Return

Well, it’s been nearly two long weeks since the last blog update, and strongly worded messages have been pestering me to produce something. The list of good things is going to come eventually, but for now something that happened last night has inspired this rant. The rant will then descend into random observations on various things I'm reminded of while I wander through the universe.

I recently downloaded Full Tilt Poker to play Texas Hold’em online. Last night I entered a 2,700 person tournament for free, and the top 27 finishers would earn real money from the competition. By 11pm last night I was down to the last 220 people in the tournament, and I was about 150^th at the time we enter the story. I’m doing pretty well – we started with 1,500 chips and I’ve got around 10,000 at this point.
I’m first to act after the blinds and I’m dealt pocket tens. Anyone who knows poker will know that while a pocket pair can hit it big if another of that card (in this case another 10) comes out on the flop, so many people with higher cards could instantly destroy my pair. I raise pre-flop, and only one person calls.
The flop:

I make a small raise into him with my set of tens, currently the best possible hand available. He makes a massive re-raise, and I go all-in over that. He calls my all-in raise and shows his cards. He had pocket fives.
So we each have three of a kind, and I’m going to double up on this hand and go much higher in the tournament. At this point there is only one card that can come out which would make me lose, and there is under a 0.002% chance of my opponent getting the four of a kind needed to beat my tens. Take a wild, crazy guess what the next card was!

BLAM! I make a full house but he makes four of a kind, and I am knocked out of the 2,700 person tournament in a meagre 218^th place to a hand that there was no way I should have lost. As such, I don’t even come close to the £7.50 first prize. Bastards! Ah, screw you kmanTC, I hope you rot. I think he should have donated all his money to me out of kindness when he won a hand he really shouldn’t have. What a type 7 .

I just felt a link to the Bristol Stool Scale was needed here. Speaking of Bristol, it really is the worst city on the planet. I had the misfortune of living nearby for many years and the definition of "classy" appeared to be the white trash who hung around the mall all bloody day. The city is incredibly cheap and appears to be made out of little more than cardboard at times - there are simply no redeeming factors.

What makes this even more surprising is that Bristol is the second richest city in all of England but yet has the worst education in the entire country. I'm honestly not surprised - while going to school nearby an impressive record was someone who could work out a three-letter acroynm. It seems appropriate that a chart for measuring types of shit is named after what is possibly the worst city on the earth.

Anyway, there's an incredible line up of awesomeness for the return of the blog - tomorrow will be another Jabberwacky log where I prove the world's best AI has an IQ lower than 50. We might also be moving to a swanky new site with all the bells and whistles that go with such a monumentous occassion, so stay tuned.

Shitometer

The next two blog entries (including this one) are going to be a 100 to -100 scale of things that rock and things that suck. Thusly, here is the shitty half. Enjoy! Comments appreciated as always since there are bound to be omissions...

Battle

In the words of the main character in A Clockwork Orange, I don't mind "a bit of the old ultra-violence" here and there. I have Sin City and both the Kill Bills on DVD, so the film of Battle Royale seemed a sensible idea. I first watched it on Youtube, then downloaded a nicer Bittorrent version, and now I intend to buy the £18 super DVD mega-box-set-tron. The film has been described as a modern-day Lord of the Flies, but I disagree - Battle Royale isn't shite.

Battle Royale is set in Japan in the near future and probably a slightly different universe from our own. Unemployment has reached record levels and nearly a million students are boycotting school. Fearing the youth, the government pass the Educational Reform Act V, otherwise known as the BR act, or Battle Royale. In order to scare young people back into obedience, a randomly chosen class (selected by "impartial lottery" as their teacher explains") will be sent to an island each year, armed, and set free to kill each other. If the 40-odd students haven't wittled each other down to just one survivor by then, a necklace they are wearing will explode and kill them anyway.

Now, I realise this is a lot more relevant to people of my age, being forced to kill off your classmates and what not, but it's still a great film regardless of age. Some people decide to play the game and maybe settle previous scores while others commit suicide. A few try to find a way to either stop the game or find a way out without being killed. With 42 students at the start, and with the battle supposed to whittle them down to just 1, the kill count is high. Telling exactly how high would ruin the confusing end of the film.

Battle Royale is - funnily enough - very violent. The kids are given weapons ranging from a scythe or nunchucks to a pistol or an Uzi. Some have more creative weapons such as hand grenades or food poison, which implies you'd have to gain someone's trust before using it. But the violence is a required part of the film, rather than just showing off and being pointlessly gory as it can be in some others. The acting is generally good but I feel the translation in the subtitles is sometimes a little off. At one point, someone we thought was dead gets up and says "Yes! I survived thanks to my excellent bullet-proof vest!"
Would anyone actually say that? I suspect the original was more like - "Phew, glad I was wearing a bullet-proof vest" or something similar.

