Last night I tweeted that we were looking through my Woodward yearbooks and I had forgotten that Kenan Thompson had a mean flat-top in eighth grade. Several people requested something along the lines of “pics or it didn’t happen,” so here you go. Kenan Thompson’s eighth grade yearbook photo. While I don’t have Kenan’s permission to post this, he was a super nice kid, and I kind of think he’d be okay with it. If he tells me otherwise, I will take it down.

Either way, I don’t think it would be cool for me to post a friend’s yearbook picture without also embarassing myself, so here’s my own photo from that same year. In my defense, the picture was taken right after P.E., and I was sweaty. And also braces. Lots of braces. Man, I had a lot of hair.

I think the last Stephen King book I read was either the final volume of The Dark Tower or Under the Dome, whenever they came out. It’s been a while since I’ve read King, but he’s always been one of my favorite authors, ever since I cracked open Christine way back in middle school. After a long binge of epic fantasy books, I decided it was time for something different, so I grabbed the e-book of 11/22/63, which I just finished last night.

There’s been a lot of buzz about this book, and it’s usually referred to as “The Kennedy Book.” I love conspiracy stories, especially when they’re rooted in some sort of reality, and that’s what initially drove me to check this book out. The initial conceit is that an ordinary guy living in Maine (of course) is given the chance to go back in time to save JFK from the assassin’s bullets. Once I was well into it, I realized the Kennedy angle is only a fraction of what the book really is about. It’s a novel that is pretty neatly divided into three discrete but intertwined threads.

The first and most readily awesome is that it’s an intriguing time travel story. Actual time jumping does occur early and often, and in both directions. No time travel stories really make much sense if you stop to consider the physics and implications, but Stephen King does a good job of making us forget about that kind of stuff. In fact, he goes to great lengths to establish specific rules for his time travel model, and in the afterword acknowledges his son, comic writer Joe Hill, for working out some of the time travel kinks for him. In the end, the time travel in this book is more satisfying than most of Doctor Who’s wibbly wobbly timey wimey.

The second thread winding through 11/22/63 is a star crossed love story. Stephen King has said he’s no good at writing romance, but he proved himself wrong with this one. The love story in this novel is a very unique one that ends up being engaging and believable despite some predictability (which I see more as inevitability when it’s coupled with the time travel). The book sometimes feels a bit overlong at 849 pages, but the length allows King to build a town full of real characters that we grow to know and love as the infamous date in 1963 draws near.

The third component of the book is tightly detailed historical fiction tracing the minutiae of the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald, his family, and his acquaintances in the months and years leading up to the killing of John Kennedy. It’s obvious that a ton of research went into this thing, and I actually feel like I learned a lot about the era and circumstances surrounding the assassination. King definitely embellishes and extrapolates many of Oswald’s movements and encounters, but by and large he seems to get the broad strokes right.

Time travel, romance, and historical fiction have been combined countless times in the past, but there’s no denying that this is a Stephen King book. The tone and style of the prose are undeniably King, but even beyond that 11/22/63 is firmly rooted in King’s larger literary universe. I won’t spoil anything with specifics, but I managed to spot references that tie this book into It, Christine, The Running Man, The Shawshank Redemption, Under the Dome, and of course The Dark Tower. There’s a lot of subtle numerology stuff as well, if you know to look for 19s in Stephen King’s books.

11/22/63 is in many ways a different animal than Stephen King has tackled before, but in just as many ways it fits perfectly on his bibliography. If you’re into King, have an interest in the Kennedy assassination, or like well designed and compelling time travel fiction, this is a great book to pick up. I gave it five stars on GoodReads, and that’s a rarity for me.

