Talentless Low-Budget Productions

Sorry we moved

2006-01-29T22:17:00.000-04:00

I grew tired of this fucking lame blogspot html code , i now can be reached at: http://anubissilva.wordpress.com

Mistakes I Made Last Year

2006-01-05T00:28:00.000-04:00

Caught a raccoon with my bare hands, but then realized I had no reason to do such a thing and spent the entire afternoon panicking, afraid to let it go for fear it would attack me.
Tossed said raccoon into my bathroom and slammed the door shut. I had to pee in jars for a whole week until the raccoon expired.
Told a hobo that he could sleep on my couch on the grounds that he ghostwrote at least two of my cooking school reports a month.
Forgot to get rid of expired raccoon, causing the hobo to abandon my humble dwelling for less smelly pastures.
Ate nothing but cheesecake for a whole month, temporarily gained the ability to hear five minutes into the past with my left ear.
Bought a dozen parakeets thinking they would grow big enough to eat. Ran them all down the garbage disposal a week later when they failed to demonstrate sizeable weight gain.
Drove my Tex-Mex cooking instructor to do something she swore she would never do: take a human life.
Spent $10,000 faking my own murder to get out of a Tex-Mex cooking class.
Abandoned a brilliant career as a cook to spend more time building forts in the sandbox.
Abandoned a brilliant career as a sandbox fort maker when children threw hardened chunks of sand at me.
Attempted to build a fort using loaves of bread as bricks at the grocery store. Now I'm no longer welcome in the bread aisle without supervision from a manager.
Mastered falconry in order to become a superior hat thief, become cocky and attempted to steal the hat of the town sheriff. Now my precious falcon is sealed in a police evidence bag.
Traded all my shares in Google for a really nice bandana, spent half a day pretending to be an outlaw.
Started a petting zoo consisting solely of Mexican jumping beans. Failed to chain beans up to prevent them from hopping away in the night.
Wrote the first really great American novel, which concerns the affairs of a small town that is torn asunder when an alien rapes and eats Santa Claus. I accidentally stole the story from an early draft of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and had to abandon it altogether.
Sold advertising space on my lower back to GoldenPalace.com.
Got emotionally involved with a coworker, something I swore I would never do. We just couldn't stop talking about large breeds of dogs together.
Took an RV for a test-drive and liked it so much that I decided to go on an impromptu cross-country trip. Ending up getting arrested for vehicle theft somewhere near los andes. Naturally I decided not to buy the RV.
Invented a method to solve the world's food distribution problems but forgot to write it down. I think it involved conveyer belts and the world's longest rubber band.
Disguised myself as a chess piece and then robbed a jewelry store. Was caught when I couldn't run diagonally from authorities.
Spent $5,000 building and staffing my own sweatshop in Nicaragua, then having them make me one really large high top shoe to live in. It ended up collapsing and killing everyone in the factory before it was finished.
Opened a library in my bedroom, but failed to draw interest due to the fact I own less than 20 books, most of which tell you how to 3d model a horse and then how to animate a walk cycle.
Spent New Year's alone in a slime-covered alleyway, drinking cheap booze and stuffing cold Pop-Tarts into my mouth.
Wore my best fedora into a port-a-potty.
Locked myself out of my apartment, and then set the door on fire to get back in.
Attempted to create a perceptual energy machine and ruined my stereo.
Opened a water slide park in Thailand.
Opened a water slide park in New Orleans.
Downloaded popular music without paying money, thereby helping cause artists like Usher to starve to death.
Cloned 5 versions of myself to split the rent but they ended up forming a Christian rock band.
Faked my own death to get out of work for a week but at the funeral my boss noticed I was alive when he saw me configuring my iPod in the casket.

100 things we didn't know this time last year

2005-12-30T14:11:00.000-04:00

1. The UK's first mobile phone call was made 20 years ago this year, when Ernie Wise rang the Vodafone head office, which was then above a curry shop in Newbury.

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2. Mohammed is now one of the 20 most popular names for boys born in England and Wales.

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3. While it's an offence to drop litter on the pavement, it's not an offence to throw it over someone's garden wall.

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10 toes by Stuart Evans

Every week, users send pictures 10 things they have seen. These are some of the best - submit yours by clicking here

4. An average record shop needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth stocking, according to Wired magazine.

5. Nicole Kidman is scared of butterflies. "I jump out of planes, I could be covered in cockroaches, I do all sorts of things, but I just don't like the feel of butterflies' bodies," she says.

6. WD-40 dissolves cocaine - it has been used by a pub landlord to prevent drug-taking in his pub's toilets.

7. Baboons can tell the difference between English and French. Zoo keepers at Port Lympne wild animal park in Kent are having to learn French to communicate with the baboons which had been transferred from Paris zoo.

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8. Devout Orthodox Jews are three times as likely to jaywalk as other people, according to an Israeli survey reported in the New Scientist. The researchers say it's possibly because religious people have less fear of death.

9. The energy used to build an average Victorian terrace house would be enough to send a car round the Earth five times, says English Heritage.

10 beach huts by Angela Pini

10. Humans can be born suffering from a rare condition known as "sirenomelia" or "mermaid syndrome", in which the legs are fused together to resemble the tail of a fish.

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11. One in 10 Europeans is allegedly conceived in an Ikea bed.

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12. Until the 1940s rhubarb was considered a vegetable. It became a fruit when US customs officials, baffled by the foreign food, decided it should be classified according to the way it was eaten.

13. Prince Charles broke with an 80-year tradition by giving Camilla Parker Bowles a wedding ring fashioned from Cornish gold, instead of the nugget of Welsh gold that has provided rings for all royal brides and grooms since 1923.

14. It's possible for a human to blow up balloons via the ear. A 55-year-old factory worker from China reportedly discovered 20 years ago that air leaked from his ears, and he can now inflate balloons and blow out candles.

15. Lionesses like their males to be deep brunettes.

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16. The London borough of Westminster has an average of 20 pieces of chewing gum for every square metre of pavement.

17. Bosses at Madame Tussauds spent £10,000 separating the models of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston when they separated. It was the first time the museum had two people's waxworks joined together.

18. If all the Smarties eaten in one year were laid end to end it would equal almost 63,380 miles, more than two-and-a-half times around the Earth's equator.

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19. The = sign was invented by 16th Century Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who was fed up with writing "is equal to" in his equations. He chose the two lines because "noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle".

10 butterfly eggs by Peter Rettenberger

20. The Queen has never been on a computer, she told Bill Gates as she awarded him an honorary knighthood.

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21. One person in four has had their identity stolen or knows someone who has.

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22. The length of a man's fingers can reveal how physically aggressive he is, scientists say.

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23. In America it's possible to subpoena a dog.

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24. The 71m packets of biscuits sold annually by United Biscuits, owner of McVitie's, generate 127.8 tonnes of crumbs.

25. Nelson probably had a broad Norfolk accent.

26. One in four people does not know 192, the old number for directory inquiries in the UK, has been abolished.

27. Only in France and California are under 18s banned from using sunbeds.

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28. The British buy the most compact discs in the world - an average of 3.2 per year, compared to 2.8 in the US and 2.1 in France.

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29. When faced with danger, the octopus can wrap six of its legs around its head to disguise itself as a fallen coconut shell and escape by walking backwards on the other two legs, scientists discovered.

10 on Ford GT40 by Tony Crowther

30. There are an estimated 1,000 people in the UK in a persistent vegetative state.

31. Train passengers in the UK waited a total of 11.5m minutes in 2004 for delayed services.

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32. "Restaurant" is the most mis-spelled word in search engines.

33. Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho has only been in an English pub once, to buy his wife cigarettes.

34. The Little Britain wheelchair sketch with Lou and Andy was inspired by Lou Reed and Andy Warhol.

35. The name Lego came from two Danish words "leg godt", meaning "play well". It also means "I put together" in Latin.

36. The average employee spends 14 working days a year on personal e-mails, phone calls and web browsing, outside official breaks, according to employment analysts Captor.

37. Cyclist Lance Armstrong's heart is almost a third larger than the average man's.

38. Nasa boss Michael Griffin has seven university degrees: a bachelor's degree, a PhD, and five masters degrees.

39. Australians host barbecues at polling stations on general election days.
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10 bowling balls by Nathan Jenkins

40. An average Briton will spend £1,537,380 during his or her lifetime, a survey from insurer Prudential suggests.
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41. Tactically, the best Monopoly properties to buy are the orange ones: Vine Street, Marlborough Street and Bow Street.
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42. Britain's smallest church, near Malmesbury, Wiltshire, opens just once a year. It measures 4m by 3.6m and has one pew.
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43. The spiciness of sauces is measured in Scoville Units.
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44. Rubber gloves could save you from lightning.
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45. C3PO and R2D2 do not speak to each other off-camera because the actors don't get on.

46. Driving at 159mph - reached by the police driver cleared of speeding - it would take nearly a third of a mile to stop.
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47. Liverpool has 42 cranes redeveloping the city centre.

48. A quarter of the world's clematis come from one Guernsey nursery, where production will top 4.5m plants this year alone.

49. Tim Henman has a tennis court at his new home in Oxfordshire which he has never used.

10 grandchildren - five kids and their portraits - by Jimmy Martin

50. Only 36% of the world's newspapers are tabloid.

51. Parking wardens walk about 15 miles a day.
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52. You're 10 times more likely to be bitten by a human than a rat.
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53. It takes 75kg of raw materials to make a mobile phone.
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54. Deep Throat is reportedly the most profitable film ever. It was made for $25,000 (£13,700) and has grossed more than $600m.

55. Antony Worrall-Thompson swam the English Channel in his youth.

56. The Pyruvate Scale measures pungency in onions and garlic. It's named after the acid in onions which makes cooks cry when cutting them.

57. The man who was the voice of one of the original Daleks, Roy Skelton, also did the voices for George and Zippy in Rainbow.

58. The average guest at a Buckingham Palace garden party scoffs 14 cakes, sandwiches, scones and ice-cream, according to royal accounts.

59. Oliver Twist is very popular in China, where its title is translated as Foggy City Orphan.

10 penguins by Nic Evans

60. Newborn dolphins and killer whales don't sleep for a month, according to research carried out by University of California.

61. You can bet on your own death.
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62. MPs use communal hairbrushes in the washrooms of the Houses of Parliament.

63. It takes less energy to import a tomato from Spain than to grow them in this country because of the artificial heat needed, according to Defra.

64. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's home number is listed by directory inquiries.

65. Actor James Doohan, who played Scotty, had a hand in creating the Klingon language that was used in the movies, and which Shakespeare plays were subsequently translated into.

66. The hotter it is, the more difficult it is for aeroplanes to take off. Air passengers in Nevada, where temperatures have reached 120F, have been told they can't fly.

67. Giant squid eat each other - especially during sex.

68. The Very Hungry Caterpillar has sold one copy every minute since its 1969 publication.
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69. First-born children are less creative but more stable, while last-born are more promiscuous, says US research.

10 bales of straw by Peter Bradshaw

70. Reebok, which is being bought by Adidas, traces its history back more than 100 years to Bolton.

71. Jimi Hendrix pretended to be gay to be discharged from the US Army.

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72. A towel doesn't legally reserve a sun lounger - and there is nothing in German or Spanish law to stop other holidaymakers removing those left on vacant seats.

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73. One in six children think that broccoli is a baby tree.

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74. It takes a gallon of oil to make three fake fur coats.

75. Each successive monarch faces in a different direction on British coins.

76. The day when most suicides occurred in the UK between 1993 and 2002 was 1 January, 2000.

77. The only day in that time when no-one killed themselves was 16 March, 2001, the day Comic Relief viewers saw Jack Dee win Celebrity Big Brother.

78. One in 18 people has a third nipple.

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79. The section of coast around Cleethorpes has the highest concentration of caravans in Europe.

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10 sunbeds by Ann Cooper

80. Fifty-seven Bic Biros are sold every second - amounting to 100bn since 1950.

81. George Bernard Shaw named his shed after the UK capital so that when visitors called they could be told he was away in London.

82. Former Labour MP Oona King's aunt is agony aunt Miriam Stoppard.

83. Britain produces 700 regional cheeses, more even than France.

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84. The actor who plays Mike Tucker in BBC Radio 4's The Archers is the father of the actor who plays Will Grundy.

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85. Japanese knotweed can grow from a piece of root the size of pea. And it can flourish anew if disturbed after lying dormant for more than 20 years.

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86. Hecklers are so-called because of militant textile workers in Dundee.

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87. Pulling your foot out of quicksand takes a force equivalent to that needed to lift a medium-sized car.

88. A single "mother" spud from southern Peru gave rise to all the varieties of potato eaten today, scientists have learned.

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89. Spanish Flu, the epidemic that killed 50 million people in 1918/9, was known as French Flu in Spain.

10 snowdrops by Bryce Cook

90. Ordinary - not avian - flu kills about 12,000 people in the UK every winter.

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91. Croydon has more CCTV cameras than New York.

92. You are 176 times more likely to be murdered than to win the National Lottery.

93. Koalas have fingerprints exactly like humans (although obviously smaller).

94. Bill Gates does not have an iPod.

95. The first traffic cones were used in building Preston bypass in the late 1950s, replacing red lantern paraffin burners.

96. Britons buy about one million pumpkins for Halloween, 99% of which are used for lanterns rather than for eating.

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97. The mother of stocky cricketer - and this year's Strictly Come Dancing champion - Darren Gough was a ballet dancer. She helped him with his pivots.

98. Nettles growing on land where bodies are buried will reach a foot higher than those growing elsewhere.

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99. The Japanese word "chokuegambo" describes the wish that there were more designer-brand shops on a given street.

100. Musical instrument shops must pay an annual royalty to cover shoppers who perform a recognisable riff before they buy, thereby making a "public performance".

A Trout´s Lament

2005-12-13T10:15:00.000-04:00

Alas, I am caught! Oh, woe is me, the day I have so long dreaded has finally arrived. Please, I beg of you, remove the stinging hook from my jaw! Oh, it pokes me so! Ah, thank you, friend. You are a just and merciful captor, and it is all I can do to surrender to you honorably and accept my fate. But wait! Do not break my head just yet! I must commend you, before you kill me: your lure was quite convincing. Did you make it yourself? No? Well, even so, I must compliment your discretion in buying lures. It is apparent to me that you are an experienced hunter, for a novice would never have been so wise as to pick that lure.

Wait! Please, put me down! Do not dash my head against the hard seat of your boat! I am sorry that I flattered you so extravagantly. Please! I assure you that my compliments were sincere! Many fishermen have tried to catch me, sir, but you are the first with the talent and wiles to complete the task. You are wise and hearty man to be out on the lake so early, just as dawn is spreading her dappled glow upon the water. Please, before you kill me, allow me to look upon the water from the outside! It is a perspective I rarely enjoy. Ah, it is beautiful! I envy you, human. You can see such sights whenever you please, and I must be confined to the dark, murky depths.

I beg of you, sir, I would love to continue our illuminating conversation, but my gills are so dry! Could you find it in your heart to dip me into the lake for only a moment, so that I might catch my breath? I give you my word as a trout and as a gentleman that I shall not attempt to wriggle from your grasp. No? Ah, I suppose it was too much to ask. I suppose there are limits to the compassion and mercy of men, and I apologize for asking you to do something which exceeds your humanity. Again, I am sorry; I heard tales that men were the most compassionate of creatures, and that they would go to some lengths to ensure that their prey did not suffer unjustly, but I suppose the thing that I ask, to merely be dipped in the lake for a moment, is too complicated a task. It is too much to ask, I suppose, even if it might ease my suffering and allow me to breathe one last breath of sweet fresh water. Even if it might stop my poor throat from seizing and choking. Please excuse my coughing, I am in great pain.

What is that? You will? Oh, human, you are the kindest of souls, I promise that in the afterlife I shall seek out your god and tell him of your compassion. Oh, I thank you! A thousand thanks to you!

A thousand thanks!
Oh! Please, do not squeeze me so! I was not attempting to wrest myself from your grasp, I swear to it! When I touched the cold water, my body merely seized in an involuntary spasm! I swear! I am an honorable trout; I would never betray your confidence by trying to escape! You caught me fairly and legally, and I bear no ill will to you. I am resigned to my death. I would not dream of using deception to circumvent it, and I am insulted that you would imply such a thing.

I feel like we understand each other. Men must eat too, just like any creature. They must scour and hunt for their food, and if you allowed compassion to cloud your judgment, you would surely starve. Am I correct? Will you not starve if you release me? Will your family not starve? No!? Well, I am sure that there is some reason why you have chosen to pluck me from my happy home and eat me, instead of simply buying food with the ample money that you have at your disposal. After all, I amount to no more than a pound or two of meat. Does my flesh contain some vital nutrient that you cannot find anywhere else? Will you waste away and suffer if you don’t eat me?

Please! Wait! Do not smash my poor skull just yet! I meant no offense! I did not mean to goad you and imply that your motives were dishonorable. I was merely trying to understand your motivation for fooling me into biting a painful lure which ripped through my flesh and then pulling me into a boat where I had no water to breathe. I am merely trying to understand why my flesh is so special to you that you would smash my head against the seat of your boat and murder me so that you could enjoy the scant amount of meat on my meager frame… Oh, I forgive me; I am running out of breath once more, and my gills burn with a pain which cannot be described. I apologize for saying so, friend. I know that you are too kind a man to wish any suffering upon me. I shouldn’t burden you with my pain, oh, my unbearable pain…

Pray, will you dip me in the water once more? I swear to you upon everything sacred that I will not wriggle again! No? Yes, I suppose that is understandable. From your perspective, it must have appeared that I tried to escape last time. I’m sure that I must have offended you. Please forgive me. I do not wish to die on bad terms with my captor.

No, no, say no more. I understand. You hate me. You think I tried to escape, and you hate me. Silence! Do not insult my intelligence! I know that you do. I do not blame you for despising me. You are an intelligent man, a kind and just man. You believe that I attempted to take advantage of your compassion. From your perspective, I must seem like a horrible, deceptive little creature. I understand perfectly if you no longer wish to eat me, lest my awful corruption spread into your belly. You must think I’m a cowardly little liar. Oh, please, forgive me if I cry. I cannot bear the thought of one so compassionate and noble as you having such a low opinion of me.

You don’t? I am so relieved! You are a true friend! Please, since we are friends, will you ease my passing by dipping me into the water just once more, so that I may die with fresh water in my gills? It would make my death so much more bearable.

Very well, I understand and accept your refusal. It is a great disappointment to me, for unless a trout dies with fresh water in his gills, he cannot be admitted into trout heaven. I understand that the afterlife of such an insignificant creature as me holds little interest for an important man such as you. I do not blame you for condemning me to eternal suffering in trout hell by refusing to dip me in my beloved home just once more, just for one more fleeting second. I know how trifling an act it would be to you, a man, a creature with much greater concerns. Very well. Bash my head upon the seat of your boat. Condemn me to an eternity of fiery torture. It is my destiny, I suppose, never to reunite with my family in the afterlife.

Please, hurry! Dip me in the water so that I may wet my gills one last time!
Oh, thank you, thank you! You will not regret your decision to show a small creature such mercy. I shall spread your name far and wide in the afterlife, and every trout shall know that you are a wonderful and caring man, and the god of trout will smile upon you and bless your further fishing expeditions. Please, hurry! Dip me in the water so that I may wet my gills one last time!

Wait! Wait! Please! I was not trying to escape! I merely saw my wife under the water, and was violently thrashing my tail to signal to her that I loved her! I never said goodbye to her! Please, won’t you dip me in the water just once more, so that I might tell her I love her?

No! I beg of you! Do not bash my head! I have wishes! Wishes! You have passed the test of compassion, and I will grant you wishes and riches and magic powers! This was a test of your mercy! The trout god sent me to see if you were a kind and merciful human, so that he might bestow untold power and wealth upon you! He told me he would grant you three wishes if you allowed me to live! If you put me back in the water I will go back and report to him directly!

Stop! Consider it! Just by releasing one modest little fish, you could make all your wildest fantasies into reality! The order of the universe would be realigned to your whims! You could wish for a thousand more trout to eat, if only you released me! Think of it! If you regretted your decision to release me, you could even wish to have me back! Release me, friend, and all of your dreams shall—

Worst Jobs in Science Fiction

2005-12-12T18:09:00.000-04:00

11. Vogon Poetry Focus Group Member
10. Borg Rebel
9. Alien Invasion Cleanup Crew
8. Klingon Personal Injury Lawyer
7. Alien Surrogate/Host Parent
6. Telephone Sanitizer
5. Thunderdome "Foam Finger" Vendor
4. Terminator Test Target
3. Matter Transporter Guinea Pig
2. Blue Pill Tester
1. Jar-Jar's Speech Therapist

Confessions of a Teenage Messiah

2005-11-29T13:02:00.000-04:00

Today I healed a bunch of lepers and ministered to sinners and whores. At Sunday school that Mary Magdalene sure was looking fine. If I were normal I would so hit it. But I'm not. So I won't. Life is so unfair. Why can't my dad be like other dads? Mine's perfect. And all powerful. You know what a pain in the ass that is? I'm scared shitless here! He says I have to go to camp. In the desert. For 40 days and 40 nights. And the camp counselor is THE FUCKING DEVIL. And he's gonna offer me cool things like money and power and fame and I have to turn them all down. WTF? I heard this Eastern dude, Bubba or something, did the same thing under a tree. What a weirdo. Gawd, my life is so lame. I have to save the world cuz daddy told me to. I hate you Dad! I hate you! JC <3>

Lessons in Extreme History Presents: Thanksgiving

2005-11-21T14:49:00.000-04:00

Thanksgiving is a time of year that many North Americans view with mixed emotions. On the one hand, we dread the impending holiday shopping season, and the pervasive commercialism that has divorced it entirely from its meaning and perverted it into an unstoppable soot-belching juggernaut fueled by money and excess. On the other hand, we feel a childlike excitement at the approach of the one day each year when our instinct for wantonness and gluttony is not only tolerated but rewarded. Most people are aware that there is a history behind Thanksgiving, because it is illogical to assume that the holiday arose spontaneously and without explanation, but they're also unclear on the specifics. That's why I've compiled this handy outline.

The holiday that we know today as Thanksgiving began in 1621, with a group of buckle-hatted misfits from England known as the Puritans, although they later changed their name to the Pilgrims after firing their drummer. Tired of being persecuted for disagreeing with the church and smoking too much, they hatched a plan. In 1620 they penned a manifesto proclaiming themselves to be "bigger than Jesus Christ" and nailed it to the door of the church. Then they all crammed themselves into a tiny modified cigarette boat with a leaky fiberglass hull and throttled away towards freedom. Their destination was the New World! A vast and largely uncharted wilderness teeming with all of the natural resources required to establish a settlement where they were free to live and worship as they pleased! It went off without a hitch. On December 11th 1620, they landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts. And then half of them starved to death!

Fast forward to autumn, 1621. In stark contrast to the winter of the previous year, the Pilgrims pulled in a bumper crop of oats, crabgrass and a now extinct grain referred to in their literature only as "blandwheat". Smallpox, typhoid, and dysentery mercifully overtook starvation as the leading cause of death, and the settlers were elated.

In fact, so thrilled were they with their ability to avoid starving for nine months that they planned a great feast to give thanks to God for their bountiful harvest. They even agreed to temporarily put the campaign of genocide they were waging against the American Indian on hold in exchange for long days of backbreaking labor to be performed without compensation. Historians believe that it was this decision which led to Thanksgiving becoming not just a mere day of gratitude, but an orgiastic spree of shameless gorging and unapologetic wastefulness.

With no outlet for their bloodlust, the town grew restless and tensions ran high. On a crisp autumn morning, Governor William Bradford held a meeting in the town square to address the growing unrest among his people and delegate the responsibilities of preparing for the feast. Dozens of hunting parties were organized to scour the surrounding forests and destroy all living things. Behind the hunters, two man teams would follow to salt the earth and poison the groundwater. Below is an excerpt from Bradford's speech that day:

"From the sturdiest bison to the tiniest beetle: if it walks or crawls or slithers or swims, destroy it. If you cannot kill it for food, kill it for sport. Cut flesh until your blade is dull, fire until your musket runs dry of shot, smother every beast great and small with your hatred."

According to legend, Bradford then demonstrated by hobbling a passing doe with a fallen oak branch and drowning it by forcing its head into a small bucket of water. Inspired by his leadership an invigorated by the ghastly sputter of a gentle creature as its lungs filled with fluid, the townspeople set out into the woods to harvest meat and sate their appetite for torture. By the time the sun set on that very same day, the people had amassed a pile of carcasses in the town square. According to one man's journal:

"…in the center [of Plymouth] lay a pyramid of slain beasts as wide as a home and as tall as two men. Any path of cobblestone was too slicked with blood to walk on without taking great care. Blood had pooled in the low spots and formed pits of thick, tarry mud that were black as pitch and could suck the boot off any man who tread in them. On that night not even the crickets would chirp. Were they dead or just cowering? Either way was fine for us, and we danced godlessly about the fire pit like lustful heathens, robed in nothing but necklaces of sinew, while the savages pounded out rapturous rhythms on their deerskin drums."

The next morning, still aglow from the previous day's slaughter, preparation began in earnest. The corpses were butchered and roasted, fruits were picked and vegetables were prepared, and a space was cleared in the center of town. Three days of round-the-clock eating ensued. By the second day, they had become so bloated and tired that they couldn't leave the table to move their own bowels. The modern Thanksgiving tradition of unbuttoning one's pants at the table dates back to this.

After the festivities had ended, local masons erected an eight foot tall tower out of animal skulls, and the concept of a Thanksgiving centerpiece was born. News of the feast quickly spread to neighboring towns, and in the years following 1621, the ritual of an autumn feast became widespread among colonial America. The traditions and customs of the holiday gradually took shape, undergoing a number of changes along the way. By the 1650s, dishes such as goose tallow pudding and pickled vinegar were no longer on the menu. In the 1680s it once again became fashionable to slaughter Native Americans during the Thanksgiving season, and remained that way until the late 1960s.

Although the way in which we celebrate Thanksgiving has changed greatly over the years, its original purpose remains intact: one last display of inhumanity and wastefulness before we're swept away by the torrent of manufactured sentimentality that comes along with the Christmas season. A final chance to cut loose and flout the laws of our savior before we're forced to buckle down and commemorate His murder. In conclusion, happy Thanksgiving America. Don't forget to get drunk and smother everything in butter!

