No Blood for Oil! No Blood for Oil! Oh, wait.

This is BP *Solar*, by the way.

Save the earth! From oil!

Frank Chu was there, of course.

Frank Chu Redoux

Watching people get nabbed by the po-po is actually pretty boring so I left after fifteen minutes or so.

PICK UP THAT CAN, CITIZEN

These two dudes behind me started shouting at each other. I thought they were going to start trading punches, but they didn’t.

Time for a little vay-cay.

2009’s REC 2 is the sequel to 2007’s REC (which was remade in the United States as Quarantine). I haven’t seen Quarentine and don’t really care to; REC was awesome enough for me.

REC 2 starts about 15 minutes before REC ends. That statement doesn’t spoil anything. However, it’s not going to be possible to talk about the movie any further without spoiling either REC or REC 2 so I’m going to have to shut up about it soon.

Just know that it does an excellent job of turning the zombie trope on its head. It does so well and it does so in an unexpected manner.

You’ll probably, uh, have to, you know. Locate a copy of this. Just FYI.

By that time I was fully in hate with the game. But I was not going to let it defeat me. I was committed.

I really, really liked the game up to when you land on the planet. After that, it seems like the designers engaged in an experiment: how long can we artificially prolong this game with pointless min-boss sections and tedium?

However, the disc is worth picking up because it also has Escape from Butcher Bay on it as well, redone with the newer engine and replete with its own gamer skittles. That game is absolutely worth your time.

So it goes.

If this were . . . a normal site we might choose to punt on the bugs. Your technology is out of date, we can’t support you, your browser has reached end-of-life years ago, etc.

We got this message. Every now and then I pull it out and re-dedicate myself to The Mission.

Hello Wikipedia,

Up until you made these changes my husband was learning a ton! He had seizures growing up and as a result he has a very low IQ. I was so thrilled when I showed him your site and he would go to it just like a child, hungry for knowledge! He searched for answers like I never thought he could. He was learning and talking passionately about things he read here. I’ve been searching for an alternative but unless we can pay the $14.99 for the app, we’re lost. Could you please bring back the functionality for Blackberry users? It would open the world to a 38 year old man like you can’t imagine.

Just a plea from his loving wife.

Thanks for reading.

[redacted]

That is why I do what I do.

Today, I noticed this on it’s windows.

It is easily the best film I have seen this millenium.

Future archaeologists will regard this film as Christopher Nolan’s high-water mark. I say this with melancholy and hope that my prediction is misaligned. I don’t know if anything Nolan makes again will be this collected and that fills me with mourning for masterpieces yet to be made.

Inception braids several genres together in a manner most masterful. It is a caper story and a psychological thriller, a romance tale and an action vehicle, a puzzling mystery and a con-artist yarn. I felt a brilliant dizziness watching these plates juggled, breathlessly waiting for breakage.

You see, I wanted the story to implode because I wanted to have written it.

Spoiler: I was denied the satisfaction of schadenfreude. All of the story’s shenanigens pay off in a satisfying manner.

Have I discussed what the meat of the plot yet? I haven’t? Hrm. I’m not sure it’s possible for to do so cogently. You see, Inception is about dreaming. To explain the storyline is to retell your dream from last night. Events only make sense in the context of their own timelines, realities, and dreamers.

The plot of Inception is strong and easy to follow. However, like the dream-stories it spins, Inception is more about the feeling and experience of the dreaming rather than any crude linear timeline. And why would Nolan want to talk about timelines anyway? He already did that.

The movie is filled with small hedges towards its philosophic underpinnings. At one point, the team’s “dream architect” imagines into “reality” two large mirrors facing each other, which then display an infinite number of Ellen Pages and Leonardo DiCaprios receding into the far forever,

turtles

all the way down.

None of those are the real versions of the characters. Not even the physical bodies between the mighty marbled mirrors: they, too, are figments within a dream, avatars of their sedated, sleeping selves.

That scene forms the existential seeds of the forbidden apple-of-knowledge within Inception’s Garden of Eden. The idea of disassociated reality repeats through the film, over and over again (turtles all the way down). There are some Deep Core questions concerning the nature of existence and our perception of it: are there dreams within dreams within dreams?

Nolan twists and spins the story back upon itself with this idea, creating a climax that occurs at the same time in four different realities, each running at a different speed – and does so in a way that the audience is never left to wonder “which reality is this scene occuring?”

It’s masterfully done.

I could easily spend several hundred words discussing the film in the context of other existential films (like Dark City, one of my favorites). How the movie is what I had hoped the The Matrix trilogy would have been, or how the film’s final scenes call back to Blade Runner.

However, to do so may very well dilute what Inception really is, and I don’t want to do that.

Dear reader, if you carry even the slightest degree of respect for my opinion about matters such as these, you will see this film.

And do it before someone stupidly spoils it for you.

Many things may not make sense out of context. Let me break down some weird-ass events for you.

* A bunch of us trespassed into a part of the old town that had been bombed into oblivion 60+ years ago and took photos. We pretended to not know what the signs meant even though one of us spoke the language and was actually born in Gdansk.
* While out to dinner, an unexpected parade passed us. A parade of pirates. Pirates on stilts.
* Several of us went to a museum. A museum of amber (a local precious “gemstone”) and torture.
* I met a dog with one eye.

Here are things I saw.

The Internet is Trustworthy in All Countries

Blood Chicken

(I almost titled this “Dude, What the Fuck is Wrong with German People?” but didn’t know how may people watched South Park and would get the joke.)