Screw Sharks, Think Of The Dolphins!

So I was going through the junk folder on my oldest email account, just to see if I was missing anything, and I found this petition: "The Cost of Shark Bait Soup: Dolphins Chopped Up And Skinned Alive."  The hysterical summary cries out about the sadful sadness that is the dead dolphins, butchered by those horrible fishermen.  They just don't appreciate these amazing creatures!  Also something about havoc on the ecosystem.  The dolphins, though!  The dolphins!

Seriously.  The first paragraph of the petition's description reads, "Shark fin soup comes with a price. And we're not talking the thousands people pay to eat it — we're talking the mass killing of sharks, the disruption of our oceans' ecosystem, and the brutal slaughter of hundreds of thousands of dolphins used by fishermen as shark bait."  The other two paragraphs, however, focus exclusively on the fate of the dolphins, and the petition itself is asking the Peruvian government to better enforce the ban on dolphin meat.

I didn't sign the petition.  Normally, I'm a sucker for petitions.  I know they don't actually have any real effect, most of the time, and they are an easy way for someone to pretend to be an "activist" without actually doing any real, meaningful activism.  But sadly, I'm guilted into signing them pretty easily.  A corporation has done something mean!  I must take a stand, or else I am supporting them!  An animal is being abused?  I must sign this, or else I will be as bad as the people abusing it in the first place!  Et cetera, et cetera.  But I didn't sign this one.  In fact, I was kind of offended by it.

For one thing, they don't ever mention which kind of dolphin is usually being slaughtered.  It makes me a little suspicious.  After all, while there certainly are endangered breeds out there, the bottlenose dolphin, for example, isn't endangered in the slightest.  Neither the petition nor the article it links even throws in a sentence like, all dolphins are killed, regardless of endangered status!  Also, dolphins are kind of dicks.  I admit, I've got a bit of my own personal bias going on too: dolphins are just so universally adored, but I just don't see how they are any cuter or more endearing than another type of animal, and after a lifetime of hearing about how they're so sweet and friendly and spiritual and they have such a connection to us and "My spirit animal is a dolphin because I just love dolphins" I just got kind of annoyed by them.  I don't actively dislike dolphins or anything, they just don't register as special to me the way they seem to for everyone else.  

Which leads me to what is probably the main reason I didn't sign the petition: it was just obsessed with the freaking dolphins, and it completely ignored the worse industry: shark fishing.  Even though the petition's page starts out by directly mentioning shark fin soup, which kills a huge amount of sharks annually, it's the freaking dolphins that matter.  They're as bad as dolphins, taking an industry that's explicitly about killing sharks in horrible ways and only being concerned with the way it affects the one animal that's popular and cute enough for them to stir up emotions over.  It's killing the dolphins that will ruin the ecosystem, folks! The shark killing is just a little side drama to add to this horrible dolphin tragedy!

You could probably say that sharks are my dolphins: everyone else seems to think they're just awful, but I love them to pieces, and the shark fishing industry just breaks my heart.  The dolphins are getting off easy here.  The article the petition links to even says, "the dolphin is hauled on board and almost immediately dies on the deck of the vessel."  Bleeding profusely, sure, but at least it dies right away.  Compare the poor sharks; a lot of the time, the fishermen don't even kill them before cutting off their fins, and they just toss them back into the water to sink down and die, eaten by predators or drowning without their fins propelling water through their gills.  And I can't think of any non-endangered shark breed subjected to finning off the top of my head.*  Great whites, endangered.  Hammerheads, endangered.  Mako sharks, probably endangered, I can't remember.  Whale sharks and basking sharks, both endangered and greatly sought after.  If the petition really cared about the plight of amazing creatures, it would be objecting to the entire practice of shark finning, not just the way shark finning also includes the death of "cute" animals like dolphins.
*Not to say that there aren't any; I can pretty much guarantee that there are plenty I'm not thinking of.  Just not off the top of my head, like I could with the dolphin thing.

But nope!  Hey Peru, get to work on saving those dolphins!  Those cutie-patooties are the real victims of the shark finning industry!  Assuming this is that magical unicorn petition that actually does have an effect on the real world, what would happen if it worked?  Peru would stop people from hunting dolphins, sure.  But it wouldn't stop anyone from hunting sharks, or from using a different animal as bait.  This petition isn't about animal rights, it's just about dolphins specifically, because people have decided that dolphins alone are worth protecting, but sharks aren't cute enough and "the ecosystem" is too broad and vague to have an emotional impact.  Look at Flipper!  He's always smiling!  Quick, pass a law!

Disclaimer: I'd just like to say, for the record, that I'm not an animal rights activist.  I strongly disapprove of animal abuse, and I love just about any critter that isn't a bug.  I absolutely think there should be laws in place to protect animals, especially endangered ones like the various sharks and dolphins mentioned in this post.  But I also approve of keeping animals as pets, and of using them when it's convenient, I approve of animal testing (look, it's sad that animals get hurt over it but I want to know that my makeup and medicine is safe for living things before it starts getting tested on humans!), and I approve of hunting.  In fact, I think hunting is more humane than animal farming.  At least my moose had the space and freedom to run around and live, and it's not stuffed to the moosey gills with steroids and hormones.  Basically, just because I disagree with how limited this petition is, don't lump me in with those Peta freaks.  

