The Hand That Feeds

So, I've been toying with GarageBand, remixing Nine Inch Nails' "The Hand That Feeds," and it's been a fun little time, eliminating the guitar track and replacing it with the Eastern Santoor 01 loop, making for a bizarre mixture of Nine Inch Nails and Ravi Shankar or something. It'll be better in a few days, after I've run Trent's voice through a filter or something.

So this week, I bought Black & White 2 and have been somewhat enjoying it. Like a very large number of videogames, it's my contention that the computer cheats, because I left it with virtually no population in one level, and five minutes later it had two-hundred-some soldiers. So, of course, I had George, my Unholy Cow, lay waste to them. And then the computer did it again. If there's anything I hate in videogames, it's when the computer cheats, and the only thing I hate more is jumping-puzzles. I'll actually write up a review of it at some point, but probably not here.

And earlier today, I bought F.E.A.R., which I'm not going to abbreviate with those silly periods again, because it's hard to type. So, FEAR it is, then. I've been playing it for a couple of hours, and I've got to say that I'm tremendously glad that I've got a rig capable of handling it decently. By "decent," I mean running at 1024 by 768, but unfortunately without anti-aliasing, because that's just a performance-hog that made the game nearly unplayable. However, even without anti-aliasing, the game's very pretty, runs at an acceptable framerate, and I found being able to pistol-whip bad guys is even more fun than shooting them. I'll have a more informed opinion in a couple of days, likely after I've beaten the game. Tell you this now, though: I haven't played a game this scary since Clive Barker's Undying. I mean, Doom 3 was scary because you'd wander around tight corridors, wondering when demons were going to burst out of the closet and start singing Judy Garland songs attack you, but this game is legitimately scary at times.

Speaking of Doom just a minute ago, the "film version of the game" came out today to scathing reviews, including one star from Roger Ebert. There are a couple of things that make the Doom series of games what they are:

• Must take place on Mars.
• Must involve a portal to Hell.
• Demons come from the aforementioned portal, and they are indeed demons from Hell.

The Doom movie, instead, takes the Super Mario Bros. movie route by eschewing a portal to Hell for a portal to Mars. Yes, it takes place on Earth, which is like sticking an Alien movie in a prison instead of a spaceship, and completely eliminating the Hell angle is like saying, "Y'know, instead of a bad-ass "queen bitch of the universe" alien, you get some albino half-human alien that can only be defeated by a well-placed finger-sized hole in a window. Be warned, this movie could be up for more Raspberry Awards than Showgirls.

In political news, Tom DeLay is on trial in Texas, and his attorney is none other than Dick DeGuerin, whose illustrious legal record includes representing David Koresh. Now, how you go from representing the leader of the biggest cult this side of Jim Jones to the former House Majority Leader, ... well, actually, it makes perfect sense.

The big celebrity news lately has been that Katie Holmes is pregnant. Please note that nowhere in that sentence did I mention the phrase, "with Tom Cruise's child." Read into that what you will, but remember that even Rock Hudson was married. So, if anyone happens to see a vertically-challenged man jumping on couches out on Fire Island sometime, make some Scientology jokes for me, such as:

How many Scientologists does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two: one to hold each wire, and the other to ask questions of the first until the bulb lights up.

Yeah, it's obscure to you, but Tom Cruise would probably jump up and down on the couch like a gorilla on crystal meth, screaming, "I'll fucking kill you!"

The British intelligence agency, MI6, has gotten to the point where they just don't have enough spies, and so they've turned to the internets for applicants: "Applicants are promised foreign travel and must be resourceful and flexible, thrive on a challenge and be able to cope with stress." However, they are unfortunately not promised Aston Martins, wristwatch-lasers and babes in every corner of the world. When informed of that, the would-be applicants returned to their pornography.

Taken from Denver's ABC affiliate: A former Colorado Springs coach and teacher who masturbated in front of a Web camera for what he thought was a 13-year-old girl pleaded guilty in the case Thursday and faces up to 18 months in prison when he's sentenced.
The video was discovered by millions of teenage boys when it was accidentally mis-marked and uploaded to the internet as the "Anne Hathaway Boobie-Scene From Havoc." It is still unclear how the coach was identified so quickly.

On This Day in History, October 22, 1844: Jesus does not appear to the Millerites, thus creating the first modern quack of a preacher. According to Wikipedia, Seventh-day Adventists maintain that Christ went into the second apartment of the heavenly sanctuary on October 22, 1844 to begin the investigative judgment of both righteous and wicked to see who is actually ready to go to heaven. That's right, Jesus spent 1800 years in one apartment before finding out that the paperwork was right next door. Turned out that for all of those years, He'd actually been wasting His time on Santa's naughty-and-nice list.

That's right, we don't take hostages here, and we don't play favorites. Whether you're Branch-Davidian, Scientologist or Christian, you're gonna get it here, where there continue to be: No Boobies.


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