Talking ‘Bout Dexter – the Series and the Finale

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919YdoOHuHL._SL1500_[1]Regardless of what you actually thought about tonight’s series finale, it’s kind of strange to think that this incredible show – arguably one of the best suspense dramas on television these days – is now over after 8 long years!

This is one that my wife and I have been watching from the very beginning … in fact, we had actually just started dating when this show premiered in the fall of 2006. I don’t recall what actually drew us to tuning in, but it certainly didn’t take long before we were completely hooked. Maybe it was Michael C. Hall himself – I’ve been a big fan of his since Six Feet Under, even though Sara never showed much interest in revisiting that one. Ironically, I guess Dexter ended up being centered around death as well, albeit the other end of the equation this time around…

But boy, did this show have down pat the art of leaving you on the edge of your seat! Maybe not so much in this last season because admittedly the first few episodes for the most part felt a little dry, but some of those earlier seasons were killer … pardon the pun. Never before have I had a show that’s made me exclaim, “Why aren’t we watching this six months from now on DVD?!” more consistently after every episode, and they did a really great job with a lot of the guest stars for each season, too … my favorite, of course, being John Lithgow as Trinity – the storyline that culminated in probably my single-most favorite episode in the entire season.

If I had to rank my top three seasons, they’d probably go:

  1. Season 4 – The Trinity Killer, who ends up killing Rita before Dexter puts an end to his spree
  2. Season 7 – specifically when Dexter is with Hannah before she gets locked up
  3. Season 1 – The Ice Truck Killer, who ends up being Dexter’s biological brother and almost kills Deb

And so as for tonight’s season finale…

*** SPOILERS ***

…I guess I’m kind of torn about it because when we first watched it unfold, I was kind of content up until the fade away with Hannah and Harrison in Argentina, and then we met Lumberjack Dexter and things got a little weird! And I think it was confusing because all of this time, we had been setup with the notion for the finale that this only ends one of two ways for Dexter – either in a body bag or in prison, and so at least *I* didn’t put an ounce of thought into the idea that maybe there were other ways that Dexter could finally “be punished” for his sins, too.

I mean, I kind of had a feeling that Deb would one way or another be a casualty, though I wasn’t really sure how. And I’ve read some complaints about people not liking that Dex took her body out to sea in the same manner that he dealt with all of his other victims, but I suppose for me that was a little symbolic because he did feel responsible for all of the bad that had happened in her life, even if it hadn’t been dealt directly from his knives. So I was ok with that.

Now that fact that he survived the hurricane while his boat did not … a bit far-fetched, but whatever – it’s a TV show about a serial killer who’s eluded his peers at the police dept. for 8 years now! Hurricane survival is the least of my worries!

I guess what I didn’t care for, ultimately, and I have a feeling that many people agree with this sentiment, is the last minute or so where we see Dexter alive and living the life of a lumberjack … somewhere.

I may have missed a clue somewhere that hinted otherwise, but as far as I could tell, we’re to believe that he’s now living a lonely life without Hannah and Harrison, and that’s his punishment for all that he’s done. Kind of rough and unexpected, but again if we all knew that this series had to end with Dexter finally being held accountable for the things that he’s done, isolation as a means to protect the ones that he loves from himself is a pretty harsh reality for our lovable serial killer.

It makes sense, but it doesn’t leave the best taste in your mouth … almost making you wish that somebody had bested him instead.

If it had been me doing the writing, I’d have taken it one of two ways instead…

If we were able to ultimately get to the happy ending, Dexter would open the door to the cabin to find Harrison and Hannah there waiting for him … maybe even for the first time, where Harrison comes running to him and Hannah cries as they lock eyes and the screen fades.

Granted, even I myself would argue that the happy ending is a bit much for this show … as much as I wanted to see Dexter & Hannah live happily ever after … and so instead, here’s a super simple way in my eyes to redeem the existing ending with hardly any changes at all…

Dexter comes home to the cabin after a long day at work and the camera fixates on him to imply that now he’s very much alone. Then Dexter stands up and walks into the other room where we find a kill room has been setup with a new victim waiting for him, and we end on the note that even after faking his own death, Dexter will never truly escape his Dark Passenger.

