The Mocking Dead

Despite the show being tailor-made to appeal to someone of my demographic, I just can’t get into The Walking Dead. I’ve only watched two full episodes and some snippets from others, and it never really bagged me. I know it’s based on an ongoing comic book series, but then so is Naruto. The difference is Naruto is a cartoon and doesn’t have to worry about budget cutbacks and if they’re going to have enough money to dress up the extras. Also: ninjas.

To me, my main problem is with suspension of belief. If you’re watching a zombie movie, you only have to put up with their gaping plot holes for an hour and twenty-two minutes. Every zombie movie is littered with moments where you feel the urge to shout at the screen, “You idiot!” when someone goes off on their own down a dark hallway, or the motley crue of survivors overlook the fact there’s an infected in their group. With Walking Dead, you have to do that every week.

The biggest plot hole of course is how the zombies took over the world to begin with. Of course during the first 48 hours there’s going to be a few losses, but not 99% of the world’s population. I’m basing that on the fact that any zombie can easily be defeated by a chain link fence, or a locked door. That’s all it takes. They’re too weak to break through most barriers, and they have no climbing skills aside from going up the stairs. I was watching one episode where the dude who banged his best friend’s wife and some fat guy were holding off a horde of zombies by standing on top of some lockers, just barely out of reach. Seriously, they were basically just cookie jars on top of the cupboard, and the zombies couldn’t get them. Even a five year old could have got them. Your cat could have got them. The zombies were helpless. Then, the fat guy jumps off and tries to make a break for it, and breaks his ankle, because he’s fat. He’s 300lbs and has a broken ankle, and he still manages to escape despite all logic. Then, at the end of the episode, they both hide behind a cage being held in place by a single loose bolt on a thread. The cliff-hanger was them cowering in fear hoping that the bolt wouldn’t rattle out of the lock. The fact it held for more than a millisecond is phenomenal. The fact that none of the zombies posses the intelligence or coordination to push that bolt out with their thumbs is embarrassing for everyone involved. It’s like watching a senior citizen try to open a childproof bottle.

The sad fact is that zombies in this series are less threatening than wild animals. Being cornered by a pack of zombies is totally survivable. Being cornered by a pack of wild dogs? Not so much.

How did it get so bad to begin with? No one turns into a zombie instantly and there’s plenty of time to diagnose a victim before they turn full zombie. Lets say there’s a zombie attack at a baseball game, or a rally. The zombie might bite one or two people before someone steps up and stops him. Whoever’s bitten has hours before turning. Obviously, they’re going to be treated and hospitalized. If they die, they’re taken to the morgue at the hospital and laid out on a slab, or put into one of those drawers where they’d never be able to escape. Hospitals are chock full of locked doors, alarms, sharp implements, and they have their own security. It’s almost ideal for fending off a zombie wave.

Another thing: Take any real-life situation where someone opened fire on a crowd at random. The highest death toll for a single shooter is around fifteen. Most times, the shooter is taken down after the first three shots. Those are real statistics for people armed with deadly weapons. A shuffling monstrosity with only his hands and his teeth as weapons isn’t going to get as far as that. There’s no way that can balloon into billions of casualties.

What about graveyards? What if the dead actually rose up and started killing? Ever see a graveyard without a fence? The zombies are screwed.

Skyrim

I’m very late to the game, but I continue to find a plethora of bugs and glitches in my copy of Skyrim on the 360. When you encounter these kinds of errors, the general consensus is you’re simply supposed to shrug and say, “What are you going to do?” then post a hilarious youtube video. Rallying against the studio would be pointless, as they’re too busy rolling around in a pile of money. Internet users will tell you to get the computer version of the game and then mod it to wipe the glitches, but that’s not my job as a gamer, now is it? They will also call you a fag, because they’re on the internet.

Imagine if you didn’t have an internet connection for one thing, and you were unable to update. Skyrim isn’t an online game, so why are patches being delivered that way post-install? Because fuck you, that’s why.

Mostly, the errors are ridiculous and incomprehensible. I was talking to the Puff-the-Magic Dragon, or whatever his name might be, on top of the Throat of the World, and he suddenly took to the sky. As he’s a dragon with wings, I thought this was suppose to happen. Then I noticed he was flying backwards and his wings weren’t even moving. He was like a leaf caught in a tornado, swirling ever higher until he reached the very stratosphere. Then he began to descend. I had hoped he would stop at my ground level, but he went down past the mountain cliff and probably through the mountain itself. I had to save halfway through because the was about fifteen minutes of pointless dialogue involved, which I couldn’t even hear because he was out of range and I was frozen to the spot. When I came back, he was still out of sight, but then he reset himself to the correct position.

