…because he was effing hilarious on last night’s episode of Chuck as a retired spy living out his days on copious amounts of gin martinis and sex. (It’s like Dan Fielding became a spy instead of a lawyer.) Anyhoosit. If you haven’t seen the show, here’s a little clip:

And also? If you haven’t seen the show, what the heck is wrong with you!?!? Watching Chuck is like imagining what would have happened if Eexlebots or Zaphod had grown up in SoCal instead of AlmostCanada and gone to Standford instead of St.John’s–which is to say, it’s quirky, nerdy, witty, silly, and absotively hilarious.

If your reaction to the above comic is, “WTF!” you may get a kick out of Comics I Don’t Understand since posting and talking about ridiculous comics is pretty much that blog’s mission statement. Hooray!

gillen posted this a while ago but since I ripped the video I figured I should also post it here! St. John’s College aka the “Great Books School” commissioned a an inadvertently hilarious promo for their school’s program a long, long time ago…and here it is for your viewing pleasure!

Watch our intrepid (old as hell) freshman struggle with the meaning of old Greek words and old philosophy ideas in general, and the unique and surreal program on his quest for meaning!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

I first read this article in Wired a good long time ago and it is still a fun read, and badass to boot. The writer hops around different users of old computers with hardcore followings, like Amiga users and crazed Commodore hackers. Many of them used an ancient computer to do most or all of their work, and one group had found a way to hack web support into a C64-seriously!

I knew a couple of people who would use their old computers to do really crazily awesome things-even if they were mundane, like surfing the web or photoshopping, they were awesome when seen on a NeXt cube or old SGI system, and that sort of display of mega-geekery makes you tingle then this is your porn. Or maybe this. Or this.

Yesterday as I took a break from my rapid and scary transformation into yuppie scum I decided to look up an old friend: BeOS!

Back in the day when I still had things like beliefs and values and such I used to use BeOS as my regular desktop operating system! Many a night was spent curled up by the warm glow of my old CRT with Scott Hacker’s BeOS Bible or cruising sites such as BeBits or BeNews, or typing away on BeShare!

When the company went tits-up a few years back a few efforts emerged to make an open-source version of the stupendously fast and fun OS. Well, the OpenBeOS project has morphed into the HaikuOS project, and after a few false starts they have a new release which includes…NETWORK SUPPORT!

Support is fairly basic at the moment, but as you can see from the screenshot below, FTP now works, so there is a viable way of updating the system and adding software. Now I can sit at my desk, and in between drinking my Starbucks coffee and studying up on stodgy corporate Microsoft, Apple, and VMWare systems I can daydream of a system that nimbly runs BeOS once more. Maybe in a few more months my daydreams can become alpha-release frustrating realities!

I miss those fucking yellow tabs.

BeOS, haiku, network support

OK so I wanted to know how good the new Fantastic Four movie will be, but I do not want to wait to find out because I sort of want to get hammered on Friday night and watch it! I looked around for reviews but could not find any good ones, I was about to try alt.filmpirates.moviereviews.bin but I remembered that I hate using Usenet!

I then remembered that I had a future self problem! It hasn’t been so bad lately, but I know he comes out of my brain when I least suspect it!

I wrote on the computer screen in rub-out marker,

FUTURE SELF: DID YOU SEE THE FANTASTIC FOUR:RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER MOVIE IN THE FUTURE? IF SO SHOULD I GO SEE IT? THANX TOUCHING

Then I drank a quart of whiskey and passed out with my face stuck to the keyboard!

I woke up a couple of days later, I was in the bathtub, but not in water: I was in a pool of baby oil! This is weird! I said to myself, but it was OK, I figured it was the Future Self doin’ thangs to my body again. He was probably trying to fix it after all I have been doing to it (smoking reservation cigarettes, drinking quarts of whiskey, cough syrup binges, cheese heroin shakes, dimetap and hydrogen peroxide, etc)

It took me a long time to get out of the tub, since I was so slippery! I blew out the scented lavender candles and rubbed the oil off of my body, I had to swing my feet out over the edge of the tub and rub them with a towel, then rub most of my body to get the rest of the oil off, then rub my lower body and feet and legs AGAIN to get the rest of the oil that dripped off, then I slid out of the bathroom into the door!

When I woke up again I was still by the door and nothing strange had happened, so I must have just passed out like a normal person. Anyway, so I got up, and since I had landed on the rug and not the plastic bathroom floor, I could move and not slide an extra three inches per step due to oilfoot, so I thought it a good time to go back to the computer!

The marker was rubbed out and a notepad was open on the computer, it was a message from my future self! it said:

****************
ATTN: Touching:
RE: Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer

Ok you dumbfuck, I don’t even know why I am typing this to you. I know damn well you’re going to see this stupid movie, and you and I both know you’re going to get royally fucked up before you watch it. In fact, you’re going to get so fucked up that you are going to thoroughly enjoy the “film” in question. In fact you will tell your fucking roommate that “it’s awesome, go see it!” because all you can remember from your cough-syrup induced delirium is how cool the Silver Surfer looked and acted, and that you liked how silly everything was.

