newsradio is out on dvd!

season 1 and 2 in one collection. oh man... what a great show. if only my deepdiscountdvd login would work.

more from therepublica

wow this site is amazing.

this guy changed all 18,697 grades in the district to A's by accident.
this is one crazy old bitch.
that's a lot of crack babies.
hippo elephant woman.
this family is insane

simpsons s3d3 and therepublica

i had a really great IM conversation last night with stoops as i watched the simpsons season 3 disc 3 on dvd and stoops followed along with his alien hive mind or some funky shit. i bought seasons 1-5 from costco when they were $20 each, skipped right to season 3 because 1 and 2 are ho-hum, and was a little disappointed when season 3 did not meet my expectations. well, disc 3 is solid gold. bart falls down a well, homer and the swear jar, bart courts mrs. crabapple (sp?), mr. burns hires an all-star ringer team for his softball game vs. shelbyville, bart and lisa switch sides. now i can't remember if the swear jar and mrs. k (i think it starts with a k) are the same episode, but oh man. homer's love postcard... i'd quote good lines as they came up and somehow stoops would follow up with the next hi-larious punchline.

in other news, i hit a ton of great links yesterday from hedonistica, and from there, therepublic. i'll put them up now. one of them is fake. i think it's pretty obvious, but don't look at the urls to make it a bit challenging.

trapped babe in toyland
2 people in critical condition from lightsaber duel
lion mutilates 42 midgets in cambodian ring-fight
photographer criticised (the headline is not good but the photos most definitely are)

followup to the fake article

also great with accompanying media is this video from hedonistica of a bus driver owning a 15-year old fucktard. that kid deserved every bit of it, i am positive. i didn't even see what he did, but i know he had it coming. i love the first sentence by the commentor.

in other news, tao has become a flaming woman. he's been blogging up a storm, one sign of a vagina and menstruation. and he's been blogging about his feelings. good god. i have to admit i loved the old tao, stoic to the point of taciturn-ness.
i remarked upon this to steiner, and he had this to say:

(16:29:14) jon@work: OMG
(16:29:21) jon@work: SHE DESTROYED TAO. GOD DAMN SUCCUBUS

there's got to be a morning after
if we can make it through the night...

beyond good and evil

this has been out for a while now, for xbox and ps2. i don't think it's available for gamecube. one should be able to find it for $20 or less. it's a real gem. i read all sorts of rave reviews talking about how this is one of the best and most underappreciated games ever, and so i picked it up a long time ago, but i didn't pop it in until today. go find it now and buy it. it's legitimately awesome.

i'd say the closest well-known game that's like it is zelda. so it's like that, except the fighting is easier, i think. the moving around is better. there's a huge camera aspect in the game that's a lot of fun. i remember wind waker had a camera mini quest sort of thing but it was just for kicks. in this game you're a journalist searching for proof of a conspiracy, so the camera plays a large role in the game. and there's a hovercraft that is plain fun to fly around, enough so that one could create a whole game based just on it.

it's funny, it's cute, it's beautiful, it plays well, and the story is engaging. i love how all the military guys keep calling jade things like short cake. she's this little asian girl, but she's got a short bo staff thing and some mean martial arts skills. she's gorgeous, which isn't a big deal, but it doesn't hurt that she's easy on the eyes without being ridiculous like, for example, lara croft. a lot of characters are humanoid animals, including the orphans that jade takes care of, and her sidekick is a big pig who she affectionately calls "old ham." i really like the controls, and something as simple as the code-entering interface is amazingly executed and should be the standard from now on for all games with analog controllers. it's this crazy helix thing that works really well for scrolling through all of the alphabet and digits quickly.

the first boss battle was very reminiscent of zelda. they must have drawn influences from there. so well done.

raj you ps2 owning son of a bitch, you should still get it, but i bet you it's slower and noticeably less pretty. xbox >> ps2. although if the protagonist is a cute little asian girl you're probably already sold.

vun, two, three! three bats! ah ah ah

that was a real great game of quarters. was it quarters? i liked my rule too... although i can't remember what it was. something about saying matey at the beginning and end of each sentence? arrrr? methinks?

gabi was counting clothes in her post. now i want to count things in my room. there are some slight problems, in that it would take forever. especially the books, as books are stacked upon books that are in front of other books. let's start off with the easier to count items:

video game systems - i just set up the ps2 gamecube and xbox all today. i have my dreamcast, n64, super nintendo, and nintendo all under my bed. and i have a gba sp and a gameboy color. that makes 9.

televisions - 2. the little tv/vcr combo is sitting on top of my bookshelf.

