Hork

PS3 users have been without access to online gaming for about a month now and the question remains: what are they missing? For some, they are missing connecting with their friends through their favourite games. Others are missing the unique challenge and rewards that playing against a live opponent across the world brings. Many are missing access to special features and bonuses that games bring with them over an internet connection. All of them are missing the chance of listening to a 12-32 year-old male pretending to hock a loogie onto them through their mics.

At the end of roughly one-in-three matches I play online in Call of Duty: Black Ops for the Xbox 360, I hear someone pretending to spit on me and my fellow teammates after losing a match. It doesn’t matter if we failed miserably, or only trailed behind by one point, we still have to listen to this rude gesture. It’s always impeccably timed as well, so you can’t see which player actually did it. On a good night there’s about 200,000 people online playing. As I said, one in every three matches one person will do it. There’s about twelve people in each match. So about one in every thirty-six people you meet online in Black Ops is a complete douchebag, or 5,555 people total are online at any time. This is an example of poor sportsmanship. Inversely, someone saying something positive like, “Good game guys,” averages once every eleven or twelve games or so. So 1/144 people exhibit good sportsmanship, or 1,388 players total out of 200,000. The remaining players are made up of racist teenagers from the Southern states and one lone, solitary girl.

The weird thing is: how does something like this start trending? Does someone hear it once and decide to copy it, and so on, or is it the same person over and over and over again, every match, win-or-lose? It’s not like online gaming is the forum in which to voice one’s own superiority. Chess masters do not flip over the board and scream, “YEAAAAH, BITCH! HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT?” when they score a checkmate. Why does some dude from Alabama now think he’s a level 100 Warlock because he scored 14 kills/9 deaths in a game of Team Deathmatch? I don’t even give a crap half the time if I win or lose, unless I’ve paid for a contract specifically stating I need to win x game y times.

Call of Duty rewards you for completing unique challenges in a set timeframe, so your objective doesn’t always have to be winning, or rather it could be winning in a certain way. I can come in dead last and still go up two levels inside of a match. Other people aren’t so objective. These are the people who have above level 15 Prestige.

To explain that another way: reaching level 1 Prestige should take a normal person with a normal life over two weeks. These people have Prestieged fifteen times, and are still playing. The came could not possibly have the same allure and interest as when they first started. They’d have to have played the same levels over and over again hundreds upon hundreds of times, just so they could have the honour of adding colours to their clan tags and getting golden guns. Still, they keep playing, keep acting like douchebags, and they’ll still pretend to spit on you when you lose against someone whom the game has become second nature to them. The only satisfaction you can get out of playing them is by sniping them from across the map when you respawn, assuming they aren’t running like cheetas with rabbit’s feet through your hail of bullets, which they are.

Twatter

It would appear as if my twitter account has been hacked! Is this the work of fames LULZ Security? If so, I am deeply honoured, and I tip my top hat to you. More likely, it’s some kind of exploit in the notoriously buggy twitter system. The fake tweet in question reads:

“WORK SUCKED TODAAAY :(( I wish i could be like this lady, shes a rolemodel!!http://tinyurl.com/3c6dzdx”

Obviously, you wouldn’t want to check that link. I know I certainly didn’t. Here’s what I don’t understand about spam like this: Why the poor grammar and nonsensicalness? “Work sucked today,” is something that a lot of people would tweet, so I don’t have any beef with that, except that it’s on my account and IT COULD GET ME FIRED. This is 2011, and people are fired over their tweets. I’ve read numerous articles about people making the exact same remarks on their facebook or twitter accounts, and being fired over them. Bear in mind: their bosses were assholes, and their jobs sucked because of it, but it still happens. So imagine being called into the office and having to explain your account was compromised. “That’s not my penis, it’s Governor Weiner!” (Which is my name for my penis.) I wouldn’t expect it to go over well. Why is it, “TODAAAY?” Am I supposed to be that whiny? No wonder I only have 54 followers.

After looking at my account, I have found that I’m currently following @Lulzsec, which has this as their profile:

“The Lulz Boat

@LulzSec

Lulz Security® (LulzSec), the world's leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense”

Which is interesting because I never selected to follow them. So, yes, I have been compromised. By my estimation LULZ Sec has affected 1 in 100 people in the world by now given their numerous hacks. That’s quite profound. When you’re hacking at that level, you don’t get jail: you get a high paying job. And here I am with my pants down. At least they have a classy-looking mascot.

Ah, 2011, a good year.

But to continue with my analysis: “:((“ Who fucks up an emoticon? No one, that’s who. Dead giveaway. Then there’s this shit leading into the link:

“I wish i could be like this lady, shes a rolemodel” What? Does the internet hate apostrophes? They’re useful. Where does it lead? Goatse, Lemon Party, Rick Roll, or Chinese dong pills? Or maybe it just goes back to Lulz Sec to tell me I suck. I don’t need Lulz for that, thank you.

I can’t get a handle on these guys. Are they targeting people because they’re easy, or are they targeting people because they’re on their radar? How can a group who spends all day on 4chan stay this motivated in the face of adversity, aside from the pedophiles?

Netflicker

I’ve just recently gotten back onto Netflix after cancelling my one-month free subscription before the one-month period was up. Why did I leave? Because the quality of movies on Netflix is quite low. I went to the closing sale at my local Blockbuster, which had been pulled under by low sales caused by online services like Netflix. They had been virtually cleaned out. All that was left were a few random titles on the shelf marked down to 75% off the ticket price. One of these movies was Vampires Suck.

They were practically giving it away and still nobody wanted it. Why? Because it’s a terrible movie spoofing another terrible movie. You’d think the two would cancel each other out like vampires and werewolves, but it didn’t. When I came back onto Netflix, this was one of the featured movies. They were holding it up like a golden chalice, practically demanding my patronage. Unfortunately, I obliged.

There’s Netflix ads all over the place. On the outset, it’s not a bad service. For your dollar, you’re better off with Netflix than you are at the video store. Even in the commercials, though, when they show the selection, you can tell it’s a bit skewed. I think there’s one where they show A Knights Tale, which isn’t the best choice. It is, however, one of their better choices. I’ve been watching on my 360, but the search options are terrible. What’s worse, is that when you do try a search, it’ll bring up movies that aren’t available, and likely never have, nor never will be. I have no fucking clue why it does this. It wastes time and effort to bring up titles you can’t watch. It’s like it’s acknowledging that it’s disappointing you. Genre searching is a chore too. It doesn’t immediately list every genre on the 360 interface. You first have to look for a movie you want, and if they have it, (which is unlikely), then you can use that as a template to find your genre of choice. It’s tedious work, and it constantly brings up Richard Pryor movies as recommendations. I own one Richard Pryor movie, and that’s Superman 3, where he plays the role of Richard Pryor: computer hacker. It would have been the worst Superman movie if they had stopped making Superman movies. My taste for Richard Pryor has lessened because of this, but there’s no way to explain this to Netflix.
Since coming back to Netflix, I saw Miss March under it’s New Releases titles, which is funny, because I last watched it on Netflix over eight months ago, when it still wasn’t a new release. Does Netflix update that infrequently? Yes. Yes it does. I tried to find something that could be considered comedy to some, as Vampires Suck did not fill that particular craving. I saw a college movie called MILF, featuring a box cover with some dumb-ass college kids looking through the legs of some ho as her ass was towards me. As I still pine for the old days of smutty movies on late night TV, I tried watching it. I think I got five minutes in.

The movie starts like this: some douche is walking around his campus looking at chick’s asses, when he sees some slut bent all the way over. The camera focuses on her red panty-clad snatch for an awkward amount of time, until she notices him and calls him a creep. He stutters, stumbles, and trips over some over girl in the process, which is likely as close to sex as he’s come so far. Then it cuts to his best-friend visiting his mom’s house. Since the movie is called MILF, you would expect the mom to be a MILF. She is not. Casting fucked up for this movie. If you went to the sleaziest strip club in your city at lunch hour on a Tuesday, the women featured there would still be more attractive than this woman. She looks like what they threw away when Courtney Love had plastic surgery. Her hair looks as if it had been washed with feces, and then she tried to burn it clean. It didn’t work. The best-friend wants to bone her, and after some sexual tension, he sneaks upstairs and see her coming out of the shower with a towel on. The towel falls off, and a little piece of my sexuality died with it. There’s some full-frontal going on, but I don’t think Mr.Skin would even bother to include it on their site. Then it cuts back to the dormitory, and I start thinking, “My acting is better than this, and I can’t act.” I shut it down shortly after that.
The other college movie I tried was called National Lampoon Presents: Dorm Daze. I had mistakenly tried watching this before on my old account, and it had frozen up on me like a scratched DVD, which… How does that happen? Is someone in a tiny room somewhere playing these DVDs and broadcasting them live as I select them? If so, they’re the modern day lighthouse keepers. Since I’d already watched part of the movie before, I skipped ahead and watched ten seconds, then I turned it off.

