On Tuesday I went and saw ‘3:10 to Yuma’ and loved it. It had violence, humor and emotional yet manly moments, everything I look for in a Western. Then for some reason I got really depressed and tired on Wednesday. And today I went to see ‘Juno’, a delightful romp through teen pregnancy and adoption. Plus for some reason a torrent I’m downloading has lost data, it was at 38.2% this morning when I had to turn the power off to fumigate the house and now it’s at 37.4%?

You know I don’t think it was a good or a bad week, it was just a week.

I’ve change my theme because while I like the one I was using the fact I couldn’t stop the text from sitting on the picture was really annoying me.

The keyboard on my laptop is still not working. So I plugged a USB keyboard in and it worked fine. Which means it’s a hardware fault… I think. Trouble is I noticed the clock was wrong so I went to time and date to change it and the USB keyboard wouldn’t enter the root user password. I decided to save the AbiWord document I had been working on and when I tried to name this document, again the keyboard wouldn’t input text. So I decided to try the time again and this time used the laptop keyboard and I pressed the first letter only to have it exit the password dialogue and start acting up the way it has been.

On a different note I finished Starship Troopers in about 5 hours. It was a short read but I loved it. So now I’ve booked The Code of the Woosters, Where’s My Jetpack and The Secret Life of Houdini from the Brisbane City Council Library. All three are book picks from Mac Break Weekly. Hopefully I won’t have to wait to long for them to become available.

For the third time this week the Comedy Channel has shown a repeat of Conan O’Brien from October. Why? Sure it’s on repeats in the US but why can’t we relive great moments from the trip to Chicago such as the Masturbating Bear skydiving, or other moments I can’t think of? (Originally this argument was better formed and longer, then I checked and found it was being repeated in the US as well.)

Another thing that is annoying me about Foxtel is that The Lab with Leo has been back on since last week, but I only found out tonight while looking through the electronic programme guide. This could be my own fault as when I checked last week to see if it was back on, I stupidly was checking the time it USED to be on, a nice respectable time of 5:30pm Brisbane time. The How To Channel however decided Monster House a show were idiots think up stupid impractical renovations for houses and then go through with these stupid impractical renovations, was better served in this time slot, leaving The Lab at 11:30pm Brisbane time, the time when it used to be repeated as the first run time slot.

Yet another annoyance with Foxtel is the advertising. Why does Pay-TV(lets look at the first part of that term, Pay) have ads? I’ve forked over money to see these shows, why do you need advertisers? And why do you seam to show more ads than the Free-To-Air Commercial stations?

P.S. If you know why Foxtel has ads please tell me, I’d like to know. And don’t just tell me it’s because the operating costs are just too high to be run solely on subscription revenue, because if that were the case I fail to see the point in operating in the first place.

Well It’s over now. Atlas Shrugged has the most anticlimactic ending since The DaVinci Code. It just ends, but not before showing that the whole book was a load of crap. Not much else I can say, though hindsight says that I should have waited until now to post the earlier post, that way I could have said some more.

The total communisation of the world was jarring for me. Especially the first mention of the “People’s State of England” I’m just thankful Australia wasn’t mentioned because if the phrase “People’s State of Australia” was uttered I’d have thrown the book down as fascicle twaddle. The very concept of a communist England or Australia is so alien and bizarre that the rest of the book, in its entirety was easier to believe. The very idea that people would allow such idiocy to occur is easier to swallow than the mere hint of a communist England or Australia.

Beyond that the whole book was overly pro-American, with statements such as “America is the only country to have built itself and not been built on the back of others,” or something similar, which is complete bullshit.

I honestly feel that I need to cleanse my palate by reading another book before I start to read Starship Troopers.

I’ve been reading Atlas Strugged since mid November, picking it up and reading bits and pieces here and there. I decided to read it after it appeared like five times in the same week.

The end is in sight however with just 100 or so pages to go, and I’ve got complaints. If I were to meet them I wound smack most of the characters around. The use of “lighted” really bumps me out of the novel, everytime someone lights a cigarette. And of course the speeches made continuously are long winded. This came to a culmination when a speech is made in chapter 7 of part 3 that lasts from page 1009 to 1069. Sixty pages of rambling garbage about man and objectivism and blah, blah, blah. I, as said in the title, didn’t read 90% of it, I just gave up after 7 pages and started counting pages.

Well I’m just happy that I’m near the end of this book. Have I gained new philosophical stand points? Yes. Are they that of Objectivism? No. Does it involve punching out anyone who follows Objectivism? Yes.

