Boxing Day Blues

Of all the fake Holidays on the calendar, there’s none worse than Boxing Day. Similar to Black Friday, Boxing Day is an event designed to bring out the blackest depths of the human soul through crass consumerism. Yet, are it’s core, Black Friday is about giving, as often people are driven to buy presents for others whilst trampling Wal-Mart employees to death in a ritualistic tribal frenzy. Boxing Day is all about selfishness, as people are blankly purchasing goods for themselves. All that imitation good-will towards others evaporates at midnight on Christmas. No one gives to charity on Boxing Day. People could easily give their unwanted gifts to a donation box, but instead they return them to stores for credit, merely to buy other crap they don’t really want.

The line-ups are always insane. Living two blocks from the mall, I dared entering Best Buy. There was about an hour long wait I’m guessing by the line, and on what? I flipped through the flier they were handing out. There was nothing that exciting. Nothing they couldn’t have purchased any other time of the year for about 10% more. I couldn’t even see if they had what I wanted in stock, because the line extended around the entire game section. I gave up instantly. Why? On some level I realized I was acting just like a glutton. I was seeing that extra slice of cake and chose to say, “No, I don’t need that.” At least not that badly.

To me, gift cards are the culprit. Of all that money rolling into retailers at this time, how much of it is money they already have? 20%-40%? Of course, they’re still making cheddar of these gift cards, due to the amounts these gift cards are valued at. No one is going to find anything for exactly $20. It’s $29.99 plus tax. Honestly, the gift card is like saying, “Fuck you,” to the person you’re buying it for. “Here’s part of a gift, no refunds.” There’s people who sit on gift cards all year. Some even expire. How fucked up is that? You, as a customer, give money to a retailer, in exchange for credit at that store in the form of a gift card. Say the person you buying the gift card for never uses it or else it expires. The company then keeps that money. In short: they robbed you. You gave them money, and they gave back nothing. It’s like insurance, or gambling.

The gift card has somehow become more popular than cold, hard cash. Cash is always in style, and you can spend it anywhere. The gift card? Not so much. Also, let’s say you spend $19.99 out of $20.00 gift card. If you used a twenty dollar bill, you’d be getting a much used penny back. Not so with the gift card. That penny is their’s, unless you want to spend an extra $0.01, plus the money out of your pocket. Then you’ll get some change back.

Most gift cards are used on Boxing Day, but for those wishing to make their purchases later, they’ll often encounter the “trainee.” The new employee who has no fucking idea how to ring through a gift card. You have to stand there and smile impatiently as you wait for their dumb-fuck supervisor to come and do their job for them. It’s like you gave them a ticket to waste your time.

Let’s not forget those who use their cards to discover there’s not one thin red cent on them. You’re assured there’s a good quantity of credit on the card, but you can’t fucking tell. It’s not like you can crack the card open to find out. There you’ll be, handing over your card, and you’re informed there’s nothing on it. Who do you blame? Yourself, the cashier who just rang the card through, the original cashier who filled the card, or the person who bought it? There’s a long list of people who could be fucking you over. Maybe the person who gave it to you is just an asshole. “What, there should be $100 on there!” they could say. For all you know, they could have just picked it up off the shelf and put it in their pocket. People steal gift cards all the time. It’s the perfect crime. What are you going to be charged for if you’re caught? A gift card is really just air in plastic form. You stole $0.00. It’s like you stole the idea of the card without the copyright infringement.

I work retail, and there’s always crackheads wandering around the store trying to sell stolen cards for cash. They’ll assure their mark that there’s $100 or more on the card, and all they want is $50. $50? Why that’s just enough to buy some crack! Of course, there’s nothing on the card. Or is there? I doubt this scam has ever worked, so no one’s really ever been able to check the validity.

What happens to these cards when they’re spent anyway? They’re never recycled, no matter what bullshit they’re feeding you. They’re like AOL discs, only they’re still being distributed. The card is really just a numerical sequence being run through a computer, so what’s the point of the card in the first place? The entire process could be completely virtual. That would solve a lot of problem, but it’s harder to con consumers into buying $50 in make-believe money without a plastic card to wave in their face.

Have you ever been to Best Buy or Wal Mart where they have all those pre-paid cards for phone calls, internet gaming, etc.? How many of those cards are there? How many are physically purchased? Those are the real mind-fuck cards, because you’re spending actual money for fake money on a card to be used for something that isn’t really quantifiable a goods or services. You’re buying a fake currency with real money so someone can buy a few in-game items for their virtual characters in a Second-Life rip-off.

Back to the larger subject of Boxing Day, why are we always fooled by these sales? We know they’ll extend for the full week, if not longer. Stores need to get rid of their inventory, or they’re fucked. They’ll sell the shit until it’s gone. As for the special items listed in the flier. They’re not in store. The company had no intention of giving those items over to you, to the consumer. They were never going to ship them to stores. How do I know? Because I've worked retail. My job use to be order merchandise for the fliers and have it ready for the day of the sale. So I’d send in my orders, and in return I’d receive nothing. They just plain shit didn’t feel like sending it. Other times, merchandise would be distributed automatically, only it wasn’t. The result? On average, 20% of the flier would be missing. Yes, 1/5 items would not be on shelves. Another 1/5 would be in dangerously short supply. Why dangerous? Because someone has to explain to customers why the items in the flier weren’t on shelves? The answer: the store itself is not responsible for distributing the fliers and the fliers themselves are printed months in advance. A lot can change during that time. Or to put it another way: *shrug*. You want it? I ordered it. I called my district supervisor regarding my order, and it’s still not here. Don’t like that? Fuck you. Or go talk to the manager, and then fuck yourself, because there’s no rain checks and the manager will repeat what I just told you, only he’ll phrase it so it’s my fault.

You didn’t need it to begin with. You’re just another zombie under a corporate consumerism culture spell. You’re like the man who shot the last buffalo. You didn’t need it, and there are no more, so congratulations fuckwad.

No one has ever noticed how the TVs on sale during Boxing Day are of the lowest quality offered. You’re not dealing with Phillips or Sony, you’re dealing with Citizen. What’s a Citizen? Exactly, that’s why it’s so cheap. Go invite your friends over to see your shitty TV that’s slightly bigger and flatter than the last one, JUST LIKE YOUR WIFE!

Drivers are the worse around Boxing Day. The weather’s as nice as it could be for this time of year, and I still saw a car wreck at 8:00 while dropping of my fiancée at work. In parking lots, people refuse to follow logical patterns. I’m at a stop sign, waiting to pull out. There’s a car driving by the crossroad with the right away. I wait for him to pass, only he stops. He waits for me to pull out. Only, I can’t because there’s still traffic in the other direction. He thinks he’s helping, whereas he’s making my job more difficult. People try to turn through intersections and stop short because they can’t pull out the whole way. I could have walked, but I’m a lazy, lazy man with regrets.

For all I’ve talked about, I’m still grateful for gift cards. I was all set to spend mine at EB games, but any plans of getting in and getting out (like my sex life) are dashed to hell. I don’t want to stand in line with greasy teenagers for forty minutes when I can’t even get in to see if they have what I want. The line is to GETINTO THE STORE. Imagine spending that amount of time, usually reserved for Disneyland, and then not finding what you want. You’re automatically compelled to buy something you don’t want to try and make up for it. Then you’re out of money, so when you do find what you want, you can’t get it.

