Common Decency for Dummies, or "How to Internet"

Internet, we need to have a talk. I know things have been a little hard since the dawn of the web, and I know that sometimes I've been a little bit disappointed in you. It's just that now it's moved beyond disappointment and I'm really just pissed off.

Guys. Seriously. The comments. They need to stop. I'm not talking about comments on my blog, or comments on my opinions, or comments about the way I'm choosing to live my life, or whatever. I'm talking about internet comment sections. They need to stop. Don't know what I mean?

Take a moment to think about the last time you saw a constructive, well thought-out discussion about a potentially controversial topic in the comment section of a website. No? Think about the first time, then. Still nothing?

Now think about the last time you saw something like this:

"Wow, whoever wrote this is clearly retarded. It's different from my opinion, so clearly this person is just stupid."
    -GuyWho'sAlwaysRight
   [23 Comments]
         "lol wow loser ok y u take the tiem to rite this if u dont like lol faget kill urself"
   -420blazeit2011
   [Show more comments]

Look familiar? Probably because this is probably about 99.99% of comment sections on the internet. Doesn't even matter what the comment box is attached to, whether it's news articles, Facebook status updates, YouTube videos, Kickstarter pages for bringing back Reading Rainbow (that exists, by the way, and it's totally funded), anything and everything is a victim. My recent favorite is a lovely top comment from the article at [this link] detailing how poorly McDonald's is responding to its employees' demands for better wages. It reads as follows:

Ivan Saucedo-

"It's funny how flipping a burger pays as much as working at a hospital in direct patient care..... If we can't get a raise for savings lives you can't get a rise for making people fat.."
 

(Oh, and in case you were wondering, that is his real name, and that link is to the facebook profile he chose to leave this little gem of a comment with. I openly encourage you to send him a nice message explaining exactly how he is incorrect. Tell him the internet police sent you.)
 

Now, this is about to get really angry and ranty, so if you can't spot what's wrong with that comment, you might wanna pull up a seat and get ready to take notes. I'm about to give you a crash course in what your mothers should have spent your childhoods teaching you instead of drinking heavily while you ate paint chips in the corner.
 

Now I know that there's just something about the moment that you realize you have total anonymity on the internet that just makes you want to grab the nearest sharp thing and sodomize your neighbor with it. It's like when you threw pencils at that nerdy kid when your elementary school teacher turned the lights out. Only this time you can just lynch him from the ceiling fan and nobody can even see you snicker and send you to the principal's office. The thing you need to understand though, is that everyone else on the internet isn't just boxes of text with no feelings that you can say whatever you want about. There are human beings on the other side of those words. Human beings who now think that you're a complete brainless asshole for drunkenly smashing out a garbled mess of hate-bait in the comments of an Owl City lyrics video.

 
Guys, we're born with brains. Brains are wonderful things. Sadly, an increasingly large number of us all around the world are failing to learn to use them beyond the mastery of getting hand to put cheetos where mouth hole is. Even less fortunate is the number of white-belts in cheeto-mastery that have also learned to whack their dusty orange fingers on keyboards to make internet words. And they have black belts in being complete imbeciles. And they're forming opinions.

Let me explain a little something about how opinions work with the brain. In order to develop an intelligent and informed opinion, one must first have a developed and at least somewhat intelligent brain. At the risk of using a potentially offensive metaphor, underused brains trying to make opinions is a lot like teenage pregnancy. Biological signals say that this is supposed to be a proper function, and everything kind of has an idea of what it should be doing, but chances are the result is just gonna come out with problems. Similarly, a mind that isn't yet prepared to be forming opinions can still attempt to do so, but they're going to come out with a lot of problems, and they likely won't function correctly.

Skipping over the obvious abortion joke I could be making about Mr. Saucedo's comment (and kind of just made anyway), you get my point. The vast majority of comments on the internet are the brain-vomit of minds that didn't fully digest what they were reading or viewing before regurgitating a response. Maybe they just didn't have the capacity to. But you know what? That's why I'm here.

Here is my fool proof* checklist of questions you should ask before you press the "Post Comment" button:

1: Does this really need to be said?

2. Have I spent at least ten minutes thinking about what I'm about to say?

3. Am I prepared to defend this opinion in a civil manner against an expert on this subject?

4. Am I an expert on this subject?

5. Would I say this to this person's face?

6. Would I say this to this person's face if he/she/they could definitely kick my ass?

7. Does my internet comment contain anything of a religious, political or controversial nature?

8. Does this comment accomplish anything outside of letting everyone know that I am angry?

9. Am I sober right now?

And finally,

10. Shouldn't I be doing something more constructive than starting fights with people I don't know on the internet?

If you answered in an unsatisfying fashion to any of those questions, congratulations! You shouldn't be posting a comment on the internet. Take your bag of throwing rocks and go home, because you don't belong here and nobody needs your trash. Sincerely, everyone with the capability to form thoughts outside of our own selfish agendas.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

The Subjectivity of Progress

I've never been good at allowing myself to be comfortable. That isn't to say that I'm a particularly motivated human being, or that I'm ambitions or driven. Rather, it's quite the opposite. I'm a simple man with simple ambitions. I began to see a long time ago that I was never destined for greatness. I'll never leave a mark on the world, my name will never be known to millions or likely even hundreds, and the world as a whole will be largely unchanged by the events of my life. In light of this, I've decided that all I really want from my life is to be happy, because at least that much I can obtain. It's a simple goal.

Or at least I thought it was until I finished college and began to see the deeper inner complexities of happiness. For a long time, I viewed happiness as a state I would enter when a set of specific circumstances had been fulfilled. Those circumstances were different for everyone, of course. Some people want a house, a spouse, a kid or two, a nice car. Other people want a powerful position, or a meaningful job, or lots of money. Ambition, motivation and drive were just the words we used to weigh an individual's personal dedication to achieving their personal idea of happiness. Everyone had a number they wished to reach, and a number they were currently sitting on. Between a person and their end happiness goal is a staircase; a series of events and circumstances which must be met and fulfilled before happiness can be had.

In the beginning, I had a high number in mind. I wanted to be a leader of some kind. I wanted to be a famous author, or a great professor. I wanted to live in a nice home, and have nice things. I wanted to get married and have a great relationship, and come home to visit every now and then and have Christmas parties in the holidays where my friends and I would get together and reminisce about how stupid we were as kids. It was all very idealistic, of course, but even with a mind as logically programmed as mine it's easy to get lost in the notion. Especially when growing up, we're force-fed the concept of "you can do and be anything if you try hard enough" at every turn. I'd spent my whole life with everyone around me telling me how smart I was, and how blessed I was. Every cartoon, every story book, every song, every movie, every goddamn breakfast cereal commercial spent every breath telling me that I was a special individual and that if I settled for anything less than fulfilling my dreams, I was just letting myself down.

