Good morning! To all the dudes and babes that stumble onto the den of iniquity that is OL — welcome to Wednesday. For some, this means that this cycle of  the forty-hour work-week is halfway finished. Hang in there. For others, Wednesday means the release of sweet, sweet paneled pages.

Me? I’m trying to enjoy February vacation. Unfortunately, I’ve risen before noon for the third day in a row. Damn my conditioning. Therefore, I’m pounding coffee like Bill Murray in Delirium (as seen above) and hoping something spectacular happens.

Now that you’ve woken up, what does Wednesday mean for you?

Happy Valentine’s Day

Don’t give me the standard “Uggh, Valentine’s Day, it’s completely made-up” argument. Yeah, it’s completely fabricated. As is every holiday (Wha? Jesus wasn’t born in snow-covered manger on December 25^th?!?).

If you’ve managed to fool someone into loving you, spend some time with `em today. If you don’t have anyone special in your life, go find someone.

And if you’re going to sit inside sulking all day, at least eat a heart-shaped box of chocolates. The shape makes the candy taste better (it’s been proven – by science).

To get you in the mood, a love song:

Laid back Saturday afternoon music by General Patton and the Bunglers. Hit the jump to rot your mind.

Keep Reading »

• The Cover to Nemesis #1 Has Been Revealed
  I can’t tell if Mark Millar is devolving into self-parody, or if he’s getting more and more amazing.
• Guile Is Sonic Fucked
  I stumbled across this over at Split-Screen, a new video game blog I came across. The blog is dope too.
• The Haircut Umbrella Screams “You’ll Need Therapy”
  Yeah, let’s see. Stick a cone around your neck like a dog who can’t stop licking his oozing wound, and then shave your head. Your future therapist thanks your parents.
• Fear of a 12th Planet: Remote Viewing
  Over at Mishka Bloglin is my favorite weekly column, “Fear of a 12th Planet”, which focuses on out there shit, conspiracy theories, and other shit that my paranoid brain likes. This week? Remote viewing. True or not? Who cares. Interesting.

• LOST Valentine’s Day Cards
  Epic LOST-themed Valentine’s Day cards.
• DC Unveils The Last Covers to Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne
  Yeah, gumshoe detective Bruce Wayne isn’t doing much for me.
• Prog Dorks Like Me: Listen to The Alaya Conscious
  If you don’t play World of Warcraft, worship John Petrucci, or imagine yourself gallantly crossing a stream of time and space aboard a beautiful intergalactic horse while doing math equations, this band probably isn’t for you. But for the rest of us? Hell yeah!
• World of Warcraft Has Lost Half A Million Nerds
  They’re probably dead underneath their computer desk, covered in crumbs and crusty fingers. That’s where you’ll find me.
• The Spider-Man Reboot Will Be In 3D
  Executives figure if it saved Dancing With the Alien Wolves, it can help Emo Parker.

• The 24 Movie is Real?
  Here’s hoping Billy Ray is better than the glue-huffing monsters writing this season.
• Final Fantasy XIII Is Receiving Xbox 360 Bundle in North America
  Jesus Christ, it’s hot. Not as sleek as the PS3 bundle, but it still gets the parts engorged.
• Haters Gon’ Hate: My Top 10 Nicolas Cage Movies
  My friend Patrick Cooper discusses the utter genius that is Nicholas Cage. Dude gave me Adaptation, Raising Arizona, and The Rock. He can churn out all the Ghost Riders he wants after that.
• Bioshock 2 Came Out Today
  I won’t be able to play it for roughly a zillion years, but I can’t help wanting to see how they pull off the sequel to a rather tightly-bound story, needing nothing added to it. Other than a more satisfying ending to the original. Oh, I said it!
• Bruce Wayne Looks Really Dumb As A Pirate and Cowboy
  Yo, listen. Between LOST and Captain America: Reborn, I’m officially fatigued with time-warping, trans-dimensional takes on my favorite characters.
• Now Us Men Can Count Our Own Sperm!
  Welcome to the future, may you be fertile!

Nothing really important to impart, just bored on a Saturday. I swung by Barnes and Noble today because I had to pick up some ass-chapping Penguin’s Guide to Literary terms. While I was there, I tried to find the book Infoquake because it had been recommended to me. Not finding it, I seethed and went to buy my shit. I find B&N generally exasperating, because of the complete lack of want when it comes to shitty, soccer mom drivel, but the inability to find anything random or esoteric.

But as I got to the counter, I noticed they had the paperback edition of Oscar Wao up to be peddled, and I had to smile a little bit. I don’t understand how something as dense and esoteric as Oscar Wao has garnered so much mainstream attention, but it makes me grin. It’s equal-parts fictional nerd biography, centering on references to the Danger Room and Watchmen, and a historical account of the last century or so of the Dominican Republic. When I saw a girl reading Wao on the train, I was all, oh shit!

