Chuggnutt!

Month: June 2005

  • Revenge of the Sith

    I went and saw Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith yesterday, and… wow. It was by far the best of the three prequel films, and the first one of the three that actually felt, I don’t know, epic in the sense that it’s carrying the weight of Star Wars history that fleshed out the first three movies. It was good, I’d go see it again, if I get the chance.

    This is going to turn into a larger review, and some general observations on Star Wars in general, and there will be spoilers, so only click through if you’ve already seen it (or don’t mind reading spoilers).

    (more…)

  • Fan fiction

    Checking out Wikipedia’s excellent (as always) article on fan fiction today, I ran across the site FanFiction.net, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s a comprehensive directory of fan fiction, organized by TV shows, movies, cartoon, games, books, and much more.

    The amount of fan fiction out there is truly astounding; I’ve known this, of course, but I just never guessed at the sheer depth and breadth it covers. Let’s take a little stroll through the site for some examples.

    • The combined number of Star Trek stories: 9240. Wow. They actually split the Star Trek stories up by each TV show, but that doesn’t really matter.
    • X-Files: 5393 stories.
    • Lost (the TV series that debuted just this season): 1462 stories.
    • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 26,567. Holy shit!
    • Law and Order: 2037. Like Star Trek, they split out by the different subseries.
    • Star Wars: 11,828.
    • Lord of the Rings: 37,136. Good grief.
    • Harry Potter: 190,077! If I’d been drinking something when I read this one, I would have done a spit-take. This is beyond comprehensible!

    Those are kind of the usual suspects in fan fiction, what you’d expect… but there are seriously hundreds more different topics people are writing about. Here’s a sample of some of the oddball ones:

    • All in the Family: 4 stories.
    • Bill Nye the Science Guy: 6 stories.
    • Lazytown (a kids show, our kids watch it): 16 stories.
    • Diff’rent Strokes: 2 stories.
    • Saved by the Bell: 13 stories.
    • Moulin Rouge (the movie musical): 1466(!)

    You get the idea.

  • A Fire Upon The Deep

    The latest book I’m immersed in (one of them, anyway) is A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge. So far I’m hooked (I’m about a quarter of the way into it), it’s totally compelling science fiction. And it’s a refreshing reminder that there’s really no limit to what you can do, story-wise, with well-done sci-fi.

    Ah, it’s always nice to have the “summer vacation” from TV and have time to catch up on my reading :).

  • blogfringe

    monkeyinabox: “Are blogs really as mainstream, as some of us thought?”

    No. No they’re not. That’s easy to forget for those of us “on the inside,” but blogs really are still a fringe phenomenon.

    They’re getting there, though. The Journal of Accountancy just ran an article called “Would You, Could You, Should You Blog?” which is a decent introduction to blogs for accountants. Now that’s getting mainstream.

  • 10 years of PHP

    The PHP programming language is 10 years old today. A large part of what I do these days is PHP development—I’ve got it running web sites, parsing web server log files, running command-line batch processes, and more. Thanks to Rasmus and the PHP community for making it all possible!

    For a good roundup of the 10 year coverage, go here and here.

  • It only seems like I’m burned out on blogging…

    But I’m really not. If I’m burning out on anything, it’s work and the daily routine of it. As a consequence, blogging takes a backseat and even though I have things I want to write about, when I’m finally at the computer at a point where I can, I just don’t have the energy or ambition to do it. Which is ironic, since what I’d really rather be doing is blogging/writing full time instead. But alas, I haven’t yet (figured out how to) (gotten to the point where I can) make enough money doing that…

  • Podcasting

    So I dunno, I’ve been thinking about this whole podcasting thing lately… and while it sounds like it might be fun to do (and people used to tell me all the time that I have a perfect voice for radio… but not so much anymore… I wonder why that is?), I really just don’t have the time or energy for it. Besides, what would I talk about? I already have my blog for incoherent rambling, there’s no reason to clutter up bandwidth with large audio file of that…

    That’s the other worry: bandwidth issues. Last thing I really want to deal with is hosting large media files and getting hammered.

    Any Oregonians podcasting? I know Jack Bogdanski was experimenting a bit with it. Anyone else?

  • My semi-annual TV rant

    Now that the TV season is mostly over I thought I’d post one of my self-indulgent rants on the various television shows I watched and how I’m still a slave to the tube. So, even though everything is over and everyone who was going to watch has watched, there will be spoilers. Click through to read on.

    (more…)

  • Jake’s influencing the news

    …Jake of UtterlyBoring that is. He posted an item today about our local Wal-Mart being open 24 hours, mentioned it to Barney, and a story showed up on the Z21 news NewsChannel 21 this evening. Barney confirms it in the comments.

    That’s hot.

  • June!

    June already? Geez, where’d the time go? It’s not like May wasn’t a full month… some highlights:

    • Put together a monster swingset
    • Dental cleaning… with novocaine. I had two back teeth that needed periodontal work and scaling. Nasty stuff. My mouth was sore for days afterward.
    • The end of the TV season (I have another post on this sometime)
    • Beautiful, 80-plus degree weather… dampened (no pun intended) by massive flash flood inducing thunderstorms
    • We were more socially active than normal… we went to at least three barbecues, which is a lot for us

    Hmm, that’s all I can think of right now. June promises to be a busy month, too. There’s a potluck at work tomorrow, a neighborhood BBQ on Friday, a kids birthday party on Sunday, our anniversary, a friend’s college graduation, and more I’m sure.

    Perhaps we should do a blogger get together this month?