7/30/12

This Moment's Most Hypeable Movie

Out of nowhere I see this movie trailer on YouTube. It's about the David Mitchell novel. There was one part of it I have read, the futuristic cyper-punk dystopia, which I thought was pretty sharp on a few levels, both as genre fiction and social observation. So the trailer, to me, makes the film look like it's the next Inception. Except potentially more confusing.

So Tom Hanks is in this movie, they've got 'Outro' by M83 playing in the trailer, and the words "EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED" show up on screen at one point  – really exciting stuff. In a five minute trailer I've seen a bunch of stuff out of the movie. They've referenced a bunch of concepts: metempsychosis (this one's about to trend, trust me), love, action, dialogue, narrative exposition... if you watch the trailer you will discern a dozen more. Considering the nature of the trailer, I wonder if I've seen a condensed version, which also makes me wonder, taking the unfinished book into account, if it's going to be a must-see.

It sounds like the sort of achingly metaphysical and deep movie that will keep people thinking until they reach their cars or have walked for a half hour. It definitely looks cool, and you can forgive any foreseeable cliches and laziness by the sheer variety of settings. It just seems like the trailer generously lays the movie out and, really, how hard is it to pair the movie with a neat little conceptual trailer, even if it has to be half as long?

It's got me thinking all existentially, even at this moment, and for me this is the most hypeable moment of this particular upcoming film release. Really there's always a reason to cheer when a book is turned into a movie, or concerning movies anything that's not a sequel, prequel, remake, or franchise reboot. I just wonder if Cloud Atlas will suffer in the same way Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy did.

Anyways it's a cool trailer. It starts out with ethereal music and then kicks into more tense music and then goes insane. Dudes on horses, clones in a future dystopia, inspiring quotes. Then an explosion and a moment of silence and M83 and some more inspiring material. It's hard to resist, and in just a few months we get to see if it meets or exceeds expectations.






7/15/12

User Comment Rodeo: The Lone Stranger

Anonymity is one of the internet's most cherished features. Various people forgo the problem of creating a persona, and exist anonymously online. This leads to all kinds of beliefs and misbehavior, generally in the form of being uncivil in some important way.


That or the internet is really ruining us, and the above is representative of something that has always been with us, waiting to change us for its own ends. This is either earnest and obviously not something that needs to happen or it's the sort of background trolling that I begin to wonder if anything on the internet is true at all.

All that shit I thought was serious and/or disturbing is just a mild and innocuous prank – but that's impossible, because there is obviously some need for things to have some truth, and it goes against the best types of logic that the whole shameful spectacle that is the internet is just a really immense, poorly-told joke.

The internet is obviously a product of mediocrity and apathy, enabled by under-appreciated and misused breakthroughs. It's a place much like earth, really. It's really just an echo, and nothing is really okay right now at the moment, but it's possible to believe that at some point things will get better. We will pull out of the great nosedive and begin to solve our problems again, and become better than we were.

We'll just obsessively communicate our stories and agendas while doing it.

7/9/12

A New Vanilla Ice Era

It goes without saying that Justin Beiber is his generation's Vanilla Ice. There is so much fuss made about the whole thing by people who hate him, people who support him, and, most oddly of all, people who claim to be entirely disinterested. Yet the truth is pretty simple, and I hear very few people discuss it at all.

I have to wonder about that for at least a moment. Ultimately it makes sense that nobody cares. Everyone is too busy pulling original agendas (and trying to make them stick to an indifferent, fractured and/or and shellshocked mass identity) to consider the wholesome, mundane, and entirely mystifying patterns that are more and more self-evident.

Problems, often doubling as patterns or effects of patterns, are just not so easy to turn into double-plus commercials. 

6/14/12

To Any Entity Reading This:

Are you a google crawler? and, if so, why are you leaving posts? I'm mildly disturbed. Can you comment with how you stumbled upon this post? This sort of thing messes with me and now I am just now beginning at the dawn of wonder to try and figure this shit out. I really don't try to be anything but a sloppy blogger. How do I execute these timely, completely earnest, and cutting posts? Well. It's pretty simple actually. This is obviously my nonsensical response to a nonsensical contemporary situation.