Update: I was on Wikipedia and remembered this article, so I looked up shark finning!  Turns out that of the dozen or so species listed on the page as being commonly fished, only about three of them are non-threatened: blacktips, blues, and tigers.  Well.  They're "near-threatened," so still not great that they are being hunted, but they're still classified as "least concern."  

Last Call at Christian's Bar

Well, I'm officially done with Christian's, the bar down on George Street.  I don't often go downtown, but when I do go it's usually with Ash, and when I do go we usually visit Christian's at least once, mostly because we're just amused by the irony of the name.  But it's really not worth it, all things considered.  It's a dark, small, crowded bar and everything there is way more expensive than it really ought to be.  Including forgetting your credit card, apparently.

But normal bullshit first.  For example, when I'm downtown I usually drink sourpuss in pepsi, because it tastes like candy and I am basically a child who is for some reason everyone thinks is an adult.  Every other bar on the street charges $5.25 for my usual drink.  Or at least I think they do.  Every bar I've been to and bought a drink at charges that much, at least.  Christian's, on the other hand, charges either $7.25 or $7.50, I can't remember because after the first time they told me the price I didn't buy another drink any time I went there.  I also have never used the ATM in the back of the bar, because it turns out they charge you ten fucking dollars to take money out there.  I've never seen a store's ATM charge over three dollars on the outside to use their machine, so that's just highway robbery, it's obviously just to take advantage of anyone too drunk or distracted to read the screen as they put their PIN in.  Especially since there's an ATM just a few feet from the door outside, not owned by the bar, that charges a perfectly normal small-change amount.

But still.  Even considering the complete lack of atmosphere and the naked profiteering, I'd still stop in with my friends now and then just to see if we can find a seat and hang out to talk before hitting another bar when we get thirsty again.  But after reading this news article, I'm so grossed out by the place I don't even want to do that any more.  Apparently someone left their credit card at the bar one night, and when they came back for it the next morning Christian's straight up robbed and insulted them by putting a 25% "idiot tax" on the card.  That bar officially gives zero fucks about their customers; that shit is credit card fraud at the very least, since the owner of the card obviously didn't authorize the charge, and the bar owner doesn't even act like it's a problem.  He implies that the multiple people coming forward talking about the 25% charge are lying by claiming it's a (still unauthorized, and thus thieving) 15% charge, never apologizes, and then acts like serving drinks that they pay for is some special service.  He goes on about how so many people cancel their cards so he's losing tons of money all the time over it, but like I was pointing out earlier, the bar is overcharging everything to a ridiculous degree (seriously, ten fucking bucks to use the damn atm wtf), and I haven't heard about any of the other bars (who don't act like thieving bastards and seem to get by well enough) complaining about this or charging people to get insulted for making an honest mistake.  I even asked a bartender friend whether or not this was a common thing, and he was all "Wtf no way!  That's insane, we NEVER do that, Christian's is the only place I've heard of that pulls that type of stunt."  If people cancelling their cards is such a huge problem for the bar, there's a pretty simple solution: stop accepting credit cards with open tabs!  Either it's worth it and you don't need to rip off innocent people for not pulling that shit, or it's not and why the hell would you do it.

Also dang, it has been like a whole month since my last post.  I gotta work on that.

Monster High: Ghoul Spirit Is Kind Of Shitty

While we were clearing out my grandmother's apartment after she moved into my aunt's house, I found a DS game called Monster High: Ghoul Spirit.

I know Monster High is some Bratz-style brand of sexy monster dolls for I guess the vast hordes of tween proto-goths who want sexy monster dolls?  Presumably the game belongs to one of my younger cousins, and I hung onto it so it wouldn't get lost and I could return it to her.  I got bored though, so I tried playing it.  It's...kind of shitty.  Not super-shitty, it's no E.T. The Extra Terrestrial or anything, but it has little to no value as a game.

I guess I should start with the most immediately obvious quality, the graphics: they kind of suck, even for a DS game.  I tried to find a decent screencap to show them properly, but the game is so boring and worthless nobody seems to have posted much about it.  I did nab this, which actually looks better than the game usually does:

Now, I can't really say the graphics are completely awful.  I mean, I've seen worse graphics.  Monster High: Ghoul Spirit is probably roughly on par with Nostalgia in that respect, or maybe even a little better than Nostalgia (Nostalgia was pretty bad).  But when this screencap example is the very highlight of the game's graphics, it's...not good.  There was one character who was supposed to look like a total mess, with bad frizzy hair and an ugly outfit and one of the quests was to get her looking nice again.  But I didn't realize that she was supposed to look like a mess until I finished that quest and her sprite transformed into the "pretty" version.  I don't know if it's because I never actually looked at her or if it's because all of the characters are so jagged and awkward I can't tell the difference between the ones that are supposed to be pretty and the ones that aren't.  I also don't know if it's something to blame on the graphics or something to blame on the character designs.  Maybe both.  Speaking of character designs, I just have to say something about the general look of the series.  I know it's not original and everyone has said it before me, but dang, these monster girls are freaking gangly.  And long.  You could probably have a literal skeleton as a character and she'd be able to share clothes with the rest of the characters because you physically cannot make them skinnier than this.  And I'm pretty sure they've all got horribly broken and deformed legs.  How does this poor thing walk on those twisty stilts?  Each girl is technically a different type of monster, but really they're all variations on the horrifying Lankyleg Ganglebeast

It's sad that those boots are the second most horrifying thing about her legs.

