Chillax, Brah

You know that guy in Full Metal Jacket who wrote that Oppenheimer quote on his helmet, "I am Become Death." Yeah, he was being an ironic asshole. Still funny mind you, but definitely in the assholic/ironic subcategory of humor. And somehow, I find myself slipping off the paths of the righteous to join him. I may not Become Death, but I am Become the Thing I Hate. Namely, a hipster. At least, as defined by what I find funny.

Not a big surprise, really. Everything esle in my life has hipster spray-painted and sequined and bedazzled all over it. But consider the following.

I enjoy the 'wassup' Budweiser commercials way too much. Far more than I enjoy the actual beer they were used to advertise. It cracks me up every time I hear myself say 'wassup' all drawn out to a work colleague that just came in. There are several things wrong with that last statement, and grammar and syntax are the least of its problems. Yes, I laugh at my own jokes. I'm (suddenly?) that guy. However this is mitigated (somewhat?) by the fact that i genuinely find it funny. Irony free enjoyment. It almost makes up for the fact that nobody else laughs or even smiles. The best I get is a pair of rolled eyes.

I could go into my borderline psychotic adoration of shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Mr Show, and Sea-lab 2021, but really, what's left to be said. If you don't understand their genius, no force on Earth can save you from a grim and dull hereafter.

I occassionally use acronyms like LOL, and their extended ridiculous relatives like roflcopter and LOLlerskates. Text speak to me is way too funny. Anyhting that makes you sound like a 5-year old with a learning disorder--sign me up!

I say things like 'brah' and 'chillax.' Again, not because I am making fun of anyone per se. I find it hard to believe that people actually said 'brah' at all really. They are like leprechauns or unicorns or compassionate conservatives (zing!, [see there's another example, I say 'zing!']), they only exist in theory, not in practice. So there may not even be frat-boys of this variety to begin with, let alone make fun of. But I find their words hilarious. I'm giggling to myself right now. Hehe.

Unrest

Its been a long while since my blog was in any way titular. You can either use this sentence to stop laughing, or, if you are more mature than I am, use it to wait until I'm done chuckling at my own joke.

So todays topic will fall under the Zombie rubric. Or, more specifically the Undead. I have a disturbing fascination with all things undeady, which was probably conceived when i was little and was absolutely terrified by horror movies and would lay awake for hours, trying to calm down and come to grips with my own imminent doom. My parents repeated, "they're just movies--they're not real," over and over, but their logic is flawed, because at night, in the dark, a child's bedroom is home to a great many things that have no relationship whatsoever to reality. Eventually, as a class A nerd, I through the full weight of my overactive imagination at the problem, and used the movies own logic systems against them.

Many monsters have a simple set of rules that govern their behavior, and equally simple ways of being vanquished. Laying in my bed I knew a vampire couldn't hurt me because it couldn't get inside without being invited, and if my sister was dumb enough to let one in, why, the crucifix that hung on my bunk-bed shelf would protect me.

However there are an equal number horror stories where logic and rationality are what is directly under siege, and an overactive imagination can only strengthen their evil power. Ghosts, for instance. For every 3 or 4 ghosts that wanted revenge or were improperly buried, there was one or two that just haunted stuff because it was cool. And god forbid my kid brain start to ponder the problem of evil, and come to the understanding that not only was Evil omnipresent and everchanging, but that it was necessary, because how else could we be Good?

One solution was to trick them, to become one of them. To masquerade as one of their kind, because I didn't really want to eat brains and murder and end the world as we know it. But there were plenty of neat-o things the Undead can do, and it wouldn't be a half bad gig, all things considered. So with no further ado, the benefits and costs of being various kinds of Undead:

1. Vampire.
pros- get to change into wolves, creepy mist, or a bat and fly around all over belfries and stuff. Cool capes and fancy pants. Women get all gaspy and hot and bothered when you just walk in the room. Immortality.

cons- Damned. Extremely limited diet. dealing with punk ass slayers. Goth look is a bit tired. Immortality.

2. Ghost.
pros- float through things, move things ever so slightly, generally harmless mischief making. Slick translucent white appearance.
cons- Usually been wronged in pretty fucked up ways. Bound to the clock and calendar, appearing at specific times and places. probably cold a lot of the time.

3. Mummy.
pros- likely were a pharaoh or some other noble personage. Get to take your time (mummies are never very fast). Have all your possessions right there, and if they've been despoiled, well, Scavenger Hunt time!
cons- tattered garb catches on all manner of stuff. Kind of dusty and dessicated.

4. Zombie.
pros- get to hang out with all your friends, be mindless. All you can eat. Get to do a great bit of shambling. impervious to harm save blows to the head and fire.
cons- don't ever really get a chance to sit down, rest. if zombies 'win,' they will eventually run out of food, what then? Constantly losing limbs, hair, physical cohesiveness.

all this and its still not time to go home from work.

Countdown to Christmas #6 (December 11th)

Over the years I have become able to hide (or at least shelter) the fact that I am a complete geek with varying degrees of success. Today... is not one of those days.

Last week i stumbled upon what might be the single most nerdling thing that has ever made me laugh out loud and then follow religiously. It is something called 8-bit Theater, written by a genius named Brian Clevinger since (roughly) 2000 and now in its 900-something strip showing no signs of stopping. Let me bring you down the slippery slope. Using a rating system where 1 equals 'embarrassingly but by no means hopelessly geeky' to 10 which figures as 'appallingly apocalyptically geeky' here is how the following transition works out.

