THEY ARE IDIOTS Website Launched

Check it out at www.theyareidiotscomic.com. Sample pages soon to come.

Tentative release scheduled for Spring 2010 (think late April). Donations for printing accepted!

The Future is Redundant

The iPad was finally announced today, and I stress "finally" more out of sarcasm than excitement. There have been rumors of an Apple tablet the last ten years.

And it only came out now, when there are already plenty of tablets and e-readers.

And it just appears to be an over-sized iPhone.

So... why? Why now? Why just a bigger version of something they've already done? (After all, that's kind of how the US automakers got into trouble...)

My theory: Just to mess with their target consumers.

Oh, and I guess they want to try and snub the e-reader personal devices (Kindle, Nook, et cetera), and take a different piece of the changing print media market.

Still.... Snore. I don't think this really changes anything. It's just more of the same.

And that, my friends, is what the future is really all about.

UPDATE: I just got the e-mail from Apple announcing it, with the link to the demo on the website. Only $500. Damnit, now I want one...

"I'm With CoCo": The Metamorphosis of Late Night Personality Cults in this Brave New Decade

Things you should know:

Late Night television is the recluse for bastard-children of the lost American Dream (that's why I watch Late Night tv, at least).

The hosts are categorically a-social creatures of habit, pawn figures charged to make the media industry look good (the laughter makes me forget my own rotten life).

They are secondary fixtures in television programming who survive off the success of others (pretty people go on their shows).

In a world where scheduling is of declining importance to viewership, they have become the first kings of the internet (wait, really?).

This whole mess of late night television is fucking incredible. The jokes are funny, the corporate blundering is funny, the news coverage is funny, and, best of all, the internet coverage is like a tantric orgasm because IT JUST WON'T STOP. Just look at the shear tonnage of online articles filtered through Google News since January 6th in this cute little chart!

Thousands and thousands of articles about Late Night TV, about entertainment programming that only serves to promote other entertainment programing! Do you know what this is?

This is META-NEWS. News that before our very eyes clearly points out we're all fucking idiots for even being interested in it! Amidst terrorism, recession, race riots, and TWO MASSIVE EARTHQUAKES IN THE SAME WEEK, I find myself checking Google News every thirty minutes to read every goddamn asinine article about the Conan vs. Jay cage-match.

But apparently I'm not the only idiot. Because all areas of the internet are frothing at the mouth in rage, rallying and shouting and typing and going nerd-crazy in support of Conan O'Brien. There are dozens of groups on Facebook and other social networks, there's websites, online petitions, blogging frenzies (particularly Gawker!), tweetering twitty-ness, t-shirts, YouTube rants, and let's not forget that immediately iconic poster by Mike Mitchell shown above. Oh, and all of this in just a couple of days.

All of this fuss over--that's right--Late Night television, that ancient and out-of-date broadcast tradition that sometimes feels inevitably doomed in this millennium's age of new media. Hell, at least that's what I thought.

But then I started watching Late Night TV on a regular basis this year. Why? A few reasons: Because these days I can watch it online (Hulu and YouTube have made all things possible), because the change-over of the Tonight Show host fascinated me (something that only happened thrice before in some 50 plus years), and because I've become oddly obsessed with Craig Ferguson's charming Scottish accent (is that weird?).

But those are all rather trivial reasons, they don't explain my inability to stop watching. Something attracted me back to this tired old format and I didn't figure it out until now: Late Night television was destined to rule the internet. Think about the similarities:

• Late Night shows are personality cults, built around a central figure who exposes himself to the public in often ridiculous and humorous ways simply for attention.
• YouTube's slogan is "Broadcast Yourself," and it's a place where people post videos ranging from ranting about their stupid lives into a webcam to videos of their children being doped up after a trip to the dentist.
• Late Night shows are designed to be a forum to make fun of breaking news on a frequent, daily basis.
• On the internet people respond to real world events in seconds, everything from standing in line at the coffee shop to earthquakes.
• Late Night shows are constructed around several "segments" (comedic bits, jokes, interviews) that last from 1-15 minutes.
• The internet is designed around the idea that people have short attention spans, and can only spend a couple minutes at a single page or movie.

I could keep going, but I'm bored. The point is, I think Late Night TV is so complimentary to the internet, and it broadcasts so fluidly online where there is no time limitations, where viewers can pick and choose what they do and don't view, and where there are already thousands of other narcissistic morons trying desperately to get attention. I think that's why suddenly people care about Late Night and are driving themselves into diabetic shock online. At least, I think it's why I care.

Nevertheless, remember the words of Craig Ferguson in all this: "It is a bunch of middle-aged white guys arguing over who gets X million of dollars. Who gives a [ay carumba!]."

Still. I can't stop watching. And every time I check Google News or Gawker I hate myself that much more for it.

*You should know I used the term "Meta-News" in this context as a joke. Meta-News is something a bit different, but still reveals the idiocy of the viewers.

The Killing Joke is Over-Rated

After so much hype I finally got around to reading Batman: The Killing Joke. Honestly, I wasn't a fan.

Yes, I know. Alan Moore, influence to Heath Ledger's portrayal, goes where few other Batman stories have gone, highly cerebral.

I know.

Still: Over-rated. And here's why:

1. it was way too rushed. Come on, it's Alan Moore. You can't cram a story written by Alan Fucking Moore into 40-something pages.
2. I didn't believe The Joker's whole backstory. Too easy, too crammed, too rational. Really? I'm expected to believe a struggling but sane man has one very very very bad day (his pregnant wife dies, he gets patsied by some mobsters, chased by Batman into a pool of chemical toxins) and emerges as the ultra-psychotic mass-murderer antithesis to Batman. Sorry, but I didn't buy it. Literally, I didn't, I checked it out from the library.

Let the pummeling begin.

Street View Photography

An article from io9 shows some pretty hilarious pictures neutrally shot by Google's roaming Street View Photographer. In the course of taking a photographic inventory of all the streets of the world, Google stumbled upon some of the sillier and more bizarre things that happen in plain sight.

Like anyone else who uses Google Maps pretty extensively these days, I love the Street View feature. I've even tried researching how to get a job as the dude that drives around with the 360-degree camera on the roof. If I ever do, I'll arrange for others to stand at pre-coordinated street corners with signs that read "I'M RIGHT BEHIND YOU" or "WANNA GET A TACO WITH ME?"

Oh, and here are some other classics you can find searching the web:

The Future is Bookless(?!)

(photo courtesy of GirlyGeekdom from Flikr)

You think people will still read books in the future?

Yes, of course they will.

I mean books that are in actual books, not in electronic readers.

Maybe. Who knows.

(I overheard this actual conversation in a coffee shop the other day.)

The future of publishing is foggy. Mobile devices are increasingly prominent and versatile, electronic readers are finally at a point where people want to buy them (but that could prove to be a fad), bookstores and publishers are reaching into deeper and deeper crevices to find inane filler to print something reasonably marketable, et cetera et cetera. How much longer, if at all, can the business of The Book go on?

It's a question a lot of people are asking, and only a few are trying to answer. And that's usually a good sign that everyone doing the talking is an idiot. Idiots like Richard Nash as quoted from this io9 article.

BEGIN QUOTE: "The book retail chains will disappear, just like Circuit City, Sharper Image, Tower Records disappeared... a couple of front list publishing enterprises will likely be operating trying to emulate the Hollywood blockbuster model with just about enough success to be able to stay in business"

Actually, that doesn't sound like an idiot talking. That sounds like a relatively intelligent prediction, however grim it may be. And oh god, that view is pretty damn horrifying and grim. But is it possible? Realistic? Likely?

How should I know????

What I do know is American culture loves a good ol' head-to-head battle. Everything is a war, a landscape of opposing sides pitted against one another to the death. Conservatism vs. Liberalism. Yankees vs. Red Sox. Toaster vs. Microwave. And now, BOOKS vs. E-READERS.

But here's the thing: this isn't an actual battle, it's more like a fucking advertising campaign. It's a battle of business, not of literary media. It doesn't matter whether you read Charles Dickens' Great Expectations in a serialized periodical, a book, a laptop, a Kindle, or a scroll, because the literature will always be the same.

What will be different between those mediums, those platforms for reading? The user experience--whether or not you enjoyed the act of reading: did you hate rolling and winding the scroll, was the book binding too loose, did your laptop get too hot, did your eyes hurt, and so on. Nevertheless, always remember that Charles Dickens probably doesn't give a fuck about your user experience.

There are traditionalists who love the book. They believe it is the best and only way to read, that electronic readers are a sin and a perversion against text and literacy, that the printed word will become trivialized and archived and forgotten. Funny thing is, Plato had rather similar feelings about written text itself. That's right, he felt that media is best kept confined to those pink squishy things between our ears (the original mobile device!).

But I think there's a reason why books are so loved and adored and successful: the book is the first perfected mobile media device. It's compact, it contains a lot of media, and you can access it anywhere anyhow (sitting, standing, lying down, hanging by your feet, et cetera). That's tough to beat.

The Book is still an invention, a technology, a platform to present a particular form of media: literature! And honestly, I don't care how people read, I only care that they do read.

Books will never go away even if ereaders become a more profitable platform for the publishing industry, though. But the most important reason why books will always remain is that if you're trying to fool people into thinking you're very smart and well read a giant bookshelf with snooty titles will do much better than an iTunes-esque playlist.

Well, That Decade Sucked

(shot of Saychev Peak on Matua Island by NASA's International Space Station)

The roaring Two-Thousands sucked. Period.

War, terrorism, economic upheaval, grandiose thievery, increasingly fucked up weather, narcissistic pop culture, and leaderless leadership.

Wait. Sounds like every decade, doesn't it? Well, then yes, by my logic all of history has been one continuous romp in the mud. Fan-fucking-tastic. This is the first decade I was old enough to remember in entirety, and god damn it has set the bar low.

I just finished reading The Zero by Jess Walter, and I feel like that novel satirizes a large portion of the shit-show of the Two-Thousands. Taking place in New York City immediately after the September 11th attacks it's a detective novel in which the detective has no idea what he's detecting, in which consciousness and memory contain abrupt gaps like burnt scraps of paper thrown to the wind, in which right and wrong lead to the same place, in which agents of authority plot against one another and cause the very acts they seek to prevent, in which grief and tragedy is monetarily quantifiable, in which family equates liability, in which no one can control even their own actions, in which pain and loss is inevitable, in which there is nothing to gain for anyone.

Yep. Sounds like the Two-Thousands to me. My kind of novel. Brilliant and funny and honest. There are so many hilarious moments, such as a boy morning the death of his father whom is still alive:

"Ask yourself this: what separates me from some kid whose father actually died that day?"

"The fact that I'm alive?"

"I've been through all the stages of grief. You can't want me to go back... Anyway, I don't think I can go back. Not now. Not after I've finally accepted your death."

Hilarious.

Anyways, my point is this decade was bananas. And the fact it was the decade I graduated high school, went to college, and started working makes me feel like a newborn baby surrounded by bear traps. I feel like so much utter nonsense went on in this country during these pivotal years of my life that I've been desensitized to the crazy shit-show of life.

At the same time, by all logic and intuition, I have a feeling the crazy ain't stoppin' here.