Saturday, April 29, 2006

a work of art

like it says above, this is paul robertson's pirate baby's cabana battle street fight 2006, and it is an amazing work of art. it's an animation done in the style of all those awesome fighting arcade games from back in the day that i wish they still made. watching this is a lot like watching someone play an awesome video game. the only regret is that after he's done, it's not my turn to play. i've never been happier to see monster babies burst out of their zombie mothers' wombs, and i reckon y'all feel the same way. watch it, or i'll send christopher walken after you.

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Thursday, April 13, 2006

i hate alarmists

at the risk of sounding like a republican jackass or an annoyingly frequent complainer about the news media, i'm going to have to come down on ridiculous one-sided alarmist articles like this time magazine article from a week or so ago about global warming. i mean, just look at the fucking cover. the first words are telling you to "be worried. be _very_ worried." what the fuck? is global warming a problem? quite possibly. is our government not doing enough to curb pollution and protect the environment? yes, definitely. should we, as people who might want to sustain a planet capable of supporting the continuation of the human race, stop fucking everything up? well, probably to the best of our ability. i wouldn't trade in my suv for a bicycle tho*. there are important points being brot up for sure, but the way in which it is brot up just grates at my insides. the article makes it sound like tomorrow (or perhaps the day after tomorrow), the polar ice caps will all have melted and polar bear corpses will be floating down the street while we're on our commute. there is absolutely no need for this brand of false urgency (might it be an urgent situation? sure, but is it as urgent as this article makes it out to be? hell, no). it treats its audience as if we're all a bunch of bumfuck asshole idiots, and i thoroughly resent that implication. i might be an asshole, but i'm not an idiot, and i don't need some chicken with glasses and zach braff's voice to burst into my room with his hands (or wings) frantically waving, screaming at the top of his lungs about the sky falling. please also note that this is not the first alarmist global warming article that mr. jeffrey kluger has written for time (i wonder if it has anything to do with his winning a whitman bassow award for best reporting in any medium on international environmental issues for a "global warming" cover package). you might call him the official time magazine global warming mascot. going backwards from the one published a week or so ago, here's one from january 2006, another from september 2005, august 2005, and august 2002. so perhaps, he wasn't alarmist enuf in the previous articles, so he's stepping it up, hoping that people will listen. well, did they? did they listen? i'm thinking not so much. i sure didn't. all that was accomplished is that now i think jeff kluger thinks i'm an asshole idiot, which annoyed me a week or so ago (and i suppose still does a little bit, if i'm still talking about it). i just feel like this style of news reporting, the "oh no, we're all gonna die!" sort doesn't really have a place where we are in our day and age. it just stinks of old school propaganda and manipulation. talk to me like i'm a normal person and leave it up to me to decide whether or not i think i am going to die tomorrow because of what i'm doing today.

*i'm lying. i don't actually own a car.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

i don't care about seals

this is a stupid headline. it's not even news. thousands upon thousands of baby seals have been beaten to death yearly for years and years. for something to be news, i feel like it should be, above all, a relatively new occurrence, something whose status has changed recently. at the very least, that requirement should be satisfied if you're going to put it on the front page, where important stories are reported about. to me, this stupid headline is the same thing as a news report about the benefits of breathing air and drinking water. behold, the sun comes out during the day, and the moon comes out at nite! this isn't news! this baby seal shit sounds like someone at cnn.com is anti-seal-clubbing and has commandeered the front page for their own purposes. it's not as if i want to stifle the voice of the protesters either, because i really don't care about it. if you want to make mention about a recent protest against the seal-killing, then that's news. but the bare listing of seal-killing statistics is not. it's just a number that tries to evoke some sort of emotional reaction from an audience. lemme give some more examples. iran's recent uranium enriching activities, that's news. secretary rice making a statement about it, news. peter sarsgaard and maggie gyllenhaal expecting a baby and getting married, news. "Seal hunters expected to kill 234,000 Wednesday," NOT NEWS. i'm not saying that web news is the pinnacle of news reporting, but i would like that it stay above the brain-dissolving blandness of televised news. i'm just asking that they keep the non-news out of the news.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

bank boys

the wells fargo bank on the corner of 45th and the ave has always been relatively good to me in terms of the quality of boy. i've been going to that bank since it was a first interstate, tho i don't remember the boys there then. anyhow, early in my college career (i don't think he was there when i was in highschool), there was a boy who worked at the bank named nels, and he was fucking hot, in that tall, chiseled, abercrombie frat boy kind of way. i remember liking his silly ties. needless to say, i always went into the bank to do my business, and almost never conducted transactions via an atm. i especially enjoyed casual fridays, when he would dress down give us a different view of nels. he worked there for a few years and then stopped. i still miss having such a hot teller when i go to the bank.

of course, over the years there have been other cute boys, but i can't say any have matched up to him. altho recently, a new gay boy has started working there. he's dressed fabulously and i love his hair. i haven't had him help me yet, as the last time i was there, he was helping a woman who couldn't understand english (with a dumbass next to her repeated everything the cute boy said to her in ENGLISH), which took entirely too long. but if he's just started then he won't disappear so fast, so i'll have a little incentive to go to the bank now.

