The final episode of "Teen Titans" aired on Monday. After five seasons, my favorite show is over.

And as if that fact weren't sad enough, why did the last episode have to be so damned depressing? It made my heart hurt, even though it contained the revelation that Terra is, in fact, alive.

The relationship between Terra and Beast Boy, though limited to the first two seasons, was one of my favorite things about the show. Terra was cool yet vulnerable; Beast Boy was goofy yet strong and loyal. They fit. And then Terra betrayed the team to Slade, the most vicious of villains, and gave her life to correct her mistake (or so it seemed). At the end, only Beast Boy believed in her, and she hugged him and told him that he was the best friend she'd ever had. I cried.

And now we learn, in the final episode, that Terra is alive. Joy! Joy! But wait. She wants nothing to do with the Titans. She wants nothing to do with Beast Boy. She doesn't even remember him, or so she claims. Slade, apparently still watching over the Titans and his former apprentice, returns to suggest that she doesn't remember because she doesn't want to. Terra returns and doesn't want to remember her best friend. In the final episode. What?

I enjoyed "Teen Titans" because it was a fun, oftentimes wacky show. The character development and interaction was both amusing and touching. The show had its misses -- particularly in this final season -- but its heart was always undeniable. The Titans were a team: they laughed together, cried together, fought together, won together, and held each other up when they fell. Beast Boy spent the majority of the final episode away from the team, trying to get Terra to remember things that she had apparently intentionally blocked from her mind. Things like him. Why was this the last episode? Why was the final shot of Beast Boy, alone in a hallway in the school that Terra now attends, resignedly returning to help the team -- and only because he couldn't get Terra to come with him? What is the meaning of this? Does Terra represent the network executives, who supported the show, then turned against it, then supported it again -- and then, after being quiet for a while, returned only to reject it openly? Are we Terra, who have apparently outgrown and abandoned the Titans -- or at least lack the will to join them in more of their zany adventures? I don't know, but this was a deeply depressing final episode.

Sayonara, Teen Titans. You will be missed.

Happy new year, everyone, and welcome to the first Wesoteric entry of 2006! While others were out partying and getting drunk on New Year's Eve, I spent a quiet night in the house watching Mean Girls (given Lacey Chabert's hotness, I forgive her for her involvement with the atrocious Bratz CG cartoon), "Street Fighter" episodes (I now own the entire series on DVD! Mua ha ha...), fooling with my new laptop, and hanging out with the uber awesome Bacardi. Click the picture above to see him do stuff!

So as I noted above, I got a laptop computer for Christmas. I've been too busy lately to do a ton with it yet, and the two of us got off to a rocky start (I kid you not, the message that greeted me when Windows XP booted up for the first time was "File Not Found"), but after formatting that bastard and reinstalling the drivers and SOME of the programs it seems to be alright. It's a gaming laptop, and because I don't have any modern PC games (made in 1998, my desktop can't play them!), I decided to see if I couldn't emulate some of my PlayStation games to test out its graphics capabilities.

Looks pretty good to me! I like 'em dinosaurs.

That's all for now, but we'll close with a photo of my final action figure purchase of 2005: Master Splinter. Oh, and stay tuned to Scary-Crayon in 2006! January 25th will mark the site's second birthday. Yay!

and it is raining outside and I am working inside. Happy holidays.

That is what my room looked like in June 2004. By November of that year, it looked like this. So you can just imagine what it looks like now. Or at least how it did look before I spent almost twelve hours last night -- I started at 10:30 PM and didn't sleep until around 10 AM this morning -- burrowing through the mess in an attempt to restore it to some semblance of order.

Now, I didn't take any pics of what the room looked like before I started, but several hours into the cleaning process, this is what the room looked like. Note the captions. In the course of rummaging through the clutter, I actually came across three boxes with cereal still in them, all of which had been expired for at least a year. Pictured here is a box of Winter Fruity Pebbles -- which, given its expiration date, must have been there since the previous winter season. Nice. Also, the reference to the bed frame calls attention to one of my modes of travel. Given that the floor was often too cluttered to serve as a suitable path, I used to grip the frame of the top bunk with my hands and strafe along the side until reaching an acceptable dismount spot. I'm actually going to miss doing that! It was kinda fun and made me feel like only the most nimble of secret agents could navigate my lair of mystery. (more...)

I cannot believe that this woman just said, on national television, that her thighs stick together when she gets nervous. She then advised women at home to grease their inner thighs in order to prevent this from happening.

I fucking want to vomit now.