B-Movie Posters for Classic Films

Aliens that only sort of look like the ones in the movie attacking proportionally impossible women in torn torn clothing. B-Movie posters stole most of their designs from the sketches on the back of our high school notebooks. Unfortunately, some great movies had the misfortune of being made by sane people, and never got such a treatment. We asked you to correct that injustice.

The winner is below, but first the runners up …

#27.


by egaeus

#26.


by The Machete

#25.


by mightyzamfir

#24.


by

#23.


by Cobravision

#22.


by BlondeFury

#21.


by westcogitans

#20.


by TorpedoVegas

#19.


by the_mad_butcher

#18.


by stultsified

#17.


by Sulaco

#16.


by stultsified

#15.


by spud

#14.


by DarrenJames

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The 5 Most Insane Alternate Reality Games

An alternate reality game (ARG for short) combines the best elements of viral marketing, role playing games and being an insane person who can’t tell fantasy from reality. Basically, ARGs ask the players to pretend they’re living in a carefully constructed parallel universe that can include fake websites and phone numbers and even real objects hidden throughout the world … usually for the sake of promoting a two-hour movie.

What we’re saying here is that ARGs are usually pretty crazy to begin with, but some of them go the extra mile. Like …

#5. Halo 2 — I Love Bees

Photos.com

In 2004, members of a gaming community received large and completely unsolicited jars of honey in the mail, apparently from someone related to the website ilovebees.com. This was the beginning of the most bizarre viral marketing campaign ever, which was intended to promote a video game about gritty space marines. What do bees have to do with Halo, you ask? Nothing, until this game came out.


Although a sick Master Chief calms right down when you make him a proper hot toddy.

Around the same time as the unexplained honey jar incident, the first trailer for Halo 2 was released, and fans noticed that, for a split second, the xbox.com address at the end was replaced with ilovebees.com. So the website was somehow linked to the game, but how? It appeared to be the blog of a completely ordinary bee enthusiast named Dana, which had recently been hacked and filled with strange messages, corrupted data and a series of mysterious countdowns.

Via Geekosity
Most of the bee blogs we frequent look like this all the time.

As the players decoded the “corrupt” data, they learned that the “hacking” was actually the result of a rogue AI named Melissa attempting to collect itself in the website’s server. From her blog posts, the players learned that Dana was becoming exasperated (which is understandable given that she’s paying for the hosting and all) and tried to erase the artificial intelligence, causing Melissa to lose parts of its memory. A virtual catfight ensued, with the AI Melissa leaving threats on the website and capturing webcam images of Dana to freak her out. At this point Dana’s character F***ed off to China out of sheer terror and left her readers to figure out how to deal with the AI.


You’d probably run away, too, if a rogue AI took over your S***ty blog.

Later, ilovebees.com visitors found a series of real GPS coordinates leading to pay phones all over the country. The phones would then ring at a designated time, at which point the nearest player was greeted by a prerecorded message and required to answer a series of questions using codewords related to the game. Players were so dedicated to this game that one of them waited by a pay phone while Hurricane Frances was literally only minutes away in Tampa, Fla.

Via Randompixels
“You’ll have to speak a little louder!”

Other times, when the players couldn’t make it to the designated phones in time, they had to persuade employees at a Pizza Hut and an Applebee’s to answer the robot’s questions. These phone calls were called axons — every time a group of axons was completed, a new sound file was unlocked at the website, revealing a new recovered piece of Melissa’s fragmented memory. Players were able to learn more and more of the back story: basically, Melissa was the AI onboard a futuristic spaceship that was accidentally sent back in time and crashed on present-day Earth. With the ship stranded and damaged, Melissa was forced to transfer itself to a random web server in an effort to get its S*** together and call out for help.

And then things got really weird. As more axons were completed, Melissa’s memory began to come back, and so did its deranged dominatrix-like personality. From this point onward, the players were able to have actual phone conversations with the character, having to obey to its increasingly bizarre requests: it once told a group of players to form a human pyramid at a certain location (which they did). At other times, it asked them to tell jokes, share personal stories or sing their favorite songs. By the end of the game, the calls routinely involved giggling, laughing and having sing-alongs with the awkward person on the other side of the line.

Getty
Apparently futuristic AIs have the same pastimes as 10-year-old girls at a slumber party.

Eventually, Melissa managed to return to its own time, but not before inadvertently giving up Earth’s location to an alien empire called the Covenant, thus kicking off the events of Halo 2. Currently, ilovebees.com displays a 500-year countdown to the exact moment of the Covenant invasion. As a reward for constantly degrading themselves to please a fictional future space robot mind, players were invited to play Halo 2 in movie theaters before it was released.

#4. Nine Inch Nails — Year Zero

Via Tubapants.com

Rock albums don’t usually have the most extensive marketing campaigns; most of the time it’s just some online ads, a plug on The Daily Show and calling some other artist a twat in an interview with a tabloid if we’re talking about a British band. Trent Reznor’s Year Zero, on the other hand, had 17 websites and a massive alternate reality game devoted to it.

Reznor’s main method for spreading information to his fans, by the way? The bathroom stalls of Nine Inch Nails concert venues.

It all started with a Nine Inch Nails Tour T-shirt: among the words on the back, certain highlighted letters spelled out the phrase “iamtryingtobelieve.” This was actually the URL for a strange website that described a drug called parepin, an alleged immune system booster distributed by the U.S. government through the water supply to protect its citizens from biological warfare. The website posited that it was actually a hallucinogenic and narcotic drug meant to control the populace. Because people are way easier to keep in check when they’re tripping balls, apparently.

Iamtryingtobelieve
Apocalyptic hallucinations or no, we’ll sign on with any government that promises us free drugs.

Still, divulging the address of a secret website through a T-shirt is a fairly straightforward method for promoting an album, at least by NIN standards. Things started getting really weird when a fan attending a NIN concert in Portugal found a USB flash drive in a bathroom stall that contained a real song from the then-unreleased album. Embedded in the MP3 file was a link to another website filled with people posting about topics like an underground resistance, the parepin drug … and alleged sightings of a giant hand coming down from the sky. Oh, and if you ran the last few seconds of the song through a spectrogram, you got this:

Via Wikipedia
We promise we won’t show you this thing ever again.

It turns out that these websites, plus others that were found soon afterward, were set in a future where the U.S. has become a Christian fundamentalist state and most civil rights have been dissolved. The large hand is known as “The Presence” and has been seen all over the world.

Via Ninwiki.com
That doesn’t count — it’s a totally different picture.

Fans were able to piece the game’s story together by following cryptic clues in objects found or handed out during NIN concerts, like fliers against the corrupt government, lithographs, DVDs and a few more of those bathroom stall flash drives. Another MP3 spectrogram revealed a phone number, which if called would let you hear a lengthy recording of a wiretapped conversation. Players were constantly receiving weird emails and crazy phone calls, not to mention real cease-and-desist letters from the RIAA for hosting and sharing the MP3s that the band had intentionally leaked. It was easy to mistake this for part of the game, though, because the RIAA is F***ing ridiculous.

