INTO: Kung Fu, chillaxing, music, naughty behavior, sexy tattoos, and piercings.
NOT INTO: People who are stupid because they are to lazy to be any other way.
MAKES ME HAPPY: Penguins, hanging with friends, reading a good book, learning new things, road trips.
MAKES ME SAD: Considering where I live it’s a LONG list, which includes running. Running is a terrible activity, and should be banned.
HOBBIES: Kung Fu, reading, drawing, writing.
5 THINGS I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: I can’t name just five things…definitely my books, my laptop, my cellphone, my car, my bed, my jeans, my iPod…Okay, I’m just going to land up listing everything so I am going to stop now 😉
VICES: Not having a brain/mouth filter, being a HUGE flirt, being stubborn, chocolate.
I SPEND MOST OF MY FREE TIME: Training or teaching, reading, studying, hanging with my favorite people.
The old woman cupped my hand in hers. Narrowing her eyes and making a clicking noise in the back of her throat she looked up and smiled warmly. “You are untrusting in love,” she said. “Why? What is there to worry about, you have had two great heartbreaks in your life and they are over, it’s time to put the past behind you. I look in your eyes and see such warmth, too bad you cannot speak with your eyes.” She lets my hand go and it falls into my lap. I guess that lady gets paid to say those things, but at 2 AM in New York City it suddenly seems so real, and I walk back through Times Square to my hotel wondering about what she said. Was she right? Was I totally untrusting?
I went on a date the other night with a bartender from a trendy bar downtown. He wasn’t anything like me, and while once that would have really frightened me, now it seems really appealing, challenging, intriguing. I had a great time, and at the end of the night back home at my apartment I found myself smiling stupidly, wishing my roommate was home so I could talk her ear off about it. I never heard from that guy again, and it was a bit unsettling for a few days. What did I do wrong? This was so typical.
After a few days of not hearing back I moved on; not everyone gets an explanation as to why something doesn’t work out. I couldn’t help but laugh at myself a little bit — here I was wondering why everything seemed to click when it didn’t really. Who does that? “You do that,” my roommate points out. “You do that all the time. Have a great time and then freak out and run away and never tell the guy why. That’s like, your favorite thing to do!” I think about it and I can’t help but laugh, at myself, at the poor guys I have dated in the past five months, and at the whole situation in general. She’s right, I have an inability to tell the truth when it comes to wanting to end something before it really starts; I just slither back to my bar scene life and immerse myself in work. One can always trust the reliability of a 45 hour work week. Does that make me untrusting? Easily bored? Non committal?
I have always considered trust in relationships to be something that is created over time once you find someone who doesn’t drive you nuts. All of a sudden I realize that I’m looking at the cell phone you left on my nightstand when you were rushing to work and I roll over and go back to bed – instead of flipping through your texts. I’m left alone in your apartment and your computer is right there with your e-mail up on the screen, and I sign out and into mine without even a second glance. You want to go out with your friends to the strip club with an eight ball of cocaine in your pocket? Sure, have a good time. I trust you. See? I can be trusting.
That old lady was wrong. I have trust in a lot of things. I trust that my friends will get me through anything. I trust that I’m a good judge of character, and that even if something doesn’t work out that I chose that person or that path because I saw something good in it, because I thought that it would make me a better person. I trust that I will not always do the right thing but that I will know the difference between the two, and that I will do better next time, be stronger and able to learn from my mistakes. I might be untrusting in love, but that is only because a lot of times the way it’s ended up for me has left me feeling like I trusted something that wasn’t real, or that was only real for a little while and that is devastating. I was never mislead, nor was I ever misleading to anyone I ever called mine. If I mislead you, you were never mine, nor I yours.
Untrusting in love seems normal to me to an extent; it’s good to be cautious with your heart after you have spent so long learning to trust yourself. I’ll open up when the time is right. For now, the only trust I need is from the bartender shaking my martini or muddling my mojito. It’s almost summer time, and I smell some really poor life choices on the horizon. If there’s one thing I can trust in, it’s that.
