I'm not going to the 5th annual PAX this weekend. Instead I'm going to stay home and work on my book and monitor Robo-James's favorite Simpsons quote thread and possibly hack away at Force Unleashed. If anybody has any information about the care and feeding and killing of bull rancors, hit me.

In conclusion, I would just like to know: if a dude from the New York Times feels the need to Twitter in the voice of a prostitute and her homicidal john, I'm not going to throw around any judgments about it. But why must said homicidal john be named Lev? It's not a common name. I'm just sayin'.

Sucka tried to play me ...

I'm starting to feel like the video game ad is an underrated medium. Yeah, most of them are forgettable. What do you want, they're ads. But sometimes you see one that just rips off your head and thrusts its awesomeness down your neck. I'm thinking of the "Mad World" spot for Gears of War, for example.

But check out this one. I don't have any special interest in playing Mercenaries 2. I played the original Mercs, thought it was OK, never came back to it. But I caught this ad while I was watching clips on adultswim.com, and dang. It's the white-boy rap-singing video-game jingle of the summer:

Glad to see the guy from Sugar Ray is still getting work. (That was a joke. I have no idea who the song's by.) If you feel the way I do, you'll want to see the high-res version on the Mercs 2 site.

A couple of days ago EA Sports released Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09. This would not ordinarily be a major event in my world, except that Tiger Woods did a press tour to promote it. Again: not usually a major event for me. Ordinarily I would let Time's sports guy, Sean Gregory, handle this -- it sort of falls midway between our two jurisdictions, like a murder committed on the border between two towns. Best of luck to you. Not my case.

But Sean's still in Beijing covering the Olympics. So I went downtown to talk to Tiger instead of him. If you want to know what it's like talking to Tiger Woods, it's like talking to a very nice person from a future time where genetic imperfections have been eradicated.

To add to my discomfort, Time videotaped this event happening. Video is not really my medium.

Take a look, but only if you're willing to confront my hideous true form. Saving throw vs. madness may be required.

It's common knowledge that Ian Fleming's James Bond spy thrillers were hardly politically correct. They were packed with outdated, but probably deeply-felt, sexism, racism, and, yes, even homophobia. (Not to mention the relentlessly kick-ass sadism.) Those who haven't opened the books in a while may assume that Fleming's old-timey notions lurked in the subtext of the novels. But a recent re-read of Goldfinger revealed the hate-speech was hilariously explicit.

Much of the racialist invective is reserved for Koreans, particular poor old Odd-Job. As a reward for showing off his karate skills, bad guy Auric Goldfinger gives Odd-Job a special treat:

Goldfinger took the cat from under his arm and tossed it to the Korean who caught it eagerly – “I am tired of seeing this animal around. You may have it for dinner.” The Korean's eyes gleamed.

That's right. Koreans love cat meat. Got it. (Clearly Blofeld and Goldfinger weren't in the SMERSH kitty club. Too bad, that white Pekinese on Blofeld's lap looked delicious.) Later, Goldfinger explains why he hires only Koreans:

“They are the cruelest, most ruthless people in the world… When they want women, street women are brought down from London, well-remunerated for their services and sent back. The women are not much to look at, but they are white and that is all the Koreans ask – to submit the white race to the grossest indignities.”

Okay, but Goldfinger is a bad guy, right? He's supposed to be racist. However, later in the book, he tragically seems to have won Bond over to his point of view:

Bond intended to stay alive on his own terms. Those terms included putting Odd-Job or any other Korean firmly in place, which in Bond's estimation was lower than apes in the mammalian hierarchy.

LOWER THAN APES? Oh James, how could you? We knew you were a little rough on the ladies, but a crazy backwards eugenic evolutionary theorist? Were you in MI-6 or the Klan? I'd love to see where the rest of humanity is fits in on “Commander Bond's Official Ranking of Racial Superiority.” However, Bond soon redeems himself later by repeatedly making a point of calling Odd-Job “ape” to his face. A promotion to full ape? Not “lower than?” Good show, 007.

Okay. One more awesomely wacked-out notion, written about a woman who amazingly enough, rejected Bond's advances (and, sort of, died because of that rejection).

Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterson was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed-up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and “sex equality.” As a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits – barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied. He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them.

Who know Bond harbored such a deep hatred for women's suffrage? Does Q know about his homophobia? Because Q doesn't just stand for “Quartermaster.” He's Q, he's here, get used to it.

Finally, at the end of the book, Bond redeems his rejection by "sexual misfit" Tilly by achieving every idiot male's moron fantasy. He's bedding Pussy Galore, who up until now has been described as 100% lesbian, when we get the following exchange.

He said, “they told me you only liked women.”

She said, “I never met a man before.”

As Bond later bragged to M, "Any girl who says she's gay hasn't met me yet."