Xbox 360 review

2005-11-19T16:08:00.000-04:00

There seems to be an awfully big hubbub about Microsoft's upcoming video game system, the Xbox 360. The console will arrive in stores on the 22nd just in time for the holidays, but unless you are being held at gunpoint or are some sort of shipping magnate with billions of dollars to spare, you should definitely not purchase this box of hell and lament.

Microsoft has gone with the baffling decision to launch their console with only 18 games. That's pitiful compared to the 500 titles available on the Playstation 2, which is manufactured by our advertising partner Sony, a company that's just all around a bunch of really great guys. The poor saps who defy all logic and buy an Xbox 360 won't be able to play this season's hottest titles such as the Playstation 2 version of 50 Cent: Bulletproof, EyeToy: Operation Spy, and The Official Playstation Magazine Demo Disc. I have no idea why Microsoft chose to launch the system with 18 titles instead of 500, but it's safe to say they definitely hate their audience.

As of this time, there are only a handful of people using the Xbox 360's Live online multiplayer service, and they are mainly Microsoft employees and members of the gaming press. The console has not actually gone on sale yet, but it's obvious that such a pitifully low number of users means no one is interested and that the Live service will tank horribly. One analyst projects that Live will literally crash and burn within a week of the Xbox 360's launch, and that the console itself will fail completely within the month. Another analyst disagrees, however, projecting that the console will fail within three weeks. There were a few other analysts who didn't believe the console would fail at all, but their predictions didn't really jibe with my article so I decided not to quote them.

The main selling point of the Xbox 360 is that its games will all take advantage of the higher resolutions available on HDTVs. While this will benefit a handful of erudite playboys who can afford such frivolities, it seems that Microsoft only cares about these select individuals, leaving the rest of us to wonder whether or not the Xbox 360 will even be worth buying if we don't have an HDTV. The answer is a resounding "NO WAY MAN".

According to analysts, the console will detect when a standard non-HDTV is connected and then magically make each game's high polygon counts, lighting effects, normal mapping, motion blur, and other state of the art visual effects disappear completely. After this process games will look considerably worse than the superior titles on the Playstation 2 (which is available in stores now), and will actually be rendered entirely in 2D with crude sub-Pong graphics. Analysts say that in addition to looking slightly worse than Pong when displayed on a normal television set, every single Xbox 360 game will literally be Pong but with completely unresponsive controls. Whether you buy the newest football game, first person murder simulator or racing game the results will be the same: Crappy Pong. You're free to make up your own mind as to whether that's a good thing or not, but I am telling you right now that it's not and as a member of the press I am infallible.

Further proving that they hate those who live in middle and lower-income households, Microsoft decided to sell the premium edition of their console for the outrageous price of $400! For $100 more than the $299 base system, unwitting customers will be duped into getting a 20gb hard drive worth $99, component cables worth $40, a headset worth $20, and a remote worth $30. These worthless add-ins were clearly tossed in like plastic prizes in cereal boxes so children will plead with their parents to buy the more expensive package. It's deplorable, really.

But it doesn't end there! Just to get your Xbox 360 up and running with the barest of essentials you'll need to shell out a frightening amount of money.

Simply buying the measly library of 18 games available at launch will cost you $900. You'll also need three extra wireless controllers, every single faceplate available to customize your console depending on your mood, and an extra Xbox 360 in case your first one breaks or gets a smudge on it. These necessities will run you another $800. If you want to play any of your games online you'll need to sign up for Live, which will run you $2,500 for a lifetime if you're around 24-30 years old. You'll of course need a top of the line HDTV to fully enjoy the experience, which will cost you another $3,000 or so. After factoring in a corinthian leather couch to sit on as you play, electricity, housing, and a broadband connection, you're looking at a total investment in the range of several hundred thousand dollars just to play a handful of subpar games!

Compare that insane expense to the cost of, just off the top of my head here, a sleek Playstation 2 which sells for only $149, and it quickly becomes apparent that you're a jerk if you buy an Xbox 360.

Analysts also warn that the Xbox 360 could potentially carry a mutated strain of the asian bird flu. The consoles are being assembled in China, which is notorious for being asian. Despite this blatant public health risk, Microsoft has decided not to check any of their units for the bird flu. I guess profit means more to them than human life.

If you still haven't been swayed and are actually thinking about buying an Xbox 360, you should know it has severe limitations which could put you and your family at risk. In the event of an emergency, the Xbox 360 can NOT be used as a flotation device and has not been approved to put out grease fires due to its shoddy design and Microsoft's willingness to cut corners. The console does indeed play dvds, but fast-forwards through scenes it doesn't like and flat out refuses to play any movie starring a now-deceased actor.

Given this myriad of shortcomings, it's not really a big surprise that no one is excited about the console at all. Not a single person. I conducted a poll by calling random phone numbers in a Syrian area code at around 3am their time, and not one single person replied to my question of "Are you excited about the Xbox 360?" with a "yes". Some of them were so irate about the shortcomings of the system that they actually yelled at me!

Don't be fooled by the slick advertising and deceptively impressive hardware and launch titles. Hold on to your hard-earned money until next week's holiday guide, "How Many Copies Of '50 Cent: Bulletproof' For The Playstation 2 Should I Buy For My Kids?"

*Today's update was loosely based on this article

Fun things to do at your local Wallmart

2005-11-06T17:05:00.000-04:00

1. Get 24 boxes of condoms and randomly put them in peoples’ carts when they aren’t looking.

2. Set all the alarm clocks in Housewares to go off at 5-minute intervals.

3. Make a trail of tomato juice on the floor leading to the rest rooms.

4. Walk up to an employee and tell him/her in an official tone, ‘Code 3′ in housewares and see what happens.

5. Go to the Service Desk and ask to put a bag of M&M’s on lay away.

6. Move a ‘CAUTION - WET FLOOR’ sign to a carpeted area.

7. Set up a tent in the camping department and tell other shoppers you’ll invite them in if they’ll bring in pillows from the bedding department.

8. When a clerk asks if they can help you, begin to cry and ask ‘Why can’t you people just leave me alone?’

9. Look right into the security camera; use it as a mirror, & and pick your nose.

10. While handling guns in the hunting department, ask the clerk if he knows where the anti- depressants are.

11. Dart around the store suspiciously loudly humming the Mission Impossible theme.

12. In the auto department, practice your Madonna look using different size funnels.

13. Hide in a clothing rack; when people browse through, say PICK ME!

14. When an announcement comes over the loudspeaker, assume the fetal position and scream “NO! NO! It’s those voices again!!!! And; last, but not least!)

15. Go into a fitting room and shut the door and wait a while; and then yell, very loudly, “There is no toilet paper in here!”

How to summon the internet demons

2005-10-31T15:35:00.000-04:00

Many people have begun to believe that demons have all but vanished from this world. This is not true, as the darkest of all spectres have just chosen new breeding grounds: the Internet. There are some who are foolish enough to attempt to summon these nefarious forces. It is our solemn duty, as championship surfers of the internet, to keep even the ones who summon these demons safe. Below is a list of the more notable internet demons, illustrations of their possible appearance, as well as their chosen symbols. Instructions on how to summon them are listed below the short description of their history and favorite colors. Please forgive the quality of these pictures and descriptions, they are from a time long forgotten in the lands of Internetia.

Kawaiizon: This is the Internet demon of obsession. She is said to be a “Grand Super Daimyo OK”, giving her command over 606 legions of the damned. The number of her army is often used as a symbol of power amongst her followers, shown in her heathen language as “^o^” and sometimes “^_______^”. She appears in bright purples and greens, often with speed lines and flowers petals while using an echo effect on her voice. This is before the theme music plays, which always sounds like a very badly translated karaoke tune.

Her followers show their worship by adorning their walls with cheap scrolls depicting shows they barely watch. The more devout of her followers resort to ornamental katana swords and entire wall racks full of unreadable Japanese magazines. You can easily spot a higher ranked follower by their inability to read them. Other common symbols of her blight include the pronouncement in public of such words as “kawaii” and following everyone’s name with “san”.

After the sacred words are spoken, Kawaiizon will appear and quiz you on your knowledge of animators and voice talent. Even when the questions are correctly answered she is an unruly demon. To keep her from morphing into a lion with the ability to shoot lightning bolts, she must be fed pocky every three minutes. Once summoned she can be used to point out sites to download Japanese OVAs and can navigate you to the nearest datable person of a relatively Asian heritage. Her curse is an uncontrollable desire to dress up as an anime character and converge at a place of her choosing, as well as ruining all of your bootleg anime copies.

Unterlapsche: Formerly known as Waschesus, most likely originated from the ASCII demon Lollilmas. He is a demon of errors, notorious in the human realm for he is the one who steals your images from your screen as you browse the internet, replacing them with little white boxes bearing his mark, a red “x”. He takes great pride in increasing your speaker volume just before you go to a webpage that contains material you don’t want others to hear. His joys increase even more if you are at work, your shirt is off, and a supermodel happens to enter the office who is starting a campaign against people who prefer (very vocally) to be hit with wiffle ball bats.

Contained within the Book of ARPA, a story describes the deception of a young man at the hands of Unterlapsche: “The young had curledth up in his chair, prone before a shining screen. His fingers wind, his mind distracted by another window displaying the genitals of a woman whose region could cleft melons in twain. And Lo! The young foundeth that he had written to his mother such foul words as “mexijew” and “hit her in thy private landscape.” And he was for shamed, knowing he had just been bested by the demon Unterlapsche.”

A Grand Braon of Internet Hell, he is the force that governs your hand to make the most awful of typos. This includes crafting a sentence that talks about your love of cars, yet somehow comes out proclaiming your love of rainbows and how you own every Culture Club album. Even when it’s not true. He is in charge of lots of my butt. I mean demons. Scripture says that his army could be anywhere from 400 to I’m stupid. I didn’t mean to write that. Oh, I give up.

Extolend: Beware the golden cow of madness, Extolend: the Internet demon of insanity. Creator of Conspiracy Theory webs, this demon is potent and only should be handled by the most skilled or the most neurotic. His domain is marked with rotating gifs and flashing text. He grants the ability to string together any number of unrelated elements into a deliberate effort to kill everyone on the planet. His very breath can bring someone to imagine a piece of debris in their water is a planted mind control device. His eyes are like lasers, but I found that on a website so I don’t know if it’s true or not. My fillings are telling me otherwise.

Gostais: A demon of advertising, she is the one that whispers into the ears of ad companies, “include sounds into the ads”. The appearance of car commercials that show no cars may have something to do with her. This demon can only be summoned after taking ten pills of Viagra, getting a mortgage on your home, and increasing your bust. Her powers lay in deception, allowing anyone you desire to believe they can get an iPod for free if they click your banner 300 times.

The Book of Compuserve describes the hideous effect Gostais had on the people of old: “As pestilence and homosexuality began to blanket the land, a more silent evil appearth that could not be smote so easily. Blacksmiths and cobblers began to hang animated signs above their households as a dark taint filledeth the townage. These signs ranged from simple text that flashed, but grew in foulness to offering free horseshoes if thou could hit Napoleon in his face with thy blue boxing gloves. Older, less advanced merchants could not overthrow the compelling signage that could not only offer free subscriptions to Newsweek but included sound clips of mainstream rock that most villagers found mediocre but pleasant to thine ears. The Lord took justice into his own hands, and hurled great bolts of lightning and preventive measures to smite thy flashing typography and jovial muzak jingles.”

Segichne: A demon of misplaced humor, he is the demon that compels one to save all of the funny pictures one finds upon the internet. Not surprisingly, he is also the demon that compels you to show all of these pictures to your friends in rapid succession. Summoning him is an exhaustive chore, requiring one to read the top 100 jokes from barreloflaughs.lol, as well as perform the majority of one of these three movies: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Family Guy movie, or Hackers. The process by which you flog the funny aspects from these movies is so rigorous that it cannot be described here.

Sortort: He is the demon of nasty internet behaviors. Under his tutelage, the Pornathium theory was crafted. The theory is as follows: The amount of time it takes for one person to look at porn equals the number of Maxim issues in their room divided by the amount of time alone. He is also the spirit that commands the weak willed to immediately show their brethren the most foul imagery on the internet, especially if the person is first using it. To summon him you must do unspeakable things. I don’t even want to think about it. I need to go get a glass of water. He can be used to grant invulnerability to the horrors of the internet. He is the patron of travelers, for some reason.

Turburratos: Formerly known as Emotxon, he is the demon of overdrawn emotion. If someone insults your attempt at a Shakespearean sonnet describing how much you like a girl in your class, Turburratos whispers threats you can leave on their journal. He is there upon your shoulder, egging your fingers on to respond with a drawing of you, complete with black wings, driving a sword into their very heart. With his guidance any picture that displays a member of the opposite sex will become attractive. You will be driven to desire them despite how wide their hips are, how big the gap in their teeth is, or how large their nose picture you see on the screen will be crafted by Turburratos himself to make you want to meet them. His touch can make your words sound sweet and deep even when you are describing how you ran out of mascara. Signs of his followers include a penchant for beard growth, skirt wearing (both genders), unnaturally black hair, and attraction to the letter “x” in any of their various online names.

The influence of Turburratos is so strong that his followers must listen to music every twenty four hours or they will go into an emotional rage that could possibly shake the very internet itself. Or just the forums they frequent. The most affected by the stink of Turburratos do not even notice the very slight differences between the bands they listen to, only being attracted to their cunning and creative ways in which they rhyme “bleeding” or “heart”. When summoning this demon, be aware of the variety of tricks he employs. He may appear as a tall and lanky white male, a medium sized young man with a Mohawk, or a short Asian girl. Be sure to compliment his hair and clothing, no matter what forms he chooses. He will quiz you on bands that you, nor anyone else, have heard of. Offerings of vinyl pants and spiked bracelets are preferable, but mixed tapes will more likely guarantee good results.

The Appalling Cinema

2005-10-24T13:08:00.000-04:00

Watching movies is not something I would suggest to the unprepared. If you pick the wrong movie you're pretty much trapped after the first ten minutes or so and by the time it's all over you may have wasted up to three hours of your life. Nothing and no one can give you back that time and nothing will allow you to un-watch a terrible movie. That's where I come in, with micro reviews of movies to save you the time and trouble.

In Theaters

Doom
Micro Review: Your time could be better spent uninstalling Doom 3.
My Version: A lone marine on Mars spends the entire moving lifting a flashlight, spotting a zombie, then lowering the flashlight and shooting into the darkness. Out of anger he pauses at mirrors to shoot his reflection and will occasionally jump into rotating fan blades to end the monotony.
The Fog
Micro Review: Haha, they remade John Carpenter's worst movie! It will leave you wanting to curl up with a good Sutter Cain novel. Let me ruin this one for you: the Fog is ghosts!
My Version: There's probably some mediocre Japanese horror movie called "The Fog" about some spooky kid with the power to decide who lives and who dies that could have been remade instead. It couldn't be worse than "The Ring 2."
Elizabethtown
Micro Review: Legolas and Mary Jane in a romantic comedy directed by Cameron Crowe. If you're seeing this with your girlfriend she had better give you a blowjob right there in the theater. It has that fat old southern woman from Food TV in it for some reason so try not to achieve orgasm while she's on screen. If you're not seeing this with your girlfriend then that's your problem and you should probably talk to someone about that.
My Version: Every romantic movie can be made instantly better by adding Nazis. Look at "Casablanca," that is the ultimate date movie because it's all bittersweet romance but it also has fucking Bogart straight cappin' a Nazi at an airport. Beat that, Elizabethtown.
Flight Plan
Micro Review: Jodie Foster's daughter gets kidnapped on an airplane and no one believes that she even had her daughter on the plane with her. It's a preposterous misunderstanding straight from an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" only it's creepy and tense! The premise is so embarrassing that you'll be hoping for Sam Jackson and some fucking snakes to show up on the plane to turn it into action comedy.
My Version: "Snakes On A Plane." Jackson threatened to drop out of the movie's production when they were considering changing the title, so they changed it back to "Snakes On a Plane." Snakes on a fucking plane, man.
A History of Violence
Micro Review: Aragorn is a small town restaurant owner with a dark past. When some sinister people show up and start sinisterly looking for him things get sinister. Their leader is an extra-sinister Ed Harris. Cronenberg is about 50/50 when it comes to directing. For every "Dead Zone" there is a "Dead Ringers" and for every "Videodrome" there's an "eXistenZ." This one doesn't have twin Jeremy Ironsi, meat guns or people ejaculating over car wrecks, so you're probably safe.
My Version: Oddly enough, my version has meat guns, twin Jeremy Ironsi and people ejaculating over car wrecks…but it's fucking awesome!

Serenity
Micro Review: At long last Joss Whedon's failed TV series comes to the big screen and America shrugs its collective shoulders. If you liked the TV show you'll like the movie. If you liked that cartoon with the robotic horse that had a shotgun then you'll probably like the movie. Most everyone else won't like the movie. Also, just in case you were considering seeing the movie, Kaylee gets killed by the Reavers at the end.
My Version: I think it's awesome and so was the TV show, but Joss Whedon needs to write fewer one-liners and stop thinking he knows what the hell he's doing with a gun battle. A few of the lingering pretentious moments should be replaced with a little more development for the characters that were mysteriously sidelined. Also, put some fucking shoes on that girl, Whedon. We don't care about your foot fetish.
On DVD

Land of the Dead
Micro Review: Remember how in "Day of the Dead" mankind seemed to be down to the last few survivors isolated on a military base? Forget all that. Dennis Hopper has created a capitalist wonderland and he's got a bunch of commandos tooling around zombie country scavenging in a giant super truck that can shoot fireworks. And the zombies are becoming intelligent for some reason. And we're supposed to forgive all this nonsense because George Romero is the grandfather of the genre. If your real grandfather takes a big shit on your carpet you're not going to love it because "oh, that's grandpa." You're going to clean it up, put grandpa in a diaper and try to forget it ever happened. Try to forget this movie ever happened.
My Version: I always thought a cool idea for a continuation of Romero's movies would be some sort of ship returning to the mainland to try to find survivors and restock their supplies. They could sift through the debris of a dead world, like find video tapes of survivors who inevitably succumbed to the zombies or find a dog surviving on its own like in "I Am Legend." However, this movie depresses me so much I'd rather just have my version be something like "Romero dies from a heart attack in the middle of the pitch session."
Unleashed
Micro Review: Jet Li's Dog can barely speak English, just like in real life, and he is kept like an attack dog by Bart (Bob Hoskins) who takes a collar off and sends him after his enemies. There's some other shit where Morgan Freeman is a blind piano tuner and his brace-face daughter is the younger lesbian girl from HBO's "Rome." Bob Hoskins is awesome and it's really great when Jet Li is basically beating up a Guy Ritchie movie, but when they do shit like send him to some ridiculous pit fighting competition or have him fight some bald white guy in robes it gets retarded.
My Version: Get rid of the pit fighting and just have Jet Li literally beat up Guy Ritchie. If you could throw Madonna in maybe he can hit her hard enough to change her kid's names to something normal.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Micro Review: "Douglas Adams wrote the script" is sort of like the Romero excuse for Land of the Dead. This moderately-faithful adaptation of Adams' nerd-beloved book by the same title is a meandering road movie in space. Fans of the book will no doubt force riotous laughter from their ample bellies at the visualization of Adams' puns and gags that they have read dozens of times over. Oh yes, the fucking whale falling from the sky! At long last, in color! Some of the settings are imaginative and some of the movie is interesting in the way a museum display of butterflies might be, but ultimately what it shows is that Adams' story just makes for a shitty movie. You just don't care about the characters in the least, you don't care about the plot and you don't really care about the jokes.
My Version: Chris Tucker. Everywhere. Ten Chris Tuckers. Thirty. Maybe even fifty of them.

Herbie: Fully Loaded
Micro Review: The last Herbie movie (I think, I don't really keep track of this shit) featured blue collar cult-favorite actor Bruce Campbell humiliating himself for a paycheck as he is wont to do. This one just has an awful CGI Volkswagen and Lindsay Lohan with a suspiciously unnoticeable bosom. Supposedly Disney turned the clone tool on her rack and erased the 500,000,000 years of evolution we had all suffered through to achieve the perfect breasts. That story was probably untrue and Lohan just shaved them off with diet tips from Paris Hilton. She had better turn into the next fucking Meryl Streep because otherwise I will never forgive her.
My Version: Watch "Mean Girls" with your pants off. Actually, scratch that, I think that might be illegal in a few states.

Bewitched
Micro Review: Possibly the worst movie I have seen this year. The movie's horrible meta-comedy (Nicole Kidman is a witch who is playing a witch on TV) and Ferrell's obnoxious and one-dimensional character make for romantic tension that you could cut with a light breeze. If you head to the rental store and the only two movies left are this and "Eight Minute Abs" then just watch "Eight Minute Abs" ten to twelve times. By about the sixth time it should start to get funny.
My Version: After watching the movie I really would just like Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman to be dragged behind a horse through some brambles. You could film that and show it to me and it would probably make sitting through "Bewitched" almost a worthwhile experience. Nora Ephron should also probably have her hands cut off before she writes anything this bad again.

If I have prevented even one person from watching "Bewitched" then I have done my job. I hope everyone enjoyed the movie reviews; they should because I am an expert at watching movies. I watch them so good no one can handle my skills. Watch this: "Five stars! A triumph of the human spirit!" Can you do that? I didn't think so.

The Modern Monster

2005-10-19T01:35:00.000-04:00

The West is doomed, my friends. The first sign of a dying culture is the dismantlement of its monster archetypes, and by this standard, America is definitely on the decline. Our movies constantly mutate and redefine our classical monsters until they’re virtually unrecognizable; the monsters of the Twentieth Century are all but dead, killed off by greedy Hollywood producers looking for bigger scares at the cost of monster verisimilitude. I propose a fresh start: we must scrap our old monster archetypes and create new monsters which better reflect the fears and insecurities of a new millennium.

The Vampire
Anxieties Addressed: Loneliness, alienation, addiction

Ooh, gothy!
No class of monster has been more abused and devalued than the poor old vampire. Once, the vampire was a noble creature. Much like the gentleman poets of the Romantic period, the vampire was a sensitive and intelligent man who enjoyed solitude, brooding, occasionally biting people, and hanging out in castles. The vampire yearned for the love of a woman, but his horrifying condition prevented him from participating in the dating scene; he couldn’t go out during the day or cook most traditional Italian meals, and the pink necks of women always wound up piquing his ravenous bloodlust, making second dates awkward and apologetic.
However, the modern vampire is a handsome and flamboyant dandy. No longer is he ensconced in his castle; he hangs out at ultra-exclusive vampire nightclubs where svelte vampire ladies hiss at him and lick his navel while he smirks and acts like he’s totally over it. He doesn’t hide from the world, but instead goes out on the town and impresses teenagers with his leather pants and ruffled shirts. He has human “groupies” who paw at him and beg him to turn them into vampires too, so that they might share in his hedonistic lifestyle of blood cocktails and dorky industrial music. Nowadays, the scariest thing about vampires is that if they bite you, you might turn into a fruity gothic loser.

21st Century Update: The Obire.
Anxieties addressed: Loneliness, obesity, addiction

Ooh, fatty!
By making the vampire sexy and alluring, the elements of loneliness and alienation are removed. Therefore, the new monster must be repugnant and totally non-alluring. The problems of the classical vampire can be transferred to the new millennium in the form of the obire, the obese supernatural loser who feeds on the flesh of other fat people. While vampires thirst for blood and transfer their disease via a sexy bite to the neck, the obire thirsts for human fat. He must harvest it from the guts of fat men by inserting his long, spiked proboscis into their belly buttons, which is the least sexy thing I can think of.
While vampires remain mysterious because they can only go out at night, the obire can only go out during the day. In the afternoon, he stalks the aisles of Wal-Mart, looking for fat men in sweatpants to drain of their slick yellow lifeblood. In the evening, he sits at home watching Veronica Mars, surfing the internet, and weeping softly. Due to the plague of obesity in America, the obire is a monster that the common man can truly fear: any obese man can be kidnapped by the obire, who will drain him of his gooey belt of fat, turning him into another obire and paradoxically making him fatter than before.

The Werewolf
Anxieties Addressed: Madness, harming loved ones, disease

Born to bite faces!
An ordinary man goes on a walk in the woods under the lovely moonlight and is bitten by a shadowy beast-monster. Ultimately, he suffers painful shape-shifting sequences wherein he turns into a hideous half-man half-beast and ultimately hurts the ones he loves most, sort of like Michael Jackson in the Thriller video, or like Michael Jackson not in the Thriller video. The werewolf is a tragic and cursed figure; he is generally a good man driven to violence by a disease which unleashes his hidden bestial nature.
This is a good scenario, but recent tales of werewolves like Underworld and An American Werewolf in Paris undercut the urgency of the werewolf lifestyle by introducing the element of lycanthropy-controlling drugs. Modern medicine has most diseases under control, and since werewolfism is nothing more than a rare blood condition, it’s not quite so scary anymore. Sure, it would suck to have to take drugs all the time to keep from killing everyone around you, but it’s not the end of the world or anything. It’s a bit like having genital herpes: you have to take medications to avoid painful flare-ups, you have to be careful and conscientious about spreading your disease, and you might even want to join a support group, like in The Howling. Back in the old days, the only cure for a werewolf was suicide or a silver bullet; now it’s nothing more than a debilitating but controllable sickness.

21st Century Update: The Warent
Anxieties addressed: Freudian insecurity, disease, madness

M... MOM!?
Crafting a fitting replacement for the werewolf in the world of monster archetypes is difficult. Although the werewolf is now obsolete, he had the advantage of having two ways to scare: he was scary to meet, because he would rip your face out, and he was scary to turn into, because being a werewolf would suck.
The monster of the 21st century must have an element of angst and insecurity added to address the fact that we’re a bunch of neurotic sissies. Therefore, the warent is the ultimate psychosexual nightmare beast. Warenthood, like lycanthropy, is a communicable disease. However, this disease shall be sexually transmitted and totally incurable. Those inflicted with the disease will have an intense and unshakeable addiction to sex and will stop at nothing to get it, but the consequences of copulation will be grim: at the moment of the warent’s climax, its body will be transformed so that it looks exactly like his partner’s father or mother, emotionally scarring its partner for life. Its partner, of course, will then turn into a warent, doomed to a lifetime of being thoroughly disgusted and disturbed by sex but driven by an intense need to spread the disease to others.

