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April 6, 2015 - Davis Aurini
01:00:04
Nerd Hour with The Bechtloff: 1 of 3

My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.clipconverter.cc/ Credits: I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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Hey folks, this is Irini, and you are listening to the podcast with my good friend the Beklov.
How are you doing, brother?
Not bad.
How are you doing?
Not too shabby.
Now, before the show, we were just having a conversation, which is absolutely wonderful and hilarious.
Tell the listeners about Phelous.
Oh, yeah, we were.
Phelous is one of the Channel Awesome guys.
But one of the good ones.
Yeah, his stuff's pretty good.
I like him.
He's dating the Lupa chick that I also like, but mostly because I'm partial to Reddits.
And Phelous does bootleg action figure reviews.
And we were just talking about one he did where there was like...
Wait, wait.
Becklov, what is the bootleg action figure?
Oh, just like a generic one of these things.
It usually comes out of China or somewhere in the Orient.
They made these, and, you know, it's unlicensed.
And half the time they don't really have the official mold.
Or if they do, it fell off the truck kind of thing.
You see these all the time.
I have a little comic stand at an indoor flea market on Saturdays, and I get these sometimes.
People selling me lots of toys and stuff.
And Phalis does reviews of them, and some of them are fascinating, because the packaging will be all fucking weird.
Or there'll just be the weirdest things about wrong with them.
Like he had a Ninja Turtle toy that the weapon they put in with it was a pitchfork.
And the damn thing had like a pentagram, a satanic pentagram on the top of its head.
And on top of that, the paint on the teeth was all messed up so that there were like six teeth on the top and four on the bottom, all jagged at angles.
And there was this skin tag coming off of the side of the face.
Yeah, there's like sharp jags of plastic coming off of it.
It was the most horrific looking thing.
Like I was just reading a book on demonic possession, and it reminded me of this turtle.
Like it looks, it's a horror show.
It's scary.
I think Phalis had that turtle's face as his Twitter avatar for a little while.
I mean, I was watching his review of it, and I almost suspected that he faked it, except this is too crazy to be fake.
Okay, like, truth is stranger to fiction.
Nobody would invent this horror show of a ninja turtle puppet.
Some poor kid.
Some poor kid got that probably even in America.
You know, his aunt bought it for him because she didn't know any better or something.
Like, here's your demonic hero turtle.
And it's, oh my god, I was looking, reading this thing the other day about, oh, what was it?
Well, don't buy food from China, people.
Basically, that was the conclusion of the thing.
Do not buy food from China.
It's like the people there just do not care about quality control.
And it's, now, okay, listen, some of these bootlegs are decent quality.
And, you know, I can understand the whole concept of a little kid in Mexico or in China, India, wherever, can't afford 12 bucks for 12 cents of plastic for the official ninja turtle.
So some local enterprising entrepreneur starts bootlegging these things to make a few bucks and to sell cheap toys to local kids.
Alright, yeah, fine, wonderful.
But so many of these toys were just utter garbage.
Like, like, well, tell me what, tell us about some of them.
Well, I actually got one at my stand a while ago.
Because a lot of times the packaging is just as weird.
Because it was a bootleg Spider-Man, and it looked like it had almost no articulation.
But the paint job looked decent on.
We didn't open it.
We just sold it to some customer for like five bucks.
You know, we bought a big box of toys off somebody for 30, 40 bucks, and then you just sell them all for a little bit of profit.
Well, it had the weirdest packaging.
It had like Spider-Man from like the Toby McGuire movies on the packaging.
And then it had like Superman, just like a drawing of it from one of the comics.
And then it had Ben Affleck's Daredevil and a one-way sign all next to each other.
And it's like, yeah, this is this is this is Spider-Man, I guess.
It's like you might as well give the kids, you know, like rocks and rusty screws to play with.
You know, like the.
I mean, okay.
When China sells baby food contaminated with mercury, it's child abuse.
There's actually on the bloody, is it Hong Kong the island?
I can never remember.
Hong Kong's the island that used to be the British protectorate, right?
Yeah, and it was sort of independent for a while, but not quite.
Okay, on the northern coast of the island, baby food is in very high demand, and there's mainline Chinese people constantly coming over, and there's like a you can only buy so many units of baby food with your visa per visit because they do not trust local baby food.
Because they put like sawdust in it, they put mercury in it, they don't care.
And the monstrosity of it is just horrifying, it's perfectly sunned up by the Satan turtle.
And by the way, this is a communist government to all the people that think evil capitalist pigs are poisoning people.
Over at a communist government, they sell you baby food with mercury and satanic ninja turtles.
Probably lead-based paint on all those things, too.
Felix might want to isolate these things.
I mean, it really is horrible.
I mean, it's hilarious, but it's horrible.
I remember when I was young, I saw these.
They had these knockoff pseudo-Power Rangers for sale at the drugstore.
I don't know what it was like here in America, but in Canada, we had this drugstore that would always have the cheap $3 toys that they got the feeling that they were trying to trick grandparents into buying these because the grandparents don't know the difference between a Power Ranger and I don't know.
Yeah, I got a few of those as a kid, too.
Bootleg Ninja Turtle stuff.
Yeah, it's not exactly bootleg.
It doesn't claim to be a mutant hero turtle.
It's it just looks a lot like the Power Rangers, and Grandma doesn't know the freaking difference, so she just got scammed out of three bucks, and you got a crummy toy.
