THIS Is LIVING!!! :D

I have had the MOST RELAXING WEEKEND!!! :D

I mean, last weekend was relaxing, but this weekend was MORE than merely relaxing!!! I was able to engage in my favorite form of entertainment...

...well... one of them... ;P

I got to watch a ton of movies!

And I haven't come into any money recently. In fact, I'm so hard up for cash that I can't afford smoke. (I generally don't blog about smoking because it's a nasty habit and I don't encourage it. But, being an addict, I don't judge it, either, lol.) When I can't afford smokes, I am forced to resort to smoking pipe tobacco, which is, like, 500% cheaper. But it's, like, 50% less fulfilling to an cigarette addict, also. And tonight, I was rummaging around my room, thinking that months ago I remember putting a carton of smokes away when a pack fell out and disappeared somewhere. I remember thinking at the time that I could just leave it, in case I'm ever hard up. So I did.

And I have been hard-up all weekend.

So, like Bruce Willis's character in Last Boy Scout, I was thrilled to discover a stray pack of cigarettes!!!

Sad, but true. (Don't smoke, kids!)

But that also illustrates how sort of charmed my weekend has been!!!

It started out with a friend from high school inviting me to breakfast when I got off work Monday. Good breakfast, great conversation, and a really cool "Friday night" for me!

Then I woke up, strapped on by cyberspace interface and went to those seedy parts of the Net where you can get things without having money. I skanked a few movies (including Land of the Lost, which Brian was really excited to see!) and set up my iPod playlist for a day of unfettered film-flunky bliss!!! :D

I kicked-off by reading Issue #1 of Serinity: Better Days. If you're a Firefly fan, you know I was in heaven for the half an hour it took me to read it! (I'm saving the next 2 issues for later.)

Then I had me a Horror screening.

But I should set the scene a little...

When you're watching movies on an iPod, you're not really viewing the flick in the best circumstances. Movies are meant to be watched on a BIG screen, and the iPod (5th Generation) has a very, very small screen.

You can compensate somewhat with a badass sound setup. My li'l bro found this $20 or $30 setup with a serious bass speaker and 2 really good Left/Right speakers that plugs into a standard earphone jack. It's made by Creative, and it's worth 10 times what you'll pay for it. When I was watching movies in my room on my portable DVD player (which is, sadly, well deceased now) that great sound makes up for limited visuals. So since my portable DVD player died, I've been using the Creative speakers with my iPod to watch TV shows and movies.

But despite the amazing sound, you're still staring at this teeny, tiny screen.

So you create a mental atmosphere to turn a disadvantage into a bit of childish fun! :) I choose to imagine I live not-too-far from a drive-in movie theater. I imagine I can open my blinds, sit on my bed -- in the comfort of my room -- and see the image (tiny, because it's so far away from me) out my window. But I know the radio frequency for the screen that my window faces, so I can tune in my radio and get pristine sound! (If you haven't been to a drive-in theater in a decade or more, you might not know that when you buy your ticket you are also told what radio station your screen broadcasts on, so you can listen to the movie through your radio -- which is convenient if you go during the winter! No hassle with putting those old-school speakers in your car window when you'd rather have your window rolled up tightly!)

Now, I don't go too far with this little fantasy. I don't, like, possition my iPod right at the window and position my speakers next to where the radio is, or anything like that. It's just a minor mental device to get me in the right frame of mind.

Luckily, the drive-in theater gimmick works well for... um... lest's say "movies that you obtain in the backalleys of the Internet". ;) The sound on those flicks is actually reminiscent of the quality of audio you got back in the '70s with those old-school speakers I mentioned above. So instead of being annoyed by the poor sound quality, you can simply choose to enjoy the quaintness of this viewing experience.

So... spirit of child-like adventure in place, Monday I settled in to a minor Horror marathon. I watched The Unborn and followed it up with Dementia 13! It was fun! The Unborn surprised me a few times, and Dimentia 13 (a Cult of UHF podcast episode) was just as bad as I expected, and it was also much more interesting than I expected!!! :D

After that, I enjoyed a Comedy mini-marathon: Land of the Lost and Pink Panther 2. Both had me laughing out loud, so I would call that a win!

