Hating, because it's easy

Censorship Sucks

2010-07-12T14:06:00.000-07:00

What sucks worse though, is when a very large, generally bright population is fooled by two dudes from Colorado who say their show was censored despite half the jokes in the episode not working at all if the "censored" bars weren't present.

South Park 201 is not censored. It was deliberately made that way.

Everyone's so ready to get up in arms about corporate censorship they forgot that the thing South Park does best is make fun of everyone, on all sides of an issue. Welcome to being chumps, chumps.

Digital Downloads Suck

2009-09-29T20:36:00.000-07:00

So I've got the Lady Gaga album, and it's pretty nice, but i've listened to it a lot and want to loan it to my sister.

only I can't because it's a digital download!

options:

1. Not Loan Album

2. Break Law

If you're going to charge me a similar price to an actual object, one that you had to incur costs to create and distribute, then the same capabilities should come with it. If your item is distributed and manufactured for 1/1000th of that cost (server fees), then it should cost me less since I can do less with it (legally).

PSPgo Sucks

2009-09-29T20:28:00.000-07:00

Sony's releasing an update to their popular? playstation portable.

It doesn't play your old games, because it can't read anything currently sold in PSP format. This, considering the lack of backward compatibility, would be a nice time to take advantage of the leaps in technology over the past few years, don't you think?

Well sony doesn't. Sony's idiots. The PSPgo is everything your PSPregular is, but smaller, more expensive and less compatible. As an added bonus, you will be completely unable to loan games to a friend or re-sell them if you are done with them.

90210 Season 2 Sucks

2009-09-10T08:59:00.000-07:00

Rebecca Ingersoll-Rand Kirchner-Sinclair has delivered!

This is what the kids want! 1975 era depictions of virginity loss and alcohol abuse! Are you listening Gossip Girl? OC, you got canceled cos you didn't realize this!

The first half of the show is three of the four main girls strutting in slow motion eating ice cream. Then Annie, who had the only interesting conflict (and only for the last two shots of the season finale) finally shows up, looking for the dude she killed, who of course, has no name. If only all DUI's could be that way! All you get for killing a dude is some bad feelings. There's no one to answer to! Well, at least until Annie's life is going well and out of the blue dude's wife and kids show up in an amazing plot twist! I literally did not see that coming!

The show is the definition of obvious easy conflicts. No one will listen to Annie, Everyone hates her, everyone is unsure of their relationships (Silver's texting Ethan! Naomi's new man is married! Naveed wants to Fuck!), and no one listens to anyone.

90201 was never anything special, even the original. The difference is since then we've gotten some really good 'teen' shows between now and then. The bar is raised, and we've seen all of this before.

Maybe Melrose Place will shine into something nice?

Quicktime X Sucks

2009-09-10T08:54:00.001-07:00

When I heard that quicktime pro was done, replaced by quicktime x, I was very pleased. While QT Pro is a fanastic little app, it gets progressively shitty to have to pay $25 for the exact same functionality as the previous version every time apple decides it's time to change the number on Quicktime.

The baby got thrown out with the bathwater however. Can't open image sequences, can't export image sequences. What we have here is Windows Media Player for a mac. Other than the pretty new interface (which is pretty,), there's nothing good here.

Apple even knew this, and stuck Quicktime Pro 7 in my "Utilities" folder. Next time just re-skin QT7 assholes.

G.I. Joe, the Movie, Sucks

2009-08-16T14:22:00.000-07:00

It could have been so much worse, which would have been better. It goes without saying that it could have been better; saying that about a Steven Sommers movie is akin to saying Alaska could be warmer in the winters.

Wanted, the comic, Sucks (revised)

2009-07-05T21:06:00.000-07:00

This comic is angry, racist, misogynistic and sloppily written.

I'm gonna write a lot about how much I hate it, but really, all you need to know is the above sentence and that the movie is incomparably better.

On the second page the narrator, doing his very best Fight Club monologue, points out verbally that his boss is an African-American. Later someone else veers off their conversational road to re-establish that Wesley's boss is African-American. You'd be right to presume the boss' ethnicity must hinge around a plot point with the hammering they're giving it. That boss has to have something to do with this story.

She doesn't. The boss is verbally observed to be black twice and a lesbian once and is promptly out of the story. She is not even listed as one of the myriad of people he shoots in the arbitrary killing spree that passes as his "training" later in the story.

Welcome to Wanted: The Comic.

Wesley is the son of the greatest assassin ever and he has been recruited by a group of super-villains that call themselves "The Fraternity". The name was chosen by internet poll on a teen comic book forum. Runner up: "The Corporation". There are no super heroes in this universe; all the bad guys teamed up in 1986 and killed them. Upon extinguishing the super heroes The Fraternity reformatted the whole universe's collective memory so that only they had any memory of the way it used to be. They now run around the new world like a bunch of trench coat wearing adolescents, killing and raping to their heart's content.

Yeah, raping. Supervillains and specifically the protagonist Wesley are super into rape. It's what Wesley does for fun now that he's in the Fraternity. And why not? After all, if I were in his shoes and my societal chains broke off I'd run right out and brutally assault everyone and everything. Right? Right? While I could forgive what came before, this was when I gave up trying to like the book. I mean, I get it: Wesley's a Super Villain. He's a bad person. Bad people rape. Bad people kill. He's also the protagonist of this obscenely masturbatory fantasy of Mark Millar's. He's celebrated on every page. He's your super hero Tyler Durden. And a rapist.

I have no idea what Mark Millar is like in person. I have no desire to find out. In my mind he's a 14 year old boy with a lot of anger issues inside a 30 something year old body. The two decades lost completely in a blindness of rage and an inability to figure women out even a little. Given my imagined set of circumstances, we can see how someone would at once dream of being of allowed to rape while at the same time dream of being trained to be a great lover. How fucked up is that? Did I mention that? That his trainer, Fox teaches him how to give good head? How broken is that logic? Wesley is the definition of narcissism. I find it hard to believe that after bragging about raping famous actresses he could have any desire to please a person. When does the ability to give good head come into play in rape and murder land?

What I do know about Mark Millar is he is a mediocre writer who had an interesting idea and little capability to carry it out. The question of what a society of outlaws does when no one can stop them is excellent, exploring that with a normal guy: also excellent. Millar never digs in, never gives it more than a passing thought. Everyone goes around killing and raping. That's the extent of it. It's boring. Mark Millar (and I suppose this is some feat) has made the two most traumatic events a single human can perpetrate on another into something boring. Murder's boring. Rape's boring; a masturbatory fantasy of a teenage boy and a way to turn the evil up to eleven. It's all very boring.

Fortunately for us Wesley repents for a page and cries about his bad deeds in a most insincere manner, then he kills all the bad guys, then he shoots his dad at the end, says "Bitch" arbitrarily a few more times and it's over.

The comic is a horrible pile of shit in every direction.

But hey, I like to be the bigger man sometimes, so here are some small ideas that would make "Wanted" suck less:

- The Shit Man, instead of being "the collected feces of the 666 most evil people" why isn't he the death shits of those people. Hitler shoots himself, ass relaxes, shit falls out. Shit Man should be that shit specifically, not just arbitrary bad guy shits. Also, do evil people shit really tiny, cos 666 human shits would be fucking enormous. Also also, have you seen that Kevin Smith movie Dogma? Just curious...

- Knock off Fox's ebonics. It reads like Americans doing British accents.

- Show Wesley, super assassin, doing a kill that is more difficult than just shooting at a guy. Other than a few frames where he's posing like Chow Yun Fat, Wesley never comes off as any more skilled than a magically invincible psychopath.

- Knock it off with the "the authorities leave us alone cos of our pins and license plates" nonsense. Don't go there, don't explain it. The Super Villains can reprogram minds. Done. Don't show me cops going "oh shit sorry sir, I didn't see your pin" cos now I start to think, "How soon after a cop gets hired do they tell him to let the people with the pins do what they want?" and then, "Is anyone counterfeiting pins? How hard are they to duplicate? Do they have holograms in them?" Imagining cops kow-towing to these pins forces me to punch all kinds of holes in the reality of the world. Regular people may not be as powerful as the super villains, but it's rather unlikely that people would just sit around and take it up the ass for two decades. So either the people get their minds consistently erased or the Super Villians aren't causing all that much trouble, neither of which seems to be the case in the book, hence my issue with it all.

- That part in the beginning where Wesley's dad is about to fuck two dudes and is all "I'm not gay, I've fucked tons of women." Is written out so specifically... I don't see a super killer who's banged 5,000 women as someone who'd feel the need to explain himself (even if he is insecure enough to keep track), extra especially in a world without consequence.

- As a subset to the above note, and a general writing suggestion: imagine every line you write being spoken aloud in a real world situation. If it sounds like your character is explaining a bit much, your character is explaining a bit much.

- As a second subset to the overly explanatory dad: were any of the 5000 women he's banged rapes? I suppose if the guy was raping his way to a high score he could still be a tad insecure about himself and his sexual proclivities.

- If you're going to constantly comment on how your girlfriend character is fat, you might want to have her illustrated as such. Katsuhiro Otomo said he didn't draw attractive girls because that was too easy. But hey, who's he?

- All I see in that two page spread of Wesley shooting his dad is cock and eyes rolling back. What word did you hold in your mind when you drew that? Roofiedudesex?

- The guy who's peins is a super villian: clever. How's that working out for you?

- Dear powers copy guy (there's a guy who can copy other people's powers, but only for a limited and specific amount of time), was Wesley there with a stopwatch when you got the flying powers from the other guy? Is there a stopwatch on your chest I didn't see? Do you flicker a funny color right before you lose the powers you stole? Cos man, he knew down to the SECOND when you were gonna lose them. Super assassin AND super time teller! Also, who were you? Was I supposed to care about you when you barged into the story sometime in book five, cos I was all WTF and like, maybe I missed the part earlier where anyone said anything about you at all.

- Okay, those last few weren't exactly suggestions.

- People come into and out of this story with very little motivation. I suppose in a book whose central context is a world without consequence it is fitting that characters would appear lacking in all motivation.

I've got a bit of a complex where when I read or watch or experience some form of public art or entertainment and said art/etc is godawful. My mind imagines how the whole thing could be an elaborate ruse by the creator of said work just to mock the consumers for enjoying it (or not). I've gotten into the concept before writing about Southland Tales, as well as the previous version of this essay. To deliberately and successfully pull off a stunt like that would make you a huge douche. Writing the comic Wanted also makes you a huge douche, albeit considerably less brilliant.

Demitri Martin Sucks

2009-07-05T20:52:00.000-07:00

I liked him a lot better when he was called Mitch Hedberg.

Restaurant Websites Suck

2009-05-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

Flash Intros? PDF Menus?

Are you trying to piss me off? I want to know when you are open, where you are located and what you serve. I'd appreciate if I didn't have to utilize a two plugins just to get such impossibly basic information!

Terminator 3 Sucks

2009-05-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

Lady Terminator, midway through the movie, due to some clever physics calculated by the t-800, gets a heavy duty mobile crane slammed right on top of her. She is slowed down, but neither stopped nor permanently damaged.

Later, in the climax, she is pinned down and defeated by a helicopter. A Helicopter. A flying vehicle weighing at least one order of magnitude less than the crane simply due to it's need to function.

Uncompressed 4:2:2 Sucks

2009-05-10T12:58:00.000-07:00

There's this "fad" out there in the "professional" video world to call certain types of video "Uncompressed 4:2:2" which while it could arguably be true, is completely misleading so for the sake of everyone involved (especially the people who are so scared of the word "compressed" and what it does to their precious footage) I'm going to explain why using that term makes you an asshole.

Compression, digital video swear word that it is, means that the computer figures out nifty ways to not keep the redundant data. To explain, we'll count ducks. There are five ducks in front of you. You could write down on a piece of paper "one and one and one and one and one" or you could write "five". You've used some of your knowledge and intellect to "compress" how those ducks are counted. Most compression formats are "lossy" which is to say they throw out visual data to varying degrees to save space ("approximately five ducks"), often significant amounts of space. This is where people get their panties in a bunch, as they don't want a reduction in visual quality.

