Team Retard

Divining whether this is a commercial or feature length movie is difficult. IMDB says it’s the latter and called Torque, but the WHAT THE FUCK portion of my brain says “I’M BLEEDING, SEND HELP!”

Probably NSFW due to Mountain Dew getting its snatch punched

Torque - Watch the top videos of the week here

Since its launch, the only reason for owning a PS3 was if you liked being the butt of jokes.  That effect could easily be replicated with a big black dildo and save you approximately $470.  Any triple-A title for the PS3 would also be released on the X-Box 360 and if it had multiplayer, chances are that your friends were playing it on Xbox Live and you and your black monolith were sitting in a lonely PS3 lobby with hand-me-downs trophies.  There are a number of PS3 exclusives that even manage to reach a certain level of meh (Disgaea 3, Resistance) and everything else is short and uninspiring.

UNTIL FUCKING NOW.  inFAMOUS came out a few weeks ago and people were gushing about it.  I picked it up and loved it.  It’s an open-world electric superhero game where you can follow the moral path of nunnery sergeant or mustache-twirling robber baron first class which it almost penalizes the player for being anything in-between.  Most games give you morality choices that are laughable and this one is no different.  The first one is do I give food to the refugees or kill them? Verbatim.  Games in the past usually make it difficult to be evil because your own moral compass interferes with the role playing, but not this one.  Being evil is the shit.  I know now why George W. Bush ran for re-election, it is a fun job being a bad dude.  By the end of the game, I was minding my own business skating along a power line, electrocuting propane tanks when a pedestrian chucked a bottle at me from the street.  That burnt out metropolis is a crowded place so it was impossible to single out the perpetrator, but I am confident that leveling the entire city block with hot electric death and kicking the crippled survivors in the ribs did Lady Justice proud.  I like to think that there is some complicated fear programming going on under the hood because no one mouthed off for awhile.

If you wanted to buy a PS3 before, but weren’t sure you wanted a shiny black trophy for first place in a ‘buying the shitty console contest’, this is an excellent excuse to have one.

Internet, you do a lot of awesome things that make me happy, like this:

Then you point out things, like this:

And, of course, you’re responsible for Youtube comments and Yahoo Answers. Using that math, it’s a net catastrophe, no pun intended.

If your delicate sensibilities have been adversely affected by the above videos, it should be pointed out that image previews were not invented to mislead you.

Star Trek was a lot of fun with rarely a dull moment and just ACTION ACTION, ICE MONSTERS, SPACE BATTLES, SHIP MADE OF KNIVES AND TORPEDOES WITH RAZOR BLADES.

Boring canon was replaced with head scratching canon that was glossed over with ACTION. But there were small touches that are not strictly there to pander to the nerds. Erin pointed out that the skirts on the ladies were popular in the 1960’s when the show was produced. Someone pointed out elsewhere that an early scene with a starship being built in a shipyard is surrounded only by a chain-link fence to keep out wandering livestock, a nod to Gene Roddenberry’s socialism utopia of the Federation.

Overall, I think non-Trekkies liked it more than Trekkies, which is sort of the idea. Based on the last Star Trek movie, ticket and DVD sales to Trekkies alone won’t pay the bills; movie studios are in the business of making money, not pandering to nerds.

Conclusion: FUN.

General Motors recently canned Pontiac to little fan fare. As a brand, they have been at best a Chevrolet with a slightly different body, and at its worst has deviated from the GM mothership in an escape pod of shitty design and construction. Look at any classified section with cars and it will be inundated with the Pontiac Grand Am and Grand Prix: and it isn’t because they are good cars. My father has an encyclopedic knowledge of American cars and would drive a beat up Dodge over a shiny Lexus any day. His response to the news was, “good riddance, they’ve been garbage since the seventies.”

My very first car was a 1982 Pontiac 6000, with four doors and a hideous copper color that the rust blended into. I bought it in 1995 for $100, which was a steal since it only had 72,000 miles on it. The woman who sold it was spooked because the car had a blowout on the highway and she was convinced it was possessed by evil spirits and wanted it out of her driveway as soon as possible. Being perfectly willing to take advantage of some lunatic’s superstitions, I zipped over to her place with a jack and a donut tire and extracted it in less than ten minutes, lest she change her crazy mind. It had a wicked dent in one of the quarter panels where she had spun into a highway divider, but other than that it was in fine shape.

It wasn’t more than six months when I twisted that fine shape into something irregular by running into a tree at 30MPH. For some inexplicable reason (likely neglect), the wheel never turned back when I made a right hand turn and I plowed up into a yard and hit a good size tree square on the passenger side headlight. It goes without saying that there were three giggling teenagers in the car prior to this happening, and the incident left only one of us laughing hysterically in the back seat. Dave W. is a big and tall dude and was in the passenger seat. His knees left two softball size dents in the glove compartment. I was mortified, Dave was pissed, and Dan E. thought the whole thing was even better than whatever we were laughing at before was.

Dan would have laughed even harder had he been there when my girlfriend’s tomboy mother fixed the body damage for me later that evening. She came over, looked at it with a harrumph, wrapped a chain around the fender and to a tree in my front yard and jammed it into reverse. Slightly more time to pull out the frame than it did to bend it. When finished, she came over and said, “Presto. Now don’t be such a dipshit driver when my daughter is in the car.”

Due to the motor mounts being out of whack, the pulleys for all of the belts weren’t where they were supposed to be, leading me to changing the alternator once every 28 days. It was always exactly 28 days because Champion Auto Parts had a 30-day exchange policy. Once they caught on, I gave the car to my dad to feed the ever growing junkyard on his property. All in all, it was the perfect car for a cocksure kid who has had a driver’s license for less than a year.

The second Pontiac I had was a 1984 black Trans Am that was the car that the original Knight Rider was made out of. It had T-Tops, a V8 305 cubic inch motor with a four barrel carburetor, sweet mag wheels, a sexy hood scoop and a custom paint job. I worked my ass off at Best Buy and saved every penny for nine months to buy it. My dad tried to talk me out of it, saying that it would, “go through gas, brakes, and tires like they were hockey pucks“. I still have no idea what that means, but if he was comparing them to commodities, he was spot-on. Besides, 100K miles on a sports car and 100K miles on an Oldsmobile are two radically different things.

When the car did run, it ran like a top. When it didn’t, it wouldn’t move; there was no middle ground. But, like a domestic abuse victim, I defended it and put up with it year after year. I loved that car so much that I took one of my senior high school pictures with it. Yes, I was one of those guys, but fuck your judgment, it was gorgeous.

After high school, I sank so much money into the rear end and differential and it still would never get going like the glory days, and I sold it to a guy for $500. He fixed it up and drove it by not two weeks later, smugly offering to sell it back to me for a ridiculous price. I scowled at him and climbed into my beat-up Ford truck, vowing never to own a Judas Pontiac again.

Ten years later and my word is bond, yo.