Rick Rolling is pretty stupid.

Most massively popular internet phenomena are completely insane and pointless, but the whole Rick Rolling thing continues to escape me. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of Rick Rolling, it is when you are led to a certain place on the internet under false pretenses, like so:

OMG I have exclusive photos of Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson's super top-secret wedding! You have to click here immediately, like right now! You won't regret it!!!

You've just been Rick Rolled. Not that funny is it? But I still do enjoy this next video, which clearly took a lot more skill, time and effort than just posting a link to a Rick Astley video and saying that its something else.



and on that note, you should check this video as well, which is another well-edited live music video, but this one has nothing to do with Rick Astley, unfortunately. This is the first and hopefully the last time I will ever mention or post something about Slipknot.

this is absolutely terrifying

You know, the Simpsons has been really awful for the past few seasons, which is depressing because its clearly one of the best and funniest tv shows ever made. Only now, I don't think I'm going to be able to watch even the earlier, good episodes without this monstrosity coming to mind:



This is so horrifyingly bizarre that H.P. Lovecraft and Salvador Dali would glance at it and run crying into the night. I am going to be having nightmares about this for weeks.

i will never be embarassed again

A lot of embarrassing things have happened to me over the course of my life. Probably the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me was this one time, I was in junior kindergarten and I peed myself during recess. When I went inside the school, one of the teachers got some well-meaning older kids to help me get cleaned up and give me some fresh clothes. But the problem was, the older kids mistook me for a girl and then gave me a dress which I had to wear for the rest of the day (come to think of it, maybe these older kids weren't well-meaning at all and were actually sadistic assholes.) Anyways the point of that story is, that was pretty embarrassing, but I don't consider it that big of a deal. I mean come on, I was like 5 years old, give me a fucking break. Things could have been a whole lot worse. For instance, I could have been this guy:



I think until a picture has been widely circulated around the internet of you attempting to retain some semblance of dignity as you run a marathon while covered in feces, you do not know true embarrassment.

this baby is an asshole.

via Best Week Ever.

we are so fucked.

I can't stop freaking out about this. It is an absolutely terrifying clip of this robot called "the Big Dog," built by some exceptionally short-sighted fools from this company called Boston Dynamics. This thing is seriously going to enslave us all one day.



Fuck.

Its being developed with funding from DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. I swear I'm not making this up, it sounds like something out of a fucking William Gibson novel. This is so obviously a bad idea. Apparently its primary task is going to be to carry weapons and ammunition across a crowded battlefield. Fantastic, you've done a real bang up job fellas. Next stop:

Nicolas Cage will put on a bear suit and punch you in the face.

Making fun of Nicolas Cage in my previous post reminded me of one of my all-time favourite YouTube videos, a highlight reel of the best moments of his completely insane remake of the Wicker Man that came out a few years ago. After watching this clip I actually ended up going out and renting the movie and its nowhere near as entertaining, so if you watch this and find yourself considering renting the Wicker Man, don't, all the best parts are in here. Rent Kiss Kiss Bang Bang instead, that movie is amazing. Anyways, its Cage time!

The Hobbit will probably not suck

When Peter Jackson was having that legal battle with New Line over Lord of the Rings royalties, I started to get really worried that they were going to make the Hobbit and completely fuck it up so that we couldn't even watch the LOTR trilogy anymore without thinking about it and cringing. Like, I don't know, Michael Bay's the Hobbit starring Nicolas Cage as Gandalf or something.

Luckily Peter Jackson is back on board producing and co-writing, and brought in Guillermo del Toro to direct, he directed Pan's Labrynth and is pretty much the man, so I am really excited about the Hobbit, and the still unnamed second movie they are doing right after. So anyways, Jackson and del Toro just did an online webchat on the WETA website answering a bunch of fan questions about the two movies, so if you are a raging fantasy nerd/loser like the glorious specimen below, and are curious about what they are up to you should check that out.



By the way, am I supposed to be writing all movie titles in italics? I have no idea what the rule is on that but I guess I'm just going to continue to do it.

Salvia will mess you up good.