There’s some other movies on there that look halfway decent, like Minority Report. I tried explaining Minority Report to my family, and they just looked at me with confusion as I told them, “They solve crimes before they happen by using these psychic in a pool.” I forgot that it was also about Tom Cruise chasing his eyeball down a hall.



    

Hida

I’m having some health issues, and my doctor has scheduled me an appointment to have a HIDA scan done. After much googling, I’ve learnt that this involves me being injected with a radioactive material:

And then undergo an hour of gamma radiation:

So of course, I’ll turn into this:

Now, I know it’s all perfectly safe, but the nurse telling me this will be behind a lead shield.

The Death of Comic Books

DC Comics announced they would be rebooting their entire catalogue. All of it. Slavishly. Reboots, of course, are terrible things. No one is ever !00% satisfied, because it means every story developed over the last seventy years of writing gets thrown out. DC, of course, is no stranger to the reboot. Every one of the Infinite Crisises has been a framework for their reboots, but they’ve never taken it this far before, and for so little. There isn’t much rhyme or reason for resetting their series again except to drive up sales. Some of their titles, like Wonder Woman, are coming off of a hard reboot that failed miserably. DC tries to justify their position by saying that it’s a good starting point for new readers to get into their titles by starting over each series fresh. It’s not a philosophy that works. A series is basically driven by it’s writer, and those writers come and go according to their contracts. That’s how you end up with characters dying at the climax of a big series, only be brought back to life magically when the next writer takes the reins. Even by starting fresh, you’ll soon find yourself bogged down by references to comics that may have been release forty years ago. Spider-Man comics is lousy with this kind of backlogging. Series like the Clone Saga were created to basically reset the character and pave over everything that happened beforehand, but then it would keep skipping back. It was a 90’s series that referenced a separate obscure series that took place in the 80’s.  Now here in 2010-2011, Spider-Man’s been rebooted again with One More Day, wherein his marriage to Mary Jane never happened, and over twenty years of cannon were erased. You can already see that plot-line beginning to retract to the old status, though, with issues trying to explain what happened by re-referencing 80’s comics.

Reboots always try to do two things: They try to be gritty, and they try to be X-treme, with as many X’s as they can get in there. That’s how this:

Can turn into this:

They also renumber all their volumes back to issue #1, because they sell more copies that way. Casual collectors think their #1 issues will be worth more in the long run, but statistically, it doesn’t work out that way. First appearances: yes. First issues: not necessarily. X-Men Issue #1 Vol #1 sold a bajillion copies, and hence the comic is worthless. They were giving them away free at Pizza Hut, for God’s sake. How does a jr. man of steel get a tattoo? Is it painted on? That’s X-treme!

The question is: do comics need reboots? Comic book movies do, because actors and directors and studios can change drastically. Also: some movies are terrible. A lot, really. As I mentioned, the creative teams for comic books changes quite frequently. Bob Kane, for instance, no longer writes Batman, because he is very dead. “Team” comics, like Justice League and Teen Titans can be rebooted just by changing the cast of characters. Titles like Superman, however, have very well established stories. Everyone knows Superman’s origin, and there’s no point in rehashing it. No matter how off-base Superman gets (think of Smallville) his origin is the same. As for Batman:

This is all you need to know. Still: it crops up in every single issue of Batman, and there’s close to a thousand now.

Does DC need a reboot? Sales are slumping, and they need to go digital to keep up. The reboot ties in with their big digital push. Of course, I have read literally thousands of comics illegally, so offering comics as digital doesn’t really recoup the losses: it just means someone won’t have to scan their comic collection every Wednesday.

Do the comics themselves need a reboot? A lot of issues are enjoying a high-water mark, like Supergirl, while Superman (oddly enough) is floundering.  Wonder Woman needs a re-reboot. Other titles, like Gotham City Sirens have reached a natural conclusion. It’s also an opportunity to re-introduce dormant titles like Blue Beetle and Justice League International, while starting much deserved new series like Mr.Terrific. Other series, like Batman and Robin and Green Lantern, would be a disaster if affected.

Halo Reacharound

Halo: Reach is probably the only game I’ve played where I like the bonuses with the special edition more than I like the game itself. I bought the Legendary Edition of Halo Reach on sale for $49.99, which is less than a regular copy of the game is going for. I think it was somewhere in the range of $149.99 when it was first released, but that’s Guitar Hero kinda money, and no one goes out of their way to buy special editions. By biding your time, you can usually pick up these clunky boxes on the cheap, because retailers hate anything that doesn’t fit nicely on their shelves. I saw the same thing happen with Bioshock 2, and D.J. Hero. The product itself is the size of a pet carrier, and includes a statue featuring five immoveable action figures ala Tod McFarlane on a  large base, a book, and lots of styrofoam. Not the regular kind of packaging styrofoam: this shit is classy. It’s solid, grey, perfectly moulded to every contour, and bears the Halo: Reach emblem. I felt bad when I threw it out. It was like throwing out the hubcaps to a car. The box itself is designed to be a display item, and the artwork on it extends to the interior. Inside, there’s the statue, which has to be partially assembled, and then a second case with the book and game in it, along with a loose paper telling you how awesome you are for owning it. The book is a string-bound journal with magnet lock filled with drawings and loose clippings, and includes weird little bonuses like patches and fake key-cards. I didn’t realize at first how long the book was until I started reading it. It’s created to give the reader greater insight into the mythos of the Halo universe. Halo, by-the-by, is way up it’s own ass. It also included an in-game armour effect for a flaming helmet. In a game where only headshots matter, having your head on fire is bad-ass, but it makes for an easy target. By using it, I can be sniped from literally any player with any gun at any distance. It makes me wonder how long Nick Cage survived as Ghost Rider. Ghost Rider would have been a better movie if a Spartan sniped him thirty-five minutes in, then tea-bagged his corpse. There was also an avatar award, but nearly every game has one of those now.

The game itself, after having played through it, is more challenging and more frustrating than say, Halo: ODST, is closest predecessor. Being killed by invisible A.I.s; or using every last piece of ammunition on a map on an enemy and still not have them fall over dead; and being insta-killed by kamikaze Grunts with grenades, when no other grenade in the game seems to have much effect, is all frustrating. There’s also more than a fair share of glitches. In the game you’re playing alongside your Noble teammates, who invariably seem to get stuck in some part of the map. For me, Kate refused to leave a warthog, and I had to try and solo two unkillable alien monsters in a parking garage. I tried about ten times on my own, then went back and tried to free her by slamming the warthog into a wall and tossing grenades at it. Apparently, it was all my fault, because I hadn’t parked the warthog in the invisible designated area. Somehow, she was able to solo these beasts on her own. Other times, I’d be doing a vehicle mission, and they’d just stay behind because they were too damn slow. I would leave them behind in an active warzone while I flew off. Another time, I was on a space mission, and I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to do, so I tried to dock my ship in the hangar. This sent my character flying through the windshield of his spaceship and into the interior of the station, which for some reason had been rendered, although it was inaccessible. I missed Number 1’s instructions on another mission and kept trying to get into a base without killing everyone around me first, because I’d gotten a little tired of that. So I died about sixteen times trying to jack a seraph, when I couldn’t.

Halo continues to be the only shooter franchise where guns do nothing, which is why my preferred weapon of choice is my fist. It’s far easier to punch an enemy to death as opposed to shooting them. It takes one to two punches as opposed to 100 bullets. This is the future, mind you, and in the future, there is no ducking for cover either. Every vehicle is easier to flip than an S.U.V.. To all this nonsense, they added jetpacks so you can Bobba Fett yourself. There’s also the new armor lock ability, which makes you invincible for a few seconds. So when you’re playing multiplayer, you have to stand around and wait until they drop their shields. At that time, you can lob a well-timed grenade at them, and they’re helpless, but one of your teammates will invariably run into the fray and get killed by it. Halo multiplayer is always friendly-fire on, so you’re constantly being betrayed by jackoffs, or else you’re using a heavy weapon and you get one of your teammates stuck in the crossfire. Too many betrayals and you can be dropped out of the game. When that happens, their networking doesn’t allow for new players to enter the game, so you’ll be short-handed for the rest of the match, which can last over fifteen minutes. So your team can be ahead, and then you look at the player list and realize you’re the only one left against a team of sixteen. This crap happens even before the game starts. You can’t even drop out of the map select menu once it starts. So if you’re sick of playing the same level endlessly, you can’t escape.

The plot is kinda lacking. You’re basically just being ordered around while the planet is being invaded. You already know by the time you put the game in that the planet gets destroyed, so what’s the point? So you take down some anti-aircraft guns and save some others. Your teammates die one-by-one in one selfless heroic act or another. Then you get “chosen,” ala Master Chief to cart Cortana’s holographic ass around. Never has any resource in a war been so overestimated. If you know Halo 3, then you know that Cortana is basically a computer program version of Princess Toadstool. She’s worthless for anything other than getting captured and needing to be rescued. Plus Master Chief has a weird sexual relationship with her, much like you do with your computer. Noble Six doesn’t even get the courtesy of a reach-around. Bear in mind: she’s a computer program. She could probably upload herself to any system wirelessly, but they haven’t figured out how the internet work in 2500. So these poor dudes have to carry her around like precious cargo, while being shot at. Thanks Cortana!

