November 2005 Archives

The comics catalogging continues, although I am out of bags again as I hit the U's. I've been through 600 bags since I started and I would estimate about 100 more to go (lots of Uncle Scrooges and Walt Disney's Comics and Stories). So, ballpark that at 700 comics in a little over two years. A comic a day! That's not a bad lifeplan at all, if only I could guarantee that there wouldn't be any days that suck.

So here's six more cool covers that I re-discovered this week.

(Green Lantern #177) That's the absolute best Jade ever drawn.	(JSA #67) When you see the average quality JSA covers that surround this issue, #67 stands out all the more. First of all, the logo is like nothing printed before or since. Then there's that eye-grabbing center band, covering the naughty bits of Sue Dibny's corpse. It's just different, it's classy... it actually looks like an Elseworlds cover.	(Lex Luthor: Man of Steel #3) This series has a lot of Angry Superman imagery, since it's written from Luthor's POV. And even aside from the cool, mean-looking Supes hiding in the shadows, I want to point out the New Trend in super-hero art: seams. Everywhere these days, artists are adding visible seams to the costumes, and I think we can blame Alex Ross for that. I do like the seams fad, since it adds some realistic texture to something that has been historically one of the goofiest aspects of the genre, the impossibly skin-tight bodysuit.
(Marvel Knights 4 #5) Once you get that Sue is using her invisible force field, then you can grok the detail of the gradually smooshing bullet casings.	(Superman: Birthright #4) Speaking of details, here's a Superman book without Superman himself on the cover. Or is it?	(We3 #1) All three of the issues of this mini pulled this same kids-missing-pet-ad trick, but issue one did it the best... because that's what every dog in the world looks like when you take its picture. After you read the book, your heart bleeds for the story this cover tells.

Stop sucking.

This is about your "Monthly Rag" news section. I know that it is difficult to write articles about upcoming toy lines. I know that almost every article in your old "Buzz" section was either "Toy Line X Announced" or "Look at these Protoype Figures from Toy Line Y." I know that every time you asked the brand manager for a quote, you always got the same inspid "We are SO excited to be able to bring these beloved characters to the fans" crap.

But that was all a damn sight better than this terrible Onion bullshit you've been doing since issue 95.

For example, in issue 101, you completely destroy what could be an interesting interview with the creators of Aqua Teen Hunger Force with fake comments from a Rabbi about the show being non-kosher. Ha ha, get it. I mean, this was with the guys from Aqua Teen. They're like a pull quote dispensary.

I get your message: toy news is boring. Perhaps a focus group told you that they usually skim that section. Well, now you've made it impossible to tell what the hidden news item is. The second article from #101 has some pictures of new DC dioramas, but in order to find out what the hell they are, I had to wade through a comedy piece about the "friends of Fayetteville, NC-area deli clerk Derek Motley" and his infatuation with the movie Se7en. If your efforts are just to spice up dull toy news, I'm telling you that you are over-reacting. Plus, you're not particularly funny in this "Not Necessarily the News" format.

You still have the "Incoming" section, which is nothing but big pictures of new toys. Many of the lines featured here don't hit stores for months, so I assume the only difference between Incoming and Monthly Rag is that you have a couple of genuine sound bites for the toys featured in the Rag (that's setting aside the Rag articles that are complete fakes, which only confuses the issue more.) Those DC dioramas could have been just an Incoming page, with pics of the toys, the in-store date, and a couple of "OMG we're drooling" comments in the accompanying text box. Instead they're buried under a giant jpeggy shot of Brad Pitt that is probably a copyright violation.

Please give it a rest. If you find straight news to be boring, then don't try to fill ten pages with it. Shove it into two and take a quarter off that $5 cover price. Or incorporate the news under the Incoming header, which is probably all you really need anyway.

If you print this, please hold the "lighten up d00d its a toy mag" comments. I've always loved ToyFare and enjoyed the word balloons, the McGuffin gag, Twisted ToyFare Theatre... even the paragraphs in the regular "Top 10" feature, which I know must get to be a grind after month upon month of Wolverine figures. I like my ToyFare funny. You've just gone overboard with your new Rag section, because you're treating the "news" like it's not important unless it is funny as well. Like I said, if it's not working for you, then dump it! The Rag is confusing, misleading filler... and it must be one of your writer's secret resume file for his/her rejected application to The Onion.

This is sort of unrelated, but I can't believe your reader mail goes to an AOL.com address. Time to toss the dial-up, man. Shamus has his own domain, make him share it.

Thanks, Joe Fourhman

P.S. Please tell the jerks behind Stikfas that it's time they actually submitted real world photographs of their new toys, not fucking CG renders. I don't want to see some CAD artist's conception of the toys, I want to see the genuine goddamn toys.

There's some hilarious meta-fiction going on at Penny Arcade, by the name of Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga. It started out as yet another one of their grating high school in-jokes, but Tycho and Gabe managed to find a way to make it relevant to their fans: hand over the keys.

To understand this link, you have to bring along several culture-underground touchstones. You have to know what a Wiki is, foremost. You have to have somehow been in gaming in the last twenty years. And it won't hurt to have been annoyed by one or both, because that makes the whole concept funnier.

