(for the price....)
But, alas, the Apple earbuds suck sweaty, hairy donkey dong when it comes to audio quality. To say that they sound horribly tinny is a compliment. I had been using bigger earphones, the kind with padding and stuff, with bigger drivers, but they're not always portable. And something usually breaks after repeated abuse inside a backpack or whatever. So I was looking for something new. i wanted better audio quality, without having to drop $100+ on studio monitors, in a compact portable size.
I of course was looking at the various earbuds and what not. You know... Those 3rd party ones with the Apple remote and all that. But quite frankly, it didn't seem like earbuds could really deliver better sound being such tiny little things. And I don't think they'd last very long either.
Somewhere I had read someone raving about these PortaPros from Koss. So I checked them out at Amazon. They looked pretty funky (which to me is a plus) and many reviews of them really praised them for their sound. The best selling point, they were $30 on Amazon, plus with some special discounts, I got them close to 50% off MSRP!!
Sorry for the long-winded opening, but the internet did not let me down on this one. The PortaPros are great! Now, Koss, as a brand, didn't exactly strike me as all that great. I vaguely remember them from the '80s and never really heard from them again. Didn't they make discount CD players and stuff? Sony was the big audio brand back then....
Anyway, the sound coming out of these things is fucking awesome! I could hear things that I never heard with those shitty Apple earbuds. Those things might as well by 2 paper cups with a piece of waxed string. The PortaPros on the other hand produce some really nice sounds in a variety of ranges. Yes. Definitely there are probably better headphones out there on the market. But you would end up paying around 4x what I paid for my PortaPros, for slightly better sounding stuff.
Are they comfortable? They look pretty fucking weird. I was going to say that they're not exactly the most comfortable. I had them on for most of the work day, and I must say, my ears got a bit sore. But then I remembered they also built something into them called the "ComfortZone". Essentially, you can adjust how firmly the speakers will grip your ears. I had them on "Firm" the whole time. Once I dialed it back to the lightest setting, it was almost like I had nothing on my head, but sweet, sweet melodies were pumping out of the ether. See what happens is, there is also padding that grips your head, right near your temples. So the ratcheting system behind the ComfortZone simply lifts the headphones further away from your head, and lets the temple padding do the work. So are they comfortable? Fuck yes they are. Just simply adjust them to your desired strength and you'll be able to wear these things long into the night.
I can sum this up like this: I got these things last night, but I wanted to go a full day of use before I actually wrote about them, because I wanted to capture more than just my first impressions. But I found that I ended up staying up till around 2 a.m. just listening to music. The TV wasn't on or anything. I was just blissfully jamming away with my PortaPros and my iPod. It was pure awesome. I don't think I've done something like that since high school. So, if you're looking for a really solid headphones with good sound at a price that won't destroy your bank account, you definitely need to get these. And if you have them and don't like them, well, you're a douchebag.
Just a note, there are probably some spoilers ahead. So if you don't want to get spoiled or whatever, avoid reading below where the analysis starts.
So, last night, we made another attempt to go see Inception. This time, we actually succeeded at securing seats (yay us!). I guess the buttmunch teenagers don't go to the Metreon very much these days. Perhaps mommy and daddy doesn't let them go too far away from home.
Anyway, yes, we saw it finally... The Metreon, despite being almost completely empty these days, is still great for watching movies. I remember when it first opened and it was like "Whoa! Stadium seats!!!".... It's a little bit more worn out than when it first opened, but the sound system is still really good in there.
What to say about this movie? Well... I have been interested in Mr. Nolan's work well before "The Dark Knight" hit the big screen. And I guess based on his earlier cinematic efforts and the weird images shown in the marketing for the movie, I sort of had my hopes up that this would be on par with something like Memento. So it was really disappointing to see that it really wasn't all that compelling. The biggest problem is that the movie relies on one of the cheapest, most bogus plot devices ever invented for cinema: dreams.
I know what you're thinking, but just listen up for a sec. Relying on dreams, or the sub-conscious as a plot device is basically taking the easy way out. It means you never really have to explain anything about why people can do what they do. You can just say, "Well, it's a dream." and deny any other rationale for, say, some scrawny geeky guy being able to handle an assault rifle with a relative degree of success.
