Late to the Party: Flight of the Conchords

Just started watching this show. I enjoy it, but I don't love it... yet (question mark?). If you ask me, some of their songs go on for too long. But then again, I probably like the dry dialogue better than the songs anyway. But what the hell... Here are two of my favorites so far:

And if I see Van Helsing, I swear to the Lord I will slay him

I just got finished watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and holy crap... I hate myself for missing this in the theater! I think I may have fallen in love a little bit -- I mean, you see Jason Segel's penis like four times, you can't help but feel a little close.

Even if you don't elect to see this movie (you fucking scumbag), you should at least watch this scene:

A musical about Dracula with puppets? Fucking brilliant! This just replaced Show Me Your Genitals 2 as the song that I'm going to be singing to myself all the time.

It might not have quite the LPM (laughs per minute, as coined by Jeff Cannata) of Knocked Up, but it's up there with the best of the Apatow movies. Plus, if you watch it on Blu-ray, you'll enjoy some lovely Hawaiian scenery. The only thing I didn't like was that Kristen Bell is cross-eyed or something and it's terribly distracting. Poor girl.

But seriously, this movie has heart and you won't feel like you're an idiot for enjoying it. Well done, Mr. Segel -- your first screenplay was fantastic. I would also pay to see a full-length Dracula musical.

So is it funnier than Tropic Thunder? Definitely. Funnier than Pineapple Express? Yes -- and you're a terrible person with a black soul and diseased genitals if you miss this movie when it comes out next week.

Also, for people that care, you can find Jason Bateman in the extras. Well, I'm afraid I just blue myself...

Freestyle Rap Battle Translated

So here I am watching diggnation instead of working on my essay that's due tomorrow. But that's cool. Fixed myself a White Russian and just sat back...


And for the hell of it, here's a couple sentences on a few comedies that are out or are coming out soon.

The Love Guru - Mike Meyers recycles jokes from Wayne's World and Austin Powers in this sad, sad shadow of a movie from a man I love so much. Also, why the fuck is Justin Timberlake in this movie? Never mind his atrocious acting, his character really had no point.

What Happens In Vegas - I dunno. Girls seemed to like it. I thought it was tolerable enough -- and that's coming from someone that doesn't care for either Ashton Kutcher or Cameron Diaz. The only part that had me laughing, however, came just a couple of seconds into the end credits.

Baby Mama - Ah, funny brunettes -- my only weakness! Tina Fey and Amy Poehler serve up some laughs in a comedy where you forgive the predictable plot for the one liners you'll pick up. Bitch, I don't know your life!

Run Fatboy Run - I found this more sad than funny... A guy runs away from his pregnant bride-to-be only to enter a marathon later in life against her new boyfriend. I'd expect better things from Michael Ian Black and Simon Pegg, but it's not a deplorable movie. Also, it has a phenomenally disgusting scene involving a blister that almost had me throwing up... So beware of that.

The Foot Fist Way - Starring the guy with a neck brace from Pineapple Express who also played the explosives expert that nearly killed Jamie Lee Curtis on the set of Freaky Friday in Tropic Thunder (Danny McBride), this is a mean-spirited comedy that is pretty much what you would get if you theorized on the daily activities of Diedrich Bader's character from Napoleon Dynamite. The first 30 minutes had some guffaws, but after that it just gets meaner and bleaker.

So there you go. I'll be able to watch Iron Man and Forgetting Sarah Marshall for the first time this week, so it's possible I might write something on those... Or not.

Oktapodi

A French student film:

oktapodi by students of gobelins from liquid idea on Vimeo.

Literature of the moment

I found this passage of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being to be particularly poignant and beautiful:

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).

If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: lightness/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?

Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative.

Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.

American Graffiti

Something I found on digg: 50 Beautiful Graffiti Artworks. Also of interest is this Systm episode on "archiving" graffiti.

[Edit: Unfortunatley, the screenshots of the graffiti pieces I picked out don't show up anymore.]

Sword Rain βeta

So, I guess school is the anathema to blogging. But I don't think it's just that... I think the lack of communication is also because I started playing a game that just won't let me out of its grasp: Tales of Vesperia. Whereas Too Human personally failed me for what I wanted from a console RPG, Tales delivers what I want in spades.

I have been a fan of the Tales series ever since I played a fan translated version of Tales of Phantasia for the SNES. Over the years, there have been fantastic iterations in the series (Abyss, Symphonia) and dreadful ones (Legendia). So, where does Vesperia rank?