Mostly, I’m just pissed off because I didn’t get any games this year, and there’s some good ones I need. To me, Boxing Day is about spending time with my game systems, and I can’t do that. I even check Xbox Live Marketplace’s deal of the day. “The Fugitive.” You can rent it online. Or, you could go to the store and rent it. Or you could buy it for the same price they’re offering on their “slashed” sale price, and have it to own. Xbox Live movie rental expire after about 24 or 48 hours after you first press play. I rented one movie once this way just to see a movie in HD before I figured out TVersity on my computer.

Ugh… anyway, Christmas is over, and that’s the important thing. Every year, Christmas loses more meaning. All the TV specials you watch give you a mixed message that tries to re-establish that link, so you’ll go out and buy things during the commercial break. This year, while watching one of an infinite array of “Christmas Carol” knock-offs, I realized the real message that film portrays, which is If you don’t go along with Christmas, you’re fucking dead. It’s pretty clear about this too. I mean there’s a  ghost showing Scrooge his own grave because he wasn’t “Christmassy” enough. He’s only allowed to live because he buys people a bunch of presents. Even then, his survival isn’t guaranteed.

“A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens the most Socialist/Capitalist thing ever written. On one level, it’s saying the rich are economically responsible for the poor, on the other, it’s saying all of life’s woes can be solved with spending more money. It’s like Obama’s America! There’s an underlying sense that if you don’t buy people presents, some form of Proletariat mob will rise up and rip you limb from limb. The redistribution of wealth is critical to human social well-being, and more importantly your own. So watch the fuck out because Santa/Big Brother is watching you.

Avatard

So last night I saw Avatar in Real 3-D.

“Real 3-D” to me means going to a live performance like Cats, as is my wont. Ironically, it probably would have cost the same to put on a live stage production of this movie in every North American movie theatre simultaneously as it did to film it. Rumours put the budget at around half-a-billion dollars.
So what does half-a-billion dollars and ten years of production get you in terms of a movie? Everything’s been pretty much visually perfected. You’re looking at these blue cat people, (who are all a metaphor for indigenous people abroad so they look blackish), flying around on some fucked-up pterodactyls and they look pretty damn real. You can’t fault the movie for it’s visuals, even if everything in their world glows like they’re in a gay nightclub.
But here’s what I thought was fucked up:
I was ready to stop the movie about seven minutes in when they reveal the “avatar” they’d been growing to use as a spy growing in it’s tank. It had a perfectly braided ponytail. The avatar hadn’t even been born yet, and already it had a hairstyle. What, did someone go into the tank with a scuba suit and braid this guy’s hair?
Then I found out what the ponytail was for. The blue cat people aren’t big on pants, and they don’t have much to swing down there aside from their tails, if you know what I mean, but their ponytails are like this USB cable. They pull back then ends of their braid and they have these urchin looking feelers that pop out, and they use this to plug into random objects in the forest, like trees and horses. For some reason, for them to be able to ride a six-legged horse like Odin, they have to stick their hair into the horse’s Fu-Manchu thing. Saddles are a faux-paus.
Like I said, they don’t have any kind of noticeable wangs happening, so I’m think their hair does double-duty as their ding-dong. Which means: they're straight up fucking these animals. With their hair.
There’s also a scene where the avatar dude gets hoisted up by his ponytail and smacked around, so it’s like he’s getting yanked around by his dick. Which would explain his screaming.
There’s sex in avatar, of the most awkward variety. I don’t think either one of them knew what they were doing, and neither did the audience. My guess was: hair sex foreplay.
So I mentioned they can plug their hair into trees, and the trees have the voices of their ancestors inside of them. You know when natives get all uppity with the white man and try to tell them their ancestors spirits still roam the place? That literally happens in Avatar, and they have scientific proof of it happening, and the evil corporation still doesn’t care.
This movie has more hippie bullshit in it per square inch than the entire 60’s. It’s all about how cutting down trees is bad and blah blah blah. At one point Mother Nature actually attacks the bad guys trying to cut up the trees, but Mother Nature is a hypocritical bitch. The animals she uses to strike back with are these rhino things with hammerhead noses, which they use to knock down trees. These animals probably knock down hundreds a trees a day, and no one gives a shit, but if the humans try to come in and do the same they’re evil and must be stopped.
There’s also an incredible amount of alien side-boob action going on in the movie, even if it is of the itty-bitty variety.

All the aliens are anorexic as shit. They have these incredible detailed and individual faces, but their bodies are all the same. Kate Moss would tell these bitches to eat a sandwich.
Plus, these caring, sensitive native aliens are racist as fuck. The whole reason there’s avatar clones is so they can get natives to accept them. This is the equivalent of putting on blackface. The thing is: it doesn’t even work. The natives know right away they’re impostors, but they still have to use the avatars because they’ll kill the humans on sight. So avatar clone: good. Human: bad.
Now: the whole plot of this movie is that the evil corporation wants to mine the shit out of the blue alien’s home, which is this giant tree. So they send in all these human controlled blue alien clones to negotiate with them and try to get them to move the fuck out. Only, that doesn’t work, so they decide to just bomb the hell out of the tree. So the main character ends up spying for them. To summarise: they’ve invested billions of dollar in surveillance equipment so they can have they 3-D graphical charts, and then they spend millions more to build an avatar clone body just to infiltrate the native group, and the best plan they can come up with is, “Blow up the tree.” A fucking tree.
Even though it’s the future, military strategy is exactly the same. “Bomb the hell out of them.” Their Endgame strategy is to take two pallets of explosives and drop them on their most sacred religious site. When it comes to dropping them: they have to push them out the back of their plane. PUSH THEM. Plus they leave the hangar door open long before they need it open, so the aliens can just swoop in easy as you please.
The bad guy in this movie is way too obsessed with killing blue guys. Even when things are taken past their natural conclusion, he decides to keep going for it. He brings a lot of bad-assery to the movie, though. There’s this one door in the movie that’s like the kind you would see on a submarine, and he just kicks it open like it’s paper-mache. Later, he’s on fire for no less than three minutes and just doesn’t care.
Another thing: Sigourney Weaver and Michelle Rodriguez are two type-cast bitches. This is Sigourney’s sixth or eighth alien movie, and Michelle is the bitch with the gun in every movie.
If Titanic and now Avatar can prove anything, it’s that James Cameron has become the Michael Bay of people falling to their deaths. There’s a lot of falling going on. It’s like half the movie.
All in all, two thumbs up… my butt.

Underachiever

(Courtesy of Penny-Arcade)
I was getting points all over the place today on Xbox Live, and I wasn’t even playing for that long. After popping in a rental copy of Halo 3: ODST, I managed to unlock 10 achievements just by playing through a few levels in a Normal Campaign. The cool thing about that is two Achievements got me two new clothing items as Avatar Awards on Halo Waypoint. It’s kind of weird that playing one game unlocks something in another game (Halo Waypoint is really more of Halo dedicated website on Xbox, but it’s cool because it lets you follow your campaign over several games, and gives you a score based on your total progress. Imagine if they had something like this for Super Mario. Honestly: have you ever wondered how many goombas you’ve bopped or how many times you’ve saved the Princess? Nintendo needs to get on this.) Here I am, wearing my new hoodie and shirt combo.

…And my 2010 New Year’s glasses. They were free yesterday.

