Obama Raises Debt Ceiling to Fight The Machines, Escape the Matrix

Tech news site of Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones, All Things D is reporting that Obama's plea to the American people to call their representatives and end the insane, flip-flopping opposition to any plan to deal with national debt has caused several key opposition leaders' websites to crash under the torrent of calls.

Chief among them being Representative John Boehner.

This flood of calls, overwhelming phone and web servers with regular usage in irregular volume, is exactly what hacker groups call "DDoS" attacks. "Digital Denial of Service." It's what Anonymous hackers keep using to piss off Visa and Amazon.com. Of course, politicians have told people to call and write their congressmen for decades. Barack Obama would never intentionally crash his opposition's websites, right?

I mean.

Unless, guys, could President Obama be Morpheus?

And does that mean … dear God. The new, skinny white guy no one has any faith in? Oh no.

I think Joe Biden might be The One.

"There is no debt ceiling….Whoa."

Grant Morrison Could Sue Warren Ellis, If He Wanted to Admit Being A Little Bitch

Nerds, I just started a serious flame war, there. Regular folks, some explaining is in order.

Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis are two fairly well-known comic book writers. Morrison's biggest titles include All-Star Superman–which recently got its own abridged animated feature–the recent Batman arc Batman R.I.P., and major DC crossover Final Crisis. Also his original creation, The Invisibles. Ellis, meanwhile, also worked for DC Comics and its Vertigo imprint on series Hellblazer, Bruce Willis/Morgan Freeman/John Malkovich/Helen Mirren basis Red, and major Iron Man relaunch Extremis. He is known for several bat-shit crazy pet projects, most notable among them being Transmetropolitan.

Here's the nerd-rage:

While some (read: Grant Morrison himself [via iO9. This is what actually got me to read the series]) have laid claim to the idea that The Invisibles is a direct basis for the Wachowski Brothers' Matrix film franchise, somehow Warren Ellis doesn't appear to have been sued violently for making an even more similar work in the same media form, closer in time.

Transmetropolitan is a whole series about what The Invisibles was afraid of.

Two bald men with various tattoos, formerly … outspoken hairstyles, near-constant use of sunglasses and identifying as info-terrorists with a mission statement for anarchic truth in the face of totalitarianism and consumerism. Both are brilliant, possibly mad tacticians, dislike undershirts, carry ray guns, enjoy a bit of lethal computer wizardry, and know things that will make you mess your tin foil hat.

Both employ brutality as a matter of course, are at their core righteous bastards (despite outward personae), and are to-the-nines archetypical antiheroes for transhumanist, post-modern, culturally dissective series. From 1994-2000 (with hiatuses), Morrison wrote King Mob's teammate Lord Fanny, a Brazilian transvestite/former-prostitute shaman, who is purportedly well over six feet tall and a blond knock-out, who actually knock you out. From 1997-2002, Jerusalem frequently had blonde amazon/former-stripper assistant/bodyguard Charon Yarrow:

Both teams were financially backed by older gentlemen with a propensity for black suits and thinking only to meet their own ends: Spider's editor Mitchel Royce and Invisible billionaire Mason Lang:

They even sport the same haircut,
and both of their offiices sometimes explode.

Beyond that, and the fact that both series were printed by DC imprint Vertigo, thematic elements are more similar than direct mirrors. The Invisibles is more sorcery and altered consciousness and Transmet is approaching the technological singularity, ironically what the Big Bad from Morrison's book is described as, except as hell also.

Spider is the insane journalist, revealing the truth when Orcer and Control seek to hide it to maintain power. The rest of his time, he's content to fuck off and gripe about how water-ed down and advertisement-filled violent children's cartoons have become. Mob is just a former Spy Romance novelist who became a tantric sex guru and thought-warrior on a higher plane of existence so he could better assassinate evil bug creatures and their minions in all major governments.

The glaring similarity is probably the notion that, on average, 7% of the text on a page is complete tencho-magic jibber jabber, and at times this climes to 100% just to screw with you. It's all real, though. If you were to look up everything that gets said, even the insane babbling, is historically and scientifically something. Holigraphic universes, tulpas, commercial matter reorganizers, they're all explainable, even the things that purposefully aren't real. (Ellis' now-on-hiatus series Doktor Sleepless, a series about not getting the post-singularity jet packs and flying cars future we were promised, even includes tulpas by name.)

Honestly, the only grand difference besides tech v. magic and a hero complex is that Morrison set up a story about saving the world, about averting a terrible apocalypse and hopefully replacing our world with a better one. Ellis' series is entirely about living where you are because The City is a living breathing thing, exactly as Morrison believes, far greater than any of its inhabitants, again exactly like Morrison, but this is the world we live in and there's no grand design, no imminent death, only constant change and rebirth and wonderful spectacles like Nazi sex midgets and gay werewolves and complete information integration. Morrison feared the spiritual singularity as a step beyond our own society. Ellis sees it as our birthright, something to one day become just as mundane as verything else as we grow past it.

