My wife is gay for the Horrorclix

Lucky for me, they've been discontinued and are going by the brick on ebay.



Cthulu monsters vs Clowns


Nothing says "I love you," like 96 little tiny pieces of plastic.

I got (gay) married

Mike blows his life savings on synthesizers

Best Talk Show Interview Ever

Norm McDonald on Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1997.





This is the part when it takes a turn for awesome.

Same old pictures, brand new words

I steal art to subvert it to my own purposes

I want to play "Braid"

Braid is an independently developed platformer that has gotten a lot of attention lately, even from some mainstream media. The hook that sets it apart from other indie platformers on the market is that you can manipulate time in various ways depending on the level; as an example, in some levels you can just rewind time, in others, when you move left-to-right, time goes forward, but when you move right-to-left, time reverses - as illustrated in the video below.



I think that's pretty fucking cool.

Of course any game could have incorporated such a mechanic and still been ho-hum. Apparently what sets Braid apart is that it is really, really fucking good - perhaps even profound. So why am I posting about it instead of playing the fuck out of it?

Because right now it's only available as a download on the Xbox 360.

***

You know what's fucking sad?

I saw that they now had Xbox 360's for $200 and I actually considered picking one up. I mean there's other games I'd be interested in picking up later - Dead Rising, Mass Effect (I hear the PC version is buggy and I'd probably have to upgrade my hardware to run it decently - something I'm not willing to do at this point), but really, even considering to buy a $200 game system to play a $15 game is pretty depraved.

However, the more I looked into the whole Xbox thing, the more disappointing it became. The $200 "Arcade" version of the Xbox 360 does not include a hard drive. I figure I'm going to need that to play a game that's downloaded from the internet. It comes with a 256MB card, but I have found nothing to indicate whether that would be enough for Braid, so I'm going to assume it's not just to be safe.

So I'd need a hard drive - an external 20GB Hard drive for an Xbox 360 is $80. BUT the next Xbox 360 model above the $200 one comes with a 20GB hard drive built in - that model costs $259. Well so much for the $200 Xbox 360!

But wait, there's more!!!

None of the Xbox 360s come with wireless built in, if you want to use a wireless network with your Xbox 360, you need a special Microsoft(TM) Xbox360(TM) wireless adapter!!! While wireless adapters for PCs can be found for as low as $20, the super special wireless adapter for an Xbox 360 is between $80 and $99.

Furthermore, in order to download Braid you need to SUBSCRIBE to Xbox Live Silver or Gold. Oh boy, pay a subscription for the privilege of paying to buy games?!!! Sign me right the fuck up! And beyond that, you can't BUY Braid with REGULAR moneys! Nooooooo!!! You need to exchange your REGULAR moneys for Xbox points... Braid is $15 worth of Xbox points, but Xbox points are bought in increments of $19.99. Figure THAT out.

So yeah, I'm not going to buy an Xbox 360 ever - it's just too complicated. Steam is so easy. Braid is supposed to be available for the PC by the end of the year, but game release dates are what they are, so who knows. I'm willing to impulse buy like a pervert for $200 bucks + 15, but not for 259 + 80 + 19.99. At least I know I have some self-restraint, even if my threshold is perversely high.

Anyways, here's some more Braid.

Terror EBM - Nurzery [Rhymes]

A friend of mine recently started a blog called Awesome or Sucks, which simply gives one word reviews to new albums - either it's awesome or it sucks. I figured if he can be that brief, I can do one or two sentence reviews of albums I've recently bought - because life is too short to overanalyze pop music.



This caught my attention while I was browsing various Terror EBM bands on amazon.com. I was basically in the mood for something harsh, aggressive and screamy, that wasn't mixed with the same frequency response as a vacuum cleaner and that didn't have vocals that were processed with a deep, rapid chorus effect making it sound like it was underwater (don't do this, it sucks!!!). Nurzery [rhymes] delivered. The production is decent, the song structure doesn't fall on its ass and there's not a single song that sucks on this album - what more could I ask for from the genre? Rated: Awesome.

Holy fuck

I love the internet

joebidenjoebidenjoebiden

Well, at least it isn't Evan Bayh.

I do have to wonder, whom would Obama have picked had the whole Russia/Georgia thing not happened? Because I don't think it would have been Joe Biden.

Aaron Rodgers = god

"Quarterback Aaron Rodgers' training-camp ritual -- strange facial hair -- continues. He's gone from scraggly, unkempt beard to something he found on beards.org called "friendly mutton chops," with a cheesy mustache up next. "This is a tribute to the Civil War generals from the mid-to-late 19th century,"" - unknown source

***

"The new face of the Green Bay Packers is decidedly hairy these days.

Quarterback Aaron Rodgers was sporting unique facial hair Wednesday, featuring mutton chops that flowed into a mustache.

Noting that he was a history major at California-Berkley, Rodgers called the arrangement "a tribute to the Civil War generals from the mid-to-late 19th century."

But it was apparently inspired by a Russian czar. The monotony of training camp probably played a significant role, too.

"I was watching ping-pong on MSNBC in the Olympics, and they showed this ad for this TV show which was going to be about Abe Lincoln and Czar Nicholas, who was the last czar of Russia," Rodgers said. "So anyway, Czar Nicholas had this look. So I was laying in bed, I go, 'That's a sweet look.' So I got up, about 10:30 at night, I shaved my chin and said, 'Hey, if the czar can do it, I can do it."'

But not without the proper research. Rodgers and one of the team's trainers looked up his new look on a Web site, beards.org, and discovered that it had a name: The "friendly mutton chops."

Seriously?

"You know what? In training camp, you've got to go anything you can to make yourself laugh," Rodgers said. "When I came in yesterday, some of the guys were excited about it, so we looked it up."

This isn't the first time Rodgers has had fun with facial hair in the preseason. In 2006, Rodgers grew a mustache and called it "a tribute to all the great people in history that had mustaches. Guys like Tom Selleck and Chuck Norris and Jesus and Ron Burgundy."" - 620AM WTMJ

Cradle of Filth = Banjo Music

Twiddly twang, twiddly twang, noodley-doodley-doo.

Seriously.

I'm gonna talk some shit about Doctor Who now

Doctor Who is a British Sci-fi series that ran from 1963 to 1989 and was recently revived in 2005. It is about a time traveling alien/demi-god who travels around time and space with stupid, boring, obnoxious "companions." Mostly girls, once in a while there's a guy thrown in. The secret to the show's longevity is that the main character, simply known as "The Doctor," doesn't die, he "regenerates" twelve times, meaning the show can have up to twelve actors portraying the main character.

