Wheels are Feet for Cars

Season of the Witch > Black Swan. No, seriously.

2011-01-11T19:39:00.000-08:00

I went to see Season of the Witch because I was bored and movies are six bucks on Tuesdays and I love Nicholas Cage. After watching Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, one of my all-time favorite movies (up there with Taxi Driver), I realized that the man’s an artist. That film was like the Rosetta Stone to his career; suddenly films like Knowing and Ghost Rider became works of art and I discovered classics like Vampire’s Kiss. Nicholas Cage is a fucking genius.

So six bucks, why not, I bought my ticket and went into the theater expecting insanity and cheese. And, you know what? It was a pretty absurd film, pretty damn cheesy, but not that bad. It was certainly not Nicholas Cagey enough, it played more like an ensemble piece which was a pity because the characters weren’t that interesting. The story, though, wasn’t terribly written (though full of anachronism), the special effects weren’t distractingly bad (more like the high end of mediocre), and the acting was passable. It was a decent shitty movie. I do not regret seeing it. I do not regret giving them my money.

The reason I say it was better than Black Swan is because the same people who sat down to do what they always do just did a better job in this context. You expect the best from Black Swan’s effects team and you got some weird, sometimes goofy-looking stuff. You expect GameCube graphics from SotW’s team (shit like the Scorpion King) and you got something pretty decent. You expect a great script from Black Swan, you got a pile of hackneyed drivel. You expect a shit script from SotW and you got a pretty entertaining fantasy action-adventure. You expect great acting from Black Swan and you got… yeah, it was pretty good, hell, up to par. You expect shit acting from SotW and, relatively speaking, they blew it out of the fucking park.

My one complaint is that Cage’s acting was just not weird or surreal enough to make this film worthy of the canon. But we’ve got Drive Angry and Ghost Rider 2 this year, so there’s hope.

Black Swan was a completely pointless movie.

2011-01-04T23:29:00.000-08:00

“Pointless” is not to be confused with “plotless”; it certainly had a plot, just not one worth giving a shit about. Natalie Portman weeps and weeps as she portrays a ballerina who has invested her life in pursuing her dream that’s more likely her domineering mother’s—a former ballerina who had to throw that life away to give birth to little Natalie. But when all seems to be going smoothly, a wrench is thrown in the works by way of Mila Kunis, a sexy, dangerous ballerina who smokes cigarettes, rolls E, and smooches strange men.

So Natalie, a spineless, virginal doormat of a girl must overcome her frigid innocence to dominate the role of the black swan—she plays both, white and black, though, never having seen the ballet, I don’t know if that’s standard. The black swan role requires Mila-style sexiness and Natalie is threatened by her presence.

Now in case you’re an idiot and you’ve already forgotten what’s going on, Aronofsky jabs you with this duality theme through abundant symbolism. Get your pens out, freshmen film students, here’s the final paper to your intro course. Black and white, black and white, black and white. Natalie’s pretty much always wearing white, Mila black, Mila hands Natalie a black negligee to wear when she’s trying to coax her into ‘badness’, the director’s whole fucking apartment is black and white, and on and on. When Natalie jerks it, behind her is a plush little black swan, in the bathtub are little carvings of white swans. Further, to really drive home the idea of fragmented identity: mirrors. Here are some mirrors, here are some more. Oh look, everybody’s bodies are divided or scattered or multiplied because mirrors are fuckin’ crazy like that. Ya get it yet? Hmmm? Yeah?

Behind all the wacky bullshit is… really, nothing. Take away the smokescreen of substanceless Kafkaesque nonsense and you have a plot that you’ve probably seen several dozen times before. Frigid protagonist learns to loosen up with the help of some wacky friend (The Hangover comes to mind), subservient hero learns to stand up for themself against overbearing relative (…The Hangover comes to mind again (and also Carrie)), prodigious champion (I’m clearly struggling for synonyms here) struggles to fulfill expectations (actually, the Wrestler… in fact, the ending’s practically the same). The film is just a collection of stale, canned plots, driven by characters who aren’t engaging doing things that aren’t engaging, served out a punch bowl spiked with peyote. It doesn’t suck, it just has no reason to exist.

I was, however, pleasantly surprised by how NOT irritating Mila Kunis’ voice was.

A brief lesson in Russian New Year tradition

2010-12-25T18:50:00.000-08:00

In honor of this Christmas season, I thought I'd share with you all a holiday tradition that we Soviet ilk celebrate. Now I'm not Christian, though my love of pork products and my many subscriptions to anti-Semitic newsletters may have made you think otherwise, but my family does have a tree. A New Year's tree. You see, the Soviets, in their brazen attempt to be as cartoonishly supervillainous as possible actually banned Christmas in Russia. And much like the Nazis went East and West, conquering nations and purging them of Jews, the Soviets did the same with Christmas. The Poles, the Czechoslovaks, the Ukrainians, all these people were forced to surrender their most cherished holiday, and this time they weren't so eager to collaborate (that's right, fuck you, Poles).

One could call it a Christmolocaust... if one were so inclined.

But as we all know, because American cartoons and sitcoms have bludgeoned us nearly to death with this fucking point, canceling Christmas is like destroying our souls. You may as well outlaw smiles while you're at it. So Stalin and his crew had a great idea, "Maybe," he thought aloud, "we could cancel Christmas but then have like... New Year's trees and gifts and potato feasts, and there could be like... some fuckin' Santa thing that's, you know, totally Slavic or whatever." His henchmen nodded, "Yessirthatsoundsgreatpleasedontkillus." And the Russian people at large were too drunk to notice anything had changed at all.

What I'm going to share with you now is the story of our fuckin' Santa thing that's totally Slavic or whatever. His name is Deyt Maroz and he is not just an ersatz Santa. This is the tale my mother would tell me as she tucked me into bed on the eve of New Year's Eve, images of presents and pickled herring swirling around my little boy brain.

It all began in a time before… before there were czars, before peasants boiled beets and cabbage to make their meals, before bears roamed the snowy plains and mountainsides, before our blood was poisoned by the rapists of the Mongol horde. A purer time, a time of gods and magic.

The forest and its animals were ruled by a young god with great vision. He was friend to all manner of beast—bears brought to him the spoils of their hunt, the sparrows showered him in berries, chickens even offered to him their eggs. He spent his days polishing stones into fish, making sure the flowers bloomed bright, and the trees rained enough nuts for all the squirrels and chipmunks. He spent his free time conjuring up new plants, new animals, to fill the canvas of the forest. He had it pretty good, he thought, life was pretty simple.

The goddess of death didn’t have it quite so good. You see, the forest god was an orphan, so he didn’t have to deal with divine Slavic parents getting all up in his shit all the time. “Ven veel vee be see-inks grant-child?!” Her mother badgered, “You ahr neer terty! Yo vant be hyag?! Hyag veef cats, cat-hyag?! Expektahnsee of laiyf eez ohnly feeftee yeers fer Slav-gods.”

“Yees,” nodded her father, “Slav-god govr-mhent cohr-oopt, dok-tors eez bad, alk-hol aboos pahn-dyemic. You haf behbee naow!”

The goddess of death left her family’s one bedroom underworld apartment intent on finding a man to marry and finally satisfy the expectations of her overbearing, intrusive parents. This would be the day, she thought, for she had a plan.

Now this plan may not seem too novel for us now, but mind you, these were the gods. They invented fire, wind, water; all this shit was new to them. On this day, the goddess of death invented a scheme that many Slavic women would come to rely on: she would find a man, get him drunk, fuck him (or, rather, get him to fuck her as she stared vacantly at the ceiling), get pregnant, and shame him into marriage. It was foolproof.

Trouble was, the divine Slavic realm was full of absolute creeps and weirdos. The god of the sea smelled and was missing teeth, the god of the sky was alarmingly overweight… and also smelled and… well, was missing teeth, the god of war had really greasy hair and a gaudy fashion sense. Slavic god men just did not know how to take care of themselves. And so she wandered and wandered, feeling more and more miserable with each and every step. That is, until she wandered into the forest.

And there he was. He was rugged, muscular, his teeth were alright and he smelled kinda piney: the forest god, frolicking around with his animal friends.

“Hyello!” she waved, “vat is name ahf yours?”

The forest god stopped mid-frolick to see who it was calling to him. Now, I should probably mention, the forest god had always been something of a recluse… I mean, he lived in the forest, after all. The closest he’d ever come to a she-gods touch was that one time he choked out a deer and fucked it. But here, right in the god-flesh, a bona fide female deity.

“mmm,” he thought, “I nyever mahch eento moteef ahf goff but mehbee kinky, yes?” Having convinced himself that hooking up with a goth chick might be pretty cool, he galloped over to her side (did I mention he had horse feet? He had horse feet.).

“Hyelo!” he said, “Ahy ehm goht off fohrest. I do makeenks of ahnmals.”

“You vant get dreenk wif me?” asked the goddess, coyly.

“Oh-khey!” agreed the forest god.

So they drank and drank until finally the goddess said, in the most romantic voice she could must, “You want make fah-kings in mine vah-gina weef pehynis of yours haveenk?”

The forest god narrowed his eyes, “Is you comeenks on to meez?”

“Yehs.”

“Oh,” replied the forest god. He promptly began wrapping his hands around her throat.

“Wat you doink?!” she yelled, shocked.

“Eez how I makah da fahk in foh-rest wif deers.”

“Oh, oh-khey,” replied the goddess of death, rolling her eyes up to the sky, going temporarily catatonic.

Pretty soon it was over. The forest god woke up alone the next day, feeling pretty good about himself. He called over the bears and tigers and bragged about his conquest. Months had passed as the forest god continued frolicking merrily and free. But then, one day, a letter arrived via… uh… bird, or something: the goddess of death was pregnant!

“Sheet” lamented the forest god, knowing he had but one course of action: marry the goddess. He’d considered suicide but even then he’d be cast into the realm of the dead, where her big ‘ol fuckin’ hard-on of a dad would harass him for eternity. “Fahk eet,” he sighed, and conjured a ring out sticks and stones and whatever.

As he marched into the underworld, the trees wept in his wake, their leaves falling to the ground, their limbs shriveling. A coldness crept onto the forest.

The two promptly got married and the goddess never lost her baby weight. Every year, for but a few months, the forest god managed to get her off his fucking back so he could finally get some work done in this goddamn hellhole GODDAMMIT and he’d storm back into the forest to conjure. But the magic inside him… just wasn’t quite there anymore. He couldn’t think of new animals to make, he could barely make the trees drop enough nuts for the squirrels, make enough grass for the rabbits, enough fish for the bears. “Veel you stohp ryidings ahf ass-mine?!” he found himself screaming at a bear. He couldn’t concentrate, he just wanted to forget about everything and just jump off a bridge or something.

The goddess of death let herself go pretty hard after marriage.

It’s worth nothing he also looked like shit. He had bags under his eyes, his hair’d started falling out, he’d started gaining weight from all the booze. But he was too dead inside to care.

His son, who they named something totally unpronounceable but who I will refer to as Sergei because that's sufficiently generically Slavic, was a sensitive young lad. Kinda gloomy like his mother, but also creative like his father. He spent his time taking black and white photographs of railroad tracks and empty shacks and writing poems about the darkness inside him (remember, this is way back when in the olden-god times, before this shit was totally lame).

One day Sergei approached his father, who was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking, “Fazer, I vant to go to skool ahf stadees ahf ahrt to be arhteest.”

“Noh fagh-yot sohn of mine havinks vil be major of ahrt! You be dohkt-or and make-ah de mohnee fer mazer and me for the livinks!” Grumbled the forest god, his hairy, skin-tagged man-bosoms sinking deep into his mustard-stained sleeveless t-shirt.

Sergei’s heart sank into the deep, dark pits of his stomach. He could feel his veins twist into knots, his blood curdle with anger, “YOU ARE DEH FAHK!” he screamed, his eyes mashing down on tears he could no longer hold back, “I AM NO FAGH-YOT YOU ARE DEH FAHK WHO MAKEENGS DAH GAY I VIL SHOW YOU!” He grabbed his leather jacket and bolted out the cramped studio apartment the Slavic gods called their home.

He ran off, past the outer boundaries of their apartment complex, past the rundown park, past the Hasidic neighborhood and Chinatown and that part where all the Puerto Ricans lived, right into the forest. The dark, cold, neglected forest. “Ahy nhot gay! I veel shyow who gay! I veel maka-de-sex veef woman!” Fueled by rage and passion and teenage libido, he got down on his knees, grabbed clumps of snow (yeah, there’s snow because it’s like winter now since the forest god's all gone and stuff, it's solid symbolism right there), and started assembling a real, proper woman to have sex with and show everybody that he was totally straight.

He poked eye-holes with his fingers, pulled down his pants, and whipped out his forked demon dick and started plowing the shit out of this mound of snow. He came fury, the magic of his god cum brought the snow girl to life. “Hyelo!” she shouted, awakening for the first time, “ahy ehm Sneygurochka (Russian for maiden of snow-cum) eez naice meetings weef yous you seem goot mahn, haf job, yes? You veel poot reeng on fyeenger mine! I not whore! I vant baybee!” She began spouting declaration after declaration about commitment and joint bank accounts and all this shit that Sergei just couldn’t handle so he punched right through her snowy skull, right the hell through.

Stunned and shaken, Sergei stared at his trembling hand; he unraveled his fingers and his eyes tensed at the site of snow-brains twitching in his palm, "Fahk," he whispered. But not even spectacular, magical murder could shake Sergei of his resolve. He grabbed the limp snow-girl's feet and dragged her body behind some trees and tried again. And again. And again.

But he soon found that snow beneath his feet was getting packed and hard. It was nigh unusable for the purposes of sculpting a fine lady friend. He needed some fresh powder, but he couldn't just make it snow, after all, he didn't inherit that kind of power from his old man. "Vat to do, vat to do..." he thought, "Ah!" an idea struck him from above, so he looked up. And what did he see? Trees! The pine trees, still green in the winter, covered in layers and layers of fine snow. So he knocked the trees over, grabbed them by their trunks, and ran his palm against their bristles, knocking loose all that snow.

He kept at it for a long while. He'd been at it so long, in fact, that Spring was now nearly upon the forest, which meant the forest god's return. Sergei noticed the snow begin to melt and drip off the trees, the budding blades of grass beneath his feet, and he began to panic. He knew that if his father came by and saw all the trees scattered about that he'd totally lose his shit. He had to think fast.

He ran around the forest, panicking, trying to find some serendipitous source of inspiration, "Hyalp me, bear!" he pleaded, "Hyalp me fauchs! Hyalp me crokadeel!" But alas, his pleas fell on deaf ears, for the animals knew but one master, the forest god himself. When all seemed lost, out of nowhere there appeared a small group of children, doing the things Russian children tended to do in the woods--burying their middle-aged grandparents and passing around a small flask of crudely distilled grain alcohol.

Sergei dashed over to them quickly, his genitals flapping and slapping his thighs, "Cheeldren! You mahst hyalp me! Take trees ay haf ahp-rooted to hauses of yorz and I veel pahy you backs mooch!" The children, being obedient and pure of heart as children tended to be because they were beaten regularly and I turned out fine so shut up and get me a beer, did exactly what that giant, naked demon requested and dragged the trees back into their homes.

When the forest god finally arrived, he found not a single fucked up tree, just a pile of dead girls. "Vat eez dees?" he asked. "Oh! Ah..." Sergei stammered, "...I try use god-majeek ahnd make-a deh veemen for dah sex."

"You make-ah dah veemen of snow?"

"Yehs."

"Theys in gooht shape, weef boozom."

"Yehs."

"But you no layke?"

"They eez deemahndings ahf tyme ahn mohneez ahn attentions."

"You try eemproof?"

"Yehs, ahy try make-a deh veemens weefout bohx ahf voice ahn brain of want."

"You make-a for me too?"

"Okhey."

His father nodded approvingly, finally accepting his son and his artistic passions, in exchange for the promise of a perfected concubine down the road. So Sergei continued sculpting every winter, making new girls, killing the shitty ones, knocking over trees, talking to kids, and so on and so on. Because snow-concubines don't do too well in the heat, even the good ones didn't last too long. As the seasons cycled, so did the workload.

At home, the children covered the trees with decorations and stuff because why not. And Sergei, true to his word, went from home to home and wherever he saw a tree, he would leave a gift (usually a turnip or possibly an amusingly shaped rock of some sort) to honor his eternal debt to the children. He used his snow concubines to help him find and deliver all these wonderful presents.

And he was forever known as Deyt Maroz, deyt being Russian for “debt”, maroz does not have a direct English translation, the best I can muster is “pulsing forked demon cock”.

Please read, charity fundraiser a user emailed me about.

2010-12-03T15:07:00.000-08:00

A reader of the site sent me an email about a charity event he was hosting, I promised to post something on the site about it but because of finals and delays among guest artists I couldn't update in time. So check this out:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Penny Arcade Forum Members Hold Grudge Match for Child’s Play Charity
Joe K and HLPRMNKY will fight for their respective hospitals. Matches will be shout-casted by EG.iNcontrol, one of the best professional Starcraft 2 players in the world, and Trus, the premier tournament shoutcaster of Starcraft Arcadia.
November 29, 2010 – What started off as a playful back and forth about each other’s inadequacies as Starcraft 2 players has escalated into a Child's Play fundraising grudge match.
On December 4th, 2010 at 9PM EST/6PM PST, EG.iNcontrol and Trus will be shout-casting a Rumble in the Bronze between Joe K, representing Abington Memorial Hospital, PA and HLPRMNKY, representing the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital.
All proceeds will go to Child's Play; the lion's share will go to the winner's hospital and the loser's hospital will receive the rest. For more information please visit the following sources:
Battle in the Bronze Trailers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoHvSBYGXEs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y48b4RcnhQs

Donation Page
http://pennyarcadeforums.chipin.com/childs-play

Battle in the Bronze Thread
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=132562

Stream
http://www.own3d.tv/live/5043

Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Penny-Arcade-Forum-Rumble-in-the-Bronze/111271298942019

Promotional Assets
http://www.boss-fight.com/rumble_in_the_bronze.zip

Hosted and planned by members of the Penny Arcade forums.
###
Contact:
Joe Kisela
PA, USA
E-mail: jkisela@gmail.com
Ph: 215-694-9082

California... what the fuck?

2010-11-03T07:43:00.000-07:00

Proposition 19 has failed, marijuana remains illegal to cultivate and sell for recreational use. That's not to say it won't be done, drugs are not hard at all to come by in the United States. So the people who want to be smoking weed, will be smoking weed, the state will still be spending a fortune to find the people selling and growing, it will still be trying and incarcerating these people, and it'll still be broke. The black market will remain vibrant, healthy, and will continue to find funding in illicit drug sales.

Great.

Last night, I had a pretty stupid argument with someone on tumblr, about whether or not marijuana consumption was a fundamental right, or a human right--I think I used the terms interchangeably, but there's probably a contextual difference that I didn't bother meditating on. I don't think there's really a definitive list of natural human rights, or fundamental rights, since the whole notion of "rights" is an unnatural construct. But assuming there is, and I think most of us are compelled to say there ought to be, a set of such right, I would definitely say drug use qualifies.

A question I received on tumblr:

"HOW MUCH DOPE DO I HAVE TO SMOKE TO BE UNABLE TO COMPREHEND SIMPLE SHIT? I FIGURED YOU WOULD KNOW."

This question probably came from one of the followers of the person I was arguing with. The claim is, my probing of "why isn't drug use a fundamental right?" (answered with, to effect, "because it's a recreational desire," to which I further probed, "why is that sufficient to say it isn't a right?")was irrational, and the answer to the question is so obvious, I must be high to not intuit it.

Anyway, my response:

What simple shit?

I’m not a regular pot smoker, but I still think it’s a valuable right that people ought to have. And why not? Why should a person not have the right to determine what substances they want to consume, if they have knowledge of the risks and consequences? Isn’t that an assertion of our basic human right to autonomy?
Paternalistic legislation comes in two flavors (well maybe more, but two that I can think of right now), and that’s prohibitive and informative. Informative legislation is like putting warning labels on cigarettes or requiring calorie counts be posted next menu items in fast food joints—the information is available, but the government doesn’t believe we’re ever going to look it up. Fair. I don’t have a problem with this sort of thing because all that they’re doing is improving out decision-making power.

But then there’s prohibitive laws—the prohibition of alcohol, of transfats, of drugs in general, obscenity laws, etc.—where the government plainly asserts that we are incapable of making the right decision, and it will do so for us. I think this is bullshit, I think, as long as we’re not hurting other people, it ought to be our right to do what we please.

So by this argument, smoking pot is a fundamental right. Or a manifestation of a fundamental right. And I believe that.

Now what simple shit am I not comprehending?

The original argument was far more asinine, I won't delve into its details because they don't make any sense. The point is, I'm pretty disappointed this morning in the step Californians have decided to take and I'm confident this will set the nation back a good decade in the war against the War on Drugs.

nyoonch, nyoonch, nyoonch, smoking weed, smoking weed

2010-11-02T19:27:00.000-07:00

Thirty minutes before polls close in California; I don't know shit about the gubernatorial race, and most Californians probably don't either (if they're anything like us apathetic, jaded, lazy New Yorkers). If Prop 19 passes, as all sensible people hope it will, the sale, possession, and cultivation of weed will be legal in the state--subject, of course, to regulation and taxation--and the nation as a whole will take one short step towards sanity.

The benefits are many and great; a new revenue source for the financially emaciated state, millions saved on prison and prosecution expenses, reduction in police and enforcement costs--the state might just bank enough money to salvage its public education system into one that could rival Mississippi's. Oh, and lets not forget that whole incalculable liberty gain; another right secured by the people, men and women, unjustly imprisoned, seized from their families, friends, and communities, set free (all noble characters, surely). And legalizing weed nationally could potentially undercut 60% of Mexican drug cartel income--10,000 people a year are killed in Mexico's ongoing drug war, if you needed any sort of idea of how significant this could be. California itself could have a strong impact, based on its population size and proximity to the border. Hell, if federal fears materialize and Californian weed starts saturating the American market (and why not?), this might actually be a significant blow to Mexican organized crime.

But is the road ahead actually all pot smoke and rainbows? Or will big, bad federal government take a shit on this parade?

Attorney General Eric Holder promises to vigorously enforce federal law in the sunshine state.

I'm just going to go ahead and quote that blog right there:

In 2008, according to the FBI's numbers, there were about 848,000 marijuana arrests in the United States. The feds accounted for less than 1 percent of them. The DEA has about 5,500 special agents nationwide, compared to nearly 70,000 local police officers in California. It certainly can make trouble, but it simply does not have the resources to bust a significant percentage of the state's marijuana offenders now, let alone after every adult is allowed to grow his own pot. If the DEA could not block access to medical marijuana under Bush or Obama, what chance will it have after the drug is legal for recreational purposes as well? Not much, says Stephen Gutwillig, California director of the Drug Policy Alliance:
(DOUBLE BLOCK QUOTE):
Under our system of government, states get to decide state law. There is nothing in the United States Constitution that requires that the State of California criminalize anything under state law. If California decides to legalize marijuana through the passage of Proposition 19, nothing in the Constitution stands in the way. In fact, Congress has explicitly left to the states wide discretion to legislate independently in the area of drug control and policy. States do not need to march in lockstep with the federal government or even agree with federal law.

