Well, perhaps not yet “born” yet, per se, but it’s definitely somewhere in its second trimester and we have gotten quite a clear ultrasound at this point of NETdevil’s high concept sci-fi space shooter MMOG, Jumpgate: Evolution. While the game is currently in a solid alpha-build stage, what we’ve been allowed to see thus far has been impressive and looks to be a innovative and creative addition to a pair of suffering genres, namely the Space-Simulation and MMORPG genres, to be precise. With the last great space sims being as far back as 2005’s X3: Reunion or 2007’s Spaceforce: Rogue Universe (although nothing has been able to quite top Microsoft’s 2001 opus Freelancer in this gamer’s opinion in terms of sheer playability or longevity -- Freelancer has been kept very much alive to this day by an active modding community and several privately run multiplayer servers) and space-based MMO’s being rather nonexistent with the exception of CCP’s EVE Online and the general MMO market at large being dominated by Blizzard’s powerhouse World of Warcraft, both species of games seem to need a little something to come along and breathe some new life in.

There’s no way to accurately discuss Jumpgate: Evolution (or JG:E if you don’t like typing out entire words) without mentioning it’s 2001 predecessor Jumpgate: The Reconstruction Initiative (or JG:C for Jumpgate Classic), a PC MMOG that first brought the infinite vastness of space to the massively multiplayer genre. JG:C featured several unique ideas that helped it find it’s niche upon release, the most notable being the “Newtonian” space flight physics, essentially meaning that piloting your spacecraft was alot like, as one JG:E wiki editor put it, driving on ice, accurately simulating what it might be like to steer a ship in a vacuum with no gravity. It’s a bit tough to explain, but basically don’t expect to make any 90 degree turns at high speed and it can take up to two full kilometers to go from full throttle to a complete stop. Unfortunately, JG:C was plagued by a steep difficulty curve and sub-par graphics (even for it’s 2001 release), however it’s creative approach to space flight have given it an active user base to this day despite an overall lack of traffic that led to the merging of what started as several servers into one “global” server. Now, enough about the past. I’d first heard of JG:E through a few web forums while looking for something prettier to replace Freelancer as my main “blow shit up” space sim, and upon viewing their official website at www.jumpgateevolution.com, I was forced to run to my kitchen to grab a hand towel to stop the constant flow of drool.

It’s clear that JG:E won’t suffer from it’s predecessor’s fugly graphics. Also, it’s graphically scaleable to run on systems as small as 800MHz processor and 32MB of video memory - without pixel shaders.

JG:E’s lead creative director Hermann Peterscheck has been quoted as denouncing the design decisions of games like EVE Online in which space is dark and empty (and, in EVE’s case, repetitious and actually quite boring) by saying that “space should be beautiful”, and by God, is it ever. JG:E’s high-contrast and colorful vision of space makes for intense eye-candy and serves as quite an immersive backdrop for the games action-based play system… and by action-based I mean that JG:E provides innovation by throwing away the character classes and pen-and-paper style dice rolls for hit chance and damage persistent though every successful MMO to date in favor of a “twitch based” live combat…so basically this MMO will be based more on player skill rather than how much time you have to repeatedly farm Karazhan for the leetest gear for your class. That’s right, no action bars, no skill trees, no lengthy cool downs, just frantic reticule-based shooting and real-time dogfights. Player skill is even required for tasks such as docking your vessel at a station, a procedure during which player ships must approach at the correct angle and velocity to physically pilot their ship into a station’s docking bay.

I’ll be sitting, parked and giggling as I watch newbie pilots crash into stations like these while learning to properly dock.

The flight model found in JG:E will be a reworked version of the JG:C physics described above, allowing for full vessel control including pitch, roll and yaw, with thruster control allowing for the obvious forward thrusters and afterburners as well as strafing thrust for left, right, up and down. JG:C’s Newtonian flight physics are in full effect, allowing players to slide around targets and even fly backwards, however this time there is a switchable “inertial dampener” system in place that give things a more “arcade-like” or “stickier” feel for novice pilots or pretty much anyone that needs to do some tight maneuvering, and given JG:E’s wide array of diverse locales containing hazards such as dense asteroid belts or disused ship foundries (rife with broken-down husks of massive capitol vessels), it’s this gamer’s opinion that you’ll find yourself switching them on and off pretty regularly depending on the current terrain you need to navigate. Another solid win in the control department is JG:E’s full support of analog joysticks and HOTAS (hands-on-throttle-and-stick) flight control setups, allowing for an incredibly genuine and totally immersive experience.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4AjNRdmMJ0