And actually, you don't need to read a damn thing, because it's the simple concept that's so great.

As I said, Tycho started the avalanche by off-handedly mentioning some stupid Dungeons & Dragons ripoff he once imagined when he was young... whether he really did or not isn't of much consequence anymore. His idea was a thin outline of battling wizards (on a world subtly named "Battal"), magic spells, and packed with important fantasy buzzwords like "heirarch" and "realms" and such. Except for the silly trivium of the wizards' familiars being living oak dressers (furniliars), the base is all very pedestrian.

Then he opened a Wiki and let the PA horde fill in the blanks.

Soon the whole thing blossomed into something that you would think was very, very real (a la Michael Chabon's Escapist comic book, which pretends that the Escapist - a super-hero created in his novel "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" - was published across the decades in hundreds of comics. Which he wasn't.) The Wiki has a massive amount of shrewdly detailed pages, discussing the history of the world of Battal, of the games and cartoons it inspired, and of the franchise itself. All thrown together by complete strangers keen on constructing a post-modern fantasy parody.

Wired has an article up about it, and the quote that got me was this:

"(These worlds) are the half-ass bullshit used to underlie the money-printing extravaganza," of game systems like Wizard of the Coast's Magic: The Gathering collectable card game, explained Holkins. The Saga exists in part to prove the facileness of such back stories and in part to acknowledge the culpability of fantasy fans who buy it all, no matter the quality.

Goddamn.

That is balls-out truth. When I first got into Magic (during 3rd edition, or "Revised" as we called it back then), there was no story. Just cards. It didn't matter how a Mahamoti Djinn and a Sengir Vampire and a Kird Ape got together, they just did. You summoned them and they fought to the death. Nobody cared about Clan Sengir in those days, we just pumped up our vamps with a Nettling Imp combo and went on with our day. As I got into the game and searched out the older cards - "older" meaning cards printed in the previous year! - I discovered the some of the flavor text alluded to a cohesive story... by name, The Brothers' War of "Antiquities." I was pretty excited about that.

Then the sets dragged on and on and before I knew it, we were expected to care about some failed Han Solo screen tester named Gerrard and his rag-tag group of heroes with an edge. The "Weatherlight" expansion was pretty much the death knell of my interest in Magic. There was this air of desperation to it, the characters were all simply begging you to like them. The hype was everywhere because the characters were everywhere. You were no longer playing yourself as a powerful spellcaster, you were re-enacting the events of Gerrard's Irregulars. It was a fabricated, soulless story designed to lift Magic above being just a game and into a franchise. And we all knew that, and we didn't care, because we just wanted more game cards. Unfortunately, the continued success of the game must have been attributed in part to the new storyline, because Wizards has continued to waste resources on developing the gameworld in every set.

And it doesn't help that Magic has had historically terrible flavor text anyway. Everybody, and I mean everybody, talks like action movie heroes. Full of badass irony. Or ironic badassery. And how many times did the game designers find it hilarious to have the flavor text be a scream? Like, "AAAIEIIIIIEIEEEEE!!!!!" This is where I point to Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, she of the worst flavor text lines ever written.

All very much like Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga. It's a gutsy move to boldly finger Magic (among others) the way PA is with Epic Legends. (And just a little suspect given their proclivity to creating their own useless, pandering franchise characters... and given that their own card game is coming out next year!) But that's exactly what these guys do well, when they bother to do it: lift the shroud of nerdery and acknowledge that not even the inmates can take this asylum seriously at all times.

Also, Xbox 360s have crashing issues! SPOILER.

Today I buckled down and started bagging and boxing my way through the immense pile of comics building up downstairs. Usually I do this once a year, but somehow 2004 was skipped... so I have over two years worth of books to sort and file away. I'm already out of bags and I'm only into the G's.

Since I'm at a forced pause, here's some of my favorite comic covers within this storage cycle. All these images were stolen from the Great Comics Database, a site that is attempting to index every comic book ever published. It's a great place to burn some hours leafing through cover galleries.

(Action Comics #806) I thought this was a strong visual era for Action, one of the most venerable comic titles out there. This was part of a series of personality covers spotlighting the new-blood female supporting cast, and this one of Girl 13 was the best. I also really liked the way they handled the title logo in these issues. Not really sure what happened to Girl 13, but she did get a DC Vs. card.	(Adventures of Superman #636) When your mag is about somebody as iconic as Superman, you can get away with a shitload of arty covers like this one. This is a nice take on the classic image of Clark Kent pulling off his shirt. Even though this is one of the hoariest of Superman cliches, I'd rather see more high-quality renders like this than yet another variation of Superman punching something.	(Batgirl: Year One #9) This whole series had outstanding covers (particularly #2). This one shows a confident, eager young Batgirl. Her cape making a subtle bat-symbol and her head just slightly cropped off the top, making her seem bigger than life. Nice work.
(The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #4) Here's your hero in a clearly un-winnable position. Want to bet he makes it out okay? This one is so delightfully silver age. In fact, given the Escapist's fourth-wall meta-existence, I'm pretty sure this is an homage to something.	(Flash #214) You got your vaguely sinister Barry Allen looming in the top right and you have your chief subject matter doing something entirely un-heroic: reading. Throw in the empty costume's neat illusion of calling for silence and you have a cool-ass cover.	(JLA #118) Zatanna has been all over the DCU (and Vertigo); nobody can decide if she's a fairly bland magic-using super-hero or if she's an ultra-hip young slacker with fantastic powers. Either way, Identity Crisis put her back on the drawing table. This is a great cover, because it manages to be both directly intriguing to the viewer and it refs a key plot point from Identity Crisis.

