A hero for a new America

Just yesterday I posted a peice about people killing each other in more interesting ways for my own entertainment, and it just so happens that only yesterday something of the sort did happen that kept me unbelievably entertained. It wasn't a school shooting, but it did involve a makeshift tank.

Plenty of people have property disputes with the government. How do most people deal with it? Write their congressman, go to town meetings and the like.

Booooooooooooooooooooring.

But one man, yes, one man had a different vision. One man kept me entertained for hours while he was doing it. One man is Crazy Bulldozer Rampage Man!!!

Crazy Bulldozer Rampage Man didn't take your "normal" routes towards resolving his property dispute. No, not at all. Instead, Crazy Bulldozer Rampage Man spent years taking an industrial bulldozer and covering it in armor. Not halfassed armor, either, but a foot of fucking concrete sandwiched between 2 half-inch thick plates of steel. Crazy Bulldozer Rampage Man didn't stop there though. Hell no. He also grafted firing points onto his Bulldozer and attached 2 50 calibur rifles to the front. He made an industrial bulldozer into a goddamn tank. An awesome tank. A tank that the police could not stop. That, my friends, is good old fashioned American inginuity. That is goddamn supervillian shit right there. I could see it in a comic book. Quick, alert the Justice League! Some crazy dude made a tank out of a bulldozer and he's going batshit all over the city!

Crazy Bulldozer Rampage Man also had the last laugh, because he killed himself inside his Crazy Bulldozer and didn't let the authorities get their hands on him. When they tried to get into his body, they had to try to blow the thing apart 3 friggin' times before they could actually get in there.

Crazy Bulldozer Rampage Man, I look back at your swath of destruction, and I laugh. I ponder. Then I laugh again. And for that, Crazy Bulldozer Rampage Man, my hat's off to you.

Thank you, Crazy Bulldozer Rampage Man. Thank you.

/R.I.P Ronnie, R.I.P Crazy Bulldozer Rampage Man

Apocalyptic Knifefight

Earlier today, I ran across this story over at fark. If you're too lazy to click, it's about the sentencing of a 17 year old boy who, about a year ago, brought a crossbow to school to shoot his ex-girlfriend.

Immediately after I read the article, I harbored a sort of respect for the kid. I mean, a crossbow? That's just fucking awesome. Apparantly he brought some molitovs with him too, but somehow they failed to ignite. How the hell you can fail to ignite a recepticle full of gasoline I doubt I'll ever understand, but that's not the focal point here.

In a day and age when school shootings are so utterly, utterly passe, this kid shoots his ex-girlfriend with a motherfucking crossbow. Not only that, after it blows a hole back out through her chest, it hits another girl and pins her legs together. If that's not the most interesting school shooting story you've ever heard, I'd like to hear your most interesting school shooting story, cuase it's gotta be a damn doozy.

This whole case has openend my eyes and reminded me of a thought I had years ago, after columbine and the first rash of highly publicised shootings. Hence, I put out a plea to the schoolchildren of the world:

Please, please, please kill each other more entertainingly.

I'm certainly not advocating a child murdering another child, but I think we all know it's going to happen. It's not something that does away. So, look at it this way: Say 50 children will die in school violence over the next 5 years. They're dead, no matter what, you can't stop it. Now, would you rather read about 50 gunshot wounds, or 5 crossbow wounds, 4 smashed skulls, 8 incinerations, 7 decapitations, 2 disembowelings, 12 dismemberments, 9 crushed throats, 2 suffocations and a skullfucking?

You know the answer as well as I do. And you know damn well that answer involves skullfucking.

Think about it, kids. Take after this guy. Has that slut looked at another guy one too many times for you? Can't take it anymore, going to kill them all? No way I can talk you out of it? Alright, then at least let me offer you a suggestion. Instead of breaking open daddy's gun cabinet and stealing his hunting rifle, setting up shop on top of a hill and pulling a fire alarm like has been done so many times before, come up with something original. Here's one: use a claymore. Not the mine, the sword. Get one as tall as you are. Sure, it'll be slow, but it'll be fun, too. Keep it stashed somewhere inside the bathroom near the cafeteria. At lunch, wait till everone's settled in, then go get the claymore and slice the motherfucker down the middle. Split him in two. I mean, shooting someone in the head? Yeah, that sends the message that you were upset with the guy. Cutting him in half? That sends a very serious "do not fuck with me" vibe, and when isn't that an advantage?

Do you want to be seen as another Klebold/Harris copycat? Hell no. Those sonsofbitches shouldn't take credit for your pain and your retribution. Instead, be the guy who brought a maul to school and smashed the captain-of-the-football-team-who-always-gave-you-a-wedgie-and-called-you-a-fag -in-front-of-the-whole-class-at-that-one-pep-rally's fucking head apart like a goddamn melon. That'll get your name remembered by history.

If you're considering this, you're already ostracised for being a "nonconformist". Why confrom when it's time for slaughter? Don't, and make it a far more interesting day for the rest of us.

/don't wink at me, whore, the price isn't changing

I think my brain is broken

It's been said that the human body, and most specifically, the human brain, is the most incredible peice of machinery ever created. This may in fact be true, but I think mine's defective. This isn't to say it doesn't work at all, I just think some of the proverbial wires are crossed, as it were. Take, for example, this snippet of a conversation from the other night:

T3h Sacmaster (6:15:10 AM): Word of the Day for Saturday May 29, 2004
pernicious pur-NISH-us, adjective:
Highly injurious; deadly; destructive; exceedingly harmful.
T3h Sacmaster (6:15:12 AM): oooh
T3h Sacmaster (6:15:14 AM): me likey
T3h Sacmaster (6:15:19 AM): me likey bouncy, me likey bouncy
T3h Sacmaster (6:15:20 AM): lmao

Notice, that in a span of 10 seconds, with no outside influence (I'm the only one talking), my brain made the following jumps:

interesting new word->expressions of admiration for word->obscure quote from cancelled television cartoon->hysterical laughter.

This can't be normal behavior. Imagine, if you will, several of my brain cells during this event:

Supervising Cell:Well, he said something really dumb. Run it through the folks over at "obscure pop culture quotes" and see if anything comes back.
OPCQ Cell:Yeah, right here.
Supervising Cell:Ok, you, up front here. Ok, he said it. Now, pull the laughter lever.
OPCQ Cell:What? But that's not even funny out of context.
Supervising Cell:Listen, don't question things. Just pull the fucking lever. I've been here since before you were born, it's the way things work around here.
OPCQ Cell:*pulls lever*

That goddamn lever is pulled so often that I've come up with a couple different possible explainations. First off is that my brain cells are taking after me and becoming lazier and lazier; when the supervisor comes by to check on them they are jostled out of their dreamlike state; the most obvious way to look as if they're working is to simply pull the laughter lever. Perhaps they've discovered that if I'm laughing at stupid stuff I don't think, and since thinking causes them to be tired, they simply find it easier to keep me in a state of perpetual stoner laughter. I'm also considering the possibility that there's only one cell responsible for pulling that switch and he's really bad at his job and everyone knows he's bad at his job but he's very scary and all the other cells know he has a gun collection so no one has the balls to fire him for fear of insane retribution. So, because of laziness or the status quo or an overabundance of self-preservation within my cells, I remain in this state where just about everything is funny for no real reason at all. A state where Badgerphone is required viewing for at least 15 minutes a day, where the phrase "Oh noes!11" is captivating and "In Soviet Russia, boat sails YOU for 80% of the game!" can keep me rolling for so long I begin to get lightheaded from lack of oxygen. Where I can say "poo sex" and giggle like a mental defective for roughly 30 seconds. And 2 seconds after that, when someone else says "poo sex"? It happens all over again, and the cycle doesn't end until something else equally vapid and meaningless and therefore hilarious is said to distract me from the poo sex.

I'm 20 fucking years old. I was smarter and more focused than this at 13. What happened to my brain? That brain that was so full of potential, that in 7th grade outscored 60% of high school seniors on the SAT?

I will leave you with a true story. This happened only hours ago, and it honestly is not truly shocking in my current state of mind. Only when you look at the situation as a whole does it become apparant what a desparate and rediculous state my mind has carved out for itself in my head.

I am sitting in a chair at the computer, playing Lineage and eating Cocoa Pebbles. Cocoa Pebbles, for those who are unware or simply forgetful, are very small, perhaps half inch long dark brown puffs of corn in a roughly oval shape. As I draw a spoonful to my mouth, a disparate few fall from the spoon and land on my right arm. The situation, it would seem, is simple enough to rectify: simply lick the rouge puffs from my arm. This all goes perfectly well until the last one: it seems a cocoa pebble on the top of my forearm will not budge. I lick again, harder this time, still to no avail. I put my lips on my arm and suck, creating a vacuum that should dislodge any misplaced cereal from my appendage. Still wondering what could be keeping the pebble attached to my skin, I begin to bite at it. Still no luck. It is at this time that I take a closer look at my arm, and realize why there was no progress in the pebble cleaning inititive: this was not actually a cocoa pebble. It's not even close. It is, in fact, the scab which has formed from the dog bite I incurred yesterday. And I, in my infinite wisdom, was trying to eat it.

This is what I've become.

Sometimes, I still manage to scare and/or depress myself.

/it ain't a pony

Apathy

I have so much to do that it's almost dumbfounding. Yet I find myself doing nothing pretty much all week long. Vital projects are put off till the last second or even completely ignored. It's as if the laziness that has been such a dominating factor in my life for the last... well, always, has been amplified many times over. The worst part is that recently, I'm not even doing things I enjoy.

As such I've begun thinking about about giving up on my goals of being a computer programmer, a hero to the gaming industry, ruler of the universe, and legend in my own time and give my life over to a new cause: Apathy.

Apathy, noun.
1. Lack of interest or concern, especially regarding matters of general importance or appeal; indifference.
2. Lack of emotion or feeling; impassiveness.

I mean, I've always railed against those that only do things halfassed - halfassed gamers, halfassed slackers, halfassed whatever, so what am I involved in this halfassed apathy for? Who's in for going full on apathetic with me, eh?

Reasons apathy is good:

• No stupid expectations to fail to live up to.
• It's impossible to be disappointed if you don't give a shit about what happens.
• Never argue with anyone ever again! Tired of listening to jackasses? Just say "meh" to anything anyone ever says to you.
• Apathy has no time constraints. Don't wanna get up til 5 in the afternoon? Don't! If anyone gives you any shit about it, just say, "meh".
• Increased self-esteem. If you don't care about anything, than you obviously don't give 2 shits about what other people think about you. This allows you to not think about the ramifications of your life choices and leads to a truer version of your own spirit, which is undoubtedly so lazy that its beginning to atrophy into nothingness.
• No responsibilities means never having to do anything you don't want to ever again. This means you're free to do only the things you like. However, if you've truly given yourself over to apathy than you don't care one way or another about anything anymore, which means you basically just spend your days sitting on your ass and dicking around on the internet in a haze of sleep and general malaise.
• By not doing anything you will become the envy of your friends who have lives and actually need to do things other than jerk off all the time. Once again however, this is somewhat of a double edged blade, since even their envy won't make you feel any better if you're truly fully apathetic.

Frankly there's more, but I'm surprised as all hell that I got that far. See, I'm already breaking my vow of apathy. Christ, this entry sucks. Then again, it was this or reload FARK for the 300th time this hour. Ah well, if you don't like it, fuck off. Yeah, you heard me. I'll leave you with the lyrics to the greatest song about apathy in the history of the universe. Ben Folds is my god. Well, that is, if I can be bothered to have one.

Do you not hear me anymore?
I know it's not your thing to care
I know it's cool to be so bored
I sucks me in
when you're aloof
It sucks me in, it sucks it works
I guess it's cool to be alone
Will you never rest
Fighting the battle of who could care less?
Everyday you wake up late
Sometimes I wish I was
that way
And you think Rockford Files is cool
But there are some things
that you would change
if it were up to you
So think about your masterpiece
Watch the Rockford Files
And call to see if Paul can score some weed.
Will you never rest
Fighting the battle of who could care less?
Unearned unhappiness
That's all right I guess...
I've got this great idea
Why don't we pitch it
to the Franklin Fucking Mint?
Fine pewter portraits of
general apathy and major boredom singing...
Whatever and ever, Amen
Oh well maybe not try again
This should cheer you up for sure
See I've got your old I.D.
And you're all dressed up like the Cure
Will you never rest
fighting the battle
of who could care less?
unearned unhappiness
You're my hero I confess
-The Battle of Who Could Care Less, Ben Folds Five

/meh

Give me twenty fucking years

Lately I've been thinking. Quite a bit, actually. A lot of things have been pissing me off. I was really waiting for one last thing to top off the pile and push it to rant time. It presented itself to me earlier today as the New Weekend Web at Something Awful. Very specifically, the first part. Go ahead and read it. Mind the blindingly stupid linguistics (if you can even rationally use that word) and the complete idiocy, or your brain may collapse in upon itself while trying to take in that much nothing.

