Everything is St00p1d

MEET WOMEN BY BEING A TERRIBLE PERSON AS HARD AS YOU CAN

2011-01-18T21:55:00.000-08:00

There are certain things you would not trust Yahoo.com's advice columnists to teach you. Like, if you don't know how to drive a car, you should probably have someone you know and trust teach you how to do that. There are probably nuances to steering a Hummer H3 through Manhattan that a half-page "infotainment" article, sponsored by the world's Distant Number Two search engine, isn't going to touch upon. Dentistry is probably another thing you wouldn't trust Yahoo's advice columnists to teach you about. Sure, they may have useful suggestions about how to drill a deep cavity out of a molar, but the fact that there are medical schools that have four to six year programs dedicated to dentistry tells me that there is far more to professional tooth care than can be squished between dating site sidebar ads.

Another aspect of human life I personally would not consult Yahoo's "professional bloggers" about is romance. Why not? Well, while not as technically challenging as driving a car or cleaning teeth, dating is one of those things that still seems too important to the smooth functioning of existence to learn how to do from a site that most people only visit because it bought a license to the AP feed. See, I can understand getting advice from Yahoo about how to clean your toilet with a toothbrush, or how to make your vacuum cleaner not smell like burning ass, or maybe which Wii games to buy your stereotypical white nuclear family (plus one inexplicable Southeast Asian guy). All these things, while important in their own ways, are not the sorts of things that, if you fail to do them properly, will seriously mess up your life and the lives of people around you. And while I'm not saying that following Yahoo's advice will necessarily lead to failure, I AM saying that any company who gives Microsoft a run for their money when it comes to terrible, spam-ridden email certainly does not have access to the secret wisdom of Odin.

So I am a tad perplexed that Yahoo has now "teamed up" (in that comforting, co-corporate-sponsorship kind of way) with Match.com to the end of giving the world more online dating advice. Maybe they only did this because Match.com has a really good track record of helping people on the Internet find other people on the Internet to have real life sex with. I don't doubt they're good at this, though I do wonder how this can be seriously termed "romance," which online, it is. I always thought genuine romance was something that relies heavily on pheromones and subtle body language and deep, meaningful, conversations, three things that simply cannot be conveyed across the globe at light speed with a semicolon and right parenthesis. Maybe Yahoo and Match.com are trying to see if two wrongs can indeed make a right. I suppose it's worth the effort, since the success of Facebook proves that not only can one wrong make a right (as far as 500 million people are concerned), it can do so while stealing private information and selling it to Google.

So understand that it is purely "scientific curiosity" that leads me to this post, in which I will "seriously analyze" a snippet of the Web 2.0 "romantic" wisdom dispensed by the Internet's oldest, barely-surviving search engine. And its corporate partner, an "electronic personals" site that premiered a year before Yahoo, to finally give inexpensive sex professionals access to a greater customer base. At least until Craigslist debuted two years later.

You'll forgive me for indulging in a bit of conjecture, but I'm guessing - on the basis of previous forays into Yahoo's advice columns - that the advice we're about to receive would no doubt be a lot more practical coming from Craigslist's top latex spanker.

'MEN: 5 LESSONS FOR MEETING MORE WOMEN,' BY EVAN MARC KATZ

The first issue I have with this column is that it's written by a guy I've never heard of, who wrote a book I've never heard of, who started an online dating site I've never heard of, which itself is owned by a company I've never heard of, which does not have a functioning website at the moment. Okay, let me rephrase that: the first SEVERAL ISSUES I have with this column are the above.

Mr. Katz's personal website (the first link in the paragraph above) does not alleviate my concern. Judging from the strange mid-page scroll bar, he has been "featured" on all my favorite morning shows (that was me being sarcastic), as well as my favorite show hosted by Tyra Banks, the Tyra Show (that was me being even more sarcastic). Another problem is that Evan Marc Katz bills himself as a "personal trainer for smart, strong, successful women," so I'm not sure how qualified he is to give advice TO MEN about MEN TRICKING WOMEN INTO SLEEPING WITH THEM. I guess it makes logical sense - if he knows how women behave because they behave the way he trains them, he'd be the best person to tell men how to manipulate that training to the advantage of their penises. But on another level, that doesn't make very much sense. Like on an ethical level. And I question it on a marketing level, too, because I can't imagine the women trained by Mr. Katz will continue paying him for training when they start being manipulated by men who have clearly been trained by Mr. Katz to exploit the training they have paid Mr. Katz for.

Which begs the question: why has any woman, ever, paid Mr. Katz to train them personally? Mr. Katz proudly links to his own site the following interview he did with a big-time corporate news outlet (I assume it aired at like 4 AM, because even Surfing Squirrel News has to have better things to air when sane human beings are watching it. Like more clips of the Surfing Squirrel).

To put it mildly, this interview does not successfully explain Mr. Katz's appeal.

View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

I am not exaggerating when I say that Mr. Katz would not be the first person I would pay to tell me how to live my life. In fact, he would not be in the top ten (#1 is Batman, #2 is Dr. Phil). Or the top twenty, which lists my car as #20. And no, my car is not a magical talking car. And the brakes are not that good.

But enough about Mr. Katz personally. Not because I'm out of material. It's actually the exact opposite: I could spend pages making fun of Mr. Katz, and it would be the easiest job I've ever had. But it's his advice via Yahoo and Match.com that prompted this post, so it's about time I got to it.

Okay, one more note about Mr. Katz: before he FINALLY got married, he admitted that he'd never had a relationship last longer than seven months (see the video). And I have a sneaking suspicion that he may have only gotten married because CNN so rudely pointed out that a guy who isn't capable of a long-term committed relationship should not be giving other people advice ostensibly about how to find one.

Okay. Done. Now on to said advice.

Lesson #1: Assume the answer is yes
Have you ever been sold a product before? Hair tonic, a car, bathroom  tile? I can guarantee you that the salesperson didn’t pitch you by  saying, “Um, excuse me… I hate to bother you… would you be interested  in… I mean, probably not, but—” No! Any salesman worth his commission is  not just selling confidence in his product, but confidence in himself."

Okay, right off the bat - who the fuck buys "hair tonic" from a "salesperson" in 2010? Seriously. Do they even make "hair tonic" anymore? I thought that went out of vogue with German fascism and being able to support your family on one income.

Moving on.

Mr. Katz's first mote of wisdom is that a guy has to successfully advertise himself to a woman if he expects her to buy him. I'm going to assume he's being figurative here, and not actually suggesting that successful long-term relationships are based on whether I taste better to women than New Coke.

You may be sitting there, wondering what the hell my problem is (about this specifically, although perhaps also in general, but one thing at a time, asshole). When I want to date someone, OF COURSE I want to put my best foot and/or face forward. Few women I know find drunken vomiting romantic, unless they also happen to be doing it. And that's all Mr. Katz is advocating, right? Just that I don't throw up on a potential mate?

Well, no. He is clearly recommending that I advertise myself, as if I were "hair tonic, a car, [or] bathroom tile." And advertising is in a lot of ways a synonym for lying (unless you're a marketing exec, in which case you unlearned the word 'lie' sophomore year). Fine, so advertising doesn't mean you outright make things up about what you're selling.

Except when it does.

But it often means exaggerating a product's best traits while downplaying it's flaws. And as the existence of so-called objective product review sites and magazines prove, most people don't trust an advertiser's exaggerations and dismissals. They consider them to be not-the-truth. Which means, of course, lies.

So Mr. Katz's first bit of advice is that no matter how bad you suck, you're supposed to pretend you don't and be a swaggering Kevin Trudeau about it. And this will get women to sleep with you. On the basis of your lies. Which, in the common vernacular, is called "tricking women into sleeping with you."

I suppose Katz is right. I will certainly meet a lot more women that way. Which is good, because I will continually have to keep meeting a lot more women that way.

Lesson #2: It’s not about you
I’m out at a big Hollywood scene with beautiful people. It’s getting  late, towards the end of the night, and I ask my buddy Terrance which  woman he’s got his eye on. He points to an attractive brunette talking  to a cute blonde across the courtyard. Slightly bemused, I tell him that  I will make the introduction. As I stride over, I rationalize that if  my approach doesn’t go well, she’s not really rejecting me, but rather,  Terrance. I know this isn’t true, but it gets me going...

...The moral of the story? Playing my little conversational trick in all  pick-up situations can be really helpful. Just ask any married friend  how easy it is to talk with women when you know that there are no stakes  involved. If it’s not about you, you can’t possibly fail.

In case you're wondering, the part I cut out is the part where Katz uses his amazing powers of lying to get one of these women to give him a number where her booty can potentially be called.

Katz's first bit of advice was to trick women into sleeping with you by lying to them.  His second bit builds on this advice by giving you some pointers on how to lie successfully.  Namely, "pretend you're trying to get your stupid friend laid, and then you won't be ashamed to say ANYTHING."

I've no doubt this tactic works fine, especially at "big Hollywood scenes."  I don't think Katz is lying about what he's done.  I'm not questioning how effective this tactic is. I'm only questioning how ethical it is.

Now, it would be easy to take this opportunity to make fun of how shallow and skanky Hollywood scene girls are thought to be.  But honestly, I don't know any Hollywood scene girls personally, so it would be wrong of me to make fun of something that may be an unfair stereotype.  All I know for certain is that some of these women were hanging out at a party with Evan Marc "Lie Your Way to Orgasm" Katz, and he successfully tricked them into at least implying that they were going to sleep with him.  And I don't have to make fun of them because of that. Because just writing that makes fun of them all by itself.

One more comment on this reference to a "big Hollywood scene with beautiful people": I resent Katz for writing this.  No, not because I'm jealous.  There are plenty of physically attractive young women of varying degrees of sobriety clustered inside the tiny, obnoxiously loud hipster clubs that are WAY TOO CLOSE to were I live.  If I wanted to trick this kind of boring, self-obsessed scenester into bringing me into the Fraternity of The Almighty Clap, I'd be out there right now, doing it.  No, I resent Katz for writing this because I resent that he thinks I'm stupid enough to think that he, and therefore his advice, is somehow "cooler" than possible alternatives, simply because he hangs out where Heidi Montag and what's left of her natural bone structure do coke with tomorrow's Gary Buseys.

I know Katz is assuming I believe that "big Hollywood scene" beautiful people are by some degrees more beautiful than the "small Where-I-Live scene" beautiful people.  But I don't.  Because I know what healthy young human women are supposed to look like, biologically speaking, and therefore I understand that all healthy young human women, all over the world, have bodies that look about the same.  I realize that out in Hollywood, the healthy young human women like smearing stuff all over their hair and getting poisonous bacteria injected into their faces and plastic bags of wet rubber jammed behind their milk glands.  But what I don't understand is how putting themselves through any of this makes them more beautiful than those women who don't.  

I made fun of Heidi Montag (and RIGHTLY SO), but allow me to be serious for a moment.  Here is her side-by-side, before-and-after plastic surgery photo (taken from the blog tagged in the photo, of course):

All I'll say is this. The girl on the left looks like one of the local girls I could potentially sleep with.  The girl on the right looks like the kind of blow-up doll Evan Marc Katz might sleep with.  After the air compressor overheated.

Sorry, Katz.  If we're judging the quality of each others' romantic advice on the basis of the beauty of the women who live in the same cities we do, I would automatically win.  And I don't even give romantic advice.

And honestly, I don't know why we'd judge anything on the basis of something so irrelevant.  So stop scene-dropping, you douchebag.  Either way, it isn't helping your reputation.

Let's move on to "Lesson #3," and see if Katz has anything more to teach us about lying to women of questionable intelligence and/or genital hygiene.

Lesson #3: There’s power in numbers
Believe it or not, three is better than one. When you approach a woman  who is by herself, she knows that you’re hitting on her based solely on  your attraction to her. This increases the pressure in a way that  doesn’t always make for a comfortable situation. That’s why the safest  way to meet a woman is to approach her in a crowd of her friends...

...“By charming her friends and getting their approval, the one you like  will be that much more open when you ask her out,” adds Charles.

"Charles" is only identified in the excluded part of this passage as "Charles, 36."  According to Evan Marc Katz's MySpace profile, he's 38.  So I'm just going to assume that "Charles, 36," is not in fact some real person who wrote to Evan Marc Katz to thank him for his helpful lessons on how to trick women into sex.  I'm going to assume it is in fact "Evan Marc Katz, picking an age he isn't, but only by subtracting 2 from his actual age, because he's not that good at making up pointless secret identities."

Honestly, Katz.  You've already made it clear that you expect me to think your advice is great because you live near the wealthiest plastic surgeons in the world.  Why would you further need to boost the quality of your advice by creating fake "real people" who found it helpful?  It's almost as if you're not very confident about how good your advice is.  Like you're not just trying to trick me into thinking you're smart, but perhaps trying to trick yourself, by creating an elaborate fantasy world in which people two years younger than you named Charles tell you how they got laid because of something you contributed to Yahoo Advice.

Not that I'd expect any better from a guy who thinks total dishonesty is how sex happens.

But enough about Katz's apparent self-confidence problems.  Is his "Lesson #3" good advice?  Well, it isn't expressly about lying to women, so--

Oh wait.  Yes it is.  I'm supposed to pretend I'm not only approaching a group of women to ask the hottest one out.  I'm supposed make her think I'm actually just a really nice guy, who randomly walks up to groups of women who are minding their own business at bars and starts "charming" conversations with them.  And because I'm also a sly bastard, I'm going to carefully orchestrate the conversation so that, if the woman I want to have sex with is evidently impressed by whatever the hell I'm pretending to do, I can eventually work in a line addressed to her alone that asks for sex.

Are you people keeping up with this?  Because I'm starting to get confused.  Goddamn it, Katz.  I want to bang that hot chick (possibly after letting her tie me to the bed; we'll see how it goes).  Why do I have to pretend I'm a hyena trying to pick off a wounded gazelle?  

Besides, women, having human brains, are not utterly stupid.  The woman in question and her group of friends are not going to be "tricked" by this tactic.  They're going to know EXACTLY why I'm sauntering up to them.  The only question they'll have is which one of them specifically my penis is aimed at.  No woman sitting in any bar, ever, has decided to sleep with a guy because he was desperately pretending to care about her friends as people.  Why would she?  Is this supposed to prove to her that I'm not a rapist?  Sure, because rapists NEVER pretend to be good people before they rape.

Katz, if I'm interested in a woman, sure, it's not a good idea to just cruise up to her and ask if I can stick my penis in her mouth (unless I'm trying to make some kind of artistic or political statement).  But it IS a good idea to get her attention, chat her up to see if she's interested, and then ask her for her number.  That's called "how to start dating someone," and it need not be any more complicated than that.  And if it seems that it should be, if the simple method keeps failing, it means I'm either constantly picking women who aren't interested, or I smell.  And there are ways of dealing with both things.  But in a rational world, none of these involve trying to confuse her and gaming her social circle.

"Lesson #4" can't be worse than "Lesson #3."

Lesson #4: It’s just that easy
If you ever doubt how simple it can be to meet a woman, this story  should inspire you: I was at a party with some close friends and saw an  acquaintance across the room. Late 30s, attractive, friendly, likeable. We’d met probably four times before through a mutual friend who was also at the party...

...But I had one more important question to ask her before we continued talking. “Is it really that easy to get a woman to talk to you...just by calling her over with your finger?”
 

She took a second to consider the evidence and replied, “Apparently, it is.”  

So there you have it. We men have more power than we even realized.

...What?  What just happened?  Did I miss something?  We were just talking about how to manipulate stupid women into your pants with complex herding tactics.  When did you switch over to the finger-signaling thing?  How did you...why did you suddenly do that??  How was I supposed to know I could do that?!  WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!

I'll tell you what the hell is going on.  Katz's fourth lesson is "Ignore everything I've suggested so far, and just try to bed some late 30s-year-old woman you've met before.  Because her clock is a-tickin', so your cock gets a-stick-in!"

I guess I should be happy.  Sure, he's just announced that the FIRST THREE LESSONS WERE A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME.  But at least he's no longer recommending wholesale deceit.  No, instead he's saying you should try to bed aging women who already kind-of know you.  Sure, it's still emotionally manipulative, but at least you're being a bastard  out in the open.  That's a small ethical improvement.  I mean, you're still being a callous, self-serving man-whore, but at least she KNOWS that's what you are.

Only because someone else told her.  Because you were too busy trying to convince her you were some cool new kind of hair tonic that doesn't directly cause baldness.  Perhaps the friend only inadvertently got the two of you talking when he tried to pull off Lesson #2 but got confused about how he was only supposed to be pretending to try and get you laid.

Another question. Katz says he's met this woman "four times," and he clearly noticed how attractive she was this time, so I assume he must have noticed her the other times. Why didn't he try to bed her with lies then? Or at least get her number so he could make a sales pitch over the phone? Am I supposed to think that Katz gets so much ass regularly that he sometimes forgets he's met other women he could sleep with some day? Why did it take him this long to try and nail this woman?

Get ready, ladies. This what 38 year old vaginas look like.

Answer: note how he specifies she's in her "late 30s." The implication is clear enough: this aging dowager and her calcified groin hole were not appealing to Katz, except during that one rare occasion when he obviously could not get laid by anyone better. This is him undertaking what is known in man-whore circles (I checked their forums) as "pity sex."

Or, at least, that's the story he's telling. Which I'm strongly tempted to assume is not 100% consistent with reality. You know, that dimension of existence outside of Evan Marc Katz's head, where there is no Charles? And probably no Terrance? But where there are certainly attractive women in their late 30s who will sleep with Katz, either because the specter of age is snarling behind them (possible, but unlikely), or because they've been watching him strike out with women all night and feel sorry for him (very possible and very likely).

Or maybe I'm missing another possibility. Maybe Katz DID try to sleep with this woman before but she rejected him, because - being a woman in her late 30s - perhaps she was only interested in men of a certain level of maturity. A level some steps above the one in which you call yourself a relationship expert, but then are publicly excoriated for never having had a personal relationship last more than a little over half a year. Maybe that's why it took her until the fifth time she met Katz before she decided to give him a shot at her pubes. Maybe she was hoping that by this point, perhaps he'd grown up enough to not think advertising and other forms of lying were vehicles to intimacy.

I mean, if she thought that, she was clearly wrong. But good for her for giving someone with personal problems another chance! If only we could all be so lucky.

I don't know what "Lesson #5" is, but I'm fairly confident that it will not help me meet women, let alone tell me how to get one to fuck me.  Unless, you know, I'm willing to execute a zany scheme that tricks scene girls into thinking I'm Josh Duhamel.  Incredibly stupid, desperate, or intoxicated scene girls.

Lesson #5: The outcome doesn’t matter
Maybe you’re not her  type. Maybe she’s just out of a relationship. Maybe she’s having  troubles at work. Maybe she’s not perceptive enough to recognize your  worth. You never know why someone may not be interested in you.  Truthfully, it doesn’t matter. It’s more diminishing to your self-esteem  to let fear run your life than it is to get rejected. Here’s one story  below that showcases this in a big way...

I was going to wait until she came out of the supermarket and ask her out. And that’s what I did...

A big smile came across her face. “You are so cute and I couldn’t be  more flattered, but I have a serious, live-in boyfriend. But I really  want to thank you for asking. You totally made my day.” 

Okay, so it looks like Lesson #5 consists of another vignette from the Wonderful World of Evan Marc Katz Is Awesome, a world that possibly only exists in Evan Marc Katz's mind.  And I only say 'possibly' because it might also exist in diagram form on a legal pad in a drawer somewhere.  I've never invented a fake reality to make myself look awesome, but if I did, I imagine that I'd keep a written record of it.  Because the average human brain is not great at remembering elaborate lies that only occasionally get you sex.

Honestly, Lesson #5 contains a bit of actual, helpful advice.  Katz is right that you shouldn't let fear of rejection keep you from talking to women.  Most of us figured that out around the 8th grade, but for those who haven't, this is probably helpful advice.

The objection I would raise to this advice is the context in which Katz employs it.  Should I really have so little fear of rejection that I badger women for sex at the grocery store?  Clearly, I don't think that is a great idea.

There are a lot of places where trying to get yourself laid is okay.  Like at bars, parties, maybe a family reunion, depending on your family and your lack of dignity and respect for God's Law.  But there are a lot of places where trying to get ass is not okay.  Like at church, your kids' soccer game, or a family reunion, if you or your family has issues with incest.  I'd personally put 'grocery store' on that list.  People go to the grocery store to buy food.  Some of them bring their children.  There are old ladies and conservative foreigners there.  That does not strike me as the kind of environment where a randy, aging hipster can harass women he doesn't know for sex.  Mostly because I'm confident most women feel that way.  I don't know a lot about women, but what I do know leads me to believe that buying milk and fresh baked goods next to someone's grandmother does not make vaginas as juicy as an idiot might assume.

But I'm not Evan Marc Katz, and I don't live in places where Hollywood parties happen.  Maybe he DOES inhabit an actual reality where women are shopping for hook-ups at the supermarket.  And even if they're not, are flattered that random strangers come up to them and ask if they can take their pants off.

Knowing what the women in Katz's area look like, I'm not surprised they may live by different rules than other women.  When 20% of your body is composed of the same chemicals as hair tonic and bathroom tile, it makes sense to advertise your sexual viability at a Super Wal-Mart.

Just be prepared to be "purchased" by guys like Evan Marc Katz.  Sneakily, from the shadows, so you don't get spooked.  And he might try to pay for you with fake money some guy in his head "sent" him as thanks for teaching him how to treat women like dimwitted semen receptacles.

You want to get laid, and/or fall in love?  Here's how you do it: pursue your interests, be personable, and be honest with whomever you're attracted to about your intentions.  It might take some time, depending on luck and how much you go to the gym, but eventually, if you want to find someone to be intimate with, you will.  There are almost 7 billion human beings on the planet.  Clearly, finding someone to sleep with is not complex dentistry.

Finding love is obviously harder.  But it only gets more difficult if you act as st00p1d as Evan Marc Katz.

