It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Tag: tv (Page 2 of 8)

Day 339: things that happened

January 17, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I beat Uncharted 2 last night. It was a non-stop thrill ride, even if I’m still not entirely sold on the treasure collecting part of the game. I played a bit of multiplayer today, where I was mainly manhandled by skeletons with shotguns who sounded like British people.

We made decent headway on the vine infestation in our backyard, despite strong resistance and being completely outnumbered. We will continue our quest to prevent our walls and the tree back there from being choked to death by these evil vines tomorrow if the rain doesn’t make the prospect completely miserable.

We ate at a small Chinese restaurant in San Leandro tonight named Little Namking. While we were there, Katie asked me where Namking is. I wasn’t sure. After returning home and looking it up, there actually is no Namking. It probably is a bad transliteration of Nanjing, which is actually close to Shanghai. Either way, the food was pretty good and very cheap. I can’t wait to go back another and try their signature beef chow fun. There’s nothing that compares to a good chow fun.

Then we watched the scandalous second episode of The Bachelor on a laptop in bed. I tried to log in through Facebook Connect so that I could create a text commentary for the episode with all of the snarky things Katie and I spouted but technology was not on my side tonight. I hope, however, that my attempts did not – as Katie suggested – post to my wall that I was watching The Bachelor a dozen times. I only watched it once, and that’s shameful enough.

I also played a bit of the Saboteur today, where I eliminated an entire Nazi radar station single-handed, but accidentally shot a nun in the process.

Day 322: 2009 favorites

December 30, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Author’s note: This post is ghostwritten by Katie. Scott is busy reading the directions to a new board game we got for Christmas, so he’s dictated his list of “favorites” for 2009. I’m providing the descriptions, which probably won’t give you any real insight as to why he picked them.

From Scott: I wanted to make a best of 2009 list, but seeing as it’s only my opinion on things, calling anything “the best” seems like an overstatement. So instead, here are my favorites of 2009:

Favorite Movie: Where the Wild Things Are
I talked Scott into going to see the Maurice Sendak exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum on Free Museum Day. He wanted to go to the Chabot Science Center, but I convinced him it’d be a better strategy to go into the city during the day and then come back to the East Bay and check out the science center at night, since they have an observatory. It would have been a brilliant plan except that everyone else apparently had the same idea. By the time we got to the observatory there was NOWHERE to park so we had to turn around and go home. The only relevant point to this story, of course, is that Maurice Sendak wrote Where the Wild Things Are, and we got to see a lot of the original drawings that day at the museum. The movie was pretty good too.

Favorite Old TV Show: Lost
I don’t even remember what happened last season on Lost. Time travel? Juliet might be dead? (Oops, spoiler.) They’ve been on hiatus longer than the human gestation period! We’ll have a BABY before we know how this show ends!

Favorite New TV Show: a toss-up between Glee and Better Off Ted
Yes, the singing is fake, and yes, the baby drama is a little over the top, but how many other TV shows have choreographed musical numbers? Glee may be cheesy, but who among us doesn’t love cheese? Better Off Ted is pretty funny too. I feel like there are a lot of shows about people named Ted, though at the moment the only other one I can think of is How I Met Your Mother. That probably isn’t relevant either.

Favorite Theatre Event: American Idiot
For those of you not in the know, Berkeley Rep produced a musical this fall in collaboration with Green Day. The result, American Idiot, felt a lot like I suspect Hair felt like back in the 60s. Disenchanted youth abusing drugs and alcohol to dull the pain of real life…one guy goes off to war, another gets his girlfriend pregnant, the rest of the plot is a little fuzzy. We had seats in the second row. The set was enormous, the music was loud, and the baby had a great time thrashing about in my belly like the dancers onstage.

Favorite Internet Thing (Useful): Google Wave
Umm…Scott sent me an invitation to Google Wave, but I never actually tried it, so I have no comment on this one. Other than I heard from other people that it wasn’t useful.

Favorite Internet Thing (Useless): Yo Balloon Boy
I was disappointed to find out, about 10 minutes ago, that this is an actual internet thing and not just something clever that Brice thought up for his facebook status update.

