Soon, all the monsters will be hot.

Well, vampires have been hot for a while now. So have aliens. Then werewolves got sexy. None of those is really all that surprising. Sure they're threatening figures, but the body horror element is not in your face the whole time they're on the screen. But then zombies got hot. Now we've got a hot Frankenstein's monster. There seems to be some sort of a trend at work here. Playful stretching of the qualifications for what's hot (at least three of these dudes are technically room temperature) might not be a bad thing. Maybe we'll get a hot evil robot next, or a hot ghost?

So I was trying to watch a good scary movie in the theater recently when things suddenly got a whole lot scarier. Hipsters walked in the door. You might be asking yourself why hipsters cause such dread in the souls of other human beings. You might not necessarily even be a hipster to be asking that question. Well, I'll explain it succintly: hipsters think they're cool enough to get away with shit that they would never tolerate from other people. To wit, the idiots who interrupted a screening of a spooky movie. It would not have been a social foul for them to walk in late, but they had to walk in late and then proceed to navigate their trendily-clad asses past an entire row of people trying to watch the movie. This was not due to a shortage in available seats. Maybe they thought everyone wanted to appreciate their cunning fashion sense? We didn't. Then they must have thought we wanted to appreciate their witticisms as they texted other people and exclaimed over the texts all during the rest of the movie. Hipsters, nobody cares about your texts. The final straw, though was during an eery scene which was suddenly interrupted by somebody's hand shadow reaching into the projector light to "snatch" at the smoke. Granted, it was kinda funny the first time they did it. It was not amusing the rest of the 10 times. Not cute, hipsters. Not cute.

Hello there. The web is protesting SOPA and PIPA today so I'm not doing an extended post here, just putting up a classic movie poster. The storyline of this movie is not altogether irrelevant to the topic at hand, so go see it if you get a chance. Or read Poe's short story. Isn't media cross pollination awesome?

Double Dipping

A housemate charged with making dinner started assembling an unlikely assortment of ingredients out of the pantry - it really was past time to hit the grocery store - but, undaunted, he combined them and came up with something that looked surprisingly appetizing. Then he proceeded to eat it right out of the casserole dish that everyone was going to be served from. I don't mean he was testing it to see if it needed anything. I mean he grabbed a fork and dug in. It made me realize I have some conflicting beliefs about double dipping. I've lived with some pretty outstanding cooks, and I've seen them taste the sauce and put the spoon back in plenty of times and thought nothing of it. It's like taste testing canceled out the germs, which is ridiculous. If the cook puts the spoon back into the pot uncleaned, of course any germs on that spoon are not canceled out. Yet, the housemate's actions made me immediately start looking for my keys to go for takeout. Germs acknowledged! Then it occurred to me that the difference in perception of the double dipping behavior might not have anything to do with germs, but more to do with the type of cook implied by that behavior. A taste tester cares deeply about the end result, and seeing that behavior is a good sign that the dish will taste good (germs bedamned). Whereas, my housemate is the sort of fellow who will eat anything that doesn't run away fast enough. Who knows what that thing tasted like, regardless of how good it looked?

Attack of the Robot Lawyers

I've been noticing a creepy trend in ambulance chaser ads. Okay, a creepier trend. The attorney is always carefully posed, mannequin-like, and throughout the impassioned speech about how, for a fee, he is totes on your side, his (or sometimes her) head moves back and forth like a metronome, but his body does not so much as twitch. They move just like animatrons from Disney World.

It's Skynet, I'm tellin' ya.

Infernal Machines

The future is upon us. Only, the machines aren't going to kill us by direct means, oh no. What will happen is that ordinary consumers' heads will explode when they realize how much money they have spent on machines that they have no clue how to operate. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAAA! *COUGH*

I might be preaching to choir here, but....

Whatever you do, don't commit crimes during the season of peace. Not only are you probably creating extra bad karma for yourself, but if you get caught, you will reap the whirlwind of a criminal justice system that is in slow motion due to all the people using their vacay time at the same time, just in time for you to have to wait in the pokey until after New Year's before your case really gets under way. So whatever you were thinking of doing, reconsider. For so many reasons, it's just not worth it.