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Duncan Shea's LiveJournal:
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| Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | | 12:32 am |
emporgs?
No, MMORPG... well... Contemplating them... Do I really need to play World of Warcraft? How is it not on XBox Live already? Actually, my interest was piqued by a decidedly more humorous take on the MMPORG... it's called Dungeon Runners... It has Bling Gnomes that gather whatever treasure you find and turn it into gold for you so you don't have to leave the dungeon and go back to town in order to actually make money doing your MMPORG derring-do... and weapons include... a GIANT PIZZA CUTTER? And apparently it's free to join up... you make your character and go dungeon crawling... | | Saturday, July 11th, 2009 | | 4:34 pm |
So... Guillermo del Toro is working on the film of The Hobbit for Peter Jackson. Trying to remember what all is in The Hobbit that plays to del Toro's strengths as a filmmaker... Well, there are those giant spiders... Maybe if we're lucky, we get Ron Perlman to be the voice of Smaug. | | Friday, July 10th, 2009 | | 9:51 pm |
"We just want to go home."
So I've seen a couple posters for District 9 at the movie theater and thought that maybe it was going to be something along the lines of a Men in Black-style comedy... or something animated, even. Who knows. And Peter Jackson's name was attached to it... I've seen a couple of the trailers now... I don't think it's a comedy... if there's any humor in it, I dare say it's of a bleak sort... It looks to be a satire about aliens on earth... huge spaceships and whatnot... But after looking at the website and the trailers and whatnot... I have a sinking feeling it's not really about aliens at all... as in, the strange insectoid thing (which looks like a monster from Kamen Rider) whose eyes are pixilated to conceal its identity as it croaks "We just want to go home" is not an extraterrestrial being... and the spaceships are just a front...? The film comes from one Neill Blomkamp, a South African filmmaker who did animation and commercial work and short films up 'til now (the film is set in South Africa), and was tapped to do the Halo movie... District 9 seems to be an expansion of an early short of his called Alive in Joburg... | | Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | | 9:48 pm |
...
Did that kid just scream "KNEEL BEFORE TODD!" twice? | | 7:28 pm |
Whither the Ghostbusters soundtrack?
Yeah, that soundtrack album with all the songs was... all right, but... aside from the Ray Parker Jr. song, it was Elmer Bernstein's orchestral score that stuck with me when I was walking out of the theater... An album of Bernstein's score has yet to be released on CD... And of course, the video game uses the late Mr. Bernstein's music extensively... for which I am grateful... | | Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 | | 11:53 pm |
Culinary curiosities
Black olives or green? Anyone have a preference or do they taste about the same? My sister says the different types of olives taste different... All I can really discern from the ones I've tried that aren't on a pizza is that they taste... a little pickled. And a little bitter, but I figure I'd be bitter if I were pickled... | | Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 | | 1:03 am |
| | Sunday, July 5th, 2009 | | 11:16 pm |
sublimation?
... I have the Glorified Sock Puppet Pattern from ProjectPuppet.com. I was thinking of ordering things like the Alternate Body Pattern and the new Leg Pattern... Of a mind to create me a sort of "Kermit the Frog Meets Marilyn Manson Meets the Crypt Keeper" character for a hypothetical "Creature Feature" show... And I was thinking I were gonna do this myself somehow... And then I stumbled onto this site... http://www.puppet-planet.com/index.htmlAnd... uh... One of a few sites where they will custom-make a puppet for you. I recognize one of the puppets from ProjectPuppet.com's gallery... it was made from the Glorified Sock Puppet Pattern, funnily enough. Hmmm... So... Do it myself, considering I never done something like this before... paying however much for materials... OR Pay a professional however much to do it for me...? Dilemma dilemma dilemma... Even as a birthday present to myself it seems kinda... lavish? Extravagant? Um... | | Friday, July 3rd, 2009 | | 9:51 pm |
| | 8:42 pm |
Are you gross under there? Are you Night of the Living Dead under there?
