Create an Album Game:

In case you don’t know, this is how it works:

1 - Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The title of your article is the name of your band.
2 - Go to http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last 4 words of the last quote of the page is the title of the album.
3 - Go to http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The 3rd picture is the artwork on the album.
4 - Mix and match in Photoshop/Paint/whatever the hell you use.
Example:

Band name: Caelus

Album name: And to the men themselves.

I’d work these all together in a cohesive .jpeg, but my photo editing software’s somehow escaped my computer. Seriously, I have no idea where it’s gone. Either a virus ate it, or it’s joined the Matrix. You’ve got to admit, though, this is a pretty kick-ass album. I don’t know what it’d sound like, but I’m guessing a cross between Danzig and Arcade Fire.

Skyrim in Real Life

In the past week, there’s been two high-profile and rather unusual thefts in the Fraser Valley. One was the theft of aproximately 8,000lbs of honey and a half-million bees from a beekeeper. The other was the theft of 5,200 bottles of wine from Blackwood Lane winery in Langley, not thirty minutes away from the beekeeper’s. Obviously, this scale of larceny is the work of sophisticated criminals with access to heavy machinery, an inside knowledge of the respective industries, and a long-term plan for profit.

It also exactly parallels the crime perpetrated in Skyrim, making the suspected ringleader Maven Blackbriar.

Pictured: The face of evil.

I can’t possibly be the only one who’s noticed this, unless I’m Batman. In the game, Skyrim, there’s a quest chain for the Thieves Guild where you have to do Maven Blackbriar’s dirty work. As a quest giver, she has you sabotage a honey farm and they a rival meadery, so her own line of Blackbriar Mead can flourish. This involves breaking into a honey farm and stealing certain items while burn bee hives, while ensuring that the farm can remain productive. Then you have to break into a meadery and poison the spirits therein, and then in the ensuing chaos take over the entire operation and amalgamate it with Blackbriar’s.

Stranger still, in the weeks before the honey farm robbery, I had the exact same idea for a crime. That’s not to say I was going to be the one perpetrating it, but at work (I work at a hardware store that will remain nameless), several people were complaining about a millionaire beekeeper who kept coming in and bothering everyone with his extremely frugal and over-demanding ways. My one co-worker told me he had him sift through over a hundred pieces of plywood, each weighing well over sixty pounds or more, to find him fifteen sheets worthy of his purchase. Another told me that she’d dealt with him before at a Habitat for Humanity store, where items were already offered at rock-bottom clearance prices, but he still demanded an unreasonable amount of attention and unwarranted discounts. That made me think to myself: why would a man who flaunts his riches make so many enemies, and be as cheap as Mr.Crabs from Spongebob Squarepants at the same time? Especially when he’s in a business that’s so easily destroyed. I’ve read all about the phenomenon known as colony collapse affecting beekeepers the world over. The smallest infestation can wipe out a man’s livelihood, but why would one resort to that when there’s such lucrative profit to be made in simply stealing the bees for one’s self? With colony collapse, the price of honey is rising. People are even willing to pay top dollar for what’s essentially honey-flavoured corn syrup out of China by way of Indonesia, and articles on Cracked.com have told me how easy it is to disguise psuedo-honey as the real thing. Abbotsford borders Chilliwack, which boast some of the best corn in all of Canada, if not the world.

Stealing bees is an easy thing, if you’ve ever seen the movie, “Bees.” A little smoke and they’re out like a light. After that, you can do what you want with them.

I’d be impressed if these two crimes were by the same criminal, because to me they’d be operating at Batman villain levels. Anyone can steal cold, hard cash. Stealing tonnes of honey and wine is the work of someone who either intends to black market their own product, or else keep it for their own enjoyment. I’m imagining swimming pools filled with honey and booze, and the ensuing rap video they create.

Fifty Shades of the Olympics

Am I the only one that noticed the Olympic opening ceremony contained Harry Potter/Marry Poppins Slash fiction?

Seeing them both on stage together made perfect sense. Marry Poppins, of course, is a witch. No one likes to talk about her being a witch, but she’s a straight up witch. I don’t know how she came about her magical powers. Maybe everyone in England is secretly magic, or maybe she fucked the devil. What’s important is that she fits seamlessly into the Harry Potter universe.

Which brings up the possibility of erotic fan fiction.

On the note of popular fictional characters fucking, Fifty Shades of Grey is a multi-million dollar selling series of novels. They’re also, by all accounts, terrible. I personally have no clue what the fuck they’re about. Like literally no idea. All I know is that it includes boning and it’s basically fan-fic. I don’t even know what characters it’s purportedly ripping off. Given recent trends, I’d assume Dracula, because hey, “Vampires.” It’d be far more awesome if it was Oscar Wilde’s character, Dorian Gray, then the title would make sense, although using one of history’s most renowned homosexual’s character in an erotic novel intended for hetero, idiot women would be a stretch.

I’m all for ladies masturbating, but about twenty years ago, I started writing a book at the tender age of twelve. It was called, “Shades of Grey,” so I’m a little bitter. You can buy a copy on Amazon for Kindle, in it’s unedited format. I assure you it predates the erotic novel, but be warned: it has nothing to do with penises going into vaginas, but you can interpret it however you wish.

Obviously, I’m missing out on millions of dollar by not tapping into the lucrative “fan-fic” market. There’s no such thing as good fan-fic, of course, so quality doesn’t matter. What matters is not being sued senseless by Time-Warner and Disney.

Well too bad, mega-corporations, because I’m about to tear you a new asshole!

Tentative titles for my work:

Marry Poppins VS. Voldemort:

The Sexoning

Sex Hex

The Whoreacruxes

Marry’s-a-Poppin’

Good God, how do I do it?

Possible lines of dialogue:

“What a big snake you have.”

“Use your Elder wand!”

“I’m going to sweep out your chimney.”

“Just spoonful of sugar make the medicine go down… on you!”

“Your ass is practically perfect in every way.”

“Not having a nose makes it easier for me to stay down there.”

“ENGORGIO!”

“Use the umbrella!”

“Let’s have a pee party on the ceiling.”

“Two points for Slytherin!”

Did you cum yet? Then see a doctor.

The Comma

If you’ve been reading my blog with any regularity, you know that I place commas before words like, “and.” That’s because commas are what separates us from the animals. Also, APA rules regarding the use of commas in sentences including the word, “and,” only came into effect by the time I was in the Eighth Grade. By that time, I’d already started work on my second novel. Also: I can’t give a shit. I’ve never read the APA and never will, and I’m an English Major. Suck on that, APA.

Hail Britannia

I was trying to figure out what’s been Great Britain’s greatest cultural contribution since The Beatles, and all I could come up with was Harry Potter. That’s a giant 40+ year gap. Of course everyone loves the Brits, but they’re not the kings they once were, quite literally. Americans are constantly copying their television shows, like American Idol, The Office, etc., but they’re copies, meaning the Americans prefer to buy American. They’re not above stealing talent like Simon Cowell, Hugh Grant, or Ricky Gervais to make their own Americanized product, which is strange. Americans tend to “Americanize” British culture because they don’t understand the subtle nuisances or accents, then they demand talent that represents both.

You can list hundreds of contributions Britain’s made, from Lady Di, to Monty Python, Dr.Who, the continuing James Bond movies, etc., but nothing’s rocked the world quite like Harry Potter. Harry Potter is as big as Disney. It even has it’s own theme park, for Christ’s sake. People will wait in line for days to read a new Harry Potter novel, or movie, but not necessarily Coldplay. The serious thing is: Harry Potter is over and done, completely. The biggest British thing in it’s wake is Dr.Who, and that’s a cult following at best.