I also finished the quest for the Helm of Winterhold, and was about to turn it in, which apparently isn’t allowed. I was previously hoping to avoid the quest altogether because of yet another glitch. I was doing the chain of quests for the Companions in the hopes I could cure my werewolfism, which turned out not to be as enduringly awesome as I had hoped. Every time I enter their hall the characters are frozen in their mourning states after their leader dies, and it won’t let me continue the quest chain. Looking online told me that I was basically screwed, and that I would be double screwed if I went through with the Winterhold quest, as both quest chains take you to the same location, and doing the one before the other makes it impossible to complete both. I did it anyway, and was prepared to bring the helm back to the Jarl. The map marker took me far from Winterhold, where he was supposed to be sitting on his throne. I instead found him swimming, fully clothed, in the middle of a river, which is just about as unlikely a place to find him as the inside of a volcano. I couldn’t even interact with him, although the screen showed the option of talking to him. I think it was because he was treading water.

So my point is: I’ve already put over 100 hours into the game, and I find out I might not even be able to finish at least two quests because of grievous errors, which also means I can’t get the Achievements associated with them. I could always try starting over, but then there’s no guarantee it wouldn’t happen again. There’s not even a rumour that the studio plans on patching the game anytime soon to help me out, aside from selling more downloadable content. Why would I buy an add-on to the game when I can’t even play the game I have?

Role Reversal

Do you remember how only a few, short years ago commercials for Axe and Tag body spray would all but guarantee you’d get laid like a billion times?

Literally:

That’s a lot of sex to be having. I don’t think my fragile imagination, let alone my body could handle that kind of tang. No man could. This product is dangerous and should be banned.

Then things got gay. Advertisers realized that the person most likely to buy a scented product designed for men are their sexually repressed and long-suffering women. That introduced the beefcake commercial:

Look at that video again: Not one tit jiggling around. A heterosexual male isn’t going to watch that an run out to buy Old Spice. Old Spice used to be that shit your Grandpa would slap on his face before between shots of rye. Now it’s associated with men who spend too much time doing crunches and not enough time slapping their wives.

Now advertisers have given up on men and their reeking pits altogether. Over the Christmas holidays there was an absolute barrage of commercials for women’s perfume.

Virtually every commercial like this is the same: women fucking random strangers, but on a train or in a ballroom so you know it’s classy. How is that any different than the male “sexist” commercial of yesteryear? The message is the same: spray this piss on yourself and good times will happen to your genitals.

Worse still, when I tried to research this article, I stumbled across page after page on youtube of frumpy, unattractive and probably unemployed women reviewing perfumes. Some only had like 57 hits, which makes me wondered why they bothered, while others had over 100,000 views. Furthermore, it’s women reviewing the same product. There are dozens, and dozens, and dozens of different women making videos about the same thing they picked up by happenstance at Wal-Mart. Is this some kind of underground marketing ploy, or is this really happening by itself? Are they watching each other’s videos and saying, “I don’t think they touched on all the different points of that one perfume in their 2:36 minute video. I’m going to make my own.” How do you even review a perfume, except to say it smells like lavender, celebrity-tie in and commercial greed? Wine reviews are usually only three paragraphs long, and they have the extra sense of taste to deal with. Why are these women so obsessed with cosmetics and perfumes when they obviously can’t attract a man with either? Watching their reviews is like taking dietary advice from Dr.Phil.

Before it’s gone.

I logged into myspace today. It was like travelling back in time; a very confusing time. I did so to scrounge my account for a video I may have uploaded back when I was doing Minimates animations for fun an not profit. I’m still not making any profit off them, and never will, because they are terrible. Yet, here we are.

This is all I found. Everything else was destroyed to shit because of copyright infringements.

Final Sectet Crisis Invasion Episode 3: The Long Pause

Strangeman | Myspace Video

Yop

The Superbowl was held today, and with it came the Superbowl ads. In Canada, our live feed of the game is overridden with Canadian commercials, mostly for Goldbond Medicated Foot Powder. It detracts from the spectacle, especially since the Superbowl is comprised of 50% commercials, 25% half-time shows delivered by faded rock stars, and 25% time-outs.

I barely watched this year. Instead I was forced to watch children’s programming. At nearly every commercial break there was the same damn ad for Yop. I shit you not: this commercial has been on the air for over six years.

SPIKE
Yop Commercial
www.spike.com
Spike Full Episodes Spike Video Clips Spike on Facebook

I put this copy of the video up because I know it will force you to watch another commercial before you get to the real video. How meta is that? It’s convoluted, it’s weird and it’s unnecessary. It angers me, and it’s art.

