This Big Fat Blog

Happy 1 year Action and Action.

action and action 1 year on: what have we learned?

The answer is nothing.

But it has been a fun year sharing all the random shit that I find on all my web adventures with all of you. We've laughed, we've cried, I even put on my internet-journalist hat and covered the US election (if you consider making ridiculous photoshops of Sarah Palin "covering" anything.) I've also been happy to bring Mark and Noah aboard to help me out here while I am busy with my real job (note: I don't have a real job.)

Anyways, I'm not sure what the future holds, but I know that it is highly doubtful that I will quit wandering the internet aimlessly in search of weird stuff, so in all likelihood this blog will continue to exist, and hopefully it will continue to improve to the point where it is a daily source of amusement for all of you.

Thanks to everyone who has stuck around.

I'll leave you with this bad boy:

new favourite artist: Tyler Stout

Well I am just about to get on a plane headed to the UK to go on tour for a few weeks, and I'm not really sure if I'm going to be blogging with any kind of regularity while I'm away. So before I go I thought I would leave you with some cool stuff, in this case the artwork of Austin, Texas based artist Tyler Stout. As you can see, Tyler creates speciality posters for classic films and other pop culture gems, usually in conjunction with Austin's legendary Alamo Drafthouse.







I would absolutely love to have one of these bad boys hanging on my wall (particularly the incredible piece he made for the Big Lebowski above,) but I think they sell out pretty fast. Still though, I know very little about the art world, but I do know that Tyler Stout is wicked awesome.

Alright, well I'm off, and I will be back as frequently as I possibly can! I love you all!

computer porn.

Too...awesome. Can't put into words...just watch...video.



via Gizmodo

The Kepler Launch: finally, NASA does something cool.

The Kepler telescope is the first of its kind designed specifially to find Earth-like planets. It has a much wider field of vision than most telescopes and, by monitoring the brightness levels of a specific area of space which is populated by around 100 000 stars, it will find planets that are around Earth size and located in the ideal proximity to a star to support liquid water. This will come in handy once we have fucked up this planet to the point that we all have to go live somewhere else.


Kepler Telescope from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

What I find really cool about this is that if Kepler determines that there is a significant volume of Earth-like planets within its search radius (which is larger than any other telescope but still ridiculously tiny in the grand scheme of space, which is pretty big,) then it really does significantly increase the odds that there is other life out in the universe besides us. And the aliens that have visited Earth already.

If you want to see the launch, here it is.

crazy exciting changes.

So I know I wrote that long-winded piece the other night at 4am about how I was going to start using this space to talk about my personal life a bit more, but I ultimately decided that that was a silly idea. This blog has never really been about me, only things that I happen to be interested in. So I ended up starting a totally new blog where you can go from now on if you want to find out exactly what is going on in my ridiculous life.

So from this point on, Action and Action is going to exclusively be about different aspects of the pop culture universe...more or less exactly what it's been since I started it. But it has occured to me that I am never going to have the time or dedication that is required to make this blog into what I really think it could be, so I've contacted a few like-minded friends who are going to start contributing here, and I am really excited about this decision. It will add some much-needed fresh perspective and some new voices into the mix, but the bottom line as that way more content is going to be going up, and I think it's going to be good times for everyone.

So all that's going to be happening in the next little while, and I hope you guys enjoy the changes!

late night ravings / michael jackson robot head.

So I've been having lots of trouble sleeping lately. Well I shouldn't say that much, as I've been sleeping a normal number of hours per night (at least for me,) but it's just that my sleeping patterns are completely screwed up and I am keeping some seriously vampiric hours these days. I have generally been staying awake until around 7 or 8am until the sun is fully up and then sleeping until about 2 or 3 in the afternoon so that by the time it is around 10 o'clock at night I am awake and alert and ready to be productive. I have spent the night hours working on various projects - I've rediscovered my love of FL Studio and I've been obsessively working on a few new songs using that and that's taken up hours and hours of my time.

I also completed a new Spin Earth video that you can see here, which was on Toronto pop star Lights. That was actually my first experience editing video, all the other stuff I've worked on up until now I have had help from some generous friends who know about such things, but I'm starting to get the hang of it now, so I think I will gradually be making more and more video content that I can post here and elsewhere. I actually sent the video to Lights and she wrote me back and said she thought I was hilarious so hey, go me.

