That fat, old clown is fuckin’ right, yo.

Stranger than fiction, dude. Just read the latest Penny Arcade comic, and then, via this, saw this: Israel calls off raid after soldier’s Facebook post. Wonder if the Israeli military will de-friend him?

How about some nerd gossip? Penny Arcade are in the midst of a book tour, and they appeared on Jordan Jesse Go, the lesser known podcast of the folks behind The Sound of Young America. Things do not go well, and Tycho posts this scather. I love love love Penny Arcade, and I’ve never gotten into any of the Jesse Thorn stuff; however, as a fan of You Look Nice Today, I know those guys are pals with Mr. Thorn and he’s unlikely to be as horrible as PA makes it out. You can read his own description here, and read the follow-up post from a commenter who mentions PA’s well-known anxiety problems. Who knows though. They haven’t posted the podcast evidence yet.

UPDATE, April 8 Gabe mentions they have posted the podcast here, but the link is nothing (right now?). However, the internets have come to the rescue. I haven’t brought myself to listen to it yet…

You can watch our 12 Days of SPACE-mas spot featuring Star Wars characters here. It got mentioned on starwars.com, which is dopeness! I have a ton of great pictures from the set – I’ll try and post them soon.

I’m a little late posting this as I put it up on the SPACE site last week but anyway:

We did a couple Space promos about zombies. The post on spacecast contains some behind-the-scenes pics and commentary, plus the videos.

For the viewer’s convenience the spots are embedded here:

Vimeo link

Vimeo link

A brief note: this was a very low-budget shoot by our standards, so we shot it on my GH1. I’ll post more GH1 details later, as I’ve now had a fair bit of time with the camera and it’s worth reporting back in about that.

Saw Bruno on the weekend. It’s got some hilarious parts, but it seems almost like a collection of skits that would be better enjoyed on YouTube.

It’s almost all embarassement humour in the same mold as Borat. Part of the time Bruno is successfully provoking and lampooning hetero gay panic. But often he is doing this by playing into straight stereotypes of gays. I think my favourite scenes were at the beginning, when the victim of the meatspace trolling was the fashion industry, and not so much later in the movie, when the victims are southern US men. In general Bruno felt a lot staler a character than Borat – we’ve all seen hilarious gay stereotypes in our entertainments before, and we don’t need Bruno to point out that yes, wrestling is pretty gay.

Video, from Hardcore Nerdity.

He can speak Elvish – in Klingon.
(via the King of Canadian sci-fi Mark Askwith)

No.

(via)

Dear Robot Readers,

I could use your help with something. I have a film in this year’s Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge. (I admit it, I’m a huge nerd.) It’s called “Bad Day For Vader”, and I’d love it if you voted for it. It’s only a minute long so that part ain’t hard, but you may have to register on atom first – not sure. You should be done in a couple minutes regardless.

Those of you with weblogs, newspapers, megaphones and/or skywriting businesses, I’d also appreciate your help spreading the word.

Voting stops at noon on friday, so if you could, make haste!

Here’s the link

Thanks and I owe you one.

Vindicated! I was actually having my doubts as to the authenticity of this film (see previous post), after I seemed like the one naive idiot who didn’t think some arch ironist like Gondry or Jonze was ingeniously behind it. However, here’s a review at twitch. “The film is not a put-on. After Last Season is, however, so genuinely and startlingly bad that a movie cult will undoubtedly form around it.”

Other highlights:

• “Unbelievably, the film’s trailer, including the editing, is representative of the entire movie.”
• “Impromptu props made of cardboard and other discarded material are everywhere.”
• “In fact, the performances seem disconnected from the overall narrative as if they were occurring in a black box.”
• “Some scenes are perceptibly out-of-focus. There is a pervasive, muffled background noise. Scenes come and go with no continuity or explanation. Conversations often cutaway to shots of furniture and other items for no reason.”
• “A large part of the movie consists of the previously mentioned computer graphics, which are brutally crude. Although these graphics fit into the story, [the] film leans heavily on them to pad out the 93 minute running time. Thus, the parade of colored circles, spheres, birds, and fish tends to goes on and on as if the film went on pause and a screen saver kicked in.”

Joy!

I’m really thrilled by After Last Season. The trailer is something else:

It’s tempting to believe it’s an exquisitely constructed hoax, isn’t it? After reading this MetaFilter thread, though – especially this and this – you’ll be convinced it’s real. Real, and more awesome than a sack of robot pegasi. Just for font nerds alone it’s a comedy explosion. If you like fonts, unrelated clips of mundane dialogue and overlit white rooms, you’re in for a nirvanic thrill ride.

Anyway, it’s opening “regular-wide” tomorrow, so if you live in Lancaster, CA, North Aurora, IL, Rochester, NY or Austin, TX, please go see this. I hear they have printers in the basement you can use. (via the Space blog)

SHE: Oh Shit, Dog shit
Suck my dick, bitch

HE: No, its:
Raw shit, aw shit
Slapped in the face with dog shit
I see some haters
Get on the ground and shine my balls, bitch
No, that’s the second half. The first is… What is it?

