in Cali.

I'm in California because I'm a jerk. Well, actually I didn't know we were going this year. But Chad wanted to. And then my mom realized that we needed to deliver our gifts to people. And we needed to trade some stuff with cousin Wesley. So on Christmas day someone told me "We're going to California tomorrow. We'll be back Monday." So here I am.

We were going to leave today and go halfway but then people started getting all huffy and saying 'It's snowing in the pass which means instant death so you must stay here.' So I will be back in Leb tomorrow evening. We started a new post-Guns Behind Brett series, one in which Jack and Alex chase each other, and Chad and Wes and Brian and Elaine and Connor all have parts in the struggle. The movie turned out quite good. They call it "Old School Style".

No more for now.

on his way, in the night, Saigon hero pistol light.

Last night I had a dream that George Dubya Stupid was trying to set up missile-launching bases here in Oregon. He set up one, and people found it and protested, so he closed it up and then set up another base which we found again. Then in part two of the dream I was driving to Portland with my friend who was a bizarre mixture of Andy and David Villenueve. In the car we were talking about A.R.E. Weapons. Along the way we stopped and met up with his girlfriend, who was a complete figment of my imagination. She was not based on anyone. I find it fascinating that when I'm not even in control of my brain it can create an entire person, with distinct physical traits and personality. She was nice.

I'm using the computer of mon mere et pere, and it sucks. Sure, it has DSL, but it has fallen victim to the scoundrels of the internet. Some people say "ah, what's so bad about pop-up ads?" What's bad is when they infect your PC with a virus and then completely take it over. I am assaulted with ads every minute or so. The homepage is always automatically set to some "daily offers" page that sets off a chain of pop-ups when you get on the web. Some sites are inaccessible because "this computer has been hacked. File error 556TTTG7,,[ 99--hjh3ASSH*&Y6677. Go download this stuff." Just now the computer froze up for a good 20 seconds as if it was processing something. Then it stopped and nothing happened.

I know the Davey picture didn't work. That's because I can't get onto the Google image search to find any pictures. The page won't work. So I must use the Yahoo image search, which is far inferior. Jeremiah on a horse to Mexico!!

So that's what's up. I have yet to write about Christmas. But it's comin.

art imitating life? or just crap?

I have conquered Daydreamin' Davey. For those of you not in the know, DD was a poorly made game for the NES from the HAL company, the same people who brought you...I have no idea what else (but according to the end credits, DD is "another fine product from the HAL company", which sounds strangely sarcastic).

In the game you take control of Davey, a young ADD victim with the tendency to drift off into dangerous dream worlds while attending school. During the first part of the game there is some setup for each level, like a teacher saying "now we will talk about the middle ages" or "let's watch a video about the old west", which thus sends Davey into the Daydreams of his namesake. But as the game goes on, things stop making sense, and at one point Davey simply runs out of the school and falls into delusion right on the front lawn.

The daydreams are all based in history, which leads one to believe that the character Davey is either a super-nerd or that the game was made as a final project in someone's world history class. Throughout the game Davey visits the middle ages, the old west, ancient Greece, the middle ages, the old west, ancient Greece...and then the middle ages, the old west, and ancient Greece again. And every time each world is laid out the same, which means Davey must have a very uncreative imagination. The worlds start overlapping near the end of the game as a hole in the ground of the old west suddenly leads to Hades, and a bridge in the middle ages leads to "the dark forest" which is just a green Hades where arabian sultans shoot magic at you. Maybe Davey has some creativity after all, or maybe he's just been poppin' too many pills.


Every school has it's "special" students...

The game ends with Davey awaking in class after shooting some cowboys in his dream world. A girl sitting next to Davey asks him if he would like to study with her sometime, because apparently she is very impressed with his ability to sleep through class but still know how the shootout at the O.K. Corral went down (because he was there, of course). But I guess Davey prefers living in his dream world, because he exclaims "I'm outta here!" to the girl and proceeds to run out the front doors of the school. The end.

So what did Daydreamin' Davey teach me? That it's okay to spend $10 on a nintendo game if it keeps you occupied for a few days and leaves you with a sense of accomplishment after you complete it. I'm outta here.

brain-exploding breaking news.

"Saddam, with a thick, graying beard and bushy, disheveled hair, was seen as doctor examined him, feeling his scalp and holding his mouth open with a tongue depressor. Saddam blinked and touched his beard during the exam."