I’m going to finally get around to reading Starship Troopers after I’m done with Atlas Shruged. With any hope I’ll enjoy it 100 times more than I’ve enjoyed Atlas Shrugged.

First things first, I started writing this on the laptop I keep in the lounge room that I use to write these but then the keyboard decided to randomly reassign all the buttons as Num lock, Caps Lock, Back space, G, H or ‘.

I decided that I need a mascot so I spent literally minutes in 3DS Max and made one, which can be seen here or in the header. Hopefully he’ll show up in posts to demonstrate the issue. I planned to write this while watching Leno and Conan and post before going to bed, but instead I’m typing it up mid afternoon after taking longer than I thought to make this example of how the as yet unnamed mascot will be used.

The Little guy needs a name and the two I can think of are Todd with either 1 or 2 ds, or Thomas Oliver Dunkirk III. I prefer Thomas Oliver Dunkirk III because it sounds pretentious.

I’m probably going to go see Cloverfield at some point, probably when I have to be out of the house for 3 hours while the house is being cockroach bombed. The reason for this change of heart is the legal team have told me I can’t call a movie the worst movie of all time just because I’ve seen the trailer.

Speaking of the trailer, the TV spot lists it as being rated M for frightening sequences or something and “Sci Fi Violence”. What the fuck is Sci Fi violence, and how is it different from regular violence? “Oh My God that nice man’s head exploded when the bad man shot him!” is no different to “Oh My God that nice man’s head exploded when Mr alien bad man went ‘BZZT’ with his ray gun!”. The ratings used to be simple, the violence was in varying degrees of violence or animated violence. None of this pointless sub-categorising with “War Violence” or “Battle Violence” or “Sci Fi Violence”

Either way I apologise for lying that I’d avoid Cloverfield like the plague, then turning around and deciding to go see it. As I’m a sad little quote monkey I’m going to end each post with a quote from whatever DVD I watch while writing the post. Tonight it’s “10 Things I Hate About You”(1999) the romantic comedy with Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Allison Janney and a host of other people whose names I can’t be bothered to remember.

“I still maintain he kicked himself in the balls” – Kat

Star Trek XI in the hands of J.J. Abrams and crew, well a sad day indeed, sure it has the guy who plays Sylar in Heroes and Eric Bana and John Cho, but even these fantastically talented people cannot over come the enormous drag factor of J.J. Abrams and crew. I say crew because not only is it J.J. but all the writers and producers are a close net group who have worked with him on the projects I’ve listed above. This means that the production, directing and writing team for Star Trek XI is roughly equivalent to the current Bush administration. Not only is a complete buffoon in charge but he’s decided that the best men for the jobs are his mates, all of which are buffoons of the same calibre as Mr Abrams himself.

Some of the people involved in Star Trek XI have admitted that they haven’t seen an episode of Star Trek. This is not necessarily a bad thing after all, Nicholas Myers had seen practically no Star Trek before he directed The Wrath of Khan and this one was possibly one of the best things to happened to Star Trek. He brought humor and irreverence to Star Trek that saved it after The Motionless Picture. Being involved in Star Trek is no guarantee of success though, look at Voyager and Enterprise, all the people involved in it had been involved in Star Trek since the late 80s or early 90s. That is of course a rant for another day.

Some of the people making Star Trek XI have said that they are huge trekkies, one even to the point of considering the novels canon. Once you consider those canon you might as well consider Star Trek V to be canon. And then to go even further you might as well consider fan-fiction to be canon, I can just imagine it now, “Kirk and Spock’s Love Child: The Movie”. At this point now though I’m just talking shit and rambling, of course some would say this entire article has been rambling shit. But enough about this, lets move on to more pointless reasons to hate J.J. Abrams. He along with Michael Bay represent what is wrong with the American movie industry. They make horribly predictable movies aimed at the 90% of the population who are complete morons. Who think that reading is for pussies, reality television is entertaining, and Halo is the greatest video game series of all time. Oh sure they make money, that is the aim of any business, but this is truly the worst thing about them. It is a sad sad world we live in when geniuses like Joss Wheadon and Mike Judge are for the most part toiling in obscurity, and it’s a miracle that the likes of the Cohen brothers and Wes Anderson are able to continue making movies. Movies that are a beacon of great story telling in an age of “High Concept”, where movies get written and conceptualised so that they can be pitched to a studio executive in a sentence, preferably a short one.

Part of me wants Star Trek XI to be a good movie so that the Star Trek franchise can continue on be it through more movies or a new TV series. But another part of me wants it to fail so that J.J. Abrams can be taken down a peg. Then another part of me also wants the movie to fail so that Star Trek can be put into a kind of hibernation and reawakened when both it and the world are ready again.

