I'm sitting here, waiting for the bus and using a Wendy's internet connection from across the street. (Thanks, Wendy's, I buy your chicken nuggets all the time, they're pretty good. Plug over.)
1) The Anime Central fanfiction panel has hit a snag. At present, the ACen organizers said that they would not provide space for a scheduled panel. I'm sure that there will be some sort of alternate plan, but this absolutely shocks me that an anime convention will not grant space for a fanfiction panel (but, thank heaven, the lemon writing panel is still on! Literature is SAVED!) I will post any updates I hear about this situation. I am still going, but there are absolutely no plans for a live MSTing at present.
2) Transformers 2 really sucks. I watched the first fifty minutes while riding buses, and it's utterly amazing how bad the movie is so far. So far there are humping dogs, Megan Fox doing everything she can to drape herself over freaking Shia Labeouf, the freaking Autobots draping themselves over freaking Shia Labeouf, and military security that couldn't guard an ocean. I'm not saying it's implausible, but MST3k itself had better narrative continuity and less implausibility. Thank heaven the Rifftrax is around, the riff they cracked about Buckcherry songs and a pole in Megan Fox's future was terrific. Can't wait to get to more.
3) The only problem, though, is that half my headphones died. I have--- I *had* a nifty pair of over-the-ear headphones that allowed me to shut out most other noise so that I could hear things while riding on the bus. My wife just bought a Nintendo DS, which came with a pair of ear buds... but they are a far cry from what I had. Ordered a new pair from TigerDirect, noise-cancelling and hopefully over-the-ear (though the pictures could have been clearer...) I'm crossing my fingers that it'll work.
MSTings still march along, Meg and I are still editing our most recent. Meg, in his wisdom, pointed out our next project... to continue a MSTing that we had already started but put aside. I think that the break will help the MSTing, it was dragging a bit but the action scenes are still to come. Hopefully, we'll be able to publish a couple of MSTings this year.
02 April 2010
22 March 2010
In Memoriam: Bill Livingston
According to sources online, prolific MSTer Bill Livingston passed away last week at the age of 45. (Obituary here) Both Megane 6.7 and I wish to offer our sympathies to Bill's family and our appreciation to Bill, who wrote some terrific stuff. Bill only dabbled into anime MSTings occasionally but he also has a large catalog of spam MSTings as well as Star Trek MSTings. I've read quite a bit of his work, and sincerely enjoy it.
Bill was able to take some extremely long 'fics and had the patience and enjoyment of writing to be able to riff them with his friends. The finished pieces are extremely good, and here are some links below for those who want to check them out.
My favorite of the bunch: "The Misery Senshi Neo-Zero Double Blitzkrieg Dilemma". Warning, this *text file* is over 1MB large. The riffing was terrific, the story was amazingly... well, amazing in and of itself, and the host segments were plentiful and funny. I've never been able to read it all in one sitting... but that's a good thing, because that way there's more riffs waiting for you for next time too.
The MSTing Mine also has Bill's work here. Curiously, I needed to link Misery Senshi above as it seems that it may not have been posted on Usenet before.
Thanks, Bill, for your wit and humor, and we'll miss you.
In Memoriam:
William "Bill" F. Livingston
2 January 1965 - 14 March 2010.
Bill was able to take some extremely long 'fics and had the patience and enjoyment of writing to be able to riff them with his friends. The finished pieces are extremely good, and here are some links below for those who want to check them out.
My favorite of the bunch: "The Misery Senshi Neo-Zero Double Blitzkrieg Dilemma". Warning, this *text file* is over 1MB large. The riffing was terrific, the story was amazingly... well, amazing in and of itself, and the host segments were plentiful and funny. I've never been able to read it all in one sitting... but that's a good thing, because that way there's more riffs waiting for you for next time too.
The MSTing Mine also has Bill's work here. Curiously, I needed to link Misery Senshi above as it seems that it may not have been posted on Usenet before.
Thanks, Bill, for your wit and humor, and we'll miss you.
In Memoriam:
William "Bill" F. Livingston
2 January 1965 - 14 March 2010.
11 March 2010
Yeah, yeah, more stuff... Anime Central 2010
I realize that I'm double-posting in one day, but I neglected to mention something with the last post and didn't want to edit it. I will be attending Anime Central in Chicago this year, from 14 May through 16 May. I will also be attending the fanfiction panel at ACen, where I am fairly sure that I will be on the panel itself. If anyone is in the neighborhood in Chicago, come on by! Any small show of support for MSTing at the fanfiction panel is appreciated, especially since mostly everywhere else online it's pretty much a dead topic.
