So, the various films I’d judged, apparently accurately, too stupid to see last year are emerging now on disc. And at the top of the list of things I expect RiffTrax.com to slaughter within minutes is of course the loosely termed 'remake' of The Day the Earth Stood Still. As suspected.

To explain how loosely termed 'remake' really is, in the short form, the 'remake' of Day of the Dead was similarly similar to the original. In the long form, here's what thrilled audiences in 1951....

Once upon a time, a race of tall, boring aliens with names like Klaatu discovered through whatever means that the people of Earth were developing and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, which were conceivably something of a threat to First Universe Starsystems, coaxing the likes of Klaatu to invade with or without sanctions and...look: the film in 1951 was just Desert W Storm. In advance. When three people and a goat knew that Iraq was even a country. Assuming Iraq was a country in 1951. As much as nations change positions over there faster than an ecotard's argument, I'm not sure anyone would have the answer. Maybe it existed. Certainly, the film was released and, to the extent that anything made in the fifties was more logical than boring, made some element of sense to the neanderthals alive to see it at the time.

Plus nearly sixty years. And Fox—you know Fox: that uberconservative Fuck the World NewsSource rapidly adopting the Onion's logo while interrupting their doomed little shows with ecotarded messages from the actors otherwise appearing in their doomed little shows ['I'm Keifer Sutherland; Jack Bauer tortures people while breaking all laws everywhere because waterboarding's too kind; but we torture the planet every day....']—rework this coldwar timewaster to appeal to modern morons, specifically by having Klaatu [oddly enough played by Keanu Reeves, despite everyone's assumption that he'd been cast to stand around expressionlessly as Gort] come to Earth to get shot on sight [if there was anything about the sadness of bullets shattering whatever gift Rennie was about to hand over—the cure for bad filmmaking, or whatever it was—I guess I missed it], get hospitalised, whimper that humans had to be destroyed before they destroyed the planet, get better, escape, bug the Minister of Silly Walks for no clear reason, clash with the black kid wanting to destroy the planet in something like a debate but different, and ultimately kindasorta make the Earth Stand Still at the very end, without announcing why he'd be doing that, whether he as Rennie had would keep lifesupport systems and planes in flight operational during the hour of downtime, whether it was only an hour of downtime or a total ending of planetkilling technology like analogue wristwatches...I have no idea what the hell happened. Honestly, if I had to guess, Fox wanna destroy the planet, and figure that by agreeing with the ecotards while taking their money by releasing ecotarded films so totally illogical that even ecotards might notice how silly they're all being and finally shut the hell up.

Did I guess right? Whoa.

It's not all bad news. The film was all but designed for RiffTrax.com. Highlights include Klaatu's line that 'There are some things I cannot do' followed by enough silence to interject 'Like act'.

So, I guess that was a couple hours I won't be getting back. I guess I saved ten bucks. Well, twenty, if Hunter had gone along. Fifty if we'd got a couple burgers at the cinema. So...fifty bucks. And also the planet. Since I didn't get the cinema's hopes up enough to show this stupid thing for an extra week, using a few more watts of planetkilling electricity.

So, what else is new....

Speaking of stupidity, I might have some—well, I do have some bad news. Either way. Though I'm still working out exactly how bad it really is.

Part of the problem is that, here in Denver, the temperature's been leaping from twenty to seventy-five and back for about a week now, and I picked up something like a cold. I think. I dunno. It could be Captain Trips, for all I know. But I doubt it. Looking at the list of symptoms for the flu, I've never had it. But I'm fuzzy and probably shouldn't be trusted with a website at the moment.

So, granting that, I wandered in here to the 'net earlier, laying in bed getting really, really boring, just to see if I might have been missing anything important out there. Just in time to get an EMail from CafePress.com kindly letting me know that a forum on their boardsystem had gained a new post about...I dunno; just this:

Hello,

We are making two key changes to the CafePress Marketplace. Please read more about these changes on the News Announcement page.

Thank you.

So I tracked down the board, which I hadn't looked at for a while—this year, really—since getting a bit angry at the overwhelming percentage of democrats outsourcing their silly little .pngs to CP whimpering at the end of the summer that the performance bonus was being declawed. I have no doubt that these were the same people later whimpering that employees at AIG were given the performance bonuses they'd contracted to get the last time they'd signed a new contract, and thrilled at BamBam's bill of attainder to tax AIG employees ninety percent to fix the part where the government forgot to read the damned contracts and replace them while replacing AIG's management. Don't get me wrong: AIG were as close to actual Evil as I've ever seen in nature; but trying to back out of a standing contract is fraud, and taxing a small group ninety percent—whether that's AIG employees getting a bonus, guys named Bob, or, if you like, guys named Schiavo—is a bill of fucking attainder. Am I seriously the only one who's ever bothered to read and understand the constitution? And I've got a cold. You just think about that....

Anyway. The whimper at CP was that, the ToS containing something about the ToS being updated from time to time, and updates applying to those continuing to outsource shirtmaking to CP accepting the new Terms of Service as a matter of obvious course, CP were putting an end to the performance bonus programme in relation to their webmall, back before that was cool.

Was it bothersome? Sure. Was it illegal/fraud/terrorism/whatever else these whimpering sophists were calling it? Nope. New contract: new terms. So I got fed up at these twerps and left.

Until today.

Today, I get in to see what these changes are. And they're not good.

