Post-Convention Sick-Day Blues

Troy + Abed in the Morning!

Today’s lunch: hot tea and meds.

The day after we finished up with Indiana Comic Con 2015, I could already feel “con crud” creeping into my system. I’m no stranger to the notorious cold/flu that strikes at convention attendees after they’ve hung around a few thousand fans too many, but I’d hoped to dodge a bullet this time. Between the cool temps and Friday’s nonstop rains, my good health wasn’t meant to last.

I held out for as long as I could. I lasted three business days before I surrendered and took a sick day so I retreat into defensive hibernation. After last night proved disastrously unhelpful, today I slept till noon, took more countermeasures, and tried to keep distracted with news and hobbies and such.

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Box Office Beyond Borders III: What 2014 Movies Did Other Countries Enjoy More Than We Did?

Expendables 3!

From a certain perspective, the third outing for the Expendables proved the worldwide marketing viability of all-star team-ups, diversity, explosions, and machismo. Probably not in that order.

For the last two years around this time, I asked a question aloud to no one in particular: if we know the highest-grossing movies at the American box office each year, and we know the highest-grossing movies worldwide at all box offices, which movies were the year’s winners if we subtract America’s dollars? What were the rest of Planet Earth’s favorite popcorn flicks?

Box Office Mojo is a fantastic source for fans who can’t get enough number-crunching, being the premiere online source for film revenue tracking. You can check out their 2014 stats for domestic and total worldwide box office as separate lists, but if you want to know only what drove the rest of the world into their respective theaters regardless of American appetites, additional math is required to remove us from the Big Picture.

Lo and behold: I did the math for all of us. Presented below are the forty highest-grossing movies of 2014 outside the U.S. Right this way for the World’s Top 50 Without Us!

Top 10 Best Parts of Tonight’s State of the Union Address

SOTU 2015!

President Barack Obama delivered tonight’s State of the Union address with a cartoon angel and devil at either shoulder.

From the Home Office in Indianapolis, Indiana:

10. Biden blinking in Morse code “BIDEN/BEYONCE 2016”
9. One lone applauding Republican getting tased by the Senator next to him
8. A frustrated John Boehner wishing his bottled rage could turn him into Red Hulk
7. Ambassadors from Iran and Cuba giving each other cutesy quizzical Jim-and-Pam looks
6. Three-minute ovation every time Obama took a selfie
5. Special guest Sidney Poitier awarding nine honorary Oscars to Selma
4. Anointing of Anita Sarkeesian as head of newly formed Department of Gamer Tolerance
3. Preview footage from The Force Awakens in which Jedi Knight Obama and John Boyega fight Imperial ninjatroopers
2. Sheepish apology for preempting Marvel’s Agent Carter

And the number one Best Part of Tonight’s State of the Union Address:

1. Scene after the end credits: all-Democrat conga line while speakers blare “Everything is Awesome!!!”

42 Bath & Body Works Rejects for Last-Minute Christmas Shoppers

Bath & Body Works!

This photo contains SPOILERS for some of our relatives, but they never visit this site. Lucky me!

I don’t know if your local strip malls have Bath & Body Works stores, but ’round these parts they’re the uncontested champions of creating and marketing soaps, shampoo, shower gels, lotions, sprays, and other assorted cleansing liquids in imaginative flavors, scents, or made-up poetic themes. You can’t buy just one B&BW item in a given kind such as Juniper Breeze, Country Apple, Twilight Woods, Midnight Pomegranate, Dancing Waters, or Warm Vanilla Sugar. You have to collect the entire set or else your bathroom cabinet contents won’t match and all your showers and baths will go horribly wrong. Other customers can just tell, and their concerned glares will heap shame upon you and your failure to treat hygiene as pretty-smelling Serious Business.

The women in my wife’s family love, love, love their B&BW products. Every one of them has a favorite flavor or scent from the vast catalog of personal cleansing products. Amazingly, my wife has memorized the favorites of every single relative so she’ll know exactly which stocking stuffers to buy. I’ve never once seen her swap their gels by accident, nor vice versa. Somehow they all have a system and it works for them. This sort of thing doesn’t have to be divided among gender lines, but my son, my brothers-in-law, my nephews, and I are united in our befuddlement while this part of the annual gift exchange goes on. We figure as long as we’re clean, or at least clean-ish, we’re good to go.

Right this way for your last, best, most desperate holiday gift-giving guide!

MCC’s Top 15 Favorite Cosplay Photos of 2014

Bucky, OLD SCHOOL.

