Baten Kaitos

Tonight I have been playing Baten Kaitos. The reviews warned me about the voice acting and they were right. The voice acting is TERRIBLE. People who reviewed this game recommended to turn the voices off, but I won't do it because, as bad as they are, they are also very funny at times.
This game has a card battling system and one of the cards is for a *voice attack* which means when you play that card, the character taunts the enemy. One of the male characters, Lyude, has the silliest and most amusing voice, and when you play the voice attack card for him he says things like, 'I'm ready for battle!' and 'Looks like I don't need to fight too earnestly!' and my favourite, 'You must be in a mad panic!'
Also, a female character, Xelha, has a good line she shouts just before using one of her special attacks: 'Watch out! I am not so innocent!'
Ha ha! Watch out monsters! This girl is not so innocent that she won't heat your ass up with a Fire Burst Lv 2!
Something else funny about the Lyude character is this: whenever you make him use a healing item on himself, he says, 'This is for YOU!' He talks to himself like that. Isn't that funny?

Half Life

Thank God Almighty it's Friday night and the week of work is finished. Now what? I have two days to do whatever I please. I can sleep in two mornings. Can do whatever I want for two days and not have to worry about going to work. I can do whatever I want on my two days off, but what difference does it make? I'll be back at work on Monday and get through the week and another weekend is there to do something with for a short time before work starts again. The same thing over and over again. Get through another week and then two more lousy days off to pass the time before going back to work. Sometimes I get the feeling there is more somewhere, but it's just out of reach. I feel like I'm flopping around on the ground like a fish, gulping stupidly for air, not really for air but for something, I don't know what, but SOMETHING. What is life anyway? Is this life? Am I alive? Of course I am, but it seems to be a kind of half life. I see people on TV and they seem to have a life much different to my kind of *life*. What is their secret? Their eyes are white, bright. Well, many of them seem to be idiots, so I guess that's some consolation. But I look in the mirror and my eyes are barely open, and bloodshot.

Swans

I bought another Opeth album (Still Life) on Tuesday just before I went into the movie house to see Sin City. Inside the CD cover was a catalogue of other releases on that label. One of the albums had a title that I heard of years ago and have ever since been fascinated by - the pictures it created in my mind.
What is that album title? You must know immediately! OK. Are you ready? Here it is:

TURN LOOSE THE SWANS

Sin City

This afternoon I went and saw Sin City.
Frank Miller's Sin City comics (the ones that this movie is based on anyway) came out in the early-mid '90s and they were great. His writing was lean and powerful, the stories were strong - hardboiled/film noir type themes - and his art style was unique. There's even a guy who does illustrations for the Sydney Morning Herald who has blatantly ripped off his style.
The movie is made up of three stories all taking place in the one city.
The first one deals with John Hartigan (Bruce Willis) a cop on the last day before his retirement (classic!) and he's chasing a sadistic freak who rapes, tortures and kills young girls. He is also the mayor's son so he gets away with it all. He's just abducted an 11-year-old girl called Nancy O'Callaghan and Hartigan is racing against the clock to stop him before he has his fun.
In the second story there's Marv (Mickey Rourke) an ENORMOUS tough guy with a Frankenstein-type head. A gorgeous girl called Goldie spends the night with him and he can't believe it because he is not a handsome devil, you might say. It's really a case of Beauty and the Beast, and very touching too. Aw, the big guy! But when he wakes up, Goldie is dead, yet mysteriously without a mark on her. He goes off to track down her killers.
The third story is Dwight (Clive Owen) who is now with a girl called Shellie. He's basically saving her from her ex-boyfriend Jack (Benicio Del Toro) who beats her up all the time.
The way this movie looks will knock you out, your eyes will pop out of your head. It's absolutely stunning. Mostly shot in black & white with colour here and there, like a car or a pair of shoes, or the evil stinking Yellow Bastard.
It is violent too. One of the most violent movies you will ever see for sure. But usually the violence is happening to the evil guys so you will find yourself laughing and cheering, but if movie violence makes you queasy, you better stay far away from this one because you will be sick for weeks.
Mickey Rourke's performance in this was the highlight for me. His face is truly monstrous. In real life he started a boxing career and got his face badly smashed up. I hadn't seen his face since hearing about that so first seeing him in the movie thought that this was really how his face looked now! Ha ha. But anyway, Mickey Rourke steals the show here hands down. Bruce Willis is excellent as well, along with Benicio Del Toro's awesomely sleazy performance. And I cannot forget to mention Jessica Alba (as the grown-up Nancy O'Callaghan) - heartbreaker!
It was also strange and funny to see Elijah 'Frodo' Wood in the role of ninja cannibal Kevin.
This movie was great. GREAT! It easily moves into my Top Five Movies of 2005 with almost zero chance of getting squeezed out.
The audience in the theatre was quiet and well-behaved. How boring! Boo!

Birthday Sugarcubes

This morning when I went inside the place to get my muffin, I heard Birthday by The Sugarcubes playing on the radio. That was the band Bjork was in before she went solo. I always liked that song, but I remember that at the time a lot of people in the media were getting upset about it. They said it was about a man molesting a little girl. These people were idiots. There are people like that everywhere today. They see the worst in people, their perverse minds working overtime to create the vilest scenario.
Here are the *incriminating* lyrics, decide for yourself:

Today is her birthday
He's smoking cigars
They sit in the bathtub
And they're naked.

If you imagine a big hairy cigar-smoking man in a bathtub with a small girl, do you imagine that he is doing some not very nice thing to her and she is crying, or do you imagine he is giving her a happy bubble bath for her birthday and they are having a nice fun time and laughing?
What kind of person are you anyway?