(lossy) Compression = loss of visual quality = bad, or so the saying goes.

"4:2:2" is a form of pixel subsampling. There are three channels in a video signal, usually referred to as YIQ or YUV (there's a difference between those two, but it's heady). The first channel (the Y) is the luminance of the image. The second two add the color. In a 4:2:2 subsampled image, half the color information is thrown out. This is done for bandwidth reasons just like compression is. It also, just like compression, makes for a poorer final quality image.

So if you are reassuring a client that your "Uncompressed 4:2:2" or whatever is uncompressed you are an asshole.

The caveat to all this nonsense is that it's very hard to handle true uncompressed, non-subsampled imagery, and in many cases it genuinely does not matter. If you're going to edit something and do a light color grade, you'll be fine and no one will be the wiser. If you plan on working with the footage in a visual effects context you will likely run into some issues.

Bayer Patterns Suck

2009-04-01T23:13:00.000-07:00

the bad news: Every digital camera (save one) and every digital video camera (under $100,000) uses what's called a Bayer pattern for it's CMOS or CCD sensor.

Sigma's SD14 is the digicam that doesn't, and high end HD/digi-film cameras such as the Sony F23, Thomson Viper, and Panavision Genesis, which are all out of your price range so forget about it.

but anyway, what is a bayer pattern and why should anyone care?

Because, in effect, every camera company is lying to you with your megapixel ratings. Your 14 megapixel camera is actually giving you something that's up-scaled by a factor of three, give or take.

let's take the RED camera, everyone's favorite boner-maker. RED is a 4k camera. This means that each horizontal line of an image that it makes is 4096 dots or long. Now, in a digital image, each dot, much like each dot on a TV, is made up of Red, Green and Blue. The whole issue comes about because in the case of digital camera sensors, each dot is not Red, Green and Blue.

Each dot is Red, Green, OR Blue. In a bayer pattern, the first line goes
G, B, G, B.....
and the second line goes
R, G, R, G........

then there's software on your camera that takes that upper quadrant of one Red, one Blue and Two green and it mashes it together to make four RGB dots.

That is complete fucking bullshit, and I'm pissed.

Your Facebook Correspondence Sucks

2009-03-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

When I was younger and an idiot, I would occasionally find myself having an interesting conversation in a bar that I was pretty sure some of the nearby patrons would really enjoy. I would not be so brash as to turn to them and go "can you believe this?" Instead I would talk a bit louder, angle my body a bit to lure them in, and you know what?

It never worked!

you know what else?

You're doing it too! Only instead of being 22 and drunk you're 29 and sober. And everyone around you is sober, and Facebook is going to leave those messages up so long Andre the Giant stickers will get jealous.

We don't care, none of us, the people who are close enough to you to accept your digital friendship. Instead of publicly shouting your insincere hellos back and forth, why don't you construct an actual message of thought?

I suppose that would be too hard. Take too much effort when all you wanted to say was, "I had the kale salad at M de Chaya and it was off today, how are you?"

Your Reply to All Sucks

2009-03-30T23:16:00.000-07:00

I know that Facebook and Twitter have you under the impression that people care about your day to day thoughts and activities, but sending a message meant for one person to 27 of us is uncouth.

It's very likely we are not friends. I know this because anyone one of my friends who "replies to all" on an email with something to the extent of "congratulations" or "yeah, I'll be there" has been scrubbed from my personal friendship records.

So you're happy our mutual email acquaintance graduated. I don't care. Write back to the one person who wrote to you, not the other 26 of us who happened to receive it. I do not care about your sentiment or availability. I did not ask.

What's your side project? Keeping up correspondences on myspace via the comments section?

The App Store Stucks

2009-03-15T21:21:00.000-07:00

I read about the game "Go" and instead of swimming through the misery that is the iphone games selection on my phone, I go to the App Store via itunes. After twenty minutes of searching (itunes is not much better at searching and sorting than the phone) I find an app I want and buy it. It's reasonably expensive at $10.

The app downloads to my local itunes and goes wherever it goes. I don't immediately hook my phone up to it. I go over to my other mac and plug in my phone. Despite being connected to the same itunes account (a .mac account no less), my desktop and the itunes store has no idea I ever downloaded or purchased the app, so I can't install it via my desktop.

I come back to my laptop to install the game. It's not immediately obvious how to do so, but eventually I find the "Sync Applications" panel, telling itunes to sync all applications.

Itunes then proceeds to delete every application I've downloaded (free and paid) off my phone, then it installs the one.

I swear to god Apple has three smart people and they all quit sometime before the iphone came out.

As a bonus, just to show you they are ignorant douchebags, when I synch my addressbook, it asks if I want to merge or replace my contact list. Wow guys. Wow.

Maya for OSX Sucks

2009-03-03T02:20:00.000-08:00

It's not that Maya on a mac is godawful. It doesn't crash much and does what it should, basically. The problem stems from the fact that whoever ported it must have been blind and relied on a series of diagnostic tests to see that all the functions were working.

I can guarantee they never once opened it up and saw the fonts hanging over their baselines, the ramps that disappear if you scroll up or down, and they certainly didn't try to scrub in the channel boxes while footage was playing. This is after their "service pack 1" to fix issues like those.

Again, it works, it just doesn't work nearly as well or snappily as the windows version. It costs the same. Thanks Autodesk.

That Song, Umbrella, Sucks

2009-03-03T02:14:00.000-08:00

Since I'm on the topic of choruses, the one in "Umbrella" is fantastic. The problem is that after hearing the chorus so many times on so many montages, award shows, youtube anime videos and whatever else, I finally heard the real song.

My first thought was it's a b-side remix. B-side remixes always suck. Someone gets the great idea to pair down the song to some random beat and just keeps the vocals. Only in this case, it's the A-side.

She should have collaborated with Lil Wayne or T Pain instead of Jay Z.

Now imagine you're Thomas Jefferson, it's the late 1700s and you read that last sentence, from the future. Right?

Katy Perry's Grammar Sucks

2009-03-03T02:08:00.000-08:00

I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry chapstick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don't mind it

lines 1,3 and 4 are complete thoughts.

line 2 is not.

Outside of the very catchy chorus the song's forgettable, and outside of the song the album is a batch of Hilary Duff b-sides. All there is is that chorus, but what the fuck?

Why the sentence fragment?

The taste of her cherry chapstick what? You liked the taste? I'm guessing so, cos this song is all about (I'm not gay) kissing other girls (I'm not gay) and liking it. Complete your boring and obvious thought Katy Perry, whatever it is.

The Dock Sucks

2009-02-19T00:39:00.000-08:00

Even at it's smallest, the stupid thing is taking up 5% of my laptop's vertical real estate. Thanks Apple for taking something that was really nice in Windows 2000, making it shiny, animated (magnification---oooooh!!) and bigger. Do I really want to look at all the horrid icons applications have? Maybe.

BUT MAYBE NOT!

People crap on Windows a lot. A lot of it's deserved, but at least with XP (I can't speak for Vista) I could make it look like Win2000, change all the colors around and customize it reasonably extensively. Recolor the OS down to the application level, change all the fonts. Its' really nice. My copy of Ubuntu isn't even as easy to muck around with, so I applaud Windows (XP)

Things I can customize in Apple's OS-X:

1. The color of the minimize/maximize/close gumdrops on each window
2.

That's right. There is no number two.

For all their "it just works" and "It's for people not robots" attitude, the choices in OS-X are nil. You get gray and white and more white and more white and a little more gray and some colored gumdrops. And you know what? You're gonna fucking like it!

I'm well aware that the reason Apple's popular is the same reason the Nazis were fashionable: fetishistic attention to detail and complete and utter uniformity. But I'm a "mac"; I'm your guy from the movie Dodgeball, with my comfortable clothes and desire to get high and make beats in garage band. I am an individual, and your operating system is not letting me shine.

Truth be told, I could give two shits about changing the font. Whatever they've got going on works well enough (except in Maya--are you reading this Autodesk?). I want two things:

1. As a working professional in the digital arts, I'd like to be able to make my OS a dark-ish gray so I'm not blinded by the mandatory bar across the top of my screen when I'm working on dark imagery. I don't need to "theme" color my os, but the ability to darken it down (and not that garish "cmd+opt+ctrl+8" nega screen).

2. The ability to not have the dock, but instead a drop down menu on the mandatory top bar where I could put my aliases instead. (Where have I seen this before.....?) Then, when I didn't need them (which is most of the time--and that is true for everyone) all my dock application icons aren't annoyingly in my way or popping up to say "hey" every time my cursor goes to the bottom of the screen.

Admit you screwed up. Admit the dock, like your shiny screens may impress the type of people who are more into shinyness than functionality, admit the dock is a bad design choice.

All I'm asking for is the option. I'd even be happy if it was command line only, I don't care how hard you have to bury it, but I want it.

Seriously, Whoever does Claire Bennet's Makeup Sucks

2009-02-02T21:58:00.000-08:00

Holy good Jon Benet, why?

Painting the face of a tramp on a little kid only makes you a closet pedophile, so knock it off. Ever since that makeup commercial I know she doesn't have to look like a pederast's concubine. Please, for my ability to keep watching this new "rebooted" Heroes, stop it with the whore's makeup on Claire.

Adrienne Brody Sucks

2009-02-01T15:33:00.000-08:00

Sure he made some movie where he played piano in the Holocaust (can that just be a separate Academy Award subset by the way? Best Performance/Movie/Director in a Holocaust movie?) but ever since Adrienne won or didn't win (I forget) he's done nothing cinematically noteworthy.

His entire career is spent looking smugly at the camera in Tag Heuer and Dior Homme ads. He's basically Paris Hilton for all he contributes to his "craft" these days.

No, he's worse. She's never won an Oscar.

The G.I. Joe Movie Already Sucks

2009-02-01T15:28:00.000-08:00

Superbowl commercial iced with these two gems of dialogue,

"Technically, we don't exist"

and

Government Stooge: "What did you say your outfit was called?"
General Hawk: "I didn't"

Oooooh..... That simmer you hear is me in a stew of BAD-MOHTERF*CKING-ASS!!!!!

OH YEAH BABY!

Congratulations, by the way, to the Jimmy and Eric Olsen for winning Brietbart Junior High's "write your own G.I. Joe movie" contest.

Dubai Sucks

2009-01-29T20:44:00.001-08:00

I went there once as a kid, when it was called Orlando.

Your Blog Book Sucks

2009-01-29T02:46:00.001-08:00

Cory Doctorow blogs for boingboing.net. You know what he blogs about? Two things: anything steampunk related and himself. Cory has written books and good for him. I don't read not-his blog to find out about where he'll be signing them however. I don't care.

Maddox, who I consider to be one of the finest internet writers out there (his points are both concise and humorous) wrote a book. It's boring. It has no tooth. It's watered down in the way comedies about handicapped people are.

Your Internet Writing Sucks

2009-01-29T02:43:00.001-08:00

That's write, your internet writing sucks, and by sucks I mean feels like eating twenty miles of camel shit that's been out in the sun for so long it tastes like a milkshake made of rotten rat carcasses and vomit.

Movie Trilogies Suck

2009-01-29T02:32:00.001-08:00

The "doye" exceptions being stuff like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

I'm looking at you Pirates of the Carribean, you seven hour drive to nowhere.

Rick Warren Sucks

2009-01-21T22:02:00.000-08:00

Goatee?

Should I have titled this post "Evil Rick Warren Sucks"?

Your Segment on Subliminal Advertising Sucks

2009-01-18T23:41:00.000-08:00

Do it Inside Edition. Do it.

I must be audiovisual jesus, because I could tell you that's a flash of a McDonalds at without having to "frame-by-frame" it. It's a rather large and recognizable icon.

This seems to be what people mean when they talk about subliminal advertising. The problem is I have a hard time believing anyone under, say 60, can't make out the imagery, yet news segments like the one linked above always insinuate that you don't realize you saw something. Nope, I saw it. So did everybody.

