Let's Get Serious: A Batmanabonanza

Okay everyone, I'd like to talk to you all about a very serious subject for a change: Batman.

So, before you all ask "why so serious?" and lapse into a giggle fit about how clever you are, let me remind you that the third installment in Christopher Nolan's beautifully dark Batman series is coming out very, very soon. And that shit is serious.

I know what you're all wondering, because as an avid fan of all things Batman, I'm wondering it myself: How is this series going to end? Or even more importantly, how in the hell is Anne Hathaway going to play a convincing Catwoman?

Look at your future Catwoman. Look her in the eyes and despair.

There are a million questions that The Dark Knight Rises  is going to have to answer. Chief among them: What is going to happen to Bruce Wayne? Does he keep on being Batman? And when the hell is Alfred going to be institutionalized?

"We burned the forest down." ~ No sane person, ever.

I'm sure that whatever Nolan churns out will be fantastic, but there's a way that I want the series to end. A way that I would end it if I were writing it. It's also a way that definitely won't happen, because Chris Nolan said so.

You see, in the first movie, we got the origin story. The start of Batman. Then, in The Dark Knight, we saw him falter and question if being Batman was really doing the right thing, and at the end, he regains confidence in himself and his actions. In the third movie, I think we should see the end of Batman. 

And there's only one character from the Batman universe that can do that:

That's right. Robin. I said it.

Think about it for a second. You could even keep Bane as the main villain. In the comics, Bane was the first villain to ever seriously injure Batman (by breaking his back). What if Batman and Bane fight at the very beginning of the movie, and Bane seriously injures Batman, who needs to take serious time to recuperate. 

This would shake his faith in himself a bit. I mean, he's Batman. He doesn't get hurt. But more importantly, it would make him realize that his body physically will not allow him to be Batman forever. One day, he's going to have to hang up the cape and bat ears. And then what? Who will protect Gotham?

"Master Wayne, I'll burn the villains down."

Shortly after he heals from his injuries, Bruce could attend a large circus that has come to the city. He's a philanthropist, so maybe the circus could be raising money for one of his charities. Anyway, during one of the acts, there is a terrible accident and two of the trapeze artists are killed-- and accident that their son, Dick Grayson miraculously survives. But Bruce is Batman. He sees that it was no accident and that the act was sabotaged. (A mob boss was trying to extort money from the circus by killing off it's performers. Hell, maybe that's why Bruce is there: to catch him in the act.)

So the mob boss sends his henchmen after Dick outside the circus tent to finish the job, and BAM! He gets saved by Batman. Bruce, who can relate to this boy losing his parents at a young age, takes him in.

The eyes of  a man that cares.

So, the rest of the movie would consist of Bruce training Dick to be Robin and the two of them eventually defeating Bane together. Then the movie could close on the idea that, yes, Batman can't be Batman forever, but now there is someone to take his place when he his gone. All of a sudden, the series doesn't end with "Batman saves the day again, and will continue to do so indefinitely. Possibly until the end of time." Instead, this movie has closure.

And that, my friends, is a movie that I would watch. 

Christmas and Everything After

It's been a month since I've posted. Sorry about that. Christmas, writing for Cracked, and work have all been vying for my time, and far too little was left to work on my blog. But the desire remained, festering deep within until it grew too large to contain. Then it burst out. Or to explain it in Alien terms:

                                                            via tvtropes.org

Everything should be explained in Alien terms.

In other news, the New Year is here: the last year, if you believe that Mayan voodoo mambo-jumbo. I haven't made any New Year's resolutions-- not because I can't better myself in any way, but because, hey, when do those EVER pan out? I'd much rather just take life as it comes, and if that means my teeth rot out of my head because I practically inhale Mountain Dew, so be it. I could try and stop drinking so much, make it a New Year's resolution if you will, and revert back to my old habits in a month or two. So why not just skip all the hassle and keep right at my bad habits?

Let's rewind a bit. Christmas went well for me. We got a television so big that when I watch the Walking Dead, I can see every last skin cell on Daryl's wonderful, wonderful face.... I mean, every single drop of blood with forensic precision. Yes. That.

                                             via www.series-stars.info

He's even dreamier than he was in the Boondock Saints.

(I'm not gay. I swear.)

As for the other things I got for Christmas: a veritable mountain of candy, several video games that I wanted, socks and underwear (gotta love the classics), and a 32 inch television for my bedroom. I would have gladly traded the television for a new laptop. Typing 2, 5, o, p, k, and using backspace is hard for me. But whatever. The TV has it's advantages, and I don't use -k that much anyways.

 

This is the actual keyboard for my laptop. Note the missing keys.

I've also stared watching a new TV show recently: Dexter. For those of you that don't know, it's about a serial killer that works for the police as a forensic blood spatter expert. He isn't a madman though. He only kills people that actually deserve it-- which is seen as wrong by some and vigilante justice by others.

A lot of people have opposed this show because it "glorifies murder" and blah, blah, blah. I stopped listening at "will make young people think murder is ok." I'm sorry. Bullshit.

To these people, I say: "I know where you live. And Dexter has trained me so well. Maybe you'd best keep quiet."

TV's chief exports are violence, boobs, sex, and Dora the Explorer-- though not necessarily in that order. Anyway, for those of you that realize that television is television and has one main purpose: entertainment, give Dexter a watch. It was surprisingly good. I promise it has no ulterior motives, such as corrupting and brainwashing our youth. It's just good TV.

                                                    via screenrant.com

TV with.... murder. 

Turkey Day and Black Friday: The Aftermath

I know, I know. I'm up during normal hours. But don't fret. The zombie apocalypse hasn't come yet, and I'm not being forced to stay awake and on the move-- lest the undead devour my succulent flesh. Yet.

Instead, I'm awake because Thanksgiving and Black Friday have seriously done a number on my sleep schedule. You see, since I work at Spencer's, I had some odd working hours on Black Friday: 3 a.m. to 8 a.m. Normally this wouldn't have affected me. I'd have just slept in until five p.m. the night before, and I would've been fine. The problem was: I couldn't do that since had Thanksgiving dinner that evening, so I had to be up by at least noon.

                                           via igourmet.com

Plenty of tryptophan  for your late-night drive to work.

I still would've been fine if this was it. I'd have come home and gone to bed at nine in the morning, woken up at three or four, and all would've been well. But no. My friends and I had an all-day video game party planned for Friday. I went straight from work to there and didn't wind up at home until two in the morning. For those of you keeping score, that's 38 hours straight with no sleep, and five of them were work hours.

I don't even remember much of the gaming party. It's one giant blur of animated blood and violence, people shouting the word "noob," and me dying a lot because I was too tired to play. I eventually got my second wind and woke up enough to play an RPG (Eternal Sonata) for a few hours. That game, despite it's cutesy-wutesy appearance, is actually incredible. I highly recommend it to any fan of RPG games.

                                                           via wikipedia

Yes, there's a rainbow on the cover. It's a good game. I promise.

My sleep schedule still hasn't returned to normal. You see, I went to bed on Friday night and had to get up at 6 a.m. for work the next day. And when I got home, I still couldn't go to bed because we had people over at the house for my brother's birthday. Then, my brother insisted that we spend the night at my cousin's house as part of his birthday celebration. We got to playing video games, and I didn't get to go to bed until 6 a.m. 

Let's stop and check the score again. That's 38 hours with no sleep, then 4 hours of sleep, then another 24 with none. That's almost three days with only 4 hours of sleep. To say that I was exhausted was an understatement. My brother went home that night, but my cousin asked me to stay another night. Another whirlwind of pixilated death and destruction later, and my head hit the pillow at nine in the morning.

This brought the grand total to 9 hours of sleep in 4 1/2 days until I could finally get a decent night's rest.

To my surprise, I woke up at ten in the morning the next day and couldn't sleep any more. Even stranger, I got tired around ten or eleven at night, like a normal person. I've gone on like this for a couple days, and I hate it. After eleven, it becomes difficult to concentrate on even the most menial tasks without nodding off.

                                              via HolyTaco.com

I decided to put my new-found, wakeful morning hours to the most productive use imaginable: watching movies. I don't know if I was still groggy or if the morning sun had baked my brain with its devil rays, but Snakes on a Plane actually seemed like a decent movie. Perhaps it was so bad that it was good. 

The greatest line in that movie, as I'm sure many of you know is when the TV version tries to dub over Samuel L. Jackson's "motherfuckings" with other word's that begin with -m and -f. For example, "Enough is enough! I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane," becomes:

"I've had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday to Friday plane!"

Seriously, who would ever think that's what he's actually saying? Did they just get lazy from all the dubbing they had to do (Samuel Jackson swears A LOT) and say, "Screw it. Just pick words that start with those letters. That'll work."

But above all, the funniest thing about that movie is seeing Samuel Jackson hold a snake up by it's neck and try to identify it to a biologist over the phone. What an immense amount of snake knowledge he possesses.

                                                                   via howstuffworks.com
It appears to have murder-fending scales on its mostly-fuchsia body.

Writing is Hard. Not Writing is Harder.

