Pacificapocalypse

And it’s filled with fresh piping hot mini donuts.

Court and I were at Fogfest this weekend; the usual assortment of arts and crafts and other nonsense… until we saw this, the ultimate application of technology and mankind’s overwhelming desire for fried dough products.  I give you Harvey and his automatic mini donut machine.

photo credit: Scott Ableman

I *need* one of these. Imagine it just chugging away on your kitchen counter top; an endless parade of hot, fresh, mini donuts. Video awesomeness below.

We Watch Movies: Severance

Ever wonder what you’d get if you made a movie about the cast of The Office (UK original) getting trapped in Hostel?
You’d get something like Severance.

An odd little film that didn’t get wide release here, but we caught on Netflix streaming. even though the humor/horror mix is just a little off, Severance is still pretty enjoyable.

International weapons manufacturer, Palisades Defense, sends one of their sales teams on a  team building excursion in Eastern Europe. When the road is blocked, on questionable advice of the boss, the employees abandon their tour bus and head down a heavily wooded road to find their “luxury” lodge. Little do they know a killer is lying in wait around the corner, bent on slashing each of them to a horrible demise. In proper British style, victims die with a stiff upper lip (though not all of them accept their fates without a fight) and killers snuffs them in suitably absurd fashion (bear trap?).

Is it a dark comedy or a horror movie with brief moments of funny? Don’t know, it can’t seem to decide and that’s it’s biggest problem. There are a lot of bloody scenes but I can’t think of  one really graphic death scene. Just before the death, the camera pulls away and sometimes returns just after the death, so it doesn’t feel like a strict horror. There are a lot of attempts at comedy but only a few will leave you laughing out loud, so it doesn’t feel like a sinister comedy. Severance isn’t completely void of humor though, there’s a scene near the end that that involved the… uhm… very uncomfortable demise of one of the bad guys that’s pretty funny.

All in all not the best example of the comedy/horror genre that the British do so very well (I’m looking at you Shaun of the Dead) but not a bad rental.

Random Flickr picture

by powerpig

If you have no idea what’s going on here, try this.

We didn’t get it.

Picture unrelated.

So what exactly does the purchase of Marvel by Disney mean?
Maybe a little… something.. like… this:

Donald/Wolverine by SaiyaGina.

Or this:

Beauty and the Thing – - one of several mashups A. David Lewis posted here.

All from Super Punch.

….when you can find parking in the Mission.
Yes, indeed, once again, it’s Burning Man.
Take it away Violet Blue:

While attendees of the yearly arts festival known as Burning Man come from all over the nation and the world, the impact of the costly desert bacchanalia is felt pretty strongly around San Francisco. Many rejoice at the sudden lack of rich hippies and art cars dripping Barbie heads and Legos onto the roads when fog breaks down cheap art-store epoxy, and the ease with which one can get brunch in the Mission. There are virtually no white dudes with dreadlocks for seven square miles. San Francisco smug levels ratchet back to tolerable in the absence of arty hipster trust fund brats and Web 2.0 lets-resurrect-Pets.com-as-a-vlog leeches. Super annoying guys don’t hit on me in bars assuming I know what the hell they’re talking about when they use terms like “the burn,” “the man” and “off the grid.”

And at house parties, there are no chicks that become uncontrollably drunk and then attempt to show you how they can “fire dance,” accidentally setting fire to the host’s potted plant/small dog/infant

From the article, how to enjoy Burning Man and not have to leave the City:

• Before eating any food, drop it in a sandbox and lick a battery.
• Stack all your fans in one corner of the living room. Put on your most fabulous outfit. Turn the fans on full blast. Dump a vacuum cleaner bag in front of them.
• Buy a new set of expensive camping gear. Break it.
• Get so drunk you can’t recognize your own house. Walk slowly around the block for five hours.
• Have a 3 a.m. soul-baring conversation with a drag nun in platforms, a crocodile and Bugs Bunny. Be unable to tell if you’re hallucinating. Lust after Bugs Bunny.
• Cut, burn, electrocute, bruise, and sunburn various parts of your body. Forget how you did it. Don’t go to a doctor.
• Pay an escort of your affectional preference subset to not bathe for five days, cover themselves in glitter, dust, and sunscreen, wear a skanky neon wig, dance close naked, then say they have a lover back home at the end of the night.

I’ve said it many times, and so I’ll say it again:
I have a perfect Burning Man attendance record: zero.

We made an offer on the place in Oakland last night, an offer with MASSIVE contingencies. Now we wait; it’s like some Rube Goldberg machine; every piece of the puzzle has to fit and function perfectly for the whole thing to work. If one part fails, even a little bit, the whole deal falls through.

Which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, the worst thing would be Raptors with with guns, or carnivorous bunnies or swarms acid diarrhea bees. That’s worse that losing this deal. Seriously, especially the bee thing.