So I was contemplating how ghosts are depicted in film and television and elsewhere... There's that memorable exchange in BeetleJuice... Barbara: Is this what we've been reduced to? Sheets? Adam: Think of them as death shrouds... Took me a while to figure that one out... why, for all the world, did a "ghost" look like someone wearing sheets? It hearkens back to the old days, before the funeral business really became a business. Back in the day, when someone died, the departed was not buried in his or her Sunday best. Good clothes weren't cheap, even back then, so they weren't gonna bury Uncle Pulsifer in his good suit, because one of the nephews could grow into it. Presumably, the dead person was buried in whatever clothes he or she happened to be wearing at the time of death... if that. More often than not, the body was wrapped in a sheet. The shroud, the winding-sheet. It's just a wild guess on my part, but I have the weird notion that if the person died in bed, his or her body was wrapped up in the bedclothes. Maybe. Never mind where I got the notion that Ouija boards are made from coffin lids. And that scene near the end of Master and Commander comes to mind, where (I think) the ship's dead are being sewn into their hammocks... But, yeah... ghost = someone wrapped up in a sheet. Maybe draping it in a fashion to make oneself a neat cowl. And around Halloween, you get kids cutting out eyeholes in sheets. Cartoonists drawing semi-amorphous humanish shapes with a head, a mouth, eyes... remember the Gus the Ghost books? Casper and his uncles? It's maybe a little easier in movies and TV... In movies like Topper and, well, Ghost, the ghosts were actors rendered ghostly via special effects. Appearing and disappearing, walking through walls, that sort of thing. In Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, we've got... some decidedly spooky stuff. Actors again. A room full of moldering corpses, at one point, if memory serves. In Poltergeist, we've got... well, whatever that was sticking its head through the door to roar at Craig T. Nelson... in the Ghostbusters movies, you have some ghosts that looked like transparent people (the jogger, the library ghost, the people coming off the Titanic), at least one specimen of something a little more solid (the cabdriver who looks like he came right out of Tales from the Crypt)... and then you've got something like Slimer... this green blob who looks marginally human, but distorted... little eyes and nose, a HUGE mouth. No neck. No legs. Just a head and a torso... arms coming right out the sides of his head. He's meant to be the ghost of John Belushi, in a way. The later cartoon adventures of the Ghostbusters ran the gamut from some of them looking like people, and then those distorted things again... what were some of those things supposed to be ghosts of, anyway? And that goes double for what appeared in Extreme Ghostbusters... According to Wikipedia, Freddy Krueger is a ghost. And then we've got BeetleJuice. "This is what happens when you die. That is what happens when he dies. That is what happens when they die. It's all very personal. And I'll tell you something. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have had my little accident." In other words, however you die, you stay looking that way. And we see, among other things, a hunter with a shrunken head, a diver with a shark clamped onto his leg, a camper in a sleeping bag full of rattlesnakes, the lady sawn in half, the guy who I presume died while smoking in bed, that flattened guy, and so on. "Coach? I don't think we survived that crash." The guy who wrote the screenplay for Ghost also wrote Jacob's Ladder, which features some bizarre things that seemed to anticipate the creepy stuff of J-horror, I dare say... and then we have The Sixth Sense, and it's actors who don't look particularly ghostly... And the Headless Horseman in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow is decidedly solid... and dangerous... This is all academic... and it's all research... | | Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | | 6:18 pm |
bustin' makes you feel good?
Seemingly on a Ghostbusters kick... watching the movies, playing the video game... watching a couple episodes on YouTube... A few years after The Real Ghostbusters cartoon ended its run, there was a follow-up series... Extreme Ghostbusters. Taking place after the original Ghostbusters went their separate ways... Egon (now sporting a ponytail instead of his pompadour) decided to form a new group of younger, hipper Ghostbusters... I figure the "extreme" in the title was meant to hint at that. Perhaps predictably, the show went for a kind of "darker and edgier" take on things... the team dynamic was... off... the new group members (including a jock in a wheelchair and a kohl-eyed gothette) didn't get along as well as the originals did... but keeping in mind that the original four Ghostbusters had been friends for years, and the new group were kind of put together as a necessity... And the ghosts were weirder-looking... I caught an episode the other day where the team investigates an ersatz R.L. Stine whose scary stories are becoming real... the baddies, the Vathek*, have a definite Clive Barker Hellraiser Cenobite chic... heck, the episode begins with images of dangling, clinking chains which end in hooks... the Vathek leader looks a little like the Butterball Cenobite, with a circular saw blade imbedded in his head... It only lasted forty episodes... the finale was a two-parter that reunited the original four (and the voice actors from The Real Ghostbusters came back to do the voices... but of course Maurice LaMarche was always there as Egon)... *"Vathek" is the name of a caliph who makes a deal with the devil in a Gothic novel called, er, Vathek, if memory serves... | | 5:51 pm |
| | Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | | 6:09 am |
| | Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 | | 8:48 pm |
Mr. Earbrass just wants to get to the stuff with the monsters already. Also, he has pen envy.
