The Inverted Panopticon

An Open Letter

2012-02-02T21:10:00.000-08:00

Dear DC Comics,

It's a long, strange trip we've been on, you and I. How long has it been since One More Day drove me into your waiting arms--five years? Already? Damn. Maybe by your standards it's not that long, but I've read enough of your back catalog to know just how many ups and downs you've had. And holy hell have there been a lot of downs. Sometimes I think it's a miracle you've lasted 78 years.

But still, I've stuck by you. Even if it seems like the screwups have been increasing of late. I'm not even talking about the relaunch--that's not an out-and-out fuckup, just unnecessary. You don't seem to have done anything that required such a massive shake-up. If you wanted to bring in new creative teams to rejuvenate the line, why didn't you just, you know, do that? It's like buying a new car because you're tired of the current one's bumper stickers--you're paying thousands of dollars to solve a problem a bit of peeling would fix. Your "fresh new start" has proven neither fresh, nor new, nor even a start. (Meaning, in fact, the relaunch IS a fuckup. Oh well, at least we got Jeff Lemire writing Animal Man out of it.)

Indeed, the goofs have been coming thicker and faster than before, but I am a patient and forgiving god, willing to overlook and forgive...up to a point.

Look. Let me put it this way. In the past six months, I've watched you turn a character best known from a children's cartoon into a sex drone. I've seen you turn Harley Quinn into a juggalo AND take a great big runny shit on one of your most fondly-remembered series in one whack. I've seen you cancel one Rob Liefeld series, only to give him three more (which is at least four too many). I've seen you change your logo to something resembling a kangaroo getting an abortion (which, strangely, is growing on me--I guess my commitment to reproductive rights just runs that deep). I've seen you not fire Judd Winick.

Spreading the net a little, I have in my studies found evidence of greater chicanery. I speak of such incidents as turning a lighthearted fantasy comic aimed at young girls into a horror series, rife with gory deaths and butt-babies. I've seen you try to turn the JLA into 24. I've seen you call Countdown "52 done right" with a straight face. I've seen you take the concept of an elderly Superman fighting twin clones of Hitler in a post-apocalyptic future and make it suck. And in the face of all this...

THIS is the worst idea you've ever had.

Fuck, I'll go one further. Not only is this the worst idea you've ever had, it's arguably the worst idea anyone has ever had. Yes, worse than Comic Sans. I am so willing to go there. Yeah yeah, I know, just another case of nerd rage, right? By tomorrow I'll have forgotten all about it and moved on to the next "worst thing ever". That's how jaded I am--I don't expect worse, I know worse is coming. But you know what? When you get down to it, right now is all you have. And holy hell am I pissed about this right now.

And don't think a positively dynamite creative team is going to help matters. Credit where it's due, you've gotten some of the finest talent in the industry (and J. Michael Straczynski, durr-hurr-hurr) in on this mortifying prolapse. If you got these people together on any, and I do mean any other project, I'd be sprinting to Floating World Comics right now, jizzing all the way, to carve my preorder into Jason's forehead backwards. As it stands, however, these folks' involvement is just twisting the knife more. Not even Darwyn Cooke can polish a turd. It's like if Pope Julius II got fucked in the ass (little known fact: Julius II--total bottom), then Jules got horrible gas and expelled santorum all over the walls of the papal apartments, then called Michelangelo, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio in and said "there's this old chapel I've been meaning to spruce up and I think this pattern would look really nice on the walls and ceiling". Those three eminent men of Renaissance art notwithstanding, the end result would still be the Sistine Chapel's interior looking like a frothy shart-splosion.

So no, I won't be buying your stupid Watchmen prequel. Anyone who does is part of the problem. Are we really that jaded? Will we happily slurp down whatever obvious cash-in that gets held in front of our collective face while a reassurance voice warns us of an incoming airplane?

I'm beginning to understand just why Alan Moore is such a cranky old bastard. With tributes like this, who needs denunciations?

More Yelping

2012-01-19T21:00:00.001-08:00

Take a stroll around Old Town sometime, see the sights. See the loud, angry homeless people, the polite, well-behaved homeless people (courtesy of Right 2 Dream Too), the Chinese Garden, the puddles of clubgoer vomit punctuating the sidewalk, the godawful semi-testicular One Pacific Square building...but, most of all, the Hung Far Low sign. Yes indeedy, that beloved old restaurant shingle bearing a no doubt innocent Chinese phrase I can't be arsed to look up, which--quite by accident--connotes gravid genitalia in our mongrel gwailo tongue.

The restaurant itself fucked off to 82nd years ago--didn't love us anymore, I guess. Doesn't matter, though, as a new restaurant now huddles in its erstwhile space: Ping. Which is, apparently, one of GQ's top 10 best new restaurants of 2010. Not that I give a fuck what GQ thinks. I mention this only as an excuse to point out that Ping hasn't let this no-doubt-high honor go to its head--or prices.

Yes, a mere $18 will get you a full dinner of a steamed pork bun, spicy mama ramen, and a bottle of Chang. The bun was not only made to order, but heated all the way through--more than I can say for the pork buns of some Old Town restaurants *COUGH*houseoflouie*COUGH I could name. The ramen is the standard "everything including some hard chunks we're pretty sure are bits of the kitchen sink, so watch your teeth" noodle bowl local Asian restaurants love so well. It's odd in that I like everything in it EXCEPT the noodles, which I'd swear came out of those quarter-a-pop packs you can find in supermarkets and convenience stores the world over (and believe me, having subsisted on the things the middle third of my life I know my cheap ramen). I can't comment on whether it tastes like your mama (who, if I may say so, is damn tasty if it does), but they're not kidding about the "spicy" part--be certain of your bravery before taking the wait staff up on their offer to toss some more capsaicin in there. The Chang, eh, confirmed my suspicion that I don't really care for Asian beer. Not that that's the restaurant's fault.

The place is a bit of a closet, albeit a cozy one--all chunky wood paneling and mood lighting. The waitstaff are helpful, if not what I'd call friendly--but then if I wanted my ass kissed I'd go to Red Robin. As is my wont, I sat in the most out-of-the-way corner I could find just to see if they'd forget about me. They didn't, and I wasn't kept waiting for hours on end, so what more do you want?

Recommended.

Below The Barrel #1

2012-01-08T22:27:00.000-08:00

Welcome to “Below The Barrel”, our semi-recurring feature chronicling the most obscure of the most obscure. Rare books, underground movies, forgotten webcomics--you name it, we cover it!

Today’s installment:

In My Skin: A Study Of Race Relations In America
Motion picture
Starring: “Rayneesha” and “Jakeesha”
Director: Unknown
Writer: Unknown (N/A?)
Producer: Unknown
Distributor: N/A
Release Date: N/A
67 min.

Overview

We had reservations about using this film. Not so much due to its content, disturbing as it is; the subjects of planned future installments contain similarly extreme content. Rather, we were uncertain as to whether or not the film was obscure enough for this feature. The movie--heretofore referred to as In My Skin for short--has maintained a high degree of notoriety in certain sections of the Internet, chiefly in so-called “shock sites”. In a real-life setting, In My Skin has been the subject of several expose pieces on various news programs, most notably the March 27, 1998 edition of Dateline NBC. However, out of all these programs, only Dateline described the film’s actual content in any detail, and then only in the briefest and most bowdlerized terms--which still necessitated the episode’s airtime being pushed back two hours, so (according to NBC) as to minimize the risk of minors viewing the piece. Furthermore, the film is or has been banned by every nation on earth, with the exception of Burundi.

In the end, however, we decided to press forward. In My Skin’s mainstream exposure has been, at best, a short string of brief flirtations. Traditionally the film has been treated more as a bullet point for larger “moral panics” with regards to new media as a whole, rather than a genuine threat to morality and/or cultural integrity in and of itself. Furthermore, very few people (including, as per custom, virtually none of its would-be censors) have actually seen the film, learning instead of its content through secondhand sources and becoming averse to further investigation. For these reasons, we have opted to feature it on Below The Barrel.

So what is the semi-existent fuss all about? What kind of movie is In My Skin? An excellent question, and like most excellent questions not one easily answered. The prevailing opinion among those who have seen the film in question is that it is a porno movie. While this is a tempting answer, and one that is more than defensible, we hesitate to label it as such ourselves. To be sure, In My Skin contains copious, literally start-to-finish nudity, but we believe nudity alone does not pornography make--if it did, the Louvre would be Paris’ red-light district. Certain of the acts portrayed within the film could be portrayed as sexual, but only to the most eclectic--and arguably depraved--of fetishists; far from titillating, most viewers would (and do) consider them downright nauseating. We are of the opinion that the “porno movie” explanation simply does not hold water, and that the truth lies in one of the other proffered theories.

However, this is scarcely narrowing it down. In My Skin has had at least as many theories as to its “meaning” as it has had actual viewers, and arguably more. Aside from the aforementioned porn theory, the most popular of these explanations is that the movie is a filmed performance art piece and/or student film, with the purpose of providing satirical commentary on racial stereotypes. Almost as popular is the hypothesis that the film was made by some clandestine white-supremacist organization, intended to denigrate African-Americans. The utter lack of commentary or clarification from the filmmakers has had the effect of making these two diametrically opposed theories seem equally plausible.

Sadly, it seems unlikely that concrete answers will be forthcoming anytime soon. As of this writing, no one involved in In My Skin’s production process has been identified, nor has anyone come forward. The only names listed in the scanty credits are those of the two actresses, and those are presumed to be pseudonyms. They, along with any and all other individuals who may have had a hand in the film’s creation, have resisted all attempts (including at least one FBI investigation) to identify or locate them. It is as if the film appeared out of thin air; alternately, it is as if some divine judgment took such umbrage at the film that it purged the filmmakers from the earth, scouring their names from the very memory of man. Why a metaphysical entity would do such a thing while leaving the film itself untouched remains unclear.

Whatever became of the filmmakers, their legacy--the film itself--continues to haunt the world. Since its first appearance in 1996, In My Skin has been submitted to a bewilderingly eclectic array of potential distributors. Aside from the expected independent and adult-film specialists, evidence exists of the film also being offered to those distributors responsible for mainstream, big-budget Hollywood movies. It is perhaps unnecessary to say that the latter passed on the film, as did the former. And this is not merely the case within the United States (the film’s presumed country of origin, based upon accent analysis)--over the next decade In My Skin appears to have been submitted to quite literally every film distributor in the world, regardless of size or specialty. The sheer financial cost of undergoing this notoriously lengthy and expensive process hundreds of times over must have been staggering; no doubt the expense far outstripped that of making the film. In My Skin’s producers seem as tenacious (to say nothing of wealthy) as they are anonymous.

Upon exhausting literally all possible avenues of traditional film distribution, the filmmakers seem to have released In My Skin to the Internet at large, first appearing sometime in mid-2007. The film is easily found on a variety of torrent sites, often under misleading titles concealing its true nature (such as “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn pt. 2 work print”). Tracking down a copy of In My Skin requires both luck and speed--the film is nearly always taken down once site administrators become aware of its presence.

Synopsis

(Warning: the following is massively, unspeakably, unbelievably Not Safe For Work We’re typing that phrase out for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the acronym--we’re THAT serious about this. Additionally, it may be unsafe for children, pets, and sanity. You have been warned.)

The film begins with opening credits, consisting of white lettering on a black background with no soundtrack. The film’s title is displayed first, followed by Starring “Rayneesha” and “Jakeesha” (quotation marks included).

After 45 seconds, the film jump-cuts to the “set” upon which the remainder of In My Skin will take place. This set is located in a single small room, the lighting barely sufficient for the needs of cinematography. The room appears to be some sort of maintenance-access area, the walls covered with pipes, conduits and circuit-breaker boxes. A ventilation running along the ceiling is visible in some shots. Faint music accompanies the entire film; however, it is muffled and does not appear to be a deliberate part of the soundtrack. It is believed that the music was playing over a PA system elsewhere in the building and the filmmakers’ sound equipment picked it up by accident. Analysis has identified this music as instrumental “Muzak” versions of hit adult-contemporary songs of the 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s. This, coupled with the set’s locale, has led many to theorize that In My Skin was filmed clandestinely in a back room of some public place, perhaps a shopping mall.

With regards to the set itself, it consists of a table and two chairs. The table is plain-featured and made of unfinished pine. Upon it rest the film’s props--a thick leather-bound book, a carving knife, and a large, seeded watermelon. The chairs are similarly plain. As the film opens, the chairs are occupied by In My Skin’s “stars”, presumably the “Rayneesha“ and “Jakeesha“ of the credits--no indication is ever given as to which is which. Both are significantly obese African-American women of late middle age. At no point over the course of the film are either shown wearing any clothing.

The two “actresses” sit silent and motionless, seemingly avoiding eye contact, for the space of about two minutes. Finally, one of them stands and picks up the carving knife. She uses the knife to cut a large wedge from the watermelon, then replaces the knife and places the wedge on the floor. This task complete, she then lies prone on the floor, buttocks lifted slightly, and begins eating the watermelon.

Once she has done this, the other actress stands up. She takes the book from the table, then maneuvers herself to be standing above the prone actress at approximate waist-height. She opens the book, dropping into a semi-crouch position as she does so. She begins to recite a passage from the book; these passages have identified the tome as Proper Methods In The Instruction And Training Of The Negro, an American antebellum slave owner’s manual authored by Japheth Beauregarde, first published in 1846.

(Research indicates the copy of Proper Methods used in In My Skin to be a first edition, several copies of which were purportedly bound in the skin of murdered slaves. Should this rumor indeed be true, and should one such copy be the one used in the film--as many have argued, though this cannot be substantiated--it perhaps casts the film's title in a new and rather disturbing light.)

The standing actress reads aloud, straining her lower torso as she does so. Eventually the purpose of this becomes clear as she defecates, the trajectory of the fecal matter sufficiently well-aimed so that the bulk of it enters the prone actress’ rectum. In the case of both actresses, their considerable girth makes simple gravity sufficient to keep the receiving actress' buttocks spread without manual or mechanical aid. The prone actress remains silent, apart from occasional spitting sounds as she expels watermelon seeds onto the floor.

Once the standing actress finishes voiding her bowels, the two switch places, and the process is repeated. Fresh wedges are cut from the watermelon as needed. This sequence, which comprises the majority of the film, is shot from several different angles on what appears to be 16mm film. This implies the presence of a sizable camera crew, equipped with top-of-the-line technology and know-how; the overhead shots, in particular, must have proved difficult in the cramped locale.

Near the end of the film, the screen goes blank. The remaining five minutes of In My Skin comprise a black screen, accompanied by the faint sounds of Muzak, before the film’s abrupt end. It has been theorized that this segment was originally intended as a credits display, which was scrapped after the crew demanded anonymity--or had it forced upon them.

Notable Quotes

“Understand that the Negro is as a hound, albeit a hound lacking the cunning customary to the breed. It may become a cherished helpmate or a loyal guardian, dependant utterly upon proper care and the firm hand of an assured trainer. Likewise, should you fail to provide this firm hand, the Negro shall become as a feral hound--savage and bloodthirsty, with an eye only to your destruction.”--Actress #1 (Rayneesha?) reading from Proper Methods In The Instruction And Training Of The Negro, page 27, paragraph 3.

“It is of the utmost importance that you must treat the Negro as you would your own son. Do not scruple to chasten him with rod or whip, as you hate him not. To do otherwise would invite the African wickedness inherent to his race to take root in his heart, spreading throughout his veins like a noxious weed in an ill-maintained gutter.”--Actress #2 (Jakeesha?), ibid., page 56, paragraph 1.

Reactions

“Sin and debauchery! The so-called ‘filmmaker’ is the lowest order of pervert and pornographer, lacking even the courage to identify himself! Mark my words, sinner, there is no refuge from the eyes of the Lord! Be sure your sins will find you out, oh yes, very sure indeed!”--Rev. Elias Postlethwaite, Saginaw Baptist Church

“Sick, sick shit, brah. Makes me wanna ralph my cookies just remembering it. I remember this one time I had this elk in my sights--twelve-pointer, absolute beaut. Got the fuckin’ thing dead to rights when all of a sudden--I mean outta nowhere--this one part of the film pops into my head. You know the part where the one chick’s reading about how much you can expect to get for a healthy black five-year-old and some of the shit splashes on the watermelon and the other chick eats it anyway? Yeah, that part. So I go like “AUUUGGGHHH!” and the elk fuckin’ bolts. So yeah, totes nasty flick. Last time I go to one of Mark Millar’s movie-night parties, that’s for damn sure.“--Mike Grell, sequential artist

“Ungh…ungh…ungh…hhngh…hhngh…hhngh…oh god…oh fuck…oh shit…OH FUCK EEERRRRRNNNNGGGHHH!”--Some homeless guy we showed part of the movie

“Get the fuck out of here.”--Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam

“Finally, a film that dares to tell the truth about what the darkies get up to when white America’s not looking! This should have been the #1 film in the country--and it WOULD have been, were Hollywood not run by Jews!”--Clovis Thibodeaux, Grand Wizard, Imperial Klans of America

“A bold, insightful take on the cycle of self-denigration within the African-American community, as seen through the lens of a (as yet unidentified) modern-day Bunuel.”--Dr. Carl Northrup, Professor of Film Studies, Brigham Young University

“I mean, you’ve got two kidneys. Don’t give both kidneys up--go see Wicked before you give up both kidneys. But give a kidney to go see In My Skin. I’m telling you, mark my words, it’s being panned right now, nobody’s saying good stuff about it. I’m telling you, you go buy your ticket--you buy your ticket now, if you’re thinking about coming to New York, because when this thing opens and it’s starting to run, you will not be able to get tickets to this for a year. This is one of those shows, this is the Phantom of the 21st century.”--Glenn Beck, radio personality

Our Take

What more can be said about In My Skin? No mere rhetorical question, this. It does seem as though every opinion that can be expressed about this short film has been, everything from “ew, gross” to “brilliant!” In such a case as this originality of insight may well be impossible, but we’ll try.

For our part, what we find most striking about In My Skin is its self-importance--at least, what we perceive as such. The utter lack of anything resembling explanation or commentary from the filmmakers, of course, makes their true intentions impossible to discern. However, it seems clear to us that they harbored ambitions above their scatological station. Whatever the larger point may have been--be it to lampoon racist attitudes or to reinforce them--it seems clear it existed.

The way we see it, this very pretension, coupled with the aura of mystery, is the secret behind In My Skin’s longevity. Without it, it would have been simply another pornographic movie, catering to a fringe fetish too ill-populated for profit or lasting fame. As it is, however, the film remains in the periphery of public vision, as a subject of both scholarly study and morbid curiosity. With the rise of the Internet, it has thus far eluded “old meme” status, as due to its scarcity and semi-mythical status many people refuse to believe in the film’s existence until they have seen it for themselves.

This, to be frank, is the source of our problem with In My Skin. To be sure, the content is off-putting and gross. However, the film is also completely lacking in any deeper merit--even if it is meant as satire, it is all but drowned out by the mind-blasting scatology. Ordinarily such a work would provoke outrage, make the word-of-mouth rounds for about a month, and then quietly fade away. This pretension through anonymity, however, has thus far spared In My Skin the latter fate. This, then, is the sheer hell of it: In My Skin is puerile, disgusting, and crude…and it won’t go the hell away.

Not only that, there’s also the mystery of it. Just who are these people, and what the fuck was going through their heads all those years ago? Where did all that money come from? Just how high does this stupid thing go, anyway? Are those rumors about the book's binding true, and if so, was/is this film intended as some sort of bizarre occult/necromantic ritual? The implications are staggering--or would be, if we allowed ourselves to ponder them.

We, of course, fully realize we are not helping matters. To post this piece on In My Skin is to expose (or re-expose, as the case may be) it to our uncounted millions of viewers. We bring things full circle, and this nasty little cinematic opus of race-baiting coprophilia lives another day. Our resolute refusal to provide any links avails us not--we can almost hear tens of thousands of fingers clattering away at thousands of keyboards, running searches on variations of the film’s title, on the words “fat black women”, “watermelon”, and “shit”.

Lord help us all.

Dagnabbit

2012-01-07T22:07:00.000-08:00

So I was watching Batman: The Animated Series just now. The episode was fine, just as awesome as I remembered, that wasn't the problem. The problem (if it can be called such) lay in the end credits, whose copyright dated the episode to...1992. Dear lord. Yes, that's right, the (for me) iconic Batman series, Timm and Dini's masterpiece, is twenty years old.

That latter word is what I'd like to discuss today, because the revelation left me feeling very much so. I don't know if that's a good thing or not--I may lean one way or another, depending on my mood. Right now the trend is towards "bad", if only because it was the first time I'd truly felt that way, and as we all know, old farts hate new things.

I'm supposing this happens to everyone--the sudden, searing revelation that one is regarded as "uncool" due simply to one's age. This is of course monstrously unfair, as in the great uncoolness spectrum it is, perhaps, the only factor over which one has no control. (Most of the others have to do with "not being a douchebag" and "staying open-minded, for fucksake", truisms that hold regardless of vintage.)

How do I really feel?

2012-01-06T23:24:00.000-08:00

(Please to note: I may have a teensy bit of difficulty remembering what, precisely, I ordered at Chin's Kitchen. It's been several months since I ate there--time I've mostly spent trying to block the memory--and fucked if I'm going to repeat the experience for the Internet's sake. Now, onward!)

Imagine, if you will, a locker room. The specifics are unimportant, just your stereotypical, garden-variety locker room. The sort in which all the traditional locker-room activities took place--the communal showers, the storage of damp clothing, the wet-towel-snapping ass-torment, the semi-public-nudity-emboldened braggadocio, all of it. Imagine that this locker room functioned for many, many years, literal decades of black mold and simmering homoeroticism, before finally closing, at which point it sat empty for several more years, just to make extra-sure the fungi had taken root. Finally, imagine that someone or someones came along and decided, without so much as setting mop to tile, that this locker room would make a fantastic Chinese restaurant.

You can stop imagining now, because now you have Chin's Kitchen.

Chin's Kitchen is the sort of place where, upon setting foot inside the doors, your first thought is this is gonna suck. Most sensible people, upon finding themselves in this situation, do the sensible thing--turn on their heel and go eat at Shandong instead.

Very rarely have I been accused of being sensible.

Yes, I walked into Chin's Kitchen, saw the state of the place, knew on the spot what I was in for--and sat down and ordered something anyway. Call me stupid if you like--I prefer to think of myself as an optimist. First impressions have led me astray in the past, after all. Hell, for the first several months of its existence I was convinced Sizzle Pie was a strip club. I must have been in a forgiving mood that day, because I ordered a combo platter, was presented with a pile of hot garbage and I STILL ate it.

And garbage it was--canned/bagged storebought garbage, from the looks of it. Canned water-chestnut slices are never a welcome sight in my eyes, and yet here were the little frozen-jizz slices infesting my chow mein without so much as a by-your-leave. The chow mein's "noodles" were those awful rock-hard brown things (like fossilized goldfish shit) only crappy Chinese restaurants buy, despite their near-ubiquity in the "ethnic foods" section of your local supermarket. Gluing it all together into one gelid mass was a gravy best likened to thick, gluey phlegm fresh from the lung.

So, bad fucking food is what I'm getting at. Almost as bad as the decor. There's no reason for this place to exist, not when GOOD chinese food is less than a mile away. Surely you can walk that far--nobody's THAT American.

A Christmas Tale

2011-10-19T19:44:00.000-07:00

Spokane, 6:30 p.m. So much snow on the ground you’d swear asphalt was white, and more on the way. I’m going on my 37th sleepless hour, unless you count the few minutes of intermittent slumber I pocketed on the bus (and I sure as fuck don‘t), face plastered against the canine-adorned upholstery. I’ve been ferried in the wrong direction; north, along one of the main commercial streets, an unwilling tourist of one of the most unpleasant districts of one of the most unpleasant cities in the northwestern United States. My destination? A goddamn Golden Corral.

So, to say this is the very last place on this miserable planet I wanted to be right at the moment would be perhaps an understatement.

The hell of it is, the party responsible for this outrage considers this a kindness. Apparently this slophouse is her favorite “restaurant” chain and she’s taking us there as a family Christmas gift. My mother and brother are holding their tongues, and my frazzled conscience whispers I should do so as well from whatever dark recesses of my brain to whence it has retreated. “It’s the thought that counts” is perhaps the most shopworn of holiday clichés, but I’ll admit it’s by and large accurate. After all, my own efforts this year at showing appreciation to my friends and loved ones have been somewhat lacking, both in generosity and effort. So it follows I should shut up and make a show of enjoying my fried stodge, right?

