K.I.T.T. stands for “Knight rider is reTurning unforTunately “

Or possibly “Knight Rider‘s Not Unix.”

Gnu joke… Anybody? Oh well. It actually stands for Knight Industries Two Thousand. Yes, they spelled out 2000 to make their super R.A.D.D. acronym work. Back in the 80’s, the year 2000 was believed to be so distant in the future (nearly 20 years) that it must be part of a fantastical future scape rife with unimaginable wonders like sentient talking cars voiced by middle school principals. So any time something in an 80’s movie or TV show was supposed to be futuristic, or a thing that doesn’t normally talk had to talk they would tack a “deuce triple ought” to the tail end of it.

When I first read that NBC was bringing Knight Rider back to the smallish screen, I could only think of T.K.R.Team Knight Rider (that’s to those of you outside of the T.K.R. Fan-Fic community). Maybe YourTubes has some Team Knight Rider videos you can watch to better understand why even still I quiver in a cold sweat at the mere mention of teams or knights or anything riding anything else. Just look at the cast list. Keep in mind the names on the left are supposed to be the actors’ REAL names:

Brixton Karnes as Kyle Stewart
Christine Steel as Jenny Andrews
Rick Copp as Clayton
Michael Lexx, as Scott
Steve Forrest as the Shadow

This is either the Team Knight Rider cast or the cast of “Backdoor Glory Hole Creampies IV.”

Oh look, I found a list of understudies:

Tad Firetruck as Jim
Blast Fuckfurnace as Jim C.
Leggz Tittsington as Cheryl
Beaf Manmeat as Jim H.
Chest Tittsingon (no relation) as Tanya “Tits”Tittsington

NBC RESPECTS ME AS AN INTELLIGENT CONSUMER!

Heroes continues to not be X-Men

A virus that only infects super powered individuals? No way.

Josh seems to have a crush on Ali Larter, as much as any gay man can have a crush on a woman. He has similarly misplaced feelings for Kristen Bell, who is also joining the cast of Heroes. He’s often said things like, “Man, this movie is terrible and everyone in it should get flesh eating virus and die… except for Ali Larter. I really like Ali Larter. She should get a prize.”

I caught the premier of Heroes on NBC this week. They are pulling a LOST and introducing new characters before dealing with the ones I actually give a shit and a half about. They are also continuing their sparse display of powers on screen. I want optic blasts and sonic booms, and powers that actually have a physical (or graphical) manifestation. Hiro has a great power but they chose to represent it with a “Squishy Blink” as opposed to any sort of time or space warping effect. Hell, I would settle for a sound effect. A nice “WHOOOAAAAMMMMG!” or “ZOOOOORRRMMP!” would suffice.

How about a few more lame-ass powers that require no CG:

Guy that can reverse the Coriolis effect in Australian toilets (you could just film the toilets in America!)
Guy that can alter international shipping rates at the Post Office (very profitable eBay business)
Guy that can draw crude sexual flip books on Post-It Notes really fast (flip it in reverse and she doesn’t get chlamydia)
Girl that can keep her eyes open when she sneezes (also causes a random person’s brain to melt every time she does it. But she doesn’t know that)

These are all great ideas!

I read that the new Latino heroes (I think their names are Dora and Diego) are real life Wonder Twins. Their powers are somehow connected and activated only when they make out or something. I hate the Wonder Twins so goddamn much. You’ve got these alien siblings with fantastical magic power rings and transmogrification abilities yet one of them can only turn into things made of water.

To compensate they would pull shit like,

“Wonder Twin Powers Activate!”
“Form of a fucking T-Rex with giant teeth and crushing mandibles and an insatiable hunger for flesh!”
“Shape of an Ice Dinosaur!”

They also had a space monkey, Gleek. He couldn’t do shit. Space Ghost’s space monkey, Blip,was a brilliant strategist and decorated hero. Gleek was a poo-flinging retard.

Jonathan Coulton: Zombie Fighting Troubadour pt. 2 (Extinction)

Amazingly enough, there actually is a part 2 to last week’s edition of “Jonathan Coulton: Vampire Slayer Zombie Fighting Troubadour.” First thing’s first. The JoCo show last Wednesday at Club Dada here in Dallas was a blast. Jonathan’s performance was fantastic. JoCo is quite different from most comedy/music acts. Jonathan’s songs seem to be about robots and squids and ruined ponies on the surface but you can tell the underlying emotion is real. It reminds me of a geek that is trying to tell a girl he loves her and all he can muster is a Buffy analogy. Also, I highly recommend Paul and Storm, who opened for Jonathan and backed him up on about 1/3 of his set. They were more or less straight comedy but their set killed.

Afterwards I gave Jonathan a print of the for “JC:ZFT” comic. He signed a copy of it for me and posed for a pic with Josh, my wife, Emily, and myself (as is evidenced below).