"I could direct a better movie" Sucks

2009-01-09T21:02:00.001-08:00

No you couldn't.

You know why I know this?

Because you didn't.

Souhtland Tales Sucks

2009-01-09T19:42:00.000-08:00

While I hate Donnie Darko, I really, really wanted to like Southland Tales.

It's set in a dystopian near-future Los Angeles. It's cast includes Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson, Sean William Scott, Amy Pohler, Christopher Lambert and Justin Timberlake. I generally enjoy movies with those people and consider all of them a boon to a film.

Sure Donnie Darko is exactly the film a stoned teenager would come up with after watching NOVA's episode on wormholes, but second time's a charm. Right?

Right?

Nope.

It's god-awful.

I was gonna go with the idea, as I have in the past, that the film is some large meta-joke about poor films, the world and all sorts of stuff, but then I blew that apart with two thoughts:

1. Richard Kelley has never made a good film, so it's very likely beyond his capacity to create self-referential super-art.

2. It's extremely cynical, both of me and the imagined creator, to make something that is just one giant "fuck you" to everyone. The best analogy I can come up with is if you took a shit, then managed to convince people they liked eating it to the point where everyone happily would eat your shit, would seek out your shit to eat and would evangelize eating it on the internet, and then you laughed at them. It's a pretty elaborate ruse to pull off in popular media and thinking rationally I don't think either "Wanted" or "Southland Tales" are such attempts, as much as it would make me feel better about the universe...somehow.

There's a lot of problems with the movie, but by focusing on one, I can hopefully explain why it's so bad. The movie hates republicans, which, okay, fine. But it hates them in such a simple and childish way. Not particularly original other than replacing "Government" almost exclusively with "Republicans", but there it is.

A story, if you'll amuse me:

When I was in high school, I was going to write a play about futuristic people enslaving and torturing other people if I can remember correctly. I was sure that my depiction of the strife of these people was going to bring tears to the eyes of everyone who saw it. I was 16 or 17 at the time. I'm really glad I didn't write that play, but I feel that Richard Kelley's mind sees his stories exactly as mine did back then. When he thinks about his stories, sees the images it's all fantastic, brilliant moving stuff. His worlds are flush with culture and history. I'm sure of it, and that's fine. It's actually pretty awesome. The problem is, much like my aborted dystopian one-act, what the rest of us see does not glow the way it does in the creator's mind. It's awkward, clumsy, cynical and boring.

It's also way too damn long.

Iphone Sucks 2

2008-12-16T19:05:00.000-08:00

I've decided the iphone merits it's own series of semi-regular posts. Today's post is about MMS messaging.

MMS (Multi Media Stuff) messages are texts with a picture from someone else's phone. Until 2008 when everyone got iphones, they were pretty popular. Iphones can't send them, nor can they recieve them. Kind of.

When your iphone gets sent a MMS you get a text from whoever sent it that says:

I sent you a multi media message, you can view it online at http://viewmymessage.com
login: kFq4CtFf7q
password: eelsballs

and the iphone, because it's an awesome internet phone will allow you to click on the URL and bring you to the login screen at View My Message .com. Sadly, the impossible to remember login and random words password are back in your text app and didn't make it across. It's an iphone and while "Copy and Paste" is on the apple's to-do list, they were too busy making sure Crash Bandicoot would run well on it for all 10 complete suckers who care.

Now what you do is go back to your text application (or whatever you wanna call it) and you grab a pencil and some paper and you write down the login/pass so you can go BACK to your web browser and type them in.

Pretty awesome effort to put forth for a picture of your friend in a bar.

No copy/paste. Fine. To be perfectly frank, outside of this one instance I don't feel much of a need for it. But it's been a year and a half. AT&T built a website around people not being able to recieve MMS messages. It's obviously an issue, and so I have to wonder, why has no one up in the gilded white halls of Cupertino come up with the simple idea that when an iphone receives a MMS it understands that it's an MMS and enters the login/pass for you? Even better: it downloads the damn picture to a MMS folder in your pictures app.

Over a year now. I can watch youtube videos, shake it to find arbitrary restaurants and get the weather in Saint Tropez, but I can't get pictures of my sister's dog in the pool.

Your Internet Form Sucks

2008-12-16T18:59:00.000-08:00

Filling out a bank account, shipping address, petition to get some senator to listen to you, whatever, and they've got the zipcode for you to fill out and it's mandatory.

Then you have to enter your state.

Why?

It's the digital age, just check your database of zipcodes and figure out what state I'm in. It's not a cellphone number, it'll be right. You can do it computer!

Why has this not happened yet? Why am I still punching in my zipcode and then having to enter a less specific version of that in a dropdown menu right after?

Heroes, for the last time in 2008, Sucks

2008-12-15T19:00:00.000-08:00

Claire's wig.

Good God. So distracting I wasn't even bothered by her manner of talking from the very back of her throat.

Get yourself some tips from Tyra at least.

Celebrity Fragrances Suck

2008-12-14T19:08:00.000-08:00

Puff Daddy has a perfume.

Why would I want to smell like cocaine and sycophants?

Guns N Roses Fans Suck

2008-11-24T14:58:00.000-08:00

Listening to the new "GnR".

I'm fine with Axl making music. He can do as he pleases. The stupid part comes about when I encounter people who speak of the last decade of GnR like it's the same band.

This is a huge problem in society, much larger than Axl's side-band. Humans make companies, but in most cases, the humans that make a company one thing don't stick around, or other humans come in and make it something else. The company name is all that stays, and people will, effectively, mindlessly endorse said company even though whatever person responsible for creating their affection for it is long gone.

An Example:
Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of Final Fantasy, left Squaresoft. Squaresoft still makes Final Fantasy games and Sakaguchi still makes games like Final Fantasy. Sakaguchi's games are arguably as good, only they aren't badged "Final Fantasy" so they sell worse.

I don't entirely expect people to do development team research on their games, but don't fucking ever try to tell me that Guns N Roses is a band that does not involve at least two of the original members.

Burning Man Sucks

2008-11-22T22:56:00.001-08:00

Just because you and I are both creative does not mean I will like art cars. I don't feel like being stoned in the desert for a week with a bunch of naked hippies and--even better--part-time hippies. If I was going to do drugs in the desert I'd do them alone, upping the likelihood I'd come across a talking Coyote.

Your Conversational Idioms Suck

2008-11-22T22:24:00.000-08:00

"Seven minute silence"

Yeah, um no. There's no such thing. What you have run into is the fact that you and the people around you are both boring and uninterested in each other enough to have run out of things to talk about in just shy of half of a quarter of an hour. Good job.

"No such thing as absolutes."
"That's an absolute!"

Yes. Thank you both. How about this assholes: There's no such thing as absolutes except for a few, this being one of them, go fuck yourselves knowitalls.

All Obama Impersonations Suck

2008-11-22T22:20:00.001-08:00

Everyone I've seen try has completely blown it. The SNL guy neither looks nor sounds like him. Last time I saw him on I was far more impressed with the Tom Brokaw impression. Gawker had some dude who wants to get the job on SNL but other than being black, he was no better.

My feeling (that I'm willing to share with all you aspring Obama impersonators) is that to get him to be funny you have to think of things that are funny and then have Obama do them. Like maybe he's always dancing like he did on Ellen. I'd watch that. I am right now, in my mind!

Saturday Night Live Sucks

2008-11-22T22:12:00.000-08:00

I know we all started watching again after the "Lazy Sunday" video, and again when Tina Fey dressed up like Sarah Palin, but the show is godawful.

Neither the McCain guy nor the Obama guy is any fun to watch, and even when Fey teamed up with Will Ferrell it was a one trick pony, only getting laughs cos the two are famous legitimately now. The remainder of the show that isn't ads is two people standing and awkwardly reading cue cards.

Jimmy Fallon Sucks

2008-11-22T22:06:00.000-08:00

Jimmy Fallon's success resides in various network and movie excecs feeling two things to be true:

1. That Saturday Night Live is relevant, hip, funny, or any combination of the three.
2. That Jimmy Fallon was funny on it.

Barring this idea, I have no explanation for him landing movie roles and certainly not for his appointment to the Late Night desk.

Lara (Laura? Lyra?) Croft Sucks

2008-11-22T15:54:00.000-08:00

Not because of her consistently terrible character design of muddled green and brown paired with orange skin and eyes set so wide as to be an orca, each generation both getting slightly better and less insipidly proportioned, yet still paying homage the original disaster that the character is still unsettling to look at, not for that.

For her voice.

It's too "British".

Yes, yes, thank you, I realize she's supposed to be some heiress raised all nicely, thank you for trying to poke that hole in my argument. That's not it. It's that no one, British heiress, Q of E or girl from Staines, sounds like that. Every time I hear the character speak her voice sounds decades too old for her poorly designed body and it blows the whole poorly slapped together image.

Tomb Raider was, is and always will be a mediocre game series, cobbled together using the concept of what men like without any actual thought, giving us inpossibly huge and unshapely breasts, a manly run and your mom's voice. It's a computer's solution: vairables fed in ("giant tis" "big eyes" "kind of tan" "short shorts") and the uncomfortable result returned with digital indifference. She'd probably smell like fresh bread.

Your Distaste for Arial Sucks

2008-11-22T10:29:00.001-08:00

It's that bad huh? It's ruining your life the way that gay marriage is? Messing up your program harder than an ATI graphics card? It's the Xbox to your PS3.

Give up.

It's not a shitty typeface.

It's not Helvetica. Waaah. Sorry that your one right answer, the one you always go to when you are incapable of, I dunno, desinging, thinking, whatever, so that is gone when you boot up your friend's PC. Epicly tragic. Thank you for blogging about it. Thank you for the snarky tests, the comparison websites and the offhand comments about the design failures of the tail of the lowercase "a". Thank you for this idea that Helvetica is god therefore anything close is shit. Anything except Univers, cos that is also god.

Do they hand out a list of the fonts that you should, will and have to love for life when you take a graphic design class? Is there a day where they tell you to hate on Comic Sans and Arial? Special seminars where you talk about when you had to slum it cos you were on a PC?

In art school the biggest insult was to call something "craft" versus "art". Defaulting to Helvetica is craft.

The Lack of Politics News Sucks

2008-11-15T20:20:00.000-08:00

I'm used to checking out wonkette and fivthirtyeight every day, but now, with the next president elected the whole network's gone quiet.

What am I supposed to chew up two hours of every day with now? Actual reports of happenings in the world? Booooring!

Kanye West Sucks

2008-11-11T15:42:00.001-08:00

"I got this idea where I rap over another song, and then lets make the video look just like that other video, yeah!"

Your Dessert Selection Sucks

2008-11-11T15:22:00.000-08:00

Creme Brulee
Tiramisu
Cheesecake
Chocolate Mousse
Sorbet
Apple Pie/Tart/Fancy word.

That's the list you'll be handed at 97% of all restaurants when you ask for a dessert menu.

I'll give you that desert is a tricky business, but the lack of imagination at even very good restaurants is astounding. Maybe that's all people order anyway, but to be perfectly frank, if your restaurant is functioning solely on market conditions you should just franchise a Cheesecake Factory cos people line up around the block.

I'm not asking for a revolution here, just a few items that aren't dairy-based and a non-apple fruit option. Apple pie is the shittiest pie. Apples taste like almost nothing. It's cinnamon pie. Apple tart just means less of everything presented prettier but tasting the same. Just change the goddamn fruit in it and I'll be perfectly happy with the tower of unoriginality that you call a desert menu.

Wanted, the comic, Sucks

2008-11-07T22:48:00.000-08:00

This comic is angry, racist, misogynistic and sloppily written.

I'm gonna write a lot about how much I hate it, but really, all you need to know is the above sentence and that the movie is incomparably better.

On the second page the narrator, doing his very best Fight Club monologue, points out verbally that his boss is an African-American. Later someone else veers off their conversational road to again establish that Wesley's boss is indeed African-American. His boss' ethnicity must hinge around a plot point with the hammering they're giving it. Why else bring it up? That boss has to have something to do with this story.

