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
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 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
Nov 17
Last time on “Don’t Put That In Your Mouth” I defied my own intuition in regards to Chocolate Mix Skittles and went ahead and put them in my mouth. That was a bad move, and clearly I do not learn from my mistakes; this time around I will be putting the Jelly Belly “Bean Boozled” jelly beans to the test. Compared to Jelly Belly the Skittles are small potatoes because when Jelly Belly makes purposefully bad flavors they do it with a precision unrivaled by anybody else on the face of the Earth (keep in mind I said “on purpose” there, otherwise virtually every single candy that comes out of Mexico would be on this list – it’s not their fault they substitute sugar with chili powder, I think). I have formerly gone toe to toe with some of Jelly Belly’s off-key flavors when they had those special Harry Potter beans, and much to my horror they have seen new life as Bean Boozled beans; beans with the ability to hide amongst the good flavored beans and bite you when you least expect it. Dear God, these are V beans!!
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Tagged with: candy • crap • don't put that in your mouth • jelly belly
Nov 12
vaporware (vay – poor – where) n. A term used to describe massively hyped or advertised software that is excessively delayed and ultimately never released.
Game not included.
Yes this is an article about a dragon-related computer game, and yes I am actually satirizing it. Just because my name is “Dracophile” doesn’t mean that anything with dragons in it instantly gets five gold stars and a Dracophile Seal of Approval. Quite the contrary, actually; I have taste in what I like. Simply dropping a bunch of random dragons in front of me actually won’t keep me occupied unless you managed to find what I like. DragonPlay, a game that can best be described as “a complete Club Penguin rip-off with dragons” and worst described as “Yahtzee with letters on all the dice”, does not fall into the category of things that I find pleasing.
Of course, I would be lying to you if I said I wasn’t originally on the game’s development team at one point in time. When the project was announced in 2006 by the dev team they also asked me if I’d like to hop aboard and do graphic design work for the game which I agreed to do and also offered to design the website and host it on my own servers. Normally I’d charge for a service like that (because graphic and web design is my job) but I waived all of those fees because “hey, dragons!” They kicked me out about two weeks later because it was readily apparent I was the only developer with a head on my shoulders and a generous helping of common sense and Internet business practices.
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Tagged with: crap • dragon pr0nz • dragonplay • duke nukem • vaporware • video games
Oct 31
Author’s Note: Portions of this article were originally written as a part of RFSHQ.com’s lineup on May 15th, 2006 (“Afterlife TV”). Excerpts have been modified and new content has been added to it since its original posting.
It’s Halloween and I’d like to be the first writer on VitalViper.com to usher in the holiday and wish you all the best, and by “all the best” I mean don’t eat razor blade apples and if you see Michael Jackson in his Thriller get up then he is actually a zombie and you should RUN. Halloween is that time of the year when everybody fawns over spooky stuff and television networks air all of their scary programming. Nickelodeon is airing special “Spooktacular” episodes of Spongebob Squarepants, Cartoon Network is beating Goosebumps into the ground (which is not even a cartoon great job), American Movie Classics is showing their stock of so-bad-it’s-great horror flicks, and C-SPAN is… well they are just doing business as-is because on any given day watching the American government system self destruct is scary in its own right.
Perhaps the most recognizable facet of Halloween, though, is Syfy’s annual marathon of their Ghost Hunters show, one of many shows on television that manage to never actually produce anything worthwhile but still get greenlit for second, third, and fourth seasons. Do I believe in spirits and ghosts? Well to some extent yes, that’s debatable, but that’s not the main idea of this article. Television shows like Travel Channel’s Most Haunted and Syfy’s Ghost Hunters are so poorly faked that they essentially become programming that would be better suited as late night drunken frat boy fodder on Comedy Central.
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Tagged with: crap • ghost hunters • syfy channel • television
Oct 28
Skittles are a classic candy that date back quite a ways (to 1979) and have enjoyed a modest amount of success through actually not being that bad of a confectionery as well as having outright bizarre and/or terrifying ad campaigns to support their product. Seriously who hasn’t dreamed of planting a bag of Skittles into the ground in hopes that a giant rainbow would erupt from the Earth and rain candy on you? That’s seriously a wet dream for some people out there (Jared the Subway Guy, pre-Subway diet). Speaking of rainbows the fact that their slogan “Taste the Rainbow” sounds moderately homosexual is funny and I mean that in a tasteful way. Taste. Rainbow. Tasteful. Weiners. Hah. Back on subject, though, Skittles have come in a variety of flavors so awesome that I can only summarize Wild Berry by saying “holy crap I am freaking out”; and Tropical Mix is a close second. Sour Skittles are amazing, and for that short period of time when Green Apple and Watermelon were flavors I enjoyed a few extra handfuls of the candies just because. In fact as I type this article I have a few “Fun Size” bags of Skittles tucked away in my desk… even though there is nothing “fun” about a bag of candy that only has somewhere around 8 Skittles in it.
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Tagged with: candy • chocolate skittles • crap • don't put that in your mouth • food
Oct 23
Seeing as how I am largely a byproduct of the 1990’s I had the opportunity to grow up enjoying a lot of wondrous things such as MC Hammer making a zillion dollars off of one song and subsequently spending it all on the randomest crap ever (2 Legit 2 Pay My Bills), a time when Nickelodeon didn’t suck copious amounts of things I cannot say on this blog, and the awesome green version of Gator Golf (seriously the new orange one is terrifying). Also in the nineties (in 1993 specifically) this virtually unknown Swedish pop band called Ace of Base released their debut album Happy Nation. If you don’t know who Ace of Base is, then you might recognize this song anyways, because it’s terribly catchy in a godawful “this is why some people hated the 90’s” kind of way. Here is, arguably, their biggest hit single ever, The Sign.
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Tagged with: 10 years after • ace of base • bands • crap • music
Oct 14
Perhaps I am not properly enculturated in the world of how to be a MANLY MAN. I’m not a fan of football (or sports for that matter), I could care less about NASCAR, I think hunting is pointless, and any kind of outdoorsy activities bore me to hell and back. UFC (or Ultimate Fighting Champion-something-or-other) is the latest “craze” amongst overly aggressive men and how they choose to spend their weekends (and Pay-Per-View credits on Dish Network). UFC has been around a while, but it’s only recently gotten popular as the “in” thing to do. Spike Network adopted the series into their programming lineup and since then they’ve also produced a crappy reality TV show akin to “The Next Greatest UFC Fighter” or some other pointless manufactured nonsense. You know the kind of show I am talking about.
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Tagged with: crap • pridefest • ufc • video games