bookshelves and media shelves (the ones that are dvd sized) - 2 of the big bookshelves, 3 smaller ones, and 4 media shelves. that makes 9.

it'll be easier if i divide my books up by category. i will also count omnibus editions as the appropriate number of books (e.g. a 3-book omnibus will count as 3). for some authors i may own more books than they have actually written because i buy the paperback first and then the hardcover when it's a bargain book.

books by:
orson scott card - 16
bernard cornwell - 14
philip k. dick - 5
david eddings - 19
terry goodkind - 10
nick hornby - 5
john irving - 9
brian jacques - 8
robert jordan - 12
stephen king - 19 (some extras from the dark tower, but a lot of bargain book crap too)
c.s. lewis - 26 (a lot of his books are small, narnia is 7, and i own 3 different editions of alice in wonderland + through the looking glass)
mickey zucker reichert - 7
j.k. rowling - 6 (extras of books 1 and 2)
r.a. salvatore - 16
j.r.r. tolkien - 9 (2 sets of the trilogy and a nice illustrated hardcover ROTK)
tad williams - 6

single series:
death's gate cycle - 7 (austin told me about this one)
a song of ice and fire - 4 (an extra copy of book 2)
his dark materials - 4 (an extra copy of book 1)
madeleine l'engle's wrinkle in time series - 4
prydain chronicles - 6 (an extra copy of the black cauldron)
the riverrun trilogy - 3
fred saberhagen's the book of swords - 7(these are pretty short individually)
diane duane's wizard series (not sure of the proper name) - 5 (an extra copy of book 1)
dragonriders of pern - 3
foundation - 3
dune - 6
anne rice's vampire stuff - 6

this is funny:
calvin and hobbes books - 10
copies of the indispensable calvin and hobbes - 3 (i don't know! i think i must buy it every time i see it on sale)

this is simply pathetic:
D&D rulebooks - 13
D&D campaign setting boxsets - 4 (dragonlance, 2 addons for dragonlance, and planescape)
books set in the dragonlance world - 89 (yeah. i had a boring childhood)
books set in the magic: the gathering world - 11
michael crichton - 9
john grisham (he and crichton are such trash) - 5

books that i can't or won't categorize. these could be:
real good books from real good authors that i don't feel like cataloguing. i'm sorry, good books.
from high school classes.
from ms. burns (english teacher) when she left the school and was giving away good stuff (1984! animal farm! shakespeares that i never read).
various gifts
books i bought off the NY sidewalk, in stores, or from the scifi book club that sounded interesting but weren't (shannara, recluse, thomas covenant the unbeliever, i'm looking at you).
stuff from the sci fi book club i forgot to reject (although this has worked out really well before, especially riverrun).
by my count, and i don't think i missed anything, and i definitely didn't overcount, there are 99 books in this non-category. and at the very bottom of one bookshelf, blocked off by another bookshelf creating an L with it, are a bunch of hardcovers from the scifi bookclub. i'd estimate 15-20 down there. i'd say i've read 1/3 to 1/2 of these.

i'm counting the calvin and hobbes books, but not any other comic books. i'm not counting the D&D campaign setting boxsets... wow i think i actually got everything. let's add it up.

187 in books by.
58 in single series.
10 in calvin and hobbes.
127 in pathetic.
~115 in other.
giving us 497 books total.

i haven't read some of the lewis, cuz i just got it from costco. and i haven't gone through k. dick's short story collections from front to back. but everything else not in the other category, i have read. since that's books owned and i have doubles, it's not quite the same as books read. but still, that's messed up.

i just spent one hour and ten minutes figuring this out. i can't believe i own 89 books from the dragonlance campaign setting.

episode iii

wow. good movie. redeems eps 1 and 2. i just got back home, and i wanted to put some thoughts down here before they slip my mind. there might be spoilers? so if you haven't seen it yet, you might not want to read it.

oh, and one incredible thing that's not a spoiler. as the movie came on, people started clapping. i said "no clapping!" not very loud and there was no effect. people picked it up again louder as the name george lucas came on the screen and i said, "it's a movie. it can't hear you." loud enough for everyone to hear. amazingly, the clapping stopped. not all at once or anything but it died, and fast enough for me to be sure it was because of me. then the words started scrolling and one person, defiantly, began clapping loudly and then realized he was alone, and a jackass. i _shamed_ people into not behaving like morons! it's possible! i explained to them why what they were doing was idiotic, and they got it! anyways,

the movie is fucking brutal. it's pretty awful. and a lot of what anakin does makes sense in a skewed kind of way. what kept me going through the second half of the movie was the knowledge that anakin will redeem himself. i'm going to put episode 6 on as soon as i finish blogging so i can watch him throw that fucker down the shaft and save his son.