The Over-Reaction to the Over-Reaction

Vancouver recently rioted over the Canuck’s loss to the Bruins in the Stanley Cup Final. No one could have predicted that a full-scale riot would erupt over something as trivial as a hockey game, except that the exact same thing happened seventeen years ago. There was once a riot when Guns ‘N’ Roses cancelled a concert at the last minute, but no one in the media has mentioned that, because it’s not hockey related. I mention it only because it gives you a broader sense of the Vancouverite mentality.

Over 100,000 people attended an outdoor gathering to watch the game on big TV screens as the Canucks lost, and lost hard. This is after months of over-hype for the Stanley Cup playoffs. People had Stanley Cup predictions before the season even started, as they do every year. You know when you see ads for a movie everywhere you go, only to find out later that the movie sucks? That’s how this went, in the absolute extreme.

Allow me to give you some examples of the hype going on. Bear in mind, I am not a hockey fan, and I am biased as hell:

Every morning, when I’d get in my car and go to work, and turn on the Jeff O’Neil Show on C-FOX on the radio, they’d be discussing the Canucks. This wasn’t isn’t sports program, by the way: it’s about alternative rock. It didn’t matter if there was a game the night before, a game that night, or a week from the date in question, they’d be talking about the Canucks. Then people would call in and talk about the Canucks. Then someone would make a dick joke.

Every time I’d log on to facebook, I’d have to scroll through a sea of status updates about the Canucks, and everyone’s opinions on them. This would go on and on, until I realized that facebook is secretly hell, and I’d give up and leave. Meanwhile, cross-posts to facebook from my blog received comments from my “friends,” like, “Why do you post these? They’re stupid and they’re not funny.” Indeed, they’re not, and I don’t know. I just don’t know.

People would wear their jerseys to work every damn game, then drone on in the break room about the game. Customers would too. “Did you see the game?” I’d be asked, and I’d have to remind them that no, I don’t watch hockey. I don’t particularly like hockey. Please stop asking. The store would become deserted every game. People would call in sick or leave early.

With every win, the streets would be shut down as people lined up in their cars and honked loudly, creating a traffic-jam parade, so even if I didn’t watch the game, I’d still have to plan my day around it. My wife was pregnant, and there was genuine concern that if I had to get her to the hospital in a hurry, I wouldn’t be able to make it past the crowds. The Canucks won a game the day my son was born, and it seemed as if the hospital was understaffed as a result. The nurses all asked me if I was a hockey fan. My parents got stuck in the mob on the way out of the hospital after visiting us and the baby. A week later, I had to go to the emergency room with chest pains, and there was the same situation. I was trying to get a ride, but of course the game was on, so that was a no-no. My basic point is: the more the Canucks won, the greater the chance was that my wife, my unborn son, and myself would die.

Everyone had only one thing on their tiny little minds for months, and that was the Canucks. Then they lost. Riots ensued. Sports riots by themselves are nothing new. Depending on where you live, soccer can be synonymous with riots. This riot was a little unusual, mainly because of the hipster crowd, the fact that 100,000 people were basically stranded together in the city, and because of cell phone cameras. 90,000 people stood around and filmed people with their cell phones while the rest looted and rioted… while filming themselves with their phones.

Yes, people were standing on top of overturned cars, taking pictures of themselves, while other were taking pictures of them taking pictures of themselves. There’s a slim chance this riot may have been better documented than 9/11. I thought that the covers of the Province and the Sun had used the same photo of a dude jumping over a garbage fire, with the flames licking his nuts, but then I realized that the photos were from two different people likely standing shoulder-to-shoulder. There’s already been a full story done about this picture:

Which looks like one really kinky couple about to get it on in the middle of a riot, which is deserves a reward, but really it’s some dude checking to see if a chick needs medical attention. It wouldn’t have been so popular so quickly if anyone had bothered in the slightest to help out, but no. In a crowd of 100,000, only one dude bothered to help this chick. Now papers and news are running stories every day about the heroes of the riots, who either tackled looters, or told them to back off and not torch cars.

They’re trying to show the good side of the city in the outcome of the riots, but as far as I can tell, the crowd was 10% doucebags, 1% hero, and 89% indifferent. Everything was fodder for facebook, especially the aftermath.

Then there’s this dude:

Dude straight-up has some balls. And some sweet kicks. Honestly, if I were in a riot, I’d loot those off of him. Look at how wide a berth this guy has. Dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of people are watching him as he goes through the convoluted process of trying to light a cop car on fire. He’s clearly put some thought into this. Now: at any point, anyone could have stopped him. He’s seventeen. A person wouldn’t even have to necessarily have to fight him. A smack upside the head and a, “Knock it off,” could have sufficed. But no, no one did a thing, except take pictures and post them, because it’s easier to be passive aggressive on facebook than do something in real life. If you want to talk about facebook leading a social revolution: this is it. It’s basically allowed people to become so detached that it’s easier for them to react through a c became an instant pariah, and he and his family have received numerous death threat on facebook. The kid committed a major offense, but it’s not like he deserves to die for it. People demand justice.

Except they don’t really understand “justice.” An angry mob has formed over the actions of another angry mob. Bear in mind, no one died in the riots. Stuff got wrecked and stollen, and people got pushed around. That’s it. Now they want to kill a kid. He made a full public apology, and he’s still likely to face some kind of charge at some point, and then have it thrown out of court because he’s seventeen. Every day in the paper, it’s this:

People are basically responding like a mob. They’re using facebook to track down the rioters and to harass them. Even with all the photos, it’s difficult to ascertain who committed a criminal act during the riots and who was basically some douche standing around and flashing gang signs like a hipster. Then there’s people bragging about their looting. There’s no real way to tell if they’re serious or not, but they’ll be treat the same by people either way. Facebook is the number one tool in catching the rioters, but it’s leading to more crimes, namely: uttering threats. So in confronting the criminals, average citizens are becoming criminals.

Also, there’s this:

People doing graffiti on the plywood they put up to cover the broken windows. I know it’s all innocent, but GRAFFITI IS A CRIME! Think of all Vancouver’s gone through. Now it has to put up with your poor penmanship? Even the major came out to take part in this bullshit, when really the whole thing is kinda his fault. There was a lot of poor planning that went into the event, and if you’re the mayor of a place that riots after allowing drunken sports nuts to congregate in the city streets with no supervision, you should think about what went wrong. If you want to point fingers, you can’t just blame the rioters, because statistically: Yes, there was going to be a riot. The police get off Scott Free because no one died. People still love the Canucks, so it’s not their fault. So it’s basically the government at fault for thinking their dickish people wouldn’t be dicks.

With regards to people “paying the price,” today in the paper the cover said that, “Apologies aren’t enough.” In the inside cover it talks about an anarchist leader who caused over $5,000 damage during the Winter Olympics walking free without having to do so much as community service.

Moral Ambiguity

I just read this on Kotaku. “Ryan Dunn, Jackass daredevil and co-host of G4's Proving Ground,died in a Pennsylvania car crash this morning. He was 34.”
They also ran this picture:

Now in the split second between seeing the image and my eyes passing over the “car crash” text, I was hoping somehow that the person in question wasn’t  the same dude, or else this random (to me anyway) chick, because I’d just watched Jackass 3.5 a couple days ago. I know the dude, albeit in that vague, “Hey, I know that dude. That’s the dude who froze his balls to the ice horse,” sense, and hence I was wishing death on someone else. Isn’t that strange? There’s always that weird microsecond your mind takes to process bad news, and it tries intentionally to misinterpret it. For instance, my dog died at my parent’s house about three days ago, and I went through the same process where I heard the news from my wife saying, “I’ve got some bad news for you about Tekei,” and I optimistically thought that the bad news isn’t going to be the bad news. Obviously there’s the initial pessimistic wave of, “Oh shit,” inside my head, then the optimistic thought of, “Wait, let’s hear this out.” You always hope to be that person at the morgue who has to identify a loved one, only to realize, “Hey, this isn’t my wife, this is Courtney Love!”
Jackass 3.5: The Unrated Movie

