Under anesthetic, subdivided and synthetic

Because I thought that more than a few of us have been...how shall we say...transitional, lately, and since I haven't done this in, oh, 14 months or so...how about a little indulgence?



( Below: good and bad luck, voyeurism and vandalism, futile magic and furious Makoto.... )

In case you missed it, the first seventy-three seconds of last night's Castle, featuring Nathan Fillion channeling Captain Mal Reynolds one last time (with a perfect little musical cue), and disturbing use of the term "candy beard." He does stick with the outfit for a bit longer in the episode (and asked/mocked about the suspenders), but this is the meat of the moment.

You know what's surprising me lately? Castle. MightyGodKing likens it to The Thin Man and someone else elsewhere compared it favorably to Murder, She Wrote (only, I imagine, with the age demographic shaved to one-quarter) -- the important thing to remember about it is that it's a trifle. It's a pre-CSI police procedural, more cute than clinical, and you certainly don't watch it for the same reasons you watch other shows ostensibly of the same genre. Took it a while for it to get its sea legs, but it's found a groove and it's one of the more unrepentantly fun shows out there. You get Nathan Fillion going IM A RITER in front of a camera for an hour. Silly, goofy fun.

So the final issue of Planetary came out and...well, the two-and-a-half-year wait didn't do it any favors. It was perfectly excellent for what it was, don't get me wrong, but as it stood, it served as more of an epilogue than an actual final chapter, but that pronounced anticipation might've raised expectations just a touch beyond rational levels -- we already knew from #26 basically what shape the major plot had taken, all that was left was to tie up a few loose ends...one in particular, and handled satisfactorily. (If you haven't read Andrew Wheeler's excellent post on everything that's happened both since the first issue of Planetary was released and since the previous issue of Planetary was released, do read it -- it's been a busy decade.) It was an excellent little series, and I'll be sad to see it go.

Speaking of seeing it go, I did try the first issue of Mark Waid's Irredeemable and maybe I was looking for a reason not to keep going, but I did find one -- in the midst of the created-from-whole-cloth characters standing around laying down necessary exposition one of them insists "I don't want to talk about that day. We said we never would." Of course the day in question is the day in which the Ubermensch main character went murderous bugfuck, and I'm sure this is supposed to be a device to keep the reader interested and intrigued and not smack at all of being coy or a writer stepping in to stop perfectly natural exposition amongst a group of individuals who should, under these circumstances, feel as secure as they're ever gonna. At best it feels contrived, and there's too much artifice in a title that seems to pride itself in being unsentimental for me to suspend myself in. And this is after reading the last issue of The Boys, where Mallory actually appears in flashback, obligingly staying far in the background and keeping his face shadowed -- contrived, sure, but how many other questions were answered in that same issue? Strange, innit?

But my favorite thing from last week? Cyberball Robot Player's Union Says Lockout Likely In 2073 Season. Yes, that Cyberball.

Re: the Blackest Night #5 cover and revelations, just two words: called it.

And I went off about one aspect of the myriad chromatic corps in a comment to daethkow that bears repeating, but in short: I hate the oaths --

There is nothing magical, profound, evocative or even moderately interesting about the AABBCCDD rhyme scheme anymore, Geoff. If I'm making my own Corduroy Lantern Corps and I would like it to not be a watered-down ditto-mark version of the GLC, I dare say I would (a) eschew having an oath at all (b) probably just make an oath a random garble of obscenities (c) just scream (d) at the very least I would not use the same goddamned rhyme scheme every time. I'm going to go out on a huge limb here and say that, yes, the idea of the blood-spewing, hate-saturated Red Lanterns having an oath at all beyond WHARRGARBL is insipid. The GLC oath is tolerated because it's tradition and it's corny but we forgive the things that endure. I suffer enough abysmal poetry in the real world, I don't need to see Ragecat and Ranx the Sentient City suffering from antiquated rhymes unless they're writing for the Jonas Brothers (which would explain a great deal).

Revelation: Oh, God, there already is a Corduroy Lantern Corps: the FFA. Suddenly zombies aren't quite as scary as they used to be.

I've made many, many questionable choices in my life, but one of the more glaring has to be the night I rented both Ridley Scott's Alien and James Cameron's Aliens and watched them back to back.

