Greetings Semantinkers!

Technology can be a beautiful thing. Just think about all we can do today that wasn’t possible just ten years ago; we can check our email on our phones, we have robots that can perform surgery, ugly people can be made pretty in Photoshop. Yes, technology is wonderful, but, there is a downside to all these modern miracles, and nowhere is this more evident then in the world of comics.

Once upon a time, comics were filled with human villains plotting bank heists and world domination. Sure, these baddies were often ugly people, but at least they were people. Sadly, as technology has advanced, computers have gotten involved in super-crime, and now we have reached the point where robots and their kind are not just evil, but UGLY.

The prime example of this terrifying trend of robotic repulsiveness would have to be Marvel Comics’ M.O.D.O.K. Behold the terror of technology gone awry!

M.O.D.O.K. or the Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing, was created by the dirty bastards at A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics), probably because of a drunken wager. If you are a clandestine organization hell-bent on ruling the world and you want to mutate a dude into a crazy floating cyborg, that’s your prerogative, but why does he have to look like a midget with a failed face-lift?

Yup, that octopus has tank treads.

M.O.D.O.K. is not the only instance in comics where technology has progressed to a state of ugliness. The field of cybernetics also has created monstrosities. Behold Heavy Metal!

This menagerie of hideous cyborg animals shows the dangers of trying to improve upon nature. Just look at the octopus on tank treads, or the vulture with a steel mohawk. You can’t see it in this picture, but that menacing purple shark has legs. Cybernetics is a field of science rife with possibilities, but seeing a gorilla dressed up like a cross between Robo-cop and an S&M fetishist shows just how hideous the future could be.

Bio-engineering is another field that comics have shown us can progress to a state of ugliness. I know what you are thinking, ” Bio-engineering? that’s why we get such nice produce in the supermarket, how could that be a bad thing?” My answer to that is Three Willied Seth from THE AUTHORITY. Ewww.

If this guy was touching my head, I’d cry too.

Willy was given over one hundred super powers by the American government, one of which was poop-vision. Apparently none of those powers was the ability to look like anything like a human being. And while we are on the subject of bio-engineering, let me show you another example of how this branch of science go go horribly wrong: The Alpha Lanterns!

Super-powers in exchange for your face? No deal!

Green Lanterns are pretty awesome, they can do basically anything with those neat little rings. So, to be an Alpha Green Lantern (basically a super green lantern), you get bio-engineered to have a gaping hole in your chest and a face that lifts up to reveal a gasmask when s#!t is afoot. This isn’t right, and moreover, it isn’t pretty. Shame on you scientists for allowing things like this to happen!

So, I suppose my point here is that while technological advances have largely made our lives better, there can be pit falls, and they will not be pretty, in fact they could be downright fugly. Watch out for technology getting unpretty on you, otherwise you could wind up with a real life M.O.D.O.K. living down the street from you.

On a serious note, keep an eye out for THE UNDERGROUNDS #3 coming out tomorrow, as well the latest issue of MYTHOI, MYTHOI Birth: TAROS! Both are free and can be found on semantink.com.

It’s official:  The new expansion, Cataclysm, is coming.  I played the WoW but quit about a year ago.  Some friends have been asking me, “Mr. Wolff, will you return and explore this new world with us?”  I’ve thought long and hard about my response, each time saying something profound, akin to, “I dunno.”  But I think I finally have my answer and I’m ready to give it to the world:  No.  I will not be playing World of Warcraft ever again because that game is f*cking stupid.

Now, before you level 80s get all bent and start drafting your hate-mail, allow me to explain why you are retarded. I have a logic behind my answer and I’d love to share it with you.  Perhaps, if all goes well, you will read this blog and come to understand the clusterf*ckery of your ways.  Then maybe, just maybe, you too can ween yourself off of the WoW, heal over time and become a functioning member of society once again.  And I’m not talking to the occasional players who have been stuck at level 39 for the last three years of their life and I have no idea what a Death Knight is.  I’m talking to the hardcore bastards who haven’t seen daylight for more than 1 hour a week and only go outside to run their paper routes in the morning in order to pay their monthly fees to the Blizzard gods.  Yeah, you idiots.

“This is my tier 2 virgin suit.”

Reason #1:  Playing World of Warcraft isn’t real.

