Dear creationists,

 

You're all officially insane.  I understand that there a number of different types of creationists out there, but I'm specifically focusing on one kind.

 

There is a man named Dr. Duane Gish who believes that dinosaurs and man walked the earth together.  At the same time.  And that... steel yourselves for this... humans had domesticated these creatures and used them as mounts and beasts of burden.  And there are people out there who believe this whack-job and consider him the most brilliant scientist alive today.  I'm going to give you a minute to let all of that sink in.

 

For those of you who read that and thought Dr. Fuckhead's theories made sense, let me point out to you that Ray Harryhaussen was not making documentaries.  Those were models on a set that he was manipulating using a cinematic process called stop-motion animation.  Or to put it in terms that you apes can understand, he dun' used 'dem speshal fx, cuzin.

 

These people gave up on the theory that Satan made fossils to lead believers off the path to Christ (Satan gets really bored, I guess), and have now turned to an explanation of world history straight out of Marvel Comics.  Because apparently it's easier for them to just crowbar pop science into some myths written in the fucking Bronze Age.

 

One thing that these rabble like to argue is that the widespread myths of dragons were based on dinosaur sightings.  But if you use that same logic to say that werewolves are real, they'll call you a lunatic.  Actually sometimes they won't say you're crazy.  They'll just say that doesn't add up because no one ever found a werewolf skeleton.  Well, durr!  They turn back into humans when you kill them, geniuses!  And considering I've spent the last five years with the League of True Metal Warriors fighting the werewolf shock troopers of Baron von Doomheart, I like to think I'm something of an expert at this point.

 

It's interesting to note that they think Grendel from the Beowulf saga was a T-rex, and that the dragon St. George killed was a Baryonyx and that both of these stories took place after the fall of the Roman empire.  That explains all those stories I heard in school of Roman legions using triceratopses to pull their siege weapons around and how the vandals sacked Rome while riding velociraptors and dimetridons.  And of course we're now finally able to make sense of why Alexander the Great claimed to have a cavalry of stegosaurus riders: because he did!

 

You know... Duane Gish's theories sound a lot like some of the stories I wrote and the doodles I drew when I was 6 years old.  If I still have the copyrights on those, I'm gonna sue his ass.

 

Most frightening of all is the fact that there were enough of these chucklefucks to scrape together the cash to build... wait for it... a Creationism museum that exhibits displays and dioramas of these delusions.  You can actually go to this place and see life-size statues of cavemen riding velociraptors with modern saddles.  That is incredible in how terrifying it is.  And no fundies, I don't say that out of how threatened my atheist brain is by the sheer might of your logic (and holy shit does it hurt to call it that).  I say it because this museum is a monument to madness.

 

What is my suggestion?  That Duane Gish admit that he's leading a cult within the greater cult of suffering that is Christianity and just skip straight to the mass suicide that we expect of these things.

 

Thank you, and expect a call from my lawyers you fucking plagiarist.

Dear sing-along assholes,

 

Shut up.  I'm not fucking kidding.  Shut... up.  You tone deaf, beer swilling mooks are causing noise pollution.  You don't sound like Amy Lee, Bradley Nowell, or Freddy Mercury (only two of whom don't suck, incidentally).  You sound like Soulja Boi trying to shove his head up the ass of a screaming cat.

 

Karaoke was designed by the Japanese to humiliate people into shutting the fuck up, but it seems to have backfired as it only encouraged you idiots to turn up the volume.  Yet another unfortunate side effect of Westerners turning to the land of the rising sun for entertainment.  I almost wish the country would go back into isolationism to get you all to be less irritating.

 

Maybe I'm just bitter.  I have a (devastatingly sexy) bass-baritone voice, so about the only stuff I can sing along to without sounding like a jerk-off is Type O Negative and any metal band with a vocalist who sounds like an angry bear with laryngitis.

 

On second thought, I'm not bitter.  I'm just a dickhead lording my godly voice over everyone not so gifted.

 

But it's not just singing talent and the lack thereof that pisses me off about sing-alongs.  It's the people who try to alter the song.  The worst offenders of all are the people who continue to modify Queen's We Will Rock You.  You all know what I'm talking about.

 

We will, we will rock you, stomp you, pick you up and drop you.