Mario Kart DS is great. Not super-mega-awesome, merely great. Even when Mariofied, racing games just generally ain't my thing. They either have to be super-arcadey, like Burnout, or super-gimmicky, like Double Dash. MKDS is more or less both, hence the great. You know, I still can't see "MK" without parsing "Mortal Kombat."

Mario Kart goes a long way towards appeasing the non-racing gamer with plenty of unlockables and extra modes. I can get behind that. So far, I've unlocked all the GP cups, Daisy, Dry Bones, and the third tier of karts. Bowser's third kart is one of his hilarious clown-faced airplanes. I like that, when online, you can see the bonus stuff even if you haven't necessarily unlocked them... the other night I saw Dry Bones for the first time in an online match, and he was in a tank. Gawrsh.

Is 2005 the official year of Dry Bones? He's playable in Mario Party 7 as well.

As everyone has reported, the Online Friends mode is nowhere near as robust as it should be. You can create a buddy list once you gather some 12-digit friend codes, but you don't actually get to click on a friend to invite them to a race... the matching service just pulls randomly from all your connected friends. I guess the way around that is to not have that many friends. You can also lock your friends to increase the probability that a particular pal will be matched with you, but that seems like a long way to go for something that could be accomplished with just one stylus click on a live list.

Of course, you can always race with non-friends, which is what I've been doing. Just don't expect Nintendo to allow you to turn any non-friends into friends; there's no way to communicate with fellow racers, not even an after-match "Want to Buddy? Y/N" option.

Despite Nintendo's attempts to bulletproof and fam-friendly the system, there are still plenty of pricks in the online world. I've had a competitor bail out of a race at the last second when it turned obvious I was winning (His handle was Artoo.) And I raced against one guy who made his custom car decal say "FUCK COPS." I forget his name, it may have been Megatron but spelled stupid. You rock, dumbass.

My custom icon is my little Dred Head, as visible every three inches here on fourhman.com.

So here is my MKDS friend code. Feel free to add me into your friends list, and email me with yours (or use the shoutbox on the main page.)

I took my DS into a Panera Bread last weekend, just to see if I could play online Mario Kart while eating something vegetarian in a bread bowl, but was unable to get a connection on their in-house wi-fi. It kept throwing an "access point detected, but cannot connect to the server" error, something like 52100. That sounds to me like there's something I should manually edit after the DS successfully senses the wi-fi, but I don't know what that is. Also, they were out of bread bowls. Jesus, folks, order a few more of those.

While you're waiting for a race, check out the real reason for taking your DS online, Animal Crossing: Wild World. Here's a classy commercial for the game in Japan (via Kotaku, you are reading Kotaku, right?)

I love this image. It's the kind of thing that gives me chills.

I was cleaning up some junk in the basement when I uncovered a small box full of items from, oh, let's say childhood. The range probably goes from the late '70s to the late '80s. Here's the overview pic of what was inside.

First, we have some cars. I no longer remember what made these awesome, but I remember that they were. They're Tonka something and they need batteries. The little side wheels look like the cars belong with some kind of walled track, but I don't recall ever owning anything like that.

Next up is some Ghostbusters 2 sound effect things, which I think were from Burger King. These have to be the newest items in the box, judging from the movie's release date (1989). Each one played two sounds, and I even wrote on the back of them what the sounds were, which should give you an idea of the kind of kid I was. They're in the trash now; if you want them, you're going to have to swing by before the trash guys show up around 7am.

I loved these guys. They're from the Micronauts line and according to this website they came out in '77. I distinctly recall loving the green one, liking the blue one, and hating the red one. Note which one is missing his weapon arms.

Aside from some general piles of junk (is that an original MOTU halberd from the Castle Grayskull weapons rack?!), note the cheap plastic green and orange things. That's what you got in a McDonald's Happy Meal in 1982. Cheap plastic green and orange things.

And yes, that is a sandwich baggie full of tiny spiders.

Kind of a sad tale here. All four of these original Madballs toys have succumbed to toy rot. You'd expect that from the balls themselves, being foam. But the action figures? Sadly, yes... they're uncomfortably sticky. I'm not really sure what to do with them. They are rotting, true, but they're also extra-sweet. Did you even know that they once made Madballs action figures with launching ball heads, revealing the never before seen bodies of the Madballs? I like that the eyeball's body is just a mass of ropey red muscle. Here's a toy line that's ready for a revival. Just add some tribal tattoos and turn that 's' into an extreme 'z'... and you could have a whole new modern generation of gross-out toys for boys.