I won't be doing a live-action MSTing like we attempted the last time I attended ACen, which was... ACen 2001. Wow, nine years ago. Anyway, I don't have a 'fic picked out. Of course, doing it now (with a laptop) would be so much easier than printed sheets and longhand, and it would be enough time for me to find something, but there's absolutely no way that I want to be the only goofball riffing while an anime convention is raging around me. However, popular acclaim and emailed/replied notes of interest may sway me to a different direction...
I won't be doing a live-action MSTing like we attempted the last time I attended ACen, which was... ACen 2001. Wow, nine years ago. Anyway, I don't have a 'fic picked out. Of course, doing it now (with a laptop) would be so much easier than printed sheets and longhand, and it would be enough time for me to find something, but there's absolutely no way that I want to be the only goofball riffing while an anime convention is raging around me. However, popular acclaim and emailed/replied notes of interest may sway me to a different direction...
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Cinematic Titanic Review: "Alien Factor"
Another Cinematic Titanic offering! Today is "Alien Factor", a pretty crummy late-70s low-budget alien movie. It was almost like rewatching "The Giant Spider Invasion", except the riffers' voices were completely different.
The riffing was pretty solid through the movie, and I enjoyed it. At one point though, the riffers even acknowledged that the movie was difficult in spots to riff, as Josh broke what little of the fourth wall existed to state, "This is why riffing is hard!" while one of the characters was involved in an oft-seen repetitive action. There were a few spots where I was just begging for a riff to be said, but unfortunately there were no callbacks this time. (Dangit, "This is where the fish lives!" C'mon, Mary Jo, you watched that heap of parrot droppings!)
The live audience still does terrifically in helping the mood along, and there were a couple of riffs (one by Trace, and one by Frank with comments by Trace) that got the crowd going. I also enjoyed that the riffers broke out laughing over both the movie itself as well as a couple of the riffs that were happening. I suppose that one of the disappointments with MST3k is that the riffers sometimes seemed as if they were just tossing jokes and there was really no interaction between the jokes and human reaction, as if there was a mandate that they had to be silent. Well, this is definitely a strength of the Cinematic Titanic franchise, especially apparent in the live episodes.
Last note; I saw the trailer preview they did for East Meets Watts. I feel completely vindicated when I noticed that they ended the trailer on Josh's Journey riff. There were a couple other spots in the movie that they could have shown, but that Journey riff was the culmination of some good riffing, just like a big guitar hit and the final chorus.
Minor mainentance note: Blogger is discontinuing FTP publishing. This pretty much means that the blog itself has to be hosted outside the www.nabiki.com/mst domain, and if anyone has bookmarked this page (?, yeah right...) they will need to adjust their bookmarks once I finish transitioning to a Blogger-approved domain. I will post more details when they come available, and my deadline for this is 1 May 2010.
The riffing was pretty solid through the movie, and I enjoyed it. At one point though, the riffers even acknowledged that the movie was difficult in spots to riff, as Josh broke what little of the fourth wall existed to state, "This is why riffing is hard!" while one of the characters was involved in an oft-seen repetitive action. There were a few spots where I was just begging for a riff to be said, but unfortunately there were no callbacks this time. (Dangit, "This is where the fish lives!" C'mon, Mary Jo, you watched that heap of parrot droppings!)
The live audience still does terrifically in helping the mood along, and there were a couple of riffs (one by Trace, and one by Frank with comments by Trace) that got the crowd going. I also enjoyed that the riffers broke out laughing over both the movie itself as well as a couple of the riffs that were happening. I suppose that one of the disappointments with MST3k is that the riffers sometimes seemed as if they were just tossing jokes and there was really no interaction between the jokes and human reaction, as if there was a mandate that they had to be silent. Well, this is definitely a strength of the Cinematic Titanic franchise, especially apparent in the live episodes.
Last note; I saw the trailer preview they did for East Meets Watts. I feel completely vindicated when I noticed that they ended the trailer on Josh's Journey riff. There were a couple other spots in the movie that they could have shown, but that Journey riff was the culmination of some good riffing, just like a big guitar hit and the final chorus.
