Category — Things I Hate

Well, not all haircuts.  Not really.  I actually (and I know I’m not alone in this) find the experience of getting my hair cut to be kind of meditative, calming and peaceful.

No, I really just hate my most recent haircut, which happened about two weeks ago.

Why?

1. The stylist managed to stab me in the neck with her scissors.  It didn’t bleed (much), but it was still getting stabbed, which is never something that I’m a fan of.

2. After telling the stylist that I was happy with the current length of my hair and simply wanted a trim, I was shocked to, scant minutes later, feel about two to three inches of hair fall off of my head.  I’ve known people who suffer panic attacks and have always wondered in some masochistic part of my brain what they were like.  Now I know.  After a very short cut left me with a very, very unflattering driver’s license photo a few years ago, I started growing my hair out, and would even keep it long in the summer, when it was a bit of a pain in the ass, honestly.  It looked good, people (read: girls) liked it, and so who was I to argue?

3. When I paid, the hairdressover hovered over me waiting for a tip.  Had she not, I would have stiffed her, because, really, she did the exact opposite of what I asked her to do and nicked me, and I was a little out of sorts as a result.  Instead, due to some overcompensatory impulse in the prehistoric parts of my brain, I ended up giving her an above-average tip because, seriously guys, she was right in my face at the register, like a kid trying to sell her last box of Girl Scout cookies, mister, won’t you pleeeeease buy some cookies?

I meant to rant about this, well, two weeks ago, but my blog has been seven kinds of neglected lately.  I was reassured that I looked fine and that I’d get used to it.  However, I was hanging out with a friend last night and, while stopping at Sheetz for cigarettes (not for me) he looks at me and says, “You know, you really did look better with longer hair.”  Which got me thinking about the whole thing all over again.

I commented to a co-worker this morning that every iPhone owner is like a viral marketer on Apple’s payroll.  That’s hyperbole, but I stand by it.

iPhone users are like cultists.  The only difference between them and Branch Davidians or the anarchist weed farmers that pray to Glycon is that they think it’s the iPhone that can solve every one of their problems, not David Koresh or a made-up snake god.

Ask an iPhone user a question.  There’s probably one or two around you at this very second.  No matter what the question is, they’ll look the answer up on their iPhone and tell you while they’re doing it that the iPhone is great for looking up information on the go.

“Where should we eat tonight?” Let me check the iPhone.

“Have you seen the new Facebook layout?” Let me check the iPhone.

“How’s your cancer?” Let me check the iPhone.

“Are you being held hostage by the iPhone?” Let me check the …help me.

To be clear, it’s the cult of personality around the device that I loathe and not the functionality of it or the design of it.  It’s a pretty phone and, seriously, I wouldn’t say no to one if AT&T WANTS TO GIVE ME ONE, GUYS, JUST SAYING.

But I hate these people that think their phone is the pinnacle of civilization and not just a really neat phone.

Sent From My iPhone

Last House On The Left is a pretty standard grindhouse remake - the film looks more attractive but is less impactful and I never find myself caring about that poor girl or what line the family is crossing.  Like When A Stranger Calls, the thing that gives the original power is the thing that everybody knows about already, and that really dilutes any attempt to recapture its vengeful goodness.  The sort of horror represented by Last House only really works when it has two key elements: empathy and catharsis.  This has neither.  There’s a glimmer of a cathartic moment, when John appears in the kitchen, claw hammer in hand, and helps his battered, terrified wife to her feet, but it’s too short and the audience has to wait too long for the payoff that inevitably comes from it.  Which is in fact my problem with most of the second half of the movie.  It should be twenty minutes shorter.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

In the theater last night, there were no fewer than 3 children that I estimated to be under 12 years of age, sitting dutifully with their parents.  This bothered me immediately, but really, really bothered me once I heard a little girl audibly ask “why the man was doing that” during the rape scene.  Which means the parents let her watch that scene without covering her eyes or removing her from the theater.

Seriously.

Fuck. You.

Is the world so desensitized to its own ugliness that any parent can walk into a theater with a little girl and think “She can handle the R-rated slasher movie.  Screw Hotel For Dogs or The Jonas Brothers.”  If that is your only viable choice for seeing a movie with your elementary-aged child, stay home and call Child goddamn Services to come pick the kids up.  Then you can watch whatever you want, you callous shits.

So, some of you have been lamenting the change of heart that I’ve had following both my damning review of Twilight and my ill-fated attempt to see the Spirit.  A kind, happy Jeff is not a Jeff that some of you want to read, it would seem.

