Your Plastic Pal

Happy Mothers' Day, all mothers out there.

And now a final plug.

On said day, 2pm, is the last that is to say final performance of Guys and Dolls, featuring me as Nicely-Nicely Johnson (see review).

2pm, $30, 4588 Bathurst, if you want to see me sing and dance in purple pants.

I've had a lot of fun putting th eshow on, and tons of you have come along to se and support me and thats way past awesome.

Anyone else wants to see it, and has a chance to do so, I'd love to see you tomorrow.

Cheers,

First one I drove was my parents' Mazda MPV, 1992 edition.

Guys and Dolls opened on Friday (for previews) and Saturday (for keeps). Today was the weekend matinée, and next week we've got four more shows.

This represents about three months' worth of my removal from most of reality, work aside. It has been a payoff, for sure. And I get a moment in it, the cool kind like you see in movies, where a spotlight focuses on me and there is silence and I tell a story with some singing in it.

And then I rode my bike home from my parents' place.

I'm looking forward, too, but for a few days it's nice to look neither forward nor backward* and say "wait a minute. This moment -- these two weeks -- is one of those times to which I have been looking forward and one day will look backward."

* (I suppose that's what being a shortsighted person, like *name politician you don't like here, but for me it's the Bush administration* feels like)

TTC strike started at midnight - well, the asshole locking the door at Bloor/Yonge station at 11:45 started early, but there you go.

Justification: "protect worker safety now that we're going on strike."

I'm so close to being snide here.

Anyway, I'm all for essential service legislation now. A lot of people are going to be stuck downtown tonight. Cabs were already getting hard to find half an hour ago. Not going to be a pretty weekend.

Chris Rock and Stephen Wright are telling each other's jokes. Oh dear lord. It's just rupturing the fabric of spacetime.

Poached from Daniel aka uberroomie.

1. My username is _____ because ____

Kinra - I was making friends in Toronto through Legend of the Five Rings when I returned to the city from my time at McGill. People tended to post on mailing lists using in-character names. I chose one that fit the clan I liked - the Lions - and since the family name "Matsu" was nearly an anagram of my last name, I put together the name "Matsu Kinra" (subbing Rs for Ls) and just used the pertinent part for the journal.

2.My name is _____ because ______.

Ilan - my parents met in Israel, and liked the idea of a Hebrew name. I was going to be named for my late great grandmother Ida, and so I got the name Ilan. I quite don't mind it.

3. My journal is titled ____ because ____.

"Your plastic pal." Sirius Cybernetics - marketing robots as "your plastic pal who's fun to be with!" My user pic was the Stikfas samurai at the time, and so I was a sort of plastic pal. Eventually it was decreed that I was fun to be with also.

4. My friends page is called ____ because ____.

"Perspective Vortex." If you've read The Hitchhiker's Trilogy, it needs little explanation. For those that haven't, the Total Perspective Vortex shows you the whole universe, and your significance in it. The Lovecraftitude of the whole experience should be enough to drive people insane, but Zaphod Beeblebrox had no trouble with it.

5. My default userpic is ____ because ____.

A stuffed RBC Lion mascot puppet I got when my father got a job there in '87 or so. I brought it to school with me at one point, and andmiss put it on during a walk, and I stuck glasses on it, and then took a picture with my phone. I like to think that it is the best representation of me ever.

Not to dwell on the point, but there you go.

Just a quick message to let people know I'm alive, I'm doing fine.

I'm in a new place - sharing a kitchen and living room and landline with _stuman_. Occasionally sharing food and drink and laughs with andmiss.

I'm working, on the prowl for my next locus within The Big System. I'm performing, nicely nicely thank you very much. But I'm not really writing, and I'd like to do that a little more than I have.

Tomorrow I'll find out just how fine I'm doing, I suppose. Getting an opthalmological check to see whether my weird "hey I can't see" thing a couple weeks ago is anything about which to fret.

Amidst Spitzergate, Zhivagan snow, waiting for tommyhat to get back to me so I can read my RSS feeds in the style, long days, longer nights, and so forth, I'm wearing a bit thin. I figure - hey, what better time to try to get thoughts organized or at least spewed out into readable form? And then I always think about how awful they look when I reread them. And I stop.

