Time Traveling With Tesuya Mizuguchi

Classified under:video games,music
If you're not familiar with Mizuguchi's work, you're missing out one of gaming's most innovative creators, best known for his innovative use of music in games. He's the brains behind Sega's Space Channel 5 and the mind altering cult classic rez. Instead of doing the regular question and answer that most interviews stick with, 1.com opted to reanimate the music from Mizuguchi's gameography and used it to jump start old memories. It's a fantastic interview it's strongly recommended that you watch the video clips to get the full effect. Ace reporting.

Creepy new Burger King commercial (Windows Media)

Classified under:advertising,Burger King
It only seems like yesterday that Burget King was using subversion to sell burgers. Thakfully (or not, depending on your sensibilities), the King has once again has dipped into the well of well of post modern marketing with the help of famed music video director David LaChapelle. Although the new commercial lacks the creepy undertones of having the Burger King wake up next to a man pimping his new burger, there is something disturbing about women playing with buckets of secret sauce.

The Onion's Good Scenes/Bad Scenes

Classified under:webjunk,the Onion
In that last couple of years, on Tuesday, I've been looking forward to the Onion's AV Club moreso than the satire. This week's special on Bad Scenes in Good movies/Good Scenes in Bad Movies. Highlights features cinematic weirdos Christopher Walken and my favourite, Crispin Glover.

Sometimes, the strangest actors do their most subversive work in children's films, where their demented quirks stand in sharp relief to the family-friendly wholesomeness. (See also: Christopher Walken in The Country Bears, above.) As the prototypically cruel head of a orphanage, Glover forgets he's in an overlong Nike commercial and sets about terrorizing kids in his inimitably peculiar style. In the most twisted scene, Glover tries to squeeze information out of young Jonathan Lipnicki (the bespectacled moppet from Jerry Maguire) by holding a lighter under the sole remaining picture of his long-lost mother.

What is it? Glover inspired trauma.

Holy Shit! Gene Defcon is back!

Classified under:music,Gene Defcon
Olympia Washington, and (dare I say it?) quite possibly the world's best lo-fi indie band is back. Bingo, Gene Defcon is back with his long awaited (by me) follow up album to Come Party With Me 2000. Oh yes! We've missed you, Gene Defcon. Carry on, you party cowboy.

Movies that I want to see: Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan

Classified under:movies,Shaw Brothers

I had one of my Chinese friends, Chi, scout Vancouver's Chinatown last year for Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan. He said that he found it, but decided not to pick it up since he thought that it was a porno and he thought that I made a mistake with my film request. Is the film pornographic? Probably as pornographic as a shampoo commerical. Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan is one of the Shaw Brother's early exploitation movies, packed to the gills with sex and bloody kung fu action. The plot is typical revenge fare, an angry lesbian prostitute decides to kill all those who wronged her in the past. The reviews that I've say that the action is top notch and doesn't skimp out on the action. Something that I'll definately try to pick up this weekend in Vancouver.

Not pr0n

Classified under: webjunk,
Not pr0n is my favourite internet time waster. Where most games on the internet focuses on slaughtering strangers using a half the US military's armoury of weapons, not pr0n challenges you to use your brain. Fustrating but extremely rewarding, it's worth the countless hours that you'll sink into it.

Sam Fisher on Metal Gear

Classified under:video games,

A while back, I mentioned that I've been trying out the Metal Gear Solid games, just to get a taste of the competition. As I've said before, most of my experience with video games has been through military training simulators, which offer all the interactivity of a video game, with none of the fun. So I'm no expert game reviewer, but I'll give you my thoughts.

Let me start off by saying this -- in all my years of covert operations, I've never encountered robotic ninjas or rollerskating fat guys. I've never dealt with vampires or enemies telling me to do things with my controller, either. This is just ridiculous stuff here.

It's bad enough that your enemies are straight out of the comic books, but then there's the silly names. No self-respecting bad guy is going to call themselves names like Howitzer Platypus or Bazooka Marmoset. I'd like to meet the Japanese game developer who makes up these names, and make sure all aerosol products are kept out of reach.

