Monday, December 28, 2015

2015 is really sealing the deal on be a fuck hole: RIP Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead

Fucking
Fuck
Fuck

I'm not going to be like a fucking poseur and claim that I was a huge Motorhead fan because I wasn't even a minimal one - literally the only songs of theirs I know are Ace of Spades and the trio from WWE: The Game, King of Kings, and Line in the Sand - but Lemmy was a goddamn pop culture icon. The documentary some dude made about him a few years ago is one of the few docs I have ever bothered to watch and it was engrossing. Finding out he died is a huge fucking deal, easily up there with all of the other celebrity deaths this year.

2015 is really a steaming pile of shit, dude.

Sunday, December 27, 2015

John Boyega has his priorities in order

Hokage is a Naruto reference. Had to google that because I don't watch any of the new animes and by new animes, I of course mean anything made after like 2001. I'm Toonami trash, okay?!

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Nerd Trash and 2016

Just thought I'd give you folks (the ones who actually read this blog) a heads up on what I thinking of doing with Nerd Trash next year. There's not going to be any huge changes in the next year, but I do have some things up my sleeve:

Posting and content: I'm going to try and increase the number of daily posts up from my average of like one or two in a blue moon. Tumblr is the number 1 culprit in stealing my time and attention away from Nerd Trash, so I plan on decreasing my time on there in exchange for more time spent on here. Not a big deal because my interest in Tumblr has been on the decline since it became a battleground for the social justice/anti-social justice/actually went overboard with the social justice brigades and everything else that's made the site not as fun as it used to be.

In terms of posts, most of them will be short things and pictorials daily, with longer posts showing up about once or twice a week. The content will be whatever catches my eye or the attention of the internet. I don't plan or have any desire to regurgitate the same content that the bigger blogs crap out, but if I see something that I think is worth posting, up it goes. I'll also be posting about whatever I'm reading, since I'm planning on reading a lot of books next year. I read eleven this year and my goals 15 for 2016.

Then there's the videos. I've been watching Let's Plays from the Achievement Hunters YouTube channel, so I'll be posting my favorites along with videos from other channels. The same with music. I also want to post more about the shows I watch, both on TV and any that I find online. I might try and get back into watching Geek and Sundry's videos, so there's that.

I mentioned pictures earlier and one of the features I plan on adding is a person of the month. I'm shamelessly stealing the idea from top blog HeroPress and its proprietor, Tim Knight, who runs such a feature and it's a real good one. Not a lot of people are going complain about a monthly post filled with pictures of beautiful women and occasionally, guys and fictional characters that I think are cool enough to be highlighted. I had to add my own spin to it. So who is going to be the inaugural Nerd Trash person of the month (I'll eventually come up with a proper name for it)? You'll just have to wait till January 1st. ;)

More gadgets in the sidebar: I'm aiming to personalize Nerd Trash by adding what I'm reading (which I've already done), watching, listening too, etc. in the left hand sidebar. More links to blogs and websites of interest will be added too, as I find them.

One more goal I have in all of this is to increase the number of hits the blog receives on a daily basis. I know I'll never reach the hundreds of thousands or more that the big websites get and I'm more than glad for that, but I'd very much like to up the number of visitors into the several hundreds, if not a thousand. Ultimately, I'd like Nerd Trash to become one of those blogs that is well known enough to attract a respectable number, while remaining small and not bloated.

Well, that's all I can think of right now. I aim to make 2016 the most fruitful and productive year for Nerd Trash so far.

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Really wish I hadn't missed that episode of Matlock

I caught the tail end of "The Dare" yesterday and what grabbed my attention was how tense the last few moments were. Ben Matlock, Cliff, and Jerri all had stunned, defeated looks on their face. But why? Did Terry O'Quinn's character (who was on the witness stand) buy all of the hot dogs Atlanta? Did Ben's entire wardrobe of cheap gray suits get destroyed? What happened? Fortunately, there's a thing called The Google, so I looked the episode and found this summary.

Basically, O'Quinn plays some rich guy named Malcolm Engle who swore revenge against Matlock because the latter successfully defended a psychotic (and got him institutionalized) who later murdered the former's wife. So in return, Engle gets payback by murdering a character named Bob Brooks, a police lieutenant who appeared in the first six seasons of the show, then fell off the face of the Earth until season 9 when he was Murder Death Killed in this ep. Engle not only murdered Brooks, but told Matlock that he was going to do it and that the victim was going to be somebody close to the aged lawyer.

Let's jump to the ending because it makes the whole thing kind of amazing. Matlock gets Engle on the stand and comes close to proving him guilty when the bombshell drops: Engle has cancer and will likely die regardless of the outcome of the trial. The final line in the episode are Engle asking "What are you going to do, Ben? Get me the death sentence?" That's some straight up Law & Order shit right there. What caught my attention was just the expression on Matlock's face. There's no look of horror or shock, but he just stares at Engle as the realization that he'll almost certainly escape punishment for his crime, that Lt. Brooks will never have justice. Matlock failed, he lost.

Season 9 was the final season of the show, so I guess the writers wanted to do something bold before the show wrapped up and I think they nailed it.

Monday, December 21, 2015

And this will probably be the only Christmas post on this blog right here

The town's park gets decorated for Christmas every year and this was one of the more adorable additions.