Take a look at this commercial. First off: it’s vaguely racist. A couple of white kids having their CG mouths sing with a Jamaican accent. Is Yop even Jamaican? If so, why is Canada it’s prime demographic? What is Yop? All I’ve been able to discern is that it’s some type of breakfast drink. I think it might just be yoghurt that’s been left out in the hot Jamaican sun too long.

It’s not even the product or the commercial that gets me. It’s the fact that it’s been on the air for over six years. SIX YEARS. The Taco Bell dog likely didn’t even live that long before he was turned in a burrito. The company that made it apparently blew their entire marketing budget on the one commercial, but still had enough money left over to air it twenty times a day, every day, on every channel, for six years. I shit you not: I saw this commercial three times today on two different cable channels. My six year old step-son started singing the song at bedtime. THE COMMERCIAL IS OLDER THAN HIM.

I tried researching the video and discovered it had it’s own facebook page with 86 likes. Your Grandma probably has more friends than that on her page. ……OH SHIT! AS I’M TYPING THIS THE COMMERCIAL IS PLAYING AGAIN ON CANADIAN MTV! THAT’S THE THIRD CHANNEL TODAY!

It knows I’m talking about it…

I’m sincerely not writing that for comedic effect, or as hyperbole. It was literally playing as I was writing about how often it’s on. I’ve seen this commercial more than I’ve seen my own parents over the last few years.

If you do the math, (because I’m not good with math), a large percentage of the Canadian television industry is funded by the Yop company. They control a little piece of the media everywhere they go. That means they could put poison in it tomorrow and we’d never hear about the deaths due to a media blackout.

Is this commercial really so successful that it has to be the ONLY commercial? It’s got a catchy jingle and it clearly conveys that Yop is a thing you drink, without getting into the nitty-gritty of what Yop actually is (toothpaste and motor oil?). Think of how many commercials you see for something simple like milk. Why does milk even need commercials? It’s milk. Are you going to be swayed over to milk’s competition (possibly soy-milk?) if they don’t have commercials playing? Does having a commercial do anything for milk’s sales? There’s no possible way to even prove the effectiveness of a milk commercial. Any consumer who’ll say they were influenced is lying.

Book Club

I was thinking about blogging about some of my reading lately, but then I thought: who gives a fuck? By the time I get around to a book, I’d be the umpteenth millionth person to have read it and voiced their opinions on it. It’s like writing a paper of Shakespeare wherein the sheer volume of students in schools all across the planet have to write their own papers on the same tired subject. It becomes impossible to be original, or have an insight someone else hasn’t already thought of. That’s why I pity English scholars and Biblical Theologians the most. Imagine if you’re a pastor with a Bible opened before you, and you had to deliver a sermon related to a passage therein that the next preacher in the church down the street isn’t giving. If you don’t open your mouth and spout out the craziest racist thing you can think of, you’re not going to get through to anyone. That’s also why there’s so many theories involving Shakespeare being a fraud, or a homosexual, or an avid drug user.

Apply the same theory to any bargain bin book you pick up at whichever bookstore has yet to go out of business, and you’re encountering an internet culture where anyone can voice their thoughts and opinions on the same work. You’re likely only to have read it months or years before it came out and your average blogger scooped you before the book even made it to the shelves.

It’s not just books, but movies, games, sports, cars… anything really. I frequently blog about comics, movies and games, but those are all easily digestible. Even if the reader isn’t familiar with the subject they can sit down and browse through the content in minutes, if not hours. It’s harder to get them to read.

2011

2011 is now a thing of the past, and I’d just like to say that as years go, 2011 had some balls to it. First off, I don’t remember so many douchebags getting their comeuppance since the Nuremberg Trials. Kim Jong Il, Gadaffi, and Osama were all members of W.’s “Axis of Evil,” and now thanks to 2011, they’re all dead. The Arab Spring took power away from corrupt individuals and put it back in the hands of the people, at the cost of many innocent lives. While the rich got richer, the world made it harder for them. The 99% told the 1% where they could shove it, and got a free macing. Berlosconi saw his empire crumble, and consoled himself in his teenaged whores. Donald Trump and Herman Cain thought that being terrible business gurus made them qualified to be President of the United States, and were shown the error of their ways. Text messages of dude’s wieners got the thumbs down thanks to Wiener himself. Jacko’s doctor got the tongue-lashing of a lifetime from his judge before being sentenced to four years for killing the King of Pop.

In fact, the only two news stories that didn’t involve completely reprehensible people getting fucked over by fate was the Royal Wedding and Steve Job’s death. The War in Iraq also came to an end, but I don’t think a single person who’s not currently serving in the military even noticed or cared by that point.

How will we top this? Why, with the end of the world, of course. Come on Dec 21st, 2012!