shuffle-songs-the-return
This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Shuffling Ipod

Turn on the Ipod, hit Shuffle Songs and post the first 10 songs, no matter how embarrassing:

Counting Crows - Amy Hit the Atmosphere (This Desert Life)
Our Lady Peace - Neon Crossing (Naveed)
The Mamas and the Papas - Dancing in the Street (Complete anthology)
Dave Matthews Band - American Baby (Live Trax)
The Flamingos - I only have eyes for you (Rolling Stone Top 500 songs)
BSG Soundtrack Season 1 - Flesh and Bone (BSG Soundtrack)
Blue October - HRSA (Consent to Treatment)
Dionne Warwick - Walk on By (Rolling Stone Top 500 songs)
Jonathan Coulton - Rock and Roll Boy (Thing A Week 3)
Keane - Broken Toy (Under the Iron Sea)

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Game Review

Lost-Via Domus

I picked this game up the other night on a whim. I heard that it sucked but was fun for true Lost fans..gotta say I can't disagree with that feeling.

The story doesn't focus on any of the main characters, although they are present and you interact with most of them. You play Elliot, an amnesic crash surviving photojournalist. The storyline is pretty plain and simple, in fact it almost seems like they had a story already and tacked it onto the Lost universe. The main plotline is finding out who you are. To accomplish this you do several mundane tasks and periodically go through "flashbacks" in which you have to take a picture of a certain event to "remember" your past. It's all very...odd and frustrating trying to get just the right angle of the scene to trigger the remembering part.

The best part about the game is you get to visit several detailed Island locations from all the DHARMA stations to the Black Rock, you even get to see what was behind the magnetic wall in the Swan (hint: not that impressive). The game features some of the actual actors doing voice work and most of the fill-ins do a decent job...the notable exception being whoever voiced John Locke, he sounds like some old-timey prospector from Scooby-Doo.

The game is a good romp for about 4 hours of work. If your an Achievement whore the games 1000 points can be had with hardly any work. I'm not a Gamerscore freak by any stretch and I got 960 points on my playthrough (the 2 achievements I missed could be had if I put in maybe another 10 minutes of my time). Most can be obtained by doing things vital to move the story along anyway. The ending is a big WTF moment, and not in a good way like you normally expect from Lost.

If you were thinking of getting this game and are not a Lost fan I'd classify it as a renter considering the short playtime involved..or wait until it eventually drops down to a sub $10 price. Lost fans though should pick it up if only for the cool ability to walk around set locations.

**update 7/5 - all achievements unlocked. Lost - Via Domus is my first 1000/1000 Xbox 360 game!

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

It seems that the more people stop believing the shit they are peddling, the more Stalin-esque they get in their desire to force people to believe them.

A Boy and His Dog - Post-Nuclear. This movie, sometimes referred to as “A Dog and his Boy” centers on Vic (Don Johnson) and his telepathic dog named Blood. Vic travels the wastelands with Blood foraging for food and…raping women?…some protagonist. They eventually encounter an underground city where men are scarce so a new influx of semen is needed. Vic leaves Blood and goes underground. He eventually finds love and finds out something nefarious is going on and leaves with his new honey. Upon getting to the surface he finds Blood near death and in one of the strangest endings ever, Vic kills, cooks and feeds his new love interest to Blood and they live happily ever after…raping women, I’m sure.

The Postman - Post-Nuclear. Kevin Costner stars as a wanderer that finds an old US Post Office uniform and inadvertently starts up a post-nuclear postal service. This film is most remembered as Costner’s next worse movie after Waterworld, but I like it. The storyline is pretty solid and has some excellent set locations. The main antagonist, General Bethlehem is well written and interesting. I just don’t see why this movie generates so much hate, other than it being fashionably cool to diss all Costner movies except Dances With Wolves. I like it, fuck the haters.

The Day After - Post-Nuclear. This movie and Threads kind of go hand in hand. Both were produced in the early 80’s for television and both showed the after effects of nuclear war on everyday people. The Day After deals with residents in and around Lawrence, Kansas after a nuclear exchange with Russia nukes Kansas City and several other US cities. It has a big, sprawling cast that includes such 80’s stalwarts as Jason Robards, Steve Guttenberg and JoBeth Williams. Originally conceived as a 4 hour miniseries it was shortened to a 2 hour movie because execs were worried all that doom and gloom over 2 nights would make people sad. Idiots. It includes cool scenes of people being vaporized by a nuclear blast and one guy getting blinded by staring at the explosion. haha.

Threads - Post-Nuclear. This BBC drama is hauntingly realistic in it’s portrayal of life after the bomb drops. The city of Sheffield England is the setting and it focuses on a young pregnant girl named Ruth and how she and others cope with things like rape gangs, looters and radiation poison. One cool thing about this movie is some characters are introduced and killed of rather graphically or, in the instance of Ruth’s boyfriend, Jimmy, run off to find someone and we never see them again. Leading to the assumption that they died at some point either through malice or succumbed to the radiation. The end of the movie fast forwards 13 years to find Ruth and her daughter fruitlessly trying to grow crops. Ruth dies, her daughter is raped and gives birth to a deformed, stillborn baby. the end. It’s fucking depressing but very well done.

