R. Kelly: Some Kind of Mad Genius

I've told some of you about my fondness for Trapped in the Closet, R. Kelly's narrative, soap opera-style R&B epic. This video from his latest record compresses the arc into a tighter package, only here Kelly shares storytelling duties with Usher.

Like Event Horizon Except Not Soul-Crushingly Awful

Apple has the extended trailer for Sunshine, the new sci-fi flick from Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, Trainspotting). My friend Jason, the chemist/board game geek from Stanford, saw the movie in France earlier in the year and gave it a thumbs up. If Jason doesn't have problems with the science, then only the stodgiest movie muggle has room to gripe. I think we've got one or two in the house, right?

Trailer here.

Ratatouille: Why Sturm5.0 probably won't see it.

Masterpiece or not. Best rendering of this story archetype or not. Unless Grandma wants to take the kids we probably won't see this film. The throw away reason is that they want to see Transformers instead anyway. The real reason is familial and societal. Stories about the underdog overcoming all obstacles to a brilliant end are an American staple. A staple that us Sturms can't relate to. Two possible reasons. The first is that we have never been underdogs and can't empathize with the main characters. Watching a 'woe is me' character is hard. Unless it is Hamlet because *spoilers* he dies *end spoilers*. The other reason could be becasue we are a pretty content stock of folk. You are what you are and you is what you is. And it is good.

Give me the escapism of big robots anyday.

Fun With Fluid Dynamics

Even if you aren't on a fistful of hallucinogens, you should be able to enjoy the old-things-made-new Plasma Pong for at least twenty minutes.

At first, the ideas "Pong" and "Fluid Dynamics" might create a bit of cognitive dissonance, but after about 20 levels of this game you'll understand why they always belonged together and curse the laziness of humanity for not working out all the math and modeling decades earlier.

Download it for Mac or PC at plasmapong.com

Red vs. Blue 100 and done.

It has been a bit since I visited but RvB is ending it's long and wonderful run. Episode 100 should drop tonight and then they will only pull out the guys for specials. Kinda sad news but good. I mean, they don't wanna be Brett Favre.

(I found the news by reading some Wil Wheaton stuff here.)

Now this is a sign of geekdom going MS.

From Fox, Nintendo Europe is using Nicole Kidman in an ad campaign. Now I did go with T-Mobile because they kept sending me pictures of Catherine Zeta-Jones but I dunno about this.

Edit: Here's the commercial. -g

Kanye's "Stronger" Video

Apparently the clip premiered on MTV recently. The Daft Punk robots are featured throughout. Who knows if the actual Frenchmen are beneath the masks? I dig the thumbs up that one of the robots throws midway through the video. And was that Danger Mouse strutting across the street for a split second?

To me this video is significant as a sign of an ongoing shift in contemporary culture. Setting a music video in Japan is no longer the domain of the "kooky" Beastie Boys any more. Tokyo cool is mainstream after 20-years of Blade Runner, manga and anime. I see the influence of Tron, Kill Bill, Akira (dig them tail lights) and Jin-Roh on this promo as well as the lingering influence of Chris Cunningham.

And Tim, this version is a radio edit so it's suitable for sensitive ears.

Edit: Fixed the broken video link.

Droppin' B list names.

Cali-Gus proly knows how I feel. Kya's school is in the 2001 film "Joe Somebody." I could just handle the last 15 minutes that were on when I got home. It is pretty cool having been in the same place that the great James Belushi has been. You know, mostly because he is related to his brother. Anyway the outside shots of the school and the auditorium are from her school. Very cool building.

Meet the Next Timothy Treadwell

If you didn't see the documentary Grizzly Man I'll bring you up to speed. Treadwell was a self-styled bear expert who stalked, video taped and frequently cavorted with the creatures. He met an inevitable gruesome death. Director Werner Herzog used Treadwell's footage to create a complex examination of the man's life and obsession.

The gent seen above is animal behaviorist Kevin Richardson. The cheeky photoshop is the handiwork of Acksman from the NeoGAF forums.

Carcassonne Wednesday

The reasons to buy an Xbox 360 mount. Though, I have to say I haven't played a single online game of Catan against and of the Source regulars yet. What's up with that?

Official page.