I have an OCD uncle who obsessively videotaped all kinds of sci-fi and cult tv shows in the 1980's. He recorded a shitload of Doctor Who reruns off of PBS, and when my pot smokin' dad got a VCR, he "borrowed" the entire run of the fourth and fifth regenerations. (After my parents were divorced, we still had those tapes all the way up to 2003, when my mom moved from Wisconsin to Hoosierville - then we threw them out. Never, ever lend shit to your brother-in-law.)

So I grew up watching the adventures of the fourth doctor, probably the most iconic, played by Captain 'Fro aka Tom Baker and the fifth doctor, Peter Davison, who was most iconic in the PBS favorite All Creatures Great and Small, a boring show about boring farmers and their boring sick animals and the boring farm doctor who cures their boring farm animals. Or some shit like that. God, PBS was fucking boring. If they had such a hard on for British television, why the fuck couldn't they get some Young Ones?! (Oh fuck, Alexei Sayle was in an episode of Doctor Who. I told Rotwang that I was Alexei Sayle. Shit.)

Anyways - Point being, I grew up watching this shit 'cuz my dad would fire up and watch it. And when you're a kid in the 80's in the Midwest and your dad's watching the one TV in the house, you're watching what he's watching. And it sucked. Cardboard scenery, robot dogs that talked like dildos, paper mache bad guys...

Yeah, that's so not awesome.

So anyway, I saw a little bit of the sixth doctor, Colin Baker, (whose 'fro was not quit 'fro-riffic as the fourth doctor's) but PBS quit buying that shit because the show was going down the shitter, even by crap ass Doctor Who standards. There was a seventh doctor at some point and then the BBC canceled the show for being awful. I guess there was an attempt at a revival of the series in 1996 with a Doctor Who movie, but apparently it sucked and that went nowhere.

So in 2005, the BBC brought back Doctor Who. Shit, if they got 26 years out of seven doctors, I guess they figured they could squeeze another 18 out of the remaining five. (Oh shit, does that movie Doctor count? If so, fuck, imagine having 12 lives and having one begin and end in two hours... DAYMN!!!)

I didn't even know this until 2007, when I remember flipping through the guide one boring Sunday afternoon and seeing "Doctor Who" listed on BBC America. "No fucking way," I thought. I assumed they were simply rerunning episodes from the old series. I decided to check it out for a minute for a laugh. Instead I'm confronted by this guy all decked out in black leather being all action-y and shit. Oh and there was an alien with a baby doll face taking a dump while talking to some lady in a public restroom. I should love aliens taking dumps, but for some reason I didn't. I guess it's all in the execution. Bad Taste? Brilliant. Doctor Who? meh... I flipped it off after a few minutes.

Anyway, Rotwang, being the sci-fi nerd that he is, loves this shit. I mean, I own two different copies of The Stuff, so who am I to judge? Yet judge I do. A few weeks ago, I was watching a channel that was NOT the Sci-Fi channel, and they played a commercial for an upcoming episode of Doctor Who on the Sci-Fi channel and it had FLYING DALEKS.

What the fuck is a dalek? If you don't know, pat yourself on the back. You've gone this far in life without knowing what a dalek is and you should be commended. Daleks are pudding in a robot shell with guns and they talk like dildos. They were made by Davros, a crippled blind guy in a hi tech wheel chair. This knowledge is burned into my brain and I can't get it out. Daleks, like their master, are handicapped. They wheel around. That's it. Oh and they yell, "EXTERMINATE," even though they have a knack for never exterminating any of the stars of the show, like the Doctor or any of his companions.

SO ANYWAY - I see a 30 second spot advertising Doctor Who and there's Daleks flying around space and launching an all out air assault on Earth. Bullshit. The next time I saw Rotwang at work, I was all like, "SO I SEE THAT NOW THE DALEKS ARE FLYING," and continue to disparage the show. Because I'm an ass. To which his response was, "Dude, you've got to see an episode called Blink. I might even lend you the DVD."

There are two things in life that I love. One is a throw-down, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is challenge, and the other is ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY FUCKING HATING THE FUCKING SHIT OUT OF SOME-COCKBUCKET-THING. OH YEAH, SNAP INTO A SLIMJIM!!!!!!!

So I took him up on it. But I didn't borrow the DVD. No, I went to YouTube, where you can probably find any Doctor Who episode ever, accompanied by comments from the uploader ranging from polite "This is not meant in any way to infringe on the BBC's copyright," to the more aggressive, "I dare you to take this down, BBC cocksuckers! HAHAHAHA"

So on to the episode.

First thing to talk shit about is the title, "Blink," which in my mind I always think of as "Blank," which rhymes with Drank, which I want to chillax with someday. But there's no Drank to drink here, so right off I'm fucking disappointed.

Next, a plot synopsis. The episode starts off with a young woman taking photos at an abandoned mansion. In one of the rooms, she sees the wallpaper is peeling back and there's writing underneath. She starts peeling the wallpaper, and finds that the writing on the wall is addressed to her. It's telling her to beware of the weeping angels, of which there is a statue of one in the garden right outside the room she's in. SPOOKY.

The young woman goes home to her (female) roommate, sees her roommate's brother naked, and then takes her roommate to the spooky mansion. Stuff happens, then *poof* the roommate is suddenly in 1920. It goes back to modern day, where the photographer chick is met by a spooky young man at the abandoned mansion. It turns out the spooky guy is her roommate's grandson, and he promised his grandmother on her deathbed that he'd deliver this letter. SPOOKY. The letter talks about how great of a life the roommate had in the 1920's onward, and warns the chick to get the fuck out of the mansion.

From here, the photographer chick goes home, depressed that her roommate is gone, and goes to tell the roommate's brother that his sister loves him and shit, since she essentially never saw him again and requested she tell him that in her letter. It turns out, the brother works at a DVD store and he's geeking out over this weird DVD extra that's some guy called "The Doctor" having a one way conversation hinting at the weeping angel statues. "Don't look away from them, don't turn around, don't even blink." SPOOKY. I like spooky. Oh, btw, this Doctor is NOT ACTION MCLeatherPANTS, it's a new Doctor who is even younger - this guy. So apparently Time Lords (the official - and officially GAY - name of The Doctor's race) age in reverse from this:


to this:


I fully expect the twelfth Doctor to be this:


Moving on.

