Sing me a bawdy song, make me merry

Hurk. Well I'm sick for the THIRD TIME since I got hired two months ago. Such is the life of a grocery cashier in winter, though I'm starting to wonder if my immune system is completely incompetent or something. At least all I've gotten is colds so far, as opposed to my coworker who came down with shingles.

Between my new job and being sick, I haven't been doing a lot of fannish stuff, hence the lack of posts. Mostly I've just been watching MST3K and Todd in the Shadows and Zero Punctuation, and occasionally bingeing on Minecraft. I've twice downloaded MCEdit and tried to figure out how to use it, but I can't make heads or tails of the damn thing. WorldPainter is a lot more straightforward, although my lack of drawing skills is a bit of a handicap.

I'm meaning to read more JoJo's and Attack on Titan and work some more on the MG Project, but currently lack the mental power to do any of those things, since my brain seems to have been replaced by a big wad of mucus.

Also I see that LJ has mutated into an even more hideous version of its former self. I'd like to thank the design team for reassuring me that moving to DW was the right decision.

Ugh, I am going through some serious GioGio's withdrawal over here. It's like I've turned into an internet version of Notorious B.I.G., except I only eat fanart. Good thing there's so much great JoJo's art on Pixiv and Tegaki. Om nom nom. I saw a couple of fanarts of Giorno riding a vespa, which made me realize: we spent all of Part 5 in Italy, and yet nobody ever rode a vespa! Blasphemy!

As for my future JoJo's reading, I'm leaning towards Part 4 especially now that it's getting a new-and-improved re-scanlating to replace the godawful DUWANG scans. Plus I like Josuke's eyebrows. And his pompadour is pretty cool too. Never let it be said that I have deep reasons for choosing my reading material! I flipped through the first few chapters and am feeling lukewarm about it so far, partly because this arc isn't nearly as ~*~fabulous~*~ as Part 5 and partly because this was before Araki switched to the now-iconic JoJo's art style so the art is still kind of fugly and Fist-of-the-North-Star-ish.

In other news, I've been watching a lot of MST3K lately. The other day I watched Red Zone Cuba and Beast of Yucca Flats, and dear god are those movies dull. I think Yucca Flats is less awful because a) funny narration and b) Tor Johnson. Also I think it's shorter? Still, I have to agree with Agony Booth that in order to create three whole movies as bad as these, Coleman Francis must have had an "active hatred towards paying audiences." Coffee? Yes, I did like coffee, before watching these movies.

Relatedly, I hear a lot of people name Manos as the worst movie MST3K ever riffed, and I have to strongly disagree with that. The worst (that I've seen) is clearly Monster-A-Go-Go. At least Manos had a consistent story that it told from beginning to end. At least Manos didn't get rid of the whole cast halfway through and bring in an entirely new bunch of characters — even the pointless make-out couple and useless cops were in it all the way through. At least Manos's twist ending was genuinely unsettling and didn't make me want to kick the writer in the head for insulting my intelligence. And at least Manos had a pleasant musical score that didn't make my ears bleed. Seriously, the soundtrack to Monster-A-Go-Go is one of the most painful things I have ever experienced. And just look at what one of the MST3K writers had to say about Monster-A-Go-Go:

"I recall this episode as being the first time we decided explicitly to write sketches having nothing to do with the movie. Really, we had no choice. (...A)ny topic that is about something (that is, any topic that exhibits 'topicness') cannot, by definition, have anything to do with this movie."

That's right, the MST3K crew could write sketches based on Manos, but they couldn't write any based on Monster-A-Go-Go because it was just that bad.

Also I'm inclined to go a little easy on Manos because it seems clear that the people involved in it had no clue what they were doing. They seem like just a bunch of average people who were like "Hey, let's make a movie!" The director was an insurance businessman and Manos was the only film he ever made. On the other hand, Monster-A-Go-Go's two directors were both professionals with at least 10 films each to their names. They may have been bad at film-making, but it was still a career for them, which implies that they ought to have had some level of competency, and yet they still managed to fuck up in every conceivable way. Basically, Monster-A-Go-Go has less of an excuse.

However, I couldn't say for sure which of these I think is worse: Monster-A-Go-Go or the Creeping Terror. Because that one's pretty awful too. I'm also not sure where Hobgoblins fits into all this. It's clearly one of MST3K's worst, but it's a totally different kind of bad from those other three.