There's a little castle tower in there that came with four plastic figures inside, very Dungeons & Dragonsy for the day. There's a dragon, a roc (maybe a pheonix?) and a lizardman holding a club. The fourth figure is gone, but I think it was a wizard and a crystal ball. I'm actually rather surprised there's a piece missing.

Battle Beasts. I am so happy these guys escaped the Madballs toy rot. Here's a franchise tailor-made for me in 1986. Little collectible animals with body armor and secret team affiliations. Hell, I'd buy these today. You remember the deal... each one had a heat-activated insignia that revealed either Fire, Wood or Water (or Sunburst if you were lucky). It was elemental Rock / Paper / Scissors between action figures that you could always, always win... provided you had a good memory and your opponent picked first.

When I took them out of the box, most of them were still holding their weapons, except for four of them, which I matched up to the loose weapons completely from memory. Looking online for some Battle Beasts info, I found this page from semi-obnoxious kitsch snark site X-Entertainment that has pictures of the accompanying BB playsets... which I imagined owning so deeply back then that I am almost convinced that I once owned them now. And don't forget, these guys were created in Japan as part of the Transformers universe! NOW how cool do you think they are! (Here's another BB site that I'm linking to here simply to avoid clogging up my Safari bookmarks list.)

That damn rabbit. I can't look at that rabbit holding a double-bladed staff and not laugh.

Out of the four miniseries leading up to Infinite Crisis, the most interesting story wasn't even one of them... it was the four part Power Girl tale from JSA Classified #1 through #4. DC should have pumped that story up a bit and made it one of the hyped minis... it would certainly have been a better choice than that terrible and pointless Rann-Thanagar War.

PG's big problem is that she has never been a marquee name; therefore, no new mini. Post-Crisis, her widest fame came during the JLI/JLE years, when she was largely used as a one-note "bitch" character with a pet cat and a diet Coke addiction. She's had several origin revisions since then - which is why the Classified story was so good, because it directly referenced the confusion surrounding her. Plus the art was great, super-heroics with an indy vibe. I thought it was a fantastic fresh take on the character, because she hasn't exactly been well-used in JSA since she joined a few years ago anyway. In JSA, she's just another token strongman. In JSA Classified, we saw her as a person, which was, for me, the first time since, well, ever.

That story led directly into Infinite Crisis #2, where we finally hear her true origin: the same one she had when she first appeared, back as part of Earth-2. She remains as she was then, the cousin of Earth-2's Superman... the mirror analogue to Supergirl being the cousin of Earth-1's Superman.

Of course, post-Crisis, all Supergirls of any stripe were wiped out. And that decision was made with good reason... because it becomes increasingly stupid for Mr. Last Survivor of Krypton to also have a Kryptonian cousin, a Kryptonian dog, a Kryptonian city-in-a-bottle, and a baker's dozen of Kryptonian villains. It just eats away at what makes Superman Superman. So while Supergirl herself died during the Crisis, somehow Power Girl survived into the new, One Earth universe... but she needed a new origin to take her away from her former Kryptonianishness. Which is why we had all the confusion as new creative teams tried to make her new role make sense... she's super-strong, she can fly, she can go toe-to-toe with any number of other DCU powerhouses. She's too big to ignore. (Alex Ross made her one of Superman's key lieutenants in Kingdom Come!)

And yet, even though the concept of "Supergirl" was more or less off-limits to poor Karen Starr, other people were pouring out new Supergirls all over the place. Not too long after Crisis, a "Supergirl" showed up who was actually an alien shapeshifter who modelled itself after Superman. A brunette Supergirl walked into Action Comics one day claiming to be Clark and Lois's child from the future. And now we have the sexy Michael Turner version from an arc in Superman/Batman, who, I guess, is the new "real thing." (Great Wikipedia article here.) Eh. The whole Super-Family concept annoys me.

So the notion that Power Girl is a lost fragment of pre-Crisis continuity is cool. It's like a meta-origin. We fans all know of her Earth-2 days, even though they were wiped by Crisis on Infinite Earths... and now the hook of Infinite Crisis is that the Golden Age Superman wants to bring it back.

There's a bit in IC #2 where Kal-L, the Original Superman, reflects on what has happened in the DCU since Crisis. Doomsday. Knightfall. Emerald Twilight. OMAC Project. Among others. It's more or less a Greatest Hits cavalcade of DC's big event series over the last twenty years. (GA Superman must have passed over such pseudo-event flops as Bloodlines, Underworld Unleashed and Eclipso: The Darkness Within.) His point is that the current DCU is dark, brutal and undeserving of having won dominant status after Crisis... which is actually a bit misleading, since it wasn't just Earth-1 and a couple of -2 longshots that survived... the "new Earth" was supposed to be a gestalt of five Earths: 1 (Justice League), 2 (Justice Society), 4 (the Charlton heroes), S (the Shazam family) and X (the Freedom Fighters). Classic Supes is looking at the world through rose-colored super-glasses when he posits that an Earth-2-dominated universe would have turned out better.