The reality is that the federal government has neither the resources nor the political will to undertake sole -- or even primary -- enforcement responsibility for low level marijuana offenses in California. Well over 95% of all marijuana arrests in this country are made by state and local law enforcement. The federal government may criminalize marijuana, but it can't force states to do so, and it can't require states to enforce federal law.

The federal government can't force California to enforce federal law. It can't direct the actions of state police, and it certainly doesn't have enough DEA agents to make a dent in what's coming.

Though Congress could always... cut California's highway funding or something. Or leverage some other federal program to force them to comply; but if that would require another ballot initiative, it may be difficult to find a program that could mobilize a significant enough portion of the Californian electorate to face heel turn on the issue.

If your IQ is in the triple digits, Marvel does not want you writing their movies.

2010-07-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

You can suspend your disbelief, and invest yourself in a narrative if what you're surrendering is somehow enumerated in a cohesive way. For instance, the basic premise of Inception is that people can enter one another's dreams--alright, we accept that, and the particulars that follow seem reasonable or rational given that initial acceptance. In Terminator, a robot time travels from the future in the beginning of the film, and that's really been the foundation of the series. While I didn't see the fourth, I am aware it has robots doing a hell of a lot more than time traveling, but whatever abilities they do have are in line with the basic rationale of the canon.

This is the problem with comic books, but adaptations and reboots can adapt--though, for some reason they rarely do. To clarify: Batman is a millionaire gone mad and he's waging a personal war against Gotham city's criminal underworld. There doesn't seem to be much sense for him to fight aliens or magical creatures, as that would incongruous to both the themes of his character, his journey, and his catharsis, but also to the world of Gotham city. Gotham isn't a battleground for the superpowered, it's a relatively grounded reality. We walk in, we accept that there are people who put on costumes and do all sorts of wacky shit, and then we proceed as normal. The plot can go on to have emotional resonance and be meaningful and interesting.

Superman is a humanoid alien who has every fucking power in the catalog. He fights aliens and gods and all sorts of silly shit. Well, see, crossovers sell so lets team him up with DC's other iconic big seller, Batman... aannnd... whoops, shit just got stupid. Real stupid. Iterate some more (Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern...) and we've got Batman fighting Greek gods, superpowered alien warlords, wizards, hyper-intelligent apes, the Westboro Baptist Church... whatever.

This is was a severe problem in Iron Man 2. Marvel's writing staff, which fucked it up on oh so many levels... missed the boat on assembling that Avengers storyline. It was absolutely tacked on instead of intelligently integrated. The original Avengers comic was scrapped together from these separate storylines haphazardly, because comic book readers don't really have a ton of discretion and Marvel certainly wasn't going to spend the money to reboot all of the characters and establish a cohesive universe when a simple team-up was a far faster cash-in. But with the movies, made decades later (that's many many many many hours of hindsight), there aren't any excuses. When Tony Stark makes a new element, or rediscovers it based on his father's designs, why can't it be the shit Captain America's shield is made out of? What if the Captain America project was partly his father's work? What if some moral qualms that he had with it resulted in his seclusion and alienation of his son? Suddenly this nonsensical collage of a story ideas begins to mesh into a cogent narrative. Hell, we have a reason to be invested in this whole nonsensical SHIELD garbage because it has real emotional stakes for our protagonist and even future relationships, such as Tony Stark and Captain America's, begin to develop in subtle ways.

This is why the Thor movie, as this article describes, is fucking moronic. Between Iron Man and its sequel, and the Incredible Hulk movie, the three existing films in the Avengers canon, not once do we see aliens or gods. And yet here we are; instead of some tech-powered, deluded, crazy-but-benevolent human Thor (which in itself would be a tremendous source of dramatic tension, if he were, for example (and this is straight from the ridged insides of my ass), a SHIELD scientist gone crazy off of an updated or modified Captain America serum, outfitted with experimental tech, who needs to be taken down but whose aid is invaluable in conquering some greater threat...), we get a humanoid alien from a planet inhabited by Norse gods.

I'd just like to say, if you yourself are a writer and if you absorb even one thing from these rants, humans as aliens was a concept that was long outdated by 1970. Star Trek got away with it because they had a church choir budget, but what the fuck is Marvel thinking?

But back to the point of this tremendous ass-pull:

Could you imagine, Terminator 5: John Connor, fleeing from a pack of raging robots, stumbles into a crystal cavern where he meets Gaia, the spirit of the Earth. She tells him the machines, running on gasoline and seal blood, are poisoning the planet and that he, and four other scrappy freedom fighters, must band together and harness the power of the elements to destroy the techno menace. Each is given a ring... fire, water, wind, earth, and heart... and when their powers combine, they summon a cool, green-mullet wearin' dude who appeals to the 8-14 year-old demographic, who defeats the evil machines. I'm pretty sure everyone in the theater would drop their popcorn and say "what the fuck is this shit?!"

We checked our disbelief-coat at the door, guys, we don't have... a second, under-coat of bullshit detection that we can just hand you again. I honestly thought this was some cardinal rule of writing... like if you even took that joke of a high school creative writing elective, you know where you had to hear all your classmates' fruity poetry about how sad and lonely and boring and suburban those assholes were but they still managed to look up at you from their banal narcissism and criticize your shit for being too experimental but really they all just have lumps of rotten dogshit where their brains should be... if you took that fucking class, suspension of disbelief, universe consistency, that's day 1 stuff.

Directors, stop writing!

2010-07-19T21:43:00.000-07:00

Guys, it's okay to collaborate. Hire a writer, why not? They know what they're doing... sometimes, we hope, it's their job! It's their job! Let them do it! You've got good vision but you're just piling so much onto your own shoulders, jack-of-all-trades, master of none.

It keeps coming back to this. Over and over.

Heavy Rain is an awesome game. However, there were parts that I did not like. I will list them briefly because they are relatively simple points:

- Plot holes! Plot holes so big we could fuck in 'em. All of us, I mean. You, me, and the site's three other readers. I heard some rumors that they might be bandaged up in upcoming DLC (which may no longer even be upcoming), but dammit, the story should be self contained. You wouldn't stand for that shit in a movie, why a game?

- Bullshit! The character I was controlling strolls into a garage, under my control, approaches a mechanic. Press the analogue stick right and swing it around to hand him your receipt for pickup. Why? This is so minute and pointless. And worse yet, I can't skip it. If I want to replay the particularly awesome action sequences, I've got to sit through blah blah blah bullshit.

- Walking isn't this cumbersome in real life. Hold R2 and the directional button to walk. Holding the directional button on its own pulls the camera and the character's focus into a particular direction. I never really used this feature; holding R2 felt superfluous and the characters walk like Sherman tanks. Stop that, Quantic Dream.

Otherwise, Heavy Rain is a phenomenal piece of software. It's innovative in a way that could really impact the way many other games are played. When there are no lives and your characters can die, and the game proceeds, suddenly there are real dramatic stakes. Scenes are tense; I was pulled to the edge of my seat, mashing buttons frantically in the midst of fights and action sequences. I was invested, something I don't think I've ever felt in a game before.

And some of the button sequences were brilliant. A character tries to uncomfortably crawl through an irregular obstacle, so your fingers are forced into awkward positions to make him move. You can relate, in a tangible, analogous sense to the plight you see on screen.

All cut scenes, from Metal Gear to Final Fantasy, should play like this. Your characters aren't standing still and talking endlessly, like in some Bioware snoozer, your choices extend to actual actions that occurring dynamically. You give a shit because you have varying degree of material influence on how the story unfolds, and the choices you're bombarded with are varied in scope and delivery. Some are blink and you miss 'em, some are just a matter of slow, methodical, thoroughness.

And the story... yes, it's pretty weak when you look back, but it was hard not to be enthralled while playing it. I felt like I had so much control, so much of what I learned was up to me, that I never stopped to scrutinize it until the last few scenes. It was refreshing to play through a videogame story that didn't have me pumping aliens or robots or animated skeletons full of lead or steel; it was a relatively grounded narrative with characters who, despite their often cobbled motivations, seemed relatable and likeable in a very human way.

I really hope that developers are taking notes. Not only is this a successful experiment in what sort of subject matter a game can tackle, but a demonstration of innovative control potential. Damn good game.

Inception: A Case of Poor Conception

2010-07-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

Spoilers Ahead:

I saw Inception this weekend with some of my film friends; they loved it, I thought it was decent. That is to say, for a blockbuster. Placed side by side with Transformers, Twilight, or Harry Potter, Inception is a very decent, relatively intelligent, piece of cinema. The visuals were outstanding, the fight choreography unique and dynamic.

However, examined as a narrative work in the greater literary tradition of story telling, I feel there were many places that the film fell absolutely flat.

After watching the film, I'm left with a lot of really basic questions:

1. Who is Leonardo DiCaprio?
Leo is a top notch dream-spy haunted by visions of his dead wife which manifest in the overlap between his dreamscape and his target's. She attempts to foil his missions and cause him harm, as she embodies his guilt for her death and reflects his self-destruction.

Alright... but... were they both dream-spies? Or did Leo start dream-spying after her death? How did he get into the whole dream-exploration business? We never really come to understand who she is, as only one other character seems to have ever had any interaction with her, that being Michael Caine, but we know nothing as to the nature of their relationship. The entire foundation behind his drive, what propels him through the narrative, is presented in an aloof, imprecise manner and I'm left with only an abstract idea of who he is.

2. Who is Joseph Gordon-Levitt?
Joe is Leo's right hand man. He's confident, focused, and experienced. He's there to save Leo's ass and make sure everything goes as it has to. His personality is... pretty much like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator (the Terminator was a robot, mind you).

...sooooo... how did Joe meet Leo? Where is Joe from? Is he also on the run from the law? Why is he doing this? Why is he taking such tremendous risks to aid Leo? What are his motivations?

3. Who is Michael Caine?
So he's either Leo's father or his father in-law, as he's the grandfather or Leo's kids. I don't understand why this remains ambiguous. He taught Leo everything he knows about dream-exploration but disapproves of his using it for corporate espionage. He introduces Leo to Ellen Page, a student of his whom he claims has the capacity to be the best dream-architect yet.

Now it's unclear whether Caine invented dream-exploration or is just really good at it. Joe explains, during Ellen's training sequence, that this dream stuff is utilized by the military for training purposes. Is Caine ex-military? Is he some guy who latched onto the technology and did something completely unique with it? Did the military take the technology from him?

What the fuck does he teach?

4. Who is Ellen Page?
What the fuck is she studying? Even though Caine is the dream-diving master and Page is his best student, she's never even heard of the process. So that can't be what he's teaching. Is she a psych major then? I think it was Caine or Joe or Leo who said you need a good imagination to be a good architect... which makes it even less clear what the hell Ellen is doing.

I should note that someone pointed out to me that there are layouts and designs behind Caine in the scene in his office, implying that Page is literally an architect. But whether these are designs of buildings or dream-construction practice or whothefuckknowswhat, is never explicitly stated.

Not that it matters, since her role in the movie is more or less limited to narrating Leo's motivations because, as all writers know, a character should never merely announce how they feel ("I FEEL GUILTY FOR MY WIFE'S DEATH!"). So instead Ellen does it for him.

You may be noticing a trend: none of the characters actually have any dimension. They're just shallow plot devices meant to help Leo achieve his mission and get his shit together... which he does, as he confronts his wife in a climactic scene that feels unearned and insubstantial.

Speaking of his mission:

5. What is the deal with dream-exploration?
By the end of Ellen's training montage--the sole narrative purpose of which is to explain to us, the audience, how the film's central mechanic works--we should know everything there is to know about the process. We don't. Every five minutes, this dream bullshit is expounded upon with new contrivances that are contradicted ten minutes later.

You can't possibly delve three dreams deep!
We'll do it.

Nothing can make someone that unconscious!
Well, except this right here.

If you die three dreams deep, your consciousness goes into wacky town.
Well, unless you die in wacky town... then you'll just wake up.

Also, the rules of wacky town are absolutely arbitrary. Leo's first time there, his consciousness ages fifty years, his second... nada. Though Ken Watanabe's character does. I have no idea why the inconsistency. We've never witnessed any sort of time-skip dream mechanic.

The feeling of falling wakes the dreamer up, allowing the explorers to return to the real world. The drug they use to knock Cillian Murphy out doesn't affect the inner ear, so they can still be waken up by falling. Simple enough. But get a load of this: if you're three dreams deep (that is, a dream within a dream within a dream), the second-level dreamer incarnation of you can fall, and that'll pull you out of the third dream.
Does that make sense? There is a symmetry between physical you and dream-you and dream-you and second-dream-you. If you fall in real life, you cease to dream. If dream you falls in the dream, you cease to secondary-dream and you 'awake' into the primary dream.
This makes absolutely no sense as the dreamer's physical self isn't falling, their actual inner ear isn't being stimulated in this manner. So what does it matter if the drug impairs inner ear function? The explorers' dreamscape versions retain some manner of physicality, it seems, and the operate within the physics of the dream. That is, whatever your actual organs are doing doesn't matter, as (and try to bear with me here), tertiary you can feel the sensation of falling, but secondary and primary you do not, yet you all share the same physical ear.

The physics of the real world also affect the dreamscape. If your body is tumbling, the gravity of the dream-world shifts. Fair enough. But if you're two dreams deep, and in the first dream, your body spins, gravity will shift in the secondary dream world regardless of what your physical (non-dream) self is doing. The sole purpose of this mechanic is to provide justification for some awesome fight choreography, but it doesn't make any sense. All the dreamscapes are arbitrary constructions, subject to the sensations of the physical body... but why are sub-dreams affected by the illusory physicality of a dream body? And moreover, why is it limited? In one scene, the characters' actual bodies are still, their primary dream bodies are spinning, their secondary dream bodies experience shifting gravity, but everything is normal for their tertiary selves.
That's contradictory. If tumbling in the primary makes the secondary kooky, then why doesn't secondary kookiness have any effect on the tertiary?
Sorry if this whole rant's devolved into absolute convolution, but the mechanic itself is just a sloppy pile of bullshit.

Further, what can and can't you do in the dream realm?

In one scene, Joe is shooting at some random bad guys with an automatic rifle he conjured (note, these bad guys populate Cillian's mind as a defense mechanism, providing fodder for action sequences that are both cool and kind of pointless). Tom Hardy approaches him, tells him to stop being a pussy, and conjures a grenade launcher. In a later scene, Joe is wrestling with a dream-bad guy for a gun. Why couldn't he just conjure one? Why couldn't he conjure attack dogs to just deal with the bad guys so he didn't have to even worry about it? Attack eagles?
Also, if the defense mechanism is the subconcious' awareness that the subject is dreaming and his dreams are being invaded, and it can summon such out-of-place objects as a big 'ol train in the middle of the city... why can't it summon totally weird shit? Dragons, or giant robots, or... Terminators...

These are elements of the dream mechanic that are just kind of underwhelming. At one point, in the secondary dreamscape, Leo tricks Cillian into aiding him and consciously entering the tertiary dreamscape. All the dreamscapes typically have to look convincingly real because the subject shouldn't know they're dreaming, but here he clearly does. So why are our heroes transported to a snowy military base (which Metal Gear fans will surely recognize as Shadow Moses) and not... fuckin' rainbow road crazy town? You assholes are mega-dreaming and I'm watching this shit in IMAX, I want to feel like I'm tripping on the kind of acid Jesus would deal.
Honestly, all of the mechanics of dreaming seem like contrived ass-pulls. Dream time moves ten times faster than real time and this is compounded in sub-dreams also the subconscious mind manifests its defenses as perfectly rationally planted extras and there are safes that your brains fills with secrets also if you get hurt in a dream you really feel it and time moves only linearly and while your subconscious populates the landscape it only does so with objects encountered in reality and not strange whatthefucks.

And the end... there's a phrase I heard recently that I really like, "deep as dirty water". The ambiguity of the ending, which I wasn't invested enough to even appreciate, was a really cheap way to make the film deceptively deep. Suddenly, all of the inconsistencies and flaws in the script could be hand-waved away by a 'twist' everyone expects from the first scene.

Look... you will probably love this movie. Everyone will probably love this movie. This is probably the smartest shit you've seen in a movie theater in ages, so I suppose that's worth something. But it's not a brilliant movie. It's a brilliant looking movie, for sure, but I think Nolan, like many other directors, would be better off directing someone else's script for a change. Often directors' own talent is overlooked or marred by their reluctance to work on anyone's material but their own, just look at Lucas and Shyamalan as examples. Or at least give it a second draft, please.

Yep, game journalists still idiots

2010-07-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

I read Kotaku pretty regularly just to see what's on the horizon. I don't play many games anymore, but it's summer break and I've got time for one or two. Besides, old habits die hard. Anyway, as of the last day or so, writers on the site have been periodically shitting out editorials regarding Roger Ebert's acknowledging that videogames may very well become something that somehow resembles art...

The trouble with flat out saying, "No, Kotaku, Ocarina of Time is not a work of art, you're stupid, stop it STOP IT NOW," is that the definition of the word has become so subjective. According to the dictionary, anything and everything is a work of art:

art
1 /ɑrt/ Show Spelled[ahrt] Show IPA
–noun
1.
the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.
What the fuck does that mean?
2.
the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria; works of art collectively, as paintings, sculptures, or drawings: a museum of art; an art collection.
So any film, from Citizen Kane to 2 Fast 2 Furious is a work of art.
3.
a field, genre, or category of art: Dance is an art.
4.
the fine arts collectively, often excluding architecture: art and architecture.
5.
any field using the skills or techniques of art: advertising art; industrial art.
6.
(in printed matter) illustrative or decorative material: Is there any art with the copy for this story?
So my kitty calendar is a work of art.
7.
the principles or methods governing any craft or branch of learning: the art of baking; the art of selling.
8.
the craft or trade using these principles or methods.
9.
skill in conducting any human activity: a master at the art of conversation.
10.
a branch of learning or university study, esp. one of the fine arts or the humanities, as music, philosophy, or literature.
11.
arts,
a.
( used with a singular verb ) the humanities: a college of arts and sciences.
b.
( used with a plural verb ) liberal arts.
12.
skilled workmanship, execution, or agency, as distinguished from nature.
13.
trickery; cunning: glib and devious art.
14.
studied action; artificiality in behavior.
15.
an artifice or artful device: the innumerable arts and wiles of politics.
16.
Archaic . science, learning, or scholarship.

Bravo has a reality show dedicated to discovering the "next great artist"; how fucked up is that? How many tortured geniuses do you figure are hungry for the reality TV limelight? Furthermore, like many reality shows, the winners are pretty much cherry picked by the producers (which is why I figure the airhead with the big tits hasn't been eliminated yet). Even if the contest is a legitimate one, can we expect these douchebag, industry-autistic (because art has become an industry) panelists to really determine who's the best of the bunch when many great artists weren't even recognized in their own time, by their own contemporaries? I know it's just a fuckin' TV show but the more we think about what a farce it is, the more we realize what art isn't, the more capable we are of coalescing what it is from all the vaguery.

Lets shelve that "art is everything with an aesthetic element" definition for a second. We're just going to ignore it. It's not to say it's untrue, but often the literal definition of a word as it appears in a dictionary and its use in parlance can be pretty dissonant. So we're putting it on our brain-shelf.

Okay, now that we've shelved that, we're going to whip out our shitbox. Item by item, we're going to take things from the art pile and toss 'em in the shitbox. We'll try not to be too controversial about it.

Furry Vengeance, starring Brendan Fraser? Shitbox. Twilight series of books and films? Shitbox. I'd add Harry Potter too, but some of you'd piss your pants, so we'll leave it in. Halo series? Shitbox. Transformers? Shitbox. Hannah Montana? Shitbox. Bratz dolls? Shitbox.

We're just gonna take anything that we can reasonably assume was made purely for the profit of the product, and just toss it in there (we'll be liberal about it though, there'll be an appeals process later in the game). Back to the game:

IKEA office chair? Shitbox. Curtains? Shitbox. White coffee mug with Toyota logo? Shitbox. My ASUS EEE? Shitbox. My old, fat, Sony TV? Shitbox. Lets toss the PlayStation in there too. My electric fan, the shorts I'm wearing, my Batman t-shirt from Target... shitbox, shitbox, shitbox.

New category: anything that we can reasonably assume was made with a purely functionalist motive. Can-openers, light bulbs, tires. A product can be ingeniously constructed, but we're not going to call it art because it wasn't... wasn't... wasn't...

meant to be expressive? Wasn't some unique manner of expression? Doesn't exist to, at least partially, convey some fragment of the artist's identity?

We'll leave Starry Night and the Scream in the pile, a whole bunch of novels too... commissioned paintings, old school Renaissance portraiture is contentious, but I think it'd be just too damn controversial to shitbox it. I'd shitbox Legend of Zelda, all those fucking games are practically identical in pace and structure. I don't think Uncharted 2 is a work of art either; it's elegantly constructed and resembles a medium that often conveys works of artistic merit (film, as that Kotaku writer pointed out), but we don't really see any unique voice or solid message. I'd dump the Indiana Jones movies in the shitbox, especially the new one. Star Wars, Crash Bandicoot, Batman... shitbox.

And hey, I like Crash Bandicoot and Batman's been pretty okay in the past. We can like stuff and still not call it art. I like Millionaire Matchmaker on Bravo (fucking awesome show), but I wouldn't call it art. I think Final Fantasy VII is a good game, wouldn't call that art either.

I believe games can be art, I believe some are art, but I also believe the vast, overwhelming majority are complete diarrhea. Absolute, abject diarrhea. I don't think Ebert was wrong in his initial assertion that they weren't, or at least I don't think he was necessarily coming from an ignorant vantage point. When the biggest selling titles are Halo, Modern Warfare, and Gears of War, those become the face of the industry and they have as much emotional or intellectual depth, as much poignancy, as a Michael Bay film. Games like ICO and Psychonauts, real auteur products, are few and far between and they sell poorly. The only real hope for that micro-genre is digital distribution, where risk taking doesn't necessarily spell bankruptcy.