 

Fuck you with a knife.  If Freddy Mercury ever thought the song needed that, he would have bitch slapped himself for being a twat.  At no point in his career was he ever high or drunk enough to imagine that shitty rhyme would make the tune better.  And if he was, you're still a dipshit for repeating it.  I guess what I'm saying is either way, go fuck yourself.

 

What is my suggestion?  Sew your lips shut, you miserable parasites.

 

Thank you, and get throat cancer.

Dear vampire horror writers,

 

How about writing some horror stories that are actually horrifying?  Between the time "Dracula" was first released and sometime in the 1970's, vampires were some seriously scary shit.  Christopher Lee in his days as Dracula was the scariest sex symbol in the world, and yes I am talking about the dude who played Saruman.  Vampires have always been about sex, sure.  But it was a dark side ordeal.  It's a bit like that femme fatal you saw at the bar and didn't know whether or not to hit on her because of that nagging feeling you got that what she'd do to you if she said yes would be worse than her saying no.

 

Then Anne Rice came about and everything got fucked up.  Suddenly, vampires weren't monsters.  No, that had to go.  Instead they were just misunderstood gay dudes.  With just a couple novels vampires lost their luster as malevolent creatures of the night and instead became emo bitches lamenting that they had so much love to give, but no one to give it to.  I never thought the day would come that I had to attach that description to a Gothic monster instead of my pre-pubescent self.

 

For the record, I always thought werewolves were inherently cooler than vampires.  They're thoroughly bad-ass.  Especially when you look at the transformation they underwent about 20 years ago when they stopped being dudes in crepe hair and turned into 8' tall engines of gory, primal destruction.  Makes sense if you think about it.  Wolves in the real world are feral pack hunters that lure caribou into ambushes, possess jaws that can crack vertebrae like fortune cookies, and frequently inspire Norwegian people to write fucking awesome metal songs.  Speaking of, the Norwegian word for werewolf is Vargr.  I have to have a son just so I can name him that.

 

Where was I?  Oh yeah, vampires.  I suppose Anne Rice isn't totally to blame.  Her bizzare fixation on homoeroticism aside, the Vampire Chronicles (at least the first two) were still reasonably well-written and at least presented us with something new and interesting to spice up the mythology of vampirism.  The fallout is what killed the whole thing when everyone latched onto the idea and proceeded to drain the lifeblood out of it like a swarm of lamprey eels through repetition and hackneyed imitation.

 

The final death knell for vampires was when some dipshit let Joss Whedon start writing TV shows about them.  Buffy could have been an intriguing show mixing vampire horror with a dry sense of gallows humor, but instead he cast a talentless male model as the vampiric love interest and gave him a spin-off series wherein he did nothing but act like a total pussy.  It didn't help matters that his replacement on the show was a cockneyed bad-boy type who spent more time being a douchebag than a blood-sucking abomination.

 

Various attempts have been made to breathe some life back into vampires, but for the most part they're total fuck ups.  Anyone remember Dracula 2000?  No one?  My point exactly.  The instant you try to tell me that the evil count of Transylvania is in reality Judas Iscariot, someone has to die.  Dracula doesn't really need reinventing, because his story already fits together pretty nicely.  I'll admit, I liked Coppola's adaptation but the true love plotline was something I could have done without.  Shit, I'd still take Keannu Reeves over that story.

 

And while I'm on a harangue, let's talk Underworld.  I knew I was in trouble when reviewers described it as a modern Romeo and Juliet story.  I steeled myself before watching the movie by eating a lot of red meat, drinking to excess, watching porno, and breaking things with my face.  With my testosterone levels appropriately high and my blood as equally awash with machismo as it was alcohol, I sat down and watched the flick.  And realized that it sucked as a chick flick, and it sucked as a monster movie.  It just plain sucked because it tried to please too many people at the same time.

 

Once again, vampires were turned into complete pussies, and the werewolves weren't much better.  Kate Beckinsale in tight pants is not enough to make me sit through such a movie, especially when I can rent all sorts of 20-year-old B-movies that have tits and (sometimes) better monsters.

 

Apparently I'm a glutton for punishment because I watched the sequel on cable.  Amazingly, it managed to be even worse, delivering moment after moment where I caught myself hitting the rewind button on the TiVo shouting, "Wait, what?!"  It's a movie that tries to be sexy by having vampires walking around in fetish gear, action-oriented by having (bad CGI) werewolves killing stuff, romantic with some limp-dicked love story, and hip and edgy by giving us some flimsy exposition about how vampires and werewolves are actually victims of an infection.

