Category: Nerdiness

Today I drew a picture of the wizard Silent from The Black Company. And I think I have a job starting on Tuesday at Raincoast Books so I celebrated with some pizza (Kodos joined in the celebration – I’m surprised he hasn’t puked from all the bread). I taped the season premiere of Enterprise, plus a new episode of Justice League and Home Movies while I drew. Then I did up the debriefing/recap of what happened in D&D last night. It was all very exciting. The group took a new step this week in that they tied up some smugglers and slit their throats in cold blood. COLD BLOOD.

Well you’re a pretty kitty
Now grab those guys
And put ’em in a box
And tape up the sides
Now throw them into space
So they’ll stay up there
Cuz you’re a pretty kitty
With pretty kitty hair

The Last Wave
This was one of the features and even though S.T. Joshi pointed out how Lovecraftian it was, I found it to be only tenuously linked to HPL’s style/philosophy/Cthulhu Mythos. It was quite good. This white fellow becomes the lawyer for some urban tribal aboriginies who execute one of their members for touching forbidden objects. The lawyer has prophetic dreams about these objects, etc and it tears him and his family apart. There were some cool bits. 7/10

The Resurrected
I have a copy of this film on VHS so I didn’t bother watching it at the fest. It’s a very good adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, one of my favourite HPL tales. Plus it was filmed locally, and has Chris Sarandon (Prince Humperdink from Princess Bride) as Ward. High 7/10 – it would be higher if some of the actors were better.

Quatermass 2 (1957 black and white)
We missed the beginning of this but I loved it. Meteors from space infect the townsfolk and they harbor space blobs in a mysterious factory. Very campy but the acting was great and the style was typically cool. I love the esthetics and social dynamics of the 20’s through the 50’s, and I need to see more classic films in general. 6/10

Enter the Dagon
A pretty silly mockumentary short about some guys who are trying to make a Lovecraftian martial arts film. Some of the jokes were expected, some of them just bad, but others were pretty funny. The idea for the film is great, but it’s really just a one-joke concept and it can’t hold up for more than a few minutes. I had heard that it was edited down and I think that was the right decision. It worked and was enjoyed by all. 6/10

Why Vote for the Lesser Evil
A very silly short about two guys who are trying unsuccessfully to fill out their Cthulhu cult and get Cthulhu voted for president until they realize that George Bush is more evil than Cthulhu. I was amused but not as much as everyone else in the theater as I have heard all these jokes before. 5/10

The Visage
I found out after I saw this that it was adapted from a Gogol story. I’ve read a few Gogol stories and have really enjoyed them, I think I may still have a book kicking around. Anyway, this would have been good had they cast someone different from the lead actor, Derek Thompson. Thompson played Clifford the down-on-his luck young man who is recruited to watch over the body of a dead spiritualist for three days. This guy had -5 charisma and his acting was painful to watch. Seriously, it drove me nuts–I can’t get past it. I could not enjoy this otherwise good short film that had legitimately tense, creepy moments. One cool part was when Clifford was hiding under an afghan blanket and you saw his P.O.V. of the room through the tiny holes in the stitching. I have to give this a 4 (out of 10). If they had cast a better actor, it would easily have been twice that.
If you saw it you can rate the movie here http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386852/combined

The Case of H.P. Lovecraft (documentary)
I have seen this French, artsy documentary on H.P. Lovecraft’s life before and it’s amazing, if long. 8/10

The Summoning
Another silly little short (I have nothing against silly, mind you) about a guy who is given a book and finds a glowing circle in his basement so naturally he goes into the circle and starts reading aloud from a book. Surprise surprise, tentacles appear and eat him! Simple, on-topic, and well done. 6/10
Rate it yourself here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0426591/combined

The Tell-Tale Heart
I love Andrew to death, but this is where he and I differ on judging what goes into a HPL film fest. Poe is fantastic, I’m sure you’ll agree. But why is The Tell-Tale Heart in a Lovecraft festival? Argh! Okay okay – Lovecraft was Poe’s number one fan. Fine. Anyway – I had never actually read the story, so it was good that this film was basically the narrator reading the story throughout the short. It was quite good – but there were some things that bothered me greatly. The narrator said things like “It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening” of the door, and “I undid the lantern cautiously — oh, so cautiously — cautiously (for the hinges creaked), I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye” but all the while you were watching the fellow on film put thrust his head into the doorway in 2-3 seconds, and the room was lit at all times so you could see not just the eye, but the entire body of the sleeping man and the narrator. How would I get around these things if I were making the film? I don’t know. Suffice it to say, these discrepancies bugged me. Also the policemen weren’t acting like the narrator was telling me they were acting – that definitely could have been fixed with better direction. Otherwise the film was really quite outstanding. The narrator did a really good job. 8/10

