This movie does a good job of creating a scene compelling enough that it's like actually being in deep space. Placement is created for you by bearing witness to the gruesome death of the characters. You can be frozen solid by the absence of temperature and pressure, and if you survive that, you'll get a lethal dose of frostbite anyway. Get caught on the wrong side of the solar shield and you'll be incinerated. Sunshine is a constant struggle to avoid extreme temperatures that you will never experience, unless you get stuck in a primary blast zone or something.
Although Frank was right about one thing. The flaws in this movie happen to be the personal ones. The captain of the ship is Japanese, and surprise, he kills himself in a space age seppuku.
The next character is a Chinese, and he commits suicide when he makes a mathematical error. How typical.
Two down, Michelle Yeoh plays a Chinese woman that is obsessed with farming her hydroponics garden.
And then we have the pretty white kid and prodigal physicist that spends the entire movie staring at the corona of the sun. The fire of romance erupts here, releasing a bright solar flare of suck.
After setting up what I thought to be an effective story and putting high stakes on the ending, the movie becomes a sequence of symbolic imagery. Gayyy. Rating:50%
stop fucking using statistics as evidence in your medical research? Just stop. STOP. Stop it. You're going to drive me crazy. Every time you publish some rollerball study about the health benefits of some medical procedure, the media puts it onto a pedestal of everlasting life, which I then have to hear about on the radio. God I swear, everything you do is boring second-rate freshman level sample statistics. A hypothesis test isn't fucking magic. It doesn't explain medical phenomenon just because you double blinded it.
For example, you ask: "Would men who got regular PSA tests have less risk of dying from prostate cancer?". Stupid question. You don't consider the fact that these men would seek your medical tests simply because they have lifestyles conducive to throbbing pain in their testicles? What about the fact that the risk of dying from prostate cancer is directly related to your wellbeing and not directly related to having tubules inserted into your dickhole?
Yet, completely disregarding anything else and focusing only on your brilliant testicular exam, you go ahead and throw that statement out there. Yes, take this test, otherwise there is an additional X% chance that we will have to amputate your balls.
What happened to finding out why people get that kind of cancer? I'm talking about real medical science and not the excel file full of test subjects from the homeless shelter that you paid $20 to experiment on. Why don't you do real physiological studies rather than spend 10 years updating a mailing list? That's not medicine, and that's certainly not what a bunch of morons walking around a candlelit track and field paid for.
But the real insult is that you actually think that these statistics are a breakthrough worth reporting on the news. That you actually think this will lead to medicinal progress. In your own words, that it will "save lives", whatever that means. Why don't you actually spend your time trying to figure out how that shit works rather than hiding behind a veil of statistical significance, while making everybody think about their impending death by crotch rot.
Although this movie isn't particularly recent, the characters happen to be relevant to current events. The show starts in the slums, the New York variety, where the gangs are living a competitive life of owning useless property and fighting over chunks of sidewalk. One day, the drug dealer gets mixed up with a shady Wall Street guy. Rather than steal from the middle class like they usually do, they start scamming each other. Wow how great is that? Two detestable social classes that I dislike are going at each other's throats. It's almost as if the death penalty got replaced by a gladiatorial ring, giving both society and criminals what they want. (see Felony Fights) Empire is a movie designed to show the corruptive effects of capitalism in all it's glory. Released in 2002 during the middle of the dot com recession, this was probably what people wanted to see at the time. As the movie nears conclusion, the moral of the story suddenly changes to "crime doesn't pay". The shock of this alone makes this a shitty movie.
Mexican Tupac gets scammed and young Bernie Madoff gets shot. Rating: 30%
Every once in a while, Jon Stewart speaks for liberals everywhere and clowns a public figure. This week, that man was Jim Cramer, and the verdict on the internet is an overwhelming victory for Stewart.
Is it really? The interview begins like any other episode of the Daily Show. Initial pleasantries are followed by funny but insulting questions. Stewart accuses Cramer of several varieties of fraud, against which Cramer is too nervous to defend himself. He twitches a bit and shamelessly chastises himself for the rest of the interview, allowing Stewart to passionately bitch him out. Pwned, right?
Not quite. Unfortunately, beating down Cramer makes little sense. He's way too easy. Between doing retarded shit with a soundboard and having potent anger issues, Cramer is weird and easily despised. That goes double for being accused of contributing to the recession.
So naturally, Stewart blames Cramer for being the direct cause of people losing their savings. Honestly? If you actually take investment advice from a show called "Mad Money" hosted by a bald raving lunatic, then you are an idiot and probably would have lost money anyway.
Stewart also has a problem with Cramer juxtaposing a soundboard with a serious topic like your life savings. Stewart is telling Cramer to be more serious? Common, this is just typical capitalist sleaze. Lighten up.
People everywhere are watching Cramer get publicly disgraced and thinking to themselves, "take that Wall Street!". But Cramer is just a court jester in the world of finance. Jon Stewart has not sent any "fuck you" to Wall Street by publicly disgracing Cramer, instead, he has simply lynched a clown. Yeah, that's kind of funny, but it is not a victory.
(insert picture of a Jewish man punching a clown here)
I used to live in the same house with this insane autist half-Japanese loser. He scavanged old Macs from the dump, strew them around the living room and wired them together into horrible approximations of working computers. He and his other weird outcast buddies would then play retarded old games on them that were incredibly hard, incredibly non-intuitive, ugly and appreciated only by fringe audiences.
One of these games was Nethack. I once caught my autist housemate playing this game, where your character is represented by an @, monsters were various letters like B or q or L , hallways looked like ###### and potions looked like '. It was the hardest fucking thing to understand, what was going on or even what it was about. So my OTHER roommate (who was also a huge geek but was my buddy and an actual human being) explained that it was this ultra-difficult RPG in which there were a million ways to die, literally.
