107 Days

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, a thousand times I’m sorry, but…

I really cannot describe the utter loathing I feel towards this movie.

Tomorrow I might try to collect my thoughts about it and write that romance post I’ve been meaning to get on all summer. But for right now, I think I just need to stew in my bitter hatred.

I know that every time I mention this show, it’s to bitch…and I have absolutely no qualms with continuing this trend.

How stupid is this fucking opening sequence? Like, I almost enjoy the music, but the rest of it is just shit. The ending in particular gets me, with her stupid little card swipe and smug smirk. And the awkward dance she does with that guy, and. I think my hatred for this show is getting irrational, and I think I recognize this, which is why I continue to keep giving it chances. Because I’m trying to prove myself wrong or something.

thedailywhat:

So This Just Happened of the Day: Confirmed: Shaquille O’Neal signs with Celts.

[celtics.]

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT.

I swear to God, if my housing/enrollment gets jeapordized because of this stupid loan dispersal wait period, I am going to tear every banker a new asshole from here to Boston.

Things I hate: being lied to for absolutely no reason.

Not that I particularly enjoy being lied to even if you have a reason, but it’s even worse when there isn’t one. Like, I get called in to work today because apparently I’ve been demoted from “stand-by waitress” to “call this desperate bitch whenever you don’t feel like working the entirety of your shift and get her to come in for a couple hours”. Kenny tells me he is sick and asks if I can take the last three hours of his shift. Sure, why not.

But I get there, and he certainly doesn’t look sick. And after I clock in for him, he sticks around for another hour, just eating and chatting away like it’s nobody’s business. Dude, I really wouldn’t have minded taking your shift if you just didn’t feel like working or had something to do. Seriously, there was no reason to be like “merr merr merr I’m sick so I just worked the rush hours of my shift and got the majority of the tip, can you take the last three hours that pay a lot less so I can go ‘be sick’ somewhere kthanx.” That’s just unnecessary. Let me have your whole shift if you don’t wanna be there, or don’t bother calling me. Or at least don’t lie about it.

And if Stacy still has food poisoning tomorrow…I mean, okay. I get it. Food poisoning sucks. But she gets it about once a month (and if she’s not faking, she should really reconsider where and what she’s eating), and it always lasts for like three or four days. I’m sorry, if you have food poisoning for three days, you are dying. Take your ass to the hospital. Seriously, that’s not shit you fuck around with.

The point of this rant is what the point of every rant about work is. I really don’t like work. I really like money. Blah blah blah, I’m Andrea and I only blog to complain about nothing at all.

(I like to finish on a strong note, always.)

This shit terrifies me. Seriously, flying down the freeway at 80 has nothing on bumper-to-bumper. Today alone I was nearly flattened by at least three trucks who didn’t bother checking their blind spots, or their mirrors, or they just didn’t really give a shit about a tiny little Asian girl cursing like a sailor and slamming on the breaks to avoid total annihilation.

I hate people who look perpetually pissed off, no matter what.

Like, I just gave you a goddamn glass of water on a 95° day, and I don’t even get a smile, or a nod, or a thank you? I don’t care if your day was bad or not, you can go fuck yourself. I hope you dehydrate and pass out.

Seriously, I would’ve taken any kind of acknowledgment that wasn’t a fucking glare. And then she slaps at the table to get my attention? Yeah, get yourself a glass of water next time, you bitch.

So I’m waiting in line to post bail for my ticket

when the guy in front of me says, “Excuse me.”

I look up, and he’s staring intently at my hair. Then he points at it and asks, “Can I ask you something?”

“Uh, sure?”

“How long does that last?”

I finger a chunk of my most visible purple streak. “This? It’s actually been in since January.” This is a proud point for me.

This guy visibly winces at my answer. “What? So long? So it’s permanent?”

“Yeah,” I say, “why do you ask?”

“Well, my daughter - she’s eighteen - has been asking to get purple in her hair, like how you  have it.” He does not seem pleased . “I was hoping it wouldn’t really last.”

“You can get semi-permanent dyes at CVS,” I inform him. “Those usually only stay in for a month or two.”

The guy looks relieved. Sort of. “Really? That sounds better. I really don’t know why my daughter wants to dye her hair like that. She gets good grades, you know.”

I falter. “I’m sorry? I mean, I get good grades too.”

He didn’t say it in a vicious or mean way, but…really? He brushes off my defensive response reflex and continues babbling to me about his daughter and how wonderful she is and blah blah blah. Then  he starts going on about how she wants to dye her hair again, then asked why I did it.

“Because I’ve wanted to since I was twelve,” I tell him, “and it’s fun and makes me happy and I’m still in college so I can get away with it before I have to go looking for a real job. Besides,” I laugh lightly, “it was less permanent than a piercing or a tattoo.”

