08/01/04 - 08/26/04
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08/01/04 - 08/26/04 |
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DIY DIY Mao
A few of you might already be aware of the homespun Alien film I made as a child with my brother and an old friend of mine. Suffice it to say, I hope it stay where it lay. But it was a good time. And though I can't provide web access to the film, some other fellows out there in the world have created their own special tributes / spin-offs available for your immediate viewing pleasure. For example, watch the "trailers" for Predator: Dark Jungle and Predator: Hunter's Match. Or watch the 9-minute long, hilariously preposterous Predator: A New Enemy. Ah, if we'd only had such digital technology in our day. Our Alien "Creature FX" consisted of my brother bursting out of his closet with a hooded cape on making screeching noises and curling his fingers like claws. So awesome. Anyhoo, there's many more Alien / Predator fan films linked up on the AvP World fansite. Most of them are funny as hell.
Speaking of dorks, the main character from Bloodrayne (PS2) will apparently be "posing topless" in October's issue of Playboy as the cover feature. A digitized fictional character, posing nude. Riiiight.
Fellow Eyeball Kids might be interested in listening to "Day After Tomorrow," one of the tracks featured on Tom Waits' forthcoming album Real Gone. It's not revolutionary material, really, just a slow, spare Mule Variations-era ballad. But it's pretty good and the lyrics are interesting. And supposedly iTunes Music Store has a clip of "Metropolitan Glide," another new song, but I couldn't find it to save my life.
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No News Is Still Good News
Besides this gem of a CNN screencap (see related story), I'll share with you a number of strange little items that have come to my attention recently.
First of all, the new Decemberists album will be coming along sooner than expected. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the supporting tour has any Austin dates set yet. Hopefully that will change.
What are you looking at, butthead? Why don't you spend less time painting little toys and more time waxing up my shit out there in the carport? You know I'm taking it to the lake this weekend! Tell K-Lube's mom hi for me.
Take a deep breath before you watch this commercial. I linked to this from a little Pop-Tarts game on Yahoo Instant Messenger and for some strange reason, I thought it was hilarious.
John Kerry will be interviewed on The Daily Show tomorrow night at 10 pm. Me, I usually watch the "morning after" rebroadcast. It's like a brisk slap in the face to get your blood flowing before stepping out in winter. Ah! That stings!
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Los Santos Heats Up
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is looking pretty damn sweet. There's a new interactive site with at least 3 different gameplay videos mixed in with the flash content. The beach party especially was damn impressive. Looking good.
I want to weigh in on the entire John Kerry / Swift Boat Veterans bullshit that seems to have captivated the media recently. Today I saw the second commercial released by the S.B.V.F.T., which features footage of a younger but somehow more haggard Kerry testifying on behalf of other veterans like himself, witnessing to the atrocities such men experienced during their service in Vietnam. This is interspliced (rather ironically, I might add) with testimonials from a bunch of John Q. Crankyvets, who mutter pitiful bits of invective about a man with whom none of them really "served" in the first place. Here he is, testifying to the horrible truths behind such a massive armed conflict, and they're cursing him for blowing their cover! It really feels like these vets are either in denial or were stuck cleaning the latrine their whole tour and never had the displeasure of seeing their friends' eyeballs shot out and whatnot. My point is this: you served with John Kerry, I served with John Kerry - can't we all just be friends and vote Bush 2004, so he can take even more benefits away from future veterans? Simple young whippersnappers.
The Magnolia Elec. Co. concert at Emo's last night was great. Molina and his 5-man backing band even got around to covering The Byrds' "You Ain't Going Nowhere." They did play a few songs from the Magnolia album, but these were keyed up, rollicking versions that very much reminded me of Neil Young live - filled with tons of piercing guitar breaks and feverish vocals.
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Erogenous Killzone
In keeping with modern political tactics, I'm flip-flopping a bit on Killzone (PS2). What happened? Well, I played several games in a row with a group of people who basically managed not to be retarded little dicks for an hour or so. Instead of dumb ole Deathmatch, we fought team matches using three different game modes: Assault (one team defends an objective), Defend and Destroy (both teams must defend objectives), and Supply Drop (both teams must recover and return supplies to their base). Having discreet home-bases and objectives negated most of my complaints about respawn, and playing with a smaller group of savvy beta-testers also alleviated lag and team-killing issues that had originally chapped my scaly hide. After overwhelming initial disappointment I was amazed to find myself enjoying the game! While finding and entering a reliably good match is still problematic, I'm nevertheless re-excited about Guerrilla's unique interpretation of first-person shooter multiplayer. November, here we come.