I guess what really bothers me is that we have this coven of sanctimonious, pretentious shits, sporting liberal arts degrees that could've been cut out of cereal boxes, claiming to be journalists while dedicating their lives to writing about toys and they're so happy to jump on Ebert for making a statement that comes from a sensible standpoint. Sure, some games are art, but that's more a fortunate accident, that the people in the creative seats could even sneak genius under the noses of their corporate masters, than a feature of the medium. I could believe that the average gamer is above average intelligence, were there such a statistic, but I would absolutely not not believe that the average gamer is well-read. I would not believe that the average game developer is well-read. Hell, if they were, consumers would exercise way more discretion in the shit they buy (what the fuck was Kingdom Hearts even about?), and the games we see hitting store shelves wouldn't have narratives that felt like they were composed by fourth graders (Modern Warfare series, Assassin's Creed (in fact, anything by Ubisoft), Final Fantasy series, etc.).

Roger Ebert is an intelligent, often witty, and respected film critic. I may not always agree with him, but he deserves the benefit of the doubt. He sure as shit doesn't need to be 'pardoned' by some game journalist, especially when most games have as much substance as the blandest pornography.

...is this my least intelligible rant yet? I'm tired and frustrated and I'm getting ready to the hit gym soooo... maybe if I give enough of a shit I'll try for a second draft.

America can be a scary place.

2010-06-15T11:24:00.001-07:00

I've been watching the E3 press conferences unfurl on TV. There's been a lot of genuinely cool shit on display, a lot of casual shovelware (Good dog, Skittles! Skittles, that tickles!), and a bunch of surprises. But I think it was the EA presentation that made me think... maybe a bit too much.

A bit of history:
On September 11th, 2001, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked in terrorist operations by Al Qaeda, a trans-national terrorist organization. Thousands died as the tower complex was completely demolished in the first successful attack against the nation on its own soil since Pearl Harbor. American citizens were immediately consumed by fear and rage and the Bush administration, which had run on a platform of minimal foreign involvement, suddenly found itself obliged to respond to this call to action.

Unlike Pearl Harbor, where Japan attacked the United States, this was not the aggressive effort of any particular nation. The terrorists themselves came from a variety nations, among them Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, funded and trained by many others. However, our military, having been effectively formed towards the needs of the Second World War, and shaped by the Cold War, is geared pretty much solely towards nation-to-nation conflict. Our cultural milieu also tends to phrase wars in these terms, so someone had to be invaded to appease the demand of the electorate.

Now, attacking Saudi Arabia wouldn't have made much sense. They're an economic ally, and while, certainly, Osama Bin Laden had close ties with particular members of the Saudi royal family, they, like the other Arabian kingdoms (like the UAE), are an enemy of Al Queada. Likewise, Iraq, a secular totalitarian regime, was an enemy of the terrorist group. The predominantly Shia Iran was also a target of the radical Sunni Al Queada. These nations, most directly threatened, also stood as potential valuable military allies as they possessed, and some continue to possess, vast amounts of valuable military intelligence on the organization.

Afghanistan was not a novice when it came to conflict. A previous war destabilized Soviet nationalism and fueled intense dissent in even small cities, like Samara, in a nation that had previously never tolerated it. The Soviet loss shaped the Islamic guerrilla renaissance, demonstrating that a small number of people could take on and defeat a super power. Further victories against the West, like the defeat of the US in Somalia in 1993, and active combat on European soil during the Yugoslavian dissolution through the 90's (Muslim populations suffered some of the worst atrocities in that war and elite guerrilla units, arriving from the Middle East, were critical in their defense, ultimately sparking increased NATO intervention, for fear of increased radical Islamic presence on the continent) aided the cause of global, trans-national militarism.

Of course, the US invasion of Afghanistan did little to further American efforts to destabilize terrorist strength. A virtual standstill for nearly a decade, it has only further united and radicalized terrorist opposition. In fact, it was largely the abysmal failure of this invasion that prompted the Bush administration to invade Iraq, to divert attention from the Afghani quagmire. After all, the first Gulf War was quick and dirty and launched Bush Sr's approval ratings into the high 90's. Americans wanted war, and this was a means onto some manner of satisfaction (a road that'd be paved with lies and misrepresentations). (Of course, this wasn't without a ton of internal fallout. The blatant deception and manipulation of intelligence data to make WMD claims made our 30+ intelligence agencies look absolutely inept. The National Intelligence Estimate, a summary that reflects collected base intel among the US's 30+ intelligence agencies, in 2007 demonstrated a refusal among agencies to submit to the Bush administration's desire to designate Iran as a nuclear threat and declared that Iran had neither a nuclear program nor the capability, an act of internal dissent.)

The whole discussion of Iran as it relates to US foreign policy and American foreign wars is a complicated beast in itself, and isn't the point here. The point, Afghanistan is and was a total shit show. It is not a good war, it is not a noble war, it is not a worthwhile war. To see EA launch an Afghanistan game, where you the player gets to pick a side and have a rousing skirmish in your favorite Aghani warzone just felt kind of... oddly morbid.

They announcement of the EA Gun Club was comparably... weird. It's not that war games can't be fun or interesting; World War II games are kinda cool, futuristic combat's pretty sweet, fictional covert ops stuff is often fun. The difference, though, is the narrative being propagated. As gray as WWII was, and black and white our views of it tend to be, our mythologizing of it doesn't really shape our views of current events or foreign policy as much as these newer conflicts. An Afghanistan game confounds fiction with reality and glorifies militarism in a conflict where such an attitude has been ruinous to the health and prosperity of the United States. The Gun Club, in its language and tone, has similar hawkish overtones... it almost felt like EA is trying to write a very particular cultural narrative.

I understand that there's nothing nefarious going on in EA studios... game devs, game writers and producers, they tend not to be the most worldly or literate people. I say this as someone with several dozen game cases scattered across my coffee table. It's innocent but also kind of irresponsible. The advantage that games have is that, because they're not taken as seriously as an entertainment medium, like film and television, they're not frequently the targets of intellectual criticism. I think, knowing how wide their influence is, how many kids and young adults play these games, the sort of influence they'll have on policy in the future, they have a particular responsibility to be intelligent about these sorts of things. That goes beyond "honoring the soldiers", a phrase they tend to drop every now and again, but honoring the reality.

The Star Wars Effect or Why I don't like Jean-Pierre Jeunet films.

2010-05-27T09:45:00.000-07:00

Star Wars has a tremendous following that spans over three decades worth of adults and children. Tons of novels and games and comics expand on the film's universe, populating it with peripheral planets and plot lines and characters (largely often redundant and absurd, like Dragon Ball villains who keep ratcheting up power level possibilities). And the toys, fuck, the toys...

Why? As a kid, I grew up watching reruns of old 1960's and 70's pulp scifi cartoons, like the Herculoids Space Ghost, as well as movies and shows that are decidedly 'post-Star Wars'. So when I finally did see Star Wars, at age eleven or twelve, I was entertained but not amazed. My parents had never seen it either, so there was never any legacy-appreciation as you'd more likely find in an American household. There was no hype, no mythos. Star Wars came and went out of my kid mind like the GI Joe cartoon, Sega Genesis, or roller blades.

But there are people out there who are absolutely devoted. Adults, even. Objectively, taking the series for what it is, I don't really understand. The new trilogy is unequivocally terrible. Out of the original, we have a decent movie, a good movie, and a pretty-okay-I-guess movie. The Godfather trilogy, proportionally, has way more hits, but you don't see people flocking to convention halls dressed as old timey Italian gangsters. I'd go to a Taxi Driver convention if there was one, but not even that film's worthy of the Star Wars esteem.

So what the hell is it?

I think Star Wars is loved for the same reason Avatar is. I'd even go so far as to say the films are pretty similar in a somewhat abstract sense (the original Star Wars trilogy is way, way, waaaaaay better; but lets be honest, they're playing the same game). You've got pretty standard, canned stories, radicalized on a science fiction backdrop with cutting edge special effects. People love the shit out of Avatar and that movie is trickling pig diarrhea. What they're marveling at isn't the quality of the narrative, it's the novelty of the movie-watching experience.

2001: A Space Odyssey, took me four tries to watch it all the way through. I kept falling asleep. I think the film is disjointed as all hell, paced so poor I wonder if the script ever went through more than a first draft. You've got, effectively, four or so tangentially related mini-plots, only one that actually has any emotional stakes, one that's half an hour of sllllooooooowwwwwww ddddrrrriiiiifffftttttiiinnnng to classical music with some characters you'll never see again, and then an ending so abstruse you need to have read the book to get it. What the fuck? But people swear by it. Hordes of film buffs will argue to no end that it's a masterpiece of cinema, an incomparable work of excellence.

Why? Well, I think, it's because, thirty years ago, it was something people had never seen. Many initial reviews were terrible:

Andrew Sarris, a critic and film theorist generally “more concerned with the director’s attitude toward the spectacle than the spectacle itself,” was irked by Kubrick’s detached style of directing. In his initial review for the Village Voice on April 11, 1968, he dismissed 2001 as “a thoroughly uninteresting failure and the most damning demonstration yet of Stanley Kubrick’s inability to tell a story coherently and with a consistent point of view.”

But the film captivated audiences and began to build momentum within the less cerebral, public sphere of interest. It became a phenomenon for its sensory novelty. A sober mind fuck for the pre-pre-pre-YouTube generation. Now its legacy precedes it; for someone like me, living in the 'post-Space Odyssey' world (and I keep using that sort of phrasing to imply that filmmakers and artists have built upon that foundation, and have had their work built upon as well) I can watch it and... recognize its technical merit, but not really appreciate it on a deeper level.

Avatar. It's the same situation again, only Cameron set out to really test the limitations of the sensory-novelty idea by investing all his space age technology on a script a fifth grader could've written in crayon. And he fuckin' did it. The film was so successful, made so much money, that its investors are wiping their asses with hundreds as we speak. It even scored a few Oscar nominations, putting it in league with such masterpieces of cinema as Crash and Shakespeare in Love.

In thirty years, people may very well be going to Avatar conventions, dressing their kids up like little lion people, reflecting on the splendor and groundbreaking nature of the trilogy (or sextology or however many films the franchise eventually sees).

But this rant's supposed be about Jean-Pierre Jeunet and why I think his movies suck. Now, to be fair, I've only seen three of his films, but they turned out to all be the same fucking thing, so maybe it's just a recent trend with him.

I must've been thirteen when I saw Amélie and I actually thought it was pretty interesting. The whimsical narrative, the elastic and effervescent characters, the beautifully shot scenery and distinct Jeunet visual style.

Then, a few months ago, I watched A Very Long Engagement. It was the second Jeunet films I'd ever seen, nine years after Amélie. A Very Long Engagement was, indeed, very long. But it wasn't engaging. At two hours and change, we got maybe forty-five minutes of actual plot and lots of extraneous episodes to fill in the rest.

Interestingly, I saw Amélie again shortly after, and everything I hated about A Very Long Engagement became pronounced. A central romantic quest (character A wants character B), complicated by the need for clues and investigation, stretched thin with episode after episode of quirky characters doing quirky things.

And I use the term 'character' loosely, as more often than not, what 'characterization' really amounts to in these films is... well, these quirky characters being quirky. Think of an insane asylum from some old movie or TV show; our protagonist has been wrongfully committed and now the camera pans around and every patient has some loud, cartoonish mental illness, some phrase they shout. They're entertaining set pieces, but they lack humanity because, really, they're just caricatures.

Jeunet masks this by giving his characters endearing quirks. They're helpful and charming and fun. They're the kind of crazy people you'd let babysit your kids because they have rainbows where their genitals should be.

I saw Micmacs recently. I was lured into it with the plot, which a friend pitched thusly: "Yeah, it's the Amélie guy, but the story's about a guy who gets shot in the head and seeks revenge on everyone involved, up to the guys who made the bullet."

"Hmmm..." I thought, "quirky yet captivating actiony-noireish-kinda thing? Could be awesome..."

FALSE FALSE FALSE. It was none of those things. Our protagonist doesn't even pursue the man who shot him, hell, we never even find out who it is. Instead, we get some half assed, heavy handed 'quirky' (QUIRKY QUIRKY QUIRKY) rant about the weapons industry.

Brief aside: Not to parrot the NRA mantra, but really, people kill people. It's not only a tragic reality, that eliminating weapons will not eliminate violence, but it's a fundamental to story telling. In Kill Bill, we don't give a shit about what gun was used to shoot the Bride, she's not going to go hunt down the weapon and smelt it into a horse shoe, she's going to... KILL BILL BECAUSE BILL TRIED TO KILL HER GODDAMMIT.

And much like with Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, the plot only really needs half an hour to find its end. But shit, we're not in the business of short films here. Ready your stock of irrelevant quirky characters. Ready the vignettes. FIRE.

Characters in Micmacs do not follow narrative paths that are intuitive. While many films revolve around crazy counter-intuitive protagonists, their thought processes are either consistent or somehow accessible. Travis Bickle tries to kill the senator, alright, I understand the rationale based on the character and the context of these events. It's a payoff that's earned by giving a character real depth; empathy transcending sanity, rationality, is something a skilled storyteller can achieve. In Micmacs, as well as other Jeunet films, characters are pulled along like marionettes on attenuated strings.

"It doesn't have to make sense, you asshole, it's quirky and cute so shut the fuck up and stop ruining it for your girlfriend." - my Jean-Pierre Jeunet's mental stand-in.

Suffice to say, I don't think Amélie is a good movie, I don't think any of these movies are good movies. But what's important is that I did, at one point, like it. What ruined it for me was the fact that what I thought was novel, in reality, wasn't. That's just the sort of product Jeunet outputs. It's merely an algorithm upon which he iterates.

I don't care much for Star Wars because, watching it as a kid, it wasn't that novel either. Same for 2001, same for Avatar. I think I may be past the point where I can be captivated by great visuals alone. The more dynamic challenge, really, is to utilize aesthetic capacity to deliver a more engaging, engrossing, narrative. Aesthetics for their own sake, well, I guess they win awards... and fans... and tons of money... and...

...fuck it.

DreamWorks... what the fuck?

2010-05-21T14:11:00.000-07:00

How'd this happen? You're supposed to be the bad one, the D-student, the mouth-breather... Pixar's the good one. They've got the talent, the vision, the drive... and yet...

This movie's great! Not quite Kung-Fu Panda awesome, but miles ahead of the diarrhea Pixar's been spewing these last few years. While Wall-E operated under a contrived first-draft mess of a script, Panda was pristine and polished. Up was an improvement, but sold itself more on sentimentality than substance--I personally dislike Forrest Gump style "cry now" moments that are so blatantly manipulative they smokescreen the shallowness ("We pulled your heart strings with that montage!" the Pixar writer cackles, "You're ours now! Bwahahaha haha hahahaha ha ha").

I looked up the Dragon people on IMDB, thinking there's gotta be some magician here at work, some mastermind at DreamWorks churning out the good ones (the diamonds peaking out from the overwhelming pile of sloppy Shrek and talking animal garbage); a Brad Bird type (the man responsible for the Incredibles and, my personal favorite CG film of all time, Ratatouille).

Nope. Directing the film though, I did find Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, the men responsible for writing and directing my favorite Disney 2D film, Lilo & Stitch. But with Kung-Fu Panda, I didn't find anyone at the helm tethered to any previous big-name awesome project that I fuckin' adored.

These movies are exactly what's in my mind when I criticize the shit out of 'kids' films'. Yeah, their target demo might be children, but that doesn't mean the rules of good writing, directing, production don't apply. Films are films are films and there are rules.

I know that's controversial to say (ooooooohhhh art can't be put in a box), but it's the truth. Think about language, for instance. Whether you're from Potatoville, Idaho, Dixie, Alabama, New York, LA, London, Sydney, or even if you're one of those apes they taught how to communicate through sign language (and someone's miming this to you right now), you're still speaking English. "Ya'll dun talk real good." "Thou speakest with much clarity, sir." "*signsignsign*" There are a ton of ways to express the same thing, tons of ways to warp the thought, to personalize it. But ultimately, the expression has to obey certain axioms of communication to be intelligible. This isn't grammar, it's not even spelling ("wuz up?" "r u ok?"), it's something even more basic.

So whether you're disgusted by the idea or not, there is something called "good writing", "good film making", "good story teling".

I'm glad there are people out there still trying, still making stuff they should be proud to put their name on, regardless of "target demographic".

A final note on the new Jak and Daxter.

2010-05-20T18:12:00.001-07:00

You've probably seen those commercials on TV for... I guess they're videogame design trade schools or something.

Yeah, you ever wonder what those people end up doing? I'm sure if they're talented, as some of them have to be (probability, right?), they end up working with some big studios, working with some of the industry's most talented designers.

Most, I figure, fill out the middle rung; they're working on the movie and TV tie-in games. Not Wheel of Fortune: Super Spin Edition or The Price is Right: Motion Madness Wii mini game anthologies; no, that stuff is for the D students who were below even Ubisoft's standards (not to imply everyone making those games is totally talentless, I know some of you, fresh out of school, really need the money and have no say as to what you help create, but you know at least a few of your coworkers and superiors definitely fit the bill).

But what if you're just too darn talented for the shovelware but not quite skilled enough to make the next big mundane shooter?

You work here:

And you make this:

The new Jak and Daxter (cont.)

2010-05-17T21:18:00.000-07:00

I told a friend of mine that I'd pretty much quit videogames. He asked me what I do with my free time now and I said, "Well sleep, TV, some creative stuff... Jak and Daxter. Well I've mostly quit, I just got this game for free..."

"Is it good?"

"No, not really."

The new Jak and Daxter game

2010-05-14T20:40:00.000-07:00

Fifteen minutes in, I was skeptical about this game quality and rolled my eyes when some NPC told me I had to run a challenge course to prove my worth. Immediately Daxter belted the following:

"Ha ha, jokes on them! If there's one thing we're good at, it's arbitrary platforming challenges mixed with heavy gun play!"

And I smiled wide.

Iron Man 2 was a big pile of shit.

2010-05-12T15:01:00.000-07:00

Spoilers ahead, not that they matter... not that the story can be ruined any further. Here's the trailer (because it matters):

Talking to some friends of mine who actually read comics, this is what we thought the plot was going to be:

Tony Stark has become addicted to the suit. The power grants him, the freedom it bestows. So he begins integrating his biology further and further with its technology. In the comics, he has this Extremis armor that utilizes nano machines to create a direct interface between his nervous system and the suit. That new triangular-chested armor relates to the Extremis interface. In the trailer we see these techno-patterns in his skin appearing around his power core, spreading throughout his body. The more of a cyborg he becomes, the more his humanity is compromised.

And the secondary plot would revolve around the spread of power-suit style weapons across the globe, the implications thereof.

Well... we got the second part right. Not that the movie actually resolved that point or anything. That first part? We were totally wrong.

Here's a breakdown of the plot, in no particular order:

- Tony Stark has palladium poisoning because that's what fuels his power core. For some reason, it manifests as techno scribbles in his skin. He is dying and needs some solution for this problem.

- Nick Fury... well, Sam Jackson as Sam Jackson playing Nick Fury (a character we don't really understand within the logic of the film's universe, made absolutely worthless by his two dimensionality), tells Tony Stark that his dad, Howard Stark, actually loved the shit out of him and had some secret formula conveniently stashed somewhere that'd save Tony's ass. It ends up being in some fucking model that, for some reason, is in Pepper's office. Tony proceeds to synthesize a new element for his power core by lasering the shit out of his lab (for no reason... dude, aim the thing first on lower power, then notch it up) and firing it at some crystal thing that made a triangular circuit. New triangle suit! With no obvious upgrade other than not killing our hero... which wasn't even a side effect alluded to in the first movie.

- Also: terrible writing. TERRIBLE. Here's the thing about sci-fi: if you're not a physicist or you just plain haven't done your research, don't explain things. There's a reason why we have that scrappy hero paradigm in sci-fi and fantasy fiction; Luke Skywalker knows as little about the Empire as we do and so we learn along with him. Hell, we learn through him, we learn what he needs to know as he comes across it. Luke doesn't care how a warp drive works, so a few words like "parsecs" are dropped (and not even safely, mind you, people still bitch about that one) and we buy it. Tony Stark rambling endlessly and doing a bunch of shit that makes no sense to any reasonably educated viewer derails the immersiveness of the film and shows the ineptitude of the screenwriters.

- Mickey Rourke is actually a pretty fun character and does a cool job... though his final battle with Iron Man and War Machine sucks pretty bad. I don't care about our two heroes fighting computer controlled robo-chodes, they're not characters, they've got no dramatic weight to them. I want to see an epic fucking battle, but just like the first movie, they blew it. Bullshit copout too... I don't really understand why repulsers do that. Also his tentacles cut through everything but heroes.

The script just plain subverts some of the most basic standards of decent writing. What are the emotional stakes? Why am I invested? What's going on? Shit, they had it under control for the first third and then it just devolved into a big pile of garbage. Lots of bad ideas, lots of wasted potential. Some cool graphics though.

You don't have to be progressive to be popular.

2010-04-29T07:57:00.001-07:00

You can just spout any old whatchamado.

This is it.

2010-04-25T10:22:00.000-07:00

The best damn sitcom on television.

The joke is dead. That whole setup, punchline, payoff archetype is stale and old and frustratingly transparent. It's what makes shows like Modern Family, or 30 Rock, or whatever else the big networks are airing, pits of mediocrity. Some people may love it, sure, like some people find those parody movies funny (Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans...), but the success of their humor rests on one fundamental quality of the viewer:

The viewer is themselves humorless.

Humor is a difficult concept to define because, like many facets of our personal and cultural psychologies, it's primarily an intuitive notion rather than a rational one. Like morality and love and purpose, it descends more so from a mental framework acclimated, over years of evolutionary trial and error, to the conditions necessary for our success as a social unit. So defining what's funny and what's not is a task that requires us to work backwards, not forwards.

I think it's fair to say, something has to be surprising to be funny. Not "holy shit, my dog's bleeding out its dick" surprising, but there has to be some general established norm and a deviation from that norm. That's how jokes work. In the setup, we're given a background that we can understand and relate to--maybe not directly, maybe we ourselves have never been to a bar, for instance, but we understand, thanks to the pervasiveness of media, what a bar is and what happens in them--and the punchline undermines the expectations created therein.

A man walks into a bar, says ow.

If you've heard the joke before, it's not going to be funny because it's no longer surprising. There is no disparity between expectation and reality. For someone who hasn't heard this joke before, there's also that secondary level of expectation; it's a standard joke opener, they expect a longer anecdote to follow, and it ends in two words. Random humor plays on that notion a lot, the subversion of the joke. But that also wears really thin really fast.

In the end, the disparity between expectation and reality can't be obscenely huge; the reality has to fall within the logical scope of the expectation. A man walks into a bar, says ow--we know what a bar is, we know the word has multiple meanings, it makes sense. "A man walks into a bar, takes a shit on his shoe," is not a joke because the 'punch line', the realization of tension between the two elements, is a total non sequitur.

This has been a long rambley way of saying that if the writers of a show are banking on the joke-joke-joke format, then they have to either be way smarter than their audience or their audience has to be pretty humorless, to not have an intuition as to where it's headed.

