Hulu vs Netflix

A better title for this post would be "Hulu vs. Netflix vs. Illegal Chinese Streaming."  But to make it a fair fight, I'll just go with the "legal" internet TV and movie sites.

Netflix ranks as one of the top ten companies to fuck the goose that laid the golden egg.  They had the perfect business plan, basically putting Blockbuster and other movie rental stores out of business.  Little red DVD envelopes made up half of all non-junk mail and were set to save the US Postal Service.  But then...the suits that ran the company did what suits do and got drunk off of hookers and blow.  In their coked-out minds, thinking they were golden gods free to roam the Earth and bend mankind to their omnipotent will, they thought they could get away with secretly jacking up the price of their service and not telling anyone.  Then they started losing millions of dollars.

After a great amount of confusion and panic, hookers being tossed to the side and blow flying everywhere, the suits decided to send a ridiculous apology email saying that they were ever so sorry to have broken the trust of their customers...but they were still going to jack up the price.  Oh, and they were also going to take their outrageously successful business idea, DVD rental-by-mail, the core of "Netflix," and turn it into a separate business called "Quikster." Now you had to pay even more to get Netflix back in the form of streaming video.

After they lost another hundred million in stock prices, the suits had to apologize even more and begged customers to continue getting gouged for little in return.  Today Netflix streaming alone is $8 a month for an extremely limited selection of movies and shows.  Netflix's business plan now revolves around sucking in customers with cheap monthly streaming and secretly transitioning all their streaming stuff back to DVD so customers have to pay the full price of their increasingly-expensive service.  More cocaine, please.

Hulu was also a popular streaming site dedicated to TV and movies.  It was free, worked well and was well-liked.  It was too much of a good deal, so of course it had to be "monetized."  A monthly charge was threatened, leading to the loss of interest in 100% of all Hulu watchers.  A 3/5ths compromise of sorts was developed, so now you can have "free" streaming for an extremely limited selection of shows, or you can pay for "Hulu Plus" and get a fairly limited selection of shows added to the free stuff.

Free Hulu is inundated with commercials.  I was watching a free 20 minute show and literally after 2 minutes of the show's beginning there was a good 1 minute block of ads.  The ads are the same 2-5 ads repeated infinitely, so I hope you like Allstate and Citibank.

Netflix's more notable selection includes:

-Lots of bad anime
-Terrible CG movies being played on FX
-Crappy comedy shows
-Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
-The first season of a show you like that's in its 8th season

Hulu's selection includes:

-An insane amount of bad anime
-Chinese movies
-Good '70's shows that by today's standards are hilariously cheesy
-Oh here's a good show...oh wait Hulu tricked me into thinking it was free, here's a 90 second preview (Sandwiched by 1 solid minute blocks of ads)
-Seriously, a shit ton of anime



Fuck this, illegal Chinese streaming sites are the best.

Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3

Red Alert 3 is a game designed to be stupid.  Not just any kind of stupid:  aggressively stupid.

Back in the '90's Westwood made the original Command and Conquer, and soon after that the original Red Alert.  Full Motion Video was the current plague on gaming.  Cutscenes featured terrible acting from no-name actors and actresses in front of green screens goading you into greater feats of tank rushing and attack moving.

When EA took over in the early 2000's, they held a secret meeting where they discussed the past success of the C&C franchise and what they needed to improve on to make their games popular to the modern audience.  Obviously, the continuance of the dead art of FMV was paramount.  Pencil more terrible B-list actors into the budget!  Give me Tim Curry as a Russian premier!  The asian chick from Battlestar Galactica as your personal assistant!  Michael Ironside as some general!  James Earl Jones trying hard not to cry!

After fucking up the Tiberium francise for a good decade and offhandedly fucking up Red Alert 2 for good measure, the C&C drones came up with the amazingly racist and fun-to-play Generals and its even-better expansion Zero Hour.  Generals was lots of fun despite a bad campaign, terrible FMV and shittily-coded multiplayer that, even if played 50 years in the future on quantum computers, will still bog down like you were playing Crysis on a Pentium 2.

Red Alert 3 attempts to copy some of what made Generals fun and fails.  Gone are the options to play each of the 3 races in a different fashion like Zero Hour let you do.  Each of the 3 races, Soviet, Allied and Gay Empire of George Takei, plays very differently.  This is even to the point of having buildings constructed in different ways, somewhat like Starcraft.  However, this just means that only the Soviets build buildings in a rational way and the other two races have you micromanaging the shit out of everything just to build a base. 

If you try to play a skirmish against the computer, then God help you.  The enemy AI's all secretly work together to beat on the puny human.  You'll see AI-controlled units all the colors of the rainbow attacking your base at the same time at regular intervals.  When you start a match these AI's will take over your map screen and broadcast shitty FMV acting at you while you scramble around for a few seconds trying to fend off attacks.  The speed of the game is way too fast for everyone except Koreans on Ritalin to keep up.

If you make the mistake of watching the intro movie you will want to take your own life rather than watch fat Tim Curry make an ass of himself by trying to approximate a Russian accent.  Instead of playing this game, send a letter bomb to the EA offices showing your appreciation for all their hard work keeping this long-dead franchise twitching.

Helpful hints for finding employment.

So you decided to venture on the internet to look for employment? How the fuck did that happen? Oh, you heard of craigslist? Well this is the only site you will ever need for your job hunt. If you follow these simple steps you will land a job almost certainly.


1) Pray. This works quite well because you have no fucking chance in hell of getting noticed. Historically the bible was created by someones pet, mistaken by jesus and stolen by god. So how does this go with obtaining a job? Well think back to the first paragraph, re-read it five times, maybe six, and dismember your own head, only then will you understand the collerlation between job-hunting and praying.

2)Cold call. This works extremely well, especially when you are an established prostitute. You can find clients relatively easily. If you get someone that is under 12, make something up because you might be able to network enough to get to their parents, and that's good for 20bucks, maybe 60 if they are rich. You don't want to set your hopes too high as a prostitute, you might forget to take your vitamins. This is also the point at which you cut off your head again. You can never do this enough because finding a job is impossible, and you are wasting your time.

3)Send 500 emails a day. This doesn't work because you can't possible do that, and I don't even know why you are trying at this point. It's preferential that you cut off your head and quit reading this article. You probably thought this article was here to help you, but you now realized that you have wasted your time, and not only that you have read something extremely negative, and you probably will kill yourself.


And that concludes finding a job! We have learned that through praying, you wont find a job. Also we have learned that cold calling will not find you a job as well. And finally, you can send as many emails as you want, you'll still be penniless and produce stillbourns if you ever attempt to procreate. This is the best advice I can give you, and it works. Now do America a favor and decrease the population today!