Photographer lady next decides to go to the cops. Because when statues make your friend disappear - and her disappearance is followed immediately by a letter from your friend dated at least twenty years before she disappeared warning you to get the fuck away from those statues - you go to the motherfucking PO-lice. A young detective asks her some questions, leading up to if she'd like to go out for a drink with him. Somehow they end up in the underground garage of the police station, where the Doctor's spaceship, called the Tardis, just so happens to be chillaxing. The Tardis is disguised as an old British police box from the 1950's, there's a series spanning joke about how the "chameleon circuit" of the ship is broken, so it always looks the same. (GOD FUCK IT WHY DO I KNOW THIS!!!) Note to sci-fi writers and Who fans everywhere - if you don't want RETARD jokes made about your SPACESHIP, don't name your SPACESHIP the TARDIS.

Anyways.

Photographer chick gives the detective her phone number for a date and leaves. The detective guy stays in the underground garage, and the weeping angel statues show up to steal the Tardis. The detective guy gets touched and ends up with The Doctor and his latest companion in 1969. At this point, the Doctor explains that the weeping angel statues are the "nicest psychopathic killers in the universe," in that instead of killing you outright, they send you back in time to live out the rest of your life. SPOOKY - kind of, I guess.

Whatever.

Anyways, the Doctor and his latest unnamed companion are stuck in 1969 without their time machine, so they're going to need the detective to live about 40 years and deliver a message to the photographer chick. Good thing she gave him her phone number, because in the present day, immediately after photographer chick leaves, she gets a phone call from forty-years-older detective guy to come meet him in the hospital where he's dying of old age. Turns out that Detective guy became a DVD publisher and managed to sneak the Doctor DVD extras onto 17 DVDs, which were the only 17 DVDs that photographer chick owned a copy of. So she calls up roommate's brother and they decide the best place to go to watch the DVD message again is the SPOOKY mansion crawling with weeping angel statue psychopathic killers. Turns out the DVD extra is a conversation between the Doctor and photographer chick, where the roommate's brother wrote a transcript of the conversation so the future Doctor could use it in the past to try to explain things to the photographer chick.

This is the point where a decent episode takes a shit.

1) When Doctor know-it-all explains every thing about the angel statues, how they're really aliens from such-and-such who turn to stone whenever another living creature looks at them, it just kind of falls flat. I think it'd be better if The Doctor was all, "I have no idea what the fuck, but they only move when you're not looking at them, SO DON'T FUCKING BLINK!!!"

2) The weeping angel statues are nice and spooky up until this point. Then they blow it.

Here's spooky:


This is also spooky:


This is not spooky. This is stupid:


Okay, so here's the part where I give away the ending, so if you're concerned about OMG SPOILERS you've been warned.

Anyways, the reTARDIS is in the basement of the mansion, where there just so happens to be a single light bulb on. Why is there electricity in an abandoned mansion? And who is paying the electric bill? And who is changing the light bulbs? It's not like there can be some kind of caretaker, the place is crawling with homicidal weeping angel statues of death...

Photographer chick and roommate's brother get inside the reTARDIS - which, by the way, is huge on the inside, small on the outside - where the Doctor left instructions for them to press some buttons or some shit so the TARDIS goes back to 1969, but somehow it's programmed to leave photographer chick and roommate's brother behind. I didn't know the reTARDIS could do that, but whatever. It looks like a great "screw you" moment, like the Doctor set them up to be "killed" by the weeping angel statues, but it's actually a trick, because the weeping angels are all gathered around the reTARDIS trying to push it over or some shit, so when it disappears backwards in time, they're all stuck looking at each other. Apparently when they look like they're "weeping," they're really just covering their eyes, because if they look at each other they turn to stone. At one point one of the protagonists says, "they're trapped in stone forever!" to which I say, "yeah, until that fucking light bulb burns out, DUMBASS, then they're going to hunt your ass down and send you back to the motherfucking stone age or some shit."

Anyway, photographer chick and roommate's brother end up as boyfriend and girlfriend, and obsessively chronicle and file their adventures so that one day, a year later, when the Doctor and his companion happen to run by the DVD store the brother guy works at, photographer chick can give them all the info they need because apparently this whole weeping angel thing hasn't happened to them yet. Hence the Doctor has the transcript for the DVD and knows who the photographer chick is and everything in the future - all the way to the year 1969. Or something.

After watching this episode I had to point out to Rotwang how ironic it is that the best episode he recommended to someone critical of the show has as little of the title character as possible in it. I then pointed out all the flaws I listed in my synopsis above as well as the fact that The Doctor just keeps regenerating younger and younger. To which he replied with this image macro:


So whatever.

Oh, and flying Daleks are still fucking bullshit.

Gay for Batman

Saw "The Dark Knight" yesterday morning... went to an 11:20am Sunday morning showing to avoid the crowds, and it worked.

This movie is worth the hype. Heath Ledger's portrayal of The Joker is worth the hype.

Don't read about it, don't spoil anything for yourself, just go see it.

It's the only movie I've ever considered seeing a second time in theaters.

Step 1: Shave Eyebrows

Step 2: Buy $3000 worth of Doepfer Modules.



Step 3: ...

Step 4: Profit!!!

If I sound bitchy, I'm just jealous of that modular synth setup. *drool*

Audiosurfin' Some More

Lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy...


Audiosurf - Haujobb: Faith in Chaos from mtodead on Vimeo.

Haujobb's "Faith in Chaos" from Vertical Theory. I wanted to post a video of waaay back when I first got Audiosurf, but the video quality on YouTube was so crappy it wasn't worth it.


Update 07/26/09 - As you can see Vimeo pulled the videos a while back. Apparently Audiosurf videos got so popular that Vimeo instituted a new rule: No videos of video games. If popularity is detrimental to your business, doesn't that mean the business model is a failure?

Audiosurfin'

Bird of Prey by Destroid. Destroid is Daniel Myer's (from Haujobb) other band.

Audiosurf - Destroid: Bird of Prey from mtodead on Vimeo.

Pusher Elite Mode.
At the very end I fill up my slots with 24 reds, getting the most points possible in a single match and winning the "Big Kahuna" achievement.

Pusher gets a 100% bonus when your match clears the board, so you may notice that I pass up some good blocks waiting for high value clusters to disappear.

