thank god for amy poehler on snl…

Current Mood: Amused

watched obama’s speech yesterday.  here it is, if you haven’t seen it yet:

watching this not only makes me an obsessed obama groupie (he does seem to have that effect), and go out and buy some obama stuff on his website, but also makes me realize that this election is huge.  it’s not even about the issues.  it’s about the future vs. the past.  obama is a politician who i believe can really lead this country into the 21st century, and as a techno-geek, i’ve seen lots of pie-in-the-sky solutions for a variety of environmental and economic problems.  but what all of those plans need is someone who is willing to take a risk and shake things up.

d00d.  mccain is not that person.

i think obama could be.

i was just reading a wired article about electric cars — yes they’re back.  and the program is being developed by someone with a realistic plan to get us off oil.  meanwhile, i’m watching obama talk about getting america off our oil addiction and i’m thinking, this could be the guy that gets the ball rolling.  and i want, want, want a f’ing electric car!

and i thought it was a key moment when he brought up all the hot topics that everyone debates about, abortion, gay marriage, and says, look, we might not agree on these things, but we can at least come to some middle ground – downplaying those issues because that’s not what this election is going to be about.  it’s not.  it’s about the future, and someone who can lead us there, and the past, and someone who will continue what reagan, bush #1 and bush #2 left off.  personally, i’m ready for the economy to not suck anymore.  i’m ready for new renewable energy.  i’m ready to live in a country that i am proud to live in, and not feel embarrassed about if and when i’m abroad.  (”yes, i’m american, but i think our president is a douche, too”)  a lot of politicians talk the talk, but few actually make me believe.

Mike Doughty talked in his blog about this being the first time he’s been politically excited about something rather than against something.  seriously, obama has the commanding presence of malcom x, he’s just, you know, not as angry.  and i was really digging kucinich, even though i knew he had no chance.  with obama, it’s like, the little issues don’t matter as much, because that’s not what he’s going for.  and since high school (when i declared myself an anarchist), i have been firm that the only way to fix the system is massive, radical change.  hell, that was why i voted green instead of gore.  it wasn’t that i didn’t want gore in the white house — i did, and i honestly thought dubbya had no chance of winning…which, you know, he didn’t.  it was that i wanted there to be a third option.  it was that democrats and republicans were two sides of the same worn out coin and neither represented me.  that’s what has made the myspace generation apathetic about politics.  how can you get excited about anything when it’s the same old stuff?  repetition isn’t exciting, not even when it’s techno — what’s exciting is when something gets thrown into the mix that’s different (this applies to the techno metaphor, too, and gee i’m just throwing around metaphors today, aren’t i?).

i feel like i need to be a much more active supporter of obama, which is kind of weird to me.  i feel like i need to tell everyone i see about him and make them part of the obsession too.  i don’t want this to be like the 2k election again, where no one really believes the crappy candidate really has a chance of winning and then he does by stealing florida.  even when mccain’s running mate looks like a blatant grasp at straws, i feel like it’s too dangerous to feel comfortable, because the alternative is another 4-8 years of destroying the environment, drilling holes in alaska, pumping more CO2 into the air and making the cities unlivable.  more economic depression and cold war-era “trickle-down” theory.  as much as i agree with the sentiment, i don’t want the bumper stickers that say “dissent is patriotic” to define my political views and outlook on the country.  we need someone to shake up the system and lead us into the technological future because otherwise, we need to get moving on our martian colonization program because this planet isn’t going to hold up for another generation of pillaging.  i’m ready to move into the future, not the Terminator future, or the Battlestar Galactica or the Matrix dystopic future of creating artificial life that proves its’ superiority and attempts to wipe out humanity for being inefficient, but the future where, you know, we still have ozone.  where the water is still blue and falls from the sky.  where there’s still animals.

there’s an episode in BSG where they’re crashed on Kobol.  Chief Tyrol is sitting by one of his knuckledraggers’ side as he’s sputtering blood and probably isn’t going to make it, and Tyrol says “How’re you doing?”  “Just listening to the birds,” he says.  Tyrol looks up for a second and notices the sound.  and the look is like “wow, I never thought I’d see the day when…”  and it’s terrifying how realistic that alternate reality is — that we could live in a world that has been without animal life for so long we’ve completely taken it for granted.  where we don’t even know to miss the sound of birds in the trees.

i feel like there’s a real momentum toward real revolutionary change and it’s an exciting time.  but i feel like we need to hop on the bandwagon because if we miss the window, it might never happen.  so i’m voting for obama.  you should too.

