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i started watching the new tatu video because it was uncensored and has both of the girls naked. i kept watching because it had a good sound. then it blindsided me with a fucked up ending.

excellent.

what’s most interesting about the uncensored version isn’t that it has boobies, it’s that it’s twice as long, based around a remix of the song that’s better than the real thing, and has a whole extra chunk of the video storyline that doesn’t make it into the official version. the official video, meanwhile, uses some different camera angles and has a half a dozen better shots. so they’re both actually quite good, and the fuck you ending is intact on either.

i actually never liked the lesbian angle, if you can believe that? i tried watching the videos from their first album (they’re hot and kissing on each other in the rain!) but it was such ridiculous teenage melodrama that i couldn’t stand it. but the music was always catchy, so a few pictures of hot russian girls in the liner notes and some fat beats, i’m sold. the rest is irrelevant.

probably buying their two russian discs off ebay next week. the russian language tracks are generally superior anyhow. pretty much any time you translate your hit song into a foreign language it’s going to be weaker, unless you’re nat king cole. (and even he isn’t anymore.)

i may get the second us disc, there’s a ‘greatest hits’ comp with some b-sides and remixes and a dvd, and of course, they’re working on a third american english studio album. also, their third russian language disc is supposed to drop next month.

couple that with glukoza thanks to gta4, let’s just say don’t be surprised if you hear a lot of russian pop coming out of my workspace for awhile.

marvel is reissuing grant morrison’s entire run on new xmen in three softcover volumes. this is fantastic. i want comics i can pick up on a whim and flip through, and hardcovers are the exact opposite of that.

there’s this wierdness going on in tradepaperbackery right now where it’s kind of a crapshoot if something will be a hardcover only, paperback only, both, or like both plus a solid gold variant.

say i want to pick up the first 100ish issues of fantastic four by lee and kirby. i have four options.

i can get the omnibus editions, vast unreadable tomes with thirty issues at a time in archival quality oversized hardcovers, with obsessively hi-res paper stock, list price $99.99 each.

i can get the masterworks editions, a more reasonable but still overdone archival quality hardcover, with ten issues at a time, list price of $49.99 each.

i can get the essential editions, twenty issues at a time, in cerebus-style black and white paperback, list price of $16.99.

or i can get a dvd-rom set with 575 issues of fantastic four and 185 issues of silver surfer, complete with all original ads and bullpens and letter columns going all the way back to the original 60s issues, for $49.99.

if the essentials were manga sized i’d be all over them, but at full-size, i want the stuff in color.

if the oversized omnibus editions were available in a softcover for $50 each, i’d eat up all the jack kirby i could get my hands on. fantastic four, silver surfer, inhumans, eternals, fourth world over at dc… all the classic cosmic stuff on burly hires paper stock, but without an inflexible shell encasing the thing and making it awkward to read. as hardcovers, i’d need a lectern.

i’ll probably end up getting the dvd set just because it’s the most accessible option, and the price is certainly right, essentially $1 a year. but i would rather have something material, something i can hold in my hands. something that won’t suddenly look terrible if i upgrade my video card.

a straightforward tpb release, ten issues per volume, full color, $19.99 each. that’s what i want, and that’s the only way i can’t get classic fantastic four right now. or classic xmen, or doctor strange, or avengers, or all the other classic marvel that’s only available in essential or hardcover.

if these were real books i could almost guarantee a softcover release six to twelve months later, and happily wait for that. but comics are different and it doesn’t make any damn sense.

in other book news, i found my copy of the bible again. it’s this little abridged, i think, version, with an orange vinyl cover, that i was handed by missionaries in front of high school one day.

i’ve never quite been able to bring myself to get rid of it. not out of religious fervor, just that i’d feel like an ass.

one - drivebys with the katana on the motorcyle.

two - google maps for gta 4, with street view. tag all the pigeons, stunts jumps, weapon locations, and etc, make them easy to find and thereby acquire. allow customization, hooked into your profile, such that you can see what you’ve acquired, what you haven’t, where you earned achievements, died, got arrested, and etc.

ideally this would be linked up with all your virtually geo-tagged screenshots taken with your in-game cameraphone that you purchased on the in-game internet which is where you go to access this whole thing.

three - integrate a wii style sensor bar into all tvs, and give actual tv remotes wiimote functionality. motion sensitivity, a numeric keypad, a high-quality d-pad, four buttons surrounding the d-pad, and a trigger. (stealing the wii-motes best tricks is the entire point here).