White blocks are an automatic 2000 points, so they're highly desirable, but they don't disappear, they have to fall down the bottom, so collecting them at the wrong time can block your board. Reds are worth the most points, then yellows, greens, blues and purples. Unless there's a cluster of blues and purples that I clear as soon as I collect, I'm hitting the blues and purples by mistake. Sometimes I don't even realize I have them on my board for a few seconds - D'OH!

Music is Bird of Prey by Destroid from their album Loudspeaker. Buy it!

(For those so inclined, you can see what I'm talking about in my last post regarding how horrible YouTube makes this shit look here. I even tried doing the 11 minute trick, and while the vid quality is slightly better than the other YouTube vids I've posted, it's still shit.)


Update 07/26/09 - As you can see Vimeo pulled the videos a while back. Apparently Audiosurf videos got so popular that Vimeo instituted a new rule: No videos of video games. If popularity is detrimental to your business, doesn't that mean the business model is a failure?

Terror EBM - Again

This past weekend I felt like Audiosurf'ing some Terror EBM a.k.a Hellektro a.k.a. Aggrotech. Problem is, the only thing I own in that style is Hocico's Signo de Aberracion, which is awesome and probably one of the best albums of the genre - even if half of it is pseudo-Classical instrumental filler.

So I hear all the kids are doing this new thing called downloading music.

Wait, I mean - LEGALLY!!!

Who the fuck would've thought? I own a Mac, so I fire up the iTunes store and look around. But there's a problem with iTunes... last time I checked, Audiosurf didn't like iTunes's .AAC format, and the workaround was to take your .AAC files downloaded from iTunes and burn it to an audio CD and then rip the audio to .mp3.... no. No. NO. Fuck THAT!!!

I just so happened to have been on Amazon.com listening to 30 second previews of songs on each album anyways, (I swear to god once upon a time I was able to listen to 30 second previews on iTunes but I can't seem to do it now... WTF?)* and I pulled my head out of my ass just long enough to realize Amazon sells music downloads as well!

It turns out Amazon's downloads are already in mp3 format, plus the entire albums are consistently $1 cheaper than iTunes. So I spent the next few hours just previewing tracks of pretty much everything, using amazon's recommended shit to check out new bands I'd never heard of. Originally, I thought I'd end up getting something by Psyclon 9 and Dawn of Ashes, but it turns out I don't really like either band all that much.

In the end, I bought Unter Null's The Failure Epiphany and The Retrosic's Nightcrawler. After playing in Audiosurf for a while, I decided it would be fun to record some videos and post them on YouTube.

YouTube sucks.

Seriously, it makes good looking, well compressed video look like dick. I can record something where the track bounces and YouTube's junk compression quality just kills it. Part of the problem, I guess, is that YouTube displays things at 425x318, but always compresses to 320x240, meaning your video is always "stretched," making it look blocky and craptastic. Now, this doesn't matter for live action shots, it seems, but computer generated stuff tends to come off looking like shit.

So I switched, to Vimeo. I see a lot of other Audiosurf videos posted there, as well as various synthesizer videos over at MatrixSynth (linked to the right). I've never noticed Vimeo videos taking longer to load than YouTube videos, and the picture quality is much better.

So without further adieu - TERROR!!!


Audiosurf - Destroy Me from mtodead on Vimeo.


Audiosurf - Perrey & Kingsley from mtodead on Vimeo.

Postscript: I've been reading up on tricks to get better picture quality on YouTube, and apparently you have to cheat it and make your video 11 minutes long and encode to .flv using some obscure DOS-type utility... blah blah blah. No thanks.

Oh, and apparently there's also this, but I have no idea how they managed to do that.

*Edit: I finally figured out how to do this - you just double click on the song title for a preview. I thought this would've put it in my shopping cart. DOH!!!

Update 07/26/09 - As you can see Vimeo pulled the videos a while back. Apparently Audiosurf videos got so popular that Vimeo instituted a new rule: No videos of video games. If popularity is detrimental to your business, doesn't that mean the business model is a failure?

Of Wendigos and Waterways...

Almost done cleaning off the DVR - granted there were a handful of things that I just said "Fuck it, I'm never going to watch this," and deleted. For example, Eaten Alive (crocodiles? blah.) and The Crazies (Sorry George, but outside the first three "Dead" films, your track record isn't so good).

Ravenous - I had been meaning to see this movie since it came out in 1999, but 1999 - 2005 was when I was in college and didn't really watch many new movies (nor listened to many new CDs). It takes place right after the Mexican-American War, and the protagonist is an American soldier who chose to lie down and play dead rather than fight. As luck would have it, the Mexican soldiers put him on the bottom of a pile of dead Americans at just the right angle that a whole bunch of blood poured directly into his mouth and down his throat. The premise of this movie is that cannibalism makes one supernaturally strong, albeit constantly hungry. The lead character crawls out from under the bodies and singlehandedly captures a Mexican fort. He is honored as a hero at first, but then when he tells his superiors that he captured the fort by playing dead, they decide he's a worthless coward and send him to a remote outpost in Northern California.

The idea that cannibalism = super strength is apparently based off the Native American legend of the Wendigo. In Ravenous, when someone eats another person, they become a Wendigo. They get supernatural strength and are nearly impossible to kill, but always crave human flesh and are never satiated. As luck would have it, the small Californian outpost ends up entangled with another Wendigo, and whereas the protagonist quit eating all meat after his ordeal in the war, this new Wendigo revels in the power derived from eating human flesh. Sure enough, there's only one way to stop the bad guy, and that's to eat more people!

Overall, this movie was pretty good, though for some reason I expected it to be gorier than it actually was. I should also note that the bouncy main theme music was actually used in some Seat Belt PSA they used to play all the time on the Milwaukee buses between 2003 and 2005. Let's see, a PSA about the importance of buckling your child's seat belt properly, what music should we use? I know, how about the theme music from that movie about Pre-Civil War soldiers eating each other!

Wendigo - Larry Fessenden is awesome. He directed this movie and a vampire movie called Habit. Both are low budget indie flicks I caught on IFC. In Habit, a New Yorker goes through a midlife crises, breaks up with his longtime live-in girlfriend to "see other people," and soon finds himself involved with an alluring, enigmatic woman who knows how to get fucking freaky. However, the more time the protagonist spends around her, the sicker and weaker he seems to get. Could she be draining the life out of him? Habit is awesome because the majority of the movie is shot in the areas of New York City that one doesn't usually see in film and on TV. The plot is a little slow, but the interaction between the characters is very engaging.

