Over the course of the past six months, I’ve had a lot of seat time with my favorite MMO – World of Warcraft, arguably one of the most addictive and well constructed PC games of its time, but not all of the experiences have been rosy. When I began playing WoW again after a year or so hiatus, I was initially thrilled to put on my winter wardrobe to battle the undead legions of the Lich King in the frozen wasteland of Northrend, but then I realized Blizzard made a critical expansion error.
Death Knights.
See, the balance of WoW has been kept in check by a variation of classes that are built from the ground up. Starting at level 1, a paladin player will, presumably, learn the ropes on his/her way to the current level cap (as of now, 80). This can be said for most classes, with the exception of Death Knights, who begin at level 55 and practically have everything handed to them, particularly the false ideal that they are good at everything because their starting armor is better than yours. This has led to a whole new generation of frustration.
The problem with Death Knights is not simply limited to the fact that your kid can roll one on your account as long as you’ve gotten at least one character to level 55, thereby bypassing any knowledge of how to actually play in a massively populated online game, no. In addition to that, DK’s are just not very balanced. They are OP (overpowered) in their starting levels, but have a limited choice of spells and skills, making them utterly boring to play as. A friend and I both made the decision within the past few days to delete our Death Knights because frankly, we agreed that they’re not very fun to play. So basically, a Death Knight is Blizzard’s way of saying thank you to their loyal players over the years by introducing a class that a retard can have grouping with you in the Dungeon Finder within a day and in their off-time enjoys slamming square pegs into circular shaped holes while grunting. Two of the most popular and well known DK’s on the server I play on are almost always in Trade chat, shooting the breeze, they’re that bored.
Hey, you know what Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show all have in common? Assuming you’ve even heard of the Cleveland Show by now and have also NOT committed suicide knowing it exists, I’ll tell you: all three are the projects of a guy named Seth MacFarlane. Seth, after an attempt in the 90’s to make children’s cartoons (and failing miserably), was eventually responsible for Family Guy, a mostly garbled animated sitcom with a lot of pointless pop culture references and segues that veer straight off a cliff into the unfunny unknown. The show’s low percentage of actual humor is countered by shock laughs, sex gags, and uncomfortable subjects that kids shouldn’t be watching, but probably are because hey, it’s a cartoon right? Cartoons can’t be bad.
Warning: Cartoons can be bad. Very bad.
See, the thing about MacFarlane’s humor is that it’s funny to him and was never very funny to anyone but him, until he convinced a lot of idiots that his formula was a display of utter brilliance and laughs, the same idiots that still watch the Simpsons hoping it will ever be as good as it once was, and even then it was overrated. The allure of making an animated sitcom is hey, you can make your characters do practically anything without worrying about budget or props, and thanks to MacFarlane, they can say anything they want too, much to the dismay of people who aren’t impressed by constant flashbacks, and those who don’t drag their knuckles when they walk. Can anyone count the number of times in one episode without losing track, just how many times Peter “remembers the time” he <did something zany> with <famous person>? If you said yes, there’s a good chance you’re a liar, seeing as sitting through an entire episode of that shit means you probably can’t count nearly that high.
The sad thing is, Family Guy is his best show. It gets the most attention from writers and advertisers and as much as I hate to admit this, has a broader base to build upon than something like American Dad or The Cleveland Show. (Trivia: The theme song originally contained a line referring to Cleveland’s “happy black-guy face,” but this was replaced with “happy mustached face” to make the song more racially sensitive.[8])
They actually changed the song to an animated Blaxploitation sitcom to be more “racially sensitive”. Amazing. Even if by some miracle this show does not get canceled, its fans can feel dead on the inside knowing that they kept a humorless husk plodding along.
Conceptually creating a convincing villain is actually terribly difficult if you want to do it right. When you consider, foremost, coming up with a strong enough motive to possibly justify said villain’s behavior. Which, is not entirely the most difficult part of the process, but it’s close. The most popular justification is the ‘one bad day’ scenario. As is the case of many comic book heroes and villains, is that quite a few had one. One moment in their lives that was so awful and terrible it bent and twisted them, one way or the other, into acts of extreme depravity or heroism. Just a few examples. Spiderman decided to use his powers to be a hero for good when his Uncle is gunned down in the streets after he (Spiderman) had a fight with him. The Punisher is another great example. Retired delta force officer, takes his wife and kids for a stroll in the park, and they all get gunned down in front of him, caught in some mobster’s crossfire. Batman, for example, he too has one bad day, seeing his parents killed in front of him by a mugger. These moments fundamentally change their lives, sending them off to be heroes. The mentality being of course, that they cannot allow what happened to them to happen to anyone else. Though, I feel I must clarify that I don’t technically view the Punisher as a hero per say, he just kills criminals. I cannot really fault him for just killing them rather than simply capturing them and allowing them to get loose over and over again. Which, is a fault of the character of Batman, who only seems to contain the damage his villains cause rather than put an end to it for good. It’s arguable as to who’s methods are more effective, but not exactly the point of this entry.
