I was fortunate enough to do a phone interview with Joss Whedon last Friday on his new Internet musical miniseries “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.” UPDATED: my article is up at www.news-journalonline.com/entertainment.htm, along with the audio of the interview. Here’s what was said.

This is Chris Bridges with the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and I’m talking with Joss Whedon, creator of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel,” the show “Firefly,” the movie “Serenity,” the upcoming FOX show “Dollhouse,” and now an original online musical mini-series, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.” Thank you for talking to me.

Thanks for having me.

Go ahead and give me the elevator pitch for “Dr. Horrible.”

There’s an elevator pitch?

I hope so.

I’ve never heard that phrase. Basically it’s your typical Internet musical about a super villain who’s trying to make his bones in the super villain community and get some respect, and maybe even work up the nerve to talk to the girl at the Laundromat.

So, like every other Internet serial musical.

Yeah, you know, I mean it’s a tired genre but I thought I could wring a few bucks out of it before it dies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Come on, people! Friend me! How else can I judge my worth?

In return I promise not to send you endless messages about my great real estate opportunities, my seminars on how to feel really good about yourself, or offers of pictures of me that “MySpace won’t let me post.” I won’t post animated graphics in your comments. I don’t have MySpace’s IM service installed, so you’re safe from me there, too. Any bulletins I send will be rare and relevant. My own page will neither blink excessively, play any music at all, or contain color combinations that cause cancer in rats.

Which rather begs the question, what do I use MySpace for, anyway. But the answer is clear.

To collect friends. So get going.

Updated: I hit the 1,000 mark. And you can really tell the difference, I actually feel more loved. I’m all shivery now.

Friday was an interesting day. And I use the word “interesting” with loaded meaning (couldn’t find the right smilie to indicate that, so here we are).

High point: finding out with an hour to spare that I would get to do a phone interview with Joss Whedon. All I really remember was that I was focusing on not sounding like a doofus, my painful discovery that it’s a big, big mistake to pound down a large Sprite to calm your nerves when you’re afraid to leave the phone long enough to pee, and that when he did call and we talked I sounded like a doofus.

With luck it’ll appear online Tuesday and in the paper later in the week. Only really new thing in it that I haven’t seen anywhere else: the Dr. Horrible episodes will appear on drhorrible.com pretty close to 12:01 am on their launch dates. Didn’t get if it was PST, I’m hoping to hear back about that. My favorite quote was when I was asking about his knack for attracting obsessive fans:

“That’s what I am, that’s what I grew up as. The things I love, I love very hard.”

Low point: immediately thereafter, when my car blew a head gasket on the way home and my brother-in-law and I spent four fun-filled hours next to Beville Road trying Bars Head Gasket Fix in the desperate hope that mine had blown in just the right way for this to work and save me many hundreds or thousands of dollars that I don’t, strictly speaking, have.

Results: I have an interview which I have now transcribed and will tomorrow edit, modulate, and possibly remaster until I sound like David Attenborough, am now working on my article. Car is running well if not smoothly, the oil has been changed, and we’ll see how that goes.

All in all, best thing about the weekend? Watching the little videos Teres took of the concert with our camera, where her fangirl shrieks can plainly be heard over the din. She’s been blushing nonstop, I’m working on making one of them my Windows startup noise.

Teresa has decided to become a full-time groupie.

Not just the type who gushes about her band online, pins posters around her room and writes “Mrs. Bon Jovi” on her notebooks, although she does that too (not the Mrs. part, she said she has no interest in leaving our marriage or breaking his; I believe she has in mind more of a sophisticated arrangement, like a time-share). No, she plans to be the one who follows her band, concert to concert, city to city, country to country, becoming friends and confidant to the road crew. The fact that we’re broke has no bearing on this. You can’t deny your calling. She has already begun looking into which countries allow you to sell your children.

Yesterday, on an extended and carefully planned last minute whim, she flew to Boston to see Bon Jovi in concert. She’s even now in the air on her way back, possibly without waiting for the plane. With her are the well-wishes, advice, and (in some cases) open envy of the other ladies on the Bon Jovi forum she frequents. They have kept up on her doings from other forum members at the concert who are calling in song-by-song updates, and from me, as I’ve been hearing from Teresa and posting on her behalf with her account. (I am, apparently, “Mr. Teresa.”)

