Since looking it up the other day, I haven’t been able to get Jellyman Kelly out of my mind. Seriously. What does this say about the pervasive power of children’s programming? Shit, what would media theorist Neil Postman say?

In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do. Television educates by teaching children to do what television-viewing requires of them. And that is as precisely remote from what a classroom requires of them as reading a book is from watching a stage show.

[Amusing Ourselves to Death – p. 144]

What does that mean? Not sure. But for some reason, I can’t stop singing and eating jelly.

[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]

It’s been over a week since the release of Fantastic Four #587. In that time, the comic has inspired a few mild debates here at OL and no doubt countless others across the globe. Hell, maybe even the galaxy! But it’s to be expected, as this issue has long been designated as the comic in which one of Marvel’s First Family would be killed off.

Do superhero deaths ever last? No. Absolutely not. The decision to kill a character is almost always rooted in the hopes of driving up sales. After all, there’s nothing more attention-grabbing than “HEY, KIDS, YOUR FAVORITE HERO IS GOING TO DIE!” Hell, when old Kal-El bit the dust millions of comics were sold and the story hit the news:

Even in the news clip, it’s no secret that Clark Kent would eventually return. And you know what, I’m okay with that. I don’t mind the deaths and resurrections of caped heroes, provided that they are treated appropriately. If it seems like a hollow cash-grab, then count me out. But if it seems like a creator is murdering or reviving a character to tell an affective story, then I say go for it. `Cause the fact of the matter is that although rare, it can be done.

Case in point? Bucky Barnes. Ed Brubaker took a dead sidekick, turned him into a villain, and then made him Captain America’s replacement. And while this might seem like a gimmick, the quality of the comics has always been way above most superhero books. Will Steve Rogers eventually reclaim the shield as his own? Certainly. But the ride we’ve been taken on is damn amazing.

It’s this same sense of enthusiasm that I find flowing through my veins when reading Fantastic Four #587.

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[DEFEAT. is Rendar Frankenstein’s truest attempt at fiction.   Presented in weekly episodes, the novella tells the tale of Daryl Millar – a hero who dies at the intersection of pop culture, science-fiction, war epic, and fantasy]

Like any noble leader, Daryl allowed a bit of entertainment only after ensuring that his friends were given their opportunities. 8-Bit returned, looking as baffled as ever. Daryl tried to reassure himself. “At the very least, it can’t be any lamer than that Ouija Board we tried to use.” 8-Bit and Riff didn’t say a word, but responded with eyes that did plenty of talking.

What you’re about to experience is the real deal.

Surprised by the reproachful staring of his two best friends, Daryl was now forced to reconsider his dismissal of the Woman in Gray Robes. Zipping his lips and nodding, steps were taken into the supernatural workplace.

Quickly accepting the possibility that he was graced by the presence unknown forces, Daryl was only marginally astonished by Rimina’s greeting. “Well hello there, Daryl, I’m quite glad to see you. Always the best for last, I suppose. I can already tell that the soothsaying I am to provide you will be of the utmost importance.

“So sit down, time is of the essence, especially in your case.” Outstretched hands, one of which held a cigarette (of course), beckoned the teen to rest in the chair. He was now directly in front of the embodiment of conflicting messages:

A woman doing the job of a wise man.
A pirate’s accessory on an astoundingly sexy face.
A healthy disposition residing in such an unhealthy environment.

Daryl was ready. So was Rimina. Sensing the beginnings of psychic fatigue, the last remaining leaf from the Jacoby tree did not ask for permission. Instead, she simply took an especially long drag from her cigarette and then snatched hold of Daryl’s hands. She waited a few seconds. When his eyes looked upward from the table Rimina blew smoke right into them. The exhalation was both blinding and eye-opening…

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Oh, here there! Welcome to Press Start! The only weekly..uh, biweekly, uh…semi-regular…maybe…column about video games. In theory, this pig is a weekly column counting down the top five things in video games from the prior seven days. However, as of late I’ve been jackknife powerbombed by the real world, and I totally slipped off the map.

For those who (don’t care), you’ll find this son of a bitch regularly on Saturdays from now on. Enough with the bureaucratic bullshit. Let’s dance.