She actually doesn't. The boss is verbally observed to be black twice and a lesbian once and is promptly out of the story. I don't even know if she is one of the myriad of people he shoots in his arbitrary killing spree that passes as his "training".

You see Wesley is the son of the greatest assassin evar and now he's being trained by some "Super Villains". The "Super Villains" run this secret society called "The Fraternity" which narrowly beat out "The Corporation" in a vote on "sweet names for evil organizations" among wet men. There are no "Super Heroes" cos all the bad guys teamed up in 1986 and killed them. For reasons that escape me The Fraternity then pulled an Agent Smith and reformatted the whole place (human brains and all) so that only they had any memory of it and run around the new world like a bunch of adolescent Neos killing and raping to their heart's content.

Yeah, raping. Supervillains and specifically the protagonist are super into rape. It's what Wesley does for fun now. And why not? After all, if I were in his shoes and my societal chains broke off I'd run right out and brutally assault everyone and everything. Just get my rape right the fuck on man! I mean, I get it. He's a Super Villian. He's a bad person. Bad people rape. Bad people kill. He's also the protagonist of this obscenely masturbatory fantasy of Mark Millar's. He's celebrated on every page. He's your super hero Tyler Durden, also: rapist.

I imagine that Mark Millar was drowning in the gallons of his own semen flooding his parents' basement when he looked up and asked God to save him. That must have been when the vision hit him: the ability to kill indiscriminately, to be taught how to have sex, to be able to rape anyone and get away scott free. This was the dream. This is what the unsexed 14 year old who'd let the past two decades slide right the fuck by saw as a savior: sex training and easy revenge. Also: rape.

It's far more likely however, that Mark Millar is a mediocre writer who had an interesting idea and little capability to carry it out. The question of what a society of outlaws does when no one can stop them is excellent, exploring that with a normal guy: also excellent. Millar never digs in, never gives it more than a passing thought. Everyone goes around killing and raping. That's the extent of it. Rape used as the "edgy" spice. The whole book spends so much time trying to be badass in every direction it's a dish made with every ingredient in the kitchen. Celery Salt, Cumin, Nutmeg, Rosemary, Brown Sugar, stir it all up! Yum! Piles upon piles of ideas of how to show you "Badass". Later Wesley cries about his bad deeds, but whatever cos he goes in killing on the next page (oh, sorry, now he's killing BAD guys...) then he shoots his dad at the end, says "Bitch" arbitrarily a few more times and it's over.

I'm conflicted: I think it's a talentless screed--that much is clear by now--but I love the movie. The movie of course, took the "Super assassin dad dies, hot lady finds son, trains him" part and dropped the juvenile sex talk, rape and everything else. This complete pile of shit produced a very fun movie. I suppose we should call it fertilizer, the comic.

But hey, I like to be the bigger man sometimes, so here are some small ideas that would make "Wanted" suck less:

- The Shit Man, instead of being "the collected feces of the 666 most evil people" why isn't he the death shits of those people. Hitler shoots himself, ass relaxes, shit falls out. Shit Man should be that shit specifically, not just arbitrary bad guy shits. Also, do evil people shit really tiny, cos 666 human shits would be fucking enormous. Also also, have you seen that Kevin Smith movie about God? Just curious...

- Knock off Fox's ebonics. It reads like Americans doing British accents.

- Show the Killer doing a kill that is more difficult than just shooting at a guy. Other than a few frames where he's posing like Chow Yun Fat, Wesley never comes off as any more skilled than a magically invincible psychopath.

- Knock it off with the "the authorities leave us alone cos of our pins and license plates" nonsense. Don't go there, don't explain it. The Super Villains can reprogram minds. Done. Don't show me cops going "oh shit sorry sir, I didn't see your pin" cos now I start to think, "How soon after a cop gets hired do they tell him to let the people with the pins do what they want?" and then, "Is anyone counterfeiting pins? Cos if I was a cop (and thus knew about the secret pins) I'd sure a shit make a few for myself and friends." Imagining cops kow-towing to these pins forces me to punch all kinds of holes in the reality of the world. Regular people may not be as powerful as the super villains, but it's rather unlikely that people would just sit around and take it up the ass for two decades. So either the people get their minds consistently erased or the Super Villians aren't causing all that much trouble, neither of which seems to be the case in the book, hence my issue with it all.

- That part in the beginning where Wesley's dad is about to fuck two dudes and is all "I'm not gay, I've fucked tons of women." Is written out so specifically I'm creeped out. I don't see a super killer who's banged 5,000 women as someone who'd feel the need to explain himself (even if he is insecure enough to keep track), extra especially in a world without consequence.

- As a subset to the above note, and a general writing suggestion: imagine every line you write being spoken aloud in a real world situation. If it sounds like your character is explaining a bit much, your character is explaining a bit much.

- If you're going to constantly comment on how your girlfriend character is fat, you might want to have her illustrated as such. Katsuhiro Otomo said he didn't draw attractive girls because that was too easy. But who's he?

- All I see in that two page spread of Wesley shooting his dad is cock and eyes rolling back. What word did you hold in your mind when you drew that? Roofiedudesex?

- The guy who's dick is a super villian: clever. How's that working out for you?

- Dear powers copy guy, was Wesley there with a stopwatch when you sucked the powers from the other guy? Cos man, he knew down to the SECOND when you were gonna lose them. Super assassin AND super time teller! Also, who were you? Was I supposed to care about you when you barged into the story sometime in book five, cos I was all WTF and like, maybe I missed the part earlier where anyone said anything about you at all.

- Okay, those last few weren't exactly suggestions.

- Plot based killing. People come into and out of this story so ham-handedly it's like someone opening a door for you while they say "you can't see me! you can't see me!" I suppose in a book whose central context is a world without consequence it is fitting that characters would appear lacking in all motivation.

that makes me think, what if this book is really some amazing art thing I only partially comprehend? The whole no consequences thing being more about the writing than about the actual book? An epic brilliance that will have to be dug through by scholars before I can truly see it clearly. Is this another "Night of the Carrots"?

I stand in awe.

Sarah Palin Sucks I.V

2008-11-06T01:35:00.000-08:00

McCain woke from his nightmare where he was a creepy republican proxy and delivered a very nice concession speech. To be perfectly frank, I'd have been impressed with Obama had he done so as well if the reverse had happened, though admittedly, he's been a bit better about not lowering standards,

ANYWAY,

It looked to me like Sarah Palin was crying.

This is sucks 1.5 because IF she was, then I have another if/then statement:

IF she was crying because she'd realized using her children as cheap political props made her a terrible human being who not only didn't win the election but gave the children some severly difficult memories to chew on THEN I forgive her and she only gets one and a half "sucks's" on my bastion of standards.

IF she was crying for any other reason, well, whatever. Barring my friend's wish for her to do Playboy, I don't see much more interesting coming from her.

24 Season 7 Will Sucks

2008-11-06T01:04:00.001-08:00

I saw a piece of the trailer for this "Jack Bauer in Africa" business in a bar. I was told it would take place in Washington D.C. instead of Los Angeles.

I was hopeful.

I made a mental note to watch the trailer with sound on.

Utter blah. Other than putting an orange filter over all the Africa footage, what is new? It's all the same parodies of real humans, so one sided they might as well be the stars of a Joel Schumacher courtroom drama. Easy answers are on the menu.

Things that will happen in this season:
- Jack tortures people
- People tortures Jack
- 3rd party gets tortured and instead of either a) dying, or b) getting their ass to a hospital they will c) get right back to the work "only they can do" and create filler for the better half of the season.
- CTU gets infiltrated
- 3 to 1 it's by someone who has a recently kidnapped relative and a cockamamie reason for not calling the cops about it.
- Jack's boss hates Jack and will fuck him over to add another 15-20 minutes to each and every goddamn episode
- A bunch of government dudes will be complete horrible shitholes for almost no reason other than like one of them has a brother in law who's half Chinese or something.
- Jack Bauer will say "You're gonna have to trust me" and you know what? He'll be right, because Jack Bauer is never ever wrong on 24, ever. He's like Donald Rumsfeld's idea of Colon Powell and George Patton's lovechild: indescribably perfect.
- Jack's Ninja father shows up again and does more Ninja like crap.
- Things that kill many normal people (poison gas, bombs, bullets, torture...) make Jack cough, grimace and possibly sputter for 2-5 seconds before he gets up and does something heroic or we break for commercial.
- They'll lose Jack, the bad guys or more likely both, on their satelite feeds.
- Jack will rack up a 40 plus bodycount over the "day" and the rest of the world will not notice all the random shootings in North Hollywood (sorry, "D.C.") parking lots.

and finally,
- No one will fire any of the incomptent turds that comprise the "white house staff" that has consitently blown it for 6 seasons in a row. There's been four presidents, right? Five if you count whoever pre-Palmer was. I don't want to see the same people snarking on each other while some genuine crisis is only averted beacause superhuman Jack Bauer makes up for the incompetence of an entire government.

Go Jack,

I'll be rooting for you, at least until I start skipping to the "Next week on 24" part way at the end like I did for last season.

Maddox Sucks

2008-11-03T10:17:00.000-08:00

(Updated: 11-08-05)
(Updated: 02-10-06)
(Updated: 05-06-06)
(Updated: 07-27-06)
(Updated: 11-13-06)
(Updated: 03-05-07)
(Updated: 04-01-07)
(Updated: 04-30-07)
(Updated: 07-16-07)
(Updated: 10-29-07)
(Updated: 04-01-08)
(Updated: 05-31-08)
(Updated: 12-25-08)

I love every one of those updates, even all three in 2008.

I bought the book. The book is godawful.

Bape Sucks

2008-11-02T15:12:00.000-08:00

I'm actually rather upset about this. Bape is a company that makes more expensive versions of popular streetwear.

They make a version if the Nike Air Force 1, the Adidas Superstar, the Puma clyde and I think they do Nike Dunks and Max's now too.

The Bape knockoff of the AF1 is a better shape than the actual shoe in my opinion. Slightly sleeker without getting into the "duck foot" territory the Nike Dunk occupies. It's a very nice shoe and I have exactly 1 pair.

There are two problems here:
1. The shoes sell for $150 but are poorly constructed out of cheap leather and materials. The cutting and stitching is all ragged and shoddy.

2. They're all patent leather clown shoes now.

Seriously. Ultra colorful patent leather. So your shoes are going to look like hell after exactly 1 wear.

Awesome.

All This Sarah Palin Sucks Business Sucks

2008-11-02T01:40:00.000-07:00

Okay, I don't like Sarah Palin, I don't think she'd be good for this country, but to see/read/hear people just DYING to see her eat complete shit publicly is annoying.

Dear Democrats, Obama supporters, people who still care about Michael Moore and general right wing haters,

What are you, A bunch of welfare queens who want to win the lottery?

Winning a battle because the opposition slips on a banana peel is bullshit.

Yeah, she ain't special. Yeah, she's not qualified for president. Let's get over that and win this properly instead of waiting for her to sink the ship like some misplaced Anakin Skywalker.

John Hodgman Sucks

2008-10-21T23:27:00.000-07:00

I really loved all his spots on the Daily Show, and his anecdote about someone being starstruck by him was also memorable, but then someone over at boing boing started to take an interest in him and the loose gravel gave way. They made a video of him talking about his book. I can only imagine the appeal is exclusive to those who are into mediocre humor which appeals only to them. An insular group who will insist I "just don't get it". A variant on your drama geeks who incessantly quote Monty Python's Holy Grail, his fans.

Mole men. I get it. Hi-larious.

Now he's back on the Daily Show, promoting his book, and he sucks.

PC Makers Suck

2008-10-17T01:37:00.000-07:00

Straight off a post about Apple's horrid industrial design comes this.

For all the terrible work apple does, they also do some great things. The Mac Pro for example. Great looking workstation-class computer. When Dell or HP make one of these the case is gobs of ugly plastic glued onto a standard PC case.

While they may be off dreaming about humping the robots in the Bjork video most of the time, when Apple does make good hardware they make it look good as well, and very few, to this day, manage that.

It's getting better, and thank god, because I don't think i'm going to be able to stomach buying another Mac.

