Ah Internet, is there nothing you can’t destroy? An excerpt from the modern Hamlet:
ACT III SCENE II
Gertrude’s Bedchamber.
Enter HAMLET, to GERTRUDE.
HAMLET: Oi! Slag!
GERTRUDE: Watch your fucking mouth, kid!
POLONIUS: (From behind the curtain) Too right.
HAMLET: Who the fuck was that?
(He stabs POLONIUS through the arras.)
POLONIUS: Fuck!
HAMLET: Fuck! I thought it was that other wanker.
(Exeunt.)
Did you know that the History Channel’s new shows based on the Bible and on Vikings kicked the living crap out of the other shows on TV that night? Ratings-wise, I mean. Still, several wags in the comments on that article continue to insist that Jesus was a zombie.
Clearly that is untrue. Jesus came back from the dead, sparkled in the sunlight, and drinking his blood transformed people into his minions. He was obviously a vampire.
In case anyone was wondering what I’ve been up to. Did you know Red Dead Redemption lets you hog-tie an innocent woman and leave her on some train tracks to get run over? And you can also capture the entire population of a small town and leave them wriggling in impotent desperation while a train comes bearing down the tracks at them?
Did Django Unchained really have a 2h 45min running time? Because damn, I didn’t notice. In case you were wondering, that haunting Italian song in the middle of the movie was Ancora Qui by Ennio Morricone and Elisa (some Italian singer). The movie and the song are much recommended by yours truly.
I have finally finished the last book in The Wheel of Time series. The series was bloated and Jabba-like in its wordiness; I curse myself for getting stuck in its sunken cost fallacy. The last book was actually somewhat satisfying. However, for as long as I live I will never read the series again.
I’ve just had to find a new video link for the trailer for The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, which I discuss on the post linked. The original uploader apparently set the video to private, meaning I had to see if someone else posted the same trailer to Youtube. It’s easy to forget how ephemeral stuff online is but when big stuff like the deletion of Geocities happens people get a big kick in the pants reminding them that uploaded stuff is always in danger of disappearing. Good thing the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine exists, we sorely need their help if future generations are ever to understand the history of the Internet.
Music video of the opening theme.
I’m currently doing a marathon of Bodacious Space Pirates, a sci-fi anime about a high school girl who becomes a pirate captain in space (the title is fairly self-explanatory). It is glorious. Don’t be put off by the cutesy opening. It reminds me of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in its oddball premise and in the way it firmly grounds its fantastical science fiction elements within an interesting narrative. It’s how science fiction should be done, but too often writers forget the “fiction” part and it becomes a three hundred page exegesis of the workings of blaster pistols.
It’s actually fairly hard sci-fi for something from the visual media (i.e., movies, tv, comics, etc). Not that I care about the consistency of fictional gibberish (one of my favourite science fiction writers is Ursula K. Le Guin), but the little details are still pretty neat, such as how the space suits have an attachment point for helmets on the back and how the bulkheads have to be manually cranked open after the power on a ship comes back on.
I even like the recap at the beginning of each episode. Normally I’d just fast forward through it (for instance, Bleach has freaking five minutes of recap and the opening before you actually get to the episode you want to watch) but this show’s recap usually has some kind of space philosophy being read to you while scenes from the previous episodes remind you of the gist of what happened before. Stuff like,
“In outer space there isn’t an absolute left, right, up, or down. It all depends on your relative position. Understand where you’ve come from and where you’re going, which way you’re facing and you’ll always know your current position. Confronted by the vastness of space, you may be disoriented by how small you are. But overcoming that feeling is your first step in outer space.”
All of this while the protagonist is shown on her training cruise and learning how to space walk. The recap even presents new background info which isn’t absolutely needed but is nice to have.
Anyway, I like this show. Watching it isn’t a bad way to say goodbye to 2012.
Ok, done. Site looks pretty boss in mobile now. Also, congrats to everyone on not dying on the 21st. Here’s hoping we continue this streak to next year!
I am just now testing what my site looks like on a mobile device and unfortunately it looks like utter shit. I suck large for this oversight. Mea culpa. Expect fixings posthaste.
Via Cracked, that strange competitor to Mad Magazine during the 1980s (and now a comedy website/time sink), I learned about the Sami practice of half-castration, where a reindeer’s testicles are crushed to remove its orneriness while leaving it enough male hormones in the form of squished testicles to give the animal plenty of muscle mass and preventing it from becoming decadent and eunuch-like. The traditional practice is to have the reindeer’s testicles crushed personally, that person being a woman using merely her teeth and jaw muscles.
Perhaps a video might help illustrate what I’m talking about. Incidentally, if you watch it with the sound on mute it becomes vaguely pornographic, especially with the final shot of a guy smoking a cigarette.