GUSTER.

Was amazing. My brother has lots of pictures of the interior of the Beacon theater (Both Guster and their opening act, Jukebox the Ghost made a big deal about how it was "The most gorgeous room they'd ever played in.") so I'll get those from him and post them later. The opening act played about a forty minute set and I was pretty sure I had no idea who they were until they played this and then I was like, WAIT I'VE HEARD OF THEM. Anyway they were pretty cool, gonna look them up on iTunes later.

(Also, re: this video, last night I was thinking the song reminded me of Charlie Brown and hey look what they're referencing!)

At that point the theater was pretty empty and Max and I were eying each other like, "This is a sold out show?" but apparently the pros know to skip the warm up guys and show up sometime between 8:45 and 9. By the time Guster launched into their first song (Manifest Destiny, from Ganging up on the Sun), it was a packed house. So they played two older songs, followed by Stay With Me Jesus off the new album (Pattering to the audience, "We're a couple of Jews who don't really believe in God who went and wrote an album that keeps talking about Jesus") and people were still kind of filtering in and getting warmed up, but by the time they started on Ramona, everyone was singing along and it became very clear that audience participation was mandatory.

They played a mix of new and old stuff, a lot of crowd pleasers and favorites - at one point a guy somewhere behind us shouted "AIRPORT SONG," at which point they played Airport Song and I have no idea if he knew the set list or was a good guesser or they listened to him. (They did not respond to similar requests for Timothy Leary).

Some highlights:

"Do I pull off the white denim look?" - at which point they launched into an impromptu jam session about "White denim, black shades, white shirt, shoelace."

During Happier, Max turned to me and asked, "Is this new? I've never heard it." "No!" I yelled back. "It's really, really old!" And then joined the rest of the crowd in shouting "ONE MORE INCH, YOU SON OF A BITCH."

For the start of the first encore, they played "Diane," which has a really distinctive opening base line that will forever stick in my head as the first Guster song I ever heard and is still one of my favorites. This video isn't from the show last night, but it's a pretty good approximation. (People really do sing along to every single song at these shows. See!)

They played two encores, which the crowd seemed really intent on forcing to go on and on and on. Every time you thought they were done, one of the stagehands would hand them a different guitar and they're play something else. The second time they got dragged back out by popular demand, they came down to the edge of the stage and waited for the whole room to be quiet and played an acoustic of "Jesus on the Radio," which was an awesome way to end the show.

In total they played 25 songs in just under two hours, and it was absolutely awesome. So worth the jacked up ticket price I paid on Stubhub!

HERE, I FOUND A COMPLETE SETLIST.

Anyway, when I get Max's photos I'll post them but currently that is PFAD. (Post for another day. Max's word.)

And then, Aliza had a Twitter

I resisted! I fought the good fight! And then Caleb made me do it!

But since I made it I might as well share.

https://twitter.com/#!/GoGoAliza

And then, Aliza was a superhero.

So my friend Caleb of the newly-minted and absolutely fantastic Does This Make Me Look Hipster has given me a blog award. A sort of tag thing, actually, I think, but it comes with the condition that I fill out an interview and tag more people and stuff like that so hey, let's have at it! It'll be fun!

1. Thank the blogger who gave me the award.

Hey, Caleb, you are pretty cool! Thanks for being a friend and an inspiration for crazy and a source of great stories and one of my biggest fans. You rock!

2. Sum up your blogging philosophy, motivation, and experience using five words

Here today, gone tomorrow. Maybe.

3. Pass this on to 10 other bloggers that you feel have a substance in their blogs.

I don't /know/ ten other bloggers, but I'll give it a shot.

Max @ Jumbo Sized (uhhh... my brother.)

Ryu @ Eldritch at Home

James @ Arbitrary Musings

Roma @ Roma's art blog

Snikki @ Snikki's Say

I made it halfway to ten. That's good enough!

We had a fire drill tonight. Excellent way to start Halloween weekend. Not.

Caleb thinks this is awesome but I don't quite agree.