The Halo clothing line for Avatars is horrendous, honestly, so I’m glad I didn’t pay for that. The coolest is the floating eye droid, but with props you can only see them on your own dashboard. You can’t bring them into 1 vs. 100.
Anyway: none of these Achievements can touch the one I got playing The Ballad of Gay Tony this morning. Catch the Bus is a relatively easy Achievement to get, but it involves dancing perfectly (within reason) at two clubs in the game. Think about it: an Achievement based on dancing in a game about getting a BJ from a hooker and then blowing that hooker’s brains out with a shotgun and running over her body as you escape from police. Not only that, but it involves going to a gay club. With dudes. You even have to have a dance-off with an angry gay dude to prove your “manliness.” You’re dancing at a gay club in a game called “Gay Tony.”
You know what that calls for, don’t you?

Aw yeah!

Technorati Tags: Xbox,Halo,GTA,Avatar

Goddamn Hippies

Okay: you watched that. You can’t un-watch it. So what have we learned from watching his piece of hippie bullshit?
1: Bears are the greatest threat to our nation. Much like Al-Queda, bears are planning to launch themselves against our skyscrapers in a coordinated suicide attack.
2: Global warming is rapidly destroying the polar bear’s natural habitat, namely Coca-Cola bottling plants, forcing them to find work as stuntbears.
3: If you’ve ever taken a plane anywhere, ever, you’re a terrible person and you deserve to die.
4: If Global Warming continues, the Polar Ice Caps won’t just melt: THEY’LL EXPLODE! The force will send polar bears plummeting through the sky thousands of miles away without killing them until they hit the ground. That’s how fucking scary Global Warming is. You’ll be eating your cereal one day, and a fucking polar bear will fall through the roof into your breakfast nook, all because you didn’t recycle that plastic bag.
5: The polar bear in Lost got there by falling.
6: Always put on your parachute before jumping out of a plane.
Honestly: what was the logic behind this commercial? How did the meeting for this go?
-

“People just aren’t overreacting enough to Global Warming. We need an overpriced commercial to scare them into thinking what we believe.”
“I know, we’ll have a commercial where we kill babies!”
“No, babies are too cute, but I like the killing part.”
“What about old people?”
“Not cute enough.”
“Kittens?”
“No! Bigger, people, we need to think bigger!”
“…Bears?”
“Wrong! We’ll use POLAR bears!”
“Brilliant!”
“Now how are we going to kill them?”
“We’ll put them in concentration camps, like my Great Aunt!”
“No, it has to be related to the environment somehow, but in the most vague and obscure sense possible.”
“Let’s have the bears fly planes into buildings like 9/11!”
“Too soon. We’re saving that for Sarah Palin’s 2012 Presidential Campaign.”
“What if we just drop them out of the planes, then?”
“Perfect. We’ll say it’s because the airline industry is polluting too much, and we’ll keep saying it until they give us money. BWA-HA-HA!”

Who did the math for this one anyway? What kind of a Rainman can make the instant connection between emission from an airplane and the weight of an animal? My carbon footprints as big as a polar bear when I take a plane. GOOD! It’ll give the bear someone new to play with.

Technorati Tags: commercials

Tiger’s Wood

Am I really supposed to care if Tiger Woods got him some? Am I supposed to feel sorry for him and his wife and the hundreds of millions he stands to lose in endorsement deals? Because I don’t. He’s a goddamned billionaire with a pre-nup and a too-hot wife. He made an obscene fortune playing golf, and hocking overpriced disposable razors. At the end off all this, even if he loses his wife, kids, and any future endorsement, he’s still a BILLIONAIRE. Let me explain: he can lose a million dollars and still have a BILLION DOLLARS. O-N-E B-I-L-L-I-O-N. As in 1,000 million dollars.
Fuck you, Tiger Woods. Fuck you and you ghetto-fabulous lifestyle.

Gay Ballad

LiveJournal Tags: Gay Tony,GtA IV

I’ve been playing The Ballad of Gay Tony, the third and final DLC for GTA IV, instead of playing Modern Warfare 2 out of some misguided sense of peer pressure. This might be why:

I’ll wait it out until things clear up. I don’t need to be getting pissed off at shooters more than I already am.
The Ballad of Gay Tony brings the trilogy in one part to a close, and it may indicate that the writers of Grand Theft Auto are more clever than you might expect. As in Lost & Damned, Gay Tony enjoys a separate-but-equal status. It’s a self-contained story/game, wherein you play as a Louis, a Dominican-American club manager/ladies’ man instead of Niko, a borderline suicidal Slavic immigrant. The difference between the two games is readily apparent with the higher-octane gun-action and base-jumping. Louis is straight-up fucking girls in the club and getting head in the back room, while Niko is cradling his dead Irish girlfriend outside a church (*SPOILER ALERT*). If you were a fan of San Andreas and all the shit you could get up to in that game, this DLC is truer to that game than GTA IV proper. It’s also more challenging. The guns are bigger on both ends, so you’re getting as good as you’re giving. Meaning: you’re dying more. They also added a new scoring system. After each mission, there’s a breakdown of how well you did, which is uploaded to your Rockstar Social Club profile. You could nail the whole mission, but there’s still aspects you may have missed. Did you get a headshot? What’s your firing accuracy? Did you parachute into the boat? No? WELL YOU SUCK!!! AND NOW EVERYONE ON THE INTERWEBS KNOWS!!!
Plot-wise, Louis’s character is less sympathetic and deep than Niko Bellic. He’s an ex-con who’s days are filled with club hopping and gun fights. The biggest problem is his coke-toking gay boss, Tony, and his Lucy-esque schemes.
I think the most interesting thing about the game is how it overlaps with GTA IV and Lost & Damned. Johnny, Lost & Damned’s protagonist was already an established character in GTA IV, but with Louis, it’s a bit more tricky. Louis makes several appearances in both editions, but you don’t realize it until you play Gay Tony.
Gay Tony starts with Niko’s botched bank robbery attempt, wherein Louis is an innocent bystander during a hostage situation. He’s later a key figure in a botched diamond smuggling operations… TWICE. You know when you’re going to trade the diamonds to the Jews in the Museum? (I’m not being racist, they’re Jews,) Louis is the black-looking guy who shows up in the window over your heads. (I’m not being racist. He’s the black looking guy).  This overlayering of plots kind of messes with the continuity of the game. Since GTA IV was somewhat open-ended, you could finish a number of missions at your own leisure. That means to you, some of the characters Louis is dealing with are already dead. That kind of takes you out of the moment when you have to think about what happened when in GTA IV.
Also out of context are the news bulletins you read online in the game’s in-game internet. When you blow up a construction crane, you’d think news of it would reach NIko, especially when he drives by said crane every day. Of course, cranes can be replaced, so I guess it’s not completely out of place.
Aside from that, Gay Tony modernizes the game a little bit with people Twittering all over the place.
Also, there’s this:

Watch out, Anime, Rockstar has your number!
If I had any complaints, aside from cars that handle like boats, and getting my head shot off as soon as I walk through a door, would be the use of racial slurs in the game. There’s at least fifteen different slurs used in the first hour of playing. I know it’s trying to be “edgy” and shit, but I don’t need to know how spics eat tacos and how fags gobble cock, etc. For fuck’s sake, the game’s called “Gay Tony.” You could have left it at that. There’s cocaine use in almost every cutscene as well, which is to be expected with a game about a gay nightclub owner, I suppose.

Technorati Tags: Gay Tony,GTA IV

Scorpion to the face.

