The interface is one of the most gorgeous I have ever used.  It’s slick, fast, interactive, and modern.  Everything Facebook is lacking.  The Circles feature is the best idea for sharing information with all your friends and people you’ve ever met, known.  I love being able to have different Circles for my different groups of friends, and restricting the information they get to know about me, and the updates I post to those individual ones.

It’s like I’m the dictator I’ve always dreamed of being, and the circles are my subjects, with different classes for everyone – Council, Guardians, Agents,  the list goes on, and on, and everyone in those circles has a role to play, a specific role.  And they only get the information that I deem necessary for them, I love it!

The one lacking thing about it has been the invite system, and when I first signed up it was disjointed and inconsistent.  They changed that and made it more Gmail like, and that’s better, because now I know when I invite someone and stuff.

The only things missing now are further Google Integration, I’m talking to you Google Music. I’d love to see some interactivity between the different services, posting my currently playing song to my Goolge Chat friends, like the desktop client (sometimes) does.  I have a feeling that in the coming months this kind of integration will become standard, and then I can tell everyone that I listen to Garth Brooks, Bon Jovi, Billy Joel, & Backstreet Boys alllllll day.

Also, if you want a Google+ invite, leave a message in the comments with your email address and I’ll see what I can do.  That invite thing on the side doesn’t always stay there.

Terminator Salvation was faced with a huge mission, to keep to the roots of The Terminator history, and to prove what we already knew (Kind of like Star Wars Episode III in a way, it had to show how Anakin became Lord Vader, and make up for the horribleness of Episode II.).  T3 showed that judgment day happens, and sure, it may share alot in common with T2, but it was still a good action movie.  That being said, Salvation is not so much an action movie as a War movie.  Sure there is action involved, but it’s more about war, and with war comes sad, depressing moments.  So here’s my review of what I thought about it.  It’s after the click, cause it’s full of spoilers see, I’m being nice today.

There was things wrong with Terminator Salvation, but, there was more things right with it I think.  There was some bad editing, and some bad acting, and while you can’t ignore the editing, at least the bad acting wasn’t everyone – mainly the Tec-Com Command guys.

On that note, I did not like how there was a command structure above Connor, in all the flash-forwards, and descriptions of the future from the previous 3 films, John Connor is the leader of the human resistance.  While the resistance listens to him via FDR type radio broadcasts, he is not technically their leader, I did not like that.  Although, with the destruction of the sub that had the high command, maybe he will become their leader now, I hope so anyway.

Taking from the above, it is inevitable that with the events of each previous Terminator film, the timeline was changed slightly(I am completely ignoring The Sarah Connor Chronicles, as you should too, they fucked up the timeline), so facts that the original Kyle Reese gave Sarah in Terminator would have changed alittle (or would they not? because he was a different person already?(I am not going into the paradoxes of time travel here, chris would hurt me)).  Another thing about the future that’s different was the battlefields of human skulls that naked terminators walk across (Aren’t those naked Terminators (aka the metal endo-skeletons) nice looking?!, I think so, and I’m scared to death of them).  Next up, why is it so sunny out?  We know that there was a nuclear war, so it should be nuclear winter, or at least not as clear day sunny as it was in the movies.  Although this can be explained by saying all the flash-forwards were in the evening, but that’s just cheating your way to an answer if you ask me.

Why did John Connor get stabbed?  That was dumb.  Why still did the T-800 walk out of the molten metal that fell on him?  As we clearly saw in T2, molten metal can kill terminators, this is major contradiction and I don’t like it.

What was with the giant walking harvester terminator?  What was the point of that?   Pointless chase scenes, eh.  That stupid girl, what was her deal, she didn’t ruin the movie, but she didn’t add anything to it either.

Marcus Wright was an interesting addition, although I don’t really know why they needed it?  I guess they just need a new and improved Terminator for each film.  I don’t get why though when these films are set in the future, but in the past of the timeline there is this advanced terminator, but it’s made to seem like he was a prototype for the T-800 series, except, if he was a prototype, why change the body features?  Unless it’s because the resistance already knows what Wright looks like, so they need someone new.

The thing that kept the movie together in my mind was that in the end, it was about killing John Connor.  That’s it, that’s all that was required, the rest of the movie was just a set up to kill John Connor, just like the previous 3 films, John Connor was seen as a threat, and must be terminated.  What I don’t get is how does Skynet have a record of the future past events where it sends Terminators back in time to try and kill Connor and failed?  It shouldn’t should it?  Unless of course it has records of some of it it hidden in the computers of Cyberdyne, I guess that’s possible.

Taking this as a stepping stone, I hope that the next film shows Skynet sending back either the original Terminator, or the T-1000, (I would so love a Robert Patrick cameo).

Overall I thought that the movie was better then what the reviewers thought of it.  It was a war movie, and it seems that most of the reviewers thought it was supposed to be a Terminator movie (while it is, it still is about a war at heart).  At least it didn’t fuck up the timeline like the TV series did, I mean really, Sara Connor lives, another Terminator is sent back in time to protect them forever, and she lets it, that was ridiculous, and you know it, and that’s probably why people stopped watching it, that’s why I did.

Does Salvation live up to it’s sequels, yes.  Does it surpass them, eh, not really.  Besides the fact that absolutly nothing will ever top Terminator 2 in terms od sequel quality, T3 was good (I know T3 gets a bad rep in the world, but I put my full backing behind it as a film), and so was Salvation.  It could be because I am biased and I love the franchise so much, but I think that unlike some other 4th movie instalments, Salvation is just what I expected – a film about the Human/Machine war, and the ultimate protection of the fate of John Connor.

The world is split up into 10 sections, each has 10% of the world’s population, represented by the little people.

Green means healthy people, red means infected people, and black means dead people.  Of each of the 10 areas, you can spread the virus through, or attack airports, water, or the country’s attempt at a cure.  If the country is not infected, but shares borders with one that is, you can attempt to infect it with the “!” icon.  That’s the newest feature, controlling the virus itself, and not letting a random generator do it.  It lets you actually control which places you attack, which is nice.  And except for Greenland, and the South Pacific (Australia), all of Europe/Asia/Africa is reachable through land, you need a plane to get to the Americas, and you need a plane to get to Greenland and South Pacific.  And you can do whatever you want, for the low cost of 1 point each.

Look at that.  That’s all you get to control?!  No individual features of the virus like in Pandemic II, and no control of it’s transmission attributes like Pandemic.  That truly is dumb simple, and I don’t like it.

However, it’s one saving grace is that unlike Pandemic II, it is winnable.

Orange areas show infected countries, see, all of them are orange.

I choose f-11 because it was very governmenty.  I could have choosen Captain Trips, but I felt this virus didn’t deserve the honnor and prestigue that that name inspires in me, (yes inspires).

Unlike the other games, this one is probabky the most realistic.  Because after 0% of the population dies, and 1% is infected, all the other countries start to develop a cure.  (Just like in real life, when one kid who may have swine flu, the entire school is shut down for 2 weeks for disinfection).  But that being said, I have been able to beat it repeatedly, unlike Pandemic II.

Fuck you Madagascar.

Regardless I did learn some stuff while watching it.

One thing being is that Billy Mays is orders of magnitude more well known the Anthony Sullivan, which is visually apparant in their Wikipedia pages.  I sorta knew who the guy with the British accent was in the original commercial, but that’s because I only saw his pitches twice.  I did some informal math in my head, and for every 1 Anthony Sullivan pitch I saw on TV, I saw 12,000 Billy Mays pitches.

Another thing I learned, more so confirmed, because it makes sense, is that there is a long process to inventing something, and then selling it.

Some things I wish they went over though were the actual cost of making the products.  They kinda went on it with the Impact Gel, but it wasn’t hard numbers, which I guess are confidential.  I do want to know how they are able to make so much money at $19.99, but wait there’s more!  It boggles the mind.

I liked at the end how they showed some basic numbers crunching being done.  It was nice insight as to how they actually make money.  What I did not like was the artifical tension they put in.  I realize it’s a TV show, but it’s annoying.  Also, did they really have to give the life story of the two guys who gave them inventions.  I don’t really care, neither of them will get me to buy the product.

In the end I say that Pitchmen is moderately watchable, just because it is informative.  However, after seeing the process one or two more times, I can’t say with certainty if I will watch the show every week.  There’s just nothing there to learn after that, and it becomes a silly useless sub-reality show.

I did gain some respect for Billy and Sully though, I still will skip over their commercials, at least 9 out of 10 times.

{Discovery}