If there’s one thing that science has taught us, it’s that the universe is really, really weird (and maybe a little scary). That’s not to say I don’t like the universe. On the contrary, it’s one of my favorite places; the problem is that the more science reveals about its inner workings, the more it becomes apparent that it bears little resemblance to the world we think we know.

No aspect of the universe gives me the willies more than the problems of thought and free will. Most of us live our lives under the assumption that we determine, for the most part, our own actions. That is to say, we (and possibly other living creatures) have the ability to make decisions and influence our surroundings of our own accord and are not simply swinging through predetestined arcs like balls in a Newton’s Cradle. This is not something that can be taken for granted, though. Classical western arguments about the existence and nature of free will revolved around concepts of human spirituality and the dual or triune nature of mind, body, and, sometimes, soul. How, for example, could a creature created by an omnipotent, omniscient creator truly be said to have a free will? If the creator knows all that is, was, or will ever be, aren’t all its creations simply playing out the part that has been written for us.

Even though many of us have rejected the notions of gods and spirituality, the picture painted by science is really no more promising. It tells us that at its most basic level, the universe is made up of tiny subatomic particles and the forces that make them attract and repel, spin and collide. No one imagines that these bits of matter and energy have a will of their own, but rather that they whirl about in a complicated dance determined by presumably fixed laws. Particle A orbits particle B under the influence of force C because preceding events have left things in this arrangement. They didn’t end up the way they are because they wanted to be that way, they simply have to; the Earth doesn’t orbit the Sun because it really likes a good tan, it just does. All the various parts of our bodies, including our brains, are made up of these same bits of matter/energy, and so far as we can tell, must obey all the same laws. What do we possess, then, that enables us to make decisions that is lacking in a rock or a cloud?

It would be easy to say that the mind is what separates us feom the proverbial chunk of feldspar, but that would be begging the question. The mind, in all actuality, is the very effect that we’re debating; it is not what enables us to make decisions, it’s not an object or force in and of itself, it’s just the concept we use to describe our apparent capacity for decision-making. We don’t decide to make our neurons fire any more than we will the molecules they’re made of to react with each other, so how exactly are we different from the aforementioned rock? Even newer ways to describe the universe, such as string theory, are no more comforting; they just add another layer of mindless and nearly incomprehensible particles and forces.

So is science, at its least human and most literal, right? Are we really just fooling ourselves with concepts like thought, intent, and free will?

We’re unlikely to ever have a definitive answer to this question, and even if we did, would we really rather live lives built around acceptance of the inevitable futility of our actions? In the end, whether or not we are truly in control of our actions is probably irrelevant. Our perception of choice and free will is an inescapable fact of human existence, and, delusional or not, one for which I am immensely grateful.

Somewhere between the highly-polished, subscription-based gameplay of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and the simple, free offerings on sites like Newgrounds.com, lies the relatively new domain of the “freemuim” game.

Most, like the wildly popular Farmville, make the bulk of their content available free and offer the option to trade real-life money for small in-game enhancements. Lords of Evil ostensibly works on this same principle, but does it very, very badly.

The gameplay and premise are vaguely reminiscent of old-school fantasy strategy games like Master of Magic and their more recent counterparts like Age of Wonders. You assume the role of all-powerful leader, presumably appointed Dictator For Life by your adoring minions, and have a choice of three races: orc, demon, or human. This choice influences what kind of buildings and units you will have access to as the game progresses.

Gameplay consists of using your resource generating buildings to produce enough gold, lumber, and ore to allow you to upgrade your buildings and construct more advanced buildings, which in turn allow you to build military units and attack your fellow players. This is all managed through an intimidatingly unintuitive series of specialized menus, and a simple representation of your growing city is displayed in a small window at the middle of the screen.

While this kind of dense, difficult simulation likely won’t appeal to a broad audience, it could still ably fill a small gaming niche were it not for one other consideration: time.

If waiting is the nemesis of fun (and it usually is), then Lords of Evil is the rocket-launcher-wielding Nazi-robot-demon of fun. It took me almost two hours of clicking an upgrade button to reach the point where military units became available, and even after finally building the barracks needed to produce zombies (yes, zombies come from a barracks), it took me another couple hours just to crank out five of the little bastards.

