You Are Dumb - Nerds

Immortal Kombat

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:54:34 -0500

Nerds, 15 August 2008

Memo to Richard Garriott: CUT IT OUT.

Look, dude. I think it's great that after two decades of making Ultima games, you're taking the piles of money they gave you for that and fulfilling a lifelong dream to go to space. That's great. I bet you're loving the training, and if I had $20 million, I might join you. But this Operation Immortality you've got going? That shit has got to stop.

You see, Garriott has made a MMORPG called "Tabula Rasa". If you don't know what an MMORPG is, it stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. If you don't know what THAT means, it means "Like World Of Warcraft". If you don't remember what World of Warcraft is, it's the game from that South Park episode. If you're still confused, enjoy your trip to Wikipedia. Anyway, he made this game, and the game involves humanity being mostly destroyed by aliens, so as a marketing tie-in, Garriott is going to fill a bigass storage device with a pile of data and drop it off at the International Space Station.

And the main thing on the drive, and the reason it's called Operation Immortality, is the sequenced DNA information for a bunch of people. Ostensibly, the idea is that if humanity is wiped out by global warming, or alien invasion, or a whole bunch of new offshore oil wells finally waking Cthulhu from his slumber under the coast of Florida*, the human race can be reconstituted from the information on the Immortality Drive.

Which is cute. Or it would be cute, but here is the most complete list I could assemble of the humans who will be "preserved" in Operation Immortality to date:

Richard Garriott, of course. Noted electric guitar noodler Eric Johnson. Warbler Patrice Pike. Jacked-up pro wrestler Matt Morgan, also known as "Beast" on American Gladiators. A female editor from game site The Escapist. Random players of Tabula Rasa who win a sweepstakes. Oh, and Dragonlance Chronicles co-author Tracy Hickman, who it turns out is a dude.

Before I get into the specifics of the program, TRACY HICKMAN? Immortality? Fuck that. Being one of the people responsible for the Dragonlance Chronicles is like being one of the guys that fucked a sick monkey and created AIDS. You thought all you were doing was having a bit of fun, but it turns out you're unleashing a plague on the literary world it has yet to recover from. Fucking Raistlin.

OK, back to the project as a whole. I think you can start to see the fundamental flaw. Some alien civilization comes along, decodes the Immortality Drive, and reconstitutes humanity on a small colony world or island. Matt Morgan immediately declares himself king, takes Patrice Pike as his queen, and the poor Escapist editor has to play Smurfette to a nation of slightly pudgy, goateed dudes who think if they keep going into the same cave over and over again, they'll come out with different stuff each time.

Johnson won't hunt, because you can't kill the alien equivalent of a wild boar with an eight minute guitar solo. Matt Morgan can't hunt, because the aliens won't realize they need to stock the colony with trained animals who fall over when you hit them lightly. The nerds will start to starve, Morgan and Pike will be forced to turn to cannibalism until they get sick of the taste of nerd burgers, and the aliens will chock it up to an elaborate practical joke played on them by a long-dead race of comedians. Offended at being intergalactically punk'd, they'll blow up the dead Earth out of spite.

Of course, there is one other possibility. You see, the Immortality Drive will also contain the avatars of every active Tabula Rasa player as of September 2, 2008. If the aliens decode and understand THAT, then humanity's only future will be as sweatshop labor in the alien equivalent of a Korean Internet cafe, grinding for rare virtual alien artifacts that the aliens can sell for huge space dollars on eBalien. Matt Morgan will be executed for accidentally crushing every control device the aliens provide for him.

Now, I love my nerd brethren, but I say this as a pudgy begoateed man who will, as soon as he's done typing this, go play a point-and-click adventure game based off a ten-year-old webcartoon I don't even watch: DO NOT REPOPULATE THE SPECIES WITH JUST ME. I only have one survival trait, and you're looking at it. So unless we're reconstituted by a bunch of snarky liberal aliens suffering under a perniciously stupid and evil sociopolitical system, I will not be able to help you.

Sure, it's a marketing ploy. And sure, any calamity that takes out the Earth will probably take the ISS with it. And I don't think even advanced aliens can clone nerds from a flash drive. But it's bad enough that we've been beaming Gilligan's Island reruns into space for decades. If the aliens get the impression we spent fifteen bucks a month and days and days on end playing Tabula Rasa, and voting Star Wars as the greatest movie ever** they're not going to hand over the fusion reactors and the cancer cure. They'll just dust off and nuke the site from orbit, because as we all know, it's the only way to be sure.

*Yes, ALL the Old Ones go there to retire.

**Yes, they did. So they're not even proper nerds. Proper nerds would vote for The Empire Strikes Back.

Too Soon?

Wed, 28 May 2008 21:36:00 -0500

Nerds, 29 May 2008

Memo to rabid Whedonoids: YOU ARE DUMB.

It's funny. Yesterday, Ubisoft announced "Beyond Good and Evil 2". It's the next project from talented game designer Michel Ancel. The first "Beyond Good and Evil" was an undisputed* masterpiece that nobody bought, due to the holiday glut and limited distribution. Damn shame.

This sequel news makes me happy. So happy that I approach a level of giddiness most of you probably think is impossible. I hope it's good, and I hope it finds the audience it deserves, and odds are, on its eventual release date, I'll be hurling myself at Best Buy with as much velocity as I can get away with. But that's where it fucking stops.

It's not my job to help Ubisoft sell the game. And I'm sure as hell not going to mount some sort of preemptive evangelism campaign out of fear that, if I don't, I'll never get to play "Beyond Good and Evil 3". I'll buy the game. If it's good, I'll tell friends who might like it about it. And that's all.

Which, getting to my point, makes me a better person than Nathan Nolastname, who's trying to kick off a fan campaign to make sure "Dollhouse" doesn't get cancelled. No, don't berate your DVR for not catching the premiere of Joss Whedon's new show. This campaign is predating the show by a good seven months, apparently under the theory that a bad idea is just a good idea without a decent head start.

Why bother in the first place? Because Whedon nerds are still fucking nerds, that's why. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I obviously know that it's abnormal to start a campaign like this so early, but I have watched so many shows end badly and talked with so many people who have stated 'I wish we had done this earlier'. We know that FOX is under new regime and are supporting the show completely. We would like the fans to be just as proactive as the network and hype the show to the best of their abilities -- so no one can ever say 'we should have done this, we should have done that'. - The Dollhouse forum leader himself.

Don't worry, dude. You'll never hear "you should have done that" from this corner. Here at You Are Dumb Dot Net, we concern ourselves with should NOTS. Like you should NOT use the word "proactive", ever. You should NOT be emotionally scarred by cancelled television shows. You should NOT believe that the reason all those fan campaigns failed was due to a lack of nerd dedication and early nerd action. If we've learned one thing from Snakes on a Plane and Serenity, it's that the combined force of the most dedicated nerds in the country can move maybe a million people, tops. And unless the first five thousand of them have Nielsen diaries, you're fucked anyway.

But don't take my word for it. Enjoy this brief listing of the five worst ideas for promoting a TV show to the general public known to man.

#5: "Why don't we make little cardboard dollhouses and set them up all around towns. A viral marketing campaign that gets people thinking 'WTF are all the dollhouses for?'" - Ultamatt.

Um, because viral marketing campaigns only work if you can pay them off with a big reveal. Otherwise, anyone who wonders what the dollhouse for in the first place will never actually find out. Also? Littering. You won't save the show, you'll just make Iron Eyes Cody's corpse weep.

#4: "You could make it artistic, with writing all over it, creepy, or just a dollhouse, like the personalities for the characters, the combinations are endless, but the vessel is the same." - Further elaboration from Ultamatt.

