Piling on the big boys

(INT. Backstage on the set of Death to Cardboard)

(KID COMBUSTIBLE is toweling off after a grueling...um...blogging set)

Well, we sure have had a lot of fun at the expense of Yahoo! in the past weeks. Obviously they are a little quick to flip headlines (not just in this specific incident - I can't count the number of times that they have flipped a headline to mean essentially the opposite of what it did, but sadly at these times I was not co-running an omniblog). Yahoo! is the popular kid of the internet, but for very little reason. Their "news" is nothing but AP wire pulls, and their mail service is good but very average. Yet it remains the most visited site (or something close to that. I'm not looking that shit up). But what makes this popularity even more baffling is the almost single-minded suckocity provided by their headlines. Such as:



Now, the article is pretty lackluster, but it shares its' main problem with the headline itself. What we're supposed to think of, according to this article/headline/Yahoo!'s first goddamn thing you see, is that the plane crash that didn't kill Travis Barker and DJ AM is similar to the plane crashes that killed Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Richie Valens, Jim Croce, Otis Redding, Patsy Cline, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Glenn Miller, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Ray Rhodes, Aalyiah, Ricky Nelson, and John Denver. Which makes sense, of course. Stevie Ray Vaughan was arguably one of the most accomplished blues guitar players of all-time; DJ AM has been on TMZ a few times. Otis Redding had one of the most singular voices in the 60's soul scene; Travis Barker sometimes is in the Aquabats! I don't care if the relationship is tenuous - these people don't belong in the same lame Yahoo! article together, no matter how much steel and fire it took to kill them.

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Creative design with Yahoo! News

After Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican National Convention, I noticed that the front-page headline on Yahoo! News went from "Palin bashes community organizers, Obama campaign" to "Palin dubbed 'Rock Star' of RNC" in less than five minutes. I was willing to give Yahoo! the benefit of the doubt, write it off as a fluke, until the following image appeared on the page today (emphasis is my own.)



*slow clap*

Yahoo managed to turn a fluff piece on fashion sense into an (at first glance) expose on Fer "Notorious for Her Drug Abuse" Gie and Michelle "Not Tyra Banks" Obama shooting up in an alley on the south side of Chicago. Does anyone say "high marks" anymore? Wasn't there room for the word "marks" on the first line? No and yes, respectively.

Funny, since Michelle isn't the addict involved in this year's election.

Just sayin'.

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Broke-ass hoes, broke-ass hoes, broke-ass hoes, broke-ass hoes

Attending a private liberal arts college made me hate feminists for a while. That's the opposite of what's supposed to happen, isn't it? You're supposed to become deeply ensconced in women's issues, go vegetarian and develop an in intense love of short-haired indie rock chicks while protesting endlessly the use of the word "chick" to describe WOMEN because I am a WOMAN and I will not allow myself to be DENIGRATED by the heteronormative, chauvinistic corporate automaton and be told that I am a helpless baby bird that subsists on PREMASTICATED CORN NIBLETS and possesses no control over my UTERINE. CONTENTS.



People at private liberal arts colleges actually talk like that (well, sort of.) Which raises the question, if you're not a bird, why are you so fucking shrill?

Don't get me wrong, the women who devoted most of their time to the campus feminist group tended to be nice, reasonable people on a regular basis. I just couldn't listen to them talk about feminist issues because after a while, my ears would start to bleed mysteriously. Which is not something I'm proud of. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to learn about the raping penis and modern ways to hate it. I wanted to give my vagina a big cuddly hug. Unfortunately, my arms just weren't long enough, and confusion gave way to resentment. I retreated to the frat house to shake shake shake it to the dulcet tones of "Ass 'n' Titties" by DJ Assault.

But in Spring Term 2008, something amazing happened. Our own Kid Combustible pointed me to the blog Jezebel, and I've been obsessively refreshing the page ever since. The magic of Jezebel is that the site sells itself as "Celebrity, Sex, Fashion For Women. Without Airbrushing." Essentially, it's a pop culture blog that happens to be pro-women. Even better, it's a pop culture blog that I consistently agree with (and that doesn't happen often.) And they're feminists, so I guess that makes me a feminist too.