It has been established on several occasions that I am infallible. I believe this puts me above all other human beings. It's been my longtime dream to take over the world, and the infallibility that I posess makes me a better candidate than just about anyone else. Soon enough, it'll happen. And remember, I said it, and I'm infallible, so it'll happen. Ha.

Now, I'm sure some people will accuse me of hypocrisy if I don't qualify a few things here right off the proverbial bat. I am a libertarian at heart. I believe in privacy, freedom of speech and all that. This, however, is based on several assumptions, these being mostly that other people are in charge, and other people are fucking morons and are, indeed, fallible. If you change these assumptions to other assumptions, for example, that there is only one person in charge, and that person is infallible and unbelievably intelligent, then the need for many of those personal freedoms are completely out the window and we can wave a collective goodbye to them as society. This is why, when I take over all known civilization, I'll do away with much of it. Don't worry, I will be fair and always right. Seriously, don't worry about it. Remember that infalliblity thing? In any case, this is why some of my rules will seem completely at odds with what I profess in normal daily life.

Now that that has been rightfully explained and thoroughly rationalized, the following are changes I will make and laws I will enact one I am universally accepted as your lord and master.

1. Furries will be ostracised and their civil rights completely and utterly stripped; they will be paraded out in front of the general populace and humiliated and maybe just fucking killed by the thousands if I feel like it.

Furries are the scum of the fucking universe. You are the bottom of the fucking barrel. I hate you. I want you to die. You are equal to child molesters and serial rapists in my eyes. People who actually fuck real animals are above you. ABOVE YOU. YOU WORTHLESS PEICE OF SHIT. You know what a furry is? A furry is someone who wants to fuck an animal but doesn't have the fucking balls to go through with it. You are a wannabe skunkfucker. That puts you beneath skunkfuckers. And when you're beneath skunkfuckers, I think it's easy to say that you are the dregs of humanity and you don't deserve to fucking live. What makes furries even worse than child molesters and serial rapists is that furries go out of their fucking way to make sure that you know that they are horrid fucked up sexual deviants of the worst degree. When was the last time you saw a rapist convention or a child molester convention or even an ACTUAL skunkfucker convention? That's right. Never. How about websites where those groups draw horrible art of themselves in their theorectical disgusting fetishes? Rarely. Only furries feel like populating the greatest communication network in the history of the universe with graphical representations of their horrible fantastical sexual deviations that they still don't have the guts to act out. Yes. I hate furries this fucking much. No, I am not kidding. You all deserve what you fucking get when I take over the universe.

2. Internet message boards will be monitored by a crack team of message board monitors, hand picked by me. We will not care the content of what you post, with very few exceptions (furries, for example). We will, however, vigorously watch your manner of posting.

There will be little to no infringing on freedom of speech; post whatever you like, as long as it's not one of a handful of taboo topics. You cannot, however, post like a fucking dipshit. This means 1)No serious 1337. Ironic or random 1337 is still very acceptable. 2)No fuckwad 11 year old AOL grrrl speak. You know precisely what I mean. If you don't, go look at the weekend web link above. The first page will be all the evidence you need. 3)No pointless posts. This of course does not apply to posts which are purposefully pointless for hilarity or ridicule's sake. It also does not apply to well placed, intelligent flames. These are perfectly acceptable. After 1 violation you will be given a warning. After 2 your internet license (see below) will be suspended for a month. After a 3rd, and an overview by me and my infallible judgement for completeness, you will be killed. Preferably by me, and with a mace, but depending on the volume of offenders this goal may not be entirely attainable. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. This will lead to an all around more pleasant internet and far fewer jackasses.

3. Increased licensing.

Social programs will be enacted to teach random assholes how to use a computer without killing yourself or ruining the internet for other people, and how to keep your children from being repressed sociopaths who feel like murdering thousands of innocents and jerk off to furry and/or scat porn. Again, this invasion of liberties is something at the polar opposite of my beliefs, but remember that I'm the only one in charge, and I'm better than you, so I'll judge everything perfectly. Just imagine a utopian internet where everone's smarter than to download unknown attachments and become zombie boxes to DDOS Microsoft. No spam. No spyware. Combine this with the message board restriction above and the internet will be the most beautiful thing ever seen. The parenting initive will, over time, decrease the need for the forum restriction and the internet licenses, but that's all a part of the great social plan. The tests to aquire the licenses will not be overly strenuous, just enough that chaos will not ensue. Anyone caught raising a child without the proper paperwork and testing will be given one chance, and their child placed in foster care while they take the class. At that point, if the test is not passed, all your assets are seized by my government and sold to give money to the good parents who end up with your children. Otherwise, you will be rereleased into society. Your internet license number will be needed to log onto the internet and will facilitate the ease of tracking the message board restrictions and more serious internet offenses, like virus spreading. Any non-message board offense will immediately receive a 1 year intenet license suspension. A second offense at any time will result in death, again preferably at my hands. A special case is made for spam, as evidenced below.

4. No spam.

Not the meat product, which is delicious if prepared correctly. The unsolicited email. Anyone caught originating spam or letting their computer be zombied into sending it will have their gentials removed from their body with a dull cutting impliment and then reattached to their face, all sans anesthetic. Anyone caught removing their genitals from their new home will be buried alive. Spamming also carries with it a 5 year automatic internet suspension and permanent parenting rights loss.

5. Vegetarians are free to practice being non-meat eating dumbasses at their own discretion, so long as they shut the fuck up about it. The second you make a fucking pamphlet or hold a rally or even mention that you are a vegetarian in a louder than normal tone of voice, you become my bitch.

I will have you forcefed meat while watching video of animals being tortured. I will then starve you for 3 weeks and place you in a locked room with the cutest baby animal of whatever species you have some rediculous affinity for with nothing but a plastic knife. If you want to continue living you will kill the animal and eat it fucking raw. If not, you will die and we will be rid of you. If you do manage to survive, you will be reintroduced into society with no restrictions, because at this point you will either be over your bullshit idealistic pipe dream in which no suffering occurs or you will still feel guilty about killing the harmless little baby animal and instead will spiral into depression, pumping thousands of dollars into our burgeoning pharmeseutical economy before eventually slitting your fucking wrists. Which reminds me.

6. Attempting to kill yourself and failing will result in a state as close to perpetual life as we can accomplish with current technology, however you will be constantly ridiculed and reminded how much you fucking suck and should just die.

Pretty self-explainitory. You will pay your own way so you're not on the government's dollar, but you will be watched at all times with survelience equipment that degrades you at every opportunity. Instead of anti-depressants, you are force fed depressants. This will teach people to cut up and down, not across. Fucktards.

7. No form of media is allowed to play the sound of an alarm clock going off without vast and very obvious warning.

It is the most annoying sound in the universe. I have nearly punched through my television twenty-odd times because some dipshit thinks it is attention getting. Anyone caught planning this will be blasted at completely random intervals with annoying sonic noise until they are crying and praying for death. At that point I will deliver the sweetest release upon you, probably with a large blunt instrument. It will be televised.

8. All Macintoshes will be destroyed. Steve Jobs will be brainwashed into thinking he's a Microsoft Public Relations officer. This will facilitate the conversion of stupid fucking mac hippies to converting to PCs. Apple Computers will be dissolved. Not only as a company, but also with acid. Lots and lots of acid.

At times, sting operations will be run where we proport to sell old macintoshes on the black market. Anyone responding to these sting operations will be summarily slaughtered.

9. You are free to believe something is great or something sucks. You may claim that something is great with no restrictions, but if you claim that something sucks you must present arguments to support your case.

97% of all human's time (estimate) is spent dealing with fucking shitfaces who think everything is terrible but can't tell you why. Your reasons don't have to be good or even valid, you simply have to present them, shitty as they may be. First punishment is a warning; a second offense is a hard smack to the head, the third is a year of jail time, and if you still haven't gotten it through your motherfucking head and do it a 4th time, I will kill you. With my mace. Or, perhaps I can get some scientists/inventors to make me some kind of badass incredibly entertaining killing machine. Overall, this will save people time and aneurysms form having to hear your unsubstantiated horseshit.

10. All drugs will be legal.

All recreational drugs will be legal but the industry will be heavily regulated and taxed to pay for my government and my own personal whimsy. However, any violent crime committed while under the influence of any drug will result in a quintupling of the sentence. This will allow people to do what the fuck they want with their money and bodies while discouraging their propensity to rob and kill people while doing it. Be responsible or get your ass locked up for life.

There. Woo. I feel far better. A weight has been lifted. There will be more laws and decrees to come, it'll probably become a regular thing here. Anyone who thinks I'm joking, however, needs to reevaulate what they know about me. I'm entirely serious, and I'm always right. Of course that means I will become ruler of the universe, and I will enact all of the above. Since you're all going to be under my rule eventually, why not just start now? Preferential treatment will be given to those who acknowledge my awesomeness and infallibility before I take over everything, so you could land yourself a nifty little leadership position below me. If you wish to become an early part of my new world order, fire off an email to spacemarinekilla at drexel dot edu (the no spam thing isn't in enforced yet, unfortunately) in the following form:

I, (Name), officially recognize that you, Steve Patton, can not logically be wrong and will eventually be the ruler of all mankind. I hereby pledge my fealty to you, and will serve you as needed.

Signed,
(Name again)

Simple, no? Sign up today for preferential treatment tomorrow!

/totally not fucking kidding

Very Bad Things kicks ass

Dark Comedy is a genre often disputed. What the hell does "Dark Comedy" really mean? Oftentimes, dark comedies themselves really don't have any laugh out loud hilarious moments, like most other comedies. My favorite one that fits that description? Very Bad Things. You probably haven't seen it, and you probably shoud. It starts off simply enough: a bachelor party in Vegas leads to a dead hooker, which then leads to a string of horrible murders. The whole thing, however, is hilarious. Why? You have to watch it with a level of abstraction and detachment. Don't think about what would happen if you were one of the characters. Just watch without caring, and you'll find yourself smiling throughout the whole thing. At least, if you're as fucked up as I am, sense of humor-wise.

But here's the best thing. Almost every movie, no matter how horribly depressing for the majority of it, ends on an up note. A sign that things will get better. How does Very Bad Things end? (Spoilers, although it's really not going to ruin the movie for you, since it's not incredibly plot driven)

The final 2 surviving members of the group of friends who were at the bachelor party are driving out into the desert. The Groom has been commanded to kill his friend by his bride to be. And he's going to do it, cause he's afraid she'll kill him if he doesn't. Just as he's about to do it, he comes to a revelation that he shouldn't do this to his friend. They come to terms with themselves, and as they're driving back home, they get in a car wreck. There is a flashforward to the near future. The 2 men are paralyzed, all their friends dead, and they're left to take care of their dead friend's retarded, asshole children. It is, by all accounts, hell. The movie closes out with the bride looking at the life that has become her, running out into the street, collapsing to the ground and screaming.

If that's not a fucking bummer, I don't know what is. And that's what makes the movie so damn great. At least it does if your sense of humor is evil and malevolent.

/horrible

I hope you die

Rarely have I felt so malevolent; everyone who knows me knows I am, in fact, very laid back and unconcerned in most situations. However, midterm #2 in Calculus 4 just got done kicking me in the balls, even harder than the first did. There's a difference, though: I studied my ass off since Sunday afternoon preparing for this one. And you know what? I still didn't know shit.

Fuck Drexel and its calculus requirement for CS majors. Fuck my prof for being incomprehensible. Fuck me for allowing myself to get distracted. Fuck Drexel for that 3.0 scholarship requirement. Fuck Newton. Fuck Liebniz.

Isaac Newton is a dickhead; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz a douchenozzle. Discuss.

I hope they're both fucking rotting in hell for all eternity, flayed without reprieve by demons who were once tortured college students forced to study their bullshit math for a major that it's completely unrelated to, causing them to fail out and take up a life of drugs and crime before being sentenced to eternal damnation themselves. At least, in this, they are vindicated.

This was actually brought up on Tough Crowd last night, as in a religion discussion Colin Quinn said:

"Roman Catholic all the way. Think about this: everyone you don't like is going to burn in hell for all eternity. Do you know what that's like? It hurts."

So, now I'm forced to drop the class to save my GPA from being mutiliated, meaning I have to do this all over during the Summer. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

If you're reading this, odds are I probably like you and there's nothing you've done to earn my scorn. Regardless, I fucking hate you and want you to die. Then you can torture Asshole and Dipshit up there for me. At that point I'll forgive you and like you again.

