Got a Sony Ericsson T610, which is an Internet favorite these days. Hoping my “T-zones” dealie from T-Mobile will start working so I can upload some new ringtones.

Today I wowed my co-workers by playing a ringtone that actually sounds like a real phone.

So I was planning on seeing two films tonight, and ended up seeing just one, twice. The first one was Fahrenheit 9/11, and the second Baadasssss!, which I’d already predicted would be the next art-film I’d see.

That could still be true, only after seeing F911, I went right over to the screen room where Bad etc. was playing, and found nothing but empty seats while the credits rolled. There was already a line forming for the next showing of F911, however, which was showing on two screens at the Arbor Cinema in North Austin (the first line stretched all the way across the lobby).

I’d already bought tickets for both movies online. At that point, though, I really didn’t want to see a movie about the making of a blaxploitation movie made before I was born, and I didn’t want to ask permission, either. So I skipped theaters.

Fahrenheit is the biggest film in America right now, grossing over $20 million in its first weekend, in less than a third of the theaters the No. 2 movie, White Chicks, is showing. So there’s no shortage of reviews available, and just about everything I can think to say would be redundant.

I’ll be brief. I didn’t expect to like this film well at all, but the fact that my parents (my mom’s a D, dad’s an R) saw it and liked it a lot, swung my vote. This film probably won’t get Bush impeached, but it’ll likely lose him the election this fall, in its effect on swing voters. Seriously.

Secondly, it ought to be the film that impeaches Michael Eisner from Disney, who pressured Bob and Harvey Weinstein of Miramax not to release the film themselves. Instead, the Weinsteins underwrote the production and farmed it to Lion’s Gate and IFCFilms, losing Disney/Miramax a ginormous cash cow, over politics.

Thirdly, Michael Moore isn’t the star of this film, though I understand he’s on camera a lot more in his other films. The star, besides Bush On Tape, is a regular woman named Lila Lipscomb.

Lipscomb. Remember the name, because she’s bound to show up on TV interview shows, as great on camera and as insightful and strong-willed as she is. This woman, just being herself on camera, took Fahrenheit 9/11 from being a good film to a powerful, moving portrait of America. She’s why people need to see this movie, though most won’t realize it until she shows up in the film for the third time.

View trailer.

Had to get my docudrama fix this weekend, so I went and saw Control Room, the movie about the Al-Jazeera TV news network, and how they might not be an enemy of freedom after all.

And they might not be. And the war in Iraq and the hostilities that still rage on might not all black and white and red all over, either.
Continue reading Control Room…

From Endgame, a play many seem to talk about but few have seen.

HAMM:

Why do you stay with me?

CLOV:

Why do you keep me?

HAMM:

There’s no one else.

CLOV:

There’s nowhere else.

(Pause.)

HAMM:

You’re leaving me all the same.

CLOV:

I’m trying.

HAMM:

You don’t love me.

CLOV:

No.

HAMM:

You loved me once.

CLOV:

Once!

HAMM:

I’ve made you suffer too much.

(Pause.)

Haven’t I?

CLOV:

It’s not that.

HAMM:

I haven’t made you suffer too much?

CLOV:

Yes!

HAMM (relieved):

Ah, you gave me a fright!

(Pause. Coldly)

Forgive me.

(Pause. Louder.)

I said, Forgive me.

CLOV:

I heard you.

(Pause.)

IT IS FUNNY. Seriously, this guy is a primary reason why I sometimes suffer through the lame parts of Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn on Comedy Central, just to hear what he’ll say next.

Like many funny bastards I know (though I can’t say I know him,) he has a blog. Please note: Not for sensitive crybaby readers.

By someone I used to know, who used to go by Mourne. Guy can still write.

Cryptic Studios has implemented a buddy system known as sidekicking. Once a player reaches level 11, he can take a young and impressionable player under his wing. Regardless of what level the sidekick is, while he is paired with his mentor and in the vicinity of that person, he will fight at one level bellow his mentor.

This is perhaps the only truly ingenious feature to be found in City of Heroes, and if this is to be considered ground breaking, then the entire genre may as well fold up its Gipsy tents and head home, because it is in dire straights.

Diagnosing the fact that people hate leveling and administering a subtle fix that allows two players to team up so that level deficits are negated should be common sense. After spending billions of dollars, we are capable of vaporizing a target anywhere on the earth from outer space with a margin of error measured in inches, but we have not yet assembled a brain trust capable of addressing the tedium of leveling in online games.

Instead of trumpeting the creation of features which temporarily circumvent the problem, Why not use the wealth of talent available in the industry today to come up with a game that does not involve making my eyes bleed due to hours of level grinding? I remain unimpressed.

City of Heroes offers an in depth character creation process. An expansion that will allow players to play villains, and partake in concentual player versus player combat is in the works. If you feel you should be forced to pay for content such as that, then perhaps this is the game for you.

Comes with screenshots and more snarky commentary. Sure sounds like he liked it more than I did — I didn’t play it that long.

GODAlumni.com. And to think I just discovered this site. Contains all those crazy bastards who ever used to work at what used to be Gathering of Developers.

Including, oddly enough, former “executive package relocation engineer” Duncan Stanley, who provided some Shadowbane fans with some amusing late-night IRC hijinks and inspired this comic, where I famously get beaten to death by even more famous pro wrestlers. (In case any of you were wondering what’s going on in the upper right corner of this page, well, now you know. And it’s all Duncan’s fault.)

I wish I still had that log handy.

Just got back.

It’s a pretty good movie. Bring the kids, scare them silent for a little while.
Continue reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban…

PvP, the online comic strip by Scott Kurtz that somehow manages to stay funny on a daily basis (for a lot of people, anyway,) is doing a treatment of City of Heroes this week. It started on Monday, so turn back if you’re just getting started.

It’s worth pointing out, not just because PvP is so rarely about specific games anymore, but because Kurtz has been hired a few times before to promote other MMOGs. I’d wager this time he manages to make CoH sound fun and interesting, as opposed to, say, Ryzom or Rubies of Eventide.

Then again, consider what he had to work with each time.