No. Fuck that. I might be technically awake, but the diplomatic and gracious part of me, a weak and sickly thing at the best of times, passed out somewhere around Pasco. For a moment it rouses, just long enough to counsel me I’m obliged to direct my vitriol at the locale itself, rather than towards this friend of the family. This I accept; all else, however, is venom, brewed in cultural revulsion and distilled by sleep deprivation. Hold it in much longer and I’ll be poisoned. Where better to direct it but at the very enshrinement of entitled American gluttony?

Where better, indeed. Fuck me, if you could see this place! As I said, Spokane’s roads are nothing short of nightmarish--a night wholly unfit for traveling any further than the bathroom (and here I am expecting to be chauffeured 70 more miles, but my unrelenting selfish hypocrisy isn’t the subject here. This time.) And yet, this place is packed! To the proverbial gills! You can’t swing your foot forward to take a step without getting it stuck in some ham beast’s folds. In fact, I’m not certain this place is all that crowded--it may be just ten or twenty really fat people. Golden Corral is well festooned with the obese, straining the chairs to the razor’s edge of their load-limits, knees near to buckling as they waddle from one heating table to another.

Jesus, what kind of cultural decline is this? The United States’ idea of decadence seems to be “drink clarified butter from a gravy boat until your heart explodes”. Somehow the math doesn’t add up. Having a bunch of meaningless sex, smoking dope and/or being openly gay makes you a slut, criminal, and/or pervert respectively. But cramming tens of thousands of calories down your gullet every day and turning into a flesh zeppelin while 36 million people die of malnutrition every year--that‘s fine! Hell, it’s damn near mandatory. At least the Romans had orgies. All we get is the privilege of eating our way into an early grave, buried in a nigh-cubical casket.

And that not even with good food! Golden Corral specializes in the finest comfort food (sounds better than “I-wanna-die-of-something-painful food”) straight from the American heartland! They use only the choicest cuts from stray dogs, rats and late-term abortions, deep-fried in engine oil and battered with week-old phlegm! Yes, at Golden Corral their motto is “All Must Be Fried”. And all will be fried. Even the vegetables. Especially the vegetables. When the shitting, shitting, shitting shit are people going to learn that you must never fry a vegetable? Because it is an act of perfect nihilism. Frying a vegetable does not simply ruin the vegetable--it makes said vegetable disappear. In its place remains a grotesque, slimy changeling, somewhat resembling the original foodstuff but showing its true nature with its bitter flavor and viscous texture. The Brussels sprouts I had tasted like slippery, moldering testicles, harvested from a corpse left to rot in the fetid waters of a BP-despoiled Louisiana bayou for several months.

And yet, somehow I managed to choke some of this shit down--not as much as my flabby fellow patrons, perhaps, but some. Somehow I lacked their enthusiasm for blunting my profile. Sheer sloth no doubt--I’ve never been what you’d call dedicated. That, and I needed to get something down my neck. Each hour on Greyhound somehow becomes the equivalent of one unprovisioned day in the desert, after which you’ll gladly lap from a muddy puddle or eat black licorice.

Thus do I manage to choke down a plate, forcing myself to unsee the eatery’s cleanliness--or rather, the lack thereof. Indeed, “Dust-Bunny Corral” would be far more apt. But you can’t fault the staff for this! The economy is bad, after all, and cleaning supplies are expensive! This is triage, not sloth! The employees know they must conserve their stocks for a “Code Splortch”--that is, when one of the corpulent patrons trips and falls over, whereupon impact with the floor causes them to explode like a water balloon, splashing the dining area with blood and lard. This is the only reasonable explanation for those stains on the walls. And floor. And ceiling. Probably happens at least once a month, judging from the tackiness.

Run-down though the décor may be, it is the Catherine Palace compared to our “waitress”. You may ask, what purpose could a waitress serve in a buffet? As it turns out, she wanders by once every couple of hours or so to refill your drinks and clear away your dirty plates. Even pigs appreciate a clean trough once in a while, after all. I judged our waitress (whose name I never learned, because fuck that) to be in her mid-twenties; however, she appeared to be attempting with more than a little success to appear two decades older. I guessed her position at this fine establishment was not her only job. Her eyes and gait bore the weight of countless long workdays, interrupted all too seldom by nights which should have been spent in slumber but doubtless were primarily occupied by night classes and the squalling fruits of teen motherhood. Were I still capable of pity, she would have mine.

Or she would, were it not drowned in rising tides of derision. This waitress, you see, is wearing a pin. After a moment’s examination, I discern that this pin reads JESUS FIRST. Why did it take me a moment to puzzle out these two meager words, so meaningless when placed side by side? Because, well, she’s wearing the pin upside-down. Yes.

I can’t figure this out. Was it a mistake? A conscious effort not to offend? Is the typical clientele of Golden Corral such unrelenting shit-wits that they are unable to read upside-down words? If so, would any of them even object to the message? Would they not object instead to the message’s inversion?

Unless…no. That can’t be it. Can it?

It occurs to me that wearing a pin in such a manner would make it easy for the wearer to read. All she would need to do is look down.

Fucketh me! Christianity can’t even get proselytizing right anymore! You’re not supposed to do that to yourself, you silly cow! It defeats the entire purpose! That‘s you people‘s primary objection to masturbation, is it not? I suppose I should be happy you’re keeping it to yourself for once, but damn. I just can’t stand to see anything done wrong, I guess.

But it all turns out well in the end. When at long, long last we make ready to depart, the skank comes bearing gifts. She brings us, of all things, a comment card! Yes! Do you realize what you’ve just done, you stupid bint? You’ve just stuck your arm down the garbage disposal and flipped the switch! God damn you! Why the fuck does this world, this whole self-immolating species have to make this so easy? I even ask to borrow your pen and you give it to me! I’d laugh if I weren’t choking in fatigue poison and hate!

So, I flip the card over and there’s a row of 1-5 ratings. Even from the depths of my ocean of bile I find it within me to be absolutely fair, though this still leads me to score “1” in the categories I feel qualified to comment on--I have no idea who or where the “drink station attendant” was, so I leave that blank. I save my “1”s for the true sticking points--”cleanliness” and “food quality”. Beneath this is printed the word “Comments”, trailed by several rows of ruled lines. A preemptive Thank You! provides rear-guard to the proceedings. Oh, don’t thank me yet.

My ranking completed, I set to the work of proffering my honest, no doubt highly-valued opinion. As a token of diplomacy, I decide to throw in a personal touch--a bit of friendly advice to brighten the waitress’ day. I write:

Your “restaurant” is cultural AIDS. Also, your pin is upside down.

The missive complete, I return the card to the table, face down. She sweeps it up along with the check, shoving it in her apron pocket without reading it. I am not disappointed; indeed I had expected and hoped for this. The time is not yet right--I don’t want her making a scene. I’m no stranger to embarrassment, but getting kicked out of Golden Corral would be too much ignominy for even me to bear. I know she’ll read it eventually, maybe even now as I flee into the cold, dark parking lot, insofar as a shuffling, balance-maintaining gait can be called “fleeing”.

Or maybe not. Still, the point is, sooner or later I know that card will be read. Truth is patient. Truth waits. Truth has all the time in the world.

And that is enough for me.

Mind-Blowing

2011-10-12T06:33:00.000-07:00

Hiya, Mike Grell here. You may know me as the creator of Jon Sable Freelance, The Warlord, Starslayer and other masterpieces of sequential art. Of course, I’m assuming you a) are awesome and b) know good comics when you see them. What can I say, I have faith in my readers.

What you might not know, however, is that I am also, as the good folks at Wikipedia put it, “an avid big-game hunter”. Although I have to say, dudes, while I appreciate the shout-out, the adjective is totes in vain. ‘Cuz if it floats, flies, lopes, scuttles or crawls, the Grellmonster will put a bullet between its eyes and slap it on his dinner table. Give me an elephant gun and a desert island full of nothing but rabbits, I’m not gonna turn up my nose--those bunnies are going down. Buckteeth and big, floppy ears all over the fuckin’ place. ’Cuz it ain’t the size of the package that counts, right ladies?

Now don’t get me wrong, I loves me some big-game hunting. There’s nothing quite like sitting crouched in the tall grass, sighting down (iron sights only, ’cuz I kick it old-school like that) on something huge and endangered, the rifle butt slamming against your shoulder as you pull the trigger and pop its heart like a water balloon…gives me a fuckin’ hard-on just thinking about it. And as for actually doing it? Well brah, let’s just say there’s a reason I wear a jimmy-hat at all times when I’m out in the bush. And yes, that is a double entendre. And before any of you tree-huggers ask, no, that’s not the only way I can bust a nut--just ask my wife. Or my mistress. Or both--they know each other, they’re totes cool with it, go on shopping sprees together and shit. Never let it be said the Grellster can’t keep his women satisfied.

But lemme tell ya, hunting isn’t all blowing away dumb animals, using their blood as warpaint and eating their hearts raw (to absorb their power, natch). There’s the not-so-fun stuff too--hauling gear, camping in the rain, digging holes in the ground to poop in (what are those called again? I can never remember), spraying yourself with deer urine, squatting in one place for hours at a time, being miles away from the nearest woman (sure, there’s a few lady hunters, but most of ‘em ain’t buying what Grandmaster Grelle Grell’s selling, if you know what I mean), shit like that.

Hours or days of hassle for two seconds’ payoff might not sound like a good tradeoff, but believe me man, it totes is. Try it for yourself if you don’t believe me. Though I have to warn you, shit can get crazy out in the field sometimes. I mean like really, really crazy--like Christine O’Donnell crazy. I could tell you some stories. In fact, you know what? I’ll tell one right now.

Huh? Whuzzat? Why am I writing this instead of drawing a comic? Good question, brah, with an even better answer--’cuz I ain’t getting paid, that’s why? Mofos think they’re my kids or something, wanting a bedtime story or some shit! You know what these d-bags are offering? Half a six-pack of Simpler Times pilsner, that’s what! Man, I hate pils--tastes like it was strained through a fuckin’ sock!

Ah, what the hell--I just got kicked out of ANOTHER AA group, might as well get my buzz on. Any port in a storm, right? So all right, I’ll write something up--but that’s all. You want purty pitchers to go along with--that you pay for. Even comic-book artists have their pride.

So anyway, this happened back in ‘98. I was hunting elk in the forest, beats me if I remember which one--Yellowstone or Redwood or some shit. Trust me, brah, when you’ve hunted in as many forests as I have they all start running together in your head. I do remember being the trees still being green in the middle of November, so a pine forest I guess. That doesn’t really narrow it down, though. Oh well, like anybody cares.

Anyhoo, like I said it was the middle of November, in the forest, which is gonna be cold and wet as hell no matter where you are. And it was that day, I don’t mind telling you. Big fat cold drops rolling down my face, getting warpaint in my eyes. Yeah, I said warpaint. When it comes to hunting, your acronym of the day is ABP--Always Be Painted. Never hurts to look like a badass, even if your opponent don’t give a shit. Especially then. ‘Cuz if you’re staring some big-ass bear or lion or whatever dead in the eye, you got BRING IT BITCH written all over your face (I literally do that sometimes--can you say “badass”?), and the thing’s too fuckin’ dumb to realize it? You will feel like a god. A. GOD. Well, you’ll probably already feel that way what with the gun and all, but more so. You’re gonna feel like Super-God; you know, the God God is afraid of.

Like I was saying, my paint was getting all messed up--looked more like it read BLIRG II LUCII or some shit. Wasn’t just the face paint getting washed away either--I could barely smell the doe-piss anymore. Here I’d spent all morning damn near MARINATING in the shit. That stuff is expensive too, especially the Chinese black-market stuff I use. Totally illegal--they say it makes hunting too easy, if you can believe that. Yeah, you try hauling 50 pounds of gear in and out of the forest sometime, then we’ll talk about easy. That, and if it’s about “difficult” why do you let us use GUNS? That makes splattering animal-brains pretty fuckin’ easy, lemme tell ya! If you’re really worried about “easy”, why don’t you make us go out there with ball-peen hammers? Though, actually, I did that a couple times, and I gotta say…but that’s another story.

So anyway, the pee-smell’s starting to wear off and I’m limper than a…a…really limp thing. I’m about to call it a day, pull this rubber off and head back to town when all of a sudden this buck comes trotting out of the brush. And what a buck it was! An absolute beaut (no homo) from head to toe. And the antlers! Most centerfolds don’t have racks this nice--I’m serious, this thing must’ve been, like, a fifty-pointer. I have never wanted to hang something on my studio wall so badly. I swear to you, Bambi’s dad (was Bambi a deer or an elk? I always get those mixed up) decided to end it all, stepped off the silver screen and into G-Rell’s sights. ‘Cuz if you’re gonna go out, might as well get your sendoff from the best, right? So the old lowercase jumps right back to attention, I raise my gun and…

Okay, something you need to know in order to understand this next part. At the time, I had recently come into possession of several hundred rounds of gas-tipped rounds--that is, exploding bullets. They pretty much turn any gun into a tiny rocket launcher. Get hit with one of these and KERBLOOEY--get turned into a meat smoothie from the inside out. Yeah, pretty gnarly--even more gnarly if you hit the colon. Blood and shit EVERYWHERE, like my bathroom on Enchilada Night. Now I know what you’re thinking--”Sweet Jesus Mikey, that is a horrible way to die”, and you’re afraid to say it ‘cuz you don’t wanna sound like a pussy. Well, don’t worry about it, ‘cuz you’re right, brah. I wouldn’t wish that shit on my worst enemy. Fuck, I wouldn’t wish that shit on Joe Quesada, it’s so nasty. Knowing these things are out there and anyone can buy them makes me wanna burn my NRA card sometimes. Then I go clean my guns and the feeling goes away. Mourn ya till I join ya, C.H.

So no doubt you’re wondering--what in the almighty living fuck was I even doing with these ungodly abominations, much less bringing them hunting? Well brah, to that I can only say, your guess is as good as mine. Last time I hit the gun store drunk, lemme tell ya. I didn’t even realize I had them by the time I was out there--I was a little buzzed when I loaded the truck (noticing a pattern?), so I must’ve just grabbed a few ammo boxes at random and tossed them in. It’s a miracle I managed to bring the right caliber this time (unlike that time I went on a trip with some buddies. Closest I’ve ever been to dying. But that, again, is another story.) And somehow, I swear to you, I still didn’t notice when I busted open a box and crammed the things in my rifle. I have no idea what was wrong with me that day; I don’t normally get that far into the zone. Or that drunk. Maybe it was a combination of both? Maybe I was in the drunk-zone? I have no idea.

So here I was, sighting down on the Tom Cruise of elk, unaware I’d loaded my trusty Winchester (or “Winkie” as I like to call it) with distilled nightmare. As far as I knew, the round I was fixing to put between this elk’s eyes was the garden-variety copper-jacketed. I pulled the trigger and…

Before I tell the rest of this, I need to make something crystal: this shit actually happened. I’m not just telling some story, not just trying to make you laugh/cry/puke/shit yourself/whatever. One hundred percent pure unvarnished truth, homes. There’ll be a couple spots where you’ll be like “there’s no way it works like that!” And if I hadn’t seen it for myself, I’d totes agree with you. But I did, and apparently it does. Or at least, it did that one time--I’ve gone through a lot of hassle (and animals) trying to make it happen again and it never has. One in a billion thing, I guess.

I took the shot, it went high and clipped the very top of the elk’s skull. There’s this huge BANG and, I shits you not, everything above the poor bastard’s eyes disappears. I mean just literally VANISHES. Well, okay, not quite vanishes, more like races as far away from the buck’s brain as possible. Both antlers pop off, shoot in opposite directions into the brush--I searched for two hours afterward and only managed to find one. And the skull? You’d think some rednecks’d tried to make a hand grenade outta the fuckin’ thing. Bone shrapnel flew EVERYWHERE--tearing down leaves, embedding themselves in tree trunks, leaving a kickass scar on my cheekbone, shit like that.

Remember what I said earlier? All that “ohh explodey-bullets are awful and I wouldn’t do that to one of God’s precious creatures BAAAWWWW” crap? Yeah, fuck that. This shit right here was stone freakin’ AWESOME. Blew so much man-chowder my balls felt like raisins afterward. So much the condom burst like an overfilled balloon and left me with a pantload of Grell-goo. Every time I moved I made “squelch, squelch” noises until I could get back to the hotel and change.

But I haven’t even gotten to the really awesome part! You’re probably thinking this poor bastard’s gray-matter made like my man-juice and got splattered all over the place, right? WRONG. What happened instead was, the two hemispheres peeled apart, like, I dunno, buttcheeks (I’m totes not gay--that’s just the best metaphor I can think of), and drooped over the elk’s somehow-still-intact eyes. It was like the grossest game of peek-a-boo ever up in this bitch. Blew my goddamned mind. The elk’s too, come to think of it.

So what did old Farmer-In-The-Grell do? Well, first I sat there in absolute shock for a couple minutes, just stewing in my own baby-snot. Then, I thought “there is just NO WAY anyone is gonna believe this,” so I pulled out my Polaroid and took a few pictures of the head, the skull chunks, everything I could find. Then I cleaned the kill, hauled it to the truck, and headed back to the hotel. Then I took a shower and changed into clean pants (I just threw the Spunky Brewsters away). Then I faxed the pictures to my old buddy Garth Ennis, who was working on Preacher at the time, then called him.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey, what’s up?” he said.

“You are not gonna believe what happened today,” I said.

“Why? What happened?”

“Check these pics I’m faxing you, brah.”

“Okay…can I call you back? The fax is in the other room and I don’t have a cordless.”

“No prob,” I said, and he hung up. A few minutes later he called back.

“Dude…is this shit for real?” he asked.

“Sure as shit is,” I said.

“No fucking way!”

“No, it totes is!” I said, and told him what happened.

He was quiet for a couple minutes, then said the only thing that made sense.

“Ho. Ly. Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s pretty fucking nasty, dude.” And as anyone who’s read Garth’s stuff knows, if he’s calling something “pretty fucking nasty” it’s gotta be REAL bad.

“You should put that shit in Preacher, brah,” I said.

“I wouldn’t take this shit from you! Put it in your stuff!”

“I can’t, man! I haven’t worked in two years! Besides, it’d look weird coming from me--people expect shit like this from you!”

Garth sighed. “Can’t argue with that, I guess. Fax this over to Steve, willya?”

“Will do,” I said, and hung up.

A couple days later Garth called me at home.

“Mike, dude, I have some bad news.”

“What?”

“You know those pictures you sent me?”

“Yeah, what about ‘em?”

“Turns out that shit’s not gonna be in Preacher.”

“What?! Why?”

“Steve won’t draw it. Apparently when he saw the faxes he puked for, like, twenty minutes straight. He says it’s too out-there even by our standards and we’d be begging to get cancelled.”

“Aww, that weak-ass limey motherfucker!”

“I know. These Brits, dude--not a decent pair of bollocks between them.”

Now it was my turn to sigh. “Aw, hell. Guess I’ll have to do it myself after all. Thanks anyway, man--I owe you a Guinness.”

“Oh, ha-bloody-ha!” he said, and hung up. I wasn’t even trying to make fun of him that time. Why are paddies so fuckin’ thin-skinned?

So, a couple years later I got back in the comics biz. I tried like a mofo to stick the elk pics in somewhere, but somehow the opportunity just never presented itself. And quite frankly, I’m tired of waiting.

So you know what? Fuck all y’all. I couldn’t think of a way to end this anyway--let’s put some lovely parting gifts up in this bitch! Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time anywhere, I present to you…(drum roll please)…the pictures in question!

(Image Censored)

(Image Censored)

(Image Censored)

(Image Censored)

(Editor’s note: Assuming these supposed photographs exist, Mr. Grell apparently decided against providing them, submitting instead several close-up photographs of male genitalia, presumably his own. We take exception to Mr. Grell’s attempts to “dick-roll” our readership and accordingly decline to upload the images.)

DISCLAIMER

The preceding was a work of fiction. It was not written by Mike Grell, nor is it meant to imply such. No attempt been made to depict Mr. Grell’s beliefs and mannerisms in an accurate manner. I have not met Mr. Grell myself, and have no reason to think he writes/talks like a retarded frat boy (if you will excuse the redundancy) who uses the terms “totes” and “brah” to excess (I.e. more than zero times). Nor is there any reason to believe Mr. Grell derives sexual excitement from the death of animals, is unfaithful to his wife, assumes women who share his interests to be lesbians, refers to himself by annoying nicknames, is an alcoholic, a sexual exhibitionist, or derives unfair advantages through illegal means. It is certainly possible Mr. Grell does indeed possess one or more of these attributes to a certain extent, but I consider it unlikely.

WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION By Kyron Horman, age 7

2011-10-07T06:30:00.001-07:00

I went to the school science fair and I showed everyone my baking soda volcano. Everybody liked it and I set it off a whole bunch of times so lots of people could see it and I ran out of baking soda. I asked where can I get more and teacher said the janitor closet so I went to the janitor closet. I found some baking soda WAY up on a shelf so I had to climb up and get it.

When I jumped down there was this little man standing there! He had BIG ears so he looked like Mickey and he looked really funny. I asked if he was Mickey and he laughed and said no. He said he was hungry and asked if I had anything to eat so I gave him an Oreo in my pocket. He said thank you and made all these funny CHOMPCHOMP noises while he ate it so I laughed. So he swallowed and burped and I laughed again. He asked if I was thirsty and I said yes, how did he know that? So he gave me a can of Coke and I opened it and drank it cause I like Coke. When I finished it the little man asked if I wanted to hear something funny and I said yes and he said that wasn’t really Coke, it was magic flying potion.

And then I started flying straight up very very fast and I crashed through the ceiling and it went BOOM but it didn’t hurt. And I looked down and I could see the town and everything and it was getting very very small and it was SO SCARY. And then I couldn’t see anything cause I was in a cloud and then I was out of the cloud and then I stopped and I was standing on the cloud and it felt like standing on my bed. And there was a man on the cloud and I said “hello” and he said “hello, my name is Jesus”. But he didn’t look like the pictures of Jesus at church. He looked like that scary Ben Loadin man from the news a little bit. I asked if he was Jesus why didn’t he look like the church pictures and he said they draw him that way cause grownups are silly. And then I knew he really was Jesus cause Jesus never lies.

Jesus asked me “what’s your name?” and I said “Kyron”. And then he said “well, Kyron, do you want to help me with something” and I said “yes”. And Jesus said the Mexico people had been sneaking into America and he was tired of it cause America is the only country Jesus likes. He took me over to the edge of the cloud and there were a bunch of blocks that were like toy blocks and there were red ones and green ones and blue ones and yellow ones and some other colors too. Jesus pointed down and I could see all of America and it looked really tiny. He pointed to the line between America and Mexico and I started picking up blocks and dropping them and picking them up and dropping them and picking them up and dropping them and I did that a whole bunch of times until the whole line was covered with blocks. And I missed with a block one time and it fell somewhere else and I asked Jesus what it fell on and he said Idaho and he said not to worry cause nobody would miss it.

And once I filled in the whole line and Jesus said congratulations and that I was a hero cause now the Mexico people wouldn’t be able to steal America’s candy anymore. He asked if I wanted to help him celebrate and I said yes. He said we were gonna have a Coke party and that made me happy cause I like Coke. So he took my hand and we flew over to another cloud where a lot of ladies were dancing in their underwear. GROSS. I was afraid of getting cooties and Jesus said there are no cooties in heaven so I guess it was okay.

And there were also a bunch of tables on that cloud and some of the tables had poles coming out of them that the ladies were dancing around and some of the tables had BIG piles of white stuff on them and you could see your reflection in the top of the table. I asked Jesus where the Coke was and he pointed at the white stuff and said right there. I said that was funny-looking Coke and Jesus said it was grownup Coke but I could have some cause it was my birthday. I said it wasn’t my birthday and Jesus said in heaven every day is your birthday. And then we went over to one of the Coke tables and Jesus picked a little straw out of the Coke and he made a little bit of the Coke into a little line like I do when I eat peas and then Jesus put the straw in his nose (SUPERGROSS) and he breathed in and the little line all went up the straw and then he took the straw out of his nose and tilted his head back and sniffed a whole lot and then he said “Oh yeah, that’s good word-Daddy-says-I-can’t-say”. And then he pulled out another straw and made another little line and gave me the straw and said here, try this. So I put the straw in my nose and it tickled a whole bunch and I put the other end of the straw down by the line and I breathed in and the Coke went in my nose and it tickled even more than the straw and I felt like I was going to sneeze but then it went away.

