Another Odds and Ends Post
Into a new weekend.
School's winding down for the kids. Less than four weeks remain, and I don't believe any of them are even full ones. They have next Friday off and, of course, Memorial Day the following week. There's still work to do, but the call of summer's becoming very real. I dearly miss the long-ago days when I could follow that call.
My loose plan for next weekend is to take Friday off, too, making it a four-day weekend for all of us.
The scheduled of new movies has shifted into areas I'm not anxious to go out and see, so that's not going to be on the agenda this weekend. It may be mid-June before I really want to go out and see something, and that will almost perversely hit going into a weekend that's looking rather packed.
That's the weekend of June 15-17th, the weekend for Wizard World East, the Philadelphia comics convention. My three-day pass for it was bought a couple weeks ago and is sitting in the side of a cabinet in the bedroom. I always buy a three-day pass even if I don't specifically intend to go more than two days because it's still less expensive than buying single-day passes.
Normally by the time I've left the con on Saturday I'm spent in terms of cash, energy and interest, and Sunday's convention programming is usually the most lackluster of the fare. This year, however, some people from HCRealms are organizing a huge game Sunday morning. The idea is to bring a 200 pt team then buy a booster of our choosing and add the complete contents to the team. We'll all play on the same, huge map formed from multiple other maps, and players to our immediate left and right will be granted two turns of immunity so we have some incentive to get out onto the map instead of just immediately beating on our neighbors. Another of the people from work is only able to come to the convention on Sunday, and he seems to be interested in giving it a try as part of the day. I'll have more to say about it and the con in general in a separate post as we get into June.
I finally got around to getting the Windstar taken care of (a new alternator and a replacement for the battery the old alternator took down with it) so that's back on the road and I'm giving the Voyager some time off. Since the Windstar has AC it's a more suitable ride as we step into summer. My usual rule of thumb when it comes to auto work is any trip to the garage that comes out under $300 is a victory. Well... this one came in well under $600. Maybe I need to raise the bar of peaceful acceptance? It's done, though, it's done.
SciFi is re-running the entire season so far, 21 episodes, in a monstrous marathon of Heroes starting Saturday morning at 9. Straight on through until 6am Sunday. With the season-ender coming up on NBC Monday night, it's a timely block. I'll likely catch some of it here and there, casually, but there's far too much else to do than stay near a tv for 21 hours. It's definitely the sort of show that'll lend itself to dvd season box sets anyway.
Sunday night sees the Sopranos continue their final countdown. Three episodes to go. Was it really 2001 when Alan Holmes and I were discussing the show as part of the dinner conversation while he was in Philly to deliver a paper at a conference? Yeah, it had to be. We easily agreed that things were unlikely to end well for Tony; we'll finally get to see what it boils down to in a few weeks.
I'm into the free-form feel of the weekend again. As I'm not tired yet, I'm going to get up and get one or two things done. That'll be one or two fewer things to do after I wake up, and a likely boost to general morale.
Into a new weekend.
School's winding down for the kids. Less than four weeks remain, and I don't believe any of them are even full ones. They have next Friday off and, of course, Memorial Day the following week. There's still work to do, but the call of summer's becoming very real. I dearly miss the long-ago days when I could follow that call.
My loose plan for next weekend is to take Friday off, too, making it a four-day weekend for all of us.
The scheduled of new movies has shifted into areas I'm not anxious to go out and see, so that's not going to be on the agenda this weekend. It may be mid-June before I really want to go out and see something, and that will almost perversely hit going into a weekend that's looking rather packed.
That's the weekend of June 15-17th, the weekend for Wizard World East, the Philadelphia comics convention. My three-day pass for it was bought a couple weeks ago and is sitting in the side of a cabinet in the bedroom. I always buy a three-day pass even if I don't specifically intend to go more than two days because it's still less expensive than buying single-day passes.
Normally by the time I've left the con on Saturday I'm spent in terms of cash, energy and interest, and Sunday's convention programming is usually the most lackluster of the fare. This year, however, some people from HCRealms are organizing a huge game Sunday morning. The idea is to bring a 200 pt team then buy a booster of our choosing and add the complete contents to the team. We'll all play on the same, huge map formed from multiple other maps, and players to our immediate left and right will be granted two turns of immunity so we have some incentive to get out onto the map instead of just immediately beating on our neighbors. Another of the people from work is only able to come to the convention on Sunday, and he seems to be interested in giving it a try as part of the day. I'll have more to say about it and the con in general in a separate post as we get into June.
I finally got around to getting the Windstar taken care of (a new alternator and a replacement for the battery the old alternator took down with it) so that's back on the road and I'm giving the Voyager some time off. Since the Windstar has AC it's a more suitable ride as we step into summer. My usual rule of thumb when it comes to auto work is any trip to the garage that comes out under $300 is a victory. Well... this one came in well under $600. Maybe I need to raise the bar of peaceful acceptance? It's done, though, it's done.
SciFi is re-running the entire season so far, 21 episodes, in a monstrous marathon of Heroes starting Saturday morning at 9. Straight on through until 6am Sunday. With the season-ender coming up on NBC Monday night, it's a timely block. I'll likely catch some of it here and there, casually, but there's far too much else to do than stay near a tv for 21 hours. It's definitely the sort of show that'll lend itself to dvd season box sets anyway.
Sunday night sees the Sopranos continue their final countdown. Three episodes to go. Was it really 2001 when Alan Holmes and I were discussing the show as part of the dinner conversation while he was in Philly to deliver a paper at a conference? Yeah, it had to be. We easily agreed that things were unlikely to end well for Tony; we'll finally get to see what it boils down to in a few weeks.
I'm into the free-form feel of the weekend again. As I'm not tired yet, I'm going to get up and get one or two things done. That'll be one or two fewer things to do after I wake up, and a likely boost to general morale.
Comments
I hadn't known about it either until a little past 7 last night when I was catching SciFi's rerun of the season's penultimate episode.
Yeah, it doesn't make much sense to me, either.
I myself suspect that they deliberately started the marathon with Episode 9 to make sure that people still have a reason to buy the inevitable DVD set, just so we can watch them in the right order. But that really doesn't make sense; DVD is so much better a format than VHS for something like this, I think it sells itself.
I see that the DVD set is set for release August 28th, presumably late enough that NBC/SciFi will be able to get ad revenues from reruns this summer, but early enough to let fans buy it and pore over it, priming them for season 2. Also noted is that a 72 minute version of the pilot, previously shown only to attendees at the 2006 San Diego Comic Con will be in the DVD set, though I'm sure it'll be edited to remove a key element of Emerson's "In-Sink-Erator" scene, which NBC was sued over. (So, again, if you have the pilot taped from early on, keep it. An edited version's already been aired and will - unless someone's screwed up majorly - be shown tonight.)
And, yes, I've just counted. 'Landslide' was episode 22. So there just isn't enough room for Sci Fi to run every ep without cutting into paid programming (which they aren't going to do for something that basically everyone is just going to tape anyway), but they did want to run the most recent ones, so that's probably why they did it the way they did it.
As to summer reruns, apparently there is going to be a 6 episode HEROES spin off miniseries this summer.
It's a questionable project, IMHO. It appears very deliberately manufactured. Partially it's there to avoid viewer drop-off during the hiatus, and partially it's there as a sort of viewer feedback element. Each of the six episodes will introduce a new character, and viewers will get to vote on which one will join the main cast in season two.
Presumably this summer they'll simply be rerunning this first season, probably timing it so the finale episode will run the week before season two begins.