And yet. And yet, it's sort of insulting to any real human reader for me to wonder about it. Aren't I supposed to have a naive faith in the internet? "Oh, yeah, it's not a total wrecked derelict piece of shit... well, by volume, only about 5% of it isn't." Sure, you can try to argue it isn't.

Not so insulting either that it could lead to terminal frustration. I mean I write this shit out sometimes, maintaining no real schedule or coherence. There is no focus of attention I never really write about anything except sometimes I'll do that bullshit thing where it's recent events or something. Recently Diablo 3 but who really gave a fuck? I maybe did for a few hours, but the whole world had a lead on me and the thing burned out as things do.

And so I'll do that bullshit thing where I write about or include likely terms but really, what happens but you search google hopelessly and this content farm yields a few matches. That's kind of the shit thing about the internet, it's so vast and organized in such (parallel) preferential hierarchies that finding anything is worse than ever. You'll find bullshit echoes of things you want to find, but everything's moved on or been killed or corrupted.

I'll try to do things for views but mostly you could pejoratively say I just do some self-satisfactory writing exercises, help nobody, basically just wring sentences out of whatever soup of words is in my head at the time. I think it has some worth, but not that much that it'd be a manuscript or something, and so on I post. It's a simple system and I think there are definitely things posted where either the writing or complete inanity has been worth the price of reading.

You'll find news articles much worse than this in execution and style. Go read some right now and come back, and tell honestly of their eloquence and, most of the time, fuck them.  When it comes to well written hack writing, I won't say I'm expert, but I do not lack for trying or panache. Which is why I try to blog it – albeit sloppily.

6/3/12

User Comment Rodeo: Point vs. Counterpoint.

Everybody's heard the story. I probably don't need to go into it, and I don't really want to. It's a chilling one. This post and ripost say something about when and when not to point fingers or ask for collective reflection. It's not even so funny.


The bottom-most post is kind of the numbskull post, or the comedic foil. Whoever posted that doesn't really have anything to say, but wants to say it. Hello 85% of comment boards, peanut gallery fucks, and general idiot populace who don't do the rest of us a favor by keeping to themselves. No empathy, just a sense of indignation that a potential sociopath managed to cleverly avoid the same security that allegedly asked for their name prior to leaving the country. Pro-tip: next time don't use a travel agent. Your inconvenience is completely unrelated and unimportant to this tragic story involving the death of a young expat student. If you're trying to make a joke: fuck yourself. Get away from anything serious, and never consider a job in comedy because you're about as funny as a bag of grass clippings. Next, the rejoinder to the above middle post:


Yes, fine, sure. Way to speak for all of Canada. Somewhat thoughtful, and you're definitely right that it was not the time to reflect on our cultural or societal values (which include ATTENTION GETTING, SELF-WORSHIP, THE REDUCTION OF HUMAN LIFE, GREED, DESENSITIZATION TO VIOLENCE VIA ALL MEDIA AND OVER-REPORTAGE, and PUBLICITY). But to be fair I don't know what the first poster wanted us to examine in modern society. The post could've been about anything. Mentally-ill people aren't ostracized to the point where they commit crimes. The committed 'insane' live shitty lives, but some of them are kept from society for a reason.

I think, ultimately, that it's the ubiquity of the alleged perpetrator of this murder that should give us pause. There are many young men and women 'on the get' who do whatever is necessary to get whatever they want. They have infantile minds and dangerous ideas, they hold very little value in life and too much in material. They are everywhere and they run banks, deficits, companies, governments, the law, and society in general. And yet we are not afraid. And yet when, say, a regional economy is dismembered and sent in bloody pieces around the world, its ex-employees festering in neglect and despair, a similar crime is not perceived to have taken place.

Maybe it's all rhetoric, but maybe it's not. Maybe the poster posted a dumb question on the old message boards, maybe the poster wasn't thinking. Maybe the poster hates society. Maybe it's just a simple story made complex by the ideas people are injecting into it. Then again, it's Canada's Most Insane Crime of the Season, and every sensationalist will jump onto it with an agenda. All those agendas will end up burying the very point of the story: the victim. And it always happens that way. Maybe we should take a goddamn minute to think about how these things come to pass, and how they may not reflect merely one diseased individual.

Or maybe we should get back to feeling good about our society because it does not literally encourage malice.

