bone thorns

Today I was chatting with one of the dealers at a desperate table ("desperate" being the casino's term for a table which has a dealer sitting on it, but no game). She'd recently had a hip replacement, and I told her about my own surgical experiences involving the extra bone growths on my legs. "Gu ci," she said, "In Chinese means Bone Thorns." Of course the Chinese term would be much more evocative than the English medical name ("multiple exostoses" or "osteochondroma" or something like that) and slightly more beautiful than "bone spur," which always makes me think of a skeleton wearing cowboy boots.
...."Thanks," I said, "Gu ci. That's great. If I learn one new Chinese word a day I'll be able to speak properly when I'm 100."
...."It's not so hard," she replies, "I used to learn 20 new words a day. Problem is now, if I learn 20 words today, I forget 25 tomorrow."
...."Yeah," I agreed. "It's the forgetting that starts to kill you."

video games do in fact make you dumb

So my co-conspirator on TA91 is hard at work on another feature film called "Half-Life." It's not completed yet, but like TA91, already has an IMDB entry, which comes with its own message board. Here are a few thread titles from that board:

"This movie has nothing to do with the game..."
"Disgrace to the game!"
"this is not the game,so the name should NOT be Half-Life."
"Everyone!! Vote this a 1! For pissing us off, fooling us....breaking our hearts, and plagerizing(name) Vote it a 1 too show your anger and love for the Half-Life video game!!"
"OMFG THE CUCKS STOLE THE CUCKING NAME OF THE ddVIDEO GAME...ONE OF THe GREATEEST OF ALL TIMES OMFG what the *beep* are youf cukign kidding m.e this is *beep* retartded. having a little azn *beep* in this movie with nothing to do with half-life. *beep* copyfright infringment myuther *beep* *beep* this *beep* movie. *beep* boycott this"

....Of course, there is not one message on the board for any of our other movies, which are all equally indie and relatively obscure, but do not share a name with a video game.

It's been a while since I hung out on a message board, and it's nice to see that there still is a a forum for idiots to come and publicly grapple with literacy. The funny thing about the Internet though, is that you never know why someone seems stupid. Maybe they're 6 and can't really type or spell yet. Maybe English is their second or third language. Or maybe video games do actually make you into a moron.

Some more gems:

"I thought this movie is finished and has been awaiting for post-production. What happened? I would think this movie might be cancelled for the year. Why not released it on DVD instead of showing it in theaters? For one thing though, I wish this movie may be re-titled "One Half-Life to Live" rather than saying "One Life to Live". It's almost enough for a soap drama." -jwtam

"When it comes to a copyrighted title, it's a question of whether or not the average consumer would confuse the one movie with the other, thus taking potential income from one copyright owner and giving it to another. In cases where there isn't likely to be any confusion of that sort, there is no copyright violation. I don't think anybody is likely to confuse some chick flick with a movie about the One Free Man. On the other hand, it IS repulsive to have the name of such an incredible game be associated with what will, no doubt, be a banal, "half-baked" movie." - bigdorkarama

"Thought that valve inc had the rights to the name "half life""... -alphadec-1

....so I'm making all these posters for about 12 years old, average. I really would like to know what's going on in their actual lives. Obviously, the game "Half-Life" is a major part of their reality. Obviously, they have bad senses of humor and reasoning skills. But they care enough to throw their "half-baked" thoughts out there. More incredibly, they feel required to defend the integrity of Valve, a fricking video game company, from "infringement" by my friend the indie filmmaker. And, although they roughly understand the concept of copyright (a major tenet of our "ownership society") they have no idea that "half-life" is a physics term, not something that Valve owns or could ever own.

Just amazing. And here's one that gets personal:

"Look at the writer/director's previous projects; there's something in there called "The Matrices". It looks like she's got plenty of experience ripping off other peoples' ideas." - genocidal monkey

YES! BECAUSE THE MATRIX IS A COMPLETELY ORIGINAL STORY. ALL KUNG-FU MOVIES, COMIC BOOKS, AND PHILIP K. DICK NOVELS, ESPECIALLY THOSE THAT CAME OUT BEFORE THE MATRIX, ARE RIPPING OFF THE MATRIX. AND PARODIES SHOULD NOT EXIST. ANY PARODY THAT IS NOT "SCARY MOVIE" SHOULD BE SUED FOR INFRINGEMENT.

Honestly, I'm really tired of people not knowing that I invented the Matrix in 1993 in a rock musical that was performed in the basement of a pizza parlor. OK, so that show was seen by maybe 78 people, but the script is in the Library of Congress, for Pete's sake. So that means anything involving virtual reality and kung fu is an infringement against me, right? Geez. Maybe I should just copyright myself and the totality of my being so that people will stop bugging me, already.