Pepsibones and myself have been pretty high on Kid Cudi for a while now. I was pretty excited about his album Man on the Moon: The End of the Day. And then I heard it, and it lit my expectations on fire and kicked them down the stairs. In a good way.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is truly rad:

Via New Scientist

On 2 September, MIT students Oliver Yeh, Justin Lee, and Eric Newton launched a 350-gram (0.8-pound), helium-filled weather balloon from a field in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. The balloon carried a used 7.1-megapixel camera — purchased on Amazon.com — that was programmed to take pictures every 5 seconds.

…

After four hours, the balloon reached its peak altitude, an estimated 28,350 metres above the Earth’s surface. At this height, the curvature of the Earth was just visible.

Earlier in 2009, a team of Spanish students launched a €1000 balloon-borne probe that made it to 30,480 metres using a bigger balloon. Larger balloons have more room to expand before breaking as the pressure of the atmosphere decreases with altitude.

[check out the entire gallery @ new scientist]

They’re making a Battleship movie. Like, the game.

Via /Film
Universal has officially signed filmmaker Peter Berg (who was in talks) to direct a big screen adaptation of Hasbro’s board game Battleship

At first I thought it was a horrible idea. But what if, like, they make it some eerie meta-narrative? Like, you have this brutal naval battle between two parties. And at some point, they cut to two people moving the pieces of a Battleship game board. And just when you thought it was some trite war movie based loosely off of another childhood relic, you realize it’s some psychedelic narrative on the freedom of choice and the manipulation of countries populations to wage war over natural resources. The guys on the ships realize that they’re nothing more than plastic pawns of two masters waging the war on some level imperceptible to them.

Then the plastic battleships, upon this realization somehow fix themselves in the esophagus of the players, bringing down the man. Or the men if you will.

Naw, it’ll just be a shitty naval movie.

FELLOW Metal Heads, fucking stop! Put down Megadeth’s Endgame, and go spend the money on something productive. I see you in the aisle, with it in your hand. I’ve been there. But you don’t owe Dave Mustaine anything. I’ve enjoyed almost all of Megadeth’s albums for varying reasons. I even enjoyed their last effort, United Abominations. It had some decent songs, and the lyrics were so bad they were entertaining.

Endgame makes a good point that I hope you all pay attention to: heavier isn’t always better. Even though Endgame is heavier than probably everything since Countdown, it’s my least favorite album since The World Needs a Hero. All the riffs sound like Dave Mustaine was trying to write Rust in Piece again. The results are thrashy riffs that aren’t really memorable, and half of them sound like a rehash or tweaking of Tornado of Souls of some shit.

Amorphous, boring riffs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Harrison Ford is talking Indiana Jones 5?

Via /Film

According to Tout Le Cine, Ford told the assembled press at Deauville that he, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have agreed on the maguffin for the fifth film. Well, my translation software doesn’t say the ‘fifth maguffin’ but the ‘fifth element’ – I hope he wasn’t just talking about the Luc Besson movie.

What the fuck. Guys. Come on. The Indiana Jones awesome to suck ratio is so friggin’ high. Don’t start diluting that. Did you ever think that there would be as mad awful Star Wars movies as there were stellar ones? Kingdom of the Crystal People With Adamantium Skulls featured Even Stevens swinging on vines with monkeys. Please. I beg you. No

It’s amazing how many people are appauled by Kanye West. Yo, I’m appauled at everyone for watching that fucking infomercial. The MTV Music Awards are like free advertising for all the shitty corporate rock on MTV. Now listen, I’m not saying he’s not a douchebag. And I’m not saying I don’t like shitty corporate music. He is, and I do. But seriously, what the fuck is the problem here?

It’s like he stormed a fucking Slap Chop commercial. Taylor Swift, some bubbly product in neat packaging will survive. She can wipe her tears with all the hundreds of thousands of dollars she has, while she gets double-penetrated by her boyfriend and her music award. Mmmm…Double Penetration.

Calm the fuck down. Who the fuck cares. I can’t believe that this is on CNN, and that like everyone’s status updates on Facebook/Twitter/MySpace/Your Mom’s boobs are ranting about this. It’s not like he’s fucking Joe Wilson interrupting a speech, or a dude crashing on stage during the Miley Cyrus concert and finger-fucking her to climax. This was a dumb corporate piece of shit advertisement.

IT’S THE FUCKING MTV MUSIC AWARDS.

I’m more offended by Kanye’s haircut. What the fuck was going on! He’s got the fucking forest maze of Kokiri from Ocarina of Time carved into his god damn skull.