Apple Sucks III

2008-10-17T01:06:00.000-07:00

Every mouse Apple Computer has designed since the imac sucks.

First we had the puck. Which way is up? My hand cannot tell because this object has no tactile indicator of "up". Cute and unusable.

They fixed that when people got tired of buying jelly bean computers and we got the one button mouse. Up was easy. Clicking and dragging? Impossible. You have to awkwardly grip two side-nubs (the only part of the mouse that is not the button) to get the contrary force to allow you to tell the computer you are down-clicked-and-holding. It's like buzzard attempting to turn some knobs: Hard to do.

Then we got the mighty mouse, which had magic right clicking technology for the first time in a first party mac product. Welcome to decades ago. Still suffers from the buzzard claw issue. At this point I want to see what the hands of Apple's testing department look like.

I think what this showed them, along with the ipod, is that no one cares about interfaces. They care about shiny, or gumdroppy, and smooth.

To say that their design trumps it's intended function would be to mis-define the word design. The design of any thing should take into account how it's used. That's part of it. If you are making an unusable art object based on a computer mouse you can get away with this. If, on the other hand, you are designing an interface object whose sole purpose is to make controlling a computer more intuitive, then you have failed.

Apple is now in the business of making shiny art objects that can also, with some finagling, compute stuff.

This post came about because Apple's new notebook monitors are shiny. You used to have the option of getting a matte monitor. Matte is superior for viewing; it has less glare. Shiny is 'prettier' especially when the monitor is off, and I suppose for all your people with DWR furniture it's the computer to get. For those of us who make a living staring at these things, it's a big waving middle finger.

Apple doesn't want to make your computers, and the fact that Johnathan Ive is the guy they say is gonna replace Steve Jobs confirms that. Ive wants to make pretty things. I wish I could believe the guy gives any thought to how we might interface with his pretty designs, but it doesn't seem to be in the cards.

I'll be watching paint dry until another company can step it up.

Sarah Palin Sucks II

2008-10-14T02:30:00.000-07:00

http://embeds.blogs.foxnews.com/2008/10/11/palin-drops-puck-at-flyers-game-receives-mixed-reaction/

I can only imagine what I'd have felt like at age 7 if my mom took me to the center of a sports arena and half the crowd booed her. I feel genuinely sad for her kids to have to deal with that sort of stuff.

The kids could have stayed home. It's school season. The reporting outside of the punditry class is minimal. They could keep their esteem for their mom. I may not be a huge fan of the lady and honestly this behavior is exactly why, but even I believe her kids should still look up to her and feel she's a good person who people like.

have I mentioned Heroes Sucks

2008-10-14T01:45:00.000-07:00

First the obvious: Hiro didn't kill Ando. It was Time Warping Magic!! Which, well, which underscores the whole issue with his ability and how they use it. Zero accountability for Hiro. Also, it's been three years, time for him to stop talking like a 10 year old.

This whole episode was, hmmm....

It was.... I'm working on the analogy.

It was a great hand of poker, played terribly. The end reveal of Parkman's dad as the mastermind was underwhelming; more "oh, okay." than "Oh Shit!" Another example in a long like of "doye" moments that abound. The show is getting better but still has some serious issues showing it's hand.

Then there's Sylar. WTF? Was there a contest to write his character this week and five people all won? He could be a great character if his rehabilitation were more real. See also fake Linderman tell speedy girl it's cool to kill if you have a reason. How about maybe making the show about a slow moral decline? Valid reasons leading to horrible actions. The glib way people brush off death, get upset with each other and/or make friends in this show makes nothing permanent.

If Peter, or Claire or any of the "good guys" had, instead of a 1 episode change of opinion, a slow 12 ep decline then when they innevitably became good again it'd be real drama. Stealing bread for your family, so to speak. (who loves the Office?) As it stands the few people still watching the show are going to yell "DOYE" at the TV instead.

Metal Gear 4 Sucks

2008-10-14T00:02:00.000-07:00

Not exactly timely but holy hell.

For your $60 you get something like 20 PS3 "tech demos" and 20 nanomachine powerpoint presentations, with the actual game on this shit sandwich being mustard there's so little of it.

Someone call the Japanese police. Hideo Kojima has thrown out his baby and is selling us dirty bathwater.

Apple's Color Sucks

2008-10-13T19:47:00.001-07:00

I know I rag on Apple a lot, but they deserve it.

Color is an application bundled with Final Cut Studio. Apple bought "Final Touch" and renamed it "Color" and much like the un-renamed "Shake" they bought only the name and current code so no one, ever, will update it or improve it.

Seriously. Apple Pro Apps are becoming this miserable wasteland of whogivesafuck. Shake's gone from being the #1 desktop compositing app the world over to bargain bin "I wish we had Nuke" software. While I'll be the first to admit compositing isn't exactly the forefront of technology and since Shake supports floating point bit depth it's pretty much at the top of the game, but come on. Autodesk manages to staple on some unnecessary crap every year to justify the $1200 Maya upgrades.

So Color. A DI suite on your desktop. You've got your digital versions of trackballs for your different hue swings and you can make masks and bad keys to isolate areas, so I'd put it on par with a DaVinci in terms of a feature set, but what the fuck is this? I can't set color ranges, the number input fields are a pain to use and the Shake like schematic is only deep enough to really piss me off and make me want to individually export every damn shot to Shake to color correct.

The whole point of this software is that it works so dang well with Final Cut Pro, which it does in the sense that sending the project over is easy. So far however, It's not radically better than Final Cut's native color correction tools.

Maybe now I know why it's free.

Mostly Color sucks cos it's close to being really dang nice. A few more features, an actual product cycle instead of wating for yet another NAB for Apple to not show up at and not announce anything for cos they're too busy getting people to code tip calculators for their phone.

American Godzilla Sucks

2008-10-13T19:44:00.000-07:00

If you're gonna name the main character after a friend of yours, it's probably best to not make his difficult to read and/or pronounce name a recurring joke throughout the movie. Especially when the stupid looking monster he designed is running amok outside.

Oh, sorry, burrowed underneath New York.

Sarah Palin Sucks

2008-10-01T20:23:00.000-07:00

I was never very enthusiastic about doing homework. When I was in the 10th grade my World Civ 2 teacher yelled at me in front of the class to put at least one fact in the papers I was handing in.

Sarah Palin never had my World Civ 2 teacher.

Deregulation Sucks

2008-10-01T15:07:00.000-07:00

So with all this business about investment banks and the stock market, I'll happily chuck in my uninformed two cents.

People are greedy, and when being greedy is easy to get away with, they get extra greedy. I have illegally downloaded music that I've never even loaded into itunes, let alone listened to. I've downloaded hundreds of applications that started up maybe once. When you can get away with all this, the specialness of things decreases as does one's fear of getting caught.

If firms are making money hand over fist using shady practices, but no one tells them to knock it off, they're gonna use shadier practices.

I don't know why this is such news. In this age of government officials having such disregard for the law, it only makes sense others would feel it longer applies to them either. Who knew you could tell a subpoena to go fuck itself?

Laws are really more of handy suggestions.

I'm still waiting for the day when "Karl Rove did it" is someone's defense.

Las Vegas Sucks

2008-10-01T00:45:00.000-07:00

Las Vegas is a party town for frat kids who's entire understanding of 'party' is getting housed and going "whoooo" a lot. It's training wheels for your party bike. Scripted fun. Lets go to this club and sit around, let's go to that one and sit around. Amuse me Vegas, I've got money.

Las Vegas is a city built on losers.

Heroes Season 3 Ep 2 Sucks

2008-09-29T22:25:00.000-07:00

Minute 11, which considering Tivo grabbed an extra 5 at the head means I'm only one tenth of the way into this drivel, but two things I forgot to mention last time need saying:

1: There's ANOTHER guy who can paint the future. All he paints so far is the earth blowing up, but still. Can't he write the future, make videos that contain the future, pee in puddles that are future shaped? Sure it was a cool ability in season 1, but all this time travel you can't change the future cos I painted it only you totally can bull is exhausting.

2: blue fire man. Never has fire been more unconvincingly thrown than by this man. Shamed (heavily I might add) by the Nickelodeon cartoon "Avatar: The Last Airbender". I'm having a hard time coming up with a picturesque analogy for this other than to say it looks like the actor is embarrassed that he has to throw fire.

subnotes:
Painting Man's Paintings. WTF. He trips out and does them with his hands. But they don't look like he does them with his hands. They look like someone's deviant art page. "Hey, come check out my cool drawings of Batman giving handjobs."

Awesome. Seriously.

The Sarah Conor Chonicles Sucks

2008-09-23T01:46:00.000-07:00

In the same way that I'm upset with the Animatrix, Matrix 2 and Matrix 3 for forcing me to question much of the machine logic that I was fine with in Matrix 1 (specifically how humans can dig fast without machines, and why don't the machines either build rockets to go above the goofy clouds for solar power or do like we do now and just burn things and smash atoms to make energy), So has the show "The Sarah Conor Chronicles" forced me to wonder why the machines of the future can't make a Terminator capable of any kind of emotion.

They can put living tissue on a metal skeleton, shoot it through time seemingly at will, but programming smiles in is too much?

Subnote: why did they all of a sudden start sending ladybots back? Was the idea to have them hump JC (In this case "John Conor") and kill him Xenia Onatopp style? It makes zero sense; you can stick way more death aparati in a large dude.

T4 better not have ladybots.

Heroes Season 3 Sucks

2008-09-23T01:11:00.000-07:00

Getting started off right with a visit to the future (which, lo and behold, sucks) Claire and the two porcupines the makeup department crammed into her eye sockets bust out this gem of a line:

"It ends here."

which, well, which two things:

1. In hindsight: i wish.

2. Nice to see they got whoever wrote "generic tough guy video game #7" to write for them.

There's a lot of bullshit, but let's focus on three key points.

1. Hiro sees Ando betray him with some red lightning. The "Ando betrays Hiro" setup is dumb and I'm almost as uninterested in how it pans out as I am in how his trip to Japan did. I'm biting my nails down to soft pulp worrying if Ando and Hiro will be friends in season 4. Soft Pulp.

2. New vilians. This season's about the bad guys. I got that from the subtitle. The bad guys are a black dude, a white guy with blue flames, and Magneto. Fake Magneto's even German. Maybe it's just me, but an homage (assuming it's not ignorance or ineptitude, which is a stretch...) is unnecessary. It's a comic book show. It's not like they broke any molds when coming up with the existing powers, but do you have to underscore it so heavily by picking a superpower that is so specifically iconic to one (German) dude? Unless Fake Magneto's doing cooler things than ripping out Wolverine's exoskeleton or laying waste to prisons with pennies, you're doing a disservice to Real Magneto. As for the other powers, blue flame? The justification for what kind of power in this season can be summed up thusly:

"Fuck it. Because."

3. Any story that involves time travel sucks. Time travel is plot hole spackle. It takes away every single rule and leaves you knowing that things are going to continue and bla bla bla. Having Hiro see that the future still has issues, like wow. They're not going to happpen. Super Hiro's bad future never happened. The virus future never happend. Roll them plot dice kids, "Clair with a Gun Future" isn't happening. It will be narrowly averted. It's 24; it can never be a good show cos nothing lasting can ever happen on it. Instead of creating some interesting constraints and working with them, we've got magic time travel want to fix everything.

Every week, after "The Sarah Conor Chronicles" airs, my friend tells me how terrible it is. He gives me a run down of all the nonsense that these terminators go through to not successfully kill John Conor. He says he's just waiting for the robot sex, but I think his larger motivation is to see how shitty it can get. Heroes is now my Sarah Conor Chronicles.

Megan Fox no longer sucks

2008-09-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

I read this:
http://dlisted.com/node/28277

and I take it back. Props to proud ball grabs.

90210 sucks

2008-09-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

things I can lift with one arm:

- my laptop
- an orange
- carry on luggage
- the entire female "teen" cast of the new 90210.

not a show, rather a weekly documentary on eating disorders and slouching.