Extremely honorable mention: Captain America’s sidekick Bucky, comics old-school style.

As of last weekend my wife and I officially finished our 2014 convention schedule. We attended seven cons this year, our new all-time record. In addition to our annual Chicago trips, Indianapolis itself became the epicenter of a Midwest convention explosion and offered us more opportunities than ever to meet comics creators, greet actors old and young, buy cool stuff, and see lovingly crafted costumes drawn from across several decades and all available media. Some cons fared better than others; some will return in 2015 with lessons learned and bigger plans than ever; and at least one will be a mere footnote in local geek history. At least two more newcomers, Wizard World Indianapolis and Culture Shock, are also inviting themselves to the dance for 2015. Somehow our convention bubble is bursting and expanding at the same time.

We here at Midlife Crisis Crossover would like to thank the crew and guests of all the cons we attended this year, throw a shout-out to those people we met whose names we didn’t catch (and vice versa), and salute the scores of cosplayers we saw, photographed, and appreciated for their presence, their fandom, their inspired creativity, and their fortitude in the face of the physical rigors, the construction costs, the naysayers, the gatekeepers, and the gawkers like us who stop you every three feet because either (a) we don’t get you but we love what you did, or (b) we do get you and your brilliant character choice just made our day.

In particular, this entry goes out to fifteen of the standouts we captured from among that vast, maddeningly talented crowd. Thanks for helping make our 2014 an unprecedented, wondrous, far-out year of geekiness.

Right this way for the niftiest of the nifty!

Top 10 Best Scientific Inaccuracies in “Interstellar”

Interstellar!

The stars of Zero Dark Thirty and Gone Baby Gone spent months crafting an accurate portrayal of apocalyptic farm life.

[Courtesy Spoiler Warning. Plot points ahead.]

So you and your friends have turned Interstellar nitpicking into your new favorite spectator sport? You say you’re not content with forgiving the movie its flaws, or with engaging in the more challenging activity of brainstorming reasons why they’re maybe not flaws? Or you’re possibly dissatisfied because Christopher Nolan’s new movie barely passes the Bechdel test and only scores 1/3 on the Blackdel Test. (The latter is of course rarer and tougher, requiring a movie to contain (1) at least 2 black characters (2) who talk to each other (3) about anything except race. And a 1/3 is an amazing score compared to most other major-studio films.)

Internet users have had no shortage of axes to grind over the movie, and it’s telling that Interstellar has pulled in over $120 million at the U.S. box office without winning the #1 position in its first three weeks of release. It’s on track to become Nolan’s lowest-grossing film since The Prestige, possibly because everyone has been quick to dissect it and find faults since it doesn’t meet their narrow expectations of what a film about spaceflight should look like. Or everyone’s still bitter about The Dark Knight Rises. Hard to say.

Personally, I liked what Interstellar tried to do and appreciated what it accomplished, even if it may not become The Film That Saved NASA. I embraced it despite its problems, theorized why some viewers may have been overthinking it, and thought that some of its errors, omissions, and outrageous fallacies were actually pretty cool.

From the Home Office in Indianapolis, IN: Top 10 Best Scientific Inaccuracies in Interstellar:

10. Tom eating a giant dust burrito and exclaiming, “Mmmmm, farm-to-table dust!”
9. The tap-dance shoe-clicking in Anne Hathaway’s zero-G musical number
8. McConaughey insisting he needs to lose forty pounds
7. The ship slingshots around the black hole and reappears in the Enterprise‘s 1986 humpback-whale tank
6. Waterworld suspiciously free of the wreckage of Kevin Costner’s career
5. Reciting the same poem three times somehow does not summon the ghost of Dylan Thomas
4. Fifth Dimension ruled by a black gay female Mr. Mxyzptlk
3. Rocket fuel magically synthesized from used copies of Failure to Launch
2. Matt Damon in a movie without top billing

And the number one Scientific Inaccuracy in Interstellar:

1. God appears to the crew; reveals His true name is Oscar Consideration.

Top 10 Lay’s Potato Chip Flavors Coming in 2015

Lay's!

Actual potato chip flavors as of today. I’m saving this as a reminder for myself five years after I’ve forgotten they were a thing once.

Yes, it’s true: I allowed these in our house. Some experiments you have to try for yourself.

