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Post by tjaman on Apr 4, 2007 19:11:46 GMT -5
I just made a n00b go kaBOOM! ;D
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Post by quantumcat on Apr 4, 2007 22:37:29 GMT -5
In a nice way,of course.... It's good to give these folks a dose of surreality now and then. It gives them the mental equivalent of a high colonic and helps them think better. Not that brainwashing will suffice by itself. The mind needs contact with something abrasive on occasion to remove the last vestiges of crud and make the empty spaces all shiny. ;D That's when it can start getting filled with sweet,clean, functional notions. But you have to get rid of the trash first.....
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Post by quantumcat on Apr 4, 2007 22:50:54 GMT -5
Having lives is good but remember to keep things balanced. (The last thing we need is an unbalanced !BRIAN.) If we got tipped over,we might not be able to get up again. It's nice to hear from one another even if it's just a brief hello or update. If you have to be AWOL from here,stay busy feeding your soul with good things. If your time gets monopolized by things that drain your spirit and wear you down without offering anything positive,put those dead LAST on your list and remember we're here to provide a recharge. A soul battery should be a resource of spiritual energy-not a form of assault. Choose your friends/family/livlihood/community accordingly. Au revoir!!!
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Post by quantumcat on Apr 5, 2007 0:43:21 GMT -5
Have any of y'all caught 'Blood Ties' or the Tanya Huff stories they were based on (now in a 3 volume omnibus plus a spin-off series)?
I'm curious about the revival of sf/supernatual/fantasy series in print and on screen.
I've also wondered about the trend toward resurrection and extension of established series.
Will this lead to over-saturation of the market,poorly realized properties and burn-out or will the current patterns support one another and encourage the rebirth of Angel and Buffy and series that died aborning or were mauled when they hit the airwaves?
I think I'd really like to see a 'photonovela' type show with mini-series that could stand alone or be expanded later.
They could be joined by one-shots in an anthology format.
This could be a sort of Tales of the Darkside/Love,American Style /Movie of the Week/ Mystery/ Name of the Game program with each offering being a bit different.
Name performers,writers and directors could be featured along with unknowns.
Black-outs could be 3 minute YouTube -esque segments.
It could provide more variety and less commitment than standard fare and whet the audience's appetite for more.
A premise could be re-tooled at the 'pilot' stage yet have more than a few episodes to find its fan base.
Think of it.....
Comedy,animation,thoughtful drama,action-all available in packages that are long enough to tell the story.
No more or less.
If the main networks couldn't swing it,could a co-operative create it along the lines of the syndication unit that produced Hercules,Vanishing Son and Midnight Run?
They might take a floundering infomercial-infested network and turn it into something analogous to Current -only the material would be imaginative tales rather than an audience-created newsmagazine.
The 'open mike' part could be downplayed in favor of skilled veterans for a while but I think a return to the fiction magazine models of Playhouse 90 ,early Hallmark and Disney and the like could give us 'niche market' folk a lot more quality material without our worrying that it would be shot down before it had a chance or drowned in a deluge of faddish drek until the demand for the genre changed.
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Post by tjaman on Apr 5, 2007 1:03:14 GMT -5
There was grails lovely comment in his newest podcast, and here's what I had to say about it a couple weeks back. Enjoy!
'Blood Ties' worth a look, even in a crowded schedule
This year for my birthday, the government stole an hour from my day. I got a bit older, and I got a new vampire show to watch.
Lifetime premiered “Blood Ties” on Sunday. It stars no one and features nothing, but for all that it’s got some exciting visual effects and some reasonably solid acting and writing in it so with any luck at all, it’ll prove itself worthy of our time as viewers.
From what I could gather, Vicki Nelson, played by genre vet Christina Cox, is a former detective with the Metropolitan Toronto Police diagnosed with a deteriorating eye condition. She chose to leave the department rather than be sidelined and earned her private investigator’s license.
And she teams up with a vampire, Henry Fitzroy, who is something like 500 years old.
Vicki: See, I was gonna say you don’t look a day over 450. Henry: Well, I moisturize.
Henry, played by Kyle Schmid, is as beautiful as you’d expect an undead, eternally youthful, blood-sucking thrall-thrower to be. It’s Vicki’s unnervingly glamorous ex-partner Mike Celluci, played by Dylan Neal, who seems a little too polished to entirely accept as a cop. But polished he is, so clearly he knows how to moisturize as well.
In the pilot episode, Henry reacts to a series of murders that threatens to raise a demonic force. His path crosses Vicki’s when a client of hers asks her to investigate the serial killings from a mystical perspective, rather than the police perspective. And when Vicki realizes the locations of the murders are describing a pentagram against a city map, she can predict the location for a fourth murder – at about the same time Henry does.
