playing with the boys.

So I watched Top Gun again the other day, and it had been quite a while. I had (almost) forgotten just how homoerotic the volleyball scene with Cruise, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards, and random sweaty, muscular guy was.



Now they're talking about making a Top Gun sequel?? I'm so there.

my eight-year-old self would be disgusted.

Probably the coolest add-on for the new Firefox is something called Firenes, which allows you to play old-school Nintendo games directly on your web browser via a simple flash player. So I have become really hooked on playing Contra, but I have come to a somewhat embarrassing conclusion: I am fucking terrible at Contra. This was a game that as a small child, I could easily beat, and now I am a grown man and I can barely make it past the second level. It's really quite depressing. I have gotten so used to complicated games like Grand Theft Auto and Metal Gear that I have forgotten my video game roots. However, the plus side to this unfortunate reality is that I was looking searching Youtube for Contra videos and I found this sweet video of a guy playing the music from the 1st level on guitar. He also plays music from other 80s video games, you know, if you're into that sort of thing.

its so easy.

I am currently reading Slash's autobiography and it is fucking entertaining. I highly recommend it. It's funny, I guess at this point in my life I can officially call myself a professional musician, but I am well aware that neither I nor the band I play in can ever hope to be as cool as Slash and Guns N' Roses were. I mean look at them: they really do not give a fuck. G n' R are representative of an era of music that has pretty much come and gone. There isn't one aspect of that band that is contrived or phony, they were just 5 total badasses who came together, made one of the greatest rock records of all time (Appetite for Destruction, of course,) and totally conquered the music world for a brief time before unfortunately messing it all up. Bands like that just don't exist anymore. I mean sure, there are bands that try to emulate that sort of hard-rocking, fast-living image, but its so obviously an act, they just end up seeming like douches (like these guys, for instance.) Anyways, despite the fact that Axl became an overweight, football jersey wearing, dreadlock having loser who replaced the whole band with people who also pretty much suck in every way imaginable, Guns N' Roses are, as far as I'm concerned, probably the coolest band of all time (Zeppelin doesn't count because they reached such a level of ultimate coolness that they are automatically excluded from any such argument.) Wow, that was quite a run on sentence. Now, do I provide the obligatory Youtube video? Yes. Yes I do.



I see you standing there. You think you're so cool. Why don't you just fuck off!?!?

-Axl Rose

can we still be friends?

This is another one of my favourite songs. I don't know what it is with me and posting random 70's and 80's music videos recently, I just get a big kick out of them. Anyways, you should watch the video just for Todd Rundgren's amazing outfit, even if you watch it on mute. Plus there is a really weird interpretive dancer that is also strangely compelling.

superhero movies don't suck anymore.

I'm incredibly excited about seeing the Dark Knight this weekend. Its funny, because you'll remember way back on June 25th, I mentioned that I had a suspicion that Heath Ledger would get nominated for a posthumous Oscar for his role as the Joker, and within the next few weeks, the movie started screening for critics and pretty much every review I've read has said the same thing. The only thing is, I was basing this assumption on the fact that the publicity surrounding his death would force the extremely shallow Academy to give him the nomination, no matter how good the actual performance was. But from what I understand, Ledger really did turn in a performance for the ages, and most critics seem to agree that he would have gotten the nomination whether he had died or not. In any case, I am chomping at the bit to see what Christopher Nolan and that absolutely insane cast has accomplished, the gushing hyperbole surrounding the movie has been so intense that I am pretty much expecting to see one of the greatest movies of all time, and anything less than that will be a profound disappointment. Yet somehow I have a feeling it is going to live up to those impossibly high expectations. I guess I'll find out this weekend.

Its really quite astounding how seriously studios are starting to take superhero movies. You have Marvel creating this true cinematic multiverse with Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, and their upcoming plans for Thor, Captain America, and the Avengers, you have Christopher Nolan pretty much doing whatever the fuck he wants with the Batman franchise and making a movie that people are seriously comparing to Heat and the Godfather II, and now you also have a Hollywood studio actually making an Alan Moore adaptation that looks to be a faithful interpretation of the greatest graphic novel of all time:



Things are really looking up for geeky fanboys like me. Now we just need an epic, sweeping adaptation of Robert Kirkman's the Walking Dead, directed by Peter Jackson. That would actually make me cry a little.

silly love songs

This is one of my absolute favourite songs of all time. It's literally impossible to be depressed while listening to Silly Love Songs. Paul McCartney takes a lot of crap for being trite and whimsical, but damnit, I love him triteness, whimsy and all. This critical obsession with marginalizing everything he does as somehow not artistic is a struggle that I definitely identify with, and that's kind of what this song is about. Because literally, "what's wrong with that?" Not much if you ask me.

writer's blog.