Dyson's Fear 3.0

Wonders never cease

My parents bought a Wii.

I'm floored.

Labels: video games

posted by Jason @ 4:03 PM 0 comments

Chow Yun-Fat is still the personification of cool

This is an ad for a new casino opening in Macau, starring CYF, and allows us to bask in his cool.



I think I finally get why he's so cool. So bear with me here.

One of the most common terms used to describe him is humble, and I think that this humility is what drives him. The man has complete confidence in what he has, not what he believes he has, and this translates through his charisma. I've never met the man, but I'm going to guess that he's utterly disarming in person, and that's why he'll never lose that aura of cool. What I mean by that is that you'll never find the man drunk at a concert, hopping on stage during the performance, and spouting insults at the obviously annoyed crowd who aren't there to see him.

Of course, I could just be spouting out crap like any other CYF fanboy, but that's up for you to decide.

Labels: asian pop culture

posted by Jason @ 1:39 PM 0 comments

Sony's Home for PS3

Presented without commentary:

Labels: tech, video games

posted by Jason @ 4:26 PM 0 comments

Jay's Weird Weekends

Okay, the savvy folks have already seen this. Since I'm not one of them, I just discovered this:



Yes, that was a cosplay flashmob, on the street in Akihabara, dancing to J-Pop.

Yes, I'm still twitching.

Labels: asian pop culture, misc

posted by Jason @ 5:39 PM 0 comments

To paraphrase Neal Stephenson:

The difference between a geek and a nerd is that a geek knows shame.

posted by Jason @ 4:43 PM 0 comments

A whole-hearted apology to Roger Ebert

A while back, in more polite terms, I said that Ebert should retire because he was relic. Now, I take those words back, thanks to his article about his illness.

Mr. Ebert, as long as you've got it in you, keep doing it.

Labels: misc, movies, pop culture

posted by Jason @ 2:05 PM 0 comments

Happy 10th Anniversary Duke

As of today, Duke Nukem Forever has been in development for a decade, and what a decade that's been.

Labels: video games

posted by Jason @ 9:47 AM 0 comments

Attention John Tory

Oh, just flick off.

We already know you're a slimy fake, who'll say or do anything for a soundbite, so stop trying to prove it.

At the same time, I can fully understand why he'd be against any plan to educate youth about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as he is a major source of them.

(Update on July 30, 2007: Click here.)

Labels: current events

posted by Jason @ 6:12 PM 0 comments

Now, with more content

Supermarket 2.0

glumbert.com

Labels: humour, media, video, web

posted by Jason @ 2:20 PM 0 comments

e-STINKERY

Yeah, I know, very clever. Ha-ha.

Anywho, I just watched a preview of the play, e-DENTITY. Wow, that was horrible. It's as if they took every modern theatre parody concept they could think of*, threw in and expanded upon a bunch of internet terminology they don't understand, then put it on stage. No wonder it's getting such terrible reviews, as it's about as insipid as it comes. (I think the ones shown on the page I linked to are the only positive ones I've seen.) It's stuff like this that makes me ashamed of my fine arts background.

*Or rather, lift from Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Labels: pop culture

posted by Jason @ 10:57 AM 0 comments

Hmmm....

Now that's interesting.

Last week I was getting numerous hits from China, and now I'm starting to get hits from some Fantasy Blog Stock Market site called blogshares.com. While I know that this isn't a private blog by any sense of the term, I'm just wondering the why behind where all these hits are coming from.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm to be summoned to the Temple of Beer Gods momentarily. (Or, as it's nearly two hours later, not.)

Labels: misc

posted by Jason @ 9:16 PM 0 comments

Media rundown and other stuff

Okay, here's the first part:

Watching: On DVD- The Lost Room, Venture Bros. season 2, and Ultraman. On TV- Supernatural, Smallville, Stargate SG-1 and Jericho, with Heroes once again starting Monday night. By other means- Doctor Who season 3.
Listening (to): Various MP3s, podcasts, and Coast to Coast shows.
Reading: Sadly, nothing these past few weeks.
Playing: The Hobbit.

Basically, for the past few weeks I've been stressing out over work, my life, and my potential new job which looks more than potential and more like starts when all the paperwork is done. The realization that I'm about to turn 36 and am on the road to "pushing 40" has made me play my hand, and finally dig in. I'm too old to be living the way that I am, and it's time to put the "childish things" behind me. (Although, directly behind me, hiding like.)