Journey would be so disappointed. Which reminds me - I could catch Pete Rock tomorrow.

If this blentry has blored you, please to be distracted by this collaborative movie review I did of Be Kind, Rewind last week ago.

And then check it, and rock it -- I am in a play as mentioned earlier. Obviously the site hasn't been updated recently but I assure you, it's happening May 2nd-14th, at 7:30 on the Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and 2:00pm on the Sundays. As with last year, you will hear me sing, see me dance, and suffer my acting - or make jeering catcalls. Either way, you win!

Huh, I started this entry at 3:14am, but now it's 3:28 and that's not terribly numerologically significant. Pity.

Well, it looks like it's 2000 again.

Nader is launching another presidential bid.

Could we all please just remember what the hell happened last time and for all of our sake not vote for him, at all, ever?

no more heroes anymore
no more heroes anymore




(I am playing No More Heroes)

Well, well.

It looks like there are some people who realize that it's the future already, dammit and we should start acting like it.

Herein I present Dean Kamen's "Luke Arm" which is what it sounds like. For all your lightsaber-cauterized-stump needs.

Next step: flying electric cars if you would, please.

Quite a lot of white about.

So you do something wrong and you do it wrong for a while. Eventually someone points out that not only is it wrong, it hurts people, they just haven't been telling you in a way that you understand.

So you can say:
A. "I have been doing something wrong, but don't want to change! Convenience is a powerful motivator."
B. "I have been doing something wrong, I will change slowly so that the habit sticks."
C. "I have been doing something wrong, I must change it immediately, and if I slip back forgive myself and continue trying the complete change."
D. "I have not been doing anything wrong, and to suggest I have is to be disingenuous. I will do what I will do and nobody can tell me otherwise."
E. "I have been doing something wrong, but to admit it is to sacrifice something of myself and feel worse for it. I don't want to make myself suffer that way."
F. "You tell me it's wrong, but other people tell me it's right and the opposite is wrong. Why should I believe you? I'll do what's most convenient."

I mean, a couple of these make sense, and even the really awful-sounding ones can be rationalized. But convenience is far more an influence on how we act than it should be. That is rational, insofar as you save effort and energy, but it's also not going to get anyone anywhere that's not convenient.

Oh, so incidentally I picked G, "I've been doing that thing wrong but I do lots of things wrong that I'm aware of, and I'll change some but not others in an inconsistent fashion and then go on to loathe myself." Am I right? Do I get partial credit?

Sure, Justin. I might as well.

Ecce meme!

( Shall you tell me what you think of me? Or, just about you? )

yum install uqm

...it's over. I am officially a thrall now.

This is my review of Dungeon Siege: the Movie.

They didn't call it that, of course, and with good reason: it wasn't really related to Dungeon Siege, and it wasn't really a movie.

No, instead they called it "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale", which is wildly appropriate, for three reasons:
1. It makes you think of the phrase "...what in the name of GOD",
2. It sounds like the title of the fourth (or seventh) Lord of the Kings movie,
and 3. It suggests... hedging. Like, "it's not, like, Dungeon Siege itself, but it's A TALE", the indefinite article suggesting that it could be one of THOUSANDS of stories about a brave farmer avenging himself upon an army of Krugs (?), and the world "tale" suggesting that it's apocryphal, embellished, or perhaps even allegorical, merely suggesting morals or life lessons pertinent to one's besieging of dungeons.

So, wearing Burger King crowns and bolstered with cynicism, The Bitter Guy and I plunged headlong into a boll of suck. (It turns out 'bowl' is a misspelling, as suck is actually measured in bolls, millibolls, and in the case of ItNotK:aDSt, terabolls.) Fifteen minutes of sponsor thanks, door prizes and awkward backgrounders came and went, and the curtain came up on the tender image of Ray Liotta and Leelee Sobieski, spooning.

This is where the movie establishes its creep quotient. In all honesty, throughout the whole thing - the styrofoam armour (no WETA blacksmiths on staff here), the extended sequences of child-murder, the hamfisted cribbing from Cirque de Soleil, yea even unto Matthew Lillard drinking and groping giggling courtesans while trying to avoid Burt Reynolds - the mission statement here is "I, the director, do not like the audience." He did not like us, and he wanted us to be uncomfortable, feeling too awkward even to assail the wretched proceedings with mockery.

