Who will be Shameful Human of the Year?

Image: Adapted from Nepal Protest. Photo by SFTHQ. Used under a CC-BY license.

With the month of December upon us, it’s time to begin considering the all too important process of selecting the Shameful Human of the Year. We’ve had some 40 Shameful Humans this year so far (Uwe Boll twice), and before all my rage is drained for 2010, we’ll probably have a couple more. Who among them has shamed the most? Who has shamed the most shamefully?

Hit the jump to see the full list of candidates thus far, with links to their corresponding write-ups. Ponder on the evil-doings of Bobby Kotick, Prince, Gene Simmons, Michael Bay, and so many more. Marvel at the collective badness of this especially annoying rogues gallery.

Pile upon the comments section of this post with your leading contenders. You can nominate anyone from the list so far, combine candidates (like the parade of Nintendo haters), or even throw in last-minute nominations I have yet to write about. I’ll put up a poll in a couple weeks between the leading contenders to determine the wrongest wronger of 2010.


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Magic Card of the Week: Thornling

Hailing from the Conflux edition, Thornling is this week’s Magic Card of the Week.

Thorny here is pretty decent in a scrap, and he’s got the toughness to take a solid beating. But he really sets himself apart when you start giving him access to your mana account. Invest a little in this shapeshifter and he quickly becomes the top member of Club Beat-Your-Face.

It can get expensive to power up all his abilities every turn, but if you’ve got big beasts and powerful elementals in your deck, you’re using some land acceleration anyway. Just giving him the one mana lets him be an indestructible wrecking crew this turn. Giving him more lets him trample the crap out of your opponent’s army, and if you’ve got more spare mana kicking around, giving him +1/-1 can’t hurt since he’s already indestructible. A powerful addition to any mono-green stomp deck.

Question of the Week: Do You Like Motion-Based Video Games?

Gaming companies the world over have been jumping all up and down over the irritating fad of motion-sensitive video games. Wii, Kinect, Move, whatever, they’re reaching out to an expanding market as consumer demand seems to do nothing but increase for these products. But does it really?

I maintain that there is a small resistance movement present in the world, those still in possession of their faculties and sanity, that reject the supposed awesomeness of motion-sensitive games, and want nothing to do with this part of the swirling miasma of gimmicky gaming.

So this week’s Question: Do You Like Motion-Based Video Games?

Image: Microsoft.

Shameful Human(s) of the Week: Mark Wahlberg and David O. Russell

Mark Wahlberg has broken the news himself: he will be playing the role of Nathan Drake in the upcoming Uncharted film, based on the PS3 game series of the same name. In other words, Nathan Fillion, the nice guy who wanted the role, who would have been perfect for the role, won’t get it.

I went back and forth on who to lash out against over this information. It’s hard to blame Wahlberg for taking a job, and maybe Russell just wanted to hire his friend (these two have worked together a number of times).

Ultimately, I had to target both men, not only because they contributed to depriving Nathan Fillion of a role, but because a cursory glance of their Wikipedia pages indicates that both men are complete ass-piles.

Marky Mark can be blamed for this, as well as his performances in Planet of the Apes and Max Payne. Also, when he was a teenager, Wahlberg robbed a pharmacy, and followed it up by knocking a man unconscious and blinding another man in one eye. Oh, and he fractured someone’s jaw for no reason when he was 21.

David O. Russell is apparently about as fun to hang around with. He had a screaming meltdown during the filming of I Heart Huckabees in which he repeatedly swore at Lily Tomlin before doing a little set-trashing and then locking himself in his office.

An even more astounding incident occurred between Russell and George Clooney during the filming of Three Kings. Clooney stood up to Russell after he had been hassling workers, and Russell did the mature thing by replying “Why don’t you just worry about your fucked-up acting?! You’re being a dick. You want to hit me? You want to hit me? Come on, pussy, hit me” and then grabbing Clooney by the throat. The only good to come out of all this is that Clooney responded by beating Russell down.

So there you have it folks. Nathan Fillion missed out on a job because an abusive director wanted to hire his untalented buddy instead.

Image: Uncharted Drake’s Fortune box art. Copyright SCE.

Magic Card of the Week: Echo Mage

Further confirming my opinion of leveling creatures being WotC-sanctioned cheating, here we have Echo Mage.

This dickhat here has true potential to royally fuck up any game. After being leveled, all you need is the usual control deck double blue to fire any spell for a second time. After a little more leveling, you get to copy the original spell twice. This includes any of your own bitchy blue control spells as well as your opponent’s. And to top it all off, for a wizard, he is pretty damn tough with a toughness of 3-5 and requires serious effort for removal. But then he just copies your removal spells anyway.

That’s right folks, the days of honorable beasts, zombies, and elephants duking it out is forever over,  Magic has fallen into a hate-spiral of trickery. If you meet anyone playing with Echo Mage in their deck, tell them, from me, that they are a penis.

Image: Wizards of the Coast, Inc.