Are you optimistic about the future? What about just tomorrow? What about just tonight? What do you think when you look back on this year that just ended? Are things going according to your plans or are you finding yourself constantly delivered into new and different and exciting and altogether unforeseeable outcomes? Are we living in the future? Or are we just dreamers lost in our own magic spells and writing the story as we trip over the words and the lines and the chapter breaks?
Do you have more questions than answers, or vice versa? Which do you prefer more, sunrises or sunsets? Beginnings or endings? Or are they intrinsically tied together, just like all of us, in the grand scheme of things?
Just curious.
This was an interesting year. As much one full of little victories and joys as it was of big failures and sadness. For me, at least. Things happened. The players moved the pieces across the chessboard. The game continued. It was exciting, it was heart breaking, and sometimes it was just one or just the other, and sometimes it was both. The wheel kept turning.
If you’re reading this now or read it before, then some kind of contact was made. With you, with us, with it, with “the other,” with nothing and everything and anything that falls in between all of that.
It’s really up to you there, though. It’s all subjective. Just as you choose your own level of involvement in all things (but especially the future), you also bring your own meaning to the equation. In the end we’ll all be getting exactly what we what. The angels of tomorrow will all be speaking the same language: glossolalia.
Things can seem small in one moment and in one kind of light, and loom large in another. Understanding has to be unearthed and earned and meaning was to be extrapolated. We keep guessing, we keep surmising, we keep poking and attempting things and shining our torches into the dark.
And if there’s something out there, then have no fear, we’ll find it.
That is so wild, right? The end of the science fiction year that wasn’t too science fiction-y, sadly. Or maybe it was and I just wasn’t paying nearly enough attention. Or maybe I’ve just gotten so accustomed to the very pedestrian and incredibly mundane and boringly sexy science fiction-y aspects of my normal life?
In this year, in this world of internetting and bloggery and social media, I had five very simple goals that I laid out at the start of 2010 and wanted to complete by year’s end. In order of my own personal interest and their importance, they were:
1. Not going to tell you (you’re not ready for this one yet, folks)(and neither am I).
2. Not going to tell you (forthcoming).
3. Not going to tell you (total abysmal failure).
4. Not going to tell you (worked, but was embarrassing and not worth mentioning again).
5. Getting 2,010 tweets in 2010!
The fifth one is the one that I’m going to definitely accomplish. Unless I lose both hands sometime in the next three days. Or lose my phone or computer or both. Or unless an EMP just wipes out all technology in the country/world.
But, well, I just don’t twitter much. And getting 2,010 tweets in 2010 was a silly, frivolous goal that I jokingly threw out on my twitter sometime back in… I don’t know what month, but sometimes those things you only jokingly declare are the ones that stick with you. It was somewhere around the start of the year, I believe, and I think I had less than a thousand tweets then and was probably tweeting an average of four to five tweets a month, roughly.
And eventually I just thought, yeah, I can do this shit, why not? Because it’s stupid? Stupidity has not stopped me from doing anything ever in my life.
Also, this is the 825th post on your friend neighborhood Counterforce. That’s wild. We didn’t make it to 1000 posts this year, but that’s perhaps for the best. Personally, I’m just shocked that I managed to ramble on for nearly 2,010 tweets. I mean, what a silly declaration. Thinking back upon it, at first I was like this:
And then I was like this:
You understand.
Oh man, how creepy is this photo below?
Right?
Also, New Year’s Eve is almost upon us. Time to celebrate!
Speaking of “science fiction,” the recent Doctor Who Christmas special was fucking wonderful.
So fun and smart and a nice little twist on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol cause, hey, why can’t the ghosts of Christmas’ past, present, and future be time travelers and holograms?
Michael Gambon was brilliant, but ruthlessly mean and joyously funny in places. And while the show did play around with some of it’s own rules towards time travel (and that’s why we have rules about time travel, folks: so they can be broken!), I found the idea of one watching their own past and memories change before their very eyes to be fascinating. Plus, the interesting but slight references to “the silence.” And I had to love the nice little nods to the recent JJ Abrams Star Trek movie with the copious lens flares on display of the crashing starship’s bridge.
…which I hear was pretty terrible, but that Olivia Wilde was the best part of. Is it me, or is Olivia Wilde totally the new Angelina Jolie?
I mean that based on a lot of things, like her acting ability, her potential, the type of roles she’s taken in the past, but also based on her seemingly having that same ability that Angelina Jolie has to turn straight girls a little curious.
And this is some old school adorable chillaxing right here:
The last six months or so on this blog and in my life have been… weird, to say the least. I’d go into more details here, but quite frankly, I don’t want to. I’ll just say that due to illness in my family, my life got a bit… derailed and I’m astonished that I’m seeing the end of this year without having gone totally insane. Or maybe I have already gone totally, stupendously insane and it’s just helping me see the end of this year more clearly? Like 3D glasses? That’s a comforting thought, right?
Anyway, at some point this will all be over and I’ll get back to some kind of semblance of “normal,” whatever that is. Are we still doing that? “Normal?”
