Even by the standards of television sci-fi in 1978, that was baaaaaaaaaaaaad.
Category: It Happened to Me
Categories
Sick Day Movie Watching
Nothing like a day at home sick to catch up on my BitTorrented videos in bed.
I’m about ten minutes into the Star Wars Holiday Special,a
video I downloaded a little while back and haven’t gotten around to
watching in its entirety until now. It’s been said to be so painfully
bad that George Lucas has
said that he wishes he could wipe every copy of it from existence. I have
vague memories of it as a kid — I think I was 10 years old and in the
fifth grade — but I do recall being thrilled at having another shot at
seeing my heroes.
Click the picture to see Stomp Tokyo’s review of the Star Wars Holiday Special.
“It’s the Star Wars Holiday Special!” announced a voice-over, who then
went through the laundry list of principal actors from the Star Wars
movie.
Then, the warning signs started: “Introducing Chewbacca’s family! His wife, Malla! His father, Itchy! His son, Lumpy!”
Uh-oh.
Then it really hit the fan: “With special guest stars…Beatrice Arthur!”
What? I don’t remember Maude being on it.
“Art Carney!”
“Norton!” I yelled in response. I have no recollection of him being in the show either.
“Diahann Carroll!”
I vaguely remember. Didn’t she perform some spaced-out slow number?
“The Jefferson Starship!”
Them I remember. I was under the impression that they’d changed their name just for the special.
“Harvey Korman!”
What the –? The title card cut to scenes of Korman playing three different roles. Signs of serious crap to come.
Thus far, it’s been nothing but a quick scene with Han and Chewie
outrunning Imperial Star Destroyers followed by several minutes of
grunts and wookie pantomime. This doesn’t bode well.
It’s going to be an interesting day. Not olnly are the future in-laws
flying in for the weekend, but it’s also Annual Performance Review Day
here at work. The picture in my library that best conveys this feeling
is the one below. Click it to see it full size.
I’m expecting a better outcome than this. Click the picture to see it at full size.
Categories
Apologies to Penguicon
I spent most of this weekend alternating between a groggy wakeful state
and passed out in bed. I felt pretty out-of-it on Friday evening and
decided that it might be best to sit out my burlesque-dancing friend Penny Whistleton’s birthday party seeing as I was driving to Detroit to attend Penguicon the next day.
I woke up on Saturday morning feeling a bit better. I joined my friends George
and Leesh, their son Henry and Leesh’s parents Gerry and Allison for
Dim Sum lunch after which I planned to mosey on down to Motor City. I
began spacing out about halfway through lunch and soon went home
afterwards, where I passed out until about 8 p.m., well after my
schedule departure time.
After trying to see if there was a chance that anyone would drive me in
my car to Detroit — hey, I’d do it if I was free and someone
asked me — it was clear that I wasn’t going to make it. I gave Bill,
one of the organizers, a call and sent my regrets, and he was quite
nice about it. A couple of days later, another one of the organizers,
Matt Arnold, IM’d me just to say hi.
I’d like to send my sincerest apologies to Penguicon. I was honoured to
be invited as a “Nifty Guest”, the enthusiasm with which my
presentation suggestion was received was flattering and the way with
with you took my cancelleation was very gracious. Thanks for being so
understanding!
Cory tells me that it was a fun conference, and extremely nerdy. (Yes, “nerdy” is a good thing in our books.)
(Penguicon organizers: Keep watching your mailbox. A package of Tucows swag is headed your way.)
Starting tomorrow evening, I’ll be at Penguicon, a convention for both Linux and science fiction enthusiasts…
AT Penguicon, I will be a “Nifty Guest” as well as a speaker, where I will be presenting the following talk:
Interactive Fiction: Down and Out in the Grue Kingdom
Sun 2:00 to 3:00 pm
Kensington
Interactive Fiction, also known as “IF” and formerly known as “text
adventure games”, has a history spanning over 30 years and thrives even
in this day of console games. If you are (or hope to be) a game
developer, an author, or both, join us as we show you how to develop IF
using the Inform programming language. We’ll implement a game/interactive story based on a scene from Cory Doctorow’s “Down and
Out in the Magic Kingdom”.
Yeah,
I’m shamelessly borrowing some of Cory’s mojo to get people to come to
my talk. You gotta understand — I’m scheduled at the same time as the Tron Guy.
In addition to making the presentation and quite probably playing the
accordion, I have secured a small number of Tucows T-shirts and the
coveted SquishyCows™ (a herd of which you can see here). I’ll give ’em away at the presentation.
P.S. I’m driving from Toronto to Novi, which is just outside Detroit. Anyone who wants a lift, let me know…
Eric Rice, who attended the Podcaster’s Gathering we had on Tuesday,
has managed to live through his hangover and post a 3-minute, 51-second
video blog entry of what happened. You can get it in two flavours:
The Low-Bandwidth “Extra Crispy” Version
[7 MB, QuickTime] — I took Eric’s original video and compressed it for
those of you on a slow connection or who want to see it pronto!
Get a load of that beefy forearm! You don’t get muscle tone like this playing electric guitar like those skinny wusses from Slayer.
The High-Bandwidth “Original Recipe” Version [23MB Quicktime] is hosted on Eric’s blog. The price you pay for better video and audio quality is a larger filesize.
Eric Rice and Rannie Turingan.
Usually, when they cut to a black-and-white still in VH-1’s “Behind the
Music”, the voice-over says, “…and that’s when the band started
getting into drugs.” In this case, we started ordering the Yellow
Menaces (Smirnoff Ice with a tequila shot).
Categories
He’s "Julie", and I’m…
If Ross’ part in last night’s podcasting dinner was that of “Julie”, the cruise director from The Love Boat, I was this gentleman. [850KB animated GIF]
