Will the sequel be Hannukah on Venus?

I love The Flaming Lips. Bonus to you and me, they're in a film called 'Christmas on Mars'.

Weird? You haven't heard their Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots then. Apparently, their Fight Test EP had a trailer of the movie. I'm so late to the game.

While the movie's in release in *select* theaters, a CD-DVD set including the movie and soundtrack is coming out in November.

These guys are by far one of the best things to ever come out of Ohio. Family and friends reading this, you know it's true.

That's what we call meat on my planet

IGN has a great piece on bad comic book turned movies. I'm truly curious to know if that unreleased 1994 version is worse than the '05 and '07 iteration.

As I was watching this horrible clip, I found myself unable to pull away. It was like being in a speeding, out of control car, and knowing you're going to crash into a telephone pole.

I also found the soundtrack seemed very familiar, and given that it's a Roger Corman production (king of the B-movies), I said to myself, "Self, didn't you see another Corman film when you were a kid with that same soundtrack?" Thanks to the internets, I can say "Yes." It was Corman's 'Battle Beyond the Stars'. Revel in the pre-A-Team George Peppard campy goodness.

Who would play Kuato?

izz naaht uh toooomah

PS: some of you on the Google Groups might have noticed some jerkface assclown spammed the group with some porn themed postings. I've since reported them to the Google Hive. Let's see what happens. I'd originally left the group open so anyone could post, but I've now restricted it. The internets are an amazing place that we each have to police. Let's make the world a better place...one keystroke at a time.

Hiro and Y.T.

So I started reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and I'm about 40 pages into it, and know it's going to be awesome.

Hiro and Y.T., by the way, are the...ahem...Protagonists...well at least Hiro is.

I was initially turned off by the whole 'cyberpunk' term because it sounded desperately needy. It screamed: I'm a cutting edge technophile who reads amazingly gadget-ridden books and don't make fun of me because I watch Star Trek, The Original Series! Of course, the dichotomy of the matter is that I like books with gadgets and own the TOS on DVD, but really who doesn't?

I digress...

What's the point in discussing the plot, when you can get it from Interweb Cybertown, suffice it to say that it anticipated virtual worlds like Second Life, and is rich with relatively accurately extrapolated computer science themes and disciplines. Above that, and this is what I find the most rewarding, is its social commentary on consumerism and what happens when privatization goes wrong, while at the same time not being extremely preachy.

It's so far been a visceral and completely engaging read. Which was a nice change from reading Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, about which I read somewhere in some dust jacket text indicating that Gully Foyle should watch out because Sterling's Abelard Lindsay was the new man constantly on the remake. I found that to be debatable, but the last part of Schismatrix became so anti-climactic (right around the time of the Neotenic Cultural Republic) and somehow bereft of the intensity and passion with which it initially started out that I returned it to the library...twice. Both times I checked it out! I had other books (Snow Crash) waiting in the hopper and somehow I just couldn't force myself to finish it.

I never do that, but when I do, it's soooo liberating.

OMG! Anchorman III: The Late Show

There aren't enough unique filmmakers and scriptwriters.

While present-day American cinema is known for its tentpole blockbusters, with Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer leading each summer release blazing to theatrical premiers in their futuristic alien jet-space car that shoots lasers where headlights should be, and is able to project cgi buildings which it then proceeds to barrel into, throwing virtual debris on the Fandango populace held at bay by the velvet rope, it's not exactly consistently producing innovative or groundbreaking material on a semi-regular basis. Don't get me wrong...God Bless America and all that, but damn, do we really need a remake of The Fly?

Maybe it's me getting older and being more critical of what I watch. Maybe it's the dumbening of America, when the hallmark of comedy is the next new Will Ferrel Anchorman-70s retro-basketball star-stepbrother vehicle that's misting my vision. We all know that Dubya is a big fan of Will's movies, which, by all reasonable calculations done on my stupiditron device indicates that they are inherently evil...save for 'Stranger Than Fiction'.

Of course there are the handful of recent and relatively recent films that stand out as being uniquely powerful, stimulating, and provocative:
The Departed (based of the Hong Kong film 'Infernal Affairs')
Little Miss Sunshine
The Usual Suspects
Goodfellas
Schindler's List
Batman Begins & The Dark Knight
The Lord of the Rings
Juno
Hard Candy
Being John Malkovich
Donnie Darko
Fresh
El Mariachi
Memento
Swingers
Rushmore
The Royal Tennenbaums
The Fountain
Sunshine
No Country for Old Men (Look for the next adaptation of McCarthy's book, 'The Road' and Michael Chabon discussing The Road).

