Finally, I just had my last two geology classes of the semester. It's such a relief to have finally finished. I like geology, but these two classes have been extremely discouraging at times, enough to make me rethink being a geology major.
It's nice to end the semester on a couple of classes that you're somewhat interested in (Political Science and History)
I really miss C3 :(
Something that I picked up from a friend's weblog: 01) Total volume of music files on my computer? Currently: 1539 Songs, 4.4 Days at 5.73 gigs. And growing. At a quick pace. Currently, I have 372 songs that I have not yet listened to, although in some, if not most cases, I listened to most of it then passed over to the next one just before it ended. In any case, that's 24% of all the music that I have that I really haven't listened to. 1.1 days. Yikes. More statistics:
Albums: 197Artists: 219 Genres: [Genre, (Song Count)] 33: Acoustic (1), Alternative (50), Alternative & Punk (47), Bluegrass (1), Blues (2), Classic Rock (13), Classical (2), Country (11), Electronic (2), Electronica (2), Film Soundtrack (3), Folk (21), General Rock (1), Hard Rock (27), Humor (26), Jazz (75), Jazz/R&B (20), Light Rock (41), Metal (10), New Age (31), Other (6), Podcast (5), Pop (50), Rock (548), Rock/Pop (11), Salsa (1), Soundtrack (495), Spoken Word (2), Techno (2), Unclassifiable (2), Vocal (1) and World (1). Now, I don't know why some of these are here, like Electronic, Electronica and Techno, aren't they the same thing? Ditto for soundtracks. A couple others, I think that I'd reclassify, because iTunes tells me what everything is, including the genre.
02) The last CD I bought was...The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy soundtrack. Really enjoyed the music set to this, having fun listening to it, listened to that a couple times. I think that my favorites thus far are So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, and Journey of the Sorcerer, which is a weird title.
03a) The last song I listened to before writing this was... Life Less Ordinary, by Carbon Leaf. Outstanding band from Virginia, have some great CDs.
03b) Song playing right now is... Stay (Wasting Time), Dave Matthew's Band. That's really just a coincidence.
04) Five albums I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me...This is going to be difficult: a) Indian Summer, Carbon Leaf. Even though I just found these guys, I must say that their music is very relatable to many things in my life. Life Less Ordinary, This is My Song, Changeless and What About Everything are my favorites off of that album. b) Garden State Soundtrack, Various. This is an incredible CD with a really cool mix of music from a really good movie. Favorite tracks off of there is the Winding Road, Don't Panic, Caring is Creepy, New Sland and Let Go. c) Moonlight Dancers, Sara Wheeler. New England singer, I don't think that I've ever gotten tired of her music. d) Yourself or Someone Like You, Matchbox 20. I think that this was one of the first rock CDs that I got. Love every song on that one. e) Under the Table and Dreaming, Dave Matthew's Band. First CD from these guys, probably their best CD and one that I constently listen to. Runners up: Rush of Blood to the Head, (Coldplay), One, (Beatles) Crash (Dave Matthew's Band), Silent Steeples (Dispatch), Cracked Rearview (Hootie and the Blowfish), Room for Squares (John Mayer), Inarticulate Nature Boy (Josh Clayton-Felt), Ex-Girlfriends (Low Millions), Star Wars (A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi- John Williams), The Italian Job/Bourne Supremacy Soundtracks (John Powell)
5) 5 People to pass the baton to and why: Anyone really. It's always interesting to see what other people like for music.
My cold's almost gone. I just love how something can make you completely miserable for a straight week then just up and vanish. I've spend the last two days going through about two boxes of kleenex and now hoping that whenever I blow my nose, I'm not also going to make it start gushing blood.
Alrighty, start the countdown. 10 more days until exams are over. 16 more days until Revenge of the Sith is out in theaters. I should look into getting advance tickets. You know something, I've never, ever been to a Star Wars movie on opening night. Never. When Attack of the Clones was released, I was working that night as was Eric, so we went the next day, and when the Phantom Menace was out, I can't remember why I didn't go the opening night, but just that I was annoyed that some people that I knew had. And the special editions, it was some time after they had been released.
And finally, I've gotten my Celebration 3 pictures up online!
Here's some highlights:
Me
Me and Brian Gates, my "Boss"
Me, Cathy from DelRey Audio and Donovan
Donovan and I
Me and Matthew Stover
Jan Duursema and I
Alpha and... Beta?
Clones
Me and Timothy Zahn
The New England Garrison
Karen Traviss and I
Me and Troy Denning
I guess we found out what happened to Jar Jar...
R2-D1 and R2-D2
Aaron Allston and I
The George Lucas talk
Sarah, one of the very cool people that I met.
That's all for now. The rest of the images can be found here.
For all of those who visit the Unofficial Clone Wars Site, we're now located at a new address:
http://www.clonewarz.com
Man, I can't remember a time that I've laughed so hard at a scifi movie since I first saw Spaceballs. I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a long time ago, and recently reread it this past fall. If you haven't read this book, do so soon. It's quite a funny book, and well worth the time for it's complete difference from everything else in this world. I was excited when I heard that the movie had been greenlit for production, after being in limbo for nearly twelve years. From the first trailers, it was clear that this movie was going to be unique, expecially with a new director at the helm. The movie is a delight to watch, and a great laugh. It's witty, funny and it doesn't take itself overly seriously until the very end. It's fairly close to the book, with some sections verbatem from the pages, while there are a couple others that are clearly not, but overall, the entire plot works extremely well. Visually, the film is spectacular. The CGI department did an outstanding job with some very odd things, such as the entire ship turning into a ball of yarn, flowers and any other number of things. There are several very cool scenes in here, and it's just amazing how much computers can do now adays.But the CGI doesn't overwealm the film at all. I believe that most of the costumes, aliens and sets were real, which is a good thing, expecially since Jim Henson's company did all the puppets and things. Being the same people to do Farscape, they did an outstanding job. The soundtrack was also very fun to listen to, very witty at times. I have to go download the main theme, that was a pretty good tune to listen to. I didn't listen to a lot of the music though, I was paying more attention to what was on the screen. The only problem that I had was that the movie does change up several things, which was somewhat disapointing, and why I'm not giving this a perfect score. That being said, the changes that were made are all fairly well done, and very funny, expecially the end, although it's a little flat and predictable.
In other news, I purchased an FX lightsaber that Master Replicas created. Very awesome.
As some people already know, I'm a member of the 501st Storm Trooper division, a group of fans who dress up as Storm Troopers, not just for fun, but for some charity work, expecially with children.
At Celebration 3, I had the pleasure of attending a panel by Jay Thomson, who's working on a documentary on the 501st, entitled Heart of an Empire. It's been in the works for the past three years, and he's had to make some incredible sacrifices to make this.
Initially intended to be a simple, 30-40 minute documentary on the legion, it took a very sudden turn last year when Katie Johnson, the daughter of the legion's founder, Albin Johnson, was strickened by an inoperatable brain tumor. The documentary is now about the 501st, but also what we do. It's about the conflicts between legion members, how we work together, how we work with the professional community and what impact that we've had on people. It's going to be very good. The crew is shooting for a 2006 Sundance release and they're hoping to finish post-production this November.
I urge everyone to go take a look at their main website and trailer, and to spread the word. The project needs all the help that it can get, and word of mouth is a great way to get other people to know about things like this.
The last day was pretty sad. I had to leave, and I wasn't looking forwards to it. Over the past couple of days, I had met many interesting people, and I'd call some of them my friends. I met people who were professionals, who were there to work, and I met people who were just there to have some fun. Overall, I think that everyone had a lot of fun over the days. I got up at 7, fixed up my armor and went out to find the 501st, who were doing a picture. I found out that I just missed them, for they were doing a parade around the convention Center, and I sprinted around the building a couple of times before I found them. I also had to go back to my hotel room to get my volunteer pass, which I forgot. Thinking that I missed the picture, I walked to the room, hoping to find some people. To my surprise, they hadn't taken it yet, and I was able to get in. (It's up online at www.501st.com- bonus points if you can pick me out of the group.) After that, I got some pictures with people from the New England Garrison, and got out of armor, which I put away and sealed up. I then set about saying goodbyes to the various authors, artists and professionals that I had met, as well as friends that I found along the way. I got a quick lunch, tried in vain to find Linh and Sarah, turned in my badge and hours, said yet some more goodbyes, and left. I left a note at Sarah/Linh's room, which they didn't follow up on. :p I got a taxi back to the airport, and waited for my flight. I talked with a couple of people from the convention, including the graphic novel's writer, who was on the same flight, and waited while learning that the flight was delayed pending a couple of people dropping out of the flight to make room. I ran into Randy Stradley and Jeremy Barlow, who nearly killed me when I told them that I was Darth Nuke, a particularly annoying forum member at Dark Horse. (I'm really not) Boarded the flight to New York, waited around there for a little while, got dinner, waited for yet another person to drop out of the flight, then boarded that one. I changed seats with a woman wanting to sit with her family, and sat next to a girl, Lindsay, who happened to be a UVM student. We talked for most of the flight home, working on a crossword puzzle, which made the flight go by very quickly. I gave her my AIM SN, although I have yet to hear back from her. Waiting at the airport was my brother, and we drove home. It was over. And that's that. I'd do it again in a heart beat. It passed as fast.
