Last Rites

In a moment of weakness and laziness, I had a Panda Express lunch today. And what did they give me? A fortune cookie with no fortune inside. I have no future. I think I'm going to die today.

Well, I guess this is the final blog post then. If you see updates after this one, it's my ghostwriter. No, I did not make this whole story up just for that pun. I thought of it as I was writing. I'm quick on my feet like that. Watch out!

Lexicon Luthor

There are some turns of phrase whose usage piss me off, plain and simple. They are oft used in a way that makes no sense. "It hurts my soul" is my first example. I hear this phrase uttered after watching a show or playing a game where the characters exhibit a lack of morals--such as being a serial killer or just a complete asshole. Excuse me, your soul is now tainted more than before because of entertainment? Unless you were watching and perhaps whacking off to snuff, perhaps I could believe it. But television doesn't hurt your soul.

This thought was brought about because I read a complaint about Disney "raping my childhood" because there's a new CG sequel to Winnie The Pooh. Until someone provides me with proof that Disney executives own a time-machine solely for the purpose of traveling back to your viewing of the original Winnie The Pooh movie and metaphorically (or literally) molesting it, the childhood itself is intact (the comic The Authority has a brilliant and sick and twisted scene where something worse occurs to a character). I'm not saying that it's not possible; for example, if George Lucas revealed that the Greedo/Han Solo scene was a lover's quarrel, that I might consider raping of the childhood. When the offender is something new, however, it's simply not doing justice to one's childhood memories of how the franchise should be.

Wow now that I've effectively increased the occurrence of the words "rape" and "childhood" tenfold this blog is going to end up on the FBI's watch list even faster than before.

Other things I hate, mostly seen online:
- The single word responses "Want" or "This"
- Anything Lolcats
- "for the win" and "for the lose" and I'm pretty sure I've blogged about this before
- The use of motivational posters to explain jokes that are pretty goddamn apparent from the picture itself and/or could be executed by a much more effective method

In an unrelated story, somehow I now am expected to behave myself on my own personal writing ideas wiki because we're consulting a 14-year-old girl that my artist knows and I've never talked to on character designs. Oh, and her dad monitors the websites she browses. I can't even make this stuff up; gods how I wish I could! It's practically begging to be molded into a sitcom episode!

Grand Slam

Damn you, Bank of America! You sent me a Dodgers card. Now whenever I pay for anything I get to have a short conversation with every cashier who "loves my card" or "are you a Dodger fan?" I've gotten sick of explaining that, no, I don't really like baseball, but playing along requires me to pay attention a little bit to what's happening. "Oh, it's such a shame they lost," or "what's going to happen with Manny?" are current favorites. I need to look into getting a Houston Rockets card somehow.

Max Payne is ridiculous. Who expected anything different? My advice for watching the movie: nap through the first hour, go into bullet time and get wasted, and enjoy the action and utter trippiness of the last 40 min. And Mila Kunis, bless her heart, is gorgeous but can't play Russian gangster. It's nice to see Beau Bridges in something other than Stargate SG-1.

Hey, Hey, Hey, Heiki

Curse you, astronomy! When a physicist is giving a talk, you're nowhere to be seen; yet the moment an astronomy professor is speaking at colloquium you arrive in droves and eat all the free food! When it's physics's turn, I can show up 10 minutes late and snag a bowl full of chips, but today arriving 10 minutes early revealed only 2 crackers and a cube of honeydew left. But the joke's on you all! I grabbed the one hot chocolate packet!

Although our departments are technically merged, I swear to the gods that astro wants nothing to do with physics. I only know one astro grad student, and that's because she is dating a physicist. It should be a shame, as they have all the girls, but really there are as many better looking girls around campus as there are stars in the sky.

I'm having a ton of trouble getting Japanese to work in the new Firefox. It was working fine earlier! I think I want to continue to do something with Japanese after graduating/dropping out, but not teaching English in Japan. I believe this narrows career options down to "poser".

Oh well, if I can convince the Japanese-English Language Exchange Club to rent those sumo suits and have a tournament, I will consider my work done.

Deeply Disturbed Dexter

I finally finished Darkly Dreaming Dexter, the book on which season 1 of Dexter is based. More often than not, one hears "the book is better than the movie". With Dexter, I have to recommend the show over the book. While the book is rather interesting and well-written, it's not amazingly written. The narrative is first-person perspective from favorite serial killer Dexter himself, which gives the reader a fun look into the mind of the antisocial protagonist, but it works a million times better when imagining Michael C. Hall's voice while reading.