And then WOW, I felt like I ate a whole bunch of candy and drank a whole bunch of normal Coke but even more than that! I felt like Speedy Gonzales so I started running all over the place and yelling “Arriba, arriba, andale!” And Jesus started laughing and said the Mexico people were starting to sneak into heaven and we needed another other-word-Daddy-says-I-can’t-say wall. And I started running along the edge of the cloud really fast and Jesus said be careful I don’t fall but he distracted me when he said that and I tripped and fell off! And then I was falling down, down, down, down, down and America started getting bigger and bigger and I could see my blocks only now they were REALLY REALLY big. I kept falling and it was SO SCARY so I closed my eyes.

And then I wasn’t falling anymore and I was someplace really dark and it was hard to breathe and it was SO SCARY so I started crying. And then I heard this noise like unzipping a backpack and then I could see and a policeman was standing over me. I asked where I was and he said I was in a duffel bag in Mama Terri’s closet. So he took me home and I got to ride in a police car and it was fun. Mama Terri got to ride in one too except she was in the back seat and she kept her hands behind her back for some reason. And then I got home and Daddy started crying for some reason. I guess it was cause he’s a grownup and he’s silly like Jesus said.

So that’s what I did for my summer vacation. I was surprised cause it didn’t feel like all summer but I guess it was. I had fun except for the scary parts and those didn’t take very long so it was okay. I see on the news that the President keeps trying to move the blocks so I hope he doesn’t make Jesus mad because I think he’s cool even if that loud man on the radio doesn’t like him.

puff COUGHCOUGHCOUGH

2011-10-06T20:15:00.000-07:00

God DAMN, it's been a long time.

Not that there hasn't been a good reason for it. I've been busy working on other projects. Well, one other project really. That doesn't account for all the time away; the dreary aftermath of the project going tits-up--during which the mere thought of writing anything more complex than a shopping list made me painfully ill--filled out the balance.

I came out of this period of hard work and mental anguish with nothing much to show for it, save a considerable collection of prose pieces. Each one is a slice of my very subconscious, thin enough to melt on your tongue and suffuse your entire mouth with the flavor. Like one of those breath-freshener strips, except they taste awful and leave your breath smelling like you've been eating your dead grandmother.

I'm kind of fucked up as a person, is what I'm trying to say. This in itself was not a surprise; the surprise came from finding out just how fucked up. That's why I mention all this--not because I wish to revel in my own puerility, a modern-day carnival barker pulling you aside and whispering "you wanna hear somethin' fucked up?", but rather to assure you that, grossed out though you may be, there's an extremely good chance I'm just as disgusted with myself.

Apart from plowing my way through this backlog, I'll try to throw in some extras as well--bringing back weekend music videos, the odd review, etc. And I'll start writing new stuff once the well starts to run dry--see how much more of grandma I can stuff in your mouth. I hear the perineal maggots are especially juicy this time of year...

Actually, DON'T explain her appeal to me

2010-08-28T19:40:00.000-07:00

Recently while replying to a dear friend's blog post, I went on a (somewhat off-topic, I'll admit) rant about the sorry state of commercial radio. Contrary to their claims that they provide invaluable exposure to new artists, I retorted that mainstream radio plays only those acts hand-picked by the music industry at large as potential platinum-sellers. This involves playing styles of music which, by and large, I regard as at best irrelevant and at worst unlistenable. Further, I made the claim that I hadn't heard any musician I liked and subsequently followed on the radio for the first time since I was nine (likely either Nirvana or Guns and Roses, judging from the age). This last was, of course, an exaggeration and an infamy. I was probably closer to twelve.

As my long-time readers (all six of you) have doubtless noticed, my tastes in music run somewhat to the extreme and eclectic. This is, however, a relatively recent development--not until I by and large renounced mainstream radio for more inclusive sources of information (chiefly the Internet) did I discover such artists and musical styles. As an example, allow me to present Godflesh.

Fronted by Justin Broadrick, this English industrial-metal band was active between 1988 and 2002, recently reuniting for several European festival dates. Though not my favorite band by any stretch (I do not, at present, own any of their albums), I like them quite a lot.

Think about this for a few moments. This band formed in 1988, released seven full-length albums (including one remix album), seven EPs, two singles, and three compilations, played innumerable concerts and festival dates, then broke up in 2002 in a not-unspectacular manner, with Broadrick suffering a nervous breakdown and canceling a tour at the last minute (financially ruining himself in the process).

And, until about 2007, I knew not a thing about any of this.

Before you ask--no, this band was by no means obscure. By the time of their dissolution Godflesh had acquired a formidable international reputation, with many bands (both very good and very, very bad) citing them as influences. Glenn Danzig attempted to recruit Justin Broadrick as a guitarist. No less a personage than Kirk Hammett declared Godflesh to be "the heaviest band in existence". They appeared on the soundtrack of a really shitty wide-release movie.

And yet not once did the tiny men in my mom's car radio see fit to play one of their songs.

You might be tempted to argue "C., you sheltered twat, clearly you weren't listening to the right stations! Godflesh might have been big-ish, but they were never Top 40 material!" That's a good point, actually. Why, was I not listening to the stations geared to this sort of music? I can't think of a single reason--oh, right, there fuckin' weren't any. Not out in the redneck hellhole where I spent the bulk of my formative years, at least. (Funnily enough, my family was actually friends with the family who ran the local radio station. Decent people, but they wouldn't have known an eclectic musical style if it bit them on the collective ringpiece.) This is getting back to the problem of commercial radio only playing the sort of music they think will make them money. "The free market has spoken!" they say. "Lowbrow pop and corporate rock is the best music in the world, because people listen to it! More Ke$ha singles for all!"

Well, balls to that I say. Much as I hate to turn this into a political/economic rant, it's becoming more and more clear that a free-market ideology is no way to run an economic system, so why the almighty hell would you use it as a gauge of artistic merit? Nothing is more subjective than musical taste--there's a reason the "pop" in "pop music" stands for "popular" and not "good". My theory is that many people are, by nature, somewhat uncultured and desperate to be seen as "fitting in", so by and large they listen to/buy what people around them are listening to/buying. For every diehard, true-blue Lady Gaga fan (and can one of those people explain her appeal to me? I ask in all seriousness, there must be something I'm missing) there are ten copycats trying to look cool, and those copycats then get copycats of then own...you get the idea.

Noticing this, the blind idiot god Mainstream Media proceeds to pump out even more product (at this stage it can no longer be fairly called music) similar in style to that of the profitable artist. "One Lady Gaga makes money," it thinks, "so ten Lady Gagas will make ten times as much money!" It never works quite that well, but well enough for the industry to do it over and over and over. This phenomena is by no means confined to the music industry, of course, but to go into any more detail than that would make this already-too-long post even longer.

Hence, a pop-culture Ouroboros is formed, with the serpent's head of the Music Industry swallowing the tail of the Mass Market. Or is it the other way around? No matter, I suppose the metaphor works either way. Meanwhile dozens of legitimately original and talented artists, foolish enough to view a major-label deal as their "big break", wither and die, unnoticed by all except those true fans not cool enough to attract sufficient hangers-on.

I suppose in the end, I mean this post as a love letter to the Internet, possibly the world's first and only form of disinterested mass media (for the moment, at least). Without it, I never would have known Godflesh--or any of Justin Broadrick's other musical projects, for that matter. Most people alive today still equate "listening to music" with "listening to the radio" in their minds, and yet it wasn't until I got the hell away from radio that my musical tastes started to develop a unique personality.

Curious, no?

Charlton, The Trigger-Happy Ghost

2010-08-19T08:51:00.000-07:00

I don't ask a lot of my Facebook friends.

I know they're not all like me, and to be frank this world would be a rather scarier place were there more than one of me. I realize they're all from different (in some cases radically different) walks of life, brought together on my profile by the common thread of myself--a tenuous thread indeed in some cases. Accordingly, I realize all these people have their own unique tastes and viewpoints. That's fine. I'm not going to agree with all (or even most) of it, but then I'm into some pretty weird shit myself. They can put up with me, I can put up with them. In fact, there's really one thing I ask of my Facebook friends.

Don't be a fucking imbecile.

Allow me to explain what brings this on. Until rather recently I had a certain fellow on my friends list, a guy I had known casually in high school. This man, whom I shall refer to as "F.H." (short for "Fuck Head"), had managed something I very much had not and found a niche in the sedate redneck milieu of our mutual alma mater. Reconnecting with him hadn't been something I'd planned--his name had popped up on my recommended list, I remembered not completely hating him and clicked "Add". Nor, for that matter, did we ever directly communicate--his posts appeared in my news feed, vice versa, and that's as far as it went.

At first I noticed only two things about F.H.'s posts--his atrocious grammar and his apparent all-consuming obsession with firearms. Both of these, however, are pretty par for the course in that part of the world, so I didn't fuss about it.

But it wasn't long before F.H. gave me something to fuss about.

As you may have heard, the proposed plans to build a mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks has aroused something of a furor amongst the more reactionary elements of this country's political landscape. Aaaaaand right away you can probably see where I'm going with this. Or rather, you think you can see where I'm going with this. I've heard enough xenophobic fear-mongering over the past nine years to harbor the foolish belief that nothing could surprise me anymore. Man oh man oh man was I ever wrong.

So what were F.H.'s proverbial two cents on the subject? He was...in favor of the mosque's construction. Not for any of the typical, sensible, sane reasons, you understand. No, F.H. approved the project for one reason, and one reason only...

Now, before I continue, I must insist that you, as a passive participant, make certain you are physically and mentally prepared for what I am about to relate. I am not one to worry overmuch about the well-being and/or sensibilities of my potential readership. I take it as a given that any reader of this blog knows what to expect, or failing that simply finds the subject matter not to his/her tastes and departs in disinterest/horror, never to return. Problem solved either way, right? Still, this is a bit outside the norm by TIP standards. I just want to make absolutely certain this is understood.

So. Seated comfortably? Any sharp objects stored safely out of reach? Not suffering from any ailments potentially exacerbated by shock?

All right then.

F.H. stated it was his belief the Ground Zero mosque should be built so that it could be haunted by the restless spirits of those who died on 9/11.

Yeah.

No...no! I'm not fucking making that up. He actually said that.

YES, F.H. is real! This isn't some kind of incisive satire of the American right! This is something a real, living person, one whom I have personally met, said and presumably believes! No, I don't think he was joking! Even if he was, it doesn't really help 'cuz it means he's really, really, really bad at telling jokes!

I mean...Jesus. From this point on, every time I think I'm being a wee bit harsh in my estimations of my erstwhile hometown, every time I consider the idea I missed a prime opportunity to learn how to make the best of a bad situation, every time I entertain the notion I'm just a pretentious, elitist snob...I'm going to remember F.H. and what he said.

So congratulations, Mr. Head. You've made my already pretty abysmal childhood memories even more miserable. It's like you printed them out, stuck them on a target (next to pictures of Osama bin Laden and Barack Obama, no doubt) and chewed them to bits with dozens of MP5 rounds. I do hope you're pleased with yourself.

So what did I do after he posted this comment? Well at first I thought it important not to overreact; I merely hid his comments on my feed. A day later I thought better of it and removed him from my friends list. I briefly considered making this blog entry a name-and-shame exercise, but decided at last on an unflattering pseudonym, partly out of a desire not to alienate other high-school acquaintances still on my friends list, but mostly out of a desire to avoid being shot.

The deed done, I found myself having twinges of something resembling second thoughts. Had I just proven myself a hypocrite? Was I not punishing F.H. for speaking his mind, something I myself have always insisted on doing? Wasn't he entitled to his own dumbass opinions, just like me and everyone else? And it's not like I'm any sort of virtuous paragon--I mocked a former Senator mere hours after his death, for fuck's sake.

In the end, I decided the expression of the opinion itself wasn't what bothered me, so much as the completely and utterly balls-out retarded means in which it was expressed. Invoking the tragedy of 9/11 is a tasteless rhetorical device at the best of times, but turning it into an episode of Tales From The Crypt is sinking to a downright chthonic low.

Hence, the banhammer. Entitled to his opinion F.H. may be, but he's not entitled to my goddamn Facebook page.

Travelling through time at the speed of time

2010-08-13T08:42:00.000-07:00

I turn 28 this Sunday.

Not a very momentous age, I'll admit. Apart from being a divisible of 7, there's nothing all that remarkable about it. It's not like, say, 18. Or 30. Or 50. Or 100.

Thing is, I don't feel a year older. By that I don't mean I'm "only as old as I feel" or some other bullshit I got off a coffee mug (if only because I don't drink coffee). I mean I have mental difficulty grasping the idea that a year of time has passed between this birthday and the last one. It feels more like, I don't know, four months. Maybe six.

Most people feel like time goes by faster as they get older. Not me. Time's sprinted past me with nary a hello as far back as I can remember. This is a a large element of my memory problems: I can remember specific events from my childhood, to be sure, but often I couldn't tell you precisely when they happened. Ask me about a specific year and, more often than not I'm pressed to think of a single memorable incident. There are exceptions--1992 sticks out to me, for some reason. I'm not one for nostalgia, but it's one of my favorite years, if only because that's the year Crystal Pepsi came out.

But that's not my point. My point, in the most literal sense, is--where does the time go?

My theory is I just haven't been paying attention. Certain predispositions have led me to find the most comfort with my head lodged firmly up my own ass--or at least in a book. I spend so much time off in a world of my own while the "real" world (whatever that is) TiVos past. It'll take care of itself...right? Relaxing as this sounds, it does tend to grow dull after the first couple decades or so.

And now the frigging "Skip Ahead" button is stuck...

I do have methods for counteracting this, but I don't have much in the way of fine control. I find if I anticipate some future event, the time leading up to that event slows to a crawl. BUT! Once the event comes, time goes by even faster, so it passes in the near-literal blink of an eye. And once it does pass, depending somewhat on how much I'd been looking forward to it, I may go through an odd mental state where I feel as if the event never happened and I imagined the whole thing. Then I get depressed for a while.

Something like this happened just last weekend--something I'd been looking forward to enough for me to go through all the above steps. More often, though, it's something as simple as looking forward to the weekend or the end of the workday. Those are frequent enough occurrences that I at least avoid the subsequent dislocation.

Another thing that helps--waking up early. These days I wake up much earlier than I did previously. You get up at 7, the day races by--and you look up and notice it's still only 10. Only problem with this is, this has got to be the laziest fucking big city on the planet--good luck getting anything done when nothing opens before 10 am.

And another thing--for the first time since I was about 6, I don't live in the middle of fucking nowhere. No longer needing to leave everything for the weekend and no longer needing all afternoon to run the simplest errands does wonders for one's schedule. The closer you are to stuff, the less you miss out on.

Of course, it might also help if I didn't spend every morning and evening either on the Internet or playing X-Box...

But, you know, no sense sacking Rome in a day. Baby steps and all that.

Not any stupider than Dinosaucers

2010-07-17T16:04:00.000-07:00

So last night--well, early this morning--okay, in between bouts of thrashing around for the snooze button--I had a dream.

In this dream, I came up with, basically, the most socially irresponsible Saturday morning cartoon ever. The animated hijinks of Joe Camel couldn't have topped this. Were I to somehow, against all odds and sanity, succeed in ensuring its production it would be my greatest and final achievement all at a stroke. Greatest because it would encapsulate every iconoclastic urge I've ever held or pretended, and final because I would in all likelihood be beaten to a stain on the sidewalk by a horde of enraged (and quite likely bereaved) parents.

In my dream the show was animated in a pseudo-realistic style, similar to Megas XLR (still the finest children's cartoon of the past decade). The main characters were two young adult (young enough for children to identify with, yet old enough to live free of adult supervision) males of the stock "lovable slacker" character type; the sort who somehow manage to live in relative comfort despite the lack of any obvious employment or support. These two young men (whose names I never learned) shared one joy, one specialty, one driving passion in life:

Blowing shit up.

A quick clarification: these two fellows were not petty terrorists, destroying random buildings in their neighborhood. Rather, their specialty was homemade fireworks, the sort unlikely (at least initially) to cause property damage beyond scorch-marks on the driveway. Though the duo frequently possessed pre-made fireworks, they rarely fired them off as-is; they preferred to take them apart, salvaging their combustible elements for use in their own creations. These custom explosives were invariably large, very noisy and even more colorful, though the two's tendency to set them off in broad daylight dampened the effect somewhat.

Though the fireworks always had exceptionally long, match-lit fuses, this was the summation of the protagonists' safety precautions. At no point did they ensure the ready availability of fire extinguishers (or even a common garden hose), wet down the ground before detonation, put on eye protection or employ any other risk-reduction tactics one might associate with such a dangerous hobby. Yet they displayed no physical signs of any mishap--no missing fingers, no cauterized optic nerves, no burn scars. The two remained as whole and handsome as my totally-not-gay subconscious first birthed them. Every week some shadowy antagonist (the dream provided no details on this point, beyond his apparent existence) would threaten the duo's beloved neighborhood and they'd use their bomb-crafting expertise to save the day.

By itself, this all might not sound so bad. It's nothing you don't see every drunken white-trash idiot do every 4th of July. With the addition of about ten thousand disclaimers and parental-advisory warnings it might even reach the air. Hell, just look at all the crap Japan pumps out with the seeming purpose of providing pedophiles with masturbation material.

And then came the moon voyage.

It's exactly what it sounds like--the heroes decide to take a trip to the moon and set about building a conveyance. From what I recall it consisted entirely of a plywood board, with four plastic buckets attached one to a corner and stuffed with bottle rockets to serve as thrusters. There was no way to steer (this will be important later), no oxygen supply and no life-support system of any kind, so I have no idea how the duo planned to survive the rigors of hard vacuum should the plan succeed--which they fully expected it to. They lit the fuses and...

Now at this point logic should dictate that the contraption would explode (or simply catch fire) on the ground, held snugly by the Earth's gravity well. Even if it were to attain liftoff, the would-be spaceship should reach only a few feet of height before plummeting back to terra firma. Either should produce the same result--a fiery death for our heroes, becoming just another scorch-mark on the abused driveway.

This is not what happened in my dream.

For some reason I feel the need to point out that the two men did NOT, in fact, reach the moon. This may or may not be an important distinction, given the result they did achieve. Though outer space remained beyond the protagonists' reach, they did succeed in building a rather handy (and unlikely) flying machine. Upon a bed of multicolored sparks they rode, zipping back and forth across their hometown with speed and ease--this despite, as previously mentioned, the machine lacking any steering mechanism. The phrase "toyetic" floated through my unconscious--I recall a moment of pure shame at knowing what that even meant.

There's not much else to tell--the dream ended just as the heroes managed to relieve one of the antagonist's henchmen of his pistol and started taking apart the bullets, to use the gunpowder within for--well, you know.

So you can probably see how people would have a problem with this cartoon, were it to exist. The sheer amount of "imitatable behavior" is nothing short of flabbergasting (is that a word?). I've never been the sort to blame the stupidity of children on the media--kids are a little smarter than that, and even the ones who aren't tend to have a limited shelf life no matter what (if he hadn't put on a cape and jumped out the window, it would have been something else--say, eating spinach until his stomach exploded trying to gain super-strength). But every fireworks-related injury would end up getting blamed on this show, rightly or wrongly. And it'd only be a matter of time before some aspie tried to build his own bottle-rocket flying-machine and wound up cremating himself (and rest assured, it WOULD be a boy).

So no, this show would never get made. It's kind of a double standard, really. So many people in this country--Michael Bay, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the US military--built careers and reputations on the premise that explosions are cool. Isn't there room for one lousy cartoon saying it's cool to violate local fire codes?

Apparently not.

Erin, Go Fuck Yourself

2010-03-17T13:58:00.000-07:00

Wow, didn't think I was gonna miss that many days. Work got all kinds of crazy and I wasn't paying as much attention to this blog as I told myself I would, you see. I had a choice between sleep and updating this blog, and being the lazy bastard I am I chose sleep.

Anyway...

So, it's St. Patrick's Day. Woo-hoo, I guess? It's kinda silly this is a high-profile holiday at all. Not many saint's days are, apart from St. Valentine's Day (in honor of the saint who discovered a heretofore-unknown scriptural passage specifically allowing the exchange of chocolate for sex--that the passage was in handwriting closely resembling his own is universally considered irrelevant), Halloween (named of course after the Hallowed St. Ween, who forbade the practice of putting razorblades in children's apples unless you really, REALLY want the little fucker dead), and of course today. And at least you get candy out of the former examples, unlike on St. Patrick's Day. So why, then, did it take off?

As with so many other things in life, we can blame this on the damn Irish. This country is home to many a long-distant descendant of those potato-snarfing bastards, many of whom think being one-eighth Irish is their most interesting personality trait. Most of them are right. So, come St. Pat's they celebrate by congregating in urine-soaked bars, getting piss-drunk on watery Guinness (sorry for the redundancy), loudly complaining about the blacks, watching The Boondock Saints (the alcohol having dulled their sense of artistic taste to an appropriately low level) and staggering home to beat their fat crucifix-fondling wives, bellowing like the damned every step of the way. You know, the same thing they do every Saturday. You'd think they'd switch things up a bit for the occasion--getting piss-drunk on watery Killian's Irish Red, watching Leprechaun: In The Hood (too many black people?), walking home quietly and beating their numerous children, for example.

Oh, and somewhere in all that there's something about wearing green, on pain of getting pinched. Not being one to kowtow to the Paddy O'Furniture I of course refuse such nonsense, indeed going out of my way to not wear green that day. This year I'm going one better--I have successfully developed the "anti-green", a hue which is the exact opposite and antithesis of green. It turns out to be a sort of brownish-pink color, like the stuff that comes out of a cyst. I plan to slather myself head-to-toe with anti-green paint before I head out to work today. Sure, it might be frowned upon, but it's not specifically prohibited in the employee dress code...on account of it being insane, but the point still stands I think.

Unlike every other holiday observed by the American public at large, St. Patrick's Day has resisted the encroachment of the greeting-card industry with surprising irascibility. I mean, you see green paper plates and crepe streamers, along with the odd leprechaun-festooned party favor, but they're usually pushed into one lonely cardboard display rack shoved in wherever there's space between the Easter candy. No, the real money in the holiday has always gone, and no doubt always shall go, directly into the pockets of producers and purveyors of alcoholic beverages. Because the Irish and all their half-blood ilk are all filthy, irresponsible drunks and inordinately proud of the fact. Did I mention that yet? I keep getting the feeling I forgot something.

And the leprechaun--Stickly, there's something else. Has any mythological creature undergone quite so much badass decay as the Fair Folk? Back in the day they were some nightmarish combination of Cthulhu and Johnny the Homicidal Maniac--now they hang around pools waiting to refill your life hearts. (A similar point can be made concerning the modern-day depiction of angels versus how they were portrayed in the actual Bible, but that's neither here nor there.) What, you think I'm making shit up? You ever see Darby O'Gill And The Little People? That movie scared the piss out of me as a kid, and not just because Sean Connery sings in it. I never cease to be amazed by the human race's tendency to reduce mythological pants-shitting horror to children's entertainment (i.e. fairy tales. Yes, all of them).

You ever think that's gonna happen to us? Like, centuries from now they'll be making animated movies featuring Freddy Krueger breakdancing and singing about friendship? Actually, that sounds kind of awesome. Never mind.

Couldn't suck as much as the Irish, anyway.

This one takes a very weird turn near the end

2010-03-10T12:57:00.000-08:00

I used to love Marshmallow Peeps.

Couldn't get enough of them. Every year when Easter season rolled around, there I'd be at the store, snapping them up. I must have been eating something like three boxes a week back then, that time of year. The Bunnies were my favorite--'cuz of the texture, you see.

This wasn't always the case. When I was younger the very idea of Peeps revolted me. I'd never actually tried any--it was the very concept of the thing I found so off-putting. At some point my parents got me a single, giant Peep one Easter as a joke. I figured "what the hell", ate it--and discovered I actually enjoyed it. From then on, I was hooked.

