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* My good friend JH Williams got me the ALIEN QUADRILOGY box set for my birthday, and I have now successfully watched all 4,300 hours of supplemental material. It was all extraordinarily well-produced, but the highlight, oddly enough, is the two-hour making-of feature for ALIEN³. The frankness of the people involved is astonishing. Writers, actors, producers, effects people all openly discussing the disappointment they felt as they were making what they knew was going to be a bad movie. One disaster after another, with plummeting morale all around. It’s a really unique insight into what “plagued by production problems” really means. And, no surprise, it all started when studio executives started rewriting the story to make it more marketable.

* On the insistence of another friend (TWO friends? No way!) I watched the much-lauded Canadian documentary THE CORPORATION and was completely blown away. It’s one of those rare docs that everyone should be forced to watch at least once. It touches on a lot of the themes in Naomi Klein’s work (she’s featured heavily in the film), but goes much further in pursuing its central question: if a corporation really is a “person” according to the law, what kind of person is it? Highest recommendation.

* Albums in heavy rotation right now: Eisley - COMBINATIONS, Various - MARIE ANTOINETTE: ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK, Flight of the Conchords - FOTC, Patton Oswalt - WEREWOLVES & LOLLIPOPS, Spearmint - PARIS IN A BOTTLE

* Fuck you, I happen to *like* M. Night Shyamalan movies. Y’all haters need to quit. For real.

* BOOM BLOX for the Wii is roughly as addictive as Percocet.

* I know I’m late to the party, but has there ever been anything as awesome as THE VENTURE BROS.? I’m pretty sure there hasn’t.

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Two days ago I’m at the mall buying a video game for Jill. The kid working the counter at the game store, he’s maybe 17. He looks even younger.

I ask for a copy of JAWS UNLEASHED and the kid makes a face.

“What?” I say.

The kid snorts. “That didn’t sell very well.”

“So?” I say. “It’s a lot of fun. It’s like GTA, except you’re a shark. You should give it a try.”

“If it was that much fun,” the kid says, “it wouldn’t be twenty bucks new.”

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Hey, if Gaiman can get away with random, disjointed blog entries, then so can I, damnit.

*****

Just bought a wireless PS2 controller, and its presence in the house has served to underline just how much of a lazy bastard I really am. See, our couch is just far enough away from the TV and the PlayStation that we need to use an extention cord for the controller. It’s a big, unweildly cable that has to be unwound every time we want to play a game, and if we don’t put it away again immediately, the cats chew on it. As a result, we don’t play games that often. Pulling out the controller and then putting it away again is just enough of a pain in the ass that we usually just watch TV instead. Yeah, I know. Pathetic, right? When you’re too lazy to play video games, maybe it’s time to consider suicide for the good of the species as a whole. Anyway, with the wireless one (which I’m already thinking of as “the PlayStation remote”) and Jill laid up with the flu, we’ve been playing all weekend.

(Currently playing: TONY HAWK 3, WE LOVE KATAMARI, and PSI-OPS — because sometimes you just have to kill people with your brain.)

*****

Has anyone seen this show HEX? Any good? From the ad I saw on BBC America, it looks like a sort of British BUFFY about a teenage spirit medium. And apparently her best friend is a ghost who dresses like a goth chick from the ’80s.

So far it’s pushing all the Beaton buttons, I gotta say. Anybody know if it’s worth watching?

*****

Since its initial release, I’ve ranted to a lot of people about how STARSHIP TROOPERS is a wildly misunderstood film; that at the movie’s center is a very clever anti-fascism statement, a sort of, “What if the Nazis had won — and now it’s three hundred years later and there’s aliens?”

I saw the movie again for the first time in years the other night, and while I still think the above is true, the movie itself really isn’t very good. Sometimes it just shakes out like that, I guess.

*****

I installed the Google Web Accelerator a few days ago. It says it’s saved me 7.1 minutes so far.

I think it’s lying.

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From Jill:

Okay [...] the ten peso version is that the Left Behind guys made (endorsed, whathaveyou) a video game where soldiers run around after the rapture and execute the non-believers.

Yep. The game is called LEFT BEHIND: ETERNAL FORCES, and it will totally save your soul.

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Oh, hell yeah.

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