Here's a video snippet of Neal Stephenson talking about his new book Anathem. It's a Nerd World exclusive! He talks a bit about how this book relates to his other works (not at all, is the basic answer, except on a philosophical level, which I guess means no Enoch Root cameos), and its connection to the Long Now Foundation's Millennium Clock project.

You have to be a genius to pull off that beard.

The Venture Brothers season finale dropped last night. It's here, or at least it was at the time I posted this.

I gotta admit, I found it slightly, just slightly, unsatisfying. Maybe Venture Brothers just isn't a big-episode show, it's the little in-between bits and pieces that really work. When they go all epic I feel like the subtlety always drops out.

There was a slightly edgeless quality to the writing, starting with the opening scene with the head of the OSI, General Traister, a typical southern-fried military type who sounded like he was voiced by Hank Hill's dad from King of the Hill. Funny, but in a very limited way. (Guh. I just looked it up in IMDB. He was voiced by that guy.) And yeah, I get it. Good-cop bad-cop is a cliche. Dean's a wimp. I get it. But I only really laughed out loud three times -- the first time was when the henchmen attaches jumper cable's to HELPeR's eyes and the Monarch snaps, "He's not a Mitsubishi Ga-lant!"

(more...)

The consensus seems to be that Star Wars: The Clone Wars is very, very bad. (How could any movie with the word "Wars" twice in the title be good?) Many of our leading critics and random internet nobodies are even saying that Clone Wars is so terrible that it should mark the end of the entire Star Wars franchise. The coffin-nailing job started by the Ewoks twenty-five years ago has finally been completed by a baby Hutt named Stinky. (This coffin sure has a lot of last nails in it.)

If this indeed is the final finale for all things Star Wars, there is one serious silver lining.

THE END OF EASY STAR WARS PARODIES

Over the last thirty years, generations of comedy writers have been unable to resist this crowd-pleasing but super-easy formula: CURRENT THING + STAR WARS = HILARIOUS. This very blog recently linked to a Star Wars parody called Padmé, (JUNO + STAR WARS = HILARIOUS). And the pantheon includes everything from Spaceballs (JEWISH SHTICK + STAR WARS = HILARIOUS) to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (DRUGS + STAR WARS = HILARIOUS) to Family Guy's Blue Harvest (STAR WARS + STAR WARS = HILARIOUS). (Yes, The Simpsons has done it too. But at least we didn't do a beat-for-beat re-creation.)

But forget "legitimate" entertainment. The number of internet Star Wars mash-ups is staggering. How long before the legions of amateur comedy writers working (for free) in the online ouvre tire of combining the popular culture clichés of today with the same twenty tired quotes from a long time ago and a galaxy far far away? Please, take to heart the massive critical failure of Clone Wars, and put an end to this decade-spanning trend right now.

What is it about Star Wars that makes people want to mix it with something else and call the product good comedy? As Star Wars itself issued in the era of the mega-blockbuster, it too brought forth the era of the easy parody in the form of the proto-YouTube sensation, Hardware Wars (TOASTER + STAR WARS = HILARIOUS). Maybe it's because the whole Star Wars franchise is so fundamentally bland that it accepts the imprint of other movies with absolutely no resistance. Doesn't it make anyone suspicious that George Lucas himself LOVES these parodies? The man isn't exactly known for his taste in comedy.

Like oil now, and water soon, we are running out of new sources of original, non-self-aware, genuinely-involving popular culture. Where are the new Silence of the Lambses, the new Maxtrixes? What will future generations make easy parodies of?

Here is a challenge to both the "professional" and "amateur" writers and directors of the world. Rather than "parodying" Star Wars by mixing it with The Jonas Brothers or whatever crap you saw yesterday, create a new trilogy of earnest, generation-defining adventure garbage for people to relentlessly mix with other stuff for the next thirty years. PLEASE. Because Star Wars has been Xeroxed so many times, you can't even make out the original any more.

If I could blog about the Venture Brothers every day, I would. But I can't. Apparently you're supposed to blog about different stuff every day. Whatever. I didn't blog about TVB yesterday, so I'm all clear.

Plus if I post these, then the last 20 minutes I spent watching Venture Brothers clips magically becomes "research."

(more...)

I knew my words had the ring of prophecy. And not just because I was huffing Delphic vapors at the time. That stuff is strictly recreational for me, you know what I'm saying. I just didn't believe it would happen so soon.

Last week I said that despite the huge shortcomings of Clone Wars, the franchise was far from dead, and that one day somebody would do something cool with the Star Wars universe again. Something dark, something that meant ... something.

Then a dude at Lucasfilm sent me a beta version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Then I put it in my debug Xbox. Then it wouldn't play. Then they sent me a firmware updater disk. Then I put the beta disk back in the Xbox. Then it played. And damn.

(more...)

G4 is running what I assume is a series of spots called the Will Wright Minute, in which Will Wright says some random cool thing. Obviously this is, deep in its black withered heart, a promo for Spore. But what he says is pretty cool: