[  Mood: Confused ]
[  Currently: Listening to Zombie by The Cranberries ]
A disease has broken out in Africa. Those suffering from this condition don’t know that they’re infected until its probably far too late. Physical symptoms appear quickly, yet its dehabilitating effects are so subtle, people don’t even realize what is happening to their bodies and minds.

In a region already strife with poverty, hunger, genocide, language barriers between neighbors, sickness, and the highest infant mortality rate in the world, this disease has proved it possible that tensions could get even worse. It spreads exponentially, and there is no cure besides immediately amputating a limb or taking a bullet to the head. What is this horror?

Not AIDS.

Aside from the horrible, horrible American voice acting in the early days, the Resident Evil games have been delivering strong activist messages to gamers for years now. The zombie genre can be a masturbatory holy land for the deranged and egotistical to stage their political fantasies, but it can also be the host to some of the most eloquent synopses of society’s flaws and triumphs. This is where the franchise has always excelled, and where I believe it will continue to succeed with Resident Evil 5.

Like most Japanese film, games and anime, the message of the first few Resident Evil titles was "Nuclear war is bad." With various spin off franchises, they examined a number of other issues. In one spin off focusing on survivors from the first game, the writers explored the worth of an imminently doomed human existence. No matter how you played the game, the zombie infested town would be nuked to contain the zombie threat, making your character a tragic hero, perhaps even a martyr. In other Resident Evil games, they’ve pondered the dangers of religious extremism, xenophobia, science untempered by humanity, and deep rooted psychological disorders, such as gender confusion. If only the movies could be so deep.

To most people, zombie related media is all about the scary horrible monsters walking around trying to devour anything with a pulse. And at its core, that’s the purest way to enjoy this slice of the horror genre – just let your adrenaline get pumped up as you desperately cheer for the protagonists to survive the night – except for that one smug asshole who deserves to get disemboweled from eight different angles.

But for some people, their sensitivities make doing that without understanding the subtext, well, dangerous. In other words, this happens:

Most awesome spam e-mail ever.

Learn how to do it, with Christopher Walken.

I’ve seen images of a Saudi Arabian man setting himself on fire when some sparks from an American flag he was gently roasting found their way to his polo shirt, courtesy of a strong wind from God. I was a mere seven feet away from a war protester in Los Angeles who screamed so loud for so long, that she vomited into her megaphone. And while this group might count as ever so slightly a more bat shit insane crowd (I want to ghost write the memoirs of that topless lesbian grandmother who glued her bangs to her chin), I must say that without a doubt, South Korean protesters are my favorite.

This gentleman, who is probably sad that he is not dead, was upset about an upcoming marine survey by the Japanese government. And yet there are even more insane things to do for even more insane reasons. Somebody, get Seoul the internet before they nuke themselves, those bitches are bored.

I suck at cooking. I suuuuuuck.

The last two of seven days of attempting to make home cooked meals have failed horribly. Yesterday I tried to make a green bean casserole with ham and left over sausage spaghetti sauce, and it came out as some horrifying, crusty clump of dark red gelatinous goo that you’d possibly see in the corner of the screen on Dexter. The day before that, I tried defrosting frozen ground beef in the microwave for hamburgers, and I barfed the second I smelled the wet, luke warm raw flesh when I took it out.

My cooking in essay form.

I didn’t know what’s wrong. Why can’t I innovate like everyone else? I’ve eaten food my whole life, I should be able to make it. But noooooo. Everything I delicately sprinkle with basil leaves turns into some horrific abomination.

Oh, sure, I can do simple stuff, like meatloaf or broiled chicken, but its the even simpler stuff that gets me. Enter Alton Brown, the Beakman of cooking. It turns out that I didn’t know how to cook because I didn’t know the science behind cooking.

Tomorrow night, I will be making Mexican lasagna – a weird mix between corn tortilla enchiladas and the layers involved in the traditional italian dish. It involves mixing tomato sauce with chicken broth and lots of chili, creating my own tortillas out of dry corn with help from my food processor, and not screwing up defrosting and browning meat. And I am confident in doing this because of Chef Brown.

He taught me the recipe in the only way that I could have possibly taken it in and understood: through a narrative involving annoying protesters provoking a magical kitchen fairy to apparate and inspire Alton to throw all his crap in a baking dish and hope for the best, while taking a few minutes occasionally to share the gift of SCIENCE a la Prometheus or Bill Nye. Other adventures have included ten minutes of the show dedicated to proper knife sharpening, and a CSI autopsy like segment on how to properly cut up a chicken, complete with dramatic whispering and dark synth heavy music.

If you have no idea who he is, personality wise, Alton Brown is not so much Emeril Legassi as he is your favorite university professor. A motorcycling enthusiast in addition to a gourmet, he had a limited run on Feasting on Asphalt, a show about cooking stuff while traveling the country on a friggin motorcycle. He also worked cameras for an R.E.M. video and a Spike Lee joint, and conducted a twenty minute interview with astronauts, while they were in space. That’s a guy I want to learn how to cook from.

I highly recommend catching his show on the Food Network, Good Eats, as it is Good Times.

From giant paintings of a monstrous squid attacking a tyrannosaurus rex riding a whale in a thunderstorm, to intimate portraits of Edward Norton harmonizing with nature in classical Japanese kaiga, Brandon Bird is a brilliant and talented artist. And, well, he’s made my heart swell up once again.

Bravo, good sir. Bravo.

