August 06, 2008: Tropic Thunder with A Gay Spider-Man

So no real reports on the great migration. I'm still looking for places.

In the meantime, here's a review of Tropic Thunder which will hit theaters pretty soon:

I got to see a screening of Tropic Thunder at San Diego Comic Con. I guess Alex has the hook up. It was Wednesday night, so Justin hadn't made it to San Diego yet. Pete, Alex, Alex's Brother John, and myself sat down in a crowded theater in the Green Lantern district.

Right off the bat there was a special SDCC trailer for the movie. It was Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr. in front of a white screen. They vamped and improved for a few minutes with some great jokes. There were some great Comic Con jokes, and some great Iron Man jokes from Downey.

The movie itself began with a bunch of fake trailers for the "actors" in the movie. The movie is about a bunch of infamous actors coming together on a single movie. The trailers were hilarious. All I can say is "Tobey Maguire". If you don't laugh, you don't know what humor is.

Without spoiling the movie I'll say it was great. I didn't know it was a "Ben Stiller" movie before hand, but it in no way diminished the quality of the movie. I say quality with a "but". It's obviously intended to be a funny movie, not an award-winner.

That reminds me, I still need to see Step Brothers.

August 05, 2008: Comic Book Club w/ Mini Marvels Pics

Pictures of the latest Comic Book Club are available on our Pulp Secret flickr account. This week featured guests Chris Giarrusso (Mini Marvels) and Nate Cosby (Marvel Comics Editor). You may remember Nate Cosby from one of our New York Comic Con episodes of The Stack (you may also recognize frequent Comic Book Club visitor Jordan D. White!).

Enjoy the pictures!

August 04, 2008: Happy Birthday Obama

Turns out today is Barack Obama's Birthday. To honor Amber's namesake, we at Barely Political did a birthday Amber-chat. This is were fans of Amber or Obama-Girl can ask her or any of us questions.

Some of the good ones:

1. How does Obama keep his hair so silky smooth? - That must have been Adam Sandler in disguise.

2. Can I have some of that cake you made? - Politics always make people hungry

3. Who the hell is computer guy and why is he answering all Amber's questions? - We got a lot of Computer guy comments. Either Ben (Relles) or Mark (Douglas) sat in the middle and used the PC to get questions. They were both affectionately referred to as "Computer Guy" maybe when they're more popular fans will give them proper names.

Pics: Happy Birthday Obama, Studio Chat Setup (Live Feed), everybody preps, Devon and Kate R. monitor the live feed, and Obama Girl Chat in Progress (quiet on the set).

August 03, 2008: Funny Roomate Stories

Funny Story:

So I'm hanging out on a lazy Sunday (nod to Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg). During the course of the day I notice my roomate is talking on his phone on his window sill. We're on the 9th floor of a building with no fire escapes out front, so sitting on the window sill is a little precarious. "But hey" I think he does this often. It's really weird, but he's a really weird kind of guy, so I go about my lazy Sunday. Paying bills, answering emails. Blogging about semi-interesting goings on.

Eventually it's close to 4 or 5PM and my front door opens of it's own accord (aided by the building Super and a group of police officers, and the nice security guard from the lobby downstairs). Normally had I recently done something of questionable legality I would not be surprised to see the Man knocking on my door. But as they walked past me I asked them, "How's it going?" in the most casual way you can ask a group of authority figures with guns walking past you. They pointed to my roomates room, and I began to wonder...

It could be any number of things:

1. He actually decided to jump out his window.

2. He was involved in an international sex-slave ring (he's from China).

3. He ran over that nice crippled man in the street with his car (we have a lot of bums during the summer months).

4. Or...(just insert any stupid thing you want here).

So the cops, the super, and the security guard ascertain that he wasn't trying to jump out his window, but just decided to sit on his window ledge like the idiot he is (turns out someone saw him from the street and thought he was a jumper).

Long story short, now he's getting kicked out of his apartment which means I have to move. I guess it's ok, I was thinking about moving closer to work anyway. It's events like this that convince you to get studio and forgo any further roomates of questionable sanity.

August 02, 2008: Sleepy Saturdays

My actual recollection of Saturday is pretty fuzzy. I think I slept in till noon then sat around and watched TV on DVD for most of the day. Either way I stayed way too late at work doing actual work. I did have a beer whilst finishing my last editing project.

