Korean Air sucks

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

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

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

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

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

Democrats Suck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.