While the details of the character creation system are still firmly placed under wraps by the developer, it is known that players will be divided into three separate factions: the industrious yet corrupt Solarian Commonwealth, the firmly religious Quantar Paths and the militaristic Octavian Empire, with several NPC-only factions like the secretive Hyperial Protectorate, the technologically advanced Anamath (believed to be extinct), the overtly hostile Conflux and a pirate faction known only as The Infernals. Each faction hails from a separate section of space and feature, yep, you guessed it, even more eye-candy in the form of highly varied star system design and vastly different tech. These three playable races set the stage for some interesting PvP and RvR action in the form of open-world Player vs. Player skirmishes as well as instanced battles based on flag capturing games and, my personal favorite, a squad based “destroy the other team’s battleship” game who’s name implies that it’ll be simply…intense. As for RvR (or Realm-vs.-Realm, a concept known well to Dark Age of Camaelot and Warhammer Online players), players will be able to seize control of sector control bases in contested systems, claiming that system for their faction and gaining themselves and their compatriots certain bonuses while in the sector until the base is either destroyed or assaulted and reclaimed by an opposing army. Another original gameplay mechanic devised for JG:E is called “soft grouping” where multiple players engaging the same hostile target will gain experience and loot regardless of whether the participating players are “partied”. This simple idea shines in the fact that it subliminally encourages comradery between players through rewards…I can’t even count the times that I’ve had to watch my character in WoW get crushed by an NPC monster as members of my own faction simply run past without so much as a second glance or even an offer for assistance, or alternatively having quest-related creatures “ninja-ed” from my party by members of my own force.

Large-scale fleet engagements await you in the universe of JG:E.

Thus far, NETdevil has been allowing information regarding this unique title to trickle from their offices at a painfully slow rate, with even the release date slated to an ambiguous “Q1 2009” with a closed beta launching “sometime soon” (The beta can be applied for on their official site -- although with keys being doled out in clusters of 1000 and nearly 150,000 applications as of mid-November the chances of getting into the closed beta are slim at best). From what we’ve seen so far, JG:E is shaping up to be possibly the best new MMO released in some time. Combining furious action with RPG style progression and some impressively realistic space flight, Jumpgate: Evolution gets my vote as THE title to watch for in the coming months. Look for my forthcoming full review either a few weeks after the game launches, or earlier if I can finagle my way into the beta. For more information, visit their official site at www.jumpgateevolution.com or their meticulously updated wiki at www.jumpgateevo.wikia.com.

I’ll leave you with an in-game footage reel to wet your space battle appetite. Enjoy.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cX491A9aLk

Note: Thanks to IGN.com for hosting a whole ton of images with handy-dandy embedding HTML.

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Good morning, shoppers. As usual December has rolled around which of course gives us the lovely sentimental holiday known as Christmas. And as we all know one of the many traditions that is a part of the spirit of Christmas that isn’t mass consumerism is movies. The kind that are sweet, loving, caring. the kind of movies that give you hope, that warm tingly feeling in your stomach like hot cocoa after playing in the snow. What the fuck are you doing reading this then? Although I’m not entirely off on that last part, the movie I’m about to review can leave a tiny warm feeling in your stomach, the catch is it’ll be a bullet hole. For those unaware, last Friday on December 5 the sequel (kinda) to the 2004 movie “The Punisher” was released. “Punisher: War Zone” I had been looking forward to for quite sometime since I saw the trailer. I saw the first one with Thomas Jane and enjoyed it (didn’t wow me but as a movie it was good.) When I heard that Jane and the director had bailed out I became skeptical as to who would take over. Came to find out it was Lexi Alexander and thought it was a brilliant pick after seeing her previous movie “Green Street Hooligans“. Then when I found out Ray Stevenson, an Irish actor I’d never heard of, was going to take over the role of Frank Castle and discovered that he looked JUST LIKE him I was rooting for it full steam.

The film takes place in New York City, where arguably many criminal minds reside. Castle has already made his presence as The Punisher well known to those in the criminal underworld who fear and members of the judicial system who envy him. It kicks off with Castle in his safe house watching a news broadcast about an infamous aging mob boss skating on serious charges due to a missing witness. Immediately vengeance is exacted by The Punisher on the mob family with the exception of the boss’ nephew, Billy Russoti (played by Dominic West) who escapes his wrath momentarily. The Punisher later follows him to a recycling plant which serves as a front to the crime family, which is being monitored by the FBI. A war begins inside the plant causing Russoti to fall into a pit of glass bottles which are waiting to be broken down by large grinders… to only be activated by Castle. Not killing him but only horribly disfiguring him turning him into his arch nemesis Jigsaw. In the midst of the lead-based melee Castle kills and undercover FBI agent in the line of duty. Which in comes his family featuring wife Angela Donatelli (Julie Benz) and daughter Grace (Stephanie Janusauskas) that in quick succession become a priority for Jigsaw when a large amount of money comes up missing from the family fund, making their safety a number one priority for Castle after accidentally murdering Donatelli. With the assistance of his friend Microchip (played by Wayne Knight, more commonly known as Newman. Yes, Newman is The Punisher’s friend) they go out to protect the Donatelli’s and take down Jigsaw with an arsenal behind them and in front of them.

