Facebook; The ‘Sophisticated’ Myspace

So, we all know about these two, mammoth websites. While one (myspace) is drenched in many scandalous, sometimes unhappy, and stalker ridden memories, it was a fun place while it lasted. I remember when Myspace used to hire people to walk around advertising their website on T-shirts at Six Flags and Disneyland, saying of course..”Myspace, A Place For Friends.” Then again, while they always said that you could easily find ways to reconnect to your friends, you still got friend requests from people that you didn’t know. Some of the time, they were people that weren’t even connected to your pools of friends and just added you because they found you ‘attractive’ or ‘interesting.’

Then in some cases, people actually died off of myspace who suffered from being manipulated by older people into becoming friends with them or from crude harassments of fellow peers at school. In terms of ‘dying,’ the people being manipulated would get raped then killed and found a week later, or some kids wouldn’t like someone in particular, they would make nasty comments about them in threads, then the kid pursued would commit suicide. Myspace has always gotten a bad rep from parents and kids alike because there’s a certain ‘trashiness’ to it that just can’t be overlooked because next to your cute and customized profile, you’re basically completely exposed to the world, even if you DO restrict your profile to only your friends.

Then comes ‘Facebook.’ Before, it was conceived to simply be a place where University and college kids could reconnect with their classmates from high school or find people in their classes online. Even though it still contains that original premise, its become so widespread because of its real-time quick connection and infatuation with updating its users about every single thing that their friends are doing. So opposed to not seeing a friend over months over time, they can simply check their ’status updates’ to see what they’ve been up to.

So upon that fated reunion, Jack will be like..

“Yea..I heard that you’re ‘in a relationship’ with someone now?”

The ‘Problem’ with NewMoon

Now anyway, for the first half of New Moon, I’ll admit to actually considering on putting some of my biases to rest because the cinematography had actually drastically improved in comparison to Twilight of last year. Then even though I haven’t read the books, I know for a debatable fact that the director could have buffed up the movie with more ‘in between’ scenes to carry the film along.

When I mean by ‘fillers’ I noticed that the first half of NM was all about Bella sulking and contemplating (before) initiating suicide over the fact that Edward left (like a p****). Right after that pre-teen tear jerker of their temporary farewell, the bulk in between was a 30 minute interior monologue of Bella entering states of depression. My problem here is that I was actually extremely bored during this up until the point where she actually considered sleeping with a 43 year old, balding man because she wanted some lovin’.

Then the oversexualized Jacob Black steps in. I admit that Taylor Leighton is a hot piece of ass, but I wish more people had taught him and the rest of his cast how to act properly. Whenever I watch a film, tv show, or live show, I can always tell if there’s such a lack of emotion to the point where it honestly just seems as though someone’s just stating their lines. The premise of Twilight is meant to be about over-emotional teenagers running around, nearly having babies, killing each other, and finding true love.

The only ‘chemistry’ that I saw between Kristen and Robert was when they were actually making out. Yet up until then, I felt no intensity. All I saw were two people looking at each other with empty expressions, and one of them with an unnaturally protruding forehead. I was immensely disappointed because whenever you actually talk to a Twilight fan about New Moon (the film), they either condemn it for its poor choice in actors, shitty synchronization of events, or the fact that the only remote thing that they remember is Taylor’s glistening chest.

It’s really awful because if Twilight ‘didn’t’ have a built-in fanbase, I’m pretty sure that at least a larger portion of audiences (no matter the age) would be able to recognize good acting, natural on screen chemistry, good cinematography, and cuts….

-opposed to yet another addition to a franchise that is primarily built off of such hypersexualization towards younger girls that the films can slide away with having shit – quality in every one of their movies because the fans are too turned on by watching their fantasies in front of them on screen to actually tell the difference.

I wish that I could actually have a conversation with Stephanie Meyer.
I would tell her that if there’s a deeper gap in successful heterosexual relationships and healthy separation between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy,’ that she’s entirely to blame because she’s brain-fed a younger generation of women into believing that being emotionally abused, and only having lust-based relationships is entirely okay.

Then as for the director -
I hope she realized that Hollywood is just ‘going’ along with this whole vampire-obsession because its the current obsession. But once it all dies down, the fact that she directed the mammoth ‘Twilight’ will no longer reward her with a good impression on her resume.

