My 2002 Flavor-it Mead-ya

On 08/13/2020 at 09:23 PM by KnightDriver

'02 was fair for me. Nothing special happened for me that year, just more pizza delivery and jam sessions, two great tastes that taste great together.

TV: Firefly

I think the characters are a bit too obvious stereotypes ripped from some old western film. I also think they don't fit together well on the same ship; I don't buy it that they would travel together, but this show has grown on me. I love the dirty scifi look and the use of space ship models instead of CG. It recalls the look of the original Star Wars trilogy. The Reapers, a mindless hoard of rampaging psychotics, still scare me even though you rarely see them (and that may be why they are so scary). Mark and I often sing the theme song "The Ballad of Serenity" with altered lyrics, as you do.

Film: Spider-Man

Sam Raimi directs Toby MacGuire, Kristen Dunst and Willem Dafoe. I really got back into Spider-Man with this film. Sam Raimi is the best for comic book movies, in my opinion. He's got the right balance of camp, style and drama to pull it off and it not be rediculous or overly dark and serious. I enjoyed the whole trilogy directed by Raimi. He's doing the next Doctor Strange movie too, and I couldn't be happier.

Game: Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance

When my friend Mark and I weren't playing co-op FPS games we were playing co-op dungeon crawls like Gauntlet. So when this trailer dropped for the PS2 in '01 we were excited but annoyed because we didn't have PS2s at the time, only Xboxes. We had to wait a whole year while people talked about how good it was. It was unbearable. We got it finally and played the heck out of it. I was the human archer, Vahn and Mark was the dwarven fighter, Kromlech.

Music: Mastodon - Remission

These metal heads have a touch of progressive rock in them. Their songs are longer and their albums have themes. I've also taken a liking to metal bands that create a kind of sonic wall of sound. It's a big orchestral type sound. It washes over you like a wave and pulsates with energy. Instead of staccato pummeling, it's a drone with undulating, rising and falling changes. It's like riding a boat in a storm instead of being in a runaway minecart in a cave-in. I've followed them ever since this first album of theirs.

Book: Taken By Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design 1937-1971

Above is a lecture I found based on the catalog I had by the same title I got at a Philadelphia Museum of Art show in 2002. It's about The ID, or Institute of Design in Chicago and its photography program between '37 and '71. This is a period I particularly like in photography. It's largely black and white and focuses on experimental explorations of the medium. I'm big on design elements in my photographs and less about content, so this book's grouping of photographers was particularly interesting to me.

Cary Woodham

08/13/2020 at 09:35 PM

2002 wasn't a great year, as I was still reeling from the year before. But at least nothing new had happaned that was bad. Since I wasn't writing for the newspaper anymore, my friend made a little web site that I wrote some reviews on, but it paled in comparison to what I was doing before.

Two big games I remember playing in 2002 were The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and the first Animal Crossing game. At the time, I felt I was the only person who LIKED Wind Waker's style. And I don't think anything needs to be said about Animal Crossing. The first one is still one of my top five favorite games of all time. Mainly because you could play NES games on it! My birthday was especially sucky that year, but on my birthday in Animal Crossing, Prince the frog showed up at my door to give me my birthday present, the NES game Donkey Kong! Sadly, that was probably one of the best things I got that year for my birthday!

Luckily, things started getting better in 2003, but I'll get to that when you write your blog for that year.

KnightDriver

08/15/2020 at 08:29 AM

That's too bad, but Wind Waker and Animal Crossing are good ones. Wind Waker is actually the Zelda game I'm most excited about because of that art style and sailing, the two things it got criticized the most for. My Farm Together game needs stuff like prince the frog.

SanAndreas

08/14/2020 at 01:29 AM

I saw Spider-Man in theaters while on vacation. In gaming, I got Virtua Fighter 4 on PS2, which was one of my favorite fighting games of the generation and came after Sega abandoned the Dreamcast and hardware in general. I also got into the Sims, and I picked up Grand Theft Auto III. I mostly liked causing havoc in the game environment rather than doing the missions, although you had to play through the story to unlock the other two areas. I liked the Flashback station, which was the soundtrack to Scarface, and the talk radio station with Lazlow Jones was really funny. I also got Devil May Cry and Kingdom Hearts that year.

08/15/2020 at 08:43 AM

GTA was such a phenomenon. I remember lines to get the PS2 and everyone talking nonstop about GTA. I may have sampled the GTA III at some point, but never really played a lot of it. Vice City was the one I got interested in because of it's 80s theme. I got it digitally recently on PS4.

Matt Snee Staff Writer

08/14/2020 at 11:22 AM

2002 I was living back in Maryland with my parents, and working as a projectionist at a movie theater. And smoking a lot of weed. It was a nice time.

Is there a book about that photography program? Sounds really interesting, but I'm not really into youtube.

08/15/2020 at 08:53 AM

I was considering taking a movie theater job not too long ago. When will they open again?

The book is under the same name Taken By Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design. I used to own it, but I found a copy at a library to look over again.

Super Step Contributing Writer

08/14/2020 at 10:21 PM

I should probably have looked into Firefly more before including the main character in my thesis.

I don't care what the hindsight warriors on YouTube say, 2000s Spider-Man was the best Spider-Man. Hail Raimi. I'll have to look at the rest later as I'm on a podcast.

08/15/2020 at 09:29 AM

I guess people wanted a dark comic movie. Batman Begins was '05. I enjoyed it but thought it was a little too dark and serious.

08/15/2020 at 01:03 PM

I mean, I wanted a darker comic movie too and I wound up liking Daredevil. But Spider-Man to me has always been corny. I find it to be a charming aspect of his personality. He's not the right comic book character to make dark.

Not saying he can't be in a dark storyline or be in a situation with heavy themes (the fact he's a poor New Yorker with three jobs is pretty relatable to much of the country) but I don't think you can lose the sense of humor with Spidey like you can get away with to some extent with batman.

08/16/2020 at 10:00 PM

Yeah, Spider-Man is like a tamer Deadpool.

PixlBit