The guy gets this absolutely horror stricken expression on his face. “No, my daughter would never get a tattoo. She knows what happens when you get older and the ink stretches out. I’ve taught her well; she knows the difference between good attention and bad attention. But then again, she wants to dye her hair purple, so I guess I didn’t teach her that well.”

I stare at this guy for a full minute, trying to figure out if he has some kind of disorder that keeps him from understanding basic social etiquette. So now the actually really subtle purple streaks in my hair make me stupid and an attention whore? The zinger really comes later though, when he asks me what I’m studying in college.

“Writing, Literature, and Publishing,” I tell him confidently.

“Oh,” he sighs, “You’re not going to ever have a job.” And then he laughs. “My daughter wants to be a doctor.”

The most disturbing thing is that with every backhanded insult he doled out to me, there was never really indication that he was looking down on me or intentionally trying to put me off. He just kind of smiled and said all these really subtly horrible things about how much of a failure I was/am/forever will be.

Thanks, guy in line. You made the journey to fork over $630 to government officials for a traffic violation that I didn’t commit that much more enjoyable. I’m going to go continue being a mentally deficient, attention whoring, forever jobless member of society now. 

Ten minutes into the drive to San Diego

I’ve already broken a nail and the lunch place sold out of my favorite buns.

Bad omens much? Eek.

If Avatar: The Last Airbender wasn’t practically a piece of my soul, I probably would’ve found the travesty that was its movie adaptation fantastically hilarious.

Unfortunately, this is a series I care very deeply for, and as such I am off to go play in some good old Los Angeles traffic.

Just some bullets so I don’t forget exactly why I want to torture and eventually murder M. Night Shyamalan in the most excruciatingly painful ways possible:

• The pronunciation of everyone’s names. What was the point in changing every single name? It’s fucking “Sock-uh”, not “Soh-kuh”. “Eye-roh”, not “Ee-roh”. “AANG”, NOT “AH-NGH”.
• Appa was, by far, the best actor in the whole movie. And he was computer generated. The cartoon was a bunch of drawn people. Ink and voices and nothing more. And yet five minutes with any single character in the series were able to elicit more emotion from me all the actors did in the entire 103 minute movie.
• Line delivery. Dear God, did they take these people off the streets and put them in the movie or something? It felt like someone was reading me a take-out menu from a foreign restaurant. Just enough awkward pauses to know that the person speaking doesn’t really know what he or she is talking about.
• There was nothing distinct about the characters. The only reason I could tell them apart is because they physically looked and sounded different. None of them had personality. And for a series that was so great because of the depth of its characters, zapping all the individuality from them is just rubbing lye in my already gaping wounds. Sokka is supposed to be goofy. Katara, bossy but loveable. Aang is just a goddamn kid, which is such a huge driving force in who he is and what he’s all about. And Iroh, oh, you were my favorite until Shyamalan decided to rip out any semblance of individuality and wonderful that you had in your bones.
• The movie felt less like a story and more like a time line of a small handful of things that happened in the cartoon. It was completely disjointed and had I not seen the entire series beforehand (slash obsessed over it slash keep your judgments to yourself), I would’ve been completely lost.
• The bending. The bending. This was, theoretically, meant to be the saving grace of the movie. Because when all else fucking fails, at least there’s no way you can possibly make bending look anything but bad fucking ass. BUT NO, apparently there’s a way to shit on that as well. There was more tai-chi than there was actual elemental manipulation (to quote Billhat: “Way too slow. Too much dancing”), and really the coolest thing you actually see is that one shot that’s in the trailer where Aang does this flip thing while water bending. The rest of it is just…boring. And if you’re asking yourself “how the fuck could someone bending WATER and FIRE and EARTH with their hands be anything close to boring then…well, we’re in the same boat. I still have no fucking idea.
• That romance thing with Sokka and Yue. Seriously, if you didn’t have time to develop their romance, don’t bother starting it at all. I was literally floored by how obnoxious it was. “My brother and this hawt princess bitch became friends and then he protected her and then they kissed and then she died.” That is literally exactly how it went. Including the fucking narration.
• The narration. Oh my fucking shit balls tits, the narration. I read on Rotton Tomatoes that the whole movie was very expository, but I didn’t think it would be quite that bad. Most of the movie was Katara’s emotionless drone going “and then we did this. And then this happened. And then we went here and did some things.” First rule of stories: show, don’t tell. Someone needs to reteach Shyamalan. And then punch him in the balls. Twice. With the butt of a gun before shooting him.
• I know we only saw her for like ten seconds, but Azula was not nearly batshit mc cray cray evil enough. When her father gave her the assignment to go catch the Avatar, she looked more like she was having a minor muscle spasm in her lip than delighting in the idea of showing up her pathetic brother Zuko and adding one more I AM AWESOME trophy to her cabinet.