/motherfucker

You're fucked up

Though you probably couldn't tell from my haphazard method of writing and my fascination with going off on stupid tangents and making no sense, I generally plan these entries at least a day or two ahead of time, and I spend those few days getting my thoughts together. This one's different. If you would have told me, even this morning, that I would be writing a entry about sex changes and gender transfer before I went to bed tonight, I'd have called total bullshit. Yet here I am.

It all began early this afternoon when I saw a link on Fark which informs us that Larry Wachowski is getting a sex change.

Now, this makes the second person whom I know of (not personally, mind you) who's had/having this surgery done, the first being Jessica Mulligan, project manager of Asheron's Call 2.

Generally, I'm all for the "do whatever you want, so long as you're not imposing on me or anyone else" philosophy, so I don't have any moral problems with these transgenders/ transsexuals/ whatever; more power to you if you get it done, but that's not going to stop me from thinking that you're fucked up and crazy. I definitely won't stop you, however, live however you want. It seems to me, though, that it just doesn't work. This isn't a seamless thing. I suppose they now technically have a hole where they used to have an anti-hole, but comon, we can all tell that you used to be a dude. There is no masking it. No amount of makeup or hair or jewelry is going to hide it. You were a man. You still really are a man, sorta. If you think I'm lying, look at a picture of the aforementioned Ms. Mulligan:

Christ. That doesn't mean you're a bad person or anything, but you were a man and nothing's going to change that. Really. Look at you. Jessica Mulligan is smart and charismatic and all that, but there is no way that you can look at he/she/it and not realize that he/she/it was born with testicles. With that said, I find it hard to understand the point.

Among many things brought up in the Fark thread about the article (a very disturbing thread, I might add), one of them was that, and I quote, "Gender and sex are not the same thing.".

I'll let you read that again. Go ahead. I want you to grasp it.

I thought maybe I was missing something big here, after all, I was educated in American public school, so I figured I'd make sure that I didn't have some gigantic misunderstanding of one of these two words, so I went and looked it up in a dictionary, and then a thesaurus.

Dictionary:
gen·der Pronunciation Key (jndr)

The condition of being female or male; sex.

Thesaurus:
Entry: sex
Function: noun
Definition: gender

So, you, Mr. Poster, are officially a tard. Congrats. Take your hippie PC bullshit somewhere else, assface.

All that aside, it wouldn't have had enough of an impact to warrant an entry if the entire situation weren't eerily mirrored just a bit later in the day in my own experience.

When I decided I wanted a dwarf for my Lineage II character, I could choose male or female. As the two are identical in game terms, the decision is purely aesthetic. As such, it came down to spending all day looking at this:

Or this:

Needless to say I picked the redheaded cutie over the gruff old fat guy. Just about everyone, I'm sure, has heard the old axiom of lonelyass male gamers giving preferential treatment and even just awesome free shit to female avatars under the assumptions that a) everyone using a female avatar is indeed female and b) this somehow makes up for the fact that they can't get a girl to talk to to them for real.

I've never done such a thing myself, and to be honest I always thought it was a bit of an urban legend. Today though, I got myself in a bit of a sticky wicket at one point, and as I ran and yelled for help a human mage came to my aid. I thanked him and went running off only to find that he was buffing and healing me. Awesome. I thanked him again.

Soon after I noticed he was kinda hovering behind me. He'd toss a lot of heals my way and rebuffed me whenever might and sheild ran out, and I was thankful. We weren't partied or anything, he was just being nice.

This was all well and good until he started coming on to me. He was talking in that stupid tone that guys try to impress girls in, sending me winking emotes and telling me to let him know if I needed anything at all. At this point I really started to get weirded out. The worst part of it all, however, was that I didn't just log out or tell him I was a guy. I wanted the buffs and heals to keep coming. Not that I lead him on or anything, I wasn't replying in girly giggles or nuthin', I was just playing and thanking him when he helped me out. Nonetheless, this made me feel like a whore. A buff whore. Even after I finally left the area and told him I was leaving the area he kept whispering me.

I'm a veteran of these kinds of games. There is courtesy, there is good samaritanism, and then there is THIS . There's a difference. A big difference. I was not imagining this. This guy was totally coming onto my virtual female avatar, assuming I was also a girl. And I let it happen. And I can't tell you how absolutely fucking creepy that is. But, hey, at least I'm not turning my dick inside out.

/happy being a man

I almost died just meow

Sorry. I had to do it. The title was sitting right there in front of me. I tried to fight it but stupidity won out. Sorry Kera.

But, really. I did almost just die. Death by knife as it were. Almost went straight though my head. As I'm not the most dexterous creature in the universe, my relfexes were far too insubstantial to do anything about it, and it really just came down to a matter of inches.

I was reduced to this seconds later. What this picture doesn't show you are the tears, laughter, and subsequent noise resulting from the former and latter.

Not that this was all that surprising. Out of my numerous near-deaths today, however, this one was truely the most near and, as such, the most filled with horror and hilarity simultaneously. I near-die so much that I'm shocked it still shocks me, to be honest.

So, after damn near taking a blade through the cornea, none of us could do anything but laugh. What does that speak of me and my friends? It's the same question I asked after the car accident, and I really have no better answer now than I did then. I have a fuckered sense of humor, I suppose. If you can get something else out of it, please enlighten me.

My friends were also kicked out of the house for the first time in history tonight. Not just a polite nudging which I eschew and ignore, but a truly loud and pissed expousal of immediate repraisal should the evacuation not commence. We always commment on how odd it is that we haven't been kicked out of anyplace yet. I suppose, now, we can no longer say "anyplace". Shame it was my house, though. It doesn't have a badass feel to it at that point.

In a day filled with near death and weaponry, it was still a fun day. And I suppose that makes the point more than anything. What point? Fuck if I know. But I know it's there somewhere.

/verbose
/rambling

The hell?

Alright, so I passed out while playing Skies of Arcadia today and laid down for a bit of a nap - during which one of the odder dreams I've had in quite a while came to me. While I realize how deeply this treads into "livejournal" territory, I wanna write this down, and this is the best place for it. Besides, maybe somebody can tell me what it means? Probably something about repressed sexuality. Seems that's what all dreams are about. Anyway.

So the dream stemmed from a real life conversation I had earlier today: my car has been fixed but as a consequence all my money is gone; my dream began with me moving into a new apartment cause I couldn't afford my dorm room anymore. My dad said he had found a house for me with a few other guys, and the rent was very cheap. I jumped on the opportunity. So I get there, and I meet my housemates, who all turn out to be thug gangbangers. Like, my age, but real hardcore fucking gangsters. Guns and drugs and all that. Needless to say it was somewhat uncomfortable. I then found out the reason the place is so cheap: it was actually just the basement of this rich dude's house who let us live there because he wasn't using it at all. The only exception was that he had a gigantic bathroom, right in the middle of our "house" which we weren't allowed to go in. I met "Pops" and he was somewhat indifferent towards us, which seems odd considering we were living in his house. He went into his crazy bathroom and I didn't see him for the duration of the dream.

Between going out on hits and selling drugs and stuff the other guys and I played a lot of video games and watched tv. That part of the dream really wasn't even that odd. I, however, needed a job, and it just so happens there was a restaurant down the block. Now, I have sworn to myself on several occasions that I would rather starve to death on the street than work in a restautant, but for some reason it was the only place I could work. Anyway, I went there and got the job, but then found out that all the employees had to dress up all goth-y. The hell? They told me I had to be all gothed out by the next time I came to work, which was perplexing, as I have no goth wear. Anyway, a group of very rude people tipped me a dime, possibly because I was not dressed like a goth. All my gothy co-workers can't believe I stood there and took that, so they told my roommates, who were there for some reason, and they cut the fuckers down in a hail of gunfire, which was more than satisfying.

Anyway, I believe I woke up at that point, which is a shame cause I was really kinda looking forward to where all this shit was going. I know this wasn't interesting or even a particularly crazy dream, it just seemed so removed from me on so many levels that it creeped me out that it was produced in my head. Anyway. Feel free to ignore all that.

As a second, somewhat more depressing point, earlier this week there were tons of high school students all over campus, prospective students visiting. Why was this depressing? Cause I could pick out every fucking high school student in the lot. Every one. In the buildings, walking down the street, in the Kelly Deli - every one of them was like a sore damn thumb. They just looked... young? The hell? I'm only 20. It was less than 2 years ago that I graduated from high school. I'm barely 2 years older than these people, why do they look so much different? The answer: I am old and busted. Christ. I wonder if this will continue. When I'm 23 will 21 year olds stick out like this? What's even worse, when I was in high school, could everyone tell I was just because of the way I looked?

Goddamn, that was incoherent. Fuck it. I'm tired.

Also, I've started doing some rudimentary photoshop work. I've created 2 images, and since I love throwing images into my site now, I figured what the hell?

For the "Photoshop a warning sign that would have changed your life" contest

For the "What would happen if our president was a 1337 H4x0r" contest

Haha. I suck.

/no photoshop 5ki11z

The List

I've always like to rank and order things in terms of best, worst, and all that, and this GameFAQs contest is only making it much worse. My 5 favorite games of all time have more or less been pretty much solid since 2001, which speaks to the fact that the Playstation and Dreamcast truly are the two best consoles in terms of game greatness. In any case, I decided I finally wanted to solidify my 100 favorite games of all time, especially since I'm procrastinating my ass off for studying for my Physics test tomorrow. Ah well. In any case, these are my 100 favorite games ever. If you haven't played them all, start working on it soon, cause otherwise you're unworthy and I hate you. Seriously, these are the best games money can buy or bandwidth can download. Beating them all will only take a couple thousand hours. Hell, I've played these and a ton more inferior games in only the last 12 or so years. Stats of system, developer, genre and the like will follow after the list. Not every game will have comments, but many will. Games are listed in the form of:
Rank. Game - Platform - Developer - Year released

Platform is the system I played the game most on, and the year of the American release on that platform. For example, several games were in the acrades years before they were on the Atari 2600, but that's where I played them, so you will find that for the info. Use this to look up the games and play them yourself :). Online only games were excluded from the list.

1. Final Fantasy VII - Playstation - Squaresoft - 1997

FFVII is just... it. It does everything. Great graphics for the time, FMVs that are still stunning, unique characters, awesome battle system, great story, the best video game villian in existance, and polished all around. It brought RPGs into the next gen and the mainstream, and there's a good reason for it.

Hideo Kojima's masterpeice was so innovative, original and beautiful that every adventure game released post 1998 generally borrows more from MGS than anything else. Some moments in MGS were so brilliant that they've yet to be recreated, nearly 6 years later.

The most obscure and least played of all the games in my top 10 (which really says something, considering Jet Set Radio sits only one spot down), Vagrant Story took the one man dungeon crawling RPG and turned it into something beautiful, with innovative puzzles, an awesome story, excellent combat system, the deepest weapon crafting system I've ever seen to date, and quite possibly the most badass main character ever in Ashley Riot. I'll never get over the fact that this game didn't sell well, even in Japan, and that a sequel will probably never be created. Alas Ashley, we hardly knew ye.

The only non Playstation game in the top 5, and one of only 2 not made by Square, Jet Set Radio is the best reason to own a Dreamcast, and there were plenty. Combining fast action, unmistakable style, tons of customization and simply the best soundtrack to a game in history, JSR is so good it's scary. Get your ass out there and buy a dreamcast and this game - the sequel on the Xbox, while great, can't do it justice, and you'll never play anything else like it.

Xenogears has what I seriously consider to be the best story I've ever seen in a game, along with quite possibly the deepest characters. I have no problem saying that if Xenogears had been done with FFVII's battle system and earth shattering graphics, that combination of eye candy, narrative and gameplay experience would be better than FFVII. Xenogears is absolutely square's finest work in terms of story and character development, and that's saying quite a bit.

It's the best strategy game ever, and it comes with a story so complex I've gone through it at least 4 times and I still don't get it. Greatness.

What can I really say here that I didn't when I said Prime was the best game of 2003? It's astonishing, and the only game of the current generation to crack the top 10.

The highest ranked game from before the advent of the Playstation, and what I consider the best game ever until FFVII and the rest of Square's next gen games broke onto the scene. Awesome combat, great characters, a cool story and nonlinearity make Chrono Trigger the culmination of 2 generations worth of of RPG evolution.

My second favorite FF and the golden boy of those Final Fantasy fans who hate that FFVII became so popular, many point to FFVI as the epitome of the series. Their admiration is not misdirected, FFVI is beyond awesome.

Heh, and my last entry had said it was about my 10th favorite game ever. I can see into my own future, I swear. Anyway, everything that needs to be said was said in the previous entry.

