Grimaces, Everyone! Grimaces!

Memo to my people: STOP MAKING US LOOK BAD.

This is not about the SpikeTV Video Game Awards, which were held last week and repeated all weekend, because I've covered that ground before. Although I will mention, casually, that having an award titled "Most Addictive Game Fueled By Mountain Dew" is not exactly striving for legitimacy, here. The Oscars do not go begging to Victoria's Secret to sponsor the Best Supporting Actress award, and people care who wins it. Learn from example.

No, this time I'm talking about the brilliant act of spending real money on virtual assets. I know this has been going on for years, with Ultima Online nerds, then Everquest nerds, then Everquest II nerds, lining up on eBay to shell out upwards of a few hundred bucks for magical items they can't be bothered to go and find on their own.

Now, that's stupid. But it's at least understandable. There's a time/money equation involved that works out to something that borders on reasonable. I've spent a hundred bucks on stuff people would find questionable, so if someone wants to drop some of their funmoney on a hundred virtual gold pieces, that's their business. I don't begrudge people their stupid, stupid hobbies. Unless it's funny.

But when you jump a couple of orders of magnitude, and spend the equivalent of a mid-priced luxury car on an island that DOESN'T FUCKING EXIST, then we need to have a little talk. Because you get on the news for doing shit like that, and then people think we ALL do that, and then we all get questions like "Bought any fake islands lately?" Which is better than the "Beaten up any hookers lately?" questions gamers got after GTA 3 caused a ruckus, but still.

And use your real name. I know your "handle" is important to you, because you hate your real self, but when journalists come calling, tell 'em what your mama called you. Otherwise, it leads to ridiculous sentences in news stories. Here, I'm quoting the venerable, dignified BBC, forced to utter the following: "The Australian gamer, known only by his gaming moniker Deathifier, bought the island in an online auction."

If your only name is "Deathifier", you should not be having major news stories written about you unless you blew up a building. And even then, there should be a bit of snickering from the news-reader after they say "Deathifier".

Australia's leading expert in deathification apparently purchased a virtual island in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game "Project Entropia", which I'd never heard of either. Entropia is like Everquest for economics majors, allowing you to buy and sell your virtual stuff in-game instead of relying on outside auction services like eBay. So there was an auction for a fake island, and when all was said and done, He Who Deathifies had spent $26,500 on a bunch of polygons on a server somewhere.

Now, how much would you pay for ACTUAL QUOTE TIME? What if I told you that when you purchased the ACTUAL QUOTE from Deathifier, I'll throw in an ACTUAL QUOTE from the developer absolutely free? This is a limited time offer, so act now.

"This is a historic moment in gaming history, and this sale only goes to prove that massive multi-player online gaming has reached a new plateau." - Marco Behrmann, PR flack for the game company. And in a sense, he's right. This auction proves that Moore's Law applies to both computing power AND the Barnum Temporal Sucker Ratio.

"This type of investment will definitely become a trend in online gaming." - Deathifier (snicker). Yes, Deathifier (snicker) hopes to make back his twenty six grand and then some by charging virtual rent and selling off virtual parcels of his virtual island to a bunch of OTHER fantasy economists who are even dumber than he is.

Enjoy it while it lasts. Since your great investment is completely at the mercy of "gods" that are vengeful, angry, and constantly filing for Chapter 11, I'd work on finding a bunch more suckers fast. 'Cause your Treasure Island is one server crash away from being Mount Vesuvius.

I've Got A Bad Feeling About This

Memo to America's Geek, Nerd, and Dork Communities: IT'S GONNA SUCK.

Having recently experienced the crushing disillusionment of false hope, I would not wish such a thing on my fellow man. So when I see signs of false hopes starting to arise, it's best I crush them quickly, where it will only twinge a bit, instead of letting them blossom to full flower before they are ripped from the hearts of the people.

And in the hierarchy of false hopes, "The Trailer Looks Pretty Good" is right on par with "the youth will turn out in droves to vote".

