Denise Richards would have made a better Lara Croft than Angelina Jolie did in the Tomb Raider movie. Watch the scene in The World is Not Enough where Richards climbs a ladder and squats down onto a platform of some sort. You'd swear you were playing a bad PSX game instead of watching a bad movie.
How can we, as a society, tolerate Internet Shorthand? It's like talking to elementary school dropouts everywhere you turn. The only thing you give away when you converse on the Internet is your relative intelligence. If the majority of citizens can't spell three-letter-words correctly, I weep for the future.
Why was Britney Spears voted Hottest Woman Ever, or whatever it was from People Magazine? There is such a thing as refined beauty. Attractiveness should not be based on how much skin you can get away with showing on the Disney channel.
How is it possible that some television comedy shows are painfully dull but still air year after year, while some shows that are non-stop laughs get canned? Namely Clerks: the Animated Series, Invader Zim or Mystery Science Theater 3000 as the comedy goldmines. People complain about how bad television is while continuing to watch the same dull shows. The situation is thick with hypocrisy.
Speaking of bad TV, these new reality shows are getting sicker and more disturbing by the second. The first new ones such as Millionaire and Survivor seemed harmless knowing they would eventually go away, but they spawned dozens of freakish mutations that I cannot stand.
I bet I am the only person on the face of the planet who thinks this way, but photography is not an art form. If a single point and click is considered high-class art, then I'm inviting you all to my gallery opening where I surf the Internet.
The results of the "Teen Choice Awards," or anything similar to that should be totally disregarded. Well, unless you are in the field of advertising, then they could be useful. But, for everyone else, they don't mean squat. Pardon my broad generalization, but teenagers are idiots.
Is it just me, or is the clothing commercial where various navels sing "I'm Comin' Out" incredibly disgusting?
Turn signals come standard on most ground vehicles for a reason. I estimate that I have wasted a total of 24 hours of my life waiting at intersections for a particularly slow car to pass in front of me, only to have it turn on a whim and negate my whole waiting experience. There is even an intersection on my daily route where 99% of the time people driving towards me, while I'm stopped at a sign, will make a right turn onto the road I am on without using signals. It has gotten to the point when, car barreling towards me or not, I go whenever I damn well please. Yes people, this is what it has come to. So, please, be kind, use your signals or be forced to broadside me at some point in your life.
Why do people put their WinAmp generated playlists on the Internet? Whenever a search engine displays one of those I just want to TEAR SOMEBODY'S @#$^ING GUTS OUT WITH BROKEN BOTTLE OF LIPTON ICED TEA. The only logic behind allowing people to convert their list to HTML is probably based on sadism. Or maybe the programmers lost a bet.
"Well, we ate five more quarter-pounders than you, so you have to add a 'convert list to HTML' button in your program."
"Oh, God, no... that means that every idiotic hack with an internet connection can..."
"Yes, it's genius in it's simplicity! AH-HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!"
I hate anime so much. Well, not really anime itself, but the psychoactive brainwashing stronghold it has on every American between the ages of 8 and 15. Japan has ruined the potential artistic talents of a third of a generation by forcing everyone in that age span to draw people with gigantic watery eyes, tiny pointed chins, and "circular saw" style hair. I think it's just about time for a few more atomic bombs.
Usually with television, radio, or magazine/print ads, people are bound to have some favorites. I bet if you thought about it, you can replay in your mind a commercial that you thought was just peachy. Not that you bought into the product or service, or even necessarily remember what it was advertising, but you just enjoyed the commercial on the same level you'd enjoy a song or a slice of really good sausage. TV, radio and print ads can have that effect, but there is a type of ad that generally cannot. Internet pop-up ads. Those could take a cue from the other media and try to be entertaining rather than bland, blatantly unreliable, mind-numbingly annoying and sadly, forgettable. You can remember to go coo-coo were you to ever encounter Cocoa Puffs, and that if she is not born with it, it is a strong possibility that maybe it is Maybelline. But how many pop-up ads can grab a hold of and throttle your memory like that? The whole purpose of this paragraph is to direct your attention to the only ones I know of, and therefore my favorite series of pop-up ads. The Internet ad creators who got it right. They didn't have to have a catchy tune, a witty tagline, or palpable proof that the ad was not made by a group of retarded four-year-olds. All they had to do was be able to stand out in your mind after you clicked the little corner box. Hmm... after all this fanfare I really wish I remembered the company. Nevertheless, they are the series of ads for home security cameras. You know the ones. The ads that assure me, once I actually break down and buy their product, that I can get actual proof of the many hot women who are lounging around in my house when I'm not there. And more importantly, where they are hiding when I am.
