Nothing new. No. Not in three days. No job. No positive female attention. No serial killers. No super powers. Not even any noteworthy email.

Yeah, I’m bummed about it, too.

So let’s talk about the wrestling video game. Let’s see. First, I got my character Tamara a manager, again. You may remember, last time around I’d reported I’d finally achieved this, and then the game froze up. So now I make sure I save the game between every match, and since then, I’ve gotten Tamara a manager twice. The first time, I got Kane to agree to manage her in what turned out to be the last match of the season I was in. Little did I know that after the last match of the season, you have to go through this extremely long credit sequence that there is no way to skip or fast forward through. It takes forever, and frankly, the programmer who made it necessary to sit through that nonsense should be put in a ring with several very large professional wrestlers and beaten until he or she is a whimpering quivering mass of bruised flesh, but never mind. Being extremely annoyed that I couldn’t skip through this endless droning list of credits of every single person remotely genetically related to anyone who had ever so much as glanced at a keyboard where someone was typing an email regarding a beta test of this game, I turned the game off and brought it back up, and, of course, that meant the last match hadn’t saved.

Augh doesn’t cover it, but, well, we’ll stick with it for the moment.

So then I went through it all again, and managed to finally get Kane buttered up to the point where he agreed to be my manager once more (Hurricane, who I got to be my manager the first time, was for a while the World Champion and not really available for friendly overtures). So that was good. And then I de-selected Tamara so I could work on her profile, and guess what? When you do that, and then come back in to Season, all the work you’ve done on a character in terms of personal history has been rebooted. You have to start all over again.

So, currently, Tamara once more has no manager, goddam it.

Last night, I also set up a new character named Jillian the Red, and having the game all to myself (Paul was at work) I set it up two player and ran both characters at once. This worked out very well, because it let me use the Encourage activity with both of them (Tamara Encouraged Jillian, and vice versa) to bring up both their popularity and establish a friendship between Jillian and Tamara, which is very useful. Because they’re both female, when you run two player and use them as characters, the computer puts them against each other a lot, which is also useful… I can basically have Tamara (whose popularity is currently maxed out at 100) throw matches to Jillian, who is only in the 60s or so.

This game has some annoying glitches we’ve discovered. Other than the one I just detailed… losing all the personal profile modification you’ve done on your character if you go in to work on their skills and such… probably the most noticeable and annoying one is that occasionally other wrestlers will jump into the middle of one of your matches. This is called Interference, and it’s something you can try to do to other people’s matches, as well, but the annoying thing is, when people do it to you, they invariably do it to help you by beating hell out of your opponent. And, well, that’s not annoying, except for the fact that the other wrestlers who do this are invariably your enemies. Now, if your enemies are going to jump into one of your matches, they should be fighting you. If people are going to jump in and help you, well, it should be your friends, not your enemies.

Obviously, there’s just an error in the code, but it’s an aggravatingly stupid one.

Obviously, nobody else out there plays RAW 3 so I’ve just bored my entire small audience into a coma and there will be no comments regarding this, but hey, that’s okay.

Captain Kirk vs. The Spiders From Mars

There are people… and mind you, I know ‘em… who love nothing better than a really really bad movie. In fact, one guy I used to go to college with, Steve Puchalski, edits and self publishes an entire fanzine called Shock Cinema devoted to nothing but reviews of really, really bad movies. For most of the period I went to college with Steve, he was the head honcho of the University Union Cinema Board, and that may well explain why the U.U. film schedule every year was redolent with truly, truly lousy movies, like an astonishingly wretched old Nick Nolte film called Who’ll Stop The Rain? and a ‘just so bad you really can’t believe it unless you’ve seen it’ wannabe psychedelic social satire thing featuring the Monkees called Head, both of which, despite my most fervent and horrified protests at every Cinema Board meeting, managed to pop up on every semester’s film schedule somewhere for about eight semesters in a row from 1980 to 1984 or thereabouts.

Me, I’ve never partaken of the “I love cheesy films” mentality. As far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing as “it’s so bad it’s good”. To my mind, the films of Ed Wood are not interesting to watch simply because they are so spectacularly, mind bogglingly terrible, nor have I ever particularly felt that any of the innumerable Planet of the Apes movies were worth watching so much as once, much less again and again because ‘they’re so corny they’re lots of fun’. As far as I’m concerned, a bad movie is just a bad movie, and I don’t care whether it’s, you know, just routinely bad in a pretty mediocre and forgettable fashion, like Deep Star Six or Harly Davidson & The Marlboro Man, or all out nuclear holocaust bad, like Plan 9 From Outer Space or Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. A bad movie is just a bad movie; it’s simply a waste of the time it takes me to watch it and the collective efforts it took some relatively large group of people to create in the first place.

