Found a funded PhD which involves creating a “Web 2.0” interactive ontological database of egyptian demons from the middle kingdom period. Greatest three years ever? Sadly I am a poor egyptologist and cant read either german or french. I feel so oppressed. Maybe I should write a book about it – which reminds me, on the way home from today’s shitty interview my taxi driver first showed the manuscript for the book he wrote and then told me the entire fucking plot. It involved a homeless man, a dog he found and a bizarre segue into something involving 1920’s gangsters. Even insane old taximen are doing better than me. Weirdly whiny today, I blame it on my mental menses, a third eye has opened and its weeping blood. “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity”, I’m sure rough beasts are slouching hither and yon to be born. Fucking Yeats, maybe thats what I need to do, join a hermetic order. Or spend my remaining money on building an eight sided shack surrouned by purified river sand so I can conduct the rites of Abramelin (which strikes me is an anagram of “Baa Merlin”). But, instead, I think I’m going to have a ham sandwich (unbuttered, as God intended) and a glass of coke. It seems like less effort and time (which in fairness wouldnt be hard, the initial purification period of the rite of Abramelin takes eighteen fucking months – unless you’re rocking the Mathers version – but who would follow the word of a crazed scotsman so unlikeable he was ejected from more or less every occult society he joined?). This actually reminds me of one time in, I want to say fifth year, where a friend of mine wanted to try and summon a demon using some of your standard hermetic ceremonial magic in order to see some girls breasts. In the end no demon was summoned, he stole a Steve Earle cd on me (with an excellent live version of Steve Earle and The Pogues singing Johnny Come Lately) and I later saw the girl topless, she wore extremely padded bra’s it turned out. Which is likely a metapor or allegory or somesuch.

Watched Avengers. It was great, easily the current pinnacle of superhero movies. The bit where the Hulk punches that thing? My new favourite bit of superhero cinema. Actually the entire final act/battle was pretty amazing. That being said I think there were a few bum moments and the pacing and structure of the narrative was a little odd/off. They should also stop putting Loki in movies as he always seems to be written and acted so much better than the other characters (also really liked The Hulk and Captain America in it). To expand my thoughts a bit:

The Good

– Haweye and Black Widow were cool. I have never liked Black Widow as a character until this film. I also thought Hawkeye’s quiver was an amazingly elegant and stylish solution to the “Robin Hood” superhero
– Special effect’s – Top notch, not a single gamey looking moment in the film. It really is a tour de force of top notch SFX
– Spectacle – Super hero films are largely defined by spectacle, The Avengers had this in spades – from the early stuff like the Helicarrier to the various battles and particularly the amazing setpiece at the end. It was packed with those “Fuck yeah!” moments that make stuff like this enjoyable
– Loki – Much like with Thor Loki seemed to be written and acted better than the rest of the cast, he was great.
– Hulk – Great, both as Banner and especially as the Hulk (thought the Hulk’s voice maybe should have been a shade deeper but thats a minor nitpick)

The Bad

– Pepper Potts, just terrible, why is she trying to be the female Tony Stark?
– Pacing – the middle section of the film dragged and was unfocused, it seemed full of pointless scene’s which added nothing to the story or characterisation
– Poulson – Why?
– The “something to avenge” – I think it would have worked better in the first act rather than the second
– Chitauri – The whole hivemind bit, while not really addressed, felt like a cop out
– Non sequiturs – Quite a few of the characters make bizarre off the cuff comments that just seem odd rather than funny/insightful/whatever
– The Invasion – While the final act was pretty amazing considering they were invading a world the alien forces seemed weirdly anemic
– Iron Man – I havent seen Iron Man 2 so maybe that has something to do with it, but going from Iron Man to the Avengers Iron Man just seemed, well, flat.
– Team up incompetency – Captain America seemed weirdly useless for the first 2/3 of the film
– Odd tonal shifts – Not that I really minded but there were quite a few moments where the tone of the scene rapidly shifted back and forth from, say, melodrama to comedy and then back. While generally entertaining enough it felt jarring – I’m blaming Whedon for this as his work is redolent with stuff like this

Most of the stuff listed under “The Bad” is really minor and in no way interferes with the film to any great extent, I would most heartily recommend giving this a watch.

Supposedly the Dragon Age 3 story has leaked, shockingly it made me care even less about the game – http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/315/index/13661809/1 Its been semi-confirmed as legit and theres some companion concept art floating around. It sounds like absolute cookie cutter bullshit though. Also wheres the fucking Grey Warden? The last thing the franchise needs is another main character. It sounds rather boring as well the Templar/Mage thing was played to death in DA2 and the setup sounds like every bioware game ever “Recruit Factions and People To Do a Thing: A BioWare Production “. The rumoured companions are “A brutal barbarian who enjoys drinking and fighting, a clever mage, and a young bratty rogue.” Way to break out of the box there Bioware.