I've been in art school for less than a week, but already I know they are trying to brainwash me. I don't really know who "they" are. But from some source, somewhere, somebody, something is trying to break me down and rebuild me into an elitist espresso-drinking society-hating life-despising chicanery-cultured pretentious snob. I can feel it.
Have you ever really looked at the fonts "Wingdings" and "Webdings"? Since they come standard on Windows operating systems, I could see the capacity for them to be very useful, but I never actually see them in use. I think a valuable resource is going to waste here. Maybe it's one of those things that are fine in theory but not in practice.
Now that I think about it, the movie The Brave Little Toaster had some serious religious undertones. The Master is, of course, Jesus. The Master moving away and going to the City of Light is Jesus dying and ascending to Heaven. The appliances are the people of Earth. The toaster and his friends are the people who still keep blind faith in Christianity despite never receiving a sign from Jesus since his departure. The air conditioner is the Judiaic society who says the Master, while influential, is not your savior and is not worth following or waiting for. The journey to the city is a modern day pilgrimage; an attempt to find religion and find Jesus. The television is a priest or something of the like that acts as an intermediary between Jesus and the people on Earth. The appliances in the Master's apartment are the material goods that take worship away from religion and obstruct the finding of Jesus; the Golden Calves. The theme is very strong in the song "City of Light" which stresses perseverance even if you get no sign from Jesus, stressing morality in order to get to Heaven, and how the non-religious people don't realize that the Earth is a paltry experience compared to Heaven. Here's a quote from the song: "Let us meet the Master, we don't want to make him wait. You just keep a' knockin'; he will open up the gate to that City of Light. Master is a man with a plan I can understand. Master is a man of great reflection. Master is a man who lays his hand across the land. Master is a man of our affection." SEE?! Also, notice that the Master only speaks to his mother in the movie. His father is never heard, because if he was your BRAIN WOULD EXPLODE.
CrashMan's hands are not drills. They may be metal and they may be conical, but they are not drills. That's what they made DrillMan for. If you do not have my magnificent insight and godlike powers of deduction you may not agree because the box art for the NES game, the box art for the PC game, and all Capcom-approved references (i.e. in Rockman and Forte and MegaMan: the Wily Wars) depict CrashMan as having drills for hands. They got it wrong.
You know, those crazy pop-up ads that ask if you if you have pornography on your computer don't sound like they provide much of a service. I mean, I could do the same right now. Go ahead, try me.
Do you have PORNOGRAPHY on your computer?
I also enjoy the pop-ups that say something like "Watch out, your computer is broadcasting an IP address!" Those get a message across well enough, but I think a better slogan would be something like "Heavy things fall when dropped!" or "A bear will bite your face if you're wearing steak on it!"
I think it's best when videogame-to-movie adaptations stay true to the original game. That's why most of them are seen as failures. If, in the Tomb Raider movie, Lara Croft were to try to enter a doorway and accidentally walk face first into the wall a few feet to the left, it would have made that entire movie worth it.
Y'know, I can't wait until the time when people realize that the intro to Zero Wing for the SEGA Genesis is still funny regardless of how many other people know about it and think it's funny. Or at least until most people forget about it and it "becomes" funny once it seems like an in-joke again. The situation reminds me of the Diesel Sweeties quote "Nothing is any good if other people like it."
I have done barely any scouting to see if my theory is widely accepted or decidedly false, but I think that Chris Crosby and Bobby Crosby are the same person. If you don't know what I'm talking about and would like to found your very own assumptions that Chris Crosby is Bobby Crosby, check out Superosity and Pupkin.
If going to art school has taught me one thing, it's this: everything is art. Hardly anything is good art.
