Month: January 2005

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Sideways.

Over many, many bottles of product-placed wine, these four mis-connect, connect, disconnect, and reconnect.

The Daughter of Time.

What’s interesting about the novel isn’t what Grant discovers about the murder, but what he discovers about the production of history.

Jeez, isn’t that King back yet?

How much of this stuff can a person really take in before going into analeptic shock?

Raindrops keep falling on my head.

Sudden warmth and a heavy snowpack lead to lots of water everywhere: lying in puddles on the curb, flowing down gutters, dripping from my goddamn kitchen ceiling.

Floating along on the Internet Slush Pile.

I’m almost always interacting with the Web, yet I never think of it as media; in fact, I hardly ever think of it at all.

Non-multiplayer online games on Xbox Live.

I always think online gaming is a good idea, until I actually go out and try it.

I’m in over my head.

As the scene progresses, you feel that sinking feeling as our hero realizes that he’s way out of his depth: he’s unworthy, a phony, not even a pseudo-intellectual.

Films I might as well have skipped: Fahrenheit 9/11.

Josh’s Weblogging Rule #31: “When posting about a movie, don’t just link to another review and say ‘I agree!’”

Films I didn’t want to watch: The Passion of the Christ.

The parts of The Passion of the Christ that didn’t make me roll my eyes in irritation or close them in sleepy boredom made me avert them in disgust, and those parts made up a distressingly large portion of the movie.

Coming soon: the Nip/Tuck Game.

While my inner knee-jerk liberal wants to rail against a wave of corporate invasions in video games, the cynic in me just shrugs.

Holy Crapulent!

When it’s late, and I’m writing, and I’m stuck in mid-sentence, I often procrastinate by looking words up in the dictionary or thesaurus.

Firefly: Brief notes on half a show.

Even though the show contains plenty of po-mo formal trickery and became popular in the closed format of DVD, it exhibits some very traditional traits of television shows.

Viewtiful Joe 2 and my inability to learn from my mistakes.

VFX powers are useful not only because they boost your abilities and power, but because slowing down, zooming in, and replaying the action allows you to revel in the simple pleasures of wanton destruction. At least that’s how it feels when you actually get to destroy things.

Saved! from satire.

The thing that makes the film fall flat as satire is the same thing that makes it click for me: its unrepentant affection for its characters.

Alien Hominid. (PopMatters)

My review of Alien Hominid is now up at PopMatters.

Quitting shouldn’t be so much work.

Quitting is a purgative for those trapped in this wearying cycle of “work hard, play hard.” It’s about breaking down the binaries of work/leisure or office/home and finding an in-between space where those structures don’t define us, don’t govern every minute of our lives.

Seven simple resolutions for 2005.

This year, I’m giving up on vague directives and sticking to easy, well-defined goals that I can actually achieve.