見たmorphosis

So in the last entry I mentioned the viral sites for the movie Tropic Thunder, starring Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black (plus Steve Coogan, and he was wonderful in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story).

The news is that the site for the movie “Simple Jack”, which stars Ben Stiller’s character Tugg Speedman in a parody of Hollywood stars taking roles as mentally handicapped people (Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, Juliette Lewis in The Other Sister etc.) in hopes of getting an Oscar. A bit more info here. I keep forgetting the word “retard” is offensive in the world outside of teens, 20-somethings and the internet. But yeah, the whole issue appears to have been that the background context (that it’s a parody of something that should perhaps be considered more offensive, yet accepted as commonplace) was overlooked and/or not known.

Here’s the poster in question. Judge for yourself.

The controversy hasn’t pulled the plug on any of the other sites though – more have gone up. http://www.jeffportnoy.com/, the site for Jack Black’s character and http://www.fatties2.com/, the site for his grossout comedy that stars him as 4 different characters. As well as that, the site for http://www.alpa-chino.com/, Alpa Chino, one of the other characters and that of his product “Booty Sweat” are also up, as well as his Myspace. Also Make Pretty Skin Clinic, Cody Effects – Pyrotechnic for hire, Tropic Thunder: The Book. I think that’s most of them.

But they still haven’t responded to my panda email :(

Tags: ARG, bloody yanks, internet, movies

So San Diego Comic Con finished recently, and with it brought a whole bunch of stuff. E3 was before that, and most people now remember it for “Wtf? Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox 360?”. There’s been a huge influx of geeky news. And there’s some news I find interesting that I haven’t written about anywhere, so it’ll all go here.

• Ghost in the Shell remake rights picked up by Dreamworks – pushed ahead by Steven Spielberg and with no one but producer Steven Paul (of SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2, Bratz and Ghost Rider fame) attached to the project so far. And before you laugh at the hapless Shirow fans – he’s also attached to the Tekken and Castlevania remakes.
• Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse – Cowboy Bebop remake announced, with Keanu Reeves attached to play Spike Spiegel. It does say it’s just a rumour, but the previously announced info, with Keanu’s agent/manager Erwin Stoff as producer attached points in that direction. Really now. It’ll be horrible.
• Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation has teaser footage released. I don’t care, to be honest. I saw the trailer ahead of The Dark Knight and it was a confusing mess. Calling Zack Snyder visionary is a joke. Dawn of the Dead came on the heels of 28 Days Later, 300 was after Sin City and Watchmen is coming after basically every single other goddamn comicbook movie. He’s a hack who makes technically sound but incredibly shallow and unsatisfying films – calling him Michael Bay for fanboys does Michael Bay a disservice. His films have the potential to be so much more, but I have this feeling that he’s sitting there in the background going “Oh shit, the audience is about to start thinking! Quick! Stop them! Spoonfeed them some more information!”.
• Just when you thought Singstar couldn’t get any gayer after Singstar Anthems (probably the best of the Singstar games out there along with Singstar 90s), Singstar: Hits from the Musicals is allegedly in development. I do like that they’re going an anti-Rock Band/Guitar Hero route with these games, and I admit, “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” is damn tempting.
• Mythological Veterinarian sounds like an incredibly cute concept, though the whole point of comedies is that they’re cheap to make and this sounds like it’ll need a lot of creature effects. Still, gonna keep my eye on it.
• Spiderman Musical wtf. Directed by Julie Taymor, so obviously they want to recapture the magic of The Lion King Musical (interesting trivia – Timon and Pumbaa’s dialogue is localised for the various regions, even within countries. In the Japanese run, the Nagoya, Tokyo and Fukuoka productions each had different regional accents for the characters). But yeah.
  

  Arache, a beautiful, boastful young woman turned into a spider for her hubris and lack of respect for the gods. She subsequently appears to Peter Parker and the audience as in turn a powerful spider-woman who comes from another time to inspire Peter; an otherworldly lover; a bride; a terrifying (and sexy) dark goddess of vengeance; a dance partner in a charged and violent spiders dance of death; and, finally, a lonely, fragile young woman.”

  This just doesn’t make sense.

As well as all that, the success of The Dark Knight – currently number 1 on IMDB, breaking records left and right. And of course, the viral marketing campaign was a huge success. Indeed, even just Gotham Cable News is a good watch to prepare for the film or to watch later as a supplement.

So naturally, everyone and their dog wants to start viral marketing or an ARG of some kind.