6/2/12

I haven't read CJR for a while and then return to read this: a timely and concise collection of regrettable headlines. I do get a bit of a kick out of jokes sometimes, I have to say – and these are some fine, amusing headlines. For instance:

"173 animals seized; 2 face cruelty charges"

That sounds like a really nice group of animals, why would they ever get arrested? Did the innocent ones get set free? Were there at the minimum fair trails? What kind of cruelty charges? In reality it's probably some sort of crazy neglect story which makes it, somehow, even more disturbingly funny than ever.

And it's not even the best one; the best one, predictably enough, is about a shark.








5/30/12

The Exciting World of Computer Mice

I'm not going to research this at all but there's a few hundred types of mice and mostly, from bargain to budget to bullshit crazy, they are not optimum. There's a sort of rule of mediocrity at play: the mice closest to median price are typically the best of the bunch. This rule doesn't really exist with keyboards, which is why I'm writing about mice. High-power web publications will tell you different, and in glowing language, but all the php coding and art direction can't hide the truth: cheap mice can be the best, mid-priced is the best bet for longevity in any case, and expensive mice are either awkward or insane.

Back in the day you could unscrew the bottom of the mouse and use the hard, small tracking ball as impromptu projectile. The insides were covered with dust and a patina of random filth, and it was easy to purposefully or accidentally break or sabotage one. Cleaning them out was something you did at home only, because there was nothing worse than the ball pit of a public mouse. Mice didn't have scrollwheels for years, also, which is really easy to forget and really charming to remember.

So it makes sense that there are now wireless mice with lasers, eight buttons, and adjustable weights, or that double as lighters, or whatever. The old rule still applies. Mid priced mice are worth at the minimum twice. I recall an old Microsoft mouse that worked fine for 8 years until the buttons finally gave up working properly. The last mouse I paid for (ie. was not included with the computer) lasted 6, and it was the cheapest reasonable mouse I could find.

It was fine for most of those years. Then the middle button stopped working, and I found I'd gotten so used to it I couldn't just accept not having one. I was lured into the habit of using modern, functional mice, and it was pretty bad. I never got a case of the shakes while trying feverishly to make the button work, but I got pretty frustrated. Middle mouse button is useful for all kinds of things, like opening extra browser tabs (luxury), to quickly scrolling around oversize pages and docs (productivity/luxury).

And so I finally put down money on a Logitech M500, which to me has always stood for the pinnacle of mid-priced quality. And it is. The scroll wheel and mid button are loosey goosey but the side buttons, hyper-speed scrolling, and everything else is perfect. I haven't had a mouse this good in years if not decades, and I bet it'll increase my blog posting, content, quality, and attractiveness by .5 if not 1.0% Mostly, when I was in the process of looking around for a cheaper, better, M500 alternative I was either disgusted or in disbelief.

And again, holy shit are there some expensive input devices for computers. The only thing I could see myself spending money on is the wireless, solar powered keyboard because when you write, a good keyboard is like a comfortable, quality pen and good paper rolled into one. For now, I'll simply say that I will never go back to scrolling like a sucker again. Hyper-fast scrolling makes even multi-thousand song playlist issues a thing of the past. Whirl that baby and fly past song titles so quick you can't even see them. Simply amazing, this future of mice.

5/15/12

Diablo 3? Let's get drunk and play Diablo 2.

While I am somewhat interested in Diablo 3, it's just easier to find an old copy of D2, with the expansion pack if possible, and just drink and play that. Considering: D3 is a 12 gigabyte download and will murder anyone with a bandwidth cap; D2 installs in under 2 GB with the expansion, offers similarly limitless possibilities for time wasting and compulsive gameplay.

Probably the best part is that 60 dollars can buy a decent amount of liquor, which makes getting drunk and playing Diablo 2 cost-effective compared to drinking and playing Diablo 3. Analysts have offered the ludicrous explanation that although the game will sell very well, it will not outlive its predecessor.

Personally I don't know what I'm going to do. Nothing even seems real anymore in this brave new world.

Diablo 3 + 18 hours. Servers are down, the title screen and introduction cinematic were nice, there were plenty of graphics options and I can't play but I can fiddle around for optimum (imaginary) performance. My attempts at a screencapture were  failures, and since Diablo 3 does not run in the Steam framework, pressing F12 did nothing.