As far as gameplay and battling, it's still pretty much just Symphonia with a tiny little twist that's really pretty much negligible. That's not a bad thing, of course: the Tales series has always had one of the most fun and exciting battle systems in JRPG history. Now if Japanese developers would only took a couple pages regarding narrative from our western developers...

That brings us to the weak point in Vesperia's armor: The story is the same JRPG story that you've played time and time again. It's Final Fantasy X and Tales of Symphonia all over again: You've got the ditsy girl who can use magic who wants to sacrifice herself so the world can live in peace, etc., etc. Vesperia's story isn't told in an offensive way, however. It's not girls in skirts falling over so you can see their panties, but it is a distinctly Japanese story (which is to say that it drags). If the story moved more briskly and featured less exposition and pondering aloud, it would improve by leaps and bounds.

The characters are nothing new (except maybe a dog with a pipe), but most of them are affable enough to make me give the story enough slack as to not just drift away elsewhere while their lips are flapping. The Tales team (this goes for other JRPG makers as well) needs to get rid of their female protagonist model that they've been using since the start though. I hate this clumsy girl with clasped hands who's only use is cure spells and who is so sheltered/mentally impaired that she just exudes sunshine and goodwill. Kill her, kill her now. Please. (Also, why is anyone who is over 17 considered to be an "old person" in these games?)

All-in-all, I do think that Vesperia is the first great Eastern RPG of this generation and I eagerly await the next current-gen Tales game, but I'm not holding my breath for a story that's worth a damn. Bioshock, Portal, or Planescape: Torment these games ain't.

Chrome impressions

Let's start in reverse with my conclusion of Google's browser: I think Chrome is a fine starting point for a browser. I like it well enough to keep it around, but not enough to ditch Firefox. So maybe I'll feel adventurous and fire up Chrome instead of Firefox every now and then. However, it lacks features that I find essential in my browsing habits.

First, the absence of AdBlock is probably Chrome's biggest fault. It's like visiting a completely different internet when you have AdBlock disabled (and that's an internet I don't care to visit). In Firefox, I only whitelist pages in AdBlock that I respect (1UP, Digg, Revision 3), but now I see that the internet I remember from say, 1998, is still alive with Flash ads that aren't far removed from punching monkeys in the face for some inglorious prize.

Secondly, Chrome's version of Firefox 3's "Awesome Bar" isn't quite as good... I like typing in a couple of letters that correspond to a bookmark and having that show up first instead of "Search Google for..." Combining the search bar and the address bar in Chrome is something I'm not a fan of. I use the Google, Wikipedia and YouTube search engines all the time in Firefox and taking that away disrupts my browsing habits greatly.

The third item on my agenda that greatly throws me off is not being able to middle-click and have the mouse do auto-scrolling by having the mouse pointer above or below that click point. I guess I've gotten so "lazy" that I don't like bothering to physically scroll through an article to read it. If you've ever had to use a mouse without a scroll wheel, you'll have a feeling for what that's like.

The absence of a built-in spellchecker is also missed in applications such as e-mail and the writing of this blog post. I don't see any option for add-ons within Chrome, so even the idea that it only has "what you need" is a misgiving. I do think that Firefox has acquired a little bloat through the years and Chrome almost feels like a "lite" version of that, but without the option to add what you need (AdBlock, spell check, download manager support), it also feels limiting.

I do, however, like the interface. The absence of the file menu and having the tabs above the address bar is something so minor, but it somehow works for the betterment of the whole. Being able to detach a tab and make it its own window or to merge windows into tabs is a very slick feature that I'd like to see in Firefox.

It's also a very speedy browser. The only thing that it doesn't seem to do as good as Firefox is Flash video. However, this could be just because of the current programs and whatnot that I've had running while using Chrome versus Firefox. Maybe I'm wrong, but so far all my Flash videos stutter in Chrome, whereas they're normal in Firefox.

At any rate, it's just another reason that Internet Explorer should go in a corner and quietly die.

Edit: Check out Ars Technica's review of Chrome. Until reading it, I didn't even realize that Chrome left out RSS!

The OneUps do Chrono Trigger

Via Kotaku:

It's a nice thing to just chill out to while you wait for November to come so you can enjoy Chrono Trigger on the Nintendo DS.

The Google browser is nigh!

Check out this 39-page comic explaining how the team at Google is tackling problems in their own unique way in regards to their upcoming web browser Chrome. Some of their ideas (like having tabs as separate processes so that if one goes bad, only that tab is kaput) are fascinating -- even if you don't understand the more technical jargon they use (it's very simplified, however).

If there was a company that would make me curious as to the development of another new browser, Google would be it. Supposedly it's launching tomorrow. Lets see how it goes! (And let's hope it has Adblock support!)