Archive for 'tv' Category

2008.07.30

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Alright, I have to admit I was skeptical at first. Some time ago I saw mention of this weird Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and I was like, Huh? I read mention how awesome it was, how amazing it was, la la la. Well, I finally said, “Fuck it,” and went to the website to check it out. I can watch it online? For free? OK.

Only I got there too late. They’d taken it down. It was now only available from the iTunes Store. Hmmm… Not the kind of thing I would normally do, but I went and looked and it was $4 for the show. All ~45 minutes of it. I spend $4 for a couple songs. 45 minutes of story and a load of songs? Guided by whim, I bought it. (Apparently you can watch it for free on Hulu).

I’ve watched it four times now.

I love it.

You will, too.

If you love superhero stories = YES
If you love origin stories = YES
If you love musicals = YES
If you love the geek = YES
If you love something that twists = YES
If you breathe air = YES

Seriously, I didn’t think I would like this show quite so much. I thought I might watch it once or twice, but for four bucks it wouldn’t be any real loss. I can see myself watching this again and again, and every time I’ve seen it I notice more nuance and detail I never though I would. Get it. Seriously.

For more check out the out the officially unofficial fan site and, once membership is open, join the Evil League of Evil.

5 Comments | Catergorized: geek   tv

2008.03.21

BSG Season 4 on 4/4

Battlestar Galactica’s final season kicks off on April 4th and I can’t wait. And to whet our appetites the SciFi Channel has been blitzing the media with all kinds of print and TV ads and other items, such as this summary or seasons one, two and three in eight minutes. Though it doesn’t do the show justice by itself it’s quite funny and covers so-o much ground. So many plot lines are covered and yet not even all of them! The cast of BSG even went on David Letterman to present the Top Ten Reasons to Watch the New Season of Battlestar Galactica. I think #6 and #5 are the best…

So who has a huge TV and wants to host a Galactica party for the premier?

No Comments | Catergorized: geek   tv

2007.11.12

Battlestar Galactica: Razor

On November 24th, just a short ways away, SciFi Channel will be premiering Battlestar Galactica: Razor, a two hour movie that tells the story of the Battlestar Pegasus and her crew. This has been expected to be filler to tide everyone over until Season Four, the final season of the show, gets underway sometime in 2008.

However tonight I just got back from a movie theater showing of Razor with Banana Boy and let me tell you, it kicked some serious butt. Spoilers follow so stop now if you aren’t into it; just be satisfied that you will really enjoy the show!

Read the rest of this entry…

1 Comment | Catergorized: geek   movies   san francisco   tv

2007.10.30

BSG: Razor in Theaters

If you’re a fan of the new Battlestar Galactica series you, too, are probably going crazy with this immense dry spell before Season Four starts. SciFi Channel is filling the gaps with mini episodes like they did before Season Three but the current excitement is about a two hour for-TV movie called Razor. It will fill out some of the backstory for many of the major characters and also explain what happened to the old Cylons those familiar with the original Galactica series know. The movie will premier on television on November 24th.

However, you could have the opportunity to see Razor on November 12th in a movie theater by going to this site and registering. It’s only showing in limited cities, but the Bay Area is one of them (others are Boston, Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia and Seattle). San Francisco proper was already filled up by the time I checked, but I will be going to the 10PM showing in San Mateo. If you’re interested sign up and if you need a ride let me know!

Who’s coming?!?

No Comments | Catergorized: geek   san francisco   tv

2007.09.23

4×4 Ayes

So Jason tagged me with one of these things where you answer all kinds of questions and then tag others in the hope that they reveal as much information as you do so your answers aren’t quite so embarrassing when you look at them the day after you post them. Jason’s post is a series of four answers for various personal stats. My post title pays homage to the nature of fours, his post title, the fact that I didn’t post anything for Talk Like a Pirate Day, and an old anime called 3×3 Eyes. I’m kind of proud of how much reference is in that title. :)

Four jobs I have had (current job excluded):
I’ll make these approximately in order from the first jobs that I consider “real jobs” since I’ve had far too many jobs in my life…

1. Burger Flipper. McDonalds. My parents made a deal with me in high school that I could drive the car but I had to pay for the gas and maintenance. Not knowing what else to do I took a job in fast food just like, it seems, much of America has at that age.
2. Industrial Drill Press Operator. Haynes Engineering and Manufacturing. For two summers I worked for my Uncle in Detroit as a drill press operator. We made many of the pumps that Detroit automakers used on their assembly lines. It was hard, dirty work but I learned a lot about honest work under the watchful eyes of my Uncle and the guys in the shop.
3. No title. The Front Room. I don’t know if all of you are old enough to remember, but coffee shops used to be almost non-existent. There were no vente, grande, or short coffees. Certainly no frappucino sweet drinks. Despite that we were on the bleeding edge and actually had imported coffee. Ironically I didn’t drink coffee at the time.
4. Currency Exchanger. Cekobanka. My only qualifications for this job were I could count in a couple languages and speak English natively. The job rather sucked but the people I worked with were united in their bitterness in the job and scorn for the tourists.