Someone at the Lay’s Potato Chip factory got bored this year and let the general public choose new flavors for their mad food scientists to concoct and test on us consumer guinea pigs. So far I’ve tried two of the four ostensibly brazen offerings. Our first contestant, their festive Mango Salsa variety, tasted like authentic dried fruit from the health food store, but crispier so they’re less depressing, and with a pound of salt to help tone down the overwhelming potpourri-basket sensation. I imagine these are what astronaut fruitcake would be like if NASA hated astronauts enough to invent it.

Last weekend we picked up a bag of their Cappuccino chips, which tasted bizarre but not offensive. I suspect this fugitive product hails from an alternate Earth where coffee-flavored sweet cream is a common topping for baked potatoes. The sweetness seems out of place, though it contains zero grams of sugar, only fake flavors. From that standpoint it’s a healthier option than dunking them in HFCS-laden ketchup. Call it a Pyrrhic potato victory.

(Of the other two new flavors, Bacon Mac ‘n’ Cheese sounds perfectly in tune with today’s America and therefore wasn’t abnormal enough for my testing purposes; and I’m flat-out afraid to try the Wasabi Ginger flavor. If they’re terrible, there’s no one else around who’d finish the rest of the bag for me.)

For those who can’t eat just one…

Pacifying the Pumpkin Police

Pumpkin Donut!

The scene above was part of today’s breakfast: a pumpkin donut. Only because it’s that time of year when every American has a pumpkin quota to fulfill. My part is done. I’m legally free to move on and go back to eating normal food in the flavors I like.

Every year the same product wave pummels all consumer shorelines: pumpkins are in, everything else is out. Pumpkin flavors permeate and overwhelm every conceivable grocery item, restaurant dish, and miscellaneous product or service. Looking away or hiding are futile defenses because pumpkin surrounds you in every direction from your personal space to the horizon. You’ll never be allowed to exit autumn until and unless you surrender to the will of Big Pumpkin.

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President Obama’s Top 10 Secret Winning ISIL Strategies

President Barack Obama!

Our Commander-in-Chief gears up for conflict as part of Operation: Desert Suavé.

The past several years have not been America’s best in the realm of foreign policy. All that never-ending awkwardness, tension, and/or bitter feuding wasn’t exactly alleviated this week when President Barack Obama delivered a special address Wednesday night outlining our military’s proposed strategies for tackling the Eastern-Hemisphere forces of ISIL or ISIS or whatever this week’s code-acronym is for headline news’ newest bad guys.

Depending on where you stand with him and/or this escalating conflict, the speech was either too long, too short, too detailed, too vague, too overdue, or too Obama and you’re not listening no matter what LALALALALALALALA. Rest assured, our President and his speechwriters know better than to provide sensitive information to all listeners equally. We three hundred million onlookers will never know the full story behind all the extensive plans being concocted and implemented by our top officials, officers, politicians, diplomats, advisers, think-tankers, and other various hangers-on with useful knowledge or arsenals at the ready. Whatever they’re coming up with, the best we can do is hope it doesn’t blow up in our faces like an explosive cigar from a third-world novelty factory.

This realization, then, begs a question. Given that his speech was merely a superficial overview to assure Americans that they do indeed have concrete plans afoot, even if they can’t share blueprints or instruction booklets with us; assuming they aren’t just trying to save face and feign confidence in the face of roiling international controversy; knowing that the U.S. hasn’t exactly been scoring A-pluses in overseas negotiations over the past several years; I ask, then, because I can’t possibly be the only one who wants to know: What does Obama really have in mind here? How much is he not allowed to tell us, either to withhold info from enemy hands or to forestall embarrassment at the parts that might not work?

Right this way for tonight’s list!

Top 10 Ways I’ll Be Celebrating MCC’s 800th Entry

Sundae in Salem!

I had no idea how to illustrate this entry. After 28 months I still have no site branding to showcase. I’m not in the mood for anything prideful. Please randomly enjoy this outtake from our 2013 road trip — me eating a sundae at the Witch’s Brew Cafe in Salem, MA. Why not.

We interrupt our Wizard World Chicago 2014 galleries to bring you this brief intermission noting the occasion of Midlife Crisis Crossover’s 800th post!

Neither writer’s block nor Hollywood’s siren call nor reckless abandon nor typing-finger tumors have stayed me from my appointed fixation yet. If and when MCC crashes and burns someday, I hope I can think of reasons to blame anyone and everything except myself.

