‘oh, that couch is hideous!’ what, the gorgeous green one? (apparently I have a fondness for ugly 70s furniture.)
ultra laser
trailer is up for the prince of persia: the sands of time. hat tip again to blast-o-rama.
it looks ridiculous/ly awesome. i agree with marty that it’s a little bit the mummy and a little bit pirates, but i loved both of those, and this looks excessively spectacular in exactly the right way.
also, they manage to avoid the first pitfall of most video game adaptations: they actually played the game and didn’t throw out all the good bits. the dagger that can turn back time, the playful rivalry with the maharajah’s daughter, the parkour and elaborate set pieces? hell yes. make up an entirely new story thread and turn it into a globe-spanning quest for a mythical temple, that’s fine. they’ve captured the soul of the game.
that still doesn’t mean it’s going to be objectively any good, but you should know by now that’s not my primary concern.
the luke and vader sets are on ‘order stop’ on hlj, which means unless koto makes more they’re probably already sold out there. should flood ebay soon, but no worries: the kotobukiya us store (i just found out about this?) has them up for pre-order, sets of vader + yoda and luke + yoda.
HELL YES. i’m getting both sets and i’m going to have to start making stir-fry more often.
hat tip to blast-o-rama
damn
so i’m totally into trauma now. it’s got it’s fucking hooks in me. i blame cliff curtis.
but i’m also starting to like the other characters, and olivia wilde is in there now. i missed a couple episodes, but watched a bunch of house season 4 yesterday, so i like to think she’s playing the same character.
universe was weak. the bits on the destiny were good, the bits on the planet were complete bullshit. ’the ship is going to fly into a star in episode four’ was more plausible than this weeks ‘a main character is going to fall down a hole and die’. sitcom drama is always bulltrue, especially so when main characters are immune to it. not being atlantis doesn’t mean you can write people out like that and surprise us: it wasn’t in the teaser, it’s not going to happen.
okay, quick rundown. col. young, doctor rush, eli, tj, and the black guy who’s name i haven’t caught are solid and interesting characters.
also, tj is smoking hot. god. yes.
chloe and scott are potentially interesting but the whole ‘i suddenly love you’ feels so forced and unearned that i can’t help thinking the writers are planning to kill one of them off and are trying to make us care more. (also, wasn’t scott sleeping with some sgc girl on the icarus base planet in the pilot? like, a week ago ship-time? and who goes so dramatically batshit about their fathers death and then a week later is like ‘no, i’m totally okay now’. (maybe she’ll reject him as her therapy guy after the trauma of her father’s death and end up with eli later? god, i don’t think that’s actually better…))
and pretty much everyone else ranges from inconsequential to actively annoying. hopefully they’ll use up all the idiot deaths soon?
the ship is interesting but it’s already frustrating that the writers keep re-defining ancient technology for each show. like, why don’t the destiny shuttles look like early puddle-jumpers? why didn’t atlantis have ring platforms or kino’s? why did merlin have that crazy flash teleportation stuff but that never showed up anywhere else?
there’s a case to be made that merlin represents late ancient / post ascenscion technology, which puts atlantis at mid / high ancient tech, and the destiny is somewhere between atlantis and the oldest obvious sg-1 stuff (the orange gates, rings, the time-loop device and the ping-flood device).
which gives us four rough tech levels, but they don’t really feel like progressive levels of design. if destiny can fly through a star’s corona on low power, that gives it much stronger shields than atlantis had even with three zpm’s, which implies that the solar reactor (or whatever) is a better power source than a zpm, which came later. and the asgard apparently copied destiny-level ancient spacesuits and tech, maybe left behind by destiny’s precursor ship before the lantian-era ancients moved to pegasus?
all of which is extraordinarily nerdy, of course. eminent domain tells me i should write some stargate scripts solving these conundrums and try to trick them into giving me a job.
destiny’s set design reminds me of deep space nine. it feels comfortable familiar. i half expect once they fix the biodome chamber that they’ll find a medbay across the promenade from the bar and security office.
there’s a lot of potential here, and i’m hoping what we’re seeing is a few early mis-steps. given that sg-1 and atlantis both hit the 50/50 split between excellent and fucking terrible by their respective ends, that’s the biggest hurdle universe needs to hit: consistency. even if it’s consistently average that’s good enough. i mean, i’m watching trauma and trauma is terrible.
elecom usb touch pad - numerical pad + multi-touch gesture support » awesome
y6500 (about $70 plus shipping from japan) « awesome
everything about this machine is fantastic except the lack of a numerical pad. at this point, i’m not buying a laptop over 12” without that, especially something with two inches of bezel on either side of the keyboard. it’s a sixteen inch laptop! it’s not like you don’t have the space.
still. both the ‘nebula’ design and the deep red-brown back panel options are absolutely gorgeous, the purple highlights are slick, the baseline specs are very nice, the maxed out specs are fucking ridiculous. and the (currently a free upgrade to a) blu-ray drive isn’t helping my gadget lust.
