I need to make something incredibly clear: art appreciation is subjective, but art itself is not. What most people fail to realize is that any piece of art, no matter the medium, still requires certain techniques in order to produce it. Those techniques are not opinions; they are merely processes subject to criticism just like anything else.

Take a film, for example. Your personal opinions on the overall product nonwithstanding…how was the acting? The editing? Sound design? Special effects? All of those are tried-and-true techniques that are taught, learned, and mastered. If a film is poorly edited, your comments on it must take that into account, otherwise you’re simply wrong. The same applies if a film has fantastic special effects, but you pan them because you didn’t like how they were used to advance the story. You’re incorrectly dumping your opinion on quantifiable techniques, rather than feelings toward the final product.

Criticism should be specific rather than generic. When it’s the latter, you’re often criticizing someone’s appreciation of the medium rather than actual details of a certain work within that medium. That has nothing to do with the work itself, and thus has no place in proper criticism of art.

I’m not talking about that dumb Comic Book Guy meme. That would be “Worst. Episode. Ever.”, which is completely separate yet still annoying. I mean the tendency of everday Internet dwellers and professional critics alike to dub something as the worst ever, when it is clearly not. (Sure, it’s possible for something recent to be the worst ever, but I’ve rarely if ever seen this.)

Further inflaming things is that they’ll label something the worst ever…until the following year, when something else becomes the worst ever. Wash, rinse, repeat. That clearly means that the preceding items weren’t nearly so bad, now were they?

For example, take this summer’s superhero film Green Lantern. It wasn’t great, but I’ve heard more than one critic dismissing it as “the worst comic book movie ever.”

Are you kidding me? Have these fools never seen schlock like Superman IV: The Quest for Peace or Batman & Robin? Even non-comic book fans could likely name five to ten superhero flicks off the top of their heads that make Green Lantern look like Citizen Kane.

This whole “worst ever” practice is blatant ignorance of and disregard for history. I understand that more often than not it’s either a) just the usual mindless bullshit from the average Internet troll, or b) a shameless ploy to pull in more page hits by making an inflammatory statement. In that case, I hereby declare this entry to be the worst blog post ever.

…until next year’s worst blog post ever.

I find these commercials insipid and insulting. They’re sexist towards women, as they imply that jewelry is the only thing that makes them happy. They’re also equally sexist toward men, as they imply that you’re not a real man if you don’t buy them these perfect gifts. This is done with all of the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Thankfully, my girlfriend hates that shit just as much as I do. Does she enjoy jewelry? Sure. But she doesn’t see it as a damned requirement for happiness, and she’d much rather pick out her own styles. She also doesn’t give a shit about brand names or pricey crap, either. Yet another of the many reasons why I love her.

So take a stand this holiday season. If some sensible jewelry is on your lady’s wishlist, fine; but if an overpriced glittery trinket is the only way to keep her affections, kick her to the curb. You don’t need that kind of high maintenance nonsense.

All of the expected stuff is present and accounted for: the Christmas tree, stockings, house lights, gifts, and a big meal to cap it all off. Aside from the generic celebratory pieces, I’ve also got some Christmas traditions that not everyone observes. Some might be fairly unique, at least to the best of my knowledge. Read on…

• Christmas specials and films. Once December rolls around, I’ve got my triple threat of A Charlie Brown Christmas, Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I own them all on DVD or Blu-ray Disc, since the television broadcasts edit the shit out of them. (That, and I ditched cable almost two years ago.) I’ve been watching those three each and every year with family or friends since as far back as I can remember, and starting last year, I unearthed A Garfield Christmas to add to the mix. For holiday films, I really only watch two on a regular basis: A Christmas Story and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. As with the specials, I know there’s plenty more great ones out there, but I’ve got to stick with my favorites.
  • Quick sidenote concerning A Christmas Story: my girlfriend and I have created our own tradition surrounding the film, since it’s one of our favorite movies. We hunt down some unique gourmet hot chocolate, and drink it while viewing the flick, often accompanied by some other holiday-themed dessert. (Yes, that includes fuuuuuuuuuudge.)
• Annual ornament. Every year, I buy a new dorky ornament for my folks’ tree, and it’s often one of Hallmark’s offerings. Plain glass bulbs and the like bore me, so I feel the need to spice things up a bit with ridiculous crap like Star Trek ornaments and talking Muppets. C’mon, who wouldn’t want Statler, Waldorf, or the shuttlecraft Galileo on their tree? Especially since the Borg Cube routinely scares the shit out of my mother when she turns on the tree lights. Resistance is futile.
• Cookie decoration. This one goes way back. Since I was very little, my mother would make a batch of basic round sugar cookies on Christmas Eve, and my brother and I would coat them with frosting, icing pens, candies, et cetera. Now we’re fully grown men…and we still decorate the damned cookies. How could we not? Cookies are delicious, damn it, and you really can’t outgrow them. They’re always a hit when we bring them over relatives’ houses the next day, at least. We also construct a giant stacked cookie heavily laden with frosting and icing, which we’ve dubbed “the Conan Cookie.” We then try to convince each other to eat the monstrosity, because we’re stupid.
• Board Game Eve. No, that’s not the name of some esoteric stripper. You people are sick! On Christmas Eve, my family plays a board game or two. After my folks hit the hay, my brother and I keep playing until at least midnight. We try to vary it up every year, from common offerings like Scrabble and dominoes to more unique fare like Architekton and Fluxx. Either way, grumbling and swearing competes with Christmas spirit.
• Wolferman’s English muffins. The baked goods from Wolferman’s aren’t cheap, but holy shit, are they worth every last damned penny. Their massive English muffins in particular are a tasty staple of our Christmas morning breakfast. In fact, they pretty much are breakfast; the scrambled eggs and whatnot are just accessories.

That’s a decent bunch, but there used to be even more. Here’s a few traditions from times past that have faded away as my brother and I grew up.

• Voice recording. When we were kids, my father would always break out the tape recorder on Christmas Eve and ask us about our wishlists. He’d then read us a Christmas book, and it was off to bed with us. The next morning, everyone opening their gifts was also recorded. I guess it was cute at the time, but those old tapes are rather painful to listen to in retrospect.

• The long walk. As you know, children find it impossible to sleep on Christmas Eve. My folks went for the direct approach to solve this problem: they marched us around town until we were ready to drop. That’s how it felt at the time, anyway; we really were just going for a walk that lasted a mile or two, with a hot chocolate bribe halfway through. It was annoying at the time, but I can’t fault my parents’ logic: it worked!
  • My brother and I still go for a walk on Christmas Eve, but for different reasons. We don’t get to hang out that often, plus it’s always good to get out of the house for a bit if it’s not too cold outside. (And it’s still a good excuse to nab a hot chocolate or coffee.)
• The light drive. Once or twice in December, my father would pack us all into the car and drive us around town to look at other people’s Christmas lights. Most folks had fairly basic displays, from a lone tree with lights in the front yard to the electric candles in the windows. A few random folks went all-out; there’s two houses in particular that to this day still set up massive Christmas villages on their front lawns. Bear in mind, these are tastefully done, high-quality villages, not the tacky overload that’s so common nowadays. There was none of that inflatable crap back then!
• Christmas lists in the Noel mailbox. Most kids wrote wishlists or letters to Santa, and my brother and I were no different. We usually stored them in this mailbox ornament on our tree; it was one of those homemade deals that were knitted on a plastic frame, with giant “Noel” text on the side. The idea was that the lists would magically transport themselves to the North Pole (read: our folks nabbed them when we weren’t looking). Laugh all you want, but if we believed in Santa Claus, then how was that any more ridiculous? Anyway, our days of writing letters to the big man in red are long gone, as is our sneaking downstairs late at night to try to snare Santa in a Calvin-style trap…but that Noel mailbox ornament still hangs on the tree.
• Christmas Eve Christmas. As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, my mother’s a nurse. Hospitals don’t close, and back in the 1980s, she had to work a lot of second shifts and holidays. For a while, this meant that every other year she had to work Christmas Day. That blows. But spending Christmas together as a family was paramount, so my folks had an ace up their sleeve. The first time this happened, my brother and I woke up on December 24th…only to find a pile of gifts under the tree, and a letter from Santa. The letter explained that my mother had to work the next day, so Santa felt that we should all get our gifts early to spend the time together. We were thrilled to get our gifts a day early, and my folks got to sleep in since us kids were clueless. Clever ploy, huh?