In reality, of course, it isn't quite that simple. As my college years went by, my suspicions that this whole notion that everyone is a beautiful snowflake with limitless potential carried with it the slightest aroma of bullshit were slowly confirmed. As I began to grasp the realities of my own potential, my number began to change. At first I tried to fight it. I felt like there was no reason I should have to lower my expectations, because that only meant I was letting myself down. I was giving up on my dreams, and in the blind world of optimism I'd been surrounded by growing up such a thing was unheard of. There was never any little engine that got half way, went back down and suggested maybe building a track that went around the hill instead of over it because in addition to being more cost efficient over the amount of fuel it takes to move a hundred ton steam engine over a seventy degree incline, you're also not trying to move a hundred ton steam engine over a seventy degree incline. I'm also fairly positive that no Disney character ever sang a song about "Y'know, maybe I'll just stick with my mediocre lot in life because friendship and dreams can't solve everything and I'm kind of terrible at stuff."

Ultimately, I was defeated. The realities of my potential became impossible to deny, and I was forced to settle. I graduated into a field I didn't want, realized that I'll likely never be a famous author, and that given the average salary of my career options I'll be fortunate to own a home, much less a large one. And as I sat there, staring at the shattered remains of my tragically hopeful former life goals, I began to piece them back together into something that made more sense. Something didn't compute. In the logical portion of my mind, I had done everything I'd been told. I had tried my best, I had given it my all, and I had dreamed hard. By all accounts, everything should have fallen into place and I should have succeeded like the underdog hero I was always meant to be. But instead, I failed. So now what? I had no answer. There was no preordained course of action when you in fact cannot become anything and anyone you want to be because you dreamed hard enough.

I needed a foundation to build a new viewpoint from to make sense of this. Much like fishing for the corner pieces in a box of a thousand piece jigsaw, I started to root out the things I truly wanted in life that I felt would lead to happiness. I threw out the things I didn't want and left only the fundamental things I would require to achieve that state of being known as "happy." What I came up with was fairly simple. I wanted a job I enjoyed, and a space to live in and call my own. I wanted a good computer, and a reliable car, and I wanted to be able to comfortably afford these things. Big houses are nice, but my apartment in college taught me that I'm quite comfortable in small apartments. My experiences with relationships and the value I place in privacy and the sanctuary of solitude taught me that I didn't really want a wife or a family.

Suddenly, my pretty picture of hopes and dreams had been reassembled as a simple list of things. An apartment, a nice job, a good computer, a reliable car. It seemed simple enough. The problem then became getting there. Or getting anywhere, for that matter.

In order to achieve a goal, one must find a way to make progress, and the shortest path between two points is a straight line. Logically, it made sense to arrange these things in the order of priority. I needed a job before anything, of course. After I had a job I could worry about replacing my car, and then moving out. When I had my own place, I could get a new PC. On paper, most people would arrange things in this order.

Life isn't written down on paper, though, and I soon began to find that my ability to follow straight lines is about as good as a Parkinson's patient's ability to draw them. I figured it would be easy to just fixate on one thing until I'd achieved it and then move on to the next, but as life went on and my perspective of my position changed, I couldn't decide which goal to fixate on. I spend the most time on my PC, and it's the least expensive thing to replace, but at the same time it's a non-necessity, but my car still runs, and better than my PC does. Meanwhile though I'm still living with my parents, and I desperately crave independence and my own place, so for a time I'll fixate on that, but then my PC starts to show its age again and becomes the center of focus. Meanwhile I'm working jobs around the city, and while I have money coming in, it seems to be going out just as quickly between repairing the car I have now and paying off my student loan.

Furthermore, I've found myself questioning what defines a good job. What defines a reliable car, or a good PC? What defines a good apartment? How much of the quality of each thing on this list am I willing to sacrifice for the sake of brevity or easiness to obtain? Suddenly my structured corner pieces have become a mismatched handful of black pieces with stars on them from a puzzle that is literally just the night sky. I don't know where they go, or how they fit together, or even why I'm holding them. I could ask for help, but what good would that do? Everyone's opinions will either reflect the standard logical order I mentioned earlier, or be tainted with bias based on their own personal views of what happiness is. They'll tell me I don't need material goods, I need religion, or maybe that I don't need money, I just need a good relationship.

Everything has suddenly spiraled into a catch 22. Only I can determine what makes me truly happy, but I have no idea what happiness even is.

Let's go back to my original statement. I've never been good at allowing myself to be comfortable. I'm constantly trapped in a state of wanting to stop and just be comfortable where I am, wanting to settle, but feeling like if I just try a little bit more I can achieve the goals I need to be happy. Every time I feel like I'm making progress along the line, I look up and realize that I've been walking in circles and nothing I've done for the last week has been productive. Am I making progress if I have a job I love that doesn't pay me enough to move out? Would it be different if I had a job I hated every day of my life that paid me better?

In the end, I have no idea. I have no idea what happiness is, or how to get there. I don't know how I'm going to take these abstract, subjective ideals of happiness and comfort and meld them together with life and reality. What I do know is that in the evenings I have good friends to talk with, I enjoy the job I have now, and I'm 500 million points into the best game of Pokemon Pinball I've ever played. Maybe until I find out how the rest of all this works, I should just take the little bits of happiness I get from simple things like these and be done with it.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Kids these days, and the games that make them stupid.

Despite my best efforts, I recently came into possession of a 3DS XL. When the original Nintendo DS came out, I swore on my life that I'd never own one of these gimmicky, glorified doodle pads that cost more than half of what a real console cost, but I've finally caved. I justify the decision based entirely on the fact that I was able to get a limited edition Legend of Zelda 3DS that's gold colored with an image of the Triforce emblazoned on the top, but deep down I'll always know I've spent a large sum of money on a handheld toy intended for children.

The decision was also influenced, however, by a group of friends who are all fans of the Pokemon franchise. You remember Pokemon, right? That game from the mid 90's about 10-year-olds who leave home to wander the world free of supervision, capturing dangerous wild animals in cramped plastic spheres and forcing them to savage each other for sport and money? Of course you do. Even grandparents who call them pokeymans or refer to all of them as either Pikachu or Pokeychu at least know what Pokemon is to some degree. When I was a kid, my dad made up his own pokemon named Squeegee just to pester us when we played the game.

The point of all of this is, I was eventually convinced to get a 3DS so that I could give the new Pokemon generation a try. I haven't played a pokemon game before this since the third generation, and with the franchise now in its sixth and sporting over seven hundred of the little creeps to capture, getting back into it was a little bit overwhelming. However, this blog post isn't actually going to be about pokemon. This post is going to be more about the aspect of the game that bothered me more than any other change, which is saying something because they've declined to the point of trying to pass off ice cream cones with eyes, piles of garbage and a set of car keys as pokemon. (Here's a fun project you can try at home. Get a bag of plastic googley eyes, a hot glue gun, and a random household object. Glue some of the eyes someplace onto the object and make up a name that combines something that describes it with something it does. Congratulations, you've created a pokemon. Send it to Nintendo and wait for your royalties check.)