For those who are relatively new to the site, and my obsessive stalking indicates there are quite a few of you, allow me to state, for the record, the official You Are Dumb Dot Net policy regarding Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith.

1. "The Phantom Menace" was complete shit, and all the flashy lightsaber fights in the world cannot mask the fact that they portrayed one of cinema's all-time great villains as an annoying, bratty kid.
2. "Attack Of The Clones" was an even bigger pile of complete shit, "Dooku" is a stupid name, that thing around Jimmy Smits' neck needs to be dragged behind a dumpster and shot, and all the flashy lightsaber fights in the world cannot mask the fact that they portrayed what had, before Episode I, been one of cinema's all-time great villians as a petulant, obnoxious wanktard in looooooove.
3. George Lucas is an accomplished producer, a workmanlike director, and a shit writer.
4. All of the above leads to the inevitable conclusion that "Revenge Of The Sith" will suck, too.
5. You're going anyway.

People susceptible to Point Five will seize on anything they can to dodge the inevitability of Points One Through Four Inclusive. The "PG-13" rating. The homage to the original title for "Return Of The Jedi". And now, the first trailer. And what, pray tell, does this trailer give us to inspire false hope? Fucked if I know. Whatever it is, I don't see it.

The trailer uses the original movie as a framing device, which only serves to remind us of when Star Wars was cool. There's a bunch of clone troopers, which we've seen before, and have since been outdone by orcs. When Alec Guinness says "Darth Vader", they show Hayden Christiansen, further compounding one of the universe's fundamental points of wrongness. and then we see him, I think, in a hood. Scaaary.

But wait! VOLCANO! Yippee. I don't even know, at this point, how we all knew it was a volcano, but for aomost 30 years, we've known it was a volcano. So now we get to see the volcano and its CGI lava. You will forgive, perhaps, my lack of excitement. And then, intercut with headshots of the cast we've grown to hate over the past six years, is Darth Vader on an Imperial... dentist's couch. It's like they've replaced Ralph McQuarrie with an IKEA catalog.

And that's when the trailer really kicks into high! Spaceships we've seen before! Yoda with a lightsaber... just like the last movie! A whole army of Wookiees, which would be cool if they weren't DRESSED LIKE FUCKING EWOKS! * An alien made entirely of corduroy! Firefighting spaceships! R2-D2 hiding behind something! Amidala with Leia-muffins, proving that, like the Force, hairstyles have a genetic and biological component!

Lightsabers! Spaceships! Lightsabers! Spaceships! Lightsabers! Lightsabers! Spaceships! Imperial March! Why, it's almost as if someone at Lucasfilm came to the conclusion that the only worthwhile things left in the Star Wars saga were... lightsabers and spaceships! And put a bunch of lightsabers and spaceships in the teaser in a crass bid to regain an audience already burned twice!

I seem to remember the first two movies having a bunch of lightsabers and spaceships in the trailers, too. And I seem to remember these trailers NOT having things like borderline**-racist aliens, midichlorians, wacky robot head jokes, and soliloquies on the relative abrasiveness of sand versus Natalie Portman's epidermis. Because those were the shit parts. And when you take all the shit parts out of a Star Wars prequel, you have just enough footage left for a teaser, a trailer, and three TV spots.

We in the GND Community are being given a nigh-unprecedented opportunity to show we can learn from our mistakes. Will we seize it, moving boldly on to exciting, new, less-sucky things to obsess over? Or will we give in to our base natures, shell out our six-fifty, and walk out, two hours later, feeling like we've just soiled ourselves for the third time in a decade? I know where I'll be on May 19th. Do you?

*Yes, I know they wanted them to be Wookiees in Jedi. I also don't care.

**This word is a concession I make solely to stave off the inevitable nergument.

Not About The Goddamn Election

Memo to my fellow game geeks: STAY THE FUCK HOME TONIGHT.

