Not Abandoned

Wow, the month is almost halfway over and I've only posted once. That's some dedication right there. I guess moving all of my link posts to my shared Google Reader items page turned this place into a wasteland.

I've been caught up in other stuff, but eventually I'll get back on some sort of semi-regular schedule on here. Part of it is finding stuff to write about. I don't think anybody cares about my "thrilling" dog-walking "adventures". I also doubt anybody needs daily updates on my poker progress. I'd write about movies that I've watched, but I always seem to lose motivation when I plan to do that. (SHUTTER ISLAND was really good.)

Anyway, summers are always slow on my blogs, and this year hasn't been any exception.

First One Of 2010

Welcome to 2010. Like I said before, I'm going with "twenty ten" instead of "two thousand ten". Judging from the mixture of the two I hear out there, I guess we haven't reached a consensus as a planet on what term to use for the year.

I'm not a big New Year's resolution guy, but if I did have one (aside from getting better at poker), it would be that I want to resume exercising and losing weight this year. I was doing pretty good last summer until the treadmill broke. Then I sort of slacked off and put a bunch of weight back on. On the upside, I did, at least, keep up on things like using less salt on my food, and cutting back on cheese. (I do still love my pizzas though, and the occasion cheeseburger instead of a hamburger is nice.)

Lots of games I'm looking forward to this year. SPLINTER CELL: CONVICTION, BIOSHOCK 2, and DEAD RISING 2 all have me wishing we could just skip right past January. Well, until I remember that the new season of CHUCK starts on January 10 and 11th, and 24 starts up the week after.

I can't think of any movies coming out this year that I'm psyched for. At least I can't recall any at the moment.

Still, any year that is better than 2008 was for me is a vast improvement. Let's hope 2010 is a good one.

In conclusion... where's my damn flying car and silver jumpsuit? I'm also displeased by the lack of women in matching silver miniskirts. Oh science fiction, you lied to us all.

Last One Of 2009

So long 2009. Hope your replacement is a good one.

By the way, I'm going with "twenty ten". "Two thousand ten" is for chumps. Jump on the bandwagon.

Buying The Same Junk Over And Over

I was working on my Christmas list (since I'm being hounded about it), and I just realized that the majority of the Blu-rays on my Amazon wishlist list are upgrades from my DVD collection. In fact, a few of them are titles that I got on standard DVD last Christmas. (Like LOGAN'S RUN and MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN.) It seems silly to get some of the exact same movies as last year, just with better picture quality. If anything, it makes me feel like a sucker for not waiting a few months for these titles to have come out in HD. (To be fair, neither were announced as coming out on Blu until well into 2009.)

So, with a few of the regular DVDs on my list, I'm reluctant to ask anybody to get them for me, since I'm going to be pissed if come mid-January or whatever, they announce they're coming out on Blu-ray.

I'm also trimming out older movies I have on DVD that I want to eventually upgrade to Blu-ray. Specifically, titles that aren't going to give any significant visual upgrade (I'm looking at you LOCK STOCK and SNATCH). I'll still pick them up for myself eventually, since there will be some improvement in picture quality, but I really don't see the need to upgrade anytime soon. Low budget movies, or movies that are mostly people sitting around talking (i.e. Kevin Smith movies) are low-priority re-buys.

I'm considering throwing in a few visual effects blockbuster movies on there that would be blind buys for me. After all, those are the movies that bring out the most on Blu-ray. So I figured, IRON MAN and GI JOE, neither of which I've seen yet, fit that bill. They're likely to wind up in the bought blind and watched once pile with WATCHMEN. I may scrub GI JOE from the list though. I heard it's entertaining but really dumb.

I'm trying to think of things that I will actually watch. I love LOST, but I own seasons 1-3 on DVD and 4 on Blu-ray and you know how many times I've watched them? Zero. Oh, I've popped them in to see how they look, but to sit down and rewatch them beginning to end? I don't know if that'll ever happen.

I've got way less TV box sets on my list this year. I've often said that TV box sets are a better deal in terms of the amount of entertainment you get per dollar compared to movies. However, since my brother died, I just don't watch many box sets anymore. These days I just watch shows as they air and watch movies. (That having been said, I do wish the CHUCK season 2 set was coming out before Christmas instead of on January 5th. I may ask for it anyway, and just get it late.)

On the gaming front, all I could think of that I want are the two UNCHARTED games.

Honestly, I'm just trying to throw together a list of reasonably affordable things that I semi-want and just haven't bothered to buy for myself. The stuff I really want is either not coming out until February (BIOSHOCK 2 and SPLINTER CELL) or way too expensive. I can't think of anything that I really want this year. Even the things that I do want, I can't muster up any real excitement over. Yeah, it'd be nice to have them, but I've been getting by just fine without this stuff.

Gunboat Diplomacy

All of these stories about boats being hijacked by pirates got me thinking. The simplest solution to dealing with Somalian pirates is a very old one. Trojan Horse them. Fill two or three ships up with soldiers or mercenaries, hide these guys in the cargo holds. Then sail around that area of sea for awhile. If or when the boat gets jacked the pirates are in for a nasty, well-armed and very dangerous, surprise. Sounds like an easy way to cut down on the problem.

Randomness From My Weekend

Started feeling ill on Friday, and so far it shows no signs of letting up. I'm beginning to get a sore throat, which is probably the symptom of being sick that I hate the most. So I have a feeling this is going to be a long one. (On top of feeling like crap physically, I've been a bit depressed as well.)

Friday night's GALACTICA was awesome. I'm scared that next week's episode will be a boring episode, because there were two episodes in a row.

Clumsy oaf that I am, on Sunday afternoon, I managed to actually walk into a door and now I have a nice little (scabbing up) dent on the right side of my forehead. How I managed to do this in broad daylight is a mystery to me. This is one of the few times I wished I had a wife, so I could tell people that she beats me. Well, at least I know that I can take comfort in knowing that that door is pretty sturdy in the event of a home invasion.

Encore had a marathon of the Bond movies (from the Connery-era up until the two Dalton movies) in HD all weekend. Everytime I sat down to see which one was on, with the exception of GOLDFINGER, it was always one of the ones I already have on Blu-Ray. Despite that, I did watch some of the marathon.

I made an attempt over the weekend to watch the first two FRIDAY THE 13TH movies, since they were available in HD on OnDemand. I fell asleep during each one. I'm waiting for cable on the remake that's coming out soon.

I heard that the XIII mini-series finally aired over here over the weekend, which I didn't even know was going to happen. Coincidentally, on Sunday morning I downloaded scanned translations of a bunch of the graphic novels. The company that was printing it here in the US stopped after a few issues a few years ago (2005?). Despite digging the comics and the video game, I didn't bother with the mini-series. I briefly considered downloading it after reading that it had aired overseas, and then I figured a made for TV adaption of a video game would be an even worse abomination than one made for movie theaters.

The Sorts Of Dumb Things I Think About: Superman And Grooming

Something occurred to me while I was clipping my fingernails. How does Superman clip his fingernails? Stay with me on this. Superman and all the parts of his body are indestructible except when exposed to Kryptonite or magic. Years ago, back in the MAN OF STEEL reboot miniseries, writer/artist John Byrne came up with a neat explanation of how Superman shaves. He uses a reflective piece of the spaceship that brought him here and burns the whiskers off of his face with his heat vision. I assume this is also how he cuts his hair. (Which sounds like an incredible feat to me. Hell, I shave my head with a pair of clippers, something that takes zero skill and I occasionally miss a spot and have to go back and fix it. So how he can use laser beams and mirrors and not wind up with bald patches is beyond me. I guess that's why he's Superman and we're not. Plus being fictional helps.) Maybe he uses his heat vision to clip his nails. Otherwise there's a bunch of indestructible nail shards in a landfill in Metropolis.

The movie HANCOCK did a riff on the Superman shaving bit. They had Hancock scrape the hair off his face with his fingernails to shave. That seems awfully painful to me.

Don't get me started on wondering what happens to the stuff Superman flushes down the toilet. Or where he got a toilet strong enough to handle the cargo he's dropping into it.

2009

Well, so far 2009 has been very quiet for me. So quiet, in fact, that I can't think of anything to write about.

I was hoping this would be the year we made the switch to using "twenty" instead of "two thousand", but I guess popular consensus says that's not the case. I wonder when we'll switch. It's one of the useless things that I find myself thinking about.

"Twenty oh nine." Try it on for size. It's shorter than "two thousand nine".

Holiday Laziness

Just popping in to say I hope everybody has a good holiday.

(I'll be back on Friday or Saturday. This is if I can tear myself away from my gifts.)

I Think The Paranoia Will Kill Me First

The last two nights I haven't been able to sleep. I feel like a ticking time bomb. Hey, if you had a mother with a heart condition and a brother who died from a heart related problem, you'd be a bit worried too, especially considering that those sorts of things are genetic.

Every little thing has me worried that I'm going to drop dead at any given moment. The other day the build up feeling in my chest of a hearty burp had me worried that there was something wrong. Believe me, you've never seen a human being more happy to let out a window-rattling burp than I was at that particular time.

The funny thing is that all of this paranoia and stress about my health is probably going to kill me! I guess that'd be okay. An ironic death would be right up my alley.

Random Thoughts For November 5, 2008

So we have a new president elect now. I expect the same amount of petty bickering between people with differing political affiliations even though the election is over. I guess this means Tina Fey (who I love) doesn't have to worry about doing "that" impression anymore.

It's hard for me to believe that it's only been exactly one month since my brother died. It just seems so much longer to me. It's still very very weird and sad for me. I'm trying not to be overly morose about it, in general, not just on here. Anyway, I've noticed that most of my posts have a liberal peppering of sentences that contain the words, "my brother". It's a slow process, I guess.

On a related (ha ha pun) note, I'm definitely not looking forward to the holidays this year.

My Rapidshare Premium account expired on Tuesday evening. I caved and tried to renew for a single month, but for whatever reason my payment wouldn't clear through PayPal. I don't know why, the debit card I used absolutely has more than enough money to cover the bill in the account. I guess that's the universe trying to tell me not to bother with renewing even for a short amount of time.

Election Day

I won't tell you to remember to vote like every other site on the internet. That's because I'm assuming you're bright enough to know what day it is. Instead I'm just here to remind you that no matter who wins, even if it's your candidate of choice, you'll be grumbling and complaining about the bullshit they pull once they're in office.

I'm just glad all of this is about to be over. I've been so sick of hearing about it every day.

Random Thoughts On A Saturday Night

I caught a commercial for EAGLE EYE (again) and this time instead of just reminding me of THE GAME, it also reminded me of nearly every movie Harrison Ford has made since the '90s. All that's missing is Harrison Shia yelling, "Give me back my family!" Maybe Ford passed on this one, so the producers hoped that since he played Indiana Jones' son they might as well give the role to the kid.

I didn't mean to, but I wound up watching STAR TREK III on cable. Some movies, no matter how many times you've seen them, suck you in every time you pass by them on cable. "My god Bones, what have I done?" No matter how good the new TREK movie might turn out to be, those actors will never be the *real* crew of the Enterprise in my mind.

Chris Rock's new standup special aired earlier tonight, but I forgot and missed the first half hour. I'm PVRing the replay so I can catch what I missed.

Recently, I got my hands on three DVDs worth of old exploitation movie trailers. Someday I might even sit and watch them all!

Two Site Change One For The Better One For The Worse

Rapidshare finally raised the daily download limits back up to 10 gigs a day again. I doubt I'd ever hit that a day, especially with capped bandwidth making that prohibitive, but I liked having that cushion.

I hate how IMDB went from a fluid layout to a fixed-width. It makes everything on there so cramped on my widescreen monitor. I'm sure somebody will come up with a decent Greasemonkey or Stylish fix for Firefox.

This Is Not The Future We Were Promised

"Labor Day" has gotten me to thiking about who should be doing the labor by now.

