I think Teen Wolf is one of those movies that everyone loves at one point or another in their lives. I mean, Fox was as big a star as you could be in those days. But, admittedly, the movie is dumb. I mean, really dumb. If you want to see exactly how dumb, and laugh a lot in the process, watch the below video. I found it linked on Kent Nichols’ blog (of Ask A Ninja fame). I’ll let him explain:

Okay I’ve watched this video five times in the last 12 hours.

I’ve known about Summer of Tears since we started AskANinja.com when we saw them at Comedy Cocktail, produced by the fabulous Jay Leggett and Amber J.  I loved their stuff, and they’ve been doing solid sketch stuff for a while.

But they haven’t really broken out.

It took this video, which violates a lot of the common sense rules of making a financially successful online video: it completely infringes on copyrighted works, it had to be very expensive and time intensive to shoot, and it’s probably only a one off thing.

But.

It’s funny and it will get them noticed and appreciated way beyond the circle of fans they have now.

So, if you enjoy the below, seek them out, and buy stuff from them.

The nice thing about going a while in between posts, there’s a lot to talk about when I do finally get around to it.

First off, there were a couple more disturbed individuals who blamed their criminal behavior directly on video games. A 18/19 year-old (stories differ on his age) man in Thailand stabbed a taxi driver to death either because he could not afford to purchase GTA IV or because he was copying behavior in the game (again, the stories vary), which has led to the banning of the title in that country. Spain and Malaysia are also considering a ban in light of the crime.

It’s already been said elsewhere. Blaming the media a mentally imbalanced person consumes for their actions is alarmist bullshit. Why isn’t anyone asking if this kid’s parents were abusive? Why aren’t they held accountable? The kid played a violent video game that millions of reasonable and well-adjusted men his age have played without incident. But because this killer called out the game by name, he’s suddenly less accountable? Le sigh.

Then two arsonists in Atlanta cited GTA IV as their source for how to make molotov cocktails. And obviously, they wouldn’t have been able to firebomb cars if they hadn’t played GTA IV. Again, where the hell are the parents of these little hooligans?

On to less infurating news.

The 20th anniversary of Madden NFL was released today. I don’t really care about this franchise, since they just rehash the same game every year. Go somewhere else if you want coverage of Madden ‘09. Anywhere else, really.

The episodic adventure games based in the Homestarrunner universe debut this week. I honestly lost interest in the eponymous website a while ago, but SBEmails used to be a staple of my Mondays. The humor just isn’t as fresh these days. I’d love to see an episodic adventure game based on Zero Punctuation. Essentially you’d just go around as Yahtzee, and the puzzles would revolve around deconstructing a game for being clichéd, implementing clumsy game-mechanics and calling JRPGs stupid.

I rented and played Soul Calibur IV and Ninja Gaiden II in the past couple of weeks. I wasn’t terribly impressed with either of them. Both games are good, in their own right, but just aren’t my thing. I feel like Soul Calibur IV would require way too much of my time in order to be brilliant with any one of the characters. Ninja Gaiden II is essentially the Devil May Cry series minus all the spikey-haired heros and melodrama, which are replaced with a lot more dismemberment and gore. And tits. See Yahtzee’s review below of Ninja Gaiden II. He says it better, faster and more British than I ever could:

The Olympics are in full swing, and you know what that means! Another horrendously bad multi-platform Olympics video game tie-in that you PRAY your grandmother won’t buy you because she doesn’t know any better. I have caught Olympics fever though. It’s nice to know that no matter what time it is, no matter how many infomercials and crappy soap operas are on daytime television, somewhere, there are world class atheletes competing. And I can watch them do it.

The big video game highlight of the past two weeks has been the release of Braid. This game was completely under my radar, but is now one of the top-ten rated video games on the X360 platform on Metacritic. Which is an especially big accomplishment considering it’s a puzzle platformer released through the Live Arcade. The big controversy surrounding its release has been the $15/1200 MS Points price point. Trust me, the game is worth every penny. I played the demo, and then immediately went to GameStop to buy a MS Points Card with my store credit. It’s beautiful, it’s unique in it’s game mechanics and story line. It’s this year’s Portal. Seriously, if you love video games, even if you don’t typically enjoy this genre, you must play Braid.

