Reply to “All Christains are Serial Killers”

This is a response to this blog post:

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/scrowder/2009/05/26/lonewolf-diaries-all-christians-are-serial-killers/#idc-ctools

I call shenanigans.

Let’s start from the beginning. First let’s look at the TWO examples given by the author: Carrie and South Park. I don’t really see either as being representative of either 1. society or 2. Hollywood. In fact, South Park is an outcast that isn’t exactly among the Hollywood elite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Religious_affiliation

Take the statistics. If 75% of the United States is Christian, then what is the religion of most of the characters in most of the movies out there? I’ll take a wild shot in the dark and say that it is around, say, 75%.

Think of it this way, there you are watching the latest romantic comedy where up and coming young New Yorker is juggling a budding career and a new girlfriend at the same time. They have their trials, but in the end, they live happily ever after. If neither one ever comes out and states their religion, why would you think they weren’t Christians? And what is more Christian than finding the one you love? What is more Christian than “happily ever after”?

Just as there are millions of normal people who go to work, go to the bar, go to the gym, go to wherever it is they go to, every single day who don’t outwardly display their religion, there are these characters in movies. How can you spot them? By how you should be spotting them in the real world: by what they do.

The first instance is a great one: Carrie. Carrie’s mother isn’t just any Christian. She isn’t even a conservative Christian. She is a wacko. A fucking nutcase. She is a whack job who is as far from sanity as you can get and still function in society. She expresses that insanity through religion. Why? Well, ask Stephen King.

But allow me to make conjectures. Carrie is a horror story. For horror to work, the reader/audience has to identify with story, with the characters. By grasping onto something like Christianity (75% of America), King brings home something that a lot of his potential readers are completely aware of. And then he twists it. He perverts it. He turns something that should be safe into something that is not.

That is to tell a story, not to destroy Christians.

Ok, let’s go to comedy. Take Dogma as a good example. This movie is directly aimed at what Christianity tells us. It puts the faith and the church right in the cross hairs and really doesn’t hold back. It is hilarious. (I think, at least)

Now imagine the same type of movie: just as blasphemous, just as scandalous, just as badly humored and whatnot, but this movie is aimed at Hindus. Would you get it? Would you think it is funny? What do you know about Hinduism?

Christianity is such a deeply rooted part of our history as America. Most of our predecessors came from Europe. Most of them were Christians (some escaping repression from? Other Christians! See we don’t even like ourselves). That history from Rome forward changed Europe, guided Europe and carries over the Atlantic to here today.

How would you write a period piece about the Elizabethan era without touching on the oppressive control the church had on normal life? Would you gloss over the past to appease the present?

Hollywood doesn’t have an anti-Christian agenda. (maybe some people in Hollywood do) Hollywood has only one agenda. It is a good old American idea: money. It has got to sell, or they won’t do it. The dollar wins every time. So here is the thing, if Christians don’t like what is being put out, why don’t they stop going to see it?

If 75% of America is Christian, then is safe to say that most of Hollywood characters are either acted, written or directed from a Christian perspective.

Look at the real world. Are all Christians saints? Hell no. We rob from each other, we beat each other, rape, murder, get into road rage, we swindle old people out of their life savings, we do a lot of horrible, horrible things to each other.

Well, you may think, those people aren’t really Christians. I’d be inclined to agree with you, but the requirements for Christianity aren’t that high: Believe in Christ.

Christians come in all types, all shapes, from Christmas Eve Christians to every Sunday Christians. We are Democrats, Republicans, Independents. We are open minded, we are closed minded. We are tolerant. We are bigots and racists. We are sports fans and we are pacifists. We are war heroes and we are poets. We are people. And as people we are not defined by a singularity of ourselves.

Pirates 2, Mummy 3 and Indy 4, a proposal

So once upon a time, after seeing the awesome that was Pirates of the Caribbean, I had a thought. It was a simple one: crossover movie. So this was my idea for that movie i put together all those years ago. Since then, Pirates 2 (&3), Mummy 3 and Indy 4 have in fact been made, but I still think my idea was better. This was an email, so awkward wording and typos will probably survive:

( ps. I am aware that Incans were in South America and Aztecs were in Mexico, so there is a location disparity in the story, but I am pretty sure I wrote this before lunch, so please have forgiveness. )

I figured it out, the greatest action adventure movie of all time. It is a Pirates of the Caribbean, Mummy, and Indiana Jones crossover. Allow me to expand:

In the beginning the British are chasing the Pearl and our band of Pirates in the open waters. The Pearl turns south and a mysterious storm takes both ships by surprise.

Flash forward to the 40’s

Indiana Jones is in Mexico searching for Aztec gold. Naturally where Indy is, there are Nazis.

Nazis find the Aztec gold and become zombies, just moments before Indiana Jones finds it.

He escapes on the Pearl which has just appeared off-shore.

They take the gold back to their stash in South America where the relic of the Scorpion King is kept.

Brenden Frasier and Arab Dude break in to kill some mummies, kill zombies. The Scorpion King is awakened anyway.

The crew of the Pearl tries to figure out how to forcefully change them back into normal Nazis. Meet up with the mummy crew on their blimp. (it is a dirigible)

The British show up to hunt the Pearl, and fight the Nazis. the Pearl saves them, Mister Stuffed Shirt starts to become cool.

The Scorpion King shows up and teams up with a South American mummy (which did exist) they start to restart the Aztec empire, Nazis change from zombie Nazis to resurrected Zombie Aztecs.