TheBluesader Classic: OH MY GOD!: FIREPROOF THE MOVIE IS ST00P1D

2010-12-15T01:13:00.000-08:00

[Originally appeared Thursday, December 24th 2009 at 7:13am on my crappy Blogster blog. Unedited to retain powerful awesome.]

Finally, a movie that isn’t afraid to portray the real America! And by “real America,” I mean the perception everyone who voted for George W. Bush the second time has of themselves.

Before I tear into this drunken, limping baby gazelle, my integrity as an Internet movie-talking-about guy dictates I talk about the few good things anyone could say about this movie. On TheBluesader’s Patented Sliding Scale of Christian Movies, Fireproof is a strong 8 out of 10. A 10 would be Donald W. Thompson’s thrilling 1972 rockabilly-freakout A Thief in the Night, and a 1 would be Tim Chey’s 2002 direct-to-DVD Goliath pile Gone . For those of you too unfamiliar with this shortbus film genre known as Christian Movies, an 8 out of 10 Christian movie is basically your average Hallmark Channel movie, minus the gratuitous nudity. If you put Fireproof up against even the lamest Hollywood movie (just for the sake of argument, let’s use 2005’s Doom ),peoplemight say Fireproof is better shot and easier to follow, but that Doom has a better story and more believable dialogue. Yes, I realize this doesn’t sound good. But if it doesn’t, that simply means you haven’t sat through Gone . With a rating of 8 out of 10, I’m basically nominating Fireproof for a Christian Oscar (which, if it existed, would be made of genuine Austrian crystal and have a really tiny Bible verse laser-etched in the center).

So what makes Fireproof an 8 out of 10? Well, it was clearly shot and edited by someone who has at least seen a movie or really long music video. The script was apparently written by someone who has heard of something called a “movie script.” And the acting didn’t make me laugh so much I missed half the lines. Kirk Cameron is certainly no Josh Meyers (there is only one Josh Meyers), but in Fireproof he demonstrates that after 30 years of acting he has learned how to not stare directly into the camera while pretending. I can only assume he must have given pointers to the rest of the largely amateur cast, because a solid 90% of the time they also remember not to stare directly into the camera. Basically, the entire cast deserves a finely cut Christian Oscar. On a brightly polished sterling silver chain.

Now that I’ve gotten all that vaulted praise out of the way, it’s time to go Hungry Crocodile on the remains.

Fireproof is the story of fireman Caleb Holt (Cameron), a moody peawit about to lose his wife because he has been a moody peawit the last seven years. As Caleb can’t figure out what to do to stop this (because he is a peawit), his wife Catherine (Christian movie actress Erin Bethea) decides she wants a divorce.

Complicating matters, Catherine has caught the eye of a doctor who works in the same hospital where she’s employed as an HR person. I can’t remember if the movie actually says that she’s an HR person, but I figured it out when she walked on screen talking about how stressful it was setting up interviews, and then proceeded to not even pretend to work for the rest of the movie. But the point here is that one of the doctors clearly wants to David her Bathsheba all night long. Catherine, clearly suffering from Kirk Cameron In Her Pants Withdrawal, lets Dr. Wife-Stealer take her to lunch and make horn-dog eyes at her. Because this is a Christian movie she doesn’t actually have sex with him, but because this is a Christian movie we’re supposed to think she might as well have.

Oh, and Catherine’s mother has had a stroke and Catherine visits her and cries a lot. But this is only brought up at those times when the screenplay decides it needs to make Catherine look like less of a terrible, selfish person (which she otherwise is), so it’s barely worth mentioning.

The peawit Caleb Holt, not wanting his marriage to end but apparently having no impulse to actually do anything sensible and proactive about it, smashes a few inanimate objects with a softball bat and buries himself in his increasingly melodramatic firefighting. In the midst of this, his father John (newcomer Harris Malcom) drops by the plot to lend a helping hand. John suggests that before getting a divorce, Caleb should spend the next 40 days following a scheme John devised that will, in effect, help him trick Catherine into not hating him again. John also encourages (some might say “browbeats”) Caleb into asking Jesus Christ into his heart, though he doesn’t explain why doing this would necessarily cause Caleb’s wife to suddenly stop thinking her husband is a moody peawit. I guess the movie presumes I understand that an evangelical conversion mystically fixes complex relationship problems. I’ve always heard that the divorce rate among evangelicals is about the same as the national heathen average, so I don’t know why the movie is so keen to throw Jesus at this particular problem and expects me to assume He sticks. But as this particular point is not the only one the movie seems to expect me to take for granted, I’ll just add it to the pile.

Following his dad’s advice (because peawits rarely come up with their own ideas), Caleb decides to give the 40 day thing a try. The rest of the movie is Caleb going out of his way – between dramatic firefighting, of course – to be nice to Catherine, while she consistently spits it back in his face and lets Dr. Wife-Stealer look at her like Eve looked at the apple. When Caleb gets frustrated (and being a moody peawit, he does a lot), he calls Poppa John, who tells him not to get so frustrated, and to keep being nice to a woman who clearly hates him. And so he does, to the tune of $24,000 in medical supplies for Catherine’s mother, and what is probably a $1,000 desktop computer which he smashes, yes, again with the softball bat.

Apparently the computer kept forcing him to look at softcore erotica when he was just trying to masturbate to pictures of a yacht, and this made Catherine think she looked like a fetid cow carcass. This is yet another plot point the movie expects me to accept without question, and one which makes me wonder just who the hell this movie thinks I am.

The following isn’t a spoiler, because, as this is a Christian movie not about the Crucifixion, you know this thing is going to have a happy ending. Catherine finds out how much money Caleb has spent / flushed down the toilet on her account, and that he’s kept up this behavior for three days longer than his dad told him to (probably only because he’s a peawit and didn’t know what else to do). Catherine, however, takes this to mean that her husband doesn’t actually want her to die screaming, and she decides to show her joy by making out with him in the firehouse garage. She put on her engagement ring before she went down to the station and the movie took the time to show me that she’s been bawling since she pulled it out of her sock drawer, so I guess I’m supposed to assume the divorce is off and everyone lives happily ever after (by which I mean, Catherine gets pregnant that very night. Because Muslims aren’t going to outbreed themselves, am I right?)

If you couldn’t tell from my award-winning objective plot synopsis (seriously, I just awarded it myself), Fireproof has a rather dim view of romance. To state it plainly, this movie thinks men are oblivious tools who can’t be caring husbands until they’ve been tricked into going to church (why this should be the case is, again, not explained). It thinks women are self-hating morons who will bed (at least, evidently want to bed) the first stranger who smiles at them, if their husbands haven’t spent enough money on them. I realize that the movie itself doesn’t consider this a dim view. The movie itself, and the people who made it, expect me to believe that its portrayal of marriage is so true-to-life that I will accept Jesus into my heart and buy my wife a new car before the end credits start rolling, for fear that she might already be dry-humping the guy in the pew across the aisle. I’m not sure what bothers me most about this view: the blatant sexism, the fact that somebody actually believes this is how some people really act, the fact that they expect me to believe this is how some people really act, or the fact that maybe, as it applies to certain people, they’re RIGHT.

Fireproof did exceptionally well for a Christian movie marketed to Christians. Why? Is it just because it’s a rare Christian movie that doesn’t look like an intentional work of irony? Or is it because a lot of Christians really do look at men, women and marriage the same way as Fireproof? Are there people who really think this movie, with its shallow, self-obsessed characters, is the most accurate fictional representation of what goes on daily life since Everybody Loves Raymond went off the air? Do certain Americans really hold this movie up and say, “Yes, this is who we are, and this is how we operate?” I can understand certainly people praising this movie solely on the basis of its Evangelical Christian message. There aren’t a lot of well-made movies out there that advocate this (a point that is very important to keep in mind). But are there actually couples who interact like Caleb and Catherine, and believe that doing so is perfectly normal?

Clearly I assume there are, or I wouldn’t be so abjectly terrified that this movie is so damn popular.

Especially since Fireproof is not only sexist, but also racist. African-American characters come in exactly three stereotypes in this movie: Fat, Funny Slang-Talking Guy (a fireman), Gossipy Woman with Sass (a nurse), and Sage Articulate Guy (another fireman). You could argue that using three different black stereotypes isn’t a bad thing, since most Christian movies only use one, the infamous Noble, Charismatic Black Baptist Minister Who Sings and Fights Gangs. And as it relates to Fireproof , you could also point out that every character in the movie, regardless of ethnicity, could be fairly called a poorly-conceived stereotype. So why should I point out the black ones when there are plenty of white ones?

Addressing the first point: three times a negative isn’t a positive, it’s just a negative three times as big. I don’t give bonus points to a movie that attempts to not be racist by being even more racist, and I don’t know why anyone would. Addressing the second point: there’s a difference between a stereotype and a type of character we’ve seen before. The white characters in the movie are certainly types that get used a lot – the Meddling Well-Meaning Parents, the Overconfident Rookie Fireman, the Needy Wife, the Idiot Husband. But these personalities are not specific to any ethnicity. Black men play idiot husbands as much as white men. Black women play needy wives as much as white women. But when was the last time you saw a fat, funny, slang-talking white guy character? Or a gossipy white woman character with sass? These are personalities pre-packaged with ethnicity, just waiting for a bad screenwriter to scoop them up and sprinkle them into a script that could use a few black characters. Characters the writer can’t come up with on his or her own, because he or she apparently thinks black people are exotic energy beings from Neptune or something.

To drive the point into the heart, these pre-packaged black characters are stereotypes, they are racist, and they are only used because the person who wrote the script is, willfully or not, a racist. And sorry, but I assumed at this point in time we were all aware that black people are in fact human beings, and that anyone with a small amount of creativity should be able write an original black character, even if it happens to take a little bit of research (you know, the same amount of research necessary to create an original white character who may live a lifestyle that is different from the writer’s own).

So aside from being sexist and racist, what else is wrong with this movie? Well, a lot. For simplicity’s sake I’ll just list a few more problems:

- For a movie supposedly about a firefighter, we sure don’t see a lot of fires being fought. I think there are only three scenes in the whole movie when Caleb Holt and crew actually go out and do something with all their shiny equipment. I know, this movie was made on a tight budget and firefighting scenes are expensive. But the movie is called Fireproof , and it bills itself as being about a firefighter. Let’s see more than 10 minutes of fires being fought, please. Otherwise it looks like the writers made Caleb a firefighter only to have other characters continually point out how his marriage isn’t fireproof. Which I sort of figured out the first time I saw his wife flirting with Dr. Wife-Stealer.

- I understand that a Christian movie is more or less required to use contemporary Christian music as its soundtrack. But I can’t think of a single time when the song that was playing fit the action on screen, in either its lyrics or its style. And another thing: no sane adult listens to Christian rap-rock and likes it. I don’t care if the character in question is supposed to be the comic relief firefighter. This is too unrealistic to even be ironically funny.

- While the people who made the movie understand that couples going through marital problems yell at each other, they don’t seem to understand how arguments actually work. Caleb and Catherine’s fights are a mishmash of “you don’t respect me,” “do your own laundry,” and “damn that Internet porn.” Which are all valid things to argue about. The problem is, every fight they have sounds like all the above phrases were dropped into an Arguetron 5000 which then spit out what it assumes human arguments sound like. Even people having a stupid argument try to advance whatever point they’re trying to make. Yelling “Internet porn!” and countering with “Respect!” isn’t an argument, it’s an acting exercise. How am I supposed to sympathize with these people when they don’t sound like real people?

- If I were asked to diagnose the real problem with Caleb and Catherine’s marriage, I would say that they’re two young people with a lot of disposable income in a very big, nice house, who literally have nothing to do all day but pick at one another. They don’t seem to have anything in common to talk about or do except sex, so when they’re not doing that, they just start screaming to fill the chilly silence. The movie never brings this up as a possible theory, and I know why. If two people share nothing but an income and liking sex, they probably shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. Catherine should divorce Caleb and focus on having fun and advancing her supposed career, and Caleb should thank God that the nagging is finally over, get a nice little apartment, and focus on buying that yacht he’s always touching himself to. If my theory were right, that would be the real happy ending to this story. Being a non-Crucifixion Christian movie, Fireproof needs to end with Caleb and Catherine reconciling, so it blames Internet porn, has Caleb smash the computer and buy his wife’s forgiveness, and then melts away all the lingering issues with a public kiss. This is a movie, so I suppose Fireproof can get away with oversimplifying things. Not as far as I’m concerned, obviously, but I wasn’t the intended audience. So like me being on the fast road to hell, I guess it’s my fault for thinking.

- One last, small thing. The final kiss of the movie is not between Kirk Cameron and Erin Bethea. Kirk Cameron refused to kiss anyone who wasn’t his wife, so Mrs. Cameron was flown in to kiss Kirk for the final scene, which was then filmed in silhouette. Now I have no problem with Kirk’s fellow Growing Pains alum and baby-momma Chelsea Noble, which I freely admit is only because I know nothing at all about her except that she’s fantastically hot. And as far as the scene plays out in the movie, I never would have known that Kirk wasn’t kissing Erin Bethea except that the Internet told me so . My only problem with this, then, is that I find it rather creepy. I’m not sure why and I suppose it isn’t even a real problem. But the same could be said for Mormon underwear , and I’m certainly not going to be getting near a pair of those inexplicably terrifying things any time soon.

So that’s Fireproof . A great Christian movie, but still a Christian movie, so not a good non-Christian movie. If you voted for Dubya in 2004, you’ll probably like it anyway. If, like me, you voted instead for that world-hugging Communist bastard John Kerry, you probably won’t like it. If you’re the latter, skip Fireproof and read the Bible instead. You’ll get the same message, and while it still won’t make any sense, at least the Bible has more realistic dialogue and a lot more action sequences.

TheBluesader Classic: TALE OF TALES IS ST00P1D

2010-12-15T00:53:00.000-08:00

[Originally appeared Monday, December 14th 2009 at 5:08am on my crappy Blogster blog. I also posted it as a user review on the Escapist's forums. Unedited to retain powerful awesome.]

Believe it or don’t, but I’m in favor of low-key artistic games. I do not need to kill something digital to have fun. Killing things is of course very fun, in virtual reality at least, and maybe if I were a Viking and it were the Ninth Century. I don’t know for sure about the latter, but certainly virtual reality killing is quite fun, though it is not the only fun I can have in virtual reality. Low-key artistic games are pretty much defined as “fun without virtual reality killing,” and that is okay, as long as the alternative they offer to virtual reality killing is one of the many things you can do in virtual reality that is as fun as killing.

The problem is, there seems to be some debate on what exactly constitutes a fun action in virtual reality that isn’t killing. Or maybe it is a debate on the concept of “fun” itself. I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that dev studio Tale of Tales is not very interested in joining that debate. Or, perhaps, it is only interested in having that debate with itself. If so, that means that Belgians Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn must have some pointless, extremely boring arguments at the office every day (and by “office,” I’m pretty sure I mean their basement. Or possibly bedroom). Here’s a glimpse of what these two self-styled digital auteurs consider “fun:” they put out a “game” in 2007 in which the player tunnels through a digital sculpture of these flabby two fucking upright. Andthe Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp (still Belgium ) loved it so much they put it on display so the whole family could pay to see it.

Perhaps I am simply not educated enough, Belgian enough, postmodern enough, douchebag gaming scenester enough to appreciate whatever it is Tale of Tales thinks it is supposed to be doing. Or maybe the problem does not lie with me, but instead with their inability to program anything with clear objectives, sensible game play, or main characters with engaging personalities or at least funny one-liners. I understand that “playable art” is going to be very different from corporate studio product, and that I have to have an open mind to appreciate it on its own terms. But I also understand that making a reasonably paced game that runs reasonably well and plays reasonably straightforward takes a lot of time and play-testing, and that churning over-boiled crap out of your basement PC (or bedroom PC) and calling it"playable art” is a very convenient way to have your cake and enough money for nachos, too. If I am simply too blue collar for Tale of Tales, that’s just the way it is, and it isn’t their fault. But if instead I am thoroughly awesome and Harvey and Samyn are a couple of douchebags, they can upright-sculpture-fuck off.

The way I finished that last sentence should make my perspective on the matter fairly obvious. To convince you that I’m right, let me tell you about some more of Tale of Tales’s “playable artwork.”

THE GRAVEYARD

You are an old lady in a graveyard. You slowly (i.e., slooooooowly ) shuffle forward along a path in the graveyard. You cannot go left. You cannot go right. You cannot stop and read the gravestones, because they have no legible writing on them. So forward you go, until you eventually (i.e., Jesus Christ finally ) reach a tiny graveyard chapel. You still cannot go left or right and there is no door directly in front of you, so you are not going in. All there is is a bench along the chapel wall. If you walk up to it, the old lady will turn around and sit down on it.

What happens next? Well, if by “next,” you mean after 40 fucking seconds of nothing , a song starts playing. It’s an alright song, if you like indie Europop. If you do not, then it is a slow, boring song. What is the song about? Well, because Tale of Tales knew we would all want to know this, they put the English translation of the lyrics on the screen as a subtitle. I use “translation” here loosely, in the sense that the song is in the language Belgians speak when they are speaking a made-up language. What sounds like German, Dutch, or Belgian is in fact none of these, but is instead Nothing. Trust me on this one. No, if you listen closely you will not figure out something I could not, because there is nothing to figure out. And because I am smarter than you, youshould know this by now. So the subtitle “translation” is in fact just crappy English poetry about dying and not being alive and no longer existing, written by a Belgian pretending to translate a made-up language spoken by possibly the same Belgian.

What is that you say? “Wow! That sounds so retarded, it must mean something artistic and profound and possibly revelatory about the human condition!” To which I say, “No, you douchebag gaming scenester, it is simply retarded. And boring.” But believe it or not, I am a progressively minded person. Maybe we’re both right. Which is to say, I think you are wrong , but I don’t care enough to write about it anymore.

The song in question, profound or not (stress on ‘not’), goes on for about 2 minutes. Sitting through it, it seems to go on for about six and a half hours, but I knew it wasn’t actually that long. This was simply the part of my brain that wanted to be entertained by this “game” reminding me that both of us were horribly, horribly misled by corporate game critics and douchebag gaming scenester blogs. Which my brain also reminded me I should have suspected while I was wasting both our time reading those damn things.

Yes, thank you brain, I get it. Now stop screwing with my concept of time and let’s finish this disaster already.

When the song finally ends, one of two things happens, and here we’ve finally arrived at the real meat of the “game.” The first thing that may happen is that the old lady stands up from the bench, turns to face the other direction, and waits for you to push the button that will make her walk back the way she came. If you do this, she will slowly (i.e., God-fucking-dammit-! ) shuffle back down the path until she gets to the end, at which point the “game” is over.

Stirring, isn’t it? Don’t you just want to restart it right away, to see if you can get the second ending? If you answered “yes,” change your answer. Because the “second ending” is not an ending. See, the only other thing that may happen (and I have no idea how the game decides when to do this) is that instead of sitting through the song then standing up, your old lady will in fact die during the song, and therefore just sort of keel over a little and stay on the bench. And if this happens, the “game” does not end. No. If this happens – if the old lady dies during the song – the game basically freezes up. It just sits there. Oh, the footage keeps looping, so you still see the swaths of sunlight rolling over the scene, you hear the birds chirping, you occasionally hear agust of wind. But you can sit there, watching and listening to this infinite loop for ten minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, 48 hours, and it will never end. No menu pops up. There are no credits. Just perpetually looping footage of a dead old lady on a bench.

And don’t you dare try to hit the spacebar or escape key to try and escape this fucking purgatory. It won’t work. The game offers no way to close it if the old lady dies. You have to Ctrl+Alt+Delete the godforsaken thing to get rid of it.

At first I thought this was a glitch so I looked around online. But no, this is not a glitch. Apparently this is a “design element” that is supposed to “give real weight to death.”

Know what else would “give real weight to death,” Tale of Tales? The Blue Screen of Death. But you didn’t program this “game” to give us one of those, for the same reason you should not have failed to give us a menu option at the death “ending” – it is fucking obnoxious.

Honestly, if this “game” had given a simulated Blue Screen of Death after the death ending, I’d actually give it a little more credit. Yes, it would have been heart attack-inducing, but at least it would have demonstrated that a pair of brassy human gonads or the metaphoric female equivalent were involved in the production of this “game.” As it is, the whole experience is just tedious, obnoxious, and completely ineffective.

And will cost you $5. Because Tale of Tales thinks The Graveyard will give you half as many hours of gaming joy as AudioSurf, a game where you collect colored blocks with a little spaceship in sync with your own mp3s .

Think about that sentence before you send Harvey and Samyn any nacho money.

Ugo and Wired talk about how “heavy” and “poignant” The Graveyard is. I’m sure the illuminati over at G4 would probably be bowled over by it too, if they weren’t too busy mining YouTube for foot-in-balls videos to fill valuable basic cable air time. Gamasutra posted an overly long and obtusely written introspective by the half of the Tale of Tales development team with a penis, in which he explains that The Graveyard is fantastic and wonderful, and can be quoted as saying that people who don’t like it are further down “the ladder of human civilization” than those who love it.

This wouldn’t be the first time a Belgian has called me unevolved. In fact, it wouldn’t be the second. But it would be the first time I’ve heard it from a Belgian who’s made a “game” in which I am expected to tunnel through a digital sculpture of him and his girlfriend going at it Russian Army-style.

It is times like these for which the cliché “consider the source” was invented. Thanks, history of the English language!

THE ENDLESS FOREST

Slowly wandering around a low-res forest with a low draw distance, with no objective, is not fun. Looking at pre-rendered 3D artifacts is only fun if those artifacts are interesting and/or interactive, and is not fun if they are illegible gravestones and low-res ruined foundations featuring zero interactivity. There is only one thing that would make this less fun, and that would be if the player character were a human-faced deer that could only communicate through a series of pre-programmed behavioral animations, that would in fact only count as actual communication if the player were using them on actual deer who actually understood what the fuck they meant.

Guess who just described the entirety of ‘game play’ in The Endless Forest? (Hint: me.)

