Episode I: The True Meaning of Life Day

Last month, some friends and I agreed to hold a traveling holiday party in our picturesque burg of Jersey City, with each person hosting a different type of holiday celebration in his/her home. It'd be like a wholesome 1950s progressive dinner but with less green bean casserole and more Night Train.

All the good winter fetes went quickly. My pals immediately called dibs on Saturnalia, druidic Solstice, and Festivus, and I was left with few palatable options. Hanukkah? Christmas? No way. I was moments away from signing up for Taiwanese Constitution Day, when an idea struck me like a bolt from the blue.

"Guys, I'm going to host a surprise Life Day party."

"Life Day? What the hell are you talking about?"

"It's from The Star Wars Holiday Special. Life Day is, uh, like Chewbacca's Christmas. All the Wookiees put on red bathrobes and, um, watch a stoned Princess Leia sing a song or something."

"Well, that's a wanting explanation."

Yes, for all my years of jaded fanboy aspersions cast towards the Holiday Special, I didn't actually know the true meaning of Life Day. Maybe I'd lost sight of an emotionally rich yuletide parable interwoven between scenes of Bea Arthur waltzing with Mos Eisley's scum and villainy and Harrison Ford delivering most his lines with a constipated grimace. It was time to give the Holiday Special another go.

Fortunately, the entire special is available on Google Video. Unfortunately, it took only 5 minutes of viewing to feel as if I was being skull-diddled with a lightsaber.

The Star Wars Holiday Special is guilty of the worst sin kitsch can commit – it's hella boring. Case in point: the opening 15 minutes are mainly devoted to Chewbacca's family yowling in their Wookiee tongue. Hell, most Z-grade scifi flicks are worth the slog for a fugitive glimpse of nudity. The most titillation the SWHS gives us is an interlude in which Chewie's father Itchy ogles VR porno starring Diahann Carroll. Ooh la la.

It wasn't until the 99 minute mark that my Life Day epiphany dawned on me. At this point in the special, Han Solo – who has eluded Imperial forces long enough to drop Chewbacca off on the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk – turns to Chewie's clan and (without a whiff of that trademark Solo rakishness) gushes, "You're like family to me."

Normally this kind of Lucasian sincerity would've made me lose my shit, but I empathized with Han. The Empire had been chasing him all day; our favorite rogue was so hopped up on adrenaline and fatigue that it made perfect sense that he'd start doddering like a Hallmark Card. Likewise, I was so gonzo from 1.5 hours of Holiday Special that I became nostalgic for such banality as tile grout, riboflavin, and The Phantom Menace.

It was then that my Life Day miracle hit me – The Star Wars Holiday Special was such a train wreck of existential horror that it made my boring-ass life seem like a cornucopia of wonders, and Life Day was simply the gnarled track, the tetanus-soaked philosophical underpinning that caused this prime-time disaster to run off the rails.

Now I knew the true meaning of Life Day. It isn't a day for family, friends, or fellowship. It's a day to dive into that oubliette you call your soul and almost asphyxiate yourself on the darkness. The Star Wars Holiday Special had taught me this, and after my Life Day party, my pals would never take the other 364 days of the year for granted ever again.

Episode II: No Blue Milk At This Party

Of course, if you're going to put your mates through psychological duress, you need a suitable sop so that, y'know, they talk to you again someday. My sop was free booze.

According to Star Wars lore, the traditional Life Day foodstuffs are Hoth Chocolate and Wookie-ookies. Sadly, the official recipes I found online were ho-hum, so I deviated from canon and dubbed this potent NY Times cocktail "Hoth Chocolate" (Absolut Peppar is a suitable proxy for Tauntaun blood). My roommate Jenny was dear enough to donate "Wookiee Coconut Rhombi."

I also added two new bromides to the Expanded Universe. To commemorate Boba Fett's debut in the Holiday Special, I made him a microbrew by relabeling some mediocre beer "Mandalorian Panther Piss." I always pictured Boba as a light-beer-swilling douche, so I added Twi'lek babes and Boba bleating drunken frat boy threats to the bottle art.