The villains also have a similar origin pattern, often simply being a mirror version of their nemesis. In this way, it makes their reason for fighting each other almost a co-dependent relationship. The hero needs the villain to satisfy his urge to save the day and protect villain, and the villain needs the hero to give them something to fight against. A great example of this would be Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, which depicts the Joker’s origins as similar to Batman’s. One bad day is all it took, and his world was destroyed and he went insane, in a different way. Or as The Joker himself comments in the comic, “You had a bad day once, am I right?… Why else would you dress up like a flying rat?” In this intricate dynamic your villain and hero cannot really carry a story on their own and therefore the story becomes co-dependent on this element to always be present. The villain acting and the hero reacting.
But that’s just the comics, but do not mistake that sentiment for me being dismissive, as I still actively read graphic novels. Not so much the typical superhero fare anymore. The problem as I see it with the ‘one bad day’ scenario is that it’s too clean, too easy to justify or explain. It’s not realistic or, honestly, very believable. Villains are not just the result of one terrible tragic moment, some villains are born twisted. Some are slowly, and gradually, driven towards the inevitable event horizon of their own person mental apocalypses. Some just make a string of increasingly amoral decisions based on morality or greed or patriotism until they have become crooked on the inside. The real world equivalent of super villains, people like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and (to a lesser extent maybe) Osama Bin Ladin. People like that aren’t just born from having their parents killed in front of them or their village tragically burnt to the ground. They are also proof of one statement that I have heard, but cannot remember the source exactly, so allow me to paraphrase: “No villain written could be as bad as history’s worst.” Which, I semi-agree with. Who could match orchestrating the deaths of millions of people to a comic villain pouring some fear inducing powder into a cities water supply? The problem I have always felt with villains I have seen in some stories is that they don’t feel realistic.
Released in 2009 during the famous television writer’s strike, Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is a web-based mini series created by a small talented team and distributed in 3 acts over the course of about a week. The entire production from beginning to end consists of purely brilliant writing, acting and creativity that was apparently meant to show that the writer’s strike would not make all options for entertainment impossible. It worked.
As I watched, and watched again, I realized that there is something very familiar and comforting about this one-shot sensation. Sure, the humor is some of the best I’ve seen, the music is incredible, and it’s going to be topping charts as one of the greatest random displays of genius that we’ve had the pleasure to see outside of the typical scripted work on TV. But it wasn’t that. It was Dr. Horrible himself.
Dubbed a “tragicomedy”, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog presents trials that could relate to so many people if the rules were different. A decent person down deep, Dr. Horrible (alias Billy) merely wants to be inducted into the Evil League of Evil for his scheming and inventing talents; a typical mad scientist, he is not brutal or murderous in the least, until someone hurts him and puts him in a position in which even non-geniuses find themselves driven to unspeakable feats, and that is where some viewers can identify. It no longer becomes the exact same sort of humor the bubbly idiot sitting next to you is watching, and you find it funny but you find it sad too.
Friends are awesome. It doesn’t matter what they look like, where they live, or what they do for a living; the important thing is that they stimulate you to try your hand at previously undiscovered territory in your hobbies and/or talents, for example writing mean-spirited rants about their common sense deprived non-mutual acquaintances. Today’s subject: Ridiculous footwear and the people that love it.
Now I was introduced to the following link, which I knew was going to be gold the moment I was asked “Ok, how gay is this?”, by one such friend. I prepared with a strange mix of glee and trepidation for the sparkling trove yet to be unveiled when Firefox finally decided to load. I was not disappointed. Feast your eyes on the Vibram brand Fivefingers KSO for men:
Yes, those are real shoes designed, presumably, by real people and not crazed hippy gorillas injecting drano straight into their corneas for a buzz, but it’s not like anyone would blame you for making the mistake. They give the appearance of being rather uncomfortable, they’re stupidly overpriced, and the name KSO stands for “KEEPS STUFF OUT”. Brilliant! (not really) The most important thing, however, is that they look fucking retarded and I would be embarrassed to be seen in them, especially if the people around me knew they carried a price tag of $85.
