December 31, 2007

Regina Spektor Show at The Tabernacle

So I'm mad because I just "discovered" Regina Spektor recently, and I also found out that she's going to be playing a show at the Tabernacle in Atlanta, GA in late February. I don't have anyone to go with, and I hate going to shows like that by myself. The trip, for me, would be about 4 hours if I'm remembering correctly.

I wish I had someone to go with...

Anyway. If you haven't heard of Regina Spektor, you should definitely check her out. It's weird, fun, kooky stuff. But that's what I'm realizing about the world though, you know? Humor and silliness makes everything so much better.

December 26, 2007

Shhhh...We're Hunting Monitors!

Okay, so it doesn't get good until a minute or so into the video. Be patient...

Bright Eyes--When the President Talks to God

December 22, 2007

Made of Honor

Okay, so maybe there's too much estrogen in my veins tonight, but the trailer for this new Patrick Dempsey movie Made of Honor looks interesting:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/madeofhonor/

As some of you know, I watch pretty much any kind of movie: foreign, drama, romantic comedy, action, classic, documentary, everything. The romantic comedy genre is not unlike the scifi, horror, and action genres: there can be good movies, but most of them are really bad. Also, I'm not really a fan of Patrick Dempsey. I liked him for about 2 movies back in the 80's, but most of me thinks he should've stayed unpopular.

But, nonetheless, this movie looks pretty good. The jokes made me smile at least, and the premise looks at least halfway plausible.

Mass Effect

I've been playing Mass Effect on the 360 the past couple days. For me, video games are usually really awesome or really terrible. This is one of the few cases where I'm somewhere in the middle. It's made by Bioshock, the company who made Knights of the Old Republic a few years ago, but I don't really know what to think of the new game. It's like they changed some of the good things and kept some of the bad stuff.

Many of the problems deal with the functionality of the game. For instance, in some menus you can't just press B to get out of it; you have to make a selection. Also, equipping items and selling items is a bit of a pain. Let's say you want to buy a new suit of armor from a merchant and then sell the old one you were wearing. To do that, you have to first go to the merchant and buy the new suit. Then, you have to leave the merchant in order to go to your equipment screen, where you will equip the new suit. Then, you have to approach the merchant AGAIN and listen to his stupid speel about sampling his wares. Then you can sell your suit to him. It's all rather complicated. Rather than that, you should have to option of equipping the new suit and selling the old one as you're talking to the merchant.

The AI is absolutely some of the worst AI I've seen. And I'm talking about your teammates, the people you rely on to take out enemies and heal you. They CONSTANTLY stand in your way and run into rooms full of enemies.

In fact, the combat in general is horrible. Why are there separate buttons for unholstering and holstering your weapon??? The framerate drops constantly, even when enemies aren't on the screen, which makes playing the entire game difficult. You can sprint/ran, but only when you're in the middle of the battle. What if you're running through some huge building? Too bad.

The graphics, though quite good, have their flaws as well. The character shadows are kind of screwy, so as you're talking to people their shadows around their neck region are all jagged and deformed. Also, when a characters faces show emotion, sometimes the different pieces to their face (cheeks, lips, mouth, throat, etc.) "come apart" and you can see inside their heads. The bad animations and low framerate make it hard to focus on the storyline of the game.

The storyline is the absolute only reason I want to keep playing the game. It's a great scifi story with pretty good dialogue and voice acting. The game takes something like 40-50 hours to beat if you're thorough, which I am.

So, I dunno...do I want to keep playing? Yes, but only to see the story develop. If I get frustrated with the fighting much more, though, I might change my mind.

Overall Score: 6 out of 10 (Based on the storyline alone, I'd give it a 9 out of 10, though)

I Hate Morons

I hate morons who wait until the last minute to buy everything for Christmas. I mean really, why do people do that year in and year out? I want to go to Wal-Mart because I NEED FOOD TO SURVIVE, but I can't park anywhere because MORONS WAITED UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE TO BUY THEIR LOVED ONES CHEAP, CHINESE-MADE GOODS.

