fine whine

Well, the PS2 dropped to $179. Not the great discount I was hoping for, but I've still got a couple more weeks to make up my mind. I have to say I like a couple of the games. I finally earned my 'b' license in Gran Turismo 3 A-spec after at least an hour of trying. I like the racing parts, just not the license tests, so far. After all, it tells me I'm a whopping 0.7% finished.

I also picked up Devil May Cry, highly recommended by Ryan and for only ten bucks. I think that I like it, though I have a long way to go before I'm as proficient in killing the marionettes as I am at killing soldiers in Dynasty Warriors 3.

Not so long ago I wrote a little ditty about coincidences and chance, specifically the chance that I'd be watching a movie (Requiem for a dream) written by the favorite author of Andy Kaufman (Hubert Selby, Jr.), a pseudo-biography (Was this man a genius? by Julie Hecht) I'd read and returned to the library to pick up the closest Selby book to Andy's favorite (The demon). Well, at the time it seemed pretty interesting a coincidence.

And now I discover that all the time this was going on I had been seeking a track sampled from/remixed from Requiem's soundtrack! By sheer chance, I was trying to track down "Zoo York" by Paul Oakenfold, off of his studio and collaboration album Bunkka. You see, I'd come across another album track, "Nixon's Spirit", featuring a rant by the one and only Hunter S. Thompson, whilst looking for the audiobook edition of Fear and loathing in Las Vegas. Further, but limited, research into the album revealed the possibility that "Zoo York" also featured H.S.T. and this was enough to pique my interest.

Anyway, to make an already long story longer, I've now sat through "Zoo York". It's pretty cool. The whole album is, for that matter, despite some missteps in the collaborators department and occasionally too much trancing, quite cool. My disappointment in the lack of H.S.T. in "Zoo York" was to be replaced with first curiousity and then the current state in which I began this post. As though there were no offbeat lyrics, there was something else, a symphonic riff at first I could not place except from recent memory. Then I realized it to be a theme from Requiem, and that was just too cool.

So here I gush like some ecstasy-crazed dj fan. Whatever. I like finding these sorts of convergences. And for the curious, the track's actually a remix of the Requiem track "Lux Aeterna", part of a dance remix project that never materialized otherwise. And to take it all one step further, evidently Oakenfold sampled Clint Mansell, who in turn had sampled from a song "Quarbani Quarbani" with Bollywood connections I'm still tracking down.

I caught the beginning episode of The AniMatrix, and I have to admit it was quite cool. I'm the first to admit that I was let down by The Matrix the first time I saw it. For that matter, subsequent viewings didn't make me like it too much more. I'm not sure it was the over-the-top wire-fu or bad writing interludes, but something really overshadowed the great visuals and incredible premise for me. Keanu Reeves was more than passable for the role and Lawrence Fishburne was fantastic, but some of the lines they had to deliver (and their co-stars) went beyond cheesy, past camp, and well into the other side.

But the ani-Matrix shows much promise. The deeper ideas are more in evidence, and the visual style is even cooler than the original movie's. Though it resembles in no small way the film Metropolis, itself no paragon of originality. Not to say it's a bad movie, in fact it's quite good. Don't say that to an anime fan, though, as they seem to find it lacking somehow and will look at you the same way opera fans view "Jackass" watchers. Derision doesn't start to describe it.

So I'm working on my website at the same time, and it too is showing some promise. The whole XHTML/CSS layout process is mildly arduous to adapt from my old, convoluted style of HTML, but ultimately I think it'll be worth it.

Check this out: last year 700 people wrote 50,000 word novels. Nothing remarkable about that, per se, other than the fact that they did it all, start to finish, in the month of November. You see, it was 'National Novel Writing Month', and as members of the Na No Wri Mo challenge, they ultimately emerged exhausted but victorious. I found the link surfing through old college acquaintances (read one's novel at his site), and I have decided to do it this year. Of course, now I just have to put off thinking about novel writing until around October.

... that John Malkovich has never seen Con Air? He says he's not among his greatest fans. Not to say he's averse to seeing his own work, but he much prefers to be doing it, not watching it.

I'd agree with him, except that I seem to enjoy reading what I've read here on this site, and especially old school papers I wrote. They're hilarious.

Oddly enough, I had two experiences today that made me happy. First, I got to be a major part of rejecting a production run of a badly-made garment at work. You see, until my ship comes in and I have a computer engineering job, I'm working for a large multinational fashion and beauty empire, doing various menial jobs. Lately, in between days cutting boxes open, I've been working in somewhat of an inspector role. And the jean I was looking at today had a lot of issues. It was stitched badly, looked ugly, and (my own turn of phrase) the belt loops were throwing up. That is to say the inside belt loop was longer than the outside. Which is like putting a Large Fries container inside one from a Happy Meal (thankfully, I've never worked for the big M). In other words, it's crap.

The other thing that made me smile was an interview on NPR. Not the content of the interview, but the fact that I could still recognize what both sides were saying between the lines. Being able to decode that meant that despite my recent NPR-listening, I have yet to become a mindless liberal radio devotee. Or whatever NPR's sinister plot for hapless listeners could be. And not to say that NPR's evil—it's not. I had just begun to suspect that my brain was turning to mush.

These suspicions started long before I got the PS2. Really.