Weewar is lowercase hell

Weewar is web and turn-based multiplayer strategy. You have to sign up for an invite, but the response is quick.

Wiki here.

New Noah Baumbach Film

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Baumbach directed The Squid and the Whale (excellent) and co-wrote The Life Aquatic. A question to the Tenacious D fans: does this fall under the King Kong family of "do not want" Jack Black?

Just What I Needed

Read/watch Gus's hand post first.




Sometimes I think I am the only guy that watched this show. They were on MTV either right after or right before South Park. Kinda hard to hang with Kyle and the boys. I actually scheduled my day, sometimes nights, around this show. (read between the lines) That is how hard I laughed at this show.

The Summer of Stronger

Once the song's lyrics start to kick in you'll get why this video is so cool.

King of Kong

Here's your marching orders for Saturday. King of Kong is showing at the Solstice Film Festival -- one screening at 5:00 P.M. The movie is a documentary about the competition for the Donkey Kong world championship and the dark horse game player who goes up against old school gaming master Billy Mitchell. The screening is at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul.

What Rockstar Should Do

A long, long time ago I equated Rockstar Games and EC Comics. Whether the two companies are working on the same level is arguable. I'm not sure if I've yet seen the brilliance of Bernie Krigstein or Wally Wood in the Grand Theft Auto Games, but damn if Bully isn't getting close. I think the bigger connection between the two companies is that they make adult-oriented art in a medium that is widely considered for children. They also happen to profit from that fact that children and adolescents have a rabid desire for that kind of material. But that's another story.

Right now I'm thinking about what Rockstar should do about Manhunt 2's UK ban and AO rating here in the states. This is where the big difference between Rockstar and EC comes into focus. EC was in the hands of William Gaines, son of the company's creator. Rockstar is beholden to Take 2 and a butt-load of stockholders.

I've always posited that Rockstar was one gutsy move from being the Larry Flynt of video games. Larry, some say cynically, turned attempts at censorship into a key component of the Hustler brand. He's coasted on that image ever since, never really creating anything (besides the Flynt Report) that really lived up to his freedom-fighting image.

Rockstar, on the other hand, probably wouldn't coast. They'd continue to make great, beloved and incredibly risque games. Only now they'd have the mandate of the masses behind them. As 1st Amendment poster children there'd be an expectation from customers and stockholders alike that they continue to push limits.

It wouldn't take much effort to repackage Manhunt 2's censoring as a 1st Amendment issue. I can already see the bold sticker slapped across the game packaging: "Banned in the UK!" The game would be in good company too. Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange was once barred from view in England. The Rockstar marketing machine is well-equipped to pull this kind of thing off. But it's very unlikely that Take 2 would ever sign off on this kind of approach.

The company's shameful silence during the Hot Coffee affair is proof of this. Rockstar is hamstrung by a crumbling company and scrambling executives. So we'll probably see Manhunt 2 watered down. Though there's a chance that that no amount of edits will please the ESRB. It could be that Rockstar now has the stink of AO on them, which may be impossible to wash off. Just ask Sam Raimi who struggled for years with the MPAA. His Evil Dead films consistently exceeded the R rating, some say because the ratings board had it out for the director.

My dream is that Nintendo is right now making a phone call to Take 2, telling the company that they'll permit Manhunt 2 to be released for the Wii as is. But I don't believe, either, that Nintendo would risk their current public goodwill on this game. And this is, perhaps, the biggest crime of all. We may never play the definitive version of Manhunt 2 -- the game as experienced with the visceral Wii remote. There's no chance for an uncut DVD here. Manhunt 2 on the Wii is our first and last chance to play the game the way it was intended. It could be that the game is cynical trash or even dangerous when played with controls simulating the physicality of murder, but thanks to censors we'll probably never be able to decide for ourselves.

Read my review of the original Manhunt.

Cross-osted from Looky Touchy.

There's Never Been a Better Time to Jump Ship

If you ask me, Mike Bloomberg has the right idea. When a Republican president and Democratic congress both have abysmal approval ratings, a unique opportunity to move off the political grid presents itself. When so many people on both sides of the proverbial aisle are dissatisfied, everyone is looking for a new place to put their political faith. Why not throw in with the guy who's swinging from the balcony?

"You Can Major in GameBoy If You Know How to Bullshit."

If Droz only knew.

If this is a thesis, then interactive telecommunications is a much less rigorous and competitive field than I might have assumed.

Not that she's got a bad idea there, mind you. I, for one, have been playing video games in my underwear for well over a decade.

Bonus: That's clearly Waters in the demonstration video

So Close and Yet So Far

This is multiplayer away from being the best thing on the internet.

Yeah, I said it.

Shit Just Got Real

There's still chance for redemption. The USPS just delivered the UK region, 2-disc Hot Fuzz. If your home player is hackable the flick is available for loan. If not, I can arrange private screening or even loan you my player.

On a different note I just noticed that the movie was rated 15 for Europe. Here in the States it was an R and at our theater they'd actually posted extra staff to re-check tickets before we entered. Gotta protect the children.

The Source Commercial

I caught this clip out of the corner of my eye while eating dinner at Pizza Luce. Since the blog is named after the shop and the gaming that goes on there Thursdays we'd be remiss in not plugging the store and their snazzy commercial.

Official Source Comics and Games Site.

http://www.splitreason.com/productdetail.php?id=369

I think that is a great design

Girls Make Noise

Above is the trailer for Girls Rock! a documentary for an all-girl rock and roll camp. Check out this clip, "Popcorn! Music" to see some of the awesome results.

I'm sure somebody has already made the comparison, but there's a distinct possablilty that some of you haven't heard of the outsider world's most infamous girl band, The Shaggs. Susan Orlean, she of The Orchid Thief aka the book that Adaptation is about, wrote about them for The New Yorker.

Here's a user made video of the Shaggs' "My Pal Foot Foot", a song about a lost cat.

A cover of the song by Deerhoof:

Figure 5: Britney and a Metal-Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition Machine

Sometimes when you look for information on the intarwebs, you end up looking at something you couldn't have been looking for because you couldn't possibly have surmised that what you were looking at existed in the first place.

That's exactly what happened to me when I found myself face to page with Britney's Guide to Semiconductor Physics. As the math gets more complex, the pictures and diagrams get funnier. I'm not sure whether the mad genius behind this site should be praised or killed. Or maybe given some sort of research grant.

Pazuzu Was A Lady

The wife's all-time favorite movie is The Exorcist. If you've seen it, you'll know that the force, known to Reagan and their family as "Captain Howdy," has a connection to the wind demon Pazuzu. Maybe the creepiest parts of the film are the nearly subliminal flashes of Pazuzu that pop up at strange moments. Alexis' sister Glynnis just pointed out today that the face belonged to actress Eileen Deitz. I guess those weren't her real teeth.

We Are The Robots

Long way for a bad pun.

Ahhh summer. A time to enjoy the outdoors. Get back in shape. Take that summer road trip. "Accidentally" turn the TV to the AVP pro women's beach volleyball finals. Or to "coincedentally" bring the family to BW3 when the finals are on cable.

But much to my ms.may the reason for watching is now married. Since I only watch in a 'disinterested' manner I don't know when it happened. Misty May is now Misty May-somthinorother.

Gonna be a long summer.

" "

The Horror

Rob Nelson of The City Pages just published a fascinating conversation with Adam Lowenstein, a scholar from the University of Pittsburgh who studies horror films. In the interview they discuss the controversial Hostel II and question whether or not scary flicks are yet addressing 9/11. Most interesting is Lowenstein's assertion that horror isn't about catharsis, but rather outing catharsis as an easy way out.

Lowenstein:

Horror's dark gift is to remind us that the tragic events we think we've gotten over and understood always come back to haunt us. And that's an incredibly valuable gift. I share Eli Roth's sense about this. I find these films to be incredibly optimistic even in their darkest, cruelest moments. What the films share is a sense that it's still worth communicating with an audience: It's still worth getting a point across, still worth making someone feel a certain discomfort; it's worth having that kind of commitment and confidence. There's hope that comes with that—a hope that things can get better.

The Wisdom of GameFAQS

On the Etrian Odyssey F.O.E. tip: the posters at GameFAQs in a rare display of brilliance riff on this J-pop video based on the game.