Please. I beg you. Do not turn out in droves. Do not stand in line. Just go to the store tomorrow, like a normal person, and pick up your copy of Halo 2. Exchange your money for goods and/or services as if you were buying, say, a toaster, a bottle of Advil, or perhaps having H.R. Block prepare your taxes. Those extra twelve to sixteen hours will result in the salvation of your dignity, and, in a small way, the dignity by association of the rest of us.

I can sort of kind of maybe get behind, on a purely conceptual basis, the midnight showings of the big blockbuster movies. At least with that, you're actually seeing the movie first with a bunch of other people who want to see the movie first. It's a communal experience. A big, stinky communal experience that gets you whacked in the back of the head with a toy lightsaber at one o' clock in the fucking morning, but a communal experience nonetheless.

I'd never DO that, of course, because first, my aging, decrepit frame does not need to be crawling home from a mall movie theater at 2:30am just so I can be among the first to be disappointed, and second, I don't need to meet that many new people I'd then be compelled to forcibly sterilize. With the new stadium seating, it's just too big a demand on my free time.

There's going to be no communal experience tonight. Just a bunch of guys standing in line to shell out 55 bucks for something they'll then immediately take home to play alone, or, if they're lucky, online against the people they were just in line with, and their counterparts across the country. Having spent some time on XBox live, listening to other XBox Live players, trust me on this one. These are not the kind of people you should be anxious to spend more time with.

I mean, OK. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you live in New York or L.A., where they're going to make a big deal out of it, spending lots of money on a party and having music and crap for you to stare at while you wait to buy your game. That sounds pretty exciting at first, unless you live in New York or L.A., where even the public restrooms have a company rep, two plasma-screen TV's, a DJ, and a complimentary gift bag.

In the rest of the country, where the game stores will be opening their doors at midnight, your experience will be, shall I say, less than ideal. A drive out to a darkened suburban mall. Trying three entrances before you find the one they convinced security to unlock. The walk past all the darkened, closed stores and kiosks, until you get to the store, where, if you're lucky, the assistant manager brought the Master Chief helmet he made for Halloween and is walking around with it on his head, pointing an empty Super-Soaker at you and shouting, "Halt, Covenant spy! Present your pre-order receipt!".

If you're not lucky, you'll be confronted by two wage-slave clerks who drew the short straw, wearing promotional t-shirts they already hate the sight of, who rightfully resent you and everything you stand for, and who, through bleary, hate-rimmed eyes, recite their sales script in a monotone as they take your money and hand you your shiny silver box. And it's one o' clock in the fucking morning, and the guy behind you keeps hitting you in the back of your head with his toy lightsaber.

STAY HOME. You're worse than the Ikea whores. At least, with the cheap Swedish furniture, there's only the one place to get it. You, on the other hand, will be making an extra special trip to an extra special store at an extra special time to buy an extra special thing that you won't be able to avoid for the next year. Every Target, every Wal-Mart, every Costco, every toy store and department store is going to be THICK with the fucking things by Friday. I half-expect to see copies of Halo 2 sitting next to Cosmo, 101 Delicious Meatloaf Recipes, and tiny Jesus Tells You Your Cat's Horoscope books in the supermarket checkout line.

In fact, I figure sometime in January, we'll see the class action suit by game store employees after doctors discover they're all suffering from Halo Lung Disease, in which millions of copies of Halo 2 end up lodged in the breathers of people forced to work around them all day. By June, the earth's surface will be 70% copies of Halo 2. And by this time next year, the Von Neumann hive mind that is Halo 2 will have colonized three other planets.

So put the homemade "My Other Girlfriend Is A Holographic A.I." shirt down, back away from the car keys, and get some sleep. You'll need it when the underground resistance movement forms in August.

Does Whatever A Loser Can

Memo to fanfilm nerds: YOU ARE DUMB.

Especially the fanfilm nerds at www.secretspidermanmovie.com. I mean, the Batman one, the Robin one, the for fucksake World's Finest one... at least these got made, as deluded and misguided as they were. The Secret Spider-Man Movie nerdthings are just -talking- about making a movie.

