Notable WNY Media: Wonderfalls

So, here’s an interesting thing I learned in my new media adventure looking for all media related to Western New York: Tim Minear once produced a show that took place at Niagara Falls. And yes, I DO mean THAT Tim Minear. The very same Tim Minear who was buddied up with Joss Whedon to create Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of the greatest shows of all time. The very same Tim Minear who again buddied up with Joss Whedon to create Firefly, probably the greatest CANCELLED show of all time. And what came of him this time was another gem of a television show… That got cancelled long before its time. Because it aired on Fox. Yes, that would be the very same Fox that famously aired Firefly completely out of sequence, shuffled around the starting time, and ultimately cancelled the show still having not ran four episodes. And that was more or less the same path taken by this show, Wonderfalls. Okay, it’s less. Firefly and Wonderfalls produced almost the same number of episodes. Firefly made four episodes which didn’t see the light until the DVD package. Wonderfalls made NINE. From a 13-episode series. Yes, you math whizzes, that means Fox only ever aired four episodes of Wonderfalls. Fox hates Tim Minear.

I should also mention that the two people credited with the proper creation of Wonderfalls are Bryan Fuller and Todd Holland. Holland is best known as a director. He’s done a few movies, but as his best-known movie was the 90-minute Super Mario Bros. 3 ad with Fred Savage known as The Wizard, it’s best not to talk about that. His acclaim comes from the episodes of The Larry Sanders Show and Malcolm in the Middle that he directed. Fuller’s resume is as infallible as Joss Whedon’s. Fuller is responsible for Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, Hannibal (which may take place in the same universe as Wonderfalls), American Gods, and Star Treks Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Discovery. Judging from all these resumes, you may be able to venture a guess as to what kind of show Wonderfalls is: It’s a fantasy. It’s a very smart and creative fantasy too. It has memorable characters, creative plots, witty dialogue, and lots of stuffed animals who communicate with the main character. It also has some commendable Western New York connections: Yes, it takes place in Niagara Falls, New York, even though all the setup shots of the Falls are clearly from the Canadian side. (Face it, they wouldn’t look as good from the side of the Horseshoe, even from the Cave of the Winds.) Buffalo native William Sadler plays one of the main characters. Even the accent used by lead actress Caroline Dhavernas is a great approximation of a typical WNY accent, although she does lay it on a bit thick. (It’s harder than my own unapologetically thick WNY Lakes accent, which is really saying something.)

The show revolves around Jaye Tyler, a 24-year-old Brown University graduate who doesn’t give two shits about having graduated from an Ivy League school. She seems pretty content with what she’s currently doing with her life, which is working at a cheesy souvenir ship called Wonderfalls in Niagara Falls, New York. One thinks of Daria when it comes to Jaye, but Daria was capable of acting on her own conscience. Jaye needs to be pushed by plastic talking animals. Yeah, that’s the idea of Wonderfalls. One day at the store, Jaye gets into an argument with a customer who tried to make a wax lion, but the lion comes out wrong. Later, Jaye takes a hit and gets knocked out. When she comes to, the wax lion suddenly starts talking to her and telling her to do things. Jaye’s initial response is to ignore the lion and think she’s losing her mind, but eventually she gives in, and she sees the lives of people around her start to get better.

As Jaye goes, more inanimate animals start talking to her: Lawn flamingos, a McGruff-like cardboard cutout of a cartoon crime dog, and a Totem pole are just a few of the things that spring to life and give the confused Jaye orders. And they won’t stop giving her orders until she takes the time to go out and follow them! And unlike a lot of regular examples of this trope, Jaye doesn’t try to keep the weird talking animals to herself. In fact, she talks about them to her family and friends at will – and sometimes against THEIR will – but they just don’t believe her! Her brother thinks she’s turning into some kind of divine messenger, her best friend thinks she’s holding back and will talk about it when she’s ready, and the hot bartender she likes simply accepts it as part of her charm.

Yeah, the episodes of Wonderfalls don’t revolve around typical episodic television concepts. In one, Jaye and her brother chase their house maid into Canada and learn that she’s not a French immigrant, but a native of Canada. Another is about Jaye making friends with a shut-in at the trailer park she lives in. In another episode, Jaye turns a 13-year-old boy away from the mail-order bride he ordered… Only for him to turn his attention to her. Since this was done back in the days of 20-episode seasons, you can’t go into Wonderfalls expecting an overly long and complex serial arc, and that’s to its advantage. (It’s actually to the advantage of every show in the pre-streaming era, but I won’t start on that.) Wonderfalls doesn’t demand your overt attention at all times, and it feels no pressure to shock you every 10 minutes. All it asks is that you enjoy spending time with its quirks, characters, and oddball settings. The lighthearted and comedic tone doesn’t leave you completely drained to the point where you have to set it aside after every episode for a breather.

That’s not to say there aren’t any overall story arcs in the show. They exist, but they’re not there to carry the show on its back. That means that, despite its short number of episodes, the final episode – “Caged Bird” – was able to give one of the major story arcs an emotional conclusion satisfying enough to feel like a proper way to close the series itself. (More parallels to Firefly!) For a series that was cancelled after only 13 episodes, there’s a tight lot of character development packed into it – enough to leave you wanting to see more of it, and wondering what inventive directions the show would go in. Apparently there were already plans drawn up for the second and third seasons; the second would have developed an arc with Jaye and a therapist she started seeing, while a third season would have had Jaye checking into a mental hospital. Like Firefly, a lot of interesting plots can now never be answered; questions about how her friendship with Mahandra would go, how her brother Aaron’s views on these talking animals develop, about sister Sharon’s sexuality and ability to keep it a secret, and if she’ll ever open up to Eric. It really, really sucks that we’re never going to get conclusions here. But it’s all we have to cement Tim Minear’s reputation as the inventive showrunner who keeps making great, creative shows that networks are afraid of.

Notable Buffalo Media: The Taqwacores

The Taqwacores is a film adaptation of a classic novel that lives in more infamy than one would expect of a novel with its roots. The novel was written by Michael Muhammad Knight, a native of Geneva (in Central New York, close to Syracuse) who clearly spent plenty of time in and around Buffalo. He reverted to Islam after reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as many reverts did) as a way of rebelling against his white supremacist old man. Unfortunately for Knight – and for far more reverts than most Muslim communities would ever dare acknowledge – he learned within a few years that Islam as his orthodox Sunni community practiced was much different than Islam as sold. The obvious contradictions between the two pissed Knight off, and he wrote The Taqwacores as a way of sending it off, publishing it at a print store as a photocopied rag and giving it out to anyone who asked. ISNA threw him out of their yearly convention in Chicago. But The Taqwacores managed to get picked up by Alternative Tentacles, a label known for distributing punk records, of all things. It made its way into the hands of a lot of young Muslims who shared his frustrations and anger, and a real punk music movement started springing up around it. Knight himself ultimately started to reexamine his faith after encouragement from other Muslim punks. He decided to stay Muslim, earning a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard and a Doctorate in Islamic Studies from the University of North Carolina. His journey of faith took him through the Muslim progressive movement, the Five Percent Nation, and Salafism. If anything, his journey has always been evolving and changing, but he seems to be secure of himself as a Muslim.

This is where I tell everyone that I’ve never read The Taqwacores. It’s not from a lack of desire, but a lack of opportunity. Oddly enough, for an author with such strong connections to Western New York, Knight’s books are damn near impossible to find there. While I found them in Chicago, I made a note of his name, but I didn’t get around to reading them while I was there. It wasn’t until Knight’s name happened to suddenly pop back into my head during a cursory skimming of Seattle Central that I finally picked up his work; but even then, The Taqwacores wasn’t available, so I made it up by reading Blue-Eyed Devil instead.

As far as work which prominently features Western New York goes, The Taqwacores doesn’t give the audience a lot to work with. Yes, the movie takes place in Buffalo, but it would be a mistake to call it a quintessential Buffalo movie. It could have taken place literally anywhere else and the message and theme would be just as strong. Knight seems to have picked out Buffalo because he wanted to add a location for a little background color and Buffalo happened to be the place he knew and had the most personal experience with. So if any people there reading this are watching it in hopes of shout-outs to Chippewa, chicken wings at La Nova, or the Bandits, they’re SOL. The Taqwacores takes place mostly in a single house, and outside shots are used sparingly, so the movie can almost get away with subbing out a shooting location. But the location finally gives itself away with scenes on flat rooftops and skate parks. Houses with flat roofs on which residents can get together are nearly nonexistent in Buffalo. Skate parks aren’t much of a thing there either, although that may have changed in the last few years. The Taqwacores mentions Buffalo by name a handful of times, but that’s it. Oh, and the part of Rabeya, the main woman character in the movie, is played by Noureen DeWulf – the wife of Sabres legend Ryan Miller. (DeWulf was raised as a Nizari Ismaili Muslim, a branch of Shia.)