I have also been trying to start a new writing project, which has been an interesting experience for me, as its something that I've always been interested in in but have never really been able to get past the very initial stages of. So the odds are against me that I will ever complete anything that I am satisfied with, or that I am comfortable sharing with anyone, but just starting to work on something has been cool and its been another thing that I've been able to turn to in order to feel like I'm not wasting my time. I guess this is why I haven't been writing in this blog that much as I've been spending a lot of daily writing capital working on that, but I will try to balance it out a bit more in the future.

I definitely consdider my primary job as being a musician, so it has been frustrating for the last few weeks kind of waiting for the giant music industry machine to lumber back to life after the new year break so I can get back to work. I have so much stuff coming up in the next few months but I still have the next few weeks to sit around Montreal and sort of figure out ways to make myself useful. It would be nice to spend this time working and making extra money, but work is pretty scarse because of my erratic schedule, not to mention my general aversion to getting jobs of any kind that suck the life out of you, which is the vast majority of jobs in existence. Nevertheless, as I mentioned before I have been in a great creative mindspace so that has been cool and has helped me to avoid the depression that would probably have set in by now had I spent this entire time watching television (which obviously I have done a lot of as well.)

Another thing I have been doing recently is watching really odd movies in the really early hours of the morning. The other morning it was around 6am and I was trying to sleep and then for some reason it occured to me that it would be a good idea to watch Rob Zombie's Halloween remake. I actually really enjoyed it even though it was really weird seeing this depraved violence unfold in front of me as the sun was coming up outside my window. But I think Zombie is actually a great filmmaker, and I think I'm going to write a bit more about the movie and a little bit about the horror/slasher genre in general but I'm not going to do that right now as this post is long enough as it is. I'll try to post that later this week.

You might have noticed that this post is somewhat different from most of my other posts that I've ever done. Up until recently I never really had an interest in using this blog to talk about my personal life beyond just writing about stuff that I am interested in or obesessed with. I think I had a vague fantasy when I started this thing that if I become more successful and well-known in real life, I could sort of have this forum to talk about certain subjects with this anonymity so I could say whatever I wanted and not have it come back to me, but you know what, fuck it, keeping a secret internet identity is too much of a hassle, and besides, if I can't tell anyone about this blog then no one's going to read it anyways and then what's the point in even doing it all, right? My point is I will probably start writing some more posts like this in the future where I go into a little bit more personal detail about what's going on with me, or nights like tonight where I am bored and restless and just felt like writing something and this is just kind of what came out. So I hope that sounds interesting to those of you that have stuck around thus far.

Oh yeah, the Michael Jackson robot head.



This is the reason I originally started this post, as it was around 3:30 and I found this beauty on Gizmodo. Michael Jackson is going through some financial troubles lately (which is totally mind blowing to me since he has made fucking astronomical sums of money in his career. Note to self: do not buy amusement park. Or put myself in a position where I have to spend millions of dollars of lawyers fees to defend myself against child molestation charges. Further note to self: really seriously remember that second thing I just mentioned. Don't do that, seriously.) Anyways he has financial troubles so he is selling this bust of the robot head from the climactic scene in Moonwalker for a measly few grand. Those of you who were born in the 90s won't remember Moonwalker, but it is MJ's epic 80s film where in the end he transforms into a giant robot Michael Jackson and saves some kids by defeating a bunch of evil drug dealers. No, I'm not making this up. Anyways that's all I really have to say about it, I just saw the head and thought "fuck, the Michael Jackson robot head," and so here it is.

Well I guess that's all I got for now. It's almost 5 am and I think that means its time to see some horrible violence inflicted on sexually curious teenagers. Sometimes I wonder about myself.

more birthday fun.

Alright Michelle it's your turn. Have fun tonight!

n-hole it was your birthday.

So it was my friend Nichole's birthday on Monday. Now, I went to see Fucked Up with her and her sister / my old stalker Michelle this weekend and it was kind of an official birthday hangout, but yet when Monday rolled around I don't think I gave her a call. I'm not sure why exactly this was, I think I got confused as to when the actual date of the birthday was. How did I manage that? I have no idea. But anyways I just realized this tonight and I felt like a dick so I made this sweet belated birthday card, so happy birthday Nichole.

Happy Halloween

its too late to apologize.

For those of you that have been checking back at Action and Action for the last few weeks and were wondering why it hasn't been updated, I sincerely apologize. I was well on my way to my most productive month as a blogger yet, but unfortunately there was...an incident which I will not go into...resulting in the loss of my computer, which has still not been resolved. I should be up and running again shortly though so hopefully I can be back next month with the same frequency that all my readers, (yes, both of you,) have become accustomed to.

