Yeah, yeah. I'm just ripping off links from BBspot. So sue me.
Does this look familiar to any of ye olde timey adventure gamers? Zork Map.
Magic Baseball Bat.
And, finally, not from BBspot, but from Dad, comes this link to a gallery for the Northrop Grumman X-47B UCAS. "Now you can kill people and break things from the comfort of your own armchair!"
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Monday, September 17, 2007
Friday, September 14, 2007
Geriatric Jones and the...
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? What the hell kind of name is that? It sounds like the name of one of the cheesy novels or video games. Raiders of the Lost Ark; The Last Crusade; Temple of Doom; hell, even The Fate of Atlantis; those are cool titles. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Not so much.
By the way, which one of you no-good, fake, phony friends of mine new about this and didn't tell me about it? Now you can fly an F-16 down the Grand Canyon at 1000 mph, or land on the Las Vegas strip from the comfort of your own work.
Also, be sure to check out the new, digitally-remastered by George Lucas version of Singin' in the Rain.
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? What the hell kind of name is that? It sounds like the name of one of the cheesy novels or video games. Raiders of the Lost Ark; The Last Crusade; Temple of Doom; hell, even The Fate of Atlantis; those are cool titles. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Not so much.
By the way, which one of you no-good, fake, phony friends of mine new about this and didn't tell me about it? Now you can fly an F-16 down the Grand Canyon at 1000 mph, or land on the Las Vegas strip from the comfort of your own work.
Also, be sure to check out the new, digitally-remastered by George Lucas version of Singin' in the Rain.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
F.U. News Friday Game
Hapland, an intriguing point-and-click puzzle game with stick men. The first in a series of three games, each more difficult than the previous. Walkthroughs are for losers!
Warning: time-consuming.
Hapland, an intriguing point-and-click puzzle game with stick men. The first in a series of three games, each more difficult than the previous. Walkthroughs are for losers!
Warning: time-consuming.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Becoming Jane
One man’s secret mission to infiltrate the secret world or women
Aka A rant against the movie, the woman and anyone who ever liked the woman
Becoming Jane was as insipid, uninspiring, unimaginative, uneventful and whatever adjective means opposite of “epoch in nature” as any episode of Sex in the City could hope to be. All in all, it was everything that Jane Austin would have wanted.
I would start here by posting a “Spoiler” warning, but I don’t think I could further spoil this movie beyond what state the screen writers left it in.
So the movie starts with long shots of English country side and horses eating in the pastures. My mind already begins wondering how the rumble of German bombers could improve this scene. And then the movie goes downhill. Suddenly we break into mindless blabbering of Jane as she searches for adjectives to describe something unimportant. Then we cut to Farmer Hoggett and his sexual romp with his wife (strangely I can’t stop humming “Magic Carpet Ride”….). Great start, Julian Jarrold, I’m sure Mother Teresa would be happy. Then some more blah blah blah occurs, and finally we suffer one last slew of useless cross-fade sequences to see an aged, unmarried Jane talking to the now married dim-bulb she spent the movie fretting over and meeting his daughter, Jane. At this point, the girls in the audience whimper. “Twue love”, I think I hear someone say over a sob. I re-swallow my lunch.
Among some of the “memorable” lines my brain wandered in and out of was one Jane spoke to Darcy-I-mean-Lefroy (the Jane Austin equivalent of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine’s Nazi-I-mean-Soviets) included some equivalent to “That would be living a lie, could you do that?”. That may be a tough question for a girl to answer, but we men have all seen Natalie Portman in a leather corset asking that question and know that the only appropriate answer to that is a chorus of YESes sung to the explosive end of the 1812 overture (something like “yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes YES, YES, YES” looped something like 4 times before you hit the low YESes).
At this point, you are saying, “But what do you know Tom, your just a boy!” (yes, you misspell you’re as you speak it too). Here is what Mark Twain has been quoted as having said about Jane Austin:
Jane Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.