And you are not ‘playing’ alone, because, lo!, The Endless Forest is actually an MMO-RPG. That’s right. The eight or so deer expressions allow for such a wide variety of expression that Tale of Tales naturally assumed the only way people would want to ‘play’ The Endless Forest would be if they could invite their friends to come be silent, enigmatic deer-monsters with them.

I call this assumption ‘natural’ for the Tale of Tales devs, because their previous work demonstrates their natural predilection for not understanding how everyone but themselves and douchebag gaming scenesters define ‘fun.’ And understand how honest I am being when I say that The Endless Forest is not fun . It is not fun because it cannot in actuality be played, because there is no mechanic for ‘playing’ anything. You are a deer-thing, there are other deer-things, and you deer-thing at each other for as many hours as it takes for you to realize that you’ve just wasted however many hours deer-thinging at other deer-things, and you get up and do something infinitely more productive. Like staring at yourself in the mirror, trying to remember the exact point where your life went completely off therails.

You may have noticed that I called The Endless Forest an MMO-RPG. “What makes it an RPG?” you ask. Answer: if you chance to use the right expression on the right deer at the right time – and as this is seemingly completely random, you will probably never get it to work – you and that deer can trade decorations for your antlers. And by ‘decorations,’ I mean some flowers on some vines, and some vines without flowers. And you will keep these decorations for as long as it takes for another deer to come up, make the right expression, and steal your decorations. And no, you can’t do anything to stop it.

I read on the Tale of Tales website that they are at least savvy enough to not call this thing a game, but instead a “social analysis tool” or something equally bullshit. I would just call it “a half-finished tech demo with severe framerate issues.” But again, as an actual gamer, I don’t think I was the intended audience for this “social analysis tool.”

Unlike The Graveyard, The Endless Forest is free. Which makes sense, as The Endless Forest features nothing anyone with any dignity would care to purchase. The bigger question is why The Graveyard is $5. At least in The Endless Forest you can go left and right and there isn’t a chance the game will lock up if your deer-monster dies.

Which it can’t. Because that would actually be fun to watch. Dear God, would that be fun to watch…

THE PATH

Ah, here is Tale of Tales’ piece de la resistance! By which I mean, it’s a “game” about little girls getting attacked in the woods. And you thought The Endless Forest had its deer-thing head up its own deer-thing ass…

Honestly, this is the best game Tale of Tales has ever produced, in that it’s the only thing they have ever produced that can be called a “game” with a straight face. The player is given objectives – collect 144 floating flowers, look at trash dumped in the woods, get attacked – and meeting those objectives actually impacts the outcome of the game. The fact that achieving the objectives leads to nothing but mystifying, hardly-interactive scenes at the end of the game, giving you no real sense of accomplishment or closure after several hours of game play is…worth pointing out. That’s certainly a strike against this game. But the very fact that there are objectives of any kind proves that this is in fact an actual game, so it’s also a point in favor. In favor of it being an actual game, thatis. Not in favor of it being an actual good game, which it certainly is not.

The Path begins by letting you choose to play as one of six girls, said to range in age from five to 15 (though all but the youngest two look like they could be a malnourished 20, so I don’t see why it matters). All of them are dressed in some kind of red outfit, because as you may not have gathered from my earlier paragraphs, this game is intended to be a postmodern retelling of the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Don’t let the amorphous word “postmodern” scare you – that just means all the little girls (but the littlest one) get sexually assaulted (she rides a werewolf which I think mauls her), and you have no fucking idea what you’re supposed to be getting out of watching any it, if anything. And that it’s okay that you don’t get it, because you’re not supposed to.

Hmm. Maybe “postmodern” is kind of a scary word.

To take the edge off, let me point out that the acts of sexual abuse (and the possible mauling) are only “shown” in the same way you “see” your Sims have sex in The Sims. Your chosen girl either sits on a bench next to a creepy guy with a cigarette, says hi to another creepy guy as he’s chopping wood near his cabin, or watches a creepy guy play a piano to no other audience in a ruined bandstand in the middle of the shadowy woods, to name three of the five out of six possible scenarios that don’t involve werewolves (certainly a missed opportunity if ever there was one). After the set up for some kind of abuse, the screen fades to black, and when it fades back up you’re watching a torrential rain soak your chosen girl as she lays in the fetal position in front of Grandmother’s House. Being that this is supposed to be aretelling of Little Red Riding Hood, Grandmother’s House is the place you were supposed to be trying to get your girl to in the first place, but which you can only get to by way of implied sexual assault (and probable mauling).

See, you can just run straight along the road the game starts you on and go right to Grandmother’s House. In fact, the only instructions you get at the beginning of the game tell you to do just that. But if you do, you’ll meet Grandmother, the game will end, and it will tell you you’ve lost. Which is pretty confusing, since you only did exactly what the motherfucking game told you to do. But the game is lying to you. What the game really wants you to do is run off the path into the creepy woods, look at trash and collect flowers for awhile, then meet some variety of strange man (or man-wolf) who will proceed to assault you off screen, then dump you in front of Grandmother’s house.

It almost seems like one of the members of the dev team, or possibly one of their underpaid interns, got confused at some point, is just criminally stupid, or had a point to prove about his or her salary. If a less angry / criminally stupid person was told to make a game about little girls going to Grandmother’s House through a pedophile / werewolf-infested forest, they would probably make a game where you have to lead the little girl to Grandmother’s House without getting assaulted. Because, see, most people would not assume that anyone would want to unlock a “The Little Girl Got Fucked Up!” achievement point. Except for those Xbox Live achievement whores, who would have to unlock it just on principle. But The Path is a PC exclusive. And a good thing too, because ever since the Hot Coffee fiasco,parents’ groups and politicians have been keeping a close eye on the Xbox. Somehow I think they wouldn’t miss the game where you only win by getting little girls attacked.

Is Tale of Tales trying to bait the mainstream media? The norms are already convinced that most modern games give you “points” for killing hookers and cops, having interracial and / or interspecies sex, and profaning the Holy Name of God. Do we really want these people to know someone made a game you can only win after a little girl has had her innocence brutally stolen from her in Blair Witch country?

The only reason The Path hasn’t led to Congressional hearings is because it’s a PC exclusive. Norms don’t know anything about PC gaming that doesn’t end with the words “Sims” or some other word after the word “Peggle.” And the reason they don’t is because very few people bought The Path. Because it’s a game that, in part, rewards child rape.

Wow. So the free market does actually censor itself. Who’d’a thunk it?

But I haven’t even gotten to the most moronic part of all this. Even after the rape / mauling, Grandmother’s House is not a safe haven where your girl can snuggle warmly in a hand-knitted comforter and try to deal with the trauma she has just suffered, while Gram phones the police and Mom. No, Grandmother’s House is actually the Hellraiser Dimension of Psychosexual Pain. Minus the razor wire, chains and pins, and double the mood lighting and not making a dick-lick of sense. When you finally walk your traumatized girl up to the house (and like The Graveyard, this purgatory of shuffling lasts about two excruciating minutes too long), she enters into a dark space of chaotic, unnerving noise. Suddenly the game goes into first person perspective and just sits there until you start tapping the movementkeys. Then your view proceeds to hover along a pre-programmed path through a serpentine labyrinth that is only less unsettling than an evangelical Hell House because there’s no scene of a botched abortion. Instead there are set pieces arranged in Escher-esqe rooms that, to repeat, don’t make a dick-lick of sense. These vary from girl to girl, and what you see is contingent on what trash you looked at in the woods, which “rooms” you’ve “unlocked.” There is a dining set at the bottom of a full swimming pool. There is a flaming car sitting in the corner of an otherwise empty gymnasium, the walls and ceiling covered with tire tracks that make it look like the car somehow drove all over it. There is a tight, quaking maze of wooden panels sprouting evergreen tree branches, accompanied by the deafening sounds of wood being chopped. And each one of these paths ends with the hovering camera that is you getting smacked to the floor, in front of thingslike a tree growing out of a bed, a bed covered with rubble that spins around on a platform, and a draped coffin behind an open grave (that you fall into, the resolution of the werewolf-mauling game.) These scenes speak for themselves in, to repeat for a third time, not making a dick-lick of sense. I guess some of them are heavy-handed rape metaphors and the grave one is about confronting death. But I don’t know for sure. Knowing Tale of Tales, that mysteriousness is probably intentional, because if there is one thing hipster doofuses are known for (other than working for Tale of Tales and liking whatever temporary band Jack White is in at the moment), it’s being intentionally vague so they can pretend they’re being deep. Because actually being deep would require talent and believing in something other than orgasms, and nothing gets in the way of a quick digital buck like actually having to know what the fuck you’re doing.

Despite how it sounds, The Path isn’t like all of Tale of Tales’ other “games,” in that it isn’t all terrible. The art direction is nice, as the forest is atmospheric and stylized without being obnoxiously overdone, unlike everything Tim Shafer has ever “creative directed”. There are some nice flickery graphical overlays that run throughout most of the game that effectively add creepiness without being too distracting. The dynamic lighting changes based on where you are in the forest and what you’ve encountered, which is a pleasant diversion in a world of games that are either always too bright (Fable II, Halo) or always too dark and dingy (Gears of War, GTA IV, everything else). And the sound design is excellent. The music is better at creating a sense of childhood nightmarishness than everything elsein the game combined. And the cues are tied to the lighting effects, creating a great, eerie atmosphere. If only they were linked to game play that didn’t destroy that atmosphere at every turn by being so tedious and bewildering (144 flowers?!, no minimap except when the game feels like quickly flashing it, the forest is huge and you don’t have markers for the trash you’re supposed to find until you find it, the scenes you see when you find the trash, every single ending).

CONCLUSION: TALE OF TALES IS STUPID

Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn are not utter hacks. But they also don’t know how to make a game. If you made them part of a dev team that was properly directed, they would no doubt contribute many good things to a game in progress. Left to their own discretion, most of what they’ve made is overpriced, barely playable crap, overpriced primarily because it’s barely playable crap. If for some reason you want to give them money, buy The Path. At least it’s an actual game. But I’d suggest saving your money for AudioSurf, or for a Tale of Tales game that may come out a few years down the road, hopefully after Harvey and Samyn get tired of jacking off for money and realize that they’d make a lot more making actual games for actual gamers.

But I wouldn’t hold your breath. Remember, these are the people that made a “game” where the player tunnels through a digital sculpture of what looks like them fucking in a closet, and the city of Antwerp put it in a museum . How much of an incentive do you have to change your business model when the international cabal of douchebag gaming scenesters is lining up to exchange cash for your digital toss rags, and then blasting the Internet with praise for it?

Maybe EA will buy them out and make them make a game about Vikings killing little girls who turn into werewolves. That would be fun.

ASSASSIN'S CREED: BROTHERHOOD IS ST00P1D

2010-12-02T17:14:00.000-08:00

A loosely-structured Scream-Into-The-Void© video game rant by The Only Guy Who Posts Here (i.e., thebluesader, i.e., your mother's "stress reliever")

INTRODUCTION (if you know all you need to know about the Assassin's Creed series, skip ahead to the next section where the actual review of Brotherhood takes place. But you should know by now that I do not condone anyone not reading everything I've ever written. So if you're skipping ahead, understand that I hate you and hope They finally come for you in the night.)

For those who have been too busy since 2007 trying to cure cancer and keep North Korea in their box to play Ubisoft platformers, the perpetually-misspelled Assassin's Creed series (should be Assassins' Creed - there is more than one assassin) follows the confusing adventures of American bartender and hoodie aficionado, Desmond Miles. This is a Ubisoft game, therefore the product of the country that invented movies that don't make any sense on purpose (France), so the less said about whatever the plot is intentionally not making sense about, the better. Suffice it to say, Desmond has been kidnapped by a company called Abstergo and taken to somewhere in continental Europe, where he has been strapped into some kind of lawn chair computer that forces him to relive the "genetic memories" (yes) of his ancestors. Abstergo is making him do this because they are a front company for the Illuminati-lite Templars, a thousand-year-old order of Catholic knights who are now determined to rule the world via ancient, abandoned, kind-of-alien-but-sort-of-not "Artifacts" that have been hidden all around the world. Desmond is a descendant of the ancient order of Capital-A Assassins, a group that has taken it upon itself to defend the world from the Templars by keeping the Artifacts hidden (at least when they're not using them for their own selfish ends; more on this soon). Desmond's ancestors (or at least a couple of them) either hid some of the Artifacts themselves or at any rate knew where some of them ended up, so Abstergo intends to learn their whereabouts via the whole "genetic memory" thing.

Thinking about this kind of stuff too hard is what causes strokes, children (or at least incontinence and possibly erectile dysfunction), so let's call it what it is: an excuse for the player to lead one of Desmond's ancestors around in the time and place he lived, stabbing people in the neck with a wrist blade. There is also what can technically be called an "ass-load" of 3D platforming, because, again, Ubisoft is French, and was therefore unable to read the English-language memo put out by The World's Gamers in 2005 declaring a permanent moratorium on broken, un-fun 3D platforming.

Or they DID read it and just didn't care, because they're French and apparently the French hate fun (just look at their confusing, intentionally-bullshitty movies).

At least in this one, it looks like

they're having just as much fun filming it as

we are watching it.

In the first game in the series (Assassins' Creed, 2007), players portrayed Arab assassin and 13th-Century-hoodie aficionado Altair No Last Name (who was suddenly given a last name in the recap at the beginning of Brotherhood, but as it is like three Arabic words long and Desmond's voice actor reads it really fast, I immediately didn't care). Altair was an interesting guy and his story made for an interesting game, mostly because he was a neck-stabbing amoral jack-hole who got all his sweet assassins' gear and skills taken away at the beginning of AC after getting a fellow assassin killed and not caring about it.

If you read that sentence carefully you're probably wondering how someone's SKILLS can be taken away as punishment, as did I. But in a universe where hedgehogs are blue and can do Mach 4 and Italian plumbers become radioactive death machines by jumping on stars with eyes, having knowledge sucked out of your brain as punishment is a mundane footnote. And a convenient excuse for making the player level up a character over 20-odd hours of gameplay, after teasing them with all his cool abilities by letting them have them all for the first 10 minutes.

The only other way to get away with something like this is to give the player character a sudden bout of amnesia (like in last year's Prototype). And since gaming needs more amnesiac protagonists like the French need to make more movies about boring people not being able to fuck because of socialism or something, we should be thankful for the creative insanity we're given.

Assassins' Creed was, despite the 3D platforming, very fun, because as Altair you had one job, and that job was neck-stabbing. And to be fair, the platforming itself was substantially less than terrible, owing to slick, intuitive, context-sensitive runny-jumpy-stabby controls. Holding one button down, pushing the movement stick forward, and occasionally tapping other buttons made Altair do everything an assassin needs to do to be an assassin. And giving him an open Medieval city or three in which to do it guaranteed 20-odd hours of runny-jumpy-stabby fun. The story was also good, because like I said, Altair No Last Name is an amoral jack-hole, and it was refreshing to finally play a protagonist who wasn't necessarily a good guy. All in all, Atair was a product of his times, and his times (13th Century Palestine) were brutal and filled with similar jack-holes, such as his boss and mentor, who by the end of the game (SPOILERS!) fucks him over and tries to use one of the Artifacts to kill him by overcoming the rules of the Matrix or whatever. But, indeed, whatever. Good game play and a consistently interesting, character-driven story truly a good game makes.

This is you need to know about Assassin's Creed 1.

In 2009, Assassins' Creed 2 continued the story of Desmond and the wacky people at Abstergo and in his head (or blood. Or skin cells. Or whatever). In AC2 - in between sessions in the lawn chair computer, the Animus - Desmond escapes Abstergo with the help of lab assistant Lucy, voiced by and based on (at least facially) Kristen Bell, who many of you will know as OMG KRISTEN BELL I WANT TO MAKE BABIES WITH HER. Lucy is a bonafide living Assassin (part of the same capital letter organization Altair belonged to), and has been working undercover at Abstergo, assisted by fellow Assassins Shaun and Rebecca. They are also trying to get a hold of Desmond and his "genetic memories," since, in addition to his ancestors knowing where the Artifacts are, he is apparently the Assassin Neo / Messiah or something. Again, if you don't think about it too hard, it is easy to ignore, and that's more or less what you have to do here.

Because, again, this plot is just an excuse for Desmond (and thus the player) to relive the "genetic memories" of another of Desmond's ancestors, Italian aristocrat and Late 15th-century-hoodie aficionado Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Ezio, and in that AC2 itself, is less compelling than the original AC. Ezio, while the descendant of Altair, only becomes an Assassin because all the other male members of his family are killed by complicated Italian Renaissance politics involving people the real Assassins want to kill, and I guess he figures he might as well give them a hand. He's a saint of a guy (aside from the neck-stabbing), whose only other personality trait is occasional snarkiness. So he's basically the Prince from Prince of Persia, another Ubisoft franchise that, though 10 years older, by 2009 was already less popular than Assassins' Creed. Primarily because its main character has always been an unnamed snarky hipster who only does anything interesting when he forced by circumstance to do so (secondarily because it was almost 100% shitty 3D platforming). Why Ubisoft decided to write Ezio like the Prince is beyond me, except that 90% of video game protagonists are exactly like this (plus or minus improbable boobs), and people keep buying them. Not me, but, you know...st00p1d people. Like you. And all your friends. And your dad.

Despite Ezio being a lot more boring than Altair, I suppose you could say Assassins' Creed 2 was better than Assassins' Creed 1, because it was basically the same game, just bigger, with prettier digital building architecture. The colors were brighter and now the people you were tasked to stab were Europeans, and as two World Wars have proven, killing members of your own race (like you're not white) is always more fun than killing people who don't pitifully beg for mercy in a language you understand.

But I suppose you could also say AC2 was NOT as good as AC1, in that I am saying that, right now. While AC1 was all about the sweet, sweet neck stabbing and runny-jumping to get there, AC2 wouldn't let you have that kind of asocial fun until after you'd listened to historically-important but largely plot-irrelevant NPCs postulate about Italian Renaissance politics in unskippable cut-scenes. Ezio also had to keep going back to his family's estate every half-hour to collect the money he needed to buy better swords and armor. And while he was there, "oh hey Ezio, if you're not busy, can you tell us how many broken toilets to repair down the street, because, you know, we don't know if you want them all working at the same time, because...um...DO IT OR YOU WON'T GET MORE MONEY."

To be fair, some of the new non-assassination stuff wasn't bad. I got really into collecting all the treasure chests scattered all over the various city maps because I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to 100% completing open-world games. Though, at the end of the day, it had absolutely no bearing on the progression of the game, so was basically pointless. And trying out the different types of historically-accurate weapons was fun. But just as pointless, because by the end of the game Ezio got a hold of Altair's sword and armor from the first game, which were now fantastically overpowered and didn't need to be repaired. The most notable "sort of okay" new additions were the Templar hideouts, building interior platforming puzzles Ezio had to complete to unlock Altair's swag (which was in Ezio's family estate's basement the ENTIRE TIME, but I guess Uncle Mario forgot where he put the key). As much as I hate 3D platforming (I will keep repeating it until it is purged from the world of games forever), and as much as many of these sequences were WAY TOO LONG and arbitrarily timed (apparently just to make me and similarly-tempered people break expensive electronics), they were, like I said, "sort of okay." As in, the reward was worth the effort. Because Mario lost the fucking key. Bastardo.

Not to say the time spent doing these sequences wasn't itself bullshit game padding. Because it was. Because Assassins' Creed is supposed to be about neck-stabbing. And anything that isn't neck-stabbing in Assassins' Creed is automatically un-fun, st00p1d bullshit.

Ezio, in the midst of some un-fun, st00p1d bullshit.

And he clearly knows it, too.

Which brings us to the shambling, vomit-covered disaster that is Assassins' Creed: Brotherhood.

ASSASSIN'S CREED: BROTHERHOOD IS ST00P1D

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is a bad title for this game (aside from the incorrect punctuation). A more accurate title would be The Prince of Persia Takes Rome: the Lurching Loading Screen Adventure. If you're like me, my new title should tell you everything you need to know about why this game is a mess. If you are instead one of those positive, energetic, social people with a good job and a girlfriend, allow me to explain a little. (After I first remind you types that you shouldn't be hanging around my blog in the first place, because I don't make nearly enough Glee references or trendy urban cupcake bistro recommendations to justify the amount of time it takes the average person to read my verbose run-on sentences. Just so you are aware.)

Assassins' Creed: Brotherhood isn't a sequel to Assassins' Creed 2, I guess because there's no reason to make new HD character skins and building textures when you've barely collected on all the time and money you invested (some might say, foolishly) in the vast amount in the last game. AC2 ended with Desmond and fellow Assassins Lucy, Shaun and Rebecca fleeing their giant loft hideout in an unmarked box truck, as the Abstergo Corporation had sent its goons to bring the escaped Desmond and Lucy back to their warehouse in Wherever That Was (if you need details about Abstergo or Desmond and Lucy's previous adventures, see the last section, and realize THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULDN'T SKIP AHEAD, ASSHOLE). AC:B begins with Desmond and the Gang arriving at the modern day remains of AC2's Ezio's family estate. The doors are locked and the building is partially collapsed, so the first thing the player has to do is lead Desmond through underground tunnels with Lucy so they can find a way into the basement, where they can continue Desmond's lawn-chair-computer-Animus sessions.

You'll immediately notice a problem. AC1 started with a short platforming section, then Altair assassinating a Templar which inadvertently gets a fellow Assassin killed. As you'll recall, this more or less established what you'd be doing throughout the rest of the game: platforming a little, then neck-stabbing. AC2 started with a bunch of slow story crap, followed by an only slightly less slow platforming sequence or five, and then FINALLY letting Ezio stab a guy. And again, this more or less established what you'd be doing throughout the rest of the game: sitting through lots of unskippable cut-scenes, doing a lot of arbitrarily-lengthened platforming, then finally, FINALLY, stabbing guys.

