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Interested? Sure.  I think the bigger question is how much interest there might be for that sort of thing, around here anyway.  I got the impression that our Hurt Locker episode wasn't terribly well received due to all the military talk.  To be fair, I believe that was my first time on mic, and I kind of stumbled through it.

I wouldn't have a whole lot to say about martial arts stuff or westerns though, and I don't know how long we could go before we just start covering the same ground over and over again.

That said, I'd be willing to give it a shot.

I love that we already have a title, font and graphic too; great job Ash!

SDCC is still on my bucket list.  Crossing fingers for a week off next year, not only for Comic Con, but to see all my west coast peeps again (damn I miss you guys).

I have been to a few small Star Trek conventions.  When I was in middle / high school a company used to hold them at a local hotel back home.  I got to meet Gates McFadden, Brent Spiner, and Armin Shimerman.  The only real story I have from any of them was going to my first.  I had never been to a con, but I figured I needed to get there early.  So I rode my bike the eight and a half miles there the night before, hoping to get a good spot in line.  But there was no line, and the hotel staff told me I couldn't just camp in the hallway outside the room.  So, I just sat outside all night, eventually falling  asleep.  When I woke up I found that a line had indeed started to form, so I took my place, confident that I would get right in.  Turns out they sell tickets to this sort of thing in advance, so by the time I got in it was already packed.  It was pretty cool though; I bought all kinds of silly things.  One of those was where I got my hands on bootleg copies (from the laserdiscs I assume) of the widescreen (remember when those were hard to find?) extended cuts of Alien and Aliens.  I also got a bootleg of what I thought was some sort of Star Wars behind the scenes / making of feature, which turned out to be The Holiday Special.  I did not watch it.

Whatever anyone thinks of Prometheus, I'm looking forward to the BTS and commentary on the DVD.

I guess Weyland Corp. will buy out Microsoft soon, and just never develop a new os.  And we thought XP was around for a long time.

Ok, here's what I was on about earlier:

On the left, we have the suit, on the right, the Engineer they wake up.  They're clearly different.  From what my fuzzy memory and what other stills I've dug up indicate, I believe the four Engineers in the pilot room holo are all in the righthand getup.

I had a couple more thoughts after seeing it a second time.

Caught a 3D showing this time.  Still meh on the whole idea, but it works pretty well on the CG stuff like the tunnel map.

Someone mentioned a comparison to The Fountain.  If the stuff coming out of the tree at the end was black goo, and a chestburster came out of the guy instead of flowers, there ya go.

I did notice something on the second showing: the Engineer that they wake up, is different than the one we see in the beginning.  He already has a Giger like appearance, whereas the one in the beginning was more of a straight up albino.  I couldn't tell from the point-cloud-flight-recorder (which is somehow also interactive?) David activates, whether or not the rest of them looked like that or not.  It could be that HE was what the others were running from, and was the thing that killed off the others.  My money's on, we never find out.

Sigh.  More interesting ideas, more questions.

This is what I meant by the movie creating more questions than it answers.

Here's another: the last surviving Engineer, presumably from the time of the outbreak, doesn't climb in the chair and fly to Earth to carry out the blah-blah-blah-plan-blah-blah.  Nope, he goes to sleep.

Now, I'm willing to give the story some latitude, because they're dealing with questions like "where do we come from?" and "who made us and why?"  And to the film's credit, the do touch on that.  Why did we create robots? Because we can!  Why did the Engineers seed (?) life on Earth? Because the could?  The film seems more interested in ideas and raising questions than giving answers, and in terms of a search for the meaning of life I'm ok with that.

I'm not sure how I feel about the whole "because I can / we can / they could" motivation in terms of writing a story.  It strikes me as an interesting idea, but not one that makes for an interesting story.  I cite the recent Pixar Story Rules: #2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

Maybe there's an overarching logic that will make sense if they make the next (2?) film(s), but I while I'm not a writer, I know enough to understand that even if that's what you're going for, each film still has to have its own internal logic.

The Engineers are left as this complete enigma; you don't know who they are, what they want, what they're doing, or why they're doing it.  Now, as an idea, that's God personified, which is a cool idea.  The film is grappling with the idea of meeting our creators, e.g., God.  But again, interesting idea does not equal interesting story.

The best I can come up with regarding the Engineers, I have summed up in this imaginary response to whatever question David asks when they thaw out the one Engineer:

"Look, we (the Engineers) basically used Earth as a test bed for biological warfare or experimentation; we didn't intend to create you humans.  Still, we thought it was cute how you developed intelligence near ours, so we'd pop in there every few millennia and say Hi!  I mean, who doesn't like being worshiped like a god, eh?  But we saw the potential for you to evolve to the point where you could have the ability to run around the stars like we do, and we could't have that.  So, we gave you a map to our super secret weapons facility, so that when you figured out how to get there, we could destroy you, and start over again.  So thank you for waking me up; I've been asleep for a very long time, and now I must go wipe you all out."  //rips David's head off, kills everyone, fly's off.

I've been meaning to post this for a while now, but I keep forgetting.

For a genuine, but humorous take on Star Wars in a courtroom scenario, check out Star Wars on Trial.

Basically a bunch of authors and essayists (many of whom have authored Star Wars related material) got together, chose topics to debate, and presented an argument for and against each, including opening and closing statements.

I am so stoked for this.  My only question is "To 3D or not to 3D?"  I'm thinking not, but I'm sure I'll wind up seeing it more than once anyway, so maybe once each.

Fuck. Yeah.