To me his prose is unreadable–like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
So now you think “Well, what does he know. He’s just a guy that does… stuff!” Well fine, then let me get one of her greatest compliments by Lionel Trilling and beat the hell out of it to illustrate my point:
"It was Jane Austen who first represented the specifically modern personality and the culture in which it had its being. Never before had the moral life been shown as she shows it to be, never before had it been conceived to be so complex and difficult and exhausting. Hegel speaks of the "secularization of spirituality" as a prime characteristic of the modern epoch, and Jane Austen is the first to tell us what this involves. She is the first novelist to represent society, the general culture, as playing a part in the moral life, generating the concepts of "sincerity" and "vulgarity" which no earlier time would have understood the meaning of, and which for us are so subtle that they defy definition, and so powerful that none can escape their sovereignty. She is the first to be aware of the Terror which rules our moral situation, the ubiquitous anonymous judgment to which we respond, the necessity we feel to demonstrate the purity of our secular spirituality, whose dark and dubious places are more numerous and obscure than those of religious spirituality, to put our lives and styles to the question …"
“moral life [is] complex and difficult and exhausting” I detest that loathsome “but life is so hard” attitude. Practical, physical life is hard. Hoeing a field is hard! Deciding if you want to go to church today is not. Deciding if genocide is good or bad is not. Moral life is almost always a simple black or white when you break it down to its simplest components. If you make it complicated that is because you don’t like some of what you know to be true. “Should I marry a guy who’s boring but my family wants me to marry him and I’ll be poor if I don’t but I’ll be rich if I do and people will like me but I’ll be miserable and what will the children be like and how shall I get on in age as I am married to someone who may change or may not….” Blah blah blah. Break it down: Can I love him? Specifically, can I change ME to make ME love him, and can I be faithful? Yes, no? I don’t care, flip a damn coin. This is not tough.
Farmer Hoggett had a great line in the movie saying that poverty breeds misery (or something to that effect). He is correct, and a lady should smartly choose a good provider as she seeks a spouse. But again I point out, it is a simple question to answer: can I change me to make me love him, and can I be faithful? (of course I’m assuming the “can he change himself to love me and can he be faithful” question is a yes as Jane Austin’s male characters are generally made out of cardboard and don’t have any depth so I assume the blandest yes).
Now of course 90% of chicks reading this out there will say “But what if there is someone better out there?” and alternatively some will say “What if they aren’t my soul mate?” News flash, genius: There will always be “someone better” out there and a soul mate is not some single random person wandering the earth that you have to find like Where’s Waldo. Your spouse IS your soul mate BECAUSE you choose to make yourself theirs. So whoever you choose to change yourself and sacrifice yourself for IS your soul mate, at least until they die and you grab another. So, in conclusion on this part, if you think you could stand to wait a while longer for someone better (someone you don’t have to change as much for) to come along, then wait.
“the modern epoch” That is her real problem: She raises petty personal problems to the level of an Epoch. She spends more time with a character fretting about what to say to a suitor than Homer with Odysseus’ battle with the Cyclops. She has no sense of proportion and raises every little concern to the level of catastrophe. Jane frets about having to grow up in a man’s world as a female author threatened with the prospect of hoeing a garden for potatoes. Odysseus was looking forward to getting home and working on his lands but he had giant sea creatures in the way.
Perhaps I can’t blame Jane Austin too much for according to this movie anyway, she was raised in a society built entirely on inheritance. Her mother wants her to marry some guy for inheritance. Her “sister” (I think distant French relative even though they kept referring to her as sister) escaped the French Revolution but brought her dead husband’s money with her and marries Jane’s brother. Neither work after the marriage. Jane’s true love lives on the money doled to him by his uncle and even his brothers and sisters in America live off that money as he sends it to them. It is mentioned multiple times in the movie that those who don’t marry for money end up poor and various examples of relatives are given. Out of curiosity, who the hell in this country actually worked for money? Something doesn’t seem right.
“She is the first to be aware of the Terror which rules our moral situation” I agree that is how she portrays our moral situation, but that is just dumb. No further comments needed.
“the purity of our secular spirituality, whose dark and dubious places are more numerous and obscure than those of religious spirituality” Sounds like somebody is an atheist. I agree that religious spirituality does not have many dark and dubious places and is not that obscure, but… WHAT?! Only a sissy could dwell on this crap!!! Who cares? Good vs Evil, that is a story! Not ambiguous vs. ambiguous, that is boring and leans towards evil since it degrades the moral importance that Good vs Evil epochs teach.
Jane Austin may be the grandmother of the Soap Opera, shows that dwell to a near vicious level on relationships and their importance. Am I saying that relationships have no place in story? No! But manly movies never make a character more important than his environment. Take Shawshank Redemption, a story all about a man falsely accused. The movie doesn’t dwell as much on the tortured soul of the falsely accused and how his wife cheated on him. Instead it shows how he got over it and righted a great injustice going on in the prison. The Jane Austin version would have dwelled on what a great friend in prison he made. All action movies involve the hero making the world a better place, and don’t focus on how he made himself a slightly better person. That is always the smaller side story. Hamlet, one of the manliest stories of all time (some would misunderstand as a chick flick simply because it dives into character), spends his life trying to find out how he can avenge his father’s death. There is something greater than himself. In Becoming Jane, there is nothing greater than Jane’s happiness. She is not a heroine; she is a leaf on the wind complaining about how the wind isn’t fair to her.
