Author Archives: Shadowtwin

It’s Bubba Ho-Tep!

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Since signing up for Netflix I have been watching a lot more movies than ever before in my life. I probably watch 10 movies a week now, where previously I would watch maybe 2-3 a month. As a result of this, and also having the ability to stream the movies instantly as opposed to having to wait for the mail to both deliver and return them, I have been watching pretty much anything with a flashy cover or catchy title; Mom always told me to always judge movies by the cover…

I have watched some pretty bad movies lately as a direct result.

To be fair I have also found a couple that were pretty good. Interstate 60 for instance was a great movie that I had never heard of and would never have seen were it not for the fact that Netflix recommended it to me. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon was another title that they recommended that I thought was excellent. Occasionally they are bound to hit a bit wide of the mark. Such was the case with Bubba Ho-Tep.

Bubba Ho-Tep was another of the Netflix recommendations. As is generally the case with the recommendations, I don’t like to read anything about the movies they recommend before I watch them. Being totally unaware of where the plot is going keeps me from trying to guess the ending (which I’m sure my wife will tell you is an annoyance that I have trouble shaking). So I went into this movie knowing nothing except what you see in the picture to the right there: It somehow involved Elvis.

I know from spending hours watching the history channel that “Ho-Tep” came at the end of the names of some of the Egyptian Pharaohs. While I wasn’t entirely sure whether that was a name or a title (still don’t know really) I was relatively sure that it was being used in the latter context in the film. When the movie opened up on what appeared to be Elvis in his 60’s in a retirement home, I was a little thrown. I had been expecting this to be some sort of a bio-pic about the life of Elvis or something. Boy was I ever wrong. The reality was far worse.

I’m going to spoil the plot now.

Evidently, according to the film, the real Elvis had traded places with an Elvis impersonator sometime prior to the famous death of the king in 1977. The real Elvis was still living as an Elvis impersonator, but had accidentally burnt up the only proof he had of that on a barbeque grill at his trailer park (seriously). So the real Elvis was now wasting away in a backwater retirement home. Everything in the movie was very anachronistic though, this was supposedly at least a couple decades after Elvis’ death -clearly set in the 1980s or more current- but the lights, beds, radiators, doorknobs, bedpans, and, well just about everything electrical inside the retirement home looked more like what you would expect to see in the 1940s than the 1980s. That’s really beside the point though.

While he is in the retirement home, Elvis happens to meet John F. Kennedy. Kennedy is now a black man. Evidently after the shots rang out from the school book depository that day in Dallas, Kennedy’s brain managed to survive the ordeal (although anyone who has ever seen the Zapruder film could clearly see that a great deal of his brain matter got splattered all over the back of the convertible. In fact Jackie O was said to be trying to scrape it up off of the trunk in the later frames) but for security reasons the secret service had put his brain into a black man… ‘Cause no one would think to look there. No shit, This is really in the movie.

Now that we have both Elvis and JFK on the lam in a retirement home somewhere in Jerkwater, what do they do with the film? Do they tell the stories that led up to them eventually being put into the home? Do they try to quell rumors about the alleged conspiracies that surround both of their untimely deaths? Nope. They fight a Mummy.

Yes, that’s right. A mummy. An Egyptian mummy that at one point actually uses a toilet inside the retirement home and scratches graffiti -in hieroglyph of course- on the walls. The mummy was evidently being transported by bus between a couple of towns when it somehow got lost (in a bus accident I think it was). But for some reason that they never even bothered to try to explain, this mummy was not wrapped up in the typical strips of cloth you have come to expect from mummies, he was dressed up as a cowboy! Because when I think Egyptian mummy, I immediately think of ceremonial silver and gold belt buckles that say “Bubba”, don’t you? As I say, they didn’t even try to explain this part. But they do say that he eats people’s souls…

What becomes of these legendary figures in American history as they battle it out with the boot-scootin’ bad-ass from Beni Suef? Well you’ll just have to watch the movie to find that out, won’t you…

But the odds of you actually watching it are bad enough that I should just go ahead and tell you that JFK dies in the fight, but Elvis manages to kill defeat the mummy. And I just saved you the 90 minutes of your life that you would have wanted back if you had watched it. You’re welcome.