Batman: The World’s Worst Detective

Batman is billed as being the “World’s Greatest Detective.” It’s right there on the comics. They weren’t even called Batman Comics when they were first released, they were called “Detective Comics.” The problem with this idea is that Batman sometimes comes across as not being the brightest bulb in the bunch, and that bunch involves the Green Lantern.
First off, he never solved his parent’s murder. He set off trying to avenge their deaths, but fell far short. In the comics, Batman never solved his parent’s murders in seventy years. They had to retcon the entire series during Infinite Crisis to correct that mistake, but for the record: he doesn’t know who killed his parents. Officially, it’s believed that Joe Chill was the culprit, but Batman spends his life going through every database, shaking down every criminal, and infiltrating every underground organization without ever knowing the answer. Even in the movies, he’s as clueless. In the Michael Keaton Batman, he doesn’t even have a suspect until he’s thirty-something and hears the Joker say the exact same thing he said when he killed his parents. Then, despite hearing what’s essentially a confession, he still has to pour through old files on the Batcomputer to positively I.D. him. Then, instead of going to the police with his findings, he drops him off a building… by mistake. Then, in the Bale Batman, the criminal straight up confesses to the court. No Batman necessary. You’d think that the highest-profile back alley murders in Gotham would have a larger police presence investigating it, but it’s considered a cold case by the time Bruce Wayne becomes Batman. Bear in mind, the worst thing this says about Batman is that HE WATCHES IT HAPPEN AND RELIVES IT IN HIS MIND EVERY WAKING MOMENT. As a rule of thumb, Batman’s parents being murdered is brought up every second issue or so. Even having clearly seen the culprit and having it etched in his mind, he still can’t find him.
Then, Batman finds out he has a son named Damian with his evil-nemesis/sexual plaything Talia, and that he’s now a pre-teen. It never occurs to him that the woman who’s main goal is to mate with Batman and bring her father, Ra’s Al-Ghoul a heir may have gotten herself knocked up during one of their hot desert trysts. Plus, Batman is supposed to be keeping close tabs on her and the organization she works with, but never notices any mysterious nine month absence. One day, she just shows up with a group of man bat ninjas and basically tells him it’s his weekend to watch the kid. What’s Damian been doing his whole life? Training with ninja assassins. The same ninja assassin league Batman breaks up every month when they get in his fucking way. Never once does he see him, or get suspicious.
Then there’s the time Batman found out who the Red Hood was. Batman was plagued by a super villain calling himself the Red Hood who kept leaving him mysterious clues, like his own batarangs, taunting Batman to find out his real identity. It turned out to be Jason Todd, the second Robin, who was supposed to be spectacularly dead. Afterwards, Batman had to go back and trace everything he did after Jason’s death to see if there were any clues. He even had Jason’s coffin booby-trapped to alert him if anyone had tampered with it. His studies showed him there hadn’t even been a body in it. Only, there had been. Jason dug himself out of his own grave. To Batman’s credit, none of this makes any sense, because it involves Superboy Prime punching a crystal wall until reality itself changed with the very specific outcome being Jason coming back to life.

For realz.
Afterwards, however, Jason gets taken in by Talia, for whom Batman has a very large blind spot. There’s really no excuse for Batman, however, since Ra’s is arguably his greatest, if not deadliest foe, and he’s the first and last line of defence between Ra’s and the deaths of billions. So if Ra’s slutty daughter has taken his dead former sidekick, he should fucking know about it.
Then there’s Stephanie Brown, the fourth Robin, the current Batgirl, and the former Spoiler. She was dead too. Her murder was a little easier to solve, as she had her ass handed to her by the Black Mask. Only, it turned out she could have been saved on the operating table by Batman’s personal physician, but she simply chose not to. Batman totally calls her on it and tracks her down to Africa, telling her if she ever shows up State-side again, he’ll turn her in to the police. CASE CLOSED! Only, Stephanie is now alive and well, and it was all a cover up so Stephanie could start a new life away from super-crime and help starving orphan children in Africa. Batman never knew this. There’s no indication of him ever knowing this. Only, when she shows up on their doorstep alive and well, he tells Robin he knew all along, meaning: Batman is full of shit. I have a graphic novel War Crimes, where Batman clearly shows in every panel that he believes in his heart of hearts Stephanie is dead. He even does the criminal investigation himself to confirm his every suspicion. He straight-up drops the ball, and doesn’t owe up to it. This makes Robin get pissed off at Batman for lying to him about Stephanie being dead. Only, he’s never lied about her being dead, he didn’t fucking know. He tells a lie to cover up his own ignorance, just to save some face. Jerk. Then again, it could have just been this:

Then there’s the time he went to jail for the murder of Vikki Vale, which happened in his own mansion. Also: he was innocent. You’d think that the world’s greatest detective would pretty much instantly be able to tell who the real culprit was the instant they set foot in his high-tech security based mansion, but no. He had no clue. There’s a very short list of suspects who could do something like that in his own home with his fourth of fifth favourite on-again/off-again girlfriend, but it takes him months to solve the crime. In his favour, he’s being hunted by the police and the super hero community while investigating the crime, plus he has to break in and out of jail every night. Still, in the end, the culprit has to basically announce himself, and his ass-backward revenge plot. Plus I think Batman kills Azrael during all of this too… by accidentally letting him fall. It’s a common theme in all super hero comics. Then, of course, Vikki Vale comes back to life magically because of this:

Meaning: death is meaningless. It’s impossible to even commit a murder in Batman’s universe because it will be retconned out, making Batman and his criminal investigations a redundancy. Batman himself was killed and came back to life like a week ago through pilgrim-hat wearing time travel. At least that made more sense.

Volde-riggor-mort-is

Voldemort has to go down as history’s most incompetent fictional bad-guy. Worse even than the two crooks from Home Alone and Home Alone 2. Voldemort has one singular goal in life: to kill Harry Potter. Why? Because of something Harry had no control over when he was a newborn baby. The dude comes back from the dead and raises a virtual army to kill Harry, and he still can’t get it done. Bear in mind that he’s the world most powerful wizard and Harry’s a meddling teenager. You think that after the third or fourth failed attempt he’d wise up and move on to something new, but no: it’s always #1 on his to-do list. There’s even posters he prints off saying, “Harry Potter: #1 Most Wanted.”
Still, Voldemort is a man who can get things done. Dumbledore gets iced on his say-so. His minions go to extreme length to bring him back to life, even though they’re deathly afraid of him and they’re better off with him in the cold, cold ground. Killing Harry, though? Hard to do.
In the seventh movie, Voldemort kills a muggle studies teacher, just ‘cause he’s the kind of guy who can’t leave high school in the past. If he’d been taught in a muggle school, it would have been Columbine all over again. Try going back to your old high school and start kicking over trash cans, and see how quickly the cops arrest you. Voldemort gets a free ride, though, because: no nose. Obviously, though, he can kill. Just not Harry. He even has Harry dead in his sights, but Harry, half-blinded and concussed, still kicks his overly-veiny ass. This leads Voldemort on a quest for the world’s most powerful magic wand.
Okay: so bullets are a real thing in Voldemort’s world. He’s strictly anti-muggle, but still: bullets. Harry Potter is not invincible. He’s constantly bruised and bloodied and near-death. Instead of using, say: the world’s most powerful magic wand, he could try instead: the world’s most affordable handgun. No one’s going to look at him differently if he takes that route. He’s not going to be ostracized by his evil minions for using a muggle gun, but it’s like he’s fighting Superman with bullets when there’s kryptonite laying around everywhere. Or straight-up go fight him man-to-man. Quit being such a pussy and throw-down. What’s the worst that can happen? He dies again? He’s got like these thing-a-ma-bob-doo-hickies that keep him alive and evil, and noseless.
But the dude takes over the entire Ministry of Magic and turns them all into Nazis like it ain’t no thing, and even then he can’t get it done. Harry runs through the entire breadth of the Ministry with like forty people chasing him, and he still gets away. The kid’s fucking untouchable. There’s even a giant snake-trap at one point, which obviously doesn’t work because Harry took down an even bigger snake with petrifying-eyes, so why would a much smaller snake work? It’s like Voldemort’s a reject from C.O.B.R.A. with his lack of original ideas. Then two of his best goons get taken down, even after they have the drop on Harry. He honestly should work for G.I. Joe. Seriously: his goons nearly kill a whole group of fake Harrys, but they can’t get the real one. They even know where he lives, because they’re staking it out, and then they attack the wedding too. Still: nothing. They can shoot themselves like cannonballs through walls, but they can’t do that to a dude with bad eyesight that’s looking the other way.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1

Alter-Alter-Ego

There comes a time in every super hero’s life that he needs not one: but two alter-egos to fight crime with. Why? Because people who get superpowers by being involved in easily-avoided accidents aren’t the best strategists.
Best:
Bruce Wayne/Batman: Matches Malone

When Batman needs to infiltrate organized crime in a manner that doesn’t involve punching random thugs in the face, he dons the disguise of Matches Malone, who’s basically every Italian stereotype rolled into one. His getup involves a pornstache, aviators, suits worthy hockey sportscasters, and a toothpick. As Matches, he can get close enough to Gotham’s worst to snap their necks, but that would go against his code. Instead, he plays the part so well that he’s actually ended up in prison as Matches. No one has ever been able to see through his double-disguise without being in on the joke, because Batman is Batman.
Dick Grayson/Robin: Nightwing