Let's get the good stuff out of the way first.

ACTORS. Ron Perlman, awfully as he's treated by the script, makes you care about the wooden stereotype that would, under the hand of a director who was also incompetent but had actually showed up on set, have spoken in a laughably bad scottish accent and Died So That The Hero Might Live. Instead we get a sort of twisted Ron Perlman character, which is good times. Burt Reynolds, John Sliders-Gimlies, and Statham all show up and play themselves, and they wouldn't be the kind of actors who suprised us by being in this movie if they weren't actually entertaining on their own merits.

EFFECTS AND SCENERY. Face it, British Columbia's mountains and forests are f*&kin' gorgeous; they're prettier than your neighbourhood and your girlfriend put together, even if they were painted by Monet on the surface of Angelina Jolie. And then there's the fact that it is full of brilliant computer animators and movie teams (remember where they film Galactica these days). So the movie looked pretty as long as no actors, props, sets or Matthew Lillard were visible.

And aside from the crapness of the film in general, a few things stood out as conspicuously gruesome:

BAD ACTORS OR GOOD ACTORS GONE PEAR-SHAPED. I'm looking at you, Sobieski. Liotta is just bringing the ham, and poor Lillard doesn't even seem to know whether he's in a movie or not anymore. But Leelee! Weren't you really entertaining that time? I don't remember when exactly? And you portrayed characters with grace and nuance? Or maybe I have you confused with LEELEE SOBIESKI. God. I won't say you deserved that opening scene, but you earned it as you went on.

PHYSICAL EFFECTS. You know on the poster, how Ron Perlman has a bow, and Statham is in armour and holding a sword that looks like a cross between Beowulf, Gladiator and Conan? In the movie, the Krugs dress in spraypainted styrofoam, Statham is always in rags swinging a cardboard cutlass, and Perlman only ever fights with a rake. While this is hilarious, and possibly intentionally thus, it is also cheap-looking when compared to the money spent on ninjas, lesbian elves, and Burt Reynolds' eyeshadow.

WHEN IT TRIED TO BE LORD OF THE RINGS. It did this a lot, we noticed, we got the joke, and we were annoyed when they finally had the "fellowship" go over "Caradhras". Please note that for about 30 seconds was any part of the movie set anywhere near a dungeon.

In conclusion, this movie sucked and you should not see it. Not even to make me feel better about having seen it. Not even to laugh at its genuinely ridiculous moments. Not even to enjoy the ninjas.

Wait, is that sick fascination I see creeping across your face?! NO!! Whatever you do, don't let it get the better of you, not even on a rainy day, when there's nothing to do and you're home with a few buddies and a case of booze, and you feel like getting your mock on.

Don't do it, because at the beginning of the movie Leelee and Liotta spoon, and pillow-talk, and just... ugh.

So that's what I had to say. Justin, please correct what I missed. I have a list of zingers I haven't included, many of them The Bitter Guy's, so I'll revisit this in a few days to give him his due.

LET me GET this STRAIGHT.

Transplant programs have been screening potential donors, but in some cases use organs from people in high-risk groups if they've tested negative for diseases. The new legislation means that practice must stop.

So, we're currently afraid that if you get an organ that might be contaminated with Teh Ghey, that you might get Teh GRIDS.

Pardon me while I tell this legislation to go quietly practice some high-risk sexual activity with itself.

Quick bit of pseudoactuarial number crunching. Worst POSSIBLE case if you get an infected organ is an HIV infection, I presume. Okay, fine. That's what all of those fancy antiretrovirals are for, you know, the ones we've spent years developing and that save all those lives?

Tell me, you boneheaded imbeciles: precisely what pill do you prescribe for organ failure?

1. Dear lord. The Dresden Dolls do put on a show. These peoples, they entertain like it was some sort of important thing for them to do.

2. 76 words

Learn Touch Typing

Watch one of my DVDs every week.

Read one of my unread books every week.

Paint one miniature or troop block every week.

That is probably about 20 hours, all of which is regenerative and fun stuff, right?

Sometimes sleep is elusive.