Matt Van Stone

I was pretty excited when I first found out that Rob Zombie was going to do a Halloween remake. Although I thought House of 1000 Corpses was pure crap, The Devil’s Rejects is one of my favorite movies. If Rob comes anywhere close to what he accomplished with that movie, I’ll be happy.

Anyway, here is the first trailer for Rob Zombie’s Halloween ‘reimagining’. The movie is due to be released August 31 2007, but I don’t know why they wouldn’t shoot for an October 31 release. It would make sense.

Read the rest of this entry »

Holy freaking God man. Let me give you a recap of the events that took place on Friday. Drove past Guitar Works on 16th Ave (Calgary) at about 11:30pm. Sign says “Meet Zakk Wylde April 12th, see guitarworksonline.com for details!”. I crap my pants. Get home, find out you have to buy a Marshall amp to be guaranteed a spot or enter a draw to possibly win. I drive in next morning at 9:30 and buy the cheapest amp I could. Now I’m going to meet Zakk Wylde at 1pm on Thursday before the concert that night at Mac Hall.

I can not even believe how crazy this is. This is like psycho screaming girls crying because Nick Carter touched them crazy. I’m trying not to think too much about it because I don’t want to be too disappointed when all that happens is he grunts hello and signs an 8×10 glossy for me as quickly as possible to keep the line running. I don’t know what to expect. I have this dream of standing in line as he shreds on some Bullseye Zakk Wylde Signature Gibson 10 or 15 feet away from me while he waits for the 1pm mark so he can start his signing session. Oops… did I say I was trying not to think about it? I know, its a far fetched dream, but I cant help myself.

Anyway, like 70 hours to go.

Here is the PDF advertising it: Meet Zakk Wylde at Guitar Works

Read the rest of this entry »

I just want to point out that Microsoft’s Live Search for images is my favorite image search engine. Really it’s only for one reason too: I love it because you don’t have to click “next page” ever. As you scroll down it automatically loads more pictures. You can continue scrolling forever and if there are pictures to load, it will load them. Kudos to Microsoft on this feature.

Now if they could somehow create a spotlight style search where images start appearing in the results view as you type your search, that would be a sweet feature.

End transmission.

I got my hands on a copy of Fiction, Dark Tranquillity’s new album to be released April 23rd in Europe. (Don’t know the North American release date, probably the same)

It is all standard Dark Tranquillity. Mikael’s singing is clearly wicked. You get exactly what you would expect from him. I have listened to the album a few times now and in general I am a little disappointed. I have yet to find any of their songs to be very original. To be honest it sort of sounds like Character… but it’s like these are all the songs that didn’t make the cut.

The first single, Focus Shift, is probably the best song on the album, but still I expected more from this. The album just doesn’t have that over the top dramatic feel of Character and Damage Done. I am going to continue to give it a chance, it wouldn’t be the first time I didn’t like an album right away, but I just wanted more out of the box I guess.

If you can’t “find” the album like I did, look after the jump for the music video for Focus Shift.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have been watching the Sopranos for a few months now. I caught up to the series back in January and have been eagerly awaiting the final 9 episodes. Throughout my life I have religiously watched MacGyver, Quantum Leap, X-Files, Alias, and a few other shows but I can honestly say The Sopranos is my favorite show of all time. After being hooked on Alias I really didn’t think I was going to like another show as much as I liked that one. Now it is only be second best to The Sopranos in my eyes.

The final episodes start today on HBO. I’m not really sure how I’m going to go about watching them yet. Since we don’t get HBO or Movie Central I’ll have to find some other means. I can’t wait for them to be shown on CTV or A&E. Actually, they have been playing all of the past episodes on A&E and it basically just makes me depressed to see it since the show is almost over.

I have a few “predictions” for the final series. I have been bad at predicting the plot in the past, and I really don’t think these predictions of mine will come true, but I guess this is what I could see happening in the final 9 episodes. Possible spoilers after the jump, so don’t click it if you don’t want to be spoiled.

I read somewhere that the shows creator, David Chase, always tried to stay away from the rise and fall style of all the mob movies. Every one has it. Gangster starts from humble beginnings, becomes the most powerful man in the mob, and then goes down in a rain of bullets. David Chase said that Tony is constantly going through highs and lows and ups and downs. There has never been a clear high in his life because he is always struggling with something. I really think this will continue into the series finale. That being said, I doubt my predictions even more.

Read the rest of this entry »

A dream of mine has come true. I got to see Eric Clapton live at the Saddledome on March 26th. It was awesome.

The concert was really good. I enjoyed it thoroughly. We weren’t as close as I originally thought. I thought we were in section 3, row 6, seat 7-10, but they had the stadium setup differently then the diagram showed on ticket master when we got the tickets, so we were actually in row 36. It would have been nicer to be in the lowest tier instead of floor because you wouldn’t have to try to look over the people in front of you, but still, they were really good seats.

The show was probably the best concert I have ever been to. The opening act, Robert Cray was really good. He is some old blues guy. It was awesome though because he didn’t play for very long, just 30 minutes or so. Then they setup for Clapton and he came right out. Clapton played until 10, then walked off. The crowd cheered for 5 minutes solid and they came back out and did 3 more songs. The sound was amazing. It was like watching a concert DVD in person. You always assume that they do all this post processing on the sound on those music DVDs, but really they wouldn’t need to if they regularly play as good as they did last night. Everything was in tune and the sound setup was great. You could hear all of the instruments and everything. Not like some of the metal shows I have been to where all you can hear is the vocals and the drums and then a barrage of guitar and bass noise. It was crystal clear.

The only thing I would change was I would have liked it if Clapton talked a bit more. He basically just came out, played, and left. He said a few words in between a few songs and introduced his band but that was it. It would have been nice to hear him talk for a minute or two.

I am the worst binge blogger evar. Lets see… 9 post over a 3 or 4 day span in JANUARY. And nothing until now… nice.

Moved from Movable Type to Wordpress 2.1.2 Blogging Platform

Well I finally moved this site from Movable Type to Wordpress 2.1.2. As you can see it has a similar format, but completely different theme. I have been wanting to do something with that background pattern for a long time and I’m pretty happy with what I have mocked up. It was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. Most of the work went into stylizing this very popular theme I downloaded. I was able to import my posts and comments from the old site very easily, and I updated my .htaccess file so that all of the addresses for the old site are properly redirected to the new page.

If there are some things that don’t look quite right let me know so I can fix them up. I had to edit a few of the posts because their format was all messed up, but for the most part I think it’s ok.

If you are on Internet Explorer it might not look so great. I spent some time fixing up some of the IE bugs, but really in the end I didn’t care. If Microsoft cant put the effort into making a w3c compatible browser I’m not going to put the effort into fixing the code so it looks right on their browser. If you are viewing in Firefox or Safari it should look as it is intended to. Otherwise it might look crappy.

You’ll see I added a lot more static stuff to the sidebar. There are photos, del.icio.us links, digg links, and blogroll sites. I also have last.fm stats and top movies in there.

Comment Span Zapped

One of the best things about switching to Wordpress is I now have a sweet comment spam filter to block out all that crap I was having to manually delete on my old platform. Spam Karma is sweet. Hopefully I can keep all of that smut spam I was getting on the old site off this one.

Lots of Posts

I currently have a load of drafts that I am going to publish over the next few days. Look for some posts on Linux, The Sopranos, horror movies, and Wii modding coming soon.

Read the rest of this entry »