Maybe if I drank two and a half 16-ounce bottles of Robotussin I would feel the same way..OH WAIT! I did, didn’t I? That’s right, brainfucker, I did, because I had to come from you.

So, do you want to know what you should do? I’ll tell you. Don’t see it, go draw pictures or study astronomy this coming Friday. What will you actually do? You’ll drink five or six Pabst Blue Ribbon’s at Kingman’s Lounge or The Alley or the Easy Lounge or some other fucking Oakland hipster preening hellhole and be so drunk you’ll think you are having a good time there, then you’ll stop by the drugstore and buy three bottles of cough syrup with dextramorthophan and drink them one by one in the back of the meth-addled Kwikway (in front of the eyepatch lady, too), before hurling in front of the KFC before you get halfway through the third bottle of Robo. Then you know what you’ll do? You will teeter into the Grand Lake Theatre with the last bit of muscle control that you can muster, and you will drop ten fucking bucks to sit in the very front of the theatre and go “oooh whoah” in between giggle-fits for two goddamn hours.

Have fun, asshole. This will be another reason I hate you so goddamn much.

-Your Future Self

****
So it sounds like the movie will be worth seeing! FOUR STARS THANK YOU MARVEL AND GARBAGE DIRECTOR!

future self, adventures with touching, fantastic four: rise of the silver surfer, review, fantastic four: rise of the silver surfer review, baby oil bath

I mean, I looked at my blog and it was not displaying animated gifs for some reason (well, maybe they hired a designer with a sense of fucking taste). When I reposted it, a familiar error by the name of “an unexpected error has occurred” occurred, and then when I tried again I got some messed up time/date stamp error which i had never seen before!

This is on top of random weird errors that happened when I tried to pretty up my profile and blog with the new “DIE HARD FOREVER AND EVER UNTIL BRUCE WILLIS DIES” editor!

Maybe the Pubic Troll is having fun in the server room again. I dunno. What would Myspace be without ten million fucking errors, eh? It just wouldn’t be Myspace any more (it would be pleasant to use, that is)!

OK so today I woke up and ROOMMATE was not around! It was good times, I danced around naked in the apartment for a while to 90s music like THE REAL MCCOY and HADDAWAY until I remembered that people can see in through the windows, so I washed some clothes and put them on like a normal human being!

I went on the inter-net but I got bored, so I decided to go to Everything2 and type in “Robotech.” I was enthralled for hours and then I found out they MADE A SEQUEL THAT WAS ACTUALLY ANIMATED AS AN ACTUAL ROBOTECH CARTOON. In case you have a life and did not either grow up in the 80s or smoke pot and watch Cartoon Network in the late 90s Robotech is an awesome show (when you are stoned or a small child) about aliens who invade Earth to get a ship they lost and who apparently like J-Pop a whole lot! Also there are lots of mechs and space fighters that transform into robots (those sequences were most of the budget…of the show they came from!). The show was actually three shows stitched together from Japanese TV to make one show for America! Hahaha wtf.

ANYWAY I decided to go buy that movie! TOUCHING, my mind said, YOU NEED TO GO NOW AND BUY IT AND ALSO A JUG OF CARLO ROSSI TO HELP WITH THE MOVIE!

So I went out! I drove to Berkeley, which is basically the worst thing you can do in the Bay Area (aside from letting your truck melt the highway!) I somehow found parking close to RASPUTIN’S and AMOEBA and went into both, hoping to find the movie. NO LUCK but I did find a whole bunch of Hentai which was exactly next to the “R” section in the “Japanime” <---hahaha that is seriously what they called it--->and that sucked because girls already do not like you if you are looking at anime, if they think you are looking at tentacle schoolgirl pr0n and being all picky about it they probably want to call the police or at least take a pic of you and post it to “Don’t Date Him Girl.com”!

So neither of those places had it! I went ughghgh and went into a Moe’s Bookstore and SOMEHOW FOUND A COPY OF “MARTIANS GO HOME” (which was right next to the “John Brunner” section, double awesome!).

Anyway, this left me with one option: I had to go…to….EMERYVILLE. DAMMIT. Well I forced myself to go, I ended up at the Borders or Barnes and Noble or whatever big giant corporate bookstore that is there near Trader Joe’s! I looked it up on their video thingie and it said —>whoah touching look at that beautiful Indian lady over there *swoon* I should go over and say hi and maybe try to WAIT MOVIE —> and then the video search thingie said NOT AVAILABLE YOU CAN ORDER IT AND IT WILL GET HERE IN ONE WEEK!

Well THAT WILL NOT DO! I screamed, the Indian lady looked over at me when I did that, I smiled and said “Hi!” and she looked creeped out and walked away, dangit! I make more irritated nerd noises and walked out and thought, TOUCHING< maybe you can just go to the other bookstore? The other bookstore is in the worst place on Earth though, it is in the faux-small-town brick "Emery Bay" chamber of horrors, so I said NO! to my brain and suggested I download a backup copy in the inter-net instead!

TOUCHING, my brain said, Good idea!