Across the board, the motives are... suspect at best. The World's Finest one, if you haven't seen it, has a huge "please don't sue us" notice at the end full of fanspeak like "homage" and "honor" and "icon" and "legend" which no judge in the world actually cares about. But these people have a lot of time on their hands, digital video is cheaper than monkey shit these days, and all they're really wasting is their lives in a new way.

Being fan films, of course, there's not the tiniest bit of originality in any of it. "Fan Creations" borders on oxymoron. Fandom is about slavish devotion to something someone ELSE created. So when a fan "creates" something based on what he's slavishly devoted to, all he can pour into it is every bit of low-budget production values you can manage. They can't create or add something, because if they could, they wouldn't want to dress up in Jedi robes and wave a stick around in the first place. Fucksake, the Robin and World's Finest ones are just trailers for a fake/unmade "movie", and these TRAILERS are just like every summer movie trailer ever.

But the pinnacle of unkempt, vaguely soiled, zombie nerddom has to be the Secret Spider-Man Movie. They're out to save the entire fucking universe from crappy superhero movies like Daredevil, Catwoman, X-Men, X-Men 2, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, and oh, by the way, every single superhero movie ever made. These movies failed because they diverged (even the tiniest bit) from their original source material, you see. And since that crime against humanity cannot be allowed to stand, a few brave souls will, and this is their actual plan, I swear to Vishnu... they're going to make their own version of Spider-Man 3 that's 100% faithful to the comic, bring it to Marvel, and once Marvel sees it can be done, Marvel will pressure Sony and Columbia to take the exact same approach with the REAL Spidey 3.

To say this goal is unrealistic would be a smidge understatementesque. Every single person involved in this project has a greater probability of having a night of wild, passionate abandon with Kirsten Dunst AND Jessica Alba than they have of even getting someone at Marvel to take their call to tell them they can't bring their movie over, much less influence the creative direction of Spidey 3. In case you think I'm being hyperbolic, allow me to remind you of Amazing Fantasy #20, page 4, panel 2, where Peter Parker CLEARLY informs Aunt May that he cannot take out the garbage because it is ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"They underestimated the audience, they made changes that didn't need to be made just to simplify the story. They altered the history Spider-Man the comic, and in doing so they have created an entirely new and misinformed legion of comic fans who now believe Spidey shoots webs organically. This might not seem like a big deal in the scheme of things, but we look at it as just the beginning. It's only going to get worse. With 20 new comic films in development as we speak, other studios will see that box office doesn't depend on authenticity, but rather on celebrities, special effects, and glitz. The history of all comics are at great risk!"

Look, you psychos, I'm going to tell you something every single one of your girlfriends has told you at one time or another. Maybe it'll sink in this time, because it's ON THE INTERNET. Just because you like something... hell, just because you love something more than life itself, that DOES NOT MAKE IT YOURS. I don't care how much you love Buffy, the bank will still not let you cash checks made out to Joss Whedon. I don't care how much you've spent, in time, energy, and money, on merchandise and cosplay and letter writing campaigns and websites and LiveJournals and message boards. At the end of the day, for all your effort, you're just a consumer. Your job is to consume. You have, and you can count this on your dick if you want, ONE piece of input into the creative process, and that is to GO or NOT GO; BUY or NOT BUY. If you had something to say, or something to contribute, you'd be behind the table and not in the audience.

And that, frankly, is how it should be. Even the astonishingly incompetent people who made Catwoman did not do it because they have been waiting all their lives to accurately translate Catwoman to the screen.* They did it because they (somehow) make movies for a living and someone scraped up 100 million dollars and flung it around VERY cavalierly. And as awful as they are, they are about 22% less DUMB than you lot.

* Obviously.

Fanboy Nerds

Well, people still appear to be pouring in from the John Haley column at 411, so the bit on Eugene you're looking for ran two days ago. If you like what you see, stick around, there'll be more of it. I have so much hate to share, and there's enough for everybody.

