Trying To Pull It Together

I would consider today a pretty momentous day. Jenny and I finished up 99.9% of all Christmas shopping a good month before Christmas! Thanksgiving is next week, which means the beginning of the busiest part of the year for us. I may have mentioned it in blogs past but I’ll bring it up again.

Jen and I rotate our Thanksgiving locale every year. Some people prefer the insane method of visitng everyone and having six different dinners. I love Thanksgiving and all but no thank you. We rotate between going to Jen’s parents, my parents, and having it here at home with my parents. To sort this out out you might need a flow chart but I’ve managed to simplify it pretty easily.

Jen’s parents place on Thanksgiving is the ground zero for all family activity on her side of the family. Jen’s Mom has a good 25 or people over year (not including us). They also live a good 10 minutes away from us, so we figure we are giving them a break on the work load to not have to feed three extra mouths, plus we seem them on a pretty regular basis. My parents live out a bit farther away and we don’t see them as often so inviting them over when we have dinner here always seems like a nice thing to do.

After Thanksgiving we are re-arranging  the living room to make room for the Xmas tree and all other Xmas related decorations.  So it’s going to be a busy few weeks leading up to the 25th O’ December.

Jen and I check out Funny People from one Judd Apatow who was behind 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked, ect ect.

Real good movie! Laughed my ass off at a lot of stuff. I thought Eric Bana was really awesome in this, and Adam Sandler works so much better mixing comedy and drama then he ever did with just the comedy in my opinion.  If anyone has not checked this out yet then I highly suggest a viewing or an extra addition to your Xmas lists.

Also watched Drag Me To Hell from Sam Raimi and I was less impressed. Most horror movies do not earn high critical praise and thi one most certainly did. I was told to expect cheese, but that it would be of the good to great variety and I guess I just didn’t see it. I certainly saw in parts of the movie but most of what I saw was the bad kind of cheesy.

On a totally unrelated note I am getting a little worried about my classes. I knew the math classes were coming down the road and I thought I’d be ready for them when they did but so far it is not turning out that way. I have always been a terrible numbers person and it doesn’t help that I find pretty much everything above basic math to be pointless in everyday life. I’m hoping (as the title indicates) that I can pull it all together sooner rather than later as not only do I have to pass these classes but I have to maintain a decent GPA in order to continue my grants.

Space….The Hidden Frontier

So I’ve had a lot of time on my hands lately. I started the ultimate Star Trek saga a few months ago. I did the same thing last year, went through the entire Trek catalog in order, so I am flying the Geek Flag high these days. Most people who know me also know that I am a HUGE Trek fan and I am pretty into video editing and recently I’ve become interested in effects as well.

So one thing I’ve been drawn to is fan films. It’s always great to see people so passionate about something that they pour this much time and effort into it. The biggest example of fan film work in the Trek universe is Phase II. They aim to recreate the 60’s style Trek that many grew up on. For a fan production they have incredible sets and a near full fledged TV production sized set up and virtually TV quality visual effects. Obviously the big knock on fan films is the acting. In most cases the people in these are not professional actors (although many fan series have had professionals as guest stars) some of them are amateur actors and some not even at that level. But with Phase II if you watch all of their episodes in progression not only does the film making improve but as they work with more and more professionals you see improvements in the acting as well.

Well that leads me to this post. There is a fan film series out there called Hidden Frontier which takes place in the TNG/DS9 era of Trek and it has quite a large number of episodes and spin offs.

So I have decided to go through and watch it all and then write down my feelings on the series. Once Phase II adds a few more episodes to their list I will likely do the same for them as well. Since there are so many HF episodes I will be breaking it down in to seasons.

We are starting with Season One of course. The first season featured six episodes with a three part pilot. The first season began in 2000.

The Stories: C
Much like Phase II I fully understand that the first episodes are more like a “proof of concept”. Things are going to be rough around the edges. For me I did not really get a sense of who the characters were, just not fleshed out all that well. I suppose that is to be expected though. Other than that the actual stories were not all that bad sans “Two Hours” which saw a time travel plot involving the Titanic which I thought was a little over the top. A new Trek villain was introduced (The Grey) which is obviously based off of the stories of Alien Abduction we here about every now and then. Not a whole lot has been fleshed out with them yet either. The stories were not as bad as I was expecting though.

The Visuals: D-
The visual effects were about as bad as I expected them to be. HF’s secret to pumping out so many episodes is that they do a lot of Keying (Green Screen) in their episodes. So in almost every scene we had some kind of screen replacement used as a substitute for a set background. Sometimes these were used well, sometimes not-so-much. The biggest problem was really the poor quality of some of the backgrounds and of course the Keying artifacts (green outlines around the characters) would tend to distract from the story at times. I was surprised that I found myself not as distracted as I thought I’d be.  All of the space and ship scenes were done as 3D models. It was nowhere near TV quality effects, the renderings were pretty decent and just passable enough to keep me from clicking the “X”.