Strange things happen when I starve myself for two weeks and then throw myself off my sleep schedule. Today I passed out around 7 AM, and had a dream about an obscure Spanish cartoon based on Dutch children’s novels that was on in 1987 – so I must’ve watched this show from the time I was two years old until I was three.

I’d like to introduce you to the people who got me through my terrible twos, David and Lisa. They are gnomes who live in a tree stump with two pet mice and a cricket. At 399 years old, David was a doctor, and Lisa was a full time great great grandmother.

Here is a little background on the species in case you aren’t familiar with them: Gnomes are about six inches tall and weigh about eleven ounces. They have human sized hearts, and live to be exactly 400 years old. They are seven times stronger than a human being, but prefer to live life away from society by communing with nature.

My dream was just little bits and pieces of the show, as well as I could remember it. I mostly remembered the funny hats and rosey cheeks, and the grandfatherly voice of Tom Bosley. I wanted to reconnect with the series and buy the DVDs, thinking this’d be a good thing to recommend to some of my friends to show their kids. But given how fucking insane children’s entertainment is today, I don’t know if a two year old would be into it these days.

Think about it. What’s a two year old’s TV life like today? Giant talking bananas in pajamas come down the stairs to wake you up. Then, at breakfast, a baby’s disembodied face in the sun squeaks at you to warn of forthcoming rotund seamonkey things with TV’s in their bellies doing some repetitive act for half an hour, and then WHOA, it’s a fucking singing/dancing purple dinosaur! Follow this up with a pink haired lolita doing kartwheels surrounded by creeeeepy puppets, and then some little mexican chick with her monkey comes out of nowhere to interrogate you about where her backpack is so she and her boot wearing monkey buddy can teach you high school spanish.

David the Gnome wasn’t some sort of surreal Teletubbies kind of kiddy show, or a Sesame Street learn how to count and read thing. It was a fantasy world based behind reality. While the tone was often jovial and friendly, it had some really heady morality and lifestyle lessons for kids to grab onto. It stressed the need to respect the environment, love your fellow man unconditionally, and avoid getting grinded into fleshy pulp by trolls.

I am going to order some DVDs off Amazon UK, but I think I’m gonna warn the parents in my life of the dangers this show could bring about. I’ve been watching episodes on youtube all day, and I’ve got to conclude that it was a thrilling, heart warming and exciting show, and I’m kinda glad I didn’t get every lesson it offered on the first run through when I was two years old.

Because at the end of the first season, Lisa and David died at the tender age of 400.

Rock.

I wanted to jot down my thoughts on this year’s E3 before I forget, because I will forget, because this year sucked.

It seems like the competition came out as sort of a wash this year. Scaling down the event obviously hurt smaller companies who have big ideas, and the show was sort of an oversaturation of the big three’s first party games. Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all played it safe, and didn’t really show a damn thing an educated consumer wouldn’t know about.

It’s true.

Nintendo showed off stuff like Super Mario Galaxies and their idea of a fitness pad. It looks fun and innovative. Whoopee. Noticably absent were new games like Metroid, SSBB, and anything that wasn’t a conglomeration of party games. Their new little fitness pad thing is kinda cool, and I’m looking forward to trying it out some day, but the Nintendo showing didn’t exactly inspire irrational enthusiasm. They did make me lust after women who do yoga, but that’s so very easy.

Think thin, play your Nintendo!

Microsoft fell into the trap of showing off things that would only be available within the next six months, showing off only a handful of surprises that most people already knew about, like Resident Evil 5. Their keynote was absolutely lackluster. They took time out of our lives to show off a Master Chief green console? STFU. Peter Molyneux gave terrific demonstrations of Fable 2, but he’s bitten the hand that feeds him one too many times to elevate his baby into a top tier game.

xuenylom

Sony’s keynote was slightly more interesting, and I’d have to say they edged out a win this year. Which would be cause for congratulations, but really, considering the pace of things, it was like they won the hundred meter dash at the special olympics. Bless their hearts. Before the PS3 was released, Sony tried to BS a bunch of pre-rendered movies as gameplay footage and nobody fell for it. They tried to make up for that by rendering one of the more infamous trailers with an in game engine, and eh… Not quite looking as sharp. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that Killzone 2 looks fugly in places, but, of course, its an unfinished game and doesn’t deserve such harsh criticism just yet. What does deserve harsh criticism: Before E3, Sony hyped a $100 price cut for the PS3, and then announced the model that the price cut would effect is no longer in production.

How can you tell when Kaz Hirai is bullshitting? His lips are moving.

As anyone who truly knows me will tell you, I leave a substantial wake of destruction and chaos everywhere I go. My recent stint in the local Comfort Inn was just one such example. It, however, provoked a great deal of outcry from the staff, and I am no longer welcome. Remember that scene from Dumb and Dumber where Lloyd performs the most annoying sound in the world? I am that incarnate for janitors, housekeepers and girlfriends. My deepest apologies to the elderly women whose weeping I caused. And don’t worry, it was just chocolate.

Super 8 knows not what dark destiny has fallen upon them. The lemony fresh scent I gallantly meandered into will soon have a permanent tinge of poo for the next guests. The sheets will have to be burned, the dresser will be filled with McDonald’s wrappers, and I’ll be damned if that coffee maker is going to make it out of here alive. And the things I’m gonna do to the air conditioner! HAHAHA! THE AIR CONDITIONER! AHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAAAAAA!