This is from local artist, Preston Lee, who put together this mix over time, mixing and remixing it since 2000 to current date. He describes the piece as:

A constantly evolving dream of slowly drowning in a pool of water. Originally conceived as an acoustic guitar solo played in bell tones, it was moved to electronic medium in Cakewalk for orchestral score. The score later migrated to Sonar XL and eventually to Logic Pro where it was resampled with 24-bit synthesizers. It has been remixed in over a dozen different orchestrations along the way, though most have been lost.

All drum tracks were manually sequenced using an Alesis SR-16 for live play, and imported via MIDI for remixing. Organs, pianos, mallets, strings and all other instruments were originally recorded from live performance and later synthesized using EXS24, Sculpture, EVB3, EVP88, Ultrabeat and other tools.

Download audio file (Drown%20(Radioactive%20Mix).mp3)

Direct Download

Local Music Presents

The “Break it Down” Blog wants to help support local musicians and artists. While we are bringing you bits and pieces from Arizona’s local artists we would encourage the community to participate if you have a favorite band or artist you would like to share with the world.

If you have a favorite local band that you would like to promote, grab a link to an MP3 of theirs online (must be an MP3) and use the following format to post a player to their song down in the comments section, like this:

[audio:http://www.flergville.com/song.mp3]

Be sure to include information about the band as well so anyone interested can learn more or find out where to buy music from that band.

This is from local artist, Preston Lee, who put together this mix at Christmas time; pissed off about the Iraq war.

Download audio file (Christmas%20At%20War%20(Iraq%20Mix).mp3)

Direct Download

Local Music Presents

The “Break it Down” Blog wants to help support local musicians and artists. While we are bringing you bits and pieces from Arizona’s local artists we would encourage the community to participate if you have a favorite band or artist you would like to share with the world.

If you have a favorite local band that you would like to promote, grab a link to an MP3 of theirs online (must be an MP3) and use the following format to post a player to their song down in the comments section, like this:

Download audio file (song.mp3)

Be sure to include information about the band as well so anyone interested can learn more or find out where to buy music from that band.

Tickets for BlizzCon 2008, Blizzard’s annual convention taking place on October 10-11 in Anaheim, were sold out last night.

There were so many people trying to acquire tickets that the Blizzard store was temporarily unavailable several times over the past couple days.  Tickets for the convention were priced at $100 a piece and included access to discussion panels, hands-on play, tournaments, and the coveted goody-bag.

Obviously, there are going to be many new announcements and new footage shown.  Can’t wait to see some more of Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and hopefully we’ll hear what the new Blizzard MMO is going to be.  And let’s not forget the infamous sound-alike contest.

2005

2007

When I was a kid, I always thought it would be awesome if I could get paid to play video games.  There couldn’t be a better job in the world!  Up until within the last few years, the only viable way to accomplish this be a tester, spending hours and hours slaving over a screen trying to find bugs and glitches.  But things are changing fast.

Last week, the Birmingham Salvo captured the title of World Champion in the second season of the Championship Gaming Series (CGS) after defeating the San Francisco OPTX.  The CGS is one of the very solid up and coming venues for gamers to earn a living by doing what they love.  With major corporate sponsorships, including gamer fuel Mountain Dew and Microsoft, the CGS is bringing a competitive and entertaining broadcast to both DirectTV and G4 audiences

CGS caters to many types of gamers by combining games from a wide array of genres.  FIFA 08, Forza Motorsport 2, Dead or Alive 4, and Counterstrike: Source are the games being played this season, covering sports, racing, fighting, and first person shooters.  The CGS also adds the unique approach of playing as localized teams to mimic sports teams, making the competition more about overall team performance and less about individual efforts.

Can competitive gaming industry become a mainstream attraction?  It may not be there yet, but the CGS is making a very strong and solid attempt at making this childhood fantasy become a reality.