I don’t know … I guess the ending was a little bittersweet and I would’ve liked to see it go a bit differently, but in reality if I look back to some of those earlier seasons, even then I remember thinking that I couldn’t imagine how long he’d be able to evade anyone who managed to catch onto his trail. I’ve been saying this for eight years now, but it still makes me want to read the book series to see what they did differently … to be completely honest, at one point this season I actually found myself up late one night looking for plot synopses of the books to try and get some insight on what they were going to do with the final season, and everything that I read made it sound like they actually deviated quite a bit from the books for the TV show. Apparently he’s with Rita much longer – she might not even die, and I guess at one point Dexter starts to teach Aster and/or Cody how to kill like he does.

It would be fun to go back and read them now, especially having such an incredible mental picture of Michael C. Hall as Dexter Morgan to help put a face to the main character … I know how most people always rave over the book compared to the movie, but it’s kind of funny how sometimes seeing a Hollywood face that’s become attached to a role can make the original book itself shine in a whole new light. I know that I was that way after watching Peter Jackson’s telling of The Lord of the Rings, anyways.

All in all Dexter has been a pretty great show, even if it did lose a little steam here in the final season or two … I think after so much chaos, it actually starts to limit your direction a little – I know I personally felt that way with Weeds there at the end. Still, I think this is going to be a fun one to load up on the DVD Player/Magic Streaming Box in 5 or 10 years to revisit the serial acts of one Dexter Morgan … the finale might not have been exactly on the nose, but there was still way too much great TV in the earlier seasons not to give it a replay on down the road when there aren’t any other arguably justifiable serial killers on TV worth watching. 🙂

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My Dexter Series Finale Predictions

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Dexter actually lives and escapes to Argentina because all this time we’ve been telling ourselves that the only way this can end is for him to either get killed or caught.

Hannah is revealed to be pregnant with Dexter’s second child.

Deb dies.

Extra Credit: Just before the credits roll, we’re presented with the two words that will segue into the new series to follow the end of Dexter … “Surprise, Motherfucker…”

24a[1]

😯

Conan Plays GTA5

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I honestly still haven’t even played IV yet, but this really makes me want to pick up a copy of the new GTA! It’s been such a long time since I’ve wasted a weekend away stealing cars and mowing down hookers and thugs with said cars that I’ve virtually stolen…  8)

Dream Journal : Where’s the necklace, Sara?!?!?!

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Boy, was I apparently pissed at my wife last night … at least in dream world, anyways! 😯

So the scene started out with everyone in my family gathered for some sort of holiday feast – likely Christmas, because that’s the holiday I usually spent with my Dad’s side of the family. I was mostly around my cousins, as I was growing up, and at one point I remember getting scolded by my Grandma for not eating everything out of a bowl before handing it over to be washed.

My Grandma passed away a few years ago, so that came as a bit of a surprise!

Anyways, segue to another gathering in another house – I’m not really sure whose at that point – and right before we were about to pull some things out of the freezer to start on dinner, I just started berating my wife because apparently she had lost a necklace that I’d given her on our first anniversary together. I was pissed! And even though it was getting dark and we all wanted to settle in for dinner, I insisted that we get in the car right then and there and go back to the place where she lost it so that we could find it.

Now this is where it got a little weird because the place was actually some random person’s house – no idea who it was, but we kind of entered without asking for permission to look around and then had to sneak back out when she came home. Most of the searching was out in the yard – all I remember is that there was a lot of dirt involved, and at one point I went to go get something out of the car and somehow our car was on top of a giant hill that you could only get to by climbing straight up it and I couldn’t make it to the top.

I almost got there, but as I reached for a clump of dirt to pull myself over the edge, the whole thing slipped out from the ground and I fell probably 10 – 20 feet, this giant swath of dirt landing on top of me.

So now we had two problems – find the necklace, and also find a way out.

