Geeky Snake

 

This was supposed to be for a sony blog that never materialized.  Just thought I’d put it up for funsies.  It’s supposed to be a hardcore metal gear fanboy.  Sometimes too much detail can kill ya. That’s all really.

Guilty Pleasures: Good Charlotte’s Good Morning Revival

I hate Good Charlotte.  Really really hate them, as much as I hate any triple platinum raking in the money like there was no tomorrow fucking hollywood starlet bands that complain about their miserable lives.  But dammit they set out to reinvent their sound and they succeeded more than even they probably thought they would.  Their first few single (the river, get your hands of my girl, dance floor anthem) are catchy as hell, and for the most part the album manages to keep that spirit alive and kicking.  I’m still a little ashamed this is in my zen but what the hell, it’s better than catching them on MTV and being forced to watch their skinny tattooed bodies just to hear a song.  The last few songs feel a bit tepid though, so best avoid them entirely.

Iranians arrest squirrel spies

What, I have to write a witty  post to make you want to read this?

Music and Lyrics movie review

People complain that it’s formulaic but let’s face it, romcoms aren’t really known for breaking boundaries.  There’s enough wit and humor here to please even the hardest of hearts, and Hugh Grant gives another of his bumbling British guy performances to good effect.  And if that doesn’t do it for you, the 5 or so minute intro of Hugh and his 80s band “POP” in a music video should elicit a few chuckles, if not uproarious laughter.

Music and Lyrics is a great date movie, especially if you’re not sick of 80s pop culture references.

In the land of Women movie review

I kinda liked it. Miriam REALLY liked it. Some scenes felt forced along by the music, which was killer by the way, I’d ge the soundtrack for this movie more than the movie itself.

One thing that really struck me though, Adam Brody is the next John Cusack. Not as good as John Cusack in his heyday, but he plays the scruffy regular guy just trying to get by much better than the elfin Orlando Bloom did in Elizabethtown. Think about it.

Beyond the Window (and onto the pavement)

In homage to my FRIEND mapet’s photoblog, I present to you the saga of shyguy and bull-bull (only funny to those of a filipino persuasion).

Hi there, my name is shyguy. I live a meaningless existence in a 12th floor office somewhere in makati and sometimes when the mood is right I wonder what lies beyond the dirty window that obscures my view of the city.

Oh hello there, reflection of me. Say, I was wondering, how’s life over there? Is there really a meaning to all of this? Is life really better on the other side? Only one way to find out you say? Well, that’s true isn’t it. Well then, I’ve made up my mind. I will journey the other side…

…on my faithful steed, bull-bull! Who apparently appears out of nowhere, right beneath me. Bull-bull is a red bull. Red bulls have lots and lots of energy. Truth. He will be very useful in traveling the world beyond the window.

And so my friends, I bid you farewell. My journey begins here, and I do not know when it will end, but I’m sure I will have a wealth of experiences and stories upon my return.

MANILA (AP) — reports of a masked man astride a bull falling to their deaths in Makati city have been confirmed. Residents of Manila’s main commercial district claim they heard the sound of breaking glass before hearing a large thump similar to the sound of meat falling on the pavement. A really, really large hunk of meat.

Philippine police have no clue as to the identities of the victims, or if this was a suicide. Initial forensic analysis has yielded no clues to the identity of the fatalities, as the man riding the bull seems to have a mask that simply “won’t come off”. No identification information could be found on the man, so the police will have to resort to DNA testing.

The latest reports indicate that a bespectacled office worker was seen walking around the bodies mumbling something to himself about “going beyond the window”, but this has yet to be confirmed.

More updates on this story as new information arrives.

My first T-shirt sale (maybe)

Well, this is for everyone who’s been asking about how to get t-shirts offa me. I recently made a t-shirt featuring the monkey character by graf artist ff, seen here:

front

front close up

back

back close up

Now I really like how the T-shirt turned out, but the catch is that it’s just a tad too big for me. It’d have been perfect during my chunkier days, but unless I start packing in the pounds again it just looks a little awkward on me. So. I’ve decided to sell it for the low,low price of 900 pesos. Ok, so it’s not THAT low, but let me explain the thought behind the 900 peso price tag before you all go apeshit on me. The basic formula is:

T-shirt = 200 pesos

materials + labor + design = 550

payment for “gorilla” design (assuming ff looks for me and asks for a royalty) = 150

Total = 900

Please consider that this shirt design was made by hand (cut it out and painted it myself and everything) andis at this point a one of a kind design. You can wear it with the utter confidence that no one else will have the same shirt as you. If that’s important to you at all. If you don’t think the price fair, but you’re interested in the shirt, let me know what you think and why you think its unfair and I’ll get back to you. inquiries can be sent to endlessthirteen@yahoo.com. FF, you can also send me threats and cease and desist letter, or we can negotiate just how much I owe you for stealing your design.

