inherently different

Archive for October, 2007

Unless you have been living under a rock the last year or so, you have to know that Showtime has been catching up to HBO when it comes to interesting and well-done shows. Dexter is the show based on the quietly successful series of books written by Jeff Lindsay featuring a serial killer who hunts other serial killers while working as a blood spatter specialist for a Miami Crime Lab.

The books are a fun read. Not deep, nor overly taxing mentally, they are fast paced and entertaining.

Excerpt: “I can’t even keep pets. Animals hate me. I bought a dog once; it barked and howled –at me– in a nonstop no-mind fury for two days before I had to get rid of it. I tried a turtle. I touched it once and it wouldn’t come out of its shell again, and after a few days of that it died. Rather than see me or have me touch it again, it died.” – Dexter, explaining why he isn’t big on socializing with other living things.

I am not usually one to gush over remakes. In fact, most remakes suck ass not unlike the way Oprah sucks the life out of just about anything decent this world has to offer.

Originally, 3:10 to Yuma was a classic western and one of the films on my Top Fifty Films of All-Time. It combined some of the best elements of two of my favorite film genres (western and noir) and delivered a compelling story of vengeance, honor, duty, and ultimately, vindication. Like many films of that era, the heroes were all good, and the villains all bad.

The 2007 version, starring Christian Bale and Russel Crowe, is different in so much as the hero is flawed, and the villain complex. The story is not a cookie cutter lift from the original story, but a fusion of all the best the original offered with some twists necessary to captivate modern audiences.

I love a good vampire story and I love graphic novels. Imagine my fan-boy glee when I came across what I still believe is the pinnacle of Vampire fiction back in late 2002. Originally published as 30 Days of Night in a three issue miniseries of horror comics written by Steve Niles, illustrated by Ben Templesmith and published by IDW Publishing, the series told the story of a family of vampires who lay siege to a small town in Alaska during the annual 30 days of night.

The movie version takes some liberties with the story, but the few changes were necessary and I believe make the story much better for the medium. Josh Hartnett does a good job of playing the role of the hero who ultimately has to choose between love and death.

Until I Am Legend is released, this now tops my list of vampire movies. And since you asked, here are my Top Five Vampire movies:

5. Brahm Stoker’s Dracula
4. The Hunger
3. Lost Boys
2. Near Dark
1. 30 Days of Night

It pains me to think of how normal, rational, careful people suddenly becoming ridiculously abnormal, crazy, and reckless when put in front of a computer with internet access. Jesus cries every time some moron opens an email from someone without taking a brief moment to think about what they are doing.

The biggest culprits of email protocol faux pas are the mom’s and grandparents who try to be hip and do exactly whatever it is that is requested in email forwards.

Whenever you get one that says, “FORWARD THIS TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE AND I WILL GET XXXXX FOR EVERYONE WHO DOES IT!” I die a little inside because I know some cocksucker is now going to harvest my name along with the names all the other fucking Net-tards added to the forward list.

I hope you are all aware how foolish it is to actually forward these darn things. It’s a load of poop… emails cannot be counted once they leave the originator (unless there is an image embedded that gets counted every time its opened, but thats another problem all together). So it doesn’t matter how many people forward it, no one could actually track how many people received or forwarded a given message.

A friend of mine just forwarded me an email that supposedly would, if forwarded, prompt The Make A Wish Foundation to give 7 cents for every email that gets forwarded to some allegedly terminal 12 year old kid. Now, someone who knows better can correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I know, the Make A Wish foundation is not in the habit of giving money to kids who are terminal (it’s just a bad investment). They get people to donate time or money to make the wish come true, not solicit funds to give directly to a kid… i suppose if the kid’s wish was to be a millionaire before he/she died, that might be a reason, but thats a pretty shitty dying wish don’t ya think? If I was 12 or 13 years old, I would ask to get laid. Fuck the money, I can’t take that with me… and one thing i definitely don’t want to take with me to the hereafter is my virginity. God clearly hates virgins if the Muslim’s have it right… I mean, if Ahmad the Mad bomber is right, and he will be serviced by 20 young virgins, do you really want to find out if ALLAH has a sense of humor and he just picks 20 virgins out of a hat regardless of their sexual preference?

Secondly, emails that ask you to forward the message are just another type of virus… even if it is simply a way to clog an email server with bogus traffic like this, the reason they exist is to cause spikes in internet traffic… think of it as passive aggressive terrorism.

The worse is when you get an email message from friend that is ACTUALLY a real virus… that can happen with these email forwards because the attachments get buried under tons of fwd delimiters like peoples names addresses… which brings is to the real reason for email forwards…

People create these email forwards specifically to harvest valid email addresses to sell to marketers. Some tool simply creates a bogus story about dying of an anal embolism and asks for people to forward that email (forwards copy the email address of everyone they are sent to) and eventually it comes back with a long list of real email addresses… These unscrupulous scammers then sell those valid (and verified) addresses for 7 cents per address.

I know better of course and just toss that shit into the garbage, but my friends? Some of them are just naive and don’t know… others are just dumber than a fucking box of rocks, so my email address gets sent along with the rest of the hapless victims of this common internet scam…

If you have my email address… don’t be a douche… keep me off your fucking retarded email lists and save me the trouble of blacklisting you.