Skating For the Gold!
Is your need to see a skater that looks strikingly like a child predator falling two stories and getting impaled on a fence going unsatisfied? How about witnessing the same man now mentally handicapped running amok along the city sidewalk? Well, boy are you lucky that you’re my friend and visit my blog-o-blag! I recorded these videos with my character (who I’ve lovingly named Hector Ricky-Bob Santiago Camaro) during some Skate 2 play and recently rediscovered them on the Skate.Reel site.
Feel free to watch the rest that I’ve uploaded here.
Also Crank 2 came out the past weekend as did the CD for the Original Soundtrack done entirely by Mike Patton. I’m happy to say that the music is exactly as Patton as one would expect and is a fantastic work of art. It sounds the most similar to Fantomas with a bit of Mr. Bungle. It works extremely well on it’s own as well and I highly recommend heading over to Amazon or iTunes or your music distributor of choice and giving it a listen. The entire 32 track album is great, my favorite at the moment are the main theme, “Chelios”, “The Hammer Drops” and the fantastic polka “El Huron.”
Motorcycle Helmets: The Wave of the Future
Warning: Incredibly sage advice incoming! I hope that you are satisfied being lonely, because you are about to become so rich that it will alienate you from everyone you care about.
Buy stock in motorcycle helmets now.
I have just finished five years of intensive research and all signs point to a dramatic increase in the consumption and usage of black motorcycle helmets in the very near future.
During this time I have managed to obtain inside access to certain classified information. This classified information tells me that within a short few years (by 20xx at the most) all government enforcement agencies will be employing black motorcycle helmets as part of their newest uniform changes. Joining the motorcycle helmets with be a completely leather garb consisting of a black leather trench coat, black leather pants and shin-high black leather boots. I am currently unsure if they plan to employ stun-batons or laser-pistols.
For some curious reason, the helmets are also apparently going to include “E-Z 2 Break” shatter-prone glass face shields. Although this does seem a bit counter-productive, I’m sure that Father no doubt has has a fantastic reason for including this technology formerly used in saloon windows.
These changes come as a part of a much wider governmental reform aimed to curb recent spikes in “dissent and the possibility of uprising.”
Hail Father.
Pro tip: Other items worth investing in include flaming spires, leather, holograms and the color black. Be careful though, get ready to quickly dump books, art, music, emotions, free thought and self-identity!
9 (and Mike Patton)
While seeing Coraline in 3D last weekend they showed a trailer for a new CG movie that I have yet to hear of called 9. The trailer got me pretty excited, especially due to my romantic infatuation with anything post-apocalyptic.
Trailer:
The original short it was be based on:
High(er) Quality Version
On a completely unrelated note Mike Patton recently talked about Faith No More reuniting (sans guitarist Jim Martin) for a European tour. As cool as this is, I was more interested by a little note that I had not previously heard. Since I loved the first Crank, I’ve been excited ever since I’ve heard about the sequel, but now my excitement has reached a new height somewhere slightly above “free bacon and beef jerky day.” Apparently Mike Patton has been busy recently doing his first ever fully original film score, for Crank 2: High Voltage. I think this is going to be awesome.
Fun fact: Patton contributed his voice for the ‘infected’ in Left 4 Dead.
What Did Holograms Ever Do to You?
Holograms exist everywhere in every future. The bright shiny technologically super-advanced futures, dirty industrial cyberpunk futures, semi-futuristic pasts, semi-pasteristic futures, not-so-distant futures and just about everything in between. Holograms have appeared in your Star Wars, Star Treks, Blade Runners, Aliens, big budget Hollywood sci-fi epics and hundreds of low budget B-movies, but there is always one thing that every hologram ever perceived in a sci-fi movie has in common, and thus we get to my theory:
No matter how technologically advanced a society is, their holograms will always be imperfect, barely working pieces of shit.
This is the picture that every sci-fi movie paints: a culture that has made intergalactic time travel something the family can do for fun on a Sunday afternoon. That has created space stations and civilized planets across the galaxy. Is able to transport matter from place to place instantaneously and has befriended countless alien beings. Yet it is still unable to get a fucking video to look good. In the future, holograms are used for TVs, phones, decoys and so much other crap. They have become a linchpin of communication. Yet, every instance of one in the future still shows signs of 1950s era television. Many holograms can only display one color. Way to go. Most show heavy interference, scan lines and picture refreshes/breaks constantly pulsing through them. Congratulations. They seem to cut out randomly, never actually letting the viewer see the whole thing. Seriously.
I am willing to accept that in some futures, these terrible holograms make sense. Blade Runner is a perfect example. A technologically advanced, yet run-down, industrial, depressing world. Holograms in this movie should look shitty. It works. Star Wars however, no excuse. The Fifth Element? No. And so on. So why is it that every future has such terrible holograms?
Why has no support been given to hologram makers so distant ahead in time. Do the people really accept that sort of technology as the ‘as good as it can get right now so we might as well take it’ when they are riding around space on beams of light with their alien space-dogs guarding the precious space-cargo (space-hot-pants)? Maybe everyone was too busy mining Spaceridium and creating folds in space-time to try and improve the picture quality of a hologram so that it was comparable to that of something 500 years in the past?
This isn’t some sort of thing that’s burdened by the technology of the film crew at the time, like computers. Computers look shitty too, but they improve as current-world tech improves. But holograms are different. First, they haven’t improved at all. Second, to make a hologram colored, or not look like a giant turd, doesn’t require a more advanced Special FX. There’s no excuse that the technology to make a good looking hologram doesn’t exist.
Is it that all these film creators thought an element of imperfection would help settle our disbelief that all we are watching could really happen in the future? If that’s the case, was there some sort of secret society that all agreed the sacrifice would be the poor undeserving hologram? Why did every movie pick the hologram as the piece of tech that gets the shaft? And did they really think, “Hey, maybe if we make this floating video only one color, they will believe that you can fly 10000 light years in a few minutes to get some sort of laser weapon that melts people’s pants.”
And so a plea goes out.
Dear future,
…with your motorcycle-helmet wearing police force, your cityscapes sprouting fire, your weapons and vehicles of unimaginable power and energy, please, please, fix your holograms. If you have to, please use your time machine to go back when the hologram was first developed and slap the inventor in the eye and tell him to stop being lazy. If you have to, allow Xenu back out of his space-volcano to use the power of Thetans to create a correctly working hologram. Maybe you could even pool together some space-beer money from some of your friends and use it to advance the hologram out of the second-middle-ages era of technology. Thank you,
Looking forward to meeting you,
Doug Hogan
Saying Things on the Internet
Someone said the other day that they were surprised that I didn’t have a blog and that maybe I should. So I started one. And now that you are brought up to speed with my life so far I suppose that I should start with something interesting.
…
Now that that’s over with I hope to actually update with the occasional essay on the future or complaint about the present and maybe even the ever so rare movie or doodle.
Listening to
Playing
Archives
- June 2010 (1)
- April 2010 (1)
- March 2010 (2)
- December 2009 (3)
- October 2009 (1)
- September 2009 (1)
- August 2009 (1)
- June 2009 (3)
- May 2009 (2)
- April 2009 (1)
- March 2009 (2)
- February 2009 (2)