Hooray!

This made my day:


For those of you who don't know MoMa from Momma (including me until I read the story that was posted with this picture on tor.com) it is the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Maybe the "trash" Annabelle mentions is actually her take on splatter art or any Yoko Ono apples she may have seen.
If MoMa finds this post, might I suggest this work as a way to sate any future visit from critics such as Annabelle:

Stop hating on Twilight...not the post you think it is.

Yesterday's post lead me to this one. Therefore, steel yourself as we talk about Twilight. Other topics will include, but are not limited to: Apple, Charlie Sheen, and Donald Trump.
I'm a huge fan of comedy. Sketches, stand up, improve, bad puns (thanks Dad), dark, family friendly, whatever. I'm not, however, a fan of seeing the same funny used over and over and over again. This brings me to Twilight. When the first movie started casting I remember all my nerd sites (io9.com, boingboing.net, joystiq.com, bleedingcool.com if you want to surf some of my daily addictions) were covering it. Sometimes, they were pointing fun, sometimes they were genuinely excited, but the noise of Twilight was only just beginning. Soon Conan and Jimmy Fallon and SNL and people on networks other than NBC were poking fun. The more I learned about Twilight, the more I loved the bashing. Twilight was (passed tense because I'm no longer judging it) so lame.
You know what's lame now? Bashing Twilight.
I've heard all the sparkle jokes, I've seen the glittery bedroom erotic aid made for women who are entirely too into this stuff, I've seen more anorexic boys in face powder and bulked up Latin tweens brooding for the sake of mockery than I'd ever need. Let's get a little more creative people, let's make fun of something that really needs it.
This goes as well for Apple bashing. Pretty soon Jobs will come out with a turd and we'll all buy it like zombies. Pretty soon he'll be selling us something so small we won't be able to see it with the naked eye. Pretty soon he'll be selling us back out own souls which we sold to him for last year's iPod model.
Andy Rooney is working on an anti-apple piece for sixty-minutes right now (not actually true)! This horse is dead, and I don't know how I ever lived without my iPad, so let's just drop it.
This is funny:

This is beating a dead horse:
Charlie Sheen is crazy/on drugs/ugly/whatever, Donald Trump's a Birther now, but his own released birth certificate is fake, his hair is weird like a taxidermy squirrel, he's only running for President to boost Apprentice ratings...We ALL know this--except maybe the birth certificate thing, I threw that in there as my own personal aside--please leave it alone.
Go forth world. Give us more Cosby-Mordor thingies, but not literally more of Cosby himself, that'd kill that whole thing too.

I, am nah lef handed!

I wore a Star Wars shirt today on my errands, and two things happened for the first time.

First, a kid at Best Buy made me feel old. I know that some of my readers will be shocked that anyone under thirty can feel old, and I know that you might be mad at me for saying so, but feeling old and being old are not the same thing. I met an 83 year old man in Colorado once who still roped cattle and rode an ATV for more hours everyday than he spent in the bathroom. If you can still laugh at a whiny fart ringing out from the back seat of an otherwise silent car, then you are not old.
The reason I felt old was because that kid at Best Buy started complaining about how Lucas was making 3-D versions of all the Star Wars films and reissuing them in theaters. When I mentioned how awful it was for me to see the special editions of the original films in theaters when I was younger, and how that awfulness escalated exponentially with the release of the pre-trilogy-Jar-Jar-Binks-sess-pool episodes 1,2, and 3 he looked at me like I had poop on my nose. Episode 3 came out when he was 11! He thought it was freaking COOL! He thinks the special editions are--with the exception of the Muppet sing along in Jabbba's palace and the "Han didn't shoot first" fiasco in A New Hope--more enjoyable than the original!

Grey hair popped up all over my head as he told me these things, and when I got to the car I had a revelation; it being the second thing that happened to me for the first time today:

I DON'T CARE ABOUT THIS CRAP ANYMORE!

Not "this crap" like life, I'm not giving up the living. I mean I don't care about the thing underlying our conversation that has made me, and the rest of the geek community, grumpy for years now. Pretension. Most people won't think of me as pretentious for saying that Episodes 1, 2, and 3 sucked, but if I substitute in "Twilight" or "Avatar" or "M. Night after The Village" people might get ruffled. Sure I hate Twilight. Sure I loved Avatar and got grumpy at a friend of mine who called it "boring." Sure anyone who likes M. Night's Air bender is under the age of Ten and probably smells like an unchanged diaper, but that's fine by me. Creating something, writing in my case, is putting yourself out there. If you have even a single person who will argue with a fat bearded man in Best Buy about how your artistic contribution is worthwhile then you've made it. You've done something that the majority of people will never be able to match.
That's awesome!
Plus, everyone knows that The Princess Bride was the best thing with swords and princesses to come out of the Eighties and early Seventies, so there's no point in making a stink anymore.
Unless they remake my Bride with Robert Pattinson as Westley..."As you wish," my ass! That'd be a real reason to throw a fit.

The change they made to this part of the movie would be alright, though.
You killed my father...Lightsaber style!

House keeping and a little Dilbert bashing

First: This is a new blog. I've done a couple others, but this one will be used for two things. Thing one will be to update people on my writing progress, offer some sample pages (if I need some feedback), and reach out for advice or give advice that my readers didn't ask for. Thing two will be to mention/laugh at/introduce things I find in the real world or on the web that just need to be shown to everybody.

Second: Dilbert has lost his damn mind.
The man behind the Dilbert cartoon (Scott Adams) is insane. He wrote an op-ed about himself that seemed to ruffle the feathers of many online commenters. The reports I've read say that the article was pretty proud and egotistical, although I haven't actually read it. The BIG story is how he then used the screen name "PlannedChaos" to defend himself as though he was his own biggest fan (he probably is, in fact, just that.)

Great quote from him pretending to be a fan who was only trying to protect himself from the mean internets:

If an idiot and a genius disagree, the idiot generally thinks the genius is wrong. He also has lots of idiot reasons to back his idiot belief. That's how the idiot mind is wired.

It's fair to say you disagree with Adams. But you can't rule out the hypothesis that you're too dumb to understand what he's saying.

And he's a certified genius. Just sayin'.

What a big poo! In the days after this story broke, he ended up admitting that he'd used the alias, then he posted an interview between Chaos and himself on his blog in an attempt to make fun of the situation, but those parts aren't important or funny, so don't worry about them.
If you want to read more about this, check out Gawker.

Third: The background image on the blog is by Banksy. He is awesome, and you should google his work.

Last: Here's a video my son and I made the other day. If I get published, I will continue to be able to spend many full days with him every week influencing him to do crap like this. If I don't ever get published, many of my resources will be reallocated to helping customers at Starbucks or some dying retail big box store.
Enjoy: