Day 17: Getting older? Inevitable. Wiser? I hope so. More mature? Not if I can help it. I am a very serious employee.
The X-Files
One of my favorite geek shirts; unfortunately, it’s showing its age and is getting a little harder to decipher. Need to see if I can track it down to buy another one. (241/366) #coexist #geek #nerd #fandom #starwars #lordoftherings #lotr #alien #aliens #xfiles #drwho #harrypotter #shazam #startrek
No More West Wing
Earlier this week, Prairie and I finally finished an ongoing project of the past few years and made it to the end of the seventh season of West Wing. It was such a good show, and it’s really a bummer that there’s no more on the way.
We’re almost done with Season Five of X-Files, after which we’ll be getting the movie and then exiting gracefully. I’ve had too many people I trust iffy on the quality of the post-film X-Files, so that seems to be a good place to leave off.
From here on out, we have various incarnations of Star Trek as a backup when we don’t have anything else in progress (currently somewhere in Season Four of TNG, I think, with DS9 after that already in the home collection), more Simpsons whenever a new season gets released, and we’ve dropped Season Two of Lost in the Netflix queue (as we gave up trying to keep up with their erratic schedule midway through last season and are now way behind).
For a guy who doesn’t much like TV, I’m sure enjoying some of the shows. Quite a bit after the fact, but it’s so much nicer this way!
Goodnight, Dr. Frankenstein
I do believe that ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus‘ just vaulted to the top of my ‘favorite X-Files episodes’ list.
On that whole TV thing…
Most people who’ve known me for a while are aware that I’m not much of a fan of television — and actually haven’t really watched television in a long, long time. Seeing as how a couple people commented on my watching Lost, I thought it might be worth addressing this. :)
I’m really not sure when exactly I got sick of TV, but my best guess would be sometime around 1992/1993 or so I decided that it just wasn’t worth my time. Most programs didn’t have enough intelligence to keep my interest, and even when I did sit down to watch something, the insipid and insultingly stupid commercials would drive me up the wall. So I quit.
In the intervening years I’ve seen bit and pieces of shows here and there, generally when I’ve been over at friends houses. For the most part, though, I’ve relied mostly on recommendations from friends as to what shows were actually worth watching…and then I’d wait for the DVDs to start coming out. Thanks to DVD, over the last few years I’ve seen (for the first time) all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, the first four seasons of The X-Files, and the first four seasons of The West Wing.
More recently, adding BitTorrent to my repertoire has allowed me to keep up with more recent shows. I first saw Firefly this way, I’ve been keeping up with Battlestar Galactica, Gray’s Anatomy got a few trial weeks, and I’ll soon be watching the first three episodes of Surface to see if it’s worth keeping an eye on.
So I’m not really entirely against television as a whole — in a very general sort of way, yes, I think that TV is primarily a waste of time, and most people (especially children) would be far better off finding better ways to spend their time — but I’m not entirely opposed to finding specific shows that are better written, more intelligent and/or more entertaining than most.
I’d have been quite happy sticking with BitTorrent and watching things at least a day or two behind most of the rest of the world, too, except for two things: Prairie, and Lost.
Prairie, while sharing many of my views on the majority of the shows on TV these days, has never been quite as militant about her anti-TV views as I have been over the past few years. She’s had a few shows that she’s been enjoying keeping up with, with her top three being ER, Desperate Housewives, and Lost. All during last year, she’d occasionally drop tidbits of what was going on in that week’s episode of Lost to me…and then, after getting me to admit that it sounded interesting, and determined to get me hooked, she picked up the Season 1 DVD set when it came out.
We spent the next week powering our way through all of Season 1 — and she won. I’m hooked. So, Wednesday nights are now “Lost Night” for us. Admittedly, I still grit my teeth during most of the commercials (and even the ones that are cute once or twice get extremely grating the twentieth or fiftieth time they show up), but I’m quite enjoying watching the show itself.
So I’m still primarily anti-TV, and am far happier spending my free hours either fiddling with projects on my computer, wandering around town with my camera, or getting together with friends whenever possible. For one hour each Wednesday night, though, I’ll be joining the majority of America in setting back, grabbing some munchies, and keeping up with this week’s adventures on the boob tube.
(Oh, and while I’m just not interested enough in a hospital soap opera to get sucked into ER, she just might get me hooked on Desperate Housewives if I’m not careful. The last two episodes have been pretty entertaining, I must admit….)
Plot vs. Monster of the Week
The more I watch of Buffy, I’m starting to notice one definite similarity between my enjoyment of that show and my enjoyment of the X-Files. Nothing terribly earth-shattering, it’s just that both series have two basic types of episode: the “plot” episode and the “monster of the week” episode. In each case, while they’re both enjoyable, it’s really the “plot” episodes that I enjoy the most.
Like I said, nothing terribly earth shattering.
iTunes: “John the Fisherman” by Primus from the album Frizzle Fry (1990, 3:37).
Catch up: Downtime, Pigface, Godhead, Gravity Kills, Concrete Blonde, and Alaska
Well, now’s as good a time as any to play a little catch up after the past two weeks or so of the server being down.
Back to the usual
I’m back!
