Grrrr.

So, a part of Ascension in KOL involved resetting the Tower of the Naughty Sorceress. Which means I need to either spend $16K on an item (not named, for spoiler's sake), or find a new one, which in turn means finding an air freshener, etc.

Really pissed about this -- I wouldn't have bothered going into the Tower before if I'd known that the adventures were pointless.

On the Mac/Intel kerfluffle

The Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg is one of the best tech columnists out there (along with David Pogue of the NYTimes), and his faq on the Mac/Intel alliance (available for free -- no bugmenot required) is a nice voice of reason that needs to be read by the Chicken Littles.

The Inside

So, not great, but I seem to have liked it a lot more than other folks. glenn5 was underwhelmed, and laurel, over at TVpicks, got to see the first three episodes, and was also not overly impressed.

It might have been my lowered expectations, as well as the knowledge that Minear came in to a show that was a lame Mod Squad rip-off and had to retinker it to make it watchable, but I had fun. Granted, Baldwin and Finneran, the reasons I was watching the show, had way too little time, and the lead male (the potential love interest, not Peter Coyote) has annoyingly turned his "sensitive male" dial to 11, but there's still enough fun stuff there, as well as a few nifty twists, to keep me around. It's no Keen Eddie, but every summer cop show can't be that good. If nothing else, I'm intrigued enough by Peter Coyote as a cross between The Cigarette Smoking Man and, well, Peter Coyote. Some major plot issues (such as, say, how did Coyote get to the next station?), as well as a few character ones (if Coyote really likes fucking with his people's heads that much, why doesn't he just stick a dildo in their ears and get it over with?), but I'm on board for the next few weeks, at least.

Well, that was overhyped.

A co-worker tossed an expiring Blockbuster freebie coupon our way, so we rented Garden State.

Consider me truly underwhelmed.

Part of that, of course, is that this is a tiny movie that was held up as the motherfucking indie holy grail last year, when it really should have just been treated as a small indie romantic comedy. But even then, the first twenty minutes or so are painfully boring, recycling the same awkwardness/disassociativeness that we've seen in hundreds of other movies. It didn't become watchable until Natalie Portman came on screen, partially because her character was a lot more interesting than Braff's (who, wearing the actor/writer/director hats, seemed to do too much to avoid overshadowing the other characters, a critical rookie mistake). Then again, Portman's worth watching in anything*. Likewise, Peter Sarsgaard steals a good chunk of the movie as well. But although there were plenty of good moments, the movie felt disjointed, and not in the way Braff intended (as a metaphor for Andrew's disassociation with society and life in general).

And don't get me started on the worst-trained guide dog in the history of guide dogs. Pointlessly stupid scenes like that throw me completely out of a movie.



*Disclaimer: For these purposes, "anything" does not include any film directed by, written by, or otherwise affected by George Lucas.