"It isn't on drugs, it was just born intelligent enough to choose stupidity over seriousness like a giggling vizier with schemes to poison the kingdom's groundwater... bombast is good-simple."

Three things happened at once. Boombastic, by Shaggy, was on playing off Pandora, Sucker Punch: The Long Version, was playing on mute on the TV, and we had just finished rearranging the bookshelf. Strange to see Othello next to Watchmen next to Paradise Lost next to The Diamond Age. Then we paused Pandora, threw on Deadmau5, and kept staring at Sucker Punch from across the room. What a meaningless piece of background-movie. It's blustery and when it waxes poetic, it forgets how to speak English. That doesn't stop it from tripping over its voluminous bombast and it can't even shoot straight enough to hit that target.

bom·bast
noun
1. speech too pompous for an occasion; pretentious words.
2. Obsolete. Cotton or other material used to stuff garments; padding

The dictionary treats the word like it's a dirty. . . word. It so isn' t! Etymologically, it's cool to see that it comes from an airier / padded definition. Now, bombast can be a bad thing, particularly if a story has been relying on realism for credibility, that story is just flat out fucked and silly if it becomes too bombastic. That said, bombast is buoyant and it can come in a lot of forms.

"[Jane Eyre] That's humanity. It's a time-traveling bullshit-breaking missile, killing insecurities, past and present, with chemical weapons that violate the Geneva Conventions."

This is a creeping story about outdated ideas presented through a modern lens. It's a lady-movie that has a gender-neutral opinion on what it means to be emotionally miserable. Progressive! English countrysides, stupid rules -- mental, emotional, and meta-physical demons crawl the background. It's a chick flick staged as a gritty ghost story. There are old books that were written with the intention to trundle on for months and months, dragging a reader down with them. In many ways, those stories were ahead of their time. You are meant to read them chapter by chapter, digesting them slowly, distancing yourself when you don't have time to read or can't stand the story's boredom or the villains' cruelty anymore. Remember for the entire back half of Wuthering Heights when Heathcliff was donkey-punching every stable emotion he encountered? Urgh. You can only process so much slobbering misery in book-form. As a movie though, you're stuck with it for a limited engagement. Movies are watched in one sitting. You're there from beginning to end -- there's no escape and that's a good thing. You're there, just like characters, bound by stupid rules.

"When the ultimate frisbee sports-club that you're enamored with—which is meant to be the healthy evolution from competition-driven traditional sports—quickly turns into a clusterfuck of LSD and wardrobes of unaddressed sexuality, you've got a contradiction on your hands."

In the grand scheme of personal vices and obsessions, we'd rate Ultimate Frisbee just below World of Warcraft and just above Bible Club.

"If Fred has a tragic death soliloquy at the end of the season, nobody will give half a shit and we would send a box of chocolate iPads to the [Scooby-Doo] writers for doing what we wish the U.N. had done long ago."

Okay, this episode was significantly better than last week's. Witches and zombies are way scarier than a fucking mummy, and don't get me started on the twist that the guy managed to create a concrete mold of himself that quickly. "Which Witch is Which" is a much more down to earth story featuring better narrative structure and actual character motivations for the villains. It also introduces us to Zeb: Frog Hunter and his hetero-life-mate Zeke: Bean Seller.

Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

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(originally published July 27, 2011)

"If [Sly Cooper] The Thievius Raccoonus were a real eBook, its marked-down $99.99 price would crash the Amazon servers, this all after a 52-week stint as a bestseller with a sticker price of $firstborn."

The best videogame in the world is a mixture of Red Bull, vodka, smelly ink, velvety poetry, half of those good notes a jazzman isn't playing, and that one girl across the room. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus is several of these things, retold as a music video. It is the best piece of fan fiction that you wrote based on your favorite Saturday morning cartoon, as edited by Paul Krugman. A lot of the time, you're re-enacting Walt Disney's bold, visionary remake of Shigeru Miyamoto's 1996 platformasterpiece Super Mario 64, and the rest of the time, you're Scotch-taping your older sister's cheap scarf to your lower back and waving a lacrosse stick, shouting: "Broken glass! Broken glass is the gift for the man who has everything!"

"At the most basic moment, I/O (1 or 0) was all they knew, and neither was deemed better than the other -- 'yes' and 'no,' despite being opposites, were not recognized as 'here' and 'gone,' even by the most intelligent code. 'On' was not 'better' or 'worse' than 'Off.' . . .The programs inside the V.i. were infinitely and effortlessly replicating -- humans, and the concept of death, were not a threat."

The earth got really cold when it got knocked off its axis and started free-falling through the heavens. After six years since coming within sight of a star bright enough to call a sun and our race's population falling below 16,000 souls, I didn't think we had a snowball's chance in hell. Another ten years passed, and Pumpkin, I was still alive. I think I should make the most of it.

I feel like I've been piped into the V.i. for a really long time. This isn’t the case though. It's been less than six hours of research today. I think it’s my age, honestly. Nowadays, whatever, I was 16 when I started writing this, and I'm only 22 now, time is finally slowing down for the first time in my life.

"Paradise Lost has the balls to dissolve confusion, changing the topic of conversation from 'why?' to 'because, bitch.' It's a great piece of mythological fan-fiction. It's a great piece of persuasive advertising."

"Satan's actions are all the more identifiable given that there are quite literally no other humans to be found in the story at this point. He doesn't even know that he's evil though."

"There's nothing about the contents of Hell in The Bible. It's woefully under-represented."

". . .we suppose it's communication that is humanity's greatest survival tool. It fights the confusion. It's a tool for prosperity, for growth, for demonstration of intellectual prowess. When there is communication, there is stability, and when there is stability, there is great opportunity for freedom."

"You're not afraid to leave this world because this world is negligent and it won't care when you're gone, and yet to identify with even one person and admit that you can't name every voice speaking in your soul, and to give over that responsibility in the face of absolute terror, that is the greatest persuasion.

NB: We originally wrote this review between February and July of 2011. Why? Because this Paradise Lost, the greatest thing ever written. Not only did we need to do it justice, we got to writing about it, and left the computer for a bit, and then came back, and had an epiphany. Needless to say, in order to prove a point, we took our time and pledged months ago not to have this thing be "done" until July 19. That's today. Enjoy!

We're huge admirers of actionbutton.net. Those guys have got it going on. Their freewheeling aggro-talk inspired a lot of what we do here. Our favorite feature of their site is that they are inclined to re-review things, sometimes more than once, and sometimes months or years later. What a concept! Imagine if we did this for the Academy Awards, for example. Did you know Shakespeare In Love won best picture? It did. Do you know what year it won in? Do you know what didn't win that year? Saving Private Ryan. Can you imagine if the evaluation system involved a re-review process 5 years later? Which of those two movies resonated further with audiences then, now, and a decade from now? Did you know Chicago won best picture? Over both Gangs of New York and The Two Towers.

There's a toxicity in our need for immediacy. It hinges on demand and on people's inability to make decisions for themselves. Make enough small bad decisions in a row, you lose yourself in your vat of errors, and incorrectness becomes unrecognizable. Sure, everybody has a right to accurate news though, to information, and to have it delivered in a timely fashion. It's when information blurs with consumption that things become clouded. We fear the day when all information and interpretation of events, both recent and ancient, are homogenized into a singularity, like the eventuality of Wikipedia. Information might one day be so ubiquitous and accessible that to be "intelligent" will become obsolete. People will be able to claim data and fact from the ether, its finality will be undisputed, and we all go Eloi (cruel irony, tell the people what Eloi are if they don't already know).

"A pristine trip to the beach forms no good memory. A weird trip to the beach forms a fantastic memory."

What's weird about the beach is that people make every effort to exude a confident aura while they're there and yet simultaneously pretend that they aren't in the most filthy and public place imaginable. We aren't talking just about the looking-good -- there's more bad than good. It's more the "get out of my way, I'm having fun!" attitude.

"This here's my patch of dirt and seafoam, don't you even look at me (or please, please, please do)!" People pack their families and friends into salt-frosted vehicles, throw on highly-specific, and sometimes unbecoming, clothing, lie down in the heat beside water that most will be indifferent to, pretend that they're not hot, and get sand in their cellphones. We suppose it roots back to our theorem on why Winter Is Better Than Summer, and the recurring fact that people love being good at doing jack shit. Americans like to think they're good at this, but they need to understand that the position of "Most Chilled-Out Motherfucker On The Planet" was claimed all the way back in 1901, and we don't think Australia is going to give up her title any time soon. Nevertheless, people love working hard at lounging skills. They love tolerating the haters, blowing off responsibility, giving scheduling the middle finger, and turning up back in reality later on, sunburned and smelling like kelp, stating: "Went to the beach, bitches."

"No, the way she stood, it was more like she'd ridden a rocket bareback to Mars, out-drank Bacchus, out-foxed Loki, punched-out Tyson, stolen diamonds, split atoms, won a race, and somehow manage to turn God's girlfriend gay with just a wink and a smile."

Aran bent his head down for a closer look. The woman's body looked deflated and dry, especially now that the bed was propping her up, her skin obeying gravity while her giving her bones their turn in the spotlight. Behind hair that resembled dust curls, her eyes were indeed moving, blinking -- very much aware, if a bit sedated. He had been struggling out of his foggy hangover with aspirin and coffee, the post-race celebration had been a lengthy affair the night before, packing in noise, substances, and rain -- the latter of which had not yet subsided. All these things thinned Aran's ability to think. He ran his tongue over his teeth, thinking how gritty they felt, and how he hoped it wouldn't activate his gag reflex. Then the woman in the bed looked at him, first with her face, then with her eyes, lids pulling back like the last seconds before a music-box runs out of energy. If Aran had had hiccups, they would have been gone.

"Hi," he said to her in a normal voice.

Are you considering spending some time in the fabulous state of Massachusetts this summer? If so, please be aware of the inherent perils in cross the street [see fig. 1].