So. What's the point of this diatribe? Mostly, I've been galvanized by Jezebel's recent coverage of the Sarah Palin debacle. (That's not a Jezebel article, but it should be read nonetheless for reference.) Anyway, they dared to ask the question that has been on my mind since we first heard of Tina Fey's horrible evil twin: why does Sarah Palin blind normal, reasonable women with rage? Personally, I think it's because her spokesman is named Tucker Bounds. What the hell is up with that. Also, I have a hard time enjoying the company of people who are cool with torturing wolves with helicopters and then shooting them to death. Doesn't anyone collect bottlecaps anymore?

And if you're badass enough to aggressively interrogate lupine beasts from the skies, do you need a guy named Tucker Bounds to man your spokes?

But seriously folks. The pros did a good job of explaining why exactly I react so violently to the mere thought of Sarah Palin. And by react violently, I mean I could get pretty into an episode of CSI wherein the team investigates charred remains found in a deserted Alaskan woodland near a business that rents helicopters and AK-47s to wolves and librarians who are fired for allowing people to take out banned books.

I'm just saying, that episode of CSI sounds rather engaging. Think about it, CBS!!

Enough hate, though. The point of this post is to declare my love for Jezebel. For the aforementioned reasons, and also because they introduced me to the video series Target: Women with Sarah Haskins, which in turn led me to one of my favorite shows (albeit one that I can only watch online) InfoMania. Thanks, guys!

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I Will Follow You into the Blackness of My iTunes Library

Sometimes I worry about how often I listen to a certain song. Or album. Or band. It's all very very worrisome. You have a piece of music that you like so much, you want to hear it over and over again. It happens all the time. However, at some point you have to worry if you are over-saturating yourself with just a single piece of music. You listen to a song fifty times in two weeks and fifty-one might not come for a long time after that, if ever. Thanks to all that there newfangled electronicky shit that I can use, I can teleport my thoughts straight through a CAT-5 cable into my ipod, telling it to pull back the high end juuuuust a little bit. The current battle is between me and the Los Campesinos! addicting song and awesome video "We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives":



It shouldn't be very hard to avoid that feeling of fatigue for this song, seeing as I don't have the EP that it comes on (makes it only available through Youtube or through totally legal insanely legal so legal I bought it from a pharmacy download). This takes the all-important iPod question out of the equation. Let's meet a few songs that were in for a worse fate.

"I Will Follow You into the Dark" - Death Cab for Cutie

Siiiigh. Remember, like, how awesome it is to be in love and shit and to play this song over and over again because you love that person SO MUCH and then it's like two summers' later and you haven't spoken to that person in like a year and all you can think of is the fact that LIFE is all DIFFERENT and it's more LAME and SHIT? Yeah, that totally sucks.

This song does not deserve that sort of stigma.

This song is sooo over-the-top sappy/sad/precious that it should live as a beacon for nothing. Not love or happiness or sadness or remorse. This song should only be admired in those most saccharine of moments. Adding this to any moment with your significant other is akin to pouring straight corn syrup onto your Frosted Flakes. Like, yeah it enhances something, but someone's gotta say when sometime.

The video also features animated rabbits. I (rabbit) DCFC!



Last Time Heard: Fairly recently, actually. Mid-June, it looks like. Although I think it was mostly for sleepin'.
Do I Still Like It?: Yeah, I guess. I mean, it's my most listen to song on iTunes, which has to mean something. No, wait, it doesn't. It means I used to love a song that I now hate because of all the crap associated with it. It has become an unpleasant song, which is difficult because it pretty much started off as an unpleasant song.

"Rebellion (Lies)" - The Arcade Fire

Last fall, I had the great fortune to see The Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem. It remains the best concert I've ever seen. However, it could have been even better had almost all of the songs they played off of Funeral weren't so overplayed in my personal library. You see, being a young and sudden lad of 18, my parents bought me my first MP3 player, which was a 256 MB one and held, like, 40 songs or something like that. It was akin to about four hours of music, and most of that was taken up by America: The Audiobook. Therefore, I really only had space for one album, which became my recently purchased copy of Funeral. This, compounded with the fact that I listened to my player pretty much every damn place I went in high school, lead to a lot of repetition. For probably a month I did nothing but listen to TAF (also stands for Ira Glass's new show This American Fire, which is mostly about Ira Glass committing random arson).



Also Win Butler has like the sharpest face in the world. Watch out Regine!