Next up: Pictures!
Here's one:
Here are some screenshots that I took from the Big Damn Trailer:
Lots of Images:
Day Three of the convention was the one that a lot of people were looking forwards to. George Lucas was in for the morning to make his first convention appearence in nearly twenty years. People knew it too, and began lining up early. From the reports that I heard, people started lining up at midnight for the 8 am show. On top of that, it was about forty degrees, lightly raining and windy. Not really the most receptive place for a line. I awoke at about 4 am to get ready to help with the lines. It was already several blocks long, wraping around my hotel. Crazy, and people were getting annoyed, because we had to move them around a little bit. I didn't have armor on, and by 7 am, we started moving them into the building. I had to lead a couple of bitchy people around then went back outside and to my room, got my armor on. I then was asked to man the ground floors to help get people out of the building. I was given a pass to get into the second Lucas showing of the morning, and I went up to go see him. It was quite a while before I got in, as we took a while to move nearly three thousand people into the room. We didn't fill it with the people supposed to be in the next showing, so we started filling people from thethird showing. Then we went in, and for the first time in my life, I saw the person who's really changed my life by introducing Star Wars to me and countless others. For a half hour, probably twenty or so people got up and asked questions of the flanneled one. There were the general questions, like what's coming up next (Two Star Wars TV series, a possible Willow TV series, a couple movies that might be in the works.) What did he think of the fans, and some things like that. It was a quick, but very good talk, and he was very appreciative of the fans, and the 501st. He pointed right at me, or my section when someone asked about the Five-Oh-First. "Well, seeing how they're all pointing guns at me..." The entire trooper line cheered. It was great to hear him say that. After that, we cleared the room and got out, and went on to our other assignments. My armor was really starting to fall apart and I got out of it, and worked at Del Rey for a little while, then wandered around for a little while inbetween signings. I talked with Randy Stradley and Jeremy Barlow from Darkhorse comics, whom I'd met the day before. I won a t-shirt from Lucas Arts, talked to Ken, one of the guys who was on the production team for some of the Star Wars games that I made friends with. I saw Battlefront II being played for a bit, which was a really cool looking game that I'm certainly going to upgrade my computer for. It was amazing. Can't wait to see it in it's entirety. I went back and helped with another couple signings, and talked with Matthew Stover, then met Timothy Zahn for the first time. I also went to the Star Wars Spectacular, which was 8 mindblowing minutes of finished Episode III footage. It was absolutely amazing. All of the major fights, and even then some other footage, it was just amazing. Simply amazing. I talked to several people about it and got dinner, tried to get into the panel on the new 9 book series, but the guys wouldn't let me in. Gr... But I found out anyway, which is good. I got Aaron Allston to sign my books, got images from Karen Traviss, Troy Denning and talked with them for a little bit. I got dinner, talked to the artists again and went and walked around at the convention center then went back to the hotel room for a while. I told Sara and Lihn to stop by, but they never did, and I called Eric, who was just on his way into class. I went to bed early. It was almost over.
