frustratedpilot | Entries tagged with magic

One of the more contraversial pieces on YouTube these days is an interview with Jake Lloyd, the former child actor who played Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Of course, fans hate that movie, and many of those fans blame him for it. He says he was bullied an awful lot in school. So I don't blame him at all for what he's saying in his interview.

At first I thought that if there was a movie about me, he could play me...but my follow-up thoughts came with the idea that he should play the lead in another story I had written: Ethics & Toy Soldiers. E&TS is about a battlefield hero who is forced to become a refugee when his homeland is overrun--and then an outlaw when the army of a nation that had been an ally up to then turns on his people. My original vision for the story is a New Age Gulliver's Travels but with as much modern sensibility as modern mysticism/neomagic.

( My Favorite Part Of The MAKING OF THRILLER Documentary )

I first saw this in school, in Mass Media class. When the time came to make our own short films, we were told point-blank by our teacher: NO MUSIC VIDEOS!

Current Music: The Jacksons -- Can You Feel It?

( Hagane No Oni )

The video behind the cut is the climatic action sequence of Hagane No Oni ("Steel Demons"), an anime by the creator of the Iczer series, Dangaio and several other notable anime shows. Two good buddies are forced by circumstance and mecha mojo to take the sides of evil and not-necessarily-evil and duke it out against each other.

I've wanted to see this for about twenty years.

FP

And I heartily endorse this proposal as I both own a modest wad of common stock and am the son of a sorceress.

A convergeance of changing pop culture and improving technology...

There is a new "laser tag" place moving into Pigeon Forge. But since "space opera" is "out"...

Laser units have gotten more and more compact...

And modernist fantasy is "in"...

The place is going for a Harry Potter theme with the lasers in "magic wand" form.

*shrug*

Meanwhile, I'm listening to NPR's Fresh Air program about the superhero pr0n that Joe Shuster drew after he left DC and lost the rights to Superman.

FP

The Greatest Artist Of The Era In Which I Grew Up.

( I Don't Think I Even Heard This Song Till It Was Nearly Thirty Years Old! )

Golly, is it old enough for the Life On Mars soundtrack?

FP

Current Music: Deep Purple -- Burn

Another Vending Machine of Awesome Cut.

Current Music: Wang Chung -- Don't Be My Enemy

( The Crimson and the Claidemaugh )

Current Music: Glass Tiger -- Thin Red Line

My characters, an artist's fresh idea on how to use them.

Nightmare Wars, Dan'l and Clarity invented by me, artwork by "crow" of www.APForums.com for the latest "Acid Test".

From good ol' Full Frontal Nerdity:

This is why I never took up Magic: The Gathering.

FP

Lest You Doubt My Mom...

Because of the suffering I have seen from

nick_101 and others on the West Coast in recent days, my Mum and I have been trying to use our influence on the Sky Gods. Now, the Valkyries and the Sylphids are on board, and Tlaloc is amenable too (once you get enough barbecue on his plate), but the Banshees have been balky and I don't know what their problem is.

Anyway, my advice to those in the West:

1) Know Where Your Towel Is. Keep a nice, big, beach or bath towel within six paces of where you are. You need to have a towel to properly perform the rain dance.

2) I cannot teach you the rain dance, but when the time comes you will know how yourself. That is the nature of the dance.

3) While the Sylphids like being "buttered up" as much as anybody, the Banshees are another story. I think perhaps they're masochists and malcontents, and cussing them is more likely to motivate them. But I'm not so willing to test that theory.

So, we're working on it on this end, and we'll try to have results by this time tomorrow.

FP

( I'm sure this is all over everywhere by now )

I remember how shocked we were as kids when certain child stars of the shows we loved died from drug abuse back in the 1970s. While it's not exactly the same, those horrible questions are going to come from the young, and how can we answer them?