One of the things I loved about Stevenson as The Punisher was the fact that he embodied the comic book version of Frank Castle from the looks down to his demeanor, whereas Tom Jane who was Frank Castle if he were a stiffly bitch-like overactor (“You mean Tobey Maquire? The gay monk that shoots webs?”). My issue with Jane was he did an okay job playing The Punisher, but he wasn’t being The Punisher. The Punisher is a man who shows no mercy, no restraint, and is a true soldier when it comes to the war on crime. And in a war nobody, especially the enemy, comes out clean or generally in one piece. In this version of the war the enemies of hundreds turn into thousands from the blood-curdling violence. To say that there are a few head removals in this movie is to say that flowers grow from the ground. All the moments of violence you wished were in the previous one, it all got thrown into this wagon, set on fire and launched from a catapult. Another noteworthy item about this movie is the fact that they were more true to the origins of The Punisher. The Tom Jane version he was an FBI agent who was involved in the killing of a money launderer during a sting operation, thus him and his family (all members of his family, not just his wife and son) was killed for retaliation. Bullshit. How The Punisher came to be in the comics was how it was mentioned in the movie, his family (mother, son and DAUGHTER) witness a gangland execution while on a picnic and are killed shortly after. Also he was an FBI agent with Special Forces training as Tom Jane, appropriately Stevenson was a military instructor as he originally was which is more prominent in the character archetype that is The Punisher.

As for Lexi Alexander’s take at The Punisher I truly enjoyed and wasn’t disappointed in the least. Clearly she referenced the comics for the storyline and it’s look, which is very dark contrast and also quite colorful at the same time. Kinda had a very nostalgic, ’80s feel from the way it was shot and also from a lot of the production design. They also included some references in some of the backgrounds as well, the one that stands out the most is there’s a big shootout that takes place at the end in a place called the Bradstreet Hotel, which is a reference to Tim Bradstreet (EXAMPLES) who did the cover art for the comics for quite a long time. And according to an article that there were many instances of The Punisher skull in the background, sometimes just as a fluke (article.) Comic book fan or not I highly recommend seeing this if you’re looking for a good ol’ fashion movie with a lot of violence in it. Until next time, keep making shit.

=Sketch/Ed

Amazon Links
Punisher Vol. 1: Welcome Back, Frank
Punisher MAX Vol. 1: In The Beginning
Punisher: War Zone Official Soundtrack (featuring Slipknot, Seether, and Rob Zombie)
Punisher “Well Suited” Shirt (a black shirt with his new armor)

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Yes, you read it right folks. Another Ghetto Dinner Party is upon us, they only come but once a year. When the last leaf of the great Maple tree falls and when it becomes too cold to play whiffle ball, the Great Ghetto Dinner comes forth like a mighty steed. When you get out of work and you’re greeted by cold winter winds and Mr. Night man, and you say “Mr. Night Man, why are you here so early?” Then Mr. Night Man replies “I do what I choose, and I just karate chopped the sun because I hate you”. That’s when the Ghetto Dinner party comes in to rescue you from your woes.

Anyway, this is your OFFICIAL invitation to the best dinner party of the year. In the old days people would have magnificent balls, or masquerades. In our time, this is pretty much the best you’re going to get. The champagne in crystal flutes will be replaced with 40′s in brown paper bags. The gowns and fine suits shall be replaced with ripped jeans and hoodies covered with stains and boot. The feasts of roast beasts and various sorts of gelatins, replaced with spam, raamen, twinkies and various canned goods. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Oh, what’s that? You’re new to the idea of a ghetto dinner party? Well if you aren’t excited about it by the time you reach this sentence, good luck to you on your quest for a better time. Not only will all of what I have mentioned be available to you, but there will be Frank Sinatra involved. You can’t have a classy dinner without ol’ blue eyes. Now onto the details:

1. What day and what time should I go Kat? Friday, November 21st at 9PM. We shall eat, judge you, find a winner, and get wasted. We will then walk to Trophy’s on a triumphant journey to place the Cup of Broken Dreams atop the highest shelf, in the highest bar in town. Which, of course, is Trophy’s.
2. Where is it? If you don’t know ask one of your comrades, or just get into their car and wait for them to drive to my house! That will be a fun surprise for you and them! Of course, you can just reply to this email and I will tell you where I live. Too lazy to write my address now.
3. What do I need to bring? Well, the best and most delicious ghetto food item you can think of! You better bring something good because we will be judging you. If you win, you’ll get a fancy prize!

GUESS WHAT! We have the trophy back in our possession at the South Pine castle. Many of you may remember Lauren won last year and her name was “engraved” on the Cup of Broken Dreams. Who knows? Maybe your name could be next?

