Omg guys, did you know that Kanye West was mean to Taylor Swift at the MTV VMAs? Ohmigawd it was soooooooo rude, wasn’t it? I mean, she was having a nice moment and he just went up there and-yeah, shut the fuck up.

Kanye West is still Kanye West-a slightly decent rapper with an ego that could fill a skyscraper. Taylor Swift is still mediocre at best.

WE FUCKING GET IT ALREADY.

Christ’s sake, you guys, you act like Kanye West hasn’t acted like a 5 year old getting grounded 2 or 3 times in the past. Why is this newsworthy? Why do we need to make such a big deal about things like this, every goddamn time they happen? Don’t we have anything better to talk about? Obama’s trying to nationalize healthcare, an action that is meeting a good amount of resistance from the Right. Osama Bin Ladin hates our guts, and most of us still don’t understand why. Kim Jong Il is still a fucking lunatic who could make Kanye look humble.

And yet, most of us are either crying or giggling because mister gay fish got another stick up his ass. Get over it, and get back to the things that really matter. In fact, to put it more bluntly, until Kanye spoons Taylor Swift’s eye out and skullfucks her for a huge audience to see, quit whining.

Not as long as my usual posts, I know, but I needed to get it off my chest.

As a young child, I had a brief phase where I idolized Michael Jackson. I wasn’t fortunate enough to grow up around the time of the Thriller era (The phase of his career, most argue, where he was at his height). But I was growing up around the early ’90s, when its wave was still lifting the later hits to the higher points of the charts. Driving around with my parents, I was always amused by Rock with You, Man in the Mirror, and Will You Be There, all of which were in constant circulation on my favorite radio station. And whenever I had trouble sleeping, You Are Not Alone would always be on to help lull me to sleep. The last great experience I had in my childhood was when the last minutes of the Thriller video kept me awake in a Las Vegas hotel room a few years later, although the catchy tune that accompanied it would put my mind at ease again.

As a teenager, I remember coming home one day and glancing over my father’s shoulder at the TV, and seeing the headline-the man I briefly looked up to as a child had been indicted for sexually molesting young children at his private estate. I felt betrayed, and for a time, I absolutely loathed everything about him. I laughed my ass off at the multitude of jokes made at his expense, and I continued for a good long while.

When Michael’s stunts finally stopped happening and the Jesus Juice jokes slowly faded away, my grudge against Michael slowly followed suit. The organizer of a youth group I attended at the time would play ’80s Michael Jackson videos between events, and although I started off with a lingering repulsion, the music slowly grew on me again. I thought back to the wonderful times that his music acted as a soundtrack to, and I chose to remember him as the wonderful musician on the ‘95 Explorer’s radio rather than the half-plastic ghoul who pretended to be Peter Pan, gave little boys semen-laced wine and cuddled in bed with them afterward. As I began dabbling in Michael’s music again, I noticed that many of my peers had regained their interests as well… sure, there were the ones who cracked jokes and avoided the music, but for the most part, my entire student body would sing and dance along whenever they heard “Billy Jean” playing.

So of course, Michael would shock me a second time with the news of his death. I was on a yearly family trip with a few of my father’s friends when I got the news… the daughter of a friend ran out of her family’s RV, cell phone in hand, and announced to everyone in the campsite that Michael Jackson had been found dead by his family. The morose feeling slowly sunk in as I listened to the others talking about it, and we spent the night talking about the late King of Pop, both the good and the bad.

So where do I currently stand on the man himself, as well as his funeral service? While I still find the jokes about him funny, I forgave him a long time ago. He stopped showing up in the headlines, so my guess is that he got the hint and got his shit together again. And I think the people dancing on his grave should at least give him credit for that. (SPOILER: They won’t.) As for the funeral services, they were very extravagant and very over-the-top, and honestly? I think he would’ve wanted them that way. The man himself was extravagant and over-the-top in almost everything he took part in, and that’s what people admire about him.

Since my childhood, I’ve mostly phased Adult Contemporary music out of my life. The soft rock on my radio has been replaced by heavy metal, and the unfathomable happiness of my earlier years has been weakened by the experiences of my age. Still, Michael Jackson’s music is one of the last links between my childhood and my adulthood, reminding me of a much simpler time when mom and dad were just mean instead of low on money, when a cardboard box could provide as much entertainment as the TV upstairs, and when stepping off the school bus came with a euphoric rush rather than a mild satisfaction. And while I’m not in Los Angeles to “worship at the altar,” as Sean Hannity puts it, I will be playing the songs that helped define my childhood, as well as the songs that were just fun to listen to.