This is why I think Modern Family is an incredibly mediocre show; the jokes are obvious. I sit, I watch, and I distinctly hear or see setup and punchline. And often the disparity between expectation and reality isn't all that strong. Alright, maybe the dad is more afraid of some minute thing than his child son... look that subversion of expectation... comedy...

In 30 Rock, the Tracy Morgan character exists to add variety to the show's formula. The things he says are funny because they may either actually be counter intuitive in a really entertaining way, or, more often, because everyone else is written so rigidly. He is a walking, talking punchline in this big setup world. The comic relief for the comedy. And the success of his humor hinges on how scarcely we see him. Many comedians fall out of favor with the public--like Leslie Nielsen or Will Ferrel--because we know what we're going to see when we see them.

Shows like Party Down, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Arrested Development, and even animated fair like the Venture Brothers or Archer, also follow this reality-subversion paradigm. They have to, that's pretty much what humor is. But most of their humor (I think Arrested Development does often suffer from the joke-joke-joke form) lies in the situations themselves. The shows don't quite have 'freak' characters, as the entire cast is unhinged, but relatable, in different ways; the humor's in the situation and watching them struggle to overcome some obstacle and coordinate among one another.

Each episode is like one big, elaborate joke that doesn't try to insult your intelligence with trivial bullshit in the middle. The charisma of the characters, and their interactions, fuel the levity.

Party Down is an awesome show for a number of reasons. First, the cast is terrific. The characters are believable and relatable, and so we invest ourselves in them pretty quick. The humor is often derisive, with characters sarcastically eating away at one another or the scenarios they find themselves in, and it's carried by wonderfully organic dialogue. It doesn't feel like Juno or Gilmore Girls, or comedies of that nature where characters exchange clever lines like bullets in a John Woo film. Party Down is clever, but not too clever... which makes it more clever. The characters feel real and that makes you kind of give a shit about what happens to them.

And fuck, the show's just great.

Watch Party Down. You can stream the whole first season on Netflix, season 2 episodes come up as they air (I don't know the time gap, but the second season premiered three days ago and I watched the first episode today).

The biggest conspiracy of our time...

2010-04-11T16:37:00.000-07:00

I didn't want to believe it myself, I couldn't... it goes against everything I ever thought a man was capable of... of good, of evil. It undermines everything I ever thought I knew about the physical world, of what's possible. But... but photographs don't lie.

IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW...

...Justin Bieber used Adolf Hitler's Nazi time machine to sabotage humanity. The horror... the horror.

The future is ours! Man has dominion over all!

2010-04-11T14:57:00.000-07:00

And the serpent said to the woman: No, you shall not die the death.
For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

The shackles of the natural world have been broken and we are free to ascend to the throne of heaven, creating and destroying what we please. The cosmos is now our plaything, reality warps around our will.

"All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment..."

The overman is now! We laugh at our fathers and their impotence!
KNEEL. We command them because they are weak, slaves to the natural order which is slave to us.

We have taken the chicken, divorced its soul and essence from the ephemeral flesh and we have fused it into the biskit, manna of the overman. We deny it body, we deny its spirit physicality, and we laugh as we consume. These children of the tyrannosaur, lizard king, the demon overlord that shattered the minds and souls of our ape ancestors through terror and destruction, are nothing to us, insects drowning in the shadow of our strength.

HAIL THE ERA OF THE OVERMAN.
HAIL THE CHICKEN BISKIT, EMBLEM OF HIS RULE.

Well, yeah, my site's good for that too.

2010-03-31T16:17:00.001-07:00

It's loaded with fun and useful factoids that can help you in all kinds of situations.

I think I met my hero today.

2010-03-27T15:55:00.000-07:00

I was on my way back to campus, riding the E train in from Queens. My head was down, eyes fixed on my little mp3 player as I fiddled between Eskimo Snow and the Excitement Plan. Deep down the aisle, by the door, enters a man pulling a little red cart.

Now I think, alright... another panhandler. We get these all the time on the subway. Dirty, disgruntled people, begging for cash, slinging some sob story that's muddled through whiskey lips.

Before you look down your noses at my disaffection towards the homeless, giving them money is actually counterproductive. New York City shelters, as of a few months back, no longer require individuals to be drug free when seeking help. I think, despite the system's flaws, it's far more useful for these people than the odd dollar.

Anyway, this guy wasn't like that at all. Pulling his cart along, he exclaimed loudly, "You don't have to be poor to be hungry." And told everyone aboard, who wanted to, to grab a free sandwich (bologna and white bread, individually sealed in little ziplock bags), some fruit snacks, or a tape (I scanned the labels when his cart stopped in front of me, curious what kind of music he was handing out... a lot of pretty random, eclectic stuff--probably donated or found).

He wore, if I remember correctly, a blue jumpsuit--or possibly his jeans and shirt were the same color--a post-it note on his forehead, thick glasses, and big badge that said, "Eric" (I regret not remembering what the note said). Eric was thin, tall, mid to later forties, and seemed a bit off. Not eerily off, but much too nice and energetic for a city that can be so septic. I thought of Taxi Driver, if Travis Bickle decided to make his stand without shooting pimps or politicians, but by making every stranger he saw a little happier.

Eric walked around shaking a blue donation cup and noticed me digging into my pockets. I had no singles in my wallet and only two pennies in my jeans (which I felt would've seemed insultingly stingy), so when he looked at me, I said, "I'm sorry... I wanted to make a donation, but I've got no change."

"Oh, that's alright!" he smiled, "You can have a tape if you want!"

Looking back, maybe I should've, but I felt like there were needy people out there... the ones he was actually trying to reach, and I'dve felt guilty if he squandered his kindness on me, "That's alright," I said. I didn't see anyone in the packed train look up or reach for any of what he offered, or give him a donation (which I imagined went to buying more snacks and sandwiches)... gave his struggle a Sisyphean air to it.

As he walked away he pointed to one of many stickers he had on his cart, it said, "I work for smiles." I gave him a handful.

When I got back, I did a Google search, hoping someone else had already written something about this guy. I didn't find a thing. So maybe this is the internet's first article about generous Eric. He deserves at least that.

What I did yesterday morning:

2010-03-27T09:44:00.000-07:00

Woke up realizing my arm had completely fallen asleep. Started wriggling around to get off of it and fling it onto my stomach. Punched myself in the nuts with my own numb hand. Writhed.

Tiger Woods owes himself an apology.

2010-02-28T22:59:00.000-08:00

For being such a spineless sack of shit.

Manufactured media outrage strikes again. A model and a pro-athlete, their storybook marriage falls apart. Who could've guessed that two vacuous people could not construct a sturdy foundation for a relationship?

"That's sexist!" someone told me, "To assume, just because she's a model, that's she dumb... or incapable of greater things."

"But she hasn't done anything else noteworthy, other than fuck Tiger Woods. Even he's got that whole... whatchamacallit... golf thing going for him."

Lets face it... people are pretty dumb. Random man on the street? Probably an idiot. Now imagine a whole group, a profession of people, not paid to think of speak or do anything at all (hell, even athletes have to strategize). You think they'd somehow be smarter than Joe Mouthbreather? They are financially compensated for demonstrating minimal signs of consciousness, and they have chosen this as their career. I'm not expecting great things.

Can there be outliers? Brilliant models? Sure... it pays the bills, college tuition, whatever, but that doesn't make the presumption any less valid. What's true of the whole won't necessarily be true of the parts.

But I digress...

The man doesn't owe anyone an apology, only himself. When the world pissed its pants, he should've pulled up to a podium in his platinum golf cart (spinning rims made out of panda tits), and given everyone and everything the finger. "Fuck you," he'd say, "and fuck you and fuck you and fuck you," fingers pointed, moving down the line, "I'm Tiger fucking Woods. I'm obscenely rich. I can do whatever the fuck I want to whoever the fuck I want." And then he'd retire, forever. Toss his golf clubs into the crowd (maybe injuring some children or something... some disadvantaged children), sell his mansion to the highest bidder, his wife to some Mid Eastern prince, and use all the cash left to build a giant floating pleasure fortress. A sphere with rocket boosters and hover plates and heli-things... that'd float above every major city, a statement to the masses of just how loaded and privileged he is, and there'd be a dropship that came down, venting and replenishing an ever-rotating supply of beautiful women and ecstasy. Lots and lots of ecstasy. All the water, all the food, everything that can be consumed, in this giant pleasure fortress, would be laced with it. And that's how Tiger Woods would live out the rest of his days forever if he just had a fucking spine.

But instead, he apologizes to the public. To me. And to you. He says, "Hey Polkster, just thought I'd let you know, I'm leading a significantly better life than you. Wealth, fame, women, wealth. Influence. Power, whatever, I'm on Wheaties boxes. But I guess I went a tad overboard, sorry. I undermined your trust. That wasn't fair. Forgive me?"

And I have to raise my head, up above the numbing drudgery of internet obscurity and process all of this. Dedicate even a second of synaptic activity to contemplating how fucking set this son of a bitch is. And I have to care... say the papers and the TV stations.

Haiku Moment

2010-02-24T14:30:00.000-08:00

Flipping through the latest Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, I was reminded of the void in the center of my implosion.

Feminist battles own irrelevance

2010-02-24T12:43:00.000-08:00

This is Sunsara Taylor, she was recently on campus to give a talk titled, "From the Burkha to the Thong: Everything Must, and Can, Change! WE NEED TOTAL REVOLUTION".

Yep.

I didn't go to the talk, I had way too many women to oppress that night, but I did grab a flier, it reads as follows:

"IF YOU ARE A WOMAN, YOUR BODY IS A BATTLEGROUND. Anywhere you look, women are being slammed backwards. In Bangkok and Bangalore and Moldova young women are stripped naked and sold across borders as sex slaves. In Indonesia and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia women are shrouded in veils, kept as the property, and even killed if they somehow 'dishonor' their family."

Wait, what? Slammed backwards? Like we saw the great age of equality come and go in... the mid 90's or something? Alright, alright, to be fair, that's a little nitpicky. And fuck, if we pick on every odd phrase or choice of words, we'll just end up skirting around the real issue. Here's where the problem, for me, comes in:

"Meanwhile, in the US we are told women are no longer oppressed. Yet, how many will learn to starve themselves, cut themselves, hate themselves--internalizing the images that saturate society of women as objects of sexual conquest, the butt of a joke, or baby-making machines?"

As a frequent butt-of-jokes and a chronic self loather myself, I have to ask... what the fuck? No one can deny that our society is fraught with problems but to reduce the essence of all conflict to... what, lechery? Our society's hetero-normative standards? Certainly, there's a lot of shit that's fucked up, but the problems that Taylor sees are symptoms of a much bigger disease, and to reduce everything so blindly and so passionately to this little anachronistic battle for "women's rights" just cheapens the credibility of the whole discussion.

It 's like watching a forest burn and saying, "Those poor, poor squirrels."

That video up there is an excellent example of the simplistic nature of her philosophy. Christianity is not the problem; hell, in Latin America, Christianity rests hand in hand with socialism. To say the Bible is the cause of all the nation's political problems blatantly ignores a sea of complex issues.

I don't really know how many modern men see women solely as baby-making machines, but I do understand the general point... because, behind all of this inane, seemingly senseless rambling, there is a point. Women are objectified. Society tells them how to dress, how to eat, how to act, who to be.

But last I checked, everyone is subject to this same breed of bullshit. I don't wear neckties because I think they look fuckin' sweet, or Old Spice because goddamn I just can't take the smell of natural 'ol me (I can't, but there's a lot about me I can't stand... thus whiskey). And sure, while throughout history, women have generally suffered greater indignities than their male counterparts, the majority of all people were hopelessly and utterly fucked (serfs and slaves have always outnumbered lords and masters by an obscene proportion).

The "man" is not the enemy. A few men ran Rome, a few men run Wall Street, but by and large, we're all neck deep in the same septic tank. Most of us are slaves, and hell, most of us are complacent. To say that this is somehow the result of a chauvinist conspiracy makes people like me wonder... where's my freedom?

Everything you do is scrutinized and controlled by everyone else. Either directly, by the scoffs and derision of your coworkers and classmates, or through the market--which is really just a giant megaphone for the often arbitrary whims the people (Elmo is hot hot hot!)--if you want to succeed, socially or professionally, you have to be the biggest tool you can be. It's not fair, it's not always fun (though some people have a lot of fun with it (fuck those assholes)), but no society in the history of the human race has been free of this reality. It's an elemental facet of our social cohesion. Military uniforms or Nike sneakers or crosses around your neck, the illusion of the whole comes from the expulsion of the other.

Kinda why my neighbors downstairs are such high-horse assholes who give me the dirtiest fucking looks. Being dicks to me makes them better friends to each other.

And while men and women are treated differently in this country, every culture has made some sort of distinction because... the biology is different. Functionally, both genders are incapable of doing all the same sorts of tasks, total equality is an impossibility. Is our society particularly bad towards women?

Well, while incidents of depression are higher in women, four times as many men commit suicide every year. Possibly, women are more social and are capable of using the resources our society provides to cope far more effectively than men (and therefore are actually less isolated) . Or, as that same article mentions, men are less likely to seek help, so are less frequently diagnosed, and perhaps the depression gap between genders is entirely illusory.

The point I'm making is the psychological trauma that results from society's imperfections isn't obviously targeting women in a more severe manner. So maybe thongs aren't the problem.

And later, of course:
"But, the oppression of women is woven so deeply into the fabric of society here and all over the world, that it will take total revolution--communist revolution--to liberate all women."

Anyone who advocates communism should not be allowed to vote. Period.

I think the most elegant analysis of the movement's failures is that old idea that people vote with their feet. The Berlin Wall wasn't built to keep people from fleeing out of Western Europe.

Once again, the site demonstrates its nearly universal appeal

2010-02-20T13:41:00.000-08:00

The strangest searches lead you right to my doorstep.

Best movie of last year, hands down.

2010-02-13T11:37:00.000-08:00

I cannot emphasize enough just how much I loved this fucking movie.

I'm sorry...

2010-02-09T21:39:00.000-08:00

...you're actually a good movie. When I said I didn't like you, all those months ago... I was, well it was a different time in my life. I was carrying all sorts of baggage and... and I didn't know what to expect. I was surprised... skeptical. Dave Eggers, I'm not a fan of his, you know. Don't care for his writing (it can be awfully masturbatory sometimes)... so I was biased? Yeah, maybe. It was a host of different things. But you're actually a very nice film and I wish you the best.

Oh, hey there, A Serious Man! I was just talking about that other movie... no, no, I don't like it more than you. I don't know, really... it's a hard comparison. Can't I like you both equal? You're different, I mean you can draw all sorts of thematic similarities... but you're different! Different! I still think you're great though. I like your style... you know, open, meditative. Something that makes you think about what you watched, piece it all together and argue the themes with yourself, your friends. Wild Things is a bit more obvious, I think.

These movies are good movies, give them a chance.

Up in the Air is not a good movie. It is a string of cliches stitched together in a tapestry of mediocrity. Predictable, shallow, with little twist at the end to subvert your expectations, but which then ultimately undermines its own journey. It's got a bunch of nominations for all sorts of awards, though, right? Like Avatar and that Sandra Bullock movie... how does she keep getting work?

I'm fucking sick of my low resolution glasses...

2010-01-31T21:43:00.000-08:00

Finally! As many of you may not know, I wear glasses. Not all the time, but quite a bit. One of the biggest gripes I have with my lenses is their lack of picture clarity. Everything looks so bland! Every time I open my eyes, I see a world that's flat and gray... a colorless void where I'm isolated and alone, a spiritual prison in which my mind festers. Life just does not feel worth living...

But now, with HD lenses, I finally see the world in beautiful High Definition! That's full 1080p, 120 Hz! Where once there was a void, now there is a bounty of beauty! Goodbye, pills! So long, manic notebook scribblings! Farewell, frequent thoughts of suicide!

These lenses are also 3D compatible, so now even reality can look as vivid and dynamic as blockbuster films like Avatar, Harry Potter, and... and Muppets 3D (pretty sure that's a thing).

THE FUTURE IS NOW

2010-01-27T14:20:00.000-08:00

Resealable pull-tab! Well, more of a spin-tab. Saw this contraption for the first time on a free can of Monster some people handed to me out of a truck. It's Monster: Import. Pretty much the same shit as before, with a gimmicky name to justify a price hike (no idea if it actually is more expensive though, wouldn't be surprised).

It's almost high art!

2010-01-23T20:01:00.000-08:00

When I first saw this commercial, I thought it was making a statement about how society turns art into capital, undermining the value of personal expression by framing it as a mere commercial product.

Turns out they were just hawking ravioli.

Shit, got-damn, I'm a man.

2010-01-22T17:10:00.000-08:00

I was taking a nap today, fuck was I ever tired, when Garrett burst in and started hopping around... making noises... trying to bug me back into consciousness. I told him I'd go to yoga with him but I was pretty out of it. But those of you who know me know a little prodding is all it takes to make me do just about anything (though I'll yell and I'll curse as I do it).

Yoga is hard as fuck. I go to the gym all the time, weight lift mostly, so I'm not particularly weak or anything... but holding even the simplest of poses begins to hurt like hell after about a minute or so. Like someone doused my muscles with kerosene and lit them on fire.

On the upside, yoga is awesome.

No, not because you feel... oneness or complete or in tune with your chakras or any of that hippie, new-age, bullshit. No, it's awesome because you're surrounded by ladies, TONS OF LADIES, wearing the tightest, most wonderfully revealing attire. It's practically a dirty bit anatomy lesson.

Feet. It's weird... I've never liked feet, always found them kinda gross. Always been pretty greatful about how far nature planted them from my body. But lots of these ladies have really nice feet. Really, really... pretty feet. Goddammit, all that time spent upside down is fucking with my brain...

And the butts! Goodness me!

Being in a yoga class is like browsing through a catalog of expensive things I know I'll never own. Masturbatory fantasy fodder galore.

Now back to my nightly game of solitaire (not a euphemism... (not literal, but not a euphemism...))

I'm a winner.

2010-01-22T17:00:00.000-08:00

Fourth result on the greatest search ever.

This Game is Prom Queen

2010-01-17T11:03:00.000-08:00

Playing this thing, one thought that just kept coming back to me was... what a functional game. It just works. Everything is pretty intuitive because it's familiar... because, well, it's lifted off some other game.

Which is fine. More games should do this, build on the progress of their predecessors.

The stealth segments are actually more fun than they are frustrating, which is rare for the genre. The AI is interesting; while certainly not flawless, it definitely makes for an entertaining fuck-around experience. Really, it's like Metal Gear light (lite? Diet Metal Gear? How do I make this damn reference?!).

It takes the stupid save system right off Metal Gear as well; all my progress is totally worthless until I leave a room. At least Metal Gear had a manual save system. This was one of those "are you fucking kidding?!" parts of the game for me. The developer managed to make a really decent, really polished all-around product, but never bothered making the save system resemble anything remotely modern.

Combat is fuckin' cool because it's so fluid. Only I had kind of difficult time pulling off multi-button combos because, first, while two buttons on a diagonal to the left of my thumb are easily mashed, the right's not so comfortable. Sometimes I press both buttons and I'm not sure if the game's completely ignoring me or not; they just don't work too good. It wouldn't be as bad as it is if the system were more lenient, but often times my combo count breaks... for nothing. A split second pause and I've lost it, no damage taken, nothing disrupted. Sometimes I'll just button mash and it'll stay put... honestly, this fucking element pissed me off a lot. A frustrating blemish on an otherwise pretty awesome, and innovative, system.

Gameplay as a whole is pretty cool. In the style of Metroid and Castlevania, we've got a lot of "oooh! New item! Time to backtrack!" kind of stuff. The map's constructed in such a way where it's not too frustrating getting from point A to B to C, back to A. And yes, there are pointless little collectibles that unlock shit scattered all around everywhere... but there are maps! Yes! Maps that tell you where all that shit is. Except the teeth. Fuck those teeth. FUCK THOSE TEETH.

But yeah, the gadgets are actually really useful in combat. I wish I'd paid attention to the little instruction/hint window and realized how to use some of them properly, I only learned their utility in challenge mode.

The graphics are pretty damn good. Standard grunt bad guys look real decent, and animate really well. Everyone animates really well, it's just a pity they're so goddamn ugly. Batman looks like a (more) roided out Mickey Rourke, only a little uglier. Looking at him was another one of those "what fuck were they thinking?" moments for me. Scarecrow also looked kind of weird, the other designs were just passable. Except Joker, Joker looked great.

The reason I called this game prom queen is because, first, it's pretty. Second, it's easy. And I don't mean it's easy to beat (which it was, and I've only played it on hard mode), but because it's easy to pick up and finger--I mean fondle--I mean play. It's easy to play. The gameplay is intuitive, they did a good job. But the whole package is pretty shallow. Beyond the aesthetics and the gameplay, there's no brain.

You know, Paul Dini wrote the story--he was one of the writers of the animated series. And the story wasn't bad. The overall who/what/where/why was perfectly passable. The dialogue was total dog shit, but the framework was alright.

It's funny, watching shows like Justice League or, well the Batman Beyond and Green Lantern animated movies were both on last night (Mike and I multitasked bullshitting/interneting/watching), it's hard not to wonder who the hell writes these things. It's like, they're competent enough to make a plot, but when it comes to minor details like... characters and plot devices making any sense at all, dialogue not sucking... these people are abject failures. 100% awful. And it's not just one person, it's a little coven of mediocre writers (at best, maddeningly horrible at worst (and by maddening I mean their writing induces to me to start carving lines into my own flesh just so I can feel like I have some control over the pain)), of which Dini is certainly a part, distributed across all of these DC properties.

Here's a tip: do not put Batman in a situation that tests his moral foundations in a way that makes them seem two-dimensionally altruistic.

So pretty early on in the game, Batman finds the Joker and he's standing on this suspended crate (or elevator), and he offers Batman a free shot at him with a batarang. Now batarangs are used throughout the game, especially in combat, and are not lethal. If Joker were knocked off, I don't think it's impractical for Batman to figure out a way to save him from dying... I don't know, whatever, lets assume Joker would die. Batman does not throw the batarang because he does not want to kill Joker. But Joker's whole Arkham plot has led to the death of many, many guards, and many more to come. Men with wives and children and all sorts of fictional foundations for tragedy. Batman, not being an idiot, obviously knows this. But he does not throw the batarang...

This entire scene is all of twenty seconds, but it really pissed me off because it didn't make any sense. In fact, there are a lot of parts of the game where the writers demonstrate their inability to grasp philosophical and moralistic subtleties (i.e. their illiteracy).

One of the collectibles you can find are patient interview tapes. You don't want to find them, they're stupid. They're poorly written, poorly acted... they're just annoying as all hell. But there's one that really annoyed the hell out of me. One of the bad guys, Zsasz (not quite a boss, more of a tutorial enemy), describes his nihilistic outlook towards life in a rant that amounts to something like, "I DON'T BELIEVE IN ANYTHING BECAUSE NOTHING MATTERS AND I KILL WANTONLY AND I'M A NIHILIST."