Amazon Link: 11/22/63 by Stephen King

Time for another new collectible! This time it’s the new Faith statue, made by Sideshow Collectibles. Eliza Dushku played Faith on both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and she first appeared in the third season of Buffy as a deeply trouble rogue Slayer. Sideshow Collectibles has the Buffy license and has made a bunch of 12″ action figures and large-scale collectibles in the past. More recently they’ve been producing a line of really cool Buffy statues based on the most iconic characters from the show. The first release was Buffy herself, sitting on a gothic styled throne, and the second was Willow with her school backpack. Faith is the third in the series and stands around 18″ tall, including the base. The regular version of the statue comes with a crossbow in Faith’s right hand, but the Sideshow exclusive edition has interchangeable hands, one of which holds Faith’s knife the Mayor gave her in season three. That’s the one I have her holding in these photos. The pose and design are loosely based on Jo Chen’s cover art for one of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic books (linked in the image gallery below).

Time for a nerd milestone! Back in November 2005 my friend Keenan and I sat outside the local Best Buy all night long so that we could each get a then-brand new Xbox 360 on launch day. With a little time share help from my parents, we made it through the night and eventually stumbled home the next morning with our shiny new game systems. I can’t remember which games Keenan picked up, but my first batch was Perfect Dark Zero, Amped 3, and Condemned: Criminal Origins.

After hooking the system up, I got my introduction to this new thing called Xbox achievements. Microsoft had this brilliant idea to hook a meta-game into all the games that would be released on their console. Each game would come with unlockable achievements that gamers would earn for accomplishing various things within the games… Stuff like “Complete the game on hard difficulty,” “Shoot 100 barrels,” “Collect all the hidden gems,” and so forth. Each achievement would be tied to a point value that would accrue in your gamer account across all games. So, for example, you could win 60 points by playing Call of Duty and switch over to win 30 points in Mass Effect and end up with 90 new points in your gamer account.

The crazy thing about achievements and gamerscore is that they mean absolutely nothing. You can’t trade points in for anything, you don’t get special access to anything with them, and they don’t even give you access to new parts of games. They are just meaningless points that accrue. The brilliant thing about them is that they are utterly addictive to obsessive geek personalities, and they spur gamers to play every Xbox game we can get our hands on. After I earned my first achievement points, I knew I had to gorge myself and hoard as many points as I possibly could get. Each retail game typically comes with 1000 achievement points you can unlock, and each downloadable game usually has 200 unlockable points.

From 2005 through today, I’ve played 341 different games on the Xbox 360. Some were really good, and many were completely dire. I fully admit to having pushed my way through quite a few truly terrible games (Hannah Montana: The Movie: The Game, I’m looking at you) just to get my hands on more sparkly gamerscore points. A week or so ago, I realized I was getting pretty close to 100,000 points, and I decided I needed to plan my gaming strategy so that I’d land exactly on the 100k mark. I inched my way up to 99,950 points and decided that I needed to make the last achievement be something worthy of this truly dorky milestone.

I used the stat tracking tools on TrueAchievements.com (yes, there are whole websites devoted to tracking and monitoring Xbox gamerscore now) to search out achievements I had yet to earn that would net me those missing 50 points. There were a lot to choose from, but I decided to go for an achievement called Visions of the Future in the very first Assassin’s Creed game. Over the years the Assassin’s Creed franchise has become one of my favorites, so it seemed fitting that I’d hit 100k by going back to the first game in the series. After reading up on the achievement, I realized that all I needed to do to earn it was to load my save game from the end of Assassin’s Creed, finish the very end of the game, and watch the end credits all the way through. I guess I just didn’t watch the credits when I originally played the game.

After loading in and doing a couple of quick actions, I sat back to watch the names roll past. And then, ding!, 50 more points dumped into my account, bringing me to 100,000 gamerscore. As of this writing, my account is sitting on 100k even, but I probably will unlock something new tomorrow and mess up all those nice, round zeros. Any non-gamers reading this probably will think I’m insane. My only response is that this is what I do when you’re watching sports.

Onward to 200k!

At last, I clamber up from the depths, undead-like! Pale and dessicated, I shamble onward into a land that has become foreign in my time among the dead. It is I, survivor of that most vile of afflictions… food poisoning!

