In the middle of the dot-com bubble Crosswinds used to offer unlimited free hosting service. This allowed me to go out of my way and uploads hudreds of kilobytes of pictures, videos (remember, back then we didn’t have Youtube) and all kinds of other crap. At one point my website was closing in on 200MB in size. It was mostly data too – screenshots and pictures I made, stolen or begged for permission to display.

When the bubble burst, like many hosting companies Crosswinds discontinued their free services leaving me stranded. We entered what I can only describe a free hosting crunch. Getting web space for free was nearly impossible – and if you did find a free host it was either incredibly show, or infested with nasty popup ads and capped your drive space at 15-20MB. They were forcing me to move but there was no where for me to go. No free hosting service offered as much space and I needed. My only choice was to walk away or to scale the website down and relocate it to inferior host with severe storage and bandwidth caps. I chose the second option and decided to make a project out of it.

I scrapped the old design, and re-built it from scratch using a “borrowed” copy of Dreamweaver proper cascading style sheets and my pitiful photoshop skills. The result still looked like crap, but at the time I was proud of myself:

This iteration of the page still exists out on the web but as you can see for yourself it does not have much content. I was very constrained by my new host – not only did I have a 20MB hard drive quota. I also had a monthly and daily upload caps, bandwidth caps and whole host of other annoying “features”. For example – do you see the adds in that screenshot? They are not mine – my host “injected” them into my page. After working with crosswinds and their unlimited everything, no adds, no charge plan this was hell.

Around the same time Farscape got canceled and for some reason Gigi was not lucky enough to get transferred to SG1 like some of her co-stars did. She wasn’t really getting any work in US for a while and my new host was driving me bonkers. So I did what any reasonable man would do – I walked away from the whole project.

Since then I have learned a lot about making and running websites and Gigi seems to have learned how to get more work stateside. For example she starred in that horrid movie Showdown at Area 51. She’s also been busy making music, comic books and all sorts of other crazy things. While she is not as notable now as she was at the height of Farscape popularity, she is also not completely MIA from the public scene like she was cica 2004-2005. So I figured, why not resurrect the fan site.

I looked around, and realized that there is not much competition outh. There is Gigi Enthusiasts which has a forum that is somewhat active now and again. The forum itself a good resource, but the website itself still looks the way it looked when it first started in late 90’s or early 00’s. Which is fine – but it doesn’t have a modern look and feel to it.

Beyond that there is the official page which gets updated once per glacial cycle. It’s one of those sites that was made before we re-branded DHTML into AJAX and started actually using Javascript for more than XXS exploits. So it uses unhealthy amount of flash for stuff that could have been done with just a dash of Javascript.

Beyond that there is nothing significant. So there is definitely a space there for a third website – one solidly grounded in modern principles of web design and utilizing modern technology. I want it to look professional, have RSS feeds, comment threads in the articles and etc. In other words I want my website to stand out and look like it belongs to the web 2.0 universe rather than being a relic of the ages past. And I also want to accomplish all of this with minimum work possible.

In other words, I need a CMS that has all that stuff built in or available via plugins. I could have set up WordPress but I don’t really want another blog – I have enough trouble keeping up with this one. I wanted an easy to maintain news/resource site. Something I could log into once a week (or less often), post some 3 line news blurb along with a handful of links and a Youtube video of some sort and then leave it be. So a traditional CMS was more appropriate here – at least in my opinion. I opted to go with Joomla because I’m already somewhat familiar with it. Or rather I know how to beat it into submission and make it do what I need it to do most of the time. It is not a perfect system, but it is fully configurable and maintainable from the web infterface, has a huge community, bazillion plugins and countless custom templates to pick from

You can see the effects of my work at gigiedgleyfansite.com. Click on the link and check it out and compare it to the competition. I hope that it looks at least a bit more modern, and with the times than these other sites:

“Oh hey, look – it is using a slightly tweaked default Joomla template. It seems that you really like them default templates. It sort of reminds me of another site of yours… What was it called again? Thermally Incorpulent or something?”