In short, New Moon is good for the fans because it makes them want to have sex with characters that will never be real. It was horrible for the rest of us because it shows us how truly ‘desperate’ some people must be to think that sparkling vampires can teach us how to fall in love.

The Influx of ‘Being Healthy’ in America

It’s basically everywhere. No longer do we see a constant wave of advertisements showcasing super sugary, fried, and heart attack drenched foods with actors with smiling faces. These days, since its increasingly obvious that we’re probably the fattest country on Earth, a lot of companies are pushing their money into creating foods that’ll help speed up our metabolisms, slim our waists, make it easier to burn off calories, or decrease our amount of desire to devour food all together.

It’s really interesting because their way of encouraging us when they’re actually trying to ‘force’ us to eat healthy is by persuading us into psychologically believing that even though we’re eating healthy foods, we’re just cheating without all of the added fat and calories. I know that whenever you browse through the frozen food aisle, there’s been a new health-food revolution in addition to new stamps being placed on the most common foods that record the amount of ‘points’ you’re consuming if you’re on the Weight Watchers’ diet.

Hell, even big-name fast food giants like McDonald’s are already trying to act like a ‘happy, concerned camper’ in the heat of these times because of their new even more starkingly obvious and larger charts of calories on the backs and sides of their products. Everyone knows that for most people, the easiest way to get healthy is to exercise for a few months and cut the amount of junk you eat to lose weight. But different industries (I’ve noticed) are decided to market their products in particular  patterns right after one another.

You’ll see an advertisement to eat healthier, then one for 24 Hour Fitness, followed neatly by an E-harmony commercial, then one filled with Armani or Dolce&Gabanna models.

patterns, anyone?

A little diamond, A lot of ‘Precious’

I don’t think that anything would have prepared Hollywood for this. The entire premise of Hollywood, Tisneltown, is drenched in the notion that every single thing and every single person must be perfect, successful, usually light skinned, powerful and beautiful. In that sense, the entire American Dream became warped from the original seeds of, “I want to make enough money to support my family and make myself into someone,” into “I have to become famous..no matter what.”

But with this new film, ‘Precious,’ originally a book called ‘Push’ by Sapphire treads into the dangerous waters that mainstream Hollywood has always preferred to avoid–Deep, Emotional, Raw, and authentic. Even though I haven’t watched the film myself, just the trailers, reviews, knowledge and deep relation to the film itself are incredibly ground shaking to the media’s usual portrayal of beauty, need, and survival.

‘Precious’ is essentially about a young teen, nearly 16 and is still a few years behind in school. Even though she’s already struggling through school as a single mother, her own mother considers her as competition to her sense of independence and femininity and abuses her both emotionally and physically on an every day basis. I love the fact that this movie does not hold anything back. Despite it being a movie that’s broad casted to the hearts and chairs of discrimination in America, it makes an impeccable impact as a film that will hopefully show people that showing how every day people endure and overcome the worst kinds of pain on our own soil will shake common social stereotypes.

Scientists fathom that the ‘Moon might strike earth’

This is why that wouldn’t happen -

The moon is freakishly small compared to earth.

If a bowling ball represents the earth, then the ‘moon’ is a golf ball.
If the moon crashes into earth, which won’t happen because its actually growing ‘further’ away by inches every year, then it’ll create a dent on earth that’ll probably be a little bit larger than the grand canyon. Or it’ll make such an impact that the most that earth will have is a retarded looking crater that’ll make it look like the ‘Death Star’ or something from Star Wars.

The moon is floating in space and doesn’t have any inertia.
Inertia is what happens when there’s collected speed. Something enormous would have to ‘hit’ the moon in order to actually cause enough momentum for the moon to crash into earth. Think of meteors and comets hitting the earth periodically over time. They always have extreme collected inertias that gather enough speed over decades to actually make an impact to break through earth’s atmosphere to strike its grounds.

That argument can easily be appointed to one of “Jupiter’s” moons leaving it. For example, a moon that sits between Jupiter and its other moon ‘Europa’ is called ‘Io.’ Its evident that Io has no sway over Jupiter’s natural gravitational pull because the energy between Europa and Jupiter is so intense that it causes a ‘disruption’ and causes Io to have volcanoes and magma sputtering all over it because the energy between the two bodies affected its core.