(by the way, i’ve enabled a new subscriber feature which emails alerts when i write posts.  if it bugs you, you can modify your subsription from the Subscribe widget in the sidebar, or you can email me.)

Current Mood: Determined

i nixed the single sign on due to the fact that a) it was kind of buggy and b) i didn’t need it anyway.

but in better news.  WII.  seriously.  wii.  it’s wiitastic.  i’m wiidicted.  it’s wiilicious.  and i’ve got wii-arm now.

gavin’s b-day is coming up so we decided to get him a wii.  okay, he’s 3, but he likes crazy weird cartoony animals and games involving such, and the controls are more movement based meaning active and easy to learn, and it’s nintendo which means more games for kids, and it’s a more family oriented thing and it’s cool and and and…anyway, he likes it and it won’t be long before he starts playing.  but that’s getting ahead of the story cuz the point is the wii rocks.  i mean seriously.  more so than i had really considered.  it’s amazing how much more fun what would be a boringly simple and basic 3 inning baseball game or single tennis game is when you’re actually swinging a (wiimote) bat or (wiimote) racket.  even the dumbest minigames become more interesting when that leaning thing you do with an old school nes controller to make the car (or whatever) lean in one direction ACTUALLY DOES SOMETHING.  it’s like someone watched videos of people playing video games and turning the controllers and leaning on the couch in weird angles and said “you know, i’ve got a great idea….”

a wii wasn’t something i’ve been planning on for forever.  actually, it wasn’t until we had the “what do we want to get for g for his b-day” conversation a month ago that i even really considered it.  but when i did, i thought it was a brilliant idea.  and i have been sort of following the press around the wii over the last year and the wii continues to be the most impressive in how it’s been able to grab people who aren’t gamers and appeal to them.  and it’s all in the innovativeness of the movement-based controller.  because nintendo isn’t nuts — it really is more fun to do rather than sit on your arse and watch, even if you remote control the guys on the screen with your fingers.  it’s a visceral thing.  it gets your body moving and your blood pumping and it feels good. and that’s what makes the wii rocktastic.  and it really takes doing it to realize just how wiitastic the wii is.  it makes me want to pack it up and take it with me wherever i go just so i can say “d00d, you gotta play this.”

otherwise it’s been busy, hence no posts.  we set up a freelancer account on elance where the projects and the site seems a lot more professional and businesslike.  i’m excited about that, and about making more money on our own work.

also, just a reminder, i’m sure you all have your calendars marked and have been keeping up, but today is the last day that dr. horrible will be available to watch.  after today, that’s it, it’s off the air and you have to wait for the dvd.  after watching all 3 acts i can say it was good.  not fantabulously awesome, but it was good.  it wasn’t knee-slappingly funny, but it was amusing.  the only real LOL bit was after the “hero” Captain Hammer steals Dr. Horrible’s (Neil Patrick Harris) love interest and they meet in the laundromat and Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion) is gloating and says “She’s with Captain Hammer now.  And these [his fists] are not the hammer.”  He walks away and a full ten seconds later comes back and says “The hammer is my penis.”  the timing and the schoolyard-ness just cracked me up.  and Nathan Fillion is really good at being ironical (to use a Firefly word).

we’re going to california in about a week and i managed to get a macbook on ebay for $700 bucks (2ghz, 2gb ram, 60gb hard drive, office, logic, ilife  pre-loaded — i’m stoked, altho not so much about the office, i’ll probably dump that and get open office), so maybe i’ll do a road journal or something.

also, we’re giving the thinktank site another overhaul, with a dropdown menu to select the site theme.  it’s pretty exciting, and awesome.  we’ve got 4 themes up so far.  we need to figure out which one to use as the default.  behold the awesome.  we’re still working on more, but it’s functionally complete.