Getty
“We’ve never heard of this ‘Reznor’ fellow. But he certainly doesn’t have the right to go leaking our music.”

As the story progressed, the resistance movement became more and more organized. Fans were invited to a resistance meeting in Los Angeles, where they were given all sorts of cool alternate-reality swag (including prepaid cellphones). Those who received the cellphones were summoned to a slightly more secretive meeting five days later — which turned out to be a live goddamn concert for Nine Inch Nails.

This in itself would have been a spectacular enough way to end the game, but apparently Reznor didn’t think so: halfway through the concert and without a word of warning, a SWAT team busted in and shut down the entire thing.

After that, a few more links were found leading to one final website that seemed to describe the end of the world at the hands of the Presence. However, before that happened, a group called the Solution Backwards Initiative managed to send information back in time as a plan to warn us about the future, thus explaining the whole game.

#3. Cloverfield — Slusho!

Via Memoclic.com

When the first Cloverfield trailer debuted in 2007, no one really knew what the hell it was for. All we saw was some shaky footage of a bunch of dudes in New York escaping from an unseen creature (little did we know that the film was basically 90 minutes of that). Online speculation linked the mysterious trailer to everything from Lost to H.P. Lovecraft to Voltron. That’s how little we knew. The viral marketing campaign that unfolded didn’t just give us a sneak peek into the film’s secretive story — it ended up showing way more of it than the film itself.

Cloverfield ARG
Plus, the ARG featured much better camerawork.

Back then we didn’t even know the movie was called Cloverfield: the closest thing to a title was the date 1-18-08 at the end of the only trailer. This led inquisitive fans to the website 1-18-08.com, which showed pictures of the characters from the movie plus photos of some sort of sea accident and random Japanese people. Also, someone in the trailer was wearing a “Slusho!” shirt, which J.J. Abrams fans recognized as a Japanese slushy brand that also shows up in shows like Alias and Fringe.

Via Cloverfieldclues.blogspot.com

Since at this point the desperate fans were clearly pasting every single word uttered in the trailer into a URL bar, they quickly discovered the official Slusho! website, which is … very Japanese, let’s put it that way.

In addition to mind-F***ing the film’s followers with sheer confusion, the website unveiled some of the back story. It turns out Slusho! is owned by a company called Tagruato, which has an even more extensive fake website. Besides manufacturing soft drinks, the company has apparently branched out into other ventures like deep-sea drilling and space satellites. Tagruato’s corporate website was frequently hacked by an environmentalist group called T.I.D.O. Wave which, whaddaya know, also had its own site.

T.I.D.O. Wave
Take that, evil fictional megacorporation.

Meanwhile, several Myspace pages were discovered for specific characters in the film. One of those characters, a guy called Rob Hawkins, would announce in a January 2008 blog post that he had been offered a job at the Slusho! company in Japan (that’s why they’re throwing him a going away party at the beginning of the movie). Among Rob’s group of friends was a guy called Teddy Hanssen who was actually a T.I.D.O. Wave activist secretly planning to infiltrate the new Tagruato sea drilling station set up near New York City. Teddy’s story could be inferred through postings on the T.I.D.O. Wave website, plus the private webcam videos recorded by his girlfriend Jamie Lascano (password: jllovesth).

In January 2008, several news clips from around the world were uploaded on YouTube reporting on the unexplained collapse of the same drilling station Teddy was supposed to infiltrate (Teddy had since disappeared, and was presumably captured by the Japanese).

Tagruato Corp. blamed the activist group for the destruction of the station, but it’s pretty obvious from the clips that it was actually attacked by some sort of undersea monster. Players who bought Slusho! merchandise over the website (or who won it in the contest to create a fan-made Slusho! commercial) had previously received a torn Tagruato memo mentioning a “dark secret” in the station. This, along with some other information posted on the activist site, suggested that the company found the strange sea creature with their satellites and built the “drilling station” to study it, accidentally causing it to grow larger by exposing it to the stuff Slusho! is made of. From then on, all that was left was for the monster to march into New York and go all Godzilla on it.


“Quick, someone get this thing some Cheetos!”

The game ended when 200 fans were invited to Rob’s going away party, which was followed by a midnight screening of the film they had immersed themselves in for all those months. Of course, it turns out the movie doesn’t bother to explain any of what we just told you, even in passing — the biggest reference to the ARG is when we see the girl from the webcam videos passed out on a couch during the party.

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The 5 Craziest Children’s Cartoons from North Korea

No matter where in the world a child is raised, odds are cartoons feature heavily in their upbringing. North Korean kids are no exception, except instead of Scooby Doo they get a state-issued peek in the mouth of madness.

Take a look at the most insane Saturday morning line-up in history:

#5. Learn Geometry so You Can Defeat America

First of all, if you think North Korea’s children’s cartoons are all about destroying the evil Americans, well … you’re mostly right.


That was pretty low-hanging fruit.

For instance, this cartoon stars a young boy who, like every other young boy in history, doesn’t want to do his geometry homework. So instead of studying, he doodles an American army helmet and pretends to shoot it with his compass until he falls asleep. He promptly finds himself having every North Korean child’s government-sanctioned worst nightmare: an invasion of anthropomorphic American ships.


Led by the infamous USS Jerkface.

It’s up to him and his friends to fight the Americans — which they do with missile batteries made from school supplies.


Granted, they are probably more effective than North Korea’s actual missile batteries.

At first, the defense of the Homeland goes well, with the children blowing up large numbers of American Naval, uh … tanks?


Whatever they are, they’re no match for giant exploding pencils.

Between the flashy missiles, the patriotic music and the impressive explosions, things are all inspirational and it looks like the day is won … until. The main character is way too inaccurate to hit the ships closing in on him. He frantically tries to calibrate his shots, but since he can’t use his giant protractor properly his aim is off and American missiles get through.


Although to be fair, America is using Bullet Bills, which can be a real pain.

One of them hits him, and the music turns grim as American vessels close in. His friends come to his aid (as shown with a Batman-esque red star wipe), but — gasp — it looks to be too late. Then, the dream ends and our protagonist awakes with a newfound desire to study. He’s going to get those Americans next time!


There’s a fine line between folksy and half-assed.

The moral of the story:

Do your homework, or enemy forces will kill your ass.”


Better math could have prevented this.

An effective message, to be sure, but you can see right away how far behind America North Korea is when it comes to entertainment propaganda. When an American high school got attacked by the Russians in Red Dawn, we didn’t write some convoluted plot where the students won the war with math. They flung their textbooks to the floor and raided the nearest gun store, bitch! Good luck with your pencil bombs, nerds!

#4. North Korea’s VeggieTales

You may be familiar with VeggieTales, the American cartoon show about the adventures of talking Christian vegetables. This cartoon is like that, except with fewer speeches about how awesome Jesus is and more potatoes that know martial arts.

It begins with a couple of young corn cobs out for a bike ride.


One of which kind of looks stoned.

They watch a parade, then go check out the local farmland. There, they meet some potatoes who are the soldier class of this vegetable world. Everything seems idyllic, but there’s trouble brewing underground.