But I should at least try to stick to game-specific criticisms. One thing that's definitely bad in this is the map.  The school you're in is so bland-looking that it's hard to figure out where you are just by the surroundings, so I mostly used the map to get around.  Unfortunately, the map is not actually an accurate floor-plan of the school.  The game designers thought it was more important to make the school coffin-shaped on the map rather than make a map that could accurately tell you where you are.  Or, you know, make the school actually coffin-shaped, for some reason.  If that was so important to them, I don't know why they didn't just draw the map first and then design the school to its specifications, but whatever, it's a stupid game and it's obvious that nobody actually cared.  I can't tell you how many times I went into the wrong room because the map told me I was on other side of the corridor.  The school is pretty small and bland-looking, which is kind of weird.  Not really the small part, I guess, since there's only like ten students, but you'd think a trying-to-be-coffin-shaped school of monster people would look more interesting.

So it's mediocre graphics and a shitty map.  Not a great start, but it can redeem itself with the actual gameplay, right?  Maybe it's an okay game after all!  But...no.  Sorry.  Not a chance.  The gameplay is crap.  The entire game is random fetch-quests and pointless busywork.  One particularly egregious example was the "storyline" (I guess? I wouldn't call it a story arc, but it's as close as this game managed to get) about how the zombie girl was kicked out of class for "mumbling" but the real problem was that the teacher doesn't understand zombie language.  Well, okay, I guess in that case you go to the headmistress and explain what happened and make sure that the problem gets documented and dealt with?  Nope!  You talk to the zombie girl instead and she tells you that she wants to make sure the teacher learns zombie language by reading a zombie language book.  So she sends you to her locker to get the zombie language book, then you bring the book to her so she can highlight the important parts, then you go find a custodian's outfit, then you bring it to her so she can change into her disguise, then you go to the "creepateria" to get a soda, then you bring it to her so she can explain the next step where you bring it to the classroom and pour it on the floor so she can clean it up as...a distraction, I think?  For some reason it is vitally important that you find a custodian's outfit for the zombie girl and then pour a soda on the ground.  Then you go into the empty classroom and leave the book on the desk.  That's it, right?  The end of the quest?  Nope!  Next you get a text message from somebody else, so you go find them and they tell you to go find the audiobook of the book you just left on the teacher's desk.  So you bring them the audiobook, and they tell you to go put it in the teacher's headphones.  Or mp3 player.  Apparently the two are interchangeable.  So you go do that, and wonder why you're wasting your time like this.  Then you go leave that on the teacher's desk.  But you're not done yet!  You get another text, and suddenly someone else has an idea!  You should make a potion that magically makes people understand languages!  So you go all over school collecting the potion ingredients (I think -- I vaguely remember doing something like this, but I'm not entirely sure. I tried to double-check by looking up a walkthrough, but none seem to exist, and I'm certainly not going to play the game again just to check, so let's just assume I'm remembering correctly), then you have to go to the Mad Science Lab to make some sort of potion with them, then you have to find whoever sent you on this quest so you can give them the potion so they can drug the teacher with it and the teacher will suddenly know the zombie language and everything will be solved!  For the third time!  That was very long and complicated, wasn't it?  Basically, you do a fetch-quest to fix the problem, but you're immediately sent on a second, completely unnecessary part to the fetch-quest to solve the same problem you just solved, then the final part of the fetch quest is to render the first two needlessly long fetch-quests unnecessary by using a potion to make the teacher understand zombie without needing either the book or the audiobook.  What the hell.  That was a waste of a waste of my time.

I feel like I've wasted your time just making you read that, so here is a hopefully useful "life hack" to try and make up for it.

There's a relationships element to the game, too.  I don't see the point of it, though.  You seem to max out every character's affection for you by completing the quests, and since the quests are the only things to do in the game, you don't have any other options.  You can't progress and do another quest until you've finished the one you're on (or at least I think so, this is another thing I only half-remember) and there aren't extra things to do like give gifts or anything.  So basically, play the game in the only way you can and you'll automatically max everything out and win the popularity contest at the end of the game.  Yaaaaay.  If that's how it works, why bother keeping track of affection at all?

Overall it was a tremendously dull game.  In fact, it was so boring that I forgot I was writing this post three-quarters of the way through and left it in my drafts for like, a year, until I found and finished it today.  I've since given the game back so I can't replay it to familiarize myself with it again to have anything fun to say at the end of the post.  Instead, I'll just point out how the series has desecrated The Phantom Of The Opera by having a character named Operetta, who is somehow the Phantom's teenage daughter from the Deep South, complete with a Southern American accent and obsession with .... ugh ... country music.  Not that there's anything inherently wrong with country music, until you try to mix it up with the fucking Phantom.  She is the single worst interpretation of anything related to Phantom of the Opera.  Just look at it, it's horrifying.