Ok, this is viral-marketing entering a new stage that it hasn’t been in before… supposedly “bootlegged” handy-cam footage of a private showing of a new Tron 2 movie trailer (named Tr2n); you know, cause movie studios don’t like to stir up buzz about their movies ahead of time:

In lighter news, the trailer for the Max Payne movie with Mark Wahlberg has come out… doesn’t look too bad, looks about a 6 out of 10 just because of the implied cheese factor; little things you notice, like how his gritty, world-trodden trench coat is brand new and pristine or the snow-covered Glock… cause he was standing there for 15mins holding his gun out so snow could land on it?

Otherwise looks pretty action packed and has that Ukrainian girl (Olga Kurylenko) from Hitman in it and she got nekkid in Hitman sooooo… fingers crossed!

NOTE: Correction below…

We are very pro-naked around here; in fact, I wrote the Vatican asking for them to declare the last Sunday of everything month as “Topless Church Sunday for Jesus”, but got no response.

I bought plane tickets and am probably going to go meet with the pope directly about this though, so I’ll keep you guys posted. I guess if I had to wrap up my feeling about this in one word… I basically feel like I’m doing God’s work.

So your welcome, God.

DOH, I’m wrong! It was actually Mila Kunis in the movie I guess… man doesn’t this look like Olga though?

Check out the trailer and see what you think… there is a scene towards the end where she finally looks like Mila Kunis; I just assumed the movie had evil-love-interest and good-love-interest, and at some point they fight each other covered in oil for Max’s love. Which is sort of like my real life, except more like Hugh Hefner’s life and nothing like mine.

Well this is just awesome. If you’ve never heard this song, it’s just this band singing the F word and S word… but it’s catchy:

To boot, apparently you can play it on Guitar Hero 2 as well, ha!

Thanks Brian Fernandes!

Badass! The remake of Clash of the Titans, an awesome movie from the 80s covering Greek lore, has gotten the director of the newly successful The Incredible Hulk remake, Louis Leterrier.

It also looks like the movie is going to be getting the fast-track treatment to get this puppy done and out by Summer 2010. Hope they don’t skimp on the story… word on the street is that IESB, folks who did the script review, loved it and said it rocked some socks off.

NOTE: IMDB seems to be still listing the original director for the remake and hasn’t updated it with Leterrier’s name yet.

Thanks Latino Review!

Let’s take a break from all the Diablo III news and concentrate on what is really important: Sex and the Internet.

I am announcing a world-wide moritorium on ugly celebrity sex-tapes… just stop… please god stop. We are going to click those video links out of curiosity and we don’t want to see somethings.

If you haven’t heard Mini-me (Verne Troyer) had a sex-tape with his girlfriend leak out on the internet and Up My Own Ass has a small clippet of it… it’s SFW, but still… getting stabbed in the mouth with a dwarf-tounge… that looks… oh god I’m going to stop thinking about it now.

Some shitting news hitting the wire this morning, looks like George Carlin dies at 71 due to heart failure early this morning.

I’ve never been a huge Carlin fan until I got older and started appreciating his cynical performances discussing the shit that makes us crazy today (where Us means mildly intelligent citizens… if you are an under-educated KKK member from the deep-south, you probably don’t think much of Carlin).

For the nostalgic folks reading this, you might dig this booking picture of him from the 70s, had no idea it was him at first… Carlin, the early years:

Thanks MSNBC!

Ted Regulski just sent along a link too awesome to not be passed along. Someone took the time to put together a 30min video of all the opening sequences from the most popular 80s cartoons (Heman, Thundercats, Ghostbusters, Inspector Gadget, Transformers, etc. etc. etc.)

For a kick-ass blast to the past, check it out… you probably watched most of these (if you didn’t then you might suck real bad… check with your doctor):

When your a porn star I imagine the types of things you want to be known for are… sex-related. It seems that porn star Mary Carey is known for farting… not little tiny ones, but ripping full on diarrhea farts all the time.

That is a really interesting tactic… that’s like being a dentist and having a reputation for blinding your patients because you get jimmy-arm when you drill teeth.

