Chocolate Cake for Breakfast!

Have you ever found yourself doing an impersonation and then have the person you’re doing it for ask who you’re trying to be? Then, when you tell them, they ask, “Who’s that?” There’s no greater defeat than that. In one fell swoop they’ve informed you that you’re not funny, that your impersonations are terrible, that you’re old and no one gets your references anymore. Napoleon wasn’t defeated so thoroughly.

It doesn’t matter who you’re trying to be or how popular that person was, eventually no one is going to get the joke. Take Bill Cosby, for instance: everyone knows Bill Cosby, or at least everyone who was born last millennium. That means you should be able to go up to anyone and make a wacky face while saying “Pudding Pops!” and they should automatically know who you are. No blackface, ugly sweaters or saxophone solos are required. Yet: this is 2012. No one knows what a Pudding Pop, Kodak film or the New Coke are anymore, and those are the three things you have to reference when you do your Cosby impersonation. In five or ten years, people might not even remember what film is, let alone Kodak.

Another one is the Fonz. All you have to do to be the Fonz is give the double-thumbs up and say, “Heeeeyyyy.” Happy Days was filmed in front of a live studio audience in the 70’s and referenced 1950’s culture. That’s a show that’s 40 years old and was about an era 60 years in the past. Ron Howard is now a respected director. Also: he is old. At some point, you’re going to go up to a kid and give him the, “Fonz,” and they’re going to call protection services.

It’s getting weird too for shows that are basically 100% references like Family Guy and Robot Chicken. Family Guy’s been on the air for ten years. They’re still referencing the sitcoms and cartoons we watched in the 80’s. Their core audience is probably teenagers. They weren’t alive then. The only way they can recognize these references is to ask an adult. When Robot Chicken talks about Transformers, most of the kids watching will only have known Transformers from the Michael Bay movies, which is a travesty.

It’s a problem for everyone. There’s an old Bugs Bunny cartoon where Elmer Fudd walks by a long row of A-list Oscar winning celebrities that were universally known in the era the cartoon came out. I don’t think anyone today could name 100% of them without wikipedia and imdb.com. It never occurred to the creators of the series that people today wouldn’t know, “The Jazz Singer?” Sketch comedy is also hampered by this effect. Look at topical shows like SNL as reruns. You lived through it all, but can you remember or care about the 2008 Republican convention candidates that weren’t Sarah Palin? That was just four years ago. Four YEARS. SNL has been on forever. How could a person born today hope to understand Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford impersonation, particularly because it wasn’t that good except for the falling down parts? That’s going back years, thought.

So what do we do about this? Do we give up our Cosby impersonations? No! We stop reproducing. Japan has already started with their declining birth-rates, and Chine with their one child rule. We need to jump on the bandwagon. The only other alternative is to stop all pop-culture and raise our children Truman-style in a time capsule where they’ll only watch recycled programming. The younger generations are out to replace us. They can sense our weakness and know that with every passing day we become less, while they grow stronger. It’s either them or us.

The Saddest Avengers

I finally got around to seeing The Avengers, and it made me realize how utterly useless 50% of super heroes are. Every super hero team has a mix of heavy hitters and regular Joes, and the ones on the other end of the spectrum are just wasting valuable screen time. When New York was being overrun by aliens, Captain America’s only power was delegation. He had to show true leadership and find a role where everyone could feel important, so he told Hawkeye to go up the rooftops and scout out the situation. He didn’t bother to plan how Hawkeye, a guy who’s good with arrows and nothing else, was going to make it up there. He had to ask for a lift from Iron Man, and then he was basically stuck up there until he ran out of arrows. It also demonstrated how arrows were a terrible choice of weapon. Quivers are large and bulky, and can’t hold that much ammunition, unlike a gun. Plus, Loki straight-up caught an arrow in midair, which then exploded in his face. Awesomeness aside, that could have been a bullet, which would not have needed the extra advantage of exploding.

At the end of his orders, Captain America seemed to realize how screwed he was when he told the Black Widow they’d have to pair up and fight in the streets because they were part of the 50% of the team that couldn’t fly or jump over buildings. At least the Black Widow had a gun. Cap’t was just standing there with a shield. He had a gun in his own movie, but for some reason he decided to ditch it. Maybe today’s modern guns are just too new-fangled for a guy who’s used to fighting dude with disintegrators rays and flame-thrower bracelets.