Eventually we decided to change our efforts and look for the way out instead. I guess it was kind of like a video game – we discovered that if we could get this random item, we’d magically be able to get back up to our car … it was something with wings or whatever … I don’t know. But it basically involved us going back into stranger lady’s house and finding a secret passage in the basement. After working our way through a small maze, we came to another lady who was kind of the gatekeeper – she had a computer in front of her, and for whatever reason, she was in a video store. 😕

We discovered that the thing that we needed was in another room behind her, so Sara snuck past her while I kept her distracted with a long line of customers behind me. We talked about video rentals and her system was really weird because none of the movie titles showed up as you would expect – for example, the classic Die Hard was for whatever reason in her computer as DIE HARD 0, and you had to get the name exactly right if you wanted to take the movie.

In hindsight it makes me think of a lot of corporate jobs – it was needlessly complex and only the person doing the job understood it, and she didn’t want to change it because it offered her job security, even though it didn’t make any sense and ended up just being a big pain in the ass for everybody else! 😛

Well, apparently she didn’t do all of her job right because at one point I saw some flashes in the corner of the screen showing that her ID had logged in at a different terminal – it was Sara using it in the other room to get the thing! But rental lady never really caught on, as she was too busy arguing with me about old Family Guy episodes, and when I glanced back in the room’s direction and saw some glowing thing float across the room and through the wall, presumably to the outside, I knew that we were good to go.

I’m not really sure if we ever did find the necklace that Sara had lost.

I also remember a cut scene at one point where I was either biking or running with another of my cousins, possibly on the way to dinner though it was the wrong side of the family for that, and when I asked her how far as had to go, all she would say was, “Oh – it’s only 29 … it’s not that bad.”

I couldn’t get her to tell me 29 what…

My Very First Lego Mosaic – NES Nostalgia Style! … Glued & Framed

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Hey! Remember that really cool NES Lego Mosaic that I made something like 5 months ago?!

Well, I finally got around to actually finishing it! 😯

And by finishing it, I mean gluing and framing it to hang on my wall … so let’s talk about that.

lego_mosaic_glue1

So finding the right glue to do this is part of why it took me so long because it was kind of a pain and I wanted to make sure that I tested them before inadvertently ruined my 8-bit masterpiece! I first tried a couple of different spray adhesives from Walmart and Home Depot because I wanted something simple … I’ve read one or two accounts of mosaic creators essentially building the whole thing and then going back through and gluing each brick into place by hand one at a time … which I have nowhere near the patience to do!

I figured that a spray would be easy, but after testing it on a simple 10×10 square that I made with extra bricks on a spare base plate, neither of them ended up drying clear and they looked pretty bad. So I tabled the whole idea for a while until my wife had been working on some puzzles and had gotten her glue out to glue them together afterwards, and it made me wonder if the same stuff would work for bricks, too.

And it did! 🙂

The stuff is called Mod Podge and you can buy it pretty much anywhere. It looks a lot like Elmer’s Glue, and the trick is to put it on super thin – you can see in the pictures that I basically applied some to the bottom half of the mosaic, and then pretty much used the excess from that to cover the rest…

lego_mosaic_glue2

lego_mosaic_glue3

lego_mosaic_glue4

It ended up going on pretty easy, though I’d still recommend a test run to anyone just so that you know what you’re in for before slathering down a layer of glue on something that you’ve worked really hard on. And note, the goal here wasn’t to make the completely and utterly unbreakable – as I found with my test piece, I could bend the board and see separation between the bricks – but as long as you’re not tossing the thing around the room, they’ll at least stay in place after a simple coat. I would’ve loved to not need the glue and just leave them natural, but some of the bricks are a little loose on the board and even when you just hold it vertically to look at it, pieces would fall out all over the floor. *cringe* So the glue was really a necessity.

It probably took me maybe 5-10 minutes to lay down the glue, mostly just brushing back and forth to try and spread it out as much as possible. You want to get rid of where you can see white accumulating as much as possible because while it does dry clear, you can still see the excess glue around the pegs if it goes on too thick. And be sure to get the edges, too – if you’re framing like I did, you won’t even see them anyways, and it’s a really good opportunity to get some added support along the sides where bricks are more likely to fall loose.

