My Favorite Peice of Marketing

I fucking love Halloween. I love it. I like New Years, enjoy Christmas, and don't completely hate Easter, but I absolutely love Halloween.

Halloween is the one holiday without this "love thy fellow man" bullshit.
It's the one holiday that can never "sell out", or become "too commercial."
It's one of the few holidays that doesn't have prayer, or special services.
Unlike Thanksgiving or Columbus day, it doesn't venerate the historical rape of an innocent group of people.
Unlike President's day or Kwanzaa, it's a holiday people actually participate in.

It had candy, booze, dress up...

What's not to like? Putting on fake lashes and getting drunk on badly made mixed drinks served in plastic skeleton goblets with dry ice in the bottom? Dressing hapless children in embarrassing/macabre homemade outfits and having them collect candy from strangers? Community center haunted houses and Vincent Price marathons? Wearing fairy wings to the office?

How about the day after, when the stores try to clear their supply of neon wigs and black eyeliner? (A girl can never have enough black eyeliner.)

It sucks that the US doesn't take carnival seriously. It really sucks that the one thing we have like it, Mardi Gras, may never be the same. What's left is DragonCon, local bacchanals, and Halloween.

Oh, and after this week, it'll also be my anniversary.

Day of the Rant

So I'm not the only one's who's reaching her breaking point.

There are two deliciously elegant rants I'd like to point out today. The first concerns video games, the second concerns sex. yay. sex.

As for video games, there's apparently some douche bag named Jack Thompson trying to step into Jonathan Swift's buckle shoes. He has a modest proposal for the video game industry. Anyone who makes his game about killing a video game publisher gets $10,000 donated to charity. Whee. There's more to the story, look here.
Essentially, the game involves Osaki Kim, a father whose son was beaten to death with a baseball bat by a 14-year-old gamer. The guilty party was only sentenced to life, even after finding a connection to video games and the murder, so O.K. (as Thompson abbreviates) goes on a killing spree to avenge his son he kills the publisher (Take This, a not-so-subtle reference to San Andreas publisher Take Two), followed by all parties involved in the trial, merchants of GameStop-like store and arcades and, of course, any cops that get in his way.

Clever, huh? No ordinary monkey with a keyword could ever come out with an idea like that, right?

I love Tim Buckley's from Ctrl Alt Del, a webcomic I adore, has a response. There's a comic version I really recommend here. And when you're done with that, read some more of his words. Look here.

An excerpt:
Ten-thousand dollars is a lot of money, and would really benefit some charities. But why would a video game company spend the millions of dollars it takes to design, develop, produce and market a video game, when they could just donate the ten grand themselves and be done with it? Why don't you offer something that would actually motivate these companies, such as offering to throw yourself off a cliff.

Anyway, for the record, I agree with keeping violent video games out of the hands of children under 18. Make it illegal for a minor to buy M-rated video games. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. However that is where the line is drawn.

I'm an adult, and if I want to play a video game that contains violence or sex, that's my constitutional right. And it's the right of the developers to create these games.

Don't start trying to fuck with the choices of adults, Jack, unless you're prepared to take on pornography, alcohol, cigarettes and gambling. And booze, cigs and poker have been proven to have negative mental and physical effects on people. You can't say that about video games.

And pornography... well porn is just great. Everyone loves porn.

Which brings me to rant number two, most of which I haven't finished reading yet. I found it on BoingBoing
You can have the whole cheerleading squad,
I want the girl in the tweed skirt and the horn-rimmed glasses:
Betty Finnebowski, the valedictorian.
Oh yes.
First I want to copy her Trig homework,
and then I want to make mad, passionate love to her
for hours and hours
until she reluctantly asks if we can stop
because she doesn't want to miss Battlestar Galactica.
Suma cum laude, baby!
That is what I call erotic.

The rest is here. Read it!

i *heart* porn.

Oh, and I saw an episode of Battlestar the other day with C, and while I liked it, Richard Hatch is so much the suck that I don't know if I'll be able to watch more. I'll complain more about him later.

Actors. It's like they think they're people or something.

Can't Stop the Signal...

...motherfuckers.

I've been drinking and watching the O'Reilly Factor. I've tried watching it sober, but it does bad things to my blood pressure. Things have been that way ever since my irony broke.

So I'm drinking and watching O'Reilly. He has some talking heads bitching about bloggers. Apparently, some bid bad meanines who disagree with the American Spectator's presidential ass-licking. These evil, mean, bad guys published an editor's email address on their website. His poor inbox was flooded with disapproving emails! Oh no! Lions and Tigers and Giant Fucking Bears, oh my!


But it's okay, the people who bloc about politics are creepy fiends hiding in basements wearing tinfoil hats, or long haired granola eating freaks posting from their sidekick while they march to save the whales. And it's all slander, anyway. Icky poo nasty hearsay and hyperbole. Unlike O'Reilly's show!

This kinda shit makes me pull clumps of hair out by the root.

Let's hear it for the blog. Let's hear it for the livejournal. Let's hear it for the Geocities page. Let's hear it loud for Wikipedia. Let's hear it for freedom of the press. Finally.

You know who O'Reilly fears? Who he paints as a rumor-monger? The Smoking Gun. You know, those rumor mongers who publish legal documents Who back up their rumors with evidence. That's what O'Reilly fears, the free flow of information. But my Lord and Master Joss Whedon told me, "can't stop the signal". Fuck you, O'Reilly.

Bloggers, wearing their biases openly on their sleeves and not answering to corporate masters are the greatest example of democracy in action. And you can't stop our signal.

Can we see that again?

I'm getting spoiled. The comcast DVR doo-hicky is completely ruining me. I've become so used to rewinding to catch line's I didn't quite hear, or neat special effects, the while watching Firefly Friday night I tried to rewind it.

Sitting in the theatre, I reached for the non-existent remote to rewind the movie.

How fucked up is that?

I don't know how I lived before my "not-a-Tivo". I record all my favorite shows, watch them when I want...It's pretty cool. I now I sound like I've sold out to them, but it's really changing my relationship with TV. It's hard to say "there's nothing on TV", cause there's always a few shows I've recorded but not watched yet.

God bless cable television.