This requires absolutely no explanation on my part.
Favorite quotes are:
Wesker: "Stop it! Don’t open THAT DOOR!"
(It might be a way out to safety...)
Barry: "I’m going with you. Chris is our old partner, y’know."
(Do you have any documentation that will defend your claim? Because your timbre makes me wary, Barry...)
Barry: "A dinning room!"
(For a member of S.T.A.R.S. he sure is unfamiliar with household anatomy. "A dinning room! I've only ever heard about these in books!")
Barry: "And—Jill, here’s a lock pick. It might be handy if, you, the master of unlocking take it with you."
(Master of unlocking sounds like a D&D rank. I am a Dwarven Brawler/Master of Unlocking/Paradox Mage. And my magic missile attacks the darkness)
Barry: "It’s a weapon! It’s really powerful, especially against living things. Better take it with you."
(As opposed to the other weapon he was planning on giving her which was only powerful against canvas portraits, ceramic tiles and the cast of H.R. Pufnstuf)
M'kay, I had my fun.
~CMK
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Resident Evil: Voice Acting 101
Monday, January 28, 2008
And Now for a Moment of Childhood Messedupness
Do you recall when computer animation was in its exploratory phase? And have you ever repressed memories of being **assaulted by really trippy experimental 3D animation sequences? (For Canadians, that would have most likely occurred on YTV during the weekends sometime in the 90's.) Are you now getting painful shivers at the base of your spine? Perhaps a twinge in you sinuses like I've just opened up a jar of cayenne pickled asparagus?
If you aren't feeling it, not to worry— you either have no clue what I'm talking about or you just aren't like me. That's not necessarily a bad thing because God knows I needed therapy after viewing segments from the grossly underrated and elusive Gate to the Mind's Eye series of 3D animated shorts, among other things. Again, back in YTV's hay-day, filling those 2-10 minute gaps between weekend programming, especially in the afternoons became a grounds for exposing youths to bright, emblematic and always creepy animated segments which more or less involved stories about evolution, peace to mankind, or a little dog named "Styro". You may remember these shorts simply titled "Short Circutz."
As for me being disturbed for years after their initial run, well, that just reflects the brittleness of my psyche and my caveman dislike for all things ultra-colorful, symbolic and cathartic (No really— the "Pyramid" segment used to make me weep and gag simultaneously. Don't ask how I could 'relate' to butterfly people, I just could!) And while I can't exactly explain why those shorts impacted me the way they did, if you’re in the neighborhood of making me feel like less of a screwball, share your childhood experiences viewing Mind's Eye shorts, etc..., or just tell me how they make you feel right now.
I'll now leave you with a few of my favorites (I have since gotten over my fear of 3D animation):
Enjoy!
~CMK
**The phrase "sporadically bombarded" sounds like something a monkey would type up after ingesting a bottle Listerine and a handful of ritalin. It kills me how bad my writing is at times...
Friday, January 25, 2008
Science v. Religion (Or Eve Rides a Theropod)
I guarantee you won’t find another girl in the Northern hemisphere whose bathroom reading section includes the novelization of the Star Wars trilogy, a March 1993 Playboy containing the notable interview with Anne Rice amid the dirty, dirty pornography (which I also look at), and Billy Corgan’s Blinking With Fists (albeit with personal revisions). A new addition to my heap in recent months has been a subscription to New Scientist magazine, the Christmas edition sidestepping Science v. Religion somewhat by including only a small section on what stem cell research means for the future of humanity and why Christian activist have their feet in their mouths or other places.
Pop Quiz Hot Shot: many of the Christian activists (and I won’t get into numbers because God knows I’ve failed mathematics too many times to be credible with numbers) holding up those sad little protest signs, you know the ones: “My baby is not an organ donor” or “Only God may give and take life” still don't have a Blue’s Clue what stem cell research involves beyond the literary propaganda handed to them by their church heads, i.e. They are aborting life and we don’t stand for that one bit. And maybe that's over-dramatic, but Heck, if I cared about life that much, I’d probably have their back. Scientists and the likeminded, however, don’t need that kind of mental roadblock because what they produce is high art, higher than God. Think: beyond Dan Brown’s character Leonardo Vetra in the novel Angels & Demons, there hasn’t exactly been a whole swack of holy scientists real or fictional bent on reconciling faith and science (I read moderately, so if there is another example dangling in front of my face, do inform me. I like to be clued-in on life.) Scientific fact and the Christian Holy Book don’t exactly melt together; but heck neither do dinosaurs and the story of Genesis (and I promise an amusing picture depicting exactly that by the end of this entry.) Wait, what happened to the pop quiz?...
Alas, one great 2 am, soaking my popsicle toes in the sink basin (low blood pressure = cold feet), I flipped through the NS Christmas edition to find a lengthy article on Mary Stopes that I had previously overlooked. That brought back half a week of University where I actually learned something useful: years before dear Alfred Wegener argued his Pangaea/continental drift theory, Mary Stopes was already collecting samples and trying to lobby for a place on Robert Scott’s ship bound for Antarctica, one that would prove fatal for him and his crew, but one that would also produce plant fossils proving that all Southern continents had been joined in the past, aka. Gondwanaland.
Mary Stopes was a keen specimen herself: the article mentioned candid details about her love life and her obsession with a Japanese man twice her age who eventually faked leprosy just to get her off his back. Good riddance, because while NS chose to omit a fair chunk about the woman fossil crusader's later life, I didn't require a pick-axe to uncover what my professor had mentioned only in passing a year ago: that Mary Stopes was a dirty little eugenic campaigner. High and mighty was the woman who disowned her son for marrying a woman who wore glasses (that was a disease her son was apparently spreading to humanity through his children.) By golly! How long before they applied that theory to race? Not very: Germany held The World Population Conference in 1935 under Nazi rule— and Stopes attended it! *Sigh,* one person’s theory of eugenics is another person’s pretext for racial and ethnic cleansing.
All that hate aside, it’s nice to assume that we all came from the same place. I mean, I’m Catholic, so in theory I would believe that we are the progeny of the outcasts of Eden, right...? Ok, I’m not that naive because I also believe in scientific facts: scientists have determined that dinosaurs existed and that—no way José—were there ever humans and dinosaurs sharing dirt and air in the land before time.
Here is now my squaring off of those facts, a kind of happy medium that marries the Bible and the bones into what I hope will be many more fun drawings courtesy of my paint program. Enjoy!
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
I ♥ed the 80's (even though I couldn't remember being there)
You know you have diverse tastes when the bulk majority of your iTunes playlist contains either music from Gilbert and Sullivan comedic operas or else late breaking Kanye West, the end result being "We sail the ocean blue, / And our saucy ship's a beauty;" / "So how the hell could you front on me / There's a thousand yous, there's only one of me." A true masterpiece! Until next time, stay alive, starry eyed and nostalgic. Always. ~CMK
But enough about the K W.E.S.T Pinafore (not yet realized, though there is an H.M.S. Dumbledore...)
No, for the sake of consistency, I will now proceed to discuss the original title of this blog post which is a hazy retrospective on the decade that saw both the Pope and President survive gunshot wounds from assassination attempts, the last days of the Soviet Union, and the birth of a magical place called Care-a-Lot. On second thought, let's just chuck everything and make a CB list, shall we?
Things I Learned from the Care Bears