Trolling Sucks Ass - Please Stop

Even before I knew what it was, I thought that trolling was a pretty useless, socially maladjusted activity. Well, last night some people educated me, I learned all about trolling. And I have to say that this new knowledge has caused my opinion on the subject to stay exactly the same.

Here is something I think is true:

People who make puns, or wordplay in general, aren't clever. In fact, it's a social disengagement; a reaction to the content of one's sentence rather than the substance or meaning.

I think it's partly a selfishness thing, like saying, "Well, that's nice, but let's talk about me now." It's also a way to avoid the consequence of actually interacting with another human being, which is a little scarier. They say the mark of a good politician is someone who can talk a lot without saying anything. If this is the case, these trolling motherfuckers could all run for Emperor of the Goddamn Multiverse.

I have not participated in anything really related to internet culture in a long time, and this makes me very happy that this is the case. Holy shit.

Dear HP

You may not remember me, but I was a lower-level employee in a Compaq production plant on Center Square Road in Swedesboro, New Jersey. After you took over Compaq, you closed the plant. Thanks a fucking lot.

But I digress. I write you today to say that status bars are not the most difficult thing to program. Please consider using them on your installers so I know the difference between installing updates for an hour and when the program is hanging because it's fucking broken.

Thanks.

Jerkface.

Things

"I'd like to thank Absecon Middle School for providing the entertainment tonight, thank you."
~ E

Aside from the fact that it's over ten dollars to get into a movie after 5 PM these days, I forgot that going on a Friday night to see a horror movie around Halloweentime is basically asking to get pelted with teenagers. As if they're being launched from the menacing, revolving barrels of a prepubescence cannon, each shot self-propelled by a fuel reserve of douchyness and tipped with a warhead filled with obnoxiousness and pimple juice.

Anyway.

John Caprenter's remake/sequel to 1951s The Thing From Another World, shortened to The Thing, is one of my all-time favorite movies in the history of anything ever. It's right up there with Big Trouble in Little China, Halloween and, well, just about everything else Carpenter has done with the noted exception of Starman. So I was understandably skeptical when the new one was announced, but there are some positives here.

Remakes might be evil, but there is a right and wrong way to go about it. The wrong way is easy to illustrate with movies like Fast Five, Spider-Man, and the greasy, pulsing monstrosity that is Footloose. In both cases, I'm pretty sure I've found things in my crisper older than any of their inspirations. 2011s Thing starts on a high note by not re-using any characters - it takes the concepts from the 82s Thing and builds on them. There is an incredible amount of detail - myself, X and E all took turns pointing out where certain bits were constructed shot-for-shot from 82, including the ice block room, the hole above the space ship, the exploded storeroom, and others. Also, the plot devices from the first are used, but not copied - there's a remake of the infamous test scene, but the test is completely different and holds with it different ramifications.

Then there's the Thing, the real star of the show. The computer effects are done well, particularly one scene where the monster only partly absorbs a member of the crew. The way the creature hunted reminded me a lot of the incorrectly named velociraptors from Jurassic Park, which, in comparing it to the original, actually makes it less scary. More grotesque maybe, since there is no shortage of the monster running in front of the camera and hogging all the screen time Dead Space style, but on the whole, the movie was much less frightening.

But my biggest complaints have more to do with the writing than anything. First, there is no sense of pacing. Ever since the success of American-made Japanese horror movies like The Ring and The Grudge (not originals Ringu and Ju-On), all notion of building tension for anything more than a few seconds before something goes "Boo!" is gone. 82s Thing has quite a few action sequences, and the monster is just as much a camera hog, but it all builds up to a final confrontation as a doomed Kurt Russel blows up everything in sight in order to kill the monster. The big reveal at the end of 2011s Thing doesn't carry the same ultimate confrontation weight. We've already seen the monster in all of its viscous glory, so where else is there to go? And without giving away too many spoilers, the last five minutes don't completely jump the shark, but the dude definitely smacked his balls on the dorsal fin if you get what I'm saying.

