SuperSatellite

Bear with me here…

// July 9th, 2006 // No Comments » // Brain dumps, Entertainment, Movies

I am apologizing in advance for tonight. It’s been a few days since I’ve posted anything, and not for a lack of things to write about, I’ve just sort of been saving up the stuff. Now though, I’m afraid this will be quite long, so I’ll do what I can to keep it entertaining.

Of course, the real trick here is figuring out just where to start. Also trying to remember what all I had to say to begin with. Dammit. I’m worse than my own worst enemy sometimes. Well, let’s start with movie stuff, because that’s what I just finished with. Pirates of the Caribbean 2 was excellent. Great CG. I won’t spoil anything though. Just go see it. What I will discuss is the “pre-game.” The trailer for Snakes on a Plane played. They audience reaction was pretty damn worth it. A comical mix of “what the hell” and “what the fucking hell.” Frankly, and I say this with all seriousness, the damn movie is brilliant. The hype that has been built up around that movie is going to make it a fortune. You’re damned right I’m gonna go see it. And I’ll love it, because I know exactly what I’m getting. Snakes. On a plane. Samuel L. Jackson. I expect no more and no less, and know that’s what I will get.

Transformers. Man, you can’t imagine my hopes for this movie. In case you haven’t seen it, you have to go check out this demo footage of Optimus Prime transforming [youtube.com]. The trailer the movie had was just a teaser, but even it was cool. I cannot emphasize how much you have to go watch that sixteen seconds of happiness linked above though.

During the pre-light-dimming phase, the movie theater runs those silly little slides, you know? Well a bunch of them are quotes from EOnline.com. Now, I can’t remember any, and despite the fact that the slides claim you can visit the site for more celebrity quotes, I challenge you to do so. So you’ll have to take my word that these things are some of the dumbest and most pretentious sounding comments on the planet. Who picks that shit?

So I played mini golf last night. I had to succumb to a new level humility. Not like “oops, I tripped of my shoelace I hope no one saw” humility, like “oops, I forgot I’m supposed to wear clothes to my high school graduation” humility. It was bad. That was quite possibly the most masochistic $3.00 I’ve ever spent. And I really like Chinese finger guffs, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I shot a 17 over par, only a slight nine strokes worst than last time. I got one hole in one that I can only assume was fate fucking with me. Sorta like giving a kid a lollipop before stabbing him in the ass with a hypodermic needle. Maybe I’m just too mousey to play minigolf [re: inside joke, sorry folks].

You know, despite the fact that Nickelback is about as inspired a band as Nirvana (sorry, but let’s face it, their music is farking simple), I like them just the same. Sometimes the depth and creativity of a band isn’t as needed as just a decent rhythm (that’s a hard word to spell). Regardless, I found this link [thewebshite.net] that Rachel showed me quite humorous. And scary. Considerably more scary the second time I listened and really paid attention. Give it a try. It’s like a bizzaro world Pepsi challenge. With itself.

I want to know who hit the Pittsburg city officials with the brilliant stick. I don’t know how, or why, but someone realized that maybe, just maybe it might be a neat idea to make Locust not a one-way. And I think they are going to follow suit with Pine. I am dumbstruck at the practicalness of this decision. What’s next, left turns on Broadway uptown? God forbid! I am certainly not complaining, but if they keep doing shit like this, it’s going to make it increasingly difficult to pick on them. Granted, they are stripping and resurfacing a big chunk of Broadway south of Quincy, which was super convenient combined with the traffic jam it caused and having Joplin street closed off because of the stadium. So I will hold off on giving the gold star just yet.

Looks like my job is really fracking cool. Granted, I have found a great deal of enjoyment in what I do now. But to top it off, I get to go to New York in October for a conference. Yeah, that’s sort of work, but it’s kinda a vacation too. I’ve never been to New York, and while it’s Rochester, not NYC, I’ll take what I can get.

I regularly check out Break.com. Today they had a video posted [break.com] that I felt a compelling need to share. I hate sharing random internet video clips too much, especially since you need nothing to follow up that Transformers clip with, but this did make me laugh. I love the end when the one guy is heard saying “our skin is fucking gone.” My only hope now is that I can find a way to convince one of my friends to do that. Maybe while drunk…

Does Superman have to brush his teeth?