Last Time Heard: In an attempt to rekindle my love for the album, I listened to the whole thing in full a couple weeks ago. Didn't really succeed.
Do I Still LIke It?: Probably not, sad to say. Before, that song in particular was just so energetic, and now it's just like the seven-hundredth time I hear the band scream "LIIIIES LIIIIIIIES" and how it sounds like a bunch of muppets.

"Packing Blankets" - Eels

I have a TON of Eels in my top 30 most listened list on iTunes. In actuality, it's only three songs, but for a band that I don't even really like it seems insane to have even that many. I know for a fact that there was a period of time where I was regularly listening to them, in particular Daisies of the Galaxy, it's just that even then I don't think I really liked them all that much. They were...boring? Still are boring. Kinda just seriously totally boring.



Last Time Heard: Not since May.
Do I Still Like It?: As I said above, I'm still not completely convinced I ever did.

"Mary" - Langhorne Slim

the fuck is a langhorne slim is that some sort of maxi pad



Langhorne Slim is actually a very good country singer-songwriter, and this is very short tune is easily one of the catchiest on his debut record When the Sun's Gone Down.

Last Time Heard: Now this is messed up. At 34 plays, this song is currently at #19 on my most listened to playlist. However, I have not listened to it since December 2nd of 2006. Over a year and a half, I have probably at least doubled my albums count on my iTunes, yet this song somehow hangs around. Jesus Christ, he compares a the taste of a woman to corn on the cob!
Do I Still Like It?: That corn on the cob line might be one of the best lyrics ever. Still catchy. .

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Content gone questionable

I feel the need to expound on my previous assertion that Jeph Jacques is a douche. See, in high school, I used to worship the man. After all, he's from Maryland, and I'm from Maryland. He graduated from Hampshire College, and I got $3,000 in financial aid from Hampshire College before deciding it wasn't the right school for me. He's a self-important twit who erroneously believes he's funny and likes namedropping obscure indie bands, and I'm...wait a second.

Where, then, did the romance die? Somewhere during the five years that spanned my development from a fresh-faced Daria emulator to a wizened husk in a Gogol Bordello tour tee, something went horribly awry. And I'm pretty sure the problem wasn't entirely with me.

Looking back on the first comics in the Questionable Content archive, I realized that the early comics are nearly indistinguishable from the recent ones. (Recent here meaning "published after the release of the Jennifer Lopez/Jane Fonda vehicle Monster-in-Law.) The tone is different, the art is different, the subject matter is even different. At its inception, the strip was about the hardships of growing into young manhood, suffering at a crappy job in a state of involuntary celibacy. The art consisted mainly of angular lines and a neutral blue/brown palette; simple, but visually interesting. When the character of Faye was introduced, she played the confident, tough-talking broad to Marten's simpering and wishy-washy sad sack. But as the comic progressed, the two switched roles. Jacques retcons his capable and admirable female lead into a whiny and neurotic idiot who can't make the simplest decision for herself. Later, the supporting character Hannelore is "developed" in the same way.

But that's just the tip of the douche iceberg. As the comic became more popular, Jacques forsook the angular style in order to give Faye a perceived weight problem, thus rendering her more relatable. (Which would work if Faye had the appearance of a weight problem, or even if any of the comic's characters had a single unappealing physical trait. Clearly Jacques has never seen a fat chick outside of badly doctored BBW porn, considering how he gave Faye a visible collarbone. jesus christ.) At present, the art has the look of a badly animated CGI cartoon: spatially round, but dimensionally flat. I wonder what that sounds like? Oh yeah, all of the characters.

The shift in tone is perhaps the most off-putting. Jacques's protagonist once worried about his job, his relationships, and keeping his adorable robot out of trouble. Today, Marten has a fun job at a college library (and no trouble paying his bills! or buying outrageously rocking guitars!), shtups his perfect (but irrational, like all women. amirite?) girlfriend at every conceivable moment, and Pintsize seems to have gone the way of the original iPhone. Why do people keep reading? Is it to see what masturbatory fantasy will manifest next for ol' Marten? To anticipate the day that the art style at last evolves into neo-Impressionism with shapelier tits? Or do people return to Questionable Content for the same reason I do: because I've been reading it since Broken Social Scene and the Arcade Fire seemed obscure, and typing the URL is little more than a habit.