FP

Tonight I've been celebrating my re-connectivity by downloading YouTuberies while, in another room, binge-watching Torchwood via my brother's loaner DVDs. Seen three stories so far. I guess I'd sooner call it technoid-horror than sci-fi. Or perhaps fusion social SF/horror?

Captain Jack reminds me of the character Jon-Erik Hexum played on (*cheats by looking on IMDB.com*) Voyagers! (*realizes that most of the readers of this LJ probably never SAW Voyagers!) Of course Jack is much much smarter than Bogg. But a lot of the same traits are there.

(*multiple sighs of resignation*) Now I really feel old.

Torchwood wins for its fabulous visual storytelling, its effects, its direction and its "reality". I'm not sure I'm into all the characters yet, tho'.

* * *

( And Another Video For the Weekend )

Current Music: America -- You Can Do Magic

Zooty Zooty Zoot! (If you understand why I use that line in conjunction with this video, you are a nerd, if not a dork.) :)

FP

PS: If the above link doesn't work...try this one.

Current Music: Run-DMC -- It's Tricky

Hey.

For my birthday/Xmas, somebody (dunno who) sent me a University of South Florida hoodie, meadow green. This is the first time I've owned a hoodie since some washed up Hollywood actor was in the Oval Office.

You see, long before It's Walky set the hoodie back into its proper vogue, I'd had another outlook on the garment. At my High School alma-that-does-not-mater, hoodies were (and probably still are) the trademark garb of the wrestling team.

When I was a student at Springstead, the wrestlers ruled the conference with an iron hand. At matches and tourneys our wrestlers would pound opponent after opponent into the mat. The school sucked at football, barfed at basketball and made the Lake Wobegon baseball team look like a major-league powerhouse. We didn't care, 'cause our wrestlers would eventually make all the other schools pay.

They wore hoodies because of their shaved heads and a blanket dress code policy that forbade hats, bandannas or other separate head-covering devices indoors. With those hoodies on, they looked EVIL. They looked like they would give you Hell for just breathing their air. They always had their "don't mess with me" faces on, and seemed on a hair-trigger to permanently deprive somebody (hopefully not YOU) of one of their dimensions. Which dimension, it didn't matter to them.

After seeing the hoodie'd wrestlers enough times, I fantasized about them being some sort of darkling monks, who had left the monastic life in order to impose some oppressive and painful justice upon the world. They needed no weapons because they built themselves into weapons. Needed no arcane magics because they were embodiments of arcane magics. They could not be killed. They could not be stopped.

I had been relieved of my own hoodie before I got to this conclusion, tho'. My sister had moved to college in North Carolina, and her need for my hoodie was greater than my need, so we mutually agreed that she should liberate it from me. And I never replaced it till this one came.

Now that I wear it, I keep hearing voices whispering blasphemous secrets about dark acts that lead to ultimate power...

*in mid-shrug, a cosmic zot flies from my hand through the window, catching an errant squirrel and transmogrifying it into a Cornish pixie*

Fear My Hoodie.

FP

PS: Producers Are Money-Grubbing Scum.

On Tube Network lately, a certain music video must have become a "programmer's favorite", as in consecutive weeks I've seen it more often than I'd think if it had been random chance. (Here, the FOX station airs an hour of Tube at 2AM on Saturday Nights...and that is the only regular airing of Tube that I think I can catch, at least till I get a TV that can handle "decimal stations".)

It is a live concert version of Alice Cooper's "School's Out".

Finding this version on YouTube is a futile exercize, as there are literally dozens of such videos there, not including the Muppet Show version (which is listed about twenty times!).

Anyway, where videojitsu comes in...I'm imagining this particular version as the soundtrack for a "highlights of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"--especially the Weasley Brothers' rampage at Hogwarts sequence.

Yeah, it'd have to wait for the DVD--and for me to get a DVD-drive for the compy and video editing software and a rip of the music and and and and...

...And I wish I had an idea that PAID. This is no fun.

FP