A weekend in lovely Richmond, Virginia (Part 2)

...and we're back, continuing with more highlights from my awesome Richmond, Virginia trip.

Awesome Sushi Place: Though technically it wasn't in Richmond, we found this wonderful Japanese steakhouse & sushi place. The seating is in small groups around a bar-style table, and the authentically asian chef guy prepares the food right there inches from your very epidermis, with lots of pyrotechnics and throwing of knives. At the end, there's delicious complimentary sorbet.

Flea Market: we found an excellent flea market outside Richmond. It was entirely indoors, which is sometimes a bad sign as flea markets go, but we enjoyed this one. There were little pomeranians there, but they were asleep and couldn't be cuddled. I even managed to find some good Star Wars stuff. I found a 12-inch Ponda Baba action figure (no, it's not a doll! it's a figure!) for eight bucks. Better still, the seller also sold me two boxes of miscelleneous Star Wars stuff for $15 total, including an AT-AT walker, a Millenium Falcon, an X-wing, Boba Fett's ship Slave 1, a snowspeeder, a landspeeder, and various parts. All in all, quite a deal.

Toys 'R' Us: Speaking of cheap toys, we dropped by a Toys 'R' Us on Sunday, and they had a crazy sale going on. The old green-tag merchandise that was 50% off for awhile last year was now 90% off the lowest marked price, which in most cases was already at least 50% or more off the original prices. Almost everything we got was under a dollar, and some of it was under 10 cents a piece. Among the better finds were the Van Helsing movie action figures (49 cents each), some Simpsons action figures including the not-too-popular Brad Goodman (29 cents each), interactive Pokemon watches (19 cents each), Pixter electronic drawing pad thingies (about $3.00 each), and a LEGO hockey player and goal set for 3 cents! If you live near a Toys 'R' Us, go check it out. Even if you don't like toys, this stuff would be good for gift giving.

Oh, and I finally got the album "The Hush" by Texas! It rocks! Bit hard to find in the USA, though. Highly recommended... by me!

A weekend in lovely Richmond, Virginia (Part 1)

Madeline and I spent the weekend in Richmond, Virginia. It's the awesomest place in all of Richmond County, Virginia! In addition to being the birthplace of Tom Wolfe and, um, Irene Langhorne Gibson, Richmond is also where they keep Virginia's government, which is ever so convenient since it's the state capitol and all that sort of thing. We had a totally fun time, which is well documented in many clear colour photos.

Richmond isn't really all that far from Orange, so we just drove there. We listened to a book-on-CD version of Brian Jaques' rodent-based fantasy epic Redwall for most of the way there. Some highlights of the trip included:

Plan 9 Records: One thing I always look for whenever I visit someplace new is the local used record store. This one was about par for the course. The best things we found were a bunch of Slayers VHS tapes for a dollar each and the Art of Noise "Into Vision" DVD. There were two levels, with most of the vinyl downstairs in the basement and most of the CDs upstairs. There's also a Plan 9 Records in Charlotte as well, which I've also been to, and I think the Charlotte one is a little better. In case anyone out there doesn't know, it's named after Ed Wood's film Plan 9 from Outer Space, regarded by some as the worst movie ever, though that was before Gigli came out. Anyway, the Plan 9 Records in Richmond is located in the awesome trendy part o' town.

Awesome trendy part o' town: in Virginia, there's an awesome trendy part o' town where lots of the buildings are painted wacky colours and everything costs quite a lot. It's like the old saying goes, "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to file my taxes there."

Gondolas painting: we found a great mural of some pastel gondolas painted on the wall of a building in the naughty side of town. we managed to get there just as the sun was setting, and the remaining rays of light made the already-colourful image glow a radiant gold hue. I took lots of pictures of it, including some great ones of Madeline standing in front and looking adorable.

Skateland of Richmond: Apparently just a normal roller-skating place, this building has a massive bright orange metal entryway, and the whole building is painted neon orange and blue. Got some great pictures which will probably end up on DeviantART. On a sad note, though, they had the empty husk of an old Hard Drivin' arcade game out back. Could it really have been just a decade and a half ago that this was the pinnacle of gaming technology, and now it's a planter for weeds?

That's it for Part 1. Tune in tomorrow for Part 2, the one with all the naked pictures.

How To Totally Talk To Chicks

Actual dialogue from real life (just a minute ago, actually)...