During all of this waiting, there is literally nothing to do but watch the building countdown timers and fiddle around with the included maze mini-game; it says a lot that the developers felt it necessary to include a second game whose sole purpose is to distract players while they wait for something to happen in the main game. Sitting several hours waiting for lumberyards to be upgraded doesn’t seem particularly evil or lordly, and it isn’t very much fun, either.

Users aren’t charged for playing (if one could even call it ‘play’) the game this way, but the only way to speed things up is to spend real money on in-game currency in the form of gems. Buying these gems doesn’t open up any new content or add anything to the game experience, it merely uncripples the core mechanics by allowing you to cast “spells” whose only function is to make shit happen faster. This kind of shameless cash-grab in a “free” MMO is, frankly, a bit insulting.

If the game’s near-vertical learning curve and unplayably plodding pace isn’t bad enough, its poorly translated text, abysmal graphics, clunky user interface, and uninspired art should drive off all but the most self-abusive of players. Lords of Evil is the poster child for everything that can go wrong with a “freemium” game, and should be avoided by anyone who doesn’t hate fun.

What, you thought a universe-exploding machine was as bad as it gets? Not by a long shot! It only gets worse from there:

5. Web 2.0

This so-called “Web 2.0″ is, as far as I can tell, an effort to make everyday schmoes into experts on any conceivable topic so they can publicly share their thoughts on said topics. The problem is that most of us would rather sniff a homeless guy’s bellybutton lint than acknowledge the validity of someone else’s opinions. It’s only a matter of time before global society implodes as we devolve into condescending, nitpicking trolls obsessed with proving that absolutely everyone else is wrong about absolutely everything.

4. MMORPG’s

Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games are a highly effective therapy for treating the paralyzing phobia of social interaction from which most of us dorks suffer. MMORPG’s enable troglodytes like myself to experience the virtual equivalent of a meaningful, productive life and eliminate all those scary things waiting for us in the real world, like “girls” and “feelings”. Unless some alternative means of treating our fears can be found, all us nerds will retreat into these online worlds leaving no one to write the sarcastic, amateurish blog posts upon which the Internet advertising business model is based, thus throwing the world into a catastrophic economic collapse from which it will never recover.

3. Gay Marriage

Consider the following points:

1) Gay couples are fundamentally different from heterosexual couples (in that they are not heterosexual couples), and stuff that’s different is really scary.

2) Children are highly suggestible and if exposed to married homosexuals may come to accept and respect them as valued members of society.

3) American society as it was established over 200 years ago was perfect and immutable, which is why, to this very day, we allow only male landowners to vote and slavery is legal and universally accepted.

Clearly, even considering the legalization of gay marriage brings us one step closer to the apocalypse.

2. Global Climate Change

Now, I know that you’re thinking this one seems pretty obvious, but I’m not talking about the oceans rising and drowning all our cities or hurricanes destroying the food producing capacity of entire continents and triggering a global famine. No, I’m talking about something much more frightening: dinosaurs.

Seriously, stop and think about it for a second! We’re changing our climate to something closely resembling that of 65 million years ago before the dinosaurs all disappeared. How long do you think we have before they move back into their old digs and start looking for some savory mammalian morsels to snack on?

1. Children

It is often said that children are our world’s future. As has been amply demonstrated by the previous nine items on this list, our world’s future is totally screwed. Thanks, kids.

Check out Part 1

It’s been predicted by everyone from John the Revelator to Roland Emmerich, and the evidence is stronger than ever that The End is Nigh. Here are the top ten signs from the last decade that the world isn’t long for this world.

10. The Y2K Bug

It could be argued that the Y2K scare wasn’t really part of this decade, and it could also be argued that since it turned out to be a total non-event, it doesn’t belong on this list, but this is my column so shut up and stop arguing. The Y2K bug, more than any other event in recent memory, proved that mankind is still capable of both enormous ineptitude and colossal overreaction. Not only did we build the programs running all of our society’s infrastructure to be less robust than a $10 digital watch, but our solution to this problem was to stockpile toilet paper and cling desperately to our Tickle-Me Elmos while waiting for the end to come. Not a promising start to the new century.