Europa is as big as planet earth, and many scientists and astronomers identify it as a pretend-planet because of its massive size.

Then Io is slightly bigger than the moon, or around the same size. If Europa can represent earth, and has all of that energy, and Io doesn’t have enough of a natural gravitational pull to *affect* Europa to counteract the volcanoes that are being created on it, then that basically means that if the Moon were to ever leave Earth, then the solar system would not break out of Balance.

Pluto is practically out of the freaking solar system as it is.
Yet is there any magnetic planetary combustion where the entire system hits a point of chaos?

No, because the answer is simply this -
The moon is not big enough to actually have that much of an affect on earth other than the tides being out of sway

Disney finally chooses a ‘Black’ Princess

Given the fact that animation has evolved beyond that fixed mind set of beauty and creation, artistic technique, and overall storyline, the fact that Disney is actually making a movie set back in one of the most controversial geographical and historical racial borderlines is beyond me.

It began with a portrayal of lived in, freshly freed, yet horribly racially stereotyped blacks back in the South with a movie that escapes me, but I’m sure you can find it on wikipedia. But scratching the race-talk here, I’m just fascinated that Disney’s actually giving us another princess that our younger generation can look up to instead of just reverting back 60+ years to find one.

I have a love for the classics as well, including a good bulk of the world, so to speak. But you can’t just easily dismiss the fact that Disney is actually ‘trying’ to scratch its former borderline Nazi glory for a movie that’s taking a tale about an originally blonde female, and making her African American and a Latin Prince to appeal to new audiences. If that isn’t a strive for decent modernization, then hardly anything else is.

Also might I add that the general appeal of the classics was sugar coated with a pre/post war, economic, and social mindset of relationships and gender roles. It’s only still appealing because of 1) It’s Beauty, 2) Its simplicity rather than prickling complexity, and 3) the fact that those blatant mixed messages are much more subtle beyond pretty sing a longs, and faces/anatomies reminiscent of those particular eras.

All in all, I honestly think that The Princess and the Frog is going to be a fantastic film, and is going to give a lot of us a combination of ‘classics’ nostalgia, and a sense of pride that Disney has given us a movie about a new princess that we can be proud of.

The Italian-American Underground…..what?

Even though I have a couple of italian friends over on the east coast, I wasn’t aware of the fact that there’s an entire stereotype and subculture of ‘guidos’ and ‘guidettes’. They’re basically like the cream of the crop of usually young Italian Americans who are beautiful, rich, well dressed, come from the largest and wealthiest families, and are the ideal lovers amongst the Italian community. I can be completely wrong on this, but the premise of this article is that MTV is basically getting sued because their new show, “The Jersey Shore” is based on what guidos and guidettes truly are in the heart of the public eye.

The show takes young adults from different spots on the east coast, deliberately picks the rowdiest, most confident and prone to alcohol out of the people that auditioned, and houses them in a nice looking beach house on the New Jersey coast line. It’s basically like the ‘Real World’ for Italians. I think that its interesting that MTV has literally met the end of its rope with reality TV since its going as far as sticking its camera into how the club scene defines guidos and guidettes, opposed to its actual older social definition of being somewhat close to an aristocracy. So MTV is getting sued by Italian American organizations for inappropriate portrayals of those two terminologies with a bunch of horny kids in the club scene.

From both perspectives, I can instantly see why there’s conflict here. I’m completely ignorant of all of the social constructs of the Italian culture aside from its amazing food, so when I saw them calling themselves guidos and guidettes, I figured that as a younger generation, they had ripped the names from their pedestals and applied it to judge and mold every day Italians to determine lovers, friends and mates. The ‘guidos’ were basically beef cakes with tanned skin, spiked hair, and larger than life personalities. While the girls were materialistic, pretty, and also tanned. To be honest, I don’t really see these ‘guidos/guidettes’ in terms of the clubscene, any different from normal people who like to live it up and party.

The only difference is just that they have a much heavier emphasis on loving their backgrounds and loving to get more tanned skin.

The Irony of ‘No Same Sex Marriage’ in California

When anyone here and far imagines California, they usually think of the extreme amount of diversity that this state bears. It goes back to the fact that this state was an immense cultivation of the pulsing ‘Manifest Destiny’ during the 1800’s that caused new settlers from Europe and existing ones to migrate west to the edge of the state to start building new farms and cities because the East coast was too crowded to house all of them. Then once cities actually formed, generations blossomed, and a scatterplot of ethnicities started to settle into the same neighborhoods without too much trouble, one would think that California would truly be ‘The Golden State’ in more reasons than just its lack of tangible gold.

It isn’t just San Francisco that has them -

The LGBT community is so prevalent in the state of California to the point where I’m not surprised that it doesn’t have its own metaphorical stilettos. So when the same-sex-marriage proposition came in, I witnessed the entire state go insane with marching in the streets, waving rainbow plastered flags, and screaming for justice into the night as the final lines of voters cramped into the voting sections. It was a wonderful thing because I honestly thought that as the largest and most diverse state, we’d be able to set an example for the rest of the country by saying that it honestly doesn’t matter what sex you and your partner are, as long as you’re able to love who you want and get married.

But the backlash of the actual voters’ selection was that in 2008, the LGBT community did not receive a glittering victory probably due to the fact that the question on the ballot was phrased in a ‘reverse’ manner, so people who were ‘for’ same sex marriage, would end up voting against it by accident. So once that victory was shot to the ground, again arrives another protest to demand civil rights to a community that’s capable of loving as dearly as the rest of us.

But seriously….California is anti-gay marriage right now, literally?

Apart from the state’s diverse history, it doesn’t really make any sense.

Infected With Gaga for “Ms.Gaga.”

When Lady Gaga’s first video and single ‘Just Dance’ came out, I was pretty sure that she would sail to the bottom of the Music Industry and would rot there because I didn’t think she’d actually do well. However, due to a ridiculous amount of radio play and air time, it quickly and literally became the ‘chant’ of the entire summer of 2008. Then carrying into the actual year, her next single ‘Pokerface’ became adored at such a momentum to the point where simply saying the word outloud would result in a bulk of people unknown to you muttering the following lyrics of the song.

Lady Gaga has become a major entity within at least a year. She’s grown to such a magnitude that some would even dare say that she’s the new ‘Madonna’ of our pop, Daft-Punk inspired and auto-tune affected generation. I noticed that her old single Just Dance has become an extremely marketable slogan with a widespread of different products, slogans and tags for major social events. She’s become so much of a star that her tickets for her concert in the California at the Staples Center were sold out within a matter of 2 weeks into October, whereas the concert itself would be held in December.

On top of that, Dr.Dre worked with her to release her own set of headphones called ‘Heart Beats, ‘ which are an extremely fashionable, unique, and pretty triangle-shaped headphones with Dre’s technical synchronization for the sound quality. Bose is still obviously better, of course.

While Gaga steals and continuously dominates the radio waves with her new singles from her newest album ‘The Fame Monster,’ she is proving that a funny looking girl from New York with a bizarre fashion sense can easily cause a social eruption more than the uproar over 2012 can ever comprehend.

Gamers are the new ‘Teenage Robots’

It’s been a fair while since there was actually a time when kids were squabbling over pokemon, digimon, and yugioh cards on the playground. The kids would actually get huddled up together in little packs alongside buildings and would start new and engaging social events of screaming and hollering as their poor little pocket monsters were defeated by their own card bullies. Remember how cute it was to watch as people would be quick to befriend or hate one another over something so minuscule?

– Then again, that generation of kids graduated. There are now PSP’s and DS’s scattered on the pavement instead of gameboy colors. And the kids who originally kept together in close knit packs of card traders have evolved into teenagers and young adults sitting on the edges of their beds, with their laptops or videogame controllers pressed beneath their fingertips.

Even though some people might go as far to say that the ancient Playstation 1, Nintendo 64, or ‘Dreamcast’ may have began this social revolution, I actually think that it began with the previous generation of game-consoles. What began? Oh the fact that its almost impossible to get through to most people that are glued onto the tiny screens of portable game systems and have an even harder time trying to talk to anyone who’s locked up in their room, screaming to a videogame character on screen  across the room, with a Monster or Rockstar in hand.

I call them ‘robots’ because I’ve seen how people can get when they’re rooted to their games. It affects teenagers and young adults the most because that’s where the videogame market industry targets the most. Over time, the people playing the games for hours and hours lose a sense of time management and connection to the outside world called ‘reality.’