This big game came out a little while ago, you might have heard of it? It’s called Starcraft II.  It went on to sell 1 Zillion copies in an hour and ruin human productivity for at least the next 5 years.  So I had never played a Starcraft game before and I thought I would give it a little spin.

How is it?  I don’t know….have you ever played a War/Real-Time Strategy game before?  I think they are boring as fuck.  It’s a lot of building for a half hour and then you either get your ass tore up or you unceremoniously do the tearing….very little in between.  And the space drama is as tired as ever.  Three races: Space Marines with Power Armor (read: Starship Troopers), CHECK!  Up close and personal Alien (read: Aliens), CHECK!  Lastly, High Tech Smart Race (read: Predator), CHECK!.  YAWN.

I mean, if you haven’t tried one of these games before, you might as well start here…the presentation is pretty amazing and the game feels expensive, but that’s about it.  Oh, well there is this kind of cool thing where every time you end a mission you go back on your ship and buy upgrades and chat with your crew like in mass effect.  But then there are other lame things like how there are 3 different races but you only get to play as one of them (not counting those 4 bonus Protoss Missions).  Or how if you have played any Command & Conquer game or Warcraft game or….ANY RTS, you have played this game before.  This genre is stale as loaf of Wonder Bread found by the characters from The Road.

Anyway, the real reason I am talking about Starcraft II is that it gives me an excuse to talk about it in relation to South Korea.  South Koreans, for those who don’t know, love them some Starcraft. Starcraft is practically the national sport of South Korea where people pay money to watch matches in stadiums.  In South Korea there is not one but TWO stations dedicated to Starcraft.  Sponsored Starcraft players make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.  So yeah, Starcraft is a big fucking deal in South Korea.  Check out the videos below for knowledge and laughs.

For me, one of the biggest rewards of being a bicycle blogger is traveling to various cities and diving into their culture. In some cities, the culture is spearheaded by one body or shop. When you go to San Diego, the cycling scene has been sparked by none other than Velo Cult. Sky and the team prove that no matter where you are, you can ignite passion in cycling. Southern California may not strike you as a region rich in bicycles but that’s because you’ve yet to enter the cult.

Ever see that show Horders? Sure you have. It’s all about people who collect relentlessly and refuse to discard anything. While the team at Velo Cult isn’t that bad, you can see a certain degree of passion in their ever-growing stock and personal stable.

Like any bike shop, regardless of clientele, doing repairs is what keeps them afloat. I always say that you can tell what kind of shop you’re in by the bikes in the repair stand. Whether it’s a cruiser with a flat or a carbon fiber road bike getting a new groupo, what’s in the stand tells a lot about the work the shop is known for. Take this beauty for example. Pure Italian steel.

Hanging from the rafters like pieces of art, the collection at Velo Cult is inspiring enough to make even non-cyclists appreciate the soul craft that went into constructing them.

I love Eddy Merckx bikes…

The Campagnolo tool set is a collector’s holy grail. No one did it better than Campy and still, to this day, the Campy tool set is one of the most sought-after pieces of cycling history.

When I stepped into the cult, they offered me their version of Koolaid.

Just look at that mechanic’s area.

The guys are also working on a book that’s filled with, um, bike porn.

Here’s Moose, the shop dog. He guards the guys from the delinquents. If you’re diggin on these photos, check out more at my blog and my Flickr. Thanks to Sky and the crew at Velo Cult for showing me around!

Your friendly neighborhood Hateball plans his year around Comicon. There. I said it. Come January, I start telling my clients to expect outages in July. Feb and March is the hotel/plane ticket truffle shuffle. April/May is spent alternatingly celebrating the birth of the Easter Bunny and hounding Brian Ewing about booth details, release schedules, and other general ducks-in-a-row-edness. May June is spent getting my OWN shit together on whatever giveaway I’m doing for my other job, and then, well, July is spent waiting. Stalled. On the side of the road. Waiting for those fateful 5 days in the SD heat, rubbing nuts to butts with all the other mouth breathers.

But! Don’t be fooled. No matter what your girl or my girl or anybody else’s real-life girlfriend tells you (as, I have never heard a girl that I actually know ever admit that some other girl that nobody knows—in costume or otherwise—is actually pretty, looks good, is worth looking at, etc. But still) there are some awesome lady sights down Comicon way. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed or not (I’m sure Caffeine Powered has), but: most characters a girl would want to dress up as have some pretty scant fashions. Some hotness. Some tightness. And of course, there’s always the scathing radness of her dudefriend and/or walking buddy.

