Amber Night (rebooted)

Well kids, I’m headed out of town for some rest and relaxation. Haha just kidding, I’m spending it with family. Anywho, I made the excruciating decision to leave the laptop at home. I know. I know. Sweet Jeebus do I know. Even now my hands are shaking at the anticipated withdrawal.

I’ll be back around September 10th or so. I’m tightening comment moderation up a little bit while I’m gone, so if you wind up in commenter alley, please accept my apologies and I’ll try to get you out before the nightly beatings begin.

Have fun!

I love Variety, but I was never interested in G.I. Joe. So I’m not sure why I followed the link I found at (the always interesting) Kill Ten Rats, but I’m glad I did. Because I found this gem:

WMA is also helping Hasbro with possible movies based on such properties as the board games “Monopoly” and “Battleship.”

Okay, Monopoly is a stretch but then nobody thought you could make a decent movie out of a theme park ride either. On the other hand they tried to make a movie out of Clue, which I’m told pretty much did not have one. The odds of a Monopoly movie being good are low but not out of the realm of possibility.

But…Battleship? The game that’s an abstraction of naval combat, where winning involves random bouts of attrition through blind guessing? Three words come to mind: Straight To Video. I mean come on. Americans aren’t just going to pile into a movie theater because it uses a familiar name brand are they? Um…they’re not, are they?

Oh hell. Sign me up. Here’s the pitch: Bruce Willis is Captain Blue. He’s a man on the edge, and he doesn’t take shit from nobody. Samuel L. Jackson is Captain Red. He plays it by the book, and he’s only days from retirement.  Captain Blue is unstoppable, Captain Red is immovable. The stakes?  Civilization as we know it.

The trailer:

NARRATOR
In a world.  Gone mad. 150 pegs. 10 ships.  And two men.  Are about to SINK...

CAPTAIN BLUE
(Barely whispering)
B...7.

FIRST MATE
(Looks at CAPTAIN BLUE in disbelief)
Sir.  That's...that's madness!

NARRATOR
...Your...

CAPTAIN BLUE
(Grabs FIRST MATE by the shirt and screams in his face)
B7!  That's an order mister!

Suddenly warning klaxons go off.  There is a low-pitched rumbling sound, and both men slowly look upwards.

SCENE: A giant red CGI peg speeds down towards the earth.  Re-entry flames cascade all around it,
and the camera shakes with the intensity of the re-entry.   We follow the trajectory of the giant peg
towards the rapidly rising ocean, and then we see a gray blip in the water that quickly becomes a
Battleship.  Just before impact the screen goes black and the music crescendo's.  The "Battleship" logo
explodes onto the screen.

NARRATOR
...Battleship!

BATTLESHIP. A Brian Singer Film.
This film is not yet rated.

Get your rez’s now, because soon you’ll have to stand in a DMV-style line for it. And you’ll have to go to China to do it:

Aug. 20-27, 2007 issue – In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.”

Monks have also been strongly admonished to use the new cover sheet on their TPS reports. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama, despite your best efforts (and by best efforts I mean your peeling “Free Tibet” bumper sticker) refuses to be reincarnated in Tibet.

At 72, the Dalai Lama, who has lived in India since 1959, is beginning to plan his succession, saying that he refuses to be reborn in Tibet so long as it’s under Chinese control. Assuming he’s able to master the feat of controlling his rebirth, as Dalai Lamas supposedly have for the last 600 years, the situation is shaping up in which there could be two Dalai Lamas: one picked by the Chinese government, the other by Buddhist monks.

Which can only be a good thing, because you know what’s coming next dontcha? Only the coolest fucking thing since that Bob Saget dream I had last week: Dalai Lama Death Match. 2 Dalai’s enter, one Dalai leaves. It’ll be like Karate Kid meets Fight Club. First rule of Dalai Lama Death Match Club? Sweep the leg.

This is Ulmo, my friend’s pug:

He’s gonna be a great fighter…or else.

