K-Squared Ramblings

Sci-fi mommy

I can’t believe nobody’s made this comparison yet……it looks like the producers of “Lost” picked the wrong SF TV-show lead to be Alex’s mom:

Of course, it’s entirely possible that they might be able to land Claudia for a recurring guest spot as her “mother” (flashbacks maybe?), and thus call into question through visuals alone whether Danielle is even as right in the head as she seems to be.

Stargate: The Gatekeeper Wars?

Apparently Stargate: SG-1 has been canceled after 10 seasons. I wasn’t a fan, but you’ve got to admit, 10 seasons is a serious accomplishment. But I found one remark interesting:

Ironically, this is the first year since Season Four that plans were already in place, both creatively and in signed actor contracts, for another year. The show has lived on year-to-year since moving to SCI FI, with the writers forced to write a possible series finale every year — only to find the show renewed once again.

A space-based show on the Sci-Fi Channel, used to planning one year at a time, has finally decided to plan two years, only to find themselves cut off halfway through. Starring (among others) Ben Browder and Claudia Black. It sounds oddly familiar. Where could I possibly have heard something like this before?

Only in San Diego? Volume 2 Part 2

If you’re in danger of losing your religion, try…

We saw this by the side of the road in Old Town, and both of us immediately thought of cake topping. Not something you’d want to use this for.

There was just something inherently amusing about seeing Xena standing at Mrs. Field’s.

You know, ever since the new VW Bug came out, Katie’s said that the yellow ones looked like Pikachu. Well, the Pokémon people fixed one up and were raffling it off at the con.

This probably belongs in with the hall costumes, but the cardboard thought balloon was a nice Farscape reference.

One oddity we didn’t manage to catch on virtual film was mixed into the city’s graffiti. In two places (one visible from the Blue Line trolley, one on a freeway on-ramp), someone had spray-painted the word Enron on the wall.

The last two were actually in San Clemente, where we stopped for coffee on the way back. We picked an exit and got off, looking for a Diedrich’s, Starbucks, or other coffee shop. We found a Starbucks (with a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf across the street that we didn’t notice until we got back in the car), but we passed two odd signs on the way to and from the freeway. We couldn’t get decent pictures from the car, and neither of us was in the mood to find a parking space and take the photo on foot. But I did find photos on Flickr by Brian Mitchell, under a Creative Commons license that allows me to repost them here under the same license. The first: Taste of China…in the shape of a hot dog. And practically across the street was a place advertising the Pastrami Love Burger.

(Continued in Volume 3.)

Farce Cape

A caption I always wanted to write. From “Crackers Don’t Matter,” one of Farscape’s more comedic episodes.

Fargate!

Okay, this has got to be one of the strangest pairs of sci-fi news stories I’ve seen in a while.

First, Farscape star Ben Browder (John Crichton) will join the cast of Stargate SG-1 for its ninth season. (No word yet about his character, though I suppose he could appear as Daniel Jackson’s long-lost brother.)

Now it turns out that Farscape star Claudia Black (Aeryn Sun) will reprise her Stargate SG-1 character Vala in a 5-episode arc next season. (The original episode in which she appears, “Prometheus Unbound”, airs in January.)

Another one for the “Holy frelling dren” file.

(Thanks to aeryncrichton for the news.)

Spoiler-free FPKW Review

Three words: Holy frelling dren!

Alternate review: “Boom. Boom boom boom. Boom boom. Boom! Have a nice day!”

One door closes…

Since we’ve started showing Babylon 5 to a new group, I’ve been surfing the Lurker’s Guide and other sites. I came across an interesting tidbit about the spinoff series Crusade that I had forgotten.

At the point that TNT cancelled Crusade (13 episodes into filming, and months before it aired), Warner Bros. tried to sell it to the Sci Fi Channel. SciFi was interested in picking it up — and they actually did buy the rights to show reruns of B5 — but they had already committed their original-programming budget to several new shows. No mention of what shows they were, but…

Something jogged my memory. “What year was this?” I checked; it was 1999. “What year did Farscape start?” Sure enough, 1999.

