The Google/Yahoo search engine card game!

This is pretty cool. A very simple card game requiring two players and three standard decks of playing cards.

Brought to you by the seriously insane minds of User Friendly. I really wish he was updating daily instead of doing reruns, but that's OK.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20150222

Movies: Kingsman and Wing Chun

My wife and I went and saw Kingsman on Friday night. Excellent movie. It's based on a comic book series, and it's a series that I want to buy. The basic premise is a private spy organization fighting nastiness around the world.

We really enjoyed it. Nicely developed story, great training montage/time compression, and the gadgets were great. I especially liked the genre self-referential, but I won't spoil it. Excellent action sequences, and also some occasional very graphic violence: we're talking actual head explodey.

Definitely fun, one that I'll buy when it comes out on DVD.


Wing Chun is a classic Chinese Kung Fu period piece from 1994 starring Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen. This is a tremendously fun movie that I got on Laserdisc 15something years ago. Michelle is Wing Chun, a young woman working in a tofu shop who is also uncharacteristically a Kung Fu master. The fact that a woman is a Kung Fu master is a recurring theme throughout the movie and the subject of, in my opinion, one of the best martial arts fights that I've seen: the "smash the block of tofu" fight. It is absolutely awesome. The story complicates with the women running the tofu shop bringing in a very young widow, mistaken childhood identity. and a bandit gang.

It was very interesting seeing it again last night. It's been a long time since I watched my Laserdisc version and I bought the DVD off Amazon to simplify my collection, last night I watched the DVD for the first time. Most of the details on the case were in Chinese, the back cover blurb was English. So I assumed Chinese language with English subtitles. The movie starts, I'm reading the subtitles, then I realize that not only is the audio track English, but what they're saying doesn't match the subtitles! This was really weird because I had four movies running through my brain: the one that I was watching, the subtitles that I remembered, the subtitles that I was reading, and the audio that I was hearing. Very surreal.

Between the audio and subtitles, I think the subtitles were more accurate. I should pop it in again and see if I can turn off the English audio and turn it back to the Chinese.

Anyway, Wing Chun is an excellent movie. To be honest, it's not a great movie, but it's huge amounts of fun with some fantastic fight sequences. HIGHLY recommended, but you probably won't be able to find it locally without a special order.

Movie: Jupiter Ascending

Another really big movie from the Wachowskis, this one is also an original story by them. The movie's release was pushed many months, it was supposed to come out in early/mid '14 and was pushed to this month to get more special effects done. In the USA it got slammed by the critics and hasn't done too well in the box office here, though the theater we were in this afternoon had a pretty good crowd. Apparently it is doing much better in Europe.

This movie is quite a spectacular, but the plot and the dialog is a little muddy. The story is well-structured and visually the movie is fantastic, though I found some of the abilities of the aliens a little strange. I read in a blog that they did something quite interesting: they recorded the entire musical score of the movie before they started production. Apparently they also did this for Cloud Atlas, though I haven't seen that yet (it's sitting in the 'Watch At Some Point' pile).

What it boils down to is that I wasn't expecting much out of this movie. The previews looked like it was overly ambitious, and perhaps it is. But it's not a bad movie, it has lots of good stuff in it and lots of very good special effects. So I can say it's worth seeing, but I'd wait for a matinee or discount theater. Can't say that I'm buying this when it comes out on DVD, but I might.