Strange thing, though--even once they started selling holiday-appropriate Peeps more or less year-round, I still only ate them around Easter. Any other time just felt like cheating--spoiled the magic, if you will. Same reason people only eat candy corn around Halloween (apart from candy corn tasting like pre-chewed Tootsie rolls, that is)--it just isn't done.

Somewhere along the way, though, it all changed. I remember I was halfway through a box of Peeps when a sudden realization struck me like a DU round:

This is the most disgusting thing I have ever tasted.

This is not the only time something like this has happened. My once all-encompassing addiction to Mountain Dew Code Red was broken in a similar fashion, by the abrupt (and, again, mid-consumption) epiphany that its taste resembled nothing so much as cough syrup.

The difference in these two cases lies in the completeness of the break. While I haven't so much as touched Code Red since that fateful day, the benighted Peep still, somehow, maintains a vestigial hold on me. Every year, sometime during Easter season, I find myself compelled to purchase and eat a single box of the blasted bunnies. Some kind of bizarre tribute to the Gods of Confection, perhaps, or a twisted feeling of holiday spirit, Easter never having held any meaning to me beyond dyed eggs and piles of candy nestled in Astroturf-lined baskets. Now that I think of it, the latter explanation seems more likely--I plan to feed my next batch of hard-boiled eggs through the Paas machine, same as last year. I even plan to make yet another annual attempt to drink the contents of one of the cups of dye. I may even succeed this time, obviating the need for any further attempts.

But that's besides the point. The point is, I got my Peeps quota out of the way this morning.

They were the bunnies, of course--always the bunnies. Pink ones. I'd hoped to find season-appropriate green ones, but no such luck. I noticed they're not holding the sugar so well anymore--the pink shit got everywhere, including my eyes (I'd rather not talk about that). Somebody's getting sloppy. Probably me.

About the eyes on those things--man, even when I actually liked these things the eyes always bugged me. What are they made of? They don't taste like anything. Actually, come to think of it that's not true. They taste like old scabs (or, uh, so I'd imagine). Appropriate I guess, since that's what they look like.

How were they? About as awful as I remembered. I didn't think it was possible to fuck up a marshmallow, but somehow Peeps manage it. Leaving the sugar-shit coating aside, they just taste...flattened. If there's such a thing as unleavened marshmallows, Peeps would be they. And the sugar coating just makes it worse--they use way too much of it, always have. It's like eating a marshmallow cocooned in fine-grain sandpaper.

So, yeah, pretty awful. Plus I think they've upped the dye content or something--when I went to brush my teeth I noticed the toothpaste suds were all pink. I never noticed that before. It makes sense--why go for quality when you can get vibrancy at a fraction of the price? All you need do is get beleaguered mothers to toss the product in the shopping cart to quell their screaming brats--then the money's in the register, regardless of whether anyone eats them or not.

What is it about these things, anyway? Did I ever really like them per se, or was I just so surprised by their failure to be sublimely horrid I convinced myself such? Despite what I said above, Peeps aren't the worst thing I've ever eaten, not by far. It just happened to be the worst thing in my mouth right at that moment. And I had a great many things in my mouth just then--I'm still compiling a list. Certainly I don't maintain a ritualistic relationship with any of the other appallingly unhealthy foodstuffs I've sworn off over the years. I don't, say, walk into McDonald's on the anniversary of my first viewing of Super Size Me and order the #3 combo. Nor do I mainline Mountain Dew Code Red when I get a cold. You get the idea.

Perhaps I should find a healthier, thematically similar substitute. Like say, every year around Easter I find a warren full of baby rabbits and swallow them all whole. Good source of protein, baby rabbits. Plus the fur is great for scouring out your colon--each one's like a little scrub brush! Oh, don't look at me that way--they're rabbits, notorious for their fecundity. It's not like I'm going to swallow a baby rabbit only to belatedly realize it was the last rabbit on earth. Actually, in that situation I might go ahead and do it anyway. It's not like the little squirt's going to singlehandedly refresh the lagomorph population or anything. Plus I imagine being the last rabbit on earth would suck. What's worse--suffocating in gastric juices or dying of a loneliness-induced broken heart?

Which, I ask? Which?

Gyaahhhh...

2010-03-10T01:24:00.000-08:00

Well.

I know I said yesterday how my mind was clear for the second half-hour, and I might well write about pretty much anything. I was even formulating a humorous short piece--a re-telling of St. Patrick expelling the snakes from Ireland, utilizing several Irish ethnic stereotypes for comedic effect, if you must know.

But that shall have to wait. It's now abundantly clear that there's only one thing on my mind, and therefore only one thing I could possibly write about:

This. Fucking. Headache.

It feels like I'm being shot between the eyes in slow motion. It feels like someone was running a jackhammer in my skull, dropped it and now it's pounding away at the back of my brow. It feels like the pile of wasp eggs nested in my cranium are hatching and the larvae are chewing their way out.

It feels, as I mentioned on Facebook, like God shit in my brain.

What did I ever do to him? Questions I know the answers to I don't need to ask, I guess.

I just wish I knew where it came from. The last time something like this happened I was hung over, but I don't have that excuse this time, sadly enough--then at least I'd have enjoyed the lead-up. Right now I'm guessing a combination of stress, fatigue, the change in weather, several hours of listening to fire alarms, paint fumes, and a recent reduction in caffeine intake. At least, that's what I hope it is. High on my very long list of things I really, really don't need is a brain tumor.

There must be an upside. I have to see an upside. Luckily, there is an upside. Damn, I'm going all optimistic.

I now have something to write about.

I started this, the first day of my new writing regimen, somewhat at a loss for material. Hell, you saw the last post--I was reduced to wittering on about squirrels and how I revel in tormenting my stupid cat. But now? Now I'm good and worked up. Now I can sit here merrily tapping away about how it feels like I'm trying to sprout a third eye (having seemingly chosen to interpret Eastern mysticism a tad too literally) whilst cursing myself for never getting around to buying ibuprofen.

And it could be worse, as it always can be. It no longer hurts to breathe through my nose. Much. Getting some dinner down my throat seems to be helping (now, ironically, I begin to worry I'm not eating enough). And standing upright merely brings about a dull pounding, as opposed to a full-on horse's hoof to the face.

What's really odd about all this is how my Pandora station doesn't seem to bother me one bit. You'd think if fire alarms make it worse, Hate Eternal certainly would. Seems not to be the case, though. If this is cancer it might actually be helping--I'm pretty sure the music I listen to is capable of beating tumors to death with its metaphorical bare fists.

You know, I wasn't even gonna do this tonight. I thought the headache was the perfect excuse for getting out of this. But nope, here I am. Maybe I'm more of a writer than I thought. Well, I have always enjoyed complaining.

Nothing worth telling Facebook about

2010-03-09T13:20:00.000-08:00

What does it mean when the name of the record label is printed in larger text than the name of the band? Lack of support? That can't be it in this case--they were a pretty big name back then. Mere carelessness? More likely--labels aren't known for their consideration of such matters.

An explanation. I was trying to think of something to write just now, happened to glance over at a CD laying on my desk and noticed that detail. You find inspiration in the strangest places.

I shouldn't leave that CD just lying out like that, actually. It's liable to get scratched up, and even with the album safely ensconced within my iPod it's always nice to have a hard-copy backup. I know where the case is--I'll get up and put it in there. One of these days. Probably. Pretty much my default attitude to any housekeeping.

I did at least get around to throwing away some of these surplus phone books, at least. Seems like every other week some phone company is dumping one or two on my doorstep. Like my bookshelves aren't warped enough from my horribly unfair insistence that they do the job for which they were constructed. I don't know why they even bother--they're probably all the same numbers and anyone I might want to call is in my cellphone already.

Nothing in my chosen profession on Craigslist today. I really need to just find another line of work. I want a change of pace, so why only go halfway? But doing what, exactly? Crap. I should've stayed in college.

The cat's staring out the front window, on the lookout for squirrels. Meanwhile she misses the squirrel scampering around the backyard...

Arrgh, this isn't working. I came here to write and I'm turning this blog into a glorified Twitter account. I think I'll cut this session short to half an hour. I'll do the other half when I get home tonight.

Still, this is something, right? On an ordinary day I'd write, let's see, nothing, and here I've gone and written something. I mean far as I'm concerned it's nothing, but it's a more substantial nothing than usual. A warm-up, if you will. Plus now I've cleared my head to think about what I'll write tonight. Maybe I'll work on one of those projects I've had piling up.

Ooh, the sun's coming out now! It's still early enough in the year I'm actually happy to see it. Of course I'll have changed my tune by about mid-July when I'm well and truly turned into living bacon. Even then I doubt I'll miss rain. I really did move to the wrong city.

The cat's washing herself on top of my monitor again. I keep telling her it's not a bathtub. She refuses to listen, no matter how many times I fill the actual tub with ice-cold water and chuck her in.

Your (some indeterminate time period) music video

2010-02-20T22:28:00.000-08:00

So I tried to make fun of another music video, couldn't make it funny and wound up deleting it. Here's another video as a consolation prize.

I've got more features than posts these days

2010-01-27T00:22:00.000-08:00

So I was in Everyday Music a few weeks back when I stumbled across something I just knew I had to have. It was a certain used CD--ancient, cheaper than your mom, and funnier than a Tommy Wiseau sex scene. I snapped it up (without the expected strange looks from the clerk, disappointingly) and scurried home to upload it to my iPod.

As I listened to my acquisition (the subject of today's post) that night, the concept for a new recurring feature germinated in my mind. This CD represented a fertile field of music criticism--the Embarrassing Album. You know what I mean--a band releases a record that, for whatever reason, they ought to be ashamed of. This could be due to bad production, abysmal songwriting, inappropriate genre/style shifts, lineup changes, a combination of these or other factors, etc. Whatever it is, these albums have the ability to put even a band's most fervent fans in a torches-and-pitchforks mood. Very often the band itself will express dismay with the finished product; however, they'll just as often stubbornly brush off criticism and soldier on with the new sound. This, to put it mildly, rarely ends well.

This isn't the case with today's album. Mercifully. Submitted for your (dis)approval: Ministry's With Sympathy.

Even if you're not a fan, you've probably heard Ministry on a movie soundtrack at some point. Certainly they're one of the more distinctive bands out there; their brand of pounding industrial music combined with Al Jourgensen's heroin-soaked, strangled-loudspeaker vocals is pretty much unmistakable. Just hearing a few seconds will make you think "Huh. Is that Ministry?"

This...is not the case on With Sympathy.

Nothing, nothing on this debut album correlates with the later band. Seriously. Don't believe me? Look, I'll show you. Here's a more typical Ministry song:

And here's a song from With Sympathy:

Now, I realize you probably have questions. Such as, say, "I don't understand--is Al Jourgensen behind this guy?" or "So was he doing more or less heroin back then?" or, most likely, "Are you absolutely sure this is the same Ministry?"

This last is quite relevant; Stickly knows bands names get repeated often enough (there've been, like, three Nirvanas. Seriously). But yes, I'm sure in this case. Not only is this that Ministry, it's that Ministry's debut album, their first and last for Arista Records. Not what I'd call an auspicious beginning, and Jourgensen agrees--he's referred to With Sympathy as "an abortion of an album", further elaborating:

"I consider it worse than that because it's not my album...I was the original Milli Vanilli, man. I'm serious. They (Arista) wrote the songs, they wrote the lyrics, they appointed producers, they appointed musicians. I even had management tell me what I could or couldn't dress like. It was like going to prison...I was young and stupid. I sold out before I even started. When you're living in a burned out squat where it snows through your roof into your living room, and you have extension cords a block long for space heaters, you're not going to say no to someone offering you 150 grand...It was really fucked up. I don't think I have a pretty face (on this, Jourgensen and I are in perfect agreement--C.), but someone up there apparently did. Either that, or they were happy to find a fucked up idiot that would say yes to everything they said..."(Decibel Magazine interview, Nov. 2007)

And this is coming from a guy who thought a "Lay Lady Lay" cover would be a good idea.

You may be pondering another question. "Now, C., is With Sympathy really THAT bad? Sure, it's...unusual, but Jourgensen's nothing if not experimental. For fuck's sake, he collaborated with Ian MacKaye of all people and I'm pretty sure he's had more heroin than blood in his veins for most of his career. And that song you posted isn't completely horrible; how bad can the rest of the album be?"

Is that an awful lot of words to put in your collective mouth? Sorry. But to answer your hypothetical query: pretty damn bad, actually.

I'll start with one thing which stands out in the above song--Jourgensen's singing voice. "Hey," you might be thinking (and this is the last hypothetical question/comment, swearsies) "I didn't know that guy was British!" Well...no. He's not. That's right, Al Jourgensen (or "Alain" Jourgensen, according to the liner credits) fakes a British accent for the entire album. That's not even the funny part. The funny part is, he does a great job of faking a British accent--he pulls it off all flawless-like. It's literally the only thing With Sympathy pulls off consistently well. If you didn't know the band's later reputation (and remember, this is a debut album), you'd never suspect Jourgensen wasn't British. That's old Al for you--even when he's so baked he literally can't remember recording entire albums (and presumably greenlighting retch-worthy covers for said albums) you can't fault his work ethic.

The same way With Sympathy does the phony-baloney accent consistently well, one thing is done consistently badly--the production. This becomes apparent from the first moments of the opening song, "Effigy (I'm Not An)". The whole album sounds that weak and, I don't know, farty. It sounds like one of those TV shows or commercials set in the 80s whose producers didn't feel like springing for song rights, so they just strung together a few vagely new-wavey sounding beeps and boops and called it a club scene. Or, if you prefer, like the soundtrack to pretty much any porno movie.

The composition's about as inspired as the production--even if you hate new wave (and I don't, believe it or not--at least, not always) the instrumentation's so generic you have a hard time working up much loathing for it. With Sympathy sounds every inch the cash-in it is--a bland, factory-stamped also-ran meant to wring a few more pennies out of this new-fangled music all the kids are talking about these days (you know, assuming "these days" is 1983).

No, it's in the lyrics where the veils of mediocrity fall from With Sympathy to let the true crap shine through. Most of them reminded me of nursery rhymes more than anything else--see above video ("the corridor, yes, the corridor"? Lolwut?). Though you at least have to give "What He Say" credit for including the word "Swaziland". That, and being the album's worst/funniest song (which I know is saying a hell of a lot), thanks to its faux-mariachi/world music pretensions.

The sad part of all this--the truly, desperately sad part--is, someone out there, some dreary distasteful shell of what I only loosely deem a human being to be sure, having taken the band's future discography into account, still thinks this is the best Ministry album. It might even be you.

But perhaps I'm being too harsh. Sure, With Sympathy is bad, but it falls very much on the "so bad it's good" side of the scale. Certainly it's nothing a band like Ministry wants on its discography (especially as a debut), but in the end it's mostly inoffensive and forgettable.

It's certainly not as bad as some of the other albums I have in mind...

'Cuz this seems to be my favorite feature

2010-01-24T02:13:00.000-08:00

Well, it took a little longer than I thought (due mostly to reasons of laziness) here I am, posting again. And what better way to get back in the swing than with yet another hilarious dissection of a crappy music video?

I'm doing something slightly different this time: I'm actually going to do a GOOD song. The video isn't even all that bad, it's just snarkworthy and strange as hell if you don't know where it's coming from. And I DO know.

Today we're covering a song by Finnish band Amorphis, who draw most of their lyrical inspiration from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. Originally compiled from a series of loosely-connected folktales by physician Elias Lonnrot in the 19th century, the epic provided the Finnish people with a heretofore-missing sense of national identity, leading them to seek independence from foreign oppression with their army of terrifyingly skilled, invulnerable snipers. No, that picture's not Photoshopped. The really scary part? It was an EXPLODING bullet. Remind me never to pick a fight with a Finnish guy, ever.

Something else you need to know about the Kalevala: it's really, REALLY fucking weird. Seriously, you thought the Egyptian gods marrying their siblings or Zeus turning into various animals to fuck random women was strange? That has NOTHING on stories of people getting turned into swamps or being pregnant for 700 years. You know you grew up in a weird place if a folktale of an immortal prehistoric blacksmith trying to replace his dead wife with a robot (the subject of today's song) is one of the less strange local myths.

Anyway, let's get started on the video proper:

I should begin by pointing out that this video doesn't include the entire song--about the first thirty seconds or so have been chopped off (yes, I own this album--no, I'm not Finnish). You're not missing out or anything, it's just a bit of intro and isn't at all integral to the rest of the song. Don't know why I brought it up, really...

0:03--The fu...this video is blacker than Tyler Perry!

0:05--Oh, wait, there we go. Damn, this opening riff is just so kickass...

0:08--~~Santa's~~ Ilmarinen's off to have a little chat with his plastic surgeon re: his nosejob. And by "chat" I mean "he's going to dickcrush him with that hammer".

0:09--My, Finland sure is sepia today.

0:13--You know, if I was a talented enough blacksmith to make the FUCKING SKY I probably would've invented the razor at some point. Plus I'd probably wear a shirt. 'Cuz I've heard it's cold over there. Just saying.

0:16--But then, I was also under the impression Finland didn't have mountains. Shows what I know, right?

0:20--Eww, it's like he's wearing a hospital gown!

0:21--Sorry, I should have mentioned--Amorphis' singer is apparently Captain Jack Sparrow. Also, his voice is the only thing more kickass than that opening riff. He's much better than that nasally little bitch he replaced.

0:23--Yeah, Finland's Olympic fencing team isn't turning out well.

0:27--"Hmm...yes, there's DEFINITELY a woman in here!"

0:30--Most bands run like bitches when their venue catches fire. Not Amorphis. Funky Claude can suck it.

0:35--"I detect a hint of cilantro!"

0:39--"Welp, my wife got killed by the only actual villain in this epic and I couldn't even be bothered to get revenge. Still no reason to close the shop, I say!"

0:44--Sad to say, he probably thinks that hair's pretty metal. However, he commits the fatal error of being a white guy with dreads and winds up looking like he belongs in a Korn tribute band (do those really exist? Stickly, I hope not). Still, I guess it's the thought that counts.

0:53--You ever wonder why anvils are shaped the way they are? I do. I should research than and then disseminate (huh huh) what I find out. Maybe I'll film a documentary about anvils. I'll call it Anvil: The Story of Anvils and...FUCK.

0:58--Damn, this guy's FACE is a fire hazard.

1:07--Why is he dressed like a doorman?

1:11--Funny, that looks more like a fireplace poker. It makes sense--all women are cold metal implements, once you get right down to it.

1:17--You know, I think this guy should challenge Brian Fair to a dread-off. He'd lose, but he should still do it. Just to prove America's still #1 at something, damn it.

1:20--Dammit, would you just spring for a spirit level already?

1:27--Shouldn't he be wearing gloves or something? Basic conduction indicates that bar should be getting hot as fuck, right?

1:28--"STOP PLAYING COY, YOU FUCKING SLUT FORGE!!!"

1:30--Whoa, when the fuck did he do THAT? Ilmarinen Claus has mystical montage powers!

1:31--YOU GONNA GET RAPED

1:33--He seems nice, doesn't he? Stickly knows I'd let him babysit MY kids...but then, I hate children...

1:36--So is his head just really sooty or is that some kind of tattoo? I can't tell.

1:41--He got all this out of one chunk of rebar? Take THAT, Conservation of Matter and Energy!

1:44--Hey, he found the little man in the fire canoe!

1:47--Captain Jack's posture's even worse than mine...

1:51--I see he's above the vagoo-part now...he could just stop here really, everything from here on up is quite superfluous.

2:02--Weird how he can just hammer on it randomly and it'll still make a woman shape...

2:04--What, the feet again? Did Joss Whedon direct this?

2:06--It's even weirder how it burns like firewood, despite being metal and all.

2:08--AIIIGGGGH! LARS ULRICH!

2:16--Wow. At least the singer's white-boy dreads weren't on his face.

2:27--Yes, warm your hands over the fire 'cuz it's CLEARLY a bit nippy in there!

2:28--Okay, your fingers are actually IN the fire now. Clearly these are the same CGI people who worked on Alone In The Dark, except now they've progressed from ignoring obvious misses to ignoring obvious hits.

2:34--Hey, that's the guy who was staring at me at the bus stop yesterday!

2:47--Nope, not getting any creepy vibes off this guy at all!

2:57--Okay, time to get something off my chest: I really, really, REALLY don't like double-tracked vocals. It just makes it sound like the singer has two vocal chords or some shit.

3:02--I will say, though--Captain Jack can death-growl with the best of 'em...

3:14--Congratulations. You've made Persis Khambatta. She didn't have nipples either, right?

3:18--"I WINZ TEH KLAEHVLAHEH!"

Holy shit. HOLY SHIT. I just noticed. This guy shaves his armpits. HIS FUCKING ARMPITS. Just look at his face and then his armpits. Stickly. Just...STICKLY. I mean...I just...WHAT?!

So, yeah. I get the feeling I'll be covering a LOT of Finnish bands in these features. You can't have folklore this odd without producing a shit-ton of metal bands (many of them absolute shit) with crazy-ass videos to match.

And yes, I'm back. BITCHES.

Man, I have weird taste in music

2009-12-25T18:08:00.000-08:00

No, I haven't forgotten about this blog--not completely, anyway!

I dunno what happened there...my enthusiasm for updating just emptied out in one great gush about a month back. Well, maybe not all at once--I was getting pretty lax on the twice-a-week thing even before then...

But rest assured, I'm back now! And I'm not even waiting until New Year's to take up the rein again--a month off is more than enough, I think. There'll be at least one new post going up next week, I'm not sure what just yet. Maybe I'll finally finish up that first Quag Keep article...

Until then, here's a brand-new weekly music video--a holiday song, no less:

Your weekly music video

2009-11-28T19:35:00.001-08:00

Two kinds of people I can't stand: Portland cops and people who don't like Katatonia.

I am SO gonna get beaten up

2009-11-25T20:56:00.000-08:00

Oh, you're Chris Humphreys, are you?

You have no problem identifying with a murderous thug, then. Superb.

A few months ago my grandfather came to visit. He mentioned how he'd heard Portland had problems with gangs in the past and asked if that was still the case. I told him that there's only one gang in town right now, and they're called the Portland Police Department.

I was semi-joking at the time. Now I realize how right I was. When presented with a shithead who should by rights be seen as a disgrace to their profession, the PPD opt instead to make a martyr of him. How laughable that one of the few remaining effective unions in this country spends most of its time standing for the rights of unrepentant thugs and racists, viewing even the most halfhearted slap on the wrist as an unforgivable insult.

Were this world perfect, the thug Humphreys would receive every punishment and injury he inflicted upon his victims. I wonder if his supporters would be so eager to claim his identity then.

Your weekly music video

2009-11-21T02:33:00.001-08:00

In honor of season 3. New article should go up sometime this weekend.

A slight modification

2009-11-18T23:10:00.001-08:00

So, originally my Quag Keep review was gonna be a Let's Play-style chapter-by-chapter dissection. On further examination, I think I'm going to jettison that plan. It's not a terribly long book, but it'd still take a hell of a long time at one chapter a week. And believe me, Quag Keep does NOT deserve that kind of analysis. So I think I'll just do it more big chunk by big chunk--still multi-part, though.

Some initial impressions:

Remember how I assumed that Andre Norton was a crappy writer? Yeah, so far it looks like I was right on the money. Here's the first sentence of the book:

"Eckstern produced the package with an exaggerated flourish and lifted the lid of the box to pluck out shredded packing with as much care as if he were about to display the crown jewels of some long-forgotten kingdom."

THE ENTIRE BOOK IS LIKE THIS. Norton does NOT do brevity. Except, heh, when it comes to characterization.

Also, do you know what Eckstern is unwrapping with such reverence? Pewter figurines. Yeah, it's one of THOSE kinds of books, where D&D is a tabletop wargame (this was written back in the Chainmail days, so it IS a wargame) even in the context of the book. Say what you will about R.A. Salvatore--and I have--but he never pulled this shit. This didn't work for the cartoon and it doesn't work here; all it does is pull me out of the story. Norton makes a point of thanking the book's publisher Donald A. Wollheim, "an authority and collector of military miniatures, whose special interest was so valuable for my research". Say, Andre, if you ever want to write a book about copyright infringement, Wollheim's something of an expert in that, too.

I'd also be remiss not to mention this picture of...whatever the hell this is a picture of.

