Bored of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was on the other night. I had one of those revelations that only come from seeing the same movie over-and-over. This time, during the scene where Legolas goes apeshit on the giant elephant, I realized what a total dick he was being. After releasing the harness and sending the saddle base tumbling off of the elephant, he had effectively won the fight. There was no reason to go any further. In the scene prior, it was firmly established that the Rider of Rhodan were outnumbered 10 to 1. Sauron’s armies were on foot, while the Riders were obviously mounted, and therefore could escape the path of an elephant far more easily. Therefore: a rampaging elephant without it’s handler was far more likely to kill a huge swath of the orcs instead of the Rhodans it had been sent to kill. Legolas didn’t see it that way. Instead, he put multiple arrows into it’s brain and slid down it’s trunk as it died. It was a dick move, especially for an elf who’s supposedly into animals and nature.

Previously, when asked why Gandalf didn’t have the giant golden eagles fly Frodo to Modor at the very beginning and be done with it, I had always said it was because of the dragons. They would have to kill the dragons before the eagles could reach the mountain. Then, as I watched it again, I saw the eagles actually show up during the last battle before the ring was destroyed and fight a dragon, blowing my theory to shit. The eagles apparently outnumbered the dragons at all time, and are more than capable of killing the shit out of them. So why didn’t they help out before? My new theory is: the eagles don’t give a shit. They’re eagles. Gandalf was saved in Part One by the eagles, but it’s not like he controls them. It was more like calling a cab than him going all Aquaman and summoning them telepathically. Getting you down off of a tower is one thing: flying past the Eye of Sauron through a flock of dragons into an active volcano is another. I think they just showed up in the end so they could look like the heroes. All the work was already done. By the same theory, the Balrog could have taken over all of Middle Earth on his own. He was a giant flaming hell demon. Gandalf pretty much shit his grey robe when he saw him. After he killed him, and vice versa, the universe was so impressed it decided to give him a promotion, and a change of pants.

Which brings me to my next point: Gandalf is basically given a promotion by the powers that be with the understanding that he fire the current white wizard. It’s the exact plot to the pilot episode of News Radio. There’s some kind of cosmic force doling out wizard colours. At any point it could have fired Sauromon and be done with it. It could logically do the same to Sauron. After all: he’s just a floating flaming eye on top of a tower with it’s life-force connected to a magic ring he managed to lose. In a flashback you see how he gets pwned just by losing a finger. He’s not exactly the most powerful being in that regard, and yet he’s still the most powerful being, with the exception of whoever is giving out these wizard robes. If this power decide that Sauron could go suck it, what’s he going to do? He’s basically just an living lighthouse.

What the fuck is up with Sauron’s tower anyway? What’s in there? Is it nice. Does Sauron actually live in there, and he’s like the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz? Could you kill Sauron by knocking the tower over? It’s like the One Ring and the tower are his horicruxes. It’s like there’s alternatives that no one ever bothered to look at.

Also: if you look at Modor, you realize that there’s no way Sauron’s army was going to make it another year. The war happened when it did not simply because Frodo was planning on chucking the ring into the fires of Modor, but because if they didn’t take over some agricultural resources immediately through arms they were going to starve to death. There was no food in Modor. There’s nothing but rocks, fire, and pain. Sauron was the undisputed ruler of a inaccessibly and uninhabitable wasteland, due largely to the fact that no one else wanted it. Plus: orcs and giant spiders.

Pyjama Jam

This:

This is a real thing. Forever Lazy. It’s a fleece coverall, incredibly similar to a baby sleeper. You’re expected to wear this in public. At all times. The video shows people working, and attending tail gate parties with other people dressed the same. There’s no attempt at fashion. One of their highlights is the zipper on the side for when you need to make poopies, like those flap-traps in ol’tyme pyjamas you’d see hillbilly prospectors wearing in Looney Toons. Basically, they took the already ridiculous notion of the Snuggli: the blanket with sleeves, and turned it into an outfit.

It’s called the Forever Lazy, but honestly it would take more effort to put this on than a shirt and a pair of pants. Especially when it comes to going to the bathroom. Like I said, the zipper is on the side. You’re expected to pee like a turn-of-the-century Chinese stereotype.

Don’t buy this. I know people are buying this, but don’t buy this. Even for people you hate.