It's like the next layer of that.
It just, it's no morals.
Think of the children.
Yeah, seriously, think of the children.
Alright, we're going to talk about how video games suck nowadays.
Because this is the internet from 2009 and everything sucks.
But I want to start with movies and why movies are always leftist.
Now.
But before we even get to that, we need to cover the problem with HD.
Becloff, as a filmmaker, there is nothing I hate more than HD.
HD has utterly ruined movies.
Because nowadays, everything needs to be up to this idiotic stand where you can see every single pore and where it's it's now the expense of movies are over-realistic.
There's this hyper-realism in movies and movies are not supposed to be realistic.
The medium itself is not about accuracy.
It's not like listen, if you want deep realism and insight, you get a book.
Movies are supposed to be dreams.
And the HD just utterly ruins them, in my opinion.
Your take on that.
I don't even have an HD TV, I don't think.
I mean, I got my TV in probably like 09, so I doubt if it.
I mean, it's a flat screen and all.
But yeah, I don't give a damn.
Half the time I go to like a friend's house and they got the new HD and shit, and I'm like, it's reaching a point where my eyes can't even tell the difference.
This is just wasted money.
Well, and that's exactly it.
Now, like, from an artistic standpoint, I cannot stand watching stuff in HD, especially 6Di.
I think everything's being broadcast in 6Di now.
60 frames per second looks like a bloody documentary.
I feel like I'm watching a documentary about a TV show being made instead of watching a TV show.
It's too realistic.
And as you said, it's the expense.
Because everything is HD nowadays, because we expect to be able to see every bead of sweat and facial hair that is perfectly manicured on the face of the superhero on the stupid movie.
Because you expect to see all of it, it's like it's now so bloody difficult to make these films because you have this ridiculously high bar.
And then, you know what?
I go back and I watch Star Trek the Next Generation.
What's the problem there?
I mean, okay, you know what?
As a kid, yeah, I wanted to see an HD version of the Borg costume.
But as a filmmaker, it's not about that.
You know, like Star Trek is not about getting the phasers and the photon torpedoes mixed up.
Okay, like that stuff happens.
That's part of the difficulty of making a movie, is that it's a fantasy.
It's magical.
It's a dream.
It's not about HD Borg costumes.
And when all of a sudden you need this HD Borg costume, you can't just paint like the circuitry, you can't just paint the circuitry on.
It needs to be actual three-dimensional circuitry because the camera will be able to see that.
Budget goes through the roof.
And so what happens with all of this is that movies, the production studios in Hollywood, they are banks.
It's not about making art.
It's not about telling a story or creating a dream.
It's about making money.
And what sort of people are attracted to money?
Yeah, really.
Not artists.
Anybody, and you know, go check out Confused Matthew's rant about Marvel Studios.
The studios just want their banks.
They're not creative enterprises.
They're banks.
And because movies cost so freaking much to make, because of these ridiculous standards, there you go.
That's why it's people that are willing to sacrifice artistic vision for a political message, they are the ones making movies.
And I think this goes over to games as well.
And so I've been going on for a while.
Why don't you introduce the game's topic?
Well, I was going to...
I'm probably still going to write this on reaction this week, but the research is taking a little longer than I thought it would.
The game Destiny come out on the PS4, Xbox Nun, and I guess PC2.
It's a bloated mess.
I haven't played it.
Oh, you should play it for you.
But I've watched all the Let's Plays.
I've watched all the reviews.
I've watched all the footage.
I've read on it.
It seems like everything that's wrong with Triple A games.
It's first of all just a generic Space Marine game.
It's gorgeous.
The visuals are amazing.
They hire Peter Dinklich to do the voice of your robot buddy that tutors you through the game.
And he's the little midget from Game of Thrones.
He's also known as Mr. Charisma.
He's also in the new X-Men movie and was quite good in it.
He's a good actor, but a good actor doesn't translate to a good voice actor, especially when he clearly doesn't give a fuck.
And there were no fucks to be given by Peter Dinklich.
He phoned that in completely.
But, hey, fuck it.
Let's pay for a big celebrity voice actor.
Which, by the way, on a tangent, celebrity voice actors piss me off a little bit.
There are really talented voice actors out there.
And that's not the same thing as just being a talented actor.
I heard somebody else making this exact same point.
There are so many talented voice actors.
Look at Adult Swim.
Adult Swim is chock full of these amazing voice actors.
And you're right, it's not the same thing as acting.
Yeah, when Disney, or especially Dreamworks, puts out a newest animated film, you rarely get any of the really good voice actors in it anymore because it's got to be the big names.
DreamWorks is farting out some animated movie about an alien right now, and it's got Rihanna and the guy and Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory starring in it.
Wait, wait, the new alien movie has Rihanna in it?
No, no, no.
A cartoon.
I don't remember what it's called.
It's a no, not the new alien movie.
A new movie about an alien that DreamWorks is making, some cartoon movie.
And the two main characters are voiced by, fuck, what the guy?
Sheldon for the Big Bang Theory and Rihanna.
And what is the fucking point of that?
The point of that is they're big names, so we'll shell out the extra money for that, even though neither one of them necessarily have the ability to do good voice acting.
So anyways, yeah, Peter Dinklich doing the voice acting in this, which I'm sure cost a lot of money and was nowhere near worth it.