No robot servants (unless you count people with a Roomba). No flying cars. No space colonies. No silver jumpsuits for everybody. No death rays. We're living in "the future" and it's not what old school sci-fi promised. I'm disappointed. Seriously, where's my moonbase and robot maid?

We've been had.

Stuff On My Mind As The Last Week Of August Begins

Random thoughts because I can't find anything interesting to use in a link post.

Over the last two nights, I've finally caught up on the final four episodes of the current season of VENTURE BROS. This season started out so-so, but the last few episodes were really hilarious. I can't believe the ending the finale had.

Reading reactions on the net to the rebooting of the SUPERMAN movie franchise and the somewhat surprising agreement from a lot of people that Bryan Singer's movie absolutely sucked got me to thinking. Where were all of these people hopping on the "Singer sucks" bandwagon when he did his two X-MEN movies? Honestly? I liked the second better than the first, but I think both of those movies lousy adaptations. Plus, one of my biggest sticking points, "the costumes wouldn't work on screen" have been shown to be absolute bullshit. I think it's a shame the real X-MEN have never been to the big screen every time I see pix from SPIDER-MAN, BATMAN, or WATCHMEN.

Why does anybody care that Kevin Smith has already seen the new STAR TREK movie? Or WATCHMEN for that matter? Does that really count as movie news? I just don't get why so many movie news sites and even a few mainstream media outlets feel it's important to inform us of this useless piece of information.

Anybody else have trouble switching between shirts that come without a tag on the inside near the neck and ones that do? I have a helluva time with shirts with tags now. I can't stand them, and I'm just too lazy to cut them off of my shirts.

My GRAND THEFT AUTO playlist in Foobar is getting ridiculous. At the moment it clocks in at 1 day, 16 hours and 42 minutes. (It's all of the radio stations from III, VICE CITY, SAN ANDREAS, IV, and two stations from VICE CITY STORIES. One of these days I've gotta do the rest of VCS and LIBERTY CITY STORIES.) It'd probably be a lot shorter if I trimmed out all of the songs I don't listen to because I hit the next track button on them.

I Can't Decide

I can't decide what's going on in this picture...

Either this guy is staring at her ass or crotch so hard that it's going to burn a second hole into it, or he's concentrating really hard on taking a dump in that pool.

One Of My Great Ideas: Special Forces

All of the hoopla about groups representing "special" people protesting TROPIC THUNDER for using the word "retard" gave me an idea for a movie...

SPECIAL FORCES. It'll be a comedy about retarded people in the army. I haven't worked out a plot. Just the title and concept. Half of you can start preparing your protests and the other half cans start deluging me with your money right now.

Vampires In Love

I keep breezing past news stories about TWILIGHT (and it's allegedly annoying following) on movie news sites. I guess it's some sort of vampire romance series aimed at teenage girls and sad sack older women. Not my thing at all, but hey, somebody enjoys it. So good for them. (After all, things I enjoy like super heroes and sci-fi are probably just as retarded.)

Anyway, the thing about the whole "human girl loves vampire thing" actually made me think for a second. It raises the question, if a human is in love with a vampire, which is essentially a walking corpse, isn't that necrophilia?

No Baby No!

I'm just going through my Google Reader feeds, and I have to say it's funny how many people are hilariously negatively reacting to the news that Mike Myers is in the process of writing AUSTIN POWERS 4. I don't think I've seen one post yet that thinks it's a good idea. Here's just four...

Someone Tell Mike Myers To Stop

The Death of 'Austin Powers' (And Six More Hobbled Franchises Worth Putting Down)

Mike Myers Planning Austin Powers 4

HOW DOES MIKE MYERS STILL HAVE A CAREER?

I guess most people are of the opinion that Myers should pack it in. I knew this would happen eventually. People seemed to forget he's from the SNL era of "beat a funny idea into the ground by over-repetition". I knew that someday people would finally catch on to the fact the he essentially put out the exact same movie three times in a row. (I liked the first AUSTIN POWERS, and then each sequel less than the one before it.) THE LOVE GURU being a gigantic steaming turd of a flop certainly hasn't helped either.