freddiew has a bunch of really cool videos. Check out his YouTube profile page.

The price increase is pretty modest, especially if you buy in one year increments. Still, you might want to take advantage of the current discounted offer of $39.99 for one year and either renew or extend your current subscription. Want to know when your current subscription expires? Visit this page to find out.

Having fun with Halo 3 and my capture card. Made it mostly so I could learn Sony Vegas.

Oldboy

In the realm of revenge thrillers, you’d be hard pressed to find more ultra-violent vengeance and psycho thrills than in the creepy story of Oldboy. This Korean import made a pop splash at the Cannes Film Festival and during its limited theatrical run thanks to the imprimatur of Quentin Tarantino, who raved about it and its visionary director, Chan-wook Park, to anyone who would listen. It’s easy to see why QT fell in love with the grindhouse attitude, fast-paced action, violent imagery, and icy-black humor, but it’s a disservice to think of Oldboy as another Tarantino homage or knockoff. The darkly existential undercurrent in the themes that Oldboy traces over its life-long narrative arc is much more complex and deeply disturbing than anything of its kind. The movie’s tagline is, “15 years of imprisonment… 5 days of vengeance.” The imprisonee is Oh Dae-Su, an ordinary Joe who is snatched off a Seoul street corner and locked away in a dank, windowless fleabag hotel room for the aforementioned 15 years. Just as abruptly he is released, and thus the five days begin. Why did this happen to Oh Dae-Su? Ah, but that would be telling, and in fact we don’t know ourselves until the final wrenching scenes.

Oldboy breaks into a classic three-act saga, the first of which details the hallucinatory period of imprisonment in which Oh Dae-Su wades from mild insanity to outright psychosis in the hands of unseen yet attentive captors. Act 2 is the revenge, when an entirely different tone takes over and Oh Dae-Su moves with single-minded purpose and clarity. It’s this section that has gained the most notoriety, primarily for the claw-hammer dentistry scene, the one-man-army tracking shot, and the wriggling octopus that Oh Dae-Su consumes in a sushi bar (he’s been dead so long he simply needs life back inside him in any way possible). In act 3, answers finally start to emerge and the sinister atmosphere grows even more profound–not without a healthy dose of extra bloodletting, of course. Oldboy is an undeniably poetic masterpiece of tension, fury, and dynamic craft. Ultimately, its epic cycle of tragedy is of the sort that mankind has been inflicting upon itself for all time. Some of the images may be gruesome, but all converge into a kind of beauty. It’s in the telling of this lurid tale that these details become one and the memories of pain ultimately heal.

I have not had my Playstation 3 for very long, but thanks to some pretty low prices from Amazon I am already off to a good start on my collection.

Movies!

So what should I add to my collection next? What movies do you currently have and how do they look? I am open to all sorts of suggestions. As you can tell from what I have so far, I am a big fan of science fiction and action in general, but I can enjoy a good movie whatever the genre is.

My current musical addiction is now The Glitch Mob. Its rare for independent artists to hit it big, but that is exactly what it appears they have done. Their self-published debut album Drink The Sea debuted on the iTunes Electronic Chart at number five and peaked on the CMJ Top 200 Chart for College Radio at #57. The album’s debut led Electronic Musician to run a cover story on the trio.

The album can be downloaded from Amazon. If you are more into the physical CD, you can purchase that from their website.

The great news is that the game is set to be released on Good Old Games later this week. I honestly could not be more excited. Raptor is one of the few games that I could never get working on Windows, and I lost my copy of the game ages ago. The Good Old Games version will be updated to work, and come with copies of the manual and soundtrack. Plus, the game is DRM free.  I will certainly be buying a copy later this week, and I would be ashamed if all if you don’t pick it up and give it a try for only $5.99.

As a mercenary in the not-so-distant future, flying the super-advanced Raptor space fighter, you’ll be sent on interplanetary missions to knock out your MegaCorp’s top competitors. Battle against hordes of relentless enemies. Spend the bounties claimed for their demise to expand your devastating arsenal!

Discover secrets, find bonuses and battle boss ships that appear at the end of every wave! With each ship and ground target you destroy, you’ll earn more cash to improve your ship’s already formidable technology, in preparation for the next wave. You’ll be sent out to kill and destroy… But then again, it’s in your blood.

Raptor: Call of the Shadows – GOG.com

Inspired by the Half-Life Video Game series, this is an action packed short film centering around Adrian Shephard and a band of resistance fighters struggling to get out a warning about the impending invasion.

The film’s website can be found at http://beyondblackmesa.com/.

The Nerd conquers an oft-requested NES classic.

Anyway, here are some random Halo 3 clips. They are not edited at all as this is just a test to see how they look after being compressed for the web. I can go a lot higher then 3000kbps, so any final video that I make will certainly have much higher quality then this.