http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/34166277#34166277

Wait for the line "But now, for the first time, they're about to see an animated Disney heroine who looks just like them."

My. God.

Y'know, I know what they mean. I take their fucking meaning. But still, I haven't seen anything this overtly racist on FOX, let alone MSNBC. It's really the "just like them" part. Would it really have been so taxing to use a phrase like "...an animated Disney heroine with whom they have something in common?"

In other news, had a good Thanksgiving, where the only thanks given were to eachother for buying the food with our own damn money and cooking it with our own damn hands. Hung out a bit at my parents’, fucked with their router, got loaded down with leftovers and borrowed “Sarah Palin’s” “Going Rogue.”

Came home, watched some of the MST3K marathon on GBStv, reinstalled “Call of Duty 4” and got all the way to that fucking ferris wheel in Pripyat before I cried uncle and reduced the difficulty from “Hardened.” SO MANY FUCKING DOGS. FUCK. All with ultra-annoying instakill quicktime events. FFFFFFFFFFFUCK.

Actually looking forward to playing the sequel. It might be as fucking short as everyone says, but let it never be said that Infinity Ward can’t craft a good story.

It’s times like this that I wonder why I’m not a total fucking alcoholic. It’s pretty much only when I’m drunk that I feel really...good. Like a detente, however brief, is reached between me and myself. I’m relaxed and it feels like my glands are dumping a month’s worth of dopamine into my brain. I feel great. But I don’t have the drive to feel this great all the time. A head shrinker, I feel, would just adore that. I would say, in fact, that it is probably indicative of a problem that I don’t habitually seek out that which makes me feel this damn good. I’m not a drunk, and that probably means I’m slightly insane. What a world.

I’m a hardcore Dawkinsite, Hitchens-fellating atheist and...y’know what? This truly is the most wonderful time of the year. I love the Christmas season. Mainly because of giving and receiving gifts, the fact that my enemy the Christologers actually believe their murdered demigod was actually born in the winter and that’s hilarious and an indictment of their faith, and because Saturnalia, the holiday the Christologers hijacked, was basically the Gay Sex Holiday of its time. Amongst, of course, many, but this was the really big one. And also because everyone seems so determined to get all whiny and suicidal and my obsessive dare-to-be-different urge, for once, comes in extremely handy. And it’s not even forced, vat-grown happiness either. I simply make a conscious decision to enjoy this season near as much as I did as a kid.

You can do that, y’know. If there’s one thing I spent my life learning, it’s that you don’t have to be a slave to your heart. Most of the time you can crack the whip and feel just about however you tell it to.

So happy holidays, all you worshippers of mud-hut prophets and vengeful desert gods, ye merry throwbacks, ye philosophical dinosaurs, ye mules of intellect. I’ll just be over here enjoying this season for only what it can be proven - feasting, family, and fucktons of mutual generosity. Oh, and buttfucking, like the inventors of this holiday intended. You can all bow your heads and pretend to be serious about the birth of your supposed lord. “Glory to the newborn king” and all that rot. I won’t stop you. I won’t even discourage you.

Because that’s how far my enjoyment of this season is advanced over you. So go mope despite the anniversary of the birth of your so-called savior.

Somehow, NASA keeps fucking up.

Astronauts walking sort of brushing their feet against an asteroid. A step in the right goddamned direction, undoubtedly.

But why the fuck don’t they bring along some ion motors instead of instruments? Refuelled by probes, they could put the asteroid in high earth orbit in less than a generation. Then we can study it at our leisure with just a few OTV hops and - get this - teach ourselves how to mine asteroids and use solar refining. The weird shit like Palladium and Niobium and Rhodium and god knows what transuranics alone would fund itself and destroy the precious metals industry. Suddenly, U.S. interests have complete and unapprochable control over the semiconductor market. Hell, you could even loop a Bucky tube around it and anchor a goddamned space elevator. Everybody fucking wins.

But noooooooooo. NASA’s got its balls chopped off now that we don’t need a strategic orbital bomber. I doubt it was even the losses of Challenger and Columbia. At some level, people know that space travel is fundamentally dangerous, even if, by comparison, it’s statistically less dangerous than getting behind the wheel of a car. Yes, they were horrible occasions. But they were mourned as all explorers are mourned - with resolve.

And I’m still pissed that we don’t have some VentureStar type thing coming down the pipe. Going back to those dumpy fucking capsules, like Major fucking Tom. Like fucking Laika.

Hey, Russia? Yeah, you guys with the fucking crazy, totally out-of-the-box ideas that inexplicably work? How about starting up the Buran program again? It’s not like anyone else is really using circumterran space for anything more interesting than telescopes of various attitudes and commsats. All the battelites probably burned up decades ago. прогресс!

Saw "2012" today. More than anything it felt like the writer ripped off Stephen Baxter's "Flood."

It was big and stupid, but the effects were...acceptable and the Arks were...just amazing. Except for the fact that they were twice as wide and half again as long as an aircraft carrier and very obviously diesel powered. The fuck?

The science was actually worse than "The Core." The movie starts and The Operative from "Serenity" is going to Derkaderkastan to check on a neutrino detector in an old copper mine. I pumped my fist; "Hey, neutrino detectors are big boring tanks of water and optical sensors, and they're often in disused mines!" I smiled. This was going to be a good movie after all. Then Dr. Jihad said that a massive coronal mass ejection had somehow "mutated" the neutrinos coming from the sun and they were zipping right through the crust and heating up the mantle.

I laughed. A loud chuckle, really. I was shushed.

LEPTONS CAN'T FUCKING DO THAT. They're basically free quarks and force carriers. They don't interact with the macro universe we know and love unless they hit the dead center of an atom. And the homework the screenwriters did is astounding when you take into account that there are less retarded ideas out there - you can say something about dark matter and bosons and SO LONG AS IT DOESN'T REALLY MAKE ANY REAL SENSE everyone with a taste of the subject knows to disengage their hemispheres and everyone who doesn't won't notice.

Seriously, it's like saying "Your cat is sick. She's listless and not eating, which points to a urinary tract infection caused by antimatter poisoning." It's correct and scienticiously edifying most of the way and then takes a sharp turn for the ridiculous.

Believe this multi-disciplinary scientist-layman when I say that restarting the earth's core with nuclear bombs is just slightly more plausible than a neutrino getting "mutated" by phenomena slow and transparent and irrelevant from its perspective.

And then there was all the "herp derp the crazies were right" bullshit. Dr. Science even said once something about "all our fancy machines and the Mayans predicted this a thousand years ago."

But, that all being said, I didn't feel as mugged as I did after the director's last big-budget fuckup, "The Day After Tomorrow." So there's that. And there were some lengthy shots of a monstrous 6-engine (fucking SIX) Antonov. A big fucking Antonov somehow not tearing its wings off with a climb way too steep for the frame. But still. Sexy plane.

Finished off "The Ninth Gate" and it's a fucking masterpiece. Fun fact: Depp's character breaks all 10 commandments and commits all 7 deadlies. Though my rationalization for "sloth" is sorta iffy. Currently downing "Frantic" and "Death and the Maiden." I need me some more goddamned Polanski.

Al Gore was on SNL this week. And he was actually pretty funny; totally deadpan. Mind = blown.

:3c

Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, this will be the only update this week. We'll be back to our usual schedule next week!

Someone's career is in the toilet...

You think that free tech support for everyone who knows you're "good with computers" is bad? Try painting a model for someone who's seen your work.

Though really, I'm happy to do it and she supplied me with the extra paints I needed. It's like she brought me back out of retirement for one last big score. Somehow, my point control AND my speed's improved. It's so damn weird. Still got a lot of cleanup to do but it's about half done after only about three hours of brush time, and it ranks with the best work I've ever done.