That’ll wrap it up for gaming news!

Movie news right quick: Go see Wall-E if you haven’t already. It is adorableness in its most pure form. The Dark Knight is worth seeing despite mostly ho-hum ham-fisted performances, because Heath Ledger’s Joker is one of the most powerful and disturbing performances I have ever seen.

On a personal note, I have taken a job in NJ and will be moving at the end of August. Wish me luck!

Forget Food Service workers spitting in your food. Worry more about a pissed off sys admin locking out all other administrators of your city government’s network. Personally, I think it’s kinda awesome. In some strange, nerdy way, it feels like a win for the little guy. Even if win = a couple decades in PMITA prison.

Orignally found via Fark.

So, this morning I was reading over the reviews of all the cool new apps you can get for the iPhone once you’ve upgraded to the latest version of the software. This got me all excited.

“Finally,” I thought to myself. “The functionality I’ve always wanted from this beautiful piece of technology!”

It helped to ease the sting of being another screwed-over early adopter, having purchased my iPhone back in December. The Apple Store guy actually had the audacity to tell me a 3G iPhone wouldn’t be coming out any time in the next 6 months. I guess technically he didn’t lie to me. It was seven.

So, anyway, I decided I would wipe my iPhone entirely and start over because the iPod part of the device had been behaving strangely lately, e.g., deciding randomly not to play songs. So, I click restore, and walk away. When I come back, the wipe has errored out.

“That’s strange,” I thought. So, I tried again. Then I ran a repair on iTunes. Then I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes. I checked the Apple.com home page. No indication that they’re having any problems there. What the fuck is going on here? My iPhone is now wiped and ready to be restored but I can’t seem to get a connection to the iTunes store. Or, more specifically, the part of the iTunes store that handles iPhone activations.

So, I head over to the Apple support forums, and whadya know, the top thread is about a hundred posts in with people who can’t get their iPhones, new and old alike, activated.

Shit.

Look, as a consumer of MMOs in the past, I know that product launches can be shaky or even downright disastrous. Some companies totally miss the mark on how the volume of a million people trying to do the same thing all at once will impact their servers. I’ve often wondered how you could get so upset when the company who’s providing the service drops the ball.

Thing is, those are just games. Sure, you’re paying a monthly fee, and you expect to have access to that product when you want because you’re paying for it. But again, they’re just games.

My iPhone is my primary method of contact for all things, business and personal. I have no other phone. I have email and twitter, but I primarily access those, you guessed it, from my phone. So, unless I want to drag my laptop around with me, I have no means of contacting anyone until Apple fixes this.

This is extraordinarily frustrating, and the situation is only exacerbated by the fact that I need to leave town in about two hours to head to podunk Iowa. So, I have to drag my laptop along with me and hope the hotel I’m staying in has Internet service so I can MAYBE get my phone activated again at some point tonight.

My point is, Apple really dropped the ball on this one. They saw how this impacted their servers when the first iPhone was released, so they had every means and all the time in the world to prepare, and they STILL couldn’t get their shit together.

Unacceptable, Apple. I expect better from you.

I’ve always found the image of law enforcement officers riding around on Segways far more amusing than intimidating. That is, until I saw this photo over on Daily Mail Website…

I don’t care who you are, if you see a bunch of armed men on Segways, you do NOT resist. Can you imagine the kind of balance and dexterity it would take to drive those things AND accurately fire a small assault rifle? Jesus.

Seriously, State Legislatures, stop wasting my and other taxpayers’ money with futile lawsuits. The video game industry can self-regulate just like the music and movie industries. We have a ratings system. Those ratings are clearly marked on the box, and are no more or less vague than the movie ratings. There are even parental controls built into some of the latest generation consoles. What more do you want?