The aspect of the game that bothered me the most is a term you'll find frequently among gaming communities, and that term is hand-holding. The term means pretty much exactly what you expect it might. It's when a game takes you gently by the hand, assures you it's gonna be okay, and then proceeds to do everything for you as if you had no idea what a video game was and were very lost and confused as to how this device made it into your hands.

I'll give you an example. When you begin this game, you enter a forest full of tall grass- regions where wild pokemon will attack you, and you have to battle them with your lone starter pokemon. In previous games like those from my childhood, if you didn't remember to get the secret potion hidden in your bedroom or buy some from the store before entering the forest, if your pokemon fainted it was your own damn fault. Too bad for you, guess you lose a bunch of money and have to start over. You learn a lesson about being prepared and you don't make that mistake again. In this new game however, an irritating two-dimensional character followed you around and offered to fully heal you for free anytime you liked. No lessons were learned except that the healbot in the pink shirt is evidently a magical walking hospital to be maliciously abused.

Now, this isn't to say that there weren't any tutorials in the early games. In fact, in Red and Blue versions, the first pokemon games, there was even a mandatory tutorial on how to catch pokemon. A man stopped you, you entered a cutscene where the game demonstrated how to navigate the menu, select a pokeball, and use it on the wild pokemon. Then it was over and you were free to go. No more tutorials, no more help, no more hand-holding. That was it. In this new game, however, the tutorial phase seems to last for the entire first half of the game. Your group of two-dimensional cardboard cutout characters the game forces you to be "friends" with follow you around and act like morons, adding a babyish and irritating glaze over the game's potential fun.

Another feature that's been persistent through most if not all of the games thus far has been the presence of a Rival character. In Red and Blue versions, your rival was a tough competitor who almost always gave you a run for your money. He appeared without warning at times, and his team was actually difficult to defeat in many cases. This, however, served a purpose. The game developers weren't just being sadistic by creating this obstacle you'd have to fight time and again to overcome. If your team wasn't strong enough to defeat your rival's team, it meant that progressing in the game beyond that point was going to be too difficult for you. Many transitions of the map in that game were designed to become impasses when you crossed them until you defeated a certain gym or found a certain move that would allow you to backtrack. In many cases, your rival served as a checkpoint before these impasses to make sure you didn't find yourself in a situation where you were trapped in an area too strong for your under-leveled or poorly constructed team. The point is, you learned from experience. The game didn't baby you and tell you exactly what to do and put band-aids on your boo-boos. It would coldly defeat you and tell you to go work harder. And you learned from it. Even if surpassing that obstacle meant just training one pokemon to a super-high level so you could brute-force things, it forced you to work for your progress.

In the new game however, your rival is one of the weakest trainers in the game. Her team is never full all the way to the end, she's never a challenging opponent, and there's nothing gained from defeating her. You don't learn anything except that your neighbor sucks at pokemon. Then right after that, you can stroll into a gym (or boss-area) full of confidence from your triumph only to get curb-stomped by trainers who are an actual challenge.

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old codger, back in my day, games just weren't this... childish. By this point, you may be dismissing all of this because well, it's a children's game. It's designed for children. Of course it's going to be easy and hand everything to you. But what I'm saying is that video games have almost -always- been for children, but up until recently they haven't been anywhere near this level of insultingly brainless. It isn't limited to Pokemon games, either. I've also been playing the new Legend of Zelda game that came with my special 3DS, Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. While some of the age-old difficulty and puzzle depth remains intact, there are literally areas in this game where NPCs are dotted around puzzle rooms to hand you solutions to the puzzle at hand. For instance, in an older Zelda game, you would walk into a cleverly hidden puzzle room and see a collection of moving platforms, switches, pressure plates, impassable obstacles, and a really shiny treasure right in the center of it all. You'd have to figure out how to move the platforms, what order to hit the switches, what box to place on the pressure plate and what barely-visible eye switch to shoot with an arrow in order to reach your prize. It may have taken upwards of fifteen to twenty minutes to riddle that out, and sometimes you just couldn't do it. Tough break, guess you don't want that heart piece badly enough. In those instances in A Link Between Worlds, however, if you make it across the more obvious points of the puzzle, you reach little "thief" NPCs who mutter to themselves when you speak to them. They literally mutter solutions to the problems. The game is handing you the solution to the problem with absolutely no progress required.

Furthermore, there is literally an item in the game that you get very early on called "hint goggles." You put them on, and it shows you the solution to the puzzles in the game. Not in cryptic hints, as were present in older Zelda titles, but literally hands you the solution to the puzzle on a silver platter because you used a get-out-of-thinking-free card. In an older Zelda title, if you had trouble figuring out the sliding ice-block puzzle, you could just get stuck there until it finally clicked in your brain or you wimped out and bought the guide book. It forced you to think. Learn. Solve the puzzles by using your brain. Abstract reasoning, spatial reasoning, problem solving, patience. You learned these things from these puzzles. Why then, are new games handing the solutions out like plastic trophies at the end of a tee-ball season? It's literally the same as saying, "Look. I know you didn't hit a single ball the whole season, even though it was stationary and resting on a stick right in front of you, and your foot never even touched a base, and you peed yourself in the outfield more than once. Hell, our team never even won a game the whole season long. But you know what? You showed up, sat on a bench, wore a uniform and chewed bubblegum. So here. Have a big plastic shiny reward for doing nothing. Good job, kiddo."

Guys, kids aren't stupid. They may be loud, messy, obnoxious little bundles of financial suicide, but they aren't stupid. I spoke to dozens of parents while working retail electronics over the holidays who were buying iPads and other tablets for their four and five-year-olds so they'd stop playing with theirs. After talking with them I learned that these kids nine times out of ten didn't only know how to slide the screen around and poke the buttons, but they knew how to play the games. They knew how to launch the Angry Birds to blow the castle up in one or two hits. They knew how to get on the internet, go to websites, get on the App store and buy new apps. These kids are toddlers, and they've figured this out. So why the hell are we continuing to treat them like mentally deficient sheep who need a guiding shepherd for every waking moment?

From a company standpoint I can understand these design decisions. Kids these days don't have the patience for solving puzzles or learning or challenging things. Why would you make games that are hard for kids who won't buy the next one because they couldn't beat the first?

But riddle me this. Why are these kids like that in the first place? Could it be because maybe this generation is too busy molly-coddling their kiddos, handing them everything for free and rewarding them for lack of progress? Maybe it's just being ingrained into our society that if we show up and look around, if the answer to the puzzle isn't made obvious in the first glance, we don't have to solve it. It'll eventually solve itself, or someone will hand us the solution.

All I'm saying is, it's going to be a sad day when you march down Victory Road with your assembled team of googley-eyed household objects and instead of battling you, the Elite Four just congratulate you, shower you with money and praises and cupcakes, and then gently take your hand and lead you into a degrading tutorial on how to push a big red button and have all the pokemon you haven't caught delivered to your PC free of charge because you earned it, slugger.