As a nerd, who relates to Oscar Wao’s tale more than should be healthy – obesity, being a virgin until 25, self-deprecation and suicide attempts, it makes me glow inside to see it up there. If you haven’t checked out Oscar Wao, and you’re a fan of nerdculture, historical fiction, or more important, really fucking gorgeous prose, check it out.

[images & words is the comic book pick-of-the-week at OL. equal parts review and diatribe, the post highlights the most memorable/infuriating/entertaining book released that wednesday]

The theme for this week’s Images & Words is blood and thunder. This is the phrase that I couldn’t stop thinking of as I read the second issue of Siege, the limited series that sees Norman Osborn and his cronies trying to trash Thor’s crib. Built upon the premise of gods and superheroes duking it out, the expectation is that Siege would be an action-packed fanboy wet dream.

So far, the expectations are being met. And then some.

Picking up where the first issue left off, Siege #2 takes the reader right into the middle of the battle for Asgard. As was to be expected, Ares (yes, the god of bloodlust exists in the Marvel Universe) realizes that Norman Osborn’s been playing him for a damn fool! Jumping ship, Ares has himself a slugfest with the Sentry.  And it’s this slugfest  that ends up stealing the show.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say this – the fight ends with a fatality. Actually, it’s a two-page dismemberment, with entrails and blood and bodily fluids flying all over the damn place.

Yeah, it really is the artistic team of Coipel/Morales/Martin (pencils/inks/colors) that makes this comic especially worthwhile. Bendis’ scripting isn’t bad (in fact, it’s quite good) but the stunning visuals are what elevate the book. In addition to the aforementioned gorefest, even the more mundane sequences are sexy. Coipel’s pencils give Captain America a youthful sensibility which really shines through during his conversation with Steve Rogers.

Hell, the team even manages to make a snoozer of a meeting (between…well, some of Earth’s mightiest heroes) worthy being framed and hung poster-style.

I’m not going to waste time with one of my exhausting complaints about comics-events – but only because Siege is genuinely enjoyable. I think the series is pushing the Marvel universe in an interesting direction, and is doing so with guns and gods and explosions and all that other good shit. I’m sold.

And a thousand nerds creamed their pants at once, as the last season of LOST was underway. We had traveled through time ourselves, arriving in front of our televisions, our pants soggy, our lungs shuddering, our heart thundering. Sweet Jesus Christ, I had my mind fucked and left for dead last night. You know how sometimes a dog gets too excited, and it piddles on the floor? Well unfortunately, I’m a human, and I had the misfortune of running around my room screaming in-between commercials and peeing all over brother and friend alike.

Where to start? Where the fuck to start?

The episode starts and already I’m hyper-ventilating. I had a good suspicion that the episode was going to start with the plane crashing. Wrong, I’m already wrong. Jack’s sitting in the cabin and I’m vibrating back and forth and saying annoyingly out loud “Is this the actual footage from Season One? Is it? Pepsibones? Is it? Is it?” and he isn’t paying attention to me and I don’t blame him.

Turbulence starts! And I’m like, alright, they’re going back to the Island I knew it! Suck it, destiny prevails! And then I have the experience of being wrong twice in a row. So then they show the sunken Island, and I’m all like, we’re not on our Island anymore!

And then they come back from the commercial and they’re on the Island? What the fuck is going on? Oh, only one of the nerdiest things ever: alternate dimensions! As in Dimension X! LA X! Get it?! Is it only so amazing to me!? I’m shitting myself just thinking about it. Was anyone else hyper-paranoid and staring at all the passengers trying to see if they were conscious of some sort of shift? Because I think there may be one guy who knows all the different timelines.

Mr. Desmond Hume.

I mean, I’m not really basing that on anything, other than the fact that he fucking disappeared off of the plane. But if this is a guy who has been traveling through time and space for a long, long time, maybe he has been aware of the different possibilities? He’s seen Charlie die a zillion different ways, in what I assume are different dimensions.

So now it becomes apparent where the wrinkle in the narrative is coming for this season. When I was told that they were no longer doing flashforwards or flashbacks, I was like, well then, what does that leave us with? The producers are calling it “Flash Sideways”, but we can just call it following the alternate dimension that occurred when Juliet smashed a hydrogen bomb with a brick and “fixed” everything. It’s a neat twist. I had always assumed that if they had prevented the pocket of energy from being released, that reality would have rebooted. Instead, there’s another splinter reality that broke off from the one we already knew.