Happy Holidays, especially to the people who think saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas is somehow religious persecution. A very, very, very Happy Holidays to those people.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

World's Second Biggest Asshole* Martin Shkreli arrested on securities fraud

And it really couldn't have happened to a better asshole. For those who don't recall the name, Shkreli is the SOB who bought the license to make an out of patent drug that's used to treat some kind of blood parasite in AIDs victims...then raised the price over 5000% from like $13 to $750. That's some straight up Lex Luthor villainy right there. Scratch that because I don't think even Lex would pull that kind of jackassery. The fraud charge is from before he did this because if being a massive asshole were a crime, the prisons would be even more overcrowded that what they already are.

Really, if you add this to the new Star Wars movie coming out, this really is the best Christmas season ever!

*Donald Trump being the world's biggest, of course.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

How to re-enable extensions that have been disabled by Firefox 43

I updated Firefox just now and lo and behold, two of my extensions were disabled with no way of flipping them back on. Rather annoying, but I found a solution after a little bit of googling. Somebody created an extension that'll re-enable the ones that have been disabled, but it simply does automatically what can easily be done manually. I tested out the latter and it works, so here's how to do it:

1. Open a new tab (or use a current one, whatever) and type "about:config" (none of the quote marks are required).

2. Click through the warning page and in the search box on the next page, put “xpinstall.signatures.required” and change the value from “true” to “false”.

3. Finally, restart Firefox and boom, the extensions should work again.
 Now bear in mind that this disables the new "signed" security feature that's suppose to protect against bad and potentially harmful extensions, so there's a small risk if you're inclined to install new extensions. At best, this is just a short term workaround until those disabled extensions are signed by their creator or Mozilla allows them to be re-enabled individually. Of course, if whoever created the extension is no longer supporting it, then you're pretty much screwed.

To be honest, I think automatically disabling unsigned extensions is a load of BS. It wouldn't have been a problem to me if Mozilla had included an option to re-enable them, but just unilaterally disabling something I chose to install and use is just plain being an asshole.

Monday, December 14, 2015

Well, so much for the gangbang joke about Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" music video

I was originally going to post the video and make a joke about how the ending (or what I thought was the ending) looked like the setup to a porn. If you've never seen the video or just forgot, it's this whole thing where she's acting as a personal trainer for a bunch of fat fellows who can't do even the simplest exercise without suffering a coronary. She eventually gives up and hits the showers. Meanwhile, all the fat guys somehow transform into bodybuilders and when Newton-John comes back, she does what I imagine a lot of women would do in this situation and basically gropes them all. You can check the video below.



Like I said, I thought the video ended with the now fit guys surrounding Olivia Newton-John and her giving the camera a "I'm gettin' some dick today!" look, but I was wrong. Boy, was I ever wrong. Somehow, the whole "the guys are all gay" twist ending escaped my memory. Keep in mind that it wasn't until near the end of the 70s that the American Medical Association removed homosexuality as a mental illness. This video came out in 1981, so only a few scant years later. With that in mind, the ending was really quite bold.

Aside from that, the video was pretty controversial for the time. It was overtly sexual, what with Olivia Newton-John touching and rubbing against half-naked guys in speedos, to say nothing of her shower scene and some very interesting camera angles (like the one in the thumbnail). Nowadays, the video wouldn't even raise an eyebrow except among the very conservative crowd.

I'm going to get a little cheeky with the url for this post, just to see how many pageviews it'll get.

Friday, December 11, 2015

Uzo Aduba would be amazing as Hannibal Lecter. Also terrifying as dicks.



Glamour Magazine's doing a series of videos called "Role Reversal" where actresses take a turn as a character originally played by a guy and if Uzo Aduba's performance is any indication, Hollywood may need to do some genderswapped reboots.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to hide under some blankets for the rest of the night.

I appreciate the cat-based humor, Entertainment Weekly

(via Entertainment Weekly)
The Real Housewives reference I could have done without. It is nice to see to finally see more superheroes of color start to emerge in superhero movies and in comics. Definitely need more superheroines, though.

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Arrow definitely went a bit too far tonight with "Dark Waters" [SPOILER WARNING]

(via Arrowverse Wiki)
So the winter finale of Arrow, "Dark Waters" aired tonight (this seems like the week for winter finales) and while it was a good episode with a cliffhanger ending that left me with a big pile of nopes, there was a part in the plot that was incredibly insensitive. Hit the jump for spoilers.

Still with me? Alright, so in "Dark Waters" there's a point where Damian Darhk kidnaps Felicity, Diggle, and Thea in an apparent ploy to gain leverage over Oliver and use him as a puppet in controlling Star City. It turns out, however, that his real plan is to kill them in order to destroy Ollie emotionally and psychologically. Unfortunately and this is the tasteless part, he plans to kill the trio with a gas chamber. A gas chamber.

I'm with you, Reigns. I'm with you.
Did I mention that Felicity is Jewish? Yeah, the writers decided to put a Jewish character in a gas chamber and at no point did that strike anybody involved in the production of Arrow that that might just be a teeny tiny bit insensitive. Even though all three were rescued by Black Canary and Not Captain Jack Harkness, it still rubs one the wrong way. What's weird is that Darhk mentions the Nazis use of the gas chambers during the Holocaust and even condemned Hitler as being an extreme evil and yet, that doesn't stop him from using the very same thing for the very same purpose. Wow.

I checked the Arrow tag on Tumblr as I usually do when I'm watching the show and boy, to say people were upset and downright pissed off at the showrunners for putting Felicity in a gas chamber would be a pretty accurate statement and I honestly can't blame them.

So, will this permanently wreck Arrow? I doubt it. I would be surprised if the show didn't lose fans because of this and there will probably and should be a backlash from the fandom because of this, but I don't see it having a hugely negative impact.