Favorite Food: Yogurt by weight
I’ve never seen Scott so swept away by any other trend. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that you feel like you can’t get ripped off–you’re paying for exactly what you put in your bowl. That and he feels like an “expert.” And I can pretend it’s somewhat healthy!

Favorite National Event: Barack Obama’s inauguration
We only saw about 5 minutes of the inauguration telecast before heading out to work. We had recorded the whole thing on our DVR but never watched it and it got deleted. We saw the important part, though, when he was sworn in.

Favorite Personal Event: Katie’s pregnant!
I bet we can all predict Scott’s favorite personal event of 2010. Hint: Katie will no longer be pregnant! (And I don’t mean the series finale of Lost.)

Scott: Wow, Katie did such a great job writing most of this post, maybe I’ll make her write all my posts in the new year! Tomorrow, I’ll write a lot about video game this past year, which I would never let Katie write because she’d make video games sound stupid and boring. She once wrote an ode to a Playstation that should never be seen by any video-game-loving gent. It would break a boy’s heart.

Day 312: outplay?

December 20, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Something weird happened on the Survivor season finale tonight.

This post may require some knowledge into the history of Survivor winners and also some general Survivor knowledge.

Generally, two types of contestants win the game: maniuplators and robo-Survivors.  Manipulators do very well in the social game and either fly under the radar but still pull the right strings or take alliance leadership reins from the get-go and never let go.  Robo-Survivors just keep winning challenges after the merge and never give people a chance to vote them out.

The rest of the cast is filled out by those who can’t walk the fine line between being aggressive and being bossy, those judged too physically weak to help win challenges, those judged too likable to be a threat in the finals, and coat-tail riders.

Russell, on this past season, was one of the most blatant and cocky manipulators I’ve ever seen.  He managed to, from day one, convince people to trust him when they shouldn’t have and sway and dictate votes for nearly every tribal council.  He went into the finals with two allies of his (but, really, who wasn’t an ally of his at one time or another?) and he ended up losing.

And not even to the charismatic handsome bro-date-worthy doctor who managed to win an immunity challenge and consistently get votes against him because he was a threat!

This is the first time I’ve actually seen a coat-tail-rider win the game for no other reason than the fact that the person who actually played the game better was too obnoxious and dislikable to vote for.

Which makes me wonder: is this a one-time thing?  Was this just the people the jury was composed of this time, or has there been an actual ground-level shift in the thinking of Survivor?  Does “Outwit, Outlast, Outplay” no longer actually tell the whole story?

It’s a bit like running a perfect political campaign, only to find out after the votes come in that the people are now basing their votes off of your congressional voting record.  Sure, it’s a valid criteria, but that’s not how the game has been played.  Who would have guessed that basing your play style off of the winners of the past 18 seasons was actually a bad idea?

Certainly not me.

Day 291: flashforward

November 29, 2009 / / 0 Comments

After that depressing end to the Steeler game today, Katie and I caught up on the last couple FlashForward episodes that we missed.  While the show itself is a nice LOST replacement until 2010 rolls around, I find the premise pretty intriguing.

Barring all the grisly death and disaster that the blackout caused, what would life be like if we had a brief flash of our future?  What if we saw a relatively true vision of what we were doing for a little over 2 minutes on April 29th?

There’s an interesting facet of human nature that the show portrays through several characters, and that’s the fact that by even being given a small glimpse of the future, the future has already changed.  There are people throwing parties on April 29th because the date was significant due to the flash forwards.  There are chance meetings that are already written because of the flash forwards.

There is a set of future events that are opened up as possibilities by the simple fact that the future has been seen.  This idea is fascinating to think about.

Of course, equally interesting is the simple question of what I personally would expect to see in my flash forward.  Most of our lives are relatively simple; I assume my flash forward wouldn’t involve people trying to kill me or seeing people I had presumed dead.  But I would get to see my baby, which would be rewarding enough for me.

Would seeing that future change my daily actions?  Would I try to drive towards that future?  Let it manifest itself?  See if I could change it?  It’d certainly be a fascinating conversation topic for the next six months.

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