I always thought the merging of the Earths was rather even-handed. The biggest losers of Crisis were the hitlisted duplicate characters and anyone connected to them. Like Earth-2's Robin and Huntress, grown adult heirs to the Golden Age Batman's legacy. GA Bats had died several years before Crisis, neatly removing him from the stage, so Robin and Huntress were crushed into oblivion during a shadow demon battle. The Golden Age Wonder Woman was quietly shipped off to a far corner of Paradise Island, and then her role in the JSA was later retconned into Hippolyta herself, who wore the Wonder Woman mantle 40 years before Diana set foot on "man's world." And, of course, the original Superman, whom not even DC's editorial staff could kill during Crisis. He was hidden away in a pocket dimension and assumed to be one of the final continuity taboos.

Until Infinite Crisis.

But you can see why DC did that... having extra versions of the big three running around, with history set squarely in World War Two, is a major drag around the necks of the characters as they exist today. Especially since the difference between Earth-1 Superman and Earth-2 Superman is damn near nothing, certainly not as obvious as the Earth-1 Flash and the Earth-2 Flash. Of course, the real reason behind that is that the big three were in continuous publication from the '40s through the '60s and into the '80s; they were never "reinvented" as were Green Lantern and the Flash into completely different characters. So when fans demanded a logical continuity between all the characters, there was just no way to have one single Superman or Batman or Wonder Woman explain away fifty years of stories.

It was a mess and Crisis on Infinite Earths was a brave idea, and the right thing to do. That's what makes Infinite Crisis so exciting, because of the threat to undo all of that... and with the World's First Super Hero cast as the antagonist! (And he has Superboy-Prime with him, who will probably get a sound drubbing before this is all over. I've never understood just what his deal was back in COIE, and I even have that crossover issue of DC Comics Presents that was supposed to explain it.)

You just have to wonder how all this will turn out for Power Girl.

That gigantic brick in the lower left is the Xbox 360's external power supply. It looks to be roughly one third the size of the 360 itself, unless impotent rage is clouding my judgement. Is this really the best they could do? Is that thing converting to 220 as well? You do not get to claim a nice new compact form factor to your console when you ask gamers to dump that monster in their living rooms.

Take a good look, because that's going to be recalled within a year when Microsoft gets served with a class action lawsuit for burning up dorm room throw rugs.

Also: some shitty third party peripheral company called; they want their controller design back.

Actually, the game is called Trapt, which isn't much better.

It's been over five years since the last game in the Deception series, and that was on PS1, so it feels like it's been even longer. In the meantime, the folks behind Deception - Keisuke Kikuchi and Makoto Shibata - went on to create the mega-superb Fatal Frame series on PS2... so for a while there, it was looking like we'd never see a new Deception game.

I'm kinda bummed that they didn't retain the word "Deception" in the title. I would hazard a guess that it was Marketing who decided Deception 4 would be dubbed "Trapt." Since A) it's been five long years and one entire console generation since "Deception 3: Dark Illusion", and B) once you get above a "3" in your series, people start to ask tough questions about the quality of your franchise.

I really like these games, so it's good to be back. Once again, you take on the role of a lost girl who finds she can place and trigger booby traps inside some cookie-cutter medieval castle. Each level begins with you being chased by a random assortment of knights and wizards and whoevers... you pause the game and set up some traps... then you walk yourself around as bait to get the jerks to come within range of your smashing floors and falling guillotine blades. Aside from navigating the pause screen, your only controls are running and setting off traps via remote control (each trap is assigned to either triangle, square or X). Easy.

Good fun. But...

This is a final-year PS2 game, yet it looks and acts like a first-year game. It won't take you long to realize that the graphics are downright awful. Crappy textures, little-to-no detailing, just plain ugly all around. In fact, were it not for the advanced character models, you might think you're playing one of the PS1 versions. When your victims bite it, the game cuts to a specialized death scene that features only the dying character, regardless of whoever was standing right beside him when he caught the killing blow. Not to mention that despite the whole concept being about people dying in hilariously gruesome torture devices, there is very little visceral connection between trap and victim. Not that I want to see a bloodbath, but it would be nice to see the intruders believably interact with the traps, instead of duping the same contortion animation no matter which trap did the deed. In 2005, we should be seeing quite a bit more realism coming out of the PS2.

Then there's the painfully over-organized menus and sub-menus, all of which wait a palpable beat before loading. This game could have used some serious streamlining. Don't even ask about all the text typos.

All of which makes me think that Tecmo finished this game in '01 (pre-Fatal Frame 1) and then dropped it down a well. There are literally NO advancements between the PS1 Deception games and this one. You're still limited to three traps per room (which is stupid, we could certainly manage more than three trigger buttons). You're still limited to "equipping" only nine traps total per level (which is stupid, we could certainly manage an entire library of traps). You're still limited to only two intruders at a time (which is stupid, we could certainly face down more than that). You're still interrupted at every opportunity for looooong cutscenes showing victims entering the room and, later, the same victims in their death throes, complete with subtitles. It's like I don't even have a PlayStation2.

Was this a PSP title and somebody accidentally shipped it on CD?

So I've pretty much convinced myself that it's late 2001 and either I play this game or I try to finish the Target Test Mode in Smash Bros. It's still a lot of fun dropping giant rocks on the heads of angry soldiers, or tossing bitchy archers into electrified rivers. It's just not the "next-gen" advancement I had hoped for.

