The Oscars are over, and I didn't win this time. Here are the results:

Congratulations to Mr. P for the win.

I'm going to get a little obscene here because this post deserves it...nay...demands it! Kim and I saw Cursed on Saturday night and it FUCKING SUCKS!! I still cannot believe how terrible it was. You'd think that with Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson, there would be something there. But there isn't, it is absolutely the worst movie I've seen in 10 years. Everything about it is incredibly awful. I would like to think that the script was not that awful when it got greenlit. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "It must be so bad that it's great." Some movies achieve that. They are so bad that their terrible-ness contains an inheritant amount of quality that is worth seeing. However, some movies can go even further until they are so bad that they fucking suck! Cursed is one of these movies. Avoid it.

posted by Travis at 8:57 PM

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Thursday, February 24, 2005

I know what you're all worried about, so here it is, and just in time.

The Official Guy in a Suit Oscar Pool

1. Go here
2. Login
3. Choose nickname
4. Create or Join a Group
5. Search for "GiaS Oscar Pool"
6. Click "GiaS Oscar Pool"
7. Enter password "lucasrocks"
8. Click your own nickname
9. Click "Click here to edit your predictions"

I know you're thinking, "Why should I even bother entering? Travis always wins and is absolutely unstoppable." That may be true, but you should enter anway because if no one else enters, I'll have no one I know to defeat. Just put The Aviator or Million Dollar Baby down for everything and you're bound to get some right.

posted by Travis at 4:02 PM

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Monday, February 21, 2005

This is good, you'll all love this. It's 3:05 am Monday morning, and the ceiling in my bedroom is disintegrating. You see, it's raining again in LA. Our leak problems have been getting worse and worse, but still managable. Well, no longer. Kim came upstairs to tell me that water was pouring out of our ceiling onto our bed. When I investigated, I saw that a large seam had appeared in the drywall in our ceiling and the drywall itself was almost completely liquified. I pushed a hole in the ceiling to let the water out and a column of water poured out onto our bed and the floor.

I'm declaring my bedroom a total loss. I'm moving out of it tomorrow. This is the kind of thing that makes my head hurt.

posted by Travis at 3:04 AM

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Wednesday, February 16, 2005

I often post my opinions on movies, games, books, and the like here. Sometimes my opinion is not favorable, or even downright negative. During these times, I am sometimes faced with a retort by defenders of whatever product I didn't like that goes something like this, "Well, how many *ENTERTAINMENT_PRODUCT*s have you made?"

For example:

ME: Man, I watched Mask last night, and that movie is complete shit.
DEFENDER: What do you mean? I thought it was good.
ME: No, it sucks.
DEFENDER: Well, how many movies have you made?

As if only Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick can decide for everyone else what movies are bad. Why stop there? Why not have only people who make movies decide what is good also. So the conversation could go like this:

DEFENDER: Man, I watched Mask last night, and that movie is terrific.
ME: No, it sucks.
DEFENDER: I thought it was good.
ME: Well, how many movies have you made?

Why stop with movies?

DEFENDER: President Bush sucks.
ME: Oh yeah? How many most-powerful-countries-in-the-world have you been president of?

DEFENDER: This chicken sucks.
ME: Oh yeah? How many farm animals have you killed and prepared for eating?

And so on, and so on. This argument has no merit AT ALL. I do not have to make movies to judge their quality, I only have to see a lot of them, and then I can still be wrong..., I suppose. So, do not stoop to this depth when you have no more Valid Argument Arrows in your Quiver of Conversation. Just accept defeat. That movie sucks, and you are incorrect.

posted by Travis at 11:45 AM

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Saturday, February 12, 2005

We watched The Manchurian Candidate last night; the new one, not the original. I'm an enormous fan of the original, but I think the new one is quite good, too. I think in trying to make the ending original, they made it not as good, but it is still a good ending. Kim thought it was extraordinarily boring, but she doesn't care much for the original either.