Scaly green booty-shorts and pixie boots do not comprise a costume that strikes fear into the hearts of evil, so Robin grew up and decided to become Nightwing. What’s a Nightwing? Who knows, but anything is an improvement on the old costume/name, even if the original high-collar was dated before the 70’s disco era was even over, but it’s highly reminiscent of Deadman. He switched weapons too, in that he started using weapons. His main instrument of choice became a pair of nightsticks, which keeps with the whole theme. Strangely, even though he only really changed his clothes and kept the domino mask, a lot of his former villains never clued in to the fact that Robin/Nightwing were the same person, thanks to the introduction of a new, short-lived Robin.
Jason Todd/Robin: Red Hood

Coming back to life gives you the instant right to adopt a new identity, and Jason chose one designed to stir up difficult emotions in Batman: the Red Hood. The Red Hood was originally just a gimmick that got passed around between gangsters to keep authorities looking for a non-existent ring leader. Even the Joker wore the Red Hood one time, before getting the chemical treatment. Batman got the shock of his life when he saw under the hood and found his dead sidekick. For extra fun, Jason wears his Robin domino mask under the hood, so he’s simultaneously three identities.
Iron Man/Tony Stark: Cobalt Man

Cobalt Man was one of Iron Man’s former foes, until he died of radiation poisoning. Who knew cobalt would make a bad choice of materials to use as armour? Tony took up the mantle, however, to infiltrate the Thunderbolts, all of whom had triple identities as well. They were a super villain team posing as a super hero team lead by Citizen V/Baron Zemo. The weird thing about the Thunderbolts was how they kept everything grey. Tony didn’t know what to make of them and he was an Avenger. He nearly helped Zemo with his evil/good plot to depower every super-being on the planet, because gamma radiation and mental retardation shouldn’t go hand in hand.
Bucky/Captain America/Jim Barnes: Winter Soldier:

Bucky didn’t really have a choice, but for most of the 20th Century he was a thawed-out killing machine for the Russians. They gave him a cyborg arm and brainwashed him to do their bidding, so he went from being some scrawny distraction for America’s greatest hero to a badass assassin. Congratulations, Bucky!
Worst:
Wolverine/Logan/James Howlett: Patch

When Wolverine’s killing ninjas in Madipoor, and wants to go incognito, he puts on an eye patch. That’s pretty much it. He might also put his helmet hair into a ponytail and put on a suit, but bear in mind that he’s basically a hairy midget with metal claws sticking out of his hands. It’s not easy for him to go anywhere and not be recognized. Bear in mind that Wolverine, for about for the longest time, had no idea who he really was. He called himself, “Logan,” and that wasn’t even his real name. Why would someone with amnesia, no birth certificate, no family, and a codename need a second secret identity? The only people Wolverine has to hide from are ninjas and spy agencies, and they’re both very good at finding people. Wearing an eye patch to a bar isn’t going undercover, it’s playing pirate.
Spider-Man/Peter Parker: The Slingers

For Spider-Man, it almost makes sense throwing out the old costume and getting a new identity, given how often his image is plastered over the newspapers with the words, “Menace,” written in the headline. So when it all got to much to bear, he created not one: but four separate disguises: Prodigy, Dusk, Ricochet, and Hornet. Each identity used a different aspect of his skill-set, like Ricochet used his agility, Dusk his stealth, Prodigy his strength, and Hornet his inventiveness. He was basically his own team, thanks to a few quick costume changes. As awesome as it was, it was also retarded. He’s going to be shot at no

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matter what he wears, so why bother with theatrics? He thankfully dropped the act, but for some poorly-explained reason, four other heroes took up his identities in a clear case of copyright infringement.
Dick Grayson/Nightwing/Robin/Batman: Crutches

Crutches is to Nightwing as Matches is to Batman. Same concept, only Nightwing took it too far and went deep undercover, becoming a mob bodyguard. Now: as crutches, he’s basically just Dick Grayson on a pair of crutches, who’s posing as a kung-fu master. So his disguise is to use no disguise, and an overtly complex persona. Bear in mind to infiltrate the mob, he has to prove his worth. When you show up to an interview for a bodyguard, and you’re on a pair of crutches, you’re not getting the job.
Bruce Banner/Hulk: Mr. Fix-it

Okay: so when Bruce Banner gets mad, he turns into the Hulk. When the full moon comes out: he turns into Mr.Fix-it. Instead of smashing people because he’s mad, he smashes people because he’s being paid to smash people. He has a job as a Las Vegas bouncer, which is messed up since he’s part super-genius/part wrecking machine, and his main interest is standing outside doors and checking clip boards. Plus: he learns the value of a finely-tailored Big’n’Tall suit.

Excelsioritis

Stan Lee is a God among men. He’s consistently had a moustache for over fifty years, which should make him king of all hipsters. He’s created Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, etc.. Compare that to Todd McFarlane, who created Spawn. What’s a Spawn, you ask? Exactly. With that being said, if you ask Stan Lee to make anything for you, you will end up with a steaming pile of crap. His best years began and ended around the same time as the Hippie movement. Maybe all his work was the result of a three-year acid trip in the 60’s. Who knows? All we can say is he doesn’t have, “It,” anymore. His goofy creations, once on the highbrow end of the spectrum, now seem ridiculous if brought to market. There’s numerous projects he’s been involved in this century across multiple mediums since Marvel Comics tries to keep him as a far away from what made him famous. These projects include cartoons like Striperella, Mosaic, and The Condor. All of them have been so very, very awful. DC hired him, albeit breifly, to re-imagine their most famous heroes. The result was something that could have been recycled instantly into toilet paper. He’s been in nearly a dozen blockbuster movies, but the degree to which you notice him also indicates the awfulness of the movie. Case in point: Ang Lee’s Hulk where he’s a security guard opposite the cheesy 80’s Hulk actor Lou Feregno =  Bad. Iron Man where Tony Stark mistakes him for Hugh Hefner = Good. The most he’s on screen as himself: the worse it gets.
For some reason, the NHL thought it’d be a great idea to get Stan Lee to turn every team in the league into it’s own super hero. Why does every team needs it’s own super hero? I can see one or two, maybe, but all of them? That’s stretching anyone’s capabilities. Stan’s attempt at this has been half-assed at best. His basic premise is to take the name of the team and put, “the,” in front and dropping the plural. For instance: the Red Wings get the Red Wing. You can turn yourself into a super hero using this technique as well. You can go from, “Bob,” to, “The Bob.” Now you’re ready to fight evil.
I’m not going to shit on every one of them, because there’s thirty, and I don’t have that much shit. I’m just going to pick the Canucks.

Now: The Canucks have a whale on their logo, because of poor marketing choices. They thought First Nations Art would be trendy. It’s not, nor will it ever be. Native Art peaked around the 2010 Olympics, and that’s only because they put it on every stupid souvenir and mascot they could make, and they made a lot. It’s not an indicator of it being popular, however, as there can be lots of something, just for the simple fact that someone made lots of something and left it there, thinking someone would like it. I don’t want archaeologists digging this stuff up and thinking this was all we’re about. This was only ever about us Whites/Asians trying to pretend we have our own B.C./Canadian cultural identity by co-opting someone else’s. Since there wasn’t any black people around, we took the Native’s art (just like we took their land). Most teams, when picking an animal mascot will either go for a bird of prey or a wildcat. The Canucks went with a whale. What do whales have to do with hockey? Nothing, but it’s local. Not local enough that you’ll ever actually see a killer whale by happenstance, or exclusive to the area as whales are migratory creatures by nature. However it happened, it’s there on their jerseys, and it looks terrible.
Stan Lee looked at the Canucks logo for ten seconds and made a whale-themed Aquaman rip-off. Then he remembered it’s in B.C. and we’re all lumberjacks up here and added some shit about tree-climbing spikes, because apparently there’s a lot of crime going on in the tops of trees. His cape also transforms into “an enormous whale fluke,” because that’s going to intimidate the enemy. It’s like a halfsie cape that leaves his ass exposed and freezing in the elements, which needs to transform for some reason. He can also fly, because being able to swim fast is completely useless. He’s essentially a super hero version of the Beachcombers. For any American who doesn’t know what the Beachcombers is, it’s Baywatch without fake breasted attractive people and slow-motion running and more tug boats.
There’s literally no crime he could fight if he’s exclusively patrolling the waters off of B.C. except smuggling, and there’s already agencies with actual police powers devoted to that, making him useless. He can’t just board a boat full of refugees and beat them up because they might be legitimate refugees. If he wants to be accepted, he better lie and pretend to live in a secret underwater kingdom. At least that way someone might think he’s not sucking 100% of the time when no one can see him. He can show up late to crimes and say, “I was off battling Mer-Man and a giant octopus. You guys probably didn’t see it because it was underwater.”
Notice how none of his powers involve anything that could help him fight crime. It’s all about getting to a crime. He has hidden spikes, but they’re for climbing apparently, and not for kicking people in the head with his spike boots. That would be impolite and therefore un-Canadian. He can’t even Burtuzi someone with a hockey stick, because he doesn’t have one.
For the record: do you know what a Canuck is? Johnny Canuck was basically a Canadian Paul Bunyan: a giant with an axe. Stan Lee couldn’t be bothered to do a wikipedia search though, so that awesomeness went out the window. Seriously: a giant with an axe. Who fucks with that? No one.