I knew that the convention would be really fast, but man, it blew by. I had an outstanding time while I was there and met some very cool people, as well as some weird ones. I didn't get around to writing things down like I did for Arizona. I was busy. Literally, I got up earlier than I thought that I would and got in later than usual, usually pretty tired. To start, I got on the plane and headed out to Indy, making a layover at Philly, where I met a girl named Lynn, who was also headed to the convention. She was reading the same book that I was, Republic Commando, and struck up converstation, and shared a taxi to the hotels that we were staying at. When I got there, I signed in, got my volunteer badge and walked around the center for a while. (It wasn't open yet) I met the Del Rey people, Shelly and Colleen, who said that they'd need a bit of work later on during the event. They had a nice schedule lined up for signings. Matthew Stover, Aaron Allston, Timothy Zahn, Troy Dennings and Karen Traviss were the big ones, and there were a couple others. From there, I wandered around for a while, running back into Linh, who was on her way to meet a friend, Sarah, at the bus station. We met her, then I went off to go do some work, having nothing to do. I ended up manning a door and directing people to the proper entrance. The next day was the big event. I got up at about 7, got my armor on and headed down. There was already a huge line forming, and people were getting excited seeing the number of Storm Troopers, Snow Troopers and pretty much every other costume around. The 501st troopers lined up and we marched to the state house, where we got our photos taken. My armor kept coming apart, and I later patched it up with some tape that I found. From the march, I went to work over in the store, which was a complete disaster all weekend, with people waiting in line for upwards of 7 hours. Insane. With some time off, I wandered over to the Fan Room, which had several fan booths and a life sized X-Wing fighter. I ran into Karen Traviss, who wrote Republic Commando. Her thoughts on the convention are in her blog on the right. She is a wonderful woman and I really enjoyed meeting her. I was then drafted into the Storm Trooper Olympics, which has been covered in this story. (There's a picture of all of us.) From there, I went to the DelRey booth, where I helped manage the line for Matthew Stover and Karen Traviss. The lines grew quickly, and I talked to a number of fans of the books and EU. That evening was the opening Ceremonies, which I am kicking myself for not going in armor to. The 501st did a march to Imperial March, which was awesome, and the 2 hour event was just fun. A Jazz band played, people talked about a number of things, and we saw several live performances, including a great rendition of The Saga Begins and of the Revenge of the Sith Trailer, brought to us by the SW in 30 people. Funny stuff. We also got to see some of the music videos featured in the next soundtrack, which looks amazing. Finally, all of the VIPs in attendance were brought on stage, which was cool to see. After that, I left and ended up wandering around the convention hall for a while before patching up my armor and heading off to bed. Day Two of the convention was much like Day One, except that I didn't work the store. Instead, I worked at Del Rey for the entire day, meeting several authors and having some great chats with them. I also met Jan Duursema and a number of artists whom I'd talked to, as well as several people from Lucasarts, who invited me to take a look at their projects. Great people. That evening, I went to a 501st party to raise money for Katie Johnson (More information at the banner at the bottom of the page- not the Serenity one) and I met a number of people from the New England Garrison. More great people in that group.
I'll get back to days Three and Four later, but I have class in a little while.
However, before I go, excellent news: Tomorrow, the first official trailer for Serenity will be released on the internet, and will be hitting theaters this Friday. KICK ASS.
Man, oh man, Celebration 3 was an awesome time. I'm pretty tired now, getting off of the plane just an hour ago, but here's a couple things and thoughts:
I'll have more tomorrow.
Okay, I'm headed out to Celebration 3. I'm very excited, hopefully meeting some people for the first time face to face. If anyone who reads this is going, search me out, I'll be volunteering, and I've got images of myself and the badge that I'll be wearing on theforce.net message boards in Lit and C3. I'll also be in armor, the helmet has two black stripes on the back. If you see me, give a shout.
Have a good rest of the week everyone.
Wow, time really flies. I'm always amazed at how it does that. It's the eve of Celebration 3. Man, I have been waiting for an entire year for this, ever since it was first announced, and I promised myself that I'll be headed out to it. It's too big of a thing to miss, and I absolutely cannot wait to get there. My flights are perfect. I'm flying out of Burlington at 0710 tomorrow morning, getting to Philadelphia at 0830, arriving in Indianapolis at around 1203, according to my eTicket. The way out, I have an afternoon flight and will be getting home at around 2200 hrs. My dad was saying that the next couple days are just going to fly by, and that's slightly unfortunent.
I started signing up for shifts to work on, and I'll post those later tonight for anyone who's going. I'm going to try and change a couple around, because I accidently signed my self up for a couple of six hour stretches, which might get a little too annoying and a REALLY long time while in armor.
