hard gay

Hard Gay is my new hero. Bear with me, I know that sounds a bit strange. But when I was in Japan last year, I saw all these posters of a weird guy in a leather outfit and glasses, who Gulkis informed me was named "Hard Gay", and was all the rage. But I'd never actually seen any of his work.

Yuzo sent me a link to all of Hard Gay's videos last night, and they're HILARIOUS. He's difficult to describe, an eternally cheery bondage-dressed Japanese man who runs around chatting with people and yelling "hooooo!".

Start here:

http://www.videouncovered.com/adds/play_page.php?id=1263&id_char=bakuten

Hard Gay goes around the city helping people who need help. There's a couple in this series. The best is watching the Japanese people react to him running up to them.

Next, this one:

http://www.videouncovered.com/adds/play_page.php?id=584&id_char=bakuten

A ramen shop needs more customers, so Hard Gay helps out by grabbing people off the street. There's a surreal sequence where he plays in a park with children, which would be horribly inappropriate if he wasn't so harmless.

And then the best of all, he attacks Yahoo headquarters, claiming they stole his "HOOOOO!", and insists that they put him in a commercial. Watching him get Yahoo's massage expert in a leg lock is the funniest goddamn thing ever:

http://www.videouncovered.com/adds/play_page.php?id=585&id_char=bakuten

I'm going to spend the rest of the day yelling "HOOO!" after everything I say. Hard gay is the funniest goddamn thing ever.

mexicans

Apparently Mexicans really, REALLY like racing movies.

When Adrienne and I got out of seeing Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift tonight, the first thing she said to me was "There were one and a half white people in that theater", referring to the fact that she's half-Japanese.

That was freaking nuts. I would say that Mexicans are loud and annoying in movie theaters, because that place was a goddamn zoo, but that's the experience I have at every movie I see these days, because I'm old and growing to hate all of you. Most of all those of you who think you can come to a movie and talk to your friends without me killing you and using your corpse as a chew toy.

Anyway, the movie was fun and loud and stupid, and I highly recommend it to all of you. I was really surprised when I got home and looked up the trivia on IMDB to find that all of the drifting was real. That actually makes it even cooler in retrospect, because some of those moves they did just seemed completely unreal they were so sick.

As a side note, I've come to accept the fact that I'm Square Enix's bitch and there's no need to fight it. I've played through a little over half of Kingdom Hearts 2 so far, and I can't even stop watching the intro movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-iT3MxH7zo

Here's the thing. I'm playing a game where I'm a kid running around with Disney characters. But yet it's more engaging and produced better than damn near anything else you find in the RPG world. Square Enix could do an RPG where you spend the entire game getting better at flipping burgers and I'd probably play it, because they'd have some sort of complex burger flipping ranking system, and cute little chocobos who evaluate your progress, and some sort of dark Vegan level boss.

Point is, Square Enix is cool, and so is that video I posted above. They make videos like no other company out there.

eco movies

Speaking of eco-movies, like my last post, here's another one I want to see:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MSBykAngDpY

It's called "Who Killed the Electric Car?", about the fact that we've had electric cars for 10 years and NO ONE freaking uses them.

Hell, I want an electric car. I should go find where the hell I can get one and how much they cost. 99% of my driving is to work, errands, to the pub, or somewhere else within 50 miles. I wouldn't even need to find a charger when I'm out, because I'd be home in time.

I guess the big deal would be cost. Someone needs to make some cheapo $10k electric commuter car, where you could literally see how you're making up for the cost of the car while gas prices skyrocket.

Last time I looked there were a bunch of cars that only did about 40mph, but that preview seems to claim that there are some zippy electric cars out there.

Hmm. All the GEM and ZAP cars I just found are really slow non-commuter vehicles. Maybe the electric car really is dead.

a convenient advertisement

I saw An Inconvenient Truth tonight, a film billed as an environmental cautionary tale, and it was two movies in one. One of which I liked, one I didn't.

The first movie, which really felt like the reason the film was made, was an Al Gore biography. Lots of closeups of his face, him making fake phone calls, him standing surrounded by light as if he was a diety, him talking about his childhood in reverent terms, lots of slow motion and old photos, and heart tugging music. That movie SUCKED. It was boring, insincere, and I felt like I was paying to watch a campaign advertisement.

They could have called the movie An Inconvenient Truth: Gore 08!

The other movie, however, was a slideshow that Gore has been traveling the world to show people, and that was a great film. The effects of global warming have become so distinct as to become unavoidable and undeniable. He skews his graphs so that they're not centered on 0, so the film looks a bit more sensational than reality, so it looks like we're all gonna be dead in 10 years instead of 100, but seriously, 100 isn't that long either. We're really screwing ourselves, and at this point, we all pretty much know it, but it's just so damn easy to keep doing it.

I still recommend this film to people even though half of it is crap, because the other half is something everyone needs to see. Watch lakes vanish and icecaps melt over the course of a decade, and try to tell me that you're not scared. We're a bunch of stupid shortsighted monkeys, and we need to cut it out, have less kids, and stop shitting where we eat. Well, the nondeveloped countries need to have less kids. We've already started doing that.

The only sad part is that this film could have reached so many MORE people if it wasn't an Al Gore ad. That's going to turn off the half of the country that voted against him in 2000. If it was all about global warming, I think it would have had a stronger impact. Instead it's a really good important lesson, smothered in ego.

online address book

Has the address book problem been solved? I use del.icio.us for my links, gmail for my mail, I'm moving all of my things to a backed up, stable online source, so I can access it from anywhere. However, my address book has been the bane of my existence for years.

Some of you may remember that I lost my main machine a few weeks back, and have had to restore it. My palm address book was backed up there. Well, guess what? My treo died before I had a chance to back it up to the new machine, so I've lost all your addresses and phone numbers. Which freaking SUCKS. I've not had a very good year for data.

But I'm solving my data problems with a RAID in my machine so I'll never lose it again. What I want to do is solve my address problem. I want to gather the data on all my friends and put it somewhere that I can export in XML and import into everything I need, phones, email clients, whatever, and have it all in ONE place that I can access from anywhere.

It doesn't look like Google has an address book. Yahoo has one but it feels a little crappy. Do any of you use a good one that you can recommend?

clerks 2

When I found this trailer on google, I nearly had a heart attack:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4160288067913211129&q=clerks+2

Clerks 2, baby! It looks like Kevin Smith decided to kick it old skool, and drop all the dumbass plots about poop monsters and pop stars playing God, and just go back to a low budget bunch of dipshits running around saying things that make me laugh.

What's crazy is that Jay and Silent Bob don't look any older. Hell, Randall looks exactly the same too, and it's been 12 freakin years.

Thank you, Kevin Smith, for making me excited about a movie again. It's been a while!