We All Die Screaming

The HIJINKS ENSUE STORE Is where you can buy stuff that I made! It supports me and my family and keeps this little operation going.

This video RUINED my brain.

Check Out Industrial Light and Magic’s Oscar Effects Reel for The Avengers

COMMENTERS: Have you ever been completely fooled by subtle CG or other movie FX and astonished when you found out the trickery? The lies? The deceit?

If you used to get HE in your email inbox through Feedburner (a service I stopped using this year because Google stopped supporting it), this service seems to offer the same functionality for free.

Just plugin the HE RSS feed [http://hijinksensue.com/feed/] and your email address.

The Unsearchable Ones

The HIJINKS ENSUE STORE Is where you can buy stuff that I made! It supports me and my family and keeps this little operation going.

There are two lies in the above comic. 1) Josh would never “Bing” anything, and 2) The Apple Store would never deny Josh anything. They simply pull up his purchase history, count the copious amounts of zeroes, and immediately start peeling grapes for him. I, on the other hand, being the guy that buys a new computer every 4+ years, a new pair of phones every other generation and a new ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE EVER, get the standard “this is out of warranty and even though there was a recall it only applies to everyone in the world BUT you” treatment.

When the Macbook Pros came out in 2007, I made my switch to Mac as did my wife. A little over a year later people were noticing that the power supply cables were coming unsheathed and fraying all over the place and, in some cases, catching fire. Apple started replacing them free of charge to avoid a class action suit (though I believe there was eventually a suit and a settlement). Once day my wife’s power supply cable up and caught on fire while it was plugged into her computer. It burst into flame EXACTLY where her leg would have been, had she been using it at the time. I knew about the issue and brought both of our power supplies in for replacement. The Genius on hand told me he could replace the one that had already combusted, but not the one that was in grave danger of combusting since it was still in it’s pre-combusted state. So I went home, set it on fire with a lighter, brought it back to the Apple store and got a replacement.

COMMENTERS: Give me your best computer repair/ tech support/ massive malfunction story. Was the dumbness on your head or theirs? Every try to return something that you clearly ruined through your own stupidity? A buddy of mine once returned a CF-Card sized micro hard drive that his cat had peed on. Luckily the Best Buy employees aren’t in the habit of sniffing every return.

If you used to get HE in your email inbox through Feedburner (a service I stopped using this year because Google stopped supporting it), this service seems to offer the same functionality for free.

Just plugin the HE RSS feed [http://hijinksensue.com/feed/] and your email address.

Parallelogramps

CRUISE FUNDRAISER UPDATE: All 100 “Bridge Collapse” prints are sold, signed, packed and shipping as I type. If you ordered, you’ll get a shipping email soon.

Me and Wil Wheaton made some shirts for you to put on your body.

I have mixed feelings about the ending of Fringe (warning you now, I will definitely be posting SPOILERS]. On one hand, I LOOOOOVED the show, loved the characters, loved the intricate, interweaving plots and subplots and especially loved John Noble’s mushy grandpa face that he wants me to kiss the cheeks of because he is my crazy science grandpa. On the other hand (and this is coming from someone who just said all of those things that I just said), I think they finished telling the story of Fringe a season ago when they finally realized William Bell was the big bad all along and defeated him.

Every mystery established since the pilot: what’s with all the weirdo science crap happening all over the place, who’s this dude David Robert Jones, and what’s his deal, why is Olivia so special, why is Peter so SUPER special, who are the ZFT and are they the bad guys, who are the observers and are THEY the bad guys, who is William Bell and IS HE the bad guy, what happened to Walter’s brain, what’s the deal with Nina and Massive Dynamic and ARE THEY the bad guy? All of these questions were answered to my satisfaction by the time Olivia took the bullet to the head on Belly’s boat.

Everything that happens after that point (and really everything that happens in the first half of season 4) is basically non-integral to the overall story arch of Fringe. Especially considering all the timeline reboots and in-universe retcons that take place in parts of season 4 and the entirety of season 5, those literally do not effect the plot. That said, I did enjoy nearly every episode of the final two seasons. It was great TV and great Sci-Fi. I’m just not sure that all of it was necessary. The argument could even be made that the last two seasons kind of muddy up the mythos of Fringe and detract more than they add. The showrunner already apologized for the “Peter never existed” plot (which should have been 2, maybe 3 episodes max). If you completely ignore the vanishing Peter aspects of season 4, it makes an appropriate endcap for the series (assuming Peter would have gotten out of the machine alive having healed the mutliverse, instead of teleporting to a future war zone). And the “Observers invasion” final season was quite enjoyable, but it was a completely different story from what seemed like a completely different show. It was a ballsy move (skipping 21 years between TV seasons), but I don’t think it was needed.

The Observers might be the one thing that required a bit more explanation by the time Olivia took the bullet and saved the universe(s) once and for all, but I think they could have tied a nice little bow around their existence with one final scene where either Olivia or Walter are greeted by September, who explains how they are from 600 years in the future and how they’ve been intervening in Walter, Olivia and Peter’s lives in order to make sure the two universes were healed. The end. The “we broke the future so we’re going to conquer the past” just doesn’t feel like anything that was ever really planned for Fringe. It felt tacked on at the end. Blah blah blah, still liked it, yadda yadda.

Fringe has been rerunning on the Science Channel for awhile now. I find that I can’t watch single episodes of the show AT ALL. It’s far too serialized to catch a one-off without a definite plan to continue from that point on. Even the early “monster of the week” episodes bother me as standalone adventures because I know too much and I want the characters to know the same as I do. The most satisfying episodes in terms of rewatchability for me are the ones before Peter disappeared where we were alternating between universes. The contrasts between the Universe-A and Universe-B characters, the story possibilities they explored, all of it was just incredibly satisfying. And Walternate… ooh man he was a fantastic character, due in no small part to how my love for Walter fed into my near hatred and ultimate FRUSTRATION with Walternate. That was some expert writing and acting.

Damn, I guess I sort of wish the show had been cancelled after season 4 after all. Oh well. Considering it was primetime sci-fi and ESPECIALLY considering it was on FOX, it’s safe to say I got more quality entertainment from Fringe than I deserved or should have ever expected.

COMMENTERS: How did you feel about the Fringe finale or the last two seasons in general? If you’ve never watched Fringe, what kept you away? Please tag spoilers in your comments with [SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!!!!!] for the sake of others.

If you used to get HE in your email inbox through Feedburner (a service I stopped using this year because Google stopped supporting it), this service seems to offer the same functionality for free.

Just plugin the HE RSS feed [http://hijinksensue.com/feed/] and your email address.

The Dopest

If you missed the lastest HijiNKS ENSUE comic “White Light, White Heat, White Guilt,” then… don’t. Don’t have missed it.

CRUISE FUNDRAISER UPDATE: All 100 “Bridge Collapse prints are sold! Woohoo! They arrive at my house this weekend (a week later than I anticipated) and will start shipping Monday the 20th.

I made a new eBook/iBook! It’s called “Sorry I Ruined Your Book Vol. 1”! which is available to anyone for a one time “pay what you like” donation.

I had a reader tell me via twitter he was unaware that I had a store where I sold T-shirts and books and such. WELL I CERTAINLY DO.

I’m pretty sure I’ve accurately described blood doping in the panels above. You take out your blood, put stuff in it, then reput the blood back in your carcass, thus infusing said YOU with the new stuff. I can only assume this method arrose out of an athletes desire for somewhat plausible deniability. “I never took performance enhancing drugs. I just had all my blood removed, went and ran a few errands and when I came back and put my blood back in there was all these drugs in it. What am I supposed to do? Take my blood out AGAIN and run it through a Brita filter? Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the Olympic Committee, I beseech thee… believe this crazy lie so I can keep doing on these drugs because THEY MAKE ME FEEL INVINCIBLLLLLLLLLLE!!!!!! [headbutts the witness stand in half, leaps through the ceiling, runs into then across the ocean, is eaten by a whale]

My point is, if Lance Armstrong if guilty of anything it’s being a stone cold sports-Dracula. Like any other highly competitive sports-Dracula, he only eats blood and sometimes you get tired of the same old hemoglobin and you gots to add some taste enhancing seasoning. Also he’s guilty of perjury and all the other regular drugs he took too. What a creep.

