NEEGAAA

This is a hilarious "pilot" epsiode of a Japanese show called Tokyo Breakfast, where this whole Japanese family speaks ghetto english. It's freaking great.

And yes, I've been told that this particular meme has been floating around for several years, but I just saw it for the first time today, so kiss my ass. Check it out if you've not seen it.

http://www.comicore.com/~tobin/movies/Tokyo_Breakfast.mpeg

This poor bastard

This is a very well written and incredibly angry rant on Craigslist by a guy whose dog was hit and run by some asshole.

I especially like the "piss down your bleeding skull" bit.

http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/about/best/wdc/11505843.html

Common sense

You know, the results of this study are completely common sense, evolutionarily. I don't know why it's presented as if it's something interesting or surprising.

"Handsome men produce the best quality semen and beautiful women seem to have good voices, according to two different scientific studies."

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/05/28/offbeat.looks.study.reut/index.html

Video games make me smart

Well, okay, not smarter, but I've been telling people this for years. I have much better hand-eye coordination, reaction times, and ability to adapt to situations with quickly changing visual information than my friends who don't play video games.

"Researchers at the University of Rochester found that young adults who regularly played video games full of high-speed car chases and blazing gun battles showed better visual skills than those who did not. For example, they kept better track of objects appearing simultaneously and processed fast-changing visual information more efficiently."

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/fun.games/05/28/action.video.ap/index.html

Cat Masks

Okay, I don't even like cats, but this is freaking hilarious.

There's a site for buying these weird outfits for cats, like chickens and frogs and what not, and the Engrish on the site is stellar.

Here's a little taste for you:

"If it finishes taking a photograph, you will make it remove clothes from a cat immediately. You will say then, without forgetting the language of gratitude to a cat. "-- be flooded -- a way -- good -- having done one's best -- ! -- "

What?

http://www.petoffice.co.jp/catprin/english/

The "real" Matrix

This is very bizarre. DARPA is funding a proposal called Lifelog to "develop an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person’s experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities. The objective of this "LifeLog" concept is to be able to trace the "threads" of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships."

Check it out.

http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/Solicitations/PIP_03-30.html

I know Gnostic Fu

Here's a slightly pompous but entertaining philosophical wank about the ideas embedded in the Matrix.

Some of his ideas are overthought garbage, but a lot of it ties into the redeeming features of the Matrix, the fact that there appears to be a pretty well thought out philosophical premise behind much of it.

http://www.corporatemofo.com/stories/051803matrix.htm

SSN 411

This site has some interesting information about how social security numbers are assigned. I found the fact that we had a whole range of number only assigned to railroad workers, regardless of their locale, to be odd, along with the order that the middle two digits are assigned. I had heard that someone born in another country who was assigned an SSN upon becoming a citizen got a number starting with 999, but that apparently isn't true.

http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/privacy/ssn/ssn.structure.html

Blue windshield of death

This is pretty damn funny.

The OS on a BMW limo crashed, leaving the passengers trapped inside until someone smashed the window with a sledgehammer.

http://aardvark.co.nz/daily/2003/n051301.shtml

Tivo hacking

You know, I've done a few hacks on my Tivo. I've added a larger hard drive, so I can store more. I've done the "thirty second jump" hack. My tivo is wonderful, and I love it.

But now O'Reilly is publishing a book called "Tivo Hacks" that's 226 pages long! I am insanely curious as to what the hell could possibly fill a book that long regarding hacking your Tivo. I'll have to check it out when it's published.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596005539/downandoutint-20/103-9940315-2417418

OWNED

Man, this is funny.

CAT = OWNED.

http://njsr.org/pics/uploads/cat_owned.jpg

Ringu

Alright, so someone at my work told me that I should check out Ringu, the Japanese movie that The Ring was based on, because it was a) totally different and b) better.

Neither of these were true.

First off, the movie was basically exactly the same. Same exact plot, same cinematic tricks, practically the same sets half the time. I was borderline bored through the whole thing.

Secondly, it wasn't better. The acting was pretty good, but the effects were worse, the budget was lower, the music was worse.. and The Ring actually had more exposition as to the motivation of the evil girl. You got to see more of who she was, and they made her much more evil and more convincing. Since Ringu didn't do this, the whole "finding the corpse in the well" scene didn't make as much sense. And The Ring was much scarier, Ringu did these cheesy "scary" freezeframes when bad things happened, because they didn't have any real effects going on. If I had never seen The Ring, I would have loved it, it's a good movie, there's no doubt about it, I'm not diputing that.

I'm kind of confused as to why so many people I've talked to have said the same things about this movie. I figure it has to be the whole theory that the American remake of a foreign film simply CAN'T be better, if you're a "cultured" movie watcher, you always prefer the original and look down on the soulless, American studio remake. Well, they're full of crap. The Ring was a superior movie.