The armor is all packed, primary pack in the car, carryon packed up with various things to be signed, as well as the CDs, book and other things that I'm bringing onto the Airplane to keep myself occupied. I also stuck the digital camera that I borrowed in, as well as a notebook with various addresses and things of that nature. I've packed all of my Jan Duursema comics, for she's coming in and told me to bring things in to get signed. Pens are numerous. Money as well, for the hotel and the things that might catch my eye. I'm thinking a t-shirt or two, maybe a figure or something or a photo with someone.
Drove into Montpelier with Hilary earlier to pick up money. We were talking about how annoyed everyone is on campus at being stuck there for Junior Ring Ball, (The school is restricting Corps Freshmen and Sophtomores to campus for the Junior Ring celebration this weekend.) so I offered her a ride in to get off campus. I picked up a a CD by Carbon Leaf, Indian Summer, which is outstanding. They have some tracks streaming on their website here. I'd highly recommend it. Great band. Hopefully I'll have enough money after this to go see them when the play up here this week. I think that I should. Ben & Jerry's had their free cone day and about a hundred people were in line to get free ice cream. Crazy, and I get to laugh at my brother, who works at the main B&J plant over in Waterbury. I heard that it was swamped.
What else... I stuck a new site tracker on this. I had a counter before, and reached somewhere around 4000 or so, but that's all that it does. This new one tells where the computer is (Just the server, such as a school or AOL) and the country. Apparently, people from Canada, France, Spain, Germany, the UK and Iceland all visit. That's a cool thing to learn. Don't worry, I'm not going to use that info for anything, it's just a curiosity.
Current Music: Life Less Ordinary, Carbon Leaf
Just got back from another geology trip this week. This time, we went to southern Vermont, near Rutland, where we took a look at some folds and faults. It was much better than a regular lab, being outside in the sun, that was lots of fun. The only problem- I woke up at 0915 after my alarm didn't go off, and I had to get to school by 0930. After making lunch and taking out the trash. That was an interesting ride to school, but I wasn't the last person to get there. Listened to some music on a CD that I burned the previous night, slept a little, looked at rocks in the sunlight with no snow to be found. Yep, good day.
I've been listening to Carbon Leaf and Low Millions compulsively. Two great bands. I think that I'm going to try and see Carbon Leaf the 27th. It's be a shame to miss a band that I like when they're so close. Vermont's not exactly the high point in concert tours, although we do get some people every now and then. I've found that between their main site and amazon.com, I've gotten about 3 hours of their music, including a couple of full CDs.
I've gotten the chance to listen to several new things recently, a new band and a couple of things that were introduced to me recently. The other night, I picked up a CD called Ex-Girlfriends, by a band called Low Millions that I've had my eyes on recently. I liked them enough to get their CD, and I've been listening to it since. They've got a good sound and sense of music.
The second band that I've been listening to is Carbon Leaf, which Rachel told me about. It turned out that I've actually heard some of their songs and have liked them, but I hadn't known who sang them. It also turns out that they're playing in this area soon, at the Higher Ground. They're Irish, and have a pretty cool sound about them.
The third is the Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith Soundtrack, which mysteriously appeared on my computer. (...) I haven't listened to anything beyond the main title, which is pretty good thus far, but I've heard from some people that it seems to borrow a lot from other works that John Williams has done, which worries me a little. Hopefully it will turn out to be okay, but I doubt that it will top the Original Trilogy's soundtracks.
That's all for now. Work to do... 8 days until Celebration 3!
Got back late last night from New York, where we spent the entire day looking at rocks covering the Precambrian Age to the Devonian. We started by leaving at 4:30 am, and hit our first stop at about 6:00 am over near White Hall. From there, we went to a place called Lester's Garden, which featured Stromatolites, near the base of the Cambrian. From there, we went to a site with black shales, then up the column to more Cambrian, Ordivician, Silurian and Devonian, seeing various fossiliferous limestones, shales, and sand stones. We found a lot of fossils in some sites. One of them was essentially an entire reef, entirely made up of fossils. I collected some great samples of coral and crinoids. We ended our trip over near the Adirondacks and Catskills. There's something great about New York, at least the area that I've been in. We used to have a lake house in the Adirondacks, which we sold several years ago. The terrain is very different from Vermont in some ways. There's no large mountains like Vermont has, in some areas, with smaller hills and lower areas. The way that houses and fields are arranged, it's got a very cool feel to it. Maybe I'll return someday.