2012 is off to a gangbuster start for me. First my car sputtered its last gasp, and now I lost half a week to grossness. Everything was fine until last Wednesday night when something I had consumed decided to break forth from its meaty prison. I don’t know exactly what I ate that was contaminated, but while laying in bed in misery I had plenty of time to contemplate the culprit. I’ve narrowed it down to four possibilities:

• Veggie tacos at Tijuana Flats – This is actually my least likely suspect, because I had the tacos for lunch on Tuesday, and I think I would have had trouble before Wednesday evening if they were to blame.
• Leftover Bloomin Onion – I had lunch with my parents on Wednesday, and they had some soggy, greasy leftover Bloomin Onion from when they went to Outback the previous night. Definitely sketchy.
• Alfalfa sprouts – I’ve never had trouble with these before, but recently I’ve been reading about all the horrible ways these things can infect you with disgustingness, and there’s no way to prevent it. We’ve had sprouts in salads and wraps recently. Celeste has eaten from the same sprouts and hasn’t gotten sick, but it’s still a possible source.
• Frozen vegan chick’n patties – Ordinarily these are delicious and mundane little patties of awesomeness, but I ate two of them just about an hour or so before all hell broke loose. I think it’s possible we snagged a bad batch.

Whatever the source, Wednesday wasn’t a pretty night. After reenacting scenes from both Alien and The Exorcist (and possibly combining them along the way), I let Celeste dump me into bed, where I passed out cold. Thursday and Friday are a blur of me being in bed and feeling terribly as I floated in and out of various literal fever dreams. I had my Kindle Fire and Windows phone with me, but the only things I managed to do with them were look up more information about my impending doom and watch three episodes of Ice Road Truckers (possibly related to said doom) via Netflix on the Kindle.

In the grief cycle, there is a stage called Bargaining. I reached that in my illness somewhere around 3am on Friday morning. There’s an open closet at the foot of the bed, which was pretty much all I stared at this week. I have a bunch of collectibles stuck in there waiting to be displayed, and at some point I started pondering which and how many of those I’d be happy to give away for an instant end to my misery. I’m not sure to whom I would be giving these things, but hopefully they would have some use for statues of Witchblade and Wolverine. It wasn’t until much later that I remembered my delirious mental Let’s Make a Deal-ing with chagrin. But, even now, I’d totally give up some Witchblade for food poisoning immunity.

Celeste and my parents were fantastic throughout. My mom and dad came over a couple of times, laden with Ginger Ale, Gatoraid, Saltine crackers, and all sorts of other stuff, and Celeste constantly kept me sane, alive, and medicated when needed. I came out the other end of the tunnel Sunday morning, alive but wretched. I lost around ten pounds between Wednesday night and Sunday morning, and I’m now trying to gradually rehydrate myself. Having lost so much weight and completely dried out, my fingers kind of look like pale prunes right now, and my skin feels not unlike paper. It’s going to take some time to get back to normal, but I’m just glad I’m ambulatory now.

The only good thing to come out of all this (and it potentially is a very good thing) is that I apparently am broken of my caffeine addiction now. For as long as I can remember I’ve been hooked on soft drinks. At the time of The Incident on Wednesday I was averaging two Dr. Peppers a day, sometimes ramping up to three if I felt dangerous. Anytime I’ve tried to cut back on them has resulted in brain shattering caffeine induced headaches, so I’ve shied away from it even though I knew it would be good for me. After not drinking anything, caffeine or otherwise, during my illness, I realized I am over the caffeine headache bump. I’m not sure whether it will last, but I’m hoping I can ride this wave and cut sugary soft drinks out of my diet.

That’s how my holiday weekend was. How was yours?

We’ve been watching Once Upon a Time since it premiered last year, and I’ve had so-so feelings about it all along. I think it’s a show that has a lot of potential, but it just hasn’t had enough forward movement to be truly engaging. It came back from its holiday break this week with a new episode. Ava is doing the official Fandomania reviews for this show, so I’m putting my own thoughts here instead of there. If you haven’t seen up through the newest episode (“Desperate Souls”), beware of spoilers beyond this point.