Our Fiction Friday serialized novel, The Killswitch Review, is a futuristic murder mystery with killer sociopolitical commentary (and some of the best sex scenes we’ve ever read!). Written by bestselling sci-fi author Steven-Elliot Altman (with Diane DeKelb-Rittenhouse), it offers a terrifying postmodern vision in the tradition of Blade Runner and Brave New World…
By the year 2156, stem cell therapy has triumphed over aging and disease, extending the human lifespan indefinitely. But only for those who have achieved Conscientious Citizen Status. To combat overpopulation, the U.S. has sealed its borders, instituted compulsory contraception and a strict one child per couple policy for those who are permitted to breed, and made technology-assisted suicide readily available. But in a world where the old can remain vital forever, America’s youth have little hope of prosperity.
Jason Haggerty is an investigator for Black Buttons Inc, the government agency responsible for dispensing personal handheld Kevorkian devices, which afford the only legal form of suicide. An armed “Killswitch” monitors and records a citizen’s final moments — up to the point where they press a button and peacefully die. Post-press review agents — “button collectors” — are dispatched to review and judge these final recordings to rule out foul play.
When three teens stage an illegal public suicide, Haggerty suspects their deaths may have been murders. Now his race is on to uncover proof and prevent a nationwide epidemic of copycat suicides. Trouble is, for the first time in history, an entire generation might just decide they’re better off dead.
(Catch up with the previous installments of Killswitch – see links below – then continue reading after the jump…)
I go back a long way with the writer/directors of the fourth American Pie movie. I saw their first film Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle months before it was out and interviewed them for a screenwriting magazine that is long defunct. In fact, we met at the Newsroom Café outside of New Line Cinema, which is also now defunct, absorbed by Warner Brothers.
Fresh out of college, the writing duo was ambitious and enthusiastic about entering the comedy landscape. Back in 2004, the R-rated comedy was just making a comeback with Old School, and Wedding Crashers and The Hangover were years away. As ‘80s children and comedy junkies, they wanted to give this generation the comedies that would play every night in dorm rooms across the nation.
We got to catch up every time they wrote a new Harold and Kumar movie, one of which they directed. Now they’ve been handed the reigns of American Reunion. They decided to bring back every single actor from the first American Pie, including those who were not included in American Wedding. They also ignored the four straight to video movies under the American Pie brand.
In Reunion, Jim (Jason Biggs) go back to their high school reunion and see what’s become of their classmates, and clash with the current high school seniors. A virginal 18-year-old is throwing herself at the happily married Jim, and he still ends up caught naked in the kitchen, and later practicing dominatrix role play with Michelle (Alyson Hannigan). These days, the guys have grown up themselves, with marriages and children of their own. They still like to tell dirty jokes though about penises and MILFs.
INTO: Surfing the web, drinking, partying with friends, sleepovers, pillow fights, cats, long drives (especially at night), living life and smiling every day – all day.
NOT INTO: Fighting, politics, hangovers, doing dishes, small yappy dogs.
MAKES ME HAPPY: My friends, my family, my kitten, shopping, eating junk food all day while sitting on the computer blogging about how much fun last night was…even if I can’t remember it.
MAKES ME SAD: Saying goodbye, sad movies, finding out my milk has expired, pulling my iPod out only to find it’s dead.
HOBBIES: I make jewelry, vintage shop, blog about living richly for cheap, surf the web for various reasons, and I also collect masks.
5 THINGS I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: My Computer, my kitten, my credit card, Vans Era’s, sunglasses.
I SPEND MOST OF MY FREE TIME: Sitting on the computer or partying. If I’m not doing one of those two things, something is probably wrong with me LOL.
Mission Statement: Someone once said to me “Please never stop drawing naked ladies.” And so far, I haven’t.
Medium: Chalk pastels, ink, and watercolor.
Aesthetic: Oversaturated crumbly false color. Otherwise, I don’t think I’ve developed an aesthetic yet. I keep at it in the hope an aesthetic emerges.
