If you have any love whatsoever for MST3K, then you know about Rifftrax. Mike Nelson, the man who took over after Joel left, started his own version of MST3K – you download an extra audio track and play it while you play the movie. it’s like MST without the silhouettes at the bottom of the screen, especially when he gets the voice of Crow for the last few seasons and the voice of Tom Servo for most of the seasons to join him.

Apparently he’s been making boatloads of money doing it, because suddenly Joel is getting into the action again, too. He’s starting this thing called Cinematic Titanic, with Trace Beaulieu (the original Crow) and J. Elvis Weinstein (the original Servo). They’re going to have TV’s Frank helping them out, and even Mary Jo Pehl.

Interestingly enough, the press release about Cinema Titanic makes no mention whatsoever of Mike Nelson or Rifftrax, which makes me wonder how much bad blood there is between the two groups. This is especially interesting considering how Joel and Trace left the show early in order to pursue careers in Hollywood that really didn’t amount to much.

This will inevitably bring out the Joel vs. Mike debate again, in which I refuse to participate – I like both of them for different reasons. What matters most is that now, dear readers, we will have double the bad-movie-mocking!

There aren’t a lot of girls participating in the massive social clusterfuck of online gaming called XBOX Live. Even as recently as World of Warcraft’s first few years, you couldn’t be sure that a person who claimed to be a girl actually was a girl, and most of the time it didn’t much matter anyway – a Night Elf jumping around in the Goldshire inn while you tried to get to the basement and talk to some dwarf or whatever was just another Night Elf jumping around in the Goldshire inn.

Despite the promise of online gaming, there isn’t much socializing that doesn’t consist of “LOLZ U SUX.”

Voice chat changed all that. I witnessed it firsthand while playing Halo 2 with my then-SO who is, just so we’re clear, a girl.

There is a certain kind of weird equilibrium in online shooting games, like the men’s clubs of previous generations. The masculine social hierarchy in shooting games was established a decade ago, and it hasn’t deviated. Girls don’t enter into it because girls just haven’t been very active in the community.

But when the Boys hear a Girl, the great, masculine machine of online social norms shudders to a stop and nobody really knows how to deal with it. While playing with my ex, I noted that there are basically three reactions:

1) Mommy! The boy in question begins apologizing for anything he might have said that perhaps could have offended her, immediately sends a friend request and starts following her around on all of her matches.

2) You’re just a kid! The boy is so entrenched in the men’s club that he cannot perceive that a woman would ever be interested, let alone participate. He accuses the girl of being a little boy, because the assiness of online voice communication can often garble a woman’s naturally higher voice into sounding a lot like a prepubescent boy’s naturally high voice.

3) I’m in love! The boy has no idea how to handle women in his real life, so he ham-handedly tries to handle her virtually. This is most noticeable in the most trash-talkingest players, who instantly shift their chest-beating into soft, limp, embarrassing attempts at flirtation.

The fourth reaction is one that I rarely see, which is to treat the girl exactly as you would treat any other player. If that means you’re a doucebag, then be a douchebag. Don’t fall into line as another of her gallant defenders – she doesn’t need you to protect her.

She’s there to have fun and kill other players with guns, which is a little redundant.

Some random bits of ephemera, plucked fresh from my mind.

—
The pilot episode of Pushing Daisies can currently be viewed in its entirety, commercial-free, in High Definition, for free, at abc.com.
—
I saw that PittGirl recently posted about the Black Sheep Puppet Festival, so I had to comment.

Why do I suddenly feel like I’m in junior high all over again, with the popular kids making fun of the geeks? They don’t get us and they never will, my brothers and sisters, not even when we’re in our thirties. The best solution is to ignore them and just make more puppets, paintings, sculptures, stories, movies and music.
—
I’ve decided to throw out the parts of my novel that seemed to be parts of somebody else’s novel and concentrate more on the novel I want to write rather than the novel that was being written. It’s going to take less time to finish it now, if that makes any sense. I won’t make my self-imposed deadline for the end of October with a readable first act, but maybe I can get something together by Thanksgiving. Watch this space.
—
I miss the people I don’t get to talk to half as much as they deserve, and I talk to the people I miss less than half as much as I want. Er. Or something like that.
—
I’ve succeeded in not smoking cigarettes for about five weeks. As of tomorrow, I will have saved $150. That was enough to subsidize the acquisition of replacement parts for my brother’s hand-me-down XBOX 360 and a copy of Halo 3, which were sufficient to remind me that I’ll never be as bad-ass as the teenaged punks who repeatedly pwn me, which makes me want to have a cigarette.