Movies that I have to see: GI Samurai

Classified under:movies,
The title pretty much sums the movie up. It's a Sonny Chiba actioner where he plays a military officer that, get this, travels back to Feudal Japan to fight along and against samurai warriros. And did I mention that it has a tank fighting a platoon of samurai? Sold!

the Photography of Wing Shya

Classified under:photography,Wing Shya.

I found this on a livejournal community dedicated to Chinese photography from the 30s. It's a small example of Wing Shya's evovative photography.

Hooligans trailer

Classified under:Hooligans,Trailers
Thanks to Ain't It Cool News' coverage of this year's South By Southwest, I'm hyped up about a new movie called Hooligans. This is what they have to say about the film

Like Ong Bak, this movie is not about gangs or violence or even "football"...it is about finding what is missing from life and the journey of the protagonist to find it.

Matt Buckner just walks away from his future and his own talent in the beginning of this movie. We are given the superficial reason, but we cannot help but feel immediately that he gives up "without a fight" he just resigns himself to it and then "runs away". It seems maddening that he does this, but at the same time, so many of us do the same thing in small ways everyday that we relate. Essentially this is the set-up for his personal transformation.

He gets drawn into the completely foreign world of football firms or gangs. His naivety leads the way, because he really doesn't know how deep and dark this world is, even though we, the audience, are given a glimpse of it at the beginning of the movie. For the first time, Matt gets a taste of loyalty and friendship that seem to expand his world to a sense of belonging which has been missing from his privileged but solitary academic life. But he is still naive. As Americans in the same unfamiliar world of the football firms, we go right along with him because of the down to earth appeal of being a "regular" guy, and the treat of seeing a real West Ham United match with real fans complete with all the frenzy and excitement. But we are also drawn by the charm of Pete, the head of the West Ham United firm, who happens to be Matt's sister's brother-in-law. Pete is played brilliantly by actor Charlie Hunnam.

The violence of the brawls that ensue to protect the reputation of the firms and the teams they "represent" is handled extremely well in this film. Bloody, "gritty" and adrenaline-pumping bare fist fights without weapons where wit, nerve and fighting ability are all the tools the firms use to maintain their reputation. Occasional sticks, stones and broken beer bottles find their way into the fights and when they do, they are usually used as an indication of dirty fighting or survival. The movie in no-way glorifies violence or even justifies it. The fights just become an important part of the story and the transformation of Matt.

I will not say more of about this movie because people just need to see it themselves

You can check out the trailer here. Beware, tho', that it's not a trailer in the truest sense, but ratherm it's just a montage of violence. Not that there's anything wrong with that

Another year closer to the grave

Classified under:,Rob Andrews
That's right, I've been on this earth for 24 years. Happy birthday to me. Delight me with webjunk that is appropriate for this joyous occation.

Spaced

Classified under:television,Spaced
Before Shawn of the Dead washed its way overseas, brainchildren Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright created the acclaimed Brit tv series, Spaced. I'm not a huge fan of British sitcoms, a lot of the humour is pretty dry sale fair and usually illicits a stodgy nod of "that's funny" rather than tearing laughs through my body. Thankfully, Spaced is nothing like that. Keeping with their pop culture sensibilities the show has a clever mix of various levels of screwball antics, sight gags and tight dialogue. That, and I found it funnier than Shawn of the Dead. Watch it.

Game Developer's Conference Roundup

Classified under:video games,Game Developers Conference 2005
Keita Takahashi, Katamari Damacy's creator rountable
"Takahashi claimed that the simplicity of his design was more the result of necessity, lamenting that he lacks the skills to explore more complex subjects such as love."
That said, the pacakge of Katamari's music, opening cinema and gameplay is the closest thing to a lover's hug that you'll get from a video game.

The New Legend of Zelda trailer
In which Link pets kittens, fights one eyed spider creatures and swims through the most beautiful water that you'll see in a video game.