Britain needs something big, and hopefully the Olympics represents that.

Tyrant

Today I realized that the only way to avoid life’s daily annoyances is to live in a totalitarian dictatorship dedicated to the eradication of your pet peeves.

I was standing in line at a check-out, and had to change lanes because the person in front of me decided to fill out a credit card application with reward points for what was soon to be a defunct department store. At the next checkout, I had to wait because the person in front of us was having a price check on an item that couldn’t have been more than ten dollars to begin with. As a general rule of thumb, if a deal on an item seems too good to be true and it’s on the wrong shelf by itself with no price tag, you should price check it before getting to the cash register. That’s why most stores have barcode scanners everywhere. The first checkout I’d been in was nearly clear by the time I went through the second one. On the way out of the store, the door alarm beeped, meaning I was expected to wait for someone to check my receipt because the cashier couldn’t be bothered to deactivate the tag. There was no one around and I decided to leave anyway. I could have avoided the checkout entirely and just walked out without paying, and the results would have been the same.

Throughout it all, I thought about how great it would be if soldiers just dragged everyone off the second they began to irritate me. I’m not necessarily saying they should be taken to concentration camps. The beauty of my idea is that the actual fate of these people is never disclosed. They’re just, “taken.” They could be going to, “Re-education centres,” or to, “Candy Mountain.” In the end, it doesn’t really matter.

I wonder if people living in Germany, or Russia, or any other of the hundreds of countries who’ve had their own concentration camps actually cared about what happens to the people who’re taken away. The Germans obviously knew something was up, but they all claimed ignorance after the war. They saluted and shrugged it off. Think of our own society and how many people are in prison right now. Sure, there’s murderers and rapists in prison, but they’re there with the drug addicts and people who’re caught shoplifting candy bars.

London 2012

My predictions for the Opening Ceremonies for the London 2012 Olympics:

1: A holographic Benny Hill will chase the Queen around to the tune of, “Yakkity Sax.”

2: There will be a re-enactment of the, “Chim-Chimmery,” scene from, “Marry Poppins.”

3: Quidditch.

4: The Olympic torch will be lit by a Dalek.

5: The Queen will light up a, “fag,” with the Olympic flame.

6: The spectators will be pick-pocketed by lovable street urchins while watching.

7: “What’s all this then?”

8: “’Ello guv’na!”

9: “Cor blimey!”

10: “London Bridge,” by Fergie will be the official theme song.

Not Wheelchair Accessible

 

This Professor Charles Xavier.

This is his school for, “Gifted Youngsters.”

Charles Xavier has been crippled for most of his adult life and has a net worth of millions, if not billions. His School for Gifted Youngsters has been modified to include an underground hanger that exits thought a fold-away tennis court, or alternatively through a waterfall. The facilities themselves have been destroyed and rebuilt numerous times. At no point has there ever been a wheelchair ramp. There are elevators, which can take him into the sub-basement where he houses Cerebro, but he can’t get up the front steps.

Similarly, he’s often found to be addressing the public, but while he may take the Blackbird on covert missions, he’s unlikely to fly it out to meet with the U.N., as it’s highly classified and illegal. He doesn’t have a handicap van.

How does he get around then? Does he have Collossus carry him around everywhere? For a long time in the 90’s he had a hoverchair made with Shi’ar technology.

Look how bulky that thing is. That’s like driving an electric car. Doors would have to be at least 4’ wide for that to squeeze through. Also, when people see a school teacher in a hover chair, they’ll start to ask questions like, “Where’d he get a hover chair?” and, “How do I get a hover chair?” Professor X has technology that will help cripples the world over, and he’s not sharing it. Professor X is a dick.

The X-Men are supposed to be a group of misfits, and Professor X’s wheelchair bound status is supposed to invoke sympathy in the reader. No one in the world is less inconvenienced by their disability than Professor X. Cyclops, for instance, can’t take off his ruby-lens glasses or he’ll destroy the ones he loves. Angel in considered a freak because of his wings. Beast tries to cure his gorilla-like condition and instead turns himself blue and hairy. Jean Grey is a woman. Professor X is a multi-millionaire with his own person army of super heroes who lives in a mansion, fucks space aliens, and can control anyone’s mind to make them believe he has hair. On top of that, he’s regained his ability to walk more times than he’s died and come back to life, which he’s also done. There’s a lot of soap opera drama in the X-men, and the Professor regaining the use of his legs was supposed to be a jaw-drop moment back in the day. It’s happened about five or six times over the years, though, so it’s gotten a bit ridiculous. I think in the space of time the only other famous wheelchair-bound comic book character lost her ability to walk and regained it, Barbara Gordon, a.k.a. Batgirl, a.k.a. Oracle, he was able to walk again about four times. It makes sense when you consider he lives in a universe where people have the super power to heal anything, like Elixir and about twenty other X-Men. What doesn’t make sense is how he keeps losing the ability to walk again. You can only drop boulders on someone’s spinal column so many times.

Gunner

This week’s shooting tragedy that took place in a crowded midnight screening of, “The Dark Knight Rises,” had nothing to do with the movie, Chris Nolan’s trilogy, or Batman in general, but it’d be hard to tell that by listening to the media. Every news story about the movie makes certain you know just what movie was playing, because to them that’s the most important ingredient in the case. The shooter likely chose the time and location because he knew it’d be as crowded as possible. He knew people wouldn’t be able to escape with him blocking the exit and it’d be a simple matter for him to make a breakaway. He’d already planned it out by placing his gear outside the exit where he could quickly don it and step back inside. The fact that the movie itself contained gunfire would add to the confusion, making it ideal.

Again, it had nothing to do with Batman. Even when he told police, “I’m the Joker,” it still had nothing to do with Batman. He’d dyed his hair a ridiculous orange colour. If he’d been trying to emulate the fictional character of the Joker, he obviously would have dyed it green. People were trying to find a parallel between what he did and something the Joker might have done during his past eighty years or so in comics. They won’t find any, because his plan wasn’t based on a comic book. It was based on opportunity.

People are also calling for tighter gun control. The man already had access to several kinds of explosives, as his booby-trapped house obviously proves. He could have brought a bomb with him, left it on his chair, and left the theatre as it exploded. The result would have been the same, or worse. Madmen pick guns either because of the convenience, the allure, or the thrill of them. One of the women in the audience had escaped a shooting in Toronto several weeks earlier. Canada has tighter gun control laws than their American counterparts, but nearly half as many people have died, or were injured in a shooting last week in Toronto. Nothing but an unenforceable and total ban on guns would stop gun violence, although it’s ridiculous that one person could stockpile such an enormous arsenal and munitions supplies without raising any red flags.

Lingering Questions

One of the greatest mysteries about reality is reality shows.

Specifically one aspect of reality shows, beyond the fact that they still exist:

If you look at a show like Big Brother, or Survivor, there’s always one fact about their “guests” they never fail to educate the audience about, and that is their occupation. Their jobs are listed on screen virtually every time you see them, which is another weird thing. I understand the concept of making the show easy to pick up on for the flip-through audience by listing the names of the people on TV, but after thirteen hour-long episodes you should be expected to pick up their names on your own. Showing the person’s name every time the camera focuses on them is really saying something about the audience, and that is that they’re dumb as dirt.

Beyond that, why should we care what jobs these people have, or had? I say, “had,” because if they can afford to take the two months off work to dick around on a TV show, they likely didn’t have much of a career happening in the first place.