I suppose I needed a little bit of a break from my internet addiction anyways. Like that heroin addict that tries Methadone for a few weeks, knowing full well that pretty soon he's going to be getting back into that awful stuff with a renewed vigor and sense of purpose.

Also, because I think my laptop was overheating and projecting radiation directly into my groin area whenever I was using it, most likely eliminating any chance I may have had at having children without the aid of costly and intrusive medical science. So maybe it was about time to get a new one. Blessing in disguise anyone? No? OK then.

So in any case, I'll be back soon. Thanks for your patience. Except those of you that have stopped reading my blog just because I didn't post anything for a few weeks. You people can go straight to hell.

steampunk ray guns!!!

For those of you who aren't massive geeks like I am, steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction that usually takes place in 19th century Victorian England, and is generally credited as having been popularized in mainstream fiction with William Gibson's The Difference Engine, and even moreso with Alan Moore's the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the graphic novel, not the awful Sean Connery movie.)

WETA Workshop is Peter Jackson's special effects company, and along with Stan Winston studios, is probably the coolest company working in practical effects today. They have constructed an amazing line of hand-crafted steampunk rayguns that are so awesome my head actually just exploded. Check them out:







via Geekologie

To find out more, click here, and I would also like to remind everyone that Christmas is rapidly approaching, and Lord Cockswain's Ray-Blunderbuss "The Unnatural Selector," is selling for only $7,900! It's a steal!

Oh, and also check out Steampunk Star Wars, a really neat reimagining of the Star Wars universe in a steampunk context.

why do I cuss like a sailor?

I was just perusing my last couple of posts and noticed that I use profanity in almost every one of them - a disturbing trend which I have now realized traces all the way back to the beginning of this blog (for example, the title of my third post is F*CKING F*CK.) At first I didn't think much of it, but it has slowly dawned on me that for most modern day, enlightened individuals, this isn't exactly standard procedure. How can I really expect to sound intelligent or be taken seriously if I talk like some kind of crude street urchin?

I've examined the vastly superior blogs of other like-minded, beer-bellied layabouts and I can't help but feel that sometimes, instead of coming across as entertaining or thought provoking I can be a bit vulgar and boorish. Or is it that my colourful vernacular is the product of a different sort of pop cultural landscape that just doesn't exist anymore? I thought I would try to examine the origins of my sailor-like speech patterns and see if I could come up with some kind of greater explanation for what it all means in a larger, social context. At this point it seems unlikely that I will be able to do that, but bear with me here, I feel like rambling. Let's see what I can come up with.

Seeing as how today I am a shameless, filthy internet addict, its difficult for me to think back of what life was like before we were all blessed with this wondrous, porn-filled miracle. But although I may have came of age with the internet, I was definitely a product of the VCR generation. In addition to some basic human interaction and moderate outdoor activity, one pastime I had when I was younger was to close myself in my room for hours on end and obsessively watch my favourite movies over and over again. In one of these films, I could derive hours and hours of entertainment, as I watched them repeatedly until the scripts and soundtracks were burned directly onto my brain. A few that I can think of off the top of my head are Aliens, Terminator 2, Predator, Predator 2, Total Recall, Hard to Kill, Under Siege, Die Hard, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, From Dusk Till Dawn, and Desperado. There is definitely a common thread to this random sampling of movies that the mid-nineties me obsessed over: each one of them was rated R, filled with foul language, and featured scenes of extreme violence (and in most cases, nudity, the most glorious of all the forbidden movie vices.)

This is one of the reasons that I get really frustrated in today's stifling, politically correct, artistic vacuum. There are politicians out there who seem to believe that playing Grand Theft Auto will cause the next generation of children to turn into a group of animal-torturing, psychotic serial killers. This same sort of backlash has been occuring in pop culture for decades, like the 80s and 90s, where spotlight-loving doomsayers like Tipper Gore denounced certain films and records that they deemed to be unacceptable. Or the 60s when a nation of parents recoiled in horror when their baby boom offspring were listening to music that encouraged free sex and drug use. Or the 50s when those same people listened to Elvis, and their parents were disgusted by the success of a sexually explicit, black music-imitating, southern pretty boy. I could go on. The only difference seems to be that today, the politicians are actually winning, and slowly but surely, our culture is being homogenized into a family-friendly, PC heck hole.