-The Sarcastic Soul

A Word From Microsoft, America's Favorite Company

Guys, I like to consider myself a good person. It's true. I like to think that I'm a fairly kind individual, and sometimes I like to further solidify that delusion by doing charitable and kind things for people who are in need. And you know who's in need of some charity and kindness right now? Microsoft.

Microsoft has been the center of some rather negative views by the public lately, and I feel they should have a chance to defend themselves and explain some of the things that the people are concerned over. So, in lieu of my usual blog post this week, I'm turning control over to a friend of mine from Microsoft in hopes that he'll be able to clear up some of your concerns over the company's latest decisions.

*Ahem*

Hello, readers! My name is not important. I would give it to you, of course, but I've been advised by my friends from the PR department to refer to myself simply as "Mr. X" in the interests of my own protection. I can understand, working for one of the most popular and widely-loved companies in the United States right now,  how it might be important for me to keep my identity secret. I mean, it isn't like there's anyone out there who might actually want to hurt a Microsoft employee, right? I mean, we're giving you that patch for Windows 8! You see, Microsoft is a company who listens to their fans and consumers. We read your emails. You asked us things like "Windows XP was the last operating system you guys have crapped out over the past several years that came anywhere close to functioning properly, why don't you just revert to a new version of that?" Or, "What in the nine hells were you idiots thinking when you decided to port a half-assed operating system intended for tablets and phones to PCs without changing anything?" Another popular question people ask is "Just what the actual flying [censored] are you guys smoking up there?"

Well, I'm here to tell you that we greatly appreciate your senses of humor, and we know how to recognize a good satirical joke email when we read one! Turns out, our consumers are really good at it, because we just receive so many of them! ...But in all seriousness, we did actually receive a lot of legitimate negative feedback over the latest operating system. But while we just couldn't nail down why people wouldn't enjoy being forced to navigate their personal computers via a series of pinches, swipes, pokes, loops, and ancient arcane symbols we found in the dusty Grimoire buried under our headquarters, we heard your concerns! And so, we're giving you back the start menu!

Yay!

You see, we here at Microsoft sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into highly unorthodox and unproven research methods to hone our business practices and relationship with our customers to a fine edge; the cutting edge, if you will. In a series of tests involving two groups of subjects with severe short-term memory problems and one group of goldfish, we discovered that when introducing a system or a technology with obvious flaws, a lackluster interface and confusing elements, it created a unanimous feeling of frustration and anger in our subjects. However, if we waited long enough for their short-term memories to forget that Microsoft were the ones who handed that technology to them in the first place, we could later swap that technology for something that worked marginally better at little cost to the company. Given that the somewhat improved technology was at least a little bit better than the previous incarnation they had before they forgot that Microsoft gave it to them, we found that we could actually improve our relationship with those test groups. We were so confident in this method, in fact, that we didn't even include a control group. Why bother? There was simply no way this experiment could be flawed! The kind folks behind some of our research did inform us that the test wouldn't technically be scientific or present any truthful or realistic results if we didn't have a control group, however, so in the test involving the goldfish, we replaced one of the goldfish bowls with a bowl full of goldfish crackers. The results of the tests involving the fish were inconclusive.

Regardless, however, one thing we definitely learned is that if we give a less-than-functional product to our consumers and wait a longish period of time, we can safely assume that they'll accept it as the best they're going to get. Then, when they've likely forgotten that it was Microsoft who gave that sub-par technology to them in the first place, we sweep in and offer them something slightly less crappy, and receive positive response! Of course, the real-world results of this practice have yet to yield any positive feedback, and there is always a tiny possibility that what we're doing is completely asinine and insulting to the public. But it worked in the lab, so we're convinced that it will eventually work!

Let's put all that talk of operating systems and cutting-edge sociological research aside for now, though, because that's not what I'm here to talk to you all about. I'm here to discuss Microsoft's latest revolutionary leap in gaming technology: The Xbox One.

Now, anybody with a connection to the internet can tell you that there have been some concerns raised over the Xbox One. I'm here to assure you, however, that our console is clearly the best choice for the next generation of gaming. Let's take a look at some of the features, shall we?

Let's start with the name. A lot of concern has been raised over our decision to name the new console Xbox One. "But it isn't the first one" people are saying, "How can you call it Xbox One if there was already a first Xbox? Why didn't you choose something cooler? Xbox 720 would have been more creative, and it's not even creative!" Well, let me assure you, a great deal of thought has gone into the naming of this console. We at Microsoft spent a great deal of time trying to come up with the perfect name for the new Xbox. As you know, we considered such names as the Xbox 720, the Xbox Rift, the Xbox Aurora, and The Xbox Next. Actually, in one of the console's earlier design stages when we were considering a system involving a slot that you fed money into in order to continue playing, we even considered dropping the X altogether and calling it "The Skinner Box." We were unfortunately forced to drop that name and design after Research and Development explained to us that it simply wasn't possible to have a console transfer physical dollar bills into our pockets via slots on the console because that technology didn't exist yet.

But let's get back to the point. We came to the decision to name our console the Xbox One based on a new and revolutionary development strategy. Let me ask you a question. (A rhetorical one, of course. You can't talk to a screen, after all. ...Unless you're using an Xbox One, that is! Oh snap!) Have you ever been driving in the car, and noticed that the wheels of the car next to you are moving so fast that they look like they're spinning backwards? Your smarty-pants friends and "conventional scientific information" will tell you that it's simply an optical illusion. We at Microsoft, however, are smarter than that. We've realized that this must be because the wheel is moving so fast in a forward direction that it's actually moving backward, and thus moving forward faster than things that are only moving forward. It's a bit of a tough concept, I know. Believe me. But Microsoft firmly believes that, like those car tires, the only way to truly move forward faster than your competition is to actually move backwards. Has your mind been blown yet? Of course it has! That's why we decided to name our console the Xbox One. Because the most backwards you can get from 360 is 1. Any math nerd knows that.

And on that note, I'll move to addressing the second concern people have had over our console: the design. We've been told that the Xbox One's design is bulky, brick-like and cumbersome. "It's like a cable box, except my cable box is smaller and doesn't watch me when I sleep," some critics have been saying. Well, fear not, for I am here to explain the super-logical reasoning behind our console's clunky design. It all relates to the principle I mentioned before: The only way to move forward faster than everyone else is to actually move backwards. Therefore, the only way to make sure that our console was something entirely new and innovative was to make something that has already existed for a long time and isn't innovative! The reason our console looks like a cable box is simply because it is one! But there's more to it than that! We here at Microsoft know that in order to stay ahead of the competition, you have to watch the competition. We've been watching Apple, the leading company in terms of technology. They seem to be completely obsessed with making everything smaller, thinner, and sleeker. So using that principle of backwards = forwards twice as fast, we decided that our console needed to do the opposite. We made it as big and blocky and cumbersome as we could, and even made the Kinect module bigger to match! It's literally too big to fail! ...Y'know, unless it encounters a partially-foreseen hardware issue, explodes and burns your house down, but we've been assured that it probably won't do that this time.

