And thus, let us begin and name a few things: The Dark Knight Rises, the Hobbit, Prometheus, the Bourne Legacy, and Men in black 3 as well as the Avengers. Highly looked forward too, predictably blockbuster films, all of which are coming out in good ol’ 2012. Other, perhaps lesser known films that I personally look forward to are also slated for this jolly old year, one such being Chronicle and yet another being Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. The Dictator is also looking to be kind of, possibly good if it isn’t totally shat on by crude, family guy-esque jokes and that battleship movie is looking…different, to say the least.
Continue reading
We Are Sanctum
Games. Movies. Politics. Sports. Life.
The Time Machine Story (aka the Tenth Greatest Night Ever)
Note: Certain names have been changed to prevent legal… stuff. Also, We Are Sanctum does not condone the following. But, as always, it is ALL true.
One of the big reasons I decided to broach the idea of a Blog with the guys this week was to create a catalog of stories that people have asked about in the past. Though you wouldn’t know it now, yours truly used to lead quite the interesting life while in college. As dorky and reserved as I am now, I used to be apart of a cadre of running mates. We called ourselves the Four Horsemen, or the Gamma Delta Xi fraternity (an unauthorized group on a Catholic school, which is probably why we called ourselves the God Damned X-Centrics), and we tore it up in school. This particular story doesn’t involve them, but it’s the right era. There are a ton of stories from that era; some good, and some not so good.
This is one of good ones.
This particular Saturday night started off as nothing overly special. A friend of mine, whom I shall call Jack, invited me over to chill with him and listen to some music while we embraced “herbal medicine”, if you will. During this time of medicinal lulz, we decided that Screwdrivers would be appropriate, albeit with Smirnoff Vodka. We downed an entire bottle together, and decided to pop in some Bone Thugs ‘N’ Harmony and just chill. At some point, Jack decided he was sufficiently buzzed enough to call it a night, but I hadn’t quite had my fill yet, so he took a “sleep inducer” and hit the hay, while I decided to slog through Epic Movie for the Hell of it.
Editor’s Note: By the way, the “________ Movie” guys get waaaay too much flack from people. When you’re both drunk and… you know, “fuzzy”, those movies only induce mild discomfort.
If you’ve never had the pleasure of watching Epic Movie, allow me to spare you the burden of going through the maddeningly inane piece of shit and save you the movie rental. It’s an absolute atrocity that would make you want to punch a puppy and kick a kitten. People get killed in Saudi Arabia for less than what those filmmakers achieved. I could seriously reenact that entire movie better than they filmed it, to the delight of absolutely no one.
On this particular night, however… something happened. Maybe it was the combination of things I’d ingested that night, or maybe I was just overly bored. But at the point when Foreigner’s I’ve Been Waiting (For a Girl Like You) started playing in the movie, I was no longer in 2005. I had been magically transported to 1984, driving in a ’76 Ford Pinto and eating Godfather’s Pizza (which no longer exists in this part of North Carolina) while cruising through my hometown. The clip in the movie with the song only lasted for about thirty seconds, but for those thirty seconds, I was blissfully unaware of anything else.
Once the song stopped, I was back in drunk 2005 land, and this didn’t sit too well with me. So I rewound to the start of the scene, and went back in time to 1984 all over again. I repeated this action for almost three hours, each time doing the same thing over and over. After three hours of this, I had the impression that I’d discovered the most amazing thing ever, and so I proceeded to run down the street, hollering that I’d found the key to the ’80s at 4:00 AM. And to this day, whenever I here Foreigner start playing over the radio, I have the weed-induced equivalent of an acid flashback, suddenly forgetting where I am or what I’m doing for awhile.
I’m not exactly sure what happened after my run through the neighborhood. All I remember is that I awoke the next morning, covered in dew and clinging to a fold-up lawn chair by the mailbox of my friend’s house at 6:30 AM. I remember wistfully dreaming of the ’80s (which were awesome, by the way), climbing into my car, and sleeping for four more hours. Strangely, I didn’t even see my friend again that day, leading me at the time to conclude that he’d gotten lost back in 1984, and that I would have to go back and rescue him the next night.
