People Are Stupid (From Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule)

“People are stupid; given proper motivation,
almost anyone will believe almost anything.
Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie
because they want to believe it’s true,
or because they are afraid it might be true.
People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs,
and most of it is false, yet they think it all true.
People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference
between a lie and the truth,
and yet they are confident they can,
and so are all the easier to fool.”

WWF Summerslam 1997

(Note: This piece was written last year and yet somehow never got posted. Also, this is straight from Notepad to Blogpost with little edits, so some typos may leak through.)

I’m sure this’ll air on the Network eventually, but since I’ve got the VHS tape on hand, let’s give it a lookie now. Summerslam 1997 is perhaps the show that truly planted the seeds for future developments, whether it’d be the World title match between Bret Hart and Undertaker or the injury that almost derailed the biggest superstar to grace the WWF at that time. It’s been a good while since I last saw this show, so I guess it’s as good a time as any to give it another shot.

Continue reading “WWF Summerslam 1997”

Random Thoughts On… Ryback

Source: http://rajah.com/node/52918

Skip “Ryback” Sheffield has just wished WWE the best in all his future endeavors and is going to launch a line of food products called Feed Me More. I wonder if he could actually use that sort of thing.

Gee, I don’t know. I should feel bad that another guy with potential to be a big star was misused or whatever the case may be, but for some reason, I could never buy into the guy and the mystique around him. Part of it was his Tough Enough stint, where he was eating loads of food. And then there are the ears.

Good lord, the ears.

Still, good on him for walking and doing what makes him happy. I wish him all the best.

Random Thoughts On… Suicide Squad

So let me be upfront about this… I am not the biggest fan of the recent crop of DC films to come out of that camp. I’m talking about the Zack Snyder helmed stuff like Man Of Steel and Yawn Of Justice. Even going further back, I’ve also fallen a bit numb on what some would laughingly call the “holy” Dark Knight trilogy, of which only one of the films (The Dark Knight) holds up to any real degree. I’m not saying that I hate the films… well, Yawn Of Justice comes close… I just don’t think they’re all that good.

That having been said, watching the few trailers for this Suicide Squad film left me with some semblance of cautious optimism that this might be interesting at most and not completely worthless at worse. I was looking forward to this one; mostly to see how bad this might turn out.

Having just seen it and giving some deep thought, I can say with a clear conscious that Suicide Squad is perfectly average fare… and that probably makes it the best DC Film yet. Shocking, I’m sure.

Seriously, I actually enjoyed this one. It was simple, straightforward, no nonsense, no world building crap, just a bunch of bad guys doing bad things to even badder people. There was some decent gunfights, there was a couple laughs to be had at times, the mood was appropriately grim at times, and there was some attempt at making you care about these not-heroes, which is more than what I got out of the other flicks. In a strange way, Suicide Squad almost accomplishes the Iron Man affect; taking relatively lesser known characters and making people care about them in some form or another.

If there were any complaints to be had, I thought the drug-induced editing was a bit too much, what with all the “colorful” graphics and desperate attempt to infuse “livelihood” to a grim picture that was perfectly suited for the dark tone. The picture was dark to a point where it was difficult to see what was going on, The choice in music was absolutely dreadful, almost as if they just took whatever songs are or were popular and stuffed it in there without rhyme or reason in regards to tone (the actual score by Steven Price, on the other hand, is pretty good). And I’m particularly dismayed that they did very little with Katana (the one with the soul-stealing sword). Oh well.

Despite the quibbles, Suicide Squad was somewhat enjoyable and was completely terrible. Not a cinematic masterpiece nor a theatrical terror; just a perfectly average film that just happens to be the best film to come out of the DC Film Universe or whatever the fuck they’re calling it… and when “perfectly average” is the best you’re getting out of DC, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

Here’s hoping Wonder Woman doesn’t turn out to be a bust… sorry, poor choice of words.

Or is it?

Disney Games on GOG.com

For those who might not know, GOG.com has just posted three classic Disney games from the 16-bit days; The Lion King, The Jungle Book, and Aladdin. All three games are the original DOS versions running under DOSBox with slight tweaks that makes it easier to play this with a 360 controller (just use the Keyboard setting instead of the two Joystick settings) and yes, the Aladdin featured here is based on the Sega Genesis version from Virgin (the Super NES and Game Gear had entirely different games as far as Aladdin is concerned.)

Right now, I’ve only sampled a bit of Aladdin and for my part, it works just fine. Off the top, I like the MIDI soundtrack that feels like a step above what you got on the Mega Drive. However, I dislike the massive black border where all your stats are shown, as it covers a huge chunk of the screen and reduces overall visibility over the playfield.

So far, so good, though. Can’t complain all that much… yet.