human rind hidamari?

Lots of work, not much play - hoping to finally get a rest later next month after the major projects are out of the way, and I just have my 'regular' jobs to do, hurrah.

After a friend of mine got all excited about those cheap Polaroid I-Zone scanners from the last update, and wanted me to buy him a bunch of them, I went back to the store, and they were _all_ gone - I'm speculating they went into a landfill into the desert, cos I can't believe people actually purchased them.

For whatever reason, I never got through my Season 2 DVD of Futurama from, um, a long time ago, but, ohboy, Ragnar's Human Rinds never get old. Also striking my animation fancy, and yes, I'm slow on the uptake for this too, FLCL, aka Fooly Cooly, still showing on Cartoon Network - rather insane, and one of the few recent anime I actually dig.

As for recent objects of desire, seems that Ferricide has turned me on to Hidamari No Tami - gotta love solar-powered Japanese stress relieving, uhh, bizarre cute things. Must... buy... now.

grind the webster josie lemony odama

Finishing up the weekend with an update, I'm somewhere north of 50,000 words on the O'Reilly book project, but still quite a bit to go. Nobody told me books were so long - who'd have thunk it? Hopefully my particular brand of obscure gaming-related cojones (with help from some great external contributors) will go down well when it finally comes out later in the year.

As for extra-curricular fun and games, I had a little play around with the Polaroid I-Zone Webster, which Surplus Computers have been selling for all of three bucks. It has no focus (it's meant for 'scanning' small pics up close), but I still tried it out on some of the random toys in my office, from devil dolls and caterpillars through Homers and Swamp Things:

    


    

Media whorishly, I'm still digging Penn & Teller: Bullshit! on Showtime very, very much - they had a wonderful show on how most (subsidized) recycling was simply 'busy work' that the taxpayer has to shell out for. Also finished watching Gray's Anatomy, the last of the monologues I hadn't seen from the amazing, sadly missed Spalding Gray. Oh, and catch Josie And The Pussycats on Cartoon Network whenever it's on - I had completely forgotten it was so deliciously, badly Scooby-cloned.

Elsewhere, Michael Gondry's video for Steriogram's 'Walkie Talkie Man' is deliciously perverse, all yarn-unraveling. And thanks to Costco, the Lemony Snicket books (at least the first 9) are all ours, and they're marvelously gloomy - I know, I know, way behind the curve. And Odama, all wargames and pinball tables in one (!), as designed by the certifiable Yoot Saito of 'Seaman' fame, was the sleeper hit of E3. End of random recommendations.

candied angelic lowriding ghoulies

I'm not 100 percent sure I have anything interesting to say, given that lots of working has eaten into my doing-anything-else time - I'm not going anywhere until the trip to Berlin (for Wizards Of OS) and London (to see my folks) next month, and it's full steam ahead until that happens. So let's talk spare-spare-time media consumption, filled out to encompass more than a paragraph this time, shall we?

Pulp-wise? I'm currently reading The Devil's Candy, by Julie Salamon, an apparently infamous movie-industry book about the filming of the colossal flop Bonfire Of The Vanities, of which I confess I have neither read Tom Wolfe's book or seen film. But you don't really need either of these to appreciate the raw trainwreck honesty of the whole thing, and the amazing pluck of Brian De Palma to allow complete, uncensored access to the movie's long and perilous production phase.

Also notable with regard to The Devil's Candy: the phrase after which the book is named was coined by the one-time producer of the film, Peter Guber, who I enjoyed seeing bickering with Variety editor Peter Bart on AMC's Sunday Morning Shootout, up to the point they started repeating themselves with the grosses vs. halcyon Hollywood spiel. Their interviews with genuine Hollywood bigshots, of both the acting and directing species, are still well worth TiVo-ing, though.

Over on the DVD menu du jour, we have the first season of Angel, which feels easier to get into fresh than Buffy The Vampire Slayer itself (I've seen so many Buffy bits and pieces over multiple series that I'm thoroughly confused about how to fill in the gaps.) Anyhow.. Angel, at least the first season, is a fun, witty, fleet of foot show, and while it sometimes seems a little rote, and the Buffy crossovers make less sense when you can't see the corresponding episodes at the same time, it feels like a darn fun part of the whole mythos, snobbery be damned.

Finally, on the interactive entertainment front, I've been playing a few random GameFly rentals, including Lowrider (much as I like rhythm games, ehh... not so much. Feels like it was made out of flimsy plastic), Jet Li: Rise To Honor (reasonably serviceable, although comes across as a bit.. vanilla?), Metal Arms: Glitch In The System (top-notch, sacrificed sales for cute character designs, grab it if you see it in the bargain bin), and Grabbed By The Ghoulies (replace Jet Li with cel-shaded wimp and Hong Kong mob boss with inexplicably Dick Dastardly-styled evil genius, add a little stylin' presentation, but left with lingering taste of same... vanilla?)