—-

#1: Microsoft Tried To Get In Conan’s Pants.
Remember last year when Conan threw up the deuces and left NBC after Chin McFuckerton took back his old time spot? Of course you do. This week an interesting little morsel came out of that news: Conan was wooed by Microsoft. Yes sir, they tried to get the grand ‘ole Irish bastard onto Xbox Live. Imagine that shit! I don’t know if that would have been a Biblical sized bomb, or a watershed moment. Last week executive producer of the Conan show, Jeff Ross, shed some light on the whole thing:

Ross said it was “interesting to sit and look at it,” Microsoft’s proposal lacked a clear vision, and he recalled that “a lot of the conversations were, ‘Well, it’s a show, but it’s not a show and there are no breaks, but maybe there are breaks and it’s not 60 minutes – it’s this,’ and nobody really knew what it was.”

“So it was really going to be a leap of faith to jump in with these guys and figure something out which we didn’t know,” Ross said, later reiterating that “we had some eventual television offers and we basically shied away from the [Xbox thing].”

While it doesn’t seem practical at this juncture, I can imagine something like this heading down the road. Not necessarily on Microsoft Live, but why not online? As the integration of your televisions-computers-phones-video game systems march to the inevitable point where we have hardware in our head that projects digital hallucinations, something whacky like this shit is a given down the road. In my fanboy fantasies.

—-

#2: Legend Of Zelda Imagined As Hughes’ Movie.
A group of enterprising people have answered the question you’ve probably never asked: what would Legend of Zelda look like if it was shot as a John Hughes movie? I’m going to level with you; I’ve only watched a good three minutes of the five minute video. Why the fuck am I posting it then? I find the concept endearing. I’m a sucker for coming of age flicks, and goddamn it if I didn’t come of age while working through Ocarina of Time. My balls were all a-twitter for Sheik, and even though it was released markedly earlier, I enjoyed myself some Breakfast Club.

—-

#3: Kevin Butler Retweets The PS3 Root Key.
I used to think the Kevin Butler PS3 commercials were pretty fucking funny. They certainly dragged the PS3 marketing campaign out of some weird, abstract, pseudo-minimalistic realm and put a human face on them. It Only Does: Everything? Cool enough. At this point however, Butler has overstayed his welcome. Case in point: “Butler” has a Twitter account.

With this in mind, I was amused this week when everything went awry on said account.

Last month, the PS3 was cracked open and its soul, its root key was released to the public. Since then, hackers have been able to dance on Sony’s filthy Corporate corpus, and entire thing has been amusing to watch from afar. This week a Twitter peep Travis La Marr tweeted the root key at this Butler character. Understandably, whoever the fuck maintains the account had no fucking clue what the numbers and letters meant. I mean fuck, I wouldn’t have. Butler retweets them shits, and BOOM!, a whole good shitload of his followers were greeted with the PS3’s soul.

Well done.

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This spoof is a combination of rock previously though unfathomable. Vampire bullshit is reimagined as Twilight For Guys, which of course features lesbians in underwear making out. I hope I just sold the majority on watching this video.

Some of the stock “reaction” footage from the movie is hilarious, featuring lines like “It is the best acted movie since Reindeer games.”

Amazing. Hit the jump for lesbians. Oh, and a spoof.

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Marvel is on a goddamn character killing spree. They offed a member of the Fantastic Four, they’re promising to kill Spider-Man. They’re not stopping there though! No sir. According to Bleeding Cool, at “the ComicsPro retailer summit, David Gabriel, Senior Vice President of Sales at Marvel Comics has announced that as a result of the Fantastic Four sales and media coverage, Marvel are going to kill a main character every quarter.”

Well then! The death of the Fantastic Four member was one of the most emotional sequences in recent memory. Why it worked was because of how well Hickman built the entire storyline up to that moment, and then how well he executed the moment. If everything is as well done as that storyline, god fucking bless them. However, color me accordingly skeptical.