Comics (in general) = 2 (mildly geeky) ----->
Internet or 'Web' comics = 6 (outrageously geeky) ----->
Pixilated 'Sprite' Web-comics = 8 (unabashedly, you just can't believe how geeky these are)----->
Sprite Web-comics whose material is gleaned almost entirely from Final Fantasy 1 = 10 (congratulations, you cannot possibly hope to manifest your geek to a higher level)

8-bit Theater is just such a web-comic. 99% of its images are from the 1990 Nintendo video game Final fantasy 1. These images are captured screen shots, manipulated in various ways to present characters and show settings, emotions, actions, etc. The characters are all drudged from the pool of those found in the video game and spun wildly out of proportion with absurdist humor and tongue in cheek self depreciative in-jokes about the silliness of things like Dungeons and Dragons and the like. In other words, you, reader, probably just wouldn't understand how hilarious this is unless you too are a guy who entered your teens in the early 90s, played video games (and maybe, *cough* D&D as well *cough*) and have a certain knowledge of the kinda stuff that goes on in the world of people who do like this stuff.

The story follows the adventures of a motley crew of heroes, and here i use adventures and heroes in the loosest way possible. There is an astoundingly dumb warrior named Fighter (after his character class, in fact all of the characters take their names from their class) who talks constantly of swords; Black Mage, a diabolically evil little man with a short fuse and tremendous power which is always mis-used; Red Mage, one big D&D in-joke; and Thief, a guy who is taking advantage of everybody else for his own financial gain. Among others.

It's pretty much impossible for me to do this sort of thing any justice, to show you how unbelievably cool it really is without, well, reconfiguring your upbringing, but hey, if anything deserves a shout out, this sure as hell does.

Back on Topic (Finally)

Lest you nay-sayers out there in the peanut-gallery start calling foul, here's a post ruminating (tangentially) on one this blog's three titular heads. Above is a video link for as long as youtube supports it, NBC is tenacious about protecting their dear intellectual property which is asinine in and of itself. These videos function as free advertising! The more times I laugh at some dude punching another dude just before the second dude eats something the more likely I am to tune in to SNL some night. Okay, so that last bit won't actually ever happen, but still. This is the first time I've even thought about that "Great Saturday Evening Institution" in like, long times.

The premise. As detailed above, the video is mostly a sequence of shots of everyday folks, who might be SNL regulars (*shrugs shoulders*), just about to bite into a slice of pizza, an apple, a french fry, etc. And then just before they hit pay-dirt Andy Sandberg lunges into frame and delivers a punch right in the face complete with a big yellow 'Punched!' description on the screen before Sandberg dances giddily. Equally effective is the music which deedle-deedles along until the big actions where it swells right along with the punches.

Very simple = kinda brilliant.

Why is this brilliant? Perhaps a better question would be, why is it not? You have random, senseless violence which is somehow augmented by the fact that the people being hit are just about to eat. Random punches would be funny--hitting unsuspecting diners is hilarious. Unrefined, maybe. But hilarious. And the dances that follow could easily be mortally stupid. But Sandberg enlivens them with more than enough dumb enthusiasm. And i don't mean dumb in the negative sense. This is dumb in the most positive sense.

One of the parts of me that finds this the most funny is the part that wants to simulate it. How fun would it be to run down the street and do everything normal behavior warrants one should not? Punches to the face occupy the high end of this spectrum because not only are you doing something unwritten behavioral codes forbid, like laying down in the middle of a busy sidewalk or peeing on a shop window, but you are interrupting the normal behavior of others, right at the precise moment where a person expects it least. Not to get all philosophical or anything but this is a Althusserian's dream come true. These actions are funny because they are fundamentally ideologically unexplainable.

And that is why, I would argue, that children, and those of us with very child-like sense of humor (er, guilty) will find this immensely funny. because everything adults do, everything in the real world that is so straight-laced and boring and horribly mundane is deflated. Children haven't been 'hailed' into the system yet, to go back to Althusser for a moment, and thus either don't know the codes or haven't bought into them yet. The only thing they know is that adults are boring and deeply unfunny. Adults punching each other in the face for no reason just before they eat, however...

And the punches make a fairly logical progression from least absurd to most. We go from one random man being struck to several in succession to a pair of foo-folks seated together in a cafeteria being 'double' punched to a punch-out and 'full recovery' by Mr Jon Bon Jovi to a man who temporarily escapes his punch-doom by answering a call on his cell phone. That last bit perfectly shows all that philosophical nonsense i was blathering on about above to be true. This isn't just random violence, but violence instrumented through a very child-like field of logic. It makes sense that Andy cannot punch the cell phone talking guy because that would violate the very basic child-logic rules. Cell-phone dude isn't just about to eat, therefore no punch. The same set of rules that make Andy murder the guy who 'figures things out' and tries to defend himself. If that guy had only just got punched and played along, everything would be fine. But instead his disruption escalates the violence.

Likewise, when Andy is forced to up the ante, the world reacts in turn. Just how boring are adults/regular life the world over? So much so that they are mindless zombies. And Andy must now flee from them across the globe through various stock footage shots of Paris, etc. Yet Andy has a trump card, he knows that he simply has to reverse things back to his own set of rules. How do you stop a marauding pack of killer zombies from eating you? You do the zombie dance, naturally.

Believe in your dreams, indeed.