Odds are you haven't played Ico. Odds are you should rot in hell for your heresy. It took puzzle/adventure to a new level, and looks beautiful in a unique way. It's one of the few games that I could never quite get over how damn pretty it was, even while racking my brain against the puzzles.

The original is still the best, in my estimation. A lot of people point to LTTP or OOT, which I both like quite a bit, but Zelda 1 is still the definitive experience for me.

With 108 playable characters, Suikoden II holds that record, along with Suikoden and Suikoden III. Suiko II was the best of the series, however, combining a powerful story, cool characters, excellent battle system with frequent large scale army sized battles which were a blast to command. Recruiting all those people to work in the your castle is sitll one of my favorite RPG gimmicks ever. And the cooking competitions? Brilliance.

A whole new look at the Role Playing Game, Valkyrie Profile was fresh, innovative and hella fun. It's too bad that Enix simply can't promote its games in the West, because VP sold more or less like ass on this side of the ocean. A shame.

My favorite fighting game ever, 2d or 3d. My Tron Bonne, Guile and Strider will own whoever you pick, unless you're TJ, in which case you will kick my ass.

It gave me nightmares for weeks after playing it. Seriously scary, and an excellent game to go along with the psychological trauma.

The farming game holds out in the top 50. In terms of addictiveness, it is crack to Diablo II's heroin. DII may hold you longer, but Harvest Moon will have you slathering for more as soon as you finish your first week of in-game farming. Back to Nature, the Playstation version, is simply the best.

It would not be exaggeration to say that I have put thousands of hours into Diablo II. It holds my overall play time record, and since I played it semi-regularly for most of the 3+ years since its release, it may hold longest stretch of playtime as well.

The only game that I knew of on the NES, or even to this day, that will let you microwave a live hamster. This is the game that brought "open-ended" into my vocabulary. A truly unique experience.

Yup, I liked UJL better than Parappa. It's the only music game to crack my top 100, and hot damn is it fun. The songs are excellent, as well.

Nintendo - 18%
Capcom - 14%
Squaresoft - 12%
Sega - 11%
Konami - 8%
Sony Computer Enterainment America/International - 4%
Game Arts - 3%
Bioware/Black Isle - 3%
Blizzard - 3%
Atari - 3%
Namco - 2%
Midway - 2%
Electronic Arts - 2%
(All others with 1%) - Nippon Ichi, Enix, Rockstar, Bungie, Epic, Natsume, Tecmo, Westwood, Technos, Rare, 3DO, Valve, Level 5, LucasArts, Vid Kidz, Bally.

Nintendo wins out here, and the big 5 really aren't a surprise - pretty much anyone would pick those 5 companies as the most influential and powerful in the history of game development. While Nintendo holds the greatest overall chunk, also note that Square created 40% of the top 20 and 60% of the top 10. They make the best games in history, folks.

Action - 52%
RPG - 31%
Fighting - 6%
Strategy - 6%
FPS - 5%

Pretty lopsided, I'll admit, but I think a lot of that stems from the broad definition I used for Action; I didn't feel like tallying 25 splinter genres. Still, numbers don't lie. The top 10 is split into 60% RPGs and 40% Action.

Playstation - 24%
Super Nintendo - 14%
Personal Computer - 12%
Nintendo Entertainment System - 11%
Dreamcast - 9%
Playstation 2 - 8%
Genesis - 6%
Gamecube - 5%
N64 - 5%
Xbox - 3%
Atari 2600 - 2%
Saturn - 1%

I was actualy somewhat surprised with this part. There was no debating that Playstation would crush the competition here - it was the dominant system during what I consider the golden age of video gaming. SNES clocking in at #2 isn't surprising either, but PC at #3 did catch me off guard, as did NES edging out the Dreamcast. The PC only makes sense, however, when you think about it in terms of time. The prime development window for any console is, at a maximum, 5 years. The PC, however, in all its iterations has been going strong for well over a decade by now, giving it a much greater time span not only for games to be developed, but also for developers to learn the platform and milk all they can out of it. Besides those two hiccups, though, everything pretty much falls into place.

2000 - 15%
1999 - 14%
2002 - 9%
1998 - 8%
1996 - 7%
2003 - 7%
1994 - 7%
2001 - 6%
1997 - 5%
1990 - 5%
1993 - 3%
1995 - 2%
1992 - 2%
1991 - 2%
1988 - 2%
1985 - 2%
1986 - 2%
(All others with 1%) 1987, 1989, 1982, 1984

Again, could see this coming a mile away. '99 and 2000 were simply incredible in terms of video gaming, I don't know if we'll ever enter another period of time with so much incredible stuff. Also of note is that between 1998 and 2000, truly the years of the Playstation's utter dominance over the market, 37% of the greatest games ever were created. Not bad at all in a spread that contains games created over 22 years.

Well, there you have it. This has taken quite a few hours over the course of a few days, but I think it was worth it, I love quantification and statistics, and it really is nice to take a look at all the numbers and a list I've been talking about writing up for years.

Again, really, these are the best games ever made. Go play them all. Now. Remember, anything pre-32 bit era is very easily downloadable and playable even on ancient computers. Get to work, I'm sure you've got a lot of playing to do.

/this took soooooooo much time

Goodbye, Chaz. At least you won't have to struggle

I've been dreading this day pretty much since the bracket was announced in the GameFAQs contest. Tomorrow (or today, depending how you look at it) Phantasy Star IV: End of the Millenium will march proudly out of the gate and into the arena, wherein it will be mercilessly pounded into dust by what Electronic Gaming Monthly recently declared the best video game ever created.

Did you ever have an overwhelming emotional attachment to something? Something that was comparably inferior? And when that thing is confronted with said superior thing, you feel great inner turmoil? I've got that right now. Hardcore.

There is no debating in my mind that Super Metroid is better than Phantasy Star IV. Only a handful of games, ever, can beat Super Metroid. I'd say it hovers right around my 10th favorite game of all time. SM is perfection of the genre - it does everything right, and the combination of all the elements creates a nearly religious experience. Super Metroid is the apex of sidescrolling action/adventure. I can't imagine anything in that genre could ever be as good. Even Symphony of the Night pales in comparison.

I will never, ever, ever, however, forget Phantasy Star IV. PSIV was the first RPG I ever played, the first game I ever was addicted to, the first game I ever played for every waking moment, the first game that scared my mother because it was all I ever did or talked about. The first game I went to school and started explaining to my teachers, the first game I ever doodled in my notebooks and worksheets. PSIV opened up an entire world for me. PSIV was the first game that made me feel emotion for the characters, the first game that I played and finished and immediately began again because I wanted to go through the story again. Phantasy Star IV was my first step towards being the hardcore gamer that I am. FFVII may have completed the transformation, but PSIV started it. For that, I am forever grateful and reverent.

And so, I feel torn. I will go to the site tomorrow and vote for PSIV in a token show of resistance; of love. It is hopeless, however. It stands no chance against Super Metroid, which is a great shame. I would bet my life and the lives of my family on it.

Earlier in the contest, however, I was railing against voting for games on any platform other than their awesomeness, and, like I said, SM is superior. Voting against PSIV, however, would feel like treason. It's a hard decision.

Am I taking this overly seriously? Perhaps. PSIV affected my life, however stupid or silly that sounds. Is it wrong to feel strongly about something which changed you, even if it's a game? I don't believe so.

Justice will be done on GameFAQs tomorrow, and while it will hearten me in one way, a little peice of me will die, I'm sure. Have heart, my friend. It'll all be over soon. Know that I will love you and what you did for me till the day I die.

In Memoria

/wren was the FUCKING MAN

Trendyization

Hello, 911? I'd like to report a rape. It was my calculus 4 midterm. Here at Drexel University, Curtis 456. It bent me over a desk and had its way with me. I can produce witnesses if needed.

Fuck.

Thank god for that whole "Disregard your lowest test score" thingy, or I'd be hella screwed.

Anyway, that's not the point of the entry. I'm not sure how many of you have near you or frequent a SunCoast store, but I entered one at the mall here yesterday on my Kill Bill buying excursion and was quite taken aback by what I found.

The entire front of the store is anime. Nothing but anime. Everywhere you look. Sure, behind the counter and in the back are still bastions of hollywood produced movies, but at least 50% of their floorspace is now devoted to anime and all that goes with it. It was like an otaku's wetdream: Anime Dvds, Tapes, Magazines, stuffed animals, action figures, soundtracks, racks of manga, and even japanese snacks. Yeah, my suncoast is imbued with Pocky, Black Black and other assorted cooky Japanese foods. (Note: I only use otaku as Americans do; I know the actual japanese context and I know how profoundly negative it is, but it's a good way to describe us western nerds who love the stuff).

SunCoast, as far as I'm aware, is a pretty large and well known national chain. That they have devoted so much to japanese animation really speaks to the growth of our culture - for better or worse, our hobby is becoming more popular, accepted and commercialized. Trendy, almost.

Anyone familiar with me knows my loathing for trendiness, hipness, for doing or liking things because they're popular. That's what I fear for our beloved hobby. People watching anime because it's now popular, never really giving a shit about it. Infiltrating our communities. Pissing me off. I don't want people doing such things. If you're not genuine, fuck it. Leave us alone.

The flipside to this is that many people may give anime a shot because of its current underground hipness and end up really finding something that they like and enjoy. I am of the opinion that if you forced every person in the universe to sit down and watch Cowboy Bebop you'd convert 4 or 5 billion new anime fans. Then again, maybe it's not the best idea to start off on Bebop. It's as close to perfect as one can get, the epitome, the pinnacle. It'd be like FFVII being your first video game, or PCP your first drug. Nothing will ever live up to it, you'll be on a constant decline, which is a shame. That's all tangential to the situation at hand, however.

And no, I've never done PCP, or any other illicit drug for that matter. It was an example. Stop looking at me like that. Quit it. Now.

It can certainly also lead to other good. We're at the point where a very popular american director can throw a 15 minute anime sequence into the middle of his action movie, and most of the american viewing public won't flinch. (On a side note, my roommate informed me yesterday that a Kill Bill anime is in the works, using much the same style as that scene from the movie. Badfuckingass.) Even in mainstream media, however, there can also be the exact opposite effect. Anyone remember that retardedass AOL commercial with the spy who was using his little hiptopesque dealy to message people over AIM? I hated that commercial with all my being. Our hobby, something we've devoted much of our time to, being bastardized and commercialized to the point where it's being used to push a shitty AOL device, simply because anime is now "cool". If that's the way we're headed, fuck the dubbing and american releases, we'll leave it all fansubbed and hard as hell to find. It's better than seeing anime used in the next motherfucking McDonald's ad campaign.

Overall I still think it's a positive, I'm just wary of what could come. The sooner the majority of people in the western world recognize anime as the legitimate form of art and entertainment that it is, the better. I just don't know that commercials for massive asssucking corporations and 13 year olds who think they're cool are the correct catalyst for getting people to that point.

/you shouldn't have come here, catholic

Nostalgia

Sometimes people still manage to shock me. Take a look over at the GameFAQs Best. Game. Ever. Contest today, and tell me those results aren't sickening. Pong is massacring River City Ransom. Where is the fucking justice?

My rendition of Alex from RCR Pwning Pong up and down

Now, I had been perfect thusfar in the contest, and this RCR thing is going to ruin that perfectocity. Hell, I even called #12 Contra upsetting #5 Phantasy Star I from day 1. That, however, isn't the main thing that's angering me here, though it is sort of upsetting. Here's the problem:

Whether you like a game more than another game is, in most cases, entirely subjective. Everyone enjoys different things in their video games, and while some games are universally awesome, others can be enjoyed or ignored by different types of people.

People are missing the point of the contest, however. I appreciate that pong was a trendsetter and it's a very important part of gaming history - this is what's getting it the votes. It is now cool to play, and like, pong. Don't get me wrong, pong is a fun way to waste some time, and I respect how it helped the industry. To insinuate, however, that pong is in any way even within RCR's ballpark in terms of greatness is a goddamn insult to RCR. People on the gamefaqs boards are screaming that RCR is a Double Dragon ripoff - yeah, in that they're both sidescrolling beat 'em ups. RCR did everything else better than DD.

I think the real problem here, in terms of voting anyway, not in the underlying causes of it, are the punkass kids, now in their early and mid teens, who were too young to have played either game. They wake up and check GameFAQs and find 2 games they haven't played: 1 of which they've probably never heard of and another which everyone in the western world knows. Which will they pick? Pong, of course. And they'll fuck up my bracket while doing it.

I suppose it doesn't matter really, it's only one point to me, and the rest of my bracket is looking fine. It's also a foregone conclusion that FFVII will be the overall winner; GameFAQs is a community of, if nothing else, Final Fantasy fanboys, and FFVII is their messiah of choice, not that I don't think it deserves it. However, it's the principle of the thing that bothers me.

