As should be no surprise, I got the hell away from my roots. You can die up there.

But anyway, I digress. I do that a lot. You may have noticed. So I bought a motorcycle. It’s an old beater, but a lot of fun to ride. The price was right (cheap) and the thing runs. I put a hundred odd miles on it without undue smoke or smells and figured it was worth while. Now Mandrake, my car, is one of my prized possessions, so I started thinking about how riding the two differ.

Both have manual transmissions, but shifting the bike isn’t quite the same as shifting the WRX. You need to give the bike a lot more gas, and make sure it’s got some ass behind it. In addition the thing revs a lot higher, so my usual tendencies to keep RPMs low doesn’t work. When someone learns to drive stick a lot of times they won’t give it enough gas. They are, but they’re giving it a constant amount of gas and you need to vary the throttle as you shift. The throttle curve is different for the bike, different enough that my reflexes are off.

Not quite as intrusive but more obvious is the difference in exposure. A car is like a little house. You’ve got walls, windows, doors, and no one can directly come in. That’s not true, of course, but that’s the way it feels. I’ve stalled out in my car and not really cared because it felt like I was in private. On the bike that’s different. On that thing you get the impression people are watching you and wondering what the hell you’re doing. On the other hand, it’s a lot easier to appreciate the scenery as you drive. The wind is nice. Very different sensations.

The safety thing hasn’t become an issue yet, and I’d like to keep it that way with both. Internal air conditioning is wonderful though. In and of itself the AC is the reason my bike will never replace my car. Music is also an issue. Really, the car is unbeatable on every form of luxury. The bike does get better gas mileage, and it is fun to fill up for $6. Basically though, riding the bike is an end, in and of itself, while in almost all situations, driving somewhere is simply a form of transport. Thus while driving is probably superior on most grounds, it’s also not an activity. Not until I get to a racetrack or head up independence pass again. I think I’ll go do that on two wheels and see how it works.

This makes me want to ride a horse for the sake of comparison, but every place I’ve looked at all they offer is riding in little circles for a few months. Boring. Jousting or GTFO.

“What’s he doing?”

“Hanging a pirate.”

“Gunnar, what are you doing?”

“Hanging a pirate.”

And done. It was the first scene, so I’m not exactly spoiling anything here. But that sort of set the tone for the rest of the movie. Huge, hilariously over the top fight action sequences filled with the EOD jump (That’s where you survive an explosion by jumping just as the shockwave hits you. It works. Really. But only if you’re screaming something macho.) and absurdly Freudian guns fill this movie. At the end of it I was laughing so hard my cheeks hurt, and I loved the movie. It is like Shoot ‘Em Up, only a little less silly.

You’ve got a bunch of dudes. They shoot people. There is a female cast member, but her job is to motivate the bunch of dudes to shoot more people. These dudes are so over-the-top that the cloud of macho eclipses the tropical sun, setting the final fight at night. It is hilarious. The dialogue directly and indirectly lampoons itself, while at the same time providing perfectly functional transition from scene to scene. Functional in that you know why you’re there, and it sure isn’t to hear philosophy.

Like Kill Bill, I thought the Expendables was both a spoof and homage to the source material. In case there’s any doubt, that source material is ’80s action flicks. It does an excellent job of telling the audience that yes, it knows how silly it is. If you have a problem with that, this is not the movie for you. But if you like lunacy by caliber, it delivers. There are a number of things in the movie that they could have done for maximum awesome, and they hit most of them. For example, Randy Couture, one of the UFC’s greatest stars, is in it. So too is Steve Austin. They are on opposing sides. The fight happens. It is awesome. When everything was finished, I wanted two hours more stupid. I hope they make a sequel, but I’m worried they might take it seriously, which would ruin all the fun.

Ultimately, the movie delivers exactly what it promises, and nothing more. Well, there might have been something more, but it blew up halfway through. If you want stupid ’80s action done with modern special effects and techniques, this is exactly that. If you want anything else, you have come to the wrong place. In conclusion, on a scale of the Punisher to Predator, I give it a .45 ACP. That’s on fire and explodes.