Power supply replacement

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If you know me at all, or if you happen across my website once every 6 months or so, you know that I go through a lot of pc’s around my place. At any given moment there are always a minimum of three pc’s up and operating in the room I am sitting in now, additionally I have a laptop connected to the TV in my living room right now to use for instant video through Netflix. Normally I think of the PC’s as disposable, however since I have been doing a lot more tinkering with them lately, I have started to become a little more attached to them. The one you see in the picture here was the first one that I really started customizing. In a previous post, I detailed the time and effort spent sawing through the top of this case when I made it my mission to get 4 case fans installed in it. And I really loved how it looked when I finished it. So after I put all the time and effort into it, I was a little too attached to it to just give up on it when it quit working last week.

Oddly the power supply is the one thing that I have never replaced in a pc. I say oddly because I have replaced pretty much everything else, even the cpu, but the power supply is the one part that I have never actually pulled out of the case and changed. Well, I have never changed a motherboard either, but IMO the motherboard and case are the PC, so if you plan on changing one of them you may as well just move to a new box/motherboard combo and call it a new pc.

I bought a new Rosewill power supply unit. This one is 500 watts, so only a very slight upgrade from the previous one, but being a better name, I expected the quality of this to be far superior to the one that had been in the tower in the first place. There was also a less important concern with aesthetics; this one has two blue LED fans to match the case as well as the wrapped cables you see in the picture here. The lines wrapped around the ribbons glow under the lights in the case also. So with the wrapped cables eliminating most of the wire clutter in the tower and the additional glow of the striped cables the whole setup looks far better than it did before. If I were to base the relative quality of the product on weight alone (certainly not the best measure of quality) this one is far superior to the supply it was replacing. The listed weight on this is 5.2 lbs and it certainly feels like it. The old psu, while 480 watts, so only nominally smaller in output, barely weighed 1.5lbs.

My only real concern with the new power supply was with the cables. There were so many different letters in the descriptions -SATA, MOLEX, ATS, EPX,- it had me a bit frightened. Most concerning though was whether a 24pin connector was the same as a 20+4pin connector. I mean, if its the same thing then why are there separate listings for 24pin and 20+4 pin? Is the 20+4pin an older version that was later incorporated as standard into motherboards until eventually they dropped the confusing +4pin descriptor? Thankfully I never had to learn since it all worked when I hooked it up.

In addition to cleaning up the inside of the case by wrapping all the power cables, the inside was further reduced of clutter by being able to directly plug in the hard drive and dvd drives, which had been run through a 4-pin converter on the old power supply but could be directly hooked up with the (SATA?) cables the new psu came with. I only took one picture of it after I got it put back together and then stuck it back beside and behind my wife’s desk (this is our third pc right now, so for backup and occasional internet use only) before I found that the picture didn’t turn out, so until I feel the urge to slide it back out you’ll just have to take my word that it looks considerably better.

But the reason for this post is that I began to wonder -after seeing how easy it was to replace the power supply- if the industry intentionally uses so many acronyms and abbreviations for the cables and plugs on the inside of pcs to try to intimidate the average Joe into thinking that they are difficult to work on. Or perhaps the enthusiasts that build their own machines perpetuate the use of the jargon to make themselves sound more knowledgeable than they really are? At any rate, each new project I work on with regards to pcs makes me realize that they are extremely simple to work on and I’m not sure why I find that surprising anymore.

Applying sideways logic to pedophilia!

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I remember having seen the movie Brainscan on video back in the 1990s. I remembered liking the movie quite a bit back then, and thought that the story was clever enough that I should force my wife allow my wife to enjoy it with me. Surprisingly, the special effects on this held up fairly well for being 15 years old; there isn’t anything so fake that it takes you out of the movie (possibly one scene where we see a foot being cut off, but eh, I haven’t ever amputated a foot, so who knows). The story was still good enough to make the movie watchable, although the huge surprise twist ending aspect was completely lost to me since I had already seen the movie, but also to my wife -since it was foreshadowed pretty much from the opening credits. That is the risk you take when you try to go back and watch movies you remember fondly from your younger years though; you may have simply been easier to fool when you were younger.