Amend my above comment. This is now littering that will get you profiled as a serial killer, and you'll probably be arrested for the murder of Iron Eyes Cody.

#3:"My suggestions are to use the principles of Word of Mouth Marketing and keep it cheap or free. Get the influencers to buzz about it. Get it on WWdN. You already got it on Whedonesque. Get everyone you know to Twitter it... Get regular updates on io9. Continue to get the blogging community to buzz about it, and then start spreading the arms of the virus beyond the standard scifi blog community and over to more mainstream blogs. Make some LOLcats. Get your friends involved in the facebook fan page... Can we set up a Dollhouse in Second Life? - "babydoll".

Put down the Web 2.0 and back away slowly, babydoll. I don't know who these mysterious "influencers" are, but I guaranfuckingtee you that if one of these influencers sees a Dollhouse-themed LOLcat, their next action will not be to call all the people they influence and influence them to watch Dollhouse. Even if said cat is in ur dollhouse, wastin' ur fuckin' time. Also, you can set up a dollhouse in Second Life, as long as you don't mind a parade of avatars coming through and fucking all the dolls.

#2: "another idea is for those that do fan art, where ever you post it (livejournal, fansites, fanpop ect) why not slash dollhouse with other scifi/fantasy shows like smallville or supernatural and post on sites and comunities such as that" - "amazondebs".

And this is why fan campaigns fail. Fans think the "broader audience" is people who enjoy Supernatural fan art. Also, since the show is seven months away, the only Dollhouse fan art people will draw are pictures of Eliza Dushku in tank tops, or Eliza Dushku in tank tops having sex with Sonic The Hedgehog.

#1: "What I would like to see happen is EVERYONE spreading the word about Dollhouse to their friends, web-friends, coworkers, and whomever else will listen and may be potentially interested. The point is not to come off as a superfan of a show that hasn't even aired yet (I agree that is quite annoying when people do it to me), but to show genuine interest in a show and make them believe that they MUST at least watch the first episode and make their own decision. - Forum Overlord Nathan.

That's the most awesome advice ever. Tell everyone who will listen, whether they choose to associate with you, are stuck being related to you, happen to reside in the next cube from you, or can't get away from you on the bus that they MUST watch the first episode of a TV show that won't air until January. But make sure you don't do it in a way that's annoying or comes off as a superfan. And if you can pull that off, I guarantee you you'll win a gold fucking medal the very first year they host the Asperger's Olympics.

*Or at least it damn well better be as long as I'm in earshot, fuckers.

Can't Spell Dumbledore Without It

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:03:06 -0500

Nerds, 26 October 2007

Memo to Jeffrey Weiss: YOU ARE DUMB.

It was inevitable, really. As soon as J. K. Rowling announced to the world via a book tour stop that Albus Dumbledore was, in the vernacular, a gay homosexual, wheels were set in motion.

The turning of those wheels would lead to many, many stupid things being sent out into the public sphere. And with a pile of stupidity that large, someone was bound to beat the odds and crack the threshold for YAD's sublime, albeit fickle, attention.

To be even franker than usual, I couldn't give two of someone else's shits about anyone actually upset about Dumbledore's sexuality, at least from a moral turpitude standpoint. He's already a pagan warlock with a history of child endangerment - the small number of people who could overlook that, but be pushed over the edge by a retroactive outing can safely fuck off without any help from yours truly.

Jeffrey Weiss, however, is a problem. Because his outrage is rooted in the depths of Bad Nerddom. And unlike most Bad Nerddom, it's not confined to the message boards and comic shop back rooms that are its natural habitat. No, in a horrific case of nerd mainstreaming, we've got an entertainment writer for the Dallas Morning News sounding like Harry Knowles after a three day Red Bull bender. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"But telling us that Dumbledore is gay, as you did last week? Why would you do that? As a fan, I can understand both the authorial impulse and the public interest. As a reader, it's making me nuts."

First, Weiss deprives me of a perfectly good testicle joke by not going with the more traditional "driving me nuts". And second, he's got his roles completely backwards. A reader would be the one to understand authorial impulse. It's the fan in him who's got his panties in a twist. Case in point:

"Jo – can I call you Jo? Like all of your myriad fans, I've spent so much time exploring the children of your mind over this past decade that I feel we are friends. You lived with Harry, his friends and his foes for so many years. You birthed them, shaped them, honed the fine details of their existence. And you thought long and hard about exactly which of those details were so important to the story that you would include them in the books. For all of those years, until those books were published, the characters and settings were yours to command and control. But then you let them go. And speaking for all of your happy readers I need to tell you: Now they are ours."

NO THEY FUCKING WELL AREN'T. They're still hers. And you're not her friend. You're the creepy dude she's forced to interact with on these book tours. She tolerates you because you have collectively given her vast sums of money, but all you bought were the books, not the intellectual property rights. You're a hobby-stalker. Nothing more. A hobby-stalker with - at the very least - closeted fabric tendencies. Get a load of this:

"Based on what you decided to put in the books, I can imagine that Dumbledore once had a girlfriend or that he was so emotionally crushed by guilt that he sealed himself off from romance or that he was one of those rare men for whom romance never really came up – or that he was gay. I can consider any of those possibilities as I read – or I can mull over all of them at the same time. Talk about magic. Is Dumbledore gay? He is for you, apparently. But unless you said it in the actual books, must he be so for me? Your saying so now makes it harder for me to imagine anything different. Do you really want to limit your fictional world that way?"

She's not limiting her fantasy world, Mr. Magic Pants. She's limiting your fantasy life. Which is not her problem. Dumbledore is gay. Apparently he always was. Your inability to cope is not proof of Rowling's secret malevolent plot to crush the delicate spirits of you and your fellow dreamers.

Although if such a secret plot existed, I do admit my respect for Rowling would grow faster than the Dumbleschlong* at a merman orgy. Because a good solid spirit-crushing is exactly what's called for here.

* Everyone and their gay uncle have been doing "magic wand" dick jokes for the past week. It's phallic. We get it. Move along.

Busted Motivator

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:15:45 -0500

Politics, 20 March 2007

Memo to "Dr. Rusty Shackleford": YOU ARE DUMB.

And you're not alone. You're just the example, the outlier, the pointy tip of the bell curve that stands as a shining example to us all of why we should discontinue a particular practice. In this case the practice of applying ham-handed political analysis to big-budget summer blockbusters.

Oh, sure, we all should have seen this coming years ago, when Revenge Of The Sith was seen as an attack by George Lucas on the Bush administration. This kept us from focusing all of our attention on the fact that Revenge Of The Sith was an attack by George Lucas on our aesthetic sensibilities*.

Blockbusters have no political content. Period. Even the ones that do. I know that seems like a conceptual oddity, but let's face it. Even assuming the writers and directors of big-budget movies are trying to put political content in there, it's in all of our best interests to pretend that they didn't. Otherwise, we end up with more shit like Smokin' Aces, and we know we don't want that. If I wanted to know what Michael Bay thought about global climate change, I'd be able to sit through more than five minutes of The Day After Tomorrow.

Achieving political detente with the movie industry not only prevents turgid, ham-handed analogies from getting in the way of important Shit Blowing Up, it also would prevent turgid analysis posted by reactionary nerds like "Shackleford", the King-Of-The-Hill-inspired alias of the man behind right-wing blog "The Jawa Report".