Hopefully, if we’re lucky, we’ll be right back to asking “Who’s your daddy?” in no time flat.
This is an example of the happy medium between sanity and fear:
This is an example of how Batman is both a master of surprise and also quite probably a huge pervert:
And sadly, no matter what we say or do, Lost is still over and done with:
Oh well. Three days to go. And then…
Fingers crossed about something exciting happening in those next three days (after all, a good deal of people on this planet thought that their magic wizard man came back from the dead in that same amount of time) but not holding my breath. Exciting, but not too exciting. Wow me, thrill me, blow my mind, fuck me over and fuck me up (but in a good way, please), but remember that when the sun comes up, I’ve still got bills to pay and TV shows to catch up with. Three days to go, promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep, and a long journey sprawling ahead of us through mountains upon mountains. This is both the place we made together and the journey we started together and I’m gonna be there with you. And wherever we end up, whatever new definition of home or normal we excavate, when we do we’ll turn to each other and say, “This must be the place!”
The inevitable is upon us: the year is almost over.
You find yourself out somewhere, you’ve got a drink in one hand and your cell phone in the other. In your stomach is chocolate and booze. On one side of you is a girl in a leotard with cat ears on and she’s telling you what an asshole her ex is. On your other side is a girl dressed up as sexy Mother Teresa and she’s sleeping with the other girl’s asshole ex. Trick on one side of you, Treat on the other, and your drink is almost empty. It’s getting colder now outside and darker earlier and earlier. It’s time to start self reviewing and battening down the hatches.
Last night I got into a conversation with someone who told me that they hated Halloween. They didn’t see the point of it anymore, they said. I have to say that I wasn’t exactly super enthused about this year’s festivities but in a way, I still feel like Halloween is one of the last pure holidays available to us.
The various Halloween decorations sold to you leading up to tonight feel more welcome in your home, I feel, than the Christmas ones. And the fact that the Christmas decorations start rolling out in store aisles as early as October now doesn’t make the sentiment that comes with them feel any more genuine or less hollow. But there’s still a kind of joy in those who put up something around their house with the intent of scaring a person or reveling in a bit of annual darkness.
Then there’s the candy. That one’s self evident, I think.
The movies. Halloween movies, or the movies that they play on TV around Halloween or the ones you specifically seek out because of this holiday, they aren’t just seasonal. They’re timeless, in their own special, twisted, beautiful way.
There’s always a mood that can strike a horror fan for movies about witches or demons or zombies or psycho killers or what have you and that mood isn’t solely isolated to Samhain. It’s just amplified there, maybe.
Besides, there’s just a handful of true, genuine Christmas cinema classics and the rest is bullshit. A movie can feature Rob Lowe in a pullover standing in front of a Christmas tree or feature an orphan meeting an angel who cures his syphilis or whatever, but that doesn’t mean I want to watch it. And as far as “holiday cinema” goes, Christmas is Halloween’s only real competition, and just like the holiday itself, it’s an empty category.
Never mind the fact that Halloween is the last real holiday where you can be yourself. You can be independent. Maybe you need to put on a costume and go out and get drunk and pretend to be someone else for a few hours after the sun sets, but it’s worth it. Maybe that’s how you need to express yourself. Either way, it’s your time. Enjoy it. After this it’s Thanksgiving and your circa Christmas fare, and you’re surrounded by family and you have to pretend to be someone else. No, you’re not a disappointment to your parents or extended relatives who know nothing of the real you but have some concerns based on your facebook status updates. No, this year hasn’t been a disappointment despite all the big plans and hopes you’ve had for it. And no, you’re not a disappointment to yourself, you hope.
Just to reiterate, Halloween is nothing but: Candy, booze, spooks, thrills, sexy costumes, ghosts, goblins, ghouls, an excuse to break free and have a little fun while leaving a little bit of your dignity behind. That sounds amazing. It also sounds like your average day on the internet just IRL.
This is the 750th blog post on this blog. Will we make “contact” with 1000 posts before the end of 2010?
We’ll see. But in the meantime, this is a picture of Betty White and Jon Hamm:
This is funny ha ha:
And this is just the truth, no matter how you try to fight it:
Look, I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, but we’ve been hanging out for a while now, right? Well, here’s the thing…
In all that time, we’ve really gotten to know you. We know what you’re thinking…
You’re thinking, “Where did this blog go? I love this fucking blog and it practically disappeared into thin air!”
Calm down. Don’t be so dramatic. Take in a deep breath. Do not shit your pants please. Everything is going to be just fine. Trust us.
This is just a blog. And we are right here. And this is a picture of what looks like not only a completely unnecessary “remake,” but also something that is terrible:
Only slightly related, this is a video featuring a guy hitting on a girl at the beach:
from here.
by Kelly Reemtsen, from here.
from here.
via Boing Boing.
Here’s 12 ways to spot a cheat.
Did Kanye steal Dr. Dog’s music video?
The eurotrash and their monetary destiny.
Visualizing the deletion process on Wikipedia.
from here.
These screencaps
The Day looks interesting
