Feb 02
I have been absent from a lot of things lately for a variety of reasons; I’ve been conspicuously MIA from MCCP (I’m there just kind of aloof) and my updates here at VV.com have been kind of sporadic lately and off-schedule. There’s been a few ongoing things in my life that have been on my back for some time now and very recently a lot of them reached their breaking point and became too overwhelming to properly deal with. I am not going to divulge the nitty gritty details of the events because they are personal and I do not feel comfortable sharing them publicly, but in short I am resigning my columnist position here at VV.com indefinitely, and until further notice I will no longer be writing 3 Years, 5 Months, & 2 Days in the Life of Dracophile. The column has not moved elsewhere and I have no plans to start anything with GatorAIDS.com right now. I need some time away from things so I am simply severing a few things that are beginning to lose their luster to me. I do not want writing to be a chore for me, and overusing it as a crutch will eventually turn it into that ala RFSHQ. Writing is an art that I cherish and hold close to me, and writing out of anger or misplaced emotion will only tarnish the art’s image in my mind, which is a mistake I have decided to not make a second time.
I apologize to my readers and fans of my column here, I really wanted to make it a lot longer than #23 and I personally was looking forward to putting together a “best of 2010″ summary but my article tally for this year is bottoming out at four. I am very appreciative of all of your support and love (and hate too I guess) and wish to extend a very warm thank you. I enjoyed my time here but I think it’s best for now if I let things lie as they are in my life.
See ya around, space cowboy. You’re gonna carry that weight with you.
- Dracophile
Tagged with: bawwwww • resignation
Jan 28
I’m on a roll with these “10 Years After” columns, really. I’ve done Pokemon, Ace of Base, and the actual 00’s decade itself. In the aforementioned article about the decade in review I had a section about how far Nickelodeon Studios has fallen from grace and a phrase from what I wrote got me thinking; the phrase in question being “somewhere around the Nickellennium the train derailed and crashed through the side of the Fail Station”. The “Nickellennium” as it was called was part of a whole Y2K marketing thing that Nickelodeon started to ring in the new millennium, and while the previously mentioned quote was only part of a larger joke it actually reminded me of said marketing campaign. I started thinking about Nickellennium.
For those of you who are too young or just don’t remember, Nickellennium was actually a six-hour long movie (no commercial breaks either) that cataloged the thoughts, dreams, ideas, and hopes of kids from around the world as to what they thought about the future. It really was a monumental undertaking, and likely the last good thing Nickelodeon has ever produced, but I mean… seriously, putting an 11-year-old in front of the camera and asking him about the future is only going to end in him saying something he’ll regret when he’s in his 20’s. I thought about it and wondered what it would be like to revisit that production a decade later to gauge either how close or how far we are from everything that was said in the film because I’m expecting it to be hilariously skewed towards “THIS MILLENNIUM SUCKS SO FAR”, but mostly just because I’d like to make sure Frank (9, Georgia) cringes when he is reminded “in the future maybe we can talk to dolphins”.
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Tagged with: 10 years after • books • millennium • nickelodeon • nostalgia • spyro the dragon
Jan 18
As I get fed up with this computer I have been graced with I realize that it’s aging; I’ve had it since mid-2006 and included on its hard drive are backups of folders from as early as 2004. I’m running a system with seven years’ worth of stuff crammed into it and here I am complaining about how it doesn’t seem to be working as well as it used to. Go figure, right? I’ve had MSN Messenger for as long as I’ve had a computer because it’s my preferred method of being annoyed by people at all hours of the day. With the use of MSN Messenger you can send files to people and likewise let people send files to you, and in the past I’ve told stories about how people have accidentally sent me pornography instead of what they intended. I’ve had this computer since 2006 and not once have I cleaned out my “Received Files” folder, so there’s about four years’ worth of random snippets and trinkets sitting in there… stewing.
When someone sends you a picture via Messenger it’s usually relevant to your conversation, for example “here’s a picture of my new car”. In four years I’ve been a part of many websites and communities and talked to hundreds of people, most of whom have sent me things via MSN Messenger. As years go by I lose contact with these people but the artifacts of our conversations remain on my computer either for eternity or until I delete them, and I’ve deleted nothing. Everything in that folder had some kind of context to it but as long as 4 years later I have since completely forgotten whatever in the hell it was in the first place. I decided that digging through my Received Files folder and finding my favorite bizarre pictures would be a fun way to waste an evening writing and wouldn’t you know – it was. Below are seven pictures that were sent to me from various people with whom I’ve talked to, their context is just as much of a mystery to you as it is to me.
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Tagged with: dragon pr0nz • japan • nostalgia • realmscon • sonic the hedgehog
Jan 17
No, I’m not about to rip into the (many) problems with the modern-day era of Pokemon. As much as I’d like to do that I don’t even know enough about Gold/Silver/Crystal to even begin to fabricate an argument higher in thought than “it sucks pretty bad”. This article is about a peculiar video of the same name, specifically the November 30th, 1999 episode of the show In Focus, a religiously charged broadcast that airs on WVCY TV30 in Wisconsin. This shoddy public access tape traveled all the way from Wisconsin down to the bowels of South Texas to meet me, like a stroke of destiny, in a Goodwill store. I always lurk the VHS section of any second-hand store because I have a knack for the awkwardly cringeworthy and that’s simply the place for the best pickins. Nestled in between a copy of The Land Before Time 45,713 and Popeye cartoons in Spanish lied this VHS – a simple black tape with a homemade type-written label reading “THE PROBLEM WITH POKEMON”. I bought it with a smile on my face knowing this would be superb, and it was.