Current Mood: Bouncy

dr horribe, which i quickly mentioned last time, is joss whedon’s latest entertainment foray as an internet-only, 1 week, limited, totally free, musical/blog thing.  it stars neil patrick harris (doogie howser) and nathan fillion (firefly’s malcom reynolds) and i can’t wait.  here’s the teaser:

Teaser from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

so, long time, no post.  don’t care, this isn’t a substantial post, i just wanted to get something off my chest.  ready?  okay, here goes:

if i see another stupid “who is the final cylon” quiz, article or anything, i am going to ftl the frak out of here.  it’s getting tired.

plus, everyone knows it’s gaeta.

here’s some interesting frakking stuff:

BSG as interpreted by lolcats and more BSG lolcats
bet on the final cylon?
IGN interview with the actor who plays gaeta (the real final cylon…i’m of course going to get flamed for saying that because he jokes about it in that interview.  that’s not what makes him the final cylon, btw.)
last, but certainly not least, adama oracle, cross the admiral with a magic eight-ball and add snark.

oh, and on a personal note, these were contributed for the 30 project….

Current Mood: Tired

so we’ve been watching the new bionic woman series. why? two words: katee sackhoff. other than that, it’s yet another remake of an old tv show. since battlestar galactica there’s been — that i know of — dr. who (which would have been fantastic were it not for the fact that the doctor couldn’t be more monotonous — not saying anything against christopher eccleston, he’s fantastic, but the character was written really badly — and the british pop star/female co-star was neither hot nor particularly interesting. the plots felt like recycled sci-fi and i lost my suspension of disbelief with the line “he’s downloading the internet.” which was after they had this exchange:
random tech guy: don’t worry, that door is encrypted with a thousand passcodes.
dr.: he’s a genius, he can decrypt a thousand million passcodes in less than 10 seconds.
[ 30 seconds later ]
random tech guy: oh my god, he got through!
there’s the new flash gordon (i haven’t even bothered with this, it sounded too awful to bear), and now bionic woman, which should be subtitled: another tv series remake. i’m sure i’m missing some.

but we’re watching it for katee sackhoff, who is our new favorite actress. the problem is — or problems are: her screen appearances are too few and far between; she’s basically playing the Six Cylon from BSG (the actress of which, i’m told by my pop culture source-of-all-gossipy-celebrity-information, erin, is katee’s real life BFF); and she’s not given enough opportunity to be snarky. and that’s what katee does best — snark. it would be somewhat redeemed if she at least kicked the crap out of michelle ryan — who plays the show’s title character — more often. but no, they have one fight scene at the end of the first ep and then she’s hardly seen in episode 2. wah. but i will continue to watch it because it’s got katee sackhoff and if they kill off her character then i will no longer have any reason to watch it at all.

the show itself is an alias clone with different actors, with occasional random interjections of the m’f'ing gilmore girls. nothing against gilmore girls – well, nothing aside from the watered-down, saccharine, easily digestible with a spoonful of sugar variety of “feminism” they tout — i just didn’t order a side of heartwarming with my asskicking badass chick show. and there’s major plot holes too, like, okay, if they’re going to have some semblance of ethics and only implant these superduper bionic limbs and stuff on a person who would otherwise have to have those limbs amputated due to some horrible accident, their ethics kinda go completely out the window when they do it on those people without them knowing or consenting. i mean, come on. in that case, why isn’t the whole organization bionic? if you don’t care about getting permission, why aren’t all your agents just required to lop off their limbs to get supercyber ones? at least in alias everyone was more or less on par with the badassedness, no one was anymore superspiff than anyone else, they just had different skillsets, and in buffy there was only one (okay, two) slayers who didn’t ask to be, but that was a plot point and no one else could get it even if they were hit by a car and needed new arms and legs. (well, up until the super witch used the power of the ancient scythe-thing that looked an awful lot like some custom sword dealie some modern LA D&D-geeking metalsmith would craft that held the power of the Slayer and released it into the ether so that any girl who could potentially ever be a Slayer suddenly was one.) ok i’m done. katee sackhoff needs to be in more stuff, especially since this is supposed to be the last season of bsg :(