Radical Hive

We’ve got Oceans’ Eleven on the 7th, Vanilla Sky on the 14th, Spy Game (by Tony Scott) is in theatres now. Made (which I missed in theatres) is out on DVD right now, The Coen’s new movie, The Man Who Wasn’t There, is in wider release, and the biggie…Lord of the Rings coming on December 19th. Never mind that Ali starts on Christmas, or that there’s about a dozen movies between now and February that look great.Not Another Teen Movie looks hilarious, The Royal Tennenbaums looks great, The Majestic could earn Jim Carrey his Oscar, A Beautiful Mind will be an Oscar Contender, and Black Hawk Down is Ridley Scott’s latest movie. How can any one of those films be bad (well except for Not Another Teen Movie).

In the world of Comics we’ve got The Dark Knight Strikes Again coming out this Friday…and if no other comic came out this year, I think I’d be happy.

But we’ve also got SSX Tricky out for the PS2, as well as Legends of Wrestling, and the new James Bond game…not to mention Metal Gear Solid 2 (which is one of the best games I’ve ever played…better even than Half Life).

And that says nothing for the fact that the best CD’s of the year always come out at Christmas!

In totally ME news, my first TSNMAX MagEzine article on Todd McFarlane’s toy success “Canadian spawns sports toys” was published to TSNMAX today. It got some good reviews in the huzzouse, and Reed did a terrific job of editing the story and making it tighter than it originally was. He put a lot of work into it for sure. Still, I’m pretty proud of that bad boy. It’s a good read, especially if you’re interested in Action Figures like I am.

I’ve become quite addicted to Morpheus. It all started innocently enough. I wanted to see what was out there, and everyone told me that Morpheus was way better than Bearshare. With Bearshare, you had to download a new version practically every time you connected. Not so with Morpheus. It’s way faster too since you’re downloading snippets of files from various people, and the program then stiches them together. I’ve downloaded a ton of TV lately, and some cool video clips. Now I know that these things are supposed to be used to get MP3’s and porn…but I’d really rather check out the new episode of Justice League, or that really cool Batman Beyond that I missed. What can I say? I’m old and married. I’m all porned out!

Which brings me back to my topic, Why was it all better when we were kids? No, not porn sicko…I’m talking about cartoons. I downloaded and watched the new Justice League cartoon, and a couple of last season’s Batman Beyond’s which had the JLU in them. Both were really impressive, and made me nostalgic for the days of the SuperFriends. So as I was looking for this weeks episode of JL, I happened across a couple of old episodes of JLA, they said they were ancient, but I think they were from the mid 80’s, when Perez was writing the book, and Batman had his own cartoon (because Bats isn’t in the title credits). They sucked. The animation was bad, aided only by strobe flashes which just gave me a headache. The voices were horrible (I swear Casey Kasem must have been on every single bad cartoon in the 80’s, and could probably die on the fat royalty cheques he’s getting from Comedy, Cartoon, and Sci Fi networks in the States right now).

After watching this drek, I had to find some quality Warner Brothers stuff to clean my palate (sort of like sucking on pickled ginger after sushi). Now this is great stuff…and my kids will probably never get to see it. Y’see ole Bugs and pals weren’t exactly what the kids these days call “Pollitically correct”, mind you this was almost 50 years ago…but DAMN some of this stuff is nasty. Funny, but nasty. It’s funny though, I remember seeing these cartoons as a kid…I think I turned out pretty well. So why can’t some of them get shown today? Tweety never did anything wrong…just used a little dynamite. Oh, like that’s a bad thing? Listen, if my kid is gonna be eaten by some cat, he damn well BETTER be using dynamite on him. That’s not overly violent. That’s just common sense. That stupid Coyote got everything he ever deserved. Those cartoons showed us two things. 1: Acme makes really cool stuff. and 2: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. That’s right, so far cartoons have taught us basic Darwinism (survival of the fittest), and Newton’s third law of physics! And that’s just using two cartoons. Speedy taught us that if you were diligent and a hard worker…your friends would use you. Sure the cartoons were rife with stereotypes, but when they’re done as parables, shouldn’t that make them okay? I mean were the Speedy Gonzoles cartoons really telling us that all Mexicans were lazy? Or were they telling us that the Mexicans we were seeing in this instance were lazy. Speedy wasn’t lazy was he? Hopped up on speed and lord knows what else maybe, but lazy? No way!

Just take a look at what the two or three generations of kids who grew up on unadulterated Warner Brothers cartoons grew up to do, and then take a look at what this latest generation has accomplished…and tell them to pull their damn pants up while you’re at it.

Ironically, it’s the two or three generations before this one who has decided it would be better for them if the old cartoons weren’t seen anymore.

Go get them on Morpheus or Bearshare, before they take them away from us the same way they took Napster away.

Album Du Jour: Buffy the Musical (the songs are stuck in my head!!!)

DVD of the week: The Matrix Revisited

Movie of the week: This was a movie free week for me…sad isn’t it?

Game of the week: Metal Gear Solid 2 is the reason it’s a movie free week this week.

Website of the week: I’ve been using Morpheus a lot lately, so it gets the nod for this week.

Comic of the Week: Powers started a new storyline this week, and as usual it was about as solid as a comic gets. This one had just the right amount of intrigue and enough mystery to really make you want to know what happens next. The Powers stuff reads so well as a TPB, but it really is best as a monthly comic…you always want the next issue to come out now!

