What’s with the Japanese, gore and high school girls? The latest gore-fest movie to hit from Japan is called “The Machine Girl” by Iguchi Noboru and starring Yashiro Mikase. The basic premise is Yakuza do the girl over (as their wont), and girl goes out for revenge with a machine gun ala Ash from Evil Dead (they like that sort of thing, if you’ve ever seen “Stacy: Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombies” you’d agree, I’m not making that up either).
Anyhow, obviously not meant to be taken seriously when trailer captions go “Yakuza. Ninja. Tempura. Sushi.” Watch for yourself from TwitchFilm.net here. Obviously, you have to be in the right mood to get into it.
Found this link on FriendlyAtheist.com by Hemant Mehta, How to Ruin a Trip to the Museum where Biblically Correct Museum Tours have their own view of things. Interesting things pop up like:
• Adam and Eve walked with dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden
• Tyrannosaurus Rex ate vegetables until evicted from the Garden of Eden (what, no coconuts?)
• Fossil exhibits are artwork, not science
• Evolution is a religion or philosophy
• Determining the age of fossils by measuring the age of the sandstone they are in is considered circular reasoning
• Ignore the exhibit on radiometric dating claiming “We can’t cover everything!”
Queried about the lack of dinosaur and human fossils being found together (which would prove the whole Garden of Eden issue) the comment is “Well, there are some problems for Creationalists…”
I’ve been keeping an eye on TwitchFilm which IMHO has the best coverage of films outside the US you can get to keep up to date with the new film with Jet Li and Jackie Chan called “The Forbidden Kingdom”. Hopefully it’ll work out OK but the made-for-US story elements usually bode badly but I’ll give it a chance. TwitchFilm has got a behind the scenes video of the film, so looks good so far. See it here.
Some games just don’t get old no matter when they were released. Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle are one of these rare games from 1986 and 1987 for the Mac that really defined the platform action game for a lot of Mac users back in the day. These days, most people don’t have hardware capable of playing it, so there’s Mini vMac by Paul Pratt (based off vMac by other smart guys) to emulate the Mac Plus so you can play it again in all the B&W glory.
Not content on just beating the game, some people have taken it to the next level by doing speed runs, limited rock, limited elixir and no Shield runs through the game, so there’s people like Richard no Yuuutsu, MacMannz and Phantom Peasant showing everyone how it’s done. The forum can be found here as everyone’s keyed up for the next installment, Return to Dark Castle which looks close to a release this year.
Someone else out there decides to have a rant about pennies being a useless part of the US currency. While I travel through USA I inevitably end up with loads of pennies as they had the intelligent idea that you shouldn’t know how much tax to pay until you hit the counter, ending up with some bizarre non-5 or 0 cent count. It’s really hard to get the right number of pennies out when there’s about 5 people behind you urging you to get a move on.
In my view, they should:
1) Declare the price up front. None of this calculated tax nonsense when you get to the counter. You can anticipate and get the right change out before you hit the counter.
2) Switch to a minimum 5 cent denomination. Maybe even 10 cents.
3) Ditch $1 notes in favour of coins and bring in $2 coins or more widely circulate $2 notes like in Australia. No more grubby “I found it in a toilet” $1 notes!
Anyhow, usually what I do in USA is find one of those penny squashing machines that turns them into a surfboard or something, that’s about all they’re good for.
The new game Guitar Rising by GameTank apparently takes the Guitar Hero phenomenon to the next level by using real guitars instead of those guitar shaped controllers. By using a USB microphone you play the guitar to play the music (who’d have thought of it!) to pass levels, check it out here from Gizmodo.
Read about it from Engadget here. Pretty good reproduction of the iPhone called the HiPhone. Don’t think it’ll last long what with Apple getting onto them… Can’t China make its own decent products that don’t rip some other company off?