The Mummy
Anxieties Addressed: Archeological hubris, superstition, curses

Lucky thing I'm not an Egyptologist!
To be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely sure what’s so scary about mummies. Sure, they come back to life and shamble around strangling and cursing people and possessing girlfriends, but they really only affect Egyptologists and friends of Egyptologists. How many Egyptologists do you know? You could probably count them on one hand. Most of us aren’t in the habit of disturbing tombs, and even the tombs that we inevitably do disturb in the course of our everyday lives are generally non-Egyptian and contain inanimate and non-cursed corpses. While anyone who walks in a forest or visits a castle could reasonably be scared of werewolves or vampires, the odds of mummy attacks seem negligible. Furthermore, unlike vampirism and werewolfery, mummyness can’t even be spread, so unless your will contains provisions that you be mummified and cursed, you don’t really have to worry about catching it.
Most monsters were poignant and scary until Hollywood ruined them, but mummies have pretty much always sucked. How many of us have lain awake at night, worried that we may have somehow resurrected and offended Imhotep? Probably only those of us who are archeologists or complete fairies.

21st Century Update: Do we really need one?

Thinking up a new monster that’s indicative of our society’s fear of archeological hubris seems like sort of a waste of time.

The Ghost
Anxieties Addressed: Death, the afterlife

Patrick Swayze's finest role.
Man has suffered a complicated and troubled relationship with ghosts for centuries. Some ghosts are good: Hamlet was alerted of foul murder by his father’s ghost, Bill Cosby learned a valuable lesson about posthumous parenting by becoming a Ghost Dad, and Patrick Swayze overthrew a sleazy criminal conspiracy and ether-humped Demi Moore by becoming the titular ghost in Ghost. On the other hand, ghosts can be real assholes. They might bug you incessantly until you fix their problems, they might suck your daughter into the astral plane through the television, or they might just bang around the house and make a general nuisance of themselves.
The major problem with ghosts nowadays is that we’ve lost sight of what they can and can’t do. Some of them seem to be nearly omnipotent; was that little girl in The Ring a ghost, or what? She could do all sorts of crazy things, like strangle teenagers make water run upwards (although water running upwards isn’t so crazy, I’ve seen that happen at a tourist trap called Confusion Hill on Highway 101). Some of them, like that dork Sam Wheat in Ghost, can only interact with uncooked pottery and talk to Whoopie Goldberg. Not only do ghosts need limits and boundaries, they also need challenges and responsibilities. We don’t want any more overzealous ghosts like the girl in The Ring popping out of televisions and mutilating people, but we don’t want lackadaisical underachievers like Swayze falling through walls like losers, either.

21st Century Update: The Everelative
Anxieties addressed: Death, the afterlife, poverty

DIE ALREADY!
Ghosts can haunt you, but they can be exorcised or appeased. They are a powerful cultural image, but they are no longer effective representations of our fear of death. Death is inevitable, and the afterlife is intangible: the 21st Century demands a monster that can destroy our lives in a prolonged and devious manner by foiling our perceptions of mortality.
You don’t know this monster personally, but you are well aware of his existence. You know him only as Great Uncle Charlie or Cousin Clarence or Grandma’s Rich Half-Brother. He is the stuff of family legend: he is an extremely rich and extremely elderly relative with no immediate family or close friends. He sends loving cards every Christmas with subtle hints that you will not be forgotten in his will. However, he will never die; this monster lingers in the plane between life and death, forever taunting you with the promise of a seven-figure inheritance which shall never come to be. His age is a nebulous and incalculable thing; year after year, he seems just old enough to finally kick the bucket, and yet as the years turn to decades, his age mysteriously never passes the threshold of the unreasonably old. You live your life as a shiftless and lazy slob, forever waiting to hear the news of your aged relative’s demise so you can board the gravy train that you feel is your entitlement. You die penniless and alone, cursing the vaguely-remembered name of the old man who never died.

The Zombie
Anxieties Addressed: Mindlessness, being overrun and eaten, death

Braaains!
Judging by the wealth of zombie movies lately, zombies have held on to a mainstream relevance far beyond most monsters. The zombie speaks not only to our fear of death, but to our fear of mindless conformity, making it a powerful symbol in an era of globalization and mass marketing: the preceding is what I would have written if I were a mediocre high school student writing a paper about zombies.
We all know what zombies are and what they mean, but we can’t seem to agree on how they behave. Some of us want our zombies fast, while some of us want our zombies to waddle with their arms outstretched. Some of us want them dumb, but some of us want them to form societies and stuff like in The Omega Man. Some of us want our zombies dead, and some of us want them diseased. Some of us write novelty paperbacks about surviving zombie attacks, and some of us buy novelty paperbacks because we are semi-illiterate. Some of them want to use you, some of them want to be used by you.
Wherever you may fit into this spectrum, we can all agree that the zombie thing is getting old fast. Those of you who don’t agree are probably either George Romero-worshipping horror movie idiots, hilarious comedy rebels who think ninjas and monkeys are totally “random,” or possibly George Romero himself. Zombies have become oversaturated, and have thus lost their power. Maybe it’s just because there’s so goddamn
many of them all the time.

21st Century Update: The Slightly Faster Zombie
Anxieties addressed: Mindlessness, being overrun and eaten slightly faster, death

Brainsbrainsbransbrns
Come on, wouldn’t it be radical if there was a zombie who could run instead of shambling and stuff? That would be awesome! Also maybe he can use simple tools like a gun or a helicopter or something! Why scrap the zombie genre in favor of something infinitely more interesting when it’s still so goddamn ripe for reinvention?

The Mystery Primate
Anxieties Addressed: The wilderness, the primitive, the unknown

I see you!
This category can apply to any number of synonyms for a wilderness-based ape monster: the yeti, Bigfoot, Andre the Giant, the wendigo, the abominable snowman, the sasquatch, that thing from The Empire Strikes Back that hung up Luke in a cave, the skunk ape, the Apeman, Old Yellow-Top, The Jolly Rancher, or the devil monkey. Although these are not “movie monsters” like many of the others mentioned in this update, they have historically held the attention of the populace just as firmly as any big-budget monster.
Unfortunately, Bigfoot sightings are few and far between these days. Now that flashy movies can dream up any monster imaginable, America’s heart just isn’t in the hunt for Bigfoot anymore. As science and technology strips the magic from our world, and the trees from our lands, we have little time or space in our lives for our hairy traditional folk-monster. The fear of the unknown is vanishing from our lives, and with it vanishes the noble skunk ape, suburbanized out of popular consciousness and into the dark forest of hirsute monster obsolescence.

21st Century Update: The Racquatch
Anxieties addressed: The wilderness, the unknown

Stay outta my trash!
Since Bigfoot is an obsolete product of a densely forested America of yesteryear, a suburban folk-monster must be created to fill his gigantic shoes. The racquatch is a suburban monster who can safely terrorize all of America without the fear of his habitat being destroyed. He is a man-sized raccoon who walks erect. He stalks the yards and gutters of America, feeding on garbage and cats, digging up rose bushes, setting off car alarms at 3 AM, and showing up only in the blurriest of photographs. Children camping in their tree houses go missing, and hushed voices blame the racquatch. Nobody knows for sure whether the racquatch is a gentle creature or a ferocious menace, because he is skittish around humans. If he is spotted, he flashes his nocturnal eyes at you for a brief, unphotographable instant, and then scurries into the deep wilderness of fences, telephone poles, minivans and hedges.

With any luck, these new and improved monsters will provide more socially relevant thrills, which will translate to big money at the box office! Producers who are interested in making movies based on these monsters will have to pay me a hefty sum, but since I’m supposedly saving our civilization somehow, it’s a small price to pay. Sleep tight, Something Awful readers! Beware the all-new creatures of the night!

Just some disturbed people

2005-10-17T00:21:00.000-04:00

Cliky the super fun linky link!

Geek Porn

2005-10-13T11:08:00.000-04:00

I've noticed that there don't seem to be any porno movies
that are made for guys like me.

All the porn I've come across
was targeted at beer-swilling sports bar dwelling alpha-males
Men who like their women stupid and submissive
Men who can only get it up for monosyllabic cock-hungry nymphos
with gargantuan breasts and a three-word vocabulary

Adult films are populated with these collagen-injected
liposuctioned women
Many of whom have resorted to surgery and self-mutilation
in an attempt to look the way they have been told to look.

These aren't real women. They're objects.
And these movies aren't erotic. They're pathetic.
These vacuum-headed fuck bunnies don't turn me on.
They disgust me.
And it's not that I'm against pornography.
I mean, I'm a guy. And guys need porn.
Fact.
"Like a preacher needs pain, like a needle needs a vein,"
Guys need porn.

But I don't wanna watch this misogynist he-man woman-hater porn.
I want porno movies that are made with guys like me in mind:
Guys who know that the sexiest thing in the world
is a woman who is smarter than you are.

You can have the whole cheerleading squad,
I want the girl in the tweed skirt and the horn-rimmed glasses:
Betty Finnebowski, the valedictorian.
Oh yes.
First I want to copy her Trig homework,
and then I want to make mad, passionate love to her
for hours and hours
until she reluctantly asks if we can stop
because she doesn't want to miss Battlestar Galactica.
Suma cum laude, baby!
That is what I call erotic.

But do you ever see that kind of a woman in a contemporary adult film?
No.
Which is why I'm going to start writing and directing Geek Porno.
I shall be the quintessential Nerd Porn Auteur.
And the women in my porno movies will be the kind
that drive nerds like me mad with desire.

I'm talking about the girls that used to fuck up the grading curve.
The girls in the Latin Club and the National Honor Society.
Chicks with weird clothes, braces, four eyes, and 4.0 GPAs.
Brainy articulate bookworms, with MENSA cards in their purses
and chips on their shoulders.

My porn starlets will come in all shapes and sizes.
My porn starlets will be too busy working on their PhD to go to the gym.

In my kind of porno movies the girls wouldn't even have to get naked.
They'd just take the guys down to the rec room and
beat them repeatedly at chess
and then talk to them for hours about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle
or the underlying social metaphors in the Aliens movies.

Buy stock in some hand cream companies
because there is about to be a major shortage.

And I'm not just talking about straight porn. Oh no.
There should be fuck films for my nerd brethren
of all sexual orientations.
Gay nerd porn flicks with titles like "Dungeons and Drag-queens."

This idea is a fucking gold mine.
I am gonna make millions,
because this country is full of database programmers
and electronics engineers
and they aren't getting the loving they so desperately need.
And you can help . . .

If you're an intelligent woman is interested in breaking into the adult film industry,
and if you can tell me the name of Luke Skywalker's home planet,
then you are hired.

It doesn't matter if you think you're overweight or unattractive.
It doesn't matter if you don't think you're beautiful.
You are beautiful. . .
And I will make you a star.

Much ado about music

2005-10-11T23:58:00.000-04:00

EMI and Sony BMG took a flying leap off the top rope of copyright protection and fell flat on their face. In an effort to stop kids from listening to music, these companies have started to make use of technology that limits the amount and types of formats that can be used to copy your music to. This technology is called DRM, or Destructive Robot Mastodons. Reports have been made that these tiny mastodons keep your little pointer from being able to poke at the music and make it turn into what you want it to. That's unless you use some of those little animated custom cursors because Mastodons are afraid of mice.

There's been a lot of upheaval over the use of these issues in the news lately. Pizzaz, the Current CEO of Sony and lead singer of the band "The Misfits" had this to say about their recent use of DRM in CD manufacturing:

"We spent a lot of money producing these albums for our artists and they deserve money for their work. I'll have a double latte with cinnamon, and you better make it the right way this time." She said to me then added, "And stop talking to me."

Close your eyes and imagine a place where people don't steal music. Imagine a place where people get along. Imagine a place where birds sing and fly and everyone rides on the backs of giant sea turtles. Now realize you can't have your eyes closed and read this at the same time so that means you're cheating. See? This is exactly why DRM exists.

The measures currently being used by big record only annoy customers and reduce overall sales. How do we, and by we I mean they, go about changing the way we listen to music so that they can make money? So far we only have a system where we pay and it involves voodoo and Apple computers. I don't know because I cannot afford apples nor computers nor those little crackers you put in your coffee.

All of this doesn't matter because in the future these types of methods will be looked back upon and laughed at like someone who only owns a single iPod. And this single, sad little iPod gets plugged into their sad and single little iCar. Remember, this is the future so their car probably has a firewire plug-in so it fits snugly into a two port garage. But we're getting off of the point, which is that technology is not here to make people's lives easier, but more frustrating. Frustrating for hackers and regular consumers to play this music and steal it with their grubby little hands that have eyes on the fingertips or is it this stuff I just took oh god my skin feels like it's on fire and the pills that my doctor gives me don't help at all why can't I stop crying.

The direction that this technology needs to be taken can only be explained by Peter Lee, an executive at Disney.

"If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed."

This is a war. We use real bullets called words. And above all, remember that the enemy is you. Make sure you don't fire until you see the whites of your own eyes. Have you ever seen your best friend get his arm shot off by a subpoena? Have you ever reached over to pat your commanding officer on the arm and realize his head has been cut in half by a couple of misplaced and irate quotations? Think about how horrible this is, multiply it by ten, now realize it's all your fault.

This is the present or future of the CD.

To fight off these hungry ears with teeth we need harsher punishments for people who steal our precious plastic donuts. Instead of just fining them, a sentence is needed. You should make them go to jail as well. You feel like stealing a little pop music? Have fun asking Bubba what kind of bands he listens to. They'll probably suck because he's in prison. Ten to twenty years in prison per mp3, minimum. If they like rap that talks about spending time in the hokey, they can go right ahead and experience it themselves. Then we can sign them to our label.

But jail is too good for these mongrels. Have you ever seen the movie Rollerball? Good, cause it is terrible. But my concept is pretty much the same as that movie. The people who steal mp3s should be put into a pit full of cannibals and lesbians who share your organs with anyone who wants them. When you share someone's organs enough they will learn not to share people's belongings. Have you ever heard of Pavlov's dogs? I have an album of theirs back at my place if you want a copy. You do? Oh, I'll go get it. That's after I share your organs with my friend Kristy who is a lesbian.

But this has all been said on the news. What you, the vilest yet most precious resource of the business world has, need to be at the cusp of all things cuspable.

Pizzaz, the Current CEO of Sony in the year 2050 (the future) and lead singer of the band "The Misfits", had this to say about what should be done with DRM:

"The people who buy our music should be ready to cram it up their you-know-whats." But before I could ask her what she meant I figured out she wasn't really there, but was a cardboard cut out attached to a bomb. Then she blew up the bomb and the windows exploded and it was all "To be continued?" which sucks because I don't know if I can wait that long.

If you want to stop people from using CDs in ways they shouldn't, these companies have to realize you need to get rough. Make it use GPS so that the disc literally explodes when taken so far away from the record shop in which it was bought. Make it release a nerve gas that turns everyone in the room into a liberal. Have each disc contain a picture of the person who buys it and every time you copy the music from it the disc cracks a little and hurts the consumer like a little voodoo doll. The best defense has always been offense, unless you are the Detroit lions because oh god they suck. See, I'm a funny guy who likes sports and doesn't spend all day reading books.

This definitely is the future of the CD.

But all of this might hurt sales in some way, how I cannot say. The little man I drew on my hand informed me with great certainty that this type of intellectual revolution is something the world is not ready for, so we may need to figure out new angles to sell these CDs with. Security comes with a price, and lots of people will not be willing to pay this price to buy our special brand CD players that attach to your skin and drill holes in you if you copy files illegally. My right hand man tells me that all of these features that are going to be added will make a CD unplayable. This is true. Some people will look at these suggested types of business models and consider them to be uncaring, unfeeling, or unexpurgated. All of these comments are made by people who don't understand how business works. First you ask me to do something for you. Then I ask you to sign a contract. Then I do what you asked me to do whenever I want to because you signed a slice of ham, and everyone knows that hams aren't legally binding. See how easily fooled you are? Leave this type of stuff to the big boys, buddy. We'll be doing this type of stuff forever, which includes the future.

But where will DRM really take us? In the year 5020 (the past), Pizzaz, the Arch Deacon of Sony and lead singer of the band "The Misfits" made further comments about the future of DRM use:

"In the future, which happens to be right now, we plan on developing DRM technology. How much? A lot. What kind of things will we be doing? I have no clue, but I hear it's pretty sweet. Will it work and not be cracked within two hours? That's something I'll have to actually do some reading on."

Now that all of you are prepared for the future of DRM, please visit your Apple iTunes store, pick up some music, and remember never to cross the people who provide you those little floating notes. Or those floating notes will grow fangs and eyes and rip into your flesh, you sunshine thief.

Days before you came

2005-10-10T00:03:00.000-04:00

Though the history of the video game spans almost five decades, video games themselves didn't become part of the popular culture until the late 1970s.

Early years

Many people attribute the invention of the video game to William Higinbotham, who in 1958 created a Pong-like game called Tennis For Two on an oscilloscope to entertain visitors at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This is incorrect, as under the general definition, the first video game came about six years prior to Tennis For Two.

A.S. Douglas developed OXO, a graphical version of noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe), in 1952 at the University of Cambridge in order to demonstrate his thesis on human-computer interaction. It was played on the now archaic EDSAC computer, which used a cathode ray tube for a visual display. In spite of its technological antiquity, the game is still playable on an emulator available on the Internet.

The 1960s

In 1961, a group of students at MIT, including Steve Russell, programmed a game called Spacewar on the then-new DEC PDP-1. The game pitted two human players against each other, each controlling a space ship capable of firing missiles. A black hole in the centre created a large gravitational field and another source of hazard. This game was soon distributed with new DEC computers and traded throughout primitive cyberspace. It was the first widely available and influential game.

One of the developers of Multics, Ken Thompson, continued to develop the operating system after AT&T stopped funding it. His work focussed on development of the OS for the GE-645 mainframe. He actually wanted to play a game he was writing called Space Travel. Though the game was never released commercially (and apparently costing $75 per go on the mainframe), the game's development led to the invention of the UNIX operating system.

In 1966, an engineer named Ralph Baer created a simple video game called Chase that could be displayed on a standard television set. Baer continued development, and in 1968 he had a prototype that could play several different games, including versions of table tennis and target shooting.

The 1970s

In 1971, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney created a coin-operated arcade version of Spacewar and called it Computer Space. Nutting Associates bought the game, hired Bushnell, and manufactured 1,500 Computer Space machines. The game was not a success because many people found it difficult to play.

As Bushnell felt he did not receive enough pay by licensing games to other manufacturers, he founded his own company, Atari, in 1972. The first arcade video game with widespread success was Atari's Pong, released the same year. The game is loosely based around table tennis: two players each control a "paddle" which has the freedom to move up and down at their end of the "court". A ball is "served" from the center of the court and as the ball moves towards their side of the court each player must maneuver their bat to hit the ball back to their opponent. Atari sold 19,000 Pong machines, and soon many imitators followed. The coin-operated arcade video game craze had begun.

1972 also saw the release of the first video game console for the home market, the Magnavox Odyssey, based on Ralph Baer's earlier work and licensed from his employer. The console was connected to a home television set. Built using mainly analog electronics, it was not a large success, although other companies with similar products (including Atari) had to pay a licensing fee for some time.

1976 saw the first controversy over gratuitous violence in a video game, with the release of Death Race, by Exidy, where the object of the game was to run over "gremlins"—who looked more like pedestrians—with a car. The controversy increased public awareness of video games.

Early home computers from Apple, Commodore, TRS-80 and others had many games, that people typed in from books (those present will remember David Ahl's book, Basic Computer Games), magazines (Creative Computing), and cassette tapes, floppy disks, and ROM cartridges.

In 1977, Atari released its cartridge-based console called Video Computer System (VCS), later called Atari 2600.

The video game industry entered its Golden Age in 1978 with the release of Space Invaders by Taito. This game was a runaway blockbuster hit, and it inspired dozens of manufacturers to enter the market and produce their own video games.

In 1978, Nintendo released an arcade game: Computer Othello.

Also in 1978, Atari released Asteroids, its biggest best-seller. It replaced the game Lunar Lander as the number one arcade hit.

In 1979, Activision was created by disgruntled former Atari programmers. It was the first third-party developer of video games ever.

Other arcade classics of the late 1970s include Night Driver, Missile Command, Berzerk, Breakout, and Battle Zone.

While the fruit of development in early video games appeared mainly (for the consumer) in video arcades and home consoles, the rapidly evolving home computers of the 1970s and 80s allowed their owners to program simple games. Soon many of these games (often clones of popular arcade games) were being distributed through a variety of channels, included the physical mailing and selling of floppy disks and tapes, and the inclusion of the game's source code in magazines and newsletters, which allowed users to type in the code for themselves. Soon a small cottage industry was formed, with amateur coders selling disks in plastic bags sent through the mail.

The 1980s

Home video-game systems became popular during the 1980s.

1980

Pac-Man (first powerups?) was released, the most popular arcade game of all time. 100,000 units are sold in the United States. Williams created Defender, a side-scrolling shooter which was also very popular.
Shigeru Miyamoto was asked to improve Radar Scope, an arcade game by Nintendo that did not sell well in the US. Miyamoto decided to make a new game instead: Donkey Kong, which instantly became a big success.
Coleco released Colecovision, a cartridge-based home console. Nintendo licensed Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. to Coleco. Midway released a top-selling game: Ms. Pac-Man and Namco released Super Pac-Man.

1983

The famous Commodore 64 (C64) was released. This was a great success in sales, because it was marketed aggressively. It had a BASIC programming environment and advanced graphic and sound capabilities for its time, similar to the Colecovision console.
By the middle of the year, the video game industry crashes.

1984

The Apple Macintosh arrives. It lacked color, but the operating system support for the GUI attracted developers of some interesting games (e.g. Lode Runner) even before color returned in 1987 with the Mac II.

1985

The North American video game console market is revived when Nintendo releases their Famicom in the United States under the name Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It was bundled with Super Mario Bros. and it suddenly became a success. The NES dominated the market until the rise of the next generation of consoles in the early 1990s, causing some to call this time the Nintendo era.
Squaresoft was founded and Hironobu Sakaguchi decided to make their final game a fantasy role-playing game, and the Final Fantasy series is born. Final Fantasy saved Squaresoft from bankruptcy.

1986

Due to the huge success of the NES, Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda and Metroid; two other games that established big franchises.

1988

Nintendo published their first issue of Nintendo Power Magazine.

1989

Nintendo released the Game Boy, a monochrome handheld console.
Sega released their 16-bit console, the Sega Genesis.

The 1990s

1990

Nintendo's sales rose because of the success of Super Mario Bros. 3.
SNK released the 16-bit NeoGeo console in home and arcade formats.

1991

Nintendo released their second console, the 16-bit Super NES, packaged with Super Mario World.
Sega created Sonic the Hedgehog, their flagship character.
The first fighting game arcade success was Street Fighter II, released by Capcom.

1992

Midway released its top-selling fighting game Mortal Kombat. It became an instant success. It was the first game with digitized characters. It was criticized for its gratuitous violence, which ironically added to its popularity. Nintendo released a version for SNES without blood and different fatalities.
Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

1994

Rare made a game for Nintendo called Donkey Kong Country. The game was popular because of its distinct graphics, sound and gameplay. Its 3D pre-rendered graphics contributed to its success.
Nintendo released Super Game Boy, an adaptation for the Super NES in order to be able to play Game Boy games in the console.
Nintendo released Super Metroid, the biggest game on the Super NES at the time.

1995

Nintendo released its 32-bit virtual-reality console called Virtual Boy.
Sega released the 32-bit Sega Saturn.
Sony debuted with the release of the 32-bit PlayStation.

1996

After many delays, the Nintendo 64 and Super Mario 64 are released. More than 1.5 million units were sold in only three months.
Nintendo stopped manufacturing the Virtual Boy.

1997

Rare released Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64, which is criticly acclaimed for actually being a good movie licensed game.
Square released Final Fantasy VII for Sony's Playstation, it is a huge success.

1998

Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and the Game Boy Color.
The Sega Saturn is discontinued and considered to be a huge failure.

1999

Sega released the DreamCast (named Katana before release).
Connectix Corporation released the Virtual Game Station, a successful PlayStation emulator. Sony went to court to dispute the legality of the system, but Connectix won. The Bleem company released Bleem!, another PlayStation emulator.

Early 21st century

2000

Sony released the PlayStation 2.

2001

Nintendo released the GameCube and the successor to the Game Boy Color, the Game Boy Advance.
Microsoft entered the videogame console industry by releasing its new home console, the Xbox. It's flagship game, Halo:Combat Evolved is also avalible at the systems launch.
Sega announced they would discontinue the Dreamcast and no longer manufacture hardware.

2002

Sega became a third-party developer for Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft.
Following the launch of the GameCube, Nintendo released Super Mario Sunshine.
After nearly eight years without a new Metroid title, Nintendo released Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion on the same day.

2003

Microsoft bought Rare.
Nokia introduced the N-Gage multimedia handheld console.
The 3DO Company filed for bankruptcy.
Nintendo released the Game Boy Advance SP compact handheld console, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
Infogrames, owner of the Atari intellectual properties, changed its name to Atari.

2004

Nintendo released a brand new type of portable handheld console, the Nintendo DS.
Nintendo launched the Classic NES Series, and released Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.
Microsoft released Halo 2.
Sony announced the PSP.
Nintendo acquired the majority ownership of the Seattle Mariners Major League Baseball team.

The 100 Best Products of 2005

2005-10-04T21:40:00.000-04:00

All Products Listed by Ranking

Mozilla Firefox Web Browser
Google Gmail Web Mail
Apple Mac OS X Version 10.4 (Tiger) Operating System
Belkin Wireless Pre-N Router and Notebook Network Card Wireless Networking
Dell Ultrasharp 2405FPW 24-Inch Wide-Screen LCD
Alienware Aurora 5500 Performance PC
Seagate USB 2.0 Pocket Drive Portable Hard Drive
Skype VoIP Service
Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT Digital SLR Camera
PalmOne Treo 650 PDA Phone
Zone Labs ZoneAlarm Antivirus Antivirus and Firewall Software
Mysoft Technology Maxthon Browser Plug-In
Rio Carbon Midcapacity MP3 Player
Webroot Window Washer 5.5 Utility
Maxtor H01R300 Shared Storage Drive Network Hard Drive
Google Search Engine
Netgear 54 Mbps Cable/DSL Wireless Travel Router Model WGR101 Travel Router
OnlyMyEmail Pro Spam Filter
Sony PlayStation Portable Handheld Gaming Device
NVidia GeForce 6600 GT Graphics Board
APC Back-UPS RS 800VA 120V Uninterruptible Power Supply
2BrightSparks SyncBackSE Utility
Moon Software Password Agent Password Manager
HP Officejet 7210 All-in-One Multifunction Printer
Winternals Software ERD Commander Data Recovery Software
Ubuntu Linux 5.04 Linux Distribution
Epson PictureMate Photo Printer
Mozilla Thunderbird E-Mail Program
Cloudmark Anti-Fraud Toolbar Browser Security Plug-In
Vonage VoIP Service
Cloudmark SafetyBar Spam Filter
Adobe Photoshop CS2 Image Editor
The New York Times on the Web Web Site
Apple ITunes Media Player
Seagate USB/FireWire Hard Drive External Hard Drive
Canon CanoScan 9950F Scanner
IRiver IFP-895 Flash-Based MP3 Player
Valve Half-Life 2 PC Game
Samsung HL-P5063W Rear-Projection TV
Tor Privacy Software
LG Flatron L1981Q 19-Inch LCD
Dell 3000cn Color Laser Printer
BlackBerry 7100t PDA Phone
Verbatim Store 'n' Go Pro USB Memory Key
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 SATA NCQ Internal Hard Drive
Compaq Presario V2000 All-Purpose Notebook
Microsoft Windows Media Player 10 Media Player
Canon Pixma IP4000R Inkjet/Photo Printer
Best Software Simply Accounting Accounting and Personal Finance
Orb Media Streaming Service
Flickr.com Photography Site
Dell Inspiron 6000 Desktop Replacement Notebook
DirecTV HD DVR HR10-250 HD Receiver and DVR
ACD Systems ACDSee 7 Photo Organizer
Dell UltraSharp 1704FPV 17-Inch LCD
Olympus C-8080 Wide Zoom Digital Camera
Qnext Instant Messenger
IBM ThinkCentre A51p All-Purpose PC
SightSpeed Video Instant Messenger
Wikipedia Online Resource
Cerulean Studios Trillian 3.1 Instant Messenger
CMS 80GB USB 2.0 ABSplus Notebook Backup System Portable Hard Drive
Nikon Coolpix 7900 Digital Camera
Contour Design RollerMouse Pro Mouse
Adobe InDesign CS2 Desktop Publisher
Shuttle Computer XPC i8600b Small PC
IBM ThinkPad X41 Ultraportable Notebook
Adobe Premiere Elements Video Editor
Dell Axim X30 PDA
A9.com Search Engine
Toshiba RS-TX20 Digital Media Server DVD Recorder
Roxio Easy Media Creator 7.5 Burning Software
Plextor PX-716UF Rewritable DVD Drive
Casio Exilim EX-Z750 Digital Camera
Apple Mac Mini Small PC
Google Desktop Search Desktop Search Tool
Mitsubishi LT-3050 30-Inch LCD TV
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Looking for the ultimate pong experience?

2005-10-03T20:47:00.000-04:00

Look no further.

Turbonegro hates the kids

2005-09-28T10:51:00.000-04:00

Here is my 5 point plan for dealing with children. Children are defined as
anyone below the age of 12. Exceptions are made for girls 10 and above who
bloomed early.

1. There should be a mandatory curfew for children. They should only be
allowed in public from 3-5pm Monday-Friday; and 11am -6pm on the weekend.
While they are in public, the parents are responsible for having some way to
entertain them. A portable DVD player with earphones is great. Any clear
plastic bag is an economical alternative. Don't give your child a noisy
handheld video game: it's like handing the child a drum or a fistful of
fireworks. While, I have no problem with you giving your child a fistful of
fireworks, I just ask that you do it at home.

2. One child is allowed in public per adult supervisor. No more field
trips, no more haggard women towing 5 screaming kids through the mall. If
you're pregnant that counts as your 1 kid.

3. Children are not allowed in movie theatres, or restaurants. The only
exceptions being themed restaurants, fast food joints, G-rated movies, or
anything with Sandra Bullock.

4. Children in public need to be drugged to make them quiet and compliant.
Parents who do not want to drug their children must physically restrain
them. They need to be muzzled, and strapped down to handcarts; sort of like
how they used to wheel Hannibal Lecter around in, "Silence of the Lambs".

5. Children not restrained (see above) will be equipped with leashes and
shock collars. The controls for the shock collars will be publicly
available. Anyone seeing a misbehaving child will have the ability to
activate the shock collars.

Parents and children unwilling to follow these rules will be sent to labor camps where they will build shock collars and handcarts. The other option for parents who don't want to follow these rules is to leave their children at home when they go out. That's why God made TV, books and matches.

So in closing, please write to your congressman, representative, or local warlord, and tell them you want them to endorse the TLBP Childcare Act of 2005. If they refuse, tell them you know all about the videotape. You don't need to be specific; they'll know what you 're talking about.

Back in maracaibo

2005-09-23T15:03:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the lack of updates folks but I´ve been in caracas since last week, I went there to watch the slipknot concert wich by the way rocked hard, anyhow, I´m back again and fully recharged. my life is going pretty well these days, things are coming together (at least the material things), im starting in the culinary school next month, so now I can finally achieve my lifelong dream of becoming a space soldie... ehhh, I mean a cheff, I hope that turns out for the best, and it looks like I might get a job in American Airlines, that is gonna rock too if it happens, we´ll see.

This contest is interesting, it shows how things would be if pirates ruled, and this flash animation was pretty scary too.

My first real entry

2005-09-18T13:47:00.000-04:00

Things are gonna change around here starting today, this started as a news blog kinda like boing boing just because I was too lazy to actually write shit, but I decided that now im gonna write my boring ass life, wheter you fucking like it or not, so its gonna turn out o be a regular blog , you know like the ones everyone does, the first thing im gonna write about is the crappy concert I went to yesterday, ok I basically got dragged there for reasons I dont wanna speak of, or at least not just yet (I dont know you enough motherfuckers), anyhow it was Adrian Belew (the king crimsom guy) this concert blew, maybe I did not like it that much because I´m not on LSD, and because I´m not fucking 40 years old.

You know what, I am beggining to hate every fuckind kid out there that tries to become something they are not, I mean, I dont know where this taste for vintage music comes from, fuck, Im sure its great, but move fucking on, theres other things goin on in the world, you cannot stay there and live that era forever, maybe its because they look back a these times and they think of them in the same way that I think of the star wars universe, but the difference is that I´m fucking mature enough to know not to wear a jedi robe in my everyday life.

The 60´s era sucked hard they had no computers, no quake, no mario, no simpsons, and everyone was smelly, ok maybe they had a lot of drugs, but come on, we have that now sans crazy dudes puting flowers in the rifles of soldiers, come on people wake up and smell the coffe you are either not old enough to pretend you like that shit, or you are far to old to still act like a teenager, it pityfull, stop smoking weed and get a job, and by the way, this is a news flash for all you creppy old guys out there, we dont like you, we dont laugh with you, we laugh at you, and fucking damn it, take a shower once in a while you always stink, but then again maybe is the stench of death coming closer for you, and be pissed all you want about this little rant cause I´ll laugh last when you die, wich will be fucking soon.

PS: The guys paying in the concert were great musicians though I gotta give them that.

SOAD sucks!

2005-09-14T19:18:00.000-04:00

All I ask is that you think critically about the music you listen to. It’s not so hard. Next time you put on a record, close your eyes and ignore how cool the band’s logo would look on a t-shirt. Allow the music to be processed by the part of your brain that does your taxes (or your math homework if you’re too young to work for The Man). After a few minutes, ask yourself “is this terrible?” If you’re listening to a System of a Down record, you will either think to yourself “wait a minute, yes, this is terrible,” or you will be unable to think things to yourself because you were kicked in the head by a horse when you were a child. If the former is true, congratulations. You’ve graduated. You’re now a discriminating non-idiot, and you can fend for yourself in the big scary world of adult tastes. If the latter is true, you can probably consider yourself exempt from this article, because you’re an adorable man-child halfwit who just wants hugs.

A third option exists. Perhaps you’re steadfastly holding on to your misguided little teenage love of System of a Down. Perhaps you’re unwilling to admit that they’re terrible because you refuse to turn on the special part of each and every human brain that is biologically devoted to hating System of a Down. Be not afraid, child, I can fix you. It’s my job. There are plenty of low-wattage individuals who never realize how offensively stupid their favorite band is until some hero like me comes along and snaps them out of it.

I never thought I’d have to worry about System of a Down. Hard rock fans, I thought, don’t usually bother spending their money on children’s novelty records. But I admit it, I was wrong. I overestimated the mental faculties of hard rock fans, which is a dangerous thing to do. Hard rock fans have never been the deepest thinkers (getting stoned and going “what if this is all… like… what if we’re all, like, inside a huge… uh...” doesn’t count). However, I figured that since Tool was so popular, rockers had come to expect at least a veneer of fake intelligence tacked onto a solid core of dumb. System of a Down has a thin, watery varnish of fake smarts smeared sparsely over a huge, majestic blimp of dumb.

If you’re a dim and misguided teenager who hates his parents, you could reasonably mistake Tool’s lyrics for deep. Once you turn sixteen and start noticing girls, of course, you’ll go “what the fuck have I been listening to?” and buy some grown-up albums. Mistaking System of a Down lyrics for deep, which thousands of feckless, virginal Hot Topic pantywaists do every day, requires a level of confusion so severe and overriding that I’m surprised they even manage to drop out of high school properly (I’d think they’d fuck up dropping out so bad that they’d wind up with a Master’s Degree).

This May, System of a Down released Mezmerize, an album so misguided that even the spelling was bungled. The rock and roll press, fresh from lowering their standards to accommodate Green Day’s moronic record into the increasingly meaningless canon, failed to laugh at Mezmerize’s clumsy political posturing. Spin magazine, for example, labeled Serj Tankian an “agitprop trickster,” which both gives Tankian way too much credit and makes Spin look like schoolboy douches for using the word “agitprop” in a rock review.

Why don't presidents fight the war? Because Roosevelt was in a wheelchair, you ASSHOLES!

If Green Day’s vile American Idiot built political commentary out of Lego, Mezmerize snaps it together out of Duplo (you know, that double-sized unswallowable Lego for toddlers and retarded kids). The album’s first single, B.Y.O.B., is the kind of scathing indictment of the military industrial complex that’s usually reserved for lofty literary media like bumper stickers and picket signs. Yes, we know the war is bullshit. Everyone knows the war is bullshit, even the rednecks and Republicans that pretend it isn’t bullshit. We all love to make fun of conservative politicians for speaking in platitudes, but how about lyrics like “why don’t presidents fight the war / why do they always send the poor”? Wow, slam-dunk. Now do the one about the Air Force holding a bake sale. What’s worse, the video for the song centers on the most insipid of egotistical metal clichés: the band playing to a bunch of invigorated youths as fascist police try to smash up their concert. Sorry, morons, your jackboot martyrdom is not forthcoming. You have to be hurtful to the system before you get squelched, and as it stands, you’re still funneling money to Republicans (more on that later).

B.Y.O.B. is dumb, but the rest of the album doesn’t fare much better. “Radio/Video” is The Replacements’ “Seen Your Video,” a mere twenty years too late. This song, along with “Violent Pornography,” really illustrates System of a Down’s distaste for mainstream pop culture, to the extent that impressionable young listeners might forget that System of a Down are turning the exact same tricks as any other whores on Earth. Listen to this, teenager: The Sony Corporation is just shilling System of a Down’s rebellion to extract money from the demographic who doesn’t buy Destiny’s Child records (both artists are beholden to Sony’s Columbia Records). Regardless of System of a Down’s clumsy political posturing, they are an integral part of the system of extracting money from stupid teenagers (you) and giving it to old, rich white Republicans. Am I one of those awful idiots who hates all major-label music because of this? No, of course not, those guys are complete pussies. I just like pointing it out to youth-addled stoners who think they’re supporting something alternative. For example, a member of System of a Down’s official forums writes:

im really into the political side of the music aswell even tho i havnt been to a campaign of this scale before i though some of u might like to know sooo here's a link http://www.anticapitalism.org.uk/index.html there's a campaign in 2 weeks to do with war,poverty,hurricane katrina,g.bush and how is actions are going to effect the world, and many more subjects that i found quite intresting the campign is on the 24th in london if you want to know more go to http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/2005/406/np12.htm i know most of you dont really care but if u do then you really should take a loook. hope to see some of u there and thanks for reading.
daniyelle

The Sony Corporation of America welcomes your anti-capitalist dollars, Daniyelle. System of a Down may have had a CD called “Steal This Record,” but I’ll bet you ten bucks they had to fight tooth and nail to clear it with some grey-haired asshole who was worried that idiot fans would take it too seriously.

System of a Down’s “political” lyrics are trite and hollow, to be sure. But to their credit, many of their lyrics aren’t political, they’re just stupid. Elsewhere on the album we have “Cigaro,” a song about the phallocentric aggression of world leaders and their Freudian love of cigars. Well, I suppose you could call it that, or you could cut the community college bullshit and admit it’s just a terrible song about dicks. Demonstrative lyric:

My cock is much bigger than yours,
My cock can walk right through the door
With a feeling so pure..
It's got you screaming back for more

They have all the rhyming skills of a middle-aged schoolteacher from Nebraska trying to show his students he’s “with it” by busting out a funky-fresh rap. Oh, but they said “cock,” so I guess they’re as edgy as a giggling fourth grader. I don’t know who’s stupider, someone who writes those lyrics, or someone who listens to them and says “this is great!.” Wait, yes I do, it’s the person who listens to them. Those lyrics have gone far beyond the point of being justifiable with a claim that they’re tongue-in-cheek. They’re not tongue-in-cheek, they’re finger-in-nose. Period. And did I already tell you that you’re stupid if you like them? Okay, I guess I did.

This guy needs to stop trying to sing.

It seems that I’ve said quite a bit about the lyrics but haven’t addressed the music. I could come up with all sorts of flowery ways to say that it’s annoying and disjointed, but that would be dignifying their pathetic efforts to be weirdy-beardy. For all their abrupt changes in tempo and intensity, the band succeeds only in insulting the intelligence of the audience by assuming listeners will be dazzled with cheap antics. To add injury to insult, the vocal duties on Mezmerize are shared between irritating but capable singer Serj Tankian and irritating but extremely incapable whiner/screamer Daron Malakian. Malakian taking over more vocal duties speaks not of intra-band conflict, but of a disgusting lack of intra-band conflict. Why won’t anyone tell the guy he can’t sing? They need to sit him down and say “sorry, you sound like a twelve-year-old diabetic with bad insulin regulation. Sit this one out and let the singer sing or we’re going to be even shittier than we were before, if that’s even possible.” I was probably a little too charitable in affording them the lucidity to realize that they suck, though. They probably think they’re great, which is funny to me.

Lola Stars and Stripes

2005-09-13T16:27:00.000-04:00

Check the original google page, this is downright disturbing. How far people have come from those humble days. Check it!

Looks like the new burnout will have to grace my console. Looking really good, and GameSpot thinks so as well. Read more…

This is pretty funny, people that look alike. Not much else to say.

Yet another image worth a thousand words

2005-09-07T18:43:00.000-04:00

An image is worth a thousand words

2005-09-07T01:27:00.000-04:00

Bolsa de Mareo

2005-09-05T23:03:00.000-04:00

SNES is as good as it´s going to get. Do you agree with this? I am not so sure but they sure make some interesting arguments. Check it.

Build your own FPS, this looks like the real deal, and you can even sell your creation when you’re done. Check it out! Its a bit rough graphically. Maybe Quake II era stuff perhaps.

Start Over

2005-09-02T18:40:00.000-04:00

Maker Alen Parekh transformed an old hard drive into a spinning LED-illuminated clock. Not that it matters, but "the clock that is produced isn’t exactly practical since most hard drives (especially older ones) are too loud for a clock that is to operate 24 hours a day," Parekh says. Link

This is a great gory flash animation!

Mediodia

2005-09-01T14:30:00.000-04:00

Islamic extremists rejoiced in America’s misfortune, giving the storm a military rank and declaring in Internet chatter that “Private” Katrina had joined the global jihad, or holy war. With “God’s help,” they declared, oil prices would hit $100 a barrel this year.

Just when I thought it was just the terrorists that were totally retarded, saying the storm had joined the Jihad, it seems that you can turn Katrina into anything you like if you just have the ~~balls~~ gumption to say so publically. People drive me crazy.

I just can’t see how you can rebuild New Orleans? I mean just look at this 3mb shot of the flooding? Its totally mind blowing.

El baile del Muñeco

2005-08-29T18:43:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the lack of updates but i´ve been away for a while,Today I have only one link to you, you might think thats too little too late, but due to its horrible content i dont believe you will be able to remain in your seats after its finished. here!

40 Things That Only Happen In Movies

2005-08-24T17:14:00.000-04:00

1. It is always possible to find a parking spot directly outside or opposite the building you are visiting.

2. When paying for a taxi, don't look at your wallet as you take out a note. Just grab one out at random and hand it over. It will always be the exact fare.

3. Television news bulletins usually contain a story that affects you personally at the precise moment it's aired.

4. Creepy music (or satanic chanting) coming from a graveyard should always be closely investigated.

5. Any lock can be picked with a credit card or paperclip in seconds. UNLESS it's the door to a burning building with a child inside.

6. If you decide to start dancing in the street, everyone you bump into will know all the steps.

7. All bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red digital displays so you know exactly when they are going to explode.

8. Should you wish to pass yourself off as a German officer, it will not be necessary to learn to speak German. Simply speaking English with a German accent will do. Similarly, when they are alone, all German soldiers prefer to speak English to each other.

9. Once applied, lipstick will never rub off. Even while scuba diving.

10. The Eiffel Tower can be seen from any window of any building in Paris.

11. Any police officer about to retire from the force will more often than not die on their last day (especially if their family have planned a party). (Caveat: Detectives can only solve a case after they have been suspended from duty).

12. Getaway cars never start first go. But all cop cars do. (They will also slide to a dramatic stop in the midst of a crime scene).

13. If staying in a haunted house, women should investigate any strange noises wearing their most revealing underwear.

14. On a police stake-out, the action will only ever take place when food is being consumed and scalding hot coffees are perched precariously on the dashboard . . .

15. All grocery shopping involves the purchase of French loaves which will be placed in open brown paper bags (Caveat: when said bags break, only fruit will spill out).

16. Cars never need fuel (unless they're involved in a pursuit).

17. If you are heavily outnumbered in a fight involving martial arts, your opponents will wait patiently to attack you one by one by dancing around you in a threatening manner until you have defeated their predecessor.

18. If a microphone is turned on it will immediately feedback.

19. Guns are like disposable razors. If you run out of bullets, just throw the gun away. you will always find another one.

20. All single women have a cat.

21. Cars will explode instantly when struck by a single bullet.

22. No matter how savagely a spaceship is attacked, its internal gravity system is never damaged.

23. If being chased through a city you can usually take cover in a passing St Patrick's Day parade - at any time of the year.

24. The ventilation system of any building is the perfect hiding place. Nobody will ever think of looking for you in there and you can travel to any other part of the building undetected.

25. You will survive any battle in any war UNLESS you show someone a picture of your sweetheart back home.

26. Prostitutes always look like Julia Roberts or Jamie Lee Curtis. They have expensive clothes and nice apartments but no pimps. They are friendly with the shopkeepers in their neighbourhood who don't mind at all what the girl does for a living.

27. A single match is usually sufficient to light up a room the size of a football stadium.

28. It is not necessary to say "Hello" or "Goodbye" when beginning a telephone conversation. A disconnected call can always be restored by frantically beating the cradle and saying "Hello? Hello?" repeatedly.

29. One man shooting at 20 men has a better chance of killing them all than 20 men firing at once (it's called Stallone's Law).

30. When you turn out the light to go to bed, everything in you room will still be visible, just slightly bluish.

31. Plain or even ugly girls can become movie star pretty simply by removing their glasses and rearranging their hair.

32. Rather than wasting bullets, megalomaniacs prefer to kill their enemies with complicated devices incorporating fuses, pulleys, deadly gases, lasers and man-eating sharks.

33. All beds have special L-shaped sheets that reach to armpit level on a woman but only up to the waist of the man lying beside her.

34. Anyone can land a 747 as long as there is someone in the control tower to talk you down.

35. During all police investigations it will be necessary to visit a strip club at least once.

36. You can always find a chainsaw when you need one.

37. Most musical instruments (especially wind instruments and accordions) can be played without moving your fingers.

38. In Middle America, all gas station attendants have red handkerchiefs hanging out of their back pockets.

39. All teen house parties have one of every stereotypical subculture present (even people who aren't liked and would never get invited to parties).

40. Trucks use their horns at random (no hang on, that happens in real life too!).

Blame it on the Rain

2005-08-19T19:59:00.000-04:00

Recently I went undercover as a fat roll on Harry Knowles left leg, and found out some SHOCKING and SOUL DESTROYING news regarding the remakes coming out next year. As you know, the hottest trend in Hollywood recently has been remakes of old TV shows such as The Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky and Hutch, and Scooby Doo. These have garnered large box office earnings, spurring the movie industry to blitz through every conceivable show ever made until the public stops handing over their hard-earned cash and tears the movie executives to bloody pieces in an angry mob. I fear that this riot is far from happening, and as such we have many more years of TV show remakes to endure. My hazardous undercover work gleaned new information that I feel I should share with you loyal fans, so that you have time to prepare for these ill-tidings, and won't be ambushed with this news while sitting through the hour-long previews before a movie. We will get through these troubled times, together.

Alf

The remake of this classic sitcom from the 80's is sure to be a hit with the kids and adults alike. Owen Wilson stars as the incorrigible alien from the planet Melmac whose spaceship crash-lands in a suburban family’s backyard. Ben Stiller will be playing the constantly irritated father who can’t win against the charming Alf as he befriends his children and captures the hearts of all around him with his wry wit. The big change in this Hollywood take on the series is that Alf is no longer a short, fuzzy puppet, but rather a complete CGI body with Owen Wilson’s real face spliced on. The creative team decided that his nose was large enough to suffice for the trunk of the alien, and they didn’t want to miss out on the chemistry he has with Stiller as the frustrated father. Alf is coming out next summer.

Small Wonder

This relatively unknown show was extremely popular with retarded children and pedophiles, but the producers didn’t want to put out the same vibe that the original short-lived series did. That’s why they decided to revamp the idea of a robot sibling to live with a normal suburban family. Instead, this is to be a raunchy college comedy full of sex jokes playing on the fact that the robot isn’t programmed for such activities like drinking and panty raids. A brilliant professor makes a bet that he can design a robot to look like a seemingly normal college student (played by American Pie’s Jason Biggs), and not only will he maintain a steady 4.0 grade point average, but he will also blend into the college community. Well you can just imagine what crazy hijinks are in store when his roommates introduced him to beer, girls, and wanton vandalism. This robot is in for a learning experience! Ben Stiller makes a cameo as the guidance counselor with a funny mustache.

Mama’s Family

Although this sitcom was universally disliked and directly linked to the spread of airborne diseases and civil war in developing countries, studio execs decided to reinvent the series in the form of an observational comedy about the differences between white people and black people. Ben Stiller plays a snobby yuppie that gets arrested on charges of fraud and is sent to a halfway house as part of his probation. A large black woman runs the halfway house, played by Martin Lawrence who reprises his role from "Big Mama's House". Big Mama doesn't cater to the newcomer's attitude towards her home cooking and sassy attitude, leading to some fireworks between the two. Chris Tucker also stars as Stiller's roommate who demonstrates how they are different in so many ways, but in the end they learn how they are also the same.

Perfect Strangers

The remake of this classic sitcom of Larry and his troublesome but lovable foreign cousin, Balki, is probably the most anticipated of this whole bunch. The big change in this movie redo is making it set in New York City where Larry is played by Owen Wilson who is a suave Wall Street broker who lives a fast-paced life. Soon he is burdened by his cousin Balki, played by Ben Stiller, who imposes himself on Larry, giving him no choice but to let him stay. Fireworks erupt when these two birds of a different feather clash on ideas of what it means to have fun and be alive. The highlight of the movie is when Larry takes Balki to the New York Stock Exchange and through a series of misunderstandings, Balki buys a million shares of pork bellies and starts a market trend that leads the US out of the recession. Soon he is more successful than his cousin, leading to a split in their friendship, but of course by the end of the movie, they both learn a great lesson about life. Rated R for foul language and gore.

Grizzly Adams

The sitcom of the lonely mountain man who talks to animals and befriends the natives is a little outdated for today's savvy audience. John Woo has been given the slot as director in this new action movie starring Nicolas Cage as Adams, a special agent who battles large corporations who illegally dump toxic waste into the environment. Helping him in this battle are CGI created animals who are the ancestors of the original inhabitants of the Garden of Eden and have been enlisted by Adams to help him save the planet. The fight scenes in this movie are going to be explosive thanks to the directing style of John Woo. A spoiler scene shows Adams flying sideways through the air in slow motion, firing a pistol in each hand, with CGI doves firing small pistols behind him. Ben Stiller plays the villain of the large corporation who is bent on the destruction of nature, and Vin Diesel plays his evil minion that always rhymes when he talks.

Webster

Ben Stiller plays the lovable Webster in this remake of the 80's sitcom of a well-off white family who adopts a cuddly little black child with an incurable growth disease. Unlike the other movies, this one is almost completely unchanged from the original premise, besides the fact that Webster is now a neurotic Jew from Long Island and he is adopted by a pack of CGI-created wolves in the Canadian wilderness where he is taught how to hunt down and vivisect deer with his teeth. This will be a direct-to-video release and will include a full soundtrack by the punk group "Good Charlotte".

Coldplay Sucks

2005-08-17T22:24:00.000-04:00

the first time I saw Coldplay I honestly wasn’t sure if they were a joke. Allow me to explain. A few years ago, before they hit it big, they were featured as performers on NME’s Carling Awards show, which is known for such feats of critical genius as giving out awards nobody cares about and always giving Primal Scream awards, even if they haven’t released anything in three years.

Between the segments featuring the greasy, simian drunks of NME’s staff giving awards to the greasy, simian drunks of the British music world, they brought a new band called Coldplay on the stage to perform. The instant they started, I was convinced that it was some sort of joke set up by NME to make fun of indie music. The singer was a laughably lugubrious donkey-faced 15-year-old and the music was a watered-down pastiche of Ride or early Radiohead; even the name of the band could be easily mistaken for a jab at the gloomy fog-rock that had dominated British music in the past years. If it wasn’t some sort of a clever joke, I thought, then Rock and Roll music was doomed. To save my sanity, I chose to believe it was a parody.