9. SARS/Swine Flu/West Nile/Avian Flu/Mad Cow Disease/etc.

Nature never seems to lack for new ways to scare the shit out of me, and now in the 21st century I have to be scared of pigs and birds and African rivers cooking up viruses to kill us. How long until I have to watch out for Man-eating Crocodile Flu or SAERIOS (Severe Acute Exploding Internal Organ Syndrome)? Not too long at all, I’d wager.

8. 2008 US Presidential Election

In 2008, after reflecting on the preceding eight years of presidential “leadership”, we Americans went to the polls determined to elect a candidate that was definitely not George W. Bush.

A little over half of us voted for Hope and Change™; we didn’t really know what Hope and Change™ meant, but it sure did make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Real Americans (which, interestingly, amount to roughly 44% of the general population of the US),  enchanted by the maverickyness (wink) of Sarah Palin and whoever that old white dude with her was, voted for Not Being a Foreign-Sounding Black Guy. After more than 200 years of refining the democratic process, those were our choices: “warm and fuzzy” or “not a black guy”. I’m looking forward to 2012, when our choices will probably be between  ”fond of shiny things” and “doesn’t eat own poo”. We are doomed.

7. 9/11

With the end of the Cold War, the west assumed that stuff was going to be pretty good for a while. Our biggest worries were figuring out this new World Wide Web doohickey and deciding once and for all just what a president was and was not allowed to insert in his interns.  September 11th, 2001, brought about a certain shift in our values. Suddenly the entire western world was caught up in the fun of hunting for guys with long beards and funny hats and we deduced that the causes of liberty and justice was best served through kidnapping and torture. This kind of reasoning doesn’t seem well-suited to the continued survival of our species, especially if questions like “should we try to blow up the moon” should arise int eh near future.

6. The Large Hadron Collider

Let’s assume, for a moment, that the universe begam as most modern physicists  say it did: the biggest friggin explosion ever. As most of us know, explosions are not generally known for their constructive, life-nurturing attributes; on the contrary, explosions are usually a sign that things once structured and orderly have just been rendered non-existent and/or that things which were moments ago alive are now, post-explosion, very much no longer alive.

So imagine if you will, the biggest friggin explosion ever (hereinafter the Big Bang). Next, imagine the effect a relatively small friggin explosion would have on, for example, your face.  Now, using your recently exploded face as a frame of reference, imagine the effect of the Big Bang on, say, all of existence. It would seem reasonable that the likely result of this would be, to say the least, undesirable.

Finally, keeping our previous thought experiments in mind, imagine spending 50 fucking billion dollars to build a machine designed to recreate the Big fucking Bang. This has actually happened. They have made a universe-exploding machine.

Continued in Part 2

You know that sinking feeling you’d expect to get if you heard that principal photography had just begun on a feature film entitled “The Smurfs: A BLUE Generation”? That feeling is exactly what this list is about. The first decade of the 21st century has brought us a plethora of ill-conceived remakes, reboots and reimaginings of cherished icons from my childhood and has generally trashed my fond recollections of growing up.

Here are ten of the biggest culprits, in no particular order:

10. Where the Wild Things Are, the movie

Despite not actually seeing this movie yet, I’m confident that it could do nothing but despoil the special place the beloved literary classic holds in my heart. Admittedly, that place is pretty small and sparsely inhabited, containing only the thoughts “monsters are spiffy” and “I need cooler pajamas”, but I will carry those feelings with me forever*. Were there suggestions that the home of the titular Wild Things was a refuge from the boy’s own broken home? Probably. But my aforementioned special place doesn’t really have room for deep, insightful stuff like that.

9. Transformers, the movie

Where to begin? This movie has, on its surface, a lot going for it: explosions, giant robots, lasers, etc. What it doesn’t have is any of the things that made the original animated series great: explosions, giant robots, lasers . . . um . . .

Come to think of it, Transformers: The Movie is an awful lot like the animated series of my youth, but with the added bonus of an outstanding performance by several of Megan Fox’s body parts. Maybe I need to rethink this whole childhood nostalgia thing.

8. Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

See above, but with extra helpings of yummy, racial-stereotyping goodness.