IPOD: Raw shit, raw kicks
Get in the way, might get your jaw split
Aw shit, I see some haters
Don’t step to me until you get some balls, bitch
Raw shit, raw spit
Get smacked in the face with dog shit
Aw shit, I see some bitches
Get on the floor and shine my balls, bitch

HE: Pretty hard to remember.

Klingon Night School

Do yourself a favour and check out my friend Gord’s masterful Klingon Night School spot. And give him a vote in the showdown – I hope you’ll agree he deserves it.

Full disclosure: I may or may not be a klingon in the above video.

And he can ROAR.

Ah, Mr. Show. (via)

Knockoff brands always make me laugh, whether it’s Sorny or Toasted Oat Os. So I wound up thinking about The Asylum today, the studio that produces ‘mockbusters’ (which I’ve mentioned here before), and I checked in to catch up on their recent output. Highlights:

• The Day the Earth Stopped
• Sunday School Musical
• Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls
• 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea
• The Terminators
• and the confusing Transmorphers 2 in 3D.

What, no Dank Knight starring Heath Leggings and Bristian Cale? Missed revenue opportunity, fellas.

Without all that rap, courtesy Mr. Show.

THIS is the best TV I’ve ever seen.

This is so weird:

Why can’t the whole campaign be a comedy-off?

I hesitate to make fun of this but make of it what you will: a Brazilian priest, hoping to ‘promote religion’, break a world record and raise money for truck drivers, strapped himself onto a chair tied to 1,000 party balloons for what was to be a 20-hour flight to a nearby town.

This was in April. His body was recently recovered 100km out to sea.

Stories like this always capture my imagination. Like the homemade rocket car driver who wound up fused into a sheer rock wall, they are tragicomic Icarus tales, stories of those brave enough to try something foolishly beautiful. Let’s remember the Kubrick quote about Icarus:

I have never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.’

There’s also this video.

The Star Wars Fan Film contest is in full swing and I would like to direct your attention towards this excellent submission:

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via waxy, somewhat indirectly, the webcomic Pictures for Sad Children, which starts here. The author describes it as, “there is a place between ‘funny’ and ‘sad’. A hidden world. This is where I live.” (He’s also got this livejournal page.)

I’m not the most knowledgeable dude when it comes to webcomics, so perhaps all of y’all have already been reading this. But hell, it’s good.

This was going around a couple of weeks ago, and that’s where I saw it, and I tried to get it out of my brain. But it’s been completely, absolutely, irreversibly burned in. Father and son:

Now, I haven’t even dealt with the son. It will probably take a couple years for my mind to process that. I’m stuck on GIT-R-DUN. I mean, the wisdom of any forehead tattoo is beyond questionable, but GIT-R-DUN? Is that supposed to impress prospective employers?

Oh yeah – if you haven’t read the article yet, guess what’s tattooed on the back of ol’ Floyd’s head?

GOT-R-DID.

TSG actually has an excellent archive of facial tattoos, and I can’t go out without mentioning this: fuck you eyebrows.

Self explanatory, really. By Evan Shaner.

We’ve been talking about JRPGs a lot lately, so this seems topical: a review of Barkley: Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. Story summary:

Protagonist (and former NBA star) Charles Barkley is a haunted, troubled man with a dark past, but a noble heart. He lives in the future dystopia of Neo New York – a fearsome place where basketball has been abolished and most of his friends slain – trying, as best he can, to make a life for himself and his son Hoopz… but first he must dodge the authoritarian intentions of Michael Jordan, who believes Barkley to be responsible for the civilisation-wrecking Chaos Dunk.

Here’s a trailer.

Lore Sjöberg of Brunching Shuttlecocks fame is doing videos for wired now, and you can watch the first one. If you like shark astronauts, this one’s for you.

Also entertaining is reading the comments and seeing how the internet is unable to imagine humourous videos about games as anything other than Zero Punctuation. My favourite:

I’m also agreeing with other commenters that Zero Punctuation is a very obvious influence, which is fine in my book.

In light of that, really appreciate the homage. Looking forward to future instalments, keep it up! However, please trim down the script a bit and speed up the delivery by about 400%.

On the robot tip, I just gotta share this:

In The Know: Are We Giving The Robots That Run Our Society Too Much Power?

Let me branch out here from videogames to nerd culture in general. First off, the Crate Digger Deathmatch is on, and you can vote on the singles here. Full disclosure: I’m a participant, under the name Snake Eyes. If you like both country and hiphop – which you probably don’t, what are the odds – you just might like my track. But check out all the tracks, and the full albums where available (some of them are linked from that voting page there).

Also, I thought this was pretty good: Paddy K reconsiders the Death Star as rebel atrocity. It’s sort of derivative of the scene in Clerks, but it’s still funny.

And oh yeah: wrock, wizard rock! (I’m totally stealing links from Hipster, Please here)

Wow, get a load of this AV Club review: “blunt, dumb, ridiculous, and almost never funny.” We totally didn’t play the same game. Sure, it could be a whole lot better; its shoddy camera nearly wrecked the thing for me. And I’ll admit that the first few levels are probably the weakest. That Lard Lad level is a little too early in the game, and a little too close to the intersection of hard and tedious. But later levels more than make up for it. The Overlord-style controls for Marge (who uses a megaphone to recruit angry mob members) were a great change-up, and who can argue with the boss fights towards the end: Matt Groening, Shakespeare, and God?

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