Minor mainentance note: Blogger is discontinuing FTP publishing. This pretty much means that the blog itself has to be hosted outside the www.nabiki.com/mst domain, and if anyone has bookmarked this page (?, yeah right...) they will need to adjust their bookmarks once I finish transitioning to a Blogger-approved domain. I will post more details when they come available, and my deadline for this is 1 May 2010.
04 February 2010
Cinematic Titanic Review: "East Meets Watts"
Quicker than promised, too! Recently, I had a chance to check out the latest Cinematic Titanic offering, "East Meets Watts". As stated before, it was a bit of a fusion film, joining both the HK chop-socky action genre with the blaxploitation genre with the 70s genre. The film itself deserved the riffing, yet would probably be decent cheesy 2AM viewing otherwise.
This is the first Cinematic Titanic offering that I have watched, and it did take a small bit of getting used to. Of course, you finally get to hear Joel, Trace, and (for the REAL oldsters) Josh riff the film, and you get the added bonus of Frank and Mary Jo also riffing. I've got a few of the S1 MST3k tapes (Thanks, Meg!) and it's really a blast from the past to hear the original crew. This film was riffed and recorded live, so you see all five of them around the side of the movie... which isn't actually all that distracting, to be honest.
If this is your first Cinematic Titanic experience, give it a bit of patience. All MSTed movies and fanfics have spots that lag and lull, and unfortunately I think that one of these spots happened from the beginning of the film and lasted for a bit. (It started getting better when the Chinese guy was departing from the boat, with Josh's Journey line). To be honest, I was not overly impressed with the beginning, but when the riffing picks up it shines. To be honest, it was even closer to the MST3k experience than Rifftrax is, if only because you can see the riffers and don't have to jiggle around a movie or a track, and you get the whole "cheap movie" phenomenon to boot. However, I'm glad that there's now two flavors of MST3k rather than just one (or, really, zero).
Riffing live was another good decision, I thought. Having a crowd there was terrific, especially when you could hear the reactions to certain jokes. Josh cracked a riff about twenty to thirty minutes in that took the crowd five seconds to process, but you could hear the laughter ripple once they got it. I also enjoyed hearing the cheers from the MST3k fans when the riffers did a few callbacks to the original MST3k, accompanied by Frank's (faux-)outraged splutter, "Pandering!"
Overall, this was a terrific movie and well worth checking out. I hope that they do more live shows, that was fun to see and hopefully the riffing will continue to shine. Considering the creators behind this, I can only believe that it will.
This is the first Cinematic Titanic offering that I have watched, and it did take a small bit of getting used to. Of course, you finally get to hear Joel, Trace, and (for the REAL oldsters) Josh riff the film, and you get the added bonus of Frank and Mary Jo also riffing. I've got a few of the S1 MST3k tapes (Thanks, Meg!) and it's really a blast from the past to hear the original crew. This film was riffed and recorded live, so you see all five of them around the side of the movie... which isn't actually all that distracting, to be honest.
If this is your first Cinematic Titanic experience, give it a bit of patience. All MSTed movies and fanfics have spots that lag and lull, and unfortunately I think that one of these spots happened from the beginning of the film and lasted for a bit. (It started getting better when the Chinese guy was departing from the boat, with Josh's Journey line). To be honest, I was not overly impressed with the beginning, but when the riffing picks up it shines. To be honest, it was even closer to the MST3k experience than Rifftrax is, if only because you can see the riffers and don't have to jiggle around a movie or a track, and you get the whole "cheap movie" phenomenon to boot. However, I'm glad that there's now two flavors of MST3k rather than just one (or, really, zero).
Riffing live was another good decision, I thought. Having a crowd there was terrific, especially when you could hear the reactions to certain jokes. Josh cracked a riff about twenty to thirty minutes in that took the crowd five seconds to process, but you could hear the laughter ripple once they got it. I also enjoyed hearing the cheers from the MST3k fans when the riffers did a few callbacks to the original MST3k, accompanied by Frank's (faux-)outraged splutter, "Pandering!"
Overall, this was a terrific movie and well worth checking out. I hope that they do more live shows, that was fun to see and hopefully the riffing will continue to shine. Considering the creators behind this, I can only believe that it will.
03 February 2010
Short games review, school, and AMFAS update.
