Saturday, May 07, 2005

Jon Stewart = funny

I'm sure that's no surprise if you've seen The Daily Show, but my wife and I saw Jon Stewart live last night at the Palace Theatre. It was a great show, super funny!! If you get a chance to go see him live, do it - you'll thanks me later.

Friday, May 06, 2005

Chappelle's Show suspended, bitch!

Looks like it's a no-go for the expected May 31 premiere of season 3, Comedy Central announced Wednesday that Chappelle's Show is suspended, and production has been halted. Here's a New York Times article (subscription required) written today and an article from E! Online written Wednesday. Sad news - I was really looking forward to the third season. Dave's publicist Matt Labov denies rumors that the reason for the delay is because Dave is in rehab, and Comedy Central has no information on when (or if) new episodes will be seen. Bummer.

Successful boot of Linux kernel on a Nintendo DS

They've done it - the folks over at DSLinux.org have successfully booted a Nintendo DS to a Linux kernel, and been able to run a shell (SASH) and some text games. There is still a lot of work to do, but this is good progress!

Thursday, May 05, 2005

Did you ever wonder how a lightsaber works?

Well, Howstuffworks.com can answer that question for you! Check out How Lightsabers Work for answers (sprinkled with a lot of humor, especially in the Using Your Lightsaber Around The Home section).

Kevin Smith's review of Episode III

You can read it here, but WARNING - spoilers!!! Reading this, written by a HUGE fan of Star Wars, really gets me more excited about this film. God, I'm really hoping it's as good as Kevin says!!

Episode III a "bloodbath" which deserves it's PG-13 rating, says AP writer after screening

In this article from BBC News, Associated Press writer David Germain is quoted as describing the action in Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith as "relentless", and "It includes sequences more dark and disturbing than anything previously seen in the tragic Skywalker soap opera." Germain attended an advance screening at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch home near San Francisco on Tuesday (lucky bastard). All I have to say about this is, what did he expect? We already know from the original trilogy that the Jedi are massacred by Anakin Skywalker, who becomes Darth Vader, and it makes sense that the movie shows us how his final fall from grace and transformation from good to evil occurs. It should be a darker movie - it has to be to be any good and be true to the over-arcing storyline. As long as there's no Ewoks and little to no Jar-Jar Binks, this could be the best out of the first three episodes. I guess we'll see on May 19th...

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Orson Scott Card's thoughts on the end of Star Trek

Sci-Fi author Orson Scott Card has weighed in on the pending end of Star Trek : Enterprise, which will result in there being no current Trek series on television. You can read the article here - I don't know if I agree 100% with his view that we don't need Star Trek anymore, but he's got a point about the storytelling being better on current shows like Smallville and Lost.

Monday, May 02, 2005

Movie review : Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

My wife and I saw Hitchhiker's Guide yesterday, and I'd love to be able to say it was a great movie and I loved every minute of it, but I'm afraid that I cannot. The movie began well enough, explaining that humanity was not, as it had long believed, the most intelligent species on Earth - but was in fact only the third most intelligent. The second most intelligent species, the dolphins, had long had it's attempts at communication misconstrued as elaborate tricks for our amusement. And it's final message to humanity, "So long, and thanks for all the fish", appeared to us to be an elaborate triple backflip executed to punch a ball. So far, so good - this is all lifted verbatim from the book. After the voice of the Guide has related this information to the audience, a long musical number involving dolphins doing tricks while a song called "So Long and Thanks For All the Fish" plays takes over - and that's the point I knew this movie was in trouble. Why ruin the beautifully crafted absurdist humor Douglas Adams crafted into the tale of the dolphins final message to humanity before leaving the soon to be demolished Earth by turning it into a ridiculous musical number? I asked many similar questions throughout the film. In fact - I don't remember laughing at a single joke or comical situation in the movie. I was really disappointed, and won't recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the book, unless you just need to satisfy some morbid curiosity about how far wrong the filmmakers could get Douglas' work. My wife even commented later that "We should have gone to see XXX 2 - State of the Union". I couldn't have agreed more.