The second cocktail I invented was "Salacious B. Crumb's Rancor Gamete Extract," which was a 3:1 ratio of Hawaiian Punch to chilled Spirytus Rektyfikowany (i.e., 192 proof Polish rectified spirit). It tastes like the Death Star exploding in your mouth.

Episode III: Like Eyes Wide Shut, But Hairier

If I was going to make my pals truly miserable, my decorations and party favors would have to tease out the creepy sexual dynamics of the Holiday Special, such as Grandpa Itchy's erotic interlude, the hirsute androgyny of Wookiee society, and, according to Wookieepedia, the wholesale celebration of procreation.

In order to fissure the bedrock of my guests' sexual identities, I first printed out 20+ genderless Wookiee masks. Hopefully these disguises would force my friends to question not only their sexuality, but their very humanity.

Next, I labeled my bathroom "Grandpa Itchy's VR Experience" and hung a blacklit mural of his leering mug on my shower curtain. It would've made sense to play Diahann Carroll's "This Minute" (her song from the SWHS), but I instead opted to play Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy" on infinite loop. The shrieking techno and soulless gaze of Grandpa Itchy will scar my guests psychosexually and invoke pee shyness.

Similarly, I put on an annoying loop of unsexy Star Wars themed disco. My guests' primordial id would command them to dance, but their super-ego would stop them – after all, it's impossible to look sexually attractive if you're bebopping to a remix of the Ewok chant. Their libidos will be confused, and they will despair.

Here was my playlist:

1.) The Max Rebo Band – Lapti Nek (Club Mix)
2.) Bea Arthur – Good Night, But Not Good-Bye
3.) Meco – Ewok Celebration (the rapping C-3PO kills me every time)
4.) Koto – Jabdah
5.) Meco – The Empire Strikes Back
6.) The Cantina Theme. Six times in a row.

I blasted this exact same playlist – but five seconds off – in an abutting room 10 feet away. I did this for no other ulterior motive other than to confuse folks.

Episode IV: The Day of the Party

After weeks of anticipation, Life Day finally arrived! There was a blizzard outside, but that didn't stop me from donning my Life Day bathrobe and Wookiee beard. At 9:30 PM EST, the traveling partiers showed, and I was raring to stare into the abyss with them.

Here's a log from my party. As you can see, things didn't exactly go as planned.

9:30 PM – My first guests arrive. I hand them their Wookiee mask. The seeds of sorrow have been planted.

9:49 – The revelers have donned the Darth Vader masks I left out. Good. These should exacerbate any preexisting father complexes.

10:17 – A guest complains that the Rancor Gamete Extract burnt his esophagus. Taste the void!

10:33 – My apartment is jam-packed with 50+ people. Tensions should be running high. This place will be a Hobbesian state of nature in minutes.

10:52 – Someone unironically compliments me on "a great party." What is this shit?

11:10 – As a last ditch attempt to unleash the horrors of Life Day, I rally my guests to sing "Happy Life Day" in the key of Carrie Fisher, who was rumored to be bombed out of her brainpan when she filmed the SWHS. I pray that the cacophony will rouse the neighbors and we all get arrested.

11:15 – No dice. The guests shuffle off to the next party. All the Hoth Chocolate, Wookiee Coconut Rhombi, and Mandalorian Panther Piss have been consumed. Oddly enough, I am left with a full bottle of Rancor Gamete Extract.

Episode V: So What Went Wrong?

As I cleaned up the following morning, I ruminated on my total failure as a Life Day host. None of the guests appeared to be in the agony I was in when I watched the Holiday Special – in fact, most of the gang was convivial and laughing. Were they laughing to hide an inner sadness? I doubt it.

For next year's Life Day party, I plan on doing a few things differently. First, I'll definitely screen the Holiday Special – this will force my guests to wallow in the anguish of Life Day firsthand. Also, I'll only serve Rancor Gamete Extract – this beverage tastes the way Life Day should feel. Finally, I'll require all my guests communicate solely in Wookiee absolutely for no reason whatsoever.

In conclusion, Happy Life Day from io9. To you and yours, AUGHGHRUHGGHGGH.

Additional photography by Dave Digioia, Ian MacAllen, Laura Parry, and Lauren Rath.

