Pikkt – live!

Well, after faffing about with ASP.NET for the past couple months, I've finally finished the website idea that launched me into the insane world of web design (after a long absence since the heady days of uni and mucking about with HTML).

The site is called Pikkt and it's a lottery number generator and aggregator. The idea is that people can add numbers to the database that they think will win the lottery. The site will display the most popular numbers from the past seven days. There is also an everyday random number generator.

Why add numbers to the database? Let's just call it a really big stats experiment... (why yes, I did enjoy my time in quant stats at uni).

Check out Pikkt here - http://www.pikkt.com

Movie Ticket Stubs

The greatest movie ticket stubs website - Movie Ticket Stubs - is in the process of migration from Geocities to Wordpress. All the content is being moved, one post at a time. It's time-consuming, but the blog format suits the original site well.
Check it out here - Movie Ticket Stubs!

Open? Closed?

LOL, whut?

Seen outside the bus stop on Lonsdale St, between Elizabeth and Queen St, Melbourne, Australia.

Swimming Pools and Waterfalls

Here's a link to Steve's latest and greatest - Swimming Pools & Waterfalls

SilentDilemma featured on Youtube

The Steve made it onto the featured vids for Youtube Australia. Here's the link to his profile page.

Bus vs Plane

On a bus, you're crammed onto an uncushioned seat with very little leg or arm-room and there is no on-board entertainment. On a plane, the seat is cushioned, there is a seat-belt, there is more arm and leg-room than in a bus and there is on-board entertainment.
On a bus, you have to bring your own food and drink. On a long-haul plane, you are served two meals, snacks, alcohol and simple spirits.
On a bus, you'd probably have to buy an extra ticket for the luggage you'd be able to take on a plane. On a plane, there is a luggage allowance.
On a bus, there is no toilet. On a plane, the toilet might smell but it's better than going into the sick-bag.

A bus ticket in Melbourne from the suburbs to the city (return trip) costs roughly $10.00. The round-trip distance is approximately 50 kilometres. There are about 250 working days in a year, so a person will spend $2500 a year on bus fares while travelling 12,500 kilometres. This equates to $0.20 per kilometre.

A plane ticket from Melbourne to London (return trip) costs roughly $2000. The round-trip distance (according to the almighty Google) is approximately 33,800 kilometres. This equates to $0.059 per kilometre.

Bus vs. Plane - you decide.






Moron - of course, Plane wins!

Random Post

Refer to title.

Ryan Adams @ The Palais

RARwwraraAARRAAAARRA

rrwwaaaarrrarararaaarwwarawwwara

The Departed

Finally got around to watching The Departed.


I have nothing sarcastic, ironic or snarky to say. It's a damn fine movie. Go see it.

So, how many ticket stubs would I give to watch this movie in a cinema again?

7 - but they would be the teeth of Jimmy what's-his-name.

Editors

Plot: A bunch of poms get on stage and prance around in the grand delusion that they can actually play music.

Review: What passes for music nowadays is fairly broad and mostly crap. In the case of the Editors, these people think they can get on stage and play a brand of rock that uses minimal distortion, too many effects pedals and even a fricking keyboard. Keyboard? This is rock, people - NO KEYBOARDS ALLOWED!

And another thing: support acts are supposed to suck, they are NOT supposed to be any good - or, if they are good, the support act's genre is completely unrelated. This is for the safety of the main act so that there is no unexpected upstaging. Whoever organised the support act (called Mercy Arms, by the way) for the Editors should be shot.

The gig itself wasn't a complete loss. There was the obligatory emo-loner who stood right next to the stage, scoping out the venue (and probably thinking he looked way cool) while people were still arriving. There was the teeny-bopper dicklick who thought he was a rabbit and bounced around in his own imaginary mosh-pit (yes, I pushed him out of my way after my surreptitious attempts to trip him in mid-bounce failed). And there was plenty of rock-pointing by the audience, which looked as stupid as it sounded; I refused to point at anyone, no matter how much they rocked.

So, how many ticket stubs would I give to watch this movie in a cinema again?

5 - but they would be the smashed teeth of the cockmunch teeny-boppers who shoved their way to the front.

88 Minutes

Plot: The old dude from Scarface and the chick from Cybill run around solving crimes.

Review: Prior to seeing this movie, I didn't think there could ever be anything quite so boring but I now stand corrected. Despite the presence of the pasty-white-hot chick from Cybill, some half-way decent acting from Scarface (though he still doesn't know how to fake crying), 88 Minutes just felt like it went nowhere. The plot was forced, a mish-mash of cliches from countless other crime-thriller films and probably would have been improved with the addition of zombie ninjas.