From the Home Office in Indianapolis, IN: Top 10 Ways I’ll Be Celebrating MCC’s 800th Entry:

10. 10,000-word all-star salute to me, myself, and I

9. Have a WordPress “Freshly Pressed” banner tattooed across my chest

8. Reprint a past entry no one else liked except me; grovel for pity-Likes

7. Eight-hour scenes-after-end-credits marathon

6. Saccharine love letter to my wife that makes all other readers nauseous

5. Write epic fanfic crossover “Bunheads Go to Sleepy Hollow”

4. Buy a PS4 and one game; play until my gamer-cred upticks; then go settle every Quinn/Sarkeesian rage-war single-handedly

3. Prize drawing to get rid of all my unwanted DC New 52 comics

2. Live-tweet a Dog with a Blog rerun

And the number one Way I’ll Be Celebrating MCC’s 800th Entry:

1. Family road trip to Ferguson!

How Much Would You Pay for Midwest Convention Space?

Who N.A.!

Who North America is a regular staple at our regular cons. They seem to be doing okay, even though they have to pay for four or five times the space.

This past Wednesday I walked into my comic shop and waded into the middle of a conversation about booth space prices. Awesome Con is staging their first Indianapolis show in October, and the guys weren’t too keen on what was being asked, how much extra a corner booth would cost over an endcap, and why the con’s rep promised them a “locals” discount over the phone that appeared nowhere in the marketing materials. Much snickering ensued.

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Top 10 Rejected “Doctor Who” Battle Cries

The 12th Doctor!

The Tenth Doctor, David Tennant, had “ALLONS-Y!” The Eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith, had “GERONIMO!” or sometimes “YOWZA!” The Ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, had…well, mostly he said “Hello!” with a silly grin. For my wife and I, he was our first Doctor, so he gets a free pass.

The last two men to bear the Doctor Who mantle rallied us to their cause as they leaped into various forays with a flick of the sonic screwdriver, a fierce look in their eyes, and a snappy catchphrase to mark the exact moment at which their enemies’ downfall began. With one week to go until the August 23rd season premiere, plenty of questions remain for those of us who didn’t already rush to devour the Season 8 materials that were leaked prematurely onto the internet by impatient killjoys. To me, one question is most intriguing: what words will Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, use to inspire us and his allies before running headlong into conflict?

From the Home Office in Indianapolis, IN: Top 10 Rejected Doctor Who Battle Cries:

10. “NORM!”

9. “WHO-WHO-KA-JOOB!”

8. “HASHTAG-VICTORY!”

7. “YES, WE CAN!”

6. “FRIES ARE UP!”

5. “WINNER GETS THIRTY MINUTES IN THE BALL PIT!”

4. “NO MORE DALEKS!”

3. “ASK ME HOW YOU CAN SAVE 15% ON CAR INSURANCE!”

2. “TEQUILA!”

And the number one Rejected Doctor Who Battle Cry:

1. “DOCTOR SMASH!”

Top 10 Signs You’re One of Those People Who’ll Never Shut Up About “The Wire”

Slim Charles!

Life and headlines won’t let you put The Wire out of your mind for long. If you’re not spotting its alumni in shows like Community or The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones or True Blood, they’re randomly resurfacing in your daily headlines, such as Sunday’s news that Anwan Glover, a.k.a. Slim Charles (pictured above), was attacked at a Washington nightclub (but he’s doing better now). The worst is when you catch their obituaries, as with last year’s passing of Robert F. Chew, a.k.a. Proposition Joe. They’re kind of everywhere if you know who you’re looking for

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? You can’t looking because your refuse to stop. You don’t want to live in the here-and-now, and move on to shows that haven’t been dead for six years. You’re afraid you’ll begin forgetting all those intricate, internecine subplots. You’ll forget the exact moment when you began hating McNulty. You’ll lose track of the names of all of Marlo Stanfield’s crew. You’ll convince yourself you never saw Amy Ryan in anything before The Office. You’ll think of Baltimore as just another city, maybe even plan a road trip there. On purpose.

It’s hard, I know, but if you don’t get over it, other internet users will track you down and stage an intervention. And no one wants that, because airfare is expensive and interventions take valuable time away from tweeting or Netflixing.

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“Weird Al” Yankovic’s 8 New Videos in 8 Days: the Full Rundown

Weird Al with Foil!

He’s back! And this time, he’s still weird. Duh.

For those just joining us: last week saw the daily release of eight new videos from the great “Weird Al” Yankovic, whose three-decade music-parody career is cherished by my generation and responsible for inspiring roughly 104% of all internet musical humorists. These and a few other tracks are now available on his latest album, Mandatory Fun, which is on my want-list for immediate purchase as soon as I dig up some spending money.

Right this way for Weird Al’s Top 8 videos of 2014!