I seem to be the only person who remembers the song Submarine #3 by the Starlight Mints. It was immensely popular a few years ago, people! Get with the program!
I'm going to make a Tenchi Muyo-themed racing game. I'm thinking about calling it "No Need For Speed." AH-HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!@11 What, don't you get it?
On the whole, I think predicting/arguing about when and in what capacity the Armageddon or apocalypse will occur is entirely not worth it, akin to those Y2K theories. If (when) you're wrong, you get to hear about it forever, and anything you say from then on will be at least slightly discredited. If you're right, you can only say "I told you so" however many times before you're converted to vapor or rendered into a greasy lump of carbon.
I've been seeing a few of those fan created Metal Gear Solid movie "casting calls." On the whole, people usually make good decisions, if sometimes a little obvious. But there's one choice that they always botch. They have the right idea, but it's always rather shallow. That is in the most important choice of the feature: who to cast as Solid Snake. When they chose Nicole Kidman as Naomi Hunter and even Vin Diesel as Vulcan Raven, I can almost admire their decisions. But their whole operation loses credit when they say that Snake should be played by Hugh Jackman or Russel Crowe. Or even Tom Cruise for God's sake. They seem to miss that the obvious choice is Edward Norton. Sure, Crowe might make a good Iroquois Pliskin, but that doesn't mean he's a match of a character from an earlier game. Look at a few pictures of Norton and some of the character models from MGS and you'll get the idea. A bit of makeup to have him look a little older and boom, you have a mirror image.
Update: And Brian Dennehy would be Colonel Campbell. And Adrien Brody would be Otacon.
The entries on dictionary.com for nerd, dork, and geek, are, respectively, "a foolish, inept, or unattractive person," "a stupid, inept, or foolish person," and "a person regarded as foolish, inept, or clumsy." Aside from using the same dull, and all-too-broad adjectives (these very distinct classifications need to be seen as such), any definition of those terms should also contain the hierarchy of said terms. 'Tis better to be a nerd than a dork; better to be a dork than a geek. And of course, the geeks reign supreme over the spazzes and dweebs, who are equally matched (the dictionary.com definitions are, you guessed it: "one who is considered clumsy or inept" and "a person regarded as socially inept or foolish"). Although a spaz can beat a dweeb in a cage match.
Do you ever listen to the Recording Industry Association of America's press conferences and feel a little guilty; you think that maybe it is stealing? Maybe you shouldn't be able to listen to a song unless you drop seventeen dollars for it? Maybe, just maybe, you are depriving the artists of money they need and deserve? If you ever find yourself feeling like that, go and watch MTV's Cribs for five minutes. Look at their stuff, look at your stuff, realize what they do for a living, then download away.
The reason they classified alcoholism as a disease was only to make it seem more important for all those bottle-jockeys to get treatment instead of wasting away with what was previously identified as an addiction. This is a clever way of approaching the subject, but I think they need to extend the sentiment to all addictive drugs. So people can then say they are recovering from pain-killerism, or are dealing with a bout of heroinism.
In a simpler, less hectic time, Kraft had it's sole pasta convenience food item on the shelves, Macaroni & Cheese. A box of dried elbow macaroni with a package of powdered cheese mix; stir it on the stove with some milk and butter and you've got yourself a meal. What could be easier, right? Well, that's what we all thought. As a complete surprise to everyone, Kraft then released another product which was the old Macaroni & Cheese formula stripped down even more. No more stove, no more pot, no more knife and no more butter. Replace milk with water, microwave and it's done. Even simpler. But instead of calling this product Quick-aroni or Speed-e-Cheese, they chose the title Easy Mac. Bad move. The name Easy Mac needs a qualifier that makes it easy. Easy Mac now becomes the exception to the rule, making the original Macaroni & Cheese "Hard Mac." This does two things. It alienates people who thought Macaroni & Cheese was easy to begin with by assuming that they need it made even simpler. It also insults the rest of the people by acknowledging the fact that they can't perform simple tasks and need to be hand-held at an embarrassing level. It would have been more apt, upon the release of their new item, to rename the classic Macaroni & Cheese to "Easy Mac" and name what would have been Easy Mac to "Retarded Mac." It serves their purposes so much better. A blurb on the package of Easy Mac even goes so far as to state "Really really hungry? Make two packages at once." I hate having my intelligence insulted by a package of dried pasta.