Quick aside:
I would also go into detail about Billy Mays, Farrah Fawcett, and Ed McMahon, but I don’t know enough about them to. Billy Mays is the newest addition to my personal list of entertainers I became interested in posthumously, along with Dimebag Darrell Abbot and George Carlin, and besides the references to her role in Charlie’s Angels, I only recognize Farrah Fawcett from the episode of Johnny Bravo she had a cameo in. Still, a death is a death, and I figure I might as well take some time out to recognize them as well.

So it seems that even with the stimulus bill debates and that crippling recession that, according to a few talk radio hosts, isn’t even a recession, people still manage to find time to gawk at celebrity gossip. In case you haven’t heard (And I’d be surprised, considering how many media networks are obsessing about it), a sound byte was recently leaked onto Youtube, consisting of Christian Bale flipping out on the set of Terminator 4 recently. A light technician wandered onto the set and ruined Bale’s shot, so he lost his temper and began viciously swearing the technician out. Many nasty things were said, and many expletives were used. It sounds like Bale was simply acting like your typical pretentious Hollywood git.

…Until you consider the fact that the guy wandered onto the set multiple times, hence the “fucking amateur” accusation from Bale. That’s only one thing to consider-also consider the fact that it’s a high-demand blockbuster, which means even a little stress for all involved, and that it may have been a rigorous scene. If I had to run across a desert plain for half a mile 20 times in a row with a PVC robot model draped over my back just because someone kept wandering into the shot, I would not only cuss the guy out, I would pick up the nearest sharp object and disembowel him in front of everyone else. Then I would take the footage that would inevitably be filmed and put it on Youtube myself.

Of course, you’re not going to get any of this from tabloids and news channels, because the appointed commentators will be too busy wagging their fingers at Bale for losing his composure and using the word “fuck.” They’re going to take the whole thing out of context and make Bale look like a short-tempered ego-maniac, and they already have. That’s the sad part-I’m willing to bet that if he wasn’t half as famous as he is, he wouldn’t be getting any of this to begin with. This is because if somebody is popular, then people are either holding them in a superhuman high regard, or tearing them to pieces because they fail to meet it. That is the point of the celebrity-an obsession with creating role models to force others to adhere to. The point of paparazzi and tabloids is to keep a constant eye on these role models and make sure they are constantly living their lives the way everybody else wants them to, and to punish them severely for deviating from it-even if the deviation is out of their control.

Because god forbid celebrities try to act like actual human beings… that would just be horrible.

By now I assume a lot of you have heard about the conflicts between Youtube and Warner Music Group. If you haven’t,then I’ll start with a quick crash course (Skip this paragraph if you at least know what Youtube is): Youtube is a website that was created for the purpose of social networking, video blogging, and independent movie producing, among other things. Its a website where you upload a video to share it with some of the close-knit community and have them comment on it, potentially gaining a criticism or two on how to improve. As more people caught on to the website, it was bought by Google for a large sum of money, causing the creators to rake in a whole bunch of money combined with what they got for advertising. Even more people caught on after this, especially businesses who saw an opportunity to milk the cash cow for all it was worth. Some, like Viacom, set out to sue everybody involved in the website and steal a portion of their money, as well as exploiting the website for their own advertising uses. Others sought to partner with Youtube, offering videos and assistance in exchange for another portion of money.

One of these companies was Warner Music Group, and it was more instrumental to the site. Recently, though, business negotiations between the two entities have completely collapsed, and Warner Music Group has stated that until negotiations re-open, they will be removing any and all Youtube videos containing any of their copyrighted material, effective immediately. This has resulted in what can only be described as a metric fuckton of videos from various artists, including Disturbed, Slipknot, Stone Temple Pilots, Van Halen, Killswitch Engage, and Linkin Park (Meh, not too concerned about this one) being completely purged from the site.

Now, I understand that WMG needs to find ways to make money in order to keep running. I understand that when you aren’t being paid for your work, you have full license to remove it from use until payment is made. That’s basic economics. If that was all there was to it, then I’d take it in stride and just get over the fact that about 4/5 of the music I listen to is no longer available on Youtube, will not be for at least a good deal of time, and, worse comes to worst, may not even be available on Youtube any more.