The Taqwacores is seen mostly through the eyes of Yusuf Ali, who came to study engineering in Buffalo from the exotic, foreign land of… Syracuse. After spending his first year in the dorms, he decided he needed to be among his own people, so he moves into what he assumes will be a collective home full of standard-issue Muslims. It isn’t long before Yusuf learns that, rather than acting as the check he was looking for, his new housemates are forever on the verge of running down his dogma with their karma. The only person in the house who acts anything like Yusuf is Umar, but Umar makes it his personal mission to force The Quran’s morals on everybody, and he tries to intimidate the others. The others, though, just aren’t having it. Others in the house include Jehangir, who wears a red mohawk and plays a guitar; Ayyub, who rides a skateboard and never wears a shirt; Fasiq, a stoner with a head full of spikes; and Rabeya, who wears a full burqa (which she’s never seen without) but is as much a radical as can be other than that.

Yusuf can’t look in any direction without facing some sort of challenge to his religion, and what he goes through is reflective of the point where anyone on a genuine spiritual journey reaches the end of their rope. Everywhere he looks, there’s a temptation or a challenge. One scene early on has his housemates welcome him by taking him out for a beer. He meets a girl who likes him, and who he clearly likes back. But while most of the people living in the house have habits that would make traditional Muslims question their piety, the people who live there are good Muslims who are just wondering what their places are within Islam. Although they don’t wear it on the outside, religion appears important to everyone who lives inside the house, and this is shown when the residents turn one of its rooms into a masjid. Every week, they hold a proper Jummah, with everyone rotating turns to give the khutbah.

I don’t want to give off the impression of The Taqwacores being some pro-religious inspirational schlock, though. After all, Knight pecked it out when he was fed up and on the verge of his exit. It’s the vein of punk in it that rules the movie, present in almost every scene. So no, The Taqwacores doesn’t end with Yusuf’s positive reaffirmation and rediscovery of his faith. It doesn’t involve everyone in the house gradually coming into the light. It’s about people being punk in spite of Islam, not the other way around. And it’s punk, in its loud, brash, aggressive glory, that really dominates every scene and every set of The Taqwacores. With the exceptions of Yusuf and (possibly) Umar, the characters aren’t out to try to fit into the Muslim community. Chances are, the Muslim community already rejected them, and since that makes them discontented outliers, they’ve reacted by doing their best to shock it in return. And, of course, there’s the music. It’s hard to portray punk if you’re not playing the music. Not only does the movie feature a soundtrack with actual Taqwacore punk bands, but the residents of the house are all obsessed with the Taqwacore scene on the West Coast. The movie’s finale happens at a punk show that takes place right in the house basement.

Whenever The Taqwacores seems to be on the verge of celebrating or acknowledging the more powerful aspects of both punk and Islam, it pulls back. Remember, the original novel was written by a man who was questioning his commitment to Islam, so the movie takes an attitude toward it which is ultimately bittersweet. And while The Taqwacores definitely seems to be more favorable toward its punk side, the ending also brings that crashing to the ground as well. Punk isn’t seen as much of a fun alternative lifestyle, but more of what it’s supposed to be: A way of explicitly telling off other communities that refused membership to particular individuals. The Taqwacores isn’t big on closure or resolutions, and by the end, the main character is more full of questions than ever. Perhaps the movie’s idea can be summed up in one of the khutbahs given in the movie, in which one character talks about how his god is too big to be defined by the things he forbids. That very same sentiment was repeated word for word by Knight himself at the end of Taqwacore, the punk music documentary that sprung up about the real punk movement around the same time as this movie.

The 2023 One Percenter Gift Guide

Its been awhile since I’ve written up one of THESE things, but what the hell. It’s time to have a little fun again. It’s the fun-lovingest season of them all, you know, and you know what that means: Gift lists! Gift lists of every niche gift ever made for all of your niche buddies! And that means the inevitable lists which feature suggestions for the gift-giver on a budget! Folks who have been reading this blog since the beginning know that, until a few years ago, I too offered a list of good gifts for people who are on budgets. They also know MY budget lists feature gift suggestions for those whose budgets are particularly high! That’s right, I’m here to create a new list of the best damn gifts you could ever get your One-percenter friend! Price here is no object – after all, the true One-percenter has to pay people to hang out with them, so aren’t they actually paying for all this shit themselves anyway? Yes, your One-percenter friend may think they have everything, but there’s always something they don’t have and may not even realize they want until you give it to them!

HigherDose Infrared Sauna Blanket – $699

Saunas are in kind of a weird place. The common person sees them as a full-out luxury item or, at the very least, a bit of a splurge. Rich people see them as basic items which they hand out to commoners like candy and don’t bother with unless come with nice fixins, like dispensers for caviar and champaign. So why not get the One Percenter in your life something that combines a sauna with another item – say, a blanket – that’s also for commoners? (What, you think Jeff Bezos sleeps under a regular old comforter? HA!) The solution to this unique dilemma comes from HigherDose: An infrared sauna in blanket form! This nice little sleepytime aid boosts your body’s thermal temperature for increased circulation, enhanced relaxation, and glowing skin! Yes, the pedestrian price tag reeks of something your friend would expect you to buy on a whim when you just happened to be in the neighborhood, but One Percenters CAN be interested in novelty as well. Just as long as the regulars can’t afford that novelty.

Serendipity3 Golden Opulence Sundae – $1000

Finally, a treat for those who can always afford to treat themselves! This sucker is the dictionary definition of a rich dessert! It features three scoops of Tahitian vanilla ice cream drizzled with almonds, caviar, and gold leaf! Yes, gold leaf! I’m not sure if the gold leaf there is edible or not, but the big orchid that tops this extravagant runny confection is crafted from sugar and takes a whopping eight hours to construct! And hey, you think a masterwork like this is gonna be served in a dollar store bowl? No, One Percent ice cream is worthy only of One Percent dishes and silverware, so this sucker is served in a #350 Baccarat crystal goblet and eaten with an 18-carat gold spoon! It also has to be ordered 48 hours in advance, so when you send your One Percenter pal to the One Percenter restaurant, make sure you warn them to not get too indulgent with the wine too quickly.

Shumukh Perfume – $1.3 million

We don’t often think about the way we smell. But our musks follow us all the time, wherever we go, and they’re always sort of just wafting through our personal auras. If you think your One Percenter friend isn’t going to want to run around with an enchanting scent following them, letting all comers know how much better they are than the plebes? The world’s most expensive perfume is called Shumukh – Arabic for “deserving the highest.” And your One Percenter friend almost certainly thinks they’re the highest of all! Released by Spirit of Dubai Parfums, this perfume hails from the land of all rich things: The United Arab Emirates. It comes in a bottle nearly two meters tall and adorned with 3571 diamonds, as well as other bits of gold, silver, pearls, and topaz. Also, the spray is controlled by remote. Hey, spraying perfume right is work, so your One Percenter isn’t gonna do it!

Reinast Luxury Toothbrush – $4200

A good set of pearly whites is like a good smell: You may not think about it very much, but if a good One Percenter is to keep up appearances, it’s best to make sure they have a set their business partners can see themselves in! But they probably don’t want their servants to be pre-pasting an Oral-B from the dentist’s office. The Reinast Luxury Toothbrush is something your One Percenter will be stuck working manually; that’s right, it’s not even an electric toothbrush! But it’s made of titanium, and the company says its design, durability, and anti-bacterial coating make it worth the hefty price tag. And this thing IS built to last – the bristles are replaceable and screwed on for the times when they inevitably wear out. Your One Percenter can have a choice of four colors: Titanium, champagne, rose, and matte-black. If they complain about the lack of a motor to do the work for them, remind them that the lack of a motor makes it extra classic and that they have servants who can brush their teeth for them!

Jewel Royale Chess Set – $9.8 million

If your One Percenter has friends they like to bring over for a nice night of gaming, a good, old-fashioned board game is a good bet for them. And board games are very easy to spend money on – a good base game can run $60 easily, and an expansion or two could push the price into three figures. You know, pocket change. But if your One Percenter is into the classics, a good thing to buy them as a gift would be the Jewel Royale Chess Set. Manufactured by Boodles in 2005, this chessboard is made of solid gold and platinum and features nearly 1000 diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. The pieces are helical-shaped with the exception of the knights, which are realistic-looking horses. I realize it may be tempting to get them that gold Monopoly set for $2 million, but a good One Percenter won’t be impressed. They’re already doing that shit for real.

Swarovski Crystal Toilet – $128,000

Well, you know that your One Percenter needs a comfortable spot to do his business while they do their business. And although their shit may not be encrusted with crystal, that doesn’t mean their throne can’t be! This thing has 72,000 crystals on it! But if it’s a frills, bells, and whistles seat you’re looking for, this ain’t it; the Swavorski is meant to sit there and state “my owner is fucking RICH!” while it gets befowled.

Shenzhen Nongke Orchid – $200,000

Maybe your One Percenter has a green thumb. Or maybe they just like to call themselves gardeners because they have a ridiculously large greenhouse full of plants which they like to neglect like they do their spouses, kids, and employees. Either way, this plant isn’t natural – it was cultivated by a group of scientists who worked for eight years to get it down. And that was just in its creation! Should you choose to splurge on this for your One Percenter, they’ll have to wait four or five more years before it finally blooms. And the fragrance is said to be truly one of a kind, so most people will never get a chance to get a whiff of its unique scent. Let’s face it, your One Percenter will likely never get to sniff it either because they don’t give a shit about doing the garden work that comes with a houseplant. They’re just in it to brag about the cool and rare new plant you gave them.

