Are you people jealous?

Instead of thinking about whether Hussein's sons are actually dead or if this is just something else made up, and instead of thinking about Palestine/Israel, and instead of thinking about that our government now admits to lying in order to justify war in Iraq, and instead of thinking about that old guy who plowed into a bunch of people, and instead of thinking about generally anything at all, I've just been playing PlanetSide. It's infinitely more fulfilling and it doesn't make me nauseous.

So, how've you been? 
¶ 10:05 AM

  A couple evenings ago, eating dinner with my mother and sister, my mother asked my sister what she would like for her birthday. My sister replied, "A Swedish penis enlarger." My mother responded by saying, "But you don't have a penis," to which my sister retorted, "Yeah, but my friends do." I am not making this exchange up.

To express my feelings on Jason Kidd resigning with New Jersey, I've taken liberties with Alice In Chains' "Would," one of the better songs of the 1990's.



"Would," by Joe, with apologies to Alice In Chains

Know me broken by my master
Teach thee on child of love hereafter

Into the flood again
Same old trip it was back then
So I made a big mistake
Try to see it once my way

What on earth is Jason Kidd thinking? If indeed his interest is winning, then he is delusional. Certainly New Jersey will win the Eastern Conference, there's no doubt there, but this guarantees him naught but another loss to the best Western Conference team. Currently this figures to be the Lakers, and if they maintain cohesion, I can't see New Jersey outscoring them in a single quarter, let alone any one game. I hate to break this to everyone, but Alonzo is not a marque player, nor was he ever. He, like Grant Hill, Vince Carter, Shawn Kemp, and countless other gifted players, fell victim to the mountain of expectation. Also the mountain of kidney disease. Jason Kidd is a tard.

Drifting body its sole desertion
Flying not yet quite the notion

Into the flood again
Same old trip it was back then
So I made a big mistake
Try to see it once my way

Am I wrong?
Have I run too far to get home
Have I gone?
And left you here alone

If I would, could you?



I hope you enjoyed that. A list of things that are not unusual is as follows:

1) to be loved by anyone
2) to have fun with anyone
3) to see me cry,
4) to go out at any time
5) to be mad with anyone
6) to be sad with anyone
7) to find out that I'm in love with you

Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh. 
¶ 11:46 AM

  Hey, there's this new pirate movie out, and while it's unfortunately rated PG-13, it's still very enjoyable, despite the obvious joke working on one less level than it should. Note that I didn't say "good," I said "enjoyable." It's a bit long and there's far too many characters featured who are not Captain Jack Sparrow as played by Johnny Depp, and not nearly enough of Captain Jack Sparrow as played by Johnny Depp. Roger Ebert describes Depp's performance as "original in its every atom. There has never been a pirate, or for that matter a human being, like this in any other movie." In any case the pirate flick was fun and Depp is great in it and everything in it that isn't Depp is mostly tolerable except for the two evil comic relief pirates. Seriously, this isn't a fucking cartoon, can we please not have the two comic-relief sidekicks? The running "joke" concerning said haha pirates dressing like girls was totally fucktactular. Who wrote that, and can't someone kill their pets?

I was looking forward to that Sean Connery jam but it's received some laughable reviews, focusing on the movie's own lack of logic on any level, which is just the sort of thing that would have me frowning for the duration. So instead I'll just wait for the new Tomb Raider. Yay.

In other news, the NBA Finals recently ended, setting a record for the shortest distance between titles in NBA history. Normally the time interval between titles is one year. One would think that's what makes the most sense. This year however the NBA decided that a one minute-long season held less than a month after the last Finals would be best. I say that the season is one minute long because that's how long it took me, give or take, to read this.

Unless Duncan plays like he did in the last game of the 2003 Finals every game and Tony Parker learns what "consistent" means, or unless Skynet becomes self-aware and destroys Los Angeles, this season is going to be a giant joke and the Lakers will break the Bull's record for wins in a season, which will by the way prompt me to hang myself. 
¶ 10:08 AM

  I love Mark Rogoyski. That's streaming video, so if you have a slow connection better not to bother. But worth it regardless.