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Tagged with: 10 years after • nineties • nostalgia • pokemon • religion • vhs
Jan 14
Look at that! 2010 and a brand new shiny graphic that I’m sure I will be tired of by March. 2010 is also important because it means that quite literally the worst decade in the history of decades, the aptly named “Double Zeroes” (named as such because it fails twice as hard as regular decades), is over and perhaps mankind can move on from such crippling things as terrorist attacks, an emo economy, and Luke Wilson advertising AMERICA’S NEXT 4G NETWORK and focus on the more (de)pressing matters like even more terrorist attacks, an economy so emo that it now combs its hair over both of its eyes, and more than likely Whoopi Goldberg advertising the inevitable “5G” network.
I kid; I have high hopes that the 10’s will turn the world around because seeing “10’s” gives me a mental picture of a monster truck completely destroying everything, doing a backflip, and bursting into flames while the judges literally crap their pants and hold up cards reading “10″ while tacking all of their other score cards onto the end of it trying to give Grave Digger a score of “10,987,654,321″ (that’s almost 11 billion points folks, beat that Maximum Destruction). At the very least if the Mayans are right with their 2012 nonsense then this decade won’t even have a chance to turn bad so think of it like that, it’s always great to stay positive!
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Tagged with: 10 years after • crap • internet • nostalgia • television • video games
Jan 05
One thing I’ve learned in my time here at VitalViper.com is that the name of my column makes a killer acronym. I also fell short of my “decade in review” article on New Years – I apologize for that I had a personal emergency and was unable to update. I’ll get around to writing it “eventually” since I now have plenty of time to do so without a deadline. It’s also incredibly, well, foreign for me to be writing for this website considering I feel so out of place and that nobody likely reads anything I write because I’m clearly far too well ahead in an educational and lexicon sense.
Regardless of the fact, I’ve written almost 20 articles for VitalViper.com since I joined at the site’s launch. This is actually my 19th submission but I’m not counting it because there’s no original content. Instead for you new visitors to the website this article is a recapping of the “best of” this column from the past year.
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Tagged with: 2009 • best of
Dec 25
Good morning! If you’re reading this then it’s either Christmas Day or it’s sometime after Christmas and you’re just slow in keeping up with my column! Just on the sole basis that I’ve inadvertently become the lead writer for this website that also kind of means that I’m in charge of the holiday-themed content. Last Halloween I put out Afterlife TV (Revisited), a serious look at Ghost Hunters… and because of a personal emergency I missed Thanksgiving and/or Black Friday (and even Cyber Monday) so now it’s really crunch time for me to pull something out of my rear for Christmas (and likely New Years as well). I’d be lying to you if I said I had a single ounce of a clue as to what I want to write about this holiday season because I don’t, so we’ll just see how that goes. New Years, though, I’ve got that under control – a quick retrospective of this crappy decade appropriately called “The Double Zeroes”. :3
But that’s beside the point, I’ve got a whole week to ponder over this wacky and pathetic decade, it’s all about the jolly red fat man today so I should get busy talking about Christmas…
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Tagged with: christmas • dragon pr0nz • nostalgia • school • spyro the dragon
Dec 20
Being a part of a band comes with a lot of choices and decisions. First and foremost there’s a name that you have to agree upon followed of course by the kind of music you will be performing and recording. If you can manage to get through all of that without killing each other then the last hurdle to leap over is the name of your album and what to put on its cover. There are literally thousands of terrible band names and equally as many if not more terrible album covers. This article is a showcase of those covers.
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Tagged with: album covers • crap • jesus • mexico • music • zoophiles
Dec 19
So help me God, the next person that comes up to me and asks me what I think of “James Cameron’s new furry movie” is going to get punched right in the temple. I’m going to say this once (and more times in this article no doubt) and I’m going to say it nicely – the tribal characters, the Na’vi, in Avatar aren’t furries; they are hardly even in the same boat as furries. To quote the great Dr. Evil, they’re the Diet Coke of furries – just one calorie, not even enough. I feel kind of stupid here, really, like I’m some kind of professor of furrydom which is not only a terrible job title to begin with but also something that hardly applies to me. I have no doctorate in Furry; if you want to put it into some kind of silly and drawn-out educational joke let’s just say that I took a couple of classes for a few weeks and dropped out because I didn’t like the classwork. Are you even still with me here? I think I may have lost everyone when I went off on the Dr. Evil and college humor.
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Tagged with: avatar • furries • internet • james cameron • movies
Dec 10
eBay has had this new thing on their homepage for a while that contains a bunch of various odds and ends at “deep discount” prices and free shipping. It’s called the Daily Deal and it’s basically an excuse for people to liquidate their inventory of mindless artifacts that they can barely give away let alone sell at MSRP. Every so often something actually worthwhile will show up like an overabundance of copies of Halo 3: ODST (if that’s your thing) but usually the Daily Deal is the victim of crap like Rock Revolution with it’s guitar and drum controllers for $14.99. Keep in mind shipping is FREE so whatever poor sap was cursed with a back-stock of copies of that terrible game is willing to lose money instead of keeping the boxes around. You could build a fort with all of those and then have a pretend band full of guitarists and dummers banging on miniature drum sets that have no less than 20 drum pads. THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES!
I can say with a clear conscience that yes I have purchased things from the Daily Deal. I bought a copy of V: The Complete Series from the 1980’s and a camera tripod. I won’t, however, find myself buying any of the following pieces of crap passed off as a “deal”.
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Tagged with: bargains • computers • costumes • crap • decor • ebay