It’s like looking into a mirror on our own decadent, capitalist lives.

Said trouble comes in the form of anthropomorphic smuts and blights, which are basically diseases that affect corn and potatoes. They hatch a plan to attack the surface, and when they emerge and start devouring plants, it’s up to the potatoes to defend the crops.

With kung fu.


Yes, those potatoes are doing backflips. Yes, it is rad.

In what must be the single most ridiculous fight scene ever animated, the potatoes jump kick the S*** out of everything in sight, and aren’t slowed down a bit by bullets or gas attacks. The smuts and blights promptly get their asses handed to them in a fight more one-sided than a My Little Pony / Wolverine crossover.


The people’s revolution is adorable.

To celebrate their flawless victory, the vegetables put on a big song and dance number, which is what you’d expect. Then things take a turn for the distinctly North Korean when this celebration includes the hero potatoes being happily harvested, killed and turned into food.

The moral of the story:

If you work your hardest and battle your mightiest, you’ll one day be worthy of sacrificing your life for your Country.”


Hooray for civil virtue!

“Wait,” says one little child, watching this cartoon on his state-issued TV. “If these potatoes have extraordinary kung-fu abilities, can’t society find a better use for them than to just skin them and chop them up along with all of the other nonsentient potatoes?” “No, dear. All of us must eventually be butchered and fried in burning oil. That is why this country is great!”


“Mommy, what’s a ‘potato chip’?”

#3. America’s Army of Evil Insects

As we mentioned, America is a recurring villain in North Korean cartoons. They tend to follow the same scenario you know from all your favorites from Inspector Gadget to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: there’s a megalomaniacal head bad guy, his incompetent lackeys and their latest, needlessly complicated scheme to destroy the plucky heroes.


Generic Evil American General #2 even has a bit of a Dr. Claw thing going on here.

This setup offers us the interesting opportunity to see how the world looks from the bad guy’s vantage point. In this episode, America’s (that’s us! Woo!) evil master plan is to drop canisters full of trained insects on North Korea to spread disease and famine. We’re not sure why we go through all the trouble of training insects when we could just drop bombs. But we guess that’s just us silly Americans for you, eh?


“These are probably better than nukes.”

The American henchman takes to the skies but is promptly shot down, as he’s too busy daydreaming about the riches he’ll receive to pay attention to his flying. But he manages to release his payload before he crashes.


Who wouldn’t be distracted by dreams of shiny skull jackets and giant coins?

OK, we think we’ve got this thing figured out. Those cute little bugs are the heroes here, right? Any minute now, they’ll probably bump into Kim Jong-il in all his glorious leadershipness and defect on the spot. That would make sense.


U-S-A! U-S-A!

Then again, “sense” is not a concept North Korean animators are familiar with. So instead, they bring out the North Korean Exterminator — looking for all the world like he (it?) has wandered in from a totally different show — who unceremoniously starts gassing the S*** out of Ameribugs with his friends.


Seriously, dude looks like a cross between a fire hydrant and a sex toy.

Surprise! North Korea was well prepared for a sentient bug attack all along! Their defense force is on the scene in seconds and starts hosing down the bugs — which of course flee at the first sign of trouble, being cowardly Americans.


You’ve got our number, North Korea.

After the bugs have been taken care of, what follows can only be described as a three minute death run (it’s worth noting that the total length of the cartoon is only 10:21) of the terrified and whimpering American pilot, who has survived the crash only to get scared by his own bugs and run off a cliff. Yes, of course we see him land face first after the drop. The pilot barely survives that, but is promptly infected by the last remaining bug and dies a horrific, agonizing death.

Because the children must see the infidel perish twice.


And see a bug spit in his dead mouth.

The moral of the story:

“America is a foolish, cowardly country, and its plans can easily be thwarted by Lego men with gas guns.”

Also: “Everything bad that happens in your life is due to something secretly dropped out of an American plane.”

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4 Fan Fiction Excerpts from Celebrities

Captain of the USS Enterprise and all around philosophical genius, Jean-Luc Picard once said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Don’t bother trying to find the episode because you won’t. He said it to nude Jethro Gibbs while painting his portrait in a TNG/NCIS crossover piece of fan fiction I found online. Even though Picard was using it to seduce Special Agent Gibbs, it doesn’t make the sentiment any less true. What’s more, I don’t think there’s anyone more willing to squeeze out heaps of sincere flattery than fan fiction writers.

“Stick around, Data, I want to show you what human love looks like.”

Fan fiction affords people the opportunity to celebrate their favorite franchises and novels by hijacking the carefully constructed universe from each, and clumsily forcing all the characters to have sex with each other. Granted, not all fan fiction devolves into sex, but all the ones worth reading certainly do.

While scouring through the sexualized fanfic about Ziggy Stardust and pretending that each mention of Bowie was actually me, I discovered that a few famous people are actually writing their own fan fiction every day. Below are my favorite four. While some of them hint at the longings and desires of the celebrities themselves, most of them are just opportunities to make beloved characters do each other.

#4. Barack Obama — Firefly Fanfic

Excerpt #1

For the first time in her history, Serenity has no charted course. Adrift in a foreign galaxy, the crew sleeps. As ship mates, as brothers, sisters, as human beings, they are simply not prepared for the trouble they’ll soon face. They’re just not. This unknown star system harbors many threats, namely, Reavers.

Let it be known: I hate Reavers.

Mal awakens. Yawning, he rises as he does each morning, to do the work of man. He climbs out of bed, quietly so as not to bother Inara or Simon or River. Staring at their slacken, naked bodies, he fully weighs the costs and benefits of telling them the truth. They are out of fuel. It’s that simple. And without a renewable energy source found soon, the crew will mutiny and choose another captain. He reminds himself that a coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.

Still, he elects not to wake them.

Excerpt #2

With a final stomp and twist of the foot, Mal dispatches the last Reaver. Heaving with testosterone, he turns to his crew.

“Look, I know some of you are unhappy with me and the way I have run this ship. I know you have had your doubts about me as your leader. I respect that. I’m sure many of you have thought you could do a superior job. That’s simply not true. It’s not. I run this ship. I run it well. Yet time and again, you ignore this fact. And while competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point, cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off. If we are to have any hope against the next wave of Reavers, I need you with me. Who still believes in me?”

River, with the courage of a thousand suns, stands. “I am with you, sir. I am with you implicitly.”

Wash is the next to rise. “I know we are in an unstable environment right now, fiscally and physically. But our ship has seen worse and survived. I am with you.”

“I am with you too,” says Zoe. “Also, I am pregnant. It is yours.”

“As am I” says Kaylee.

“Me too,” says Jayne. “On both accounts.”

“Come here, quick. It’s hiccuping.”

Now, with all of them pledging allegiance to their commander, Mal smiles. He is happy, both for the loyalty and pregnancy of all. A good leader can never cast judgment on his people, he must love them equally. Still privately in his heart, he hopes at least one child will be a boy. He already has two daughters on another planet and daughters are really hard.

#3. David Caruso — CSI New Miami, Magnum P.I. Crossover Fanfic

Excerpt #1

There is a body cut in half. It is dead. A bunch of the good guys stand around it. They are looking at it and waiting until Horatio gets there. He does get there, on a horse. Everyone claps.

Horatio looks at the body and sees it’s a teen girl. She’s dead but she’s still pretty hot. He counts the rings inside her and sees that she’s 18 so it’s OK to notice she’s hot. Not everyone thinks to do that.

It also looks like there was a bad drought when she was 13.

The blonde one: What do you think, Horatio?

Me: I know how to throw knives.

The Cuban one: [some Spanish]

Me: You’re right. The one thing this girl and our killer have in common is that they both split.

The other one: Let’s use this box of stuff to detective on her.

Me: Good idea.

Suddenly a helicopter lands. It says “Island Hoppers” on it. Magnum and TC get out with beers. Nice. Magnum walks up to Horatio and the body. They high five with their guns.

Magnum: What have we got?

Me: The one thing this girl and our killer have in common is that they both split.

Magnum: Ha! Yeah! We’re on it.

The blonde one: Hold on. We are working this case already.

Magnum: Oh, damn. Wait, I’ve got an idea …

Magnum and Me together: Crime solving race!

Horatio and Magnum shake on it. The winner gets to sex the lab girl for a whole sun gone. They put on their bulletstopping jackets and go looking for the bad guys. Miami is hot.

Excerpt #2

Horatio meets Magnum at the high school. They are asking the other girls if they know what happened to the one that’s in two pieces now. They say they don’t but Magnum wants to take them to dinner just in case. They agree. They are going to wear bathing suits and they are all going to get pizza together. Is Horatio invited? Of course.

Me: We’re best friends.

Magnum: The best.

They hug.

“I’m ordering now. What does everybody want?”

At the pizza place some terrorists are there. They have drugs probably and guns. The girls scream but Horatio and Magnum don’t wait for backup and kill all the guys except one. He tells them where the treasure is buried. Then they shoot him.

Me: Yes! We CSIed it together. It’s a tie.

Magnum: We win together. Teammates.

The girls cheer and everyone has a pizza party.

Montage of science reactions in test tubes.

Case closed.

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5 Visions of the Future From Experts (Who Should Be Fired)

I’m a sucker for technology. I love watching videos about gadgets that are coming up in the near future, even if I know I can’t afford them or really even use them. But every once in a while, I’ll catch one that makes me question whether the makers really thought it through.

I mean, you can tell they put in thousands of hours of thought into the actual technology, but when they portray how it’s meant to be used, you wonder if they’ve ever actually spoken to another human being.

#5. In the Future, Every Surface Is a Touchscreen!

Photos.com

The people at Corning, who make glass for touchscreens (and everything else) made this video portraying a future where absolutely everything in the world is a goddamned touchscreen:

It takes exactly 39 seconds before you realize that the people working at Corning have never met another person outside of their offices. It’s the moment the woman in this video turns on the water to brush her teeth, looks up into the mirror and responds to an instant message.

In her F***ing bathroom. The place where she could very well have been taking her morning S***, just glad to be in a quiet room where people couldn’t bother her until she was fully awake and prepared to cope with the world.

While she’s dealing with her work’s bullS*** in what used to be the most serene, sacred room in the house, the dad is in the kitchen, preparing breakfast. Their spoiled little S***head daughters walk in and plop their cleats down onto a counter top that has the ability to display full video … making it worth more than my car. The dad continues to cook without pausing to beat them with their own shoes until they’re the consistency of his raw eggs.

Mom leaves for work and drives by a sheltered bus stop … which is also a display/computer. Because in the future, every possible surface of anything that exists is a computer.

Note the distinct lack of dicks and gang signs spray painted on the glass. Notice the absence of bricks embedded in that map. Surely this company is based in a city, right? I mean they’ve had to have come across some filth and vandalism on the way to work? Actually, it’s becoming more apparent to me that the reason they’ve never met another human is because they were born into those offices and they’ve never dared venture outside of them.

In their world, everything is a computer. Every floor, every ceiling, every wall, every pane of glass on the entire planet. It’s all a giant connected display, impervious to people like me who would devote nothing less than his entire life to be able to replace this model with goatse.

But there’s something else that this video does that’s a little better illustrated in this one from Microsoft:

It’s a trend that’s been going on for a few years on all of these “future” videos where they show the display as a table or a counter top … some common household surface. And when you lay your camera or phone on it, all of the pictures and videos come spilling out so you can view them, edit, transfer to other devices and whatever.

Some of you see where I’m going with this already, but let me spell it out for those who don’t: In my experience, the ratio of people who have porn on their phones or cameras versus those who don’t are roughly every last F***ing one of them to none of them at all. Maybe I just know too many perverts, but I can absolutely picture a scenario where a dude comes home from work, drops his car keys and phone onto the table two feet from his kids, and porn shoots out like a geyser made of tits and F***ing.

Now imagine you have that same phone in your pocket while at work. You’re talking to a coworker or your boss as you casually lean against the desk. Just like when you accidentally dial someone because your keys (same pocket as the phone) touched the wrong button, this time they’ve hit the “spray porn all over this desk” button. Best case scenario, you’ve kept it in your back pocket so that when it does happen (and it will), it will look like you just spontaneously shot porn right out of your A******.

#4. The House of the Future!

At some point a long time ago, somebody decided absolutely everything in the future that wasn’t Blade Runner would be white and spotless (so many sci-fi movies do this that TVTropes has a page on it). So we have this video from the Living Tomorrow project, a concept home where 70 different companies have combined to show you what your place will look like in 2015 or so.

The narrator tells us, “Living Tomorrow is what we’ll all be doing, and this house shows you what to expect.” That’s important, but I’m going to come back to it in just a few minutes. For right now, I just want that to be fresh in your mind.

In the meantime, let’s take a look at the kitchen, which on top of being bigger than any three rooms in my house combined, is adorned with furniture and appliances so white, it’ll make your retinas sweat.

Let’s skip right past the fact that it looks like everything there was designed by a toilet manufacturer, and get right to the part where we try to imagine cleaning that bastard. See, this is the problem of the “white future” we see in all these movies. Have kids? Then your future is constantly following them with a Windex bottle and a bucket for your exhaustion-induced vomit. Just changed the oil in your car? Don’t even walk past that room.

Case in point, you see those dildo-shaped, faucet-looking things on top of the long … I’m assuming that’s an autopsy table? They zoom in on those things at one point, and you get a quick glimpse showing that they’re already becoming scratched and stained … in a demonstration house where nothing is being used.

That aside, it also comes with, guess what, a touchscreen interface built right into the wall …

What she’s doing there is hitting a preset switch that automatically dims the lights and puts on your favorite music for a nice romantic evening in. You know, in case you plan on F***ing the family from Beetlejuice.

Or let’s say that you just flipped out and drank all of the booze in your house. You’re too S***faced to find a pen, so you stumble over to the several thousand dollar LED screen and drunkenly scrawl “red wine” with your finger like a blind five year old with Parkinson’s Disease. You can then drag down the item you want, tell it how much you wish to purchase … and then for whatever reason, watch a video of what you just ordered on your TV in the other room. Most likely because you were too F***ed up to remember why you came into the kitchen in the first place.

