WarGames

David Lightman's quest to get a sneak peek at some upcoming computer games puts him on the FBI's most wanted list after he accidentally engages with a military supercomputer. With a ticking clock counting down to armageddon, David must find the system's creator in order to prevent global thermonuclear war. WarGames is a Cold War-era action adventure sci-fi romp that gets more and more out of date with each passing year. What keeps WarGames watchable all these years later is its cast, with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy oozing charm while being backed up by a bevy of recognizable character actors. Come for the five inch floppy disks, stay for the endless rows of blinking lights.

Rating: 75%

(Image from Wikipedia)

Fun Fact: Matthew Broderick's hacker buddies were played by Maury Chaykin and Eddie Deezen. Eddie Deezen was also in Critters 2: The Main Course.

The Face of Evil

After Elisabeth Sladen announced that she would be leaving the show, Tom Baker apparently tried to convince Doctor Who's producers that they didn't need to hire another companion. He felt that he could carry the show by himself. The producer's rightfully argued that the Doctor needed someone to talk to, someone to tell the Doctor how brilliant he was. The Deadly Assassin was, in part, a concession to Tom Baker. And while that serial was a success, there was no getting around the fact that the Doctor needed a new companion. It's painfully obvious in The Face of Evil's first episode. The Doctor steps out of the TARDIS into a mysterious jungle. He starts to mumble to himself about needing to repair part of the TARDIS while mugging to the camera. It's awful. As much as I like Tom Baker, it's a tough scene to watch. Thankfully, moments later, the Doctor meets Leela, a savage warrior woman. The Doctor and Leela team up to defeat an unhinged supercomputer and bring an uneasy peace to the planet's two opposing factions. When the Doctor attempts to leave at the end of the serial, Leela makes her way into the TARDIS and becomes his new companion, despite his protests.

Rating: I forget if I forgot%

Star Trek: The Next Generation - "11001001"

Some aliens who speak in binary steal the Enterprise and program a holodeck program to give Riker a major bone (not difficult).

RATING: 58%

Star Trek - "The Ultimate Computer"

For a show about a future with an advanced society propelled by amazing scientific and technological advances Star Trek sure  does have a lot of episodes about the evils of computers.

RATING: 74%

Star Trek - "The Apple"

The Enterprise finds a beautiful planet with happy citizens whose every whim and desire is taken care of by a computer but nope! That's not free enough for Kirk so he destroys their computer and peaces out.

RATING: 77%

Star Trek - "A Taste of Armageddon"

A couple of planets have been having a computer simulated war for 500 years except the casualties are required by law to kill themselves (under punishment of...?). Anyway, Kirk decides to upend their whole way of life by destroying their one and only computer because in the future there's no such this as backing up important files.

RATING: 79%

The Commodore 1541

Hey, remember floppy disks? No, not the 3.5" ones that you used to trade copies of Wolfenstein 3D back in the day. I'm talking about the old 5.25" bad boys. I recently came across an old Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive, which at one time was quite the piece of gear, capable of handling single sided 5.25" floppy disks with a storage capacity of 170 kilobytes. According to the faded price tag on the box (it was bought at Zellers), the unit originally cost $341.99. Just think about that next time you're shopping for an external terabyte hard drive.

Rating: Obsolete%

(Image from nielsthooft.com)

A New Laptop

A new laptop is a neat thing because you think to yourself "Wow, when I get home I can finally play Rise Of The Triad online with my buds, time to get rid of my shitty desktop!" Then it turns you can fix the desktop you thought was dying, and even though you put all your files onto the new laptop, you're just so used to the shitty, broken down, old-ass desktop that you basically never use the new laptop. Then you end up with computers or parts of computers that you've owned for the past 10 years just sitting around your place because YOU NEVER KNOW! Don't worry, though, you donated ten whole dollars to Haiti, so whatever disgusting, uniquely American trait this excess represents was probably offset in a global sense.

RATING: 86% (I think?)

Google Chrome for Mac

For too long mac users have been limited to choosing between Safari McRAMhog and Firefox Crashy McCrashesalot for their web browsing needs (because let's be honest here--no self-respecting mac user is going to let Internet Explorer anywhere near their mac), but Google has finally brought us salvation from shitty web browsing with the much anticipated release of its Google Chrome browser for mac. I've been using this shiny piece of work for about two days now and after trying all my usual browser-killing tricks--using 10 tabs at once, searching Hulu for a new show while playing Hulu in another tab, browsing Amazon while doing everything else, running my browser while running 10 other programs, and generally showing no respect for the idea of doing one thing at a time--my sweet little 1st generation macbook has only crashed a total of two times. Most browsing has been smooth and special and at this point I'm willing to accept that the two crashes I did have were either the result of my newly updated OS (finally got snow leopard) or are kinks that our benevolent Google overlords will work out over time.

So all in all, Google Chrome is the best new thing since the sexy Keurig machine (review coming soon) that my sister gave me for Christmas.

Rating: 81%

Avatar

Ok, so we've all heard how terrible the plot of this movie is, but I have to say that I think we can put all of that aside and just enjoy the most amazing visual spectacle of a movie that I've seen in years, if not ever. Anyway, some space cats live on a planet and then humans come along to move them away from some valuable things. Also the space cats wear feathers in their hair and shoot bow and arrows GET IT??? I swear though if you see it in 3d you won't care about how dumb any of that sounds.

RATING: 73%

PC Users

Congratulations! If your computer were a person, it would have syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, crabs, heartworm, tapeworm, roundworm, ringworm, fibromyalgia, epilepsy, and a fleet of surveillance vans following it wherever it went. But hey, at least you can listen to Fruity Loops while you roll pennies, you broke motherfucker.

RATING: 12%

(Image from www.clker.com.)

Mac Users

Congratulations! You're officially the hippest, least racist, most humanitarian, kindest, gentlest, biggest dicked/tightest vaged computer users on the face of the whole planet. Now if only I could ever in a million years afford one of your electronic crash boxes then I would be able to count myself lucky enough to join the ranks of the elite.

RATING: 15%

A Month Of Boring Things - Day Sixteen: The Trackball Mouse

Fine, I get it, nobody enjoys the kind of great wrist health that you do, but you'll still never catch me using one of these things.

RATING: masturbationjoke%

Square Eyes

When I was eight years old we got a Nintendo Entertainment System. It was one of the second or third generation models with the orange zapper gun. I never really understood why, since every time my mother saw us playing it she'd tell us to turn it off, but on that joyous Christmas afternoon when my brother and I were sitting down to play Rampage for the first time, a visiting family friend who was on her way out the door admonished us, "Don't get square eyes." I'm not sure what she'd make of my current enslavement to the MacBook pro, but I think she'd approve of my desire to dig a hole in my apartment complex's noisily manicured lawn for the purpose of burying my head in it for a few hours.

RATING: God, if you're out there, save me from information hell%

(Image from hagenillustration.blogspot.com.)

Worms

Worms are versatile creatures. The early bird gets them, but if you or your dog gets them then that's gross see a vet/doctor. I read a book as a child that discussed various culinary methods of worm preparation, and although I thought the ending was infuriating I guess it was a good book. Sometimes you get ringworm that that's not a worm, it's mold or some shit, who am I, former surgeon general Dr. Jocelyn Elders? The worst thing about worms is that one can get into your computer I'm told and then that fucks up your shit but not in a good way like when Berlioz was on opium. The lesson is don't do drugs and also make sure you have anti virus software which I don't.

RATING: 43% (Regular old earthworms are charming enough to make up for all the other bad kinds a bit)

Google Zoology

You can find anything with Google. Crabbit? Check. Donkeysaurus? You betcha. How do people come up with this stuff?



RATING: 50% donkey, 50% dinosaur






50% crab, 50% rabbit
(I can't even remember where I found these. Maybe I'll retro-google them when I'm feeling spry.)

Not Having The Internet

Not having the internet is a thing that happens sometimes when you don't have money, live before 1995, or maybe a big hurricane hit your town, who knows. When you don't have internet you have to get all your news from network television, if you can stand it, and if you can't you get vaguely panicked sentences from people about a second great depression or something, but I sure as hell am not watching network news. Also if you go to the movies when you haven't internet for weeks you won't recognize most of the movies on the placard and somehow Kirk Cameron will star in a movie again. What did I do to deserve this, Jesus/whom it may concern?

RATING: 11%

Mind Reading Computers

Well there goes the planet.

(Yes I get all of my news from Hotmail's logout page.)

RATING: 26%

My Computer

My computer isn't as terrible as it looks from this picture, although by the size of it I bet its monitor is about 95 years old. It has a good processor (2.4 gHz), and decent storage space (80 gigs), but its ram is pretty bad (256 MB). I tried to run Google Earth earlier and the map would barely move. To be fair, it's probably all the spy/malware that's buried in the computer from when it was my brother's, but it's still kind of sucky. Also, if I told my high school self that I was complaining about only having 256 megs of ram, he would shit himself, because he only had a computer with 4 megs of ram and 100 megs of harddrive space he was doublespacing up to 200 just so he could play X-Wing and Doom 2. Man, that kid needed to get laid.

RATING: 39%