I remember a few years ago, people started telling me about Salvia, the legal hallucinogen that is readily available and that, after smoking it, makes you heavily trip out for like five minutes before it completely wears off. My response was usually, "yeah, I'm really sure that exists, let me just go to a bank machine so I can be sure to spend as much money as possible on this obviously made up bullshit story," (this was done while making a masturbatory hand gesture and pretty much being as condescending as possible.)

Turns out though, Salvia is quite real, and thanks to the glorious wonders of technology, thousands of YouTube videos have popped up over the last couple of months of young kids smoking this stuff and absolutely tripping balls. I was pleasantly bemused by this phenomenon but didn't really find it particularly funny, as most of the videos just feature some random kids laughing hysterically at nothing. That is, until I stumbled across this video. The guys who made this are clearly trying to put a little more thought and subtlety into the 'kids getting high and acting stupid' genre. Enjoy.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Review

So I saw the new Indiana Jones movie tonight. I'm having a hard time deciding how I feel about it. On the one hand, it is really nice to see Harrison Ford looking like he actually cares about being in a movie again. He was such a massive movie star at one point that watching him waste away the last decade of his career, phoning in performance after performance, was just kind of upsetting. Firewall? Hollywood Homicide? This guy was motherfucking Han Solo. So it definitely feels good to see him as Indiana again, whipping commies, cracking one-liners and getting in crazy adventures. The rest of the cast is pretty good too, Ray Winstone, Kate Blanchett, Karen Allen, John Hurt, Jim Broadbent, they are all great actors and they do a good job of bringing all the secondary characters to life. Even Shia LaBeouf, who is kind of getting really overexposed and is starting to suffer a huge geek backlash because of it, does a good job. The chemistry between him and Ford and Karen Allen works really well, but I think George Lucas is smoking crack if he thinks he can continue on the franchise with LaBeouf as the star. Actually come to think of it, maybe George Lucas is secretly smoking crack. It would actually explain a lot of things. Like this, for instance:



Incidentally, Shia is also apparently up for the roll of Yorick in the film adaptation of Y: the Last Man, and while I think this would actually be pretty good casting, I still hope they hire someone else as LaBeouf is just in everything right now and it's kind of annoying.

But I digress. I was saying that there are definitely some great aspects to Crystal Skull. The central premise of the movie is probably going to piss off a lot of fanboys, but it worked just fine for me. I rewatched all three Indiana Jones movies recently and the things Indiana is questing after in those are no more ridiculous than anything in this movie. I mean come on, Raiders of the Lost Ark is probably the best action-adventure movie ever made, and it features a box full of God sand that melts off a bunch of Nazi's faces. In The Last Crusade, he meets a fucking 700 year-old knight and uses the Holy Grail to cure his father's fatal bullet wound. My point is that the plot, while different from the other movies, still feels like an Indiana Jones story, and is updated to the 50's in a pretty cool way.

I guess my main problem with the movie is that since its been almost 20 years since the last film in the franchise, Spielberg has all the tools of modern filmmaking technology at his disposal and this ends up working against the movie in a pretty serious way. I love the practical 80's effects of the first three movies, like the mine cart chase in Temple of Doom, or the aforementioned Nazi face-melting scene:



In Crystal Skull, there is tons of CGI and although the effects aren't bad by any standards, it still really bothered me at some points seeing all these modern effects in an Indiana Jones film, and made it feel less like the other films in the franchise, and more like National Treasure or Tomb Raider or something equally terrible. (NEXT DAY UPDATE: there is a couple of green screen / CGI effects sequences that bugged me throughout the movie, but the absolute worst one, involving Shia LaBeouf, a gaggle of monkeys, and a bunch of vines was so terrible that I think I blocked it from my mind last night. That was awful, and probably my least favourite part of the entire movie.)

In any case, if you consider yourself a fan of the previous movies you should really check it out, Harrison Ford is finally cool again, and kicks Ruskie ass with the same intensity that he unleashed on the Nazis and that messed up Thugee Cult that forced him to drink blood out of a human head. The rest of the cast is great, the story is cool, there are a bunch of really crazy action set pieces, the John Williams score is back, as is that sweet sound effect of Indy punching dudes in the face. Even the Wilhelm Scream makes an appearance, which brought a smile to my face (for those that are unfamiliar with the Wilhelm Scream, it is a famous movie sound effect that is in every other Indiana Jones movie along with pretty much every other movie ever made.)