Children of Men - Post-Nuclear/Biological. Clive Owen plays a former rabble rouser who gets drafted back into the cause to escort a woman carrying the first baby in 19 years to an enclave of scientists. This movie has it all, great story, great acting, great directing, superb camera work…everything.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome - Post-Nuclear. A pre-racist Mel Gibson and post-Ike Tina Turner? Oh yeah. A sequel to both Mad Max and Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (or MMBT, as fans call it) follows former Australian policeman Max as he journeys through a nuclear devastated Outback. After stumbling into Bartertown, a make shift town that runs on methane from pig shit, While fighting in the Thunderdome, Max breaks a deal with Auntie Entity (Turner), leading to the introduction of one of the movies signature lines..”Bust a deal, face the wheel” . Max is exiled and hooks up with a tribe of feral children looking for their savior, Captain Walker. They go back to Bartertown, bust up the operation but at no point do they go “beyond Thunderdome” so I have no idea what the title means, but it’s a good romp.

The Omega Man - Post-Biological. Charlton Heston plays a military scientist named Neville who creates a vaccine to immunize himself from a plague as it starts spreading. The bulk of the movie has Neville fighting a group of nocturnal, cloaked plague sufferers called “The Family”. In the original book they were actually vampires but in the movie their more like light-sensitive luddites that want to kill Neville because he “Lives by the wheel”, an oblique reference to the fact that Neville lives in a fortified, generator powered apartment with plenty of ammo that he uses to kill Family members. In the end Neville meets a group of young, survivors that the plague is taking longer to kill, he develops a serum from his vaccinated blood to save them. In the closing act he dies in a Christ-like way after ensuring his serum would help save who’s left. I remember watching this when I was younger and being freaked out by the scarred, deformed “Family”. Heston’s trademarked overacting doesn’t lead to any “YOU FINALLY DID IT! YOU BASTARDS!!” moments, but it’s memorable nonetheless.

28 Days Later - Post-Biological. Fucking Brits. In between tea and crumpets they’ve gone and invented a deadly virus that turns normal people into crazed loonies intent on killing everyone in sight. Awesome. People sometimes mislabel this movie as a zombie flick, it ain’t. The infected are not dead, they’re just batshit insane. It kind of meanders toward the middle once the main stars find the military base but it ends well with lots of action and finally hope for rescue.

The Stand - Post-Biological. The Stephen King movie based on the book all his other work is compared to. I love this movie. The Stand deals with the aftermath of a nasty strain of flu escaping from a military compound and basically killing most of the country. The survivors are essentially in one of two camps. Those that follow the wisdom of Mother Abigail or those that swear fealty to demonic Randall Flagg. The titular Stand is the battle of good versus evil. Good movie, even better book. I was kind of disappointed they didn’t include some of the cooler things from the novel like the TV station take over during the outbreak or the steps taken to make the Colorado Free Zone, but still it’s an excellent movie and worth the 6 hours to watch.

he-could-no-sooner-disown-private-donors-than-he-could-his-own-white-grandmother

Obama throws his earlier pledge to accept public financing under the bus:

Democrat Barack Obama has said he will not take public financing, allowing him to raise unlimited private funds in his campaign for the US presidency.

His decision means he will forgo more than $80m (£40.5m) that would have been available for him to fight Republican John McCain for the White House. Candidates who accept public money cannot raise funds from private donors. Mr Obama set records raising money for his campaign for the Democratic nomination during the primary contests.

The decision reverses his earlier promise to use the federal public financing system if his Republican rival also did so.

It's CHANGE we can...come to expect from the Obamessiah.

In a Blender magazine interview songstress Alicia Keys let's everyone in on the secret; The government created gangsta rap to convince blacks to kill each other:

We ask what other gangsta rappers she liked. And that’s when Keys drives a steamroller through the wall.

“‘Gangsta rap’ was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other,” she says, putting down the sandwich. “‘Gangsta rap’ didn’t exist.”

Come again? A ploy by whom?

She looks at us like it’s the dumbest question in the world. “The government.”

A new Rasmussen poll out shows what pretty much everyone with more than 3 brain cells had already figured out; the media is so in the tank for Barack "Messiah" Obama:

Given these results, it’s not surprising that 76% of voters believe the media has too much power and influence over elections. Just 3% believe the Fourth Estate has too little influence while 16% say the balance is about right.

Eighty-seven percent (87%) of Republicans believe the media has too much influence along with 80% of unaffiliated voters and 65% of Democrats. Voters have little doubt as to who is benefitting from the media coverage this year—Barack Obama. Fifty-four percent (54%) say Obama has gotten the best coverage so far. Twenty-two percent (22%) say McCain has received the most favorable coverage while 14% say that Hillary got the best treatment.

A cool little video using Halo 3 to remake the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air opening:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7TydVzYlpI

With yesterdays primaries our long national nightmare now appears to nearly be over. The Lamb Of Chicago has been christened and his opponent, Hillary Clinton is all set to drop out and endorse him:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is moving to suspend her campaign and endorse Senator Barack Obama on Friday after Democratic members of Congress urged her Wednesday to leave the race and allow the party to coalesce around Mr. Obama, according to a senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton.

It's all too funny, just a couple months ago she mocked his only experience as president to be a speech he gave a few years ago, now suddenly he's the only one capable for the job! gotta love how a possible shot at the VP slot can make even the most bullheaded bitch change her tune.

false-deities

The Book of The Obamassiah

The Obamassiah shall reveal himself to us by his teachings, which will be the spoken word in the form of the finest silk and silver. » Read the rest of the entry..