The offending product:

Sounds like:

Did it first, did it better:

Called and wants her gimmick back:

Would like Katy Perry to stop raiding her closet:

In short I don't really have a point I just don't like Katy Perry and would like to dissect her ripped- off music video with its inconsistent message and hot button issue sensationalism and stollen scenic and musical elements. Also I needed something to post about.

A cocktail brewed of equal parts win and what the fuck.

This would appear to be a 50-something Christopher Lee singing a villain song production number in a 1980s movie called The Return of Captain Invincible. From the looks of it, it is the spiritual precursor to such great works as Doctor Horrible's Sing Along Blog.

Or maybe not.

Either way, I really want to find the whole thing and watch it.

Forcing an upgrade

So I got to writing and figured that first, second, and third scientists would just be one-off characters but then I realized they were making themselves into too big of a deal and were getting personalities and should probably get names. So here we go.

First scientist/ Valeri Gridenko - M - A slightly-timid man whose soft-spoken manner belies great physical strength. He has a tendency to speak to Ivan when they are alone in the lab, a tendency that Anatoli finds both creepy and kind of hilarious.

Second Scientist/ Anatoli Chicherin - M - a boisterous mathematician with a dislike for manequins, a love for slide rules and unrounded numbers, and a lust for Svetlana. Valeri finds him to be brash and poorly mannered, which isn't an inaccurate description at all.

Third Scientist/ Svetlana Lazarev - F - a buxom biologist involved in an on again/off again workplace relationship with Anatoli. Her work primarily concerns space dogs.

Oh characters who create themselves are a fun deal. I'm just worried about what I'm going to do with them in act two - probably just have the actors play differently named scientists or else swap them out for Milena and Gennady and switch other characters from act one in. Necessity can be a scientist in act two, after all.

Pokemon training is expensive.

Today I finally beat the Elite Four in Pokemon Soulsilver. While I was preparing for the match (five extremely difficult battles in a row), I went to New Bark Town and took out all the money I'd saved up over the game, and spent nearly all of it on full restores, hyper potions, and revives so I could stand a chance of winning. It occurred to me that if Pokemon were real life, it would be the equivalent of spending your life savings on a single event that, if you lose the battle, you're basically screwed because you've used all your items, you don't have any money, and you've beaten all the other trainers in the region.

But I won, so it doesn't matter. The elite four have some of the best payouts of any trainers in the game. Savings = restored.

The soul silver credits aren't as nice as even the Ruby/Saphire credits, which is disappointing because that was a whole system ago.

/Get Excited/

THIS!!!! :D

The Tempest is easily my favorite Shakespeare play. Scholars call it "A problem play" - it's not a history, and it's not clearly a comedy or a tragedy. It also isn't, as it is commonly remembered, his "final play" - That would be Two Noble Kinsmen, written in collaboration with John Fletcher. However, it was the last play Shakespeare wrote on his own and I won't contest the trailer's claim that it is his "final masterpiece." I haven't actually read Henry VIII or Two Noble Kinsmen, but I would presume it's better than both of them. So sure. Why not. Final masterpiece it is.

At first I was worried about the casting - Hellen Mirren as Prospero? (Sorry, Prospera in this version.) Djimon Honsou as Caliban? (He's a terrific actor whose primary strengths are roaring in a most manly fashion and being shirtless, but isn't that a bit racist? Granted he's been painted gray, so I guess you can't say Caliban is black so much as he's played by a black actor.) Russel Brand? Alfred Molina? But I think the trailer's almost won me over. Julie Taymore, I was hoping you'd bring the same wacky sense of magical realism to this as you did Across the Universe, and this has my hopes up!

Also, is that Sigur Ros at the end of the trailer?

Oh, apparently it's Saeglopur. (I love Sigur Ros.) :)

The Tempest hits theaters December 10th, 2010. I can't wait!

Excited about movies again,

Leez.

Since when do I have keratosis

ON MY FACE?