You know, the story and gameplay are forgettable at best.
It kind of doesn't quite, but it kind of forces you into online mode.
Point is, the damn thing cost $500 million to make.
How much did, what was that sci-fi movie that came out recently?
The good one.
What are you thinking?
Interstellar?
How much did that cost to make?
I'm not sure.
Was it $500 million?
I mean, that's what big-budget movies cost to make anymore.
There's no reason a video game should.
And then I was trying to do some research where I wanted to find some prices on, like, just some classic video games.
Like, let's say Doom or Super Mario World or Final Fantasy VII.
Just, you know, big, big-time games that were huge back in the day, you know, anticipated and, you know, cornerstones in the history of gaming, kind of shit.
Although I think Final Fantasy VII is a little overrated.
Not the point.
And just, I wanted to look up some of the some of some of the production costs for them.
And I haven't been able to find as many as I wanted to.
But the point is, like, Grand Theft Auto V, I think I looked that up just recently, was $47 million make.
And that was considered ridiculously expensive at the time.
And Grand Theft Auto V is this huge, immersive, fucking damn near masterpiece by a lot of people's accounts.
Way more you can do in it, certainly, than Destiny.
And it was $47 million.
And Destiny was $500 million.
And the point I wanted to make is: A, what are we getting for this money?
Is every video game like fucking Water World?
You know, where it's okay at best, but it costs way more to make than it should have.
Or Marvel Studios, which has had a couple of home runs.
You know, The Avengers, it was a great movie, but most of the stuff they've been producing is absolute garbage.
Well, I do kind of fight you on that a little bit, but they keep firing really creative people.
Iron Man 2 is the.
Iron Man 2 is the weakest of those Avengers universe movies, and it's a keen example of what happened when the studio got the most involved.
I mean, I still kind of like Iron Man 2, but I like it because the actors in it are really good.
And they carry it.
Robert Downey Jr. carries it.
And I do adore that scene where he's telling Congress to go fuck off.
Oh, that's an excellent scene.
I didn't appreciate in the third one where he cut off his testicles and gave it to his wife.
Yeah, I wasn't a big fan of that either.
I really like the Congress scene in Iron Man 2 because not a lot of people know that Tony Stark was originally based on Howard Hughes.
And Howard Hughes did that.
He, at one point, told Congress to eat his balls.
Well, and the gun control message was very solid in 1 and 2.
Yeah.
I mean, the Iron Man movies in pure story or RB movies at best, they're carried by the actor.
I mean, Robert Downey Jr. melded into that role, and he carries it.
Even Iron Man 2, I can sit and watch, even though it's, by all accounts, a bad movie, because he just does such a fantastic performance in it.
From what I hear, though, the studio keeps killing the movies.
They keep firing anybody doing anything creative.
And again, it's the problem with these movies is that they're a franchise.
They're making McDonald's cheeseburgers.
They're not trying to make art.
Yeah, that's.
I mean, the shared universe idea is both a blessing and a curse.
But it could be done way better than this.
It could just be done with, hey, like, here's what's going on in this broader universe.
Here's your guidelines, you know, but then go nuts within those guidelines.
You know what?
But instead, it's way too micromanaged.
That's why the Ant-Man movie's been in development hell for so long.
Let me put it in video game terms.
These are the equivalent of making a video game that presumes a sequel.
Which Order, a recent game, which is a fantastic premise.
The idea is that the Knights of the Round Table find the Holy Grail.
And they're basically immortal.
Like, as long as they keep drinking the Holy Grail water.
And so London, in Victorian era, is this steampunk era sci-fi empire.
With werewolves and Dracula.
Yeah, with Werewolves and Dracula.
Because you need something for the superheroes to fight.
And all this game is, story-wise, is just a prequel that presumes a sequel.
It goes nowhere.
You know, you don't get to do anything really.
Looks gorgeous, of course.
That's the next-gen console.
It looks great.
Yay.
And you know, like, this is what I was saying that movies, movies are supposed to be dreams.
And it was honestly better when they were lower resolution, because, like, hyper-realism is just as unrealistic, but it's ten times as difficult to do.
It doesn't add anything to a movie where you can see the board armor, where you can see every hair follicle.
It doesn't make the movie any better.
It just makes it that much more difficult to make.
And so, in video games, video games are not about the graphics.
They're about the interaction.
No, I mean, I'll give you a good example.
Going back to cartridge hair stuff.
Back in the day, you know, you had games like Super Mario World, and around the same time, maybe a couple years later, you had Donkey Kong Country.
Now, Donkey Kong Country, the graphics were considered amazingly cutting-edge at the time.
But you look at them now, to me at least, they kind of look like shit now.
Now, Donkey Kong Country is a really fun game.
You know, it's a well-made platformer.
It's aged well in that regard.
But purely visually, Super Mario World has aged way better.
Yeah, I really view it as the.
The games are trying to do too much.
They're trying to be too big.
I've been thinking about writing a series of articles about all the problems with Fallout New Vegas, which is a great game, in my opinion, but the flaws are just so absolutely massive.
And contrast that to stuff like Fallout 1 or Fallout 2, which were these amazing, rich environments.
But see, in Fallout New Vegas, the world is so big because it has to be a sandbox, because sandboxes are what we do nowadays.
And so every so often there will be something where there'll be some corpses that like the there's like a story of the corpses.
