Toot toot!

So we’ve all heard about the recent Mel Gibson debacle, right? You know, the one where he revealed himself to be a complete lunatic? Well, not to toot my own horn or nothing, I’d just like to point out that I called this in December of last year. My exact words were

Gibson has officially Lost It and is now certifiably batshit insane

See? It’s almost spooky. If Nostradamus had a blog, it would be lowbrowculture.com.

Lomo Effect

Thanks to the Tao of Mac for pointing me to this incredible tutorial for using photoshop to give images a Lomo effect.

There’s a delicious irony in using a high-tech piece of software like Photoshop to recreate the look of a cheap, plastic lens.

Before

After

Things to keep me occupied on the long weekend

Download the Dead Rising demo from Xbox Marketplace

It’s time-limited to 15 minutes per game, but still. This is one of the games that finally convinced me to buy an Xbox 360. Let’s hope it was worth it.

Go see A Scanner Darkly on Monday

Get a coupon from today’s copy of The Ticket in the Irish Times. Bring it to UGC today and exchange the coupon for a ticket for two to see the preview of this amazing-looking movie.

Finish reading On Stranger Tides by Tim powers

I bought this because I’ve got such a boner for pirates right now, and this is the book that inspired Ron Gilbert to write the Secret of Monkey Island. It’s a huge story of pirates, voodoo and revenge. And lots of buckles being swashed, naturally. Also recommended: The Bumper Book of Pirate Stories, if only for the chapter entitled “How Half-Arsed Became Captain”. Half-arsed being a famous pirate who got half of his ass blown off by a cannon. They don’t make ’em like that any more.

Mac nerds rejoice: Ellen Feiss is all growned up

Ellen Feiss, internet phenomenon and star of the most famous Mac “Switch” advert, is all growned up. She is making her film acting debut in a French movie called “Bed and Breakfast” alongside Ruardhi Conroy (‘Tito’ from Into the West).

And, y’know, now she’s no longer jailbait/completely mashed, she’s actually kinda hot.

Balls to Google

“Hey H., you know what would be awesome? A service where you could register a group of friends’ phone numbers, then when you’re out and about, you text your location to a server and your friends could text the server and find out where all their friends are.”

“You mean like Dodgeball?”

I search for “Dodgeball text” and find out that not only has someone already thought of this, but Google has bought them already.

All the same, someone needs to launch this in Ireland. It would make weekends so much easier to organise. I hope this is built into Live Anywhere.

DVD Inbox

My DVD inbox - movies I haven’t seen or whose DVDs special features I haven’t watched - has grown to 60 DVDs. I figure this is a good time to take a look through the list and see what’s going on. Maybe figure out why I’m having such trouble getting through them. If you’re interested, the full list is available on listal.com.

Genre

To be honest, I’m amazed that drama features so highly. From looking at my list, I’d have guessed Horror or Sci-Fi would be the most popular genre. I put this down to shoddy tagging on IMDB. Or a really bad personal definition of “horror”. Cutthroat Island is horrific, so that makes it horror… right?

Decade

For an eighties kid, the 1980s are seriously underrepresented here.

(This was the first bar-chart I’ve ever made in excel. I had to get H. to help me.)

Language

I couldn’t be bothered breaking this down any further. Although I’d say that the majority of the foreign-language movies were Japanese, from the large amount of J-Horror waiting to scare the pants off me.

TV Shows

I’ve all but given up watching TV now. I tend to do all my TV watching via bittorrent or DVD. This is probably lower than I would have guessed. Still haven’t gotten around to watching Six Feet Under yet. Is it wrong that I am completely unable to get excited about this show? Loving Carnivale though.

Douglas Coupland's JPod

I finished reading Douglas Coupland’s JPod last night. Here are a couple of my theories regarding this book:

• Douglas Coupland is completely out of ideas and is gently strolling down the David Sedaris route of desperately presenting the most mundane situations and ideas as innovative. Not only that, but he knows it. There’s a twinge of panic about JPod that completely sets it apart from the laid-back coolness of Microserfs.
• He got so sick of people asking for a sequel to Microserfs that he decided to punish them by churning out something that takes the same style and formula but takes it to the point where it actually mocks the reader. Case in point: 40 pages of the first 100,000 numbers of Pi with one wrong digit. What is this? The Da Vinci Code for autistics?
• Maybe he really has, once again, completely captured the zeitgeist and the world is actually full of the same kind of boring, selfish fuckholes that appear as characters in JPod.

Personally, I think it’s probably a combination of all three.

Wanna be a Freetar Hero?

Someone in work pointed me to Freetar Hero - a free PC-based replacement for Guitar Hero. Nothing really new there, there’s been a few out there already. But what sets this apart is the awesome new Freetar Editor, which allows you to create your own levels from your MP3 collection.

As this video demonstrates, the upshot of this is that I might actually get a chance to rock out on my Guitar Hero to Journey!

Looks like Mackers won’t have to buy a TV to play this after all.

Cosplay

This is my favourite piece of cosplay ever:

This is my second favourite:

Paul Gleason, RIP

BURBANK, Calif. - Paul Gleason, who was in "Trading Places" and "The Breakfast Club," has died. He was 67.

Gleason died at a local hospital Saturday of mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer linked to asbestos, said his wife, Susan Gleason.

“Whenever you were with Paul, there was never a dull moment,” his wife said. “He was awesome.”

A native of Miami, Gleason was an avid athlete. Before becoming an actor, he played Triple-A minor league baseball for a handful of clubs in the late 1950s.

Gleason honed his acting skills with his mentor Lee Strasberg, whom he studied with at the Actors Studio beginning in the mid-1960s, family members said.

Through his career, Gleason appeared in over 60 movies that included “Die Hard,” “Johnny Be Good,” and “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder.” Most recently, Gleason made a handful of television appearances in hit shows such as “Friends” and “Seinfeld.”

Gleason’s passions went beyond acting. He had recently published a book of poetry.

“He was an athlete, an actor and a poet,” said his daughter, Shannon Gleason-Grossman. “He gave me and my sister a love that is beyond description that will be with us and keep us strong for the rest of our lives.”

Actor Jimmy Hawkins, a friend of Gleason’s since the 1960s, said he remembered Gleason for a sharp sense of humor.

“He just always had great stories to tell,” Hawkins said.

Gleason was survived by his wife, two daughters and a granddaughter. Funeral plans were pending.

He never really got any huge roles, but the few lines he got were often the standout moments in movies. The moment in Trading Places where he turns around and tells and old woman to Fuck Off counts, for me, as the most perfect delivery of a “fuck off” ever filmed.