moar funny pictures

Control is a bit of a departure for me, in that it’s not a horror movie.  It purports to be a biography of Ian Curtis, the late lead singer of Joy Division, based on the biography written by his widow.  Like any biography, it ends with the death of the main character, but that’s the point of it.  the point is the story that leads up to it.

Control starts us off with Ian Curtis as an adolescent, wearing stolen makeup and dancing around in an inside-out jacket to a David Bowie record.  He’s a teenage misfit in a small town, pining for a chance to get away from it and go somewhere interesting and do something exciting, and in the meantime he and his friend visit senior citizens under the pretense of conducting a survey so they can steal pills from the oldsters’ medicine cabinets.

He plays it smart, though, and learns about what he’s taking with a physician’s desk reference.  “Side effects include drowsiness, apathy, agitation, and blurred vision.  I’m taking two!”

I liked this bit of the movie.  it really takes Ian Curtis the legendary mope and makes him a human being,  a thrillseeking misfit that people can relate to rather than some dark god of mopey music.

he meets a girl, does some awkward teenage-dork dancing in front of a mirror, that kinda thing.  Good times.

and then we skip forward and he’s married to his highschool sweetheart and starting to sing with the band that will become Joy Division, and he’s celebrates his fledgeling celebrity by… having a kid?  Well, his eccentricity has been established by this point, so I let it slide.

What cement’s Curtis’ decision to pursue his musical career is a series of medical mishaps – he witnesses an epileptic seizure at his employment-office dayjob, gets diagnosed with the same illness, and then finds out the epileptic job-hunter hat a fatal seizure their first day on the job.  With his own mortality staring back at him from a 1970s desk-phone, he becomes firmly committed to making Joy Division a success and leaving more of a mark on the world than a daughter and a scuffed up desk.

This is also where the tension begins, the drama, the conflict, the tragedy, the slow descent to his suicide in 1980.  With death-by-seizure always around the next corner, he finds himself torn between being a husband and father in a town he never liked or touring with the hottest band in the whatever-it-was-after-punk-rock-ended.  His wife loves it back in their home town and never really sees his fame, she just sees him as the same desk-job misfit she married years ago.  when asked about her husband’s status as a celebrity, she says he’s not famous to her because she still washes his underpants.

The musical numbers are okay.  Wikipedia cites that they were all performed by the actors themselves rather than overdubbed with actual recordings from the period, so they only sound almost like joy division, so it was a bit disorienting for me at first.  I’d see Joy Division on stage, expect to hear Ian Curtis, and hear Sam Riley trying to sing like Ian Curtis.  The performances were, I should note, good enough to send me on another Joy Divsion bender, putting the Manchester masters of mope back in heavy rotation on my ipod (they’re always there, but sometimes I play the music more than others).

What really makes this movie is Sam Riley’s facial expressions as Ian Curtis.  The movie is sparse on any kind of meaningful dialogue explaining what’s going on in Curtis’ mind and doesn’t delve at all into his aesthetic influences, but that face can convey a thousand flavors of subtle anguish and human misfortune.  there’s the exhausting-himself-on-stage face with his half-closed eyes drifting off in different directions, the “oh shit, I’m kind of a rock-star” face before and after gigs, the scooping-elephant-dung-with-a-teaspoon face of having to come home to the house he didn’t want in the town he wants to leave forever and face the wife he married too young and the kid he fathered too soon when he’d rather be off in some exotic foreign city with his cute groupie-mistress.

Overall, no individual element of this movie stands out as great, or even good – they’re just okay.  The sum of all it’s parts, though, is something stunningly, heart-breakingly tragic, like watching a man sprout wings, only to discover his legs are made of lead and partially submerged in the concrete of a place he never really wanted to be.

Hace varios meses, durante una de mis visitas al sitio de Destructoid, me topé con una imagen que me causó mucha risa. Se la enseñé a varios de mis amigos y amigas, y nos reíamos cada vez que recordábamos la foto de los gatos diciendo: “Let me show you my Pokemans – My Pokémans, let me show you them”. La perfección en la gramática era lo que más me causa gracia y me hace reir.

Pocos meses después, al tener ya mi nueva cámara de video, me puse a pensar en una parodia de esta imagen, pero cambiando de Pokémons a Pokéballs.
Tan pronto llegaron las vacaciones de Semana Santa, me puse de acuerdo con mis primas y empezamos a grabar el video.

Dania y Paola se vistieron como Pokémon trainers al igual que yo. Colocamos a Pikachu en la mochila y las Pokéballs en sus lugares correspondientes y grabamos. Paola se subió a distintos techos, Dania estuvo con las flores y también, las dos disfrutaron un poco de sol al acostarse en los camastros, además de practicar algunas maniobras en el pasamanos.