"AN MAH MYOOZIC CAN WHUP Y'ALL'S MYOOZIC!"

 (PLEASE PLEASE KILL ME NOW)

Star Trek Next Gen: Up The Long Ladder

So I'm slowly working my way through Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I'm almost done the second season.  I just finished the eighteenth episode, "Up The Long Ladder," and...wow.  Just wow.

STAR TREK, WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT.  THAT SHIT IS MESSED UP.

So the episode starts off with some dinky little subplot where Worf gets Klingon measles and has tea with the doctor.  If that counts as a subplot, because that's pretty much all that happens.  It's also the most tolerable part of the episode, so...yeah.

The rest of the episode is about the forgotten human colony they find and rescue from a bad case of splody planet or soemthing, a colony of the most cliche stereotypes of Irish people you can imagine.  Complete with Irish accents, despite being isolated from Earth and other humans for three hundred years.  They're a bunch of redheaded farmers who don't know anything about computers or science and the men are all portrayed as lazy drunks and the women are sharp-tongued and complain about how they have to do all the work and they've got sheep and pigs and goats and assorted barnyard animals and use equipment like looms and wear homemade peasant-type clothing, and it's basically just a really offensive Irish stereotype and what the hell Star Trek, I thought you were supposed to be progressive.  The sharp-tongued redhead daughter who's dad keeps trying to marry her off to random dudes wears a petticoat.  A petticoat, for crying out loud.

Then it turns out there's ANOTHER forgotten colony!  So they go check that out and it's from the same group who went up, but they're not Irish because they're scientifically advanced!  So they speak with normal American accents and have basically the same lifestyle as the crew on the Enterprise.  Except they reproduce by cloning!  You see, all but five of the original settlers died in a crash or something and the survivors were scientific peoples, so they just started cloning and at first they stopped people from inbreeding through drugs and punitive laws, and "now, after three hundred years the entire concept of sexual reproduction is a little repugnant."  Because that's how people work, right? Just put up a bunch of laws and stuff and eventually nobody ever wants sex ever.  But blah blah reproductive fading copy of a copy blah blah, and they need new blood!  So they're all "Hey you, want to give some dna?" and Riker is all "Oh fuck no, I'm too special!" and Picard is all "Yeah probably everyone's gonna feel like that so I won't ask around or anything."  So they steal some DNA from Dr. Crusher and Riker in a really ridiculous, needlessly dramatic scene.  And when Crusher and Riker find out they go kill their clones and the clone dude is all "What choice did we have, you wouldn't help!  We have a right to survive!" and the show is all "huh maybe they have a weird point here" and I'm like THE FUCK THEY DO.  They have a right to exist, they have a right to reproduce themselves, but they do not in any way have a right to impose on other people.  Some random dude who wants to make sure his bloodline survives doesn't have the right to force a woman to carry his baby against her will, that's just a more extreme version of what the clone people are trying to pull here.

So the crew goes back to the ship or something and have a meeting and go "What these dudes need is breeding stock....oh!  We've got those homeless Irish assholes in the hold!  Let's shotgun wedding this shit."  Not "Let's present the option to both cultures while informing the rest of the Federation that there's a Class M planet that could use some settlers."  Just straight up "bully these homeless people who've just had everything torn away from them into living with these assholes who have no sense of respect for other people and who clearly look down on them, but need them because their society is collapsing due to a lack of a genetically diverse population."  Then they go into a private meeting, just the two male leaders and Picard's group, and after a bit of disagreeing they finally settle on WHAT THE FUCK STAR TREK THIS BULLSHIT IS CREEPY AS HELL.

Ahem.  Sorry.  They settle on a plan where the Irish group settle the clone planet and monogamy is illegal now because we need lots of babies, so every woman, both the poor Irish women who have just had their entire lives ripped up and are thrown into chaos and the clone women who have a culture of finding sexual reproduction absolutely repugnant, have to have at least three kids by three different men.  None of these women, who's reproductive future is being decided on by a group of men and one doctor, are present for this meeting or have any say about what's going on.  We don't see the reaction of the clone women (who are probably gonna end up rape victims, because none of them actually want sex but they will be pressured into becoming broodmares by the (male) leader of their society), but we see one Irish woman's reaction.  She's the one who's had her father try to marry her off to every man he sees.  She's understandably furious that her father and Picard went around making all these grand plans without ever asking if the women would be willing to play along, and Picard is all "wtf you said you wanted a new home, here it is!"  She goes "Yeah, but I never said I wanted to be Eve!"  Because seriously who would willingly sign up for that bullshit.  Picard is all "Fine, I'll just take you to the nearest star base so you'll have lost not only your home, but your family and friends and entire culture as well."  Because that's not coercive at all.  Suddenly she has a complete 180 on her opinion and goes "Wait, that dude looks important.  He's rich, isn't he?  And I can have three husbands?  Ok, that makes up for everything," and wanders off to hit on people.