I was going to recount very thoroughly the circumstances surrounding getting inebriated with my father, who is about as close to me emotionally as I am to Bucharest physically, which is to say not close, but instead I'll just say that I bought him a bottle of good scotch for father's day (a decision based largely on that I hadn't seen him since his birthday in November despite living ten minutes away) and somehow we ended up sitting on his deck downing the entire bottle. During this time he regaled me with very interesting stories about the company that I work for (he used to be the head of human resources for said company). Also apparently at some point I brought up some problems I had with him as a person. I only know this because my sister told me that he said so later, but wasn't specific. This mortifies me because while I'm aware of many problems I have with him, I have no idea what I actually told him. Yeah.

A more specific detailing of that evening's events would reveal how I smashed one of my fingers with a large stone lantern and how I threw up in a Jim's at two in the morning, but that's not really necessary. 
¶ 2:58 PM

  Please see the previous comments section so you can submit your thoughts regarding T3, and also so you can see where Allen claims that Resident Evil is a good movie. Allen is wrong. Resident Evil was a steaming pile of horseshit for many reasons.

They tease us with the first half hour, which actually contains some decent suspense and nice setups, and with the last shot, which is stunning. However all points in between, starting with when they choose to kill off half of the cast at once in one of the most laughable scenes in film history, is total crap. Paul Anderson confuses volume for quality. Anything that happens in this film sounds like a nuclear blast. The actual nuclear blasts in T3 don't sound like doors opening in Resident Evil. The music overlaying the scene with the zombie dogs might well be the worst music ever used in a motion picture. So, the scene is supposed to be intense, because my ears are bleeding? This is to say nothing of the first scene involving zombies in the "cafeteria" that actually contained the cryogenic pod things, where the ridiculous amount of useless gunfire and cacaphonous music serve to create real physical discomfort in the viewer. Having Marilyn Manson, who is a talented musician in some ways, produce the movie soundtrack probably didn't help. Think about the eerie, John Carpenter-esque music that plays during the final shot - think about how much the movie would have benefitted if they slowed the plot the fuck down and let you mull things over, while playing music like that, rather than music that sounds like planes hitting each other over and over.

It is only a horror movie in the first half hour and the last two minutes. Everything in between is one of the worst action movies ever made. They missed the appeal of the Resident Evil game franchise, which wasn't characters dying, it was characters staying alive. On that note, if you're gonna kill people, you may as well make me care about them. The only characters who are interesting are the black STARS leader, Milla, and the only guy left alive besides Milla at the end. Michelle Rodriquez's character was like they said "Hey, let's take Vasquez from Aliens, only we'll make her retarded" and then they told Michelle to sneer at everybody. Everyone else was a throwaway, and were subsequently thrown away. And Milla - poor Milla, I'm sure she meant well. What they did to her in this film could probably be defined as rape. She should file suit...I can't think of any actress I've seen as mistreated to no good end as Milla in this movie. Did her rehearsals consist of getting gang-banged while beaten with sticks? Jesus.

I TRIED to like it, I tried so hard. I have watched it multiple times. Every time it gets less tolerable, as amazing as that may seem. I went in to the movie WANTING to like it, wanting SO MUCH for it to be quality cinema. I wish we could, collectively as audience members, send it back, with a note that says "redo the middle pls." The beginning and the all-too-brief end prove that the people working on the movie are in fact capable of producing something worth watching - so what happened in between?

The overall degradation of the Resident Evil franchise pains me, thanks in large part to this movie, followed by the piece-of-shit that was Resident Evil Zero, and Capcom's continued insistence on released faux-lightgun games featuring Resident Evil characters, games which are not so much games as they are experiments in taking money from stupid people. On that note, who the fuck wrote the last couple Resident Evil games? So the evil scientist girl is actually an evil scientist guy who is also an overly-theatrical sniper? How would such a maladjusted individual ever get the money to embark on a zombie-manufacturing venture? All this person's really likely to do is shoot up their school. Also, bugs? Bugs? People are not playing your fucking games to shoot bugs, Capcom, regardless of their mammoth proportions - they are playing them to shoot the living dead. If something is going to be big, just make bigger fucking zombies. And let us blow their arms/heads off again - why did that ever change? Let us blow them in half again. And why does ONE game in the series (RE3: Nemesis, incidentally the game the next film will be based on) feature a control scene that isn't roughly the same as having teeth pulled? They finally give one of the games a semi-fluid control scheme, then they take it away again, never to return. As time goes on, the more I realize that Resident Evil 2 was actually the only good game in the series. And it was monumentally good, stupendously good. And everything else in the franchise sucks. Oh well. Maybe Resident Evil 4 or the sequel to this awful fucking movie will make things better. I doubt it. Take Resident Evil 2 out of the equation and I'd take half an hour of any Silent Hill game over the entire Resident Evil library, with the possible exception of the Gamecube remake of the original, which was pretty great. 
¶ 11:09 AM