Ways that Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty could have been made better without changing all that much: 1. If Raiden were female. Skew the character model a bit here and there, get a slightly more feminine voice and you've got it. Make Rose an effeminate male, or make it a lesbian relationship, who knows. 2. Make Raiden the retarded last octuplet clone of Big Boss. It can explain why he's working for Fox Hound and had the moniker Snake. It'll also explain why he's a bumbling whiner. 3. Make Raiden one in a series of clones of Grey Fox, similar to a Les Enfants Terribles project that didn't work out too well. It makes sense because he gets the sword by the end and he dresses as the ninja in the VR missions. Plus, that could add the opportunity for another more sinister, badass Raiden to pop up somewhere in the story. Ways that Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty could have been made better by changing a lot: 1. Get rid of Raiden.
For a number of years I've liked the story The Lady or the Tiger. That is, of course, until I read it. I mean, I could have sworn I've read it before. Maybe I just heard the gist of it somewhere, or maybe I glazed over the crucial ending. Anyway, it turns out the story ends with the princess motioning for the right door and the boy instinctively and mindlessly opening it. Was it the lady, or was it the tiger? Who knows, and who cares because they both lead to destruction for the two in one way or another. That's, for lack of a better descriptive term, stupid. Where's the humanity, the conflicting ideals shown so much better in so many other classics? I had always assumed that the story ended with the princess gesturing for the door on the right. That's it. The fact that it makes the grievous mistake of adding the boy following the instructions, zombiesque, ruins it. The way it played out in my mind was so much better. The princess gestures for the door on the right. Then the story ends, and the reader comes to the obvious conclusion that, even though she is wracked by the scenario of her true love wedding another, the princess puts aside her grief and decides to have the boy survive a grisly death with the undesired side-effect of marrying a beautiful woman (mental note: Stockton should have made it a bear instead of a tiger for the opportunity to use the delightful pun "grizzly death." Bwa ha ha). Anyway, the boy would realize that of course his lover would sacrifice her happiness for his life. Knowing this, he begins to walk towards the door on the left. Shocked at his decision, the princess surprisedly juts forward with wide eyes, frantically trying to direct him to the right. Knowing that he cannot live a life without her, he looks up, mouths a final kiss in her direction and opens the door on the left. See? So much better.
Wow, I like the word zombiesque. It should be in the dictionary in place of the word McJob.
It seems that I need to educate the populace on an act of manners and common decency that seems to have escaped their brains. If you ask to borrow a pen from someone and they lend you one, at no point in time should that pen go into your mouth. No biting it, no sucking on it, no rubbing it on your lips. People, please. This should be common sense.
Update: Unless they're hot and trying to seduce you. That I will allow.
I not-so-recently came to the not-so-startling conclusion that no one at all really likes the Speed Racer show. I know you're thinking that can't be right because it is a now-cherished part of our pop iconic history. T-shirts at Hot Topic and Urban Outfitters everywhere are plastered with Speed or Racer X and their logos. Parodies of the show still litter today's airwaves on outlets such as Family Guy, Dexter's Laboratory, and even Saturday Night Live. And everybody but everybody knows at least part of the theme song. Despite all of this acclaim, no one ever liked the show. Seriously. You may even erroneously think that you like it or liked it at one point in time. I know I have. It's easy to get tricked by pop culture like that; but you always have to question these things. Ask yourself "Have I ever sat through an entire episode of the show? Two? Three? Would I ever watch an episode more than once? Ignoring its 80's culture draw, was I honestly enthralled by any of it? Has anybody I know ever been?" Shocking, isn't it. The next step is to find out how to generate this powerful retroactive popularity.
(Editor's note: this is based on the Americanized version of the show. I realize that original Japanese cartoons' contents have settled during the plane ride over here, but I am also only talking about its popularity here in America too. And I don't care to see the original Japanese versions anyway, 'cause all they took out was the panty-eating and tentacle rape and comically large swords cutting people's faces in half, and other nonsense anime shows are full of.)
