Gives Us Buckets of Blood

I saw the new Jason Statham flick, The Mechanic, this weekend. I’ve liked Statham since Snatch though some of his movies are definitely hit or miss.

Mechanic wasn’t the greatest modern action flick I’ve seen, but the fact that it was a straight-up ballsy R with some serious ultra-violence along with a touch of sex made it quite charming… well, from my point of view at any rate.

How I curse the rise of the PG-13 action flick. Admittedly, Nolan showed the new way with Dark Knight but still, I like proper weapon play. One of my favorite action films of the last decade (and believe it or not inspirado for you budding Far West fans) is John Singleton’s Four Brothers. Four Brothers is basically a classic revenge western set in modern Detroit and yeah, it is definitely an R. Greatly underrated, it helped continue to establish Mark Wahlberg as a contender, showed Tyrese Gibson to a wider audience, and introduced Garrett Hedlund (who just played Sam Flynn in Tron: Legacy).

Give Me the Horizon

So a piece of my future was revealed today.

Allow me to share three thoughts with you all:

We may be what we say we are, but sometimes, we must become what others need us to be.

Beware of men with butterfly tattoos.

Our bards don’t need no stinkin’ badges.

Back in the Saddle

Whew, home again, home again, jiggity-jog. Back in Cali-forn-i-a, mostly intact.

My plane back from GenCon routed through Denver and I shared that leg of the trip with the greater bulk of the Paizo folks who were proceeding onto Seattle while I passed west to San Francisco. As we were cruising along, I got to idly thinking about the cottage gaming industry and mosaics.

If you take a tile from an intricate mosaic, you have disrupted its perfection; however, if you took said tile from the edge of the design, most folks wouldn’t notice. The closer to the centre, the easier the flaw is to perceive.  Remove several tiles, and the break in the mosaic becomes immediately visible.

So many of the wonderful (and even the not so wonderful) folks in the gaming industry I know are all irreplaceable tiles in the grand pattern. Lose one and it just won’t ever be the same.

Like I said, idly musing… I think I’ll be one of those bright turquoise hexagon tiles.

Oh, yes – my voice? It is nearly non-existent at the moment. I can do a spot-on Gollum impersonation though.

Where Are Ideas Born?

“Within Dreams” used to be my answer. I’ll have to come up with a new one, ’cause everybody will think I’m cribbing from Inception from now on.

That’s okay though. Inception leapt to my personal top 3 movies of this life in one viewing, which is pretty damn remarkable, as I’m an old and jaded cinema goer. That Nolan fella has got him some leet skills.

Review? Nope. Reviewing perfection is like unto personal blasphemy.

SEE IT…

Alright, one line review: Lacuna with a Neuromancer chaser.

There.

The Game Is On

We are officially within the month mark, so the queries are starting to trickle in:

Yes, indeed, I will be at GenCon this year. Lots of people I want to see, some bizness to attend to, games to be played, etc. etc.

My Toy Story Story

So we turn the way-back machine to the summer of ’95. My friend Patrick and I went to see an early Saturday matinee of the film from a relatively new little studio called Pixar. We had both seen the short of the bouncing light along with “Tin Toy” before. It was the first weekend and the theatre was absolutely packed with children.

I think we were about 30 minutes in when a sense that something was off in the theatre struck me… I couldn’t put my finger on what it might be for another 20 minutes or so until I suddenly realized what it was. I’m a big fan of all forms of animation, be it Miyazaki or Disney or what-have-you I see it in the theatre, often at a matinee and kids, even the best behaved kids, make a lot of noise at the movies…

There was no sound from the audience; no sound at all. I mean, there was popcorn munching, and frequent laughter at appropriate moments, but otherwise, no sound from the kids. I turned and looked back into the darkened theatre and all I could see was little faces staring up in rapture, eyes wide open, mouths agape. The whole theatre was soundless, speechless, utterly captivated. I caught the eye of a few Moms and Dads and grinned. They grinned right back.

It was magical.

I’ll be damned if it didn’t happen again last Saturday afternoon.

Soundless, mouths agape.

Magic.

I love you, Pixar – thanks for my Father’s Day present.

Did you get Lost?

The 6 year ride comes to an end and it sounds like the fan community doesn’t know quite what to think. I’ve seen love and hatred in equal buckets across the web.

So where do I stand? Well, I was never a big devotee of the show, I watched here and there but never with any regularity. I thought the ending was sweet.

That said, I always looked at Lost as a morality play embracing the struggle not just of good and evil, but science versus religion, faith versus cynicism, etc. Faith clearly won out in the end, which I imagine has pissed off a lot of the more rationally inclined fans who were pulling for science.

As for all the Dharma Initiative questions? Please, me and any of my RPG designer mates could give you all the answers you would want with five minutes of riffing on the subject.

Here, not even trying very hard:

The unusual electro-magnetic properties of the island put it on the scientific community’s raider sometime during WWII when radio communications were strangely effected in proximity to it.

The Dharma Initiative came in to study the phenomenae.

Some of the DI folks were above board and only went in for scientifically sound and humane experiments. A select group did not, and kept their tests secret from the rest. Example: they brought in a polar bear to study the effects of a specific energy stream on a living creature. The stream in question was running through the underground of the island, causing freezing cold temperatures where it passed. To conduct the experiment, they needed a massive endotherm inured to cold.

There, decent answers to three questions.

Welcome!

So I’ve put out a new plank, got a new attitude toward the world…

Well, not really, but I like WordPress quite a bit. Still fooling around, making myself feel at home.

At any rate, come one, come all!