Legends of League of Legends: URGOT

If you're one of the brain surgeons, doctors or lawyers who regularly plays the original Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients you might be familiar with the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game League of Legends. It's a game that pits werewolves against deaf women with giant harps that shoot lasers, rock men against the guy from Assassin's Creed, pirates against squirrel men piloting robotic battlesuits. It's a game that's good at wasting your time. You get pit against other dirtbags who refuse to pay money for a finished product but are too lazy to use bit torrent.

Which leads us to our champion spotlight of the day:

Urgot: The morbidly obese cyborg crab man.

Urgot is fucking awesome. When you start the game playing as him you're basically a huge bully. He works best in mid-lane where you go one-on-one with the best guy from the other team. Your E skill is an acid bomb with mid-range that tags an enemy, doing slight damage over time as it melts their face off. However, when you hit level 2 and grab your Q skill you then have the ability to tag someone with an acid bomb and lob ballistic acid-seeking missiles at them from a huge distance. This effectively makes you the Aegis missile cruiser of the game. You are a battleship of pure long-range damage output and mobility and your W is a shield to help you slug it out with whomever you're dueling against.

Urgot's ultimate is one of the trickiest in the game. You hit someone with it and you switch positions with them, while at the same time upping your armor for a few seconds. Enemies that are harassing you are immediately thrown into places where they really don't want to be: In the middle of your team or underneath an angry turret. You can use people trying to gank you as stepping stones to freedom as you switch places with someone trying to block your path. Most opponents you use your ultimate on panic at the sudden jarring shift of position (with the accompanying crazy sound effect it produces) and start flailing and waste their summoner skills trying to get away.

Urgot's strategy is to ramp up in gold until he can get his Perfect Item: The Manamune. Once you get it you no longer have to worry about wasting mana. Just keep spamming your abilities as Manamune rewards you with a higher mana cap for doing so. And then you get more attack power the more mana you have. It allows you to unfairly steamroll in offensive power until you get to dangerous levels.

Making Urgot as scary as possible is one of your goals. Grab some lifesteal so you can heal yourself as you fight. Get Guardian Angel so everyone can see you'll revive if you ever get killed. Grab both the blue golem buff and the red lizard buff in the jungle so you have a ton of spinning shield shit around you whenever you fight. Fuck it, grab Stark's Fervor too so you have a glowing green icon underneath you as you run around. It's like pimp my ride with a fat guy on robo-crab legs.

With great-sounding voice acting, fun skills and a plasma cannon for an arm, Urgot is one of my favorite Legends of League of Legends. He is regularly overlooked by most other players, at least until they see him bearing down on them surrounded by swirling buffs of all kinds and launching acid bombs and seeker missiles as he inexorably moves towards their base.

Dungeons of Dredmor

The Indie Revolution in gaming is upon us.  What does that mean for you, the aspiring game developer?  Well, for you it means that you can grab your kid brother and cobble up something on your parent's Commodore 64, add some chiptunes and, voila!  You have your next indie sensation.  Send your gold copy to Gabe Newell (be sure to wrap it in cheese so he takes interest) and it'll be on Steam within 24 hours, probably part of another Humble Indie Bundle for $19.99.

Dungeons of Dredmor works on the basic assumption that you have no idea what Nethack is, and it's a pretty good assumption as the only people who do are dangerously obsessive Autistics who moderate the Nethack wiki.  This game flew across my radar when it appeared in PC Gamer's 100 Best Games of All Time list (which, shockingly, does not feature Deus Ex as its number 1 game any longer.  Now it's Portal.  More cheese, Gabe?)

Dredmor is pretty much Nethack lite.  However, that might be an unfair statement.  While Nethack has had a lot of work put into it over the years, making it possibly one of the most complex and difficult RPG's ever made, it has had absolutely no work done to it to make it remotely palatable to the average human being.  ASCII characters making up the visuals combined with a stark cliff face of a learning curve do not pull in the customers as well as graphics and sound.  I'm looking at you too, Dwarf Fortress.

So Gaslamp Games made an easier-to-play Nethack with Super Nintendo graphics and decent sound effects and music.  Chiptunes, of course.  That's the Indie hallmark, everyone loves chiptunes.  Retro is the candy that gaming nerds crave.

Nethack's staples still survive:  Hardcore game mode, where there are no loading saved games and character death is final.  Ramped-up difficulty that will have you slaying tiny blobs of goo one level and horrendous mind-raping abominations from Below the next.  You drink from fountains and they either make you feel good or poison you.  Your can choose for your character to be laughably inept to deal with the challenge of defeating a dungeon's worth of monsters, just for fun.

However, you won't see truly random happenstances like putting on a ring that's cursed, which you can't take off, which makes you float around and unable to go downstairs until you exit the dungeon the way you came.  You won't be able to kill a gnome and use your tinning kit to make canned gnome to eat later.  You won't drink a potion that turns you into a tarantula.

Dredmor's graphics and crafting system are notably good and fun to use.  The character creation system is hilarious.  You choose 8 aspects to throw together in a mishmash and see what kind of adventurer you create.  You can have an armor-using mathematician magician who uses blood magic and crossbows, who specializes in mushroom magic to summon killer fungus to defeat his enemies.  And he's a sparkly Twilight vampire as well.

The game has a lot of referential and sardonic humor, which helps make it a fun little diversion.  If you're a neckbearded hipster then you'll love this game's many references, which are the nerd's lifeblood.

What really shows this game's Indie origins are the fact that it crashes every 15 minutes and gets old really, really fast.  Having a game that centers around you having a hardcore, un-revivable character who you play for a couple hours until he or she becomes really cool, then gets deleted when the game crashes, is not a hallmark of a professionally-made product.  Gaslamp Games then proceeds to not give a fuck, instead making a half-assed sequel with more references and chiptunes instead of patching the original game.

Thanks, but no thanks.  There's nothing I Dredmor than an unfinished product.

The Eagle (2011)

The Eagle: A Channing Tatum Joint is a stressful movie.  With so much moral ambiguity it's hard to know who to root for...the oppressive Romans who seek to rule all of the British Isles, or the native Britons who dress up like lunatics and murder for fun?  Never mind that the movie just assumes you'd be on the side of the Romans, because the filmmakers are too stupid to realize that their main character isn't even slightly sympathetic.

