No words. Too funny. Apologies for content-less YouTube update. SERIOUS REVIEW post later today.

P.S. There’s more.

While promoting Rudy Coaches a Baseball Team, Sean Astin told MTV that a Goonies sequel is “an absolute certainty” at this point. The movie would likely follow the adventures of the original Goonies’ kids and shamelessly exploit the fond memories of an entire generation. Strong DVD sales of the original are cited as the primary reason this idea is even on the table, effectively laying the blame for this inevitable disaster squarely on the fans. With Anne Ramsey long dead and the looming prospect of a CGI Sloth, hopefully someone with some sense realizes this is a bad idea before it’s too late. Or that Konami already made a ‘good enough’ sequel.

Later: more knee-jerk reactions and unwarranted scorn.

What is the Monkeysphere? Why, the very secret to human interaction, of course.

A reprieve from CRACKED.com’s onslaught of 80s nostalgia-fueled top ten lists, the Monkeysphere is hilarious, enlightening, and soul-shatteringly depressing. It is, of course, the basis for human society and the explanation for the very structure of our lives. If you only visit CRACKED.com once in your lifetime (and honestly, you’ll be hard-pressed to come with a reason for a second trip), today is the day to do it.

Sportacus knows the secret of the Monkeysphere. Do you?

Trying to write about Law & Order is a daunting task. The original series has been on the air for 17 years; its 18th season starts this January (look forward to a Law & Order premiere liveblog!). With four other series falling under the Law & Order umbrella – two successes, two horrible, horrible failures – the entire franchise represents an incomparably massive crime drama mythology. There’s a lot to discuss, and simply choosing a starting point is an intimidating prospect. I want to quote Dick Wolf and tell you that Law & Order has done for New York what James Joyce did for Dublin. I want to quote Saturday Night Live and tell you all about the various components of The Sound. But I’m not going to do any of that yet. Instead, I’m going to start with Jack “Hang ‘Em High” McCoy (Sam Waterson), the reason I bothered watching an episode of the series beyond the first.

Jack McCoy isn’t an asshole, exactly. He is a man who believes in justice, and he doesn’t care whose toes he needs to step on, or whose skulls he needs to crush, to see justice done. He is a ruthless executive assistant district attorney. At one point, McCoy has all gay marriages in the state of New York annulled so that a murderer’s confession no longer falls under the protection of spousal privilege, much to the annoyance of his lesbian ADA. In another instance, he stages a fake trial to extract information from a dirty DEA agent, ultimately failing and getting the agent killed. Having been found in contempt more than any other lawyer in New York (and once in a California court!), for Jack McCoy the ends are more important than the means. He’s an unconventional prosecutor that plays by nobody’s rules but his own. Basically, Jack McCoy is the Jack Bauer of the legal world. He even has an estranged daughter.

Additionally, Jack McCoy has taught me more about the American legal system than any other source. Thanks to him, I know what a grand jury is and understand the power of an indictment. I know to always object to hearsay, that most cases end in a plea, and that a prosecutor can get a witness to give the most prejudicial testimony in the world as long as the defense opens the door for it. He’s taught me to shake my head when I yell at people.

He’s also taught me that Law & Order is awesome. You see, McCoy isn’t an anomaly. Law & Order’s entire cast is surprisingly well developed. I expected flat non-characters acting as siphons between viewers and the case of the week. Each character is defined by his or her actions, the actors playing their parts with an almost extreme minimalism, making each morsel of personal information all the sweeter. The main cast, subtle performance building on subtle performance, outshines the often cartoonish guest stars. Though the focus of each episode is unquestionably the case itself, the reoccurring characters – their personal motivations and beliefs – primarily drive the action. A case’s affect on the characters is frequently more interesting than the case itself.

Law & Order is the police procedural that knows it’s a police procedural. Its seemingly rigid format – 22 minutes of detectives working a case, an arrest, 22 minutes of the DA’s office prosecuting the suspect – isn’t quite so rigid. The series often plays with its own format, playing against viewer expectations and easily manipulating the audience. Additionally, episodes rarely end with sterile conclusions. Everything comes with a price, and often the price is too high for the justice system to pay. The district attorney’s office loses many of the cases it prosecutes. Often times, an episode ends with no conclusion at all. The only true constant in the series’ format comes from the “slice of life” segment in the first 30 seconds of each episode, often leading to a crime or the discovery of a crime scene.