 

AND WHY THE FUCK IS EVERYTHING BLUE IN THOSE MOVIES??!!  Did they spill Kool-Aid all over the film stock, what?

 

30 Days of Night is perhaps the only vampire movie in recent memory that allowed vampires to be genuinely scary, returning to their roles as unholy predators neither living nor dead and existing at the apex of the food chain.  Too bad the movie itself blew.

 

Any time I have a desire to see a movie about conflicted gay dudes, I can pop in Brokeback Mountain.  But if I want horror, don't balls it up for me with your shallow, teenage, romantic angst bullshit!

 

What is my suggestion?  That we all reclaim horror movies from the clutches of psychotic authors who exist only to de-ball our favorite monsters.

 

Thank you, and go cry on your Angel boxed set if you don't like it.

Dear web designers,

 

When your client tells you that they want audio on their website, tell them to fuck off.  And if it was your idea, fuck you too.  In the last week, I can count three different occasions when surfing and listening to music at the same time, then some website starts playing music or some other piece of audio and nearly blows out my speakers.  This shit really needs to stop.

 

I know you think you can get away with it because MySpace lets people embed songs, but that pisses me off too.  In fact, most things about MySpace piss me off.  The point is that popular sure don’t mean right.  When you get right down to it, showing off your ability to embed a media player in a web page is just that: showing off.  The audio serves no purpose but to create an illusion of cutting-edge sophistication.  Kind of like buying carbon credits, but that’s another rant.

 

Whatever happened to form following function?  You look at Google and you could swear that Mark Rothco was the webmaster.  The fucking White Album had more graphics on it.  Google is a search engine, designed only to do the function of finding what you’re looking for and showing it to you.  They don’t need Flash animations and Marvin Gaye samples to help me find porn.

 

While I’m thinking of it, Flash-based web pages can fuck right off too.  Don’t get me wrong, Flash is great.  For uploading media that is.  It works.  Case closed.  But when you design entire web pages with it, it has this nasty habit of slowing my browser to a crawl and occasionally making it spontaneously develop a digital hernia.  If I wanted to fuck up my computer and slow even the most basic functions to the point of being painfully constipated, I would download shit off of Limewire.

 

Getting back to the point, web pages like Google and Maddox’s Best Page in the Universe are exercises in simplicity and just by their function or content they have massive amounts of traffic.  Having a nice-looking web page certainly helps, but you don’t need to tag a lot of extra superficial shit onto something to make it look good.  You hearing this, Michael Bay?

 

If you want to do a couple of kooky things with Flash, that’s fine.  If you want to embed a video onto a page, you can do that too.  But tell your web designer to beat himself to death with his own laptop if he starts trying to get all arty on you with animated backgrounds, drop down menus with sound-effects you can’t turn off, and buttons that instead of taking you to a new page just super impose a flash animation with scrolling text over the page you’re currently looking at.

 

That reminds me.  Whoever invented those ads that super-impose themselves over the page and have small, hard to locate close buttons, you will roast in hell forever.  That kind of shit actually discourages me from buying a product out of a sense of spite.  So in effect, you’re doing yourselves more harm than good.

 

Friends have told me that I have a penchant for making low-key graphics, color schemes, and designs look good.  So once again, this perhaps reflects my bias.  But there's still something to be said for simplicity.  Witching Hour Productions is designed specifically to make sure you can get at the content without a lot of obnoxious ads or fancy bells and whistles that have no real effect on the quality of the stuff you're trying to get at.  The point of my shameless self-advertisement there is that sometimes form needs to follow function.  Disobey this rule, and you run the risk of having function kick you in the nuts and stop working, asshole.

 

What is my suggestion?  Stop using our browsers as a wanking tissue.

 

Thank you, and step away from Dreamweaver for just 5 minutes.

Dear Christian fundies,

 

Two weeks ago I got something in my Sunday paper that I wasn't expecting.  A flyer for and DVD copy of the outrageously fundamentalist documentary Obsession.  For those not in the know, this documentary is the result of a well-funded Christian group making a lot of ill-informed hate speech against their long-time nemesis Islam.  They paid every major newspaper in the country to distribute free copies in their Sunday editions.  I can't be certain, but I have reason to believe that oral sex was also part of the deal that got this disaster in motion.