Pat Robertson must still be working on his quota of batshit things to say before 2006.

This quote from the other night is in reference to the nonsense going on right in my own backyard, the tossing-out of the Dover School Board.

�I�d like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don�t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don�t wonder why He hasn�t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I�m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that�s the case, don�t ask for His help because he might not be there.�

Even once you straighten out the jumble of his poor, rambling old man sentence structure, it's still an embarrassing mass of half-threats. As usual, Pat demonstrates a keen eye into God's intent. Should a disaster happen unto Dover, God may or may not be around to pick up the assist to an event that Pat's not saying will actually happen. Man, he really does deserve his leadership role!

Plus, it's not even particularly relevant to what actually happened. No one voted God out of town, Pat. They voted out the School Board who wanted a statement read in science class that offered up intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. Outside of the classroom, the churches are all still standing. The God Bless America ribbons are still on every car. The voters' statement would seem to be: let's keep things as they have been for decades, and as they are in every other non-moron town in America. Do you have anyone prepping you before you hit the airwaves, or do you just fly in and wing it, you doddering, fascist, genocidal old windbag?

Pat's statement does make it obvious that he, at least, equates intelligent design with creationism! That's in spite of the ousted Dover Board's continuing fantasy that ID exists outside of any religious influence. Let's hope the prosecution picks up on that one; I'd love to see Pat brought into town on his private learjet, if indeed he ever leaves his perch high up on the mount.

Pat might be heartened to learn that the margin of votes was pretty slim, with the new Board only just coming out on top. (Although, at this point, Pat is completely incapable of learning anything.) It was a close race, and Dover - formerly a town with absolutely nothing of note except for the area's oldest themed mini-golf joint - has been bitterly divided. And all because of a few faux politicos with delusions of grandeur who thought they could assbang the Constitution and spit in the face of anybody who held different religious or non-religious beliefs. The debate outside of the court has come down to the misinformed versus the malcontent. The misinformed are the Christian sheeple, who have been fooled into thinking that Christianity is the State Religion and needs to be protected as such. The malcontents are the Angry Atheists (such as myself) who are sick and tired of History's Chief Oppressors finding yet another way to force their worldview onto others while simultaneously crying about being attacked and victimized.

I guess we're lucky Pat didn't call for anyone in Dover to be assassinated.

Speaking of crazies, we received a hilarious press release at work today. Some church in Virginia is holding an event where the pastor will pray over bottles of fuel additive, in the hopes that God will bless the additive and make the faithful's gas last three times as long.

I am not making this up. This guy plans to incant over gas additives so it will turn into gasoline. My boss said that he's thinking too small, that his church should send him to Texas or Iraq and have him pray over the drying oil fields directly. Let's take him to the source and get God to renew those fossil fuels!

The release said things like "Imagine the savings to your wallet!" and "It may work, or it may not work, but what do we lose by trying?" Our dignity.

So I called them. A woman answered the phone. I verified with her that this event was going to happen, then I asked if this was a joke. No. Okay, is this some kind of stunt? No. I inquired if she really expected this guy to effectively turn gas additive into more gas. "We just believe in God," she said.

I was hoping that I would be told that Pastor John was a bit of a prankster and that this was just a fun recruitment drive to pull in some new faces and talk about how a modern church faces issues in the year 2005. I was hoping that the world did not contain lunatics who think they can summon up divine alchemy. I was wrong.

There's a high probability that you - you - would consider yourself Christian, since you're reading this in English and you're affluent enough to afford a computer. Do you think this is anything but complete nuthouse looney time? How do you feel when you hear of small town churches trying to supernaturally alter chemicals? Or when a major Christian celebrity suggests that a School Board election equates to inviting God's wrath (or at the least, his divine apathy)? Do you dissociate yourself from that? Is that the domain of fringe elements that you normally wouldn't pal around with? What would have to happen before you question how the very fundamentals of your belief system can get so comically twisted and/or tragically perverted by so many different groups?

Because those groups are saying the same thing about your version. That you're not God Warrior enough, not hardcore enough, not hardline enough, not thinking hard enough about What Jesus Would Do. Maybe it's in respect to recruiting new parishioners, or in voting down pro-choice legislation. Maybe you're not running enough food banks for the needy, or maybe you just don't hate the gays as hard as you should. Maybe you're just not praying hard enough, because your coffee cup still holds plain old coffee, no creamer.

Stunts like what's going on in Virginia are harmless (but stupid) enough, but guys like Pat Robertson are out-and-out dangerous. His empire is part of a mighty machine that influences our government and, as Pat and his pals like to remind us, they are out to get anybody who doesn't follow their rules. If you're not a 700 Club-style Christian, you should be thanking the non-Christians out there standing up against this small-minded brute... because if we weren't around, he'd be coming after you.

We took Clark to his first Disney on Ice show tonight. Not that an eight month old would have any idea what was going on, but we figured we'd give it a shot and the tickets were free.