So, how many ticket stubs would I give to watch this movie in a cinema again?

None - what a waste of time.

Music and Lyrics

Plot: A songwriting English dude finds a muse in the form of that chick who's only famous because she was in ET.

Review: I don't know how to quite describe this movie because for the first time in a long time, I actually enjoyed watching something. I know what you're thinking - you've probably got an expression on your face like our two fine characters here. But this movie had everything - thrills, spills and kills! (Musical ones, at least). Perhaps it was the frustrated musician in me or perhaps it was a sheer enjoyment of seeing the cinematic equivalent of a pop chick on screen but Music and Lyrics was thoroughly enjoyable.

Don't fuck with me because I'm revealing cleavage down to my navel.

The ubiquitous English dude with the dry wit (I forget his name) was great and the chick from ET (I can't believe she's all grown up), was looking fairly good.


Big sloppy jumpers are so in.


There was laughter, there were tears, there was incredible chemistry. And no, I was not delusional from lack of sleep or imbalanced due to recreational substances - this was a decent movie. And no, that was not sarcasm. That wasn't sarcasm either.

So, how many ticket stubs would I give to watch this movie in a cinema again?
3 - but it would be necks of all the broken guitars in the English dude's collection.

Catch and Release

Plot: A chick flick meets chick flick with the chick from that other chick flick in it.

Review: Wow - what an incredible waste of time. For once, I should've listened to Rotten Tomatoes and not bothered but I was swayed by the fact that Death Cab For Cutie featured in the film and any film with a cool song on the soundtrack is automatically cool, right?

WRONG!
The film begins with an interesting premise but soon enters the realms of the improbable and highly moronic (as most chick flicks do - except for the ones featuring John Cusack because he's cool by default (as in Must Love Dogs, Serendipity, America's Sweethearts, Con Air)).
It's a great shame, something that not even Kevin Smith's participation can save.

So, how many ticket stubs would I give to watch this movie in a cinema again?
Half - but it would be a broken fishing rod.

Pathfinder

Plot: Conan the Barbarian meets Apocalypto - and no, it's not a good thing.

Review: This movie sounded like it could have been another action-classic but instead it ended up being a horrifying train-wreck. The initial premise was intriguing - a Viking is left stranded in North America, assimilates into the native American villages and ends up protecting them against the Viking invaders. Unfortunately, halfway through the movie, everything turns to nonsense as the Viking invaders seem to lose all sense and rationality when they commit all of their effort and energy to chase a single man. Thousands of hectares of nice, fertile land to settle in but no - the Vikings want to chase one person across the eastern coast of America. I know sliding down snowy mountains is fun, but really...

Check out the awesome tobogganing action

We later find out that the Vikings are systematically destroying all the native villages, which makes sense because they're bloodthirsty inhumane villains. Of course, it makes even more sense to trust the one person who has been living with your enemy for the past 15 years - there's no chance of betrayal there, right?



Ooh, what a large sword you have!



Of course, the movie isn't a complete waste of time. There's Karl Urban from that movie with the little people, the chick from Daybreak, the guy who played Conan on the TV series and the bad guy from Highlander (playing yet another bad guy). It's just a shame that the direction was aimless, the plot laughable and the potential for awesomeness wasted.

Actual frame from the movie (left). Special effects so life-like, it's nothing like a stunt-manikin (bottom).







So, how many ticket stubs would I give to watch this movie in a cinema again?
1 - but it would be the finger from the string of trophies owned by the Vikings.

20th August 2007

Well, it seems that Ryan Adams is coming back to Australia for another tour. His last tour clashed with Interpol, so my friends and I ended up travelling to Sydney in order to catch a show. Such bad scheduling was probably due to the fact that the Ryan keeps his eyes closed most of the time.

But what else should we expect from someone who doesn't even play an instrument - instead, he has hired several slaves to do his bidding (and probably also his seeing, as his eyes are so very tired). And what's the deal with calling his slaves 'The Cardinals' - he should just be done with it and call them Whiskeytown. Besides, it's not The Cardinals if there isn't any Catherine Popper...

Public Transport morons part 2

So, you're riding on a tram or bus on a comfortable seat.  At the next stop, more passengers board and one of them sits in the next row behind you.  You hear the rustle of a bag, perhaps a packet of food-stuffs being opened.