Well, you guys are in fucking luck.

Today, I am a burning obelisk of pure hate thanks to dealing with Microsoft Customer Service.

Last night, I got home and wanted to play some Guitar Hero.  I fired up my Xbox 360 and got the infamous Red Ring of Death that indicates hardware failure.  This happened to me not long after launch and my experience with Customer Service that time was exemplary.  This time?

I went online to arrange a repair on my own, and that’s where the problem began.  I was asked to register my console, and was informed that the serial number of the console was already registered.  I didn’t buy the console used, either; I got it directly from goddamn Microsoft.  Because I can’t register the console, I can’t do anything online, so I have to call.

When I call, I am confronted with an impenetrable wall of automated responses suggesting that I use the Internet to do what I need to do.  It takes way too long to finally talk to a human being who is obviously outsourced and obviously unwilling to deviate from his script, and I have to explain my problem to him at least three times.  He then asks me to walk through each of the suggested fixes that the online troubleshooting guide and the automated phone system have both suggested to me.  He does not address the console registration issue and he won’t tell me how much the repair will cost, just that I need to print a label online and send the console in.  I’m given a service number and told to have a great day.  Which, you know, seems very likely because one of the few things I can do that will occupy my time without requiring me to think is broken and I just spent a half hour on the phone with someone that I want to strangle.

Once I get a confirmation email, I try to print my shipping label, but SURPRISE - the website that I’m directed to doesn’t recognize my service number and/or zip code.  So I now have a broken Xbox 360 which will be repaired 3 weeks after I ship it to them with the shipping label that I can’t print. So yeah, that rocks.

As it stands, I’m going to have to get back on the phone with them, which I’m as excited about as setting myself on fire, wearing footie pajamas to work or reconciling with my ex.  I sometimes feel like the universe consigns me to the most difficult route to any positive resolution. Bullshit like this is why.

Here are some phrases that will not make me more interested in you.

“I love to read - my favorite author is Ayn Rand.”

“You like horror movies, right? You should see Twilight. It’s about vampires.”

“My husband would be pissed if he knew I was flirting with you,” and its corollary, “I guess the counseling isn’t working.”

“I’ve only seen the first three Star Warses, but not the older ones.”

“What does that word mean?”

Yesterday, Cory Doctorow talked about Atompunk, which is apparently like Steampunk except rampantly nostalgic for the 1950s instead of the 1850s.

It strikes me that the -punk suffix has only really held any meaning when attached to the word ‘cyberpunk’ and even then, only tangentially.  I’ll grandfather in ’steampunk’ too just because it’s used so often, but everything else?  Come on.

- Biblepunk: the blatant fetishization of pre-christian architecture, most notably including clay masonry and Solomonic gates.

- Merpunk: the blatant fetishization of living underwater, most notably by organizing large groups of people to sing “Part of Your World” from Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

- Beardpunk: the blatant fetishization of facial hair, most often perpetrated by hipster d-bags and stoners who partake in asocial rituals like “No Shave November.”

-Presentpunk: the blatant fetishization of current popular culture, most notably by watching The Soup, Best Week Ever, and listening to Britney Spears’ “Womanizer” for hours a day.

-Muppetpunk: Like steampunk, except with Muppets instead of gears.  “Hey, check out the cool Muppetpunk watch I found at the Disney store!”

- Punkpunk: A bit of a fakeout, punkpunk is the blatant fetishization of blatant fetishization, not of the actual punk culture.

Ham Sandwich from Adam "Slice" Kuban's Flickr

The key to creating good social media content is typing. Without typing, you really can’t interact online. There are plenty of reasons why ham sandwiches are awesome, but ‘having hands and fingers’ isn’t one of them. So, yeah, of course ham sandwiches suck at being part of the online conversation. Why would you think otherwise?

I mean, yeah, ham sandwiches are also kind of elitist and off-putting. And they have a coke habit. But mostly it’s the lack of hands. And it depends on the kind of mustard you put on it. Really, a bit part of it is that ham sandwiches don’t like me. I know you saw me with grilled cheese that one time, ham sandwich, but it didn’t mean anything. Please answer my calls.

I know I’m given over to wild hyperbole sometimes.  So when I say that Twilight and the massive embrace it has received from American readers represent the death of art in another couple of sentences, it’s likely that some of you will think that I’m exaggerating.

I’m not exaggerating.

Twilight and its attendant cult of fictionality represent the death of art.