Wendigo came out after Habit, and is about a family of New Yorkers getting away in the country for a weekend. The main character is their son, who is played by the youngest Malcolm in the Middle urchin before the sitcom hit big. The mother is a psychiatrist and the father is a photographer, so the impetus behind the plot is urban professionals versus the local with a chip on his shoulder. Now this ain't Deliverance or Calvaire, all but one of the locals in this movie are just nice, normal people. It's this one guy, Otis, whom the family butts heads with. The movie starts out with the family hitting a deer in the road. Otis and his two friends were hunting that deer, and when it turns out the deer's antlers got busted in the collision, Otis holds it against the father, who was driving the car. Otis's two friends just laugh it off like normal people, but the dad starts seeing Otis hanging around everywhere they go. Speaking of the dad, the dad in this movie is the single best dad in any movie - ever. He's not abusive in anyway, he's not mean to his son, yet he doesn't come off as sappy and fake. He ends up being the most sympathetic character in the movie.

Oh, did I mention there's a Wendigo in this movie too? In this movie, the Wendigo is simply a spirit that eats and never stops eating. It's also the major flaw in this movie. Really, this movie doesn't need a Wendigo for anything to happen, and the Wendigo itself reminds me of the "Jackolope" sketches from when America's Funniest Home Videos first came out (why do I know this?!!). On the other hand, I guess if this movie didn't have a Wendigo, it wouldn't have been tagged as "horror" and I probably would've never watched it.

Tideland - I loves me some Terry Gilliam. Every movie up until The Brothers Grimm is just pure gold. I grew up on Time Bandits and the Adventures of Baron Munchausen. In High School, I saw 12 Monkeys, connected it with TB and AotBM and made it a point to see Brazil and The Fisher King. When Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas came out, I convinced my mother to take me and my younger sister to see it. Every one of those movies - PURE GOLD. Then he tried to make a Don Quixote movie, ran out of money, did the Brothers Grimm and then Tideland.

When it first came out, people hated Tideland. HATED IT. It's based off a novel, which is apparently one of those novels that is quirky just for the sake of being quirky. The protagonist is a little girl whose heroin addict parents both die, leaving her to fend for herself in a dilapidated house in the middle of rural nowhere. The only people she has contact with are the creepy neighbors, a witch-like sister and a retarded, epileptic brother. The title comes from the fact that the brother likes to pretend he's a captain on a submarine, that the grassy fields are the ocean, and a nearby train is a shark.

Bad things about the movie: 1) Remember the annoying child actress from Silent Hill? Yeah, now you get to see her do a Southern Accent for two hours. 2) I think the reason why people HATED this movie is because a type of "romance" develops between the main character and the (grown up) retarded brother. The last half hour you're just filled with dread that any minute he's going to molest her or something. I mean, it wouldn't be that out of place in a movie that BEGINS with the little girl cooking heroin and shooting it into her father. I've met people who didn't like The Professional because they felt there were undertones of a romantic relationship between Leon and the girl. In Tideland, there are no undertones, they declare their love for one another and imagine themselves married. It's really fucking disturbing.

There were many points during this film that I wanted to just stop it and turn it off. It's long, there's a sense of despair, you expect the absolute worst to happen - Requiem for a Dream was great, but I don't really want to see that happen to an eleven-year-old girl.

But the most fucked up thing?

When it was over, I was glad I watched it. It's stomach churning while you watch it, but afterward, I thought to myself, it's another dark fantasy by Terry Gilliam - just as Time Bandits was a dark fantasy, just as Brazil was a dark fantasy, etc. Some of his movies have happy endings, others don't. Maybe the source material wasn't exactly the best thing to adapt, and maybe this would be Gilliam's worst movie had he never done The Brothers Grimm, but even a bad Gilliam movie is better than a lot of other movies out there.

So there, I'm the only Tideland defender I've ever read.

Things that somehow exist but shouldn't: #324

Posted by user BearJazz at the Something Awful Forums.


1) It's a soundtrack... TO A BOOK!!!

2) Composed by L. Ron Hubbard.

...and one other thing...

I can't get this song out of my head.

Oh yeah...

...sometimes I make music.


This is just the typical type of thing I can kind of crap out in an hour. Then I end up spending hours and hours mixing and mastering it for practice. It's a bad habit that I need to break. Instead I should take the time to write out a non-generic piece of music, then not mix and master it unless I actually, y'know, have a reason to.

Of Logic and Ninjas

My very first post of this blog was about Logic 8. In summary, I started using Logic 4, moved up to Logic 5, Apple bought the company that originally made Logic, Emagic, Logic 6 was Mac-only and I didn't have a Mac at that time, then I got a G4 12" Powerbook when Logic 7 came out. I bought two ~$25 books put out by Apple's training series on how to use Logic 7, and I got pretty fucking good at it. At that point, Logic 7's interface was pretty much the same as Logic 4 and 5's interface.

Then came Logic 8. This is the point at which Apple decided to give the interface the Apple touch. Don't get me wrong, Emagic's Logic was always, always notorious for its "steep learning curve" due to its interface. Some people just "got it," some people never did. I was one of the people that "got" the old Logic interface. I had tried Cubase and Digital Performer, including 4 separate semester-long college courses on the latter, and neither clicked with me the way that Logic did. However, I must concede, Apple's new direction with the Logic interface is probably for the best. The problem is, I have 6 years of Logic and its key commands stuck in my head.

So I have two books, really good books, that I spent about $50 on that are now, for all intents and purposes, completely outdated, and I don't really feel like spending the money on the new Logic 8 books from the same series.

Well just last week, I was fucking around in Logic 8 and found that I couldn't step sequence the way I used to be able to in Logic's Matrix editor. Step sequencing is the most simple, most retarded way of programming a sequence in the world, so it was really fucking frustrating.

Fortunately, I found a series of YouTube videos by a guy calling himself SFLogicNinja that are actually really, really good. SFLogicNinja is apparently a guy named Dave who teaches Logic for some weirdo "music academy" called Pyramind. Whatever. His videos have been great. They're really good for showing the bare bones basics of what Logic 8 can do, which is great for me because I've pretty much found myself re-learning everything I used to know how to do. He teaches the new key commands as they come up in his videos, which helps, plus he goes over some of the old Logic stuff that many found so esoteric, like the infamous Environment, the Transformer Window and Logic's weird ass Touch Tracks. (On the subject of Logic's Environment, I only wish they would go whole hog and incorporate Miller Puckette's Pure Data into it somehow - that would be awesome.)

