CULTURAL JUNKDRAWER
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BEHOLD! We art thou at the endeth times! Ye need only observe the multitude of signs wantonly hanging about to understand that what was foretold shall come to pass! See with thine own eyes and shortly thereafter weep oceans of tears from them,,, presumably after you’re done with the seeing part of the instructions!
For the uninitiated I shall show jpegs of the harbingers of doom that was doth foretold in the ancient text…
It doth cover thine heart totally! We therefore are living in a powderkeg and doth givith off sparks!
The Illuminati kept the one with Garfield quotes a secret!
BEHOLD the acolytes of the impending doom kneeling in worship at the obscene overtly sexual imagery!
Revelation 23:23 – … and lo, the BEAST shall rise from the abyss and he will at one time have have the look of a clown and the behavior of a pretentious douchebag!
Giant birds wearing sunglasses! If THAT’S not a sign of the apocalypse I don’t know what is!
And finally the last sign hath been given! Soon the seas shall be as red as blood and then BOIL! Then turn a sickly greenish pink hue and smell like that Johnny Depp parfume “Sauvage”! Then the seas shall boil again but only for a little bit because it has other things to do. Nope; the sea shall only do the pink green hue thing once because the sea doesn’t want to seem like a one trick pony. Then the earth shall crack open draining away the oceans into the abyss which really fucks over the sea life who sorta get the short end of the deal because they never did anything wrong… EXCEPT SHARKS!
Where was I? Oh yeah the last sign!
Behold the last sign has been revealed! Behold again:
I am the night!
I am vengeance!
I… goddamn I sparkle?
At least that’s how a lot of you fanboy are making it out to be like.
So it seems like the word is that Robert Pattinson of “Twilight“ fame is going to be the new Batman/ Bruce Wayne.
Whoo BOY are a lot of fanboys PISSED!
They haven’t been this pissed since… well, since Ben Affleck was announced as Batman. Remember when there was a petition sent to Barack Obama, the last president before the United States became Bizarro world, demanding him to intervene on the casting decision? “I know Christian Bale doesn’t want the role anymore but can’t we have someone more like him instead of the guy that was in “Gili” for fuckssake!”
How ‘bout when Christian Bale was announced? “What that skinny guy from “The Mechanic?” Warner Brothers and that idiot Nolan have no idea what they’re doing! Next thing you know they’ll cast some pretty boy like Heath Ledger as the Joker! WHAT NO JOKER IN THIS MOVIE! WTF! How can you have a Batman movie without the JOKER! They haven’t done anything right since the Keaton era!”
Everybody was on board for Clooney, though!
I’m also pretty sure that people were pretty upset when Val Kilmer was announced as Batman too. Especially anybody that had to deal with Val Kilmer on a daily basis.
Reach back years ago to when Michael Keaton was announced as Batman. Oh there was outrage! “Mr Mom as the Dark Knight! The guy is a fucking comedian for chrissake! This is just proof that the movie people don’t know squat about Batman!” was the general consensus written about to the letters column of Detective Comics or People Magazine because there was no twitter to express your outrage instantly like now. “Why don’t they let a real genius like Frank Miller direct the movie!” I had heard that the hundreds of people attending San Diego Comic Con the year before the movie came out were so incensed that they vowed to write thousands of letters to Warner Brothers demanding a change in casting. Then put in… maybe… Fuck it, Arnold Schwarzenegger instead.
Oh and Adam West? WTF! Why wasn’t somebody handsome and square jawed like Frank Sinatra given that role? I’m sure was grumbled between searching long boxes of back issues at the “Tallahatchie bi-monthly comic book fair” located in the Ramada Inn Veranda room off route 55.
Anyway fanboys are pissed. So pissed that they’ve turned their attention from petitioning HBO to remake the final season of Game of Thrones with “…do it the way I fucking saw it this time!” And the fruitless, sisyphean task of hating “The Last Jedi” the “crooked Hillary” of movie beefs. I ask you to recall the odd feckless con last year to remake “The Last Jedi?” People wanting the billion dollar plus earning movie to be “more like how I imagined it being, namely a soft reboot of Empire Strikes Back! If you don’t I’m only going to see Solo twice!” so much that a lot of people sent money to some dude with a red digital camera and a 8×8 cut of greenscreen? Well it’s on to the new thing and I bet that dude is buying a gallon of flat black paint for his “The Batman” remake two years from now.
So pissed that there is a new petition to prevent Pattinson from being cast as the sullen billionaire with lots of toys that likes to beat up the mentally ill and poor. (Hey, chill out! I think Batman is pretty fuckin cool, ok. Don’t get me wrong here; I’m just taking the piss out, alright no death threats, please.)