Except for the fact that-you know-they’re not only removing their own material, but the material of other labels.

Recently, I checked all the dead links in my favorites, and I noticed that among all of Warner’s actual material, a bunch of my George Carlin clips, as well as a slideshow set to “Don’t fear the reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult, had been removed due to WMG copyright claims. Now, as far as I know, I might be wrong about the Carlin material. To my knowledge, the only corporate entity to exercise control over George Carlin’s stand-up routines was HBO, but maybe Warner got a hold of it as well, I don’t know. But Blue Oyster Cult’s music is owned and copyright by Sony Music Group, NOT Warner. In fact, many people have taken notice of WMG’s actions, so much so that it is even listed on WMG’s Wikipedia article.

This means that Warner Music Group has no interest in keeping its media from being used unfairly. Warner Music Group is simply trying to remove as many of Youtube’s most viewed music-related videos as possible, thus reducing traffic at a slow yet steady rate until Youtube concedes and finally gives up the bribe money. Warner Music Group is, essentially, extorting Youtube. This is not copyright enforcement, this is typical corporate bullshit in an attempt to scrounge up a few more measly bucks. It’s pathetic, and why nobody has bothered to take action against WMG (As they are clearly violating the copyright of Sony Music Group, as well as others) is well beyond me.

Shit was SO cash.

Seriously, though, it was a good movie… great by remake standards, considering the industry standard is a foreign horror movie with different actors, slightly tweaked dialogue and maybe a minuscule detail or two added. The marketing was a bit cheesy, but beyond that, I was pretty psyched for this. And as opposed to a few other movies I’ve planned on seeing, I didn’t walk out with crushing disappointment and a seething urge to buy The Anarchist’s Cookbook from the nearest Barnes & Noble just so I know the best way to torch the involved studios to their foundations.

The movie starts out on a surprising note-the text “BURIED ALIVE!” appears on the screen in bold headline text, accompanied by a loud thump and a classic “doo doo doo DOOOOOOO” suspense track made up in Pro Tools. As the movie cycles through various news stories, both through newspaper articles and assorted radio clips, we learn the backstory, which stays somewhat loyal to the original-a freak explosion has trapped a group of miners in the Harmony coal mines. On top of the economic stand-still brought on by the loss of the small town’s most important revenue source, innocent miners are trapped helplessly underground, and before long, the rescue effort becomes a body search. That is, until the comatose Harry Warden is discovered in the mines. Harry is hailed as a hero by the townspeople until autopsies are done on the bodies…turns out the miners were killed by pickax injuries rather than asphyxiation or explosion trauma, meaning that Harry murdered all of the other miners to save air for himself. Things only take a turn for the worse when Harry wakes up from his coma and decides that he needs to viciously slaughter random townspeople to vent stress.

Fast-forward 10 years: Axel, Tom, Irene, and Sarah, the only 4 people who managed to escape Harry’s massacre, aren’t doing too well for themselves. Axel acts as the town’s sheriff with a stub of a fuse, Sarah is his mistreated wife, Tom is a jaded drifter, and Irene sleeps around with other people. Tom returns to town, making his intent to sell his father’s mine in a misguided attempt to leave the past behind public, and further complicates Axel’s marriage to Sarah in the process. And just when things seem to be as bad as they can be, Irene is found dead in a motel room, bludgeoned to death by a pickax.

First off, the movie is marketed as a date movie, and that could not be more true. The movie is so full of jump scares that one of its main reasons for existing is obvious. A good portion of the scares are a bit cheap, on top of that… the movie utilizes the technique of “distract the audience with some happening on screen then HOLY SHIT LOUD JUMP TRACK AND SUDDEN POP OUT FROM OFF SCREEN” to a good extent. If you ever need a good excuse to snuggle with your fright-stricken mate, here’s your chance.

As you’ve probably noticed from the corny commercials for the movie, it’s filmed in RealD-3D to make the movie more immersible and scarier as a result, and this is used very well throughout the movie. Blooming fire licks hungrily at your lenses, the point of a pickax is constantly coming too close for comfort, flecks of blood pop out at the unfortunate viewers, and a drunkard punches a mirror positioned in front of the screen, causing a nice crack over everything. Despite this, it still isn’t incredibly realistic, and it was a bit milked at points, as if the director wanted the viewers to remember that it was a 3D movie… for example, there was one scene where a man dragged the barrels of his shotgun across the screen at a painfully slow rate, creating an ever so slight pop-out effect that had a strong air of “OH EM GEE U GUYZ THIS IS BEING DONE IN 3D! ISN’T THAT AMAZING?” But then again, neither of these really matter when you have the illusion that a pickax is sticking out of your bleeding eye.

