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Been in Austin selling records at a convention. Didn't do as well as I had hoped, but none of the dealers did. Still, I paid for the trip and got some cash on top, so it's OK.
I found out that the Pope died. About ten minutes later, I found out that Mitch Hedberg died. Is it weird that Hedberg bothered me more?
Anyway, I'm spending the day in Little City Coffeehouse, near the UT campus (I can see the tower from here). Gonna do some work, watch some people. A mini-vacation.
Orb Networks is now free! Stream all you rmedia from home! Whee!!!
The Internet's most versatile HTML editor
The new Gorillaz video proves that they're getting even better, and that De La Soul can pop out 20 words and show they're one of the best things to ever happen to Hip-Hop.
Watch out for Snakes. Comics gone bad.
Y'know, I thought these little Cellboost phone charger thingies were stupid until I went to Austin without my phone charger. Five bucks, totally worth it. Although their home page is way fancier then needed.
Get Perpendicular, a Flash animated music video with talking and dancing bits (pimp bits?) from Hitachi. Very odd.
I4U, in the strangest move since Luba slept with an iPod, presents sexy PSP girl. Apparently, she's farsighted.
Sad Update: Half of the top ten most viewed images don't even include the girl. Poor PSP girl.
Seems that Bowling for Soup has booked an indie rapper on their current tour.
No, I'm not jealous.
His song iGeneration is a must for your iPod. Download it here.
Okay, I'm a little jealous.
I've recently gained a new interest in vinyl. I got hold of a large collection, and I'm back in the groove (ooo. pun not intended.). As a result, I started looking online for varied stuff, and came across this.
The ELP Laser Turntable plays any kind of record you put in it without needles. This is the coolest thing I've ever seen. $20,000. Poo. Good review at Stereo Review.
I was driving East down 17th street towards I-35 (one way, 4 lanes), and I was in the leftmost lane. A guy was walking West on the sidewalk by the rightmost lane. He stepped out a couple of feet into the lane and kicked an empty can of Skoal towards me. I shifted the car over about a foot and crushed the can with my right front tire. The guy pumped his fist like we scored a goal in some kind of twisted MOPAR street hockey derivative. It was awesome.
Okay, I have to be included. Personal bios using the first result from images.google.com. Taken from Nikonius, who took it from someone else who took it from someone else, etc. Mine sucks.
Place you were born: Tupelo
Place you live now: Waco
Your name: Lee
I also tried LO2...
Favorite food: Stuff my girlfriend makes for me
Favorite drink: I tried Vanilla VOdka and Diet Dr. Pepper, but there were no results, so Iced Coffee.
Favorite band: Right now, Jellyfish
Favorite smell: My girlfriend's hair
Favorite shoes: Timberland
As I was gassing up my S.O.'s minivan of doom last weekend in Temple, I found this lighter for a buck. So awesome, I can't explain it. Lighter, plus bright as hell LED flashlight built in. Pros: awesome and lighty. Refillable. Cons: The refill hole is a little too big, so fuel goes everywhere, and you could do serious freezing damage to your hands. Shitty Phonecam Pic by Nikonius. Sold by Novelty Inc.
Ever see the deleted scenes on the High Fidelity DVD? I think this guy beats it.
It was my S.O.'s birthday this weekend, so I went to visit her. I got really drunk at her party. Really really drunk. Like, "I just want to sit here on the balcony while I stare at this bit of wood and repeatedly say 'stop moving stop moving stop moving,' while marveling at the concept of the cold sweat and trying not to justify horking in the salad bowl my girlfriend was kind enough to leave for me, even though I would feel better if I did but NO NO NO YOU ARE NOT A PUKER you can hold it down you're a man A MAN YOU HEAR ME just ride it out and heep looking at the wood so you won't end up being that guy, you're not that guy, oh God I have to poop" kind of drunk.
Thankfully, no hangover (thanks vodka!).
Attacking the Clones
Who's responsible for big-budget Hollywood dreck? This critic blames you (and this magazine) and calls for drastic action.
by Mike D'Angelo | Esquire | May 2005
So this ordinary, middle-class American male walks into a bar. "Gimme a beer, whatever you have on tap," he says, slapping down a fiver. The bartender, smiling, reaches below the bar, audibly unzips his fly, and a moment later produces a tall glass that looks suspiciously as if it might be full of warm urine. But our guy is a trusting soul, and he gulps it down anyway. Big mistake. He retches, curses, and then storms out, furious.
Three years later, the same guy walks into the same bar and asks the same bartender for a beer. No problemo , says the barkeep. Zzzzip . Handed what again looks like something better suited to a specimen jar, the guy barely even hesitates. Down the hatch it goes, and then halfway back up the hatch again. Tears of rage are shed; a lawsuit is threatened. Exit the dude, livid.
Three years later, the same guy walks into the same bar and asks the same bartender for a beer.
You're waiting for the punch line. It's not a joke, I'm afraid. It's a parable. The guy is you, the bar is the neighborhood multiplex, and the third steaming glass of piss you're about to be served with a smile is called Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith.
For God's sake, don't drink it.
FOR LACK OF A BETTER TERM, let's call what I'm advocating here a provisional boycott. It has to be provisional because I haven't actually seen the film yet. I'm assuming it's going to reek, just as I assume, based on precedent and logic, that my cats' litter box isn't going to be filled with emeralds and rubies tomorrow morning. But I could be wrong. Maybe this time the painstaking care evident in the film's CGI cityscapes will also manifest itself in the story and the dialogue, so that we don't feel as if we're watching a history seminar being conducted at a Renaissance fair. Perhaps Jar Jar will be decapitated in the opening scene. There is a chance that George Lucas has rediscovered the sense of rollicking, devil-may-care adventure (exemplified by Han Solo) that made the original trilogy an enduring classic, and the absence of which turned The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones into pristine, monotonous slogs. If that happens—if reviews suggest that the new film is light-years more entertaining and memorable than episodes I and II—then disregard everything that follows.