First of all, let's compare a couple of confusingly similar ideas. The bonus thing can be one. A bonus is an extra something you get for, like, doing a good job. I guess. Unless you're with AIG; then it's just a benefit, like getting Dental. But whatever. Particularly now, few people in the world would confuse a bonus with a salary.

On the other hand, we have salary. Sorta. Not really, since I for example am not employed by CP. In point of fact, they're employed by me. And others; but this is about me. They make about $150million per year [granted: not a whole hell of a lot in the business world] for providing fulfilment to several million of us trusting them [to date] to print and mail whatever we're jamming onto shirts. Cool.

Meanwhile, they've got this webmall thing. A virtual marketplace. Meaning that there are a couple of places, technically, to get a shirt from Wasted, Inc. [there are more than a couple, which is actually good news; but this isn't about that. Yet.]: from wastedinc.com, obviously, but also from CafePress.com itself, with its searchbox letting you track down whatever results from your keywords, including stuff from Wasted. Great.

Now, as mentioned, if you get a bunch of stuff from CP's marketplace, I don't get a bonus from that. Which is fair: I'm not advertising CP. I'm not really advertising Wasted [people eerily just know, somehow], but that's irrelevant. CP are advertising CP, so, where the marketplace is concerned, I'm doing nothing to help them, and I really don't deserve a bonus. I can get a bonus when people buy a bunch of stuff from wastedinc.com, because that's pretty much all about me. I get that, so I'm not whimpering about getting cheated outta the extra cash.

But here's the thing.

In six weeks, the rules will change a little. And, if you get a bunch of stuff from Wasted, I'll get—apart from maybe a bonus—the precise amount over my cost by which I marked something up. If...I dunno. I think—and I could be wrong—that my cost on a bumpersticker is $3.99; your cost is $4.99; that extra dollar goes to me for coming up with things to turn a big white sticker into whatever it is now. That seems fair. And, in that example, my cost is eighty percent of the MSRP. Meaning that my profit is twenty percent. Meaning that I'm making what a waitress tends to make by default, even if she happened to suck. Okay?

In six weeks, while I'll get that twenty percent for stuff literally at wastedinc.com, the rules change so that the same bumpersticker in the marketplace at CafePress.com, if $4.99, will get me forty-nine cents, that being not actually the forty-nine point nine cents I should get at ten percent, but someone's already fucked up on the math. What counts more than a fraction of a penny is the fraction of the MSRP. Most things CP have in their webmall, if designed by Wasted, will net me a tenth of what they sell for. But not all. For example, a FlipMinoHD, selling for $229.99 [I think] would net me ten bucks, since ten percent would be more than that. The plan ultimately is to prevent me from ever making more than ten bucks from stuff found in the marketplace. Because—and I couldn't make this up—they wanna communise prices. They want all bumperstickers to be the same uniform price, not $3.99 and $4.99 and $9.99 and whatever. Except that, if I leave bumperstickers at $4.99 at wastedinc.com, and they set the price at $5.99, we still have a problem no one at CP is addressing yet, ten hours after this announcement. So I don't get it.

Now, to address that whole Bonus/ToS thing from above: technically, when the ToS changes, I retain the option of agreeing or bailing out. So, if I opt against bailing out, I'm left with pretty much whatever they offer. That's not my issue; this is legal enough. My issue is that, for the last ten years, these idiots have encouraged the people using their service to mark shit up. Because, for example, the shit we'd be marking up differs from a threepack of shirts at WalMart via A Unique Expression of You^®. Which is great [if a little silly], until that $1.66 the unprinted WalMart shirt would cost becomes, because I thought up something funny to print onto it, worth the same $1.66 to me, if that's ten percent of the $16.69 CP could arbitrate its value at.

Which leaves wastedinc.com, which is immediately unaffected by all this. Except: remember how I don't advertise CP's marketplace, so I don't deserve a bonus there? That's true: I don't. But they do. They advertise CP, which now sells Wasted stuff, possibly for less than wastedinc.com sells it, in competition against wastedinc.com. Meaning that I outsource fulfilment to idiots who'll smack shit onto a shirt for me, then turn around and sell the only thing ameliorating a shirt worth a couple bucks into a shirt worth ten times that, for which I get exactly a tenth of the price I'd inflated by ten times its value by making it more than a blank shirt. To put this in perspective: you're spending, say, twenty bucks on a shirt which woulda been two bucks but for my efforts, and I'm getting approximately what the sales tax woulda been if it weren't online.

Not that I'm technically the force behind ninety percent of the effort; I'm not pretending that. In a real way, I'm just the guy thinking something would be funny, photoshopping it, uploading the result, and letting CP make it available through their magic of buying machines and employing everything from custodial to legal to marketing to IT to whatever. But that nagging fact remains that, removing me alone from the equation, according to a decade of peptalks, removes the difference between a shirt worth two bucks and a shirt worth twenty.

This isn't good.

So, I'm trying to work out how to handle all this. While I'm all fuzzy and shouldn't be trusted with a website. So I probably won't find an answer today. Maybe this'll lead to comments [hopefully better than wait...so you make more than ten percent from TShirts?!? What are you, a neocon?!?] on the board which'll help me figure it all out. Not that there's much to figure out. Either I accept whatever these new terms are, bug out before it gets worse, or hope I'm sick enough that I'm hallucinating. Thinking more about this once I feel better should drop me down to only one or two options.

Meanwhile, if anything, this is making me feel worse.

More later....

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