Now if you haven’t figured it out, I hate J.J. Abrams. I don’t know why I hate him so much, just that I do. I’ve never enjoyed any of his TV shows or his movies. Let’s have a look at some of them.

Felicity, a show about a female university student who has awkward relationships and other girlie stuff. That really sounds like the kind of show you would expect from a male nerd.

Alias, a show about a “sexy” spy living undercover as a university student, I put sexy in quotes because to call Jennifer Garner sexy is like calling a “Chicko roll and a XXXX” a “slice of Wagu and a glass of Grange Hermitage”. I’m not saying she’s completely hideous but for the love of god, visible ribs are just not sexy. I stopped watching Alias when during the first episode she walks into the fake blood donation van and arrogantly tells the CIA agent that he needs her because only she can give him information about some other agency. She then proceeds to show what she knows by drawing a pissy little diagram of how she understands the organisation operates. The CIA agent then shows her a proper diagram that takes up a piece of paper like 1.5m2 in size, with really tiny font.

Lost, well now we get complicated. I will admit that I watched the first season and the start of the second. I could have edited it down to 5 minutes an episode watched them in one sitting and still have gotten everything I got from the full hour long episodes. And no, I didn’t stop watching because it got too complicated for me, I stopped watching it because it just felt like work instead of entertainment. I would go so far as to say that the closest parallel to the other 55 minutes would be the hour long Youth & Society lectures at 9am on a Friday morning I had last semester.

Mission: Impossible 3, I haven’t seen it yet and I don’t want to, because it stars Tom Cruise and it’s a second sequel to a mediocre movie, the first sequel of which is even more mediocre. But with these facts in place, I can safely assume M:I3 is less a movie and more a kick in the head with a bag of shite on the side.

With these as a guideline I going to extrapolate what this new city destroying monster is. A 300 foot high robot, resembling Tom Cruise, built by a group of hippies in the 70s with a purpose that is difficult to determine. The hippies of course are actually agents of a nondescript, possibly malevolent, covert agency. The robot is rampaging through New York because it’s currently in the middle of an awkward relationship.

Coming Soon: Part 3, The future mistakes.

J.J. Abrams, is there anything this guy can’t fuck up? His movies don’t even make good trailers. I was at the cinema today and saw a trailer for… something.

It started off at a going away party for some dropkick named Rob or Ron or whatever, with all his dropkick friends saying how they’ll miss him. Then a loud bang/rumble, which a news report thinks might be some sort of earthquake, shakes the apartment. To see what’s going on some of the dropkicks decide to go up to the roof, which is the first thing I think of when in an earthquake. On the roof they see a large fireball in the distance moving through New York, throwing large pieces of debris into nearby buildings. They then run down onto the street and see a very large piece of debris coming towards them which lands in the street and is shown to be the head of the statue of liberty. The trailer then ended, it showed “2008″ then flashed the credits. The only other title cards that appeared were “From Producer J.J. Abrams” and the “Bad Robot Productions” logo. Because of this I have no idea what the hell the name of this movie is, not that I would really want to know, other than to avoid it like the plague.

The entire fiasco was made worse by the fact that the trailer was comprised of footage shot to appear as camcorder footage of the party. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m a multimedia student or because I have taste but I detest footage shoot in this style. Another nitpick with it is that when the statue of liberty’s head lands on the street, it looks too small, about the size of two or three small cars. Now to be fair I’ve never been to New York, yet alone taken a tour of the statue of liberty to see it up close, so it may actually be that size. This still doesn’t excuse that it just looks small.

I finally checked Wikipedia and the movie is called Cloverfield. It turns out the entire movie is shot to look like someone found a camcorder and watched the tape. Apparently when the statue of liberty’s head lands in the street, people get out their camera phones and take pictures, the director says this was done because this is the modern norm continuous self documentation of our lives. And once again this doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you do WHEN NEW YORK IS BEING TORN TO PEICES!

The film is based on J.J. Abrams feeling that King King is “addorable” and that we need a city destroying monster who is “insane and intense” something he realised while in a toy store in Tokyo. Which is perfectly fine, I’m sure a Tokyo toy store is a great place to get wacky ideas, if I ever go I’m sure that I’d be able to come up with some brilliant ideas, ideas that can be sold to clients for cash. Not ideas that involve reviving a genre that is basically dead outside of Japan. After all the last city destroying monster film I saw was the modern American Godzilla, which was good for some laughs and mildly entertaining, until they did the usual Hollywood thing and left the door open for a sequel… and then made an animated series.

Coming soon: Part 2, the past mistakes of J.J. Abrams