Magnolia Electric Co. is playing tonight at Emo's. Looks like you could buy tickets online ($8.50 w/ all fees) if you wanted.
Plain Ole Gossip it may well be, but entertaining nonetheless.
If you think you had it bad, think about growing up a Phelps. "God hates fags-that's a synopsis." Ugh.
Though I play SC:PT on PS2 and not XBox Live, I can vouch for the veracity of the claims made by this Penny Arcade strip. I can never understand why so many fucking people play these pointless variations where the host cranks up the time limit and players' lives and play either deathmatch or tag. Not only do the modifications automatically turn ranking off (no ranking does serve as a great red flag for detecting bullshit assholes), but the spy/merc dynamic is not balanced for this kind of free play: spies are sposed to sneak around and achieve their objectives, mercs are sposed to kill spies. Of course the folks that create these games are always spies; I think the only fucking reason they do this is because they like to grab your neck and talk shit or repeatedly jump you to death with relative impunity. It's so stupid. I just can't say that enough. Play ranked games.
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Don't Touch My Zone
I got my Killzone public beta disk yesterday, and I managed to play it for an hour or so. Here's the Killzone 1UP.com page. There are some really good things about this game, including the overall tone, the environments, the models, and the guns. However, I was really frustrated by the lag problems, especially because it seems to lag differently than SOCOM 2 or Splinter Cell: PT. One second you're emptying your gun into an enemy to no avail, and the next second it correctly takes the three or four shots to bring him down. Coupled with the swimmy movement style, sometimes it feels like you're floating in and out of the ether, utterly intangible until you die right out of nowhere.
Everyone on the game and the beta forums says things like "It's just a beta," or "Still better than SOCOM 2 Beta." I actually didn't think the S2 beta was so terrible. And yeah, I know it's a beta, but there are some major features lacking in the online interface, which makes starting a game quite irritating. After you finish a game, you can't use voice chat, only typed text. Worse, you have to quit that one and find another - it doesn't start a map over.
I've never been a huge fan of random respawning, or its best friend Spawn-Camping, both completely unavoidable in Team Deathmatch mode. I've also played the Assault mode, which is a bit more fair, but it feels really pointless. More playing might iron out some of the misunderstandings I have with KZ. Based on my initial experience, I'll at least rent it when it comes out in November, and I'm eager to see what tweaks they make to their game and servers in the meantime. More to come.
And just a couple more notes about AvP. I'm being inundated with shitty reviews of the film, and they all say the same kind of things. I thought it was at least worth matinee price, if you're even halfway interested in the two series. But watch the popcorn, apparently that shit goes down hard.
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Alien Vs. Predator (2004)
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Did You Get A Little PS in your I?
I rented PSI-Ops for PS2 this week, and beat it in just under 5 (non-consecutive) hours. Five hours sounds really short, but I thought it was a perfect length for a renter, and it was a great game besides.
As I've mentioned before, it's much like a blend of Killzone and Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast. You begin the game with the inevitable silenced pistol, using cover and engaging in minor shootouts. It's not long before you get your first (and best) PSI power: telekinesis. Telekinesis is a joy unto itself, much like JK2:JO's force grip. I didn't use the other powers all that often unless they were required for progress.
The storyline is mildly entertaining, if somewhat predictable. I'll warn you now: it ends with a forehead-slapping "To Be Continued." And once you get good at using TK, there's few challenges that don't only require rote trial and error.
PSI-Ops was a perfect rental game: it's short, sweet, and the fun of throwing boulders at your enemies is really hard to deny. The incredible rag-doll physics engine they use for PSI-Ops makes up for most of the game's shortcomings.
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Dam!
The physiological and psychological complications of fear continue to amaze me. Maybe you heard about this little incident in Charlotte, NC? Your attention to this line:
According to affidavit released Tuesday, the tapes contained images of Mansfield Dam near Austin, Texas; the MARTA transit system in Atlanta, Georgia; the Downtown Transit Center and Downtown Metro Trolley in Houston, Texas; and trolley cars in Dallas, Texas, and New Orleans, Louisiana.Whoah! A little close to home there, bad guys! Can you please keep your senseless bloodthirst out of my reality bubble? Go perpetrate your shitty shit somewhere else, specifically the fuck away from me. In my Reservoir Ecology class last semester, we discussed the implications of a collapsed dam. It ain't pretty. Think of life as a business; dams breaking is real bad for business. Shit, axe China. China know. FEMA, your comments? Ha-ha! This shit is funny (ha-ha funny). |
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Mending Fences
Hooray for Robosan! He sent me this fucking awesome Will Farrell / ACT collaboration. All other George Bush impersonations fall by the wayside. Some might argue that it's too ridiculous, too fanciful a portrayal of our Commander-in-Chief. I thought it was eerily dead-on. Sure it's not a bear, or a puma?
