A Random October Post

I had a Sausage, Egg & Cheese McGriddle this morning, and I don’t think it really improved the quality of my day. I think I probably should have cut out at least one of those components. I think optimally just three of the sausage, egg, cheese, or McGriddle portions at once would have been sufficient, but all four together just kind of tipped it over.

I should probably stop starting my morning down six bucks and up six hundred calories. This is not a great lifestyle decision that I should be continually making.

– Here are a series of famous logos mixed with other famous logos (a “mashup” if you will!) in ways that make my head hurt. Crazy to think how deeply embedded some of this imagery is already in my brain, to the point where I get physically ill as my brain rejects these horrible mixed unions. Or maybe I just have a thing against mixed unions in general. Just make sure these all remain hypothetical or else multi-billion dollar oil companies will sue you. Wait, you mean this television channel is NOT associated with Exxon Mobil? Oh man…I didn’t know that. The interlocking Xs obviously implies that it is! I bet next you’re going to tell me X-Treme X-Men WAS NOT published by Exxon either? I guess it’s a good thing FXX has some legal experts on payroll.

– Someone wrote a scientific paper about Wolverine’s healing factor that is more novel than entertaining. The citations of fictional institutes and universities are mildly amusing, but I take offense at the mention of “Fortress of Solitude, Moon.” It is in the arctic dude, come on. If you’re not going to follow through on the references, why do them at all? Plus this paper does nothing to tackle the question of how this protein is activated by stress at injury sites, whether or not these proteins require template cells to guide regeneration under extreme situations in which he loses whole organs, or if they’re immunogenic and why his healing factor isn’t passed along in blood transfusions. So really, this was a waste of time and literally worse than the Holocaust.

– There is a site called EliteFixtures.com, which is a site that I think sells lamps, or at least is a site that is really passionate about lamps. And seems like they also have some solid Photoshop experts in-house as well, as these Photoshopped movie pictures and Photoshopped comic book covers show. It is a simple concept, but that should in no way imply a lack of greatness. The comic book covers especially demonstrate someone that knows their stuff. That iconic Fantastic Four #243 cover in particular…that’s not a simple cut and paste job, they drew new stuff to put in!

– Here is a crazy 20 minute long video called Here Comes The Night Time, featuring Arcade Fire debuting some songs from their new album, and for some reason there are like some famous people in there making cameos. The whole thing is wacky, but goddamn this sounds like a crazy album. How come no one’s ever told me about this band before? Also, question for you to ponder – is Reflektor the greatest song of the year…or the decade? Tough one.

– News is that Samuel L Jackson dropped the fact that Elizabeth Olsen is involved in the next Avengers movie, so everyone is assuming she will play the Scarlet Witch. Which I initially thought was awesome news. And then I realized that I had confused Elizabeth Olsen with Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy Olsen. So now it’s like there’s no way I can enjoy this movie, because the whole time I will be thinking “Man, Peggy would have been a much better choice than her.” Plus, I didn’t see him specifically reference her as the Scarlet Witch – for all we know, she could be playing like Kang or something. We don’t know! Why are we assuming!?!

– I found this Reddit post where Dan Harmon himself addresses haters on the internet directly (always a good idea), but I thought it was a neat point he raises about how the fan base of Community has been divided. The whole thing is an interesting read, but here’s a relevant snippet, in which he basically equates Season 4 with your dog getting hit by a car. It’s not a bad metaphor.

We all know what happened. It was a Civil War between two people with equally good intentions: the people that loved Community so much they wanted it to live forever and the people that loved Community so much they wanted it to die. Like a married couple standing over a dog that got hit by a car, and one person is saying “it’s okay, it’s okay,” and stroking it and the other person is saying “it’s not okay” and grabbing a big rock. Who’s right to yell at whom? Well, it depends on your definition of a healthy dog, but the good news is, that issue’s over, because this dog is up.

But now we have the legacy fight between the married couple, along the lines of “I can’t believe you wanted to kill that dog” versus “I can’t believe you were willing to let it suffer just to make yourself feel better and we still don’t know if it has internal bleeding.”

To which I say, guys, three very important things to now remember:

1. You’re MARRIED.
2. You weren’t driving the car that hit the dog, it was a robot truck controlled by a corporation.
3. There’s no internal bleeding.

Love or hate whatever details of the show you want but if you cast yourself as part of some overall faction, as if there’s such a thing as a Pro This or a Loyalist That, as if it’s possible to be a True or Untrue fan of Community, the only side that wins is going to be certain entities that shall remain nameless, that resent this show, resent all of you, and resent me and that can’t wait for it to go away quietly. They want to prove nothing ever happened. The ones driving the truck.

I’m not going to lie, I was definitely holding that rock, with wild murder in my eyes that I justified to myself as “mercy.” I have issue with his metaphor though. First, I ain’t married to no crazy hippy dog lover. I have no allegiance to any larger Community fan contingent, and whatever opinions I had about this show are mine alone. I didn’t like it because I thought it wasn’t good, and there is no need for me to reconcile that with a new perspective.

Truth is, I consider the dog already dead. The first three years we had together were wonderful, and I got to see it pass away with dignity and closure…as I bashed its head in with my murder rock. The zombified dog that returned with heavy head scars from rock bashings? That’s not my dog. It occupies its body and barks like it used to, but the dog I knew is dead. It’s nice having a pet that resembles my old best friend, but I’ve moved on. And while I am a little bit excited about Dan Harmon’s return and his thoughts that Season 5 “can be the third act of a great movie” are admittedly pretty inspiring, the fact remains that the second act did kind of suck and there’s no reason I have to have my enjoyment of the first act get dragged down by the suckage of the second act and the yet unknown quality of the third act. My dog did get smashed by a truck, and it might be overly optimistic to presume there’s no internal bleeding, or least any light crippling. Even ignoring anything that happened during Season 4, one principle cast member has left and another is going to spend five of the episodes catering to a forced storyline that writes him out of the other eight.

There’s no reason we have to consider everything within the same context. I don’t need to consider the tepid slow drag of the last two decades of The Simpsons when I think back upon the first six seasons. I don’t need to imagine Shaq as a 38 year-old, struggling play 20 minutes a game on one leg while chasing rings on the Boston Celtics of all teams. Forcing me to lump together Season 4 and Season 5 of what is seemingly now a different show with the first three seasons does me no favours – let me enjoy whatever I want in whatever context I want to.

My dog was hurt. And I put it down before it had a chance to suffer.

There are two kinds of pain. The sort of pain that makes you strong, or useless pain. The sort of pain that’s only suffering. I have no patience for useless things.