OK, I think I went over everything. If you have any questions you can find me in TMT. I’m the girl with the baggy pink sleeves, and the juice on my jeans! That was for Amy, and if you need to be told a description of who I am, then I’m not sure why I invited you in the first place.

Raamenly Yours,

Kat

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Good evening, it’s your friendly neighborhood cyst Sketch here bringing you an article for your Internet Arts & Leisure feed. Today we bring you a review on “Sex In The City: The Movie”… sorry, wrong drugs. Now that we’ve changed substances a proper review is in order. Last night the one man band Trent Reznor stopped into Manchester, NH with co-conspirators Robin Finck, Alessandro Cortini, Josh Freese and Justin Meldal-Johnsen to assemble the band Nine Inch Nails. They stopped in Manch-vegas as part of the second leg of their Lights In The Sky Tour Over North America. I arrived at 6PM, half an hour before they opened the doors. In that time I got moist from the weather, exchanged words with some of the other patrons and watched planes fly over closer than they should’ve. About five minutes prior to them opening the doors one of the security guards got everyone’s attention to inform us of some of the rules — no smoking, no food or drink from outside, no knives, no chains etc. When he mentioned the knives and chains I was looking around for the people with chains seeing who was gonna get screwed for entry. Behind me was a guy wearing Tripp NYC pants which had a chain on them, which couldn’t be removed. To which he ironically responded by saying, “I would get it off but I left my knife at home.” So I got in, bought a shirt for $35 because I’m daffy and wanted some schwag. Now before I get to reviewing Nine Inch Nails’ performance I must mention the opening act.

As it can be shown from my previous entry reviewing the Rock & Shock Festival with Mushroomhead and Gwar, I have a predisposition for disliking opening acts. I believe that many of them are hired deliberately because they suck and make the headliners infinitely greater. This opener was no different. The band was called Health and came out of Los Angeles. I felt their name was ironic since after their set was over I WANTED TO KILL MYSELF! To save you the trouble I’ll let you know what you’re in store for with this group. Imagine three skinny Hot Topic Emo kids screeching on Fender guitars and stomping on distortion pedals while singing like a seven-year old girl in one microphone and screaming into another microphone; while the drummer, who looks like Chino Moreno of Deftones (IMAGE) if he was built like a brick shit-house and had a pony tail, actually plays his instrument. To say that I wanted to slit my wrists after hearing their “music” would be both an offense to my wrists and the blade I would’ve used. They were nothing more than a garage band that was trying to rip off Nine Inch Nails and Muse and any other industrial band you can think. Now I’ve never been to a Nine Inch Nails show before but from my understanding the opening acts are mostly noise bands, that’s all they were minus the band part. Trent Reznor should get his $20 back. But one thing I noticed is that the “singer” had two microphones – one mounted on a mic stand where he let us hear his girly voice and a pink microphone from the ’50s which he screamed into. And it occurred to me that one of the microphones was auto-tuned, either to make him sound very girly or like he has testosterone in his system. I’m thinking the first one since at one point toward the end of their “set” the “bassist”/(long haired douche who pounded a drum stick on a single electronic drum pad that was never heard through the speakers and danced around on stage like a ballerina) went up to the mic stand and screamed like a little girl. Now me being a somewhat rational man at this point hysterically laughed like the dozen others around me. During the encore Trent said to the crowd, “Buy their album, take mine for free.”

Now on to the main event. House lights get killed and the ambient “999,999″ gets cued up which leads into them playing “1,000,000″ off their new album “The Slip” (which can be officially downloaded for free and purchased here.) They then proceeded to do two more songs off the new album, “Letting You” and the single “Discipline”, both which were a powerhouse on the audience. One thing I learned about the show is that it is oddly one of the more tamer shows I’ve been to, though the concerts I’ve been to have been straight-up metal bands and have a very aggressive tone to them. With NIИ it carries many tones to it, start off aggressive then become very serene and then back to aggressive. Also Trent doesn’t really interact with the audience like many front men do. Then again I’m sure that’d just be one more thing in the arsenal he’d have to deal with due to the intricacy of the show. But as much as it lacked in band/crowd interaction the theatricality of the show is definitely worth seeing even if you don’t know of Nine Inch Nails or their music or even if you don’t like it, the visuals are amazing.