/ducks

This is a real product. I’m not making it up.

Here’s what I love about 3D Mailbox: “If you delete good mail, it goes to the trash alley.” Next to this proclamation we see a screenshot of Trash Alley (above) showing that our discarded email has turned black¹ and is now standing in a dark, grafiti-strewn alley while a lone palm tree behind a chain link fence marks the boundary between Trash Alley and where the beautiful emailerati enjoy the sun and fun. A length of torn down chain link lays in the foreground, marking the place of the previous evening’s riots where some uppity emails got theyselves some stick time.

As if to highlight the plight of our urban deleted, even spam gets to hang out on the beach while you decide their fate. If the system can’t figure out if an email is spam or not, it gets to go ice-skating.² Granted, they have to wear bikinis (presumably this makes it easier for the virtual INS to search them for illegal phentermine offers), but it’s probably better than living with the knowledge that at any time, the popo might show up in the ‘hood to lay down some e-pression.

(via The Forge)

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¹ It could just be that trash alley is a very dark, cold, shadowy, place. You know, for your black emails.
² Yeah. Ice skating. Dear god I love this product!

We interrupt your Friday Cinema for…squeeeeeee!

(And welcome crushing hordes of GU readers! )

Had it not been for the fact that she takes her clothes off for a living¹, Mia Rose’s World of Warcraft account banning might not have even made the WoW forums, let alone that paragon of journalism par excellence², Kotaku. But she does, and so the story, likely influenced by some sort of memish fluffer, got pretty big. And then it got nasty. Well, nastier.

Oh it didn’t get nasty about the banning. The banning just became part of the lead, sort of like “Mia Rose’s account got banned BECAUSE SHE’S A WHORE!” A comment left at Broken Toys sums up the general nastiness rather succinctly:

“Giving porn actresses respect will just make them even more stuck up bitches than they already are.”

It’s nice to see the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is still in effect.

Mia herself admits she didn’t handle the sudden torent of vitriol—most of it not even related to the banning—very well. “Argh. That’s pretty much all I can say. I mean, I shouldn’t have responded at all,” she told me in an email. Her lash back only fed the flames to the point where the story—remember the story?—was completely lost.

I exchanged a series of emails with Mia, and we talked about…you know…girl stuff. Then we did each others’ hair, Ron Jeremy came over for some scrapbooking, and then…alright, actually we just talked about the whole banning fiasco. More after the jump.

¹ There might be a little more to it than that. I’m told.
² I almost kept a straight face when I said that!

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From Kotaku:

Mia Rose, hardcore gamer and pornstar, who appeared in several episodes of World of Whorecraft, told Kotaku that she was banned from the World of Warcraft over the weekend after a fan recognized her and mentioned her webiste [sic] in a public chat channel.

Porn Starlet Mia Rose, who goes by the in-game name of “Miarose” is absolutely stunned that her secret identity was revealed.

“After someone said I had a bad nose, this was randomly it happens a lot, I responded ‘Hey, learn hot to search, stop using Google, go to Myspace or something, I’ve had a noise job’” she said. [beyond my capability to "sic"]

The unidentified player presumably learned “hot to search” and the gig was up.

“The person then typed MIAROSESEXXX.com ZOMFG.”

ZOMFG indeed.

About ten minutes later Rose received a message from a GM saying she was suspended. She hasn’t been able to get a hold of the Blizzard folks to try and clear it up.

Rose said that while she likes the serve [sic] she’s considering changing to another server under a different name to try and avoid the often boisterous, sometimes unwanted attention. [eyes bleeding...]

Obviously Ms. Rose will need to wait to change serves until after she gets that cashier position at Jack In The Box, because (it can be inferred) being a porn actress is against the Blizzard ToS. Unless, you know, there’s more to this story than is being reported. You don’t suppose there’s more to this story than is being reporting…do you? Nahhhh.

Aside snark: Brian, copy editors are your friend. You can type one-handed and still make deadline!

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The first 4 comments in this thread just made my week.