Al terminar me dirigí a mi casa y edité el video. Cuando terminé, lo guardé en mi computadora hasta el día del estreno, cuando se subiría a YouTube.
Debido a varios apagones en la colonia y la poca ayuda por parte del clima a estos sucesos, pude terminar de subir el clip hasta un día después.

A final de cuentas, el primer short de Z Studios quedó listo. Espero que sea de su agrado. Además, les adelanto que este no será el último short que verán de nuestra parte.

También quiero agradecer a mi amigo Irving de Pokémex, quien realmente nos ayudó a promocionar el video al anunciarlo en su sitio. ¡Muchas gracias!

No olviden la imagen…

I just read a pretty interesting factoid. According to VNUnet.com, the three top selling game franchises of all time are: #1 Mario, #2 Pokemans, and #3 The Sims. I read this when I was trying to find out when The Sims 3 comes out (sometime in 2009) because I was thinking about investing in EA. The Sims has only been around since the year 2000, whereas Pokemon first dropped in 1996, and Mario games have been around since the beginning of time.

I personally have bought four Mario games (SMB’s 1, 2, 3 for the NES, and Galaxy for Wii), two Pokemon games (Ruby for the Game Boy Color, and Diamond for the DS), and one Sims game (Sims 2 for PSP), which I hated.

Wow. Just…wow. Pretty f*ckin’ awesome. Sucks that it’s not Ash though

via smashbros.com

“No way! The Pokémon Trainer has finally arrived. And it looks like he doesn’t do his fighting directly. Instead, he uses the three Pokémon with him—Squirtle, Ivysaur, and Charizard—to do the fighting for him.”

“The Pokémon Trainer watches from the background.”

“Is… Is he issuing commands?! He needs to use his three Pokémon to fight. So the only ones who fight directly are the Pokémon. I guess you could say using this character is like playing three for the price of one! And the Pokémon Trainer uses a special move called Pokémon Change to switch between them.”

<Down Special Move: Pokémon Change>

“Good job, Ivysaur! Come back!”

“The returning Pokémon tags the next Pokémon.”

“Charizard! I choose you!”

“They swap out in a set order: Squirtle→Ivysaur→Charizard.”

“They all share the same damage meter, so they don’t recover from damage during Pokémon Change. But they also have another stat, which you might call stamina. If you keep fighting with the same Pokémon, or if you change them out too often, it’s not so good for the Pokémon. If you want to be a good Pokémon Trainer, you’ll need to learn these kinds of ins and outs.”

CHARIZARD?!! F*ck yes.

Imagine a melee with four Pokemon Trainers.

via Penny Arcade

Picture by Lorelei

These past two days have been tiring in two ways. Monday was stressful and today was because of sickness. Monday was pretty normal except for STAR testing for Physics. And that I could barely breath at all. My sinuses were congested like no other. All I was doing was looking at the clock to see when class ends. I was seriously miserable. After that I had tutoring with Kalvin again. He was a bit better this day. He still needs to work on his sentence building though aha. I left twenty minutes earlier to set up for the chamber mixer. I got picked up by my friend Cheri. I gave her tips on driving…even though I dont even have my license and I think I personally suck at driving aha. It was funny seeing her get nervous >.>

The chamber mixer was at Centerpointe Salon and Spa in La Palma. I got there a bit late because I needed to get Ice and stuff. We set up and people came. I think it went pretty well. We got financial donations for going to FBLA National Conference. It was funny when Sabel thought the bowl I was holding was for donations, which in turn was really just for the raffle xD. Im going to be helping the chamber of commerce this summer now with their newsletter, and business directory with mrs de leon. I hope this might get me a good job and awesome networking with these business professionals.

I hope I’ll also be able to do the senior video for next year. My friend Daniel did it this year. I need to buy my own camera and stuff, as well as learn to edit videos pretty well. He gets into all the dances and stuff and events for free as well as going and doing everything the seniors do. I’m really interested in that. Plus the 1k that we’ll get keke.

Thursday I’ll be going to San Jose/Sunnyvale for a new CA FBLA state officer meeting. I need to do a lot right now to get things going. I have the initiative, but I need to work on my “diligence” part of my campaign speech.

I was sick today though.  I went to the doctor and she said I had no infection. it was a “virus” Even though my mom said I had a sinus infection. Thennn she told me to take 2 30mg tablets of Sudafed and 2 500mg tablets of Tylenol x.x. Wow.

Ohh and I went to Asia Buffet and ate 3 plates of King crab legs.

lates.