Bruce Campbell is fucking awesome. It’s a scientific fact. If you don’t like Bruce Campbell, I’d fancy beating your head in with a can of Spaghettio’s. And then I’d drag your useless corpse to your parents, and say, “You made this refuse, please recycle.” So when I hear that Bruce Campbell is going to have a ‘larger’ role in Spider-Man 4 I get sort of excited:

Via /Film

According to the info garnered by Access Hollywood, Campbell is expecting his role in the next film to be “a major part.” Of course, they translated this in their headline to there being a “villainous role in the works” for the actor, despite the absolute lack of evidence to support this supposition.

I don’t think anyone with a functioning frontal lobe (which sadly isn’t as many people as I’d like) can defend the asshole vomit that is Spider-Man 3. It was terrible. And the sequence in which Peter Parker dances in a jazz club was straight out of…I don’t know. I don’t even have a funny remark.

As bad as it was though, Sam Raimi is fucking rad. Everyone and their dog knows that Raimi had Venom shoved down his god damn throat, and he didn’t really dig the guy, et cetera. So let’s float the guy a mulligan, why not? Drag Me To Hell was the sleeper movie of the summer, and I enjoyed the crap out of the first two Spidey movies. Maybe if they let him rock out with his cock out like he wants to, and they don’t jam their conceived notion of what the film should be, it’ll be sweet.

Now they just need to find a way to make Peter Parker not look like a wimpy douchebag who needs to get over his Uncle’s death. And recast Kirsten Dunst. Who has the worst teeth this side of Anna Paquin.

Let’s get er done!

I don’t think that anything makes me feel more old than my perpetually widening disconnect from pop culture. I’m like eight months away from doing the jitterbug and talking about how I remember when The Great Gatsby was released.

Evidently the VMAS were last night. I wouldn’t have known any better if it weren’t for the fact that Kanye West went and acted the fool again. Who could have suspected that? People were all OMFG, that’s so disrespectful to Taylor Swift. And I was like, “What’s a Taylor Swift?” Another Disney machination? A new American Idol abortion? Apparently she emerged from somewhere, another Happy Meal for public gorging.

But people were blown away by this corporate-package on corporate-package hate, and I wasn’t even aware who one of the parties were. I’m floating further and further into the real of the Out of Touch. It’s a frightening feeling, since all you do during your teenage years is say to yourself, I’M NOT GOING TO BE MY FATHER.

Yesterday I was walking around the mall, gazing at the storefronts. You know the shitty mannequins schilling the specific store’s slop. Pimping the wares.

Walking past Hot Topic, I was shocked. It wasn’t the shitty t-shirts and caps that blew off my skull cap. It was the fact that these pieces of crap belonged to the Insane Clown Posse.

The fucking Juggalos still live? I had no god damn idea. I thought that all the Faygo-pounding toolsheds had been put out to pasture. Just what the fuck was going on?! Had I slipped into some alternate dimension? All my friends who used to wear JNCO jeans and sport Jugga-faces have long since disavowed their face-paintery.

What the fuck! What the fuck am I missing?

I am destined to be another nerdy dad. I can see my kid now:

Read the rest of this entry »

I hadn’t been covering Search Engine Terms lately, because there wasn’t anything new and truly extraordinary. Plus, I realized that if I want you, my friends, to be able to read my crap at work, I should probably stop posting links like “BRUCE WAYNE’S JISM NIPPLES” on Facebook. So I’ll take that into consideration. But this one is truly head-scratching:

Orifice Abuse Horizon Tentacles. Hm. I definitely know what orifice abuse is, but horizon tentacles? Huh? I got confused. Then I hit Google up, and apparently, there’s a hentai called Orifice Abuse – Horizon of Tentacles. Amazing.

And don’t think you were getting off the hook, Mr. or Mrs. World of Warcraft cumshots! What exactly where you searching for? Arthas climaxing onto Yogg-Saron? I’m sorry to disappoint. But welcome to the my adobe, I’ll treat you well.

With so many releases on the horizon, it’s easy to lose track of some real gems. Next Tuesday’ll see me blasting new Every Time I Die, Kid Cudi, Thrice, the Protest the Hero DVD and maybe, just maybe, new Megadeth (probably not). Yes, there’s a lot on my plate.

But not so much that I should have lost sight of The Great Misdirect, Between the Buried and Me’s fifth studio album. Come October 27^th we’ll finally have the follow-up to Colors, the 2007 effort that I believe to be one of the most important rock albums of the last ten years. I’m not going to ramble about why Colors is amazing — just sit down and listen (from start to finish) for yourself. If you’re not blown away on some level, I’m not sure you know what music is all about.

Other than a few studio updates and a teaser track on Myspace, BTBAM seem to be keeping The Great Misdirect under lock and key. But it was brought to my attention that a couple of new tracks were premiered live; of course, it only follows suit that some fan captured them (on what seems to be an iPhone) and uploaded them to YouTube.

The quality isn’t great, but it’s good enough. The new material presented is equal parts aggression, melody, musical showcase, straight-ahead groove and mind-bending brutality. Check out the video after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »