The Miss: Is 'The Mist' This Summer's 'Under the Dome'?

IT was such a big movie that I haven't seen it, but I have heard of it. I've seen the memes. The memes are OK, and I watched the 80s movie which is frankly a pretty effective if silly horror movie. Stephen King is doing alright lately. But for every good media product, there is a subpar product created as reaction. Stephen King has provided society with a fair amount of media products as his bestselling books regularly get reconfigured into television and film, and that makes sense: King is a prolific writer with a huge audience. Sadly, his admirers often fail to elevate the material, and a recent case is all the example we need.

Today, we are gathered at this sloppy blog to discuss and explore The Mist - the 2017 Netflix special. Apparently it started its sad life as a new series for Spike TV. Spike TV's last major show was MXC and that was over a decade ago. You're going to ask something about why I would watch a show made for Spike TV. Because, let's face it: I should've known better, right? Let me answer for my actions: sometimes you know the trainwreck is coming and you just have to make sure you see it happen. I saw it on Netflix (where it had been dumped fairly quickly for an American exclusive), knew it would be pretty bad without any research, and dove right in.

I vaguely recall a movie of The Mist released in 2007, based on Stephen King's novel by the same name (at this point I won't read it anytime soon). The movie had weird bugs that the protagonists had to shoot when they were in a supermarket. Big things loomed in the dark. Were they dinosaurs? Then, at the apportioned time, the mist blew out of town, and everyone had endured personal struggles, survived, and grown as people. I assume this TV series is aiming to do the same, but since it was written by committee with little regard for coherence or impact, I also assume it will kind of spin around in annoying circles for 10 episodes.

All you need is a coping mechanism, and you can watch this show.

It opens, kind of like Under the Dome did, with the destruction of an animal. In Under the Dome it's a cow that gets split into two steak-like halves, in The Mist it's a dog that gets eviscerated. And a soldier wakes up without any memory of what's going on... oh yes, friends, you've entered a zone of mass entertainment you've probably stumbled over before. The dead dog looks a lot more realistic than the dead cow, though. If you have Netflix, you can see for yourself. Actually I'll spare you the trouble:

Big mystery: who did the dog piss off to get done like this? Also: nice one, SFX people.

The same team is responsible for The Mist as made Under the Dome. I'm sure that the key people are unchanged. There's a deep connection between the shows. I can sense these strange coincidences... the casting seems similar. The locations seemed to have been scouted the same ways. The special effects: again I'm getting some deja vu. The writing is what really seals its fate. Something about the situations and the handling of characters and the bizarre missteps they have to take in order to make plot lines viable just reminds me of the 8 or so episodes of Under the Dome I watched.

Millennials For Bernie and Other News From The Modern Gutter

Wow 2016 has certainly been a year, between celebrity deaths, political chicanery, imminent race war with shooting-a-day news, terrorists wilding out everywhere, a surprise coup in Turkey, and the grand return of Pokemon combined with augmented reality, the Age of Indifference seems poised at the cusp of its Golden Age. It's almost possible to forget the insanity of the first four months of the year based on the last three months of the year. It's almost possible, even tempting, to think that we are at an all time high of crazy happenings


But things have been shitty for a very long time, haven't they? And it's probably our fault. In fact it is certainly our fault. We've done this. Some of us try to do better, some of us try to fuck things up, and the majority don't care. I like to think I fall outside of all these groups. I don't care; but I do. I want to do better; but I don't. I never really considered the option of making things worse... it seems there are plenty people on each side of every confrontation who can do that better than I could ever hope to.

So I was trying to come up with a good overview of the past ten months or so but there are so many squawking heads yakking about it that it doesn't matter. Plus, I'm a piece of shit idiot with nothing new to add or a redeeming perspective. Suffice it to say I get it: everything looks pretty grim. Things looked bad in 2003, and they look roughly as bad now, except there is more bad stuff? (I'll look into this after I kill myself, because fuck making that graph.) But there's also good stuff: like consumerism! So I'm going to recommend some pretty good stuff that'll help you get through July without killing yourself or fantasizing about killing every last human in an insane laser drug apocalypse in a doomed attempt to fix Earth and right all the wrongs.

