Made of WIN.

Too tired to do anything but link:
Cthulhu Movie Pitch

The Disney-esque font on the Lovecraft is the best part.

Of course he's awesome.

In news that should surprise precisely no one, David Tennant is receiving critical praise for his new role in Love's Labour's Lost. Apparently he was awesome in Hamlet with Patrick Stewart, and he is also killing as Berowne, that signor-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid,
Regent of love-rimes, lord of folded arms,
The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans,
Liege of all loiterers and malcontents
Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces
Sole imperator and great general
Of trotting paritors...


Sigh. I lurve me some Tennant. His oath would not be safe with me around, I can tell you!!! I'd be his Rosaline, wink wink! I'd wait a year and a day! Oh, Shakespearean humor. Nothing could be less funny.

It's so stimulating being your head.

I picked up a cheap DVD of Labyrinth the other day. I haven't seen it in ages, but on the whole, it fared well against the test of time. Kind of a trip down memory lane. I was never a huge Labyrinth fan, but there were also a couple of genuinely funny scenes. And the creature effects were fabulous, as always.

As a kid, it certainly cemented a lifelong love for David Bowie. This might have had something to do with some halfway decent songs he wrote for the flick, like this one, which featured some awesome 80's production values, fantastic sparkly masks, as well as Jennifer Connelly's teeth*.



Or, on second thought, it may have had a little to do with the costume design, which I found absolutely captivating as an 11-year old girl:





Nah, it was the music.**

*Does she have, like, the sexiest front teeth ever, or is it just me? If teeth can be classified as sexy.

** Seriously though, put some pants on that dude. That movie made me feel funny as a kid. Leggings are not for everyone.

Maybe they need new writers?

Judge for yourself. Forty + years of the same question, and it still never gets old:



Thanks for finding this, io9! And thanks for sifting through ten generations, NoDaylight!

My brain just exploded.

Okay guys, I promise after this I won't post anything about gaming for like, a week. But this news, via Kotaku, is too cool NOT to mention:

Level 5 Games is teaming up with Studio Ghibli to make an RPG, called Ninokuni: THE ANOTHER WORLD. Unfortunately, the game will be for the Nintendo DS. Which I don't have.



In case this news is meaningless to you, let me explain. Level 5 is an independent game developer, responsible for some of the best games I've ever played, including the Dark Cloud series, and Dragon Quest VIII, my all-time favorite game ever in the history of the universe. Um, I like the game, is what I'm saying.

Studio Ghibli, meanwhile, is the anime movie studio responsible for my favorite movie, Spirited Away. A couple other people liked it, too.

So, to wrap up, this promises to be one of the best partnerships EVER. I only wish I was going to be able to play it myself. Sigh. Isn't that always the way?

How do you spell "ambivalent"?

Okay. Er. I guess Disney is planning a huge comeback for the Muppets. That's good, right? The world needs more Muppets, right? Even if Disney is behind it?

I dunno... I think we can file this one under "careful what you wish for", folks.

Like a virgin

Last night I expanded my nerd universe by a thousand fold. You know I'm an avid gamer, but I've always stuck just to RPG's. And puzzle games. Oh, and versus fighting games. But that's it.

Yesterday, though, I took a plunge and tried a whole new genre: first person shooter. Holy f*ckin' crap, people. SO AWESOME.

The general consensus is that a lot of women don't like first-person shooters. I'm too lazy to look up any statistics for this, but I've seen lots of articles speculating on why this is the case. Theories range from inherent male bias in game design, to the "fact" that women are worse at spatial relations than men. (Note to my readers: even if this is true, never bring it up around me, unless you want to test my spatial perception in terms of my ability to punch you in the face.)

Anyway, I know why I never played first-person shooters: I sucked at them. No one likes to play a game that is too challenging. If you die fifty times in the first level, it's no fun. But a couple of people pointed out to me that I play Oblivion in first person, which does require a fair amount of hand-eye coordination and camera control. So I thought I'd give some shooters a try.

I went into GameSpot after work yesterday and picked up a used copy of BioShock. This accomplished two objectives. First, I saved a couple of bucks. Second, I got a huge ego boost by impressing the clerk because I knew Gore Verbinski might make a movie version. Seriously, I think I'm his dream girl now. He had nice sideburns.

ANYWAY. Getting off track here. Point is, the game was awesome. I had to force myself to stop playing after an hour. It was not at all as difficult as I remember and I had no trouble with the camera or aiming or any of that stuff. And the graphics also totally fascinated my mom, who plunked herself down on the floor next to me and watched me play for like, 45 minutes.

So, in conclusion, I had a great time sitting in my parents' basement playing BioShock with my mother. Don't you wish you were me?

Takes my breath away.

I'm just gonna be honest here. This sculpture collection gave me chills the first time I saw it. It still does:

It's a series by Jason deCaires Taylor. He installed the pieces in the ocean in the West Indies. The sculptures are gradually becoming part of the underwater ecosystem. They act as an artificial reef, of sorts, with coral and various biota becoming part of the installation. Each piece changes over time, becoming more and more a part of the ocean, until they are a ghost of life on land.

I've always been attracted to art that explores the beauty of decomposition, especially in man-made materials - the way metal rusts, wood grays and splinters, concrete spalls. These themes speak to me because I respond to the loneliness of post-apocalyptic environments - what the world would look like if any of my favorite sci-fi disasters actually occurred, empty and broken.


At first glance, the underwater works would seem to explore a similar vein: the longer the sculptures remain underwater, the less they resemble their original forms. However, what Taylor has done is to create pieces not based on decomposition, but on composition - the forms that seem to decay are actually becoming more and more alive, despite transforming into spectres of their original selves. This lends an alien quality to the work which I find very appealing. He has created a little world down there, a parallel universe; Pompeii as Atlantis. Brilliant. Beautiful.


All images copyright Jason Taylor, 2007.

Also, there's this.

I NEED that T-shirt.

Level up!

So after months of intermittent lobbying by my friend Badpie, and then a solid weekend of nagging by her husband M@, (no doubt on her behalf,) I am almost convinced to get a World of Warcraft account.* I might split the difference and get an Xbox Live gold account so I can play Halo or something with them before I dive into full Massively Multiplayer mode.

Sigh. I am a solitary gamer, people. It's in my blood. I play games to get away from people. But I'll admit, the prospect of getting to play with people I actually know is kinda tempting.

But I'm not quite convinced. However, a week or so ago Maggie from Kotaku divulged that she is in the same boat. In this article, she writes about her first foray into MMO territory, which doesn't sound too bad. And there's also this article from Only a Game, which gets into the differences between solitary and social gamers. Central to the difference is the experience of "fiero", which is the feeling of having triumphed over adversity. Apparently MMO's stimluate fiero in people more than solitary games.

Okay, so I'm just realizing that I have just quoted a statistical study on the emotional response caused by different kinds of VIDEO GAMES.

I think that means I just went up a nerd level. Yay?


*This is fair. I am actively feeding her Oblivion addiction.