A face that even a mother could punch.
Imagine my surprise and dismay when I heard the very same song on the radio here in the States a few months later. I learned that it was called Yellow, and the singer was not, in fact, 15 years old. He really was just a nerdy, earnest man with a piano who wanted to tell me of his pain through the medium of tedious, leaden, derivative ballads. I was rather confused as to why American audiences largely rejected the comparatively lively British music of the 90s but were so taken with such mediocre, joyless, and uninspired pap. Then I remembered that the last British guitar band to hit it really huge over here was Oasis. Not just any Oasis, but Oasis in whiny balladeer mode, a la Wonderwall. Could it be that the ridiculously fickle American pop audience was subconsciously looking for, of all things, a surrogate Oasis? I honestly wouldn’t put it past them, since they were stupid enough to fall for Oasis the first time.

Coldplay’s first album, Parachutes, didn’t quite catapult them into the realm of true stardom. It did, however, produce the aforementioned Yellow, a single which was bland and uncontroversial enough to appear comfortably beside Creed and 98 Degrees on Now! Volume 6. Parachutes also featured the modern rock radio downer Trouble, which was more of the same sad-bastardism and unnecessary falsetto, but this time with graceless, repetitive piano playing to add some variety.

Their first album may have been mildly troublesome, but the year 2002 is when Coldplay really began to get ridiculously irritating. They released an album entitled “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” which describes the all-too-frequent physical sensation of shame that lead singer Chris Martin gets when he wakes up in a pool of his own urine. The first single from the record was In My Place, a slightly peppier number in which Martin goes into full-blown poet mode to make such bold pronouncements as “Yeah” and “Oh Yeah.” It should also be noted that this song seemingly samples the first twenty seconds of Ride’s Dreams Burn Down and runs them through some sort of studio “weak-sauce pussy-filter.”

The second single, the one which makes most of us click off our radios like they were playing a tape of our parents having sex, was The Scientist. You might argue that so far I’ve been expressing my own highly subjective opinions on music and nothing I say can be regarded as concrete, but I think I can state this as fact: The Scientist is a terrible song. It is empirically terrible. I’d go get the special NASA Super-Objective Terrible-Meter we invented to prove it, but you’re probably not smart enough to understand the readouts anyway.

The instrumentation of the song is not just weak, it’s frustratingly awful. The piano slowly shits out chords without any style or feeling. It’s not like we expect Elton John to hop out in a Donald Duck costume and boogie down, but perhaps he could have injected some sort of melody in the piano line. An acoustic guitar jumps in after the first chorus to remind us that we’re listening to a ballad, and it too just bangs out the chords. After the second chorus an electric guitar is added to remind us that we’re listening to a “modern rock band” and not our mother’s Joan Baez records. Guess what this electric guitar does? Nothing, of course! Neither of them adds any sort of tune, or any counterpoint to the vocals. They're just there, as if by force of habit.

And the vocals themselves, which carry the song, are totally devoid of any emotion other than some sort of lethargic wistful melancholy. The lyrics are typical, clichéd, inarticulate sad-parting-song bullshit, and he sings them with such incredible, unmusical lameness that I can't help wonder why he didn't just write them down and hand them out to us instead. The man should not trust himself as an interpreter of his own songs. He is clearly without the slightest idea of how to sing a song, so he just plops out his lyrics with as much gusto as a suicidal salesman making his final vacuum cleaner pitch.

Keep that mouth of yours closed, you shit.
The worst part of this whole terrible fiasco is that it’s made Coldplay famous. Famous as in dating-Gwynneth-Paltrow-and-getting-namedropped-by-Kelly-Osbourne famous. Famous enough that I know the lead singer’s name, and I have to see his stubbly horse-face on television and in magazines. The terrible side-effect of this is that they apparently want to use this newfound fame to kill rock and roll entirely and permanently, as evidenced by this news story from futureforests.com:

You loved the album 'A Rush of Blood to the Head' - Now help make it Carbon Neutral!

Coldplay are not only one of the best bands in the world, they are also committed to saving the world! Coldplay has joined with Future Forests in the fight to prevent climate changes by planting 10,000 Mango trees in Karnataka, India.

The trees provide fruit for trade and local consumption and over their lifetime will soak up the carbon dioxide emitted by the production and distribution of Coldplay's best selling album 'A Rush of Blood to the Head' .

Well, that’s just fine and dandy if you’re Al Goddamned Gore, but come on, these pathetic bastards are supposed to be a rock band! Even those shitheads Oasis knew enough about their responsibilities to at least feel up a few stewardesses and throw some televisions out of hotel windows. But instead of doing this, Coldplay is performing CHARMING GESTURES OF ECOLOGICAL COMPASSION! In turn, this will make the desperate-to-be-hip 35-year-olds with goatees and flat-front Gap khakis even queerer for Coldplay, which will make Coldplay more famous, which will make them richer and more able to continue to put out utterly worthless albums and make us more likely to turn on the radio and hear the brain-numbing dance remix of “Clocks.” God help us all.

Just Tonight

2005-08-16T23:38:00.000-04:00

Word on the street is that Aston Kutcher and Demi Moore are trying to have a
baby. Demi has 3 children with former husband Bruce Willis: Rumer, Scout
LaRue, and Tallulah Belle. If the new child is a girl, she plans on naming
her Doorknob Underpants; and if it's a boy, Kick My Ass And Take My Lunch
Money. As for why they're having a child, Kutcher is said to be desperate
for an intellectual and emotional equal; while Demi is just looking for
someone new, and younger to fuck.

Some people call that entertainment. Early man had little choice when he wanted entertainment. He would basically sit in the entrance of his cave, jerk off, and watch his
neighbors.

If he waited long enough, hopefully he would catch a glimpse of them fucking
their mate, beating their children, or getting eaten by a dinosaur. If he
was lucky, he would get to see all three. If he was really lucky: all three
at once. You would think our entertainment choices would have evolved right
along with us. I say if anything they have gotten worse.

People today enjoy the circus. The Romans invented them. But not pussy
circuses like we have. They were designed as an alternative to watching
your neighbors. Action was guaranteed. Every show they had lions eating
people. Every show was followed by an orgy. In modern times, you're lucky
if a lion eats even a couple people when you go to the circus. Sure, the
modern circus is always good for an elephant trampling, but that's really
more of a tease than a main event. And maybe you'll find a horny midget or
a licentious acrobat to eat your ass at intermission if you're lucky, and
you keep your ass spotless.

In spite of this, most modern circuses still manage to deliver a modicum of
entertainment. But now there are more and more circuses without any
animals. Crazy, dirty French circuses made up entirely of pretentious
acrobatic clowns. These clowns rarely eat members of the audience and
they are insufferably rude if you even dare suggest they fondle your
buttocks or twist a nipple. As if we needed another reason to hate
the French, or clowns.

Around the 1700's man invented television. Of course these early
televisions were made of wood and there were probably only 3 or 4 channels,
with one of them being devoted entirely to churning butter. In the
twentieth century we have cable television. There are over 5000 channels.
They still have the channel devoted to churning butter, but now they also
run it in Spanish. The Spanish version is way better because the butter
churner has enormous tits. Sometimes Erik Estrada shows up to chase her
around the butter churn wearing only a bonnet, a bow tie, and a pair of high
heels.

We all know that modern network television is highly regulated and censored.
We expect it to be creamy soft serve dog shit in a cardboard cup. Basic
cable is also a wasteland. Basic cable is divided between crappy low budget
decorating shows, tedious wildlife shows, and that show where they build
motorcycles. The motorcycle show, which used to be one of my favorites, is
now just one big product placement opportunity for whatever corrupt
corporation dumps a mountain of cash on these, 'rebel' bike builders/cheap
corporate whores.

Premium cable television is no better. They've hired all of the writers
away from basic cable and network television and then they never put out any
new shows. There is one new episode of the Sopranos every 3 years. The
new season is going to open with A.J. getting a colostomy bag and moving
into a retirement home.

And what has basic cable and network television done now that they don't
have any writers? They've switched to Reality Programs. What are Reality
Programs? Cameras follow people around as they go about their day. Does
this sound familiar? You're just sitting in the mouth of the cave watching
your neighbors. We're back where we started, except this time there is no
chance a dinosaur will show up and disembowel Bobby Brown. And that's a

Eulogy

2005-08-16T00:19:00.000-04:00

As a rich, young bachelor with a physique whose beauty makes the night sky shudder with envy, I have zero trouble landing top shelf trim night after night. My guy friends call me "the white Hitch" because I'm always the guy to go to for advice about reelin' in the sweeties and I'm a terrific dancer and I'm also white.

Anyway I was drinking by myself the other night and I figured it would be selfish of me to put a "penises only" clause on my expertise, because let's face it ladies, some of you are pretty clueless and revolting yourselves. My hectic schedule wouldn't permit to come up with anything original, but with a tiny bit of scouring I was able to find someone who's got this dating game figured out almost as well as me. Her name is Amy Spencer and she has compiled a list of 10 things every single girl must own for the renowned internet advice column MSN Does Dallas. Over the course of today's update, I'll be going down the list and comparing notes with her to see where we agree and disagree. Let's kick it off.

1. A fabulous photo of yourself
Amy Says: "What he says: "Is that you?" What he means: "Daa-aamn, girl, you're hotter than I realized!" Keep a digital version handy so you can email it to online suitors or blind dates who want a glimpse of the goods beforehand. And never, ever throw it away—when you're 80-something it'll serve as an instant reminder that back in the day, you were a total dish! "
Deviant Says: I couldn't agree more. Most likely, the picture you choose will have you holding hands with an old flame who moved on to bigger and better things. Stare it in the face every single day to remind yourself what you're missing out on. Helpful hint: Scribble over his face in permanent marker to let potential mates know that you're completely over him. Oh, and for accuracy's sake, when he says: "Is that you?" what he means is: "It looks like all that desperation went straight to your thighs."

2. A pretty pair of heels
Amy Says: "The good news is that these days, you can transform virtually any outfit to make it on-the-town ready by adding heels to a skirt, jeans, cropped khakis, whatever. And no, they don't have to be towering stilettos, even a pair of 1-inch kitten heels will make you stride a little more confidently. (Added bonus: The taller you are, the more cute men you'll be able to see around the room.)"
Deviant Says: Again, Amy is on the ball here. If you do your research, you'll find that all of history's greatest lovers have had foot fetishes: Danny DeVito, Quentin Tarantino, Eddie Murphy, the list goes on. Reel in these winners with a sexy pair of pumps and spend the next morning thanking yourself for it while he gently nibbles your toes and refuses to break eye contact with you.

3. An Eminem CD
Amy Says: "What's one of the first places a guy peruses when he walks into a woman's home? Her music collection. Good for you if you have an extensive one. But if all he sees is a stack of girl bands (say, the Indigo Girls, the Go-Go's, Joni Mitchell and the Bridget Jones' Diary soundtrack), he's going to panic. Balance out your collection with one CD, any CD, by Eminem and you have no idea how relieved he'll be."
Deviant Says: Amy's definitely on the right track here, but I'm going to go one better and recommend an Allman Brothers box set and Larry the Cable Guy's Right to Bare Arms CD. Take it from a bona fide sexpert ladies: There's nothing less attractive than a gal who thinks she's smarter than you. Follow this advice and you'll be making sure that never happens.

4. A great pickup line... and a way to blow 'em off
Amy Says: "In this post-chivalrous period, we can't always depend on guys to initiate contact, so prepare thyself with one simple, non-cheesy icebreaker to lay on that cutie who's making his way to your area of the bar. Our favorite: "Hi. Having fun?" (Though a friend of mine has recently taken to asking well-dressed men, "Hetero, homo or metro?") And in cases when a guy initiates contact and you're not interested, better have a better blow-off than "Ummmm, no... " Our suggestion: "Sorry, I don't think the guy I'm seeing would appreciate it." Sure, it's a lie, but it'll let him down easy—without destroying his ego or making him think you're a jerk."
Deviant Says: Masking your loneliness with pithiness is a good idea way to get alcoholics to follow you home. However, the part about letting him down gently is a little worrisome. What I would recommend as a replacement for the rejection strategy is a paper bag full of airplane glue. Also, make sure to have your address tattooed on your inner thighs so he knows where to drop you off at the end of the night.
Juve Says: "MONGO WANT DICK"
Deviant Says: Who let you in here?

5. A six-pack of good bottled beer
Amy Says: "A prepared single girl is ready to host and toast at any time. If you want to make a guy-guest feel at home and your girlfriends feel special, skip the mass-produced swill and go for microbrews like the exotically-named Smuttynose Shoals Pale Ale from Portsmouth, New Hampshire or the grandfather of microbrews, Sam Adams Boston Lager."
Terrorsaurus says:Although I agree with Amy that alcohol is a good way to numb the body, remove the inhibitions, and anger the Lord, there really is no functional difference between a fridge full of beers-of-the-month and a Dixie cup full of Victory Gin served at room temperature. My advice: Skip the fancy shit and keep your bar stocked with utility booze. Trust me, you'll need an excuse if any of your girlfriends see the kind of guys you bring home, and Bottle of rum buys you a lot more leeway that Oak Creek Nut Brown Ale.

6. Bathroom reading
Amy Says: "What man doesn't appreciate finding interesting reading in his sweetie's bathroom? So instead of tossing out your magazines when you're done reading them, toss them into a basket by the toilet. No need to go overboard with a stack of Sports Illustrated (if you don't follow sports, that would just be weird), but consider Newsweek or even Cosmopolitan (hey, this may be the only time he's a captive audience and can learn a few things). Or, just buy a book that's made for the bathroom, like Schott's Original Miscellany by Ben Schott ($10.17 at amazon.com) so he can learn a few things about shoelace lengths and sign language while he passes the, uh, time."
Deviant Says: This is a pretty clever little suggestion. It says to your new companion "I anticipated your bowel movements long before we ever met, and have made accommodations." Courteous? Yes. Romantic? Not hardly. Try writing love notes on the toilet paper, interspersed with harmless bits of scatological humor. It'll make him feel right at home!

7. A business card
Amy Says: "After the age of 18, it's no longer cute to scrawl your first name and phone number on a napkin and hand it to a man who wants to call you. So if your job doesn't provide a card or you'd prefer one with your personal email address and phone number on it, then have some made at your local Kinko's. The very budget-bound can get 250 full-color business cards for free from vistaprint.com if you don't mind the company's logo on the backside of the card. Hey, it's better than nothing. A napkin he can lose. A card he'll file and keep."
Deviant Says: The number one thing men look for in potential sex partners is professionalism. Here are some potential ideas for job titles: Women's Studies Major/Graduate, Multiple Cat Owner, Spinster, A-Cup and Proud of it. Be creative!

8. Earplugs
Amy Says: "Ah, there's nothing sweeter than a man who wants to cuddle up with you in bed for a long night's sleep. Unless — SNZZGGHGHRRJJZZZ! — he snores so loudly you can't get any sleep. Prepare thyself for surprise snorers with a pair of earplugs stashed in your nightstand. (2 pairs of Mack's brand self-described "snore-proof" plugs sell for $2.79 at cvs.com.)"
Deviant Says: Remember in late 1999 when all those rednecks were stockpiling guns and water and food because the world was about to end? And some of them decided that since money would have no meaning in a few months they might as well blow their retirement fund on supplies to prepare them for all kinds of bizarre and unlikely scenarios? And then the apocalypse never happened and they had to buy a storage unit to hold their 70 tanks of propane and their 5 man life raft? At least earplugs will fit in the drawer on your nightstand.

9. A straight male friend on your speed-dial
Amy Says: "Every girl knows she needs a gay male friend she can go to for fashion advice (a personal Queer Eye for Your Closet). But when it comes to relationship advice, you need another source. While your female friends may have good intentions, if you really want to know if you should call that guy, save the guesswork and go to someone who's been there, done that."
Deviant Says: If there's one thing I learned from listening to stand up comedy in the 90s, it's that "platonic" male friends would never sabotage their female friends' budding relationships out of jealousy or spite.

10. A condom
Amy Says: "Hey ladies, you know the drill by now. If you want to be able to have spontaneous fun of the bodily kind, you have to prepare for it yourself. You can't always count on him to have something in his back pocket—or a 24-hour drugstore on the route home. (Your new mantra: If you don't want it to break, you buy it.)"
Deviant Says: Contraceptives come at the end of the list for a good reason: If you're the kind of person who regularly enjoys reading advice columns like these, AIDS would probably feel like a day at the beach to you anyway.

Fake Frowns

2005-08-13T15:55:00.000-04:00

Brian Clevinger wrote this today, and I could not agree more.

I have never been a religious person or a church-goer of any sort. I've studied a variety of religions on an academic level because A) I needed the elective credits and B) as an outsider, it's interesting to see how religions have influenced cultures and helped to shape our modern world.

Now, I understand, on a purely intellectual level, that people get pretty worked up about this Jesus guy. And, hey, why not, right? He had some very groovy ideas about how to live, though it sure would be nice if most of the people who were so worked up about him actually behaved how he advised.

But that's another topic.

Anyway, the sheer fervor he inspires in some people is something I've never fully grasped.

Until, one day while driving somewhere with Lydia, I was struck as if from a blackhole-powered cannon.

"What if Jesus is their Optimus Prime?"

And it made sense.

I'm not saying I actually worship a robot, even one so far advanced to as to be in disguise. That's stupid. But if Optimus Prime gave me a gun and said, "Brian, I need you to kill a man," I would say, "I've got your back, Prime." There would be no questions, no hesitations, no doubt.

That man would be dead.

And, really, isn't that the power Jesus has over religious types?

Alarma

2005-08-12T21:42:00.000-04:00

This has to be one of my favorite internet videos of all time. It's a montage of still photos set to the theme from Deliverance. I could watch 100 times and not tire of it. Video ode to the American hillbilly.

Hmmmmm. That’s good eats! When I was a kid I watched a Mantis kill a full sized toad. Crazy tough bugs, these.

Play doom in your iPod!

Rock Against Ass

2005-08-11T22:26:00.000-04:00

Inevitably, Mac OS X for x86 has been hacked to run on a non-Apple PC. Is this the beginning of the fulfillment of the Dvorak prophecy?" RetrogradeMotion also writes "The OSx86 Project has posted a how-to guide telling how to run OS X on any Windows or Linux-based PC using VMWare." Not 100% corroborated, so ingest with salt.

The trippy "pink elephants on parade" sequence from Disney's Dumbo is remixed in this video with a version of that song recorded years later by the great Sun Ra and his Arkestra. Sun Ra's version, the trippier of the two, seems infinitely more fitting. Link to 17mb *.mov

Ojala te Mueras

2005-08-10T22:29:00.000-04:00

This reminds me of the time I bought a box of Alphabits cereal, and found that after I opened it they had filled it with NOTHING but the marshmallow bits. Factory error or some such. Anyway, check out the case mod.

This guy wants to blow up his G4 for you if we can only help him upgrade to a new G5. I am giving him a buck right now*. Here is plea.

I am not sure I agree with ALOT of this list, but its still interesting to read.

* Lies.

Black history month

2005-08-09T23:56:00.000-04:00

I´have been Kinda busy, so for today i only have this to give you: Weebl & Bob , work your way up the archives, the hilarity ensues.

How to make people think you know about music

2005-08-08T20:52:00.000-04:00

Trust me; you don’t want to learn everything about rock and roll. It’s a pain in the ass having a brain filled with worthless trivia about worthless art. It’s impossible to learn more about rock and roll without hating rock and roll more than before. That’s how I became the twisted old monster that I am today: knowing stuff. I used to be a fresh-faced teenage genius, in love with music and in love with the world. Then I started learning more and more; now I see every rock band as an exotic symptom of a diseased culture, and if I could sign some sort of order to have them all thrown in a volcano, I’d do it in an instant.

Luckily, there’s really no actual need to know anything. If you want to impress people with your boundless wit in the field of popular music, all you have to do is convincingly fake it. It’s not hard at all. Just like anything else worth knowing, from tying a necktie to building a nuclear bomb, you can learn to do it just by reading a single stupid article on some two-bit Podunk website. I’ve been watching people do this for years; it’s impossible to have conversations about music frequently without running into quite a few sly bastards who have mastered the art of faking musical knowledge and quite a few more who are at least half-assedly attempting it.

There are a couple of main aspects to seeming more pop-savvy than you really are. First of all, you have to break through the more-indie-than thou barrier: sometimes, people are going to bring up a band that you know nothing about, and you have to be able to beat them at their own game. Secondly, you’re going to have to create an air of pretentious snobbery in order to assert the superiority of your taste (and who would know more about that than me?). Finally, you must fake a sick obsession with some sort of musical cult figure. Once you’ve done these things, you’ll be virtually indistinguishable from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

Part One: What to Do When You Don’t Know Anything

If you’re trying to come off like a musical hotshot, people are going to start poking at you a little bit to test your boundaries; it is critically important to know how to deal with this, so I’m putting this section first. If you mess this up somehow, your cover is blown, you’re back to being Ronnie Retard, and you might as well just admit to everyone that you listen to Evanescence.

A) The importance of Double Dare.
Suppose someone says this: “Hey, have you heard of Flop?” Obviously, we’re also going to suppose that you haven’t heard of Flop, because you haven’t. How would you react to this? Your first instinct might be to say “Yeah, I’ve definitely heard of Flop.” This is bad idea for many reasons: first of all, it might be a trick. There might be no such band as Flop. Worse yet, your interrogator might have all manner of follow-up questions about Flop, and they’re going to be increasingly difficult to weasel your way out of. It might also be tempting to say “I’ve heard of them, but I haven’t really heard their records.” This is a wishy-washy compromise, and it’s an essentially meaningless answer. Basically, the only way to win at this game is to play it like Double Dare. You supposedly know everything about music. They ask you about Flop: dare. It’s time to put them on the defensive. “Hmm, Flop… what label were they on?” Double dare. Chances are, they don’t know. For all your opponent knows, you might know all about Flop, but he has failed to give you enough simple information, such as the name of their record label, for you to correctly identify them. Even if your opponent does know what label the band in question was on, you still can’t lose. “Ah yes,” you can say “I am almost certain that I have a compilation released by that label that has a few Flop songs on it.” This at least buys some time; the worst that can happen is that you’ll have to go home and look up Flop on the internet (this is known as the “Physical Challenge”). Your opponent is foiled, and you live another day.
B) Never let a stranger get a handle on what you like.
Next, a significantly more dangerous situation: suppose that someone unfamiliar asks you “So, what bands do you listen to?” Obviously, if you don’t know the person’s taste well enough, you can’t tell him what bands you actually listen to. When you’re faking your knowledge of music, that’s a huge risk; for all you know, the bands you listen to are complete shit in this guy’s eyes. Luckily, there’s a simple way out. Make up a band. This might seem dangerous, but if you do it right it’s a lifesaver. There are, however, a couple of tricks to it. Firstly, the name has to be plausible. Don’t say “The Magnificent Penis Rangers,” because that sounds like a fake band. Don’t say something overly simple, like “The Trolls,” because it’s too likely that it’s actually the name of a real band. Come up with something esoteric and meaningless, like “The Alabaster Swans” or “Cornbread Farm.” No matter how much your opponent knows, he can’t call you on it. What is he going to say? “I know about every band, and Cornbread Farm isn’t one of them!”? All your opponent can do is either acknowledge that he hasn’t heard of Cornbread Farm or press you for more information. This is where the second important aspect of it comes in: have at least a rudimentary biography built up for this band. What years were the active? Try the early Eighties; it’s far enough back that their records might not be out on CD and the internet might come up clean for information on them. What label were they on? Make one up: Catbird records. What sort of music did they make? Mix up a bunch of unrelated terms until you get one that sounds acceptable: proto-shoegaze jangle-pop. If you want to put some icing on the cake, make up a critic who loves them. “Cornbread Farm is actually John Simon Dodge’s favorite band. He talks about them at length in his book.” This will make your opponent feel clueless and poorly read.

Part Two: How to Be a Bastard

Faking factual knowledge of music is one thing, but you haven’t got the complete package until you also know how to be a snob about it. One of the most important aspects of fake snobbery is never to let on that you like anything. You may have noticed in my articles that I rarely admit without bitter sarcasm that I actually like anything; this is because I am a real snob, but faking it isn’t too hard. Remember: conversations about music aren’t really about music, they’re about you. Always steer your conversations toward your own personal taste. In this case “taste” just means “superiority.” You can’t help it if your standards are too high.

A) There’s no such thing as a straight compliment.
Never bring up a band you like without a backhanded compliment. This is extremely useful, because if the person you’re talking to hates the band, they will assume that you’re smart enough to dislike them too. If they like the band, they will assume that you like them a little bit as well, but you’re simply too cool to like them all the way. For example, if you’re the kind of irreparable idiot who listens to Muse, you might say “Muse really have their sound figured out. I guess that happens when you make the exact same record three times.” Even if you enjoy a rock band, you enjoy them despite their glaring flaws.
B) Nothing is as good as it used to be.
Remember: You preferred their first album. They totally sold out. They were better before the original guitarist left. They’re just a rip-off of Big Star anyway. Keep in mind that rock and roll has been in a continuous state of decline for the past 30 years or so. Every band just gets worse and worse until they collapse under the weight of their own failure. Every band is essentially an inferior version of an older band. Even if a band used to be a good, they suck now. They’ve sucked for years. They’ll never get their old spark back. You might as well give up on them, because they’re just a grotesque parody of their former selves. Does this mean you should start liking older rock? Certainly not! Everything made before 1978 is primitive, uncool, and culturally irrelevant.
C) Every genre is artless, boring, lame, or pretentious.
Personally, you can’t understand how anybody could listen to something so tedious, pretentious and masturbatory as progressive rock. Does this mean you prefer punk? No! Punk is for tin-eared plebeians and retarded, politically clueless teenagers. Electronic music is for boring white geeks with no souls. Jam bands are for burned-out stoner hippies. Industrial music is for Dungeons & Dragons-playing social rejects in trench coats.
D) If anyone’s heard of it, it’s crap.
Nothing can possibly get on the radio or on MTV without being watered-down for easy consumption by frat-boys, hicks, and teeny-boppers. Anyone who owns a radio and has it tuned to anything but the local pirate radio station or college station is a reprehensible consumer whore who wouldn’t know art if he ran face-first into Michelangelo’s David. Pop music is for children and yahoos.
E) If nobody’s heard of it, it’s crap.
The kids who do shows on the local pirate radio station or college station are a bunch of idiot scenesters with an infantile and ridiculous fear of pop music. Unable to appreciate pop music on its own terms, they turn instead to tuneless indie crap and ridiculous obscurity pissing-contests. The shit they play has no standard of quality; maybe that’s why only fifty people bought it.