It’s going to be interesting watching where this LA X goes. Thematically, you can already see them suggesting that a reality in which they never crashed wasn’t the Utopia that they had perhaps deluded themselves into thinking it was. Charlie wants to die, Kate’s on the run, Locke is still a crippled mess.

During an intermission, Pepsibones began rambling about how the Island is the means through which perhaps these people were able to correct their flaws, and they needed the tragedy to improve themselves. There may be something to that.

Let’s take a break from LA X, shall we?

Meanwhile, on the Island, the grand reveal I had been prognosticating with a lot of others came true: Smokey is fucking Jacob’s Nemesis. The entire reveal was immeasurably fucking awesome, and centered around an action sequence that had me shitting my pants, and one of my favorite lines in a long, long time. After thrashing all of Jacob’s bodyguards as Smokey, Facob comes back and tells Ben:

I’m sorry you had to see me like that.

My brain actually exploded in an alternate dimension when I heard that line. In this reality I just moaned uncontrollably and pissed off my friends with fist-pumps and hand-claps. I’m slowly realizing I’m like a toddler when I get worked up. You’ve probably all known that way before me though.

And since I’m still bragging about being correct, Smokey wants exactly what I predicted: he wants to be free from the Island. The dude has been bound to the Island, and I assume Jacob, for god knows how many centuries. This entire time Smokey has been manipulating people to get exactly what he wanted: Jacob dead, himself freed. All of this was detailed in an epic speech given to Ben by Facob as they laid in the Shadow of the Statue. The speech also contained one of the most heart-breaking moments in the show for me.

Locke’s ultimate fate is heart-smashing, and the speech that Facob gives about it laid waste to my skin with goosebumps.

You should know, he was very confused when you killed him…Do you want to know what he was thinking while you choked the life out of him was, Benjamin? I don’t understand. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard? But it’s fitting in a way. Because when John first came to the Island, he was a very sad   man. A victim. Shouting at the world for what he couldn’t do. Even though they were right. He was weak, and pathetic, and irrepairably broken. But despite all that, there was something admirable about him.

So what are they going for here? We have had the clash of the titans, Faith versus Reason since the show kicked off. Jack Shepherd versus John Locke. And both of them, both of them are miserable, sad bastards. My first inclination is to hold up Faith and say “See, this is what you get when you believe in something so blindly. You get choked to death in a hotel room for nothing.” But that isn’t entirely true, because as Facob said, there is something admirable about that dedication.

And I find that poor bastard’s fate to be entirely more heart-wrenching than the Sawyer and Juliet bullshit. Shit, she died. Oh well. And the Freckled Hussy still lives. But while Sawyer and Juliet hugging and making out covered in each other’s hemoglobin were one of the few times I was bored, hearing Facob describe Locke’s life nearly broke me. I got goosebumps, feeling for the guy. And I can’t help but hope that both Locke and Jack have happier lives in LA X, as suggested by the idea that Jack could cure Locke’s paralysis.

And I hope so for Jack’s sake, too. For reason has clearly failed Jack where faith has failed Locke. Jack wakes up, somehow being nuclearly-propelled back into the present day. Juliet’s dead, and they’re hanging out in the Temple of Doom with Jacob’s followers or some shit. It seems that the writers are trying to stem a bridge between the worlds of Faith and Reason, suggesting that the two of them are useless to an extent without the other, and suggest that staunch adherence to either of them gets you….Choked out in hotel rooms or fighting for you life on the set of an Indiana Jones movie.

As always, LOST follows the formula of giving us four mysteries for one answer. Alright, Smokey is Facob. But who the fuck are these people? What is this temple? What’s going on? Jesus Christ. The entire show has gotten entirely more epic in scope, for it appears that the fate of the world rests on Jack and his Buddies. They need to stop Smokey the Amorphous Cloud of Doom from leaving the Island, but how! And just who the fuck is he? Or Jacob?!

Facob is clearly heading for that Temple, where Jack and the rest are, and he does so after putting a serious stink onto Alpert’s face. Seriously, my heart seethed when I saw my boyfriend get laid out by Not-Locke. There was a serious ass-whupping dealt out. Facob comments that it’s good to see Richard out of “those chains”, which makes it clear the dude was summoned to Island by Jacob as part of the Blackrock. In addition, it would fit in with my idea that Richard was bound to Jacob just like Facob was bound to him. Not only would Facob have freed himself from serving some unaging-fish-eating master, but he would   have let Alpert off the leash as well.

And then, the episode ends with Sayid waking up, after being resurrected in some Fountain of Youth/Lazarus Pit. Two hours of mindfuck, doled out to all of our unsuspecting asses. The entire experience has blown me away, and I cannot, for the life of me, stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it prior to it airing, and now all I want to do is watch it again.