And Henry is ticked off that someone is raising this force because with 500 years of history gives him an understanding that people react badly to disruptive mystical forces – “villagers with torches and pitchforks,” he recounts.
Ultimately, there was a lot more background on all of these characters than maybe there should have been, but Lifetime gave them a two-hour pilot episode and a timeslot to run it in, so if there was more exposition to meet these new characters, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
It was a pretty good show as shows go — nice characters and strong enough dialog. The plot got a little buried underneath the exposition. But really, protagonist sensitive-artist-type vampires bedding gorgeous women and then vanishing into the night to fight evil, I’ll be honest with you, familar as it is, it makes for some hot television. Then the snipery between Vicki and Henry points to some excellent chemistry.
The show, based on characters and books by Tanya Huff, airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on Lifetime, and I do take issue with the scheduling.
There’s no space on the grid of course that viewers are completely ignoring, but FOX and ABC are already dug in head-to-head with solid programming Sunday and indeed, none of the networks is entirely conceding the night. Toss the strong entries from the Sci Fi network and the programming people at Lifetime must realize that it’s not their mother’s Sunday night. That is, “MISSING” may have been able to carve out a tiny but dedicated audience for itself several years ago, but that was ... several years ago.
That and it’s not terribly dissimilar to Sci Fi’s “The Dresden Files,” where a wizard is a private investigator and runs into vampires and werewolves and the like. And this NBC show “Raines” that premiered this week where the detective communicates with the dead directly.
One wonders how anyone solved crimes before ghosts and other mystical beings hopped in to help.
Anyway, I look forward to seeing it as long as it’s available, but am not holding out a lot of hope. It has a certain flash-in-the-pan quality to it and circumstances may simply choke it out.
But if the pilot episode is anything to go by, however, it seems to be worth a look.
"Blood Ties" airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on Lifetime. tjaman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.
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Post by quantumcat on Apr 5, 2007 1:34:37 GMT -5
Ah!
That appeared during my screen freeze week.
Grrrrr.....
Excellent reportage,gentlemen!
I'm waiting for them to show Henry's affair with the street kid.
Err.... purely PLATONIC,of course,until those potable platelets come of age.
I'm wacked enough to be interested in watching people avoid being 'politically correct' and safe while evading the trap of being irresponsibly incorrect and insensitive.
Common sense,morality and good story telling aren't easily amalgamated but it's so much fun when folks get it right.
The bland version and titilation for outrage's sake just don't have much appeal.
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Post by tjaman on Apr 5, 2007 17:43:30 GMT -5
Hmmm ... Jasmine's preternatural thrall seems to not be working over on the Ultimate Baddies thread.
Suggestion: Any Magnificent Bastages and Beeyotches who see this and are moved to do so ought to drape that Evil Lying Sack's thrall about them like the Cloak of Badassery that it is and vote as tho it were.
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Post by tjaman on Apr 6, 2007 20:29:21 GMT -5
Gremmie sighting!
Hi Gremmie.
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Post by Disgruntled Gremlin on Apr 6, 2007 20:30:36 GMT -5
The rumours are true.
THE Disgruntled Gremlin lives : )
Man, has it ever been a while? How's everything in the cyberworld?
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Post by tjaman on Apr 6, 2007 20:51:59 GMT -5
43 percent less fabulous in your absence.
Otherwise, it's n00b city over on the Fraud.
I understand there are people spelling "You're Welcome" incorrectly, even.
Is that an ... Alanis Morrisette quote near your lovely Lilah avie?
How patriotic you are. ;D
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Post by Disgruntled Gremlin on Apr 6, 2007 21:06:11 GMT -5
Just be glad I haven't broken out any Shania-love. Yet.
Nice running-gag memory, by the way. And dare I ask...what the hell is "the Fraud?"
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Post by quantumcat on Apr 6, 2007 23:06:03 GMT -5
We have a DISGRUNTLED GREMLIN! HOORAY!!!!!
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Post by tjaman on Apr 6, 2007 23:13:16 GMT -5
Just be glad I haven't broken out any Shania-love. Yet. Nice running-gag memory, by the way. And dare I ask...what the hell is "the Fraud?" The not-especially-Tomelike replacement for the Tome at tv.com.
Meh. It is what it is.
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Post by TheMasterGeek on Apr 6, 2007 23:50:01 GMT -5
Hi Gremmy, long time no see.
What are you up to?
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Post by quantumcat on Apr 7, 2007 4:43:01 GMT -5
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