See... nihilism is really interesting and can be a compelling philosophy when fleshed out in conversation with moral relativism, pragmatism... whatever manner of intellectual discourse you want to bring to the table. The point is, it's not just crazy people mumbo jumbo. And sure I can see how a murderer could defend his action through the philosophy, especially an educated one (as Zsasz's backstory implies he is). I think that would make a really interesting character. But to write a one like that, you have to... not be an idiot.

They fucked it up. It made me mad.

So yeah, everything Rocksteady did with the gameplay was awesome. Everything else was diarrhea. Overall, decent game. Really decent.

Comic Rant Retread: Sailor Scout Fuckability

2010-01-15T11:27:00.000-08:00

The title is a bit of a misnomer; this rant's actually about the Sailor Scout who'd make the best girlfriend. 'Fuckability' is just an abstract measure of all qualities that make for an awesome significant other.

Often within the realm of intellectual discourse, scholars stumble upon a question or a problem unto which no unanimous solution can be afforded. This is usually the case with matters that are seemingly limited to our own subjectivity – our tastes, preferences, desires. In such circumstances, we are often forced to to simply “agree to disagree”. And this is generally understandable; after all, while you and I may enjoy pepperoni on our pizza, there is no objective measure by which we can rationally argue it as the best topping.

But there is one debate that I believe is not limited to subjectivity and which has a clear, unquestionable, objective solution: which Sailor Scout is the most fuckable.

Before we can even pursue a definitive answer to this question, we must define our criteria for “fuckability”. “Fuckability” is not merely one’s physical ability to be fucked – as in, a dog is fuckable because it has a penetrable orifice but a slab or marble is not because it does not – but also the degree to which one could be fucked under normal conditions.

Normal conditions are as follows: we, the fucker, are a heterosexual male with typical heterosexual male tendencies. That is, our tastes and habits do not deviate from the typical societal norm. For this reason we can eliminate Chibi Moon from discussion because she is prepubescent and thus not “fuckable”. The same applies to Chibi Chibi, who is both a child and some sort of abstract corporeal entity, neither of which we would normally fuck. Moreover, Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune are lesbians in a committed relationship, so it is doubtful that they too would be fuckable. Granted, many scholars theorize most lesbians are just faking and can be broken of their man-hating habits by a variety of simple procedures, most common of which is the standard “deep dicking”, however such matters are still heavily debated and are outside the scope of this article. Besides, having to break a woman of her lesbian tendencies merely adds to our wooing workload, and thus decreases fuckability. For simplicity’s sake, Uranus and Neptune will be classified as “Not Fuckable” as opposed to “Ultra Low Tier”.

I doubt most scholars would object to Sailor Mercury and Sailor Moon herself being assigned to our “Low Tier” of fuckability. Sailor Mercury is rarely portrayed as anything more than a frigid scholar, completely absorbed in her school work, possessing few other hobbies or special interests. Yes, you could fuck her if you so desired, but it would be entirely phlegmatic and sterile, like fucking a pig’s fresh carcass–warm, of course, but hardly mobile or responsive. Additionally, her constant intellectual banter would prove tiresome and would create too difficult an environment for any sane man to sustain an erection.

The same is not true of Sailor Moon, who is obviously far less frigid and far easier to interact with, plus her kisses taste like bubblegum, which is also a plus. But then why assign her to the low tier? First of all, she is in a committed relationship with Tuxedo Mask; granted, as an adversary he’d hardly be threatening, what with his limp-wristed rose throwing and scrawny build–-easily dealt with by a simple sucker punch to the throat-–but being faced with any sort of competitor merely adds to the time and effort necessary to bed a woman. Second, Sailor Moon has a daughter from the future who is not only irritating as all hell but who would also serve to complicate the relationship. We would be obligated to frequently deliver the all too infamous “I’m not your fucking dad” speech, and her presence would consistently derail all sexual tension. Children are merciless cockblocks. So why settle for Sailor Moon when there so many other Sailor Scouts who have no such baggage?

Sailor Pluto and Sailor Saturn are among the least developed characters throughout the entire run of the animated series. Other than their looks, which are comparable to that of the other scouts, there is really no criteria by which they can be judged. Obviously, Sailor Saturn is not fuckable in baby form, ala the beginning of Sailor Stars. Under the possession of Mistress 9, she would probably be quite the terrifically vicious fuck, biting and scratching and belts and choking among other acts of shameless deviance. “She definitely looks like she knows how to take a dick,” a colleague argued. However, the fact that she is evil, and therfore untrustworthy, still keep her from being included in the “Top Tier”. And, on a purely technical note, Mistress 9 possession is not default Sailor Saturn, so its relevance to this discussion is questionable.

All in all, there is no obvious reason to assume anyone would have a particularly difficult or easy time fucking either of these two, nor anything to imply it wouldn’t be good. Therefore we must default them to “Mid Tier”.

This only leaves us with Sailor Venus, Sailor Mars, and Sailor Jupiter for our high tier. We can justify their presence by first asserting there are no particular limitations in pursuing them; they are heterosexual, they are not in committed relationships, and they have been known to fawn over men. Next, we can see that they each have their own particular positive qualities. For instance, Sailor Venus is the Sailor Scout of love, so we can assume she would be particularly affectionate and amorous, the kind of woman who engages in “sweet gentle lovin'” not raw animalistic fucking. Sailor Mars is a Shinto priestess and has the ability to exorcise demons, which I know would benefit me personally, and has, appropriately enough, a rather fiery personality. Whereas Venus would fuck with passion, Mars would fuck with fervor, as if she wanted you to beg for mercy before she snapped your cock in two with the herculean muscles of her vagina. Thus we would be foolish to deny them spots in the “Top Tier”.

But what of Sailor Jupiter? Surely we did not forget her? Of course not, as we have asserted upon initiating this discussion, there can be only one objective answer to who is the most fuckable Sailor Scout. Our eliminative process has restricted our final candidates to Mars, Venus, and Jupiter, and the exclusion of Jupiter from the "Top Tier" can only mean I believe her to be the most fuckable. But how can I defend this claim? Jupiter obviously fulfills the same difficulty requirements as the other two, but it is her unique characteristics that allow her to outshine them. Of all the scouts she is considered the best cook, and while snuggling and exorcising demons have their benefits, neither is as consistently useful as cooking ability. On average, we eat three times a day, seven days a week; how often do we need a good snuggle? How often do we need a demon exorcised? Next, Jupiter is the physically largest Sailor Scout. Not only is she simply the tallest, but her thighs and posterior are the most muscular, allowing her to crush you like some sort of wildly erotic sex vice. Being the most physically powerful you know you could engage her in wild and untamed acts of power-fucking. And when she finishes bruising the living hell out of your manhood, she can make you a milkshake or some fudge cake. Futhermore, being the tomboy of the group, after having sex and eating, and then having more sex, you could snuggle up on the couch and play some videogames with her.

Using clear, objective, scientific examination skills, we have found a solution to a problem most scholars would have incorrectly labeled as “subjective”. Remember, readers, all things can be explored through the rational means I have demonstrated today.

Hey, look at this shit

2010-01-14T21:56:00.000-08:00

I Google Image Searched "masturbatory", that's the best picture I got. My friend Brian has a great masturbatory expression, it involves a single cocked eyebrow, a half smile, and the jerk-off hand gesture. I've plagiarized it many an occasion, including this one:

The Writers Guild of America, 2009 best videogame writing nominees:
Assassin's Creed 2
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Uncharted 2
Wet
X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Now Uncharted 2 had some pretty decent dialogue--my standard for decent being "not jarringly bad"--but its story, much like the stories behind all of these games, teetered somewhere between mediocre and just plain shitty.

Not that a WGA award would mean anything; the day Crash won the academy award for best picture, I lost whatever little faith I had in the credibility of awards. I could've taken a blank roll of film, grabbed it by both ends, and flossed my unwiped asshole with it... would've made a better fucking movie (same goes for Avatar, but that's... an unnecessary rant). By and large, awards serve to recognize mediocre, inoffensive, bullshit. Genius is risky, genius can alienate.

There's a saying out there... maybe it's a movie quote, I don't know; it goes, "Individuals are intelligent, people are stupid." By and large, individuals are pretty fucking stupid. They like dumb shit, they say dumb shit. Individuals with any iota of authority aren't necessarily the dumbest, but they're the most destructively dumb. Administrators, bureaucrats, committee members (be it the government, your office or university, or whatever committee selects WGA winners), they're not mouth-breathingly stupid (they can do the crossword and brew a pot of coffee), they're just disarmed of their critical intellect by systemic pragmatism. As in, because they are individuals aware of what they are doing and why (salary, promotion, approval of superiors), they can't deviate from the path of intellectual mediocrity. And that makes them bland assholes.

But that's not the point I'm making, in fact that whole rant was a complete tangent. The point I wanted to make was that people don't read enough. Not all people... just people who write. And not all people who write, just people who write functional shit (which doesn't have to be art, it just has to work).

The standards are pretty low when it comes to games because most of the people developing, writing, and playing these things... well, they're not literary people. The majority of my friends who would label themselves as 'gamers' (and I mean they legitimately sit down and play a game for a couple of hours, none of that Nintendo Wii jerkoff bullshit) don't read books... ever. Except maybe for class.

Most people are like that.

I'm not saying reading makes you smarter, or that only smart people read, but exposing yourself to literature calibrates your mind to understand what makes a story and how it ought to be told.

Don't get me wrong; as a kid my dad would always tell me that I watched too much TV, spent too much time playing videogames or browsing the web, not enough time reading. He told me all he did as a kid was read. I called him a faggot (in my head).

But now I'm older and I've found that writing is something I enjoy doing, and I've grown to like reading for that reason--because I like writing. The more I read, the more aware I become of different styles and philosophies toward the craft, the more aware I become of just what the fuck I'm doing, or would like to do.

And no, comic books are not a substitute for real literature. A lot of people will go on and on about graphic novels, but it's such a limited medium. At its best, a graphic novel can be on par with a decent novel, never a great one. You read something like The Unbearable Lightness of Being or A Confederacy of Dunces, and you know how much more important voice is over imagery. It's not all that often comics are written and illustrated by the same person, and that in itself disrupts the purity of the voice, the poignancy of the emotion. I'm either flipping through a miniature gallery disrupted by unnecessary text, or reading a story disrupted by gratuitous drawings.

For that same reason, you'll never see great writing in games until writers understand what the medium is and is not capable of. Just as great movies rarely achieve the narrative heights of great literature, games can rarely achieve the heights of film. Literature is a thought medium, film is an image medium, games are an experience medium. There is only so much you can convey through experience that overly ambitious games become... well, movies. The Metal Gear Solid series is a prime example. Many games pause gameplay to convey story through short cinematic segments because it just cannot be done through gameplay.

I think Fumito Ueda comes closest to understanding that, as well as the general limitations of games for the purposes of story telling. While most games, like Modern Warfare 2, try to avoid this narrative pitfall by just not having one, Ueda relies on atmosphere and gameplay, with as little exposition as possible.

This Game is an Awkward Game

2010-01-12T11:21:00.001-08:00

You guys have no idea how long I'd been waiting for this game to come out. Psychonauts was one of the best damn games to come out last gen... fuck, I get a nerd boner just thinking about it. Every person I've seen who's ever owned, borrowed, or looked at a game controller, I've told them to play that fucking game. It's unbelievably good.

Brutal Legend... not so much.

Now I won't let the fact that my game data will no longer load because of a glitch associated with the DLC... preventing me from achieving 100% completion (I'm stuck at 99)... negatively skew my opinion. As frustrating as it is. To be honest, by the time it happened I was done with the game. Emotionally, I mean... hands up in the air, head back, surrender. Done.

First and foremost, the writing: the game's premise is fucking awesome, it's actual script, however, doesn't do it the justice it deserves. Now Psychonauts was written by both Tim Schafer and Eric Wolpaw. Wolpaw was also one of the three writers who worked on Portal. One of the three who worked on Portal. Schafer is Legend's only writing credit. Portal was a three or four hour game (I don't remember exactly, but I have beaten it), yet its writing staff was triple that of Brutal Legend, a game with significantly more dialogue.

That's not to say more writers make a better product, if any of you have you seen the film Crash (the Academy Award winning PC propaganda piece, not the car crash fetish one (which was awesome (James Spader!))), you'd know that often times more writers means more idiots smearing shit everywhere. But looking at what is consistent between Psychonauts and Brutal Legend, it seems to me that Schafer's an idea man. An amazing idea man. But not a detail man--compared to Wolpaw, whose job, along with most of the other Portal writers, was to litter the game with details.

Before you ask, Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle, and the Secret of Monkey Island each had four writers. Full Throttle is the only other game that Schafer has solo writing credit for; I haven't played it, so I can't comment on its quality relative to the others, but the point is that the man generally does not work alone. And it shows.

The pacing is not good. The dialogue doesn't overflow with humor like Psychonauts' dialogue did. There isn't a ton of random funny shit scattered across the game world like in Psychonauts. The overall plot is pretty alright; like a strong skeleton for an emaciated body. It's disappointing.

The graphics aren't that great either. And I mean... noticeably. Draw distances are awful, polygon counts seem pretty low on most environmental models. When you look at the concept art, which is just fucking awesome, you can't escape the realization of how bland the in-game world looks by comparison. The character models are great; they're obviously not going to be Metal Gear caliber, but they're cartoony and stylized and get the job done. They're what they need to be. The environments are not.

And speaking of the environments, the organization of the world map feels somewhat arbitrary. Like the team got together, thought of some cool shit they'd like to render, scattered it around with some thematic consistency, and then just laid down dirt in between.

I really need to stop comparing this to Psychonauts, it's too frustrating.

Gameplay is divided into three general modes: action-adventure, driving around, and RTS. The single player experience, particularly the mode-specific missions, highlight each mode's particular problems.

The action-adventure segments, by which I mean the portions of the game where Eddie (our protag) is running around on two feet, killing shit, are really too few to count. There are maybe three. This was disappointing because this is what I thought the game was going to be, but that's fine, I won't hold this against the game. Anyway, there's no jump button. Which is alright... in theory. Jump buttons have become such an intuitive element of adventure games that if you can't jump... something feels wrong. Even Nathan Drake's little limp dick hop in Uncharted makes you feel like you've got better control of the character, for no functional reason whatsoever. But lately games have been getting away with it. Only our pal Eddie often gets stuck on environmental obstacles... like stairs that are a quarter inch too tall. There's so much shit going on on the ground, that not having a jump button cripples on-foot exploration.

To the game's credit, though, combat is pretty damn fun. It's simple enough: you have a physical attack button, a magic button, and a dodging/blocking button. It's nowhere near as elegant as the system in Arkham Asylum, but it works and I enjoy it.

The car is what makes exploration possible. Summoning it often gets you unstuck in whatever little crevice you've weaseled yourself into. It's your main mode of getting from anywhere to anywhere else... though a teleportation system between garages would've been intuitive* (like the tree stumps in Psychonauts, where you go to a central underground location to get upgrades... same fucking thing, only in that game you could use it to travel between stumps, whereas here you leave through the hole you entered). Its physics are sometimes a little wonky, which was really frustrating in the racing missions. The opponent would tap my car and it would go spinning out, I'd straight up ram his but I guess he was on invisible iron rails or something. Car combat is pretty decent, I didn't feel the secondary weapons were worth much though.

The RTS element is fucking weird. I know the different troops have different functions and whatnot... but at the end of the day you're just going to be amassing a large, and somewhat diverse, army and sledgehammering your way to victory. There just isn't a system in play where you can be surgical with how you divide your team and the missions you give them. You can give class-specific order, you can fuck with distances and spawn points, but all of this is just the player compensating for the game should have provided you with. I didn't play Starcraft for more than a couple of hours, but that fucking box system, where you draw one and all the troops inside are selected for an action, that shit makes sense! Aside from the troops I spawn, and the actions I do myself (like melting a ton of the enemy's faces), I don't really feel like I have all that much control on what goes down.

"Everybody... go here. OK, now, everybody... there."

This problem is the same general problem between all of the modes, and really reflects a greater philosophy behind game design: the creator's promise to his audience.

Every game, with few exceptions, gives you a few basic premises:
Your mission (save the princess, save the world, make your dog happy, etc.)
Your toolset (jumping and fireballs, guns, a frisbee)
Your opposition (mushroom men, pirates, the desperate agony that is so fundamentally a part of being alive)

The best designed games are the ones where these elements are purest, or least interrupted. For example, Mario can run, jump, and shoot fireballs. He kills turtles and mushrooms with these skills, and proceeds to save the princess. It's straightforward, its simple, its organic. But you can fuck it up.

When your toolset isn't sufficient to overcome your opposition, for instance. Like if jumping or shooting fireballs didn't kill anything, because of some glitch (not because they weren't meant to, we're assuming they're still parts of your toolset). It'd frustrating as all hell, there'd be entire parts you couldn't finish.

Or what if you can't utilize your toolset in an organic manner? Whenever we jump, we can jump up, forward, backward, left, or right. Mario is 2D, so ignore that last dimension. What if Mario could only jump up and not forward or back? And what if that were intentional and the game facilitated it? It'd still feel weird because it undermines our idea of what it is to jump.

The point is, you make a promise to your audience, like you can organize an army to defeat an opponent, your audience expects to be able to control that army in a manner that has become intuitive to them. Like if I'm staring at the screen, thinking of basic instructions I'd like to yell (foot soldiers, flank left), but there's no way to translate that through the controls, that's a problem.

At the end of the day, it's an 'alright' game elevated to 'decent' because of the originality of its concept and gameplay style. It's novel, ambitious, yet broken, which still makes it a worthwhile experience, in my opinion. Just don't compare it to Psychonauts.

Oh, and on the plus side, the soundtrack is fucking awesome. They probably used the money they saved on not hiring another writer to license all this damn music.

*I starred the word intuitive because I think that's the major flaw in this game. A lot of things simply aren't. Like it wasn't properly play-tested, or no one had the balls to speak up, I'm really hoping Schafer doesn't descend the George Lucas path in going from an auteur to a... fucking bad auteur, isolated from the sheer badness of his bad ideas by an army of yes-men and nodding heads. Tim Schafer is an amazing artist, but he needs an amazing team to make his vision something we can all experience.

This movie is lame.

2010-01-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

Sherlock Holmes was never much of a character, he was pretty much always just a vehicle to explore Arthur Conan Doyle's crazy mystery setups. It's something of a common literary practice, especially in genres like mystery, adventure, and scifi. Asimov or Dick ask themselves, "What if a time traveler could go back in time and butt fuck Satan?" And then they write the story, centering it around the adventures of Standin McAnybody.

Holmes is kind of like that, only he has idiosyncrasies... like... uh, he's smart and... does drugs... sometimes. It's shallow but it gets the job done.

Now the story's been reinvented over and over, through various other literary works, TV shows, and film adaptations. House, M.D. is one example. House is Holmes; the show's creators have even discussed the intentional parallels, and how the series is, fundamentally, a modern interpretation of the series-turned-mythos.

House is an awesome show because House is an awesome character. He is incredibly observant, has impeccable deductive skills, and abuses drugs. There's the Holmes foundation. But he's also sardonic, witty, socially and psychologically detached from the world in a very turbulent way--he's a lot like other famous fringe character, like Travis Bickle or Captain Benjamin Willard, in terms of his role in the narrative (an unusual, often disturbing, and deeply intriguing interface for the audience)--in short: he's a character. The writers of the show took their inspiration from a bland stand-in persona and turned it into something fuckin' awesome.

The Sherlock Holmes movie, from the get go, was also supposed to be a radical new interpretation of the mythos. I was expecting something along the lines of Wild Wild West--steampunk and cheese (melty cheese punk? fondue punk?)--which would've been awesome, but they didn't really go that far. Holmes is still boring, only now he's vaguely psychic (like Nicolas Cage in Next), something of a kung fu master (he boxed in the books, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Shaolin shadowboxing (which, it should be noted, is no match for the Wu-Tang sword style)), and coked out all the time. Oh, and aloofly homosexual. Guy Ritchie thinks having Robert Downey Jr. walk around with corpse-like, unfocused eyes is some sort of replacement for actual personality.

His deductive abilities are total bullshit, as is the plot as a whole. A guy has chalk on his jacket, therefore he must be a professor. What? Who wrote this shit? Do you know how Holmes solves the final mystery? This isn't detailed enough to be a spoiler, just revel in the crazy: HE TRIPS BALLS. I have no idea on what, but we get a scene where he goes crazy, has something like a violent acid trip and... wham! Solved.

Also the acting is wooden.

Also nothing really makes any sense.

This movie could have been so much cooler if it were just Wild Wild West 2. Will Smith could've been Sherlock Holmes, there could've been spider robots. It would've been fucking sweet. I mean if you're going to make him a fucking autistic martial artist, lets see him pound on a goddamn robot animal or two.

Children are often unintentionally educated...

2010-01-07T19:41:00.000-08:00

I was talking to a friend of mine when we kind of struck on this point. What brought it on was actually an story from my own childhood...

So, I don't know how many of you experience this--I have friends who can relate, friends who can't--but sometimes I stare off into a direction and my vision gets grainy. Like the images are composed of the tiniest of pixels. It's most evident in low light; in total darkness I just see tons and tons of staticy dots, immeasurably small.

When I was a little kid I asked my mom why my vision would do that.

She replied, "Because you watch too much TV."

Now she didn't sit and think about it, she probably didn't even listen when I asked. She just said that because I watched a lot of TV and it bothered her. Hell, she may have been watching TV when she said that. It was totally off the cuff, a quick, aloof response that, completely unbeknownst to her, fucked me up for months.

I'd try my damndest to avoid ever seeing static on TV because I thought it imprinted the graininess into my vision. It became a major point of paranoia, and I'd try to look at as many solid things as possible to... I don't even know, solidify my eyesight?

Other things I was terribly afraid of as a child: Aliens. Would not sleep near windows because I was afraid of abductions. General insomnia...

Other weird incidents: First became aware of my own mortality after playing Sonic 2 on my Sega Genesis for like five hours straight. Got really jittery, walked around like a zombie with a rapid fire heart (some kind of crazy ass seizure?), bam! Realization.

Weird, huh?

Haiku Moment

2010-01-03T18:55:00.000-08:00

I was making doodies and drinking a cup of coffee when I realized: I am turning into my father.

Like the sparsely sprouting shoulder hairs weren't enough of a tip-off.

New Year! Let my first post of the decade be this erotic fantasy...