'Brick' is another film. Written and directed by Rian Johnson, it's been called a neo-noir crime drama played out among highschoolers who talk like cats from the 1940s where the protagonist works to solve a murder. It was good. It was different, and it required some involvement from the audience. Johnson's next one coming out ('The Brothers Bloom') looks pretty interesting as well, but it's 'Looper' that's sounds compelling to me.

 "It's called Looper," Johnson said during a recent visit to the edit bay for The Brothers Bloom. "It's sci-fi, but it's very much -- well, I think people toss out Philip Dick sci-fi when they mean 'small, dark' sci-fi. Although, when I think of Philip Dick's books, it's something very different. I think people are confusing it with the movie Blade Runner.

Being a sci-fi uber nerd, and a Philip K. Dick fan at that, the comparison to Dickian themes whets my appetite, while the nerd is busy nodding his head and in complete agreement with the Dick |does not equal| 'Blade Runner' comment.

So, until then, I'm satisfying myself with Oliver Stone's next unbiased biopic, 'W.', which delves into the background of the only monkey ever to be elected President of the United States. Well done red staters!

'City of Ember' also looks interesting, but I'm reserving judgment. Just because Tom Hanks' company is producing it doesn't mean that it's going to outshine 'The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe'.

If Philip K Dick were alive he'd order from here

Cool shirts from Atomic Tarantula. Found this one from the sponsored listing spam header in my gmail.

The Hal-9000 one is pretty good, although the shirt info on this one (Stark Trek tricorder to those living under a rock), indicates that this is the 'classic' model.



Sorry to be the uber nerd, but this is actually a model from the Next Generation franchise.

Now here's a classic...sturdy, heavy, and made for Spock and Bones' loving hands. Just look at that bulbous display. Who needed all those fancy buttons, why in my day we did just fine with six, and rubbing that equalizer-lookin thing on the left. Damn space-whippersnappers....

GTA IV is here

The production of the video review is pretty sweet. The Kanye tie-in with the syncopated claps and gunfine is divine.

IGN has an amazing review here, and you'll see that's one of the very few games that they've ever given a '10'.

I remember playing GTA III on the PS2 back in a humble 2 bedroom apartment back in early 2001, and being completely blown away by the graphics, gameplay, and sheer replay value of the title. Vice City and San Andreas were worthy sequels, but I never found them to be all that compelling.

Now that the HD-DVD has gone the way of the dodo, and most games are available for both consoles (only talking about PS3 and 360, here: the Wii is cool, but we're not talking about Mario Kart here), I've serious motivation to take up a paper route to score the PS3 so I can get down with GTA IV. Or at least pick the new gear from the finery outlet at the Rockstar Warehouse.

I'm going to have to bug my colleagues in MIS to procure this one for the game room.

Ironically enough, I'm reading some short stories by J.G. Ballard (the writer probably best known for his work 'Empire of the Sun', which Spielberg made into a movie in the early 1980s). One of the tales is called 'The Subliminal Man', in which the protagonist becomes aware of the large signal arrays that are being erected all over the city. At first, he thinks they're related to airline traffic, and later realizes that they're huge subliminal emitters, blasting the populace with urgent advertisements designed to evoke consumption. It's a great commentary on how the things we own end up owning us, and more deeply embedded, are the pitfalls of extreme instances of capitalism and communism.

Is Sony shooting ads at my brain? Bastards. I'll fool them in the end. I had a lobotomy.

Spock reboots

J.J. Abrams is doing the franchise reboot for the next motion picture installment for Star Trek. I saw the trailer this past MLK Birthday when I saw Cloverfield, which was pretty good, save for the underlying plot involving a dude and a girl. C'mon, people....it's a creature film not a love story.

I know some people don't get 'it' with Star Trek. I got into it because my parents were into it. Other people I know who don't like it mentioned that their parents weren't into it. Maybe it's a generational thing, unless you're also prone to sf (sci-fi) tales, but there's something compelling about the Star Trek mythos.

Tons has been said about how Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future was a welcoming and refreshing optimistic view, as historically speaking I'd go so far to say that the sf genre leaned towards dystopic themes (think Philip K. Dick, Heinlein, Bradbury, Vonnegut). I think that's what makes this body of work so enduring. The audience wants to hope...dare I say...they have the 'audacity' to hope for a better future: one in which mistakes of the past are used as lessons and guidelines for building a brighter tomorrow.