Christmas Time

I did some quick calculations, and found out that I’ve listened to approximately 1,500 hours of Christmas music in my life. Nearly 1,300 hours of that has been from the last nine years alone. This is a result of working retail where Christmas music plays constantly on a non-stop rotation from late November to late December/early January. The songs in their playlist automatically become my most listened to songs by default, as the song rotation is fairly short, and I listen to roughly 130 hours each year.. The top listened-to songs on my iPod don’t even come close in terms of time played, even combined. Christmas music comprises 1/12th of all music that reaches my ears. None of this is by choice, mind you. I have, and still listen to Christmas music by choice, but it differs greatly by content, artists, and target audience than the songs I listen to at work, or in malls and stores, and makes up a tiny fraction of total Christmas music I’ve listened to. It’s hard to gauge, but I believe I may have listened to over a hundred hours of Christmas music intentionally, be it on record, on television specials and movies, singing or instrumental, or in concerts and pageants.

My point is that I’ve mentally broken, and have long since gone insane, and am now a danger to myself and others.

Full Moon

In the past two days at work, I had a customer swear vehemently at me, I was treated like a retail slave worker by another, I had two customers break open lifts of merchandise in the overhead to get at things that didn’t really exist and argue with me all the while, and I had some dude with a shaved-head (ie. skinhead) in a 80’s acid washed jean jacket come up to me and say the following when he saw me using a pull bar, “Hey, you didn’t happen to work in the death camps in a former life, did you? I think that’s the kind of hook they used on the Jews when they took them out of the ovens.” I nearly went nuts and punched him in his meth teeth. There was that brief instant where I literally thought I would fucking do it. He made a blatantly anti-Semitic remark out of fucking nowhere, while simultaneously calling me a death camp Nazi. Nothing that person could say or do for the rest of his life would ever make up for that. All I did was clench my jaw and ask him, very pointedly, “Did you need help?” because I work in fucking retail. I never had less respect for myself than just then.

Worse thing is: I think this is the second job I’ve been in where I’ve dealt with this fucker. I don’t know what kind of shit he does for a living, but it’s not legit. Plus, I know I’m going to see him again. Seriously, even if I quit this job and get another, he’ll probably show up again. I think the first time I noticed him, he was towing around some chick like a piece of property and making very sexual remarks to other members of the staff. Classy.

I’m going to refuse to give him service next time I see him, and I’m going to let the managers know why. I honestly don’t care if I’m fired because of it.

Double Jeopardy

Last night I had not one, but two dreams that I died, and both dreams ended the same way.

In one I was picking up my kid from school, and on the way home I was chased down by another driver wielding a gun. I tried speeding away, but he shot at the back of my car. I eventually made it to my childhood home, and it turned into a gun-in-the-back hostage situation where I had to pretend everything was okay. This went on for quite a while, until we were separated, and I told my mom to call 9-1-1. The gunman caught on to me immediately, and took my brother hostage in the basement. I ended up getting shot in the leg before I woke up, with my heart racing.

When I went back to bed, I had another CoD-style dream probably inspired by those n00b trailers. I was a soldier in a war trying to clear out a huge swath of the enemy on a cliff-side. I got up to the last batch, and ran out of bullets. I took a strange old fashioned gun from one of the enemies, and tried using it. I couldn’t get it to work. I was grabbed, and one of the enemy gladly showed me how to use it by emptying into my body. I woke up again, heart pounding. More than anything, I was worried about my pulse rate, which was getting fairly high. I had a nosebleed later on in the morning.

Occupy Ball Street

Occupy [fill in the blank] has reached around the world to most major cities with freeloading hippies living in them, and now it’s coming to your backyard. Or, more specifically, my back yard. Yes, according to the local paper, Occupy Abbotsford is coming this Saturday, SATURDAY! SATURDAY!!! You'll pay for the whole seat BUT YOU’LL ONLY NEED THE EDGE!!!

Actually, it makes a lot of sense, so long as you’re a jobless, pot smoking hippie. All the shiftless losers featured in Occupy Vancouver are being kicked the fuck out after a drug overdose death, along with mayoral candidates complaining about used needles, fire hazards and rodents. Instead of moving four blocks over to East Hastings St. where they’ll continue to live just as they have but slightly out of the public view, they’ll apparently set up their tents down near the town library here in Abbotsford, which happens to be four blocks from my house. That means more homeless people jaywalking across the street during my daily commute. Abbotsford has all the essentials an Occupy movement needs. It has a high unemployment rate, and the few job prospects there are are mainly minimum wage. It also traditionally has a high crime rate with easy access to the drug trade, so stay tuned for more drug related deaths. People here are generally pissed off, and take pains to have it known.

What does Abbotsford have to do with Wall Street? Nothing. You’d struggle to find people in Vancouver who could even find Abbotsford on a map, despite being an hour’s drive away, so imagine the global impact we have when we don’t even rank locally here in B.C.. It’s really just an excuse for the homeless to set up a new homeless city, after their last one, Camp Hope lost all hope. One day, Abbotsford will be magically transformed into a Hobopolis, and shifty-eyed drifters will come from all over the world to squat in our backyards and defecate in our gutters.

Honestly, though, I support the Occupy movement to the extent that it gets me laid. If you want to protest, go protest. It worked out great for the students of Kent State. But if you come complaining to me about inequity, you can go and fuck yourself. I’m barely hanging on by a thread. The whole town is probably hurting too. So who the hell are they complaining to? The Fat Cats at the public library? They couldn’t even find a business centre to protest, because they have no idea where to look for one.

Post-Modern Warfare

With all the hype surrounding today’s release of COD: MW3: Electric Boogaloo (citation needed), I almost forgot the game was being released by Infinity Ward in name only. The originators were denied their bonuses, fired, escorted off of the premises and sued shitless, and I was thinking about how that all ties back to the anti-corruption protests going on around the globe. How more corrupt does a company have to be to completely black ball the people who made them millions? Activision completely got off Scott Free with their deplorable actions, as today’s release will prove. It’s set to be the highest grossing release in history for a video game, and consequently all media by proxy. They basically proved you can keep an idea and do away with the people who had it. Imagine if James Cameron was fired from his studio after Avatar was released, and they gave the sequel to Uwe Bowl to direct? There’s not much of a difference. No fan of the series would ever be indignant enough to boycott the release on principle alone. You can hate what they did, but you’ll still give them your money. The team who created this game could very well find themselves fired as well, as the gaming industry is notorious for it’s unjust layoffs.

Gamer

I think Gamer is a movie a lot of people passed over when it first came out, even it’s own FPS playing target audience. Which is a shame, because it’s great satire. I know it’s not considered a satire, but that’s what it is. It’s a dead-on look at the video game generation, right down to their screen names. It takes current ideas of the most popular games and takes them to the natural conclusion of people controlling other people as their avatars. The outcome isn’t attractive. If you know anything about the actual habits of gamers, you’d know enough to be wary. In a Second Life style open world game, obese men who dip waffles into buckets of syrup before cramming it into their faces control female character and engage in what is essentially gay sex. A female actress goes up to a male actor and the two get it on, without any choice in the matter, because their minds are being controlled. That’s what people are doing all day long on Second Life. The only change is that the avatars are being replaced with flesh’n’blood people. Your average gamers would take great offense to being portrayed as overweight, perversion-obsessed shut-ins who live through their game characters, but they’ll tell you this in the comment sections, with their outdated anime pictures as their avatar, and never in person.

The main bulk of the movie, though, is a Death Race 2000 style game, with criminals fighting in a FPS for freedom. They’re being controlled by greasy teenagers who’re treated like rockstars. Now: the movie hinges on a Mike Zucherberg-style villain and his invention of mind controlling nanobot technology. He uses it on criminals not to make them more compliant, but instead to force them to do violence. Seriously, the same nanobots being used to make them kill each other gladiator-style could also make them perfectly docile and productive members of society. If you watched Shaun of the Dead where they eventually train the zombies to put shopping carts away, the same idea could apply to this movie. Criminals could hold jobs and have ideal lives, and the general public would never have to fear for their safety. The guy who killed your uncle could make your latte, and then you could spit in his face, and he’d just stand there and smile at you. Is that a type of slavery? Yes, but less so than the one illustrated in the movie. After all, it’s just a lousy plot device to get people to kill each other.

The movie actually takes great pains to show how the participants are, for the most part, completely unwilling to take part in the bloodshed. Avatars have total mental breakdowns after each session, while the players look at their fans’ teenaged boobs on webcam. Only one dude is really into it, and he’s a psychopath rival to the hero. They’re all supposedly fighting for their freedom, which is exactly like Death Race 2000, especially since that promise is complete bullshit. You have to feel sorry for the characters in the movie who fall for it. Do you think they’d let the world’s most deranged killing machine free, after proving himself to be virtually indestructible? On the other hand, they use to do it in Ancient Rome.

The whole scheme seems like it would cost everyone involved a lot of money. Having your own human slave with accessories can’t be cheap. The one fat dude was living in the dingiest apartment imaginable, but he could still somehow afford a glamorous female avatar. The FPS player had an entire room that was a virtual projection screen, and he could afford new weapons and armour for his avatar to use in-game. Plus when your character dies in the game, you’re basically fucked. Imagine if you had to pay every time you respawned.

I was watching the movie, and I thought to myself, “This movie could use more Ludacris.” Then, Ludacris came on. That automatically makes this the best movie ever, because you know Ludacris would never attach himself to anything terrible.

Oh, wait.

There’s honestly not enough movies out there with rap stars in them.

Then we find out that Ludacris can hack anyone’s mind control nanobots and download useful apps. He could have gone mainstream and made a killing with his “Walkie-Talkie” program that lets two people talk to each other using only their brains. But no, he decided to take on an evil corporate empire by freeing one guy out of hundreds of potentially sympathetic victims. That didn’t turn out too well for him. Or he could have just hacked everyone’s mind with a virus and put a stop to the game that way by giving them their free will back.

There’s a lot of stupid plans in the movie. Like the bad guy having his team of elite killers perform a song and dance number, then let them be killed one-by-one. Then he challenges the deadliest man in the world to a game of basketball. Or the whole escape plan that involved the hero drinking himself stupid, then throwing up and urinating into the fuel intake of a truck to power it. For some reason, he couldn’t bring the bottle with him. He had to drink it, then pee it out. And somehow it was still potent enough to fuel a truck for a daring escape through an exploding city. He had someone sneak booze into his locker, which is in a maximum security detention centre. He could have just had the person fill up the truck with some fuel, which is in an unguarded garage. Was he so certain the truck was empty to begin with? In the same act, there’s a vehicle that a player uses to run over some chick in the street, so obviously there’s cars with fuel, and they’re easily accessible.

There’s people in the game that are there for the sole reason to get blown up. They’re just there for decoration. They walk mindlessly though the killing fields and get run over or turned into swiss cheese. On some level, they agreed to that. One of them is John Leguizamo, though, so it makes it okay.

Then the hero, who claims to be innocent in everything he’s done, and apparently abhors the violence forced upon him, breaks the spine of another avatar he catches about to have sex with his wife. The avatar is a completely unwilling participant, and a paid actor. Essentially, he’s being raped, and the hero knows this. But he sees a dude about to bang his wife, who’s basically a hooker anyway, and he kills him with a backbreaker. It completely goes against every other theme of the movie. If he was innocent up until then and just killing to survive and find his freedom, he completely blew it with an act of Second-Degree murder. If you catch yourself over-thinking that scene, though, you probably would have turned off the movie by now. That’s what’s so messed up about the whole movie. It brings up all these ethical sci-fi questions and then shits all over them.

The Fog

So I watched The Fog on Netflix two days ago. I’m not going to shit all over the movie with a bad rating, because what’s one more drop of urine in a sewer?But I am going to say this:

I’ve never seen so many people thrown through windows. Like: never.

The first two chicks the ghost fog kills are thrown through the windows of the boat they’re on. Like that’s supposed to be scary, or something. At that point I could shrug it off, but then it keeps happening. Superman’s driving around town, and suddenly his windshield gets smashed in for some reason I didn’t really pay attention to very well, because it’s The Fog. Then, later, the fog throws the MILFy chick in the suit through the window, which is survivable, but apparently she didn’t. It’s kind of weird, because they didn’t even show the fog doing it. She’s just standing next to the window as the fog rolls in, and then she goes blasting through it. Then some priest dude is standing in between two glass display cases, and they explode, then the glass goes flying around and pierces right through him. So it’s like a Yakov Smirnov routine where, “In Soviet Russia, glass is thrown through you!” Then the mayor, who’s kinda blameless in the whole ghost fog revenge scheme, get thrown through the window.