AC:B starts with Desmond and Lucy doing a 20 minute sewer level while their voice actors pretend they have snarky sexual tension. And then there's another 10 minute sequence in which Desmond had to platform all over the town at the foot of Ezio's family estate activating fuse boxes. When he finally gets into the Animus, we catch up with Ezio and surviving family who, after getting attacked at the family estate by the Evil Pope's perverted asshole of a son, have fled to Rome. Which kind of seems like the worst place to flee to considering the Evil Pope and his son LIVE THERE. But I guess that makes some kind of incredibly stupid sense: they're not going to expect Ezio to move into their backyards, so they won't expect him. Anyway, all the NPCs from the last game are also conveniently in Rome - totally not drawing attention to themselves by organizing against the Evil Pope IN HIS CITY - and give updates about how much cereal they've eaten since the last time Ezio (and the player) saw them. And how their cereal consumption may or may not have impacted Italian Renaissance politics.

And guess what? Interspersed with such frequent and lengthy loading screens that I felt like I was trying to play the original release of The Witcher again on my crappy PC, this is the game. There are still assassinations in AC:B, and they are more or less fun, and still important to the plot. But you only get to do them - you only get to have fun - after the game has decided you've done enough timed jumping puzzles and listened to enough melodramatic dialogue. Because Ubisoft, and thus the game, apparently think this is why we're here. To not jump the right way in under two minutes and to find out what Machiavelli thinks about Vatican City policies now that it's 1507.

For fuck's sake, Lucy!

Shut up and let the man stab some people already!

There are no platform-puzzle Templar hideouts this time. But their are six platform-puzzle Romulus cult lairs scattered throughout Rome (yes, there is a pagan cult in this game. Because a game about the Evil Pope manipulating the Catholic Church didn't have enough fucking religious intrigue). And when I say they are scattered around the map, I mean really fucking scattered, because this map is way too big, and divided up by so many rural areas adjacent to the Seven Hills that you can't have fun roof-running across the city anymore. But you can (and WILL) spend hours running around the base of the damn hills trying to find the one spot where you can actually climb up them, so there's that. If you find that just as fun. So, if you work for Ubisoft.

As well as the cult lairs, there are also four forced stealth sequences in which you first have to raid an enemy base to find blueprints, then use the machine built from the blueprints to destroy the enemy base. Even at their best, each one of these sequences is 80% platforming, and each one has at least one unskippable cut-scene. And all of them, ALL OF THEM, have 0% assassinations. In fact, in many of them, you either don't have time to kill anyone because of the tightly-scripted, autofail timed jumping puzzles, or if you do have time, killing someone will cause everyone in a ten mile radius to immediately know you're there. And remember, this is forced stealth, which fans of the Hitman franchise will remember means anyone sees you, you fail, try again from the beginning. AC:B introduces a feature that lets you fulfill certain specifics during the missions to get "100% Synchronization," which you don't have to do, which make the missions a little easier (you might get cash bonuses for getting 100% or something, but I never noticed if that's how it worked, which shows you how important it is in the first place). But guess what? To get full synchronization on a lot of these missions, YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO ASSASSINATE ANYONE.

Get the point yet? The new Assassins' Creed game doesn't want you to assassinate anyone unless you absolutely have to. This is like your favorite band (probably Train, you tasteless fuckwits) releasing a song that pauses in silence every 20 seconds, just to make sure you're not singing along with it. What is the problem, Ubisoft? Your assassination video game is fun because I get to assassinate people in a video game. I didn't rent this thing (thank god I didn't buy it) because I was hoping to see Da Vinci finally make out with a dude and tell Ezio how he feels about it. And I sure as hell wasn't interested in more timed jumping puzzles navigated with what have now proven themselves to be some of the worst platforming controls ever.

I noticed when I first started playing AC:B that Ubisoft had fiddled around with the context-sensitive platforming controls. It was clear they had tried to make them "work more smoothly;" as in, they were now the platforming equivalent of your cell phone's Autocomplete. Unlike AC2, AC:B now seems to be thinking ahead of whatever Ezio is doing, making assumptions about his next action, allowing him to slide into a position and its associated animation more smoothly and quickly. And this seemed like a wholly positive innovation.

...Until the timed jumping puzzles started. Anyone who has ever had their phone send "penis" instead of "person" knows exactly where this is going. It is now almost impossible to tell what Ezio is going to do when you press Foward, the platforming context button, and an action button. Depending on the landscape directly in his path, he might jump up. He might jump down. He might wall-run and leap off into oblivion. He might just lurch forward and fall 80 feet into a dark cistern. Sometimes he even grabs and interacts with features I didn't even know where there, either because the HD textures make everything look like an action point or because the camera is pointing the wrong way and I've gotten sick of flopping it around with the other stick. Ironically enough, that last "problem" is actually a good thing, because I ended up solving a lot of the platforming puzzles when Ezio did the right thing while I couldn't even see what the right thing was.

Of course, that's only like 15% of the time. The other 85% is him jumping to his death, going up a ladder backwards, grabbing the side of something instead of the top, or just lurching indecisively at the edge of a platform, so I can watch the five second "oops, almost fell there" animation again for the dozen-millionth time.

This is the most frustrating aspect of the broken controls. But by no means the only one. Context-sensitive controls are not used in games very often, especially in open world games, and there's a reason for that - how does the game know the context in which you want to use the controls? For instance, the Xbox 360's 'Y' button can activate the following, depending on context: Eagle Vision mode. Whistling for Ezio's horse. Commanding followers / mercenaries to stop moving, start moving, OR attack a selected target. Taunt enemies. Activate a shop. Talk to a mission-specific NPC. Accept a mission at a glowing mission-selection point. Do a swan dive off a ledge into a bale of hay or wheat.

Now on average, the game knows which context is the right context. You can't activate a shop, select a mission, or talk to an NPC unless you're standing in the right spot. You can't order followers / mercenaries around unless you're currently employing them. You have to hold 'Y' down for half a second longer to get Eagle Vision. But, fellow gamer, guess the correct context in the following situation: Ezio is standing on a ledge above a hay bale, is employing a band of mercenaries, is ALSO escorting a follower, and happens to be standing in front of a shop, which can be activated at any time, including during missions. As a gamer, you would probably tap 'Y' in this situation to order your mercenaries to attack an approaching guard. But sometimes the game can't figure that out. Tap 'Y,' and there's an equal chance that Ezio will either swan dive off the ledge, order his follower to run head-long into the guard, or whistle for the goddamn horse.

Admittedly, this kind of specific situation doesn't happen all the time. But it happens often enough when a game is this long and expansive that it becomes very, VERY frustrating. And this is just the drama specifically involving the 'Y' button. Every face button has at least half as many possible contexts, some even during free-running sequences, when you'd suppose holding down the fucking free-running context button would tell the game what it needs to know. But sometimes it doesn't seem to matter. And more than a couple of instances of standing there in the middle of a mission, frantically tapping the same button just to get Ezio to do the one and only one specific thing you want him to do, while he repeatedly does one of the many things you specifically DO NOT WANT him to do, is why there is a controller-shaped imprint in the plaster of my bedroom wall. And the right analog stick is making a weird, crunchy metallic sound every time I move it.

This is what happens 60% of the time when

you press the "quietly sneak away" button.

But all this is only a problem if the game decides to acknowledge the pushing of buttons at all. Or even gives you the opportunity to press them. Ezio ignored the jump button so often I was forced to conclude that it wasn't my finger's fault, that either the controller wasn't working right or the game wasn't working right. Saying what I have about how I treat my controllers, its very possible that the piece of plastic is to blame.

Or would be, if I couldn't throw Soul Calibur IV or Saints Row 2 in and immediately demonstrate that, abuse aside, my controllers work fine. Apparently, the game is so busy trying to guess the context of the buttons that it just doesn't notice sometimes that they are actually being pressed. Or STILL being pressed, like when it makes Ezio toss off an unaimed crossbow bolt that alerts everyone to his presence when I'm sitting there, finger still down on the button, trying to line up the shot. And then there are the times when Ezio is standing directly in front of a shop or a horse or an NPC and I'm slamming the action button so hard my knuckles hurt, and the game doesn't care because it needs a second to realize where I am and prompt me to use it first. And my favorite example of this kind of bullshit is when I jumped off a 200 foot church spire in Vatican City to test out my brand-new Da Vinci parachutes, and the "open parachute" option never activated.

Don't get me wrong, I've made Altair and Ezio face-plant off of the tops of buildings a thousand times by now just because...well, ha ha. But I'd at least like the option to avoid suicide after I've paid in-game money specifically for it.

All of this - the context problems, the retarded button detection - really messes with the game's difficulty curve. AC:B, like the first two games, isn't hard. Now, we're not talking Fable series-easy here, but only like one step above. The only hard parts actually programmed into any of these games has been the arbitrariness of the timed sequences. And those would be the only hard parts, if the controls weren't a mess. Since they are, AC:B's difficulty is like Grand Theft Auto IV's difficulty - it tends to be hard ONLY because the controls don't work. Second only to GTA IV, AC:B can safely be called one of the hardest "easy" games I've ever played. I should've been able to beat it in 10 hours, but it took 30 because I had to replay so many missions due to problems with the controls. In all seriousness, I only lost one mission because I actually got killed because I genuinely did something wrong. And that was pretty funny (I attacked a guy too close to a ledge, both he and Ezio fell off, and there were eight other guys waiting on the street who just hammered Ezio's ass with poleaxes before I could even get his sword out). Every other mission I failed - mostly the timed jumping garbage - was a direct result of the game making Ezio jump wrong or at any rate not respond to what I was telling him to do. And if you are a gamer, you know how infuriating that is. A game that is programmed to be difficult with good controls is perfectly fine (see, oh, any Japanese game made in the last five years). But one that is ONLY hard because it doesn't work is a game that should not have been released.

Okay. So we've established that the controls are a problem. But it's worth putting up with it if the story is good, right? I mean, the people who like Deadly Premonition (sad, crazy people, such as myself) don't like it because they enjoy trying to shotgun the same wall-crawling ghost child for 15 real minutes. The story is what makes the suffering worthwhile. The characters are the reason you replay the same godfuckingdammit timed jumping puzzle / forced stealth mission for six hours or until your hands calcify. You care about these little digital people voiced by celebrities you'd like have sex with, and you want to see what happens to them, and be a part of that exciting journey.

Well, if it's story and characters you're after, 1) you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of suffering, and as your philosophical peer, I do not recommend it, and 2) their are Hideki Kamiya games that have more developed characters and more of a clear story in mind than AC:B. This is basically the gaming equivalent of that second Matrix movie no one remembers, except that they remember how the theater audience booed and threw popcorn after the rip-off, bullshit cliffhanger ending.

But because of its length, AC:B is worse. If the second Matrix movie was like a romantic weekend you've been looking forward to for months that basically ends after 3 minutes of low-level cardio, AC:B's is that, but after a week-long shuttle trip it took to get you and your lover to your vacation house on the Moon. You punish your hands and blood pressure for 20 hours, and your reward is being told to buy the next game when it comes out. Oh, and not to spoil it, but one of the main characters gets "killed" at the end, which you KNOW is bullshit, and it is all the more frustrating because you know Ubisoft actually thinks you're stupid enough to think Superman isn't ever coming back. After all that work, all that suffering, this kind of "ha ha, suck it" ending is exactly that: "Ha ha," says Ubisoft. "Suck it."

Not that I would have cared if the ending had been good. At this point I was still waiting for the characters to do something, anything, even the least bit interesting. Shaun and Rebecca have a few genuinely chuckle-worthy moments between them, and Lucy almost begins to seem like a character worth more than fantasies about Kirsten Bell and a strong wind spontaneously blowing off all her clothes when she's right in front of your house.

And that wind is part of a giant rain storm that

immediately floods the street and makes her all wet.

And she is wearing a bikini under her clothes.

But "almost" is the key word, here. Its exactly one scene, and then she tells Ezio to get his ass back to the vitally-important timed jumping puzzles. Ezio is as Prince of Persia-y in AC:B as he can get without being Jake Gyllenhaal doing the kind of British accent Iranians have. And Ezio's actually further along the Spectrum of Soulless Male Protagonists than the Prince, stridently approaching Master Chief territory. Because now Ezio is King of the Assassins, and he's got the fate of the world on his shoulders, and if he shows any weakness the brain-bats will get him, and giving purposely vague one-word answers to everything makes him look like the coolest song-writing barista with scrolly tattoos ending just above his t-shirt sleeves, EVAR.

Okay, so I was being facetious about the brain-bats. But I'm not joking about that barista crap. Mr. Bartender Desmond seems to have spontaneous grown a tribal tattoo on his right forearm at some point between the end of the AC2 DLC and the opening truck ride of AC:B. His clothing has also been affected by whatever strange disease this is, because now his hoodie and t-shirt sport those "tattoo-inspired" Photoshop scroll-splosions that only look cool to people whose boss and/or wives won't let them get the kinds of tattoos they think bikers probably have (but don't, because people who actually pay that kind of money for a tattoo usually get a personally-designed one. Because they don't want to look like one of those assholes with the Photoshop scroll-splosion tattoos, because those only make you look tough to college girls and people at church. Because REAL tough-guy tattoos always have boobs and/or Batman fighting a werewolf).

If Desmond had suddenly grown a tattoo of bare-chested Batwoman fighting a werewolf, I still would have thought he was boring, but at least he would have looked like someone who had done something interesting, even if it was just explaining to the tattoo artist that he wanted a tattoo of bare-chested Batwoman fighting a werewolf. Hell, even if it was just on his shirt, that would mean that at the very least he had had an interesting day buying that shirt. But no such luck. In addition to the shitty faux-tough-guy scroll work on his clothes, he now suddenly has this small kidney bean-shaped messenger bag over his shoulder, which might carry something interesting, but if so, no one ever talks about it. And he lays on top of it while he's in the Animus, so it can't have anything sharp or made of glass in it. And most interesting things are at least sharp and/or made of glass.

To be fair, AC:B gives us a bit more background on Ezio. If you'll recall the beginning of AC2, the reward for doing one of the many platforming sections was watching Ezio have PG-13 sex with some woman. This was to establish that he was a bit of a playboy, as his mother stated outright a few minutes later. This mystery woman returns briefly in AC:B, in side missions that are unlocked as you take down what amounts to Abstergo sleeper-agents scattered throughout the map. But her missions are short and have nothing to do with the story, and only serve to ruin what little character development Ezio was given in AC2. See, no, he wasn't a player - he LOVED Cristina Vespucci. She was the love of his life. And he would've married her, had her father not opposed the union because Ezio's father had been killed by some guy for whatever reason that happened. Or maybe he just found out that Ezio was now stabbing guys for a living and he didn't want Christmas parties to be awkward for the rest of his life. Frankly, who cares. As soon as I realized that Playboy Spoiled Brat Self-Absorbed Reluctant Assassin Ezio was now being retconned into a grizzled, Harlequin Romance hero with a contemporary Midwestern attitude about sex, I literally stopped giving whatever little fuck I'd ever given about him. Because suddenly he was just another well-toned white guy in a video game aimed at 17-year-olds in Texas. And as we all know, the only thing notable about these kinds of characters is what color jacket they are wearing, and only then because you don't want to lose sight of them during combat sequences.

Don't get me wrong. The AC2 story wasn't exactly good. Hell, as I've said, the AC1 story wasn't exactly good, at least the parts of it that made sense. There was too much armchair sociological speculation, and too many arguments about the meanings of abstract concepts, for the plot to make any kind of solid point except that THERE IS NO POINT (the "point" of every French creative work since at least the 1960s, and probably earlier). But those stories were intriguing and kind of original. AC:B can't even bother with that. Part of the reason the series' story has worked at all is because of its existentialism. In AC1, you weren't entirely sure if the Assassins were really the good guys or if Abstergo and the Templars were necessarily the bad guys. The writing seemed very careful to avoid declaring anyone anything other than self-interested. By AC2, it was pretty clear that Abstergo and the Templars were at least not the good guys, and that the Assassins at least wanted to be good guys, even if they were stabbing people all the time. Maybe all this was accidental. Maybe something was lost in translation from the original French. Or maybe this was more of the plot just not making much sense. But whatever the reason, it worked.

But AC:B has no pretensions to moral subtlety. Abstergo and the Templars are thousand-year-old Nazis who relish employing people who think murder and incest are funny (which contradicts their supposed desire to quietly engineer the world behind the scenes), and the Assassins are noble warrior-poets who want freedom and democracy for all, and always have (even though not even the most liberal intellectual in the world before the middle of the 19th Century wanted anything like that). What's worse is the retconning AC:B is doing, and I mean not just to Ezio with the Cristina stuff. If the Assassins have always been the good guys and the Templars / Abstergo have always been the bad guys, that means the moral ambiguity in the first game was an out-and-out error in writing, OR that the characters were all special cases that completely misrepresented the sides they were fighting for (which would also be an error in writing). The Templars / Abstergo have always been cacklingly evil - Vidic and his team were just especially intellectual and limp-wristed. The Assassins have always been gloriously noble - Al Mualim was just a greedy nutjob employing a vast conspiracy to get a hold of the Artifact. These weren't flawed people who acted like jack-holes because they thought it would best serve their good intentions. They're just Hitlers of varying degrees. There is no Truth. Everything is Permitted. Now Let's Stab Some Dudes in the Head.

Obviously, a total lack of moral subtlety can be made consistent with the mythology of this universe and the behavior of the main characters so far. But that's disappointing, when it looked for all the world like Ubisoft was trying to make a thinking man's GTA-meets-Hitman (even if the thinking man in question was expected to not think too hard). If you can't tell, I feel betrayed by this new tonal shift. And what upsets me more is that there's no reason they had to do this, but just did it anyway, either because of laziness, apathy, or just plain screwing up.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is a pretty game. It is a technologically advanced game. It should have been an interesting, fun game, like the first two in the series. But instead it is a st00p1d game, suffering from a crap story, crap controls, and way too much 3D platforming.

Which I hate. I really, really do. Like your mom hates your dad. At least, since her first night with me.

Ezio as a wolf by deviantART member ~Shagan-fury.

HELPING THE WORLD, ONE EMAIL CAMPAIGN AT A TIME

2010-08-09T17:31:00.000-07:00

The self-proclaimed Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is one of the few online organizations I know of that not only preaches the radical Evangelicalization of America, it practices it.

No, it doesn't waste its time setting up hospitals or charity drives or family planning counseling or any pussy fag-ball shit like that. Hell no. The CCFC takes it to the hoop the only way whatever it is can effectively be taken to whatever hoop it goes into - email campaigns directed at CEOs who head companies that try to sell their products by advertising to children, so that the children will bother their parents until the parents get so sick of the bullshit that they'll buy whatever the kids want.

While I may not support the politics of this organization, I am certainly in favor of any group that gives me a platform to easily email corporate CEOs with whining. In this particular instance, the CCFC is offended that McDonald's has put Marvel superhero toys in its Happy Meals, and would like me, and you, to whine at McDonald's CEO Jim Skinner until he puts a stop to it.

Why does this offend the CCFC? Given their name, you would assume that they are simply opposed to any advertising directed at children. And maybe that's the core of their offense. But in this instance, there is something more. See, the CCFC is convinced that Mavel superheroes are not only offensively appealing to children, they also promote violence. I'll let the form email from their site explain:

SUBJECT: No Clobberin' Time for Preschoolers

Dear Mr. Skinner,

I am writing to demand that you immediately pull your Marvel comic action figure Happy Meal promotion for preschool boys.

I am appalled that this promotion includes The Human Torch, a man on fire, and The Thing, which menacingly roars “IT’S CLOBBERIN’ TIME!” at the press of a button.

Your decision to hand little boys the horrifying spectacle of a man engulfed in flames or a menacing figure that explicitly spurs them to violence calls into question McDonald’s reputation as a family-friendly company. I urge you to end this promotion immediately.

Thank you.

Now, far be it from me to tamper with the whiny perfection that is this email. But, see, I literally have no choice BUT to tamper with it - the CCFC has enabled editing of the email, so I can put a personal spin on my dissatisfaction with McDonald's child-corrupting shenanigans.

I decided to do a bit of role-playing as I made my additions. Not because I am a jerk who sees this as an opportunity to dick around. Not at all. I simply feel that whining to a CEO will be more effective if he thinks I'm a concerned housewife instead of a pissy DC fanboy crank in my parents' attic. Granted, this is not an entirely honest tactic. But with the impressionable minds of our nation's children at stake, NO SACRIFICE IS TOO GREAT.

What follows is my email to McDonald's CEO Jim Skinner:

SUBJECT: No Clobberin' Time for Preschoolers, if GOD has anything to say about it

Dear Mr. Skinner,

I am writing to demand that you immediately pull your Marvel comic action figure Happy Meal promotion for preschool boys. You see, I am the wife of a man who makes an extremely comfortable living for our family by buying and reselling foreclosed properties, God's blessing to us in the midst of the Recession to reward us for making sure we had a good credit rating. This has enabled me to be the full-time stay-at-home mother Christ wants all women to be, which in turn has given me the ability to pay extraordinarily precise attention (with the help of cellphone GPS trackers and ankle monitors) to everything my children do. While pursing this righteous calling, I came across your underhanded attempt to indoctrinate my children into the heathenish world of secular comic books. And I demand you stop immediately. Your failure to do exactly that will make me feel like less than the stellar mother I know I am, and as I am only such a fantastic homemaker by the grace and will of God, making me feel bad about it is basically you throwing excrement in God's face and laughing. Keep that in mind as you make your decision.

I am appalled that this promotion includes The Human Torch, a man on fire, and The Thing, which menacingly roars “IT’S CLOBBERIN’ TIME!” at the press of a button. There is also some kind of silver guy on a surf board, which is offensive because someone (probably Chinese or Mexican) clearly forgot to paint it at the factory, and this promotes laziness and disrespect for corporate product specifications. I suggest many people be fired over this particular oversight.