Or could it be the tiny specks of lovingly-drawn ass cracks?





Yeah. Definitely the ass cracks thing.













((art found at http://aod-shadowjester.deviantart.com/art/Questionable-Content-52914830))

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The internet done me wrong again

So Sony is making a game called "Fat Princess", where your chance of winning is increased by locking a princess in a room, force-feeding her cake to make her weigh more, thus making her hard to carry around. Take a minute to digest thLOL. Okay, sorry.

There is a ton of shit that sounds really damn offensive about this. You have to lock her in (as described by Yahoo!) a "dungeon". You have to force-feed her. So she gets fat. It portrays women as being unable to defend themselves. It portrays women as being objects to behold or be sought after for capturing. IT IS CALLED "FAT PRINCESS". It's hard to separate the offensive from the downright stupid, because both seem to be feasting on each other like fucking piranas here.

However, the real majesty of the Yahoo! article about this is the last three paragraphs. Seriously, it is fucking majestic:

Sony has yet to issue an official response, although Joystiq did receive a particularly informative update from James Green, Fat Princess' lead art director, who clued gamers in on the origins of the game:

"Does it make it better or worse that the concept artist (who designed the look, characters, everything) is a girl?"

Hmmm...hope the game's detractors don't mind eating a bit of crow.

HAHAHAHAHAH FUUUUUUCK YOU YAHOO! GAMER WRITING PERSON!

Holy shit, seriously, this is, like, the basic element of someone being offended. Intent is irrelevant. It doesn't matter what you were trying to do, all that matters is that people found it offensive and wished to tell you about it. Building on that, it also doesn't really matter who was trying to do anything. Women can offend other women. You know Ann Coulter? She offends everyone, women too! Of course she designed the look and the characters and what not - that was her job. She probably didn't find it offensive. That's fine. However, other people really really do. These feminists aren't trying to speak for all women - they're trying to speak for the type of women who sees a video game that children will probably play that revolves around kidnapping and force-feeding princesses. Just because one woman doesn't find it offensive and draws all the art and designs it means absolutely nothing. This crow will not be eaten. This crow shall fly, motherfuckers.

This article (and the linked Joystiq article and its comments) lead to the heart of this problem: people assume that there is pleasure in getting outraged at these things. They assume that we enjoy getting ourselves riled up and writing angry screeds over and over again. At least, I assume that's what they assume. I can see no other reason why people seem to get so mad at people for getting offended. It should be considered a rule of thumb on the internet that the faster and louder people are willing to shoot down any allegation, the more obvious it becomes that they aren't willing to confront the issue themselves. Perhaps if these people would stop talking about how much they hate femi-nazis for twelve seconds and think that maybe they aren't fairly portraying women in this and other forms of media, maybe there could be a dialogue. Maybe there could be something, some sort of evolution. But no. Never. No one wants evolution. People want the internet to remain a funtime happyplace where anyone can say whatever the hell they want and not have to worry about being offensive or whatever. So enjoy it, kids. Enjoy a culture that completely belittles women almost as a god damn bylaw and completely decimates any criticism on the fact. Enjoy your childish jokes and your hate-fueled stupidity. Enjoy yourselves, fuckos.

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Ultimate List: Unrequited Love

So many media blogs, so many of them do lists, right? Of course they do, they're fucking vultures who couldn't be creative with a stack of playdough and three hits of acid. So we here at DTC have had a hard time figuring out the list problem. Namely, how do we do lists that don't seem like everyone else's lists. New lists. Controversial lists. Listless lists that come on Listmas and live in Listbon. Here is one of undoubtedly at least three attempts to make the list as glorious as it once was.

First off: The ULTIMATE BEST!!!!
AHAHAHAHAH
WOOOOOOO
*73 minute guitar solo that would make Yngwie Malmsteen shit his chain mail underdrawers*

What is the ULTIMATE BEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! you may ask? It is simply a list of various types of media that represent a certain theme. This week, since it's Friday, the theme is Unrequited Love. This is most often experienced when MM goes out drinking on a Friday night, smears her makeup all over her face in a bathroom stall after doing too much X and cries her way back home when the bartender that seemed SO nice wouldn't go home with her. Also, Jena Malone won't return my god damn phone calls I BOUGHT STEPMOM ON DVD FOR NOTHING.

