[The hip new way to keep tabs on Rob, without all that time-consuming conversation.]
“The bomb will not start a chain reaction in the water, converting it all to gas, letting all the ships in all of the oceans drop down to the bottom. The bomb will not blow out the bottom of the sea, and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy.”
-Vice Admiral W.H.P. Blandy
Don’t kid yourself, we’re living in the future over here.
Think of that storage! How many times could you store the data of your first hard drive on, for instance, your phone? Crazy.
It’s not like I’ve operated a punch card computer here, but the rate at which neat stuff passes us by is fantastic. (Although, as Louis CK reminds us, we’re still not happy.)
I noticed it today as I sometimes do – in an electronics store. And not for the first time. It’s happened to me before, in a gamestop, when an employee was trying to describe the then-elusive and sold-out classic controller accessory for the Wii. Because I’m very helpful, I jumped in and said it looks just like a Super Nintendo controller. Yeah, says the clerk, but with sticks. Kid customer turns to me then. ”What’s that?” What’s what? ”What’s a Super Nintendo?” Right. I’ll just be going now. Can’t be late for the bus back to the retirement center or I’m stuck in gamestop for a week.
Today, it was by my lonesome, in a Best Buy, checking out camcorders. And for around $100, I can get a thing that fits in my pocket and shoots 1080p. That’s one hundred United States Dollars. That’s crazy. And I considered it briefly. It’d be just fine to shoot some shorts for the internet, and I could do some post trickery and make it look perfectly usable – more than youtube needs, anyhow. The hardest part would be trying to get actors to take it seriously when it’s sitting on its tiny tripod. The SVHS shoulder mounted monstrosities I shot on at SCTV weighed a ton, but at least you had an air of authority during an interview.
And even then, what I was doing was more or less a technological miracle! This used to be so hard – at least by comparison. It used to require taking dozens of actual photographs per second! You had to wait until Thomas Edison invented a way to develop your film before you could even see what you’d shot! And what do we do with all this completely amazing stuff? Well, we do the exact same thing humans have been doing with motion picture technology for the past 120 years. If only Étienne-Jules Marey and his big luxurious beard could see what he’d started….
I saw a trailer for a new movie the other day, Death at a Funeral. It reminded me a lot of another trailer. For Death at a Funeral. Here’s a look at both so you can decide which actor you think is best at saying all these great jokes!
In second grade, in reading groups, at St. Pascal Baylon, the teacher for our group made fun of me for not grasping the concept of blindness. She described it as being ‘just like having your eyes closed all the time.’ But, if my eyes are closed, I can still distinguish when a light is turned on in a dark room, for instance. We went around on this point a couple of times.
A couple years ago, I worked for someone who would, perhaps once a week or so, tell me “You look just like Mike Myers.” and if one of his friends or family members was near by, he’d bring them over to weigh in on my similarities to Mike. He needed confirmation so much that I would get asked my opinion on the matter too. ”That depends,” I’d say, “serial killer Mike Myers [from Halloween], or comedian Mike Myers [from SNL]?” Neither, it turns out.
I’m not sure why the above never got posted back in May, but I hope you all had yet another SpoooOooOOOOOoky ThaaaAAaaankgiiiIIiving!
Surviving Disaster ended last month. Better Radio rages on. Applied for UCB’s Maude and Beta teams. Writing a lot of things. Booked holiday plane tickets. Watched some movies. Watching movies faster than I’m writing 2 liners about ‘em though, so I’m just going to do that in sections for a little while.
-The Last Temptation of Christ – Courtesy of the hulu. Started off funny. Became less so.
-Let the Right One In – Cool, especially for explaining what happens to a vampire who ISN’T invited in. I may have been late to the scene, but at least I saw it before the remake.
-Secret Beyond the Door… – Not a very good secret, frankly. The orchestra liked this movie significantly more than I did.
-Closed Mondays and Your Face and Kiwi! -Animated shorts, like you read about, presuming you read about short films, or animation, or something. Maybe a general interest publication with a particular focus this month on award-winning short subjects. Kiwi was great.
-Shooter – I guess if they explained the shock reveal of the last couple minutes at the beginning when it was equally valid, it wouldn’t be much of a movie. Certainly, Marky Mark wouldn’t've had to commit the dozens of murders he ought to be prosecuted for instead.