COMMENTERS: In a bleak and dismal hypertechno future, the only way we get nourishment is by removing all of our blood, dumping it full of whatever and pumping it back into… let’s say our eyes. You get the idea. What’s your additive of choice? Red Bull? Bourbon? Sriracha? Lik-M-Aid powder?

White Light, White Heat, White Guilt

UPDATE: Get a print of panel 3 of this comic HERE!!!

CRUISE FUNDRAISER UPDATE: All 100 “Bridge Collapse prints are sold! Woohoo! They arrive at my house this weekend (a week later than I anticipated) and will start shipping Monday the 20th.

I made a new eBook/iBook! It’s called “Sorry I Ruined Your Book Vol. 1” and it has over 180 pages of HE book 1 preorder/artist edition sketches with commentary on every drawing! Donation subscribers get it free and it’s also available to anyone for a one time “pay what you like” donation.

I had a reader tell me via twitter he was unaware that I had a store where I sold T-shirts and books and such. WELL I CERTAINLY DO.

I absolutely loved Django Unchained. Call it a base, animal reaction, but I really do enjoy seeing histories most egregious hatefucks getting served violent and almost comically gory revenge. I’m not super gung ho on cinematic violence, but how can you argue with Jews carving up Nazi’s or freed slaves cutting a swath of recently face-exploded slave masters across the South? (I guess you could argue plenty if that’s just not your bag, but it certainly hits the spot for me).

Django Unchained is a Tarantino film if there ever was one (Spoilers: There was. There was a few, actually… WERE a few. A couple of them were good.). It’s backdrop is a terrifyingly hateful period in American history and deals with some of the most unpleasant subject matter humanity has to offer, yet wraps all of that in pleasingly witty word choices, top notch performances by all and an L.O.L. (laughables outed loudly) level of cartoonish violence. Jaimie Foxx was surprisingly effective as, Django, the slave turned bounty hunter. I say “surprisingly” because, for the first few minutes he’s on screen you wonder if this movie is somehow below the Ray Oscar winner’s station. It isn’t. The movie and the actor simultaneously rise to the occasion once it gets going, and they continue to compliment each other for the duration.

That said, Foxx is not the star of the movie. Christolph Waltz, just as he did in Inglourious Basterds, STEALS the show. I was wondering if I would be able to see him as the hero, Waltz having so permanently cemented himself as the villain in his previous Taratino collaboration. If you loved to hate him as the monster of the Third Reich, you’ll love him even more as the German dentist who assassinates bad guys and sells their corpses to the government for profit. German Fancy Bastards who has seen the film will have to tell me if Waltz was doing a certain regional German dialect that I am unfamiliar with or just annunciating like a funny little German elf might. Either way, it was delightful. I could listen to that man oddly pronounce words all day.

DiCaprio did a fine job, but I felt his was the part that could have been played by nearly anyone and the movie wouldn’t have suffered. There’s just something about him that I never quite buy into, especially when he’s doing a crazy accent (which is nearly ALWAYS). Couple this with the fact that he was CONSTANTLY upstaged by Samuel L. Jackson’s doting Uncle Tom-esque house servant character and you have a performance that neither detracted or particularly added to the overall film.

Overall it was a very satisfying movie. It’s an action film, a revenge drama, a bit of a heist-flick or con job, a love story, a comedy… it covers all these genres, yet never feels unfocused. I will say that if you are squeamish about hearing the n-word oh… I don’t know… A THOUSAND TIMES, then this isn’t the movie for you. I know Tarantino has taken some flack for trying to make a movie about racism and slavery without somehow sidestepping all the racism and slavery. I’m not sure how he was supposed to do that, but I do not feel the end product was exploitive to anything other than the concept of a Spaghetti Western. Each of his films is a love letter to a certain genre of cinema. Some hit home better than others, but Django is the first “Best Picture” caliber movie he’s directed.

On a side note, every time I hear “Django Unchained” I think about Picard and that Tamarian captain in “Darmok.” Oh, and Thomas Edison is just a slimy ratcock of a villain. Fuck that guy. Seriously.