Holy carp! Nuclear power is safer than your filet-o-fish
Since the tsunami that did more work on Japan in one day than Godzilla has accomplished in decades, hippies and “activists” have been outraged about the dangers of nuclear power and how it should be abandoned. Common explanations include some allusion to environmental awareness, a reference to either the Fukushima accident or Chernobyl, and guttural sounds usually made by large Australian lizards. Regardless of the extreme form of reactionary acclaim surrounding most of these hyped-up claims, nuclear power has indeed taken a bad rap lately from legislators and policymakers across some of the nuclear power-using nations in the world. In the classic vein of politicians, however, there’s a real look at the short term going on and a blatant miss on long-term realism. Anti-nuclear activists pay about as much attention to consequences as Richard Nixon.
Guardian.co.uk
“This seems legit, guys.”
Let’s pretend for a second that we don’t immediately disregard these activists as products of horrible American sitcoms and actually take them seriously. I’m going to compare each claim made by anti-nuclear power proponents and show how McDonald’s is worse.
NUCLEAR POWER IS BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT!
You know what else is bad for the environment? Shutting down these nuclear plants and replacing them with power-generating systems that will produce at comparable levels. Explaining this fact is akin to smashing one’s head against the door, except with the added benefit of turning on light bulbs and slightly less cranial blood. Let’s take a quick count at other things bad for the environment.
- Excessive farting, which produces methane and is pretty consistent across the animal kingdom.
- Toilets filled with water. Clean, fresh water is a precious resource; we should obviously shit in it.
- Buying food from McDonald’s at the current rate, which makes more obese people and thus requires human civilization to make more food.
Nuclear power produces little in terms of waste besides spent nuclear rods, which are radioactive and a big hazard. Consuming Big Macs by the millions, however, produces a ton of waste that has to be disposed of, often via landfill. This is probably why that show Hoarders is so popular. Considerable McDonald’s intake produces great gastric distress, and as you can see above – excessive farting is bad for the environment. We should outlaw it.
OTHER ENERGY SOURCES ARE CLEANER!
Sure. They also don’t replicate anywhere near the amount of power we need – with 13% of the world’s electricity produced by nuclear plants. Tidal, solar, and wind farms are great in theory – in practice, they also have this little effect of “not powering your television in time for you to masturbate to Xena.” Theoretically they could – we’d just have to build a ton of them, and as you’ve probably noticed, the economy has been slightly less stable than the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
vibrationdata.com
“I think we lost something” ~World Economy
Let’s see how each power system hurts the environment:
- Wind: It kills birds by the truckload and takes up a lot of space.
- Solar: Takes up a huge amount of land for little efficient gain.
- Hydro: Dams rivers and disrupts aquatic animal migration patterns; upsets Poseidon.
- Oil: Makes BP create Gulf Tourism ads on my tv during Bowl Season.
- Coal: Really?
On the flip side, servicing the thousands of McDonald’s retailers across the world requires a metric shit-ton of power that could go towards things like “blowing up African dictators.” Also, see the fart thing above. That’s not very environmentally-friendly of you, McDonald’s!
NUCLEAR MELTDOWNS ARE DANGEROUS!
Nuclear meltdowns do have this side effect of creating ghost cities later used in Call of Duty and Transformers, but I say that’s a good way to stimulate the economy. Of course, on a catastrophe level, the BP Gulf oil spill hemorrhaged oil all over the place – that’s like claiming the bonfire in your backyard is a fire hazard as F-15s napalm your house.
globalsecurity.org
Pictured: Minimal fire hazard.
In truth, everything is dangerous. Waking up in the morning is dangerous. Going to work is dangerous. Taking a dump at work on the boardroom conference table instead of in the bathroom is dangerous, but slightly less than doing it in the bathroom. Here’s something else that governments have conveniently overlooked as dangerous: invading countries. There’s no way that’s dangerous, right, since we do it with regularity these days?
In truth, eating regularly at McDonald’s is far more dangerous. As the title (and Kanye West) mentions the filet-o-fish sandwich, let’s take a gander at the nutritional “value.” Slightly less than 400 calories (1,600 kJ for our overseas readers) with 28% of your daily fat intake – on one of their healthier items! This is a recipe for a quick trip to emergency liposuction. Obesity and the fat epidemic across the United States has killed far more people than nuclear accidents have, and will continue doing so for the foreseeable future – so the answer is clear: ban nuclear energy and keep eating burgers that would make Newt Gingrich sacrifice his pancreas to the fire demons.
NUCLEAR POWER PROMOTES NUCLEAR TERRORISM!