The tender tale of a guy who becomes a ninja after being apprenticed to a funeral director (???), the story meanders between strange white guys fighting - often in gold foil tops - and our main character learning ninja skills so that he can save a town. Here's a great moment where his master teaches him to fight a zombie.

I love that the scene starts in winter and ends in spring. Also, I have no idea if the original dialog was that awesome - "I've never seen anybody shit like that before!" - or it's all the fault of some snarky dubbing. Somehow, having heard the English-language dialog in the first clip, I don't think it's a bad translation. Director Ho is sometimes called Hong Kong's answer to Ed Wood.

Zombie vs. Ninja via IMDB (Thanks Gregor and Lorena!)

This soft-core mindbender from the mid-1980s was directed by none other than Just Jaeckin, the French filmmaker who brought the classic flesh flick Emmanuel to the world in 1974. Apparently he wanted to try his hand at science fiction, and the result is this bizarre tale of Gwendoline's search for the elusive, unnamed butterfly her dead father once sought. It begins as a sort of Raiders of the Lost Ark adventure, with Gwendoline wandering around in various "savage" countries (?), meeting rapscallions and her plucky pal Beth while being yelled at in untranslated Chinese by random people.

At last she and Beth find a guy named Willard to take them to the forbidding Land of the Yik Yak, where the butterfly is rumored to be. Unfortunately, nobody has ever survived the journey there, and in these clips you find out why! It turns out the Yik Yak are a female-dominated society of warriors who live in a vast underground city. For some reason, every part of the city is full of giant steampunky gears and other industrial objects that happen to have mostly-naked women in them. Why are there strange steamy machines with women popping in and out of them?

Luckily Gwendoline is able to cross-dress Willard as a woman (complete with fetching g-string), as you can see in the top clip. Then she stages a dramatic rescue of Beth from another inexplicable region full of water fetish scenes. Did Just Jaeckin travel through time and film this at Kink.com? I'm starting to wonder.

Anyway, everything ends happily, but not without more bared flesh and sex-hungry ladies attacking the lone man in their midst. This is a must-see, and perfect for Thanksgiving!

Gwendoline via IMDB

Thanks, Gregor and Lorena!

Of course this indictment of LARPing in the USA is itself an exercise in role-playing. "Kalle" is Viennese performance artist Johannes Grenzfurthner, who loves to mix geek culture with bizarro art and strange scholarly endeavors.

via Larpen Tumblr

If you are unfamiliar with the roiling cauldron of memes represented by this video, you will feel as if you've stepped off the cultural deep end and into an alternate reality. So let me sort it out for you a little bit.

The buttsechs motorcycle guy is supposed to be popular 1980s bisexual porn star Billy Herrington. Talented at karate, Billy starred in a bunch of karate-themed porn flicks, as well as wrestling. He had a nice time and retired in the 1990s. Enter the popular Japanese video-sharing site Nico Nico Douga. One of the members of the site uploaded a chunk of one of Billy's old videos, and it exploded into a crazy meme.

I'll quote from the source of all internet-related knowledge, Wikipedia:

Thousands of mash-up parody videos of him have been made, many of which utilize deliberate mishearings (soramimi 空耳) of lines from his films. He is affectionately called "Big Brother" (兄貴 aniki) among the Nico Nico Douga community, and most of his videos are deliberately mistagged with "Wrestling Series (レスリングシリーズ resuringu sirīzu))", "Forest Fairy" (森の妖精 mori no yousei), "Philosophy" (哲学 tetsugaku), or both.

Herrington visited Japan in February 2009 to attend in a live online event hosted by Nico Nico Douga and Garage kit maker Good Smile Company. Herrington said that he is flattered and humbled by his fans' creativity. A limited-edition Herrington figure was announced for a July 2009 release. Two other limited-editions Herrington action figures were announced for the Halloween and Christmas holiday. The Halloween figure is due to release October 2009 and the Christmas one is due to release on December 2009 both are Nico Nico Chyokuhan exclusives.

In South Korea, especially on DC Inside, audio of Billy Herrington's dialogues, including "Oh my shoulder", became internet meme.

