i cannot do the smurf

In retrospect, playing the first 4 Castlevania games in a row really kills your brain for any kind of videogame experience.

i'll probably post this on myspace too

I am bored (not bored enough to get through some of the stuff I want to read, apparently, which is kind of sad because honestly theres a lot of it and it's not that I feel it's a chore, I just can't find the time to give to it [you know, regardless of right now]). Anyway, I decided to do something that someone on another blog I read did. I'll turn on my mp3 player and hit shuffle, then list the first 10 songs that come up and comment on them. No matter what they are. (unless I get one of those silent untitled tracks that some albums have as filler). Here goes.

1. "Race for the Prize" by The Flaming Lips. This is probably my favorite song on The Soft Bulletin. I listened to it god knows how many times when I first got the album, and as such I usually skip it when I listen to my music shuffled. I've just been overexposed to it. It's a really awesome song though. I love a good song about scientists racing to save lives, even if they are just human beings after all.

2. "Romantique" by Felix da Housecat. Not my favorite Felix da Housecat tune. It's got a slower tempo than the other Felix songs I like and no insane hooks. It's got some interesting sections but other than that it's not a favorite.

3. "Young American Freak" by Material Issue. Oh god. Talk about overexposed. I must have listened to Telecommando Americana 6500 times in 2004. This is far from the best song on the album and it's really pretty much just a standard Material Issue song. It's got some decent parts to sing along to in the car, but again it's nowhere near their best song for any purpose. And it's got this really silly sounding keyboard section at the end. Any song with someone yelling FREAK! FREAK! FREAK! isn't gonna stand up to repeated listens, probably.

4. "Come on Eileen" by Dexy's Midnight Runners. I love the 80s (volume 4 with Michael Ian Black so fucking DONE with his life). I pretty much love all of the 80s 1-hit wonders for the same reasons everyone else does. They're usually catchy and dance-able, even though I don't dance (in public). This is definitely a song that's awesome fun to sing in the car, and the breakdown can be amazing. The only other thing I can think of about this song is that I'm pretty sure theres a pornstar named Cum on Eileen, and that's pretty lewd.

5. "Section 23 (Get Up and Go)" by The Polyphonic Spree. I'm not the hugest fan of the Polyphonic Spree's newest album, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy songs from it. My main criticism of the album was actually that all the songs start to sound the same by the time you've listened to all 12 of them, but a number of them are great fun to listen to just randomly in a shuffle mix. This one is no exception, and listening to it outside of the context of the album I really enjoy it a lot. It's got most of the good things I like about The Polyphonic Spree contained in one song, so that's pretty cool.

6. "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" by The Arcade Fire. This album was hands down my top pick for #1 whatever year it was that it came out (04?). I've come to appreciate this song more, as on my first few listens I thought that the album didn't really click until about the 4th song. This has maybe become my favorite track on the album. It sounds very isolated in a kind of chilling way, and it's an interesting look at youth I think.

7. Well, number 7 was "Come Together" by Weezer, but I accidentally hit the skip button when I picked up my mp3 player to read what the song was, so I didn't listen to it. It's not a good song.

8. "In Aeroplane over the Sea" by Neutral Milk Hotel.
And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly
From the aeroplane over the sea
But for now we are young
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see
This song is beautiful. The whole album is about Anne Frank, I'm pretty sure. I have a pretty distinct memory of reading some of the more emotional or climactic moments in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay while waiting for a bus in the rain, and then listening to this album on the way home. I don't know why that's significant, but it's something that sticks out to me.

9. "All My Life" by Foo Fighters. This song is kind of a holdover in my collection from when I was in high school. I still enjoy some of their early stuff, but their later stuff is pretty bland and sometimes unlistenable. This song is just a kind of boring single from their kind of boring album One by One. I should really delete it from my player, but I'm not that kind of person.

