Infrequent posts about stuff.
Amblypygid and I made an entry for the Reasonably Clever DIRTY BRICK ‘06 contest and finally submitted it this past weekend. Over all I’m fairly happy with it. The dog head on the pommel really did come together very nicely and is probably what I am most proud of in the design.
Feel free to peruse the entire Flickr photo set for the entry and let me know what you think.
Just saw on BevNet that GUS has a new flavor: Dry Pomegranate
Given their other great flavors, and the relatively favorable review on BevNet, I hope to see it relatively soon at the local Cost Plus World Market locations.
I finished watching Lost Season 2 on DVD (out from Netflix) last night, or all of the episodes anyway. (I didn’t realize disc 7 was just extras until I watched the last episode on disc 6 last night which was very obviously a cliffhanger.)
I had talked with a friend about it just as the first disc was arriving and she had mentioned that she wasn’t interested in seeing Season 2 because she was apparantly tired of the neverending slow reveal of mysteries paired with just a bit too much posing. I just wanted to know what was in the hatch.
Honestly, I almost agreed with her when I had finished the first of six discs of episodes. Specifically episodes 1-3 where, I think, possibly the most grotesquely painful replaying of the same 10 minutes of footage that I have ever seen on television. Yes, the hatch opening was a big deal for the series but you don’t spend three entire episodes without moving on to something, ANYTHING, else.
The good news? As soon as they got over themselves and got on with the rest of the season things took off very nicely and I really think there was enough balance of interesting new mysteries along with answers for the old mysteries even if not complete, and usually leading to new mysteries. The last episode of Season 2 alone was a great payoff for answering quite a few issues and I was reasonably happy with most, thought not all, of the answers.
Was there still maybe a whole lot of posing? Hell yes, but I think there may have been slightly less than in Season 1. I also had some small issues with the overly melodramatic continuing epic saga of the stunning and dramatic love triangle supreme of all time, space, and eternity that is Sawyer, Kate, and Jack’s story of love, unrequited and not, spurned and returned, and flowing through the, well, you get the idea. It runs on even worse than that last sentence. Possibly the most irritating thing about it though is that I think I might know people just like that.
Maybe I’m just a sucker for neverending plot lines, my 85% complete run of the Avengers comic from Marvel not being another indication, but I thought it was fun and it succeeded just as well as Season 1 at making me nervous to be alone in the dark after the TV had been turned off.
Just an update about how Intelliflix is doing. I decided back in July that it wasn’t worth the hassle of trying to cancel my prepaid 1 year membership, so I’m just keeping track of how it’s performing at this point.
A couple of interesting tidbits:
As you can see I’m still not particularly happy with the service, but I think it would be far more trouble to cancel my 1 year prepaid membership than to continue to track how well they are doing and maybe satisfy my curiosity about whether they actually have any Xbox 360 games at all or not.
It appears that Mr Whedon has very big plans indeed for Runaways. I think I’m looking forward to the Crisis on Inifinite Molly’s storyline.
I downloaded the brand new version of iTunes (version 7.something) and thought it was interesting to see the following dialog in the installation UI. Haven’t done a lot of digging on exactly what the “Apple Software Update” precisely does yet, but hopefully it doesn’t eat system resources like iTunes and it’s associated iPod services do.
Popular Science has rated Minneapolis as the “Top Tech City”.
I was looking over the Star Tribune candidate profiles for the primary tomorrow and thought it was fairly interesting to see that in the Hennepin County Commisioner District 4 race there is a Green Party candidate (Farheen Hakeem) who is running on a social issues platform and a DFL Party candidate (incumbent Peter McLaughlin) who is running on an environmental issues platform.
One of my most favorite local artists is Nachito Herrera. His consummate skill and amazing talent just blow me away whenever I get to hear his work.
Case in point: I’m listening to “West Side Latin Jazz” from Live at the Dakota Vol. 2. The level of energy that so fully saturates every single note of the song is striking, but is almost nothing compared to the layers of texture that make this song almost the anti-thesis of saccharine. One of the elements of latin jazz that has always drawn me is the use of multiple percussion instruments. So hearing Shai Hayo on timbales (?) and Gordy Knudtson on the more usual drum set throwing around their increasingly more frenetic variations of the main theme in the alternating percussion solos near the end of the track is just pure heaven.
Besides, how can you not like a form of music that takes the cowbell seriously.