Deliverance Banjo Kid all grown up on 'roids Channing Tatum is all the star power The Eagle has to offer, which should give you an indication of the movie's quality.  From Fighting to GI Joe Rise of Cobra to Dear John, Channing has been trying as hard as he can to be the Steven Seagal of the 21st century.  The squinting, the mumbling, the cavalcade of instantly-forgettable performances...it's all there.  He just needs to get old, join up with some obscure Asian religion and become a truly overweight shitbag cop and the cycle is complete. 

Oh yeah, the plot.  So apparently in Roman times they made these giant golden eagles that vanguard forces of the army would take into newly-conquered lands.  Channing's dad was a super cool Roman general guy who decided to take one of these eagles into enemy territory and was promptly torn apart by the super-evil Briton savages who selfishly didn't want to be enslaved.  The Romans build Hadrian's wall to keep the filthy paleskins at bay, forming what you might call a Green Zone that's a safe refuge for the civilized soldiers in the midst of a war-torn land.  The jarhead (or brush-head) Roman soldiers find themselves led by the son of the failure who lost the Eagle.  Lucky for them, Channing has super-human hearing due to the fact that he has severely reduced vision from all that squinting and wakes them all up in the middle of the night to fend off a surprise Briton ambush.

The director must have realized at this point that no one in the audience gives a fuck so he has the Briton leader, a babbling Druid, take some Roman soldiers hostage.  They drag one up to Hadrian's wall and behead him.  Pretty gruesome, eh?  Not really, since The Eagle is PG-13 so retarded teenagers could potentially pay money for a ticket.  Any time in the movie that someone is about to get beheaded, eviscerated or otherwise brutally murdered the camera turns away. 

So this turns out to be a ruse, and Channing's phalanx of wannabe Spartan warriors who went out to save the other survivors gets set upon by war chariots.  After a magic spear throw that kills the Druid leader Channing gets hit by a 2-ton out-of-control chariot that knocks him out and cuts his leg a little.

He goes back to the Green Zone and gets some stone-age surgery which turns him into a cripple.  While rehabbing his leg he visits the local bread and circus deathmatch where the daily matchup is the two-face helmeted gladiator guy from Gladiator versus a shrimpy 98-pound Briton slave who refuses to fight.  As the Gladiator is about to strike the killing blow the audience screams "Death!  DEATH!!" with their thumbs down.  Channing has an epiphany and throws his thumb up, yelling "No!  Life!  LIFE, GUYS!"  which totally turns the mood of the crowd around.  The Briton whose life he saved becomes his slave, swearing to be loyal to him forever.

Channing decides to go on an epic quest to find the eagle his father lost while being devoured by cannibal Scots.  He takes his Briton slave up past Hadrian's wall into the wilderness.  At every opportunity Channing treats his slave buddy like shit.  He orders him around, tells him about how his people need to be crushed by the Empire and squints at him accusingly.  Channing doesn't even speak the local language and if anyone figured out he was a Roman soldier his innards would be used for haggis and blood pudding.  The slave is his only hope for survival, but he's still an elitist dick to him.  You would think that as soon as Channing closes his eyes to rest the slave would cut his throat and head home.  Maybe it was really hard for the slave to tell if Channing was asleep or not, which is understanding.

Channing finds some old Roman soldiers who escaped the massacre back in his father's time.  They have all gone native and no one knows where the eagle is.  The only thing that points Channing in the right direction is praying to Zeus, wherafter he hears an eagle cry and follows it to the North.  I didn't even make that part up.

Channing and the slave come across the Seal People, an ultra-savage group of Britons who wear grey bodypaint and bone armor 24/7.  Channing's slave tricks them into believing that Channing is actually HIS Roman slave.  Channing is unable to deduce this ruse and instead becomes enraged and calls the Briton a traitor, attempting to kill him with his bare hands.  The Seal People then proceed to beat his ass, repeatedly.  "We'll help you keep your slave in line" they helpfully offer.

After being humiliated for a while at the hospitality of the Seal People, Channing becomes witness to one of their heathen Druid rituals.  They all get drunk on goat piss and hallucinate while their deer-antlered shaman dances around in front of him.  And what does the shaman have as his magic staff, but the golden eagle.  As soon as he sees the eagle Channing tries to assault the shaman and promptly gets his ass beat again by the Seal People.

Channing's Briton slave then reveals that he was faking the whole time and he's still indentured for life to his Roman master.  They grab the eagle and take off on horseback.  The only one left in the village who's not stoned off his ass from last night's ritual is a little kid who is sorry to see the two leave.  The slave gives the kid a little wooden fish to remember them by and to not wake anyone up.


After their horses' legs break in the peat moss of the Scottish Highlands, it's a foot race against the Seal People.  Everyone back in ancient times had the ability to run for days on end.  It was a survival tactic that allowed them to hunt wooly mammoths, one which disappeared with the invention of polyunsaturated fats.  Channing's wound starts to give him trouble and he goes into septic shock.  His slave runs off back to Hadrian's wall in a stupid attempt to get reinforcements from the Romans.  In case you were wondering, Channing still treats him like a dick.  He very begrudgingly gives the slave his freedom in order for him to leave his side to go find help.


So the Seal People who have been running for a week finally catch up with Channing, who takes time off from puking his guts out to somehow be in fighting shape again.  Magically, his former slave comes back with all the disgraced old Roman warriors who had lost the eagle to begin with, their armor and weapons still intact.  "Defend the Eagle!"  Channing commands.


But the Seal People have one last surprise.  The director must have remembered that at this point absolutely no one would be sympathetic to Channing and are most likely actively rooting for the Seal People to kill him, so he tries to demonize the savage Britons one last time.  The Seal People have brought that little kid from the village, the one who got the wooden fish from Channing's slave.  They then slit his throat (off-camera) to show just how hardcore they are.  It's cool that these guys sprinted for a hundred miles with a little kid in tow just to make a point (and wipe out one of their small village's only male heirs), but whatever.  A slow-mo 300 Spartans fight ensues where all the Seal People and old Romans die and Channing is branded Best Roman Ever.  Hooray!

Moral of the Story:  Pray to Zeus, and you'll get shit done.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) - Breaking and Entering Evolved

Setting aside for the moment the fact that the original Deus Ex somehow keeps finding its way onto Top 10 Games of All Time lists (If not the #1 Game of All Time), it was still a game plagued with issues.  These issues have become popular to ignore by gaming journalists, who have been seeking for years to turn the "Best Game Ever" debate into something more complex than just "It was Half-Life.  Alternatively?  Half-Life 2."

Playing the original Deus Ex would lead one to notice some glaring problems.  Namely, horrendous voice acting, casual if unintended racism, retarded sound effects, abominable AI and convoluted plotline.

Now, this is a '90's action game so I'm going to let all those problems slide.  I'm going to do this namely because Deus Ex was the most hilarious game I've ever played.  A game that took itself so seriously and attempted to bring up so much deep commentary on government, religion, power and the future of humanity, one that allowed you never before seen freedom to complete missions in any way you wanted...none of that mattered when you were tasing the homeless in the streets, gathering up as many '40's of malt liquor as possible and downing them at once, breaking into someone's apartment and stealing their couch, beaning cops in the head with basketballs, and generally being a cyborg criminal nuisance.

My experience with Deus Ex can be summed up into my first impression gathered during the game's training mission.  As JC Denton you're set through a variety of simple trials to get you used to the controls, augmentations and inventory screens.  At the very end of the training mission, however, you encounter a GIANT ROBOT FIRING LIVE AMMO.  Evidently UNATCO is pretty serious about putting you through the ropes before sending you into the world.  In trying to escape this mechanical monstrosity I was introduced to the damage system that was able to calculate injuries down to individual limbs, even going so far as to immobilize them until you've received adequate medical attention.  I got my legs shot off and had to crawl across the finish line.


I continued to scrape along in agony as my superior congratulated me over the radio on my achievement and subsequently expounded at GREAT length on the happenings of the world, UNATCO, terrorism, the "gray death, etc. etc."  All the while I'm crying with laughter, screaming at my monitor for a medic and oh god why is no one helping me.

I'm happy to announce that, while the outright silliness of the things you could do in the game world have been toned down a bit in Human Revolution, most of what gave Deus Ex its flavor have returned.  Homeless people lie in the streets waiting to be shot with taser guns and brutalized with your augmented steel fists.  Apartments with easily-hackable door locks range far and wide.  The AI is still laughably bad, voice acting ranges from decent to horrendous (Eidos has a very specific stereotype in their minds on how blacks and Chinese people talk and act.)  You get to go to China for no real reason and check out people living in pods.  Poverty is everywhere, people whine constantly about the nature of humanity and augmentation and governments.

While there's no GEP gun to be found, the main difference in augmentations in this round is that they are all useful and pretty cool to boot.  They are also extremely expensive, so you really have to take some time to choose what to upgrade.  Do you up your hacking skills to be better at breaking and entering, or do you boost your battery system so you can punch more whores in the face before having to find a Cliff bar?

Sadly, alcohol is not nearly as prevalent in Human Revolution as it was in Deus Ex, leading to far fewer instances of wanton drunkenness on the job.  This is due to the fact that liquor gives a legitimate boost to your stats, temporarily pushing your health up past 100% like you were Bender or something.  The only way to replenish your battery power (after performing multiple lethal takedowns on Chinese civilians) is to eat powerbars, supposedly to "replenish nutrients."  So you can run out of powerbars pretty easily and be wandering through a Shanghai market where street cooks are frying up meat in woks left and right and there's shops full of snacks everywhere you look, but you go hungry because all Adam Jensen eats is a specific brand of candy.

I am about halfway through the game and enjoying breaking as many laws as humanly possible, surpassing what he term "humanly possible" even means as I see through walls, jump from 5-story buildings and land without a scratch, punch through walls and immobilize transients with a sonic cannon.

Final Verdict:  I never asked for this.

Dwarf Fortress: Tales of Promise and Failure

Dwarf Fortress (Or:  Armok, God of Blood volume II, Dwarf Fortress) is a game that appeals to me much in the way Nethack appeals to both me and to people with sick senses of humor like me (but who, unlike me, are obsessive and Autistic.)

Namely, it's a game about losing.  Losing in surprising and horrifying ways.  Ways that are also funny.

The Aspergers-afflicted shut-ins who play this game refer to this aspect of the game as "Fun."  "Fun" being a sarcastic way to describe grim failure.  Most of the work the creators of this game have done in creating Dwarf Fortress is to create ever more varied ways for you to lose.

This game has levels of complexity that dwarf (fuck you) supposedly complex games like Civilization and Master of Orion.  It revels in demonstrating to you how intricately it can create an entire planet of dwarves, elves, goblins and humans.  In a matter of minutes it will randomly generate hundreds of different biospheres that rate landscapes based on terrain, local wildlife, vegetation, geology (including dozens of types of rocks, minerals and ores that make up the dozens of subterranean levels), danger level, local civilizations and, of course, how blatantly evil the surroundings are.  Whereas in Civ your biggest concern is which river you plop your first city next to, in Dwarf Fortress you have to worry about whether your first Dwarf settlers will be instantly surrounded and devoured by hell rats.

And, even better, the biggest Autistic masochists can play the game with its original graphic options.  Meaning, there are no graphics.  Everything is in fucking ASCII format, so a dwarf is represented by a different-colored happy face, an arrow is a <, a dog is a d, a monkey is an m, an elephant is an E, and a horrendous hell-beast is a D.  If you care about your sanity at all, you can download a tileset that somewhat attempts to represent the world in a more convincing way than a lazy bunch of letters and punctuation marks.  You'll also turn the default music off IMMEDIATELY and play some internet radio instead (I recommend either classical music, or dubstep.)

After a random world is generated, the game will then spend about 10 minutes generating an entire HISTORY of that world, including notable historical figures, events, heroes, cities, tomes and legends.  It's sort of retarded and pointless, but the game likes to flaunt this aspect of itself.

You start Oregon Trail-style with about 8 dwarves showing up in your chosen area.  The lives of these brave few midgets now rest in your incapable human hands.  As in Nethack, there are shortcut key-presses to remember, menus to delve through, jobs to assign, food supplies to manage, rock to dig through, labors to assign and train, structures to build, caverns to carve, smooth and decorate, and lots and lots of time to waste.

Over time more dwarves will stupidly join your doomed civilization (And don't kid yourself, it's doomed.)  Your society will swell through accumulation of useless, stupid Dwarves with titles like "Cheesemaker" and "Miller" who steadfastly refuse to make cheese and mill, instead choosing to drink dwarf beer and fuck and make useless baby dwarves who instantly become targets for goblin pedophiles.

I don't want to list every way in which your Dwarves can be brutally maimed over the course of their adventures, but here are a few of my favorites that I've either encountered directly or read about from Autistic people posting online.

-A Goblin kidnapper appears in your fortress, luring you into sending all of your poorly-trained militia after him.  Soon after they leave the safety of the fortress they are set upon by well-armed Goblin raiders who kill or cripple your soldiers, leaving the rest of your Dwarves to be murdered in their bedrooms.