Spring is officially here. The snow is finally melting off of our lawn, and the Corps of Cadets have changed into their Summer Bees, which are short sleeve White top uniforms with blue trousers, a change from the long sleeve blue tops and trousers. The snow's gone down there as well, as well as everywhere else that I've gone. There's still some snow in banks in the shadows, but now that the temperature is getting higher and the days are getting longer. It's great to be able to go outside in a tee shirt, even though it's about fifty degrees. Still
better than sub zero temps. It also means that the road is full of mud and ruts, which makes me hate the road more than ever, just because it's a pain to drive on, all the time. Hopefully, it's on the way out soon.
I've been recently watching a show called Alias, created by JJ Abrams, who also did LOST, another show that I've been watching. This guy has talant, and he's really going to be going places. The show's pretty good, although I think that I like Lost a little more, although this one certainly makes up for it in action and a highly structured storyline. Abrams is going to be directing Mission Impossible 3, and given some of the material that I've seen him direct, I think that he'll be good for it. I've also been thinking: He should direct the third Bourne movie. That would be awesome.
For a little while now, I've been noticing how out of shape that I'm getting. The Grand Canyon trip was pretty brutal at times, going down and up, but I've also gained a little weight, and while that's not a bad thing, I'm not terribly happy about it. So I need to get out more. The Norwich Climbing Club is not really meeting anymore since on of the leaders has been kicked out, and I haven't been climbing in a while. I went for a run this morning, no more than a mile, probably a little more and I got out of breath pretty badly on the way back. I'm going to try and do that more now. I think that it's a little much to hope that I'll run in the mornings, but I'm going to see if I can do that. Maybe talk with a friend or two of mine, and find out when they're working out in the gym.
Just got really good news, my friend Eric's coming over for a bit. Haven't seen him in forever.
I tried updating last night, but Blogger was being annoying and didn't post.
It's been a couple of days since I've posted, mainly due to work. One geology teacher seems to think that we really like lots of work. We've been getting tons of various things just piled on to our already large workload. The other geo professor likes to give us work over and over again, shit that I don't understand. Political Science is boring as fuck and History is just plain awesome. Doesn't quite balance things out the whole way, but it's just frustrating. And tomorrow, I have to get up really early to go on a field trip to New York State, in the Adirondacks, to look at some rocks. We're going to be out for a long time. It was intended to be a two day trip, but we were able to talk it down to a single day, by talking to the Geology department chair. I don't think Prof was happy.
I attended the Colby Military Writer's Conference yesterday. It was the tenth one that they've done. It's basically a group of military historians, writers and former/military personnel, and they generally talk about current events, or something that's relevant to today's world somehow. This year's topic was torture, how it should be used, if it should be used and how the military should generally handle gathering intelligence. They also touched on procedures for asymetric warefare. Overall, it was a really good talk. They went over a couple of things in a really good fashion, better than last year's talk, which I thought was a biased argument for the war against the War on Iraq. This time, the talk was mainly for and against limited torture. Putting prisoners in uncomfortable postisions, and most psychological stress doesn't constitute torture, but things suck as physical harm, dismemberment and physical pain do constitute torture. We had people advovcating finger cutting and other similar methods to be used in an urgent situation, which really had some military people pissed off, which surprised me. Somewhat Ironically, it was a holocaust survivor, a 2 star general who headed the Special Forces branch of the military. I talked to him today, and told him that while I didn't agree with everything that he and others said, and did for other things, I really enjoyed the talk and debate.
The entire thing comes at an interesting time, with some things in SciFi really pulling at the human rights ideas, mainly a Galactica, Firefly episode and a novel called City of Pearl. I'm planning on writing an essay on this issue, but not now.
Found some excellent news today:
"Prior to going up in theaters, the trailer will make an online debut. Where and when will be posted on the Browncoats site close to the time of the online debut, so you will all be able to see it BEFORE it is in theaters."
That's regarding the Serentiy trailer, which is supposed to be released with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Apparently, it's being released online first, which is outstanding. When it's released, I'll be posting up a detailed summary of it. I don't have a release date yet, but it'll probably be closer to the 29th. With my luck, it'll probably be while I'm at Celebration 3.
Which, by the way, it's going to be in less than two weeks. I can't wait!
Here's the details:
SERENITY #1
Written by Joss Whedon and Brett Matthews, pencils by Will Conrad, colors by Laura Martin.
This fall Joss Whedon makes his big-screen debut as writer/director with Serenity, the big-budget feature follow-up to his cult-hit TV show Firefly‹the story of a ship full of mercenaries, outlaws, fugitives, and one law-abiding prostitute running across the fringes of space. Now Whedon pens a three issue miniseries based on the film with Brett Matthews, whose previous credits include Spider-Man specials with Daredevil and Wolverine, episodes of TV's Firefly, an Angel miniseries, and the animated Chronicles of Riddick feature Dark Fury.
The crew of Serenity once again find themselves broke and on the wrong side of a number of very large firearms, making the first issue a case study in how to mix intense, Whedon-style character interaction with cinematic action and violence. Artist Will Conrad and colorist Laura Martin paint a rough and wild world of adventure across a strange and dangerous universe. Each issue of this series features three covers, one for each member of the Serenity crew, drawn by the biggest names in comics. Issue #1 features Mal by John Cassaday, Inara by J.G. Jones, and Jayne by Bryan Hitch.
32 pages, $2.99, in stores on July 6.
And the Covers:
The Doctor: I'm the Doctor, by the way. What's your name?
Rose: Rose.
The Doctor: Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!
I just watched the the first episode of the new British show called Doctor Who, the latest incarnation of a long series of shows by the same name. I have no idea what the old one was about, save that it was started in the 1960s and involved a doctor in a police box who went around all over the place saving the human race. This one seems to be much the same, and I'm not sure if this is a remake/reimagination of the series like what the SCIFI channel did here with Battlestar Galactica in 2003 and 2005. From all intents and purposes, the new show holds up very well, with quite a bit of humor and intelligence behind it. The new Doctor (Number 7?), played by Christopher Eccleston is a wonderfully funny guy, with some great moments and quotes (like the one above). Billie Piper did a slightly lacking job at points, but also holds up well. This show has promise.
So the season finale of Battlestar Galactica is airing tonight, which I'm really looking forwards to, and am about to go watch in a little bit. I'll be getting a review up after it's over, so stay tuned anywhere where I usually post them up.
Had a quiet day today. Slept through Comparative Politics, probably the most boring class that I have, had an exam in History which I think that I did good on (pretty sure) and waited around for one of the guys that I tutor before finding that he had something else to do. Went to a friend's room and watched half of Galadiator, which I'll talk about in a bit, listened to some music, read, went home. Should do some homework sometime...
Galadiator: I wasn't terribly impressed with the movie, for a couple of reasons. The plot is pretty lackluster, pretty standard Hollywood. Mostly, it was pretty boring, I kept falling asleep for short periods, but then I didn't have time to get to the main fights. I'm not up on my Roman history, but some things looked a bit off, so I'm going to ask a friend of mine about that. Mainly, I think that the reason everyone raved about it was for the battles, and from the first battle, I wasn't thrilled.
The video direction, on the other hand, was pretty interesting, although fairly random at times. I was very impressed with the soundtrack, although it's nothing that I'm going out of my way to pick up. Still, this movie is at the top of my list of 'Sword and Sandal' movies, followed by Troy and King Arthur. Hopefully Kingdom of Heaven and Hannibal will be done a bit better than these ones.
I have a lot more on the way, but here's a couple more that I got up:
Me at Toroweap Point
Grand Canyon at Toroweap
Hike Down
Snow Canyon
Opposite Side of Toroweap
One of the girls that was on the trip, Stacy, put a number of pictures on CD, which I've been able to get up online thanks to the wonderful Photobucket.com. Here's a handful of them:
Fire Canyon
More of Fire Canyon- Red Rocks are the Windgate Formation
Snow Canyon - Petrified Dunes
Us. Gred, Meegan, O'Neill, Kris and Me, Stacy Missing
Mesa, near St. George
Road to the Grand Canyon, Cinder Cone in the background
Grand Canyon. Professor Dunn in Corner
Greg trapped
Dangerous Trail
Trek Down- Me and Prof. Dunn in Center, Greg and Jason in Foreground
The Colorado River
Crossbedding at Zion National Park
Entire Group: (Top) Jason, Prof. Westerman, Kris, Prof Dunn. (Bottom) Me, Meegan, Stacy and Greg at Zion (Eh picture of me...)
Hoover Dam
That's the first bit, more to come later!
three more from on high
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