:(

Dear you,

I wish I shared your enthusiasm but the fact that you set your drama-stirring attack dog on me a few months ago just puts me off from getting involved again. I feel bad, but I've still got a bad taste in my mouth from the last time I tried to get involved like you wanted me to.

No love, Me.

Replacing placeholder names.

AND SO...

Irina becomes Milena

(Three I names in one play is two too many. I can't rename Ivan or Ingenuity, so I have to rename Irina.)

The Broker becomes Mister Papers

(Still haven't decided which Russian myth he is, just that he is one.)

Doktor Kosmos is Doktor Kosmos

(Who cares if a Swedish pop band beat me to it?)

I started drafting last night. The beginning is coming sort of slow, but I want to take my time and make sure I get my premise set up right because the rest of the show has to stand on this rather rickety concept. It's going well so far, there's just this temptation to write everything sounding like a translated Russian drama that I need to fight off or else... ugh. The results won't be pretty.

Anyway, today I'm going to march myself down to the gym for about an hour. I've only been once in the last three weeks out of a combination of illness and sheer not wanting to move, so I really need to get myself down there. Still not feeling up to hardcore spinning, because I'm still coughing, but the stationary bike sounds like a good deal, man.

And then when I get back: Shower, lunch, MOAR WRITING!

Weirdly Self-Satisfied Kid is watching you do laundry

Dear you,

I understand that you sympathize with my struggle to find a dryer that works, but your intent study of my laundry is honestly kind of disturbing. I could have lived without you discovering that I own a bright green sports bra (which now that you know, hey, why not tell the world!) or what kind of underwear I wear. There is a reason I try to get my stuff into the dryer as fast as possible and its because all my bras wind up piled on top of the washer so I can take them upstairs and hang them up, and you staring at them was kind of a turn off.

Also, what's with that weirdly smug tone of voice you have? At first I thought you were gay, but now I'm thinking it's less that and more that you're just kind of creepy.

No love, me.

If I could explain it to you in a venn diagram...

Actually, I can.

"The Broker" is a sort of late addition to a piece I've been revising continuously over the last few days in preparation of starting to draft this weekend. The basic idea being that he is a "man on the inside" - the original description of him, before I realized he might be a cool person to actually see, was. "I have a man - he's a clerk in Moscow - he gets me new papers, a new name, a new life - every ten years." But when I actually started messing around with the idea of this character, he started to sound too much like Izaya-kun from the anime I linked in my last post - kind of smug bastard, playing all the sides - which he very well may be, but I need a better idea of him besides being an expy of an anime character before I'll feel good about him.

I think I probably need to, first of all, decide if he himself is a mythical creature, or if he simply likes to help them. I'm thinking a look into russian mythology is in order, because I get the feeling that he is - He also needs a new name, because "The Broker" doesn't even describe what he does - I just kind of slapped it on him for the sake of having something to call him. And knowing my track record with placeholder names (Gary, Joe, Garrett...), if I don't change it soon, it's going to stick. :|

This post took a while to write because I'm multi-tasking watching BBC live coverage of the Chilean mine rescue.

The fact that....

Roger Ebert 'ships Jacob/Edward totally just made my night. Also just kind of furthers all previous arguments that Twilight is the most unintentionally hilarious series ever when it comes to sexual tension. Like, there's these, and then there's Twilight, which isn't the result of any actual purposeful subtext, just the fact that the author is absolutely clueless. (Also Mormon. Can we talk about how Twilight is pretty much just an excuse for SMeyer to push a mormon agenda? Actually, let's not.)

Anyway, that's all I've got for tonight.

Also I spent my four-day weekend working my way through this and I have to say it is one awesome piece of work. Crazy random gems like this make me happy I watch anime.

Clearly the sexiest rendition of "To be or not to be" /ever/

Go here, watch this, and tell me if you don't agree. It starts around 59 minutes in, and you need to watch into the next scene to get the full effect.

Oh god I am so glad I found this version. :)

EVERYTHING ON VENUS IS TRYING TO KILL YOU.