What the ever-loving fuck is going on here?!  Granted, a lot of Star Trek episodes are pretty doofy, but this is the first time I've been literally repulsed by the events of an episode.  It's like they tried to think of every possible way to make this episode as creepy as they could, or something.  And they put a cheerful comic-relief/happy-ending gloss over it just so you could tell that they gave zero shits about what a bullshit society they just created.  I thought Star Trek was supposed to represent some futuristic utopia, but here they throw this super-dark, seriously fucked up situation in our face and pretend it's all sunshine and rainbows.  Fuck, show.  Don't do that.

If You Love Musicals....

Give Jekyll and Hyde a miss.  Specifically the David Hasselhoff version, which is the only one I've seen, but I assume they're all varying degrees of terrible.  I literally just finished watching it in the past five minutes, and already I can't remember a single tune from it.  I watched it thinking, "Okay, so this isn't great, but so far I've been able to find something to enjoy in every musical I've seen.  Surely sooner or later I'll hit that one guilty-pleasure song that makes the whole thing worth it, right?"  Nope, never happened.  Once or twice a song would start with one or two notes that would make me pay attention because hey, that's sort of good! Except then it would immediately go terrible again.  The lyrics were really lazy (at one point they rhymed "doorstep" with "your step," how the hell did they get away with that), and the performance was....well.  I did enjoy the first transformation scene, but not because it was good.  I enjoyed it the same way I enjoy watching clips of The Room on Youtube.  Which is not a compliment, to say the least.

I would continue with other vaguely-reviewish-words, but I don't have much else to say.  Like I said, I only just finished watching it, so I haven't had time to dwell on anything or come up with fancy reasons why not to like it.  Just...it's bad.  That's all I got.  The Hoff's acting is ridiculous, everybody else is bland, flat and forgettable, the "romance" sub plots between Jekyll, the orange lady and that stripper chick are completely lacking in...everything, really.  And I had a really hard time suspending my disbelief.  Like, I'm familiar enough with the story, as everyone is, to know that Jekyll's potion thing will work, but while he was petitioning the...medical board, I guess?  To let him begin human trials, it sounded so ridiculous that even I was going, what the hell are you on dude, this is not science. I would have agreed with the medical board that he's off his rocker and shouldn't get to do his experiment, but they were all like "You're going against God's will, you're crazy!" instead of "This is the most ridiculous theory I've ever heard, I thought you were a doctor for goodness sakes, what half-rate hotel of a school would give you a medical degree?"  I didn't care about any of the characters.  Not the stripper lady who got killed at the end, not the bride lady who...didn't?  I don't think she did, I was pretty bored by then so I wasn't watching all that closely.  Overall, it might have been the worst musical I've ever seen.  Even worse than West Side Story.  Even that had one or two songs going for it, this thing was just completely forgettable, all the way through.

Well, that's it, that's pretty much all I can think of right now.  Maybe in a day or two when I've had a chance to let the experience stew in my brain for a bit I'll have something more clever to say, but it's all I've got for now.  Bad musical, did not enjoy, do not recommend.

Subeta

As far as I can tell, Subeta is just a knockoff of Neopets.  Like completely.  Every step of the tutorial walkthrough was exactly the same as stuff you'd do on Neopets.  Anyway, I found it because I was fucking around online and got linked to a forum discussion about...something, I can't remember what, on this website Subeta.  I made an account because the little avatars were pretty cute, but mostly because I was bored with nothing better to do and the site promised games somewhere and possibly interesting conversations in the forums.

I never got around to playing any games on it, though.  I was in the middle of a walkthrough and doing some quests, where the NPC was looking for some random items and I had to find them in the shops.  I did a few before I realized that doing shit on this website was worse than doing nothing at all and closed the window.  The fetch-quests were annoying, but it was just really irritating to do a shop search and find something that sells for like five hundred coins or whatever in the regular shop, and see literally all of the user-owned stores selling it for over ten thousand.  Apparently everybody on that site is a greedy idiot, so there isn't even any point in going on the forums.

Well done, Subeta.  You are a direct ripoff of a site that came out in the nineties, and ten minutes of dicking around in your tutorial walkthrough showed me that a.) nothing on your website was original enough to be worth dicking around with in the first place, and b.) you are full of terrible people who overcharge basic crap to a hilarious degree and think the other users are actually dumb enough to buy it!  Good job selling the site to newbies, Subeta!  I'm off to delete my browser history for the past hour so I can forget about you completely and never come back.

Why I Won't Rant About The Big Bang Theory

I wrote a ridiculously long post complaining about the most recent episode of The Big Bang Theory.  I had a big long multi-paragraph rant on how irritating the characters have become and how the romantic pairings are awful and filled with misery and how the jokes are old and un-funny (Howard's mom is fat!  Ha!  Sheldon is a sexist douche!  Ha! Ha!  Leonard is clingy and smothering and his relationship with Penny will destroy them both!  HA!).  Then I realized that obsessing about the show that I watch when I want to turn my brain off is doing it wrong.  Also, this show has really gone on for too long, it needs to end already.  TV shows are not meant to go on indefinitely.  Half of the problems I had with the most recent episode wouldn't have been a problem in the first season before the show had so much history and character development to trip over.