Also, so much time had gone into this game (having been a work-in-progress since 1986) that there was an incredible amount of depth to it as well. If you fought a Vampire and it bit you, you might become one and have to suck blood for the rest of the game. You could find a tinning kit and put monsters you've killed into tin cans to eat later, so as to avoid the ever-present threat of food poisoning. You could pray to your god to help in times of need. You could role-play a tourist with no weapons except a credit card.
I said "well why is it so fucking ugly? Can't they make it look decent?" My buddy said "You can download stuff that makes it look modern, but it's still the same game." At this point my loser roommate chimed in "but why would you want to do thaaat?" at which point I felt like curb stomping him and decided to forget about Nethack.
Then, arriving last week, my April copy of PC Gamer (which actually had some good shit in it for once) listed the Top 49 Game Developers of All Time. Among them were Valve, John Carmack, Wil Wright Blizzard and "The Nethack team: Makers of the game that hates you and wants you dead."
Quote: "It's not beating Nethack that matters; it's knowing just how few people have managed to do it...Behind the challenge is one of the most fiendish cabals ever to plot your randomly generated doom...they think of everything."
Unable to resist at this point (and helped by an attached screen shot of the game that looked like a mid-90's RPG instead of DOS code), I downloaded the thing and a tileset to make it look decent and started to play.
So far, these are the horrible things that have happened to my various characters:
Magic Man the Wizard: Killed by his own kitten while unconscious from lack of food.
Pussy Man the Caveman: Frozen by a floating eye and killed by a sewer rat while helpless.
Sheila the Tourist: Killed by a falling rock trap that had just killed her kitten, while attempting to pick up the kitten corpse to offer to her god.
Magic Mann the Wizard: Killed in the gnomish mines by a master mind flayer that ate his brain.
Johnny Lollerskates the Ranger: Also killed in the gnomish mines by a master mind flayer that ate his brain.
Leafboy the Elf Ranger: Killed by a watch captain (the furthest I've gotten so far).
Patty the Tourist: Killed by her own kitten after putting on a "ring of conflict."
Konan the Barbarian: Killed by a Pony.
Dr. Hessler the Archaeologist: Killed by a Naga Hatchling that jumped out of a fountain he tried to drink from.
Sally the Tourist: Drank a cursed potion of levitation, which meant she couldn't go down any stairs, push boulders, or throw anything without flying backwards. Also couldn't pick stuff up off the ground. Escaped by the stairs she entered the dungeon through.
Dr. Bentler the Archaeologist: Killed after being bit by a WereJackal (and becoming one himself) and succumbing to food poisoning from eating a rotted Gnome King corpse.
Wizard's Baker the Wizard: Mauled to death by animals inside a shop while trying to buy food and fainting from hunger. (The shopkeeper "gladly inherited his belongings.")
Here are various odd things that have occurred, and can easily happen to you with no warning:
-Read a magic scroll that causes your stuff to explode. -Stand on a water trap that rusts your sword. -Go blind from shooting lightning at a monster. -Hallucinate from an unidentified potion, and get messages like this: "The harpy beeps! You kill the poor succubus! The audience applauds!" after you accidentally kill your own kitten. -Enter a room with 20 leprechauns who all steal your gold and run. -Get blinded from a thrown custard pie. -Eat homemade gnome that you tinned yourself out of gnome corpses. -Lose 50 DKP from getting feared into the dragon welps (j/k that's World of Warcraft LOL) -Be a tourist and blind monsters with your expensive camera. -Accidentally wear or use one of a million cursed items. Anything in this game can be "cursed," meaning it sucks and you can't drop it, ever. -Die from eating an egg you find on the ground. -Waste a shit load of free time only to die horribly.
More mini-updates to come, hopefully once I get better at this and find all new ways to get killed.
I got the 2 fish sandwiches from Jack Box for $3. In California, this comes out to $3.25 with state taxes. This is totally convenient. It's a couple bills and quarter. This is a "whole number price", a food cost that allows you to use whole units of currency and get back whole units of currency.
Dimes, nickels, and pennies are worthless. People hate them, shopkeepers hate them, bank tellers hate them. Why is a whole unit price better than a decimal one? Because it allows people to make transactions without fucking around with these little peapod coins. Take for example this other thing I got at Jack's Box for $2.99, which comes out to $3.24 with tax. That is shit. Now you have to fumble with all sorts of metallic coinage that will be ultimately destined for coinstar.
Food vendors in the United States should adjust their prices so that the payment is a whole number after tax. In my area sales tax is 8.25%. Why not just set a $1 item to 92 cents rather than making people pay you $1.08? Would it really hurt restaurants that much to do this? ... Then they invented money cards, which everyone switched to except for fugitives of the law, xenophobes, and the chinese.
Remember those partisans that would pop up every time you took over a city in Civilization 2? That is what this movie is about. It features Jewish freedom fighters encamped in a wooded forest trying to survive the holocaust by fighting their way out. As usual, Hitler is the bad guy. You can't really go wrong with that kind of storyline. Once in a while, the world of movie producers decide to remind us about the persecution of the Semites, and because this is set in Eastern Europe, we get a refresher on the revolutionary tenants of communism as well. Daniel Craig takes a break from his quantums of Bond movies with the role as leader of the revolt. His performance is enthusiastic yet not brilliant, and his character is portrayed as grim and irrationally desperate to preserve the lives of peasants.
A Jewish version of Braveheart based on the true story of the Bielski family. Rating: 50%
