Today, I was reading volume 5 of Grimm Fairy Tales. The beginning of The Little Mermaid features a two-page spread of a ship crashing against some rocks during a thunderstorm at night. At first glance, I was like "Okay, I get what's happening" and was ready to turn the page.

But then I had a thought. A two-page spread obviously takes a lot of time, care and effort to draw. Maybe glancing and turning the page like that would be doing a disservice to the artist. Maybe I owed it to Claudio Sepulveda to take the time to look at and absorb every detail to honor all the effort.

Anybody else ever feel this way?

There was a discussion at a forun I occasionally visit on which gaming systems you've owned, past and present. I took a trip down memory lane and came up with these:

PC
Mac Plus
Atari 2600
Colecovision
NES
Super NES
Sega Master System
Sega Genesis
Sega CD
Sega Saturn
Sega Dreamcast
Playstation
Playstation 2
Playstation 3
Gamecube
Xbox
Xbox 360
PSP

Maybe I should write an entry on the various memories I have on each console. That might be fun!

You can put a small robot on an airplane by stuffing it in a suitcace and metal detectors and x-ray machines will never detect it.

There's huge airplane graveyard and desert in the back of the Smithsonian.

Every female college student looks like a Maxim cover girl.

College dorm room are pretty big and come with complimentary Mountain Dew vending machines.

College students can afford hi-tech computer technology.

The U.S. government can cover up giant robots beating each other up and causing collateral damage in major cities, even in foreign countries and in an era of cell phone cameras, the internet and 24 hour news networks.

You can make a movie that doesn't have one moment of silence in it.

Eating a pot brownie makes you act drunk and hyperactive.

In an action movie, it's not necessary to be able to see what's going on during the action scenes.

If two giant robots was to have a private discussion, the best place to do it is on top of a skyscraper in New York City.

Flights from the East Coast to the West Coast take about 30 minutes.

Robots have souls and share the same Heaven as humans.

All major landmarks in Egypt are conveniently located within walking distance.

If you get constantly shot at and nearly blown up in the desert, the guys will all be dirty and have cuts and bruises. Hot women, on the other hand, will still look like they just stepped off a photo shoot.

A movie can have many subplots, but no main plot.

It's possible to make an action movie that has more failed comedy that a Friedberg/Seltzer movie.

Do you think Joe Quesada and Dan DiDio got together one day and made a bet to see who could do a more efficient job of running their respective companies into the ground?

I experienced one minor consequence of watching Paranormal Activity. While I was trying to sleep, I kept jumping at any small noise I heard around the house. Didn't make for a good night's sleep.

I played the Left 4 Dead 2 demo last night. I also played it right before going to work. It was longer than I expected. The demo allows people to play two stages of one campaign. I think the demo for the first game only had one stage to play. Of the new infected, the Spitter and the Charger are the most badass. The Spitter spits out green bile that harm the survivors. They also leave a pool of green goo when you shoot them. The Charger just plows into like a linebacker from Hell. Then it grabs the nearest survivor and keeps pummeling him on the ground until he's dead. Most of the returning special infected have been given a slight makeover. While playing this morning, I got a closeup of the new Smoker and he's much uglier than he was in the first game. The Witch also walks around now. I guess she got sick of sitting around, crying and decicded to be more proactive. We also have zombies in riot gear that you can only kill by shooting them in the back or hitting them.

I tried almost all the firearms and all the melee weapons. The melee weapons are hit or miss, no pun intended. The police baton is kinda slow. I was eager to use the guitar to do a Pete Townshend impression with the zombies, but it doesn't seem to be too accurate and  you miss the zombies about half the time. The machete was neat to use, especially since killing the zombies with it causes blood to splash on the screen. The pan is kinda neat too.

Last night, I played as Coach (The big black guy) and this morning, I played as Nick (The guy in the Miami Vice suit). How do the new characters stack up? I haven't quite warmed up to them as much as the original cast. Maybe I need to play more. Or maybe their personalities come out more when you play a full campaign. They didn't seem quite as talkative and their dialogue wasn't quite as funny and snarky. Maybe it's a demo thing and this will be smoothed out in the actual game.

I saw Paranormal Activity today. Go see it! Don't read spoilers. In fact, don't read anything about it. It's best if you go in cold.

Unfortunately, the experience was tarnished somewhat by the idiots in the theater who kept talking and making bad jokes very loudly.

I finished my third day on the new job today. Five hours of data entry isn't quite my ideal job, but I'm grateful to finally have a steady paycheck again. At the end of my shift, my boss had a bunch of Halloween candy and invited me to help myself to as much of it as I wanted! I hadn't had any Halloween candy this year and eagerly snapped up anything that looked good. I felt like a kid on Halloween again.

Okay, it's been a week since I've watched Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and while I'm still licking some wounds, I've overall recovered from the experience.

Since this movie made approximately five hundred zillion dollars at the box office, naturally, a Transformers 3 has been greenlighted. And Michael Bay is gonna be directing again, whether we like it or not. The question is, will anybody heed the criticism that the second movie received or will they adopt an "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach. The cynic in me figures that since is was a massive blockbuster, they'll go with the latter. The second movie pretty much took everything wrong with the first movie and cranked all the knobs up to twelve. The thought of trying to outdo the second movie makes me shudder.

So I guess we can look forward to more useless human characters, more pointless subplots and no main plot and lots more attempted comic relief that's unfunny at best and offensive at worse. Oh, and plenty of badly shot, incomprehensible action scenes as well.

One of those things that makes you glad the days of 90's CD-ROM "interactive movie" games are over. Made all the more bearable by Spoony.

I watched two movies to help get me in a Halloween mood: Drag Me To Hell and Trick 'r Treat. I started with the Unrated Director's Cut of Drag Me To Hell was really good! Nice to see Sam Raimi hasn't necessarily abandoned his horror roots. In retrospect, it probably wasn't the right movie to watch while eating dinner. Trick 'r Treat had its moments but wasn't essential viewing. Both were much better than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

I read Batman: Streets of Gotham #5. It's bad enough that they put Huntress back in the Jim Lee outfit, but so they really have to undo all of her post-Hush character development as well?

Okay, it's been two days since I watched Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and I've had plenty of time to recover from the pain and trauma. I'm still pretty mad, though.

Why am I mad? Two reasons. First, how could they spend $200 million to make such a bloated, overlong, annoying, sensory-overloading, 100% entertainment free pile of shit? It's obvious that no love or care was put into this movie. Didn't anybody involved in the production step in at one point and say, "Uh, this isn't really working. Maybe we should clean it up?"

But what really infuriates me is that it made as much money as The Dark Knight did last year. For some inexplicable reason, people flocked to this movie in droves. How could bad word of mouth have possibly not killed it? Did nobody tell their friends, "Don't see it. It sucks!" This sends a message to Hollywood, "This is what we like. Please make more movies like this." How could a movie that nobody seemed to like make so much?

Now, I'm getting worked up again. Fuck you, Michael Bay and fuck you, movie going public.

Last night, I watched the Blu-Ray for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Before I start this review, let me stress that I'm not one of those obnoxious film snobs who only likes black and white movies that are three hours of people sitting in a room, talking to each other in Scandinavian. I approach each movie judging it on the basis of what it is and what it's trying to accomplish. And I believe it takes just as much skill, talent and craftsmanship to create a good piece of entertainment as it does to makes something "artsy."

That said, Transformers 2 completely and totally blows.
( More of the review... )

I've been reading Batman: Streets of Gotham, mainly for the Manhunter second feature. After reading the last two issues, something confused me. Maybe I've missed something, but I have to wonder: What is Huntress doing back in the Jim Lee outfit?

This was Sonata Arctica's first headlining show in the U.S., having spent the past month opening for Dragonforce. The band seemed happy to play a full set this time. As Tony Kakko said, "This is where the real fun begins." The band sounded great. Tony, as usual, was great at interacting with the crowd.

Setlist:
Everything Fades To Gray (Instrumental)
Paid In Full
Black Sheep
Caleb
The Last Amazing Grays
Fullmoon
Replica
As If the World Wasn't Ending
Flag In the Ground
White Pearl, Black Oceans
Last Drop Falls
Juliet
The Cage

Encore:
In the Black and White
Don't Say A Word

I'm gonna be starting a new job a week from Monday! Let's hope it goes better than the last one.

Something cool I just found out about Zombieland.

An editor of that movie is the husband of someone I knew in high school. And the director is a friend of hers!

How about that!