Yeah, shut your face. The theme still needs some work. I’ve been looking at various Joomla template sites but I have yet to find a customized template that would look nice and maintain this sort of layout. I tried couple different ones and they all need lot’s of work. My goal is to have something that looks nice, but that does not require hours and hours of design work – which is not my forte. So I’m keeping the default 1.5 theme for now and I’ll either tweak it into submission or change it later. My goal is to try to stop myself from adding functional hacks into the theme itself – something that I did on this blog. My version of Kubrick has so many little custom tweaks that I don’t even remember all of them – and changing the theme to a default one would break about 50 things. So I learned my lesson and I’m going to keep my hands out of the template layer as much as I can.

This project will also allow me to observe SEO effects or lack of thereof. Common sense tells me that once I link to it, the site with such a narrow focus and with little viable competition should bubble up to the first page of Google results relatively quickly. The fact that it should, doesn’t mean it will. So it is a little experiment to see what it takes to get a virtually unknown site onto front page type position. Will a link from Terminally Incoherent boost it through to front page? Or is my own page rank to crappy from that. And if it is, what will I need to do to get it where it needs to be. We shall see. I get bonus points if I can actually get placed higher than Enthusiasts or the official page.

What does this site mean for Terminally Incoherent schedule? Absolutely nothing. I’m keeping it the same. The Gigi site does require a good deal more work, but this is all the upfront effort of launching a resource driven site. I just need to add content and I found out that I can do this kind of shit quite reliably when I’m to tired or to shit-faced to coherently write blog posts. Once I populate the damn thing with more data, it will be just tweaking, upkeep and occasional news post. Thankfully for me, Gigi is not that busy these days so it won’t require my full time attention.

And now for something completely different – and yet related. It seems that Crosswinds is back in the free hosting business. Once again they are offering free and unlimited everything, add free. It seems that doing this sort of thing is once again feasible and affordable. Say thanks to Google kids. They started this revival of free online services with Gmail. I remember that back in the day all the experts who heard how much storage Google was offering would promptly pick up their jaw from the floor and say something among the lines of “well, its’ their funeral”. And here we are again where even an obscure company like Crosswinds can afford to give out space for free again.

If you go bit back in the archives you know my unhealthy obsession with Gigi Edgley. I knew she was working on some sort of scifi movie all the way back in August 2006. Hell, IMDB did not even list it back then. My cyber stalking skills are far superior it seems. This very movie that I posted about last year just premiered on SciFi Channel yesterday and I hand no clue about it. It was a total fluke that I just stumbled upon it! Which tells me this was fate, divine intervention or some shit like that. I was meant to review this movie, and damn it, I’m going to because no one else will!

This movie sucked. End review.

No seriously, the original title was “Alien vs. Alien” but SciFi apparently renamed it to “Showdown at Area 51” which is probably the only possible title that is even more tacky than “Alien vs. Alien”. With a title like that, do you really expect a Science Fiction masterpiece? Nah, this is one of those few shitty, low budget flicks that Scifi buys each year so that they can shut up the critics who say that they actually don’t air any original science fiction on their network.

What do you mean we don’t air original SF movies? We had that Alien vs. Alien thing in December. That’s SF – it has the fucking word Alien in the title twice. And that chick from “Firescape” (sic) was in it. No, not Claudia Black, the other one.

Actually, the fact that I sat through this whole movie just shows depth of my obsession with appreciation for Ms. Edgley. I don’t really have any screenshots to show you since I just saw it on TV and I doubt that anyone actually went to the trouble of capping this one yet. So instead here is the promo shot from scifi.com:

The plot is fairly simple – two aliens get sent to earth. One is a bad guy who is supposed to do something bad, and the other one is a good guy who is sent to stop him. Sigh… I already saw that movie when it was called Terminator, and it was much better back then. Everyone keeps trying trying to cash in on this formula but no one really produces anything of value.