This morning before my alarm went off, I was dreaming about being stung repeatedly by a big black scorpion in an abandoned sewer system while chasing after John Stewart and his book-writing guest, as is my wont. It became a lot like an episode of the Deadliest Warrior where someone was doing a play-by-play of how a fight between me and a scorpion would go down. Basically: I got stung a lot, and it hurt, but you would expect it to.
It didn’t teach me much, aside from it’s best to avoid angry scorpions, but it did make me realize one thing.
The morning before, I was dreaming that I was explaining the price of a piece of merchandise to a customer, by indicating the clearly printed label directly above the object in question. They refused to believe me. Our argument went on for quite some time.
Somehow: that dream was WORSE. Yes, a glimpse of my daily life is somehow more frightening than being stung to death by scorpions in a lonely sewer.
Honestly, I’m just not enjoying myself, if I ever was.

Mayonetta

I got into a advanced demo for Bayonetta for the 360, and wasn’t all that impressed. Basically, it’s a God of War style button masher with combos galore. It doesn’t really seem to be that modern, actually. The graphics left a little bit to be desired and the opening sequence looked like something you’d see on the PS One. There was something very 90’s about the whole thing, including the soundtrack. The demo included the Falling Clock Tower sequence from a few of the trailers. Honestly, even after playing it, I have no idea what’s going on. There’s demon-angel dudes, flying cherub heads, and dragon things. All I know is that I have to keep pressing Y and A and they eventually go away. The environments were a little claustrophobic, like you’re almost on rails. There doesn’t seem like there’s much to do besides shoot things with guns in your fetish boots. There was a few signs to read in text pop-ups, and a door you have to hit a certain way to open. The was a CGI sequence of her getting off of a train, which felt unnecessary, and graphic-wise was a little behind the times. I suppose the main attraction to the game Bayonetta is supposed to have sex appeal with attacks that look like something out of a Sailor Moon transformation. The game is rated 17+, but I don’t think it’s really that outrageous in terms of what you see. There’s the same gore you’d see with any fighting game in the past 15 years, and maybe a little side-boob action. If there’s a plot, the demo really didn’t delve into it. Also: there’s this weird loading sequence like in Assassin’s Creed, where you’re in this featureless environment, and there’s a list of combos you’re supposed to pull off to practice.
Personally, there’s something weird looking about Bayonetta, like he body’s out of proportion, and not in the good Hollywood kind of way. It’s like her head’s too tiny and her neck’s too long, much like my penis…
All in all, I’m sure some Japanese kid is jacking off to it already, and by “kid” I mean 47 year-old.

A Year Behind the Times

I just finished every quest in Fallout 3, after having bought the special Game of the Year Edition a month or so ago. This edition included every add-on that was released over the past year, which considering that buying these expansion separately would have set me back about $50 extra, it was rather fortunate that I waited.
With regards to the expansions, not every one was worth it. Each expansion has it’s own locations, equipment, characters and quests. Broken Steel expanded on the original story, which would otherwise have fallen flat. The original game ends with the reactivation of a water purifying plant. There is still the matter of an evil army of Enclave soldiers on the loose, which Broken Steel addresses with space lasers. Other expansions like Lookout Point prove more challenging with the enemies you face, but are somewhat anti-climactic. It didn’t have the same sort of good vs. evil moral conflicts like The Pitt, where one has to choose whether or not to abduct a baby. Operation Anchorage and Mothership Zeta are both valuable for their fun factors, but Mothership Zeta has the bonus of giving you a large supply of deadly alien weapons to use against your enemies.
I just wanted to talk about some of the weird glitches I encountered while playing. The original release was beleaguered by numerous bugs, some of which caused the game to crash. The Game of the Year edition doesn’t include and special programming to resolve these bugs, so it’s still glitchy at some points. I was forced at one point to resume an old save when my auto-save made my game freeze upon loading after exiting a door. The game would load, then freeze immediately. That wasn’t fun.
Other weird shit included Deathclaws, one of the most dangerous enemies in the game. I would chance encounter groups of Deathclaws attacking Raiders out in the Wastelands, and would wait for them to finish with their prey. Only: the Deathclaws would suddenly jump horizontally to the very height of the game’s invisible sky canopy, where they would vanish. Air Jordan couldn’t jump higher.
Once, while walking through an abandoned subway tunnel, I saw some scrap pieces which have previously been lying around assembled into a somewhat human form with a doll’s head on top. I don’t know if this was a random thing, or part of some poltergeist activity which the game sometimes displays, but it was messed up. Touching the display sent pieces scattering everywhere.
I lost my dog once. I made the mistake of sending him to look for a weapon near the quest start point for Mothership Zeta. He bounded off towards a crashed U.F.O., where he would wait for me. As I approached him, I was sucked aboard the Mothership, and the game informed me that my dog was waiting for me back at Vault 101. When I returned, he wasn’t there. I spent ages looking for him, to no avail. Then, while tying up some loose ends in the game, I happened to find him outside the Whitehouse, attacking mercenaries, as if I had mistakenly left him there to defend for himself. I told him to follow, but he didn’t obey, so I had to return and go through a few more lines of dialogue before he’d come with me.
Another time I sent Fawkes on his way to try another Follower, and I was informed he’d be waiting for me in the History Museum, only he wasn’t there. Ages passed, and eventually I found him stuck outside a door in the Citadel. Meanwhile, I was informed that I would not be allowed to take another Follower until I got rid of the one I had. Only, I didn’t have a follower.
I was unable to complete one Achievement for the game on Xbox despite finishing the quest, apparently because I hadn’t listened to the correct Holotape at the right time before talking to the right character. To unlock it now, I’d have to go back through half the game. Similarly, I can’t finish my Bobblehead collection because I blew up Raven Rock. I was three Bobbleheads away from finishing before I realized that goodie.
Just today, as I did a Necronomicon style quest in Point Lookout, I was unable to go with the Good Karma option for completing the quest because the one character vanished. From what I read online, it’s because I exited through a kitchen door.
This wasn’t necessarily a glitch, but at one point I had a quest in Broken Steel to go through an old underground railway under the White House. There was a part where ghouls and robots were attacking each other. Depending on how I went through that scenario, both or one of the factions was supposed to be hostile to me, and the portion would end with me looting a robot who was supposed to have died in the conflict. Only, because of certain items I had, no one bothered to even look at me. So I tried waiting and waiting for the ghouls to kill the one robot so I could nab a fuse off of him, but it never happened. So I had to cap him myself and steal it.
The Ghoul Mask in the game was originally supposed to make me immune to ghoul hostility by wearing it, but after a time it broke. Afterwards, I realized that ghouls still ignored me, even if I wasn’t wearing it.

Turtle Power-Ups

This morning there was a 25th Anniversary special original animated movie for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on TV. Typically, this is the sort of movie that’s released straight-to-DVD, so airing it on Saturday Morning TV is about the most awesome thing ever. Let’s face it: Saturday Morning TV has sucked balls for over 10 years, approximately around the same time that Japanese cartoon began dominating American television. The TMNT special helped illustrate this.
Let me explain why:
The movie is a mash-up of the modern TMNT series and the original TMNT cartoon, complete with frequent high-threes and pizza breaks. The original TMNT cartoon characters go through a trans-dimensional portal and wind up in today’s TMNT universe, where they’re ridiculed by their modern counterparts for being so goofy.
Listen to me, modern Turtles: you shouldn’t make fun on anyone. Why? Because you suck. You fucking suck. You suck so hard. No one wants your toys, because you’re EMO. That’s right: you’re EMO. You’re whiny little fuckers who spend more time feeling bad than fighting ninja robots. You don’t even have proper catchphrases like, “Turtle power!” or, “Cowabunga, dude!”
These fucking EMOTMNT even make fun of the Technodrome. This is the Technodrome:

The Technodrome is fucking bad-ass, and you’re just jealous because you’ve never seen anything so awesome. Also: your Shredder isn’t any more competent than OG TMNT Shredder. In fact, the frequency in which he dies would lend credence to the fact he’s less competent, so shut the fuck up.
Also, don’t make fun of the way O.G. TMNT April O’Neil is dressed, ‘cause her tits are HUGE.