I’m going to conveniently ignore that we’ve entered the George W. Bush zone, because this is patently idiotic. Yes, terrorism is a problem in this day and age. No, we don’t need to ban everything because of it – otherwise, we’d need to start with, oh, everything in our daily lives. Russia and Pakistan don’t even have clear grips on their nuclear weapons and the complaint is that nuclear power is a culprit here? Sure, other countries may want nukes to threaten with each other or promote their foreign policy dicks; it’s apparently easy to forget that Russia and the US had a forty-five year-long Cold War with both packing thousands of nukes.
I’m not sure how to relate McDonald’s to nuclear terrorism, but I do know that looking into the eyes of Ronald McDonald is looking into the very bowels of Hell itself.
NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS ARE NUCLEAR BOMBS!
We’re already dead.
The Mayans Drank My Kool-Aid: 2012 Edition
For what seems like since the 1960 Olympics, pundits such as your local homeless bum and the German guy at the bar have been swearing up and down about the world ending in 2012. A slightly less homeless bum in Roland Emmerich made a movie out of the 2012 phenomenon, which encapsulated all of Alex Jones’s fantasies into a 2-hour monstrosity of CGI, tidal waves, and girlfriends running from movie theaters as their male companions sank into brainless piles of ash during the midnight screenings. Despite this vomit of Hollywood mash that makes Michael Bay look like Michelangelo, 2012 still strikes the average person with more fear than the last time Bill Clinton tried to have sex with Hillary.
Let’s break down some of the top reasons, outside of the makers of Saw 3D hoping for a reprieve from Earthly existence.
THE MAYANS SAID SO!
That’s exactly why they wiped themselves off the face of pre-industrial Earth, right? Placing your bets on the world’s future on a long-dead society makes about as much sense as judging political races by watching the Cleveland Browns – either way you’re a loser. I’ve heard better suggestions of predictions made by cast members of the Jersey Shore – sober.
Ignoring that the modern-day Mayan civilization prides their economic strength on counting dead bodies in Ciudad Juarez, the Mayans make dates after 2012. The Mayan b’ak’tun 13 references the date 2012 – a claim made by a few Mayan specialists named Markus Eberl and Christian Prager – but only speaks of some sort of transformation. Hey, you know what kind of transformation happens on December 21st, 2012? Holiday sales at Wal-Mart (apocalypse!) Further ruining your average idiot’s beliefs, the Long Count calendar of the Mayans makes reference to a date in the year 4772 – a date that by which I fully expect to be destroying battle droids with the intellect of dog turds while Anakin Skywalker whines to me about dreams. Another Mayan inscription writes about a date far beyond the expected life of the universe – so those of you reading this then, I guess you’re screwed.
PLANET NIBIRU WILL CRASH INTO THE EARTH!
Let’s take a look at the night sky for a brief minute, assuming you don’t live in Tokyo where your night sky looks like a Japanese game show set. You’re considering hiding a planet that will crash into the Earth in less than a year in the sky. At the chance of sounding ridiculous, the only thing more insane than that is the chance that the Detroit Lions will make the playoffs.
First off, we can see Jupiter and Saturn, planets very far away in the solar system, with our naked eye in the night sky. A planet on course to hit Earth that we’d be able to know about with any semblance of record would have to be so immensely close by now that it’d be causing gravitational distortions in the solar system. In short: there’s a good chance you might just see it. Defenders of the 2012 frenzy claim that the planet has been hiding behind the sun, which is a good claim if your idea of a logical defense is picking your nose and eating it to drive off debaters. There’s always the chance that a rogue planet or star could come crashing through the solar system, but not only would we have no prior warning, we’d be dead before you could pray to Family Guy one more time. Besides, there’s much cooler doomsday scenarios, at least one of which rhymes with “George Lucas making more Indiana Jones movies.”
I SAW THE 2012 MOVIE AND IT TOLD ME SO!
This is totally true. I saw Star Trek, and the very next day, an alien starship came down and started laser-beaming San Francisco.
A GALACTIC ALIGNMENT OF THE BLACK HOLE IN THE GALAXY’S CENTER AND THE SUN!
I’m seriously starting to wonder why I picked on such an easy target. I’d be better off demonizing fans of the show Terra Nova for their sheer dedication to irrefutable scientific claims – that would at least require me to cite the contents of my bowels as a source.