That if you look at the scene, there's like a story that there was a car accident that happened 200 years ago, and the corpses are still lying there, and it's and that's brilliant, that's amazing.
Except nine times out of ten, there is no story.
There is nothing going on.
I have no idea what this is supposed to be, and so I don't notice the times they actually do give a damn.
Yeah, the AAA industry right now is a bloated mess.
And you can't keep that kind of shit up.
I mean, if you have a video game that has a $500 million budget, you have to sell the shit out of that video game.
You can't.
You can't just do okay in the sales.
You know, I go back to Water World.
Everyone considers Water World this huge flop of a movie.
And the reason they consider it is a huge flop of a movie is because it cost a fucking kajillion dollars to make.
It did okay in the box office when you compare it to other movies in that summer.
Now, it got critically panned, but it was another big fucking popcorn flick, and people went out to see it.
But it didn't make enough to justify the insane budget.
Yeah, like when we talk about it.
Because nothing was going to make enough.
When we talk about it being a flop, it's not that it was a crappy movie, which it was.
It had a bad plot.
It was the price that went into this.
A lot of that movie could have been filmed for much cheaper.
Like, that whole stupid action sequence in the beginning of the movie was not necessary for the story being told.
I mean, the story being told sucked, which is its own problem.
But you didn't need that huge city they built in the middle of the Pacific for this one stupid action scene.
But yeah, they just pissed away Moni like drunken sailors.
To go back to New Vegas, New Vegas one of those games is trying to be everything to everybody.
Like, there's this crafting mechanic in the game that's very poorly implemented and out of place.
There's um they mistook the computer hacking and the lockpicking.
In Fallout New Vegas, lockpicking is it's mammorphic a skill.
It's basically lockpicking gets you more ammo and stim packs.
That's it.
The only time that doors are plot relevant, you can't lock pick them.
It's good, the game tries to be a first-person shooter, it tries to be a crafting mechanic, it tries to be an RPG, and you know what?
The writing is absolutely amazing.
The plot, the environment, absolutely amazing.
But it also tries to be a sandbox, and it is trying to do too many things at once, and it winds up doing none of them very well.
I mean, like, you know, and I write for a video game site, and I have a hard time justifying getting myself a PS4.
I could arguably tax write it off if I wanted to be a smart ass come next year.
And I still, I'm like, looking at it, and I'm like, this just seems like one disappointment after another.
Well, I'll tell you, a huge reason that I don't play that many games anymore is because they're all exactly the same.
You know, I already played Max Payne, the best first-person shooter ever made.
Why would I get another update with shallower characters and etc.
Yeah, I mean, an amazing graphics engine doesn't count for much when it's just to show me more glorious shades of brown and gray.
And when you have a development team that is hundreds of people, you're not going to have a coherent vision.
You're not going to have a purpose to it.
Fallout 1, with very repetitive graphics, managed to create an incredibly rich environment because the development team was all on board with the same thing.
They knew what they were doing.
And the same thing with movies.
When you're trying to attract everybody to your movie instead of just trying to make a good movie, it waters it down.
Yeah, that's the other thing.
When you have a budget of $500 million, you can't just be happy with a niche audience.
You can't make something that a specific audience is going to love.
You have to make something that everybody's going to like.
You know what?
You want a good success story?
Look at the show Supernatural.
Supernatural was one man's vision.
And that guy, he had to make sacrifices for the budget.
A great example, the werewolves in it are basically just people wearing sharp teeth in their mouth with a little bit of extra fur on their face.
Because there wasn't a budget to have these fancy, amazing CG werewolves.
Dean was originally intended to be a smoker.
You can tell this because one of the first scenes introduces him, he walks out of the gas station with a pepperette held in his mouth like a cigar.
And on a recent episode, they had an ashtray on the middle of the table where him and his brother were talking.
Even though there weren't any cigarettes.
He's a smoker.
He also has a Zippo.
But they had, oh, you know, only Arabs and bad guys can smoke, so he's not a smoker.
He made a lot of creative sacrifices to get that show made.
Did it on a very tight budget for a professional TV show.
I don't know the budget, but I can just...
I see the corners cut constantly.
And they do it very well.
But it was one man's vision.
And Supernatural is insanely popular, even with the SJWs, which is, again, that's a whole analysis there.
It's that this is one of the most red pill shows on TV.
I mean, it starts off with a couple of brothers looking for their dad.
You know, is that not a metaphor for our society?
But, you know, even the SJWs, when they see masculine virtue and virility, they admire it.
even if they then go write slash fic about it because they're sexual degenerates.
You know, I never got into Supernatural, but I keep wanting to.
I just want to catch it from the beginning.
Ideally, only watch the first five seasons.
It was only supposed to be five seasons long, but it was so popular, and the money was so tempting that they kept going with it.
And beyond season five, it's okay.
It's a soap opera after season five.
After season five, it's a couple of guys driving a classic car with classic rock, hunting monsters, and yeah, it's fine.
I was going to say, that still sounds pretty cool.
Exactly.
Remember, that's a five-season show, and season six is a spin-off with the same actors and the same settings, but it's not the show anymore.
I might check it out on Netflix.
I'm going to get myself a Netflix account here soon.
They're doing a daredevil show on Netflix that I'm going to want to check out.
There is absolutely no feminism in it.
No social justice.
All the monsters are metaphors for personality disorders.
And they criticize women just as frequently as they criticize men.
