Are You High Maintenance? You Are Low Maintenance

Compared to most people, you are incredibly easy going. To be honest, you are truly a breath of fresh air. You are open minded about trying new things, and you're not upset when things don't work out. You are willing to go along to get along. And your attitude helps you truly enjoy life!

What I've been listening to lately...

1) Ida Maria - fortress round my heart
2) Manchester Orchestra - mean everything to nothing
3) Mandy Moore - Amanda Leigh
4) Mat Kearney - city of black & white
5) The Offspring - rise and fall, rage and grace
6) Metallica - reload

- Have you noticed that there is a huge surge of food franchise places fiercely competing with each other? You've got McDonald's McCafe line against Starbucks. KFC's Kentucky Grilled Chicken line against El Pollo Loco. El Pollo Loco's BBQ Chicken Sliders against Jack In The Box's Mini Buffalo Ranch Chicken Sandwich (what else is Jack going to make a mini?), etc, etc, etc... This is most likely the result of the poor economy, and companies trying anything they can do to get new customers and kill the competition. We all win I guess, since we have more options of what to eat (or is that a bad thing?). 

- Speaking of competition, Microsoft is now directly competing with Google in the search engine department by introducing us to "bing.com." The marketing geniuses are even calling it a "Decision engine," instead of a search engine, because it's search results are suppose to give you the actual options that you will want. There's some truth to that line of thinking, because when you do a search on Google, it does give you ALL the results, even the ones you don't want. Bing is suppose to eliminate that problem. I've tried Bing, and while I see the potential in what they are doing there, I'm personally going to keep using Google as my primary search engine. If you search "properly" on google, you should get the results you want anyway. I am however going to use bing as a backup search engine, whenever google is being difficult. In that sense, Microsoft is succeeding with this move.

- For those that matter, a reminder about this coming Friday, June 12, 2009. It's the day when the U.S. officially transitions to an all digital TV system. So those of you with them rabbit ears better have your digital converter boxes all ready to go. I'm actually anxious to see all the complaints that we'll be hearing on the days that follow, from people who still were not prepared for the switch, and can't watch anything on TV. They've been warning us for how long now? A couple of years? There really are no real excuses if you aren't prepared.
You can listen to this : Kevin & Bean show on upcoming Digital TV transition (audio)

Raise the Random Alarm

Honest Graduation Song (video)

Bret Michaels Clotheslines Himself at Tony Awards (video)

BIG RED TEXT (video)

Play "Keyboard Gato" Off, Keyboard Cat! (video)

Best Bud Light Commercial Yet (video)

The Headphones Sketch (video)

LOL (video)

Womens handball final ends in massive brawl (video)

Famous people painting (pix)

X-Play's Best of E3 2009 (link)

If you like trivia games, and you like playing with other people, then you have to play "1 vs 100" on xbox LIVE. This is a game that you play real time on the xbox 360 with as much as 100,000 other gamers (U.S. & Canada) on at the same time with you. There is even a live host that does the in-between talking, promoting the sponsors for the game, and reading e-mail or talking about photos sent by the gamers playing the game. You do have to be a "gold member" to play the game, but it's totally worth it, and is surprisingly very very fun.

This is a general knowledge trivia game that covers current events from politics to entertainment, history, random facts, trick questions, to of course video games. While you may not know all the answers, you do have a one out of three chance of getting it correct via multiple choice. You also directly play with four other gamers in your "location," and since voice chat is available, you can always share the correct answer with the others if you like. Along with getting the answer correctly, this is a game of speed in how fast you can answer the question, which overall determines how well you are doing in the game compared to the others.

Check out the video below or the video links after, that shows some of the questions I had to deal with in the show. As you can tell, there are some really easy ones toss in there, but it can be somewhat hard like a question asking what is the definition of "defenerestation?" or current event stuff like "what was stolen from Kevin Bacon while he was in the subway?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXoOzzsppQM

Two more videos from the June 6 game below...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuGj8Hfop_w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o5mYTfjbh4

The default area that the game will mostly likely put you in will be in "the crowd," and while you won't win anything by being in that area, you still play with everybody else. Now if you are wondering how to be in "the mob" or "the one," I'm not completely sure. Although it supposedly has to do with the other format of the game called "extended play" where it's just you with everybody else answering questions for 30 minutes. It's looking like your accuracy in how you answer helps the most, because this version does allow you to "skip a question" to help avoid lowering your percent accuracy. When 1 vs 100 is out of beta, being "the one" does give you the chance to win the grand prize of the game, which is $100 worth of Microsoft Points that'll allow you to buy more game add-ons (like extra stages, downloadable songs for Rock Band / Guitar Hero, etc...), to using xbox LIVE's movie/tv rental service, or just buying a picture pack / dashboard theme.

1 vs 100 is a completely fun experience to play, and I'd like to see more game shows translated to a video game version in this fashion. Seems like a natural thing to happen for trivia game shows.

Check out the schedule linked below to when the next game is going to be on...
http://www.xbox.com/en-CA/live/1vs100/fullschedule.htm

official page which includes rules and info...
http://www.xbox.com/en-CA/live/1vs100/

How Random Do We Know

X-Ray Funnies (pix)

WoW Nerd Arrested And Tasered (video)

Konami Code Rap (video)

Bleep Bloop: Xbox 360 Home Repair (video)

bad losers wall of shame (link)

Cramped Quarters (video)

Phone Sex Pranks: Sex Robot - NSFW (video)

Hardcore Tetris Orgy - NSFW (video)

Hardcore Super Mario Brothers 2! - NSFW (video)

Street Fighter Collab - NSFW!!! (flash)

"I'm not buying any more games for the Nintendo Wii." That's what I said after I saw the demo of "Project Natal" for Microsoft's xbox360 at E3. This is Microsoft's motion control peripheral that is meant to compete with the Wii, and based on what I've seen so far, they are off to an incredible start (released sometime in 2010). Don't know what I'm talking about? Just watch these three videos linked below...

Introducing Project Natal (video)
Real time "ricochet" demo (video)
and most importantly, watch THIS... you know what, I'll just embed it here...
Lionhead Milo Project using Natal (video)

What Room of the House Are You? You Are the Living Room

You are laid back and casual. You can have fun in almost any situation. You believe in being easy going. Life's hard enough, and you're not going to make it any harder. You are sociable and friendly. You welcome almost anyone into your life. You are completely unpretentious. You prefer living in a comfortable home to living in a showy home.

What I've been listening to lately...

1) Bob Dylan - together through life
2) CKY - carver city
3) Eisley - room noises
4) Heaven & Hell - the devil you know
5) Weezer - (red album)
6) Metallica - load

Movies I've seen recently...

Drag Me To Hell (2009)  A-

Director Sam Raimi and his screen writing partner/brother Ivan Raimi are back in the horror movie genre with "Drag Me To Hell." True to Raimi's own brand of horror made popular by the "Evil Dead" series of films, this movie also has that campy feel to it, providing scares as well as laughter. I mean what other movie out there right now has a scene where a piece of cloth or a slice of cake can be evil and deadly? Scary jump at you moments, some pretty gross and disgusting scenes, a horrific premise of a curse that will send you to hell, and a competition of trying to get the assistant manager position at a bank. This is classic Sam Raimi. Alison Lohman does a great job playing the lead role of Christine Brown, who is the unfortunate recipient of this curse. Her character starts off as pretty meek and mild, but she learns that she needs to be a lot more courageous (or desperate) when faced with the fact that she is going to be sent to hell in mere days. As an actress, Alison Lohman really puts up with a lot in this movie, from very physical scenes, having bugs thrown at her, to being in muddy rain. Also of note is Lorna Raver as the old gypsy woman Mrs. Ganush who pretty much stole the movie, and has got to be one of the most ferociously terrifying old woman in cinema, but at the same time she hilariously doesn't come off as much of a threat at times. "Drag me to hell" has the making of a future cult classic. Fun stuff.

Up (2009)  A-

With the main premise of "Up" being that it involves a house being flown to South America via a whole lot of helium balloons, the movie is clearly something of a fable than a story where you should expect pure realism. Logically speaking the movie has several flaws that we're just suppose to ignore, like dogs that can actually cook and pilot planes, or old men doing physical stunts but start having back aches when it's convenient for the comedy. Clearly there are liberties taken here just to tell the tale. What a tale this is though. The main strength and draw of "Up" is that it has a lot of heart with it's story and characters; especially that of the widowed Carl Fredricksen as voiced by Ed Asner, and the young Russell as voiced by Jordan Nagai. Speaking of heart, the montage alone at the beginning of the movie got me teary eyed at how bittersweet that whole sequence was, as there are some emotionally powerful moments in this film. Then combine that with this imaginative adventure of trying to get this house to "Paradise Falls," plus the comedy that is mostly derived from the dog characters who are able to do unbelievable things that dogs shouldn't be able to do (yet they still very much act like dogs), then you got yourself another masterpiece by the creative geniuses at Pixar. "Up" is simply a wonderful movie through and through, although while it is suppose to be a kids movie, I oddly enough think that this will resonate more with adults.

The Brothers Bloom (2009)  B+

Director/Writer Rian Johnson is really starting to leave his mark as a top talent for making indie films. With "The Brothers Bloom," he gives us a fun, whimsical, eccentric, fantastical movie, with some very charming characters. From the first opening sequence that explains the origins of the Brothers Bloom and how they started being con men, I had a huge smile on my face because I was greatly enjoying the style, look, dialouge, and creativity of what I was watching. That smile goes on for the majority of the movie, especially the first half of it. Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody excellently play the two con-men brothers, Stephen and Bloom respectively, with Rinko Kikuchi as the almost always untalkative character named Bang Bang who loves to blow things up. However it's Rachel Weisz as "the mark" of this grand con who steals the show. Weisz plays the role of the very wealthy but odd Penelope Stamp, who happens to have a vast amount of talents and knowledge, from juggling, skateboarding, to making pinhole cameras, as wonderfully shown in a montage sequence. There are some issues though, like moments where the movie blatantly cheats with a plot point just so the story could continue, and the last act of the film unfortunately didn't live up to everything that preceeded it as well. All in all, I greatly enjoyed "The Brothers Bloom" and wholeheartedly recommend watching this hidden gem of a movie.

The Random Journey (Revelation)

G4's E3 2009 coverage and live streaming (link)

Tonight Show Bloopers from the past 17 years (video)

fan made Green Lantern movie trailer (video)

embarrassing yearbook photo (video)

How to fit 300 DVDs on one disc (link)

Luigi Finally Snaps (video)

The Kindle 3 (video)

Cat Doesn't Want to get out of Bed - NSFW (video)

Anatomically Correct Slow Jam - NSFW? (video)

Inappropriate Soundtracks (video)