Emily Dickinson-the Game
Part of the yearly Game Design Challenge, wherein the industry's best creators attempt to advance game design and explain their creative process. This year's challenge was to create a game based on the property based on Emily Dickinson. You know, the poet/writer.

XBoX keynote speech
Not owning an XboX and having virtually zero interest in the system, the speech did a good job of selling me their new system. Their online plans are very impressive and I love the possible swiss knife functionality of having *all* game enabled with Live. It will undoubtably bring the PC style expansions to the platform market.

Iwata's Keynote Speech
If we ignore his anecdotes about his life as a developer, there's some good meat in there, such as the Nintendo Revolution being backwards compatible and both that and the DS being wifi enabled. Whether or not it'll be able to compete with Microsoft's excellent online service will be something to watch for.

Rob Requires Torrents and Search Tools!

Classified under:personal
Since I now have a spiffy new computer, I'm in the market for torrents. Anyone out there want to recommend any sites? I heard that there's a site that's entirely dedicated to concert mp3s. Anyone know anything about this? Also, for what it's worth, where is everyone getting their music? I've been hitting the music blogs pretty hard the last two days, litterally downloading everything that I can get my paws on. I know about Kazaa, but my experience with it suggests that it's slow as fuck, has oodles of spyware and is pretty buggy. I'm looking for something like audiogalaxy. Remember that?

Aderac reviews the score of the Harmony of Dissonance

Classified under:music,video games,Castlevania,
On "marble corridor - "offense and defense""

Here's the meat. I've written about this before. This is the one piece which would make the score for me, even if everything else stank. I'm not going into detail. It's too complex. Just listen to how the parts speak to each other, particularly the highs and the lows. Listen to how they spiral. How the tensions get woven and unwoven and lead to new anxieties. This piece is pure paranoia. It's relentless. Ruthless. It makes me shiver, it makes my eyes water, it makes me clamp my jaw, it makes me very uncomfortable. It's possibly the most moving piece of chip music I've heard.

Hell, I just noticed the piece's title. That pretty much sums it up, compositionally.

Reading aderac's blow by blow reminds me of Stephen's writing in that it's a very emotional response to machine music. That, and it's a tad pretentious too.

Tax Day comics

Classified under:tagname,
I got my taxes back yesterday and decided that it would be a time time to burn some cash and pick up a couple of trades. While the comic shop in Prince George doesn't have the greatest singles collection, they have a fantastic bookshelf full of trade paperbacks. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the best selection in Northern BC. This is what I picked up: Seaguy, Sleeper and the second trade of 100 Bullets.

Seaguy was pretty good. Yeah, it had a lot of Morrison's mad ideas, but they seemed more stream of concious than anything else, rarely delivering on their promises. Despite that, the story got much better as it approached the end with the upped action the big moon revelation, despite its abrupt ending. Knowning that Morrison had plans for two other arcs after the first one compounds the situation. The revelations at the end of the story felt like a big tease, like I was only seeing the first ten minutes of a movie. Hopefully sales will convince DC to bring out the next two arcs, but considering how obtuse the story was, I doubt it.

I picked up the first issue of Sleeper two years ago based on Brubaker's promise that if you didn't like the first issue, you could send it to him and get a refund. I wasn't impressed, but liked it enough not to go through with the refund. I had the same experience with 100 Bullets a couple of years ago. Read it, and was underwhelmed. Since then, I think that my brain has been re-wired to like noir. Hell, I'll probably like the Third Man if I saw it again. Sleeper is like a train. It starts slow, but when it gets going, it's tough to stop. Solid characterization and moral ambiguity makes this one of the better deconstructions of the super villian, much better than Mark Millar's attempt with Wanted.

Has-been teams up with wanna-bes

Classified under:Star Trek,
It has been reported that Star Trek's Chekov will be joining up with the cast and crew of the online remake of the original series, the New Voyages. While I give kudos to the guys that run the show for getting Koenig into the fold, I find it a little sad that he calls it " An opportunity not only to resurrect a role, but to make of that character a living breathing profoundly human - being." Dude, it's fan fic. No one in the real world cares about mastabatory knock-offs.

