It’s intensely green in Texas right now. The rhythm is familiar to me from California: long months of brown, followed by intense green while it’s raining. In February, we had 3.04 inches of rain, up from an average of 2.34 inches. January averages 2.1 inches, but we had 4.7 inches this year. November and December were above average as well. We need it after the summer; when Susan and I got here, the ground was hardtack dry. ...
Last night I headed down to the new Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter Lane location, since movie tickets were two bucks during this week’s soft open of the theater. It’s way out of the way for us, particularly coming from work, but seems reasonably convenient for South Austin peeps. Take Mopac south to the first traffic light and turn right, then immediate left. It took twenty minutes flat to come home at 12:30 AM. Kind of late? Well, cheap movies, so I caught a pair of them. Oh look, the title of this post is a bad joke. Look, they were both set in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it’d be way amusing to watch a motion captured Andy Serkis in an Oakland A’s uniform. ...
I won an award! I am the 2012 Rose & Bay Best Patron, which is pretty cool. I think mostly this means that C. E. Murphy has a lot of fans who listened to her when she said to vote for me because I convinced her to try crowdfunding, but I guess that implies I deserve some kind of credit for something. It wouldn’t have gone far if she wasn’t an awesome writer, though.
It’s all very well that we’ll see a new iPad in a week or so. I’m holding onto my anticipation for two weeks, however: new Tim Powers!
That didn’t suck. Let The Bullets Fly is not really a Chow Yun Fat movie in the way that The Ides of March isn’t really a George Clooney movie. It’s just that when you get an actor that charismatic, a movie tends to lean towards him or her. Pleasingly enough, Jiang Wen is equally magnetic and is both the star and the director, so the charisma duel is just about even. You can’t say the same for the duel between their characters, but that’s the story of the movie. Note: it’s a battle of wits, without a whole lot of significant gunplay. It’s a black comedy at heart. ...
I don’t get the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 (original). It’s a pretty standard tablet, with LTE as the standout feature. It’s a 7.7" model. It runs Android 3.3 – in theory ICS will come in the future, but we hear that a lot. At 16 GB of storage, it retails for $499 with a two year contract. How does that make sense when the 16 GB iPad 2 is selling for $580 no contract at Best Buy? And where’s the cheaper WiFi model?
Tuesday night plans: Sneak preview down at the Alamo. It’s a pretty Hong Kong week for me, yep.
In a hypothetical world, someone with a huge cache of Hong Kong flicks but without clearance to show them might ask attendees of a movie marathon to stay mum about the actual movies shown. In unrelated news, the Alamo Drafthouse Hongkongathon was way better than I’d anticipated. I was expecting a bunch of exploitation stuff and a good time, rather than great movies. In practice, Grady Hendrix showed us two serious classics, two pretty entertaining movies, and one bottomless pit of sleazy horror. I managed to stay awake for the whole thing by some minor miracle, given my advanced age. Grady’s effervescent introductions probably had a lot to do with that. We started at 10 PM and got out at 7:30; five movies and two trailer reels. One trailer reel was dedicated to Category 3 erotica, which perhaps saved us from having to watch an entire Cat 3 movie. Good call. The other one was trailers for 70s US releases of Shaw Brothers flicks, and highly entertaining. ...
As one does, I wrote up my old superhero PC Emoticon in the hot new superhero RPG. This time, it’s Marvel Heroic Roleplaying (original). MHRP character writeups are tied to specific versions of the characters, both in powers and in XP Milestones, so I decided to do this writeup as the youthful, optimistic Emoticon. In actual play he went all the way through the Weight of Responsibility Milestone, but I don’t think he ever finished up the True Teen Love Milestone. I’m not sure how I’d add the martial arts he picked up later – actually, he had a bit of it early on, too. But that’d be a third Power Set, which is a bit more spread out than typical MHRP characters. You could drop it into the Projective Empathy Power Set, but the Limit doesn’t make sense. There are a couple of small tricks in the original Champions UN PEACE gear package that I skipped. Flash Defense never came up, so you could represent it with a stunt, and the radio headsets are most easily handwaved. Oh, and I added a Social Specialty, because it’s missing and there clearly ought to be one. Cite: Johnny Storm, socialite extraordinaire, with no particular business acumen at all. Emma Frost might also fit in that category.
Mike Doughty, acoustic guitar, around 150 people, “Country Roads.” So that’s a nice way to spend an evening with one’s beloved. If you didn’t know Doughty was touring solo to promote his new book, now you know. If you didn’t know you should go see him, you know now. If you don’t like music that’s so dry you might not realize you have to drill through the bedrock to get at the vast lake of pain underneath, that’s a fair objection and I won’t think the less of you for passing it up. He’s kind of an odd taste. I love what he does with sound and the way he uses his voice, but it’s a pretty idiosyncratic little corner of the musical universe. ...