Twenty More Free Movie Titles

I’m embarrassed to admit that none of the previous twenty are currently in production that I know of, but I really feel that this batch hasl a lot more box office potential.

Nothing But Shrieking Accusations

Orphans vs. Robots

Yvonne the Terrible

Golden Fingers, Silver Tongues, Lead Feet

Too Many Torso Heaps!

Not That Kind of Fiddler

Til Meth Do Us Part

The Lanai Where He Lied

Game, Set, Match, Apocalypse

Who the Hell Destroyed My Bathroom?

Prognosis: Hilarious

Fops vs. Dandies

Turkish Delight, Portuguese Danger

The Safety Scissors That Dripped Blood

Did Somebody Say “Secret Family”?

The Butler Did Me

The Slow Unzippering of a Mild-Mannered Schoolteacher

Pew Pew Pew! You’re Dead! I’m Shooting You!

Fresno Face

Not Buried Deep Enough, Apparently

Blue Skies and Broken Hearts — Next Twelve Exits

It’s not because I’m a diehard Ataris fan. In fact, I don’t think I could hum a single song by The Ataris even if you put a gun to my head. I actually don’t think that I even realized that this neon blue trailer park sign had any pop culture relevance outside of just looking old and cool. But on January 9, 2006, I trekked out to it to take a photo, just because I liked it just because I thought maybe I could do something with the photo.

I never did. In the end, really, all the photo expedition did was get a certain someone’s shoes unpleasantly muddy. (No, not mine.) So seven years later, here you go: Here’s the sign that ruined what I imagine were nice shoes.

The Tree of Life

Note: I am reposting this from my Tumblr. It usually works the other way around, with the Tumblr serving as a means to promote this blog, but this one hastily-written Tumblr post actually resulted in more reaction than what my blog posts here do, so I said why not? Perhaps I stumbled into something that meant something to someone.

The man who made this illustration passed away this week.

Hiro Isono, the man who created promotional illustrations for the Secret of Mana games (including this one and this one), did something that not many artists working for video game companies can do: Rather than just drawing from the game itself, he envisioned the essence of the it, that spirit of adventure and all that, and in doing so he created an entryway into a colorful, new world. It helps that these games had a big impact on me, but I actually think the art stands up on its own. Why else make art than to dream up something up that doesn't already exist in real life and make the viewer wish so badly that it were real?

Encyclopedia Drew and the Bad Balloon

A short update.

Since I last reported on the evil balloon roommate I now have in my apartment, the situation has worsened. It’s now floating lower than it had before, so it’s basically aimed at my junk at any given moment. It’s still moving around the house, just more sluggishly. I suppose its declining health prompted what’s happened as I type this. See for yourself:

Literally, it’s sitting in the chair. And not just any chair. It’s sitting in the one seat that has a view of me working at my computer. As I type this, it’s pointed toward me, and I honestly feel like I’m being watched. No lie: I had an itch in my noise and I declined to scratch it because I felt like someone was looking at me.

I’m not kidding about this. If I stop blogging, that means the balloon got me and my soul is now trapped in the balloon and you have to come break into my apartment and pop the balloon so I can be at peace.

Help?

The Rustling Terror

Trigger warning: If you suffer from globophobia, this post may be very disturbing. I do not suffer from this hilarious psychological condition, and this is still kind of creeping me out.

When my friend Michelle gave me a mylar balloon for my birthday last week, I realized that I’d never been given one before. I had a childhood full of the regular, stretchy, imminently pop-able balloons, but never their hardier, metallic counterparts. (They’re the humanoid robots of the balloon world, these things. They’re Robert fucking Patrick.) I should probably note that what Michelle gave me was also no mere circular balloon. No, it was the mylar Taj Mahal. Observe:

It’s large. In fact, I joked to Michelle that the balloon will make it feel like I have a roommate. It may be bigger than some of the children to whom its helium-filled brothers are given. It also differs from most balloons in that it has points — a head and arms, if you like.

Have I ever mention that my apartment is drafty? Well, it is. Perhaps you can see where this is going.

The first time: So I’m in the kitchen, washing dishes and I hear this peculiar scraping noise. Scraaaape. Scraaaape. Scraaaape — pauses in between and then the noise for a few seconds at a time. I stopped washing to hear the noise better. Scraaaape. It was getting closer. So I dried my hands and stepped into the dining room to immediately come face-to-face with the birthday balloon. I jumped. Were it a horror movie, it would have been punctuated by a blast of music.