Princess Diana Beanie Baby – $10,000

Your One Percenter believes themselves to be royalty anyway, so why not offer them a Beanie Baby created to commemorate royalty? Ah, Beanie Babies. Remember when they were a thing? With the distinctive purple color and the white rose embroidered on its chest, these particular Beanie Babies were launched right off the line back in 1997 as a tribute to Diana, the Princess of Wales. After her death that year, they were all snatched up and sold off as collectors’ items. And there’s nothing like the feeling of giving your One Percenter a stuffed tribute to a member of a royal family to make them wonder why no one makes stuffed toys as tributes to THEM.

Hock Goldloft Dumbbells – $164,000

HA! Let’s be honest: We all know your One Percenter isn’t an exercise hound. Why work out when you can pay people to do all the heavy lifting – both physical and colloquial – for you? These things are more there for art. One Percenters want them for the same reason they want all that other gold-embossed, useless shit: To show everyone how much better they are than you! These dumbbells are made with sustainably grown grenadilla wood, which is the same wood often used to make clarinets. Not that it makes much of a difference. It’s then treated with natural vegetable oil before being sanded for smoothness. The gold weight plates are cast in a German gold refinery and polished by hand. There’s about one kilogram of gold in each dumbbell.

Dirty Santa Candle – $70

For those who haven’t read one of these lists before, I usually close it out with a GOOP listing from Miss Paltrow. And this doesn’t look like an overwhelming price. But keep in mind, it’s for a fucking scented candle! That’s right, for the price of a Triple-A release video game, you too can own a candle from perfumer Douglas Little! This gives you an intoxicating fragrance of hickory, woodsmoke, and pine with a spike of warm clove and oakmoss, with a hint of leather for good measure. One wonders where the leather scent part comes from, seeing as how this thing is vegetarian! Yep, it’s made of vegan soy wax and has an unbleached cotton wick!

Horror or “Horror?”

The most frightened I’ve ever been watching a movie was when I first saw William Friedkin’s 1973 horror classic The Exorcist. Even though it was a TV edit of the movie – they happened to be showing it on TBS or TNT on a weekday night – and I only ended up watching it because my mother wanted to watch it, it left me with one hell of an indent. Although I wasn’t a huge horror movie aficionado at the time, I was familiar with Hollywood gore. I had been a huge action movie buff for some time, and regularly played Mortal Kombat; in short, some of my entertainment choices were pretty gross. As far as graphic gore went, The Exorcist was pretty run-of-the-mill by my standards. So it wasn’t Linda Blair’s vomit that affected me. The thing that got me was the way Blair’s scenes showed her getting tossed around in a haphazard way. After just a few minutes of that, I came to the realization that my fingernails were digging into the armrest and my legs were tied up tighter than a torqued bolt. My sister, who was also watching, was equally aghast. Although both of us were still kids, we were both old enough so that Mom no longer felt the need to shield us from violent, sexual, or otherwise shocking imagery presented in the name of art. So she simply explained to us that yes, The Exorcist was a disturbing movie that frightened its original audiences. When we got sent to bed, it was only because we were still kids and had bedtimes. Unfortunately, we had only watched the movie for 45 minutes, which was more than enough time to get invested in the story of the Devil taking possession of Regan, and I made sure to rent the movie afterward to finish watching it. To this day, The Exorcist is still the greatest horror movie I’ve ever seen and the gold standard by which I judge every other horror movie I watch.

Anyway, I’ve been wanting to do a fun movie-related write-up for some time now, but I had to scrap my first few ideas because they involved forcing myself through a good number of movies I had no interest in. So between my breakdown symptoms finally settling and the fact that it’s October, I’m ready to enjoy horror movies again. I did a few Google searches on good horror movies, and several of the expected titles kept popping up: The Exorcist, The Shining, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Saw, and all those usual suspects. But randos love to seek attention by breaking convention in efforts to be cool, and that results in some choices that are, for lack of a better word, questionable. Now, I’m not knocking anyone’s TASTE here. I’m knocking the fact that some people seem to be stretching their definitions of what a horror movie is. This is a list of a handful of movies that pop up on horror lists, but may not fit in with the genre. And I’m going to tell you if they’re horror movies and explain why or why not. I’m sure this will settle each and every possible argument on the subject!

Carrie

Carrie is a longstanding personal favorite in horror movies, and it brought in a load of prestige as far as the genre goes. An adaptation of Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie was the movie that put director Brian De Palma and star Sissy Spacek on the map, and John Travolta was in it as well. (Travolta started receiving retroactive top billing in later editions after becoming a $20 million movie star himself.) But you can make a case that Carrie isn’t much more than a gussied-up high school drama because the true representations of horror take a backseat until the finale. There’s not much of an overwhelming atmosphere of dread, and there are no tricks with the characters – everyone is exactly what they’re portrayed as. But there’s a horror element in Carrie’s portrayal of the main character: The way she is othered at school is painfully real, and she gets no respite from her religious psycho of a mother at home. While things get better for her in the second half of the movie, the rug is pulled out at the end, and we are painfully reminded of the fact that she’s never going to be seen as something more than a freak of a trick monkey.

Judgement: Horror. Admittedly, this is a borderline case which happens because the horror is in dragging out a reality to its most extreme conclusion. But that last sentence also sums up a LOT of Stephen King’s work.

Young Frankenstein

Yes, really. But you know what? We tend to concentrate so much on Mel Brooks’s comic brilliance that we don’t give any attention to his eye for detail. Young Frankenstein is kind of the reverse of Carrie – every bit of it is meant to invoke the setting of an old-fashioned horror movie, from the sets to the plot to the dialogue. Nothing in the way Young Frankenstein looks or frequently acts would be out of place in one of the old monster movies of the Lugosi/Karloff era. What Brooks did with a lot of his movies take a common kind of movie and simply twist his own brand of offbeat observations into it by asking how he could twist it into something funny. Sometimes he’ll get it by taking a wrecking ball to the fourth wall. Other times he’ll add a dash of subtle detail, like the EXIT sign on the background castle door from Robin Hood: Men in Tights. But the bottom line here is that Brooks intentionally created Young Frankenstein to make his audiences laugh at an old-timey horror movie, and he succeeded.

Judgement: Young Frankenstein is one of the greatest film comedies of all time. The look of the movie makes it an appropriate Halloween movie, but there’s no horror to be found here.

Zombieland

The original Night of the Living Dead scared the shit out of me. Even though George Romero’s classic, genre-defining movie came out in 1968, a lot of it still holds up. Unfortunately, though, the problem with the common image of the zombie is that it’s so one-note that it’s impossible to make an effective bit of entertainment that makes zombies truly scary. It can be done – I can’t vouch for Dawn of the Dead or 28 Days Later because I haven’t seen them, but I’ve heard a lot of good things. The HBO take on The Last of Us was excellent, and the Resident Evil video games are also plausibly frightening. But with the latter two, the frights don’t come from the zombies themselves – The Last of Us revolves around humanity being stripped to basic needs, and the Resident Evil games are partially scary because of the intensity involved in being ready to face a zombie horde without an ample supply of ammo. Zombieland is another movie that I love, and one of its strengths is that it knows it’s hard to bring the scares in an action-oriented zombie apocalypse movie. So it doesn’t even try. Instead of trying to scare you, it tries to make you laugh with a combination of trope-savviness, humor, and straight-ahead action.

Judgement: Zombieland is more of a remnant of the Golden Era of action movies than anything else. If it had been made 15 years earlier, I’m convinced the part of Tallahassee would have been written for Arnold Schwarzenegger and the movie would have been seen through his eyes. But it ain’t horror.

Shaun of the Dead

Shaun of the Dead is a zombie movie in a similar vein as Zombieland, but not quite the same. Whereas Zombieland was a steroid-addled action movie which took place well after the zombie apocalypse and the scattering of humanity, Shaun of the Dead takes place at the start of the zombie apocalypse and mines laughs from the fact that if a real zombie apocalypse were to happen, THIS is how people would react. Shaun himself is a slacker who isn’t seen as heroic, motivated, or even especially bright by anyone around him. Like most people would, Shaun has trouble accepting the fact that his world is going to hell and he spends the first half of the movie acting and plotting as if everything is still normal or will soon be normal again.

Judgement: Shaun of the Dead turns the scenario into a brilliant comedy by showing the way people would react.

The Sixth Sense

The Sixth Sense is another one of my personal favorites, even though the horror element isn’t what I took away from it. What I saw back in 1999 was the story of an outcast little kid who faced constant bullying despite going out of his way to fit in, make friends, and be social. (When my mother first saw it, she accurately deduced that I saw a lot of myself in Haley Joel Osmont’s character.) There were also stories about the struggling single mother who was trying her best to raise that child, and about the main character trying to repair his broken marriage. (The latter plot is why the final twist rocked audiences to their cores.) Director M. Night Shyamalan is considered a walking meme nowadays, but that’s because he doesn’t spend much time directing into his significant strengths – Shyamalan excels in creating cold, detached atmospheres, and in a movie about ghosts, his direction creates a sense of dread which is always present.