I’m also selling this Gundam shirt for 600 pesos, since I’ve used it once or twice, and it’s just too small for me.

Right.

By the way. If any of you (friends, family, passerby) think I’m crazy for selling it that high please please let me know.  It’s much more useful for me to be told I’m crazy instead of you smirking and casually clicking on the “close’ button. 

Fallout boy in Manila September 21

That’s right kids, check it out on their website.  Tickets on sale TOMORROW.  Despite the fact that they’re admittedly not the greatest live band ever, I’m definitely looking to catch them, if only to compensate for the means in which I acquired their albums.

Darth Vader lives on…

 

In limited edition adidas sneakers.  Cute, but i’d never buy/wear them.

Transformers follow up

Now that I’m over the movie, here’s something that’ll perk up even the most disheartened Transformers fan: A soundwave mp3 player!

Also, because I can’t express myself clearly enough, I shall direct you to two podcasts that say exactly why I wasn’t quite floored by transformers. One reason they brought to light about the redesigns that I entirely agree with was that one of the things that made the transformers so fun was that even in their robot forms you could tell what they were supposed to be. But in the movie, they were so “robotized” it was almost impossible to tell what they transformed to in vehicle form.

Back to Soundwave. Interesting that he’s called “music label” soundwave. Is he in the pay of music execs?  Is this what happened after he got kicked off the set of the Transformers movie?  That’s right, he’s the RIAA’s new semi-legal watcdog, and he’ll track all you music pirating criminals down!

Upcoming

On a shirt. Soon.

Idiots arm robors with stun guns

So apparently Taser international thinks it’s a good idea to arm robots with stun guns to they can hold prisoners unconscious while the humanoid fleshbags get their asses out of the donut shop and onto the streets.  While I’m sure they have the best of intentions (to make a tidy profit, of course), the Japanese will be happy to know that on the day of the robot armageddon (twenty years, tops) they won’t be the only ones to blame.

Clerks 2 movie review

I’d like to say that you don’t need to have watched the original Clerks in order to appreciate Kevin Smith’s latest movie, but you kinda have to.  The first Clerks movie was about being twenty and stuck in the same old job as a convenience store clerk and all of the excitement (or lack of it ) that this entails.   The common thread between the two movies is the idea of moving forward in life, something that the main characters Dante and Randall don’t manage in the first movie but somehow blunder into in this second installment, with a little help from Jay and Silent Bob.  I don’t wanna spoil too much, but I’ll just say that their evolution happened in the only possible way it could have.

Along the way lots of hilarity ensues, my favorite part being the standoff between Lord of the Rings geeks and Star Wars geeks, and Randall’s reenactment of the LOTR trilogy (“the entire three movies were about walking to goddamn volcano and dropping off a ring!).

Clerks 2 is highly recommended, I’d give it five stars if only I didn’t want to sound like too much of a Kevin Smith fanboy, so it gets 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Oh. and hot diggity damn Rosario Dawson looks smoking hot wearing glasses.

Die Hard 4.0

The action summer blockbuster to watch this year. Until the Bourne Ultimatum comes out, maybe.  This is the perfect movie to watch with a big tumbler of popcorn and a bunch of your friends.  Bruce Willis is a badass.  Justin Long is funny at the right moments, and provides a way for the audience a character they can relate to.

My one peeve, my one and only peeve comes when (kinda spoiler alert) maggie Q gets hit by an SUV head on and not only survives, but manages to put up a fight afterwards.  Granted, some of the action sequences were a bit ludicrous, but they were feasible.  You get rammed by an SUV and you’re crippled for life at the very least, and you’re not gonna start kicking the shit our of Bruce Willis.  If anyone, and I mean ANYONE decides to argue this with me, I will ram them with an SUV and watch amusedly as they try to get up and prove me wrong.  Really, I will. Anyway watch the movie, it’s well worth the price of admission.

One last thing.  Kevin Smith has a bald spot?  A HUGE one?  I had no idea.

The night we’ll never have

 

See, this is what you get when you put your mp3 player to random play while on the MRT and find a depressing song with a catchy melody that just sticks in your head.  The song was “You could be happy” by Snow Patrol, and this took roughly 30 minutes of thrashing about waildly on the tablet to do.

My Simpsons avatar

Here’s a neat little online app that lets you make your own Simpsons avatar. Check out my friend luis’ avatar here. Not having such a great day, but this cheered me up some.

I’m a Transformers fan, really.

Made for when I watched the movie last Sunday. It’s my way of saying I like the original Optimus Prime, thank you very much.

Entree : Robot Sniper

 

Just something I’ve been working on for the past few days or so.  Purely in vector.  I’m thinking of doing a mini tutorial for it soon, the workflow thoughts may be of use to some people, but we’ll see.  The larger image can be seen here.

Noki-huh?

