Angry Birds Space - Review

If you've never played Angry Birds, then the long and short of it is pretty simple.  Basically an exercise in the physics of Ballistics theory, which is quite honestly the same as skipping rocks on water.  You do it over and over again, but why?  To predict the next path, or to alter it using different velocities or angles.

But with Angry Birds, you get a much more rewarding experience when you apply this theory, using pissed-off birds in a slingshot, to squash pigs sitting in wood, stone or other materials that conceal them from the birds.  

If you've never tried it, you have the only valid excuse for not liking it, because to have tried it is to have loved it.  This series is fantastic, a truly once-in-a-generation series like Pacman, Super Mario or Grand Theft Auto, if you will.  But, there is a big, or should I say small, difference at play here.  This series came to life on the iPhone, and spread like a virus to other platforms, but still remains a mainstay on the touch-screen platforms as a total stalwart of amazing time-wasting.  If you work in a place where you have downtime, this game will make you wonder where the day went with no trouble at all.
 
Now, we come to the new sequel, Angry Birds Space.

At first, I was very hesitant to be excited, until I saw the different way this game plays.  Having played it, I want to let you know something about this version.  It is the best Angry Birds there is, surpassing the first three in almost every single way.

Addiction is the best word to describe this, just like Angry Birds, Angry Birds Rio and Angry Birds Seasons...

I had planned on putting this review up the day this game was released, but I was busy doing the impossible.

I was getting 3 stars on every level!

This is a game of the year contender, even if it is really an iOS game at its heart.  When you really think about it, what is Tetris other than blocks falling, that require you putting them into a certain order, or Pacman other than a pizza-shaped guy eating ping pong balls and ghosts?  They're not much, which is why those games, like the Angry Birds series, capture the player so fast.  The simplicity of it brings you in, but the personality of things like the birds themselves, really stamp it into your heart.  The squawking sound they make is hilarious, and the game will definitely make you chuckle.  

This game should be $9.99, not the borderline- insulting base price of $.99. The pure joy of the new gravity effect makes this sequel unlike the others in that I am finally feeling like this IS an actual sequel, not a cheap upgrade preying on my addiction.

And though I have yet to come to the half-way mark of the aforementioned goal, I want to let you all know, it is the trying that makes this game worth every one of the 99 pennies you will spend on it.  In fact, there is an upgrade in-game for another $.99 called The Danger Zone, which I downloaded like a truly masochistic gamer today.  Its levels are on the level I need Adderall in order to focus on the solutions.  It really amplifies the gravitational effects, with a lot more hazards.

If you have an iPhone 4, 4s, iPad 2, new iPad, Android phone or a laptop, I would definitely recommend having this game on your device.

If you haven't gotten it, get it.  


Now.

Review: Machine Gun Preacher

At the onset of this website, one of the things I had looked forward to doing was movie reviews.  I didn't have any I really wanted to do, though.  I couldn't find one that I could recommend people watch, with a sense of relevance to something they understand.


Last night, however, I did see a movie that I feel deserves to have a review done in a better context than some of the reviews I've seen online.  That movie is Machine Gun Preacher.


To start, this movie opens with a scene that is absolutely horrible.  Without giving away what happens, I will warn you, It is one of the most cringe-worthy things I have ever seen, simply based on the way it strikes you.  You are thrust into a situation that you cannot even fathom.  I almost did not make it past this scene, but it is important for the viewer to watch it, to remember it.  

The movie revolves around what happens in a different part of the world, as a junkie biker named Sam Childrers is let out of prison.  Not even before 5 minutes has past, Gerard Butler has done the inconceivable, and made you hate a character to the point that you almost don't want to know how he redeems himself, because you don't think he deserves to.  

His wife Lynn(played by Michelle Monaghan) picks him up from prison, and takes him home, only to tell him that she's given up being a stripper.  This enrages Sam, who tells her she isn't giving dancing up, whether or not she likes it.  He yells at her, proceeding to degrade her in horrible ways, in front of their 5 year old daughter, Paige.  The disconnect between him and his daughter is defined from the get-go, when he wakes up after a heroin binge with his friend best friend Donnie(played by Michael Shannon).  He is facedown on the floor and racing to a toilet to throw up on, all the while she's playing with her dolls.