 

The DVD came with boasts of awards it had won.  From far right wing film festivals.  It had recommendations calling it required viewing.  From that twat Michael Medved.  In short, it was a perfect storm of bullshit.  I'm no more a friend of Islam than I am Christianity or any other religion for that matter.  Though I do tend to sympathize more with Buddhists and Rastafarians, whose solutions to most problems consist largely of chilling out while sipping tea and getting high as a fucking kite respectively.  But this whole thing is a hollow, futile gesture of preaching to the choir and making everyone else roll their eyes before heading to the garbage can.

 

And this is the thing that confuses me about evangelicals.  They don't seem to understand that the rest of the world finds them annoying and crazy.  We only take their little comics at the subway because we accidentally made eye contact and we're hoping that if we take it they'll go away.

 

Since I don't have the money or fellatio skills to pull off a suitable counter move, I decided to express my distaste in another way entirely.  I destroyed the flyer and the DVD.  I tried to burn the former, but those fuckwit Jesus freaks ballsed that up for me too by covering it in too much gloss to allow for proper immolation.  You'd think that all the innocent people they roasted alive for being witches (read: different) would make them more sympathetic to my pyromaniac fantasies.

 

So lacking the patience to get the proper pyrotechnics assembled, I decided my bare hands would have to do.  Here are the results:

 

 

 

What is my suggestion?  That the religions of the world get off our balls and stop trying to drag the rest of us into their miserable pissing contests.

 

Thank you, and take your Jesus elsewhere.

Dear Tru TV,

 

Have you no sense of shame?  You friggin’ sold out!  The only show you have worth watching anymore is Forensic Files, which still fucking rules.  But it’s not really enough to keep me watching your channel when you have to ram adverts down my throat for your awful Scariest Car Chases show with B and C-list celebrity commentators.  I’m sure Leif Garrett appreciates the work, but Jesus Christ…

 

Most of your programming these days can be described as either “COPS rip-off” or “Stupid Criminal Tricks”.  What happened to Till Death Do Us Part?  What happened to Murder by the Book?  Granted, with the latter I could have done less with the host authors reading lines off a teleprompter that sound like something Billy Wilder would have come up with while suffering from a head wound.  But still, those were good shows.  How can you do better than a show about murder hosted by John Waters?

 

You hear that?  You hear that silence?  My point exactly!

 

Most of your shows take place in either Texas or Florida (see previous post of Florida: What is it good for?).  In these states, stupid white people do crazy shit and get busted.  That’s the extent of the show.  Occasionally you’ll throw in a brotha robbing a convenience store, but for the most part it’s white people getting drunk and making profound asses of themselves.

 

The worst offenders in this category are the ones that focus on high school and college students.  I already hate pasty, rich white kids enough as it is.  I don’t need to hear a crowd of them chanting, “Fuck the po-lice!” when the cops come in and tell them to stop breaking shit at a Spring Break party.

 

While I’m thinking of it, do you little bastards know who wrote that song?  And no, it wasn’t Rage Against the Machine you lily fuckwits.

 

I know a lot of people like to pretend that bubbly, screamy college girls are great, but they’re really not.  They’re loud.  They’re shrill.  They have no sense of tact or any concept of restraint (much like the assholes they date).  They won’t have sex with you unless they’ve already boned your friends at least twice before.  Getting them drunk won’t increase your chances either; it will just make them wander off with their girlfriends who will start an impromptu karaoke of Sublime singles.  And you want this on your network, why?  To remind people of how much their lives suck, to spread pain and suffering, to increase college suicide rates, what?  Throw me a bone here.

 

Hating on my own race aside (that’s for another entry), what has me truly offended is that you have a show about psychic detectives.  Those motherfuckers have never cracked a case in their life.  They never were responsible for the break in a manhunt or the recovery of a kidnapping victim.  They’ve never found a body or found a missing child.  They’ve never recovered stolen property, and their testimony isn't considered admissable in a court of law because they've never correctly identified a culprit… Shit, if it weren’t for TiVo they’d probably never find the damn channel where you’re giving them free advertising and a blowjob.