Madeline: "I love you."
Andrew: "And I love you."
Madeline: "Will you still love me when I'm so old that I have to keep looking down so I don't trip over my boobs?"
Andrew: "Yeah, I'll still love you next year, too."

Chicks totally dig that sort of mushy stuff like that.

Dream Journal 2

I meet a friend of mine named Kevin C., someone who I knew in middle school but haven't had contact with since. He seems to be in the process of moving, as he has quite a lot of stuff packed in cardboard boxes. He shows me a two-player fighting video game, which looks graphically similar to the old SNK Neo-Geo Samurai Showdown, but which can be controlled merely by passing one's hands over different parts of the controller without actually touching it. I can't quite get the hang of this, though I can do somewhat better by actually pressing the buttons instead. When it becomes abundantly clear that the game isn't quite my bag, he presents me with a beautiful intricately-carved chess set, with large yet exquisitely-detailed chess pieces carved from some shimmering substance. It's almost magical-looking, and apparently I get to keep it.

He shows me his car, a little blue compact, and drives me to the place where he works, where I've apparently agreed to help out for a few hours as a volunteer, as a favour I suppose. His job turns out to be at a very large Chinese & Italian restaurant. Although not much more fancy than a normal restaurant, the place is huge, with a large central dining area and several bars in smaller rooms off to the sides. Deciding it would be a good idea to meet the various employees, I visit one of the restaurant's several bars, which is tended by a very sweet elderly Chinese lady. She's the sort of person one gets along with instantly, and before long she reveals to me that she has a side business right there at the bar: a hamster that can supposedly tell fortunes. The method of the hamster's divination involves the bartender laying small polished stones with rune-like symbols out on the bar, then setting down the hamster and studying his reaction to the spread. She offers me a reading on the house, but for some reason I remember that we've parked Kevin's car improperly, so I go out to adjust it (apparently I have the keys for some unknown reason).

I go outside onto the restaurant's parking lot, adjacent to the Camp Hill Shopping Mall near where I grew up, and now there's snow falling. It turns out that Kevin parked next to a yellow curb line, in an awkward and very narrow triangular street. I move it to a better position, and survey the surrounding area. Behind the restaurant is a secluded suburban area, which I explore. It seems this suburb has its own amateur wrestling league, and a match with seated spectators is going on in a basketball court in a little park. I find this odd even in the dream, especially considering the cold weather, but don't stop to watch or ask questions.

My walk leads me back to the restaurant, where I decide to try another one of the bars. This time the bartender is a friendly Englishman, a stout older gentleman with white hair. A radio is playing, and suddenly Saint Etienne's "The Bad Photographer" comes on. Very rarely, in my experience, does recognisable music appear in a dream. I express my great surprise that such a great song would get played on American radio, and that's about it, as I'm woken up by a meowy kitten. Good dream though, with an uncommonly large amount of detail. I hope you lot enjoy it as well.

Dream Journal

Quite an odd dream last night, really. I had travelled to England for the purpose of... well, I'm not sure exactly, but it had something to do with something creative. I was staying in this beautiful little house in London that was centered around a fairly large dining room with a long wooden table. Everything around me seemed to be dark woods and deep greens, beautiful and elegant. Perhaps in need of a change of scenery, I went out to a local video arcade. It was fairly typical looking, all bright colours and lights, sliding and pulsing. I figured I'd try one of those motorized crane machines where you pick up a stuffed animal with the little metal claw. I won several, but the chute to the prize door was apparently clogged, which can happen with those machines sometimes if a larger prize gets caught. So anyway, I figure I'll shake the machine a little to get them out. Although I expect it to be very heavy, I find that it's easy to lift it right up off the floor! Just then, the video arcade manager (who is in a little cage box, just like Danny DeVito as Louie DePalma on Taxi) tells me that picking up the machines isn't allowed, which I suppose makes good enough sense, even in a dream. He doesn't seem to care if I keep the stuff I shaked loose from the clogged prize chute though. When I open the little door, it turns out that the various stuffed animals--many of which resembled Nintendo's pink puffball Kirby, by the way--had transmogrified into various coloured leather bowling gloves! This seems odd to me, but I very carefully packed them all with my stuff. At this point, I was woken up by Tigger clinging to the screen outside my window, yowling to be let in. Tigger is a cat, by the way, so don't anyone call 911 or anything. I never did get to find out what I was going to do with all those bowling gloves.