Ladies and gentlemen, this may surprise you, but I am a writer. I know, I know. You were under the impression that I just beamed my thoughts straight from my head to the computer, but unfortunately, I write them down. I compose them into tangible and logical trains of thought, with sentence structure, nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Sometimes I throw in the occasional semi-colon; sometimes I don't. Nonetheless, I am a writer, and I hope you can forgive me.

Today, I lounged around the house with one purpose in mind: churning out an article for cracked.com. This often leads to a lot of stress. The editors for Cracked push their writers and can be quite picky. This is a good thing, since it ensures that the content they publish is always of the highest quality. It may prove to also be a bad thing though because after so much banging my head against the wall, I'll either have to shell out a lot of money to repair my walls or induce severe cerebral hemorrhaging.

                                                                               via wall designs.net

And the cost of repairs to my walls will be extensive.

Despite all of that, writing for Cracked is a pleasure. It's one of the most friendly environments for a writer to learn in, and I learn every day. If you submit your work to a writing journal or magazine, you could wait three to six months just to receive a fill in the blank rejection notice. At Cracked, you receive personal feedback from the editors on a weekly basis. Sometimes more often. Plus, rather than be sodomized when submitting work to writing journals,  the Cracked editors only verbally sodomize you. (David Wong, please don't vaporize me for that joke He can do that you know. With his mind). In all seriousness though, the editors are fantastic. And comedy wizards. My fellow writers are the nicest people in the world. And everyone in the community wants everyone else to succeed.

A wise writer once told me "You've got to cut yourself open and bleed on the page. That will give your words power." I tried this once, but I couldn't tell how powerful my words were. It was hard to read through all of the blood. Did I not say the right chant to Sithis or something? But he was right. Sometimes the words just pour out of you like blood from an open wound, or to be less morbid, like water from a river. Other day's there's a drought, or you have a clotting problem (You should really see a doctor about that. It's nasty business).

Earlier today, the words just kept coming. I was a finely-tuned writing machine. I punched those words out of my head like Liu Kang punches hearts out of his enemies.

 

                                                            via GamingBolt.com

Pictured: The writing process.

But then, when I sat down to work on my blog, the words stopped coming. I'm having trouble formulating this very sentence. Seriously, I revised that sentence three times. If I didn't flapjack, revise my sentence bacon, they would be almost water-buffalo to understand. I'm going to stop now before I hurt somebody with the wildly irresponsible way I'm flinging these words around. Someone could put an eye out is what I'm saying.

Let me close by saying what you've already read in the title: writing is hard, but not writing is harder. It's one of the only things that make my life worth living. The sense of fulfillment I get when I complete something... not to mention when someone actually likes it... That feeling is indescribable. And I hope you can all feel it someday- in whatever it is that gives you purpose. Find that something and strive toward it. Punch hearts out of people's chests-- figuratively of course, and never lose sight of what you love and the people who helped you along the way.

And just one last thing: a tip for the aspiring writers out there. Caffeine is your friend.

                                                                               via msn.com

The nectar of the Gods.

The Boredom Affliction

Today was boring. Really boring. It was so dreadfully boring that if you sat down and watched professional golf on TV, you still wouldn't be as bored as I was today. This probably has something to do with the fact that I was nice and decided to let my brother play Skyrim today. Now I'm suffering withdrawal.

Yesterday, I was Arcus, the necromacer scourge of Tamriel. I could raise the dead with one hand and conjure a blade of pure magic with the other. People would explode in a cloud of red vapor at the mere sight of how awesome I was.

Today, I'm Kier, the pasty, white scourge of no one. I have a cat named Cuddles, and she loves me... sometimes. I also have an imaginary pet seahorse who lives at the park. He lets me ride him.

Sometimes.

Yesterday, people ran screaming in fear, hoping against hope that I would spare them. Today, people still run, but for different reasons.

But I digress. I needed to find a way to pass the time, so I returned to an older game that I've spent a lot of quality time with: League of Legends. It actually helped ease my boredom, but I was interrupted after my first match by a loud whining noise. It was my cat, demanding that she be given food.

Who can say no to that face? Not me.

After I filled her bowl, she rewarded me by rubbing up against my leg and informing me that I was allowed to pet her now. Then, the second I started petting her, she scratched the hell out of my arm. But I couldn't stay mad at her. An open wound is the only way her love particles can enter my bloodstream.

I picked her up, very much against her will, and went back to playing my game with her on my lap. I sat there, with my eyes transfixed on the computer-box for a couple hours, until I realized that dinner was ready. Dinner was tacos.

After eating so many tacos that I spontaneously learned Spanish, me senté a ver algunos televisión. Uh... I mean... I sat down to watch some TV, but after fifteen minutes, I decided that TV wasn't doing it for me either. Then I decided to watch the second Paranormal Activity. That movie was scarier than that one time that I had to carpool with a monster.

Plus, he smoked in my car, and that was not cool.

My mediocre day came to an end with this week's episode of The Walking Dead. Any show with some good ole' fashioned zombie killin' is all right in my book, but this one has something more. Maybe it's because it's a weekly show instead of a movie. There's a lot more time to show what's going on, so it seems more of an accurate representation of how a zombie outbreak would work in real life. Perhaps it's the character Daryl. If I've ever had a man-crush on anyone, it's that guy. Or maybe it's the necklace of ears that Daryl wore tonight. That was pretty special.

                                                          via "The Walking Dead"

© 2011 Kier Harris

The Glow Bowling Excursion (A Photo Documentary)

I drug a few of my family/friends kicking and screaming to go glow bowling with me earlier tonight. For those of you that don't know what glow bowling is, it's like normal bowling but with the normal lights off, black lights on, lasers, and loud music.

Like this, but with more Katy Perry.

People don't usually want to go bowling with me because of how good I am. I've been bowling for seventeen years (since I was three) and my friends have this thing about not liking to be shown up. When I finally guilt enough of them into coming along, a night of fun always ensues. Fun for me at least. 

Let me introduce you to the stars of this saga:

 My Friend, Cody

My sister, Briana (front) and my girlfriend, Emily (back)

And me.

The four of us bowled a couple games together, but my companions soon tired of seeing a repetition of this:

Hey, I never claimed it was good music.

Cody in particular was getting really frustrated. He'd made such good friends with the right gutter that it probably bought him drinks later that night. He'd throw gutter-balls over--

And over---

Cody and Emily kept shooting me dirty looks every time I threw a good shot, and after two games, they threw in the towel and went to play pool.

"Screw those guys and their bowling."

My sister and I kept bowling in spite of our party-pooping friends. We played a couple more games and both did fairly well. Then, as the night drew to a close, the owner turned the lights back on, and Cody returned for a rematch.:

Hey, I never said it was a good rematch.

At one point, I even wound up with a split that looked pretty difficult to make, and I'm pretty sure Cody had to restrain himself from throttling me when I picked it up:

I drove my friends home, grinning from ear to ear, as they fumed in the back seat. I said things like "Did you see it when I......" and "Remember those five strikes in a row?"

Maybe I'm starting to see why my friends never want to go bowling with me. I can be an ass sometimes.

© 2011 Kier Harris

Musings of an Insomniac (part 2): The Quest for Skyrim

I don't know if you guys heard or not, but the new Elder Scrolls game came out a little over a day ago.

                                          via Wikipedia

Now, The only Elder Scrolls game that I really got into was Oblivion, and I played it pretty regularly until I beat it. So, as I'm sure you can imagine, when I heard that Skyrim was going to improve upon Oblivion in every single way, I was mildly excited.

 You should see me when I'm really excited.

Before I continue, note that store clerk's extreme disdain for his job. He wishes he was at home playing Skyrim.  Anyway, I bought the game, and probably broke the sound barrier running back to my car. I sped home as fast as I could, hoping that there wouldn't be any cops along the way, or if there were, that I'd be going too fast for them to even see me. Once I reached home, I popped the disc into my Xbox and tuned out the rest of the world. 

I just now resurfaced, and that was only because my bladder kept rabbit punching my kidneys in protest. Once I relieved myself, I realized that I had a throbbing headache from not eating all day and proceeded to eat half the contents of our refrigerator. Only then did I remember that I had a blog to tend to, so I headed straight for that next. I don't know what's scarier though: the fact that I forgot to eat all day, or that the pain of having to urinate was so bad that I didn't even realize how hungry I was.

The Elder Scrolls games always bring out the worst in me. For example, I've spent more time terrorizing the townsfolk and going on city-wide murder-sweeps in Oblivion than I have actually playing quests. But somehow Skyrim is different. It brings out the Snidely Whiplash in me. Let me explain by telling you something that happened to me in the game today, and don't worry. There won't be any spoilers.

It all started when I stumbled across a lumber mill that you can actually run at the edge of a mountain stream. I spent about five minutes splitting huge logs and going "This is so cool," and then I continued on my quest up the mountain path. After a short distance, I reached a spot where the path crossed the stream just above a large waterfall. I bumped into a man on the bridge who offered to sell me skooma (drugs), and something called moon powder.

                                                                                                            via Wikipedia

Moon Powder?