So after the glue came the framing, and this too required a bit of testing because I found it more difficult to find a 10″x10″ square frame (the size of a base plate) than I would’ve thought! I first tried an old record frame that I had laying around, but that ended up being too big and I really didn’t want to hassle with trying to matte them or anything. Eventually my search took me to Michael’s where they have those make your own frame kits, and it even took two stores to get both kits that I would need, but after dropping $10 and 1/4 tank of gas on frame parts, I got home and found … the frame wasn’t deep enough to fit around the bricks. It was pretty close, but still off by just enough to make the frame useless, so at that point I turned to a company online that I’ve ordered frames from before with great success – frameusa.com.

Honestly the only reason why I didn’t just go with these guys in the first place was because the shipping kinda hurts unless you’re buying a bunch of frames at once. Case in point – the parts I ended up ordering was the same two frame kits as before for about $10, but then I also paid another $10 in shipping. I knew that I’d probably need more in the future, but I wanted to make sure they would work before sinking a bunch of money into frames that wouldn’t … I even ended up e-mailing customer service before I placed my order to check and they verified that the model I was interested in was 1/8″ deeper than their standard line.

The kits that I used were these:

Assembly is super easy – you just screw some little plates into the edges to connect them together around your piece, and they also include these little spring clips that you can put in behind the piece to make sure that it fits nice and snug. Now that I’ve seen how they look, I’m sure I’ll end up ordering several more for my next mosaics, and it’s kind of neat that you can get them in different colors, too, because although I think simple black works well for these video game mosaics that I’m doing now, I could see possibly trying some other colors for future mosaics maybe for a kid’s room or something where you might want to be a little more colorful than just black.

Anyways, so here’s the final piece now mounted on my wall…

lego_mosaic_glue5

I’m really happy with how it turned out, and the lighting in the picture doesn’t really do it justice. The glue adds a nice shine to the bricks without being overbearing, and I didn’t end up using any glass or anything so I like how you can still feel the texture of the bricks if you touch it.

So my next steps – there’s enough room on that little strip of wall above the light switch in my office that I want to put two more video game mosaics there – one above and other below this one to kind of wrap up this little vision. I need to literally dust off this one for Final Fantasy and figure out what bricks I need to order to complete it … unfortunately, it looks like I lost the Excel file that I’d designed it in so I kind of have to do it all over again. 🙁

As for #3, I’ve been going back and forth with it because there are so many great characters, but I think I’m going to dedicate that one to Mega Man because the others are all about my favorite classic games and the blue bomber was definitely up there on the list of games that were in heavy rotation during my childhood, too.

Plus, I’d still love to eventually do something much bigger like this massive collage, so all of the other characters hopping through my mind could still make an appearance over there instead.

Also, my wife has a Disney-related one of a bit larger scale that she wants to do sometime in the next six months, which may end up being my first multi-base mosaic, so I suppose that’ll give me some practice for eventually doing one even bigger!

Now … to BrickLink for more 1x1s!

The Sinking of the Oceanos, 1991

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjTuAV036yY

I’ve been up most of the night learning about this kind of fascinating, but mostly terrifying account from 22 years ago of the cruise ship Oceanos sinking off the coast of South Africa.

Much like the recent Costa Concordia, the Captain abandoned his ship and left the passengers and most of the crew to fend for themselves, however unlike the more recent disaster, not a single one of the 571 passengers and crew on-board actually died from the incident.

Playing a key part in the evacuation of the ship’s passengers was Moss Hills, who worked on the Oceanos as the lead guitar player, and it’s just incredible to read his account of realizing that something didn’t seem right, then finding that many of the crew and officers were gathering personal belongings without a word to the passengers, then discovering that the ship was in fact taking on water, and finally working with Lorraine Betts, the cruise director, to coordinate an evacuation first into the remaining lifeboats … and then also via airlift by the South Africa Air Force once they discovered that because between some boats being unavailable and the crew abandoned ship only half-filling another, there wasn’t enough room on the rest for everyone who was left…

At one point he talks about having to lash himself to the railing in order to help people into the harness for the helicopters, and photos show pictures of the deck at a 45 degree angle … it truly is a wonder that nobody ended up falling into the sea that night.

Oh wait – one person did! And yet one of the rescuers was able to dive in and save him, too!

This 6-part series from NBC called Miracle on the Wild Coast tells the entire story and includes interviews with a number of the passengers, the guy who fell from the harness into the sea, and of course, the entertainment staff heroes who led the rescue effort in lieu of actual leadership.

The Captain was quoted later as saying, “When I order abandon ship, it doesn’t matter what time I leave. Abandon is for everybody. If some people like to stay, they can stay.”

It’s amazing how a story can make you both lose and gain faith in humanity at the same time.

New (Old) Weird Al!

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I guess I’ve just been out of the Weird Al loop for a while – the last album that I really remember is Straight Outta Lynwood, which is crazy considering that it’s 7 years old now, but apparently he put out Alpocalypse 2 years ago, which features some of these delightful, little modern gems… 😉

P.S. Best Weird Al song ever? Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota. No, wait – When I Was Your Age. Or maybe Frank’s 2000″ TV – 1993 Scott couldn’t get enough of that song on his Walkman!  8)

iPads in the Movie Theater? No thanks.

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This seems like … an ill-conceived idea at best.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYpRQ5Mw2lM

(via Yahoo! Games)

Granted, I think it’s a neat idea at home, but it seems like theater-wide use would have a couple of issues:

  • Dozens of people playing on their iPads all at once is going to get pretty noisy, even if the app itself has no volume.
  • Movies at the theater are expensive enough as it is without factoring in distractions from the app and other people that might diminish one’s enjoyment of the movie itself.

And I get that this is pushing more of a community experience with sing-a-longs or whatever, and kids movies typically aren’t as engaging as what I would expect from an adult movie, but it just really seems like this is a new feature better left for DVD or Blu-Ray. Of course that said, there’s probably a relatively small percentage of users who actually watch additional features on their Blu-Ray/DVD purchases as it is, and lest we not forget that Disney has really been pushing hard to re-release in theaters a lot of their older content anyways.

I don’t see this particular one going very far, although thankfully even if it does, the chances of me getting stuck in a movie theater with a bunch of kids pounding away on their Moms’ iPads in the middle of the afternoon is slim to none anyways…

The Legacy of the iPhone, and the New iPhone 5C

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I find myself wondering about Apple every once in a while.

I’m sure a lot of people do, and quite probably the same exact quandary, too – will the company continue to innovate after the passing of Steve Jobs.

It’s been almost two years since Apple’s founder and resurrector died, and there have been two new versions of the iconic device that has been the iPhone since his death. And it’s interesting to look down the improvements that the device has seen over the years as we ask ourselves, “Is it still getting more and more amazing???”

  • (2007) First Generation iPhone – 2G connectivity, no 3rd party apps, blew us all away
  • (2008) iPhone 3G – 3G connectivity, GPS, introduction of the App Store
  • (2009) iPhone 3GS – essentially a hardware upgrade
  • (2010) iPhone 4 (GSM version) – added retina display, gyroscope, FaceTime, and a new design
  • (2011) iPhone 4 (CDMA version) – added CDMA support, personal hotspot
  • (2011) iPhone 4S – hardware upgrade, iCloud, Siri
  • Steve Jobs passed away the day after the iPhone 4S was launched
  • (2012) iPhone 5 – 4G connectivity, better hardware
  • (2013) iPhone 5S / 5C – 64-bit processor, Touch ID

Maybe just not enough time has passed yet, but it feels to me like some of these cool, new features that have broken new ground for the iPhone are slowing down. I mean, I honestly don’t even really consider Touch ID to be a worthwhile feature on account of how horrible fingerprint security actually is, although for what it’s worth I did tend to discount Siri, too. But are we just reaching the limits of what technology we can cram into these little, handheld devices?

