Maneki Neko

Come on, television stations.  The signals might be pretty good if you're living next door to the broadcast tower, but if you're out in the boonies or have transmission interference issues (ie humidity, sunlight, a friggin' butterfly getting squashed in Tokyo), they're completely terrible.  Put some of that advertising money to good use and BUILD MORE TOWERS.  They're desperately needed, particularly in Michigan where trees are everywhere.  I'm sick of watching Conan O'Brien as imagined by Pablo Picasso... that is, if he even comes in at all.

Hey sports announcers, the obsequiousness was cute back in the late 1990s, but could you get off Tiger Woods' dick, already?  He's not a "superhero," as you boasted on NBC earlier today... he's just some guy who plays golf, and evidently not as well as the other contestants in the US Open.  Stop treating him like he's some amazing novelty act and start treating him like all the other athletes in the sport!  Seriously, are you getting payola from Nike or something?

A few days ago, a friend of mine was accosted by some douchebag who claimed he was worthless, because he contributed nothing to society. I was a little hurt that the friend speculated that I was the douchebag in question, but utterly incensed by the idiotic notion that a man's worth is directly proportional to his contributions to society. Romantic "we are the world" fantasies aside, nobody goes to work thinking about his impact on society... he thinks about the more concrete, and more pressing issue of his immediate survival. He slaves at his desk to keep a roof over his head and put food on his table. Any impact this has on society is minute, and largely coincidental.

If people didn't have to work to survive, they wouldn't work, even if it was for the benefit of society. After all, society is people you don't care about, who don't care about you. They're the strangers who take your taxi in the rain, the clerks who are rude to you in the supermarket, and the tight-assed NIMBY-holic neighbor who squeals like a stuck pig when her illusion of utopia is shattered by the slightest inconvenience. Society is background noise at best and an irritant at worst, and nobody with even the slightest shred of brain matter would waste their time contributing to it. They instead devote their resources to themselves, their family, and their friends, because ultimately, these are the only people who matter to them. Even the people who contribute to charities are only in it for themselves, either for the personal satisfaction that comes from giving or because they have a personal investment in the cause.

So let's not pretend that contributions to a nebulous and largely uncaring society matter, because they don't. If you honestly believe otherwise, you're a fool, and you deserve to waste your time on a masturbatory and ultimately fruitless cause. Tell yourself whatever you like, and measure yourself by any yardstick that's most flattering to you, but in the end, you're still not worth shit to anyone else.

I'm moving back to the farm with my parents shortly, and I'm not going to have access to high-speed internet, possibly for a long time.  This almost feels like a walk down the green mile... I've lived so much of the past four years online that it's going to be hard to imagine being without it.  I'll surf on their 56K connection whenever I can, but needless to say, my internet access is going to be severely curtailed. 

Man, I can't wait for Arizona, and the fall season when I'll have my next infusion of cash.  Until then, I'll have to get by with what I've got, and hopefully find some way to continue my work at 1UP while finding other supplemental income sources.  Wish me luck.

EGM's coming back!  Yay!

But it's being edited by Steve Harris again!  Boo!

Oh life, you give with one hand, then stab me in the heart with the other.

For the longest time, a lead actor from Star Trek has never appeared in any Star Wars franchise.  Sadly, George Takei ended that streak by appearing in the lackluster animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, lending his pompous voice to the villain Lok Durd.

(He looks like a Lok Durd, too.  Imagine an overfed, anthropomorphic slug with glass marbles for eyes and you're on the right track)

I'm probably revealing myself as a huge nerd by saying this, but I get a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach when I see a Star Trek alum in the inferior Star Wars mythology.  And Clone Wars, the series with battle droids who sound like Steve Urkel!  After this and his flamboyant to the point of insulting appearance in You Don't Mess with the Zohan, I'm more convinced than ever that Takei will star in anything for a buck.

I shouldn't laugh, but man, this is so good it just has to be fattening...

http://www.mikeandheth.com/games/97-connect-wii-usb-hard-drive.html

This hack makes the Wii more open to software piracy than ever, and there's not a damn thing Nintendo can do about it.  Frighteningly enough, they did successfully petition Amazon and eBay to have all listings for Nintendo DS flash cartridges removed from their respective sites.  However, I don't think they're going to have too much luck convincing them to stop selling hard drives.

I do strongly believe that you should purchase video games that you enjoy, to support the developers that created them.  On the other hand, I can't help but get a little shadenfreuden from this news... Nintendo has racked up a lot of bad karma since 2007, letting the quality of the Wii software library slip to sub-game.com levels and making weak excuses and dubious promises to their most dedicated fans.  I can't help but feel like they deserve to lose a little face, if not their entire head, after two years of doing their best Marie Antoinette imitation.

