First off, let’s fast forward to the privacy models these websites use. Twitter is the most open of these networks. Facebook is essentially a walled garden because most people have privacy settings or have their profile completely blocked from non-friends. Non-friends, by the way, is slang for people who have not given into the smash hit service that wants to protect you from other people. Myspace is basically a site that intends to be a walled garden but nobody can figure out that fucking control panel.

Now let’s contrast this to what was going on during the 90s. AOL was trying to BE the internet by tricking n00bs into believe their interface was the “internet.” It was “online” in America. You have patriotism, tech bubble jargon, and those free coasters that everybody loves contributing to AOL’s success. For all your grandmother knew she was seeing The Matrix.

And that wraps up this ramble. I’ll try to post a little more often if I ever manage to free myself from Minecraft.

5. The Zombie Survival Guide
As I’ve stated before, I love zombies. It’s a guilty pleasure at this point. The zombie subgenre really shouldn’t continue to be around; at its best it’s a huge cliche that keeps getting retreaded, and at its worst it’s an insult to the original films by George A. Romero. Yet, I still think zombies are awesome, and I’m really glad that they’re still popular.

The zombie comedy, however, is coming to a close. I really think Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland have run through all the humour a pure zombie comedy could have, and a film adaptation of The Zombie Survival Guide would only be yet another comedic zombie movie. It’s possible that the screenplay could make it over-the-top in the same fashion as the book, which hasn’t been done for a zombie movie yet as far as I know, but that sense of humour would get tiring really quickly.

4. Monopoly
What would be better than a film based on the most popular board game in the United States? Almost anything, I’d think. As if the game wasn’t boring enough as it is! Who wants to watch an old man make super exciting retail estate dealings for two hours? Though I admit, I look forward to seeing that thimble playing piece as a cute CGI mascot. Besides, don’t we already have a movie about how much monopolies suck?

And Citizen Kane was kind of good, so the Monopoly movie is going to have a hard time competing. Besides, do you really want to see rule 34 applied to the thimble even more so than it already is? I don’t.

3. The Magic School Bus
Wouldn’t life be better if there existed a hardcore action movie based on the Magic School Bus? The film takes place twenty years after the events of the TV show. Liz has been kidnapped by an evil corporation bent on destroying science education forever. The movie follows the students as they reunite under Obi-Wan The Frizz and battle the evil Ben Stein, who has used the kidnapping as an excuse to lead our heroes into a deathtrap!

Our protagonist is Arnold Schwarzenegger as “I shoulda stayed home today” Arnold, who has somehow turned into a muscle-bound Austrian politician in the last twenty years. Seriously people, this movie writes itself. Someone get Michael Bay on the phone.

2. The Sims
Has The Sims ever been more than a voyeuristic dollhouse/murder-simulator? How do you turn that into a movie? The way I see it, there are two options:

a) A reality show in movie form, with a twist ending. The first act introduces all the Sims and establishes their various motives, desires, fears, etc. The second act shows the Sims sleeping for an hour or so, sped up to run eight times as fast as it was filmed. The third act is when God comes down and sets fire to everything.

b) A Truman Show rip-off, with Truman’s fear of water replaced with Truman’s fear of fire.

Either way, the movie might actually have a chance at the box office thanks to all the searing flesh that will be included — but I’ll give it a scathing review on my blog, and that means it’s bad.

1. Twitter
Do I even need to explain this one?

I join all the social networks, but I do so gradually, with the knowledge that I’m never going to get what I expect out of the experience. I approach new websites with a childlike fear of the unknown, but also a small bit of childlike glee: maybe this will be the one! Maybe I’ll finally find the social network that delivers what it promises!

Thus did I join Twitter. But to truly understand my experience with Twitter, you need to understand how I got to this situation.