Top 10 Exhibits We Won’t See at George Lucas’ Chicago Museum

Millennium Falcon!

One of many unreleased pics from our 8/31/2013 visit to the Indiana State Museum to see the “Star Wars: Where Science Meets the Imagination” traveling exhibit. It belongs in a museum!

Midwest Star Wars fans were elated to catch last night’s announcement from the AP wire that The George Lucas is moving forward with plans to establish a “museum of arts and movie memorabilia” in his wife’s hometown of Chicago, where current Mayor Rahm Emanuel is wisely welcoming this fabulous opportunity for local commerce and geek voters. Assuming local aesthetics sticklers can be appeased, the museum will be situated off Lake Michigan, along Burnham Harbor between Soldier Field and the North Building of McCormick Place, home of C2E2.

Lucas is scheduled to present preliminary architectural plans to the proper committees in the fall, so we may have a long wait until we can storm the gates and take in the sights. Whenever it’s ready for us, we’re prepared for a certain lack of objectivity. Considering the media have refrained from calling it a “Star Wars Museum” it’s reasonable to assume we’ll see cameos from Lucas’ other works in addition to that one galactic-sized phenomenon. But we have to wonder: how much of his own history will Lucas leave out? Will we be allowed to see any flaws or signs of the stresses he’s endured in his forty-year career, or will his biography be subject to a selective “Special Edition” treatment?

Right this way for the countdown…

Top 10 Things I’ll Remember About Casey Kasem

Casey Kasem!

I’m 95% certain I owned every single on this 1984 Top 10 list, even for the one song I hated.

Today’s celebrity passing news: at age 82, legendary radio DJ, animated voice actor, TV host, and professional list caretaker Casey Kasem passed away early this morning after extended illness and an unsightly captivity in unsavory media headlines that I didn’t want to read. Lord willing, it’d be awfully swell to see all that in-fighting between his relatives disappear from our front pages forever.

As previously cited on Midlife Crisis Crossover in an entry about the joys of writing lists: “Casey Kasem’s American Top 40…had a profound impact on my childhood.” Syndicated reruns of that long-running radio show are still airing each week on both commercial and satellite radio if you know where to tune. Here in Indianapolis, they’re on B105.7 Sunday mornings from 8 a.m. to noon, pleasant accompaniment for my early drives.

But that impact went beyond my list-making proclivities…

Science Fiction is Our Most Realistic Defense Against Random Shooters

Candle.Headlines today informed Portland, Oregon, they were the next unfortunate recipient of a tragic American public shooting incident. You can dive into Twitter, Facebook, or any other corner of the internet where people with human emotions dwell and witness a diverse cross-section of reactions: horror, terror, outrage, lamentation, grief, et al. There are other corners where you can pull quotes from those who bask in inhuman emotions, but there’s no healthy reason for that.

Sadly, stories about shootings are commanding so many front pages and conversations, as much from frequency as from simple impact, that we’re seeing numbness and moral surrender joining the social-media chorus in increasing numbers. I’m a proponent of directed prayer myself because I firmly believe that many things are parsecs beyond my control, but when it comes to talking preventatives or cures or root causes or coping mechanisms with others of differing beliefs, I fear the internet in general may soon run out of eloquence on the subject. How many more ways can we express indignation, extend comfort, and proffer wisdom over the same kind of event over and over again? Could we reach a point of having to reuse the same sentiments every time it comes up? At the rate we’re covering this same ground at length, I won’t be surprised to see Hallmark mining everyone’s retweets and reblogs for material to reuse in a new line of shootings-specific sympathy cards.

So what can we do?

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Countdown to Indy PopCon 2014: Working on My To-Do List

Indy PopCon!

It’s convention time again! And for the second time this century, someone besides GenCon has decided Indianapolis is a worthy host. This weekend the inaugural Indy PopCon will paint our fair downtown red with a healthy mix of comics, gaming, actors, LARPing, and various other manifestations of pop and geek culture in general. My wife and I will be attending Saturday only, partly as a budgetary measure (by which I mean, the longer I’m there, the less money we’ll have for vacation in July, or for utilities) and partly because we’re still feeling a bit burnt after last March’s the inaugural Indiana Comic Con went, um, not according to plan.

Thankfully I’ve seen numerous signs that the Indy PopCon showrunners were taking copious notes from that experience and have stepped up their game accordingly. They’ve reserved three times the space at the Indiana Convention Center; invited more media guests; kept up an active, lively presence in that “social media” racket that’s all the rage these days; added a “Cosplay is not consent” sidebar to their program; actually made an official program in the first place; and have an actual big-name comics publisher in the house! Three cheers for IDW Publishing for believing that Indianapolis doesn’t suck. They can expect to be rewarded with some of my dollars.