edit: i was thinking about putting this and i decided against it, but since it's casey's away message, i'm not alone. YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE! best line in the movie. i thought so too.

some thoughts
how did the medical robot diagnose padme as having lost the will to live? is that in the medical knowledge databanks standard in all medical robots or something?
damn, those twi'leks are packing. even, no - especially the jedi twi'lek. in the words of an eloquent dog, did you bring enough breasts for the rest of the class? i swear, they took all strippers / pornstars, painted them blue, and glued some tentacles on their heads. hell, that wouldn't make a bad porno.
senator organa's wife is fucking smoking. i would filibuster in a second. get it? filibust her?
funny that obi-wan orders that c3po's memory be wiped but not r2's. that makes a lot of the dialogue in eps 4-6 better.

some unrelated ep 3 thoughts that are still in the movie category:
i've never wanted a movie poster before, but i want the johnny depp one for charlie and the chocolate factory. and batman begins.
i watched spiderman 2 last night. the dvd was sitting on the table, still wrapped, i assumed my brother bought it and opened it up. somehow i'd forgotten all the little things that bothered me in that movie. but whatever. the fighting was good. i could go on for paragraphs about all the little things wrong with the rest of it.

i saw unleashed the day before that. it's a good drama. it's hard to relate to someone who has been raised as an attack dog since childhood, and so it's hard to understand how he thinks. the action was good, when there was any, but it's not an action movie, so i won't judge it like one.

the avatar of patience

i think i say a lot of weird shit that the other teachers simply don't get. while elevator-talking in the elevator with a teacher whose name i do not know, i made the preposterous claim that i was made of patience. i might have even said that i was patience incarnate. the other teacher without missing a beat agreed and said with complete seriousness that that was probably a good thing here at this school. i tried to backpedal and explain that i was in fact not made of patience but was in actuality suffering from a dearth of it. this left the teacher more confused than if i had just smiled and nodded. this all took place in under 15 seconds i think. thank god one can just jump ship on those conversations when one gets to one's floor.

what am i doing here? this is ridiculous.

mr brightside

i've sat here for 20 minutes trying to think of how i should write about this. i'm just not going to. but no one should ever have to go through this.

Now I'm falling asleep
And she's calling a cab
While he's having a smoke
And she's taking the drag

Now they're going to bed
And my stomach is sick
And it's all in my head
But she's touching his chest now

He takes off her dress now
Let me go
And I just can't look
It's killing me
And taking control 

weekend trip to NY #56

highlights

20Q _owning_ gabi. i've never seen someone get pwned so hard by an inanimate object.
the food. good work mike liu.
beating mario bros by actually jumping over bowser. i've never beaten him without fire.
scoring a solid 6,6,9, respectively, on my three turns at taboo. sai is a great guesser. i think my 2 6's were both 7 - 1 because i let a taboo word slip out each time.
(EDIT: that indian bitch!! subway! beautiful)
the combination of toadily wasted and toadal chaos.
equilibrium making casey its bitch.
grape fall. my head hurt from laughing so hard.
seeing catherine on sunday. catherine getting pinkeye at 5am in the morning somehow.
teasing catherine some more about her boyfriend.

this good and evil thing is way off. we need some kind of authority to step in here.

scary

in response to raj: i was terrified after the ring. i watched it all the way through, though. i'd already seen the ending, if you're talking about the time i "cut" the movie to keep it happy.

in response to natalie: one of the reasons i was able to play myst was because of the guarantee that there were no monsters, traps, or any possible ways for me to die. i would have jumped out of my skin, and probably this dimension, if some slavering skinless humanoid had jumped me from behind and spewed diseased caustic blood on me whilst savaging my face.

grape fall, dog massage, ann coulter

everyone must go here, here, and here. don't read the descriptions as they're like previews to movies that are already out. thank you paul, sai (indirectly), and makiko respectively for expanding my world.

the suffering

oh my god. i unwrapped "the suffering," loaded it up on the xbox, turned off the lights in my room, and changed the brightness on my tv to the suggested setting. i didn't even make it to an encounter with an actual monster before i turned it off.

i could only play this game in a brightly lit room with at least 2 friends. if it was only 1 friend i'd be afraid of him mutating into a bloody torso with knives for limbs and skewering me x4. good god. raj, this is your kind of game, buddy. fucking creepy doesn't begin to cover it.