One of the main plans by the people in the movie trying to escape the fog was to hide inside buildings and shut the windows. I guess the fog didn’t really like that idea, and tried to make his feelings known the best way he knew how.

The smashing glass actually relates back to the scene where the ghosts in the fog were dying (the first time) and they’re punching their hands through the portholes of their boat to escape a fire. It makes more sense, then other means of murder. Fire, honestly, would make more sense, but the fog does light the mayor on fire. Honestly, I don’t understand how burning to death on a boat turns you into a ghost fog. But think about the Friday the Thirteenth movies where Jason drowns, then starts killing teens with chainsaws and lawnmowers and machetes and shit. Shouldn’t he be drowning them? I mean the lake is right there, and we know he’s an undead zombie who doesn’t need to breathe. It seems like looking for all these sharp implements in the forest takes up a lot of his time.

The Man With the Golden Gun

Somewhere out there in this big blue world people are demanding war crimes charges be laid against the Libyan forces who killed Gaddafi. That’s fucked up. That’s like saying someone who had their house robbed should be charged with theft for taking back their stuff. Gaddafi got pwned in the most awesome way possible. I don’t think anyone could be more satisfied with how that went. There we people shouting, “We need him alive!” as he was getting kicked down the street. They weren’t listened to. No one needs a long, drawn out trial. Look at Sadam. Everyone knew he was guilty as shit, so why put on the show?

Besides, Gaddafi had a golden gun on him when he was caught. That’s a rare item drop that sells for top dollar at auction. It’s one of the few times life imitates WoW.

Seriously, that’s literally something a James Bond villain would have on him. You got to ask yourself, “WWJBD?” He’d kill that motherfucker.

People, mostly liberal hippies, had the same negative reaction when Osama was killed. There were tweets from that huffy Huffington Post chick about how we shouldn’t be celebrating the death of a human being. How far up your own ass do you have to be to not realize that something bad happening to someone bad is a good thing?

I saw an episode of Family Guy the other day where Peter annex Joe’s pool and creates the nation of Petoria, and invites all the world’s despots over. They showed Saddam and Gaddafi on screen at the same time.

Eerie, isn’t it?

Horrible Bosses

My resume has basically no one on it for references, due largely to the fact that I’m something of a loner. The two that are on there are former supervisors, one of whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in maybe eight years and likely has retired, so she should be removed. The second I am on awkward terms with due to a failed bromance. I’ve been thinking of asking my current and more recent supervisors for their seal of approval, but my last supervisor doesn’t give out references. Another, apparently, is a convicted felon.

I only found out yesterday that a former supervisor I worked with for two years robbed the store he transferred out to. I’m not talking about taking money from the till either. He went in with a mask, stole things off the shelf and got arrested a few minutes later by a cop waiting outside. That’s because the store he robbed, which is also the store he works in, is smack dab next to a police station. They couldn’t even call 9-1-1 in the time it took for him to have a pair of cuffs slapped on him. To recap: he went in to a place where he was very well known in a terrible disguise. I say terrible because the description of the suspect I found online has him pegged. To survey the scene of the crime the police wouldn’t even have to leave the station. They could have just pulled up the blinds and looked out the window. Plus, he stole tools, not money. At best he couldn’t have netted more than $500. It would have sucked if the police had to confiscate the good as evidence, because I don’t think he even made it out of the parking lot. The dude obviously had some kind of breakdown to think any of this was a good idea. It’s like how in the first episode of Prison Break the guy gets himself arrested on purpose.

Now: obviously when someone you know gets arrested in the stupidest manner possible, it makes for juicy gossip. This happened over a year ago, and I found out yesterday. Yesterday being a relative term because it took me weeks to finish this post.

Thing is: I applied for the same job as he did, and they chose him. Twice. Despite having actual credentials, and experience, they decided that I wasn’t even in the running. They made him my supervisor, then switched his department, then switched him back. They chose a dude who’d rob his own store over me. That’s depressing as fuck. That’s like taking the worst possible candidate, and then saying you’re even worse than that. “You were five minutes late yesterday, so we’re giving the job to this escaped mental patient, Phil. Now get the FUCK OUT MY OFFICE!”

FUCK and YOU, good sirs.