First of all, in order to truly take in the visuals you are best to be toward the back of the crowd, maybe even sit in the bleachers (as much of a cop out as it is.) I neglected to remember this so my dosage was a bit low. The highlight of their visuals is three large LED mesh curtains (one at the rear, one in the middle and one in the front of the stage) that go up and down for each song to accentuate it. For instance their song “Vessel” (a song with almost no practical instruments involved except guitar), the five men stand in front of the forward curtain which flashes distortions of red to the beat of the song (EXAMPLE, best viewed in high quality.) When they did instrumental tracks off “Ghosts” they stood in front of the middle screen which was dropped and contained a desert, while the front screen was elevated so to show the grey clouds sifting through black above the amber dunes. (“Word?” Word.) The sight of it was truly beautiful, but would’ve been better if people hadn’t have used this time to talk among themselves since there were no lyrics being sung. To those who attended and did the aforementioned crime, fuck you. (5 GHOSTS I) And the screens don’t just serve as pre-rendered images to highlight the narrative of the songs since they are fully interactive. The stage has sensors strategically placed so at any time Trent can manipulate the screen. For instance during “Only” the front curtain is dropped and projects TV noise and when he passes the sensor he can open up a hole in the static (YIKES.) Truely gorgeous use of technology. During their performance of “The Greater Good” off “Year Zero” they projected on the front curtain what looked like a blue microscopic organism reacting to the music. However it got really amped up when an embossed blown up version of Trent singing was pulled up. As I said, it was an interactive show which used sensors and other pieces of technology to make it what it is. When it made that turn I froze in awe. (To freeze in awe at your computer, LOOK HERE.)

“Survivalism” was probably one of their more pulsating songs due to it being a rather ferocious track. And the screen in the back projected rather comical images. For those who have never seen the video, it is a constant camera motion going to various security feeds watching the band perform and an apartment building with the tenants either being submissive to the totalitarian government or committing crimes against it (homosexuality, graffiti, and other things against the good Christian country that it is in this alternative reality.) One monitor housed the Bureau of Morality censoring something, one of a camera on Trent, two of a camera on the audience, and three others with prerecorded footage (most likely) featuring a couple having sex in the bathroom, a man walking down a stairwell and I believe the inside of a bathroom stall. Never a dull moment in the three hours that Nine Inch Nails was on stage. From “1,000,000″ to “In This Twilight” it was a proverbial narcotic the whole place was taking in. They closed their set with their classic single “Head Like A Hole” then dropped the front curtain which held the NIИ logo for a good minute or two with droning ambiance over the PA. I knew the show wasn’t over but the suspense for the encore was grinding over me and the rest of the patrons. After a while they raise the screen and kill the picture. On the middle screen was three rows of white boxes. The drummer, Josh Freese, came out from behind the curtain and interacted with it by turning some of the squares all red to start up “Echoplex”. They went on to do “God Given”, “Hurt” of course was a must, and finally closing with “In This Twilight” which was truly beautiful. For those unacquainted with the song it has a heavy tone to it but Trent melodically singing it making it rather eerie and surreal. On the back screen they projected a metropolis with a large factory in the background emitting smoke from two giant stacks. Across the city bombs were going off showing an attack from either terrorists or members of the resistance, couldn’t be known. At the end of the song a white hot flash of light came from the factory and panned up until “the sky is filled with light.” My first show with Nine Inch Nails and hopefully not my last. That’s all I got for this round. See you on the other side, folks.

Oh, and to close out this piece I’ve enclosed another video. This didn’t happen at the show I was at but I figured it’d be interesting to see regardless. Enjoy.

=Sketch/Ed

“Something’s Gonna Get Broken”

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Good evening children, I come to you yet again blathering however it’s not complete nonsense, this one actually has some thought behind it that doesn’t involve tearing out the asshole of a pop culture icon (since most of the opening acts nobody knows.) A couple weeks ago I contacted Sir Jeffery Nothing from the masked Ohio metal band Mushroomhead for two purposes — for him to take a small part in my short film, and to do an interview promoting their new DVD Mushroomhead, Vol. 2
due out October 28th. And instead of saying “Ew, no, queer. Hurry up, the wife’s coming home soon,” he said that he would take part. The interview was a concept that came later, I figured since the segment for the film wouldn’t take very long (recorded two shots collectively spanning just under 10 minutes) why not a little bump for something they got coming out. Plus I have my system all worked out where this time I can actually interview him on camera and publish the footage. I had interviewed him about a year and half before at their show in Portland, Maine but I couldn’t extract the footage from the DVD where I burned it. Now I can do it but damn it takes a long time.

So I truck out an hour and a half away from home for day two of the Rock & Shock Festival, a three day event that compiles two things that work together beautifully — balls to the wall metal and pure unadulterated violence. The headlining acts for the second day were Mushroomhead (who got second billing, they were on before the main act) and Gwar. However before they took stage I realized something, opening acts are kinda like sex — in that you start out dry jerking, then next time you do it with lube, then you cum, then head, go through a couple skanks just to grease the wheels further and then finally you’re in a broom closet with Heidi Klum or Margaret Cho because you’ve had about six scotches and can barely operate without causing harm to yourself. The first band was a complete scream band, basically taking heavy double-bass drums and doing a shitty Dr. Claw impersonation to it. Second band was a bit better, still in the vein of screaming surpassing actual music all while the vocalist had a very Vince Neil/Nikki Sixx rip-off kinda hair-do. Let this be a lesson to you kids, an aggressive voice isn’t the focal point when it comes to metal music. Any 14 year-old girl with a vocal box can make that guttural sound no problem, but those who can balance between that and singing, more respect to them than anything.

