Week In Geek – The WE DON’T REMEMBER MUCH Edition

Some stuff probably happened this week but we here at Dorkadia really don’t remember much past about 7pm on Tuesday evening, when the customary New Year’s Eve party began. Personally I just barely recall a rousing group sing along of Bohemian Rhapsody just before midnight, Charles’s amazing muttonchops and Megan making me a drink that may have been 99.9% gin and 0.1% something fancy and orange, I’m not really sure. Let’s see if we can catch up to this week’s nerdy events together.

The Case of the Disappearing Deadpool

The Deadpool video game, released just barely six months ago at the tail end of June, was part of the lovely Winter Steam Sale. Just Wednesday night, when I had finally regained a semblance of consciousness, I decided a great way to fight off a hangover would be to play the Merc with a Mouth. However, to my surprise, when I hopped on Steam to buy the game that was already on my wishlist, it was mysteriously…gone. Checking the community page, I noticed quite a few other people saying the same thing – Deadpool, a AAA game way less than a year old, had simply vanished from Steam.

Further research shows that all of Activision’s Marvel titles, including X-men: Origins, X-men: The Official Game, Spiderman: Friend or Foe, and all of their DLC, have been pulled from pretty much every digital distribution outlet that exists, including Steam, Amazon, PSN, Xbox Live, and Gamefly. Turns out, Activision has lost its hold of all Marvel licensing, prompting the removal of their games.  To be fair, this isn’t much of a loss for most of those titles (Marvel has decent comics, great movies and a pretty swell TV show but their games with Activision have long been bad)…but man did my timing blow.

Shia LaBeouf, more like Shia LaDouche

Daniel Clowes is a well known creator of alternative, independent comics, with one of his most popular titles being Ghost World. Shia LaBeouf is a mediocre actor who tends to star in movies that ruin good things (Transformers, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Whatever). This month marked the release of a  LaBeouf-directed short film, Howard Cantour.com. This film didn’t remain on the internet for very long though, because shortly after its release, more and more people started noticing just how similar it was to Clowes’s work Justin M. Damiano – to the point of which Howard Cantour.com has been described as ‘exactly the same with only the name of the main character changed.’

So that’s pretty messed up. BUT. It gets better. And by better, I mean douchier.

LaBeouf took to Twitter to admit to the plagiarism and apologize, but his sincerity somehow seemed…lacking. Turns out even his apologies were plagiarized, containing quotes from infamous apologies by people such as Facebook High MuckityMuck Mark Zukerberg and Crazyass Director Lars van Trier. So that was pretty weird, but on the nice side of things, Clowes doesn’t seem to give a damn, having mentioned that he’d never even heard of LaBeouf’s movie until someone sent him a link in the middle of the controversy. Good for Daniel Clowes, because I don’t know about you guys, but I could use way less Shia LaBeouf in my life.

Oh and also, LaBeouf then hired a skywriter to write ‘I AM SORRY DANIEL CLOWES’ all over the Hollywood skies. Clowes lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, by the way.

Rich Johnston over at Bleeding Cool had a fairly incredible (and by ‘incredible’ I mean ‘incredibly hilarious’) interview with LaBeouf, who at one point in time ‘argues:’

“Authorship is censorship [sic] Should God sue me if I paint a river? Should we give people the death sentence for parking violations- You’ll not only have less parking violations but less DRIVERS.”

We’re Gonna Be Less Weird

Underdog favorite sitcom Community returned to TV last night for its 5th season. This season features the return of series creator Dan Harmon after he was unceremoniously fired before the 4th season. Sony then very sadly watched the 4th season struggle even further as the show attempted to keep the quirky-but-somehow-not-cloying weirdness that Harmon was so great at producing from both writers and actors. He was then rehired and the show was given another shot at the rallying cry we fans have been yelling about while wearing felt goatees: six seasons and a movie!

This isn’t particularly big news but I just really like Community and thought these first two episodes (“Repilot” and “Introduction to Teaching”) were really fantastic – it felt like I was watching Community again. Watch this show, dudes, preferably through a legit source so it can continue to afford to do paintball, video game and Dungeons & Dragons episodes.