I think everyone likes a good clusterfuck. Like when the trailer for Bevery Hills Chihuahua hit, it was like watching a train full of syrup barrel down the tracks toward a stalled truck full of turkeys. Horrible? Yes. But yet you await it with a kind of nervous anticipation that is not at all unpleasant. A part of you just wants to watch a great disaster unfold.

Thus, Capcom has just released what has seriously got to be the most politically incorrect two minutes of video in the history of everything. It’s the brand new (released yesterday) trailer for the zombie survival horror/African genocide simulator Resident Evil 5.

If you’re confused, you may not remember last year when the first teaser trailer appeared and drew some outrage because, well, it depicted a strong, muscular, handsome white man killing hundreds and hundreds of mindless African savages.

Well, this trailer makes it about ten times worse.

“I knew it from the moment I arrived. There’s no reason here. No humanity.”

This is so hilariously, amazingly wrong. I am told the Japanese just culturally don’t have a grasp of why this sort of thing (or casual racism in general) is a problem. But there have to be people inside the company patiently explaining why the symbolism there isn’t going to fly. And I’m picturing programmers staring back with blank stares and saying, “But… they’re zombies! And of course they’re black! The game takes place in Africa!”

Well, right… but you made that choice, Capcom. Same as if some game took place in a girl’s school, and the premise of the game is that all the little girls are possessed by evil spirits and the only way to defeat the demons is with your penis. It would be laughable to defend level after level of sodomizing children by quoting the fictional framework that set it up (”But.. they’re possessed by demons! It’s the only way to save them!”) as if it was completely out of your hands.

YOU are the ones who set things up so the child raping would happen, and you’re the ones who created a scenario where the gamer finds Africa to be full of bloodthirsty savages with sticks and stones, and the only way to win is to mow them down with your state of the art weaponry.

If this game becomes a hit - and judging from the buzz, it’s going to be a monster - then the shitstorm that erupts over this game is going to be something to witness. See, there’s an x-factor here, too, and you can only get it by actually watching the video linked up there. These people you’re killing are absolutely photo-realistic. They may be the most realistic humans ever killed in a game.

And thus we have the second paddle in our shit-stirring apparatus: the fact that we’re very, very close to games where you can finally kill somebody who looks as real as your next door neighbor.

It won’t be until the next generation when we really get there, to women whose blood gets matted and clotted in their blond hair when you blow their brains out, and men who twitch and shit their pants as they lay dying, air whistling as they try to suck breath into a punctured lung, stray bullets that kill toddlers. And, hell, maybe that’ll be the point where the upward surge in realism flattens out, where publishers realize we only want so much of it in our games.

But first, we have 2009 to look forward to, which is when RE5 comes out, and the mainstream news media will do their usual clumsy, laughable job of trying to cover anything gaming related, only with the added bonus of endless civil rights activists fighting over camera time, most of whom will have never touched a console controller in their lives.

It should be awesome.

If you didn’t have a credit card or for some similar reason haven’t ordered a copy of my retarded horror novel John Dies at the End online, you can finally walk in off the street and just buy a copy.

Borders has ordered a shitload of them to stock on their actual shelves of their actual brick-and-mortar book stores. Sure, up until now we’ve had a few small shops here and there stock a couple of copies, but otherwise all of our sales have come through the online sellers.

If anyone spots them on the shelves, snap a picture for me. Post it or send it to davidwong@johndiesattheend.com. It’s kind of a big deal for me and I like to celebrate every little thing because it makes me feel like I’m better than everybody else. Try to get your balls in the picture too if possible.

No, this is not the mysterious announcement I’ve been hinting at. Speaking of which, let me remind you…

THIS IS A LIMITED EDITION. Buy it while it’s available. Buy extra copies and then sell them on the black market at inflated prices later. Shit will be like Beanie Babies.

Meanwhile, the charity we started on the forums (see below) has raised more than $3,000 to loan to entrepreneurs in impoverished nations. If you want to help us fuck poverty in the asshole, here’s the details.

As you may know, the posters on our forums occasionally band together on an informal basis and donate money to some worthy cause, be it sick kids or replacing a dude’s stolen camera. It’s time to do it again.

Somebody found Kiva.org, a program that lets you directly loan money to people from poor countries trying to start businesses. Give a man a hot dog and he eats for a day, give him an industrial hotdog shooter and he’ll eat for a lifetime. It’s a brilliant idea, because a $100 donation (worth exponentially more in their currency) can wind up providing multiple jobs and a steady source of income for who knows how many people down the line. The economic benefit ripples out in ways straight charity never could.

So I have been appointed to collect the money, because I’m the one guy who you know will never leave the forums. You all know where to find me.

If you want to donate to the program, you can give via Paypal at my address:

dwong187@gmail.com

If you’ve never used PayPal before, it’s as simple as going to Paypal.com and clicking the “send money” link at the top. It takes seconds, and anyone with a credit card or bank account can do it.

If you want more details on how Kiva works, click here.

We have set up a lender’s page HERE.

There you will be able to track all of our loans and such. We have decided to name ourselves “Bernie’s Kids,” after 70 year-old stripper and long-time forum hero Bernie Barker:

We have a forum thread with further details and where questions can be answered.

Innocuous words that will return porn in Google Image Search.

Another treasure from the forums.

Hey, remember the fund raiser we had for St. Jude’s, where they would let you engrave a name of your choosing on a memorial brick and we engraved one that said “Brick Tamland?”

HERE.

Well, it’s time to do something like that again. If you’ve got ideas, suggest it in the forum thread.

Some people are terrified of message boards, and I don’t blame them. Just last night I was browsing through the enormous gaming forum NeoGaf and saw this 100-plus reply thread discussing my Video Game Commandments article. I quietly backed away without even a glance inside.

Nothing good can come from me joining that discussion, though no doubt it is simply dozens of people speculating as to whether I am a mere genius, or some kind of transcendent super-being representing the ultimate in human evolution. Mankind must find this answer on its own, I cannot reveal it to them.

Anyway, if you hate message boards because of the kind of anonymous, over-aggressive ass-hattery that goes on, you may wonder why any sane person participates at all. The reason is that occasionally, magic happens.

This is one of those occurrences.

A young man drops in, eager to show off his web comic, presumably the first one he has ever, ever made. If you then scroll down to the bottom of the first page, you’ll see other members being to post their own episodes, taking the man’s own art in strange and wonderful new directions, surely to his delight.

As some of you have noticed from my author page, when we turned off the PWoT server last week, not every article got saved.

I have 37 articles listed there, maybe 10 of them Cracked originals. Because I didn’t have the time or staff to import all 105 articles from PWoT (as they have to be laboriously reformatted by hand) I basically picked the top 15 or so most popular, which represented more than 99% of the traffic PWoT was getting. Then after that I just started working through the movie reviews at random.

Some day I’d like to have the entire library restored for posterity (and it would be for posterity only, I saw the traffic those things were getting) but it will have to be done on an article-by-article basis.

If there is an article that you particularly miss, comment below. If I get three votes to restore it, I’ll make time some weekend and upload it instead of riding my jet ski.

Page 16 appears to have been lifted from the book Hurling Cats Against The Wall.

About once a week somebody asks me to update The gamer’s manifesto, which got 1.6 million hits in its run but is now three years old and hopelessly out of date. I always hesitated to do that because it seemed kind of cheap to do a “sequel” the article where I wind up re-using a lot of it anyway (since so many of the items do still apply). I thought it would feel like a dance remix track of my one hit song.

What I decided to do was approach it from another angle and, after a quick survey of disgruntled gamers in the forum gathered the principles behind their many, many complaints and formed them into the Seven Commandments of Gaming:

The article.

Digg it.

Thanks to everybody who contributed, your money is in the mail.

New feature article coming tomorrow. Tune in at around 8 am EST.

As many, many of you have noticed, we have finally turned out the lights on  the pointlesswasteoftime.com server, after nine years.

In the early spring of 1999, I wrote a retarded movie review on a message board. It was deleted and some guy emailed saying he wanted to read it, and asked if I stored the stuff I wrote somewhere.  I didn’t, but I went and opened a free hosting account on a site called Freeservers and put the review up there so it could be a repository of all the things that got deleted from message boards by moderators who didn’t like lots and lots of penis jokes in their posts.

The PointlessWasteofTime.com domain was purchased in November of that year, after I read an article saying they were extending the allowed length of domain names and I thought it would be funny to come up with the longest name possible.

That thing I started on the spur of the moment would come to dominate the next third of my life. I put in an average of 30-40 hours a week updating the site and moderating the forums, for basically no reward other than the compliments of many strangers.
But,  following the belief that even a dog turd will grow into a tree if you water it enough, PWoT finally bore fruit and I wound up with a career writing dick jokes and horror novels. No English degree, no previous writing job, never had a single word published in a paper publication.  I wasn’t invited to the party, so I kind of wandered in and by the time they realized I didn’t belong, it was too late.  I had brought those cocktail wieners everybody likes and they figured they’d let me stay until they were gone. But I brought a lot of  wieners. A lot. And they’re in sauce.
Anyway, new article tomorrow.