-Human traders enter your area, bringing with them valuable items for trade as well as some Yaks.  One of the Yaks goes insane immediately after appearing in your territory.  The Yak tramples the humans and goes on a months-long rampage through your fields and into your fortress itself, killing about 4/5ths of your Dwarves.

-Your Dwarves dig too greedily and too deep, attracting Cave Trolls, Albino Alligators, Imps, Tentacle Demons and Forgotten Winged Poisoned Elder Snails.

-Your Dwarves go insane through lack of clean water and turn on each other.  Lack of laws and prisons mean that murderers go unpunished, and bad feelings send your society into a spiral of revenge killings.

-Herds upon herds of elephants roam through your lands, stomping your Dwarves into paste and camping the bodies of the dead.  They feast on any other dwarves who idiotically try to loot the items left behind, or even those who attempt to bury their fallen comrades.

-You choose the least evil (and therefore happiest and most magical) area to place your fortress...and your settlers are murdered by Unicorns.


More stories await those brave enough to read through more text than the game itself in my future updates.

The Book Of Eli (2010)

On paper this film has everything. Denzel Washington, a post-apocalyptic setting, and Fallout-style visuals. Unfortunately this movie has no plot, stupid characters, and incredibly boring scenes where nobody says or does anything and the actors stare at the camera like they're trying to remember their lines.

The movie starts off with Denzel shooting a cat with an arrow and killing it. He then takes shelter for the night in an abandoned house where he cooks and eats the cat. He drains the oil from the cat to use as a skin moisturizer. As he's eating the cat, he notices a mouse in the corner of the room. He gives the mouse a small bit of cat meat and wishes it well.

Before he sleeps that night, Denzel listens to an iPod and reads from his book. This is presumably the titular book of Eli. Also we learn from a nametag on Denzel's coat that his character's name is Eli. Things are starting to make sense. So what is this book? Where is Denzel going? What's his mission? Immediately the viewer is drawn into these mysteries that have been expertly presented from the setting and actions alone. There's no need for a voice-over explaining how the nukes killed everything, etc. We can infer everything by ourselves.

Next comes the random encounter. The computer spawns seven level 16 Raiders including a level 18 champion Raider wielding a +2 Chainsaw of Dismemberment. They gank Denzel at a highway overpass, demanding all his money and equipment.


Denzel rolls a 20 on initiative and critically hits Raider leader, slicing his hand off.


In a horribly cliche moment, the leader yells "GET HIM YOU IDIOTS", and Denzel proceeds to kill all 7 raiders with his machete. The raiders attack him one at a time. Denzel leaves the chainsaw raider for last because it's more dramatic that way. Then Denzel loots the dead bodies.


This is where the movie starts to turn bad. It's only about 20 minutes in, and it get much worse than this. First of all, this scene is completely ridiculous. Even before any fighting occurs, they drag out the scene by ten minutes with stupid cliche lines and inane dialogue which goes something like this:

Raider Leader: Well look what we have here boys.

Denzel: I don't want any trouble.

Raider Leader: Give me your pack of equipment and any water you have.

Denzel: No.

Raider Leader: I said give me the pack, man.

Denzel: I can't do that.

Raider Leader: Are you fucking stupid? Give me the FUCKING pack.

Denzel: No.

Raider Leader: *Looks around in astonishment* We'll kill you, man.

Denzel: I can't give you my pack.

Raider Leader: Give me the fucking pack.

Denzel: Can't do that.

Raider Leader: *Looks bewildered*

This is seriously how the scene plays out. Each party just repeats their demands over and over. Do all people in the wasteland talk like this? I understand that human contact is diminished, but I'm pretty sure all the stakes were clearly laid out on the table when this guy popped out:


Actually, now that I think about it, Denzel Washington is a master in scenes where somebody wants something from him and is going apeshit, but Denzel calmly refuses:



So the Raiders completely surround Denzel and attack him from all sides but seemingly all die because Denzel is a trained Wuju swordsman or something. This completely ruins any sense of realism or suspension of reality because you can see the perfect choreography and the queue for each raider to attack one at a time. In real life Denzel's head would be on a spike hanging on the overpass. This doesn't even happen in Fallout.

So now that we've established that Denzel is a combat mastermind, he goes to some shanty town where there appears to be some civilization.


This is where the plot takes a nosedive, mainly because you soon realize that there is no plot. Denzel goes to the local tinkerer's shop to recharge his battery on his iPod. Denzel then barters KFC clean wipes for a recharge.


This makes absolutely no sense. What is the use of a sanitary wipe in an post-apocalyptic world? You'd be clean for about 2 seconds before you're covered in radioactive ash. In fact while they're bartering the shop keeper refuses to take a lighter and oil for the battery recharge, two items that would probably come in handy considering that there's no electricity anywhere in the world. Now you may say that the wipes aren't actually meant to be used, but are simply a form of currency, as they may be rare. But this isn't true because in the begining of the movie you can see Denzel using a wipe before he goes to sleep, and there's another scene where someone buys shampoo and uses it to wash her hair.

So after recharging his iPod, Denzel goes across the street to the bar to fill his water bottle. There he is ganked by 20 men who want to kill him again.


Denzel then starts reciting lines from the Bible which sounds really badass but takes a long time and if all 20 men jumped him at that very moment while he was talking they could have actually killed him instead of all getting horribly stabbed with Denzel's machete. Oh yeah, Denzel kills them all single-handedly. Why not.

After Denzel kills everyone in the bar the bad guy who runs the town comes out and instead of shooting Denzel, the bad guy tries to hire him, because he knows Denzel has a special skill that causes enemies to attack him one at a time. The bad guy, who's name is Carnagie, explains that he wants Denzel to kill his enemies so that Carnagie can create an empire of little towns under his control. Also, Carnagie is searching for a VERY IMPORTANT BOOK that he is devoting all his resources towards finding. Geez, I wonder which book it is. Carnagie gives Denzel a room and food for the night to persuade him to join the cause. Also a whore named Solara:


Of course Denzel refuses to sleep with Solara, and instead reads to her the Bible. That's right, the book Denzel has been carrying around all this time is the King James Bible. This is also the book that Carnagie is going apeshit over trying to find. Now before this point, you are thinking, "yeah, there's really no plot here, we don't know who Denzel is, what he's trying to do, why he has the book, or what the book is for, but I bet it's really great." This is the point where all expectations just disappear, because you realize that,

WHOOPS, YOU'RE WATCHING CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALIST PROPAGANDA

Denzel vaguely explains to Solara that all Bibles were burned either before or after the war that killed everything. Bible-thumpers rejoice. The salvation of humanity resides in the last Bible on Earth. This is where the movie just unravels into a heaping pile of horse shit.