Anyway, check it out for yourself (Safe for Work)…

For those of you that saw this a few weeks ago when it originally dropped, you can skip this post… but for those of you that didn’t see it, it is pretty amazing.

Rick Saldana sends in a link to MUTO, which was a wall-painted animation by BLU recorded using stop-motion over the period of god-knows-how-long. It makes the wall painting look like it’s crawling along the wall doing things when in reality this is some dude painting an entire wall, taking a single snapshot of it, then erasing it and repainting it in a slightly different position… I can’t even imagine the patience required for this.

Thanks Rick!

Matt Young has been kind enough to send along a mini-review of the Roku, NetFlix set-top-box streaming media player used to stream the NetFlix “Watch it Now” library directly to your TV over the internet.

I had originally been concerned at the size of the NetFlix Watch-it-Now library as well as the picture quality, but Matt does bring up a good point… that if you aren’t a freaky Movie/TV junkie already, there is a ton of stuff for you to watch that you likely haven’t seen.

Here’s the full mini-review, thanks Matt!

Recently, Netflix announced that they and Roku had created a little device to allow you to stream Netflix “Watch Instantly” stuff to your TV over the net. Here’s the URL for the device:

http://www.roku.com/netflixplayer/

Using it is free as long as you have a Netflix subscription, and use of it is unlimited. The catalog of what’s available, however, is pretty severely limited, but they *do* have an awful lot of older movies, tv shows, etc… I had no trouble finding a bunch of stuff I wanted to watch… some Hitchcock movies, “The Orphanage”, a bunch of old tv shows (Voltron :))

The device is pretty awesome… just hooked it up to power, ethernet, and HDMI to my monoprice switch. Setup was a breeze… it updated itself. You use your computer to fill the queue, and the device see the stuff instantly. Streaming quality was fantastic and completely uninterrupted. It’s nice to be able to decide what you want to watch just by browsing on your computer and not waiting for anything. Well, you wait about 15 seconds for the initial buffering. For $99, well worth it.

Downsides: You can’t rip the DVD and keep it forever (but now I know I want to get the Orphanage and download it to scare other people with), not many new releases (though apparently they’re trying to broker a lot more ‘watch instantly’ arrangements), not BD quality - just DVD quality. Good for old stuff, but I still want Blu-Ray delivered by Netflix.

Are you a Star Wars fan? Then I’m about to drop some atomic shit right up your ass…

• How exactly did George Lucas develop the script for the first Star Wars?
• Why were the prequels so uneven when the originals were so good?
• Did he really have a masterplan for six, nine, or even twelve episodes, and why did the official Lucasfilm position keep changing?
• And just how big an influence were the films of Akira Kurosawa on the whole saga?

“The Secret History of Star Wars” is a completely free, unauthorized e-book by Michael Kaminski that uses evidence, interviews, articles, etc. from history to tell the “true” history behind Star Wars, and not the Lucas Arts “official” history.

How freaking awesome is that?

You probably already knew that, but the part of this news that should blow your skirt up is:

• Director: Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean)
• Writer: John Logan (Academy Award-nominated writer of Gladiator, The Aviator and Sweeney Todd)

For the folks that aren’t familiar with the game, it takes place in the 1950s/1960s alternate future and begins with your airplane crashing in the ocean. You swim over to a light house sticking out of the water and soon find it’s the entrance to Rapture; an underwater utopia created by this power-crazed guy wanting to create a world/civilization that could exist with “no limits”. So biological engineering and DNA tampering ran rampant until the utopian society eventually destroyed itself. There are twists and turns to the plot and overall I hear a truely badass game… I haven’t played it yet (still waiting for the PS3 version).

So yea… looks like they are taking the Triple-A hit game and going to turn it into a pretty badass franchise (Verbinski loves his franchises). BioShock 2 is already slated for a late 2009 release, so there will be plenty of content to work with.

