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