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first day back from a week off of work, and i came home early because i was moving comic boxes around yesterday, and i guess my back didn’t like that.

all the more motivation to switch from long boxes to short boxes. only trick is, short boxes are less than half the size of a long box. which is patently ridiculous.

so i may just buy some new long boxes, and trim the whole lot down to half-length. wouldn’t be terribly difficult, and i wouldn’t end up resenting the short boxes for fifty years for being slightly too short.

i am revising my archives. i am okay with this. i want my blog, my entire blog, to be something i can point people at and say ‘read this’ and not feel ashamed at how horrible it is.

there’s a certain honesty in not changing things, that is simply not what i’m looking for. i don’t care if you want to read what i wrote when i was 20, what i cared about when i was 20. i was an idiot. it’s not worth your time.

mostly.

so it’s on. feel free to read all the revised posts from 2001. there’s some good stuff in there that i’d forgotten about. first appearance of shaolin soccer, some rumblings about that jedi kung-fu epic i wanted to do, my 9/11 experiences that i was prescient enough to get down on (paper) while it was fresh in my mind, and a post about how good enterprise looked from the first trailer.

only one post references the fact that this was all posted on sean.kmorg initially, and uploaded into wordpress later. that’s why i’m doing this. i’ve got 400 posts tagged simply as ‘vintage’, with broken links and no titles. i had to revise them all a little anyways, you know how it goes.

then there was this one, a long ramble about one hell of a day i had, that was painful to read now, but had enough stuff in it worth saving that i decided to completely rewrite it instead of simply deleting it. so now it’s presented for your consideration. this is who i was when i started this blog, as filtered by who i am now, seven years later.

someday, maybe this will be chapter one.

the terrible pop-up ads on zero punctuation are back. i know it’s horrendously popular and all that, but good lord, if there’s anything on the internet i hate more than heavy-duty flash banner ads that slow down the page-loading to a crawl, it’s pop-up flash ads that display over the very content i’m trying to enjoy and are a puzzle game in themselves of trying to turn them off.

i don’t know if advertisers are aware or even concerned with ‘you’ve just pissed me off enough to avoid your product on principle’ but the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity is just as bullshit as ‘the customer is always right’.

anyways, that’s annoying me right now so i’m venting. i’m talking like yahtzee because i’m apparently a sponge with no personality of my own. or maybe i just share his propensity for twelve dollar words and run-on sentences.

i got the no-caps thing from e. also, i’m lazy.

nobody is going to read it until monday, and even then, they’ll have seen it so much elsewhere it will feel dated, even if it’s smoking hot right now.

anywho. head on over to starwars.com and check out the full trailer for the clone wars, which hits theaters august 15th, and i am completely stoked for.

’see star wars like you’ve never seen it before!’

if you mean wooden acting coupled with overwhelming amounts of cgi and ridiculous battle sequences, then i already saw that three times in the last six years. if you mean strong characterization and clever action sequences coupled with an epic sensibility and good production design, i haven’t seen that since the original trilogy ended.

if you mean kinetic action, a joyfully unrestrained use of force powers and a near total lack of realism, plus some decent character bits and a kind of subtlety that was wholly absent in the prequels, then this will be a worthy successor to the clone wars animated series we already saw and loved better than the actual new star wars movies they spawned from.

it’s got obi-wan negotiating with jabba the hutt. that’s awesome. the painful attempts at yoda dialogue, and the presence of ‘cute girl sidekick’ jedi, who looks like shaak ti’s little sister(which is fine with me, shaak ti was totally rad in clone wars season 2) aside, this looks absolutely amazing, and seeing it theatrically will only help.

in any case, it can’t possibly be worse than vader dropping to his knees and screaming ‘noooooo’. see my previous post about the empathy test, and apply it in reverse. somehow, lucas managed to make darth vader non-threatening. now, when i see vader in the original trilogy, i feel like someone should offer him a hug.

[addendum]
i just watched last nights episode, it had lots of good stuff, and locke’s last line has so much potential that i can forgive them, as long as we get some decent resolution by season’s end. which is in a few weeks? it’s either sixteen or fourteen episodes, this was episode eleven.
[/addendum]

finally got caught up on lost. they’re, uh, they’re really running low on characters aren’t they? at this point, any more major deaths and they’ll be very much running up against the empathy test. you know, the point where all the characters you liked when the show started aren’t on the show anymore and suddenly you’re watching something else, but it’s still called the same thing?

sliders started out with jerry o’connell, rembrandt (the black guy), arturo (john rhys davies), and wade (the girl). arturo died and was not replaced with a duplicate, nor did they encounter any more alternate arturos, a curious side effect of the actor getting fired off of the dimensional-travel show mid-run.

he was replaced by kari wuhrer, who did a lot of softcore nudity direct to video, and fit the trope around then of ’sexing it up’. this is fine, except john rhys davies was the best actor who was ever on that show, so you know, whatever, it’s sliders. fox at this point wanted it to be an action show, so it changed from alternate histories to cheap versions of species, anaconda, the island of doctor moreau, and whatever else was in theatres at the time.

wade (the girl) left next, and was replaced by jerry o’connell’s brother, charlie o’connell, playing his characters brother, neither of who’s names i can remember. around here the cromagg dynasty became the recurring, dimension conquering villians, and they were about as interesting as they sound. by the end of the show, jerry and charlie o’connell had been fired and replaced with a black science girl (we’re not racist, we swear, look, now there are two black people!) and another bland white dude, playing jerry o’connell’s character in a new body. (yes, the main character is still a white guy, but seriously, we’re not racist. never mind that the black supporting characters may as well be the only non-whites in the entire multiverse…)

so by the end of the show, they’d jumped from four friends hopping between alternate timelines to one of those people and three new characters fighting dimension-conquering mongoloids.

i’m getting tangential here. the point is that if they kill off anymore characters lost will be running perilously low on characters i can empathize with and want to see survive. i’m very much in doubt at this point that we’ll ever get ‘all’ of the answers, or even a satisfying amount of them, and while it’s nice to see ben proving himself more multifaceted than lying schemester, there’s a certain point where you cross a line between bucking tradition and ignoring tradition. it’s good for a show like galactica to not have lee and starbuck hook up, because it’s expected that they will and it’s breaking tradition and expectations for them not to.

it’s bad for a show like galactica, or any show, to not have lee and starbuck hook up, because if that’s what the audience wants to see, and they don’t get it, that’s going to drive them away. you have to be fucking awesome to get away with that, and for lack of ship to ship combat to distract us, season three felt at many points like a long slow tease for the kind of story we knew they weren’t going to give us. you can have lee and starbuck buck tradition, as long as they follow that up by jumping in vypers and blowing the holy hell out of the cylons. if we’re not getting either, you will (and did) lose viewers.

part of me is glad that i waited to watch season four of lost until i could get it in a big meaty chunk, but unless they blow up new york city or something like that, i think the show may have plateaued for me. if the worst the monster can do to a special forces unit is beat one of them up, do i really care what it is anymore? the thing can rip trees out of the ground, but now it’s like, did it take out mr. eko because he was just too weak to fight it off? because he was simply so awesome that they writers couldn’t handle him anymore?

and ben can go anywhere and do anything and he’s supposedly got all this power, but he has to trick sayid into doing his dirty work. he doesn’t have any kind of island-based offensive power? there’s a war between a rich executive and a guy with a mystical island, and it’s all manipulations and tricks? we’re introducing a new arch-villian and Rules and Competition between them, and we STILL don’t have any real answers to questions we’ve been asking since the first season.

it’s just underwhelming. i want to say i’m disappointed with where we are right now. they’ve got a few episodes left this season, but the mysteriousness doesn’t feel legitimate anymore, it’s just the writers stalling for time. the new mysteries aren’t distracting me from old mysteries so much as pissing me off.

galactica, meanwhile, is 100% pure intensity from the moment the season began, with nothing to break the tension except the week between episodes. THEY are obviously in it to win it. whether it ends satisfyingly or not, i’m there for the ride.

lost… i’m losing my patience with lost. we waited almost a year for new episodes and i just want to reach through my tv (technically my monitor) and pummel the writers. you’re not being cleverly coy anymore, you’re just being schmucks. give us as many answers as new questions, or stop killing off all the likeable characters. it’s kind of that simple.

looks much much better than ‘ark of truth’ turned out to be. hundreds of goauld ships, giant battles, jack, baal, time travel, what’s not to like? and it’s being released on blu-ray.

i had forgotten about dresden codak for awhile, but caleb at edilw linked to a recent strip about dark horse people that is pure genius. (technically it’s about the stumptown comix fest 08, but let’s be honest here. it’s about dark horse people.)

now i need little pvcs of dark horse people. they should sell them at tfaw. things (from another world).

i liked it better when the store was just called pegasus.