I’m not quite sure what to make of the Nokia 7500.  On the one hand, it seems very blade runner-ish and its very 80s sharp edges must appeal to some people.  And on the other hand…well it’s almost as if Nokia should really get out of the stylish phone game. I’ve gouged Nokia for not having come up with an original looking design for years, but every time they try (hello N76) they just fall flat on their faces.  Safe design is what Nokia does best, and I really think they should stick to it.

Aperitif

 

Transformers is slightly overrated

That’s right, it is. Someone wanna pick a fight? I’m not looking for one, and I’m not looking to shit all over your movie experience, so if you came all over yourself while watching this movie, please leave this blog. I implore you. Go over to rottentomatoes.com where Transformers has achieved a spectacular 82% approval rating from critics the world over.

If you’re reading up to this part I’ll assume that you are on the same boat as I am regarding Transformers, thrilled but not overjoyed. It was an okay movie. It had its moments, both good and bad.

The Good

Breaking from tradition, I’ll go over the parts I loved about the movie. Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime. He sounds a little different, but maybe that’s because he’s 20 years older now. But I still got a little shiver down my spine when he said “Autobots, roll out!” Shia Lebeouf, and in general all of the human actors. All of them played their parts well, although the cute hacker and the big black hacker dude could have been excluded from the movie and no one would have noticed. The CGI was also gorgeous. As much as I disliked the robot redesigns, I have to give up to the animators for creating such beautifully rendered machines.

The action scenes were fucking amazing. This is where Michael Bay, for all his directorial weaknesses, really shines. There were a few moments that felt a little too Michael Bay-ish (ie slow-mo high contrast silhouetted against the sunlight moments) but they came at just the right moments and were used sparingly enough so that you wouldn’t get sick of them. And that scene where Prime takes out his sword/ax and chops off (insert name of Decepticon here)’s head? Totally badass.

The references dropped for the fans were sometimes cute and somtimes annoying (Like them…we are more than meets the eye). But the dialogue between Prime and Megatron towards the end of the movie mimics their great battle in the animated film, although the actual battle itself was less than spectacular.

Oh, and Mikaela aka Megan Fox is smoking hot.

The Bad

Now the stuff that I didn’t like. Again, if you’ve read this far and you LOVED the movie just don’t read any further. I’m tired of being accused as a wannabe critic and a “purist”. I am not a fucking purist. I watched all 3 Lord of the Rings movies and appropriately had a hard on after leaving each one. Any Tolkien fan knows that the movies chopped up maybe half of of the content in the original book and presented what I call “the good stuff” onscreen. What Jackson did and what I feel Bay failed to do was stay true to the core of the fracnchise they were revamping.

For example, Optimus Prime doesn’t do comedy. He doesn’t. Why? Because he’s the leader of the autobots. Because he’s solemn and old and tired and has fought a never ending battle against megatron. This is what lends him gravitas. This is what made children (myself included) cry when he died the Transformers animated movie. The jokes they threw him felt so forced they really made me cringe.

The robots also lacked character because Bay doesn’t spend enough time with them and the time we do spend with them is used up in an SNL comedy sketch called “robots at play in the garden”. By far the only characters that resonated were Ironhide’s triggerhappy “kill the parents” character, Bumblebee, and to a lesser extent, Prime. Jazz was black and Ratchet was the doctor and if either of them went to the scrapheap I don’t think I would have noticed much.

The Transformers redesigns. I’ve gone over this a bit before, but I don’t think I’ve ever articulated why I really dislike the redesigns. Again, I’m not a purist. There are legitimate reasons why I dislike the new designs, one of them being that the makers of the movie decided to imbue the character with personality through the articulation of their faces. This is why optimus prime has lips, to convey emotion. In some cases, like Ironhide, it works because the way his face was designed made him look tough like a soldier. But to be honest it just put me off everytime I saw those mechanical eyeborows and lips move because it felt like watching someone with their skin taken off. If they wanted character they should have done it with the appropriate dialogue.

The redesigns also hamper the action scenes to ta certain extent. When the robots are all flying about and smashing each other I found myself a bit confused as to who was who because there were so many moving parts to focus on. Cleaner, streamlined desings would have allowed us to focus more on the actual fight isntead of the technology bristling from every mechanical pore.

The wha-huh?

• What happened to the robots that were accidentally created by the allspark? That one vending machine robot was fricking hilarious, I can just imagine it lobbing mountain dews at unsuspecting peestrians.
• Why, after making a big deal about their being able to transfer their “spark” to a new vehicle at will, did Bumblebee not simply transfer to a different vehicle when his legs were smashed?
• Why are most of the decepticons cannon fodder, with made up names like “blackout”?
• With the allspark cube gone, we’re so screwed, seeing as all of our technology was reverse engineered from it

I give the Transformers movie a 3.5 out of 5, and am looking forward to the inevitable sequel.