BEST ALBUM:



Black Sheep Boy, Okkervil River

The temptation, of course, is to put In The Aeroplane Over the Sea here simply to forward the argument. However, I really don't want to be one of those people who attempts to elevate interest by lying and making ridiculous statements (btw FUCK THE DARK NIGHT MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL = TEH FAT). As much as I love the Anne Frank mythology behind Neutral Milk Hotel's final album, everyone has to be able to recognize the wealth of other material in there.

Plainly put, Black Sheep Boy deserves this because unrequited love is all the album has going. This is not a negative, and also not a universal opinion, I'm sure (there is a lot of father daughter imagery to support such a theory). Rather, Will Sheff and crew does what the band does best: completely nail a story and its narrative over an album. The tale of the presumed Black SHeep Boy in love with a woman who constantly tells him no such love is possible. From the heartbreaking "A King and QUeen" through the final death knell in "A Glow", the album exists solely to tell the story of someone in love with what is not there, and all the efforts involved in extricating oneself from



BEST MOVIE, or film. Does film sound too pretentious? I'm gonna go with film.

BEST FILM



The Science of Sleep

Michel Gondry is my favorite director simply because he accomplishes my most pressing issue with film: how to make the love story interesting again. Other directors do a fine job with such a task, but few with the vigor and sweet tenacity of Gondry. The terrifyingly tender story of Science, where the chronically childish Cael Garcia Bernal attempts to open up to the discreetly beautiful Charlotte Gainsbourg while coping with his dream-obsessed mind, might as well be shaped and referred to as a dagger when presented to awkward males. Simply put, this movie hurts to watch; it creates a sort of mythical Catch-22 where the woman might be interested, but the man doesn't see it as such, so he blames her, he blames himself, and generally acts the fool all over the place until everything is ruined. The films' final scene states the final tragic idea in the most blatant way: life is so much better in dreams.



BEST TELEVISION DUO/TRIO

This has got to be Pam and Jim right i mean it basically dominated television for about two years and



Charlie, Dennis and The Waitress, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

OOOOOOOOH SNAP.

Charlie might be the best character on television right now. His actions are, of course, morally reprehensible for the most part, but unlike Dennis or Dee or Mac his poor actions come from ignorance. He can't read. He can't write. He has an excessively childlike mind. He huffs glue and paint. He lives in an efficiency with Danny DeVito. His life is so sad on so many levels, and it is only compounded by his love for The Waitress. From the first episode on, The Waitress rebuffs any and all of Charlie's advances with a mixture of scorn, disgust, and outright vitriol. She, however contains the same amount of unadulterated love for Dennis, who at various times turns her away or (more often) takes advantage of her emotions to gain something over the rest of his friends. In the midst of a terribly funny television show, this is easily one of the saddest love dynamics on television today.

Case in point: The episode "Mac Bangs Dennis' Mom". Charlie, suddenly given an amount of power over the rest of the crew thanks to Frank, uses his power to (of course) stop Dennis from having sex with the Waitress by having Dee show him attempt to hit on the various mothers of the other friends, who all are not interested. Charlie's desired effect, of course, is to influence The Waitress to lose her attraction to Dennis. Instead, she responds by having sex with Frank, thus turning Charlie's arguably one true win in the series into the shows' most poignant and tragic moment. Making it all the more heartbreaking for Charlie is his unwillingness to to stop: unlike The Waitress and her infatuation with Dennis, Charlie doesn't understand this is a losing game. Charlie, hopelessly, believe he can win her heart, no matter how off-putting or foul-smelling he may be.



BEST PLAY

The Glass Menagerie

In a play absolutely filled with both old and new unrequited love, the extent that it plays out with the two minor characters, Laura and Jim, is the strongest and most immediate. Laura, a young woman crippled more in mindset than body (though she acts oppositely), has spent her life since high school listening to old records, playing with her imaginary jungle of glass figurines, and nursing a love for the high school hero, Jim. Through stupid chance, the two are reunited in an attempt to find Laura a man. The minimal relationship between the two is rekindled ten-fold, she gains her change into the world of humans, they kiss...and he chooses this moment to reveal he is engaged to be married, never to return to the apartment and all its bizarre glory. It is the fragile edge the play walks along, and the moment it falls off is the end for all involved.

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