Soylent Red

It's been a long time coming, but I can now finally declare that Soylent Red is dead. It may protest otherwise, but it will be stone dead in a moment. It's been nailed to the perch for a while, and will soon be pushing up daisies.

Fear not, however. For one thing, fear is an inappropriate response to the death of a blog. For another, I've started a new blog. It's at roryparle.com, which is a domain that I've had lying around for a bit. It has the great advantage of running on a blogging system that was not written by me, which means I don't have to be the poor fool who fixes things when they inevitably go wrong. Huzzah! This should mean more frequent posting because I will no longer be approaching the composition of a blog post with the trepidation ordinarily reserved for man with magnets strapped to his body walking into a knife shop.

I'll get onto sorting out feed redirects in a moment, but if you want to be sure not to miss anything you can subscribe to the feed directly.

This site will remain up, but stagnant, for the foreseeable future.

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I've just taken another significant step on the road from fake movie buff ("I love movies, me." "What do you think of the Godfather trilogy?" "Um, yeah, I've been meaning to see those.") to real movie buff. Platoon has sat on my DVD shelf for the last half year, ever since my last abortive effort to see it was scuppered by the shoddy workmanship of the Chinese DVD manufacturing industry ("Yarrr!"). Back then I settled for a long-overdue re-watching of Se7en, the better known sequel to S6x, to meet my John C. McGinley-viewing needs.

Still, the urge to see Platoon remained, so it got thrown on the DVD pile during one of my then-frequent purchasing sprees. And there it remained until today. I was looking through the available films on ScreenClick (our poor-man's Netflix) compiling my wishlist, when I realised that I had an unwatched classic sitting on the shelf.

Not just one classic, actually. Today's viewing was a toss-up between Platoon and Goodfellas—I know, I know, I suck at movies.

So that's how my Sunday evening turned into a viewing of a bloody war movie filled with death, and guns, and War-is-Hell, and betrayal, and honor, and deceit, and that one guy with a massive scar, and McGinley—I swear to God this is true—saying the line, "Hey their Bob-o," in exactly the same way he delivers it in Scrubs, and napalm, and the quiet religious guy who goes crazy.

Now I don't want to give that whole spiel of an introduction and then finish with a one-line review. So I'll do a two-line review instead. Here it is:

Well worth the wait.

Best. Death. Ever.

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Regular readers may know that I'm something of a fan of one Danny Wallace. Not just a fan, actually, but a subject—Danny is the king of his own micronation, The Kingdom of Lovely, of which I am a citizen. He's also The Leader of my not-cult, Join Me (it's not a cult; it's a collective).

Danny has a new book out, called Friends Like These. It's about a quest (oh yes! another one!) to track down a bunch of old friends Danny went to school with twenty years ago. To promote the book, the Danny Wallace Appreciation Society group on Facebook ran a competition in which people were asked to submit their stories of how one of Danny's previous books—Yes Man—had affected them.

It seems I won. Nice one. I look forward to the copy of Friends Like These I won to join the other two I accidentally pre-ordered.

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What's brown and rhymes with Snoop? ... Dr Dre

(from Twitter, by txt)

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I keep forgetting Christian Bale is still alive.

(from Twitter, by txt)

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