Free Candy For Everyone

Just watched Hot Fuzz and I was disappointed. I had high hopes for huge laughs. It wasn’t huge laughs. For most of the movie it was actually vaguely amusing but slightly painful. The last 30 minutes or so were the best part of the movie, for me. I laughed out loud a few times. All in all, the movie was clever but I actually found the extras funnier than the movie. well, some of them.

Don’t want to give away anything about major plot points, but vaguely the movie is about a London cop who’s too good at his job so he’s “promoted” to a position at a quiet town in the country. And there’s not much going on there, apparently. There’s a long portion of the movie where he’s becoming more and more lost and it was just a bit painful. But ultimately there’s a climatic shoot out like you’d expect from the cop movies it’s parodying and that was pretty fun.

To the extras. The outtakes were quite amusing. There’s just something about watching actors completely unable to keep a straight face. They have a long video of their American press tour which starts out quite funny, but as the tour continues, they got obviously more and more exhausted and the humor becomes a bit … crude.

Whoa - Hot Fuzz out grossed Shaun of the Dead in just 4 days, or so says the end of this documentary. That’s impressive.

I find few movies or shows that actually make me laugh out loud. I’m constantly watching movies, and I’m willing to try most anything. But this was one that I thought would really be a keeper for me. Unfortunately I have to say it was just one that was nice to visit.

Updated my blogroll in the sidebar for the first time in probably over a year. Added a few, removed a few. Need to keep it more updated - let me know if any links go dead or anything.

When writing my post of top time wasters I forgot one of them - Facebook. Facebook, you say? Yeah, the social networking site/application platform. With applications like iLike, I can lose way too much time. iLike is a music site, it integrates with the favorites artists you have listed on Facebook to tell you about upcoming concerts by your favorite bands. You can also use it to embed music in your profile. But my favorite way to waste time with it is the music quiz. It’s basically name-that-tune. They play a clip and you have to identify the artist or the song title. The quicker you respond, the more points you get. I like trying to answer as quickly as possible so my average response time is really low. It’s great fun and somehow I managed to just sit there listening, listening for quite some time.

Every time I go over to MySpace I cringe at the loud busy pages. But Facebook is so slimmed down. And it has great apps like Vampires vs. Werewolves that let’s you bite your friends, and Flixster that let’s you rate and review movies. It has a cool little Movie Compatibility Test that let’s you see how much like your friends your music tastes are.

And that’s enough about Facebook. I think I’ve written 3 posts about how fun it is. That’s enough. It’s not all that much fun, but it is a nice way to waste a few minutes here and there.

“Space Siege”? Ooh, that’s terrible. I’m sorry, but that is so completely generic. And it doesn’t even make sense! “Space Siege” is the recently announced new action RPG by Gas Powered Games. I suppose they want to tie it to their previous title, “Dungeon Siege”, which is, of course, also a terribly generic title. But somehow it makes a bit of sense to think of sieging a dungeon. But Space Siege? Sieging space doesn’t seem to really mean anything.

Considering it’s a PC RPG chances are I won’t play it. But who knows what I’ll think in a year when it comes out. I may well be back on a PC gaming kick. But that name just makes me laugh. Silly name.

This weekend I turned on my Xbox 360 for the first time in a while. Played some games, then looked at the Xbox Live Marketplace to see what was there. They had some clips and trailers from Comic Con for free download. I loaded one up and took a look. They also had a free download of the first episode of Jericho.

They had it available in HD so I downloaded it. I’d been meaning to watch the show, I just somehow missed it when it was on the air. The show was canceled but saved by its fans when they sent over something like 20 tons of nuts to the network to show their support. The download service was pretty cool. It just downloaded in the background, and as soon as it got to about 10% it said it was ready to play. It just continued downloading while I watched. No problems, the interface was simple. No commercials, of course. And in HD! I don’t know that I’d want to “buy” episodes of shows on Xbox Live, in general. The hard drive on my Xbox is the original one, only 20 gigs. It would fill up pretty quickly if I were getting lots of shows on it. There’s no permanence to it. Maybe if it were a “rental” for a few cents instead…