Amber Night (rebooted)

If, like me, you’ve always wondered “wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to order my pizza using an interface that sucks for things like ordering pizza?” well wonder no more!  You can order pizza on your Tivo:

From the press release:

TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), and Domino’s Pizza, Inc. (NYSE: DPZ), the recognized world leader in pizza delivery, have teamed up to give broadband connected TiVo subscribers the ability to order pizza for delivery or pick-up, and track delivery timing, right from their TV sets using the TiVo® service.

Norrathians will note alternative ways to order pizza while sitting on your ass has been around for awhile.  Narnians do not eat pizza because jeeeez people we are still at waagh so it’s rat on a stick for you lot.

And Unix geeks did it first.

Okay, I’m being told that Britain is not a virtual country, but is in fact Narnia, which is where all that scratching is coming from in your closet.

Anyway, this:

LONDON, England (CNN) — A British couple who married in a lavish Second Life wedding ceremony are to divorce after one of them had an alleged “affair” in the online world.

Amy Taylor, 28, said she had caught husband David Pollard, 40, having sex with an animated woman. The couple, who met in an Internet chatroom in 2003, are now separated.

lolz, even CNN, who are “real journalists” for a “real cable network” air-quoted “affair.”¹

David Pollard’s avatar, SexahCheatinHubby, was last seen grinding public quests in Chrace, proudly displaying his “Virtual Asshole” title, selected from his Tome of Knowledge by wanking off at his keyboard a million times to amateur Greenskin pr0n.  Oh, Mythic knows what you do.  Yes they do.

§

¹ Question: Are they really “air quotes” if they’re in print?  God I’m going to be up all night now.

At first blush, this is kinda cute:

And then you think “haha it’s funny because remember how over the last 8 years we Librulz were so outraged that the Right-wing had used symbols like the flag, supporting our troops, and patriotism to demonize any opposition?  Well now Sasha Obama (zomg Russian/Muslim !!) has the nookyaler launch codes beeyotches, and it’s our turn to rub your magnetic yellow-ribbon snorting noses in the now openly gay flag and you goddamned better well stfu and support our Muslim Ayatollah-In-Chief because IT IS YOUR PATRIOTIC DUTY!!!!11!!!1″

Yeah.  That’s the change we’ve been talking about.  It’s…it’s not really gonna get better, is it?

What do you get when you sacrifice everything that made Casino Royale the first Bond-film worthy of the title in, oh, probably 20 years, for the bland, hyper-edited, plotless mess that is Quantum of Solace? Well, you make me wish I’d just sat through an hour and a half (yeah, not even a full 2 hours) loop of the jaw-dropping new Star Trek trailer because, seriously, watching James Tiberius Kirk trash a Corvette is never, ever, going to get old period end of discussion.

Take the opening sequence for example (of Quantum, not the Star Trek trailer), in which Bond is driving a black car being pursued by about a dozen more black cars.  We see a speedometer, we see Bond’s face, we see the bad guy shooting, Bond grimacing, some tires, a hood, Bond shifting, more shooting, a car skidding that is possibly Bond’s but they are all fucking black so who knows because we only get 7 miliseconds to try to figure it out, and now we are in a what-the-fuck quarry and hoo-boy someone just went off a cliff, Bond perhaps? no because then the movie would be over, but oh shit now he just did something cool I think but I blinked and therefore missed the last 65 cuts, and now we are in a tunnel that makes me think it’s going to turn into Get Smart! but no such luck, and now Bond is safe and then he opens his trunk to find…

You could call this kind of sequence “breathless,” or a “thrill ride,” but I like to think of it as lazy film making because it is actually lazy film making.  The Director, who has never directed an action movie but has seen it done in a cartoon once so hold my beer a sec cuz I think I can do it, had absolutely no vision as to how this or any of the action sequences would or could make you sit on the edge of your seat, so instead he had every single clip brutally edited into savage, incomprehensible bites of sensory input, hoping that you would not discover how utterly devoid of excitement it really is.

In every one of the chase scenes, I dare you…no, I fucking DEFY you…to map it out and tell me exactly how they get from point A, to point B, all the way to the end.  You can’t do it.  You motherfucking cannot do it because Director Mark Forster completely disguises any semblance of real action with quick cuts, the completely over-used epileptic-cam, and narrow, tight shots that would make David Blaine claustrophobic.  One second Bond is jumping from one balcony to another (he does this about seven thousand times), and all of a sudden he is on a roof because Q gave him a magical teleporter cell phone.  Often times you can’t even tell who’s who, like oh my fucking god he is falling to his death, should I be worried, or hope he dies?  I just don’t KNOW!

There is a plot.  I’m told.  It’s all about revenge, and some slimy dude who wants to take over the world by controlling Aqua Man, and oh also the South American General who must die because he is really really fat and also burns children alive, and then some British chick pops out of nowhere but soon departs, and then there’s Judy Dench who’s all like “Bond must be stopped at all costs!” but at the same time is like “Oh James, you’re such a MAVERICK,” and there is also Olga Kurylenko whose name I had to Google and then copy/paste, and she has a dark hidden past that is only cliche if you understand the meaning of the word “cliche,” but she’s really hawt so it’s ok, and then there’s the stupid American CIA agents who are stupid except one of them who (spoiler!) we have seen before, and then there’s a Holiday Inn Express in the middle of the goddamned desert that is made out of balsa wood and paint thinner, and then the bad guy dies in a horrible gun fight that lasts for HOURS!!!!  Oh wait, no he doesn’t, he dies from heat exhaustion, just like in every other Bond movie.  But WAIT!!!!  Then there’s ANOTHER BAD GUY WHO WE HAVE NEVER SEEN IN THIS MOVE!!!!  And HE dies in a horrible gun fight that lasts for HOURS, except no he doesn’t, he only dies in his soul because Bond kicks his girl friend out and then pouts at him, and then they make love off-screen, in a space capsule because James Bond is incorrigible!!