10. "Marla" by Grizzly Bear. I don't know what this song is or why it's on my mp3 player. Honestly. It's sort of haunting and eerie. It's a pretty soft song but it's got some interesting noisy sections and sounds going on in the background. Pretty decent stuff, I'd probably be interested to listen to more of it. I have to wonder how this got on my mp3 player though.

BONUS 11. Only because that Weezer one was kind of lame. "Wookie Prisoner - Detention Block Ambush" composed by John Williams. Jesus. If it wasn't already readily apparent, I am a giant geek. Yes, I have Star Wars music on my mp3 player. And not just the main theme or the recognizable leitmotifs from the score, but the actual entire scores for all three of the original trilogy movies. I mean christ, Wookie Prisoner? Is that really necessary to have pop up in between a Talking Heads song and an Apples in Stereo song? For me it is I guess. It's pretty exciting music though, I must admit.

runs of comics I want to own for inexplicable reasons

The New Mutants #86 - 100 and X-Force #1-9 (the Liefeld run)
The entirety of the Spider-Man clone saga
Fantastic Force #1-18
The entire Marvel 2099 line
Kickers Inc #1-12
J2 #1-12
ALF #1-50 plus annuals and specials



Yeah, they're all Marvel, but I don't really know any bad news DC titles that I particularly want, so oh well.

the next dimension

I was reading a bulletin on myspace and at the bottom of the page there were two buttons. One says "Reply to Poster" and the other says "Delete from Friends." The idea that you would delete someone from your friends list due to the content of a bulletin they posted is absurd to me. In general myspace is absurd.

I ate half a pizza today. Not a small frozen pizza or a Tony's or something like that, a regular, large pizzeria pizza. I was so unbelievably hungry when it came and I just kind of gorged myself on it. I don't feel incredibly good about it now, a few hours after the fact, but I'll have to live with my own decision.

I like finding descriptions of my dreams that I wrote months or even years ago. It's like reading the most mind-bending story you could possibly imagine, and then remembering it happening to you, in a sense. I was looking through an old sketchbook and I found a page long description of a dream where I was being held prisoner on a boat and we were running away from dinosaurs and it's probably one of the oddest short stories I've ever read, but I kind of lived it.

Also in my sketchbook I found numerous references to an idea I apparently had at one point called Henry and the Ghouls. It appears to be about a middle-aged/late 30s business man who is haunted by ghosts. I was going to scan in one of the pictures, but my scanner is acting up so I can't. It wasn't anything super awesome anyway.

There was also a poem about my experiences at summer camp. It was pretty rough, and it also was in a forced rhyme scheme so it wasn't really too good. Some of the imagery was interesting to me and really did kind of take me back, but for the most part it seemed like a really terrible attempt at something meaningful. Someday I'll do something interesting with it maybe. Who knows.

The topic title is a reference to the X-Men videogame of the same name, by the way. So I've got that going for me.

if you were a car, instead of a boy

i love getting so paranoid about my computer's hard drive because it was losing like 3 gigabytes a day and I wasn't installing or downloading anything new. i figured out that system restore was just making unreal number of copies and taking up so much space on my hard drive (like 30 gigs). i cant really do anything about that though cause it's allowed to take up 15% of the space or something and theres no way to change that. at least i know it isnt VIRUSED

world's shortest rant

I hate.

For God's sake, somebody call NextWave...

Basically nothing is new. No one should be shocked by that revelation. I was reading through that Civil War Battle Damage Report to get some updates on Marvel characters and I realized that I almost entirely don't care what happened to a great majority of them. Apparently the 3 characters/teams I actually give a shit about are basically up to nothing. Two members of Nextwave joined Cap's team (aka did something entirely outside the realm of the Nextwave reality, which is apparently still a part of the Marvel U, but I like to think of it as somewhat seperate.) The Great Lakes Champions are patrolling Wisconson after registering. Apparently D-Man is a "potential recruit."

