Interview for Podioracket on BlogTalkRadio!
I was interviewed by Rhonda Carpenter for PodioRacket.com, in front of a live virtual audience at Blog Talk Radio. I took Rhonda’s questions and live questions from listeners. Topics discussed include Space Casey, the Parsecs, Nina Kimberly the Merciless, Nina 2, and my recently completed scifi novel rough draft.
Promo: Qattusverse
Hey everybody!
My friend Chris Moody has a new fiction project coming soon, and this is the teaser promo!
Check out his website for more info!
Talking About Stuff #150
Requesting topics on Twitter
A bit of feedback and a discussion of comment spam
Tee Morris suggested topics:
AppleTV
The 40th Anniversary of Apollo 11
A bit of Twitter Synchronicity from Daryl Cognito
Conspiracy theories and people with a distrust of science
The value of space exploration
“How do you actually ‘bate’ your breath?”
I haz iPhone!
Song! Norm Sherman’s “Pimp My Satellite”
Watchmen on DVD
Movie Mini-reviews:
Harry Potter 6
Moon (Christiana’s text review)
Bruno (Christiana’s text review)
Discovery’s new show, “The Colony”
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Nina Kimberly Companion Episode 6B
PC Haring returns to co-host part 2 of the companion episode for Nina Kimberly the Merciless Episode 6!
Movie Review: Brüno
Did I laugh?
Yes… A lot.
Did I cringe?
Yes… A lot.
Were they often at the same time?
Yes… Nearly always.
There’s no question that Sacha Baron Cohen (AKA Ali G, Borat, and Bruno) is not for everybody. He’s made his career not so much by amusing the public as by amusing himself at the public’s expense.
He specializes in acting outrageous in front of unsuspecting passers-by and videotaping their reactions. Sometimes he manages to catch people in the act of behaving very badly, or displaying bigotry or bias. Sometimes he just gets people who are very rationally reacting to someone who is, to all appearances, a complete lunatic.
If you saw Borat, you pretty much know what to expect here, though of course, there is much more of a focus on gay jokes, nudity and attempting to evoke homophobia in the unsuspecting participants. (Which, more’s the pity, is usually not super-hard to do.)
That said, the lengths to which he’s willing to go to make his jokes are really astounding, and occasionally terrifying, but I almost always had a nervous smile on my face and plenty of uncomfortable laughter, which I’m certain, is exactly what Cohen was going for.
P.S. An anecdote…
While seeing this movie, I had an experience that was truly surreal, almost worthy of one of Cohen’s own skits. A few minutes before the movie started, a very proper-looking, 40-something woman walked in with four children in tow: All boys, in the 8-10 years old range.
If my understated review has not already made it clear, this movie is probably the least-appropriate movie for children that is possible short of actual hard-core pornography. Perhaps even less appropriate than that.
The most likely backstory to this, of course, is that the boys had misled their guardian (probably the mother of one of them) into taking them to a movie she knew nothing about. Frankly, I hope that’s the case, because frankly, the possibility that there is a woman out there who could knowingly bring four 9-year-olds to this movie scares the hell out of me.
So the question in my mind was not IF they would walk out, but WHEN?
And the crazy thing is that the first half-hour, (which contains a LOT of nudity, a LOT of simulated gay sex, and a LOT of what could charitably called “mature situations”), was not what drove them out. No, they stayed through all of that, but then, the nudity and sex calm down a bit and Bruno attempts to start bringing about peace in the middle-east by getting an Israeli and a Palestinian to agree that hummus is healthy.
And THAT’S when they left.
I don’t even know what to make of that.
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Pseudopod #151: The Undoing
By Sarah Totton
Read by Christiana Ellis
There are two accepted procedures for performing ocular excision. One involves suturing the eyelids shut prior to dissection and removal of the skin and soft tissues around and within the orbit. In the second method the eyelids are sutured open before the eye is dissected out. Given my patient’s particular circumstances, I was instructed to use the first method. This method has an added appeal for me; although the second method is less bloody, it involves performing the operation with the eye open — and I dislike being watched while I work.
Nina Kimberly Companion Episode 6A
Guest Hosts:
PC Haring
http://cybrosisnovel.com
JD Sawyer
Also Mentioned:
Tee Morris
http://www.teemorris.com
Scott Sigler
http://scottsigler.com
New Discounted price for Nina on Amazon! Now only $13.57!
Promo: Borrowed Time by Keith Hughes
http://www.penslinger.com
Split Heirs by Lawrence Watt-Evans and Esther M. Friesner
To be continued in 6B!
Talking About Stuff #149
Christiana reviews inFamous for the PS3… morality in video games… celebrity deaths… Expedition Africa… True Blood Season 2… The Number One Ladies Detective Agency
Movie Review: Moon
Today when I discovered that Moon was playing at my local independant movie theater, I was really excited. I’d read a bit about this low-key non-explodey science fiction film but since it hasn’t gotten a huge release so far, I thought I might just have to wait for DVD. Yet it just so happens that it is now playing in North Carolina, so yay for me!
If you are like me, and a big fan of space in general, then Moon is worth seeing just for the awesome lunar setting and the 2001-meets-Grease Monkey aesthetic. Ultimately though, the moon itself is really just a backdrop for a character-focused scenario that is thoroughly-explored, if not quite totally original.
I won’t spoil anything here, (and in fact, if you want to be completely pure, you shouldn’t even watch the trailer), but if you’re even moderately familiar with sci-fi tropes, you’ll guess the “mystery” almost immediately.
To his credit, so does our hero.
Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a blue-collar astronaut on the last two-weeks of a 3-year contract. He’s been manning a mining station on the far side of the moon, harvesting helium-3 for shipment back home. It’s been a long three years, and he is more than ready to get back to his wife and the daughter he has never even met. Alas, poor Sam, he’s got science fiction to deal with first.
The movie is less concerned with keeping “the answer” a secret than with exploring all of the implications of it, and while I might have liked a plot that I couldn’t guess five-minutes in, I did appreciate the depth and the emotion the film brought to mapping out all the details.
There are little nit-picks. For example, whenever Sam is inside the lunar base, the film makes no attempt whatsoever to simulate lunar gravity. (The first shot is of him running on a treadmill.) While I could certainly understand the practical reasons for this, it did bug me.
On the whole though, it was a very nice change of pace from the frenetic pace and big explosions of most scifi movies these days, and I can solidly recommend it to anyone who’s looking for thoughtful, character-based science fiction, or for that matter, anyone who just wants to ooh and ahh at all the shots on the lunar surface.
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Crescent by Phil Rossi Launches July 9th 2009! Buy it!
You read the title, right? Well, what are you waiting for?
This is a kick-ass sci-fi horror that’ll give you goosebumps, nightmares, and quite possibly drive you over the edge into total madness. So yeah, I liked it.
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