Still, every reality show insists on categorizing human beings based on their occupation. If you’re trying out for a contestant on the Bachelorette and your occupation isn’t C.E.O., doctor, or cowboy-strippergram, you’d best not apply. The same goes for the Bachelor, if of course, you’re the Bachelor. Who cares what he women on those shows do, since they’re expected to squeeze out babies for the remainder of their lives from the safety of their kitchens. The same concept applies for Rock of Love and the rest of those, “date a minor celebrity” show. The women are meaningless arbitrations. It doesn’t matter what they did for a living before going on the show, (one would assume they were groupies, strippers, or coke addicts), the only thing that matters is that they’re desperate and bitchy.

Similarly, being a housewife on, “The Real Housewives,” isn’t a prerequisite. A lot of the women on that show aren’t married and have careers of their own, making their, “housewife,” status absurd. The only thing that matters about them is that they have fake plastic boobs to go along with their faces, and that they are huge bitches.

Even shows like Wipeout, where the entire premise is for people to fall into a mudpit, people still have to have a clearly defined career. They can't be real homemakers, or between jobs, or work part-time at two different occupations, because that’d be confusing. They can’t have the lowlier jobs like, “fry cook,” or “night-shift manager at Bed Bath and Beyond.” Having a terrible job like, “bartender,” is perfectly acceptable though, because people think it’s fun. They can’t lie about what they do either, because the internet is obsessed with digging up every bit of dirt about people on reality shows, including their sexual pasts and every speeding ticket they’ve earned. Lying about being a junior accountant for a big firm when you’re really just a trash collector is as big an offense as lying about killing your best friend in a hunting accident, or being a member of a hate group.

The reason for all this is clear: we’re a classist society. Years of social evolution hasn’t elevated us past the point of the peasant/pauper relationship. Roles have changed, but prejudices have not. If you’re a blue collar worker, you’re supposed to be rooting for the blue collar workers. You’re also expected to pick winners based solely on a person’s occupation. If someone’s a college football star, they’re expected to win the pointless scavenger race as opposed to the day-camp worker.

The weirdest thing is: all of TV aside from reality shows explain to us how little a person’s occupation actually matters. Every workplace-themed sitcom from Cheers to The Office explains to us how wildly divergent people with the same occupation are. You shouldn’t need TV to know that, though, when you have real life. People have workplaces. People know how much everyone they work with sucks at what they’re doing. It’s life. What a person does for a living and how much that person is paid for doing it has little or nothing to do with that person. Stranger still, we know our managers and top-people are more likely to be raging sociopaths and brown-nosing toadies, but when we hear a person is Vice-President of a company we automatically have a better opinion of them. Why then, whenever we meet new people we ask, and are asked, “What do you do for a living?” Half the people out there jump from job to job, likely never keeping the same occupation for more than a handful of years. No one has a resume with just one job title on it, because that’d be stupid. People pity, “lifers.” You don’t actually respect a person more for working the same terrible job for dozens of years when you know for a fact that person’s lucky to even have a job.

Everyone on reality TV has the exact same occupation: reality TV star. It doesn’t matter if they’re Vanilla Ice and working on a construction site. They’re not former, “rappers,” or current, “construction workers,” they’re reality TV stars.

Toyvolution

There’s three big-budget super hero movies out this summer. On average, we can expect around five super hero movies in a given year. Virtually all of those movies will have sequels, prequels, or reboots. It doesn’t matter if the movie was good, or bad. As long as it makes a decent amount of money, it’ll be back in one form or another. Take the Amazing Spider-Man, for instance. It’s a reboot after Spider-Man 3 got terrible reviews. The Avengers featured a reboot of a reboot for the Hulk, while being the sequel to three other movies. The Dark Knight Rises is the sequel to the sequel to a reboot of a reboot of reboot of sequel.

You may notice one of the big things about all these movies are the commercial tie-ins, which are incredibly lucrative for the companies that make them. The Dark Knight is sponsored by Mountain Dew Dark Berry. The Avengers is sponsored by Dr.Pepper. There’s a slew of toys for all these movies. The characters in the movies are practically chosen for their ability to sell toys. The Avengers featured seven super heroes, and the Dark Knight Rises has two villains, which is staple now. Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman and Robin, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and the Dark Knight Rises all have one thing in common: they all have two super villains in each of the movies. Was there any real need for Harvey Dent to become Two-Face in the Dark Knight? His transformation, however, allowed them to sell another toy on the shelves. That was one of the major complaints about Tim Burton’s Batman, where kids had to settle for this action figure:

This is Bob, the Joker’s sidekick in Batman. No man or child would ever want this, as it’s the action figure of a balding man with a removable hat. It’s essentially me. Also, it looks nothing like the actor in the movie, or even the box art. If you’re going to mess up an action figure, why not go whole-hog and add a missile firing jetpack?

If you think back to the failed Superman reboot that Superman Returns replaced, Kevin Smith talked about how the director held up production because he wanted to be able to pick a costume for Superman that would sell more toys.

That’s really the only reason movies are made: to make money. That’s why there’s a Jar-Jar Binks and Ewoks. Star Wars has made more money from toys than it has from the films, ever after re-re-releasing them in theatres. Avatar and Titanic might be two of the highest grossing movies, but George Lucas sleeps on a mountain of money. He has to wait for a gondola to get out of bed, or ski down.

My point is this: super hero movies make excellent fodder for toys. Those toys suck, though. Sometime in the last five years, nerds stopped caring about collecting off-the-shelf store-bought movie merchandise. Incidentally, there’s been three Transformers movies. The Transformers movie toys were terrible. Every aspect of Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise was designed to sell toys to kids. Nerds didn’t really care for them, and hated on them.

Same goes for super hero action figures. Green Lantern was a terrible, terrible movie with an enormous cult following… of the comic book. The movie opened up a barrage of Green Lantern toys available at your local Wal-Mart that’d never been available before. They were actually pretty cool, with an original spring-loaded transforming-ring power feature. No nerd likes them. They can love the Green Lantern, but not the figures.

Why?

Weirdly enough, I think the size ratio is a major role. The Green Lantern figures and the Avengers, Spider-Man, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Wolverine, etc. all have their figure in the ‘80’s G.I. Joe ratio, not the ‘80’s He-Man ratio nerds seem to cherish. The smaller size makes sense in terms of how many you can fit on a shelf, both in stores and in nerd homes, plus it easier to get vehicles and accessories for those figures. No one’s really biting, though.

The new Batman toys are still in the old Kenner ratio, but still no one wants those because they look nothing like the movie actors.

This is what was sold in stores:

Fuck that. I have this.

This is what you can order online:

Notice a difference?

Kids don’t really care about action figures anymore because of the prevalence of video games, smart phones and the internet, which has pornography on it, by the way. Plus there’s the whole economy thing. Nerds are the same way. There’s no, “must have,” toys in stores now, for nerds. They’re more into retro toys or exclusives. Exclusives like this:

4’ long, like my wiener.

A lot of them started their collections in a certain ratio and don’t want to convert, but seriously, that’s toy porn.

With declining toy sales, some movies are moving away from selling-out. Look at the surprisingly good X-Men: First Class. Did you ever see a single toy or product related to that movie? On the other end of the spectrum, Green Lantern was terrible and has a million different toys. Similarly. do you think Chis Nolan lost any sleep about how to squeeze neon-coloured Bane goons into the Dark Knight Rises? Super hero movies can drop the act now, unlike the 90’s and the 00’s, and focus more on presentation and appealing to a broader audience, and nerds are eating it up at the box office instead of spending money on collectibles.

