retard slave army

Now here's something you just don't see every day:

"The operator of a group home for the mentally ill was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for enslaving its residents, forcing them to work naked and perform sex acts"

http://www.courttv.com/news/2006/0124/kaufman_ap.html

i'm a bandwidth pig

My ISP has been having problems with overloaded routers, and they're working to get new ones. In the meantime, they've sent a few people emails begging them to stop using so much bandwidth:

"We have done substantial work to alleviate this situation as much as
possible, and you are receiving this notice because out of 5,500+ users on
the affected system, your bandwidth utilization calculates in the top 2% of
all users on this router."

Heh.

Top 2%! Woot!

flickr game

This game is really neat.

Realtime multiplayer, try to guess the common flickr tag with the pictures as they come up. It gives you a score based on how fast you guess, and ranks you against everyone else.

Try it, it's strangely addictive.


http://randomchaos.com/games/fastr/

AAAAAHRN

If you really, really want to be my best friend in the whole wide world, and you live in Pittsburgh, you'll get me a case of Iron City for the Superbowl.

I'll pay for the case, and shipping, of course.

Hell, I don't even really watch football. But I'm going to a Superbowl party this year, and if I could show up with a case of Iron and represent my burgh, that would be glorious.

I checked the Iron City website and there's not a single distributor in California. Weak, I say. I need the AAHRN if I'm gonna watch the Stillers.

Panther Hollow Inn would be a glorious place to be for the bowl. But alas, it is not to be.

Yinz must hook me up.

japan photos

At long last, I've made the album of photos from my Japan trip. Enough of you have been harassing me over the last month that I figured it was time.

Japan photo album

Here are some shots from it:











Yeah. Go check it out.

movie nerd

Good lord, my Netflix queue just passed 300 movies.

It would be more impressive if I had a better track record, but I keep renting shit that looks good and is actually awful.

On that note, if any of you reading this actually enjoyed the movie Gozu, please tell me why. I love weird movies, and experimental cinema, and all of that nonsense. I have a high tolerance for bizarre situations and bodily fluids and gore. But Gozu was just BORING. I can't believe so many people gave it a good rating.

And just for reference, I loved Ichi the Killer.

charities should send baseballs to idiots

By the way, did any of you read the story about the three kids who died of bird flu in Turkey? At the very bottom of the story that I read, they happened to mention in passing that the kids probably caught the disease from PLAYING CATCH WITH THE SEVERED HEADS OF DEAD CHICKENS.

They might as well just name it Darwin Flu.

shadow of the colossus

I've been playing Shadow of the Colossus all night. For those of you who don't know it, it's this really innovative PS2 game where you have to run all over the world and kill these 16 massive (and by massive I mean 20 story tall) colossi. You climb all over them and stab their weak points. And that's it, no other fighting, just you riding your horse over an empty world, killing huge monsters. It's pretty amazing.

Thing is, almost the whole time I'm playing, I want to just throw the controller down and quit, because the idiots that made this game must not have play tested the controls or camera angles AT ALL. I want to keep playing because it's brilliant and beautiful, and I've never played anything like it before.

But jesus CHRIST these might be some of the worst controls I've ever seen on a game. A huge part of the game is hanging on to the fur on these monsters and climbing around on them. But half the time, you push one way on the controller and the guy goes a different way. Or the camera will be stuck on the other side of the monster and you'll have no idea what you're doing.

It's almost like they finished the game and it was too easy, so they said "fuck it, let's just make the controls not work, that will make it harder".

We'll see. I want to keep playing and beat it, but I just beat the sixth colossus and nearly threw the controls across the room a few times during the fight, so I might just end up with a broken controller.

PLAY TEST YOUR GAMES BETTER, DAMMIT. There's barely enough good games out there as it is, you don't need to mess up the good ones.

don't cross the streams!

Ray! Turn the blasphemy meter to 11!

lost

Okay, I spent a solid 14 hours this Monday watching Lost. I had heard that it was pretty good, but I didn't expect it to suck my life away. I sat down in the morning to watch an episode with my breakfast, and I ended up turning it off sometime around 4am, because I couldn't keep my eyes open any more.

Yeah, it's a good show, but that's not what I want to talk about.

I'd like, just once, for a TV show to just take a big shit all over stereotypes and conventions. Lost does not do this, obviously. The cast is totally full of every racial stereotype you can imagine, and it's not like they're bastards for doing this, we expect it. It's everywhere in our media, there's hardly a movie or show out there without them.

But these are the characters I'd like to see in a tv show:

Older black woman - Instead of being wise, and saying "honey", and knowing people's inner secrets, I want an older black woman who is completely imperceptive, callous, arrogant. We've seen the "wise mammy" character in every damn movie and show ever. Let's see a cursing and spitting black woman COWBOY, kicking ass and taking names.

Asian woman - Let's have an asian woman (real asian, not americanized asian) who isn't meek and mysteriously good with herbs. I don't understand why every asian woman is born with a magical ability to heal people with herbs, but that needs to go. I want them to put an asian girl on the show who looks and acts more like the asians I've seen in real life, in cities like Tokyo. Make her a gum chewing, tittering fashion whore. Even better, make her a middle aged gum chewing, tittering fashion whore. Asians in media are always very young or very old.

Indian/arabic/generic brown guy - These guys are always problem solvers, or techies, or some other deus ex machina device where anything that the main characters can't figure out will be magically solved by the phenomenal abilities of Generic Brown Guy! I have to give Lost respect, they make Brown Guy have a love interest, he's usually totally asexual and nonthreatening. Here's what I'd like, give the asian woman role to an indian guy, that would freak people out. Have a young indian guy be really meek and good with herbs and acupuncture. I've never seen that in a show.

Fat guy who isn't comic relief - nuff said. I don't care what role Fat Guy gets, but just once, I'd like to see him not be the Jester. Give him a love interest, make him angsty or serious, but stop making him the dancing monkey. Show some creativity.

That's all I've got for now. But you get the point. I'd like to see a minority in a tv show and not be able to predict their niche and behavior.

hey man, nice shot

Someone has produced a stabilized version of the Zapruder JFK assassination video that looks fantastic. They apparently went back and cleaned up each frame and stabilized its location to remove the blurs and shakes.

What's produced is by far the clearest rendering of the assassination that I've ever seen.

http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0512/zapruder_stable.mov

I still don't get why Jackie went vaulting over the back of the car like that.