During the past 10 years since I moved back here, I've spent the majority of them becoming a hermit. My once social self is pretty anti-social now, and I think that's been the one thing that's eaten me the most. From my understanding of it, there's a Taoist concept that if you don't live the life that you're supposed to, that you poison your soul and karma, and it kills you after time. While I don't necessarily subscribe to that exact concept, I do think that if you can't be yourself, then you won't live long. There's way too much stress involved in not enjoying life, and it's especially bad when you let life get away from you. This is what happened to me.

Somewhere along the line, I just gave up and coasted. I think it may have been the fourth time I unsuccessfully tried to move back to Toronto that did it. If I were to subscribe to it, I'd probably have to say that I'm not intended to move back... at least not yet. I need to get to a point where I control my destiny again, and it looks like I'm on that road again.

I'm looking forward for the new challenge in my life, as for once, I actually feel confident about it. Sure, I have some doubts, but those are the doubts that anyone has and I won't let them consume me. Once I have my hands on the wheel again, I'll be unstoppable and I won't hopefully repeat the mistakes of my past. Now that it looks like I'll have a steady income, I sense that my confidence will return, and with that confidence return, I sense that my health will too. I need to shed the 70 or so pounds I've put on over the past decade, and dammit I'm going to do it.

Oh yeah, and I shout out to Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer for making my week with Season 2 of the Venture Bros.

Labels: media rundown, misc, personal crap

posted by Jason @ 7:01 PM 0 comments

Another rant about geeks

So, I'm going over posts at the place I go to but really shouldn't, and one thing comes to mind: there's a lot of talk on subjects where people haven't a clue what they're talking about it. Granted, I'm guilty of this too, but it's an epidemic over there.

In this post on his blog, Denis McGrath says the following:

Don't get me wrong -- there's a whole lot of problems catering to the built in audience, as well. For one thing, in my experience working for Canada's sci-fi channel, I've found that generally the hardest core fans tend to eschew complexity. They're conservative -- they don't like change. They don't like sex or complex human relationships between men and women. They like to think of themselves as more sophisticated, and smarter than the "average" tv viewer -- when in reality, they're not

This is pretty much the demographic of folks at that place, the one that annoys me but I masochistically always return to. At one time, and I kid you not, a poster there claimed to have superior taste because of his advanced degrees... in engineering. There's a pseudo-intellectual arrogance at play that I just don't understand, as it really defies logic. There's a term for it, "fan entitlement". It's the mindset that because they spend so much time and emotion with something, that somehow they're owed something for it.

It's pretty psychotic, if you ask me. It's like coming up with an in-depth fantasy about the girl that sat in front of the class who you never talked to and doesn't know you from Adam, and then getting angry when reality catches up with your little delusion.

It's this mindset that I constantly get run over by. You can't say anything about it, because these are people in deep denial. They all tend to fall into Denis McGrath's demographic, and because of that, they all think they're right. They throw around incorrectly used terminology, like straw man and asperger's, while they basically just masturbate in public.

Right now, over at that place, there's a number of threads discussing the business model of a particular publisher. The problem with this is that none of them are actually privvy to said publisher's business model, only assumptions based on their limited exposure to it through a press release. If you dare to point this out, the fact that they don't have any proper info to go on, they attack you for it.

Like I said, public masturbation.

Why, oh why, do I even bother?

Labels: cultural theory, rant

posted by Jason @ 10:18 AM 2 comments

I don't want to sound insensitve here

This post is a pipe-dream, as I know it's not going to mean anything at all to anyone, but I just feel like I need to say it.

Today's the 8th anniversary of Columbine and it's been 5 days since the incident at Virginia Tech, and I think there's an important lesson to be learned that people just aren't mentioning, and it's a simple. It's also a biblical one, to. Basically, it's the old "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" thing, or as I like to boil it down to, "don't treat people like crap."

In both cases, we're dealing with individuals who believed, rightly or wrongly, that they were being mistreated by society, and acted out in the only way that they felt they could. I'm not going to even remotely condone their actions, but I completely understand the motivations.