-Battle for Terra – Humans are the invaders! Oh no! It wasn’t clear why flying creatures need flying machines, or what they have to fear from falling.I think it looked good except for the humans, but it didn’t stick with me.
-The Girlfriend Experience – A Soderbergh experiment. Better than Bubble. Making the story non-linear just seemed like a technique to spread a thin story…thinner? That can’t be the analogy. That’s not something you’d do on purpose.
-Toy Story and Toy Story 2 – in 3D! Hadn’t seen these before, but part 3 is coming. Except now I don’t want to see it. Part 2 was almost exactly the same movie the first one was, with the same jokes, the same one song, same…everything. Seems like a waste.
-Zombieland – Yuck. This is to the zombie genre as timecrimes was to time travel. It’s the smallest possible amount of story they could bother with and still technically be a zombie movie. Just terrible.
-The Informant! - Hey, this was really good. Soderbergh’s 90s by way of the 70s. Lots of great comics in cameo roles, cool story, funny, well done, this is the opposite of cinematic warm mayonnaise.
-The Strangers – Worth it for one long genuinely creepy shot of Liv Tyler on the phone, with one of the strangers hanging around in the house, unbeknownst to her.
-Redbelt – I heard sometime later that this is a movie people don’t like. Those people are wrong. Fancy Mamet-y plotting unfolds, honor is preserved.
-KRAA! The Sea Monster – Truly a misunderstood horrible monster of the sea. Courtesy of Doc Mock’s Movie Mausoleum. (still, better than the sequel, KRAAmer Vs. KRAAmer)
“I’m going to go home and download that song. Legally!”
“What?”
“I said, ‘I’m going to go home and download that song,’ and then I said, ‘legally!’”
“You can’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“Is music-sharing legal?”
“I think it is”
“Wait, it is?”
“Maybe it isn’t.”
“I think it is if one person paid for it.”
“I’m not really sure how it works.”
“Anyway, you should all know that WE are going to go out to eat after our show today!”
“We haven’t even decided where we’re going to go yet.”
“I think I could go for Aunt Chilada’s”
*ding sound effect*
“Yay!”
“I think maybe it’s not good if you’re going more than three times a week though.”
“It’s Sunday, so I haven’t been there at all this week yet.”
“Wait, are we advertising them?”
“No, they are just a place that exists. And has really good food.”
“Oh, I don’t go there for the food.”
“And has really good…something else…even, I mean, but not unless you have ID”
“Oh, no, of course not.”
“Of course.”
“Well, since Mike was kind enough to come in and tell us that the levels were turned off–”
“Thanks Mike!”
“We love Mike!”
“He’s smart. He knows how this board thing works”
“But since he told us nobody heard our opening block, we’re going to play our first six songs again”
“Oh, I don’t want to listen to those again.”
“What? Why not?”
“I didn’t like, like, three of them”
“You didn’t like those? I thought you said you – wait, what?”
“gestures on the radio!”
*giggling*
“I’m nervous! I don’t want to talk anymore!”
“Uh oh, she just walked out.”
*Same 2-minute commercial for Ray & Mike’s Deli plays three times in a row*
-College radio station WQAQ, now simulcast on internet, just in case any alumni should ever experience accidental interest, mild waves of nostalgia, swelling, or existential crisis
Until this moment, the words “inert zune” returned only one result in a google search.
Still, it’s a lovely phrase, for any number of reasons.
Got myself all distracted from writing this morning when it occurred to me to pursue Andrew WK records that I hadn’t heard, and in fact hadn’t been released in the US.
So of course we end up on wikipedia after a while:
and down the rabbit hole we go, decoding http://www.awk.dudeguy.com/STEEV%20MIKE.htm (which is a nested number-letter code that works out to ‘there is one more coming’) and some more hunting around reveals ‘the story so far’ as told by someone who writes like a maniac:
http://awilkeskrier.homestead.com/ (take heart, it’s an incredibly long page, and manages to get a little bit less interesting as it goes)
So, Mr. WK not only makes such brilliant music as “It’s Time to Party” and “Party Hard,” apparently puts on performance art pieces that end up as party-concerts in addition to great big tours that go on for years (even when he’s stuck in a wheelchair because he broke his foot jumping around on stage), and somehow has a live action TV show on Cartoon Network, where he combines teams of kids and really big explosives, but he’s also got his own Conspiracy Theory (re: he’s an actor playing Andrew playing music written by some evil faceless shadowy figure?) or more likely his own ARG (since every one of the sites with crazy codes and stuff on them are owned by his production company.)? Hey, leave some awesome for the fish, huh?
Ceteris Paribus.
Which is to say, all else being equal, if you’re some economist or guy who likes to make arguments based on inconvenient terminology (like an economist). All else being equal, I prefered “can only sleep with the TV set to maximum volume” guy to “vomiting out a window or perhaps off a balcony” guy, as neighbors go.
Or so I thought. VOAW(OPOAB)-guy has been going for about 12 hours now, which has taken on comic proportions, even if the scream while vomiting and a second later, the splash of said vomit isn’t any less horrible than it was last night.
And on that note, please allow me to introduce you to a short post written on Oct 12, 2008, that never got past the draft button:
This might be a difference of living in the city vs. the suburbs, but when I was growing up, if the kids down the street were screaming their heads off, it was part of whatever game they were playing, and you ignored it.
Not the case at a friend’s house a few months ago, in a fairly suburban corner of LA, when the neighbor kid started screaming his head off. Our host dropped everything to go to the back yard and yell ‘are you okay?’ for a little while, and then went around to go knock at the neighbor’s door and see how things were going. Seemed strange, but only to a few of us. To the rest, we seemed monstrous for being inclined to ignore it.
But what happens when max-volume-TV-neighbor can go to bed and leave some horror movie on, with a woman in distress screaming “HELP ME! HELP ME PLEASE! SOMEBODY! SOMEBODY HELP!” at 2 am? What’s neighborly then?
Maybe the thing to do is to just let one of the other neighbors take care of it. Relying on ’someone else’ to call the cops, or to put out that fire, or to cure cancer is typically a recipe for disaster, but we can rest assured that one nearby neighbor is on the case. Angry-yelling-out-the-window-guy moved in somewhere around here lately, and I like him.
The family with the new baby does a pretty good job, and the baby doesn’t cry very often, but when it does, angry-window-yelling-guy is on top of it. Someone’s gotta tell that baby to shut up, after all, or it’ll never stop crying! He makes me feel like I live in a movie about New York in the 1970s. There’re two girls fighting about something right now, about 1:30am, and angry-guy set ‘em straight: “You’re both assholes,” proclaims he, “now shut up!”
“There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
And yet, just wanting to like something doesn’t seem to be quite the same as genuinely enjoying it.
Legends of Zork is a newish browser-based game, nominally set in the world of Zork text adventures. A more accurate description of the game seems to be turn-based World of Warcraft, with Zork-flavored names for the places and some of the monsters. There are no puzzles, or, there are things called puzzles which you solve or don’t based on a dice roll. There is no inventory, or, there are weapons you can hold, which, in combination with magic spells you can buy, modify your dice rolling battle results. There’s nothing to look at, aside from maybe a dozen banner-ad sized illustrations, no clever descriptions of things, and nothing to do except grind for points. Players may fight monsters in order to gain experience points and level up, or they may fight each other for useless fame points and slightly less useless money points with which more weapons and armor are purchased, in order to fight more monsters in order to level up, which increases the maximum allowed wager in the PvP arena, which allows faster money making to buy weapons and armor. Great. I’ve stuck it out so far in the hope of something interesting happening. Even tried multiple characters with different goals (making money, magic user, fighter) and the gameplay offers nothing to make these characters different from one another. Still, it’s probably a slightly better version of Zork than the novelizations of the late 1980s. But at least the books didn’t keep automatically logging me out.
Parks & Recreation is the quasi-spin-off of The Office (US). It seems like it leans on the fact that most viewers will see it immediately after The Office on TV, and makes heavy use of all the mock-doc techniques found in the other show. Granted, I didn’t really like The Office either two episodes in, and now I’m a fan, but the thing that makes it seem odd to me is that it doesn’t feel like it is or could be a documentary. Similar to how The Foot Fist Way attempted to use that style without committing to the limits that go with it, maybe, or just too jokey. I guess I’d rather be wrong, but it’s not sitting very well yet.
I saw one Dane watch a Desperate Housewives last night. That only barely qualifies for this topic because I don’t think anything should have to be that lousy.