Part Three: Hitching Your Wagon

This aspect of being a fake music geek is perhaps the trickiest and most dangerous part, because it will open you up for criticism. I’d recommend that you stick to the first two sections of this guide for quite some time before you even attempt this, because it’s not for beginners. Basically, you need to find some band or artist with a cult following to fake an obsession with. If you’re in a political party, you have to hitch your wagon to your party’s candidate, despite his flaws. If you’re religious, you have to accept your God despite your doubts. If you’re going to make a convincing music expert, you’re eventually going to have to latch on to a cult figure and defend him or her vehemently at every turn. Don’t ask me why. You just have to. If you don’t have a sick devotion to some strange and inscrutable artist, all the real music geeks will eventually be able to smell your deception. You don’t even necessarily have to pick a good artist, but you have to pick one. Find somebody with a broad and varied body of work, because you’re going to have to at least pretend to own a bunch of their records.

A) Pick an artist of medium obscurity.
Picking the right one is a difficult task, and pretending to like them is going to have its consequences. If you pick a widely-known cult hero like Morrissey or Elvis Costello, you might accidentally meet another fan and have to pretend to know things about the artist. Unless you’ve done your homework, your ignorance will be exposed. If you pretend to like somebody more obscure, like Captain Beefheart or Scott Walker, people may fail to be suitably impressed by your slavish devotion due to their ignorance of the artist’s body of work. I would recommend picking an artist of medium cult status, like Mike Patton of Faith No More and Mr. Bungle; he’s involved in so many worthless side-projects that you could easily evade his fans in a verbal maze of made-up album names and non-existent collaborations.
B) Become frighteningly obsessed.
Once you’ve picked your cult hero, the only thing left to do is bring him up in every single music conversation. Compare every other artist unfavorably to your hero. Lament the fact that your hero has “lost it” and “will probably never get it back,” but express your opinion that his early body of work is enough to counterbalance any mediocre material he may have released later. Your hero is the only one who ever really got it right, and as long as you live you’ll never see another artist like him.

Honesty about the music I listen to

2005-08-07T13:02:00.000-04:00

Here’s my mediocre idea: Music has a very difficult time managing to be any good because every style and subgenre is inherently awful. Friendless music nerds love nothing more than endlessly subcategorizing their record collections until they’re absolutely sure that no two albums inhabit the same subgenre; no matter how broad or specific one chooses to get, one will find that there’s simply no style of rock music that’s anything but unlistenable garbage.

The more I think about the project of cataloguing and systematically disparaging each of these subgenres, the more I realize that it’s an impossible task due to the approximately eight trillion subgenres that music nerds have come up with. In the interest of this not taking more hours to write than I’m willing to invest, I’ll just hit some of the highlights.

Grunge: Do you know why so many twenty- and thirty-somethings nowadays yearn for the era when grunge ruled America? It’s because back then it was fashionable to be a loser. You could roll out of bed in yesterday’s clothes, tell your dad to go fuck himself, and head to the coffee joint to peer at your stubbly reflection in some thrillingly disheveled girl’s glasses. It was like being a hippie, except you didn’t have to care about anything (except maybe AIDS or abortion, and even then, only when it was pragmatically necessary to care). It was like being a punk, but you didn’t have to worry about being uncool, because everybody was a loser. The music was specially engineered to sound good when listened to from big green bong water-stained couches with ripped upholstery. You didn’t have to worry too much when your hero died of a heroin overdose, because the Pacific Northwest was a bottomless reservoir of untapped indie talent, and somebody even more rugged would step up to fill your hero’s army boots.

Punk: Punk, of course, is much more than a style of music. This is beneficial, considering how little punk has to offer as music. While it started as an attempt to resuscitate rock’s corpse by way of loud, fast, simple songs, it now encompasses pretty much anything that involves the adorable irreverence of youth and/or no talent. In terms of outlets for confused kids to trick themselves into feeling like they’re a part of something, I guess it beats Christian youth groups: the fashion is slightly better, and at least the guitars aren’t acoustic. It’s cute to see kids make elaborate justifications to turn staying out late, drinking, fighting, and fucking into symbols of honorable virtue and emotional purity.

Nadir: Any time a critic or documentary filmmaker asks someone to define punk. Through all the stammering, it will always turn into a ridiculous quasi-spiritual speech about community and passion.

Post-Punk: If the term “post-punk” sounds stupid and nondescript to you, you’re on the right track. It’s tough to describe just what post-punk is. Maybe UK punks realized that they were having too much fun and should concentrate harder on spreading their half-understood notions of Marxism through music. Maybe they thought punk music wasn’t abrasive enough, so they felt the need to add some dorky dub basslines and clattering drums. Perhaps it was a pity-based humanitarian effort to create a style of music so ridiculous that not even poor Mark E. Smith would be laughed out of it. However it came to be, post-punk still holds some sort of imaginary relevance to a certain type of guy in cuffed jeans, and quite a few new bands seem to be enthralled by the style’s endless possibilities for intellectual posturing; be sure to read the latest issue of NME if you’re in the mood to read lazy critics mistake Art Brut or Selfish Cunt’s tedious, affected nihilism for cleverness.

American Indie Rock: Well, first of all, I’d better head the “but indie’s not a genre!” nerds off at the pass: shut up, you. Don’t pretend not to know exactly what I’m talking about when I say “indie rock.” It means white kids with guitars playing slapdash lo-fi pop songs about spatulas. You know, Sebadoh, Guided by Voices, Pavement, et al. Sure, there are plenty of musical approaches within the American indie rock scene (some bands sound like broken vacuum cleaners trying to suck up The Beach Boys and some sound like broken vacuum cleaners trying to suck up The Kinks), but they’re all just differently-textured turds in the same befouled milkshake. There are a thousand indie labels churning out the same clamorous bullshit, and ten thousand indie bands stabbing at their guitar pickups with screwdrivers to get them to make that perfect irritating hum. There are a million brain-dead hipsters trying to one-up each other with their advance knowledge of the latest group of shaggy unemployables to get signed to Sex Blister Records by virtue of their super-ironic Casiotone sound and their unimpeachable haircuts.

Post-Rock: Between this and post-punk, I think I’ve come up with a new rule: basically, adding “post” to a style of music just means “with all the fun taken out of it.” Post-rock is all the stuff that gets shuffled off into its own little category so that people with an interest in actual rock music don’t have to worry about it. Post-rock records ought to come with warning labels so that music fans don’t accidentally buy them. God forbid anybody looking for a good time should ever accidentally buy a Godspeed You Black Emperor record. It would be disastrous. Or, suppose somebody who wanted to dance accidentally picked up Talk Talk’s “Laughing Stock” instead of one of their earlier sane records; the flailing of limbs which might result in trying to keep up with the weirdy-beardy syncopation and floppy guitars could put the listener in danger of serious dislocations.

Hardcore: I refuse to believe that modern hardcore fans actually enjoy music on any level. I think they like the idea of music, but I don’t think they like music. They like guitars and concerts and bands and tight pants, but music is really just not involved in any part of the process. They’ve cut out the middleman and headed straight for the part with ringing ears and drinking and getting laid. Some of them lately have even gone so far as to cut out the parts about drinking and getting laid, too. I can’t tell whether it’s genius or madness, honestly.

Emo: I swear, there is no musical term more abused than “Emo.” Not that Emo doesn’t deserve all the abuse anyone can throw at it and more, but people just seem to get it wrong when it comes to Emo. I’ve had people e-mailing me and calling things like Coldplay and Evanescence “Emo” when they have about as much to do with Emo as Ludacris has to do with polka. Look, kids: Emo isn’t just anything whiny or shitty or emotional. Emo is a whiny, shitty, emotional thing all its own. Believe it or not, it’s an offshoot of hardcore with a history too tedious to relate in a snappy paragraph. It ranges from simply lame (The Get Up Kids, Braid) to frighteningly unworthy of human consumption (Cap’n Jazz, Rites of Spring). Mistakenly calling something like The Smiths Emo isn’t just a music-nerd faux pas, it degrades the power of an extremely disgusting word. It just makes me want to say “no, you don’t understand. You haven’t heard Emo. It’s much worse than you think. Be afraid.”

Britpop: British people, heartbroken by the fact that they were too effete to make Grunge, had to come up with an equally iconic style of music in the nineties as a matter of national pride. Out of this necessity was born Britpop, which allowed English musicians to be as square and effeminate as they wanted while still doing enormous amounts of cocaine. It didn’t make much of an impact in America, aside from our brief national flirtation with tolerating Oasis (as it turns out, not a good idea), but the UK is still just as menaced by its shadow as America is by the shadow of Grunge. Britpop was something of a cultural phenomenon in the UK, unfairly and mistakenly convincing a generation of youths that it was cool to be English. Bands like Suede, Blur, and Pulp gayed up the country for a few years and then petered out, making room for even lamer bands like Coldplay and Travis. Stylistically, Britpop was pretty much just guitar pop with exaggerated English accents (uh, no, not like Green Day).

Shoegaze: Shoegaze is, of course, named for the musicians’ tendency to stare at their shoes while performing. Some might say it’s because the complex nature of the guitar style required the musicians to constantly fiddle around with countless foot pedals, but I’d like to submit that they just didn’t want to look their audience in the eyes due to the overwhelming shame of the music they were producing. A more accurate name for the style would be “cacophonous din” or “the sound of two bands playing at once, underwater.” I do own a copy of Ride’s “Going Blank Again,” though. I turn the speakers to the floor and use it to scare raccoons out from under my house.

Metal: Okay, we know what this one is. This is where guys with long hair wail like tone-deaf banshees and play jerk-off guitar solos for arenas full of sleazy heshers with flimsy mustaches, dragon t-shirts, and 14-year-old girlfriends. I thought it died out in the late Eighties, but I guess some sorry souls are still clinging to its corpse.

Black Metal and Death Metal: This is that awful tomfoolery with the big pretentious song structures and “BWAAARGHHH” vocals and Scandinavian guys who burn down orphanages and eat each others’ brains, right? The best part of this stuff is the band names, which sound like ten-year-olds trying to name their secret no-girls-allowed clubs.

Brutal Death Metal: I assume this is like death metal but with slightly more intense band names. Like, for example, instead of a pedestrian death metal name like “Festering Corpse,” maybe a brutal death metal band would be called “Grotesque Festering Corpse.”

[80’s] Hair Metal: Shh, we’re trying to forget.

Fantasy Metal: Well, all metal fans play Dungeons and Dragons and read shitty fantasy novels. That’s just a given. But some of them are so nerdy that they can’t even enjoy their metal without explicit references to elves and swords and dragon-slaying. Hence this crap.

Fantasy Death Metal: Same as above, I’d imagine, but probably deals with mercilessly slaughtering elves for Satan.

Metalcore: Adding “core” to the end of a type of music is functionally the same as adding “for morons in white belts.” So, take all the awfulness of hardcore and add some bitchin’ guitar riffs. Or, alternatively, take metal and remove anything that might be mistaken for music.

Grind: How does one even go about distinguishing a good grind band from a bad one? I posit that it’s impossible, and I don’t think I can be proven wrong.

Light Metal: I’ve never heard of it. Is it like light rock? Is it metal for sissies? Somewhere out there is there the metal equivalent of Christopher Cross? “When you get caught between the moon and Satan’s fiery maw…”

Heaby Metal: What the fuck does “heaby” mean? Is this heavy metal for guys with sinus problems?

Rap Metal: I’d say that rap metal is music for stupid people, but that’s not really fair. Everyone who listens to rap metal is stupid, but not all stupid people listen to rap metal.

Rap-Black-Metal: Rap metal with creepy Scandinavian guys?

Rap-Death-Black-Nu-Metalcore: Rap metal with creepy Scandanavian guys and scarier names and white belts?

Pop-Punk: The opposite of punk.

Nu-Metal: The opposite of… music.

Goth Metal: Stay away from this stuff, kids, it’s bad news and you don’t need it (writing that gives me credit toward my state-mandated community service hours).

Whatever The Fuck The Cure Is: I already did post-punk, but I guess later The Cure turned into sort of a warbling sad-sack goth-pop band. So, uh, am I telling you about warbling sad-sack goth-pop? It’s sort of like what the Cure does.

Classic Rock: I suppose I should write a little bit about classic rock just to tie up the loose ends from the last article. I danced around everything from post-punk to emo last time, but somehow I neglected to illustrate my distaste for the meat and potatoes of rock and roll. Of course, “classic rock” is a broad, vague, and semi-meaningless definition, just like so many other arbitrary genres. Nonetheless, any rock fan has some general idea of what classic rock is. Nowadays, most of us just know it as the world’s shittiest radio format. Flip around your dial a little bit, and in no time you’ll come across a syndicated middle-aged DJ announcing his playlist. Do you maybe detect a hint of shame in his voice as he announces Def Leppard alongside Jimi Hendrix in his last computer-mandated set? No, you don’t, because all classic rock DJs are dead inside. But, getting back to the point: the classic rock radio format, I suppose, merely encompasses the broad canon of guitar music that middle-American rednecks have agreed upon over the years. We might as well ignore it, since there’s no rhyme or reason to it. Aside from that, those people with a tenth of an ounce of brain in their heads probably think of classic rock as the music of the Sixties, the music of Woodstock, the music of rebellion and revolution. Of course, there are many of us from younger generations who didn’t “tune in” or, more tellingly, didn’t “drop out” and therefore have slightly more than a tenth of an ounce of brain, but we usually pity our hippie parents too much to point out that their “revolution” was either imaginary or a failure or both. At least we can credit hippies with more of a grasp on their own culture than classic rock radio programmers, since you’d be hard pressed to find a true sixties wild-child who’d walk over to his stereo and play a double-shot of Boston followed by classic tracks from Van Halen, Simon & Garfunkel, and Loverboy. Aside from the feckless unfortunates who fell into the grotesque Sarlac Pit of Deadheadism, hippies generally have some musical integrity. Much as I appreciate people who know how to turn up their noses at Journey, even “real” classic rock fans piss me off. For one thing, a lot of them like Pink Floyd, and that’s totally fucking inexcusable no matter how many drugs you took. For another thing, they’re so wedded to the past that they’re going to be content listening to the same played-out garbage for the rest of their lives, and would gladly tell some young punk why The Jefferson Airplane is ten times better than what the kids are listening to these days, even though he has no idea what the kids have been listening to for the last thirty years and has no particular desire to find out.

Blues: Rock and roll purists usually find it necessary to at least pretend to like the blues. They would argue that you have to love the blues in order to love rock, because it’s the foundation upon which rock was built. That’s magnificently stupid, or course. I submit that it’s possible to love modern medicine without loving phrenology and bloodletting, or to love cars without loving the kind that you have to turn a crank to start up. But I certainly can’t call blues crap only in the context of rock and roll, because that would be unfair to the inherent crappiness of blues itself. I’m not going to say that all blues songs sound the same, because that would be wildly ignorant. I will, however, say that most blues songs sound pretty much the same. Argue that one, why don’t you? What’s that, Mr. Blues Man? No comeback? Oh, of course you’ll try to tell me that the art of blues lies in finding new artistic avenues within familiar frameworks, but that’s a gigantic cop-out and even the most die-hard blues fans secretly know it. Jesus, learn some new progressions, it’s been the better part of a century. And then there’s…

Electric Blues/Blues-Rock: If most guitar solos leave you feeling intellectually over-stimulated, you might want to check out electric blues solos; they’re easier to follow because they’re geared toward stupid white people who don’t even want to bother with the rudimentary subtleties of classic blues, and you don’t have to worry about unpredictability because there have only been two or three electric blues guitarists who’ve had a single shred of ingenuity or artistry in them. I suppose that if heavy metal solos are a readymade metaphor for feverishly jerking off, electric blues solos are the musical equivalent of rolling away from your wife and letting one out while you think of your daughter’s cheerleader friends and worry about going bald, like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty. Electric blues is disgusting cultural backwash, like smooth jazz or lite-rock, and I can think of absolutely nothing to recommend it. I’m not sure if I can think of anything more disgusting, hollow and gauche than an Englishman affecting a throaty growl and singing about his childhood in Mississippi, but if I ever do it’ll probably involve a Vanilla Ice/Fred Durst crossover.

Industrial: I’m not even sure what the pathology behind liking industrial music is, but once psychologists cure it we can certainly look forward to a world where the goggles are confined to welders, the fishnets are confined to whores and the stupid double-mohawks are confined to that screaming cockney shithead from The Prodigy. At the same time, nothing puts a jaunty accent on a fat teenager like a ridiculous outfit, so maybe Industrial music has something to recommend it after all. Come to think of it, industrial music is generally reserved for those who have absolutely nothing to lose socially and aren’t afraid of dressing like assholes so people will give them badly-needed attention in the form of derisive laughter. In that situation, everybody wins: the goth-industrial loser gets a heartening affirmation of his “Keep Staring, I Might Do A Trick” t-shirt, and the people laughing at him get to experience those profound “at least I’m not that guy” moments. Okay, enough fun and games: people always get mad at me when I just make fun of music based on the dorks who listen to it, because really every style of music has dorks who give it a bad name. But seriously, have you ever seen the type of people who go to industrial night at a club? If people don’t me to base the quality of their music on how they look, maybe they shouldn’t swaddle themselves in big black “kick me” signs.

Synth-pop/New Wave: Here’s another little morsel I left out of my last Your Genre Sucks, and in the interest of tying up loose ends I might as well go back to it now. Most of us know synth-pop as the stuff people are talking about when they say the Eighties sucked. Nobody says “the Eighties sucked? You mean you don’t like Public Enemy?” They say “yeah, fucking Spandau Ballet, screw the Eighties!”

Classical: See, nobody ever asks me what I think about classical music, so I try not to think about it. Well, some people ask me, but they’re usually just being smug dickheads, so I ignore them. “So, Doctor Thorpe,” they say, “if you’re such a genius then what do you think of my personal favorite, Chopin!?” Basically, the sort of people who listen to classical music are the sort of people who write letters like that. Or else they’re old people or smart people. Count me out. I may be a genius, but I’m not some kind of stodgy mental gourmet who finds it necessary to listen exclusively to real music. Symphonies are like boring concerts where nobody yells or sings and you can’t surreptitiously grope any underage girls. Why bother? And as for the music itself, there are no backbeats or electric guitars or slap-bass breakdowns, so it’s basically like listening to grandma’s mellow snore. Plus, the songs are often really long, and I’m not even sure they’re technically songs at all, which makes me instantly suspicious. If Radiohead released a “tone poem” we’d all be lining up to call them busters, but we’re going to let some effete dead geniuses get away with it? No way. They should have known better, even back then.

Electronic Music: Of course, I’m talking about modern electronic dance music, but I have to refer to it in the vaguest terms possible or else people will get mad. Some people call it “techno,” but of course those people are berated because “techno” is a specific term for a certain kind of music and you’re actually talking about liking Joey Beltram or something, and he sucks. So you could call it “Electronica,” but of course that’s a stupid fucking name and nobody’s going to take it seriously, so electronic music fans will get all huffy if you come within a mile of that word. You could be like the UK press and just call it “dance music,” but, hey man, it’s not just for dancing, you can also chill out so that won’t do! Like rock and roll, electronic dance music has countless little musical suburbs. Unlike rock and roll, however, you don’t need an actual scene in order to warrant a new subgenre. You can just mix and match until every single song is in it’s own little division. Hence all the autistic nerds who have to special-order rare German white-label singles because all they listen to is Hard Shufflebreak Dropstep and you can’t find it just anywhere. A lot of the modern fondness for electronic music is rooted in the now-defunct rave “culture,” which involved thousands of brightly-colored outfits filled with sweaty meat converging on a helpless field somewhere and taking mind-dulling huggy-drugs and doing jerky dances until everyone was rattled and stupefied enough to mistake their chemical bliss for spiritual unity or some bullshit like that. Once all these dumb kids started longing for musical innovation, they had to step up their game a little; they were no longer satisfied with “boom tss boom tss” dance music, so they had to invent varieties with significantly more clicks and whistles. Of course, all this brilliant innovation with beat and tempo eventually resulted in music which was impossible to dance to, so they had to pretend electronic music was good for other things, too. Shamefully, the rest of the world hasn’t caught up. Most of us still think it’s just soulless, castrated, culturally irrelevant pap for neeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrds (and we’re right!)

Not a real post but something that came to my mind

2005-08-07T02:28:00.000-04:00

Someone asked me what my favorite my favorite story is. I guess I would have to say the one about the fat kid who said Chuck Norris came to his house and blessed him with ancient samurai power, which is what caused him to break a chair when he sat on it.

Changes are no good

2005-08-05T19:22:00.000-04:00

Microsoft is perhaps the most hated company in the history of business. Anointed with names such as the Redmond Giant, Microshaft, Microsloth, so on and so forth, the nicknames and jokes are perhaps exceeded only by the vengeance with which people hate it.

The question is why do they? I love Microsoft. Absolutely adore it and what’s more, I hate Linux. I think it’s the most over rated piece of software ever built and survives simply out of spite and not because it is terribly good at doing something because it is not!

What has Microsoft given us? It has given us Windows, sure, it was buggy earlier and a lot of things didn’t work like they were supposed to (plug and play springs to mind) but it was a pioneering effort. No one was even close to the ease of use that Windows offered. Sure, Mac OS was a lot prettier but then it cost the moon and the stars along with both your arms and legs.

I understand the criticisms about the security of the software, the critical flaws and what not but again, we must look at things in the proper perspective. More than 95 pecent computers in the world use one form of Windows OS or another. The remaining being divided between Linux, MAC etc. now lets say MAC has 1 percent, does it make sense for a hacker to create a virus that can at best infect just 1 percent of the computers in the world? It doesn’t, therefore you don’t have as many security threats for other software as most of the people developing Linux probably sit at night writing up malicious code for windows!

In a nutshell, it’s not so much as that the software is secure; it’s simply that no one is interested in spending sleepless nights writing a virus that won’t give them the satisfaction they get from causing havoc. Considering the fact that everyone who knows how to write two bits of code dreams of hitting windows with a virus, the guys at the "Redmond Giant" are doing a spectacular job.

XP is such a joy when it comes to simply connecting a device and watching the pretty little bubble detecting it and saying "its installed and ready for use" makes the slightly high price absolutely worth it. In Linux, you have to recompile a kernel if you want to so much as change your modem! Give me a break guys, Linux is light years behind Windows XP and I am sure it will be further back biting the dust when Longhorn (now Vista) comes out.

This reminds me of the bundled issues with the antitrust lawsuits being slammed on it. It’s just sad, unfair and uncompetitive. Basically what the stupid courts in Europe said was, hey, you’re doing a great job, and you must pay for it! This coming from a bunch of people who couldn’t even agree on a constitution!

And of course, the long list of lawsuits that Microsoft is straddled with. I am sure it is a business model for companies such as Sun and Oracle to just sue Microsoft whenever their profits are down due to insanely stupid and useless products that no one is buying.

Every year, just before the FY results are out, Mr. McNealy sits with his board and shakes his head, guys, we are in the red, what do we do? How do we turn it around? Suddenly a bright face says, I know, let’s sue Microsoft for a billion odd! Bill can afford it, after all, he makes such smashing products that everyone buys them, making him rich! That ought to be a crime in SOME court!

Microsoft made some products which it would like to ship together with its OS, no where in the EULA does it say that "you are not authorized to install other software" If Mr. John Doe thinks media player is the worst piece of software he has ever used, he is free to go and download Winamp or Musicmatch Jukebox (neither of these offer free full versions).

Lets be fair and honest about this. Here is a company that single handedly created the market for Personal Computers, brought computing to ordinary folks like you and me, made it affordable by encouraging mass acceptance and constantly strives to provide us ease of use in every sphere it touches. From tablet PCs to handhelds to media centers but he didn’t do it for free and wants to protect it’s own interests. What is wrong with that? After all, the people who are suing Microsoft, aren’t they looking after their interests as well? Why do we think or believe that if they were in the position Microsoft is in, they would do things differently.

I do not for a moment think or believe they would be philanthropic and give away years of toil away for free or act in the best interests of everyone but themselves. It is about time we stopped being hypocritical and appreciated a job really well done.

Requiem for a dream

2005-08-05T01:56:00.001-04:00

Physicist, string theory pioneer, and excellent author Michio Kaku has written a set of guidelines called "What to Do If You Have a Proposal for the Unified Field Theory" that describes all the fundamental workings of the universe. A few of Kaku's tips:

1) Try to summarize the main idea or theme in a single paragraph. As Einstein once said, unless a theory has a simple underlying picture that the layman can understand, the theory is probably worthless...

2) If you have a serious proposal for a new physical theory, submit it to a physics journal, just as Physical Review D or Nuclear Physics B. There, it will get the referee and serious attention that it deserves.

3) Remember that your theory will receive more credibility if your theory builds on top of previous theories, rather than making claims like “Einstein was wrong!”

This near full-scale Bell 47 helicopter was built entirely from corrugated cardboard by artist Shannon Goff -- be sure to check out the killer instrument panel!

This from Devtron, you must see this.

Requiem for a dream

2005-08-05T01:56:00.000-04:00

1) Try to summarize the main idea or theme in a single paragraph. As Einstein once said, unless a theory has a simple underlying picture that the layman can understand, the theory is probably worthless...

2) If you have a serious proposal for a new physical theory, submit it to a physics journal, just as Physical Review D or Nuclear Physics B. There, it will get the referee and serious attention that it deserves.

3) Remember that your theory will receive more credibility if your theory builds on top of previous theories, rather than making claims like “Einstein was wrong!”

This near full-scale Bell 47 helicopter was built entirely from corrugated cardboard by artist Shannon Goff -- be sure to check out the killer instrument panel!

This from Devtron, you must see this.

The Velorium Camper I: Faint of Hearts

2005-08-04T00:15:00.000-04:00

Skotos's Chris Allen sez, "Today, we've released a new Cthulhu Mythos comic out called 'Return to Arkham,' available for reading on the web, or pdf, or print-on-demand via Cafepress. It's set in 1933, and includes beautiful, moody black & white art depicting H.P. Lovecraft's town of Arkham. In support of Lovecraft's belief in stories developed by 'Divers Hands,' this comic has also released under a Creative Commons license, allowing anyone to create and release their own derivative works based on the comic." Link

According to the BBC and Reuters, South Korean scientists have created the world's first cloned dog, an Afghan hound. The research purpose of the research is ostensibly to produce research animals and not for commercial purposes. Dogs are especially difficult to clone, but the scientists were able to extract DNA from a skin cell, inject it into an egg, and implant the egg into a surrogate mother.

MozillaZine is reporting that the Mozilla Foundation has created a commercial subsidiary to continue development of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Don't let the word "commercial" scare you, the new Mozilla Corporation (as it has been dubbed) will be owned 100% by the Mozilla Foundation. The change is mostly a legal/tax thing to avoid the problems of pursuing revenue-generating avenues while remaining a non-profit. There will be no change to the development process and end-users won't notice much difference either. See also the Mozilla Foundation press release about the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla reorganization FAQ.

2005-08-02T14:54:00.000-04:00

So I was sitting around the other day, playing "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," when suddenly I received an email with an attachment called "hot coffee mod." So I did what I always do when I get programs from strangers in my email: I ran it.

Then I went back to playing the game and didn't notice anything different, except for when I took my in-game girlfriend back home, she now asks "how about a little coffee?" Naturally I got excited, because I was expecting to see a scene with the protagonist, Carl, and his girlfriend, Denise, sipping a tall cup of joe and discussing the finer points of globalization and how cultural distinction will shape future generations. Instead, I was shocked to learn that Denise wasn't talking about a delicious beverage made from roasted beans, but what she was really talking about was SEXUAL INTERCOURSE.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I thought there was some mistake, this couldn't be the family-friendly carjacking game I thought I knew. Maybe Denise changed into an outfit that just happened to look like the bust of a naked woman. I watched the scene over and over again, carefully analyzing every pixel, but the conclusion was inescapable: Denise was in fact nude. Or at least had a skin colored texture applied to the surface area primitive of her character's model. To prove it, I took a screen capture of the right nipple texture, and enlarged it to show that the game does in fact contain nudity:

You are gazing into the pixels of moral decay.

The creator of the game, Rockstar Games, has stated that it will offer a downloadable patch to fix the sex issue in the PC versions, and is working on a new version of the game that will prevent this content from being unlocked in the future.

Thank God. I'll be the first person to download and patch my PC version of "Grand Theft Auto." I want to shoot people in the face, bang prostitutes, traffic drugs, steal cars, and terrorize police officers without this filthy smut in my game. Frankly, I'm appalled that Rockstar would allow such wholesale corruption of our youth. Years from now when America has become a withered husk of the morality it once stood for, historians will look back at what triggered it all and point to one event: a boolean variable that unlocked a simulated sex scene in a video game.

The game is now being taken off the shelves all over the country and re-labeled with an "AO" rating. This is much stricter than the "M" rating the game originally received. According to the ESRB website:

	Titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons of age 17 and older.
As opposed to the stricter AO rating:
	Titles rated AO (Adults Only) have content that should only be played by persons 18 years and older.

What pisses me off more than anything is that I paid for a game rated for 17 year olds, or possibly 17 and 1/2 year olds, tops. What I got was a game rated for 18 year olds instead. I must warn you that if you're easily offended, please shield your eyes from what I'm about to unveil to you:

A woman clearly in a heightened state of arousal.

I think it's only fitting for Rockstar Games to go out of business, and all the programmers lose their jobs over this. God bless Hillary Clinton for allocating tax money to have federal regulators investigate "the source of this content," because if she hadn't, consumers might have to go through the trouble of reading the label on the cover of the box.

Lost

2005-08-01T21:29:00.000-04:00

A wireless computer / hi-fi system built in an old stereo cabinet. It's a fantastic device -- you can play LPs on the turntable and convert them to MP3s with the built in Mac Mini. Mister Jalopy has written an article about the making of this thing for Make.

Sean Casey is a storm-chaser and an IMAX cinematographer. He transformed a long-wheelbase 1997 Ford F-450 diesel dually pickup into what he calls "TIV" (Tornado Intercept Vehicle), for driving into tornados. Every inch of detail was planned for the purpose at hand: there's even a turret for the IMAX camera! I've seen art-cars in Black Rock City that looked similar, but all they did was blast trance music while transporting bodypainted hippies from one rave to another. This mod's made for workin'.

According to The Inquirer, hackers gained access to the secure server where the data about the new planet was being held and threatened to reveal it. Evidently the discoverers have been withholding this information from the public since 2003 while they waited for full analysis.

NUFAN

2005-07-28T16:26:00.000-04:00

Brice Mellen is a whiz at video games such as “Mortal Kombat.” In that regard, the 17-year-old isn’t much different from so many others his age. Except for one thing: He’s blind.And as he easily dispatched foes who took him on recently at a Lincoln gaming center, the affable and smiling Mellen remained humble.

The way I see it, this is a MMORPG class just waiting to be created. What a wicked cool thing this is!

Let it Bleed

2005-07-28T01:23:00.000-04:00

Positively electroencephalicious! A St. Louis-based cosignment shop is selling an electroencephalograph and a BEAM (Brain Electrical Activity Mapping) system on e-Bay. Bidding starts at $9.95, and at post time, there have been no bids for either.

English translation of a controversial, internet-propagated map that lists places and methods for Killing yourself in Shanghai.

Most of the major studios use Linux -- such as DreamWorks with more than 1,500 Linux desktops and 3,500 Linux servers. The MovieEditor Conference is an all-day event on computer-based filmmaking in downtown Los Angeles on August 3rd. Studio technology chiefs and other experts discuss ongoing work using Linux in feature animation and visual effects. Presented in collaboration with LinuxMovies.org.

Romix

2005-07-26T19:15:00.000-04:00

Voltron is coming to theatres!. While details are sparse, we do know it will be produced by Mark Gordon ('The Day After Tomorrow'). I'm still waiting for the DVD sets." From the article: "The 'Voltron' animated TV series debuted in 1984, about the same time as Hasbro's Transformers toy line, igniting a morphing robot phenomenon. According to sources, Voltron has generated $750 million in worldwide licensing and nearly $200 million in toys and merchandising since 1984

Microsoft will begin checking for pirated copies of its Windows software when users attempt to update. Security updates are supposed to be exempt from the check. Upon detection of pirated software the user will be given the oppportunity to purchase a legitimate copy of the software for a discounted price, upon providing proof of purchase etc.

Dozens of stray dogs roaming around the new Walt Disney theme park in Hong Kong have been rounded up and put down as the company prepares to open the park in September, a newspaper has said. Cool man. Sounds like good times.

I think I have now seen what I really wanted for my birthday. Check this thing out.

Trans Euro Express

2005-07-22T23:31:00.000-04:00

QQQ is a piece of art made by modding copies of Quake III. The artist, Nullpointer, has modded the Quake III engine so that it renders out crazy, haunting, beautiful high-speed graphics instead of levels. Sometimes he gets people to play public games of Q3 on an Internet-connected server and renders out their movements in the QQQ engine at his gallery installations. The videos are just wild. Link

The folks at Redmond have long pointed to the user interface of the next generation Windows release as one of its major selling points. Now, it appears Microsoft has chosen an official name for Longhorn with just that in mind. Enter: Windows Vista. Microsoft is expected to make an official announcement early Friday morning." From the article: "Microsoft has also registered domains to go along with the newly christened Windows, including windowsvista.com. The domains were registered in late March, indicating the company made the decision even before WinHEC gave developers their first taste of Longhorn in over a year.

What if God was one of us?

2005-07-21T09:30:00.000-04:00

You may have a hard time believing this, but I have an excellent
relationship with God. I know you probably think I'm an atheist, but
nothing could be further from the truth. I love God.

See, the problem with most people is they have no idea how to have a
relationship with God. That's because they're caught up in the infinite,
the indefinable. Or worse, you've been listening to your minister, priest,
rabbi, or mullah. These people are not experts on God. They may know
about pedophilia, embezzlement, where to buy lean pastrami and/or bomb
making supplies but they don't know shit about the Lord.

You need to think of God in human terms. Instead of worrying about your
relationship with God, imagine you're trying to have a relationship with
Charlie Sheen. Why Charlie Sheen? Because like God, most people wish they
had a better relationship with Charlie Sheen. Like Jesus, Charlie Sheen
hangs out with a lot of prostitutes and has great hair.

The first step in improving your relationship with God/Charlie Sheen is to
stop asking him for stuff. Sure he's got tons of cool stuff, and probably
wouldn't miss it. He's fucking Denise Richards in the ass and all you want
is enough money to buy a new toaster. Well unfortunately, Charlie has that
money earmarked for nipple waxing and crack so he's not going to just hand
it over. Like God, Charlie gets requests from people he doesn't know all of
the time. Even if he did know you, he can't just hand you everything you
want. That would make God OJ Simpson and you would be Kato Kaelin. Do
you want God to be OJ Simpson? I didn't think so. Are you starting to
understand how God works?

The second thing to do to improve your relationship with God/Charlie Sheen
is to stop holding him responsible for things that you did, or didn't do.
Nothing is more annoying to Him then you saying, "If I don't get that job,
it was because Charlie Sheen didn't want me to get it." or "Charlie Sheen
will get me out of this speeding ticket, even though I'm shit faced on
Percocet, Crestor, and Peach Schnapps." I'm not saying Charlie will never
help you, but you really need to take some personal responsibility.
"Charlie Sheen wants me to beat up this prostitute. After all, did he not
shoot Kelly Preston?" Believe me Charlie Sheen probably does want you to
beat up that prostitute, but you're still the one holding the sock full of
nickels.

The third thing to do to improve your relationship with God/Charlie Sheen is
to stop talking shit about him. Don't be bragging about how well you know
Him, and how everyone else should get to know Him. Your relationship with
Him is not special. Plus, Charlie Sheen has more friends than he knows what
to do with. If other people want a relationship with Charlie Sheen they
only need to go to the nearest topless club.

The fourth thing to do to improve your relationship with God/Charlie Sheen
is to stop going to his house. Would you want someone coming over your
house every Sunday? Even though you're going there to praise Him, it's all
a little much. Plus, look at the douchebags all around you. They're not
really friends of Him. They all just want stuff, or want to blame Him for
stuff. You don't need to be associated with these people.

Finally, stop questioning everything he does. He has done good things like
"Wall Street" and "Hot Shots!" I and II. And yet, he has also done "Men at
Work" and "Two and a Half Men"? He broke up with porn star Ginger Lynn.
Some things he does are beyond our human comprehension

Try being a good friend to Him for a change. That way when you die, you can
go live with Him in Malibu. I hope you take comfort in that. Next time
I'll explain why loving the Devil is like a giving Paula Abdul a Slippery
Rocking Horse.

Les and Ray

2005-07-20T18:50:00.000-04:00

Hello people, long time no see, sorry for the lack of updates but I was sick, the town shaman ordered me to stay in his yourt, you know cause thats what we have in south america instead of doctors. anyway I have some links for you today:

This Java hoo-ha is rather mind boggling. It really puts your brain in perspective when it comes to the size, complexity and utter mind-blowingness of our universe.

The best part of this thing is the lyrics. What a funny freaking idea. When someone actually sings the words, “Need to free up some bank space and repair and we are good to go.” Too freaking funny.

Holy crap, I wan’t this thing!

I can see the light...

2005-07-13T21:47:00.000-04:00

No update today, I´m quite sick

No song title, I´m currently at the university

2005-07-12T21:30:00.000-04:00

Link to online comic written by Dave Milloway and Matt Wood, illustrated by Stephanie Freese (yes, I know the site's been around for about a year, but sometimes what's old is renewed.

In AMD's recient anti-trust lawsuit AMD have examined the Intel compiler and found that it deliberatly runs code slower when it detects that the processor is an AMD. "To achieve this, Intel designed the compiler to compile code along several alternate code paths. ... By design, the code paths were not created equally. If the program detects a "Genuine Intel" microprocessor, it executes a fully optimized code path and operates with the maximum efficiency. However, if the program detects an "Authentic AMD" microprocessor, it executes a different code path that will degrade the program's performance or cause it to crash.

Nintendo is really pushing their Nintendo Wi-fi hard, completely reversing the anti-online mentality they've held in years past. Nwizard.com reports, "Nintendo will soon be producing a router that will allow access to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Network on both the DS and the Revolution. The router plugs into a USB 2.0 port and transfers your computers internet connection wirelessly into your next-gen Nintendo devices." It should be noted this story came at almost the same time as Sony announced they dropped the PS3's router functionality.

The CBC is reporting that about 15 copies of "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" were accidently sold at a 'Great Canadien Superstore' in a suburb of Vancouver BC. The Canadian Distributor, Raincoast Books managed to get an injunction prohibiting the people who recieved the books from talking about them and demanding that they return the books to Raincoast until Friday. To add a carrot to the stick, raincoast is offering various goodies including a signed bookplate

Sleeping beauty

2005-07-11T21:25:00.000-04:00

Jerome Abramovitch pumps saline under the skin of his face for the sake of art.

We pause now for a Unicorn moment. Provided as a public health service for all of our readers whose retinas were scarred by the totally gross image I just posted. Unicorns, rainbows, and happy flowers forever.

This is a clever hack, using a laptop and GPS to play the classic Lightcycles game from Tron, using bicycles and a city. The page is a little light on details, but does give the essentials, including screen shots.

Steve Bowler, lead animator for Midway Games, has written an article for Next Generation called Doomed: How id Lost Its Crown. He talks about id no longer being the king of the hill in the FPS genre, losing the multiplayer gaming wars to Counter-strike and the engine licensing wars to competitors like Unreal 3.0, and focusing too much on rendering realistic environments at the expense of modern gameplay features. From the article: 'It's hard to stomach having to shoot a zombie in the head the same number of times as in the body (six rounds from a pistol, thanks for asking) to dispatch it, when you can shoot a light fixture and watch how realistically light dances around the room.

There is an article over at Ars Technica with some insider information about the reasons behind Apples x86 switch, given that the new IBM processors seem to be a perfect fit for Apple. The article claims that Apple hopes to power its entire line, from Servers to desktops to iPods and other gadgets with Intel CPUs, and that by doing so, they will gain the same kinds of discounts that Dell get.

Be quiet and Drive

2005-07-08T20:32:00.000-04:00

This is always funny!

Researchers from Tokushima University in Japan demonstrated that data can be stored in a human fingernail. The data is "written" onto the nail with femtosecond laser pulses and read using a fluorescence microscope. In experiments on a clipped piece of nail, each "bit" of data is 3.1 microns in diameter and 5 microns apart from its closest neighboring bit. The system records in three layers at depths of 40, 60, and 80 microns. (A human hair is around 100 microns thick.) From Optics.org:

Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months - the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced.

"I don't like carrying around a large number of cards, money and papers," (Yoshio) Hayasaki from Tokushima University told Optics.org. "I think that a key application will be personal authentication. Data stored in a fingernail can be used with biometrics, such as fingerprint authentication and intravenous authentication of the finger..."

Although the initial experiments have concentrated on small pieces of nail, the team is now developing a system that can write data to a fingernail which is still attached to a finger. "We will develop a femtosecond laser processing system that can record the data at the desired points with compensation for the movement of a finger," said Hayasaki.

Bug Eyes

2005-07-07T20:02:00.000-04:00

Here's an excellent gallery of adult movie posters from the 1960s and 1970s. I stumbled over this test the other day it seems interesting enough.

This Flash thingie lets you do your own flash animations, if this catches up, we are gonna be seeing a lot of more animated cocks and asses than we need to.

Finally, I give you free porn passes, because im cool like that.

Coin operated Boy

2005-07-07T01:10:00.000-04:00

Two of the most famous props in US film history — light sabers belonging to Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader of “Star Wars” fame — will go under the hammer in late July auction, organizers said.

The Electronic Sports World Cup Grand Final will be organized from Wednesday 6th July to Sunday 10th July 2005, in the most prestigious venue of France, in Paris, “The Carrousel of the Louvre”, and is designed as a traditional sport event and produced as a show for television.

Philisophers photoshoppically fused with the physiques of Pokémon personages. Link

Sooo ehh.. a friend of mine asked me to post this thing that he is selling... its a video card, a GForce 6800 GT.

Elena

2005-07-05T19:47:00.000-04:00

The Wicked Queen will not know what hit her. Snow White is about to be transformed into a martial arts epic with Shaolin monks replacing the seven dwarves of the original Grimm Brothers fairytale.

Oh boy…here is yet another game related thing that I am sure people will have a hay-day with. Big dumb idiot after the link.

Nowhere near

2005-07-04T23:55:00.000-04:00

These shower-heads feature built-in high-intensity lights. The manufacturer bills it as "chromatherapy" (as in, "a recent scientific study disclosed that each cell in the body emits light"). Never mind the crazy newage, this thing just looks cool.

Remember the ruling in Britain which outlawed mod chips last year? BBC News is reporting that a man has been convicted of modding an Xbox and sentenced to 140 hours of community service, a fine of 750 pounds (about $1300), and the confiscation of his PCs and Xboxes." From the article: "The man had been selling modified Xbox consoles which he fitted with a big hard drive containing 80 games. 'This case sets a major precedent which marks a milestone in the fight against piracy,' said games industry spokesman Michael Rawlinson.

Finally i give you The Coolest TV ever and your grandfather´s iPod.

The Harassment Awareness Certification Course

2005-07-01T10:17:00.000-04:00

We here at TLBP Incorporated take the issue of mutual respect and appropriate behavior in the work environment very seriously. You are required by FNS standards to complete this certification by July 14th in order to comply with human resources directives. This website promotes equal opportunity in a harassment-free environment. Before taking this test, make sure you go over the source material so you will know how to conduct yourself and what to do if you find yourself a victim of harassment. Failure to comply with this policy will result in disciplinary action, preferably by a spanking to the buttocks. You would like that wouldn't you, you dirty, dirty whore. Good luck.

#1: Ronald is chatting it up with a new female employee named Ping Pan Pot in the break room. Ronald notices that she is Asian so he does an impression of the atomic bomb blast in Nagasaki by ramming her with his large stomach. Ping is not pleased. What did Ronald do wrong here?

A) Didn't remember to replace the coffee filter in the machine.
B) Was rude and inconsiderate of Ping Pan Pot's nationality.
C) Failed to make a bomb noise when recreating the atomic blast.
D) All of the above.

The answer is B. Ronald did not act in a manner that is proper in a work environment. All atomic blast recreations done with large bellies should only be done to blacks or Indians, who have never felt the deep scars of an atomic blast on their land, and as such won't be offended.

#2: In the midst of Ronald thrusting his gut into Ping, she holds her hand up in defense, yet in the process touches Ronald's nipple. Ronald is confused and upset over this overt sexual gesture. What should he do?

A) Go directly to his HR supervisor and report the incident.
B) Go into Ping's office and touch her nipple, to show her how it feels.
C) Write an email to his state representative and complain about road construction.
D) Cry in the shower.

The answer is A. This kind of behavior is unacceptable, even during those steamy 3:00 meetings. The HR supervisor will have a one-on-one talk with Ping and, depending on the amount of money she has on her person, will be reprimanded with a verbal notice or shipped back to the old country in a rice boat.

#3: Back in the break room, Ronald introduces Ping Pan Pot to Larry, who works in finance. Larry asks Ping if she wants to go out to the parking lot to see his new hotrod automobile. Ping refuses, saying "So solly, Charlie." Larry, angered at being turned down and called "Charlie", spikes her coffee with his semen. Ronald laughs when she takes a sip and spits it out in disgust. What is wrong with this scene?

A) Employees should not be in the parking lot during business hours.
B) Larry forgot to put sugar or sweetener in the semen laden coffee.
C) Ronald's top button is undone, and his chest is clearly visible.
D) All of the above.

The answer is D. What a bunch of goofballs.

#4: Ronald likes to browse joke websites full of crude riddles and hardcore pornography. He calls Larry into his cubicle to show him a picture of a man bending over and stretching his anus to unbelievable proportions. "Oh my god what is that man doing to his anus?" cries Larry. Larry knows that they shouldn't be looking at such pictures at work, but how can he tell this to Ronald?

A) Cut the power cord to Ronald's computer so it won't work.
B) Tell Ronald that images like that are not appropriate for the workplace and that they should quit so they can stay at home and look at porn.
C) Report Ronald to your HR department and then hide and watch as they come into his cubicle and beat him with billy clubs.
D) Watch the sky for omens.

The answer is C. Always rat out your co-workers to the HR department. There is nothing to be ashamed of when you are concerned with your own job, and need to sell out others to gain the trust of your superiors -- even if you are a sniveling little wretch who has no friends and would stab your own mother in the back for a promotion. There is no "us" in the word "team".

#5 Ronald and Larry sit in the employee lounge area discussing important business implementation paradigms so they can touch base and stay on the same page. Then Ronald starts telling a story about how he became intoxicated in Mexico and milked a goat for 100 pesos on a dare. Ping Pan Pot is walking by and is offended by the story. Then Ronald and Larry knock her down and rape her while shouting racial slurs. What should've been done differently?

A) Ping shouldn't have worn such a skanky business suit that tempted the men into such an embarrassing situation.
B) Ronald should've known better than to talk about milking goats around the 3rd world melting pot that is the technical department.
C) Larry forgot to wear a condom.
D) All of the above.

The answer is D. In this case, all three of these employees would face harsh disciplinary action or possible termination.

#6 Ronald tends to fall asleep at his desk with his eyes open and his mouth agape. Flies will often land in his mouth to lay their larvae, causing a cascade of maggots to fall out whenever he talks or smiles. This disturbs and frightens his co-workers, who report the strange behavior to their HR department. What would you do if you were the HR representative?

A) Put flypaper inside Ronald's mouth.
B) Put flypaper inside Ronald's mouth.
C) Put flypaper inside Ronald's mouth.
D) None of the above.

The answer is D, none of the above. Given the situation, the proper course of action for the HR representative in this case would be to put flypaper inside Ronald's mouth.

#7 Ronald has been put in charge of a task group and has to choose his team members. He picks his friend Larry because he is a true Aryan like himself, but he has trouble finding other members. He didn't want Gerald, who was black, because he was afraid all the paper and pens would be stolen. He didn't pick Jose, a Mexican, because he didn't want any lazy people on the team. He didn't even want Peter, a Canadian, because he talked like "a big homo". What was the right way to pick the team members?

A) Aryan features.
B) Lottery.
C) Based solely on skill, dedication, and the best person for the job.
D) Hire a Jew.

The answer is D, you should hire a Jew.

#8 Larry, eager for a promotion and that corner office, plans to seduce his boss. They go out to a cubs game, split a hog dog, and end up making out in the bleachers. Larry's boss gets in trouble with his wife when a camera zooms in on them and the act is broadcast on national television. Larry gets fired the next day, and moves to the slums of LA to become a fluffer on a porn set. Was Larry's termination lawful?

A) No.
B) Yes.
C) Only if Larry's boss bought the beer at the game. If they split it than it’s a push.
D) Yatzee!

The answer is A. This country was founded on people whoring themselves out for money and power. What Larry did was in no way wrong and in case he was unlawfully fired for making out with his boss and giving him a blowjob in the parking lot. That's how Ben Franklin invented the light bulb.

#9 Ping Pan Pot has had it with the sexual harassment and racial comments made by her fellow worker, Ronald. She meets with her HR representative, Dan, who sits her down to talk about the problem. Dan explains that Ronald is a good worker and they can't afford to fire him, so instead they will construct a rocket and shoot Ping Pan Pot to the moon where she can cook, clean, and raise babies in a low gravity environment. Dan then presses an oversized red button, sending Ping down an oiled chute leading to the corporate crocodile pit, where all the men gather around to hoot and holler at the highly erotic spectacle of wet female temps struggling with crocodiles. Dan watches the scene from his tower, laughing and smoking a cigar. Did Dan do the correct thing as an HR representative?

A) No, there is no smoking allowed in the building, aside from the designated smoking areas.
B) Yes, Ping Pan Pot was batting her eyelashes at Dan, and years of experience told him that this was a sign of a flirt. She could just be blinking, but Dan didn't want to take any chances.
C) All of the above.
D) One of the above.

The answer is D. If you chose one of these answers then you are correct.

#10 Ronald's dark past has finally caught up to him. His time was running out in the department. He was personally responsible for one million dollars in harassment settlements in the last quarter alone, and it all came crashing down on his head after he made a pass at the boss's dog. They could no longer ignore the UN-enacted human rights sanctions on their company due to Ronald's actions, and they had to let him go. What could've Ronald done differently?

A) Wear a new disguise every week so victims couldn't point him out in a picture of an employee outing.
B) Respect all his fellow co-workers and treat them as equals.
C) Send Dan a box of cigars for all the trouble.
D) Eat a whole package of Nutter Butters and throw up in the copy room.

The answer is B. You should ALWAYS treat your co-workers as equals and with the utmost respect. Unless of course they are one of the lesser mongrel races that are only good for breeding in the hay like dogs. Like the Swedes.

Congratulations! If you got at least 3 of the 10 questions correct, you are now certified for harassment awareness. Print up this certificate and turn it in for a free small ice cream cone at your local Baskin Robbins. Good job.

Roots

2005-06-30T22:21:00.000-04:00

Scientists have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans. Heaven help us ALL!

This fanciful Sync mag roundup of gadgets for gangstas includes a number of chuckle-inducers -- such as the mouse shown here mit junk in trunk, and the Redman Redeye photo filter.
Link to the whole list.

Perhaps some Korean-speaking TLBP readers can tell me what in the Sith is going on here. Image found on Yahoo! Korea.

his company sells computer mice shaped like pixellated Mario and Goomba sprites. Not very ergo, but very much teh sexy.

Egotrip

2005-06-29T19:58:00.000-04:00

Following the release of the Google Maps API, we spent an hour or so and put together this map depicting Star Wars Imperial ATAT attack on Palo Alto. Yay for remixing.

Anandtech follows up their initial in-depth coverage of the Xbox 360 and PS3 CPU with the real truth about the next-gen consoles' Poor CPU Performance. From the article: "Speaking under conditions of anonymity with real world game developers who have had first hand experience writing code for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 hardware (and dev kits where applicable), we asked them for nothing more than their brutal honesty. What did they think of these new consoles? Are they really outfitted with the PC-eclipsing performance we've been lead to believe they have? The answer is actually quite frequently found in history; as with anything, you get what you pay for."

Midlife Crisis

2005-06-28T22:11:00.000-04:00

The King Kong trailer. Very cool stuff. I am pretty pumped to see what Peter Jackson has in store for us as a followup to his seminal LotR’s trilogy.

Keyboards are great, but for the hardcore gamer, they are far from perfect. Just think about how many times you’ve dreamed about moving the keys to fit your hand, or to make a key execute a string of commands. The DX1 Input System was built with you in mind. Simply put, all you do is stick the keys where you want and then tell the DX1 what you want each key to do. It can be one command, it can be a string of commands - you now have the freedom to configure your ideal keyboard.