The story itself does not exactly match up with the first season; it plays a lot more with the ambiguity of the killer and Dexter's reaction to it, and a few twists are thrown there I was not expecting. The involvement of the supporting cast is much more minimalized, which makes sense as Dexter cannot truly connect to other people. In fact, the novel does a really good job of making the story about Dexter.

While I wouldn't call it a must-read, it's an enjoyable, quick read for anyone that can't wait week to week for more Dexter goodness. I'll be checking out the other books (which diverge even more from the show) eventually, but I've still 7 Discworld books to read first.

Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn

You know it's a good party when yourself and several others are mitsukayoi (futsukayoi = hungover, literally 2 days drunk. Mitsukayoi = 3 days drunk). After these parties I always feel like an ass. I remember everything that I did, with the exception of why my big toe is bruised (actually if anyone saw me kicking something/one, let me know). The feeling doesn't come from anything specific, as I'm generally a quite jolly drunk and am not belligerent or a terrible jerk. I'm just louder and more attention-demanding than I like to be, and alcohol switches the filter off.

According to hearsay, people liked me and thought I was funny (although I did inherit humor via my Jew blood); but I also heard that I was hitting mainly on girls with boyfriends, most at the same party, possibly including the one girl I kissed on the cheek. Whoopsies! It'll be good practice. 0:-)

All these antics took place up in the bay area. It was nice because I usually don't get a chance to hang out with a bunch of new people in a relaxed, non-bar environment. I know too many people getting ready to settle down and spend most of their time picking out matching towels and planning dinner parties, and I don't often get a chance to break out of the physics crowd. Although, it was a little chilly up there for a supposed pool party, but that just makes anyone not swimming a pussy.

And I hit on too many white girls here. At least up north, I get to be token white guy, and it'd be only a matter of time before I'm badmintoning it up with hottie Asian girlfriends. Haha, just kidding. Squash > badminton, bitches!

This Island Earth

I must apologize to my 2 readers; I've had a couple entries thought up but not sat down and written. Why, you may ask? Because Retsuprae is back! For those too lazy to click on the link, here's the breakdown: some time ago people on SA started cataloging and videotaping themselves playing video games, calling it a Let's Play. They are well done. Then people on YouTube started making crappy ones. Cue the MST3K treatment of the YouTube vids.

Well, the most recent ones involve a series of 1990's video game reviews called "Video Gaming In The Clinton Years".

Here are some choice ones (perhaps nsfw language but ok w/ headphones):
Tomb Raider 2
Goldeneye
Formula 1 Racing
Buster Bros.

Rockin' The DBQ

I've been too distracted by Disgaea 3 and Mega Man 9 to write up these thoughts as full posts, so here they are in abridged form:

- I have crushes on too many girls that are already dating someone. And no, I do not believe in actively trying to break up a relationship.

- You know how in TV and movies whenever someone's having or about to have sex they get a phone call? I wish in reality, the opposite of TV, whenever I'd get a phone call it'd be interrupted by my having sex.

- I think I hate Tuesdays more than any other day now. At least on Monday there're TV shows to watch; Tuesday is too far from the weekend.

- I really hate sharing a TV, especially when I have cool new video games.

15'll Get You 20

Last night I saw a screening of a new Seann William Scott vehicle, Balls Out. Expecting a vanilla down-on-his-luck athlete returns to coach a ragtag team of misfits to victory sports comedy, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is anything but. In a role that brings to mind a Stuart Smalley that flirts around the edge of morality and throws decency out the window, Seann William Scott plays optimistic high school janitor Gary Houseman, who had sworn off tennis forever after a less-than-illustrious career, suddenly being drawn back into the game as the new assistant coach, determined much more than anyone else in the movie to win the state championship and change everyone's lives in the process often with humorous results.

Sounds pretty standard, right? While the plot may be, it takes a backseat to the surrealness of the rest of the movie. If you see a gun in act I it should be fired by act III, right? I'd say it only happened in the movie perhaps 10% of the time. We live the team's struggles to make state through a series of vignettes loosely strung together that practically only serve to punctuate that Houseman, though unorthodox, really is a good guy and touches the lives of the people he's around. Most of the scenes have no bearing on anything else in the story. But it provides for a humorous tale through a mixture of absurdity and naivety, obscenity and innocence, and just the right sprinkling of one-liners and physical comedy.

I feel pity for people who aren't at least cheered up by the movie even if it's not their style of humor, and I give it 4 Magen Davids out of 5. I just hope it makes it to theaters, unlike The Fifth Commandment, perhaps one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Wait, IMDB says it did come out this summer. Well, good for it.