Scattered

On Saturday night Anders and I worked at a rave party called Scattered. This one was in the city, at the old Pitt Centre movie house in Pitt Street.
The night got off to a bad start when we saw the tiny cramped space we were gonna be working in. Also, my tooth had started pounding again from a beer I just had.
We got set up while a DJ started playing his records. The bass all of a sudden went right up and I felt the sound waves hit my stomach. Got a sense of nausea and turned to Anders with a horrified expression. He told me he got the same sick feeling in his stomach from those bass tones. It was uncomfortable but we couldn't just leave or move to another part of the room. That was our glowstick stall, all set up with tables and everything. We were stuck right there in front, getting BLASTED.
The night was really shaping up to be quite a miserable one for the professional glowstick salesmen.
Kids kept coming in and the place quickly filled up, the bodies in front of us absorbing most of the sound waves. The Nurofens I popped kicked in. The music the DJ was playing sounded not bad, pretty good, not bad.
It wasn't gonna be so horrible after all.
Everything was going smoothly and it was coming up to 1:00am when DJ Dean would start playing. He's a German DJ who plays what he calls *Tunnel Trance* - he was gonna play a three-hour set and I found myself looking forward to hearing his stuff.
Somebody came up and told me that a bunch of cops had arrived with a sniffer dog. Somebody else said there were 18 cops there, searching the kids for drugs.
DJ Dean came on and started playing his Tunnel Trance records. It sounded OK but nothing special, but that was only three tracks. Maybe he was only warming up.
The sound was cut halfway through the next track and the promoter jumped up next to DJ Dean and announced that the party was about to be shut down by the cops, but DJ Dean could play a couple more tracks. The music started up once more but was cut again after only a minute or two. A cop had reached over and ripped the needle off the record.
It was over.
There was DJ Dean and the promoter and two or three cops up on the stage. Some of the kids started yelling and abusing the cops. Bottles and glowsticks started flying towards the stage.
Most of the kids are mellow (*Candy Ravers*) but there are also the Hardcore brigade, *the Lads* who wear white baseball caps, those fiends who like Gabba, *Nosebleed* techno. Maybe they threw the bottles. I later heard that DJ Dean got hit in the head with a bottle. The kids were aiming at the cops of course.
I also heard that this was one of these Project Viking raids the cops do here every few months or whatever, where they move into a club or rave party in large numbers and shake down everybody for drugs.
Well, those cops were just doing their job I guess, but those duty-bound men and women of the NSW Police must live with the knowledge that on this night they deprived hundreds of bright-eyed raver kids of DJ Dean's Tunnel Trance.

Tooth Problem

If it wasn't enough that I had yet another bad headcold last week, just as I was at last getting over it, one of my teeth started giving me a hard time. It really started revving up on Friday and by Friday night it was roaring. Pain was howling through my lower jaw, throbbing in breathtaking pounding waves. It really hurt! Yes indeed, and it hurt so much I barely slept that night. The strongest painkiller I had was Nurofen Plus - which is usually pretty good (Codeine rules!) - but that night all each two-pill dose got me was another half hour of half-sleep, which, EXACTLY thirty minutes later, was brought to a brutal end by the return of THE PAIN. (Terry Goodkind has THE MAGIC, Stratu has THE PAIN.) It was almost funny, how much it hurt. That pain, so close to the brain! I found myself fantasising that the pain would move to my big toe, the furthest point, but sadly that wish did not come true.
Anyway, after a million years spent in HELL, 9:00am Saturday morning rolled around and I phoned the dentist and told the receptionist that if the dentist would not help me IMMEDIATELY I would start bawling like a baby right down the phone into her ear and she would be sorry. She said come as soon as you can. I broke the speed of sound then the speed of light getting over there and sat in the dentist chair. He looked at it and said, You have an abscess! You poor bugger, it must have been quite painful! I said, Ha ha! Yes! You got that right, all right!
He told me he wouldn't have to give me the needle because the nerves were all dead. He got the drill and drilled down to that nasty old abscess. When he got down to it, he shouted triumphantly that there was an enormous surge of pus pouring out of it and that I should be feeling a diminishing of THE PAIN. I slammed the tooth with my tongue to test his theory but THE PAIN slammed back in answer. Cruel! OK, then he kept going away and coming back and asking me if it was improved, but each time it was not so he decided to leave the hole there and plug it up with a little piece of cotton wool and I would come back first thing on Monday.
Well, does this saga ever end? You wish!
THE PAIN did eventually diminish, but not completely, so this morning before work I went back and he put some high-powered anti-bacterial nukejuice down into the tooth before filling it. I left and THE PAIN had grown again. How did it do that? That was not very fair was it? So at work I popped two Nurofens and they worked a little but only after 90 minutes. Then at lunch while I was trying to chew on the right side, I kept accidentally hitting the rotten tooth and THE PAIN came back amplified and bellowing. Plus the lady put way too much chilli sauce on my kebab! What a day! When I got back to the office at 12:45 I dropped two more Nurofens and this time they did not even do anything.
I had to leave work early (3:00) to return to the dentist, and would you believe it! by the time I got to the dentist THE PAIN had disappeared! Dentist told me that THE PAIN was a result of the battle raging between the nuke liquid he put under the filling and the abscess pus minions. He also showed me the bottle of the stuff he used and told me it was the same stuff used to treat gangrene. But even that stuff is the second most powerful weapon in his arsenal - next Monday I have to go back and get THE most powerful abscess napalm put in there. UGH!
No that is NOT the end!
But all I will write for now on this compelling subject.
Make sure you keep coming back for any future update of my tooth saga!