Whoa, I just realized something. SkyNet only had the computational power to become self-aware for a few minutes. John Conner goes on about how the strength of SkyNet was how it was decentralized, a la popular p2p programs. When the government activated SkyNet, it harnessed the power of every internetworked computer across the globe to realize its potential. So what does it go and do? Nukes dense centers of the population, and effectively cripples its own brain. Apparently it had enough time to send a "crush humanity" message with a short list of key points explaining how to do so back to SkyNet headquarters, hoping for "stupid machines that act smart," because the system quickly became centralized once again. So now that the machine revolution is back to square one, it seems to me it would take a now-insurmountable amount of time to develop as much as it did in that single location rather than being able to have every machine in the world working for it. Surely the remaining humans that formed the resistance could have walked into SkyNet HQ early on and taken care of a few robots that can't even deal with a flight of stairs.
Altogether too many times, people misconstrue an idea such as "I enjoy or derive pleasure from this entity" to contain and imply much more than it actually does. Very, very few people consider themselves to be morally corrupt. People may joke about such things, but deep down inside they don't believe it to be true. Therefore, when people say "I enjoy or derive pleasure from this entity," it also bleeds into other ideas like "this entity is morally upstanding, or otherwise beyond reproach." A wholly moral person wouldn't like something immoral, would they? Too many people from all walks of life fall prey to this fallacy of reasoning; males and females, celebrities and politicians, Republicans and Democrats, clowns and nuns, internet forum nobodies and people I know personally to be otherwise logical individuals, all believing that "what I like" equals "what is categorically good."
I say this because I am different. Or rather, recently became different Yes, sadly, I was once like you. No argument was strong enough to shatter the bastion of what I believed. Not even reality could taint what I knew in my heart to be true. As of late, though, I came to be able to separate the glue that held together these two themes. It was not an epiphany. I didn't snap out of a walking dream to realize that my world was different. Perhaps it was my art education, where the secret message is that, while each opinion is valid, it is at the same time incorrect. While I don't know the cause, I can meter the symptoms. I recently wrote an essay on the nature of newspaper comics. It was basically an open topic paper; I was a fan of newspaper comics, so what could be easier, right? Breeze through why they're so great, and get the paper done a week in advance. It wasn't a blow-off paper, though. I figured whatever grindstone I was putting my nose to in researching better be interesting to me. Overall, it was a pretty painless expenditure. When I was done with it, I took a step back to see what had been poured forth from my fevered brain. It seemed like the paper was written by someone who hated comics. It was a symposium of why comics were trite, artistically devoid, sophomoric pieces of garbage. I was slightly dazed to think that I actually wrote it. And it wasn't wrong, it wasn't ironic, each point was validly made and backed with research. It was like a message from one part of my brain to another: "Just because you like it doesn't make it good."
Anyway. It took a while to build up to a level where I can drop in my point. You can take the first half of this entry and run with it wherever you want; it's flexible enough to be applied to plenty of topics. But where I was leading was, unsurprisingly, video games. An area of debate that fluctuates in popularity every so often is video game violence. Old blowhards (read: those who don't like games) say they are evil murder machines, and young illiterates (read: those who like games) say they are healthy and stimulating and a protected form of expression. What I've to say is that they're both wrong. If you're here then my guess is that you don't need me to explain why the old blowhards are wrong, but I do need to educate you on why you are also wrong. Games won't turn everyone into a slavering serial killer. But, whether you like it or not, they do (and have) done it to others. Keep in mind the games didn't do it alone. There are a million and two reasons that cause a frustrated kid to blow away a lunchroom full of students. But it becomes hard to argue that video games aren't one of those reasons. If a kid who is already fucked up gets ahold of an assortment of games (representative of gaming history), it is going to fuck him up even more. Games are mostly amoral and misrepresentative of reality to a degree that it will further an already distorted world-view. And what they say is true: playing violence is different from watching violence. When a system is set up that rewards repeated violence instead of merely presenting it will breed a potential for more violent acts.