Nowhere in the video does it say that you can order this stuff. It just says that it makes the actual grocery list.

But it gets better. This “house of tomorrow,” which is basically just a giant house with all the S*** hooked up to Windows, has a feature that lets you pay your bills by fingerprint.

If you don’t see the problem with that, then you don’t have kids. They could lock that F***er down with DNA testing that makes you submit a blood sample in order to open the menu, and kids will find a way to break into it. Even if they don’t get into the bill-paying section, the video later claims that every single electronic device in the house is hooked up to a central “easy to use” system. Heat. Air conditioning. Showers. TV. Now let’s flash forward to the first time your power gets knocked out.

Or, the first time a virus — or, hell, a faulty software update — bricks the system. So, what, does your heat shut off? And if you’re paying your bills online, that means the system is going to have to have security updates. Which means one morning you’ll wake up and find everything off in your dark, cold house, and all of your touchscreens blinking a “Could Not Start, XJKFDSUJ5715733571.ini is Missing or Corrupt, Please Reboot” message. You restart the system, at which point it displays the same message.

Oh, and that sentence I asked you to keep in mind? How this is what “we’ll all be doing”? This house costs 22 million euros — $31.6 million U.S. Holy S***, the future is awesome! F*** this house, just give me that in cash.


Wait, it has a tanning bed? This IS the future!

#3. In the Future, We’ll Wear Our Computers!

Photos.com

Maybe to get an idea of just how badly these demonstrations misunderstand human nature, we need to go back in time. Here’s a video from 1992 that shows how in the near future of a few years ago, we’ll all be wearing bulky computers everywhere we go:

So here is the body-mounted “office of the future”:

… and here she is holding the cock and balls of a futuristic giant robot she had to fight:

Ah, the ’90s. But make no mistake, the industry is still shooting for wearable computers. To the engineers working on this sort of thing, I need to remind you of a minor detail: lots of people are self-conscious about what they wear.

Think of these expensive gadgets as jewelry. There are two types of people in this world where jewelry is concerned: 1) people who hate it because they don’t like worrying about expensive, pointless accessories on their bodies and 2) people who like it, in which case they’re going to be pretty goddamn picky about what it looks like and on what part of the body it goes. If you don’t believe me, go out and buy your significant other a random necklace with some throwaway pendant on the end. Most people will appreciate the thought … right before they put it in a drawer and tell you, “Oh, I’m just not wearing it because … I, uh … don’t want to damage it!”


“Awww, for me? F*** you.”

People want to look cool. And sure, you say, but some day we’ll have smaller devices that won’t make it look like you smeared glue on your torso and rolled around the appliance shelf at Bed Bath Beyond. Fine, here’s a video of a guy trying to look suave while sporting a more modern wearable computer system:

Here you go, ladies:

They’re also claiming to make the keyboard obsolete — more on that claim in a bit. Again, by making you look like this:

Yep, that’s exactly how I want to look when I’m out in public. Giant mechanical arm/screen hanging off the side of my head. Fingers curled in black wires. Miniature computer attached to my belt like a fanny pack. Completely shut off from the world around me.

Note the caption. Yes, I barely noticed the sociopath eating alone, constantly tapping his fingers like an OCD case. Now, about those keyboards …

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If Nature Decided To Screw With Us

It’s only a matter of time before nature develops a sense of humor. The platypus seems to indicate that it’s already happening. We asked you to show us what it will look like when they really start nailing their punchlines.

The winner is below, but first the runners up …

#19.


by MattOwl

#18.


by Simp

#17.


by Snaeblooc

#16.


by ThreeHolePunch

#15.


by The Machete

#14.


by Tea-Qualizer

#13.


by Snaeblooc

#12.


by Silverbullet89

#11.


by Simp

#10.


by Kurowski

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5 Most Insane Alternate Reality Games

An alternate reality game (ARG for short) combines the best elements of viral marketing, role playing games and being an insane person who can’t tell fantasy from reality. Basically, ARGs ask the players to pretend they’re living in a carefully constructed parallel universe that can include fake websites and phone numbers and even real objects hidden throughout the world … usually for the sake of promoting a two-hour movie.

What we’re saying here is that ARGs are usually pretty crazy to begin with, but some of them go the extra mile. Like …

#5. Halo 2 — I Love Bees

Photos.com

In 2004, members of a gaming community received large and completely unsolicited jars of honey in the mail, apparently from someone related to the website ilovebees.com. This was the beginning of the most bizarre viral marketing campaign ever, which was intended to promote a video game about gritty space marines. What do bees have to do with Halo, you ask? Nothing, until this game came out.


Although a sick Master Chief calms right down when you make him a proper hot toddy.

Around the same time as the unexplained honey jar incident, the first trailer for Halo 2 was released, and fans noticed that, for a split second, the xbox.com address at the end was replaced with ilovebees.com. So the website was somehow linked to the game, but how? It appeared to be the blog of a completely ordinary bee enthusiast named Dana, which had recently been hacked and filled with strange messages, corrupted data and a series of mysterious countdowns.

Via Geekosity
Most of the bee blogs we frequent look like this all the time.

As the players decoded the “corrupt” data, they learned that the “hacking” was actually the result of a rogue AI named Melissa attempting to collect itself in the website’s server. From her blog posts, the players learned that Dana was becoming exasperated (which is understandable given that she’s paying for the hosting and all) and tried to erase the artificial intelligence, causing Melissa to lose parts of its memory. A virtual catfight ensued, with the AI Melissa leaving threats on the website and capturing webcam images of Dana to freak her out. At this point Dana’s character F***ed off to China out of sheer terror and left her readers to figure out how to deal with the AI.


You’d probably run away, too, if a rogue AI took over your S***ty blog.

Later, ilovebees.com visitors found a series of real GPS coordinates leading to pay phones all over the country. The phones would then ring at a designated time, at which point the nearest player was greeted by a prerecorded message and required to answer a series of questions using codewords related to the game. Players were so dedicated to this game that one of them waited by a pay phone while Hurricane Frances was literally only minutes away in Tampa, Fla.

Via Randompixels
“You’ll have to speak a little louder!”

Other times, when the players couldn’t make it to the designated phones in time, they had to persuade employees at a Pizza Hut and an Applebee’s to answer the robot’s questions. These phone calls were called axons — every time a group of axons was completed, a new sound file was unlocked at the website, revealing a new recovered piece of Melissa’s fragmented memory. Players were able to learn more and more of the back story: basically, Melissa was the AI onboard a futuristic spaceship that was accidentally sent back in time and crashed on present-day Earth. With the ship stranded and damaged, Melissa was forced to transfer itself to a random web server in an effort to get its S*** together and call out for help.

And then things got really weird. As more axons were completed, Melissa’s memory began to come back, and so did its deranged dominatrix-like personality. From this point onward, the players were able to have actual phone conversations with the character, having to obey to its increasingly bizarre requests: it once told a group of players to form a human pyramid at a certain location (which they did). At other times, it asked them to tell jokes, share personal stories or sing their favorite songs. By the end of the game, the calls routinely involved giggling, laughing and having sing-alongs with the awkward person on the other side of the line.

