Monday, May 2, 2005

New
I went to the CD store just to look and see if one specific album was there, having it in my head that there really wasn't anything new that I wanted to buy. Somehow I'm getting good at just finding new albums randomly when I go to the store. I ended up buying Ted Leo and the Pharmacists (Hearts of Oak) on a whim since my brother reccommended them a long time ago. I actually only got to give them a listen just now and its a good CD so far. Not mind blowingly good, but better than most of what I've been perusing on the interweb lately. Rachael bought an album from Oslo, which remings me of Jeff Buckley in a more smooth way. Cross between Buckley and Travis maybe? Its mellow but pretty good for a band I had never heard of. I was also looking for a Dinosaur Jr Album (Where you been) but they didn't have it in stock. They had Green Mind and some newer ones. Something mysterious happened to all my Dinosaur Jr CD's somewhere along the line, but I've been craving it for a few weeks.

Also caught the new Family Guy episode on Fox (ashamedly). It was pretty good, nothing special. I had to do my best to stop myself from having huge expectations of it. There was just too much build up. I have been watching the reruns on CN enough that I've seen every episode too many times though, so its nice to be able to see some new stuff. I'd rather they had broght back (or just kept) Futurama though. Futurama >> Family Guy.
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Thursday, April 28, 2005

The world is a joke
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is without a doubt the funniest show on TV. Somehow, noone else has figured out that you don't have to take everything seriously and how much fun it is to make fun of stuff.

Its a bit old news, bu they had an interview with two womes who were fired because the company refused to pay health insurance for anyone who smokes. I'm not really sure how you can get away with that shit. Spend a day in Mexico City and its like smoking 2 packs there is so much pollution. Should anyone who goes to Mexico City be fired or dropped from their insurance? Or Los Angeles for that matter? This world is full of some greedy motherfuckers.

Also big news was the first flight of the 800 passenger Airbus. Wow, they built a plane that could fly!! Should we all be excited? At least the name of the company is very honest. The two worst and most uncomfartable ways of travel are flying and bus travel. Nothing quite like having your knees pressed up against a seat in front of you for 6 hours.
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Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Sleepy
For the life of me, I can't get out of this nasty sleep pattern where I can't get to sleep before 3am. Even if I try to get to sleep at 1, or somewhere around then I have not been at all successful. Makes getiing up in the morning for school very difficult. I'm just going to have to force myself awake really early and be exhausted all day, then make myself stay up til midnight and finally get to bed. Man, I don't know if I have that kind of willpower.

Oh, yeah I almost forgot that I put up some new pictures (relatively funny) and a shitty video of my former band playing in Rochester on my website. The URL is on the bar on the left on MyOtaku <-----
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Monday, April 25, 2005

Hustle you fairy!
Kung Fu Hustle was really awesome. If you like chinese Kung Fu movies (Crouching Tiger etc.) then you would like this one. Its definitely a spoof, but not that obvious, and it doesn't so much make fun of the genre as it just super-exaggerates it. It has a great mix of regular martial arts moves and extreme effects based moves. The first half of the movie also has a lot of homages to Looney Tunes. I'm not going to give anything away, but a couple of characters do the thing where you run super fast and your feet move in a blur. Good times.

On a completely different note, today is my 1 year wedding anniversary. This means that I have outlasted the majority of all celebrity weddings. SO far we've never yelled at each other either, so we seem to be on the right track.
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Friday, April 22, 2005

....
Every season or so I get sucked into Survivor, so I've been watching it and caught almost all of the episodes this season. Its actually pretty good, though as always most of the people I liked have already been voted off. I don't know why I watch that stuff.

Also I watched the first episode of Wonderfalls, the short lived TV show I never even knew existed until it was cancelled. It was really funny though, well worth seeing. The first episode had a Bic pen tracheotomy. Netflix is nice, since you can rent any fo the TV series collections that are out on DVD now.

Kung Fu Hustle is opening this weekend (today), so I think I might either go see that or maybe Sin City.
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Tuesday, April 19, 2005

poo
I watched CKY3 the other night, and for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it is Bam Margera's (Viva la Bam) semi-homemade videos that led into Jackass etc. The third one was made around when Jackass was still on I think? Anyway, I don't really like Bam, he seems like an ass who is really full of himself. The tapes however are funny as hell. Gross, but funny. There is a fourth CKY video that came out a while ago, but I haven't seen it yet. It might be hard to top the older ones though. This one has disproven one of George Carlin's Jokes (You'll never see anyone take a shit while running at full speed). Oh, so very disgusting.

I've got Netflix, but you pretty quickly run out of movies to put on there. I usually end up renting a lot of movies I would never normally watch, like the Terminal and I, Robot. Also some that are horrendously bad girl movies like Little Black Book (watched about 25 minutes of).

So I'm desperate, I need some movie ideas from you guys and I know you watch a lot of movies (Shinmaru) so lend a lend please.
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Friday, April 15, 2005

Samurai MC
Samurai Champloo airs on Cartoon Network (Adult Swim) Saturday May 14th at 11:00pm.

I watched two more episodes (fansubs) last night, which filled in backstory on one of the main characters. Very cool.