Alone In The Dark: rare insight on why Uwe Boll's masterpiece failed

Everyone who's known me personally for any reasonable length of time knows that I love bad movies and anything associated with them. From the classic Medved Brothers tomes like The Golden Turkey Awards to the popular and accessable MST3K to comprehensive modern websites like Jabootu, if it covers terrible movies, I'm there. As entertaining and often hilarious as these sources may be, we rarely gather any hard evidence as to why a particular film is so dreadful. We can always point and laugh over silly rubber monster suits, gaping plot holes, and incoherent dialogue, but seldom do we know why those elements are present. Was the director blessed with an awesome vision but couldn't achieve enough funding to pull it off? Was a reasonably good presmise betrayed by a ghastly script? Was the whole project ruined in post-production through overzealous editing by the studio? All are easy to speculate about, but difficult to prove.

That's why it's so refreshing to see an article like today's Something Awful, which explains precisely where Uwe Boll's poorly-recieved video game movie Alone in the Dark went wrong. The article is written by a non-regular to the site, Blair Erickson, who explains that he was given the chance to work on the Alone In The Dark movie script, right around the time that Boll was finishing up his similarly crappy Sega arcade game homage House of the Dead. According to the article, Erickson wrote a reasonable script with actual story elements like characterisation (remember that?) but that Boll wanted something with gun battles and car chases. Keep in mind, of course, that this is supposed to be an atmospheric horror film: the game it's based on was set in Victorian times and featured a detective named Edward Carnby exploring a mysterious and creepy house. For those who have never played it, imagine a Silent Hill game starring Sherlock Holmes, that's not too far off. That's certainly a servicable, if well-worn, premise for a horror film, but Boll seemed more interested in mixing elements of Tomb Raider, Blade, and Alien. Come to think of it, that might have made a decent film too, with the right director. The article chronicles some of the arguments between director and screenwriter, complete with Boll's rather inelegant english and rather faint ideas of what a horror film involves. Erickson (who always refers to himself as "we", suggesting either that he had a screenwriting partner not mentioned in the article or he's British royalty) ultimately walked away from the project. Good for him, I say, as being associated with a turkey like Alone in the Dark would have been an unwise career move.

Of course, the article only really presents one side of the story, but it's an argument that very much rings true, especially considering how wretched Alone in the Dark ultimately turned out. As a side note, I've always wondered why movie makers bother to license properties for their films if they're not going to be faithful to them at all. The putrid Dungeons & Dragons film, for example, had virtually no connections with any existing Dungeons & Dragons material whatsoever. So why bother licensing it at all? Neither dungeons nor dragons are patented concepts, nor are haunted houses or scary monsters. The most obvious answer might be brand recognition, as in "I like playing Dungeons & Dragons, so I think I'll see the movie" but that clearly isn't the case here. Alone in the Dark has never been outrageously popular, and the last game in the series, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, came out almost five years ago. A good number of even hardcore gamers haven't even heard of the series, and it has almost no hardcore fans. Why on earth is there a movie for a mostly-forgotten property like Alone in the Dark, when there hasn't even been a movie for Myst, or Quake, or Half Life, or Halo, or Diablo, or the literally hundreds of better candidates? Okay, it might have something to do with those licenses costing more than a six-pack of Miller High Life and a half-empty bag of Funyons, but still.

For the record, I have not yet seen Alone in the Dark, but I plan to remedy that situation as soon as possible. Any movie that gets a 3% at RottenTomatoes and shows up at #12 on the IMDB's Bottom 100 Films list three days after its release is a special thing indeed. Such a movie only comes out once in a cherry moon.

New fake Nokia N-Gage adds new features like "sucking less"

Quietly, like a mime in the night, it came. It's a two-page mock-up of the next Nokia N-Gage celluar phone/video-game hybrid machine. With a somewhat fresh new look and improved horizontal (landscape-oriented) screen, built-in camera and stereo sound, it's certainly a vast improvement over the two existing N-Gage models. The bad news? It's also totally fake, as reported by Engadget. The question is why anyone would ever suspect it was real, what with the busload of spelling and grammatical errors, which would never appear on such a document, even one not intended for public viewing. The image even says it was made by somebody named coolknee, so it wasn't even intended to fool anyone. Perhaps Nokia could consider hiring coolknee for the N-Gage design team, as it's surely got to be less expensive than the infinite-monkeys-with-infinite-copies-of-AutoCAD that plopped out the first two.