i just whipped that up and posted it right away, but i'm editing it now to include some more thoughts. 1) i can't play resident evil either. i've tried. 2) i don't know why i can watch scary movies but not play scary games. i think it has to do with passive vs active involvement. i can sit back and relax because it's not ostensibly _me_ wandering into the obviously haunted house or peeing in the indian burial ground. but running around, even in a third person view, constantly shifting the camera angle because i'm sure some knife doll mannequin is creeping up behind me (possibly along the ceiling instead of the ground) - that is an entirely different story. 3) i like fps's, and scary games. i've been able to play some. the exceptions, i think, have to do with ambushes. i hate needing to WATCH MY BACK. i'd love a game with linear progression and areas that, once cleared, stay that way. facehuggers crawling around in the ventilation system and lunging at your unprotected back (of course you always turn around just in time to get the face hugged), zombies appearing out of nowhere from the direction you just came and lunging at your unprotected back, knife torso thingies coming from a prison gate locked on your side and lunging at your unprotected back... can't handle it.

this weekend

i accomplished nothing. there's a big to do list that's not getting any smaller. i did buy a hanging swiss cheese plant for myself, and some orchids for my mom, from home depot. that was nice. i picked up a stuffed Ein from cowboy bebop for 1.88 from media play. and i got def jam vendetta: fight for ny and 3 other games for $20 each. what bothers me about djv: ffny is that whenever i win, it is because i controlled the entire match. whenever the computer wins, it is plain cheap. there are lots of games like that, where the computer AI is unimpressive but it is a challenge because it can anticipate and time things better than a human. annoying.

been playing a lot of settlers of catan. wow that game is awesome. thanks austin and natalie, for turning me onto it.

i mean to finish writing about that particular day i had. it wasn't special in any way, but i started and i should finish, especially since i didn't even write about a single class yet. it is getting fainter in my memory the longer i leave it, though.

oh man, i almost forgot. i went to o'brien's corner friday afternoon with some teachers from scitech. it was fun. feels awful strange though, to walk out of a bar at 5pm into daylight, with a buzz.

his eyes open. no alarm? this could be bad. what time is it?

7:07. this is bad. oh, nope, today is F day. 3 4 5 6 7 1 - prep first block. he can go in late. he's not supposed to; other teachers have told him that the administrators are always watching. by contract, he should be in the building by 7:15. he doesn't care; they can go ahead and fire him. usually, he sets his alarm for 6:15, snoozes until 6:40 or so, brushes his teeth, irons his clothes, and is out the door by 6:55, but today all of that is shifted back 40 minutes.

the drive is autopilot by now. he's been listening to the same pearl jam cd (69 - san francisco a, or maybe it's chicago b, or maybe seattle a) for a few days. it's got some good ones: given to fly, wishlist, better man, evenflow. he halfheartedly curses his useless ipod in the back of his mind for the nth day in a row. it takes half an hour instead of 20 minutes to get to the school because he left later than usual.

he gets in at 8:07. 18 minutes left in first block - not bad. he checks his mailbox - empty. he goes up to 312, the room that contains his, along with 12 (he thinks) other teachers', desks. he starts grading homework; he gave the students a take-home quiz that involves that section and he owes it to them to return the assignment so they can use it to help with the quiz. he realizes he has not structured a lesson plan for today, beyond teaching surface areas and volumes of spheres. he flips to section 6-6 in the book. project to find the surface area of a sphere involving foam balls, yarn, and scissors - yeah, right. derivation of the volume of a sphere involving n number of pyramids - also yeah, right. what's left to teach - diagram of a sphere, equation for surface area, equation for volume. ok, lesson's ready. not much time until 2nd block; he grades more papers. he gets up just as the bell rings.

today is national teacher day??

that is news to me! no one told me, surprisingly. where are my fucking apples. fuck those kids.

what do you use to track hits

i like the abbreviation for no text - n/t. i strongly advocated that the columbia frisbee team be named the columbia university no text. or at least the b team since nobody cares about them. i meant to make this a no text but then i just had to remark on it.

what is wrong with him?

i just showed him the last episode (20) of clone wars, the one with greivous, and he said, i don't think it's very well done. i don't see why he would choose to do it in the style of aqua teen hunger force. you know, the one with the giant meatball.

boggling.

what an icebreaker

after taking the kids to coldstone yesterday and chuck e cheese today, i am positive i could pick up infinitely many girls with their help. i'd definitely get far enough to get shot down, at least.

tastes

i had written up a post in notepad because blogger was down yesterday, but then i shut down my computer ( i have to at night, the fan is so loud) and did not feel like saving the file or posting it then. the gist was that i don't like soda or candy anymore. i now like cucumbers (this is a big deal, i used to consider them inferior to pickles in every way, although i still like pickles), and i will eat the hell out of some baby back ribs. still hate coffee, although i'll drink it if i think i need to wake up. i will be frightened if i one day enjoy wine.