The film has three main "villains" - two of the students who decide to go nuts and butcher everyone, and their teacher who is following the progress of the game. These two students kill off half of the class by themselves in various creative and gory ways. As apparently often happens in Japanese films (as opposed to Hollywood) is that the ending isn't totally explained - you have to guess the explanation to one or two bits, though it helps if you've read the book. Which I am currently doing.
There is more to the film than perhaps first meets the eye. There is lots of very black humour and comments on various things, ranging from how adults see themselves to what people are capable of when "let loose" as it were. While at first we hate their teacher, later on things get more complicated and we realise maybe he isn't quite as evil as we first thought.
This film has shot into my Top 10 films with ease, and so I say this - WATCH IT. Now.
Just as with Borat, I refuse to give any film 10/10. So 9/10 is effectively the highest rating anything is going to get...

Nightrider

So, Alex Rider. The teenage super-spy who does impossibly nonsense like zooming down the side of an impossible skislope on an ironing board. But was that as absurd as tightrope walking - wholly untrained - across the roof of a burning buildng? Who could say.

Stormbreaker

Well, the series got off to a nicely xenophobic and generally minority-insulting start. A dwarven foreigner has come to England is mass producing computers filled with poison. Despite this being perfectly clear on the details of the computers, stupid headteachers are buying them up. Advice : don't buy poisoned computers, you morons! Alex Rider then changes himself to go undercover (see below) and infiltrate Sayle's factory, which also contains sharks. A quick lesson for Anthony Horowitz - sharks are not manufactured.

Nevertheless, Alex does some absurdity involving a giant inflatable colon or something and saves the day for the first - and sadly not the last - time.

Point Blanc

So, Alex Rider returns this time to go school. Oh, the excitement! Will he assassinate the dinner ladies when they feed him the wrong type of chip? Will he garrotte his maths teacher for being an incredible bore who is less interesting than a seagull? Alas no. In his latest absurdity he will battle some kind of living skeleton man accompanied by a giant hermaphrodite nazi, an unlikely pair who have nevertheless managed to clone humans.
Some people die, some people get shot, an SAS soldier no-one cares about dies, and then Alex Rider kills someone with a mechanized slow-sled thing. What does he say? "You've been sleighed."
Oh, and he also skis down a mountain on an ironing board as mentioned earlier, hits a freaking train at full speed but still survives. Horowitz is cranking up the realism index meter thing!!!!!

Skeleton Key

Ok, so which country or group shall we insult this time? I feel like a gander down "Better Dead Than Red" lane - let's have a bloated Russian who misses the good old days and may or may not look like Comrade Bloatface below.

Basically, the plot of this literary misfire involves a Russian general who wants to blow up his own country to restore it to its former glory or something while also poisoning an old school friend and drowning him under piles of voluptuous women.
He also seems to want Alex as his son, bringing in nice subtle undertones of paedophilia into the already spicy mix of crap. In addition, the Russian general has an assistant called Conrad, who in keeping with the holy-shit-this-guy-is-bizarre tradition of henchmen has a metal head. And body. Basically, he's a robot or something, and so eventually Alex uses a magnetic crane to dump him in a lake, which saves the day!!!

Eagle Strike

Ok, now this one really passed me by. Something happens involving a plane, a mercenary and six tubs of lube.

Scorpia

This time, just by TOTAL CHANCE, Alex happens upon the company of assassins who killed his father. Who would think of it? It's just like that time in Skeleton Key when he just happened to be in the perfect position to help MI6. How handy.
Anyway, this time after a brief tussle with a tiger and the latest freakish henchman - a man half black, half white - Alex joins the evil baddies who, for the second time in the Alex Rider series of pain, intend to kill English schoolchildren. What is your agenda Horowitz?
Anyway, Alex decides to have a balloon ride over London, kills people, scares a cat, blah blah, tramp gets crushed, hooray! The world is probably saved again, but then - disaster! Alex gets shot while stepping off the pavement, has a hallucination brought on by too much weed then collapses!

Arkangel

Alex Rider survives the bullet in the lamest way possible. He happened to be stepping off the curb at the second it hit him and so it missed his heart by an inch. How lucky! Even more convinient is the fact that he finds himself in the same hospital ward as another teenager who kidnappers are after. You'd think it was all planned like some awful plot device, wouldn't you?
Anyway, this kid is being kidnapped by his own dad for some reason in order to persuade the government that his dad isn't going ahead with THE MOST DUMBFUCKTACULAR plan ever.
This latest collection of words has a quite monumentally awful plot which nearly puts the last steaming pile of shit to shame. The plan of the evil father is to launch a monkey spaceship into orbit then divert its course and crash it into the Pentagon.
WHAT?!?!
Oh, and before this Alex tight-rope walks over the burning buildings as mentioned earlier for no real reason. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Alex goes into space, blinds someone using the "Bathe In Deadly Light" button on a spacestation and returns home to save the day having avoided destroying the Pentagon.

Please stop these books. Oh, and no more films. Ever.

Avast

The legends tell of a ship shrouded in mystery, a ship that very few people ever get to see. A ship that sailed the seven seas in search of pointless acts of violence while pointlessly arguing and forcing people out of the Politburo. That's right - this is the Dictator Ship!


