Random Hoo Haasthe blog with the guff

The most exciting of super updates is here!

Friday, April 1, 2011 at 12:40 pm Comments (1)

Would you believe that Random Action Hour updated today? Really! And technically it’s the first step towards the Random Hoo Haas site revamp! Admittedly it’s the crappiest of the revamps because all I’ve done is rearrange the directories (linking to the ol’ “Cartoons/” directory will forward you to the new “rah/” index) and removed a lot of RQ87’s stuff. Yeah, that’s what you get really excited about. As of this writing there’s still a few things to finish uploading, but the real highlight of this update – for me, at least – is that it ties the online and offline files closer together.

If Random Hoo Haas were to violently cyber-splode, I wouldn’t be able to make a flawless replacement just by uploading my offline files, as there’s a fair few things changed or missing compared to the online one, and vice versa. As of this update, Random Action Hour is totally in sync with its offline files, and as mundane as that sounds, it’s a bit of a relief.

This update has meant that I’ve had to upload every single RAH file all over again – that’s over 400mb of stuff. Sorry for killing your bandwidth, FO!

Scarcely amusing anecdote – I was so concerned about the strain on the server of uploading all this stuff again that I was thinking of just getting my own server/domain/whatever so I wouldn’t be bothering anyone else. This is what happens when you’re comically non-confrontational.

Also, hey, did I mention there’s Resident Evil movie coverage? Check it out.

“You’re programmed to be an asshole!”

Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 11:22 pm Comments (3)

And so, I’ve finished the Alien quadrology (I can’t help but laugh every time I hear that) with Alien Resurrection. It is better than Alien³ in a lot of ways, but it just came across as the least appealing film.

Ripley died in the last flick, but two hundred years later a new organisation clone her using a blood sample so they can extract the alien. Surprise surprise, that eventually goes tits-up, and Ripley, a scant few crew and a bunch of bounty hunters are trapped on the space station with them. That’s about as far as the plot goes, really.
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Rental night!

Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 11:48 pm Comments Off on Rental night!

Paid another visit to Xtravision today, where I rented Transformers: War for Cybertron, Prince of Egypt, and Space Chimps. The last one was at my father’s choice. He’s got a thing for all things simian.

Just a head’s up – this entry’s gonna be looooong and largely about Transformers. Just a warning for the many folks who don’t give a damn about that little obsession.
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Wankers! In! Spaaaaaaaace!

Friday, March 18, 2011 at 12:06 pm Comments (6)

Watched Alien³ last night. I’d seen it once before years ago; it was actually the first movie in the Alien series I’d seen, but I couldn’t remember much about it besides the totally gratuitous deaths of everyone but Ripley from the previous movie – before the movie even begins! – and the ending, so I was looking forward to seeing it in full.

You’d need a lengthy list to detail all the ways it’s different in tone from the first two films, but the main point is that there’s only one alien, the place they’re trapped on has no useful working technology to fight the creature with, and for some reason, despite being set on a dingy prison planet in the ass-end of the universe, it’s probably the brightest of the first three movies. I can understand Aliens because it was on a ravaged human colony that about to blow up or something, but who’d thought a near-derelict prison would be lit well?

Yep, that’s a great comment to start the review off with.
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Battle for Originality

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 11:49 pm Comments (3)

Went to see Battle: Los Angeles, because that’s the kind of braindead movie one wants to watch after you’ve done nothing but feel ill and write code all day.

When I say braindead, I really do mean it. The movie is practically Military Movie 101, it throws in so many clichés. The first half hour is spent ‘getting to know’ the main players in the force, which is not only needless because their personalities are summed up in less than a minute, but also… well, let’s face it, they all end up looking the same in the heat of a battle. One guy is joked about by the others because he’s a virgin, but it’s difficult to see what other contribution he makes to the movie because it’s so damn hard to keep track of who’s who. We have emotional overreactions thrown about every ten minutes. The group find two adult civilians who provide one useful bit of support and then are made redundant. There are the kid civilians are there just for the marines to give inspirational speeches to. At one point there’s a helicopter with wounded soldiers (who are all given emotional good luck speeches from their comrades) that is blown up mere seconds after takeoff. There’s a rather needless scene where the hero and female civilian (who I guess is meant to be a love interest, but it sure isn’t developed!) muck about with an alien corpse and try to find its weak spot (which is to the right of where a human’s heart would be. Yeah, like you wouldn’t hit that eventually through regular fire). All the film needs is a dog that somehow survives all the hellish action until the end of the film and the aliens taking over a human’s body and that would nearly complete the set!
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Seriously awesome?