Oh and one last thing, the commercials prior to this movie were a dead giveaway for the dim-bulb nature of the audience. All of them were hippy movies that no doubt will barely make their budgets back. Among the most memorable was the story of some mexican kid who adventures to America to see his mother working in LA, and the plot revolves around illegal immigration and how no law can break the bond of mother and son. Make me puke.
Big whoop. Go see Hot Rod, you’ll pee yourself laughing. That movie has good lines in it like “I’d rather die than live in a world where I can’t kick your ass”.
PS.
Question: Why would I go watch this movie?
Answer:
One man’s secret mission to infiltrate the secret world or women
Aka A rant against the movie, the woman and anyone who ever liked the woman
Becoming Jane was as insipid, uninspiring, unimaginative, uneventful and whatever adjective means opposite of “epoch in nature” as any episode of Sex in the City could hope to be. All in all, it was everything that Jane Austin would have wanted.I would start here by posting a “Spoiler” warning, but I don’t think I could further spoil this movie beyond what state the screen writers left it in.
So the movie starts with long shots of English country side and horses eating in the pastures. My mind already begins wondering how the rumble of German bombers could improve this scene. And then the movie goes downhill. Suddenly we break into mindless blabbering of Jane as she searches for adjectives to describe something unimportant. Then we cut to Farmer Hoggett and his sexual romp with his wife (strangely I can’t stop humming “Magic Carpet Ride”….). Great start, Julian Jarrold, I’m sure Mother Teresa would be happy. Then some more blah blah blah occurs, and finally we suffer one last slew of useless cross-fade sequences to see an aged, unmarried Jane talking to the now married dim-bulb she spent the movie fretting over and meeting his daughter, Jane. At this point, the girls in the audience whimper. “Twue love”, I think I hear someone say over a sob. I re-swallow my lunch.
Among some of the “memorable” lines my brain wandered in and out of was one Jane spoke to Darcy-I-mean-Lefroy (the Jane Austin equivalent of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine’s Nazi-I-mean-Soviets) included some equivalent to “That would be living a lie, could you do that?”. That may be a tough question for a girl to answer, but we men have all seen Natalie Portman in a leather corset asking that question and know that the only appropriate answer to that is a chorus of YESes sung to the explosive end of the 1812 overture (something like “yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes YES, YES, YES” looped something like 4 times before you hit the low YESes).
At this point, you are saying, “But what do you know Tom, your just a boy!” (yes, you misspell you’re as you speak it too). Here is what Mark Twain has been quoted as having said about Jane Austin:
Jane Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.
To me his prose is unreadable–like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
So now you think “Well, what does he know. He’s just a guy that does… stuff!” Well fine, then let me get one of her greatest compliments by Lionel Trilling and beat the hell out of it to illustrate my point:
"It was Jane Austen who first represented the specifically modern personality and the culture in which it had its being. Never before had the moral life been shown as she shows it to be, never before had it been conceived to be so complex and difficult and exhausting. Hegel speaks of the "secularization of spirituality" as a prime characteristic of the modern epoch, and Jane Austen is the first to tell us what this involves. She is the first novelist to represent society, the general culture, as playing a part in the moral life, generating the concepts of "sincerity" and "vulgarity" which no earlier time would have understood the meaning of, and which for us are so subtle that they defy definition, and so powerful that none can escape their sovereignty. She is the first to be aware of the Terror which rules our moral situation, the ubiquitous anonymous judgment to which we respond, the necessity we feel to demonstrate the purity of our secular spirituality, whose dark and dubious places are more numerous and obscure than those of religious spirituality, to put our lives and styles to the question …"
“moral life [is] complex and difficult and exhausting” I detest that loathsome “but life is so hard” attitude. Practical, physical life is hard. Hoeing a field is hard! Deciding if you want to go to church today is not. Deciding if genocide is good or bad is not. Moral life is almost always a simple black or white when you break it down to its simplest components. If you make it complicated that is because you don’t like some of what you know to be true. “Should I marry a guy who’s boring but my family wants me to marry him and I’ll be poor if I don’t but I’ll be rich if I do and people will like me but I’ll be miserable and what will the children be like and how shall I get on in age as I am married to someone who may change or may not….” Blah blah blah. Break it down: Can I love him? Specifically, can I change ME to make ME love him, and can I be faithful? Yes, no? I don’t care, flip a damn coin. This is not tough.