The series is also far smarter than it has a right to be. As a mainstream police procedural/courtroom drama with nearly 400 episodes under its belt, Law & Order is a show that uses big words and doesn’t stop to explain them. And just like Jack McCoy, it doesn’t pull any punches, attacking issues “ripped from the headlines” head on and rarely taking the easy approach by choosing sides. It moves at breakneck speed, with no establishing shots or transitional scenes – only white-on-black title cards accompanied by The Sound – and dares the viewer to keep up. This isn’t flashy, substanceless fluff like CSI or banal garbage like CSI: Miami (the #1 show in the world!). The rotating cast of genuinely interesting characters keeps things fresh, and some exceptional writing doesn’t hurt either. Law & Order is an excellent TV series that is taken for granted by most television viewers, but is just as good now as it was 393 episodes ago. Better, even.

Oh, and that Dick Wolf quote? “Crime is a constantly renewable resource. That’s why we have newspapers.” That’s also why we have Law & Order.

“But it’s impossible to lose a game of SimTower,” I replied. And like always, I was right.

A half-mile wide lobby, a single subterranean Japanese restaurant, and a $100 million dream. Sure, it took two millennia and the discovery that the in-game clock resets every 1000 years, but my honor was upheld. You can try to lose as poorly as me at SimTower, but you will fail. Still won’t lose though.

In other equally exciting news, I spent all of today recoding a great deal of the site. Sure, it doesn’t look any different aside from the new font, but it’s considerably more futureproof now. And I made actual headway into converting all of the Memoirs of an English Major essays into the new (and now newer!) format like I should have done six months ago.

And… that’s it. Feels like an Olde Timey update, doesn’t it?

Five years worth of dorkclub.com Wordpress content has found its way back online, boys. How historical for us. Content resurrection is almost as fun as content nuking, except without any sense of forward progress. Still, regression is change all the same.

Now get to it: find as many dead links, formatting errors, and examples of bloated self-indulgance as you can!

Next up: Newspro posts and DORK Club Episodes! Seriously. (Not seriously.)

I’ve started playing World of Warcraft again against my better judgment. The endgame is one big waste of time, designed specifically to string players along with the smallest possibility of reward lying in wait at the end of each massive time investment as they continue to pay their monthly fees. Leveling alts only leads to the endgame again, an endgame in which the honor system, which greatly reduces the effectiveness of alts, plays a prominent role. Yet here I am, LFGing, farming, pking, and fighting with mages and priests over the fattest of the l00tz.

When you’re spending between five and eight hours a day in Azeroth (I wish that wasn’t a conservative figure), it doesn’t leave all that much time for, well, anything. Except for dinging, gratsing, and pointing out that Blizzard’s design staff is, like, totally inept and stuff.

I’ve graduated from college now with a nice and shiny English degree. As a proud member of the “real” world, so far I have spent a week and a half with my parents and spent an unhealthy amount of time flipping 1s and 0s in some server farm in Florida. The beta servers were in Florida. I’ll just assume the retail servers are in Florida rather than Irvine too. They’re probably not though. The point, however, remains the same.

The point: I suck; World of Warcraft sucks.

Other things that suck: too many to list. So I won’t bother.

That new crunchwrap surpreme at Taco Bell, though. That’s about as far from sucking as one can get. For those of you not in the know, and God bless you for that, and for those of you too lazy and/or unable to click the link above and find the pertinent information therein (future generations, this is you), the CWS is a tostada – corn tostada shell, ground beef, lettuce, tomatoes, and nacho cheese, of all things – stuffed into a tortilla which is then grilled on the Grilled Stuft grilling machine. I know, settle down. It’s as awesome as it sounds. It is the perfect representation of the cheap white Americanized commaless Mexican food that goes just great with some Del Scorcho hot sauce and a Mexican pizza on the side. It is a symbol. It is Gatsby’s green light across the water. It is perfect. God willing, our children will never know a day when the CWS does not exist. And the future, that magical world of tomorrow, will look back on these simple days as good. Better than what had come before, but not as good as what was to come. Crunchwrap supreme. It has nacho cheese.

