Half on the sidewalk and half on the asphalt, the limp drool of the coldest piss the devil ever took was raising me just north of a blackout, and in a long second, I imagine a world of forgetful people. It felt good to be alive, but then it escaped me before I had a chance to thank her. Then I found my brain, and it fit back into place, and I remembered that reality had kicked my legs out from under me. I needed a coffee. Something hot. Something empty with flavor. First though, I had to do somebody a favor. A couple of flat-footed reptiles without an ounce of warm blood between them had put me on the concrete. I owed them now. I had to return the favor. It's just common courtesy. I wasn't raised by wolves.

We really don't need to honor America all that much. America is a self-perpetuating Honor-Machine that runs on liberty and pisses freedom. We invented the 4th of July. We invented the President and the lightbulb and the helicopter and the eagle, and the eagle is the baddest bird ever invented. It was also America's idea to put the words "fuck" and "yeah" next to each other when watching movies. That's why we've got to count down the best Fuck Yeah, America movies on Earth, which is the planet that America is on.

The following is a transcription of a telephone conversation with my father concerning Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a movie by the man who directed WANTED.

Any sci-fi fans that saw Prometheus and disliked it have plenty to complain about—they also have plenty of things to discuss too.

"It was tangible, inky, and deep. We could now bottle sensations. We could distill joy. We could inject awe."

America stood still below carbon-caked skies. Nothing went in, nothing came out. No trade, no communication, not even porn. A few people probably maneuvered through their new country's firewall and had a little communication, but not enough for real news to get through. It was more trouble than it was worth. More people just ended up dead.

On occasion, some refugees from other parts of the world would be exiled to the US as punishment, most of whom were shot for fun by the Coast Guard before they reached dry land. Those that weren't killed and managed to make into society were called the Noir -- the blacklisted.

Fuck the USA. Rightfully so. The diffused-Americans needed time to think. Nobody attacked us, fortunately, since it was assumed that we were strung-out addicts with itching trigger-fingers, which was a three-quarters truth. We had no foreign policy. Alone in the universe. All sides in the Schism, were in shock, a silent agreement that things had gone too far, that much was true. The country rotted, and what didn't rot, rusted.

Take a look at the above image. It's a banner poster for The Dark Knight Rises. It speaks volumes about what this movie is going to be about, and while we can only speculate at this point, it's becoming clearer that director Chris Nolan is approaching the Batman mythos, and the superhero movie in general, through critical lens. Superheroes are destructive psychos that cause trouble and confuse the masses more than inspire them. Stranger still, they are difficult to interpret when they start showing up on the wrong side of a social revolution.

Winter is better than summer, yes, but that doesn't mean we can't adapt. Unfortunately, some marketing genius at Starbucks decided to charge extra for iced coffee by filling the entire cup with ice and cooling it below room-temperature. There is more water, less liquid, less coffee, and less caffeine. And less flavor, which is something that a lot of people go without in their coffee, adding sugar or milk instead of making, you know, nice-tasting coffee.

The notion of "Who would win in a fight between...?" is one of the oldest debates in the history of man. After the cavemen got fed up arguing over whether a mammoth could kill a saber-tooth tiger in the midst of a starvation-hallucination, they decided to invent intangible, imaginary gods that were totally way more powerful than the ones the other cavemen worshipped, dude, because their god can throw lightning and shapeshift into a bull if he wanted to. The arguments raged for centuries, gods and men have warred, cities burned, crops were sewn with fire and salt, all because people were insistent that these rivalries were worth arguing over.

Without further adieu, let's debate.

Killzone 3

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(originally published May 18, 2012)

"It's just your gun occupying Killzone's world. If the gun was a more fun person to pal around and goof off with, then this would be acceptable..."

Put down your vaporizer and that bottle of Quaaludes, we're going to deconstruct concept of "winning" at online videogames. Killzone 3 does not do this. It does not win at offline videogames either. It's the expensive chew-toy that your dog perpetually ignores because it's spiky and it makes her gums bleed. It mashes its terrible haircut, let's say, for example, a weave, into a discolored biomass. Interacting with this world is a joyless affair.

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This will just take a second, and unfortunately, we're going to focus almost exclusively on all the negatives that you'll encounter when you step out of college and into the real world. Sad, right? You're graduating college. You've been handed an intangible victory that simultaneously feels very final and stressfully anti-climactic. You might feel dead already! You can't live inside your college diploma, and it won't cook you breakfast or pat you on the back -- at least not yet. And it's seriously not as bad as I'm about to make it seem, but these are some of the realities that you're going to have to deal with. You can't dodge all of these bullets -- you can lessen their damage by seeing them coming though.