Why Does This Keep Happening?

 

Why do C-List celebrities keep getting arrested for masturbating in porn theatres? Why does no one hear about regular people being arrested for masturbating in porn theatres? They’re porn theatres, not the opera. Are there police on stakeout in every theatre? Who gets assigned that job? Is there a second officer undercover in the theatre to keep tabs on the first officer to make sure he’s not masturbating? Who gets paid to clean the seats after? Does that job have a high turnover/suicide rate? What do they tell people their job is? What are they paid?

Most importantly, why are there still porn theatres? Everyone has the internet. You can look at porn on the internet for free, in the privacy of your own room. You could technically look at porn in a regular theatre on your wireless device, thus making it a porno theatre.

Why do people go to porn theatres if you can’t even masturbate, or be arrested if you do? Where’s the fun in that? Are you expected to simply rub your chin and ponder the underlying themes of the plot?

Is there a concession in a porn theatre? Do all the popcorn buckets come with a hole in the bottom?

Batman Begins Vs. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Has anyone noticed these two origin movies, “Batman Begins,” and, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” are exactly the same?

-They both start out focused on the protagonist’s parents until the moment they tragically torn away.

-Both protagonists have an epiphany about who they really are after a violent confrontation that’s out of character with their personas.

-Both protagonists join a group of their peers after being imprisoned, where they train themselves and are forced to fight to earn respect.

-Both protagonists use an image from their childhood to symbolize their new movement.

-Both protagonists have a chance to save or kill the antagonist and choose to walk away and leave them to their deaths. Both climaxes take place on bridge.

-Both movies contain a plot point about a drug that radically alters the mental state by those affected by it.

-Both protagonists have violent confrontations with the police where they resort to unconventional warfare.

I could go on, but hey, that’s weird, isn’t it?

Dark Brotherhood Blues

Has anyone mentioned how ineffective the Dark Brotherhood in Skyrim is? They’re a guild of assassins contracted to kill. Unlike your typical assassins, however, where they’d be contacted through an intermediary and then met is a secluded neutral area to discuss business, the Brotherhood has a bizarre and ritualistic means of summoning them. To call the Brotherhood, you need a rare book called the, “Nightmother,” a circle of candles, a flower, a dead body or skeleton, human flesh and a human heart. So essentially you need to kill someone, or have a spare dead body lying around before they’ll even consider killing someone for you. It kind of defeats the purpose of hiring someone to kill for you if you have to kill someone to do that. Plus you’ll need about eight feet of empty floor space, and it’s not like they show up in thirty minutes or less like a pizza. You have to wait days, weeks and even months before they’ll show, and you have to keep the candles burning and the body exactly where it lay. That’s a long time to keep a well-lit dead body hidden. Think about how hard it is to hide a birthday present around your house. Then imagine that if instead of a present, it’s a rotting corpse. You’re expected to pull a John Wayne Gacy in your own home. Hiring an assassin is supposed to remove suspicion from you, and nothing is more suspicious than a ritualistically laid-out corpse.

Did I mention once they’re summoned they’ll show up at your house, or come up to you in the street? There’s no arrangements for secret meeting places. They’ll just bust right into your house at any hour of the day, depending on when they decide to get there. Did I also mention they can choose not to show up at all? You can go through the whole ritual, wait months, and they might not show.

Plus, you have to pay them. A lot. Sometimes, up front. If you select how your target will meet their end, you’re expected to pay a bonus on top. There’s no set price on assassinations, either. Killing a street urchin could cost as much or more as killing a nobleman. Assuming you paid up front, and the target is never killed, there’s no way to get a refund, either. It’s not like anyone’s going to ask murderers for their money back anyway. All you have to go on is their word, which is the word of psychotic killers who worship the god of the Abyss.

They can also choose to turn around and kill you. There’s nothing keeping you safe throughout this entire procedure. They can kill you on principle, or for fun. For instance, say that their target begs them to kill you out of revenge right before they slit their throats. They might do it for free, just because they were persuaded by a dying man’s last words.

On the Brotherhood’s end of things, accepting a contract is even more complicated than summoning them. Once the ritual is performed, it passes through the magical talking mummy of a woman who killed her seven babies, who can only talk to one person, the, “Listener.” Then that information is passed on to the Guild leader, who can veto the contract. If either the Nightmother or Listener are missing, which is often the case, they can’t even accept new contract.

Marley’s Mellow Mood: A Review

Lately, when I’ve been to the grocery store, I’ll pick up a can of Marley’s Mellow Mood.

It’s a “relaxation” drink with Bob Marley on the can, so you know it’s legit. There’s a lot going on here in a 355ml can. First off, it’s endorsed by a dead celebrity. Second, that dead celebrity is Bob Marley and it’s using a Rastafarian/Jamaican colour scheme, so you’re assuming it’s a can full of weed. I’ve actually drank a hemp infused energy drink, “Dank,” before, and let me tell you: you don’t want to drink a “hemp infused” anything.

Dank tastes like bong water. I drank a Dank and Vodka at a strip club once and ended up vomiting on the stage. Bear in mind that I had a lot of other things that night, including shots that were basically Tabasco sauce and unlabeled booze, but Dank, by far, was the most disgusting. There’s a reason beyond the illegality of marijuana that hemp isn’t used in more products.

There’s no hemp in Marley’s Mellow Mood, though, so it’s kind of misleading. The ingredients list reads a lot like a cup of specialty tea, because it basically is carbonated tea. It has the same, “Don’t drink more than one can in a day,” warning label that an energy drink might have, but it’s essentially the polar opposite of one. If a Red Bull is supposed to get you riled up for a night of raving and debauchery, Marley’s Mood would be your precursor to lying in a beanbag chair and rolling a joint. 

I’ve only had the citrus flavoured drink, and it tastes like someone mixed green tea with Mountain Dew, only better. It has that fizziness that only carbonated beverages have with the flavour of exotic tea.

Useless Skills

Kids are learning skills today in class that will be useless to them in all future employment. I started out learning how to type on a typewriter. That’s how old I am. I have no clue how to use and iPad. I haven’t even touched one yet. In the near future devices like the iPad will likely replace notebooks in school, just as the ballpoint pens replaced inkwells, and inkwells replaced chalk. There’s already a move to give underprivileged children in India iPad knockoffs made for under $40 for use in their schoolwork.

With that being said, there’s a fundamental shift in what’s useful in school. Kids use to gripe about how they’ll never use math in the real world, and they still do, but the best jobs in programming, accountancy and investment embezzlement involved copious amounts of math.

School use to be about the, ”3 R’s,” Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. If you read that sentence then you know how the first two don’t really count. Writing and Arithmetic don’t start with, “R.” Every teach who presented this idea to their class glossed over this fact and quickly moved on. They’ve been teaching kids how to read with incorrect spelling. Even as I write this, my computer is telling me every spelling mistake I’m making. I couldn’t spell, “Arithmetic,” correctly after two tries, and had to go to Auto-Correct. Much like people will roll their eyes and say, “Why do we need to learn math? I have a calculator,” we don’t need to learn how to spell when a computer can do it for us. No one proof-reads their own work, not when a machine can do it faster and better.