"Where did he have time to get combat training?"
"I 'unno.... durrrrrrrr..... dreams?"
See? It's a cheap tactic that prevents the audience from questioning further. Sometimes, dreams can be used really really well. Examples of movies that used these kind of alternate reality concepts successfully:
This movie? No. Just no... First of all, there's no real explanation of how these people learned to fight or get trained. Second of all, the dreams they have basically mirror reality; no one flies or no surreal landscapes... They're basically having dreams about real life. Who the hell does that? Furthermore, we have people who were conscious of their existence in the dream world, akin to lucid dreaming. Yet they basically acted as if they were not dreaming, going on about things as if it were the real world. It was an opportunity to really convey the dream world as something unique and perhaps terrifying. But all they showed was a bunch of crumbly buildings and random people with guns (with an astonishing ability to never need to reload).
The Tech
This didn't even make sense. If you are supposed to be sharing a dream with someone, why are you being injected at the wrist? Forgive my ignorance, but I always thought that dreaming took place in the brain, not your circulatory system. Yet every single time someone entered the dream-state, they were injecting something into their wrist, which you have to assume is going into a vein. This makes absolutely no sense. The Matrix made sense. You plugged in via a shunt at the base of your skull. One assumes that the sharp pointy thing plugs directly into your brain stem where you, in the real world, can participate in alternate realities via this thing you're plugged into. With Inception, they're just shooting up heroin or something.
The Characters
Who the hell is Saito? We have no idea what his "business" is, and it's never clearly described in the movie. Yet for some reason, his business cannot compete with some other guy's business. But Saito is clearly connected to major governments around the world, AND he owns a fucking airline for chris'sakes. If you find that you cannot compete with someone else, why wouldn't he just dump the airline and get some of his government connections to help a brutha' out? This didn't make any sense to me at all.
Then he goes and hires Leonardo DiCaprio to do something in someone's dream. But based on the ENTIRE FIRST HALF OF THE MOVIE, he is proven to be a complete failure at whatever it is that he does for a living. But Saito hires him anyway???
Look. I know you probably liked the movie. But seriously.... Just think about this scenario for a second. Saito has a business and he finds that he cannot compete with another business. Instead of consolidating things to help shore up his revenue prospects, he seems to have remained steadfast in keeping his operations diversified across what seem to be disparate industries that may or may not even be profitable. Then, instead of consolidating things and trying to build a better business, he hires what we can only surmise is a complete failure at their job to engage his rival business in some kind of hair-brained scheme to disband their company via their sub-conscious.
Does that seem even remotely like a good idea to you?
See, the problem with this movie is that the whole plot exists simply to move the characters through a long sequence of events. There's no reason for them to even be where they are, doing whatever it is that they're doing, EXCEPT for the fact that you paid some amount of money to go watch whatever is being shown to you at that particular moment in the history of humanity. Crucial points of the story occur simply so that the characters have something to do to move to the next plot device in the movie. This is essentially what bad movies do (see Star Wars, Episodes 1 - 3). I suppose it was well acted and was in some way entertaining, but the ending was predictable and most of what happened in the movie was of little interest, and usually didn't make any sense.
But I guess if you can get Hollywood buzz, and are a fairly well-known director, what difference does it make if your movie has interesting characters, a well thought-out story, a compelling plot, and an interesting conclusion, if people will pay you simply to make moving pictures on a big screen.
This was one of the worst movies I've seen in a while, and you really wouldn't be missing much if you did not watch it. Sure, it can be entertaining, but I definitely walked out of the theater thinking that I should have just waited for it to come out on DVD so I could borrow it from the library and watch it for free. Only go see it if someone else buys your ticket. That's the best advice I could give you.
Two posts in one day?! I'm on a roll...
I haven't done a junkfood review in quite a while (those smokey bacon potato chips really were quite good), and I just so happened to have gotten something that seemed like a good candidate for a review. So without further ado, I bring you.....
My commute takes me very close to this:
No matter how fast you think you are on a bike, there is always that one person who will prove you wrong by being faster.
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