Read the rest of this entry »

I need a new Web service, and I don’t think it’s other there yet. Nor do I want to set it up myself, I just want to avail myself of its nonexistent services.

I want a plot search engine.

Say I think of a fantastic idea for a story (it could happen). And say I invest time, trouble, and skullsweat into developing that story. How do you think I’ll react when I realize, halfway through, that not only has someone already written that story but probably did it better. Pretty darn despondent, that’s how.

So to head off that despairfest I’m calling for a plot search. If I want to write about time-traveling monkeys I want to know how many brave writers have gone that road before me, never to be heard of again (answer: 6). I want to type in “Barnard’s Star,” “alien warfare,” “Cheeze Whiz,” and “testicle” to see if I’m original or just pulling from the collective unconsciousness.

How tough could it be? All we’d have to do is review every book ever written and enter the plot and publishing info as keywords in a database. There are people online who do that kind of thing for fun.

In the meantime, I’m off to write. Hmm. How would Cheeze Whiz react to microgravity…

Well, that was fun.

Dreamweaver was giving me problems yesterday so I rebooted. Or, rather, I turned my computer off and it came back up partway. The graphic image of your motherboard logo or graphics card that you see for a second before your system starts loading? It stopped there. That’s kinda weird.

Memory was fine, checked it in different slots and tried different memory sticks.
Blew out all the dust everywhere.
Video card was fine.
Unplugged all the drives, same thing.
Had it down to either the power supply, the motherboard, or the chip. None of which I could easily test without buying the components.

Here’s the difficult bit: Office Depot has a clearance price on an HP Pavillion computer that’s better than what I have now: $399 after rebate. Tempting. Read the rest of this entry »

Disney hass announced that their new imprint, Kingdom Comics, will revamp existing Disney products in the hopes of bringing them to new readers. The happy folks at RevolutionSF helpfully compiled a list of suggestions, and damn if I wouldn’t read every one of these…

Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Neil Gaiman, writer / Bernie Wrightson, artist

It is 1940, and war has come to the sleepy village of Pepperinge Eye!

Ms. Eglentine Price, an apprentice witch still learning the mystic forces, assisted by Prof. Emelius Browne, a flim-flam man and three orphan East-End gutter snipes, must seek out and discover the secret to Substitutiary Locomotion to combat Hitler’s Third Reich.

From the smoggy streets of London, to the mythical island nation of Namboombu within the Realm of Dream, they travel to find the fabled Star of Astaroth, the only force able to combat Heinrich Himmler and his supernatural army of Ubermenschen, marching on England behind the Spear of Destiny.

With the words Trecuna mecoides antrecorum satis dei, war will begin, greater even than the war engulfing Europe; a war which threatens to unravel the very fabric of our world.

Includes “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes” by Grant Morrison and Ted McKeever, “Freaky Friday” by Terry Moore, the hilariously newly violent “The Apple Dumpling Gang” by Joe Lansdale and Tim Truman, and more.

According to my daily balance e-mail, I was suddenly about $200 down. While it’s possible it could be from backed up gas station charges, I checked anyway.

And lo and behold, there were 5 pending charges from companies I’d never heard of and have never done business with: passhlp.com, kdeweb.net, fileservicehelp.com, com-pay.com, and userhelponline.com. The charges were all for amounts around $39.

My bank can’t dispute them till they actually charge against my account, so I have to wait till they clear and then get them taken off, right before a banking holiday and long weekend. In the meantime, I killed the card to prevent more of my money being siphoned and now I get to wait for the new card and the fun of updating anyplace where my old card appears.

And I’m not one to throw my card number around. Amazon has it, and PayPal, and a few companies I have standing orders with. Mostly I use PayPal. So somewhere out there, someone I trusted has spread my card number around.

It also just reminds me that there are companies out there whose standard operating practice is to openly steal from me. Always a good thing to remember. And to check my balance regularly.

Bastards.

The massive onslaught of Dr. Horrible-related coolness has begun, with this tie-in comic about his arch-nemesis, Captain Hammer called “Captain Hammer: Be Like Me.”

Written by Zack Whedon and illustrated by Eric Canete and Dave Stewart, it’s a civic-minded piece that serves to instruct children in the straight, narrow, and violent.

It’s also free, part of this month’s Dark Horse Comics “MySpace Dark Horse Presents.”

Cool? Free? The new paradigm is working! Joss, where can I send you all of my money?