Not because the movie is bad (it is) or because the book is worse (it is), but because the collective thumbs-up that our culture has given this underedited, overwrought ’saga’ of wish-fulfillment fan fiction denotes a massive lowering of our bar.  In fact, if given time and Red Bull enough, I can craft a flow chart that shows the negative influence Twilight has had on every piece of art, literature and cinema that have been released in its wake.  The book is an exercise in lazy self-indulgence and the film manages to do a workmanlike job of taking that inauspicious source material and not make it an apocalyptic disaster.  Oh, it’s still bad, but it’s a manageable kind of bad, the kind that you can laugh at with a few martinis in you.

Marvel Super Intern and Twitter pal LiterateKnits told me that Twilight was enjoyable as long as I could put myself in the frame of mind of a sixteen year old girl.  I tried, honest, but sixteen-year-old-girl Jeff is apparently the kind of sixteen year old girl that wants to drop a brick on Bella Swan’s head.  Maybe it’s just me, but I have a hard time rooting for a vapid, self-absorbed drama queen who spends half of the time bemoaning the cruel, cruel circumstances that she has created for herself and the other half of her time monologuing about how much of an outcast she is - despite being the BFF and crush object of everything with a pulse in a 20 mile radius around the ridiculous town of Forks, Washington.  And several things without pulses.  Like, you know, vampires.

As bad as the whole ‘pretty ugly girl’ part of Twilight is, the vampire stuff is what makes it criminal instead of merely disposable.  Not because they have none of the traditional vampire weaknesses.  Not because they sparkle in the sunlight (which is, let’s face it, ridiculously dumb), and not because an overwhelming majority of the vampires in Twilight are ‘good vampires’ (which is also ridiculously dumb - it’s like reading an R.A. Salvatore book and replacing all of the characters with different versions of Drizzt).

No, the reason I hate the vampires in the Meyerverse is the lack of theme, metaphor and consequence that they have.  They are only vampires instead of, say, angels or elves or sentient cheeseburgers because the author thinks that vampires are cool and sexy.  That’s not a crime, mind you - vampires, when done well, are cool and sexy, but the associations that fiction makes with vampires, the ones that make them not only cool and sexy but also dangerous and destructive.  If a vampire isn’t symbolic of the consequences of our baser urges - sex, drugs, gluttony, lust - then they’re totally impotent from a literary perspective.  There is no danger inherent in Bella and Edward’s relationship other than ‘Will Edward take me to the prom?’  There is no negative consequence to being a vampire; in fact, being a vampire is so amazing that Bella can’t wait to be one.  By the end of Bella’s story, the awesomeness of vampires is something that not only Bella, but every other person in the freaking world, apparently, has accepted as fact - even their sworn werewolf enemies (who are also hopelessly in love with Bella, by the way).

So, it’s not the bad, fanfic romance or silly supernatural elements that make Twilight so unbearable, it’s the total lack of substance behind it.  Unfortunately, its devotees like it that way.  I saw the movie a few days ago, and the throngs of mindless, lovestruck teens nearly deafened me with their whoops and applause and shrieks of ‘OMG’ and their swooning whenever Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson locked lips.  It was like being at a tent revival, except instead of religion, these hapless kids were getting crappy supernatural romance.   Pray for them.

I meant to talk about Halloween.

So, Halloween was another one of those nights when my friends told me:

1. I need to get the divorce off of my mind.

2. I need to have fun.

3. I need to go clubbing with them.

Unfortunately, some part of my brain was unable to accept only 66% of the proposition, and so I ended up at the local meat market of record’s Halloween party and was perhaps the only person dressed like a pirate that wasn’t also dressed like a slut.

Because my people know, respect and gracefully tolerate my geekhood, one of them points to a couple clad in superhero costumes, thinking that I’ll appreciate it.

Green Lantern, his hair and beard dyed bright green, accompanied by Poison Ivy.

My response, “That’s not even canonically accurate.”  And that’s where the title of this post comes from.

The Internet is abuzz with the news that Jeff Robinov, the mastermind of Warner Bros.’ handling of its DC licenses on-screen, has quashed “The Graysons” an hourlong teen drama about Richard “DJ” Grayson before his assumption of the mantle of Robin. The Graysons would have aired on The CW, and probably would have starred one of the douchebags from Gossip Girl.

Fan response ranges from “Why didn’t this happen sooner?” to “Thank fucking Christ!”

So yeah, that’s good.

In other comics-to-film news, Grant Morrison is doing his standard terrible job of denying in any way that he’s involved with a Flash movie, leading virtually everybody to ask “There’s a Flash movie?”