kung fu hustle, shaolin soccer, blade: trinity, hitchhiker's, nausicaa, mononoke

lots of movies lately. kung fu hustle and shaolin soccer were a while ago. go see KFH in theaters. it's worth 10.50 and 4 bucks for the subway ride. shaolin soccer is out on dvd. they are both amazing. to be honest, i would be hard pressed to admit which is wackier. one question, although this might be a minor spoiler: why is the girl in shaolin soccer pretty at the end? does that mean all she had to do for her entire life was wash those oozing sores (or whatever they were, i watched a not great quality VHS) off her face? still need to catch god of cookery. i can't find it on dvd here in the states. or rather, i can, but i'm afraid it will be a bootleg.

blade: trinity - terrible. i loved blade 2 - in fact, i enjoyed it much more than the first. why didn't they just do the same over the top action with different fill-in-the-blanks for characters and bad guys and witticisms? instead they made this one a fucking slow-paced joke with an out of place unfunny sidekick (van wilder man is funny, but it simply does not work in a vampire flick), an incompetent team of hunters that blade is forced to work with (they put the _BLIND_ woman on watch), a nasty looking head female vampire (nyssa was a hottie, i remember her from the tailor of panama), and the most inappropriate product placement i've ever seen in a movie - and that is saying a lot. jessica biel likes to make playlists on her apple laptop for her apple ipod so she can listen to music while... fighting vampires?? granted, zhu and i watched the extended version as opposed to the theatrical, but if everything that should have been cut was, the movie would be 20 minutes long, and that's being generous. oh, and dracula - the FIRST - looked like a reject from the village people. so gay.

hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy -

oh yes, those fuckers at enfield cinema 12 changed the super matinee (4-6 pm 7 days a week) from $4.25 to $5.00. i remember when, not too long ago, it was only a smooth $4. oh well. $5 is still cheap. it reminds me of those restaurants in the columbia area that, starting out, would give incredible portions for very cheap, and raise their prices every year, until they're no longer a good deal, but they're still not that bad. for example, saji's is still a nice deal, but that first year they opened up was amazing. i think m2m's lunch platters were bigger in the beginning, too.

anyways, hitchhiker's. it's funny how one certain movie can make an actress beautiful. i recognize the name zooey deschanal; i'm sure i've seen her in movies before, but until now she was not remarkable enough for me to recognize her. now she's hot. it was the same thing with jenna elfman in keeping the faith. and kelly preston in nothing to lose. the movie was cool. definitely worth $5. not sure about $(10.50+4). sam rockwell was hilarious, as was mos def. the robot was awesome. i read the series a long time ago and i barely remember it, which probably made the movie better. corny how they placed the romance angle at the forefront, but then movies always need a romance, or the execs think so, at least. i feel they should not have listed douglas adams in the screenplay credit, as he has been _dead_ for a long while now. but i don't think he'd be ashamed of the movie by any means.

nausicaa of the valley of the wind. i picked it up from best buy for 19.99, which was a deal. it was supposed to cost 28.99 but they mislabeled it. i really should have picked up all of those - the cat returns, porco rosso, kiki's delivery service, castle in the sky - when they initially came out and best buy had them for 17.99. in general, movies will go down to under $10 if one is patient. except animated films. which sucks. i'm going to pick up kiki's for 21 something from DDD because i want to show it to my nieces, but that extra 3 dollars and change will eat at me.
the movie is amazing, as are all of miyazaki's films. on the miyazaki meter, which i suppose is some sort of relative rating scale of all of his films that i have seen, i would place it between... damn, it's impossible. they're all good in their own categories. kiki's delivery service is #1 in girl witch sets out on her own and starts a broom flying delivery service. my neighbor totoro is #1 in little kids befriend a magical totoro and ride a catbus. castle in the sky is #1 in boy inventor catches a girl falling out of the sky and discovers the remnants of a lost civilization. so on and so on. they're all so different and so amazingly unique that they can't really be compared with one another.

princess mononoke, or mononoke hime - i will say that this is my favorite miyazaki film. there are a number of reasons: it was the first one i saw. thank you kentaro. the main character is a man, which is unusual, plus i'd give anything to be him. "yes, i was resolved the moment i let my arrow fly." how cool is that. HOW COOL IS THAT? and i think it's more adult in its themes and plot compared to most of his films. i just watched it again last night, fell asleep halfway through, and finished it this morning. so incredible. the symphonic ost is epic. the description on the back of the dvd is a mite painful, but what can you do.