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

dangerous muse

dangerous muse is making its way across the blogs, and for good reason. it's great 80s dance music that i just can't not dance to (always indicative of awesome dance music), and above all, the two boys pictured above are fucking hot. FUCKING HOT. you guys have my immediate support. check them and their music out on myspace. okay, i have to post this so i can close the window. that picture is getting me too hot, and i need to put this shit on my ipod immediately.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

law building stop-and-chat

i ran into a highschool classmate in front of the law building. a lot of my highschool classmates seem to be at the law program here at the u. i hadn't seen him since we graduated, i'm sure, which was almost six years ago. it was another one of those slighty awkward conversations (the dreaded stop-and-chat), but i didn't pay attention to much of what he was saying because i couldn't help but notice that his skin was really dry. the guy should invest in a bottle of lotion, if anything, for his own dermic health.

also, these people always ask me, "what are you up to?" and i kno they mean, "what do you have going on rite now in terms of the big picture?" but i always answer it as, "what are you currently on your way to do?" so instead of talking about being in school, i said, "oh, i'm on my way to the library to print out something." i'm sure he found that enlightening.

Monday, April 03, 2006

edison chen

as many of you might already kno, this is edison chen, canadian-born hong kong pop star. i don't like the way he sings (or "raps"), and his acting is sub-par at best, but none of that matters. boy is hot! he's always seemed like an asshole to me, and from what i hear, that's not terribly far from the truth, but i still can't deny it. boy is hot! here's a pic of his balls (unfortunately, they are only tennis balls) from the same spread in february's taiwan men's uno. he's appeared in a bunch of movies since i first saw him in gen-y cops, and if you watch hk cinema at all, i'm sure you've seen him too. i'm not sure i'd go see a movie just cuz he was in it, but it doesn't hurt. not at all...

Sunday, April 02, 2006

kingdom hearts 2

i loved the first kingdom hearts a ton. i was initially weirded out by the whole concept. a melding of the disney universe and the square (now square-enix, or squenix) final fantasy universe? that sounds like putting milk and sugar in tea! preposterous! but then i read a bunch of really good reviews, and there's really no way i can avoid getting a widely-publicized square or enix game (i've been playing final fantasy and draqon quest since i was so small) with final fantasy characters in it, and of course, the prospect of seeing my beloved disney characters in 3d was just too enticing, so i ended up getting it. it was everything i expected out of it and so much more. talking to pooh bear and piglet, swimming thru the mermaid kingdom with ariel, and battling maleficent in dragon form like i'm in fucking sleeping beauty! this is the stuff of dreams.

so when kingdom hearts 2 finally came out (it seems forever since they announced it) this past week, i had to go get me some. i'm only a few hours into it, but already it's exceeded my expectations. the beginning was a little bit weird tho. it starts out with a long prologue in which i had very little idea what was going on (and i still don't even after the prologue was over). i spent a lot of the time thinking, hey, where's sora? but other than that, it's been a lot of fun. i can't wait to get into it more, but i'm afraid it'll be slow-going because i just have so much schoolwork this quarter. no worries. there's always room for kingdom hearts.

one of the things i love about the fact that disney has a stake in this project is that they get familiar actors to voice the characters. like, most of the voices for the disney characters (barring mickey and goofy and donald, et al) are voiced by the actors who did them in the original movies. so that means king triton, aladdin, mulan and beast sound like they should sound, and geoffrey rush actually voices captain barbossa, zach braff voices chicken little, and bruce boxleitner comes back for tron. and the voices for the squenix characters don't sound horrible as they often do in anime voice-overs for tv shows, because they get real actors to do them. in the second one, haley joel osment is back for sora, david boreanaz for squall, and david gallagher for riku, and then christopher lee, ron perlman, jesse mccartney and brittany snow voice new characters. these are actors i have actually heard of and whose movies (or tv shows) i've seen! amazing! anyhow, what i'm really saying is that i'm a sucker for characters voiced by jesse mccartney.

of course, then when people don't return for their roles, i wonder what's wrong with them. maybe robin williams (genie), eddie murphy (mushu), and danny devito (philoctetes) feel like video games are beneath them, but billy zane, mandy moore, and lance bass? what do you got that's so important you blew off disney? was it over money? seriously, billy, the last time i saw you in any movie was probably titanic, and lance, come on, man, the astronaut thing fell thru and it doesn't look like your boy band is getting back together any time soon, so what gives? well, whatever, you do what you want to do.

anyhow, i'm still at the beginning of the game, but i felt a need to let everyone kno how much i'm loving it. not that i'm going to convince anyone who wasn't already going to get it to get it, but i wanted to add another positive voice to those who enjoy disney and square-enix and whatever mixes come out of the two.

Saturday, April 01, 2006

the bouncer

last nite i hit the town, and it was a lot of fun. it'd been so long since i went out, but most things hadn't changed at all. after a certain point, events get hazy as often tends to happen, but i do remember talking with the bouncer at r place who months and months and months ago wouldn't let me in for being too drunk. i think it's wild that she remembers me, but perhaps that just means i was THAT drunk. at the time i was pissed off that she wouldn't let me in, but i really wasn't in any condition to be doing anything at all at that point, and i'm glad she didn't allow me to go anywhere (she kept me with her for a portion of the nite at the doors to r place, hoping i'd sober up some before i left to find my friends). last nite i got to thank her for helping me out. it's always reassuring that there are even strangers out there who care enuf to look out for you.