"Those fools at Geek And Nerd dared to cancel my Movie Review Feature after one post! Perhaps they feel they should devote more time to Video Game Reviews...let's see how well they review video games without....THEIR FAVORITE CONSOLE! The delicate innards of the Xbox 360 are no match for my mighty mechanical arms! Hope you like Mario Tennis Party, you no talent hacks! MUAHAHAHA!"
Please take a look at this Boba Fett Mimobot ad I received today and see if you can tell what's worked me into a fit of nerd rage.
Can you believe that? I mean, who fact checks this stuff? Did the copy editor call in sick?
MANDALORIA? *snort* Where's that? Somewhere in made-up fantasy land? I seriously doubt Boba Fett is headed back to Mandaloria. Because Mandaloria is not a place that exists. How can he be going to a place that doesn't exist? He can't. It's impossible.
Maybe he's on his way to MANDALORE, his adopted home planet and base of operations. That sounds like a more likely scenario to me, in all honesty.
JEEZ.
PS: If you'd like to own that promotionally incorrect yet still undeniably attractive flash drive (the helmet comes off and you can see his face!), head over to the online Mimobot Store.
SPOILER ALERT for Final Crisis #6 after the jump...
DC Comics, you blew it! You took your best shot at a mainstream press event since Jason fucking Todd, and you blew it!
Remember this?
Sure you do, cause it was big news! The Death of Captain America! A sad commentary on the Post-9/11 world! Collectors item!
Well, this Wednesday, DC went ahead and killed Batman. That's right, they offed Bruce Wayne, good old crazybrain, everyone's favorite agreived sociopathic hero.
This should, by all rights, be big news. Batman is a huge character. Roughly 17 times as popular as Captain America. And now he's dead. People should be weeping. Remember when Superman died? People were horrified. And at this point, what with the Dark Knight, Batman is a BIGGER, more recognizable character than Superman. He is, perhaps, the MOST FAMOUS comic book character in the world.
How did DC manage to kill the most famous superhero in the world without anyone noticing?
Let me count the ways:
1) OBAMA!
Marvel completely pwned DC this Wednesday, and they didn't even have to try. They simply put out a comic in which Spider-Man meets Obama. It's practically a goof, based on the fact that Obama has said on several occasions he collected Spider-Man comics when he was a kid.
And what happened? Lines out the door! 1st and 2nd printing sold out in hours! ebay auctions for hundreds of dollars! I want to give Joe Quesada a gold medal to wear that says "I KNOW WHAT PEOPLE WANT". America is at a major turning point, and people want to see their cool new future prez fist-bump with Spidey! It's called monitoring the national mood, DC, look into it.
2) Batman CAN'T BE DEAD!
Batman isn't dead - we all know Nolan's third movie is coming out in a few years! Plus I could have sworn I just saw him on Brave and the Bold a few days ago. If you told someone on the street that Batman died on Wednesday, they'd react like you told them Santa Claus died on Wednesday. Batman is too big a character to die - what he does in DC is just a blip on the radar of the American public.
Killing Batman in the comics is admitting that no one at DC could figure out how to make people pick up a Batman comic, DESPITE the fact The Dark Knight was seen by every person in American three times. People who saw the Dark Knight don't want to read about Jason Todd and Tim Drake ("Who??") battling for the cowl. They want to read about Christian Bale's facinating new "dark" take on Batman! Talk about EPIC FAIL.
3) DEATH FATIGUE
DC has killed roughly every single one of their characters in the last few years, including:
The Flash Martain Manhunter The Elastic Man The Wonder Twins The Ventriloquist All The New Gods
That's like half of the Justice League right there.
4) RESURRECTION FATIGUE
DC has brought back roughly every single one of their dead characters in the last few years, including:
Jason Todd Stephanie Brown Barry Allen Hal Jordan
The result of all this? NO ONE CARES.
5) Batman's death didn't even happen in his own book.
One might hope that the death of Batman would be the result of a long series of events that reflect the life and themes of the caped crusader. That there might be some sort of, I don't know, EMOTION associated with this character's death.
Nope! Batman dies shooting an evil god alien with a space-gun, thus burning his body to a cinder and sending his alternate self to another multiverse, where he will live out his days in suffering. OMGWTFLOL. So is he even dead? How can we have an emotional reaction to something so convoluted? I would hate to write his eulogy.
I would like to close this rant by saying, I love Grant Morrisson. I don't blame any of this on him. I blame the editors at the top who thought it would be a good idea to have Bruce Wayne die at the end of a immensely complicated "Crisis Event" that was clearly a financial and critical failure from the first few months of it's release. Could they not have just bailed out, and thrown a new ending on? Saved the Batman death for later, when maybe it could evoke some sort of emotion in it's readers other than, "That's it?"
The Death of Batman could have been a heartbreaking story. Batman is a deeply sad character who in many ways, I think, has always longed for death. For retirement. For escape. I'm sure his fans can imagine millions of ways that the Dark Knight could have gone out that would have made them cry their eyes out. But that opportunity is gone now, and can never be regained. Even after Bats gets resurrected, there's no death like the first death. They blew it.
Oh well, there's always fanfic.
PS, the title of this post is taken from a lovely LCD Soundsystem Song. Here is a video of Kermit singing it:
Are you one of those brave and noble souls who bucked the iPod trend and went with the road less traveled by? Well, jokes on you, Contrary Mary! As of December 31st, 2008, folks with the 30GB Zune found their music gone and their players frozen. Microsoft has posted various fixes on their site, though some folks on the forum appear to still be having problems.
The whole media is jumping on this story with shadenfruedic glee, but Computer World Magazine is the first one I've seen to report that the whole mess is due to the fact that this 2008 was a Leap Year. So Microsoft can probably just shift the blame to the Pope.
This commercial hit my local market this week, and suddenly it's on every time I turn on the TV. This means I have many, many occasions to scoff and giggle about how this shockingly unflappable pizza-lady is mere moments away from a torturous death. I would question whether the Joker's goal of ordering from Domino's was even the pizza itself; perhaps he simply wants a victim delivered to his door in 30 minutes or less?
The thing that really gets me is the ad people don't even address these very natural assumptions with a closing shot of the girl driving away from the Joker's hideout; the last we see of her is just a dry read of the punchline; "Here's your Gotham City Pizza. And uh, could you tell the Joker he owes me a car?" Um, sure lady, how bout you come inside and tell him yourself? He'll find it hilarious. And I'm pretty sure you will too.
Many of us at Geekanerd's are long-time PC users who switched to Macs several years ago (or in some cases, about a week ago). And while I personally have gotten far better usage out of my Mac, I have a certain lingering allegiance to the wacky world of Start Menus and Critical Errors. I guess that's why looking at this collection of strange and infuriating windows errors felt like a stroll down memory lane. Stockholm syndrome, anyone?
Commenters on the post have pointed out that several of these are almost certainly Photoshopped - the image above even has some very suspicious distortion around the text that smacks of a shoddy PaintShop job. But you never know with Windows; that could just be the desktop disintegrating before your very eyes.
Always on the forefront of popular culture, the good old New York Times uses a still from Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for their article about recent failed attempts to regulate video game violence. So all you time-travelers from 1995 can breathe a sigh of relief.
AH, WHY!!
"Those fools at Geek And Nerd dared to cancel my Movie Review Feature after one post! Perhaps they feel they should devote more time to Video Game Reviews...let's see how well they review video games without....THEIR FAVORITE CONSOLE! The delicate innards of the Xbox 360 are no match for my mighty mechanical arms! Hope you like Mario Tennis Party, you no talent hacks! MUAHAHAHA!"
