Diggnation Live: Except Not

On the latest Diggnation (Edward Cold Hands), Kevin Rose promised to broadcast the St Louis live show over the ‘net, using his Yahoo! Live stream. He also mentioned that he would post an announcement about it on his Pownce about it, just to make sure. Lo and behold, you log on to Netvibes to check the Pownce RSS… only find two things:

• You just missed the live taping of another show… by 8 hours.
• St Louis’ bars don’t all have internet.

What does this mean? There’s a new episode on the way, in addition to the live show… and there’s not going to be a feed to the live show. What a set-up!

They probably should have looked into it before announcing it, as opposed to just telling everybody “Oh, well, never mind, it’s not going down” eight hours before it was supposed to happen. I had this planned out for a few days now. Thanks.

Transformers

In case you didn’t hear, some genius took a picture of every single page the new Harry Potter book and made some torrents (two parts: up to page 495 and up to the end… the second one taken down :’( ). Other people who downloaded the two RARs ( < 100mb of images) posted several spoilers, one of which I unfortunately read, and can’t get that one line out of my head! Big leak… JK’s having all of the trucks shipping them outfitted with GPS trackers so this doesn’t happen again. But my main attraction today…. TRANSFORMERS! Yeah, so I just saw it yesterday… good movie. Review follows.

Great, great movie. When it first started running ads, and the first bits of news started popping up, I was just like everybody else… screaming “why?!” at the sky as loud as we could. So, first, they revive a series of toys going on a downward spiral… and then they create a movie for this new image… hiring Steven Speilburg and Michael Bay along the way! Hasbro had officially gone crazy. Except… then, the trailers started rolling in. And, well, they looked good. The critics began to filter into their pre-release screenings, and (impossible as it may sound) they liked it. Could Hasbro have pulled it off?

I’m here to tell you something. They pulled it off. And then some. (Not spoiling anything major) At one point in the movie, a shady goverment organization demonstrates the All Spark’s powers. They put a cell phone inside of a reinforced, bulletproof plexiglass box. All around the walls, there are claw marks and holes (solid sheet metal, by the way…). Zap the phone with the Spark’s radiation, and it comes alive. Unfolds, and starts shooting these cute (never thought I’d ever use this word in this context) missiles and chainguns, all shrunk down. Insta-transformer! But then it almost breaks the cube, and they zap it to death with… uh, who knows.

Great movie. They really did so well on the Autobot/Decepticon models… they move so incredibly fluidly, like they’re actually alive. Jumping up and half-transforming into a helicopter to take down a bunch of real ones, or going straight from plane to bot and swinging around part of the Hoover Dam… wow. And it’s almost believable, too… Unlike the original series and animated movie, they look like they’re real. Optimus’s trailer doesn’t just pop in and out. They are made of plates, instead of bending, growing, stretching metal… like they are organic, but can’t defy physics (too much).

Decepticons. You all know about how the original ones looked, right? Basically remodeled Autobots with a new paint job. Oh boy. Not here. These things are not the kind of thing you want to bump into in the middle of a well-lit field! I mean, everything about them was sharp, and screamed “kill kill kill” at you. check it out for yourself. And in the movie… wow. Take their original attitudes, stick ‘em in a psycho ward or federal prison for a few lifetimes, and then you get Michael Bay’s idea of one. These things are worth fighting, just so you don’t have to meet one again. Ever.

But to wrap it up… great movie. Up there with Die Hard 4.0.

4.5 out of 5
(Still no half star…)

On an alternate note, Transformers 2 was confirmed to be in the works, target release date being sometime 2009.

Live Free or Die Hard

If you have not seen this movie, get over to to your theater. This is not a movie you want to miss.

Let’s start at the beginning. A guy hacks a computer. Maybe ten minutes later, stuff starts blowing up. You’ve got everything from C4-packed computers (not kidding), to an entire factory, all mixing and matching shrapnel. There’s more to the movie than explosions, of course. I’m not saying seeing Bruce Willis smash a totalled police cruiser into a helicopter while getting shot at wasn’t cool, it’s just that there was way more to the movie than that.

There was a decent plot (You hear that, Pirates of the Caribbean?), which, of course, required half the props blown to tiny, indistinguishable pieces. The humor was also decent, and well-placed, so even the cheesy jokes flowed smoothly. If nothing else, stay to make sure Bruce talks to the villain a few times over a radio. Funny stuff. It was relatively plausible, too.

<SPOILERS>
First off, sorry for the sketchiness of details, I watched it about a week ago. On to the spoiler…

So a cop (Bruce) is sent to pick up one (Jason Long) of maybe a couple hundred hackers on a “black hat list” who might have hacked the DoD (Might have been something else, but whatever), but one by one, they’re found inside of blown-up wreckages (yes, you do get to see the computers blown up). Along the trip, a group of well-armed foreign people speaking who-knows-what-ian attempts to kill them. Several times. But they make it there anyway, and are sent to some other important place. Along the way, their guide is shot, the traffic system, the stock market, and most of DC go offline. So, they have to make sure it doesn’t happen to the East Coast by heading over to this one place that provides all the power to it. There, they are attacked again (predictably, isn’t it), and kill the main villain’s girlfriend (“Asian chick? Likes to kick people in the head?”). Bruce’s daughter is kidnapped, as is the hacker played by Jason, who is almost forced to unlock the US money market for Joe Villain. But then Bruce comes and blows some stuff up, shoots himself in the shoulder (knowing that a point-blank range, it will kill his captor), and overall saves the day.
</SPOILERS>

What are you doing here, still?! Go watch this movie!

4.5 out of 5
(What? I don’t have half a star!)

Side note: Yeah, I will eventually get around to watching Transformers. I hope it’s soon. My brother said it was good.

RvB Over 100

No, no, not some insanely complicated math problem. Red vs Blue, a Halo (1 and then 2) based show has, sadly, reached its end with episode #100, concluding season 5. RoosterTeeth (don’t ask), the group that produced it, released RvB 100 just today, and began taking preorders for the Season 5 DVD.

It was a great series, and amassed huge popularity during its 4-year-run (5 seasons, 4 years. Go figure) as you can tell from the forums. I learned about it from James (he’s going to a different school now, since 6th grade) in 5th grade, and since then, have been keeping my eye on it. But now that it’s over…

Torrents! I don’t have the hard drive space to store all of the episodes (1-3 and about half of 4 is about 2.5 GB), so I’m just getting the old episodes off of The Pirate Bay and burning them to VCDs. As Colin (pyosnka) says, “There are always reruns on BitTorrent!” RoosterTeeth used to have a rather large archive of all the episodes available, but has cut that down to a “running archive” of about 5 episodes that started at 1 and is now at 38, so you can’t get the old ones off of the site itself. But since they’re low on seeders (people who have 100% of the downloaded file and only upload to others) you can also get every episode from Machinima.com (episode 1 being here).