5 Awesomely Bad Sega CD Commercials

I hap­pen to love the Sega CD dearly and hold a spe­cial place in my heart for it, but holy shit did it have some ter­ri­ble com­mer­cials.  It’s a tough job mar­ket­ing game con­soles that have a max­i­mum of 64 col­ors dis­playable simul­ta­ne­ously, but somebody’s gotta do it.

Today I’m wax­ing nos­tal­gic about my favorite full motion video periph­eral with this round-up of five awe­somely bad Sega CD commercials:

“WHOOOOOOOA…NOTHING ELSE MOVES LIKE IT!”

Appar­ently Sega CD’s most bad ass fea­ture is…that the disc spins.

This 5-minute long in-store commercial/demo reel for the Sega CD is a typ­i­cal exam­ple of early 90’s teen-centric mar­ket­ing: choppy “in your face” edit­ing, sub­lim­i­nal text mes­sages, kids express­ing them­selves in ironic sound bytes, and employs what I like to call the acid wash jeans  fil­ter.  It could eas­ily be mis­taken for an episode of Nickelodeon’s Round­house .  I won’t blame you if you can’t sit through the whole thing.

Hey, was that Lucas at 1:28? (“Sega  CD? SO BAD!”)

“Still don’t have a Sega CD? What are you wait­ing for, Nin­tendo to make one?”

I hate it when angry black men break the fourth wall and fuck up my liv­ing room.

“There is no Nin­tendo CD.”

Jesus, didn’t Dwayne Wayne have any­thing bet­ter to do?

“Now that’s tight.”

Promo spot for Sega CD fea­tur­ing  Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch: Make My Video . This is about as 1990s as it gets, kids.

“Just when you thought you’d seen everything…”

Explo­sions! Fire! Sharks! Can­nons! Cau­tion: may be too EXTREME for some view­ers. Only watch this if you can han­dle how EXTREMELY EXTREME it is!

I hope you’ve all learned some valu­able lessons today.

‘Breaking Bad’ Gets the 8-Bit Treatment

Via Scoop.it — Shezcrafti

FACT: Sell­ing meth is more fun in 8-bits.

Col­lege Humor has pro­duced a fan­tas­tic faux role-playing game ver­sion of the twisted AMC meth cooker hit. Too bad it’s not the real thing. But beware: Spoil­ers lie within.

Via news.cnet.com

Watch the video below to watch Walt & Jesse kick some pix­ely ass (but BEWARE MAJOR SPOILERS if you haven’t’ seen all of the show):

The Pin Board of Truth

I’m sure by now you’re sick of hear­ing about Pin­ter­est, and I’m sorry that I can’t shut the fuck up about it  on this blog lately.  The shit is like a never end­ing parade of visual porn (and that’s not nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing). As a Pin­ter­est new­bie, I’m vividly aware that I’m being led down a prim­rose path of un-productivity. And that’s okay too.

Just when you think you’ve reached your quota of cool things to look at for the day, you hit refresh and before you know it it’s after mid­night and you’re still rear­rang­ing your pin boards.  I would not object to a  Pin­ter­ven­tion .

I can’t help but be amazed by the sheer vol­ume of inter­est­ing things peo­ple pin.  Pic­tures of impec­ca­bly dec­o­rated rooms, per­fectly coor­di­nated out­fits, and other impos­si­bly ide­al­is­tic depic­tions of their prob­a­bly not-so-amazing lives.

This is why the Pin Board of Truth was born. I cre­ated it to remind myself and other pin­ners that it’s okay not to be per­fect. It’s okay to want things. But don’t take it all so seriously.

Now please go repin my pins .

I didn’t realize New Moon was a comedy

All this week I pur­posely stayed away from the spoil­ers, the leaked clips, the early reviews, the 3 a.m. tweets, and the rav­ing fan­girl Twi­hards in social­me­di­a­land.  I wanted to see New Moon with­out my already low opin­ion of Stephe­nie Meyer and her ilk taint­ing my expe­ri­ence.  So tonight I cast aside the Twilulz and gave New Moon a chance.

I want my $10.00 back.

