No, not that guy.  Stop bringing that movie up.  It’s an abortion to good comic writing.  I’m sick of hearing about it.

I mean THIS Rorschach.

The Hermann one.

He probably never killed a man, but he certainly strikes me as looking similar to another murderous bastard I can think of…

… I’m getting off topic here.

Hermann Rorschach.  The namesake.  Splattering since before Pollack picked up a paint bucket.  His name has come back into the news recently.  Seems like the psychological establishment is all in a huff that a Dr. James Heilman posted the original 10 inkblot cards, along with common responses to them.  They say that having the test, and (more importantly) an insight into the metrics behind scoring the validity runs the risk of rendering the entire test moot by teaching would-be takers how to ‘game’ the system.

Well, in an effort to prove them right, I’m here to publish my own cheat sheet of sorts.  Schizophrenic?  Pathologically violent?  Serial sex offender?  We’ve got all the ‘right’ answers you need to get you out of state custody and back out on the streets.

Card 1- The Weird Goblin-Face Lookin’ One

I see a goblin here.  I don’t know about you, but it’s a face through and through.  With big ears and a pointed nose.

Card 1 isn’t so much about what you’re saying, so much as how you say it.  This, typically being the first card presented, is supposed to gauge one’s handling of problems and new situations.  Bats and butterflies are common answers.

Answer: Turn the card sideways and insist it’s a chihuahua gnawing at the back of an A-bomb in a small puddle of water.

Card 2- Man In A Goofy Hat Crawling On A Mirror

The red is supposed to be blood, and this card is supposed to give insight as to how you handle anger or physical harm.  This may or may not include sexual undertones if the patient sees two humans ( a very common response).  Various 4 legged animals are also prevalent.

Answer: It’s Zach Galifianakis.

Card 3- Two Women With Freaky Man Arms

Card three plainly represents 2 human figures.  Depending specifically upon how this card is addressed, it is supposed to give insight into a person’s handling of relationships.

Answer: 2 voluptuous silverback gorillas on stilts standing around a fishbowl.

Card 4- The Some Kind Of Animal Skin Rug Maybe?

Card 4 is a doozy.  The dark colors and shading are supposed to trouble depressed patients, and the illusion of perspective (looking up at ‘it’) is telling of one’s feelings about authority and masculinity- the creature in the blot is ‘almost invariably’ described as male.

Answer: Burst into tears and cry about your father.

Card 5- It’s Either A Bat Or A Butterfly

Card 5 is either a bat or butterfly.

Answer: It’s either a bat or butterfly.

Card 6- Oh Wow.  Um.  Maybe… Another Animal Skin Rug?

This is a card about texture.  It’s supposed to elicit association relating to interpersonal closeness or sex.  Don’t ask me.  I don’t see it.

Answer: A shoreline lighthouse perched atop OH DEAR GOD IT’S A VAGINA.

Card 7- Two Faces.  For Sure.  Well… A Vase Maybe?  Right?

Speaking of… ahem… femininity, the figures here are popularly described as either women or children, making card 7 a ‘mother card’ of sorts to uncover issues with females in the subject’s life.

Answer: See, it’s a face/vase thing again.  You got the people on the outsides lookin’ at each other right, and in the middle is… well… it’s a… a… OH DEAR GOD IT’S A VAGINA.

Card 8- 4-Legged Mammals Of Some Sort.  I think.  Possibly Reptiles.

Card 8 is just one big screw from ol’ Hermann himself.  After the vague and difficult prompts from the last few cards, this card is supposed to be a relief.  Superficially it is, but the added complexity of color is known to throw off those with difficulty processing complex situations or emotional stimuli.  What a jerk, right?

Answer: The pink 4 legged thing is an obvious out.  So take it.  It’s a mutant capybara with a vestigial lizard tail.

Card 9- I Dunno Doc.  You’ve Got Me.  What Is It?

You thought the last one was bad?  Psh.  THIS is meant to fuck with normal people.  Psychologist assholes.  The orange stuff kinda looks like some kind of shark/alligator hybrid with great majestic antlers.  That’s about all I’m getting out of this.

Answer: These guys right here

Card 10- That’s A Bunch Of Worms And Stuff.  Spiders.  Maybe A Lobster.

You thought the last one was bad?  Well, it was.  This isn’t quite so, but again, the running theme in these last three is to gauge how a person deals with varied, complicated and simultaneous stimuli.  Make sure to dope before your doc gets to the last few.

Answer: It looks like a bunch of inkblots, Doc.

BONUS ROUND: Feel free to use this in place of any previous answer.

You know doc, a little rubbing alcohol will get that right out.

I’ve never done one of these before, I swear. So I’m going to break down this movie and tell you how shitty it is.

Hokay,

So I went to the movie rental place with my hetero life-mate, Silent Job;

and we were both kind of in the mood to watch a zombie flick. The normal choices: Of The Dead series, 28 series and the Resident Evil were out, since I own all of them. We decided to try and find an indy flick that would be just so low budget that it might have just worked. We sifted through tons of movies that sounded like they would be at least NOT shitty.

Obviously shitty ones included but were not limited to:

And (sorry Georgie)

Don’t even get me started on Zombie Strippers.

As we’re walking along the “Wall-o-fuck-ton-o-movies” my eye is caught (presumably by a phantom fish hook) by this flashy cover.

Now, it is reasonable to assume that, based on this cover, this movie will be about a virus or sickness that has adverse effects on people. One could also deduce that this movie has something that needs to be shot, based on the sheer number of military/civilians on the cover.

You would be fuck-stickily dissapointed.

Not one fucking zombie. Not so much as a dead twitch or even a mere feeling of suspense. There is one fucking scary part in this entire fucking movie. It was like wathcing the Paris Hilton sex tape, except I didn’t have a boner. Nothing about this movie makes any goddamn sense.

