Frank Miller is my boy. If for only The Dark Knight Returns. I mean, he’s given me more than that, but that alone gets him into my Hall of Champions, Perverts, and Heroes. So, despite the fact that he directed a Gucci advertisement recently that looks like a federal-program sponsored version of Sin City, I’m going to try and remain positive.

The commercial stars Chris (Captain America) Evans, Evan Rachel (I Think She Banged Manson) Wood, and A Real Cheap Knock-Off Of the Sin City/Spirit set.

Hit the jump to check it out.

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Well then! The solar system turns out to be no better than my Mom, for it has been lying about it’s fuggin’ age for some time now. It’s okay solar system, I still think you’re gorgeous, and resplendent, et cetera. In fact, you have a nice, mature glow to you. Nothin’ to be ashamed about.

New Scientist:

Without celebrating a birthday, the solar system just got hundreds of thousands of years older.

To deduce when its first solid grains formed, researchers analyse structures up to a centimetre across found in meteorites. Such “inclusions” were created when gases cooled to form the sun and planets and are among the oldest solids in the solar system.

Now Audrey Bouvier at Arizona State University in Tempe, and colleagues, have analysed inclusions in a meteorite that fell to Earth in north-west Africa in 2004.

Based on the extent to which uranium-238 and uranium-235 isotopes had decayed into their daughter isotopes lead-207 and lead-206, they say the solar system is 4.5682 billion years old. That’s between 0.3 and 1.9 million years older than previous estimates, which relied on the Efremovka and Allende meteorites found in Kazakhstan in 1962 and Mexico in 1969, respectively.

Seriously, you can barely see the entropy, solar system. I won’t tell no one the truth, anyways.

Vanquish is silently sneaked up on my unsuspecting by gloriously gaping ass. Shit is coming stateside, washing up upon the shores of the Empire on October 19. But!, we’re getting a demo way before then. When, yo? The demo is droppin’ on PSN and XBL on August 31. That’s soon like woah.

I can’t wait to download the fucking demo, snort a couple of pixie sticks, punch myself in the groin, and scream in painful glee for the however-too-many-minutes-short demo this son of a bitch is going to be.

Source: Zero-Lives.

Hello, sinners. How are you? Did you repent over the weekend? And if so, how far have you strayed from the make believe wishes of your one true savior, Lord Santa Capitalism? I’m just wondering. I sin, yo. I sin hard. I sin with my hand and with my heart and with my dreams. I sin and I smile as I sin and I write it off to being human while secretly despising myself and all of us barred up in flash-casks. I don’t lament too much though.

For we are but a magical lot, capable of some truly wondrous shit if we set our minds to it.

Like, for example: The KFC Double Down.

Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me what you’re diggin’ on to get through the drudgery.

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Enlarge.

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Oh shit, Ryan Palser is the man. The dude has gone ahead and recreated the A3-21 plasma rifle from Fallout 3. And let me tell you something, I used that fucking son of a bitch a lot! I can’t even tell you how many Communist sympathizers and Super Mutant pieces of irradiated bullshit I wasted with that slab of metal, plasma, and death. Well done, Ryan Palser. Well done.

Hit the jump for more picture of those gorgeous piece of death.

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Hey Ma! Yeah you, Ma! Remember when you said that video games weren’t real? And that I shouldn’t cry over Aeris dying because she was fake? And that I was a disappointment and that you were glad you had a second child to correct your mistake?! Well guess what, video games are real! And Bowser died 3,000 years ago after totally kicking all shitloads of ass I bet.

Kotaku:

This extinct species of turtle was five-feet wide and weighed half a ton. It also looks a lot like a certain Nintendo villain.

The dog nose, the horns, the beaked mouth, the (relatively) enormous size…it’s official name is Meiolania platyceps, but it may as well have been called Meiolania Bowserus, so uncanny is the resemblance to Mario’s chief antagonist.

I know, Bowser and his Koopas are supposed to look like turtles, but this one goes a little further than looking like a turtle. I think it’s the horns. And especially the eyes. Those dark, angled, evil eyes

Well then, Mom! Take that shit. If you want to apologize, I’ll be sitting down here in my basement dungeon, penning epistles to Princess Peach about how fucking hot her ass is in that pink tuft of a dress. Slide the apology under the chain-links.

Eric Northman has spent this season on a butt-fucking rampage of revenge. He has pouted, killed, pouted more, brooded, killed, and ultimately pouted some more. Going into last night’s episode, I was fucking stoked!, shit was about to go down.

But then? Then Eric just pouted a real lot, signed some court documents, and pouted some more.

Oh True Blood, if you were as good as your previews, we’d have such a great relationship. I’d buy you ice cream, and we’d swing on the swing set near the lake and talk about the time when you locked your keys in your car and you came over and we snuggled and watched Man Vs. Food until you fell asleep on my shoulder.

But seriously, last night, what the fuck?

We finally got the big reveal! Sookie is…Navi from Legend of Zelda? Or something like that? I actually think its sort of dope, despite the fact that it’s also sort of seven shades of lame. Sookie herself knew it, and the writers had her drop the self-aware “That’s fucking lame!”, which of course makes her existence as a Fairy Lady a bit more bearable.