Vampires vs. Everyone

Due to a strange scheduling conflict, Marvel Comics recently released two unrelated multi-issues story arcs wherein the heroes of the X-men and the Ultimates fought vampires. These stories were created and released simultaneously, without the creative teams knowing about the other until they started an ad campaign for the X-Men #1. Ultimates author, Mark Millar, had a twitch (a term I’m now creating in which someone bitches on twitter), complaining that Marvel head editors were essentially screwing him over by trying to beat him to the punch. Now: vampires are nothing new. If you wanted to jump on the new vampire bandwagon, you’re about three years too late. The Twilight phenomenon and it’s fallout are already well established. Something like this was organically going to happen. Also: the X-Men and the Ultimates exist in two parallel worlds. While the characters in both are familiar to the Marvel Universe, the Ultimates are a reboot, which tried and failed to reinvigorate established characters that have been around for nearly fifty years. Whatever the situation was, both comics came out at the same time.
Interestingly enough, both comics featured a restart to old volumes. The vampires sagas began in X-Men #1 and Ultimates #1 respectively. The 90’s edition of X-Men, #1, Vol. I was the highest selling X-men comic of all time due to “collectible” multiple covers (a new scheme at the time which is now commonplace and overused) and over-printing. Ultimates,  #1, Vol. I, began the Ultimates Universe collection of comics, which also included alternate editions of the X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man. By beginning a new volume in the series, the comics are carrying a legacy with them.
Both series revolve around virtually identical plot-lines. In X-Men, the vampires want to “recruit” the X-Men by turning them into vampires, and creating a vampire master race that will dominate the world. For some reason, they think that former mutant/X-man Jubilee is their “in” for this quest. In the Ultimates, the vampires capture a newly cloned and Hulk and second-generation Daredevil and turn them. The same plan applies. Since their first choices for vampires sucked, their next targets become Wolverine in X-Men and Captain America in Ultimates. This doesn’t go well.
Since there’s vampires, there’s also Blade. Blade shows up whenever there’s vampires like the Trix rabbit shows up during breakfast. Nobody wants him there, but he comes with the cereal. Blade’s involvement is largely hinged around being an expert on killing vampires. Unfortunately, he’s talking to people who kill giant robots and shape-shifting alien invaders on a daily basis. Magneto can drop a skyscraper on your head. Vampires are no biggie. No one cares about his input, especially since he immediately suggests killing their closest friends who’ve been turned vampire. That doesn’t go well. It like if your friend gets a cold he’d tell you to kill them before you get infected. He’s also useless and kept as far away from the front lines as possible before being arrested for tax evasion (this might not have happened).
In both series, the vampire leader is also dethroned and killed by another vampire, which sets the stories in motion. Dracula gets taken down by his own son, and Sticks (for some reason the head vampire in the Ultimate Universe is ultra-obscure character Sticks) is taken down by the Hulk. Seriously: he tried to go toe-to-toe with a vampire Hulk. This makes no sense, and the comic even draws massive attention to the fact by self-acknowledging it, which is mainly what separates the two series: the writing.
Mark Millar, Ultimates writer, has also written Wanted and Kick-Ass, two comics which were turned into big-budget action movies. This has given him a super-inflated ego and lead him to release his own magazine, “CLiNT,” about how great he is. Now: go and read Wanted the comic book. I’ll give you a minute.
…
Back? Okay, now go watch the movie, Wanted. Notice how one has nothing to do with the other? And that the movie is better? That’s because Mark Millar’s involvement was pushed aside. Mark Millar is the new Stan Lee, which means he’ll put egomaniacal shit on the covers of comic books like, “The Best Damn Comic Book Out There,” the same way Stan Lee would put, “The World’s Greatest Comic,” on his. That doesn’t mean their good. There’s this weird sort of pop-culture genre-critical self-awareness about everything he writes, like it’s all part of a joke. The rest is just people running, jumping, and shooting each other Michael Bay style. He even release wide-screen version of his comics. Think about that. Wide-screen. Comics. He’s just trying to create something that someone might make into a high-octane movie with occasional side-boob, which is GOOD BUSINESS SENSE since comics themselves make NO MONEY.
So the Ultimates comic is filled with references to Twilight and second-stringer characters introduced just so they get killed off.
The X-Men comic is slower-paced as it has longer and more issues to fill. It starts off with Dracula being killed, and then the vampires gathering their forces together. One of Dracula’s sons becomes the new head vampire, while another son wonders if he should in turn betray his brother ala MacBeth. In their world, leadership isn’t an entitlement, they have to have the pledged support of each of the vampire sects to obtain and keep it. Betrayal leads to betrayal as plots thicken, Right off the bat, that’s good stuff. Then it gets into the X-Men side and all the hard choices they have to make about Jubilee being infected, the logic behind resurrecting Dracula, and the spreading plague in the city streets as they gear up for the final battle. There’s a lot in there.
In the end, both sides finally overcome their enemies through poor choices on the vampire side. In the X-Men, they seek out and infect Wolverine, who’s power is being able to heal himself from any illness, including vampire. They’re shocked when he turns normal. In the Ultimates, they infect Captain America, who’s power includes being virtually immune to any disease, including vampire. They’re shocked when he turns normal. Also: the sun plays a big role, because they’re sissy vampires. Seriously, in the long run, if you want to start a vampire plague: don’t start with the people who can most easily kill you. There’s seven billion people on the world who can’t shoot optic blasts out their eyes. I’d pick on them first if it were up to me.
On a side note: does anyone else think that Wesley Snipes being imprisoned for tax evasion is a plot by the vampire-lead Shadow Government? Because those Blade movies: they were real. Wesley Snipes is a daywalker. It makes perfect sense: quietly take out the main opposition, then lull the rest of the world into a false sense of security with books and movie and TV shows about half-naked, perfectly sculpted vampire men with bedroom eyes. Desperate women will line up to become infected then spread that infection to the rest of the population. Those who resist are to be used as cattle. Meanwhile: no one believes they exist, and head vampire Dick Cheney laughs in his bunker while supping from a newborn.

The Dan Brown Method

Setting: Some place Dan Brown wants to visit on his next trip. Everything regarding setting must read like a brochure.
Props: Some weird-ass cipher/pyramid/painting with a secret clue that should work like a prize in a cereal box.
Person A: *Gives Person B a sarcastic look* “You didn’t know that {insert wikipedia entry here}?”
Person B: *Overtly incredulous reaction to boring information. (Person B must be more fascinated by what they just heard than the fact they’re being chased by an albino serial killer.)* “But that would mean…!”
Person A: *Nods* “The Freemason Illuminati Templar Knights!”
Killer: *Enters scene. (Killer must be deaf/albino/completely covered in tattoos/Catholic or have some other facet that would immediately separate him from the rest of society.)* “Bwa-ha-ha-ha! Give me the clue!”
Person A/Person B: *Run frantically. Running should take up the next eighteen chapters. Chapters must only be one page long. Person A/Person B find Person C.*
Person A: “We need help!”
Person C: “I’m secretly evil!”
Person A/Person B: *More running. People close to Person A/Person B will be killed. Neither Person should have any strong reaction to that, they’re so entranced by the Benjamin Franklin sudoku puzzle they have to solve.*
Person B: “Wait, we’ve been doing this wrong! The clue actually means {insert wikipedia entry here}.” *More running.*
Person A: “Gasp! The truth! It’s {insert Glen Beck conspiracy theory in here}.” *Neither Person A/Person B will attempt to use new knowledge for financial gain/advancement of civilization, because they’re too “classy” for that.*
Dan Brown: *Does a line of cocaine off a hooker’s back.*
The End

  