The third biggest issue people seem to have with the new console is the Kinect. Now, this one is simple to explain. As any good and faithful Microsoft consumer knows, the Xbox Kinect for the 360 was our most popular and innovative console accessory we ever created. It out-performed both the Wii's motion controls, and the Playstation Move system. In fact, it was so gosh-darned successful and amazing that Nintendo and Sony hired an underground ring of Russian hackers to send hundreds of thousands of emails from hijacked American addresses to tell us that our Kinect was probably the worst thing Microsoft had vomitted up since Windows Vista. We know that isn't true, though, because as everyone knows, Windows Vista was such an awesome operating system that the computers of its generation simply couldn't handle it, and we had to dumb it down for Windows 7. Fortunately for all of you, we saw through the Russian lies and realized that our Kinect was probably the best thing we've ever made. In fact, we even programmed an email filter that only allowed the emails containing positive feedback on the Kinect to reach our inboxes. As such, we've decided to build our entire new console (and possibly rest the financial future of our company) on its mighty broad shoulders. As for the concerns that the new Kinect's camera might be watching you in a disturbing voyeur-like manner, we at Microsoft would like you to rest assured that we've taken care of that. Control over the interface that monitors the only slightly-recorded Xbox Kinect video feeds has been handed off to a reliable source we came into contact with via a series of emails with the Nigerian Monarchy. They seemed to be in a bit of a pickle and asked us for our bank account information, but instead we gave them one better, didn't we? Rest assured, good consumers. Microsoft isn't a company full of idiots. It isn't like we gave control over all those in-home cameras to a group who signed every email with "Definitely not the Taliban," right? That would be silly!

And finally, the biggest concern with the new Xbox One: The always-on DRM and game-sharing features. Now, it's no secret that nobody was a fan of the always-on DRM status originally announced for the Xbox One. After all, who wants to have to be signed in and connected to the internet to play a single-player game, right? Well, we here at Microsoft have heard your concerns. Instead of being always on, your console simply has to be connected to the internet once every 24 hours. It's totally different! Our studies show that the primary concern with having your Xbox always connected to the internet is that you won't be able to relocate the system in your house because your ethernet cable doesn't stretch that far, or your wifi signal doesn't reach that room very well. So, unlike other always-on systems, the Xbox One allows you a full 23 hours of disconnected functionality! During that time, you're free to take your Xbox One anywhere! Move it around the house, take it into the back yard. Allow your daughter to have a tea party with it. Move it anyplace you want to! Leave that ethernet cable disconnected and that wifi behind for a full 23 hours every day! Just make sure you plug it back in and make sure it's online so that it can check for updates that may or may not even exist, and you're fine! You definitely still have to pay for an Xbox Live account, but why wouldn't you want to do that? Don't worry. Your Xbox One's connection to its home server at Microsoft is an important function that allows it to transfer its Kinect's video feed to a secure database owned by our Nigerian friends.

Now, we here at Microsoft understand that some people may not be able to afford an Xbox Live account, or have the available bandwidth to have their Xbox connected to the internet. That's why we've made sure that you're still able to play your games even if the Xbox hasn't updated. In the case that your Xbox One goes a full 24 hours without an internet connection, it will allow you a super-generous one full hour of use before it shuts down and demands an internet connection! Trust us, this system is flawless. Our studies tell us that internet outages and service disruptions stopped happening approximately four years ago, so there's no possible way this could go wrong.

As for games, it is true. Xbox One registers your games to your Xbox Live account, so used games will be a thing of the past. This falls in with our super cutting-edge principle of backwards is forwards twice as fast. In the past, when you bought a game, you owned that game. We ran into a bit of a brick wall with our theory here, because in order to apply it to games, we'd have to make sure you never had any games. And our studies tell us that's bad for business. But it turns out, we just weren't looking at the theory the right way. In order to apply the backwards theory to games, we have to apply a double negative. Ready to have your minds blown again? In order to make our theories work, we have to sell people games without actually allowing them to own the game. It's revolutionary. Of course, it won't save on plastic or discs or anything because we're a real American company and we're not concerned with any of that namby-pamby nature stuff. What it will do is make sure that if our servers and games go down in the future, we take all of you with us. It's like we're making you all the captain of our Microsoft ship, so it would be an honor to go down with it!

However, we've heard your feedback on your inability to loan your games that you purchased with your hard-earned money to your close friends who might enjoy and also want to purchase that game, and we've come up with some solutions. First of all, you're completely allowed to hand that game off to your friend! Just make sure that your friend has been on your friends list for a full 30 days (because real friendships take a full month to flourish, all our research on what it's like to have friends tells us that) and also make sure that you never want to play that game again. Because it belongs to that person afterwards. Because it's less like loaning and more like selling. But that's fine, it's practically the same thing. Sure, this will probably do irreparable damage to companies like GameStop and GameFly who rely on the ability to rent and sell pre-owned games to survive, but our sources tell us that they're probably owned by the same Russian hackers hired to try and tell us that the Kinect was a bad idea.

In conclusion, I hope this has put all your concerns over our new console to rest. We here at Microsoft understand that our consumers want the best, but expect the mediocre, and that's exactly what we intend to give them.

Your friend,
Mr. X

Microsoft: Backwards is the new forwards.

((The preceding blog post was a work of satire. I do not actually know anyone from Microsoft. All information and content of the above post was created in the name of humor, and is likely entirely true. Please don't sue me.))

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Technology is Not My Strong Point - College Edition.

Another version of this blog entry's title is "How technology almost ruined my life for the next year and a half, destroyed my self-image and crippled my brother's college fund." ...Mostly because that's exactly what nearly just happened.

So, the people who actually bother to check and read this blog despite the fact that it's almost never updated on time (or at all for long periods of time because I'm terrible at this) may have noticed that over the past few days, there's been a short little post about the discontinuation of this blog. The reason for that was, up until around 4 PM yesterday, I had been under the impression that due to two less-than-great grades and a missing class credit, I had not graduated and would likely have another three semesters of college to do. Now, there are a lot of reasons why that wouldn't have been okay, but the primary few were that I'd already been in college longer than expected due to my struggles with math, and going back would mean becoming a taxing financial burden on my parents as well as cutting into money that was intended for my youngest brother's college fund.

And he really needs that college fund. I'm not going to sugar coat things here, the school I attended isn't exactly prestigious. It's a good school, don't get me wrong, it's just not exactly something your families boast about at fancy dinner parties (assuming your family has anything to do with fancy dinner parties- I'm mostly working under assumptions made through watching television and reading terrible fiction). My youngest brother, however, is well on his way to attending Texas A&M, which is a real school with real prestige and lots of real opportunities. Now, it may just be a bit of a black-and-white analysis of the situation, but having to explain to him that we were going to have a bit of trouble getting him through the school he wants (and deserves) to go to because his older brother took six and a half years to finish a four-year degree doesn't exactly seem fair to me. And as you can imagine, the idea that this particular scenario was about to become reality was kind of a crippling shot to my self esteem's kidneys.

