The Fallen

[immediate nerd news]
It's official. Torrent capital of the world The Pirate Bay has been sold off to a Swedish software firm. The firm (no Nas) Global Gaming Factory X has agreed to the deal which will net the founders of TPB a cool 60 million in Swedish crowns (~ $7.7 million in real money aka USD). The money will come in handy as the founders were fined $3.6 million last year as well as sentenced to one year in jail for their world domination scheme, one torrent at a time. So as we send one torrent site into the night, torrenters will only have a limited amount of about hundreds of torrent sites to choose from. What ever will they do???
[/nerd news]

Transformers 2: Electric Boogaloo Revenge Of The Fallen attacked the box office with what seems like a Cybertronian plasma ray and blew it to bits. In it's first day (last Wednesday 6/24), it grossed $60.6 million (along with close to $100 M world wide) and went on to gross $112 million over the weekend. It is the new the highest gross in the history of Wednesday openings and is the second highest gross of all time behind The Dark Knight. Criticism is seemingly split down the middle with either a love it (me & stan gable) or hate it (goldyn child) mentality. This led me to challenge the golden one to a Twoint/CounterTwoint for which he happily accepted but eventually had to back down from because he was getting embarrassed asked to not spoil the plot. We later battled to a stand still on AIM.

In news that actually means something, today is a very important day for the war in Iraq as US troops are starting to withdraw from cities and towns. The Iraqis have declared this day a public holiday known as National Sovereignty Day. Remember, combat ops are to end by September of next year with a full withdraw (pause) by the end of 2011, just in time for PrObama to start his re-election campaign on a platform of true victory in Iraq. Am I psychic or actually from the future? I'll never tell.......(Hint: neither)

I don't know if you've heard but uhh, there was a military coup in Honduras over the weekend. Former Pres. Jose Zelaya was ousted (while in bed and in his red feetie pajamas) and in his place now sits Pres. Roberto Clemete Michelette. Keep your eye on this story as it's going to be another coal fire walk for our new President.

[nerd news redux]
Today is the release of FireFox 3.5 to much fanfare and it seems like it was well worth the wait. There have been ALOT of great updates made under the hood but the point is that it's faster and smarter than the current FF3 and is waaaaay better than the load of crap* that was FF2. Mozilla still has an up hill climb as Internet Explorer is still the top dog but with a modest 22.5% of the market place, you can't say they are in the slums anymore.

That's not all either. Mozilla over the weekend also loosed two updated versions of it's mobile browser codename Fennec. Alpha 2 is now available for Windows Mobile phones with VGA resolution (mainly the HTC Touch Pro) and Beta 2 for the Maemo, which is a platform used for the Nokia N800 and N810 internet tablets. Beware if you want to try WM Alpha 2, these are not for the faint of heart as my Fuze literally donned it's fedora and brief case and left my house for about 2 days.

*FF 2 at the time actually wasn't a load of crap.
[/nerd news]

It's release date time:
DVDs: Street Fighter: Legend Of Chun-Li (Stan Gable's movie of the year) w/ Kristin Kreuk, Chris Klein & Moon Bloodgood; 12 Rounds w/ John Cena; Two Lovers w/ Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow & Vinessa Shaw
Music: Wu-Tang Clan - Chamber Music; AZ - G.O.D. (Gold, Oils and Diamonds); Jeremiah - Jeremiah; Ace Hood - Ruthless (how'd this guy get a second album?)
Games: BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger (X360, PS3); Call Of Juarez: Bound In Blood (X360, PS3); Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs (All); Harry Potter & The Half-Blooded Price (All)

Lastly, check out our new Tweetboard on the left hand side of your screen. Hopefully from now on you will be treated to the live tweets of the day's writer and will be able to respond to them directly. Thank you 140ware for coming up with such a (allthats)fresh idea. If you want Tweetboard on your site check out their page here.

We outta herrrreeeeee. Follow your boy on twitter for more hilarious antics: @cthecatalyst

Hot Shit: Transformers 2, Firefox 3.5, President Obama being cool as a fan with this world going crazy
Not Shit: RIP Mike Jackson & Billy Mays, Kim Jong Il (I ain't forget about you), my Xbox 360 catching the red ring of death

-- The Catalyst aka Dwayne Wade Wilson


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Real Spit from the Goldyn Child

Check out my comrade Young Chris aka Goldyn Child getting busy in his post this week at homebase.

Recently, there has been some disturbing news hitting the airwaves concerning our US soldiers over in Iraq.

The first being the revelation that a US Army soldier in Iraq participated in the rape of a young Iraqi girl and the murder of her family. Truly sickening. The next story revolves around a US soldier stationed in Iraq that killed 5 of his fellow soldiers. It just got me to thinking about the HUGE un-spoken toll that this war is taking on my generation. I remember being in ATL during my spring break, waking up semi-drunk with my homies (shouts to Brandon and the Henry family) watching CNN shocked and in awe (I suppose that tactic did indeed work) as they began to bomb the holy hell out of Baghdad.

Flash-forward to now, about 5 years and over 4,000 deaths later, and we have this news about these soldiers. Let's leave the actual casualties out of this. What about the many, many soldiers that return home without an arm or a leg only to be placed in a disgusting, insufficient medical facility (if you recall the Walter Reed scandal from a couple years ago)? That's America's way of saying thanks? As these soldiers are proof, the mental toll that war takes on you is beyond measure, something that also isn't taken into account.

I can directly relate to this as my Brother is a veteran of the Iraq war. I thank God everyday that he came home physically sound, but the mental toll, as he's told me, is something that is hard to quantify. The isolation, the fear, the anxiety, the nervousness, the sadness of knowing that a guy was killed who you just sat at the lunch table with yesterday or knowing your man died because a kid handed him a cell phone that turned out to be an IED. These feelings aren't easily purged, nor can they be forgotten as a soldier reacclimates his or herself back to civilian life. My brother can attest to those difficulties, he's just another example of young men, women, our peers, who return home just to feel more lost than when they left. Luckily, my brother has a network of family and friends that love him to help him, others are not so fortunate, and the end result can very well be manifesting itself in these acts that have been committed in the last couple weeks by the same young men and women that have sworn to protect our safety.

We all have to understand that, by and large, these are our peers doing this. Our contemporaries that are fighting and dying for this war. It is indeed our Vietnam, and the sooner that everyone realizes the tremendous shockwave this will have on my generation, the sooner we can go about remedying it. I have the utmost respect for all branches of the Armed Forces (my pops was in the Air Force for 24 years), thanks for keeping America safe. And that's not cliche George Bush bullshit. Shouts to my brother's dude Gino, who's currently on the ground in Afghanistan somewhere off that special ops. Yeah, he's hard core. So hard core he probably uses Chuck Norris brand toilet paper.

Read the rest of this post @ www.allthatsfresh.com

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