Santa Maria plans on spending 47 million god-damned dollars on 130 miles of bike paths.

""If you see a great bike lane and a great and easy way to get to work, I think more people would embrace the idea," said Scott Clark, who owns Main Street Cycles in town."

No. Not a chance. Nobody bikes in this part of California. Everything is too spread-out. And, face it, nobody wants to get sweaty on their way to their cubicle job, or worse, on their way to a job where they actually have to sweat. And then of course there's the gangs and the crank fiends and the just plain desperate people. This is pretty far north of Los Angeles, sure, but we've got those problems here. The rich brought them along with their Infinitis and their Blackberries.

But that's not the worst. I am so sick and fucking tired of that buzzword, "green." It's a total fucking smokescreen. These dumb assholes who get duped into using cloth grocery bags (not a bad idea in and of itself) and "offsetting their carbon footprint" by paying a voluntary surcharge on their plane tickets (also not intrinsically bad) are not significantly affecting the pollution problem posed by chemical processing companies, ore refining companies, mines, oil, coal and NG power generation, and paper and textiles manufacturing.

It's like prayer, really. A way for people to feel good about themselves, like they're "a part of the solution," while it does precisely NOTHING.

But, worse, it makes them think that if they tweak their lives a bit, maybe sweat a bit more and pay the wrong people money, that they too can save the planet.

WRONG.

The majestic Rio Grande will still KILL YOU if you were to so much as swim in it south of New Mexico, Exxon still continues to stall in paying for the cleanup of the Valdez spill TWENTY GODDAMN YEARS LATER, and pig farmers continue to poison entire towns with clouds of airborne, atomized pig excrement. The San Joaquin valley, which feeds hundreds of millions, continues to lose topsoil and there is a SEVEN THOUSAND MILE stretch of Gulf of Mexico coastline rendered devoid of animal life by the overfertilization of the farms in the Mississippi river valley.

Biking to work isn't even "polishing the brass on the Titanic." It's asking for the Fillet Mignon instead of the Foie Gras at dinner on the Titanic.

You wanna save the world? The first good place to start is writing your congressman. Forget your governor, he's generally irrelevant. Tell your congressman that his job depends on how regulated the (admittedly necessary) pollution in your district is. If that doesn't work, don't vote for the corporate finger-puppet and try to entertainingly encourage others not to. While you're at it, vote locally for measures that regard nuclear power plants. There are no cheaper megawatts to be found at this level of solar cell technology. With luck it won't always be so, but for now nuke plants are as green as Georgia in the spring. Despite what the hysterical sobbing hippies might moan at you between lungfuls of weed.

If that doesn't work? Well, I won't tell you to go picket or hand out leaflets. Because, let's face it, nobody cares what your pet cause is. Even, sadly, if your pet cause is everyone's breathing air. After appealing to your elected official and voting, the only real recourse from there is accomplished with bolt cutters and firebombs.

That is, if you're serious. If not, well, keep on keepin' on. At least you'll have some pretty bike paths to ride down while you choke on the smog and die young from carcinogens in the water.

Watching "The Ninth Gate" for the first time in years and years. I didn't remember it being this good! The dread and tension that the cinematography and the music pumps the film full of is almost overwhelming.

Hell, I'd be just about willing to extend to Polanski the same offer I extended to Michael Jackson: make me another work like this and I'll load up a few dozen kids into a box truck and deliver them personally.

I mean, god, do y'all even grasp what skill it takes to make satanism scary to a person like me? Child rapist or not, Polanski's a fucking genius.

God dammit. Too many people have discovered 4chan.

Curiously informative video, but it just breaks my heart to see these chucklefuck newfags stumble into stuff like Courage Wolf. (As though its Adult Swim exhibitions weren't bad enough already.)

Upside: possibly seeing a paid television personality say "BLAST IT WITH PISS" on camera.

