Sickly centipede sergeants are stubborn.
Their glowing bellies burn with cinnamon.
Pixie psychopaths move so fast they burn.
To touch, wrap hands in layers of Charmin.
That's from the tree just in front of the house yesterday.
I actually got up at 11:30am to-day after sleeping nine and a half hours uninterrupted. Sometimes that the reward for not having slept the previous night and it is sweet. I've felt terrific to-day--I've already pencilled and inked a page and I've gone grocery shopping. Energy, I have it.
Last night seemed perfect for video games, so I played some American McGee's Alice for a while, spending most of the time defeating the giant centipede boss. I'd forgotten how hard that motherfucker is. Alice is deceptively easy when you start--it's just a few card guards you can kill with a couple hits who always drop more life and mana than you need. Then, when you shrink, things start to get more challenging rather abruptly, mainly for the beetles who drop acorn bombs on you and the absolutely impossible to ride leaf rafts over piranha infested water--the scale is consistently inconsistent, with ants twice the size of the beetles and fish half the size of the beetles, not to mention the Mock Turtle and the Duchess, who are both just slightly taller than the ants. At least the game treats this as a dream world--thanks, Tim Burton, for making it a magic underground kingdom. I hope you found more ways to flatten the story.
I saw the novelisation of the new Alice in Wonderland movie at Barnes and Noble the other day, pretty much confirming the new movie's going to bear little resemblance to the Alice books. Again, I don't mind pastiches, but did the movie have to be called Alice in Wonderland, then? This is another example of the brain dead logic that gave us recent film titles like Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek. Both decent movies, but neither one comes close to encapsulating its respective franchise as the title suggests.
Anyway, that centipede's ridiculous. I'd completely forgotten what I was supposed to do, so I spent a lot of time running around and getting his baby centipedes on me, chewing my face off or something. It took me a long time just to figure out to shoot the bastards with the playing cards--I almost always have the Vorpal Blade equipped, partly because Alice running around with a big knife is an endlessly fun image, and partly because I like how precise the aim is when you throw it. It was ages before I remembered you have to hit the centipede boss in the glowing chink in his armour whenever he rears up. Which he hardly ever does. I tried a bunch of alternate strategies--the ice wand, putting down the exploding jack in the boxes, but no, he had to bare it himself. I ended up finishing up with the croquet mallet because I stopped caring about my life metre, I was so annoyed.
I also watched the sixth episode of Being Human's second series last night. I can tell the writers have completely no idea what they're doing with Mitchell. We went from Mitchell clumsily taking over the vampires, to vampire AA meetings and all the vampires giving up blood, to Mitchell implying to Lucy that he's the only one who's managed to give up blood, to the writers hitting the reset button with explosives. Okay, guys, keep your stories straight this time. And bring back The Vampire Daisy!
One thing I'd really like to see is one or two plots where Mitchell, George, and Annie do something together. They do have good chemistry, but practically every episode is three separate stories, one for each character, that aren't related to each other at all. I sort of wonder if this is because the actors are too expensive all together to keep for the amount of time it takes to film an episode.
I may need to give up on Dead Like Me after having read on its Wikipedia entry, "Bryan Fuller left early in the first season due to conflicts with MGM Television, including disagreement over major script and storyline cuts considered important to the main theme. He stated that the 'lack of professionalism... made it really difficult... it was like being at war... they were constantly trying to strong arm me. It was the worst experience of my life.' According to Fuller, Showtime canceled the show due to 'a loss of quality and a sense the problems would continue.'"
Sounds like sticking with that show would be too painful an experience. On Sunday morning, I watched "The Darkness and the Light", a Deep Space Nine episode written by Ronald D. Moore and Bryan Fuller. Often when I revisit Deep Space Nine I'm struck by the timeliness of the issues it deals with, being the story of a foreign government's presence in a recently liberated society and helping them to put together their own government, learning how much participation is appropriate. This particular episode deals with revenge killings of Major Kira's friends for their participation in a bomb explosion that killed civilians during the Cardassian occupation. It's a pretty good episode, particularly for season 5 Deep Space Nine (season 2's my favourite). I especially liked Kira's line at the end, after having confronted the man who'd been killing her friends; "Sometimes innocents are just an excuse for the guilty."
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