Candleblog

Cross-posted at Geek Mountain State. Andrew at Geek Mountain State asked me to write a post looking back at nerdy stuff in 2011. I didn’t see every movie or play every video game, so this isn’t an all-encompassing year-in-review post, but as I made my notes preparing to write the thing, I realized it was [...]

So the plot of Transformers Dark of the Moon is that in 1961 a ship carrying special Transformers technology that could help win the Cybertron war crashed on the Earth’s moon, was noticed by observers on Earth (in the US and USSR), who then had a space race to get to the moon and see [...]

It’s the first officially perfect day of spring here in northern Vermont. Here are some things to cogitate about as you idly meander about today… Clay Shirky has your must-read future-of-media essay for the week: The Collapse of Complex Business Models. Speaking of Shirky, he’s one of the respondents to this Pew Research Center survey [...]

Okay, it’s after 2:30 AM so this is gonna be brief. Tim Blake Nelson and I made eye contact at JFK this morning. He was on my flight to Austin. I passed his row on my way to the lavatory and noticed he was watching a 1970s Roy Scheider movie on his laptop that may [...]

Like Juno, Sideways and Little Miss Sunshine before it, Up in the Air is a fine, somewhat tepid little Hollywood film with an indy flare that will get the Academy’s panties all up in a bunch at Oscar time, and movie pundits will wonder aloud why more films can’t be made with “heart.” And people [...]

Man, people on the interwebz are crazy about their top ten lists, especially when years, decades and centuries end. I’d just like to remind everyone reading that decades (that is, periods of ten years) are ending all the time. For example, the decade that began at 2:50 P.M. on December 21, 1999 just ended a [...]

What follows are my next-day thoughts on Avatar. Minor spoilers abound. Somewhere near the middle of James Cameron’s three-hour long sci-fi spectacle, Avatar, I had to pee. The “medium” Diet Pepsi I’d been nursing was making its presence known in my bladder and the matter was just becoming too urgent to ignore. So I waited [...]

Am I the only one here who this this might be a good thing?

I have a lot of free time today… hours and hours in fact, so I’m going to try and sum up the noteworthy events of the lest several days of my trip in chronological order: Wednesday 7/15: Flew from BTV to PDX. Arrived at 1AM local time. Sat next to ACM sisters and brothers from [...]

It’s as I feared… Even a crowd in Arkansas, having been lured to an arena with a chain-link-fenced boxing ring in the center; drunk, raucous, wearing concession T-shirts that read “My Asshole’s Just for Shitting,” don’t respond according to plan. Brüno, now posing as a mullet-wearing redneck named Straight Dave, whips the crowd into a [...]