Don’t Vote

Fantastic Fest 2008 Top Ten

A running tally of my Fantastic Fest faves.

1. Brothers Bloom
2. Zack & Miri Make a Porno
3. Not Quite Hollywood
4. JCVD
5. Astropia
6. Repo! – The Genetic Opera
7. Sauna
8. The Good The Bad The Weird
9. The Burrowers
10. The Substitute
11. Fanboys
12. Short Films of Nacho Vigalondo
13. Chocolate
14. Kingz
15. Let the Right One In
16. RocknRolla
17. Eagle Eye
18. The Chaser
19. Tokyo!
20. Role Models
21. Santos
22. Your Name Here
23. Fears of the Dark
24. City of Ember
25. Seventh Moon
26. Terra
27. Deadgirl
28. Alien Raiders

My Sister

As a few of you know, I went to Ohio a little while ago to see my sister Vanessa in the hospital. She is dying from complications from diabetes. While there is no date set, she has a few months left to live and I won’t ever see her again. The doctors have never seen a case of gastroparesis as bad as hers. Basically her digestive system has stopped working. She is hooked up to a bunch of tubes for nutrition, medication and excretion. She was in constant pain and, for whatever fucking reason, is on enough painkillers for 20 people (as estimated by the doctor in the new hospital). She is addicted to those narcotics now and it would take a month to wean her off. She could go through a month of agony to gain some mental coherence, or stay in her current relatively pain-free state, but not know what day it is.

She has three young daughters who live with my mother. Her plan is to take care of them as she has been for the past year or so. That is a whole other issue.

I don’t want my sister to die. But she has been sick for a long time and everything has been tried to save her. She doesn’t have a high quality of life right now. She’s been in bed for so long that she can no longer walk.

I’m doing okay. This is always in the back of my mind until something brings it to the forefront. I don’t really want this to be about me. I just wanted to update those of you who were following this and let the rest of my friends know the deal.

Amores perros

Left to His Own Devices

Here is a flash fiction piece I wrote this morning and serialized on Twitter.

—-

Ever the precocious child, Anton used the teleporter in many ways other than its intended purpose.

Cleaning his room, for example, was a trivial task now that he had a save state for it.

Anton’s meticulously arranged ZOMG!icons vs. Blazaroids diorama could swiftly return to its pristine state after each invasion.

And, with the Doppler circuit he created, Anton no longer had just one Amazium-plated AnnihiLord shock trooper. He had twenty-seven.

Twenty-seven incrementally fragile Amazium-plated AnnihiLord shock troopers, but nevertheless many more than Paige McAllister, who had only three.

Saturday mornings weren’t as fun without his brother Dmitri.

Anton rode the train into the city every afternoon. He inserted the same token each time. Only plebs and precocious children still used the trains.

He sat next to Dmitri’s hospital bed and read his twin the latest manga. He held up the slate so Dmitri could see the explosions.

The hospital staff had seen his father’s movies. They never troubled Anton with questions. They assured him Dmitri would wake up one day.

It would be a few days before they noticed that Anton’s parents had stopped visiting.

His mothers were always in the lab and his father filled the weekends with chute-less skydiving and BASE jumping.

Anton wished they stayed home more often.

Although a bright child for his age, he often lacked common sense, particularly when it came to mass conservation vs. lossy molecular compression algorithms.

The nurse saw Anton showing Dmitri his three new Blazaroid pilot action figures. “How lifelike they are,” she remarked.

Unfortunately, for Anton’s parents, nothing was further from the truth.

The End.

Cosmic Redux

As some of you know, Cosmic Encounter is one of my favorite board games of all time. My geek heart nearly exploded with joy when I learned that Fantasy Flight, one of my favorite companies, had secured the rights and was going to release a new edition. Upon entering the dealer’s hall at GenCon, I made a beeline to the Fantasy Flight booth. “Encampment” might have been a better word, given the enormous area they took up.

The guy running the demo (drat, forgot his name) was one of the main designers involved in the new edition, if not THE guy. I chatted with him a bit about his vision of the game, what they were keeping, what they were throwing out. Then I got to play a few rounds! Continue reading →

You can stand right there if you want

A few days earlier, Beth had made an oblique reference that she knew where Cathy had ended up. I mentally filed that away, but didn’t bring it up again. Most of the time I have the context “Cathy who?” She doesn’t come up in the day to day. But there are ordinary objects, places, phrases and people which are actually disguised keys that unlock a hidden time period. In this group of friends, the Cathy-shaped gap must be quite prominent for them. I never really thought about it until now. She essentially fell off the face of the planet for seven years. For all of us. Continue reading →

a place in the sun that’s nice and warm

The ocean is one of those places where I don’t need to use English. I stop trying to find the right words and just communicate.

Due to lack of foresight and sun block, my nose was horribly sunburned for over a week.

Baby I’ve got to prove it

This guy on the right is Scott. He graciously allowed my friends and I to invade his boat at Marina del Rey. Scott makes movies. It would behoove you to get to know him while he is still an indie filmmaker. See what is up at Sirena Studios.

As you can tell from the pictures, it is impossible for us not to document our activities to the rest of the world via Twitter and digital photos.

That was a good time. Chilling on a boat, drinking beer, talking movies and games.

One foot in front of the next

I’m driving the BMW to Trader Joe’s. Beth is next to me. I notice that the experience of the car is transformed by who is handling it, much that of a gun or violin. Here the vehicle is purely utilitarian, getting us to where we need to go. I don’t care what it looks like or what it is and I only think about it in terms of how the BMW is not like my own car.

We’re talking about relationships and online dating. I haven’t given Beth the backstory of the avatar, so the things I say apparently horrify her on some level. I haven’t encountered many people who are comfortable with the rhetoric of the quirkyalone. Listening to myself, I know it sounds like I have excluded the entire world save one person.

I’m pushing the shopping cart at Trader Joe’s and reality has gone wobbly for me. I start to lose focus on where I am and suddenly I am in several different stores at once. Beth is asking me something about the grocery list, which has suddenly become indecipherable, the scrawled prescription from a mad chef. I answer noncommittally as the aisles telescope and emotions tumble down the shelves.

We manage to collect the ingredients for guacamole and hummus, dips which Beth insists must never be purchased, always made by hand. Later she would demonstrate her Shaolin avacado cutting style. She has resolved to eat an avacado a day while in California. I also found the frozen chocolate dipped bananas I had been craving.

The ride back is just like the ride there, only in reverse. Which is to say, completely unfamiliar.