Getty
Apparently futuristic AIs have the same pastimes as 10-year-old girls at a slumber party.

Eventually, Melissa managed to return to its own time, but not before inadvertently giving up Earth’s location to an alien empire called the Covenant, thus kicking off the events of Halo 2. Currently, ilovebees.com displays a 500-year countdown to the exact moment of the Covenant invasion. As a reward for constantly degrading themselves to please a fictional future space robot mind, players were invited to play Halo 2 in movie theaters before it was released.

#4. Nine Inch Nails — Year Zero

Via Tubapants.com

Rock albums don’t usually have the most extensive marketing campaigns; most of the time it’s just some online ads, a plug on The Daily Show and calling some other artist a twat in an interview with a tabloid if we’re talking about a British band. Trent Reznor’s Year Zero, on the other hand, had 17 websites and a massive alternate reality game devoted to it.

Reznor’s main method for spreading information to his fans, by the way? The bathroom stalls of Nine Inch Nails concert venues.

It all started with a Nine Inch Nails Tour T-shirt: among the words on the back, certain highlighted letters spelled out the phrase “iamtryingtobelieve.” This was actually the URL for a strange website that described a drug called parepin, an alleged immune system booster distributed by the U.S. government through the water supply to protect its citizens from biological warfare. The website posited that it was actually a hallucinogenic and narcotic drug meant to control the populace. Because people are way easier to keep in check when they’re tripping balls, apparently.

Iamtryingtobelieve
Apocalyptic hallucinations or no, we’ll sign on with any government that promises us free drugs.

Still, divulging the address of a secret website through a T-shirt is a fairly straightforward method for promoting an album, at least by NIN standards. Things started getting really weird when a fan attending a NIN concert in Portugal found a USB flash drive in a bathroom stall that contained a real song from the then-unreleased album. Embedded in the MP3 file was a link to another website filled with people posting about topics like an underground resistance, the parepin drug … and alleged sightings of a giant hand coming down from the sky. Oh, and if you ran the last few seconds of the song through a spectrogram, you got this:

Via Wikipedia
We promise we won’t show you this thing ever again.

It turns out that these websites, plus others that were found soon afterward, were set in a future where the U.S. has become a Christian fundamentalist state and most civil rights have been dissolved. The large hand is known as “The Presence” and has been seen all over the world.

Via Ninwiki.com
That doesn’t count — it’s a totally different picture.

Fans were able to piece the game’s story together by following cryptic clues in objects found or handed out during NIN concerts, like fliers against the corrupt government, lithographs, DVDs and a few more of those bathroom stall flash drives. Another MP3 spectrogram revealed a phone number, which if called would let you hear a lengthy recording of a wiretapped conversation. Players were constantly receiving weird emails and crazy phone calls, not to mention real cease-and-desist letters from the RIAA for hosting and sharing the MP3s that the band had intentionally leaked. It was easy to mistake this for part of the game, though, because the RIAA is F***ing ridiculous.

Getty
“We’ve never heard of this ‘Reznor’ fellow. But he certainly doesn’t have the right to go leaking our music.”

As the story progressed, the resistance movement became more and more organized. Fans were invited to a resistance meeting in Los Angeles, where they were given all sorts of cool alternate-reality swag (including prepaid cellphones). Those who received the cellphones were summoned to a slightly more secretive meeting five days later — which turned out to be a live goddamn concert for Nine Inch Nails.

This in itself would have been a spectacular enough way to end the game, but apparently Reznor didn’t think so: halfway through the concert and without a word of warning, a SWAT team busted in and shut down the entire thing.

After that, a few more links were found leading to one final website that seemed to describe the end of the world at the hands of the Presence. However, before that happened, a group called the Solution Backwards Initiative managed to send information back in time as a plan to warn us about the future, thus explaining the whole game.

#3. Cloverfield — Slusho!

Via Memoclic.com

When the first Cloverfield trailer debuted in 2007, no one really knew what the hell it was for. All we saw was some shaky footage of a bunch of dudes in New York escaping from an unseen creature (little did we know that the film was basically 90 minutes of that). Online speculation linked the mysterious trailer to everything from Lost to H.P. Lovecraft to Voltron. That’s how little we knew. The viral marketing campaign that unfolded didn’t just give us a sneak peek into the film’s secretive story — it ended up showing way more of it than the film itself.

Cloverfield ARG
Plus, the ARG featured much better camerawork.

Back then we didn’t even know the movie was called Cloverfield: the closest thing to a title was the date 1-18-08 at the end of the only trailer. This led inquisitive fans to the website 1-18-08.com, which showed pictures of the characters from the movie plus photos of some sort of sea accident and random Japanese people. Also, someone in the trailer was wearing a “Slusho!” shirt, which J.J. Abrams fans recognized as a Japanese slushy brand that also shows up in shows like Alias and Fringe.

Via Cloverfieldclues.blogspot.com

Since at this point the desperate fans were clearly pasting every single word uttered in the trailer into a URL bar, they quickly discovered the official Slusho! website, which is … very Japanese, let’s put it that way.

In addition to mind-F***ing the film’s followers with sheer confusion, the website unveiled some of the back story. It turns out Slusho! is owned by a company called Tagruato, which has an even more extensive fake website. Besides manufacturing soft drinks, the company has apparently branched out into other ventures like deep-sea drilling and space satellites. Tagruato’s corporate website was frequently hacked by an environmentalist group called T.I.D.O. Wave which, whaddaya know, also had its own site.

T.I.D.O. Wave
Take that, evil fictional megacorporation.

Meanwhile, several Myspace pages were discovered for specific characters in the film. One of those characters, a guy called Rob Hawkins, would announce in a January 2008 blog post that he had been offered a job at the Slusho! company in Japan (that’s why they’re throwing him a going away party at the beginning of the movie). Among Rob’s group of friends was a guy called Teddy Hanssen who was actually a T.I.D.O. Wave activist secretly planning to infiltrate the new Tagruato sea drilling station set up near New York City. Teddy’s story could be inferred through postings on the T.I.D.O. Wave website, plus the private webcam videos recorded by his girlfriend Jamie Lascano (password: jllovesth).

In January 2008, several news clips from around the world were uploaded on YouTube reporting on the unexplained collapse of the same drilling station Teddy was supposed to infiltrate (Teddy had since disappeared, and was presumably captured by the Japanese).

Tagruato Corp. blamed the activist group for the destruction of the station, but it’s pretty obvious from the clips that it was actually attacked by some sort of undersea monster. Players who bought Slusho! merchandise over the website (or who won it in the contest to create a fan-made Slusho! commercial) had previously received a torn Tagruato memo mentioning a “dark secret” in the station. This, along with some other information posted on the activist site, suggested that the company found the strange sea creature with their satellites and built the “drilling station” to study it, accidentally causing it to grow larger by exposing it to the stuff Slusho! is made of. From then on, all that was left was for the monster to march into New York and go all Godzilla on it.