Browse all of his videos.

It didn't take me long to find the help that I needed with my step sequencing problem - namely that in old Logic, each different editor window "reinvented the wheel," meaning that a lot of the major parameters were on each new window. I needed to change the step sequence resolution from 1/16th notes to 1/32nd notes, something which used to be accessible from the left hand side of the matrix editor.

Apple is going for a more all-encompassing approach with their new UI, so they had stuck my precious note resolution on the bottom - in the transport bar (where you hit start and stop). It seemed fucked up at first, but then I realized, Apple's way has it so that I have the arrange window still in the top half of the screen, the Matrix editor on the bottom half of the screen *when I want it* and the transport bar always, always, always along the very bottom of the screen - therefore the note resolution parameter is always, always, always handy. (Side note: having the transport bar at the bottom is funny because that is Apple's default location for the Dock, but I had already gotten use to moving the Dock to the left hand side of the screen in Logic 7 so that it didn't get in my fucking way...) So in the end, I can kind of see the new way as better, but it all takes getting used to. Fortunately the SFLogicNinja videos are there to get me reacquainted with the new shit.

Curse of the Demon

Curse of the Demon, aka Night of the Demon - I recorded this over a year ago off of TCM Undergound - back when it didn't suck. A psychiatrist seeking to debunk the paranormal comes up against a cult leader who claims to have the power to conjure demons and set them upon his enemies. Early in the film, we are treated to the appearance of the demon, which, considering this was done in 1957, looks really good. Rather than merely giving us a guy in a rubber suit, the directer, Jacques Tourneur, uses camera tricks and strategically-lit smoke to prevent the demon from looking lame and he succeeds. Furthermore, the story is airtight, the acting is competent and the villain is awesome. Dr. Karswell, the cult leader and conjurer, carries on with an overtly friendly, yet menacing demeanor. There is one particularly effective scene where the protagonist comes upon him hosting a childrens party doing magic tricks and dressed up like a hobo-clown. The conversation that ensues, about Karswell's self-proclaimed power over the occult, while dressed like a clown is one of the best scenes in the movie.

Overall, this is probably the best movie I've subjected myself to in a long time now.

French horror just isn't doing it for me...

Watched another movie off the DVR tonight - I recorded this one off of Sundance. The movies I tape off of Sundance seem to consistently disappoint, so I'm thinking that from here on out I'm not recording anymore horror movies off that channel.

Sheitan - A French movie; the title means "Satan." The first hour is a bunch of club kids hanging around and being assholes on a farm, the last forty-five minutes is when stuff happens - but (spoiler alert!) no one dies (spoiler alert!)

The gist of the movie, I guess, is that someone's bringing about the birth of the Anti-Christ. Reading the imdb boards (for whatever that's worth), it seems like there is a legitimate case to be made that there's a lot of symbolism and biblical allusion going on in this movie. Being a heathen myself, it all pretty much just went over my head.

If the first hour wasn't so boring, I'd forgive the movie just on atmosphere and general fucked-up'ness alone. However, the build up is far too slow for the (lack of) payoff that's delivered.

Here's a link to Horror-Movie-A-Day's review. This is one of those movies that seems to send one to "the internets" to get other people's take on it. It's strange, but not exactly good. Probably good to see in a group so everyone can discuss/bitch after it's done.

Iron Man touched my butthole

I finally saw Iron Man this weekend, and it's still at 93% positive with 208 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but I thought it was pretty "meh..." overall. I pointed out in a previous post how that's pretty much the same rating Schindler's List has. I have no idea where all this critical goodwill is coming from. Personally, I prefer Batman Begins.

Iron Man starts out pretty strong, with Robert Downey Jr. fighting against terrorists in Afghanistan. I mean, really, that could've ended up being pretty fucking silly, but I think Iron Man pulled it off tastefully enough. However, once he singlehandedly wins the U.S. war in Afghanistan halfway through the movie, it just kind of loses steam.

Look, CGI is great when used subtly. Give me a man in a suit using CGI effects against an army, make it look good, and it's great. Give me two CGI robots fighting each other, you might as well be watching Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam smacking the shit out of each other. That's why I didn't go watch Transformers, that's why I'm not going to go see The Hulk (redux). I'm not impressed by the fantastical feats of cartoons. That's probably why I don't like anime, even the supposed "good" ones like Akira - it just doesn't impress me.

And that's probably why I'm gay for Batman. Live action. Mano-y-mano. People hitting people, not cartoons. Yeah, I know there's CGI there, but I can't fucking see it, so who cares?! It's awesome!

Meanwhile, I've continued cleaning out the DVR.

The Dark - This movie feels like it was made as a low budget direct-to-DVD movie during downtime on the set of the Silent Hill movie. It even has Sean Bean. Turns out it was made and released a year before it. The overall structure is eerily the same; child disappears, mother goes apeshit trying to find her, father shuffles around in crazy mother's footsteps trying to piece together what's going on. It just begs the question, if this movie was already out when Silent Hill was being made, why the fuck couldn't they have learned from its mistakes?!

The Burning - I have a quest to see every movie that made the UK's "Video Nasty" list. I actually vaguely recall seeing this in high school, either on USA's Up All Night, or TNT's Monstervision with Joe Bob Briggs. This is one of a slew of summer camp slasher movies that came out after the success of Friday the 13th. It's hook was that the killer, a groundskeeper named "Cropsy" of all things, was a horribly scarred burn victim. (The other thing it has to differentiate itself from other camper slasher movies of the era is a young Jason Alexander from Seinfeld - with hair!) This movie is good mindless fun, but you've got to think - how hard would it be to kick a burn victim's ass? I don't care if their coming at you with a pair of garden shears, I'm pretty sure just laying your hands on them would be incapacitating, let alone a good, solid punch.