Monday, March 14, 2011 at 11:27 pm Comments Off on Seriously awesome?

Father roped me into watching A Serious Man. I sat through it to the end, and was able to wriggle my way out of stating what I thought by scoring it an interrobang out of ten, sending him rummaging through dictionaries to identify the word.

It’s an interesting film. I will wholeheartedly give it that.

It is not the kind of movie one wants to watch when you’re feeling unwell and just want to see a simple everything-makes-sense comedy where, I don’t know, people fall into bathtubs or something. When I’m unwell, I’m not exactly in the mood to watch a film exploring the injustices and justices of the world and how simple actions can warp the moral fabric of the universe and screw everyone over.

Maybe sometime I’ll be willing to analyse it, but at the moment I’d just like to go to bed each night knowing that I have something worth contributing to the cosmos around me.

I’m all alone (more or less)

Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 10:36 pm Comments (5)

Watched Aliens. I’d caught the final half hour of it while on holiday about five or six years ago, but otherwise can’t remember much about it. I know James Cameron did the directing and writing this time around, and I was curious to see how it would impact upon the style and setting. I still remember watching Rambo II; the first one was a fantastic movie that I still love, but as soon as I saw his credit during the opening of the sequel I knew that this time it’d just be a heartless action movie. I was right. Fun action movie, but no real soul to it, unlike the first one. Thankfully, Aliens is just as good as the original, in its own way.
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Ash is a goddamn robot!

Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 11:35 pm Comments (1)

I watched Alien five days ago. Yeah, I’m really dropping the ball on punctual blog entries these days.

Mind you, what is there to say that more professional, more qualified and more verbose people haven’t already said? It’s insanely atmospheric and lonely, and I love it. The first hour very much reminded me of Life Force (which you may recall me gushing about two years ago), with its very cold and lonely exploration of an alien ship, though Alien came first, of course. In a way I was almost disappointed when the alien started killing dudes full-time, not because it wasn’t entertaining, but because it had less time to explore the dank and desolate environment of space. I’m a total sucker for that kind of stuff.

I also watched The Hudsucker Proxy… half a month ago? Yeah, it was part of a Coen Brothers boxset and was one of the only two movies I was vaguely familiar with (the other being The Big Lebowski). I only became aware of the film through Platypus Comix’s very entertaining synopsis of the film with comments and other titbits of information – it’s a very good read. Also, hey, have I plugged the site before? I probably should!
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My curly moustache is in the making

Friday, February 25, 2011 at 12:28 am Comments (5)

I got vouchers for Xtravision around Christmas, and thought I’d be worthwhile actually making use of them, preferably to try other games that I’m interested in but unsure of buying, but hey, trying out movies I wouldn’t bother buying can’t hurt either. … can it?

We watched Outcast. I didn’t even read the blurb in detail, all I saw was a neat lookin’ Resident Evil style claw on the box along with a couple of beardy Irish actors on the images on the back, and I thought, “sold!” Having watched it, I can say it isn’t really my thing.

A mother and son move from their caravan to the inner city slums. The boy happens to turn into a monster at night. There’s two folks from a strange cult out to find the two and kill them. There’s a romance between the boy and a local girl. The mother is frighteningly overbearing. Misery ensues.
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THE FUTURE OF ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION IS NOW

Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 11:51 pm Comments Off on THE FUTURE OF ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION IS NOW

Today’s observation: I now know there is a site called Awkward Boners. Thank you, Google AutoComplete. If it weren’t for you, I would’ve been spared that knowledge.

(let’s see how long it takes before I get even more penile-related spam email!)