A...morbidly obese lizardman on a horse? I have a feeling that's EXACTLY what it is. The back cover mentions a lizardman character...yeah, I'm calling it.

More on the way soon...

Your weekly music video

2009-11-15T21:45:00.000-08:00

See, I listen to all kinds of stuff.

I should do those Baldur's Gate books, actually

2009-11-14T17:14:00.000-08:00

So I dropped by an antique store today (same one I got the 2e DMG from, go figure) and came home with this:

And what, pray tell, am I holding in this excessively-blurry photo? Why, it's none other than the very first Dungeons & Dragons novel! The latest addition to my collection! And what am I going to do with it? Why, the same thing I've been doing with the rest of my collection: read it!

And so I undertake a special project of sorts. This is NOT the special project I've been hinting at for a while--I WILL get to that, it's even the same basic idea as this, but that book is just so horrid and so LONG I just can't seem to get motivated on it. That it's going to take a long-ass time isn't helping either.

Not that I'm expecting any value of quality from this book, either--if anything, this'll be a warmup for the REAL shit. Because, Dungeons & Dragons? Great game, SHIT novels. Yes, that includes the Dragonlance books. No, YOU'RE a faggot. Not only that, but it's written by Andre Norton. I haven't read any of her stuff, but DAMN is there a lot of it. You could run an entire corner bookshop on her oeuvre. Forgive me for jumping to conclusions, but it's my experience that NOBODY with that kind of output is any good. And she wrote the book Beastmaster was based on. Make of that what you will.

This, then, is my mission and intent--read the book and post a blog entry, with requisite snark (or without if, wonder of wonders, the book is actually good), for each chapter. Call it a Let's Read. I'll still try to throw in posts on other stuff as I do this, just for variety's sake.

Wish me luck! It can't be as bad as the Baldur's Gate novelizations, right? RIGHT?!

Rejoice!

2009-11-11T21:25:00.000-08:00

The airwaves are--temporarily, at least--one fat, jowly racist poorer!

I doubt it'll last. I'm sure sooner or later he'll pop up on Fox News like all the other reactionary shitheads the REAL news channels didn't want.

But until then, Senor Dobbs, consider yourself PLAYED THE FUCK OFF.

Your weekly music video

2009-11-07T19:09:00.001-08:00

THIS IS HOW YOU DO VIKING METAL YOU BASTARDS

Coulda been worse. Coulda been Nightwish.

2009-11-06T21:08:00.000-08:00

Hey! It's Friday! Know what time it is? Besides "time to take that dead hooker out to the curb so the garbage men don't miss her", that is.

It's time to snark on another shitty music video YAAAAAAAY!

This one requires a bit of explanation. You see, a certain trend--some might say a plague--has befallen heavy metal as of late; that is the trend of chick-metal. Now don't get me wrong, there are plenty of--well, a few good metal bands with female singers. Arch Enemy, for example. What I speak of is pretty much its own subgenre at this point. Basically, you take a reasonably attractive, usually opera-trained young lady with large gazoombas (that last bit is utterly indispensable), stick her in front of a usually all-male ostensible metal band (talent optional--no one will be paying attention to them), and have them play some bland forgettable riff while she wheezes in an Protooled-to-perfection voice about some twee shit that wouldn't sound out of place on fucking American Idol. Bonus points if she marries/gets knocked up by one of her bandmates. Oh, and keyboards. Lots and lots of keyboards. I know this doesn't sound like winning material, but trust me, stick to the formula and Nuclear Blast and Century Media will come beating down your door!

Oh yeah. It's bad. Maybe not Attack Attack bad, but bad nonetheless. The fad seems to be dying down now, no thanks to the pandering of certain segments of the metal-oriented press. But there's still enough life in it to give us hilarious crap like today's video.

Submitted for your disapproval: Leaves Eyes, the only band that can make Vikings look like fucking pussies.

0:01--YARNMAIL ALERT!!!

0:05--So far, pretty metal. Helps there's no actual music yet.

0:09--And the first thing you hear is a mellow keyboard intro. METAL!!!

0:13--Here's the front-floozy herself. Turn-ons include sentimental ballads about FUCKING VIKINGS and sounding like a total fucktard on the Deciblog.

0:14--Ugh. See what I mean about Pro Tools?

0:16--"Shut up bitch, I'm trying to kill Romans!"

0:25--"I want you to have this. It's my silver medal in ski-jumping from Nagano."

0:36--"Girl's Night Out! Let's eat ice cream and read Shayla Black's Decadent!"

0:39--Holy crap. Is that an actual riff? Has...has this band actually started trying? Minus 50 points! Nuclear Blast drops you!

0:48--Damn. Strip out the keyboard and this would actually border on good.

0:56--Female bassist! Hotter than the singer, even! Do I add or subtract points for that?

I've heard a few Leaves Eyes songs, and this is by FAR the best one. Muse on that, why don't you--this song is the good one.

1:00--But it's not to last. *sigh* Yeah, a buncha guys are about to earn their place in Valhalla and fight alongside the Aesir during Ragnarok--but let's hear all about your problems!

1:01--Weeeeell, okay. But only 'cuz you let me look down your cleavage. But start wittering on about your destiny again and I'd better at least see some ankle!

1:06--See that guy? He's the singer's husband. He used to be the lead singer. The band used to be called Atrocity and they used to play pretty decent death metal. I'm not making any of this up. Sad, ain't it?

1:08--Man, Xerxes fell on hard times...

1:12--Where are they plugged in, anyway?

1:13--ANOTHER cleavage shot? Okay, they're doing this on purpose. Some label rep was whispering in the director's ear "Keep shooting her chesticles and we can get on whatever's left of Headbanger's Ball!"

1:18--"Tonight...we dine...awww, c'mon guys! I rehearsed that line for like a week!"

1:23--"Okay, I'm the defender so I'll go first. The striker's moving around into flank, right?"

1:24--"Aw, fuck it! Damn thing was only protecting my tender flesh from sword thrusts anyway!"

1:27--I can't decide if she's hot or creepy. I'm leaning towards creepy.

1:31--Yup, creepy.

1:37--Errrrm...does anybody have a paper bag?

1:38--NOES! Ahhh, I'm sure it won't be important later.

1:41--"YEAH!!! Take THAT, you stinking Geat or Finn or whatever the hell you're supposed to be!"

1:43--Oh, come on! Don't dignify this with headbanging!

1:45--"I JUST MADE PARAGON PATH!!!"

1:49--You know what she looks like? It looks like she's had some Countess Bathory-like deal going on for the last 400 years or so, she's been falling behind on the virgin-blood payments lately and Makeup is trying like hell to cover it up.

1:51--Well, at least the drummer's enjoying himself. Hey, long as he gets to bang on stuff he's happy!

1:54--Nope, DEFINITELY not gonna be important later. Chekhov? Who's that?

1:55--Laugh if you will, but that huge butter knife has gotten this dude out of some serious scrapes.

1:56--glu-HOY--what was I talking about?

2:02--Uh, dude, I know I made fun of your wife's singing earlier, but at least SHE didn't sound like she was in mid-difficult shit. Stick to death grunts. IF YOU STILL REMEMBER HOW, TRAITOR.

2:08--Okay, maybe not hotter than the singer. But still less creepy.

2:12--"Our friend in the middle here lost all her pigmentation. Did you find any while you were fighting the Gauls or whoever?"

2:14--"Yeah, I took a level in Monk. Here's your medal back, by the way. You got ROBBED at Nagano."

2:16--"Make fun of my samurai armor, will you? 300 references are SO 2007!"

2:19--"Oh Heimdall, I DID get robbed! Fucking Russian judge!"

2:23--HAAAAAWWWWRK*ptui* "Sorry for your loss."

2:35--Gods, her chin looks like it's about to split open...

2:39--Wizard's sleeves? Are you trying to tell us something? Sorry, I'm on like my third beer...

2:40--Oh, shut up.

2:45--Hey HEY! No praying to the accursed Nazarene!

2:48--"I told you not to climb it, you stupid...mother...FUCKING...PIECE OF SHIT!!!"

2:52--Stickly, even SHE'S bored now.

2:56--SYMBOLISM!!!!OMGWTFGENIUS!!! (note: I actually liked Equilibrium. I just wanted to show where I stole the joke from.)

3:00--"This...is...SCANDINAVIA!!!" "Bjorn, for Odin's sake, cut it out already."

3:09--"Well, now I feel silly. Did I overdress?"

3:10--Remember kids, never do today what you can put off till tomorrow!

3:15--DO NOT WANT

3:19--And the final results are:

0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5

There you have it, folks--once again, Norway is out of the high-dive medal contention. When will they learn the judges aren't impressed by the belly flop?

3:31--TWO Big Nos? Really, Leaves Eyes?

3:34--Dammit, stop looking up at the camera!

3:40--"Oh well, I wasn't cut out for the whole settling-down thing anyway! That's just an express ticket to Helheim!"

3:45--Ooh! Stab in the armpit! Gets 'em every time!

3:53--ACK! Don't show so many teeth when you smile! You're worse than that chick from the Attack Attack video!

3:55--Suck it, Xerxes! Maybe if your DEX had been higher than your STR that monk level actually would've helped!

3:56--"BOOYAH! I'm ready for Manowar videos now!"

4:00--Lady, light is not your friend.

4:03--Oh, she brought attention back to the boobelage. All is forgiven.

4:10--"Long-term relationships is dildos! Wheres is the G-MILFs?"

Leaves Eyes is Norweigan-German. Norway, of course, gave us black metal, and Germany gave us such fine bands as Kreator and Helloween. Let this be a lesson to you all: pedigree does not denote quality. Sure, their bassist is bangable and the singer's hot from the neck down (and from the neck up she looks like old pictures of my fraternal grandmother, maybe that's the mental block), but this isn't the 80s! Metal isn't all about looks anymore! Metal is supposed to be where the ugliest men on earth can achieve musical stardom! This isn't FOR you, bitch! And the English used to pray to their false God for protection against the Vikings--jeez, show some respect! God Dethroned has a chick in it and they don't totally suck! What is wrong with you?

Sorry. I'm pretty drunk at this point so I'd better just wrap this up. Bottom line, chick-metal sucks, Norway and Germany aren't to blame for that, go buy the new Immortal album.

Firefox thinks "THAC0" is a word

2009-11-04T09:35:00.000-08:00

Considering how much 2nd ed. stuff I've been collecting lately, it's probably best I do the actual ruleset next.

It took me a while to find a 2e Player's Handbook, but this one was worth the wait--it's in fantastic condition. Thanks are due to L'Anne Thompson (the name written on the inside cover) for taking such good care of it. The Dungeon Master's Guide is kind of worn out, but still pretty well off considering I picked it up in an antique store for six bucks. Not only that, but I suspect the original owner was just a kid. Why do I think this?

Call it a hunch.

This is it. The big one. For better or worse, this is the edition that defined D&D through the latter TSR period. This is the edition that brought us all the classic campaign settings we now think of when we think Dungeons & Dragons. And not incidentally, this is the edition that brought us THAC0.

But I'll get to that later. First, I want to talk about these books' design. The layout is pretty uninspiring, reminding me of nothing so much of those elementary-school textbooks dating back to the 70s-80s; I went to public school, so believe me, I KNOW my outdated textbooks. It's all black and white and blue--it almost looks like it came out of a mimeograph in places. The text is VERY small and is arranged in columns. For a game people supposedly play for fun, these books are surprisingly sober and businesslike (which you could also say about the actual rules, but again, more on that in a bit).

But that pales in comparison to the artwork, which is for the most part horrid. Some pieces look like the artist is trying to harken back to old medieval woodcuts, but just look unappealingly flat and cartoony. Others are more realistic, but those are even worse--they look like somebody dressed a bunch of models like LARPers and slapped Photoshop filters over the resulting photos. Or they would if they had Photoshop back then. You know what I mean. In fact, there's only one picture in these things I really, truly liked:

DAMN! Let this be a lesson to you: Fucketh not with dwarves!

Incidentally, do you know what the page this picture appears on is about? Calculating THAC0. Not morale checks, not crazy dwarves, but calculating THAC0. Like many of the other illustrations in these books, this picture has nothing whatsoever to do with anything in its page's text. It's pretty damn weird to be staring at a picture of Vikings storming a ruined castle while the text witters on about Intelligence scores.

Which brings me to the real point and purpose of these books: the ruleset. I know I make fun of THAC0 a lot on this blog. But, truth be told, THAC0 is probably the least problematic element of this edition. Oh sure, it's still needlessly elaborate and a pretty terrible way of handling armor, but at least it's coherently defined and fairly easy to get the hang of. I can't say that about a lot of the other rules.

Like the rest of combat for instance. I have no idea how combat is supposed to work. None. I've reread that section several times and each time my eyes just glaze the fuck over. The PHB suggests several different ways of handling initiative and I don't understand any of them. Maybe it's just a matter of actually trying it out and then it just falls into place, but that just seems like the alpha and omega of forlorn hopes. And the saving throws...GAH! You have to roll under a certain number to save, but bonuses are still called pluses and penalties are still called minuses, and a plus makes your roll lower...just...just...GAH!

2nd edition has an annoying habit of being vague about things that matter and overcomplicating things that don't. Like weapons--they cram the weapons list full of stats (like speed factor) and then claim they're optional (more on that in a bit), but then spend an entire page describing various polearms in exhaustive detail. Apart from getting the phrase "Lucerne hammer" stuck in my head, exactly what the fuck is the purpose of this? Why don't all the listed weapons get that treatment? What if I'm curious about the difference between a longsword and a broadsword, huh?

I mentioned an optional rule before--let me tell you, half these damn books are optional, and what isn't explicitly optional you can often safely ignore or house-rule. Critical hits? Optional. Skill proficiencies? Optional. The DM being allowed to stab a player in the eye with a pencil if he wants to use an arquebus? Optional, but highly encouraged. The DMG even suggests removing class and level limits for nonhuman players, then wails about how then humans won't be teh speshul no more. Again, I hear a lot of games did, in fact, ignore that particular bit of nonsense and wound up with ludicrously overpowered parties as a result. It's like TSR's giving a ten-year-old a cool new toy to play with, then slaps it out of his hands every ten minutes and bitches about how he should be content with that old copy of Mystery Date moldering away under the bed.

Oh, but I haven't even gotten to what I consider the worst part: the endless busywork. I mentioned strongholds in my Blue Box review, and how I didn't really see the point and thought it changed the focus of the game too much--well, it's even more annoying in 2nd edition Advanced. 2nd Edition has pretensions of realism, but is it realistic for small armies of bears to start following your ranger around once you cross some arbitrary level line? I play Dungeons & Dragons to--guess what--loot dungeons and kill dragons; if I want realism I'll play GURPS or some shit. Do I really need to give away chunks of my loot to a small army of hangers-on who won't even let me cast detect evil on them to make sure they're not double agents (as the books suggest is possible)? Maybe it's best I keep them around, since monster descriptions routinely suggest they travel in groups of hundreds at a time. How the fuck did battles get resolved in less than a week?

And what the fuck is with the magic system? I don't mean the Vancian fire-and-forget stuff--that part I love--I mean how it seems determined to fuck over the user as much as it does the target. The rapid aging, the system shock, the resurrection survivals...yeesh. And don't you DARE say game balance to me! That can be addressed with ability score requirements and expensive material components...in fact, it IS!

Am...am I just spoiled here? Am I so used to 4th edition holding my hand I'm reading in hassles that simply aren't there? That has to be it. People did play this thing for eleven years, after all--some even still swear by it. All that bile against 4th edition has to be coming from somewhere, right?

So, would I play AD&D 2nd edition?

I...guess? I'll try anything once and all that. If nothing else, it was home to all the classic campaign settings (Dark Sun, Planescape, etc.)--if I ever do play this thing I'll have to insist it's with one of those. And there's something to be said for a ruleset that's somewhat impregnable; it feels more like an exclusive club--ooh! Maybe even a secret society! Oh, I don't understand football? Well, YOU don't understand Bend Bars/Lift Gates!

Still, though--Darin Smith, if you want your DMG back, you can have it. For seven dollars.

Ha! Now the song's in YOUR head!

2009-10-30T10:09:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween. Bitches.

"That movie was flawed!"

2009-10-23T21:41:00.000-07:00

In a MUCH better mood this weekend. Lucky for you.

Finally getting rid of these crabs!

2009-10-22T20:34:00.000-07:00

I had planned to spend this post talking about my special project: what it is, my plans, what it means for this site.

But you know what? Fuck that. It'll keep until next week. Something else has come up--something with roots in this blog's short history.

Attack Attack's frontman has quit.

Without a doubt it was my vicious yet richly-deserved denunciation of his life's work what drove him to flee the musical C-list in tears. Like critical tinnitus, my words reverberated through his head until finally he could no longer bear the shame of shrieking in service of what is basically that band from the opening of Brutal Legend.

But you know, I have difficulty believing he'll disappear from public view. Not because he's a promising talent with a long career ahead of him, but because he's so fat.

Sometimes good things come out of my ass

2009-10-21T20:26:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna click "Random Page" on Wikipedia 50 times and write the second sentence of every page!

Its seat is the village of Ruja, which lies approximately 18 kilometres (11 mi) east of Legnica, and 45 kilometres (28 mi) west of the regional capital Wrocław. The population was 10,599 at the 2000 census. This organization offers six potential programs to the student, five at the High School level and one at the adult education level. Established in 1997, ANTHC is owned and managed by Alaska Native tribal governments and their regional health organizations. Headed by Colonel Marmaduque Grove, left-wing militaries deposed in the 1925 coup the September Junta, and handed the power to General Pedro Dartnell as interim president, hoping to recall from exile Arturo Alessandri Palma. Chile was chosen as host by FIFA in June 1956, as the World Cup returned to the continent of South America after 12 years. It orbits the Sun once every 3.65 years. The domain was founded by Maeda Toshiie and headed by the Maeda clan. It is located at the former NMBS station. It lies approximately 5 kilometres (3 mi) north-east of Charsznica, 10 km (6 mi) north-west of Miechów, and 42 km (26 mi) north of the regional capital Kraków. Designed in the Spanish Colonial Revival architectural style, it is an especially fine and intact example of the 'atmospheric' type movie theater developed in the 1920’s.

In Rataj's taxonomy, E. trialatus is in Section Paniculati, Subgenus Echinodorus. It lies approximately 10 kilometres (6 mi) north-east of Mosina and 10 km (6 mi) south of the regional capital Poznań. A priest who later became a bishop, Norbert Provencher, ordered its construction in 1818 in the form of a small log chapel. It is a small Turkish town and growing holiday destination, with the town being pleasantly developed with a range of tourist amenities. Flower is also a director of 2change Ltd, a management advisory business. In 1940, Barcza took third place, behind Max Euwe, and Milan Vidmar, at Maróczy Jubiläum in Budapest. Collier Read Granberry was born in 1899 in Austin, Texas where he spent the majority of his life as a teacher and civil servant. Covering the first five years of her career, 1971 to 1975, the compilation includes six top ten hit singles, two minor hits ("Legend In Your Own Time", "Attitude Dancing") and two album cuts that were never released as singles ("Night Owl", "We Have No Secrets"). He was a cabinetmaker with a particular expertise in the art of marquetry. He later sat as MP for Westminster.

Williams was owner of Wedell-Williams Air Service Corporation, "one of the most noted race plane designers of its day". In 1997 Jonas Winge Leisner replaced Niels H.P. as the primary vocalist. It became one of the most popular Czechoslovak bands during the 1980s. Relevant oxidation states are Sb(V) and Sb(III). It can be used as an antihypertensive drug during surgery or to control hypertensive crises. She was named in honor of her late aunt Annia Cornificia Faustina. Born Anthony Roger Tonge in Birmingham, he was working as an £8-a-week post office clerk and performing in amateur dramatics in the evenings when he landed the role of Sandy Richardson, the motel owner's son in the ITV soap opera, Crossroads, a role he would play for 17 years. There are two Boy Scout camps: Rodney Scout Reservation, also known as Camp Rodney or RSR, located in North East, Maryland, and Henson Scout Reservation, also known as Camp Nanticoke or HSR, near Galestown, Maryland. DGCA is also a compressed archive format, the next generation of 'GCA'. The book tells the story of Kirk Winfield, his marriage to Ruth, and their child called Bill.

He was born in Oslo. It is part of the Chaudière-Appalaches region and the population is 2,357 as of 2009. It is endemic to Kenya. It is a personality trait marked by a pervasive pattern of negative attitudes and passive, usually disavowed resistance in interpersonal or occupational situations. Singles that were taken of this album were Eve Of Destruction and October Grey (AUS#55-May 98). In Switzerland, it is the only institute of hospitality management of HES ("Haute Ecole Spècialisèe", or University of Applied Sciences) level offering advanced programmes which are recognized by the Swiss government. A former President of CAPO - Capital Arts Patrons Organization (1999 – 2002), he now concentrates on Event Production for the Government and Corporate sector and is also actively involved in the development of strategies and resources to promote Canberra as a conference destination for national and international delegates. The song reached #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and claimed the number one spot on the Billboard Top Rock Tracks chart for two weeks in 1985. It was located 1 mile (1.6 km) north of Volcano. She rose to fame in 2005 with her role in the Egyptian movie Wija as the femme fatale.

The 52nd Illinois Infantry was organized at Geneva, Illinois and mustered into Federal service on November 19, 1861. Bolaji is a novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, literary critic, biographer, editor and journalist. The larvae are predators of other mosquito larvae. He has played 27 international matches for the Swedish national team, and was a squad player for the Euro 2000 and Euro 2004. Before directing Six Feet Under, many of the following directors have roots that can be traced to independent films. On 8 October 1970, during the October Crisis, it was broadcast by CBC/Radio-Canada television as one of many demands required for the release of kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross. The event is held annually in Paget, Bermuda since 1999 and takes part on the challenger series of the ATP Tour. He is the son of 1992 Formula One world champion, Nigel Mansell, and elder brother of fellow racing driver Greg Mansell. The butterfly was earlier known as Lycaenopsis akasa. It is located between Maluri, Cheras and Pandan Indah, Selangor.

Well...I wound up clicking it a few more than 50 times, actually. Some of those pages either didn't have proper sentences at all or only had one.

Your weekend music video

2009-10-16T22:34:00.000-07:00

Because if I'm miserable everybody's miserable.

Writing endings is hard

2009-10-14T20:38:00.000-07:00

Haven't done one of these in a while! What better way to revisit the feature than with the weirdest goddamn thing in my collection so far?

I give you Module SJQ1: Spelljammer--Heart of the Enemy.

The module's in pretty good condition, but still a little banged up, probably due to idiots (and, er, me) taking it out of the plastic bag and reading it. I am, of course, storing it in the bag. No, it's not really this orange--I took this picture at work.

The enclosed map's in near-perfect condition. It details the general layout of and various locales in this weird-ass solar system. But more on that in a bit.

I haven't hunted down a Spelljammer boxset yet, but I already know more than a bit about the basic setting and concept. I mean, this is literally Dungeons & Dragons in space--how could I NOT hunt down every scrap of info I could?

So I already knew this setting was a little bizarre, but it wasn't until I read Heart of the Enemy that I realized just how bizarre. This thing has a solar-system-sized ecosystem, a pyramid-shaped star with pegasi living on the inside, planets flattening out like pizza dough because their sun turned green, a comet shaped like an old man's head that carries things around in its mouth, a wizard who thinks sleight-of-hand tricks are more interesting than real magic...it just never lets up. When talking constellations are the least weird thing in a module, I know I have a winner on my hands.

What, then, is the point of all this oddity? Well, the setting's space-elves (who are as per D&D tradition snobby and condescending, but still somewhat less dickish than elves in other settings) get word that this weird-ass solar system, Darkspace, is home to the control unit of a witchlight marauder (a planet-destroying organic superweapon). They hire the adventurers to travel to Darkspace, find the control unit, and then acquire the marauder before the space-orcs, or "scro" (you see what they did there, they...never mind. I don't understand why the space-elves aren't called "sevle") get ahold of both. Oh, and while you're doing that, be a dear and figure out which one of your ship's crew is a scro double agent, will you?

