"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].

"It was a stunning alchemy of human talent and organizational drama -- in short, it was just really damn-good television."

The public devoured it. It was real and it was human and it was intricate and it was dangerous and it had innumerable personalities involved at so many levels. People have always loved watching esoteric talents clash with neuroses, particularly when there's a good soundtrack and there's the possibility of injuries and explosions (D3's serving both the thermally- and emotionally-charged varieties). There wasn't a person in the Diffused that didn't watch every Sunday, or gobble up the pre-race hype broadcasts during the week.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

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(originally published June 15, 2011)

"[The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is] the best prom ever!"

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is the day in your life that you look back upon years down the road and say: "That was the last time anybody ever treated me right." Chronologically, Majora stands after your loss of innocence but before the onset reality of adulthood. In Majora, you say goodbye to firefly-questions, and accept that you do indeed have to live in a world where you must consciously accept your ignorance to the universe around you -- a universe that is entirely full of monsters and that you must nonetheless live in until the day you die. Majora is the first and only time you experience genuine, crystal-clear, 1080p, surprising euphoria following the appropriate build-up.

LittleBigPlanet

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(originally published June 13, 2011)

"[LittleBigPlanet is]...a pretentious, private elementary school compressed into a hyper-concentrated videogame form. Itís the most indifferent game of all time."

Kids, put your fingers in your ears, daddy's home, and he got the tip of penis clipped off by a cigar-cutter.

How, and why, would we allow this asparagus-scented game whose original title, we assume, was: Circumcision II: The Dick-Clippening, a piece of entertainment whose box-art displays a cuteness so violent that it violates the Geneva Convention, to get some playtime? Playtime that would lead to an over-abundance of dong-to-blade closeness? Because it was free.

NB: What follows is a work of fiction. No names or locations have been modified, because none of them ever existed. There was no relationship. There was no breakup. People that write these things are morons.

"Being in vengeance is like being in love -- you can't be told you're getting revenge, you just KNOW you are."

I broke up with a girl. She didn't reckon I had the backbone, or the wherewithal, to emotionally cripple her in the way she did me. This isn't karma. It's something more callous. It's vengeance.

The next sentence involves the word "ass." Coming out of a relationship, you can either kick it, or suck it. I will not suck it.

"[In The Hunger Games] A farmgirl with a compound bow on a mission to kill teenagers on a reality TV show run by a totalitarian government in the not-too distant future wilderness."

We deliberately kept ourselves from reading The Hunger Games too much, because we wanted it to last.

Ready for some mimicked misogyny? Hurr. . . hurr. . . women need to stop writing self-pitying stories about childhood and motherhood and iambic pentameter that have the themes of 'sadness' and 'ladyness' circled in big fat "fuck my life" red marker. Looking back, we had to read shitloads of books about female oppression in school, and do you know the moral of all those stories? "Sucks to have lady bits."

It only took half a lifetime for us to understand that was our fault.

"No, instead, you were risking a thousand self-righteous wanna-be superheroes ripping out your darkest secrets, and then displaying those blackened insides in glass fucking jars, whose curves magnify and enlarge to show the decayed organs' texture!"

You know the story because you've read your history, because it's required by law in this country, and because you're not an idiot. However, for this piece, my editor and I are in agreement that jogging your memory is a necessity for understanding where a concept like the D3 comes from.

In layman's terms, all five human senses had been "hacked." Hack is an ugly word though, it implies that you enter a computer, urgent fingers slithering across a keyboard, hammering some green characters into a command prompt, and stealing some passwords or catching some packets, or, God forbid, downloading the money!