Notable Achievements: I designed a vodka bottle once. It was like a cubist rendering of an embrace warped into three dimensions and filled with sexy fermented potato juice. It would have been lovely, but the company that hired me went bankrupt and it was never made. I recently did a CD cover. Some of my pieces once hung in a group show. Art-wise, that is about it. I manage technology workers for a living. A long time ago I was an actor. I make these drawings now, when I’m not working, because I Iike the way the chalk feels, the clouds of loose technicolor dust I have to blow off the paper, talking to the women who sit for me, translating them into completely nonsensical colors.
Why We Should Care: What I hope is that there is something engaging about these pictures, that they catch your eye the way they did mine as I drew them. It’s really no more complicated than that. Most of what I do is an attempt to grab people with colors and say “isn’t this lovely?” There’s no statement or deeper meaning. I kind of don’t think there needs to be. People don’t walk away from drawings philosophically engaged, they don’t remember a clever argument they had to read a card to understand. But just the image, light and texture, that lingers in memory, that’s what this is for.
I Want Me Some: I don’t have an online store, or any prints or other items at the moment. The drawings are all for sale though. I can be contacted through my website, twitter, or inside SG. Feel free to follow, sling comments or inquiries at me through any of those channels. Thanks!
The first clip from The Avengers movie has arrived, and it features Black Widow being a total badass. To go along with the forty second trailer, ten new official wallpapers have been released as well. With the movie less than a month out, some fans have started committing to not watching any of more clips or trailers because they feel they are spoiling too much. If you were looking to save all the excitement for the theatre, you may want refrain from watching this clip or any of the others that come out over the next month.
Joss Whedon’s The Avengers debuts May 4, but first up we have Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods releasing in just over a week on April 13. A new TV spot for the Whedon’s sci-fi horror thriller has come out. Based on what we’ve seen so far, this movie stretches the limits of the horror genre beyond anything we could expect.
Star Trek 2 production is well under way, and Alex Kurtzman has given an update on how things are coming along. Beyond praising the addition of Benedict Cumberbatch’s new villain role, he also gave us a bit of the story, saying that the crew is still learning to work together and are still on the way to becoming the bridge crew we remember and love from the series.
The Hunger Games destroyed box office records, but there may be trouble ahead for the sequels. While all of the cast has signed on to reprise their roles in the sequels, director Gary Ross has not. Ross has been credited as part of the reason the movie did so well, but his compensation from the movie was less than would be expected for an Oscar-nominated director. There are rumors that his failure to sign is over a financial dispute.
Back in October, the world lost one of its most brilliant minds, Steve Jobs. Now there is a movie in the making called Jobs that will biographically feature his life and times. The big thing everyone is talking about though is that Ashton Kutcher is playing the part of Steve Jobs. Kutcher is most famous for his roles where he plays moronic characters such as Kelso from That 70’s Show. Now he is set to portray one of the greatest innovative minds of the modern world.
Doctor Who fans should set their dials to conspiracy, because it’s rumor time. It started as what many considered an April Fool’s Day prank, but it didn’t die there. Reports of the first female Doctor have flooded the internet, after UK paper the Daily Express made seemingly joke claims. However a mole has since said the Time Lord will regenerate as a female as a big plot twist timed for the show’s 50th anniversary.
On Monday April 2, two different but equally awesome nerd channels premiered on Youtube. Geek & Sundry, a channel founded by Felicia Day, features several shows covering various geeky interests. It is also the new home of The Guild, which has an awesome new promotional music video that calls out nerd posers (see above). Other featured shows include Dark Horse Motion Comics, Wil Wheaton’s TableTop gaming show, Felicia Day’s video blog, and so much more.
The other channel of note is The Nerdist Channel, created by Chris Hardwick a.k.a. the Nerdist. Hardwick hosts a bowling show where he bowls against other celebrity groups for charity. One episode will even feature them facing off against the Geek & Sundry team. There are lots of shows still to premier on the Nerdist channel, including one hosted by Rob Zombie, a show hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and a show with Neil Patrick Harris and Muppets.
Both the Nerdist Channel and Geek & Sundry are pioneering a shift towards quality internet television programming. Unlike cable, you can enjoy all of these shows for free as long as you can get on the internet. In return, all they ask is you hit subscribe to their YouTube channels so they can hopefully keep this kind of programming coming.