Reading is going out the doors in all sorts of ways, as people move over to the internet to get their information. Books and magazines are being pulled from shelves, while half-assed blogs flourish. If you think the internet is a wealth of intellectual knowledge, think about how every article you read online is 40% stock-photos, if not 98%. The average blog has as much reading material as the caption to a photo in Maxim. Think about where the bulk of text is online. The comments section for every article is longer than the article itself, and it’s all flame wars. Same for forums and Wikipedia. Professors will scoff at Wikipedia entries and disallow them because of their accuracy. Do you know what’s also a poor source of information? Books. Yes, books. History books, Encyclopaedias, medical journals: the whole lot of them. If you’ve ever taken a university course you’d know how important it is to get the exact edition of the book your teacher requests, because all previous editions are automatically invalidated. Knowledge and opinions are always advancing, or rather changing because it’s rarely for the best, and a dog-eared paper on Shakespeare is as outdated as it looks if you’re trying to use it in your studies. To master a subject you have to pour through hundreds of contradictory texts to form your own viewpoint, and then be shot down because of a reference you didn’t make use of. So why not just let Wikipedia dictate your opinions? When all the Encyclopaedias are thrown in the trash, it’ll be the only Encyclopaedia left.

Writing is the same. When computers can take voice dictation, there’s no need for notes. No need for notes means there’s no need for cursive. Can anyone even read their own handwriting? Everyone has spent years of their lives from an early age perfecting their penmanship, only to have it ridiculed. You’re graded on it as well. Your handwriting can make or break your grade. Some people may not even be able to decipher it. Today’s note could be tomorrows captcha. Every major assignment you do, from university onwards, will require a typewritten submission. It’s increasingly unlikely that your work will ever make it to paper as we move towards a mythical paperless office. In yesteryear, people complained about your handwriting. Today, they’ll complain about your font choice.

Science is a crapshoot as well. Obviously, there’s room for advancement, but what you’re learning in class will be disproven tomorrow. Then there’s the grey areas, like say, the Boss Higgins particle. The science for it seems fairly sound, but since it’s an ongoing experiment, teachers will only teach the theory in class using air quotes. They’re also forced to teach the alternative theories as the main theory has not been proven as fact. Plus, not to offend, they have to gloss over most areas like Evolution. It’s like not having anyone run in track and field because someone’s in a wheelchair.

Gym class, obviously, is mainly useless. You don’t, “teach,” physical fitness, but rather you practice it. Or more likely, you don’t. America is made up of about 40% obese people now, and all those fat adults and fat kids had to, “learn,” gym like the rest of us. Gym does teach you teamwork, or more specifically that it’s survival of the fittest. Team sports teaches you that it’s not who you are or what you do, it’s who you know. That’s the only real skill you can ever get out of school.

Mindlesscraft

I’ve been playing Minecraft for the first time this past week, on the 360. Why the 360? Because there’s a genuine risk that my computer might crash while writing this. It’s already crashed twice this morning, so it’s not really a gaming machine.

The first thing I’ve noticed about Minecraft is that I suck at it. When I first started, I spent hours trying to set up a new world for myself. I was constantly killed my every conceivable monster on Easy. I don’t think I was able to craft anything more complex than stone. Then I found out I was using the wrong pickaxe on all the Iron Ore deposits because I didn’t read the, “What’s This?” box. I deleted the whole level and started again. After hours and hours of playing, I have yet to find diamonds or obsidian. Finding gold must have taken me a dozen hours. Then my stepson wanted to play. It took me half-an-hour to find both those deposits. We were playing split-screen on the level he made. After finding my way to the bottom of a cave filled with diamonds, he insisted on joining me. I told him I had no clue where I was, and referred to my map to tell him which way to walk. I’d taken my eyes off his side of the screen, and somehow he’d managed to get completely stuck in a pitch black cave with no way out, and no torches. He could try digging, but there was no way to tell which way was up or down. I took his controlled and tried for fifteen minutes to get out while he complained about how I sucked. I tried building a furnace and burning whatever useless item I could in it to make a light. I found a small room only a few blocks wide, with no clear way out. I still have no clue how he got in. I eventually had to go back to my controller and try to rescue him. That meant abandoning all the goodies I just found and climbing out of the cave, which meant I had to dig my way out as I hadn’t established an exit yet. So I used my map to figure out which basic direction to go and started digging up, for about ten minutes. I eventually broke though and the tunnel flooded with water. I’d dug my way to the bottom the lake. Fortunately it was only three blocks deep, and I could swim to the surface before drowning, but now there was no way back through the easy path I’d just made without diving for it.

Then, I had to search over the rough terrain for the cave where he must have started exploring. There were about four separate entrances, and no telling which one he went in. On the way, I found a monster generator and chest full of saddles, which is apparently the only way to find them, so that was the only good luck I was having. I was far, far away from our base camp, and quite lost. I settled on finally digging straight down on an angle to reach him. That took about ten more minutes. After frequently checking my map and breaching into his chamber, I did some more exploring and found he was all the way down to the lava level. He’d dug himself probably forty blocks deep in the few minutes I hadn’t paid attention.

The Worst Song Ever

"Whistle"

Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Let me know
Girl I'm gonna show you how to do it
And we start real slow
You just put your lips together
And you come real close
Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Here we go
I'm betting you like bebop
And I'm betting you love freak mode
And I'm betting you like girls that give love to girls
And stroke your little ego
I bet I'm guilty your honor
that's just how we live in my genre
Who in the hell done paved the road wider?
There's only one flo, and one rida
I'm a damn shame
Order more champagne, pull a damn hamstring
Tryna put it on ya
Bet your lips spin back around corner
Slow it down baby take a little longer
Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Let me know
Girl I'm gonna show you how to do it
And we start real slow
You just put your lips together
And you come real close
Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Here we go
Whistle baby, whistle baby,
Whistle baby, whistle baby
Whi-whistle baby, whistle baby
Whistle baby, whistle baby
Whi-whistle baby, whistle baby
It's like everywhere I go
My whistle ready to blow
Shorty don't leave a note
She can get any by the low
Permission not approved
It's okay, it's under control
Show me soprano, cause girl you can handle
Baby we start snagging, you come up in part clothes
Girl I'm losing wing, my Bugatti the same road
Show me your perfect pitch,
You got it my banjo
Talented with your lips, like you blew out candles
So amusing, now you can make a whistle with the music
Hope you ain't got no issue, you can do it
Even if it no picture, never lose it
Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Let me know
Girl I'm gonna show you how to do it
And we start real slow
You just put your lips together
And you come real close
Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Here we go
Whistle baby, whistle baby,
Whi-whistle baby, whistle baby
Whistle baby, whistle baby,
Whi-whistle baby, whistle baby
Go girl you can twerk it
Let me see your whistle while you work it
I'mma lay it back, don't stop it
Cause I love it how you drop it, drop it, drop it, on me
Now, shorty let that whistle blow
Yeah, baby let that whistle blow
Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Let me know
Girl I'm gonna show you how to do it
And we start real slow
You just put your lips together
And you come real close
Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Here we go
Whistle baby
(Whistle baby, whistle baby)
Whistle baby
(Whistle baby, whistle baby)
Whistle baby
(Whistle baby, whistle baby)
Whistle baby
(Whistle baby, whistle baby)

This is the worst song ever written. First off, it’s less subtle than the song, “Closer,” by NIN, in which the lyrics read, “I want to fuck you like an animal.” It’s a song about receiving oral sex from someone who clearly does not know how to perform it, by someone who’s never had it. He insists he’s, “Gonna show you how to do it.” A man should not demonstrate how to give oral sex for a woman. It’d turn into that scene from, “Ol’ School” where Andy Dick teaches a blowjob class.

I got very lucky with this google search for, “Ol’ School Blow Job Class,” but now I have to erase my search history.