Skip a band or two later a band called Kingdom of Sorrow takes over which is more or less a super-group featuring a bassist who did a tour with Black Label Society, a guitarist from Type O Negative, and I believe the vocalist from Hatebreed with two other guys. In comparison to the acts before Mushroomhead and Gwar these guys were actually good since they did balance the music well, the vocals were mostly screams but they were coherent and had a range in sounds. Also one thing I tip my hat to about them was the fact that the vocalist had showmanship, interacted with the crowd whereas the prior acts were like, “Fuck it, we only get 30 minutes and you probably won’t remember our names after because we didn’t actually say it.” Now the band that went on before Mushroomhead and after Kingdom of Sorrow, I gotta tell you, FUCKING SUCKED!! Imagine if you will a skinny Hot Topic kid with gauges, skin tight clothing over his skeleton-like body, and nose length hair dancing like a constipated gorilla while screaming high pitched sounds that would make a bat want to slit it’s wings open and attempt to fly through the air with the wind gliding into the wound so as to nose dive into a vat of salt, all of which is considered a blessing than to rather listen to one of Suicide Silence’s “songs.” (Damn, that was verbose.) I had never heard them before then and I don’t intended to listen to them ever again unless I’m getting a full frontal lobotomy without anesthesia, in which case I’ll blast that shit that way it numbs my brain right up. To those of you who liked Suicide Silence, please consult an abortionist immediately for your future hell spawn just to cover yourself.

Half hour after the sonic rapists leave the stage Mushroomhead takes a hold of The Palladium, which from where I was premium. For those who have never been to The Palladium, let me give you a lay of the land. Imagine the store from Empire Records if it was slightly more broken down, featured a bar and was retrofitted as a theater. So it has a very interesting design which given the event seems both juxtaposed and also disturbingly appropriate. If it were being filmed for a DVD I’d almost think that David Fincher was making it since it has quite the similar tones to it’s lighting and architecture. Prior to Mushroomhead taking the stage I went to see them across the street at the DCU center where the other half of the Rock & Shock event took place, with many booths with lovely schwag such as bootleg DVDs (there wasn’t a single DVD that didn’t look like a bootleg), shirts, patches (I picked up a Stark Industries patch, one for S.H.I.E.L.D. and one for Blue Sun which is featured in the realm of Firefly and Serenity), and anything your heart could desire. They were there at 7:00 to do a signing for fans, and hearing about it I jumped right into line and managed to make it back to the venue with time to spare. For things to get autographed I brought a poster I made almost a year or two ago which has the members of the band rotoscoped and they all loved it. One of the singers, Waylon, virtually froze upon seeing it he liked it. If it weren’t for the contacts he was wearing I would’ve thought his eyes went white naturally. Got a couple pictures from the signing, some schwag then cut back to two and half hours later they take charge of the stage.

This is the third time I’ve seen Mushroomhead perform live, first in late October of ’06 at Mark’s Show Place near Manchester, NH, then in February ’07 at The Station in Portland, ME. Both really small venues and both purely great shows. As I told Jeff in our first interview in Portland, they’re a band who can make a closet-sized place like The Station (which it very much was) and make it seem as if the crowd was never-ending. This time it was almost the opposite, while the venue was considerably larger than the previous two it actually felt a whole lot smaller. Maybe due to the mass chaos and six foot males gently gliding near my head toward the stage. Starting off with a heavy hitter “12 Hundred” the audience is immediately whipped into a frenzy as the band creates fire and sweat while they play. Shortly before Jeffery Nothing’s part kicks in he arrives on stage with a new type of make-up that is a hybrid of his long-going outfit known as The Butcher with this Butcher-Devil-Heath Ledger Joker type of deal. And it looked gorgeous. Periodically throughout the show I would watch Jeff virtually transform himself into the character he was on stage, as if he was channeling the presence of Ledger’s Joker through him. As I said, it was pure serenity. And with the benefits of a larger venue come little games like stage diving and moshing, both which took place from the crowd and members of the band. They did a couple songs I’ve never heard them play live such as “Xeroxed”  and their cover of “When Doves Cry” by Prince. Closing out with “Solitaire Unraveling” the show was an overall powerhouse as expected. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see Gwar (probably good because from my understanding everyone in the crowd got spewed with movie blood and fake semen. Yummy.) After I got out me and my co-conspirator Some Guy Named Al trekked over to the bus area, interviewed Jeff and filmed his segment for my short film. The events that unfolded from the interview follow in the video below. The events from the film will come later. Enjoy, and until next time, I’m Sketch E Whiteface reminding you to control the overpopulation, kick a skater in the balls.