OMGZ, ok if you watched the episode of Lost last night and haven’t read the Time Loop Theory yet, then you really need to in order to make sense of it, and honestly, I think enjoy the show a little more since you won’t be so goddamn confused.

That was an awesome episode last night… I can’t tell if it was awesome because I had read the theory and saw how these pieces fit together, or if it was genuinely a good episode. I wonder if I had never read that theory, if I would be raging mad right now brain-hate for the writers…

I will point out that there were a few things that occurred that don’t jive with the Time Loop Theory, namely:

• The original Time Loop Theory (TLT) states that the Blackrock was dragged up onto the island in the 1800s, and the decedents formed the Dharma Initiative. But in last night’s episode, Widmore states that the island was his and that Benjamin took it away from him.
  • SPECULATION: This made me think that Widmore actually created the Dharma Initiative in the 1960s
  • SUPPORT: The TLT mentions that Benjamin and some of the original Dharma folks split off and fragmented from the Dharma group because they didn’t like the experiments that were being performed, which sounds very much like a Widmore ideal.
  • SUPPORT (from Wife): The TLT says that Dharma were the offspring of the original Blackrock folks, but if none of the people on the island could conceive how is that possible? This just supports the idea that Widmore found the island later and brought the initiative there to the island.

• QUESTION: How did Widmore originally find the island? How did Benjamin cause him to not be able to find it anymore?
  • The TLT mentions that the island has always been surrounded in a time-bubble and until the Blackrock beached on it, wasn’t penetrable. This doesn’t make sense, because how did Widmore find it and create the Dharma Initiative?
  • SPECULATION: Widmore is really old, and likely from the Blackrock or something epic like that because it sounds like the island used to be his baby.
  • SPECULATION: I think Jacob and Widmore have a relationship that hasn’t been explained yet and they are both likely from the Blackrock.

• It’s possible that Widmore came in on Blackrock, eventually discovered the proper bearing to get off the island, and went to the mainland to create the Dharma Project to come back and study it. For years that worked, but then Ben instigated a rebellion and “cleansed” all the Dharma folks that were doing abusive/bad/wrong work.
• So possibly Richard Alpert and others were part of Blackrock but splintered from Widmore early on and lived as natives on the island until the Dharma Project was stopped with Ben’s help.
• After cleansing the Dharma folks, Ben, using possibly the Swan installation to manipulate the island’s magnetic properties/shield to change the bearing that allows items and people in and out of the island’s magnetic field so Widmore couldn’t get back in (e.g. like changing the combination on a lock)
• Widmore eventually re-found the island using the different monitoring stations around the globe, we happened to see the one on Antarctica that one time that the Swan station imploded on itself. It was listening for strong magnetic pulses which have only happened two times in history according to that station.
  • CLARIFICATION: Even though Widmore’s mercenaries already found the island in last night’s episode, that is taking place in 2007/2008, but when Ben goes back to 2005 and goes to Charles’s room he tells him and he’ll “never find the island” because Charles technically hasn’t found the island yet and doesn’t find it until 2008 real-world-time.
  • SPECULATION: This means that all the “flash forwards” we are seeing are actually not the 2008+ time of the 6 characters off the island, it is those 6 characters getting off the island in 2004 (after using the time machine at some point in the future of the series) and re-living the last 4 years of their life. That’s why Sayid is off the island, knows Ben, and is burying his wife in 2005 in last night’s episode.

Saw this over on I Watch Stuff, it’s the “trailer” for Tokyo Gore Police, which is a ridiculously over the top 80/90s-style cheesy Japanese gore-fest… sort of like Riki-Oh, if you ever saw that or to a lesser extend the original Toxic Avenger from Troma.

So if you like movies like that cause you are curious how folks are going to get mangled, you will probably dig this big time:

It seems that DreamWorks has snagged the rights to the Ghost in the Shell movie… one of the best animes out there.

They described the movie as a 3D (yay!) live-action (booo!) hybrid and said that GITS provided the perfect story to be delivered on that platform.

