welovefineshirts:

Congrats to @LightningFlux, the Twitter user who won the drawing for last week’s MLP Varsity tee giveaway!

THIS WEEK!: REBLOG THIS POST now to enter to WIN your choice of ANY tee from our ValenTEES Day Featured Category! Marvel, Star Wars, My Little Pony, Adventure Time and MORE! You pick, mens and women’s designs available. Good luck!

I may need another Fluttershy shirt at some point so I’m reblogging this in hopes of acquiring one. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Okay, so I haven’t been posting much because A)tumblr’s default blog thing is stupid and B) had to finish Anthropology 354 in a very small amount of time, which I did. Well, I wrote and submitted three essays, which I researched and wrote within a week, but that’s how I do so I’m PRETTY confident I at least passed, but hey, time will tell.

Anyway, while I like things about Tumblr I also find it hard to network and such, so I’m probably going to do most of my Pony-related musings on Twitter/Facebook/in person going forward. Well, maybe some reddit too. Anyway, there is still a designated place on the internet where I’ll be doing a decent amount of writing and chatting, that place is Pixel Response.

I’ve been doing some amateur podcasting and general “gabbin’ about videogames” on the internet for two plus years now, including Top Down Perspective and the newly renamed Pixel Response podcast. My friend Paul was kind enough to set up a designated pony forum on the website, so I’ll probably be ducking in there and throwing some thoughts down fairly often. Here is a link to that, and hope to see you there.

I guess a few notes on Pixel Response, we are pretty broadly interested in all media, as they are kind of all melding together these days. That means movies, music and the new kid on the block, video-games, all get fair and equal treatment in our eyes. None of this “which is the TRUE artistic medium?” bullshit, its all worthy of equal consideration and we try to approach everything that way. We are also looking to have a stronger focus on independent game development going forward, so if you’re into more off the beaten path type stuff when it comes to gaming, you may find what you’ve been looking for with us.

Anyway, thanks for reading and hope to see you around the internet. I’ll still duck in here now and then, but my dream of having weekly or bi-weekly posts is officially done. B-bye!

Okay, haven’t updated this in awhile because…well, not a TON of Pony stuff going on. I mean, been rewatching some episodes (“Best Night Ever” is PRETTY awesome you guys) and met some more fans and played some Munchkin at the last meetup I attended, which was fun. But yeah, its between seasons, not a lot of events happening in the dead of summer. So there’s that.

Still be checking in on the fandom though. The whole Colgate thing was kinda fun, and this here is my favorite video to come out of that (unfair advantage as it implements one of my favorite childhood shows, but hey). Oh, I DID buy some stickers as part of “Sparkle World” magazine and I added them to the WeLoveFine Rarity and Spike sticker on my laptop. I posted about that on twitter, names “Kraznor” over there if you’re into that kinda thing.

My birthday happened, I am now twenty-five years old. Quarter century. I did explicitly ask for Pony stuff from my sister but she A) didn’t really know what to get (messaged me regarding a G3 DVD and I said “NOOOOO, that’s not the thing!”) and B) still doesn’t “get” the fandom and didn’t want to support my enthusiasm for it. But hey, that’s fine, got me that new Frank Ocean album (Channel Orange, which I hope to listen to tomorrow…I did link to the Pitchfork review because hey, they can be right sometimes) and a Pac-Man mug, so she’s cool. I’ve been thinking, does every Dairy Queen not yet have MLP designs in their cake binder? With the metric ton of fan-art out there, has no one printed off some stuff and brought them down to the local Dairy Queen? Get on that everypony! 

So yeah, think that’s more or less it. Oh, got a credit increase on my Master Card today so guess who is going to totally drop a couple hundred bucks on Pony swag? Have a good week y’all!

So, there was an MLP musical at the Calgary Stampede today, so I had to check it out. Guess what? That thing was aimed at young children! But hey, met some cool people awkwardly waiting around for something more at both of the shows, so that was fun (yes, I attended both…there isn’t tons to do at the Stampede man!) 

So shout-outs and bro-hoofs to Joaquin, Sean (or is it Shawn? Either way, dude works for Otafest) and that dude with the Stampeders hat that dug my Rainbow Dash shirt. And that super chatty guy on the train. Yeah, missed my stop cause I was talking about Ponies too intensely, what of it? 

Oh, right, there is a video of “Ya Gotta Share, Ya Gotta Care” as well (as sung by not Pinkie Pie…weird), so check that out as well. 

So, been thinking a lot about the apocalypse of late, due in large part to the fantastic film Rise of the Planet of the Apes which I’ve posted about relentlessly this past week. Still, it did make me think about other popular apocalyptic scenarios and I just want to break down my observations on those and finally explain why I think the Ape Apocalypse is the absolute best way humanity could be dethroned as the primary species on this planet. To be clear, many of these are preposterous scenarios that are popular in entertainment media, and highly unlikely.