Senior English: B
Colonial Lit: B
Shakespeare: C+
Nutrition: C+

I'm at once relieved and perplexed.  I attended half the classes for Nutrition and still wind up with a passing grade... how the hell does that work?

I'm just glad it's over.  Now I can finish my last handful of classes at another college and finally get my bachelor's degree in English.  I thought I would have been FINISHED by now, but I still need about a year's worth of 300 level classes before I finally have a shot at graduation.

All right, I don't get too hung up on logical flaws in television shows, but sometimes they're so egregious that even I can't help but point them out.  The "manatee jokes" in each episode of Family Guy are routinely and deservedly mocked for interrupting the storyline while contributing nothing of value to it.  Now the random jokes don't even make sense.  Actress and frequent FG whipping girl Marlee Matlin called MoviePhone to order tickets for a film, and the automated operator couldn't understand her deaf accent.  Her deaf accent. 

If you can figure out why this joke doesn't work, congratulations... you're smarter than the Family Guy writing staff, which might actually be large marine mammals at this point.

So I wasn't actually banned from posting on Wired... turns out that Conde Nast was in the process of redesigning the comments system, forcing posters to sign up for individual accounts to cut down on spam.  After they made the switch and I registered for my own account, I was free to post to my heart's content on Game Life, Gadget Lab, and all of Wired's other blogs.

However... I'm still prohibited from posting on Gawker.  I've twice asked the editors why I can no longer comment there and have yet to receive a response.  I can't imagine what I said to deserve the banhammer, and frankly, it's hard to fathom how it could have been any worse than articles like this, which Gawker's own staff are paid to publish.

Yes, it's a metaphor, but it's an incredibly gross one.  I don't want to think about Ted Turner stroking off T. Boone Pickens, regardless of the context.  It also makes the Gawker staff a bunch of magnificent hypocrites... how can they justify banning anyone after publishing an exhaustively detailed, borderline pornographic celebrity orgy fantasy is completely beyond me.

http://kotaku.com/5234987/major-minors-majestic-march-sold-600-copies-in-first-two-days

It wasn't a major hit.  It wasn't even a minor hit.  According to Kotaku, Major Minor's Majestic March was an absolute failure, selling six hundred copies in the first two days of its availability.  I've heard reports that the game just isn't that fun, but I have a feeling that it was Guitar Hero and the industry's focus on an older, more "extreme" audience that killed the Parappa series, along with its various spin-offs. 

Parappa's dead.  Crash Bandicoot's dead.  Spyro's dead.  Toshinden is DEFINITELY dead.  Tomb Raider is just barely alive, and only because of an emergency cash injection from Square-Enix.  It's official, folks... the 1990s and the franchises that defined it are history.

Bea Arthur just died today.  I'm surprised by the news, although I guess I shouldn't be.  The cast of the Golden Girls were playing old ladies twenty years ago... the real shock is that it's taken this long for the Grim Reaper to catch up with them.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the health store, along comes the latest vegetable recall.  This time, it's alfalfa sprouts, which have become a possible source of salmonella along with the usual vitamins and minerals.

http://www.newsinferno.com/archives/5773

Looks like I picked a bad time to stop sniffing glue start eating healthy!

Huh, I've been comment restricted on both Gawker and Wired.  The weird thing is that I'm still able to post on Gawker's sister sites (Kotaku, Lifehacker, io9, etc) but not the bitchier Gawker, Valleywag, or Defamer blogs.  Wired, on the other hand, has blocked me from posting on any of its blogs; a pretty impressive trick when you consider that it's not necessary to log into an account to post there.  Evidently they're using an IP ban to restrict my access.

The funny thing is, I'm not even sure what I did to incur the wrath of the moderators at those two sites.  Either they're being entirely too sensitive, or I've turned into a huge asshole over the past couple of months and don't even realize it.  I'm not discounting the latter option... I'm dealing with a lot of pent-up rage, and some of that anger and frustration could have seeped into my writing.  I just wish that Gawker would actually tell me what I did to deserve a blow from its mighty banhammer.  I've asked twice and still haven't received a response from them.

I'll make this brief.  In a legendarily boneheaded move, the cable music service Music Choice dumped their best channel, Retro-Active, and replaced it with two new stations.  Neither of them offer much of the new wave '80s music that made Retro-Active so fantastic, forcing me to purchase those songs to fill that gap.  So I'm asking you, the few remaining readers of this blog, to offer some recommendations.  While making those recommendations, keep in mind that:

1. I've already got a buttload of Depeche Mode songs on my iPod Touch.
2. I don't care for The Smiths or Morrissey.
3. I'm going for individual songs, rather than entire albums.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can provide!