Unfortunately, the theming was centered around "The Incredibles." However, to make it more palatable, the Disney on Ice people twisted it so the Incredibles were interacting with classic Disney characters at Disneyland locations, rather than having the ice show follow the movie directly, as many of these tours do. Every year, they have several of these shows that travel the country... usually one show centers around the most recent movie, but ones based on the Princesses or Mickey & Minnie are always a safe sales bet. In the Incredibles' case (Disney/Pixar's least universally beloved film), they must have realized that they couldn't fill a stadium to watch the movie plot play out on an ice rink for 2+ hours... so they married it to Disney Proper. Remember, these are really ugly characters, and they make even uglier ice skaters, so having Mickey come out to puncture the awkward tension is welcome relief.

The idea is that the Parr family want to spend a normal vacation at Disneyland, but of course they tend to misunderstand the animatronic attractions and use their secret superpowers to "protect" themselves. Like when Dad takes out a robot alligator on the Jungle Cruise or destroys the Runaway Mine Cart coaster. Putting the Incredibles aside, the show does a really nice job of presenting all the classic Disney attractions. The Haunted Mansion set comes with one of those stretching portraits. The Pirates of the Caribbean portion features the iconic imagery of the three guys in jail trying to get the key from that mangy yellow dog. That's just good Disney detailing in action. Of course, this being an ice show, most sets are just fodder to start a familiar tune (the other problem with The Incredibles as a solo act is that there are no songs) and bring out the whole ensemble for plenty of choreographed costumed skating.

They even trot out Baloo during the Jungle Cruise bit to do 'I Wan'na Be Like You.' No King Louie, though. I recently read on Paul Dini's weblog that the estate of Louie Prima sued Disney to prevent future use of poor ol' Louie, since the character as played in Jungle Book is pretty much an exact copy of Mr. Prima himself. Sort of how Genie is pretty much Robin Williams, it's a case of the voice actor taking over the character early in the movie's development. So that would be my guess as to why Baloo has to sing his famous duet all alone now.

Anyway, I was happy to see Baloo. I do likes the Baloo.

Just before the intermission, Syndrome shows up and kidnaps Mickey and Minnie. Interestingly, the family consistently refers to this Syndrome as a "robotic duplicate" of Syndrome himself, presumably so the ice show can stay in continuity. I'm not sure why they would bother stressing this, seeing as how the show mixes a human-sized Buzz Lightyear with short-adult-portraying-a-kid Dash at one point, among other filmic incongruities. I mean, come on, it's an ice show. We just went from the Tiki Room to Snow White to Chip 'n' Dale to Frozone. We're not really concerned with canon here.

Robot Syndrome himself makes no mention of being merely a robot, which I guess is the ultimate compliment to his self-aware programming. After the fifth time they reinforced his droidishness, I thought maybe they were building towards something, like physically knocking off his metal robot head... or, less violently, have him stuck in some famous Disney animatronic diorama, doomed to repeat the same meaningless actions over and over. But no, being a robot has nothing to do with the end, when Frozone simply skates in out of nowhere and freezes both him and his big evil machine.

Sorry, "Spoiler."

He deserves it. His plan to turn Disneyland into "Syndromeland" includes turning the It's A Small World dolls into evil bumper cars. We can't have that.

Clark did really well, considering how this trip was edging him out of both his bedtime and his comfort zone. For most of the first act, he watched it or watched the people around him. Once or twice he got into a song and started beating his arms wildly. He fussed briefly, but it was so damn loud I couldn't even hear him and I was sitting right next to him. During the overlong Pirates number in the second act, he fell asleep and didn't wake up until it was time to go.

The neatest trick of the night was saved for the finale, wherein Syndrome is defeated and "the magic" is returned to Disneyland, thanks to Frozone. Each kid was given a free lightup wristband on entry, so during this key sequence, we were all told to hit the buttons on the wristband. When you looked around the stadium, you saw hundreds of little blinking red lights from everybody's wristband! The free "Incredi-Band" was mentioned in the TV commercial, so it was pure bait to get people in TicketMaster, but it was still cute in action.

I suppose it's too early in the box office to tell if next year's show will be Chicken Little on Ice. Or at least, Chicken Little's Amazing Disneyland Adventure with Mickey, Minnie and Your Favorite Disney Princesses.

I'm still enjoying Urban Dead and have even tiptoed into Advance Wars By Web, but here's two more web-based games, albeit of the entirely flash-based variety.

This one is just plain awesome visually. In celebration of Resident Evil 4's European PS2 release, they're running this slick flash game. If you're visiting from the future, it is probably long gone since the accompanying contest is over. As you can tell, the game is done in the style of Nintendo's classic Game And Watch LCD handhelds of the early '80s... which I remember first discovering under locked glass display case at Best many years ago. The deeper layer of amusement here is that RE4 was originally touted as a Nintendo GameCube exclusive, before Capcom got sick of the Cube's relatively low sales and found a way to cram the game into the PS2's final holiday shopping season. So seeing them obviously riff Nintendo here sort of comes off like a big middle finger. (via kotaku)

Escapa is hugely lo-fi, but worth a giggle. You click and hold the red box and keep it from touching any of the floating blue boxes. Very Degenatron. My high score was over 20 seconds, but then I got bored. (via evanier)

Today's religious-metaphor-busting quote comes to us from "Malcolm in the Middle":

Dewey: Like Pastor Roy said, how God�s so much bigger and wiser than us. And trying to see what he�s thinking would be like an ant trying to see what I�m thinking.