/I'm the biggest nerd I know

It would probably drop enrollment, though

Another day of being confounded. This is really, really weird for me. I can usually grasp just about any concept if I take my time with it, but Calc 4 and Physics 3 are totally kicking my ass. I think both classes should be rerolled into one and renamed "Stupidass motherfucking geometry that you forgot 7 years ago and never thought you'd ever need again, goddamnit". I think it would clear a lot up about both classes. Now, physics really is kind of my fault: We're required to take a full 3 class cycle of a laboratory science, which kinda makes sense. I jumped ship from Chem because I hate it and went into Physics; I like mechanics and even Phys 2 (wave forms, light and the like) was pretty cool, but this Electricity and Magnetism shit is, well, shit. Calc 4, however, is asinine: I'm being forced into it by Drexel, which has this rediculous requirement of Calculus 1-4 for comp sci majors. The 4th definition down in my link for this entry sums it up just about perfectly:

"Fuck Calculus II.

I'm not a math major, I'm in comp sci, and I do not need this FUCKING SHIT."

Not my words, folks, but you'd swear they were. Simply replace "II" with "III and IV". They're both just geometry, but with a bunch of bullshit nonsensical symbols and 8 different equations to calculate the same stuff, but through some mystical reasoning only one ever works in a given situation. It's only been 2 weeks and I'm already overwhelmed. Jesus fuck my eye christ. This better get better pretty soon.

Not helping at all are my profs and TAs. The calc guy knows what he's doing, obviously, but goes entirely too fast and does his transparencies in PINK FUCKING INK. PINK. NOT RED, PINK. How the hell are we supposed to read that?

Our physics TAs are clueless. They can do the stuff, but our TA today told us no less than 4 times that she couldn't tell us why it worked one way but not the other, or if this other way would work. They both have the same indecipherable Indian accent. Infuckingsane.

My physics prof knows what he's doing, but he rambles, goes on tangents, and doesn't explain anything well enough. Imagine trying to be taught Electricty and Magnetism by Grant. Rambling, nonsensical Grant. This is my world.

Fuck.

I really gotta get the hell out of this place for a few days. Yeesh. Thank god I'm going home tomorrow. I can ignore this shit for a few days and try to get my head back together. May god have mercy on my soul.

/do you know your place in the big charade?

In rememberence of the best drink ever

I was looking for food earlier tonight in the Kelly Deli when I saw a crazy new Sprite bottle - it was purple. It wasn't just a bottle change though, it was a new try on that "Sprite Remix" theme, only with a different berry flavor this time. I didn't hate the first remix, so I figured what the hell and bought myself a bottle. I just broke it open and gave it a shot. I don't know how this is possible, but it tastes like Sprite and Berry, but not exactly the way I was expecting. Odd, that. It's alright. Not great, not bad. Drinkable, but nothing to write home about.

It did, however, make me sad. I began thinking about other soda spinoffs, and that inevitably lead to the best one ever. Not only the best spinoff ever, but the best soda ever. Not just the best soda ever, the best drink ever. EVER. I don't think anything could ever compare. Behold!

50% Normal Pepsi
30% Coffee Flavor
10% Extra Carbonation
10% Extra Caffeine
700000% Sugar

The result was an orgasm in a can. And no, not in the way you're no doubt thinking, sicko. I mean after you drank it, it caused an orgasm. It was that fucking great. I forsook all other beverages for my love of Pepsi Kona.

Of course, people being the dickweeds that they are, never caught on to the best liquid ever, and it was discontinued after some time. It now lives as a joke in the halls of failed sodas, along with Crystal Pepsi & New Coke, forever to be ridiculed by those who have no idea what they were missing. When I'm a millionaire, I swear I'm resurrecting it. Even if I'm the only one that drinks it, it'll be worth it. I won't be the only one, however; there exists an entire army. We, the true devotees of Pepsi Kona. We're out there, fanatical zealots who will slit your throat for saying that Pepsi Kona wasn't fucking incredible. Think I'm kidding? Fucking try me.

Until we meet again, my delicious friend. Until we meet again.

The 2004 Steve Patton Gaming Project

That's right. I've been in a whole since my senior year of high school, and now I intend to dig myself the hell out of it. While Lineage 2's n00b lag was pissing me off I set up my holy trinity +1 (Xbox, Dreamcast, Playstation 2, Gamecube - Hallowed be their names). I just went and counted, and I have 37 games on these 4 consoles which I have yet to complete. My actual total number is far higher, closer to 100, however, this count of 37 does not include:

-Other people's games
-PC games
-Gameboy Games
-Primarily Multiplayer games
-Games I have no desire or ability to beat
-Games for older consoles(Saturn)

So, I have decided that I am finally going to get myself out of this "game debt". I'm tired of having it hanging over my head. I pledge that before I leave school in August, every one of these 37 games will be completed. My progress will be kept here as a log of games beaten and my approach to each.

Logic may dictate that I should begin with games that I've nearly completed, but I'm actually not going to go that route. Instead, I'm going to take them out by system as best I can. There are only 2 must beats lefton the Dreamcast, so that's where I begin - these 2 titles are Skies of Arcadia and Grandia II, both RPGs with well over 40 hours of content. I've decided to have 3 games on the block at once, Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary, and to begin with they'll go in the order of G2, then Skies, then Viewtiful Joe. I am some hours into both G2 and SOA, but considering I last played them aat least 2 years ago, probably more, I'm going to be completely lost in the storyline, so I will begin again. Hopefully I won't have to do this for many games.

Anyway, I'll be reporting in periodically, and while this may only matter to me, it will also be a neat little experiment. If I really give myself a goal and tell myself that I will do it, will I be able to, or will it fall by the wayside? Only time will tell...

/geek

SHR update, and I have a new obsession

SHR numbers have been holding very steady at 4:1, which is still very surprising to me. I'll give it another week before I think it's a permanent thing and not a false reading, however. Your friend and mine, Nick, had something to say about the idea, though:

Possible SHR anomolies: Ever use a voltmeter to read a voltage way higher than it can take? That's called pegging the meter, and most of them are self adjusting nowadays if they're digital. I think that you're probably right about that part. Also, don't forget that it's currently spring as opposed to fall or winter. When things are getting colder or are freakishly cold with no hope of getting warmer, women don't try to look good. Now that it's getting warmer, it's part of the natural body cycle for them to want to screw like rabbits, and thus they work out more and go through more effort to make themselves look more desirable. 3rd, it's college, and Drexel also has a good medical and chemistry program, two majors that women are interested in because they lead to med school, and thus them getting "traditionally male" jobs. Thus they have self confidence and perhaps the way they carry themselves contributes to SHR numbers. Just a few suggestions. : )

That last deduction is brilliant, and the Spring one has merit as well. I of course realized the spring thing at first and dismissed it; I was only thinking in terms of springtime clothes, but clothes don't fool me. I can see right through them (figuratively, of course, though damn that would be fecking sweet) and figure out if they're good looking or not. I hadn't really thought about the desire to be attractive, or the physical ramifications thereof. The confidence/job thing had never occured to me. Many thanks to Nick on the enlightening.

Anyway, on to Lineage 2. Drool worthy. It's pretty, it's got a solid job system, and I have a distint feeling that if the 3 beta servers weren't overloaded with cockbites who only want a free game and aren't interested in actually playing when it goes retail, they'd be pretty stable. The chat system could use a revamp, and this game is just SCREAMING for FFXI's auction house system, but otherwise I'm liking it a lot. Of course, I was 2% away from lvl 11, and then got lagged to death TWICE by said fucktards, so now I'm back to 80% and I'm pretty pissed off. Still, this has inspired me in other ways, which I'll post about in a second post, just as soon as I watch RvB 28.5.

Speaking of which, april fools day is always at its most frantic on the internet, with great pranks being pulled by FARK, H*R, Utopia Temple and Suprnova, among a plethora of others. Last night no less than 5 separate people all had to be lead to the fact that the suprnova thing was an april fool's joke by none other than me. I wasn't fooled by one of them, except UT's for a second or two before I came to my senses. Still, good stuff all around, and be sure to check them out.

/your soul is a cavern of lies

I'd say "Speak English motherfucker", but you already are

Yes, well, I'm back at college. Hooray. Huzzah. Woooo. I don't want this thing to become livejournal-y, but I feel these last two days kind of deserve a retelling.

So, I move in yesterday mostly uneventfully. My dad even said, as we said goodbye outside the dorm, that it went far too perfectly, and I was instantly made wary. Things rarely go perfectly. However, I said my goodbyes and went back inside to set stuff up. Here's where the perfectness went entirely down the shitter: Apparantly I had corrupted my boot sector within my master drive, and was missing a few system dlls. Dunno how that happened. Blech. Reinstalling wasn't working, and I had some stuff on that drive I didn't wanna lose, so after a few hours, and dealing with a keyboard whose fucking function keys won't work when the system is booting (go figure), I finally got windows installed on my slave drive, and switched it to master. It meant reinstalling all my programs, but at least I didn't lose my 100+ gigs of various entertainment media and whatnot. Of course, now I need a new jumper to set my old slave to be my new master so I can transfer the stuff off of it and reformat. I put out a plea to all of you in the computer hardware busniess:

Please, please, PLEASE set all your hard drives to 0 jumper default to cable select. It would save so many goddamn hassles.

Ugh. Anyway, eventually I got all that fixed, and after some Lineage 2 (more on that later) I got to bed and awoke early for some more Lineage 2 (that wasn't the later, I mean in a different entry).

In any case, eventually it was class time. Before I got to any class though, I was reminded of something that really had slipped my mind for the last 9 months while I wasn't here, though in the time I was at school I was wondering. I think it's something that deserves further research.

Girls around here are, unfailingly, very hot. Seriously. As I was walking the few blocks to the class buildings, I was nearly overwhelmed. What the hell causes this?

There was something that I came up with last year to measure this, though I never kept comprehensive numbers. I called it "Steve's Hitability Ratio", or simply SHR for short. Here's the comprehensive definition:

The ratio of girls, in affirmatives to negatives, in any given place at any given time, whom I, Steve, would have sex with willingly, without the aid of alcohol or other mind-altering substances, and completely apart from any other variable than pure physical attractiveness.

This is certainly not a comprehensive list or anything, and it's not who I think I can score with, or even who I'd want to, because if I ever had sex with someone whose personality I despised, I'd end up killing myself afterwards; I couldn't live with it. So, this is just in a purely shallow, purely pysically driven, male chauvinistic sort of way, the ratio of good looking girls to, well, other. I would say a good average, judging on today, is at least a 4:1 SHR 'round these parts. Four to one. Now, I'll admit that I might not have the aboslute higest standards, but I think they're up there. I'm not just interested in total hotties though, cute girls with average bodies count as well. Bonus points given to asians and chicks with glasses.

Anyway, now that I've managed to make myself sound like a shallow asshole, just think about that number. That's goddamn insane. Even in high school, the number could not have been much more than 1:1, if even that. While I was on my internship? 1:5, if lucky. That one's not exactly the most accurate number though, as high school and college girls are all my age, people at work were not. Still, you've got to admit it's a very, very radical increase.

So what causes it? I mean, there's nothing about Drexel that makes it any more desireable to hittable girls than any other school, I mean, unless you wanna be ogled by geekyass introverted engineers all day long. Yet still, there's a quadrupling over what it was like in high school, only 2 years ago. Creepy.

So, there's only one theory I've been able to come up with, in my own bullshit mind-wandering ways. And that's that of "starvation".

Now, seriously, no offense at all to the girls who I was around for the months I was home for Summer and on internship, but there were only, like, 5 of you. Seriously. For example, I love potatoes. If I have nothing but baked potatoes for 9 months, however, and then I'm walking by a goddamn potato buffet all day long, and there's au gratin and mashed and potato pancakes and hash browns and cheesy potatoes and everything you could think of, I'll be suffering from sensory overload. At least, that's my current theory. In about 2 weeks I'll take some more numbers, and if they're still at the 4:1 mark, then there's definitely something else afoot. At the moment, I'm just going to attribute it to about an 8000000% increase in girls throwing my whole detection device off.

Anyway, the classes themselves. Math foundations of comp sci is taught by a prof with a rediculous indian accent. The class seems pretty boring, it's all just logic and stuff, which I enjoy, but we're gonna be doing boolean truth tables and the like, which I can freaking sleepwalk through. That plus cheat sheets on the tests means an easy A, I hope.