Alien #1 is a bold dude with a tatoo on his face, wearing all leather. Why is it that people from space (and from the future) always wear black leather? Seriously? I will call this first guy baldie because I didn’t bother to remember his space name which doubtlessly have four X’s, 3 V’s and no vowels in it – cause you know that all aliens have names like that.

The alien #2 is a fat guy in a gas mask – cause, apparently, cool prosthetics are expensive and they went all out kitting the other guy in biker leather gear. Gigi and her boyfriend who I think is a park ranger (Ranger Smith let’s call him) – because he wears some ridiculous khaki uniform – somehow get in the middle of the fight between these two. I missed the first 20 or 30 minutes of plot exposition so I’m not really sure how they did that.

Both aliens claim to be good guys but they show it in different ways. For example Baldie kidnaps Gigi to convince her. Gas mask on the other hand decides to convinces Ranger Smith about his good intentions and tell him how baldie is The Real Bad Guy™. This would actually be an interesting plot twist if they actually cared to develop it some more. It turns out that gas mask just wanted a ride in a van, and as soon as they reach destination he decides to kill his new best friend. Baldie shows up to the rescue out of nowhere and you go WTF! They set up this moderately interesting situation where the two pairs could meet and while the aliens fight the humans need to decide which one of them to trust. If they trust the wrong one, and follow his instructions or simply do nothing the earth blows up. So you have some suspense and high tension drama here – actually pretty good shit, right up Gigi’s alley. But of course that would require good writing that does not include phrases such as:

“We need to put the ether-rod into the termination port of the ever-seed.”

But then there are many moments in this movie that actually make no fucking sense. For example there is a scene where baldie and Gigi are in a car, and they hit road block manned by armed soldiers. Baldie decides to go for it, and tank-rush the squad. The soldiers open fire. Lo and behold, not only is the car bulletproof but it actually doesn’t even get scratched up. Once they pass the barricade though some lucky shot breaks off the rear bumper and which point Baldie stops ditches the car and decides to run into the forest with Gigi in tow. In the next scene the car with ranger dude and fat-mask arrives and the same scenario repeats. Their car is also bullet proof.

What’s better is that once they go past the barricade and stop on the other side the soldiers immediately stop shooting decide to pack it in and disappear. They don’t pursue the cars that got past, or even try to investigate them.

No, I’m not kidding – ranger Smith gets out of the car, gas mask tries to kill him, baldie shows up, but the soldiers are fucking gone. Where did they go?

There is another scene where the ranger points a bazooka at the fat alien. The problem is that fatso is lying on the ground, and the he is standing above him. I’m pretty sure that rocket jumping doesn’t really work in real life, so I’m entirely certain how he was planning to get our of the blast area. Unfortunately the alien doesn’t see the silliness of the situation, and actually takes the threat seriously. Sigh… Nothing in this movie really makes much sense.

You will also laugh at the props. For example, the big bad device that will blow up the earth is a glowing traffic cone painted gold. The entry shaft that leads to the resting place of the cone is made out of a plastic garbage can cover but everyone acts as if it was really heavy metal cover. The gas mask’s costume is so laughably pathetic that it’s not even funny. It’s a mess!

As it is the norm in these sort of movies the dialog is atrocious. I could see that Gigi was trying really hard to work with the lines she was given, but there is just no way to deliver some of these gems without looking stupid. You can be the best actor in the world, but the script and direction are very important. If you don’t believe me go watch Revenge of the Sith. Natalie Portman is actually a really good actress, but you probably wouldn’t think that if you only seen that movie. Same applies for Gigi in this flick. She does all the right things though. She is really in character, her emotions are convincing and etc. She is probably the only person on the screen who is actually doing some acting. Everyone else seems to be just pretty content to deliver their lines on cue and move on. And hell, she looks really cute in this one. Sadly she got really shitty lines, and her characters actions made no sense at times. So yes, this role won’t really get her noticed out there. :(

But hey, it’s exposure right? She can now put a “lead actress in a Scifi Channel original movie” on her resume. I don’t know. I’m trying to make the best of it. I’m actually surprised she agreed to do this but I guess this movie probably sounded much better in the casting pitch than it actually turned out.