There are evil women and evil men.
Like the.
If you take the werewolf, the werewolf is largely a metaphor for the rapist, for the man that's out of control, the violent thug.
Yeah, vampires are probably metaphors for that, too, really.
They're more of a seducer, but they can be both masculine or feminine.
The werewolf is predominantly masculine, but something like a witch, you know, witches are basically feminists.
They are nasty women that try and start fights and engage in duplicitous dealings behind the scenes and make bargains with dark powers.
They're evil in a uniquely female sense.
Speaking of feminists, have you heard that clapping is now sexist?
Yes, jazz hands.
I'm still not 100% sure that's real.
Like, I keep looking at the Twitter account of this thing, and I'm like, is this an elaborate troll?
I just can't tell anymore.
For anybody that's not familiar, there's some feminist organization recently came out and said, please don't clap at our conference because it can trigger anxiety.
Do jazz hands instead.
I like, what's his name?
Milo, whatever the guy's last name is.
I can't think how to pronounce it.
But he was like, you should do the scissoring motion instead with your fingers.
Well, from what I've said.
You know what?
They did this at Occupy Wall Street.
So it does not beggar belief in my mind.
Oh, that's the ironic thing about these people.
You can never tell.
You can't tell the difference between a feminist and a satire feminist.
Like the Clean Privileged vlog.
Have you seen that?
Yes.
I can't tell if that's real or not either.
You can, I mean, you've got mainstream, I don't know if it was Jezebel, but it was some, actually, I think it was the Daily Mail.
some woman writing about how women shouldn't be expected to bathe daily.
...astounded by them.
I, I...
You know something that I noticed the other day?
I'm looking at all these, like, look at the aggros and all.
You know, look at the anti-Gamergate people and how they respond and how they talk to people.
And you look at the people on the Gamergate side, you know, when they're talking about the other side, it's always something like, it's always trying, Gamergate people, it's always trying to reason with the other side.
It's, you know, when they're absolute freaks, it's feeling bad for them.
I mean, I've written all kinds of stuff about Movie Bob on reaction, and I'm always like, man, I feel bad for this guy.
He's a talented man.
You know, he doesn't have to be this way.
And on their side, it's just like, hey, kill yourself, cis scum.
It's just vicious anger.
Like, they accuse us of being the angry side.
Well, I think, um, now there is an issue.
I'm not going to name names.
Now, if I remember correctly, I can't keep track of everybody on the internet.
But a decent guy put together a...
You know that painting of Batgirl and the Joker that got everybody upset?
Yeah, the alternate cover.
Yes, I believe you interviewed the guy, and he actually said that they decided not to run with it before it went public.
Well, I interviewed a comic book artist, Eric Larson, about related issues, and I mentioned that.
And he said that what had happened was, because it was a variant cover.
It was an alternate cover, because it was like a celebration of a Joker story from like 20 years ago.
You know, the killing joke.
And they were going to do, every book DC published was going to get an alternate cover that was going to have the Joker on it.
Regardless of whether the Joker was in the book or not, it's just like, you know, Joker Month, whatever.
And this was going to be the alternate Batgirl cover.
So the creative team of the book had nothing to do with it.
When they saw it, then they complain.
Which I can understand, because this is a Batgirl comic, and she's...
Now, like, if in the Batman comic, Batman needs to rescue her because the Joker kidnapped, okay, that's fine.
But...
But to put that on her comic, it's kind of like she's supposed to be the hero of this, you know?
Well, yeah, but at the same time, I mean, how many times in a Batman comic has, you know, Joker got Batman tied up on the cover?
I mean, I respect their right to say, we don't want that on the book we're writing.
Oh, I completely get it.
And, I mean, DC could have said, well, it's our book, you know, screw you.
But my point, it should have been resolved before it ever, you know, before it was ever in the solicits.
Well, if we weren't supposed to get that cover, we should have never seen it.
Yes, yes, exactly.
And I can understand that cover being in poor taste for the Batgirl.
Not poor taste, period.
You understand.
You know, that could be an excellent cover, but for when it's not even related to the story and when it's appearing on the back girl comic, like, yeah, that's.
Hey, totally endorse that.
But that's not what the social justice reaction was.
The social justice reaction was that there was no narrative of overcoming her rapist.
And that's the problem.
Which, why does there, first of all, it's a single panel.
Yeah, it's an alternate cover.
You don't even have to buy that cover.
And you know what?
You probably have to ask for that cover at your comic bookstop.
And we were having a conversation the other day about Alien 3 in regards to this.
Because Alien 3, which is universally recognized as a terrible movie, it's a very depressing and hopeless movie.
It's actually the sort of film that perfectly fits the social justice narrative.
Because Ripley, and this is spoiler alert if you haven't seen Alien 3, which.
Spoiler alert on a 20-year-old movie.
Yeah, just in case, you know.
You have it downloaded on your Netflix.
At the end of Alien 3, Alien 3 starts off with all of the good guys from the first movie or from the previous movie dead.
Yeah, they don't even die.
They're just dead.
Dead in their cryostasis chambers.
And then you find out Ripley has an alien in her gut.
And of course, the alien is an obvious metaphor for.
It's like the most brutal form of rape.
That's what the alien does to you.
It rapes men and women alike.
You know, it invades you through the mouth, which is a very emotionally sensitive organ.
I mean, like, Freud had a whole fixation upon the oral nature, which is.