Judgement: This is a horror movie, and despite the storylines, the horror is always present. Ghosts appear periodically and drive the plot, the atmosphere is so foreboding that you’re always anticipating the next scare, and the movie can leave you deeply unsettled.

That’s all I’ll write about write now. But I’m thinking I can make this a new series which spans various genres and types of media and entertainment, so I’ll keep it up! Also, this doesn’t actually have anything to do with the subject of the article, but I HAD to bring it up to set the record straight: You know Wes Craven’s classic series Scream? Okay, I don’t think anyone is disputing that those are DEFINITELY horror movies. But I had to bring up this problem I’m having with the perception of them: The Scream movies are NOT parodies of horror movies. They’re all-out meta, which means they’re conscious of exactly what they are are they revel in that very consciousness. But that doesn’t make them a parody; a parody is an imitation of a style which is exaggerated for comedy. The Scream movies aren’t doing that; they’re merely recognizing their inspirations, and the entire franchise stands as its own original creation. The premier parody of horror movies is the Scary Movie series, which was created specifically as a spoof of Scream but grew into its own set of affectionate horror mockups. Yes, the Scary Movie series also grew into a shell of itself in much the same way the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th and those other slasher franchises have. Perhaps you can lay the blame for that at the feet of the Wayans family, since they ALSO believed Scream was a parody and specifically said so in the promo runup to the original Scary Movie’s release.

The 2018 One Percent Gift Guide

Well folks, the rich own everything now except the Russians. They even own the country. But this is the time of year where you sit back and ask, does that REALLY warrant the exclusion of your One Percent buddy from your Christmas card list? Jesus would be ashamed! And your One Percent friends do want to feel loved and cherished and respected and dignified, right? Days of robbing good, hardworking folks of their own dignities will leave a good oppressive CEO feeling a little unloved. But what on Earth can you get someone who can buy anything? Well, allow me to answer that question as I present my annual list of perfect gift ideas for your One Percent friend!

 

Tulip E-go Diamond Laptop

The issue of net neutrality became an issue earlier. Basically, your One Percent friend isn’t profiting from net neutrality because the internet is, you know, an important public service now. The One Percent decided that there was no way this could ever stand, and they managed to talk your middle class friends into believing it! Hence, the repeal of net neutrality so your One Percent friend’ internet company would be free to use poor people as pawns in private wars. What better way to celebrate than by giving them this million dollar laptop from 2005? No one is sure what its technical capabilities are, but with a good 80 carats worth of total diamonds encrusted within the thing, who gives a shit? Your One Percent friend is likely old and white haired anyway, so they probably prefer doing things the old-fashioned way.

Alexander Amosu Suit

Okay, this one admittedly comes off like a bit of a budget rack gift. It only costs $110,000, and it’s not encrusted with any diamonds, except for nine of them in the buttons. But you know what? Diamond encrustment only makes a suit look tacky and cheap anyway, and you can’t show up to your Monte Carlo power lunch looking like you’re some cheap and tacky idiot. So while the only diamond in this suit are tastefully placed in the buttons, this suit makes up for that with over 5000 gold and platinum stitches! It looks a lot slicker, and if manpower is a testament to just what a great, great big shot you are, you’ll also be please to know this thing took over 80 hours to make.

Wagyu Steak

One of the great languages of the universe is food. Just ask our current president’s fat ass, which borders on morbid obesity. He clearly likes to eat! And lest anyone forget about his past, we can’t forget that one of his failures is as a steak salesman. One wonders if Donald Trump himself ever feasted on the steaks he sold at The Sharper Image. But one thing is for sure: Whether or not Trump has ever eaten his own steaks, he might enjoy a feast on a $2500 Wagyu Steak! Especially once his Secret Service guys get sick of fattening his Jabba behind even more with the McDonald’s food they’re going on corner runs for! Yeah. Anyway. These steaks are the products of a cattle called Wagyu. They’re raised in a lot of different places, but these elite steaks come specifically from a Kobe variety raised in Hyogo, Japan. These big guys are raised in the most traditional methods possible, except they get fed only beer and massaged by hand. That ensures an incomparable marbling and tenderness. They have an unhealthy load of fat and a high price, which makes them more than good enough for the fatass Ritz Cracker running the country!

Louis Vuitton’s Tribute Patchwork Bag

Okay, so maybe you’re One Percent friend’s personal shopping servants went on strike or something. What’s a One Percenter to do? They’re too rich to step outside without their purse giving away signs that say “MUG ME!” But purses from Macy’s are just so, well, pedestrian. What’s a One Percenter to do? Well, Louis Vuitton has the Tribute Patchwork Bag, an ugly-ass bag which is comprised entirely of old Louis Vuitton purse designs that didn’t work out. For a $45,000 price tag, your One Percenter can walk around deeming themselves the ultimate hipster – carrying around expensive items that look cheap! You know, this is exactly the sort of thing they would sell at American Apparel!

iPad Supreme Gold Edition

Apple makes expensive products, so if you decide to splurge for an Apple product, you’re already a favorite in the eyes of your One Percent friend. But what if you want to really push it over the top? Try getting your friend the iPad Supreme Gold Edition! Yes, this is more than some regular old iPad! It’s the 64GB 3G version which is considered top of the line. What do those fancy numbers mean? Who the fuck knows. What your One Percenter friends are more concerned with are a whole other set of numbers: 22K. That’s the gold shell. 2100 grams. That’s the gold shell’s weight. 53. That’s the number of flawless diamonds encrusted in the Apple logo. 25.5. That’s the number of carats those 53 diamonds total. Speaking of diamonds, there’s an iPad made of diamonds as well, but the sitting president likes to tweet from his throne of gold. So a gold iPad might get you in.

Dodge Tomahawk V10 Superbike

Want the Bat Cycle? This baby is about as close as you can get. All that’s missing is the black paint, arsenal, and United States street legality. Yes, that’s right – this is a concept design from Dodge which is classified as an “automotive sculpture,” and you can’t actually use it to zoom across the Manhattan rush hour traffic. But hell, the One Percent is rich, right? That’s why they’re in the One Percent – they never let little things like laws stop them! This baby will only set you back $555,000. Now remember, that’s only for the chopper. You’ll need to spring for the weapons arsenal and batsuit separately. Your One Percent friend deserves it. Don’t be a cheapass.

Trek Yoshitomo Nara Speed Concept

Yes, the One Percent believes in having other people and things do work FOR them, but there are those who have certain eccentricities… Well, you never know when a self-powered motorcycle will come in handy. Right? Okay, no matter what you may think of it, the Trek Yoshitomo Nara Speed Concept was created as a work of art by Yoshitomo Nara. (Duh!) Nara has a signature style which is centered around angry, childlike figures. He places his own little take on Lance Armstrong’ Livestrong logo on the crossbar, and that, I think, is the whole reason your One Percent friend would want this $200,000 track racer. It’s all about the novelty of it. And about the fact that, with Lance Armstrong having been outed as a steroid junkie, it will stand as a proud monument in their home to all the illegal drugs they’ve used.

Super-Complication Watch

Wristwates? Pshaw! Who needs something like that! We all know that if your One Percent friend is an old white man (god, what am I talking about, “if?”) they’ll prefer to have something that makes them look all-important. And the effect of looking at a wristwatch just isn’t good enough. No, they’ll need to yank a watch out of their jacket pocket which is attached to a chain and look at it. To that end, there’s this lovely $11 million jewel from Patek Philippe. Originally created on order by a New York City banker named Henry Graves in 1932 in a contest to see who could create the most complicated timepiece, this sucker hit the record books with two hands and 60 minutes. This watch contains two faces with 24 complications between them. Hey, being in the One Percent doesn’t mean someone isn’t complicated!

Oliver Peoples Corby Sunglasses

You have to keep acting young to stay in touch with the cool kids and sell to them! And what do young people love? Hipster sunglasses! You think. You’re not too sure. And what could be cooler than a pair of rockin’ shades that look like they could have been worn by rocker John Lennon? These hip Lennon-esque shades come from GOOP this year, and for $340, you too can give peace a chance!

Zigzag Beanie

Also from GOOP is this $75 way to be a hipster and go retro, all the way back to the 80’s! With this cool little beanie, you can be chic, awesome, and radical all at the same time!

 

 

 

 

The 2018 Extinct List

When people ask us what we hate more than anything else, I’ll bet just about anything that we all give them the politically correct responses: War, poverty, disease, and other things like that. Well, yeah, of course you do. What responsible human being wouldn’t hate those things? But come on now! How much do things like that really affect you? You’re lying your ass off about that because those issues are OUT THERE, and you don’t have to worry about them affecting you day to day. No, the things we hate in this country are significantly more mediocre and unreasonable, but they have this habit of getting under our skins and grating us. Why? Because we put up with them! See, war and poverty and disease are hypotheticals in this country: We know they’re bad, but few of us are ever truly forced to reckon with them, and so we just don’t feel the visceral outrage over them that affects people who have to live around them. What are the things we REALLY hate? We can count some of the things on this list.