The title of which, by the way, does not seem to stem from "Shackleford"'s love of half-height berobed junk salesman. No, The Jawa Report exists to report on Jawas, which he uses as a sort of nerdracist slur against Arabs. See, the Arab world is divided into Jawas and Tusken Raiders... oh, for fuck's sake. I can't even get into the details. Let's just take it as read that he hates people in robes in the desert, and leave it at that. So, of course, he fucking loved "300" to death.

Now, I don't have an opinion either way about the movie, but everything I know about it tells me that it is a movie with two, and only two, driving ideas: shouting and stabbing. Any analysis of the movie should thus be limited to the volume of the shouting and the quality of the stabbing, and not extend to things like this. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"There was no hidden agenda in "300". It was not a "metaphor" about Western Civilization standing up against the Asiatic hordes. There is no Rorschach effect here as I thought going into the movie--Leftists and Islamist apologists seeing the Persians as a metaphor for U.S. imperialism, while those on the Right and Liberals of all stripes seeing Sparta as representing the U.S. fight against Islamofascism."

Look, sparky. It's either a metaphor, or it's literal. And last time I checked, during the battle of Thermopylae, "Western Civilization" was busy building stone pyramids so that Bush's daughters could dance drunkenly near them a couple of millenia later. It'd be a while before they had to stand up to any hordes from another continent, Asia or otherwise.

There are a few clues in this piece that "Shackleford" enjoyed this movie even more than he says he did - hints that, were it not for the blatant evidence that is the rest of his blog, I'd chalk up to deliberate, irony-tinged self-parody. But no, this is not the case.

"Sometimes a rose is just a rose. And sometimes the rose is a metaphor for something else. But I got news for you: a picture of a giant penis isn't a metaphor for something phallic. It is phallic... Go see "300". If you don't like it you probably hate America. That, or you're gay."

Sounds like SOMEONE left the AMC Cineplex with an erection lasting more than four hours. And instead of calling his physician, he found some way to blame it on the Islamofascists who'd managed to set off a very dirty bomb indeed in his pants. The clincher is this bit, which again, in any other context, I would swear was a fucking put-on of epic proportions:

"As you know, I wasn't going to see the movie for fear that it would be a 2 hour advertisement for joining the gays. You know, something about a bunch of guys prancing around in banana hammocks that creeps me out. To quote Sarah Silverman: 'it doesn't really matter if you're homosexual or bisexual--both are equally gross.'"

First, doth protest too much. Seriously, can't these people realize that the mere use of the word "prancing" opens up a nice, clear window to their secret, cock-hungry souls? And second, who the fuck takes a Sarah Silverman joke at face value, like it's a Diceman or Ann Coulter routine? That's insane. It's like watching a fake SNL commercial and then writing an angry letter demanding that Happy Fun Ball be taken off the market, because if that's what you people consider "happy" or "fun" then you are a bunch of sick bastards.

This is why we have to send blockbusters and politics to opposite corners, people. So that the "Rusty Shacklefords" of the world don't get to enlighten us all by calling Arabs "sandpeople" and hiding their man-lust behind the Global War on Terror.

Well, that, and the Smokin' Aces thing. Sweet goddamn, did that movie suck.

*And no, you nerds, it was not neither better than the other two. That's just the Stockholm Syndrome talking.

The Return

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 20:51:41 -0500

Nerds, 16 March 2007

Memo to Jonathon "The Impaler" Sharkey: YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTNERD.

You can't keep a good vampire down, I guess. You would have thought that, after his 2006 Minnesota gubernatorial run was met with open mockery, opposition, and criminal prosecution, Jonathon "The Impaler" Sharkey might have realized that the political life was not for him.

But that would have required a level of self-awareness and internal examination that we all know is beyond the grasp of middle-aged wanky nerds who go around thinking they're vampires. That is not the way of the Impaler, dammit.

When the Impaler faces adversity, does the Impaler reconsider his course of action? No, a thousand times no! The Impaler retrenches. The Impaler regroups! The Impaler expands his motherfucking horizons and stays true to his insane nerd dreams!

Yes, the avowed vampire, satanist*, and head of the Vampires, Witches, and Pagans Party has decided to RUN FOR PRESIDENT IN 2008. He's started fresh. He's got a new wife, 19-year-old Spree, whose parents must be overjoyed that their daughter has finally settled down... with a 42-year-old politically ambitious vampire. Nothing creepy at all there, nope.

He's also taken up residence in three states simultaneously, which is either a strange vampiric power or exceptionally poor reportage on the part of the Columbia Chronicle - a Chicago college newspaper who refers to Sharkey as a "New Jersey man" who was visited by Secret Service agents in Ohio.

Oh, right. The Secret Service agents. In addition to drastically upping the ante on both his political ambitions and the target of his creepy middle-aged nerdlust, Sharkey has also upped the ante on his impaling targets. After previously pledging to impale terrorists if elected Governor, Sharkey has now promised to impale George W. Bush if elected President.

I feel almost superfluous in the face of it. It's a good thing it's Friday. I mean, Sharkey may have a brain like moldy swiss cheese, but he's got a pair of big swingin' undead balls. He reportedly told the Secret Service off, if this completely unbiased account can be believed. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"They were telling me, when they were interrogating me, that their job was to protect Bush even after he’s out of office. I’m looking at them like, ‘Oh, you’re going to defy me when I become president?'"

Oh, wait. He didn't tell them off. He LOOKED AT THEM like he was telling them off. In other words, while meekly saying "yes sir" and "I'm sorry sir" and possibly pissing himself, he managed to think up a jaunty zinger to toss their way after they left. That's the kind of behavior I'd expect from a man who provided his own photo to the newspaper - a color headshot of him in a purple and black coat, sunglasses, and with a tiny cellphone in one hand. Very draco suave.

Of course, the question is not, "Will Jonathon 'The Impaler' Sharkey" win in 2008?" The question is, after losing in 2008, where will he go from there? He doesn't strike me as the Pat Paulsen perennial candidate type. Will he run for king? God-emperor, perhaps? Or will he, after a long day of impaling, slump into a chair, only to find out, as the camera pans back, that it's actually a throne?

I don't know. But I think I speak for all of us when I say I can't wait to find out.

*Or, as the Columbia College headline says, "Santanist", which as we all know is a devout follower of the Santa Ana winds. Santanists are firm believers in threes, and will often bypass the two most obvious punchlines in order to deliver the less funny, but more surprising, third.

Let The Wookiee Win

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 09:22:06 -0600

Nerds, 5 February 2007

Memo to Hollywood: LET THE WOOKIEE WIN.

I freely admit that perhaps, just perhaps, I'm a bit more kindly disposed towards imprisoned nerds than I ever have been before. But I honestly think that it'd be in the best interest of all of us if the Los Angeles police just let Chewbacca go free.

In case you missed the story, a guy dressed up as Chewbacca and standing outside Grauman's Chinese Theater was arrested over the weekend for headbutting a tour guide. This led to a Reuters reporter getting to type one of those sentences that make it all worthwhile: "Two years ago, Mr. Incredible, Elmo the Muppet and the dark-hooded character from the movie “Scream” were arrested for 'aggressive begging' the L.A. Times reported."

That's a hell of a word-picture there. Not to mention the kind of shared-universe crossover even the most demented Internet fan couldn't come up with. But I'm getting sidetracked. FREE CHEWBACCA. Now, I'm not condoning the headbutting of tour guides per se. I'm not saying the tour guide had it coming, or that a six-foot-five-inch dude in a Chewbacca outfit isn't wrong when he's carted off by police and saying things like "Nobody tells this Wookiee what to do." That's clearly inappropriate. I'm just suggesting it shouldn't be illegal.