This is further emphasized in the next scene by Carnagie explaining to his second in command why he wants the Bible. He wants it so that he can instill a sense of purpose into his citizens, so that civilization is not just mindless living in bombed out buildings and eating rat meat and cannibalism.

Then Denzel and Solara start praying, because now the screenwriters just don't give a shit anymore and decided that if the movie is going to be about Christianity, they may as well blatantly shove it down our faces.


Now if you thought there was no plot before because they didn't explain it, here's where you realize there's no plot because the writers couldn't think of one. Denzel explains to Solara after their prayer session that he was in a bomb shelter when the nuclear war started and after he came out he wandered around until a voice in his head told him to get a book. Under the guidance of a mysterious voice, he found the Bible under a pile of rubble and then the voice told him to "go west". That's it. That's what Denzel has been doing for the last 30 years, trying to transport the Bible west for some reason, to someone.

That's not a plot, that's just a series of vague ideas that the writers came up with after they had filmed all the scenes where Denzel kills everyone with his bare hands. Then they tried to slap on some Christianity philosophy in there to create some deeper meaning but instead ended up being gigantic douche bags.

This is also where the writers decide to take part of the plot of The Transporter and have Solara join Denzel in his quests for no other reason than the Hollywood rule that you must have a hot chick accompany the main character, even if she is worthless to everyone.


Actually, Solara isn't worthless, she hurts Denzel's cause by revealing to Carnagie that Denzel has the Bible. So Caranagie goes into WTF cliche mode and orders his men to "FIND THE BOOK AT ALL COSTS". Denzel and Solara escape the town together and the rest of the movie is them running away from Carnagie's men. Oh yeah, during the escape, Denzel kills about 50 men with his knife and also shoots a bunch of people in the head with his pistol, beyond the pistol's maximum accurate range. Also he never needs to reload. I guess God did it.

Let me reiterate again that Solara is completely fucking worthless. She has no idea why she is following Denzel on his quest, other than that her mother "thinks she will be safer with him". That's why the very next scene is where Solara gets HORRIBLY RAPED BY RAIDERS.


Carnagie and his men finally catch up to Denzel and corner him and Solara in a house. Carnagie brings out a giant machine gun and shreds the house until nothing is left except Denzel and Solara, who inexpicably survive the bombardment despite the wooden walls of the house providing no protection at all against machine gun slugs.

Carnagie threatens to shoot Denzel unless Denzel tells him where the book is hidden at, because for some reason Carnagie thinks Denzel has hidden it. just as Carnagie is about to pull the trigger, he says "Dammit you are the only one who knows where the book is, I can't kill you." This is despite the fact that Carnagie sprayed the entire house with machine gun bullets haphazardly, and could have killed Denzel at any time. Then Carnagie says he is going to kill Solara unless he gets the book. This is the first time this situation has ever happened in movie history.

Denzel breaks down and says the book is hidden in the TV in the house, which it is. Carnagie gets the book and shoots Denzel in the abdomen anyway then drives off with Solara. Solara kills the driver in the car despite her weighing only 80 pounds and having no arm strength whatsoever. She then drives back to the house where she DOESN'T find Denzel laying there bleeding to death from a terrible abdomen gunshot. Somehow Denzel is fine and is walking westward on the highway. She picks him up in the car and they drive west, not knowing where they are going or why.

The scene then switches to Carnagie who is obviously excited about finally obtaining the book so that he can preach to his citizens so that they may follow him. He opens the book and realizes that it's in braille.


This has also never happened in movie history before, where the bad guy finally gets what he is searching for, but turns out to not be what he expected. Incidentally, Carnagie has a blind wife and he asks her to translate the book. She says "no" because she hates him, and the scene ends. I did not make any of that up. Unfortunately that is exactly how it happened in the movie.

The stupidity isn't over yet. Despite not knowing where to go, Denzel and Solara drive all the way to San Francisco and row a boat over to Alcatraz for no reason at all. There they find some old guy with bad hair that explains that the island is a giant library with a printing press and that their mission is to preserve the knowledge of humanity. How this place exists or how they got the equipment, books, printing press, or personnel is never explained.


But wait, Denzel lost the book to Carnagie. How is he going to give this old guy the bible? This is the final nail in the coffin. For no reason at all, Denzel starts reciting the bible line by line FROM MEMORY. The last scene is the old guy who still has no name putting the King James Bible on a shelf in one of the libraries on the island. How the book will save humanity is never explained.

So 1 hour and 40 minutes later the message is clear: the Bible is the most important thing in the world. Thanks for church.

Jakob The Liar (1999)

Hulu has recently seen a large influx of free full length movies. This old Robbin Williams movie was my first choice out of them. He plays a Jewish man stuck in a Polish ghetto where he and all the other Juden have become accustomed to scratching out a meager existence. Although they still have their shops and homes, the ghetto is closed to the outside and the people have become destitute and constantly hungry. Suicide is rampant. One day, for being outside after dark, he reports to the commendant's office for routine corporal punishment and overhears a war bulletin on the radio. The Nazi oppressors are losing ground to the Russians, and the front line approaches from only 400 kilometers away.

The approach of the Red Army means impending salvation for the Jews. He tells this story to his friends to cheer them up and eventually the rumor of rescue spreads around the ghetto folk. The suicides stop. The people ask Jakob for more information about the Soviet advance, but he has none, so he makes up stories to give them the hope and drive to keep them living for as long as possible. He uses extravagant stories and humor to...wait a minute isn't this is the same story behind Patch Adams and Good whatever Vietnam and every other fucking Robbie Williams movie? Does Robin Williams ever expand his acting repertoire ever?

Anyway in the end, well, everyone pretty much knows what happens in the end. These historical events are common knowledge. But they say, "It's easier living the lie."

Too depressing for casual viewing.
Rating: 50%

The Mosquito Coast (1986)

They literally do not make movies like this anymore.

The Eighties was a decade whose artistic values and contributions are, in this age, unattainable. In some ways (fashion and hairstyles, mostly) this is a good thing. In most ways, however, it's unfortunate. We live in a digital age, and looking back on films from the Eighties you can see how they are distinctly analog. There's a grittiness and a realism to them that doesn't exist in today's era of CGI special effects and editing techniques.

Mosquito Coast is a Harrison Ford film that is rarely mentioned nowadays, due to the fact that Ford has been making blockbuster movies for 30 years and some of his smaller works get lost in the panoply of Star Wars, Indiana Joneses, Fugitives and Air Force Ones.