Not much new or interesting to report through the last couple months... the latest MSTing is still going through a painstaking editing process, and we're pretty close to completion. Thankfully, Megane and I had hammered out a consistent time to get together to write these MSTings on a regular basis, which is better than it has been. It's a good thing we did too, because school and work and family is already a huge chunk of my life, and I just started playing three new games too: Dragon Age, Tropico 3, and Sim City 4 (the old-school $6 bargain game).
So far, Dragon Age is shaping up well, though I must admit that I'm completely unfamiliar with the interface. I'm used to console RPGs like the Final Fantasy type, rather than pointing and clicking on which enemy to deal with. (I'm so horribly out-of-it at times...) I'm enjoying the graphics and the game though, even if I can only install it on one computer (my laptop is the only one good enough to run it).
Tropico 3 is an updating of the original Tropico, which I still have. It's not a bad update, though I just started playing it and haven't really entered into the changes as of yet. The biggest one that I am glad of is a transportation setup; in the original game, people had to *WALK* to the various locations which always took forever. This was a problem because if you wanted to build tourist buildings, you either had to do it immediately or forget it, as builders would take months or years to get their lazy little electronic butts to the worksite, work for a few seconds, and leave. Hopefully this will make it a bit easier.
Sim City 4 is actually not too bad. The biggest issue I'm not impressed with is the fact that there's only a few regions loaded onto the game, and only two random ones. This, combined with the fact that building your own region would be a six- to ten-hour undertaking, is a major drawback. The gameplay is interesting though, even if it seems that this Sims is just as bad at times with simulating the actual game... I've had people tell me that traffic is bad even though they live one block away from their destination (in this case, their commute).
School is another matter, though... I can see why professionals get into the specially-designed degree mills, even if I think they're loads of crap. I had to skip a level in macroeconomics due to the fact that they did not have either an afternoon OR an evening division open. And now that I'm in advanced macroeconomics, I'm really finding a hard go of it. I'm using calculus that is either 12 years old or that I didn't have in the first place, and the professor is not helping matters much at all. Therefore, studying has been difficult at best too, because it seems that there's just no flow to the processes being introduced. I understand that college isn't the place to spoon-feed knowledge and information, but having a professor skip around haphazardly and call it "teaching" is incorrect as well.
Soon: A review of Cinematic Titanic's new(ish) offering, "East Meets Watts". Joel and the gang tackle the combined HK Action/Blaxploitation offering, but live!
So far, Dragon Age is shaping up well, though I must admit that I'm completely unfamiliar with the interface. I'm used to console RPGs like the Final Fantasy type, rather than pointing and clicking on which enemy to deal with. (I'm so horribly out-of-it at times...) I'm enjoying the graphics and the game though, even if I can only install it on one computer (my laptop is the only one good enough to run it).
Tropico 3 is an updating of the original Tropico, which I still have. It's not a bad update, though I just started playing it and haven't really entered into the changes as of yet. The biggest one that I am glad of is a transportation setup; in the original game, people had to *WALK* to the various locations which always took forever. This was a problem because if you wanted to build tourist buildings, you either had to do it immediately or forget it, as builders would take months or years to get their lazy little electronic butts to the worksite, work for a few seconds, and leave. Hopefully this will make it a bit easier.
Sim City 4 is actually not too bad. The biggest issue I'm not impressed with is the fact that there's only a few regions loaded onto the game, and only two random ones. This, combined with the fact that building your own region would be a six- to ten-hour undertaking, is a major drawback. The gameplay is interesting though, even if it seems that this Sims is just as bad at times with simulating the actual game... I've had people tell me that traffic is bad even though they live one block away from their destination (in this case, their commute).
School is another matter, though... I can see why professionals get into the specially-designed degree mills, even if I think they're loads of crap. I had to skip a level in macroeconomics due to the fact that they did not have either an afternoon OR an evening division open. And now that I'm in advanced macroeconomics, I'm really finding a hard go of it. I'm using calculus that is either 12 years old or that I didn't have in the first place, and the professor is not helping matters much at all. Therefore, studying has been difficult at best too, because it seems that there's just no flow to the processes being introduced. I understand that college isn't the place to spoon-feed knowledge and information, but having a professor skip around haphazardly and call it "teaching" is incorrect as well.
Soon: A review of Cinematic Titanic's new(ish) offering, "East Meets Watts". Joel and the gang tackle the combined HK Action/Blaxploitation offering, but live!
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