WARNING: Spoilers for Rise of the Planet of the Apes contained within.

Zombie Apocalypse- Zombies are all the rage nowadays (well, some people are over them but they still seem to get a lot of ink), but as fanciful the notion of being forced to fight for your survival against undead hordes is, this situation can only end terribly. The world being populated by brain dead cannibals sounds awful, and even if they starve to death and die out after infecting/murdering everyone, then there would be piles of corpses everywhere. One can only hope the virus wouldn’t affect other wildlife so nature can eventually take back the planet, but if it does, we are left with a savage wasteland of violent, irrational creatures and I don’t like that notion whatsoever.

Robot Apocalypse- As popularized by James Cameron’s Terminator series, the robot apocalypse also doesn’t suit my fancy. A bunch of cold, emotionless machines ruling over a dead rock in space sounds incredibly depressing. It seems this scenario always kicks off with a nuclear war, meaning all wildlife dies along with it. Makes you wonder what humanity’s plan is AFTER victory, but whatever, not the point.

Super Virus- This one seems to be getting popular again, with Soderbergh’s Contagion just around the corner and the already mentioned Rise of the Planet of the Apes making use of this scenario as well (and hey, I am Legend, 12 Monkeys and Outbreak also exist, though one could argue I am Legend is a variant on the zombie scenario what with the vampiric monster thing but whatever). Unlike both the zombie and robot scenarios, this one actually seems plausible, as improved transportation has resulted in a world where such a virus could spread extremely quickly. Next to the Ape Apocalypse, this scenario strikes me as a decent alternative as again, nature will take back the planet.

Ape Apocalypse- Still, in terms of simply being an extremely entertaining notion, the idea of apes banning together and taking charge of the planet fills me with such glee I can scarcely express it. Apes are amazing you guys. They are crazy smart, extremely strong and look awesome on top of it. And their numbers are dwindling thanks to us (humans in general, not necessarily YOU. Though if you are directly involved in the destruction of rainforests, kindly STOP doing that.) I can think of no other species deserving of becoming rulers of this planet other than apes. So yeah, if a super virus ever happens and all humanity is destroyed, can only hope apes step up to the plate and take charge. How completely amazing would that be?

Anyway, that is that. The least depressing Apocalypse award goes to, Ape Apocalypse. Rise of the Planet of the Apes in theaters now. Also, visit your local zoo and watch those apes for a bit. Just remember, in more ways than one, they’re better than you.

GOOD NIGHT!

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If Alfred Hitchcock were still alive and set about making a movie called “The Monkeys”, much in line with his film “The Birds”, it would be like this only not as good.

John Lithgow IS in it.

No amount of mediocre James Franconess can detract from the awe-inspiring spectacle of an army of apes waging war on mankind.

In said war, the most amazing things I have ever seen on a movie screen take place. This is spectacle with a capital…S. Whatever, it looks absolutely amazing is what I’m trying to get at. If this fails to win Best Visual Effects every single member of the Academy can jump off the highest building in the tri-county area in which they reside. Some may survive,  but they will never walk again.

In short, see this movie. I don’t care if you have never seen the original series, just get to the nearest cinema and see it. If you are something of a loner and hate seeing movies by yourself, I will personally accompany you (some exceptions, of course). Best Picture of 2011, right here.

So, it seems “Movie Monks” is now on an extended hiatus due to bandwidth issues and Paul being busy. As such, I’ve been watching a crazy amount of movies with no public outlet to vent how I feel about them. I’m going to summarize what I’ve seen in the past while. This list won’t be exhaustive, there are many MANY more films and shows that I’ve been watching, these are just the ones that stand out in my mind for one reason or another.

Mad Men- Watched all of it again and I’ve started watching season 1 AGAIN (third time). Liked it before but now I’m convinced this is the best television show running right now, and perhaps of all time but I’m not really qualified to say that. Really amazing show though, they build up a collection of interesting, multi-layered characters and then play around with their relationships and it is never not engrossing. Three more seasons! YAY!

The Twilight Zone- Watching Mad Men actually prompted this as they mention it a few times. Watched some episodes as a kid but now that I know the public library has all of it, going to be watching a whole lot more. This show is amazing, especially the first few seasons when the episodes are only 25 minutes long. Just concise, weird, sometimes funny, sometimes creepy little stories, many of which hold up exceedingly well. Only saw one season 4 episode, Jess-Bell, which is when they bumped it up to 50 minutes. It was good but more of a fairytale story than a sci-fi and I prefer the latter. Still, easier to marathon four or five short episodes than some big ones. But I digress, show is amazing and still unmatched as an anthology of bizarre little tales.