Honestly, read through The Invisibles, it's only 59 issues between it's 3 volumes, at least until a part where you get an idea of what Morrison thought America would look like by 2012. Then crack open Transmet #1 and see if Ellis didn't just say, "Yeah, I get you, but you were thinking too small, man."

Transformers: Dark of the Moon | Michael Bay Makes the Prettiest Spectacles

God damn it, Michael Bay.

You just had to go and make good on your promises of more of the 'good' stuff from Transformers 2 and less of the annoying, overtly racist ball-jokes. Rosie Huntington-Whitely manages to be the hot, damsel-in-distress stereotype Bay always wanted Megan Fox to be, but without all that problematic "I can take care of myself, women are real people, you know" crap. And yes, she does end up looking pretty hot most of the time, even if she looks like a French bull dog.

As a Brit, she's probably more upset that I called her a Frenchie.

I already know I probably have to buy this movie on Blu-Ray when it comes out. I'm even tempted to go back and buy your last travesty just for the coherent narrative, but I think I've got a compromise worked out.

When I read a certain XKCD comic, I sold off my latter two Matrix movies (Matrices?), and assure myself that there was a single great movie with no sequels. After Revenge of the Fallen, I decided to wait and see how awful the third one would be, because as those never-real movies had taught me, the second film's credibility is more dependent on what it leads into than where it came from.

And damn you, you did it. You made a better sequel and actually seem to have learned something from your own mistakes and made the best fanboy summer spectacle you could. It's a visual orgy of scrap metal with a soundtrack that could have been scored by the guy who did The Dark Knight. (Actually it was Steve Joblonsky, but he's worked on Transformers before, plus quite a few high-caliber films and a ton of horror/suspense.)

So here's the deal: I am probably going to own you on disc, Dark Side. I am going to own you, and I am going to put you next to Transformers 1, but I am going to stick a Post-It note on your cover, and that Post-It will have written on it all the little details carried over from Movie 2 and I'll pretend it doesn't exist otherwise.

• A few other Autobots came to Earth.
• Megatron was revived but got his ass handed to him again, and he hurts.
• Sam has a couple of pet mini-bots now.

DONE.

Now I can be happy and watch my giant robots kill each other and not worry about bonehead plot lines or pandering, lowest-common-denominator stereotypes. This movie really just has a trio of British rugby hooligans and a Ferrari that might have been French for some reason.

Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit fuck fuck shit fuck ass shiiiiiiii-

Actually, that digression comes back to where I wanted to end up anyway:

I will NOT be posting any important spoilers today. For once, and I can't believe I'm typing these words, this is a Michael Bay movie you really need to see.

Some fun things to look for, though:

• At one point, I'm pretty sure Bumblebee gets punched in the robo-junk.
• WE TOTALLY GET TO SEE OPTIMUS' TRAILER DO SOMETHING!
• Another half-dozen B+ List comedians and relatively serious actors making cameos, including Alan "Wash" Tudyk!
• Three different U.S. President impersonators.
• Some of the Decepticon invasion scenes you glimpse in the trailers are pretty intense. I think the whole movie was actually trying to make up for the lack of any human fatalities in the original cartoon. And I think they do it. Lot of implied death with explosions. At least one guy gets shot by a giant bullet unprotected, and there's one shot with a disintegrator ray gun thing that evokes a pretty iconic scene from the Terminator franchise.
• Leonard Nemoy voices a central character, and shares scenes with Peter Cullen's Optimus Prime. The two previously worked together voicing Optimus and Megatron's rebuilt persona "Galvatron" in the original 1985 Transformers: The Movie. (Which incidentally took place in 2005.) Daniel Riordan, Megatron's original voice actor, provided lungs for Bay's series' Starscream. To hear them each interact at various points is wonderful.
• The next Twilight movie had a preview, probably for all the sexy ladies who got dragged to the theater by their explosionally-aroused boyfriends.

All-in-all, it was a great time. It is three hours long, so make sure you pee just beforehand. Some of the people in my theater also found other ways to amuse themselves; one group of kids entered the theater reeking of weed, so they were going for the "pretty lights in 3D while stoned" approach, and I cannot in any way fault their logic. I bet the movie was even more magical for them than it was for me.

I also found an opened Lifestyles condom wrapper outside the other theater on my way out, so I imagine somebody had the wonderful experience of actually making love to a Transformers movie. That nerd just had the fucking night of his life. Peter Cullen's voice is just so sensuous.

Just wish he'd splurged for a Trojan. We don't need any more little Decepticons running around.

Things Dumber Than Prop 8 Californians Have Allowed

I decided "Leaving a giant collapsed sign half-repaired because you're lazy" wasn't actually very dumb. Just really, really lazy.

Things Dumber Than Prop 8 Californians Have Allowed:

• The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger to the office of governor
• For that matter, the election of multiple-monkey movies actor Ronald Regan to the office of governor.
• "Limited" use of medicinal marijuana
• Naming tar pits a natural preserve
• The Matrix sequels
• The Hills
• Jews owning studios
• The Hills again, because it's that terrible