I have to say, I’m not a big fan of the Final Destination movies. I’ll sit through them but I pretty much have to be drunk to do so.

And of course, I was drunk watching this for the first time in the “choose your own adventure style.” I remember it well - the movie opens up and a few minutes later a coin toss happens. We choose tails; and everyone walks home safely and the credits start to roll. It was brilliant.

Of course, we (being everyone else I was watching it with) had to skip back a few chapters so we could choose the other option and continue watching the movie. Which wasn’t so cool. I got much too drunk (Maristar says I binged, with a scowl), and I don’t recall the rest of the movie - I can remember some barrels falling on someone in a warehouse or something like that. Then I woke up and I had to go to work. But I digress.

Sometimes, after watching a particularly inane movie, I think to myself - “You know, this whole movie wouldn’t have happened if that one guy didn’t lip off that janitor” (insert your own inane circumstance here). It made me feel really good that a movie finally did that - gave you the option to head off the entire plot by changing one key decision. Ahhhhh.

From what I hear though, the subsequent choices you make while watching the movie affect the plot instead of ending it, but I don’t remember those.

PS: I agree heartily with Maristar’s “Start fucking with games more, too.” Sometimes things just need a good fucking with.

PPS: Elizabeth Bathory is one of the characters in the Nightmare/Atmosfear board games, and I didn’t know anything about her… But here’s a really wicked cool (literally) wikipedia article about her.

So…I watched Final Destination 3 last week. This isn’t really my favourite horror series, but I find it interesting.

Since it was filmed in Vancouver, and used a ton of their actors and stuff, I feel somewhat obligated to like Final Desination 3. The truth is, FD3 was not necessarily the best film. However what it lacked in plot, substance, and credible actors, it made up for in it’s pure awesomeness of the DVD. The DVD lets you watch the movie in the normal boring theatrical release way. Or, you can watch it…

CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN-ADVENTURE-AWESOME-STYLE!!!!!!!!

That’s right, just like those books you remember reading as a kid, now you can sit around with your friends and argue whether the coin toss should be heads or tail, and you can argue over the temperature that chick at the tanning booth should set the themostat too.

I haven’t actually watched any of the other extras on the DVD, but I’m guessing they just shot a few extra scenes? Things actually do play out a little differently later on depending on whether or not you kill people off/let them live though. Which is insanely cool.

This idea is pure genius, and right up my alley.

I used to have this board game called “Nightmare” that we’d play when us girls were like…13…where you put on a VHS and this creepy guy (the Gatekeeper) bossed you around and called you maggots as you tried to collect keys. This game was recently redesigned and sold as a DVD under the name “Atmosfear“. This also utilizes the “making choice with the remote” idea, making different choices lead down different avenues in the game.

Basically, what I’m saying is, I want to see more of this stuff. Forget your average boring movie - start making movies interactive. Start using more DVDs in board games. Mix it up a bit, get creative out there! The interactive movie idea is a great way to show those deleted scenes and alternate endings that most movies are full of anyways - so give us something to do at home! God knows that the people who make DVDs have enough time to put a bazillion other useless features on there. And start fucking with games more too.

Thanks.

Does anyone else find it a tad pretentious that he includes his name in the title of all his movies? Can you imagine if other directors and actors did this? Don’t Gore Verbinski’s Pirate of the Caribbean, or Tim Burton’s Batman, acted by Michael Keaton or even Cirio H. Santiago’s Caged Heat II: Stripped of Freedom sound a tad arrogant, self-important and just plain weird to you?

Sometimes you should think twice before buying the cheapest brand in the store, kids. A company in China was making a cheap and delicious soy sauce that was highly successful with the public due to it’s low price. It turns out though that rather than being brewed with the normal soy sauce type ingredients, it was made from human hair.

In late 2003, there was an alternatively produced soy sauce named “Hongshuai Soy Sauce “ in China ( 14 ). The soy sauce was marketed as “blended using latest bioengineering technology” by a food seasoning manufacturer, suggesting that the soy sauce was not generated in a traditional way using soy and wheat ( 1 , 3 ).

The Hongshuai Soy Sauce was sold at a relatively low price in Mainland China and became very popular among the public. The people found its taste to be similar to other brands. Because of its low price, many catering services in schools and colleges decided to use this new product.

[…] The journalists then found the amino acid syrup manufacturer (a bioengineering company) in Hubei province. When asking how the amino acid syrup (or powder) was generated, the manufacturer replied that the powder was generated from human hair ( 1 , 2 , 3 ). Because the human hair was gathered from salon, barbershop and hospitals around the country, it was unhygienic and mixed with condom, used hospital cottons, used menstrual cycle pad, used syringe, etc (figure 1).

Where’s Charlton Heston when you need him??

I’d love to learn to speak Mandarin!

Besides being incredibly useful due to the number of people who speak it, it just seems like a very interesting language. The fact that the same sound said in 5 different tones can mean all different things is just the neatest concept ever. I know it’s not actually like this, but it makes sentences almost seem like songs.

I’m a bit of a language nut to begin with (I even did a class in Chinese Linguistics). It’s pretty fascinating how we label “Chinese” as a language, when there’s 7 different major dialects that are more different that French and Italian - and the sub-dialects add on even more differences.

My only problem with “the Chinese language”, is the writing system. If a writing is so complex that people don’t want to bother with it, it’s probably not the best system to be using. But still, speaking Mandarin would be extremely useful.

There are 915 million speakers of Mandarin Chinese in the world.

Apparently not enough of them live near me that I can get a local class in holiday-Mandarin. 糟糕. Bad luck for me.

Why would I need holiday Mandarin? Well I don’t really, but I’ve always wanted to learn Chinese. Mainly because so many people speak it. On top of that, I’ve finally booked my flights to Australia for Christmas, flying on 14th December and back to England three weeks later on 5th January. Stopover? Shanghai.

It’s just a couple of hours stop on the way there, but it’s an overnight stopover on the way back. What can I say, I felt the need for adventure somewhere totally different. I’ve obviously no idea how it’s all going to work out, but I’m optimistic. I have to be. The flights were two grand. It better be money well spent!

The only question now is whether or not I try and get talking to the Chinese people who live downstairs from me…