It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of computer rendering, but after two months of premium cable I've come to the realization that I like stop-motion animation in live-action films even less.  Don't get me wrong... I've got no beef with films like The Corpse Bride or The Nightmare Before Christmas, which are exclusively stop-motion and look fantastic for it.  It's only when you combine stop-motion characters with living actors that things go terribly, terribly wrong. 

I call it the Harryhausen Effect, named after stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen.  I've noticed the Harryhausen Effect in a lot of science fiction and fantasy films from the 1980s, before computer rendering became a feasible way to create realistic special effects.  Robocop is the worst offender, with the ED-209 stumbling jerkily through its confrontation with a tin-plated Peter Weller.  (It even squeals like a pig after it tumbles down a flight of stairs, but I won't open that can of worms!) 

The foul-mouthed and utterly terrible sequel was released in 1990, just one year before computer rendering made a dazzling post-Tron comeback in the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, so it's forgivable that Robocop 2 relied on stop-motion effects for its massive, drug-addled cybernetic villain.  However, when Robocop 3 was released three years later, it too used stop-motion animation for the ED-209 units, and that was a lot harder to swallow.  Come on, this was the year of Jurassic Park!  You weren't paying Peter Weller anymore... you had the money to cough up for realistic special effects!

I just watched Terminator earlier today.  The film was released in 1984, by a smaller studio (Orion, now swallowed up by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which in turn was purchased by Sony Pictures), so naturally it was forced to rely on stop-motion animation for the film's climax.  However, the director took great care to keep its trademark jankiness to a minimum, relying mostly on close-ups of elaborate puppets that moved more smoothly and better reflected the light sources in each scene.  After The Abyss, a groundbreaking science-fiction film which made extensive use of high-tech special effects, director James Cameron swore off stop-motion animation completely and used CGI exclusively for his next film Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

What's really amazing is that some science-fiction films stand the test of time despite the limited technology available to them.  Blade Runner still looks incredible over twenty five years later, even impressing the legendarily picky Philip K. Dick with its sweeping, panoramic view of a dystopic future.  The key to its longevity was the plot contrivance of artificially created humans, letting director Ridley Scott use actors for every scene and taking stop-motion animation out of the picture entirely.  Prior to Blade Runner, Scott used an absolute minimum of stop-motion animation for his sci-fi epic Alien, putting more emphasis on a combination of clever camera work, ornately detailed sets, and convincing puppetry.  While the film looks more dated than Blade Runner, the special effects are still surprisingly effective, especially when compared to its contemporaries.

It seems that Scott had the foresight that other film directors from the 1980s did not, opting for subtlety when other filmmakers scrambled for flashy effects that would look patently ridiculous years later.  Still, films like Robocop and the original Terminator are good movies in their own right, making me wish that the studios would smooth out the rough edges by replacing the stop-motion animation with more realistic computer rendering, and eliminating that jarring Harryhausen Effect once and for all.  This is a very controversial move, as George Lucas, Steven Spielburg, and Ted Turner all discovered, but I honestly believe that an ED-209 or a Terminator that looks like it's standing in the same room with Robocop or Sarah Connor would be a big improvement.

( Here comes the meme train! )

Yep, I'm finished with Family Guy.  They had such a great idea, reuniting the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and they completely wasted it with a mundane, aimless subplot.  The bulk of the storyline focused on Meg's conversion to Christianity, and the rabidly pro-atheist slant was every bit as preachy and self-serving as any of Kirk Cameron's insufferable online sermons.  The only laugh I got from the episode was the gay Zima in Brian's alcoholic fantasy, and one chuckle in twenty two minutes is a really lousy batting average for an animated sitcom.  It's getting pretty damn sad when even kids' cartoons like The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack are more consistently funny than anything Fox can dish out in its prime time schedule.

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/faith/entries/2009/03/19/oh_paddy_dear_and_did_you_hear.html

Call me a traditionalist, or just a raging lunatic, but this PC push to turn Saint Patrick's Day into Shamrock Day is asinine and needs to be put down as quickly and violently as Old Yeller with rabies.  I was already miffed at the move to turn Christmas into National Generic Winter Holiday, but while that was a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to placate members of other faiths, the dumbing down of Saint Patrick's Day is a cynical ploy by greeting card companies and overstuffed media giants to make the holiday more family friendly. 

Well, I've got news for you schmucks... I didn't have a problem with Saint Patrick's Day when I was eight, and I don't have a problem with it now.  But I WILL have a problem with Shamrock Day, if you greedy bastards gain any traction in changing the name.  You'll take my Saint Patrick's Day when you pry it from my cold, drunk hands!

Months after getting struck by a bus, Jack is back... and he's sporting a new, yet strangely familiar look!

P.S. That really is a very good show, by the way.
P.P.S. I'm not grooving with the new Jack in the Box logo, which looks like it was pulled straight out of 1967.
P.P.P.S. Remember when these entries were worth reading?