Calc 4 seems to be taught by a very enthusiastic prof. He seems to love the idea of teaching us calc. There's a problem though: A terrible far eastern accent. Probably Chinese, it's tough to tell. It's the most stereotypical bad 1940's 3 stooges short Chinese/Japanese accent you've ever heard. Calc 4 became "cow-foor" and mathematics "mashmatics". It was kind of hard to hear what he was talking about, what with the accent and that the older buildings at Drexel are crazy loud, and I sat in the back corner by the radiator. Oh, also, one of the aforementioned very hittlable chicks next to me kept sucking on her pen in a very provocative manner. Suffice to say I have no idea what's going on in that class, and I hope it gets better soon.

Then there we the 2 physics 3 classes back to back, with a prof who has a terrible British fucking accent. 3 professors, 3 unitelligible voices. Fuck. This is going to be a fun goddamn semester. Ugh. Also, this guy, though also seemingly enthusiastic as well, felt compelled to do a "get to know each other" thingy, in addition to making us find a "buddy" to ask for help if we're having trouble with the homework. And silly me, I thought with having all hardcore math and science classes, I wouldn't have to put up with that hippie "english and philosophy class" bullshit. Bah.

In any case, things look like they're gonna be... interesting, to say the least. I'll be sure to check back soon 'nuff with new SHR numbers and some Lineage 2 facts. Oh, and if you have any theories as to why the SHR numbers have risen so sharply, let me hear them. I'm curious.

/I'm really not a chauvinistic dickhead, I swear

People are really, really, REALLY stupid

Anyone who lives without the History Channel is severly deprived. I feel sorry for you. You live without the most informative and interesting channel ever. Don't have the History Channel with your cable? Fucking move. It's worth it.

So right now, I'm watching this history of illegal drugs, and how they becamse illegal. It's really pretty eye opening. But here's the thing that blows my mind: In the very early 20th century, Bayer (you know, the asprin people) came up with a new drug called heroin. By this point, the war against alcohol had forced people on to opium, and morphine had already become so overused as a painkiller that it was an epidemic within the country, and here comes heroin. Do you know what heroin was used for? A COUGH REMEDY. HEROIN. FOR YOUR FUCKING COUGH. Motherfucking HEROIN. The most addictive, destructive drug ever. You didn't even have to go to the doctor for it, you could order it out of the goddamn Sears catalog.

You: Hi there doc. I've got this little tickle in the back of my throat...
Your Doctor: Alright. I want you to go home, open up your Sears Roebuck catalog, and order yourself some of the most addictive drug ever. Then you're gonna shoot it into your throat with this needle with no supervision, and just, you know, do that whenever your throat is bothering you.
You: Sounds like a plan! Thanks, doc!

That's fucked up.

Here's the other thing I don't get, actually. A second use for this wonderful new cough medicine is that it's used to help ween people off of morphine. So, uh... what? What the fuck? You've got a morphine epidemic, and you've got another drug that's so much like morphine that it helps overcome the addiction to morphine, so you let everyone use that new drug whenever the hell they want, like it's the goddamn drug messiah? You are stupid.

Hey, now there's a heroin epidemic. Brilliant fucking move, folks.

Ugh.

Also, I can pinpoint the second this country now started going down the crapper. It wasn't in the 20's, with alcohol prohibition, it was in 1914, when the first successful federal drug prohibition law was passed. That was it. That was the first step. That started the "slippery slope" as it were. The depression only made it worse. Unregulated expansion of government, and it only gets worse and worse every year. This is when it first became okay for the American Government to regulate personal activities with their own visions of morality. Look at where we are now, where over half the country supports an amendment to our constition which bans gay marriage. Our constitution, the document that made the world stand up and take notice, to realize people should be free to do and act as they want and that everyone should completely equal in opportunity to everyone else, and instead, they want to REWRITE IT to exclude an entire segment of our population from a very basic, necessary part of American life. When the fuck did this get to the point where this was even considerable, let alone that it has a decent chance of passing? To me, it looks like it all started in 1914.

Good fucking lord, people. Vote Libertarian. Save this country.

/this rant totally changed direction right in the middle

Ka-raaaaazy anime lyrics

Had to wake up this morning for a doctor's appointment, and since I didn't want to be listening to my normal early morning "I-gotta-wake-the-fuck-up-music-must-be-loud-and-hate-filled" music, I needed something a bit more mellow to keep the blood pressure from shooting up. This ultimately lead to my hellsing collection, and, invariably, to Logos Naki World, the opening theme. You know those Anime songs where all or part of the words are sung in English, but either all the words, or just the enlish parts, are kinda nonsensical and really slurred, like you could understand how they could be construed as English, but they really don't sound a whole lot like it? I sure do. South Park did an excellent parody of that this week, with an anime fight song with such memorable english lines as "Hey, Hey, Let's go" (repeated ad nauseum), "(bunch of japanese) protect my balls!", and "Let's fighting love!". Hahaha.

Anyway, I tracked down the Logos Naki World lyrics and listened to the song while looking at them, and I gotta say, you can kinda sorta almost make out these words, a bit. Try it yourself sometime.

Tell me the cool vibration
Living your fantasy
Tell me who, tell me surely, and the name
I'll be stunned, I'll be waiting
Ghosts of horror show
In a darken just say you love

Down, down, wish its just a revelation
Take me there, take me into a revolution
Down, down, listen to the vibration
Take me home and I'll look into return

Shooby Dooby Doo, Shooby Dooby Doo, Doo Doo
Shooby Dooby Doo, Shooby Dooby Doo, Doo Doo

Utter Nonsense. But badass sounding nonsense.

/nuh-uh Clyde, you tell on us, we tell on you, that's the ninja code

GenrEvloution

For me, the past week has been filled with two things: America's Army and Unreal Tournament 2004. And sleep. And reveling in not working. Alright, so 4 things.

Still, I've gotten back into AA (possibly a very bad mistake, we'll see) and UT2k4, the demo of which was the absolute highlight of the last LAN party and, I'd imagine, many more to come, shipped this week. "How is it?", I hear you asking. Imagine the best twitch FPS action you could possibly could visualize, every bell and whistle you've come to expect, stellar level design and great visuals, and quite posibly the single best multiplayer FPS gametype ever in Onslaught, and you've just about got it. All that's left to add at that point are the flaws - horrendous load times between levels, and a nearly 6 gig install. Still, they're inconsequential. Imagine a delicious taco, crispy shell and tasty beef, the perfect ratio of cheese and lettuce to sauce and beans. This is UT2k4. The load times and install quotient are the little chunks of tomato and peppers: the taco would be better without them, but it's not going to stop you from eating the taco. The delicious, succulent, death-filled taco.

On the other hand, UT2k3 was like the taco, only someone dropped it on the floor beforehand, and there are hairs and dirt all over it. Oh, and it's about half filled with peppers and tomatoes. And the beef is too chewy. I think you get the picture. In any case, Epic has redeemed itself, and UT2k4 has regained the twitch FPS crown.

Playing the two so much and so close together, however, made me realize how very different the two are. How these two games, both classified as first person shooters, are so very different at the core. And that got me thinking about the future. Allow me to elaborate.

While UT2k4 and AA are both FPSs, they each belong to a splinter genre. Unreal tournament, Quake, Timesplitters and the like are generally referred to as twitch FPSs, which is actually an excellent name; "Twitch" emphasises what the games are like: run as fast as you can, shoot as fast as you can, and when you kill one enemy, run into the next one and shoot him. You need quick reflexes. It helps if you're "twitchy".

AA, Ghost Recon, Rainbow 6 and the like are all very different. Commonly known as "tactical" FPSs, they're far more slowly paced, stressing an entirely different set of skills over the twitch splinter genre. If I made up a list of what I think are the 5 most important elements of a good AA player, I'd be surprised if one of them made it in the same list as a UT player. Let's try that now.

America's Army important traits (in no particular order):
1. Level Knowledge
2. Patience
3. Teamwork
4. Pattern Recognition
5. Taking cover

Unreal Tournament important traits
1. Reflexes
2. Level knowledge
3. Knowing weapon tradeoffs
4. Luck
5. Evasive maneuvers

Well, there you go. Level knowledge is essential to both, but other than that they're based on almost entirely different skill and knowledge bases. Just because you're good at one doesn't mean you'll be any good at the other. I own Bobby at UT, for example, but it'll be a cold day in hell before I'm better than he is at AA. Brandon, of course, kicks both our asses at both.

Of course, there are also the middle of the road titles, stuff like Halo, Medal of Honor and their ilk, and even beside that, there are the single player FPS titles, which while they may include multiplayer, are far more based around a single entity taking down hordes of enemies, sometimes implimenting stealth and other times brute force, and all the time story driven (Unreal, Fire Warrior, etc.).

In essence, one genre has become 4, all of which are innately different from each other in very important ways. Through this proliferating and splintering, gaming is becoming more and more specialized and diversified. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? That's something to think on.

It's really been this past decade that the genres began to split and split and split again, with the advent of 3d, and, specifically, the Playstation.

Think back 15 years, to the era of the 8 bit consoles, or even 10 years, and 16 bit consoles. How many genres were there? I think it's time for another list:

Video game genres from 10 years ago, off the top of my head:

RPG (Final Fantasy)
Sidescrolling shooter (R-type)
Sidescrolling action (Kung Fu)
Sidescrolling adventure (Metal Gear)
Text-based adventure/rpg (Zork)
Platformer (Mario)
Fighter (Street Fighter)

Now, how about these days?

Current list of genres and splinter genres, present day, also off the top of my head:

Console RPG (FF)
PC RPG (Baldur's Gate)
MMORPG (Everquest)
Action RPG (Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance)
Strategy RPG (Tactics Ogre)
MUD (Achaea)
Sidescrolling shooter (R-type Final)
Rail shooter (Panzer Dragoon)
First Person Shooter-Twitch (UT)
First Person Shooter-Tactical (AA)
First Person Shooter-Single Player Centric (Unreal 2)
Third Person Shooter/Adventure (Max Payne)
3rd/1st Person Hybrid Action/Adventure(MGS 2, Metroid Prime)
Survival Horror (Resident Evil)
Sports-Simulation (Madden)
Sports-Arcade (NBA Street)
Racing-Simulation (Gran Turismo)
Racing-Arcade (Project Gotham)
Real Time Strategy (Warcraft III)
Turn Based Strategy (Heroes of Might & Magic IV)
Non-Combat Strategy (Rollercoaster Tycoon)
Puzzle (Myst)
3d Fighter (Soul Calibur 2)
2d Fighter (Guilty Gear XX)
Party Games (Mario Party)
3d Platformer (Mario Sunshine)
2d Platformer (Klonoa)
3rd Person Stealth (Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Solid)
Flight (Crimson Skies)
Vehicular Combat (Twisted Metal: Black)
Music (Frequency)
Farming (Harvest Moon)

Alright, so that last one is only the one game. Still, I think you get my point. And that was just off the top of my head, and a glance in my cabinet-o-games. I'm sure I could remember a whole helluva lot more if I really went looking.

Everything I see I try to relate to video games, and the video game industry as a whole, since it's my selected and hopeful future career. Are games better now with 100 genres than they were when there were 5? Not really. Are they different? Hell yes. All these extra genres lead to are greater specificity and more innovation, in my opinion. Even barring technological limitations, 10 years ago, could you have imaginged half the games and genres that exist now ever being made? I doubt it; I sure as hell didn't. So just imagine what's going to happen 10 years down the line. That's what keeps me excited. I love games, and I want to be at the forefront, even when there are 10,000 genres and we laughed at the time we only had 100.

/then half-woman,half-sharks who won't even sleep with me

Warning: Patronizing philosophical bullshit ahead. Proceed with great caution.

As the warning no doubt, uh, warned you, this entry's going to be weird, and a bit of an experiment. I doubt I'll be funny, and I may be somewhat thought-provoking, but then again, I may not. This entry is a combination of a bunch of stuff I've been thinking about and a need to get something up here, cause it's been so very long since a real entry (not utopia gloating). Anyway, you are forewarned.

It's odd how the stupidest events will put one in these sorts of states of mind. On Saturday after roleplaying there was much hunger within the group, and since it'd been very long since we'd been there and I was getting sick of omlettes everywhere, we decided to hit up Dempsey's instead of Queen City or Denny's. Very odd how that one little decision would put me in this weird mood for... 15 hours and counting, thusfar.

I want to assure anyone who was brave enough to read this far that this isn't some sort of manifesto or anything, I'm not depressed or nuthin' and even though this is starting to sound a bit grandiose, that's just how I'm feeling at the moment. Don't worry about me.

I had to interject that. Anyway.

