand new. But they deserve to be heard over and over again until we once again find our passion for exploration.

Sunday nights at 8 pm CST on Discovery through June 22.


Check the trailer here.

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6.07.2008

NERF Steampunk Guns

6.03.2008

Warren Ellis on Mars Colonisation

From Warren Ellis' site:

Bending Mars

Post #5990 by Warren Ellis on June 3rd, 2008 in shivering sands

Is putting humans on Mars important? Yes. Humans need land to live on, and, in a dynamic environment, they need land to move to. Closed systems are bad because they remove options. A single planet is a closed system. And the thing about land is, as a history teacher of mine used to say, they don’t make it anymore.

Put aside the grim meathook future of our coming environmental doom for a moment. What if something drops on us? What if some natural freak event like a sequence of volcanic incidents drops us into faux-nuclear winter? We’ve come close to that before, in the 1880’s. What if something no-one ever thought of happens to make human life no longer viable on this planet? Do we just shrug and say fuckit?

I believe that exploration is necessary to the human spirit. But even if you don’t share that particular delusion, I think most people would agree that any kind of extinction is bad. Except maybe for dogs.

Mars is the best local option for setting up a colony and, eventually, a second life for humanity. It’s a bit of a crap option: no magnetic field to speak of, cold as hell, and currently no guarantees of usable water. But Venus is a shithole, Mercury’s a suicide trip and the Jovian system is a radiation trap. Forget everything you heard about asteroid habitats, it’s bullshit. Right now, it’s Mars or an extrasolar planet, and an exoplanet is going to stay out of our reach, barring a dramatic breakthrough in propulsion engineering, for at least fifty years.

There has long been a movement to preserve Mars. It’s said that terraforming Mars is nothing but another wart extruded from the human imperialist tendency, and it should remain the equivalent of a national park, unspoiled. The same people have said that if we go to Mars, we should ”do it with class,” eschewing nuclear-drive options.

I’m currently working on a project written from, if you like, the pro-Mars Id. The chances are good that in fact there is no life on Mars beyond the odd super-tough bacterium. And while I did indeed just say that no kind of extinction is good, it should also be pointed out that giving up a bolthole for human breeding pairs — which are, make no mistake, the stakes on a Martian colonisation drive — on the basis that we might kill something less substantial and self-aware than a cough is no way to run a railroad.

So my characters — and the dark side of my conscience — say what are we waiting for? Let us now bend Mars to our will (and I’m aware of the overtones of both ”run a railroad” and ”will”) and fix the place up for human habitation. Let’s cover the bastard in GM lichen and bugs, thicken up the atmosphere, drop a few nukes on Tharsis, do everything we can think of, fast and dirty, because the universe is hiding the stopwatch from us and we don’t know how much time we’ve got left. Let’s get a bit of air pressure happening, see if we can force out some of that water, do what it takes to at least get some overground stations into a safety zone.

Because it’s not doing us any good as a national park. And we are barely clinging to the surface of our world. And not through any fault of our own. Successful human life was a fluke on this planet even before we started poisoning ourselves. Playing the “we need to learn how to look after our planet before we go to another” lament is utterly beside the point. Think about your favourite art, your favourite memories, the best things people ever did. Does that have to go away because some people want Mars to always look like that quarry in Wales where they always shot DOCTOR WHO episodes in the 1970’s?

Fuck the Martian bugs, one of my characters says. In forty years I want my grandkids to email me from a .mars address. It’s not like we have to hunt whales or give a Tasmanian Devil face cancer to do it. It’s just sitting there. Why not bend it?

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