My first social network was MySpace, back when it was known for something other than camwhores. I didn’t come in expecting anything unusual. “MySpace”, I figured, had to be something about creating “my space”. That sounded reasonable. But when it came to discovering other people’s spaces, I started to get a little afraid. It seemed to me like 99% of MySpace didn’t want me to intrude on their space, so they chose crazy background images and bad music to scare me away. Quite rude, if I do say so myself.

So bad neighbours were the key reason that I couldn’t stand MySpace. But building my own “space” was okay in its own right, and it seemed like the basic concept of a social network could still be salvaged. Maybe if a website could come along and offer something truly unique; something other than a half-assed Geocities/LiveJournal hybrid. I dreamed on.

Eventually, Facebook started to get popular, and I heard a rumour that it was the next MySpace. Presumably this meant that it would be an improvement! I was excited to try it out and see for myself what changes had been made, but I was still wary. I didn’t want a social network to hurt me the way MySpace had hurt me. It was just too much to bear.

With fear quickening my steps, I attempted to register for Facebook. And failed to register, because the sign-up page was so damned intimidating. It seemed to want to know everything about me: hardly anymore than I had revealed on MySpace, but still a lot for a budding new network to demand. I was frightened, but I eventually lied about virtually every detail of myself. Bingo!

Being undercover on Facebook was boring. No one would talk to me, and no one had anything interesting to say. What little I did see was all the same generic information template and ugly, outdated layout (though admittedly pretty modern by MySpace’s standards). With a heavy heart, I admitted that, although Facebook may be more competently maintained than its predecessor, it still just wasn’t what I was looking for in a social network.

It took me over a year to get over the loss. I’d been wronged twice in one lifetime — dreams slashed by the heartless masses maintaining the giant, monolithic enterprises of MySpace and Facebook. I just couldn’t take another hit.

Then I heard about Twitter. But it wasn’t the next Facebook, no… I heard that it could be a supplement to Facebook, that it was too different to even be considered on the same playing field. Maybe a unique social network is what I needed all along, I thought.

I was determined not to let this Twitter thing catch me off-guard like its predecessors had done, so I did a little deep thought this time. What could I expect from a “different” social networking experience? I suppose it would be something hard to guess, since it wouldn’t be very different otherwise. I decided that the secret must be in that cryptic name — “Twitter”? What was up with that? “Twitter” is something my heart does after I get my first kiss, not the name of a website!

So I tried thinking outside the box. What else could “twitter” mean?

I thought, “twit” can mean “idiot”, so maybe it’s a website for idiots? British idiots, based on the vocabulary involved. But that seemed too obvious, so I tried to think of other things that “twit” could be. I eventually came to the conclusion that “twit” could be a different onomatopoeia for “tweet”, like the twittering of birds.

So was Twitter a website for birds? It seemed reasonable at first — birds are rather important, after all. Turkeys are birds; without turkeys we’d have to skip Thanksgiving every year, which would eventually make the months go out of sync with the seasons. But something about that just seemed wrong. I couldn’t recall ever seeing a bird use a computer, and there would need to be a reasonable number of them doing so to necessitate the existence of a social network such as Twitter.

That’s when it hit me: this wasn’t a site for birds, it was a site for birds, with a wink wink and a nudge nudge. “Birds” from the 1930s who are still kickin’ around and need to get in contact with all their birdy friends. Who knows what they might talk about? Now I was on to something!

And could it be that the name “Twitter” contained a double meaning of sorts? I reasoned that, if the marketing genius behind a name that crafty could have one obscure meaning, surely they could have two. “Twit” is barely one key off “tit”, and tits would certainly reach a wider demographic than old women in their 80s, right? But selling to both markets would be even smarter!

I decided that there was only one logical meaning behind Twitter’s name: that Twitter was a social networking website for 80-year-old women to show off their tits. Made sense to me, and seemed more original than Facebook and MySpace had been. I knew that Twitter had to be something special to make people praise it so much.

Swelling with pride, I registered for Twitter. Half an hour later, I realized that it was yet another site for people to whine about their boring-ass lives, and most definitely NOT a place to discuss granny tits.

What a gyp.

Check it out!