So we walk in the door to Dempsey's, and as I look to the left I notice one of the waitresses looking at us. I think she was looking at me, specifically, but I may have been wrong. I dunno. I also thought she smiled. It didn't seem like the standard "Welcome to Dempsey's" smile either. Again, I'm not sure. Immediately recognition hit me: I knew her, but from where? With the way my memory has progressed since "The Void" began overtaking me, and specifically in the last 6 months or so, I thought maybe I was just imagining it, or that it was someone I really did know, and at the moment I was simply too out of it to place her.

For a while I was trying to puzzle out who it was. I noticed she looked at our table again. These were not glances, but actual information gathering looks. Now, under normal circumstances, with normal people, this might be taken to mean that she also recognized me, and that's why she was paying more attention to our table than any of the others, even though she wasn't our waitress. You must understand, though, our group. There were 4 of us. Among that group were 2 scary looking fellows in black trenchcoats, not to mention me, wearing shorts and a t-shirt when it was very plainly well below freezing. Nah, I dunno what the hell's wrong with me either. Anyway, we tend to attract attention and staring no matter where we go, especially when we begin to do things like, you know, snort sugar, eat paper, scream "lemonipple!", and take everything on the table and in our pockets and shove it towards Kera. That's not my story to tell, however, I'll let her cover that one and the accompanying picture on her blog. Anyway, this is all very run of the mill for us, and I think at Queen City they've become used to us and don't even bother looking twice, but Dempsey's is another matter entirely. So, to get back to my point: those looks may have been recognition, and they just as easily could have been, "Look at those freaks. Do you think they're drunk or just retarded? I think drunk." You know, either way, so that wasn't helping.

Eventually I caught a very good look at her face, and hit me upside the head: Laura Shue. Laura Fucking Shue. I went to school with Laura Shue in 7th and 8th grades - after our two elementary schools funneled into the junior high and before I moved out of the district. We hung out with the same group of people, and as such, we hung out. Over time I came to like her quite a bit, you could even call it a crush; She was very cute and really funny and she was a girl actually talked to me, which was quite rare back in those days, or, hell, even now. She was also the first girl that I ever wrote down my feelings for. Of course I never gave it to her, cause I'm a fucking pussy, but I wrote it with every intention of doing just that. Needless to say that seeing her in this situation was somewhat disorienting.

I was thrown for a loop though. Within my mind I made a direct connection - this girl looked exactly the way I remembered Laura, but I hadn't seen her for 6 years. 6 effing years. I can't remember what I did 2 days ago, let alone 6 years ago. How the hell would I remember that this well? Also, people change, don't they? I mean, I look almost exactly like I did in 7th grade, or so I think. Then again, maybe I'm only fooling myself on that point. In any case, usually, look at someone at 14 and then again at 20, and while you can pick out similarities and say, "Yes, I can recognize this person used to be this person. You can see it there, there, and there", they don't look almost exactly the same.

Yet here was this person in front of me who was fucking dead on. This is the reason that for so long I was so convinced it was someone else: her face matched the one within my memory so accurately that it couldn't possibly be a 6 year old memory, this had to be someone I'd known much more recently and somehow gotten her confused with Laura. It had to be someone I went to high school with.

So, of course, I asked everyone else at the table, whom I had graduated with, who that girl over there was. Short blond hair, blue eyes. Answers came back negative from all fronts. I asked them to think really, really hard. Still nothing. This was far more confounding. Still I searched the recesses of my brain for who the hell this could possibly be. I'm still not sure why I was so adamant that it wasn't her, other than the dead-on memory. I mean, it's not like I moved from Oklahoma or something when I changed schools, I moved 15 minutes away. Still, it was messing with my head. I have a theory as to why, now, but I'll get to that later.

Now, logic would follow that the next logical step would be to ask her name, or even to try to get a look at her nametag. Unfortunately, I didn't think of the nametag thing until we were in the car driving away, and also unfortunately, I'm a goddamned social retard. I don't say anything to random people, regardless of who I may or may not remember them possibly being. So there I sat for the rest of our visit, looking whenever I could and trying to figure out who she was. I was still unaccepting. Besides, assuming she was Laura, what the hell was I going to say? "Hi, I went to school with you about 6 years ago, remember me?" Shit, I can only remember the names of about 2 other people within that group of people we left behind to reference to her in the first place. Either she felt the exact same way, or she didn't remember me, or I don't actually know her at all, because she certainly didn't bring it up to me. We left, after much hilarity, but I was still in kind of a weird funk.

Bobby and I returned to my house, and while he was on the computer I went into my room and through my old stuff, trying to find a picture or something. I didn't think I had anything of the sort, and apparantly I'm right: I didn't find a thing from my junior high school years except for some writings of mine, which I got out and read anyway, since they were hilarious.

As I was sitting there pondering I suddenly another memory returned to me: one other time, I thought I had seen her again. One time in high school, possibly 10th grade, maybe 11th, I was walking past the front of the building, either after classes or during lunch or something, I'm not sure. Anyway, our school was hosting some band thingy, a concert or, shit, I dunno, I wasn't in band, but people from other local school bands were visiting. There's a girl in a Conrad Weiser jacket talking to a guy, also in CW jacket, and as I walk by I turn to look. The girl was who I thought to be Laura, but honestly the look was too quick to tell. She had happened to turn and look at me at the same time, and I thought I saw her eyes widen in recognition. I certainly wasn't sure though, and being even more socially awkward back then than I am now (unbelievable as that is) I just kept walking. All of the sudden this all came back to me. I'm almost positive that that was the exact same face that I saw just last night.

So, to me at least, this means either I keep running into her unexpectedly, or I keep seeing her in places where she's really not. I dunno. In either case it's very weird.

Anyway, besides that obvious oddness, it started me thinking about some other things. Mostly, it got me thinking about my old life, my old friends, my old school. When we moved, I was 14, and I could not have been more pissed. I did have a clique of great friends, and I was also one of those guys that could get along pretty well with all the major high school factions, for the most part. Sure, there were assholes I didn't feel like dealing with, nor they me, but overall I got the feeling that I was pretty well liked. Maybe that was all self-distortion though, I dunno. In any case, I didn't like being ripped away from this comfort, these friends that I knew. I tried every way I could think of for getting out of moving; I told my parents of houses still in Weiser that were a lot better than anywhere else we were looking, I asked them if I could be driven all the way to Weiser every day to attend school. Eventually I steeled myself against the fact that I'd be leaving, and though 9th grade wasn't great by any stretch, by a bit into 10th I had really begin hanging with the "group", and things were well.

This leads to a whole bunch of questions though. What would my life be like at this point if we hadn't moved, or if I had conviced my family to buy a new house within the disctirct? The thought of having never met Smoker, Mike, Grant, et al is weird enough as it is, since I can't imagine another group of people ever existing with whom I feel so close or alike. There are even more implications, though. Very many of my best friends from elementary school and junior high continually show up in the police reports, for possession among many other things. Reports I hear back paint them as pretty hardcore druggies and general naer-do-wells. If I had stayed there, would I be that way? Would my life have gone to shit because I hung out with them? Perhaps I could have stayed there, and tried to steer them away from that sort of stuff? Could I have changed them, saved them? If it was neither A nor B, and we went our separate ways despite my not moving, who the hell would I have found to fill the friend gap in that situation? Would I have found people like me, or would I have changed to hang out with them because the people I thought were like me turned out not to be?

Heavy fucking shit, no?

Smoker just showed up and completely fuckered my entire thought process. Now I gotta try to get back on track. I think he's trying to molest my cat. Anyway, back to the task at hand.

Another thing, that I think made it much worse, was how abrupt the move was. When school ended at the end of 8th grade, I still wasn't sure where I'd be living when September rolled around. Since I didn't want to believe it so much myself, I told my friends that there was a slight possibility that I would have moved over the summer, but that nothing was in place and odds were I'd be back. I still hated the phone then as much, if not more than, I do now, and since my dad refused to get on that newfangled intarweb dealy at the time, there were no screennames to know. We did, of course, move during the summer, and as such I lost contact with 90% of my friends then and there. At first I often thought about it, especially when no immediate friends were made at the new school, but was too pussyish and stupid to try to get back to them. I kept slight contact with a couple of my friends who were more or less outside of the "Laura" circle for a while, but eventually they sort of fell by the wayside, especially when I started hanging out with "the group" as they are. I think this is one of the main problems and why I started freaking out so much when I thought it really was her: perhaps I've split my pre-and-post Mifflin lives into two entirely different parts, and seeing them sorta kinda come together, even on such a small scale, was scary.

That or I'm fucking retarded. Either way, you know.

In any case, she still won't leave my goddamn head. I dunno what to do about it, but I doubt, for some reason, I'll feel normal again until I figure out if it's actually her or not. Blech. I've written entirely too much, and Smoker is looking unbelievably bored. Perhaps I'll continue this later. If you actually read all this, I feel very sorry for you, but remember, I warned you. It's your own damn fault for reading it.

/bleed you fucking dry, bleed you dry

I kick unbelievable amounts of ass

My months of hard work, obsession, and being awesome have paid off, as last night I shattered my own (and everyone else I know personally's) utopia province networth record by finally breaking the big 1 million. To commemorate my accomplishment, I've decided to screencap my superior throne page and post it here for all to see for all eternity (or at least as long as my stupid website stays alive).

Anyway, no updates in a while, but I really haven't had much to be pissed about lately. Still, I'll try to come up with something at least semi-interesting here in the new future, rather than self-fellating bullshit like this post right here :).

Also, this was brought up a few days ago, so for anyone who didn't know: The title of my post is always a link to something, usually semi-relevant to the post in question; a "Link o' the day" as it were, so feel free to go a-clickin' on that.

/or maybe I'm just dumb

I hope the recording industry dies a horrible, painful death

I'm a pirate, a full fledged digital one. I am the bane of the RIAA, they just don't know it yet, because they have yet to discover a beautiful little protocol called BitTorrent, everyone who's aware of which can kindly shut the fuck up about it. BT at this point is nothing but hardcore internet dweebs, for the most part, and we like it that way, kind of like kazaa before it got popular and every moron on the internet was using it. The sooner the general populace knows of BT the sooner we get the RIAA uploading fake torrents full of bleeps to suprnova, and preteens requesting Britney Spears albums on Hawke's world, and general fucktard script kiddies deciding that BT is great for trojaning machines to make zombie boxes for DDOSing their school's website LOLZ!!!111111~one1. I feel safe discussing it here because the only people who read this are people I know and as such are probably aware of BT because I can't stop telling them how friggin' awesome it is. Let's keep it the way it is, eh?

Anyway, while a pirate, I am a pirate with restrictions. I rarely download any movies, tv shows, or games that can be easily obtained and are reasonably priced, the only exception being a movie if I've never seen it before and am unsure of its quality. If I really like the movie, you can be damn sure I'll go buy it for real. Games I download are generally old stuff or crazy stuff or Japanese stuff, and television shows are either just very recently aired or old and not available on dvd; anime I download is either not available in America entirely (or has more then 2 fuggin' episodes per disc, *cough cough* FLCL *cough*).

I respect the industries I pirate from, save one: the music industry. I have no qualms with ripping them off for all they're worth. I hate them, and you should too, because they hate you. They hate you, and they hate the notion that you should get "their" product, which is freely distributed any number of other ways, from the internet without paying for it. Never mind that that exact same music is tossed about from television, radio, and your friends' cd burners after "legitimate" purchase with such alacrity and aplomb, you're not allowed to get that same free music on your computer. No! Bad internet! *Forms cross with fingers* Don't tempt me with your evil free information!

The problem is that record labels are antiquated anachronistic dinosaurs that are no longer needed in the world of music. (See newly updated & accompanying Punk Rock Quote of the Week for the best musical description I've found of the situation). Let's go back in time a little bit.

Most people reading this are probably too young to remember when recordable blank audiocassettes began proliferating the home audio environment, but they sure did, and this was in the early 80's, people. What did the record industry do? They whined like children whose toys had been taken away, only these children had billions of dollars and a grudge. They cried that recordable audio tapes would lead to widespread pirating, not only off the radio but from friends' tapes, thus cheating the industry out of billions of dollars. I believe they even filed a lawsuit against the big electronics manufacturers to stop the production of dual tape deck machines, only to have their asses kicked in court. I'd provide references and assure that I'm correct, but I'm lazy, so take that with as many grains of salt as needed to get over my inability to fact-check. They claimed that these heretical audiocassettes would be the death of music as we knew it. So what happened? The industry continued to thrive, the RIAA continued to spit free music at people through television and radio anyway, and no damage was done to the music. To the record labels’ bottom lines? Possibly. Again, I'm too lazy to check.