A meme expert on Reddit explains this particular video in even more granular detail:

It's a combination of several 2channel / Nicovideo memes. The ones I recognize:

Overall, the thing is a parody of the racing scenes from the racing anime Initial D, which all look kind of like this:

There is also a "Gutter run" in there, which is kind of the main characters signature move, where he hooks his wheels into the gutter to be able to go around the curve faster.

The dudes on the bike are from a gay wrestling porn movie. It's popular on nicovideo and has sparked things like this:

The steamroller is from Jojos Bizzare Adventure.

The person driving the Steamroller is Kagamine Rin, a Vocaloid personification. She and Rin are somehow associated with steamrollers now, presumably because both are yellow.

And that, my friends, is how a bisexual porn star from America became a funny action figure in Japan. It's just what internet pioneers dreamed of back in the early 1990s. The web has become a place for cross-cultural sharing.

Thanks, Eliot!

The problem that CalTech economist Antonio Rangel and his team were grappling with was the "free-rider" problem. This occurs because people want public goods, but don't want to pay for them. So they lie about how much they value a given good such as health care or public parks. So, for example, a swimmer might benefit a great deal from a public pool. But she wants to pay as little as possible for it, so she lies about how much it will benefit her. This may not affect the public's decision to build the pool, but it could affect how much she pays for it.

Economists have long believed this is an unsolvable problem. But Rangel says fMRIs can actually force people to tell the truth about what their values are when it comes to public goods.

A release from CalTech explains the researchers' methods:

As part of this experiment, volunteers were divided up into groups. "The entire group had to decide whether or not to spend their money purchasing a good from us," [economics professor Antonio] Rangel explains. "The good would cost a fixed amount of money to the group, but everybody would have a different benefit from it."

The subjects were asked to reveal how much they valued the good. The twist? Their brains were being imaged via fMRI as they made their decision. If there was a match between their decision and the value detected by the fMRI, they paid a lower tax than if there was a mismatch. It was, therefore, in all subjects' best interest to reveal how they truly valued a good; by doing so, they would on average pay a lower tax than if they lied.

"The rules of the experiment are such that if you tell the truth," notes Krajbich, who is the first author on the Science paper, "your expected tax will never exceed your benefit from the good."

In fact, the more cooperative subjects are when undergoing this entirely voluntary scanning procedure, "the more accurate the signal is," Krajbich says. "And that means the less likely they are to pay an inappropriate tax."

This changes the whole free-rider scenario, notes Rangel. "Now, given what we can do with the fMRI," he says, "everybody's best strategy in assigning value to a public good is to tell the truth, regardless of what you think everyone else in the group is doing."

And tell the truth they did-98 percent of the time, once the rules of the game had been established and participants realized what would happen if they lied. In this experiment, there is no free ride, and thus no free-rider problem.

"If I know something about your values, I can give you an incentive to be truthful by penalizing you when I think you are lying," says Rangel.

While the readings do give the researchers insight into the value subjects might assign to a particular public good, thus allowing them to know when those subjects are being dishonest about the amount they'd be willing to pay toward that good, Krajbich emphasizes that this is not actually a lie-detector test.

"It's not about detecting lies," he says. "It's about detecting values-and then comparing them to what the subjects say their values are."

"It's a socially desirable arrangement," adds Rangel. "No one is hurt by it, and we give people an incentive to cooperate with it and reveal the truth."

"There is mind reading going on here that can be put to good use," he says. "In the end, you get a good produced that has a high value for you."

From a scientific point of view, says Rangel, these experiments break new ground. "This is a powerful proof of concept of this technology; it shows that this is feasible and that it could have significant social gains."

And this is only the beginning. "The application of neural technologies to these sorts of problems can generate a quantum leap improvement in the solutions we can bring to them," he says.

Indeed, Rangel says, it is possible to imagine a future in which, instead of a vote on a proposition to fund a new highway, this technology is used to scan a random sample of the people who would benefit from the highway to see whether it's really worth the investment. "It would be an interesting alternative way to decide where to spend the government's money," he notes.