I ate one of these.

Then I came home and I five-maned Stratholme. LFG 5-man Strath, I typed. And Vaalt and Shirfan, noble defenders of all things right, were quick to heed my call. We picked up some crap warrior and a brilliant mage, the kind of mage who makes you forget your own mother, and five-maned the hell out of that instance. We died on the MASSIVE WAVE OF DEATH following Ramstein. But we killed that ugly sucker, and Vaalt/PopcornChicken/Geoff Frazier and I got our new ring.

I out-rolled a druid for my new cloak earlier in the week. The Beast in URBS dropped it. Shirfan and Vaalt were there then too.

At some point between these two doings, I watched The Great Escape on AMC. The Wizard of Oz was on TMC at the time. I watched it because Major Zero/Tom mentions it in Metal Gear Solid 3, and I thought that by watching it I would somehow accrue (I just used that word) a greater understanding of the game. I didn’t, but the movie was pretty good. The teevee told me that if I liked the Great Escape I should watch some movie on Friday, but I won’t. I refuse.

I also refuse to stop playing Meteos, which arrived and which I play. It’s fun, and I don’t believe the game-destroying ‘crazy scratching’ method actually destroys the game. In fact, I don’t believe it does much of anything. I haven’t played Lumines (someday, he tells himself), so I can’t chime in on which one is better and thus confirm or condemn my own console purchases, as well as the console purchases of others, based on a single game. Such is life. Meteos is a hell of a lot of fun though. Wish I knew someone else with a DS and the game to compete against.

I’m a lonely boy in a lonely world.

But I have you, Internet, don’t I?

The short version:

Hearts in Atlantis is a very good book. I <3 Stephen King.

The long version:

Stephen King has said that Lord of the Flies is the one novel he wishes he could have written. William Golding beat him to it, but it’s probably for the best, as King’s Hearts in Atlantis, his own take on the themes and ideas behind Lord of the Flies (and then some) is far stronger than Golding’s classic.

King’s novel, if one can even call it that, consists of five parts – two long stories, 300 and 200 pages respectively and three shorter stories – featuring interconnecting characters, common themes and ideas, and some sort of relationship to the 1960s. This is Stephen King’s Lord of the Flies, and because Stephen King is Stephen King, because he is a writer of popular fiction and because he doesn’t like to leave any of his mysteries as mysteries, King goes to great lengths to make this excruciatingly clear. Lord of the Flies is at least mentioned in four of the stories, and is mentioned a hell of a lot in the first one.

The first story in the collection, titled Low Men in Yellow Coats, takes place in the summer of 1960 as Ted, a mysterious old man who carries his large book collection in paper bags, moves in above the 11-year-old Bobby Garfield and his single mother. Ted and Bobby foster a relationship and Bobby spends the summer with his friends Sully John and Carol, dealing with the neighborhood bullies, first kisses, and the pains of growing up. Like Stand by Me, It, or Hearts in Atlantis as a whole, Low Men in Yellow Coats is a story of the loss of innocence. It is a story of growing older and of learning what separates the adults from the children.

At the same time, it is the story with the most direct relationship with Lord of the Flies. As Bobby reads through Golding’s novel, he begins to see the events and themes of the novel appear in his daily life. He learns that people do bad things, and it’s easier for people to do bad things in groups, when people who would do good things are unable to act. Because the good and the weak are often times one and the same.

Low Men in Yellow Coats is also the story which the film adaptation of the book is entirely based on. It’s also the reason I read this book in the first place. You see, Low Men in Yellow Coats could have just as easily been titled The Dark Tower 4.5. The low men, who obviously play a major roll in the story, once again play major rolls in The Dark Tower 5 and 6. Bobby learns of “other worlds than these,” of the breakers of the Crimson King, of the dark tower, of the beam, and of the rose. Though all these elements are there, the story is much more than just a Dark Tower story. All of Stephen King’s stories take place in the world of the Dark Tower, this one just a little more than most. And though at times it feels a little too much like self-indulgence on King’s part, it doesn’t really hurt the story, or the book, in any way. Hell, it just wouldn’t be a Stephen King book without at least some sort of supernatural element.

Now is the point where I shutup and start being brief. Just kidding.