The Black Dahlia - I didn't want to see this, but Gemma's had a hard-on for it ever since it was in theaters. No one really likes this movie, and that's because it's ass. The movie is based off of a fictional novel loosely based on the infamous Black Dahlia murder. Everything but the fact that a girl was murdered and severely mutilated is made up and it all sucks. The photography/cinematography is pretty neat; the movie is made too look like an old photo, but the corpse of the Black Dahlia itself is some CGI abomination seemingly inspired by American J-horror remakes - it really clashes with the rest of the film and not in a good way, in my opinion. The pace of the movie is mind-numbingly slow, the Black Dahlia murder seems to be a minor subplot of the entire movie, and the ending is just total ass and poo smeared together on Wonderbread and served on a paper plate. The best/worst thing about it is that there is something about this movie that just screams, "This was made to be Oscar bait!!!" which is hilarious given just how spectacularly it fails. There's a cheap direct-to-video knock-off of the same name on FearNet right now that is apparently even worse, which is really unfortunate, because this is one of those rare opportunities where an independent film maker with an extremely low budget could have actually have made a better movie.

The DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting

I just watched about 8 hours worth of the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting - because I'm a masochist. There are many Hillary supporters who feel that Barack Obama is a weak candidate for the general election, to which I can only respond; Hillary Clinton is obviously a weaker candidate than Barack Obama, because she is losing to him. There's a sense that somehow, Barack Obama needs to do more than simply beat Hillary Clinton, as though Hillary Clinton were the default candidate - she's not. At this point, there is simply no way she could be the nominee. If she was made the nominee, it will have been through artificial means.

There was a 3 hour "break" in the meeting that was originally supposed to be a lunch break, but apparently ended up being a meeting amongst the committee members on how to finish the event - who would propose what motions that were going to be put to a vote. When they returned from the break, the first thing they did was put forth a motion on seating Florida's delegates at 100%. It was plainly obvious that a large group of Hillary supporters thought that they were announcing the motion had passed, because they flipped the fuck out with cheering and applause. They didn't realize that they were merely doing a sort of "theater" where they were putting the motion up for vote, knowing full well it would be voted down, before introducing a second motion to seat the Florida delegates at half a vote each, which passed unanimously. At that point the Hillary supporters had completely turned on the committee.

Those Hillary supporters are likely gone - done with Barack Obama, done with the Democractic Party. Why? Because Hillary and Harold Ickes and her inside supporters want to cause disruption. Because Hillary Clinton's campaign sucked and she lost what could have been a sure thing - the old "Casey at the Bat" story - classic hubris. Because they feel that even though they majorly flubbed the campaign, they're still entitled to the nomination. Damage has been done and it may yet haunt the Democratic Party in the general election.

However - if the Democratic Party were to somehow swoop in and hand the nomination to Hillary Clinton, the loss to the Democratic Party in the long run would be much greater. Barack Obama represents a new infrastructure for the entire party to win on for generations to come. The old DLC - that's Democratic Leadership Committee, an independent entity separate from the Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee - their infrastructure only ever got Bill Clinton elected, and one must keep in mind, both times there was Ross Perot on the ballot. But down-ticket Democratic candidates suffered during their reign, and in the end, it led to total Republican domination of all three branches of government for a few years. There are those who say that the 2006 election year gains were inevitable for the Democratic Party, however I do believe that had the DNC chair been another DLC person, like Terry McAuliffe or Ed Rendell, both of whom are now Hillary supporters this election, they would not have competed in all 50 states like Howard Dean did - and therefore would not have made the extraordinary gains that the Democratic Party made under his leadership. The DLC style Democratic Party was a top down thing that conceded way too many congressional districts to the Republicans. Howard Dean and Barack Obama both represent a ground-up style of funding and organization and their successes in fundraising are unprecedented.

It is really unfortunate, seeing those Hillary supporters led out of the meeting by security screaming their heads off. They're completely ignorant of the issues before the committee, why Florida and Michigan were stripped of delegates, who voted to strip them (Harold Ickes for one, despite his rhetoric today), Hillary Clinton's support of those delegates being stripped, and how inappropriate it really was to even restore any of these delegates when voters in those states were told the election results would not count. Yet they have their opinions, and their assured self-righteousness - somehow if Hillary's not winning, well, someone screwing them. They are completely oblvious to the fact that they are pawns of a failed political campaign grasping at straws.

And, likely, in the general election this fall, they will not be voting. They'll be convinced that Barack Obama somehow stole the nomination from Hillary Clinton - never mind that Hillary Clinton was the one who had all the connections to party insiders and Barack Obama was the outsider. Hillary would practically have to hold a concession speech where she admitted to every dirty trick and tactic she pulled and told her most ardent supporters "I was playing you all like a fiddle during the primary - I wasn't really screwed out of this nomination, I was just acting like a dick so you'd fight harder on my behalf! Now I support Barack Obama and you should too, and I fully apologize for all the shit I pulled on him!" I guarantee her concession speech will have no such self-criticism and no such admission of the propagandist wordplay she used during her campaign - after all, she'll be thinking of 2012.

But even if Barack Obama loses this fall, come 2012 there will be another candidate supported by the grassroots, who will raise more money from small donors than the richest DLC donors could ever match - and Hillary Clinton will find herself losing by even bigger margins in that primary, because she is part of an old-style of Democratic politics that has been discredited and is on its way out. Howard Dean and Barack Obama have created the blueprint for the future of this party - the Clintons are the past. As time passes, those who support the Clintons will be fewer, while the next generation flocks to the next successor.

If the DNC were to give in to Hillary and her supporters and artificially hand her the nomination this year - all that will die for a generation. And she will lose the general election against John McCain as I predicted on this blog way back in February. The party will be completely discredited as an organization able of governing, and she will be irreversibly tainted as the "selected-not-elected" nominee. Scores of would-be Democratic voters will flock to third party candidates or not vote at all - better to tune out than to be complicit. Trust me, I know. In 2000 I was 19 years old and voted for Ralph Nader rather than a Gore/Lieberman ticket. Al Gore ended up being an alright guy in the end, but you wouldn't have known it back then, but Lieberman is now endorsing John McCain. (There you go, DLC fuckers, I was right, you were wrong, unless the purpose of your organization is to get Republicans with D's next their name elected.)

My point, I guess, is that we may be on our way to losing the 2008 election - assuming that those two dozen Hillary supporters/protesters are representative of some larger movement - but it's too late for Hillary to win this and her candidacy will do nothing for the future of the Democratic Party. Win or lose, Barack Obama gives this party a way to win future elections for the rest of my life - something the DLC/Clinton machine never was and never will be capable of.

