Necessary to adhere

There are mods that are fun to play, and then there are the ones that have no earthly reason for existing. This one's hilarious. It changes your pet dog in Fallout 3 from a normal-looking dog:

To this:

I laughed pretty hard when I saw this. I don't know...maybe having a dog with angry eyebrows would make the game more fun. The description this modder gave makes it even better:

"Icannot speak English. Sentences are made on the WEB page of the translation. Thus, please forgive me though sentences might be wrong. This is a texture that puts up the eyebrow to the dog. It is lovely that the eyebrow has adhered to the dog, and always thinks that it is necessary to adhere. Nevertheless, because no one made it, it made it formyself."

If you're interested in an eyebrowed dog (And why wouldn't you be? It is lovely that the eyebrow has adhered to the dog, after all.), you can get it here.

A handwritten post, for kicks

This is what you've waited over two months for.

So, I'm giving an exam tonight, which means there's not much for me to do, so I was clicking around my computer and found something I wrote two years ago.  I don't know if it was meant to be the beginning of a story, or something I wrote in the middle of the night, but I've decided that it makes a great story on its own.  Here it is:


"Romance Chicken"



     “Tell me something romantic.”

     That damn chicken better get here quick.

SNL debate

If you watched the actual VP debate, this is hilarious.  If not, it's proably still mildly funny.

The Braskey Chronicles: Episode Two

Ok, that didn't take long. My GCast player is now in the sidebar, and Episode Two is up (it's not nearly as long as Episode One was, but it is a bit harder to understand because it was recorded in public).

P-p-p-podcast!

I wanted to discuss Spore, but I didn't feel like typing (and yet, here I am typing...) so I decided a podcast was the way to go.  I'm tentatively calling this experiment "The Braskey Chronicles," and the first episode features Netty and I discussing Spore and other things for 25 minutes.  Enjoy! (If this becomes a regular feature, I'll probably put the player in my sidebar.)



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First Response to "The Dark Knight"

I'll get right to it: this movie beat the bejeezus out of me with an Awesome Stick and I plan to go back for another thrashing because I f-ing loved it.  

Batman Begins did a fantastic job of setting up Nolan's new Caped Crusader as a guy who fights crime for his own reasons--not because he's a self-righteous do-gooder, but because deep down he's just fracking angry.  He doesn't hate crime because he feels sorry for the victims, he hates crime because of the criminals.  Because of the attitude they swagger around with--the "I own this town" crap that Tom Wilkinson portrayed so well as Falcone.  Because he can't stand the notion that the ones with all the guns and all the money can scare everyone else into submission.  

And Batman's fierce pissed-offedness, his desire to bash the snot out of bad men, which was set up so well in Batman Begins, makes The Dark Knight's introduction of the Joker all the more fun to watch.  This is a guy whose only agenda is to be bad.  He's not after money or control.  He's just out of his mind, and the best part is we never find out why.  The film never explains him, and although he gives us a couple of pseudo-origin stories, we're not given to believe any of them--although they are fantastically creepy as hell.  He's a bad guy without a reason to be a bad guy, a schizo-elemental, and Ledger takes that idea to a level that is scarily real.  His last scene is absolutely brilliant.  Ledger can freaking act.  I seriously don't know how he got that look in his eyes--a mix of child-like wonder and Krueger-like sadism that actually freaked me out for half a second when he combined it with that laugh.  You do not see Heath Ledger in this movie.  You see the Joker.

Ledger's Joker takes the Batman of the last film and turns him onto one mean S.O.B., and for me, that's the best element of the movie.  He's still technically on the right side, and there's still a line he won't cross, but in this movie he'll walk right up to that line and groin-punch it and spit on its grandma if he thinks it'll help clean up Gotham.  This is a morally gray Batman.  He's willing to hurt people.  He's willing to use all of the resources at Bruce Wayne's disposal, even when he has to strain the bounds of morality to do it.  And the best part is that it works...and at the same time, it doesn't.  You'll have to see the end to know what I mean.

I can't go without mentioning the supporting cast.  Gary Oldman takes Gordon to places I honestly didn't expect the character to go, and it just works.  Aaron Eckhart, an actor that hasn't impressed me up to now, makes Harvey Dent/Tw0-Face into a character I wish we could have seen more of.  Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes was a vast improvement over Katie Holmes' weak performance (I mean, seriously.  Who actually found that Scientologically-brainwashed twelve-year-old believable as an assistant D.A. in a town like Gotham?  No one, that's who.)  Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman reprise their roles as Batman's moral compass and moral compass/gadget man, respectively, and both do a fine job of developing their characters both as Batman's support team, and as interesting people in their own right. (Hunting jewel thieves in southeast Asia?  Who knew Alfred was such a deep well?)

If I haven't made it clear up to now, this is a great film and I cannot recommend it highly enough.  Whether you saw the first one or not.  Whether you like Batman or not.  Whether you trust my judgement of film quality or not.  After all the hype, I actually lowered my expectations a bit before going in to this one, just to avoid the kind of disappointment I experienced with Indy 4.  Turns out I didn't need to do that.  Like I said, I plan to see it at least once more, and I'll let you know if my opinion changes dramatically, but I suspect that I'll only enjoy it more the second time.