4 Media Products Recommended by the Sloppy Blogger in Lieu of Depressing Screed About Modern World

The Following Tweets Presented Without Comment

The Verge of Uncanny Valley

Facebook but with a dislike button. Twitter but you get to throw tweets into a virtual shredder and retweet the results. Youtube but comments cannot be prohibited and confer privileges based on amount of likes or coherent length. More review systems and as much user based content as possible, and also there must be media sensationalism. Soundcloud but with a built in editor and sampler, and a healthy amount of effects. Reddit but with upvote XP systems. RPG social media events, with PR interlacing and exciting, meaningful marketing opportunities. Viral IRL games arrays, spanning years and maybe even decades. Pure madness. The distance from one to another is growing, and getting in the middle is the biggest business of all; get in on the ground floor of the first business to dictate human thought, which will be bought by Google for billions. Log in and meet the new gods. There's an app for that. Material world a quaint place peopled by the offline troglodytes, infants, and the non-digital elderly.

Deeper into the collective subconsciousness all the while assured of individuality and rugged independence. Too good to give it up and too obviously fucked up to care. Living in the shadows of an ever-twitching and surreal world. Spastic shadows and half-formed exclamations. People who can't take jokes and people who can't stop making them, both uniting to ruin the moment. Uneasy words from agitated people. More data every second than can be processed in a human lifetime. Everything is under control, believe us. There is a number too big to fit into the known universe, and we are chasing it for no other reason than to crowd ourselves out. We are edging towards an eternal dream state, towards a hyped self destruction, into the darkness of the final delusions.

Pretentious shit from idiots, too, and pretty much absolutely as far as the eye can see or ear can hear. Why won't the voices stop, right? They don't appear to even consider your objections for a moment before saying some other thing, or a thing related to it logically. Or is it the appearance of logic, worn as a cloak over a disingenuous appeal to base instinct? Then, to add injury to insult, other voices begin to chatter nonstop about the things the first order voices said. A chorus grows in the uncanny valley of the present, a maelstrom of misinformation and ignorance grows and risks everything and stupefies the remainder. Dangerous ideas curl in the air like toxic smoke. Plumes of oil, plastic, radiation and particulates in the air will sustain the next apex lifeform... our Frankenstein will sail among the stars and tell exaggerated tales about its creators.

User Comment Rodeo: Point vs. Counterpoint.

Everybody's heard the story. I probably don't need to go into it, and I don't really want to. It's a chilling one. This post and ripost say something about when and when not to point fingers or ask for collective reflection. It's not even so funny.

The bottom-most post is kind of the numbskull post, or the comedic foil. Whoever posted that doesn't really have anything to say, but wants to say it. Hello 85% of comment boards, peanut gallery fucks, and general idiot populace who don't do the rest of us a favor by keeping to themselves. No empathy, just a sense of indignation that a potential sociopath managed to cleverly avoid the same security that allegedly asked for their name prior to leaving the country. Pro-tip: next time don't use a travel agent. Your inconvenience is completely unrelated and unimportant to this tragic story involving the death of a young expat student. If you're trying to make a joke: fuck yourself. Get away from anything serious, and never consider a job in comedy because you're about as funny as a bag of grass clippings. Next, the rejoinder to the above middle post:

Yes, fine, sure. Way to speak for all of Canada. Somewhat thoughtful, and you're definitely right that it was not the time to reflect on our cultural or societal values (which include ATTENTION GETTING, SELF-WORSHIP, THE REDUCTION OF HUMAN LIFE, GREED, DESENSITIZATION TO VIOLENCE VIA ALL MEDIA AND OVER-REPORTAGE, and PUBLICITY). But to be fair I don't know what the first poster wanted us to examine in modern society. The post could've been about anything. Mentally-ill people aren't ostracized to the point where they commit crimes. The committed 'insane' live shitty lives, but some of them are kept from society for a reason.

I think, ultimately, that it's the ubiquity of the alleged perpetrator of this murder that should give us pause. There are many young men and women 'on the get' who do whatever is necessary to get whatever they want. They have infantile minds and dangerous ideas, they hold very little value in life and too much in material. They are everywhere and they run banks, deficits, companies, governments, the law, and society in general. And yet we are not afraid. And yet when, say, a regional economy is dismembered and sent in bloody pieces around the world, its ex-employees festering in neglect and despair, a similar crime is not perceived to have taken place.