So yes, this is a very busy module. It's also unusual in another way by 2nd Edition standards: it actually seems survivable. It's no walk on Mount Celestia by any means, but it's no Tomb of Horrors either--of course I say this not having actually played the thing, but it appears pretty well balanced for a mid-level party. There are a few TPK moments, but they're not mandatory to complete the adventure and they'll only come up if the PCs actively look for them. In fact, it looks harder to run than play; the module drops only vague ideas as to how to drop enough hints to reveal the traitor's identity, relying heavily on the DM's ability to do so in a manner both fair and challenging.

Would I play this? Hell, you even need to ASK? Anything which breaks away from the standard D&D template of "walk around an old castle's basement killing monsters and looting the place" is going to be right up my alley. It's fun, don't get me wrong, but sometimes variety is good, you know?

I have a recurring problem when it comes to blog posts: I can never think of a way to end them. So let me just close by saying...um...planets will also turn into rhomboids if their sun turns periwinkle. There we go.

Yet another new feature

2009-10-10T10:46:00.000-07:00

Here's your weekend music video:

I actually looked up how to spell "fhtagn"

2009-10-10T00:12:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, I attended the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival & Cthulhucon at the externally fabulous Hollywood Theater.

There was almost no point, really. Not because I didn't have a good time--I did--but because I didn't even need to go in to see the coolest fucking thing I have ever seen in my life. I saw that standing in line outside. Really, it's like if Lemmy walked around outside before the Motorhead concert passing out speed to people in line.

BEHOLD!

IA! IA!!! The guy said his wife knitted this for him. She needs to get a merch booth at next year's festival--she'd make a fucking KILLING. I'd buy one; it's much better than what I wound up with.

You can't really read the text in this picture. Basically it turns out Lovecraft hated Republicans almost as much as he hated black people. Fits the era's Democratic Party like a glove, sorry to say. I do like this, but was pretty slim pickings for shirts--the next-best one had Cthulhu's face forming one of those gay-ass Celtic knots.

I was more interested in a couple other booths; one guy was selling what looked like every Call of Cthulhu RPG supplement ever printed. Really--he had the original-rules stuff, he had the D20 Delta Green stuff, he had everything. Another guy had put special bindings on old anatomy texts so they looked like the Necronomicon. I didn't get anything from either of these booths, sadly--I can't find enough people interested in running a CoC campaign to justify buying any more books, and I just didn't have that kind of money to spend in the latter case.

And here's the last bit--just my pass and this year's program. I liked The Mist, but not enough to stick around for it. Stephen King will do a much better Lovecraft impersonation when he learns his laughable faith in what he pathetically calls "God" will avail him for naught when sunken R'lyeh rises once again CTHULHU FHTAGN! Seriously though, the climax of The Stand? That shit was just fucking embarrassing.

Anyway, on to the movies I did see. I started out with a block of short films, which like all shorts blocks was very hit-or-miss. Only the last one, Forlorn Hope, made any real impression on me.

After that came Night of the Eagle, based on the "classic" novel Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber. It was decent, if at times hilarious when viewed through 21st-century eyes, and more like a really long episode of The Twilight Zone than an actual movie (which makes sense considering the film's writers, Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, both wrote a shitload of Twilight Zone episodes). I liked the movie more than the book, actually (I've always preferred Leiber's proto-D&D-style work), if only because the male protagonist is made more likable. Oh, make no mistake, he's still a prissy condescending sexist who pays the price for his doucheyness, but at least in this version he knows when to throw in the towel on the whole "rational scientific explanation" thing. The ending, however, has been changed and is very, very, VERY abrupt. It's like Beaumont and Matheson couldn't think of an ending, just threw up their hands and said "Oh well, this thing's about at feature length anyhow. DROP THE EAGLE!"

Last, I saw The Colour From The Dark, an Italian adaptation of Lovecraft's story The Colour Out of Space. Basically director Ivan Zuccon took Lovecraft's classic story (considered by the man himself his best), gave it a European exploitation-film sensibility, and made it shit. I really, REALLY hope certain scenes in this movie were supposed to be funny, because they sure as hell were. EVERY DAMN TIME this movie built up anything resembling dread or even basic dramatic tension, along came a line or scene which would just bring down the house in helpless laughter. Many in the standing-room-only audience resorted to open MST3K-style mockery, myself included--much to the displeasure of the two guys sitting in front of me, one of whom subsequently referred to me as "fucker". Fortunately for him I was too busy popping my knees (the screening having taken place in what was apparently the Hollywood's midget theater) to repay his kindness with the reenactment of several Cannibal Corpse lyrics. Whatever, asshole! You saw the same movie I did! And you know damn well it was no silent-film Call of Cthulhu! Prick.

Anyway, I know it sounds like I'm bitching a lot, but overall I enjoyed the festival. I'm planning a return trip next year--hopefully I'll get my very own ski-mask! And if I see another terrible movie, perhaps whoever sits in front of me won't be the director's cousin or something!

I still wasn't paying $45 for a T-shirt, though

2009-10-07T20:48:00.000-07:00

What did I do last Saturday? Oh, not much. Just saw FUCKING MOTORHEAD, is all.

And I got pictures. Not good pictures, mind you, but the best I could get from the Roseland's balcony with a cellphone.

The picture above is of the opening act, The Reverend Horton Heat. Who were awesome. Seriously, I'd go out just to see them in concert, they were that good.

There was another opening band too, called Nashville Pussy. MAN did they blow. They were a total throwback, and not the good kind like Motorhead and Horton Heat. The only good part of their set was when the frontman kindly removed his cowboy hat so the assembled throng might point and laugh at his combover skullet, thereby deriving some small amount of pleasure from their otherwise-forgettable set.

This is a pattern I've noticed at every concert I've been to--two opening acts, the first one terrible, the second almost as good as the headliner. It's almost like promoters feel sorry for these first acts.

See, I have no idea what these two are supposed to be pictures of. Some of them I had to delete 'cuz you couldn't even see this much. As always where Motorhead's involved, you just had to be there. Or buy the performance DVD it looked like they were filming that night.

Heh, now this was funny. Motorhead did an acoustic piece by the name of--what else?--"Whorehouse Blues". Have you seen Lemmy play a harmonica? No? Then you, my friend, have not lived.

From the drum solo, I believe. Their drummer is very talented but, like all drum solos, it was way too long and incredibly boring. It wasn't his fault--such is and ever shall be the way of the universe.

More videos of I-don't-know-what-the-fuck.

Before you ask--of COURSE Motorhead played Ace of Spades. It's okay--remember, there are no stupid questions. Except that one. They also played a couple songs from an album they released when I was a year old. That fact stunned me at the time--I felt compelled to yell it out loud. Not that they ignored their more recent albums; they played a couple from their last two as well.

Do you think it's a hassle from bands this old to put setlists together? Motorhead are fairly lucky in this area, I think, because they only really have one must-play song. What must it be like for bands with a dozen hit songs or more? No wonder some concerts go on for 3 hours or more. Still doesn't excuse the ticket prices if you ask me...

And here we have the aftermath. I showed up just early enough that I didn't have much trouble getting in, though the line was already back to Couch St. by then. I'm glad I got there when I did though, because by the time I got to the door the line had completely reformed behind me.

Getting out, though, was a bit more hassle. It literally took like ten minutes of inching towards the stairs and finally out the door--it was worse than when I saw Opeth. Still, it could've been worse--the place could've been on fire.

It's not often I make it out to concerts. When someone I want to see comes through, nine times out of ten I have to work the day they're playing. When I do make it out, though, it's always a memorable time, and this was no exception. I understand why a lot of the guys there were seeing Motorhead for the fourth or fifth time. And DAMN were they loud--good thing I wore earplugs, cuz if I'd been deaf I probably could've heard them through the vibrations in my sternum. And the guy I was sitting in front of flatly refused to wear earplugs. Scary.

Myself, I had a sore throat for two days afterward from screaming my head off between songs. Totally worth it, though. Hell, I would've stage-dived off the balcony if I'd thought anyone would've caught me.

Yes, I have seen Motorhead live. And that is yet another reason why I am cooler than all of you. Combined. Unless, of course, you're a roadie for Motorhead. Or are actually IN Motorhead. Or you're Horton Heat...

But I AM cooler than Nashville Pussy! So there!

Is there ANY problem alcohol can't solve?

2009-10-02T20:20:00.000-07:00

Well, um...I've gotten myself into a bit of a situation here.

See, I know I promised two entries a week, and I'm gonna stick to it--I really am. Thing is, I'm in no mood for another D&D review after Tuesday's dreadfully unfunny and angry 3.5 beatdown. I haven't seen any analysis-worthy Youtube videos recently, I don't have the special-project stuff together yet and nothing really earth-shattering's been happening this week. There IS some interesting stuff going on this weekend which will definitely make this blog, but I can't very well write about stuff I haven't done yet, can I?

So, I have no idea what to write for this entry.

Instead, I'm going to try something I've never been much good at--improvisation. I have my web browser up and running and two large bottles of Heineken. Guess I'll just ride this train and see where it takes me....

You know, I just wrote a whole hell of a lot to say "I have no idea what to write". That's a start, I guess.

Watching the new Bad Movie Beatdown video right now. That kid is such a smug know-it-all. No wonder I like him. Even if he hated Equilibrium.

You know, Deadwood is really awesome. I don't know why I never watched it when it was still on--oh yeah, 'cuz I didn't have HBO. That's right. It's gotten to the point where if I watch a Bonanza rerun I expect them to yell "cocksucker" at each other.

Okay, first bottle of Heineken's done. Portland's turned me into a total beer snob but still, I like Heineken. It's pretty much the only wide-release (is that the phrase?) beer I like. I drink PBR too, but that's just 'cuz I'm poor.

My mom thanked me for linking to her site. That bitch better have linked back...

Starting on the other bottle. I thought about pouring it into my Widmer stein but it felt too much like adultery.

Saint's Row 2 is really, really fun. I mean, it's not GTA IV, but it's not the cheap knockoff I was expecting either.

Oh yeah! Feelin' the beer buzz! Maybe I should just get a Twitter account...

I'm approaching that level of inebriation where my good taste starts to evaporate. I could almost listen to Nightwish right now.

I know I've said it before, but Pandora is awesome. And yes, I have played the Seanbaby game. I was not ready. And what, exactly, is "excessive vamping"? 'Cuz Pandora seems to think an awful lot of bands have it.

The Song of Ice and Fire TV series is shaping up to be awesome. It starts shooting in a month. I wonder which will come out first--the show or the next book?

I need to find a way to incorporate the phrase "rent butthole" (meaning "rent" in the context of "torn") into everyday conversation. Since this is me we're talking about, I'm sure I'll find a way.

Just finished the second bottle. WHEEEEE!!! I know enough not to go out and buy a third. One more and I'll just wind up feeling like shit.

Making dinner now. Chicken and green beans. Same thing I have every night on alternating weeks. The other weeks I have chicken salad wraps. Yum.

"scooters, vacation, fall"? What odd choices for example posts.

Somehow I'm still not too drunk to proofread this thing as I go along.

You know what I haven't had in a long time? Tater gems. I'm aware most people call them 'tater tots', but those people are wrong. And probably rapists.

Max Baucus is a total douchelord. It needed to be said.

I finished reading the AD&D 2nd Edition Player's Handbook today. Yes, that'll be on the site soon. Just as soon as I finish reading the Dungeon Master's Guide--I'm planning on giving my thoughts on 2nd edition in general. SO JUST BE PATIENT YOU BASTARDS

Just finished dinner. Damn, I likes me some canned green beans. In fact, I like them more than fresh green beans.

And with that, it's time to call this one good. Thanks for your patience--next week's will be MUCH more interesting!

And I didn't even get into grappling

2009-09-29T21:18:00.000-07:00

Well, shit. Here goes.

Here it is--the very first Dungeons & Dragons book I ever bought. In pretty good shape at first appearances, until you take a look at the spine:

I have a rough idea when and where this happened, but I'm still not sure how. I believe I stepped on it wrong, but I'm not sure if it was me or one of the other psychos in my original group.

So. 3.5 edition D&D. What can be said about it that hasn't already been said about doing your own remodeling? It seems enriching and fulfilling at first, until about a quarter of the way through when your kitchen is in ruins, you can't figure out how to install the new sink without dropping it on your foot and you're buying the cheapest grout just to stay in the black. There's a reason I cringe every time a 4th edition books recycles 3.5 artwork.

This book's in the collection more as a courtesy than anything else--I sold off all my other few remaining 3.5 books not too long ago and I wasn't sure Powell's would take this one, what with the damaged spine. That and this edition DOES cast a pretty long shadow in my gaming history and I'd be remiss to ignore it.

This is the edition which introduced me to D&D, sorry to say. No, I can't claim any sort of long-term investment in tabletop gaming. Basically I started to get tired of video games, heard the new edition of D&D was pretty simple to learn and thought I'd give it a shot.

And it IS simple...up to a point. For very low-level campaigns (up to about level 5), 3.5 is damn-near perfect. So long as one sticks to the basics of "move from point A to point B, check for traps along the way, swing sword at monster, repeat", you'll get along fine. It's when you try anything more complicated (and trust me, you will) that it all starts to fall apart.

You see, Wizards of the Coast wanted an edition to lure in newbies, and in many ways they got one. This edition FINALLY sets "rolling high is good" in stone--no THAC0 to mess around with, no having to do algebra just to see if an attack connected. However, they wanted to keep the veteran players interested too, and for this reason they didn't seem quite willing to just toss a lit match on AD&D and start over at this point. So a lot of elements of AD&D got carried over into 3.5. Which is a fine idea in and of itself--you don't just eject that kind of pedigree without good reason, right? Unfortunately, nearly all the stuff that got held over were the elements of AD&D people found most annoying.

The end result? 3.5 does away with class limitations for nonhuman characters, but keeps ability score penalties. It keeps the Vancian magic system, but low-level wizards are still useless after one fight. It makes high dice rolls the law of the land, but keeps the no-save insta-kill effects. 3.5 still asks you to accept that your character invested the years of time needed to learn how to use a sword or bow, but somehow never learned how to throw a punch. And clerics are still the one class nobody wants to play but you can't leave the inn without. It keeps the nine-tier alignment system, even though people only knew how to roleplay about three of them. And the level drains. Dear god, the level drains.

And believe me, a LOT of monsters used level/ability-draining attacks. So many, in fact, that I was sometimes left wondering why this game even bothered using a hit point system. Worse yet, nearly all of them were touch attacks--i.e. the monster only had to lay a hand/feeler/whatever on you. So you either wound up spending a lot of time fussing over getting your Touch AC as high as possible, or suffered the indignity of your full-plate-wearing fighter keeling over because some ghost poked him.

In fact, "getting things as high as possible" sums up 3.5 pretty well. Powergaming is annoying in most rulesets--here, it's a coping mechanism. Back when I played 3.5 I despised munchkins in principle, yet thought nothing of taking the Endurance feat and getting mithril full-plate so I could sleep in my armor. I know, I know--it's just that 3.5 spent so much damn time trying to get you killed that wise players spent a lot of time and GP preparing for contingencies like that. Or just getting tired of them and set about breaking the game so as not to deal with them at all, as in the case of the inestimable Pun-Pun. Myself, I figured out how Two-Weapon Fighting went from "too much penalty hassle" to "unstoppable steel whirlwind" if you took the right feats.

Usually I end these reviews of old D&D stuff by saying how, given the opportunity, I'd be glad to give playing them a try. But in this case...no! I've been there! It's the spawn of hell and I'll never, ever play it again (Neverwinter Nights 2 doesn't count, right?)! I don't miss having rules for everything and everything, and all those rules having exceptions! I don't miss having to carry around three swords--each a different kind of metal--AND a mace, just to deal with damage resistances! I don't miss buying every new supplement because I think I need them to stay competitive, only to find out all the new prestige classes are rubbish (okay, this one's mostly my fault, but still...)! I don't miss having to recalculate my HP because I took CON damage! I don't miss having to deal with level adjustments just because I wanted to play something with scales! I don't miss buying the latest issue of Dragon and seeing stats for something from a PS2 game! I don't miss spending more time in combat arguing than actually fighting, because...er, because that one still happens actually.

But still! I think all these people who bitch about 4th edition should go back and give 3.5 another spin. Maybe THEN they'll remember what a bad ruleset looks like! Maybe THEN they'll learn not to bitch about something just because it's new (though lord knows that's a popular diversion amongst longtime D&D players)! I know, fat chance right? But seriously, most old-timers have a favorite old edition they look back on with nostalgia--does ANYONE do that for 3.5?

Anyway, this has gone on way too long--again. Long post short, 3.5 sucked and you suck for liking it. With this kind of intro, it's a miracle I still play tabletop RPGs at all...

Status of the site

2009-09-27T22:42:00.000-07:00

No, I'm not shutting down! Tempting as it is...nobody ever leaves comments anymore *grumble* *grumble*

Quite the opposite, in fact. I've decided on an actual release schedule for new entries, apart from "whenever I feel like it". Yes, C.'s gone and developed hisself an honest doggone work ethic!

From now on, The Inverted Panopticon will update twice a week, barring unusual circumstances. And even that will probably result in a blog post announcing I'll be missing one or both entries that week--that still counts, right?

They'll still be about whatever I want, of course--D&D, crappy Youtube videos, games, etc. I have a few special projects in mind too.

So, that it for now! Watch this space and enjoy!

I was eating Oreos when I wrote this

2009-09-23T00:33:00.000-07:00

We've all at one point or another puzzled over the fine print on the backs of our food wrappers. What are these so-called "ingredients"? we've wondered. Where do they come from? Thiamine Mononitrate? How is that a food? And most often we've wondered, just how does my favorite ingredient get out of the animals and into everything we eat? Well, wonder no longer, as The Inverted Panopticon set out to uncover the curious origins of America's favorite food additive. What we found may surprise you!

No matter what certain animal-rights fringe groups may tell you, those of us living on planet Earth know a meal without semen isn't worthy of the name. This wonder ingredient appears in nearly all commercially-available foodstuffs, either as a primary ingredient or a simple additive. Each person has different content preferences (personally, I prefer just enough to catch the taste), but the love for semen is truly--some might say surprisingly--universal.

Ask the average man on the street which variety of semen is best and he/she won't hesitate to say "why, pig semen, of course!" Indeed, pig extract, with its mild aroma and low calorie content, counts for a vast majority (some 43%, by industry reports) of semen sales. However, horse extract is a close contender, due to its similar flavor profile and a more economical production process--horses are larger than pigs and thus produce a correspondingly larger payload, necessitating fewer "milkings" per day. Due to these factors, horse extract is commonly found in more "downmarket" food products, as well as in products marketed to members of religious groups with dietary restrictions prohibiting the consumption of pork products. Bull extract is also commercially available, but seldom used due to its overpowering flavor and watery consistency. Extract from other animals tends not to be commercially produced, as they are nearly all considered "acquired tastes"--these are usually found only in specialty gourmet food outlets.

Of course, as with any food item, any semen product is only as good as its production quality standards. Recent years have seen legal restrictions on what extraction machinery may be used, as well as on frequency of extractions. Too many stimulations in a single day tends to place animals in significant physical distress, to say nothing of the drop in product quality (to quote an industry maxim, "once it turns pink, you know it'll stink"). Present-day extraction machinery is also designed to minimize discomfort, with an eye to preventing abrasion in particular. The previous industry standard, the Jizvac 3500, is regrettably still in use in certain Third World nations, despite its unfortunate tendency of "degloving" subjects' genitalia.

The best extracts, of course, originate from the Republic of Seychelles. There pigs of strictly the finest pedigree, fed on a luxurious diet of grain and filtered water, are "milked" by highly-trained extraction specialists bare-handed (they believe latex gloves ruin the aroma). Each pampered pig is extracted but once a week. The resulting extract--popularly, if crudely, known as "the Kobe beef of baby batter"--is used in the most exclusive fine-dining establishments, and has been known to fetch upwards of $1,000 per cubic centimeter on particularly fine seasons.

It is, of course, whispered in certain circles that pig extract is but diluted trash for the masses. Such individuals assert that, instead, human extract is the best. As I have not sampled it for myself I cannot comment as to the veracity of this. However, there is no disputing that obtaining human extract is at best a difficult, expensive chore and at worst a legal impossibility. The legal requirements and restrictions are naturally higher for human extraction, and wide-ranging social and religious taboos have led to often-effective campaigns against its sale. Many states and nations have banned its sale outright, and many of the others have attempted to stamp out the market with high taxes and production limits--to the dismay of many social libertarians, who loudly question why they can deposit their product into their significant others for free but cannot charge money for the "privilege".

In recent years, many black-to-gray market Third World imports have become commercially available, some of them even inexpensively so. However, these cannot be recommended under any circumstances. Assuming these products consist of seminal extract at all (popular substitutes include evaporated milk, epsom salt, and other less wholesome substances), most have not been thoroughly screened for disease and other contaminants. Additionally, many are produced in sweatshop-like conditions from somewhat less than willing subjects. And the less said about extracts originating from Southeast Asia, the better.

So as you can see, the world of semen extract is far more intriguing and complex than most consumers realize. Next time you sit staring idly staring at the ingredient label of your cream-of-mushroom soup, you'll know exactly how that all that creamy goodness made its way from testicles to tummy. Bon appetit!

Next week--Pus: Diseased or Delicious?

I just blue myself

2009-09-20T23:33:00.000-07:00

We've already talked about the Red Box, the introductory set to D&D Basic Rules. That was meant to introduce new players and DMs to the game and get them familiar with the basics. It was a good set, which I found achieved what it set out to do.

However, that boxset only supported campaigns up to level 3. After that, you were introduced to perhaps the most important (for the publishers, at least) element of tabletop RPGs: constantly shelling out for new supplements.

Hence, the Blue Box.

Officially known as Set 2--Expert Rules, this boxset covers play through level 14. At which point--guess what?--you had to buy another boxset if you wanted to keep playing, assuming you didn't just switch to AD&D and buy those books instead.

Unlike my copy of the Red Box, my Blue Box was in VERY good condition. It was in its original shape and none of the edges were ripped. Like my Red Box, this copy was missing only the dice and *sigh* the fucking crayon. Was this a popular thing back in the early 80s? Because so was hair metal, and that's nothing to be proud of either.

The rulebook is also in exceptional condition--almost new, in fact. I probably could throw this one against the wall, not that I would; I have a little more respect for my collection than that. Not a whole lot, mind you, but some.

The boxset also includes Module X1, The Isle of Dread. This one's in somewhat worse shape--most notably the interior booklet and cover are no longer stapled together. But what's really interesting is the back cover:

The edition's first chainmail bikini! Funny, I don't recall seeing Go-Go Dancer on the list of available character classes. Must be in a supplement.

The box also included a couple of mail-in forms to join the RPGA. They're in decent shape--I didn't get pictures of those because, you know, who gives a fuck?

To be honest, this one isn't nearly so entertaining a read as the Red Box. The rulebook assumes you know what they're talking about at this point and consequently becomes very dry. The book introduces plenty of higher-level spells and monsters--most of the latter manage not to embarrass themselves, apart from the devil swine (a malevolent, mind-controlling, shapeshifting...pig). It also introduces the concept of level caps for nonhuman players, an illogical solution to a problem most players weren't aware existed. I've heard many groups chose to ignore the level-cap rules entirely, which resulted in balance issues (allegedly--some of the caps seem a little low to me, especially the halfling's). Party members are allowed to build a stronghold (castle for fighters and clerics, mage's tower for magic-users, etc.) upon reaching a certain level.

Personally I'd just as soon not bother with this bit, as it effectively turns this into a completely different game. You have to pay construction costs, keep the place maintained, hire and pay a garrison, etc. I play D&D to kill monsters and steal their belongings, damn it--if I wanted to deal with that crap I'd play the Crossroad Keep section of Neverwinter Nights 2 again (which, er, I am at the moment).

The book provides a lot more info on the game world's layout, establishing it more firmly as Mystara. No mention of the Hollow World yet, partly because these sets seem to operate on a need-to-know basis (the Red Box didn't stray much beyond the outskirts of the PCs' hometown), but mostly because that setting hadn't been developed yet. Yeah. Don't know why I even brought it up, really.

ANYWAY, there's also a bunch of adventure hooks, ranging from "clear the rats out of an old lady's attic" to "expose a popular local gambler as one of those shapeshifting evil pigs". My favorite, though, would be the one with an evil--sorry, chaotic--cleric raising zombies and using them to operate a local sawmill. Because, frankly, I think sawmills are an underused tableau in Dungeons & Dragons, don't you agree?