But I don’t have a cigarette. I mostly just drink water now, and suck on the occasional cough drop. I spend about 20 total minutes a day wishing I could have a cigarette. These cravings occur at predictable times, but don’t last long enough to affect me. I know how my mind works – if I let those niggling cravings in, they’ll be eating all the food in my pantry and messing up all the dishes and spilling coffee grounds all over the floor and before I know it I’m smoking again. The trick is to spot them through the peep hole and pretend I’m not home.

Not smoking is way preferable to smoking. I haven’t been able to see some of my smoker friends lately, for no reason other than that our recent meeting places have been places where people smoke a lot of cigarettes, and I’ve been avoiding those places. That will hopefully change as I become more comfortable with my new, healthier me.
—
My prime motivator lately has been the absolute, utter certainty that I don’t want the word “failed” to appear before any word in my obituary.
—
I came up with a great quote today for something really interesting and poignant, but I can’t remember what it was. On a related note, do you think anybody says things specifically to be quoted on them? I don’t mean politicians and in-the-news folks, but people like Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain. Did Oscar Wilde just write entire books full of aphorisms?
—
My foot has fallen asleep again.

Some random bits of ephemera, plucked fresh from my mind.

—
The pilot episode of Pushing Daisies can currently be viewed in its entirety, commercial-free, in High Definition, for free, at abc.com.
—
I saw that PittGirl recently posted about the Black Sheep Puppet Festival, so I had to comment.

Why do I suddenly feel like I’m in junior high all over again, with the popular kids making fun of the geeks? They don’t get us and they never will, my brothers and sisters, not even when we’re in our thirties. The best solution is to ignore them and just make more puppets, paintings, sculptures, stories, movies and music.
—
I’ve decided to throw out the parts of my novel that seemed to be parts of somebody else’s novel and concentrate more on the novel I want to write rather than the novel that was being written. It’s going to take less time to finish it now, if that makes any sense. I won’t make my self-imposed deadline for the end of October with a readable first act, but maybe I can get something together by Thanksgiving. Watch this space.
—
I miss the people I don’t get to talk to half as much as they deserve, and I talk to the people I miss less than half as much as I want. Er. Or something like that.
—
I’ve succeeded in not smoking cigarettes for about five weeks. As of tomorrow, I will have saved $150. That was enough to subsidize the acquisition of replacement parts for my brother’s hand-me-down XBOX 360 and a copy of Halo 3, which were sufficient to remind me that I’ll never be as bad-ass as the teenaged punks who repeatedly pwn me, which makes me want to have a cigarette.

But I don’t have a cigarette. I mostly just drink water now, and suck on the occasional cough drop. I spend about 20 total minutes a day wishing I could have a cigarette. These cravings occur at predictable times, but don’t last long enough to affect me. I know how my mind works – if I let those niggling cravings in, they’ll be eating all the food in my pantry and messing up all the dishes and spilling coffee grounds all over the floor and before I know it I’m smoking again. The trick is to spot them through the peep hole and pretend I’m not home.

Not smoking is way preferable to smoking. I haven’t been able to see some of my smoker friends lately, for no reason other than that our recent meeting places have been places where people smoke a lot of cigarettes, and I’ve been avoiding those places. That will hopefully change as I become more comfortable with my new, healthier me.
—
My prime motivator lately has been the absolute, utter certainty that I don’t want the word “failed” to appear before any word in my obituary.
—
I came up with a great quote today for something really interesting and poignant, but I can’t remember what it was. On a related note, do you think anybody says things specifically to be quoted on them? I don’t mean politicians and in-the-news folks, but people like Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain. Did Oscar Wilde just write entire books full of aphorisms?
—
My foot has fallen asleep again.

Music: Ta-Da, Scissor Sisters

I first learned of this band via their song Laura, which is sort of like their other stuff but not really. As a result, I was not prepared for the intense gayness of most of the Scissor Sisters’ work, which is incredibly gay.

I don’t mean that in a pejorative way at all – I’m not even sure if gay is the right word for it. Listen to “She’s My Man,” and tell me if you disagree, or if you can think of a more fitting one-word description (No, don’t listen to it – watch the weird, amazing, mumenschantzish video instead). I bet you can’t.

Their new album is like a modern disco implosion, mixing and mashing modern sounds in with classic disco themes, all of it spiked with clever, triumphant lyrics about dance floors and serial killers.

It’s peppy, gas-tank stuff, the kind of album you listen to when you feel the need for mood reassignment therapy.

TV Show: Pushing Daisies

Why aren’t you watching this show? Seriously, people.