Also the opening credits and music are atrocious, especially if you’ve still got the image of a young James Tiberious Kirk trashing a Corvette kicking around your head, and you just know he’s gonna kick that police dude’s ass and then 12 year-old William Shatner will make love to the police dude’s green wife, and all of a sudden there’s some kind of creature caterwauling the lyrics to the Bond movie and you think “oh my god did they actually get Guns ‘N Roses back for another Bond theme?  Wait no, they got a random hobo to sing for coffee grounds and cigarette butts because all the rest of the money went into the CGI necessary for turning what should have been a sure-fire success into a really, really shitty movie.

Anyway, go see it for the Star Trek trailer.

Four THOUSAND (pinky firmly planted on corner of mouth) copies of Age of Conan have been stolen:

Police said the lorry was parked at Hellman Worldwide Logistics on Chase Way, Shann Park.

A spokesman for West Yorkshire Police said the computer games – which were in two pallets – were all ‘Age of Conan’ for the XBox 360 console.

This is a particularly devastating crime, as 4,000 is also the number of current AoC subscribers, if you count each exposed nipple per avatar as a subscriber.  Still, wouldn’t the bigger crime have been not to steal them?  Thank you anonymous vigilante lorry bandit heroes, a Britishy nation owes you a debt of bangers or mash, your choice.

ps: Email neglect enters day 40-something.  I will get to it before the Day of Judgement (aka “Richard Garriot’s New Life Goal of Turning Earth Into a Crappy New MMO For Aliens Where We Will All Be Enslaved As NPC’s and Community Support Reps.”)

Okay, as it turns out, he’s just leaving NCSoft:

Many of you probably wonder what my plans are, now that I have achieved the lifelong dream of going to space. Well, that unforgettable experience has sparked some new interests that I would like to devote my time and resources to. As such, I am leaving NCsoft to pursue those interests.

This can only mean one thing, and I think you know what it is.  Richard Garriott will become President Obama’s Minister of Space Alien Defense which will be headquartered in his giant Lego castle in Sosaria, where he will fly F-16 sorties against enemy flying saucers, injecting them with Stephen Colbert’s DNA and other viruses.  It will eventually become a laggy and unbalance MMO.

EDIT: Scott beat me to it. Not to the part about the Lego castle or being Minister of Space Alien Defense though.  I totally scooped him on that.

Probably.

Do you, like, realize how close we came to totally having a 13 year-old Valley Girl as our next Vice President?  Like ohmigawd:

Q. What did you think of Tina Fey, really?

A. I really liked her. Her in-laws came to one of our rallies and met us backstage. They’re pretty hardcore Republicans, the in-laws were. She had told me that, she was like, believe it or not, I’m from a family of Republicans. You, know, it was like, we have more in common than you think.

She also believes the Republicans lost because what the Republicans really needed was a team of mavericks:

Q. Why do you think your campaign lost?

A. I think the Republican ticket represented too much of the status quo, too much of what had gone on in these last eight years, that Americans were kind of shaking their heads like going, wait a minute, how did we run up a 10 trillion dollar debt in a Republican administration?

I’m really gonna miss her.  If there is a God, President Obama will make her CIO of the intertubes, or nominate her to all 3 upcoming Supreme Court vacancies.

p.s.: I still owe a lot of people a lot of emails.  I am lame, I know.  Hopefully this week.  Sorry!!

Are there three a’s in “waaagh” or eleven?

Anyhoo. According to Game Politics, incumbent Soviet Prime Minister and 80th Level Heal Spec Shammy Barrack Obama is set to nominate Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm—the woman who tried to ban anything more entertaining than regedit from your computer—to the Supreme Goddamned Court:

Among potential Obama appointees, Totenberg drops the name of Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm. Veteran GamePolitics readers will recall that Granholm was the driving force behind Michigan’s 2005 violent video game law, later ruled unconstitutional by a U.S. District Court judge. Michigan was compelled to pay the video game industry’s legal fees in that case to the tune of $182,349.

Okay, actually it’s just incumbent Soviet Secretary of Propoganda Nina Totenberg speculating funding the social redistribution of rape kits through the siezure of control liberation of all RMT operations in China and Australia. Or at least that’s what I’m getting out of this. Cough syrup is good stuff.

I’m speaking of course about this:

Tomorrow Wolf Blitzer unleashes millions of seeker droids to hunt down and eliminate Peter Jennings once and for all.

Oh yeah, and I’m back. For the 3 people who still follow this blog, sorry for the disappearing trick. I’ve got a lot going on in my professional life (yes, no personal drama this time, sorry!), and blogging had to take a back seat for awhile. Also, I owe emails to a lot of people, so please bear with me a little longer.

Also some black Muslim terrorist baby-killing Communist is now your President. I hope you’re happy.