Was going to compile these links into a short week in review style thing to make up for my cruel absence, but frankly I couldnt be arsed (and I prefer to leave my blog an empty shrine to apathy), so instead Im going to make one gigantic Facebook update, onwards:

– David House’s notes to the grand jury are a bit special, guy must have balls of steel – http://pastebin.com/q0hTkwFh

Deadpool game announced – the trailer shows fun gameplay, dialogue which is strongly reminiscent of the comic and possibly the worst voice acting in the world – http://youtu.be/6S2MoeCpvP4

Hitmonkey game announced for next year, http://hitmonkeygame.com/, nothing at the website at the moment but theres an announcement banner image floating around. Could be amusing but to be honest Hitmonkey was good as a one off joke, not much mileage in the miniseries

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 continues its relentless drive to include more content than all other fighting games combined – free costume DLC consisting of 150 swimsuits for the entire cast (men, raptors, bears and robots included) has been announced, also this saucy trailer of real ladies dressing up – http://youtu.be/lJZQ6icEMjQ

Trailer for the new Resident Evil animated movie looks cool (and has Ada at the end, sweet), I enjoyed the fan pandering cheese fest that was the first one – http://youtu.be/FmUR6f39dg4

Images of the new model PS3’s leaked, it looks like a toaster fucked a breadbin – http://www.joystiq.com/2012/07/13/rumor-new-ps3-model-photographed/

I was only keeping an eye on Sleeping Dogs (aka True Crime Hong Kong) because Adam kept going on about how good the series was but this “Sleeping Dogs 101” makes it look pretty fucking sweet – http://youtu.be/8QuIovDO6TE (Narrators voice is annoying, could she sound more bored?)

The first game in every new Naughty Dog series is always awesome and The Last of Us doesnt seem set to change that trend – http://youtu.be/krLNvmYF7lM My only fear is that it will ride the standard post-apocalyptic trope of “man is the greatest enemy”, holy shit am I bored of that. Also, when are they coming out with a Rings of Power sequel? I still have it for my MegaDrive

Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner HD Opening Cinematic, this is seven minutes long but looks fucking awesome – the redone animation in tandem with the very well done HD upgrade makes it look great – http://youtu.be/sMK2bUIcgjY Though it does whang of Kojima’s usual (immensely enjoyable) madness

Speaking of Kojima, Metal Gear Solid 5 announcement details either leaked or faked – http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=482692

On the off chance you have been living under a rock for the last week or so, the current new technology darling – the Ouya – http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console

In kickstarter news it seems Penny Arcades (in my eyes) morally questionable Kickstarter has been funded – http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575109064/penny-arcade-sells-out

A very handy tool for cutting down the size of your overall steam install – http://steamcleaner.tikione.fr/en/

New Borderlands 2 trailer, in case you missed it or were insane and needed more selling on it – http://youtu.be/nicvyhrmTDs

Phantasy Star Online 2 has been announced for an english release in early 2013, that is good because the game is quite enjoyable and has a good free to play implementation. You can try out the Japanese version at the moment – http://bumped.org/psublog/pre-open-beta-starter-guide-for-phantasy-star-online-2/#signin , its almost worth it for the amazingly awesome character creator, it is definitely the best MMO character creator Ive ever used and easily rivals offline character creators from games such as Skyrim etc.

Darksiders II gameplay footage – http://youtu.be/S3vtN1gsXb0 I am really looking forward to this, love Joe Mad’s designwork – even if the fucker never finished Battle Chasers. Each of the four areas in the game is supposed to be as big as the entirety of Darksiders, this games is going to be a monster

Capcom announces Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure HD, a fighting game rented once for the PS1 IIRC and had no fucking idea what was going on. Its a tad pricey (15 of your human euros), which is offputting. I was also largely ignorant of the madness that is JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. But I’ve been delving into it over the last month or so and once you get over the initial weirdness its very addictive http://www.joystiq.com/2012/07/14/capcom-announces-jojos-bizarre-adventure-hd-coming-august-21-2/ Also as I mentioned before CyberConnect are doing a current gen JoJo’s game – http://youtu.be/cr3EKkQCNmI (trailers worth watching just for the pen stuff, rivals the awesome note writing bits from Death Note)

Oh and the ingame announcement trailer for Tekken Tag Tournament 2’s swimsuits has just gone up – http://youtu.be/PBRBN4GSQvc I of course hope it enables me to recreate the greatest Tekken 5 ending – http://youtu.be/PTzZRaqHtFM

Well I think thats more or less everything, now back to college work/fighting the Steam Summer sale

I’m going to try and start posting daily for a while, even if its just little bits of nothing. So to start myself off I’m going to copy a facebook post “In a way I feel sorry for Bioware, they have just announced that theres going to be an extended ending DLC. But the details they released and the manner in which they announced it clearly indicates that they said they were listening to fan feedback and then promptly ignored that feedback. The fact they couched the new stuff as “expanding on the ending while maintaining their artistic integrity” i.e. explaining the ending to us porles who didnt get their genius doesnt help in the least. Dragon Age 2 was the game that killed “Bioware = pred-order” for me (Jade Empire started it and ME2 edeged it along), but with Mass Effect 3 theyve pretty much guranteed that all future games of theirs are “maybes or try before buy” at best (e.g. I signed up for SWTOR after trialing it for a week)”