The Intermission

Ever since I moved out of my parent’s house and moved out on my own, I basically stopped reading books. This period lasted for about seven years or so, wherein I’d play video games and dick around on the internet instead of reading. There’d be the occasional novel here and there, but I’m guessing less than twelve altogether. This is interesting because:
1: I’m an English Major.
2: I’m a failed novelist.
3: I’m a huge fucking nerd.
Reading had become more of a chore than a past time. Plots became all too predictable and characters unsympathetic. I’d forgotten what had turned me off to reading in general, when I picked up an old book I’d left at my parent’s house.
It was, of course, Steven King. I rarely had picked up a book without finishing it, but in this case, I had made an exception. I’d gone about four hundred or so pages into the novel and then given up with three hundred to go. Considering this was book four, that was quite the commitment to make and then back out.
The book was The Dark Tower Book IV: Wizard and Glass. After three novels depicting the journey of the main character Roland to the titular Dark Tower, Steven King finally delves into his elusive past through a framework story. It is the retelling of Roland’s life through Roland himself. Only: instead of using a first person narrative, it uses a third person perspective. Essentially, it’s two novels in one, as the one does not co-mingle with the framework due to this ham-fisted neglect of narration. The novel itself could have been edited and placed as a prologue to the series proper instead of being injected in the middle like a mockery of Kurt Vonnegut, except that I doubt the series would have made it far were this the case, for Steven King is an author of horror and suspense: this is a western romance.
It starts off promising as the younger Roland has to train for what will become a lifetime of gunslinging murder, then, as soon as it develops the romantic plot, falls apart. We know how each character in the book is destined, as it foreshadows endlessly. The word, “ka,” meaning a kind of cruel fate is used on almost every page. Roland: first off, is fourteen at the time this is all unfurling. I don’t remember quite what it was like when I was fourteen, but it didn’t involve getting laid and shooting people’s heads off. It’s like a kind of adolescent fantasy reserved for comic books smuggled inside of mainstream paperbacks. I’ll read a Batman comic featuring a fourteen-year-old Robin taking down a three-hundred-pound man, and think to myself, “This is retarded,” even for a comic directed mainly at teenagers. Now change this to a novel with a broad age-range demographic. I couldn’t even bring myself to think of Roland as a scrawny Harry Potter-esque fourteen-year-old. It was disrespectful.
The book is fraught with the fault of all fantasy novels, which is to say: cutting away to the supporting cast. If you’re reading a series like Lord of the Rings, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The series begins with a single group of characters, who split into separate groups, and the story will break away to follow each group. Two chapters will be dedicated to Frodo and Sam, then two to Merry and Pippin, then two to Aragon, then one for Gandalf, and so on and so forth, until you forget what the hell Frodo’s supposed to be doing: which is throwing a ring in a volcano. The story here is supposed to be Roland’s exclusively, but every few pages it skips away to another character in the book. While most of this relates to the main character and his story, some of it has no bearing at all. For instance, there’s several pages devoted to a bartender investigating the sounds of screams only to discover a blood-like swath of dust blowing over the moon. I couldn’t even find a reference to the main character or secondaries ever having even encountered this man. The story could therefore have been whittled down from seven hundred pages of tripe to a modest and average three hundred or so.
The “love” story in this book is of a puppy-dog teenage variety, and therefore of the worse kind, and it’s being handled by a man who typically writes about alien sewer clowns murdering children. The pair pine for each other longingly, then meet up and have under-aged sexual congress. It’s basically kiddie porn, unless you’re of a like mind to myself, imagining an older Roland in his place.
I can scarcely recall the rest, as nearly five years or more spanned the time I picked up the book, put it down, and then picked it back up again. It had yellowed with age and took upon that library scent. If it wasn’t for the creases I’d never known where I had left off. I think I could have picked any point in the story itself without missing overly much. As I said, the book is a fantasy novel, and it’s in the quest variety. Quests are typically adventures, where the meat of the story is between point A and B. In this book, everything before the climax is just empty filler. You want to get to B without having to make any stops, and not because the story is so gripping. It’s like driving through cornfields on the way to the outlet mall: it’s boring along the way and disappointing when you get there.
Then the story snaps back to “reality,” where the older Roland is telling the story to his ka-tet. At this point, you should have forgotten their names, who they are, and what they’re doing. It clumsily explains that a magic ball made the telling of al perspectives in the story possible, and that the story itself which would have taken about a week solid to tell someone had only lasted a few short hours. Then it gets into some Wizard of Oz rip-off shit. You’re reminded that the characters are still nowhere close to their destination: the Dark Tower, and sent on your way.
It’s not a terrible book, nor unreadable, although for the longest time I refused to read it. I think it reminded me too much of the Wheel of Time saga by Robert “I’m Dead Now” Jordan. I think that’s really what killed my love of books and all things living.
For those of you who don’t know, The Wheel of Time saga is a never ending series of books. The author himself has died about halfway through writing them, and passed on his work to some poor schmuck who now has to salvage this debacle. Each book in the series is about 1000 pages long, monotonous, and sexist. The entire premise is that the main character is super-magic and must defeat the proverbial devil. My complaints about fantasy novels tarrying too long on supporting characters is taken to absolute extreme in this series. There’s a cast of thousands, with each nearly identical character receiving a garish amount of attention and detail. The details are nearly all the same. Robert Jordan is accused of having only two kinds of women in his books. Both are catty, manipulative, ear-pulling bitches, so there’s not reason to even make that distinction. The men are all dumb as fuck and lead around blindly by these Sarah Palin types.
The worst part in the drawn-out series was when at the end of one book, the main character had successfully expunged a problem which prevented the men from becoming sane, full-fledged magicians in a world ruled by literal witches. It was the prefect starting point for an escalation and acceleration towards a climax involving magical Armageddon. It could have been like the Matrix meets tits in 3-D, and everyone gets free slurpees. The next book, taking place directly after these events, makes no mention of it. 1000+ pages, and nothing progresses. It’s like American politics. Seriously: IT’S LIKE AMERICAN POLITICS.
In short: it killed my very spiritual essence. I could almost see it escape by body like a misty breath on a cold morning. Robert Jordan is in hell now, but as it’s chief mechanic. His books are like WoW. Endless grinding, characters searing for allies and artifacts in preparation for a final battle that never comes.

   

The Downward Spiral of Humanity

This article is, of course, about The Jersey Shore. Not the TV show, necessarily, but rather it’s spin-off into other brands of media, like books. I went to Chapters yesterday, and noticed a strange trend. Where there should be books about political intrigue and cooking and whatnot, there were instead books written about reality shows. Do people that spend all day in front of a TV watching reality shows read books? Do they want to read a book about a show they’ve just spent the last nine hours watching a marathon of? If you’ve ever been the the Fantasy or Science Fiction section of any bookstore, you’ll realize the answer is yes. There, you’ll find that 33% of the section is devoted to media-tie-in products. Why should the rest of the store be any different?
I picked up a novel that claimed to be written by Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, A Shore Thing.

A woman whose hair takes up half the cover. I opened it and turned to a page at random. There, the character discussed denim panties as a fashion faux-paus. I put the book back down, feeling ill. Clearly, this was a work on the level of The Great Gatsby. My deepest fear is that this will be turned into a movie.
Further into the store, I found this:


The Rules According to JWOWW. (Am I supposed to capitalize all those letters?) Shore-Tested Secrets on Landing a Mint Guy, Staying Fresh to Death, and Kicking the Competition to the Curb. I assume the secret advice is as follows:
Step 1: Dress like a slut. THE END.
Yet, the book goes on for a hundred pages or more. I couldn’t bring myself to open it, because I assume that it would be like the graveyard scene from Army of Darkness. The book could very well be the Necronomicon.
Why would anyone take advice from anyone on the cast of Jersey Shore? Even in jest? My mind can’t even get around that question. There’s nothing you can learn from the Jersey Shore that you can’t learn by spending a night in the drunk tank. If you’ve ever read a pamphlet on S.T.D.s, then you’re ahead of the game. Their only field of expertise is maintaining their haircuts, and perhaps eating pasta while standing.
Of course, according to Amazon, people who bought this book were also likely to buy this:

Here’s the Situation by Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino. I like how they have to put their full names down, because you wouldn’t want to confuse him with any of the other, “The Situation”s out there. I know that if I hear about “the situation” in Libya on the news, I automatically think of The Jersey Shore unless they give me specifics about an uprising. If you buy this book, you’re saying one thing and one thing only to the people who can see it’s cover, and that’s how you no longer have any respect for yourself as a human being. You know all those romance novels with the racy covers with the dudes that make you wonder what lonely, desperate woman would ever have this out in public? Well here’s something even trashier. Put your fucking shirt back down. You’ve done some sit-ups, and I get that. I have to imagine that the entire book is about your work-out routine and hair gel.
While in Chapters, I overheard a conversation between a customer and a clerk, and basically they were both saying that they didn’t have any copies of To Kill a Mockingbird. One of the greatest American novels ever written, and they don’t fucking have it. They have this horse shit, but not a classic like that. It’s as if their very presence in the store made the other books get up and leave. I’m lucky I don’t smoke, because if I had a lighter on me I’d torch that place to the ground and stand triumphantly arms outstretched over the roaring flames.
This isn’t even scratching the surface of the Jersey Shore book collection, but I did find this online:

Snooki in Wonderland for .99 cents as an e-book. This is possibly the greatest thing ever. I can safely say that even without cracking it’s cover. Were I a publisher, and this came into my office, I would immediately start writing cheques. I had to browse through the sample chapter and it’s basically the same concept as Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. It’s also probably garbage, but I’d like to imagine my own, better book.