October Scape

It seems SciFi will rerun all of Farscape this October, leading up to the debut of the miniseries!

• Farscape reruns October 1-15, Monday-Friday, 9am-4pm
• Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars premieres October 17

They’re already here

A couple of weeks ago, the landscaping wonks for my work building ripped out all the hedges in the parking-lot divider islands and heavily mulched the ground. They didn’t put anything new in until the middle of last week, when I noticed a slew of newly-planted birds of paradise on the exit side as we were driving out on Thursday night. This morning, the islands on the entrance side were stocked with nursery pots awaiting transplant. I’m wondering if I should start being even more suspicious of the lawyers in the building, or if I should wait to see if the thermostat starts creeping up…..

Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars Preview

Let me just say that the upcoming Farscape miniseries looks incredible. They ran a trailer they had just finished — not the one that’s just started airing, but one they’ll start showing later on — and it looks like it may be the most intense four hours of Farscape ever. They’re very cagey about the actual plot, but the clips show a level of danger, action, and drama at least equal to Farscape at its best.

The stated goal is to “bring this chapter of Farscape to a close” — to tie up the major dangling storylines and leave things open for other miniseries, feature films, comics, spinoffs, etc. Who will be around by the end is unclear, but it’s clearly going to be a heck of a ride.

They opened the floor for questions from the audience, and let me just say, hilarity ensued. I’d never seen any of this group at a convention before, but when anything funny comes up, David Kemper, Claudia Black, and Ben Browder just run with it. (Edit: quotes are now available.)
Read the rest of this entry »

SpamAssassin Logo Contest

Just saw a link for the current entries in the SpamAssassin Logo Contest. Entries range from a simple updating of the current logo through ninjas of varying danger and cuteness levels, and a few that have actually dropped the ninja motif altogether.

Oddly, a few of them remind me of the Peacekeeper insignia from Farscape. Maybe it’s just the red-and-black color scheme. Speaking of which, it turns out that logo was based directly on a 1919 painting called “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” by Russian Constructivist artist El Lissitzky. (originally linked to sebacea.com.)

Back to SpamAssassin, the contest is open through August 6.

But he wasn’t the one on drums

Went to the Counting Crows concert last night. They have a D’Amico drum set. Between the (all-caps) font and the distance, I kept misreading it as D’Argo!

Nobody has dreams about…..

Fishfax was in a discussion today about dreams and related that she had one about eating pizza with piña coladas. If it were margaritas, I’d really question her sanity.

Sorting the Leviathan

I realized this morning what struck me as odd about the original crew of Moya: they’re not a crew, they’re a D&D party. Two warriors, a priest, a thief, and Ordinary Guy (who’d probably be classed as a bard). We started trying to categorize everyone else who shows up and realized that we’d need to know all the kits and extra subclasses to do it right. Then I thought of trying to determine alignments and couldn’t decide whether to use the D&D system or the TMNT system (which I barely know but seems to work better for actual people). It was at that point that Kelson said, “You know, it’d be easier to sort them into Hogwarts houses.” So we did. Read the rest of this entry »

Cancellations

When it comes to serial entertainment, everything will end at some point. I’m sure even Superman and Spider-Man comics will cease someday. A show can end before or after it’s run out of things to say, but it’s worst when it hasn’t finished speaking.

We’ve all seen shows that kept going long after, by any rights, they should have been cancelled. Is there any doubt that Voyager only lasted 7 years because it was Star Trek, on a studio-owned network, and the previous two Treks had also run that long? “The Far Side” and “Calvin and Hobbes” ended while the artists were at the top of their form. Compare that to “Peanuts,” whose last 20 years were hardly worth reading, or the new “Opus” from Berkeley Breathed (although it does have its moments.) Read the rest of this entry »