Unfortunately, Sookie has to be the dumbest fucking fairy ever, running off as always when she’s explicitly told not to. Bill wakes up and he’s all like RAWR, RAWR, WHERE ART THOU, SOOKIE?! Then he gets up in Jason’s face like it’s his fault that his sister is the most aggravatingly impetuous bitch ever.

Seriously. Sookie is every annoying chick in a horror flick rolled up into a ball of hot buck-toothed misery. She deserves a pickaxe in her dumb chest. But she’d just catch it with the gap in her teeth and then use it to mow the lawn or some shit.

If you take a step back, the entire episode, much like the entire series of True Blood, was just Sookie running back and forth from Bill and Eric. Like, seriously. But that’s okay, because the rest of the denizens of Hick Trash, Louisiana can fill up the episode with sugar-pop bullshit.

First off, Tara’s got to fucking go. Like, seriously. Let me describe Tara to you in one sentence: Annoying ass chick who just bulges her eyes, quivers her bottom lip, and acts really pissed off.

There you go. Find me a scene where at least one of this qualities isn’t true.

She’s in the good though, because she may be soon fucking Jason. But Jason’s wrapped up with a Were-Panther, from Nearby Hick Trash, Louisiana. As an aside, Were-Panthers are probably the coolest thing in the show since good old vampires. So there’s that, for Crystal.

Meanwhile, when did True Blood become LOST? The whole flashing to Sam’s life of douchery wasn’t needed, and sort of just jumbled up the narrative. Do we really need to complicate Sam’s life? He’s already a shifter with yokel parents who fucked a Tree Goddess, and now he’s also a thief and a murderer.

I only got a place in my heart for one Sawyer, yo.

But Sam’s back-story wasn’t the only thing that was hacking the narrative structure to pieces. Lafayette and Jesus go on a ridiculous V-Trip on some Universal Islands of Adventure ride. The entire five minutes it ate up were entertaining, but I was left wondering why the fuck it was in the episode. Like, do we really need another storyline involving more characters on some epic bullshit? Isn’t this show already a disastrous potpourri of storylines?

I would have enjoyed it, if it wasn’t wedged into an episode that was doing absolutely nothing to the main narrative, other than having Fairy Gap Tooth run around and get rubbed down by the two guys she’s sweating.

That’s my main qualm with this fucking shit at this point. There’s so much bullshit going on, with so many characters, that the entire thing comes off as a tonally-uneven, fractured narrative of misery. There’s so many storylines going on, that the pacing is total fucking bumper cars, and everything is tethered together more by wishes than anything.

What is connecting the Eric Buttfucking Rampage storyline to the Jason Stackhouse Fucks Panthers storyline to the Sam is Sawyer From LOST storyline? I’m not really sure. But they hop and skip between the lot of them so quickly it’s some jerky, hodgepodge of suck. Sure they’re characters that existence within the same universe, but beyond that?

As far as the main storyline goes, the entire episode was high-fructose bullshit. Pure filler. By the time Russell finally appears on screen, almost the entire episode had been burned up with a bunch of different characters accomplishing almost nothing. Sam was sitting in the woods, Tara was probably just quivering somewhere and stammering, Sookie was in-between running to/from Eric/Bill.

And god dammit, I like Russell’s storyline. I also enjoy Eric’s butt-fucking fiascoatron. I love Hoyt and Jessica’s relationship more than both. But I’m given so little time with every character, it’s like I’m watching a bunch of vignettes tied together under the same umbrella.

There’s two episodes left. And as I always say, if the episode is as good as the preview, I’ll be happy. If it’s “The Lives of Hick Trash” again, I’ll be here next week. Lamenting and groaning and whining like I’m just another member of Bon Temps.

[This! Is! Mad Men! recaps the newest developments of Don Draper and his ragtag group of cohorts. In the spirit of the show, it will often be sexist and drunk. Apologies ahead of time.]

Okay, we’ve hit the fifth episode of this fourth season. I’m liking where things are going, even if they make me mad (man!) or uncomfortable. Let’s take a look at some of the more striking developments in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword…

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[pixelation | weekly gaming & life column every wednesday or uh thursday or even more uh, friday]

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And then I just took off. Like, really took off. Dipped out of the infostream, and enjoyed my brainstem relaxing for a few moments. Right in the middle of the week. Right in the middle of Gamescom. Didn’t care, wasn’t interested. Powered down the iMac and slipped into solitude.

Apologies for no Gamescom coverage, apologies for no Desktop Thursdays.

[As a brief aside, no one really posts on Desktop Thursdays, and I’m thinking of culling the fat from the land. Or at the very least, turn the voyeurism up a notch and perhaps begin documenting more of my weekly existence. Word? Lemme know.]

I don’t really feel like talking about video games this week, but that’s okay. Note the small disclaimer at the beginning of every Pixelation, wherein I sneak in the fact that I may ramble about life.

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