The thing is petitions suck. They are the “… Featuring Pitbull” of grassroots movements; a few select people think that’s what everybody wants when there has been no evidence to support that conceit. Also petitions have lost pretty much all of their cultural capital in the internet age. Sure you can sign a retweeted petition scolding McDonalds for selling mcnuggets. Aren’t you getting a constant flow of emails and texts demanding that Mitch Mcconnell suddenly sprout ethics and something resembling humanity. I sure do. Or maybe you’re on the other side of the culture war mailing list where they’re still demanding the black president’s birth records or supporting the righteous, christian path to challenge Roe V Wade in the supreme court if only you donate $25 dollars right now!
For a particular breed of fanboy who might not know or care Roe V Wade is not some obscure super powered matchup; it’s a very real precedent that helps women have agency over their own bodies. But, you know, women are icky and would never use that agency with you anyway.
Even if they’re well intentioned (and the Pattinson one is most certainly NOT) the whole idea of petitions smacks of screaming into the void and just adding more white noise to an already signal weary, battle scarred, teetering on the precipice excuse we have for a culture nowadays. Yes, there are a lot of good causes out there. Yes, there are a lot of injustices that need to be addressed. Yes, this wonderful, amazing technology that enables us to communicate with people on the other side of the world can be used as a force for improving it. There is also a lot of misinformation supporting selfish, greedy or just plain stupid agendas. There are a lot of injustices that are propagated by the misuse of this technology. Reaching out across to the world to tell people they are wrong and troll them ceaselessly also happens. Petitions can be all these things in various degrees but the one thing they are above all else nowadays is pointless. If you want to use the limited time and dwindling energy you have at your disposal to try and convince HBO to spend millions of dollars redoing something they’ve finished to THEIR satisfaction because you didn’t like the way it played out (spoilers: there’s no fucking way), sure, go ahead! If you’d rather scream into the digital void about how much “The Last Jedi” didn’t live up to your expectations instead of creating something… anything…that you can be proud of; knock yourself out! Do you want the hill you die on to be preventing an actor that was in a silly, corporate owned, not a fan of IP from ten years ago from being cast in a silly, corporate owned IP you are a fan of now? Well, ok, if you want… but is “Vainly tried to keep a guy who played a lame vampire from playing a superhero.” the thing you want carved into your tombstone? I know it’s just me but I’d much rather have “Beloved father, husband and friend who did his best to leave behind a better world.” That memorial will be around a lot longer than anything written in digital ink.
THINGS TANGENTIAL TO THE MAIN COLUMN THAT I COULDN’T WORK IN ORGANICALLY
Other, less important signs of the impending apocalypse…
This is: A – Trump’s new DOJ nominee
B – Early production design for “Ready Player One” the second chapter!
C – What Oculus rift has planned for E3 thi year.
Nope… just nope.
This sign of the apocalypse has just now been delayed for three months.
Why isn’t there a petition about THIS?
Revelation 39: -16 to 358 : … and then shall rise the fifth horseman of the apocalypse and she shall be neither a man nor ride a horse! Look… prophecy isn’t always crystal clear, alright!
That sea boiling stuff really sucks! God punishes the earth because… I don’t know… own the libs, I guess and cute baby sea turtles suffer! How does a just God reconcile THAT bullshit?
The Emu is Limu the Emu from the liberty insurance commercials. I find them funny as hell!
Yes, there was a time when SDCC couldn’t fill one ballroom in the San Diego Hilton.
The Last Jedi wasn’t a perfect movie and I can understand how a movie telling hardcore fans that things need to change could be upsetting. Seriously though, rending your garments and going into fits of rage over it just does not do anything for the image of fanboys or your personal mental health. Chalk it up to a miscalculation and MOVE ON!
A conversation like this one certainly happened…
Agent: “Hey Robbo! You’re smoking hot after that Harry Potter thing! How would you like to secure your financial well being for THE REST OF YOUR FUCKING LIFE by playing the lead of the Twilight movie adaptation? It’s gonna be three, maybe four movies so we’re talking ass loads of money. After that you can do art films about lighthouses with Willam Dafoe or whatever the fuck else you want. SHIT you can sit in your solid gold fucking house and play guitar till you croak! How bout it?”
Pattinson: “But what if I get offered the role of Batman someday? I’m sure a small amount of manchildren with no sense of perspective and an oversized sense of entitlement won’t want me to have that role because I did this one?”
Agent: “Fuck ‘em. You want that financial security, gold house and hot mother/daughter threeways or what?”
Pattinson: “Good point. I’m in.”
Speaking of that I’m pretty sure that the founders of the petition website Moveon.org had progressive social issues and grassroots political ideals in mind.
Look, it’s not that I want to invalidate your feelings with all this but if there is one old saying the internet proved beyond all others is “Opinions are like assholes; everybody has one and most stink.”