To start with this one (which I was actually recently instructed was the cause for our doom by an insane man) the black hole at the Milky Way’s center – dubbed Sagittarius A* – is tens of thousands of light years away. The Millennium Falcon can’t even make that in a single day, and it has Harrison Ford in his prime before he became President of the United States (the movies told me so!) That’s the sort of distance that Hawaiians have to go to get things like cars and milk – so you know it’s not even feasible that it’s going to have an effect on Earth. Moreover, what does this claim have to do with anything? The galaxy’s aligned with the solar system. I aligned two beers with a tub of yogurt in my fridge, and guess what happened? Only the beers were gone by the end of today.
I NEED AN EXCUSE TO GET ABSOLUTELY SHITFACED ON THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 20th!
Can’t argue with this.
The Doctor Goes Metal
No matter how much crap you have to slog through, the internet will always reward you if you search long enough…
Obama Tiptoes AROUND the Tulips
So, apparently President Obama has decided to bypass the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in appointing some Union-savvy representatives to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, despite a vast backlash from the GOP on Capitol Hill. It remains to be seen if the conservatives have the legal standing to challenge Obama’s actions, though you can bet that the idea will be broached at some point in the inner-circles of the Republican Party.
Personally, I think this is both a signal of Obama’s intent to escalate his hardline stance against Congress, while simultaneously setting the stage for a most important political battle of wills that shall define American politics for the next decade. Obama has long been viewed as a weak political manager who tends to cave to pressure from the left, which may have spurned on his most recent hardline policies against the GOP-controlled House. If the Obama Administration wants to destroy its image as being a pushover, then this is certainly a step towards that. At the same time, it prompts the House to begin to gear up for the fight to neutralize some of Obama’s clout, as it pertains to his appointment authority in-between sessions. This isn’t the first time the Administration has pulled a stunt like this, but with the Election Year now upon us, you can be sure that the stakes will go higher.
Whoever wins in this standoff will win a lot of political capital for their branch of Government moving forward, however. The Presidency has become so vastly more powerful in the previous two administrations, that Congress is almost compelled to act, lest it loses what little authority the Executive Branch permits it.
Welcome to Oz!
We Are Sanctum welcomes our good friend Gareth, aka Ozymos from NationStates to the administrative staff. Treat him well, people, and there may be cookies for all involved.
2012 NFL Playoffs – Wild Card Round
The NFL Postseason is about ready to begin this coming weekend, and a lot of the pundits are warming up to make their predictions for the remainder of the playoffs. Following the wild finish to the regular season on Sunday, all twelve teams have been set, with the Baltimore Ravens, Green Bay Packers, New England Patriots, and San Francisco 49ers receiving a bye for the first round. Four matches are on slate this weekend, beginning at 4:30 PM EST on Saturday. A lot of interesting pairings present themselves for fans this weekend, and the magnitude of the Wild Card Weekend cannot be understated. Last year, the Green Bay Packers managed to edge out the Philadelphia Eagles on the road in the Wild Card round; a prophetic event, considering their meteoric performance the next week in Atlanta en route to a Super Bowl title. Will this year’s Super Bowl winner be playing this weekend as well?
Here are this weekend’s match-ups, in order…
Well, to all things a beginning…
First and foremost, welcome to the blog!
We Are Sanctum is the culmination of months worth of planning from a dedicated team of writers and staffers, all of whom share a common goal of bringing a new twist on the tired old take of posting in the Blogisphere. We are committed to bringing our readers a new and fresh take on the world around us, and hope to break the mold in creating something that you can’t find anywhere else.
Ahem… So that’s a bit of a stretch, since there’s only a few of us, and we basically decided on a whim last night to make a go of this little endeavor. But the goals remain, damn it! What we are here to do is to provide entertaining reading material for men the same age as ourselves, right in that 18-34 age demographic that advertisers love so much. Why do we strive to reach this audience? Because guys deserve a place to hang out, and get together with other guys from around the world (not just the country) to share war stories from college, debate politics and sports, and talk about the general issues that confront us on a daily basis.
We’re not going to promise more than what we do here: if you’re a guy looking for a place to crash, and talk about life, then you’re entreated to join us here. We welcome any and everyone looking to share stories that make life worth living. And if bigger and better things are in the works, we’ll welcome that, too.
We Are Sanctum. And we hope you will be, too.
We Are Sanctum 