Every Other Cell Phone Sucks

2008-08-27T00:57:00.001-07:00

Seriously guys. Iphone's been out for over a year.

Nothing?

The only thing that makes me more pissed off than the shortcomings of my phone is knowing that it's still years better than anything else that's not made and sold exclusively in Japan (where, I swear to God cos I've seen it, they can do video chat and record broadcast TV.)

So yeah, eat a dick all you other phone makers. You've been owned by a company known for making smooth walkmen. How the fuck does that happen?

The Iphone Sucks

2008-08-27T00:45:00.001-07:00

Funny story, I thought about writing "Steve Job's ideal sexual object is 5 feet 7 inches of high grade plastic with a 1 inch bevel on the sides and a 1 and 1/3 inch hole, bored and polished in the center," and then I thought to myself, "What if that makes Steve Jobs sad?" and almost didn't write it.

Then I remembered that he's a billionaire and will probably get over it.

So yeah, fuck his phone. Fuck my phone. I have one and no i'm not trading it up. Two simple reasons: Visual Voicemail and Google Maps.

Fuck the app store, weather, stocks, even email and web. All that's glitter.

Maps and Voicemail keep me there. I'm dying for anyone to come out with a competitor that can do the seemingly simple tasks of allowing me to easily listen to voicemail, and to show me how to get places.

Everything else however, is just a reminder how Apple wants my money. Even ringtones cost money (I know there's hacks and I use em, it's the principle of it). Apple's getting out of the "buy our shit and break the law" mode and into "buy our shit, then use it to buy more of our shit" model, which I'm sure looks great on paper.

It does erode at least my brand loyalty to them however. Ipods were great. Even the Itunes store was more like a front than an attempt to make money. Not now. Buy the phone, buy some apps, get advertised to on other ones (that's an awesome new feature!)

Oh yeah.

Tactile feedback. That's where the Jobs fucking plastic boards came in. Between the new default mac keyboard (which even after using for months i'm still blowing it on) and the iphone, Jobs is looking to destroy all tactile feedback.

Sure doing the finger swishing is cool, but I can't even use the phone to take a picture as easily as my RAZR would. I can't tell you how many times my thumb was not hitting the button. See also using the calcluator, stopwatch and any other thing where it'd be a totally sweet thing, if only you didn't have to be looking at or prepping your hand to hit the button. I want to feel that I've hit the button, not wait to hear a delayed shutter sound that is inaudible under most urban conditions.

The Mexican Border Sucks

2008-08-27T00:31:00.000-07:00

In all ways. There is no better example of two countries yelling "Hey, Fuck You" and "No, Fuck You!" back and forth than the one you are required to seep through when you want to drive from TJ to San Diego.

Getting into Mexico is easy. It's like a laxative shit, you get ready, think it's gonna be a big deal and blammo, it's over before you even got ready.

Getting out. Mother of God. Mexicans didn't take a lot of time with the "This way to the USA" road directions, especially once you get into TJ. And really, why should they? It's not their responsibility to baby another countries ignoramuses. While I would certainly appreciate some more nicely and specifically labeled road signs, I also understand that if it works for Mexicans, then the problem is mine.

Got in the wrong lane on the last trip. Some kind of bluetooth wireless fast pass lane. It was shorter, but our getting into it was simply a factor of getting heinously fucking lost and that being the only road which seemed to be labeled "USA". This error necessitated an extra search of our car (really more of an up and down glancing), and a warning that if we are to get lost again and go through the fast-pass lane, it'll be a $5,000 fine. Now I've got America saying if I'm a dumb ignoramus again it's gonna cost me a few house payments. Awesome.

So fuck that shit. Get one of those catapults the wingnuts are so scared of.

SGEN sucks.

2008-08-27T00:29:00.000-07:00

Seriously. Fuck that stock.

iphone apps suck

2008-07-11T19:22:00.000-07:00

so I spend the better part of the morning getting my "2.0" software installed on my iphone, the "2.0" being the ability to do like hacked iphones have been able to do since 10 months ago and install 3rd party applications onto it.

gone are the days when my amazing iphone is hampered by Apple's lack of imagination.

actually, um no.

I've been digging for half an hour now, digging for anything worth downloading.

the sum total of my search:

downloaded:
- currency converter
- ability to control itunes from phone

odds of using either one more than, say, once: one in six.

The hacked apps available were way more useful and good. It's embarrassing if you think about it: a bunch of people with zero help made some seriously amazing stuff and gave it out for free. Now that Apple's helping people make it (and taking a 30% cut of the pay stuff) everything blows. Where's my non AOL version of AIM?

The rest of all the categories are split between two things: ported widgets and other useless crap is about half the apps (travel trackers, shipping trackers, re-skinned websites); the other half are, and I'm serious, applications to calculate tips and split bills at restaurants.

I can't think of a more perfect statement about douchebags who own iphones.

Seriously, who's sitting there? What programmer downloads, deciphers and masters the 2 gigabytes of heiroglyphics that comprise the iphone software development kit and thinks, "You know what the world needs? An extremely limited version of a calclulator that only relates to the strife of upwardly mobile 20 and 30 somethings who are single."

It's basic math. BAAAASIC MATH. And the goddamn phone already does basic math in the form of the calculator already on it (and every other phone from the last five years.)

The person who sees this app available and thinks, "this is just what I need!" is my enemy. I was thinking of all sorts of violent floral language to put here, but no: they are my enemy. If I see them the urge to smack will be great.

Snapple Sucks

2008-06-09T22:45:00.000-07:00

Brew some iced tea, add stale storebought lemon juice and some sugar, pour it on a New York sidewalk and lick it up.

Mmmmm snapple!

Indiana Jones 4 Sucks

2008-05-28T17:06:00.000-07:00

I had low expectations, but the first bit of the movie was very fun, so my expectations rose.

It's like making out with a girl, getting a boner and then her slamming it in a door made of generic aliens and a lack of any tension or drive to the story.

Speed Racer Sucks

2008-05-18T21:19:00.001-07:00

The Warchowski brothers have been hoodwinked into thinking that technology makes films good and/or cool. After the runaway success of The Matrix and it's amazing breakthrough technology "bullet time" (previously seen when Edward Myubridge was taking pictures of naked people and horses) they knew that their charge in the world was to use technology to make awesome films.

They got off to a good start as noted in this article:

"To simulate the appearance of cloth and its interaction with light, the wardrobes for both Neo and Smith were scanned using a Bidirectional Reflectometer, which captures the light reflectance (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function or BRDF) values for all kinds of cloth. Using this extremely powerful machine allowed ESC to scan the various types of cloth involved in the actors’ wardrobes, which could then be recreated and simulated in the computer."

Miraculous. Well. Except for the fact that the "Burly Brawl" as it was called looked exactly like the barely-not-a-video game VFX shot that it was. All that work for that cloth and it still looked like fake plastic men moving like Grand Theft Auto extras.

So you must understand how excited I was when I read that they were doing to use a magical camera from Sony, the F23. I mean listen to this:

"Whatever you think of Speed Racer, the new alternate-reality VFX fest from the Wachowski Brothers directorial team, you'll have to admit that it doesn't look like anything you've seen before."

Unless, you, you know, have ever seen television, in which case, this will look a lot like many things you have seen before.

Apparently, this amazing camera gets more color, which, you know, cool. Except for the fact that this is the digital age and all you need is any video software to up the saturation.

Then there was some rumor about it being able to shoot things with everything in focus. I suppose that makes it like the camera Gregg Toland used for Citizen Kane.

So I saw the movie. They didn't need that shit. They didn't need it because every shot in the film is a flat greenscreen shot with a defocus plugin that, GET THIS, makes the Bokeh into Diamonds and Hearts and Circles!

The car parts are decent, and do a much better job than anything involving humans or "amazing defocusing techniques" at being not lame.

So, much like every other film John Gaeta and the Warchowskis brag about their new tech in, the technological innovations were completely pointless and also not new.

The worst offense in the film isn't the technological innovations, it isn't the waste of the actors' talent, it's this kung-fu scene.

Somewhere in the movie, all our good guys get surrounded by bad guys with guns. A mediocre kung-fu fight ensues as each good guy uses their specific fighting strengths to overcome the odds. It's not miraculous, but it's probably the best use of humans in the film. As the tide has turned and the fight is wrapping up, each good guy disarms a bad guy and the fight resolves with all the good guys pointing guns at the final bad guy.

That's right, this kids movie, which has done a pretty good job of showing action and danger in a cartoon setting up to this point, this kids movie has to ratchet up the adrenaline with some GUNS. Whoo haaaa. It's bad enough that the only way to make the bad guys menacing at all is to arm them in a movie like this, but to have all our good characters, who solve their problems on the track, pick up guns and threaten someone's life is beyond offensive.

I know it's fun to talk shit about their dumb visual effects gimicks and these posts really shine when they are about inconsequential things, but the gun thing has me incensed.

There's no reason for guns in that movie. Movies already (and Warchowski movies specifically) use guns as a crutch far too much. They're becoming late night cable programming, where every dude has a bad attitude and a gun and no capability to solve anything without them both. The bad guys were beaten, there was ONE LEFT and no one needed any guns to get to that point, so what is so insanely powerful about that one dude left that requires the Speed Racer team to say "knock it off or we are going to fucking kill you."?

The very definition of shitty writing.

Blogger Sucks

2008-05-18T21:12:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to get the formatting right on my fucking speed racer post, and whenever I add blockquotes the whole thing eats shit, not to mention that it's miserable to change fonts or to, more specifically change them back to the default.

Awesome.

Music Download Services Suck

2008-02-14T04:28:00.000-08:00

itunes is overpriced and/or DRM riddled. Fuck that.

True Story:

I wanna hear M.I.A's "Paper Planes" and I find a link on Amazon where I can buy the song for 99 cents as an MP3, and the whole album for $7. I'm gonna get the whole album.

Or would, but i'm at work and don't have admin privileges, so i can't install the Amazon Downloader App.

Lo and Behold, some nice fellow uploaded the song to a file storage site.

I really was going to pay, and I do think Amazon should be supported both for good prices and DRM free music. But in this case, I had to break the law to bust some jamz.

Character Customizaton Sucks

2008-01-26T04:24:00.001-08:00

Barbie Mario.

Open World Game Design Sucks.

2008-01-26T03:33:00.001-08:00

Imagine, for a second, that you are Mario. Only, instead of having a linear path to run down and bricks to punch, you don't HAVE to do anything. You can go anywhere and do whatever you want. No more Shigeru Miyamoto breathing down your neck, forcing you to slide down that flagpole and get on to 1-2.

Screw that timer. Bop your head on that coin brick for hours. Jump on those pipes! Wasn't that fun? Chase Starman! Go ahead. Welcome to the world of "Open World Game Design".

I blame Grand Theft Auto 3, which while I think the series is about as innovative as Tomb Raider (Tomb Raider being noted in this case for becoming legendary on the merits of the first game, which was remade six or seven times over the next ten years with no significant improvements), I do respect GTA 3 for being a proper game.

GTA 3 sold very well and a large portion of that was because the game was so immeasurably fun to dick around in. Most of the actual "game" (e.g. the "missions") are forgettable, but it didn't matter cos the whole world was there to mess with. You could try to atract the attention of the FBI and steal their cars. You could jump cars over stuff, and of course, run people over.

All good fun.

The problem really started to show itself with the magnum opus "San Andreas" which was just damn giant. Instead of tightening up their rather loose game (it's a poor driving game, a poor shooting game, a poor action game, etc etc) to behave to the standards of something like Devil May Cry or Metal Gear, they left it glitchy and loose and instead used up all their money making the game obscenely huge. The game is so damn big, you can spend half an hour in transit. Just going from A to B, 30 minutes down the shitter.

This is open world gaming. Lose, sloppy gameplay and ever increasing worlds.

I stopped playing San Andreas after about a day. I like games that let me steal cars, bone chicks and drive fast. I don't need a traffic simulator. Ever since then, the idea of open world games makes me wanna puke.