As for people who have seen the original, don’t go into the movie expecting the same ending as the original. I did, and it started to look that way, but things turned on me at the last second. People complained about the execution of the big twist, but my jaw was on the floor. Maybe this is because I spent the whole movie thinking “oh it’s totally going to end this way” and had that notion quickly turned on its head, but I still felt like it was one of the better parts of the movie.

Overall, can I recommend it? Sure I can. It’s a bit over-the-top at times, but still fun. They find all sorts of wonderful, surprising ways to kill people with a pickax, so it’s never really one-note. Exposition was a bit minimal, but that meant more tense moments to keep people interested. And if none of this grabs your attention, you get to see a girl slowly decapitated from the jaw up with a shovel.

Also,on a creepy note, the night after I went to see My Bloody Valentine, I went downstairs to calm down my frantically barking dog. As I looked out the window, I saw what looked like a fairly good-sized flashlight shining only a few feet away from the porch, moving as if looking around. It almost seemed like the light on Harry Warden’s hard hat. Needless to say, I tore ass right upstairs. Something walked across the porch… and that was it. Kind of a weird experience, especially right after I saw a movie about a homicidal maniac with a flashlight on his head that spends all his time tearing people new holes with his mining implement.

This seems to be another one of those love or hate movies… a lot of the people who have reviewed this movie (At least as far as I’ve read) have panned it, while the people who like it pretty much balance the scale a bit. Personally, I find it a bit hard to see why so many people hated the movie, although I can think of one reason that I’ll go ahead and point out. If you’re interested in seeing The Spirit, keep this in mind… regardless of the fact that it’s directed by Frank Miller, it isn’t all grim and gritty, or even serious. About half the movie is, but the other half is a bit more whimsical, cartoonish, and tongue-in-cheek, so if you’re only going in to watch Gabriel Bacht backflip neatly over other people’s bullets and find out what he wants to by kicking ass and taking names, you’re going to be somewhat disappointed.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the actual movie a bit. In case you don’t know the story yet (And I’m not really spoiling all too much, since you can find this out on the official website), The Spirit is based on an old series of comics about a cop who gets killed on duty, only to awaken in his coffin a few hours later and find out that he recovers from any injury well and extraordinarily quickly. Taking up the mantle of The Spirit to protect his beloved city from outside the restrictive judicial system, he sets out to punish evildoers. The most notorious and recurring of these is The Octopus, a criminal mastermind who seems to have regenerative powers that directly match those of The Spirit’s.

The movie closely resembles a comic book feel. The mood is very bipolar, going from humorous to serious, morose to cheesy, and exciting to slapstick in no time at all. An example of this happens early on in the film, where a heated fistfight between the two quickly transforms into a Looney Tunes-esque “break ridiculously heavy things over each other’s heads” sequence. This probably doesn’t seem like the makings of an R-rated movie, but the characters swear and there are hints of graphically violent happenings, such as a man blowing his brains out with a pistol or getting sliced in half with a katana.

The setting of the movie is somewhat interesting-a semi-modern portrayal of the 1950s, when the comic began. Ford Mercurys fill the streets and most people dress up in suits, but people use cell phones and laptops. Frank Miller’s trademark gritty grayscale permeates the entire movie, but during the few daytime shots there are, it softens up somewhat and allows a few brighter colors to show, offering a little variety. The Octopus is a bit of an outlandish villain, getting sidetracked during serious occasions, constantly fighting an urge to kill everyone around him, and making everything he does into a comparison to eggs. Seriously, things that annoy him are egg on his face, he doesn’t like hurting The Spirit as much as he likes eggs, and the mere mention of the words free range chicken sends him into a tirade about how awful their big brown eggs are.

Overall, the movie is random, cheesy, and outlandish… and in the end, that’s what made it so fun for me. I’ve never read The Spirit, but I imagine the movie stays loyal to its namesake. It never takes itself too seriously, it doesn’t maintain a single mood throughout, and it exaggerates damn near everything it does. If that sounds like something you’d really enjoy, then I recommend that you see it. If you’re looking for something more action-packed and mature, I hear Gran Torino is really good.