Here’s your April by comparison:

LAME.
Also: When’s the last time you rode around in a blimp? …I thought so.
I’m honestly worried about this generation of kids, because they’ll never understand how eating pizza and slinging nunchucks around recklessly in your parent’s garage with the neighbourhood kids watch in awe really is, and it’s all the EMOTMNT’s fault.
The other awesome thing about this movie is the fact the two Turtle generations meet the original black’n’white comic book Turtles, who behave like actual Ninjas out for revenge.
I would have paid to see this in movie, but it wasn’t likely to ever make it that far. For a series that’s been rebooted as many times as the Turtles, it’s interesting to see how different each incarnation is, but ultimately the same.

Society to End Comic Book Adaptations

With the news that Youngblood, possibly one of the most forgettable super hero teams ever assembled, (I won't demean myself by inserting a hyperlink. You can search for it yourself if you wish, but be warned.)  is receiving it's own movie adaptation, I must pose the question: "When will it all end?"
How many comic book adaptations have already been created? How many have butchered the original material?
Today, I was thinking about the question why so many comic books are altered so dramatically for their feature film presentation, and thought that I had developed a formula proving that the fewer existing issues there are of a comic, the more true to the source material it will be. I would have cited, "V for Vendetta," which despite numerous changes and additions was still fairly true of the original. It would have been chosen due to the fact that it was taken from a relatively small collection of comics, but then I thought about the recent movie, "Wanted," which was also taken from a short series, but in no way resembled the original after about the first fifteen minutes of the movie. If you had gone into, "Wanted" after reading the comic, you would have said to yourself, "What the fuck, was that the movie?" The comic book was basically a knock-off of DC comics with parallels to many of their existing villains, who have secretly taken over the world and were in the midst of an internal war. The movie was about seeing 1/8" of Angelina Jolie's buttcrack. "V for Vendetta," on the other hand, allowed you to view the movie and say to yourself, "Oh, I remember that," and then a few scenes later, ask, "Where's the part about the dolls in the ovens?"
"Sin City," is the closest adaptation to date for a comic-turned-movie. You can take the graphic novel and follow along page-for-page as it progresses. "300" is a close second. "The Spirt," however, Frank Miller's third attempt at a "movie," breaks with this tradition and instead decides to follow nonsensical moodily-lit scenes of femme-fatales and Sammuel L. Jackson as a villain who's traditionally not supposed to show his face. "The Spirit" is one of those movies trying to cash in on a super hero's name while shitting on the original material. At that point, you have to ask, "Why make a movie about this character, when you can just create your own?" Ever try to make your own super hero? It's easy. They have video games where you can do just that. Why bastardize someone else's work, when there isn't a kid alive who knows who the fuck the Spirit is.
Do you think any kid is going to camped out for two days in line to see "Youngblood: The Movie," like they did with "Spider-Man?"
And what about Spider-Man? Three movies that moved progressively further away from the source material, even after separating themselves. Sure, there's over five hundred Spider-Man comics in existence, with issues from multiple series released each month dating back to 1963, so you have to update the character to a certain extent and condense it down into 2+ hours, but when you're countermanding material that was established in a movie release less than six years ago, with "Spider-Man 3" changing the story of how Uncle Ben died to include some B.S. about it being the Sandman, you're taking things too far.
Cannon is being erased with the concept of, "reset," the point at which whoever's in charge decides to throw away whatever they had and start fresh. Batman's been reset twice now in the movies, and the Hulk was the most recent.

Game Night

For some reason, the connection speed on my 360 is terrible tonight, which means I can’t play the new maps I just downloaded for Call of Duty: World at War. It’s basically the ideal time to play: everyone is on equal footing as they learn how to exploit the new terrain and there’s double exp. points to be earned. I just traded in all my previous exp. and weapon upgrades in order to earn Prestige Level 1. According to a Achievement pop-up, if I level up to 65 nine more times, I can unlock game points. That’s not happening in this life, or the next. I was pretty choked giving in my favourite weapons and going back to basics just so I could have my ass kicked for another 35 levels until the good stuff makes itself available.
I also downloaded the Hasbro Games Night after seeing that it was, “free.” I was hoping for Xbox to finally throw me a bone and give me the equivalent of a browser game for free, but instead I was treated to four “trial games,” such as Yatzee, Battleship, Scrabble, and Connect Four. The complexities of keeping your ship placement a secret from your local Player 2, etc. in Battleship is solved by a screen popping up to tell you to look away. There’s also about fifty pop-up screens explaining the extremely basic controls, such as pushing the left button will move your cursor to the left. Each game only gives you a few minutes of play. They games themselves cost 800 points apiece, which is the equivalent of $10.00. Meaning: It costs $40 to buy all four of the available games, plus there’s three more games yet to be made available, but will likely cost the same, meaning it costs $70 to buy all the games being displayed at the moment. You could nearly buy all the real board games for that amount.
Sadly: I have Scrabble in a box across the room, but instead I’m playing it on my 360.
I purchased Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon for my DS, and it’s kicking my ass on Normal. It’s a turn-based strategy RPG. The problem with the game is that death is death in the game, meaning the characters you lose in battle are gone. These characters also have a place in the story: so if you have a certain character, you might engage an enemy of the battlefield and convince them to join you instead of fighting. Don’t have that character? Then you can’t get the new character. It also forces you to kill some of your characters at certain points. So you obsess over keeping every one of your characters as safe as possible for the whole match, forcing you to reset when you misstep.

“UP…” Your Butt

I was forced to sit through a trailer for Pixar’s new computer animated movie, “UP,” while waiting for “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” to begin. Before they showed footage from the new movie, they went through a montage of every Pixar film ever made, which only served to remind me how Disney has basically given up on making “Disney” movies, which is to say “animated,” as opposed to “computer animated.”
Disney films were formulaic, but Pixar films stretch the limits. I’ve never understood how they’re perceived as “heart warming.” “Cars” was about a car wanting to win a race, but he’s basically abducted by hillbillies who force him into slave labour and somehow they all end up friends and he learns a lesson about judgemental small-town hicks dragging everyone down to their level. The movie is basically “Deliverance,” without male-rape, and with talking car stereotypes.
“Up,” from what I gathered, is about an old coot traveling South via balloon house to retire, and he’s got some Boy Scout with him. Expect the issue of an old man abducting a young boy being passed over. …Now that I think about it: a lot of Pixar films are about abduction or missing children. “Finding Nemo” comes to mind.
Far too many people in the theatre were laughing uproariously, which explains how movies like this get made.

