Gnar Wars

Gnar Wars by Mike Benson from Mike Benson on Vimeo.
My buddy Mike shot this Star Wars themed snowboarding video.

Grand Theft Childhood

As you all know I couldn't care less about R* or GTA IV. I don't like it so I don't play it. Some people like it so some people play it. That is the way life is and it works out pretty well. I'm over it.

However, today my children came home to tell me about the kids that brought the cases for the game or the map of the in game city to school. Fifth graders playing an M rated game like that? I am not over that.

There are so many judgements, read rocks, I want to throw right now.

Somebody else played "Creep" this weekend

That's Prince headlining Coachella.

New MGS 4 Trailer

Who the hell knows what's going on here. It's a good bet you won't be able to parse the damn story in English either. Still, nobody does incomprehensible better than Kojima.

The Best!

Congratulations to Source Comics and Games who were picked best game store in the Twin Cities by City Pages.

Ultimate Reality

This week's Pitchfork.tv recommendation is Ultimate Reality -- a collaboration between Dan Deacon and video artist Jimmy Joe Roche. I like my Schwarzenegger psychedelic. This is another one-week only video clip so watch it while you can.

Notsopermalink.

Gnarls Barkley Backwards

The band is giving away a backwards mix of their new record The Odd Couple. Such a cool idea.

EDIT: Oops. I forgot to link it. Grab it here.

Junot Diaz' Forthcoming Sci-Fi Book

Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer and now he's writing a sci-fi novel. He cut an pasted a raw bit of intro during an interview with Omnivoracious. I'm quoting it, because it's awesome.

I'm somewhere in the Zone, traveling on top of an transport. Bound for City.

The only City there is.

What I see. Usually just the f-ckedup hide of the truck. Every now and then I lift my head a little and see the other Travellers sucked onto the metal of the container like remora. See the fresca from the night before, long hair whipping back in thousands of everchanging streams. See: fields of white crosses, an endless proliferation of kudzu, a basketball game between the Junior Klan and the Uncle Muhammed Youth League--a regular five on five with a ref and everything so you know we're in the End Times for real. And sometimes, if I'm not careful, I see my mother and my brother standing by the edge of the road. She has her hand on his shoulder and they still got snow clotting up the spaces between their toes. They're waving. Since the transport is automated it switches its lights on only when it detects another vehicle or when we're in civilization but at night on the interstates it feels like we're rushing through a corridor of whooshing air as unlit as a vein. We pass cities and zonafrancas and fortress towns and overhead roar fighter jets and gunships and every now and then the transport will squash something on the road. A rumble under the tires and then the return to the lullaby of the whoosh as whatever it is gets spat out behind the mud flaps in ruin.

I don't try to look around too much. We are going over a hundred miles an hour and there is a little indio kid on my left who I'm trying to keep from blowing off the top of the transport. About an hour ago his pops lost his grip on him and screamed one of those miserable Noooo's that reaches into even me and before the kid could catch sky I leaned over and pulled him in. You should have heard his little heart, seen his little face. Stupid, attracting attention. A Samaritan I'm not. Believe me. I could just as easily have watched the kid sail and said, Wepa!

At times like these, even hardguys like me, all we should do is hold on. Plenty folks get peeled off the transports, especially kids and the thins, turned into axle grease which is why these rigs are plastered with signs in English, Spanish, Krïol, Cantonese, Hmong, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Russian and Ghanaian: Stay The F-ck Off. Sometimes the local youth--when they're not immbolized on huff or bending each other over--will man the overpasses and drop debris on us, anything from bricks and firecrackers to hot oil and glass, get it all on ractives so they can spin the shit for laughs onto the net. The life of the Traveller, as they say, no es fácil. You should see how tired folks are after only a couple of hours on a transport. Praying for the next reforge, their arms trembling and these are the ones who got lucky and scored a roof spot. The ones who got to cling to the side rigging, muchacho, they're lucky if they're alive by the time we reach a depot.

Diaz says the book is called Dark America. I can't wait.

"All I Need"

This clip, a mini documentary directed by Mike Mills, remains one of my favorite examples of the great creative, artistic potential of the music video. It's a thing of beauty. The full length film about Air (the French band), is available, streaming for a limited time. Again, "yay, Pitchfork."

Oh Bat Outta Hell no

I just saw a commercial where the great and wonderful MEATLOAF was schilling Go Phones from AT&T with his whole family ... to "Paradise by the dashboard light."




Here is the new commercial.

Oganization

I've always liked to see things in order. My mom tells a tale of buying cucumbers and then setting me on the table as she put away groceries. I got into the cucumber bag and proceeded to arrange them by size until I got to a pair where one was shorter but fatter than the other. Apparently I spent a lot of time switching them back and forth as my 2-3 year old brain attempted to grasp volume as measure.

My enjoyment of a topic is usually enhanced if it has some sort of organizing I can do with it, be it organizing dog breeds by size or sword patterns by age or calibers by velocity.

In this same vein, I used to ask my father questions of "If a crocodile and a lion got in a fight, who would win?" and then whatever answer I'd slightly shift the variables "What if the lion was really old? What if the crocodile was young? How about a gorilla vs a crocodile?"

Now in the realm of space vessels I am able to waste a lot of time comparing ships across 'universes'

http://www.merzo.net/

I've always wondered how Battlestar Galactica stacks up vs the Galaxy Class Enterprise, or an Imperial Star Destroyer. That web page kept me occupied for hours, comparing things, and making the Hindenburg crash into the Pyramid ships from Star gate or grab Godzilla and The Statue of Liberty and have them fight each other...

It is also interesting to place real world examples next to Star Wars Icons like a 747 next to the AT-AT, an X-wing next to an F-14.

I just wish there was a faster way to drag things around. My second complaint is you click on tabs on top to get a set of ships built to a certain X pixels = Ymeters often the same ships can be found on multiple tabs sometimes being one of the biggest sometimes one of the smallest. However, he is inconsistent, like King Kong is just a tiny little bugger on 1X where all the Star Trek ships are, but he is absent on 10X which has everything from a Volkswagen Beetle to the AT-AT (whose body is as long as an F-14), Sure, I can extrapolate, but the whole beauty of this sight is I don't have to! I can grab the Millennium Falcon and a 747 and put them next to each other.

Oh, and I wish I could figure out how to make buildings lie sideways, makes it easier to compare things to the Empire State Building (man, I never new Kong was so small compared to it)

Pitchfork.tv

Pitchfork just launched their streaming video channel and it's really great. It's like a less frustrating 120 Minutes that's on whenever you want. Go there to hear bands you've never heard of (actually you guy's can't really say that about Man Man any longer) and some you have. The exclusive Radiohead performance is great, as is the full-length documentary about The Pixies (watch this now because they've only got it for a week). Later this week they promise to run a straight up music video playlist featuring clips old and new. This is what I've been waiting for for quite a while -- the return of curated music videos. I'm a little wet down there.

Edit: Oh, shit! They've got the Aphex Twin video "On" in their A-Z collection.

GlaDOS in Bondage

Don't read this unless you've finished Portal. The realization that comes with this guy's blog post actually gave me chills.

Philippe's

When you guys come to visit me in Los Angeles (and you will, right?) this place will be one of first places we go to eat. It's one of the birth-places of the french dip sandwich and it just turned 100.

April Fools over yet?

~I hope there is a scene where the bad guy gets all silently up in Link's face and then jumps away.

Pete Bagge Reports From New Hampsire

Sure, it's ancient history by now, but Pete Bagge's Reason cartoons always offer an interesting perspective.

Read it here.