• What looks like it’s trying to be this year’s Halo 2 Ilovebees – Resistance 2 has a game going on at http://www.getawarjob.com/, where you can sign up to join their army (but I wouldn’t recommend it – they’ll test drugs on you).
• Need for Speed has a viral site up at http://www.whichroadtotake.com/, which is… kinda lame really. You click around and find video clips. The weird numbers spell out “Undercover” when inputted into a cellphone with predictive text.
• The game Too Human has a weird one up, apparently about the Goblin Man of Norway. Yeah I don’t know what the fuck.
• Apparently there’ll be some sort of Watchmen related viral material – naturally, they’re all about the bandwagon. The source for this is apparently somewhere within G4’s coverage of SDCC, but… ugh, don’t want to touch that shit.
• Lost is starting up again, apparently. They had a fairly successful campaign a few years back, and at this year’s Comic Con was recruiting for the Dharma initiative.
• Tropic Thunder, the comedy about a group of actors filming a war film (Kung Fu Panda and Iron Man go to the Jungle), has a few viral marketing sites up which are rather giggle-worthy. http://www.tuggspeedman.com/ and http://www.kirklazarus.com/ are both up, as are the various websites for the movies they’ve been in. I tried emailing the Panda Relocation Foundation regarding a panda, but they haven’t gotten back to me…
• Can probably expect something from the upcoming Star Trek film as well – the creator JJ Abrams is big on the viral thing, what with Lost and Cloverfield both having big online campaigns.

Whew, I think that’s it for now.

Tags: adaptations, Anime, ARG, bloody yanks, gaming, internet, movies, Playstation 3, Sony, sucks to be me, sucks to be you

I preemptively add “part 1″ to this post, because there’ll probably be more entries of this sort, given what kind of person I am. It’s all a bit “Onee-chan advice column-y”, but hey, I might continue with it.

Anyway, I read this, and was rather irked by the whole thing. If you don’t care to follow a link, basically it’s full of stories about people playing co-op Pixeljunk Monsters with their girlfriends/wives/fiancées.

I guess it’s the condescending “Wow, my silly little girlfriend didn’t like videogames and now she sees the light!” tone that goes through every story. Every time they mention “cute” and even at one point “maternal instincts” it makes me a bit nauseous.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not liking to play videogames – that’s most people for you. Likewise, I don’t think there’s anything terribly wrong with playing them – some people are into that kind of stuff. But when the two meet, and one assumes some sense of superiority over the other, that’s where the problems begin.

I really don’t think these people should be together, to be honest. You’d think a small matter of differing hobbies wouldn’t be a dealbreaker, but the more people I talk to the more I realise it might be. The problem is that it’s a bigger divide than most hobbies – it shows differing attitudes towards entertainment, technology, information, productive use of time and money and in general, having fun.

If your partner doesn’t like your games, they probably won’t like your comic collection, or the amount of money you spend on graphics cards, or they won’t understand why you want to go to a midnight screening of The Dark Knight, or they won’t stop feeling threatened by the amount of time you spend playing WoW (to be fair, the last one gets unhealthy fairly quickly). But the best you can hope for is that they simply won’t care, and that’s already a wedge between the two of you.

It gets worse though. What happens when they actively object? Often, it’s on the grounds of the whole “Grow up why don’t you?” argument – the idea that games are for teenagers. Maybe that’s true – maybe kids are in effect turning into teenagers more quickly, and that people are trying to stay teenagers longer, or whatever. Maybe we’re just more aware of the need to have some fun in our lives, and that the fast pace of modern life requires time to just sit down and relax. Whatever – I’m not too concerned with arguing for either side. My concern is that you like to play games.

But your partner objects. Which leads to situations like this:

Early this year, I purchased a PS3 under the pretense of playing games of all sorts with my girlfriend.

There’s a lot wrong with this. Why does he feel he can’t be honest about what he wants? Why does she control his purchases, in effect infantilising him? And why does that work as an agreement between them? I mean sure, part of him probably wants to be infantilised – the number of guys out there who want to be mothered is a bit scary really. And certainly a lot of girls see dating as a DIY improvement project (and of course, for both situations, it can work with the genders reversed).

So you wind up seeing situations where one party is forbidden to buy [x], or do [x] or whatever by their partner. This is quite common, and it leads to resentment on both sides. It effectively turns it into fishing/drinking/playing poker/buying shoes/going out with the “girls”/”boys” from our parents’ generation, when one of the purposes of hobbies was to get away from your partner. This is the 21st century, and I think nowadays the drive towards forming relationships is less and less for procreation and more for mutual company. And so, if you’re lucky, the relationship ends.