Crime Time

I live in a lax society, which is specifically that of British Columbia. Liberalism is taken quite literally, meaning that if a person wants to do something, it’s deemed generally okay for aforementioned person to do so. This attitude is extended to drug use and marijuana. The problem is seen as so big that it’s no longer viewed as a problem, but a way of life. Marijuana is our number one export, after all, although you would not find it listed in any geography textbook. As so many people are so involved with marijuana, there are constant attempts by grassroots groups of individuals trying to legalize it. The idea is that so many people are guilty of a crime that it should not be called a crime. This is a view that thankfully only applies to prohibition, or else it would lead to very dangerous territory, and the breakdown of society itself.
Yet, the drug trade in B.C. has lead to a gang wars between local groups that have left many dead. In this permissive climate, the general opinion that greets the news of these deaths is, “Good, they had it coming.” People are waiting for the problem to sort itself out: meaning one group should wipe out the other. People are even pining for the days when the Hells Angels had a stranglehold on the province.
This is a province that doesn’t believe in the death penalty. Robert Pickton, convicted of second degree murder of six women and suspected in the deaths of fifty others will spend the rest of his life in prison, but two high school kids selling drugs to classmates are dead here in my hometown. People secretly want capital punishment, but they want it doled out on the street level so they can feel blameless. It’s not vigilante justice either, it’s criminals doing injustice upon each other. They’re leaving the bad guys to take care of the bad guys. Innocent people are getting hurt in the meantime, but the media’s spinning things to make it seem as if everyone’s involved. The wife of a drug dealer has become just as bad as the drug dealer himself.

Today I am a Wolverine!

I just finished playing the X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Uncaged Edition video game, which is probably one of the most faithful movie based video games. People were probably angry about how much the movie deviated from the comic books, but I doubt they’d be able to argue that the game, which uses actual dialogue and scenes from the movie, is a painful detraction. In fact, it’s better. The game makes the final climactic scene with Wolverine fighting Deadpool on top of a nuclear cooling tower cool. The game is soaked with blood, which the movie lacked. While in the movie you have to watch Deadpool pull his squeaky-clean swords out of freshly killed corpse, in the game, Wolverine delights in impaling people on tree branches.
Despite this, the game has some points that, if you over-think them, make no logistical sense. Such as: Wolverine’s claws are adamantium, and can cut through everything, but after he leans on a downed enemy combatant’s chest, and repeatedly stabs him in the face, the dude can still get up. The dude just got stabbed in the brain eighteen times and he can still get up.
I pity the goons in the game. These are guys who proclaim, “Give up, there’s no chance of escape,” as they stand against the edge of a bottomless pit you can hurl them down with the smallest shove. Wolverine has the clear advantage: he has an indestructible skeleton and he can heal from any wound, plus he has claws that can cut through steel. That = Win.
For instance, he can survive falling like a bullet from fifty miles up with enough force to create a crater, but for some reason, if he fall two storeys into some bushes, it’s game over. There’s an actual scene where Wolverine climbs to the top of a giant tower, then blows it up. He’s hurtled about half-a-mile, and gets up afterwards. BUT: if you slip off of the tower while climbing it, you’re dead.
Also: his costume grows back. No explanation: but it grows back.

Over-Thinking Video Games

Super Mario Bros.:
Q: How do goombas survive in the wild when a 1/4 of the Mushroom Kingdom’s surface is made up of pits they’re incapable of avoiding? What purpose do any of the floating blocks serve? Obviously, someone made them. It’s as if they were trying to build a house from the roof downwards, only that roof is made of bricks. And why did they put magic mushrooms inside of steel boxes with question marks on them? Why not properly label the boxes? How is a mushroom with no muscular system able to slide across the landscape.

District 69

Had the opportunity to see District 9 tonight, and this movie is as chock-full of metaphor Moby Dick. The persecution of the aliens by humans has obvious colorations with a lot of events taking place in the world today. Setting the movie in “Jo’burg” helps make those parallels more obvious. A population, once (and perhaps still) the victims of white persecutions have turned around directed their hatred at the aliens. They call them “prawns,” because of their appearance. Instead of coming to their defence, the people who are charged with caring for these people agree with the name. The prawns are kept in dirty hovels of their own making, and are subject to constant search and seizures. Like most minorities, they’re blamed for numerous social ills.
The movie takes place 20 years after their arrival, and they’re about to be herded from their refugee camp into a concentration camp, where their fate is left to the imagination. The MNU, a weapons manufacturer with dubious intent, is going into their restricted district canvasing door to door to force them to sign eviction notices. This part of the movie is shot in a documentary style. It’s raw, like the film that ends up on the cutting room floor. The protagonist often shoves the camera out of his face, demanding that they cut that certain scene. It’s doubly impressive when you see the aliens presented in this style. Oddly, the intentional slip-shod footage only helps to make them more realistic looking. They are impressive looking, to be certain, like things of flesh and blood instead of latex, or CGI.

Blarkest Night

As an avid comic reader, I’ve been waiting for the Green Lantern “Darknest Night” saga to begin for years. Now that it has, I’m a little disappointed. On the outset, the series sounds like Marvel Zombies, where super heroes turn into cannibalistic zombies. Instead of a plague, however, this change is being brought about by power rings from the black of space. They’re resurrecting the dead into soulless beings who need to eat hearts to power themselves. The series is hyped by it’s cast of favourites dug up from some of DC’s most enduring past characters like Aquaman, Martian Manhunter, Batman and Superman of Earth 2. Only, some of these characters haven’t been absent for more than a few months. Less frequent readers might even be surprised to know they’d even been killed off. To further complicate matters, as evil creatures, these characters are almost completely devoid of any personality. They ramble off lines

Dope on a Rope in Hope

Ryan Jenkins recently hung himself in the Thunderbird Motel in Hope, B.C., and many people may be wondering how a man could come to such an end. Let me explain: Hope, B.C. is hell. An actual, factual hell. Not in the physical sense, of course, but psychologically, yes. Topographically, Hope isn’t so unpleasant. It’s a picturesque holiday-land of mountains, trees and lakes. When people think of B.C., they’re likely thinking of place just like Hope.
In terms of population, the people of Hope are considered hillbillies. Not just any hillbillies, the kind from Deliverance, who will butt-rape you. Here’s how the Fraser Valley heirarcy goes: First there’s Surrey. Everyone in Surrey is considered a gang-banger, who will stab you, and sell your belongings for crack, and crack-like substances. Then, there’s Langley. No one has any strong opinions of Langley. It leaves that much of an impression. It’s merely okay. Then, there’s Abbotsford. Abbotsford has the highest murder rate in Canada, but people think mostly about how many Mennonites and “brown people” (I’m quoting) there are. Then there’s Chilliwack. If people weren’t thinking red-neck by now, then they are now. The cow population has gone up. So has the “red people” (I’m quoting). “City-folk” from Vancouver are already frightened by the time the reach here, where there’s things like trees and mountains, and short-ass buildings. By the time they’ve reached Hope, they’re scared shitless. Their doors are locked and their windows are rolled up, and they’re driving fast without making eye-contact.
Hope’s sole claim to fame is that it’s the place they filmed Rambo. They still have Rambo tours and sell Rambo shakes. It’s Rambo Mecha. That’s a scary concept.
Another weird fact? Spider-Man’s been to Hope. Yes, there' was a Spider-Man story written and sketched by Todd McFarlane before he quit Marvel Comics and created Image Comics. It was a story about Peter Parker and Wolverine tracking down Wendigo, only to find out the murders he had been pinned with were the work of a serial killer.Yes, Hope is the scene for psychopathic killing spree.
Why does Hope induce this sense of bloodshed and rampant murder? Could it be the old volunteer fuddy-duddies sitting at the side of the road with their radar tracking your speed? This is a hobby in

Rethinking the Serial Killer

I was thinking today about the average serial killer, and how boring he actually is. Reality far outweighs the image shown in high-octane big screen thrillers featuring indomitable geniuses. There’s always the sense of mystery involving any murder, but the suspects invariably turn out to be your Average Joe who just happens to like killing hookers. The media and academic attention these individuals garner also make serial killers the most predictable people on the planet. Think of all the colleges and universities offering Criminology classes. Think of all those students studying serial killers just for the fascination of it all. Think of all the books, movies, and other paraphanealia involving these people. Serial killers can all be catagorized within moments of their first crime by trained professionals. With enough evidence, you can predict when, where, how, who and why they’re going to strike. You know their methods because serial killers are methodical. The only thing really protecting them is the remoteness, or the density of the population they’re working in. They keep finding victims because there are victims to be found. Kill one hooker and there’ll always be another.
One of the great myths is that all these killers are inherent geniuses. It doesn’t take a genius to get a hooker in a car and drive her some place out of the way. That’s what hookers get paid for. Look at Robert Pickton, and how many he was able to do away with, and he’s borderline retarded.