The Audio: D+
The sound quality wasn’t poor per say, but it was definitely not clean. You could understand lines easily enough but the audio could be fuzzy at times. The sound effects used were straight out of Trek so they sounded okay by-in-large, but given the age of the episode and home production quality at the time they aren’t as crisp as you’d want. The scores used are also straight out of Trek and Galaxy Quest and while the actual quality of the sound was pretty average you can never go wrong with a quality film/TV score. Although I found the Galaxy Quest theme kind of cheesy  which fit for the actual film but it didn’t work for me with this show.

The Acting: D
By-in-large it was pretty poor. But there were a few bright spots that I found to be fairly acceptable performances. The actresses who play Jenna McFarland and Robin Lefler did pretty good jobs especially with Lefler since that is a role that originally appears in The Next Generation and had to be recast. For the most part much of the fleshing out that most characters didn’t happen in the first season because of the lack of acting chops and of course you have people trying to find a comfortable fit in these roles.

THE FIRST SEASON: D
So this might not seem like a good thing. In fact most people would tell me to stop watching right there and the thought did cross my mind. But I’ve decided to continue on with the series. With a crew of people that only want to improve you would have to think that there will be improvements (hopefully everywhere) over the next few seasons.

For the most part the episodes were cut together pretty well and the stories were decent enough to keep my interest enough to watch the next one. I can’t really see the show declining in quality in season two (although I could be surprised) so I am looking forward to checking it out.

You can download and watch season one of HF for free from http://hiddenfrontier.com/episodes/s1.php

A little too much slack…

Oh Gods its November!?! It looks like I snoozed on the blog a little bit too much. Not to worry though, not a lot has really been going on. I have been in what seems like a perpetual holding pattern for most of the year.

To catch you up on what has happened: I paid another visit to Ann Arbor and got a good report card on my foot/ankle. Nothing broken, nothing rejected, I go back in 2010 to have another look at it but so far, so good. Oh! I passed the two classes I was taking, just started on my Algebra class and my Marketing class last Monday. Algebra will be a challenge considering I haven’t so much as thought about it in nearly a decade.

The Tigers kind of faltered in the final weeks of the season and they ended up on the losing end of a one game playoff with the Twins. It was a hell of  a game, one for the ages if you’re a Tigers fan despite the loss. The Twinkies got destroyed by the Yankees in the first round. It ended up being the Yankees and Phillies in the World Series with the Yanks taking it in six games thus pushing by World Series prediction losing streak to four years running. WORST!

We did a lot of our Christmas shopping for Kayla already, hopefully we will get some extra cash soon to get a few more things for family as well.

And September Smiles On Me

Things are looking up….kinda…sorta… We still aren’t doing the best financially but that is not to say the situation isn’t improving at all. We’ve started saving for Christmas, which we at first thought might end up being a sparse one but I think we are gonna be okay in that department.

I spent the majority of last weekend working on my Early American History and Economic Theory finals. Needless to say I passed both finals and I passed both classes and I am now moving on to International Business and Religions of the World. Two electives in a row is mighty nice I have to say…..anything to distract me from my core classes

The Tigers continue to hold on to the first place spot they’ve held since May! Being that it is now September the race for the AL Central is officially on! And it is nice to once again the Tigers contending for a playoff spot following the debacle from last year.

I recently saw Inglorious Basterds and while I enjoyed it I just wasn’t all that blown away by it. LOTS of dialogue heavy scenes that dragged on for what seems like ever and most of it is in French, or German.  The most interesting characters had the least amount of screen time. The fellow playing Landa should receive an Oscar nod however.

I also saw District 9, a movie that I was blown away by. It is  featuring a talent pool from South America and a strange documentary/actual film kind of style that really sucked me in.

WETA and Peter Jackson once again delivered stunning and subtle special effects. They blend in so well that you just buy it. The story isn’t all that uncommon but it is told from a different perspective and it was just done so good. For me it does what a good movie should and that is that it should suck you into the narritive to the point where you are almost living in the story for a while. Great movie!

Battlestar Galactica…Unforgettable

So I’ve just finished watch the series finale to Battlestar Galactica. Now I am a hardcore Star Trek fan through and through but the story arc and character development might very well make this the absolute best SciFi series of all time. If you are not familiar with the subject matter of the show or if you have not watched it through to the end then you’ll probably not want to read this.

Now I have read some reviews that complain about the “too happy” ending, complaints over the religious overtones, the “lack of resolution” and most of all the preachy nature of how the robots will all rise up and kill us Matrix and/or Terminator style. I just disagree.