Because when it comes right down to it, laws aren't about prohibiting what's wrong. They're about prohibiting what's bad for society. And there's a big part of me that thinks letting costumed characters feel free to randomly head-butt passersby is actually GOOD for society. Here's how it works.

STEP ONE: Pass a law exempting people in nerdy costumes from certain types of minor assault. Misdemeanor battery (what Chewbacca was arrested for, for example), the kind of thing that doesn't result in serious injury but is clearly belligerent and a bit violent. Disorderly conduct, that kind of thing. Oh, and it only applies outdoors, because otherwise, the San Diego Comic Con might turn even uglier.

STEP TWO: After a few well-publicized head-buttings, flying tackles, and lightsaber welts, the general public draws the conclusion that anyone who's outside and dressed as a character from a reasonably well-known nerd-culture touchstone could, at any moment, fly into an unprovoked rage and attack. Possibly with the dreaded windmill slapfight fu.

STEP THREE: The public becomes appropriately wary of costumed nerds walking down the street. They take precautionary measures to ensure they never come within head-butt range. Not wanting to be pariahs due to false assumptions about potential headbuttery, the population of semi-normal, non-violent nerds go out of their way not to be spotted walking down the street in their Boba Fett armor, and instead reserve their dress-up time for conventions and Halloween parties, where it belongs.

STEP FOUR: Utopia.

So yes, technically, you will be letting a crazy-tall, crazy-hairy, and crazy-crazy motherfucker goes free for a crime he very definitely did commit. But in the long run, society would benefit greatly. So LET THE WOOKIEE WIN. It was good advice then, and it's better advice now.

Stupid, Not Stirred

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 14:03:23 -0600

Main Column, 23 February 2006

Hey, wanna hear my rendition of the James Bond theme? DUMB DA DA DUMB DUMB, DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB DA DA DUMB DUMB...

What is it with franchise nerds and boycotts? Every time something happens nerds don't like there's gotta be a call to arms, a crappy website, and some kind of desperate, failed attempt to arrange a boycott to get their voices heard. Well, heard and taken seriously. We hear their voices, but ten times out of ten all that happens is a lot of pointing and laughing.

And who'd have thought there would be BOND NERDS? There's a word pairing that's instantly both oxy- and regular-moronic. A bunch of people bitching on the Interweb about how affronted they are by the way a suave, well-dressed, handsome man who shoots people and fucks pretty women is going to be portrayed. Give me a break.

Specifically: www.craignotbond.com. A website devoted entirely to fans upset that some guy named Daniel Craig is going to be playing James Bond in Casino Royale. I can only assume that anybody this worked up over another James Bond movie somehow managed to miss Die Another Day. And boy, are they worked up. And stupid. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

When you heard the casting announcement about Craig as Bond, you might have thought that it was all over, and there was nothing you could do about it. Well you were wrong! The movie business lives and dies on the patronage of its customers, the moviegoing public. And, as the old saying goes, the customer is always right!"

What slim chance these double-0 IQ's had of earning my sympathy got defuckingfenestrated the instant I read that. "The customer is always right" is a shitty aphorism with no relation to the actual physical world, where customers are uniformly people and people are mostly idiots. And if, as the site claims, the "customer" is the "movie-going public", then the customer doesn't actually give a damn, and will go to see the movie if the trailers include the bond theme, an explosion, and a nice set of tits.

So why, exactly, do they object to Daniel Craig? Well, I'll spare you the "photo-visual journey" provided on their website*, and instead provide you with the following bit of wrongheaded rhetorical questioning:

"How can a short, blond actor with the rough face of a professional boxer and a penchant for playing killers, cranks, cads and gigolos pull off the role of a tall, dark, handsome and suave secret agent?"

Who are these Bond fans? They sound for all the world like 48-year-old nerd spinsters with a penchant for writing Remington Steele fanfiction. James Bond is a KILLER. He is a CAD. And yes, he is a bit of a GIGOLO. That's three out of four bits of Craig's curriculum vitae that seem to apply nicely. Sure, some of those evaluations apply a bit more to the Fleming novels than they do to, say, Moonraker, but any Bond fan worth their salt would know that, right?

Two quick additional criticisms of the website. First, and this will only mean something to some of you, but this is the second time in recent memory that I've had to quote from webpages that use hard line breaks at the end of EVERY SINGLE FUCKING LINE. The last guy to do that was a crazy fugitive vampire governor, so you Bond nerds are in fine company.

And second, deliver what you promise. If you say, on a page, that "Below you will read some of the scathing commentary from lifelong fans, as well as some homemade fan art that leaves no doubt where they stand on actor Daniel Craig in the role of Bond.", you create certain expectiations in those of us who scroll down, hoping to gaze in wonder at how this particular Moneypenny Brigade has expressed their sorrow through art. Yet when I scroll down, nothing but pathetic Web quotes. NO PICTURES. No scanned effigies.

I am disappointed, and will have to resort to mocking their stupid logo, which features 007 across the bottom, and an extra line added to the "7" so that it sort of looks like the "N" in "NOT". I'd have expected maybe the famous gun barrel, with Craig's face in the middle, and a sort of blood-drippy circle-slash NO symbol over top of it. But I guess all that time spent painstakingly hitting ENTER every seven fucking words left no time for a coherent visual aesthetic.

I leave you with this last quote, to further drive home both the deep passion exhibited by craignotbond.com, and the towering intellect behind it:

"There's no question in the minds of thousands of fans that Daniel Craig might be the worse choice Bond producers have ever made! If you seen more one Bond movie, you understand that he has been portrayed for more than 40 years by actors considered good-looking by a majority of the public."

Looks like someone's acquired a license to kill the English language.

*Which, I shit you not, features a series of morphing animations from each previous Bond to Craig's face, complete with commentary written entirely in bad Italian stereotypical dialect.

No Sympathy For The Devils

Tue, 19 Jul 2005 10:31:05 -0500

Republicans, 13 July 2005

Memo To The Potentially Sympathetic: FUCK OFF.

It's tough holding certain principles. It really is. Because if you believe strongly enough in a certain principle, an individual who's caught on the wrong side of it should garner some sympathy, even if they're otherwise wholly unsympathetic. To do otherwise would be hypocrisy. It's like the saying goes: I may not like what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it. That's a stone bitch to pull off in practice. Similarly, I've found myself failing to feel sympathy for a number of individuals whose situation warrants it, because, well, I don't fucking like them very much.

Like Judith Miller. Judith Miller is in jail right now because she's refusing to reveal a confidential source. This is a big thing for journalism. A vital and important principle to uphold, even if you're upholding it to defend scumbags. Not that journalists are doing much these days with their confidential sources, and when they do, nobody listens anyway. The principle still stands, and Judith Miller was brave to choose jail time to uphold it. That said, fuck her.

More than anyone at the New York Times, Judith Miller was the one responsible for the shoddiest, flimsiest stories that supported the case for Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Relying on Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, she put a ton of misinformation out there. Mobile weapons labs? Aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges? Nerve gas antidotes? Miller believed it all, and pushed this bullshit on her readers, directly aiding the trumped-up case for a fucked-up war. So you'll have to forgive me if I take a certain attitude of revelry toward her current discomfort.

I also believe that "sin taxes" are, as a general rule, regressive taxes demonizing bad habits and unfairly punishing the poor. So I'm not thrilled that Minnesota seems to be balancing its budget on the backs of cigarette smokers. Other than giving smokers something fresh and new to bitch about now that you can't smoke in restaurants anymore, I really don't see an upside.