What all of this means? Not much to me. Civil War seems like it was a massive project to change the status quo in the Marvel Universe to get people interested in it, and what it actually did was change the status quo to make me not interested. I don't care what happens to Tony Stark, I'm not interested in Spider-Man's continual problems and most of all I don't care a lick about Captain America's death. I've been a Cap fan for a long time, and this just screams stunt to me. There's no way that this death is going to be something meaningful in the future. It's not "like" the death of Superman. It literally IS the death of Superman.

I also read the first 6 issues of The Irredeemable Ant-man. It's pretty much fantastic. The thing about it is that it ties in with Civil War in some ways, but it totally doesn't rely on it at all for it's stories. Which is nice. There's humor involved, which in the Marvel universe seems to be at a shortage these days.

I have a lot of other stuff I want to talk about but it'll have to wait because I'm tired and going to bed. Listen to the Nextwave theme as much as possible. That is my advice for the day.

X-Men 3, New X-Men and the boy Sebastian

Coming out of the movie theater on Sunday I felt fantastic. X-Men 3 had been everything I expected it to be and more, a total debacle and a completely successful popcorn movie. I had expected to find this movie as bad as Daredevil or as uninteresting as Fantastic Four, and initially I did. In fact I ranked it below Fantastic Four at first. Something has changed in my brain, some small idea has spread or something I dunno. What I mean is that I think X-Men 3 is the most entertaining comic book movie to come out since 2004. In fact it was more than entertaining, it was likeable.

Mike said that the movie shit on everything that the X-Men comics were and are. And I agree, it totally did. Which I guess makes it a good thing that this was a movie and not a comic book. You see, things that work in a comic book just plain don't work on screen. When someone goes to see an X-Men movie, they expect to be watching an action movie about sci-fi era superheroes. When someone picks up an X-Men comic book, they're lucky if they get one short fight scene. It's a soap opera. No one is going to pay $7 to watch 2 hours of pretty young people with superpowers having relationship problems, because that's just not what movies lend themselves to. So yes, this movie shit on the X-Men "mythos", and thats not a bad thing.

For example, one of the biggest complaints people have with the movie is that Scott Summers disappears, in the same bit of deus ex machina that brings Jean Grey back to life and makes her a potential villainess, very early in the film. We're not sure if he died or if the phoenix consumed him or what, and it's not really important. What was important was that the film get him out of the way. He was a dead character from the end of X2 anyway. The problem with Cyclops in the first two movies is that he did nothing and no one remembered him. If you ask someone what they remember about X-Men or X2, they'll probably say somehting about Wolverine or "that naked blue chick" or some of the more impressive special effects. Cyclops was a bit player in the movies to begin with and there was really nothing that could have been done to save his character. If you want an example of this, take a look at Storm. Her character in the first 2 movies was pretty much the same as Scott's. Marginialized and unimportant to the whole of the movie's story arcs (most of which involed Wolverine, Magneto and Mystique, or Jean Grey[which would seem to include Scott somehow, but oddly, it didn't really]) . In X-Men 3 Storm was given a much bigger role, her character was expanded and pushed on the audience, and what was the result? Nothing interesting. She did and said nothing that couldnt have been said by any other random characters they could have decided to use. I'm convinced that this is what would have happened to Scott had he been forced into the main plot of the movie.

The reason is that Cyclops just isn't a movie character. Not this type of movie anyway. His character is subtle and reserved and almost always completely uninteresting in small doses. Without the proper set-up he has nowhere to go really. For example, in Morrison's New X-Men, Cyclops can easily be recognized as the main character, the main thread that holds the team together and the character whose story arc allows for the biggest changes, and great things were done with him. But the changes don't happen overnight, it's a long process and takes over 3 years of stories for Cyclops to make a big final decision about himself. In a movie things like that just can't be done. Even more problems occur in the movie design when we realize that these X-Men movies are about Wolverine. He's the central (and to the casual audience, most interesting) character and has the obvious archetypal traits of the reluctant hero, which is something the audience can relate to. Cyclops is the boy scout, football star hero. There's no doubt in the audience, no intruige and no suspense. You give him the big problem to solve and he's going to do it (or try to do it). Wolverine has a little more edge and unknown-ness about him and it makes him more interesting to the audience.