The second time: I’m reading in bed. Straying over the top of the page for a second, my eye catches movement down in the darkened hallway. At the other end of the hall is the dining room, empty but illuminated enough by the streetlights outside that I can make out the silhouette of the balloon pass by the doorway… very… slowly. It makes little crinkly noises as it moves around my apartment.

The third (and final) time: I won’t even try and build up suspense with this one. A few nights later, I woke up and the balloon was in my bedroom, right by bed, kind of like it was looking over me. I know I said something out loud — maybe “Oh Christ” or maybe just “nope” — and I immediately locked it in the closet.

I’d just pop the ballon now, but I’m worried doing that will release the ghost that’s maybe causing all this creepiness and who is perhaps better off trapped in a mylar prison. Seems logical, right? This is the wisdom you get with age.

The Grim Specter of Death (a Birthday Post from Drew!)

Yesterday, I turned thirty-one, and I treated this birthday as a non-event, since the big three-oh didn’t mean the end of the world any more than 2012 meant the end of the world. I had the day off work, and I tried to spend my time doing the things I always want to do — happy-making, me-centric stuff, with less of a focus on what I have and haven’t accomplished one year further into my life. Please keep that in mind when I show you the painting I can’t stop looking at, and understand that no, this is not a plea for help in my battle against the grinding passage of time.

“the white peacock,” via wikipedia, via the vienna academy of fine arts

I find this beautiful. You may find it horrifying — it’s five dead birds and a dead rabbit, after all — but I think it helps to look at how lovingly and carefully these animals were painted. Click on the photo for the bigger version, and you’ll see individual feathers and hairs. But they’re not realistic depictions of hunted prey. As this sporting journal article notes, they’re idealized: You can’t see any puncture wounds, and they simply seem to have died in an immaculate state. (Spencer notes that the painter’s name was Jan Weenix, and maybe the animals just heard his name and died laughing.) The article goes on to say that such game pieces “weren’t commemorating a specific hunt, or morality tales on blood sports, or demonstrations of putting food on the table,” but instead were “status symbols for the bourgeois painting-purchasing class to hang in their country estates,” which makes me think of them as the seventeenth-century equivalent of those knock-off vintage booze posters you see in every home wanting to suggest some vague notion of old-timey class. That doesn’t bother me. I’m just looking at the painting in 2013 — in my thirty-first year, apparently — and appreciating it as a depiction of ordinary objects, rendered with a level of care that makes them seem like more than what they were, if they ever existed in the first place. (Do white peacocks exist?)

I suppose there are worse ways to begin a new year than appreciating something for what it is.

Priscilla, Queen of the Tundra

When Empire of the Sun released “Walking on a Dream,” I thought the song was catchy in a way that made me scared that I’d soon hear it in commercials and movie trailers and then eventually hate it — you know, in the way that “Little Talks” has been ruined for me. It got some mainstream play, but in the end, I never felt overexposed to this song, so when Empire of the Sun announced their forthcoming album, Ice on the Dune, I got excited. The lead track sounded great. Everything was shaping up for a primo musical experience.

Then I saw the album art.

It’s, um, expressive and colorful.

Granted, the first album’s art suggested a meeting between Blade Runner and Liberace, but when that album came out, I drove an older car. My new car actually displays the album art of whatever I’m listening to, so I have to look at this gay cosplay version of Final Fantasy — which, of course, would be called Anal Fantasy — whenever I listen to the song… which is kind of often. 

Can we stop and take a look at what someone thought made sense as an image that people would see and use as evidence in deciding whether to buy this album? If you’re more of an “outside kid” than I am and therefore don’t understand my comparisons to Final Fantasy, please examine this promo art for the tenth game in that series.

Now, imagine that this game — still with the saturated color, dramatic but ambiguous poses and unrealistically smooth skin textures — featured not only the hero but also this badass sorceress who had gnarly ice powers as well as, like, some major lady-tude and an enchanted headdress that gave her additional sartorial ferocity. And also she was interesting-pretty. And then a lot of dude-on-dude sex happened. Then you’d pretty much have the Ice on the Dune album art, just as a game. I’ll be honest: That kind of sounds like a video game I’d play. And I think it’s cool that Empire of the Sun — neither member of which, as near as online research can tell me, seems to be gay — went that direction for their new album. I’m just baffled as to why they did so whenever the album art pops up on my car console. It’s a weird reaction, I know — not so much judgment but just “Someone sure made some distinct choices, and I just want to know what their logic was.”

Also, if you want to make the video game I described, I’d basically have to buy it. Just saying.