 

Slacktivists Who Constantly Bitch at Us by Telling Us About War and Poverty and Disease

Now, I have to mention something important: It’s probably for the best that we get reminded that major world problems exist. The news about them serves as a way to remind us of our place in the world and our duties and responsibilities as people who live in it. What I have in mind here is a very specific type of person who does it. And this person speaks about those subjects with their mouths more than through their actions. They come across as completely disingenuous for two major reasons: The first is because they’re speaking from a position of comfort and have never had to worry about those problems themselves. The second is because that talk is, in fact, nothing but talk. All too often, the person trying to be this self-righteous isn’t taking any action at all to address those problems. In fact, they may be consciously contributing to them.

 

The New York Times

The grand old newspaper! Old reliable! And you know what, it’s also extremely overrated and unworthy of its reputation. Now, I’m not going to be stupid and whine about biases here, but the New York Times has been caught red-handed half-assing its reporting, failing to report, embellishing reporting, plagiarising, and yes, reporting news that’s fake. Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize despite denying Ukrainian famine back in the 1930’s. This was a case that was reopened in 2003 and confirmed. During World War II, the paper minimized reporting on the damned holocaust. It supported the invasion of Iraq. It reported rape charges that turned out to be false, employed Jayson Blair, screwed up widely known facts about a very popular video game… Yes, it won 125 Pulitzer Prizes and three Peabody Awards, but there are various times when The New York Times was got complacent and coasted on its reputation.

 

Missionaries

I’m sure your religion is a real ball for you. But you know what? I really don’t care. The quote that Christians love about going forth and making disciples of all nations yada yada yada… happens to be followed by another one that says not to impose what you’re preaching on people who reject it. The entire concept of missionary work is supremacist, and even Jesus himself thought so! Frankly, it’s bad enough to go out and be accosted by someone telling you that the only Way – capital W – is through JAY-ZUZ!!! But it’s worse that we’re sending people into other countries and trying to turn them into blind followers too. That’s saying you won’t like them until they’re more like you. Last I checked, that was a blatant form of racism, no matter what country you’re trying to do it in.

 

Waits for Major Professional Sports Expansion Teams

You know, there was one team back in the early NHL which went from concept to on-ice play in about a month. Now the process has gotten considerably stupider, or as I like to think of it, Bettmanized. City applies for team. City pays ridiculous fee. City prepares playing arena. League owners vote… Or something? And if the franchise is “awarded” to the city, the fans are stuck waiting for years to see something come up. In the meantime, there’s a naming contest and people buying season ticket packages and lots of other things. And all that is in the best case scenario. It doesn’t take into account that the league you’re waiting on has a weird history of trying to peddle its sport in places with no history of it and fanbases that are disinterested and barely know it exists and the league will probably end up rejecting your city’s bid because it just heard some non-caring place like Jackson, Mississippi doesn’t have a team yet and you bet your sweet ass I’m fucking bitter and impatient!

 

Buffering

Online videos are smoother than ever, yet they’re still in the habit of loading as they play. There’s not much more annoying than watching some great movie or television show that you’re now really caught up in, then having the thing just stop because your internet dropped down an arc thingy! And we all know how this is going to go: You’re going to sit there with a glowering look on your face, waiting around, until an hour later, you come to the realization that nothing is going to happen, so you have to restart the episode from the beginning. If you skip ahead, it has to buffer again, so you start working on something else for awhile until you know the part where the buffering took place is coming up. Then you eagerly get back to watching, and in that exact same spot, it starts buffering again! The absurdity of this is just mind-blowing. We’re long past the days of clunky dial-up connections. Hell, most people are getting their television, movies, and videos online now. Maybe it’s time to find a better way to run videos, you know?

 

Pop-up Ads

Another favorite online pet peeve of everyone which it took me way too long to get around to, you know the ones: They place an enormous block in front of the webpage you’re trying to use, and the click out icon is itty and bitty and sitting in some far-off corner of the ad where it’s difficult to see. Apparently we’ve all gotten too skilled at navigating our way around regular old online ads, so now desperate corporations have to trick us. Furthermore, why are so many of those ads not catered to your own personal tastes? You would think some of these corporations are starting to get the picture. After all, Google is watching us. (Hi, Google!) That just doesn’t make any sense, with all of the non-intrusive regular ads online that DO cater to our personal tastes.

 

Movie Ticket Prices

Life was so much easier back when movie tickets cost only $5. You went to the theater, bought the ticket, and watched the movie. Now it seems like every theater these days offers some sort of premium viewing experience. So we have theaters with 3D, theaters with surround sound, theaters with dolby, and a whole lot of other indecipherable crap. And you know why it’s there? To get your money! Yes, some of these features are quite nice. But you’re still paying an arm and a leg for all of them, and now you’re expected to pay $10 or $15 for the little additions. Then they added the bulk of matinee times and high traffic times, which tacks on an extra $3 to $5. Now the price of a ticket plus theater food for yourself and another person is the price you pay for just a single ticket. It makes you wonder: Are the theaters aware that Netflix exists? Hell, I do volunteer work in an independent video store. If the ticket price tries to smack me like that, I can wait a few months and rent the DVD for free.

 

LED Car Lights

I just don’t like them.

 

Stores that Move

One of the worst, most inconvenient things there is is needing the services of a VERY particular store. So when you heard down to the local shopping center to take advantage of said store’s services, you head to its location and find nothing but whitewall. The store tries to be all cheerful about it: “MOVING so we can better assist you…” How the fuck is a move supposed to better assist me in doing much of anything? It shuts down the location you need, ensuring that you have to drive to a part of the city that’s 45 minutes away and extremely busy. Yeah, that’s some convenience or better service right there, huh? And there’s no immediate plan to return, and in fact you don’t know when the place will reopen, but you do know that life is going to be a living hell until they do reopen.

 

Television Long-Runners

Honestly, there comes a time when a great television series, no matter how good it once was, just has to gracefully bow out. The Simpsons is pushing 30, and its younger, cooler successors, South Park and Family Guy, are about 20 and 15 respectively. And the problems are always the same: Nothing about them is fresh or new anymore. But since people are zombies who will watch almost anything, they continue giving decent ratings to these old shows, which enables them to clog up the airwaves with more recent junk episodes rather than going away to make room for newer, more daring television shows.

 

The Greatest Video Game Controller Buttons Ever

Readers of this blog may have caught a post I wrote around a year ago about the worst video game controller buttons ever made. I fully intended to follow that up with a post about the greatest video game controller buttons ever, but my ever-frequent sidetracks came along and kept me from doing so. But since it was a great idea, I knew I would have to get around to writing on the subject eventually, and so here it is: The long-awaited follow-up. Every gamer knows that some gaming console controllers are better than others, but there a lot of individual controller buttons which are better than others. Some are excellent for their quality and ease of use, others for their innovations, and still others are good for the way they commonly function. But which ones are the best of the best of the best? Well, keep right on reading, because I’ve come up with an inarguable, bulletproof list of the best video game controller buttons of all time. I wrote it up on my napkin during break!

Yes, you can blame Kotaku for inspiring the original idea. But Kotaku doesn’t do descriptions or explanations, and I do, so there!

 

10 – A Button

Gamecube Controller

Better known as The Big Green Button, the one thing the Gamecube controller managed to get right was the ginormous A Button. Standing out among a formation of oddly spaced and oddly shaped controller buttons, Nintendo’s signaling of the phrase “PRESS ME!!!” was placed front and center, larger than any of the other buttons on the damned thing, bright green and basically impossible to miss. It might as well have been a giant neon sign. Just sitting there, the A Button knew it was the lord and master of everything it surveyed. Whatever game you happened to be playing on the Gamecube, you knew that whatever function The Big Green Button performed was going to end up being hella important, and so you started plotting your gaming style and strategy accordingly. In a way, that made the Gamecube controller’s A Button an evolutionary step up from one of the legendary video game controller buttons…

 

9 – Button

Atari 2600 Controller

Yes, this is a posterity pick, but you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think it deserves a spot on this list. See, you have to remember that video games are like any other entertainment medium – they evolve, and a lot of things that were once innovations either become better versions of themselves or get junked. Back in the days of gaming yore, no one thought that video games were ever going to need more than one button, so yes, this sucker ended up running its course. But what a course it was! Sitting there alongside a joystick, you always knew where it was and what it did because it was the only action button the 2600 used. It’s the only dash of any real color on the controller. It made Pitfall Harry jump, it made the thing in Space Invaders fire, it… Well, it performed countless different functions in just as many video games. And unlike the finicky joystick standing there next to it, it never particularly cared about the position it was in in relation to the gamer, because it always performed the same way whether it was upside-down or not!