To have kept Cyclops in the film would have confused the entire plot. His relationship with Jean and the triangle between him, Wolverine and Jean would have made the actual heros and villains plot very confusing. Consider an end scene featuring an out of control Phoenix, Wolverine AND Cyclops. Wolverine knows what he has to do to end the insanity and the craziness and he does it. Throw Cyclops into the mix and it becomes harder to say. Scott wouldnt be able to bring himself to kill Jean, and I don't know that he would have let Wolverine do it either. It would be very problematic. That's mostly all I have to say about that subject. No matter what Cyclops was or what he represented on the X-Men team, his character was going nowhere and he didn't have a job to do in this movie. I guess that that doesn't necessarily mean he had to die, but they would have had to write him out somehow regardless. The kids came for Wolverine.


The other main problem people seem to have with the movie is that so many of the main characters died or were de-powered. I don't think of this as a disadvantage necessarily. The movies were getting stale, and so were the characters. If they ever decide to make a 4th movie, they will at least have a new jumping off point, so they can do something kind of new. Having Magneto be a main big bad for 3 movies in a row was tiring, Rogue and her "oh god I hate my powers I wish I could touch people boo hoo" storyline had really run it's course, and the main team definitely needed a shakeup. When I think of the X-Men, I definitely think of a core group, but I also think of it as a kind of shifting team where new kids graduate from the school and join the team and older members go off to "find themselves" and have solo adventures in miniseries land. So a shakeup on the team should really be expected if the series gets to 4 movies. Professor X probably didn't have to die, but who knows maybe he didn't.

In general I think people were too harsh on the movie. It wasn't going to be Spider-Man 2, I don't really expect many superhero movies to be that, it's a hard thing to live up to. I went in expecting it to suck flat out and it suprised me. It was fun, mindless fun. You don't need to think about it very hard to find something to enjoy. Be it the scene where Wolverine is fighting Spike in the woods or just the chance to see Kitty Pryde and Iceman actually fucking do something in the movie. And the movie didn't take itself too seriously, which was nice.

Then again, I like Batman and Robin and Last Action Hero. And not in the sense of "it's so bad it's good oh man!" I genuinely find something to just like about those movies when I watch Them. It's nothing deep and it's certainly not a huge appreciation for the acting and plot, but its something in there. Sometimes you have to ignore all the bullshit comic contradictions and character choices and silly villains and enjoy a movie.


Morrison's New X-Men run is probably the best thing having to do with the X-Men that I've ever read or enjoyed. Some parts were kind of blah or maybe badly thought out, but for the most part it's just god damn solid comics that really back up Morrison's other work on other stuff. Fantomex is one of the most awesome characters ever in an X-Men book, simply because he's a walking parody of all those other "awesome" characters that have been in X-Men books in the past. And because the book is completely self-referential about itself.


this is probably all bullshit

oh god

This comic book is unbelievably awesome.

i am watching hogan knows best and it is unbelievable

It's pretty much the fakest reality show ever. Even faker than that Manhunt one that they proved was completely plotted and predetermined. It's unreal how bad news it is.

I am sick. It kind of sucks. My whole head feels like it's both squeezed and stretched at the same time and my nose refuses to stop running. I've gone through more tissues in the last 5 hours than I have in the last 5 months. And that INCLUDES tissue time.

52 is really good so far! The Red Inferno is an intruiging concept! Black Adam is a savage motherfucker! The history of the DCU stuff in the back is pretty cool. I want some issues about Animal Man though. He was on the "missing" list at the end of IC, and I don't want him to be dead. With Grant Morrison on the 52 commitee hopefully we'll get at least a few stories about him.

I got my free copy of Back Issue. It's a great magazine. I'd like to read more issues, but I'm not gonna pay $9 for a back issue or even $6 for a new issue. It had a great interview about Spider-Man's black costume and an awesome article about postmodern super-heros. Top notch production.