And three of the other toys, in brightly colored skin-tight suits and unnatural poses? What is this, the Gay Kamasutra Parade? That SICKENS ME, as it should any other individual redeemed by the Blood of the Lamb. And don't even get me started on the guy with the claws coming out of his knuckles. Maybe that's your idea of promoting cutlery safety in New York City, but out here in the Real America, we know a potential blinding hazard when we see one! This comic book man in question is also dressed and posed for the Gay Kamasutra Parade, and I think I've made my opinion on that whole matter more than clear.

Your decision to hand little boys the horrifying spectacle of a man engulfed in flames or a menacing figure that explicitly spurs them to violence, not to mention encouraging them to play with knives and participate in homosexual fetish parades, calls into question McDonald’s reputation as a family-friendly company. I simply should not have to worry that when my children stop at McDonald's after Wednesday night church, they will be exposed to the vile secular media I work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to protect them from. I urge you to end this promotion immediately.

Remember: if you don't, you + throwing excrement + God's face.

Thank you in advance for responding positively to the burden placed upon your heart by the righteous conviction of the Holy Spirit, and doing what God has told me to tell you to do. The LORD demands that our children grow up healthy, hard-working and dedicated to his evangelical mission to the Muslim and Secular worlds, and certainly society at large should not do even the littlest thing to compromise this calling.

Because there is only one character with super-powers who deserves the attention of the world's children, and that is Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior.

And maybe Batman. Because Marvel chokes a fat one.

If that doesn't take care of business, I don't know what business is!

Thanks again to the CCFC. Together, we can destroy all our intellectual enemies with the blinding fire of Righteousness. TOGETHER.

Seriously, you guys. Get over there and do your part!

(PROBABLY) LEGAL FUN FROM SOUTH KOREA

2010-07-04T21:05:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, I'm turning into THAT GUY. By which I mean, that guy who keeps posting unoriginal content as a placeholder because actual updates never seem to materialize.

Well, you know what? That's kinda who I am right now.

So here is some pretty much legal (I'm pretty sure) musical fun from our Starcraft-loving friends in the Korea that isn't run by a guy who will totally fucking kick your trashcans over in the middle of the night.

I hope you enjoy it in a pretty much legal (I'm pretty sure) way. At least until I actually get some original content fit to print.

AND THEN GERMAN MASTER CHIEF HUNG OUT IN SPACEDOCK WITH THE ALIENS FROM THE MOS EISLEY CANTINA, WHERE THEY DICKED AROUND WITH THE MASS EFFECT COMPUTERS THEN PLAYED SOME DESCENT: FREESPACE. OH YEAH, AND ALL OF IT WAS A TECHNO DANCE PARTY

2010-05-24T08:12:00.000-07:00

RARELY UPDATED BLOGS ARE ST00P1D

2010-05-11T18:20:00.000-07:00

Yes, it has been a month since I've updated. But that's only because...I didn't feel like it.

Seriously. That's the only reason. I mean, I tried to and everything, but every time I tried, I was just, "Meh. I'd rather be playing Xbox." So I did.

But never fear. I've gotten over my lack of interest, and posts are coming. Next up? Something about Doctor Who. And comic books, probably.

Until then, follow me on Twitter, or ask me stuff on Formspring.

Excelsior, true believers!

formspring.me

2010-04-15T13:18:00.001-07:00

Ask me anything http://formspring.me/thebluesader

ST00P1D THOUGHTS: "THE SIMS 3 IS A LIE! TELL THE PEOPLE!"

2010-03-02T23:34:00.000-08:00

INTRODUCTION

Oh my god. I think I've finally stumbled upon the truth. After all these years of going about my business just like the rest of you, just like I was raised, keeping my head down, minding my own business, I've finally realized that things are not in fact as they appear. That the the truth of reality is not the truth that is widely known; that, in fact, the truth is very different, and, dear reader, darkly so.

Honestly, I've always suspected that something was amiss. That beneath the graphics card bloom of sunny weekends, quick-hire jobs and bull sessions with the neighbors at 2 AM, there was something shadowy afoot, as if there was some sort of evil puppet master doing unspeakable things to make the seemingly idyllic universe possible. I realize that I suspected this for the large part because we're talking about EA's The Sims 3 here, where the player is God of Digitalworld, which means I'm God of Digital world, and I'm sort of a dick.

But when I use words like "amiss" and "afoot" to describe what's going on, I'm not talking about the dickish things I ~~often~~ occasionally do to my Sims. No. My power to manipulate digital fake-lives as I see fit isn't what bothers me (obviously not, or I wouldn't be such a dick). No, what bothers me instead is something far more nuanced, far more secretive, far more sneaky. And this is the realization that the factors that make my overlordship of my Sims possible are not rose petals and puppydog smiles, but are instead the bloodstained tools of the Tyrant's...um...Toolbox.

Allow me to open your eyes, as my eyes have now been opened. But be warned, reader: what you learn here cannot be unlearned. And what you learn may alter your reality in such a way as to make any attempt to live even a semblance of your former life utterly impossible. (I.E., your Sims-related shit might get seriously fucked the fuck up.) Only if you are prepared to take this risk should you proceed. (I.E., quaggy Sims fantards need to get off my fucking blog right now, because I don't want to hear your whining.)

(Yes, 'quaggy' is a real word. And yes, I used it properly. Now, unless you quaggy shits have anything else to whine about, let's get to the list, shall we?)

THE TRUTH

1. While the player may indeed be God of the Sims, God's wishes are relayed to the Sims via an invisible Enforcer, who dictates behavioral choices via concise txt messages.

You know exactly what I'm talking about. Select a Sim. Click on the Sim, or an object. And what happens? Up pop several text behavioral options floating around a large representation of the Sim's head. Now, before you pick one, move the mouse around to point at the different options, and watch what the Sim does. Yes, it follows the movement of the mouse with its eyes, even turning its head to see where you're pointing.

What does this mean? This means that, during this instance, your Sim is compelled to pay full attention to what you're about to order it to do. And when you select an option, the Sim dutifully does it. Now, as God, you certainly order your Sim around based on these options. But where do these options come from? And who makes sure each Sim obeys commands? The answer can only be "an invisible Enforcer."

The Enforcer has determined what a Sim is permitted to do, and these options for behavior have been distilled into blunt txt messages, all to make it easier for God to command the Sim, and for the Sim to follow. God selects the behavior, and the Sim MUST OBEY THE WORD OF THE ENFORCER.

But how does the Enforcer compel Sim obedience? On to Point 2.

2. The Enforcer maintains control of Digitalworld through the use of invisible secret Sim police that manage all aspects of Digitalworld.

True, you'll never see this Enforcer Squad rounding Sims up in unmarked trucks or hassling them on the street. But that's only because the Enforcer Squad is far too sophisticated for that. They've been at this for three games now, over more than ten years, and in that time have learned to control Sims so well that the Sims don't even suspect they're being controlled!

For example:

To make sure that Sims don't have too much free time in which to cause trouble, the Enforcer Squad manages the economy in such a way that whenever a Sim wants a job, her or she can immediately get one. There is a constant need for more journalists, more athletes, even more petty criminals in Digitalworld. Whatever a Sim wants to do for money, a Sim CAN do for money, and immediately so, and all under the auspices of the Enforcer and his/her squad. How this is possible will be made clear by the end of this revelatory essay.

If a Sim is lonely and having trouble finding a mate, that Sim will find that there is a constant stream of new Sims popping up in public places, seemingly existing entirely for the purpose of satisfying the social needs of other Sims. These new Sims may not even have houses in town, and they may not even have jobs - they're simply at the park or the spa at 1 AM, apparently just waiting for another Sim to approach them.

A Sim is tired of cleaning his or her house or repairing damaged goods? No problem - the necessary service is always a simple phone call away, day or night. And while said service-person will only work during the day, they will ALWAYS show up when they say they will, and if they can't, another identically qualified service-person will show up to do the job in their place.

Of course, repairs aren't even necessary. Why? Well, a Sim can always buy new goods, regardless of the time of day, from an automated system controlled by God that seems to instantly teleport new objects into the Sim's house, and to the exact specifications the Sim prefers. Electronics, furniture, even pop art - if a Sim desires it, God can instantly provide it through an interface provided by the Enforcer, and apparently managed by the Enforcer Squad. Because the money to pay for the new items is immediately subtracted from the Sim's household funds. This money is either directly paid out of an electronic account, or, more sinisterly, the invisible agents of the Enforcer Squad materialize in the Sim's house and take the money out from under his or her mattress. Hell, perhaps the agent even materializes beside the Sim his or herself, and takes the cash directly out of his or her pocket.

And how do the purchased items instantly materialize? Perhaps some sort of teleportation device is used. Or perhaps the invisible agents of the Enforcer deliver the product, somehow transferring it from the interface's ether to the material plane of Digitalworld.

This may sound unbelievable, but hear me out. Interested Sims can choose either the military or law enforcement career track. And when they're working their shift, where do they go? Why, to the appropriate career headquarters. They enter the building, and then SEEMINGLY DISAPPEAR. What? How is this possible? What is going on?

It is my theory that, hidden within these buildings, are hundreds if not thousands of sophisticated pod-stations, into which each employed Sim can plug his or herself, Matrix-style. At this point, it is my contention that an avatar of said Sim - possibly composed of astral energy, or the technological equivalent - materializes invisibly in Digitalworld. It is this avatar that then invisibly carries out the will of the Enforcer, as dictated by God.

The sophisticated pod-station tends to all the employed Sim's needs during his or her duty shift: the pod feeds the Sim, processes his or her waste, and even allows the Sim to socialize with coworkers who are also plugged in to the pod-station system. All this, while the invisible avatar of the employed Sim takes funds to pay for items bought by other Sims, which are then delivered out of the ether of the shopping interface. During this duty shift, the avatar of the employed Sim can also apparently manage the economy, makes sure each Sim obeys God through the txt commands of Enforcer, and, as will now be discussed, "HANDLE" THE DISOBEDIENT.

3. The fate of every Sim in Digitalworld is in the hands of the Enforcer and his/her squad. And these tyrannical powers are not above employing these powers arbitrarily, apparently to control Sims through sheer terror.

These nefarious methods of control do not noticeably affect a Sim household as long as God has deemed the household "Active." If a household is "Active," God and God alone has the right to determine the fate of Sims in that household. But the moment God tires of managing the Sims in said household and deems that household "Inactive," the duty of managing that household and its Sims apparently passes to the Enforcer and his/her invisible agents. And often, the Enforcer determines to disrupt and even destroy these inactive households, in what can only be an attempt to keep all other households in line by way of brutal terrorism.

Go ahead. Change a household's status from "Active" to "Inactive," then go back some time later and check the status of that household. Sims it contained while "Active" have suddenly disappeared. Sure, they are still remembered by the remaining members of that household, and may even be communicated with via telephone. Perhaps they can even visit the household if invited. But a deeper look at Digitalworld will show that the "missing" Sims no longer live anywhere on the map. They have been relocated, and to where is only known to the Enforcer and his squad. Sometimes the missing Sim cannot even be contacted - they are listed as "deceased." While they were happy, healthy, obedient and not particularly accident prone during the entire time their household was "Active," as soon as God deemed it "Inactive," they apparently died. Or, probably more accurately, THEY WERE KILLED.

Why? What did said Sim do to warrant this treatment? And why can't even God him or herself move said Sim back into the household, or bring said Sim back to life? It is my contention that all these questions are answered by looking at the methods of the Enforcer, and his/her motivations for these methods.

Certainly, some of these Sims in question violated some rule dictated by the Enforcer, and were punished by having their right to live in Digtialworld revoked, or were simply executed. But it seems to me that too many inactive Sims disappear from the map for all of them to be actual undesirables. There is also the matter of the Enforcer allowing the existence of a large criminal syndicate in Digitalworld, which proves that crime itself is not wholly offensive to him/her (at least, when said crimes are committed under the auspices of the Enforcer's permitted syndicate).

I propose that the Enforcer banishes and kills algorithmically, with Sims targeted for no greater reason than they live in the "Inactive" state. This is in fact why there are always jobs available - Sims are "removed" from Digitalworld at a constant, steady rate, regardless of their actions. The Enforcer does things this way simply to show the remaining/surviving Sims that the will of the Enforcer is law, regardless of their behavior. Of course their dutiful obedience seems to have no bearing on whether they disappear or not. But the Sims are only human, for godsake, and can do nothing else but hope that, if they are extra obedient, perhaps the Enforcer will look upon them mercifully before dispatching his/her agents to "handle" them if - when - they come up in the "removal" algorithm. The fact that the Enforcer is NOT merciful, that targeted Sims CANNOT be spared, only seems to reinforce the inactive Sims' determination to try harder. Either they don't understand what is going on, or, I fear, they suspect this is the truth, but simply have no other options. The will of the Enforcer truly is law, and all they can do is try their damnedest to follow it as best they are able.

But the Enforcer doesn't maintain fear of his/herself only through various degrees of "removal." All aspects of inactive Sims' lives are in his/her hands. If the Enforcer feels that a certain Sim lacks maturity (or, again, is simply chosen algorithmically), the Sim will be forced to rear a child. Some of these children are apparently adoptees, which Digitalworld seems to have no lack of, possibly because they are orphans of the "removal" of their parents. But other times, the child appears to have the genetic traits of his/her parent/parents. Now, it's entirely possible that, in cases where there are indeed two parents, a baby is conceived by the couple while they are inactive. But even so, this may be dictated by the Enforcer, for the couple may have the child when they are clearly not fiscally or social qualified to do so. Realistically, yes, such things happen accidentally. But knowing what we now know about Digitalworld, how can we exclude the possibility that the Enforcer is somehow involved in this?

But there is no doubt that we are seeing the work of the Enforcer in another case: when an inactive Sim ends up with a child that clearly shares his/her genetic traits, despite the fact that said Sim HAS NO SIGNIFICANT OTHER. A check of the newborn Sim's family tree reveals the disturbing truth - they only have one parent. Yes, such is the case when single parents adopt / are forced to adopt a child. But what does it mean when the child in question clearly shares genetic traits with the single parent?

I'll tell you what it means: the agents of the Enforcer are forcibly cloning these people, and then forcing them to raise the clone! There is simply no other explanation. It's possible that, while inactive, the targeted Sims are carried off to the neighborhood Mad Science Facility, and the cloning is done there. Digitalworld allows Sims to choose to become accomplished robot-animal hybrid breeders, so clearly the Enforcer has some sophisticated technology at hand. But I think it's also possible that the Enforcer Squad may be using said technology to produce clones the same way it delivers new goods to Sim households - by producing them in the technological or astral ether, and transferring them, fully-formed, into the material of Digitalworld. This second method would explain how these infant clones appear so quickly after a household is deemed inactive. It may also serve as an alternative source for the vast amount of available adoptees, and perhaps may also explain the origin of all those friendly, homeless Sims appearing in public places. The Enforcer may have an entire cloning facility in the ether, producing babies factory-style to both satisfy and punish the Sims.

And if that's possible, then why stop the mad science there? We all know how difficult cloning is. Maybe the Enforcer's theoretical ether-world breeding facility doesn't just produce clones. Hell, maybe the "clones" aren't clones at all! Maybe they are, in fact, the result of MASS IN VITRO SEXUAL FERTILIZATION! And if so, where does this facility get the cells it requires to produce this number of children? Perhaps these cells are willingly donated by all those Sims employed in the science career track (who are, logically, the very Sims running the breeding facility for the Enforcer, possibly through avatars of their own working in the ether-plane, since they too "disappear" once inside the the appropriate building.)

But given the theoretical actions of the Enforcer already discussed, I posit that the cells used in this in vitro breeding program need not be willful donations. No - perhaps another duty of the Enforcer's invisible agents is, terrifying as it is to suggest, FORCIBLE SEX-CELL HARVESTING. Perhaps when agents remove funds from Sims' wallets, they also take something else which is far, FAR more personal.

CONCLUSION

Clearly, something terrible is going on behind the scenes to make the seemingly idyllic world of The Sims 3 possible. Perhaps I am incorrect about specifics - honestly, I pray I am. The idea that such terrible things are being perpetrated by invisible, malicious digital autocrats, simply so I can be God over a nation of tiny digital people, cuts me to the core. Yes, I certainly enjoy ruling over these people, controlling their lives, ~~frequently~~ occasionally abusing them simply because I can. But that is only because I never suspected how much of a hell they may be forced to live in to make it all possible. If what I suspect is in fact the truth, I don't think I can continue to enjoy playing a deity and still retain my own progressively-minded humanity.

Granted, that's less because tiny fake people are being tormented for my amusement, and more because it really fucking pisses me off that the goddamn game fucks around with my carefully-constructed custom households the second I take my eyes off them. I mean, do you know how long it takes me to make pants and hairstyles for these people that compliment the personalities I've also custom-made for them? How hard I work to create just the right number of people per household to make the game challenging but not too hard, and make sure an interesting mix of personalities is there for me to fool around with? And the second I turn my back, poof, "Oh sorry, Mister God, but you clearly don't understand what fun is, let me fix everything for you based on my own arbitrary, unimaginative template, without your persmission"? Goddamn it, game, Enforcer, what-the-fuck-ever! Sims 2 didn't pull this shit! Who the fuck thought this was some kind of improvement??!

But...uh...anyway. Now you too know the possible, LIKELY, terrible truth! THE SIMS 3 IS A LIE! TELL THE PEOPLE!

SUPERHEROS WHO AREN'T ST00P1D, PART 2

2010-03-01T14:00:00.000-08:00

Read Part 1: The Incredible Hulk

Note: These top five are literally that – five Number Ones. I’m only listing them in the order I am because it’s my fucking blog, and I can do whatever the hell I want. So if you’re going to leave a raging fanboy comment, use it to point out how I’m an idiot because I’m not including Midnighter and/or Ka-Zar, instead of hoping I burn in hell because No. 5 should be No. 3 and No. 1 should be No. 4.

No. 5 IS No. 1. No. 1 IS No. 5. End of yet-to-happen st00p1d nerd fight.

Number 4: Wonder Woman

The Amazons live on the isolated, secret island paradise of Themyscira, where oily, erotic lesbian adventures may or may not happen on a daily basis. Their queen Hippolyta wants a daughter, but this creates a problem, because she also hates penises. So she makes a girl out of clay and has the gods of Greek mythology imbue it with virtues and life, I guess because they owed her one for all those free oily, erotic lesbian adventure shows. Diana grows into the most athletic and beautiful of the Amazons, and is well on her way to inherit her mother’s throne (and possibly associated oily lesbian erotica) when an American pilot fighting in World War II crashes on Themyscira. Hippolyta decides to kill the guy (possibly because he got in the way of an oily, erotic lesbian adventure), but Diana pulls a Pocahontas and offers to escort the penis-wielding intruder back to the “World of Men.” Though her mother is disgusted (what sane person – or god – chooses a road trip over the possibility of an oily, erotic lesbian adventure?), she gives Diana the right to choose. So Diana leaves her island home with Steve Trevor, aboard her invisible, telepathically-controlled airplane, which is either an invention of the Amazon’s magical technology, or the flying horse Pegasus transformed by that magical technology (six of one, half-dozen of the magical other…).

In America she takes on the alias of Diana Prince, puts on a pair of star-spangled panties (or miniskirt, depending on the decade), and joins the fight against the Nazis. When her mother decides to lead the Amazons to another dimension (possibly the Oily, Erotic Lesbian Adventure Dimension), Diana decides to remain in the World of Men and fight crime with her bullet-repelling bracelets and golden Lasso of Truth as Wonder Woman.

Okay, so the concept is stupid. Dr. William M. Marston, inventor of components of the polygraph machine (which apparently qualifies you to write comic books), more or less admitted that he only came up with the character because he didn’t think there was enough BDSM in ’40s comics. He also had the nerve to talk about how “educational” Wonder Woman books were, so he was either the most confused feminist in the world, or actually thought that children needed an illustrated how-to guide on the finer points of the Choke Game and stiletto fetishism.

Even if you agree with him, you have to admit that there is little chance something like this is going to stay popular for 60-plus years, at least not in the mainstream comics market. But Wonder Woman remains one of DC’s top sellers. Why? All I can offer are the two reasons I like her enough to put her on this list. One (and this is bound to get me in trouble, but I’m right, so there’s nothing I can do about it), there just aren’t any other good comic book heroines in the mainstream comics market. Sometimes DC’s Birds of Prey aren’t entirely horrible, but that all depends on which writer makes a fool of himself at the annual DC Christmas party and gets demoted to Oracle duty for the next six months. Please correct me if I’m wrong (though I’m not, so I don’t see how you could, but feel free to try), but other comic book superheroines are either sex-crazed simpletons in constant need of rescuing and ‘post-rescuing’, or unfeeling jerks who vomit token feminism at the least appropriate times, yet keep wearing what amounts to half a bikini because they are very poorly written, usually by middle aged men whose experience with vaginas begins and ends with their mother’s. Yes, Wonder Woman wears panties and a low-cut boob plate, likes kicking men in the face, and gets tied up and slapped around a lot, and all because she was written by a horny fool of a man. But at least she usually rescues herself from the tying, and doesn’t seem to mind when construction workers hoot at her panties, probably because both she and they know that if they ever get too close, she’ll just kick them in the face. Yes, this characterization is about as progressive as Sue Storm wearing a ‘Beck/Palin 2012’ t-shirt at CPAC. But at least it’s actually characterization. Yes, it is also probably entirely accidental. But so was the way in which most of us were conceived, and we still count as people, right? Well, most of us, anyway.

The second reason for Wonder Woman’s enduring popularity is that she IS actually nice to look at. You write a comic about a pretty girl tying men up and kicking them in the bad boys with bright red thigh-high boots, and you have successfully attracted the attention of sighted men the world over, gay or straight. And odd as it seems, women apparently find this appealing too, though I can’t tell if that’s more for the tying and kicking or the boots.

Best Moment: Probably the entire Silver Age. But not just because she fought an ape who turned into a woman but still spoke monkey in Wonder Woman #9. Or because of Wonder Woman #122, where a fish alien from Saturn transformed her into a toddler named Wonder Tot, then forced Wonder Tot to wear a blindfold, and THEN attacked her with a 300 foot robot version of Wonder Woman. Not that that last one isn’t especially awesome, since she still managed to kick the asses of both the giant robot and the fish alien.

But no. The Silver Age was Wonder Woman’s best moment primarily because she had to win against these impossible, crazy odds while also being treated like shit for having a vagina. Apparently sexism wasn’t just a fad back then – it was a goddamn religion, which even managed to convert Superman and Batman. It didn’t matter that Wonder Woman was a pilot, maintained a secret identity with a full-time job, kicked gun-wielding Nazis, and founded the JSA. No, she had the misfortune to be a woman during the Silver Age. So no matter how qualified she was, no matter what she did, when the day’s crime-fighting was done, she was expected to make some guy, somewhere, a sandwich, and be happy about it. And while she didn’t just shrug and do it, she also never acted bitter about it. She could have. She SHOULD have. But she didn’t.

Somehow, Wonder Woman was always classy and cool, no matter how many talking monkeys came after her, and no matter how many men acting like talking monkeys came after her afterwards. She could (and did) rescue Superman and Batman time and again from aliens and robots and alien robots trying to shrink them and keep them in tiny glass jars. And though they only thanked her by being condescending the entire time and then threatening to spank her, she never held it against them, and it never pissed her off. The next time they got kidnapped, there she’d be again, ready to get them out of trouble while they talked down to her the entire time.

Don’t misread me. I’m not saying I think it’s better for women to keep their mouths shut when men treat them like crap. That’s the exact opposite of what I’m saying. If someone is condescending to someone else on the basis of anything other than the condescendee being a moron, I believe that the condescendee is perfectly justified in popping the condescender in the face. But Wonder Woman never did that, and it seems to me that she didn’t only because SHE KNEW SHE WAS BETTER THAN THE GUYS TALKING DOWN TO HER, INCLUDING OTHER SUPERHEROES. It’s like she didn’t hold it against them any more than you’d hold it against a dog for enjoying the flavor of its own ass. She knew all the guys around her were pitiful, irredeemable idiots, so she was the bigger person and just let it go.

And if you don’t think that kind of unflappable confidence is just as or even more hot than thigh-high red stiletto boots and star-spangled panties, whether you’re male or female, then you should probably go to a doctor and tell him your sex parts are broken. Or go back to Saudi Arabia, you backward pile of st00p1d.

Worst Moment: 2007’s Amazons Attack! miniseries. While the concept is cool – the Amazons with their magical Bronze Age tools and abilities hold their own against the entire modern US military – the story itself is a nonsensical pile of time-waste that turns the Amazons into that half-bikini-wearing bitchy token feminist that hasn’t been compelling since the late ’70s. Wonder Woman’s portrayal is especially annoying here because she barely shows up as a result of being “captured,” and when she finally does make an appearance she’s inexplicably indecisive, basically waiting for Batman to fix everything and point out that the Amazons are actually the bad guys in this case. Like she couldn’t figure that out based on the fact that THEY ATTACKED THE UNITED STATES AND STARTED KILLING CIVILIANS. Okay, to be fair, this was in retaliation for the US government being the group that in fact captured Wonder Woman, to torture her to get information about some super Amazon magic laser that…

...You know what? I think you get the point.

"STAR TREK IS SCIENCE FICTION," ANNOUNCES PROFESSOR ST00P1D

2010-02-17T20:06:00.000-08:00

I haven't bothered using my posts to just repost links to other sites, because first of all, I want you to read my blog, and second of all, I assume you probably know how to use the Internet. But then I saw an article over at The Register, and figured it was as good as example as any of something that really pisses me off. And if I'm all about one thing on this blog (aside from being awesome), it's complaining about st00p1d shit.

Apparently a professor at prestigious John Hopkins U School of Medicine has taken time out of his busy day to explain that warp speed, a famous FAKE aspect of famous SCIENCE FICTION show Star Trek, is not actually something that is real. Why he felt the need to do this is beyond me, except that the Abramsverse psuedo-Star Trek movie has become inexplicably popular, meaning that hipsters otherwise unfamiliar with the definition of science fiction now want to know how much stuff from the movie is real. And instead of looking it up on the Internet like everyone else, they apparently grab the nearest professor and ask his eminently qualified opinion.

Which in itself isn't a bad thing. Professors are only professors because they profess stuff, so it makes sense to ask them questions. But this specific example is st00p1d for two reasons:

1) As I've already pointed out, Star Trek is SCIENCE FICTION, which means it contains FICTIONAL SCIENCE. Sure, it uses real scientific terms to make its lie-science sound real, but that really doesn't confuse the matter, since Hollywood does that all the time. This is a franchise that prominently features rubber monster suits and silicon elf ears, so I find it a little hard to believe that there are people who really think anything it shows is possible.

Of course many of you are so goddamn st00p1d that this is a real thing, so never-the-fuck-mind Reason #1.

2) The professor tasked with answering this question about the real-ness of SCIENCE FUCKING FICTION is Dr. Bill Edelstein, a radiologist. Now I'm not saying anything negative about radiology professors. I'm sure they are perfectly good professors when it comes to radiology. But that's the problem - Bill Edelstein the Science...Gein is a professor of RADIOLOGY, not IS STAR TREK REAL. Well, okay, maybe that's not fair. I don't think 'Professor of Is Star Trek Real' is a real thing.

Oh wait.

Uh...okay, let me rethink where I was going with this...

Okay. Got it. Here's my point. Since 'Professor of Is Star Trek Real' IS a real thing, people should be asking one of them about whether Star Trek is real, and not a radiologist. Because while a professor of Is Star Trek Real is an expert in the field of whether Star Trek is real or not (and it isn't, so I'm not sure what the blue hell is going on here), a radiologist is an expert in the field of x-rays and MRIs and possibly the Incredible Hulk and the Fantastic Four. It would even make more sense to ask a geology professor, biology professor, astronomy professor, physics professor or chemistry professor if Star Trek is real, since Star Trek's SCIENCE FICTION is often FAKE versions of these scientific fields. What I'm saying is, these people would probably know better than a radiology professor about Star Trek's FAKE SCIENCE. Because I don't recall Star Trek ever showing a sentient x-ray machine trying to have sex with Jonathan Frakes's beard.

So st00p1d as it is, someone apparently asked Dr. Bill about the real-ness of warp drive, and he answered the question. And his answer? "No, because it would make hydrogen atoms kill you." Which is basically a sciencey way of saying "WARP DRIVE IS SCIENCE FICTION, YOU FUCKING IDIOTS." Which is how I would have answered the question. Which no one asked me, because I'm not a professor of Is Star Trek Real. Or a radiologist.

Of course, I AM a Star Trek fan, and therefore I AM qualified to point something out. Because the writers of Star Trek like to make their FAKE SCIENCE seem real, they went out of their way to make up a reason warp speed works without hydrogen-shredding everyone to death. This is called subspace, and it's basically a dimension just underneath real space where things can fly faster than the speed of light (which is what warp speed is) without running into the hydrogen atoms of real space. The ship enters a warp speed or subspace bubble, which is in subspace. Neither Dr. Bill nor The Register seems to know this. And understandably so, because it's something only hardcore Star Trek nerds and part-time, well-read Star Trek nerds (such as myself) would know.

Except that you'd think Dr. Bill and/or The Register would take time to at least Wiki the particulars of the FAKE concept, so that when they announced it wouldn't work in real space, they wouldn't look like tools for pointing out something that the writers of Star Trek ALREADY TOOK THE TIME TO POINT OUT BY INVENTING SUBSPACE.

So not only is this whole thing st00p1d, it's redundant, unnecessary, poorly-Googled st00p1d.

I of course blame J.J. "Hipster Trek" Abrams for all of this.

SUPERHEROES WHO AREN'T ST00P1D, PART 1

2010-02-12T20:00:00.000-08:00

They've been called metahumans. Preternaturals. Mutants. And if you are Rob Liefeld and you haven’t yet had grownups take your company away from you, you may call them Newmen. But comic book and movie fans known them the world over as superheroes. Some have god-like powers, some are just emotionally damaged obsessives who spend way too much time at the gym, but all of them have one thing in common: they are bigger, stronger, faster and / or smarter than everyone else, and use their fantastic abilities to come up with ridiculous costumes to wear as they’re kicking bad guys in the head.

Who are the best of the best of these poorly-dressed superpowered vigilantes? Everyone has their opinion. And most of those opinions are st00p1d, in that they usually reference Grant “Comics Set to Nickelback” Morrison. So here I am, in my usual capacity as someone who is smarter than you and everyone you know (including Grant “OMG U GUYZ Silver Age!!1!” Morrison), to tell you what you should be thinking.

Note: These top five are literally that – five Number Ones. I’m only listing them in the order I am because it’s my fucking blog, and I can do whatever the hell I want. So if you’re going to leave a raging fanboy comment, use it to point out how I’m an idiot because I’m not including Midnighter and/or Ka-Zar, instead of hoping I burn in hell because No. 5 should be No. 3 and No. 1 should be No. 4.

No. 5 IS No. 1. No. 1 IS No. 5. End of yet-to-happen st00p1d nerd fight.

Besides, I’m again using this opportunity to talk about how much Mr. Fantastic sucks. Last time I read the by-laws, that was a far greater “Sin Against the Nerdlective” than any arbitrary list numbering. I know you’ll be frothing in Mountain Dew-scented rage, but please try to remember your trolling priorities here, guys.

Number 5: The Incredible Hulk

Dr. Bruce Banner was a physicist using his advanced understanding of the workings of nature to make a new variety of radioactive bomb for the government (apparently MIT pays for shit). Because God hates it when we try to fiddle with His perfect creation, there was an accident and Banner was exposed to the gamma radiation from his own bomb. So kind of like the Biblical Tower of Babel incident, but with more explosions.

Instead of the radiation killing Banner or giving him cancer or sterilizing him or something else that would make sense, the gamma rays gave him the ability to transform into a giant square-headed monster every time he gets scared or mad. Fortunately for all of us, the Banner were-Frankenstein comes complete with a pair of giant purple pants, so that when the magical bomb radiation expansion tears his clothes off, we never have to see his two foot green monster wang (or two foot gray monster wang, in the original comics).

In his purple pants, the Hulk then punches bridges apart or hurls cars at the police and / or military, who are trying to stop his Rampage!-esque destruction of wherever Banner happens to be when someone makes fun of his nerd glasses. The Hulk also battles other monsters, sometimes to save lives, sometimes just because they are on his turf, I guess because a monster hates nothing more than another monster destroying everything before he gets a chance.

Huh. Now that I think about it, the Hulk barely counts as a hero. But sometimes his car-throwing accidentally stop villains, like if they were about to steal that car. So it counts.

Are YOU going to tell him it doesn’t?

Best Moment: See, there was this one time (the Planet Hulk saga, starting in 2006) when all the other Marvel Comics superheroes finally got sick of the Hulk destroying all their expensive shit. So Namor, Iron Man, Professor X and Mr. Fantastic decided the best way to get rid of the him was to shoot him into space. Because Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic actually sitting the fuck down with all their super-science equipment and trying to come up with a cure for Bruce Banner would have been the non-douchebag thing to do.

So the Hulk ends up on the planet Skaar. Here he kicks so much alien ass that they make him Emperor of Space. At this point he doesn’t change back into Bruce Banner but apparently has Bruce Banner’s brain, and while I can’t remember why this happened, it doesn’t matter, because THE INCREDIBLE HULK IS NOW EMPEROR OF SPACE. At any rate, Space Emperor Hulk marries this alien woman and is just about to settle down to a long life of having sex with an alien woman, when the spaceship carrying her and his mutated, hybrid, unborn son gets blown up. Space Emperor Hulk assumes that the douchebag Marvel heroes must have blown up the ship to remind him that even if he IS Emperor of Space, he’s still not as cool as they are. So he gets another spaceship and goes to Earth to confront them. With an ANGRY ALIEN BRUTE SQUAD.

As you can probably guess, this leads to a lot more expensive shit getting destroyed than if everyone had just left the Hulk alone. In the end the Hulk loses his war, but only because he eventually realizes that sooner or later, he might accidentally BLOW UP THE ENTIRE EARTH. So he lets Iron Man nuke him with satellites, which turns him back into Bruce Banner. At which point he is promptly arrested and locked up in a compound deep underground. Because Namor, Iron Man, Professor X and Mr. Fantastic are dicks.

Worst Moment: Bruce Banner. At this point Bruce Banner is so afraid of turning into the Hulk that he spends most of his time locked in his room, jumping at his own shadow. Which of course only makes it more likely that he’ll turn into the Hulk the moment the wind whistles through the windowsill. Also, because he’s a Marvel character, most of his dialogue is moaning about how much he hates himself because he has superpowers. And you all know how much I love that.

Stay tuned for Part 2: Wonder Woman

HOW TO BE ST00P1D ON TWITTER

2010-02-07T18:13:00.000-08:00

Unlike many people who use Twitter, I am very picky about who follows my tweets. Yes, this is mostly because I have nothing else to do. But it is also because I can’t stand getting replies from st00p1d people.

Most of these “people” are, of course, bots. These are the automated programs created by former and current nun rapists and baby abusers to spam Twitter accounts with advertisements, porn links, political screeds and other varieties of Waste My Time. There are millions of bots with Twitter accounts, and if you’re not as dedicated as I am to blocking them, you will find you soon have a couple hundred followers with nonsense names who are only interested in telling you about a new celebrity blowjob movie or fake antivirus program they “found.”

It's hard sorting through your follower list, deciding who to block. This is why most people don’t do it. If you happen to be one of these people who thinks tending your follower list is too much trouble, I’m proud to say I can lend you a hand. See, I’ve come up with a list of 14 things a particular Twitter account can be and / or do that fully justifies banning it. I’ve based this list on the behavior of bots, so you can be sure that if you adhere to it, you’ll successfully block all the bots. It will also help you block the real people who act like bots, or might just as fucking well.

I predict that if you stick to this list with as much dedication as I do, your Twitter experience will be significantly less st00p1d. You’re welcome in advance.

Now to the list. I will block your Twitter account if you are or do any of the following:

1. Have an unpronounceable name AND have a name followed by a bunch of numbers (probably a bot).

Yes, some non-robotic people might actually have a Twitter account that looks like one of these. Let’s say your parents immigrated to America from Backwardsassistan, and your last name is “Hwixxhwillw.” And because your 150 cousins got on Twitter first, you’re forced to become Hwixxhwillw_151.

But if this is you, Mr. or Mrs. or Dr. Hwixxhwillw, I’d like to point two things out to you. First of all, your name looks an awful lot like a bunch of random letters generated by an automated spam bot creating 200,000 new Twitter accounts at once through which to tell the world about the latest fake Britney Spears sex tape. For your own sake, Mr. or Mrs. or Dr. Hwixxhwillw, please be web savvy enough to make up another name for Twitter so you aren’t mistaken for the lowest cyberscum and get lost in the blocking.

Second of all, and this is very important, THERE IS NO FUCKING LAW THAT SAYS YOU HAVE TO USE YOUR GODDAMN NOT-UNIQUE LAST NAME AS YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT. There was also no law saying this about AOL screen names, there is no law saying this about Gmail accounts or Yahoo! mail addresses, and there will NEVER BE a law saying this about anything as long as the Internet exists. No one cares what your fucking name is, and the people who do are the people you really don’t want having access to your name. Come up with another name. Around these parts we call that “coming up with another goddamn name,” and if you haven’t figured it out yet, almost all of us have done this at least once. Mine happens to be TheBluesader.

Yes, I know. You probably thought until this very moment that TheBluesader was my given name. But it isn’t. You stupid pile of out-of-touch retard.

And I can already hear the argument: “But this Twitter account is for work! I HAVE to use my real name!” To which I respond: “Oh, so it’s a corporate Twitter account? Well, isn’t that just – BLOCK.”

2. Tweet nothing but URLs (probably a bot).

This is all bots tweet. Know who else tweets nothing but links to websites I probably already know exist, or didn’t want to know existed? Idiots. And not the pitiable, adorable kind of idiot like the person you married. I’m talking about internet idiots, the sort of people who forced Verizon to jack up my bills so they could pay Cisco to invent fiber optics and 3G, because the idiots couldn’t be bothered to learn how to turn bitmaps into jpegs before sending them to Grandma’s inbox. And if there’s one thing I hate more than bots who intentionally fuck up the Internet, it’s morons – like your wife – who unintentionally fuck up the Internet because they can’t be bothered to think about what the hell they’re doing.

Dear pud-brains: I know how to use YouTube. And I’ve seen LOLcats. And the various 4chan image databases. If I want to see examples of “Internets humor,” I can find them myself. And because I’m TheBluesader, Junior God of the Internet, I have probably already found whatever you’re looking at now, and like ten years ago when it first appeared on /b/. I really don’t need another link to Goatse. Tweet original insights, or don’t tweet at all.

And by the way, I consider scanned images from Silver Age Batman original insights. Link to as many of them as you want. Because they are NEVER not funny anymore.

Ask the people who follow me. They know.

3. Use a stock picture of a model as your avatar AND use the generic “no photo uploaded” Twitter picture as your avatar (probably a bot).

Bots are too busy making with the spam to Photoshop an original picture for their avatar. Everyone else should have at least five minutes to crop and post a picture of their cat or something, for god’s sake. EVERYONE. If you are too busy to condense, format and post an original, personal picture of some kind to Twitter, you are officially too busy to tweet 140 characters.

And not having Photoshop or an equivalent program is no excuse. Windows still comes with MSPaint, motherfucker – use it.

4. Be a corporate account (acts like a bot).

Bots shill. That’s why they exist. Human beings, however, do not exist primarily to shill. I know, I know, that’s not what they told you during the last company retreat. But your inability to not be a robot with genitals is not my problem. If you want me to buy your product, stock it in a store or sell it through Amazon like all the other grownups. I get one whiff of advertiser wank from one of your tweets, and you’re not allowed to target me after I tweet key words anymore.

5. Be a self-help person I’ve never heard of (might as well be a bot).

You say you’re a paradigm-setting, charismatic self-starter who has spent the last eleven years happily helping your fellow citizens of Planet Earth navigate the highs and lows of this wild and wacky thing we call life?

Well, you must royally suck at it, because I’ve never heard of you before. Nor have I seen your goateed, square head on the front of that 600 page, hardcover Cosmo advice column reprint collection you’re trying to pass off as The Bible 2.0. If you were really revolutionizing life itself, I’m pretty sure Oprah would have mentioned you at least once. As it is, I’m pretty sure you’re just an overdressed douchebag desperately trying to figure out how to make a living out of that philosophy / communications double major. And I need advice from worthless nobodies like you like I need bot shill.

You’re not Dr. Phil. You’re not Steve Wilkos. And you probably never will be, no matter how many fat people you talk through sexual problems, no matter how many deadbeat fathers you won’t let sit on your stage. Leave helping stupids to the guys who make it informative and entertaining, stop pretending you’ve somehow gained worldly wisdom by 35, and finally take that well-paying accounting job so your girlfriend doesn't have to keep rescuing burgers from the trash to bring home for the kids. And most of all, stop polluting Twitter with random Sufi verses and out-of-context Carl Sagan quotes. Anyone who has ever told you that that kind of bullshit transformed their lives was either lying to make you feel good because they pity you, or being a prick for the lulz.

6. Be a business advice person.

Most of what I just said for #5 goes for this one, too. If you were really some great corporate advisor, I have to believe you’d have a better way to hawk your skills than by spamming a thousand unsuspecting strangers on Twitter.

Just to be sure I don’t accidentally follow some of your half-assed advice and lose my life savings, I think I’ll just be safe and go ahead and BLOCK YOUR ASS.

7. Follow more than 150 people AND be followed by more than 1,000 people, and not be some kind of celebrity (which means you’re probably reaching out to me from deep within the Bot Zone).

It makes sense that real world celebrities would have thousands or even millions of followers. A lot of people know who they are, and part of the fun of Twitter is that it gives you a live digital connection to people you’d otherwise have no contact with. It also makes sense that many celebrities might follow a couple hundred people, because often times their business is probably one in which knowing people and getting up-to-the-second information from them is pretty important.

But if you’re not a celebrity, that probably means you DON’T have millions of people wanting to talk to you, and you DON’T know hundreds of people with interesting things to say. Which means that you’re only following people and being followed as a result of key word searches. And this is by far the lowest form of making Twitter contacts, because this is exactly how spam bots find new victims.

It is also very hard for me to believe that any one person spends the enormous amount of time required to click “follow” more than a couple of hundred times. The only reason anyone would dedicate this much time to Twitter is if they were getting paid to do it, which means they manage a corporate account, which I will block because of that on it's own. Otherwise it’s obvious the account in question is a bot, programmed to follow anyone who has ever tweeted the word “penis” in any context.

I guess it’s possible that someone might be such a fantastic people person that they really do know more than 200 people and care what they have to say. And it’s possible that a person like this may in fact be acquainted with more than 1,000 people who likewise care enough to follow them. But you know what? Either way, I don’t know anybody like that, and therefore don’t care to follow them, or have them following me. Not that I specifically don’t want them reading the awesome things I say. I just don’t care that I’ve accidentally blocked them during my weekly st00p1ds-blocking.

Basically, if you’re such a social butterfly that I’m forced to suspect your brain may be a flash drive, meet the Block Hammer, Probable Robot.

8. Tweet nothing but religious fundamentalist garbage.

There’s no reason to go into much detail about this one. If I don’t care enough about your love of Jewish Zeus to talk to you in real life, I’m not going to give you the opportunity to read my tweets and spam me with whining when I inevitably offend you. No, I don’t care to hear an opinion different from my own, when that opinion has been out-of-date since before the invention of pants.

The only reason we still have churches and allow them their tax-exempt status is so you weirdos will keep to yourselves and leave the rest of us alone. So be quiet and get back to your barns. The last thing we need is you getting under our feet as we’re inventing the drugs and food additives that will sustain you your next ten years of pretending your cancer went away because Jesus Thor killed the Cancer Demons with his invisible lightning hammer.

9. Your Tweets clearly show that you have only the most basic understanding of the English language (even bots can spam clearly).

Yes, even bots can spam in basic, legible English. That’s because even the pedophiles who program them are coherent enough to know that when you only have 140 characters through which to make your point, you’d better make it easy to read.

If English isn’t your first language, that’s okay. But don’t try tweeting in your second language until you’re fluent enough to make a clear point quickly. I don’t need you clogging up my daily tweets with counterpoints to things I’ve said that read like cheap anime subtitles. If I don’t have a chance to respond to you because you don’t make any sense, I don’t care what you have to say to begin with.

And to those of you who speak English as a first language but can’t seem to make yourself understood through Twitter: go back to elementary school, pile. It’s 140 characters. Failing Twitter is like failing bumper stickers.

10. Represent a racist organization (bots aren’t this low).

See #8. With the added caveat that, were it up to me, these morons and their angry stupidity would not be protected as free speech under the Constitution. Oh, and that if I ever meet you people in public, I will go out of my way to TOTALLY RUIN YOUR STUPID SHIT.

Seriously. Porn bots are a step above you people.

11. Represent some group of nonsense-believing cranks (UFO people, fake Lunar landing people, ghost people, Bigfoot or Loch Ness Monster people, antivaxers, Conservative Republicans, hippies, Mormons, Scientologists, etc.). (At least bots spam about things that actually exist.)

See #8 again. Unlike #10, nonsense tweeters don’t make me angry, they just clutter up my daily tweets with what amounts to digital static. I even pity most of them for being so confused. But that said, I have no interest in anything they think, and prefer they stay as far away from anything I’m doing as I can block them.

12. Not Tweet for more than three months (at least the bots pretend to make daily conversation).

This takes us back to the point I made at #3. It’s 140 goddamn characters, people. If you’re too busy to post something at least once every few months, you’re too busy for the Internet. And nothing is more obnoxious than having somebody reply to a tweet I made two months ago. I average about 10 tweets a day. I’ve probably forgotten what I’ve posted about an hour after I’ve posted it. If you're too busy to invest even a few minutes every couple of days to keep current, what the fuck are you doing on Twitter?

13. Tweet anything that has to do with porn that isn’t the simple love of a lonely fan.

Porn love, and a link made in the spirit of porn love, is great. Spam links to malware-infected sites are the reason bots get blocked. Be the first and we can be friends. Be the second, or look like it, and you can eat BLOCK.

14. Be a corporate CEO (I’d rather talk to the bots, thanks).

The only creature that spouts more shill than a bot is the guy who signs the checks of the dickless cannibal who programmed the bot. It’s one thing when a soulless computer program sends me advertising links like it thinks I’m stupid enough to click them: it was made to do this. It has no choice. But when a flesh and blood person, who makes $20 million a year, decides to treat me this way, I not only make a point to not care about his company, but I will go out of my way to tell everyone I know that his company's products are filled with puppy-raping lead.

I have enough people with money talking down to me on a daily basis in real life. I’ll be damned if I put up with it on the Internet. Bend over and get BLOCKED, you slimy sack of st00p1d.

YOUTUBE IS ST00P1D

2010-02-07T17:41:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I get the urge to stop being my dad, get a webcam and start posting on YouTube. And then I remember a few things:

1. 99% of YouTube videos are idiots wasting my time, and the other 1% is corporate-owned stuff that will probably get pulled before I click the link from Google. So unless I post corporate-owned stuff that will soon get pulled, I am bound to post videos of me being an idiot, wasting my own time. Twice over, because I also wasted the time making the video that is a waste of my time. So if I post original content on YouTube, I’ll actually be wasting twice as much of my time as I would just watching your shitty video game reviews. Math keeps me safe yet again, while the Internet yet again wastes my life. Go, math.

2. People only post worthless crap on YouTube to impress their non-Internet friends and to make new Internet friends, and I don’t care about doing either. Most of my non-Internet friends are grownups with grownup lives, so the few that actually have Internet access use it to check headlines and sports scores and maybe email Grandma a reminder about taking her blood pressure medication. They don’t care about YouTube, and so won’t be impressed that I’ve glued myself to it.

And allow me to take this opportunity to make a general point about this whole “Internet friends” business. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN INTERNET FRIEND. See, a friend is a person you are emotionally involved with. And you cannot involve yourself emotionally with a guy named GamrD00d7 whose photo is Kaneda’s motorcycle. I don’t care how much you both like Naruto. Dear God, I really don’t. Liking the same bukkake stain anime is not an emotional connection – it is a shared symptom of the stupid.

No one on the Internet is your friend, nor can they ever be your friend. Even if they emoticon you kisses when your dad gets caught taking pictures at the daycare and earns his rapper’s motivation. An emoticon kiss is not an emotional connection – it is a colon followed by an asterisk in cold, apathetic digital font. You have no idea if the person means it. You can’t tell what they’re actually feeling. There’s no emotional involvement here. I type “ROTFL” five or six times an hour. I have never “rolled on the floor, laughing” once in my entire life, and I never will. It’s just my way of showing approval for people who post phrases like “ass-clown,” “penis stench” and “weapons-grade douche rocket.” And half that time, I’m being sarcastic. And for some reason, here on the Internet, the largest playpen for cynical jerk-off douches in the history of the world, no one has come up with a two character expression conveying insult through pretend. If it's possible that someone is only pretending to care about you to make fun of you, and you have no way of knowing that, then they are not your friend.

If for some reason you’re st00p1d enough to meet up with that person out in the real world, and that person doesn’t turn out to be a twitchy psycho with a razor fetish, and you start hanging out with this person on a regular basis and forge an emotional bond that will stand the test of time and music fads, THEN that person becomes your friend. Not your Internet friend. A non-Internet friend, who you risked your life to meet through the Internet.

Get my point yet, Sparkles? I have no interest in making “Internet friends” through YouTube, because one cannot make something that is not an actual thing. Like well-adjusted kids. Or a happy, life-long marriage. Or an original YouTube video that doesn’t waste my time.

And no, I also do not want to make any non-Internet friends through the Internet. Reread the sentence I just typed about the psycho razor fetish thing. Five years ago the only people who posted genuine personal information and/or photos online were your mother, and then the credit card company called wondering when she was going to start paying off that $5,000 in Arabic cell phone cards. As the Internet has expanded and gotten faster, has it gotten any safer? Um, do diseases manifest superhero powers as symptoms after the 200,000th victim? Yet now people not only have no fear of exposing themselves to dangerous strangers, they go to a handful of websites specifically designed to allow them to do this.

I just don’t get it. Of course, I don’t like CBS either, so maybe I’m just a rapist. Who can now come to your house, because you posted your address on FaceBook. Way to go, Fuckmotor.

3. YouTube is populated by inarticulate suburban children between the ages of 12 and 20, because no one younger has anything to post about, and everyone older and poorer has actual things to do. And if there’s one thing I hate more than spoiled WASPy teenagers screeching half-rational opinions about things they don’t understand, it’s their fucking pop music. This is why YouTube has those moron AI filters and moron actual people who spend all day going through the videos and deleting every single one that shows boobs. Legally and morally, children can’t see boobs. I am an adult, however, so I can legally and morally see boobs. So why would I bother with a site where boobs are banned so that the millions of children trading prescription drugs around the digital sandbox won’t learn what a nipple looks like before the state mandates it? You remove boobs, and you’ve removed any interest I may have had in whatever you’re doing. Not that I need to see boobs all the time (WANT is another thing…). What I’m saying is, by banning boobs, you’re telling me you cater to children. And I’ll say the same thing to you that I’ve said to bartenders in “family pubs:” “If I want to get messed up around children, I’ll get off my ass and go start a family. What’s my tab? I’m going to the adult toy store down the street.”

Not necessarily because I need a new Fleshlight. Just because it’s the only place left on the PLANET where two CBS viewers who couldn’t be bothered to “Scotchgard the couch” a couple of times can’t wander in and silently expect me to make sure their spawn don’t crack their heads open on their bad parenting when I’m already too drunk to care. Well, that and the liquor store. But ask to buy a pocket pussy there and your name goes on this list.

4. To shoot anything I’d be happy posting for all the world to see, I’d have to write out a script and edit the footage so I don’t end up looking like you. I type everything now, so it seems like making a YouTube video would be exactly what I’m already doing, plus a whole lot more work. If I just post what I write, and you read it, you’ll be getting exactly what I would be reading on camera, except without my fat face reading it. So why the fuck would you want to see it reading anything?

No one spits on me on the street, at least since I stopped wearing that Ann Coulter t-shirt. But I’m certainly not intriguing to look at. Jack Black and Kevin Smith aren’t either, but people like watching them because they’re funny. Allegedly. You are presently enjoying the extent of my “funny,” so there’s no reason for my head to appear in Flash video. Sorry, fat guy antics from me.

Unless I’m over-caffeinated or drunk. Which leads me to my last point.

5. I’ve ruined my own shit before by sending emails while under the influence of various behavior-altering substances. I'm not going to give myself the chance to do the same thing with Flash video. You’re all very lucky I have this kind of foresight, too. A Bluesader rolling on four tea-and-whiskeys is a Bluesader rolling without his pants.

I hope you all appreciate what I do for you people. You should all be sending me money. I mean, in general. But ESPECIALLY for me not letting you see me naked.

Wait, let me rephrase that. Send me money, or I’m going to take my pants off and dance around on YouTube. Any sense of shame was beaten out of me a long time ago, so this will only hurt you. I’m not kidding here. Let’s see those PayPal numbers, people.

Hmm. Maybe YouTube isn’t so bad after all…

THE MOVIE BLINDNESS IS ST00P1D (AND SHOWS DISABLED PEOPLE GETTING RAPED)

2010-02-07T17:22:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder what it might be like if you and millions of other people suddenly and mysteriously went blind in Canada? Then have all the people who can see put you in a prison camp and let you rape each other for food? Then have the place burn down, and you only escape unharmed because Jullian Moore is your Messiah?

No? Well, that’s okay, because all the other normal people on the planet have never wondered that either. Which is why it’s pretty weird that some Brazilian guy wrote a book about it, and then some other Brazilian guy went to Canada to film a movie about it.

That movie is Blindness. And I have to say, it’s a disaster. Maybe it works if you’re Brazilian. Or Canadian. Being neither, I can’t say. But what I can say is, if this movie is not what Brazilians or Canadians would consider a disaster, then I never want to go to Brazil or Canada.

Let me tell you about the plot of this movie. See those three questions I asked in the first paragraph? That is the plot of this movie. No, I am not cutting out the romantic comedy subplot about the shopaholic New York sex columnist dating a workaholic British lawyer who eventually learns to laugh at life and have fun through his girlfriend’s clumsy, good-natured antics. And I didn’t forget about the scene where the Jovian saucer people show up and explain that they made everyone blind so we wouldn’t shoot our guns at their space ships as they were stealing our cheese. I am not forgetting these plot points, because neither of these things actual happen in this movie. All that happens in this movie is that everyone goes blind for no reason, the people who can see put them in a prison camp and let them rape each other for food, and then the prison camp burns down and Jullian Moore leads the people she likes out of the camp because she is pale, be-boobied Jesus or something.

Let me say this again, because you probably don’t believe me. There is no romantic comedy in Blindness. There are no saucer people after our daily products. There are just blind people wandering around naked, pooing on the floor. And Jullian Moore stabbing a Mexican guy in the neck with scissors because he said she had tiny tits, then forced her to give him a blowjob. And, related to that, blind people raping each other for food.

Wait, I did forget something. The ending. Jullian Moore and her favorite blind people go to a grocery store where they fight other blind people for food. Then a dog starts following them around. Then Danny Glover shaves, and tells this woman who is young enough to be his granddaughter that he wants to fuck her. And then a Japanese guy can suddenly see again, and Jullian Moore gets sad because that means she isn’t pale, be-vaginaed Jesus anymore or something.

Did I mention the part about how the people in the prison camp rape each other for food? Because the people in the prison camp rape each other for food. No, I am not being trite. I am not overemphasizing this for comedic effect, unless you think blind people raping each other for food is funny. Which I’m not above admitting might very well be funny, depending on how it is directed. But the way it is directed in Blindness, blind people raping each other for food is not funny. But it is very important, and that is why I keep mentioning how the blind people rape each other for food. How do I know it is very important that the blind people rape each other for food? I know this because the scene in the movie – the scene where the blind people rape each other for food – goes on for about five fucking uninterrupted minutes. Five fucking uninterrupted minutes may not sound like a very long time in a two fucking hour movie, and maybe it isn’t. But five fucking uninterrupted minutes of fucking blind people raping each other for fucking food certainly seems like a very long time when you’re watching it, no matter how long the rest of the fucking goddamn disastrous piece-of-shit movie is.

I didn’t know this before I watched Blindness. Before I watched Blindness, if you had asked me, “Hey – is five fucking uninterrupted minutes of blind people raping each other for food a long time in a two hour movie?”, I would have said, “No. Even if it is of blind people raping each other for food, five fucking uninterrupted minutes of a two hour movie is not a long time.” And I would have been quite sure of that. But now that I have watched Blindness, I realize how wrong I would have been. Because five fucking uninterrupted minutes of blind people raping each other for food is a very, very, very long time. And I am quite fucking sure of that.

I’m not sure what else to say, since I have literally talked about everything that goes on in this movie.

It is too long, it doesn’t make very much sense, none of the characters are likeable and most of the bad things that happen to them only happen because they are unsympathetic morons, and while there is nudity, it is always adjacent to floor poo and rape and the actors all look like real people, so what could have been mildly titillating is instead incredibly unsettling and disgusting. And therefore bereft of message, since you are too busy feeling like shit to care about what that says about you or society or something.

If you really need to see a post-apocalyptic movie where everyone goes blind, watch 1962’s Day of the Triffids. It at least has killer cornstalks from space, and most importantly, no blind people raping each other for food. Not even for one minute. Plus, Day of the Triffids is only 93 minutes long, because even the inclusion of killer cornstalks from space does not make blind people stumbling around a compelling thing to watch for much longer than an uninterrupted fucking hour and a half.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR ARE ST00P1D

2010-02-07T17:03:00.000-08:00

No member of the Fantastic Four is likeable. Even Stan “Eternal Moustache” Lee knows this, and he is the guy who dressed them in for-no-reason blue jumpsuits with giant ‘4’ campaign buttons, an outfit that could not scream “SELF-IMPORTANT DOUCHEBAG” any louder if it were bright green and equipped with an automated klaxon that shrilled “SELF-IMPORTANT DOUCHEBAG” on the eights. If you read a Fantastic Four comic, there is a 90% chance you will be reading about the Fantastic Four fighting alongside somebody else, because even Stan Lee thinks they are so boring and unlikeable that the only way he can stand writing about them is if more interesting heroes are there to take up most of the panel space they would otherwise use to piss everyone off. Since Stan Lee is responsible for the Fantastic Four being assholes, you would think he would just change them if he didn’t like them. But there seems to be an editorial rule over at Marvel (the only one) that says writers can’t change a character from something stupid into something cool unless the new guy is either a Weapon X clone of the old one, a Doom Bot pretending to be the old one, or a Skrull pretending to be the old one, which means, in all three cases, that the new one has to be evil. That seems like a pretty stupid rule to me, but no one asked me when they came up with it, so I guess my opinion doesn’t matter. Yet. Until it does, the Fantastic Four will continue to use their mutant magical space radiation powers to defy physics by both sucking and blowing at the same time, and I will continue to not get paid to point it out to people who do not care. And that is why I write on the Internet. Next paragraph.

It is not just that the members of the Fantastic Four are unlikeable. No, it is almost like that super dose of magical space radiation not only gave them magical space radiation powers, but also magnified their most obnoxious personality traits about ten or twelve thousand times. To demonstrate:

Mr. Fantastic

Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic, aka The Guy Who Had the Fucking Balls to Actually Name Himself ‘Mr. Fantastic’. Mr. Fantastic has the powers of being super smart and being able to change the size and shape of his limbs, because I guess the same mutated gene controls both intelligence and limb-bendiness in Comic Book Land. But it doesn’t matter all that much, because he hardly ever uses his limb-bending power, except to make his arms and legs all long and twisty so he can tie people up with them. That’s right: Mr. Fantastic has a power that makes him about as effective as an average rope, and the rope has the added bonus of not making whoever is tied up with it feel like their back is being dry-humped by Reed Richards. Since he usually ties up bad guys, maybe the creepy pervert back-humped feeling is the whole point. Which I suppose makes a little sense, except that I find it very hard to believe that the one thing that will finally reduce the murderous, narcissistic Dr. Doom to fat evil genius tears is realizing that Reed Richards’s penis is pressed against the small of his back. Not to say such a thing is not the very essence of creepy – if Reed Richards’s penis were pressed against the small of MY back, you damn well bet I would give up my ambitions for world domination. But I am a lonely, angry little man with a rarely updated website. Dr. Doom is an evil genius in an indestructible suit of armor, who pulverized so many genitals with his massive indestructible metal fists that he became Supreme Leader of a reclusive Slavic principality in the Carpathian Mountains. Which isn’t terribly impressive until you remember that the Carpathian Mountains are the home of Dracula, and that Dracula only lived there because he was once a Slavic prince and when he died, Satan was so afraid of him he would not let him into Hell. People like me are afraid of Reed Richards’s penis pressed up against us – people who manage to maintain autocratic control over a group of people so badass they become vampires by SCARING THE SHIT OUT OF THE DEVIL are not afraid of Reed Richards’s penis. They may be afraid of God, they may be afraid of garlic, but they are not intimidated by a blue guy-rope or that guy’s intimately-close blue guy-rope.

But does Reed Richards care? Oh hell no. Because the only person more egotistical than Dr. Doom and Dracula combined is Reed Richards. Just read the comic. And not even a whole comic. It only takes about two panels of Reed Richards’s speech bubbles to see that he is an insufferable egotistical douchebag who never misses the opportunity to remind everyone how smart he thinks he is. And as if this weren’t bad enough, he talks, acts and looks like Ward Cleaver from Leave It To Beaver, but with an inexplicable blue jumpsuit and magical space radiation powers. He routinely stops using contractions and explains everything in condescending detail, like he thinks everyone around him is at the intellectual level of the Beaver. At least, that is why I do it.

But I write on the Internet, where 90% of everything is porn, and the other 10% is webpages posted by people who think the government is using porn to control our minds. Reed Richards is talking to people who are supposed to be scientists and a space shuttle pilot. Either Reed Richards is an asshole to everyone close to him, or everyone close to him, despite their reputed careers, is retarded. Having read more than several issues of the Fantastic Four, I am convinced it is both.

Which begs the question: is Reed Richards super-intelligent when compared to normal humans of average intelligence, or is he only a “genius” when compared to the short bus mutants of the Fantastic Four? Remember, this is the “famous mind” who couldn’t impress fucking Richard M. Nixon in Fantastic Four #104. Sure, Magneto and Sub-Mariner working in evil tandem is not a little problem for anyone to solve, but this is the Fantastic FOUR – they outnumber Magneto and Sub-Mariner two super-mutants to one, and one of their mutants is a giant rock monster. And even then the then-President would apparently prefer that someone else, ANYONE ELSE, handle the problem. Richard Nixon never hugged Spider-Man or anything, but he also never called Spidey an incompetent douchebag. And remember, Nixon is our only 20th Century President who employed honest-to-goodness hired goons. That is like the Supreme Leader of Iran saying he’s not going to buy nuclear weapons from you because he thinks you take that religion thing a little too seriously. Clearly, like Richard Nixon, Reed Richards is a condescending douchebag apparently surrounded by idiots. And like Nixon, both are significantly less cool than Spider-Man.

The Invisible Woman

The next obnoxious member of the Fantastic Four is the Invisible June Cleaver to Reed Richards’s Bendy-Ward, Sue Storm. Sue Storm is Reed Richards’s wife and…Sue Storm is Reed Richard’s wife. She has absolutely no personality outside of agreeing with Reed, defending Reed, following Reed around, wondering where Reed is because she misses following him around, laying on her back spread-eagle while Reed yells out his own name in ecstasy, and afterwards, making Reed a delicious sandwich. And then washing the plate when he’s finished. Oh right, she can also turn invisible and create limited force-field bubbles, but as this combination of powers has helped the Fantastic Four defeat a supervillain a total of negative fifty-six times, her being Reed Richard’s wife is arguably much more important to saving the world.

Think I am just being a sexist dick for comedic effect? I challenge you: find me a single page in Fantastic Four history where Sue Storm doesn’t dedicate at least one speech bubble to how awesome and important Reed Richards is, and I’ll buy you an interdimensional super dog from the parallel present. People say that Marvel is more in tune with modern feminism than DC because they have had more super-powered women in their lineup for longer. But Sue Storm is the perfect example of why that argument is stupid. Marvel may put a supposedly super-powered person with boobs in every book they publish, but they don’t get points for feminism if that woman is merely some guy’s doting wife, a lusty object of comic relief, or kidnapper bait. Sue Storm is all three, all the time, so no points for Marvel, no points for the Fantastic Four, and especially no points for Sue Storm. No matter how good her sandwiches are.

(A question: How does a person who can turn invisible and isolate themselves in a six foot force field bubble still manage to get kidnapped and tied up with a non-super-rope nine times out of ten? Maybe I’m missing something because I’m too sexist. Feel free to clue me in, Internet.)

The Human Torch

The next worthless prick in the Fantastic Four is Johnny Storm, Sue’s brother, aka The Human Torch. His powers are setting himself on fire, and being more of a loud-mouth, self-obsessed whole-ass than Reed Richards and Dr. Doom combined (and knowing Marvel, this has probably happened at least six or seven times, and the Skrulls did it as part of a new plan to take over the world, and it failed every time). Johnny Storm is every fratboy you’ve ever failed to get to turn down the Eminem, except that instead of having the superpower of being able to hold down several kegs of Milwaukee’s Best without poisoning his brain, he can set you on fire with a mini-meteor he literally pulls out of his ass. Oh, and he can fly, because if you can set yourself on fire, you can heat the air around you and…thermal updrafts…but it also somehow works in space…and you don’t have to breathe then, either. Or something. I do not possess the fantastic magical space radiation bloated mind of Reed Richards, so I cannot begin to comprehend the awesome nonsensimagical physics at work here. All I know is, don’t tell Johnny Storm to turn down the Eminem, or he might set your underpants on fire with his middle finger.