Anyway. Among other things, I got my dad a Deep Purple album (Perfect Strangers) and a Bright Eyes album (I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning). My dad is one of those people that makes it hard to buy stuff for. I've been in the habit of buying him good books and movies for Christmas, but lately he's been working a lot and hasn't had time to do much reading/movie watching. So, I still got him a book (because that's never a bad gift), but I decided to get him these two CDs this time around. I hope he likes them.

December 17, 2007

Simple Things Are Destroyed So Simply

Have you ever thought about wind chimes? I mean, REALLY thought about them? What are they, really, but a few sticks (be it wood, metal, or what have you) attached to a base with string, and yet how beautiful they are. The sounds they make. They are an instrument of God, you know. God created the wind, which He uses to make the wind chimes beautiful. He gives wind chimes purpose, just as He gives everything purpose.

I don't know who He is, though. That's my problem to deal with, not yours.

But I was thinking about wind chimes last week, and it dawned on me how easy it is for them to become tangled and lose their purpose. Maybe the wind blew too hard. Maybe an outside influence, like a person, came by and hit them. Who knows what happened. But just think about it. They're here for such simple purposes--to help people gauge the wind and to sound beautiful--and yet they lose their way so easily.

If a simple thing like a wind chime can lose its way so easily, imagine a person. A person is infinitely more complicated, and yet it's actually easier for a person to lose his/her way than a wind chime. Think of all the influences, the chance encounters, the near misses...

What is a person, really?

December 13, 2007

What Comics Do You Read?

What comic series are you currently reading? Here are the ones I pick up on a regular basis. The ratings are based on a 10-point scale. The first rating, the one before the slash, is what I thought of the comic series when it started. The second rating after the slash is what I think of the latest issue or two.

  • The Astounding Wolf-Man (8/7)
  • Punisher: War Journal (9/7)
  • Nova (8/10)
  • New Warriors (7/6)
  • Thunderbolts (10/9)
  • Avengers: The Initiative (8/8)
  • Marvel Comics Presents (8/8)
  • The Order (6/7)
  • Welcome to Tranquility (9/3)
I know they're all mainstream comics, but I haven't found anything else really good lately. Zombies vs. Robots vs. Amazons came out, but I noticed that there's going to be a collected volume sometime next year.

Besides, I'm finding a lot of "mainstream" comics that don't follow the "big events" as closely. I'm tired of Civil War, Planet Hulk, 52, etc. I just like reading about superheroes, for the most part.

That's the thing: for the most part, I don't want to read a comic about regular people. I feel like books are better with that sort of thing. I like comics about superheroes only when it's an important story, not just something for the sake of action and explosions.

Notice the bad score for Welcome to Tranquility. The series started out SO great. It was about a town that was sort of a retirement community for superheroes, and there was a new generation coming in and throwing things all out of whack. It's comedic at first glance, but there's a lot of emotion built into it. The funniest thing I think in the series so far is this one Shazam-type ripoff character who says a magic word to get his superpowers, but he's old and can't remember the word, so he goes around reading dictionaries for the first 4 issues!

But, yeah, the series has gotten really old and tiresome, so we'll have to see. I'm on the verge of not reading it anymore.

Steal My Idea!

All right, whoever works on adding features to media players can steal this idea. I'd prefer it to be Windows Media Player or iTunes, but I guess that'd be too picky.

Anyway. You'd load up all your MP3s, like usual, and like usual you'd have a boring old list that sorted them according to album title, band name, etc. But THEN, you'd click a button and your screen would go black. Then, each song would appear as a small white dot--a star. The more you listened to a song the bigger the star would get, until finally it would turn into a planet. The planets would be colored according to the music genre that the song was from, and maybe the other songs from the album could circle around the planet after a while. This would keep happening until you had a whole screen full of planets, supernovas, black holes, stars, and whatever else.

THEN, the even cooler part would be the ability to go online and upload this "galaxy" file to a website and share it with others. Not the MP3s, mind you, because I'm sure the RIAA would hate that, but just the galaxy files. And the site could be set up in some way that you could mouse over the planets/stars/whatever and it'd tell you what the name of the song is.

Is it the next polio vaccine or the next hammer? Surely not. But in this age of Katamari Damacy, technology, and music, this seems like the perfect idea that just hasn't happened yet.