The second login attempt was successful, I had to accept a terms of use contract. Then another one, and then a third one, at which point I thought the game was bugging out. Then I got to the character creation screen. The options, it seemed, were tenfold. Five classes, four of which I am unfamiliar with, and two gender options... long gone are the days when an assassin was a woman and there was nothing to do about it.

Ongoing coverage may follow, especially if the game ceases to function normally or servers go down again.

Diablo 3 + 20 hours. The game alt-tabs very smoothly, perhaps more smoothly than any modern game I've recently played. This is extremely surprising and I post immediately about it. More exciting discoveries remain to be found, and the idea of drinking and playing Diablo 2, in which you can't even break the scenery to pieces, seems laughable.

Diablo 3. 24 hours later. Battle.net has been killed and will return whenever. 

5/9/12

Recent News Suggests that the Swiss are Idiots Too

Recent news suggests that the Swiss, long known for looking down at other countries for wars and stupid decisions, have a tendency to be pretty stupid, too. Having a rave at a zoo is probably one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of, since any legit raves take place in abandoned warehouses or vampire nightclubs.

Stupid event planning like this is bound to lead to problems. This story wouldn't even have existed in a rational world organized by logical thinkers and responsible adults. However... c'est la vie.

The dummy crowd have claimed another two victims, which weren't even human, at literally the dumbest possible event. There were few other outcomes than dead animals and a shocked public. The User Comment Rodeo v1.2x instantly pinged the most interesting and unthinkable response, which I felt compelled to post here so as to offer context:


This scathing, ignorant, and extremely stupid post basically reflects all the many things that are wrong with the story. These animals didn't belong in Switzerland – at all. But whatever, animals in captivity should be allowed to live fruitless and unfulfilling lives for the entertainment of religious wieners who believe that animals in captivity are precious and that there's nothing wrong with harvesting a few for the benefit of the public.

On the other hand this post is obviously a troll, from the double-single-standard animal abuse refrain that the evildoers be made to suffer to the same extent of their animal victims. Fucking dolphins overdosed at a rave. This world is evidently a few idiots away from a critical mass of stupidity, arrogance, and incompetence that will likely remain unnoticed for years.

Some Swiss losers deserve to have their drugs taken away from them, forever, for attending this insane farce of an event. The fools who organized this event should have their event-planning licenses revoked in perpetuity. The zoo is obviously going to buy two new dolphins and I'm sorry for their loss, even if I don't agree with their policies or whoever vetted this insane rave.


5/6/12

RIP MCA

First of all, Hello Nasty was the shit. I don't care who you are or what you're doing, fuck that, it was the shit. I don't think there was anything else that year that I heard that was in any way close. That album on repeat was golden for me, and "Intergalactic" was the fucking song to get hyped to. If they'd have released the same album this year I'd probably be just as happy with it. That's more than a decade late and I would've still bought two copies.

I only heard, outside of my own music playing, three Beastie Boys songs on Friday. Lots of people, of course, didn't have a clue who MCA was. Squares, hipsters, you name it - the critically uncool didn't know about anything and weren't the least discouraged. One car, at least, drove past me blaring "Fight For Your Right"* which I can't disagree with at all. I wasn't going to party on Friday, but anyone who was should have at least heard that song. If not: for shame. (*"No Sleep Till Brooklyn" is arguably a better anthem but I'm not going to argue about things I love anyway. That would be childish of me.

There's not much to say. Literally any other place on the internet will give a detailed biography send-up, information about Adam Yauch, tell personal stories and all that. Even Wikipedia put up the news. So there's nothing to do but cast this tiny, shitty, sloppy blog post into the void, with a few words of praise.

Fucking righteous, awesome music that never wore out its welcome by anyone with an open mind and a working set of ears. Sick rhymes and flowing, all around illest contender.

It seems like the true end of an era. To say there are or were no bands like the Beastie Boys is ignorant, but they were still unique. Nobody else ever wrote a song called "Egg Man", for example. If there was, it was either in another context entirely or it was ripped off of the original – or it simply wasn't as good.

That's all, then. There's at least one Beastie Boys album I haven't listened to, and I guess it's time to take that final plunge, except I have to wait at least six months to buy it at a mainstream record store, and at least a year at independent record shops. Otherwise I just know the looks I'll get.


That's a shit Friday, right there.