People just seem to like to treat others like crap. It seems to be human nature, and to an extent, we're all guilty of it. Most of us go through life with emotional support networks, and we all assume that the other person can take it as well as we can. Thing is, this is delusion and borderline sociopathic, when you boil it down. It's as if we're unaware that people are different than us, that we assume the things we do and say will be interpreted exactly as we mean them, and that people have exactly the same reaction to things that we do.

It also assumes that we're 'normal', and than 'normal' is an objective state of being.

The reality is that we're as much special snowflakes as we are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. We've all said things that were meant to be innocuous, but turned out to be insidious and harmful, and we've all been hurt by things that meant nothing to others. We all have stories, and I'm not alone.

There's a woman I was involved with in my senior year of high school who still hates me for the things I said when I split up with her. She utterly despises the ground I walk on 18 years later. I'm not going to say either way whether or not there's any justification for this, but I'm just pointing out that something I thought was simple has haunted someone else for half her life. For the record, I'm not particularly proud of it, but there were extenuating circumstances involved. (At least I hear that she's happily married, and I'm glad of that.)

As a race, we need to learn to treat each other better, and we need this to evolve. We need to get over ourselves, and learn to get along with each other. We need to learn to stop needlessly antagonizing people. We need to understand that we can only control how we're perceived by acting in the best interests of those around us. I'm not saying that we shouldn't do things for ourselves, but we shouldn't to things for ourselves that screw over those around us.

Why?

Firstly, because it's the right thing to do.

Secondly, because you never know when they're going to come after you with a gun.

While the first reason is the most altruistic one, the second one is the cynically realistic one. Many people are just not getting the help and support that they need, and these people are being released into the general populace. Some of these people are obviously troubled, but the majority of them are not. The ones that don't seem to be troubled are often ostracised by those around them, and then harassed by those self-righteous enough to believe that they're right. They're made fun of for being different, quiet, and strange. We all know someone like this, and we all know someone on the other side of things.

The question is: what do we do about it?

While you would think that there's a simple answer, there isn't really. At what point does trying to help becomes patronization, or worse, bullying? It's a difficult line to determine, and we'll often cross it accidentally. That said, as long as we're even aware that the line is there, we're already ahead of the folks who just harass and bully.

There's this kid named Steven who comes into our store on an annoyingly regular basis. He gets in the way, is frequently disruptive, and usually stinks to high heaven. He never leaves when we want him to, and has even taken a swing at one of our managers in the past. To get him to leave, we've taken to playing pranks on him, like switching off computers and video games while he's playing with them. The catch here is that we assume he has asperger's, or some other form of high functioning autism, which explains the disruptive behaviour. We have been mean to him, but at the same time, it had gotten to the point where we had no choice. The fact that we started to enjoy being mean to him is troublesome, but he's a smart kid and we needed to find ways to outsmart him. It became a challenge to get rid of him, and we enjoyed the challenge. It's been months now, and we no longer need to be mean any more. The reason for this is that our bully tactics have forced him to respect us, and he now leaves the store when we tell him too. Once again, I'm not particularly proud of the bullying (although some of it was truly amusing), but it paid off in way that no longer requires it. This, of course, is the exception to the rule.

In most cases, bullying just leads to emotional scarring, and I should now, I was bullied for the better part of my childhood until my mid teens. It crippled my social life for the longest time, and the fact that I'm referring to it shows that it still has some life to it. Those of us with healthy support networks can shuck most of it off, but those without, can't. It just builds and builds and builds until they can't take it anymore, and things take a tragic turn that depends on whether depression or rage is their emotional path. The examples at the beginning show what the latter leads to, and the former leads to Canada's suicide rate* of 11.9 per 100,000 people. (Of which males lead females 3 to 1.) While that sounds low, it's still 12 people per year who feel as though their life isn't worth living anymore, and it's usually due to humanity acting like humanity.

I can't remember who said it, but there's the saying that civilization is just a different form of barbarism, and I'd have to concur. Back in the day, if people didn't like others, they'd hit them with something big, heavy and usually deadly. Today, they just undermine their their will to live. It's far more insidious, when you think of it. It's like slowly poisoning someone's coffee over years, instead of just smacking them with a big rock. At least, with the big rock, you can see it coming.

To draw this to a close, it all still boils down to not treating other people like crap. It's unnecessary, and it's just our inability to evolve into a species worthy of being at the top of the food chain. At the same time, I'm not sure if we're even capable of it. It's been with us since the dawn of time, and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

Is being a dick what it means to be human?