But when they announced a huge tax increase on other tobacco products - cigars, pipe tobacco, and chaw - well, welcome to Toughshittia, population YOU. If there are three groups of people I have a nigh-impossible time scraping up sympathy for, it's pipe-smokers (high demographic correlation with wankery), cigar smokers (high demographic correlation with dickheadery, plus they make the world smell more like vaporized wet dog ass), and smokeless tobacco connoisseurs (high demographic correlation with pigfuckery). Sorry. I feel bad your hard-earned dollars are going to pay for poor people's health care, but not bad enough to actually give a damn.

I don't think it's right when underlings are put into awkward, uncomfortable positions because their boss is an incompetent, lying criminal who consorts with even worse criminals. That said, Scott McClellan can twist in the fucking wind until he's press-secretary jerky for all I care, and I will weep not one iota of tearwater for his sorry, sorry, Rove-ass-covering-ass. It's not like Scotty didn't know the job description when he came on board. Not like he hadn't had to watch Ari Fleischer spin as if his life depended on it during the first part of the Bush presidency. And now the press corps, sensing the possibility of making something stick that the public will be able to understand, are after him in a manner analagous to real journalists after real crooked politicians, albeit on a lesser scale. Enjoy the rest of your week, McClellan. I know I will.

And finally, I believe that when Big Media releases stuff on DVD, they should do their damndest to completely release that stuff on DVD. That means paying for music rights, negotiating for footage, restoring syndication cuts, and generally doing the fucking job right and getting it all in there. If they don't, someone else is gonna do it right down the line, and we'll all end up buying it over again.

That said, no matter how hard I try, no matter how many muscles I strain, I simply cannot empathize at all with a message board poster complaining about this week's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe DVD's. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"'Diamond Ray of Disappearance' is missing a huge chunk of footage (Orko-related, notes this fan of the little Trollan) around the act break." - One "Garrett".

Garrett does not live in a world I can sympathize with. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but I can live with that. Garrett lives in a world where the excising of Orko footage is not the act of a benevolent god or gods. In which Orko, along with his spiritual brethren Snarf, Blip, Gleek, Cringer, and Scrappy, is not a blemish upon an otherwise fond childhood memory, but is rather an object of nerdworship, to the extent of actually knowing the little fucker's SPECIES. I can't do it. Unlike Orko (apparently), I am only human.

Cat-Girl Venn Diagrams On Fire

Tue, 19 Jul 2005 10:36:41 -0500

Letters To The Editor, 8 July 2005

Dammit, it's started already.

Less than twelve hours after the bombings in London, I saw my first completely gratuitous Internet post of support and prayers on a completely unrelated site. That site? PSPUpdates. A site whose sole purpose is to keep geeks like me informed about our ability to play "Spider Man And Venom: Maximum Carnage" on our Playstation Portables via a Super Nintendo emulator.

I see shit like that as fundamentally selfish, honestly. People feel like they need to do something, so they post a couple paragraphs, and sit back, satisfied with the knowledge that people who otherwise wanted to know if they've gotten that VNC software working well yet are now taking a moment of silence to keep the victims of 7/7 in their thoughts. Oh, and also: ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"To the murderous wretches who commit such acts, I say let vengeance come quickly and 10 fold." - You run a portable gaming website. You are not Samuel L. Fucking Jackson in Pulp Fiction. Also, I find it extremely doubtful that Al Qaeda has ten subway systems we can bomb in retaliation.

That shit's going to be all over webcomics today, too. I love the folks that do the webcomics I like, really I do, except maybe Scott Kurtz. But just draw your jokes like you were going to anyway, please. I'm sure the fine people of Britain who escaped unscathed would much rather read the regularly scheduled episode of Tech Support On Ice than see a picture of a tattered Union Jack and the strip's imaginary mystical cat-girl sprite with a tear running down her cheek.

I'd much rather be allowed to assume that people care, and only take note of the vocal exceptions, than to have everyone feel obligated to make some kind of statement, lest they be suspected of being a heartless bastard. But then, I'm a heartless bastard.

Since comedy is a big part of what we do here, and rage is pretty much the rest, I do feel I'm almost beholden, when I spot a crime being committed against Sweet Mother Comedy, to mention it in this space.

Such an offense occurred recently in Grants Pass, Oregon, and was committed by 38-year-old Todd Grannis. In what surely would have made this column in an entirely different way had it gone wrong, Grannis climbed up a ladder, set himself on fire, then leapt into a pool of water. Emerging unscathed, the asked his girlfriend to marry him.

This was not the crime against comedy. He had a professional stuntman friend help him, and it is impressive, in its own gratuitous way. Unfortunately, he had to go and ruin the moment. Grannis is quoted as saying, during the proposal:

"Honey, you make me hot. I hope I'm getting the point across that I'm on fire for you."

Guy's lucky she didn't light him up for a second go after that shit. That's the kind of joke that REQUIRES some sort of self-immolation. And what's worse is, anyone who'd make a joke like that in the first place is gonna repeat it every time he tells the proposal story. His friends, family, and acquaintances will feel a dread in the pit of their souls every time they hear the phrase "And THEN I said..."

RANDOM LETTER-TO-THE-EDITOR DUMBASS OF THE WEEK:

Mike Holst, of Crosslake, Minn., does not understand the word irony. He writes:

"In my church on the July 4 weekend, the hymn selection always includes some patriotic songs such as "God Bless America."I find it ironic that our government does its best to remove any reference to God on government property -- even as our churches take steps to remind us to keep the government in mind as we practice our faith."

That is not irony. That is you being a dumbass. Your church can promote the country because everyone in your church is IN THE COUNTRY. The country can't promote your church because not everyone in the country is in your church. I'd draw you a Venn diagram, but you'd probably think I was showing you a titty and report me to the authorities.

The Last Star Wars Column (For A Few Days At Least)

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 14:03:43 -0500

Main Column, 19 May 2005

You may have heard there's a movie coming out today.

Before I go on, I have to say, if it's Thursday, and you're reading this, and you've already seen the movie, you may as well just stop right now and move on to Narbonic or Kos or whatever else you people read on Thursdays instead of working. There's no point. You either caught a free preview screening, in which case you're off the hook (hell, I'd have gone to see a free preview), or you caught a midnight showing, in which case you're beyond hope (new OR old). We don't need to have this conversation. Because you're already tired and cranky from being up until two in the morning, and your neck's all chafed from your Bail Organa doily and my grumpy ranting will not improve your mood.

By now, you know whether you're going or not. All I can ask, all I -dare- ask, is that you be honest with yourself and us about why you're going, and whether it's a good enough reason. And that I can still help you with. Because I can think of all kinds of bad reasons to see Revenge of the Sith, and I'm astonishingly good at listing things.

"Because I have to.": No. It's a movie. There's no actual geas upon you - 28 years of pop culture is powerful, but not so powerful that it negates free will. If you go see it, you, me, and everyone else knows it's because you want to. You may not know why you want to. You may not want to ADMIT why you want to, but if you say you've GOT TO, that you are helpless to resist the lure of the ticket booth, then you're full of shit and should be treated accordingly.

"Because I want to know/see how it ends": This doesn't actually require seeing the movie, you know. What the hell is Lucas going to tell us that we haven't seen or heard about already? We've seen all the designs in the toy aisle. We know who's gonna live and who's gonna die. There are no surprises in store. And what is with those designs, anyway? The first two prequels were bad enough, with the whole "everything from the first trilogy, only slightly cruder" thing they had going, but now I'm supposed to believe that the X-Wing's predecessor was some six-winged asterisk with a cockpit stuck to the front? That the development of aerospace in the Old Republic was a process of gradually reducing the number of wings and seeing if the ship would still fly?