The only responses the game provided me with were "This sounds illegal," and "No thanks. I'd rather not." I chose the first. The man responded by saying that he couldn't have me talking to the guards, and he attacked me. I think this was a bit of an overreaction, considering that I actually wanted to buy me some moon powder, but I was left with no choice other than to kill him in self defense. (Imagine my joy when I realized that I could loot all of the drugs off of his corpse after I killed him).

There I was, standing on a bridge in the mountains with nothing but a dead body and the sound of a roaring waterfall for company. Then, the sound of a saw tearing through wood would echo up the slope, and I remembered the mill.  Then, the gears started turning, and came up with a great way to dispose of the body:

Snidely would be proud..

Never mind the fact that I was standing over a roaring waterfall. I drug the corpse the entire way back to the mill, and tossed it over one of the logs like a towel on a towel rack. The bewildered woman running the mill chimed in and asked me "What are you doing with that?" NPC's (non-player characters for those of you that have lives) in Skyrim don't register corpses, so she was most likely referring to to lever I had thrown to start the mill, but her timing was just so damn perfect.

Now don't worry. The saw didn't actually cut the him in half. As soon as he hit, his arm glitched and attached itself to the saw blade. He flailed around wildly, like a macabre marionette, until the mill stopped moving, and he detached and fell into the log chute. Then, he slid into the stream and was carried away by the current.

As you can see, Skyrim has opened the door for me to be dreadfully maniacal to my heart's content. And for this reason more than any other, I love this game to death. So now I'm off to go play it some more. Tune back in tomorrow for the next post, which I promise won't be about video games.

© 2011 Kier Harris

Musings of an Insomniac (part 1)

Greetings internet travellers! My name's Kier, and let me start out by thanking you for taking the time to sit down and read my blog. There's a lot of other stuff out there vying for your attention: videos of cats chasing laser pointers, the music video of "Poker Face," and every porn created in the history of ever. That's a lot of breasts you're missing out on my friends. The entire internet is at your disposal, and you've landed here and are offering up some of your time to read this drivel that I pass for "writing." Thank you.

The title of this blog is "Makeshift Coma," and I think that might require some explaining. I'm a self-diagnosed insomniac, and I do my best writing between the hours of 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. Therefore, this blog is my alternative to sleep, or my makeshift coma. When you're all safe and snug in your beds, I'll be pounding away on my keyboard, preparing the next post for you day-walkers to read.

So that you have an idea what I look like, here's a picture of my friend Matt and I riding the monorail at Hershey Park. Why? Because it was the best picture of myself that I had readily available. And before you ask, I know that I look like I'm fifteen or sixteen years old. I'm really twenty.

 I'm Kier Harris, and apparently I approve some sort of message... Monorails?

I play drums in a local rock band by the name of Sinistry. We frequently have trouble getting gigs because everyone thinks we're a group of Satan worshipers or a death metal band. We are constantly getting responses from venue owners like "Sinistry? Like sinister ministry? I don't know man. That sounds a little too hardcore for us." In reality, our name is an intentional misspelling of the word "synastry," which is the compatibility of two people based on their astrological charts. We changed the spelling cause, hey, we're a rock band, and the word "sin" makes everything cooler-- right? To make matters worse, our font doesn't really help that much.

Remember: we're not a death metal band.

Rather than summoning demons, our songs most often talk about love, bad relationships, and people who died, died. (Bonus points if you got the Jim Carol reference, you music nerd, you.) We write a lot of our own music, but a lot of people prefer to hear songs that they know, so covers are a necessity. We mainly play covers of bands like Black Sabbath, the White Stripes, and the Black Keys. To the untrained observer, it would appear that we only cover songs by bands with colors in their names, but I would rather gouge out my eyes with the dullest spoon I can find than cover a song by Deep Purple.

At this point, you may be asking yourself: "If he's in a band, is there any way I can check out his music?" Yes, there is. And because I love you guys so much, I did the hard part for you and embedded it right here.

Now that you know a little bit about me, just what can you expect from the future of this blog? Well, I plan on making two kinds of posts. The first will be tales of my conquests and pillaging as the viking warrior Denbar Althrak humorous tales of my experiences in this world. I have a plethora of stories about my band, my writing experiences, and other facets of my life. And newer, stranger things are happening every day. The second will be humorous list based articles, much like the ones that run on Cracked.com, where I am a contributor. For any number of reasons, one of my pitches on Cracked could be rejected by the editors. Sometimes, it has nothing to do with the quality of the article, just that it isn't a good fit for Cracked. In those situations, I'll post those here for you to enjoy.

And last but not least, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me here: ogdrin@gmail.com.

Tomorrow, a new post and the rib-busting humor begins!

© 2011 Kier Harris