But it isn't going to happen. Search your feelings; you know it to be true.
Here's the plan. It's exceedingly simple but also potentially revolutionary. If you saw and genuinely enjoyed the first two installments, by all means dash straight out and see Episode III , taking special care that your imperial-stormtrooper helmet hides the lobotomy scars. If, on the other hand, you found one or both of the previous two films lacking in some way yet feel obligated by a sense of pop-cultural duty and/or lingering nostalgia to tune in for the grand finale: don't. At least not for the first week. See an intriguing foreign film instead, or catch up on the first two seasons of The Wire (the best TV series nobody's watching), or gather like-minded friends and play a drinking game in which you watch Attack of the Clones and do a shot every time Hayden Christensen pouts. Do whatever it takes; just avoid the theater for seven days. And tell every single person you know to do likewise.
In my dream, this article isn't dismissed as a bitchy provocation. People take it seriously, word of the provisional boycott spreads across the Internet faster than that "Re: Wicked screensaver" worm, Revenge of the Sith attracts only the hardcore fan boys and opens to $22 mil, and that popping sound echoing off the Hollywood Hills is revealed to be the heads of various studio executives imploding as the one and only certainty they cling to dissipates like dry ice in front of a wind machine. Hey, a man can dream.
Granted, this will require your disregarding a small avalanche of breathless hype. As a matter of fact, one of the movie's stars will grace the cover of this very magazine next month. Why? Because Episode III is guaranteed to make a gazillion dollars and sell magazines. The media is part of the problem. If anything's ever going to change, you need to tell those responsible, in no uncertain terms, that you're not interested. And that entails one thing and one thing only: killing the opening-weekend gross.
IT'S NOT GONNA BE THAT TAXING, REALLY. We all know more or less where the movie's going. Luke and Leia's conception will surely be implied in a lush, romantic sex scene, complete with tasteful fade to black. Obi-Wan will do something to really piss Anakin off. I'm gonna go out on a limb and predict a decision favoring the good of the republic over the life of somebody near and dear to the young Padawan. There will be an accident involving a toxic substance of some kind, from which Anakin will emerge suddenly sounding uncannily like the voice of CNN. And so forth. You can wait an extra week.
I hate to get all grandiose and moralistic, but the fact is that every time you go see some movie that you know in your heart of hearts is going to suck, merely because it's that weekend's megahyped commodity starring actors you've heard of, you make it impossible for smart people in positions of power not to green-light total dreck—dreck that you will wind up suffering through two to three years down the road. In short, the movies you're getting are the movies you deserve. And the only way to persuade studios to make better films is to stop seeing the ones they consider to be automatic slam dunks.
Ironically, George Lucas is one of the last filmmakers I'd ever accuse of trafficking in jaded cynicism. For all their empty spectacle and painful stodginess, the Star Wars pictures represent his vision; he's working as independently as D.W. Griffith did in the medium's infancy, albeit with virtually unlimited resources and the secure knowledge that there's a public clamoring for his work. All the same, Revenge of the Sith is the ideal subject for this experiment, because it's as close to a sure thing as exists in the film industry. If you forced studio execs to wager their infant children's lives on the opening weekend gross, they'd scarcely even break a sweat, so long as the over didn't exceed $75 million. They know perfectly well that most people were disappointed by the previous two films, and they also know perfectly well that we're all gonna show up for Episode III anyway.
Imagine the consternation when we don't. Pass it on.
Taken without permission from the May 2005 issue of Esquire, because Mike has a dream.
The scariest professor in the world. Note: the MP3 option is the quickest.
Seems that Audi is doing a new ad campaign by asking for help in finding a "stolen" 2006 prerelease model of their A3. Interested to see what they do with this.
I want this is DVD format. Please? Please Bill? While I'm at it, please Berke? Please Charles (or Charles' estate manager)?
Found via Drawn.
I can say without a shadow of a doubt, that this is the most offensive Flash game I've ever played. Yet I could not stop playing.
"To use a man named Don to do something. Or to do Don with something. Either way, it's unpleasant."
Found on Uncyclopedia. Kill a weekend on the damn thing.
Update: I did like twenty entries. See Twelve.
Okay, I've always avoided Something Awful, mainly because the name reminded me of pages like Rotten.com (note there's no link. I don't go there), pages that take joy in showing you the most horrible things you will ever see. I'm not a big fan of that, but if they want to post that stuff, more power to them. You can go, I choose not to.
Anyway, I ended up on Something Awful today, and I lauged my ass off. granted, there's some gross stuff (the squeamish should avoid "Movie Review: 'Cheerleader Autopsy'") but most of it is pretty good. I really dug the hell out of the photoshop contests, and I will provide a selection for you to link to, with samples from each one. Note: it was very difficult to pare it down to one example for each page, but I managed (except for Sin City, I had to do three.).
If you use Firefox, don't click "open in tabs" in one of your bookmark folders with 100 links in it. Just don't. Even if you're really curious to see what will happen. It's bad.
I don't have a PSP. All my friends have one. I'm sad. I want to watch movies and play wipeout and websurf and listen to mp3s and be cool and spend way too much on a handheld. I just want to be happy.
My entry for Twelve on Uncyclopedia has been deleted.
Let me explain. My fake definition of a word in an encyclopedia of fake information has been deleted. It apparently wasn't fake enough.
Personally, I think the medieval act rending elves in twain (twain elves, to the Old English Twaelves, or Twaelving, to the modern Twelve) was pretty good, as far as fake definitions go.
Ah, screw 'em.
This page contains all entries posted to LO2 in April 2005. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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