If you are a Gigi fan, you should probably watch this because she looks so damned cute, and gets lots of screen time. If you are not, then watch at your own peril. Seriously, just watch the cute blond girl and don’t even try to think about the plot because there isn’t any. Your best bet is probably to mute the damn thing when Gigi is not on the screen to protect your sanity.

If you are interested the Scifi channel will air the movie again on Thursday (Dec. 20) on 9 pm. I will probably be watching it then to catch the first 20 minutes that I missed.

[tags]gigi edgley, showdown at area 51, alien vs alien, gigi, edgley, chiana, farscape[/tags]

photo © Neil Davidson [original photo]

Here is another one, this time without a robe:

photo © Neil Davidson [original photo]

Apparently these were taken at the Starfury Convention in 2005. Neil has bunch of other pics taken at the same con on his website.

I bring these up, because being obsessed with Gigi, and a Star Wars geek at the same time, I count this as an absolute win. I must ask though – what is with the hats?

[tags]gigi edgley, starrfury, nick davidson, star wars, lightsaber[/tags]

In August 2006 I mentioned a Sci-Fi flick titled Alien vs. Alien. It is a low budget, shitty monster movie it seems but Gigi is playing a lead role in it so I’m dying to see it. Since August they actually appeared on IMDB.

I was also able to locate a picture from the set:

click to enlarge

IMDB does not list a release date or any useful info. Neither does the blurb on the publisher/distributor website. So it seems that the movie, while completed is still in some sort of post-production limbo.

Nu Image – the production company that made this move seems to specialize in churning out cheesy movies by the dozen – just read the titles they are responsible for. But then again some of their cheese is bound to make big bucks at the box office – they seem to be producing Rambo IV. This means they do have money, and they are capable of producing big budget movies. I don’t think Alien vs. Alien is one of them of course, but perhaps the quality won’t be as crappy as I suspected initially.

The movie looks like a straight-to-DVD, or made-for-TV release. But then again you never know. It would be awesome to see Gigi on the big screen. :)

[tags]gigi edgley, alien vs. alien, cheesy movies, nu image[/tags]

I took the liberty of uploading the Stingers and The Secret Life of Us clips to YouTube for easier access. These two shows are not available in US so I figured Gigi can only benefit from more exposure.

Here is the dramatic, highly emotional clip from the Australian cop drama Stingers:

Here is the clip from The Secret Life of Us sitcom:

Enjoy!

[tags]gigi edgley, gigi, stingers, secret life of us, tv[/tags]

Check it out here:

Google Video Link for RSS readers

This is probably one of the very first things she has shot in her career. It’s amazing that this thing surfaced like that. You got to love Google Video. :mrgreen:

[tags]gigi edgley, the bastard, short films, student movie[/tags]

I know that working titles are usually shitty, but DUDE! How about not naming your movie after a very established franchise? First you run against AVP, then you steal the name of a shitty thriller that spawned multiple sequels, and your third choice is a Star Trek title? What in the god’s green fuck were they smoking?

Judging from the creativity in the title choices, this picture sounds like a low budget exercise in regurgitation of alien-themed scifi cliches. I will still want to watch it though just to see Gigi doing her thing. :mrgreen:

Gigi looks cute in [tag]Last Train to Freo[/tag]:

click to embigen

The trailer, is surprisingly light on Gigi content – especially considering that there are only like 5 actors in this movie total. I can tell you right now that it will never fly here in US. It is one of those “5 people on a train talking” movies which would put even the most open minded, cultured American audiences to sleep in 3 minutes flat (yes we suffer from cultural ADD). At least that’s the impression I got from the clip.