That's PEN envy! PEN! Yeah... 'Cause there's a new guy in the writer's group who can draw very well. I mean VERY very well. Insanely detailed pencil drawings of bearded sailor types and suchlike, and I look at my increasingly cartoony monstery things and... and... and... Anyway... "What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber..." --from The Devil's Backbone... So The Real Ghostbusters is out on DVD (not to be confused with Filmation's Ghostbusters which featured a gorilla and was based on an old live-action show called The Ghost Busters which had nothing to do with the Ivan Reitman films)... and it was a cartoon I did kinda like... except when it focused more on Slimer near the end there... There's stuff that sticks with me, for good or ill... the grotesque poltergeist with the mouth in its stomach that absorbed smaller, weaker ghosts into itself to make it more powerful... the Boogieman, The Sandman, the demon Watt, the one ghost that just wanted peace and quiet so it could sleep, Samhain* the Halloween spirit, and so on... also, werechickens. And though I never saw the episode in question myself (not yet anyway... thanks, YouTube), the Ghostbusters took on Cthulhu. Which seems like logical progression to me. Considering the original film as a kind of pastiche of certain Lovecraftian elements: fictitious books (Tobin's Spirit Guide), servitor beings (Zuul and Vinz Clortho), and an ancient and powerful evil (Gozer) thwarted by doughty men who, if not actually driven insane by what they see, at least lose something ("I'm terrified beyond all capacity for rational thought.") before it's all over... Apparently I've heard tell that on the cartoon, one of the scariest creatures was something called The Grundel... I never saw the episode myself. Not in its entirety anyway... it memorably begins with the Ghostbusters going after the Jabberwock. Yes, the Jabberwock. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son!" Eyes of flame, burbling as it came, looking just like the Tenniel illustration... If memory serves, the episode (and a few more) were written by the likes of J. Michael Straczynski and Michael Reaves... But my artist brain is more interested in the ghosts... some of them were just downright weird... It turns out many of them were designed by Everett Peck... creator of Duckman... Go figure, huh? "What's your girlfriend's name?" "Tommy!" "WHAT?!" "No, Dod, you don't understond!" *Initially pronounced "Som-hain" and later "Sam-hain" on the cartoon, when the character appeared in a second episode... Except that's not how it's really pronounced if you're observing Samhain on your pagan calendar... "Sow-in" if memory serves... | | 6:06 pm |
| | Monday, June 29th, 2009 | | 6:14 pm |
| | Saturday, June 27th, 2009 | | 9:32 pm |
Life! Life, do you hear? Give my creation LIFE!
I have some fabric. I have a pattern. And... um... Well, there's probably more things I need to buy... But I have the fabric... and I think it's enough for the head, body, and arms. But then I need some polyfoam and felt... for the mouth. And then... I had some yarn somewhere... it was this multicolored yarn... mostly blue... and looked dready... as in it wasn't of an equal thickness. Styrofoam ball, halved, for the eyes? Maybe sequins to stick in the middle for pupils? Like with all recipes and formulas... in order to do this, you need this this this and this. | | Thursday, June 25th, 2009 | | 6:16 pm |
Who ya gonna call?
Succumbed to temptation and nabbed me the Ghostbusters game. Uh... yeah. Watched a snippet of the movie early this morning to get psyched up, even... I was eleven when I saw the movie in theaters back in 1984. It still holds up... can still recite bits of dialogue... still geek out over the oddball terminology and the gadgets... and am weirdly amused by how weird the ghosts look (this goes double for the cartoon The Real Ghostbusters)... Wonder whose idea it was to make the ghosts... distorted. Stylized. I mean, that librarian looked normal, then turned into something out of Creepshow... And then there was Slimer... tiny eyes, knob of nose, a HUGE mouth... blobby body... no neck... the arms just coming out of the sides of the... head? body? And green... Bernie Wrightson was one of the artists who worked on concept art for the movie... I wonder whether anything he doodled made it to final cut... | | Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 | | 7:56 pm |
Listen... you smell something?
So my writing is taking a teensy supernatural turn... I mean, it is on the monstery side to begin with, but it's sort of becoming more... ghosty. Which I find curious because I'm mostly skeptical... and this is speaking as someone who watched The X-Files and likes Ghostbusters and such. Not to mention I've house sat for friends of mine whose house wants to be the Overlook Hotel when it grows up... I've had those moments where I think I see something out of the corner of my eye, and I turn to look and there's nothing there. I don't watch Ghost Hunters or any of those other reality TV shows where people go seeking ghosts. It strikes me as lots of nightvision footage of people in corridors saying "Did you hear that?" over and over again... Current Music: That "Religious Man" song from Nacho Libre | | Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | | 10:02 pm |
Likes games? LIKES... GAMES?
There's a new Ghostbusters game out... for the 360 and PS3... I'm intrigued... but is it any good? I hear tell that it features dialogue written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, the voice cast includes Aykroyd, Ramis, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts and William Atherton (Walter Peck is back!?)... and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man is just the first boss you face (unless maybe Slimer counts as a boss?)... and Aykroyd was saying that this game was as close to a Ghostbusters 3 as we were going to get... though I also hear tell that the on-again-off-again Ghostbusters 3 is in the works? And I wonder if my computer can handle The Sims 3... |
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