There you have it. Even if you don’t give a rat’s ass, I still had to write all of this stuff down for posterity’s sake. You know how crappy my memory is, and yes, that extends to stuff I celebrate every year.

Got any notable traditions of your own? If you celebrate winter holidays other than Christmas, those still count, so make your voice heard.

However, there’s a serious problem with these new tablets, and I’m not talking about the usual technical glitches, incompatibilities, and so forth often seen in major hardware revisions. The big issue is one of privacy.

The Kindle Fire’s Silk browser uses Amazon’s cloud servers to speed up website rendering and performance. This means that all web traffic on the Kindle Fire passes through those servers, whether you’re browsing the Amazon library, hanging out on Facebook, searching via Google, or checking your personal email.

And do you think Amazon’s just going to ignore that wealth of personal information flowing through their network? Absolutely not. They’re going to mine that data for all it’s worth, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Aside from the usual profile creation to better tailor ads and services, there’s no way of knowing if and when your personal information will be sold to other companies. There’s also serious questions about how securely that information will be stored; it would be quite a prize for hackers. That’s not a risk worth taking by any means.

I’ve read conflicting reports on whether Web traffic on the Nook Tablet goes through B&N’s servers, but I think that we can safely assume that it does. I don’t believe B&N would pass up such a golden opportunity to collect profitable information on its users.

Your personal browsing habits on the Internet are no one’s business but your own. The ignorant, shoulder-shrugging attitude that so many people have towards corporations’ invasions of their privacy is absolutely appalling, and it’s only going to come back and bite them in the ass. Until there’s an option to disable the use of the corporate servers in order to browse the Web, count me out on this latest round of tablets.

EDIT 12/26/2011: Hoo boy, have I got some heavy revisions and apologies to make. I received a Kindle Fire as a surprise Christmas gift, and I soon discovered that just about everything I’d claimed in this post was wrong.

Yes, the Silk browser does use Amazon’s servers to improve web browsing. However, Amazon claims that none of the data passing through their servers is tied with the user’s identity, nor is it shared with other businesses. More importantly, though, if “accelerate page loading” is turned off within the Kindle Fire’s settings menu, then no web traffic goes through Amazon’s servers at all. Furthermore, any data sent securely via HTTPS (which many banking sites and web-based email systems used) ignores Amazon’s servers completely, even if accelerated web browsing is enabled.

So yeah, I was a complete fucking moron when I originally wrote this post. Fortunately, the gift-giver never read my original post, otherwise I really would’ve felt like an asshole. Please accept my apologies for screwing up, and I’ll try not to make such glaring mistakes in the future.

In modern times, my stance is not much of a big deal. All of my friends and family members are aware of it, and it doesn’t bother them to the best of my knowledge. When I accompany people to bars or other venues where the booze flows freely, I just don’t partake, and nobody thinks poorly of me save for the occasional stuck-up bartender. (For that miserable performance, you shall receive no tip.)

However, things were very different in the past. In college, I was constantly shit on for not drinking. Sometimes the derision was passive aggressive, but other times it was blatant. Many people actually stopped hanging out with me because I don’t drink, falsely claiming that I looked down on people who did. What nonsense.

The only time I’d intervene in someone’s drinking was when it was causing a serious health problem. Anyone who’s been to college knows that happens far too often, and I did my best to help people get back on their feet and not ruin their damned lives. What was my reward? Resentment. Yes, I actually got bitched out on occasion for making sure friends didn’t wind up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, or worse.

