Just a couple Whedon quotes that tickled me:
“I don’t want to create responsible shows with lawyers in them. I want to invade people’s dreams.”
“I hate it when people talk about ‘Buffy’ as being campy. I hate camp. I don’t enjoy dumb TV. I believe Aaron Spelling has single-handedly lowered SAT scores.”
Watched the season premiere of Alias on Sunday. Good stuff, and I really like what they seem to have in place for this season — MAN but they are playing hardball with the poor reporter guy.
We’re still developmentally disabled in regards to taping shows this season, though: this time, we managed to have the VCR tape the first twenty minutes set to the WRONG CHANNEL, while we were watching the right one. Realize that we were actually sitting right there while we made this screw up and you’ll have some inkling of how lame we are. We regularly taped five to six shows last year with not one hiccup. What happened to us?
Only show we haven’t screwed up yet: Firefly.
I’m officially swearing off trailers for The Two Towers. Don’t get me wrong: they kick ass and I love everything I’ve seen so far but I want the highest possible percentage of the movie to be brand-spanking new to my eyes when I see it in theatres on the of-course-I’ve-already-requested-time-off 18th of December.
That said, Julia has a link up to the latest trailer.
Okay, there’s a few people who read things here that speak … hell, I don’t even know if it’s Chinese.
Okay, I either need a rough translation of these phrases from Firefly if they are Chinese, or a guess as to what they are if they aren’t Chinese. (It seems like they should be… certainly the wrong vowels for Japanese.)
Yes, I’m a geek. Sue me.
Spellings are approximate, so I’ll try to provide contextual aids.
Wu de ma? – In context, seems to mean “what’s that?” or “what’s up?”
Jen dao mei
Tzao gao.
Wu de tyen, ah. – All seem to be exclamations of disbelief or horror.
Tyen shiao duh. – Used in a sentence: “What the tyen shiao duh is going on down there?”
Hwoon dahn. – Derogatory. “Moron?” “Bastard?”
In a conversation regarding Firefly, there were these two comments:
“Book’s preaching bugs me, but then I’m an atheist so that’s to be expected.”
“Huh. The reason it bugged me was that I’m not.”
I’m not a religious person, athough agnostic is far more accurate than atheist, so I guess I’m looking at this from between these two poles. I have a friend who is deeply involved in his church, but in his life it is simply part of his daily activities, and gets just as much or as little “talk time” as the other important things in his life. If he constantly brought it up the way Book does, I don’t think he’d be as close a friend (any moreso than any other person who regards me as a ‘potential sale’ :), or nearly as good a Christian. (Lead by example and all that. I may not be in a church any more than I was, but I do believe I’m a better person for having known him*.)
That said, I’ve known quite a few pastors in my time and as a general rule they are a bit different than even the most dedicated church deacon because it is their job, so to speak, to always be ‘on’.
So, comparing Book to the one good (non-judgemental, open-minded) Christian that I know, he comes off poorly. Comparing him to most pastors I’ve met, he’s about average. Whedon himself is quite anti-religion, so I suppose that fits.
Gina Torres, who plays Zoe on Firefly, also played the main K-Directorate spy in Alias last season (I forget her character’s name). Alias is written by the same guy who wrote Felicity (J.J. Abrams), which aired following Buffy during B’s third season (the WB habitually put shows it wanted to succeed following sure-things like Buffy, Angel, and *coff* 7th Heaven).
Inbred Circular, isn’t it?
Last night was the season premiere for both Buffy (7th year of dedicated addiction) and Gilmore Girls (which I really can’t recommend enough). We’re still in what I’d call our “summer schedule” right now, however, which means that our house was full of people last night.
Piece of cake: we’ve got three different VCR’s capable of taping shows in the house, and all of them work just fine — this is the same sort of gymnastics we pulled off all last season. We don’t even have to do any complicated “timed” recordings because, after all, we’re going to be right there.
Right. It’s been awhile since we’ve had to do all that. At a guess, I’d say we’re out of practice.
Buffy: forgot to start the recording, then the VCR was on the wrong channel, so we basically missed the standard “scene before the music starts”.
GG: did this one on a timer, which started just fine, recorded the first twenty minutes, and then shut off, because apparently that’s what we told it to do.
Ugh. Me not grok the ‘lectroniks so gud.
The difficulties I was experiencing in trying to set up an MT install for a work-related project continue, but on a slightly more positive note. Over the weekend, they swapped out an older server for a newer model (still slower and smaller than my slow, small home machine, but it’s generally just a file server, so I only poke a little fun), so we grabbed the old box and “repurposed” it as a Linux server that we can run MT on and create this … thing that they want.
What’s this thing, you ask? Interesting question: what they want is a web-served solutions knowledge base that can be quickly and easily updated from pretty much anywhere, broken down by category, individual entry, author, or timestamp, and is searchable. I’m going to see just how much I can twist MT around to make it work. Initially, it’ll just be for about four people (certainly what I’d call private use), and if it ends up becoming open territory for clients, then the company buys the license.
Personally, I just want to see how effectively I can make MT create a user-friendly interface for a knowledge base (I’m sort of reverse-engineering an web-based interface for an SQL database — build the interface first and let the database build itself: just how many different ways can you make the monkey dance?
I’m not that far right now, though. The server’s old, the video card is REALLY old (and crappy, because really, why have a good video card on a dedicated server?), and it’s been two days of solid struggle to get Mandrake working and looking decent. Next up: Samba interface to the rest of the network (never done that before).
The MT part should be the easy bit.