Pickman’s Model.
This was an old adaptation of the HPL story of the same name. It was a really old, low-quality print of the film but it was not without its charm. If you’ve read the story, you know that it’s about an artist who paints ghoulish things – from life!! This short followed an art critic who was writing a book on art for some kind of art gallery/society but they cut his funding when he insisted that Pickman’s work be included in the book. Pickman’s paintings cause him to have bouts of prophetic fancy. The acting was fine, the story was not bad. Generally I thought it was pretty good compared to a lot of Lovecraftian film. I wish the paintings had been more exactingly executed, and I wish we got to see, if not a ghoul itself, at least the photos that Pickman was working from. 5/10

I wished I had been able to see the other block of shorts with Edward’s “Innsmouth Legacy” and “Strange Aeons” but it didn’t happen. I wasn’t going to mention any trailers or bumpers but I will say that I sure am looking forward to seeing “The Call of Cthulhu” next year!

I get the feeling that if I lived next door to the strikingly white, bearded spokesperson for Canadian Tire all my life’s problems would be solved. He’s just so earnest and helpful it makes me want to kill myself instantly.

I’ve also noticed that car commercial narrators read $29,995 as “twenty-nine-nine-ninety-five” as if we will be fooled into thinking it’s somehow NOT five bucks shy of thirty THOUSAND dollars.

The episode of Star Trek original series on Space today was the one with Kodos the executioner. I have actually never seen it before today. Every time they said the name ‘Kodos’ it made me chuckle and want to give my cat another morsel of dampfkneudel. Last night Marmar and I went to Ursula’s for some delicious cuisine, including said german dumplings and some yummy soup. Oh and some crazy giant grapefruit called a…pommello? We brought some grape tomatoes (not to be confused with tomatoe grapes) and some broccoli. Yvonne, Caleb, Ian, Tiffany and Ursy’s mom were there and I got to watch Ursula get poked full of various needles, some supercharged with electricity, another administering C’Plus into her vein. So, fun night all ’round, including a good hour plus walk back to M’lo’s.

Tonight I am going to see some anime shorts as part of the VIFF with Yvonne and Marlo. Melange de shorts are always the best part of film festivals. Often you can just wait to see features when they come out in wide release, or on video. Shorts, on the other hand, are what film fests are all about, as far as I’m concerned. When we went to pick up our tickets at City Square last night it was an agonizing multi-step problem.

Let’s first have a look at a normal movie ticket-buying experience:
Step 1 – figure out what movie to buy tickets for by looking at the marquee
Step 2 – wait in line
Step 3 – swap money for tickets

Compare with VIFF:

Step 1 – (and this was my fault for having a bad memory) figure out what movie we were buying tickets for by trying to interpret 2 different schedule booklets.
Step 2 – Fill out a form with my name, address, phone, email, and specifics of what movie we were going to see, including the ‘movie code’ for the film.
Step 3 – wait in a different line with our form in hand
Step 4 – Hey we’re at the front of the line! Great, now we can…oh no…stand and wait some more while the lady inputs the information from the form into a laptop computer
Step 5 – fill out the membership card
Step 6 – swap money for tickets

And all that only after I had to have Yvonne explain the different ways I could get to see a VIFF movie, and the risks and hardships involved. Now, it’s a given that I’m an idiot, but come on – I just want to go to a theater and see a movie! I’m willing to show up an hour early to get a good seat. I’m not too keen, on the other hand, on jumping through a series of flaming hoops, each more flamingly hoopy than the last.

I’ve generally given the VIFF a miss over the past few years, but this has only been because I’ve been traditionally swamped with work this time of year. The only movie I saw at VIFF in recent memory is Volcano High, and I think that was 2 years ago. I hope tonight’s cinemafeast will be just as good!

At the wedding this weekend instead of a guest book there were piles of construction paper on the dinner tables. Naturally I was at a table full of gamers – Jon, Stewie, Neal, Shawn & Mariko, so there were lots of jokes about gaming. I.E. the wedding was actually a LARP, and we turned our table place name tags into mini character sheets, etc. One of the of the pieces of construction paper I wrote:

I try to pickpocket Shawn’s character

…and folded it up. Only gamers will get that. The rest of the papers we mostly doodled on.

Marlo and I were discussing the wedding. I think that if we ever do get married, for tax purposes or because we live in an Orwellian future, or because Marlo discovers that she is part Shangri-Lan and the only way I can stay there for more than a 6-month work visa is to be one of her many husbands, it would be a great excuse to throw a catered party at our parents’ expense. I would be dressed as Princess Leia and Marlo would be dressed as Darth Vader and the justice of the peace would be dressed as Grand Moff Tarkin: “I grow tired of asking this, so it will be the last time: Do you, Toren, take Marlo to be your wife?” and Marlo can shout “I’ll never join you!” And the wedding cake would be the Death Star, and all the guests would have to be in stormtrooper outfits and stand at attention while Marlo walks down the aisle to the tune of the Emperor’s March.