Actually that's not true, I totally gave up after the progress meter on Final Cut read 1 hour...2 hours...three hours...six hours. Crap balls! That's a clear sign to get the fuck out and go home.

August 01, 2008: You Call This Work and Lindsey Crawls Out of the TV

So I'm casually (more like frantically) working my way through another run-of-the-mill editing project downstairs when a mess of upstairs denizens stop by. I figured since it was Friday and the bosses had taken off everyone was just hanging out. Then the Guitar Hero crowd showed up and started swapping TVs out so that Erik and crew could use the old CRT for their newest episode. Enter Lindsey dressing up in what looked like my little sister's night gown circa 1989 and getting made to look like that freaky chick from the "Ring" movie series.

On top of all the Friday afternoon fun was Marco and the Tumblr crew re-configuring the downstairs fridge into a beer repository. Good beer at that too. I actually suspect they had plans for later, but for most of the evening (while I worked) everyone was barbecuing in the office (without the barbecue or the grill).

Pics: Marco does a solid for the office and throws down for good beer, Guitar Hero setup, and Lindsey gets freakified.

July 31, 2008: Watch out for the Tentacles

I found another great Schrute-Space. When is this show back on the air again?

The Curious Rise of Tentacle Sex in Manga

Salutations, weblog reader. I hope you are reading this at home and not during working hours because this weblog entry has nothing to do with your job, unless you are an anime scholar, sexual education expert, cultural examiner with a focus on bizarre sexual matters, or a marine biologist. If you do not hold one of these jobs, please stop reading and continue in the privacy of your home where your time belongs to you. You may also proceed to read this if you are self-employed, but that is a slippery slope.

As you are well aware, I am interested in the representational arts of Japan, most specifically manga or, as it’s more commonly known in America, anime. While purchasing some new reading material recently, my manga got mixed up with another customer’s items and I ended up with several titles that I did not originally select. At first I was incredibly upset at the idiot behind the counter who let that happen. It makes sense that he’s working retail. Real salesmen don’t mess up orders. After fuming for a while, however, I was reminded of something Grandpa Mannheim used to say: “When life gives you lemons, find a way to turn those lemons into a profit, even if it means donating the lemons to charity in order to get a tax write-off.” I decided to use the misplaced manga to enrich my knowledge in general and discover some new artists and writers. This turned out to be a mistake.

The comic books that the other gentleman was purchasing were of the “hentai” sub-genre. Hentai is disgusting. It is Japanese comic pornography and it is completely inappropriate. What disturbed me most about this man’s choices were that they were exclusively of the shokushu goukan variety. For those not familiar, shokushu goukan is the Japanese term for tentacle rape. These comics feature Japanese women getting taken advantage of by octopi. I truly do not understand their appeal. Octopi are, by their very nature, non-sexual creatures. After they reproduce, both the mother and father octopus die within a matter of months. What’s sexy about that? To chronicle the sexual nature of an octopus is as pointless as trying to find a beet weevil in December – it’s just a waste of time.

As I was perusing the contents of the various shokushu goukan comics, I kept happening on the same plot. Woman loves sailor. Sailor goes out to sea. Sailor is killed by giant octopus. Giant octopus rapes woman with its tentacles. This plot doesn’t make any sense. It paints giant octopi as if they’re these terribly vindictive creatures, not content to just kill sailors, but also to seek out and infiltrate their women. What do the Japanese have against octopi? What did octopi ever do to the Japanese besides providing a tremendous amount of nourishment in the form of tako sushi? It baffles me. It angers me. It saddens me.

The mighty octopus should be respected, not depicted as some horrible marine rapist. If you need to demonize a sea creature, make it the horrendous jellyfish, which provides not jelly but dangerous stings. I found out firsthand when I was taken to a beach on the shores of North Carolina in my youth. I have yet to return to an ocean beach.

Over the weekend, I will be returning to the shop where this terrible comic literature entered my possession. I will be exchanging it for my favorite manga: Ranma 1/2, the story of a teenaged boy trained from a young age to be a martial arts master, who is cursed to become a girl when splashed with cold water, but returns to male form when touched with cold water. Currently, the reason that it’s my favorite manga series is that there are no horny vindictive creatures with tentacles in Ranma 1/2 and that’s good enough for me.

This marks the end of today’s weblog. Fight Octopi Misrepresentation!

Arigato,
Dwight Kurt Schrute