Normally you get these action flicks which the doubt conflict where in the primary conflict is decent, but some internal conflict of the main character is cobbled onto it so the movie can pretend to have characterization and depth. It rarely works, mostly because there is no mechanical connection between the two storylines. Inception avoided that fairly well. Definitely worth watching. The climax was also an excellent piece of cinematography.

Exalted is one of those games where non-mechanically inclined people created it. As such the ideas behind it are awesome, but the application leaves something to be desired. Really, it’s a lot like the GURPS problems, where each action of combat requires a dozen or more rolls. Body language, movement, attack, parry, damage, moral, constipation check because your enemy knocked the crap out of you, etc. Now each of these ideas is good. The issue that arises is that while in real combat, everything happens at once with great relentlessness, in a game things are slowed down to a crawl. Everything has to be resolved piecemeal. Also, a lot of it becomes meaningless once things get to anything close to Exalted level. You bleed out over the course of minutes. Honestly, does that even matter? Knockdown is irrelevant once you hit any kind of reasonable stat level, because you’ll nearly automatically succeed.

Anyway, what it does lend itself to is hyper techincal combat. This technical and it gets much worse. Or better, if you will. See, very few powers become permanent, or at least few should, and you wind up playing them like cards. Clearly at some level they’re trying to emulate a CCgame. Not a bad idea, but the mechanics aren’t there yet.

The other big difficulty is that it’s made by whitewolf. Moral ambiguity is rammed down your throat. Some of the supplements get kind of torrid too. Lillun for one. Really, guys? Was that anywhere close to being necessary? But bah.

I watched it. It took me three attempts, but the second wasn’t so much aborted as interrupted by several minutes of hysterical laughter as I wandered off to clear my head. And let me say right now that at some level I liked the movie. I’m not entirely sure why. I may just be happy that I completed it. It was an odyssey for me, through the mind of Ms. Meyer.

Several months/years ago I intended to watch this thing in the theaters. I’d heard nothing about it beyond it involved vampires, and hey, we all know Mia loves him some vampires, so woot. But when I got to the theater and looked at the movie poster, there was just something about it that told me, “No. This does not concern you.” And taking that advice I wandered off. But time passed, Twiphilia grew, and once more the shadow of an urge to view the thing entered my head. It was like the hazard rising out of the east of Mordor. Or possibly post WW1 Germany. I knew I was going to have to confront the hazard sooner or later, but I let it lie quiescent for a while. That is behind me now. I have met the beast. And it looks like a stripper.

No, really. But I’ll get to that in a second. The movie opens with some odiously melodramatic lines on death. Since vampire movies are pretty much inherently melodramatic though, and teen movies double it, that was par for the course, but all right. I’m kind of down with things that take themselves way too seriously. Anyway, Bella lives in Phoenix, she goes to Forks, Washington, and everyone loves her. No, really, everyone. There is not a damn person in the movie who is not gushing about how awesome Bella is. It’s an opening out of the worst, self-worshiping self insertion fanfic from the desperate mind of a prepubescent fangirl. And I’ve read that, and it was terrible. But nonsense just kept going as all the world, or at least all Forks, grew to a furious frenzy of Bella worship and the praising and the greeting and the taking of the pictures and yeah.

So they introduce the vampire family with an eerie undertone of incest. Now they’re all made out to be fairly attractive, but kind of off. (Ie, that incest undertone. Well, it may not really be an undertone as the characters discuss it immediately upon introduction. But nothing’s really made of it, so maybe an incest angle? It’s mentioned, but not belabored.) Good, because that’s sort of the way a family of passive bloodsuckers should be. Edward gets introduced and the whole cast drools over him, and we all know with the great deal of Bella worship that the author is slinging that the main character is going to be the one girl at that high school worthy of him. Then there’s some high school romance/drama and stuff. The vampires remain kind of distance and eerie. Low, Bella and Edward wind up together, there’s the requisite part where the main character researches vampires because god knows in this day and age there’s a teenager who doesn’t know what a vampire is. Really, people?