Regardless, any TV show that spawns 11 movies, and generates enough inspiration to have an aircraft carrier and a Space Shuttle named after a fictional vehicle, is doing something right.
...digging the threads...ah...the 70s...I think they existed for the sole purpose to fuel Will Ferrell-driven movies.

The good virus

I'm normally not one for viral marketing campaigns. They just seem like a waste of time to me.

But (there's always a 'but'), the one for the J.J. Abrams movie, 'Cloverfield', is pretty cool. It's releasing today.

IGN Movies has an done a fine job encapsulating the viral campaign components.

What's a viral campaign? Well, without 'ask'ing the internet, I'm going to give you my erudite (or lamebrained) definition. With the advent of embedded and prolific technology coupled with the explosion of social networking, the viral campaign is one that is a cheap and interactive way to increase brand awareness. I also like to think that they're a cousin of mememails and sibling to viral videos.

For example, a game studio is launching a huge title...like Halo 2. They drop little packets of seemingly unrelated information (like some bizarrely named URL...like 'ilovebees.net'), and people go to that URL and find that its content is either deliberately obfuscate or shares some peripheral relationship with the title and provides additional background information.

Whatever the method, the delivery vector (a website, email notifications, or 'secure access' [those requiring a password obtained after completing some other task on another related website] sites) is designed to engage the consumer. An example of a successful iteration of a slightly older, but cult film of the early 2000s is the Flash site of Richard Kelly's 'Donnie Darko'.

Entertainment viral campaigns (those for movies and games) have been extremely successful in generating buzz. The hype for 'Snakes on a Plane' was primarily driven by its viral marketing and from the incorporation of suggestions from bloggers into the actual script. Of course, the movie was a disaster, but did showcase the awesome power of Samuel L 'Muthafuckin' Jackson, but I digress.

'Cloverfield' is shot in the Blair Witch style, which means that when we see it, the movie plays out like we're watching documentary content. Except this mockumetary is about a monster attack on NYC, and we see it through the eyes of some hip 20 somethings who could never afford to live in the places that they do in real life. In reality, they'd be sharing a couch in Brooklyn.

The movie's campaign is pretty cool because 1) it's not bizarrely obscure, and 2) because it fleshes out some back-story details. Kinda cool. It's like backstory that was left out of the movie, and I happen to like sci-fi/monster films.

You can actually infer quite a bit from the various viral components, although the film I find myself making in my head after checking out these viral vectors could be in polar opposite of the desires of production and creative team.

Regardless, the fact that there's deep-sea drilling, a mysterious substance that appears to infect/mutate people, satellite imaging, and an origin unknown skyscraper-sized creature running amok is good movie times for me!

If you're curious to see more on the viral aspects of the fime, consider this: according to the plot, there's a fictional Japanese company that does deep-sea drilling. One station is located in the Atlantic, relatively close to NY. A 'press release' on the company's website provides a phone number (+81-3-5403-6318) to call if you have more questions about the 'incident'. Hmm...want to call Japan?

No Ahhnold for Terminator 4 - is there anything Christian Bale can't do?

I was having a conversation with a friend about who today's current swiss army knife actor...the actor who seems to pop up in unrelated films and always nails the role regardless of how questionable the film may be. Such an actor usually makes the film more enjoyable.

Names were thrown around. Val Kilmer (we excused him for Thunderheart) was one...c'mon...you never saw his breakout role in 'Real Genius'? It even had the Tears for Fears hit, Everybody Wants to Rule the World, as the soundtrack's terminus; wrapping the ending up in a nice little package proving that brains can always overcome government stupidity assuming you know how to substitute a 'prom' with the 'reprom' (a little inside Real Genius humor).

Can't remember the others we discussed, probably because the crux of the matter revolved around one actor we both agreed displayed the requisite wicked thespian chops: Christian Bale.

He broke out in Steven Spielberg's 'Empire of the Sun' in 1987. I personally feel that it was his disturbing portrayal of the 'American Psycho' character Patrick Batemen conceived in Bret Easton's eponymous novel that put him on the map. From there he chose films that balanced box office appeal and roles that explored the shadowy facets of humanity without becoming overly saturated in maudlin themes...with 'The Prestige' probably being one of the more darker films of his films.