Okay, I admit that I may have been a bad boy and downloaded the unauthorized Pocket PC 2002 upgrade…but it’s Compaq’s own fault! They announced that iPAQ’s would be the only Pocket PC’s which would be flashable to the new OS way back in August. They announced they’d have a version of Pocket PC ready for purchase by September. September came and went, as did October…and now we’re hearing early December.

So when I saw a copy of PocketPC 2002 available on a certain file sharing service…I jumped at it. How should I know that it was screwy?

That really sucks.

I’m listening to a bunch of songs from the Buffy Musical episode, “Once more…with feeling”, and I’ve gotta say, the songs are actually pretty good even without the show. The best song is (of course) Spike’s “Let me rest in peace”, which has my favourite line “You’re scared, ashamed of what you feel, you can’t tell the ones you love, know they couldn’t deal. Whisper in a dead man’s ear that doesn’t make it real.”.

Album Du Jour: Big Shiny Tunes 5

DVD of the week: It’s been a Star Wars Episode 1 week checking out the DVD ROM features.

Movie of the week: Harry Potter and the Philosipher’s Stone

Game of the week: I got into NBA Street the other night for about two hours.

Website of the week: The Star Wars trailer is on Starwars.com right now.

Comic of the Week: Amazing Spider-Man #36. Wow. I don’t know what else to say. What a great response to the events of 9-11, and so far the most moving one. It was really impressive.

Barry’s World CounterStrike Guide

I have to re-install Counterstrike soon!

Strange, I swear I saw SSX Tricky somewhere for $65.00…but the cheapest I’ve found it is $75.00. That sucks. I want it, but I don’t wanna pay so much for it!

Life is pretty much back to normal. We spent last weekend painting our new bedroom (getting rid of the stupid ivy that was painted onto the walls), and generally straightening stuff up. On Monday night I went out and picked us up a new TV and Stereo, which I set up on Tuesday, and which still needs to be tweaked. Wednesday was comic night of course, and we went for a nice little walk, and last night Char and I saw a play called Picasso at the Lapin Agile which was written by Steve Martin. It was awesome. Tonight we’re going to stay in, and play with our new AV setup, and this weekend we’ll spend some more time organizing.

With a return to normal life, there’s a return to the weekly “list”.

Album Du Jour: The Tea Party

DVD of the week: Shrek, a great DVD with an entire disc of extras.

Movie of the week: Monsters Inc. It was an all animated week this week!

Game of the week: I’ve been playing with Windows XP, but not much in the way of games.

Website of the week: The Wayback Machine

Every week I put up my “Weekly favourite comic book”, and as anyone who knows me will attest, I am something of a comic book freak. My office has several pages of original comic book art, I have a bunch of comic book related action figures lying around, a Bat-Mite stuffed toy on a shelf, two Sandman bookends on another shelf, and a Dark Knight Returns statue on yet another shelf. On top of that, I have about 20 comic long boxes in the alcove of our bedroom right now, which I would like to pare down to about 10 before the end of next year. My collection grows at a rate of about one box a year at this point, and it’s due to my weekly habit. Every Wednesday, like clockwork, I go pick up my weekly comic book fix.

This list is the latest version of my monthly comic pull list (The list which the comic book guy uses to put aside my comics every Wednesday).

Regular Comics;

DC/Wildstorm

The Authority

Batman

Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again

The Establishment

The Flash

Green Arrow

Green Lantern

JLA

JSA

The Legion

The Monarchy

Nightwing

Planetary

The Titans

Wonder Woman

Image:

Clerks

Powers

Rising Stars

Marvel:

Exiles

New X-Men

Origin

The Ultimates

Ultimate Spider-Man

Ultimate X-Men

Uncanny X-Men

X-Force

X-Treme X-Men

Trade PaperBacks;

Captain Britain (Alan Moore/Alan Davis)

Ultimate X-Men TPB

Powers TP Vol 2: Roleplay

Ting 16 Graphics Studio Noteworthy Links

Wow, what a great set of links I’ll tell you what! Very cool indeed!

So I finally installed Windows XP last night, it’s running, and running well at that. This next few days I want to completely wipe my C: drive and re-install Windows XP on it, under NTFS rather than FAT 32. That should give me some performance boosts, and should mean that I can do whatever I want with it.

Just bought Shrek, can’t wait to check it out. We’re going to Monsters INC tonight, just to see the Star Wars trailer…that is going to be great.

Album Du Jour: Still listening to the D

DVD of the week: Star Wars Episode 1 is the best DVD I own! The supplemental material on it is great.

Movie of the week: Boys on the Side, sure it’s a chick movie, but it’s a good one.

Game of the week: Max Payne Demo.

Website of the week: Windows XP

Well, we’re moved into our new apartment, but things are still fairly chaotic. I don’t think we’ll really have a chance to get things under control for a month or more, and in the meantime we will live in one form of chaos or another for the next little while.This week is shaping up to be a busy one. Work is fairly slow with me just getting back into the swing of things, and shouldering some of my responsibilites onto the newly hired project manager (Joe Tek no less!). However, home life is busy busy busy. On top of the neverending series of unpacking, we did laundry tonight, have a Sloan concert to see tomorrow night, Charlene’s Birthday on Friday (which means I need to get her something nice for the morning), and then a halloween party on Saturday. It’s nuts I tell ya…nuts. I can’t wait until Sunday when we can just relax and maybe do some painting.

We went to IKEA to buy our new wardrobe, but to make a long story short, we paid for it, and it’s not there…grrrrr…they’re supposedly getting it in this week, but at this point it doesn’t look like it will be that easy to get it home.

The honeymoon was terrific, and we both had a great time with our ten days off. A week and three days after the wedding and I’m still a happy camper.