Then Tuesday I watched a Hayao Miyazaki classic, Castle in the Sky! IT WAS AWESOME!!! Although, if you've seen some Miyazaki, you know what a fun storyteller he is! :) From time to time, I get in an Anime mood, and I think the hot summer weather is doing that to me now. Miyazaki films feel like an event! They make you feel like you've just gone on this long, life-changing adventure! (The way summer movies are supposed to make you feel. At least, if you grew up in the '70s and '80s, lol.)

After Castle in the Sky I didn't feel like watching another movie -- why taint the experience with something that's bound to come up lacking by comparison?

So I listened to some OTR Horror. In particular, I listened to a couple of Arch Oboler episodes of Light Out and several episodes of a 1961 series Macabre. (If you're not familiar with OTR horror, follow those links to weeks and months of clever, free, wholesome Horror goodness!)

Then this morning (well... you know, this afternoon...), Wednesday. I woke up with a peculiar need.

Wanna hear about it?

It's not naughty, lol.

11 years ago, when The WB was still a fledgling network, they took a chance on what I thought was a BRILLIANT idea: Steven Spielberg and Harve Bennett produced this 13-chapter animated miniseries called Invasion America. (It was produced by Dreamworks' animation department, back before it became its own company, PDI.)

On Monday, June 8, 1998, the first 2 half-hour chapters aired in a single hour-long block. The WB promoted it like crazy, so when it finally aired, I was really excited to see it! :D Then the next night, Tuesday, June 9, 1998, The WB aired the next 2 installments in another hour-long block. Only, I didn't really get to watch these, for some reason I can't recall now.

Over the next 2 Tuesdays, Invasion America continued airing in 1-hour blocks, culminating in a 90-minute miniseries finale on Tuesday, July 7, 1998.

I don't remember the animation being all that amazing. And the story was compelling, but... you know... sort of disposable, as I recall.

But it had some heavy-weight stars doing the voice work, it was produced by the Close Encounters guy and the Star Trek (the movies, Khan through Final Frontier) guy, and it was Sci-Fi animation in Primetime!!! :D

A few years ago I bought a couple of $1-DVDs at Walmart (I had money back then) for this animated series I had never heard of called Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths and Legends that had a similar animation style to Invasion America, and had surprisingly good writing!

But I only got a few episodes into that series because it fired off this obsession to try to watch Invasion America again! (I own the DVDs; I'll watch them sometime.)

Back then, the closest I got was buying an out-of-print novelization of the first few episodes off Amazon.com.

But this morning...!!! This morning I stapped into my lightcycle and cruised thos questionable neighborhoods of Cyberspace AND I FOUND THE WHOLE MINISERIES!!! :D After converting it for my iPod, I can now sit down and watch all 13 episodes, beginning to end! :D

I don't know if I will get to tonight. The sun is going to start coming up soon, which means I need to get some sleep before my work week begins. But I'll bet I can put a decent-sized dent in the series before I hit the hay! :D

Oh, and while waiting for Invasion America to download, and then to convert, I enjoyed me another Horror-athon: The Happening and An American Haunting. I don't recommend either of them, but I love Netflix for allowing me to watch them for myself! :D

Next came another Comedy-athon: Mystery Science Theater 3000, experiment numbers K16: City on Fire and K17: Time of the Apes. (More questionably-gotten-gain, these are episodes from MST3K's VERY FIRST season, aired only on KTMA-TV in Minnesota and are only available via fan tapes recorded during their original airing and circulated via "Mysties" -- though Time of the Apes was rebroadcast and re-riff-ed in July, 1991 during the show's official 3rd season.)

I actually paused Time of the Apes to load Invasion America onto my iPod and write this blog entry. So I'll return to that now, and see how much Invasion America I can fit in before I crash.

By the way, if I've gotten your curiosity up, you can -- it turns out -- legitimately watch the whole series of Invasion America. (Had I figured this out earlier, I might have started off my day watching these online, lol. But it might not have been quite as interesting a blog entry.)

Something about summer... It means movies and Invasion America to me.

And this weekend has really felt like summer to me! Very groovy!!! :D

I hope you indulge some child-like summer impulses of your own!!!

:D