As modules go, The Isle of Dread isn't terribly interesting--there's no final goal to be accomplished, no firmly-established reason for the party to be on the island in the first place. It's mainly a collection of possible encounters, more like a miniature campaign setting than anything else. I guess it's all right if your group's into dinosaurs, restless natives, superintelligent giant spiders and flying-squirrel people.

So, would I play D&D Basic with Expert Rules? Eh, I guess so, but I don't see when or why I would. I mean, I'd be dabbling in older editions at most--I have 4th edition if I really want to get serious about D&D. I can't really foresee playing Basic often enough to get past level 3. Again, there's nothing wrong with this boxset at all (evil pigs aside), I just don't see how it effects me.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off in search of the Go-Go Dancer Supplement.

"Why did I do this, again?"

2009-09-17T00:40:00.000-07:00

That was the question running through my head over and over again last Saturday.

Unlike certain assholes I could mention, I elected to spend September 12th riding the MAX Green Line on its inaugural day of service. At no point did I call the train a Nazi or suggest it was from Kenya. Naturally, I wore my best green shirt for the occasion.

I rode one of the new-model trains from Pioneer Square to Clackamas Town Center. I rather like the new trains--they look a lot sleeker, both inside and out, and they lack the new buses' chlorine-and-farts smell.

As you might be able to imagine, the train was fucking RAMMED. Getting a seat was out of the question--I burrowed into a corner and counted myself lucky. Not the most comfortable position, but at least nobody was bumping their crotch into my ass.

Stickly, was it SLOW. It seemed like every single stop had someone in a wheelchair getting on or off. Just getting from Pioneer Square to Gateway seemed to take about 45 minutes, and that was only the halfway point. On top of that, the cacophony of screaming children trilled from every direction. Plus several of the people I was smooshed up against smelled like they hadn't bathed in days or weeks. To say nothing of the individuals who saw fit to talk on their cellphones at the top of their lungs, repeating everything at least twice.

What was odd about all this was how little it bothered me. Not a year ago any one of these circumstances would have driven me to near-homicidal ire, leaving me in a snit for the rest of the day. But instead I was oddly...calm. Goes to show how much I've changed in the past year, I supposit.

The new stops were all right, I guess--modern, but drab. There were some very lovely pieces of artwork at each, which I was in no position to get pictures of. The stops were so segregated I couldn't really see what was at each of them--I would've had to get off and walk around, and by that point I just wanted to get to Town Center and get this over with.

The Town Center stop itself was the flashiest--it stood on an elevated platform looking over the mall area, with a winding ramp, stairs, AND an elevator leading up to it, AND a skybridge linking it to a parking garage. Short of putting up a giant sign reading ESCAPE ROUTE, they couldn't have made it any more clear which way to go if you wanted to get out of Clackamas.

I hadn't been to Town Center since about December 2007, and it hadn't changed much. There were a few new chain restaurants in the parking lot, none of which you couldn't find downtown. The interior of the mall itself was exactly the same. Oh, there were a couple new stores--one of which hadn't been there on my last trip and was already having a going-out-of-business sale--but the basic layout was identical and pretty much everything I remembered was still there.

Not that I spent a lot of time investigating this. I went in, bought something to drink, when suddenly it hit me--"wait a minute, I've voluntarily traveled to Clackamas Town Center! Why have I done this terrible thing?!"

So I got out of the mall and got back to the escape route, fast as my overmuscled legs could carry me. Would you believe there was a line? Yes, the ramp was crammed full of people as desperate to get back to civilization as I. I was certain I'd be waiting half an hour or more just to reach the train platform, but somehow I got on the first available train.

It wasn't nearly as crowded on the way back, somehow--I even got a seat about halfway back to Gateway. It was a lot faster going too--they must have decided the wheelies were slowing them down too much and banned them for the rest of the day. As God intended.

Eventually I got back downtown--or "civilization", as I now thought of it. To cleanse the horrible experience from my palette, I went first to Ground Kontrol for a round or three of Ms. Pac-Man. Then I got propositioned by a hooker and her pimp. (I didn't plan this bit, it just sort of happened.) Then I went to Widmer's Oktoberfest celebration, inexplicably being held in September. THEN I went to another bar and spent the rest of the night describing a web cartoon where a man kills and dismembers his entire family to a pretty girl. By the time I finished that, I barely remembered there WAS a Green Line, let alone that I'd had a shitty time riding it.

So, would I ride Green Line again? Sure, why not? Silly question if you ask me. Sure, the first time out left me thinking I'd rather watch a Tyler Perry movie than do this again, but those were special circumstances. To me, MAX is a tool, nothing more. I have no sentimental attachment to it--it merely gets me from Point A to Point B, and quite efficiently at that. In fact, I rode it again the next day--I was headed towards Gateway and it was the first available train. By then the novelty had worn off and it wasn't any more crowded than any other MAX line. And I'm sure I'll need to get to one of the new stops sooner or later. Maybe even all the way down to Clackamas Town Center again, much as the mere thought makes me shudder...

"Dum-dum-dum-dum-dummmm!"

2009-09-07T23:53:00.000-07:00

You know, I've been doing entirely too many posts about old D&D stuff lately. I need to knock it off for a bit before I turn into just another special-interest blog nobody cares about.

So today, I'm going back to the theme of my very first post and (over)analyze another horrifying Youtube video! You may recall my scathing denunciation of Attack Attack!'s execrable-yet-hilarious music video. In all likelihood I'll do another music video someday (NO I WILL NOT DO THAT BROKENCYDE VIDEO YOU FUCKS), but today I'd like to take a slightly different tack and dive into the seedy realm of badly-animated interreligious sniping.

Hence this, which doesn't seem to have a name other than some variation of "Cartoon Banned By The Mormon Church" (supposedly they get it taken down a lot, so let me know if you get a "video unavailable" message):

0:01--"Space. The Final Frontier." Boy, space sure is cottony today...

0:06--I have to hand it to the narrator--his voice IS pretty metal.

0:14--Two blonde people down, 384,495,329 to go.

0:17--Funny how gods always go for the Classical Greek motif. If the Classical Greeks had invented the safety pin, in this case.

0:26--DAMN, Elohim has big ears! Plus his right arm looks like a penis. (must...not...make..."baby's arm" joke...)

0:31--Mmhmm, fascinating, fascinating--wait, human parents WHERE? I'll get back to that.

0:35--HYAIIIIIEEEE!!! HIS GLASSY EYES SEE EVERY COLOR OF FEAR!!! *pant* *pant* Best get used to this. You know, if I was making a cartoon and couldn't draw a non-scary face to save my infant child's life I probably wouldn't zoom in on them so damn much.

0:45--So Elohim aged about 60 years in between dying and getting his own planet with ~~72 virgins~~ (NO! BAD C.!)? Hey, all the cool gods were doing the bearded-old-man look back then!

0:51--Stickly, Elohim, did they ALL have to be the same model? I mean, I like Nilla Wafers but I throw in the occasional Oreo.

1:00--You don't know what I was thinking when I heard the phrase "endless celestial sex".

1:04--BILLIONS?! Okay, now you REALLY don't want to know what I was thinking.

1:13--Ah, here we see Elohim displaying this short's default facial expression, "eerie boredom".

1:16--Whoa, I didn't know James Hetfield was the devil! That WOULD explain St. Anger...

1:17--Eeeeeeeyeah. Jesus is the single creepiest-looking person in this thing. Somehow I don't think that was what they were aiming for.

1:24--See?! Earth hasn't even been CREATED yet at this point! So where the FUCK were those other humans?! Am I the only one who noticed this?! Hell, I guess it wouldn't be a creation myth if it made sense and was internally consistent.

1:27--Sadly, the last known Genital-Shield Bush died of blight in 1817.

1:38--"Screw you, Dad! The Heidi Montag clones totally dig my neckbeard!"

1:43--See, I don't know that I would've made Jesus look so much like an autistic rapist. Just sayin'.

2:05--"We'll show them! We'll never comb our hair again! BEDHEADZ 4 LYFE, YO!"

2:15--Why do I suddenly want to whistle the Futurama theme?

2:26--Yes. They went there. Sorry.

2:35--Yes, they're still going there. Sorry again. No, I don't know their explanation for Asians. I don't need to know that badly.

I should point out here that I did research this stuff. Most of it checks out, though the Mormon church did eventually retcon the explaining-the-races thing, if only to keep their tax-exempt status. So now they just hate gays. Moving on...

2:37--"White and delightsome"--didn't that used to be Wonder Bread's tagline? Hey, it's better than "We Found A Way To Bake Air".

2:57--Wait, it's a starbase now?

3:04--I like the look on their faces like "*sigh* Okay, let's get this fucking over with."

3:08--Why are all Mormons named Orson?

3:14--Um...do they mean the Mary I THINK they mean?

3:25--Yeah, Dan Brown! Write a crappy novel about THIS, bitch!

3:30--DAMN that wall's high!

3:36--"Gee, it sure was nice of Mr. Kirk to let me beam down first! Why did he want me to wear that red shirt, though? Oh well!"

3:38--This is my favorite bit right here. I love those "Say WHAAAAT?!" expressions.

3:45--"Hee hee hee! I like puppies!"

3:51--"Come on guys, so what if they have bronze armor and shields? We have stone-tipped arrows? How can we lose?"

3:56--"*sigh* Okay guys, tonight we dine in hell and all that. Let's just get this over with."

4:00--"Ha-ha! I bet you were expecting to get stabbed! Well, it's the pommel for you! Ha-ha!"

4:03--"Ha-ha! The bronze armor is like so much papier-mache! Luckily my xiphoid process caught the arrow! Ha-ha!"

4:21--Here we see Captain Murphy from Sealab 2021 hiding his favorite recipe book, The Secret Ingredient Is Love, Damn It!

4:36--And here's old Joey himself. You know, I try not to pick on one religion's specific quirks over another, because to me they're all equally bullshit. I will say, however, that most other religions' messiah figures tend not to have quite so many fraud convictions.

4:39--Hey! That thing's thicker than it was when Captain Murphy first hid it!

4:47--Animators of the world, please stop using rotoscoping. Even when it's not disturbing as hell, it just reminds people of the Ralph Bakshit version of The Lord of the Rings, and you don't want that.

4:50--Why are they all wearing the same outfit? Did they research this thing at a 19th century-themed restaurant?

5:08--Hey, those guys tried to talk to me on the way to work last week! That reminds me, I still need to send one of those guys a letter.

5:17--"Okay, that's Hitler outta the way! Somebody wheel in Stalin!"

5:18--Question: Why the fuck are they doing this at night? They're not gonna dig him up, are they?

5:24--I love the look on this guy's face. "Please don't know about the figging please don't know about the figging please don't know about the figging..."

5:30--And Jesus has a look on his face like "Oh, we know about the figging, Mr. Frantz. How, you may ask? You just told us." DUN-DUN-DUNNNNN!!!

If you saw the movie Religulous, you probably remember this bit...wait, so Joseph Smith got stuck as the afterlife's Paula Abdul? The frakking messiah didn't land his own planet of sex robots?

5:43--"Well, this is peculiar! Sweetie, were we this blonde back when we were alive?"

5:49--So, in the Mormon faith gods are basically Tyranids. Makes sense to me.

5:59--Oh, really? I begin to see why Mr. Big For His Britches didn't land the ~~72 virg~~ I MEAN BLONDE SEX ROBOTS. Yes. That's what I meant.

This version doesn't have it, obviously, but the original version I saw of this on Youtube followed up the cartoon with a live-action segment. This thing, apparently, is a segment of a longer "documentary" dedicated to debunking Mormonism, made by some fundamentalist Christian group or another. What was funniest about that bit was how the fact that Mormon marriages sometimes end in divorce seemed to anger them more than the whole "God's an alien and Jesus and Satan were brothers" bit.

Well, unlike with the Attack Attack! video, I actually DO know what to say. Most of it, however, would be as angry and incoherent as this video, and nowhere near as entertaining. Try as I might, I just can't seem to make a mandatory sterilization rant funny, not in text form at least.

Besides, Mormons have brought so many good things into this world! Like, say, the Original Battlestar Galactica...wait, no, bad example. Oh! How about Children of the Mind...gack, no, even worse example. Uhh--Oh! Howsabout the Dragonlance novels...No, no, no! Oh, wait, I have one! How could I forget the

(Editor's Note: At this point, C. apparently smashed his monitor screen, intending to slash his wrists with one of the resulting shards of glass--however, because he is, in his own words, "a huge pain-wimp" this resulted only in minor lacerations. He was found shortly afterward applying the resulting blood to his own face--which he later explained to "war paint"--and muttering about dropping various abortifacients into the Great Salt Lake. Attempts to calm C. by explaining that the Great Salt Lake consists of saltwater--hence its name--and is therefore not used as a water supply proved unsuccessful. The Editor treated C.'s injuries and then--at C.'s request--proceeded to "kiss it and make it all better.")

I had a funny title for this post but I forgot it

2009-09-04T00:37:00.000-07:00

So, as promised, here's Hollow World.

Unlike the red box, this is a complete copy. The box is in fair-to-good condition. Upon removing the shrinkwrap I found the top corners to be ripped, but otherwise it's far better than the red box's bottom-of-the-bookpile-chic look.

The rulebooks, on the other hand, were fucking PRISTINE. I'm not entirely convinced this set was ever actually used, though the condition of the box tells me it must have been. I was in genuine awe--I handled these things with a care approaching reverence.

The maps were also in good shape, though they showed some basic wear and tear on the folds. They're nicely-done--I had to fight the urge to put them up on my walls! And the cat's endless fascination with all things D&D continues. I knew I should have named her "DM Kitteh".

D&D Basic didn't have too much in the way of campaign settings--certainly not the plethora offered with AD&D. Most of those it did have were set in Mystara, a campaign world which got sort of lost in the shuffle and failed to outlive D&D Basic itself.

Hollow World is one of those settings. The basic concept is that the world of Mystara turned out to be--guess what?--hollow. The problem of gravity IS explained, but this should still mean the planet wouldn't have a magnetic field, or plate tectonics, or...

*WHAM* *WHAM* *WHAM* Sorry, I just realized I was trying to inject hard science into Dungeons & Dragons so I had to go slam my head against the wall as punishment. Not getting a square peg in that round hole, not even with a lathe.

Anyway, a bunch of Immortals (i.e. deities--Mystara's gods are nearly all mortals who reached one form of apotheosis or another), led by the superintelligent turtleneck-wearing dinosaur Ka the Preserver, hit upon the idea of terraforming the world's interior and using it as a nature preserve of sorts. Over time, they also started adding communities of dying civilizations, magically inhibiting them--using the "Spell of Preservation", which I came to think of as "the Tupperware spell"--so as to make them more or less culturally static (and provide justification for the planet of hats phenomenon, for once). They can still fight and enslave one another, but they can't be assimilated or wiped out. That's where the PCs come in--probably through the huge-ass holes at the planet's poles (and I just know some pussy indie-rock band will be swiping that for an album title).

My main gripe with Hollow World is that it tries way too hard to stay 1:1 with real-world ancient history. Damn near every culture described in the DM's Sourcebook is an expy of some ancient Earth civilization--Azcans (Aztecs), Nithians (ancient Egypt), Oltecs (Mayans), Beastmen (Inuit), etc., plus dinosaurs. Because everything's better with dinosaurs, right? (PROTIP: yes) They've usually been changed around a little--to introduce a little more gender equality or to create some obvious campaign antagonists; the Azcans, for example, are so incredibly evil I'm amazed nobody complained. Personally I play D&D to "experience" stuff I can't see on the History Channel. This setting is weird even by D&D standards (it's lit by an artificial sun that never goes down and the horizon curves up, for Stickly's sake)--if they'd taken that weirdness and run with it I would've been much happier.

Unlike the red box, this set is almost all fluff. I'd heard it was renowned for its completeness (that's why I sought it out) and I can see why. The level of detail on each culture in the DM's Sourcebook is nigh overwhelming, and there are a lot of them. Sure, they're not all winners, but even the duds (the Kogolor dwarves, the Kubitts) are more hilarious than irritating. And kudos to TSR for injecting some originality into the dark elves for once.

I couldn't help but notice a surprising number of typos in both this and the red box. I didn't mention it then because I thought it was just my nitpicky side at work again, but if anything Hollow World has even more grammar and spelling errors than the red box. Who copy-edited these things, Glenn Beck? You might not think it's a big deal--Chris--but remember these things are rulebooks, where even the most obvious errors could very well attract interest from the Lollipop Guild. Even if it that's not the case, it wouldn't kill you to look these things over before you charge people money for them. Hell, I write a free blog for an audience of, maybe, six and I still try to make sure words are spelled properly and the grammar is halfway decent. And that's why you should give me all your money. Right now.

The Player's Guide is pretty much a less detailed version of the DM's Sourcebook, including rules for playing characters from the various Hollow World cultures (which weapons/armor the Tupperware spell will/won't let them use, what bonuses they get if the limitation are severe, level caps, etc.), the penalties for going against cultural biases (the Tupperware spell won't even let you DISGUISE yourself as a member of another culture), the higher requirements for learning magic, which spells don't work in Hollow World, etc. Funnily enough, the DM's Sourcebook says not to let players read this Guide the whole way through, which seems a forlorn hope to me.

The Adventure Book is exactly what it sounds--sample adventures and plot hooks both for getting into the Hollow World and keeping players occupied once they're there. There's nothing particularly wrong with this one, but I was surprised at how meanspirited some of the hooks are--the Beastmen one in particular isn't suited to D&D's style of play at all. If I were running this I'd take it in an entirely different direction. Like the DM's Sourcebook it insists on making more work for DMs by making half the damn NPCs willing to join the party's entourage.

Again, I'd play Hollow World. The ruleset is starting to branch out a bit, testing the waters of demihumans with character classes (e.g. the warrior-elf and wokai, who were originally called "wicca". That's...unspeakably hilarious) and so forth. Its own simplicity sometimes gets in its way, especially with the alignment system--it seriously expects you to believe the plainly Lawful Evil Azcan emperor is Chaotic. It does, however, flirt with the system's boundaries, including sympathetic Chaotics and asshole Lawfuls. And the basic concept is similar enough to 4th edition's "Points of Light" conceit that it's an easy conceptual leap.

Oh, and I wasn't kidding about that turtleneck. See?

Hey kid, wanna see my big red box?

2009-09-01T00:32:00.000-07:00

So, I picked up a copy of the 1983 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, commonly known as the "red box".

As you can see, the condition of the box left something to be desired. I don't know if someone sat on this or if it was just at the bottom of a stack of books, but the box is more caved-in than my underboobs. As you can see, the cat is dying to play.

Here are the rulebooks--yes, they used that exact same piece of artwork THREE TIMES. It's even more lazy and shameless than 4th Edition's recycling of 3rd Edition art. Notice also how the text is juuuuuust inconspicuous enough so it's easy to start reading the wrong one by mistake. How clever of TSR. These books are in okay condition--kind of fragile, but so long as you don't go throwing them against a wall they'll be fine. Whoever owned this thing last marked one of the DM Rulebook pages with a paperclip, leaving rust stains on the tops of several pages. The box was also supposed to contain dice and a crayon (more on that in a bit), but this copy didn't have them.

By this point in its history, Dungeons & Dragons was already well into the multiple-edition-clusterfuck stage. This was no less than the third version of D&D Basic in six years. Players were supposed to start with Basic and progress into Advanced as they grew more accustomed to the game, but TSR wound up dividing into camps--Gary Gygax, working on Advanced, wanted specific rules to cover any and every situation, while Basic's developers preferred a more improvisational approach--and the two versions of D&D effectively cut ties. Further adding to the confusion, the original tan box wasn't discontinued until 1979. Stickly, it's like they WANTED their fans to dissolve into squabbling factions. There's also a bizarre rumor that Basic was a plot to screw Dave Arneson out of credit and/or royalties. If that was the plan, I probably wouldn't have thanked the guy at the beginning of the Player's Guide, or listed him as D&D's co-creator at the beginning of the Dungeon Master's Rulebook, but maybe that's just me. (To make this even funnier, I've also heard a rumor that the second edition of AD&D was a plot to screw Gygax out of credit and royalties. Can we just agree these guys were shit businessmen and move on, please?)

Of all the various editions of D&D, this one is the most like a toy. The books are written to be easy for children to comprehend, and it bends over backwards to avoid causing offense ("no, a cleric's religion ISN'T important--look, let's just not talk about it, OKAY?!")--this might be the only pre-3rd version not to have any chainmail bikinis. Perhaps the most toy-like aspect, though, would be the dice--apparently you were supposed to color in the numbers on the dice with the crayon. What the hell? Was number-paint an option TSR forgot to order? Did the little paint-in-the-numbers robotic arm at the dice factory break down? Was a few dabs of paint just some unspeakable financial hardship but that closet full of crayons was just sitting there? I wanna know, dammit!

Speaking of the art, apart from the flagrant copying it's pretty good--nothing in here looks like Erol Otus fingerpainting on a Trapper Keeper with his own feces. Sure, it mostly rips off Barry Windsor-Smith, but what fantasy artist didn't back in the 80s?

The Player's Guide introduces you to the rules in an unusual way by D&D standards--it starts you off playing solo. Naturally you play a fighter, since we're still in the period where that's the only useful class at 1st level. I played this section myself (NO, I didn't use the included character sheet--I just wrote it all out on scratch paper) and I have to admit it worked pretty well. What's really odd, though, is that the Player's Guide also plugs a few solo modules. Funny, I can't imagine those being big sellers. Also, I don't know if I would've thrown a solo 1st-level fighter up against a rust monster. I mean, I beat it, but still. Actually, since the Basic rust monster isn't capable of physically hurting you, it occurs to me that an effective strategy would be to strip naked and beat it to death with your fists.

A bit about classes--I think it's funny how the Player's Guide basically admits "yeah, you can play a party of all fighters and you'll probably be okay". 1st-level wizards--sorry, "magic-users", because why use one word when you can use two, right?--are even more useless than usual; their spellbook is very, very heavy and they don't even get to pick their own spells. Clerics are as boring and indispensable as ever, and thieves use WAAAAAAY too many percentile rolls. Also, the non-human races (elf, dwarf, and halfling) are their own classes because TSR were a bunch of cocksucking racists. They claim the demihumans are more powerful, but that only really seems true of one of them (PROTIP: it's the elf).

This edition uses the deeply, deeply stupid lower-is-better Armor Class system, with chart for what you need to roll to hit depending on AC and hit dice. I actually approve for once--this is aimed at children, after all, but why make things easy on the little bastards? Just wait 'til they see THAC0--then they'll beg for Uncle Gary's red box! BEG, I TELL YOU!!! *pant* *pant* Sorry.

The Dungeon Master's Rulebook contains the standard DM stuff--monsters, treasure tables, and a sample adventure. This set is only for levels 1-3, so it doesn't have TOO many insta-kill traps/monsters, but it can't resist putting a few in there (such as the normal poison rules, and one trap in the sample adventure involving a set of golden plates). To paraphrase Blackbeard, if TSR didn't kill one of you occasionally, you might forget who they were. It's actually not nearly as sadistic as AD&D, though--the Rulebook warns DMs that just because you can throw ten goblins at once at a 1st-level party doesn't mean you should and so forth. What's really weird, I think, is that experience is partly--hell, mostly--based on how much lewt you wind up with (1 gp=1 xp). Yes, excellent! They'll be fighting over treasure division as it is--maybe this way they'll even shed blood MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Sorry again.

So, if the opportunity came up, would I play this? Yes. It's as bare bones as D&D gets--there is pretty much no fluff of any kind in these books, even the alignment system is so abstract they might as well have left it out--but that just increases its pick-up-and-play value. This edition is almost perfectly suited to one-shots. It's a great edition for dashing off characters you have nothing invested in and killing them off in increasingly hilarious ways, and sometimes that's what you're looking for in a D&D game. I'm not about to toss aside 4th edition or anything, but yeah, I'd play this. Probably enjoy it, too.

TSR, however, were still racists. Who liked the taste of penis.

Hurrah, more useless shit

2009-08-30T23:51:00.000-07:00

Recently I decided to start doing something bizarre--something else bizarre, that is. I've decided to start collecting material from previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons I've never played. Not that I'll be much of a collector--I fully intend to open and read everything I acquire. This is actually pretty liberating; it means I can even buy damaged stuff! So long as any box sets I find have all the books and stuff inside, I'll buy it! I was already kind of doing this--I've owned a water-damaged copy of the original Fiend Folio for a few years now.