So, as was the case last year, this is my homage to Comicon ladies. Some gems I’ve snapped in prior years, if only to encourage you—O loyal order of the Bloglin—to come down, post up, and don’t be too weird about it.

Incidentally, if you read this AND you go there, I’d love to shake hands with yas. I’ll be at booth #433 hanging with the likes of the one and only Mr. Brian Ewing, with frequent yet unpredictable appearances made by the Buff Monster. If you’re nice, and you tell me how utterly suave and sophisticated you find my writing—and by proxy, ME—to be, I might give you some swag. Or at least a hi-five. Or, incidentally, if you’re really pretty, I might ask you to stand next to one of my friends so I can take a picture of you that I will then write about next year. META-that.

Buncha photos after the jump.

(more…)

Just got back from Inception, OH BROTHER! Quick recap: Inception is the new Christopher Nolan joint, it is about dreams.  Leo is a guy who breaks into people’s dreams, usually to steal info.  But Ken Watanabe makes him a proposition to go into Cillian Murphy’s head and plant an IDEA, or an inception, for business reasons.  If Leo and his “dream team” are able to accomplish the Inception then Leo gets to go back to the USA where he is a wanted man. Ok rad.

Inception is one of those movies where the writer keeps making up rules, changing rules, etc etc….think “Don’t cross the streams.”  Basically, if you think about it too hard you are going to get a headache, it will also take the fun out of it, and Inception is a very fun movie.

Before  I saw Inception I read two reviews.  One basically called it the greatest thing to come out of a human’s mind since the idea of fire…and the other called it a huge fucking mess, neither of those are accurate.  To the people expecting Inception to change their lives, calm down bro.  Just like most of Nolan’s films, this is a intelligent summer movie, no more no less.  It did not change my idea of what cinema can do, or move me in a massively emotional way, it’s not There will be Blood or The Hurt Locker.  The movie is very fun and very entertaining but its not perfect or transcendent.  The screenplay is definitely convoluted and sometimes just makes no sense but you buy it because you are too busy enjoying yourself.  I really enjoyed the fact that once the “heist” gets started the movie is pretty much one long action sequence.  Hot.

My favorite part of Inception was not the effects, or the pedigree, or the world….it was the characters.  Almost every character gets a chance to shine in various ways, as there are plenty of responsibilities in the dream world.  I think the real scene stealer is Tom Hardy, he was in the fantastic Bronson as well, but in Inception….almost every scene he is in is thoroughly enjoyable.  Look for him as Max in the new Mad Max movies coming someday.

So is it worth seeing?  Worth spending big bucks on?  Yeah, totally.  Making the Dark Knight put Nolan in a position to have a big budget to make a movie “for him”.  But the interesting part is that movies “for Nolan” aren’t a lot different than movies for the studio, they are both big, over-the-top, intelligent action flicks.  If you are anything like me than you have maybe cut down on your theater trips because of the killer prices and because this summer has been pretty limp moviewise.  That being said, Inception was totally worth the trek/money.   I went with a group and after it was over we all just talked it out and cracked Inception jokes the whole train home.  Good times.

Anyway, you should see it…at some point at least.  Hit up the comments for Plot talk or to yell at me.  I’m gonna be busy this weekend making my totem.

PS: Porn Version?  Conception.  Get on that.

I just find it strange, is all. Seems right up our alley. I think—gasp!—it might actually not be half-bad, though I have absolutely no evidence to substantiate this half-a-claim.

And when did Fishburne become the Andrew McCarthy of all that resonates in my pop culture DNA? He is in—like—EVERYTHING I love. Plus some other shit. But still.

Please feel free to make this as rhetorical a question as you like, but, well, I just coulda swore that we all collectively love this sort of shit.

Oh, and: Comicon! Topical!

So, Mrs. Hateball and I just announced to our close friends and family that we will—indeed—be having a baby. (I was privy to this information back when we as a blog watched metal dudes burning churches made of popsicle sticks with their daughters and laughed, btw. It was…poignant.)

Within mere minutes, I received a link to the video above from one of those close friends.

I can’t wait. Also: if we don’t have chance to talk before then, have a happy 4th. You’ve earned it.

I stumbled up this video yesterday and I was losing it.  This company, Cold Steel, makes these videos for every single different sword they make.  But this one, for their GREAT SWORD, was by far the silliest.  We see dudes cut Rope, Pigs, Boots, Hunks o’ Meat, Huge Ice Cubes, Bamboo, Balloons, Animal Heads, Barrels With Liquid…NOTHING IS SAFE!  And everything the guy says is awesome.

“That’s what a Great Sword is all about, deep penetration!”

Nice!