The fact he has to teach a woman, (if it is a woman and not a man or vacuum cleaner or himself with his lower ribs removed), how to perform fellatio, and the line, “I bet I'm guilty your honor; that's just how we live in my genre,” leads me to believe that this girl is very under-aged. Like R. Kelly under-aged.
Then there’s the whole, “whistle,” and, “blow,” part of this song. It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure there’s no, “blowing,” in, “blowjobs.” That would hurt like a motherfucker, but maybe a man with a name that sounds like a state full of old people is into. I guess the human wang does look somewhat like a whistle, but this implies that his wiener is short and flat, and there’s a second slot at the base of his shaft. Is he a He-She.

In a sense, this is a song about a whistle. They could have alluded to that by including a whistle in the music. Instead they whistle, sans whistle. So there’s a third meaning for whistle here, and it’s not clever at all. In fact, it makes less sense than before. Is this supposed to be the woman factually whistling on his dick? How is that fucking possible? It reminds me of a dirty French movie I saw (although strangely enough it was a legitimate theatre movie and not a porno on Showcase or Bravo back in the days when they showed those sorts of things), where the dude goes to see a prostitute, because he hears she can sing the French national anthem while giving him head. She obliges him, but her only condition besides cold, hard cash and a cock to go with it is he turn out the lights. Halfway through, he turns on the lights, and there’s a glass eye sitting on the table next to him. She was giving him a socket job. Flo Rida, if that is your real name, you need to start looking down when you get head, because you might be getting the wrong part of the head.

This song was basically an excuse for someone to feature their whistling talents in a public forum, in the guise of a terrible song, and they botched it. And it’s still a hit song, because people are idiots. Mindless fucking idiots.

Hot Dog

When people think of Archie comics, they typically think of a ginger kid trying to bang two chicks at once. Archie has lofty goals. If you’ve ever picked up an Archie Digest at the checkout stand and flipped through it, you’d notice that shit quickly gets ridiculous. There’s more continuity errors in an Archie comic than in the entire DC universe.

No one really thinks about him, but Archie is likely just as well known as Superman and Spider-Man, despite never having a big budget movie made after him. The reason for that is mainly how easy it is to pick up an Archie comic. They’re right there at the checkout stands of every grocery store, or in the magazine rack in a pocket-sized format. Comic book racks outside of comic book stores are a rarity these days, even in some book stores. Because of that, and because of it’s inoffensive G-rating, a kid is more likely to read Archie before reading a super-hero comic.

Archie has only had two cartoons. In one he and his friends had a rock band, ala Josie and the Pussycats. In the other, he was a paranormal investigator, ala X-Files.

Like I said, a lot of weird shit goes down in Archie comics.

Here’s an example:

Jughead’s Pal, Hot Dog. Usually you see a cover like this and not one of those things happens. Those aren’t day dreams: that’s Hot Dog’s real life. It’s an entire series based on Jughead’s pet dog. It’s like how Snoopy in Peanuts would pretend to be the Red Barron, only it doesn’t end with Charlie Brown coming out and saying, “Good grief!” In this comic, Hot Dog can talk, and has a secret base hidden inside his doghouse, to which Jughead is oblivious to because he’s too busy eating hamburgers. Plus, if you look at his mugshot up there in the issue number, he’s go his eyes closed and he’s facing the other way. Jughead always looks like he’s being smug. What a dick.

Hot Dog’s a secret agent, which strangely predates a current fad. Yesterday, there was a cartoon, “T.U.F.F. Puppy,” and a movie, “Cats and Dogs,“ on TV about dogs who are secretly… erh… secret agents. I’m not sure who came up with the idea, but someone is owed some money for plagiarism (TM).

It sort of figures. If you’re going to imagine your dog has all sorts of fun and adventures while you’re off whacking it into a baseball mitt, you might as well go all out and pretend they’re secret agents. That way, when you shake your head at him when he’s sleeping and make some sarcastic remark about how lazy he is, he’ll secretly wink to the camera. P.S.: Your dog hates you.

Is it weird that a Z-list character in a C-List comic company has his own series? Not really, when you consider that Superman’s dog Krypto had his own cartoon series. Jughead is Archie’s sidekick, and Hot Dog is Jughead’s side kick. The series didn’t last long, because it’s still a little bit of a stretch trying to sell a title like this. There’s lots of cutesy characters out there with a fan following already, like say, Heathcliff. It’s hard to build up an original property on the back of a virtually unknown one.

Better Luck Next Time

I was directed to ubernet.com yesterday for a sale on their 9” tall statues for Monday Night Combat. This one here was $5, called, “Bad Luck Tank Statue,” which sounds like a hipster band.

A better look at the description told me:

Our Hotshots tanks are heavy. The jet gun is also heavy and some of these tanks break during the shipping process. Feeling lucky? Some of the breaks are minor and can be glued. Some are not so minor. We'd love our fans to do something artful with them and send us your photos. You just pay $5 plus shipping and it's all yours.

So $5 for a practically guaranteed to be broken statue. Still. you could technically glue it together like it was a model. Still curious, I looked at the shipping costs.

$41.

So I was expected to pay $46 for something that was going to show up at the door broken. Why would I do that?

There were non-broken statues for $20, but $20 will get you a high-end action figure at the store, and not cost an extra $41.

Mickey Maus

Ever notice Mickey’s ears? They’re iconic. Walt Disney designed Mickey so he’d be recognizable even in silhouette, and then he spent the rest of his life cramming that symbol down our throats with Mickey Mouse-ear hats, and hating the Jews. Look at Mickey closely in his cartoons, though. You’ll notice that no matter how Mickey turns his head, his ear will always be facing the same direction. It’s kind of like that whole, “Never changes expression,” meme, but with ears. Logically, his ears should overlap, or turn sideways at some point, but they never do. The reason is simple: Walt Disney is a lazy animator, who also hates Jews. His ears could be drawn by stencil, if need be. That helps a lot when you’re drawing the same image a million times, or rather your underpaid Korean assistant is.

It’s really weird though when you watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, a computer animated kid’s show. With computer animation, you don’t have to redraw the ears every frame. Still, they designed it so his ears are always two perfect circles, like a pair of boobs on his head. That means instead of using a very simple process to animate the ears, they had to program it so his ears wouldn’t move with his head. Essentially, they’re separate objects. It’s kind of hypnotic to watch. The only way to recreate it yourself is to stick one of those Mouse-ear caps on your head and hold it in place while you bob your head around, although why you’d want to do that is beyond me. I think they did the same thing with Minnie Mouse, but the bow on her head moves properly.

Back to the Mouse-ear hat thing: if Mickey were three-dimensional, his ears would be globes. He’s never depicted this way for one simple reason: it looks weird.

Riverdale Problems

Sometimes, when I’m feeling sad and depressed, I think about someone who has it worse than me: Archie Andrews.

Who has it worse than Archie? Archie doesn’t know which girl he should date, Betty or Veronica, so he has to date both of them. Do you know how hard it is to keep coming up with date ideas each week so you don’t run into the other girl? Imagine taking Betty to the movies, and Veronica’s there with Reggie. How awkward would that be, especially knowing that you have a date set up the next week with Veronica and she might have let Reggie get to first base? It’d be in the back of your mind the whole time you were with her. You’d keep thinking how you neck-in-neck tie choice for a steady girlfriend went out with your second best friend. Then you’d realize that you hate Reggie, because he’s a total douchebag, but he’s still somehow your second best friend in the world next to a compulsive eater and woman-hater. Sure, you’re still friends with Moose and Dexter, and the single black kid in Riverdale, but you don’t hang out with them all the time. Jughead, with his disgusting habits and borderline serial-killer perspective of the opposite sex is basically the opposite of a wingman. Reggie’s practically doing you a favour by trying to fuck your alternate-day girlfriend. At least you know he’s not picking up diseases from anywhere else, because his other love interest is the girlfriend of Moose, and he’s not getting any of that. Any herpes he collects will be passed down from you, to Veronica, to Reggie.