Farmer Hoggett had a great line in the movie saying that poverty breeds misery (or something to that effect). He is correct, and a lady should smartly choose a good provider as she seeks a spouse. But again I point out, it is a simple question to answer: can I change me to make me love him, and can I be faithful? (of course I’m assuming the “can he change himself to love me and can he be faithful” question is a yes as Jane Austin’s male characters are generally made out of cardboard and don’t have any depth so I assume the blandest yes).
Now of course 90% of chicks reading this out there will say “But what if there is someone better out there?” and alternatively some will say “What if they aren’t my soul mate?” News flash, genius: There will always be “someone better” out there and a soul mate is not some single random person wandering the earth that you have to find like Where’s Waldo. Your spouse IS your soul mate BECAUSE you choose to make yourself theirs. So whoever you choose to change yourself and sacrifice yourself for IS your soul mate, at least until they die and you grab another. So, in conclusion on this part, if you think you could stand to wait a while longer for someone better (someone you don’t have to change as much for) to come along, then wait.
“the modern epoch” That is her real problem: She raises petty personal problems to the level of an Epoch. She spends more time with a character fretting about what to say to a suitor than Homer with Odysseus’ battle with the Cyclops. She has no sense of proportion and raises every little concern to the level of catastrophe. Jane frets about having to grow up in a man’s world as a female author threatened with the prospect of hoeing a garden for potatoes. Odysseus was looking forward to getting home and working on his lands but he had giant sea creatures in the way.
Perhaps I can’t blame Jane Austin too much for according to this movie anyway, she was raised in a society built entirely on inheritance. Her mother wants her to marry some guy for inheritance. Her “sister” (I think distant French relative even though they kept referring to her as sister) escaped the French Revolution but brought her dead husband’s money with her and marries Jane’s brother. Neither work after the marriage. Jane’s true love lives on the money doled to him by his uncle and even his brothers and sisters in America live off that money as he sends it to them. It is mentioned multiple times in the movie that those who don’t marry for money end up poor and various examples of relatives are given. Out of curiosity, who the hell in this country actually worked for money? Something doesn’t seem right.
“She is the first to be aware of the Terror which rules our moral situation” I agree that is how she portrays our moral situation, but that is just dumb. No further comments needed.
“the purity of our secular spirituality, whose dark and dubious places are more numerous and obscure than those of religious spirituality” Sounds like somebody is an atheist. I agree that religious spirituality does not have many dark and dubious places and is not that obscure, but… WHAT?! Only a sissy could dwell on this crap!!! Who cares? Good vs Evil, that is a story! Not ambiguous vs. ambiguous, that is boring and leans towards evil since it degrades the moral importance that Good vs Evil epochs teach.
Jane Austin may be the grandmother of the Soap Opera, shows that dwell to a near vicious level on relationships and their importance. Am I saying that relationships have no place in story? No! But manly movies never make a character more important than his environment. Take Shawshank Redemption, a story all about a man falsely accused. The movie doesn’t dwell as much on the tortured soul of the falsely accused and how his wife cheated on him. Instead it shows how he got over it and righted a great injustice going on in the prison. The Jane Austin version would have dwelled on what a great friend in prison he made. All action movies involve the hero making the world a better place, and don’t focus on how he made himself a slightly better person. That is always the smaller side story. Hamlet, one of the manliest stories of all time (some would misunderstand as a chick flick simply because it dives into character), spends his life trying to find out how he can avenge his father’s death. There is something greater than himself. In Becoming Jane, there is nothing greater than Jane’s happiness. She is not a heroine; she is a leaf on the wind complaining about how the wind isn’t fair to her.
Oh and one last thing, the commercials prior to this movie were a dead giveaway for the dim-bulb nature of the audience. All of them were hippy movies that no doubt will barely make their budgets back. Among the most memorable was the story of some mexican kid who adventures to America to see his mother working in LA, and the plot revolves around illegal immigration and how no law can break the bond of mother and son. Make me puke.
Big whoop. Go see Hot Rod, you’ll pee yourself laughing. That movie has good lines in it like “I’d rather die than live in a world where I can’t kick your ass”.
PS.
Question: Why would I go watch this movie?
Answer:
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