So, this just happened. two pieces of horrible news back-to-back. In manual retweet form, no less.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending what turned out to be the third and final ROFLcon. On the surface, a convention about memes seems like a silly attempt to turn internet yucks into real world lulz. And while it’s true that I can now say, “I sat next to Tron guy,” or “I talked comics with Rich Stevens,” or “Antoine ‘Hide Yo Wife’ Dodson is much taller in real life” there was another current that swept through the conference.

And that, while not trying to sound too deep here, is that memes allow us to take the work of someone else, and put ourselves inside of it. Okay, failed at the not sounding pompous part. Let’s try that again.

When we share media – loan a book or listen to a CD or watch a movie with someone – that act is sometimes a means of saying “Interpret me and my values based on the sharing of this media.”

The internet has just turned that sharing to 11, making it easier to share, and thus easier for us to find out where we really fit in the world.

And since MCA passed while I was sitting in a lecture hall at ROFLcon, I’m really glad the internet allows me to share this. Because, this video says how I feel.

The above image is, I’m assuming, the cover of the Ozymandias cover of Before Watchmen, the undemanded attempt to expand the Watchmen universe against the will of their creator.

But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about the recent uptick in attention to BDSM amongst housewives and Twilight fans – 50 Shades of Gray. Before that book became a common phrase, the above image would illicit something like this:

Damn. Oz, the smartest man in the world, just got his ass kicked by a woman with a whip…and a fixation on headgear.

However, in the post-50 world, people now look at that photo and say something like:

Damn. Oz, the smartest man in the world, clearly slept his way to the top under the heel of a femdom who’s into asphyxiation. I always knew he was a freak.

Act 1 had some incredibly stilted and cheesy dialogue.
Act 2 showed that Joss Whedon knows group dynamics. But there was a little too much fan service in the form X fights Y and two of the subplots were tied up rather conveniently.
Act 3 was one giant battle scene.

Also, Joss Whedon has balls. Stop reading here if you haven’t seen the movie.

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Spoiler Warning
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Two of the most contentious, if not outright hated, movies in the science fiction movie pantheon are Battlefield Earth and the Phantom Menace. It is my opinion that Whedon blatantly cribbed from these endings of these two films to create the ending of the Avengers knowing full well that fans would love him regardless of how poor his sources were.

Let me explain.

Battlefield Earth, the much maligned piece of scifi garbage was the product of Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard. The finale of said movie involved the plucky humans transporting a nuclear bomb to the Psychlos home world, killing them all and ending the threat. In this movie, that was incredibly contrived.

In the Phantom Menace, the droid army invasion is ended when their control ship is destroyed. Pretty much tying a bow around the plot and wrapping everything up in one convenient explosion. Again, incredibly contrived.

Whedon used both of these, having Iron Man fly through a portal and hand deliver a nuke, hitting something where a great many Chitauri were. He also used closing of the portal to inexplicably fell all of the Chitauri despite them not being robots or remote-controlled entities.

I am almost certain that the entire conclusion was Whedon’s attempt to see if he could get away with something that other science fiction films had been lambasted for. In other words, could Whedon sin without recourse.

And yeah, the fans pretty much seemed to accept it.

As a baby of the 80s, this video will bring back the memories. As a fan of mashup art, you gotta admit that this is pretty well done.

This music is Michael Nyman’s “A Wild And Distant Shore”. Here’s hoping that someone isn’t being a copyright douche.

Sure, having dual monitors is pretty awesome. I mean, I can have four documents open simultaneously without overlap. Or, I can have email, music program, web browser and word processor open. And then there’s streaming video.

But what nobody tells you about having dual monitors is that your glass and your bottle are going to be a solid 38 inches apart. And that is going to screw with your work flow.

Your thirties are that awkward time when the partying of the 20s hasn’t left, but the class of the 40s is starting to set in. You end up saying things like “Man, when I get home I’m gonna drink a whole bottle of decent pinot noir and eat the fuck out of a quiche florentine!”

Two-headed Space Nazi Sharktapus Rampage

That’s a license to print money right there.

You have this way of condensing a sentence down to it’s most baffling reduction and yet it still makes so much sense.

-Justin Koeppen

I now have to get that framed.