howie mandel

“It’s time to shit or get off the pot,” my wife warned me.

“What is that,” I asked, “a new game show?”

horses song

Man I fuckin love Blippi.

If you don’t, you’re just a hater.

But you gotta admit: this song is pretty dope. Listen to it. That galloping riff gets me amped.

Sometimes I’ll gallop around work singing in my best falsetto: Horses galloping through the country side…I wish I had one to ride!

This song has been stuck in my goddamn head for days. I’m telling you, having a toddler is amazing. I don’t know what you guys are talking about with the “terrible 2s”. I wouldn’t trade it for nothin!

sum relaxing vids

Anxiety’s a buzzword.

We’ve all got it. We can’t get enough of it.

It’s probably due to the ungodly amount of caffeine, crushing debt, and the ever present threat of environmental catastrophe. But hey, at least it’s not the 70s, amirite?

To calm myself, I sometimes watch these videos:

Eating Marshmallows

ASMR doesn’t usually do it for me, but there’s something about this one. Is it the crunch? The whispering? The craving for chocolate covered marshmallows?

Who knows?

Some people just know how to eat marshmallows. 🤷‍♂️

Charlton Heston

Everything I’ve ever learned about philosophy, I’ve learned from Charlton Heston’s Giants of Philosophy series.

What did I learn?

That Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Plato, Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, Soren Kierkegaard, and others were philosophers 😴

But I also learned that Mankind, despite being a bastard creation from God, can be a creative and colorful species.

Las Vegas getting blown the fuck up

No disrespect to the city of Las Vegas, I’m sure it’s a wonderful town. I just like seeing it get shredded to pieces.

Not sure why tho.

Maybe it makes me feel like God….like that time he leveled Sodom and Gomorrah to the ground.

Tornadoes

Speaking of God, if you want to feel his wrath, get close to a tornado.

“You call that relaxing?” you might ask.

What if I do?

Nuclear Explosions

“I have become Death, destroyer of worlds”

It wouldn’t be a bad death: getting vaporized under a gigantic fireball. But that’s what happens when man tries to play God.

So if the tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and rampant disease doesn’t kill us first, radioactive fallout rain certainly will.

I hope these videos will help you relax 🙏

a few shit films

I’m enjoying being a shit film connoisseur.

I wish I started doing this years ago instead of being a pretentious dick when it came to movies.

And believe it or not, there’s a specific art to making a really bad film. Not any joker off the street can do it. Now I watch countless movies per week, most of them godawful. But a couple of them stood out this time.

Btw, you can find these films on Tubi, which again, is a shitty app with too many goddamn commercials but they do have a pretty good selection.

Slaughter High (1986)

I don’t remember the 80s. Not because I was too young, but because, like everyone else, I was too coked out to pay attention. But I love a good nerd-revenge flick.

Sadly, this movie lacks the balls-to-the-wall energy of such classics like Toxic Avenger. Nevertheless, despite the filmmakers’ best intentions, they made a somewhat effective movie.

There’s a few good kills, surprising nudity (male and female), questionable decision making, Caroline Munro, bad American accents, and just overall good 80s fun.

Nothing spectacular, but if you’re doing a B-movie binge, you could do worse. And that’s my official endorsement 👍

Don’t Go in the Woods (1981)

Aimless screenplay, horrible dialogue, atrocious editing, halfassed ADR, cartoonishly violent…and sometimes hilarious…killings: this is the recipe for the perfect shit film.

Usually people walking around in the woods makes for a terrible, boring movie. Not so here. Its incompetence is its main attraction.

Sometimes I’d argue that the choice of blood can make or break a film. If you’re gonna make a slasher movie, make that shit as absurdly bright as possible. That really makes the killings pop.

They made that decision here and it changed the complexion of what could have been an otherwise bad terrible film.

So if you have a couple of hours to spare, these might be worth your time. There’s a lot worse things you could be doing. 🤷‍♂️

Strange New Worlds. it’s pretty good 😔

So I guess I owe Alex Kurtzman an apology.

