June Blog
Sunday, 03 July 2005 15:05:39

Not much to report for June. The work at Sarcan becomes fairly routine quickly, so I now have a rhythm to how I work. The only thing that pisses mee of is the paying scheme. They pay you on the 15th and 30th every month, but the cut-off time for the cheques is a week earlier, so every pay stub, I'm only paid for roughly ten working days. And after income tax and other deductions, it's really only 8. I hope to hell that there's a big ass severance package that comes my way at the end of August. I'm now glad that I have The Wedding Shooter as an extra source of income. As for that, I only had two brides this month. The first bride's wedding was a disaster. Let's just leave it at that. I'd rather not talk about it, actually. The second bride was much better and was a real cool chick. The only time she got mildly angry at me was when I said I'd have the video done by like Tuesday, but I only managed to get it onto a DVD by Wednesday. I have a tendency to over-exxagerrate, since the cumulative editing time is way less than three weeks, so I tell them "Hey I can have it done for you by Monday." I explain them this, and they're OK with it as well (I hope). I'm still not done with them, though. They want me to make a # of copies both in DVD and VHS. It's the VHS part that worries me. I havn't dumped anything onto VHS from my computer in a year, so I'm a bit unfamiliar with the process. Other than that, it's pretty boring stuff. Other small tidbits= I got MovieCentral for SIX FEET UNDER. Loved the season premiere, and the Ruth/George plotline is fascinating stuff. My AdultFriendFinder profile has been upgraded, so I'm kinda on the market now. First gal I met through it I didn't dig so much. Mainly because when she got into the passenger seat of my car, she was so fath that her fat hung over the parking break of my car. She could've crushed me. Hopefully, it'll get better and I can actually get laid before the end of the summer and my 20th birthday. And I now have a DVD that's half a month late. Havn't gotten around to it, because I've been so wiped.

Why I love 24.
Saturday, 09 July 2005 05:45:50

I've been wanting to write this for some time, but after reading a post here comparing Jack Bauer to rectal pubic hair, I figured it would be as good of time as any to proclaim my undying admiration for the series. The reasons I love 24 are numerous and varied. I started watching it when it first came on a year before FIREFLY debued. It really grabbed my attention from the first get-go when in the pilot ep, you found out that it wasn't the foreign photographer that was going to blow up the plane but the slutty, drunk chick who turned out to be the person hired to blow up the plane. As the show progressed, I saw how it just built and built. How it just piled on one tense moment after another, and even when it was resolved, you found out quickly that it was just another piece in a gigantic convoluted puzzle that showed you stuff that you honestly had no idea you were looking at. The whole first day seemed like a gigantic Hitchcock film that even after 23 hours, still had you on pins and needles and eagerly had you chomping at the bit to see what would happen next. And amazingly enough, it still has managed to keep it going. Even through an admittedly weak third day and whenever something happens that was way out there even for 24, there was still that "I gotta know what happens next" element to it that made you come back. I said in an earlier post that Jack Bauer could kick Mal Reynold's ass. I didn't mean that in a "fight to the death" kind of way. What I meant is that, if I was in a perilous situation, where I'm being hunted down or in deep trouble and had to resort to one of these two for help, I know that I can trust Mal. I know that he'd definitly be there to get my back. But as for Jack, I know that he's on the right side, but his methods and how he gets his results scares me. I mean, one minute, I'm being offered protection. The next, I could end up being used as bait or an incentive to get vital information, like in Day 3, when Jack nearly had to put a terrorist's daughter into a biohazardous hotel in order to get the terrorist to crack. Mal would never go as far as to nearly sacrifice the person he was protecting to do the right thing. So to me, Jack has that edge that Mal doesn't. Plus, the way that Keifer Sutherland portrays him, you know that this is not someone you can joke around with or get on your good side like with Mal. There is also the whole "what's at stake" thing that separates the two. Even though Mal lost his faith in Serenity Valley and everything else, he still has SERENITY and his crew. He has those people around him to restore all the things he has lost, and so e fights every day just so that he doesn't lose them. But Jack? Jack on the other hand has nothing to lose. By the end of each day, despite his best efforts, he still can't save the people he's determined to protect. By the end of the 4th day, he can't even protect himself. He's saved the world yet again, but he has to fake his death in order to keep an international crisis from erupting. He has no crew to go home to, or an ideology to live by. He has nothing to lose. And someone who has nothing to lose is the msot dangerous person imaginable. I'll continue this in another post.

Why I love 24-#2
Saturday, 09 July 2005 06:05:55

I'm a big fan of tragedies. I think it's more effective in a drama that is something bad happens to a character, it's because it's the character's fault and not by some outside force of evil or some shit. And the thing that permeates 24 more than anything is it's grand sense of tragedy. That all these people are doing what they do because they think or know is right, but because of some inborn characteristic, they can't achieve it and actually end up losing it. I'll give you an example of it by comparing it to another show. 24 and ALIAS both debued in 2001. Both shows have the main character lose a significant other in the first season. Sydney with Danny (played by our own Atherton Wing), and Jack with Teri. Syd lost her fiancee in the pilot ep. I think he got killed at the half hour point, I think. So we never really got to know him, their relatinship and what it would've been like. For all we know, he could've become an insensitive jerk. That, as well as the strain a marriage might have when one of them is a spy, might end up destroying the marriage. So while Danny's death was a pivotal moment in the pilot in that it became her motivation in bringing down Arvin Sloane and SD-6, in the end, it really didn't matter much. It was a plot contrivance, which was further solidified by how soon Syd skipped past mourning and jumped into the sack with Vaughn. But with Jack and Teri, you really got a sense of who they were as a couple. They had been together for years, had a child with one on the way, and went through the same trials and tribulations as any other married couple, but ended up coming out stronger. Throughout the day, you saw how the two needed each other. That for Jack, Teri was the thing that kept him sane and from losing it completely. The first day was just as much about Jack trying to protect his family as it was in trying to keep Palmer from getting killed. So when the final two minutes of the day ticked down, and you saw him hold her body in his arms, you were genuinely affected. You were rocked to the core with the fact that even though he could save the world, he can't save his wife. And of course, the whole second day was just seeing how much her death had affected Jack so much in that he was willing to fly a nuclear bomb into the desert and detonate it on a suicide mission, and not even blink. And not just with Jack. You take any character, even Kim, and watch their character and story arc, you can see that they are tragic figures trying to break free of their fatal flaws, and end up failing. I'm not trying to provoke an arguement or start a falme war. I am merely professing my love for a show that is similar to FIREFLY not only in occassional casting, but in that it went were very few dared to go, pushed the boundaries of what network tv can do and succeeded admirably. The only difference is, 24 is going into it's fifth season (or day if you want to call it that).