Archie probably has to date two women at a time just to quell the gay rumours. Jughead’s so phobic about women that any dude who associates with him is automatically considered his life-partner. That’s why it’s a surprise that the only black-man in Riverdale turned out to be homosexual in their recent gay-wedding issue. All the controversy that arose over this dull at dishwater gay issue should really have been directed at how Jughead has still not come out of the closet, or at least had an intervention about his compulsive eating habits. Seriously, right-wing hate groups came tried to boycott toy stores selling the gay issue, but binge eating is all right.

And they’re all in a band together too, when they’re not having romantic trysts or solving weird alien mysteries. Archie’s in a garage band with his two best friends, who kinda hate each other, and his two girlfriends, who kinda hate each other. If you don’t know anything about musical groups, they’re a better breeding ground for drama than high school. So he’s in the worst possible situation to be in with the worst possible people to be in it with. He might as well invite Veronica’s dad to join the group too. If you put three people together in Archie’s universe, two of them will hate each other. Everyone hates Reggie, for instance, but everyone hangs out with him. Betty and Veronica are best friends, but they also hate each other. Jughead and Archie are the only two close friends who don’t constantly try to destroy each other.

Wrong Side of the Sesame Street

Ever notice how Sesame Street is in a bad neighbourhood? Have you looked at the street itself. There’s bars on all the windows, first off. That means there’s a high crime rate. Maybe the Cookie Monster breaks into people’s apartments to get money to buy more cookies. He’s essentially a crack head, but with cookies.

Then there’s the street people.

There’s Oscar the Grouch, who live in a garbage can. There’s not an abundance of garbage cans or dumpsters, either, which means that everyone is expected to throw their garbage in the can on top of Oscar, who has a sick garbage fetish. The can itself is really just a disguised entrance to a vast underground area where he actually lives, like Hogan’s Heroes. The can is never emptied, either. That means, beneath the street is a garbage dump being maintained by a single, unpaid worker. There’s no telling how it go there. Oscar likely tunnelled into the sewer and subway systems. He could have broken into the power and water supply too, which explains how he’s able to sustain himself without having to leave his trash can. He’s not trained as an engineer, so his modifications could have dire consequences. He could have weakened the support structure beneath Bert and Ernie’s apartment building, causing it to eventually collapse.

Then there’s Big Bird, who lives in a back alley and has schizophrenia. He’s constantly talking to an imaginary friend Snuffleupagus that no one else can see. That means he has very serious mental issues which aren’t being addressed. The same could be said for Grover, or Super Grover (as he’d like to be called), who’s suffering from delusions of grandeur, possibly brought on by bath salts.

Then you need to factor in that there’s no traffic, despite it being an open street. That means no one wants to drive down there, perhaps for fear of being shot. That means there’s a lot of gang activity you’re not seeing.

Then there’s the kids, like Elmo, who have about zero parental supervision. They’re constantly being watched by random adult who live on the street, but have no ties to his family. That’s probably because they’re scared shitless someone’s going to come to their street and steal the kids, and they can’t call the cops to help because the police have given up on Sesame Street a long time ago.

Did I mention 50% of the people there are monsters? That bears mentioning. Probably all that trash Oscar’s squirreled away has caused mutations over the years. Or maybe Sesame Street is over the Hell Mouth.

Then there’s the humans who live on sesame street. There’s only one business, Mr.Hoopers, and aside from the people who work there, no one else seems to have a job. They’re all out on the street in the morning, or the middle of the day, meaning they don’t work. That means they’re probably on welfare. Plus, no two of them are ever the same race and only the celebrity guests are white. There’s about two red monster and two blue ones, meaning the monsters form the ethic majority. That means monsters control local politics. All laws are monster laws. That probably explains why there’s no garbage pick-up, police, traffic control, or school system. Did I mention there’s no school system? Little monsters like Elmo don’t go to school. They have to learn everything from the street.

Elmo, by the way, is a wizard. In the Harry Potter universe he’d be at Hogwarts. He has a magical crayon that he’s used to create his own world. That’s sorcery. He can even open portals by drawing doors or windows. His magic window in his apartment looks out a closed set occupied by Mr.Noodles and Mr.Noodle’s brother, Mr.Noodles. You never see those two on Sesame Street, where Elmo lives, which means they’re trapped in there. He’s captured them in another dimension, or maybe he conjured them up from the abyss. Plus, he can seemingly teleport himself into anyone’s kitchen where there’s a baby in a high chair, to ask the baby a question and then give them kisses. Elmo is kissing our babies whenever we turn away to make lunch in our kitchens.

Dawnguard

I’ve been playing the expansion for Skyrim, Dawnguard, for the past week. I have one thing to say about it: it’s very dark. Not it’s content, I mean it’s literally dark as in you can’t see what the hell you’re doing. Playing as a vampire was the only option for me, because that meant I had Vampire’s Sight, allowing my character to use night vision. I had to use this power about 90% of the time because every quest involved being underground more often than a Chud. Skyrim has a more extensive underground system than New York city, and every inch of it is poorly lit. The game itself was considered a triumph over it’s predecessor mainly because of the vastly improved graphics. Half the time you’ll never know there was a change, because you can’t physically see it. It’s always perplexed me why there was such a massive push for the current line of next-gen systems and their graphic capabilities when 80% of the AAA games take place in near-absolute darkness. The games themselves suggest you play in near-to-no-visibility, as the gamma selector will always tell you to manually adjust your graphics until you can’t see a black bar it’s posted on your screen. It wants your entire game to be pitch black.

Dawnguard further takes the whole play-in-the-dark theme to a whole new level, because as a vampire your goal is to blot out the sun. Vampires burn in the sunlight and lose health, so to counter that you can use a special bow and shoot arrows at the sun to black it out. That means it can be black-as-hell out day or night.

You’re given a new companion named Serena. You’ll have to play with her 100% of the time if you want a companion while playing as a Vampire Lord. Being a Vampire Lord is near-to-useless. As a vampire, you already get a bunch of perks. As a Vampire Lord, you lose your ability to fight effectively, to use items, to open doors and chests, to interact with other players, the ability to select magic spells and everything else you might want to do. It also locks you in third person perspective and transformation animations take up valuable time. Plus, any regular citizen will attack you, even your own non-vampire companions. You can level up your Vampire Lord by draining the life force of enemies. This is near to impossible. You have to hit them with the right spell just before they die. You only have two spells, though, so it’s not that tricky selecting it. Aiming it properly in the third-person perspective is. Also: the spell induces almost no damage to the enemy and it has to be a killing blow. If you’ve summoned a monster, or if you have a companion fighting, they’re almost guaranteed to get that last shot in before you. I’ve killed almost fifty people as a Vampire Lord and only got around five souls. I need hundreds to complete the perk tree, and actually level up that Vampire Lord for the Achievement. Plus, your health, stamina and magic are all increased exponentially as a Vampire Lord, but you’re also much, much weaker. I can die easily as a Vampire Lord, but I’m indestructible in normal armour. I don’t know how that works.