Wait, what? The government is going to do brain scans on the public to determine what we "really" value and then tax us accordingly? Or possibly even choose which public works projects to undertake? The only place this can lead is some kind of terrifying, dystopian welfare state where the government spends more money on fMRI machines than anything else.

via CalTech

Made by sleaze auteurs Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, who previously brought you the Crank series, Gamer perfectly captures the horror and appeal of videogames. Set a few years in the future, Gamer is about what happens when biotech advances make videogames completely real. Psychotic inventor Ken Castle – played by Dexter's Michael C. Hall in an inspired bit of casting – has invented a scientifically preposterous form of remote-controlled cell that can replace your brain cells. Inject some of his goo, and your brain turns to "Nanex," a nanotech cortex that gives your brain a unique IP address and lets people control you remotely.

Castle introduced Nanex to the world via a game called Society, which is a thinly-veiled reference to massive multiplayer game Second Life. Filled with ravers and vamps, Society is an alternate world where remote-controlled actors go to be controlled by gamers who sit at home dictating their every move. (In one horrific scene, we see a vamped-up woman in Society who is controlled by an obese man sitting in front of a bank of monitors. As he slurps up a pile of greasy waffles, he forces her to fuck everything in sight.) The game makes Castle unbelievably rich. With a creepy smile, he explains to a TV journalist, "People pay to control, and they pay to be controlled."

Now, however, Castle has released a new game called Slayers. Gamers control convicts in a deadly combat scenario, and game revenues go to maintaining the prison system. The government is a big investor in the game, and our hero Kable (an appropriately badass Gerard Butler) is its biggest star. Controlled by 17-year-old game champion Simon, Kable is on his way to getting out of jail because he's survived so many rounds in Slayers. But, of course, Castle doesn't want Kable ever to get out.

Meanwhile, a group of biohacker subversives called the Humanz are interrupting the Nanex system, sending out pirate protest broadcasts and working on ways to shield people's nanobrains from mind-control signals. They want to help Kable escape and get back to his family. And of course Kable's wife – who works as a fuckdoll in Society – wants nothing more than to get her unfairly imprisoned husband back.

Like Neveldine and Page's previous films, Gamer is awash in the balletic, stuttering violence of videogames. The scenes of combat in the Slayers game are intense, gory, and shocking. This is the kind of movie whose first line of dialogue is, "You fucking teabagged him!" Though we're given ample opportunity to revel in the violence and cheap sex of Castle's gameworlds, we also never forget that an all-emcompassing degradation seeps out of them into the real world. Gamer is intensely conflicted about the pleasures afforded by gaming.

And in the end it's that conflict that makes this movie such a winningly demented satire. The bad guys, covered in gore, sing little songs about how they're about to frag the good guys. A warehouse full of blanged-out ravers from Society get soaked in day-glo viscera when Castle's goons attack. Even Castle has an incredible zombie dance number, surrounded by his mind-controlled videogame-slurping minions, who follow his every little shufflestep because he's beaming his moves straight to their Nanex.

Will Kable escape and rescue his sexbot honey? Will the Humanz bring down Castle? Can anything ever really be resolved in a world where all our brains have been replaced with nanogoo that broadcasts our IP addresses over the Nanex network? These questions, and their resolutions, may be predictable. But every other part of Gamer is bizarre and original, from the ugly-beautiful concept design to the odd relationship that forms between gamer Simon and meatpuppet Kable. Go see Gamer for the lulz, but stay for a burning vision of your fucked up future.

Gamer opens wide across the US today.

Be warned: Don't watch this video unless A) you have a stomach of steel or B) you have read at least one essay about gender and film by Kaja Silverman or Slovaj Zizek. You could also read Julia Kristeva's work on abjection. That would work too.

The Worm is an art movie in progress by Austin Young, who is posting chunks of it on YouTube as he finishes them. It seems as if he's starting in the middle with episode 7, which you can see above. Young's work has been lauded by Perez Hilton and he's apparently filmed a chunk of the movie with Margaret Cho, so he's got subversive celebs on his side. And that makes perfect sense, because The Worm is all about subverting celeb culture.

Basically the worm is a grotesque, bulgy creature who eats nothing but canned beans. It gets created out of the combined trashy terror of Cher, Britney Spears, Winona Ryder, and Madonna. And somehow Gloria Steinem is in there too. (All played rather amazingly by Nadya Ginsburg.) What's going on in this video? Basically the combined vapidity of these women, and their hunger for power, turns into a giant, vibrating something that resolves into . . . the worm.