However, Steve Puchalski doubtless has a soft place in his heart for the film I just spent about two hours of my life I’m never going to get back watching on DVD, a truly stinky little 1977 groaner called Kingdom of the Spiders.

William Shatner stars and is the only recognizable cast member in this piece of celluloid drek; everyone else in the film was pretty clearly cast less for their acting talent than for their willingness to let hundreds of big hairy spiders crawl all over them in various scenes. Leaving aside the actors whose acting ability does not even rise to the level of producing halfway convincing death shrieks, we’re still dealing with dialogue that in its wildest, most megalomaniacal dreams could never dare to hope to be called ‘wooden’, production values worthy of nearly any 6th grade Christmas pageant, and a plot, for lack of a better word, fueled by scientific doubletalk so onerously stupid one hesitates to dignify it with the label ‘drivel’.

See, William Shatner is this big, bluff, good looking hunk of a country veterinarian somewhere in rural Arizona. When a prize calf dies of mysterious causes, he naturally investigates, and gosh, if the dumb black hick who owned the calf had bothered to mention the weird ‘spider hill’ out in his back pasture any time in the first twenty minutes of the film, Bill most likely wouldn’t have had to send blood samples all the way into the nearby city university for analysis… he’d have figured out his damn self that the calf was killed by bizarrely swarming, uncharacteristically venomous spider hordes. However, it’s just as well he didn’t, because then the ‘gorgeous’ blonde female scientist wouldn’t have driven out into the backwoods to give Shatner the benefit of her extensive etymological education, a few brief glimpses of skin, and the chance to be torn, however briefly, between his attraction to her (although from most angles she looks rather mannish) and his longing for the widow of his heroically dead younger brother (tragically killed on his second day in ‘Nam).

Fortunately for Bill, that previously mentioned, utterly nonsensical horde of bizarrely venomous spiders is around to simplify his romantic life for him by killing his sister in law, and repeatedly frightening the life out of Bill’s adorable 6 year old niece, whom the director of this film, for reasons probably best not even thought about, keeps shooting in various queasily near-erotic poses, through a camera lens that lingers almost leeringly on her panties and bare little legs.

Plot details honestly don’t matter; most of them show up to provide a couple of minute’s worth of spurious tension and are then never referred to again. There’s something about a possible quarantine of someone’s farm, something else about how this will ruin an upcoming county fair everyone is counting on, a lot of nonsense about how overuse of pesticides has wiped out the spider’s natural prey forcing them to become both more cooperative and more venomous so they can start killing and eating, well, us, a failed attempt by the local cropduster to spray the ‘spider hills’ with lethal poison, and then it’s all down hill for the human race. Shatner races around sweatily doing heroic things like nailing up air conditioning vents with old lumber (at one point he snaps to the brilliant, rather mannish looking blonde scientist “Hammer! Nails!” in exactly the same tone he uses to demand more power from Scottish chief engineers), and as if the various visuals of the ‘terrifying’ spiders aren’t hilariously stupid enough (the spiders never do anything except crawl around wherever the props department put them right before the director yelled ‘action!’), whenever any of our heroes (but especially Shatner) is actually confronted in a threatening manner by the goddam things, he has to resort to the extraordinarily desperate and unbelievably difficult technique of, like, brushing them away with the sides of his hands and his fingertips, while stolidly intoning “Ow. Ew.”

Watching this thing, you can’t help but assume that the budget was mostly divided between two expenses… paying Shatner’s salary and buying thousands of tarantulas. One of the few brights spots of the movie, though, is that since it’s an artifact of the unenlightened 70s, we’re not subjected to a “No spiders were harmed during the filming of this movie” board in the closing credits.

I do have to give the movie props for its remarkably depressing, anti-heroic ending, however, especially given just how much time and effort the story put into making us feel sorry for the poor cute little six year old niece, who, in the end, along with everyone else in cheerful little Verde Valley, ends up as spider kibble. Given how many times we previously had to suffer through William Shatner hurling himself manfully into various nooks and crannies and finding the squalling urchin standing on a table or a bed screaming her head off while being not-menaced by a lot of mostly apathetic looking tarantulas, then heroically snatching her up and racing back outside again with her in his arms, it was actually kind of ballsy for the film to end the way it does. Nearly anyone would have had the Army come in with tanks and flamethrowers, to rescue the adorable little kid, anyway.

So, if you’re one of those baffling folks who really loves bad movies, rush right out to your local DVD dealer and snatch up ten or twelve copies of Kingdom of the Spiders. If, on the other hand, you’re remotely sane, just deposit the money you otherwise might have wasted on this clunker directly to my PayPal account instead.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.