First off, apologize for the lack up updates. Yet once again… and I know I’m totally a broken record at this point, but… it?s been crazy mad hectic on my end. Hence why I totally missed the Thursday deadline for my GameSetWatch column, which I feel pretty shitty about (but my next movie review is set for later this week). Simon, being the super nice and understanding guy that he is told me not to worry about it, but to make it up, I promised a quick write of the first night of the Blip Festival… which I also dropped the ball on. But Simon, and for everyone else, its coming! I promise.
But instead of talking about the past few days in another mixed topic post (btw, Fort90 Journal 2.0 is almost ready, and another change is that I’m thinking of is breaking up my entries into smaller bits, according to subject matter… what do you folks think?), let me save the Blip Fest talk for a bit later, and quickly rattle off all that stuff that’s happen since Wednesday…
- Movie night featured Scrooge, the 1970 musical starring Albert Finney, and is actually one of the best film adaptations of the Charles Dickens’ classic I’ve seen (though the all time great, at least in my mind, with always be television’s Mickey’s Christmas Carol). The best part had to be Alec Guinness, who played Jacob Marley. The man can play it all… ghost, Jedi master, Hitler. It was also nice to be reminded that my favorite time of year is right around the corner; I guess its true that the older you get, the more you forget about the festive season due to “adult stuff”. I suppose also not helping was the unusually warm weather all last week, which I actually found annoying (its winter time, so I want it to be cold, damnit). We also saw a bunch of clips beforehand, which made the evening feel like the good old days of movie night… mostly old Hollywood song and dance numbers, many of which featured Fred Astaire. Also saw the opening from the latest Jackie Chan movie from Hong Kong that was rather blah. Oh, and Slings and Arrows season 2 just keeps getting better.
- Thursday night was the opening night of Blip Fest 2006. Again, I’ll pass along a detail rundown of the evening a bit later, though I will mention right a major reason why it was so awesome, aside from the fucking amazing music, was that it afforded the chance to hang with some familiar faces, a few of which whom I rarely get the chance to see, such as Brian (aka click of click-stick fame), Steve (aka NightsB from the now defunct Insert Credit forums). Plus other peeps were present, like Job, Colin, and Dave (Mauro). Even Adam, who posts comments here as “phooky”, decided to show up (that makes two friends, of all the folks I know who, despite being self-professed gamer and techie dorks, have always scoffed at the idea of seeing people perform music live with Game Boys, and not surprisingly he too went “Holys shit, what the hell have I been missing?!”). It was pretty much a party in every sense! And it also offered another chance to lament the passing of the IC forums, since it was the reason why I met a majority of those folks I hung out with at the fest, though I’m still on the fence about getting involved with it’s replacement. Between sets, Jake (aka virt) and I decided to run a stupid movie night sometime in the future. He’s got Turkish Star Wars and I’ve got Turkish Star Trek, as well as Turkish Spider Man vs. Captain America vs. Santos.
- Friday night was the big pre-wedding dinner with Dave (Roman) and Raina, along with Raina’s family from the west coast. And Saturday was the big day: Dave and Raina tied the knot. The entire ceremony was pretty wonderful, and cute to boot! Dave’s like a brother to me, so I, like many others, am extremely proud and happy for him. He got himself a really swell gal.
I myself was not just a spectator but one of the groomsmen, which was quite the honor, and I’d like to think I did a decent job; everything went off without a hitch, all things considered (there were about a ton of logistical nightmares to deal with, but there were no disasters thankfully… though at one point I had to run to a Radio Shack for a wire for the DJ, but thankfully Queens has the one store in existence with sales folk that actually has brains and wants to help). Also, the wedding comic (Dave & Raina asked all their comic buddies to contribute comics or funny drawings for a book that was given out as gifts for the guests) turned out really nice, and even my shitty chicken scratch turned out pretty decent (considering I had to scale back from my original plans, and my whole set-up is absent, due I would image in to space constraints). Here’s one of the very few good pictures that came out…
- As for both Friday and Saturday nights, after the wedding-related portion of the evening, I hung out with Katie who was again in town. And I’ll let her describe all that went down, via her post from over at my fan club?s bulliten board, entitled MHFC Society Column: Matt buys me drinks, wears suit this weekend?
“Matt was on a Serious Business tear this weekend. We went to the same bar two nights in a row. On the first night, he uttered through gritted teeth “Christ I need a drink” and approximately two seconds after walking in the bar demanded of me, MK, and Robin “Who wants a shot of Jack??” Playing the Asian card, he was pretty drunk within no time.
Night two: Matt made his grand entrance in a very nice suit into the same bar, I think this time as his wrestler alter-ego. (On a side note, this wrestler’s signature moves are “The Johnny Spike,” “The Wheel of Woe,” and “The Tears Fall Down.”) We didn’t stay very long, and Matt later sang a West Side Story fashion song to people standing on the street. He invited these strangers to go to a knife fight in the song, and when asked if there would be girls there, he responded with “Of course there will be girls there! It’s a knife fight!” He later yelled at a couple walking down the street, “She doesn’t really love you!!” thus ruining somebody’s night but making ours fantastic.
Coming soon: lines from Matt’s imaginary movie.”
… and the highlight for me had to be the look on Todd‘s face (who was in town for Dave and Raina’s wedding, whom MK & I managed to “borrow” late Saturday night) when I told him how shocked I was when I first saw a pair of dog testicles.
- And last night was the final evening of the Blip Fest 2006, and as expected, it was pretty mind-blowing. I decided to take some pictures and hoped that my shitty camera might be able to pull off some sort of miracle, but sadly, that didn’t happen. I’m especially pissed that the following arty-farty pic didn’t come out…
… Oh well. Hopefully Brian and Colin will pass along theirs real soon. Once more, coming up soon, my semi-detail, incomplete report.