So much to do and so little time…

Thoughts That Never Occurred to Me During My Lonely “Nice Guy” Years

Yearbook signature, Class of Long Ago.

Sample message from a classmate written in one of my old yearbooks. Somehow I read platonic well-wishing like this and did not convince myself they were subliminally asking me to ravish them.

I’ve never understood normal men, let alone the broken ones. Let’s get that out of the way up front.

Maybe it’s because I read the right books and lucked into the right role models. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have a sufficiently damaged home life. Maybe I’m lucky that my father wasn’t an active part of my life. Maybe it’s a good thing I never kept too many macho friends for long, or belonged to any particularly masculine cliques. Maybe it’s because I figured out a way for logic and empathy to share harmonic coexistence in my brain. I’m funny that way, maybe.

My first date wasn’t till age 19. My age at the time of you-know-what was years beyond that. In junior high and high school, I never bothered asking any girls out. I knew my odds were slim for a variety of reasons, some but not all of them related to appearance. I wasn’t happy with it. I had my bouts of depression and crushed self-esteem. Eighth grade in particular remains a mental and emotional nadir in my life. I couldn’t figure a way out of it on my own, other than to hope that “This, too, shall pass” would apply to my situation someday before I died.

And yet…for all my dissatisfaction with my lot in life back then, for all my innocuous interactions with the ladies in my young-stupid-male years, none of the following sentences ever popped into my head:

* “That girl was nice to me. I expect sex from her now.”
* “The world owes me a chick.”
* “I know I’m perfect, so it’s clearly not my fault.”
* “Top-40 songs about love and sex are most wise.”
* “Maybe if I insult all women a lot, one will step forward and claim me.”
* “The world owes me a hot chick.”
* “Without sex I’m nothing.”
* “Women love a guy who’s bitter and snarling.”
* “Killing will solve anything.”

…and I’m grateful to the Lord every day that I never adopted anything from this list as my personal catchphrase.

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Top 10 Greatest “Star Wars Episode VII” Leaked Set Photos

The filmmaking process for every Star Wars movie in the modern era has its traditions, and none refuse to die more irritatingly than the part where professional paparazzi, busybody neighbors, and travel-happy geeks pool together their collective talents and impatience, set up base camps all around the official closed sets, take pictures of everything that moves, and hope they catch a glimpse of something that’ll ruin the entire movie for everyone.

These photos are usually out of focus, distantly shot, wildly off-center, totally out of context, filled with restless inaction, and/or bereft of the CG work and color timing that’ll make the up-close, unadorned reality look watchable and actually interesting on the big screen a year later. Many movie sites treat such unauthorized, amateurish, slapdash, eminently deletable results as useful content. Every time without fail, enough fans and enough clicks reinforce their theory. Goody.

Now that Star Wars Episode VII finally hired a cast to act out its hopefully finished script and has allegedly begun shooting, it’s only a matter of minutes before we begin seeing photos of stunt doubles in Jedi robes, puppeteers catching a cigarette break outside a rear entrance, or empty yogurt cups that some muckraking blogger scavenged from Carrie Fisher’s trash. We, the public, will be expected to treat these offerings as Movie News.

So why not go with the flow? We here at Midlife Crisis Crossover gave in to peer pressure, did some digging without due diligence, and came across a stash of photos that we’re 30% certain were recently, surreptitiously snapped on location in London while J.J. Abrams and his spoiler sentries weren’t looking. Seems like a reasonable ploy. They have to sleep sometime, right? So we’re kinda sure these are legit. By the time we’re all done overanalyzing them, we can skip watching Episode VII altogether and move on to overanalyzing blurry set pics from The Justice League Movie instead.

From the Home Office in Indianapolis, IN: Top 10 Greatest Star Wars Episode VII Leaked Set Photos:

10. Peter Mayhew, a.k.a. Chewbacca, hanging out between takes with his manager. Or the head of his entourage. Or the guy who’s playing his son Lumpy, which would mean Abrams’ team has decided The Star Wars Holiday Special should be canonized by unpopular demand. Maybe now it’ll see a long-overdue Blu-ray release that will include much-needed extras such as a commentary by all the actors taking turns explaining exactly what the heck.

The Real Peter Mayhew, a.k.a. Chewbacca!

This way for nine more spoilers! Or probably not!