Then, it hits you.  The miasma, the malodorous stench emanating from the cavernous maw of your fellow traveller.  You hold your breath in a vain attempt to protect yourself but the reek is relentless, like waves on a beach, like The Terminator.  You look around but there's nowhere else to go, nowhere to move - you're boxed in.

But it doesn't end there.  Next comes the smell of food but you're confused as it's mixes into the scent of rotting flesh from the mouth of the person sitting behind you.

With each crunch and chew, you cringe as the bouquet of your favourite snacks is now indelibly linked to the horrific inescapable effluvium around you. Then you remember something else and grimace - smell is caused by molecules of the object in question, floating through the air.
It is that person's saliva, that person's food, that person's foul juices in your nose.

Welcome to public transport.  Enjoy your stay.

Goal 2: Living the Dream

I recently had the pleasure (or misfortune, depending on your opinion on football/soccer) of viewing Goal 2: Living the Dream. It also happens to be the sequel to Goal so, yes - the addition of the number 2 and subtitle isn't completely superfluous.

Goal 2: Living the Dream.

Plot: A bunch of dudes run around a field and kick a ball for 90 minutes. And they get paid a ridiculous amount of money to do it.

Review: Sports movies as dramas are generally failures - anyone would be hard-pressed to name more than a handful that were actually good, except maybe for martial arts movies (just don't say that out loud or a bunch of sport-hating ninjas will jump through your window and cut your head off). Good sport movies as comedies are much more common, for example, Dodgeball, Talledega Nights and Saw.
In the case of Goal 2, it's obvious that the producers knew that they couldn't possibly match the results of the aforementioned classics, so they made their own movie in the vein of Uwe Boll, film-maker extraordinaire, in the hopes of being so bad that it wrapped around the good-bad scale and ended up being good.

In Goal 2, Santiago is transferred to Real Madrid and rekindles his scandalous love-affair with Gavin Harris, his team-mate from Newcastle FC. Here are some shots of their time in Spain sharing loving glances, bathing each other in exotic fragrances and training together with the song, "Here Without You" by Three Doors Down playing in the background - who could have envisioned a more touching scene?

Goal 2, however, serves up more plot-twists in an effort to out-do even Empire Strikes Back. Santiago meets his long-lost family, including a little shit-kicker who steals his stuff and is generally a whiny little brat that was born to be hated by the entire world. Granted, Santiago is pretty stupid for letting some strange kid into his bad-ass Lambo just because of a picture of a woman who happened to look like his mother. Didn't the word "scam" ever cross his mind? Obviously not, at least until the point the little bastard ran off with his stuff.
The moral of the story - don't trust little impoverished kids when you're a super-rich mega-star. And hire better CGI animators who can actually do footballs.
So, how many ticket stubs would I give to watch this movie in a cinema again?
2 and a half - but they would be the shredded remains of Santiago's pre-marriage to that pasty pom.

Curse of the Golden Flower

So, it's been a while since I've done a movie review. With Movie Ticket Stubs being quiet for a while, I think it might be good to migrate over to a new medium - the amazing blog! So - on with the newest entry to the Amazing New Movie Ticket Stubs (without the stubs)!

The Curse of the Golden Flower (or how Chow Yun Fat is a dick)

Plot: Dudes in dresses prance around and sing songs in a comedy-classic!

Review: To say this movie was slow is an understatement - but once it got going, it was a roller-coaster ride of cool party-hats and crazy motherfuckers. That's right, party-hats. Check out the Princes of China; they're pretty cool. In fact, no one else in the movie wears party-hats because the Princes have a special dispensation for party-hats in China. And here's an added bonus picture of the afore-mentioned motherfucker. But moving on to what's important - my favourite part of the movie. Witnessing the power of the Chow!

As you can see, here's the youngest brat getting bitch-slapped by The Chow. That must be the proudest moment of any actor's career, although the character does also end up with the dubious honour of getting beaten to death by The Chow's golden belt but that's another matter for the Freudian students amongst us.
In fact, the whole movie is a bit of a Freudian paradise, with a sprinkling of Oedipus for taste, but I don't want to ruin it for those of you who haven't seen it. Just try not to think too much about where all the soldiers came from or where the fuck one would keep a bunch of giant, metal mobile walls in an Imperial Palace (probably in the Giant Metal Mobile Wall room).

So, how many ticket stubs would I give to watch this movie in a cinema again?
3 - but they would be the shattered remains of the cup from the incomprehensible ending to this shambles of a movie.

Republishing

How do I republish the blog without making a post?

Neko Case @ The Spanish Club

Neko Case playing at The Spanish Club on Johnston St, Melbourne - 1st Feb 2007.