My wish for today is that everyone watches this, and gets inspired:
The Bloggess is amazing.
Category: Film
Is this something you can share with the rest of us Amazing Larry?!
Anne went to bed before I was tired last night. Being a good husband who doesn't want to get The Wrath, I opted to head into my office on the other side of the house to watch a little TV before I went to sleep, instead of sitting in our bed and watching TV there. (Yes, we live in a house that is filled with televisions; it's part of the new cruelty.)
As I scrolled through the channel guide, I wondered, as I so often do, how it's possible to fill up almost 800 channels with nothing but absolute dogshit … and then I saw it, on HDNet: Pee Wee's Big Adventure.
I love this movie so much, I wish I could marry it (and then go into the other room to watch The Three Amigos when it goes to sleep before I'm tired.) It is one of the very rare perfect movies. The score is perfect. The cinematography is perfect. The script is perfect. The acting, editing, and directing are all perfect. I can't think of many movies from 1985 (holy shit, 1985) that hold up at all today, let alone hold up as perfectly as this one, that, we have established, is perfect.
While I watched the movie, I Twittered about it a little bit, because that's the way we do things here in the year 2525. When I woke up this morning and checked my e-mail, I saw that my friend Joel had seen my Twittering, and was inspired — nay, compelled — to create this:
I told him that the Internet needed to see this right away … and he responded that, while I was sleeping, it had already become today's comic, as if by magic.
The kids seem to enjoy the Fighting Time Lords T-shirt we made, so I told Joel that I thought it should be a T-shirt. What do you think?
[14 hours later…]
Okay, Internet! You asked for it, so Joel and I made it. BEHOLD WESLEY'S BIG ADVENTURE!
here there be dungeons and dragons
Enter the Dragon from Roshan Murthy on Vimeo.
This is a delightful, short documentary about people who play D&D and other RPGs. If you've ever wondered why we play, or if you've ever attempted to explain to someone why we play, I think you'll enjoy it.
drag your blanket blindly and fill your heart with smoke
Letters of Note is one of my favorite websites.
Yesterday, LoN shared this note from James Dean, which he wrote shortly after moving to New York to pursue an acting career, and before he became James Dean™:
Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. The stage is like a religion you dedicate yourself to and then suddenly you find that you don’t have time to see friends and it’s not for them to understand you don’t have anybody. You’re all alone with your concentration and your imagination and that’s all you have. You’re an actor.
He wrote that note in 1952. During the next three years, he would star in East of Eden, Giant, and Rebel Without A Cause … then his life was over. I can see him, sitting alone in New York — a city that can make the most gregarious, confident person in thw world feel tiny and insignificant — writing that down, staring at an uncertain future that stared right back at him. It's hard to separate the actor and his work from the legend, but when I read this yesterday, I wondered if he was able to enjoy the success that he eventually had, or if he was just one of those artists who need the pain and anguish to create.
But this stuff that he thought made being an actor feel so lonely? I think it’s what makes being an actor awesome. I love being left alone with my concentration and imagination. I love making something where something wasn't before, using my imagination and that weird thing in my artists' brain that makes me weird. (Come to think of it, that’s what I love about being a writer, too.) One of my favorite acting teachers, who helped me level up quite a bit, once told us that when we're performing, whether it's for an audience of thirty or an audience of three thousand, we have to be committed to our character, completely consumed by the scene, and intimately connected to the other actors. She said that acting was "quiet, public solitude," and for some reason I never bothered to examine too closely, I grokked that, and it's stayed with me ever since.
I always feel sad when I think about or watch James Dean, knowing that he died so young, before he really had a chance to figure things out the way we do when we get into our thirties. I hope that, if he had, the lonely kid who wrote that note would have once day found comfort in quiet, public solitude.
Your move, Fan Fiction Writers
This is Safe for Work.
As Chris Hardwick says, I think I'm going to buy this, and skip the naughty bits so I can see the story.
(There are a bunch of NSFW behind the scenes pictures from actress April O'Neil — who is a gigantic geek, apparently — right here.)