“Quick, someone get this thing some Cheetos!”

The game ended when 200 fans were invited to Rob’s going away party, which was followed by a midnight screening of the film they had immersed themselves in for all those months. Of course, it turns out the movie doesn’t bother to explain any of what we just told you, even in passing — the biggest reference to the ARG is when we see the girl from the webcam videos passed out on a couch during the party.

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5 Projects You Won’t Believe the US Government Is Working On

The mad inventor from the James Bond movies, Q, is real. Only there are lots of him, and they have a lot more money at their disposal. In the real world, they’re called DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Never heard of them? You should have — they’re responsible for some of the best technology (the Internet) and the worst (Agent Orange) produced in the last 50 years. Their job is to dream up the craziest S*** possible and make it real. And, since they’re exempt from several government hiring and spending laws, they’re not shy about thinking outside the box. Way, way outside.

Some of what they’re working on right now includes …

If you want a plane to get to where the bad guys are without being noticed, you have several options: You can make it fly really, really high and really, really fast (as is typical with spy planes), or you can get creative. DARPA has utterly insane plans to do both.

airforce-magazine.com
“We’ve finally weaponized the doorstop, men.”

First we have FALCON, or Force Application and Launch from Continental United States (we hope they pay their acronym guys really well). The FALCON program is mainly focused on the X-41 CAV — an alien-looking, cone-shaped “near-space” plane that can go 13,000 miles per hour (which is 20 times the speed of sound).

Via Disinfo.com
This is either a 3-D model of it or an official DARPA bicycle seat.

If you don’t understand what 20 times the speed of sound gets you, how about this: It can go anywhere in the world, and photograph or kill anyone, in an hour or so.

But DARPA is also capable of thinking small — the kind of small that is somehow creepier than a magical instant-death murdership.

Via DARPA
“An estimated 80 percent of conversations go unrecorded. DARPA can fix that.”

That’s why they’re also looking into something they call micro air vehicles, like the Shrike, which basically looks exactly like a kid’s RC copter and is built primarily for spying and reconnaissance. So, really, it is an RC copter, with an iPhone taped to it.

Via DARPA
Ta da!

And if that sounds unimpressive, don’t worry — they’re also developing the much smaller and much creepier NAV — the Nano Air Vehicle. One day you might find one hanging around your neighbor’s bird feeder.

Yes, we’re talking about a tiny robot hummingbird that can spy on terrorists (and maybe you). The whole thing is less than 6 inches tall and lighter than an ounce, and as demonstrated by the image on the project’s page, it will fool absolutely everyone ever.

Via DARPA
“I AM A NORMAL EARTH HUMMINGBIRD. PLEASE DO NOT APPROACH.”

This is part of DARPA’s ongoing effort to create …

Sure, we have spy satellites. But they’re still limited — you have to wait for them to pass over the area you want to photograph, for instance, and your targets might be doing their business indoors. No, if you want to see your enemy in real time, you need to get sci-fi on that S***.

So let’s start off with their giant supervillain space blimp.

Defense Industry Daily
Above: When nerds get Defense Department contracts.

ISIS (Integrated Sensor Is Structure) is essentially an inflatable surveillance outpost. It hangs out in the upper atmosphere and has the ability to take high-res battlefield photos, even at night. And they will be able to get one up anywhere, any time — it can be deployed within a matter of hours. Also, it’s totally self-sustained, thanks to a solar energy and hydrogen fuel cell combo, and it doesn’t require any kind of input from the ground. It can pretty much cruise around forever.

Via Fastcompany.com
This balloon will outlive you.

And while that’s fairly practical, another project called Combat Zones That See (CTS) is just as creepy as it sounds. Remember in The Dark Knight when Batman used Gotham’s cellphones to try to track the Joker, and Morgan Freeman got really pissed off at him? Imagine something like that, only using every camera in an entire city instead of just cellphones. That’s CTS.

Basically, it uses municipal and other outdoor video and a computerized logic routine to track objects from camera to camera. CTS is intended to be able to primarily track vehicles in war zones, but that hasn’t stopped privacy hounds on the Internet from pointing out that it could easily be used to track American citizens right here. Kind of makes you want to never leave the house.

Oh, wait, they’ve got something for that, too. First is HIBR, or Harnessing Infrastructure for Building Reconnaissance. Basically, DARPA wants to be able to map the insides of buildings, using RF signals like a kind of sonar (wait, wasn’t that also in The Dark Knight? What the F***?). And yes, there’s even speculation that the technology could be used for real-time tracking of people inside the building, with an early prototype that can see through up to a foot of concrete.

If that makes you want to retreat to your underground bunker in Montana, well, don’t bother. DARPA is also working on GATE, or Gravity Anomaly for Tunnel Exposure, which can detect tunnels and underground bunkers. It’s a sensor attached to low-flying aircraft that detects subtle changes in gravity and makes maps of the world underneath our own.


“S***, I forgot to bring health potions.”

Once more, in case all of this sounds like paranoid pie-in-the-sky bullS*** from some agency trying to justify their funding, let us ask you this: Did you ever play the Modern Warfare games? And did you use the Javelin, that bazooka thing that lets you point at an enemy, then launch a smart missile that will chase his ass down no matter where he goes?

Congratulations, you have used DARPA technology — the Javelin was created in a partnership between DARPA and Texas Instruments. Here’s a video of a real one blowing a Russian tank right the F*** up:

But that’s what we have now. For the future, DARPA has once more decided to turn that S*** up a notch. And because they use the exact same naming conventions as a comic book supervillain organization, they call the prototype weapon MAHEMMagneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition. It is a freaking molten metal-filled missile fired out of an electromagnetic launcher.

DARPA

Science is doing its best to turn every weapon you doodled in notebooks as a kid into a reality.

Basically, they launch the missile into the air and deploy the liquid-hot metal when it’s at high velocity, then have the metal cool into a giant spear sharpened by aerodynamic forces. It’s called a “self-forging penetrator” (which is a boner joke just waiting to happen). Essentially, it’s like catapulting a T-1000 at someone.

Via Intomobile.com
“Everybody stand back.”

It’s meant to penetrate bunkers and other armored buildings and vehicles. Instead of a bunker buster, it’s a bunker stabber.

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8 Hilarious Moments (From Otherwise Terrible Movies)

Bad movies are untrustworthy bitches. For every one of them that delivers the unintentional comedy you crave, there are a dozen others that simply erase 90 minutes from your life. That’s why I’ve selected eight of the most awesome moments from eight of the worst movies. I’ve even gone through every movie that ever existed to save you the trouble of telling me which ones I missed in the comments section.

No Holds Barred (1989)

D-d-d-d-d-d-dooooooooookieeeeee …

No Holds Barred is a movie about pro wrestling where pro wrestling is real. This requires the viewer to suspend his or her disbelief in two different directions at once. It’s like closing your eyes and pretending your wife is someone else, and that someone else is pretending they’re not Batman. All of Hulk Hogan’s movies have an extra layer like that. For instance, Mr. Nanny was an allegory for matriarchal societies and in Suburban Commando, he was a talking dog fire chief the entire time. Deal with that, your mind.