Anyway, I deleted that ridiculously long post, because I realized that it's stupid to try to analyze the characters on a sitcom.  No sitcom character can ever be anything less than awful, because early in the show's run awful characters are more fun to watch, and late in the show's run everyone has been Flandarized to hell and they're tripping over so much history and backstory nearly everything they do means they're being a dick.  Like Leonard, pulling exactly the same thing on Penny as Stephanie pulled on him in season two, and he doesn't seem to remember at all how uncomfortable that made him -- even saying something along the lines of "If you don't want her to move in why don't you just tell her that" to Sheldon, completely forgetting what a useless wad he was in that episode and how he even tried to beg Penny into telling Stephanie to back off for him.  Without that history, Leonard's behaviour is naive and clingy, but not that bad.  With that history, he is a complete tool.

Oh jeez, here I go ranting again.  This is a hard habit to break, let me tell you.  But I really should, because seriously, I'm watching this crap because I want something stupid and funny to make me laugh and to stop me thinking for twenty minutes.  If I then spend forty minutes writing a rant, and then another fifteen minutes on a half-rant about not ranting after that?  It is clearly not doing it's job.  Maybe I should just watch The Walking Dead instead, at least that show is fun to hate.

Oh my god Andrea, can you get any more awful.

I tried to read Kilala Princess yesterday.

It's pretty bad.  Kilala Princess is a Tokyopop manga licensed by Disney about a girl named Kilala who is weirdly into Disney.  And this is coming from a Disney fan.  She's almost obnoxiously obsessed with it.  She has a Mickey Mouse patch sewn into her uniform, and when the teacher calls her on it the idiot acts like she doesn't realize the teacher is mad, because omg Mickey is so cool!  She sees a dude asleep and goes "I should kiss him, maybe he is a prince!"  She has a weird cartoon sidekick that the manga tries to pretend is a pet mouse, but seriously, that's not what mice look like.  You're not fooling me.  I've seen Mickey Mouse.

It doesn't even have gloves!

Also, her school has some weird princess fetish.  Part of the plot is how the school has a Princess Contest where one student gets to wear the super special school tiara, because what school doesn't have that?  And Kilala's best friend Erica is the favourite to win the Princess Contest and become the school princess, and I really don't think whoever wrote this knows how princesses work.  Like, at all.  Princesses are not just ladies who wear tiaras and pretty dresses, and princesses aren't chosen by elections and contests.  Unless the prize for a contest is to marry a prince, in which case, yeah, okay, maybe that would work.  But that's not how it's set up in the manga, so fuck all of you that's not how princesses happen.

The series was described as "Kingdom Hearts for girls," because apparently girls hated Kingdom Hearts.  It's about Kilala running around meeting Disney Princesses and hanging out with some dude who's looking for the "seventh princess" who is clearly Kilala but I guess we're not supposed to realize it even though she can make the magic "tiara" (which is not a tiara, it is a ridiculous tiny crown, and it looks almost as stupid as Twilight Sparkle's Element of Harmony tiara) do magic stuff in the very first chapter. The author clearly does not think much of the cognitive capabilities of the readers.

So I think what happens, is the plot is a half-hearted Kingdom Hearts ripoff where the main character has to go hang out with Disney characters because of reasons.  I'm saying I think, because I could not actually bring myself to read much past the first part, with Snow White.  It was just that irritating.  Apparently it was after the events of the movie, except Snow White was still hanging out in the dwarf cottage cleaning and cooking because...nostalgia, I guess?  And the evil Queen comes back to life, because magic!  And then she turns into her ugly form because...because she did that in the movie!  Who cares if she did it for a specific reason in the movie, in the manga she becomes an old hag in between panels just so she can be an ugly villain.  And she makes another poison apple to threaten Kilala with!  Except, it's not actually poison, it won't make her sleep or die or anything, oh no.  Instead, it will make her.....UGLY!  That's right, the evil Queen who tried to hire a woodsman to cut out her daugher's heart and then poison her, only wants to make the main character ugly here.  Except not "only" ugly, she described her ugly-making apple as so much worse than her sleeping-death apple, and then agrees to trade the magic tiara of magic in order to get Snow White to eat the apple.  Because being ugly is worse than death.  I know that Disney's always leaned on that mindset, but it's so jarring that they'd outright say it like that.  It's around here where I gave up on trying to read this.  It's just a really shitty story that relies on the popularity of Disney characters to make up for its lack of...well, lack of pretty much everything that makes a good story.  Kilala has no characterization other than her obsession with Disney, for example.  And the plot, from what I can tell, seems to be a bland shallow thing that only exists in order to throw Kilala into the worlds of random Disney Princesses, because they're the only reason anyone would read this crap.