I will be heard

2005-06-27T20:58:00.000-04:00

Here´s a list of the use of Drugs in the history of videogames.

A gallery of captured stills from games, collecting practically (?) every scene in which a toilet has appeared in a video-game.

We've heard a lot over the last two years about HyperSonic Sound, a cool system for focusing audio and "beaming" it directly at someone, sort of like a spotlight for sound. Someone is now auctioning off one of the HyperSonic units on eBay. The auction ends tomorrow and has a starting bid of $800.

The US's new Supreme Torturer Alberto Gonzales has removed the $8,000 drapes that his predecessor, John Ashcroft, caused to have hung over the bare tit of the statue of the Spirit of Justice in the DoJ's Great Hall.

Big Day Coming

2005-06-24T19:00:00.000-04:00

Suspect sought after two of five women injected at "home silicon party" hospitalized. In other news, women are having "home silicon parties"

Introducing Hofu: Tofu that looks and tastes like human flesh. Fava beans, chianti sold separately.

He's on a mission from God: Blues Brothers fan devotes life to re-enacting movie's car-chase scenes where they were originally filmed. Without permission.

Shocking new study discovers that the adults-only rating on games makes more kids buy them. As a result of the study, scientists discover new color: Sky blue

Ausencia

2005-06-23T23:27:00.000-04:00

While porn producers (and audiences) in the US have been gearing up for the new 2257 regulations that go into effect next week, fans of Japanese erotic art have an additional thing to worry about: a Tokyo court upheld a conviction yesterday against a publisher found guilty of distributing a comic title found to be obscene in what Japan Today calls “the first major case in some 20 years in Japan to focus on printed pornographic material”. Better stock up on all those tentacle porn hentai while you still can, folks.

The Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists created a fun Flash site where you can visually collage body parts from an assortment of animals like alligators, ring-tailed lemurs, and muskellunges. The gallery displays some great virtual taxidermic mash-ups. Seen here is Bryan's "Finger Sucker." Link

Emergency update

2005-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

I just saw this and I had to share it: The Moonwalking bird, now, if only there was a bird that did the Hammer Time dance nature could claim boogie dominance over mankind.

Sour Girl

2005-06-22T21:33:00.000-04:00

Homebrew Pac Man guitar was built on a dare, but it includes loads of grace-notes: "A variable-speed knob is located on the eyeball so you can synchronize the blinker to the beat.

The Onion has posted a science fictional edition from the year 2056. There are some fantastic gags here, a few that fall flat -- by and large, though, this is some funny futurism.

ExtremeTech has the first review of nVidia's latest GPU architecture, the Geforce 7800 GTX. Benchmarked against nVidia's previous 6800 Ultra and ATI's latest Radeon X850 XT PE, the 7800 GTX comes out as the fastest video card to date. The unit ships today with a price tag of $599. While nVidia may enjoy this brief moment in the limelight with the fastest card, it may be short-lived once ATI comes out with their latest GPU technology, code-named R520, which is suspected to come out within the next two months.

Plush

2005-06-21T17:55:00.000-04:00

Wanna have your Google searches look like snop dogg fetch them? Of course you do! Why not check out Gizoogle!

This site is great if you want to find some old, underated gems.

Don’t take what you hear at face value, learn to spot a liar’s body language. Mixed signals give away the truth. This is actually sort of helpful.

I love the anti-hero tone of this thing, and hope it does well. Here are some screen shots.

A young Star Trek fan was suspended from school for reciting his own version of the Pledge of Allegiance, in which he pledged to the United Federation of Planets.

I´m back baby!

2005-06-20T21:09:00.000-04:00

So after telling my former ISP to go fuck itself, I?m back, now sailing smoothly through the internets at a reliable 1024 Kbps, anyway so here are some links for you:

Eric Paulos points to an animated gif video of a guy who "games himself into himself."

When MTV Networks’ new gay channel LOGO debuts this month, it will join a kicky set of companies whose trademarks — intentionally or not — are a little light in their serifs.

A puppy with six legs and two penises was found on Thursday snoozing outside a Chinese temple in the Malaysian town of Pandamaran, south of Kuala Lumpur. Malaysian news service The Star Online reports that devotees at the Kwang Sung Temple have named the puppy Ong Fatt, meaning "Lucky One."

Romanian Orthodox priest Father Daniel Corogeanu and four nuns have been charged with murder after ordering another nun who was "possessed by the devil" and "beyond salvation" to be crucified. The nun, Maricica Irina Cornici, was found dead and chained to a cross last Wednesday. A member of the Holy Trinity order in the village of Tanacu, Sister Irina reportedly was imprisoned after arguing with the priest during a Sunday mass.

Trying to port Linux to various portable devices is hot nowadays. One project is porting Linux to the Nintendo DS, and is making big progress lately. Right after the DSLinux guys had a working bootable 2.6 kernel, they have put lots of effort in making the sash shell work, in which they also succeeded. The latest feature added is the touchscreen keyboard. It allows users to tap in the commands, providing a much easier input method than before (when only the buttons could be used to input text). Only the basics are being worked on for now, but the future uses of Linux on the Nintendo DS are practically unlimited. In other words, it might become a cheap alternative for a PDA, an emulator, movie viewer, maybe even internet browser, who knows.

Sucks to be me

2005-06-16T18:57:00.000-04:00

My internet died today, I am using a crappy computer in an even crappier Cyber, I mean, Damn! I´m even using IE! so you see, things my get slow around here for a couple of days while I get things fixed with my ISP, but dont despair, Im gonna leave you enough links to last you for a while.

Pocket-lint has a small photo gallery of hysterical office pranks. Gizmodo, where I saw this post, is seeking reader submissions of other office prank photos and will post the best few.

Paris Hilton burger ad. The thuper-thexy remix: A large gentleman takes the place of everyone's favorite upmarket ho-bag. Only. He's wearing. The same thong. Grinding to. The same song. Details and video linkage at Defamer: Link

Crazy and stupid car mods, Some of these are downright horrible.

JengaJam had this up yesterday. A little crazy. See it here.

This video cannot be real.. can it? You guys be the judge…this is kinda creepy either way. check it.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Tetris

2005-06-15T23:02:00.000-04:00

1. Tetris is based on an ancient Roman puzzle called Pentamino
2. Over 86 million units have been sold worldwide to date, eclipsing sales of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album (best selling album of all time at approximately 56 million copies)
3. The Tetris logo was designed by legendary record sleeve artist Roger Dean, who created famous album covers for rock giants Yes in the 1970s
4. The game inspired a terrible single in 1992 by Dr Spin, featuring samples of music composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber
5. In September 2002, Faiz Chopdat, 23, of Blackburn, was jailed for four months after refusing to turn off his mobile on a flight from Egypt to Manchester. The crew asked him three times to switch off the phone, which was interfering with the plane’s communications system, but each time Chopdat turned it on again. He was playing Tetris.
6. The world’s smallest game of Tetris took place under an electron microscope using 42 glass ‘microspheres’ at the Department of Physics of Complex Systems in Amsterdam
7. Brown University in Rhode Island, US, was turned into the biggest game of Tetris in 2000, when the windows of the 14-storey building lit up as the shapes ‘fell’. It was visible for miles.
8. Yuri Yevushenko, director of the Russian Academy in the 1980s, claims Tetris is so successful because “unlike American games it is not about murder, shooting or chasing; it is about building and order.”
9. In a recent US study at the Harvard Medical School’s department of psychiatry, 27 Tetris players spent seven hours a day, for three days, playing the game. Many had ‘Tetris dreams’.
10. There is an online Church of Tetris website, which attracted hundreds of visitors per week.

A tus pies

2005-06-14T20:57:00.000-04:00

The latest article on Machinima.com is a step-by-step guide to recreating a scene from the first Lord Of The Rings film, on a budget of $15, using the Neverwinter Nights game engine.

The people behind the Simnuke project are going to simulate a mushroom cloud explosion using 500 gallons of fuel -- and the 'pushing of the button' is up for auction on eBay to help them raise funds for the project. They recently gave a presentation at dorkbot. Push the button, starting bid $10,000: Link. Three proximity suit "seats", starting bid $2,000: one, two, three.

This "real life Tetris" video depicts a person in a cardboard costume resembling the L piece from Tetris, running around a grocery store, trying to fit overtop of appropriately positioned squarish objects. 12.6MB MPEG Link

Despegar

2005-06-13T23:31:00.000-04:00

Daily Dancer is a site where a geek video-records himself dancing to a different song every day and posts it. Jamal recommends starting with the Fett's Vette boogie, on the basis of its laudable Star Wars Kid reference, and I concur.

Enterprising PSP hackers have managed to get MAME, the king-hell video-game emulator (which allows you to play basically any game on basically any machine, for some values of "any") running on a PSP. Looks like it's not super-functional as yet, but it's a pretty substantial sign of progress all the same.

This mash-up of Snoop Dogg's Drop It Like It's Hot with Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love is completely badazz -- It actually had me up and dancing; those nasty guitars crossed with Snoop's nasty lyrics, wow! 3MB MP3 Link

I am a minimalist now!

2005-06-09T21:17:00.000-04:00

1) For you old school fighting game fans, FIGHT!

2) The way keyboards should be!

3) A shapely young woman crams Saint Seiya action figure dolls into various places where such things can be crammed.

Mi camino es ningun lugar

2005-06-08T22:52:00.000-04:00

A Shanghai online game player who stabbed a competitor to death for selling his cyber-sword has been given a suspended death sentence, which in effect means life imprisonment, state media said Wednesday. Interesting.

The US Coast Guard intercepted a modified vintage Cuban taxi on Tuesday, "modified with a boat prow in front," with at least four refugees in it.

A project at Tsukuba University has produced a battery-powered robot suit designed to aid the wearer in strength-related tasks, like lifting heavy objects. The suit also has the capability of propelling itself, which is potentially useful for helping the handicapped or elderly walk. The optimistic professor who lead the project stated, 'Humans may be able to mutate into supermen in the near future.'

Grey Matter

2005-06-07T20:55:00.000-04:00

What is DDI? Dance Dance Immolation is an adaptation of the popular arcade video game Dance Dance Revolution, but with fire! Basically, you play DDR; when you do well, the computer shoots big propane blasts up into the air. When you do poorly, it shoots you in the face with flamethrowers. Yes, you, as in your actual corporeal body. And yes, flamethrowers, like the kind that are on fire. They're having a party! They're also raffling off a flamethrower!

May I have this dance? A scary pink plastic robot dancing partner is now available (in Japan of course)." The robot uses wheels, not legs, so it just glides around on the floor. That's cheating, if you ask me.

Lindsay Lohan, Jessica and Ashlee Simpson in catfight. Please wash hands when finished.

Hope

2005-06-06T22:31:00.000-04:00

I love conmemorative stuff, so here is the greatest one I have ever seen, in conmemoration of 9/11.

I think Robots of any kind are a good thing and should be enjoyed by all. Therefore, you owe it to yourself to check this one out.

This apparatus must be unearthed

2005-06-02T22:36:00.000-04:00

Last night at Dorkbot SF, Violet Blue gave a wonderful presentation on the current state of teledildonics: the science of manipulating sex toys through the Internet. Immediately following the conclusion of her speech, Violet proceeded to manipulate a Thrillhammer in New York's Museum of Sex. But the attempt was marred by technical difficulties ranging from slow camera updates to not having the cursed thing plugged in. This was perhaps the first time in history that a room-full of people had managed to frustrate a woman 3000 miles away. In the end, however, Net Michelle did manage to get her rocks off as Violet piloted her to orgasm. The thrust of the experiment basically proved that teledildonics has made some major progress, but is also a long way from being a viable form of sexual gratification.

MEDIA ALERT: Prophet Yahweh, Seer of Yahweh, will be calling down UFOs and spaceships for the news media to film and photograph. During this time, a spaceship will descend, on Prophet's signal, and sit in the skies over Las Vegas, Nevada for almost two days." Beats the earnings reports and photo opp alerts one usually finds on PRweb.

The trailer for Quake 4 is out. I was never a Quake pro, but I was a seriously obsessed amateur, who loved parts 1-2. Quake 4 looks even better. As befits a game made at the dawn of the era of perfect, on-the-fly photorealistic game engines, the thing just looks to incredibly badazz as to beggar the imagination.

But if the trailer is anything to judge by, the storyline and gameplay are every bit as good as the graphics (in Quake 4, you're still playing a space-marine hunting down evil alien cyborgs, but you're a cyborg yourself, tormented by the steel in your bones). Christ I can't wait to play this.

Son et Lumiere

2005-06-01T21:38:00.000-04:00

How did the current home-console controllers come to be? How have they evolved? You may have noticed some similarities between the current generation controllers, or between them and the previous generations of controllers. So, how do they all tie together?

Rodi is a small-client P2P application, written in Java, that improves on BitTorrent by allowing both content searches and full anonymity. It's released under the General Public License (GNU). Even your IP address can be hidden using Rodi through a process called "bouncing." That is, if A wants a file from B, they get C to agree to stand-in on the exchange. B gets C's IP address, not A's. Through IP Spoofing A can even hide their identity from C. Rodi can also be used from behind corporate firewalls and LANs using Network Address Translation (NATs), something most home gateways have.

The PSP is now the ultimate in handheld emulation consoles, already it boasts Full Speed Gameboy Colour Emulation and improving Snes & Master System but added today it also has NeoGeo CD and Sega Genesis emulators added to the impressive list of homebrew releases.

Televators

2005-05-31T21:55:00.000-04:00

Wich Carebear are you? Well take this little test and find out!

While every magazine in existence may be covering the exciting "pink" trend for this summer, I found myself unable to locate a single magazine listing the hottest new religions and beliefs for this year's working woman. How on Earth are females supposed to know what they should think, wear, and buy if magazines aren't explicitly telling them with a series of easy-to-read paragraphs separated by key floating bold-print sentences? Once again, Something Awful is here to fill the gaping void from the consumer-created hole in your soul, presenting you, the viewer, with the hottest and most popular beliefs for this coming summer. Ladies, get on down to your nearest church and let your friends know how utterly hip you are!

ojala

2005-05-30T23:16:00.000-04:00

¨In the desolate economic climate of post-apocalyptic 2006, I’m thinking that’s going to be a lot of money. Now, it’s true that at E3 Sony was boasting the Playstation 3 could crank out 1.8 TFLOPS, or 1.8 trillion FLOPS. If that many FLOPS were piled together they would fill the Grand Canyon, assuming each FLOP were the size of a muskrat. So what do gamers want from all that money and FLOP? Just ask them.¨

You can read the whole can of worms right here.

It seems after 2005 started that television has paid a visit to hades himself. I honestly can say that because of shows like this.

What do you get when you mix a creepy alien puppet with bad songs and production values that make cable access television look like an Imax movie? The Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Show!

Somewhere out there

2005-05-28T00:07:00.000-04:00

Proof that japan is loosing its collective mind when it comes to culture, Don’t get me wrong, ANY country that makes stuff like this is ok in my book.

You ever wonder why some game that you can´t stand get about a dozen sequels but the game that you really want more of never get made? It is a shame. I actually agree with much of this.

Comic book reality is only slightly removed from the reality of the runway. They both love big, outlandish, and fabulous! With that in mind Dr. Thorpe and Zack turn their attention and jack boots to the youth-corrupting work of Marvel, DC, and others.

Hollowpoint and Whiskey

2005-05-26T22:51:00.000-04:00

George Lucas said he was finished with the Star Wars movies, but it seems George Lucas has an idea for another add-on to the Star Wars movie series: a prequel to The Phantom Menace. The story would follow the Jedi regaining control of the universe from the many Dark Lords some 88 years before Anakin Skywalker ever graced the universe. Yoda, who, according to Lucas, was instrumental in the effort, would apparently have a headlining role. However, Lucas, now age 60, says he won't be captaining such a ship if it ever happens.

History tells us: Don't believe what you're hearing about the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.There was a lot of hype last week about the next generation of game machines. Microsoft said the Xbox 360 will ultimately reach 1 billion consumers worldwide, while Sony gave a laundry list of features for the PlayStation 3, showing some jaw dropping footage along the way. (Nintendo promised a Revolution, but didn't go much further than that.) I hate to be a wet blanket, but it's time to come back to reality.

Voice actors for video games threaten to strike if they don’t get their way. Pac-Man says “Big deal. In my day we didn’t have voice actors and we liked it just fine.” - Wacka Wacka Wacka
Full Story

Saw this over at eNgadget.

Thought it was kinda cool. I think all long sticks should be made to look like light sabers

Clumsy

2005-05-25T20:27:00.000-04:00

Back in February, I Blogged about this project to remix romance novel covers, adding funny new titles suggested by the cover art. There's a new batch of covers up, with lots of titles suggested by readers of the site, some of which (e.g., WHEN COUSINS MARRY, THE CLEAVAGE OF MARY-ANN PUSHUP, THE SMUG VIKING WHO SHAVED HIS NIPPLES, HE WAS SO PRETTY I FELT LIKE A LESIBAN, etc) are blisteringly funny.

Found on Flickr, this Chinese poster advertising for people to form a crime-syndicate.

This umbrella has a lightsaber handle and silkscreened vaderoid artwork on the sides. Link

I always thought bunnies looked rather delicious myself…..maybe I should try this

I don´t believe in the sun

2005-05-24T21:55:00.000-04:00

Have you ever wanted to make your own star wars fan films, here is a program that enables you to apply lightsaber effects, sound effects and replicates the Star Wars text-crawl as well.

Here's a scanned-in copy of 1952's "HOW TO PERFORM STRONG MAN STUNTS." In addition to illustration that is so badly executed it practically qualifies for an exhibition of "outsider art" executed by chimpanzees.

Rather than use expensive cgi techniques to make the light sabres glow for their home movie. This couple instead used fluorescent tubes filled with gasoline. Which they then set alight. If they don't survive they must be Future Darwin Award winners. It makes me proud to be Latin and embarassed to be a Star Wars geek.

Pattern against user

2005-05-23T22:10:00.000-04:00

Christians REJOICE! Jesus will lead us in a real star war - between the armies of Heaven and Satan. Believers will 'beam' up to the Starship in the sky, and Captain Jesus shall lead a thousand year Federation of Planets before Judgment Day!"

Scientist predicts entire contents of human brain could be downloaded to a supercomputer by 2050. Paris Hilton's could be done today using a Commodore 64.

Here, I give you the best magic trick ever, To see this is to be impressed.

Ten ton hammer

2005-05-20T17:08:00.000-04:00

Eccentric Texan archaeologist Vendyl Jones--often incorrectly named as the inspiration for Indiana Jones--claims that this summer he will finally excavate the real Ark of the Covenant from its hiding place in the Judean Desert. From Arutz Sheva: Throughout the many years of his quest, Jones has been in close contact and under the tutelage of numerous Rabbis and Kabbalists. Extremely knowledgeable in Torah, Talmud and Kabbalah sources dealing with Holy Temple issues, Jones has now received permission from both known and secret Kabbalists to finally uncover the lost ark...

He believes the ark will be discovered by Tisha B'Av (Aug. 14), a day of repeated tragedy in Jewish history. Most notably, it is the anniversary of the destruction of both the First and Second Holy Temples.Link

Grand Theftendo is a port of Grand Theft Auto, a modern, graphics-intensive video game, to the Nintedo Entertainment System, an 8-bit game-system of relative antiquity. It's quite an amazing undertaking, funny and fun and kind of perverse. Here's a site with extensive details on the project as well as links to a Sourceforge repository of the code, so that you can modify it and create your own sequels.

2005-05-19T23:48:00.000-04:00

Here's a great HOWTO on making your own Jedi robes, even if you've never sewn or worked from a pattern.

The creators of the Necoro cat robot should be fined and jailed for ignoring the the Uncanny Valley study, which found that robots that are almost-but-not-quite-completely lifelike are scary.

This video, entitled "Recycled TV, " scratches together llittle snips of audio from various TV shows, timed with TV footage from various sources. A mysterious hand reaches in and turns knobs labelled BALANCE, COPYRIGHT and CREATIVE COMMONS, changing the video. The song's catchy, the visuals range from funny to thought-provoking. All in all, a hell of a clip.

There's a workprint of Star Wars Episode III on the Internet already. It's got some timecode and watermarks, but judging from the 19 second XVID sample that Waxy has posted, it seems like it's eminently watchable.

Workprints leak from studios. The studios are trying to lock down what customers do with DVDs and cable TV and PCs, but they can't even keep their own house in order. They've got laws that allow them to get your name from your ISP and to sue you into bankruptcy for file-sharing. They've got laws to criminalize the math to defeat DRM. They're after laws to let them design TVs and camcorders.

None of those laws, measures or policies will stop files like this from circulating on the Internet. Don't take my word for it, read what Microsoft's leading DRM engineers have to say about it.

But that's OK, because Star Wars III will make a metric crapload of money, no matter how many copies are downloaded from the Internet. Hell, the licensing deals alone have already recouped the cost of production, before the first ticket was sold.

The studios don't have a problem with downloading. There's plenty of downloading, but there's no problem. But even if there is a problem, none of the costly measures the studios have asked for will solve it.

Putting the shouting, petulant babies from the studios in charge of technology is plain nuts. They are too blinded by greed and hubris to be trusted. Link

Apologies

2005-05-19T03:37:00.000-04:00

Sorry no links today, I just came from watching Episode III, and its very late, I must say that I think this is the best star wars movie of them all, I mean its so good and amazingly coordinated with the movies to come, that it enriches them and make them better movies.

Sad girls for life

2005-05-17T16:04:00.000-04:00

Finally, all the next gen consoles have been uncovered, and if the xbox 306 spects dazzled you, be prepared to for the PS3, I mean this is just awesome, this coming from Gamespot. Very nice details can be found within.

The other day i stumbled upon this site that has a lot of "cool things and quizes to put on your
blog"

A Chicago outplacement consultancy says ''Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith'' will cost U.S. employers up to $627 million in absenteeism. hehehe

Got a Sony Playstation PSP game console? Now you can run Nintendo Entertainment System ROMs on it -- just download this free NES emulator.

The age of pampirus

2005-05-16T14:46:00.000-04:00

This is pretty strange. They say this car comercial never aired due to ''paranormal activity'', or something. I have no idea why film would show this sort of thing, but perhaps they just felt it was best to scrap it and start over. See for yourself.

The nifty clips of video games supporting Microsoft's new Xbox 360 console are running on Apple machines, Microsoft confirmed on Friday.

''We purchased a number of Apple G5's because very specific hardware components of the G5 allow developers to emulate some of the technology behind future Xbox products and services,'' a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. ''This is an interim development tool that will be replaced with a more powerful and comprehensive solution later.'' Interesting news.

Nintendo's next-gen console will also be around an inch tall; will support GameCube and DVD discs.

Speaking to GameSpot several weeks ago about the imminent launch of the Xbox 360, Robbie Bach, Microsoft's chief Xbox officer and senior vice president, weighed in on the next-console race. He said he largely saw the next several years as a two-party conflict between Microsoft and Sony.'' Check it!

I am the Killer

2005-05-12T17:00:00.000-04:00

A significant number of TLBP readers are ~~perverts~~ anti-zombie operatives who ~~surf tons of porn~~ must review much sekrit information without ~~their bosses knowing~~ other spies seeing their sekrit stuff. If you are one of them, and often need to ~~ditch the nekkid babes~~ get confidential data off of your screen promptly and discreetly -- the ~$40 StealthSwitch might do the trick. Tap it with your toe, under the desk, and ~~buh-bye, Jenna~~ your screen switches to something innocuous. Link, PCs only.

Forbes Magazine, not usually the the web's premiere source of all things geekish, has posted an interesting summary of Star Wars technology and it's scientific feasibility. As a bonus, they also include a great set of Star Flops, including the infamous Jedi Arena Atari 2600 video "game".

This is pretty neat and well worth your time.

Plug in Baby

2005-05-11T22:07:00.000-04:00

Because he didn't want to lose a bet about beer, a german guy sank his computer into an aquarium filled with oil. That was one year ago and the PC is still working! He says he likes working with that computer, because 'the oil absorbs all the sound, so it's absolutely quiet.' Additionaly he discovered, that one should place the PC under the table to avoid soaking the mouse and keyboard wet with oil because of capillary action. Detailed pictures are available at his homepage.

The New York Post reports that it will cost employers $628,880,000 in lost productivity on the first two days of Star Wars Episode III - Return of the Sith . How many of you are planning to skip at least part of your workday on the first two days?

This thing pretty much mimics my real life. Give it a shot.

I am trying to think what people might use this for. Advertize that they are available for dates? Signal the end of the world? Who knows, but I think I would find a good use for this.

To have and To Hold

2005-05-10T23:58:00.000-04:00

Monkeys that controlled robot arms via neural implants were actually thinking of the arm as their own extra appendage. Duke University neurobiologists Miguel Nicolelis, Mikhail Lebedev, and their colleagues analyzed data from Lebedev's 2003 experiments in which he trained implanted monkeys to move a cursor and robot arm by thought alone. I think we closer than ever to achieve mankind´s long awaited dream of creating a killer robo-monkey army.

On April 28, it apparently rained shrimp onto the tennis courts at the Summit residential development in La Jolla, California. According to Scripps Institution of Oceanography curator Bob Burhans, the shrimp were likely sucked up by the wind and dropped over land. (More background on the Fortean phenomena of weird rains here.)

this makes me even more pumped to see revenge of the sith. Check it!

Doll-mod HOWTO: Menstruating Barbie

Even if you don't read Czech, step-by-step snapshots like this and the word "menstruovat" all over the page gives you an idea of what these folks are planning to do to the hapless plastic icon: drill a hole where no holes currently exist, pipe in a tiny tank of red Campari, and voila: "Menstruující Barbie."

Prisioners of today

2005-05-09T21:59:00.000-04:00

These remarkable sand structures are apparently made of nothing more than sand and water and are really stupendous. All I've ever managed are a few pail-and-shovel turrets. Link 1, Link 2

his Darth Vader lawn sprinkler, you can "let the Dark Side defend your lawn from the ravages of summer heat" as Vader "spins around with water spraying action, wielding his lightsaber in a furious battle to save your lawn!"

Found this over on Engadget. Pretty hot looking actually. I like the use of the logo. I still want to know if these things will be rechargable or if you have to add batteries to them. They are wireless afterall. :)

I am not sure how I feel about all this controller leaking...seems like a silly Jr. High game they are all playing, but nonetheless here is a chance to see what a PS2 controller might look like if you added a big festering sore to it. :) Check it out here.

This was very interesting I thought. Special thanks to McHenry for sending it to me.