It’s been almost nine months since I launched this blog, and I surprisingly haven’t run out of things to be angry about. Maybe I’ll make it to a year?

I’ve bitched about Joss Whedon’s shady practices before. Why am I posting about them again? Because of an article that appeared in this morning’s Hartford Courant. It’s about his new show Dollhouse, which premieres tonight. Here’s the quote that really ticked me off:

“I was sitting, talking to [Eliza Dushku] about her opportunities and her range and all of the things she can be, and the ways in which she could get constricted, and the ways in which she could be free,” Whedon said, “and literally the show came from that.”

No, you lying bearded fuck. The show did not come from that. The plot’s recycled from a 1970s German family show of nearly the same name (Spielzughaus [sp?]), and from the comic book Aphrodite IX! I refuse to believe that this is some sheer coincidence, especially in the Internet age. Whedon’s even worked in comics before! There’s no way he hadn’t heard of it. And given the fact that he’s recycled plots before, it’s just more of the same scummy tactics.

It’s bad enough that Whedon loves to rehash other properties rather than create new material. It’s insulting to anyone with a brain (including his fans) that he has to lie through his teeth about it. (The show’s placement in the Friday death slot and poor advance reviews may teach him a lesson, anyway.)

The “Cross Effect” is when I repair or otherwise perform maintenance on a computer or other electronic device, following protocols and methodologies to the letter…and then the device will not operate correctly. This is with no indication of why it’s failing to work properly, mind you. Imagine if you plugged a working light bulb into a working socket, but it wouldn’t light up. You know the bulb works, and you know the socket’s active…but no light!

I’ll have triplechecked every single thing I’ve done, but to no avail. This is incredibly frustrating and depressing, as it often results in having to send the item in question in question away for refurbishing, or worse yet, replacement.

Perhaps I give off some sort of electrical field that disrupts these devices when they’re in a state of disrepair. Esoteric metaphysical explanations aside, the Cross Effect is rather annoying. It doesn’t happen a majority of the time (not even close), but it’s happened enough that I’ve had no choice but to take notice and give it an insidious name.

Seriously, fuck Toys R Us’ ridiculous LEGO® pricing.

If you dig around LEGO®’s official Shop at Home page, all of the items there are sold for the standard manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP). Stores like Target and Wal-Mart sell them for the same price (with Wal-Mart often knocking off a few cents, as per their modus operandi).

Toys R Us, on the other hand, raises the prices of their LEGO® sets by a few dollars. Even worse, the higher the MSRP, the more TRU adds to the price! Sets with an MSRP of $49.99 are regularly priced at $59.99 at TRU. I understand there’s nothing illegal about doing this, but it pisses off consumers. Adding insult to injury are the sets labeled “special edition.” These are usually exclusive to TRU for at least six months; in other words, if you want the set, you’ve got no choice but to pay the added premium!

This kind of behavior only drives fans away. Someone needs to send TRU management a hot steaming dump in a box.

Does anyone else miss cassette tapes? Hear me out on this one.

Like anyone else who’s not part of the “iPod generation,” I grew up listening to music on analog media. My folks had a record player, but later moved on to cassettes. For movie rentals, it was all VHS tapes. (I know this makes me sound like a crabby old man, but don’t worry, I’ll get to the point soon enough.) Once DVDs, MP3s, and other acronyms took over, these magnetic media were relegated to history.

Sometimes, I wish that weren’t the case. Don’t get me wrong, I love the clarity and precision that digital recordings can give us, but there’s just something “raw” about the older magnetic tape. Even during the CD boom of the early to mid-1990s, I still listened to tapes all of the time. At that point, CDs were still rather expensive, and portable CD players far surpassed portable tape players in price. (When you’re a broke high school student, you go with what your meager pittances can afford!) Not only that, portable tape players were a bit more reliable at the time; you didn’t have to worry about skipping. Sure, there was the dreadful possibility that your tape could get eaten, but that was relatively rare, especially if you took good care of your player. Lastly, there was none of this skipping around for a good song shit; people’s attention spans are so short nowadays, they barely listen to full songs anymore! In the analog days, you either listened to a full song, or indulged in the painstaking process of rewinding and fast forwarding. It was easier to just listen to each side of a tape all the way through, and I feel that gave you much more of a personal connection with the music.

Most importantly for me, however, was the practice of tape trading. As you well know, I’m a colossal heavy metal fan. MTV and the radio only played the popular bands of the day; how was I supposed to discover lesser-known bands or international ones? A very small group of friends and I regularly traded tapes with each other; they’d get them from other friends, who in turn got them from their cousins, and so forth. That’s how I discovered black metal back in the day! Nowadays, if you want to hear a new band, you just hit up their MySpace page or the iTunes Store for a sample. Quick and easy, sure, but it’s just not the same as those halcyon days of tape trading. It seems sterile, and there’s no “thrill of the chase,” as it were. Even when I started college, there was a pretty decent tape trading scene, though most of it was bootleg concert recordings at that point. (I still have a bootleg of a Slayer show recorded live in Japan somewhere!)

Analog is dead and buried, but maybe it’ll earn itself a zombie-like resurrection someday. I’ll be first in line to serve our new undead tape overlords.