First off, the information I’m about to relate to the reader will be really confusing without knowing some terminology, so I’ll assume ignorance for the time being. First off, for anybody that doesn’t know, anime is a form of animation that comes from Japan. The style itself is very distinctive, and often recognizable by its archetypical portrayal of anatomy, although the traditions are sometimes broken by other series; the characters’ chins are very pointed, the noses are thick lines when seen from the front and pointy curves from the side, and the eyes are typically gigantic and almost circular, or noticably narrow. Some series also use a combination of these two eye shapes; the women will have the huge eyes while the men have the narrow ones. People who are so into anime that it begins to affect their daily lives are referred to as otaku, a Japanese word for geek. Otaku are generally very reclusive, sometimes overweight, and a good deal of otaku also delve into more sexually explicit anime. A form of this that they enjoy is pictures of younger anime girls or anime girls portrayed in a pre-adolescent way, called lolicon or “loli” for short.

Another thing you should know is that the otaku subculture is infamous for, like many other sub-cultures, producing a few horrific murders. Otaku murderers stand out, though, in the way that they are influenced by their long-term love of lolicon to sexually assault and murder younger girls instead of women. Now, the reason I bring this up is because one such murder happened a few months ago. Ryou Katsuki, a 21-year old futon maker, was recently found guilty of kidnapping and strangling 5-year old Yukimaro Narita to death, and when police investigated his home, they found that he owned a huge stash of anime memorbilia. If you want all the details, you can get them here:

http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2008/12/07/mahou-shoujo-obsessed-otaku-murders-5-year-old-girl/

The media coverage is, in typical fashion of an otaku murder, concentrating much less on the details of the murder and the man’s personal life, including any mental disorders he may have been diagnosed with, and more on the fact that he was an otaku. In doing this, the intent is to create a scapegoat for the crime and make it go away faster as a result. In truth, as with other media-related murders, the problem is not the media itself, but a long, unchecked history of mental disorders ignored by the murderer’s family, ignored by the murderer’s friends, ignored by the school officials that worked with the murderer on a daily basis, and ignored by everybody else around the murderer in general.

For a great example of this, look at Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter. (I bring him up because, other than the reason I mention, he was used as another scapegoat by Jack Thompson and others to blame all of society’s ills on video games, as Cho spent a lot of time playing Counter-Strike.) From an early age, he displayed strong mental illness, which simply got worse as he got older. And people just dealt with it. He threw tantrums over having to go to school. He had trouble talking with other students and was often bullied as a result. He wrote a hit list. He obsessed over the Columbine murders and wrote a message on his binder telling his classmates to fuck off and burn in hell. He stalked other women and harassed them over instant messengers. He wrote twisted screenplays with murder incorporated in some form. And how he was never actually treated for anything despite all this is probably one of the most pathetic examples of mass ignorance I have seen in the modern day, up there with Neo-Conservatism. Fuck’s sake, he even mailed videos to MSNBC threatening to murder everybody he didn’t like… that’s even worse than what the Columbine shooters did.

The bottom line of this rant is that media in general, no matter how explicit, does not cause murder; most of the time, all it does is influence a mentally ill person to model their actions after it. In other cases, though, the person will become unhealthily obsessed with the media, but this would count as a mental disorder, which I will discuss in a second. The reason that so many people out there blame everything on anime/video games/explicit music/violent movies is because people don’t like to take responsibility for anything. When a mentally ill person appears, people make a diagnosis at the most, then just go on with their lives as if nothing had ever happened. Threatening letters? Just begging for attention. Hostile actions? Just a phase. Video of themselves shooting off a whole bunch of guns as if gunning other people down? Just being silly. This mindset of “ignore, then blame” is going to create more murders and create more murderers, that’s all there is to it. If people really have any interest in bringing the numbers of murders down, then they should stop pissing and moaning about how bad <form of media> is and work to better the process by which mental disorders are diagnosed and treated by advising more people to report suspicious activity or contributing money to psychological research. Course, a lot of the people speaking out against “bad” media are social purists who are only interested in using real life happenings to push their personal interests forward, so that obviously won’t happen any time soon.