2009-12-31T23:58:00.001-08:00

I fantasize a lot. Any moment I can, I tune reality out and get absorbed in imagination land. But it's not all unicorns and rainbows and UFOs and lasers, no, a lot of the time I'm having fake conversations with real people--this is what it would be like if I told that guy I think he's a fucking shitburger, this is what it would be like if I told that girl I think she's the bee's knees (etc.etc.).

A lot of the time I get story ideas or rant ideas or... whatever, really. But, I'd say, just as often... maybe more often, but it's hard to gauge... they're just masturbatory fantasies. My life as a kung fu master, what it would be like to have an ostrich as a pet (spoilers: fuckin' SWEET), Dragon Ball powers (KAAAAAAAAA MHEEEEEEEY...), the sorts of things a twelve year-old would think about.

But sometimes they get dirty! My fantasies, they drift into that dark alleyway of tits and naughty bits (lady parts!)... but they're never normal. Not like anything you'd ever find in a porno movie, not even a Japanese one. I don't know why, but I guess no one gets off like how I want to get off.

One of my recurring fantasies involves me as a time traveler. I, with all my advanced tech (including hygienic devices like tooth brushes (super important!)) travel back to ancient China, India, North or South America... Europe would work but not entirely... and I convince the natives that I'm some sort of deity. Amazed by my pale complexion and superpowers, they present to me their women and I create a harem. My light-skinned children are then deified and become part of a new upper caste of hedonistic elites and statutes are built in my likeness. I grant limited technological knowledge unto my close circle... mostly for the hell of it, but I guess it adds to the worship fuel.

I think I could make some elements of this fantasy reality, but no one's responded to my online personals...

(note: this rant was written at 3 am on New Years' day, a decent amount of alcohol in my body. Drunk happens.)

Comic Rant Retread: Drake and Josh Movie Review

2009-12-25T21:42:00.000-08:00

You know what I love about Red Bull? They're fucking brilliant marketing campaign. I'll be walking down the street, minding my own business, singing the Metal Gear Solid theme in my head and rolodexing through my various deviant fantasies, when out of nowhere an attractive young woman stops me, "Have a Red Bull!"

"Wha-huh? For free?"

"Yeah! Take one!"

"O-okay..."

And I get a free drink and I smile and am happy. A pretty girl approached me and gave me a drink! Total paradigm shift--you know, usually it's me approaching women with drinks (that may or may not be fizzing from the bottom), and they hardly ever talk to me! But here, here there are real 8's and 9's and 10's smiling and making small talk and filling me full of FREE liquid! Brilliant!

I should add I'm one of the few people I know who likes the taste of Red Bull. Most of my friends think it tastes like shit, but I think it tastes like dill pickles and green Jolly Ranchers fused together and liquefied... two of my favorite foods! Awesome!

So when I got a free can of Red Bull Cola I was pretty fucking optimistic. Cola's good. Red Bull's good. How could their fusion be anything less than decent, right? That logic seems to make sense... you know, it's nowhere near the left-field-flipper-baby-drunken-hump of Jolly Rancher and pickle, so what are the odds it'd be total rat piss? Well you know, people do win the lottery, people are struck by lightning, crazy shit happens all the time. Red Bull Cola doesn't quite taste like rat piss, no, more like... well imagine if a rat drank its own piss, vomited it out, lapped up that vomit and then had violent diarrhea... yeah, that'd kind of taste almost as bad as this shit. Disappointment.

Thankfully, I got to wash my mouth out with pineapple Fizzy Lizzy not too long after I drank that rotten swill. The president of the company handed me a bottle himself, it was pretty fucking awesome. Good guy, good crew in general--really small, intimate operation. Turns out Lizzy's his wife and when he married her the tiny soda company came with her, kind of like a dowry I guess. The guy used to be a lawyer and he said to me, "Never... ever... and I mean ever practice law. Don't do it. It's a bottomless hell... with fire... everywhere." He was pretty damn fun to chill with, so I give his beverage the PolkOut Seal of Approval. No more Izze for me, none of that bullshit corporate knockoff garbage, no sir.

Speaking of free shit, I also got to go to a free preview screening of Valkyrie. The new Tom Cruise movie where he plays a Nazi officer involved in an assassination attempt on Hitler. I was expecting, or at least hoping for, something totally fucking ridiculous. It's Tom Cruise playing a one-handed Nazi with an eye patch, what are the odds it wouldn't out top Top Gun?! I guess pretty good. The film teeters on the fence between campy Tom Cruise vehicle and dramatic biopic, making it just kind of... awkward. Toss in some historical revisionism and you've got yourself an alright, but largely unspectacular, film.

No Longer Sober: Speaking of films, I decided to hold off tossing this update online until after the conclusion of the Drake and Josh movie. As I watched the final third of it, I drank a significant amount of Fanta and rum, so as I write this I'm pretty shitfaced. Everything prior to this point was written sober. In fact, I shall add a bold note at the beginning of this paragraph. Retroactively.

Here were my major grievances with the movie:
Not enough Allison Scagliotti. We only got her on screen for all of two minutes and she's not as pretty as she used to be... she looks older, her whole ensemble and hair and makeup and stuff seemed to serve the sole purpose of toning her down. Toning the hotness down. This is a crime because she is a very pretty woman with a very deep voice--I know some of you think it's manly but I like it. It's different, unique. We remember unique people. Unique women are superior to cookie cutter nobodies who we can just marginalize and not think about and jerk off to and forget. Personality, not identity.
Grievance two: Megan Parker is a deeply disturbed, sociopath of a character. She's mean for the sake of being mean, and in the opening she pulls out a switchblade from out of her leather jacket, like she runs with gangs. But not like modern gangs with motorcycles and whips--she drove a scooter--but old timey ones with leather jackets. Gangs today don't wear leather jackets or anything, there's no nostalgia-love in modern organized crime. Sharks and Jets snapping at each other. That's Miranda Cosgrove. She has a nice face but she's fourteen for fuck's sake, why are they trying to hyper-sexualize her? She's only borderline pubescent... I know this, I've seen the show, they put her in skimpy clothing... waste-hip differential, her body is NOT yet adept to harboring infants in her womb. So tone it down Nickelodeon, tone it down.

I've also been drinking as I've been writing this so you ought to know that if my sentences are progressively less coherent.

Miranda Cosgrove looks like Wednesday Adams. Really big head and really pale--I DON'T MEAN THAT IN THE PEJORATIVE SENSE, MIRANDA. You're a pretty girl but you're in that awkward phase of your life when you're growing into yourself... you know, physically AND emotionally... you're blossoming into a human being. Like when Hot Rod absorbed the Matrix of Leadership and became Rodimus Prime in that fucking bitching ass Transformers animated movie where Leonard Nemoy played that big motherfucker... no, not Galactus but of comperable scale. Your music video felt artificial, like a bunch of marketing executives got together in a room and tried to make you into something marketable--TAP YOURSELF, MIRANDA. Tap your heart for your music, be real. You're a great person.

The Drake and Josh movie (yeah I know, awesome I can use italics when shit-faced (and hyphens too)) had a fucking monkey that flew into berseker RAGE and pissed on a small child. Awesome. Crazy Steve, also known as JERRY "SITCOM MESSIAH" TRAINOR had some great quotes. Loved it. Decent movie only skinny Josh is a piece of fucking shit. He's not nerdy or awkward or fat anymore so the whole dichotomy is fucking dead. What's the point? It's just two Drakes now, two identical characters who both suck... save for the fact that I hate Josh more because he abandoned his roots and he KISSES ALLISON SCAGLIOTTI!!! Every time their lips lock a part of my soul weeps. WEEPS. Her deep voice sends vibrations through me... literally, bass, that's what that does... and my genitals tremble. Vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr... bass. Stay wonderful, Allison. Stay wonderful.

I'm sorry I said I hated you, Drake. I don't. I only hate Josh. You seem like a good dude and you're probably nice. I mean I don't know maybe you're a dick but your characters are nice so high five me some time. If you're ever in my area I'll buy you a beer and you can give me guitar lessons.

So the movie is very very decent. It's got decent pace and it has a script which is good, you know a plot and dialogue foundation... something for the actors to read and say aloud. Lines, they call 'em. The inside of my fucking ear itches.

I love you guys. My readers. You're good people... I know you don't... you don't share the site, you know, my popularity isn't snowballing because you're all... self-conscious maybe? Ashamed of these feelings you feel? Joy? Arousal? I don't know, man, I don't know. But you're good people nonetheless and even if my fan base doesn't build you're still all good people. You're good people. I'd hug you through the internet if I could, spread my happiness. Like I'm sunshine and you're all my little flowers, feeding off my warmth and blossoming, all in your own right. Like an army of little Miranda Cosgroves, hitting puberty all at once... a sea of pop stars. Don't sell out, my friends, be true to yourself. Be true to yourself, Miranda. Be true to yourself, Allison. You're good women. I'd totally go out with either of you--well, I'd wait until you were eighteen, Miranda, otherwise our relationship would be of questionable legal status--but you'd probably find me creepy. But that's okay. You don't need to like me for me to empathize with you. I can observe you from a distance. Not like a creepy stalker hiding in the bushes, but from a visual and emotional and physical distance. Respect, is what it's called, honoring your human right to feel however you want to feel, like or dislike whoever you want to. We can't sway human emotion, you know, we can't force or expect people to feel what we want them to feel... we wouldn't want that burden put on us, so why put it on them? It's all about maturity, you know, spiritual wholeness. Security. We can love them like Monet loves Japanese bridges. He doesn't get a boner for them, doesn't jerk off to bridges. Maybe he did, I don't know that for certain, but that's a reasonable conjecture. It'd be pretty fucked up if he jerked off to bridges. But that's what I mean, we can observe and enjoy and be a part of something while not being a literal part of that something. Completion, that's something... intrinsic, internal... we don't need Miranda Cosgrove to fulfill our lacking, whatever that lacking may be. We need to ask ourselves why that lacking exists, what is the source of that lacking? Treat the illness, not the symptoms.

Well I'm going to go and be drunk and have a good drunk time. I love you guys. Sorry I'm not ranting more, I probably could but it wouldn't make much sense and you'd be reading it and going AWWW WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?! and I don't want to alienate you guys like that. So stay terrific, because that's what you are. Deep down. In your soul. You're decent. Or maybe even great.

Everybody's got a price

2009-12-21T08:18:00.000-08:00

I got propositioned for the second time ever. Some dude at this bar we were all at offered me, and this other guy in our group, $60 to give him a foot massage. And you know what? I was flattered. As a guy, it's not that often that girls come up to me and compliment me on... well, anything. They're generally not forward, not out to compliment... but horny drunk gay men... holy shit, what self esteem boosters! I didn't end up rubbing his feet, I was kind of put off by his persistent insisting I blow him...

"I'm not some tawdry whore," I explained (quite vehemently), "I'm not going to just suck any old dick... I have to be romanced! Dinners and flowers and expensive gifts! Maybe third date, fourth... you can have a tug or two, but that's it. Call me old fashioned, call me a prude, you sure as shit won't call me easy."

So I began thinking... what is my threshold? $500 for a hand job isn't too bad, you know. You spit in your hand, close your eyes, turn around and try to ignore the smacksmacksmack sound... then douse your hands in kerosene and set them on fire... no big deal! But someone who'd give a tug job for $500 would certainly do it for $400... $300? $250? $150?

You keep iterating on this line of thought and suddenly you're jerkin' dicks for pennies.

Haiku Moment

2009-12-19T17:05:00.000-08:00

While watching 18 Kids and Counting on TLC, I thought about Michelle and Jim Bob and their marriage. I wondered how often he goes down on her. My basic prejudices of Southern religious people told me never, but my faith in human decency wanted me to believe several times a week.

I am a cullinary wizard.

2009-12-17T08:26:00.000-08:00

Free coffee in the career center. I hovered in front of the machine, holding a coffee packet in one hand (it's one of those where you feed a little coffee sock to a robot and it pisses your coffee into a cup) and a cocoa packet in another.

"Hmmm..." I thought aloud, "On one hand... I'm pretty tired and I love pooping, so this coffee right here would really be quite wonderful. But... cocoa... and it has as much calcium as milk. Calcium fuckin' rules."

If I'm anything, I'm a mediator. Conflict comes my way and I kick its ass to the curb with my meaty fucking resolutions.

So what did I do? How did I solve this most challenging of conundrums?

Best of both worlds, as Miley would say. Cocoa powder, meet coffee. I forced them to make love in front of me, metaphorically speaking, and I drank the runoff. Their babies... did I drink their babies? Is that what it was? Well whatever I drank, it was fucking weird and delicious. I am a cullinary wizard!

We all get three.

2009-12-11T19:16:00.000-08:00

Every man, in accordance with arbitrary man law, can have a list of three other men he would go gay for and remain secure with his heterosexuality. I have been contemplating my list for the last few days and I've come up with my top choices--no particular order, all fulfill different dimensions of the homo-lovin':

Jean-Claude Van Damme

Bloodsport era Jean-Claude was a beautiful man. BEAUTIFUL FUCKING MAN. I was watching that movie recently... and holy shit... I had to duct tape my genitals to my stomach because I'd just be too damn confused if I got a boner.

Dimension of homo-love: Man candy. Pure and simple. I'd take him to parties just to rub it in peoples faces, "Damn right," my eyes'll say, "I'm hittin' the premium man-tang."

Downside: What's pleasing the eye isn't always pleasing to the touch. Big Belgian muscles may be nice to look at, but you can't cuddle that shit. It'd be like cuddling a sack of bricks.

James Spader

I once watched an entire marathon of James Spader films on IFC. There's that one where he's romancing Susan Sarandon, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Crash... the one where he's a doctor... and goddamn, I was consistently charmed. He is one charming goddamn man.

Dimension of homo-love: This is the catch you introduce to all your friends. He's great at parties, makes a terrific impression--makes you seem smarter by association. I mean if a man of this caliber is spending his time with YOU, of all people, you've got to be something special yourself.

Downside: He's got better places to be. I'd wake up and he'd be gone already, or maybe fastening his cufflinks. "I'll call ya', babe," he'll say on his way out, aloofly. Maybe he will... maybe.

Tim Schafer

He's got a great personality, a great sense of humor... that's some hardcore cuddle potential right there. We're talking long haul... cutesy dates, sentimental anniversaries, and smooches. Lots and lots of smooches.

Dimension of homo-love: Love with a capital L. It's not about who you're going to bed with, it's about who you're waking up next to.

Downside: Man, I dunno... farts?

June 19th, revisited

2009-12-08T22:35:00.000-08:00

I turned twenty-one yesterday. I hardly remember anything about that night… I know I vomited for the first time from alcohol ever. Surprisingly, it felt pretty great. I felt like a pitcher overflowing, and every time I’d lean down, a little bit would spill out. It was beautiful. I haven’t vomited in years… and I always remembered it as being unpleasant, always saw other drunk people and thought they must be having a horrible time. It’s like that one really tall water slide at Splish Splash (a water park out here, for the uninitiated) that freaked the fuck out of me as a kid. I wouldn’t go on it because it looked so damn scary, until one time I said fuck it and took the plunge. It wasn’t so bad. Didn’t feel as great as puking last night, but was certainly up there.

Apologies to all the people I harassed via text message last night. Everyone was asleep and I was lonely and looking for conversation. And I sometimes get depressed or meditative or abstrusely poetic (or just plain abstruse) when trashed, and I was most certainly trashed. I’ve never been picked up off my ass and shoved into a cab before… Going home felt like I was being carried through the air by the tiny arms of a thousand cherubs, only it was three other drunk dudes and a train. Glorious.

The rest of this rant’s going to be a bit different… yeah, I know, they’re rarely ever all that consistent, but this time probably even less so. It’s just about some thoughts that have been fluttering around my head, about the site, the comic, about what I’m doing. So yeah, this is one of those alienating, pretentious rambles that you’re better off not reading.

Restless and awake for far too long, I rolled out of bed at seven in the morning and started formulating something that could maybe eventually resemble a personal statement for the applications I’ll be sending out this fall. I say maybe because, like a lot of the stuff I tend to write, it was kind of… out there, to say the least.

I’ve been reading Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting—we were all given free copies before we left for Prague, but I never really got into it because it seemed like work. Well, I finished Ham on Rye and was jonesin’ for something to read on the train, and decided to pick it up. I’m glad I did because it’s really a fascinating book; the prose is kind of directionless, in that we’re presented with a set of loosely related short stories whose endings are practically inconsequential, but it’s entrancingly meditative. It’s like reading Thomas Wolfe; you don’t read his writing for the story, but for the pathos behind it, for the subtle melody of the syntax that in itself is more ambitious than some edge-of-your-seat Dan Brown adventure. At its core, the book is about love, its weight, its profundity. But there’s strong political overtone, which I would call neither liberal or conservative, but distinctly human.

My potential proto-statement was about what it means to be an artist, to be a writer. I put a little sliver of paper in the book by the following paragraph:

“The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside.”

Every human being feels they have a story to tell, every literate individual is, at least potentially, a writer. Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal; we create this static of the unremarkable, where every person deludes themselves into thinking that their thoughts and feelings are entirely unique. So what makes any of us any different? What elevates Bukowski and Kundera out from the mediocrity of the average Twitterer? Talent is one thing, but I think it’s their awareness, that contemplative detachment that comes from real damage, that makes them artists and not mere masturbators. I’ve said this a number of times to friends of mine, so as may as well say it here: if you’ve never had an existential crisis, you’re not interesting; if you’ve never contemplated suicide, then you’re probably in that small slice of a demographic that really ought to. Pain, anguish, the mercilessness of their lives, eats away at their hearts like embers easing into the center of a piece of paper.

If we could envision our lives as a plane, that forward potential ahead of us, our pasts behind, and our present reality encapsulating us from either side, I would look back and see a dim meandering trail cutting through a vast darkness. Twenty one years worth of mistakes, missteps, and naiveté. Ahead of me is only darkness; that vast, unfathomable expanse of potential. I have no idea what will be, who I will be, what my life will look like. Aside from that dim glow of that crooked path that is past, the only light that I can see is in my hands. Those embers eating away at the only part of me that can’t bear the flames. That caustic pragmaticism of our adult lives turns the child’s heart to ash.

From dust to dust, the artist reshapes their identity, escapes the darkness by descending into an autism of expression. That wall of mirrors, a sensory depravation chamber, where our new worlds are governed by our own laws. We can be sympathetic, we can be heroes, we can be great. Sure these comics are all transcribed conversations, but it’s only a patchwork truth. I reduce myself to some messy haired eccentric with a limited wardrobe; everything in between these little episodes is lost, leaving us with this deceit, this distilled reality, this new fiction.

“Who am I?” The most dangerous question ever asked. It’s fueled every war, it’s guided every crime, it’s shaped the very course of our lives.

Ever watched Taxi Driver? That’s one of my favorite movies. It’s unapologetic juvenilia—and why is that? What does it mean to be juvenile? When naiveté is turned to ash and we are left to reshape those incinerated pieces at our own discretion, that transition, that is the juvenile. I highly recommend reading some interviews with Paul Schrader from around the time of the film's release; his creative process, the things that he was going through at that point in his life, really flesh out the nature of that film as not just a marketable work of art, but as a cathartic device for its artist.

Sometimes, as we play with those ashes, some stray embers leave pinhole burns in the fabric of our culture, of our public consciousness. I don’t think Kundera or Bukowski ever really set out to be famous, but in their exploration of themselves, they made those pinhole burns and thus became relevant.

I’ve been called a lot of things by a lot of people. Disgusting, obnoxious, out of line, immature, paranoid. But never naïve. I wonder why that is… do I just hide it that well?

Have I ever talked about how Norman Rockwell’s my favorite artist? I feel like I might’ve ranted about that already… I understand he was a pop artist, paid to make his paintings for a very particular audience with very particular expectations, but that context aside, I always find myself enamored by the reality he presents in his paintings.

“You know it’s all bullshit, right?” Asked a particularly ornery feminist-hipster friend of mine (who was admittedly very helpful in bringing me water as I sat on the sidewalk puking).

“Yeah, of course it’s bullshit, it’s all bullshit, everything’s bullshit!” You peer into Rockwell’s canvas and you see a world where wives don’t get beaten, children don’t get raped, parents stick together and pop’s gonna be at everyone one of little Timmy’s baseball game. It’s utter bullshit, yet it’s almost messianic. Here’s what human decency looks like, if that were even possible. It’s not like Banksy, who tells us democracy is a lie, capitalism is destroying us, nothing that we have is to be trusted, to be valued, can be believed in. He asks us to abandon while Rockwell asks us to dream.

It’s absolutely naïve and that’s why I love it. It’s everything I could ever want out of life and will never have. I’d wear a cardigan, smoke a pipe, and settle for that serene stability that only exists on these canvases. The people in these paintings ostensibly lack free will, inspiration, any manner of real… pain or yearning. They’re like rocks in a Zen garden. And that’s just too goddamn irresistible.

I had a dream the other night where I was walking through a city, maybe New York. Maybe it was the financial district; giant blue and white glass skyscrapers, growing and suffocating the streets like some metallic fungus. I’d face a building, spread my arms up towards it, fingers spread, and it would collapse. Just crumble to the ground in a pile of twisted steel, broken glass, and concrete. I’d walk into the center of the rubble, curl up into a fetal position, and sleep. When I awoke I’d walk up to another building and do it again. Again and again.

If that’s not a reflection of some profound disenchantment, I don’t know what is.

Well, if you made it this far and any of this made any sense, why don’t you send me an email? We could be pen pals and be pretentious together.

I like my BLTs without the malaise, thanks

2009-12-08T22:10:00.000-08:00

Ever wandered down a hospital corridor by yourself? The long hallways, white, sterile walls, pale tiles speckled slightly with dots of blue and green. Empty stretchers and wheel chairs, white sheets and pillow cases. Metallic elevator doors. An overwhelming emptiness.

We often give personality to places; our cluttered bedrooms comforting, a dim lit bar compassionate, a church judgmental.

How does this vacancy translate into feeling? Is this hospital corridor dead inside? Does its emptiness carry over into its spirit? Or is it foreboding, frightening... threatening?

Malaise. Standing in the center of this hallway, the walls desperately pulling away from you. This is the world disintegrating. This dirty, wretched, sterile world. This is malaise.

Today was the first time I was in a McDonald's in eight months and this is how I felt. I had a grilled chicken club sandwich and a medium Diet Coke.

The iCarly Addiction

2009-12-03T14:22:00.000-08:00

We've only got one TV around here, and it's in our common room. Thirteen of us share it, and since it's attached directly to the kitchen, people are always walking in and out for a variety of reasons (food, coffee, booze...). Garrett spotted me watching iCarly while I was typing away on my laptop--probably writing one of many tedious application essays--and couldn't help but stop and watch alongside me. Andy, soon enough, did the same.

Three of us. Three dudes in our early 20's, sitting around on a Saturday night (it was Thanksgiving weekend so anyone who was anyone was out of town--we're just a bunch of no one's), watching iCarly.