Four Films I have Watched Again and Again:
I’m going to divide this up into chunks of time since, really, I watch too many movies. This is probably the only part of this post where I could go on and on and on without let up, and even the answers I give will seem extremely limited. I won’t be happy with any of the answers alone…

1. High School. Highlander. I couldn’t even tell you how many times we watched this. For quite a long time it was almost a weekly ritual. There can be only one!
2. College. The Princess Bride and Heathers. Two of the most quotable movies in my life for a really long time. Eskimo! Another good one from this time was Dangerous Liasons.
3. Early San Francisco. The Matrix and Starship Troopers. Although The Matrix has sort of dropped off the radar after its sequels came out and I got disillusioned with it, Starship Troopers will still come out when Mookee and I are drinking. Man, we drank a lot of Weinhards beer watching these…
4. Late San Francisco. The Fifth Element and About a Boy. I have quite a large collection of DVDs at this point, and for some reason whenever I feel stuck on what I want to watch I keep coming to these two. There are tons of other movies I’ll watch again and again, but these two keep drawing me back.

Four Places I Have Lived:
I’ve grown up moving a lot. Comes from my Dad being in the military. Until I came to San Francisco, in fact, I hadn’t stayed anywhere more than a couple years. So here are a few of my favorites.

1. Seoul, Korea. We lived here the first time in my preteen years. It was a brilliant time when our family pulled together. I consider my years extremely formative and can see so much of who I am today coming from those three years.
2. Athens, Ohio. This is where I went to college. First relationships, life long friends, and loads of stories as we all started discovering our first tastes of independence.
3. Prague, Czech Republic. Finally out of college I went to Prague. There’s so much that happened there I don’t even know what to say. So I won’t.
4. San Francisco, California. I had a hard time picking between here and Washington, DC, but I have to choose SF. I’ve been here 10 years this month which is more than twice as long as anywhere I’ve ever lived before. For those who know me that speaks volumes.

Four Shows I Love to Watch:
This is the hardest one for me to answer because I don’t watch television. Seriously. So many of these will be “expired” shows. I think each of my shows depended hugely on their ensemble cast. There is no mistake that they are all science fiction, too. Honorable mention to Stargate.

1. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I loved this show. I think this is one of the very first American shows that had an angry black male in the lead role. It also had an angry Klingon, but that’s another story.
2. Space: Above and Beyond. This, along with the next entry, are two shows that were given only (merely?) a single season yet I thought were amazing. S:AaB took war into space with all its ugliness, heroism, humanism, and reality. I wish they’d been given a chance to at least end the series properly.
3. Firefly. What a show. While it started kind of awkwardly it sucked me in and didn’t let go. The idiots at Fox television made such a huge mistake in cancelling this and S:AaB above.
4. Battlestar Galactica, old and new. I love these. I remember being allowed to stay up and watch the original series with my parents. I think it was the first show we ever watched as a family. And the new series… Well, if you’ve been reading this blog at all you know what a huge fan I am.

Four Places I Have Been on Vacation:
I haven’t had a lot of real vacations in my life. I’m not much of a vacation kind of guy. Aside from yearly trips up to Tahoe to snowboard, here are a few of my more memorable trips.

1. Okinawa, Japan. My Dad, brother and I went to Okinawa when we were stationed in Korea the first time. My brother and I were so bloody excited to eat at a McDonalds again, much to Dad’s chagrin, but really, the whole trip was amazing. The place was so shockingly green in color…
2. Chejudo, Korea. We went one summer break from college when I was back in Korea. The island is well and truly one of the most beautiful places on Earth and almost completely unknown outside of Korea and Japan.
3. Oahu, Hawaii. Annemone and I visited my brother and his family when they were stationed at Pearl Harbor and went around the island. I loved visiting but I don’t think I could ever live there; too insular (which is quite an appropriate word if you know Latin).
4. Paris, France and Prague, Czech Republic. Though part of my trip earlier this summer was for work, I did take some time off and fell in love with Europe all over again.

Four of my Favorite Foods:
I’m not really a

1. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. For years as a kid this is what I had on my birthday every year. I will still eat a whole box of it every other week or so…
2. Steak. Almost any kind of steak. Mmmm… meat.
3. Chocolate covered cherries. These things are like crack to me. I’m eating some now.
4. Lasagna. I don’t know what it is about lasagna. Amazing. Safeway makes an amazing vegetarian lasagna. I’m not a vegetarian by any stretch but this stuff is addictive. I’ve even gotten friends hooked on it.

Four of my Favorite Drinks:

1. Jolt Cola. I wish this stuff were more widely available out here. I’d drink it to the exclusion of almost anything else.
2. Coffee. Love it. Live it.
3. Fermented and unfermented red grape. I love red wine, almost any kind of varietal. Also in the last year I’ve been drinking gallon on gallon of grape juice. It’s actually helped me cut the amount of Coke I drink dramatically.
4. Coca Cola. I do still drink Coke, though. I used to drink tons of it (since Jolt is hard to find) but in the past few years I just have some with lunch. Sadly (?) I don’t even always finish the bottle I start anymore.