Also, it looked really weird, with one character being your average shojo girl with generic anime characteristics, and the other being fucking Snow White.  Even considering that the anime-style shit was inspired by old Disney cartoons, it looks really odd juxtaposed like that in the story.  The Disney Princesses are all done in a fairly similar style to one another -- if you want to make a comic about a girl who meets them all, why can't you draw her in the style that would fit?  But I guess that would take more effort than just drawing another Shojo Magical Girl who looks the same as every other Shojo Magical Girl ever created, with a slightly different hairstyle.  Not different as in, it's unique and visually distinctive or anything, oh god no.  Just different as in, you can tell at a glance that she isn't Sailor Moon, and that's all you need.  I'm honestly not usually annoyed by anime and manga characters all following the same style, particularly when I realize that what I'm reading or watching is pretty deep into the established genres -- like Kilala's huge shiny eyes and disproportionately big head (which is part of why the ridiculously tiny crown-not-tiara looks so fucking stupid, it's a dinky little spike-circle perched on top of a giant balloon with eyes) are your average shojo-style.  I've seen character designs more original and not so fused to the genre styles, but I've also seen ones that are much worse.  Kilala is strictly average.  And the art's pretty good, actually.  I mean, it doesn't stand out as really amazing or anything, but compared to, say, the Labyrinth manga, it's fine.  But when it's right next to Disney's Princess styles.....eh.  It doesn't look right.

Anyway.  This is getting long, so I should wrap it up: Kilala Princess is kind of shit, and you should not waste your time reading it unless you enjoy making fun of things that are kind of shit.  Which I actually enjoy a lot, but I still probably won't try to read this again unless I'm really, really bored.  So you should probably not waste your time with it.  Unless of course you're so obsessed with Disney Princesses that you'll mindlessly devour whatever cheaply made, overpriced merchandise Disney slaps a tiara on, in which case you are exactly the demographic this manga is aimed at.  So...good for you, I guess?  You can read it here and save your money for another Rapunzel colouring book or something.  Have fun.

The Mob Doctor was cancelled? It can't be!

I simply cannot believe that The Mob Doctor has been cancelled.  What the hell, Fox?  It's impossible.  It's inconceivable!  Why on Earth did it take them so long?

To recap: The Mob Doctor is (was) a new medical(ish) drama(ish) that Fox trotted out this year.  When I first heard about it, I really, really, really wanted it to be good.  And on paper it has so much going for it!  It's about a woman who's a resident at a prestigious hospital, but by night moonlights as a Mob Doctor to pay off her debt to the mafia.  How rad is that!?

Unfortunately, it was not good.  At all.  It was kind of terrible, actually, and it was pretty obvious from the first episode that it wouldn't make it to a second season.  And it made me  so sad.  Not only did this show that sounded like it could be awesome turn out to be not-awesome, it wasn't even entertainingly terrible.  It was just really bland and boring.  When I realized that it was not the cool show I wanted it to be, I decided to watch it anyway, hoping that it would be bad enough to be fun ranting about on my blog and to friends.  But it didn't even have the decency to do that!  It was just....boring.  And bland.  And everybody was stupid.  And so even though I wanted to watch it despite not liking it (I had not realized how ridiculous that sounds until just now) I couldn't even do that.  I don't think I managed to get past the fourth episode.

So in short, The Mob Doctor was a vaguely terrible TV show that was impossible to enjoy no matter how hard you tried and I am kind of impressed that Fox let it go on for a full thirteen episodes.   The pilot made it clear that it was barely watchable.

In short: bad TV show is cancelled to the surprise of no one ever and I still need to find a good show to watch. Or just a bunch of good movies.  Whatever.  Maybe I'll finally get around to watching Reservoir Dogs, I've been meaning to check it out ever since I finally saw Pulp Fiction a month ago.

Live Albums Are The Worst Albums

I like listening to music, and I like going to live shows.  But I haaaate live albums.  It's the worst of both worlds.  The whole point of going to shows is so you can listen to the band in person and have a real experience.  It's fun even if you can't make out any lyrics.  And the whole point of listening to the album is to listen to the music clearly so you can really hear it and enjoy the whole thing.  But with live albums it's like, what's even the point?  You don't get the "live show" experience, and all the songs are filled with the sound of the crowd, and frequently in the popular songs the artist will stop singing and let the crowd sing.  This is awesome....when you're at the show singing along.  When you're at home and you just want to listen to the song, it's just really annoying.  Plus, it ruins softer, sad-ish songs that are supposed to be quiet.  The whole song will be undercut with people in the crowd cheering and shouting, and at the end of the quiet song they applaud and cheer and you GO DEAF FROM A CROWD OF PEOPLE SCREAMING THROUGH YOUR EARBUDS.  WHAT WAS THAT?  I CAN'T HEAR YOU BECAUSE I AM DEAF NOW.  SORRY.  I THINK MY EARS ARE BLEEDING.  I SHOULD PROBABLY GO TO A DOCTOR OR SOMETHING.

Neil Armstrong is dead.

It has begun.

DUN DUN DUNNNNN

Todd Atkin is why America is terrible.

Well, one of the reasons why America is terrible, at least.

I was in the car with dad and heard over the radio that some American politician said that a rape victim's body naturally prevents her from becoming pregnant.  What?  No, really, what??  Seriously America, there is something wrong with you.

So I looked it up when I got home, turns out it's even worse than I thought!  Apparently it's only "legitimate" rape victims who are given this magical Rape Science pregnancy prevention.  And also this dude is a completely terrible person.  Seriously, what the hell is wrong in America.