So by now it’s abundantly—absurdly—clear: I have a few hobbies. My hobbies got hobbies. Or, to pretend—just for a moment!—that I’m typing this out on a new iphone4, one that I have customized the now fully customizable dictionary on: My hobbits have hobbits. My hobbies have hobbits who in turn have hobbies. Duck Yes.

For example. (Warning: If you think I’m cool now, just wait until the next few sentences.) Each morning I roll into work, brew a pot of coffee, and then spend a minute or so deciding which coffee mug I’d like to use. Upon selection, I pour myself a piping hot cup of bitter elixir, and then I photograph it. And upload it to Flickr. And Tweet it. These are my Mug Shots. Really: typing it out is bumming me out. It sounds so totally sad, but I enjoy it, and there are literally about 1.4 dozen folks who seem to enjoy them as well. I could see making a book of them one day. A coffee-table book of coffee-mug shots. Coffee mug shots that all sort of have a corner of keyboard in them. But still.

There are also the toys. The stretched pennies. The books. The bar mats. Catchers in the Ryes. The Big Troubles in Little Chinas. On and On. The collection of collections. The talking about them. The boyish excitement that comes with wasting money on them. I took a picture yesterday—secretly hoping that it would cast some spell of silent, voyeuristic envy on our own John Prolly (it worked)—of my Dokugans and it was all fun and games until I switched into Jack Donaghy vision where everything has a pricetag floating above it’s head. Even on the lowball, we’re talking divorce numbers.

Still, though: my hobby choice(s) belie my passion for ‘things’: I’m pretty sure I’m just looking for something to say. Period. I made the statement—yes, I did—the other day that I do my damnedest to enjoy the internet as little as possible. As some of you may or may not know, The Internet is more or less an integral part of My Job, and as such, I try to imagine it as my own personal cubicle: I do my best to not hang out there on my own time. But once I said it, I realized that it wasn’t entirely true: I fuck around for hours a week uploading photos, making posts, shooting links, talking to other folks about the stuff they’re posting/uploading/shooting, etc. And that’s all stuff that is decidedly not a part of my job. So what gives?

Is my main hobby telling—showing—the internet who I am? If all this is (this, right here) merely my injection of myself—my personality—out of my fingers and into your eyeballs via these pixels, what am I actually saying about what I’m saying? Is the message the medium?

I can save you the suspense—O tireless reader—it is. My hobby is to have hobbies. And I guess the only reason I really have them is so I can tell people like you about them. Hopefully in a less-than-annoying, relatively suave and unassuming way, sure, but still. A pretender is a pretender. I collect stories to tell you…just like I collect everything else.

Dark as it all may seem, I feel good about this realization: it’s very meta, and I like feeling like I’m a particularly meta person, true or not. But what caused it? What brought it about?

I think I realized I felt this way when I started to realize how much sculpting Paul Kaiju has been doing. Rather: when I realized how much sculpting stuff Paul Kaiju has been posting to his Flickr page lately. I mean, it’s all in the name: Paul likes Kaiju. But he also has a very visible and distinct passion for lots of other stuff: sculpting little monsters, little mecha-windup-awesome monsters, and, well, he’s absolutely INCREDIBLE at putting makeup, clothes, and poses onto female dolls. And doing little photo shoots.

That’s right. He’s really big in the Blythe customizing scene (Mrs. Hateball’s Niche Fetish) and between that and the vinyls, I’m kicking around links to his Flickr page several times a week. He’s a true talent, to be sure. A talent that cares about what he’s doing, how he’s doing it, AND how he’s getting it out there. It’s amazing. Really.

And that is sort of my point: my hobbies more or less start and stop with talking about shit or spending money on shit. Here’s a guy actually spending time on those things—sure—but there’s a dimension of creation and craft that I just don’t hit. And that is an absolute critique of and throwdown-of-the-gauntlet upon me (and anyone like me), not him. And, and: he’s just one dude out of tens of dudes in the little tiny pool of dudes who I have come into contact with over the years. Not to mention Koji, Ricky, Joel, Prolly: all these dudes spending time, money AND heart on stuff that—last time I checked—isn’t even close to being their main bread and butter gig.

I make a habit of having hobbies. I would like—at some point—to make a habit of having hobbies that I am willing to commit to. I am starting with my Mug Shots. They cost a bare minimum of time and energy, but! we’ll see where it goes.

EPILOGUE

The whole reason I started writing this post (which turned into this cosmic soapbox…sorry) is so I could share links to this dude whose hobby is buying, restoring, and then tarting up lifesize mannequins. Look at the pictures. LOOK AT THEM.