Sam and Donnie find themselves in a lot more trouble, in a short amount of time, with a robbery for drugs yielding a huge score.  As they help a hitchhiker, the hitchhiker ends up trying to hold a knife to them, because they do not oblige his destination request.  Sam, fearful that the hitchhiker will kill Donnie, who is terrified and driving, gets the knife away from Donnie's neck, proceeding to stab the assailant in the back seat dozens of times before they dump his body.

When Sam's wife Lynn finds him frantically over a tub, cleaning the blood off of his clothing, he pleads for her help.  This is what leads him to God and a church.  As time goes on, he reforms his own life, making amends with his wife and daughter, working on construction for an honest living.  


Sam listens to a preacher from Uganda in church, who is there to discuss what is happening on the other side of the planet.  Realizing he can help with his skills as a construction worker, Sam decides to go over to Uganda.  

Once there, things begin to unravel inside very quickly for the man who at the beginning of the movie defined the word scumbag.  Making friends with a local commander of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, a man named Deng(played by Souleyman Sy Savane), to show him what is happening the North, where the Lords Resistance Army has been killing people  without relent, and in some cases, as is seen in the opening sequence, in the most awful forms of cruelty the world has ever known.    The scene where he realizes what is happening in the region is a very powerful, gripping and horrifying example of the atrocities committed against the people of this region.  


One night he sees the need for shelter for the children, and opened up a church to house them.  It is a safe house for children, sent from their village because it is safer for them to be at the hospital and relief area, than it is in their villages.  The LRA kill at night.  

This sets a course for Butler's character to become a one-man war machine that brings war the LRA.  Rather than watching the children hurt, he hunts the LRA in brutally similar fashion.

If any of this this sounds familiar, it should.  Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA, is the subject of an online campaign to bring him to justice by Invisible Children.  


Now, I'm not going to say this is the greatest movie ever; it isn't.  I'm not going to say this movie deserves an Oscar; it doesn't.

I am going to say that you should see this, due to the startling imagery, and realistic portrayal of how relief workers struggle with life back at home, when they know what happens in the areas they left.  There, in that sense, this movie is one of the greatest I have ever seen, because I have been there personally.  It is something I identified with immediately, and saw happening over the course of time.  You become that which you feared, that which you hated, in order to stop it, but you can't, and it eats at you.

This movie is a perfect example of that, and I think for that alone, was worth watching.  I also want to say that as an Atheist, who is unabashedly so, one of the things I do respect a lot in this world are the missionary folks who put their lives on the line in order to stop atrocities, or to be with the victims of them as they die.  One of my favorite people in this world is a minister, who has been to Darfur, knowing full well he may never come home.  He felt God called him there, and while I disagree with that justification, I do not disagree with what he does, as he is as tough as anyone I've ever met  Far and away the nicest, as well.

Tod

Rush To Judgment? Nope...

In today's society, we are more tolerant of offensive language and we have seen a rise in name-calling over the last decade with the rise of the Neo-Conservative movement under President Bush and Karl Rove. The ultimate of oxymorons, Conservative Think-tanks in Washington D.C. have crafted the art of labeling the enemies of policy as enemies of the state, and in this, there may be no better mouthpiece than Rush Limbaugh.

But Rush Limbaugh went beyond what we in this nation consider acceptable, by labeling Sandra Fluke as a slut.

To call a woman in this nation as slut is even more degrading than calling one the dreaded C word, in that calling a woman the C word(which I am not using out of respect for women reading this, even though I love the word), is calling her a name based on more of her attitude than anything else.

Calling a woman a slut is a totally different slander.

You are calling her a degrading name based on her actions, and since actions speak louder than words, insults based on actions that the woman may not even engage in, tend to piss them off greatly.

And not piss them off in a way they won't look at you.