The last new episode before the break (“The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”) was the best episode of the series until its last few minutes. The whole show up until that episode has pretty much just been the kid telling everybody they are fairy tale characters who have been cursed into mundane modern lives while everybody treats him, quite justifiably, like he’s a loon. There’s been rivalry between the kid’s biological mom (who is Snow White’s alternate universe daughter, yes, really) and his adopted mom (who is the evil queen / mayor person), but there hasn’t been anything of substance beyond the mayor being all “I am a major beeotch” and Snow White Junior being all “I will end you, but nicely and without offending anyone.”

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the most grating mom of all?

In the “Hunter” episode, we found out the town sheriff is actually the Huntsman in fairy tale world. I guess we are supposed to have been pining for him to get together with the kid’s bio-mom Emma, but I’ve thought all along that he was just kind of a creeper and maybe a little evil. But anyway, in this episode Emma kisses him and suddenly he remembers all the details of his fairy tale life. Finally! Plot progress! Until evil queen mayor lady squishes his fairy tale heart (which she’s been keeping in a vault under the cemetery) and kills him before he can convince anyone that the kid’s ramblings are true. Big letdown, that. There was a great opportunity for Emma to give some credence to the fairy tale stuff after her smooch buddy keeled over, and I was hoping that would be where the first new episode picked up.

But no, of course not, because that would mean the story is actually going somewhere. This week we rejoined the gang two weeks after Graham’s untimely infarction, and nothing at all has changed, aside from prophecy kid (who bears an eerie resemblance to a pint-sized D.J. Qualls) moping around because his mom offed the sheriff and just might kill his bio-mom the deputy. Evil queen mom and Emma are still bickering pointlessly (seriously, why doesn’t Regina just kill Emma and be done with it?), nobody believes the kid’s stories, and the whole damn town still shows up whenever anything of remote interest happens. How do all these people even know about random stuff fast enough to always turn out while whatever it is is still going down, anyway? But I digress.

Hail, hail, the gang's all here... again!

With Graham dead, the town needs a new sheriff. Regina tries to appoint Gus from Breaking Bad as the new sheriff, and he gets to say some more horrible mirror pun lines (he’s the mirror mirror on the wall in the alternate universe. We get it, already!). Rumplestiltskin cop-blocks her by digging up rules from the town’s charter that force an election between Emma and not-Gus. Wanting Emma to win, old Stiltsy pushes fame upon her by firebombing the town hall and putting Emma in a position where she has to save Regina’s life. No mention of how he knew a giant chunk of random metal would smack Regina in the leg, rendering her unable to save herself, but that’s the least of the problems with this episode.

At the sheriff election debate, Emma needs a leg up on the competition if she’s going to unseat the mayor’s pick for the job. Of course, playing up her role in saving a life—an actual thing one would hope a cop would do as part of her job—is the obvious go-to selling point. By this time Emma has figured out that Mr. Gold was behind the fire, and she turns into George “I cannot tell a lie” Washington. She takes the high ground and calls Gold out on his sneakery in front of the whole town. She does this because she is a Good Guy, and Good Guys don’t do underhanded things. And she does this, believing that admitting Gold set the whole thing up will damn her chances at the position and put Regina’s puppet into office, thereby screwing over a town full of dimwitted innocents. Of course everything works out in the end when Emma is elected because of her willingness to stand up to Gold, but that’s beside the point.

Don't cry, Robert Carlyle! It's not your fault that I dislike Once Upon a Time!

The point is that Emma blatantly calls herself a Good Guy (caps intentional), and the show is selling her to us as the hero, but she is totally cool with sitting on her high horse and watching the town crumble. At least she did the Right Thing, right? That’s not a hero to me. That’s a self righteous snob whose own perception of herself as a Good Guy is more important than actually doing things for the greater good. Therein lies the chief problem with Once Upon a Time. It’s a fantasy story with dark overtones, but it’s never willing to admit that there is morality between the black and white extremes. To the characters of Storybrooke, Maine, there are no grays.