At some point during the movie, the main character is watching a young lady through her bedroom window (here I use the term “young lady” relatively; she was supposed to be around 15 years old for the story of the film, though I can’t figure out which actress it was, so I can’t find her true age) and it appears as though we are going to get to see her topless. I turned to my wife and said, “Ooh, I think we get to see her tits!” And the wife said something like “She’s too young for you to be looking at them.” To which I replied, “This movie came out in 1994, she’s at least 30 now.” Game, Set, Match. Right? Well, it turns out that the wife thinks that just because she was (or was supposedly) underage at the time the movie was made it makes it perverted to look at her naked -despite the fact that she has obviously passed the age of consent in the mean time…

Leave it to a woman to come up with some crazy shit like that.

Which leads me to the sideways logic and its application to pedophilia. For the purposes of this example I am going to have to make a lot of suppositions. I know that the situation could never present itself exactly as I will describe it, but nothing in life ever does. I want to try to separate this down to its barest form to try to determine exactly where the moral boundary is, where the legal boundary is, and whether the moral and legal boundaries even intersect. This is purely hypothetical, of course, and the only question I am concerned about is the end question, not how or why we arrive there…

A family lives in a house with two small children. Unbeknown to anyone, there are cameras hidden in the bedrooms of the children. The cameras run to a DVR somewhere that records thousands of hours of footage, but it is never viewed by anyone. The children live in the same house until they are in their 30s, at which point they discover the DVR. The video contains a lot of footage of each of them totally naked, dressing, undressing, etc. Knowing there is a market for such material, they decide to sell the video. Is this wrong?

Legally, of course, this is wrong. Distribution of naked images of children is a crime. The legal theory, however, is that it is exploitation of the children, and in our scenario there has been no such exploitation, as the photos were never seen by human eyes until the children were fully grown, they were never made to pose for the photos, and they themselves are the ones that are distributing them. So while it is legally wrong, it seems that the basis of the laws that make it wrong do not take the welfare of the children into consideration at all. But illegal is illegal, and distribution of this would be against the law.

How about morals? Is it morally wrong for them to distribute this? I am asking if it is morally wrong for them to distribute it here, not whether it is morally wrong for someone to look at it. Obviously it is morally wrong to look at photos of naked children, but is it morally wrong for them to sell them? If it is morally wrong to sell the photos, is it morally wrong to give them away?

Personally I think it is definitely immoral and illegal to look at the photos. However I can’t really get my head wrapped around how it could be immoral or illegal for them to sell them. I am absolutely sure they would get convicted (if caught) of distributing the photos of naked children, but I just can’t imagine a jury convicting someone for selling photos of themselves.

What do you think?

Health Care in the news

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As you likely know, I generally try to steer clear of posting anything of a political nature on my site. I do make such posts on occasion, this being one of them, but generally I stay away from them just because so many other people are so much more knowledgeable on the subject than I am. Also, I doubt anyone has ever said, “I need some leftish, candid political views, I’m going to go to the site where that guy posted naked pictures with a guitar.”

The subject of health care, though, is one that I feel strongly enough about to throw my opinion out there.

First things first, universal health care is a very good thing -if executed properly. Whether or not it will ever be able to be executed properly in the U.S. remains to be seen, but we are moving in the right direction. A properly executed system will have many long-term benefits for the country as a whole. None of which I want to go into right now.

What I do want to go into right now is something that I was thinking about on the way home: the GOP seems to be a lot like GM. I am basing this all on my perception, and do not mean anything here to be taken as actual fact. This is absolutely unresearched.

GM started making those huge, gas-guzzling SUV’s back in the 1990s, and they were popular at the time, but so were the economy cars that Toyota, Kia, Hyundai, and others were putting out. GM made a couple half-assed attempts at economy cars, but they were generally unreliable and didn’t come with nearly the same warranty as their foreign counterparts. GM was focused on building ever larger SUVs, almost as if they conceded the market for economy cars to the foreign companies, assuming there would always be a huge base buying their road hogs.

By the mid 2000s gas prices and public sentiment had pushed most Americans out of their SUV’s and back into smaller cars. GM still hadn’t made a serious attempt at a reliable, inexpensive, light car, and hadn’t done anything to try to improve the unreliable tag that their small car offerings came clouded with. So Americans bought foreign cars, and a LOT of them.

By the late 2000s GM wasn’t selling any enormous SUVs, but that was their stock and trade. They couldn’t scramble to put together a reasonable small car fast enough. And since they had let the reputation of their small cars go straight to shit from their first attempt, they couldn’t have sold it if they did.

GM went bankrupt because they wanted to continue making enormous, gas-guzzling SUV’s even though that wasn’t what people wanted.