// June 28th, 2006 // 1 Comment » // Entertainment, Movies

Well, the current buzz now is all about the new Superman movie.  Probably rightfully so.  Thanks to the juxtaposition that Brett Ratner provided, we know Brian Singer is pretty well the man when it comes to making a successful comic book movie, although I give a lot of credit to Christopher Nolan too.  Robert Ebert, however, appears to disagree, at least a little.  By the way, Mr. Ratner (a.k.a. Mr. Shithead), fuck you very much for X-Men 3.

Let me be fair in saying that I don’t think I’ve seen any of the first four Superman movies ever, and given my knowledge of the matter, missing III and IV doesn’t exactly hurt my feelings.  And having seen (and loved) Batman Begins, I have faith in the ability to sort of “re-invent” a franchise, without being unfaithful to source material.  My problem is not so much with that, as it is with Superman himself.

Let’s face it, as far as Superman goes, he’s pretty damned generic.  Sure, he was one of the first (1938 was the first printing I believe), but at the same time, they went a little overboard.  He flies, he’s bulletproof, he’s super fast, super strong, has freezing breath.  It’s like as time went on, it started to be like playground battles:  “Oh yeah?  Well I’m fireproof and I burn you to a crisp!”  “Nuh-uh, because I’m EVERYTHING proof, and everything flies off me and blows you up!”  His one weakness?  Kryptonite, from his home planet, Krypton.  Come on guys, can we try a tad harder here?  I’m fucking begging you.  I guess maybe it was clever and awesome back around World War II, but nowadays we appreciate somewhat more developed ideas.

Which brings me to my single largest problem.  He’s not human.  And we casually brush the fact aside like bad guacamole.  I want my heroes to be, you know, something I can relate to.  Even The Thing started out as human.  That’s all Batman is, and Spiderman and the X-Men are human enough.  And if the hero isn’t human, at least they usually originated on this planet.  But Superman is pure alien.  He just conveniently looks like us.  That makes forget that he isn’t so much a super “man,” as he is an average alien (thanks Lindsey!) who arrived here on a space ship.  For Christ’s sake, he doesn’t even need to breathe oxygen, he just does it to look fashionable.  What would happen if the Kryptonians decided to use Earth as a penal colony for their undesirables (assuming they hadn’t been destroyed of course)?  We’d all be fucked, that’s what.  The convict Kryptonian serial killers and rapists would have bent Clark Kent over and crammed that fancy cape and prancy spandex right up his super asshole, and I guaruntee the Man of Steel henceforth would just be known as “that guy with the perdy mouth.”

So I’ll go see it.  Not because I have any warm spot for Superman, but because I trust Brian Singer and I trust Kevin Spacey and I trust some nobody named Brandon Routh.  If they were smart enough to tell Nicholas Cage that he couldn’t be Superman, then I guess they got something right…I never really read any comic books as a kid (but hey, where’s my Iron Man movie?), but I find a lot of enjoyment in their cinematic adaptations.  Why this is I can’t really explain.  I guess just catching up on some lost youth.

The need to exposit.

// June 7th, 2006 // No Comments » // Brain dumps, Movies

I have had yet another lapse in the frequency of my writing, I know.  Sometimes one just feels like the daily activity of their life isn’t really worth explaining.  Then again, if you’re me, you like rendering out the details like a Carl Sagan novel because one, you’ll read it anyway, and two, I like using words.  If you’ve read Sagan, you know that the [lack of] quality in his writing isn’t so much embedded in thorough character development, or a moving plot, or thrilling exposition.  No, basically he just doesn’t know how to shut up.  He can write a book because he can use words ceasingly, whether or not they or appropriate, or whether or not we even care.  In this regard, I write here because I can.

My parents are visiting this week.  I have to drive to KC Thursday to retrieve them from the hellish transportation nightmare that is MCI.  While it will be good to see them, I loathe driving to Kansas City.  Oh well.  The second verse is that they are here to go to a family reunion which I, by obvious association via the bloodlines, am also bound to make an appearance at.  Let me be clear in stating that I like my immediate family.  The rest…well…I see no reason to pretend to be interested in their lives and happenings any more than I would a stranger.  I keep in touch with who I want to.  You know what?  I could have been on day three of the BAK right now.  That’s how I avoided it last time, it was very convenient.