THAT'S NO MOON.
This is Mimas, and by all accounts, it shouldn't exist. For one thing, that crater on its surface is proportionally bigger than Canada. (Which is to say, it isn't actually bigger than Canada, because Mimas itself is probably smaller than Canada, but if you took the ratio of its surface that is covered by the crater and applied it to Earth... you get the idea.) An impact capable of making an impact that big should have just ripped the thing apart, but instead it made the moon look like the Death Star.

Also, while Mimas is outside the Roche limit, Saturn has moons /inside/ its Roche limit. Theoretically anything orbiting inside the Roche limit gets ripped apart, and thats why rings form. But Saturn has "shepherding moons" - moons that orbit inside the rings. What the hell, man?

I also find it weird that Pluto is now classified as a "Plutoid" and a "Plutino," which is like saying something is "shaped like itself." First rule of descriptions is to not use the word in the description, you know? But, then, Pluto has moons and things that aren't really moons, because Pluto and Charon and Hydra and Nix all orbit around a common barycenter and not around each other. They're just called moons of Pluto because the IAU hasn't got a definition for binary/triploid/quadruple dwarf planets or what have you. So in short they don't really have any idea /what/ this thing is, just that they have some weirdass felony bigamy going on in the outer solar system.

BUT BACK TO THE TITLE. You know Venus? Average temperature is a balmy 800 degrees Fahrenheit. Surface pressure is about a hundred times Earth's, the atmosphere is 100 times denser, and it's made of 99% CO2 with periodic bursts of hydrochloric acid and volcanic ash. Sounds like a real nice place to visit, right?

We've only got one real picture of the surface of the place, as opposed to radiographic imagery, because within a few minutes of landing the probe was burnt/crushed/melted. Because the surface temperature is so high, the crust is always a few steps away from molten, and you know plate tectonics? Forget everything you ever knew about plate tectonics because Venus is too hot for that shit, son. You need water for plate tectonics and Venus never had water, ever. No, Venus has Plume Tectonics which basically means volcanos can erupt wherever they damn well please. The whole surface of the planet is made of volcanic rocks like basalt and pumice.

There are theories that Venus used to have moons but that it fucking /ate/ them.

Well, shit, son. Everything on Venus is trying to kill you dead.

Who do they think I am?

Wait a second!

YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, LISA.

One and Done

So today we watched a video about the search for life on mars in Evolution of the Earth, and they kept talking about the conditions for life to evolve, the conditions for life to evolve, the conditions for life to evolve. And I'm sitting there wondering, "Wait, so if the conditions for life to evolve are present on Earth, why aren't new forms of life constantly emerging?"

So I sat there for a while with this seriously wigging me out more and more the longer I thought about it. At the end of class I decided to ask the professor why we don't see new creepy-crawlies spontaneously bursting into being all around us.

"Well," he says, "Life changes the atmosphere. Early Earth had methane and ammonia in the atmosphere, and you need those for anything interesting to happen. All the oxygen in the atmosphere is due to photosynthesis."

This goes on. I ask, "So, if hypothetically, life evolved on a planet and was then wiped out, it couldn't evolve again?"

"Not if it changed the atmosphere enough. It could only happen again if the atmosphere changed back."

In short, living organisms are bastards. It's not just humans - EVERY LIVING THING ON THE ENTIRE PLANET, SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME, has been making it progressively less inhabitable for anything that might come after. This is also a pretty good plan for boxing out any other fledgeling life form that tries to get in on your planet - make it useless to them and they'll leave it alone.

So, in short, life is one and done. Once you get it, either it sticks around or it goes extinct and never comes back.

Don't look too hard for a metaphor in this post.

They fight crime!

Try this website:

theyfightcrime.org

And let me know some of your best results. :)

He's a deeply religious neurotic astronaut on the edge. She's a warm-hearted wisecracking research scientist in the wrong place at the wrong time. They fight crime!

Coconut bubble tea.

Is delicious at the time but for the next four hours you'll pretty much feel like you've just drunk a bottle of sunscreen.