"To see if they kill off Jar-Jar": If he does, he's a pandering whore, and when he doesn't, you'll just be disappointed.

"Because Hayden Christiansen is dreamy.": You are so on the wrong website it's a wonder you're still on the Internet at all.

"Because I saw in the news it's really an allegory for our current political times...": Oh, just fuck off already. If you're such a nerdy liberal that you'd enjoy having your viewpoint validated by space aliens with ray guns, then frankly, I was sick of your sorry ass during the third seaoson of Babylon 5. Maybe if you got your jollies when your political view was expressed by actual real politicians, we'd be better off all around.

And for that matter, if someone actually gets their "Tyranny Is Bad" epiphany from a tauntaunfucking STAR WARS MOVIE, we don't need you on our team. Because all it'll take to switch you back and stop payment on your check to MoveOn is one "Tyranny Is Good" episode of Blue Collar TV*. And then we're back to square one, and there ain't gonna be any more Star Wars movies for you to get political ideas from.

I read a good review!: If there's one thing we all should have learned since 1977, it's that nobody, and I mean NOBODY, can be objective about Star Wars. At all. There isn't a critic on the planet who can fairly evaluate this fucking movie. Myself included. The actual film is just the whitehead on the zit on the ass of a 300 pound guy in a Slave Leia costume in a line in front of our collective wrong theater. There's too much cultural context to ignore, there's too much to even account for. I mean, I'm still trying to get the fucking ink out of my lungs from the front page, full-color, over-printed issue of the paper today, all thanks to Star Wars.

So go. Or don't go. Whatever floats yer yoda. But don't think it's important. It's just another "summer" action blockbuster with crap acting and tons of CGI effects, not, as we'd be led to believe, the filling of a void you've had in your soul since you were seven years old. It's just, you know. Titanic, but in space.

*This joke should ideally read "Dennis MIller on CNBC", but cha-cha got cancelled, so I had to go for the obvious target. I could have said "24", but I try not to piss off more than one rabid fanbase a day.

Can't Spell Quixotic Without A Queue

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 14:24:37 -0500

Main Column, 7 April 2005

Memo to the Star Wars Line: I'm sorry, but YOU ARE DUMB.

I feel bad about this. I really do. Because on general principle, I don't think people should be made fun of MERELY for dressing up in Jedi robes and standing in line to see a shitty movie. I don't understand it, I'd never DO it, but those two factors do not, in and of themselves, put you in the crosshairs of this space.

I actually view it very similarly to going to church, something else I don't really understand and would never do. But, you know, doing ridiculous things that make you feel better is part of human nature. We all do it. Some people collect Hummel figurines, some people play videogames, some people watch the collegiate basketyball. Whatever creams your Twinkie. I classify all this stuff under the broad umbrella term of "hobbies".

But whether your hobby is loving Jesus or loving Jar-Jar, the most vital tool for enjoying any liesuretime activity is a healthy sense of fucking perspective. Some people find Jar-Jar annoying. Some people don't even care who Jar-Jar is. And some people resent it when Jar-Jar gets quoted as a solution to problems, either personal or political. A smidge of perspective, a hint of self-awareness, that's all I ask from hobbyists, especially my fellow hobbyists in the GND community.

And all it would take is a tiny bit of perspective to come to the realization that lining up more than a month in advance, for a movie you don't want to see, at a theater where the movie will not in fact be playing, is completely and utterly insane. Yet that is what's happening, right now, even as we speak, in Los Angeles, in front of Mann's Chinese Theater. Star Wars fans who lined up for Episode 1 in front of Mann's, who lined up for Episode 2 in front of Mann's, are now lined up for Episode 3 in front of Mann's, despite Episode 3 being booked in the Arclight Dome about a mile away. And it's not like they don't know. They know. They don't care.

They are doing this despite, for many of them, having an avowed lack of interest in the movie itself, due to the acknowledged suckitude of the prequels to date. They are doing this because, well, NERDS LOVE RITUAL. Seriously. The Vatican could learn a thing or two about ritualized obsession from the GND community. But why take my word for it. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Keep the line at the Chinese. To the death." - See, this is what I mean about perspective. It's not to the death. It's not even to the pain. It's "to the movie". Once the movie opens, everyone will either go home or head off to where the movie's actually playing. Death isn't even on the table as an option. No need to bring it up.

"I think it's rather telling that we insist of having the Line at the Chinese, whether the film plays there or not. It's completely the opposite of pathetic that we are lining up where the movie may not play. The Line IS more important than the movie. And so we must hold the Line where the Line can thrive. - Tune in next week for another exciting episode of Right Premise, Wrong Conclusion!.

"This line IS STILL HAPPENING. We will still have A HELL OF A @#$% TIME. We will RAISE A SPACE FREIGHTER WORTH OF MONEY FOR STARLIGHT. My son will see EP3 in the THEATER IT'S MEANT TO BE IN. And in the end I will see if with the people I wouldn't see it without...ALL OF YOU! THIS IS OUR DESTINY! - Apparently, Star Wars destinies are like Star Wars action figures - considerably scaled down and under-articulated.

I mean, let's say we dive headfirst into the idea that lining up for the movie has somehow evolved into a social event that transcends both lining up and the movie. Let's assume that the particular brand of overly clingy, slightly creepy "community building" for stuff like this is the noble and wonderful thing it's made out to be. Why then, if it's so wonderful, is it tied to an event that can only happen three times, can only happen every three years, and will never happen again after May 19? If you're already in it for the general camaraderie and toy lightsaber fights, just throw a party or have a convention. Sure, you can't do it outside, on the street, for a month, but who the fuck wants to spend the entire month on the street outside with the same group of people? I like my friends too, but eventually I want them to go home.

The only people more deluded than the ones who don't care that they're standing in the wrong place for a movie they'll hate are the people who are convinced that BY standing in line at the wrong place for a movie they'll hate, it will magically transform into the RIGHT place for a movie they'll LOVE. And while I'm sure anyone willing to wear a Stormtrooper outfit on Hollywood Boulevard can convince themselves Episode 3 won't suck, the rest is just another case of fandom not realizing how devalued "fan power" has become.

Perspective. It's not just for artists anymore.

Whoever Wins... We Lose.

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 13:16:24 -0500

Main Column, 18 February 2005

Some days, picking sides is a bitch.

Like Alberto Gonzales vs. Rob Black. On the one hand, you've got a reactionary yes-man who thinks that torture is good for America. On the other hand, you've got a vile little troll of a man who thinks that filmed, consensual tortureporn is good for his pocketbook. Sure, as an avid free-speech proponent, so I'm honor-bound to pick Black over Gonzalez, but that doesn't mean I want to actually touich anything Black's ever been in contact with. Which brings me, in the least obvious segue since Dubya tried to explain Social Security in Florida, to children's cartoons.

More specifically, new kids cartoons. Even more specifically, "Loonatics". Loonatics is creating a bit of a stir in the GND* community, which has pitched itself, as it often does, against the corporate forces seeking to ruin beloved childhood memories. Which is fine, except the GND community, as it so often does, is overreacting with histrionics, ignorance, and really obvious and trite Simpsons referencing. A pox on both their houses.

"Loonatics", in case you hadn't heard, is a new cartoon coming to KidsWB. KidsWB, in case you hadn't heard, is the cartoon part of the WB network, which has apparently gone down the tubes. I didn't know, but then, I hadn't been watching it for about six years. The premise of Loonatics is enough to make any sane person cringe - take six Looney Tunes characters (Bugs, Daffy, Taz, Road Runner, Wile E., and Lola) - and make a show about their super-powered, crime-fighting, far-future descendants. Awful, awful idea. And the way WB execs announced it didn't help. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME, DOC!