It's a pretty damn good show. The writing is quirky, sometimes just funny because it's random, sometimes it's genuinely clever. We especially appreciated the overt marijuana reference in the first five minutes of iMove Out, possibly one of the funnier bits of the whole episode.

Garrett loves it because, he says, it's one of the few shows on TV that doesn't offend all of his sensibilities. The characters aren't all fuck-hungry, two dimensional drama-beasts. They have interesting personalities, desires, and goals beyond that of the average sitcom character--which is generally just either getting laid or getting rich.

Thinking about, what I like a lot about the show is the fact that Carly herself is actually a pretty damn decent role model. Unlike Hannah Montana, for instance, she isn't a boy-starved idiot. She doesn't get poor grades, she doesn't obsess over shoes or celebrity. She's an A student who's responsible, tech savvy (not to Freddie's extent, but he's certainly above and beyond the standard), charismatic, with artistic passions and creative drives. She's a 21st century girl. And yeah, sure, she's fashionable, but her style is both modern and conservative. Very rarely is she really sexualized (though it's fuckin' creepy when she is).

You know, this season is the last for the show. I've heard it's a hit, and while it's had its low points, these last few episodes have been solid. Strange, then, that they wouldn't move to renew it. I don't know the reason exactly, maybe it's to further Miranda Cosgrove's music career. I remember last year they were really pushing her new songs, playing that one music video over and over throughout the day. What was interesting about it was the fact that the Miranda Cosgrove pop star persona is totally incongruous with the Carly character. In the music video, she was hanging around a mall with her girlfriends, pining over boys. The Carly persona makes for a hard sell--not too easy to write catchy pop tunes about being quirky and independent. Maybe to lessen that tension, to divorce Cosgrove from the Carly persona and broaden her future potential appeal, open the doors to possible sex idol status, they figure stop the show now, put her career on hiatus for a few months, even a year or two, and come back with a new album and a new set of silicon bosoms.

I'd like to be wrong and I'd like to see them take the high ground, really embrace this more socially responsible, pragmatic image, but this is Hollywood. And Hollywood fucking sucks.

Promises we make to ourselves.

2009-11-18T10:18:00.000-08:00

Promises we know we will break.

"I'll never drink again..." your roll your face into your own sickly smelling, sweat drenched armpit as you slowly come to on the couch. Still clothed, slightly sticky... is that drool or did you cough something up? Is there any aspirin? Water? Some totemic idol to bow before, offer sacrifices to?

"I'll never love again," eyes buried into palms, your heart a little mound of ash in the dark chasm just behind your sternum. How much weight can that rope hold? You wonder. You've got to keep yourself together. Try drinking again.

"I'll never have a chili eating contest with the Vietnamese club again," arms wrapped around your convulsing abdominal muscles as your asshole spits fire. You pray to Jesus for the first time in your life but he just sits there atop his Heavenly throne and laughs at you for being such a fucking dumbass.

Me Chinese?

2009-11-08T09:03:00.000-08:00

About a week or two ago I was sitting in a cafe with my old boss from Prague--I worked at a pretentious modern art rag--along with other former interns and potential future ones. We were talking about the logistics of launching the mag here in New York, get it circulating through the US (it really is a good read if you can get yourself a copy). Anyways, at the table was this Russian girl--and I mean RUSSIAN, as Russian as Cossacks or borscht or frozen doggy corpses orbiting the Earth--and just as she's getting up to leave she turns to me and asks, "Hey... are you Russian?"

"Wait... what? Yeah... I, uh... how'd you figure?"

"You look Russian. And you have an accent."

An accent?! Let me set the record straight: I do not have an accent. I speak English with the mastery of any native born son of these United States... in fact, some may say better!

Anyways, last night I'm at this bar and this girl--I think she was Norwegian or something (by way of Oregon... figure that's a more convoluted story than my own)--turns to me and asks, "Are you Russian or something?"

"WHAT THE FUCK IS IT WITH PEOPLE?!" I throw my arms into the air in frustrated surrender, "Yeah, unfortunately I am..."

"You look it."

"How do I look Russian?!"

"Your eyes," she says as she plants her fingers at the outer corners of her own and pulls back (the Me Chinese, Me Play Joke face repopularized recently by the likes Miley Cyrus (not that I'd know...)).

The plot thickens.

Women are fucking disgusting

2009-10-24T08:51:00.000-07:00

I'm at a diner, waiting in line for the bathroom. Back against the wall, counting the ceiling tiles, doot doot doot... finally, the door opens and a young lady steps out. Petite, blond, easy on the eyes in that Central European kind of way (their faces are more jagged but that carries its own unique aesthetic appeal). I nod politely, she ignores me (par for course), and I proceed into the bathroom.

Do you, dear readers, have any idea what lay waiting for me there?

No, it wasn't a big heaping mound of turd, if that was your guess. While disgusting, that's not quite tied to her womanhood.

No, it wasn't a toilet bowl filled with menses or vaginal accoutrements.

No, friends, it was a toilet seat peppered in piss. I was only here to take a tinkle, so this didn't disrupt my plans at all, but nevertheless I couldn't help but think... what the fuck?! I know why she did it, I know how: "Hmmm," she thought to herself, "I need to piddle but I don't want to press my smooth lady tushie to the seat... guess I'll just helicopter over it and see what happens."

Why not LIFT the seat if she wasn't going to use it?
Why not put toilet paper down on the seat and actually sit?

I know you women out there do this. All of you. Some of you may wipe the seat down afterward while others just get up and leave... either way, you're sick. You're fucking sick.

I don't know what kind of fucked up satisfaction you people get from sloppily doing your business from that hovering pose, but I'm just grateful it wasn't diarrhea.

Brooke fucking Shields!

2009-10-14T08:04:00.000-07:00

"Holy crap..." I whisper to my friend, my eyes fixed on this figure in the center of the sidewalk, "...that's Brooke fuckin' Sheilds..."

I saw Brooke Shields on my way to class. How crazy is that? I didn't say anything because she seemed agitated... she was in that classic distraught woman pose: back straight, left hand gripping right elbow, right hand up in the air and spasming with every syllable she spoke. Her eyes were all red too... well, their periphery. Not the eyeball part... I don't think she was high. She might've been. I've been told there are other reasons why one's eyes might be red, but I haven't discovered them.

Also, there's a half Asian girl in one of my classes who looks like Willem Dafoe and some random white kid who talks like Marlon Brando.

Have I been hit on the head?! Cuz I'm seein' stars!

fuckingrobots vacuum

2009-10-06T15:35:00.000-07:00

I accept the implications of fuckingrobots vacuum.

Haiku Moments 3

2009-09-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

Moment 1:
I was walking down the street, making eye contact with random people, zoning out as I always do. And I realized I'd been smiling. I'd been looking at all these random strangers and shooting them smiles, left and right, looking like a legitimately happy, if not merely friendly, guy.

And what thought was going through my head as I was doing this?

"Mobile Suit Gundam is pretty ridiculous fuckin' premise..."

Moment 2:
A friend of mine, discussing a mutual acquaintance of ours, told me she was convinced they were soulmates because "he's so fucking hot".

Haiku Moments 2

2009-09-22T21:32:00.000-07:00

My high school AP art teacher once rejected a series of photographs I did because they contained the word "fuck" (and derivatives thereof) scrawled on a piece of paper. She said, "I don't like profanity."

Sitting in a dorm room a few days ago, I went around the room asking every person what the last great book they read was. One girl replied, smiling, "Existentialism: A Beginner's Guide."

It's difficult to describe how that moment hit me in just one or two words. It was a big mess of a feeling most aptly described as what the fuck. When has the realization of any existential concept ever changed anyone's life for the better? It's kind of like celebrating the fact that your gums can bleed if you floss too hard.

Ubisoft Sucks

2009-09-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

Alright, alright, I know, I realize I'm a curmudgeonly son of a bitch who hates everything and everyone. I can't help it. I'm a pretty creative guy so it's often real easy for me to see how something could've been better as I'm playing or watching it. And having spent a good two decades sloshing elbows deep in a swamp of shit, I can spot the stuff from a mile away.

First, a note about Ubisoft: they suck. Pretty much consistently.

I haven't played Rayman and I concede that Rainbow Six is pretty good... but Prince of Persia? Dogshit. The first one was pretty decent, but then... the whole series just kind of melted into one long stream of sloppy diarrhea. And the new one, that's an especially sloppy turd.

Beyond Good and Evil? Mediocre as fuck. I picked it up because it's always lumped together with Psychonauts as one of the best games no one's ever played. Oh wow... look at that, it's like a Zelda knockoff but less interesting and with a plot line that might've been engaging if it weren't more or less copied and pasted from the Oddworld games. Psychonauts should feel insulted to be held in the same esteem as this game.

Assassin's Creed? Garbage. Repetitious levels, uninteresting characters, half assed junior high level attempt at creating an engaging story. Was this never playtested? Did no one ever spot the strange lack of fun factor?

I will concede The Price is Right for the Nintendo Wii is pretty sweet.

Ubisoft is an excellent example of what can happen when a developer has all the money in the world and maybe two or three truly inspired employees. Compare them to DoubleFine, a very small company with a lot of truly magnificent artists and writers. Virgil Games is another example, though Darksiders hasn't come out yet (and it may very well end up being an awful game), I'm confident there's no way it can be worse than Assassin's Creed (and at a fraction of the budget!).

This Ninja Turtles remake... holy shit. That's what I'm really here to rant about. The graphics are atrocious, and I say that first because that's the only thing that's been updated. This game is almost, what, twenty years old? You don't think they could've invested some iota of effort to make the gameplay the least bit comparable to modern brawlers?

There's no combo system, you've got two attacks to slowly grind your way from the first level to the end. Combat is boring and repetitious. The entire time I was thinking how cool it would be if a couple of the turtles could do a cooperative combo, which would've really added some depth to the multiplayer. They eliminated the boss from the sewer surfing level, which kind made the plot (as thin as it was) make less sense. Speaking of the surf level, those goddamn traps... and the fucking floor boards that pop up on the pirate ship... this is not fun. These aren't great gameplay elements. Getting hit by a board that's obscured by three enemies and some foreground detail in no way makes for a better playing experience. These are just relics from an age when games couldn't be all that complex, so they settled for being hard as fuck and annoying as hell. Ubisoft couldn't even be bothered to maybe toss in some more varied enemies, particularly environment-specific ones, something that'd make every level more than... well, the same exact goddamn thing.

I know, I know, these are all complaints that could be ascribed to the original game, but really, if you're going to remake it... FUCKING REMAKE IT. Don't give it a half assed graphical overhaul (HD sprites would've looked significantly better than this sloppy 3D garbage), arbitrarily delete a boss from the game, and call it a remake.

Oh, and the hit detection sucks.

In conclusion, Ubisoft, even EA and Eidos manage to publish something decent every now and again (Brutal Legend and Batman: Arkham Asylum, respectively). Please get your shit together.

I AM DUMPLING KING

2009-09-18T13:39:00.001-07:00

Last night, at the Hong Kong Student Society, I threw my hat into the dumpling eating ring. Ten dumplings, seven or eight of us in the prelims, I beat the opposition with a solid thirty seconds to spare. I downed those little fuckers, swallowed them whole even.

Round two, we get seven dumplings, drowned in watery hot sauce, apiece. The ref tells us to get ready, our muscles tense and our eyes narrow... and... and...GO! OM NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM!!!!

There were two rounds of preliminaries, the top three in each facing off in the final. The winner of the other prelim was a kid in my math class, so before the start of the final I asked for the mic and I said, "You know, it's pretty clear that one of us is going to win, so we'd like to dedicate our victory to our linear algebra professor. He is here with us in spirit."

It should be noted our linear algebra professor is an Asian guy with a bowl haircut who always wears light blue wifebeaters to class. I'm not sure if he really does have a gold chain around his neck or if that's just my memory being foggy and optimistic.

Alas, I came in third place, a single swallow behind my classmate, who came in second. Our last dumplings were hard as rocks, fried and dry, nowhere near as moist as our first few. Some skinny little freshmen beat us both.

At least I got a free t-shirt.

I was the only white guy in the final round (from a total of two white guys competing). So I feel it's fair to say I'm the honkey dumpling king.

Haiku Moments

2009-09-12T16:25:00.000-07:00

Haikus are a form of Japanese poetry that emphasize elegance of thought. Only three short lines, brief but rarely incomplex, seeking profound truths. Life has moments like that. When a situation, a single scene, maybe as brief as but a few seconds, illustrates to us some manner of profundity.

As a woman handed me some pamphlets, explaining the nature of the feminist organization she was trying to promote at the club fair, I pretended to skim them as I stared down her shirt.

That same day, standing shoulder to shoulder with a hundred business students moving like a swarm towards the career fair (wearing suits and holding folders, prepared to impress the shit out of potential future employers), I, in my dirty jeans and Speed Racer t-shirt, a greasy bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich in my hand, reveled in not giving a fuck.

I had another one, but I can't remember at the moment.

I'm just no good with kids...

2009-08-27T22:20:00.000-07:00

My friend's mad at me because we went to her boyfriend's house and she made me promise, promise, I'd censor myself in front of his seven year-old sister.

Mind you this is a seven year-old who liberally throw words like fuck and shit around like they were scratch and sniff unicorn stickers.

And I was doing pretty well until we started playing versus mode in that DS Mario game (they had two DSs laying around the house), where you race to collect 10 stars and can knock them out of your opponents by jumping on them or attacking them with fireballs or shells. My friend asked me, "Is she beating you? She's really good, you know."

I laughed, and without even thinking replied, "Nah, I'm owning this bitch."

Which prompted the lady of the house to say, "I really don't think you should be calling my seven year-old daughter a bitch."

Incidentally, I asked my step brother and his wife, "You know, when your kid's old enough to talk, am I gonna have to watch the shit that comes out of my mouth?"

His wife reassured me, "No, we're not gonna give a fuck."

So at least I've still got some potential at not being banned from family functions.

Open Question to the Videogame Industry

2009-08-25T01:57:00.000-07:00

I'll be honest... I'm kind of in the process of leaving my gamer days behind. I don't know, call it getting older, growing out of it. Or maybe I'm just getting jaded. I just don't have the will power to invest 40+ hours in the same, cliched JRPG storyline or the 10+ hours in a similarly trite action/adventure title when I could be... I don't know... writing or coming up with new ideas for whatever creative endeavors I'm up to now. Working on my own shit just feels so much more fulfilling. Playing games makes me feel like I'm wasting my time... it's just more kindling in that roaring fire of self loathing.

But this week, now that I've finished a project I've been working for a few months, and it being my last full week of summer before I move to school on Sunday, and since many of my friends have already done so, I've been kind of... bored. So I said fuck it and I rented a game to kill some time (I also bought a book! So there's always that...). The game I rented was Prototype.

The following question, and it is, in fact, a question (and not merely a rant) goes out to anyone and everyone involved in the creation of games today:

I understand the need to make a game challenging. When there's an obstacle to overcome, be it a puzzle or a particularly difficult enemy (which is, essentially, a sort of puzzle), completing that segment feels... well, like you've done something. It's rewarding. And, you know, maybe you get some goodies for doing it; experience points, new weapons or gear, an achievement unlocked (or trophy or a pat on the back). It's cool, it's fun, it's sometimes frustrating (and hopefully not because of shoddy programming), and it makes a game a game.

You know what else is challenging?

Having a vast, open-world map full of hundreds of nooks and crannies, countless areas that serve absolutely no purpose to explore, littered with a few hundred hidden items. And I don't mean weapons or fucking power ups, I mean ambiguous bullshit nothings. "Hidden packages", "flags", "landmark orbs", whatever the fuck that shit in inFamous was, and so on. Damn near every open-world game sticks to this fucking convention of littering the world with pure SHIT. SHIT SHIT SHIT, everywhere! And if you scoop up all the shit, la dee da... you win the game.

This is not a puzzle. All this is is a measure of how little you value your life. There's no skill involved, no thinking, just mindless and repetitive roaming. Endlessly. At least inFamous gave you some weird spider-sense radar shit to deal with it... but it was still a pain in the ass.

So I ask you, developers... why?

And before any of you readers say, "Well, you could just ignore it," some of us have problems. Some of us need the 100% like a junkie needs his next fix. Some of us are sad, pathetic creatures.

PUI: Ponyo Under the Influence

2009-08-23T19:10:00.000-07:00

I know Roger Ebert probably doesn't walk into a theater hauling a garbage bag full of rags soaking in gasoline or a haphazard assortment of his grandparents' pills (some have got to be painkillers, right? Or some kind of... brain thing...) and I respect that. I respect his professionalism. But I am no professional and Ponyo certainly isn't a film that ought to be reviewed in a typical manner.

Pixar brass always tend to spout the same bullshit about how their films aren't merely aimed towards children, but rather they can be enjoyed by anyone. And this is... ehhh... mostly true (Brad Bird hits it out of the park every time). It's that philosophy that made me rage against Wall-E so much, because that film was shit on a platter trying to pass for steak. Of course, a lot of people chewed me out for my review because, despite Pixar's own statements, "it's a kids' film... waaah waaah waaah, you can't judge it all cinema-proper!"

Miyazaki... he knows what he's doing. He knows he's making films for kids. He doesn't give a shit about anything. I mean, Ponyo... it has absolutely no tension. No antagonist, no dimension to its characters, no real... development to the plot. There's just some sea wizard dude who makes jellyfish in his crazy wizard lab and makes fish babies... and a fish baby goes AWOL and befriends some little kid and... yeah, that's about it. It's just slice of life tinkering about for the first two thirds, and then in true Miyazaki tradition (by which I mean, with piss poor pacing) we get a turn of events that we know was supposed to be a climax... but really wasn't. And then it ends.

He's got this habit of making his antagonists compassionate... to a fault. Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, and definitely here, characters that ought to evoke tension (and this isn't my call, the narrative is structured in such a way where you think oh fuck, it's them!) don't evoke anything at all. There's this ten minute build up towards the end of Ponyo, where we're told the balance of the world is at stake... and then that goes nowhere. The film just doesn't care at all if you're invested in it or not.

And that's fine. It's for kids. I got thoroughly fucked up and enjoyed the colors and pretty scenery. No villains, no bad shit going down... it's nothing but good vibes. A happy movie. The happiest ever and all it wants is for you to be happy too. Because it loves you. So just let go, down a bottle of whateverthefuck you can get your hands on, and love the love.

Thankfully, despite those damn Saudis and their evil schemes, gasoline's still cheaper than popcorn.

Oh and can we please stop casting Tina Fey in things? Why is she famous?

I like dumb fucking ideas, can I work at Marvel too?

2009-08-12T21:31:00.000-07:00

That's Dust. She's a member of the X-Men. A Sunni Muslim from Afghanistan... who turns into sand. And she says shit... like that. Because she's Muslim. Do you follow?

Now I don't read comics, I just happen to get thrown down some mindless Wikipedia warpath every now and again and that's when I stumble across this shit. I have the impression, though I've read relatively little, that comic book writers are, by and large, unapologetic hacks.

So I was watching Boomerang, that Cartoon Network offshoot channel that shows all these older cartoons that've stopped circulating on the main network (to make room for live action diarrhea), and I saw an episode of the Hanna-Barbera Three Stooges cartoon. I didn't catch the story because there weren't enough tits on screen to keep me focused, but it was some Sleeping Beauty parody. This time, though, because I guess the writers wanted to be "diverse", the prince and princess were both black.

Now this is the 1960's; Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were still rallying for equal rights for black Americans, the Civil Rights Act had just been passed, society was in a state of dramatic flux. So there were, of course, politics at play when the writers decided to make the prince and princess both black.

And with the same amount of tact and thoughtfulness that the Marvel team shaped Dust, they named their hero "Prince Alarming" and their damsel in distress, "Ebony Black".

EBONY FUCKING BLACK. Because "Blackity Black Black" was just a hair over the line.

They were trying to establish normalcy--they're black, and that's not a big deal, because there's nothing either wrong or unusual with that. By not creating a distinction, we undermine those societal forces that attempt to tear us apart along ethnic lines.

It's clearly the same rationale with Dust. She's a Muslim woman who wears traditional Muslim garb... and that's okay. It's acceptable, it's normal, we're not going to act weird about it... acceptance is about transcending the awareness of difference (as in, we're aware of the fact that our friends are different from us in a variety of ways, but that difference isn't at the forefront of our feelings towards them).

But just like the Three Stooges writers, they crafted this statement with mangled, shit covered, babboon hands.

Magneto is Jewish. Shadowcat is Jewish. Harley Quinn is Jewish. Arthur, from the Tick, is Jewish. The Thing from the Fantastic Four is Jewish.

Note how none of these characters wears their Judaism on their sleeve. Note how none of them ever stop, mid conflict, and soliloquize, "I dedicate this victory to you, Jew-deity!" Note how none of them are dressed like members of the orthodoxy. Note how none of them carry an alias like "The Thrifty Foe"--I mean, really, when every other ethnic slur relating to Muslim people references sand or dust, you've really got to stop and think that maybe that's a bad fucking idea for a power and a name.

Fact is, I've got friends who are Muslim and it's never an issue. In fact, I would've never known because their religion isn't the center of their identity. Just like Jews or black people or Asians, they're individuals first, members of an ethnicity or religion second (or third or however they prioritize it). Not like this stupid fucking cardboard character.

Hey Marvel, I've got an X-Man for you: his name is Ghetto, he's a black man raised on the mean streets of Detroit. He likes hip hop music, spinning rims, basketball, and grills. His super power is that his arms transform into guns and he's neglectful towards his illegitimate children. I think he'd be a great way to bring some diversity to the team.

Or how about Suburb? A cardigan wearing white fellow who tips well and drives a minivan. His weakness is his lack of rhythm... and dreams. His super power is his ability to pay his taxes on time and bore the shit out of his enemies.

Addendum: I thought it was a Sleeping Beauty parody, but a friend noted that Snow White was also awoken from her slumber by a prince. So Ebony Black could be a fair play on Snow White... nevertheless... Dust is still an awful character.

Rejected Rant

2009-08-06T21:27:00.001-07:00

Nate, over at Good in Theory (another webcomic) asked me to do a guest strip for this doodle series he's got going in his news updates. Along with the comic he said I could contribute a rant.

That rant was rejected. To enlighten you as to why, here are some quotes from Nate delivering the bad news:
"Listen: I think it some of the funniest shit I have ever read... but dear lord... I still have a grandmother who reads this... and it says you fisted yourself [and] my grandma is a whore"
My quick rebuttal: "...it stands unless she can prove otherwise"
"and, you call my readers 'bible belt motherfuckers'... she also happens to be religious, like very religious"

So I agreed to write him a different one. But for all you PolkOut fans out there, here's the rejected one in all its glory:

So Nate and I were sitting in the back of the hatchback his grandma left him--she was a hippy back in the day, so it's got all these flower decals on top of the pink paint that's chipping off and some crackly old condoms stuck to the floor (bitch got around)--smoking fat blunts and writing poetry. Dude turns to me, his eyes all read and teary, and the kid just starts giggling, "Bro... you know what'd be fucking epic?"

