I got handed all kinds of shit: so much shit, in fact, that I want to share some of it with you all.
Did you know that Cinemax is doing sci-fi themed softcore porn now? I didn't. Now I do. The tagline is "Your Sci-Fi Fantasy is About To Begin". I'm gonna go ahead and transcribe the back of the card because there's nothing else on it and I want you all to do dramatic readings like Carl and I did with the Aaron Stone card. Try reading it like the guy in the Gaga Entertainment video.
"Set in the near future, FORBIDDEN SCIENCE revolves around an elite corporation, 4Ever Innovations, whose young and brilliant scientists download and sell memories. They replace those we've lost with clones and devise technology that helps us live out our greatest fantasies: from saving a failed relationship, to creating the perfect lover, to being irresistible to the opposite sex-- but sometimes our deepest desires come at a terrible price, for there are secrets within 4Ever Innovations that may cost you your life."
The problem, of course, is that while nerds are a prime porn market, we can find better porn than this. Cinemax used to fill a very important role for young men around America, but now we have the internets, you know? Whoever handed this to me ran the hell off before we were able to figure out what it was. I guess I understand. Tough job.
There was this amazing comic being handed out right outside the con, an ad for a movie called "Horatio's Odyssey". Except it wasn't particularly clear that this was an ad: I assumed that it was just a really bad amateur comic. The "art" is all photos that have been put through a "grain and black lines" filter in Photoshop, then seemingly placed at random on paper. Horatio's Odyssey (TM) is about something, but I defy you to figure out what the hell it is. The trailer will not be of any assistance. Not five feet from where these little pamphlets were being handed out, there was a pile of them, all discarded immediately upon sight.
I also recieved the most awkward pitch in the world, for a "game chair" called the Gryoxus. I'm not going to tell you exactly what the Gyroxus is or does yet, because by the time the pitch was over we had no idea. A middle-aged woman approached us as we were looking at the Ghostbusters game and broke into our conversation with "HI GREAT CHAIR GREAT GAME!", handed me a pamphlet, then extolled the virtues of this chair. I couldn't for the life of me figure it out: it looked like a flimsy plastic office chair that one tilted around in while playing videogames. She didn't really know what the hell it was either, but if we finished the "secret mission" on HAWX-- "AMAZING GAME, AMAZING CHAIR"-- we would have a chance to win the chair. The chair that neither we nor she knew what the hell it was. It was kind of like if one of your mom's friends tried to "rap" with you about these "videos" that the kids are "into," and then begged you to buy a Gizmondo because this job is commission-based and besides, you'll love the Gizmondo. I genuinely felt bad for the poor lady, until she gave up on begging and started politely demanding that we head to the Ubisoft booth for a product demonstration with HAWX. As we walked off, she even corrected us, telling us that Ubisoft was, in fact, that way.
The Gyroxus, I find out now, is actually a chair that acts as a giant analog stick: the idea is the controller is attached to the chair, and you tilt in the chair to move. Probably not a bad idea for racing or flying games, but you can see where this control scheme would run into problems real fast for pretty much anything else.
As a final note, I got a flyer from a Japanese language school that was teaching a novelty "Learn Japanese with manga!" class, using the wonderful Saint Young Men-- the manga about Jesus and Buddha as twenty-something guys living modestly in a Japanese apartment together-- as a textbook. Go figure.