 

Psychic detectives are pretty low on the ladder of societal parasites.  There’s no regulation on them since the “industry” isn’t formalized and there’s no bar to pass and no competency tests.  Any exploitative prick who bought a book on cold reading can hang up a shingle.  And they do.

 

It’s difficult for me to make jokes about this shit because unlike a lot of other things I bitch about, this is actually a pretty serious issue, this psychic detective bullshit.  Emotionally exploiting desperate families with a complete lie about your ability to find their missing loved ones does not possess any inherent comedy value even for someone with my pitch-black sense of humor.

 

I’m so pissed off about this that I’m just going to get straight to the suggestion.  Your new slogan is, “Not reality, actuality!”  I suggest you change it immediately.  From now on, your slogan should be, “Car crashes!  Holy shit!”

 

Thank you, and assume the position.

Dear sport hunters,

 

I would cock punch you if I thought there was any cock to punch.  I’d wallop you in the head if I thought there was a brain to damage.  I’d shove my boot up your asshole but I’d have no idea where to start.

 

I’ve already taken the piss out of wolf hunters already, but it’s worth repeating.  An issue getting a lot of press lately is aerial hunting in Alaska.  What a magnificent display of rich people acting like twats.  This actually ranks up there with Dick Cheney hunting caged quails from his car in terms of being disturbing and fucking pathetic.  You pussies can’t even hunt on the motherfucking ground anymore.  That’s too much like roughing it.  You know, what poor people do.

 

For those of you who have been living under a dipshit-colored rock, aerial hunting is the usage of low-flying personal aircraft to strafe wildlife in the dead of winter when there’s nowhere to run or hide.  If that’s the sort of thing that sounds like fun to you, then you’re probably also one of those people who enjoys tearing the wings off of flies, flogging children, and watching Disaster Movie, you fucking throwback.  God you make me sick.

 

The most famous advocate of aerial hunting is Sarah Palin, the Republican VP candidate and psychopath best known for being more incompetent than a high school drop-out with a meth addiction, more corrupt than an oil company CEO with serial killer fantasies, and so delusionally Christian that she thinks she’s getting death threats from Harry Potter.  Is it any wonder why I hate politicians?

 

Against the wishes of Alaskans, she spent $400,000 of their money to run a propaganda campaign glorifying this exercise in aero-dynamic asshole-ism, then pushed through legislation to make it easier to hunt by plane and tried to issue a $150 bounty for every severed forelimb brought back from a kill.  All this while bragging about her hunting trips and number of confirmed kills.  And as if that wasn’t scary enough, there are people who hear this and think, “That’s the one I want in the Oval Office should McCain’s undead body finally rot away.”  Excuse me; I need to go change into a non-soiled pair of pants.

 

…

 

And I’m back.

 

One thing that strikes me as odd is the offer of the bounty.  The only people who engage in aerial hunting are rich dickholes.  Since buying snuff films leaves too much incriminating evidence lying around and has a habit of sullying one’s reputation, these Caligulan degenerates have taken to the “sport” of shooting wildlife with high-powered rifles.  Of course, they’re not too keen on that whole thing about having to trek through the woods and camp, going for days without things like chauffeurs, hot and cold running champaign, and fuckable secretaries.  Shit, they want to kill animals, not live like them!

 

For these people, a $150 bounty applied to a bunch of bloody wolf legs they had a servant carry back to civilization really just amounts to being able to buy their kid a new iPod stereo to go along with the new BMW they got for a graduation present.  These people wipe their asses with $150.  And keep in mind that money has to come from somewhere.  And in this case, that somewhere is all the other Alaskans who possess neither the resources nor the desire to kill stuff from 100 feet in the air.  Aerial hunting costs hundreds of dollars for a single flight.  All Palin’s bounty is doing is allowing these shitheads’ gun club field trip to pay for itself so they can do it again the next day!

 

When you get right down to it, bullshit like this is all about juvenile power fantasies.  Killing a bear from a plane proves nothing.  It certainly doesn’t help the local ecology (if you want to argue that with me, you can shut the fuck up right now because the facts are on my side and not yours).  And the chain of money stays mostly in the same hands with very little if any getting to the people who could really use it.

 

No, it’s all about indulgence for the wealthy and insane.  It’s them having a good time at the expense of every other living thing in the area, human and otherwise.  But I suppose that’s what being a millionaire is all about, isn’t it?