The worm is the needy, ugly, lipsticked creature that lurks in the heart of all fucked up and fucked-over megastar women whose looks are shot, but whose wish that you would look at them is not. Imagine if you tried to explain Britney Spears to an alien. Maybe you would show them this video.

And if the video above confused you, Young has posted an analysis of the video too (below).

via The Worm on MySpace and Undead Backbrain

Angel Heart is dark urban fantasy at its most chicken-slaughteringly great. A hot, young Mickey Rourke plays detective Harry Angel, hired by a seriously Satanized Robert De Niro to find an elusive figure named Johnny Favourite. The more he hunts for Favourite, the creepier things get. De Niro luridly eats a hard boiled egg in front of him, and then he gets involved with a young voodoo priestess (Lisa Bonet) whose mother liked to drink blood with Favourite.

The movie is basically soaked in terrible stereotypes of everybody, from the "savage voodoo" types to the "ladies who like forced sex" types. Plus De Niro's hair in a bun. And there's a twist ending that is the sort of thing the demon spawn of Fritz Leiber and Philip K. Dick would scribble out in a darkened brothel basement while mainlining bug powder.

I could have shown you so many great scenes in this flick, but I decided what you really needed this weekend was a chance to see the Full Mickey in action with his voodoo lady. First they're just having sex, but then suddenly there's like blood, and scary feet, and scarier candles, and a horrifying washing lady, utterly terrifying elevators, and (gasp) orgies!!! Plus, seriously bad sex with Mickey. Iron Man could never top this.

Angel Heart via IMDB

According to Nippon Cinema:

Kouta (Shinya Hashimoto), the leader of a pro-wrestling organization called "Zero", is planning an over-the-top housewarming at his new mansion. The not-so-lucky attendees include his sister Nami (Sonim), TV producer Yamaji (Shiro Sano), and jealous party-crashing rival Ichijoh (Nicolas Pettas). Of course Ichijoh's appearance ignites an epic battle which all but destroys the entire place. Kouta's wife, Asami (Urara Awata) . . . contracts a mysterious disease. Meanwhile, the ratings-obsessed Yamaji concocts a plan to broadcast the most epic wrestling battle ever conceived.

I think we can guess the "mysterious disease" might somehow be related to zombie mermaidism. I like the combination of wrestling with zombies - sort of reminds me of Dead Set, the British miniseries about how the last bastion of humanity in a zombie-ravaged UK are the people on the sealed-off set of TV series Big Brother. I also suspect that the title Oh! My Zombie Mermaid might be a reference to Oh! My Goddess!, the silly/sexy anime series that often gets so annoying you wish that everybody would turn into brain-eating monsters so they would stop giggling so damn much.

In this alternate universe, full of silly but wonderful steampunk effects, Queen Victoria is a Paul DiFillipo-esque cyborg who is rotting away and keeps spitting weird half-formed babies out of a giant tube that snakes out from under her skirts. She sends a party of explorers (including Pervirella and her dad) out to find some sort of elixir that will either save her, save her babies, or save Pervirella. I'm not sure which - maybe all.

Meanwhile, the Pervs are fighting the Amazons for Pervirella, whose amazing powers of Perv are apparently coveted by everyone. And during Pervirella's adventures, she's menaced by all kinds of scary things, including this giant masturbating monster. Luckily the Amazonians rescue her, only to ensnare her in a massive lesbian orgy. And things just get stranger and more incoherent and more sexy from there.

This 1990s oddity is an absolutely exquisite example of the late-night bong hit film. Give it a whirl. You won't be disappointed.

Pervirella via IMDB

via Topless Robot

This model spent part of Berlin's fashion week dressed in an outfit from Marcel Ostertag that looks like it's cyber-robbery ready. She's got the skin-tight black outwear preferred by all the fashion-forward ninjas, plus a built-in harness thing that can be attached to a cloaked crane that will lower her into a cyber-vault. Honestly, can you really think of a better explanation for this outfit?