It’ll Be 9/11 x 8 Years

The next week will be filled with stock footage of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, because it was the most important event in history ever. Disregard everything that’s happened after and the mistakes made and remember that we’re all victims of the same tragedy, even though we were in no way connected to the events in any meaningful, or even imaginary way. If you know a guy who knows a guy who almost got on a plane that day, then you’re the greatest hero ever.
If anything, I think that 9/11 proved that seeing a giant skyscraper collapse makes for really good propaganda/TV.  It’s all well and good to say that x number of people died in y disaster, but these days you need to sex things up a little. No one really cares if 10,000 people died in a tsunami if there’s no HD pictures of people running from a giant tidal wave. If you can’t put it on a movie poster, it’s not saleable.
9/11 will be likely be remembered 100 years from now like the sinking of the Lusitania. Remember the Lusitania? Neither do I, and I just mentioned it. 100 years from now we’ll have space leeches to contend with, so there won’t be much time for remembering. The two events will remain similar in history as they mark the beginning of war.
What’s today’s score in the war on terror? U.S.A.: 0/Terrorists: 0. It’s a war that can’t be won, because it has no endgame. The U.S.A. could turn the Middle East in a parking lot, but the next day some nut job with an accent could set off a cherry bomb in a mailbox, and it would start all over again. Here’s a fun fact: in two more years, the war on terror will have lasted longer than WWI and WWII combined. What does that mean? Are we getting worse at fighting wars? The Cold War/Vietnam would indicate that: yes, we are.  

Things That Piss Me Off

Handicapped parking spots:
Handicapped spots are largely illogical, unless of course they’re oversized. Some handicapped drivers need extra space to disembark their wheelchairs. I can deal with that, but it doesn’t make sense if the spots are the same damn size, though. It doesn’t make sense to have these spots directly in front of the store in all cases either, especially if the store has over 10,000 square feet of floor space. The handicapped person is expected to traverse 40+ aisles of store, but they can’t go an extra 10 feet to their parking space? What’s the hell up with that? Plus they give those handicapped sticker to anyone. If you’re over 40, you basically qualify for a handicapped sticker.
That’s not what really pisses me off, though. It’s people with handicapped stickers who don’t park in handicapped parking spots. WTF is up with that? I can’t park in the handicapped parking spot, why can they park in the “normal” parking spots? It’s a double standard. If there’s no parking spots left, but one empty handicapped parking space, I’m still now allowed to park there, so fuck them and their vans.
Some day, I’m going to park in the handicapped spot, and I’ll refuse to move. I’ll be like the Rosa Parks of my generation. “No sir, I will not go to the back of the bus.”
Paid Parking:
You know how much it costs to park to see my local hockey team, the Abbotsford Heat? $10. $10 to park to see a substandard rookie NHL seeder team. It’s not even covered parking. During a recession.
Street Dates:
Street dates for books, DVDs, and games and kind of ridiculous. I use to work at the Superstore, and because of an incident at another store, they had a 24 hour security guard on duty to protect a shipment of Harry Potter books from breaking the street date. We went on to sell 10 of the 100 copies we were given. To be honest, they protect some retailers from having to deal with an unfair advantage with other retailers, but otherwise there’s no point but to build excitement for a bland product.

90’s Recall

LiveJournal Tags: jeans,90's

Remember back in the 90’s when there was a resurgence in the popularity of jeans? Pepridge Farms remembers.
I was remembering how there used to be all these different fashion options back then, most of them terrible. Bellbottoms briefly made a comeback with the ladies, and quite frankly it wasn’t that bad, especially if the girl in question had a ghetto booty on her. With grunge, people were tearing new holes into their perfectly good jeans, until someone came up with the idea of selling them at retail in a pre-ripped style. The person who came up with that idea made a million goddamn dollars by taking a $10 pair of jeans, cutting them up, and selling them back at $50 a pop. Worse still were the acid wash jeans. That was a terrible idea from start to finish. Not content with faded colours, someone decided they needed to be chemically treated. The result was an eyesore that, much like the sun, no one wanted to look at. Seriously, the only thing that went with the acid wash jeans was a baggy white T-shirt and high top sneaks with the laces not laced properly. That was the early 90’s in a nutshell. Then there were button-fly jeans. Zippers were somehow too accommodating, so people decided they needed to keep their junk buttoned up. Not that bad of an idea, especially for anyone who’s ever got caught in their own zippers. Problem is: the Americans who bought these jeans also bought cheeseburgers. The two don’t mix. As they got fatter, their bulge began to bulge in ways it was no meant to. Buttons would come unbuttoned, or unbuttonable, and the result was a peek at their new-fangled thongs (thongs being the greatest fashion article invented in the 90’s).
Baggy jeans and low-riders ended up the century. Unfortunately, these articles of clothing were adopted by Wiggers, when they were better suited for hot chicks. I can remember girls walking around my high school with their low riders on, and the knots for their G-Strings sticking up out the sides, so all you had to do was just reach out and pull on this little string and their undies come off without ever touching their pants. That was SEXY AS HELL. You know what wasn’t sexy? All those wannabes running around with their Calvin Klein undies showing. That was wrong, and it went on far too long. I don’t known what the logic was behind all that. Was it supposed to attract the opposite sex? Was it supposed to send out a message like, “Hey ladies, my mom bought me a pack of Calvin Klein undies at the mall. Does that make you wet?” I’m sure on some level women are curious to see men in their underwear. It’s only natural. Seeing the elastic band of overpriced name-brand tighties on about one hundred guys in a day, however, couldn’t have been that interesting, especially for the girls who enjoyed a good bulge every now and then. The baggy jeans showed off about 0% bulge. It was the fashion of choice for the bulge-less. Plus dude were constantly pulling their pants up. For girl who were irritated by seeing guys scratching their balls in public, this must have been similarly irritating.
On the opposite end of the spectrum: tight jeans were in style with the punk crowd for a while. I’m talking about skin-tight. And it was only the lankiest of boys wearing them, so they looked like cartoon skeletons. Those jeans were just torture to your crotch. Now ladies sometimes like a good, tight pair of pants on a fella, but if they ever ended up in the sack with him, they’d find his sack was now permanently residing inside his body, because those fucking jean mutilated genitals. You may have been a dude when you put them on, but you’d be a girl by the time you took them off.
In many ways, it was a Renaissance of Jeans. What do we have nowadays for pants? Nothing. Just stuffy old styles, and cheaply made too. Not to say that the jeans of the 90’s weren’t cheaply made: they were, and by child labour. But those kids knew how to sew. I’ve gone through six pairs of Lees last year because the back pocket of my luscious, luscious ass keeps tearing, and that’s bullshit.

