If Animal Collective is the Beach Boys on speed, Dan Deacon is Animal Collective on even more speed.

I laughed the whole way through, then it ended and I stopped immediately, feeling as though the Coen brothers had given me a WTF moment much like Osbourne Cox dealt with throughout the entire film.

Frauenfelder was in a tricky situation with this book: a lot of his audience are already advanced Internet users, especially the type that would take the time to read a book of his. Most of them probably could have written a lot of this book themselves (myself included).

However, now that I’ve read it, despite not getting much out of it, I would highly recommend it to anyone who knows how to use the Internet but wants to be more web savvy. I plan to loan this copy out to friends and family who want just that.

From a literary perspective, it was sophomoric; definitely a first draft with a lot of fluff, and it didn’t take long before Paul seemed like a whiny LiveJournal guy that everyone skips over because he has to say something about everything going on in his life, and rarely eloquently. At the same time, though, I could tell he’s an intelligent guy who needs to work on his writing skills and seeing his writing from a reader’s perspective.

The parts with Aaron were where it really shined, though, and not due to bias because I respect Aaron so much but more because it was a great example as to why I do: many wise words and an outpouring of humility, love and beauty in his actions.

The book could have been half as long and said just as much. It’s a good rough version with potential to be amazing if a strong editor took it to the chopping block.

Overall a pretty standard, yet fairly well done, crime/drug movie with Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg.

However, the car chase scene has to be one of the best scenes of its kind I’ve ever seen. Instead of going the mainstream route and doing tons of stunts, they perfectly crafted the lighting, sound and camera angles to craft an overwhelmingly intense and emotional mood. I never imagined being genuinely nervous and fearful during a police action/drama. Watch it for that if nothing else.

I’ve been an Agony Scene fan since the beginning. The progression from their self-titled debut to their last album, The Darkest Red, was all improvement. On Get Damned, they seem to have taken all the boring elements of their first album that they left out of the second.

There is nothing exciting about this album.

Let this be known as The Worst Horror Film Of All Time from here on out.

Not only did they not explain why the hell ghosts decided to haunt wireless signals or how they could take on a physical form and suck the life out of people, but they decided to turn it into an apocalypse movie with about 5 minutes left. Whoops, hope I didn’t ruin the ending for you, but that was the only part of the ant-sized plot worth mentioning.

Was this some rich kid’s high school film class project?

I have nothing against Pantera whatsoever, but Throwdown seems to have decided that they’d rather copy their brand of southern metal instead of sticking to the straight edge hardcore that has been working for them up until now.

Objectively it doesn’t sound too bad; they pull off the gravelly vocals, slurred guitars and divebombs fairly well. But within the context of past Throwdown albums, this is an unfortunate shift.

This is one of the greatest books I’ve read in a long time. It puts psychology (and a bit of philosophy) in common terms so you don’t need experience in the field to understand what Gilbert is talking about.

The concepts are intriguing, the writing is entertaining and captivating, some of the conclusions are surprising but all are explained well, and you are left to wonder how you can apply those conclusions to your own life.

A great read for anyone who likes to think and doesn’t mind having some modern myths about the pursuit of happiness shaken up.

Plain and simple: the cinematography is great and the film noir mood is amazingly authentic, but the plot is so disorganized it almost makes the film not worth watching. I’m not quite sure what story they were trying to tell, but the focus on the famous Black Dahlia murder only took up about 10% of the film. So, as someone who had a preexisting interest in the facts surrounding the murder, it not only lacked the story I was hoping for, but the story it DID tell was delivered so poorly that any chance of redeeming itself was lost.