And it uses you and kills you and eats you.
The xenomorph is just the space rapist.
Yeah, it's a giant penis monster that rapes and impregnates you to death.
And then rapes its way out of your body with its penis form.
It's an amazing, amazing horror monster.
It says so much about us.
And Alien and Aliens are great movies.
Alien 3, so she has one of these things in her.
The movie ends with her, her, uh, what's the social justice term?
Like, with a.
Where there's a narrative of overcoming her rapist?
Yeah, yeah.
Some garbage like it.
Some narrative, postmodern, whatever, gobbledypo.
But the movie ends with her diving backwards into a pit of lava to abort and suicide herself.
You know, you pointed out it doesn't really make sense, because it's not like it's not like it's the last of the xenomorphs.
Like, she's.
Because she's supposedly trying to keep the evil company from getting their hands on it.
Yes.
Now, that the evil company at the beginning is the one that the evil patriarchy is the one that impregnated her with this thing by sneaking it on board the spaceship.
Right?
So it's an evil dastardly plot because they want to have their own alien queen so they can harvest royal jelly from her or whatever.
And so she is rebelling against her evil daddy, who looks just like her dead boyfriend, by committing suicide with this.
But it's ultimately an impotent gesture.
Because there's still more aliens out there.
It's like, yeah, she prevented them from getting this xenomorph, but there's still more out there.
She dies alone and forgotten in a pauper's grave.
And weren't you saying there was a...
You thought that the company promised her that if they could harvest it without killing her?
thought that the company promised her that if they could harvest it without killing her uh yeah i and again it's been it probably over a decade since i've watched it but i seem to remember the guy was like no don't do it We can get it out of you without killing you.
Yeah, like.
Which I would think would be easy enough.
I mean, I know it's going to burst out and all, but you think if you know it's in there, you could easily sedate her and do surgery to get the fucker out?
I mean, there's a good chance, I would think, you wouldn't survive the surgery, because as soon as you cut deep enough to where it's at, it's probably going to go ape shit.
And who knows what it's going to tear up as it's thrashing around.
But it's probably a better chance than letting it just burst out of your sternum.
You got a better chance than diving into lava.
Yeah, you got a better chance than that.
And so this movie really does fit the narrative that they want.
That girl is rebelling against daddy and aborting her baby and committing suicide.
That's a survivor narrative in their twisted reality.
When universally audience hated it because it was so hopeless and negative at the end.
And now, I'd hasten to add, just guys, look into the production of this movie.
It was a nightmare.
This wasn't.
I feel really bad for everybody involved in Alien Shaw.
I think it had like nine scripts hobbled together.
It was just a nightmare.
They did the best that they could.
Yeah, like when you've spent that much on the movie, you have to, even if it's crap, you still have to edit it and put it out there.
You know, thankfully not a situation I'm in for the record.
I should hope not.
I sent you guys a whopping seven books a month.
It's actually coming together really well.
I just was editing Jason Miller's footage, and it's brilliant.
Absolutely brilliant.
I'll just leave it at that for now.
Jason Miller, he's the fellow behind The Not Your Shield.
Oh, okay.
Cool.
Jordan said you guys interviewed Aaron Aaron Clary?
Yes, yes.
Oh, as usual, he had brilliant stuff to say about it.
He made some interesting comparisons to the banking bubble.
Now, I don't recall if we're keeping those bits.
Right?
Because, like, everybody had lots of brilliant stuff to say.
It's about finding the most poignant and significant, and also something that meshes with what everybody else said.
So I forget if we included those bits, but he did have some interesting comparisons to the housing bubble, the housing collapse of 2007.
Well, basically, the media right now is in a giant bubble.
You know, journalists aren't getting paid anything, which is why it's all social justice warriors volunteering to work for free, because, you know, their agenda comes first.
But it's like the like because they're not paying their journalists anything, the journalists are reporting political garbage that only a minority of people agree with.
And so fewer and fewer people are buying newspapers or paying for mainstream journalism.
And so it's a giant bubble right now that's all going to collapse because of corruption in all of it.
Yeah, I have to imagine.
I mean, hell, yeah, Fox News still brings in the ratings, but other than that, the rest of the networks, I mean, MSNBC's ratings, I think this fucking podcast is going to do better than MSNBC's primetime lineup.
Oh, good lord.
And the thing is, Ching Junger is actually getting a paycheck.
It's disgusting.
Like, the one.
What the hell's her name?
This black chick that used to sub for Rachel Maddow, and she's got her own show.
Melissa Harris Perry.
She's got this ridiculous lisp.
And I'm I'm just every time I see her, I'm like, you're on television and you sound retarded.
And I realize it's her voice and she can't help it.
Okay, fine.
Well, I mean, she could probably get a speech therapist and knock it down.
I mean, like, John Stossel used to have a gnarly stutter and he got rid of it.
But at the same time, your job is to sound good.
Let's put it this way.
It's not even a political thing.
It's just you're not even good at your job, that aside.
You and I have colleagues that we both respect very deeply who do a lot more writing than they do speaking because they are not very good at speaking.
Yeah.
It's not a judgment on them, but it just is true.
That's all it is.
But yeah, the fact that you have people in journalism that are bad at speaking, in spoken journalism, QED.
MSNBC, it's unreal.
I don't know.
I assume Melissa Harris-Perry had to pass through Rachel Maddow's casting couch.