Cape Fear- Another Mad Men-inspired choice (to be clear, we are talking about the Robert Mitchum/Gregory Peck original). I’m also a fan of Scorsese’s remake, which helped prompted this as well. So, Mitchum is great. That guy can do an effective arrogant villain and he does so with panache right here. Peck…is kind of boring, however, as his put-upon victim. Even though Nick Nolte’s take on the role is a little over-the-top (which fits that movie perfectly, by the way) it was still more interesting to watch. He gets frazzled to the point where he is kind of destroying his own family while trying to defend it, which is more interesting to watch than the quiet, mild-mannered Peck calmly deal with the situation. But yeah, movie holds up okay regardless, just my biggest beef with it.

Errol Morris- I’d seen The Fog of War several years ago but nothing really prompted me to delve into his other films until Netflix enabled that. I started my three film marathon with The Thin Blue Line which is absolutely amazing and should be seen by everyone. Showcases just how incompetent the justice system can be in an entertaining and informative way. Then I went back to the beginning of Morris’ career with Gates of Heaven which I found pretty dull by comparison, though that just seems inherent in the quirky subject matter of pet cemeteries. Thing is, I find nothing about people being upset about their pets dying funny, so this movie just wasn’t connecting with me at all. I expect the reason most people like it is they find laughing at people’s misery over things they view as unimportant amusing but that’s not cool man. I’m looking at YOU, Roger Ebert. Anyway, closed things out with Standard Operating Procedure which was good and upsetting like all the best documentaries are. I remember when the stories about the prisoner abuse in Iraq started coming out but I had no idea what happened with that so this movie was pretty interesting, despite its morbidity. So yeah, that Morris cat is alright, though my favorite of his was the one I started with, The Thin Blue Line. Great, great film.

Captain America: The Most Adventurous Avenger Ever- Not a lot to say other than this is my favorite superhero film of the year. It has a great high-adventure feel, Evans is likable, Weaving is villainous, Jones is funny and Tucci is lovable, and Cap has no qualms with just killing dudes, which I enjoyed way too much. He has a gun! A superhero with a gun wins every time. 

Transformers: Dark of the Moon- I’ve balked at critics calling the previous Transformers films as disgusting wastes of time and money but I can’t really disagree with this latest one. What a terrible, miscalculated piece of trash this film is. The thing that bothered me the most was every single attempt at comedy (with the possible exception of Ken Jeong being ridiculous) fell so completely flat I was just baffled. The interview scene where young Shia calls an elderly Japanese fellow an “Asian Colonel Sanders” is pretty much the worst thing I’ve seen on a screen this year simply because it thinks that you’ll think that is funny, which I honestly found offensive. Yeah I know, a movie made by a toy company isn’t likely to stimulate anyone’s intelligence but that scene crossed the line for me. Maybe it was the mood I was in or something but yeah, terrible film.

Green Lantern- Speaking of terrible films…yeah, not much to say other than its really awful and broken and they probably should never make another one of these.

I Saw the Devil- Really liked this one, probably going to  buy it sometime soon. Just so dark and violent and crazy, reminded me how bizarre Korean cinema can get. So, a secret agent not unlike Jason Bourne is on assignment when his pregnant wife is killed by an extremely prolific serial killer. He then uses his two weeks of leave to hunt him down, but at some point his quest for revenge clearly goes too far and the results are grimly entertaining. Yeah, violent, disturbing, sometimes funny. In short, great.

Jesus Camp- So, I was raised in a conservative home and I went to Christian camps and attended a Christian private school but nothing I experienced was as close-minded and crazy as what’s going on in the Evangelical Church in the States. Seeing kids being force-fed their parents ignorant beliefs and political views is crazy disturbing. A grown woman chewing out kids for liking Harry Potter to the point where tears are streaming down their faces and they are falling on their knees in shame is also disturbing. Basically, the fact that this is a documentary and at least 30 million Americans are like this is terrifying. When those kids grow up and start campaigning for office…man. SAVE US CHINA! TAKE OVER THE WORLD PLEASE!

So yeah, that’s what stands out to me right now. There were others, some I liked, some I didn’t but I think that is a fairly representative sampling.

So, just found an old note detailing the first time I watched the 1996 film Scream. As you know, this film is especially good at throwing all kinds of red herrings at you, so forgive 2007 me for how completely wrong I ended up being. Going to transcribe the entire note so I can throw it away, knowing it is preserved on the internets.

“Nathan’s official prediction as to the identity of the killer in Scream.

Sydney’s dad

Theorized at 20 min mark

42 min into movie confirmed prediction

12:29AM

Likely red herring but we’ll see, wow, movie straight up said that. I like that.