Gigi did some TV work after Farscape, but the shows she appeared in are not syndicated in US. Aussies don’t mind leaching on American TV show torrents but they don’t seem to bother seeding their own TV stuff. How is that fair? Come on people, share a little of your own culture. Same goes for their YouTube and Google Video presence – if you are searching for some obscure Australian shows, you are shit out of luck.

For example, Gigi had an awesome lesbo kissing scene in Stingers, but I can’t even find a measly low-res clip of that scene anywhere:

click to enlagre

If this was an US show, this scene would probably be floating all over the internet. If you have that clip, I want it! US Gigi fans are really missing out on some good stuff here, as it seems that she pretty much hooks up with half of the cast before her role is over. It’s kinda like watching Chiana without makeup and with Gigi’s natural Australian accent.

People of Australia! Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to send me sexy Gigi footage from your TV shows. :mrgreen:

Gigi’s most recent project is Last Train to Freo – a psychological drama more or less centered around her character. Here are some screenshots:

click to enlarge

It seems to be an interesting film, and a very complex, juicy role for Gigi. But what are the chances we will see this production here in US? Slim to none. I really hope someone will actually make a torrent out of this, or share it via e-donkey/mule network.

Update Wed, August 09 2006, 07:17 PM

I found the kiss scene from Stingers:

link

[tags]gigi edgley, stingers, lesbian kiss, last train to freo[/tags]

The Gigi Enthusiast Service has some nice pictures of Gigi Edgley at the ComicCon 2006.

I guess this is a good time to do one of my “Farscape Con Stories”. For the record, I went only once, but it was a blast. It was the 2002 New York Creation Con, and it did cost me a small fortune to guy the tickets, only to end up having shitty seats in like the 10th row. But I’m not complaining – I got to hang out with some of my message board buddies, and I met Gigi. All in all, I think it was money well spent. :) At some point they have set up a picture session with Anth, Gigi and Wayne. They would sit you in between the 3 of them, and someone would snap your picture. My picture is actually quite bizarre:

click to embigen

I came out like a total dork, Wayne looks like he is constipated and Anth is screaming for some reason. Some smart ass has decided that he wants a picture with Gigi lying on their laps. She was totally cool with it and she played along. Of course then everyone started asking for that.

Gigi would have kept doing this but each time she climbed up on top of her cast mates, her skirt was riding way up. I guess this made her feel uncomfortable, and Anth told her not to do this. That is what I’m assuming, because I could not hear the actual conversation. But this is what I gathered by observing their exchange. So Gigi politely refused the next 2-3 offers for the non-standard picture.

5 minutes later, she decided to be a good sport and started doing it again. She also took one-on-one pictures with the few of us who were brave (or bold) enough to approach her after the session.

Another interesting fact is that to take candid pictures of Gigi you need a special equipment – it’s kinda like trying to snap a shot of a hummingbird in mid flight. She just never stops moving. All my convention pictures of her are blurry as hell – except for the ones that we actually managed to anchor her down, and make her look into the camera.

A guy who apparently sat 2 rows ahead of me doing the show, and used a super-duper zoom lens, also had some motion blur problems. My pics came out like shit because I had both a shitty camera, and a shitty seat.

But let’s get back to the new pictures. Take a gander at this picture from the ComicCon. The lady who sits next to her doesn’t look really happy, does she? She is most likely there to chase you off as soon as you get your autograph. And you can see she hates every second of this.

[tags]gigi edgley, comic con, edgley, creation con, pictures, gigi enthusiast service[/tags]

Can’t wait for X3. So far the X-men movies have been getting better. X1 was ok, X2 was better, so if that trend continues X3 should be actually a good movie. But then again, who knows.