The Republican party seems like GM right now. As the baby-boomers are slowly dying off the party is getting younger and younger. While some of the core ideals seem to be ageless, others seem to be dying out with the baby-boomers. Some of the things that still make the baby-boomers bitter like women voting, social security -although they probably don’t mind collecting it-, medicare- things that their generation were staunchly against 50-60 years ago are not only accepted today, but most of the party can’t even remember a time when they weren’t that way. The core of the party is getting younger and their values are changing, but the GOP is still only offering their 1950’s version of an agenda. If they don’t watch out, soon they could be just like GM; Offering something that was popular some time ago, but everyone has moved on to something reasonable, if they aren’t offering it, the people will get it from a competitor.

“Tailgate” the movie

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If you know anything about me at all, this video needs no introduction. Sit back and enjoy. If you don’t know anything about me, this video still needs no introduction, although it won’t seem like nearly the same cinematic masterpiece if you don’t know about my propensity to put things off for as long as possible.

Now, without further ado, I give you “Tailgate” the movie:


Now wasn’t that the funniest thing since sliced bread? The timing is a bit off in some places, but it was hard to take it too seriously while I was editing it.

Mindf@&k me, Baby!

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When I quit drinking several years ago, that accomplishment gave me confidence that I would also be able to quit smoking sometime in the not so immediate future. Since I have been thinking about quitting for a few months now, I had initially thought about quitting smoking on the four year anniversary of quitting drinking… That didn’t work out, in fact I forgot to try. This Tuesday night (or Wednesday morning, depending of which part I am keeping track of) I decided to give it a go.

I know a few people that have quit smoking. I also know, well, only one person other than myself that has quit drinking (here I am defining ‘drinking’ as getting drunk every single day without exception). While I think it may still be a bit too early to call my attempt to quit smoking a success (just passed 48 hours without a cigarette), I am going to make a couple observations anyway.

Quitting smoking is significantly easier than quitting drinking. I woke up one morning and decided I was done smoking, and I simply haven’t smoked since. I have had a couple urges, but I bought some black licorice to help me out (black licorice is an odd form of a comfort food for me), I have a bag handy and usually just eating a piece will get me through the urge. Licorice seemed like the way to go because the flavor is pretty intense and the vines being roughly cigarette shaped could help with the habitual part of it (or so I reasoned). I also have handy some Camel Snus which I have used a couple of times when I began to get a strong headache (which I suppose technically means that I haven’t actually kicked the nicotine addiction, but that is quite a minor point), having used a total of 4 pouches over the 48 hours since quitting.

I really thought that quitting smoking was going to be way harder than quitting drinking because, well, because everyone always talks about how hard it is, I guess. Also with cigarettes you have the nicotine addiction as well as the habitual part of it to overcome. The habitual part is actually much harder to overcome than the addiction (for me at least). Waking up in the morning without a cigarette is probably the toughest part, and I don’t mean because I want one so bad that I have to run and light one up, I mean because I generally have one lit before I have a single cognitive thought. In order to keep myself from lighting up first thing in the morning I moved my cigarettes from their usual spot on my nightstand so that I wouldn’t have one lit up before I had a chance to think about it. It was a good thing I did too, this morning I reached to where they normally are and only when I couldn’t find them did I wake up enough to realize that I had ‘quit’ a couple days ago. Really that has been about the worst it gets; I just occasionally reach for a cigarette and then remember that I quit. There is a bit of discomfort as my brain tries to deal with the lack of nicotine, but it doesn’t even hurt as bad as a caffeine headache (damn it, another addiction).

Now comparing that to quitting drinking, where I literally did not sleep at all for at least 72 hours after I quit, and probably got maybe 8 total hours of sleep over the first two weeks after quitting. My hands were shaking so badly that I could hardly hold a fork. And the worst part is that I knew, and it is absolutely true, that if I had taken one drink the shaking would have gone away and I would have been able to sleep… I guess mind altering substances have a way of grabbing hold of you.

I don’t mean to say that quitting smoking is actually easy; far from it. If you have never had an addiction to a mood altering drug, quitting smoking will be the hardest thing you ever do. If you have beat such an addiction quitting smoking won’t be so bad; no depression or intense feelings of hopelessness, the physical withdrawals are limited to the occasional headache, and you just have to remind yourself from time to time that you are quitting to be successful. Not so bad really.