Watchmen’s Rorschach tells us never to compromise, not even in the face of Armageddon. Rorschach also is a dangerous lunatic who thinks he’s a hero. In order to be a true hero and someone we can respect, a character has to be willing to compromise when necessary and to be the one to make the hard decisions. There are times when the needs of the many do outweigh the needs of the few (or the hero’s own vanity), and the hero must sacrifice her own nobility to help those to whom she must be the hero. Occasionally the hero needs to get dirty and even lose some respect in order to do what is right (see Batman in The Dark Knight). A character is not a hero because she looks pretty and conjugates her verbs correctly. A character is a hero because she’s able to do things others can’t or won’t in order to ensure that Good wins out. Emma is not that character, and Once Upon a Time tries to sell us on the notion that that’s perfectly fine.

That’s my jumping off point for Once Upon a Time. I’ve stuck with the show and hoped that it would go somewhere intriguing, but I just can’t respect a series that panders such a narrow view of morality to us. I understand that it’s a family show and that I shouldn’t expect the layered storytelling and complex characterization of something like Lost (for which Once Upon a Time’s two creators actually were executive producers) or Angel (Wesley Wyndam-Pryce solidly embodies the kind of amazing hero you’ll never see on Once Upon a Time). Still, I do expect some sort of depth and credibility in the universe they’re building. It’s impossible for me to understand or empathize with a world full of characters who see everything in absolutes and extremes, with no subtlety or acknowledgement that sometimes good people have to do bad things.

Thus end my rant and my viewership of Once Upon a Time.

One of the many things I collect is the DC Superhero Figurines Collection made by a company in the UK called Eaglemoss. They make small scale figurines of all the heroes and villains from DC Comics. The figurines typically are painted lead miniatures, and they are usually around 3 3/4″ tall. They kind of look like really cool chess pieces… so much so, in fact, that Eaglemoss’s newest series of collectibles is actually a line of Batman chess pieces. I don’t plan to collect those, but I’m way deep into the regular figurines, and I’m going to try to log all of them with photos. So far I’ve only managed to shoot ten of the many figurines I have, but you can see those in my Flickr gallery.

Occasionally they release a larger-scale figurine, usually whenever they want to feature a bulky character or some kind of vehicle or prop. The newest one to hit stores is Clayface, the Batman villain. He’s still around the same height as the other little guys, but he’s definitely bulkier and came in a bigger box. Here’s his Wiki entry, if you’re not familiar with him. I photographed the Clayface figurine last night and stuck the pics up on my Flickr, but you can see lower res versions of the photos here.

I’m trying to figure out a good way to display these lead figurines but am not sure what sort of thing or arrangement would work best. Optimally I’d like to have some kind of wall display, but between my Marvel and DC collections there now are literally a couple hundred of these dudes to show off. Anybody know Ikea hacks that would work well for these, or anything remotely along those lines?

Back in August when we went to Dragon*Con 2011, I recorded video of the Star Wars costume contest. I was super busy after we got home, and I completely forgot that I had the video. As such, I never had a chance to publish it or include it in the Fandomania Dragon*Con coverage. I was organizing some stuff in my office today and came across my Flip cam. That’s when I remembered the video and decided to toss it up onto YouTube, sight unseen. This is the entirety of the contest, including the judge intros (with an appearance by Peter “Chewbacca” Mayhew), the mid-contest lightsaber demonstration, and the awards presentation at the end. There’s even a C-3PO flasher to be seen.

]]> http://jasontd.com/dragoncon-2011-star-wars-costume-contest/feed/ 0 http://jasontd.com/tucker-dale-vs-evil/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tucker-dale-vs-evil http://jasontd.com/tucker-dale-vs-evil/#comments Sun, 08 Jan 2012 01:16:00 +0000 JasonTD http://jasontd.com/?p=309

A week ago I posted my list of movies I watched during 2011, reaching a total of 47 films for the year. I set a goal of 52 for 2012, which would raise me to an average of a movie a week. My tentative plan is to keep track of most of the movies I watch here. These won’t be full reviews like I write for Fandomania. Rather, they’ll just be some brief observations about the movies.