Having just watched Appleseed: Ex Machina, and thinking it was fantastic, I was really hoping that Ghost would have gotten that 3D/Cell-Shaded look:

instead of some big-name Hollywood actor trying to pull off crazy stunts but ending up looking like a chump in the process… <cough>Æon Flux</cough>

I ran across this new somewhat by accident… but then again I tend to do awesome things by accident. One time I accidentally grew 3″ taller… and another time I accidentally smashed a tiger and a lion together so hard that I made a Liger.

Anyway, if you are an anime fan or even have just seen a few animes you liked, but tend not to like them (I’m getting more like this the older I get) I’d strongly suggest you check out the Trigun series. It’s a 1-season series about a guy named Vash (above) that has a 60-billion-dollar bounty on his head because everywhere he shows up tends to get destroyed and for some reason he can never be captured or killed.

The show is mostly light hearted fun, but in the middle and especially towards the end, the characters you come to love start having to make some really serious decisions that you empathize with. My favorite part of the series is that Vash is not normal. He’s a closet super-badass that tries to hide his skills for the most part (e.g. can dodge bullets, never misses, etc.). There are also moments in the anime where they call back to the “lost technology” and other lore about the world they are on, and why Vash seems to know so much about this, etc. etc.

Anyway, if you saw the series, you loved it and the news that they are working on a movie for release in 2009 will blow your skirt up. It sounds like some serious effort is being put behind it as well, check it out (from Trigun Maximum mag vol 14):

It will feature an original story developed by manga author Yasuhiro Nightow and director Nishimura Satoshi who collaborated with Nightow on the Trigun TV series and is also known for his work on the Hajime no Ippo anime. The script will be helmed by veteran anime writer Kobayashi Yasuko, with character designs from Yoshimura Takahiro.

I checked IMDB and Netflix and didn’t see any placeholders for this movie yet. Either it will be a late entry in the system (not well known) or it will not be a dual Japanese/American release and we will need to wait for sub/dub release. Either way, I’m pumped.

This post is for all the Dune fans out there (tdod!), looks like a new Dune movie is in the works (IMDB Link):

the producers have secured the rights to the Dune novel from Frank Herbert’s estate and are looking for writers to provide a screenplay that is true to the original text.

So yea… if the David Lynch one made your brain break, hopefully this one will be a little less… randomly nonsensical for folks that didn’t read every single Dune book, and hopefully more main stream…

MOR-DEEEEEP!

BTW, for folks that never watched it. Apparently (according to FOLKS), the Lynch Dune movie was good, and the 2-part mini series was teh suck. So if you want to check it out, rent the Lynch one with Kyle MacLachlan in it.

For the fans of the show out there, this is an excellent (and funny) recap of Seasons 1, 2 and 3 of Battlestar Galactica titled “What the Frack?”

Just in time for Season 4, thanks VE3D!

Well it’s official, looks like New Line (now Warner Bros) is going to go forward with the Gears of War movie:

“We’ve got our script on and a director we’re about to attach. We’ll hopefully make that early next year for the summer of 2010,” said Godfrey.

If you haven’t caught it already, there has been massive conversations at BIDB about which actor should play which part.

With the help of reader DarkboyR32 we have come up with the following “master list” of who we think should play each character, check it out:

Markus Fenix (Batista):

Karl Urban (Dom):

Mighty Rasta (Cole):

Ryan Reynolds (Baird):

Jason Scott Lee (Carmine):

OR

Rick Yune (Carmine):

Kristen Bell (Anya):

Michael Ironside (Captain):

Interesting… it looks like there is going to be a Live Action remake of Akira in 2009. So far the two rumored roles for the leads (for the main guy and his friend that gets sucked into the government experiment) are:

Leonardo DiCaprio:

Joseph Gordon-Levitt:

both actors I love (DiCaprio after The Aviator and The Departed… he really came into his own in the last few movies… I love the guy now).