Kick the Donkey

The next election doesn't bode well for the Democrats.

In a new poll, it was discovered that 66% of all Americans can't name a single one of the nine Democratic presidential nominees.

Black days for the man in black

Remember the Johnny Cash video for "Hurt" that made you want to put the barrel of a gun in your mouth?

As if he wasn't depressed and sad enough already, his wife, June Carter Cash, died yesterday. Fantastic. I think the next video he releases will just involve him sitting in a closed garage with a car running.

The Matrix Reloaded

The following is a post about the new Matrix movie. It contains spoilers, so if you haven't seen it, you've been warned.

First off, it's a good movie. Technically stunning, enjoyable, good stuff. I'm not going to rave about the good stuff, because you all have probably heard about it. Freeway scene, the twins, Neo fighting 100 Smiths with a pole, etc. It's all amazing. It will blow your mind, the technical shit they pull off.

However, it also had some problems that really annoyed me.

The pacing was awful in some parts. There was a COMPLETELY pointless five minute long Zion rave/soft core porn scene that had me fidgeting with boredom. They had this problem where they would go on these really long dialogue diatribes, and then switch to a really long fight sequence, as opposed to the quicker pacing of the first movie. That got on my nerves.

Secondly, the plot and editing seemed patchy. You get to the end of the movie without knowing what happened to half the characters. I can mostly forgive this because it's obviously just a really long movie that was cut into two pieces. I suppose we'll find out what happened in the next one.

The Matrix "philosophy" seems a bit dodgy to me. The Matrix "architect" needs "the one" to decide the fate of humanity? Why? If he's in charge, why does he need someone else deciding these things? I also had some serious issues with him needing to repopulate Zion, but the more that I think about it, the more that it seems that even Zion and all the people that think they're outside of the Matrix are actually still inside of it. That would mean that they might "need" Zion to create the constant conflict that humans need to be good slaves. That's the ONLY acceptable excuse for Neo being able to stop those sentinels at the end of the movie, the real world HAS to be "inside" the matrix. If they give him some bullshit mumbo-jumbo powers in the real world, I'll be disgusted with the whole franchise.

Honestly, though, these are pretty minor nits, in the large scope of things. I think they will clean up all the plot issues that I have in the third movie, leaving only this issue of strange pacing and pointless rave/porn scenes. I can live with that, but I wish they'd clean up their editing for the next one, and intersperse fighting and boring a little bit more seamlessly.

How my friends entertain themselves

Ah, see the chaos I miss by moving out of Pittsburgh?

I got an email from Kevin today, containing this gem of a story:

"You know what Kumar and I have been doing? We figured out
that they have free booze at art gallery openings, so we've been
going to them every week just to get smashed for free. We've only
been kicked out of two so far, but we're working on upping that score.

We've made a game out of it. Since everyone at those things is full
of shit anyway, we've decided on making a contest out of
oneupmanship. We make up stories beforehand about how impressive our
lives are and we try to keep all the details straight while we
schmooze with the artfags and pound down the free wine. Last week,
he owned a beauty salon in Los Angeles and I worked for the embassy
in London. We had everyone sucking our cocks until Kumar went
apeshit and started insulting random people and breaking things. The
gallery's owner asked us to leave and some of the patrons
were threatening to call the cops. Fuckin' good shit."

ill masta'

This is wonderful.

In the grand style of MST3k, there's a new series of Kung Fu movies overdubbed with music and the voices of hip hop stars. They call it Kung Faux. I strongly approve, from the clips I've seen at this site, and over at www.heavy.com.

Kung Faux - www.kungfaux.com

Fair taxation

Our socialist graduated tax is a crock of shit. It's complicated, unfair, and full of loopholes and pork barrel exceptions.

For a long time I've been a firm proponent of a fair, flat tax on goods and services. That way, you're taxed on what you consume, and the benefits you draw from our society.

This will never happen, of course, but there's a pretty decent website out there that's trying to get people rallied around the idea. I've written to my representatives, suggesting they take a look at the site, and consider the idea. Course, I'm in California, so that's not likely.

http://www.fairtax.org/

I think I may have shot myself in the foot here.

In my last semester at CMU, I was let into a little secret. To graduate with University Honors, only your first seven semesters counted. Since I had a GPA above 3.5, that means that I had University Honors, no matter what, unless I failed out of school. So I decided to perform my experiment, titled the "No attendence 2.0", which is just what it sounds like. I attended no classes, except for tests and quizzes, just to see if I could do it. Well, that and because I wanted to sit around and play video games. Those of you who know me are probably already familiar with this part.

This was all well and good, because I knew I could just put University Honors on my resume, and employers would be all impressed. Everything worked out fine.