The second story in the novel, the titular Hearts in Atlantis, finds Pete Riley and Carol (Bobby’s Carol) as freshman at the University of Maine in 1966. Pete should probably spend his time studying, because if he doesn’t he’ll find himself out of college and “in the green” of Vietnam, but the third floor of his dorm has turned into a perpetual hearts tournament and Pete is unable to escape the call of the addicting card game. Once again we find the ease which with groups slide into a state of dystopia, and once again we watch as innocence fades (in more ways than one).

Hearts in Atlantis (the story) is just as strong, just as touching, as Low Men in Yellow Coats. Written as a sort of memoir of an aging hippie, we once again get King’s take on Lord of the Flies. An actual copy of the book once again shows up in the narrative. These two stories then comprise 525 pages of the 670 page book. They are the meat, baby, the main course, and the remaining three stories are the desert. A better analogy which isn’t an analogy at all: the first two stories rise, the last three stories fall. The climax is obviously in there somewhere.

So, the third story of the book, Blind Willie, takes place in 1983 as Willie (shock), a Vietnam veteran with plenty of ties to characters from the first two stories, leads a secretive triple life. He has not read Lord of the Flies. Willie’s the sort of man who believes in the importance of penance. He’s very sorry for a lot of things. He’s the sort of man who has some trouble with the past. A lot of trouble. He just can’t seem to get over the things he’s done, and he’s a done of lot of things, many of them good, but it’s the bad stuff that gives him all the trouble. And it’s the bad stuff, even after all his penance, that just has a habit of finding him again.

The entire story is just 80 pages long, which is extremely short for King, and takes place over the course of a single day in 1983, either December 16th or December 17th, depending on how you do your math, which makes it either six months after Bloomsday, the day which Ulysses takes place, or the day after six months after Bloomsday. Either way, it’s probably not a coincidence, and I should probably look for some Homeric parallels. This time, it’s all about the past, rather than any sort of present, and Willie isn’t the only man with some trouble looking back on yesteryear.

The fourth story in the book, Why We’re in Vietnam, has Bobby’s boyhood friend of Sully John attending the funereal for one his squadmates from Vietnam. It’s 1999 and Sully still sees the woman Ronnie, who loved chasing The Bitch in the hearts games on the third floor of a certain dorm at the University of Main, murdered on one hot Vietnamese afternoon. Sully lost one of his balls that afternoon. Sully hasn’t read Lord of the Flies, but he knows that Bobby has.

At the funeral, Sully runs into his old new lieutenant from the war, and the two of them get to talking. The 60s are gone, Atlantis has sunk, and it’s getting harder and harder not to sink with it. But Sully doesn’t have too much time for talking. He’s got to beat the rush hour traffic because Sully’s got a date with ka. MYSTERIOUS ENDING!

The final story, Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling, also takes place in 1999 as Bobby Garfield finally returns to the town of his youth. He still watches for the low men in yellow coats, even if he can’t quite remember the summer of 1960 as clearly as he once could. Bobby’s made his way back to town because he wants to revisit his childhood one last time, because his relationship with Lord of the Flies isn’t just over yet, and because all things serve the beam.

As a whole, Hearts in Atlantis is Stephen King’s story of the 1960s and its aftermath. It has that clean, crude style King is known for: wordy as all hell, vulgar one moment, and profound the next. It’s tragic, heartwarming, and beautiful, and is exactly the sort of novel most people would never expect from Stephen King. Not horror by any stretch of the imagination, and with plenty of complex subtlety, Hearts in Atlantis is proof positive that there’s a lot more to Stephen King than probably even Stephen King believes.

Those days are long since past.

We march on regardless.

All pages on this site are now SHTML files. Again. So update nothing accordingly and try not to use Google to find anything, because you’ll find nothing but 404s.

Speaking of Google, this site now has Google ads. I suck. I don’t intend to turn a profit from this website, I’m smart enough to realize I can’t, but even if they paid for half of this site’s hosting, they’d be worth it. I’ve sort of buried them under the sidebar to the right, so they’re pretty unobtrusive. Click them if you want. I won’t mind. Just don’t click them too often, because Google gets even a hint that some sort of scamming is doing down (I.E. lots of clicks from the same IP, lots of clicks from the same IP over a short period of time) then they shut me down forever. So don’t click them any more than once per day, Justin and Will, whose real names I have used to highlight the importance of not going click crazy. I’m not even allowed to click them myself.