Some days, it really just seems like it. Doesn't it?

Labels: cultural theory, current events, rant

posted by Jason @ 9:14 PM 0 comments

Thou Shalt Always Kill

Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip

Labels: music, pop culture

posted by Jason @ 11:04 PM 0 comments

For the record...

I still don't even remotely understand the concept of Transformers slash-fic*. For that matter, I still don't even remotely understand the concept of slash-fic. Why the need** to make non-homosexual characters homosexual and put them into bad porn scenarios?

It boggles the mind.

*In the name of all that's holy, do not click on that link unless you can handle that concept. I've only included the link to prove that it really exists, and isn't a figment of my imagination. (Note: the world would be a better place if it were, but....) That said, the writer of the blog entry has the same response to it as I do, but he quotes it for some insane reason.

** By mostly heterosexual women, to boot.

Labels: absurdity, fandumb

posted by Jason @ 5:18 PM 0 comments

A Skeptic is born, or how UFOlogy broke me

This is a major revelation to me, and it's something that I've recently come to notice: I don't believe in flying saucers. (UFOs are a different matter, just by definition.) The more exposure I have to UFOlogy and the like, the more I realize that these are just sad, sad individuals looking for some sort of higher meaning to things.

Somewhere along the road of their lives, something changed. I'm reminded of the woman in upstate New York who snaps fuzzy photos of aircraft and claims that they're alien spacecraft. If I remember correctly, she had a death in her immediate family (a child, I believe), and since then she's been snapping her UFO photos. The fact that she always takes her photos in the flight path of the local airport is almost never brought up, and it's ignored by the UFO community that supports her.

The woman needs therapy, but she's having her delusions supported by people who need to believe in aliens. It's an unhealthy cycle, and it's all sorts of crazy.

Now, what I have to clarify is that I want this stuff to be real. I mean, how cool is the concept that alien races are covertly visiting our planet, and doing stuff? That's just really cool SF there, and man do those stories rock, but they're just that.

They're stories.

Stanton Friedman spins a great story, and his enthusiasm for the subject is intoxicating. At the same time, it's become more and more obvious that the guy is a snake oil salesman who knows there's a market for his stories. The fact that he throws around well-worn, self-coined, catch-phrases illustrates that, and if I hear "Cosmic Watergate" one more time, I think I'm going to vomit. David Sereda uses UFOlogy to sell his goofy new agey crap, dragging down Dan Aykroyd with him, and same goes with Timothy Good. Former pro-footballer David Icke is a certifiable fruitcake who obviously had a breakdown a few years back, and is now publicly illustrating it.

I'd point out Whitley Streiber, but I really don't know where he falls in this. Same with Budd Hopkins. They're both key figures and somewhat showman like, but at the same time, really try to stay out of the limelight. Only the fact that Streiber is an author, who's made alien abduction and UFOs the latter part of his career, makes him seem less than reliable, but when interviewed, he's pretty low-key about things.

Mind you, those are just the showman of the field. There are others out there who aren't trying to make a buck off things, and whose earnest interest is drowned out by these hucksters and nut-cases. You've got people like Nick Pope, who ran the British government's official UFO investigation department for years, and all the others who just investigate for investigation's sake that leave any sort of agenda behind. There's also the two legends of UFOlogy, J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée, who have left this legacy behind them, and it's the people who have reluctantly picked it up that honour them.

Now, back to me.

I've been listening to a lot of Coast to Coast AM, and from there, I've been investigating a lot of this stuff on my own through various channels. I've gone through the various UFO web fora, and I've checked out the mailing lists, and I've come to one conclusion: the people who actively live this stuff just have no objectivity on the subject. They're either believers or debunkers, with nothing in between. They aren't me, I'm not them, and I will never, ever fit into either side of things. I'm too open-minded to be a debunker, but I'm far too rational to be a believer.

I've got the Mulder "I Want to Believe" poster, and I really do want to believe. Thing is. I can't. The stories, for the most part, tend to be way too fantastic and/or inconsistent to be real. This is more than likely due to the need to embellish that most storytellers fall prey to, and as such, the credibility of their stories become suspect. While I love a good UFO, abduction, or conspiracy yarn, I find that they're just that. Yarns. The convincing stuff just convinces me that there's something more out there, but the more out there stuff convinces me that we'll never know what it is.