But the worst thing, and what made me waste an hour of sleep to type this, is the way the game progression is inevitably built into these games. You go to an area, get some kind of objective, then go accomplish said objective. That's the pattern. If you blow said objective, you go BACK to the starting area and repeat.

In Mario terms: You die halfway though a level, and instead of restarting at the beginning (or even having a FUCKING OPTION TO), you have to get your ass up, and march back to the starting point. There won't be any fun to be had along the way. Just that march to get back to where you want to be.

There will be many, many marches to get where you want to be.

You see, while games are constantly trying to be more "realistic" they end up getting in the way of fun. I don't wanna have to go around and collect all the good weapons every time I die in GTA. I don't want a bunch of busywork put in there for seemingly no reason. The open world situation forces you into busywork. Running around accomplishing menial tasks to enable your primary goal.

Wasting your time in uninteresting ways.

So, I was already a bit apprehensive when I got the new Burnout. I've always loved the series for it's to the point presentation. Wanna drive fast? Do a race. Wanna crash cars, do crash mode. Easy ins, easy outs. Pure fun. But the new one is in an Open World.

No more menus.

I fucking swear, you'd think that Menus raped the parents of every game developer out there for the spite they have for them. They made a game where you drive blind through the streets of London because Maps are "Menus". Menus aren't realistic and shit. Hi, I'm the one over here PLAYING A GAME!

I do not give a shit about menus. I do give a shit about running a race, blowing it and having to drive back uptown for the next two minutes just to redo it. I do give a shit about how much time that wastes. I give a shit that to add a "start the fuck over" button would have been very easy but for some inexplicable reason was left out.

I love the Burnout developers, and I think they are truly innovative, but FUCK does this suck in the game. I know people say that there's so much to do you can just move on, but sometimes I wanna play a game like I play Mario, which is to say beat that little plumbers head into every rock till I pass a specific part. To learn that one level. To really get it down, without having to do it backwards every time as well.

So while people say you do warm to the game, I'm very upset with it now. And above that, i'm pissed with everyone who thinks that no menus is good and open world is even better. SSX started to suck right when they went to an "open world" (number 3 motherfuckers. Tell those idiots at EA to hire Rahzel again and go back to levels. Shit, just remake the first one. It's still the best--talk about a series where no one making the sequels seemed to know why people were stoked on it...)

I do have to give the Burnout crew credit for trying something new, but much like the GTA guys just making their game bigger, I don't think it was the right decision.

Smash Lab Sucks

2008-01-25T01:56:00.000-08:00

It's a new show on Discovery. Comes on, lo and behold, after Mythbusters. The ads tell me that it's similar to Mythbusters, but apparently with more destruction (which while hard to fathom, ought to be true based on the title of the show. It looks like "Boom" but with some science.

I'm at minute 25 of an episode where they use this amazing material, carbon fiber (a cloth!) to make things stronger. Apparently jets are made out of it.

So, to test the strength of this stuff (it's cloth!) they take a 2x4 and cover it (staggeringly poorly) in carbon fiber. Then they test it against a control of another, un carbon fiber'd (cloth!) 2x4, by, get this, having all four of them stand on it.

Well good for them that it takes exactly all four of them to snap the wood, and they cannot manage to snap the carbon fiber'd 2x4.

That's to be expected, but all they've proven is it got stronger. they haven't shown why it's in fighter jets. They've shown that if you epoxy some carbon fiber over a 2x4 it can hold at least more than it could before.

Spreading raspberry jam on denim and wrapping a 2x4 would add that much strength. So would just epoxying the thing. So would fiberglass. So what's so special about the cloth???

How about you assholes get an inch more of a budget and go get some weights. Obviously you found that your 750 pounds busts a 2x4. Get some actual weights so you can see how much your poorly carbon fiber'd one can handle. The porn's in the numbers for this. If that reinforced 2x4 can hold five thousand pounds, that'd blow my damn mind. But i'll never know. Thanks guys!

Then they get to making a shack, for as far as I can tell, no other reason than to build it poorly and blow it apart with the backs of two airboats. Whoooo?

seriously, what was the point of that boring ass exercise other than showing me that the two people who built it aren't the best with tools.

So here we are, and they're dicking around with a mobile home to make it more hurricane resistant with carbon fiber. Maybe next week they can make it more hurricane resistant with bricks!

It's a dipshit show, and they're blowing the science end of it horribly, which I have to predict the path of the show based on this it'll be as such:

Mythbusters fans fall off pretty rapidly after posting on their blogs about the shitty science and how it's not Mythbusters. This leaves only the hillbilly jackoffs who wanna see things blow up, which should make this show last as long as "Boom" which was such a promising show, but damn if that didn't get boring after about two episodes.

Average viewership life: 1.6 episodes.

Korean Air sucks

2007-12-27T14:27:00.000-08:00

I've always been of the mindset that Asian carriers are superior to domestic ones when flying to Asia. This has always been the case for me. I've flown Northwest, Singapore and JAL to Tokyo and Malaysia to Taipei in the past, and Singapore, Malaysia and JAL had similar levels of service and amenities on the plane.

By amenities and service I mean some simple things: beer and a TV in the seat back in front of me. The TV must have multiple current movies for free and on-demand. Singapore, Malaysia and JAL all have that. So i've always championed the Asian carriers.

On this trip, it was, if I had to guess, $40 cheaper to fly Korean than Singapore. My friend have flown Korean in the past and gave it good marks, even after I told them about the awesomeness of Singapore. So I buy Korean. I'm batting 1000 on Asian carriers at this point afterall.

It starts at check in. I make sure Matt and I get there stupidly early. We're about tenth in line. Get up to the front and the guy checks us in to the center group, an aisle and a nothing seat. I ask for an exit row, which he says he can't get us. Strikes 1 and 2. Dude should see that i'm one of the top ten tallest people getting on that damn plane and give it to me straight up. At least offer it. But no, this pillar of light sticks us in the center of the plane. I ask if we can get a window (Matt likes windows, even on transpacific flights), so he punches in some stuff and we get one. I then find out that the seating is 2-5-2, which makes the fact that he checked two dudes into the 5 across area when he could have stuck us in our own little private area straight up, well fucking strike 3.

I'd knock them down a point for not flying us over on a 747, but I suppose word's already gotten out that their seat assigning sucks and they don't have enough asses in seats to justify the big-boy plane.

Truth be told, all this is forgivable. Could have just gotten the wrong guy to check us in, and the way the 777 is laid out, there aren't many actual exit rows, if any (though a front row, of which there are plenty, would have sufficed). All this is fine so long as you've got your plentiful beer and a sweet selection of movies in your personal TV.

No TV's. It's like I am flying Northwest. That is straight up not forgivable in this day and age. Strike fucking 4. No TV. 12 hours in a fucking seat and no TV. On some flights they have them, cos the fucking magazine showed me what I could be watching, but none on my flight. Just two movies on some shitty projection TVs and a couple of tiny monitors to strain your eyes on. It's 1985 again.

Then there's the beer. Now, back in the day, first time I flew Singapore, I was downright shocked at two things. The first was that they up front asked me if I'd like a beer, and made pretty much sure that I had one for the whole flight. It was probably only six beers, but they were so forthcoming with it that I fell in love, not with the notoriously attractive Singapore flight attendants, but with the fact that they kept giving me beer. BEER! On American flights I'd have had to pay five bucks for that.

JAL and Malaysia were similar in the forthcomingness of beer. Korean gave me A beer. they came around a few more times with juice pre-poured in glasses, but I think the drink cart only made the rounds once. ONCE! A Jet Blue flight that's less than an hour gets the drinks out that much! Just insanity. So needless to say the flight sucked.

The flight back sucked more, because I slept through my one beer opportunity, and then we hit some turbulence which maintained off and on for most of the flight. That would be okay cos I understand Korean Air has no control over the weather. But they do have control over the cabin lights which they would exercise arbitrarily as we hit rough spots. Other than causing excessive panic, I don't see the logic of kicking on the lights after a good bump.

So yeah, Korean sucks. And to add insult to injury, as we walked out of the plane in LA, all the TVs were advertising the little TVs and on-demand movies that they have in their seats.

Next time, I'm spending the extra cash and flying Singapore.

Square Enix Sucks

2007-11-04T21:59:00.000-08:00

In the store the other day to pick up Ace Combat 6, I notice a few titles from old standby Square Enix. Pretty much every one of them is worth buying.

And so I bought all of them.

TEN FUCKING YEARS AGO!

There are like five fucking remakes in the past two years of Final Fantasy 1 alone. It's a fine game, but shit man. You can't make like, another one with an equally as simple story with a minor shift in gameplay? I mean that tactic got you all the way up to 12 sequels, so why have you become the Japanese Final Fantasy Lucasarts?

Give me a retooled Einhander, Xenogears, Chrono Trigger + Cross. Or shit, here's a fucking idea... MAKE SEQUELS TO ALL OF THEM.

Yeah, even Xenogears, cos Xenosaga is the most insulting pile of shit in the video game world.

All the company does now is remake Final Fantasy games. And not even the one people actually want (hint: it's after 6 and before 8), but just GBA and DS and PSP remakes of the first six in the series, only with like, marginally better graphics an some new monsters and weapons, to you know, force you to throw another 100 hours of your life into a 16 bit hole.

I'll admit, playing FF 4 and 6 on an airplane is the fucking jam, but mother of god, as I watch my PS3 dry up and die from a lack of any significant games, I can't help but think of how badass some new (gasp) IP from Square Enix could be.

But as far as I can tell, they fired all the guys who came up w/ Chrono, Xeno, Einhander and Tobal. So say hello to the shitfest that will be final fantasy 13 and it's 30 variations.

Al Gore Sucks

2007-10-17T15:43:00.000-07:00

He got a nobel peace price for being a narrator. And an academy award. And other shit. Narrator. You wanna talk about shitty things going on in this world, the Nobel commission giving out their highest award to a narrator is pretty high on the list. Who's next? George Clooney?

And now people are like "He should run for president!"

No. No he should not. He should narrate more eco-fearmongering movies, but not run for president. I know people say he's less of a robot now, but I saw him speak recently; he's still a robot.

People Who Donate to Public Radio Suck

2007-10-17T15:34:00.000-07:00

Do I really need to hear you out and out tell me how much better a person you are than I am? Last night there was a bumper from a (self) satisfied donator to public radio that said public radio made you smarter.

While i'd like to give to NPR at some point, hearing the testimonials of those who have given piss me off. Every single one is a passive aggressive guilt trip. I am so important and worldly cos I got my free (actual cost to you via your donation: $120) mug that I am totally cool with coming down to the station to tell everyone else how awesome I am.

Yeah, I can drop by anytime. I don't really have a job. I just sit around and get mad about republicans all day.

also: s + mug.

Word Tattoos Suck

2007-10-16T00:34:00.001-07:00

Megan Fox. Hot right? Only she has this:
Read that. Let your dick go soft. It won't take long.

Democrats Suck

2007-10-12T04:14:00.000-07:00

I don't like Republicans either but at least they are consistent and only aim to please the religious right (which if you start thinking about the relationship to there, it's very insulting to the intelligence of both sides, but anyway...)

It's really Al Gore trying to kiss his wife in 2000. More than anything that was when I was like "shit, you guys suck", and ending up with John Kerry (four total bills sponsored in however many years, one about dolphins) trying to seem like something other than a rich socialite. Aat least Bush just goes dumb to hide his elite upbringing (again with the insulting to both sides).

So Al Gore is there, trying to prove that he's not a robot, but a man of passion and he kisses his wife. At least, that's how you'd imagine it had you read about it. What actually when down was so unsettling I'd rather think about Larry Craig doing his 'thing'. If Al Gore has ever kissed his wife, he hadn't done it in a long time. I'd put it up there with watching porn with your parents while they make out.

And that's the issue: Don't be what you aren't. Don't pretend you're sald of the earth when you're a rich privelidged guy. Don't try to be a man of passion when you can't even kiss your wife. If you absolutely have to fake it go republican and follow some nice strict guidelines. It's embarrassing.

Oh, and actually be passionate about something, but not like, creepy about it. Dennis Kucinich is someone I should back, but he's too eco and too glib and too the world can be all roses. He may be right, but I'm not ready to make such a drastic shift, even if I think I want to.