Except now, I'm applying to Stanford for a Masters. Oops. They're going to look at my CMU transcript and think I turned into a drooling retard in my last semester. I almost feel like I should send a letter explaining the dropoff, but then they'd know what a horrible person I was. Damn. Guess I'll have to just take my chances.

Ever get hit on by a 404 message? Me neither. Well, until today:

http://www.binaryinc.org/404.html

Also amusing, on the same site, is CNN, ebonics style.

http://www.binaryinc.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=65

Warren Ellis, the creator of Transmetropolitian, and innumerable other comic books with brilliant plot and dialogue, now has a blog:

www.diepunyhumans.com

I just was told about it, so I can't comment one way or another until I get home from work today and actually spend some time reading it.

I REALLY need to get some sort of blog aggregator so I can wake up, look at all my blogs, and go upon my way. Hopefully when I find one I can feed RSS out of Livejournal so I can pull all those pages out too, without having to actually visit the LJ site.

Anyone have a good blog/RSS aggregator to recommend?

For those of you who are following the Animatrix online, there's a new unreleased one playing on an MTV2 special called "The Animatrix Revealed".

The rest of the program is garbage, with little snippets of useless interviews, and clips from the already released online Animatrix, however, they play a new episode beginning to end, and it's pretty good. It's about some kids who find an area of the world where the normal physical laws aren't applying just right, and the machines coming in to fix the "glitch".

I'm watching some fantastic crappy television.

It's called "Special Report: Journey to Mars", a low budget movie from the point of view of a news program in the future, covering humanity's first mars landing.

There's lots of awesome stereotypes, like a woman president, a completely multi-racial crew on the ship with bad fake accents... now there's some sort of "earth first" protest group that is threatening to crash the Mars landing, fighting the "evil" corporation that's in charge of it, saying that it's a money wasting publicity stunt, and they're against intergalactic travel for some reason. Oh, and it's got Judge Reinhold, which is always a great sign. They intersperse shots of two or three sets with really wretched computer graphics. And they do these fake global "instant polls", asking how people feel about what's going on, with a billion people responding.

I love this cheesy crap, it's like bad old sci-fi novels. It's awful, but really fun.

Your daily moment of misogyny:

http://home.wi.rr.com/themindshaft/fytytyteyr.gif

Mmmmmmmmm...

Finally, there's a website for Stephenson's new book (rather, series of books). It's not got much on it, but it has a date, and a short excerpt from his new upcoming novel.

http://www.baroquecycle.com/flash.htm

Yes, I'm sure that most of you have seen this already, but I want to both archive it for posterity, and give anyone who's missed it the chance to see it.

A little while back, a video surfaced on the internet with some poor tubby bastard practicing his light saber skills. That was wonderfully funny, especially how satisfied with his abilities the young Jedi looked.

Here's that video.

But now, oh now, someone went ahead and added music, special effects, and some star wars scenery, and it's gotten SO much better. I've watched it like three times so far, and it keeps getting better. I'm also very easy to entertain, but you all will probably at least enjoy watching it once, they did a really nice editing job.

The re-edit.

Enjoy.

Oh, how the times have changed.

If you had told the 13 year old hacker Tobin, sitting in front of his crappy little 8088 with his 1200 baud modem that one day, he'd be frustrated by the fact that he can only download 2,500 megabytes a day, he would have laughed in your face.

Over a decade later, though, it's true. Everything that I want to download these days is HUGE, whether it be games, or television shows, or rips of DVDs, everything is several gigs, and when I put a couple things in a download queue, I'm looking at a week of solid downloading. That's awful. Even back when I was grabbing stuff with my slow ass modem, nothing was so big that I couldn't get it overnight.

So the question becomes, are we ever going to have the bandwidth that we dream about in movies and books? The kind where you don't ever really consider transfer time? Here's a movie.. zip! Here's the Library of Congress... zip! Or are we always going to continue to create files that are larger and larger, so that transferring is a nightmare? A decade from now, am I going to be whining that I can only transfer a couple terabytes a day?

Holy dose of nostalgia, they're bringing back the goddamn headbanger's ball on MTV2.

For those of you who don't know, in the early to mid 90's, the greatest show on television for a punkass teenager like me was Headbanger's Ball. In the middle of all the garbage they played on MTV, there was this block of music, once a week if I remember correctly, that was just straight rock. Everything that I liked at that time, Megadeth, Anthrax, Metallica, Ozzy, you name it, it was there. There was lots of big hair, angry metalheads, and shit being set on fire, broken, and generally fucked up. Back then, I used to look forward to it more than anything on television.

Now, I'm past that stage, of course, but I'm very curious what it will be like. Next Saturday night they're running a whole block of great looking television, there's a new headbanger's ball, a "uncensored" special talking about the oldskool headbanger's ball back in the day, and then they're following it up with a special about the Animatrix. Sounds good to me.