So I went to see Bruno in theaters. While I loved Da Ali G show and Borat, I wasn’t as thrilled over his latest project. You see with the Ali G show or Borat, he pretended to be just an idiot, and as a result, people either got mad at him or showed their own ignorance. One of the funniest truisms that Mr. Cohen discovered on his last projects is that the dumber you act, the more people tell you what they are really thinking. This is something I have noticed in my day-to-day life as well, and often when you get people to talk to you as though you were beneath them, almost child-like, the better you can gauge just how fucked in the head they really are. I mean, as Borat on the show he managed to convince a country western bar’s occupants to join him in a traditional Kazakhstani song ‘throw the jew down the well.’ Which, they not only sang along to, but danced and clapped to as well. Easily one of the funniest god damn things I have seen in a long time, and not because he was trying to be purposefully offensive, he was playing a character. It’s how people react to his characters that make it sometimes depressingly funny, or at the very least, incredibly awkward. I mean, I sometimes had to look away during his interviews because of how uncomfortable he made people.
So allow me to explain, specifically, what was wrong with this movie. I can sum it up in one sentence.
Too much wang.
You heard me. Cock. Dick. Penis. It was the most wang-filled movie I’ve seen since Summer Bukkake Blast 8: It’s Raining Mangurt. Good lord there was a lot of wang in this fucking movie. Even more than The Watchmen with it’s constant threats of seeing yet another glowing blue Dr. Manhattan member (or members). Now I’m not one to be grotesquely horrified whenever I see a penis in a movie, or in general. Lord knows if that were the case I’d have already set my computer on fire after seeing some of the underlying horrors lurking within these internets. The thing was that I was expecting something entirely different from what I got. At the beginning of the film Bruno is openly mocking the fashion world, interviewing models who claim how ‘hard’ their job is because they have to ‘walk’ and ‘there’s a lot of pressure to turn.’ Or when he shows up in a suit made entirely of Velcro and it starts getting tangled in peoples clothes and the set props, falls out on the runway, and proceeds to walk the runway as though he was supposed to be there. That type of shit really makes me laugh, it’s so sarcastic and condescending towards the people whom he’s targeting and they just don’t get it. He acts like an idiot and they just think he’s for real and in turn show off their own ignorance. Too funny. Those moments are rare though in this film, and all the truly subversive humor is over with within the first fifteen minutes.
I hoped it would get better, but alas, Bruno was missing out on the wit end and I was forced to deal with seeing Cohen’s cock… or someones cock, spin like a helicopter before turning to point at the screen and mouth ‘BRUNO’ with the pee hole. Apparently he managed to get people to show up for a focus group for his new show, then proceeded to terrorize them with footage of his ’show’ that involves him dancing badly, and extremely gayly, followed by an ‘interveiw’ with Harrison Ford that was just Cohen asking Ford if he could ask him some questions and Ford yelling ‘fuck off’ to him as he got into his limo and sped away. Kudos on being terse Harrison.
I know, I know, the title for this post is awfully dramatic. I know that it’s a bold claim to make that now, officially, literature is dead, dying, or a fucking zombie shambling around the countryside as a hollow shell of it’s former self. Many people would disagree, but that’s only because not everyone has seen the utter horse shit on sale at the bookstore that I did. I want you to sit back, dear reader, and allow the following image to wash over. Relax, empty your mind and focus ahead only at this text and the preceding image. Behold:
Now, if the first thought in your head is ‘wow that looks like it could be pretty cool,’ I want you to do me a favor. Take your hand, ball it into a fist, and punch yourself right in the face. Besides my gut instinct to burst into a fit of mad laughter, there are several things gazing upon this majestic piece of surly Shakespearean art does for me.
First, it disturbs me, deeply. If you notice the top of the image states ‘New York Times Bestselling Author,’ a title, which means nothing anymore anyway. Lets face it, every shitty self-help book and half assed novel is apparently a ‘best seller.’ Just because people read it doesn’t mean it’s good. I mean the Ghost Rider movie made money, but it still sucked so much dick it practically imploded on itself sucking Nick Cage’s carrier further into an event horizon of complete epic failure. Basically the ‘New York Times Bestseller’ tag on a book just tells you that it’s popular amoung the same populace that thinks Micheal Bay is a good director, Adam Sandler is funny, and voted to elect George W. Bush president … TWICE.
