22Apr03 (Monthenor): Only eight panels this week, but damn if that ain't animation!

Anything else to talk about? Doop de doo…I played a bit more Dark Cloud 2. Just a little more fishing and golf, really. Then I broke out some Final Fantasy Tactics. Tell ya what, turn-based strategy may not be for everybody, but I LOVE that thang. Oh yeah. Knights and Priests and Archers with time to plan…

Don't mind that chip on my shoulder… it's just the sky falling.
04.22.03 (Morgion)

We've know for a while that Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be wrapping up this year. There were whispers and rumors, and finally Sarah Michelle Gellar Herself confirmed she wouldn't be back (you have to capitalize "Herself", she insists).

We all know that The Great (Fake) Blonde One wants to pursue her movie career. </fakequotes> With her hubby. *gag* There is a Scooby Doo 2 in the works, you know. They've already started filming, so no, you can't kill it. You had your chance before, but noooo, you had to go to the first one in theaters and give them a reason. o I wash my hands of this atrocity; I only recently saw it from Blockstdeo ("Blockbuster Video", sans lights in a few letters).

However, we know that SMG is not the most, how you say… civil. She has been characterized as a megalomaniacal überbitch… here, at least, if no where else recently. I do have some backup for this; her utterly whipped husband Freddie Prinze Jr. recently commented that Sarah Michelle Gellar wasn't getting enough credit for Buffy. I read the snippet and made gaping fish-mouth noises. Monthenor could only manage, "She has a cult following! Cult following!" My favorite of FPJ's comments (because it's so forehead-slapping ironic), was the following: "But things change, and people's egos get in the way sometimes. They make poor decisions."

For clarification and amusing emphasis, he was not talking about Sarah. Apparently someone on the show had a bigger ego than her. Funny… at the wrap party, the rest of Buffy's cast was sad it was ending. Maybe it was her upstaging mirror.

[ Part of me wants to try a game of anagrams with Sarah and Freddie's full names… maybe expand to the rest of the Scooby Doo cast if nothing sufficiently amusing emerges. The small, sane part of me keeps slamming its fingers in a door to distract me. ]

Now the news that not only will there be no Buffy spin off this fall, all Buffy projects are on hold. Oh, sure, there's a possibility for Anthony Stewart Head in Ripper… on the BBC! Blarg. Joss was writing the last Buffy script in early April; "The show is about life, and the final statement on life is death." You are a horrible, evil man Joss, but for all the right reasons, and we love you for it.

Oh, and on a non-Buffy worldview-collapsing note, Patrick Stewart says he won't do Jean-Luc Picard again. *sigh* Nemesis was ass, but if only Rick Berman wasn't so crazy… I do agree with one insightful comment from a fan on the news: "Trek has gone from 'space western' social commentary to techno-babble gee-whiz effects to in-your-face b00bz!!"

As I was typing my post this (Tuesday) evening, I saw an ad for Verizon. With the Phone Guy and a Phone Chick. A fucking Phone Chick. There was much screaming and gnashing of teeth. I hate you world… or at least you, Verizon marketing department. I am assuming you didn't pay some company to construct that drivel.

Someone stole my idea for the SciFi-Tron 2000 X Millennium Edition!
04.22.03 (Morgion)

Monty and I just started watching an episode of Voyager, Workforce, Part I. It started off with an eerie similarity to an episode of Stargate SG-1, Beneath the Surface. Janeway is running around a large, industrial-looking complex, out of uniform, weaving through crowds of many other species which appear equally industrious.

Seven of Nine is an "efficiency monitor", Tom Paris got fired (by Seven, to beat us with even more irony) after half a day and is trying to get work in a bar, and Tuvok is laughing at jokes (well, mostly logically reducing them into their constituent elements, a la Data). Later, Tuvok starts having flashbacks about his "former life" and tries to convince his fellow crew members turned strangers that "This isn't right! We don't belong here!"

Oh, and all of them have amnesia (if you haven't figured that out by now). Isn't the lack of knowledge about their true selves yet uncanny tendency to assume familiar roles both ironic and amusing? Ah ha ha ha!

Plus there's the Emergency Command Hologram / Doctor and Ensign Kim vying to outrank each other. This is funny because Kim has been on Voyager for six years, and is still an ensign. In comparison, Kim's friend Lieutenant Tom Paris was kicked out of Starfleet for a reckless shuttle maneuver that killed officers, joined the Maquis, was captured and put in a Federation penal colony (in New Zealand… I guess they thought the French Riviera would be too posh), recruited into the Voyager crew, and then promoted to Conn Officer and reinstated as a Lieutenant.

Then five years later, he broke the Prime Directive, blew up some ocean-polluting alien factories, got demoted to Ensign, and spent thirty days in the brig. A little under two years later, he was re-instated to Lieutenant for "outstanding performance" (note: he knocked up the Chief Engineer).

Learn the lesson. Even in the altruistic Federation, crime pays, friends are fickle, and the bad boy gets the chick.