SO now I have been waiting one hour, it says "57 minutes until completion" so while I could not buy a DVD I ended up saving twenty or thirty bucks! THANK YOU ISOHUNT.COM!

Physical Media Review: poor
Internet Review: three and a half stars (half a star is taken away because downloading it was not completely instant, but was only like two hours probably!)

adventures with touching, robotech, robotech: shadow wars, emeryville, bittorrent, dvd, review, bar area, east bay, shopping

Awesomeness if you dig maps.

read more | digg story

Last night I rented “Godzilla: Final Wars.” It’s claim to fame, until the point that I watched it that is, was that Godzilla battles “Zilla” and handily beats him (”Zilla” is the Toho name for “American Godzilla” from the crappy 1998 American movie). Well, in fact, Godzilla battles every damned monster he’s faced, it seems. So, with that bit of knowledge in my head I popped in the DVD and proceeded to be shocked and awed by the glorious glory that was the most effed up and insane Godzilla movie I have ever seen. Now that I know the director was the same gent behind “Versus” (Ryuhei Kitamura) things make a bit more sense.

This movie has everything. EVERYTHING. In no particular order, there is a flying submarine with a spinning drill and lasers that defends Earth(aka the legendary Atragon), Godzilla imprisoned in the ice in Antarctica, aliens that want to eat people, tons of monsters, the Mothra min-twins, martial arts, running on walls, lasers, robots, UFOs, mutant super-teams, Super-Saiyin power-ups, Minilla (aka Baby Godzilla) changing sizes and interacting with children and grandfathers, Mothra on fire, the deaths of millions, homoeroticism, Matrix bullet time, Neo/Smith stye fights, tons of Engrish, an Ultimate-Fighter-turned-flying-sub-captain, effed up portrayals of Americans, swordfights, pretty ladies in hot scientist labcoats, a V-style face-rip scene, kidnapped world leaders, the UN, blood, cratered cityscapes, dudes in rubber suits, CG action, actual stuntwork, wires, a big budget, etc, etc, etc.

And for a true WTF experience watch it with the language set to Japanese with American subtitles. Don’t worry. You will be able to follow everything with the greatest of ease (kinda like the first time I watched “Versus” with no subs or dubs available)-especially since the American captain always speaks in English, and everyone always responds to him in Japanese. He is sorta like Chewbacca. It’s really, really, weird-especially when he gives a long and dramatic speech in front of the Defense Force, all in English!

GO RENT THIS MOVIE YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT ONE MILLION STARS/out of four

PS: The alternate title for this movie could be “Godzilla has the Best Day of His Life” and when you see it you will understand what I mean.

Godzilla, Godzilla:Final Wars, review, Toho, Don Frye, Ryuhei Kitamura

subREVOLTers!!!

For instance:

Smoke billowing from your groin! always funny!
(hey, not his fault–he was testing a “secret government agency” prototype penis when its temperature gauge malfunctioned…causing a premature eruption.)

oh hey, if you can find it, Onur Tukel’s first film, House of Pancakes, is also a gem. but I suggest waiting for the dvd release because Tukel shot it on 16mm for $9000–so sound quality? yeah, not so hot.

movies, onur tukel, ding-a-ling-less, kirk wilson, house of pancakes

Usually the ‘ol uTub is a font of anything I want to find, from videos of kids ghost ridin’ the whip to episodes of Yu-gi-oh: The Abridged Series to old commercials and god help me, Beyblade, the most gloriously inane and incomprehensible show ever made.

But uTub only had one decently long clip of Wizard People, Dear Readers (which is now one of my new favorite things in the world)! Granted, it was the Cribbage Match, which is probably the best part of the whole insanely funny package, but I wanted MORE! MORE!!!#@$# SO ROOMMATE and I rented Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone (American Release, that is important!!, also it was the widescreen DVD) and played with teh iMovie to make the whole redubbed movie and then we started clipping it up for uTub delivery! We have a few up, there are more here on my uTub site, and more clips will be added on a semi-regular basis!

Enjoy watching Harry Potter, ‘ol HP himself, learn how to harness his incredible powers and fully embrace the terrible Godhood that awaits him !

wizard people dear readers, brad neely, mashup, hp, videos, youtube, youtub, harry potter, funny

I want to eat garbage food so bad but I can’t move. I can barely type this. Goddammit New Year’s, I though I only had a few drinks. Too bad those drinks were Andre-based *stomach turns*

I will just have to have hot fantasies about driving to McDonald’s and ordering two double cheeseburgers and larges fries and a shake, or calling Dominoes and ordering a large pizza with jalapenos and pineapples and bacon, or walking down to Barney’s Gourmet Hamburgers and pigging out like the King Tubby I secretly am deep inside my skinniness.

Stupid stomach. let me fucking eat! Or even drink.

Jesus Christ I thought I was cool and barely drunk last night. Maybe the bean dip was tainted. Or it was fucking Andre’s fault, ughghg dollar store champagne.

Goddamn I love french fries.

I also need some coffee, this headache is only going to get worse unless I have coffee.

And a large bag of salty grease.