Robert Zemeckis Sucks

2007-10-12T03:56:00.000-07:00

First it was Forest Gump. A debasive movie if there ever was one. Then there was "Contact" which is one of my favorite books, and I guess fortunately, the movie has about zero similarities and can be pretty much written off as another atempt to talk down to "the common folk"

Specifically the scene where she meets her dad who is actually an alien. In the book, she wakes up on a beach. Just a beach. No rippling walls, nothing weird at all. For all she knows it's all been a dream. But the movie needs those rippling walls. Needs to tell Jodie Foster and thus all the dumbasses in the audience who might have been asleep while her face was tearing off in wormholes (which was also dumb, but whatev) that she is on some alien planet house magic place, and thus ruining one of the key points in the book that these aliens are so fucking advanced it's straight up beyond your comprehension.

Sorry to curse there.

So Zemeckis is now doing zombie films, which usually i'm really into, but the last one was about Tom Hanks on the north pole, and the next one is taking the idea even further and merging the two worst ideas in animation, all-celebrity casts and "photoreal" humans and telling the story of Beowulf, which i haven't read and now really don't want to after that trailer.

They say that they are doing it all CG because of the way the main dude needs to age in the film, which can only be read as Zemeckis pissing in the mouth of every SFX makeup dude ever (maybe he never saw Amadeus?). Photoreal humans is a TERRIBLE idea. Dennis Muren had it right like fifteen years ago when he said it's impossible because all we, as humans, do every day, is look and interact with other humans, so the smallest things will immediately chuck you right into the uncanny valley.

I'm not against motion capture, or "performance capture" (puke), and in the case of something like Golem, or Davy Jones it makes perfect sense. In both cases the characters were stellar. They were also very not-human. All redoing known actors digitally does is allow you to change the camera angles after you've shot it. That's it. There is no other advantage. Even George Lucas used humans for his human characters.

I guess Cast Away was an accident.

24 Sucks

2007-10-11T04:38:00.000-07:00

After watching the first disc of the first season the only thought in my head was it really sucked that there wasn't a 24 hour DVD store to sell me this damn box set so I would never have to wait 8 hours before being able to see the next episode. Awesome.

See also Season 2, which was sweet.

3 started out cool, but then Jack got back to LA and I forget what happened other than a lot of people at CTU blowing it for silly reasons. See also seasons 4 and 5, which are so similar I get them confused and can't remember which one is the one where the fat dude w/ the lisp dies and which one his mom dies in (though logic is telling me he eats it in 5, so he can mourn his mom and not vice versa)

I Tivoed Season 6, but the formula was so entrenched that by mid season i'd watch the "previously on 24" and then fast forward all the way to the end and watch "next week, on 24" and feel like I had a pretty good handle on it. Then shame overtook and I canceled my season's pass to Jack Bauer's torture porn lollapalooza.

It really sucks too, because the show had so many options, and at least for a little while was asking interesting questions about policy, politics and human nature. Then it got to the point where a dude had his shoulder blade bored into and was back at work an hour later.

That's bullshit, because any dude hard enough to get back to work after such a horrible experience is definitely too hard to crack and make the terrorists a launch device.

Also, hire some new cast people. Pretty soon every non-dead cast member will have been president.

Resident Evil Extinction Sucks

2007-10-11T04:22:00.000-07:00

So Claire Redfield (so named because there was a girl in the game who had the same name) has this band of survivors. She's Mel Gibson if he had stuck w/ the Road Warrior caravan after messing up the Humongous, to explain it better.

So they come to a place that might have some food and gas and supplies. They've been doing this for at least months. So they stop, and everyone hops out and she starts giving them orders, set up a perimeter, check the interior, find any gas. Now, were all these people new to the anti-zombie caravan that would make sense. But they've been a survivor team for a while now, and i would like to think they know their jobs without having to be told every time they stop.

She even acknowledges that at the end of her aliens-wannabe speech by saying, "you know what to do,"

At which point Carlos or whoever should have said, "yeah, we do. Why do you need to tell us every time? It's humiliating."

Then Mila Jovovitch (who's married to the writer no less--though, I suppose he is the only one keeping her employed these days...) uses some psychic shit to kill some birds and then...

well whatever on the psychic shit. That stuff is just dumb.

What is positively staggeringly insultingly inane is Umbrella's base is out in the desert. A small house w/ a futuristic elevator down to their ubercomplex where they do tests on the zombies to turn them into the 28 days later zombies. Now, Claire and crew have to RUN to stay alive. Yet here is this house (complete w/ a helicopter that can fly from the American southwest to someplace in Alaska on a single tank of gas) with a ton of people living down under it.

How do the Zombies not get at these people when they have so obviously gotten everywhere else? Chain Link Fence.

Yeah. If you're gonna just stop trying like that, at least let me know ahead of time.

Perez Hilton Sucks

2007-10-11T04:15:00.000-07:00

I read that shit every day. I'd be down 100% except for all his shameless self promotion. It's like those douches on forums that have some pic of a girl who wrote their handle on her tits as their sig.

Dive Bars Suck

2007-10-11T04:07:00.000-07:00

Here's a tip, when you move to Los Angeles and want everyone to know you're new to town, but don't want to say "I'm new to town" you say this instead,

"I'm looking for a sweet dive bar,"

It's code. Don't worry, we'll keep it on the DL. Also, you could get excited about all the "industry" people you meet, but whatever.

Even drunks like a nice place to booze, they just can't afford it. Now if you are looking for a cheap place to drink, that is called your apartment. If you find an actual dive bar here in my lovely town, congratulations. Now run. Real dive bars have real people in them. People who get hammered at noon and go home and beat the holy hell out of their kids.

So give up the dream. Go over to some expensive place that doesn't wash the floor, say the Burgundy Room, and make that place your jam.

Dennis Dyack Sucks

2007-10-11T03:29:00.001-07:00

Maybe you played Eternal Sonata/Sunshine? What was the name of that Gamecube game w/ the girl w/ the blonde hair? I'm sititng here trying to use my mind and not the internet to remember it. I played the first level. Eternal something. Had elemental based magic.

Made by Silicon Knights, who, in keeping w/ the royalty theme, is king of overrated game developers (i'll get to that)

Eternal.... Sanity's Requiem.... ETERNAL DARKNESS? Right?

/checking internet

Boooyaaa

So Dennis Dyack is the owner or something, and in the past year has been known for two things: talking about how revolutionary his game will be, and about how the industry is screwed up.

Second issue first. Apparently Dyack and crew showed their game Too Human (originally intended to be a N64 title) at E3 or some other big game show and everyone said it was unimpressive. The result of that being endless podcasts, interviews and other web media whoring about how E3 and other conventions are ruining game development.

This little gem sums up his view nicely.

"We in the videogame industry need to take a lesson from Hollywood in the way we market our products. We should not start the PR and marketing campaigns until after a game is complete."

Right. The Hollywood Model. Like how Jurassic Park was doing CG dinosaurs up to a week before the print went out? Like how most trailers I work on have dudes running around on greenscreened sets for half the shots because the effects aren't even done yet (the trailer shots!). Yeah. The Hollywood model. Spoken like a true kid who once read a book on film making.

The problems w/ his game are two fold. The first is that it's a vanity project. It has to be if it started life as an N64 title. Maybe he was waiting tor technology to improve, same way George Lucas said he was waiting for visual effects to catch up to his imagination, and once they had, he promptly shit into his hands. But I don't think so. I think this is a straight up vanity project. A Spruce Goose.

I've seen some video of the game, which leads to it's second problem. It's a run around slasher w/ the design sense of Halo (purple + green = alienz). God of War in space, with space stuff. I think it might even be a trilogy of games, which is the most inexcusable thing i can imagine, but that may have to be another post. This one's already like, stalker long. The unoriginal gameplay idea makes sense though. in 1998 or whenever that was, a God of War type game would have been super innovative. But this is games. Games are the most rapidly evolving commercial entertainment. TV, Books, Movies and Music are all pretty well established. New processors = new opportunities for games. Portal would have been impossible 10 years ago (I think?). So 8 year old brilliance is as stale as the loaf bread you were munching on when you had the idea.

Now, I don't wanna hate overly, but this guy super pissed me off when I played Metal Gear Twin Snakes, which for a game that came out after MGS 2, and on a technically superior system, looked and played way worse. I stopped playing it shortly after Revolver Ocelot lost his hand. I love me some Metal Gear.

Pinkberry Sucks

2007-10-11T03:18:00.000-07:00

Yogurt, or whatever their lawyers are calling it now, is super tasty. Prices are horrible, but whatever. Los Angeles. It can't all be In N Out.

What sucks though, is the staff. The reason Pinkberry has lines at every store is not it's popularity. Pinkberry has lines because the 4 plus people behind the counter supposedly working in tandem are hand selected to be the slowest most inefficient people available in the greater LA area.

It's a glorified soft serve stand, and yet it takes me an average of 5 minutes to receive my frozen treat.

Steps go like this:
Order. One flavor (of two), three toppings (of around 20, all easily visible behind the glass counter), pick size.
Proper cup gets filled to proper size w/ frozen yogurt/whatever
Toppings are spooned on
Treat handed to customer.

It took me longer to type that than it should to produce the actual result.

I've had it take 10 minutes before. I don't care how many people you have. It takes that machine about 10 seconds to poo out a large, at which point your only task is to walk the three feet over to the topping area and scoop that business up. Under a minute. And you have 4 people back there, so two take orders, two produce the results. You're looking at 2 people served per minute, probably more if you take your job seriously.

Pinkberry sucks because it's the perfect example of something that was a decent product, taken the "FU, you'll buy it" attitude and become a dot com in 1999.

MySpace Sucks

2007-10-11T03:13:00.000-07:00

This isn't exactly news to anyone, but myspace really does suck. Bought for a bazillion dollars and the servers are still dead slow and eff up all the time. Then, just for fun, they make it so I get, oh, I dunno, ten friend requests a day from the same picture. Awesome. The past five times I've logged in all I've done is delete friend requests. Add to that there's always at least one friend w/ a hacked profile.

Oh, and the terrible design.

I hear there are people who use it to get laid. That never worked for me. I did find a ton of folks with so few friends all their photographs were self shot, usually on a webcam. That's the bagged salad of social networking.

Evite Sucks

2007-10-11T03:02:00.001-07:00

Somewhere within the last week of my inbox are at least three evite emails for different events. I am aware of all of them, and from what I glean from the emails, are enjoyable enough events. But i'm not going to click on the link if I can help it.

I wouldn't say I hate the evite website the way I hate something like, say, writing in the 1st person plural or trips to the Burbank Ikea, but I do have issues. Two of them.

The first I feel is simple. I don't respond "no" to evites, or pretty much any invitation other than something where some personally contacts me for specific reasons. But SPECIFICALLY I don't say "no" on the evite website. I have this rule because I think it screws up the karma of the event to have a bunch of "out of town"s and "have something else (better) I have to (always "have") go to already"s listed. Not gonna be there, don't say "yes", in fact don't say anything at all.

I suppose it could be argued that even a "no" is a positive in and of that it says that the host has actual friends who care enough to write an excuse and isn't just one of those people with a 70 person email list that they like to abuse. But I'm not going to think about that, because it messes with my policy.

My second problem stems from the one time I made an evite invitation. Evite tells you who's looked at the page, even if they just looked. So Jeff looks at my page and doesn't respond. Is that a no? Is he waiting to see who else comes (what an asshole!)? Checking that one page and seeing who had and who hadn't been on, and what they hadn't or had written caused me to get all--I don't know what the word is--I... I felt betrayed by these "friends" of mine who wouldn't commit to my awesome event. It caused me to live out my friends feelings about me in my head. Paranoid. That's the word.

I do think it's a rather useful tool. Not amazing, because you could accomplish the exact same thing w/ a mass emailing, but whatever, it serves a small myspacey need.

But i'm not gonna click on your evite. Sorry. I'm bad enough w/ my free time schedule.