Some exceptions: I don't plan on collecting any 3.5 stuff--in fact, I just sold off most of my remaining 3.5 books. I still have my old Player's Handbook, since the spine's damaged and I didn't think Powell's would take it. That will, in all likelihood, be the only 3.5 book in that collection.

Why? Simply put, I had so many unpleasant experiences playing that edition I've come to hate it. Every group I've played it with wound up violently hating one another after about three combats; my involvement with the last one ended so acrimoniously that not only did I not play D&D again until 4th Edition (which I like, should you wish to flame me for it), it left me hating the entire human race (well, left me hating the entire human race more). That, and I might be interested in actually playing some of the stuff I find, and I will never play 3.5 again. I know it's unusual for D&D players to despise the edition they started with, but then I also thought modrons and Spelljammer were cool.

Also, I doubt I'll be doing this with the original 1974 "tan box" D&D that started this whole female-repelling mess. Not because I'm not interested, but because it's just not economically realistic, especially if I'm not doing this for some theoretical monetary gain. There's a copy of it for sale at Guardian Games, where I picked up the stuff below. The box is in HORRENDOUS shape (it looks like someone hurled a bucket of santorum over it) and one of the three booklets is missing. And they STILL want $100 for it, leading me to conclude I'd have to take a shit directly into the box before it'd lose value.

So, yesterday I went to Guardian Games (possibly the best hobby store in the Portland area, notwithstanding its odd location) in search of an inaugural addition or two. I came home with these:

In case you can't make it out (when, exactly, did I smear my cell phone's camera lens in Vaseline?) those are copies of the 1981 "Red Box" edition of the D&D Basic Rules Set and the Hollow World campaign box set. See what I mean about damaged stuff? The Hollow World's in great shape, but the Red Box looks like Comic Book Guy sat on it.

Their overall condition can wait, though. See, I plan on reviewing each new acquisition right here in this blog. I'll be including photos, general rundowns on each piece's condition, and of course massive quantities of snark on the game material itself. My Red Box review should be up in the next day or so, right after I finish reading both booklets, with Hollow World forthcoming. I'll also be sticking in reviews of the Fiend Folio and *sigh* the 3.5 PHB somewhere along the way. I can feel my attractiveness to women shriveling as I speak. Not that I had much of that anyway.

Postmortem

2009-08-22T12:29:00.000-07:00

(Note: In my last entry, I somehow failed to mention that Howard Phillips works for Shadow Complex's developer, the bizarrely-named Chair Entertainment. Had I done so, my brief reference to Howard & Nester would have actually made some contextual sense. TIP regrets the error.)

Well, I finished Shadow Complex this morning. I'm even more convinced now it's a great game--you know why? I got to the end and found myself annoyed to have run out of game. That doesn't often happen--even in the case of, say, Mass Effect I was content to wait 3 years for a sequel.

I wasn't kidding about this being a Metroidvania game. The map screen looks exactly, and I mean EXACTLY, like Super Metroid's (and, for that matter, Symphony of the Night's). All the other elements are there too--the starting with nothing and slowly building into a killing machine, the partially-open world that becomes gradually more accessible as you find more powerups, etc.

Sorry to dickride so much, but I'm just blown away at how much effort they put into this thing. This is, after all, a $15 Live release, and a licensed game at that. They would have been well within their rights to just dash something off and forget about it. The benefits they'll reap for not doing so should (but probably won't) serve as an object lesson to film and TV studios looking to cash in on all this newfangled Atari stuff.

That said, it's hardly perfect. Like I said, it's very short. The writing (by Peter David, as it turns out) is perfectly serviceable and knows when to stay out of the way most of the time, but the twist ending (without giving anything away, not that that's any kind of favor) is, as usual for twist endings, fucking stupid. Honestly Pete, I know you're just a work-for-hire guy but you're usually better than that. Also, if anybody out there didn't see it coming about, oh, a quarter of the way through the game or so, please write in and let me know what it's like to be the single dumbest person on the planet. I'm thinking of doing a series of posts where I interview the world's thickest people, and Sarah Palin and Jeremy Clarkson haven't been returning my calls. And why did the player character have to look so much like the guy from Uncharted? Not only that, they're both voiced by the same guy! It's enough to make me wonder if this was originally an Uncharted project they retooled after the rights fell through or something. If that's the case, it's even more amazing the game turned out as well as it did...

And you know what? I think I am going to read Empire now. Oh, I'm not going to buy it (that's what libraries are for)--that "use it to pay a lawyer when you get arrested for soliciting gay sex" bit only works so many times. I know I shouldn't hatchet my counts before they chicken, but just from reading the Wikipedia entry it looks like I'll find plenty of horrible things to say about it. And if/when I do, it'll all wind up here.

Until then, however, I need to get back to unlocking the "Make 'Em Scream" achievement.

You (insert derogatory noun here)

2009-08-19T12:46:00.000-07:00

Damn you, Howard Phillips.

You tricked me.

As a child, reading your hilarious adventures in Video Game Land with a turkey-headed preteen, little did I suspect that one day you would dupe me into giving my barely-earned money to a Mormon of the worst order. A man who believes those who don't share his preference of body orifice eat white babies right out of the cradle.

You see, the Xbox Live game Shadow Complex is based in the setting of the novel Empire, the latest neocon twaddle from formerly respectable science fiction author/homophobic asshole Orson Scott Card. And it's really freaking good. Seriously, it's a Metroidvania game of the best kind. It's everything the critics have been saying about it, and that's a rarity.

And it really fucking hurts to recommend it. Because there's no escaping the fact that some of the $15 you spend on it--and it may not be any vast amount, but still--will go into the coffers of a man who considers the legalization of same-sex marriage grounds for armed rebellion. In fact, Card really, REALLY likes talking about how much he hates gay people. And as we all know, the people who scream loudest about this stuff tend to have the most to hide.

And yet, this is still a really good game.

So take my money, Mr. Card, with my blessing. Take the dollar or whatever you get in royalties from the 1200 points I spent buying Shadow Complex. You'll doubtless need it for legal fees when you inevitably get caught tapping your toes in a Salt Lake City International Airport men's room. But know this:

You still suck. Not just cock, but in general. You hit your literary peak 24 years ago and since then your writing talent's evaporated along with your brains and your empathy. Oh, and you're not just ugly on the inside:

Stickly! You look like one of those Down's Syndrome kids. That'd certainly explain a lot, but every Down's Syndrome kid I ever met was a lot nicer than you. Hey, if you can make fun of others for being born different, I can make fun of YOU for being born Mom-slapping hideous.

And you know what? I hope gay marriage DOES become legal (well, I already did) and you DO try to start another Civil War over it. Because the thought of you being forced to your (no doubt heavily callused) knees and drilled through the back of the head as a traitor verges on boner-inducing to me.

Get fucked. Oh, and good game by the way.

I don't wanna dip my balls in it

2009-08-14T00:05:00.000-07:00

Reno 911! has been canceled.

You know, I've just about had it with Comedy Central. It's gotten to the point that if The Daily Show and The Colbert Report got canceled, I'd have zero reason to watch it. To answer the immediate question, no, I'm not forgetting South Park--I lost all patience with that show once they saw fit to become the propaganda wing of the Libertarian Party. I was pissed off when Dave Chappelle bailed--now I wonder what he knew that I didn't.

This is, after all, the same network that canceled TV Funhouse after one season but kept bringing back Mind of Mencia. The same network who insists on punishing us with reruns of Scrubs and MADtv, shows which respectively showcase everything wrong with sitcoms and sketch comedy. The same network that thought (for a mercifully brief moment) it could bring back Futurama without the original voice cast. The same network that, most unforgivably of all, helped catapult Dane Cook and Larry the Cable Guy to superstardom. And the less I say about their original movies, the better.

Of course, there's no accounting for taste (I thought and still think Drawn Together was funny--it's not something I'm proud of)--they wouldn't keep airing this horrid shit if people weren't watching, right? And most of the really terrible shows are done and gone in one season, so perhaps I'm being unfair. In fact, I AM being unfair--The Daily Show and Colbert aren't going anywhere.

Still though...Dane Cook.

Errr...

2009-08-11T00:38:00.000-07:00

Apparently I'm only eating about 1373 calories a day...

Should I be worried?

Rejection

2009-08-04T00:48:00.000-07:00

So, there's this Facebook page called I'm Not Right In The Head. The basic idea is that it's where people come together to share how "not right" they are, make up funny captions for odd photos, read odd news stories, etc. As anyone who knows me can attest, I'd be all over this like hubris on an Objectivist. And I was.

Until today.

You see, INRITH (as I now think of them) frequently held a "fill in the blank" activity. It'd be something like "I'm not right in the head because I enjoy watching________", and you were supposed to--guess what?--fill in the blank.

Now, something else people who know me can tell you: I will NOT do something like this halfway. If prompted to shock, startle or outright offend, I'm gonna start where most people stop. There is very little I hold sacred. Your mother? She's a whore. The pope? He's molesting a child RIGHT NOW. Your favorite band? They suck. Your religion? Lies. Bigotry? Hilarious. You? Puh-leeze. Me? A physically unattractive, festering ball of neuroses who ridicules the flaws of others to hide his own massive insecurities, content to waste his life taking the path of least resistance. Were I to attempt an Aristocrats joke, I'm pretty sure all of reality would implode into a scatological vortex.

At the same time, though? I don't mean it--don't mean most of it, anyway. I am not a racist or a homophobe or a rapist or a misogynist or an anti-Semite or anything like that. This is because when I say gross or disturbing things, it is entirely for the purposes of humor--to effectively shock a laugh out of the listener. If I really was any of the things listed above, well, it wouldn't be funny anymore. It would, instead, become merely disgusting and pathetic. Like Glenn Beck. (Oh, and I DO mean that one.)

Anyway, back to INRITH. Their most recent fill-in-the-blank was "I'm not right in the head because I once made love in________". At this point, I'd already decided I was going to take the concept of "not right in the head" as far as it would go, adopting the persona of someone who's genuinely miswired upstairs. Since this is pretty much me anyway, this proved rather easy. I could tell my entries tended to be the weirdest of the bunch, and this time was no exception.

My entry this time was "my mom's ass".

Yeah.

Let me clarify: I did NOT mean I had fucked my mother in the ass. I meant to imply I had once made love to a woman unrelated to myself, and we had just so happened to be inside my mother's ass at the time. Looking back now, I can see how this could be misinterpreted.

As my mouse hovered over that "comment" button, I experienced a pang of doubt. Do I really want to say this? I thought. Am I about to step over the line from transgressive humor to mere repulsion?

I need to start listening to that voice, because the answer is invariably, with the resonation of a slamming door in a previously-thought-abandoned house, "YES."

But I hit that button anyway. Just like I always do.

The next day, this message was in my inbox:

that's it

there's Not Right and there's sick.
your comments are sick.

goodbye

Wow. In my defense, I'd point out that "not right" and "sick" are virtually synonymous, but still...wow. Stuff like that makes me wonder: Am I really as funny as I think I am? Or am I just another jackass who doesn't know when or how to keep his mouth shut?

Thoughts?

Note to self...

2009-07-26T23:13:00.000-07:00

Stop offering unsolicited corrections of mispronounced words. People seem to hate that. Seriously, hate that shit to fuck.

Police Report On Death Of Billy Mays

2009-07-23T12:07:00.000-07:00

Subject was found in bedroom of his Tampa, Florida home. The body was laying in bed, nude and arranged in a cross position. Subject's head was at the foot of the bed, possibly implying an "inverted cross". There were no signs of struggle and nothing in the room was disturbed or reported missing. Subject appeared to be in good health apart from an apparent swelling or goiter in his throat; however, the subject's medical records indicated no history of this.

The top half of the mattress was soaked in blood, later determined to be the subject's. Cursory examination of the body revealed that the subject's testicles had been removed. Lab analysis of the wound indicated they had been torn from the body, likely with bare hands--no knife marks were found.

Investigation was continued into the adjoining bathroom. Again, nothing was out of place or reported missing. However, a device--later identified as a Slap Chop brand food chopper--was found in the sink, covered in blood later determined to be the subject's. No fingerprints were found on the device. The device's blades were coated in a reddish-pink "slurry". Tests later revealed this to be the subject's missing organ. The phrase YOU'RE GONNA LOVE MY NUTS was found written on the bathroom wall in a mixture of blood (the subject's), semen (the subject's) and organ matter (again, the subject's).

Due to the lack of other apparent trauma, investigators on the scene initially believed the cause of death to be shock and loss of blood resulting from the pelvic trauma. However, the true cause of death--as well as the subject's throat swelling--was revealed during autopsy. The coroner found a foreign object in the subject's throat, lodged so deeply it was undetectable via external inspection, even if the subject's mouth were opened. The object--later identified as a Shamwow!(c) brand absorbent towel--was found to have brought about the subject's death through asphyxiation. The object had additionally caused significant trauma to the subject's trachea during insertion. Further tests revealed the object had absorbed ten(10) times its weight of the subject's blood, swelling to considerable size and becoming visible as a "goiter".

At the time of this report's writing, the investigation is ongoing.

Sorry, Janelle

2009-07-18T00:38:00.000-07:00

So last Saturday was my buddy Chris Green's 30th birthday party. Much fun and enjoyment was had by all, especially me. Because I'm the king now. But I'll get to that later.
I wound up taking a pathetically tiny number of pictures--far fewer than I meant to. I post them here now, with all appropriate snark.

Here's the man of the hour himself. I thought the guy couldn't look any more like a leprechaun. Boy was I wrong. Bonus points for the glasses making him look like a late 80s-early 90s VR leprechaun.

This has nothing to do with anything. Just a d-bag on a recumbent bike. Please note I don't actually know for sure he's a d-bag, but usually if a guy's on a recumbent bike it's a pretty good indicator. Note also the entirely unrelated party behind him. There seemed to be a lot of them around that part of the Waterfront that day.

And here's Shaun--one of the party planners, theoretically the one who came up with the idea of the guests wearing green. And here's what he showed up wearing.

And now his shame is laid bare for all of this blog's millions and millions of readers.

Of course I wore green myself--a T-shirt, festooned with a design which looked, as I repeatedly put it, like somebody ran over NBC's "The More You Know" logo. That line killed for some reason.

Properly attired at last! His punishment is to look like a Hawaiian-Irish National Guardsman. Now and forever. Also in this picture is...I dunno, some chick whose name I can never remember. I think she's Chris' state-appointed caretaker or something.

I sure must have liked that turned-off fountain, because I took most of my pictures of that day there. This one, however, was taken in front of Ground Kontrol, Portland's premier bar/arcade--or barcade, as I'd call it were I a completely unfunny dipshit who's nowhere near as clever as he thinks. Wait a sec...

Anyway, that'd be Chris' freshly-tethered shoe there. And I do believe that's my shadow taking a picture.

There didn't seem much point going to Ground Kontrol when we did as they hadn't started serving alcohol yet. Not that Chris let that stop him! One can of 7-Up and one miniature bottle of Grey Goose kept him on an uninterrupted path to roaring drunkenness. And boy did he get there.

Here's the gay bar we stopped at. It's actually called Casey's but I can't shake the feeling its real name is "Blowpony" and the city just wouldn't let them put that on a street sign. Does that mean somebody blew a pony there once? If so they seem awfully proud of it.

They serve beer in mason jars there--is that gay? I have no idea. Still, best High Life I've ever had.

The place wasn't as, I dunno, gay as I thought it'd be. Not until the drag queen showed up at least.

We eventually ended the night in a karaoke bar. I didn't stay long because Chris was so roaring drunk by that point his caseworker dragged him home after just a few minutes, after which I sort of lost interest and left. And I was about ten seconds away from singing "Holy Diver", too. Oh well.

One last thing: that whole day we'd been having a contest of sorts. You'd get points for showing up at each bar, answering trivia questions, winning physical challenges and the like. Well, through no small amount of sheer dumb luck, I won.

What did I win, you ask?

EVERYTHING, that's what.

BEHOLD!

Now and forevermore, I am the king! Kneel before me and pay proper tribute! Fawningly point out how the crown is so tall I could also be pope! Fail to point out that it barely fits around my freakishly large head and falls off at the merest tilt of my neck! Your king commands it!

I am SO wearing this Sunday.

Your Shame Shall Be Legendary

2009-07-12T20:25:00.000-07:00

To the person or persons who brought an approximately ten-year-old boy to the 5 p.m. showing of Bruno at the Pioneer Square Mall theater in Portland, OR today:

You are terrible, terrible parents.

The things I put myself through

2009-07-10T00:51:00.000-07:00

In keeping with my desire to become the latest person to torture himself on the Internet for the amusement of others, I've decided to spend my inaugural post covering an awful, awful song and its attendant (equally awful) music video.

Folks, I'm not going to say this is the worst song/video I've ever heard/seen. I'm not one of those goldfish-brained people who has a new "worst thing ever" every week. Suffice it to say it's the worst thing this week. And last week. Maybe even next week, too. It's bad, people.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Attack Attack's "Stick Stickly".

Tempting as it is to let this atrocity speak for itself, I think I prefer to give a full analysis of this three-and-a-half minute abortion, to further explore what it's like when a song fails on every conceivable level.

0:04--Fade in...YAAAAGH!!! *pant, pant* Sorry. Please, PLEASE tell me she's not in the rest of the video.

0:05--Lovely scene of desolation here. Put it in black-and-white, slap some Photoshop filters over it and it'd make a half-decent black metal album cover. But it's not to last...

0:07--Aaaaaand cue yowling idiot! Yes people, it's one of THOSE bands. At this point I'm convinced that Hot Topics spew these out in endless streams, like the monster generators in Gauntlet.

0:11--A word bubble just told me to "STOP HATIN ON ATTACK ATTACK!" No chance of that, I'm afraid. I love how this song STARTS with a mallcore breakdown so all the teenagers can get started on jumping up and down like twats nice and early.

0:16--I just noticed this band makes a very odd squatting motion as they play. They look like they're taking a shit. Perfect visual metaphor.

0:21--Hear that tremolo riff at the bottom of the mix? That's officially the coolest thing about this song. Don't get attached to it.

0:22--AAACK! There she is again! I like how he has a reassuring hand on her shoulder like, "there there--the natives of the Uncanny Valley have a rich cultural heritage!"

0:35--Tremolo riff's done. Replaced with singer's armband tattoo. Not a good tradeoff.

0:42--Clean vocals now. Just as whiny and unappealing as the screaming.

0:50--Nononodon'tzoominonherfaceYEEEAARRRRRGGGHHH!!!

0:53--You know, these guys all look the same. Pasty skin, dark hair--It's like The Boys From Brazil started a mallcore band. The only one I call tell apart is the doughy screamer. Because he's fat.

1:08--Yes, this house is far and away the best thing about this video. I just wish Pillsbury Screamboy would quit blocking the camera so I could see it.

1:18--And another breakdown! At least they know how to pander to their fanbase...their horrible, horrible fanbase who must be purified with fire so their foul taint doesn't spread any further.

1:20--"Hey! Poop outside like everyone else, mister!"

I looked up this song's lyrics, by the way. It turns out Attack Attack are a CHRISTIAN mallcore band. How many more coats of horrible are they gonna slap on this thing?

1:29--Seriously, don't bands death-growl anymore? Maybe when his balls drop. Assuming he can see them when they do. Because he's fat. Did I mention that?

Do you have any fucking idea how many songs like this I've heard? Back before I discovered Youtube and Headbanger's Ball was still on at a decent hour, I heard them ALL the goddamn time. For every video by someone good like, say, Celtic Frost (Satan rest them) you had to put up with five by skinny-jeans-wearing motherfuckers like these. There's a reason that show runs at 2 a.m. now.

1:35--And now creepy bitch is making it a singalong. Lady, you're haunting my nightmares as it is--can you at LEAST not encourage them?

1:37--Fatso, his shit taken, now kicks dirt over it like a cat.

1:42--SENSITIVE PIANO PART okay, it's done. What was the point of that again?

1:50--And whiny guitarist joins in again. Notice how the Lord has blessed him with TWO sets of vocal chords, allowing him to sing two parts simultaneously. Modern albums are overproduced, is what I'm saying.

2:13--Okay! We can all see your hair! We know you spent more time on it than you did on this song! You don't need to keep tossing it around!

2:25--Multiple rimshots! Maybe that means the song is a joke? Oh, sorry, I said "maybe" when I meant "definitely".

2:30--BIG scream! Let me check again...hmmmm...nope, sorry, you're STILL not a badass! You are, however, still fat.

2:31--Creepy bitch sez: "Dear god, make it stop!" I feel ya, lady.

2:33--Oh goody, ANOTHER breakdown! Okay, now I'm just bored.

Why is this song called "Stick Stickly", anyway? I think I'm not getting a key reference. Is that a nickname for Jesus? If it's not it should be. That's it--from now on I'm calling Jesus "Stick Stickly"! It'll be this blog's "thing"!

2:40--"BOOOWWWW YOUUUUR HEAAAAD!" Er, no, I don't think I shall. Because I'm pretty sure you're talking about Ol' Stickly and I listen to WAY too much black metal for that.

2:46--What?

2:50--WHAT?!

2:52--The FUCK?!

2:54--And now they're ALL doing the cat-litter dance? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!

2:55--And now T-Pain vocals?! Other people can see this, right? I haven't just been driven irretrievably mad by the horrible song, RIGHT?!

3:10--It's still going. Dear god, it's...still going.

3:21--Okay, back to plain ol' terrible now.

Seriously, what the HELL happened there? And why can't I shake the feeling that it was aimed at me personally? It's like Attack Attack somehow KNEW how trite and unappealing I would find this song and decided, for 30 glorious seconds, to turn it into the weirdest goddamned thing I've ever heard. And I say that as someone who owns Mr. Bungle's Disco Volante album.

3:27--At long last, the final note. Fade out on Creepy-adorned chair.

People, I...don't know what to say. My first entry and I'm ALREADY at a loss for words. I mean, I could have done a post like this on any bullshit screamo song, but how many bullshit screamo songs have what may be the single greatest Big Lipped Alligator Moment in musical history?! Had they not switched to an even CRAPPIER form of music it would've come close to redeeming the whole damn song! As it is it just makes a forgettable pile of crap an unforgettable pile of crap.

There we are...

2009-07-09T00:39:00.000-07:00

Just a placeholder for the time being.

The Inverted Panopticon

An Open Letter

More Yelping

Below The Barrel #1

Dagnabbit

How do I really feel?

A Christmas Tale

Mind-Blowing

WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION By Kyron Horman, age 7

*puff* *COUGHCOUGHCOUGH*

Actually, DON'T explain her appeal to me

Charlton, The Trigger-Happy Ghost

Travelling through time at the speed of time

Not any stupider than Dinosaucers

Erin, Go Fuck Yourself

This one takes a very weird turn near the end

Gyaahhhh...

Nothing worth telling Facebook about

Your (some indeterminate time period) music video

I've got more features than posts these days

'Cuz this seems to be my favorite feature

Man, I have weird taste in music

Your weekly music video

I am SO gonna get beaten up

Your weekly music video

A slight modification

Your weekly music video

I should do those Baldur's Gate books, actually

Rejoice!

Your weekly music video

Coulda been worse. Coulda been Nightwish.

Firefox thinks "THAC0" is a word

Ha! Now the song's in YOUR head!

"That movie was flawed!"

Finally getting rid of these crabs!

Sometimes good things come out of my ass

Your weekend music video

Writing endings is hard

Yet another new feature

I actually looked up how to spell "fhtagn"

I still wasn't paying $45 for a T-shirt, though

Is there ANY problem alcohol can't solve?

And I didn't even get into grappling

Status of the site

I was eating Oreos when I wrote this

I just blue myself

"Why did I do this, again?"

"Dum-dum-dum-dum-dummmm!"

I had a funny title for this post but I forgot it

Hey kid, wanna see my big red box?

Hurrah, more useless shit

Postmortem

You (insert derogatory noun here)

I don't wanna dip my balls in it

Errr...

Rejection

Note to self...

Police Report On Death Of Billy Mays

Sorry, Janelle

Your Shame Shall Be Legendary

The things I put myself through

There we are...

puff COUGHCOUGHCOUGH