[DEFEAT. is Rendar Frankenstein’s truest attempt at fiction.   Presented in weekly episodes, the novella tells the tale of Daryl Millar – a hero who dies at the intersection of pop culture, science-fiction, war epic, and fantasy]

8-Bit didn’t wait to ask Riff how it went. We walked right past his friend, eager to get his own turn at gazing towards the future. His yearning to the watch the lion tamer had completely subsided when he saw those clowns in mid-coitus, and that previous excitement was now wholly invested in having his fortune read. Any other night, 8-Bit would have disregarded this sort of psychic endeavor as a base attempt to rip off the simpleminded.

But tonight was a night for celebration. A night for trying new things.

Inside the small tent, 8-Bit removed his huge glasses and frantically rubbed the lenses with the bottom of his t-shirt. The glasses were put back on, met with disapproval, and then removed for another scrubbing. With the spectacles back on, 8-Bit realized that they weren’t the source of visual impairment. It was all of the damn smoke.

“Lady, you might want to think about conjuring up some ventilation. I’m not even smoking that stuff, but I feel like I could use an iron lung. I’m cancer-bound for sure.”

Laughing, Rimina gave a sample of her talents. “8-Bit, you’re not going to get cancer from the smoke in here. If you do get cancer, it will be a brain tumor. And it will kill you on your ninety-third birthday. So don’t blame my incense. Or my recreational use of tobacco.”

Sobered by both her words and the nonchalance with which she spoke them, 8-Bit was ready to listen. “Can you…can you tell me more?”

“Of course. That’s why I get paid the big bucks.” Rimina’s cigarette, the fourth since her meeting with Riff, was brought to her dark lips. As before, an inhalation was coupled with the grasping of handsand followed by a hearty exhalation…

Exploration. Lots of exploration, all over… the world. The worlds. In a (not-too-distant) future, the teen with coke-bottle glasses turns into the man with coke-bottle glasses, and for the first time in this existence the look actually helps him fit in. It is the realm of academia — real academia, not just the optional four-year layover before going to work. There are schools and professors and textbooks stacked higher than one might think they should be. That’s dangerous he thinks they could very well fall over. Of course, worrying even now, during a glimpse past the present circumstances and into the future. Stop worrying the female voice, communicating without speaking, reminds him. Seemingly endless work is piling up, but the academic does not cave into the pitfalls of frustration. For this man, defeat is not an option, for the knowledge-seeking of the vision bearer is not a matter of being worthwhile in its own right — it is a deliberate attempt to construct a means to an end. There is a goal. Of discovery. Of impossibility? Many think so. But not the scholar. For he is atypical. He turns to the unconventional, the dangerous, and even the manipulation of the mind through use of the illicit.

But now, the future has slipped away and it is 1986 again. It is yesterday, before school. It is yesterday, at the arcade. It is today? At the circus? Now, is this the end of the week? The pep rally? Is this now or later? Both? It is unknown, but there are feelings of success and gratitude and love and accomplishment. There is work to be done.

“Heed my words — this is but one of the many, a mere sliver of a broken shard from the entire mirror of existence, whose inward reflections of itself far outnumber the outward. This fate has been neither determined nor surrendered. If it pleases you, think of it with cautious optimism. If it displeases you, change yourself so that you may best fit within this world.”

[to be continued]

I never thought I would have anything in common with a small boy from Tanzania. That’s in East Africa where they drink the blood of the unborn and the air is filled with AIDS. But me and young Alex, representing the 607, apparently, seem to have the same taste in red-white-and blue action movies. See, Alex loves Commando, the 1985 balls-out Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. And he wants to tell you all about it.

I’m just playing about all that AIDS jive. The video is from Mama Hope, a campaign aimed at educating the ignorant about the true state of contemporary Africa. Not all children are soldiers, but if they keep watching Commando, who knows. (video via FilmDrunk)

It’s here. The official trailer for X-Men: First Class. Hit the jump for the trailer. Hit the comments box with your thoughts.

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The rumor machine chugs along! Nothing can stop it. Except the dastardly Truth which won’t be rearing its had around The Dark Knight Rises for a good while now. The latest rumor? Fuck Robin! Joseph Gordon-Levitt is going to be playing Alberto Falcone. It’s just a rumor, but it makes some good fucking sense.

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