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, though. All of this started about four or five days ago when, while opening up my college email account so that I could request letters of recommendation from some former professors, I stumbled across an email that didn't look friendly. The email was titled "Final Graduation Status" and was particularly worrying for two reasons. Apart from the nagging red flag that had been in the back of my mind since I saw that my name wasn't listed in the roster of the graduating class of 2013, I also hadn't received my degree yet, or any kind of notification from the school at all. I opened the email to find the following message:

"A DEGREE FOR SPRING 2013 WILL NOT BE POSTED TO YOUR TRANSCRIPT.  A FINAL REVIEW OF YOUR ACADEMIC RECORD WAS COMPLETED AND YOUR DEGREE REQUIREMENTS HAD NOT BEEN MET.  ALL GRADES (TRANSFER/CORRESPONDENCE/SHSU) WERE DUE IN THE REGISTRAR’S OFFICE BY MONDAY, MAY 13, 2013.  YOU DID NOT MEET THE REQUIRMENTS BY THIS DEADLINE DATE.  YOU CAN CHECK YOUR GRADUATION STATUS BY GOING TO DEGREE WORKS VIA MY SAM AND THE STUDENT TAB."

 

When I first read through this message, the actual wording of the email didn't even register in my head. Instead, the only thing that my eyes read were big angry words that said "YOU DIDN'T GRADUATE BECAUSE YOU FAILED." This wasn't even slightly helped by the fact that whoever had composed this message had deemed it necessary to unleash the internet fury by pressing the Caps Lock button.

My mental faculties responded to the contents of this email by going into all-out panicking ragemode. I immediately decided that there had to be some kind of mistake, even though I knew there probably wasn't. After raging for a bit, I followed the instructions in the email and found that according to DegreeWorks, the new degree plan software used by the college, I had made grades in two difficult classes that weren't considered passing, and one required class that I had just never even taken.

So, here's a fun fact about me: I have high expectations of myself, and when I fail at things, it seriously damages my opinion of myself (which, as you may be able to tell from reading other posts in this blog, isn't very high to begin with). I may not be a superstar straight-A "4.0-all-the-way-through-life" student, but I'm fairly sure that if I were, I'd have stressed myself into an aneurism by now. I'm not an anal perfectionist, but I am a good student. During my academic career, I made plenty of A's, but I also made enough B's to open an apiary (google that if you don't get it) and enough C's to shoot a Victoria's Secret commercial. D's, however, were something I didn't make many of. In fact, I'm fairly sure that in both my dual-credit high school courses and my years of University classes, excluding the math courses my brain is physically incapable of passing (I have paperwork to prove this), I made a grand total of three D's. And I was never just "okay" with that. I tried to act like I was because it made things less stressful for me, but D's taste like failure. The only thing that made those D's tolerable in my mind was that they were in very difficult classes, one of which has about an 85% first-try failure rate (and I'm not even joking, that's what the professor starts the class by telling you), and because I was told by my academic adviser that a D was still passing.

 

 As you might imagine, then, staring at a web page that told me those D's were in fact not passing, and that I had just straight up missed an entire class I should have taken, it didn't feel good. It felt like life was saying, "Oh by the way, you know those failures that you were pretending were okay so that you could continue to exist with some false peace of mind? Well now they really are failures, and so are you, because you failed college."

I really don't feel the need to go into the exact details of what happened over the next few days, but suffice it to say that I was not in a good place. I closed down my Facebook and my Blog, because as you can probably imagine it's kind of hard to be sociable or funny when you feel like your stupid mistakes have ruined everything. It basically became that part of every romantic comedy ever where the music gets all slow and sentimental, and the characters are all mad at each other because someone did something stupid, and it spends far too long showing off how much everything sucks with lots of dramatic "staring woefully into the distance with close-ups" shots.

Then yesterday I drove up to my apartment so that I could beg the management to let me keep it a bit longer, despite having said I wasn't going to renew my lease. While putting in an application at the local IHOP, I realized something. All the courses in question were not attached to my major, which was completed. They were all attached to my minor. After some consideration, I decided that the best course of action would then be to go to the school and cut my minor off like a malignant tumor and just deal with not having one. I headed up to the college and sat down to have a talk with the head of the English department, who also happened to be my academic adviser. And I learned a few things.

First of all, it's required to have a minor in order to graduate from the university, which wasn't great for my plan. However, she was just as confused as I was as to why I didn't graduate. We pulled up my records on DegreeWorks, and we found a few things out. First of all, I was remembering correctly and those two D's were supposed to be passing. DegreeWorks just didn't realize that, so it marked them down as incomplete. Furthermore, we realized that the reason I had a class that was completely unaccounted for was because I had taken an entirely different class to substitute for that credit, because the class in question hadn't been offered that semester and it would have prevented me from graduating on time. DegreeWorks, however, just took that class and plugged it into a completely unrelated area of my degree plan, and left the other course as an incomplete credit.

After all that, it turned out I was supposed to have graduated. I had spent the last several days in a state of mental and emotional wreckage...

...because of a system error.

In the end, I did graduate. And I will receive my degree, as I originally should have. Just leave it to the wonders of computer software to completely destroy a guy's life for a few days.

Thanks, technology.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Hello? Yes, I'd like to cancel my subscription to BS Monthly immediately.

Well folks, I realize it's been a long time since I've updated this. And I apologize. I really do. I have no excuses, so I won't make any. I just fell out of the habit and never got back in. And that's an explanation, not an excuse. I'm still taking the blame. See that? That's proactively countering smartassery.

However, today is different than most of my days recently. Today, something blogworthy happened, so I'm gonna blog about it.

I'm currently home from class for my two-hour break between classes, and I happened to stop by my mailbox. I had a typical stack of junk mail, but one envelope stuck out to me. It had my full name and address on it, and even though I didn't recognize it, usually junk mail is addressed to "Valued Texas Resident" or some insincere crap like that. So on the off-chance it was something important, I decided to open it. Inside was a notice that read as follows:

"Dear HAYDEN GOFF,

Thank you! Central Periodical Service, our authorized representative, has placed your subscription order on 2/11/2013 for the following titles:

________________________________________________________________________

ESQUIRE

ROLLING STONE

ESPN

CAR AND DRIVER

MENS FITNESS

MAXIM

MOTOR TREND

All subscriptions are mailed to you directly from the publishers.

Please allow 60 to 90 days to get your new service started.