What a cool guy. Also, if you haven’t seen JoCo perform “Mr. Fancy Pants” live with his wearable-midi-trigger-contraption… then you haven’t seen that. And you should. Because it was entertaining. If you aren’t a JoCo fan at all and this comic made no sense, please go check out his music page and listen to “Re: Your Brains.” You’ll be smiling when it’s over.

Originally the comic wasn’t going to have anything to do with Resident Evil: Extinction, but Josh dragged us to it and I felt I had to get some kind of value for my $9. It’s my own fault for saying yes. Josh does this shit all the time. Somehow he got me to go to Pulse just by repeating, “It’s got Veronica Mars. It’s got Veronica Mars,” over and over. I didn’t even watch Veronica Mars! It’s as if he were to call and say, “Hey! I got this giant hammer to smash my scrotum to death with and I was thinking you might want to get in on this action.” And somehow I agree.

UPDATE: Revisionist History

Today’s comic, much like the Original Star Wars Trilogy, was released in an incomplete state. It didn’t properly communicate my vision. I rarely go back and make changes unless there are mistakes, but this one just wasn’t all there. So take another look and see what you think. Maybe later I will release the original comic on a Director’s Cut DVD. But it will be a shitty laser disc transfer with 2 channel audio.

Jonathan Coulton: Zombie Fighting Troubadour pt. 1

(Written Wednesday 9/19/07, which was yesterday)

The Jonathan Coulton show is tonight. This means I don’t have tonight to finish tomorrow’s comic. Well, guess what, you nay-sayers (always nay-saying)? I finished it last night! Lube that up and stick it in your corn-tube. This is unusual for me (the finishing early, not the tube part), since I generally live by a strict code of professional procrastination. If I told the you the exact steps I take to make a comic and what order I did them in, you could easily spot the trends in declining quality as I approach the tasks I complete after 1:00am. (hint: It’s the drawing and the writing).

Imagine that last sentence being read by Stephen Hawking. In that scenario “quality of comic”= entropy and 1:00am = the speed of light. I think that makes me the singularity and my couch the event horizon. The point is, I collapse in on myself and then someone has to reboot the universe (hold power for 5 seconds then press F8 to enter safe mode).

Somehow this turned into an XKCD comic.

Regardless, I’m psyched for the JoCo show and hope to see you there. Special thanks to all of you who have been Stumbling HijiNKS Ensue!

Hyper Realistic Murder Simulators

Wii Fanboy posted a story about a group of parents in New Jersey and their reactions to the news of Nintendo (also referred to by parents as “Intendo”, “Nintenda”, and “That Goddamned Vidya Game”) releasing a military grade weapons training system for the Wii called the Wii Zapper. There are a few facts I should get out of the way:

The Nintendo Wii is ONLY intended for children ages fetus – 4 yrs.
Nintendo uses hypnosis to force parents to buy gun peripherals for their impressionable children against their better judgment.
The Wii Zapper will only be used for games whose sole purpose is shooting defenseless people in the face for no reason other than to watch them die. You can use a 2nd Wiimote to piss on their bodies after robbing them.
The Japanse NEVER got over WWII. Turning our children into killing machines is their ultimate revenge.

Other sites have already gone into sufficient detail debunking this horse crap of a non-story so I won’t bother rehashing their points about parental responsibility, etc, etc. I can only add my own experience to the mix. Like most of you, my first NES game was the bundled double-dong of Super Mario Bros./ Duckhunt. I shot the fuck out of some ducks. Like e’ry day. I was all about it. I graduated to the gigantic motherfucking Dirty Harryesque “Konami Justifier” for Lethal Enforcers on the Genesis. Then it was the Guncon for PSX Time Crisis (the “crisis” in question was that the game cost $65 and the “time” part was the 30 minutes it took to beat it). By the time the XBox came around I was using my analog sticks FPS style, though I did rent House of the Dead and the snot-green gun it employed on occasion. This isn’t even considering the countless flavors of Nazi, robot, futuristic armor-type-guy, and aliens I wasted with a mouse and keyboard.

I played a whole f-ing lot of shooters as a child, preteen, teen, and so forth. Guess what? I don’t even like guns. I haven’t even ever fired a real one. I’ve only been in 3 fist fights and all before 8th grade. Other than outing myself as the world’s biggest pussy just now, I have also proven that video game violence doesn’t equate to real life violence when you are dealing with a relatively well adjusted individual.

If anything the murder-sims have taught me invaluable life lessons. When the zombies rise, or the machines revolt, the remnants of Third Reich harness evil sorcery and imbue it into a reanimated Hitler clone, or any other variety of shits hit the fan I WILL BE READY. New Jersey’s parents will be pissing themselves getting eaten, assimilated, or transmogrified into rodents by Super Hitler while their kids and I are forming a rag tag resistance force and kicking undead cyborg Nazi ass. Unfortunately we will also be shit-talking over networked headsets. It’s shameful but good for team morale.

Bonus Dowload: Hi-res of the final panel with “Magical Unicorn Rainbow Defecator Happy Experience Challenge.”