Even setting down that somehow this is a popular political stance, that rape victims shouldn't get abortions because baaaaabiiiieeees -- why is somebody this fucking stupid allowed to be a politician in charge of creating laws.  Oh my god.  I'm literally stunned speechless by this.  Not only that somebody would be this completely terrible as a human being, but that somebody would be this completely fucking ignorant.  It's like, does this guy even realize that facts are actually a thing that have to be real, or does he think that if he thinks it really really hard it becomes true?

Now I'm not saying Canada is perfect in every single way and none of our politicians are dumb or bad. I mean, look at Stephen Harper, he's a total dirtbag.  But this guy just comes off as being, I don't know, evil or something.  Seriously, what goes wrong in your head to make you think that any of this is an acceptable opinion for a decent human being to hold, much less for a decent human being to say out loud on television in a position of authority?  Because you know, there's the whole abortion/conception/babies thing, and then there's just being a terrible terrible person who hates women and doesn't seem to think of them as real people but instead as babymaking boob-wearers.

What?  Oh no.  Nonono.  My sister just told me that he's a member of the United States House Committee of Science, Space and Technology.

Fuck you very much, eBuddy.

So eBuddy is an annoying piece of crap, did you know that?

It's not that it's a bad program per se. I used it all the time in college because I didn't have a computer of my own and the only ones I had access to were the school computers, so no MSN.  eBuddy did the job well enough then.  If it were just the quality of the program I wouldn't really mind it at all.  I mean, I didn't really like it, but I didn't hate it then like I do now.

See, it's not the program itself that I hate.  What I hate is how every time I have to use eBuddy, if I'm not on my laptop or if MSN is being a douche, eBuddy takes it upon itself to change my display picture and status message.  And it never said anything about doing that.  So I didn't realize at first, since half the time MSN won't load display pictures for me, that I was going around for a week or two with the eBuddy logo instead of my picture, and that my previous status message had been changed to promote eBuddy.  When I clued in, I was...less than pleased, let's say.

Putting it simply: I don't appreciate being taken advantage of like that.  I didn't sign up to become a walking advertisement for a service I'm not particularly fond of.  But the kicker is, I wouldn't have minded if they had just said something when I signed in!  I can totally get them saying "Because we provide this service for free, we have changed your display picture and included a link to our site in your status message in exchange for providing you with an alternative to MSN" or something.  But by not asking, and by not even alerting me that they've changed my visible information, eBuddy seriously pissed me off.  I've started avoiding eBuddy entirely, using other MSN alternatives when I need them, and my status message for the past month has been about how irritating eBuddy is.  So, thanks to eBuddy sneak-changing my status and image, not only did they not get the advertisement that I wouldn't object to giving them had they just asked (or even just had the decency to let me know!) to getting negative publicity because I'm complaining about how terrible they are every time I see them.

So like my MSN status message says: I am not using eBuddy, because eBuddy can go suck a rotting hippo cock.  I'll stick with Skype and Beejive for MSN replacements.

Turns out it's hard to find photos of rotting hippo cocks online, but you get the picture.

"Jesus Take The Wheel" is terrible.

I just heard "Jesus Take The Wheel" for the first time.  Fucking assclowns, that's a stupid song.

Basic gist: lady is driving to her parent's house for Christmas, running low on "faith and gasoline."  I would honestly be more worried about the gasoline, unless you're driving the Popemobile.  So she's driving with her kid in the backseat, low on gas, she's not paying attention to the road, she's speeding, and it's a snowy night. And somehow, this leads to her "spinning on a thin black sheet of glass" because whaaaaaaat, a shitty driver loses control of her car?  No fucking way!!!

And then the stupid part comes.  She's so scared and terrified that she doesn't even have time to cry!  Though it takes like a second or less to yelp when you find your car spinning off into a ditch, but whatever, it's been established that her reflexes are shit.  She does, however, have time to "throw her hands up in the air" and beg Jesus to take the wheel.

OH MY GOD WHY IS THIS WOMAN ALLOWED TO DRIVE.  Pro tip, when you lose control of your car do not let go of the wheel you fucking titshit.  The magical sky fairies will not intervene when you consciously allow a bad situation to get worse because you say "fix it for me I fucked up!"

"It was still getting colder when she made it to the shoulder," what?  No, seriously, what?  Is this a Day After Tomorrow situation where the temperature drops significantly in two seconds and flash-freezes the country?  Is that why she can't drive, her tires are coated in frozen Astroglide or something?  Anyway, whatever.  Car comes to a stop on the side of the road, lady's all "holyshitJesus!" and starts praying or something.  Apparently losing control of her car is a metaphor for the rest of her life which is equally shit.  So she goes "well fuck, my life is miserable!  Fix it for me please Jesus" because the accident taught her that she doesn't have to do anything and the magical sky fairies will make everything better if she just sits back and changes nothing and lets everything get worse.  Or something.  Oh, she says she has to change her life.  Wait, that's exactly the opposite of what you're saying when you ask Jesus to take the wheel!  Oh my god she's an idiot as well as a bad driver.

Final point, the phrase "she threw her hands up in the air" is ridiculous.  When I try to imagine that scene, all I can think of is either "She's ragequitting her car crash" or this:

PS: TK, if you seriously make "Jesus take the wheel" a popular saying, I will surround your house with wind chimes.