I’m fascinated by how Hollywood works. For instance, there are probably 25 or 30 million sci-fi geeks in the world who would set fire to their nuts for the chance to make an Alien or Predator film. Some of those people have even been to film school, and some of them have maybe even made feature films before. But they’re fans, which means they understand the mythos and spirit that made the original films worth watching.

And, yet, when it came time to make an actual Alien vs. Predator movie they just turned it over to some guy who had made video game movies, I guess thinking that AvP was also a video game at one time. 

Anyway, they’re making Alien vs Predator 2 now and they got rid of that first director guy and are boasting that these new people really understand the series. From a USA Today article:

So the brothers plan to bring the new film back to its roots — namely, Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic, Alien.

“That movie was dark. That movie used a lot of rain,” Colin says.

Okay, so that particular guy has never seen any movie in the Alien series. Or, maybe the reporter just cruelly edited his quote to make him look like a dumbass.

We’ll let the visuals from the film tell the story. Like this screenshot, of the hybrid alien/predator creature featured in the above-linked article:

Nevermind.

I’ve written this scientific article on why a zombie apocalypse could happen, with Pwotter Evil Sloth.

He came up with the idea for this one, and seemed to have a terrifying amount of zombie research at his fingertips. I’m not sure where he works but I’m sure I don’t want to know.

I think This striking 2001 documentary on how conglomerates market coolness to teens should be required viewing for everybody after they reach age 11 or so.

Some of it plays like old people alarmism, sure. You’ve got middle-aged narrators talking about teens imitating what the marketers feed them, blissfully unaware of how carefully the Beatles were marketed to them when they were teens (one guy was kicked out of the band early on because he wouldn’t wear his hair in that distinctive Beatles style they had adopted as their look). My parents named me David after the lead singer of David Starr and the Cockateers, a band I’m sure was marketed just as cleverly as Limp Bizkit was back in 2001.

But still… the sprite.com rap concert and the 13 year-old aspiring models will almost certainly depress you.

Thanks to Sanchez in the forums for bringing that to my attention.

I’m going to show you a headline. That headline is going to inspire several feelings in you, none of them good.

Ready?  Because you’re going to feel worse about yourself in a minute. 

Okay:

Delhi Deputy Mayor Killed by a Horde of Wild Monkeys.

Thanks to Mister Fahrenheit in the forums for bringing that to my attention.

I’ve cleaned up another Pwot favorite, on the best sci-fi movies they never got around to making and got it up under the Cracked banner today.

We’re going to move all of the PWoT articles over starting this week I think, the old movie reviews and everything. It’ll be a slow process because as you can see the Cracked template is different, but there shouldn’t be any interruption in your ability to read those articles. They’re all still up at the pointlesswasteoftime.com domain and will remain so until they re-emerge here.

Let’s see if this thing works.

As promised, I’m going to paste in a lot of the old PWoT front page updates here to create some continuity from the old shitty page to this one. If you’re reading this in the future, somewhere on the page you’ll see a way to get to my old PWoT feature articles.

In the mean time, I barged into the Cracked blog and used it as a platform to complain about how awful PC gaming is.

They’ve got a rotating crew of guys who update that blog I think 18 times a day.

People are asking me when the next feature article will appear, now that I’m writing full time and, since I’m working at home, have donated every pair of my pants to Good Will.

The answer is, “soon” but the answer is also that I have a hand in most of what happens at CRACKED now. For instance I helped write this article on things Hollywood seems to think computers can do. We’ve also got many of the old-school PWoT contributors working on articles and you’re going to start to see those within days. Hopefully we won’t bring the whole operation crashing down around us.