Shut the up about the Mayan end of the world plz

Well, it's been awhile since the millennium came and went without the world ending, so now screwball conspiracy theorists and hack writers looking to cash in on other peoples paranoia have latched onto the supposed Mayan apocalypse which is apparently going to happen sometime in 2012.


Oh noes! The Mayans predicted the Muppet's! ZOMG it's all coming truuuuue!!11Elventyone+1!

Of course this is silly and not based on any sort of testable evidence or logic. People keep making baseless claims that the world is going to end and every single time they're wrong. After 2012 comes and goes there will be yet another crack pot doomsday scenario for gullible people to freak out about, just like what happened before -

Jesus and Paul thought the gig was up some time during the 1st century CE http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrl16.htm

Multiple failed prophesies http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrl2.htm

http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrl12.htm

http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrl4.htm

http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrl9.htm

http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrl10.htm

There's too many to list. Just go here for a great collection of past failed predictions plus some more predictions that will fail in the future. http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrld.htm

End of the world rumors prey upon peoples natural inclination towards superstitious beliefs, a byproduct of our own evolutionary survival mechanisms. Once these predictions are brought out into the light and it becomes apparent that they are not based on any real world testable evidence or quantifiable data it's easy to dismiss them for what they are - big steaming piles of fail.

Free MMO Hell Part One – Mythwar II

Why do I keep doing this to myself? I see a free MMO and before I can stop myself I'm downloading it, even though I know that I'm only going to play it for about five minuets before I purge it from my computer in disgust. But then, why does a man climb a mountain? Because it's there, and because he's stupid of course.

And so here I am again, about to subjugate myself to another round of pain and suffering. This time I had a light bulb go off in my head, and then it promptly burnt out because I was using the wrong wattage again. I'll write about the multitude of horrors I experience while running around in free-to-play mmo's so that you too can share in my suffering because hay; nothing helps ease my unbearable pain quite like spreading it around. So without further adieu, I present part one of Free MMO Hell.

Mythwar II - http://mw2.igg.com/

Wow, I picked a real stinker for my first entry. Mythwar II (MW2) is an unplayable piece of crap unleashed upon the world by free mmo peddlers and baby killers IGG. After picking a generic RPG stereotype character to serve as my avatar I was immediately dismayed to discover that the game was played in a 2D, Diablo style viewpoint with a click-to-move interface. After speaking with the noob welcome character, a woman riding a flying bird, I proceeded wandering around aimlessly and picking up all the miscellaneous crap that was strewn about the ground everywhere. (Not at all unlike what I do in real life.)


I was surprised to discover that combat was initiated randomly while moving around the map, sort of like a Japanese RPG. (Final Fantasy 1, 2, 3, 45,824, ect.) In fact, combat is conducted from a static side view with an action timer like an old school JRPG as well, except that in this case its mind-numbingly dull and bereft of even the slightest element of strategy.

It took me a moment to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do as the game never gave me any kind of instruction how to defend myself, but basically all you do is select an ability to use, click on a target and then your character will preform the same action over and over again until you tell him to do something else or your target is destroyed. The fact that a magical blob thing appeared out of nowhere only to insult me didn't help matters.


I have a high end system but for some reason the game was running choppy on my computer and the interface was so horrible that I didn't bother chatting with anyone. I mean, why would I want to? What sort of sick, twisted fiend would play a game like Mythwar II for fun? It boggles my mind that people could actually log on to this game daily and enjoy themselves when there are plenty of other unbearably bad free mmo's out there that somehow still manage to be vastly superior to this one. I mean crap.

Oh, then after killing things for a while I got dead.


Well, unsure of how to wrap things up I ran into a familiar friend who offered me two choices, but we both knew there was only one that made any sense.


I deleted my short lived character and after I finish typing up this article I'm going to cast Mythwar II back into the bowls of the internet from which it sprang; bloody, mewing and oozing greenish puss.

So there you have it. There's bad free to play mmo's out there, and then there's games like MW2 that somehow manage to bend reality to achieve a whole new level of suck previously before unseen in the mortal realm. God, I need a shower.

One internets out of 10

An Obituary for VHS Tapes

As some of you may have heard, the last VHS tape was recently produced, and an era has officially come to a close. Before VHS (and it's arch nemesis Beta) the only way to watch a movie from the comfort of your home was to catch it on TV, or maybe 16mm/8mm film if you had a projector. But lo, the Gods of Passive Entertainment saw that their children were unhappy, and so they bestowed upon us the VHS Cassette Tape so that we might watch “Zombie Nightmare” over and over again until our tiny brains were reduced to pasty gray mush.

Suddenly you could just head out to the neighborhood video store, pick up a pizza on the way home and viola – you could watch the movie on your TV without someone annoying kid kicking the back of your seat. (Unless you had kids, but you could just lock them up in the crawlspace for an hour and a half I suppose.)

There was a problem however; there were very few movies available at first. Where there's demand there's always some big fat guy in Bermuda shorts (don't ask me why he's a big fat guy, he just is) waiting to capitalize on the opportunity. Small, fly by night video distribution companies sprang up almost overnight, putting any movie onto VHS they could get their hands on, regardless of the films quality. Bizarre, poorly dubbed foreign films , bad action movies and no budget direct to video films that should have never been viewed by anyone filled row upon row of shelf space at hasty assembled movie rental stores.

Of course, if people knew how painfully bad some of those movie were they would never have rented them! Therefore it was in the distribution companies best interest to pay a guy to paint an awesome cover for it. That way people would think they were getting when they were really getting this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF-fcz4DlSg

There was all kinds of kick ass box art. Take this one for example -
When I first saw this I was six years old I convinced that it was the coolest movie ever made. Of course my Mom would never rent it, and my dream of watching Night of Horror went unfulfilled until about three months ago when I saw an old used copy for sale at Kensington Video. (Best video rental store in San Diego without a doubt.)

I bought it for about a buck and raced home, sure that I had rediscovered a lost classic of horror cinema. I gloated over my discovery to my wife, (who somehow manages to tolerate my bad movie obsession) put it into the VCR and prepared myself for the rapture that only a crappy monster movie can bring.

But there was no monster.

Instead I was subjugated to 76 minuets of dull torture. I went to my “happy place” for most of the movie but sometimes when I close my eyes I see flashes of some long haired teenagers sitting at a “bar” which is obviously in their parents basement. I see a poorly shot Civil War reenactment, and hear a droning narration and some sort of terrible country rock song that never ends. No awesome VHS cover zombie ever appears to save the film.

This is a good example of the power of VHS box art. 20 years later and I bought the film simply based on its cover. Imagine how important the box art was back in the 80's/early 90's when people had no clue as to what the hell they were renting. For more art, I recommend you check out this site - http://www.critcononline.com/video_compa...er_art.htm You might remember seeing some of those boxes up on the rental shelf and there's a lot of good info about the distribution companies there also. (If your a nerd and curious about that sort of thing.)

All good things had to come to an end of course. Once the major labels saw how much money the little guys were making they pushed harder to get their larger budget, mainstream films onto VHS. The bad movies were pushed of the shelf to make way for the good ones (well, arguably good) and the world moved on without “A Bell From Hell” and “ I dismember Mama.” And then came the DVD format; no more rewinding, tracking problems and what have you, and you know the rest of the story.

We owe a lot to VHS. It sparked our obsession with the home theater experience and gave new life to movies that otherwise would have otherwise vanished into obscurity. Rest in peace. Especially Night of Horror. Screw that movie.