There are more reasons. I know there are. My subconscious is just protecting me from remembering them. I can honestly say that there was absolutely nothing appealing about this movie beyond the series upon which it was based. Easily the worst movie I’ve seen in years and years. Yes, this includes The Bounty Hunter. The Hannah Montana Movie. Motherfucking Twilight. I feel dirty just saying that.

In the words of the ever wise Billhat: “All I know is I’m going to rewatch the cartoon now.”

Since I doubt this will actually get posted on the Mag’s website (while not quite “starting a war”, this is hardly devoid of hostility), I figured I’d stick it somewhere.

The Los Angeles Convention Center is not something that most would equate to an impenetrable fortress, and I tried to keep that in mind as I strode though its external halls in search of the media center. My anxiety over whether I’d be able to obtain a media badge for the Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3, as it is more commonly known) was causing me to drag my feet, but the words of my friends propelled me forward: “It’s not Fort Knox. Stop worrying, everything will be fine.”

So why is it that when I finally found the counter I was looking for, I was almost immediately denied a media badge and sent on my way?

I’ll be up front with you: I did not come equipped with the appropriate credentials. I did not have a business card from my publication with my name on it. I did not have an article from said publication with my name on it. I didn’t even have a blog post written in any official media capacity. I walked into the media center that morning with only my driver’s license and a letter from my editor, because that is all a brand new writer can possibly have to offer. But this does not make me any less of a writer, any less of an individual worthy of representing a reputable publication at a video game trade show.

Once upon a time, E3 was little more than a video game convention not unlike the current Penny Arcade Expo: a delicious geek-fest overflowing with over-the-top publicity spectacles for new games and fan boys who couldn’t get their hands on said games fast enough. Though the purpose of the floor show was to demonstrate new games to industry professionals and the media, publishers and developers found themselves needing to shout over the mobs to the people that E3 was really for: people who would advertise and eventually stock their games.

Understandably, E3 needed to undergo a change. 2007 saw the expo go from a trade show to a business conference, and many cried out in protest. It was one thing to not admit every sales associate who worked in a video game store claiming to be an industry professional, but quite another to extract every last bit of glitz and fun out of an exposition about video games. So two years later, E3 underwent another restructuring, and now retains elements of both the elaborate spectacles of the past and the more recent, business oriented conference.

I am all in favor of this. The intent of E3 is to show off games to people who matter, not the everyday fan boy who only might have enough money in his pocket to buy these titles in the coming months. But my purpose there was as a journalist who wished to cover the floor show for her first article. I was greeted with an apologetic sigh. “Everyone wants to get into E3, but we just can’t let them all in. We’ve had to turn away real writers too, ones with better credentials,” I was told by the media center supervisor. Then she hesitated and reconsidered her words, like a grandmother who had accidentally let it slip to her clumsy six-year-old granddaughter that a career as a professional ballerina was not in her future. “Not that you aren’t a real writer, dear.”

The fact that I was denied entrance was hardly a pleasant moment for me, but something I could (sort of) understand. What got to me was the knowledge that tens, probably hundreds of bloggers with their names printed on flimsy, printer paper business cards and websites barely three months old had waltzed into the media center and picked up their badges without trouble, yet I was denied despite my affiliation with a fifty year old publication because this was my first article. What got to me was that an acquaintance of mine with little to no interest in the video game industry at all practically paraded into the E3 floorshow wearing someone else’s badge because she “literally wanted to go to take pictures” and nothing more.

E3 is a trade show, not a spectacle. This is clear, and absolutely reasonable. But media, no matter how new or inexperienced, should not be the ones they bar from attending. Though not exactly Fort Knox, it certainly felt like something close, valiantly keeping out “real writers” while letting cockroaches crawl in from beneath the floorboards.

This is written on the wall of my retail job, Irene’s Story, and it makes me want to take a hatchet to the Thousand Acre Woods-y font. Aside from the fact that this was written by some idiot marketing kid who clearly doesn’t understand that it is impossible to weave something into “attire”, nothing about it is real. It’s just a bunch of bullshit that is meant to make people think that the owner ripped out pieces of her soul and wove each one into every article of clothing on display. Now, this is fine if she actually designed all these pieces. That totally makes sense, and I’m all about the artsy “art imitates life”/”a lot of myself is mirrored in these pieces” thing, but the clothes in the store come from five(ish) different brands, so obviously there was no personal owner devotion in making them. So basically that’s just a (poorly worded) marketing technique to sell some false idea of care being put into the making of these clothes. In reality, they were probably made in some Chinese sweat shop by a poor little eight year old girl or something. Seriously, the whole place is brimming with clothing that is bought at literally a fraction of the price that the owner actually sells it for.

Like, shit.