During my Windows Reinstall some time ago, I lost the links to the sordid and assorted webspaces inhabited by our "Man in Washingstan" Magic. Well, he was kind enough to repoint me in the right directions. You've got the genius of The Dirty Professor, his Wakeupgod page on WireFM, and the bitingly gustatorial Cake, Or Death? Enjoy.
And I'll top it all off with three interesting CNN stories.
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Can't Amistand Ya
Since it's a tax-break weekend or whatever, I won't charge extra for these new photos from July's trip to Lake Amistad. Lots of great scenery, swimming in the springs, and tying up to a few international border buoys while we take our samples and run depth profiles for temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, specific conductivity, and light penetration. Amistad can get pretty deep in parts; that station at IB8 is mighty deep and usually pretty fucking hectic, with plenty of whitecaps that break our moorings over and over again.
I don't know how many times I'll get to go this fall. I've got some late classes (dammit) and I doubt I'll be able to get out there with the crew for a while. And that's disappointing, since I hear the birding in winter is spectacular. Heh, birding.
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Nader's Upbraiders
This picture, entitled "John French Kerry," was posted on a Kerry parody site I found. This stuff's pretty retarded, but I can't really say their aren't any Democrat counterparts. Yeah, that last one's my favorite too. But this one is also really good.
I heard something mentioned about vote-swapping the other day, and I remembered I'd always wanted to look that shit up, see how it worked. It actually took me a while to find a related site still up, possibly because the main trading site, NaderTrader.Org, was shut down before the 2000 election. Maybe I heard about this way back then and just forgot to research it, but I was pretty surprised at what I felt was the total lack of rational judgement in California's case. The chief counsel for the secretary of state at the time commented:
"The vote is an inalienable, fundamental legal concept throughout the country. Certainly in California, we take that very seriously."Hmm, interesting. Was California able to shut down and deny use of the site just because the founder was a Los Angeles resident? I also wonder if the Texas Republicans fall back on the same fake-ass swooning when asked about their ridiculous gerrymandering that prompted the Democrat walkout. I mean, tell me they at least acknowledge that what they're doing is purely political. I really don't know, I haven't actually heard a Republican response that wasn't only concerned with the walkout. Have any of you? I mean, shit! Look at what they're doing in Michigan! My only real problem with their tactic is that they won't admit it: admit the cold cunning behind their tricks and two-facery, admit that their high-falootin' family values are based on zippo personal experience *Rush, ahem*, admit that their perfect world would be one devoid of complicated problems like racial integration, the theory of evolution, sexual education - you know, all that icky stuff that Satan uses to trick us into sinning. I wish Jesus was here; he'd slap you in your goddamn face for trying to ban gay marriage. Assholes. So, I never really found a place to swap a Nader vote here for a Kerry vote somewhere else, but I will admit that I didn't really try all that hard. Truth be told, I'm just hoping they'll throw another kick-ass bash downtown for Bush's victory celebration. That'd be swell. |
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Put It In The Air
Looks like the Pope got selected to beta-test Killzone, too. God knows I'm ready to rock. Some other interesting stuff to read:
- Good science story about the "Dead Zone" in the Gulf of Mexico.
- First Lady Bush responds to the J.T.I. (the Jenna Tongue Incident).
- Hungry hungry elk. And wolves.
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Ghosts Of Mars (2001)
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The Forsaken (2001)
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In A Drunken Brawl Over A Female
Kay Lube sent me this amusing entry from the Roadside America website: Lajitas, Texas' own Clay Henry the beer drinking goat. It's quite a funny little story. Pay special attention to the addendums.
Pitchfork Media's got a review posted for Of Montreal's cover of The Shins' Know Your Onion. It's free and highly enjoyable, if you like either of these bands. No se permiten vagabundos.
Here's an interesting artist- Ronnie del Carmen.
Here's an old Crispin Glover interview on Letterman. Special.
We went and watched The Manchurian Candidate yesterday. To be honest it was a classic Enemy Of The State-type thriller, the kind (I'm tempted to believe) are released periodically to make vast technological conspiracies seem fanciful and ludicrous, with plots that are just a smidgen too contrived and inconceivable to rationalize taking any lessons home. Other examples include Minority Report, The Matrix, and any given episode of The X Files. Now that I've got my Alex Jones flowing, I thought I'd share some more fear I found recently. Biometric Express and Vote Fear 2004.
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