I have been racking my brain at work over a pretty slick CMS (Content Management System) called Joomla.  Lemme tell ya, it’s something else, that’s for sure.  Very powerful and full featured.   Naturally, however, some of the stuff I need it won’t do natively, at least in this version.  If you have ever done portal development, don’t start with this.  It’s powerful but a pain in the butt.  I’m still trying to convince myself of whether or not this is the one to work with.  Given the options though, I think it is probably the best route.

OOH!  Looks like I might have my old car sold finally.  If so, it’s new TV time baby.  I am really tired of my old POS set.  It’s only like fifteen years old, and the colors only bleed about halfway across the screen.  That’s not so bad, right?  All I watch are movies, but I would still like to be able to really watch and enjoy them.  That’s hard to do when watching the TV is like an LSD trip through a blind man’s eyes.

I made it through a number of movies recently.  The Island wasn’t actually half bad.  Not totally what I expected, but I had heard that ahead of time.  Plus I think I could watch about anything with Scarlett Johansson in it.  Yeah, I’m shameless, wanna make something of it?  Ultraviolet was…crap.  Like bad, drunk, taco-shit crap.  At first I thought:  Hmm…okay, stylized like a comic book, corny dialogue, but I guess it could work….No.  Okay just fuck no.  The dialogue wasn’t corny, campy, comic fun.  It was just bad writing.  And the special effects weren’t stylized, they were low budget.  I tried to convince myself otherwise.  Frankly, I wanted to like it.  But alas, I cannot.  The Producers was also some classic theatrical inspired cinema.  Worth seeing.  Underworld: Evolution was a gamble of my precious time that I felt paid off, and A History of Violence though strange, was worth sitting through.  Trainspotting is good because it’s Scottish.  It’s good for other reasons too, but that’s the main one.  Babies with spinning heads score high points too.  God Ultraviolet was bad.

Disappointment and stuff

// May 27th, 2006 // No Comments » // Entertainment, Movies

***WARNING: The following may contain information people waiting to see X-Men 3 might want to avoid***

Well I was finally able to appease my desire to see X-Men: The Last Stand. If Brett Ratner is ever allowed near enough to this franchise to influence it in even the remotest way, I will hunt him down and deliver unto him a beating perhaps only George Bush deserves more.  Let me be blunt, the movie wasn’t garbage, but it also wasn’t on par with the first two.  It wasn’t quite so bad as when Joel Shumacher took the reigns of Batman, that practically measured as a violation of the Geneva Convention as a crime against humanity; but Ratner’s reckless treatment, and lack of compassion or appreciation for the subject is apparent almost from the word go.  The Last Stand was to X-Men as Terminator 3 was to that trilogy.

Here are the main problems.  New characters were shallower than a kiddie pool in winter.  For bad guys, I suppose that’s fine given their disposable nature (did anyone besides Magneto even make it through the final scene?).  But Kitty Pryde, Angel, and Beast were simply inexcusable.  Call it bad writing, bad editting, or bad directing, had those characters not been there, you wouldn’t have missed them.  And oh my god….a can of beans could have played Storm better.  And not those good Bush’s baked beans, the cheap ones, from Aldi’s.  Letting Magneto rip out her vocal box for no reason would have been better than making me listen to Berry deliver the lines.  I guess that’s not new news though…You know why Famke Janssen was such a good Phoenix?  They knew when to have her shut up.  I can see it now: “Okay Miss Janssen, stand right there by the green screen, now look…left….more…Perfect!  Thanks, you can go home, we’ll CG the rest around you.”  Every now and again you find yourself thinking “Oh yeah, Phoenix is just sorta….standing…over there.”

Anyway, all told, an average movie.  Glad I saw it, and I’ll probably buy it I have no doubt, but there was a lot of room for improvement.  I can only hope the Wolverine movies are handled better.

On the subject of movies, Ghost Rider, Pirates of the Caribbean 2, Clerks 2, and Nacho Libre should help fill in the gaps nicely.

I took Isis to the vet to get her allergies taken care of Thursday.  She was pissed.  Mostly it was good though, because now she’ll stop scratching, and I get to laugh as she walks around with all her paws wrapped up so that she can’t use her claws until everything takes effect.  It’s even better when she tries to jump up on the chair, but completely falls since she can’t latch on, heh.

I was full of good ideas lately.  I found this slick piece of software called KPlaylist.  Got it running on the server which is finally healthy again.  Let’s me stream my music off the server wherever I am to listen to it.  If you want access to it and think you deserve it, beg.  Yeah, you heard me, beg.  Like a bitch.