You're kidding!!!! He blinked??? And then proceeded to TOUCH his BEARD?? This is the most mind-blowing report I've ever read!! I peed my pants twice while reading it! I couldn't ever, in my wildest fantasy science-fiction dreams, imagine an Iraqi dictator blinking and touching his beard. That's enough to make old men drop dead from disbelief. I have to hand it to those reporters for giving the American people just what they want to hear.

I hear that CBS is already planning a prime time movie about the event. They must find the right actor who knows how to blink well on camera and touch a beard with authentic fervor. Maybe Sir Richard Attenborough?

Christopher Lee's goth wig!

Momus meets The Wicker Man.

'The Wicker Man' is a movie I watched with Tristan at the Wells Manor a while back. Not since Zardoz had I seen such a bizarre, head-scratching, confused-laugh-inducing piece of 70s cinema failure. Maybe I wrote about it on my site before. It's one of those films that really isn't very good, but for some reason you remember it for the rest of your life. Kind of like Flash Gordon.

Something I found interesting was that according to the video's box the movie is terrifying and disturbing, "a totally corrupt shocker". But the actual film isn't standard movie horror. It's more like conservative-Christian horror, the kind of "nightmare tale" that bible-beating parents would tell their kids on Halloween (but they would probably change the ending and have Jesus nuke the island like in Jurassic Park). To a modern college student, the movie is just wonderfully wierd and funny. Anyway, Momus apparently took more from it than I ever could, but at least he recognised the same basic things Tristan and I did. Rent it today, kids!

"Hobbits UNITE!"

lame
adj. lam�er, lam�est

1. Disabled so that movement, especially walking, is difficult or impossible: Lame from the accident, he walked with a cane. A lame wing kept the bird from flying.

2. Marked by pain or rigidness: a lame back.

3. Weak and ineffectual; unsatisfactory: a lame attempt to apologize; lame excuses for not arriving on time.

4. Leonard Nimoy singing a song about a hobbit amidst a bunch of women born without dignity: Now hobbits are peace-loving folks, you know; they're never in a hurry and they take things slow.

amazing developments.

Way to go Tristan for figuring out how to make pictures happen! Now I can do this!

listening to Japanese new wave.

So last night I had a dream in which Chad and I downloaded a home video of Paul McCartney singing his lost song about the Hamburglar. The last few minutes of the video were just his kids drawing pictures of war, with little stick figures getting shot. In the dream I was laughing so hard I was crying.

I hear ya, Tristan.

"Y'know, college is a lot like a disease."

"Because if you live through it you become stronger?"

"No, because it sucks."

Continue on for 2 more new posts.

...in other news, the Grammys still suck.

Oh boy! The Grammys! You know what that means?

Beyonce and her boyfriend, Jay-Z, were contenders for record of the year for their summer anthem "Crazy in Love."

Not only that, but Evanescense and Justin Timberlake and 50 Cent all got nominated! Isn't that great?? It's wonderful that such talented artists are getting nods, but what about that song in the McDonalds commercials? I thought for sure that would be up for record of the year.

God, I hate the Grammys. They get worse by the year. My first gripe with the 'awards' was back in high school when I realized that there were awards for best classical album, best modern Christan album, best Caribbean dance album, best Bulgarian goth album, best interplanetary polka album, and best album recorded by a household pet, but there was NO category for electronic or DJ. Sure, there is a 'dance' category, but the nominees are always FM radio hot-mixes of pop songs. I remember when they threw William Orbit in with the 'instrumental pop' category and swept Moby into 'alternative'. The latter category seems to be where they put all the music they didn't see on MTV.
"Have you heard of these guys The Beta Band? I hear their album's good."
"Who? Just put 'em in alternative."

The good news is that Outkast and The White Stripes are nominated for album of the year. The bad news is that so are those people I mentioned earlier. It's a sad world in which Justin Timberlake's "Justified" and The White Stripes' "Elephant" get nominated for the same award. Sadder still is the fact that Justin has a much better chance of winning. I feel like the Grammys should just ignore good albums altogether. Last year they didn't even mention Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and I was okay with that because it's obvious that they specialize in awarding shallow, financially successful pop records. They should just stick to that. They should never consider Radiohead, or Wilco, or The White Stripes, or The Strokes, or The Flaming Lips, or even Beck. They should just continue throwing awards at new R&B "geniuses" and showing nostalgic pity for acts like Steely Dan and Willy Nelson. But I guess then people might notice that the Grammys are the same as the Billboard Music awards and that both are just evil schemes concocted by the big record companies to increase sales (and I think Cobra may be involved, too).