Teacher: Yes, exactly. But we can trust in his wisdom and we can have faith that he is watching over us.

Dewey: Like me with the anthill in my backyard. I spent days watching the ants, trying to figure out which ones were good and which ones were bad. But they all just look like ants. So I started smiting all of them. I was smiting them with the garden hose, and with lighter fluid, and with the lawnmower. And to be perfectly honest, I think I went a little crazy with the shovel. Those ants could have been praying to me all day; I wouldn�t have heard �em. There was nothing they could do about it. Really, it�s the same with us. There�s nothing we can do about anything, either. So why worry about it? Hey, this is making me feel better. I guess all we can do is live our lives with as much kindness and decency as possible and try not to dwell on God standing over us with that giant shovel. Bye!

But seriously though, we're having a good ol' time here in Pennsylvania right now, because of the morons in Dover, York County and their attempts to sneak religion into the classroom. Even despite my hatred for local newspapers, I have been enjoying the coverage we get in the morning rag, because every time the Creationist School Board idiots open their collective mouth, they just get stupider and stupider. There's great ongoing coverage here, including local editorials which are usually a complete snide slam dunk against the God Squad (look for the Mike Argento columns).

Yesterday, one of the School Board Jihadists had to admit in court that she still doesn't even understand what "Intelligent Design" means. Yet she forced mention of it into the school's scientific curriculum!

And under every rock another loon scurries. It has come out that in 1998, the school's janitor took it upon himself to burn a giant mural (painted by a student) that illustrated the various evolutionary steps of man. The janitor. Well, that's typical of Christians; when they find something they don't like, they burn it.

Then there's the ID textbook the Dover School Board purchased for insertion into all school libraries, "Of Pandas and People." Early drafts for the book prove that it was written using the word "creationism," but then search-and-replaced that legal landmine with the supposedly neutral term "intelligent design." However, despite their best efforts, no one is buying the idea that intelligent design does not equal creationism. Although we did have one local professor who - regardless of intelligent design never achieving any level of peer review or scientific inquiry or publication - sat on the stand and tried to sell that very notion: that intelligent design was good science and not especially religious. But then he elaborated that it was entirely possible that the "designer" (we dare not call "him" a "creator" or a "god") may have since disappeared... which probably didn't exactly strengthen his fellowship with the religious defense who hired him.

There's something else that grinds my gears. The notion of "defending" Christianity. You know, I can't drive five miles without seeing at least one Christian church. I don't think this is an organization in trouble.

The truth is that you have a collection of nuts with an agenda. They wanted to "balance" the scientific teaching of evolution with an opposing theory because evolution offended them. Which is only because modern science finds answers for things that ancient religion necessarily whitewashed out of a lack of technological sophistication. Why did those locusts swarm? Because God got pissed off, that's why.

But as the quote goes, "Congress shall make no law etc etc etc." As a country, we decided early on that the state really shouldn't force any one religion on anybody. (And I have to point out that York County, now seen nationally as a haven for racists AND religious lunacy, has a full complement of private Christian schools one can choose to attend and learn all about whatever fairy tales they like.) Of course, we've had McCarthy-esque mistakes that still must be dealt with - "under God" in the Pledge, Ten Commandments in courthouses - but we're still learning what The Melting Pot truly means. 200 years later.

Every day the Dover School Board sinks deeper into their own mire. They've lied under oath ("I misspoke," the Lead Idiot said.) They've hidden costs. They've been secretly planning this for years, with full knowledge that it was wrong, that it was offensive, that it was a bait-and-switch.

And they would have gotten away with it, had not a few brave parents and teachers stepped up. Because, as the board duly noted, the vast majority of parents and children in Dover have no problem with it. The kids could care less; they're barely paying attention anyway. And most parents around here are undeniably Christian and this sort of thing appeals to their "common sense." They're not going to complain about it, no matter how wrong it is. In fact, this only raises their ire as they buy into the myth that Christians are under attack. (Now we have to put up with the Happy God Groups parading downtown and handing out Jesus Saves leaflets and generally carrying on as if it was their rights that were taken away.)

Unfortunately for Jesus, this isn't a simple matter of majority rule. Communities don't get to vote Yay or Nay on this proposition. (Believe me, in WASP York County, there's plenty of ethical/unethical propositions that you wouldn't want anywhere near a ballot box.) This is our Constitutition being burned. If the courts were to allow this to continue, it's only a short hop to tell classrooms that it's okay to name that designer. Then some nutjob will uncover all the other nonsense in the Bible that pre-dates scientific study, like stuff about locusts and weather patterns and dinosaurs and menstruation and rotting meat. And then we will have fully undermined everything humankind has labored to discover and invent and understand for centuries.

After all, there's nothing left to think about if the ultimate answer is that God created it and there's no way we can ever understand why because he's so unknowably awesome.