AHAHAHA Man, FOX News.

FOX News never fails to provide me with my daily dose of laughter. Even if it is just one of their local affiliates. Dumb fucks. (>ワ<)

How Great is the Internet? \(⊙ ワ ⊙)/

Here's an example of how amazing the internet can be. So a group of us Sasuke fans started to notice that a lot of the music used on the program sounded familiar. Most obviously to me was the ending credits song: "Victory" from the Naruto soundtrack. Not too hard for most to identify since Naruto is one of those mainstream anime series. But then things got harder.
"This song sounds so familiar, but what is it?! WHAT IS IT?!?!" 
"Oh, I knew I heard it from somewhere. It's from Chicken Run [2000]."
Then the pool of knowledge dries up to puddle size: "What is that music that plays when the camera pans over Stage 2's obstacles during Sasuke 22?"



What the fuck, right? That's almost an impossible task. How the hell am I supposed to find that straw of knowledge in the haystack of all the music ever created? Well, damn, Internet to the rescue! Lookie here, someone comes in and tells us that the song is called "Operation Room" and it comes from a PS3 game called Mobile Suit Gundam: Target in Sight, a.k.a. Crossfire in the U.S.
Without this "internet" thing, how would i have found that? Asking my family members? Neighbors? How far can I reach from my chair? Across the world, apparently. (^___^)

Already Bad with DMCA, Straight Fucked With SOPA/PIPA

Megaupload got black-bagged on Thursday. This is what will happen all the time under SOPA/PIPA. We're not on the slippery slope anymore, guys. We're going over the edge, make no mistake about that.

On the plus side, both bills got shelved because of our show of opposition! The People ain't so retarded after all, eh?

Still, the problem hasn't disappeared. We've only won a battle, not the war. Those big companies are still circling and they still have DMCA. The link will take you to more information. It's a good article.

Piracy is crime, no doubt about that. Criminals do what they do. But guess what? Censorship isn't the right way to fight it. Let's look at this fact: A lot of people pirate music. Yeah, you know who we you are. And, yes, people used sites like Megaupload to do it. But guess what happens now that you've taken that site down? Music pirates everywhere cry out and reluctantly buy stuff?

Naw, man. They go somewhere else. Hear this, record companies: It's easy to download music. Let me say that again. It's easy to download music. Oh, did you notice the word I left out? I didn't say "illegally". Betcha didn't notice that the first time, didja? But have you heard of iTunes? Do you know how much money iTunes pulls in? Oh, hey look at that. Millions of dollars that people didn't have to spend but did anyway. How do you explain that? People are WILLING to pay money for products they want. Revolutionary and shocking, I know. Don't tell me they didn't know how to download mp3s either, man. That's weak.

Change always threatens part of the Establishment. It's a fact of reality. Get with the digital times or you'll go the way of Kodak, you guys.

YouTube and Internet Validation(?)

So if you surf YouTube as much as I then you've probably done your share of Related Video chaining and therefore, you should have run into plenty of shitty videos that suckered you into clicking on them because of their high view numbers. If you are a smart guy like me you probably cursed and wished you could see the Rating on the video before clicking on it. That way you'd know if it had earned its eleventy million views or if you're just going to the latest derp on the top of the herp heap. I present to you this excellent browser extension: here. It comes in Firefox, Chrome and even Safari flavor.

In other news, speaking of YouTube Ratings, only twice have I managed to post one of the Top Rated comments on a YouTube video. By Thor's hammer, what an accomplishment...
(- -___)=3

#1 - Yelle - A Cause Des Garçons
#2 - The Proclaimers - 500 Miles

Was I trying to get lots of Likes? Nope. Did I feel a great surge of pride or victory when I saw my comment within the top ranks? .... Nope. ╮(╯_╰)╭
People should stop hunting for Thumbs Ups... Make your comments clever, poignant or pertinent, guys, come on.

Click those links to watch the nice video, but I don't know when you'll be reading this post so I can't guarantee that my comment will still be there. My comment for the tecktonik vid will be about 2 years old now so it got shuffled under long ago.

SOPA/PIPA

I considered doing one of the "go dark" things but I think my little blog here would better serve the cause with some information.



Here are some good links for more. Since you're here visiting my blog I'm going to make the assumption that, unlike most Americans, you read things you don't have to and might even like reading things.

http://www.fark.com/2012/sopapipa/
http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41911.pdf

If you don't live in the U.S. just know this: if you frequent sites with domain names of .com or .org your virtual "neighborhood" falls within our grasp.

I don't know about you but I look across my Bookmarks toolbar and I see this.

http://chadrocco.deviantart.com/art/SOPA-PIPA-Executive-E-Motions-280090484

The big companies backing SOPA/PIPA didn't want "their" money going to the artists then and they aren't concerned about any money going or not going to artists now.

You know what? I don't think anyone really believes the propaganda these big organizations are putting out. Really, they just want you to do nothing. They win that way, too.

============================================
Over the past few days I've become more and more cognizant of the fact that things weren't simpler when I was a kid, I was just ignorant and blind. That's not self-deprecation, by the way. Honestly, I believe that at that age it isn't good to have all kinds of heavy issues laid on an undeveloped mind. A part of growing up is discovering that reality isn't so simple after all. Yeah, now that I'm on this side of 20 I can see that a lot of these "adults" never grew up when they were supposed to.

Immortality and Poor Writing

You remember Aesop's fable concerning the fox and the grapes? Hmm?

Sour grapes, that's what that looks like to me. What does this have to do with poor writing? Well, quite a few times I've read a story or comic, some article of fiction, and I find a character who has the property of immortality but he has been struck by ennui. His thoughts are written to follow something along the lines of 'I've seen it all, I've done it all. What else is there? All the people I've ever known have grown old and died before me. Fie upon this everlasting existence and woe is me for who could consider this living when there is no possibility of dying?'. To which I must retort:

In this day and age, I find the idea that anyone can legitimately believe themselves to have 'seen it all and done it all' offensively absurd. Some wags like to think themselves clever by saying vaguely Zen-like adages such as "The more things change, the more they stay the same." I refer them to my above rebuttal.

The internet. I believe the technical term for it is "fucking awesome". Nothing that has come before can compete with how far and fast this thing can spread ideas and information.

"Nothing like it"? No, you can't say that. Telephones, telegrams, a sophisticated postal system, these things were certainly like it, and just as revolutionary in their days. But these things were obstructed by borders and, more importantly, by distance.

This thing, the internet... I don't even know how to impress upon you how much more it is than anything people had 50 years ago. In the span of one day, I will (and you can, too) bump virtual elbows with thousands of people, collectively chuckling at memes and commenting on YouTube clips, funny images, etc. How many people do you personally interact with in a day? How many of those do you engage in conversation? Let's even take internet out of the equation. Before internet, how many people did a person interact with in a day? We are social animals, but even on a weekend at a party with friends, I'm confident enough to place that number well under 3-digits.
Ok, enough of that. Any more and this post will be fully derailed from the original intended topic. haha.

I believe I make my point clear. There are people in every age who look at the wonders man has wrought and think to themselves, "Well. That's it. There's nothing else to see and nowhere else to go." Immortality is wasted on these people. But then, this character probably didn't choose to have the ability. He usually doesn't when the writer's intention is to make him 'a bored guy'. He'll spend his time wishing he could be a normal guy. O TEH IRONY! Be careful what you wish for ooga booga booga!

Fuck that. If I was immortal I'd do it all. Take a look at this list, damn you. I'd master it all! War and Peace? I'd read that shit. In its original language.

In a nutshell, I believe what we have here isn't a case of being 'cursed with awesomeness', it's a case of casting pearls before swine.

The Messengers [2007] Pt.1

A long time ago, I saw a horror movie trailer. Years later, I could only remember one scene from that trailer: a mother is making a bed, she fluffs up the sheet and for a moment a pair of ashen gray legs appears standing under the sheet. That was a great scene. I have no illusions about the quality of the rest of that movie but that was undoubtedly a good scene. Unfortunately, I could remember nothing else about the movie. No actor names, not the year, not the title, nothing. Only that scene. But guess what? Hahaha, I wasn't the only horror fan out there that scene stuck to. A Google search for the unlikely search terms: [legs under bed sheet horror] brought up a Yahoo Answers query as the first result. BAM! The Messengers [2007]. Try it out! I think it's still the first result right now. Man, the internet is amazing.

I Youtube-d The Messengers trailer and it all came rushing back. This time though I recognized some faces. Guess who is in this movie? A pre-Twilight fame Kristen Stewart! Her acting was as wooden as ever but that's not a big problem here because I have no expectations of this movie. No wait, that's not entirely true. I expect this movie to be bad. There, that's better, hahahaha.

The house will be haunted. That's obvious right away, even if you didn't see the trailer. The beginning of the movie offers us a flashback. A mother rushes into a bedroom with her son and thells him to hide under the bed and everything will be alright, etc. Loud footsteps come up the stairs the boy sees his mother thrown across the room, hitting the wall. Of course, the kid is NOT ok sitting in plain sight "under" his bed and he seems to know it. He scrambles out and runs into his sister, they both dash downstairs and the boy hides under a table while his sister gets pushed over the banister. Wait. That isn't entirely true, either. I'm giving you the wrong idea. He crouches under the hall table like it's an earthquake. What he doesn't do is hide. The line of sight between himself and the top of the stairs is uninterrupted. The sister crawls toward him and urges him to run. Dumbass kid scurries around the corner and hides in a cabinet under the kitchen sink. Apparently, Hiding is this child's weak point cuz he ain't good at it. Going outside and hiding in the fields doesn't occur to him. He closes the door and sniffles quite loudly before the menace, I assume it's a demon-possessed father or something, grabs him and disposes of him. And there was much rejoicing. (If you get that reference, you're cool. If not, you are not cool.)

Years later, a new family, the Solomons, move in. The father, Dick, his daughter Sally, and son Tommy- oh sorry. I mean father Roy, mother Denise, daughter Jess and son Ben. The house is located somewhere out in North Dakota on a sunflower farm. It seems Jess did something to cause her parents to lose trust in her, though it isn't revealed til later.
As the family moves in, unpacks boxes and such, we get a good dose of jump scares from innocuous things. You know nothing is going to happen so early but they have to maintain a certain level of tension you know? And to remind you this is, in fact, a horror movie.
That bedsheet scene shows up around this time and I seriously considered calling it done straight away but I can't watch a fragment of a movie. That would be unseemly.
One of the most contrived jump scares comes from an old man who appears without a sound, offering Roy a job at the bank. I don't know about you but when was the last time someone who was looking for you walked up and stood 5 feet from you without making any sound to get your attention beforehand. You'd think the old man tried to scare Roy intentionally.
Weird noises and bangs abound, some aggressive crows (dare I say....angry birds?) harass Roy and his seeds, etc. A laborer, John, shows up and gets work helping out around the farm. The only thing that actually earns its creepy points is a ghost of the previous family's son who crawls on the ceiling. Only  Ben sees him, and for some reason he isn't frightened. This is ridiculous. I don't want to hear anything about how innocent he is. The ghost is pale, moves in a stop-motion fashion, and looks like it's rotting. If this kid isn't scared it is because he lacks self-preservation instincts.

It's a reflection in a spoon.

One day Roy cuts his hand on the tractor and needs to go to the hospital. This gives us another opportunity for the mother to hint that she doesn't trust Jess to drive nor to watch over Ben while they are gone. Eventually, Roy convinces Denise to drive him to the hospital and leave Ben in Jess's care. Too bad. While the folks are out the house ghosts decide to fuck with her a little bit. They smash lamps and shatter the banister, throw chairs around, knock shelves and china off the walls, make screaming noises, etc. While all this happens Ben calmly follows a wind-up toy around the house. It leads Jess to the basement staircase where pale rotting hands drag her backwards into the darkness, all the while Ben watches her placidly. What a dumbass kid. Not to mention an Oscar-winning actor, for sure.

Alright guys, that's it for now. (___- -)=3