"This is a kids show intended for kids today who are growing up in the Internet age, an age of technology, an age of hip, cool animation, and something that we hope will resonate with that age group. The new series will have the same classic wit and wisdom, but we have to do it more in line with what kids are talking about today. " - Sander Schwartz, president, Warner Bros. animation.

You would think that by this point, the studios would have their people go through training classes or something. A half-day session of "Shit You SHouldn't Say Unless You Want To Piss Off Internet Nerds". It would include, for example, the word "hip" unless immediately followed by the word "replacement". People like Schwartz say these things as if they think people will believe them, despite a decade of evidence that it just ain't so.

So, how bad are the "re-imagined", 2772 A.D. versions of the Looney Tunes? About like you'd expect. Wile E. Coyote looks... like Wile E. Coyote, only with big rounded Teen Titans feet. Road Runner looks like Road Runner, only slightly pointier. And blue. Bugs, Daffy, and Taz all have pointy curved hands, angular lines, and grey/black tones. Really generic and bland. Lola Bunny... oh, right. Nobody gives a shit about Lola Bunny, because she came on board with Space Jam, and nobody gives a shit about Space Jam.

Of course, this isn't the first time the Looney Tunes have been "re-imagined". Bugs 1940 is different from Bugs 1960 is different from Bugs 1980 is different from Buster 1990 is different from Baby Bugs 2000 is different from Buzz Bunny 2005. Studio execs use poor words to describe bad idea in Hollywood SHOCKER. But before you can even finish asking "Who gives a flying fuck?", the GND community responded with predictable outrage.

Here's something I want everyone on the Internet to drill into their thick fucking nerdskulls. We've ALL SEEN THE POOCHIE EPISODE. Every last one of us. We know. You don't have to scream "POOCHIE" every time someone is quoted as saying "edgy". Unless it's Kevin Nash**. Find a new comedy landmark already. It's been EIGHT YEARS. New rule. If you compare anything to Poochie (except Kevin Nash**), you have to grow a handlebar moustache and wear a bow tie. EVEN THE WOMEN. And you have to incorporate "dagnabbit" into every sentence.

There's some choice hyperbole amongst the non-Poochie-citing nerd crowd, too. ACTUAL QUOTE LIGHTNING ROUND!

"The world has officially come to an end." - "I forsee those admiting to liking this getting death penalty someday." - "The only reason I'll be watching is to see Bugs and Lola together again." - "You gotta wonder who approved this upcoming disaster..." - "Sander Schwartz has the real Wile E. Coyote tied up in his basement, along with Road Runner. He's had Tweety caged for some time, replaced by an effeminate clone with an affinity for pink and flowers. Now he's got Bugs and Daffy, and even Taz. Oh, the horror." - Selections from ToonZone.net reasders.

What these people obviously want is for a group of slavisly devoted, yet incredibly talented and brilliant individuals to take their beloved characters and make new cartoons that are utterly true to the spirit of the classics. And they want to be asked to lead that group, because they know best. Of course, if they actually managed to GET the gig, all we'd get are four thousand rehashes of "What's Opera, Doc" and the Robin Hood one.

In the battle of Stupid Ideas and No Ideas, everybody loses. As a wise sage once said, the only way to win is not to play the game.

*For newer readers - Geek, Nerd, Dork.

**If you don't get this joke, you don't want to get this joke. Trust me.

To Boldly Shut Your Shat-Hole, Already

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 13:16:48 -0500

Main Column, 17 February 2005

Memo to Trekkies: LET GO. Just let go.

Release your death-grip. Find some other way to stem your insatiable, undifferentiating hunger for anything and everything spewed from Paramount's collective Satanic wang. Let "Enterprise" die on UPN's vine. It's OK.

Barring that, if you truly find yourself unable to accept the show's cancellation, surprise us. Seek out new campaigns, new techniques. Because all your "Save Star Trek" campaigning has managed so far is the same ancient bullshit that network executives stopped even laughing at years ago.

But why the fuck are you even trying? Do you realize how much fucking Star Trek you have? Sixty nine hours of original series. Twenty hours of movies. Eleven hours of animated. A hundred and seventy eight hours of Next Generation. A hundred and seventy six hours of Deep Space Nine. A hundred and seventy two hours of Voyager. And between 99 and 104 hours of Enterprise, depending on how it finishes up.

That's SEVEN HUNDRED AND THIRTY HOURS of Star Trek, not counting DVD extras, documentaries, reference materials, "professional" fiction novels, video games, and fan-fiction. And every last fucking second of it is, or will be by year's end, available for you to purchase in pristine digital format. All of it.

This means that, if you wanted, allowing eight hours a day for sleep, but assuming you can eat, pee, shit, and masturbate while watching, that it would take you over SIX AND A HALF WEEKS to see it all. That's enough fucking Star Trek. Another 78 crapass hours of crapass "Bakula To The Future" and its horny Vulcan will not top off whatever vast tank of emptiness the first 730 horus failed to fill. Even assuming that most of it sucks big hairy tribbles, you're all still so much luckier than fans of every other series or franchise known to man that your greediness at this point seems desperate, clingy, and disturbing. And as we all know, Trekkies hate to seem desperate, clingy and disturbing.

Oh, how I wish I'd done this column when the show first got cancelled. But no. I thought about it. Settled on making jokes about Brannon Braga living in a cardboard box to friends and forumites. But I thought about it. And one ot the things I thought about was the absolute certainty that when the time came to save "Enterprise", these Trekhumpers would, beyond a shadow of a doubt, pull out the phrase "the continuing journey of Captain Archer" or semantic equivalent. I cannot prove to you that I would have written this, but that's OK, because I don't care whether you believe me. MAKE ACTUAL QUOTE TIME SO.

"Captain Archer and the crew of the NX-01 need your help to continue their journeys!" - Text fo a full page fan-bought ad in the LA Times. Which, by the way, only scores big on the whoopdishitometer. When Howard Dean can finance most of a political campaign on the Internet, the fact that you can come up with 20 grand or so between a bunch of Trekkies with 'net connections is a gnat's fart in a hurricane. TRY HARDER OR GO HOME.

The idea, apparently, is to get Trek fans to send in "pledges" to prove that they'll watch the show. Now, I'm not a huge fan of Nielsen, but the people that make the money decisions are. As far as they're concerned, they already KNOW how many people will watch the show. Two point six million. You think two point seven million Trekkies are gonna clip coupons out of the L.A. Times and send 'em in? Ain't gonna happen. And odds are the number that's gonna pay for all your fancy CGI, pushup bras, and catsuits is a lot bigger than 2.6 million.

And I know Trekkies love to live in the past while pretending to look to the future, but come the fuck ON. Full-page ads? Letter campaigns? What is this, 1990? "Roswell" fans sent bottles of Tabasco to the producers. Which didn't help. I'm sure Angel fans did something that didn't help. Yes, fans "saved" the original series, allowing "Spock's Brain" to be made. Good job there. But it was a simpler time then. If someone thought they could make money showing it, they'd be stepping up and spending money to make it, and letters won't change that.

So watch the end, buy the DVD's, and wait. In a few years. I'm sure that before the decade's out, some Paramount executives will figure you've waited long enough to be begging for it, so they'll throw another spaceship and crew of carefully groomed archetypes up there for you to jump at. And you will, because that's what you do. But until that "glorious" day, for once let Trek die with the four atoms of dignity it has left.

Grimaces, Everyone! Grimaces!

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 12:30:54 -0500

Main Column, 20 December 2004

Memo to my people: STOP MAKING US LOOK BAD.