No Holds Barred is the kind of movie you would write if you were trying to get a film director to kill himself. The script reads like a transcription of a toddler getting its stomach pumped and there are so many non-human hormones pumping through the cast members that each set had to be legally zoned as an animal shelter. It’s tough to enjoy even for me, and I take prescription drugs for my Hulkamania just so the California state government will allow me near t-shirts.

However, there’s a moment in this movie where Hulk Hogan hulks out so hard that 20 years later, it was the first thing coroners wrote on “Macho Man” Randy Savage’s death certificate. Hulk Hogan escapes from a limousine by jumping through the roof and while physics is still trying to figure out what happened, he kills 10 men with pro wrestling. This alone would be amazing enough, but it ends with Hulk Hogan ripping the door off the limo and yanking out the terrified driver. He snarls at him, and not just a little bit. He snarls at him long past the point where it makes sense. It’s a good 15 straight seconds of two men making monster sounds at each other. Out of context, you’d swear a rabies doctor had made the world’s most unethical sex tape. It goes on for so long that I think Hulk might have forgotten his lines, but that’s impossible since his next two lines are “What’s that smell?” and “Dookie!?” followed by history’s most intense and hilarious awkward pause.

The Pumpkin Karver (2006)

A Harsh Lesson in Farm Safety

It’s hard to say why someone made The Pumpkin Karver. It’s a slasher film set on a farm where teenagers are partying and a grumpy old man enjoys carving pumpkins. They live in a world where scratching faces into pumpkins is some kind of dynamic field of art, so most of the dialog is about pumpkin carving. The teenagers eventually get stalked by a supernatural ghost monster, who now that I think about, is the one character in the movie that has no interest in pumpkin carving. It’s bizarre in stupid, confusing, childish ways. It feels like the filmmaker threw a movie together as an excuse for why he got caught carving dickholes into 3,000 pumpkins.

One character you’ll particularly hate is Toga Teen #2. He’s supposed to be the comic relief which is strange since the actor playing him has the comic timing of polio. If he worked as a mortuary makeup artist, his boss would describe him as the one with no sense of humor. When he puts his mouth over your A******, people stop laughing at your farts. The only highlight of the movie comes when this guy leaves the party to climb a tractor combine and pee into a pumpkin patch. Even in a film without an insane reverence for pumpkins, you’d recognize this as horror movie shorthand for “this character is about to die.” And holy S*** does that happen.

The miserable failure mumbles out a series of anti-jokes as he starts peeing. Most people would stop this once a mysterious stranger starts knifing them in the back, but not Toga Teen #2. He stands perfectly still, continues peeing and wonders who might be responsible for all that knifing. Three chops and half a minute later, the murderer, who is probably as confused by the guy’s reaction as the audience is, switches to a new weapon and slices his head off. The head falls directly into what is now a record-breakingly sustained stream of pee. Pumpkin Karver had to really work to get there, but it made it — this dead A****** was peeing into his own mouth!

Minotaur (2006)

The Minotaur’s Rude Interruption

In the early days of planned parenthood, abortions were performed by putting your babies into a maze and letting The Minotaur devour their innocence. It’s how the tradition of abortion doctors wearing the heads of bulls got started. The film Minotaur tried to capture this whimsy but missed. The dialog is so clumsy and insane that it feels like the actors are trading lines they overheard from hobo conversations. Plus, it’s set back in the time of minotaurs, so everyone has his or her own version of a fruity half-British Renaissance Faire accent. One of the most common misunderstandings in Hollywood is that when an actor hears the words “period piece” he thinks, “Oh, like I’m having my period. Cool, I can talk like that. Hark! Wherefore shan’t there be a cock upon mine lips?”

Most of the movie is unpleasant people arguing in a dark maze and the rest is the actor who played Candyman with his shirt off, ad-libbing the creepiest things he can think of. Tony Todd and his nude torso hisses about newborn flesh, his seed and of course The Minotaur. And speaking of, The Minotaur shows up about as often as you’d think it would in a film that has the special effects budget of a movie about minotaurs. That A****** is never there. Dammit, Minotaur, if we liked sitting in a dark maze surrounded by monsters we couldn’t see, we wouldn’t have cried for help when our parents left us with our birthday magician.

When The Minotaur finally shows up, it’s totally worth the wait. The Minotaur may suck in every other possible way, but he has seen Deep Blue Sea, and he has learned a thing or two about dramatic timing. In his best scene, a girl starts telling the other people in the maze how much she hates everything. Unknown to them all, The Minotaur is hiding in the shadows behind her. This is not an easy thing to do when you’re 10- feet-tall and your head is a cow. In fact, most minotaur scientists would call into question this entire scene’s credibility. But not everything is about you, minotaur scientists.

At the risk of spoiling the only good part of this movie (shown on right), the girl’s whining is suddenly and spectacularly interrupted by a minotaur horn blasting through her head and out of her mouth. There are 73 ways to say, “Shut the F*** up” in the Minotaur language, but this one is the most common. What’s strange is that the special effects for a spike coming out of a woman’s face are good — far, far better than any of the others in the movie. It’s so convincing that I think Minotaur might have been made to cover up a forklift accident someone accidentally filmed.

I won’t cue this video up to the cranky girl dying; that way it’ll be a surprise when a minute in, a horn explodes her face:

Wicker Man (2006)

Nic Cage’s Guide to Etiquette

Wicker Man has several unbelievable scenes, but nothing compares to Nicolas Cage dressed as a bear, sprinting across a meadow and sucker punching a woman. American audiences consider it one of the worst horror films of all time, but in Afghanistan, it’s been the No. 1 romantic comedy for four straight years.

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Novelization of the Trailer for the Movie Battleship

There’s an old writing exercise for new writers that’s all about copying great work. Before he became an established writer, Hunter S. Thompson would copy The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, word for word, to try to better understand the writing styles of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, two artists he admired. It was important to him to know what it felt like to physically write down every word in Gatsby, in an attempt to understand what was going through Fitzgerald’s mind when he wrote it. Certain phrases and sentences would take on a different meaning after Thompson had actually typed them out and watch them appear on a page.

Similarly, young screenwriters exercise their minds by watching a movie and then, based on the visuals, writing what they imagine the script looked like, including dialogue, action, descriptions- everything. By transposing what you see on the screen, you learn what was important to the director; you learn what information he/she wanted the audience to see, and how he/she wanted that information presented. It’s a really neat exercise, and I recommend it for anyone who wants to learn more about visual storytelling.

I also have a few artists that I’d like to understand better, except mine aren’t literary greats like Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The artist that is most important to me is the person responsible for the new Battleship movie, the name of whom escapes me at the moment. The trailer for this film, (starring The Blonde Vampire from True Blood, Riggins from Friday Night Lights, and Liam “For Some Reason I’m In This Movie” Neeson), was recently released and, in an effort to really get inside the mind of and understand the folks behind this movie, I decided to perform my own little writing exercise. Allow me to present to you…

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