 

8 – Start

Genesis Controller

This is a weird selection, mainly because the Genesis controller’s version of the Start button eventually turned into such a wild card. As most people who know anything about video games are aware, the Genesis controller did something unprecedented: It wiped out the common stock button known as Select and replaced it with a third action button. At first, this looked like overkill. Then it looked like foresight. It eventually started to look backwards after Nintendo placed four action buttons and two shoulder buttons on the Super NES controller. That last one started to cripple the Genesis when Sega decided that it wasn’t going to start including six-button controllers in its packaging. Not everyone bought the six-button, and those who decided not to but loved fighting games were treated to a myriad of weird control substitutions which often utilized the Start button. In one game, it could be the turbo button. In another, it could be block. And in others, it switched between punches and kicks. The caveat was that there was no way to pause a game, but a button as useful and quirky as the Genesis Start button wasn’t something we saw everyday.

 

7 – D-pad Right

Most 16-bit Video Game Controllers

Well, what other direction would you go in?

 

6 – Z Trigger

Nintendo 64 Controller

For all the bad-mouthing we do about it, the Nintendo 64 controller was a stroke of genius in a handful of different ways. The Z Trigger is one of the coolest little innovations I’ve ever seen on a controller. Used in tandem with the analog stick, it brought a bit of ease to first-person shooter players because it was now possible to aim and fire using the same hand. Yes, the usual griping came out of PC gamers, but the Z Trigger introduced a natural ease to shooters which hadn’t been felt since the point-and-press days of Space Invaders. If you weren’t much for first-person shooters, well, you got stuck using the Z Trigger anyway. As I wrote in my piece about the worst controller buttons ever, the Nintendo 64 controller was bogged down by the fact that no one ever programmed anything into the d-pad or L button. The entire left side of the controller was useless. So when a function needed to get placed into a shoulder button, it was the Z Trigger that got the outsourced function on the Nintendo 64 version. What we have here is a novelty trigger with more versatility than a trigger is usually allowed.

 

5 – Analog Stick

Nintendo 64 Controller

And hey, speaking of the Nintendo 64’s analog stick, does anybody remember how much everybody HATED the thing when it first came out? The only reason we had trouble adjusting to it was because we never HAD to adjust to something so radical before. Even the Sony Playstation, which was launched around the same time and led by a prevalence of 3D games, used the basic d-pad. But the analog stick turned out to be an instance where’s Nintendo’s attempt to force gaming to evolve was right on point. Yes, everyone is still so in love with the original d-pad that all the major console makers are forcing them onto their controllers to this very day. But as a form of basic movement, the d-pad is a two-dimensional way of moving for a two-dimensional time in video gaming. When games jumped to 3D, Nintendo saw that gamers would need a form of uninhibited movement in 360 degrees. It saw that we were going to need our games to read more minute movements which would have to be read in more efficient ways than light, gentle taps on the d-pad. Now here we are over 20 years after the fact, and no hardware maker is crazy enough to try to launch a new console without this standard form of movement.

 

4 – L2 and R2

Playstation 2 Controller

Yes, I know everyone remains in love with the pill known as the Super NES controller. And yes, it WAS important – it included more action buttons than any controller ever seen at that point and introduced the first two shoulder buttons. Unfortunately, the thing was small and uncomfortable, and I hated the thing so much that I passed on the Super NES for a Genesis. When Sony introduced the first Playstation, the pistol grip put my deformed arm at ease, so it rescued my ability to game. But it wasn’t until the Dual Shock 2 came out that Sony saw it fit to extend and taper the bottom two shoulder buttons, making them easier to grasp and get our fingers around in way that was more natural than anything we had seen before. Although L2 and R2 were originally done as novelties that only made it easier to fit more functions into a single controller, the Playstation 2 is where they started to take on a new life of their own. The use of shoulder buttons as basic action buttons started with the Dual Shock 2, and a console generation later, Sony started spring-loading the buttons to allow their greater involvement in video games.

 

3 – L Trigger and R Trigger

Dreamcast Controller

Concluding the trigger portion of this list is the breakthrough enhancement that enabled designers to see the potential of triggers on controllers. Yes, the Nintendo 64 was the original, but the Dreamcast spring-loaded the things and placed them properly underneath the controller, transforming the difficult shoulder buttons into practical devices we could use without having to remind ourselves that they were there. Microsoft liked them so much that they nicked them straight for the original Xbox controller, creating the iconic versions of the L and R Triggers gamers have all come to know and love.

 

2 – X and Y Buttons

Super NES Controller

After Sega added a third action button to the Genesis controller, Nintendo realized it would have to go big. So it created a controller for its new flagship console with four action buttons and two shoulder buttons. Not only did that force Sega to create more evolved controllers to add to the Genesis, but how many more controllers had a button C? Even the Dreamcast used the X and Y axis layout.

 

1 – B Button

NES Controller

Okay, you can make a powerful argument that the A button belongs in this spot, and I’ll understand. A made Mario jump and Link swing his sword, after all. B was slightly more innocuous in Nintendo’s primary mascot series because Mario mostly ran with it. But when you make that argument, you’re denying Mario his ability to throw fireballs, Link the ability to shoot his bow and arrow, Samus the ability to shoot anything, and Kirby the ability to suck up his enemies. My qualm with A here is that so much of its function revolved around jumping. It was B that continued what Atari started with the 2600 controller, but it pulled off the trick of doing that while being an additional button which let gamers play with accessories and power-ups. B was the sort of button that shined bright whenever its time came, but which knew that it had to take a backseat at other times. It was B that eventually caused video game controllers to expand the way they did, inviting the other action buttons to show up at the party and bring along unique personalities of their own. B was the button that was at ease playing either the leader or the sidekick. Its position on many of today’s hand-engulfing controllers still enables it to play both of those roles with ease. And all of it started when Nintendo promoted it to its first big boy console.

The One Percent Gift List 2017

Herry Christmadays everyone! It’s the most expensive time of the year once again! The gift-givingest time of the year! The fatteningest time of the year! Being that time of the year, it’s time to once again go out and shop the shit out of every mall, retail outlet, mom and pop shop, and box store in the hopes of finding those perfect gifts for those perfect people in your lives! Of course, sometimes we all need a little help getting inspired to find a decent gift, which is where lists come in. And holy hell, does Christmas season gives us LISTS! Lists up the cakehole! Lists for your country cousin, your urban cousin, your dog, your secondhand friends, your friends with benefits, all of them!… Except the person who can afford anything. What kind of thoughtful gift can you give to your One Percent friend? Well folks, that’s why I’m here. Your One Percent friends need things that make them feel rich and powerful. You need to plonk some real cash down for them, so let this short list be your beacon!

 

Apple I Computer

Now, this is just a cool little novelty gift. The thing about household brands is that they all started out somewhere by some nutjob who, rather than inheriting their money like a good One Percenter, did things the HARD way and invented something! Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created the original Apple I computer in 1971. They made about 150 of them before creating the Apple II. The Apple I came with 4 KB of memory, which could be expanded to 48 KB. It was also equipped with a 1 MHz CPU. The keyboard and monitor had to be supplied by the poor sap who bought it. That means that the Apple I is completely useless today, which means you could probably get it for spare change is its value was applied in today’s financial terms. But this thing was created in 1971, and apparently it’s now a collector’s item. So when one went on sale at Christie’s in London recently, it cost $210,000, which is probably the 1971 price of $666.66 (yes, seriously) adjusted for inflation. And be sure to buy your friend the keyboard and a TV to act as the monitor as well. They’re in the One Percent. Don’t be a fucking cheapass.

UNICEF Cargo Flight T-shirt

Yes, your friend is a One Percenter. But like their big hero Donald Trump, they feel the need to do something to show that THEY CARE. Remember when Trump went to Puerto Rico and gave paper towels out to people who lost everything in the flood? Yeah, your friend has to do something like that, but, you know, without having to interact with anyone. What to do? Get one of these $300,000 T-shirts. Show a little bit of support for UNICEF without actually taking any time to commit to or, you know, DO anything. Everyone will know they care!

Super Hello Kitty Jewel Doll

Yes, Hello Kitty is a kids’ item, but your friend hasn’t been so busy doing their One Percent business to have forgotten about their kids, right? Hello Kitty is always popular everywhere! This cute little kiddie toy was created in 2009 to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Hello Kitty. Sure, your kids may just want a nice, big plush toy to hug since because you forgot about them, but this cute little toy will make every Hello Kitty hug feel just like one from your One Percent friend: Cold, hard, and no life to be found, with its 1939 pieces of white topaz, 403 pink sapphires, two black spinels to represent your friend’s cold, dead eyes, and a 1.027-karat diamond on Hello Kitty’s signature bow! See, no one says a good parent HAS to be there, especially not when they’re out at business meetings, with hookers, at fancy restaurants, and doing all those other things that make forgetting about their kids a breeze!

Antarctic Nail Ale

Are you going to give your One Percent friend a bottle of wine for Christmas? Pshaw! That is SO cliche! Yes, I realize wine is timeless, but there are One Percenters who are less interested in being timeless and more interested in being hip, trendy, and just plain cool. And what’s hip, trendy, and cool? Craft beers! Australia’s Nail Brewing Company can help you out with this one. They’ve been producing craft beers for over ten years, and one of their concoctions is Antarctic Nail Ale. No, it’s not an India Pale Ale, which is the go-to voice of cool beers, but tell me something: What IPA was brewed with ice straight out of Antarctica? Yes, it was flown in in the form of an iceberg, melted in Tasmania, then taken to Perth to be used in this brew. Unfortunately, I can’t get a description of the flavor notes contained in this beer, but that’s excusable; only 30 bottles were ever produced. They range in price from $800 to $1815 per bottle. The fact that no one knows what it tastes like is just as well. A good One Percenter isn’t going to drink it, after all. They’re just going to look at it and let it sit, going up in value.