The questions are overwhelming: why are Jack and everyone else important? Who are the people in the Temple? The amount of awesomeness that occurred in two hours far too much for me to cover. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned Hurley, who is beyond hilarious, and scripted to say exactly what the viewing audience is thinking, “Why aren’t you answering any of my questions?!”

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

I was originally going to title this one “Remember That Time On LOST When: You Realized The Show sucked?” but I balked because I felt it was a bit unfair. If the show didn’t suck, at the very least, the show has changed how we watch television, and also our expectations for how narratives are structured on a weekly basis. It marked a change from the weekly serial to something that seems intended to be ingested at three or four episodes at a time for maximum enjoyment. I know people who refuse to watch the show save for on DVD, and while I’m a glutton for the weekly satisfaction, they may actually be correct.

The beginning of LOST was a slow boil that emphasized character driven episodes with very little occurring on the Island. My less intellectual side calls it “really fucking boring” and “the shit that we waded through to get to the awesomeness of later in the series.” And to an extent, I still feel that way. However, if you go back and watch the show on DVD, the drudgery is mitigated quite a bit. It isn’t nearly as boring, because as soon as one episode ends, you’re able to keep chugging along. Nothing happens? No big deal, next episode.

This is in contrast to the feeling of watching it while it was airing. I’d like to describe the feeling of watching the first few seasons as they aired as this:

WHAT THE FUCK, THEY JUST SPENT AN ENTIRE EPISODE WALKING ACROSS THE ISLAND?

WHAT THE FUCK, THEY JUST SPENT AN ENTIRE EPISODE MAKING A GOLF COURSE?! YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING SHITTING ME.

LOST is one of the first television shows I can remember thinking worked better on DVD, simply because of the pace of the narrative. In fact, it seems to the extent that the writers may even have been conscious of how their show was being watched. Maybe they realized that people were consuming it en masse through DVD, and they felt less of an onus to give instant gratification every week. This show has been the tantric sex of television; we’ve been in the Masquerading Goat or some shit for six years, and we’re just finally about to rocket our loads and squirt our squirty stuff. Whatever that fluid is called.

So with the advent of viewers watching television shows four or five episodes at a time, writers seem more comfortable crafting storylines out over a longer period of actual time, since for most, the next episode may be no further than a remote click away. It’s allowed the characters to be fleshed out, before they were rocketed off on the the temporal mind-fuck that the show has become.

Or conversely, maybe the show has actually changed how we watch television out of necessity, since we can’t stand to be given the minuscule amount of information every week. Either way, we’ve shifted towards watching things large chunks at a time, as opposed to the serial method.

Maybe.

I could be wrong.

As well, LOST is also a show that has lent to the viewers the desire to rewatch the show, again exploiting the use of DVD or DVR. LOST is a fucking shitload of mythos and mysteries for anyone to carry around in their head at any one time. And let’s be honest, it’s been six years since we watched Oceanic 815 explode above the Dharma barracks, and there’s so much that’s occurred across so long a period of time, that must of it has rotted in our cortexes and shit.

LOST is the first show that I’ve actively wanted to rewatch just to understand how everything is tying together. It is such a dense show that rewinding and reexamining certain scenes and flashes upon the screen has become usual, for many people.

How many times has something popped up on the screen for but an instant, and you screamed out, “Oh shit! Rewind that!”. Really, LOST is the first show that’s made the rewind button a necessary button on my grimy, food-encrusted controller.

The show has turned the viewer into voracious scavengers. We’re all trying to connect dots, most of them leading to nowhere but false ends. But because anything and everything seems to be of such tremendous significance, we want to see the writing on every chalkboard, understand the dialogue from any Dharma videotape.

We’ve become active participants in the show, and it is through DVR and DVD that we have rewatched countless scenes. I’m that asshole friend of yours going, “Dude, wait, go back!”

And along with that, it has allowed people to become purveyors of knowledge. References to philosophers, physicists, ancient goddesses and other crazy shit. It’s engaged us at so many levels, and allowed a level of scrutiny and hypothesis that you don’t usually get in a television show. It has literally transcended the medium of television and spilled into alternate reality games, enormous sprawling wiki pages, heated, profanity-filled rants on Ventrillo, and other shit.

The show has changed how I watched TV, and it has influenced other TV shows to follow suit with dense mythos and mysteries, and slower, character-build storylines that are more palatable spread across four-episodes when you get to watch them on the ‘ole digital video disc. It’s gotten people interested in philosophers, weird physics shit that I’m sure the writers butcher and I comprehend even less, and really interacting as a community. It’s gotten me flattening my rewind button from over-use, and paying attention to every conversation and setting as if I’m going to find the recipe for the elixir of life, whether that’s wrong or not.

It’s changed me, man.

Tomorrow.