My first movie of the year is Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, a terrific horror spoof that released last year. I’ve seen a lot of my friends checking into this one on GetGlue, so I took a look at the cast list. That’s all it took for me to fire it up on Netflix Instant Streaming. Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine are the titular Tucker and Dale, a couple of good old boys heading out to their newly purchased cabin in the woods for a vacation in the wilderness. Along the way they encounter a gang of vacationing college kids who mistake them for murderous hillbilly psychopaths. Hilarity ensues.

Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk both have appeared in tons of TV shows and movies, but their best roles have them cast as lovable but occasionally bumbling guys who go by nicknames inspired by their last names. Labine was Bert “Sock” Wysocki, Sam’s well intentioned and laid back goofball buddy on Reaper, and Tudyk immortalized himself as spaceship pilot Hoban “Wash” Washburne in Firefly and Serenity. Chief among the self victimizing college kids is Katrina Bowden (probably best known as Cerie from 30 Rock) as Allison, the girl Tucker and Dale rescue from an accidental drowning, thereby kicking their comedy of errors into high gear.

Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil is a great send-up of the slasher horror genre with some fantastic gags and jokes. Since the genre it’s spoofing is one known for its high blood and sex volume, be warned that there’s some fairly ridiculous gore throughout, along with just a little nudity in one scene. If you’re a fan of horror movies or of any of the talent involved, you really should check this one out.

Thursday was sayonara to my car, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a little emotional about it. The actual sequence of events leading up to my final glimpse of the old Grand Am are actually kind of amusing, though, so that’s the story I’ve decided to relay to you.

When it became clear that my car had rolled its last foot under its own power, there weren’t a whole lot of options for what to do with the thing. I’d already had to sink some money into it to have it towed to a second repair shop and given its death examination, so I was ready to just be finished with the whole painful ordeal and to move forward. My parents helped me research places that could come pick up the car, and my dad ended up being the one to call the place that offered the most for my incredible unmoving automotive.

A junkyard in Clermont agreed to tow the car away for $400. They would have given me $450 if I delivered the car myself, but it would cost at least $50 to have it towed one more time, so I settled for the $400. It’s not much money, but given everything that’s wrong with the car now, I still felt like I was getting a decent deal. My dad secured the deal over the phone with the lady at the junkyard, and I agreed to meet her at the auto repair place for the wrecker to pick the car up.

We were supposed to meet there at 4pm, so I got there at about 3:50 and of course the tow truck arrived around 4:30-ish. Whatever, though. I was just glad to be getting this thing done. The truck driver was a young woman who gave the car a once over, looked at the title, and said she’d give me the $350 as soon as I finished filling out the transfer paperwork. Hold the phone. “We agreed on $400,” I said.

“No, we pay by weight. We don’t pay more than $350 for this weight,” she said.

I told her my dad was the one who spoke with the person on the phone, so I would call him and get this straightened out. I got him on the phone and passed it to the tow truck lady, who then asked my dad who he had talked to when he called. After he told her that she was the person he talked to (she has a very recognizable and distinctive accent), she denied that and said she did not actually work for the junkyard and is just a contract driver who picks up cars for them. I told her I was not letting her take the car for less than $400, and my dad confirmed for her that he had a second place willing to take the car for $400 if these folks fell through. She said she would call the junkyard to see if they could approve the $400.

It’s at that point that I’m pretty positive she pretended to punch up a number on her iPhone and mumbled incoherently into it. It took a grand total of maybe five seconds of her faking a phone call before the folks at the junkyard miraculously approved the $400 payment. “They never do this,” she assured me. “This is a one-time thing. I’m surprised they’re letting me give you $400, but it’s because the new girl said it was okay when she talked to your dad.” I nodded sympathetically and managed not to laugh when, miracle of miracles, it turned out that she had exactly $400 (one $50, seventeen $20, one $5, and five $1) in her pocket, clipped to a note with my name on it. I got my money, she hooked up my car to her truck, and we both went our merry ways.

The moral of this story: If you’re going to be a liar in your profession, make sure your improv and your props don’t give you away.