To finish the rant up, I’ll tack on this aside: yes, I am also defending lolicon, hentai, pornography, satanic metal, rap, and most fetish indulgences. While this probably makes me a gigantic asshole, condemning the above as bad influences after the rant I just typed would make me a bigger asshole, and a hypocrite on top of that.

So, I was going to do a post about fetishes (Or, more specifically, people who are so taken aback by their mere existence that they set out to make anybody who has them, or at least has one that they aren’t into, miserable), but I haven’t been satisfied with what little I’ve written on the subject, so I’ll put that off for now. Instead, I’ll talk a little bit about a person whose confrontation with Presidential candidate Barack Obama has added more fuel to the fire of the 2008 Presidential election. Of course, I’m talking about Joe Wurzelbacher, or as most know him, “Joe the Plumber.” If you haven’t heard about him already (And if you haven’t and live in the US, get your shit together), he was a simple plumber living in Ohio who confronted Obama as he walked through his neighborhood, asking him about his tax plan and how it was going to affect everyday workers like himself. First of all, I admire what Joe did. It was a pretty bold move on his part, and despite that, he brought up a valid point and stuck with it rather than resorting to some of the stuff more radical Republicans have (Throwing around bullshit that they’ve heard, resorting to a volley of racial slurs and stereotypes, etc.). Take note, people… this is how you do it.

Of course, this resulted in a lot of media hoopla, especially after both Obama and his opponent, John McCain, referred to him 23 times during their final debate. Which, in turn, caused a few news networks to leap on Joe for going against somebody they support, digging into his personal information and dredging up 15 tons of crap about him, some of it probably untrue (I.E: His wife divorced him, his total income is smaller than the incomes Obama would be taxing under his program, he doesn’t have a plumbing license, etc.). This caused a major backlash from McCain supporters, accusing Obama of using his supporters and the media to punish an innocent man for standing up against his divine word. First off, where is the evidence that Obama started the attacks in the first place? There is none… it was the news networks, not the Obama campaign, that dug up the information, and any connection between the two is merely speculation at this point. Second, yes, the media was really vicious with Joe for no good reason. Let me ask you, is this really news to you? News networks have been launching attacks against people they dislike for ages now. Even Fox News, who has been a major mainstream opponent of the attacks, has a long history of slanted reporting, attacks on people that speak out against people or things they support, and pulling things out of their asses and reporting them as actual stories. Most, if not all news channels, have been little more than vulture circles and halfway political tabloids for a while now, and to hear them constantly criticized as evil establishments that have broken all new ground in the field of mudslinging is annoying at best.

I suspect Joe will not be the last person to infuriate one side of the spectrum… there are still plenty of people out there who haven’t made their voices heard, and with more rallies coming up, they’ll have plenty of opportunities to. And with the media on the prowl, you can be assured that it will be on the front page of every newspaper and the top story of every network out there when the next person steps up. November 4th cannot come any sooner.

First off, please excuse me for any missed spaces. It’s a long story, but by being a retard, I ended up splashing my laptop with iced tea, and now that the space bar’s been out for cleaning, I’ve had a few issues putting it back in just right. I think I might’ve fixed it this time around, but if not, I’m not in much of a mood to dick around with it, and it just seems to get worse as I do, so I’ll deal until I have an opportunity to get the laptop looked at.

Anyways, I’ve been hoping for something else to drop into my lap that just screamed for a rant to be written about it, and I just got such a thing… but now I kind of wish I hadn’t. I logged onto a forum I frequent earlier tonight and found this:

http://www.gamegrep.com/news/13045-boy_accidently_kills_himself_trying_to_imitate_halo/

If you don’t want to bother reading it, an 11-year old kid became so obsessed with Halo that he took his parents’ .22 rifle out back and shot himself in the head with it. Needless to say, he died shortly thereafter. Now, I’m sure that Jack Thompson, as well as hordes of parents who, as far as I’m concerned, just hate video games, are going to be all over this in a day or two.

The kid had absolutely no business having the game in the first place. We’ve already established that most pre-teens are unable to own violent video games… hence, the Mature rating. Since Hot Coffee, all kinds of safeguards have been implemented by retailers to prevent fragile-minded kids such as Nimm (It’s the only name the article provides) from owning violent media… mainly, employees are required to warn the parents about the rating so they’ll at least be deterred from buying it. That should work, but it doesn’t, and I’ll tell you what all of you out there can do about it, mainly parents.