I hope she got worked over good to get her job, because she sure as hell doesn't deserve it.
And you know what?
Listen, I know that Fox News gets a lot of bad publicity.
Or it has a bad reputation, I should say.
Honestly, go watch some of it.
The whole stuff, it's way too bluehill for me.
It's way too like they're playing by the liberals game.
They're the liberal rules.
They're afraid of being called racist, etc.
But you know what?
There is this irreverence and humor present in Fox News.
With MSNBC, you get a lot of snark, a lot of contempt.
How dare anybody disagree with us?
Because we learned the true facts in university.
But with Fox News, you actually do get quite a bit of wit, quite a bit of creativity.
So, you know, I don't listen to it myself, but I don't listen to MSNBC either.
Of the two, I'd say Fox is far, far the superior.
Well, between the mainstream right and the left in this country, I like to say that, you know, the mainstream right is better than the left, but only in the way that catching herpes would be better than catching AIDS.
Yeah, that's good.
I'd rather avoid both.
Done to my head if I had to pick one.
You know, if I'm going to listen to talk radio, it's going to be Fox.
You know, if that's what I'm doing, if that's all there is to listen to, it'll be Fox.
Although, I do enjoy listening to NPR.
Because it's this psychological study.
I listen to Beck and Ruck.
They speak with their legs together, and they don't want to upset Nanny by being too disruptive.
A lot of women talk like this.
I can't do the woman voice, but you know that arrogant, pretending to be a man, bitchy voice that the NPR women have.
And any time they talk about politics on NPR, they are obsessing about the fronting.
They're talking about, you know, like this politician, he did XYZ to impress this group of people.
They never actually sit down and discuss, should we raise or lower the interest.
No, they never talk about what will be the objective consequences of doing anything of this.
Objective consequences out the window for these people.
They don't even know what objectivity is.
Everything is the social dynamic game where they're trying to figure out that the Republicans are doing this to impress their face so that they can get into the Senate.
And it's like this.
It's like listening to old women gossip Is absolutely hilarious.
Well, it's because you are listening to old women gossip.
There's this one episode I caught, and this says so much about the left.
They started off by playing My Way by Frank Sinatra, which, if you haven't heard of it, My Way, beautiful song.
It's about how at the end of his life, yeah, he's made some mistakes, yeah, nothing for, but you know what?
He lived his life his way, and he's proud of the life he lived.
And there's this one line in the song that they were obsessing with on NPR: Regrets, I've had a few, then again, too few to mention.
They were obsessing about this.
It's like, I don't believe that anybody has lived a life without regret.
And so then they proceeded to air three radio play drama things that weren't, they weren't even, they're basically just like a narrated story about people that had failed at life.
They should talk to social justice warriors because I'm not sure they're capable of regret.
Well, and I was listening to this, and it was so depressing.
Right?
Just these people that broke, and like this one guy that couldn't even have to give his children to a daycare because he was too broken to take care of his children, and this other guy who went to jail because he was an idiot.
It is depressing.
And it's like, wait, wait, this is the liberal mind.
Because they're all such failures.
They want to hear stories about other people being failures to make themselves feel better about that.
Whereas the temperament of the right is we want to hear stories about heroes so that we can become more heroic by emulating them.
Oh, yeah, I had a tweet a couple weeks ago where I said, you know, some people see their betters and are inspired by the example, and some people see their betters and burn with jealous rage.
And, you know, to go back to what you're saying about Gamergate and the aggros, you know what?
We do.
I think, actually, this is how we got into the whole Batgirl thing.
I was saying somebody drew a rather vulgar picture of her to trigger them.
We don't win this by hate.
Like, I think we have all been raised to have absolutely no standards, no civility, to be a bunch of vulgar, hooting baboons.
I think Gamergate does need to be about being better than that.
I mean, it's like, yeah, it's fine to laugh at the social justice warriors.
They're absolutely hilarious.
They're like walking parodies.
They're quite sad, quite broken, and quite hilarious.
But there's a fine line between laughing at them and stooping to their level, if you know what I mean.
Well, it is pretty hard to stoop to their level.
We have a pretty long way to go.
But I get what you're saying.
But for the most part, we don't.
I mean, that's the thing.
You know, I don't think we even could.
You know, sometimes we make fun of them.
Sometimes we're like, ah, look at these fucking freaks.
But I couldn't keep doing that all the time.
You know, I couldn't just constantly spit fucking venom 24-7, but apparently these people can.
You know what?
Let's look at the difference between the alleged bomb threats that Gamergate has made.
Like, I'm.
I seriously suspect that the bomb threats have been made by social justice warriors for their own ends.
Or just third-party trolls that are looking to fuck with.
Yeah.
Yeah, I would be very surprised to find out it was even a misguided supporter of Gamergate.
Although that is possible.
But let's look at, we have, like a bomb threat is, well, it's an illegal thing to do, but it's, what is it?
You are trying to emotionally upset people.
You're not actually making a real bomb threat.
Okay, like if you're going to plant an explosive, you'd just plant an explosive.
You know, if you're going to murder somebody, you're going to murder somebody.
If you write on Sarkusian's YouTube that I hope you get raped, you know, you're trying to hurt her emotionally.
Well, technically, I hope you get raped isn't a threat.
Yeah.
That's just wishing ill upon someone.
So even a bomb threat, although it is illegal and should be illegal, and I spit upon it, a bomb threat is not a physical attack.
It's an emotional attack.
Whereas it's the SJWs who are swatting people.
Well, they are.
I'm not sure if a lot of these people can even distinguish between something that makes them uncomfortable, something that is an emotional attack, and actual danger.
I mean, you hear them talking about, I need a safe space, and against what?
Somebody disagreed with you.
Somebody called you a cunt.
I mean, big fucking deal.
Oh, I don't feel safe.
I feel threatened.
Somebody from a computer screen miles away from you that you will likely never encounter in real life called you a cunt.
And you don't feel safe?
You just nailed it.
These people literally view murder and insult as the same thing.
And this is actually a trait of the narcissist.
If you insult the narcissist, if you expose the narcissist, they will react with as much violence as they can muster.
They will do anything to eliminate you saying that, including murdering you.
Because there's no line for them.
Yeah, I.
They have no concept of an actual threat.
They have no concept of danger.
These are the people that, not hyperbole, not as an exaggeration, call Gamergate a terrorist group.
And we have been terrorizing people.
Yeah, they compared Owen and myself to ISIS, which to any sane person is insane, but these are not sane people.
They can't differentiate between these two things.
These people really need to be punched in the face.
Hang on.
I got a comment on one of my videos.
I'll read here.
Let me bring it up.
I've got to remember which one.
It was during your split when I had a couple of videos where basically it was like, you know, who you shit together, guys.
And for the record, we have.
And things are, I just did a conference call yesterday with Jordan and our artist, and we had a whole bunch of arguing and a whole bunch of collaborating and things are really good.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm satisfied with how you guys have worked here.
Can you see one thumbs up?
Trying to see if I can find this.
Okay, here we go.
This comment from Shameful Travesty, which, whether he knows it or not, is not an ironic name for him.
Hey, bud, you're a grown man.
Maybe you should re-evaluate your emotional investment in a documentary by a skinhead and a libertarian aimed at harassing some lady.
Maybe take your 20-year-old Genesis games out of the bookshelf and find something to live for.
Now, let me dissect this here for a minute.
Okay, now I always throw up a cover picture on my videos of an action figure on my bookshelf in front of books or games or some bullshit like that.
That's just, you know, for a cover picture that's mine.
That's what I throw up here.
And the cover picture I had here was a little Sonic action figure in front of my Genesis games on my bookshelf.
Because Genesis does what Nintendo.
Sega.
Yeah.
Now, if you don't fucking like video games, if you don't fucking give a damn about classic Genesis game, I seriously hated Sega for that attitude back in the 90s.
They were such assholes.
That was the 90s, though.
They were edgy and extreme.
It's like Doritos.
Doritos was back in the 90s, Doritos was associated with extreme, as opposed to now Doritos is associated with fat.
But he's in here, like, oh, you got Genesis games on a bookshelf.
Okay, so I have a bookshelf with some classic games.
If you don't give a damn about games, why are you talking about this topic to anybody on YouTube?
Why do you even know who the fucking Indo Sarkeesian is?
And a skinhead Nazi, which I assume is you because you're bald, and a libertarian.
So I guess this guy's so far to the fucking left that a libertarian is essentially equivalent to a Nazi in his mind.
The same thing.
Just crazies.
And harassing some lady.
Because again.
She's just some lady.
She's a private citizen.
Yeah, criticizing the public statements and public actions of a public figure is harassment.
These are the same types of people who've told me I owe Lindsay Ellis an apology for criticizing her.
To which I always respond, well, then I guess she owes Michael Bay an apology.
Yeah.
I think both Lindsay Ellis and Michael Bay owe all of us an apology, personally.
Lindsay more so, though.
You know what?
Michael Bay, he's.
Listen, Transformers wasn't that good back in the day.
Wait, did he do Transformers?
Yeah, he did all the Transformers movies.
Okay, okay, yeah, it's him and there's the other guy.
I've been seen one and two, but I don't hate them.
I think they're just dumb action flicks.
I don't.
I mean, I don't have that much of an emotional investment to the original cartoon.
But I didn't hate them.
Like, the thing is, the cartoon wasn't that good.
It was a vehicle to sell toys to people.
You know, to be honest, I don't think it was that good either.
I mean, I realize it was a kid's cartoon, but when I compare it to its peers, hell, even when I compare it to the G.I. Joe cartoon, I just don't think it's as good.
And I really don't mean to be disrespectful because I understand Ninja Turtles was huge with me when I was growing up.
Transformers wasn't.
And so I wasn't offended or hurt by the new movies at all.
But here's the thing, is that the new movies, the new Transformers movies, don't take away from the franchise.
Like, you could make...
Let me put...
The...
The Adam West Batman does not take away from Nolan's films.
No.
No, because it's not like they threw away the old stuff.
Like, I hate the new Star Trek movie because of the new Star Trek, they're not making old Star Trek.
But if I, as a fan of, say, a superhero, you know, and they make a shitty movie based on that superhero comic, well, I still have the comic.
You know what I mean?
You know what?
We're about an hour in.
How about you and I take a brief break?
We finish this video and we upload a second, so I get twice the YouTube dollars.
Sure.
All right, folks, we'll be right back.
There is a link popping up somewhere on the screen right now.
Click that to view part two, where we are going to nerd out about old comics and whatnot because we're grown men.
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