If you're looking for a new computer, feel free to bid on my old one.

posted by Travis at 4:44 PM

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I've tired of EZ Board's forum, so I've installed phpbb on here and put up a new GiaS Forum. Now's your chance to get in on the ground floor of some of the most intelligent conversation you'll see anywhere on the internet. You can lurk all you want, but if you want to post you'll have to register, and then I'll manually approve it before you can post anything. So check out the forum, but strap on a helmet first.

posted by Travis at 10:32 AM

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Tuesday, February 08, 2005

I recently discovered that my co-worker Chris has never played Risk. So, I blew the dust off the old box and brought it in to work to entice some people into attempting a lunch game. If you've played Risk before, you know well that you cannot finish a game in 45 minutes. As a matter of fact, you can barely start one because of the time it takes to explain the rules to a newb, deploy armies, and talk trash. But all the same, Mike, Yoshi, Chris, and I have each embarked on a campaign to conquer the world; campaigns that we'll wage for a few hours each week. I'll announce the winner when we're done. I've pinned down Australia and the territories in southern and eastern Asia, Chris has control of North America, Mike has Africa, and Yoshi has some of Europe and Asia. We are playing an updated version of the original Risk. The rules are the same, but the pieces are men, horses, and canons instead of just roman numerals. There are some new fangled versions out there like Risk 2210 A.D., Lord of the Rings: Risk, and a European Star Wars Risk: Clone Wars Edition.

I finished Watchmen last week. I liked it and I see why it's so influential, but at the same time, I think the ending could have been set up a little more. It kind of comes out of no where. There is still talk about doing a movie from it, which would be interesting since movies usually twist comic book stories to match a cinematic formula. Since this is a self-contained story and not 50 years of character lore, I think they are limited to how much they can change before it no longer resembles Watchmen. My question is, who should play Rorshach?

posted by Travis at 8:07 PM

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Saturday, February 05, 2005

BEGIN TURBO-NERD SEQUENCE.........

As readers of this site know, I'm back into comics. I'm what the comic store elitists would call a "fanboy". I buy the new Marvel and DC stuff with the big name characters that have movies and scoff at the indie black & white crap. Recently, I decided to buy "out of the box" because a writer/artist team I like was doing a new book. Michael Turner (artist) and Jeph Loeb (writer) are on issue #3 of Soulfire from Aspen Comics. I bought it and picked up 0 and 1 from ebay. So far, it's good stuff. It seems like it is going to be kind of like Shadowrun without all the Blade Runner cyberpunk. It's in the future, there's magic, and there's dragons. That sort of thing. Anyway, what I like about Michael Turner's art is that he uses big splash pages. A splash page would be a picture that takes up the whole page in a comic book. Most comic book pages are broken into panels, but the big moments are reserved for splash pages. Michael Turner does them really well, and usually they span 2 pages. Michael Turner and Jeph Loeb also did a run of Superman/Batman that was really good. Each issue was a Hollywood summer blockbuster, like if Bruckheimer did comic books, but in a good way.

I guess what I'm saying is that Michael Turner can draw well and I like it. I've linked some ultra hi-res examples below.

posted by Travis at 2:33 PM

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Wednesday, February 02, 2005

A demo for the PC version of Star Wars Republic Commando came out a few days ago, so I loaded it up and drove it around. The idea is that you command an elite clone squad during The Clone Wars that take place between Episode II and Episode III. It looks to be kind of a dumbed-down version of Ghost Recon in the Star Wars universe, which isn't a bad thing at all. Actually, the game looks very cool. The controls were a little floaty, but I'm hoping they will be locked down to PC FPS standards before release. As long as the mission and level design is good, this could be a really cool game. The demo does not contain a multiplayer component, but the game will. I used to play a lot of multiplayer Rogue Spear, so this could be a more forgiving Star Wars version of that. Hopefully they'll release another demo for multiplayer before it releases. Click the pic for a hi-res screenshot I took.

posted by Travis at 7:07 PM

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If you have no interest in World of Warcraft whatsoever, you can stop reading this post. If not, please continue...

I hit a landmark tonight in WoW. I hit level 40 and, due to some financial planning (in game), I was able to squirrel away enough money to buy a mount; more specifically a night sabre. It is no small feat to save up 100g, and it does come with some sacrifice. You can't get all new gear every few levels. You can't get all the new skills every even level. And you have to take some extra steps to make money in addition to what you get for questing and selling normal loot from kills. Being a warrior, I am one of the slowest running classes in game. So getting from place to place can be a chore. Well...no longer. As my friend Anthony would say, "Peep the new ride."

posted by Travis at 1:32 AM

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