What is the Assmatrix?

Classified under:sex, ass, webjunk

Not only does the Assmatrix have scientifically proven formulas that define what a great ass is, but also have great guides. Wow to fuck a fatass and how to make your deriere more perky are required reading. Get cracking.

The No Bullshit Guide To Getting A Sex Change

Classified under:transsexuality,sex+change
Sometimes my referal system picks up strange ways that people are picking up my blog. When I'm not getting hits about secret Mormon societies and ways to masturbate a cat, I get quite a few hits from people searching for transsexual information. Following the trail of breadcrumbs, I've found a no bullshit guide to getting a sex change. Like, for example, they have to say about the effects of hormones on your body.

You take a fully male body, shock it by immediately stopping all the testosterone from being produced, and then pour into it a ton of mind and body altering female hormones at the same time. Talk about shocking a system! Suicide and heart attacks await these ignorant people. But go ahead, you want to be a woman so bad! Go ahead. But when you listen to all the great stories of how well they work and how wonderful they are from Marsha Mellow and her internet friends, dig a little deeper and find the dead ones, or the ones who went crazy, or the ones who can no longer take hormones and anti androgens at all because of the damage they did to their bodies. Talk to the 24 year old TS who has to wear support hose for the rest of her life because of the tremendous amount of varicose veins on her legs, or the 35 year old man who went back to his old life after suffering his third and almost fatal heart attack. But you want to be a woman overnight... I got ya.

And on the Big Step.

will not go into all the details here, this is something you need to seriously consider yourself. And it needs to be tirelessly researched. But in a nutshell, having your penis surgically turned into something resembling a vagina is a huge step. The truth is that advances in GRS have been so rapid that the chances of success are almost guaranteed. But, for a cost concious girl, the chances decrease. Unless you go to a reputable surgeon, there is no guarantee that the surgery will be a success, cosmetically or functionally... it may look terrible and/or you may never have an orgasm again, and actually, the ability to still climax is rare even in successful cases. But in either case, it needs to be maintained excessively in a variety of ways... and it becomes a lifelong problem... it must be dilated with progressive size dildos, starting every hour immediately following the surgery to every few days, and basically, for the rest of your life. And more.

It's alternatingly facinating and horrifying stuff.

Cory Ondrejka on Second Life, a MMORPG

Classified under:video games,Second Life,Game Developers Conference
Wonderland has been doing a great job of covering this year's Game Developer's Conference by doing transcripts of the speeches. Of the ones up as of writing, the Second Life one interested me the most. I haven't heard of the game until, but their pricing structure really interests me.

We’re not a subscription model. Players pay $10 up front, then it's free to take part from there on in. If you want permanence in the world though, you have to own land. We sell land to the users. You can buy as much land as you like. Scaling of needs, from small amounts for more casual players, to entire islands and such for the more dedicated...

The flat fee plus the extra money for more hardcore players seems to be a good business plan to me. Although I doubt that many other companies will follow their business plan, it strikes me as a very good one for the genre.

Music of the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble

Classified under:Korea,music
Before I got burnt out on the shittiness of indecipherable Japanese Rock, I was a huge nerd for Japanese music. During the early 00's I had a reasonable collection of Shibuya-kei as well as some Japnese noise rock. Sadly, a lot of the music sucked, and I ended up pawning a large portion of it in Victoria for the New Rock! The Strokes! The Vines! The Hives! Remember how long that lasted? Now, thanks to the powers of high speed internet, I've been dabbling in strange new music. The stuff that's sticking out in my brain right now is propadanda music from North Korea, in particular, the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble. The music has an old school space age lounge vibe mixed with James Bond intro singing. It's otherworldly retro. Check it.

New Grant Morrison interview is up

Classified under:Grant Morrison,interview
Recent, from Suicide Girls. On the Matrix aping the Invisibles:

The truth of that one is that design staff on The Matrix were given Invisibles collections and told to make the movie look like my books. This is a reported fact. The Wachowskis are comic book creators and fans and were fans of my work, so it's hardly surprising. I was even contacted before the first Matrix movie was released and asked if I would contribute a story to the website.