You’re thrilled, right?
Oh, well.
Okay, so Friday I got off work at 4. Spent a little time running around doing some last minute errands, then hopped online to chat until my ride showed up to take me to the airport. Got to the airport just in time to catch the plane, and headed up to Fairbanks. Kirsten and Jamie picked me up at the Fairbanks airport, and we headed back to Kirsten’s dorm at UAF (as she was kind enough to put me up for the weekend), where the three of us stayed up talking and BS’ing until way too early in the morning. But then — that’s the point of vacations, right?
Saturday was spent mostly with my family. Slept in, then walked down the hill from UAF about noon for breakfast with mom, dad, and Kevin. After breakfast we headed over to Emily’s work to visit her for a bit, then mom, dad, and Kevin headed off to do some shopping while I borrowed Kevin and Emily’s van to run around on my own. I ended up just tooling around Fairbanks for a bit, enjoying the sunshine and warm weather and listening to a great show on the public radio station called Mountain Stage — lots of really nice live acoustic bluegrass and country performances. Emily got off work at 4pm, so I headed back to meet up with everyone. We all went out to check out Kevin and Emily’s cabin (cute little one room cabin out in the middle of nowhere), then came back into town for family pictures at Sears and dinner at a local pizza parlor.
After dinner, Kevin dropped me off at the Backdoor bar, where I met up with fbkscpl2play, beckythesillygirl, meneleaous, b_converse, and ak_ghost_ryder (all chatters in the Alaska Yahoo! Chat room). We hung out there for a while, then fbkscpl2play and beckythesillygirl took me out to see a drag show at the Palace Saloon (a bar/showhall in Alaskaland). This was an absolute blast — the place was incrediby wild (maybe a side effect of having so little to do in Fairbanks?)! At one point, it was a toss-up as to which was going to be more entertaining — watching the drag queen performing on stage, or turning around and watching the people dancing on the tables!
After the show they cleared about half of the floor of tables and chairs and opened the place up for dancing. We made it until about 2:45am, then decided it was time to bail. I got dropped off back at the UAF dorms, talked with Kirsten for a bit longer, then passed out.
Sunday we slept late again and just hung out in Kirsten’s room until it was time for me to head out. She took me to the airport, and I came homeward bound. Miranda and Loren picked me up and ran me home, then they ran off to do some shopping while I kicked back and watched a few more Season 3 X-Files episodes. This show just gets better and better — unfortunately, I’ve now finished off all of Season 3, and have a few months to go until Season 4 comes out. Arrrrrrghhh! I hate cliffhangers!
Eventually I decided to get out of the house for a bit, and headed out to Century 16 to catch Shrek. This movie is just hilarious — it takes all the familiar fairytales we’ve grown up with, gives them a really wonderfully bizarre take, and has an absolute blast poking fun at Disney throughout the flick (especially the classic “princess singing with the birds” routine — I was laughing so hard after this that I almost missed the next few lines of dialogue!). Much as kids are going to enjoy watching it, I think it’s really the adults who are really going to get a kick out of all the jokes in the film — much of the dialogue is aimed squarely at the adults rather than children, and it makes for one of the funniest films I’ve seen in the theater in a very long time.
Then, not long after I got home, who should call but my friend Stacye — she was kinda bored and wanted to head out, so we met up at the Village Inn by my house, then headed out to ‘koots for a couple drinks. We sat there and talked until about 1:30am, when we realized how late it had gotten and each bailed for home to get some sleep before we got too far into Monday.
Today was a pretty normal day, just dead slow at work. Let a lady who works at GCI that’s expressed interest in buying my car take it for a test drive, though, so hopefully I may have found a buyer. Then came home, watched the extras on the X-Files set, and sold off a few more items from my online garage sale — the PowerMac 6500, SoundDesign stereo, and my old DJ equipment is now gone.
So, that was my weekend…now, back to the day to day drudge…fun fun fun!
TV time…kinda
As always, there have been a couple additions to my movie collection over the past few days. Rather than actual movies, though, I’m catching up on some of the watchable shows that I miss due to the fact that I don’t watch television.
At the recommendation of Adri, a good friend and co-worker of mine, I picked up the first season of HBO’s Sex and the City. Actually quite an entertaining little show — well written, the four main characters are all quite nice eye candy, and since it’s an HBO production, there’s even some gratuitous nudity every so often. Sure, the shows more along the lines of a “chick flick” style, I suppose, but that’s certainly never been a problem for me, and I trust Adri’s opinions — her tastes and mine, while not identical, do tend to mesh the majority of the time.
The one that’s going to keep me busy for a while, though, is today’s prize — The X-Files: Season Three. I’d never seen the X-Files before I picked up the first season box set, but am now quite hooked — and the cliffhanger end of the second season had me wishing I had the next set that day to keep watching. Well, I didn’t then, but I do now, and made it through the first four episodes tonight. Such fun stuff…should make it through the rest of this set within the next couple weeks — then it’ll just be counting the months until season four hits the shelves!
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to 2001 — the real new millenium. Woohoo!
I rung in the new year at the Future Impact rave. That’s about it for now…been a good weekend, mostly just relaxing and watching X-Files.