I was reading an article somewhere by someone that ranked all the Star Trek TV series. They placed placed SNW at #3.

Already.

Only four episodes have aired.

But here’s the sad part: I’d rank it there too 😔

Yes, SNW is pretty damn good. I’m ashamed to admit it. The nerds may nitpick the series to death. They may question its science or its adherence to canon. They may bitch about nuTrek being too “woke” (Star Trek’s always been woke). They, like me, may never want to admit Alex Kurtzman finally did something right. But they know in their hearts: SNW is quality Star Trek.

I knew Star Trek had a JJ Abrams/Alex Kurtzman problem when Into Darkness went into production a little late because, it seemed, they just straight up forgot about it. And the final product was predictably shit.

That’s when I came to the conclusion that Star Trek should have died with the ending of Enterprise. OR they should have waited longer than 5 years to reboot the franchise.

ST just wasn’t out of the public consciousness long enough to make much of an impact, I felt. And to be honest, I still kinda feel that way.

Can you imagine if Paramount waited until NOW to reboot Star Trek?

We probably would have been given an “R-rated” treatment directed by Denis Villanueva, where the 24th Century would have been presented as completely alien to the 21st Century audiences. Probably graphic violence and nudity galore as Starfleet officers take it all in stride due to Vulcan, stoic ideals permeating the Federation.

It was a missed opportunity tbh because Paramount wanted to continue exploiting the pockets of Trek fans.

But, finally, 13 years after ST09, we finally get quality Star Trek. 👍

join the dead

It’s hard being a weird asshole like me.

My tastes have become so narrowed that I really have to wring out the internet to find something I want to read and watch. Thankfully I came across Joseph D. Newcomer’s book Diminishing Return last year and I’ve been a fan ever since.

I finished reading the anthology From the Dead, which features the work of many other wonderful writers, and the Darkest Day over the weekend. It was just what the doctor ordered.

“So what are these stories about?” You might ask.

Not sure. don’t know how to read 🤷‍♂️

So you’ll have to check them out yourself.

But to give you a taste: you know, like, how your mind starts to wonder on a long car ride so you start coming up with strange scenarios: what if I get mindfucked by a drier monster? Or, what if Elon Musk manufactured another 9/11? And now imagine if these outrageous scenarios became full fledged stories, much like that delightful episode of Black Mirror where the Prime Minister fucks a pig on live TV.

That’s the work of Joseph D. Newcomer. That’s Dead Star Press.

You can find these works and other merchandise here at Dead Star Press.

You can also follow him at https://josephdnewcomer.com

Eddie and the tom cruisers

Here’s the link to that article:

https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/68/4/355/5979888?fbclid=IwAR2qyZVg_oC0j2Lr9Fe4e-k7r_RyYX04w79xTFGibJ4LUwO6Ur7X-vyNifI&login=false

Of course I didn’t read the article. I don’t know how to read. I’m sure it’s interesting.

But I don’t know what it is about Cruise. I remember becoming aware of this phenomenon while watching Mission:Impossible II. I was absolutely creeped out when he told Thandie Newton “damn you’re beautiful.”

Tom Cruise should never EVER be that intimate with someone. No one wants to see that shit.

I suppose Cruise is the last of the old-fashioned male Hollywood hero. We don’t want any sort of emotional connection with him. He’s a blank canvas on which we can project our fantasies onto.

The moment he breaks that facade, we’re grossed out…like I was while watching MI:2.

I kinda explored this concept with the stupid ass “John Cannon” character from The Last Coming (or the First Coming, whatever the fuck it’s called): an over-the-top manly man, but once when you peek behind the machismo, you wish he’d kept that shit to himself. (Of course that’s probably a deeper analysis than what that story deserves)

It’s an archetype that’s almost gone out of vogue.

But I suppose we should appreciate Tom Cruise for what he is: essentially a relic from a bygone era. He’s been doing his thing for the last 40 years. And at this rate, he’ll probably be doing it for 40 more.