Maybe it's all rhetoric, but maybe it's not. Maybe the poster posted a dumb question on the old message boards, maybe the poster wasn't thinking. Maybe the poster hates society. Maybe it's just a simple story made complex by the ideas people are injecting into it. Then again, it's Canada's Most Insane Crime of the Season, and every sensationalist will jump onto it with an agenda. All those agendas will end up burying the very point of the story: the victim. And it always happens that way. Maybe we should take a goddamn minute to think about how these things come to pass, and how they may not reflect merely one diseased individual.

Or maybe we should get back to feeling good about our society because it does not literally encourage malice.

YouTube Hates....

...any attempt at a serious erection. I'm not going to write a disclaimer. Let's get to this article. Do you like to laugh and cry uncontrollably when you masturbate? Are there not enough low points in your life? YouTube's got your back, son.

I've been lulled into watching a video playlist that has included incomprehensible low points of male fixation. By this I mean video game females, the unparalleled nadir of modern sexualization. There are enough points of contention for research, and if anything the inventiveness of cyber hussies is something... impressive. And I mean impressive in the way that any delusion, nurtured enough, becomes impressive - the sort of impressed where you feel happy to merely be an onlooker, but there's that knowledge that will never be erased from your mind or anybody else's.

In other words, if you spend enough time looking into the smut abyss... you will see lowest points. The nadirs. This is no byssus moment (internet high-five!) but this is the moment where you have to accept without going mad the fact that the human race is so goddamn weak and dissipated that lonely men don't drown themselves in alcohol and self-loathing and outrageous one-liners and hopeless chases or gun clubs anymore, and instead form constructive sexual fantasies including (but not limited to) inanimate objects, cartoon characters, animals, humans posing as animals, video game 'babes', stuffed animals, and probably at least four hundred other paraphilias. Leave it to YouTube to know what's up. Let's leave downright criminal things out of this and still be depressed. I feel I had to post this analysis. I know it'll be incoherent.

Now I was just looking casually for some smut, and the playlist started out innocently enough. French commercials for dreamcasts featuring models spraying water on each other. Brasilian butt-model videos, and generally just videos of very beautiful women in very artificial scenarios. Things involving real, paid, adults, nothing particularly schlocky except for a 'lesbian kiss' or two for the deluded, credulous homophobes with the stunted minds.

The video playlist goes downhill right around the time it uses models from the Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. Beach Volleyball videos are only just being understood by scientists, and this sport is still being played by actual women, so it's not like anybody really needed a video game about it. Well that's Japan, right?

Reality check. Japan has several thousand words for 'uncanny depressing adolescent fantasy' and about three hundred for 'creepy pitiful fixation'. Japan knows the dice are loaded. Just ask the octopus and the fisherman's wife. Is it a parable? Is it prophetic? What.

I don't even care. It's too tragic. I'm sorry, Japan. Moving on, there are videos about teen models. So obviously the video playlist is depressing here, because, hey, immaturity. I'm not kidding myself, reader. This is an obscure blog post about what gets wanked to on about the last place a mature discerning adult human being would look for smut, and this blog post isn't even even half as depressing as the innocent video playlist it critiques. I'm not going to talk about the inherent sexism in all of the videos. Some of the videos actually celebra–

This entry in the field of depressingly amateur, terrible music, insane costume design, weird postures and facial expression smut is noteworthy, because it sees you and just laughs. Try to get hard to this? That one girl knows your dirty business and thinks you are lower than a worm. Look at her face – she isn't pretending to be overly serious, she just thinks you're a dork. Didn't you know YouTube hates you? It's got your back when you look for soft-core smut, but it is not playing the game seriously at all.

You better just find somebody, even if she's bigger than society tells you she should be, has bad skin and a shitty attitude and a decrepit materialist's soul. Then you learn your lessons from her and never, never allow yourself to fall this low again. You hear me? You work your way up. We can all be better, but you are making so many people feel better about themselves that you have to improve yourself before they feel any shame. Depressing man-children of the world, you have three years to get your shit together or nobody will ever take you seriously again.

First step. Do what the Italian woman in the video is telling you with her facial contortions to do, and delete your weak, tepid, depressing store of soft-core YouTube internet smut.

Here's a final link to the playlist, so you can witness the witless for yourself. Women, if you're going to watch this.... I know this rejoinder is weak, but you do some stupid god damn things too.