Category Archives: Entertainment

“Hey, remember the 80’s?”

Movies, Music

I watched Real Genius the other night with Holly. First time for her; first time in a while for me. It made me, as always, nostalgic for 80’s syntho-pop. Since the soundtrack was never released as such, and there’s no legal way to acquire the individual tracks, I was forced to become… resourceful.

One of the resources I encountered in the course of my search was Ron “Boogiemonster” Gerber’s Crap From The Past. It’s hard to decide just where to start loving this show and its host. With the fact that both exude deep affection for a wildly eclectic assortment of pop confections from the 1970s and 1980s? Or perhaps with the fact that the show’s website is a brilliantly executed homage to text-mode DOS interfaces, something at least half of today’s computer users wouldn’t even recognize?

Who knows? Who cares? The point is that it’s all good stuff. If you’re the sort of person who played Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and periodically found himself jacking a car just to drive it around aimlessly and listen to the radio, this is the show for you.

Wyrms

Books, Comics

“The graphic novel will either complement the original text, or profane it. The prophecies are vague.”

(I like the rendition of Unwyrm on the cover — enough not to be too scandalized that the Gebling King’s been omitted. No matter — I eagerly await seeing Geblings depicted within, to say nothing of Dwelfs and Gaunts.)

Schrödinger’s Ball

Books

The website for Adam Felber’s upcoming novel Schrödinger’s Ball has gone live. Adam is far and away my favorite of the Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me regulars, and his blog, Fanatical Apathy, is a treat in its own right; I’m looking forward to seeing what he does with a longer work.

Something that baffles me, though, is the incredible lead time for the book. It sounds like it was complete a while ago; reviewers appear to have gotten their hands on it, or at least a close-to-final version of the manuscript. We ordinary mortals are going to have to wait until August to sink our teeth into it. In an age of internet-based instant gratification, that seems almost archaic. Maybe it’s just me.

Quote of the Night

Friends, Games

Greg and I just played our first game of WarCraft together in weeks, against supposedly hardcore CPU opponents. I’d worried that this was a bit ambitious, given our lack of practice, but we turned out to crush them rather effortlessly. This led to the following bit of post-game chat:

Me: I guess genocide is like riding a bike.

Greg: Genocide is like riding a bike: if you do it right, it only hurts for the other guy.

This is going to have me chuckling foolishly all evening.

Cheesy Song Lyrics — People You Didn’t Know You Knew Edition

Music

Via Rock Kills Kid.

Now you know that it’s all your fault
How are you doing with it?
Hey, are you nervous?
Everything that you’ve ever known
Will go up in flames
Tell me, are you nervous?

And the sky will fall down on you
And the world still turns round round round
And the sky will fall down on you
As your life goes on down down down

Everything that you’ve ever done
Will come back to haunt you
Tell me, are you nervous?
Now you know that it is for sure,
How are you taking it?
Do you deserve this?

(Chorus)

Dance! (x6)

Music

March 11th’s Electric Six show, which I’d been eagerly anticipating, was a blast — everything I’d hoped for and then some. Not only did Dick Valentine and the rest of the band live up to their billing, but the opening acts, Rock Kills Kid and Every Move A Picture, were entirely solid as well. (I actually wound up buying some of their music on iTunes yesterday, wondering all the while how I survived before the age of instant musical gratfication.)

For a while I worried that Greg, who had arrived in town earlier in the afternoon, wasn’t really enjoying himself, because he was just kind of standing there shrugged into his overcoat. It turned out, though, that he was just exhausted from having gotten up in the wee hours of an east-coast morning prior to a cross-country flight. He revealed his true feelings around the middle of Electric Six’s set, when he turned to me and said, with frank admiration, of Dick Valentine, “I don’t understand how he can still be alive after the third song.” The man is, indeed, a dynamo.

Octavia Butler, RIP and dammit

Books

The enigmatic Octavia E. Butler has left us, and before her time.

Science fiction was her home turf, but she’d have done any field she chose proud. She inhabited the uncanny valley: she had a knack for coming up with premises that could make your skin crawl, and then spinning them, credibly, into something ultimately life-affirming. Her work often had the quality of dreams about it, and by that I mean that it could be both wondrous and disturbing, sometimes in the same breath. But then, that stands to reason: she never flinched, and she never cheated, when it came to following where the story led. The world could use more like her.

She will be missed, and I will now read the recently-published Fledgling, the first new work of hers to appear in seven years, with a slightly heavier heart, knowing that it will — barring the discovery of some lost manuscript — be the last new thing to appear under her name.

Ave adque vale, Octavia. Dream well, as you always did.