You have until this Sunday when the telecast starts to put in your entry for my second annual Bloomington-area Oscar pool. It's for beer money (or dessert money, if you don't drink), it's honor system, and I'm promising to bake a batch of brownies for one of the prizes.

Go here to enter.

As with last year, I'm putting together an Oscar pool, since Matthew Baldwin at Defective Yeti once again provided a script for generating the setup.

( The Fine Print )

A few years ago, when I was still working for Akamai, I would often watch cable late into the night on the weekends. I worked midnight to 8am during the week, and there was only so much you could do to reset your sleep schedule for the two days you had off. Likewise, there wasn't much to do at 3am on a Saturday when your friends were mostly ( Read more... )

My ongoing adventures in consumerism:

First off, Amazon.com has finally broken me. They ship out of multiple warehouses, so when you tell them to combine packages, sometimes it takes them far longer than you would expect, as they have to move the stuff between warehouses before it can be sent out to you. This meant that my last-minute order of ( Read more... )

So, for those who aren't aware, I drive an hour each way to and from work each workday. This means that I spend about two hours in the car, Monday through Friday. Ten hours per week. That's a fair amount of time, particularly in an area with no kickass radio stations. As a consequence, I have grown to consider my iPod to be indispensable. I've ( Read more... )

First off, in Strange Horizons, we're running a piece on "taming the Beast" by Margaret Carter. Quite nifty. Also, we're doing the fall fund drive now. Give early! Give often! (...and get neat prizes!)

More game-related, there's one of those "find the movie" puzzles up at the M&M's site, though it's horror-movie themed, more or less, which is ( Read more... )

(Via IWatchStuff.com)

Simon Pegg and his crew are finally coming out with Hot Fuzz, and two teaser trailers are up here and here (Quicktime required).

If it's half as funny as Shaun of the Dead, I'll be happy.

Last night, I saw Brick with swan_tower, moonandserpent, prosewitch, ninja_turbo, and ninja's friend-whose-name-escapes-me. It was, bar none, the best noir film I've seen in years. princeofcairo was right: "If you are a fan of Dashiell Hammett, every minute that you spend not having seen Rian Johnson's film Brick is a minute of your life thrown away ( Read more... )

Two things:

• swan_tower and I will be in Boston from this evening until Wednesday, at which point I head back to Bloomington and she stays for Readercon. It's unlikely that we'll be able to be that social, but if you're a Boston-area person and would like to try to get together with us, email me, and I'll see if we can figure something out.
• We also saw ( Read more... )

First off, the movie website was incorrect. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth opens this coming weekend at Regal Village Park Cinema 17 (2222 E 146th Street, in Carmel). I know that moonandserpent and buzzermccain had indicated interest. I probably wouldn't be able to do it this weekend or the following weekend (since I'll be in Boston then). Any thoughts on possibly ( Read more... )