Blendtec Smoother Q-Series 20 Amp

It was between this or a saucepan, but I thought the saucepan was more of something your One Percent friend would give as a gift to Jeeves. A blender is more of a true do-it-yourself meal-maker, and this sucker is one of the most powerful out there. More to the point is that blenders tend to be loud, but the 20 Amp here is equipped with a copolyester sound enclosure and a muffled motor, so your friend can get their juicing done in peace and quiet worthy of the yoga classes they’re making the smoothie for! And the designers are even willing to reduce the height of it by eight inches by building it into your countertop! This baby costs $1199.95. That may seem a little low, but Blendtec also offers a six foot tall frozen food dispenser with paristoltic pumps that can place six different items into the 20 Amp. It’s sold separately at $22,105.

Leiber Precious Rose

Your One Percent friend is rich. But they’re not running around with that cash hanging out of their pockets, are they? Yeah, sure, they COULD do it – they can afford to pay for the protection that would keep them from getting mugged. But there’s also the horrible inconvenience of it. So what do they put that money in? Handbags! And here’s a rich handbag worthy of a rich person. Judith Leiber’s unique handbag has a unique rose shape you just won’t find with other bags, but it also has a whole lot more going on. The $92,000 price tag also buys the metallic kidskin, 1016 diamonds, 1169 pink sapphires, and 800 pink tourmalines which line it. The metal parts are made out of 18-karat white gold. Yeah, maybe it comes across as a little bit extravagant, but you’re rich, and that makes you an elegant, unique snowflake. And yes, this thing is unique; only one was ever made.

GnG Golden Delicious iPhone Case

If your One Percent friend has to do things that are considered “practical” – like, you know, carrying their wallet in a fancy bag – that means they probably need to carry other things too. And you’re not about to let your One Percenter carry their precious phone in a plastic shell like some kind of sucker, are you? That’s why there’s the Golden Delicious! The culmination of 12 months of development, this kingly $100,000 phone holder has a 1mm subshell made with 140g of 18-karat gold, a carbon fiber inlay, and 200 diamonds. The outer logo features another 400 diamonds, but it can also be customized! Customization prices will vary depending on what’s used for material.

Goldstriker 3GS iPhone Supreme

The current president of the United States is all about gold. No, he doesn’t know anything about how to actually earn it, or make it in any way, but he certainly knows how to surround himself with it at every turn. This cell phone is something he would be proud to say he created! Stuart Hughes of Goldstriker International is known for giving plebe items like phones and video game consoles the Supreme treatment: Decking out their halls with gold and diamonds. This $3.2 million treatment for the 3GS iPhone places it in a casing of 271 grams, 22-karat solid gold. It trims the screen with 53 1-karat diamonds, covering the home button with a rare 7.1-karat diamond. The price also gets a nice granite case with Kashmir gold and Nubock top grain leather interior lining. It’s exactly the sort of phone that the sitting president, who famously considers the White House bathroom a downgrade from his gold-plated bathroom in New York City, would love! Okay, well, he might consider this beneath him too, but still.

Detective Comics #37

The May 1939 edition of Detective Comics must have seemed like any other edition of the comic series. It was about a detective, right? Except this particular detective was dressed in a black and gray suit that vaguely emulated a bat. The character caught on, and today, Detective Comics #37 is known as the first-ever appearance of Batman. Yeah, this is an important collector’s item. It can auction for $1.38 million. For contrast, Batman didn’t get his first officially-titled comic until spring of 1940. That one runs for a paltry $359,000.

Goldloft 18K Gold Dumbbells

From the catalog of Miss Gwyneth this year, you have evidence: Lifting solid gold can make you stronger. So will lifting the $125,000 price tag in dollar bills.

 

The 2017 Extinct List

Well, that time has finally come again. We all hate the big stuff, but it’s the small stuff that gets sweated. We like to tell everyone to take chill pills and to not sweat the small stuff, but we can’t really avoid doing so, can we? It’s the small stuff that assaults us every day of our lives. If it weren’t for the small stuff, we might not get so easily triggered about the big stuff, to the point where we get set off in spurts of outrage at points where keeping a cool head might help us prevail. Thus, this list. A list of the little things that have been driving everyone – but mostly me – absolutely bonkers in the last year. And so, without further ado, I give you the 2017 Extinct List, the list of all the small things that drive us (but mostly me) nuts to the point where we (I) need to see them driven to extinction.

Bad Traffic Mergers

Maybe you’re lucky. Maybe you don’t live in a place where the definition of traffic means a two-hour, bumper-to-bumper drive 15 miles to and from work with a crowd of surrounding drivers who can’t drive in the rain, which is supposed to be their element! Traffic always sucks, doubly so if there’s a lot of it, and our seeming inability to merge causes it to be worse. Bad mergers are usually the ones holding everyone up in spots which are hypothetically fast-moving, but where the delays have a habit of hitting us the hardest. You wonder why that glorious 60-MPH freeway is moving so slow at rush hour? Bad mergers are the usual culprit. Perhaps the worst aspect of bad mergers is the fact that in order to survive, you may end up turning into one yourself. I know there’s a way to merge without slowing down traffic, but it seems pointless now.

Limited Release Movies

Maybe that’s not the best term – I’m thinking more along the lines of movies that you’re dying to see only to find out they haven’t been released in any theaters close to you. That kind of nullifies the whole point of advertising or reviewing the movie, doesn’t it? It sort of tells the interested audience, “Here it is! You can’t see it. We only intend it to be seen by a very specific class of people, and, ah, you’re NOT that class. No, we don’t care if the people we’re appealing to are movie nuts or not. We are haughty assholes.” It’s one thing when this happens with an independent flick – those guys don’t have a lot of money, so they can’t be all that concerned with trying to reach people in the boondocks. But even insiders with connections have taken on the habit of doing this to show off how cool they are with the hipster crowd. Cool or not to the hipsters, though, the people who make you famous will think you’re an asshole.

Taxpayer-Funded Sports Stadiums

So, here’s the logic of the right wing, so much as I can tell: Those huge-ass tax cuts? They’re for LE PEOPLE! Except that the people aren’t actually having their taxes cut. The people getting their taxes cut are the rich people, who create all those jobs overseas. Or something? Well, sports stadium logic operates pretty much the same way: Give your sports owners money, and they’ll use it to build a new stadium for their team, and give them more money, and something about community investment? Yeah, this is right wing bullshit. The billionaires can build stadiums all by themselves, but they won’t, but they’ll take all our money and skip town anyway if we don’t do it for them. Because that’s how conservatives think. They’re all about self-sufficiency and pulling themselves up, long as someone else does all of it for them. Yet, when asked to produce proof of any public-funded sports stadium ever coming up with a profit for a city or any civic improvements, everyone has come up short.

Overly Expensive Sandwiches

Somebody please tell me when we all became rich. Unless we’re going into a national fast food giant that specializes in food with quotation marks, we’re paying upwards of five bucks for a sandwich made with bread and ordinary ingredients we find at the grocery store. For the price we pay at the local cafe for one sandwich, a lot of the time, we could just buy all the stuff the sandwich is made from and eat for a week. There’s such a thing as a good money-to-food ratio. I hate to tell people this, but the quality of big chain restaurants isn’t the only thing forcing millennials to learn how to cook.

Anti-Millennial Raging

People seem to be of two minds about us Millennials. First, they whine about us spending money on smartphones. Then they turn right around and scream about how we’re NOT wasting money on the following things: Diamonds, which are nothing but large, sparkly rocks made at the expense of slave labor and made expensive by falsified scarcity and made into essential marriage tradition by a 1930’s ad campaign from De Beers; the golf industry, which means we waste money on sets of metal sticks which are used for nothing but hitting small white balls – which we also paid for – very long distances in large private organizations for which we pay and arm and a leg; napkins, which are smaller, more bittle versions of paper towels; and gambling, for which we pay very large sums of money for nothing in return. In the meantime, we can’t afford to do much of anything on the meager salaries people bitching about us pay us. Then they whine about how we stagnate the economy. Just so we’re clear.

Sega Classic Game Collections

I guess I’m not quite finished with these things yet after all. Pay $20, you get a collection of 40 games, which is pretty reasonable. Pay $70 for a mini-version of the Genesis with over 80 classic Genesis games… Except nearly 30 are shovelware games, around 15 are Game Gear and Master System games, and the remaining 40 are mostly found on the $20 collection I just mentioned. Folks, those of us in the know about video games call this a scam.

Early Christmas

The morons on the right want you to think there’s some sort of war against Christmas. And they’re playing limitless Christmas music starting in October now, putting up the decorations right alongside the Halloween decorations.

Novelty Flavored Spirits

I just don’t like them.