That honestly might be part of it – if you look over the iPhone’s 7-year history, there were three upgrades in wireless connectivity in its lifespan, mostly because of where the mobile ecosystem happened to be when the phone came on the market – 3G was gaining heavy saturation and talks of 4G had already begun, but nowadays you don’t hear so much about increased wireless capacity anymore. If anything, carriers are looking to offload wireless data back onto wi-fi networks, which the iPhone has supported since day 1.

So maybe the next evolution for the iPhone isn’t in pushing the mobile device itself much further, but in integration with all of the other electronic devices around our home – most obviously being our TV and our computer, since Apple already has products in both markets. Near-field communication still hasn’t really picked up yet, but I remember seeing a pretty cool video a while back where a girl sets her phone down on a desk and everything on the device becomes readily available to her desktop PC. We might still be a ways away from digital glass, but I would think that bridging the gap between mobile and desktop shouldn’t be that big of an issue…

…that is, if people actually want it…

But I guess with this latest offering of the iPhone 5C, it makes me start to wonder if Apple knows what the people want from them anymore, or what they want the people to want from them, to butcher a Steve Jobs quote just a bit. Yes, I’m one of the people who think that the iPhone 5C, in its multitude of new colors, does a disservice to the brand by making it seem cheap. Which is funny, because it’s not – it’s really only $100 less than the regular iPhone 5S, but by offering up a bubblegum pack of flavors for us to choose from, it takes a step away from the iPhone looking like the premium device that it is and instead makes it seem like something that every teenager should have in their pocket.

Case in point – just look at the 5S and the 5C side by side…

iphone5sc

There’s no denying that the new white & gold iPhone is a very sweet looking phone. I was never bowled over when the white iPhone was first introduced, but the latest design might actually force me to make a decision when I finally replace my phone whether to go with the same black that I’ve had or switch over to something different. It looks like something a celebrity would carry.

The 5C, on the other hand, to me looks like a kid’s toy. Or maybe something that your girlfriend might use because she doesn’t want a fancy, full-featured smartphone like you have. It doesn’t scream premium product to me, even though still priced in the same vicinity. And the sad part of it is, it doesn’t really even make sense why it exists in the first place.

People bought the iPhone because it looked different, and because it looked sleek and sexy, even if it wasn’t technically the most advanced smartphone available. How many kids and girlfriends were already walking around with an iPhone because it was the cool phone to have before all of these new colors??? Demand exploded when Apple finally released the white iPhone because everyone had been limited to black up until then, but more importantly, because it still looked incredibly sharp even in white.

The new 5Cs don’t look sharp to me. They feel like a callback to the colorful iMacs of the late ’90s, with the reminder that Apple didn’t have any iconic products when Steve Jobs returned and revived the company in part with the new iMac design. They really had nothing to lose, nowhere to go but up … but now here in 2013, they’ve come a long way, they still command the most popular smartphone brand in the world, and seeing a company that’s been known over the last 15 years for its design flailing a bit certainly has me concerned.

If it’s that lower price point that they’re after, I feel like they’ve sure got a weird way of going after it because the iPhone 5C doesn’t make itself all that much more affordable than its counterparts, and besides, if cheaper is the goal then what’s wrong with what they’ve done in the past by discounting older models like the iPhone 4S, which you can now get for a dollar on contract, as compared to the $199 2-year contract price for the newer 5S.

I’m certainly not ready to throw in the towel on the brand or anything – honestly, I’m still on my original iPhone 4 that I raved about getting 3 years ago, but I guess the thing is that when I eventually am ready to upgrade or if I’m forced to when this phone finally bites the dust, I want there to be something new in the latest iPhone that makes me go, “Awesome – I’ve gotta have that!” like I did with the phone that I have now. I want to be blown away by the advances that have been made since I bought this phone in 2011, and that’s going to take more than faster wireless speeds that my carrier is hungry to restrict and better hardware that doesn’t really present anything new, but is simply better for the sake of improvement.

I’m ready to be wow’ed by the next big thing, and I hope that Apple still ends up being the one to tell us how we just can’t live without it. The thing is, I guess I’m just skeptical that the next big thing is going to come in the shade of coral, and the iPhone 5C feels like a distraction from what Apple could really be working towards.