IMDb rating: 9.6/10
My rating: 9.8/10

Two things

Ahoy, internets.  I bring you  two (2) Items of Interest:

1. Hellboy 2 is a lot of fun.  Quite different from the first one, and better, I think.  Less Nazi occultism, which is kind of a shame, but more fairy tale-ness and steampunkery, which is spiffy.  I could probably watch the Troll Market scenes eight times and still not catch all the spiff.  If you like the first movie go see this one.  If you didn't like the first movie, go see this one.

IMDb rating: 8.5/10
My rating: 9.0/10

[And remember, this weekend was Hellboy 2, next weekend is Dark Knight, and the next is X-Files 2.  Try to keep up.]

2.  I just finished playing Portal, and the song during the end credits is, without question, the best song I've ever heard in a video game.  It's freaking brilliant.  It might not be that great if you haven't played the game (I'm actually curious about its non-Portal-player appeal), but here's the link if you want to give it a listen.  Note that there are a few minor spoilers in the song, so don't listen if you think you might want to play the game sometime--which you should.

Day 4

Our scenic adventures continued yesterday as Jenette, Michelle, and I went down to the Mile High Flea Market to do some treasure hunting. The place was huge, and a lot of it was just standard flea market crap--cheap/ugly clothes, obviously stolen car stereos, dirty children, carnival rides whose last safety inspection was in the late '70s, and mustaches a'plenty--but we came back with a few pieces of quality loot, including some ridiculous t-shirts (see pics in sidebar) and a really spiffy globe for our house. I might post some pics when we get home.

Later that evening we went to Colorado National Speedway and watched cars drive in loud circles while we ate unhealthy amounts of unhealthy food. I hope that last bit of funnel cake doesn't slow me down on my way to the checkered flag of life (yeah, the announcer actually uses that phrase in his ridiculous pre-race loudspeaker prayer). Normal races are ok, but I know what you're thinking. You're wishing you could see a race in which half-drunk yokels chain three cars to each other and then place mildly retarded dropouts behind the wheels of the resulting metal monstrosities so they can race in a figure-8. You know, like they do in the Book of Revelation. Well, they do just that at the end of the night. Here's a bit of video of the trains (sorry for the bootleg quality, but cameras are verboten at the races, so I was trying to keep mine somewhat hidden while I recorded).
EDIT: Blogger is being stupid, so the video will have to wait until my patience meter fills back up.


Today we braved the rain to check out the the Boulder Hippie Festival (or whatever it was called) and the Pearl Street Mall. We sampled hippie food, got rained on, saw some not-that-great-but-ok-I-guess belly dancers, got rained on, bought a couple of hanging chairs for our porch (spiff), got rained on, and ate at a pretty decent Japanese restaurant. Oh, and then we got rained on. I would post some video of the day's activities, but I didn't even take out the camera because, as I may have mentioned, it was raining all day.

Tonight, my hat and boots dry out. Tomorrow, Estes Park.

Summer trip!

So we're up in Colorado now doing some visiting and whatnot. We got in yesterday evening, after dodging most of the inclement weather, and ate with Gary and Linda at a little place called...something (I can't remember at the moment). They had excellent homemade pasta and decent alferdo (sic) sauce. It happened to be karaoke night, and although I didn't think we were the karaoke type, Michelle, Gary, and then Jenette & I got up to sing. Unfortunately, I only have video of Michelle because my camera battery died. But the real treat of the evening was that Kevin (yes, that Kevin, from "Scrantonicity") got up to sing. Michelle and Kevin are both in the video.


On the way home, we Red Box'd "30 Days of Night"...it was ok, but they could have done more with the background of the vampires (their history, how they got there, etc.)
My rating: 6.9/10
IMDb rating: 6.7/10

Today we went and checked out Main Street in Longmont. Highlights included a coin shop (or is it shoppe?) where they had some boxes of random bills and coins from around the world. We got $10 worth of some pretty neat stuff, like the Japanese 10-peso note that was printed when the Japanese occupied the Phillipines. We also found a coffee shop (or is it shoppe?) that had stop-worthy gelato.

Then the rest of the crew headed back to H.Q. while Jenette and I went to an amazing anqtique store, where we got some nice home decor--including a pair of very steampunky lamps. Now I'm back at H.Q. while part of the crew enjoys a soccer game (not my thing) and part goes to the races (which we'll all be going to tomorrow, anyway.) Nap time for me.

May 22! (Update: Indiana Jones and the MPAA of Doom!)

Lately it takes a lot to drag a blog post out of me, and this one isn't even going to requre any original thought on my part.  I'm simply here to point my finger and say "Look, isn't this freaking sweet?" (Oh, and it is.)




UPDATE: Thanks to the MPAA, who likes to treat people like children, the above U.S. version of the trailer has been edited. Apparently, it's not ok in a trailer to have a gun pointed at another person, so the guns that WE ALL KNOW ARE POINTED AT INDY had to be hastily CG'd out in order for the trailer to be accepted. We saw the Reds, we saw their machine guns pointed in a decidedly Indy-ward direction. But if we were to see the guns and Indy in the same frame, we might all...crap our pants...or something... I don't really understand the logic. Check out the comparison pics here.

Anyway, this little edit, along with an unnecessary and somewhat distracting American flag pasted across a few frames, has caused a bit of geek controversy around some of the Internets. I know, I know. Geek controversy would be flying around the Internets with or without an MPAA'd Indy trailer, but this little bit of it struck me as interesting.

If you want to see the unedited international version in 1080p, click here.  (Also available in 720p and 480p.)