=Sketch/Ed

Mushroomhead signing at the DCU Center

Mushroomhead autographing my self-made poster. They loved it.

Screen capture from my interview with Jeffery Nothing. There are several moments like this. Not sure what we were looking at.

Jeffery Nothing in a promo pic for the upcoming short "This Side Up: Omerganite."

PART I
PART II

MISC LINKS

• Mushroomhead, Vol. 2
• Mushroomhead Official Site
• No Wear Clothes
• Mushroomhead MySpace
• Jeffery Nothing MySpace
• Filthy Figures MySpace
• This Side Up Entertainment MySpace

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The blank in the center? That's where the G1 promo pic SHOULD be.

That was the scene this morning when I went in to contemplate upgrading my phone, and check on my bill. I tried clicking through the broken promo image, and was let into a clearly unfinished area, offering the preorder of the G1, the first phone to feature Google’s Android mobile OS, which I was too excited to take screenshots of, and can’t seem to dig up a cached version of, to boot. :( If anybody has any thoughts on how I could wrestle these pages out of my history without the t-mobile servers interfering, comment!

It was really interesting. Where the details of a phone usually appear, all it had was Detail 1, Detail 2, etc. There were 3 versions on offer, black, brown, and white, but the only picture available was for the black model. (Brown, seriously? Who offers brown at launch? Talk about balls.)

Later in the day, after several server busy errors and general shenannigans, the customer area looked like this:

Billing was down for the count, upgrade phone disabled, an older promotional graphic was in place. Clearly they had some issues with this too-soon promo release.

Later on, billing and phone upgrade came back, but no sign of the new “google phone” in the upgrade list as of yet. With the official unveiling of the new Android powered phone a few days off, all the hubub today was clearly preparation for the upcoming preorder frenzy. Based on the errors seen this morning, and the general lag of the site, I would say this is going to be a serious preorder crunch!

I will be checking all morning on the 23rd, to see if I can get in on this. Full disclosure: I’m not really a gotta-have-it-first person when it comes to any bit of new tech, but if I can get a new phone with a qwerty keyboard and web access, AND get a rare chance to one-up my I-got-an-iPhone-and-can’t-do-what-I-want-with-it friends, well, I can’t pass it up!

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I believe that long shots in action movies are one of the biggest “fuck you”s to Hollywood. I recently rented “Death Sentence” which stars Kevin Bacon and is directed by James Wan (of “Saw” fame, not the shitty sequels.) For those unexposed to the movie, the story takes place around a white-collar family man Nick Hume (Bacon) whose son is murdered during a gang initiation then after retaliation is targeted by the gang. In the middle of the film there’s a scene where Bacon is being chased by the gang through a parking garage and it is all in one continuous shot, and even better it’s one take (no cuts, no CG blending, nada.)

I consider “cinematographer” to be under my film repertoire and whenever I can see a shot like this I can’t help but tip my hat to the director and crew behind it since it shows they really busted their balls and want it to feel real. Side by side, the sequence at the end of “Children of Men” where Clive Owen is going after Chiwetel Ejiofor and the baby, and the sequence in “Bad Boys II” where Marcus and Mike are speeding down the highway going after Haitians, “Children of Men” wins hands down. Granted the two sequences are different beasts but I’ll explain why. It’s a lot simpler to put a camera on a tripod and film two seconds of an explosion then to have a handheld shot spanning over five hundred feet with squibs (artificial gunshots) and explosions and other things that goes for five minutes and covers every possible vantage point. Reason why I give more props to the long shots is because that takes a lot of timing, coordination, and collaboration in order to pull it off right so that the end result leaves the viewer believes he just saw a .50 caliber rip through six people.

But to get into the specifics of the “Death Sentence” shot I’ll explain the effort. It starts out with Bacon entering a parking garage and moving up floor by floor to the top where his car is while the gang targeting him is pursuing him. Now on paper you might think one camera operator follows around him but you’d be wrong. Instead of having one man rock a Steadicam and go only inside the garage it is passed around like an Olympic torch. It starts with one man in the hallway then he passes it on to a man on the next level near a gap between two levels (where Bacon is climbing through), to a man sitting on a crane/platform (so the view is now outside the parking garage by a good few feet) which lowers down to the first level where the gang is. The man then passes it off to another operator who goes in closer to the gang, backs onto another elevated platform to go up two floors to where Bacon is running and after that it’s all on that guy. My explanation sucks a bit, I’ll admit, but if you watch the clip you’ll get it.