Like nerds. Fanboy nerds. Oh, the hate I have for fanboy nerds. I can hate them more because I understand them. I think we can all identify with a time in our lives when we were slavishly devoted to something unworthy; a TV show, a game, an actor, a series of movies... something that, while good, was not perfect, and really didn't deserve the kind of unconditional love and rabid defense against imagined threats that we would strive to provide.

But we get over it. We realize that while, say, "The Empire Strikes Back" may be a wonderful movie, Lucasfilm does not actually need me to do unpaid, undirected volunteer advocacy for them in order to keep George Lucas' supply of hookers and lobster going strong. And then we realize that the last 2.3 Star Wars movies were shit. And we realize that this doesn't mean we can't still love Empire in a filthy and unclean manner. The two states can coexist.

WE realize this, because WE are not emotionally stunted obsessives with a completely fucked set of priorities. WE are not fanboy nerds. THEY are, however, and they're some scary motherfuckers. Especially the Green Lantern ones.

Here's your official You Are Dumb backgrounder. Green Lantern. Superhero. Ordinary guy with magic ring. Ordinary guy was Alan Scott at first, then was Hal Jordan for a very very long time. Somewhere in that very very long time, the ordinary guy was also Guy Gardner and John Stewart *, but that's not important. Ten years ago, in some comic books, Hal Jordan went crazy, called himself Parallax, killed all the other ordinary blobs on all the other planets who had magic rings, and got knocked off himself. And then the ordinary guy was Kyle Rayner.

That's fine. I mean, it's dumb, but as THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE learned from the Eugene article, it's not particularly dumb within its own context, which is DC making money by retelling about half a dozen stories for about half a dozen decades. Until the fanboy nerds got involved. And when I say involved, I mean deeply, personally, pathologically involved. They formed HEAT.

"Hal's Emerald Advancement Team", as it's now known, is a group of fanboy nerds who have spent the past ten years very, very upset that DC took their favoritest fake person ever and made him turn naughty and kill people. I say "now known", because the original name was "Hal's Emerald Attack Team". They changed it in an attempt to improve their image. Their image had to be improved, you see, because the writer and editor of the new Green Lantern were receiving death threats.

Pause, for a moment, to absorb that.

Of course, that was ten years ago. So much can change about a person in ten years. We've rolled the odometer over into a new millennium. We're living in the future. We've learned from our mistakes. There's really no need for DC to make the ordinary guy "Hal Jordan" again, and if they decided to anyway, there can't be more than a couple of the original HEAT members who would even notice, right?

Well, we all know what happens when I ask a leading question like that, don't we? The news just broke that Hal Jordan was gonna be the dude with the ring again. Which is fine. What is NOT fine, is that on the talk-back message board at Newsarama where the story broke, people were talking about this so much that there would be two new pages of messages posted in the time it took me to read one page this morning. And I'm a REALLY FAST READER.

Hold on. Let me check my watch. I believe it's half-past ACTUAL QUOTE TIME! - "Daredevil Father comes out tomorrow, and I find out Hal's back today. There is a God." - "Now I can read Green Lantern Again!!!!!"." - "Halleluiah! praise the lord! our prayers have been answered!" - AND THE TOPPER - "This, probabaly, is the most single best news EVER!!!!!!! Finally, after all these years of suffering with that GL wannabe placeholder, we are getting the REAL GL back!!!! Excellent excellent news and here's a tissue for all you Kyle whiners who have to eat crow now. Onwards and upwards!"

These people have been nursing a grudge for a DECADE. How is it that, for ten years, someone can care so much about a guy in green underwear that they treat his return with religious fervor? Oh, right. They're fanboy nerds. Their inexplicable passions defy space, time, and enlightenment in much the same way that their clothes defy Tide, Clorox, and Febreze. Because they are DUMB.

* That's the guy on the Justice League cartoon, in case you were wondering.