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I've seen a Livejournaler or two with a user icon that flashes the message, "December 17, Legolas DIES. Deal." I have to admit, I was tempted to use it myself. Orlando Bloom makes me realize how women probably feel about the scantily-clad women that abound in anime and sci-fi.

(not a spoiler, just a relay of a rumor -- these icons were seen long before the release of the movie.)

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smurf.

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I'm totally going to remember to take my clothes out of the dryer this time.

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Did anyone else see eXistenZ?

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If you turn on the History Channel right now, you can see "A Very Ermey Christmas", with R. Lee Ermey.

Taping obsession.

I have a real obsession with taping things.

It all started back in 1997, when I would tape South Park religiously, figuring it would get cancelled and I'd be the only person to "get it". But it flourished, and all my friends on alt.religion.kibology who didn't get Comedy Central were quite distraught at missing it. I remembered how frustrated I was when MST3K was all the rage, so I made copies of the tape and sent it out.

Of course, they only made six episodes to begin with, so I had a few hours left on the tape to fill. And I put together a masterpiece: after South Park, it was "the TV Wheel", a comedy special produced by Joel Hodgson, with the aid of a forced-perspective device he called "the X-Box". Then it was The State's Last Halloween Special, that comedy troupe's sole appearance on network television. I threw in a few odds and ends, like some live news coverage of Governor Fife Symington driving to his sentencing, under the watchful eye of news choppers. I may have thrown in an episode of Let's Learn Japanese and a local public access program to pad out the last hour. Each segment was introduced by myself, captured in grainy black-and-white, with really really long hair. The complete work was called the Pentomino Tape, and six copies total were made. I've lost track of all of them.

Over the next year or two, I made and shipped a few more South Park tapes. I didn't work during my college years, so I had plenty of time to amass a huge collection of video that I would send to other people who had too much time on their hands. dumplechan sent me a few tapes himself, including some cheesy kung-fu movies, Japanese TV shows, Nick Park animations, and anime.

Now, I'm working forty hours a week, and I'm suffering from a great deal of TiVo Fatigue. Not only do I have hours of programming I must watch, but I also have hours more that I must tape, and archive, in case someone ever needs it. A couple of years ago, I mailed out some CD's full of downloaded South Park episodes, and I have a tape with some Wallace & Ladmo episodes that I've been sitting on for a while. I've also been accumulating Good Eats, Reno 911, Conquest, some George Carlin stand-up specials, and the entire runs of Last Comic Standing, and Jamie's Kitchen.

I'm wondering, though, if I should retire from video collecting. I don't have time to watch this stuff again, and nobody I know has that kind of time either. I'm starting to run out of places to put video tapes, and what places I do have don't really facilitate easy searching. Just about anything worth watching is either legally available on DVD, or obtainable in the grey market of BitTorrent and KaZaA.

But, you know, it looks like Conquest has already been cancelled, and ran too short for a DVD run... so, I'll keep on collecting those, at least. And you never know what Good Eats episode might be useful. And, also, I've searched high and low and nobody has the State's Halloween Special -- not even me. I lost all the tapes, and I can't let that happen again.

So I owe it to the ages to keep on taping, until my apartment is stacked from the floor to the ceiling with VHS tapes.