  Everyone should go see Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. With all speed. This is the last movie I expected to be good this summer. This is the last movie I expected to be really, really good. It's totally up to the par of the other Terminator films. It's the role Arnold was born to play. Nick Stahl and Claire Danes are both great. The TX bitch is pretty emotionless and hot. And I have never seen so many things get broken, in all my life. This movie is so visceral, so heavy, so physical - seeing the reality of the car chases in this film, and the unabashed force in the fights between the two Terminators, man, it just makes all that Matrix action seem somehow just, hollow. The Terminators pounding on each other is brutal to the point of being moving, far outpacing any of the slickness of Reloaded.

The film also has plenty of funny moments, more than the first two, and takes the story on some very interesting turns that I was honestly hoping for, but would never expect. Let me just say that the filmmakers have major balls, and there are surprises for you on many levels if you're watching with the first two films in mind. That's all I will say, because any more would be criminal.

The movie is as skillfully made as any other out there without flaunting it, while telling an interesting story and furthering the franchise, and also a motorized crane-truck thing flips and blows up in stupendous fashion. I don't know what else I want from a movie. I feared James Cameron's absense would make this a piece of crap, but it turns out that couldn't be further from the truth. However, I'd like him to come back for T4 should there be one (the possibility is there, though the story could certainly end here as well), though not if that prevents him from doing Alien 5. Sigh.

Here, shameless advertising for a friend. Please click that. While you're at it, this entry, and the previous one, are sadly bereft of comments. Perhaps you could take care of that for me? 
¶ 8:38 PM

  I'd like to thank everyone who came over for the Super South Texas International Invitational IV, held this past Saturday night, at my house. Although I had grand plans for something like six singles tournaments and at least one team tournament and at least one Xtreme MvC2 tournament, my plans collapsed at the hands of alcohol and merriment. So there were but two tournaments, though we made up for lack of quantity with quality! Or something. RESULTS!!!

Tournament One!
1 Joe "DrumlinerJoe" Felan - Rogue/Storm/Tron
2 Jason "Exodus" Montez - Cable/Sent/CapCom
3 Joe "Dr. Deelite" Epstein - MSP
4 Fernando "Most 1" Gonzales - Storm/Sent/Doom
5 - Tony "PowerManFox" Hernandez - MSP
5 - Jimmy "KAOS" Moreno - Sent/Strider/Doom
7 - Erik "WhenTheSkyFalls" Yi - Mag/Cable/Psy

Tournament Two!
1 Joe Felan - Rogue/Storm/Tron
2 Joe Epstein - Sent/Storm/CapCom
3 Fernando Gonzales - Storm/Sent/Doom
4 Jason Montez - Cable/Sent/CapCom
5 Tony Hernandez - MSP
5 Erik Yi - Storm/Sent/Cyke
7 Jimmy Moreno - Cable/Storm/Cammy

So Joe (not me) won both tournaments and won as a reward free reign over my Special Reserve, which he had anyway even before the tournament. I'd blame not winning both tournaments myself on being just shy of drunk, but that's not the case since I actually play faster when tipsy. So I just suck. Jason outplayed me twice in the first tournament, I just couldn't get to his Cable consistently. Second tournament Joe beat me because if Rogue/Tron hits you the match is over, which I wasn't aware of. It's all good - I had promised to skill everyone to death with Cable but I didn't. Next time, my lovelies, next time.

In related news, big fucking ups to my friend Ryan for winning the 2003 MWC GGXX tournament! I am especially happy that he won considering things like this.

That's all I can think of right now. 
¶ 10:10 AM