Mike's Memorial Day Movie Weekend (now with 33% gratuitous rape!)

Memorial Day weekend gave me an opportunity to watch a bunch of shit I had on my DVR for the past year.

Citizen Kane - caught this on TV a few years back, never watched it "properly" from the beginning to the end. It is considered one of the best movies of all time and for good reason. I can't wait until Michael Bay remakes it - WITH EXPLOSIONS.

Shivers - David Cronenberg's take on the zombie movie genre, but instead of eating you, these zombies want to rape you! It's all the result of a synthetic parasite that looks like the offspring of a turd and a penis that was overcooked in the microwave. This movie does not flinch from its subject matter, instead exploring the full perverted range of its implications. Add in some gross out moments involving an insurance agent who essentially plays mother hen to a brood of newborn parasites and you got something that can only be described as Cronentastic!!!

Calvaire - Weird French movie I taped off of Sundance, the description went something along the lines of "A cabaret singer breaks down in rural Belgium and comes across the town's deranged peasants. A mix of gory violence and black humor." For some reason, I thought cannibals. I was wrong. One - the cabaret singer is a guy who sings for old folks homes - not cabarets. Okay. Two, the peasants are Deliverance-inspired man-rapists. Oh noes! This movie has a dreadful atmosphere and great cinematography/photography and might have been okay except it has a really shitty, half-assed ending.


The Gate - Two 10-year-old boys somehow manage to accidentally perform an elaborate ritual that creates a gate between their world and that of ancient demons that predate light itself. I saw this movie in theaters back in 1987 - meaning I was only 6 years old!!! Two things in it scared the shit out of me back then - a demonic apparition of one of the main characters dad's face melting off and a phone melting on the wall. Apparently as a kid I was bothered by melting, but not by little claymation dudes running around. Or big gigantic anti-climatic claymation dudes. This movie is a bit too day-glo and 80's to really hold up these days, and it has a super sappy sugary sweet happy ending. They should've gone with an ending more akin to Time Bandits - sorry kid, your house is gone, everyone you love is dead and you're all alone in the world. Oh, and it's your fault. Now THAT'S an ending!!!

The House on Haunted Hill (1999 remake) - Some remakes I refuse to watch, some remakes I can't help myself. I love the original House on Haunted Hill, starring Vincent Price, and this movie seemed to have the right look that I was willing to at least give it a chance. It's actually pretty decent up until the final 20 minutes. Enough things are changed in this movie so that it's not an outright regurgitation - in this version the "house" was a 1930's era asylum where the evil doctor, played by Jeffrey Combs, was performing grisly experiments and vivisections on his patients. One day they broke free, so the doctor put the place in a (technologically unlikely) lock down mode and 135 people burned to death with no way to escape. The set up provides a great atmosphere for the movie to work with, and Geoffrey Rush plays the part analogous to Vincent Price's - not a bad choice of casting. Unfortunately, they have Chris Kattan playing the wienie comic relief, but it doesn't ruin the movie - the ending does. Gemma called me about 20 minutes before this movie ended and I told her, "the movie's been pretty good up until this point, but I think it's about to take a huge shit on me." And shit it did. They ruin a pretty decent movie with a horrible CGI anti-climax that is about as goofy as the giant claymation dude from The Gate.

Touch of Evil - So I began and ended the weekend with an Orson Welles movie. Touch of Evil is a film noir with Charlton Heston as prominent Mexican law enforcement officer Mike Vargas, and Orson Wells as the racist American police captain Hank Quinlan who uses questionable methods to get arrests and convictions. Vargas is the idealist do-gooder, and when he and Quinlan cross paths, Quinlan decides the only course of action is to make Vargas and his wife out to be drug addicts themselves so that Vargas's accusations hold no weight - with the side effect of possibly letting a prominent drug cartel leader, whose conviction depends upon Vargas's testimony, go free. It's great stuff with some truly tense atmosphere as Quinlan teams up with local crime lord Uncle Joe Grandi and his thugs to go after Vargas's innocent wife - there's some serious knot-in-your-stomach moments to be had there.

Painkiller

I watch this guy's reviews every week:


I've had my eye on Painkiller for a while now... what's not to like? It's an FPS, it takes place in Hell, and... well that's pretty much it. It used to be $20 on Steam, and I was kind of ambivalent about it. Yeah, I love shooting things and satanic imagery, but really, $20 is a bit much for a cheap thrill. Then I watched Yahtzee's review and thought, "Over 50 distinct varieties of dudes to murder?! OKAY!!!" and sure enough it was only $9.99. Well, shit, I can't say "no" for that price. And apparently neither can a lot of people, because since this review came out on Wednesday, Painkiller has gone from nowhere to the #5 best seller on Steam. Valve even uses a line from Yahtzee's review in the ad banner for Painkiller: "All you really need to know is there is a gun that shoots shurikens and lightning."

There is an old game called Serious Sam that I have never played, but from what I understand, it's simply an FPS whose claim to fame is obscene amounts of monsters in a small amount of space and you have to kill all of them. Painkiller is a lot like that in that each level is essentially made up of several "rooms" and you enter a room, it locks you in, and a shitload of monsters spawn for you to murder. Once you've killed everything in a room, everything unlocks and an arrow helpfully points you to the next area you need to get to - rinse and repeat. As repetitive as it sounds, it actually gets your adrenaline pumping as it essentially throws so many monsters at you at once that you have to constantly keep moving and firing just to stay alive. Furthermore each level seems to have it's own types of monsters with their own special abilities so that it doesn't get old, or hasn't for me yet anyways.

One of my favorite things about video games like this is a wide variety of baddies. One of the weakest points of Bioshock, in my opinion, is that there's so few types of enemies - Thuggish Splicers, Leadhead Splicers, Nitro Splicers, Spider Splicers and Big Daddies. That's really five enemies spread out over a 10 to 20 hour game. Meanwhile, in Painkiller, each level is 15 minutes long and you get two to three different distinct types of enemies.

And that brings up another thing I love about this, it's easy to sit down, play for a few minutes and then quit. I'm getting to the age where I like that kind of thing. Don't get me wrong, I love long, engaging story arcs that make you just want to put a bucket under your desk and play through to the end, but it doesn't jive with real life right now, so it's nice when I can boot up the game, clear a room, save and get on with my day.

So overall, for $10, definitely worth it. $20? Maybe, maybe not, but definitely not worth more than $20.