Video store guy? (later crossed out)

Knows Movies      Knows Victims    At Party  (all of these also crossed out later)

Not Father, to obvious now. Or is it?

Chief of police introduced as potential killer, same shoes.

Kind of subtle, possible I guess.

Nice, two killers. One deked me out.”

So there you go, I basically liveblogged this movie on a pad of paper for no one’s benefit but my own. Now it is here for whomever wishes to read it. And yes, used the wrong “too/to” there, but that was how I wrote it on the page. I like to think I was too excited to exercise proper grammar.

Every so often a game comes along that reawakens the hunger in me, leaving me aching for a similarly engaging experience once its over. The most recent game to achieve this was L.A. Noire. Even though that game had numerous flaws (which you can hear about in detail here) it had me so engaged all I wanted to do was keep on playing it. Recently I picked up Child of Eden, which similarly had me completely hooked, the only problem being that game isn’t especially long. I even played through Rez HD a couple more times to draw things out, but alas, that experience is over.

So I began the process of poring over my shelves for some game I neglected to devote serious time to in the past or was hankering to replay, and here is that list of games and my experiences with them.

Tomb Raider: Anniversary- After seeing the rather impressive E3 demo of the upcoming “Tomb Raider”, I decided to finally check out this remake of the original game. I was playing the 360 version, which seems to be little more than an upscanned PS2 port. In short, the game looks terribly dated. The same can be said of the game’s structure, with a pretty brain-dead set of platforming “puzzles” that are extremely linear and unengaging. Shouldn’t have expected much from a 15 year old game, but still felt kind of let-down.

Burnout Paradise- This game is amazing, but now that I’ve done the lion’s share of the single-player, I’m faced with the daunting proposition of playing this online in order to progress any further. The game I got into gave me a sense of the structure of things, but only four of the eight players seemed at all interested in doing freeburn challenges, resulting in a big waste of time. Still, what I saw was intriguing and was lag-free. There was actually an update available when I booted this up, and I was playing this a couple months ago meaning Criterion is STILL supporting this game, well over three years past its launch. So yeah, game is absolutely amazing still, but running out of stuff to do.

Prey- Haven’t played this since early 2007. It definitely doesn’t hold up very well, but it is a harmless enough shooter for the most part. Looking forward to the sequel, despite the fact that whiny protagonist “Tommy” is said to play a role in that game. The spirit-walking stuff is dumb, the wide-open vehicle portions I’m dealing with now are tedious and the multiplayer was all kinds of laggy (thanks to Dustin aka “Fritzerbacon” for putting up with that), but I still ended up playing a bunch of it. I still wouldn’t call it a BAD game, just a dated and uninspired one. Kind of reminded me of when I played through the original “Red Faction” maybe five years after it came out. Could see why people loved it at the time but all the dated aspects of it were immediately apparent. Played through that as well though so there is definitely SOMETHING at least the tiniest bit compelling about the game. Also, dude, those portals are straight up blue and orange. So weird that Valve got away with just jacking that concept wholesale.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion- With Skyrim coming up, figured it was time to wrap up the last bit of “Shivering Isles” I never got to play through. Having not devoted serious time to this game in maybe three years, going back is tough. This game hasn’t aged especially well either, with the volume of tedious, fetch-quests completely shredding my will to play it. There is a quest that tasks me with asking the townspeople about some kind of conspiracy. Not only does no one seem to know anything about said conspiracy, every third person seems to have some quest of their own to send me on, be it fetching a pair of “Calming Pants” so they can be comfortable during the impending apocalypse or five pearls, or some such rubbish. UGH. Just want to be done with this game once and for all but not sure I can stomach it. Also, never really noticed the slow framerate before but dude, its maybe 19 frames per second on average. Hard to look at nowadays.

Bioshock- Been reading Atlas Shrugged lately so figured revisiting this in light of that may grant some grander perspective on what the game is saying. And the answer is almost immediately “yes”, so I will likely end up playing through this again. Have it on easy so I can enjoy my time and pick up the handful of achievements I missed. I’m sure my interest in the upcoming Bioshock Infinite played some role in this decision as well. Happy about it so far. Oh, and they drop a `Would you Kindly`almost immediately, which struck me as some clever foreshadowing.

So yes, those are the games I toyed around with these past two days. A couple of winners to be sure, so I`m glad I went through the trouble.

I am waiting for Trenched to finish downloading. Been hearing good things so maybe that will be the fix I`ve been looking for. Also, the new Junior Boys album is pretty good. Have yet to pick up the new Weird Al, but was immediately dismayed when I realized maybe half it was released as an EP many months ago, so not that much fresh material. Ah well, still enjoy that gentleman`s silly songs.