Channukah present!

[guingel]

yay! my vacation has begun--one day late, due to drivers ed, but oh well. the other girls in the car were a pain today. Anyway, now I have two full weeks of vacation, with nothing to do except some homework. Well, a fair amount of homework, but nonetheless.

Happy Channukah, to all those of you who celebrate it. We're celebrating today--at our house, which is unusual. Usually we do the family thing at our aunt's house, more people live near her. Not that it's a large crowd, just my family, my dad's sister and her husband, her daughter and her husband, and his parents and grandma. Small, but highly congenial :D

I'm very much looking forward to the latkes! My mom makes great, great latkes, as I say here every year at Channukah! I love latkes. And I know a song about it, we used to have a tape of Channukah songs. It's a good song. A good tape, actually. Unfortunately now lost. :(

Anyway, even though we're celebrating tonight, dad gave me my present a little while ago--he got me the DVD of the miniseries of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere! ::gasp!:: Holy crap! Definitely the last thing I expected to get, and I'm so excited. It's got commentary by Neil Gaiman and all sorts of awesome stuff. :D :D Yay! So I cannot wait to watch that.

People who live near me--we've got to get together and do cool things. Have our own Trilogy Tuesday! ;) (don't worry, I won't make you guys watch Neverwhere)

Comments

[ffenics.livejournal.com]

OMG, its out on DVD? I still have it on tape from when it was on BBC1, but I missed one ep so I *want* that DVD!

I love the icon, Mucha, isn't it? I went to the Mucha museum in prague and came out loaded with all kinds of posters and goodies of his "Dance" lady :D

[tiggspanther.livejournal.com]

Heh. I missed one ep too. And the VHS set was always too pricey. (Back when I cared about VHS)

Nope. Doesn't seem to be available here. But in America. Odd for a BBC series, ne?

[guingel.livejournal.com]

so, is there a difference between American DVD players and British/European DVD players? Cos David keeps telling me that you can't play British DVDs on an American player, like tapes. . . but that doesn't make sense to me. I mean, I don't know anything about it, really.

[tiggspanther.livejournal.com]

Well, for one thing there's still the NTSC/PAL encoding issue. But most video (and DVD) players and TV can handle that part of things.

Is the whole Region system that gets in the way. To try and keep control on what gets released when and where, the but Hollywood companies imposed "Region Coding" on DVDs.

America and Canada are R1. Though I think South America is R4 (as is Australia). Europe (and hence UK) is R2. As, strangely enough, Japan.

There are ways around it. My DVD player is region-hackable. My DVD-ROM drive in my PC had it's firmware flashed (removing restrictions), and I have DVD Region X for my Playstation2 which allows me to set it to whatever region I want.
But it's easier to find stuff in the UK. 'Cos it took a while for European DVDs to actually catch up with American ones. People got ticked with long waits and also with less features ('cos they sacrifice special features for putting more Languages on - Europe speaks a lot of 'em...).

[guingel.livejournal.com]

geez, that's really annoying and evil! how very inconvenient.

[tiggspanther.livejournal.com]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/17/1415253

[guingel.livejournal.com]

yep, on DVD. There's two, actually, in a box set. Very fancy ;) It has commentary, a Neil Gaiman bio, "the original BBC Neil Gaiman interview", character descriptions, and a photo gallery. And box cover art by Dave McKean! (I'm just saying that cos I'm proud of myself for recognizing it)

Mucha indeed--all my icons are mucha right now :D He's awesome, they're so gorgeous. I must go to Prague, I want to see the Mucha museum! Very cool!

[tiggspanther.livejournal.com]

Neverwhere's available on DVD?

*goes to check*

Typical. I'm a Brit, and I'll have to import from America if I want to get hold of a British TV series on DVD. -_-

[guingel.livejournal.com]

haha, we know how to do things! :P (ok, that's a lie. . . I'm just smug cos I have the Neverwhere DVD XD)

[tckma.livejournal.com]

I only make mediocre latkes, but that's probably because I'm not Jewish. I use a mix, which could be another problem.

[guingel.livejournal.com]

mom's not Jewish, and my Jewish family apparently aren't so much for cooking. Mom's just amazing. :D But yeah, the mix probably doesn't help. Mom's been peeling, slicing, and, uh, food processing potatoes all day! They smell really good, I'm hungry!