Tacos and Beer

Michael Shelton (who’s been in almost every movie I’ve ever made) texted me earlier to let me know we started working on our third feature film ten years ago today. Hoo boy, time sure flies. I wasn’t blogging while we were making that movie. Its working title was Red Season , but the real title (I love the real title, and all credit to co-director/co-writer Chuck for coming up with it) is For a Few Zombies More . It’s a sequel to our first feature, Hide and Creep , but it’s an old-fashioned sequel that should make sense for anybody, whether or not they’ve seen Hide and Creep . If you haven’t seen For a Few Zombies More , you can literally watch it right now — it’s available free-with-ads on Tubi.

I don’t usually watch a lot YouTube. But sometimes I go to look for something on YouTube and end up falling down random YouTube rabbit holes... Here’s a Veruca Salt demo tape from 1993 . And here’s a video from the ’90s titled “Veruca Salt — Out of the Loop.” Not sure where it came from, but it features some interview clips with the band and ends with a really nice hanging-out-on-the-couch acoustic performance. And here’s the great Sam Rockwell talking about some of his great acting roles . And here’s a playlist of the broadcast versions (including commercials!) of a bunch of episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 . (If you want to watch non-boogleg episodes of MST3K , you should definitely check out the Gizmoplex . There’s also a Gizmoplex app for Apple TV !) Not from YouTube, but the Too Scary; Didn’t Watch podcast recently tackled Prince of Darkness , which is possibly John Carpenter’s most underrated movie.

Congrats to my pal Andrew Bellware on getting his PhD! His doctoral thesis is about how music works in movies. Apparently in his thesis he mentioned that a friend rescored 2001: A Space Odyssey using 1980s pop songs. I am that friend! That friend is me! I wish I could show you my “remixed” 2001 . But it obviously breaks several copyright laws, so I assume if I put it on YouTube it’d get immediately pulled. That said, I did make a trailer for it, and the trailer is somehow still on YouTube. So who knows.

I am an iPhone guy. And I’ve been an iPhone guy basically since they started making iPhones. It’s been fascinating to see the camera evolve from rudimentary (low-res stills and no video) on the first iPhone to generally amazing (comparable to many “real” cameras) on modern iPhones. My current phone is a couple of years old — I am an iPhone guy, but I am not a gotta-get-a-new-iPhone-every-year guy. But I am going to have to get a new one pretty soon, because apparently the camera on the current “pro” iPhone is legitimately pro. I mean, you can shoot “log” video on an iPhone 15 Pro and record it to an external USB-C drive! Stu Maschwitz has an excellent blog post about how he uses professional post-production tools to color correct shot-on-iPhone video. Be sure to check out the post’s embedded video to see some examples of how good iPhone video can look these days. Speaking of professional post-production... Here’s a video about the visual effects of (the most excellent) ...

I’m back home after a short but amazing trip to Iceland. The morning my flight landed, I got to see a volcano (from a safe distance, of course). Then I got to see some amazing waterfalls and beaches. Then I got to see the northern lights ! I also got to eat some world-class pancakes . If you live in the United States and want to visit Europe*, Iceland is a great option. It’s a relatively quick flight (about six hours from Baltimore, for example), it’s easy to navigate for English speakers, and it’s a beautiful country in a way that is different from the beautiful parts of the U.S. *I looked it up to double-check, and   Iceland is geographically part of both Europe and North America ! Such an interesting country. Oh, and Stacey took a picture of me being very cold despite being all bundled up.

OK, I haven’t tried all the pancakes from everywhere in the world. But the Gray Cat (known locally as Grái Kötturinn) restaurant in Reykjavik, Iceland, serves the best pancakes I’ve ever eaten. And they come with American-style bacon, which is also really good! I guess I should learn to make pancakes so I can try to figure out why so many restaurant pancakes are meh and why the Gray Cat’s are so amazing. Aside from having amazing pancakes, the Gray Cat is just a great, cozy restaurant. Highly recommended if you’re ever in the neighborhood.

Stacey and I visited Iceland a few years ago and absolutely loved it. It’s a stunningly beautiful country (assuming you like mountains, waterfalls, and beaches). And it’s a relatively easy trip — it’s only six hours or so by plane from the States. The one thing we really wanted to see that we missed last time we visited was the northern lights. So when we visited Iceland a second time (this time bringing our friend Kelly along), that was our big bucket list item. We were not expecting to see a volcano. So seeing that like an hour after we landed was pretty amazing . The thing about the northern lights (and most other astronomical phenomena), is they’re hard to see from the city. Cities usually produce some amount of light pollution , and that makes it tough to see anything but the brightest objects in the night sky. To improve our chances of seeing the lights, we booked a tour with some local Icelandic guys who take you out of town in a van to good (i.e. very dark) viewing l...

As much as I love real film and real film cameras (I shot my first two features with an Aaton LTR 16mm film camera), I rarely shoot film anymore. Because (1) digital is pretty good these days, and (2) film (and film processing) is really expensive. Stacey is more of a stills shooter than me. She’d been kind of thinking about maybe getting a new stills camera. Which got me reading up on stills cameras. I asked Chris Mitchell what he liked these days, and he started singing the praises of Fuji’s digital cameras. I started looking at Fuji’s options and talked Stacey into getting a Fujifilm X-T30 II . Aside from taking good photos, it’s just a good-looking camera — it is silver and black and has a charming retro-but-not-too-retro look. We’ve been in Iceland for the past few days, and I must admit that I have been using Stacey’s new camera a lot more than she has. And I really, really like it. I assume you can just shoot regular “raw” photos with this camera and then tweak the c...

Stacey and I (and our friend Kelly ) came to Iceland for a few days for a quick vacation. We’re hoping to see the northern lights, which are apparently relatively active this time of year. We haven’t quite seen any aurora yet (I’ll tell that story in another post), but we did see a big dang volcanic eruption. We figured out after the fact that the volcano erupted not long after we landed at the Reykjavik airport. The eruption was visible from our rental car for several miles of our trip out of town. I managed to get a couple of photos of the eruption with my phone, but they don’t do it justice. The volcano is a lot more epic in person. The Guardian has more details about the Iceland volcano . Plus better photos and some video.

I recently mentioned my comic book blog, Marvel Time Warp . I added a new post there yesterday about issue 16 of Marvel’s now-classic Star Wars comic book.

Oh. Cool. Bluesky, my favorite post-Twitter microblogging/social networking site, is now open to everyone . (The app was previously in an invite-only beta phase. Though invites were pretty easy to come by.) If you want to look me up on Bluesky, I am @crewless.bsky.social over there.

I stumbled upon this  Tacos and Beer  blog the other day. I hadn’t updated it since 2012 and had almost forgotten it even exists. But exist it does. (Wordpress.com has a long memory, apparently.) And I managed to get logged back in. So I think I’m going to start blogging again. ( June 6, 2024 update: I have since decided to copy these 2024 posts over to Blogger, just because.) I have been doing some regular blogging over at Substack, but that’s a very specific blog about old comic books, not general-purpose blogging. I had kind of moved all of that sort of general-purpose stuff over to Twitter, which I used to love, but then  some rich racist bought it and ruined it . Substack is having  some Twitter-ish managerial issues  these days, too. So I probably need to stop using Substack, too. Sigh. Anyway, if you want to read about comic books from 1978, check out  Marvel Time Warp . I’ll let you know when it moves somewhere that isn’t Substack. (Spoiler: I am probably going to m...