New Moon started badly, ended badly, with plenty of suck in between. Now, I real­ize The Twi­light Saga isn’t exactly pro­found lit­er­a­ture.  I also real­ize I’m about ten years older than this franchise’s tar­get audi­ence.  But I also know the dif­fer­ence between good and bad movies, and New Moon is a ter­ri­ble film.  The Twi­hards must be happy, though.  If they were hop­ing for a per­fect smoldering-glare-by-smoldering-glare trans­la­tion of the book, New Moon delivers.

It’s not like the con­cept of vam­pires ver­sus were­wolves is any­thing new, nei­ther is the injec­tion of a trite love tri­an­gle.  But when you take already-ridiculous sub­ject mat­ter and try to turn it into a seri­ous film, usu­ally one of two things hap­pens:  1) You get some­thing akin to Under­world .  2) Hilar­ity.  New Moon col­lapsed under the weight of its own attempt at being seri­ous.  There were some moments when I felt like I was watch­ing One Life to Live .  At other times, an after-school spe­cial.   Sure, I laughed dur­ing the parts where I was sup­posed to laugh.  There were plenty of inten­tion­ally funny moments pep­pered through­out the film, and these I enjoyed.  But I knew the movie was bad when I couldn’t stop laugh­ing at the seri­ous parts.  I wasn’t alone, either.  I heard snorts and sti­fled gig­gles all around me.

I found these bits espe­cially lol-worthy:

• Grandma Swan’s thou­sand yard stare.
• Edward Cullen’s fond­ness for walk­ing in slow-motion.
• CGI were­wolves emote sur­pris­ingly well.  Almost as good as Fal­cor in the Nev­erend­ing Story!
• Throngs of ambigu­ously gay shirt­less wolfmen.
• Cam­era shots that make every­thing seem EPIC.
• Bella and Edward frol­ick­ing through the woods. Yes, frol­ick­ing.
• The Volturi’s drag makeup.
  
• Bella is evi­dently a Mac geek.  No won­der I hate her.

And those were just some of the good parts.  Aside from mak­ing me laugh inap­pro­pri­ately, the film’s music was another sore point.  The score seemed so out of place in most scenes, it was almost laugh­able.  In other places it was weirdly silent.  I really missed Carter Burwell’s beau­ti­ful Bella’s Lul­laby theme from the first movie; I wish they had reprised it here.  In fact there was no trace of any kind of theme at all in New Moon ; just the occa­sional soap opera-ish strings (you know, dur­ing the ” smol­der­ing glares ”) and and end­less playlist of sedate, instantly for­get­table indie songs.  This is one ille­gal down­load I’ll skip.

New Moon has a run­ning time of 2 hours.  By the 90 minute mark, I was pray­ing for it to end.  Say what you want about Cather­ine Hardwicke’s gritty direct­ing style, but she did a hell of a lot bet­ter on Twi­light than Chris Weitz on New Moon .  It’s sad that I have to say this, but New Moon makes Twi­light —a much lower bud­get film, I might add—look like an Oscar nom­i­nee. I don’t sup­pose it’s entirely Chris Weitz’s fault, though, con­sid­er­ing the source.  New Moon is a shitty book, ergo, New Moon is a shitty movie.  I guess you can’t pol­ish a turd.

God, I hate being right all the time!

The Twilight Effect: A Followup

A few days ago I wrote about a curi­ous phe­nom­e­non I’m call­ing The Twi­light Effect , or in other words, how a movie and book series full of medi­oc­rity and unin­ten­tional hilar­ity aimed at 15-year-old girls has man­aged to com­pletely cap­ti­vate thou­sands of oth­er­wise sen­si­ble grown women with (usu­ally) good taste.

Exhibit A

Since my boyfriend would sooner light him­self on fire than be caught dead see­ing Twi­light, I dragged three of my girlfriends–who were com­plete Twi­light virgins–out to the the­ater on a cold, snowy Fri­day night.  On my left was Joanna, who I can always count on to embrace the cheesi­ness of any dorky phase I hap­pen to be going through.  She thor­oughly enjoyed the movie, and bless her, had no prob­lem admit­ting that.

Exhibit B

And on Joanna’s other side sat my much snarkier friends Julie and Stephanie, who spent most of the movie mak­ing fun of it (“OMFG GLITTER VAMPIRES!?”). Which is pre­cisely why I find these emails hilarious:

Finally, and most alarmingly–

Exhibit C

My 70-something year old Grand­mother asked to bor­row my books.  (And she loved them.)

Happee Tanksgivinz

Happee Tanks­giv­inz