Just wanted to let people know that I'll largely be discontinuing use of MySpace, LJ, and Tribe and shunting over to facebook at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=688970670 and http://www.billwatters.com as my main blog site.

I'll still be checking in here and on the various other sites from time to time, but it'll be irregular. Well, except for the StaMaria fanfic, that I will continue to read with abandon.

All the best, and I hope you all have a great Holiday Season.

Originally published at From the Land of Meh.... You can comment here or there.

Famed Japanese auteur Takashi Miike, who is best known for cult classics such as Audition, Ichi: the Killer, and Children of Lost Souls, brings a fresh new look at the beloved spaghetti Western genre in Sukiyaki Western Django.

Two clans, Genji, the white clan led by Yoshitsune, and Heike, the red clan led by Kiyomori, battle for a legendary treasure hidden in a poor mountain town. One day a lone gunman, burdened with deep emotional scars but blessed with incredible shooting skills, drifts into town. Expectations reach a boiling point as everyone wonders which gang the gunman will finally decide to join. Dirty tricks, betrayal, desire, and love collide as the situation erupts into a final, explosive showdown.

MTV is about to commit first-degree murder by remaking the cult classic “Rocky Horror Picture Show.” That’s our cue to go back to bed. This is obviously a bad nightmare and we must wake up.

The ugly and mean whores at MTV said they will use the original screenplay, but may add new music. GOD NO! They are aiming for a Halloween 2009 release. So, it’s official. October 31, 2009 is the day we all spontaneously combust.

Casting has not yet been announced.

Link back to the original article

It'd been on again/off again for so very long, people never were particularly clear on where we stood, and that was both of our faults.

But for the record, Marti and I are in fact seperated, but remain the best of friends and business partners, and dedicated to continuing to be both for long years to come. At least until we've collected the whole of the faire curcuit. Anyone seeking to disrupt that business partnership or friendship will have a whole lot of crap coming down on their heads.

There were many reasons over the years as to why we were on or off at the moment. But suffice it to say that we continue to support each other as each finds their own path to happiness. I fully support the people in her life, and wish her to find all the happiness and joy that she deserves (and it's a great deal).

Nothing worse than being in a place that's beautiful and peaceful, when for all the world you'd rather be somewhere else.

Originally published at From the Land of Meh.... You can comment here or there.

It’s a user-defined-function to split a given string into ‘words’. In this case I’m delimiting words using commas and spaces. So ‘Smith, Fred’ (with a comma AND a space) will be separated into ‘Smith’ and ‘Fred’.

For convenience, it returns a table with a ‘pos’ column, representing the position in the original text that the word was found.

Hope this helps someone out there.

CREATE FUNCTION SplitWords(@text varchar(8000))
RETURNS @words TABLE (pos smallint primary key, value varchar(8000))
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @pos smallint, @i smallint, @j smallint, @s varchar(8000)
SET @pos = 1
WHILE @pos <= LEN(@text)
BEGIN
SET @i = CHARINDEX(’ ‘, @text, @pos)
SET @j = CHARINDEX(’,', @text, @pos)
IF @i > 0 OR @j > 0
BEGIN
IF @i = 0 OR (@j > 0 AND @j < @i)
SET @i = @j
IF @i > @pos
BEGIN — @i now holds the earliest delimiter in the string
SET @s = SUBSTRING(@text, @pos, @i - @pos)
INSERT INTO @words VALUES (@pos, @s)
END
SET @pos = @i + 1
WHILE @pos < LEN(@text) AND SUBSTRING(@text, @pos, 1) IN (’ ‘, ‘,’)
SET @pos = @pos + 1
END
ELSE
BEGIN
INSERT INTO @words VALUES (@pos, SUBSTRING(@text, @pos, LEN(@text) - @pos + 1))
SET @pos = LEN(@text) + 1
END
END
RETURN
END

Originally published at From the Land of Meh.... You can comment here or there.

Here’s a revised version of the trailer for Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse, which explains the show’s concept much more clearly and features a lot more ass-whuppin’. Plus, parachuting and assassining. The show’s central conceit — that these “Actives” are blank slates who can be programmed to have any skillset or emotion — comes out really clearly. Plus it gives a hint of one of the show’s main sources of conflict. Those of you who had a tepid response to the first version should check this one out. [Whedonesque, via Damon/Zeitgeist]

Originally published at From the Land of Meh.... You can comment here or there.

A while ago I’d gotten to catch a movie that I wanted to recommend but then hadn’t gotten around to doing so. That movie is the 2007 release of “The Man from Earth” - a science fiction film in the purest sense, and without a single special effect. A great ensemble film that effectively takes place in a single living room while at the same time covering most of history.

This one, if you like films that make you think about, and open up for great conversations afterwards, give this a try during your next netflix order.

Here’s the trailer:

Looks like Spain broke embargo. traffic spreading at a few per second, radiating out from spain to uk and beyond. Now that it's out other retailers are going to follow suit pretty quickly. The day just got a lot longer - where'd I put those production clusters...