No, not for the expected bouts of night terrors -- but because of two films that share a universe (or really even the vaguest sense of continuity), there aren't two as disparate as those two films. The former is an excellent deep-space Jaws, taking the unseen and unfathomable adversary to even greater extremes and with enough surprises to make for a pretty much unforgettable cinematic experience in and of itself. The latter, though, I have to say, has lodged in my heart as Cameron's best film, one that solidifies the species's mythology and vitality to such a degree that not even four abysmal follow-ups can kill the franchise outright. But it's not even the same genre as Alien -- it's an action-adventure of horrific nature, and when the first slow-paced, mostly expository act transitions into the second, you're invested in the foul-mouthed, entertainingly-flawed survivors (played by people you've never heard of before) in a way you just weren't with the ill-fated crew of the Nostromo.

And even after almost a quarter of a century, it holds up. Some of the effects are a bit dated, which is to be expected, but the performances and the script are still extremely tight, even with the Director's Cut. Yes, I'm watching it in DVD-quality for the first time, and it's a treat, having worn my VHS copy down to mulch long, long ago. And it's funny how cliché so much of it seems now -- space marines, squad-based combat, dropships, power loaders, the corporation, hive mentality -- when no single piece of media did more to establish them as cliché than this film (with Starship Troopers being a close second). But they work. My sole regret is seeing them in tandem -- that's never going to allow Alien to achieve in my mind what it really should be. It had years to solidify its place in the nexus of sci-fi and horror, and it had five minutes before the tape rewound and I popped in Aliens and Jim Cameron cranked the carnage up to crazy-go-nuts. (If Superman can have his franchise rebooted back to pre-Richard-Pryor days, surely they can rewind Ripley to even the first trailer to the Aliens sequel.)

So I'm hearing the hyperbole that's bubbling into the blogosphere re: Cameron's upcoming Avatar, and nothing I'm reading is making me feel it just yet. I'm sure the technology's going to be impressive, I'm sure we'll see millions of dollars in each frame of the film, but Cameron worries me. I'm no longer surprised when filmmakers become outed as fetishists, mistaking the technology for the craft, but in Cameron's case, I'd have a more tangible sense of loss if he disappears in a blizzard of CGI and a maze of render farms. He's shown more range and more depth than most filmmakers who've tumbled into the Lucas Pit, and I have more faith in his imagination than most. Fingers crossed.

But whatever December holds, I can always curl up with my colonial marine comfort food. "Someone wake up Hicks."

Futurama returning without Billy West, John DiMaggio or Katey Sagal. Well, let me know how that turns out, I'll be watching C-SPAN instead.

Edit: If you wanted the Twilight saga told in Teen Girl Squad fashion, enjoy.

So, Sims 3. It's enticing and vexing, encouraging and demoralizing, two steps forward, one step back. I don't think you're going to see a more insightful and accurate review than Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation review, as he does hit the high points. I've a bit of divergence in that I don't think it's quite as grindy or mundane as real life, but it's certainly less escapist than Sims 2, and that's not good.

Let me just breeze over the high notes right quick, in pictoral form, below the cut. ( Dude, long post is LONG, and filled with images, 70 of them, and BIG suckers, I'm warnin' ya.... )

Sarah Palin out as governor? I admit I hadn't paid the closest attention to politics in the last week, but...huh?

Unrelated (I think), via midnightvoyager, epic paladin is epic.

Lego Harry Potter, the video game, Years 1-4. With Hedwig!

1. Almost everybody's gone. Hee.

2. The quote of the day from Wookieepedia:

Qui-Gon: "Hey Obi-Wan, when we land, you stay put and I'll find you."
Obi-Wan: "Okay."
GM: "You're in different ships; he can't hear you."
Qui-Gon: "HEY OBI-WAN! WHEN WE—"
GM: "No. "
―Star Wars gaming session role-played in Darths & Droids

3. I don't have to follow sports anymore until the NFL season starts. Thanks Bruins, for folding obligingly, and congrats and good luck to the Magic for bouncing the Celtics (after last year, no greed here in petulantly demanding another trophy; let someone else have a crack at it).

4. Yay Jon Gruden! I'm not a big Gruden fan, actually -- I credit his success in Tampa Bay more to Tony Dungy than I do Gruden -- but God, if Tony Kornheiser wasn't the most insipid commentator in the history of sports, he's got to make the top five. ESPN's not done a good job with the MNF franchise since taking it over, but punting Kornheiser and maybe not having interviews with whichever celebrity saunters over during the game are steps in the right direction.