This is not about the SpikeTV Video Game Awards, which were held last week and repeated all weekend, because I've covered that ground before. Although I will mention, casually, that having an award titled "Most Addictive Game Fueled By Mountain Dew" is not exactly striving for legitimacy, here. The Oscars do not go begging to Victoria's Secret to sponsor the Best Supporting Actress award, and people care who wins it. Learn from example.

No, this time I'm talking about the brilliant act of spending real money on virtual assets. I know this has been going on for years, with Ultima Online nerds, then Everquest nerds, then Everquest II nerds, lining up on eBay to shell out upwards of a few hundred bucks for magical items they can't be bothered to go and find on their own.

Now, that's stupid. But it's at least understandable. There's a time/money equation involved that works out to something that borders on reasonable. I've spent a hundred bucks on stuff people would find questionable, so if someone wants to drop some of their funmoney on a hundred virtual gold pieces, that's their business. I don't begrudge people their stupid, stupid hobbies. Unless it's funny.

But when you jump a couple of orders of magnitude, and spend the equivalent of a mid-priced luxury car on an island that DOESN'T FUCKING EXIST, then we need to have a little talk. Because you get on the news for doing shit like that, and then people think we ALL do that, and then we all get questions like "Bought any fake islands lately?" Which is better than the "Beaten up any hookers lately?" questions gamers got after GTA 3 caused a ruckus, but still.

And use your real name. I know your "handle" is important to you, because you hate your real self, but when journalists come calling, tell 'em what your mama called you. Otherwise, it leads to ridiculous sentences in news stories. Here, I'm quoting the venerable, dignified BBC, forced to utter the following: "The Australian gamer, known only by his gaming moniker Deathifier, bought the island in an online auction."

If your only name is "Deathifier", you should not be having major news stories written about you unless you blew up a building. And even then, there should be a bit of snickering from the news-reader after they say "Deathifier".

Australia's leading expert in deathification apparently purchased a virtual island in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game "Project Entropia", which I'd never heard of either. Entropia is like Everquest for economics majors, allowing you to buy and sell your virtual stuff in-game instead of relying on outside auction services like eBay. So there was an auction for a fake island, and when all was said and done, He Who Deathifies had spent $26,500 on a bunch of polygons on a server somewhere.

Now, how much would you pay for ACTUAL QUOTE TIME? What if I told you that when you purchased the ACTUAL QUOTE from Deathifier, I'll throw in an ACTUAL QUOTE from the developer absolutely free? This is a limited time offer, so act now.

"This is a historic moment in gaming history, and this sale only goes to prove that massive multi-player online gaming has reached a new plateau." - Marco Behrmann, PR flack for the game company. And in a sense, he's right. This auction proves that Moore's Law applies to both computing power AND the Barnum Temporal Sucker Ratio.

"This type of investment will definitely become a trend in online gaming." - Deathifier (snicker). Yes, Deathifier (snicker) hopes to make back his twenty six grand and then some by charging virtual rent and selling off virtual parcels of his virtual island to a bunch of OTHER fantasy economists who are even dumber than he is.

Enjoy it while it lasts. Since your great investment is completely at the mercy of "gods" that are vengeful, angry, and constantly filing for Chapter 11, I'd work on finding a bunch more suckers fast. 'Cause your Treasure Island is one server crash away from being Mount Vesuvius.

I've Got A Bad Feeling About This

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 13:48:04 -0500

Main Column, 10 November 2004

Memo to America's Geek, Nerd, and Dork Communities: IT'S GONNA SUCK.

Having recently experienced the crushing disillusionment of false hope, I would not wish such a thing on my fellow man. So when I see signs of false hopes starting to arise, it's best I crush them quickly, where it will only twinge a bit, instead of letting them blossom to full flower before they are ripped from the hearts of the people.

And in the hierarchy of false hopes, "The Trailer Looks Pretty Good" is right on par with "the youth will turn out in droves to vote".

For those who are relatively new to the site, and my obsessive stalking indicates there are quite a few of you, allow me to state, for the record, the official You Are Dumb Dot Net policy regarding Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith.

"The Phantom Menace" was complete shit, and all the flashy lightsaber fights in the world cannot mask the fact that they portrayed one of cinema's all-time great villains as an annoying, bratty kid.
"Attack Of The Clones" was an even bigger pile of complete shit, "Dooku" is a stupid name, that thing around Jimmy Smits' neck needs to be dragged behind a dumpster and shot, and all the flashy lightsaber fights in the world cannot mask the fact that they portrayed what had, before Episode I, been one of cinema's all-time great villians as a petulant, obnoxious wanktard in looooooove.
George Lucas is an accomplished producer, a workmanlike director, and a shit writer.
All of the above leads to the inevitable conclusion that "Revenge Of The Sith" will suck, too.
You're going anyway.

People susceptible to Point Five will seize on anything they can to dodge the inevitability of Points One Through Four Inclusive. The "PG-13" rating. The homage to the original title for "Return Of The Jedi". And now, the first trailer. And what, pray tell, does this trailer give us to inspire false hope? Fucked if I know. Whatever it is, I don't see it.

The trailer uses the original movie as a framing device, which only serves to remind us of when Star Wars was cool. There's a bunch of clone troopers, which we've seen before, and have since been outdone by orcs. When Alec Guinness says "Darth Vader", they show Hayden Christiansen, further compounding one of the universe's fundamental points of wrongness. and then we see him, I think, in a hood. Scaaary.

But wait! VOLCANO! Yippee. I don't even know, at this point, how we all knew it was a volcano, but for aomost 30 years, we've known it was a volcano. So now we get to see the volcano and its CGI lava. You will forgive, perhaps, my lack of excitement. And then, intercut with headshots of the cast we've grown to hate over the past six years, is Darth Vader on an Imperial... dentist's couch. It's like they've replaced Ralph McQuarrie with an IKEA catalog.

And that's when the trailer really kicks into high! Spaceships we've seen before! Yoda with a lightsaber... just like the last movie! A whole army of Wookiees, which would be cool if they weren't DRESSED LIKE FUCKING EWOKS! * An alien made entirely of corduroy! Firefighting spaceships! R2-D2 hiding behind something! Amidala with Leia-muffins, proving that, like the Force, hairstyles have a genetic and biological component!

Lightsabers! Spaceships! Lightsabers! Spaceships! Lightsabers! Lightsabers! Spaceships! Imperial March! Why, it's almost as if someone at Lucasfilm came to the conclusion that the only worthwhile things left in the Star Wars saga were... lightsabers and spaceships! And put a bunch of lightsabers and spaceships in the teaser in a crass bid to regain an audience already burned twice!

I seem to remember the first two movies having a bunch of lightsabers and spaceships in the trailers, too. And I seem to remember these trailers NOT having things like borderline**-racist aliens, midichlorians, wacky robot head jokes, and soliloquies on the relative abrasiveness of sand versus Natalie Portman's epidermis. Because those were the shit parts. And when you take all the shit parts out of a Star Wars prequel, you have just enough footage left for a teaser, a trailer, and three TV spots.

We in the GND Community are being given a nigh-unprecedented opportunity to show we can learn from our mistakes. Will we seize it, moving boldly on to exciting, new, less-sucky things to obsess over? Or will we give in to our base natures, shell out our six-fifty, and walk out, two hours later, feeling like we've just soiled ourselves for the third time in a decade? I know where I'll be on May 19th. Do you?

*Yes, I know they wanted them to be Wookiees in Jedi. I also don't care.

**This word is a concession I make solely to stave off the inevitable nergument.