Month: October 2005

A couple of things from Sci-Fi Wire. First, more from your friend and mine, Emmanuelle Vaugier, fast becoming the Best. Hollywood. Pitchman. Ever:

“So slowly things start to develop. Animals and things are dying, and people are disappearing, and all of a sudden we see the creature attack. We start running away from the creature and try to figure out how to kill it and how to get everyone out of there safe. Unfortunately, not many make it out, as is usually the case with these films.”

And some words on Doom apparently the thinking-man’s movie of the season:

In the video game Doom, creatures from a literal hell invade our dimension. But for the movie version of the game, hell is more a state of mind than an actual place, the film’s creators told SCI FI Wire….

In the Doom movie, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson plays Sarge, whose Rapid Response Tactical Squad heads to a science lab on Mars where an experiment has gone horribly wrong and demons are killing people. “The movie [takes] a more cerebral approach,” Hollenshead said….

I dunno. Unearthed might be okay. Vaugier might not be as dumb as she sounds in print. And Doom might not just be the same stupid shoot-’em-up crap we’ve seen time and time again. Stranger things have been known to happen.

Heather points out via e-mail that Amazon appears to be offering the Season One Battlestar Galactica DVD set in a package deal with the 2003 miniseries that spawned the show. Which is all fine and good, except the Season One set already contains the miniseries among its many hours of bonus features*. The savings you get for taking the deal pretty much cancel out the cost of buying the miniseries separately, so I guess it’s a good deal for the completists out there. But otherwise, it just seems a little silly.

It looks like it may only be Amazon’s Canadian site that’s offering the deal. (The US site, for some reason, is offering Season One with the 2005 straight-to-video horror movie Fallen Ones.) So if you’re one of those completists and not a Canadian resident, keep in mind the exchange rate.

* A fact not lost on those of us who already bought the miniseries. Grumble grumble.

I wish I’d had all this photocopying to do last Wednesday, when I got drenched in the rain on my way to work and spent the day shivering and damp. (The copy room is a good five or ten degrees warmer than the rest of the floor.)

Like, I think, a lot of people, I pretty much gave up on Meetup.com around the time they started imposing monthly fees for group organizers. (With options like craigslist and Yahoo Groups available for free, I honestly don’t know what they were thinking.) It wasn’t a difficult decision, and it’s not like I’d had any luck actually meeting people there — Long Island being somewhat under-represented. I just closed the one or two groups that I’d tried without success to organize, and I didn’t look back.

Except, I didn’t completely leave. I still get occasional e-mail alerts from Meetup, letting me know that such-and-such a group is meeting, or that so-and-so has joined. And it occurs to me that they’re either running increasingly low on members in my immediate area — at $19.95 a month, I wouldn’t be surprised — or somebody there needs a quick geography lesson

Because New York and New Jersey? Different places.