   

Locked Achievement

I just finished playing Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4, the video game based on the Lego toy based on the movie based on the series of books with my five year old stepson. This is one of the rare co-operative games on the Xbox 360 that doesn’t involve an internet connection. We can actually play side-by-side towards the same goal. It makes for some frustrating moments, however, when you discover that the character currently controlled by a five-year-old has to solve a puzzle, and he doesn’t have a clue how, or when the scrolling screen won’t allow you to advance any further because he’s off dicking around. But I digress. My point is, I played through the whole game, and in the end, got jack squat. He’s logged in under his avatar and I’ve got mine. The save file is in his name, hence, after completing all four years, I’m left with 0 Achievements. I actually did get one for a time turner spell, but that’s like 10 points our of 1000, leaving my score at 20,000 GP even, but I digress. Even though I’m carrying his ass through the whole game, I don’t get anything out of it. It’s called co-op, but it’s more like FU-op.
So, in order to bulk up my Achievement score, I have to go through and play the game again and get all the collector items every game on the 360 forces you to get. The collector is the most tedious of all known Achievements. In Crackdown 2, you have to collect 500 Agility orbs, 300 Hidden orbs, 50 audio logs, as well as numerous stunts. All of this involves bouncing back and forth across a city while being shot at. It’s 80% of the game play. It’s another game I’ve finished this year, and it’s also robbed me of my richly deserved Achievement points. I’ve finished various challenges, but received no credit for doing so, possibly due to a mix-up between systems. For I am no ordinary man. I am Philip Allen, owner of two Xboxes. That’s 720 total. One sits in my living room, connected to the internet by wi-fi. The other is in my bedroom, connected to the TV. If I want to play games on both and still earn proper Achievements, I have to move my saves from one system to the other via a docking station. The entire hard drive on my old 360 has to be disconnected and connected to the new 360 through an overpriced wire. If the two systems aren’t perfectly aligned, it confuses the fuck out of your profile. The date on my old 360, no longer connected to the internet, read as 2004, while the new one lives in the far-off year of 2011. Long story short, by playing on my old system, I missed out on about 400 GP. Again, I’m expected to start over to regain those Achievements.
Some games have different Achievements for playing through at different difficulty levels, while some straight-up make you play again through 30+ hours. That was one of the Achievements in Mass Effect 2. I almost went for it, except I realized I couldn’t play over as a woman without losing all the roll-over points I’d gained. Fuck that. Mass Effect 2 was worth like 75% of it’s sticker price as a trade in. I’m not sitting on that just to get one Achievement out of 50.
What also pisses me off is the whole, “Completed Games” section in Achievements. If you have 100% of Achievements unlocked in a game, the game goes up on it’s own special board so everyone knows what a stud* you are. (*”Studs” may not be considered studly by women, or get laid). I have 100% of the Achievements for Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. I don’t have it on the board. Why? Because I didn’t finish the expansion pack. The expansion pack cost an ungodly 2400 MS points. That’s $30 U.S.. The game itself cost $20 bundled with Bioshock. That’s $10 for the game itself. The expansion pack costs three times the game. Plus you’re buying it on an inferior system. Betheseda games are considered better on the computer, where expansions are occasionally offered for free, but there’s no Achievements. My completed game score is being held hostage by a pack that’s not part of the game.
What are Achievements for anyway? Some games have impossibly hard Achievements while others are all too easy. You can literally push a button in some games and get an Achievement. In others, you have to perform death-defying aerial acrobatics while scoring long-distance headshots during a nuclear explosion. People don’t even bother to look at them, even when they have the option of comparing their Gamerscore to another’s. To me, Achievements are just another thing to shoot for after the game’s done to get some extra life out of it. They’re like their own special Easter Egg.

LiveJournal Tags: xbox 360,achievements

I’m on a Drug Called Charlie Sheen

Charlie Sheen claims to be, “Winning!” and that may very well be the case. Through sheer crazy, he may be close to winning the internet itself. It’s a precarious throne, one which Chocolate Rain and LOL Cat has held, only to be cruelly overthrown by the next contender. Charlie, however, has the tenacity to hold his position as King of all Webs.The dude holds press conferences every day to spew forth insane ramblings. Who else would get high on crank and shit on his own bosses for making sensible business decision, then demand a raise? Chuck Norris doesn’t even have those kind of balls, and he’s 80% balls, (the other 20% is his jean-clad legs for roundhouse kicking). The man is a new kind of crazy. That’s true. Professional psychiatrists can’t even diagnose him. Some people say he’s bi-polar, but even an institutionalized bi-polar patient can talk sense, in the form of shouting and crying. It’s like he’s taken so many drugs that his mind has crossed over into conceptual realities only Timothy Leary could imagine, but never reach. It’s almost unfathomable. If you take a microphone to a Bible-verse quoting crazy homeless person, the recordings would make better sense than this. If you look at the history of famous drug addicts, there’s Ozzy Osbourne, who doesn’t make sense when he talks, but that’s only because he’s mumbling British gobble-gook. A drunken Mel Gibson may slur his accent too, but you can still make out the phrase, “Dirty Jew,” and know it’s full intent. Charlie, on the other hand, even tweets crazy.
Here’s the most insane quote ever from twitter:

charliesheen Charlie Sheen
@
He had the Tigerblood... No doubt!! RT @Chupa72 The Babe's finest year. The Bambino was a level 100 Warlock sir. #Tigerblood
1 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply
Okay: let’s try to analyze this. “He had the Tigerblood…” Which is good, I suppose? Is his blood tiger-like, or did he drink Tigerblood as part of some pagan ritual? Was it striped? “No doubt!!” This phrase has only two exclamation points, as Charlie surmised it was worth more than one, but did not deserve the full three points, as tradition dictates. “The Babe’s finest year. The Bamino…” Ah! This is a reference to Babe Ruth. Fun fact: Charlie is an avid baseball fan. Now this is starting to make sense. “…Was a level 100 Warlock sir.” Now you lost me again, Sheen. A level 100 Warlock? Is this a reference to WoW, or D&D? Levels do not go up to 100 in those respective games. It’s as if he’s aware of these games and their basic structure, but has never played them personally. Or perhaps celebrities/crack addicts have their own expansion of WoW the average citizen doesn’t know about? Perhaps, more disturbingly, Sheen and Babe Ruth are in a secret society like the Masonites, and the Bambino had achieved the rank of level 100 Warlock. That’s not even a high rank in their clan destine organization. Sheen is a level 5.607/16th Paediatrician. That entitles him to free McLobsters.
Facts are facts: Charlie was able to write this after only a few hours on twitter. Some people spend years trying to shape a tweet like this. He didn’t even need the full 140 chars, and spawned about 15 memes. The man is breaking records left, right and centre. He’s at 1,300,000+ followers in less than a week. That’s about the same rate at which people lose interest in twitter altogether. It’s balancing out. If he went on myspace, people might even remember there is a myspace.
No matter how you put it, Sheen is winning. He can threaten to kill porn stars in his hotel room like a modern day Fatty Arbuckle, and still cash in million dollar cheques for not working. Deeply flawed contracts have him set for life. He can afford all the drugs he needs to fuel his tirades, and still fly around the world in his private jet with some cover girl from a chronic-themed magazine. Bear in mind: he’s a terrible actor on an overrated half-assed show about misogyny. I have a show about misogyny. It’s called, “My Life.” It hasn’t been picked up by CBS yet. Do people even watch that show for Sheen, or whatever hot chick his character is currently boning? People watch that show for the same reason old people watch Wheel of Fortune, because of Vana White. Ever watch that show with your dirty old uncle, who leans over and somewhat whispers something about, “Check out the gams on that broad!” Old people don’t know how computer porn works, and only get basic cable, so they have to make due with whatever glimpse of cleavage they can get, no matter how very sad that is. CBS is only viewed by old people. Old people still get horny. Two and-a-Half Men features four and-a-half boobs each episode. Ipso-factso: old people watch Two and-a-Half Men. It’s got nothing to do with Charlie Sheen being a movie actor. Name three movies with Sheen in them. No, that’s Martin Sheen. Try again. WRONG!
The worst part about all this is that five years down the line, Charlie will be the brunt of jokes on award shows the way Robert Downey Jr. is. The guy’s fucking Iron Man/Sherlock Holmes, and he still has to hear about his old cocaine habit and jail stint from some dude that fucked his kid’s nanny. Like half the audience isn’t on ‘cane. If you unscrew the bottom of an Oscar statuette, it’s filled with the white stuff. That’s the only way movies get made in Hollywood. So Downey did too many drugs and ended up taking it in the shitter from a guy named Bubba? Big fucking deal. He’s still Iron Man. You think Sheen could do what Downey does and not make it sad and a little scary? There’s no comparison, aside from the fact their lives are parallel.
See? What I just wrote there was rambling, and crazy, but it’s still not Charlie Sheen crazy. He’s like a Tigerblood fuelled Warlock.

LiveJournal Tags: Charlie Sheen,twitter,crazy,bad ideas