When the fuck will these fucking spectators get over their "lol internet" phase?!

POAST SOME FUCKING GORE. IT'S THE ONLY CHEMO THAT CAN KILL THIS CANCER. Or, at least, convert them into real Internet Hate Machines and Hackers on Steroids.

The really sad thing is that I can't even talk about this without furthering the problem. It's like Schroedinger's Image Board. Even mentioning it collapses the waveform.

Well. That wasn't terrible.

Never got around to seeing the original, so it's in this vacuum that the film doesn't seem to deserve the criticism it received.

Liev Schrieber has been one of my favorite actors since "Phantoms." And Mia Farrow was fucking excellent, even though she was doing much, much more slammingly intense films about the antichrist when "The Omen's" director was in kindergarten. If anything, "The Omen" succeeds not on its own merit (amusing Rube Goldberg sequences aside) but rather because it would introduce a whole new audience to Farrow's craft and, in turn, point them towards a much tighter and groundbreaking rendition of "Lil' Satan" than this one or any other since.

Not to say that this one was bad, per se, but anyone who likes Christianity-flavored horror will get the (correct) feeling that they've seen this before.

Incidentally, I'm downing a copy of Polanski's other great devil film, "The Ninth Gate." Which truly was the last unambiguously great thing either Depp or Polanski did.

My god. The Black Eyed Peas fucking STUNK UP the stage on SNL last night.

I really don't understand their popularity. Will.I.Am and Apl-de-Ap and that other guy who looks like a wet Derek Zoolander can't sing or dance or even rap, and Fergie looks like Angelina Jolie put on too much fake tan and then got punched, hard, right in the mouth.

They just fucking stand there in a line and mechanically clap and twitch and take turns singing.

Also I'm disappointed that Fergie didn't soil herself like a nervous five year old on live TV. AGAIN.

I like a lot of pop music. Really, I do. I also like a lot of really esoteric shit that people in this country never have and probably never will hear, but I also like a lot of what radios tend to play. But the Black Eyed Peas are just a fucking mystery.

Seriously, the goddamned Backstreet Boys had more talent than these yahoos.

Y'know, it was pretty okay.

It's the story of a young woman (one of the kids who survived "Pulse 2") living in one of the neo-Luddite refugee camps, who discovers a computer in the hulk of an old car and embarks on a journey to find the guy in Houston that she's been IMing.

Once you get past the returning premise, that in "Pulse" some scientists found a way to bridge the gap between this world and the shadowy, Sheol-like afterlife with radio waves (Ham, CB, 802.11, Bluetooth, any old sort of radio waves) and therefore the proliferation of wireless communication equals ghost invasion. Yeah, it pretty much makes "The Core" seem like a Discovery documentary. But, honestly, the unstoppable and hilarious farce that is the premise of the "Pulse" series actually makes the suspension of disbelief easier, somehow. Once you accept that these soul-sucking flickery hologramish ghosts (which are occasionally somewhat terrifying) are central to the plot, anything else that the writer asks you to believe goes down easy.

A note about the production values. So like the second one, it was direct to home video. The whole thing is shot very cheaply, with bluescreen backgrounds in really inappropriate places. Like everywhere. Literally, fucking EVERYWHERE. There's usually a couple seconds of filmed establishing shot and then the rest is bluescreens with noticeably artificial lighting. In fact, there were only a couple sets - the refugee camp, the gas station, the farm house and the interior of "Adam's" bunker. BUT! Those scenes (which admittedly make up most of the film) were shot in such a way that they didn't clash with the bluescreened scenes, which lends the entire production a rather stylish, if probably accidental, dreamlike overall look that doesn't totally displease.

It loses points for having a (really genuinely frightening, credit to the actor) Magical Black Person, but in toto it was not a terrible addition to an alarmingly not-terrible series. Check out the whole triptych if you want some zanily ridiculous but internally-consistent and often pretty scary apocalypse porn.