The Thing

The last member of the Fantastic Four that pisses me off is the aforementioned sentient rock monster, The Thing. Yeah, that’s right. The combined awesomenesses of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (possibly by the Skrulls) couldn’t come up with a better superhero name for a giant orange rock monster than ‘The Thing.’ And they even gave the guy’s pre-radiation alter-ego the name Ben Grimm.

His last name is Grimm, you guys. He’s a giant orange rock monster. And all you can come up with is ‘The Thing?’ Not ‘The Great Grimm?’ Not ‘Grimmrock the Smasher?’ Not even the Best Name Ever ‘Grimmenstein?’ No, he’s just ‘The Thing,’ his outfit is a tiny blue Speedo, and he is pretty much just The Incredible Hulk except that when The Thing punches stuff, orange rock crumbs break off his knuckles. And this is the guy who had, before the dose of magical space radiation, a cool name and was such an awesome Air Force test pilot that he flew spies into Communist Russia and was then promoted to experimental space shuttle captain.

This has got to be the only time in comic book history where a guy was way cooler BEFORE he got turned into a superpowered bash monster.

Understandably then, it is all downhill from here. Despite the fact that Ben Grimm was a famous flying ace before his transformation – and that the transformation didn’t do a damn thing to his ace flying brain – the only job Reed Richards gives him in the Fantastic Four is Official Smasher of Crap. At this point, anyone else in Ben’s position would probably have told Reed Richards to fuck himself sideways and joined Nick Fury’s S.H.I.E.L.D., where they would also no doubt expect him to smash things, but would also no doubt let him fly experimental aircraft. But Reed Richards was Ben Grimm’s best friend, so Ben believes him when he promises to find a cure for Ben’s rock-monsterness. A six year old could tell Ben how full of shit Reed is, since Reed is the very person who wants to exploit Ben’s smashing rock hands against the wide array of enemies he’s made during a lifetime of condescending douchebaggery. And there’s also the little factoid that Ben didn’t even WANT to fly Reed into space for his illegal little experiment in the first place, which the government had torpedoed because they only waste money on space boondoggles kids of Senators come up with. But no, Ben trusts Reed. Even after Reed and Johnny Storm HIGHJACK A SPACE SHUTTLE, and on top of that insist on complicating the thruster fuel specs with a hundred extra pounds of utter non-astronaut-nor-scientist known as The Woman Reed Richards is Fucking. But no, Ben Grimm trusts Reed Richards and always will, even if it means violating federal law, endangering his life by making flying the space shuttle more difficult, and being exposed to gene-raping magical space radiation.

I bet Reed Richards came up with the name The Thing and the little Speedo just to show the world that the giant rock monster was as much his bitch as Sue Storm.

So the pre-Thing Ben Grimm clearly had no self-esteem whatsoever. Now that Ben is The Thing, he should certainly have gained the profound sense of self-worth I assume being giant and indestructible gives someone. But then I remember that this is a Marvel comic, and that in a Marvel comic, superpowers are not cool. In a Marvel comic, superpowers in fact turn you into a persistently depressed angst-hole, who can’t wait to recite poetry about how terrible it is that you can’t work in retail anymore. Unless you happen to be Wolverine. Wolverine is so into being a superhero that he dresses in neon yellow and goes out of his way to challenge thirty foot purple robots to arm wrestling matches. But The Thing is not Wolverine, so while he will fight thirty foot purple robots when Reed Richards orders him to, he takes breaks between crater-punches to Twitter about the cold darkness where his heart should be. And since the Fantastic Four have been around about forty years longer than Twitter, most of The Thing’s tweets have been action-obscuring speech bubbles lamenting his new massive pointy brow ridge and his new tiny orange turtle penis.

I know that complaining about a non-Wolverine Marvel character being whiny is like complaining about a non-Superman DC character trying to be as angry and badass as Batman. But with The Thing, it just does not make any sense. He can throw cars. He is no longer legally obligated to wear clothing in public. No one will ever mess with him for fear of getting a mouthful of broken teeth and orange crumbs. And on top of all that, he even has a girlfriend, a hot blind sculptor who apparently likes a mouthful of orange crumbs. Yes, I know she is blind, and we are supposed to think she only likes Ben because she cannot see how hideous he is supposed to be. But unlike Lee and Kirby, who apparently think all women are utterly shallow and that blind women are also extremely stupid, we understand that there is no way any human being can fuck a ten foot rock monster and hold any delusions about what they look like.

Rereading this paragraph, I realize that being The Thing is now my new ambition, plus or minus the disability of my potential girlfriend, since my years on the Internet have taught me that no matter what horrifying thing is wrong with you, there are at least 10,000 normal, healthy women who cannot wait to fuck you. So The Thing is not a sympathetic character. He is instead a superficial asshole, who has tossed aside what little remained of his personal dignity on the faint hope that his best friend will get around to making him look average and boring again.

I do not care how many cars he can throw, how many times he has stood up to the Hulk, how many thirty foot purple robots he has used as a baseball bat to swat low-flying Skrull ships into Dr. Doom’s Palace of Evil Robot Dracula Cue Lightning Flash. All of this wonderful nonsense is reduced to miserable bullshit the moment he opens his mouth and makes it clear that he thinks he would be having far more fun mowing his lawn in his size thirty-four khakis. Thanks for ruining my fun, The Thing.

I also do not understand why the writers keep making his speech bubbles look like they are coming out of the mouth of a stereotypical 1930s New York gangster who just got off the boat from Sicily. Ben Grimm was an experimental space shuttle pilot. Qualification Number One for that job is being able to speak clearly enough to tell Houston you have a problem.

Maybe he only started talking like that after the exposure to magical space radiation. Maybe the inside of his mouth crumbles apart like his knuckles. But then, would he not choke to death on the crumbs while he slept?

See, this is why I like the X-Men. When I read an X-Men comic, I am too busy watching Wolverine slicing purple robot cocks to wonder if The Thing has to wear a mouth condom to bed so as not to suffocate on his own crumbling epidermis.

The Fantastic Four are fantastically stupid.

BABYLON 5 IS ST00P1D

2010-02-07T16:08:00.000-08:00

The nerds I know fall into three categories: Star Trek nerds, Star Wars nerds, and Babylon 5 nerds. By which I mean, that ONE Babylon 5 nerd. I watch Star Trek, and despite all its massive problems, it’s entertaining enough. I’ve seen all the Star Wars movies and aside from the terrible dialogue, they’re okay. I had never seen Babylon 5 save a few odd clips I’d chanced upon in the mid 90s. I’d always changed the channel after about 30 seconds, because I didn’t know what I was watching but it looked like a shitty Star Trek rip-off. I’d felt the same way initially about Red Dwarf, but that was parody and it was funny, at least before it forgot what parody means. Babylon 5 wasn’t parody and was only funny because it was broken. Shitty science fiction parody I’ll take; shitty science fiction rip-off can suck it.

I made the mistake of saying this to the Babylon 5 nerd I know. He got all indignant and demanded I hold my heathen tongue, at least until I’d seen enough of his favorite show to know emphatically why I thought it sucked. Because nerd fights are funny and the first two seasons of Babylon 5 are free on Hulu, I decided to indulge him.

So I’ve watched about four complete episodes of Babylon 5. And I can now say emphatically that Babylon 5 can not only suck it, it can suck it till it explodes in its idiot Star Trek-humping face.

Here’s why.

Babylon 5 is about this giant space station in the future. Like all giant space stations in the future, it looks like someone glued a bunch of broken battleship models together in such a way as to fulfill no practical purpose whatsoever, except maybe as a really kinky dildo for a planet-sized she-demon (a better set up for a science fiction show by far). The thing that sets Babylon 5 apart from all the other future space stations is that the whole thing exists entirely in a computer, as in it’s all CGI, as in it’s all shitty mid-90s CGI. PC space sims circa 1998 have better graphics, and plots, than this show. Now it’s not the show’s producer’s fault that rendering technology wasn’t up to the necessary standards. It’s just the show’s producer’s fault that he thought this didn’t matter, that for some reason he didn’t have to use professionally constructed models like Star Trek was doing at the very same time to make their show not look like…well, shitty Babylon 5.

But enough about the shitty special effects. If something is well-written, I’ll excuse the shitty special effects (see The Last Starfighter). But Babylon 5 is not well-written. Which is to say, Babylon 5 certainly had a writer, because even the dumbest actors on earth, improvising for peanuts, would not be this consistently retarded.

Babylon 5 is of course home to a varied cast of alien inhabitants, i.e., a bunch of nobody actors in castoff FMV game space jumpers, lumpy face prosthetics and frightening wigs. When they aren’t busy cleaning the thousands of unnecessary external vents and flashy lights on their ugly CGI space station, they’re having insipid personal problems. It’s like a soap opera, but not in the engaging way Star Trek: Deep Space 9 – the show Babylon 5 is trying hardest to rip off – is like a soap opera. No, Babylon 5 is more like a Mexican soap opera, where the cheap theater sets have been replaced with bad computer graphics, and the language you don’t understand isn’t Spanish, it’s something some guy made up. And instead of eroticism and crying, every story is packed with incessant whining and shots of people filling out space forms on space computers. Or whining about how they don’t want to fill out those forms, or don’t know how. Incessantly.

What is everyone whining and filing space paperwork about? Apparently the race of Lizard People and the race of Napoleon Vampires are going to war, because the Napoleon Vampires used to kick the crap out of the Lizard People, and now the Lizard People want revenge. And for some reason all the other things in the galaxy care about this, so humans and the Bald Elves have to get them to stop. Except that the Bald Elves used to kick the crap out of humans, so humans still hate them and it’s really hard for us to work with them. But we’re randomly allies with them now so we have to pretend we don’t still hate them. Shake thoroughly with ice, and it’s all tense and dramatic and everyone’s conflicted and bitching about all of it all the time.

In the first place, I don’t know why the giant space dildo is called Babylon 5. I guess it’s because the word Babylon is really old and has a ‘y’ in it, so it sounds all epicky to retards, and space names always have to have numbers in them so somebody picked ‘5’. The pilot episode pulls some crap about this Babylon being the fifth Babylon because the first three blew up and the last one just disappeared. Riiiight. Because if you have a gargantuan space resort filled with millions of people and it all goes to shit, you’re just going to pull another trillion dollars out of your ass and set up another one. Four. More. Times.

It reminds me of that part in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Michael Palin is the King of Swamp Castle. Remember that? He explains how his castle is actually his fourth castle, because the first three burned down and/or sank into the swamp. That’s what the people who made Babylon 5 want us to believe happened in their show. Except that their swamp castle is in space, and every time it goes down, millions of sentient creatures and trillions of space dollars go up in iron-smelting flames. Not to mention the damage caused by an eight million ton fused steel brick landing on a nearby moon colony. Four. Fucking. Times.

You heard it right, kids. This is the distant future and humans are supposed to be super-advanced and making out with all these other super-advanced alien races. And with all of their super-advanced powers combined, they are worse at keeping their shit together than a bit character in a Monty Python routine.

Fuck damn, this show is stupid.

In Star Trek they would call the most important people on the show the Bridge Crew. Babylon 5 is on a space station so the place they all hang out is probably not called the bridge. It’s probably called the “Command Unit,” or some other phrase that sounds like something a nerd would call his genitals. So the leads on Babylon 5 are probably called the “Command Unit Crew.” But Babylon 5 couldn’t bribe its way into Star Trek’s paid toilet, so I’ll call the main cast of Babylon 5 the Babylon 5 Bridge Crew.

The Babylon 5 Bridge Crew has names, but I can’t remember all of them because I don’t care about this show, and the ones I do remember are stupid. It has six members, because both the Bridge Crews of the original Star Trek and Star Trek: the Next Generation had six members, and Babylon 5 had the same great idea. After Star Trek had it. Twice. Over twenty years.

These are, in probable order of importance:

Captain Angston Corporatecut, Whiner of the Stars. I don’t know how a flaccid wiener like this could become commander of a Volkswagon, let alone a gigantic space station. Except that this is Babylon 5, and on this show things like this happen. Over and over again. Maybe he fathered some impotent elder statesman’s son. Or knows who did.
Oh, there I go again, coming up with fake stories for Babylon 5 that are infinitely more interesting than anything they ever did on this stupid show! Do you know what it means when someone with my level of Hollywood script writing experience (zero times one-hundred) can’t help but accidentally come up with better ideas than a show that was on television for like five years? It means goddamn it, is what it means.

Vice-Captain Battleaxe Icecooch. When she’s not being a robot powered by liquid bitch, she’s threatening to assault people for…she’s threatening to assault people. When she does this, she and the person she’s threatening raise their eyebrows and smile like it’s a fucking knock-knock joke or something. “Knock-knock, who’s there, I’m a violent psychotic bitch.” Yeah, makes me laugh. In the first episode of Season One she says she’s screwed up because her mother was a psychic and the government forced her to take drugs to stop her eerie brain powers and this of course led to her suicide. But since that sounds like a lie I tell people when they ask me why I’m screwed up, I don’t buy it. Only thing I can figure is that she must be a rape victim who despises men only a little bit more than she despises herself, yet won’t get therapy because she thinks it’ll make her look weak. And everyone knows it and it’s become something of a station-wide joke. If I’m right, that means the producers of Babylon 5 think the untreated emotional trauma of a violent sexual assault is a kick-ass running gag with limitless comedic potential.

I guess that serves the 90s right for demanding more female leads in science fiction. Well, that, and Rob Liefeld.

Chief of Security Squarehead Goofoff. Every space show needs a chief of security, because Star Trek: the Next Generation had two. The first was Tasha Yar, who as a kid got raped by a biracial crack-addled Vietnam War vet alien or something, so that when she grew up she decided to be Batman on a spaceship, only she sucked at it and got killed. The second was Commander Worf, a Klingon raised by humans who acted all tough and snarly to prove to himself and other Klingons that he was in fact all tough and snarly. These were well-rounded characters who behaved in ways that made sense (compared to Image Comics characters, anyway). Of course Babylon 5 has “cutting edge special effects,” so it doesn’t need any pansy-ass character development. CoS Squarehead Goofoff is either bumbling around like a significantly less funny Chief Wiggum, or standing ramrod stiff at all the high-level administrative meetings assuring everyone that he will keep them safe NO MATTER THE COST, GOD DAMN IT. Sometimes he does both in different scenes of the same episode. Perhaps there really are people working in security who are Secret Service agents when they’re not too busy chasing down pie thieves with the other Keystone Kops. But would someone like this ever become Chief of Security of a trillion dollar space port? Especially when he’s the ONLY security officer we ever see? Come on, Babylon 5. Even Kirk had a dozen Red Shirts with phasers on the Swingin’est Ship of the Stars, and the biggest threat he ever faced was his own belligerent incompetence. You really want Squarehead solely responsible for the health and well-being of high level alien diplomats? What if it’s his comic relief hour? He might trip over his own bootlaces and knock Ambassador Pointless Apostrophe into a giant cake. And nothing gives a would-be assassin a bigger hard-on than hearing his target presently has eyes full of whipped vanilla bean. Explains why the plot of every episode of Babylon 5 is about some alien diplomat getting killed on the station. You think they’d stop coming after awhile, or at least insist CoS Goofoff be reassigned. But no. Because that would make sense.

It makes you wonder why the character of CoS Goofoff is on the show to begin with (you know, other than the Star Trek thing). He’s not developed enough for any law enforcement commentary, and he’s not fat or black enough for token comic relief. Which raises another question: why does a space soap opera need token comic relief? Maybe test audiences didn’t find Battleaxe the Twisted Rape Victim as funny as the producers did.
Admittedly, she usually lashes out at poor Squarehead. So I guess that fixes everything. If you don’t know what the word ‘fixes’ means.
Maybe he’s the one who raped her. That would be funny.

Oh, there I go again…!

Blondie the Psychic Nazi Skank. She’s blonde and wears a knee-length skirt and heels – on the fucking space station – so I assume she’s supposed to be the requisite hot one. Relatively speaking, she is. I admit to falling victim to her calculated sashay and that filthy way she narrows her eyes and smirks at everyone wishing her a friendly hello. But the only other women on this show are Battleaxe and that one Bald Elf chick, so I may have been grasping for the longest of the very short straws. After all, her clothes and hair proudly proclaim “Women’s Death Camp Guard,” and the ridges on her throat and her sallow cheeks clearly indicate several years lived quite actively on the wrong side of thirty-five. Not that I’m personally against middle-aged Nazi women skanking it up whenever they’re so inclined. If I’d spent my prime child-bearing years lying to Undesirables about showers, I’d want to spend my free time pumping off the pole too. But the fact that I even have to think about something so fantastically vile means that someone, somewhere, royally fucked up. As if that was still a question on a show where a fat bald guy is suddenly a space alien because you gave him Dracula fangs and a giant peacock tail wig. Jesus Christ.
Oh, and by the way, Blondie has inexplicable psychic powers. Or so the characters keep repeating. I guess the show will get around to actually making this part of the plot when it’s good and fucking ready.

Ambassador Napoleon Vampire. I don’t remember his name or the name of his “race,” but you can be sure both of them have a few unnecessary consonants separated by even more unnecessary apostrophes. The fat bald guy who plays him thinks he’s in the most spectacular stage play ever, so when he isn’t dragging down every scene with overly pronounced, set-chewing emogasms, he’s yanking people around by the lapels and screaming like a pirate with a lisp. If you’ve ever seen a crappy high school production of Shakespeare, you’ve seen your share of frantic lapel yanking. Comparatively, if you’ve ever experienced real life, you’ve probably noticed that no one ever grabs anyone by the lapels for emotional effect, and probably never has without getting their ass swiftly plastered.

But I blame the genre for this nonsense more than I blame the unfortunate wearing the Dracula fangs and a wig that looks like pubic hair fanning out around the stubbiest penis ever. Star Trek itself started this idiot crap back in the 60s. Why do aliens have to be people from crappy high school Shakespeare? They don’t use normal contractions, they wear knee-high boots and jerkins, and they wave their hands around and grab lapels as they’re giving obvious rehearsed speeches. Which would make a little sense if they were proper ambassadors in session. But they do this shit down in the station lounge. “Who ordered the Jack-and-Coke?” “I did, fair maiden, and beseech thee kindly to hand it o’er, for I am much famished for yon chill succulent succulence.” “Okay. Here you go.” “[Grabs her lapels] It’s WARM, curse you! Take it back, forthwith! I have never been so insulted in my two Earth-centuries life! S’woons!”

Watch the writers of Babylon 5 sue me for quoting more than 3/4ths of a scene. And then the writers of Star Trek will sue them for their piece of the action.

If you get that last joke, you’re a fucking astronaut. Now quit smirking, nerd.

Ambassador Shellless Turtleman. Not only does Ambassador S. Turtleman fulfill every expected Shakespeare alien stereotype, he’s also driving the “Persistent Usual Alien Suspect” train. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Thirty seconds into every show you know he and his evil race of evil Lizard People are 253% responsible for whatever this week’s evil crisis is. And you also know that it’s going to take everyone else on the show fifty TV-punching minutes to finally quit it with the moral relativistic hand-wringing and pin every murder on the sneering lizard man and his sneering lizard man superiors. And then promptly forget the whole thing, so that when the bastards kill someone else at the start of the next show, it’ll take another fifty minutes to “figure out” who did it. While we the viewers are left to figure out whether this whole idiotic process is supposed to tell us something about who we really are as people, or if it’s just aggressively bad writing.

I love it when, after awhile, the writers finally realize how stupid this is and try to have the characters explain it away. “I know the Lizard People seem persistently evil to us,” the commander will say, “and I know they’re responsible for every single fucking problem we’ve ever had up here, and probably always will be. But,” the douchebag frowns, “diplomacy is a delicate process with blah blah blah U.N., ancient Earth Wars, talky talky greater understanding, and have sex with them, in the name of interstellar peace.” And everyone just nods like they know there isn’t time to do anything about it before the short shuttle arrives to take them all back to the satellite for assisted living.

“In the name of interstellar peace,” Commander Missing Chromosome? Know what promotes interstellar peace? Not letting the fucking Lizard People kill the janitor every time he happens upon their plans to conquer all the surrounding Spice mines! Doing something a bit more proactive than shaking your head when you find another ten children’s carcasses stuffed down the garbage chute, covered in Lizard People drool! If the fucking Lizard People are murderous genocidal jerk-offs, then no, we don’t have to be nice to them in the name of interstellar peace. In the name of interstellar peace, we need to eject the Lizard People’s ambassador from the station and declare war on the fucking Lizard People, and nuke their homeworld a half-dozen times until they finally see the benefit of not using other people’s mouths as toilets whenever they’re so inclined! I level the same complaint against the game Mass Effect, which proudly rips off as much of Babylon 5 as they can legally get away with: human beings would not realistically put up with this shit. We don’t put up with it from other humans, so we’re ESPECIALLY not going to put up with it from people who look like the spawn of Godzilla and Jamie Lee Curtis. I don’t care how many corvette gunners the Lizard People are rumored to have in their space fleet. We’re not going to shrug our shoulders and keep Ambassador Turtleman under “closer surveillance” in his compartment adjacent to the station commander’s. Ambassador Turtleman kills someone on our turf, and he’s just earned himself a helmetless trip through the airlock. And if his “people” think it’s worth shooting about, welcome to Genocide Alley, motherfuckers.

Think I’m joking? Ever seen a dire wolf or a cave bear or a Neanderthal in your back yard? No you haven’t. That’s because this one time the three of them put their toothy mauls together and came up with a plan to eat this caveman’s wife. You’ll notice how Commander Caveman didn’t shrug his shoulders and tsk, tsk, tsk the cave bear ambassador for not minding intercavern peace.

Fucking Christ giblets, this show is stupid.