Your Payment Plan:

You will pay $59.90 a month for the first 30 months and nothing for the remaining months of service. The total of your 30 payments is $1,797.00"

Now, after staring at that piece of paper in panicked disbelief for a few moments, I suddenly recalled a particular cell phone call I had received last week. I was half asleep on my couch when I answered a call for a number I didn't recognize, which was probably a mistake in and of itself. However, there is a particular number from some agency who's evidently convinced that I'm an illegal immigrant or something because every time I answer it, I get an automated voice speaking to me in Spanish. I don't know enough Spanish to tell the automated voice to "get me off your call list," so I usually just answer it and immediately hang up. This time, however, the voice spoke English, and it knew my name. 

It was some guy calling about my magazine subscriptions, asking if I'd like to continue them. Now, I actually do have subscriptions to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics that I'm rather fond of, and when he rattled off my apartment number and zip code I figured it had to be about those. They're the only magazines I've ever directed to this address. Not content with assumptions, however, I asked the voice, "Is this for my Popular Mechanics and Popular Science subscriptions?"

"Yes, it is." I was assured by the voice on the other end of the phone. Satisfied with that answer, I continued his little "customer satisfaction" survey and played along. Then, after that conversation had ended, he asked me if I would like to renew my subscriptions. Now, normally that would have thrown up a few red flags because not only had I subscribed to Pop Science/Mechanics via an online service that automatically renews my heavily discounted student subscriptions (which were a grand total of $20 per year for both), but that particular service has never called me before to ask this. As I mentioned before, however, I was napping before I got the call, so I groggily agreed. Sure, I'd like to keep getting these two magazines I like to read.

"And this is for Popular Science and Popular Mechanics?" I asked again, to make sure.

"Yes, that's correct." Said the voice. And so I agreed to renew my subscriptions, identified my credit card for him, and told him I would like to have the magazines shipped to the same location.

I was then transferred over to another person, a supervisor of some sort, who asked me if the other young man I had been talking to had been kind and professional with me. I told him the other voice had been perfectly professional to make sure the previous phone jockey got his biscuit and a good pat on the head, and then proceeded on with what the new voice instructed me to do. He mentioned a price of $59 for the subscriptions, which was a little steeper than I had remembered, but when I asked him about it he simply explained it away by stating that they'd had to raise their prices recently. I do enjoy Popular Science/Mechanics, though, so I figured sure, why not? It's only a once-yearly payment, I can deal with a couple extra dollars tacked on. He then had me answer yes and no to a series of questions and confirmations, and after what seemed like an hour in a conversation I was ready to hang up on since I picked the phone up, we were done.

Now let me be clear about something. I may have been groggy, but I paid some hard attention to that auctioneer-speed gibberish he was spouting into my ear after instructing me to respond to certain key words with "yes" or "no" like some kind of Pavlovian experiment. Never at any single moment in time did he mention ANY of the magazine titles above, or anything about a total payment of nearly $1,800. Still convinced that all I'd done was renew my subscriptions to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, I went on about my nap.

And then today happened. Now, let me explain a little something about today BEFORE I opened that letter. In the past week since that phone call, my Alienware decided it was going to pull one of those "We're going to update and shut down your computer in 15 minutes whether you like it or not, so suck an egg" maneuvers, only instead of improving anything, it learned a new trick where it can no longer boot Windows. Furthermore, I had a headache-inducing weekend of homework where I had to read two full novels, several chapters of another, and write a critical analysis paper comparing Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse to Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory." And regardless of having this done, I got a grand total of ZERO hours of sleep last night. Then, upon arriving at campus, I was rudely reminded that despite the fact that I was in the English building where ALL OF THE PAPERS ARE WRITTEN, we only have one single computer lab, and it's booked solid 24/7 for classes. ("But Soul, there are only classes on FIVE days of the week..." Yes, that's called hyperbole. Shut up.) So in order to print the damn paper I had written for class and turn it in, I had to go over to the writing lab. You know, the one where they help you write papers, and then you print them out and turn them in. Except for the part where evidently, every computer in that lab is completely incapable of printing anything. After this discovery was made, I was 10 minutes late to a class I arrived early for, and it was raining.

And then I get home and find a notice in my mailbox telling me that I owe some magazine syndicate eighteen hundred dollars for a bunch of magazines I wouldn't even read if they were the only things on the magazine rack of the most awkward doctor's office waiting room on Earth. Irate does not begin to describe the emotion I could feel welling up inside me.

And then I spied a 1-800 number on the bill.

Now, I understand that working in customer service sucks. I understand that working in that particular position means that you literally deal with nothing but people who are already pissed off. And I also understand that when you're working customer service as an underling for an evil corporation of phone monkeys who charge unwitting college students over half their tuition in phantom magazine subscriptions, you're probably spending every waking moment with somebody biting your head off. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the particular circle of hell your desk was stationed at. And so in light of all this, I tried to be pleasant. I really did. Fortunately, I was immediately directed to an actual human being instead of having to play the world's worst game of phone tag with an automated caller system that could misinterpret plain English into something akin to Swahili curse words. Unfortunately, I was extremely pissed off and immediately directed to a human being with feelings I was going to have to resist the urge to hurt.

I was greeted by one of the cheeriest voices I've ever heard. The voice introduced herself as Melanie and asked what she could do for me today. Calmly explaining that I had just received a bill for a gigantic stack of magazines I'd never even thought about subscribing to, was looking at paying (and I'm restating this for emphasis) over HALF MY COLLEGE TUITION in bills for said magazines, and was (understandably, I thought) a little bit absolutely livid, I was going to try my golly gosh darnedest to not completely breathe rage-induced sarcastic venom through the phone line. She promised to do her best to help me, and I said that the best way she could help me was to remove this ridiculous charge from my account immediately, and then immediately remove my account and make sure I'm never contacted by this company again. She told me that would be no problem, and she would get right on it.

"However," she began, "You mentioned that you liked Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, and if you'd like I can see if I can get you on the subscription list for those, or some similar magazines, because we'd be able to get them to you for less, I'm sure."

Now, here's a conundrum for you. How exactly does a living human being interpret the equivalent of "I am hinging on murderous rage over the fact that your company has duped me into a $1,800 bill for subscriptions to seven testosterone-infested packets of emergency toilet paper and I want you to make that not a thing" as "Clearly, the best way to handle this situation is to attempt to sell this person more magazines."

Is it her job to do that? Probably. Did I care? Not even a little bit.

But against all odds, I remained civil. And I told her, as kindly as I could, that no thank you, I really wasn't interested in any magazines from this company ever, and I meant ever, and if she would just remove this bill and remove me from their system forever, that would be just hunky dory. And so she complied, and after one last reminder that if I ever decided I wanted any magazines I should come on back, our business was concluded and I hung up the phone.