I know that some of you believe that you are cool for reaching level 80, getting all epic’d out, raiding the highest heroic dungeons and pwning members of opposing factions, but you’re not.  You’re really not.  It may feel good to be somebody online, but that’s only online.  It’s intangible.  It’s not real.  When you badass Taurens go to your 9-5s, sweating under the fluorescent lights at FedEx Kinkos, or whatever brainless job you may have procured, THAT’s the real you.  You’re not tough.  You cannot fly on a griffin.  And you sure as hell can’t sleigh a dragon.  It’s all make-believe.  Fun?  Sure.  But make-believe.

Don’t get me wrong, I thought I was cool when 60 was the cap and I brought down Onyxia.  But when it was over I was left with an empty hole in my chest, wondering, “Now what?”  I have some new gear?  Well, not really — my avatar has some new gear.  All I have is a backache and a pissed off girlfriend* that I could have been naked-wrestling with, were I not trying to kill a collection of pixels in the shape of a dragon.  I could have been having sex, learning guitar, earning money (not gold, I am referring to US dollars here), reading a book (comic or novel, you choose), having sex, or any number of other REAL activities.  I could have been having sex.  Sex. If right now you are thinking that WoW is better than sex, you should smash your head into your laptop because you are a lost cause and are currently wasting air for the rest of us.

*A girlfriend is a woman that chooses to date a man exclusively and every once and a while allows said man to rub flesh with her.

This is real. Too real.

Reason #2:  Their are too many Douchebags online for my tastes.

Near the end of my Warlock career (yes I was a lock in the end, but I also had a lvl 80 warrior, mage and priest), I realized that people who play WoW were assholes.  Not all of them.  Some of you are nice.  But more often than not, you’re all a bunch of dicks.  Every time I would look for a party for an instance there was always the bastard who called out some other poor schmuck for not having good enough gear.  THAT“S WHY HE“S RUNNING THE INSTANCE YOU TWAT!  He’s trying to get better gear, gear that exists in the instance we’re about to run!  These are the guys who blame every wipe on somebody else — it’s never their fault.  “Our healer sucks!”  “The tank can’t hold aggro!”  “DPS isn’t high enough!”  Well, the healer can’t heal you fast enough because you’re tanking in cloth you retarded mage!  The tank can’t hold aggro because your hurling frostbolts before he gets a strike in!  And if the DPS isn’t high enough, I guess you’ll just have to hold aggro an extra second or two, you lazy prick!  Look, I know that in some cases, especially heroic instances, you really do need a group on their a-game, but I’m talking about the pricks who make a scene at the entrance to Hellfire Ramparts because they want to run it in two seconds and get all pissy after one wipe.  It’ll be okay.  This isn’t real.  Go jump off a bridge.

Then there is the snide bastards in chat — holy sh*t.  You are the real pain in my ass.  When a n00b asks for help, give ‘em help.  Don’t get all crass and trash talk them because they don’t know as much as you.  In fact, grovel at their feet because while you were in Azeroth, those n00bs were doing things in the real world that probably advance them socially, intellectually, or physically, far beyond yourself.  Like Mamma Wolf always said, “If you don’t have anything nice to say then STFU!”  In truth, all of you snarky bastards are the ones I hope to meet irl so I can smack the sh*t out of your lippy, zitty, pasty faces.  We all know that you only talk tough in the digital world because in the real world you’re flipping my burgers, and I’m sorry about that, I really am.  But it’s not my fault, nor the n00bs, that you are a loser.  So please, don’t confuse being King Warcraft with being ANYTHING in the real world.  It’s not the same.  You may be a mighty lvl 80 in Wow and a virgin in the real world, but if I unplug your computer, you’re just a virgin.

And I’m the idiot because I can’t a Flight Path somewhere…

Reason #3:  It looks like sh*t.

World of Warcraft is one of the ugliest video games on the market today.  Go ahead, try to argue with that.  When they released it, Blizzard made the game such that OUR computers hold all the data.  What they should have done, was keep the graphics and such data on their end, so that they could upgrade them with time — I believe this is called a cloud server?  If it’s not, I don’t care.  The point is that Blizzard didn’t do it and now we have to rely on expansions to up the ante.  This isn’t the end of the world, but it is an annoyance.  When I play a game with great graphics and then switch over to WoW, I realize just how shoddy the whole thing looks.