Of course, I am a shining example of someone who was constantly inundated with sex, violence, and foul language from the time I was very young, and for all intents and purposes, I think I turned out alright: to this day, I have never been in a real fight with anyone (and seeing as how I am a passive, socially-awkward nerd, let's hope this never changes.) I suppose one of the only tangible effects my childhood indulgences have had on me is in my somewhat vulgar speech patterns. The films of Quentin Tarantino probably had the biggest influence on me in this respect, as even as a youngster I loved the way that he used language, with crude threats of violence, colourful epiphets (that occasionally even ventured into blatant sexism, racism or homophobia,) and pop culture references that came together and became a sort of modern American poetry.

I rewatched Reservoir Dogs in my first year of University after not having seen it for several years, and I was actually pretty shocked at the level of violence and profanity in it, not to mention the fact that it was a much more bleak and nihilistic than I remembered. In fact, I distinctly remember feeling strange that I had watched it so much as a child without ever being negatively affected by some of the film's more visceral moments. But that's just what the reactionaries that like to denounce such things don't understand: even a small child recognizes the difference between fantasy and reality. The inability to do so is just as likely an indication of a mental illness and not proof positive that Satan-loving film makers and musicians are destroying minds with their perverse and shameful "art."

*Though just to clear things up, I'm not advocating showings of Reservoir Dogs to groups of small children, just suggesting that it is more a parent's responsibility to judge what is best for their child, and not leave it up to a movie studio or the government.

Today, both in an effort to market their films to the widest possible audience, and to pre-emptively disarm any potential controversy that could prevent them from making the largest amount of money possible, most mainstream movies are streamlined for a family audience, even if they might have the illusion that they are just the opposite. The ultimate example of this unfortunate practice is in Bruce Willis' limp 2007 sequel, Live Free or Die Hard. As I mentioned before, the original Die Hard is one of my favourite movies of all time, and part of the reason an entire generation of people loved and obsessed over this movie was because of the graphic violence and hilariously vulgar language spewed out by Willis' iconic John McClane character. This is why I was disappointed when I finally saw the film, which unlike any other in the franchise, had been rated PG-13, and saw an unrecognizable, Mr. Clean-resembling Willis, dispatching baddies with the Mac guy in tow, without a drop of blood or a cuss word to be found. He wasn't even allowed to fully utter the signature catchphrase of the series. I was not impressed, but I wish I could say that this travesty had an effect on critics or audiences, as it scored an impressive 81% on rottentomatoes.com and grossed 134 million dollars domestically.

So it seems the dreaded MPAA has won the culture war, and now the violent, vulgar films that I enjoyed when I was younger are quickly becoming the minority, replaced instead by soulless imitations that are more concerned with toy merchandising and fast-food chain endorsement than any type of artistic expression, to be sold en masse to an audience that is all too willing to shell out its hard-earned money no matter what the quality of the product they are purchasing. It is a depressing time to be a voracious consumer of pop culture, although there are definitely a few mavericks out there like Edgar Wright or Neil Marshall, as well as some major Hollywood players like Judd Apatow and of course, Tarantino, who realize that you can still make money without pandering to the widest possible audience or the lowest common denominator, and are attempting to bring back the type of movie that I loved so much when I was younger.

Which brings me back to my original point, if I ever actually had one, which was whether I swore too much, and the answer is: probably. But you know what, if that one simple question gives me a reason to go off on such a disjointed, nonsensical rant, then damnit, I'm going to relish the opportunity. As I mentioned, I was in the mood to ramble, and looks like it was mission accomplished on that particular front; special thanks to the three of you who stuck around for the finale. I guess I just feel passionate about some things. In the future, I will continue to rant about things that I feel are important, or bring you the random weirdness and quirky humour that you've come to expect from me, but in an effort to reach the widest possible audience, I will try not to say fuck quite so much. I've got to make a living somehow.

turing trouble.

The Turing Test, designed by mathematician Alan Turing in 1950, is a test administered to machines to determine whether they are capable of displaying human intelligence. The way it works is a moderator poses a set of questions and basically has a short conversation with a human and a computer counterpart. Afterward the moderator has to point out which one was which, and if he fails to identify the machine correctly, it has passed the test. While no artificial intelligence has ever passed the Turing Test, the idea is that this is ultimately going to be the indication of when a computer has become self-aware, or as I like to call it, the "time to run away to the apocalypse cabin" alarm.

