A great disturbance in the Force…as if millions of voices cried out in terror…

My ire has been raised, and whenever my ire gets raised, the ol’ “post new entry” button doesn’t know what hit it.

My favorite British show of the past ten years is probably “Spaced”. I first illegally downloaded and watched the entire series some time after I saw and loved “Shaun of the Dead”, and before I saw and loved “Hot Fuzz”. The show was very well written, directed, and performed, with likable and offbeat-yet-real characters, delightful bits of surrealism, and a great use of geek-culture references. “Spaced” was a show about geeks that was actually created by geeks, not by network suits attempting to pander to the geek crowd through generic, vague sci-fi allusions and easy jokes about social awkwardness. (Not that I’m above joking about my own social awkwardness, but there is so much more to geekery than that.) As a geek, I can truly relate to the characters created by Simon Pegg, Jessica Stevenson/Hynes, and Edgar Wright, because the creators themselves are geeks, and know how to write a true geek who is more than a flat stereotype. In lesser hands, or at the very least, in the hands of people who couldn’t identify with the characters they were writing, “Spaced” would be a disaster.

The sad news is, it looks like we may actually get to see just what kind of a disaster. Continue reading

Just repeat to yourself, it’s just a book, I should really just relax.

When purchasing textbooks on Amazon a little over a month ago, I decided to splurge on used copies of two books I’ve wanted to read for some time. Specifically, two books by MST3K alumni: “A Year at the Movies” by Kevin “Tom Servo” Murphy, and “Mike Nelson’s Death Rat” by Michael J. “Mike Nelson” Nelson. I read both over the past month (between pesky class reading assignments) and enjoyed both immensely. Continue reading