A more comprehensible and down-to-earth bit of ninja fashion comes to us via Fashionably Geek: the Naruto Shuriken bag, or ninja throwing-star bag. You can keep all your mobile devices and a book in this deadly felt tote. Created by Great Eastern Entertainment, you can order them through Import Now right here for $30.

Fashion Week AP Photo by Markus Schreiber

Wired's Noah Shachtman has a great post on this over at Danger Room, explaining how it fits into the Air Force's broader strategy to engage with people online and "counter negative opinions" about the armed services. I applaud the military for encouraging its officers and enlisted people to communicate more online - nothing wrong with using blogs for public debate. But there is just something FUBAR about how the Air Force can turn anything into a rigid and overly-complicated flow chart - even the act of chatting informally online.

via Danger Room

Or is all of the death just in the koala's head? Is he being manipulated by the head of his company and his shrink with mind-control drugs? Who is he really? Why does he keep buying things from a guy with a frog head? Why does his boss have a rabbit head?

None of this will be answered in this 2005 cult flick, distributed with damn good English subtitles by Synapse Films. (It's nice to have subtitles that actually translate signs, which sometimes are relevant to the plot.) You will not find out why the main character is a koala, nor will you discover why he is put on trial by a bunch of people who keep singing. Also, you will be unable to stop watching. Due to the overwhelming feeling that every moment is so much weirder than the last one that you just have to keep watching until the surprisingly happy ending.

Executive Panda [via Synapse Films]

So far, nobody on the various ARG game boards I checked seems to know exactly what this ARG is for, but the Aquatic Thought Foundation is one part of the cheekily-named Jejune Institute, a group which supposedly dates back to a group of professors in the early 1960s (shades of Dharma Institute). They do "socio-reengineering," and invite you to come be "inducted" at a local downtown office building in San Francisco. Here's a video from their founder.

What stands out about this ARG is that it's incredibly sly and well-observed. These game designers know exactly what these new agey para-cult organizations sound like, and have mixed in a lot of hilarious 1970s iconography. All the "products" of Jejune are just a little too nutty to be real, but are almost believable and therefore hilarious. I utterly love the long explanation they have for why their "thought recording" equipment has to use VHS tape. Check out the gallery of fliers below to see some of their other great stuff, like a device that uses some kind of thought energy to protect your crotch.

According to people who have been playing the ARG over the past couple of months, the Jejune Institute has rented out an office in downtown San Francisco and paid a staff person to sit in the reception area and take anyone who shows up asking for induction to a room where they watch a really strange video for an hour or so. People have recorded this process and posted it on YouTube. If you want to experiment with the induction yourself, the address is on the flyers and the Jejune website.

Another wrinkle in the Jejune ARG, which apparently is taking place partly via flyers posted in San Francisco and Berkeley, is that now a counter-Jejune group has surfaced. They're posting flyers accusing the Jejune people of breaking into houses and fetishistically massaging people's feet while they sleep. Holy crap I love this freakin ARG.

Plus they have a Yelp entry.

If any of you have this ARG figured out, please tell us!

The Jejune Institute [ARG main page]

Here is Shawn's original musical tribute, intended to be sung to the tune of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band":

It was 30 years ago today
We didn't have a VCR to play
George had given in to CBS
Who tried to do Star Wars with less

But it didn't take too long to see
What a horror it would come to be
Holiday Special, aww, you were so bad

Wookiees talking with a Shriiwook* sound
No subtitles to be found
Everything was going awfully wrong
Bea Arthur singing cantina songs

But that night they introduced you to
A bounty hunter in green and blue
Holiday Special, aww, you were so bad

Malla cooking with a Bantha stew
Art Carney brought a gift or two
Itchy fantasies to kids' dismay
Diahann Carroll where are you today

Lumpy watching animated Fett
Harvey Korman took one in the head
Holiday Special, aww, you were so bad

Now Chewie made it home in time
For a Life Day chorus line
And people, if we've learned a thing,
Don't let Carrie Fisher sing
Thank the Force that you will never see
Lucasfilm release a DVD
Holiday Special, aww, you were so bad

(* Shriiwook being the language of the Wookiees.)

We just don't know what to say, Shawn. It's . . . beautiful! And it even has a footnote!

Star Wars Holiday Special [via Wikipedia, source of all information about fiction]