I chose the Vampire Lord because my character was already trapped forever as a werewolf because of the Forever Mourning glitch. To become human again, I first had to accept being turned into a Vampire Lord to banish my werewolf blood, then complete a separate quest to turn human. In my version of the game, there’s no other way. It was still much simpler than finishing the glitchy Companion Quest chain line.

Serena, as a companion, is more personable and has greater depth to her character and abilities in combat than your other companions. You learn pretty much everything there is to know about her, while other companions like Lydia are still a blank slate to you. You can also pick up a couple of new wardogs, both of whom I’ve killed by accident while not even swinging my weapon in their general direction. It doesn’t help that the vampire versions are pitch black in the aforementioned blackness. The tunnels in the dungeons levels are also quite narrow. I’ve become trapped for minutes several times while trying to move around my companions and dogs.

The new areas themselves are quite expansive with few load-doors. There’s not much in there that you haven’t already seen, though. The Soul Cairn and the wide-open Snow Elf dungeon are the most notable, mainly because of their size. The Soul Cairn is like the old Oblivion levels, but purple, and about the size of  a new territory with it’s own quests, NPCs, and even currency. The Snow Elf level is long and winding, with one giant open space in the middle that looks like an outdoor area. It’s probably the most striking of all the areas. That where I had my only real, “Wow,” moment.

I was walking across a frozen lake to read a Word of Power off a monolith, when two dragons burst out of the ice. They were both high-level and their fire breath kill my level 60 character in seconds. The Resist Fire potions lying around some skeletons before the area sort of foreshadowed this, but the potions themselves were useless. This is the only time I had to fight two dragons at once, and it made my game freeze.

My game also froze after the big boss battle with the Snow Elf, although that time the action was already done and there really wasn’t anything going on to make it freeze. So there were two big bugs in very obvious places of the game that no one bothered to correct before releasing. This is a Bethesda game. Play at your own risk.

I actually like the quests better than some of the other Guild-Faction stuff I’d finished, but there wasn’t any different feel to playing.

Kid’s Show

Having spawned a new child I am now subjected to the rigors of children’s television once more. All the same shows with the first one are still there, but their apparent flaws are more pronounced.

No less than four shows are about rescuing animals. Diego is the leader of this pack, but at least he’s got the skills to back it up. If you ignore the fact that he’s an unescorted five-year-old staring down caiman and jaguars in the darkest jungles of the Amazon and the lesson this teaches you children about having more balls than brain cells and not to leave nature well enough alone, you’ll see he’s at least capable at his job.

The Wonder Pets are much, much worse. They’re three very unqualified pets who don unnecessary costumes and waste a whole lot of time in the process to save animals in peril. They travel by a sail-boat car they’ve made out of Mechano pieces, and the have to reassemble it every time they have to go out on a job. Again, this wastes valuable time that could be spent saving lives. Imagine if a fireman had to build his fire truck from scratch every time he heard the alarm. When they do get to the scene, they have no clue what the hell they’re doing. How could they? They’re baby animals. Why would you call a duckling, a gerbil, and a turtle for help? That’s worse than praying to a God you don’t believe in, because at least there’s a chance you’re wrong about the God. They even admit they don’t have a fucking clue, and then try several half-assed plans, all while singing songs about how they’re fucking up. In once scene, a bird in peril is clinging from the Statue of Liberty’s crown and it’s about to fall to it’s death. The duckling is flying around and singing. I repeat: the bird is flying around and singing, instead of using it’s flight to rescue the other bird, which should know it’s a bird. Only, none of it matters, because the animals they rescue aren’t even real: they’re just pictures hanging on a wall brought to life momentarily. That means whenever they finish saving the animals, the picture has to reset back to the moment when the animal was just about to die horribly, or otherwise the children that go to the daycare where they live would notice something was amiss.

The same thing happened on another shows 53 and Bird, where one bird gets trapped out on a lily pad and is about to sink and drown, due to poor parental supervision. Seriously, no one was watching her. One of the adult birds was taking a nap, and I don’t think the other one cared. Two of the adult birds and a child come up and try to see if they can reach her. The child bird suggests that he swims out to rescue her, and the adult birds tell him that it’s too dangerous, because water is apparently lava. They take an extraordinarily long time to find a boat and row out to her, all while singing. Of course, they’re all birds, and they can fly. Or swim. You’re either the type of bird that flies, or the type of bird that swims, or you’re dinner. There’s no a lot of playroom in the animal kingdom. I think it was trying to teach kids a lesson, but I have no idea what that lesson was. Basically, if your parents are negligent, you’ll die, kids.

Then there’s the Chinese Dora the Explorer, “Ni Hao, Kai Lan!” which tries to teach your children that the Chinese are taking over, and they must be ready to greet their new masters in their own language. Kai Lan is China’s single remaining female child after the One Child Law. Strangely, the show doesn’t take place in a sweatshop, or at the bottom of a river. Also, it has a koala bear, which is just confusing. I can’t say with 100% certainty that it is a koala: all I know is that it doesn’t belong in China, unless it’s in the #53 meal. One of the shows tried to teach kids that there was nothing wrong with copying someone’s work. The koala bear made a cake, and one of the other animals made the same damn cake. The tiger thought there was going to be a throw-down, but Kai Lan was confused by his reaction. Why would someone get mad if someone else completely rips them off? I was confused by this message too, because this pro-plagiarism stance was the exactly the opposite of what I saw in shows as a kid. I don’t know what He-Man’s thoughts on the subject would be, but I’m sure he’d be against it. So would G.I. Joe and Inspector Gadget. From TV, I knew if two girls show up to a party in the same dress, there’d be a catfight. Also, in school I was told copying someone’s work could get me expelled. From watching the F.B.I. and Interpol warnings on videos, I knew that copying someone else’s work could land me in jail. Kai Lan is from China, though, where they don’t just make bootleg Apple products, they make bootleg Apple stores. Making cheap imitations runs in Chinese blood. Like I said, the show itself is a rip-off of Dora the Explorer. It a message they’re passing along to kids to not be creative, and to just go with it if someone steals all their ideas and take credit. They’re softening up our kids for when they take over North America.

Speaking of drowning girls, there’s the Bubble Guppies. It’s pretty standard fair, but the show really illustrates one of the Hallmarks of Children’s Programming. I heard from one of the producers on Sesame Street was that the biggest challenge was making the characters like Big Bird easy for children to learn along with without making that character seem retarded. Even a child can want to punch a giant yellow bird in the face, and it’s a fine line between saying, “Big Bird, you’re so silly,” and, “What the fuck is wrong with you, you shithead bird? There’s obviously four red blocks!” The Bubble Guppies hasn’t learned this. One of the characters goes into a sports store and asks the clerk for a, “Big blue basketball.” The clerk proceeds to produce about ten items that are neither big, nor blue, nor basketballs. It’s like when you’re trying to explain your order to the drones at Taco Bell and running into problem after problem until you want to jump behind the counter and make it yourself. Eventually the character has the kids watching the show point to the appropriate item on the screen, because she’s too embarrassed for the clerk. She takes the basketball and leaves. Without paying, of course. This teaches our children that there’s a world of stupid, stupid people out there, and the world forces you to deal with them whether you like it or not. Plus, stealing is sometimes easier than paying for an item, not because of the cost of the item, because of the bullshit you have to go through at the cash register. Imagine if there was a line up in this scene. Imagine being the third guy in line. That’s the worst, because you can clearly see what’s going on, and knowing even after that clears up, there’s still another person in front of you, and they’re likely to pay in pennies.