December 5, 2007

Credit Card Applications

I'm really tired of getting credit card applications. I mean, on the one hand it's reassuring because I don't think I'd get 2 a day if I didn't have a halfway decent credit rating, but this is ridiculous. Especially Chase. I've got almost 2 dozen Chase applications stacked up at my desk.

I think I'm going to rip them into strips, make a papier mache dinosaur out of it, and mail it to the address listed on the applications with a note saying, "Please don't give me anymore ammunition, or else I'll create something bigger next time."

Or maybe I'll fashion them into one of those African fertility god statues...

Ouroboros

I learned about the ouroboros from reading The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), a book written by Alan W. Watts. You should check him out.

From Wikipedia:

[The Ouroboros, also spelled Ourorboros, Oroborus, Uroboros or Uroborus (IPA: [ˌjʊərəʊˈbɒrəs]), is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail and forming a circle. It has been used to represent many things over the ages, but it most generally symbolizes ideas of cyclicality, unity, or infinity. The ouroboros has been important in religious and mythological symbolism, but has also been frequently used in alchemical illustrations. More recently, it has been interpreted by psychologists, such as Carl Jung, as having an archetypal significance to the human psyche.]

December 4, 2007

Just When Everything Was Making Sense

When I was a child, I believed that when someone said or did a certain, very specific thing, they'd be transported to another, more happy world. The difficulty was in finding what that "thing" was. I mostly believed it was a humanitarian effort; after you spend a certain number of hours helping the homeless or volunteering at a battered spouse shelter, an angel would confront you in the parking lot and, just like that, you'd be gone forever to a better place.

Take it in another direction and maybe it'd be an alien race watching over us, rather than some godlike force. That'd be interesting, too.

I think I invented it as a way of coping with everything. The sad thing is, it's all been downhill since then. Things just get more and more difficult. As things get more difficult, though, you also find more reasons to stay alive. Or do you? I don't know. Maybe those who commit suicide are the ones who realize just how bad the world is, but they don't have anything or anyone keeping them on the planet.

December 3, 2007

Teaching English In Japan

I have a strong desire to teach English in Japan, but I don't know how much I would like the job. I've gone to websites for companies like AEONet and Nova, but I'm pretty sure they're leaving something out of the picture. I've also visited certain websites, such as this one, that talk about how these big companies trick you and you end up regretting the decision to teach in Japan.

Does anyone out there have any prior experience teaching English in Japan? Or, for that matter, does anyone know of other jobs that are available to foreigners?

I'm (hopefully) going to be visiting Japan next year. I won't be looking for a job. I just want to see the country and meet some interesting people. Anyone got any tips for visiting Japan?

Cake And Ice Cream

I work for an IT company. That's all you need to know.

A lot of people have been jumping ship for a couple of reasons lately (the past 4 months or so), and someone at work pointed this out:

"Every time someone leaves, we have cake and ice cream."

So basically, you have situations like this occurring:

Person 1: "Hey Joe, everyone's going down to the break room to say goodbye to Susan."
Person 2: "Yeah, well, I never did really care for her. She was really pessimistic, you know, and she always tried to get in on other people's business. Plus she always chewed on the ends of her pens. I swear man, there were a few times when we were in meetings and I wished she'd gnaw through the pen and get ink all in her mouth..."
Person 1: "There's cake and ice cream..."
Person 2: *locks his computer* "You know, I'd at least like to drop in and say goodbye before she leaves."

Joke of the Day

Parents don't have to worry about buying their kids the Tickle Me Elmo toy for Christmas this year; just get your kid a regular Elmo doll and it'll shake all on its own--from lead poisoning.



[Editor's note to corporate jackals: This is a joke and is not intended to be taken seriously.]

Josh Brolin Interview

Take a look at this interview with Josh Brolin. I was amazed at how humble he is; not only does he realize he's made some less-than-stellar movies in the past, he also realizes that his star power has only temporarily increased because of his roles in American Gangster and No Country For Old Men. In other words, even though he's getting a lot of attention right now, he's not going to go throwing his weight around.

Kudos to him for marrying Diane Lane, too. I think she's another actor that's very underrated and, strangely, another actor that's starred in a crappy movie from time to time. Judge Dredd, anyone?