7. Dungeons and Dragons, the movie

This one may take the prize for Childhood Icon Most Thoroughly Ruined; it manages to not only offend those that love the original pen & paper role-playing game but also confirms that a whole generation of musclebound, meat-headed middle-schoolers were probably fully entitled to taunt and abuse me. I was outraged that the heroes were able to sneak behind a beholder’s back while it was floating mere feet from them, and outraged that this movie caused me to publicly acknowledge that I knew it was impossible to sneak behind a beholder (or that I even knew what a beholder was).

6. David Carradine

For years, my only exposure to David Carradine was his role as the funny-talking long-haired old dude on Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. Even before I discovered he had also played the funny-talking no-haired young dude  on Kung Fu: The Legendary Journeys, Kwai Chang Caine had been cemented in my mind as One Bad Motherfucker. He could kick stuff and recite vaguely Asian-sounding quasi-philosophy and was generally someone that, while he didn’t go looking for fights, sure knew how to finish them once they started.

Then he walked into a closet in Singapore . . .

Needless to say, I have had to revise my definition of Bad Motherfuckery.

5. The X-Men

These inimitable avatars of teenage angst made flesh started the decade out strong, but now find themselves languishing in the same superhero limbo as Aquaman. Director Brian Singer did an admirable job of translating ink to film in the first movie and mostly avoided the temptation to “improve” upon the comic book in his sequel. Sadly, Brent Ratner did not follow the same mantra of “take it seriously” when he took the helm for X-Men 3: The Last Stand. The mind boggles at the notion of a presumably sane person coaching an actor convey his character’s loneliness and longing for recognition with the line “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!”

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was doomed before it began, no matter what words came after that colon. It could have expressed its thesis much more honestly with the title X-Men Origins: How to Make a Comic Book Nerd Weep. The outlook for the cinematic future of this franchise is grim at best.

4. Alvin and the Chipmunks, the movie

Yes, yes, I know Alvin and the Chipmunks were around long before I was, and I’m sure that my parents were sure that they had jumped the shark when Mr. T guest-starred on their Saturday morning cartoon in an obvious and shameless exercise in cross-promotion. And yes, I know that David Seville and the Chipmunks is actually the band name created by musician Ross Bagdasarian to sell his novelty records in the 50′s and that their images have been tweaked endlessly through the years in order to best appeal to the newest batch of future consumers, but dammit, we were spoon-fed this mindless drivel intended to part our parents from their hard earned money and we liked it the way it was!

3. Anything that has appeared on Robot Chicken, ever

I can’t help but feel that the people at Cartoon Network’ Adult Swim are engaged in a single-minded campaign to prove to me just how crappy all the things I loved as a child are. Even worse, I adore this show. Every hilarious, ingenious scene is another stone in the tomb of my fond childhood recollections, and I glibly hand them over to be lampooned.

2. Harry Potter

Some of the best children’s fantasy available to me in the 1980′s was written by C.S. Lewis, a man who died 17 years before I was born and whose books, wonderful though they were, came to my attention only as a part of my parent’s good-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to indoctrinate me with Christian dogma. I could count on one hand the number of other kids I knew that had read The Chronicles of Narnia.

Children today take the popularity of fantasy literature like Harry Potter for granted, but such was definitely not the case when and where I was growing up. Reading Narnia made me one of the cultural elite. Let those low-minded cretins make due with their Hardy Boys and Boxcar Children; I knew that what I was reading was finer stuff. Now any old slob can cavort with unicorns and talking animals.

Also, Reepicheep could totally kick the shit out of Hagrid.

1. Dora the Explorer

When I was little, all us white kids in the suburban Midwest learned Spanish the good old fashioned way, which is to say we didn’t learn it at all. Sesame Street’s Maria did the best she could, but how she hope to compete with that awesome pinball animation and its funky, syncopated twelve count? English numbers were just so much cooler. And if she wanted us to think Spanish was so great, why didn’t anyone else on the show speak it? Big Bird, the hippest guy on the block, didn’t need Spanish, so why did I?

Dora the Explorer renders Maria’s paltry language lessons obsolete. Dora lives in a world populated with creatures that transition from English to Spanish and back again without missing a beat, and if you want to hang with them, you’d better learn the lingo.

I bet I’d have paid more attention to Maria if she had a god damned monkey.