A serious problem is set up among us, and we need to take action immediately. Parents, only you can put an end to this problem. The only solution will be extremely painful for some, almost unbearable, but if you truly love your children as much as you say you do, it is the only option.

RAISE YOUR FUCKING KIDS.

Just look at the situation. They bought a Mature-rated game for their son, who was six years younger than the age limit. When he became dangerously obsessed with the game and with guns, they didn’t notice, or at least didn’t bother to do anything about it. And after all this had been established, they still left him at home with a loaded gun in the house. The only way they could be worse parents is if they failed to pay child support on multiple occasions, locked him in a dirty bathroom, and gave him cold table scraps to eat every day. The multiple deaths related to media nowadays are not the fault of the media itself, as some would have you believe, but rather of plain-out irresponsible people who are just unable to raise their children. They appease their kids by giving them unrestricted access to whatever TV shows, video games, or movies they want, despite the fact that they haven’t been taught common sense any time in their lives, then the kids start to obsess, which also goes unchecked, and when they end up inevitably offing themselves somehow, the parents go on TV and cry, “We didn’t know! We didn’t know!” so their neighbors won’t dissect them over their horrid parenting. Of course you didn’t know, you fucking empty-skulled, lazy, slackjawed, irresponsible baboons. Because you never paid any attention to your flesh and blood while this was going on, and I’m guessing that holds true for their entire lives as well. I don’t care whether it was My Chemical Romance, Halo, Naruto, or whatever else you can throw at me. These things are restricted, and they are restricted for a good reason: to keep them away from dumbasses like you, and to keep them out of the hands of your forsaken children. But it doesn’t work, and there is no other sensible way to keep these things checked, since nobody in the retail business possesses telepathy.

But what do I know? After all, I’m just an 18-year old who’s been surrounded by violent media all his life, yet has managed not to go out and kill himself or his friends by imitating something from it.

Despite the title, it isn’t a rant this time around. Instead, while I try to come up with my next rant, I’ll tell any of my readers that like metal why they should totally buy the special edition of Slipknot’s new CD, “All Hope Is Gone.”

Understandably enough, by the time Stone Sour had been together for a few years, maggots couldn’t figure out if or when Slipknot was ever going to reunite, even though they clung to the hope. That’s why when Slipknot announced their new CD was in production and that they were going back on tour, I was surprised when there was a lack of news reports about collective masses of blown loads flooding the streets of every major city in the US, if not further. The two released tracks, “All Hope Is Gone,” and “Psychosocial,” were pretty well recieved (except by Jonas Brothers fans on MTV, HAAAAAAW)… in fact, I downloaded the “Psychosocial” video off Keepvid (Sorry, guys, at least I bought the album in the end) and played the everloving fuck out of it. I finally went out to pick up the CD today, and it is really good. It’s reminescent of Stone Sour’s work somewhat, so if the more hardcore fans can deal with the fact that Corey’s actually experimenting a bit and not churning out pure carbon copies of the same damn songs they bought a few years back, then it may actually be worth their while.

So now I’ve discussed why to get the CD itself… now let me offer up a few points about why to get the special edition.

-It’s only 7 dollars more than the normal CD.

-It has 3 extra songs on it. This helps the organization of the CD, in my opinion… “‘Til We Die,” the last song on the special edition, is a better song to end a CD with than “All Hope Is Gone,” which is the normal CD’s last track.

-The booklet in the normal CD is about the same size as that of any other jewel case music CD. The booklet in the special edition is twice as big with extra pictures. Given, you’ve probably seen them already, if you’ve seen the fan-made slideshow videos of the two aforementioned songs or looked through the promotions on the official website, but it’s still cool to have.

-It’s only 7 dollars more.

-It comes with a DVD that explains a bit about the making of the CD, which is really cool to have.

-It comes with a code you can use to register for the “Inside the Nine” Slipknot fanclub. This is really cool for a simple 7 dollar increase, as fanclubs normally charge around $15 to register.

-IT’S ONLY 7 BUCKS MORE, YOU CHEAPSKATE.

I’m pretty happy that Slipknot released their special edition so soon, because generally what happens is I rush out to buy a CD within a few days of its release, only to be notified of the release of the special edition a few weeks later, which always manages to piss me off. And I would’ve been really pissed if I had ended up passing this one up. Anyways, I’ve already done enough advertising, so I’ll just end with this note: I need to find an argument that doesn’t require bullet points somehow.