The story is based around Ford's character, an obsessive genius who lives as an inventor. He rages against 80's American culture, decrying its absence of character and values. He gives passionat speeches to his son, River Phoenix, about the banality of its consumer culture, fast food restaurants, its soulless music and the laziness of its populace. He also predicts America's imminent doom by atomic warfare, which is always a good thing to tell your kids.

When his employer refuses to acknowledge the genius of his newest machine, a Doc Brown-ish device that makes ice from fire, he gives up and dislodges his entire family to go live in the fictional country of La Mosquetera, deep amongst the jungles of South Africa where they will build their own civilization and live by their own means. A lot of it involves convincing the locals, a strange ethnic mix of blacks, hispanics and native indians, to obey his whims.

Ford's motivations are very Objectivist, but the fact that he's a lunatic keep it from being a Rand-fest. What follows is a mix of Swiss Family Robinson and Heart of Darkness. This movie blew my mind, and the zeal of Ford's character is amazing to watch. I can't remember another movie where he has put this much effort into a character.

Men of the Yamato (2005) 男たちの大和

This is about the WW2 Pacific theatre. As most people already know, the Imperial Navy lost badly to the American combined fleet and had their prized flagship sunk late in the war. This is basically Pearl Harbor in reverse.

From a strictly American viewpoint, this was ridiculous. Most of the movie is spent talking about ritual suicide and all these fucking weird things the Japanese culture is known for. Far too much screen time is spent watching people yell stuff like "YOIIIII" or screaming "goodbye world" off the side of the ship.

What about the good points? People persisting with anti-Japanese sentiment will find this movie appealing simply because a bunch of Japs die in droves. It's similar to watching the second half of Titanic, but with a ship chock full of screaming Japanese men. You get to see people die in every conceivable way. The naval combat action, and the whole point of this movie, was merely satisfactory.

The great thing about watching the fighting from the opposing side is that you get to see them lose. Losing a war is many times more gruesome than winning and is therefore many times more interesting to watch. Many people, especially Chinese nationals, derive enjoyment from watching Japs die because of lingering bitterness over unresolved war atrocities. For these, most of the culpability falls to the Japanese Army. The Japanese Navy was much less oppressive. Nonetheless, both the Imperial Army and the Imperial Navy are usually held equally responsible. For this undue blame, I think those guys deserve a break.

Story Rating: 0%
Action Rating: 75%

Poisoned by the Red Tide

I got sick eating at a seafood restaurant on Pier 39.

For those not in the know, Pier 39 is a tourist concentration camp on the Northeast corner of San Francisco where your welcoming attitude to foreigners goes to die. It gets trampled under the boots of a million camera-clicking French, Filipino and Japanese people who want nothing more than to get in your way.

It's because of places like this that all the small-towners who visit big cities like New York, Paris and SF leave with the impression that cities are packed shoulder to shoulder with seething masses of loud and quite possibly homosexual people. In reality, the problem is the out-of-towners themselves who feed the tourist trap with their money and turn it into an inescapable hell-hole of tacky businesses and shady restaurants.

The restaurant I went to was called Fisherman's Grotto, a nice-looking if huge restaurant packed behind a fake fish market and next to some falling-apart docks. It may be because I ordered 2 pints of beer within the first 10 minutes of my stay, but the food didn't seem bad. The only thing memorable about it was the price, which was enormous and unwarrented. Such is the way of Pier 39.

The first symptom I had was a night-long bout of physics-defying gassiness. My intestines, sensing the parasitic corruption, attempted to convert all the solids of my meal into gaseous form so that I might release them harmlessly into the atmosphere. Unfortunately the poisons were able to re-enter my system through my nose and lungs and allowed them to infect my brain more easily.

I was unable to sleep until 4 AM despite going to bed at about 11 PM. My nervous system jacked itself up to keep me from slipping into a fatal coma so I could do nothing but writhe around and vent deadly vapors while feeling my intestines deflate and re-inflate.

This morning I woke up with the feeling that my brain was lifting off from the inside of my skull to parts unknown. I felt ambivalent towards everything, including my vision blurring and my ears ringing at random intervals.

After my bowel decided to jettison everything in a last-ditch attempt to keep me alive, I decided to go jogging to sweat out the remaining toxins. While I was running I had the interesting sensation that I couldn't feel anything but my face. I had to clap my hands together to prove they still existed.

All in all, totally worth it. A little Red Tide is nothing to be afraid of when you're hungry for bottom-feeders. Next time I'm trying the crab.

Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott Ruined By Stupid People

I love boycotts. When done right, they can cause companies a ton of grief, generate controversy, and divide a community until one side becomes analogous to Hitler. In this case, supporters of buying L4D2 are the Hitlers because their blind support of Valve is the same as hard core fascism. Unfortunately, the boycott failed miserably due to the two shitbags who led the boycott, going by the names Walking_Target and the other guy. I don't know the other guy's name because it doesn't really matter: both are scumbags who wasted a perfectly good boycott opportunity.

So a few months ago these 2 dipshits created the L4D2 Boycott Steam Community Web Group Forum Twitter Page and got something like a million members championing the cause of not buying L4D2. This was a great time. Just going to the L4D steam forums the first 3 pages would be filled with whines about L4D2, complaints about the lack of support for L4D, and general FUCK U VALVE!!!!!! threads. I wanted to join in the bitch fest, but I didn't want to receive another 4 point(s) infraction from Rotten Dude:

So I just sat back, relaxed, and watched Valve's consumer support wither away from under them, as the boycott anger and strength grew with each passing week. Now you can guess where this was headed. In September, this message was posted on the boycott group page, along with this picture with the lead designer of L4D2 which seriously was the sole inspiration for this post:

Boomer!

Steam flew the two scum sucking boycott leaders to the Valve HQ for a private tour where they could preview L4D2 and directly discuss the game and their concerns with the L4D2 staff. That's where they took this picture with the fattest, ugliest boomer I've ever seen. They probably did stupid shit all day like treat everyone with respect, ask a bunch of insightful questions, etc. etc.

If you didn't want to read that entire post, I'll summarize the important parts for you:

"Over the last week or so, we've been hinting at something big. A few days ago, a potential technical difficulty forced us to say that this announcement might be postponed – which we took even more heat for."

Translation: Valve hit us with a non-disclosure agreement which we lapped up like dogs because we wanted to sell out and go to Valve HQ

"Facta Non Verba is a Latin phrase meaning quite literally “Deeds, not Words”, or “Actions speak louder than words”. This is ironic in more way than one."