Indiana Jones breaks into the Aztec temple of the Sun and learns about the curse of the Aztec gold and mummy.

Brenden helps, but is definatly side-kick. He explains the Scorpion King (who is not a bug, but just the rock)

The Rock beats up some random Nazi-Aztec zombie just to prove he is still hard.

The Nazis have a hot archeologist who Indy saves on his way out.

Capt, Jack sparrow steals a U-Boat and doesn’t tell the Brits. names it “NA-NA-NU-NA-NA” and ties it to the Pearl for escape.

Brits contemplate leaving, because who cares about South America anyway.

The Aztec capital city becomes like it was when Cortez sacked it. The bad guys sacrifice some good guy in the name of badness.

Hot Nazi Archeologist is wooed by Jack Sparrow. It is Johnny Depp, she can’t say no (and Indy learned his lesson from the last movie).

The Nazi-Aztec-zombies try to take the Pearl, there is a great shipboard fight scene. Whips, guns, swords. good guys win.

They figure out that there is this thing (because there always is) inside the most guarded part of the city (where else would it be?) that will change the curse and turn the Rock into a bug and send the Nazis back to Europe.

The Brits and the Pearl make a distraction by attacking the shore. Nazi-Aztec-Zombies fight back. Red baron makes a cameo.

Small group consisting of Indy, Brenden, HNA (hot nazi archeologist), and Orlando break into the city to find the thing.

There is fighting.

Indy and HNA get to the temple while Brenden and Orlando do what they do best: kill undead.

The Nazi-Aztec-zombies realize what is going on, the Rock sends them all back to the city. The Pirates and Brits storm the beach, D-Day fashion, in pursuit.

Bruce Campell shows up to read the words. Then joins Orlando and Brenden in the undead beat down.

Indy and the SA mummy get into a fight. It’s Indy, so he kicks the mummy’s ass.

The words start to work and Nazi-Aztec-zombies are transformed back into Nazis.

And then they die.

Jack sparrow and Bruce Campell get into a one-liner competition whilst beating down the Rock.

All the bad guys die except one. Why? Because there is always one left.

The good guys take the Aztec gold and bury it? Burn it? You know, good guy “This aint gonna happen again” type of stuff. They fail.

The brits try to arrest the pirates, they escape on the “NA-NA-NU-NA-NA”

The HNA leaves with Jack.

Indy and Eve (who only shows up for this scene) agree to work together in academia.

Bruce campell says the words, drinks the juice and .. well you know the rest.

The British stay British.

Everyone rides off into sunset.

Final bad guy finds aztec gold, sinister laughter.

Cut scene to boston.

Bar with cannon. bootstrap is drinking a beer.

Geocities is dead, Long Live Geocities

My first web page was a Geocities page. Freshman year of college, 1996. I still remember the address: geocities.com/area51/vault/1909. I even went and dug it out of the personal archives. You can find it here.

The front page was created with their creator software along with our guestbook. Incidentally, do people still have guestbooks? Do these kids today even know what they are? Then I went out and purchased a brand new hot off the press HTML 3.2 book. That is where the rest of the pages came from, frames and all.

Don’t kick the baby.

Why I made it or what to do with it, I really had no idea. I liked anime, but that wasn’t what my site was about. It wasn’t about anything, really. Just a collection of pages, HTML experiments and sometimes hosted files. It was a hodgepodge of randomness that never got altered. Why change it to something else when I could simply add on more?

But more important than purpose. More important than continuity or even coherence. This sight, Nowhere as I called it, was me. This was me on the internet. No longer was the world wide web something that I merely observed. It was now something I participated in.

That was a sense of empowerment. Sure I got practically no visitors, what was there to see? I still showed it off.

I went on. I made a tripod page for poetry. That one I used their template at first, but it was too cumbersome to update. So I remade the whole page using Netscape Composer (TABLES BEWARE!). On that one I jumped into some more Javascript. I had a menu I wanted on all of the pages, but didn’t want to write it over and over. If I added a page, I would need to update all of the other pages. So instead I made a Javascript function that printed out the menu. SImple and sweet, it later got me a job.

You’ll notice a blog-like page where I comment on updates to the site.

Next I tried XOOM (Xoom? xoom? hm) There I put ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ which was a site based mostly on AeroSpace Java programs. I made Java applets to find properties behind a shock wave and to get the atmospheric conditions at a certain altitude, etc. While it was neat playing with Java, I found myself with something more pressing than writing aerospace applets: aerospace homework.

All the while the Geocities site sat there, mostly ignored. So one day in 1999 (ish) I decided it was time for a revamp. The Vault was a neat name, so went for Vault 1909 as a site title. Worked with the page URL and even gave me a theme to design to. Made this page. So now it is much cleaner.

By this point I owned my first URL, theeverafter.com (as well as my name) and had been programming in Perl for quiet some time for a company started with two of my friends. While the free sites never really let us use CGI, getting my own server opened up an new world for me. I had been working as a web programmer since 1998 for various clients, but never really had my own production box to show off. (I had apache configured on my computer for building and testing). So the CGI I had been writing had always had a point. “I need a box that updates here.” “I need a place to get client email addresses.” Etc. Now I was free to do whatever I wanted.

So onwards I went. Perl, PHP, more Javascript, even some ASP (eek!). But in the end, it really all started with a small picture of Calvin at the top of a black website.

Godspeed Geocities.