Samurai culture is pretty popular and glamorized (why not) in a lot of books movies and anime. Its hard to think of Japan without thinking about ancient samurai and swords etc. I'm a bit of a nerd for it myself.

Lone Wolf and Cub (manga) is one of the best "samurai" interpretations. Its a beast of a series though at about 28 or so volumes at $10 a pop. I read it all from the library and in Borders, and only own issue #1.

Blade of the Immortal is my favorite comic by far. Its a great story, broken up by multi-issue spanning battles which are extremely bloody and nasty. It doesn't hurt that the protagonist Manji is immortal and can lose limbs and keep on fighting. A lot of the swordfighting is realistic, but the characters have pretty unrealistic abilities. No fireballs or any cheese like that, but some unlucky fools have been turned into not much more than blood and chunks.

Champloo fits in quite nicely too. Its not trying to be historically accurate, but rather starts with a realistic Edo era Japan and infuses it with modern culture seemlessly. There's one standout episode where this goofy movie star wannabe samurai runs with a crew that includes a human beat box. Has to be one of the best anime episodes ever.

I was also a big fan of the Playstation Bushido Blade games. It was basically a fighting game with a variety of fighters and about 10 weapons to choose from. It was unique in that you could kill your opponent in one good slice. It made for pretty realistic fighting, except that you could break arms, but only one. Also in the second game you couldn't do leg damage for some reason, so leg hits will knock you down but not keep you down. I don't know why they took it out of the sequel, it was gratifying to win against a standing opponent.

Samurai Movies tend to be a little disappointing. There usually isn't enough action, or the fight scenes are not well choreographed. Seven Samurai is a good movie that avoids those pitfalls, except that it is like four hours long. I watched it once, but probably never again unless someone buys it for me and I can watch it in segments. Yojimbo was good (not great), Way of the Samurai (Tom Cruise) was fun even though it was too much like another Braveheart copy. I didn't like how the one American turned out to be nearly the best samurai in the whole movie either. I don't care much about that stuff while actually watching it though, so its still a good movie.
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Thursday, April 14, 2005

Baaaah!
I was playing Digital devil saga last night and all was going fine. That is until I beat a boss, then may have missed a save point or something. Anyway I got through the tough fights but ran into a group of enemies that got first attack and wiped out my three characters without me even getting a turn to play. I had beaten that same set of enemies before, but they got lucky and scored some critical hits, which gives them more turns to attack. It pissed me off that I got killed in such a cheap way that I didn't bother to keep going with it. I think I'm going to let that game sit for a while. I wouldn't have minded if I had died from making a mistake or having been overpowered, but that was just really cheap. I popped in Katamari Damacy and rolledaround for a bit to balance my night out. If you get a big enough ball on a level, you can choose to play without the time limit on the second play-through. Its gratifying to be able to roll up clouds and windmills after starting the level picking up erasers and stuff. The soundtrack alone would keep me playing that game for a long time. One song with these high-pitched little Japanese kids singing is my absolute favorite.
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Wednesday, April 13, 2005

tomfoolery
A short while ago when I was in the comic book store I was witness to a conversation between a girl and a guy about Kenshin (rouroni). She was mad because he thought the manga was about colonialism in Japan or some shit, and the arguement was quite heated. The weird accent the guy had made it even more hilarious.

Not much excitement on my end. Did some laundry, watched some movies. I did come to one revelation though, and it was that the movie I, Robot did not such nearly as much as I expected. Will Smith's character was 90% believable, and classic funny tough guy Will Smith. They didn't play up the robot with human emotions angle too badly, and the action scenes were cool. There was a little bit of cheese in it, my favorite part being when they went to a crime scene and it was surrounded by holographic caution tape. It was supposed to be 2035 or something, would you really spend all that money for holo-tape? I thought it was pretty funny. The rest of the movie seemed to fit better, it wasn't too far off base.


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Monday, April 11, 2005

??
Its funny I forgot to reply to shim on my comment thingy, but it won't allow me to double post on my own site. Anyway, I'm pretty sure the schedule for the new CN lineup isn't set yet, but I'd guess Champloo will be on Saturday night or Sunday night.

Well, what I wanted to post about is hen really good and even great bands turn to crap. It happens more often than it should. A band that you love and look forward to releasing a new album puts out a real peice of crap. Examples:

The inspiration for this post was Weezer. I didn't know they had a new album coming out soon, and to be honest I'm not sure whether its going to be bad or not. That being said, their apparent first single "Beverly Hills" is quite terrible. The song concept isn't un-Weezerlike, but the song is pretty bad. You can listen to it on their website.

A band called Ours is another good example. Their first album, Distorted Lullaby's is one of my favorite albums I own. They have a loud, wailing singer with a great voice (think Muse) and a really great sound. The second album unfortunately was utterly bad, with lame lyrics that sound like Kiss covers, and very little emotion. needless to say they were a huge disappointment.

Pearl Jam comes to mind, though they weren't so terrible as they became kinda dull and uninspired after 2 1/2 albums or so. In that sort of thread, I'd also put Jets to Brazil who turned into a really dull acoustic band after one solid album. Metallica, even though they had a ton of great albums before the suck showed up.

I can think of a few more that are in my collection, but dost thou have any to add?
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