I am however quick to point out that nobody should ever laugh off the possibility of creating A.I. that could someday surpass our own intelligence. I love science but science tends to have a problem with thinking before doing. Jurassic Park had a great line about scientists being so concerned with weather or not they could instead of thinking about weather or not they should. That sort of thinking exists and as proof I give you the Tsar Bomba. Granted we have never come close to making something like a Cylon or a Terminator but that does not mean that scientists won’t try. Science may not be flawed by scientists are human and they are flawed. That not withstanding; my viewing of the last episode had me thinking a lot more than “ohh so the message is don’t create Cylons”. I think one of the messages was, yes, to stop and think if we should before we do something that could have repercussions as big as that (no matter what it is be it a Cylon/Terminator thingy or a bomb that can wipe a country and its people off the face of the Earth).

But I also got the message that Human society on its own failed (Kobol, The 12 Colonies) Cylon society failed on its own (The Colony, Original Earth) it was only when the two waring enemies found common ground and joined together that a resolution was found (for them). That brings me to the religious aspect.

One of the revelations at the end was that God did exist in some form. Many people are taking this to mean quite literally that the makers of this show are telling us to go and join a Christian church somewhere because it is all true. Maybe that was the writers intentions (I do not know) but what I took out of it was this. All of the signs pointed out in this series told me that there is something out there responsible for the creation of existence and it does have some kind of plan laid out for our species but never did it specify anything (other than Easter eggs here and there) that said anything about our religions here today. If anything it was left incredibly vague as to what it was that the Cylons and humans called God. There was no other mention of any other kind of “Christian message” that I got other then “something God like exists”. I am not a person tied to any one faith and yeah I do believe that something had to start all of this. The Big Bang started the universe as we know it? Great! What caused the Big Bang? And until people can tell me where existence started the floor is open to all possibilities in my humble opinion. I am not arrogant enough to assume I know the answer to the unanswerable.

The great part of this show is that it ends where our known history begins. So a Human/Cylon hybrid lead to our evolution and existence. The show itself ended on kind of a happy note but the real mind bender here that the story technically continues to include the history of life on this planet. They wanted to instill their best qualities in the early life that lived here on our Earth. The ironic thing is that they failed. You can look through our history and see that things they “originated” eventually came to the surface. A people who believed in many Gods and a people who believed in one true God and things splintered even more from there when people started to have ideas about what the one true God really was. These kind of em-battlements don’t just exist between nations today they exist in our own towns. The overall message I got from this show is that the Humans and the Cylons had the same issues but failed to create a decent society on their own the only way they found true peace was to find common ground in spite of their differences.

To me that is the biggest moral of this incredible story. Human civilization has destroyed almost everything its touched in the pursuit of bettering ourselves and that includes our own race (Human Beings) the only way to start to find a way to avoid annihilation is to find a common ground with those who we hate…..to try and find commonalities and look past our imperfections and our differences…..to find a way to unite…..if not we are doomed to repeat the cycle started back on Kobol. To me that is the story of BSG that is what I took from it.

One thing is for sure I am never going to forget this show. Forget the story for a minute. The fact that this is a SciFi/SyFy channel show is astounding as that channel produces a lot of crap but the effects, the characters, and the acting are beyond reproach.

It’s About Time

Well enough time has passed and I think that there might very well be enough of information compiled to make another meaningful blog post. Well….you know what I mean.

For the second time in a nearly two year span I am out of my walking boot and back into my own two shoes. The good news is that my foot is feeling a lot better compared to a year ago in the same situation. The bad news is that I am now tasked with losing all of the weight that I have gained during this process.

Granted I had become overweight since the foot pain started and gradually got worse and I became less active, this is true. But the last few years before the surgery I was REALLY inactive and REALLY out-of-shape. Post surgery number one I had actually lost quite a bit of weight (maybe 6-9lbs) due to not being all that hungry and due to the fact that I had to do everything using my arms and one leg. But after the I got back into my shoes I started having the problems that led me to the second surgery. Well needless to say the weight came back on and then some. Now that things are looking up again I can try to lose this burden that has been imposed on me, partly by fate and partly of my own doing.

I had also stopped my pursuit of my college degree(s) for some time. I am happy to say that I have since started back and I am coming close to earning my first degree in Business!

In the world of Baseball the Tigers are still in 1st place! They have been there since May and they have a 3 1/2 game lead over the White Sox. Curtis Granderson (my personal favorite), Justin Verlander, Edwin Jackson, and Brandon Inge all made the All-Star team. Inge went 0-10 in the Homerun Derby which really wasn’t all that big of a surprise. Yeah he has 21 Homers going in to the break but I imagine he has an easier time launching a fastball out of the park then a batting practice pitch, Inge doesn’t have THAT kind of power, his comes from the speed of the ball as well. Well Granderson was clutch in the the AL’s 13th straight win as he got a triple and ended up scoring the winning run!

The Tigers start the second half of the season tonight in the Bronx as they take of the Yankees. My eyes will be glued to the TV~!