A rancher comes back in from a day of, suspectedly, raping the horse he’s walking back to the stable. Not riding, walking. Then his blood vessels swell up, his blood becomes an even DARKER red, and he bleeds out of his nose. And mouth. And eyes. And presumably his asshole, but one cannot rule out Horse Cockin Sydrome.

Cut to a woman in her late twenties that is supposed to be attractive, but you’d get more sexual arousal out of a cactus. Turns out, she’s a veteranerian, which comes in to play later in the movie.

Gets a call from a frantic horse owner named Spenser, says someone did something to his lovely Chloe or something like that. I have reason to believe he was into beastiality as well. Seems to be something in the water in Diablo County New Mexico, and I do put the emphasis on BLO.

Spenser freaks out, conspiracy theorizes, and then shoots his horse.

The vet, Dr. Stevens, sees a news bit about a rancer with exploded blood vessels and storms into the coroners office and demands to see the body. The coroner is nothing if not polite and quite easily and nonchalantly breaks doctor-patient protocol. The vet, who has probably only read about viruses in books that were written when small pox was all the craze, goes prodding around in the ranchers mouth and comes to the one and only absolutely logical conclusion.

“It’s ebola.”

Mind you, she only has a paper mask and a thin layer of latex gloves on and she’s prodding around like his blood is as harmless as a snack-pack.

They call the CDC after the vet rules out Rocky Mounted Spotted Fever, The Marburg and Motaba viruses, and genital herpes. About thirty minutes later, soldiers show up in stereo typical humvees and fuck shit up, as soldiers do.

General Matthews tells Dr. Stevens to fuck off and die. He tells her he’s “helping humanity.” To which she smugly replies, “Oh yeah? Well, I’m a veterenarian.”

Yeah, she just “Bones’d” that mother fucker.

Nothing happens.

Nothing happens.

Spenser hides in Dr. Stevens’ house, finds out he’s a lunatic, “The government wouldn’t test this on innocent civilians” she says, makes her go on the run with him. They get caught by the military.

Turns out, Spenser is General Matthews’ son. Turns out, Spenser was right about it being a military test. Turns out, no one cared.

Matthews’ slips Stevens the biological warfare version of a roofie, and she later dies out side of the quarantine zone, and it’s covered up as a car accident.

The news on the TV then goes on to report that goats and humans in Afghanistan have begun to die of a mysterious virus that makes blood-vessels explode, confirming once and for all that the military is really out to get us.

Cut to: A scene of a lonely dog in a neckerchief walking along an interstate as if he’s hitch hiking whilst we here a small kid, “Dad! Can we pick him up? PLEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASE?

They pull over, let the dog in. The door closes. The dog looks out the window. The camera closes in on his left eye, and the blood vessels pop.

Sequel? I sure hope the fuck not.

This movie made my eyes want to bleed like they have never bled before. (They haven’t.)

In hindsight, this probably would have been a better zombie flick (though nothing on the front of the box leads you on that it would be so in any way shape or form):

Zombies with tribal armband tattoos.

A new drug is sweeping not only the nation, but the entire world. It’s more addictive than heroin, it’s more dangerous than a meth lab, and worst of all, it’s relatively free. You can find it almost anywhere. At home, at a library, in coffee shops (not just in Amsterdam.).

I’m talking of course about Facebook Application Games.

(more…)

Regular text like this is read in MY VOICE. Italics is to be read in YOUR VOICE.

I’m really into zombies. Like we didn’t know that.

I started reading comics about 2 years ago, starting with Watchmen. Yeah, read the best first, that’s setting yourself up for disappointment.

In my senior year of high school I started writing my zombie novel, Infection. Get to the point.

One of my teachers senior year let me borrow Dawn of and Day of the Dead, the original movies. What kind of school did you GO to?

When I told him I was writing a novel about zombies, he suggested I read this comic called The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman. Like we care. Get to the point, again. (more…)

So, this weekend I saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Yeah, me and the rest of America.

$201 Million dollars in $5 days? That’s just friggin’ ridiculous. (more…)

MySpace?  Psh.  Wow.  That’s so 2005.

I hardly use it anymore.  Anyone who checks the Just Action News promo MySpace profile could attest to that.  But it’s not just me, it’s the nation at large.  Look.

That folks, is the writing on the wall.  It’s Facebook’s market to loose now.

MySpace just cut 1/3 of it’s staff to better compete in a suddenly very hostile enviroment.  This in and of itself might not sound like much, what with businesses announcing “corporate contractions” and “downsizings” and “strategic repositionings” (and the unemployment rate teasing double-digits for the first time in years)… but remember, this is MySpace.  MYSPACE.  They were the long and short of Web 2.0 not but a few scant years ago.  Social networking used to be synonymous with Tom Anderson and his little patch of internet.  But now…

I mean, just look… MySpace has been flat for the entire year.  Facebook is now the nation’s most popular social networking site.  And Twitter… is actually making real world impact.  The Twitter folks actually delayed server repairs for Iranian election demonstrators organizing through Twitter.  The jet plane that landed in the Hudson River was first found through Twitter.  Twitter sucks the air out of a room.  It’s got problems of it’s own, you know, what with a very terrible retention rate, but it’s growing at least.  More than I can say for MySpace.  It’s one thing to have the most subscribers or to generate the most ad revenue, but it’s something else entirely to affect lives or influence the governments of nations across the globe.  It’s just one of those funny side-effects of being a wired world.

It’s not just yet an also-ran like Xanga, Bebo, MyYearbook or the others… but unless they do something, MySpace won’t ever be the mover and shaker it was.