I called up DirecTV and ordered their high-def receiver/DVR on Sunday. Today, realizing that hooking up the DVR to our current A/V receiver would be problematic, I ordered a new receiver, HDMI cables (thank you, MonoPrice, for reasonable prices), and a PS2 component cable. I ended up with the Onkyo TX-SR606 receiver, which met two important ( Read more... )

I picked up an Xbox 360 a couple of weeks ago, along with a couple games. One of the games was fine on our TV, the other had barely-legible text that cried out for an HDTV. Since I started the new job, misphit and I decided to go ahead and get a new TV (37" 1080p Westinghouse for those keeping score, it's about the same size as our old TV but wider and ( Read more... )

http://www.netflix.com/Help?p_faqid=3962

To borrow a phrase, this is vexing.

I finally signed up with NetFlix last weekend; I've already received my second movie in the mail.

But... I only have about 43 movies in my queue. That might last me a year, but a good chunk of it is anime in season chunks (which I'll watch through quickly, I think) or stuff I've already seen (but wouldn't mind seeing again). So I'm taking ( Read more... )

Hrrrm. Watched Narnia last night with misphit, and I really liked it ( Read more... )

Watched Ghost Rig last night.

Now, I'll be honest - it'd be hard to come up with a more hilarious B-Movie Premise than "ecoterrorists take over an oil rig, only to discover that it's haunted as they die one by one."

Thing is, it wasn't half bad. Well, OK... it was only half bad. At least in the same league as Terminal Invasion or Alien ( Read more... )

The remake was pretty funny... Chris Rock and Adam Sandler were either perfect for the roles, or added something distinctly their own to the roles; they were funny without using the movie as a vehicle for their comedy ( Read more... )

So, we have a second cat again. We rescued him last year (abandoned alley kitten), and icicole cared for him until recently, when he became a problem at her place. We took him back in, and aside from being a little odd (he sometimes freaks out about the ceiling fan in the kitchen), he's been great. Fleming (the cat) is much better socialized than our ( Read more... )

I'm not going to talk much about The Butterfly Effect - neither the movie nor the way of describing one effect of chaos. Rather, I want to talk about the part of chaos theory that gets short shrift in movies, prediction of chaotic systems. Cuz, here's the thing kids: you can still predict chaotic systems.

( Chaos Theory in Time Travel Movies )

I thought Pitch Black was great because it took the time to think through the *how* and *why* of the weird setting the characters found themselves in (I'm a big hard science fiction fan, though). The actors and actresses also did great jobs acting, sterling performances by scifi standards, and the writing for the characters was oriented toward ( Read more... )