Five of the most evil men looked out at the oceans, each thinking about thier own various campaigns. The ocean was a beautiful blue today, but the dictators didn't have time to think about that. They were musing over their own problems, their own failures, and the challenges that faced them on this ship. Napoleon was quietly wondering why he didn't have ships that didn't randomly sink during his campaigns while Stalin spouted random Russian reversals.

"Thankyou Joe," said Hitler testily, "those got boring around the same time Maddox stopped ranting about the different kind of tea-cosy or whatever was annoying him today. The internet has moved on..."
"Have you thought about the question yet?" asked Napoleon, sprinting over to Hitler at the pace of a turtle since his legs were far too short to get any kind of traction on the deck.
Hitler muttered an affirmative, doodling swastikas on his autographed copy of Mein Kampf.
"The best way to invade Russia," Napoleon reminded the fascist dictator. "We both tried it, sort of succeeded and failed because we're unfathomably stupid."
"Speak for yourself," smiled Hitler, the man who had been rejected twice from an art school.


Meanwhile, Idi Amin waddled about, faintly offended by that new film about him but primarily wondering whether he could fit any more medals on his stupid bulging chest.
"Do my boobs look big in this?" he asked Stalin. "I mean, I thought the medal for 'His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular' covered it up."
"Uganda in particular?" asked Stalin.
"A little wordy?"
The moustached mass-murderer nodded.


In the face of such obviously important men, Hitler was feeling a little inadequate. Seeing as he only had one ball, he was attempting to keep this secret from the others by putting in subtle references to having a full set whenever possible.
"Where do you think we're going?" asked Idi Amin to Hitler.
The raving lunatic considered for a moment. "We could be heading to ihavetwoballs Portugal - I hear it's nice this time of the year."
Idi Amin smiled uncertainly. "What does that sash around your chest mean?"
"This?" asked Hitler, thinking quickly. "It's a medal for...virility. Having the normal number of balls and all that, I'm at it all day."


Through-out all of this discussion, Mao Zedong had remained relatively quiet, as if unsure about one part of the situation. It was as if he had been musing carefully about one factor of this dictator-like equation they found themselves in. He didn't notice as Stalin and Napoleon ran past, playing musical chairs. He was far too deep in thought for that.
A few minutes later Mao seemed to make his mind up. Eventually coming to a conclusion, he let out a resounding cry which echoed around the deck, a noise which would haunt the others for decades to come.

Kill

A Film Review.

Kill Bill Vol 1 & Kill Bill Vol 2

Very few things - be they computer game, film or TV series - live up to the hype generated. Upon the release of Kill Bill, the hype reached some kind of incredible hype peak. If ordinary advertising is like being casually shown a reference, the Kill Bill obsession was like having an automated pamphlet hurler throwing them in your face every few seconds while being pecked in the head by a bald eagle.


Nevertheless, I thought these films would be good to see, and after an epic quest it culminated in me getting the DVD sets for my birthday. Naturally only a week after they're being shown on TV, but that's to be expected. Even if I got a pirate DVD of Casino Royale it would still be shown the next bloody week. This happens all the time and really annoys me.


To cut a long story short, the Kill Bill films are pretty decent, but not worthy of the hype or the fandom they generate, even if Chiaki Kuriyama (from Battle Royale, another upcoming review) is very cool as the psycho schoolgirl who wields something similar to a Manriki.
I assume everyone knows the basic plot - Uma Thurman was an assassin, she was betrayed, she wants revenge and has 5 people on a death list. The script is generally good, the action is generally great, but it lacks something.
For a start, the finale of the first volume is very dull. After a great fight against a vast array of bodyguards, including the now famous Gogo Yubari, the fight with the actual target is quick, boring, and a total letdown. Also, the sequence before this is partially in black and white.

Note to Quentin Tarantino : Putting a sequence in black and white does not instantly make it more arthouse.

The films are also fairly disgusting. From someone being scalped (resulting in a nice brain shot) to someone having the blood sucked out of them by a midge in main camera focus (not very nice) to someone's eyeball being trampled underfoot, the films are not for the faint of heart. Vol 1 has more action while Vol 2 has more speech, and as Tarantino seems to like doing the scenes aren't in the right order, though this isn't much of a problem.
The biggest problem with the films is that you simply don't care enough, and the action scenes don't grab you as much as they do in other films. While generally extremely well choreographed, I found the scenes where she fought only a single enemy sometimes better than scenes with masses of incompetent fools.


On other points, the camerawork is good, but music was used way too much. It struck me as rather lazy directing with the 30th sequence of people walking from Point A to Point B while a racy soundtrack played. This got tedious quickly. Finally, I knew Tarantino was a fan of Battle Royale, but I was disappointed to see that he copied it in a few other ways, mainly having someone bleed out of their eyes.

In conclusion, the films were good but could've been better. They lacked something which really makes you interested in the plot, and while some bits really got you into it, other bits left me comparitively cold.