But the point of this post was not to argue the relative ease of quitting smoking. The reason I wrote it is because of a conversation that went on in my head yesterday (don’t judge me), it went something like this, “You know, no one knows you quit smoking so they won’t judge you if go ahead and light up.” To which I replied, “Nah, I want to quit.” But my brain was a quick thinker, and said “Well, you did quit. You just quit for more than 24 hours, obviously can do it, now let’s put that all behind us and have a smoke to celebrate.” A dialogue very similar to that really did happen internally yesterday. That is why I decided to write about this; I find it remarkable that my own brain can try to get one over on me. I have heard the term ‘mindfuck’ before, but I never imagined it would be an inside job…

humorous spam in comments

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I get many, many spam comments since converting to wordpress. I have it set so that I have to approve them so that I don’t cover all my pages with small dick ads though. I read this one today and it made me chuckle:

I enjoyed the article and thanks in greetings to posting such valuable poop advantage of all of us to be familiar with, I caste it both auspicious and enlightening and I mesa to examine it as commonly as I can.

That came from user “Ray Ban Store”, which is odd ’cause I would think English would be the first language of anyone devoted to sunglasses. Surely that wasteful accessory is purely American?

Look at that hunk of man meat!

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So our house has become a general disaster area over the years. During the first 5 years that we lived here I was a daily drinker and keeping tidy didn’t really matter a heck of a lot to me. The wife, of course, liked to keep things in order, but there were certain areas that were “mine” that simply got various detritus piled on them for years. Then when I quit drinking and started my new job I started working so many hours (and with that hour each way commute) that I never found the time to clean up those areas -at least that is what I tell myself so that I don’t feel like quite so much of a filthy pig.

We have made tremendous progress in the making the house look slightly less like it is currently being occupied by transients over the last couple of years: The bathroom was completely remodeled in 2006 when I was out of work. At the same time I replaced the kitchen sink, put in a garbage disposal, we got all new kitchen appliances, etc. The carpets have been ripped out of the living room, bedroom and computer room. It was subsequently replaced by a new carpet in the living room, and faux hardwood in the other two rooms (we have dogs. carpet and dogs don’t mix. the dogs don’t go into the living room often.) Our large Arizona room even got some new peel and stick tile. We also threw away tons of stuff from those rooms when they were cleaned out for the new flooring/remodeling (here I think that tons is not actually an exaggeration; there was much furniture that went to the curb, the carpet itself weighed a couple hundred pounds, all the pipes from the new plumbing, the old appliances. It was probably quite literally tons). We have been just very generally trying to purge the old, dilapidated shit from the house and replace it with less shitty and worn out more current stuff (where it is being replaced at all. Trying to get rid of stuff mostly and keep the rooms as minimal as possible).

The only thing that keeps me from just shoveling shit into the back of a truck with abandon and taking it to the landfill is the knowledge that somewhere in this mess we still have some stuff bearing sentimental value. I lost my father when I was very young, and the only things I have that were his are a picture and his old watch -which I haven’t seen in a decade. The wife’s mother also died several years ago, and I know that somewhere in the house we still have some of her artwork, and some pictures of her (sadly most of her jewelery was likely pawned by her husband ((the wife’s step-father)) when she died). And while we haven’t seen these things in years, I really don’t want to accidentally throw any of it away. So the digging out has been slow.

Yesterday I made great progress on the finding the finding the sentimental items when I happened across my father’s watch. In addition to that, I also found two working copies of our wedding cd (this was something that I actually tried to launch as a business years ago; All the photos from the wedding were cropped and thumbnailed, I laid them out in two html formats, one with frames, one without frames, put in a snazzy menu, embedded a font, burned them to disc and put an autorun feature on them so that even the least computer literate person in the world would be able to use them. I think I was going to charge something like a hundred bucks to do all the coding, cropping, etc., then a buck a disc or something like that. It never got off the ground floor. Although I did manage to spend several hundred dollars on cd jewel cases, discs, labels, and everything else I would need to make it fly before I flopped). I also found yet another cache of photos (about the third such find in the various rooms during various cleanings). I have only quickly thumbed through them so far, but there was one (three actually, but you only get to see one) that made me decide to write about.