The cat’s outta the bag. I’m a reader. I read. I read about things that interest me. To make matters worse, I’m a goddamn RE-reader. There are books in my collection that I’ve read four, five, six times even. I do the same thing with television shows, but, well, that’s different. I think I’ve read The Talisman by Stephen King/Peter Straub a total of 9 times in the past 20 years. Nine times.

I’m not a particularly fast reader, either, which I think makes it even that much more grisly. When I sit here and think about it (while never ceasing to type, mind…I am THAT awesome) it really comes off as a huge waste of time. A huge one. The re-reading, I mean. Not the reading. When I sit and think about the books I could—I SHOULD—be reading while I’m re-reading Fight Club or Chuck Klosterman IV, my mind sort of boggles. I could be reading Gravity’s Rainbow, finally. Or! Even better, I could finally sink my teeth into something new and amazing that I’ve never heard of. Etc. Anyway…I got tired of that sentence before I finished it. Can you tell?

The point being, I recently re-read Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (A Low Culture Manifesto) by Chuck Klosterman. I really could not have enjoyed it more. I could not be more at home with the decision I made. What initially started as a bar-tryst with the first few essays (my ‘real’ book was trapped at home…’Visual Shock’ by Michael Kammen…yeah, still slogging through that one) turned into a bar-tryst followed by a lazy weekender, and boom: I had read the whole thing. Herein lies the beauty of reading a book full of short little vignettes (the shoryu-ken of guys like Klosterman): you (I) tell yourself that you’re just gonna read to the end of the current story and then put it down. But when you get to the end, you see that the next essay is entitled ‘Sulking with Lisa Loeb on the Ice Planet Hoth’ or ‘Being Zack Morris’ and, well, that thought sort of finishes itself. Or, if you’re a Dudeson, it Finnishes itself, but you get what I mean.

I’ve sprayed soda out of my nose at you inre: Chuck Klosterman before. I’d apologize for not being more original, but I desperately want you to like him. I desperately want him to like the things that I like. In fact, I can think of nothing more awesome, more chillingly romantic than picking up some not-yet-released book of his and opening to an essay bemoaning the breakup of Nine Inch Nails. Or waxing philosophical on the insurgence of crossover/hybrid Star Wars memorabilia. Is this weird? Is it weird that I want to read a favorite author’s thoughts about any random favorite hobby or pastime of mine? Is it weird that I want you to like what I like? For some reason—at this moment in time—it is very important to me that you like Chuck Klosterman. Actually, I think he’s a pretty hard dude to like (personally) as I get the impression that he views you (and me) as the contents of a big social petrie dish. But his work. His books. Required.

To further assist me in making my point (is: You Will Love This), I’ve transcribed the first page of this book. The first page of the prologue. It is one of the most perfect single pages of criticism and/or writing I’ve read in a long long time, and if you don’t love it, the silver lining is that you will absolutely hate it.

There are two ways to look at life.

Actually, that’s not accurate; I supposed there are thousands of ways to look at life. But I tend to dwell on two of them. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone’s life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even if we don’t realize it.

There are many mornings when I feel certain that the first perspective is irrefutably true: I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.

I guess I am not a morning person.

However, that feeling always passes. In fact, it’s usually completely gone before lunch. Every new minute of every new days seems to vaguely improve. And I suspect that’s because the alternative view–that everything is ultimately like something else and that nothing and no one is autonomous–is probably the greater truth. The math does check out; the numbers do add up. The connections might not be hard-wired into the superstructure to the universe, but it feels like they are whenever I put money into a jukebox and everybody in the bar suddenly seems to be having the same conversation. And in that last moment before I fall asleep each night, I understand Everything. The world is one interlocked machine, throbbing and pulsing as a flawless organism.

This is why I will always hate falling asleep.

Highly Recommended.

Oh, and:

Vanity Post Alert. Which is probably how I should start most of my posts, but, well, I don’t.

Is there anything better than finishing a years-long project? Anything more gratifying than finally putting down all your worries, fears, and insecurities about said project? Really, truly getting to reap the rewards of all your hard work?

Well, I had one of those weekends. One of those weekends where it all came together and I finally got to blow the doors offa something that had been turning my hair white—one by one—for the past 3 years. I am not a natural car person. I do not just automatically know my way around a wrench. There is something at once terrifying, amazing, and surreal about screaming down the road at 85+ in a car that you yourself more or less touched every bolt on. Turned every screw. Spliced every wire.

Still, all that aside, she wasn’t truly complete until this afternoon when I was able to finally break open the vault and add our all-seeing eye to my own personal pantheon of powered-by (that is just TOO Stan Lee. But! R.D.F.L.).

A different kind of geekery than we normally expect here, true. But geekery still. So I naturally thought of you.