The believers have made a skeptic out of me, and that looks like I'll ever be. Skeptical.

----

(Update 08/11/07: I change my opinion later.)

Labels: cultural theory, ufos

posted by Jason @ 10:36 AM 0 comments

I love it when ad execs don't do their homework...

The Electric Slide and the Hustle were from the exact same era. Yes, there's been a comeback of the Electric Slide, but it was 'created' in 1976. The Hustle was popularized in 1977, thanks to Saturday Night Fever.

Oh yeah, bell-bottoms and penny loafers? Heh, man, do they not understand fashion waves.

Labels: absurdity, media

posted by Jason @ 9:01 PM 0 comments

Heh, how about that...

Well, I just discovered that the Chaos Computer Club has been pinging my IP address. I don't know whether to be scared or flattered.

(The Luxembourg Internet Exchange has been as well, via the Restena Foundation.)

Labels: misc, site stuff

posted by Jason @ 12:44 PM 0 comments

Ebert on the past, present and future of film distribution

This is from the introduction to Roger Ebert's 2007 Video Yearbook, and it's a great read for those who are interested. I'm not going to quote any of it, as it's too long for me to quote the whole thing, and because it needs to be read in it's entirety.

Labels: movies

posted by Jason @ 2:33 PM 0 comments

Media rundown

I'll make this brief.

Watching: The movies have been Grindhouse, RoboCop, The Terminator, Police Story 2, Bullet in the Head, and The Scorpion King. On the TV side it's been Battlestar Galactica, Jericho and The Dresden Files.
Listening (to): Coast to Coast AM mp3s.
Reading: The Tomb by F. Paul Wilson.
Playing: From Russia with Love, Grandia III, Shadow Hearts: From the New World, and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect.

Labels: media rundown

posted by Jason @ 11:23 PM 0 comments

In the future, the great debate rages on

Labels: absurdity, misc

posted by Jason @ 11:42 PM 0 comments

Quote of the _______

“Video Violence and its retarded sequel Video Violence 2: The Exploitation are about as enjoyable as a paint thinner enema and less coherent than that analogy.”

-from a review at DVD Verdict.

Labels: quote

posted by Jason @ 6:06 PM 0 comments

Two rules of thumb

Okay, the following is my thinking overly highly of myself, and may be quite egotistic but it's something I believe in.

My two rules of thumb are:
1. If you're more immature than I am, we've got a problem.
2. If you're geekier than I am, we've got a problem.

I honestly don't have a great opinion of myself, it's something I'm working on, but if you can present me with evidence that gives me an opinion of you that's lower than myself... wow.

I have no idea why I'm posting this, but I think I might just need to vent here.

Labels: ego, misc

posted by Jason @ 1:04 PM 0 comments

Movie mash-up: Terminator vs. RoboCop

There's some great editing, and video-post, work on this one.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Trailer for Part 3:


And, one more the road, Neo vs. RoboCop:

Labels: movies, pop culture

posted by Jason @ 12:40 PM 0 comments

Grant Morrison goes Hollywood

According to Warren Ellis' Bad Signal, comic writer Grant Morrison has been tapped to write a screenplay adaptation of the videogame Area 51. From Bad Signal:

Good news for the day: Grant
Morrison's been hired to adapt
videogame AREA 51 for the big
screen. Very pleasing.

While videogame movies tend to stink, Area 51 and Grant Morrison were made for each other.

Labels: comics, movies

posted by Jason @ 11:19 AM 0 comments

Post-modern parody: Alanis Morissette

I don't know the story behind this one, but it's Alanis Morissette doing a cover of "My Humps", and she parodies both Fergie and herself at exactly the same time. It's pretty brilliant stuff, if you can get by the fact that it's Alanis Morissette doing a Black Eyed Peas song.

Labels: absurdity, music

posted by Jason @ 11:16 AM 0 comments

A Link to the past

Presented without comment:

Labels: absurdity, asian pop culture, TV, video games

posted by Jason @ 10:02 AM 0 comments

April Fools 2007, Google-style

Welcome to Google TiSP

The first page doesn't really do it, you have to dig to fully get it, and it's elaborately goofy. Also, it looks like people have discovered the Godzilla cloud again.

Labels: absurdity, web

posted by Jason @ 5:05 PM 0 comments