The second complaint is that there is a good deal of wasted screen time. Much of the alleged "dramatic tension" does nothing to make the audience feel one way or another toward the characters, with the exception of the leads. In 82s Thing, scenes were cut because they over-explain the situation, and the movie's downtime really built the characters - the pothead pilot, the hip dude on roller skates, drunk-ass hero MacReady, Wilford "Diabeetus" Brimley, and so forth. In 2011s, there isn't so much a cast as two leads, two supports, and a bunch of throwaway Norwegians. Most of the cast don't even get names. The heroine is accompanied by the only other American on the base at the end; a fact which nags at me. He's possibly the least interesting character out of all of them, and yet takes up a huge part of the third act. I say that because the two of them trade the most useless dialog throughout.

What is with the trend for modern movies to condescend to their viewers? Most of the dialog just describes things that the audience already knows, like when the two remaining survivors walk into a room that is clearly destroyed and one says, in paraphrase, "It looks like there was fighting here." No shit. He might as well have said, "Hey it's cold out," when the movie clearly takes place in Antarctica and there's a few tons of snow outside and the passed three conversations have mentioned an incoming blizzard. I'm not stupid, movie, so stop talking to me like I am.

The last poor mark the movie gets is the fact that it simply isn't scary. I'm hammering this again because horror is a genre very close to my heart, and cheap thrills and jump-out moments just aren't frightening. Sure, I jumped in my seat a couple times, but it has more to do with the fact that sudden images of a dozen playful kittens rolling around in a pile of downy feathers would be fucking terrifying in a dark room with a 500-decibel BOM-BOM-BOMMM. And once you get shocked at a movie the first time, the same trick stops working. And nothing ages faster than computer graphics. As I said, the creatures reminded me heavily of Jurassic Park, and with all of the CGI in movies these days, anything rendered in Full-3D-Out-The-Ass Vision just looks bad anymore, whether it's dinosaurs, aliens or blue hippies. 3D graphics are so pervasive in films that we're desensitized to them. I imagine this movie is going to look really bad in the next year or so, but it's also the reason why 82s Thing and movies like Alien have help up against the years so well. Good horror movies need to play on the audiences fear of the unknown. Once something is known, it ceases to be scary. And the quickest way to do that is to throw a bunch of animated alien monsters in front of the camera so often you'd think it was a grotesque alien monster fashion awards.

At the end of the day, 2011s Thing is pretty good. And I say good in the sense of nearly falling down the stairs and catching yourself at the last minute. It avoided the common pitfalls of remakes and there was a ton of attention paid to making it fit with the 82 inspiration (and keep fans happy). But at the end of the day, it's just another remake. Of a remake.

Facts & Figures

I'm writing this as a response to a comment I saw on Facebook by a group I'm part of. I'm not posting directly because I genuinely support what said group is doing and the people in it. Unfortunately, the group relies heavily on statistics from the "We Make This Shit Up As We Go Along" department.

I am all for funding public education - both in terms of mandatory school and public or state colleges. And I'm also of the mind that every American deserves a shot at college. Not that schools should just hand out degrees from overly-specific programs, but at least everyone should try it. And it is true that one stands to land a better-paying job and have a higher quality of life by getting a college degree.

That being said, a figure was quoted stating that the average starting salary of a college grad with a bachelor's was somewhere around 50K a year, and that figure reeks of bullshit. Personally, I've never had a job that pays that much, and I have both a college degree and job training/certs in computer programming. People I know with degrees who have been at their jobs for years don't make 50K. Even my friends who were lucky enough to land really great jobs with unions and benefits don't make that much, so where the hell did this number come from? Time for a lesson in how to fine-tune a Bullshit Detector.

First, check where the info comes from. In this case, the 50K figure comes from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. I don't know who they are either, but since it's a conglomerate of schools who want new students and employers who want new talent, of course they're going to make going to college as appealing as possible, even if it means lying.

And yes, they're lying. The 50K figure came from so far up a marketing executive's asshole its still got half-digested taco stuck to it. More reliable gauges of how much people make are available from sources, like, I don't know, the US Census? According to last year's, the per-capital household income in NJ is 34K a year. That's pretty far off 50K if you ask me, and by the way, that's a few thousand higher than the national average. And by the way again, that's for a household of 2 to 3 people.

Bullshit detected! Shields up!