My favorite: "I'm in town, getting ready to save ... F.O.E.! xO" You know the sadistic bastards that designed Etrian Odyssey would make it happen if they could.

Oh my, i WAS reincarnated.

or whaterver
This pic is uncanny. (found it here)

->creeped out

Microsoft: Not All Bad

Microsoft Research actually does some cool stuff. Here's a couple demos which certainly impressed me, I just hope I get to play with these products someday. The Photosynth demo is especially mind-blowing in its implications, and I like to think about future boardgames using Surface.

Surface

Photosynth

German Word of the Day

Well, the Germans have done it again. In one word, Bildungsroman, they unite two of my guilty pleasures: the coming of age movie and the RPG. Amazing.

Hero For A Day

Tim and I trekked out to see the Guitar Hero II tournament at the Mall of America Saturday. The turn out was good and the competition fairly fierce. In the first round players vied for the high score on "Rock This Town" at the expert difficulty. The best player nailed upwards of 340,000 points. The level of competition was way beyond my skills, but Tim had the guts to get up there and have a go. To punish him for his bravery I shoved my camera phone in his face.

This kind of thing used to really tick me off

I can still remember, ten years ago, being really angry at Puff Daddy for the way "I'll Be Missing You" was pretty much a Police song with new rap lyrics on top. When I was younger I had a chip on my shoulder about music. It all had to be experimental and edgy. The more obscure the better. I think I'm easing up in my old age.

Granted, Kanye puts a little more into this song that Puff Daddy used to. He flips the original Daft Punk track "Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger" a little, especially towards the end you can pick out where he isolates and repeats certain words -- like he's doing his own remix of the song. He's also added some signature flourishes -- a little extra thump and some dramatic keys to make the song fit in on pop radio playlists.

At this point I've got at least 19-different mixes of the orignal Daft Punk tune in my iTunes library, so maybe I'm just a little more comfortable with people re-interpreting the songs I love. Anyway, I'm going to pat myself on the back a little. Learning to relax and love Kanye makes it so that there's one less thing in the world that gets my dander up.

The Legend of Zelda Dungeon Theme

Ray and Blake, friends of my friend Jeremy, are professional orchestral musicians in the Los Angeles area. They're kicking around the idea of starting a string trio to perform video game themes. Here's a video of them working out one of their arrangements as a duet.

Cross posted to Looky Touchy

At the Risk of Being Disappeared by Google....

This ad changed my life.

Caravan

I should have spent more time last night integrating products of trig functions, but I just couldn't stop playing this game. It's got a little something for all the neurotic sub-personalities of your inner gamer. There's resource management. There's gunplay. There's economics. I think the thing that kept me so compelled was that the overall feel was not unlike an open-ended hybrid of Fallout and Oregon Trail.

Maestro, an appropriate tune, please?

F-bomb Humor

GC made the F-bomb funny a long time ago and now he does all my kid's shows. He had the benefit of being the first. 20 plus years later and the F-bomb can be a crutch. There is nothing worse than an f-bomb bombing and that it all it has done of late. In the 80's Robin Williams did a bit on golf with a Scottish accent . . . and the f-bomb. Remove the f-word and his golf bit sucks. So when a co-worker sent me this I set the bar low so as not to be disappointed. Good crescendo and timing. I approve.



Best Beer Commercial Ever - Click Here for more great videos and pictures!

George R.R. Martin Second Life Reading

Here's an excerpt of the Q&A:

George RR Martin: Since January, when I announced the deal with Home Box Office for the television series of A Song of Ice and Fire—A Game of Thrones--I've been getting a lot of questions about it. And I knew I'd get a lot of questions tonight, so I've asked David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who will be the executive producers of the show and the scriptwriters, who will be doing it, to join us here tonight. And you can ask them some of your questions about what will happen with the Home Box Office project. Of course, keep in mind that we're just getting started here, so there's a lot of stuff that we don't know yet. But, David and Dan, can you guys come forward here?

Moderator: Obviously you've been standing in the room and you've been seeing the questions from fans going on all evening. I guess the biggest question and the one that everybody's kind of wanted to know about the series is, how faithful is it going to be to the books and how is it going to cue off what George has already written?

David Benioff: Well, when the books were first sent to me by George's agent, they were sent for me to look at in terms of making as a feature. And I started reading and about, I probably read about 150 pages, and I realized three things I guess. One was that I hadn't been this transported into a fantasy world since I also was in junior high school reading Lord of the Rings. The second thing was that this was, this would not work as a feature because the idea of trying to compress an 800 page book with incredibly detailed subplots into 120 page script, I mean we would have lost so much of what was so wonderful about this book. The third thing was that this was something I wanted to do and I couldn't do it by myself, which was why I sent the book to my friend and colleague, D.B. Weiss.

And you know I got phone calls from people at the studio afterwards saying, "There is a way to make this as a feature. There's a way to do it as a movie. You could just take Jon Snow and Daenerys and just concentrate on them and get rid of some of the minor characters." And it just, it was kind of appalling because, much as I love Jon Snow and Daenerys, I didn't want to lose the other characters. I mean this is an epic and the only way we could conceive of doing it properly was to tell it as a series. And you can't do it as a series where's it interrupted every twenty minutes by a commercial for toothpaste. And you can't do it where I'd have Tyrion saying the things he says and doing the things he says, all of which network TV would have had a huge problem with.

So we really felt from the beginning that the best way to do this was on HBO or possibly Showtime. And then I went online and I saw that all the fans had had this idea years before I had and realized that I was quite late to the game. But luckily George felt the same as we did and the whole reason we're doing this with HBO was because we felt it was really the only way to be faithful to the books and to put the entire series on air, not just highlighting, not just in the Reader's Digest condensed version of it, I should say.

D.B. Weiss: Yeah, it's really our goal just to make it as faithful as possible within the confines of the medium, which are much less on HBO than they are anywhere else.

Moderator: That's allowing you guys a certain amount of freedom in terms of the script and the casting and everything else.

David Benioff: Yeah, absolutely it is. As opposed to having to do 120 page script for A Game of Thrones, for instance, we're going to have now twelve 60 page scripts, so that’s 720 pages to tell the full story and it really allows us to be true to George's world in a way that we never could have otherwise. It's incredibly exciting and, as George said, it's a long process. We're still at the very, very beginning of it, but we can't wait to see the "Winter is Coming" promos on HBO at the end of a, well, I guess there won't be any more Sopranos episodes, but the end of whatever is coming on in a year.

I'm still hunting for a link to the full text.

EDIT: Full transcript at the ASOIAF forums.

The Wii's Best Feature

Scroll down on the Amazon product page to spot the stealthy web meme in the wild. Of course: Screenshot...or it never happened.

Via NeoGAF, of course.

Road trips and music

My favorite part of a road trip is scanning the radio for music that I don't usually listen to. (classic rock and country) I also almost always catch "One Burbon, One Scotch, and One Beer" which is a great driving tune. That song even makes cars on cruise control go a little faster. Anyway, Karri and I found this country song with an almost EMO layer to it. As far as I am concerned she is another reason to flirt with country every once in awhile. Waters may like her because she is under 18.




(Dock, you were correct that my last post was a set up. This one is legit.)
Thanks for the word I was looking for, Gus. Changed it to EMO.

Summer Movies: The First Wave

I'll take a momentary break from shoving Hot Fuzz down your throats to talk about some of the other movies I saw this week. I initially wanted to see five movies in five days, but the wife and I lost steam after three. Here are some impressions:

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: This movie cashes in the last little bit of goodwill the first movie bought merely by not sucking. I'm not sure why I like the director, Gore Verbinski. He, after all, dumbed down one of my favorite J-horror flicks. But he's got a talent for cartoony nonsense. The set pieces in his debut Mousehunt had a Rube Goldberg quality to them. There are few moments of senseless anarchy in At Worlds End, but most of the movie is just senseless. Plot threads dangle, peter out and fizzle left and right. And I'd personally like to keelhaul the genius who thought that multiple Jack Sparrows would somehow exponentially magnify the character's charm.