Translation: This is ironic, because quite literally, I'm a pompous asshole.

"Valve took the course of Facta Non Verba in dealing with myself and Agent of Chaos. Rather than trying to explain everything via email, they invited us out to their offices in Bellevue, Washington. That alone speaks of a developer that really does care about its fanbase. So, after making arrangements and booking the time off of our jobs, we flew down for a day to take a quick tour and talk with the guys at Valve."

Translation: We creamed our pants when the fat bastards at Valve actually spoke to us. The Valve accountants decided that the boycott was going to make them lose their bonus money, so they told the HR department to order the Developers to entertain us for a day. We told our bosses to suck it because we hit the big time. Just kidding, we don't have jobs.

"We can't get into details, but we can definitely say that support for L4D is NOT being dropped by Valve and that they are actively pursuing bug fixes for Left 4 Dead. We're going to continue to talk to Valve and ask questions as needed, however if the frantic pace which we had seen people working at is any indication, we're not going to be left in the dust. The staff seemed to honestly love the original 4 Survivors and many said that “we're not done with them yet”."

Translation: The catered lunch was really good and I actually got to shake the fat developer's sweaty hand.

"As for L4D2, things seemed balanced and 'tight' and did not feel like a rushed job. While we were visiting their offices we personally witnessed what can only be called a small army of artists, coders, mappers hard at work, which explains the rapid transformations in artwork that we've all seen."

Translation: Despite the graphics of L4D2 being identical to L4D, I actually got to shake the fat artist's sweaty hand.

"We're not giving up just yet though, we will both be here up until our individual concerns are addressed and sticking with you folks."

Translation: We gave up.

"We'll be doing write ups about this tomorrow, Thrusday and Friday as well as answering questions. We will not be around that much tonight as we both have to fly back early tomorrow morning"

Translation: We will be justifying our selling out to the outraged millions of group members Thursday and Friday.

"As a collective we have done more than achieve a few goals, we have paved the way for Developer-Community relations in the future. No matter what the press or other gamers say, we have made an indelible mark upon the future of this industry. You should all be proud, we certainly are."

Translation: We've proved that all it takes to end a boycott is for the corporations to shell out a few hundred bucks to cater to two impressionable asswipes in order to avoid millions of dollars in lost revenue. Gamers have a say in what happens unless one of the boycott leaders gets to hold the golden crowbar.

Ever since the boycott effectively ended with Valve glad-handing the boycott leaders, sales of L4D2 skyrocketed. This is despite the game being priced at $50, full price for a brand new game, NOT an expansion. But wait, Valve wasn't done with those two talking heads just yet:

"We understand some of you have a problem with its price tag. Personally, I’m quite surprised with the discount on pre-orders; A 4 Pack bundle brings it down to only $33.75 for each person. I see many people took advantage of this including "boycotters", but to be honest that’s a fair price. In other words, that’s what expansions cost. You can’t blame them for making this decision."

Yes, a 4 pack bundle will only cost $33.75 each. What a great fucking deal, except that you need to buy 4 of them and you need to convince 4 friends to actually sit down all at the same exact time and play this game. And who would want to play with these two guys anyway? How do I know they won't shoot me in the back because the zombie leader gave them a tour of the zombie HQ and catered a free brain lunch for them?

"I'm sorry, but the zombies are really nice people and they are working hard on this!"

What a disappointment. I should follow more promising boycotts like Minute Maid. FUCK YOU MINUTE MAID.

The Sniper (2009) 神鎗手

lol this movie has been posted everywhere. This is the first time I've watched an HK movie without subtitles, so I probably missed some of the subtext, but I get the picture. It starts with a bunch of guys on a Chinese SWAT team that are competing to become the best sniper. They would say stuff like "chinese china bunch of chinese TOP SHOOTER! more chinese" and I would smirk. It's not long before friendly competition turns into enraged rivalry during real police action and soonafter they turn their sniper rifles on each other. It's so dramatic!
This is also the returning debut of Edison Chen after fleeing HK in disgrace due to the untimely leak of his homemade porn. He looks good. Acting still sucks though. Thing is, when I see him on the screen I just can't stop thinking about the photos of his sexual tryst ahahaha they got him good. Stuffed bear in the background watching them bahaha!

Rating: 40%

Blade 2 (2002)

Fuck yeah Blade. Let's say you were in the mood for some violence. Lots of chops, shots, and bloodletting fire. You don't care where or why it happens, simply that it does and that it happens instantly. Hands down, Wesley Snipes is your man. Blade was an "okay" movie for it's day, at the time directly competing with the not yet completed Lord of the Rings Trilogy and the Matrix sequels. Those two movie series prevented Blade from being more popular than it was, making the Blade series a forgotten favorite.

When you go back and watch old movies, sometimes you get surprised by what you find in the cast. Here, I found a young Donnie Yen as a vampiric blademaster. His character is a mute (implied, as he had no lines) and has a shortlived and unsatisfying role. Basically, even though Donnie Yen was a better choreographer than the rest of the cast, he ended up with a smaller role. The first (and last) move he pulls out is the HK classic "no shadow kick". What the hell? The director must have looked at his demo reel and said, "yeah just do that move and gtfo". Ten minutes later he is vampire food.


To date, Donnie has never had another scene with fucking eyeliner.
It also struck me on how dumb the story is. Full of holes and mostly a distraction, the plot of Blade 2 was very weak. For example, the prevailing bad guy shoots Blade into a swimming pool of blood and then expects him to be dead. Common, everyone knows that if Blade receives blood, he gets fully healed. How can the bad guy be that stupid? So forget the story, just watch the action and move on.

Rating: 60%

Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

It's hard to turn a kid's book containing about a paragraph worth of simple sentences in it into a feature-length film. Which is why it's necessary to take each of the simple, dialogue-less monsters from the storybook, give them interesting and meaningful names like Douglass and Judith, turn them into complex characters with psychological issues and wait for your Oscar.

What surprises me is that apparently the original author of the book is totally O.K. with this. Well, actually I'm more surprised that he's still alive. So now he gets to see his creation warped into a very non-kid friendly movie directed by a guy who normally directs music videos. And he's O.K. with it. So I guess I am too!

So what do the kids who go to see this movie learn? Here's a smattering of things I remember...um, teachers are dicks for telling kids the sun is going to eventually explode, single moms are crappy parents who raise kids that are nuts and like to dress up like foxes and hallucinate about monsters, it's not very nice to destroy your friends' houses, and interpersonal relationships are fundamentally flawed and will always fail on multiple levels if given time...and if you're a monster.