TOP FIVE LONG TAKES

1. . “Children of Men” – Theo’s pursuit of Luke and the baby. (Clip)
2. “Panic Room” – Dubbed as “The Big Shot”, a floor by floor survey of the house’s three floors as its being broken into. (Clip)
3. “Touch of Evil” – The opening shot going from the rooftop looking down on a parking lot, to past the US/Mexican border several blocks away. This was in the late ’50s. (Clip)
4. “Children of Men” – Where Theo and everyone in the car is attacked.
5. “Rope” – A Hitchcock movie, the whole thing is one continuous shot. Done in the late ’40s (Buy the fucking thing)

The whole purpose of the long shots is to show the viewer that no matter where, what and when the setting is there is a reality that lies in the film. It is more cerebral than your typical quick cut from here to here to here to here and only a second has gone by. That’s my time for now. In an unrelated note I’ve enclosed a picture that can only be described as EPIC (a term heavily being overused now but fuck it.) Picture courtesy of my coworker Timmay.

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Perusing my feeds I saw a link to an article that Opera does in fact pass the Acid 3 test. I was pretty stoked to hear that, since I was pretty sure when I ran my copy of 9.26 and 9.5 through the test, neither one passed or even approached passing. (9.5 was closer at around 60-64%.)

I went to try out the Acid 3 test again to see if I’d missed something, or not checked on the latest version of the browser, and Opera out-and-out crashed on me. Which is a very rare thing, Opera’s always been pretty stable for me, but it’s never fun to have to kill all your tabs and start over.

Upon re-reading the article I realized that the version of Opera which currently passes the newest standards testing is their internal development version. Translation: I was decieved by my excitement, and for my laziness was punished by crashing Opera upon the merciless rocks of the Web 2.0 usability test. From now on I’m just going to get my Opera-related news straight from Opera Labs and bypass the PR maneuvers from the My Opera side of things, and the various fans.

I’m still patiently awaiting Kestral’s release from beta to full, because I think at that point Opera might stand a fighting chance of gaining a “real” marketshare. (i.e. Above 1%)

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So I came into work this morning, only to have a co-worker mention to me that AdCenter, MSN, and Hotmail all weren’t working for him. I checked a couple things and the sites loaded up just fine for me, but when I tried to log into AdCenter I got a friendly message saying that they were down for the time being.

Curiouser and curiouser. Then my first tweet of the day appeared:

trodrigues: msn servers are down. thousands of young portuguese girls commit mass suicide.

Intrigued, I decided to start tracking instances of “MSN” through Twitter IM. Boy, was that ever a mistake! The messages – most of them not in english – began pouring in, and my IM window has been blinking like mad all morning.

Some of the highlights:

(matheusodorisi): gente, o msn naum entra de forma alguma! appocalipse now!
(s1mone): @kakah o MSN morreu! Vida longa o GTalk!!!
(pvdp): Kom msn niet op.
(jonviray): MSN down for anyone else? people here at work are getting piiiissseed……
(hdur): Supongo que MSN enfurece a los dioses de Pakistán.
(Hausdorff): MSN産経のページ，なめてんのかって位重い
(justinkeller): Adium users: is MSN giving you problems today?
(jcloop): what the fruit is wrong with MSN messenger AND Hotmail??
(agenteinforma): MSN fora do ar não só no Brasil: http://tinyurl.com/3a4qyr
(jaredavery): What a nice start to my day. Had to help mum get in to Hotmail because MSN Messager did not want to work for her.
(cl0): who cares if you can’t get on msn? chances are not many people will wanna talk to you lot anyway ;)

And tons more comments like that. Lots of suggestions to try Meebo or defect to Gtalk. None of them seem to have any concrete intel on WHY MSN/Hotmail/et al are down, or if they do I don’t know enough portuguese/spanish/insert-other-languages-here to make it out.

I would like to note, that from my end, MSN messenger (using Pidgin) worked just fine, as did visiting LiveSpaces. The home page of Hotmail loaded up but I didn’t bother trying to log in.

Anybody got any good dirt on the situation?

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Just to keep things brief:
I dreamt I had a fish tank with a few kinds of viscious, snappy fish in it, and a small octopus and some other kind of shellfish or something. I accidentally screwed up the whole aquairum by collapsing one of the sides leaving only a tiny bit of water at the bottom, and nearly crushing the fish. I set everything back up and added in the appropriate salt water for this collection of pirhana like fish. (One looked like one of those clap-trap deals from Donkey Kong Jr.)
Next time I looked into the fish tank, it was full of irridescent octopi. They would look like small, but relatively normal, bluish and reddish octopi, then they would contract and glow in neon colors with cartoon faces. I watched this in fascination, as more were arrising, born out of the dead bodies of the fish that did in fact die because I had broken the tank.
That’s all I remember now. There was so much more. There has been so much more lately but I unfortunately haven’t had time to record the overall details. I have been told I need to watch Until the End of the World. …I can’t imagine why.

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