One of my friends in college even told me that I’d be fucked over in the real world for not drinking; it was an “essential function of business,” so he said. What the hell is this, Mad Men? Fortunately, I have yet to encounter any career-based resistance whatsoever.

At least no one ever gave me shit because I don’t smoke. (Well, the potheads did, but that should come as no surprise.)

Make no mistake: if you badmouth your boss online, or brag about getting stoned before work, or admit showing up late, your employer will find it. Most offenders think that because they’re not using their real name, they’ll never get caught. (The obvious exception being Facebook, and that’s where people post incriminating photos. Yeah, that’s really smart.)

Yes, you can be fired for shit like that. I’ve known a few folks who have lost their jobs because they bitched online with no fear of reprisal. Sure, you can make the argument that what you do on your free time is your own business — and I firmly support that argument — but employers don’t care. If you’re badmouthing them, they’re going to kick your ass to the curb, and there’s little you can do to stop them.

Oh, and if you’re thinking of just deleting the incriminating information…that’s not enough. That stuff will stick around in web caches for years at the very least.

When it comes to future employment, venting your current frustrations and whatnot online is just as dangerous. Many (if not most) companies now perform “social media background checks,” in which they research prospective employees’ activities online. This ranges from a simple Google search to actually hiring firms that specialize in assembling a report on the possible hires’ online presence. So all of your bitching online, past and present, is going to be readily available to the company you’re begging for a job.

The only solution is this: don’t post that crap to begin with. Need to vent? Do it over the phone with friends, or in private company. When you post on the Internet, you’re broadcasting it to anyone and everyone. You’d think common sense would prevent most people from doing stupid shit like this…but we live in the Internet Age, where everyone’s an idiot.

As with any walking tour attraction, people are admitted in groups, with a few minutes’ pause in between each group to give actors and animatronic features time to get back into position. My girlfriend and I were lumped in with another group, which was fine (except for the two folks ahead of us who took every opportunity to make out like high school kids; weird).

The problem stemmed from the group behind us. About ten minutes after entering the trail, they caught up to us. The group was comprised of loud dudebros and gangsta wannabes, and they shouted “OH DAMN! OH SNAP! HOLY SHIT! YEAH, MUTHAFUCKA!” and the like the entire time. Not as a result of being scared, mind you. They just yelled that crap over and over and over again, annoying the living hell out of everyone else. I suspect alcohol and/or other controlled substances were involved in their behavior. Aside from the shouted profanities, the group also let fly all manner of racial slurs. The trail of terror was not recommended for kids, but that kind of shit is still unacceptable. I would’ve liked to tell the group to shut the fuck up, but there were a lot of them, and I wasn’t about to risk an ass-beating in the middle of the damned woods.

Fortunately, after about twenty minutes, the band of douchebags…disappeared. Perhaps security had had enough and removed them. There’s also multiple points on the trail where groups are split up, so maybe they ended up ruining someone else’s night. Or maybe the ghosts got them. Regardless, they were out of our hair, and good riddance.

I don’t know what possesses people to act like such horrible human beings in public lately. I’m sure most of my perception is due to my advancing age, but even in today’s extremely rude and ignorant world, you’d think people would still know where to draw the line.

Take a look at this ad from Norton entitled “You Are Your Stuff.” Yes, it’s as bad as it sounds.

As you may have guessed, it’s the line at the very end of the commercial that gets my goat.

Because what are you without your stuff? Better yet, without your stuff…who are you?

I can answer those questions very easily: without my stuff, I’m still the same goddamned person. I am not defined by objects or random data, and that’s saying a lot coming from someone who collects all manner of things like comics, music, movies, and so on. In fact, one could argue that you’re a better person without your stuff.

It’s appalling — yet not surprising — that a company would degrade its own customers like this. I was relieved to see that this ad has received an overwhelming number of dislikes on YouTube for the exact reasons I’ve specified here. Would losing your stuff really suck? Of course. But it certainly wouldn’t render your life meaningless. Don’t let any corporate entity (or even other people) ever convince you otherwise.