This Sunday, 6 computer programs - with creepy names like Brother Jerome and Eugene Goostman - are going to be "speaking" to interrogators in an attempt to pass the test. I won't be there personally but I imagine it will look something like this:



Yeah...we're pretty much fucked.

puking puppets.

Beans and Bueller are two Montreal artists that I have been friends with for a few years now. They work in a few different areas of the art world, like filmmaking, but their main area of expertise is puppetry - imagine if you were to exhume and reanimate Jim Henson's corpse and force it to smoke PCP in a dark room for 3 weeks and then set it to work creating the most fucked up things it could imagine with its drug-addled zombie brain - that's the type of stuff that they make. Like this following video:

the future sucks.

If you're like me, you are probably more than a little disappointed in the technology and scientific advancements that we have seen leading up to this foul year of our Lord, 2008. I mean, the internet, iPhones, GPS, and Playstation 3 are great and everything, but when I was growing up, I was convinced that by 2008 we would have flying cars, robot slaves, interstellar exploration, time machines, and advanced laser weapons that we would eventually have to use to fight off the robot slaves that would obviously rebel and attempt to destroy all humanity. Instead, we have a vague plan to get back to the moon by 2020 and maybe send some people to Mars eventually. Fuck. That.

Anyways, things are quite literally looking up, and I am starting to get excited about what the future holds once more. That's right. Motherfucking space elevators, bitches. God bless the Japanese.

the Large Hadron Collider is scary.

This is the Large Hadron Collider. For those of you who are unfamliar, the LHC is the world's largest particle accellerator, a 27 km tube that has been constructed underground near Switzerland for the purpose of accelerating protons to nearly the speed of light and then smashing them together. Most physicists are hoping that the reactions that result from these collisions are going to lead to important discoveries about the nature of the universe. Oh yeah, and there is also a small group of scientists who believe that the LHC is going to create an artificial black hole that will destroy the Earth.

Today, for the very first time after many years and several billion dollars, they turned it on.

So while the fact that I am here writing this at the moment is a good indication that the world, as of yet, has not been destroyed, I will provide a handy website here that lets us know if any black hole, world-ending funny business is going on. While the general scientific consensus indicates that we are probably going to be fine, I am not going to be making any long-term plans just to be sure. In fact, I believe I'll use the Large Hadron Collider's potential apocalyptic capabilities as a further excuse not to clean my room. So unless we are all swallowed by a black hole later today, everyone wins.

the world's best flying ring.

Those of you that came of age in the 1990's might remember the Aerobie, the astonishing flying ring. I never understood why it never dominated the outdoor flying disc market - in my humble opinion it is somewhere between 100 and 9 million times more fun to throw around than a frisbee. Since I've been back in Canada I've become obsessed with playing with my Aerobie again as part of my natural routine of going outside and excercising and enjoying the beautiful summer weather only in the days before the temperature begins to drop, ominously signalling the icy hellscape that Montreal becomes in the winter. Throwing it and watching it glide through the air just gives me this odd sense of boyish wonder, which I thought was just another of my many charming personality quirks, but then I watched the following Aerobie video on YouTube where the creator of the Aerobie pretty much describes that exact same feeling, before a professional frisbee thrower throws one out of a football stadium. So basically I have come to the conclusion that Aerobies could potentially bring about world peace, cure AIDS, eliminate poverty, and launch the human race, like a spinning fluorescent-pink disc, into a Gene Roddenberry-esque social utopia.

Bollocks!

As some of you may know, I am currently in jolly old England with my band. I'm having a pretty awesome time so far, I'm staying at a bed and breakfast in the middle of the countryside and eating proper English breakfasts everyday (which include an English "delicacy" of fried bread which, you should avoid at all costs if you are ever here. I ate a few pieces yesterday and I thought my heart was going to explode.) All in all, its been an extremely British experience thus far. I am having to bite my tongue to stop myself from speaking in an English accent at all times, which I'm sure is just totally offensive to anyone who is actually from around here. Anyways, my point is that since I'm kind of busy here, I'm not really going to be able to keep up any kind of regular blogging frequency. I know you are all pretty upset about this, but it doesn't phase me; while you are stuck in Canada (or elsewhere,) waiting for my next blog post with baited breath, I'll be enjoying the bright lights of the British countryside nightlife with hot babes like this:



Fuck Canada!

writer's blog.