Ladies and Gentlemen, this review is not for the faint of heart. If you are pregnant have a weak heart please close the browser now.
For those of you who a) have seen this movie and b) are still with me… you are either extremely sick s.o.b.’s OR you were made a victim like I was. Ghost Rider came out in 2007 when I was just a young girl of 21 without a care in the world. My boyfriend and I were so young and full of life… before Ghost Rider. That movie took everything that was good and fair in the world and raped it. RAPED IT I SAY. Now, it is hard to talk about but I think I need to warn the people about this six way circle jerk called a movie. When they rolled the credits I thought “Oh ok well Sam Elliot never disappointed me before… he was in The Big Lebowski for chrissakes! It couldn’t be that bad…right?”
Oh, 21 year old Kiki you were wrong! Because even though it had Sam Elliot in it, it also had Nicolas “Kicks Puppies at Night” Cage and that is something that no genuine actor could help. Ever. When my boyfriend suggested we go see Ghost Rider, I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach. Kind of like when you know something terrible is about to happen to you but you’re too weak to stop it. That was what it was like when I agreed to see this abomination.
Originally I wasn’t going to go into the plot but now I see there is no way around it, avoiding it would just enrage me more. So here we go. Ghost Rider is about a stunt motorcyclist named Johnny Blaze who in order to save his father’s life he trades the devil (WHO IS PLAYED BY A FONDA… WTF PETER… but hold that thought for moment) his soul for the life of his father.
Actually no. I can’t do it. I’m not going to put you through what I suffered. INSTEAD I give you the dance stylings of Lola Perazzo!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCW9Wqa3i-0
Not to be confused with the video game of the same title, Silent Hill, released in theatres in 2006, is what I like to think of as a horror movie done right. It typically doesn’t descend into anything cheesy and the film is plot-oriented as opposed to character-oriented, whereby the script spends so much time focusing on each individual facet of the characters that there is little room left for telling the story. If you want deep horror movie characters, I don’t know what to tell you, you’re obviously looking in the wrong genre. In Silent Hill, they serve their purpose, and you either like them or hate them, but you don’t need to know what their favorite color is (hint: it’s probably not red).
If you’re looking for depth or intense characterization, too bad. Speaking of bad, that’s all I could come up with for cons. The pros of the movie far outweigh this one essentially meaningless concept in a movie about demons that kill the shit out of shit. Look, here’s one now.
Throughout my life, it had always been difficult for me to grasp what was so compelling about tabletop strategy and RPG games. I couldn’t seem to wrap my head around how fiddling with pencil and paper games and using your imagination would ever be preferable to an NES (or a NES, if you’re a retard and pronounce the console name “Ness”). And now that I’ve discovered Warhammer 40,000… well, I pretty much skipped all of it anyway, because the Dawn of War series is on the PC. Lulz.
Seriously, I never collected much of anything apart from Nintendo junk when I was under age 12, and from about 13 to 17, it was comic books. I never seemed to be able to geek out properly, not in the sense of enjoying something like tabletop games or D&D. I think the reason for that beyond their limitations in the area of graphics and sound, two big limitations when you’re a teenager, is that they were kind of boring.
That’s right, I said it. Dungeons and Dragons bored the hell out of me, as did every other copycat RPG where you rolled dice and talked a lot. No thanks, if I was going to be a loser, I was going to do it right and do it alone. It was in 2007, however, that I discovered that one of those copycats went on to become something amazing: Warhammer.
I feel like sometimes that I was born, that I’m not meant for this society because everyone here is a fucking hypocrite. Everybody says they believe in God but they don’t do God’s work. Everybody counteracts what God is really about. If Jesus was here, do you think Jesus would show me any love? Do you think Jesus would love me? I’m a Muslim, but do you think Jesus would love me … I think Jesus would have a drink with me and discuss … why you acting like that? Now, he would be cool. He would talk to me. No Christian ever did that and said in the name of Jesus even … They’d throw me in jail and write bad articles about me and then go to church on Sunday and say Jesus is a wonderful man and he’s coming back to save us. But they don’t understand that when he comes back, that these crazy greedy capitalistic men are gonna kill him again. — Mike Tyson