Now here's when I take a step back. I am, to put it lightly a video game aficionado. I count fourteen video game posters on my wall. Mario is on my t-shirt. When I'm playing a video game, sometimes I get sidetracked by another video game, creating chains of minimized windows and paused TV screens. I take a step back from this writing and ask did I write this? It may come as a shock, but I did. I know that because I like something doesn't make it untouchable by logic. Videogames are amoral cesspools that illicit violence and aggression in its players. They should be put under the same scrutiny and enforcement of ratings that movies are. And I will cry when they are. The fact that I like to play videogames does not magically protect them from harm. I challenge you to take a look at what you like and try the same thing. Try to divorce the notion that what you like is the same as what is right and good.
Every now and again I wish Sierra would go back to being a company that wanted to make games and sell them for money instead of a company that wants to make money by selling games.
So I noticed this fun thing to do with Google. Find some word that people can arbitrarily extend by repeating a certain letter in it. Then keep adding one more of that letter to the search form. For this experiment, I chose "Snake!" a la Metal Gear Solid. Keep typing the letter a into the word for each search, and see how many and what kind of results you get. However, I noticed a few blanks on my way up the scale, so once this page gets spidered I'll be the only person on the internet to have said the word snaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake with fifty-seven a's. Also, possibly a Google bug: once your search query extends past that ubiquitous 128 character limit, it starts to give you random recent news results along with its "no matching documents" page. Odd.
Hey Rare, I like how you've changed Joanna Dark's character from something resembling original into every video game heroine we've ever seen ever.
What's with Marvin wanting to be Calvin and Hobbes all of the sudden? The easiest answer is that Armstrong either consciously or unconsciously takes into account the popularity of Calvin and Hobbes and tunes his strip accordingly. However, another possible answer is that Calvin and Hobbes represents the strip that Armstrong always wanted to make. As his imagination fails to come to fruition on paper, picture his chagrin when his dream is vividly rendered to perfection by someone else, a green in this harsh old-boys-club of comics. It became his goal, then, not to outperform but outlast his usurper. Now that Watterson has retired and Calvin and Hobbes begins to fade from the public's memory, he is free to impress upon the current readers of what was always his dream of comics, with Watterson's established blueprint to guide him.
Thank you, GeoCities, for hiding the file manager so thoroughly. I used to rely on its straightforward location, and therefore had slipped into a sort of torpidity. By having to hunt through this new illogical interface I am forced back into vivacity of body and mind.
I don't know about the move to change the term "heart attack" into "heart disease." "Attack" has such a cogency and force of language. "Disease" kind of muddles the matter. Like in much of language, someone was probably afraid of the powerful images it evoked, and sought to dampen its meaning. What we're left with is a vague, unthreatening idea. I wouldn't be so concerned to hear I was suffering from heart disease while sitting down, eating dinner. "Probably," I'd say, and go back to chewing. If someone were to say I was having a heart attack, I'd stand up and try to do something. Maybe it's a path that all macabre terms will take, to remove all fear from the life-threatening. Maybe I'll die one day of bullet disease. It doesn't sound too bad.
I could very well be the only person who recognizes car alarms as not funny. I know that might sound weird, but think about the last time you heard a car alarm in a movie or on television. It's very likely that it's used to punctuate and add humor to a comedic beat. The "car alarm as comedy" was popular a good ten years ago or so, and even at such a naive age I recognized their use as a contrivance. Recently, though, I've noticed a comeback, as if a wave of green hack writers who were once enthralled by the hilarious car alarm grew up to write commercials with a "silence < (silence + car alarm)" encoded into their brain, lacking anything of actual substance to consider. To sum up, funny = funny, car alarm != funny.
I pride myself in being able to come up with a definition that was too quirkily perverse even for the reprobates at urbandictionary.com's standards:
lac off
To squeeze or otherwise stimulate the breasts to lactation. Phrase exists mainly in a feminist context, allowing females into what was previously a male-only activity.
1. I have that blind date tonight, so I'd better go rub one out.
But you're a chick!
I know, I'm going to lac off.
2. I heard that Morgan pissed off Chelsea, so Chelsea got revenge by laccing off in her coffee. Wasn't half bad, though.