Needless to say I was thrilled to hear that he'd be picking up the Terminator franchise as John Connor, whom we all know as Sarah Connor's son, who saves humanity from the brink of extinction from the machines led by SkyNet's brutal self-aware AI. Producers are calling it a 'reboot' of the franchise, a term that's becoming more and more popular these days (think the J.J. Abrams 'Star Trek' project). No word yet on who'll be the antagonist, since the Governator has his own battles to field at present.

[sidenote: is this 'rebooting' another indication that Hollywood is running out of ideas, or that present-day themes are so fleeting or uncompelling that it keeps returning to topics it knows were once innovative, visionary, and thrilling...what is it about today's climate that's so less interesting? Are we being lulled deeper into a consumer oriented fugue? Facebooking our privacy away? Are we losing ourselves to our Second Lives, or are dynamic virtual communities making such static artifacts as lights projected on a screen passé?]

Bale is returning as Bruce Wayne/Batman in Christopher Nolan's 'rebooted' 'Batman' franchise, and recently appeared in '3:10 to Yuma' and is scheduled to headline in 2009's 'Killing Pablo', also starring one of the scariest villains ever to grace the screen in this year's 'No Country for Old Men'...Javier Bardem. Should be good stuff. They've even gotten out a trailer for the new Terminator film! Amazing! Didn't see Christian Bale though...

Blog strike

Been so busy with work and winter and playing Team Fortress 2 that I haven't been able to post for a while, so this one's a jumble of 4 topics: the writer's strike, the Top 10 Online Flash games courtesy Cnet's Crave, the sale of a WoW character, and MyLifeBits.

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I hope the writer's strike recently initiated goes on for a whole year.

I hope the surplus of filmed shows is completely drained, and the vast inventory of television production vaults are entirely withdrawn.

Why?

Becase I want 'reality' shows to rule the airwaves. I want high quality programming like The Biggest Loser, The Bachelor/ette, Studs n' Skanks, Kid Nation, Punched in the Face, and all permutations of Punk'd to dominate television. I want syndicated episodes of The Simpsons, Futurama, Family Ties, and The Cosby Show to become the commodity for which networks will bankrupt themselves while they compete for fewer and fewer viewers.

'Lost' will epynomously actualize itself, and there will be no savior for 'Heroes'. 'Gray's Anatomy' will develop a terminal illness, and 'Desperate Housewives' will get a divorce on grounds of adulterous behavior with the kids from 'That 70s Show' and they'll need to move to some city where they film 'CSI' variants.

An entire season of television will see significant delays of DVD production save for the newest 'Survivor'.

And maybe people will start reading more books and watching less crap. Oh sweet bliss.

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Crave UK, part of Cnet, puts together 'Top 10...' lists on a fairly regular basis, and one of their current ones is a must see for those who engage in a little time-killing anti-boredom activity at work. I myself have never engaged in this questionable behavior, however, I know there are many that do. Lazy sloths.

I'm posting this one because I played most of these over the course of the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I highly recommend Desktop Tower Defense.

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Ever need to sell your World of Warcraft character online? Need help in specifying all those esoteric details? You need to talk to this guy. Just an excerpt of his post:

the priest was the best geared priest on its pvp server hands down pre bc. I was the first priest to have full t1, full t2 and the first piece of t3. I took a long break and recently came back to play BC. I lvled to 70 and started farming epics, but the game just isnt the same anymore. I still have alot of those old epics as well as old weapons like Benediction/Anathema from back in the day.

Currently wearing 11 enchanted epics from various lvl 70 raid instances and have more in the bank for DPS. My current build is holy/Disc and I can achieve 1700 plus healing easily and almost 2k buffed. I have about 1k arena points saved up to buy new gear.

Priest has 5 different epic riding mounts and 1 flying mount. 375 tailoring and 355 enchanting currently. Every single pre BC enchant is known including all AQ 40/AQ20 MC and rep enchants etc. Currently have a lot of epic tailoring patterns to play with at lvl 70. Just need to farm primal nethers to make the good stuff. Plenty of enchanting mats etc as well. About 120g on this toon.

You need this character! Anyone with a character possessing holy/Disc is worth a thousand mouseclicks.

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Philip K Dick was right...again.

FoxNews is reporting that Microsoft is working on a venture to backup your life. It's a crazy thing to think that (based on Microsoft estimates) 'a 1-terabyte (1,000-gigabyte) hard drive will cost less than $300...and could easily hold all text documents, voice files and photographs of a person's complete life experience — but if it came to video, it would be only enough for four hours per day for an entire year.'

