Man, What A Stupid Commercial #009

I have to imagine that this State Farm commercial’s objective is to get the viewer to think that the wife is psychotically jealous and suspicious that her husband is cheating on her and/or is into phone sex. After all, she marches down the stairs, turns on the lights, snatches the phone away from her husband, and sternly inquires the person on the other line in an accusatory nature.

I have to imagine that the goal of the commercial is to paint the wife out to be the “villain” of the plot, while the husband and Jake, the State Farm agent are completely innocent. Yeah well, I don’t think they did a very good job. Which is why this commercial is stupid.

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Well, at least he didn’t get killed on the job

Well, to each, his own. I chose my path, you chose the way of the hero. And they found you amusing for a while, the people of this city. But the one thing they love more than a hero is to see a hero fail, fall, die trying.

On one hand, it’s good to know that Darien Long isn’t going to die on the job. But on the other hand, it’s ironically unfortunate that not only has Darien Long been let go from his job, he’s also been arrested. For doing god’s work and trying to heaven forbid, actually make a mall a better and safer place.

I get all the facts that have surfaced around both the circumstances of his release as well all his arrest, but it all just doesn’t really feel that right regardless.

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Sexism logic fail

Game is perceived to be sexist due to the fact that male protagonist must rescue female from the forces of bad.  In an attempt to nullify the perceived sexism, the game is re-created (plagiarized) with the male and female roles reversed.

…and this is considered NOT sexist how?

Murdering a murderer for committing murder doesn’t solve anything.  In the end, you still have someone who committed murder that is still alive and standing in the end, and is technically probably wanted by the authorities.  It’s a little extreme of an analogy but I think it’s valid; people who hack video games they think are sexist, and make a game where females rescue males aren’t solving anything either; in the end, they’ve produced a sexist game themselves.

Over the last few weeks, there’s been some buzz on the interwebs about sexism in video games, and two particular instances where people have hacked some classic Nintendo games in an attempt to fight an imaginary fight against sexism in video games.  One guy hacked Donkey Kong, and reversed the roles of Mario and Pauline, so that the player plays as Pauline who has to jump barrels, hammer living fireballs, and climb ladders to rescue Mario, who has been kidnapped by Donkey Kong.  A week later, someone hacked The Legend of Zelda, so that you play through the entire game as Princess Zelda, in the quest to gather the pieces of the Triforce and defeat Ganon and rescue Link.

What we have here are people attempting to fight against perceived misogyny by employing misandry.

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Photos: An afternoon in Miami, Florida

It’s been a while since I made a day trip like this, but despite the fact that I really actually don’t like Miami all that much, the allure of watching World Baseball Classic baseball inside of a ballpark that I had never been to before made it all worth taking a very short trip down to South Florida for an afternoon.

I mean literally, I was off the airplane at 9:30 a.m., took a cab into Little Havana, walked around for a few hours and had some amazing Nicaraguan food, before heading into the park.  New Marlins Park is actually pretty nice for something that’s in Miami, and I guess all those disgruntled taxpayer dollars at least made something pretty nice and a great place to watch baseball.  But due to the risk of getting stuck in Miami overnight, I opted to bail from the game in the 7th inning, and with a little bit of luck, I was back on a flight to Atlanta by 4:30 p.m.  Not too shabby of a way to spend a day, and not a bad way to make Miami a little bit more tolerable – by hardly staying.

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Real Men Don’t Wear Small update: Marlins Park

The first new baseball park update for the 2013 is a little early this year, but that’s because it’s a World Baseball Classic year!  Despite the fact that I’m not really that big of a fan of the city of Miami, it turns out that one half of the second round of the tournament would be taking place in Miami, namely the new-ish Marlins Park, the successor to the old Sun Life Robbie Land Shark Player park the Dolphins play in.  So if there was ever an excuse to go to Miami to kill two birds with one stone, this really was it.

I’ve been in a funk lately

And I’ve got a pretty short fuse, and just about everything in the world is agitating me lately.

I could go into further detail, but the effort required to formulate my thoughts into words to describe how much work is sucking lately, and how much it sucks to think about what it’s going to be like the next time go up to Virginia to visit family just seems so exasperating.

It’s also one of those periods of time when I feel kind of isolated from the world, and that there’s really nobody around that I feel comfortable speaking with who’s remotely available to speak with when I need it.

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When did Deadpool become so popular?

Back in like 1992 or 1993 is when I got into comic books. Naturally, like most kids of that era, it was X-Men that proved to be the gateway into comic-nerd-dom forevermore, and it wasn’t really long before I would blow loads and loads of my parents’ money on comic book related shit, in hopes of getting X-Men related crap.

I bought the entire set of X-Men Series One trading cards (minus the oddly-rare Iceman card) from a classmate for $15, which was a gargantuan amount in the fifth grade. I remember being all thrilled to seeing all the cards of the characters I recognized like Gambit and Wolverine, as well as the lusty excitement to see how disproportionately sexy Jim Lee drew women like Rogue and the White Queen, but all in all, of the 208 card set, there were a fuck ton of characters that I had never seen in my life, because the set encapsulated all sorts of villains that weren’t Magneto, and all of the B-characters that were a part of X-Force, X-Factor, and Excalibur. Regardless, being the inquisitive wannabe comic nerd poser, that didn’t stop me from reading all the cards’ bios and examining each and every one of them at some point.

It was during this time that I discovered the existence of Deadpool. From what his bio revealed, he was a guy mired in the X-Force storylines, entwined with whatever Cable was doing. The mention of Weapon X meant nothing to me at this point of my comic noob-ness, since I was that new to comic books at that time, and was unaware that Weapon X meant Wolverine, which meant something that ultimately the entire company revolved around. But for the most part, he was a negligible character that seemed to look too close to Spider-Man to my earlier comic days.

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