The whole, “not being able to fly thing,” seemed to take way too much time for their part of the team to work around. The Black Widow had to highjack whatever the hell those alien things were flying just so she could get to the top of Stark Towers, which had a fully functioning elevator. It was established that Tony’s building had a self-sustaining energy source that was separate from the rest of New York, and there’s an entire scene revolving around Agent Culson coming out of the elevator uninvited. So to recap: 1: the elevator works, and 2: it’s really easy to use. It never once occurs to the Black Widow, because she’s too busy being freakin’ awesome.

Out of everyone, Nick Fury was the most useless human being of all. First he manages to lose the all-powerful tesseract and get his multi-billion dollar headquarters destroyed in the process. Then, after capturing Loki, he manages to nearly get his multi-billion dollar flying fortress destroyed. Then, during the entire attack on New York, his only contribution was not stopping a nuclear bomb. His own men tried to nuke New York, their native soil, on the orders of his higher-ups. There wasn’t even any pressing need for a nuke. Everyone could have waited an extra few hours and the army would have shown up and handled it all. None of the aliens weren’t so tough that bullets and bombs wouldn’t have stopped them. There was a giant mothership on the other side of the portal posing the most imminent threat, but the portal was clearly too small for it to fit through. Their freakin’ flying vehicles didn’t even have a canopy. Imagine having the ability to make ships, but you neglected to put any kind of protection or cover around it to protect the pilots. A passing flock of pigeons could have taken out half their armada. The evil bad guy plan was to basically show up and start firing wildly. They couldn’t even shoot that accurately. The first alien dude to crash through the window into the office starts shooting and hits the wall three times, missing the fifty people or so running around scared. Then one of the aliens fighting Captain America flubs the grenade he’s trying to set and nearly kills himself and the rest of his squad. In fact, I think he did.

While there’s a lot of team work going on, I don’t even know why it was necessary. I think the Hulk could have handled it all on his own.

LOTR LOL

I keep thinking about the climactic war scene from Lord of the Rings trilogy? You remember when all the ghosts jump off the ship and then they instantly win the war? They could have done that way sooner, like at the start of the battle. They’re ghosts: they don’t need to ride on ships. It’s not like they’re all packed in there like a clown car. They’re not even physically inhabiting the ships. They could have just materialized in the middle of the battlefield at the start of the war and killed everyone then, thus saving hundreds of more lives. All that drama with the chick cutting off the head of the dragon, and the dude lighting himself on fire and jumping off the building and Gandalf telling Pippin he was going to die like a bitch: none of that had to happen. Then they could have gone into the afterlife that much sooner, but they decided they were going to go the same speed as Aragorn and his cronies, and wasted time.

Buy My Book

I read webcomics like… a lot. It’s like the internet is one giant Sunday Funnie Page to me, but with worse drawings and more vulgar video game references. Every webcomic out there prompts you to buy their book. Now, growing up I had quite the collection of Garfield, Calvin & Hobbes and Peanuts on my bookshelves. Some of them were hand-me-down from my sister and brother, and unlike other books I would re-read them constantly and even take them on extended road trips. This isn’t the 80’s anymore, and webcomics are a special breed. First off: they’re on the web. They’re free. You can read them, and re-read them any time you like. Doing so will drive up their web traffic and make the authors more profit. The book aspect seems so retro to me. It’s like they’re desperate to make a buck, which they are. I can’t count the number of webcomics I’ve followed that have gone on hiatus so the authors can work real jobs, much like Onstad and Achewood. The authors of Penny-Arcade are goddamn millionaires, but that’s because they’ve done such an excellent job selling advertising and with their conventions. Coincidentally, I’ve purchased one of their books and had it signed at the Emerald City Comic-Con, and it’s the only webcomic collection I think I’d ever buy.

Other webcomics have gone another route and gotten into publishing monthly comic book titles, like PvP, Axe Cop, and Dr.McNinja. 

In all seriousness, doesn’t it seem odd they would go that route after skipping the proverbial middle-man. Few webcomic authors starting out would ever likely land a steady gig writing for a paper, comic, or other periodical. Now, with the print industry capsizing, they’re self-publishing their own works or finding publishers just so they’ll have something other than T-shirts and buttons to sell in the web stores? The ones who self-publish and self-distribute only end up getting deeper into financial trouble. I’ve read blogs and comments about how these authors have had to stare down tornadoes to make deadlines or have to deal with losing their jobs and moving while still distributing their books. Still, the webcomic industry is expanding.

Halo 4 Follow-up

Thanks to the advanced speed of the interwebs, my last post was obsolete by the time it arrived in my mail. Here is the complete picture:

Someone online spent a tremendous amount of effort solving this puzzle, and by tremendous I mean: none at all. As ad campaigns go, this was less than spectacular. I think Halo 2 was the one that used the AR game ilovebees to send encrypted audio files to the past. This does not top dire warnings issued Matrix-style to the past.

18/32

This apparently is part of a new ad campaign for Halo 4, the one that’s not being made by Bungie. My guess is I’m supposed to collect all 32 pieces from other lonely nerds. You can see how important this piece is because of the slice of the, “Rating Pending,” box. How else would you know it isn’t rated yet?

Out of Beta

Beta-versions of products tend to annoy me in general, and I believe I’m not alone in my feelings.

First: the key. If you don’t have a key, you’re nothing. You’re less than garbage. The way keys are distributed as well is long and aggravating. You either have to know someone with a key to spare, buy a separate product, or wait. If you wait long enough, you’ll forget the product even existed in the first place, or the product will go gold. The people likely to get a key are the most tenacious, and therefore the most rabid of fans. They’re already pre-determined to have a positive interest towards the product and will give out a more positive response as a result. The problem with this is the free publicity this generates is negated by disclosure clauses in the, “Click if you agree to these terms,” box they have to sign in order to play. You’re not allowed to talk about the beta, most of the time. It’s also expected that you report bugs and problems directly to administration. In short, you’re working for the company and being paid nothing.

The last two keys I waited for were for Google+ and pottermore. Both products are lack-lustre companions, but remained in beta for an excruciatingly long time. Once in, you wonder why you wanted to be there in the first place, much like a night club you had to wait for hours to get into and find the music, decor, and drink prices not to your taste. Plus, you find yourself mostly alone. The population is kept minimal, but you’re still expected to put your own input into the environment for no one in particular to enjoy because your friends aren’t there in the beta with you and no one is looking to make new friends.

I saw an ad on TV last night for familyguyonline.com, a facebook style game in a stand-alone system. It also required me to make an account, confirm it, then wait for a beta key. In short, I wasted my time applying for something I can’t use. The game looked to be predominantly about micro-payments and in-game advertising, like the new Choco-Taco from Klondike, which sound delicious, but that’s not the point. It’s fitting, though, because I doubt I’d find this American-made ice cream confection in my Canadian stores anytime soon.

Half the time, lately, you don’t even know you’re in the beta until you see the little stamp next to the title, like Angry Birds on facebook. It’s a fully functional game that’s a port of an existing game, so what exactly are they beta-testing? Beta’s become an all-encompassing legaleese term designed to protect companies from their own shoddy products, even if they work flawlessly.

Minecraft is another offender. It was in beta for years. You could even pay to buy the beta-product, or rather there were two-tiers, one being a paid “alpha” with a little more functionality and the other being a full-functional “beta.”

Then there’s the beta-as-a-demo, like the Battlefield 3 multiplayer. They released a sketchy version of one of their maps and called it a beta.

Technically, any game that arrives with a day-one downloadable update is a beta, like Mass Effect 3, and others. That means a product you buy in the store and place in your system, and are then prompted to update online isn’t a fully-functioning alpha.

I’m finding beta versions detract from the alphas, especially with any online multiplayer. There’s always some game where other players have played for months before the game is even released. You can pick up your advanced copy on-hold, pop it in, and find out you’re a total newb. Then you, and everyone like you has to compete with players who have all the experience and drive to defeat you at every corner. They can snipe you from spots that would take you weeks to find for yourself. They can use every exploit they either didn’t report or was never repaired. They can magically phase through supposedly solid rock to kill you from behind and tea-bag you. The only way to beat them in their game is to have played the beta yourself, which is impossible at that point.