The premise: A guy can touch dead people and bring them back to life. If he touches the subject a second time, they go back to being dead – for good. If he does not touch that person again within 60 seconds, then another, different creature with a similar lifespan will die.

That’s all well and good, but the show is far more than just its premise. See, the main character is a sort of hapless, well-meaning but kind of clumsy hero is a pie-maker who is hopelessly in love with his first kiss, a naive, sheltered, unflappable girl who he resurrected in the first episode. She’s still alive, frozen at her current age but otherwise completely normal, which means she stays alive until he touches her again. They are in love, and they can’t touch each other.

The show is chock full of brilliant writing – it’s like a snarky, modern fairy tale. Some people would call it “darkly humorous,” but it’s significantly lighter fare than actual fairy tales. It deals with death in a rather light-hearted way, I suppose, and the overall tone of the show is bright and beautiful and clever and witty.

If I were trying to get another movie buff to watch it, I might describe it as, um, The Twilight Zone meets Tim Burton meets the Coen Brothers meets Jean-Pierre Jeunet meets Terry Gilliam.

You, dear reader, can watch it yourself, right now, in high definition, on abc.com. Do it.

It was bad enough that the fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactica wasn’t going to start until January of 08 – but now they’ve pushed the best show in television another 4 months!

Read about it here.

Let’s hope this means it’s just going to be that much better.

And watch Pushing Daisies while we wait.

When this show started, I warned my fellow fans that a character with powers like Hiro’s powers could easily break the internal logic of the narrative. I wasn’t wrong. It looks like this is exactly what is going to happen.

See, Hiro can teleport anywhere, instantly.

He can occupy any point in space or time, at will. This is instantaneous. He can take people with him.

He is unstoppable. Unless you kill Hiro outright, he can solve any problem.

For instance, say you kill his father. Hiro simply has to travel back to a point before his father’s death and kill you instead. If he fails to kill you then, he can travel to another point in time and kill you then.

Therefore, no death in the series is permanent, and no threat is unstoppable. Hiro is one of the most popular characters in the series, and part of that popularity is the cognitive dissonance that the most powerful character in the show is also the gentlest – and, therefore, the least likely to abuse his abilities. If you take his powers away then you take away one of the main reasons to watch the show in the first place.

Hiro is currently “stuck” in feudal Japan. I use quotes because he could leave at any point and come back to it whenever he wanted to – it’s history, after all. It won’t be changing unless Hiro is there to change it.

Hiro is sending messages back to his friend Ando by writing them and hiding them in a place where Ando can find them. A much more sensible solution is for Hiro to simply teleport back to 2007 Japan at the end of every day, tell Ando what’s going on, and then teleport back to feudal Japan.

An even more sensible solution is for Hiro to finish his task in Japan, and then travel back to 2007 one second after he left in the first place.

Basically, if Hiro has his powers, he ruins the entire narrative.

If any logic is applied to the show, all drama is nullified. More to the point, it shows lazy, lazy writing.

HCA: Heightened Couple Awareness. Everywhere you look, you see happy couples. I think you all understand what I’m talking about.

I was at Target for some medicine, and passed a dude who looked a bit like me, except where my ailment was a mysterious stomach thingy, he had a respectably wet, hacking cough. As he walked by me, in absolute misery, a girl rubbed his back. As I shuffled my way to the smoking cessation products, I thought that his misery was probably a bit less than mine.

I am well aware that this is guessing that the neighbor’s grass is greener without actually seeing it, but HCA often distorts reality. The above observation was simply a symptom of a larger illness – an unsettling dissatisfaction with one’s own relationship status.

I submit that somebody should invent a bed that easily converts from a twin to a queen. It’s like making dinner for two every night, except I’m the only one eating it.

It’s not all bad, of course. Being single has its benefits, and I’ve happily taken advantage of them in the double digits of months since I could say that I was in a relationship. For instance, when I come home from work, the first thing I do is take my pants off. Right at the threshold, before the door is closed. Walk by my house at precisely the right time, and you might see me pantsless. That’s a treat reserved for a very select few, or pretty much anybody who asks.

I don’t envy couples, exactly. Maybe that’s a part of it, but I find that the more I learn about other peoples’ relationships, the more happy I am to not be in them.

The only difference between this lack and other kind of lacks is that it’s not easy to actively change the situation – I could certainly intensify my own search, but that smacks of desperation.

All I can really do is just go on doing what I’m doing, and maybe be a little more aware of romantic opportunities that come about. We’ll see where that leads me.

Until then, I’d just like to stop being sick.