I realize that this is one of the weaker complaints I have, but it really does get under my skin.  However, to be fair, a macro  surfaced allowing players to get quite a bit more out of their gaming experience visually, but killing the fun with lagtasticness.  It doesn’t go against my concern because most of us have to choose between gameplay or look — not fair.  In case you missed it from a while back, here’s the how-to:

Reason #4:  I have friends.  Real friends.  Real, human friends that live on Earth.

This is going to depress some of you, but I’m going to go through with it anyways.  I don’t want you to go home and cut yourself, but I do want you to try and socialize with something other than Night/Blood Elves.

Friends are people with whom one shares common interests and enjoys the mutual company.  You may think you have friends in WoW, but those aren’t friends, those are guild members — it’s not the same.  You see, with my friends I can actually see their REAL faces, touch them, hear them and all at the same time!  We can also do things that you can’t do in the World of Warcraft, like: see a movie, go to a concert, play good video games, or maybe just watch some TV.  You die hard WoWers probably don’t have real friends.  You may have acquaintances or people you recognize, but those aren’t friends.  The pizza guy isn’t your friend.  Celebrities you think about when you touch yourself are not your friends.

These are pixels, not friends.

Now, in closing, let me just say that I do not condemn WoW, or WoW players.  I don’t think you’re all stupid, useless bags of flesh, rotting in a pile of your own feces — but most of you are.  Grow up, move out of your mother’s basement, get a real job and try finding a member of the opposite (or same if that floats your boat) sex and try, just try, to discover what people did before Warcraft.  Or just trick yourself into thinking your character has some tangible meaning in life and die — I don’t really care.

Until next time -

Mr. Wolff

PS: Buy Mythoi.  Seriously.  Buy it.

Cosplay, for those of you who don’t know, is “short for “costume play”, a type of performance art whose participants outfit themselves, with often-elaborate costumes and accessories, as a specific character. Characters are usually sourced in various media, including manga, anime, tokusatsu, comic books, graphic novels, video games, and fantasy movies.”  Now when it comes to a beautiful young woman dressing up as a character I’ve grown to love, I’m all for it.  I’m even okay with a gym-mongrel who has spent the better part of his life working out in order to mask himself as his favorite character from whatever realm he chooses.  What I am not cool with, is an unattractive person dressing up in anything aside from sweatpants or a tarp, and going out in public screaming for attention, especially in an area where we, the innocent masses, can’t help but see them.  This should help clear things up:

Now, some of you may be thinking, “but Mr. Wolff, that’s not so bad!”  Okay.  Fine.  The large man in the Sailor Moon outfit, could be construed as funny and not to offensive.  I can see why you’d think that.  But have you any ideas what it leads to?  Let me show you…

Don’t worry, women are just as bad, if not worse, than men:

I hope you can understand now.  Do you see what not-so-offensive-fat-sailor-moon man can lead us to?!  Sure, we laugh and chuckle at the obvious irony, but there are those who don’t!  There are humans among us who leave their homes thinking abominable arrangements of cloth that vaguely represent their heroes in color and placement upon the body is enough!  It is not enough!  Cosplay is NOT for everyone!  It is a commitment to the character involving training and shapeliness where appropriate!  You don’t get to wake up one day and say, “Gee, I think today I’m Wonder Woman!”  NO!  She’s an AMAZONIAN GODDESS YOU FOOL!  Are YOU in shape like an AMAZOINAN GODDESS?!  I DIDN’T THINK SO!!

As I write this, my heart is racing and I feel an urgency at the tips of my fingers as if somewhere, an overweight, under-sunned,  gap-toothed, overly-hairy, cankled beast dressed as Super Girl has just killed a child by merely making itself visible.  Damn you poorly-costumed villain.  Damn you to Cosplay Hell…

I’m sorry.

Fear not my friends.  All is not lost.  There are those among us who stay true to character and refuse to compromise the improbable figures of ficticious characters.  Villainess or superhero, these players represent what is good for all of us — and now that you’ve tasted the bitter, you may sip of the sweet:

Well that’s it for today.  I know my words were few and my pics were many, but sometimes, that’s you can’t explain evil to people — you have to show them.

Mr. Wolff

Check out the rest, here.