I guess the only thing that really bothered me was the extensive use of CGI, but that is a subjective thing, CGI just kind of pisses me off in general and it bugged me seeing it in an Indiana Jones movie, but that doesn't mean that you are going to feel that way. So go see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, its not perfect but it is definitely a new Indiana Jones movie, which is a great thing, and the good aspects of it, for me, totally outweighed the bad. Oh yeah, and Kate Blanchett plays a hot, Communist, dominatrix-looking, sword-wielding ice queen, and I was pretty into that as well.

FINAL RATING: 7.5 / 10

UPDATE: I just thought I would update this post as my opinion on the movie has kind of soured in the two months or so since it came out. I still definitely enjoyed it, and wasn't at all turned off by the sci-fi elements it added to the Indiana Jones mythology, but the bad green screen work and pointless cgi was really hard for me to get past. For instance, I only remembered weeks later that the first shot of the entire movie is a cute cgi gopher. That alone knocks my end of the summer score down to a 6.5.

I still liked it though.

Steven Seagal can hurt you in many different ways

I fucking love Steven Seagal. When I was growing up, even though he was the unlikely choice, he was definitely my favourite action hero. In Hard to Kill, this corrupt politician has his family killed, and after he wakes up from a 7-year coma, he goes on this absolute rampage of destruction (after a sweet early 90's training montage,) and uses his Aikido training to pretty much kill every motherfucker involved in the whole family killing incident. He even gets to bone Kelly LeBrock (and Seagal receives bonus points for actually boning Kelly LeBrock in real life afterwards.) Plus his name in the movie is Mason Storm. He could have no martial arts training whatsoever and would still be a massive badass based on this terrific name alone. I have probably seen Hard to Kill at least 100 times. My point is that Steven Seagal is pretty much the ultimate badass.

One of the writers from Ain't it Cool News (my favourite movie site on the internet,) has written a super geeky book which meticulously analyzes Seagal's entire filmography, called Seagalogy. You can check it out on Amazon, and as I mentioned earlier, my birthday is coming up, so any generous individuals reading this can easily pick up this sure-to-be-amazing book.

But the ultimate point here is that Steven Seagal is fucking amazing, and if you have never seen any of his movies you owe it to yourself to at least check out everything up until Under Seige after which he became kind of bloated and obnoxious.

new Weezer video

I had kind of given up on Weezer after they released Make Believe, which is really depressing because they used to be my favourite band ever. But their new single is awesome, and the video just came out and its awesome too. It features a whole plethora of internet celebrities, plus Rivers Cuomo has a bitchin' mustache. So I remain cautiously optimistic about their new self-titled 'Red Album,' which comes out on my birthday, June 3rd. A great present from Weezer would be for this record not to suck.

fun for the whole family

who doesn't love to torture people? I know I do. now you can torture a poor little animated internet guy without any of the legal or moral ramifications that usually come with chain sawing someone's arm off.

The Torture Game This creepy sicko game is for all you sadists and soon-to-be serial murderers out there.

FUCKING FUCK!!!

I highly doubt I'll be able to keep up this high posting frequency, but when you come across a gem like this you just have to share it, even if you have already posted on your blog twice already that day.


http://view.break.com/506205 - Watch more free videos

imagine if the actor that played Mr Mac was your grandpa??

oh yeah, and I almost forgot about this:

i want a blog too damnit.

so I got in from new york late last night, went out for an epic 4am breakfast with roomate / sidekick evan, woke up today feeling appropriately gross and I felt like starting a blog so here it is. I'll try not to talk too much about my music career, as there are other avenues on the net that allow me to do that, instead I'll just talk about my regular mundane existence and post weird things that I come across and pretty much do whatever the hell I want.

For instance, check out these amusingly photoshopped porn pictures:






if you're interested, there are more of those here.

Also, has anyone ever heard of Garfield Minus Garfield? someone had the genius idea of removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, and the result is actually kind of disturbing and depressing, but is so much better than regular Garfield its ridiculous. you should check out the site but here are some examples:











Incredible.

I kind of want to play basketball today because I ate a lot of disgusting crap in new york but I have a feeling I'll probably just watch Star Trek: deep space nine, or run over pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto IV.