Now if I were to find a photo of someone else I knew, and say they happened to be naked -or mostly so-, my strict code of ethics would keep me from sharing said photo with anyone as far as you know. That said, if I were to find a picture of me, and I was posing like a cheap man-whore, OMG yes! Post that shit! Alright, I get it. I played the guitar. But why was I naked? Further, who was taking pictures of me while I was playing the guitar naked?

I remember being in fairly horrible shape at the time this photo was taken, but as I look at it now, I really don’t see it. Barely a hint of a love handle there, my man boobs won’t hold up a pencil yet, the hair on my chest/stomach hair is still in the “kind of cute” phase (which would later be replaced by the more grotesque “why is this the only place on my body an inordinate amount of hair grows” phase), my legs look like they could have been superimposed from a third grade art student’s stick figure. Damn I wish I looked that good right now! Ahh memories.

And just for fun I took that photo and added some fun text to it. Enjoy:

Behind the Mask

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Since recently canceling my account with Blockbuster and signing up for Netflix I have been quite pleased the service. Being able to download so many movies instantly, and for no additional charge, has allowed me to watch a lot of movies that I likely wouldn’t watch if I had to go pick them out, or if I was going to be keeping the wife from watching something she wanted to see while she waited for me to return the dreck I had rented. Netflix probably thinks I have some pretty odd -and likely demented- tastes in movies, but really I don’t. I just like a movie that I can immerse myself in and enjoy, which I really can’t seem to do with most of what is coming out of hollywood these days.

I find that for the most part I can really only enjoy comedies that are current. I watch a comedy for the express purpose of laughing at what is happening onscreen, and for that it doesn’t matter who is in the film, or what the circumstances are. That seems to be the problem I have when trying to watch a drama or thriller that is current: I usually can’t enjoy it because of who is in it. For me it is extremely difficult to watch a movie with Nicolas Cage in it and see anything other than Nicolas Cage pretending to be someone acting out events. I have seen him (and all the other actors that seem to be in every damn movie that comes out) play so many roles that I simply can’t watch the movie as a story; I can’t suspend my disbelief, and that takes all the fun out of watching. When I go to Netflix to pick out something to watch, I intentionally try to find movies with people I have never heard of, and stories that I have never heard of, and I find that it makes it much easier for me to enjoy the show.

I find a lot of duds.

Even when I do find duds, I am usually able to watch them, and I don’t think I take any more or less away from them than if I had watched the latest Hollywood blockbuster. But sometimes I do find genuinely good movies… Though not nearly as often as I would like.

Netflix has been keeping track of the movies I have been watching though, and is offering up suggestions. The movie suggestion it had for me this morning was dead on: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.

I really enjoyed this one. Thanks in part to knowing absolutely nothing about it going in, partly because I was able to believe the characters -since you haven’t heard of anyone in this film, and the roles were played well- (Robert Englund is in it, but in a role that his Elm Street work actually strengthens the character if you have seen those movies), but mostly because it was quite clever and unique. The basic premise is simple: A documentary crew follows around a young man who has aspirations to become a killer. Not a serial killer, but a killer of legend or folklore: a la Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers. A killer much bigger than life (death?), with a story and reputation that will live on long after he is gone. That seems hard to believe, and as I sit here typing this I remember that I was thinking at the start that there was no way I would be able to believe the premise. Though as the story flowed I found myself not only believing it, but not finding it odd that the documentary crew was with him, and actually rooting for the guy.

That is about as far as you should read before this is going to get spoilery. Be warned.

As the story unfolds Leslie (the would be killer) is showing the crew all of the detail, training, and preparation that goes into making a successful appearance as a legendary killer. He picks a town where there was a tragedy some time before. That tragedy has already spawned some local folklore about the young boy who was pushed off a cliff to his (probably very real) death. Leslie was planning to make his appearance as this dead boy coming back for revenge. But to make sure that everyone knows that he is the resurrected boy, he fabricates news clippings to leave lying around conspicuously. These clippings also have a bogus photo to make the story seem like it personally affects one local girl. It really is genius in its own twisted way.

If you have any experience with these types of horror films parts of this are actually pretty humorous; for instance it shows him cutting through the handles of all the farm tools that could be used against him. Now you know why that damn axe always breaks with the first damn swing! He nails windows shut, has a remote control for the breaker box in the basement, pre-cuts the limbs of the trees near windows so that they will break if used as a means of escape, later he removes the spark plugs from all the cars. All the things that normally leave you wondering “when did he have time to do that” in the horror movies, he shows you.