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now:

1. Paris.
2. Prague.
3. New Zealand.
4. Asleep.

Four Bloggers I’m Tagging:
Let’s see if I can break the bad luck I have getting others to take this up…

1. Carlos Costa at Population Statistic. Let’s see how adorkable his lists are. :)
2. Kevin at Humble Tidbits of Vacuity. I can’t wait to hear more about his vacations.
3. Mr. Brown at Brown That Banana. Really I just want to see what pictures he uses.
4. Banana Boy over at Banana Land. Nothing to do with Mr. Brown’s blog. I keep hoping he’ll do one of these.

7 Comments | Catergorized: college   dc   family   food-drink   friends   korea   life   movies   paris   prague   san francisco   tahoe   tv   work

2007.09.17

System of the Moon

I got two things done this weekend. Well, more than two but I’m not counting laundry. I watched the series From the Earth to the Moon and then Apollo 13, and I finished Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and System of the World). Amazing stuff.

As lately I’ve been in a space mode I thought I’d notch it up a bit and pick up a few movies about us going there. I’d seen From the Earth to the Moon when it first aired on HBO back in 1998. I was really impressed with the show. It was tragic, triumphant and honest. Apollo 13 I saw in the theaters. Though a bit dramatic at times, I was actually kind of surpised when I watched the extra materials on the DVD at how much time and research went into the film to make it real. Some of the lines are direct quotes from the astronauts, crew and family as they recollected the tense days wondering if they would be the first floating corpses in space. Both shows are well worth it if you’re a space geek like me.

Meanwhile the Baroque Cycle… What to say? It is huge, vast… So many people asked me what it was about and I still don’t know how to answer that question. Superficially it’s about tearing down the old world of feudalism and superstition and laying the groundwork for the modern world as we know it in terms of economy, science and multinationalism/multiculturalism. The depictions of life in the late 1600s and early 1700s are wonderous and scary, and various plots will take you all around the globe.

One of the primary plots is the shenanigans revolving around a cache of Solomonic Gold (it is slightly heavier than normal gold because it is imbued with mystical, alchemical power). Isaac Newton and other alchemical fanatics are after it while those that have it generally want to get rid of it. It is my assumption that the alchemy and what happens to a few characters with Solomon’s Gold is why Neal Stephenson let the books be marketed as a science fiction story.

Many of the characters are ancestors to characters in the Cryptonomicon except, apparently, Enoch Root. I wondered about him after reading Cryptonomicon (as have others) but wrote it off as artistic license. He’s a very complex thread in The Baroque Cycle and someday I’ll have to read it again and untangle what I can.

All in all a satisfying end of the weekend. I’ve just started in on David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series. 57 pages in and it’s just as awesome as I remember it…

No Comments | Catergorized: books   movies   tv

2007.08.14

Women of Battlestar Galactica

Oh joy! The women of Battlestar Galactica might have their pieces of angst at times, but as this trailer shown at Comic Con shows, they also kick some serious fraking booty!

No Comments | Catergorized: geek   tv

2007.07.27

Sense of Scale

Science fiction and fantasy creators are notoriously bad at judging a sense of scale, whether it’s distance, time, or physical attributes. I can’t tell you how mildly irritating I found the general surprise and abhorrence in Star Trek when they would encounter “10,000 dead” on some random planet. I think of how many died in the American Civil War (or any civil war) or how many Jews were killed in WWII and I think, “Wow, those guys are so naive!” That’s why I got a chuckle with this article called Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale and its many examples. The rest of the site is a treasure trove, too.

I’m not saying that small numbers aren’t important. 50 people killed in a suicide bombing is 49 people too many (the suicide bomber can go hang himself for all I care) and the distance to even Jupiter is so vast that most people can’t wrap their heads around it, let alone to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star in our neighborhood. It reminds me of a friend who wanted to put a one kilometer wide crater on a planet that was… one kilometer deep. I think I drove him crazy trying to explain why that just wasn’t possible.

No Comments | Catergorized: friends   geek   science   thoughts   tv

2007.07.22

Battlestar Galactica Webisodes

Just like the lead up to Battlestar Galactica Season Three, SciFi Channel will be releasing short webisodes of BSG in the lead up to Razor. They’ll show in October which, for most of us, is still too far away to really want to wait.

No Comments | Catergorized: geek   tv

2007.07.14

Battlestar Galactica Razor Preview

Though the fourth -and final- season of Battlestar Galactica won’t air until January 2008, SciFi Channel will show a two hour “movie” called Razor that will fill out some of the missing details in the series. Here’s a 30 second preview of Razor. Too bad we still have to wait until November for it to air!

No Comments | Catergorized: geek   tv