So what do I think was the best music of this past year? Follow this link and click the picture.

Send down the birds.

"People thought I was dead but I was just directing The A Team."

Here's to David Hemmings.

Doom: thoughts and meditations.

I'm going to talk a little about video games. The Doom series to be precise. If you don't know Doom, you just won't know what I'm talking about. So go home.

Doom 3 is coming out soon. If y'all remember, Doom I and II pretty much defined the first-person shooter genre as well as the PC gaming scene when they were released back in the mid-90s. So now the long awaited 3rd is about to be dropped, and some information and screenshots have been released. The new game is apparently intended to be darker and scarier, more twisted and macabre, and more realistic. The monsters have all been redesigned to look nightmarish and horror-like, and the people at id software say Doom 3 is going to be more about creeping around and being scared than just shooting everything.

And this all makes sense. If you look at the current state of action and first-person shooter games you will see that the scary, disturbing motif has become quite popular, and it isn't very surprising to see the Doom franchise making an attempt to become part of that crowd rather than remain a nostalgic inspiration. It's kind of like how Vanilla Ice tried to make a comeback as a rap-metal act, or how Ozzy Osborne tries to stay potent in the shock-rock world that he created long ago.

I was playing Doom II the other day on the old family computer in Lebanon. The PC hadn't even been turned on in a year or so, but I started her up and had some fun in the Doom world in which I used to play every day after school. I put in the codes - God mode, happy ammo, no clipping - and shuffled around the halls of hell, turning big exaggerated demons into piles of pasta. As I played, I thought about the new Doom, and the scare factor, and the disturbing imagery, and I figured "to hell with it" (excuse the pun). It hit me that all that horror stuff isn't what Doom was all about. It wasn't about being scared, or being immersed in a dark story of survival and terror. It was about shooting monsters. It was about getting a bigger gun and saying "hell yeah" the first time you use it. Back in the era of the older games, the first-person shooter was a young medium that people were just starting to enjoy. Now that a game engine had been created that allowed players to simulate first-person killing sprees, the only variables were who to shoot and where to shoot them. First, id made Wolfenstein 3D which let you walk around a castle shooting Nazis. Nazis, of course! Everybody hates Nazis! What better way to utilize this first-person shooter stuff than give everybody the chance to gun down such a widely hated villian? After the success of Wolfenstein, the Doom games used the same template and just plugged in the idea of demon-martians in hell. Brilliant! Demons and martians! They're even more basic human enemies than the Nazis!

It is obvious when playing Doom II that the purpose of the game is good ol' fashioned blowing stuff away. There's an underlying element of fun, a hint of camp, that makes the game a joy. It's the way your character's face at the bottom of the screen is slightly comic; the square jawed, confident everyman that is stuck in this horrible environment but maintains a sense of arrogance. It's the darkly-comic hidden Wolfenstein levels that throw blond, blue-eyed Nazis in with hungry monsters that will eat them as soon as you. It's what "BFG" really stands for. These are the things that made Doom what it was, and it's that very same "don't give a shit" attitude that later resurrected Duke Nukem to take the genre to new depraved heights.

Doom 3 will come soon and a new generation will sit, frightened and disturbed, in front of their computers. But when I think of the imp, I will always picture a little brown guy who shot fireballs at me before my BFG turned him into stew.

news.

There's a new song. Well, it's from last week, but I didn't get around to putting it up until today. It's right here.

"whinny whinny...horse sounds, horse sounds"

What do you think of the new Hotmail?? Comment below to start a flaming controversy!! Biggins!

I meant to talk about this a while back in response to Trickstan, but I didn't. Now it comes.
I made a movie way back in the day called From the Earth to the Moon part XXVII, and it starred a bunch of G.I. Joes and animal toys and various action figures. It was an epic, two parts even, about an evil Space Nazi and the noble idiot Captain Tommy. I can't remember the whole story. Something about Tommy and his crew getting captured because they stopped to get some drinks, and then all hell breaks loose and such. The action scenes were spectacular; one featured a giant ...talking crab and another focused on a battle between a dinosaur pinata and a friendly Gobot mobile fortress. The movie also featured an unforgettable robot character named Probe-Bot, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his brilliant line delivery ("Now I will proceed with the probing of your anus" and "I am dead now, you bastard"). If any of you haven't seen it, remind me next time you're at my house. Your head will explode upon viewing!