The first hour of the movie really is just him showing the crew what goes into it. They follow him through the entire setup of the final showdown, filming it all as he starts to terrorize one poor girl. And as expected the crew grows more and more apprehensive with every passing moment. The question that you will be asking yourself the whole time (at least the one I was asking myself) is “are they really going to tape him killing all those kids or is the movie going to end just as he goes into the house?” And the answer does not disappoint.

I’ll not go into much more detail. I liked the movie when I finished watching it, and the more I think about it, the better it gets. The only complaint I have is that the movie would have benefited from being possibly fifteen minutes longer. There are two characters that are left absolutely hanging at the end. If you watch it you will know the two I mean. There is no resolution as far as they are concerned and for the protagonist to have closure we really need to see what becomes of them; it simply is not possible for them and the protagonist to coexist.

My words don’t do this movie justice, and I am terrible at trying to review movies. But take my word for it, watch this one.

Wow Screens

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One of the things that I noticed while trudging through every page I have ever written was that I made a lot of posts about games. I suppose that makes sense, as I do spend way too much time playing them. What I found odd, though, was that while I have spent more time playing World of Warcraft than all the other games combined, I have posted less about it than any other game. I have 11 posts about Guild Wars but only 6 that even mention Warcraft. I mean seriously, I have 8 posts that mention Roller Coaster Tycoon FFS, and I barely played that game at all.

As previously mentioned, I have logged more than 2400 hours of play time in WoW on my Horde characters alone. Were I to add the time played on Alliance characters that number would nearly double.  That is way more time than I have ever devoted to a game. Even Diablo II, which I played the hell out of, couldn’t hold a candle to that number. Not that I am necessarily proud of that, just that I found it odd that with all the time I have spent playing it I didn’t post about it more often.

The game can immerse me so completely that often I will sit down to play for an hour and the next thing I know the day is gone. At least it used to be that way. They have been changing the gameplay so rapidly over the last couple of years that all the parts of the game that used to take up so much time (traveling at low levels, professions, leveling new characters) has been reduced drastically. Rather obviously they are trying to expand their fanbase to include the more casual gamer, but making it so easy has really taken a lot of the fun out of it. I have 6 level 80 characters at this point, and each new character I level goes exponentially faster than the previous ones. Part of that is just knowing the game mechanics and quests, but a lot of it is just the big nerf bat that Blizzard has been hitting the game with.

Prior to the release of Wrath of the Lich King I only had two characters at max level. Those two characters consumed hundreds of hours of my time as I leveled their professions and ran 10 and 25 man raids to try to get the very best gear in the game. Of course at that time the difference between the gear you could get in the raids and the gear you could acquire otherwise was enormous. If you were walking around on a Warrior with the mace that dropped in Serpentshrine Caverns, people would notice. I got whispered dozens of times by people just drooling over it. Now the gear that you get from the top end raids is only marginally better than the gear that you can get with badges acquired through running 5 man dungeons. Why waste all that time and frustration trying to get items that are barely better than the ones they are just giving away? It seems so pointless.

I’m sure I’m not done with the game at this point, but it does get tiresome doing the same thing over and over again. As I said, I have 6 Horde characters at level 80, with another at 65, one at 62, one at 30 and another at 14. Once I get them all to 80, I will have one of every class at 80, and then what? I don’t think I have it in me to run all the 25 man raids anymore, and even if I did I am never home at the hours when most people run them. So I just keep leveling my alts with no real plan for what is going to happen once I have them all to max.

This all brings me to why I decided to write this post in the first place. It had been a while since I came home from work -usually around 2am on Monday and Tuesday- and just played a character through the lower level zones. Perhaps since it had been so long, I was able to see the game with different eyes. The artwork in the game really is pretty amazing (at least it was for when it came out), and I absolutely love the world when it is very late at night, just before the moon disappears and the sun comes back out. I have taken many, many screenshots during this late night/early morning time, and currently they are set to cycle as my desktop background. Here I decided to share a few of my favorites (click on them for 1280×800, the resolution I currently play in. They stretch well to 1680×1050):


Even if I don’t enjoy playing as much as I used to, I still love the screenshots. I especially like the top left one (shot off the cost of Shadowprey Village in Desolace) and the bottom right one (shot overlooking Spirit Rise in Thunder Bluff).