And that's how I dodged an eighteen hundred-dollar bullet, managed not to make the customer service lady cry, and possibly got my credit card information hijacked. This is the part where I should say that the moral of the story is if you get phone calls from magazine companies you should just hang up the phone and go back to sleep, but because I'm still a little bit bitter over the whole situation, I'm just going to say that the real moral of the story is that magazine salesmen are the spawn of Satan.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

How Abusing Outcasts Saved Christmas - A Cynic's Take on "Rudolph"

Long ago, in the early days of television, animation and cartoons, certain things we now consider "taboo" or "inappropriate" were much less critically analyzed. In the good old days of cartoons, we had shows about a cat and mouse actively attempting to brutally murder each other with shotguns, fire axes and 100 ton weights. We laughed at a bald hunter's obvious speech impediment as he hunted and shot at woodland creatures, and throughout it all, mysterious OSHA-devoid company "ACME" continually ripped off consumers with untested and potentially dangerous products presumably plucked from the rejected surplus bins on the factory floor.

In today's cartoons, we've replaced the weaponry and wanton violence with nonsensical, unfunny plots aimed more at hypnotizing or possibly brainwashing viewers, and persistently bad art styles that look like brain vomit from particularly bad acid trip. The homicidal cats and smart-ass rabbits of my childhood have been replaced with such characters as a potentially homosexual talking sponge and his obviously mentally retarded starfish life-partner. But that's a topic for another blog post. The cartoon I want to talk about today is the old Christmas classic stop-animation style "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer."

Watching this old movie has been a Christmas tradition in my parents' house since we were little, and that style of animation was still relevant. Every year that I watch it, however, it seems to be just a little bit... darker, I guess.

The movie technically begins with a rambling introduction from a talking snowman character who turns out to be largely unimportant to the rest of the film, but really begins in a little cave where Rudolph has just been born. Donner and his otherwise nameless baby mama, I guess, have just discovered that their child's nose is something akin to the siren light from a 1950's police car, complete with flashing red light action. They're so appalled by this bizarre deformity that they completely disregard the fact that while they're oggling it, Rudolph says "mama" and "papa" presumably for the first time. As they discuss the difficulty of overlooking something so horrendous, Santa Claus walks in to see the baby. His reaction essentially amounts to "You'd better hope he outgrows that, because I don't accept freaks on my reindeer team." Then he sings a little song and leaves, and Donner decides to take action. He slaps some mud over Rudolph's nose so he'll be a "normal little buck just like everyone else." Once the mud is covering Rudolph's nose and he can bear to look at his son again, he pulls him in for some affection. "Come here, son. Now that your god-awful facial deformity is covered, I can love you again."

Meanwhile, over in Santa's workshop, we're introduced to Herbie the elf. Herbie the elf doesn't like to make toys, and evidently, this is a crime in elf culture. In fact, when he reveals this fact to his slave driv- eh, overseer, the other elves around him sneer evilly at him and chant that he should be ashamed of himself for wanting to be different. Don't believe me? Look it up, the whole movie's on YouTube. Instead, he explains, he wants to be a dentist. For this, he's mocked by his peers and his overseer person and forced to work through his break (which, considering that the elves are pretty much slave laborers, I don't imagine they get many of) all for wanting to do something different.

So let's recap. So far, we've established that if you are different, you will be mocked by your peers, can be fired from your job, deserve no respect from your parents, and Santa Claus hates you. And we aren't even ten minutes into the film yet.

Fast forwarding again (approximately twenty seconds, because it doesn't take long to find more blatant discrimination and hate in this movie) and we find Donner forcing a nose cap thing on Rudolph. Rudolph doesn't like it and complains that it isn't comfortable (and presumably forces him to breathe through his mouth, which is really attractive), and Donner basically tells him to shut the hell up and wear it because unless his horrendous malformed nose is disguised, he won't be able to have self-respect, and Santa will continue to hate him. Meanwhile, the elf choir performs an original song and dance routine for an impatient Santa Claus who spends the entire duration of the recital facepalming and slouching impatiently in his chair. When it's finally over, he dismisses the whole affair with a mumbled "Well, it needs work," before rushing out the door, presumably to go piss on someone else's hopes and dreams. The elf overlord, however, takes this as an opportunity to inform the elves that they were all terrible, and then storms off to find Herbie so he can inform him of exactly how useless he is, and how he'll never fit in. Probably because elves in this world have something against fabulous hair.

Back at the Rudolph-focused side of the plot, Coach Comet shows up to teach the little reindeer how to fly. With some adorable encouragement from his new friend Clarice, Rudolph manages to out-fly all the other reindeer, and right in front of Santa. Seems like a pretty nice turn for this story, right? Well, we can't have that now, can we? In a celebratory bit of horseplay, Rudolph's new friend Fireball knocks his nose-cover off his face. Immediately, Rudolph becomes the reindeer equivalent of Quasimodo, and scares his only friend away. To make matters worse, the other reindeer start mocking him calling him names. But Santa's right there. Surely he'll intervene and save the poor underdog, right? Actually, he tells Rudolph's father that he should be ashamed for bringing such an abomination into this world, and not having the decency to smother it before it inflicted itself on the rest of reindeer kind. Santa storms off, and Comet blows his whistle to restore order and send the little deer back to practice. Except Rudolph, who he sends home. But not before announcing to the rest of the group, and I quote, "From now on, gang, we won't let Rudolph join in any reindeer games, right?" To put this in perspective, that's like if the weird kid in school pissed his pants in Gym class, and the coach decided to make an example of him by hanging him from his ankle with the climbing rope and instructing the rest of the class to beat him like a whiffle bat piñata. And then the principal comes in and calls him a fag before leaving him to his fate. Oh, and Santa Claus hates him.

I don't really feel the need to go through the entire movie because you've probably got the point by now, so I'll skip to the triumphant return of Rudolph to Christmas Town. The narrator gives a brief little bit about how maybe people shouldn't have been so hard on the misfits. Herbie gets to open a dentist office, and Santa promises to help out the Isle of Misfit Toys (another lengthy adventure in life lessons about how you'll be rejected and abandoned for being different). It isn't because they feel bad about it, though. It's because the "misfits" have proven themselves to be useful in some kind of way, so they're tolerated now. This includes Rudolph, who's only allowed to join the reindeer team because his glimmering nose cancer will allow Santa to navigate a storm.

Hooray! The freaks found a way to be useful, Santa learned to abuse Rudolph's deformity instead of mocking him for it, and everybody lived happily ever after. Except that until this point, the movie has clearly been setting itself up for the part where everyone learns a lesson. Except nobody ever does. While Rudolph and his melancholy band of misfits find their proverbial bells to ring (that's another hunchback of Notre Dame reference, folks) the movie COMPLETELY FORGETS TO CONDEMN the fact that everyone's been abusing these people the ENTIRE MOVIE. Sure, they find a place to fit in and some half-assed apologies are given, but nowhere does it punish or condemn the behavior from earlier in the film.

So there you have it, folks. The lessons taught by the old Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer film are that if you're born a freak, or possibly a homosexual elf with fabulous hair, your miserable existence will be spent getting kicked in the teeth by life, people will mock you, your parents should be ashamed and Santa Claus will hate you, but it's okay in the end. Because somebody will find a way to abuse your deformities for their own personal gain.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

-The Sarcastic Soul-