That was from a previous post I wrote back in November about the inanity of attempting to pass legislation regulating the sale of violent video games. Minnesota’s recent foray into this pointless pursuit was legislation that would have fined the underage purchasers of M or AO rated video games. Seriously? You want to fine a teenager a hundred bucks for attempting to buy Grand Theft Auto? That’s like an entire paycheck for most 16 year-olds, if they even have a job…

To illustrate my previous point, it looks like the taxpayers are getting stuck with check for the $65,000 dollars awarded to the games industry. Well done, Minnesota! Let’s write a guide to wasting taxpayer money!

1) Spend taxpayer dollars to cover court costs for unconstitutional legislation.

2) Spend taxpayer (and tuition) money to help construct a new football stadium for the worthless Minnesota Golden Gophers Football Team. The Golden Gophers finished DEAD LAST in 2007-2008 in the Big Ten, with an outstanding conference record of 0-8, and an overall record of 1-11. Their enitre recent history has been no less impressive. In  my opinion, the Metrodome is a perfectly good place to watch the Gophers lose. To boot, the new stadium is open air! So, not only do you get to watch the Gophers blow huge leads to nobody teams, you get to freeze your ass off while you do it!

3) Spend taxpayer money to help construct a brand new stadium for the Minnesota Twins. This despite fact that the Twins almost NEVER fill their current venu, the Metrodome.

/end rant

So, my wonderful friend Art has just alerted me to another fantastic time-sink while I’m at work. GraphJam is a website with a simple premise (publish user-submitted graphs) that yields sometimes hilarious results (see below).

more graph humor and song chart memes

Fantastic.

I mentioned Megan Meier’s tragic story a while ago. As it turns out, the mother who duped the young girl by pretending to be a boy around her age and then sent viscious messages to her on MySpace has been brought up on charges. Megan later committed suicide.

Let’s hope for great justice…

Just so you all know, I am on Twitter now. My username is pure_drivel. Look me up!

…is going to get a tramp stamp.

Seriously, I almost cried when I saw this linked on Fark. Usually, I just post little tidbits and leave some half-assed comment. But this particular find made me so sick, I just have to expound upon the subject.

I’ve spoken at great length elsewhere about the benefits of having a sexually liberated society. Men have always been allowed, per se, to be complete hornballs. It’s “natural,” even expected that men really enjoy sex, or watching other people do it. Or even just thinking about it.

Up until recently any woman who enjoyed having sex because it’s fun and feels good, was thought of as an immoral whore. Conventional wisdom was that, for women, sex was about pleasing their man and having babies.

These days its a lot easier to find women who really enjoy sex for the sake of it, though it’s still typically frowned upon for a woman to have sex with a lot of different partners and not feel guilty about it. And I’m talking about responsible (wrap it up, people!), consensual sex.

HOWEVER…

There is a problem, it seems, with all this free-flowing sexuality. Every time I go to the Mall of America (which is not very often, because I hate malls), I end up walking by a store called Libby Lu, which is apparently a place you can take your pre-teen daughter and have her dolled up like a whore! Isn’t that fantastic? This place always has kids in it, and their parents are just standing there smiling like morons!

From the Libby Lu Website:

Company Information

Our Mission

At Club Libby Lu®, our mission is to create special memories by encouraging tween girls to express their imaginations and individuality. Club Libby Lu offers products and experiences that promote a unique shopping experience that makes every girl feel special. Our staff (called Club Counselors), “Club” environment and merchandise mix provide the ultimate girl experience. Girls join the Club, where they become V.I.P.s (Very Important Princesses®) and enjoy a fun, safe and special place where they can unlock their inner princess™

Inner princess!? This is what it means to be a princess now?

It looks like a “tweener” brothel. These girls are dressed as scantily as the flesh pile that is the bar scene in Downtown Minneapolis.

My point is  the kind of things this company is doing to these girls can’t be healthy for their sexual development. Why can’t little girls be little girls? Tell me the benefit of slapping a bunch of makeup on them and dressing them up like they’re in a Brittney Spears video.

Ugh.