But why date these people in the first place? I mean, I’m not advocating finding someone with absolutely identical hobbies to you, but at the same time, I think hobbies and interests are something important that people neglect. There’s nothing like the experience of talking about something you enjoy to someone who understands it as well as you do (unless you’re one of those troglodytes who can’t enjoy something if their partner is better at it or knows more than them), and not being able to share that with a partner isn’t a good sign.

Unfortunately, people settle. And maybe this person seems okay apart from everything else. But while some differences can be worked out, I think this one goes fairly deep. Deep enough that you end up arguing, and unhappy, and both resentful of the other. And then you find me, but that’s another story altogether.

Maybe I’m talking out of my ass. Maybe I’m just overly disillusioned at the number of people I’ve seen unhappy because of these things (myself included). I’m certainly not discounting the idea that people can get along despite a lack of common interests. I just think internet/gaming/geek culture is a wider divide than most people give it credit for. Not only a cultural or interest divide, but a fundamental difference in mindset and priorities, and I don’t think enough people recognise it as such.

And so I don’t think those relationships are going to last. Maybe it’s a step in the right direction, but for the most part it looks like too little too late.

Edit: You’re so vain you think this post is about you.

Tags: boring, gaming, girl gamers, internet, ramblings, rant, Sony, sucks to be you

The May Sumo tournament has come and gone and as tournaments go, it was an interesting one. It was won by Bulgarian ozeki Kotooshu, who became the first ever European sumo wrestler to win one of the major tournaments, winning 13 out of his 14 matches, 12 of those being consecutive. He also managed to beat the two highest ranking wrestlers in the tournament, the yokozuna Asashoryu and Hakuho. This is epecially surprising given his form was going downhill for a while and he’d been written off as a prospect. Video highlights of his matches (he’s the tall one):

Of course, the other big news of the tournament was this match-up, between the two yokozuna Asashoryu and Hakuho below:

It may not seem like much. But watch it again. Hakuho (the one on the right with the brown mawashi [belt]) had lost at the point where his hands touched the floor of the arena, however notice the extra push that Asashoryu gives him. Then Hakuho gets up, gives him a shoulder barge and they glare at each other.

Living in a land where the national sport is rugby, the fact that the above scene caused a great deal of controversy seems odd. But this is Japan and the sport of sumo isn’t just the national sport, it still has all sorts of ceremonial religious overtones and to certain people, it’s very tied into the national identity. So the only two wrestlers of the highest rank acting in a dishonourable manner sent people into a tizzy and prompted phone calls and letter writing and all that sort of thing. Unfortunately there’s a nasty edge to it – there are racial undertones, given that Hakuho and Asashoryu are both Mongolian wrestlers and there’s some amount of discomfort at the perceived foreign dominance of the sport. Lots of old people watch sumo wrestling, you see. And of course in addition, there are people wondering if promoting Kotooshu to yokozuna will be good or bad for the sport.

So they’re all heading off to Los Angeles next week. It’s not an official tournament or anything, but it will be interesting to see whether Kotooshu can keep up his current form. And I guess getting away from the media frenzy surrounding the Asashoryu/Hakuho thing in Japan will do everyone some good.

Final bit of sumo news. Kotooshu has begun a blog. It’s almost entirely in hiragana, so it should be readable with very basic Japanese knowledge. I know how much of a pain this whole blogging business is, so I don’t know if he’ll be able to maintain it, but if he does it should be a fun read.

Tags: internet, Japan, sumo, tokyo, video

So it turns out that now the Japanese social networking site Mixi (it’s like a Japanese equivalent of Facebook, I guess, so it’s kind of a big deal) have made a Japanese cellphone email address compulsory for all new registrations (this is on top of already requiring an invite from an existing member). This new measure effectively limits it to people resident in Japan only. It makes me rather relieved I already have an account, because as far as I can tell, they’re not enforcing it retroactively.

Maybe I’m just being a bit optimistic about their intentions, but it looks to me like a slightly shortsighted and misguided way for them to cut down on spam accounts, rather than any particular hate for foreigners – like a more extreme version of how US sites occasionally ask for a zip code (12345 and 90210 is how I roll). Still, the end result is that it prevents anyone outside of Japan from registering, and that sucks. Go whore yourself on Stickam instead.

via Tofugu

Tags: internet, Japan, sucks to be you