The Oprah Winfrey Network and a mini-Mind Dump

The new issue of Blackboard is out, Northwestern University's African-American student magazine, and if you go to Northwestern University, America's greatest university according to Gawker, like I do you should pick up a copy. And if you want a taste, here's my article about the strengths and weaknesses of the new Oprah Winfrey Network or OWN.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Plus clicking on links now opens a new tab instead of directing you away from the page. Thank Time for that.

A Toy that Eats Other Toys and Other Great Villains (MANY PRETTY PICTURES!)

After my first brush with controversy, (on this blog at least), I’m back with another comic post. Just one that’s less inflammatory. Also be sure to check out the new, more open comment system. Now anyone can call me an idiot for not liking Thor.



To me, one of the saddest and most absurd facts about our world is that Orson Welles’ last role was Unicron, the villain of the 1986 animated Transformers movie. Let me reiterate that. The man who made Citizen Kane, arguably the greatest movie ever, died three months after voicing a robot that turned into a planet or “a toy that eats other toys”.

Why Thor Sucks and Wonder Woman isn’t quite as bad

There’s a wonderful movie studio called The Asylum that stays in business putting out movies that sound like movies you may have heard of (but not porn) like Snakes on a Train, The Day the Earth Stopped, Transmorphers and its sequel Transmorphers: Fall of Man. That last gem features one Bruce Boxleitner a.k.a. Tron a.k.a. the guy whose only thing he’s got going on is Tron.

Today I came across a trailer for their next “mockbuster” Almighty Thor, featuring, of all people, the second chick that played Marta on "Arrested Development."

Now this may be a shameless attempt to cash in on Marvel’s upcoming Thor movie but once I got to thinking I realized, unlike Asylum’s usual movies based on sleazy slight name-altering and public domain plundering, they have every right to make this movie. Marvel doesn’t own Thor and the fact that they sort of act like they do kind of bothers me.

Mind Dump 2- Video Games

Bitmob is an awesome website that allows users to write video game articles and have the opportunity to have their work promoted by some pretty important people in game journalism. I've already used their services and you should too if you have any interest in writing about games.

They also have a podcast with topics chosen by the community. For their 100th episode though, they had users call in. Around 14:30 you can hear about my ridiculous Donkey Kong dream.

LISTEN HERE!

That got me to thinking about the other strange ideas for video games I've had and then I thought, "that sounds like another mind dump post."

My Little Pony vs. Monster High: Capturing the Key Demographic

So in the last post I made about the internet, I mentioned what I like to call “the id of the internet” 4chan. It’s the source of everything funny, amazing, and utterly depraved about the internet. One of their more recent obsessions is the new “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” cartoon. It’s easy to understand why. It’s a crazy, neon spectacle full of great, terrible puns and dialogue. Plus it’s meant for little girls and the internet loves subverting things that are supposed to be innocent. It should come as no surprise that one of the biggest demographics for MLP:FIM is males age 18-34, or the bronies.

meet derpy hooves

Super Street Fighter 4 3D Edition sort of review or 3D’s last last chance

How can I tie this into some recent news? Well first, Super Street Fighter 4 3D edition just became the first million-selling 3DS game, and more news was just released about the surprisingly angry looking Street Fighter x Tekken. That seems like as good a reason as any to sort of review what is by far the best 3DS launch game.

Street Fighter 4 essentially restarted the fighting game genre initially created by Capcom in the early 90’s with Street Fighter 2. Since then we’ve seen new games in the Vs. series, a renewed focus on Mortal Kombat and the spiritual successor to Guilty Gear, BlazBlue. But like before, Street Fighter remains the standard-bearer, and when it was released on PS3 and 360 two years ago it was met with critical acclaim from casual and hardcore fighting game fans alike. And a let me tell you one thing, as a huge fan of Smash Bros., I can attest to how finicky hardcore fighting game people can be.

Because of Street Fighter 4, this craziness is now possible

Cool Post Bro

Legit review still coming but this idea literally just came to me and it’s too good(?) and short(!) to not post now.

There’s a phrase on the internet called “cool story bro” that you say sarcastically to someone when they’ve told a story that you find decidedly uncool for various reasons:

It could be a wall of text too dense to be easily read on a computer (tl:dr or too long didn’t read)

It could just be stupid. (Person 1: Today, I came home and made a sandwich, Person B: Cool story bro). On the internet these kinds of cool stories also typically have poor spelling and grammar and are clearly written by children using their parent-allotted one hour of daily computer use.

It also could be an actually interesting story, or something obviously heartfelt, deep and personal. These are labeled cool stories just to be condescending, jerkish, passive-aggressive or really ironically funny. This can also be known as trolling, a fundamental internet concept far too massive to cover here.

Mind Dump

There's another sort of review in the works but in the meantime here's an additional recurring feature I'd like to start. Sometimes when I have an idea for a movie or a song or just a phrase in general comes to me I'll just write it down. Me and some of other dudes are creating an entire fictional album with this method and one day I might share here. It involves apples. But right now here's a selection from my iPod note labeled "movies ideas."

Sucker Punch sort of Review or Why Speed Racer is the Greatest Movie Ever and Scott Pilgrim is alright too

Speed Racer> The Matrix>>>>>>> Sucker Punch

People seemed to like the Tron article so maybe I’ll keep doing these barely coherent “sort of” reviews that are pretty much just glorified, opinionated streams of consciousness.

You guys should know by now that I’m pretty nerdy and like nerdy movies and if that title didn’t already tell you, I sometimes can also have a hipster appreciation of bad movies so strong I don’t even know when my enjoyment of something is legitimate or not. What I do know is that Sucker Punch is a straight up bad movie despite its hilariousness.

Support me and people I think are cool

New banner= less of my head but more content to see at once, a fine trade off

So there's a real post coming later today/tomorrow but I just wanted to take a moment to remind you guys that if you like what I'm doing here and want to make me feel good/motivate me to keep doing this (even though I'd enjoy doing this no matter what out of ego) you can and totally should subscribe and comment.

Subscribing lets me know if I am actually reaching people and lets you know when new stuff goes up. It's real easy too. There's a little box to the right of this post and after clicking the follow button, using a variety of services (gmail, yahoo, twitter, aim, rss readers) you can start following Jordan's Obligatory Blog.

Comments on Facebook are awesome and totally appreciated but comments on the article themselves would help create a conversion with people that maybe don't know me in real life (cuz those people are totally reading this amirite?) 

Thanks in advance

Interview with the Developers of Octodad: World's Greatest Game

Octodad is the amazing, absurd free PC game that has taken our dorm by storm. Naturally, being the journalist I want to be, I set up an interview with two of the crazy men behind it.

READ IT HERE!