Long Coffee Shop Lines

When we’re in a hurry, there’s no need to discern between roasts and beans. Coffee, after all, is a medical necessity – we get up and we don’t really function without it. But getting it does present us with the problem of having to wait in line much of the time, which is bad enough in and of itself. Then there’s that one bastard right in front of you who fancies themself a professional taster and expert. They ask where the beans are from, how they’re roasted, and they’ll go out of their way to personally take the coffee cup and write down the recipe, telling the barista what to do. In the meantime, there you are, late for the bus, waiting around while this fucker argues about the price and the exact amount of double skim milk going into his coppa latte. And all you want is your basic drip. Black.

National Chain Pizzas

Has ANYONE ever had one of these that was any good? There’s a reason these places are constantly getting attacked – the pizza tastes like cardboard. It’s pretty much inedible. For some reason, though, no one seems to be able to help reaching for their phone numbers at the earliest inconvenience. It’s not like the small places that are good don’t deliver. It seems to be that people are just too lazy to do the simple Google research that would enable them to find out what is and isn’t worth their money. And so we get A-grade junk like Domino’s, Papa John’s, Pizza Hut, and Little Caesar’s ruling over the pizza racket with an iron fist in far too many places.

 

Sega’s Posterity Crap: Sega Games Gamers Hate and are Sick of

Maybe it’s starting to look like I’m beating on a dead horse, but I’m just really fucking pissed off with Sega. I’ve been a staunch champion for them going on nearly three solid decades. When the Sega Genesis Flashback was announced, I was excited. Maybe it’s just the young 16-bit Era gamer inside me, but I wanted a good Genesis classic console which would give me a chance to own and play many of the hard-to-find games that I was never able to get my scuzzy little paws on during the Golden Era proper. You know, the very thing NINTENDO IS OFFERING ON ITS MINI-CONSOLES! And what did Sega come up with? The same damned routine Genesis collection available on every other Genesis compilation ever, along with about 30 shitty shovelware games that anyone with a social life could play on their phones during a bus ride! Way to fucking go, Sega. I’m outright cheering for the Sega Genesis Flashback to bomb.

No one is even trying with Genesis collections anymore. They’re all poorly-emulated rehashes. Once in every seven blue moons or so, we get a new port of a great Genesis title, but Sega keeps giving us the same old, same old. I’ll grant that the same old for Sega can still build a hell of a classics collection, but for a mini-Genesis to reach the demand of one of Nintendo’s little brother collections, Sega needs to start eliminating its filler. And holy shit, does Sega LOVE its filler! That’s part of the problem: It loves its filler more than it loves its good games! Next mini-Genesis, it could stand to eliminate the following titles.

Altered Beast

Yes, I get that Altered Beast was so insanely popular as an arcade game that Sega had to throw it into the original Genesis box as the pack-in. But as the people old enough to remember playing Altered Beast in the arcade got older, they started to realize something: Altered Beast just isn’t a good game. It’s a game revolving entirely around a singular gimmick – and one which isn’t inventive. The reason we all loved it was because we were all mesmerized by getting to play as the weredragon in the second level. But the game as a whole hasn’t just aged badly; it was never a good game to begin with. The character design was good, but the action was slow and clunky and marred by the fact that the game used forced scrolling to push players ahead. Also, you had limited chances to collect the power-up balls, which put you in a sticky situation because if you got to the boss without being the were-animal of the level, the boss was literally impossible to beat.

Alien Storm

Anyone who’s gotten around to playing this on one of Sega’s earlier nostalgia packs has noticed a more-than-passing resemblance to a Sega classic which people actually loved: Golden Axe. This game is basically the exact same premise, in fact, only the fantasy setting everyone loved about Golden Axe is thrown out in favor of a modern day alien invasion motif. Although Alien Storm does add the innovation of a bunch of short sections which can be roughly described as first-person shooting scenes, you have no control of anything during them save a moving target cross. The vast majority of the game, though, is the same kind of beat-’em-up action, but without the attack variety, without a jump button, and without a few other little gimmicks the beat-’em-up genre is known for. And speaking of Golden Axe…

Golden Axe

Golden Axe was one of Sega’s original killer apps. It’s remembered fondly as one of the early arcade conversions that helped push the Genesis. The appeal of the game was that it took hold of the traditional beat-’em-up and plopped it into a fantasy land teeming with creative attacks and weapons, excellent character design, and creative and colorful level design. It was the rebel alternative to the popular Double Dragon, and it had much smoother controls. Unfortunately, all of that was by the standards of the time. Age came and walloped Golden Axe, especially once the beat-’em-up formula was revolutionized and streamlined by the likes of Final Fight and Streets of Rage. Both of those series still play beautifully today. Now Golden Axe feels more like a popcorn game that was shoved out by a developer looking for a quick couple of million; it’s comparatively short and clunky and doesn’t even hold up well when compared to later 16-bit brawlers.

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle

Yes, I know Alex Kidd was the closest thing Sega had to its own version of Mario during the Master System years. But there’s a reason Sega let him go, and it’s more than just the appearance of Sonic the Hedgehog: Alex Kidd is just not a good character, his games are HARD, and a lot of that difficulty is due to fundamental gameplay issues. His only outing on the Genesis was plagued by aquaplane-like sliding, atrocious hit detection, a control interface which could never seem to decide when Alex was or wasn’t in the middle of a midair kick, and graphics which never bothered to differentiate between the foreground and background. Not everyone could relate to Alex’s sickly cutesiness, either.

Revenge of Shinobi

Another one of the early Genesis pushers, Revenge of Shinobi continues to eke out a life as the defining title of its series. But the trouble with this one is that it doesn’t even feel as modern as the other games in its own series. Shinobi has long been a series where the developers have torn down their work and rebuilt everything from scratch with every new sequel, and so Revenge of Shinobi comes off as slow and stilted compared to the two games that came afterward. Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi and Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master both offer better level design and more gameplay depth. They also both offer better gameplay mechanics, which don’t necessitate resource sacrifice against your better interests in order to see anything beyond the first two levels.

Columns

This was supposed to be Sega’s response to the timeless Tetris, but from the smaller playing field to the sudden speed and difficulty surge that hits once you’ve been playing long enough, it comes off as nothing more than a pale wannabe. More to the point is that Tetris is now the most-downloaded and most-played video game of all time, so Columns is out of selling points with the real thing so readily available.

Sonic Spinball

Sonic the Hedgehog going into a pinball-style fortress to act as the pinball. It’s not quite as good in practice as it is in theory, which is saying something because it doesn’t sound like a great idea in theory. Sonic Spinball took everything we loved about the Blue Blur and yanked it out of the game. So here we are, left with a Sonic game in which Sonic can’t get a good run going, set in a closed environment which leaves no room for any exploration, and that’s without even bringing up the worst pinball physics on Earth, floaty gameplay, and clunky controls. Sonic has endured one of the hardest falls from grace ever seen in video games. We like to keep saying his transition to 3D is the culprit, but it can be traced all the way back to this game, which just preceded Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

Sonic 3D Blast

This was the game that technically made Sonic into a 3D hero. It was made under a different developer than Sonic Team, and you have to give them credit where it’s due: Sonic 3D Blast is REALLY well-made. It also recognized the fact that a lot of Sonic’s appeal was in exploring the expansive levels in the core series. But it was also a combination of a fetch quest and an escort mission, which is sin enough as it is, and the isometric presentation made all of Sonic’s signature abilities nearly useless. Even the loops Sonic runs through were forced into the game.

Super Thunder Blade

This sucker goes WAY back – it was one of the Genesis’s launch titles, but that’s about the only thing that warrants its continued posterity. It was there to show off the console’s wonder technology and that’s it. There are only four levels in Super Thunder Blade, presented in a third-person behind-the-chopper view. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the Genesis never did mode-7 scaling as well as the Super NES, so this game’s fast pace is betrayed by its clunkiness. It’s too hard to move, too hard to get a straight shot at anything, too hard to avoid crashing into the scenery, and battered by its age to boot. It can’t even be written off as a relic of its era, because Space Harrier II was also out there.

Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine

Well, okay, Sonic’s spinoff puzzle game is more original than Dr. Mario. It’s also deeply frustrating and unfair if you’re trying to go through the story mode.

Virtua Fighter 2

Yes, I get that this was where the 3D fighter really caught on, and I aso get that it was Sega’s baby. The Super NES got a scaled-down version of Killer Instinct, and it was a lot of fun. This was meant to be a response to that. But where Killer Instinct and Virtua Fighter differed was in the fact that Killer Instinct’s primary strength was in its over-the-top dark humor, its accessible gameplay interface, and its easy Street Fighter II-like control scheme. Killer Instinct was still a 2D fighter no matter how much power it was packing, so the Super NES scaleback didn’t deprive the little version of its big personality. Virtua Fighter 2 Genesis took the godfather of 3D fighters and axed one of the defining features of the game, as well as the two new characters introduced in the game, Shun and Lion. So what the Genesis version of Virtua Fighter 2 was left with was an uninteresting block fighter with zero identifying markers are ways to stand out from the crowd – or ways to stand apart from the original Virtua Fighter. Why did Sega place this on its nostalgia packs instead of Eternal Champions?