I am talking about pissing them off in a way that a Nun would kick you in the nuts, before kicking your head in.

If you want to get a divorce, call your wife a slut.

Want to reenact that scene in Goodfellas where Karen has the gun to Henry's head in bed?

Call your woman a slut.

Want to see a Georgetown Law Student make her parents proud of the young woman they raised, for standing up for her beliefs, who is commended by the President of the United States, all the while has the support of liberal and conservative women almost everywhere?

Let Rush Limbaugh call her a slut.

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Andrew Breitbart dead

This morning, it was reported Andrew Breitbart, the contrarian conservative blogger and owner of www.breitbart.com, www.bighollywood.com and www.biggovernment.com, died at the age of 43 in Los Angeles.

I want to begin this with my most obvious sentiment; too bad it wasn’t Rush Limbaugh.

I have to say that this guy was some piece of work, and by no means, an idiot. He was a rotten, ruthless, vile and revolting person, but he was by no definition of the word, stupid. His deliberate and calculated responses to anyone he interacted with showed that inside his own head, his universe was like a Minecraft game, where he created the ebbs and flows as he went along, fucking with everyone in his path.

And now, that’s gone.

I don’t want to pretend I liked this guy; I did not. I sincerely thought he was a piece of shit, and his passing does little to change my opinion of him, or draw the ability within myself to say one nice thing about him.

A woman today on Twitter suggested no one should say anything bad in their tweets, because his children may see them, and that’s not nice.

I had to make a quick point to her that his children would be a lot more hurt by the things their father tweeted about others, than what others tweeted about him, because their father outside of that home, was a prick. And not a disagreeable prick like Christopher Hutchins could be at times. We often disagreed with Hutchins, but the truth was, his sole agenda was the truth and decimation of those who conceal it. Breitbart’s agenda was hardly the pursuit of truth.

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Why I'm an atheist

This may be the shortest article I ever write for this site, if I stick straight to the facts, or lack thereof.

One good reason I am an atheist is the lack of evidence to suggest God does, or ever has, existed. 

When you speak with Christians who are ‘on-fire’ for the ‘Lord’, you tend to walk away realizing how clueless a group they are.  Nothing is more amusing than the group of people who will argue with the the most irrational fervor about the notion of this planet being 10,000 years old or younger, because it says so in the Bible.

If I am to be honest with the reader, I want to summarize a true feeling I have in my heart for Christianity.

If being an atheist means that I will burn in eternity, separated from these annoying fucking tools who love Christ, but hate science, gay people and everything else that is real in our world, then please, by all means, let me burn.  There could be nothing more terrifying than an afterlife where I have to listen to you fucking mental midgets.  You do not give me, or anyone, the hope that an afterlife brings better things.  All you do is make us hope you go there, a lot sooner than us. 

Christianity is not the law of this nation, and we are DEFINITELY NOT a Christian nation.  Annoying people like Don Wildemon of the American Family Association must die.  They must not pass go, they must just go away, forever.  These people need to shut the fuck up, get pancreatic cancer or Lou Gehrig’s Disease and rot.  They deserve to suffer in the most immense pain, for the rest of their lives for the way they have condemned people innocently for just being who they are, or more so, what they are, gay.

The notion that in this nation, America, that we should give praise to the Lord?

Go fuck yourselves.

Let’s stop being cutesy about this, and let you fucktards realize something.  We don’t like you.  We’re not going to start magically liking you, your imaginary Christ, or any other imaginary friend you have. 

Science has proven enough to let us realize, you’re no longer needed, and you’d be wise to shut the fuck up, before your irrelevance to society at large, is exercised.

In closing, I want to prove the point of how your faith is worthless.  Here is a list of the mountains, moved by faith.


Mountains - Moved By Faith:

1.   
2.
3.
4.
5.

Wow, what an esteemed list of NOTHING!

Sadly, I don’t think there will ever be stopping any of you.  You refuse to listen to reason, logic or look at the evidence.  That’s ok, as long as you shut the fuck up and keep your religion out of science classes, schools and public government.  Other than that, carry on.