Goodbye, Yellow Brick Choad

 Something's wrong here...

Tonight we dump the corpse of another one year old child into the secluded quarry of eternity. I'm speaking of course about the year's end, and I think we can all agree that 2014 could be roughly summated as, "meh." It's like someone found the dried out husk of 2013 and microwaved it, saying, "nah, we can get another twelve months out of this."

I hated 2014. I find cinema to be a good indicator of the worth of a year, as it is the most expensive and therefore most important entertainment industry. We began 2014 with yet another Paranormal Activity movie, and oh God, let this year just end. I mean, everything good is already slated to come out next year, anything released between now and the new Star Wars is just filler!

 I wonder who's gonna play Darth Vader?

After the fifth or sixth PA installment (ironic, since my personal opinion of those films could be equated with getting my dickhead pierced), we slogged through Flesh-hand RoboCop, Gritty Frankenstein Update, Unnecessary 300 Sequel, Unnecessary Muppets Sequel, and that fuck-awful Divergent nonsense (seriously, what's the point of reading books anymore if all they ever tell the reader is that they don't have to change and are perfect?) before we finally landed on the only good movie this year managed to cough up. I said it before and I will say it exactly one more time and then never again; I could not have made a better movie than Days of Future Past.

I'll give dishonorable mentions to movies that were good by comparison alone. 22 Jump Street was better than most recent sequels could be expected to be, but I fear for the third installment. Lightning in a bottle once is luck, but twice is a miracle. Remember how great Friday After Next was?

Interstellar was a nice looking movie and presented some interesting concepts, but I couldn't make the point of movie; aside from a decent Matt Damon cameo and brilliant special effects, what set this bloated wreck aside from the other $500 billion dollar cash-ins we were commanded to see this year? I mean, Interstellar was marketed as a really good sci-fi movie, and it delivered on that promise. So? Was that noteworthy? Complacency numbs the wait between nostalgic revelry. That's
a haiku, I think.

I'd raise a middle finger to the industry before the people, usually, but this year was different. If you're like me and you only read about it today, The Interview, a playful bromantic romp about international assassination, has come under some scrutiny from the North Korean government. It probably has something to do with how we're playing their fuhrer's death for laughs. I don't know what's more sickening; that an attempted war crime is being portrayed as a buddy comedy starring my least favorite actors ever, or that the American people are clamoring over their right to pay money for this. I'm sure at least some of you are thinking, "I'd never give my hard-earned money to watch that piece of crap. I'll just get it on the Pirate Bay." And to you I say, you're an idiot.

TV was worse, if you could believe it. Televised comedy died when Stephen Colbert walked away from the only worthwhile news program on American airwaves, and Family Guy dug the grave with yet another season of banal non-sequitors. Between the lack of real comedy (no new China, IL or Venture Bros. seasons? really?) and a neverending slew of vanilla yogurt cop dramas (True Detective is groundbreaking how, exactly?), I actually decided to cancel my cable subscription, and began hoarding old Simpsons DVDs. I have seasons one through twelve, and honestly, I may never go back. Short of seeing Dick Clark's corpse resurrected at midnight tonight, I declare any time spent on the boob tube in 2014 was a waste.

Worst of all was the music. 2014 had an absolutely dreadful soundtrack. Songs about enormous asses became a bonafide genre this year, and while I would have welcomed this change four years ago when I didn't own a radio, I presently revile the New Wave of Butt-Handling Music, or NWOBHM for short. I guess I wouldn't have a problem with asinine pop music covering asinine subjects (more like ASSinine, amirite?), this new slew of anal spew claims critical depth. "All About That Bass",  a bland pop tune from some chubby Californian tween would have you believe it supports fat-chick feminism with its lyrical content. I would have you believe that a world wherein a young woman's deepest anxiety is whether or not people like her butt is a world where I'm the proud writer of a semi-satirical quasi-misogynistic comedy blog. Hey, whaddaya know?

 Biz Markie lost weight for this video.

And that brings me to my last paragraph, and I mean that literally. After six or seven years of entertaining literally hundreds of readers with my non-humble musings, I've decided to wrap up shop. Not out of spite for lack of financial success, no; the time for that would have been last year. This year, I've begun working on another novel, because no one bought the first one, and I'll need to focus all of my time on that. I don't see myself having time enough for multiple writing projects and a full time job until all (any?) of the good parts of 2015 are done, and I don't want to leave any first time readers with false hopes of new material. I may update the blog with links to the new book once it's released, because I'll still need some money from you guys now and then, but I'm retiring the Mantle of Darsh, which is an actual enchanted mantle I bought at the Vatican gift shop. I donned it while writing each and every post, and its Satanic magic fueled my creativity like gasoline on a fire. But now it shall remain in my closet, alongside the real Shroud of Turin and my suitcase full of ten million dollars in cash, for an eternity.

Enjoy scouring my archives for wisdom to help guide you through your daily wanderings. Everything you need to know about life is within this blog: why things suck, who sucks, which places suck, why you suck, everything.

And now, as the ancient hawaiians say, smell you later, Bart. Smell you later forever.