Anyway, matters come to a head, she confronts him, he’s all like yeah, and then he eats her. Or at least that’s what happened in my head. No, on the movie screen (my computer monitor, right next to a fairly intense freecell game) he starts whining about being a killer. And I say, ah, no.

Anyway, dude grabs chick, throws her onto his back, and in a impressively bad special effect runs up the hill to reveal himself in daylight. It is there that Twilight: The Sparkling really begins. And it was here that I lost it and had to leave. What? WHAT? Even prepared for it as I was, there was no way that worked. It failed, so catastrophically, that there was nothing to say, do, or think. You know how strippers wear glitter so they show up under the lights? Or how preteen girls do? And they look like a glitter pen vomited onto their faces and just being near one gets bits of shiny shit under your fingernails even though you never even touched the thing and you spend two weeks pulling random ass flakes of sparkly shit out of your fingerprints wondering how the hell that was still there? I mean, you washed your hands already. This is Edward. He is a pale male stripper.

At this juncture the movie takes an important turn. Up until this point it was simply vaguely annoying. Let’s be honest, this isn’t a vampire movie; it’s a teenage female coming of age story with a strong romance angle and that niche is something I have a hard time caring about. It’s the sort of vaguely boring, mostly trivial story about characters who mean little to me set in a premise I cannot identify with outside of the vaguest ‘I was young once too’ angle. But now all that is gone. For the vampires are brought to the fore, and they are insipid. It is dreck. It is drivel. It is so bad it’s awesome.

Vampire baseball. Holy fuckballs, Batman. It is revealed that the vampires are super jocks. They play music and dance. They cook Italian! More people love Bella for no discernible reason! A villain is shoehorned into the story. Edward acts like a toolshed! Oh, wait, that’s been happening all along. Sorry. Anyway, there is a brief tangent along fairly overt ‘does this remind you of anything’ lines where Bella and Edward don’t fuck, but even that gets exploited by the vampires are whiny gas bags angle like the female lead should have. At least from that point on, there is no sparkling. I think the director knew she had to add the sparkly bits for the fans, kind of a homage to the source material, but she didn’t have to like it and even she knew it was fucking retarded. There’s some whining, some driving, one of the other vampires is brought to the fore, the prescient one, and she actually becomes vaguely interesting. Of course that cannot stand else the totally uninteresting lead loses some of her totally undeserved spotlight, so she gets shuffled off. Bella reveals she’s a moron. There’s a really badly choreographed vampire fight. Interesting girl returns and rips someone’s head off, further cementing her position as being the only interesting one, and Bella and Edward whine at each other a lot. The End.

The actors do not emote. At all. We all know highschoolers. They’re not exactly subtle people. You really don’t spend that much time wondering what one is thinking. Not so with the actors. Except, of course, for the possibility that the teenager isn’t thinking anything at all. That could be happening for this cast. But really, I cannot say enough about how atrocious this is, except that it definitely went around the corner and came back to being delightful. They sparkle. They play baseball. They cook Italian food. They’re vegetarians. These things I knew, but I hadn’t really paid attention to. I sort of expected this to be explained away during the story. It was. It sucks.

What’s odd about this is there were glimmers of ‘this could have been interesting.’ The bit where supertwit drops her apple and Edward catches it and gives it back was startlingly well done, and understated enough that it was not ruined by stupid later. Also, I kind of liked her truck. Seemed an interesting thing to throw at a teenage female lead. The part where he pops the dent out was also interesting. Small, almost throwaway details, like that did a good job. Of course, it’s like a crappy rail vodka being served in a nice glass.

Watch it. Just don’t spend money on it. It isn’t worth a one dollar red box rental.

I totally suck at this not-being-excessively-critical thing.