A Cappella Music, Babylon5, and Firefly, Oh My!

This after­noon, I opened the blinds on the win­dows behind my chair, think­ing it would draw Kioshi off the mon­i­tor (his tail kept obscur­ing the screen) to look out the win­dows. Nope. He turned around, so at least his tail was­n’t in the way, but he was inor­di­nate­ly pleased with him­self because he could then sur­vey his world from his nice, warm perch.

I down­load a ridicu­lous num­ber of pod­casts, then for­get to lis­ten to them. I can’t find my MP3 play­er, and it’s tiny any­way (512k), so it does­n’t hold much. Sam has the same kind, and he gets by, but he’s more moti­vat­ed: it keeps him sane while he’s “out there” every day. I nor­mal­ly take the lazy way out and lis­ten to Pan­do­ra or Last.FM.

For some rea­son, I thought about the pod­casts today as I reached for my head­phones. I opened iTunes and clicked on the first thing I saw: Acapod­cast. Good stuff. I need to do this more often.

Sam and I watched the first DVD of Baby­lon 5 — The Lost Tales tonight. The first half—woof! I nev­er expect­ed such heavy-hand­ed pros­e­ly­tiz­ing from JMS, and I’m dis­ap­point­ed. The sec­ond episode was bet­ter but high­ly pre­dictable. The back­grounds in both episodes looked flat and unbe­liev­able. It was also extreme­ly obvi­ous that they were using as few sets as pos­si­ble. I seem to recall read­ing some­where that all of the orig­i­nal sets were destroyed, so I under­stand that they were work­ing under some con­straints. Still, the orig­i­nal show nev­er had a big bud­get, and there have been sig­nif­i­cant advances in tech­nol­o­gy since that time, so again, I’m dis­ap­point­ed. I’m glad we got this disc from Net­flix, rather than buy­ing it!

I also fin­ished read­ing that Fire­fly-relat­ed graph­ic nov­el, Seren­i­ty: Those Left Behind, it did, tech­ni­cal­ly, fill some gaps between the end of the series and the begin­ning of the movie. It did­n’t answer any ques­tions, though, and most of it felt ter­ri­bly rushed. Some of the dia­logue was even recy­cled from the series! I can’t imag­ine how any­body who bought this thing as three sep­a­rate com­ic books could have been pleased. I’m fair­ly sure that com­ic books were longer than that when I was a kid.

On a hap­pi­er note, Sam made faji­tas tonight, which will pro­vide sev­er­al days of yum­mi­ness. The girl is home now after hav­ing fun with some of her friends, so I’m off to join the Sam­bear in bed.