What did I do this weekend? Friday night was Chris Slater’s stag party, where we ate pizza and pie, played video games (I played 5 different games – my favourite was some Final Fantasy version) and card games, and some got drunk. I did not. I saw someone’s nipple but that’s about as naughty as it got. And no, it wasn’t Iain’s.

Saturday I had a meeting with Tim Carter, went to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow which I largely recommend with some caveats (see more below), and wandered around downtown with Marlo.

Today was Chris & Kathryn’s wedding. The padre mispronounced Kathryn’s name once and kept talking about God this and Jesus that but otherwise it was really great. I’m really happy for those two crazy kids, and there was tons o’ love at the reception. It was nice, and the food was amazing. I haven’t eaten that much meat in a long time – and it was all because of the two kinds of gourmet mustard and the horseradish sauce that went with the roast beef.

BIG FAT SPOILERS ABOUT SKY CAPTAIN: As I mentioned, I enjoyed the movie. Expectation is everything, and I didn’t expect anything out of the actors, so it didn’t trouble me too much that they came through on the promises of milquetoast acting made in the trailers. Still, I wanted to slap Gwyneth Paltry just to get some kind of emotion out of her. Mostly I wanted to see the movie because I love the genre and I wanted to see how they could pull off a movie that was almost entirely shot on blue screen. I had most of the same problems with the movie as Warren did (see blog link to the right) and I had a few more as well. I didn’t see the usefulness of using CGI cars instead of real ones (it was distracting). There were some really dumb bits, such as when Sky Captain punched and essentially K.O.’d robots twice his size. I guess the robots were made of balsa wood. There were general problems with the aircraft that you didn’t have to be an engineer to balk at – monoprop planes lighting safely on a few hundred feet of landing strip; planes not shattering when they hit the water surface at terminal velocity; etc. I also made some pretty good guesses which I expect a lot of other people did as well. The second time I saw the mystery woman, I knew she was a robot. As soon as I saw Totenkopf’s holographic face, I guessed he had been dead for a long time, and the evil plan was all his robots’ legacy. One of the things that I really did appreciate in the film is that nobody had any gratuitously revealing clothes. They stayed true to the genre on that and I thought it was classy that they avoided sinking to the lowest common denominator.

I’ve been watching a lot of Enterprise lately, and introducing Marlo to series via the good episodes from the first season. Holy smokes does the third season seem like crap compared to episodes like “Silent Enemy” and “Dear Doctor.” It’s been especially fun to MST3K Captain Archer.

The good news is that the story arc from season 3 is over and done with and they can get back to exploring space. I’ve been reading about a 3-part story with Brent Spiner as an ancestor of Data’s creator, Dr. Soong, and it involves more leftovers from the eugenics war and klingons. I’m optimistic.

I just spent the entire weekend running a gaming con. It was fun but I’m very drained. I’ll have stories to tell, but later. Thanks Stewie for buying me Chinese food for dinner to put that spring back in my step.

There’s an interesting and amusing radio article on the 30th anniversary of D&D here: http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3858560
Just click on the link to hear it in Realplayer or Mediaplayer – with real battle sounds!

I have a friend who doesn’t allow cross-gender roleplaying in the groups he runs. I’m not sure why.

But, here’s an interesting article on the subject: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/play18aug04.html

I personally have played a few different female characters. In one D&D campaign I used to play Ursula Umbragia–a mother who sold her soul to a demon to save her son, and in another I played a barbarian who I modelled after Bjork and whose name was Mjath. I made up a couple of superheroines that I never actually got to play – a black cop, mother of two, who moonlighted as The Black Lantern, and a pair of shopaholic yuppie teenage twins who were also cyborgs. I’ve never played a female in Call of Cthulhu, but I have known guys who have, and gals who have played male characters. I don’t have much experience outside of those genres/systems, so that’s that. I quite enjoyed playing Umbragia because she was on this tortured quest to find some way to break the deal with Anarazel and get her soul back, as her son had since grown to maturity and abandoned her because of the demonic stigma (ingrate!). The others I didn’t invest much time or energy in, but I think I would have had a lot of fun with, like, the twins, totally.

Anghold brought up an interesting point tonight that I hadn’t given too much thought to. When you get an email, and you’re just one of many who got the email, do you hit REPLY or do you hit REPLY ALL? In this case let’s assume that the original email is an invitation to a party. What are your reasons for how you reply?