"What's that, man?" I cough real bad after a particularly rough hit.

"Fuckin... guest comic," the fucker chortled, "make me one."

"Dude, you realize if I did that, it'd just be about shit?"

"Fuck yeah, I love shitting."

So that's the story behind Nate's whore of a grandmother and how she contributed to this wonderful update. It's a true story, mind you... I was constipated for a solid two days, ate a lot of salad... fisted myself (the suction force helps), and shat a miraculous shit. Most of you probably won't find that comic funny because you're all... religious and shit. Bible Belt motherfuckers. And the rest of you... you probably don't even read the news section, so who the fuck cares what you think?

And no, I won't be whoring out my webcomic... PolkOut.com... because I'm above that. And you don't deserve me.

P.S.: Nate, you're my honey bunny sweetheart.

fuckin crocodile

2009-08-02T09:20:00.000-07:00

fuckin crocodile

For whatever reason, I read that search query in Joe Pesci's voice.

"...ehhhyeehhhehh... fuckin' crocodile. Gonna do a... yehbeheeehhhh... Googles search."

Fan Art Highlight

2009-07-31T13:46:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure when I'll be able to finish today's update, and I don't know how many people scan under the comic, so I felt this deserved to have a space of its own.

Monster is a new user, she has her own webcomic, and she made a fuck ton of fan art that will appear under the update (when I finish it). But one piece stands out as absolutely... extraordinary. So I'll post it here before it goes up on the site.

I challenge all readers with any means of illustrations to submit your own fanart with a similar me + Jupiter motif!

I am not a corporate whore.

2009-07-31T09:13:00.000-07:00

But not because of my own volition. It's not like I'm trying to maintain any artistic integrity here as I draw crude illustrations of me suffocating dogs with my anus (which, from what I've gathered from public opinion, only I find funny). The first person to come to me and say, "Listen, we'll give you a cool fifty bucks to plug our shit in a comic," I'll tell 'em, "Will do, boss." And I'll take their money and I'll spend it on some manner of intoxicant and the world will be right.

I don't care if it's tampons or deodorant or soccer cleats (or some twisted amalgam of the three), I'll endorse it. I don't care how many Vietnamese orphans slave away at making the damn thing, or how many pesticides it's got in it, or how much gaseous diarrhea is pumped into the air to produce it, if the money's there... so am I.

That being said, Snyder's did not pay me. They didn't even contact me. They don't want to be associated with me. And with good reason... they're a wholesome pretzel company, what the fuck would they have to do with a guy like me?

And then there's that whole me not being all that popular on the internet anyway thing that kind of undermines the efficacy of having me as a spokesman...

But the point is, and there is a point, their buffalo wing flavored pretzel bits are fucking delicious. You can tell that it's in no way a natural flavor, that there's some hardcore super science at work--the first flavor that hits you is bleu cheese followed immediately by the vinegary fire of hot sauce. This isn't natural... it's Willy Wonka shit... two distinct flavors, one after the other, taking cordial turns rubbing up against your taste buds. Madness! Yet so amazing. So good. So right.

Alright, here's my attempt at corporate slogandom:

Snyder's new Hot Buffalo Wing Pretzel Pieces are so good, they make suicide seem like a bad idea... if only for a little while.

Food Network...

2009-07-29T16:22:00.000-07:00

So I've been watching a lot of Food Network. I don't cook, too lazy, but I think Rachel Ray is delightful. I actually got some Rachel Ray posters from my local Dunkin' Donuts a year or two ago (unfortunately I've since lost them...)--the donuts guys only thought I was a little weird. Unlike Giada Delaurentis, who happens to have one weird freakin' name, Rachel seems like she'd be a pretty cheap date. We could go out for burgers and she'd say something like, "Cheddar cheese makes me weak in the knees!" With her heavy smoker's voice and her adorable giggle. Giada would be so f!cking high maintenance, "Burgers? I'd like mine with coelacanth caviar, on lightly toasted half sour bread baked by blind Chinese Himalayan monks, served out of a Cambodian child's anus." She's pretty hot though (in an okay-yet-GIGANTIC head on an eleven year-old's body with a thirty year-old's tits kind of way), but if you do the math--in terms of hotness per dollar--Rachel Ray's the better bargain.

She really doesn't deserve the hate she gets... sure she doesn't have many worthwhile things to say, sure you probably will never be able to engage her in meaningful conversation, but she's positive! She's a POSITIVE person. She radiates sunshine and smiles and tasty food (which makes me radiate all those same things). When's the last time Rachel ever really took a shit on someone's day?

If anyone suspects the Messiah may already be living among us, then the first person they should look to--well, realistically, second--is Alton Brown. What a f!cking badass. I bet he poops steaks and pisses A1. I want to go out and get a beer with Alton Brown--no, I want him to make me a beer as he explains the history of the beverage and its cultural significance. And then I want Bobby Flay to make me a better one.

The Googles! (cont.)

2009-07-24T20:34:00.000-07:00

Dawn Zimmer Democrat

Not only have I cornered the pervert demographic, I've got the boring, politically-minded, Hobokener. Seriously... the Hoboken, New Jersey mayoral race...? Who gives a fuck?

Additionally:

Tentacle Molest

Webcomics 101 (an educational series for creators to be): Rocking the Googles

2009-07-23T20:32:00.000-07:00

Allison Scagliotti mini skirt

See that? What the fuck does it have to do with my website?

I'll tell you: Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Whatever debauched pervert (though, admittedly, with wonderful taste in women) entered that phrase into Google was searching for pure debauchery. Exploitative debauchery! It's such a shame how much we objectify actresses in this country... if a woman wants to be successful in the film or music industry, it's usually not her talents that get her into the public eye, but her looks. Bikini photo shoots, nude scenes, paparazzi photos in compromising positions... yes, we love their bosoms, their legs, their seductive smiles... but these are not a reflection of talent!

And what have I done? I've thrown a wrench into the wretched gears of sexism. That deviant found no photos of our dear Allison, no, instead he found a comic. A webcomic. A wonderful, educational, inspirational webcomic that touched his heart much like how he wanted to touch himself: reluctantly.

And in the process I've made myself the slightest bit more popular.

The lesson learned today:
Be righteous, and Google shall reward.

I should've gone into marketing

2009-07-22T18:00:00.000-07:00

What the fuck? Now I've never taken a marketing course, I'm not all too privy to the philosophies behind creating an effective ad--there must be a science, right?

I figure, conceptually at least, the objective of an ad is to build consumer awareness of a product and showcase how it may be better than its competitors. Not... give me horrific, pants pissing nightmares.

There's been a recent trend, at least in the past five or so years, of just going for memorability. Those Quiznos ads with the crazy monkeys, those fucked up Scientology ads that look like they were scrapped from a Sea World campaign--shit like that; it doesn't convey information, but it's weird so we remember and talk about it. But what the fuck is going on here?

Do you know what I see when I look into that woman's eyes? Burning, relentless insanity. In one hand she's holding that fucking phone, writing poetic odes to it; "With my old phone, I toiled in the hellish spiritual abyss of T9 typing, a sisyphian nightmare that left me burning holes into my eyelids by the burning end of a cigarette just to escape that insanity. But now I have a touch screen," she smiles eerily. But as she holds up that phone in her one hand, you know what she's doing with the other?

No, she's not jerkin' it. She may be crazy, but not that low masturbating-to-telephones caliber crazy.

She's strangling a fucking raccoon. She's holding it by the throat and it's writhing and choking and making crazy animal sounds. She clasps its neck tighter, snapping it, and the entire creature's body goes limp. Cut commercial, she slides the phone into her back pocket, whips out a pen knife, and starts hollowing out the carcass so she can stuff and mount it on her bedside table. Maybe she'll cut the hands off so she can keep working on her raccoon hand necklace, maybe she'll turn the animal's skull into a coffee mug and use its torso for a purse (its scrotum as a cellphone case).

I think I've just demonstrated that I'm golden advertising executive material.

glorious craigslist ad (not mine)

2009-07-21T12:43:00.000-07:00

http://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/wri/1274715346.html

Looking for quality Novel editor (Park Slope)
Date: 2009-07-17, 12:25PM EDT

I will be entering my junior year of Stanford undergrad in the fall and am looking for a novel review/critique as I spend the remainder of my summer internship at a film production company in Brooklyn. I've written roughly 75,000 words and feel I'm about 2/3rds into the story.

The Novel is titled Dark Age 2.0, and is a hodgepodge of fiction genres set fourteen years into the future where social networking and celebrity idolization have reached unhealthy levels, causing large scale inner-city riots via a skewed suburban populist mentality projected through the ever growing media. This is the world my protagonist Joel Sandler faces as he deals with troubles of his own. His current occupation is mainframe server inspection/maintenance for large corporations, and his next assignment is to inspect the server basement for Faceland, the world's most powerful and influential social networking company, a company he once worked for as a young entrepreneur . Yet his envisioned project which provided educational online services was underfunded by Faceland, as the company shifted towards more collaborations with prime time reality television. As he waits to inspect Faceland's prestigious server basement, he has plotted years of revenge during his mundane vocation of server inspecting. Yet moments away from victory, Joel's revenge is interrupted by his discovery of a file sequence embedded within Faceland's server. The files are of unknown binary format, and contain coded messages many in letter structure dated centuries into the future . Now Joel is faced with a myriad of pressures: The pressure from Faceland to have it's prestigious server record remain untainted, conflicting with the pressure to make his findings known and obtain the fame he believes is deserved. Perhaps above all is the pressure to make sense of the looming information within the files' content, as well as contemplating the seemingly paranormal activity surrounding the files that bring his own consciousness into question. Needless to say Joel's new line of work is about to get a lot more interesting.

My writing is at times dark, though often sliced with Joel's determination to speak his mind while masking his insecurities with his salty tongue and dry humor. Given that time travel is a large component of my novel, it's tough to place it outside the realm of science fiction. Though I feel that there are heavy undertones of social commentary, horror, and comedy which contextualize this piece of writing into something I cannot truly define. Perhaps this is where you can be of service. If this sounds like a project you are interested in please call [deleted] or email [deleted] to arrange a phone call. I will not discuss payment until we have spoken, but I will say that I'm in a position to give professional compensation for professional work.

* Location: Park Slope
* Compensation: Discuss over phone. Willing to give professional compensation for professional work
* Telecommuting is ok.
* This is a part-time job.
* Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
* Phone calls about this job are ok.
* Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

PostingID: 1274715346

Tekkon Kinkreet

2009-07-20T16:40:00.000-07:00

I just watched this film based on a random recommendation a user posted on her Tumblr (I started a Tumblr page, but the politics of "Tumblarity" and all that other nonsense made me quick to drop that whole endeavor like a hot potato) and it was fucking awesome.

Much like Fooly Cooly, it captured a very complex and disheveled mindset, an irrational emotional range, in a very stylized, powerful, and vibrant style. Many scenes felt like I was watching art come to life, others felt like music visualized--the soundtrack doesn't stick out in my mind, hell I can't even remember if most of the scenes had any sort of musical accompaniment, but that flowing grace and passion made me feel like I was trancing to some of my favorite songs. This film is bursting out the fucking seams with style, and the substance isn't far behind.

I wish there were something I could say about the plot, the themes, the thoughts woven together here like some psychotic quilt of poignancy, but there's no way I could do it justice. It had the raw kinetic energy you've come to expect from anime, yet the subtlety common to much of auteur Asian cinema (or maybe just auteur cinema, but it made me think of Kar Wai wong in particular, even though he's not Japanese... and neither is this film's director... fuck it, now I just don't know what I'm talking about...)

Point is:
PolkOut approved.

about the latest comic

2009-07-19T15:13:00.000-07:00

My friend is Filipina and she requested that I portray her as "Pacific islandery" as possible. Hence the coconut bra, grass skirt, and lei.

See? By reading this blog you get all sorts of interesting insight into the comics, stuff I completely forgot to put into the rant and am too lazy to edit. What an amazing investment!

And for references sake, the comic I'm referring to:
the comic

The link shouldn't work until the comic's been archived, otherwise it's on the main page.

Alright, new plan.

2009-07-15T21:20:00.000-07:00

Instead of back tracking and reposting rants, I'll post rants up here simultaneously as they're posted on the comic but will ALSO, whenever I feel like it... post original ramblings right here that won't appear on the main site because they don't need to. Because they won't be germane to the ramble that'll be going on over there.

That sound good?

Awesome.

About hobbies... or lack thereof

2009-07-14T16:27:00.000-07:00

I've actually found something that loosely resembles a hobby... thanks partly to this here website, Netflix, and my local library. It's been kind of a weird weekend, from a thematic perspective at least... watching pretentious foreign films between marathon bouts of the Degrassi marathon that's been airing on the N... is this an upgrade from all the tween sitcoms I used to burn away the daytime hours with? Have I matured, from a chicken-legged, gap-toothed, twelve year-old into a perky-titted, thong-wearing, menstruating teenager? Like a bulbasaur whose trainer has spent his time grinding away at pidgeys and rattatas, I've scraped the bottom of the barrel, twice over in fact, to muster up the strength... the courage... the power, to evolve! GAZE UPON ME FOR I AM A BEAUTIFUL IVYSAUR.

No, you're not confused... it really is that pathetic. But the film thing, that's legit, right? And you know what? I'm gonna start writing again, I actually already have, but I'm gonna expand... I had an idea for an iCarly episode, maybe I could mail the script to Dan Schneider and he can be all, "WOWZERS THERE, we need you as a freelance tween sitcom writer! We'll pay you!" And I'll be raking in the dough by the... uh... how much do iCarly writers make? Like twenty grand a year? Well I'll make... maybe a quarter of that and buy myself a fuckin' crocodile, like from Clarissa Explains It All, or a chinchilla because they're real soft and I could pet it all day. You can't cuddle a crocodile. No, that's not fair, I don't know... I shouldn't put crocodiles down like that. There may be some crocodile reading this right now... some lonely crocodile, looking for a cuddle buddy, and here I am spreading these hurtful claims. Crocodile tears... ha, look at that... comedy.

To quell the boredom, I'll gladly accept book, film, and game suggestions. I'm waiting on my copy of Battle Royale to show up, but after that, I'll burn through whatever you readers throw my way. Oh and... if any of you wanna give me a job (assuming you're a legitimate employer and not some... well I was going to say pervert, but I suppose you could be both)... you know how.

Rachel Ray and popsicles

2009-07-13T18:30:00.001-07:00

So I'm writing this commentary as I'm watching the E! True Hollywood Story of Rachel Ray. College wasn't a good fit for our friend Rachel, after dropping out she managed the candy counter at Macy's Department Store. She also failed her first driver's test by running over a cat. Candy is f!ckin' awesome.

A lot of people don't like Rachel Ray, some say she's a halfass, partially because she's had no formal training as a chef, partially because she's Italian...or Iranian or one of those thick-browed peoples. I don't know. But yes, I understand, I agree, her voice is loud, shrill, annoying. But she's moderately attractive (6/10) and can cook (+3 = 9/10!), and that's awesome. I'd hit it...if she made me a sandwich.

Popsicles are so good...I...I think I have a problem. One, maybe two, a day's become a pack...all I think about when I close my eyes is popsicles...how, when, I'm gonna get my next fix. Sometimes I crush my popsicles down into a fine powder, melt it down with a spoon and lighter, and inject it straight into my veins. Mmm...you haven't had a Flinstones push-pop until you've freebased it. Dino's in my skin, man, Dino's in my skin...

This was actually two Saturdays ago...

2009-07-12T20:56:00.000-07:00

I saw the new Transformers movie, but I’m not emotionally invested enough in it to rant about what I loved and what I hated. In fact, I just don’t really feel like hating anything at the moment. So instead, I’m just going to tell you about my Saturday.

After I’d gotten back from the gym—which is essentially all I’ve been doing this summer (well, that and writing)—I met up with my friend Eric so we could head over to Brooklyn together. We were going to Prospect Park to see a free show featuring three bands I’d never heard of: These United States, Phosphorescent, and Dr. Dog.

I don’t talk about music much because I’m not really a music kind of guy. At least I don’t consider myself one; Kevin’s disagreed, Eric has too, and they’re right in a way… I really love some music, but I can’t invest myself in so much of what I hear. For me to say I like a band means I’ve listened to them over and over, memorizing their lyrics, backing them up with a simultaneous echo in my own head (I suppose a simultaneous echo isn’t really an echo, but who gives a fuck?). Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, CCR… these were the sorts of bands I loved as a teenager. Mark Knopfler is a fucking magician with a guitar, and Roger Waters, well I was obsessed with his solo stuff for quite a while… their writing, their bluesy melodies, their sardonic styles of narration, really plucked the right heartstrings for me back then. I say I’m not a music person because I don’t know shit about chords and tabs and notes and whatever the hell else goes into making that kind of art, I approach this stuff in the language that I know: bumbley, awkward, literary terms.

And just the same, Led Zeppelin seems to be the band of my twenties (or at least early twenties). Robert Plant's desperately wails with his voice while Jimmy Paige does the same with his guitar (which pours out sound like a wine bottle tilted into a glass, or more appropriately, some wino's rotten maw), simply resonates with me (I could do without his dumbass commentary on the live stuff though). It's the sound of sick dogs crying. Bands like Angels of Light, Six Organs of Admittance, and Amps for Christ (I’ve got to thank Kevin for contributing so much to my musical education), are where I am right now, and I'd never heard of them six months ago. It always seems like such a battle to let a new group onto my playlist. It’s like adopting another child and having that awkward phase where you get to know them, trying your damndest to convince them everything can be okay if we just open up to one another.

So what I’m saying is, I went to this show expecting it to be like any other; I’m there, but not really, and I don’t even give a fuck who’s on stage because I haven’t had the necessary prep time (weeks of listening and relistening and obsessing) to give a shit. But what seemed different this time was that… well, it was okay.

Beautiful day is a phrase that's tossed around pretty liberally. You open the blinds, the sun is shining on everything, burning like God’s own angry eye, staring down at all us sinners, bleaching every color, every pigment, scorching through your flesh (giving lots of people lots of cancer), and you exclaim, “What a beautiful day!” When we got to Prospect Park, it was raining. But it wasn’t bad rain, like big globules of bird shit smacking down on your head, running through your clothes and shoes, making your socks uncomfortably wet. There were little clouds and they drifted and between them the sun still shone. My folks would call it mushroom rain, the sort of weather that lets those fuckers grow and grow and grow. We walked down a road that ran along the perimeter of the park, the rain above our heads, but people, less than a hundred feet away, were playing soccer in the sun. It was pleasant in an irritating way. Like grains of sand digging into your elbows at the beach, sticking to your sweaty back. Or like spitting up lake water through your nose. Or damp dirt leaving spots on your jeans. And then it passed, and the sun sank behind the stage, but the yellow and orange that it leaked stayed in the sky for a little while. Our friend Alton appreciate it, even though he’d seen such things a million times before.

Alton was what we named the tree we sat under. We named him while we were still sober, feeling all sorts of great just because. The venue was essentially a stage, some seats, and a field, where people sat around, threw Frisbees, played with their dogs and kids, and bullshat. There wasn’t that overwhelming ego among the bands, that look at us and only us that you tend to see lots of other places. If it was too loud (and I hate loud music), I could walk back a few feet. I could kick my feet out under a tree, zone out, and just listen to the sound. What grabbed me grabbed me, what didn’t just sank under the low hum of human static. I liked all the bands about the same, maybe Presidents a bit more because they seemed the most dynamic, though I was probably paying more attention to them since they were the first ones on.

We walked around, pissed in the woods, dug holes in the earth with sticks, and thought about Alton. How someone must’ve planted him there all those years ago, how he grew, the people who sat under him, all that he’s seen, will see—like a montage, you know like when you see sped up footage of New York and Tokyo and the sun rises and sets and rises and sets and thousands of people stream in all directions within seconds. It was a beautiful day. The music didn't ask much of me and I appreciated it.

Transformers was an okay movie. The script could’ve used another draft.

A little bit of literary business with my dentist.

2009-07-12T11:26:00.001-07:00

I went to the dentist on Thursday for my biannual-check-up-slash-face-fuck. Now, try to follow me here on this one: I don't really eat many sweets, I brush my teeth twice a day, and I floss regularly, yet my teeth are Swiss cheese. I have friends who never floss, who chew on bits of glass like they're bubblegum, whose mothers scrub their rotten mouths out with steel wool... and nothing. It's like my teeth are doing it to themselves.

"I can't take it... I just can't take it anymore!" says some random molar in the back of my mouth, "Life is pain." He whips out a razor he stole out of his mom's dresser (the one she uses to shave her legs... and hopefully not much else) and begins digging into himself, "It's like I can control the pain," he sobs as he updates his LiveJournal with more poetry about how alone and misunderstood he is.

I guess a bunch of my teeth are depressed. Maybe they're... bipolar molars.

Get it?! It rhymes... fuck yes I'm awesome. Happy now, all you "this comic sucks, where are the punchlines?!" assholes?! Riding my ass like it'll take you up the Grand Canyon... suck a dick.

Grandpa says that I get cavities because I'm just so irresistibly sweet (he says the same about mosquito bites), I tell him that's a pretty gay thing for one man to say to another. He's 71 though, he doesn't give a fuck and he's got nothing to prove so he shrugs it off and says, "I can say whatever gay shit I damn well please. I made your mom." Well he would say that, if he were living up to his crassness potential... and if he spoke English.

So anyway, I was sitting in my dentist's chair, big wad of gum-like shit stuffed in my mouth like a sock in that girl's who I met a the mall but wouldn't give me her phone number so I stuffed her in my trunk, and we were talking about books.

"I'm reading Atlas Shrugged," she says, waiting for that crap to set.

"Awhn Wan suckth."

"What?"

"Awhn Wan suckth!"

"No, I don't think so... her philosophies are very interesting."

"Thee ha no souw..."

"She has no soul?"

"Nah ah aw."

"Who has soul then?"

"Kwundeahah, oo shou reah Unbeahaha Ligh-hess oh eeing."

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera again, is a damn great book... as most people are probably aware since it's older than I am. It got some negative reviews from what I can only imagine to be a horde of mouth-breathers on Amazon.

Welcome to the blog.

2009-07-06T19:57:00.000-07:00

After talking to my step brother about my latest PolkOut rant, he suggested I start posting my stuff in some sort of legitimate blog context. I figure most people who read the site come for the comic and don’t bother with the rest, when it’s actually the rant I invest the most thought into. I think they’re, at the very least… interestingly written, no less interesting than most everything else pumped out onto tumblr or livejournal or whateverthefuck other analogue.

So this is me tossing my hat into the ring. Lets dance, fuckers.