Technorati Tags: jeans,90's

Ugh…

You know what I hate? When you’re visiting a site and they have those fucking side-ads that follow you as you scroll down. There’s an entire sixth of the page you can’t click on or you’re in totally fucked territory. And they’re always the most obnoxious ads they can muster. They’ll be for some completely illegitimate service or product, like a bogus weight loss program, or some online game advertising itself with half-naked chicks that have nothing to do with their product. And it’s unavoidable. No matter where you go on the page, it’s following you, like one of those paintings with the creepy eyes. You’re being fucking punished for visiting a site. 99% of the internet exists to punish you. Every ad, every piece of spam, every pop-up, every forum, every chat room, every comment box, every social networking site, every virus, every piece of malware, every search engine result: ALL OF IT WANT TO HARM YOU PSYCHOLOGICALLY. You are a masochist for being on here. Get out. There’s nothing here for you.

My Trip to EB Games

Me: Oooh… They have a used copy of Fallout 3 for only $49.99, and I have $14.00 credit. I’m going to get that. Wait… They have a new copy for $49.99. WTF? How is a used copy worth the same as a new copy. Fuck this shit, I’ll get the new one.
Guy at the counter: “Do you want this, or do you want to wait until Tuesday when the Game of the Year edition comes out, with all four downloadable extras for only $20 more?”
Me: “…” Fuck. (I walk away forlornly). Fuck that, I’ll just go rent it at Blockbuster.

X-Men: The Last Stand

X-Men: The Last Stand (Widescreen Edition)Even after all these years I’m still pissed off with X-Men: The Last Stand, mainly because it contained the biggest, “So what happened?” moments of all moviedom. There’s that scene where Cyclops is by the lake with Jean, and then “something” happens. Wolverine accuses Jean of killing Cyclops, but all he has for evidence is a pair of glasses. Jean then later claims she killed Cyclops, but this is after the idea has been planted in her head. There still remains the possibility that he’s alive. There’s also the method in which he’s supposedly killed. You see Professor X being “disintegrated” by Jean’s powers, but after the credits he comes back in the body of another mutant. Meaning: he’s not dead. So if Professor X is alive, why can’t Scott be too?
Plus, this is the X-Men. There is literally no method of killing them in which they will not come back. Cyclops was also a big part of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, so they’re obviously not going to waste all that development into his back-story and then not bring him back for a fourth X-Men movie, or a spin-off.
I’m just pissed off about how Cyclops was handled during the movie franchise in general. He’s not the most interesting character: he’s a whiny pretty-boy jock who gets pissed off every time some even tries to look at his drop-dead gorgeous girlfriend, but you could flesh him out a little instead of killing him off outright. The whole love-triangle thing between Scott, Jean and Wolverine wasn’t even a triangle because no one gave a crap about Scott. In Ol’ School, Scott would have been the guy who got caught plowing the caterer. He’s there for a few minutes to set up the rivalry between two opposing lovers and then he’s gone.
It’s the same for X2, where Scott gets kidnapped and brainwashed about fifteen minutes into the movie, and he doesn’t show up again until the last fifteen minutes. That’s not a lot of screen time. The basic problem with his character is that a: he’s not played by a Hugh Jackman, and b: he isn’t Wolverine. Plus, it’s difficult for any actor to properly portray him in all these overly-emotional moments because no one can see your eyes. That’s why there’s these scenes with the actor curling up his lips to a ridiculous extent to compensate for the loss of that facial region. 
Plus X-Men: The Last Stand basically took everything that was wrong with the movie franchise and ran with it. There were nameless mutants no one knows, not even me: and I’ve literally read and collected hundred of X-Men comics, watched their cartoons, collected toys and trading cards, and I still don’t know who they are. I think the one dude was supposed to be Omega Red, but I’m not sure. I’m just confused. Plus there’s like three funerals in the movie. There’s a funeral for the same chick they had a funeral for in the last movie. Think about that. Think about how little death matters in their universe where a person can die twice, and they’re still all teary-eyed and making speeches. I think they even used a new grave marker. They could save a hell of a lot of money just by having a reversible sign saying, “The Professor is In/Out.”

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The Bearded Man

They say behind every great man is a great woman, but in front of that great man is his beard. As I enter into the ranks of the bearded, I thought I’d take a moment and review some of the greatest men who ever lived and their beards, and discuss how their beards made them more of a bad-ass.

Jesus Christ:

You can’t tell me you’d prefer your Lord and Saviour without a beard. When the son of God is dying for your sins, he’s got to look good, and the beard is what let him go out in style. The man was so bad-ass, he became a swear. Fact: When he was being whipped, they made damn sure not to touch the beard, because that would have brought down the wrath of God.
Mohammed:

Just like Jesus, if Jesus had some balls. Not only did Mohammed have a beard, but he encouraged others to grow their own. He started a fashion trend. True fact: Mohammed’s beard was so glorious that even seeing a picture of it could strike you blind. That’s why it’s forbidden.
Chuck Norris:

Fact: Don’t fuck with Chuck. This is why:

Mr.T

Mr.T’s beard is so bad ass (Baracus) it scared all his hair to the top of his head. That’s how he got the Mohawk. The gold chains are there only to distract you from how magnificent his beard is.
Abraham Lincoln:

The South only surrendered when they saw Lincoln’s beard coming at them. Plus, it helped hide just how damn fugly his face was. They wouldn’t let him on the penny without it.

Ew.
Ernest Hemmingway:

He spent his days drinking and fighting bulls with his bare hands. His grammar was worse than mine, but he’s considered one of the greatest writers because he knew how to be a man. Step One: Grow a beard.
Gordon Freeman:

The headcrabs come at him just because they want a piece of that beard.
Master Chief:

Ever see him without the helmet? No. Ever see him shave? No. He’s sporting a beard under there.
Z.Z. Top

Notice how the guy in the middle doesn’t have his face closer to those chick’s assess? No beard.
Adolf Hitler:

No beard. One ball. ‘Nuf said. Rot in hell, you bastard!
The Bearded Lady:

People have, for over a hundred years, paid to see a bearded lady. Why? Because she has a beard. That’s how important beards are.
Wolfman:

You can only kill the wolfman with silver bullets, because his beard gives him magical protection.
Vikings:

Fact: Vikings didn’t wear helmets with horns on them, but they had huge fucking beards, and that’s what made them awesome.
Davy Jones:

The dude could play the organ with his beard. Too bad he was the worst character in the entire series.
Homer Simpson:

A permanent 5 0’Clock Shadow is still a beard, and I salute you.
House:

He’s an asshole, but you have to forgive him, because he’s got that beard going on.
Santa Claus:

He gives you presents, and he’s got a bear. That’s all you need to know about the man, so stop asking so many fucking questions.
Captain Caveman:

The dude’s all beard.
Which brings me to my next point:
People who don’t have beards, but logically should:
Fred and Barney:

They’re fucking Cavemen. I don’t buy that shit about those lines around their mouths being beards.
Thor:

He’s a fucking Norse God. Thor doesn’t shave.
Superman:

How the fuck does he shave? With kryptonite? He’s fucking Superman.
The rare exceptions to the rule:
George Michael:

Sure, he wrote “Faith,” but he’ll also offer to jack you off in the bathroom, so it depends on your preferences.
Charles Manson:

Perhaps worse than leading a cult of serial killers is the fact he’s a dirty hippie.
Hippies:

GET A JOB.
The Homeless:

GET A JOB.

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