To one who is passionate about education, it is really upsetting to see that college isn't marketed differently. It's one thing to take a legitimate state school and bring it down to the level of daytime TV nursing school infomerical, but pulling bullshit statistics from disingenuous groups nobody has ever heard of with extremely clear agendas just creates an illusion for potential students. Not that colleges should be all Debbie Downer and pee in everyone's cereal, but there's a better way to go about it. Maybe if schools stop treating themselves like worker drone factories and practiced a little more honesty instead of promising the world to a bunch of wide-eyed freshmen with dollar signs instead of pupils, and helped them to become more well-rounded and worldly adults instead of more productive workers, more folks would be pissed off about the state of things in this country, and just maybe we'd get some of the change everyone has been screaming for.

Out Come the Shitheads

I have little love for Steve Jobs. The man really lived a kind of double life - there was the Zen-philosophied technocrat responsible for whole generations of gadgetry, from selling computers out his garage to the most recent iPad 2 and the announced iPhone 5. Then there's the deadly serious businessman, know for everything from firing Apple employees on the spot during a conversation in an elevator to joining the ranks of Nike, Levi and HP in running one of the biggest sweatshops in third world Asia. 

But as sure as the fucking tide, not a week after his death, everyone near, on, or over the border of Crazytown has come out to use it as an agenda-based talking point. Margie Phelps, daughter of Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps (of "God Hates Fags" fame), has made a promise to picket Jobs's funeral for his practice of "[giving] God no glory." Ironically she tweeted this from her iPhone, which drew some anger from her supports. Her response? Tell everyone that's why God created the iPhone.

Thankfully, the only people paying attention to this psychotic are either doing so to poke fun at her, or live so far out in the middle of nowhere they aren't going to bother anyone anytime soon.

The second example of unbridled assholery comes from Wikileaks, which is disappointing considering the site occasionally does something good. This comes in the form of a "suppressed" HIV test showing Jobs was positive. With a little research (IE Googleing it) it becomes evident that the document is faked - the company attributed to the test was out of business. For a website that pushes the authenticity of it's documents, no matter how weird or insane they may be, throwing this out is either a dumb ass attention-getting stunt or a rush to publish something controversial with no effort to verify it.

It makes me sad that the pundits jump on a man's death and shred it for talking points the way a squirrel would devour the last acorn on Earth. Hindsight on one's life is an opportunity for reflection and education, not lube for the agenda ramrod. It doesn't matter if it get coated in God's Gloopy Glory or Conspiracy AstroGlide, at the end of the day you, the reader, is still getting a stick up your ass.

Why I Don't Like XKCD

Something about the comic that is popular with nerds, geeks, programmers, and philosophy majors (on about the same level as a discount hooker on the first day of shore leave) turns me off. It's pretentious as shit but that doesn't really seem to bug me too much. I, myself, can be pretentious as fuck, given the right subject and blood-alcohol level. And the commentary on relationships, while so emo you could turn it into music and sell it as the boxed set "Songs to Which One Runs a Hot Bath, Slits His or Her Wrists and Drifts Slowly into the Warm Embrace of Death," is sometimes spot-on. And it's drawn with stick figures so most of the laughs and/or tears and/or suicides have to come from the text and/or context and/or content; a rare level of depth I appreciated in any medium but that is particularly lacking from the long stream of goat urine that is the online comic clusterfuck.

Seriously, that goat started peeing in 1999 and hasn't stopped since. What's in his bladder, the North-fucking-Sea?

Here's why XKCD doesn't tickle me in the naughty place it tickles most socially awkward beings of higher brain function. I think it's that in everyday life, I work very hard to make a distinction between being clever and being intelligent - and before I sound like I'm stepping on a box that may or may not be filled with soap, it's something at which I don't succeed very often. On a good day, for every hundred moments of cleverness, we maybe have one moment of true insight. It is those rare meta-moments where we can take a step back, even if it's just one quiet tip-toe, and really think about what we're doing and why. XKCD always seems to nail the joke, but never quite drives it home, and for a comic that is revered for it's depth, it's the stunning lack of depth that always stands out. It's like laughing at a George Carlin joke without really knowing who George Carlin is.

The clencher is that the air hanging around the comic and its crudely-drawn inhabitants is the stale mist of desperation. It seems that the overall point is that we will never find true happiness, and either by our own character flaws or circumstances beyond our control, happiness is temporary and fleeting, and each time it comes we're doomed to forget its fragility and end up crushed, over and over, taking the pain but none of the lessons that come from it.

Of course, XKCD can do whatever it damn well wishes, and there's no real need for it to constantly try to ram knowledge in readers' faces. And given the locus of most online comics, that would just sound preachy. I suppose it's the reaction to the comic that bothers me more than the comic itself. I still won't give it more than one or two clicks a year.

Incidentally, the following is absolutely true:

http://xkcd.com/231/

A Crazy-Ass Story

This is a story I heard recently, and one of the rare instances where life smacks us all in the face with its ability to write a romance story. In this case, life proves that it can write a better romance story than Nicholas Sparks any day of the week, minus all that "I write for Jesus," and, "I look like a smart motherfucker on the tee-vee" asshattery. Nature just does it because it goddamn well can.

The year is 1978. The place is South Korea. Actress Choi Eun-Hee is kidnapped by North Korean agents, and her estranged and famous director ex-husband, Shin Sang-ok, goes to look for her and is kidnapped as well. Four years later, in 1982, the new "president" (read: dictator) Kim Jong-Il reveals the impetus behind the pair's kidnapping: to make a pro-communist Godzilla-esque monster propaganda movie.

Now, Best Korea jailing citizens from other countries for who-knows-why and doing god-knows-what to them for fucking-how-long!? is actually pretty common (as far as insane dictatorships go). Most recently in the bad PR record of Dear Korea is the 140-day captivity of Laura Ling, sister of news anchor and national treasure Lisa Ling, for nothing other than well fuck Laura Ling. And if history has taught us anything, it's that evil dictators are not above farming out their propaganda to famous infidels at gunpoint.

The end product of this would be a film called Pulgasari, where a girl bleeds on a doll, which comes to life because, she uh, has magical blood or something. The monster eats metal and grows to biblical size, defeating an evil king in the process. But the monster just can't stop eating metal (iron is to giant monsters as M&Ms are to that chubby kid from The Goonies, apparently). The seemingly lovable creature capitalizes on the metal owned by the peasants it just released from the bondage of serfdom, and finally must be destroyed.

Capitalizes, get it? Like, American capitalist pigs!


If that metaphor was hard to grasp, let's remember that a man who builds gold statues of himself in major cities and has decreed that all citizens refer to him as "Dear Father" wrote and produced the damn thing.

But wait! There's more: the story of the director and his wife doesn't end there, and the tale in whole would make for a fucking insane movie.

Sometime before Pulgasari went into production, Shin and Choi decided to escape, were caught, and punished severely by being throw into solitary confinement for five fucking years. By Sang-ok's account, at times he was forced to eat grass and tree bark just to avoid starvation. Being separated, each decided the other was dead, only to find they were both very much alive when they were taken from solitary and told - forced, sometimes at gunpoint - to finish their movie.

The estranged spouses decided that a life already way too crazy to pass as a movie was a sign from the heavens that they were meant for each other. During a flight layover in Vienna, Austria, the pair tried to escape again and succeeded, complete with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom car chase. Now re-married, Shin and Choi ended up in Reston, Virginia, where they met with the CIA and turned over valuable information on and insight into one of America's most hated and veritably crazy rivals. Shin reportedly said, "There's a lot less censorship than most people think."

On, and did I mention that after all this, Sang-ok went on to a stint as curator of MoMA, judged Cannes in 1994 and directed Three Ninjas under the pseudonym Simon Sheen? Total. Insanity.

Sang-ok died in 2006, and the love of his life lives to this day in Seoul, South Korea. And a last tidbit: why was Super Korea so angry with Sang-ok to being with?

He made a film where a man kisses a woman, thereby introducing the kiss to Korean cinema. Holy fucking shit!

This is the kind of story that deserves the big screen, and I would see in it a heartbeat. Provided Nicholas Sparks doesn't shit all over it first. Or worse yet, if it's directed (read: buttfucked 'til next Thursday) by Tyler Perry.