It's not some baffling 'coincidence' that so much of The Matrix is plot by plot, detail by detail, image by image, lifted from Invisibles so there shouldn't be much controversy. The Wachowskis nicked The Invisibles and everyone in the know is well aware of this fact but of course they're unlikely to come out and say it.

It was just too bad they deviated so far from the Invisibles philosophical template in the second and third movies because they blundered helplessly into boring Catholic theology, proving that they hadn't HAD the 'contact' experience that drove The Invisibles, and they wrecked both
'Reloaded' and 'Revolutions' on the rocks of absolute incomprehension. They should have kept on stealing from me and maybe they would have wound up with something to really be proud of - a movie that could change minds and hearts and worlds.

I love the first Matrix movie which I think is a real work of cinematic genius and very timely but I've now heard from several people who worked on The Matrix and they've all confirmed that they were given Invisibles books as reference. That's how it is. I'm not angry about it anymore, although at one time I was because they made millions from what was basically a Xerox of my work and to be honest, I would be happy with just one million so I didn't have to work thirteen hours of every fucking day, including weekends.

In the end, I was glad they got the ideas out but very disappointed that they blew it so badly and distorted all the Gnostic transcendental aspects that made the first film so strong and potent. If they had any sense, they would have befriended me instead of pissing me off. They seem like nice boys.

Sanrio to Make Hello Kitty MMORRG

Classified under:video games,Hello Kitty
In a world where the Hello Kitty vibrator exists, I shouldn't be suprised by Sanrio's penchant for weirdness, but I *STILL AM*! Truly, this game will be the most haunting MMORPG ever created.

60 Minutes on Violent Video Games

Classified under:video games,60 Seconds
I don't have a television, so I tend to miss things like 60 Seconds' report on Stan Lee and now their assesment of video game violence. My favourite quote for imfamous anti-video game lawyer Jack Thompson:

"The video game industry gave him a cranial menu that popped up in the blink of an eye, in that police station. And that menu offered him the split-second decision to kill the officers, shoot them in the head, flee in a police car, just as the game itself trained them to do."

I'm *so* gonna steal "cranial menu" for future use.

Rob's Vancouver Trip

Classified under:personal,Rob Andrews
For those who want to know, I shall be heading to Vancouver for the weekened of the 1st of April to hang out with Miwako before she heads back to Japan as well as my other trendy and hip Vancouver friends. I'm not sure when I'll be leaving, but chances are that I'll head back on Sunday morning. I'm not sure where I'll be staying, but Heather wants to either get blunted or high on mushrooms, so chances are that we'll be staying at the Empress for one night. If anyone know of any good bands playing in Vancouver or anything special playing, give me a shoutout.

More New Games Journalism

Classified under:video games,journalism
I feel like I'm on the bleeding edge of something. 24 hours after I make a post ofthe Great Scam, the Guardianposts their top ten examples of games journalism. Among them was the previously mentioned Great Scam and my personal favourite, Tim Roger's Metal Gear Solid 2 review.

New Games Journalism: the Big Scam

Classified under:video games,journalism
Earlier last year, video games journalist Kieron Gillen made the rally call to change games journalism from less focused on graphics and scores to experiences that could only be experienced in the virtual world. He called it New Games Journalism. New Games Journalism has infected the internet more than it has print mags. Sites like insertcredit with writers like Tim Rogers GET IT, and it's good reading.

I have never heard of the game Eve until I read the Big Scam, but I want to. The article makes the word probably more compelling than it actually is, with the promises of high stakes swindles and pirateering. I'm surprised that print journalism doesn't do more stories like this. With the advent of more massively multiplayer games and non-linear sandboxing, it seems to me that gamers have a lot more to say about their gaming experience.

Site update

I want to give mad props to my good friend David for changing out the site layout. You rock, dawg!