To tie this directly to a Dickian theme, an India-based company went to far as to use a clever phonetic spelling for the business, reQall. While reQall doesn't implant memories as in Dick's tale, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale', it suggests that there's a market for helping people to remember.

Because reQall converts what you say to text, remembering is as easy as searching the web. You can read and edit your posts, see what you’ll need to remember next week, search for a particular item and more. You can even see an overview of your activity on a calendar view.

Don't know if this is going to be the 'killer Web 2.0 app', or if it'll end up being one more online 'resource' that you'll need to remember that you could use if you just took the time out to set up an account with them.

I'm waiting for the movie version of Burn:Cycle.

Shiva holes

Do you remember the Walt Disney film, The Black Hole?

It's a personal favorite of mine, as it remains firmly embedded in my childhood memory as one of the top 5 best ever. Robert Forster, who wouldn't make another big comeback until Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, was the the captain of a ship, the Palamino, who finds another ship thought to be lost hanging just beyond a black hole's event horizon. Reunions, theorizations on travel in a black hole, kidnapping, shooting robots, laser lobotomies, and trips into the great beyond ensue. It had an addictive theme as well.

I had the audio record for the movie. You know the big 33 1/3 speed record you'd play, while reading the accompanying storybook rich with movie photos? Man, those were awesome. I also had 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom' and the Star Trek Buena Vista records. I recommend the Robot Masters mp3 sample.

Where was I? Black holes. Some interesting recent work in astronomy suggests that at the core of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole. How big is 'supermassive'? Well, according to an article in the Washington Post (where's there's also an ad in which I was involved: see the Presidential Candidate search), the one at the heart of the Milky Way, which is the galaxy in which the Sol system hovers, is 4 million times the size of our own sun. I can't even comprehend this. Is it like 4 million pushpin heads crammed together in something the size of a carnival balloon...or a hot air balloon?

Even more interesting,

To the enormous surprise of those who study the universe, the size of a supermassive black hole appears to have a direct and unusual correlation to the galaxy around it. Researchers calculated a decade ago that the mass of a supermassive black hole appeared to have a constant relation to the mass of the central part of its galaxy, known as its bulge. This relationship supports the notion that the evolution and structure of a galaxy is closely tied to the scale of its black hole.

This means that every starlight starbright galaxy in the multiverse contains a black hole so massive, that given enough time they could eventually consume the host galaxy, and spit out new elemental particles needed for new stars, suns, planets, and such. Philosophically speaking, they are a catalyst of destruction and creation.They're like giant celestial Shivas busting out an endless Nataraja.

Meanwhile, people back on Earth pay over $3 (if you're lucky) for a gallon of gas and work in cubes like these for eight hours a day for years upon years. Perhaps it could be argued that we impose our own event horizons upon which we spin inexorably to the great unknown at which time the process begins anew. I hope my next cube has a window.

Pyramids and a coffin where the creek hits the rise

I'm working on this idea for a story, but I haven't quite gotten it all worked out yet, and I know that NO ONE else has EVER thought about this, and I've taken all the right steps to copyright my IP on it, so I feel comfortable talking about it here.

I want to write a sci-fi/alternate reality/steampunk tale based on Bob Dylan's song "Isis". You heard it here first. Anyone else in Hollywood tries to option it, I've already gelled the idea here. If you hear about it, you let me know, so I can go pull someone's lungs out and feed it to them by the jagged spoonful. I know about copyright. I saw the movie.

I'm not quite sure where I want to take it, and why he leaves his wife in the first place, but the basic journey about disconnect and frustration upon the expanse of a frontier of some sort, a serendipitous connection with someone motivated with the purpose to be remembered under false pretenses, and an eventual denouement and reunion borne out from the experience on the road is somehow very compelling to me. I think couching it in some kind of alternate reality landscape would make it a spicy meatball.

It goes without saying that as with most songs and art in general there's a great deal of interpretation left to the audience, so anyone familiar with the piece might not see it, but I keep getting this sense of a tale wanting to be told.

It might not be the next Michael Bay flick (God I hope not), but I just might have to write several drafts just to get this thing out of my head. It's pervasive and nagging, but yet I feel as though should I move it from my sparkling synapses and onto an e-sheet, it would be a good thing. It's fat like child in my head.