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3Mar/101

Weekly Dump

Okay, so, just a bit of site news first: I finally got the keyboard navigation working on the site. Wasn't that hard, I just kept forgetting to do it. So, now you can navigate the comic with the left and right arrows on your keyboard, as well as shift clicking left or right to get to the first comic or the last comic, respectively.

Next up, there was this study done about slowing down the obesity epidemic in America. What was their solution? Subsidize starvation. I shit you not.

...Okay,... so what they were really saying is that by making junk food more expensive, less people will buy it, so therefore, it must be helping them to make healthy food choices!! Yay!! Well, no. The entire study was this giant, epic fail, a full hellameter across. First off, their sampling was women only. Yes, women only. So, even if their findings weren't bubkis, it would only apply to women. Sorry guys, but having a test group of only one distinction is FAIL. Second, there wasn't a control group. Third, everybody was given about 20.00 to feed each member of their family for a week. When junk food prices went up, the number of calories in their selections went down... but, would they have been able to feed the family for the week?

Basically, it comes down to this: Make the food more expensive, and yes, people will consume less. Duh. The problem isn't how much people are consuming, it's what, and honestly here's the shitty truth:
1. Until carrots start tasting like doritos, people are going to buy the doritos.
2. A large part of the incentive of junk food is that it's cheaper than "real food".
3. Making junk food more expensive just means people will have less ways to actually stretch their money.
4. That means you're encouraging poor people to starve, unless you find a way to make the healthy food as cheap as the junk food used to be. You can't remove the cheap options without basically giving 70% of the country the finger.
5. The other big part of junk food's hold on the country is time. It's convenient and quick.
6. I dunno about you, but I really don't have an extra 4-5 hours a day to dedicate to cleaning, preparing, and cooking food, and then cleaning dishes.
7. The time argument can be fixed though, as long as we can get a bill passed that says that all women must be housewives, like it was in the 30's before all the junk food.
8. Oh wait, that's right. That's WHY junk food was made. Go figure.

University at Buffalo, I am disappointed in you.

Okay, well, not really. Didn't really have many high expectations anyways...

And last, in this giant spew off the top of my head: Adelaide huh...? Hey Berga, by any chance, you figure you're related...?

19Jan/102

In case you missed it

On Letterman last night, there was a band. It was frickin good. I cannot stress enough that you guys need to check these guys out.

And then, The Heavy's website as well.

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10Dec/091

Girls with Slingshots: Two girls, a bar, and a talking cactus, six times a week!

I read this strip today, and I just have to say... Hooray for logic!!

Girls with Slingshots: Two girls, a bar, and a talking cactus, six times a week!.

23Oct/090

Drag Me to Hell

So, I watched Drag Me to Hell, shortly after it made it onto DVD. Now, I've got to tell you that I'm a big fan of Sam Raimi's early work (read: Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, Army of Darkness, and Darkman). I even like some of his main stream works (read: only Spider-Man really). I thought that this movie would be his grand return to his roots of "camp horror." While the movie is a return to camp horror, it's far from a triumph.

The movie opens at the turn of the twentith century in Pasadena, California. A truck erratically drives up to a mansion and two hispanic workers take their son into the mansion. Inside, a hispanic mystic, name really unimportant, tries to exorcise the black goat demon Lamia from the boy. The exorcism goes awry, and the boy is dragged me to hell. Flash forward to the turn of the present century. The main character, a twenty-something woman whose character I care so little for that I can't even remember her name, works as a loan officer in a crappy McBank. She's played by one of the worst actresses in terms of skill this side of Fran Drescher, though she does look vaguely like Shawn Johnson. She's trying to get in good with her boss to get an assistant manager position at the bank, competing with an asian ass kisser. In all honesty, that is all I can remember for the "plot" of the film.

The entire film is a contrieved pile of crap; marred from the start by poorly contructed and inserted CGI effects; and plagued by poor acting, poor writing, and poor casting. No one in the film seems to believe or care about their character, which translates into poor performances by some sorry B-list actors. The writing team of Sam and Ivan Raimi, the writing duo behind the fun camp movie Army of Darkness apparently completely forgot how to write a damn movie since then.

Now, I'm not going to say that the movie is all bad. Not wait, that exactly what I'm saying. The cinematography might have been good, but the entire movie just makes me want to shoot someone rather than have to watch it again.