 

What is my suggestion?  That we throw Sarah Palin and all the other gun-crazy sociopaths out on the tundra and let the problem fix itself.

 

Thank you, and I hope your plane crashes.

Dear Katy Perry,

 

No one cares that you munch carpet.  Shut the fuck up about it.

 

Recently, you made it clear you want to make out with Lindsay Lohan at the Music Video Awards this year.  Rather appropriate considering when Britney Spears and Madonna did it, the gross-out factor was in a woman in her 20’s Frenching another woman in her 50’s.  Ew.  And here we have Lindsay Lohan, for whom a decade of non-stop drug abuse has caused her to age about 30 years ahead of her time.  Again, ew.

 

Lesbian kisses aren’t shocking or risqué.  We see them in public all the time.  You can see them at any given nightclub or bar, typically by women who swing both ways and are just trying to get attention.  When something becomes a common sight, it defeats the purpose of shock value.

 

To be perfectly honest, the only way you making out with Miss Lohan would be shocking is that at this point it’s dangerously close to necrophilia.  There’s enough alcohol in that woman to declare her legally embalmed.  For those keeping track, that’s a status previously known only to Keith Richards and Tommy Lee.

 

Which brings me to an important point.  Keith and Tommy are now old and terrifying.  Long gone are the days when people wanted to find sex tapes of whatever super model Tommy Lee was banging that week, mostly because it’s hard to focus on tits when they’re rubbing up against what is, medically speaking, a fermented zombie.  And trust me, no amount of forced perspective with your thumb blocking part of the screen is going to take your mind off that fact as you watch the bootleg video you downloaded.

 

The point, Miss Perry, is that Lindsay is young enough to be a granddaughter to these men, yet her constant drug binges have resulted in her looking like she could be their sister.  And you want to make out with that?  Are you deranged or do you just want to give us all nightmares?

 

Let’s make this clear right now.  Brokeback Mountain was shocking to old people, Republicans, and insecure teenage boys because it involved two dudes banging.  But 99% of all straight men love lesbians.  They’ll happily tell you as much.  And most women don’t give two shits.  You’re not shocking anybody.  If you were a dude and you announced your desire to hump 50 Cent, you might have something.  As it is, you’re only coming across as a shallow, attention-hungry bitch.

 

What is my suggestion?  Skip the silly stunts, and just go straight to the heroin.

 

Thank you, and write some music that doesn’t suck.

Dear comic book whiners,

 

Who besides you gives two shits that The Spirit’s costume is black in the movie?  Why are you proselytizing this to us like Baptist preachers?  It just makes us want to hit you even harder.

 

I like comic books, but I try to avoid bringing it up in public because I don’t want to take a chance on any women over-hearing it and associating me with you dipshits.  Yes, you are the reason the community has such a bad rap.  In the world of geekitude, there is nothing more annoying than nitpicking fanboys.

 

The thing is, you cheapen the right to complain.  Being repulsed by the batsuit having nipples is a little different than complaining that Spiderman didn’t make enough bad puns.  Being put off by Spiderman 3 because it was too damn chatty is a lot more legit than being pissed off because the horns on Daredevil’s mask were the wrong shape and size.  Speaking of Daredevil, be honest…  How many of you wanted to complain about the Kingpin being black, but were too scared to say so?  Fucking white people…

 

I could go on and on about the stupid shit you morons bring up about every comic book movie.  In fact, I think I will.

 

You cry and moan endlessly about Superman having a child out of wedlock and lamenting the life he could have had.  But mostly you bitch about him boinking because Jesus told you sex is bad.

 

While I’m thinking of Superman, you also cried foul that his costume was a few shades too dark, which according to you lot made him look evil.  Fashion slaves may actually have a leg up on you pricks in being less loathsome on this topic.

 

You’re ready to open your wrists over Nicolas Cage being Ghost Rider.  Of course, since none of you watch good movies like Adaptation, your opinion means dick to everyone else.

 

You were ready to burn the theaters down when Iron Man killed some terrorists.  What the fuck did you think he was going to do?  Were you hoping that he’d invite them to a tea party and through sensible negotiations bargain his way to freedom?  Actually, that’s probably what you giant, walking vaginas would have wanted.

 

Why is it that you get your frilly panties in a twist whenever superheroes are allowed to be human beings?  And no, I don’t count the angsty whining a la anime protagonists.  Your idea of a complex, well-rounded character is an orphaned young man with supportive friends and a budding career who is inexplicably hostile, crabby, and borderline misanthropic.  You know, kind of like me, except my parents are neither divorced nor dead.

 

But then when writers want to take superheroes into genuinely interesting directions and force them to make the sort of choices that give them real emotional and personal depth, you start preaching about how the fans are being ripped off.  At the first sign of someone upsetting your delicate worldview, you head straight for the internet to shoot your mouths off.  Again, kind of like me.

 

Actually, that’s not an entirely fair statement.  You only do this for movies.  You’re ready to burn Frank Miller at the stake for making The Spirit, but most of you have no complaint with the fact that he made Daredevil a Catholic.

 

What is it about movies that causes you all to mainline estrogen and bullshit?  My personal theory is that you’re all getting your shit out of shape because these movies are not the way you would have done them.  And while movies like Catwoman, Elektra, and X-Men 3 were massively retarded piles of wank, they’re still on par with the writing capabilities of the general public and the average fan.  In other words, you seem to be pissed off that Hollywood isn’t consulting all of you or letting you write screenplays but I think I speak for the general public when I say that’s for the best.

 

What is my suggestion?  Stop fucking bending our ears with your petulant, whiny crap.  We hate bad movies too, but we don’t need you rabble screaming in our faces about why the movie sucked for reasons that matter to no one else but you and the other lonely degenerates.

 

Thank you, and I hope you die of paper cuts.

Dear game designers,

 

We get it.  You think we all have a raging hard-on for Japanese stuff.  Shut… up.

 

Now, some of you know me.  I have a huge thing for Asian chicks, metaphorically and literally.  I eat sushi, and not just Califonia rolls either.  I’m one of those film nerds who worship at the altar of Akira Kurosawa.  I even enjoy some anime, though not as much as I used to.  And yes, back in the day I totally rocked my Nintendo with titles like Legend of Zelda, Phantom Fighter, etc.

 

But that doesn’t mean we unconditionally love everything that has hair colors not found in nature and swords the size of a station wagon.  Well… I don’t anyway.  I can’t speak for the people who wear cat ears in public and have a bodily funk that you can actually see.

 

There’s a whole laundry list of offenses to go over, but I want to keep this brief.  I’m sure we’ve all played Guitar Hero at some point.  Even though my good memories of it are somewhat tainted by alcoholic roommates I had to suffer through in college, I’ll happily admit to it being a fun game.

 

Which is why I bring up Midori.  You got rid of Pandora and Clive Winston, avatars of New Wave and Classic rock respectively, and gave us that neon pedophile bait.  What, did you hope to bring in the J-pop crowd at the expense of everyone with good taste?  Let’s assume that the presence of that bint did entice the Wapanese.  They still use Google.  The fat, greasy, androgynous Dir en Grey fans (in other words, Dir en Grey fans) will still be able to see there isn’t a single Japanese song on the setlist.

 

I suppose next you’ll switch tactics and put in songs like Ginza Lights and My Woman from Tokyo*.  I wouldn’t put it past you idiots.  God am I glad that Harmonix slipped the leash on this one.

 

And of course there’s the more subtle pandering such as Heavenly Sword.  Here we have a main character named Nariko who looks like an Irish prostitute.  Do you really think we’re that stupid?  Here’s a hint game designers: hookers in old world Japan wore kimonos and face paint and they didn’t have red hair.  And even oily adolescents have jerked off to enough Gothic lolita porn to tell the difference.

 

How about any game that features turn-based combat, overlong cut scenes with no player input, and Dragon Ball Z powers?

 

What about all the games that feature effeminate protagonists, or at the very least have them wielding weapons of ungodly size?

 

The new Prince of Persia trailer anybody?

 

If I have to sit through any more of this shit, I’m going to have to go Toshiro Mifune on someone’s ass.

 

What is my suggestion?  Stop fucking ripping off the Japanese and just make some decent games.  Notice that a lot of Japanese developers are making obscene amounts of money on something other than garish, linear J-RPGs.

 

Thank you, and (however you say “kiss my ass” in Japanese).

 

*Note: I actually am a fan of The Ventures and Deep Purple.  Don’t write to tell me that they’re awesome because I already know they are.  And if you’ve never heard of either band, fuck you.