I should feel pretty shitty about sticking ads on this space (and I do), but the Internet’s resident Lady Guardian has plans for doing the exact same thing. Moral comprise is more fun with a buddy.

I might finally get the archive, comment, and search pages up and matching today, but it all depends on if I go buy Battlefield 2 or not. And that all depends on Scott “PopcornChicken/I don’t want to go to CompUSA alone” Brust.

I just got back from watching George A. Romero’s latest zombie allegory, Land of the Dead, with my brother. I’ve been reading a lot of Roger Ebert’s movie reviews lately. I find them extremely entertaining. They’re well written, insightful, and contain just enough personal anecdotes to keep things interesting. Ebert’s the kind of guy who likes Dawn of the Dead (but really, it’s pretty hard not to), but isn’t particularly fond of either Night or Day. If stars earned directly translate to the worth of a film, and they don’t, and Ebert says they don’t, then Ebert ranks Land as somewhere between Day and Dawn. Personally, I found the film to be leagues better than Day of the Dead, and maybe just a little bit above Night of the Living Dead on the George A. Romero Totem of Quality. Romero’s still yet to top Dawn though, and at this point it looks like he probably never will.

Most of that paragraph was useless and/or irrelevant, but no less true. I didn’t even include any links.

Land of the Dead takes place many years after the events of the original trilogy. An unnamed city has managed to survive the zombie apocalypse and now consists of two worlds: the uber-exclusive Fiddler’s Green, a utopian society isolated within a lofty skyscraper, and the slums surrounding it. Trouble’s brewing amongst the surviving humans, as conflicts between the rich and the poor escalate and an army of zombies, led by an intelligent, and rather pissed off zombie known only as Big Daddy encroaches on their borders. Guns get shot, stuff blows up, and a variety of people are maimed and killed in a variety of interesting and violent ways. The biggest problem I have with the film though, is that there’s just too much stuff happening, and it happens much too quickly.

Whereas all of the previous films in Romero’s zombie trilogy have focused on small groups of people in small, isolated settings (a house, a shopping mall, an underground military base), Land features numerous characters, both important and Mindless Extra Waiting To Die alike, and takes place in a sprawling, if slightly underpopulated cityscape. The plot kicks into gear almost immediately and takes charge of the entire film, leaving little to no room for any character growth. That’s pretty much par for the course for a Romero flick, but in this case I was left with the feeling that I barely even knew any of the characters by the time the final credits rolled. Sure, I knew what happened, but I couldn’t really tell you about who it happened to. Because that’s exactly what happens in Land of the Dead: the plot happens, and the characters are just along for the ride. An extra 30 minutes or so (the film is only 93 minutes long as it is) to more fully flesh out the relatively large cast would have been nice.

Also, the actor (whose name I’m not going to bother looking up) who plays Big Daddy, the intelligent leader of the zombies, isn’t quite convincing in his performance. He comes across more as a stupid man than a smart zombie and just isn’t as convincing as Day’s Bub in the role of a zombie with smarts. Bub does show up for a brief cameo appearance though, as does the moustache-brushing looter from Dawn of the Dead. Denis Hopper really steals the show though, even though he only shows up in half a dozen scenes. Every single interesting line from the film comes out of Hopper’s mouth and he generally just hams it up and has a lot of fun.

Because it’s a zombie movie, and because it’s a Romero zombie movie, Land of the Dead features lots of gruesome violence. Most of the effects aren’t CG, which I wholly support, and look really, really nice. The movie’s use of CG is minimal and subtle, used only when more traditional means were an impossibility, such as in rendering a zombie whose severed head bounces and attacks from his back, desperately hanging on through its spinal column. I kinda miss the Day-Glo red paint though.

As a fan of anything Romero’s made with “dead” in the title, Land of the Dead is a perfectly enjoyable movie. I’ll definitely pick it up when it’s eventually released on DVD. I think fans of the series will have a hard time being disappointed, especially after 1985’s Day of the Dead. And hell, Roger Ebert likes it/I’m tired of writing.