Knocked Up: My nerd friends in Northern California were also reluctant to see this movie. I reassured them, as I do you, that the trailers do not do it justice. If anything the movie is vulgar. But more importantly it's smart, cutting and surprisingly honest. Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann (director Apatow's wife) play a married couple with kids whose fights ring as true as any I've seen in ages. They're all simmering passive aggression punctuated by blink and you miss 'em barbs. Rudd's character is suffering the death of a thousand cuts -- a fate all the more tragic in that all he and his wife need do is actually talk. Don't get me wrong, this is all B-story I'm talking about. The main plot is all about stupid kids making stupid decisions. And, like most paths we walk, they still tend to come out okay. And Mike, the director of your favorite comedy of all time, Harold Ramis, makes a solid cameo. That movie, at its heart, was a movie about love, youth and reproduction as well, wasn't it?

Triad Election: Johnny To is at the forefront of the current Chinese gangster film revival. He's eschewing the operatic gunplay and complicated man-on-man relationships of John Woo for a more languid approach. This, actually the second in a series, continues on the theme of mob leadership with heads of crews lobbying to be the unifying capo of Hong Kong's diverse and colorful crime groups. One reluctant wise guy, Jimmy Lee, wants to go straight and make a mint developing land in mainland China. Wouldn't you know it? They keep pulling him back in. Triad Election hits all the notes already played by the likes of The Godfather or Scarface, but sometimes all you need is a little change of scenery to make an old story worth re-telling.

Black Book: I've come to terms with the fact that people just don't get Starship Troopers. There's nothing confusing about Black Book. It's a sharply made World War II thriller about a Jewish woman who joins the Dutch resistance after her family is gunned down by Nazis. Verhoven comes down against tyranny of all kinds (his own countrymen get their due) and he does so in his trademark way. He challenges the audience at every turn to rethink their morality. He paints an SS commander as human. He pushes violence, sensuality and cruelty in the audience's face with an unflinching honesty that I can't help but admire. He's also got a soot-black sense of humor. The wife and I were the only two people laughing in a scene when a pacifist member of the resistance, a devout Christan rightfully reluctant to take lives, finally snaps and unloads his gun in the back of a sympathizing scumbag. Murder is never funny, but when he uses his victim's last words -- blasphemy against God -- as rationalization for vengeance the moment felt too cathartic to respond in any other way. Life is just fucked up that way. If you're sick of movies with happy endings this one is for you. The heroine's ordeal under German occupation eventually gives way to a depressing kind of victory -- a life behind Israeli barbed wire and battlements.

Uh-oh, our politicians have found faith again.

And suprise suprise it is in the context of a campaign. I didn't watch last night's Democrat debate and I am not watching tonights Republican debate either. I am just wondering if anyone else noticed all the news accounts of politicians and thier faiths today. I bring this up because I am once again in the unenviable position of deciding which party I am going to let take advantage of me for having a faith myself.

No not really.

You see while AVK just learned that I don't think people always do stuff for money I am almost 100% sure politicians only do things for votes during campaigns.

I am once again leaning towards just voting pocketbook. ;)

Atheists With Attitude

Christopher Hitchens' latest book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, has been getting a decent amount of press lately. A couple weeks ago The New Yorker surveyed several books rooting for the death of faith in the long-form review "Atheists With Attitude" by Anthony Gottlieb.

To me the most interesting part of the story is the way the writer looks to Hume as perhaps the most effective proponent of secularism. The writer suggests that Hume's softball approach converted more souls (a spoonful of sugar to help the oblivion go down) than Hitchens' venoml or Dawkins' haughty intellectualism will ever woo.

The second review comes by way of one of my favorite cartoonists, Tony Millionaire. His one-page strip "God Is A Big Jerk" lets a little more air out of Hitchen's puffed shirt. Tony unpacks the strip a bit more in this blog post, where he adds "I also hate his stupid little American flag pin."

Who doesn't?

The Robotic Children of Mr. Wu

This video comes with William Gibson's recommendation.

Respawning Monsters :(

I don't know how many of you are playing Etrian Odyssey. But FOEs are the game's wandering monsters. They're mean, strong and can join a battle all ready in progress. Ugly. Apparently FOE stands for Foedus Obrepit Errabundus, or foul wandering creature who sneaks up for surprise buttsehx. The first FOE in the game is the Ragelope, who many gamers have already nicknamed Rapelope. If you plan on exploring the labyrinth bring your own lube.