Fast forward a bit more than a decade (if I'm getting my times correctly, it's hard to find dates of when technology stops being innately expensive and becomes affordable enough for the masses, so bear with me). Audiocassettes are dead, compact discs are the medium of choice by far. Superior audio quality and no need to rewind makes people shun their mixtapes and buy from the bloated record industry yet again. Out of nowhere, however, comes the price crash in recordable CD drives. Sometime within the past decade, everyone in the country also acquired a personal computer, and CD burners began to become standard equipment on PCs. You could copy discs and hand them out to friends, and even make mix CDs to replace your shitty quality cassettes. Huzzah! What did the RIAA do? Again, bitching and moaning and throwing out lawsuits, this time (once again, I'm not positive about this) trying to evoke a nationwide tax on blank discs to help stem the growth of this free flow of music, once again conveniently ignoring that they've been doing this all along anyway. Once more, they cry out that the death of music is upon us. So, is music dead? Hardly. The only bad thing that came of late 90's music was horrible manufactured unlistenable bullshit, but we can hardly blame blank CDs for that. In fact, they drove the industry to record profits.

It's kind of like the boy who cried wolf. When you prophesize the death of an industry if people don't change their ways, and then no one changes and the industry gets healthier, people aren't going to give two flying fucks when you begin screaming a third time. Not only because you're probably lying off your ass yet again, but because by that time they just don't care; you've pissed them off that much. So here we sit, the RIAA is calling for the collective head of the p2p community and suing their fucking consumer base in a last, desperate, blind attempt to keep music from collapsing for the 3rd time in 20 years. Never mind their hypocrisy or the fact that it's basically universally accepted that 95% of everything put out by major labels is shitty, banal, inane, unoriginal, uninteresting drivel, or that free music still flows from every other major media outlet and they don't seem to care, they're here to fuck the digital revolution.

I don't know if they realize this, but about the worst possible way to build up goodwill is to SUE THE FUCKING PEOPLE YOU'RE ATTEMPTING TO GET TO BUY YOUR PRODUCT. Jesus. Any halfassed community college business grad or high school student who took Econ 101 can tell you that much, asstards. And you wonder why your sales are still declining? Fuck off.

Still, here’s the point I really set out to make: in this day and age, record companies are absolutely pointless. In the before time, labels existed as a means to get music to the people. If you didn’t have labels going out and finding bands, giving them money to produce a record, and then get it played all over the radio and Mtv, no one would ever hear of the band, and there would be little to no popular music at all. In these times, record labels served a purpose: to get the music from the bands to the people. In recent years, they’ve also had the dubious honor of not only finding acts and making them popular, but also manufacturing them (boy bands, pop ‘divas’, et all). Now, however, with the growth of personal computers, excellent audio compression codecs (mp3, wma) the explosion of broadband internet connections, price crashes in physical long term memory and mp3 players, and a more or less across the board feeling of resentment towards the pop music machine have created an web culture that the RIAA, with its head not firmly planted in its own ass, could have adapted to and still have been making money. Too fucking late, suckers. Evolve or get destroyed.

What do record labels do anymore? Jack shit, that’s what. They sue people, and crank out overpriced antiquated CDs. Napster? Itunes? What the fuck? Alright, so, I can go download great quality digital music for free, or I can sign up for your bullshit service that costs money, has a library of maybe 5% of what can be found on kazaa or BT or soulseek, slower download speeds, AND has restrictions on how many times I can burn or transfer the songs? Well, shit, where the hell do I sign up for that motherfucking deal? It’s too late. You’re screwed in the digital arena cause you dragged your damn feet, and unfortunately for you that means you’re screwed all in all.

And this leads into the biggest lie that they’ll tell you; for some reason they’re never rebutted about this, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. The guilt trip that the recording industry tries to lay on you is that you’re taking food out of the artists’ mouths. If you can’t see through that bullshit, I feel sorry for you.

Since the dawn of commercial music, the bands NEVER made their money off of album sales. Artists have always made their money through concerts, merchandise and merchandising. The labels are the only ones who ever made any significant money off of record sales, and up until recently, it was for a reason, even though their earnings were still overly inflated for their service. Before, record labels brought music to the people. There is no longer a need for them. Artists can now go directly through the people through the magic of the internet, distribute their music free (or at very low cost, perhaps $5 an album) and their earnings from the things artists always made their money off of will remain the same. We’re cutting out the middleman. That’s the free fucking market, people. We don’t need the RIAA anymore, yet they still don’t realize it.

The RIAA claims that the downfall of the record labels will be the downfall of music, which simply isn’t true. Imagine the musical landscape with no RIAA. God, would it ever be a beautiful thing. No music that’s popular just because it’s shoved down our throats on every radio station and television broadcast. No lawsuits for listening to music you like. No exorbitant artificial fees for a 20 cent compact disc. No top 40 radio. Just finding and listening to interesting original music that you like, for free or next to nothing, and supporting the artists directly. Mark my words, it’ll happen, and when it does, American music will enter a renaissance. And I will be happy.

/fuck the RIAA

See also: Nu-Metal, Mindfuck

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about music and also about Eva, the former because I've begun digitizing my entire music collection and the latter because Bobby's brother has just recently begun recovering from the wounds Hideki Anno created in his brain with his gigantic psychological schlong. (We warned him and warned him, but he still watched the last 4 episodes and the movie by himself. Idiot.)

Anyway, the combination of the two floating about within my brain reminded me of something that has always kinda weirded me out, but had slipped my mind for a while recently. You know how every once in a while, you hear a song, and it relates to something so closely, you could swear it was written only for that one and only thing, even though you really can't see how a connection could have been between the two?

On the second Linkin Park album, there's a song that very, very closely mirrors NGE. Sure scares the hell out of me, and I still get shivers thinking about it every time I hear the song nowadays. Anyway, I feel like reproducing the lyrics here, in a move sure to enlighten everyone who's seen Eva but not heard the song and mean absolutely nothing of importance to anyone else. Anyways, here goes, especially creepily similar parts bolded. Imagine this from Shinji's perspective:

"Memories consume
Like opening the wound
I’m picking me apart again
You all assume
I’m safe here in my room
Unless I try to start again

I don’t want to be the one
The battles always choose
‘cause inside I realize
That I’m the one confused

I don’t know what’s worth fighting for
Or why I have to scream
I don’t know why I instigate
And say what I don’t mean
I don’t know how I got this way
I know it’s not alright
So I’m
Breaking the habit
I’m breaking the habit
Tonight

Clutching my cure
I tightly lock the door
I try to catch my breath again
I hurt much more
Than anytime before
I had no options left again

I don’t want to be the one
The battles always choose
‘cause inside I realize
That I’m the one confused

I don’t know what’s worth fighting for
Or why I have to scream
I don’t know why I instigate
And say what I don’t mean
I don’t know how I got this way
I'll never be alright
So I’m
I'm breaking the habit
I’m breaking the habit
Tonight

I’ll paint it on the walls
‘cause I’m the one at fault
I’ll never fight again
And this is how it ends

I don’t know what’s worth fighting for
Or why I have to scream
But now I have some clarity
To show you what I mean
I don’t know how I got this way
I’ll never be alright
So I’m breaking the habit
I’m breaking the habit
I’m breaking the habit
Tonight

I realize that was a whole lot in bold, but really, the song is really THAT dead on. I can't wait till those director's cut DVDs for Eva come out. MMMM, extra footage.

Also, you may notice a couple little page changes. I lightened the background color because it was appearing too dark on some monitors. I also set the table width in pixels, cause on lower resolutions it was getting a horizontal scroll bar, and those are ugly. Also changed up a couple fonts in hope of fixing that mysterious "fonts showing up as times new roman" problem I was having on all machines other than my desktop. Hmm.

Also, I'm trying to convince my dad to buy a new computer, and buy it now, so I can take their old machine and turn it into a linux box for my own nefarioius purposes. Yes, my true geek roots are beginning to shine through, and I'm having great trouble resisting the open-source OS revolution. I'll use it as my side-project box, and also try to turn it into a sexy little FTP server for my friends. We'll see how that goes, eh?

/1600 mp3s and counting

Stop shitting so damn loud

Jesus.

Why is it that nearly any time I'm trying to take a relaxing dump in a public place, most notably at work, some jackass feels the need to make a spectacle of shitting? I realize it's not always the most silent of bodily functions, but christ almighty. The other day, some dude 2 stalls down, honest to god, sounded like he was fucking a mute goat. And thank god the goat was mute, or it would have sounded a lot nastier. Stop making so much fucking noise. It's annoying as hell, you dumb bastard. If defacating causes you so much pain that you have to moan and groan and seemingly brace yourself against the fucking wall, maybe you should go see a physician before you rupture your intestines and end up shooting them past your sphincter. Eat a fucking prune, and have some consideration for other people, assnugget.

/I hope he's not going to attempt one of those love-pact suicides!
/love-packed sushi's the best!

I told those fudgepackers I liked Michael Bolton's Music...

Just took this when I saw it on FARK, so what the hey:

Michael Bolton

What Office Space character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

/you know, the nazis had peices of flair that they made the jews wear

The Transcendence of Video gaming

The word transcendence conjures thoughts and images in just about everyone, for me it happens to be self-centered morons who view themselves as status symbols, dirty hippies, and dirty pseudo-hippies like Emerson and Thoreau. The word itself, however, I still find pretty cool, and I think it works very well for the point I'm trying to make here.

The reason that images and ideas are linked with that word is because it's so grandiose, and generally for the worse. It seems pompous and overimportant, and we all know how the average person views anyone trying to make video games into anything more than a child's plaything. Anyone who knows me, however, knows I take my games very seriously, so I don't think anyone reading this really found it amazing that I used that word.

However, I'm not using it here to describe the affect games can have on people, or anything of that sort. Transcend is used here for a single purpose: to show that great gameplay can transcend boundaries of likes and dislikes, of hobbies and hatreds, of personal fantasies and moral obligations. I think if everyone understood this, the world would be a far better place.

I first became interested in this theory way back in the day, when the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, or THPS, was released for Playstation, in 1999. I've never been a fan of skateboarding, you may even say I hated it; I certainly had no interest in it at all. The reviews, however, began pouring in, and every one of them was full of praise. Still I resisted, because I really disliked the whole skating idea. Finally, it became too much - I cracked, and I rented it.

During the next 5 days, if I wasn't sleeping or in school, I was playing THPS. I was throughly engaged, and rightfully addicted. I went out and bought the game as soon as my rental was over, and then spent the next 2 months playing as if in a mad frenzy. Suddenly, my prejudice against skating meant nothing. I learned the lingo, and I was in love with that game.

Did I suddenly have an affinity for skateboarding? Did I start watching it, or caring about it in any context than in THPS's world? Not at all. But the game itself transcended the fact that I disliked skateboarding. I was proven wrong.

Since that moment, I've been more open minded about my choices in gaming. If I hadn't made the dive into THPS, and seen that my preconceptions about the content of a game are more or less worthless, would I ever have played Klonoa, or Jet Set Radio? Harvest moon, or Samba De Amigo? Pikmin, Mr. Domino, Sheep? Probably no on every account.

I learned my lesson about closemindedness, the problem is, I know a lot of people who haven't. Harvest moon is a great example. Since I discovered the awesomeness that is the farming game, I've told everyone and their mother that these games are incredible and the epitome of addictive. Everyone fought against me, they couldn't get over the stigma of the game being about farming. Finally, finally, I convinced Grant and Ed to give it a shot. The result? They spent the next week calling me, asking me questions, and playing whenever they weren't. 2 years later, that bastard Ed still had my game. He finally, begrudgingly gave it back to me when he came to visit this summer. There is something about Harvest Moon that transcends the fact that it's based around farming vegetables and sheep, and it's phenominal, once you give it a chance. The hard part is breaking through people's preconceived notions. I, at the very least, am among the converted.

The second part of this, and another point that's missed by most non-gamers, is that you need not idolize characters in a game or aspire to be them in order to play or even enjoy that game. Tommy Vercetti is a deplorable character; I don't want to be him.

That being said, GTA, in addition to a great wealth of games, are based within fantasy and desire. Violent games are there to serve a purpose. Who hasn't had a day where they just wanted to take a katana or a minigun or a flak cannon and go berzerk on a city block or two? I would venture to say very few, if any, people. Will they actually do it? No.There is a space in people's psyches between their basest desires and what is acceptable and morally right in society, and video games exist within that space. Just because I may long to smash people's heads in with baseball bats within a virtual world does not mean I don't understand the repercussions and reasons that anarchy cannot exist in reality. Non-gamers have a tendency to think that desire to do something in a video game corresponds to a desire to do something for real, and it's not true. I have no desire to actually enter a skateboard competition, I have no desire to run my own farm, I have no desire to paint graffiti and fight the man from my jet skates, just as I have no real desire to pick up a hooker and then slice her in half with a chainsaw, yet all are fun in the world of gaming.

I have to cut off that train of thought right there, however, before this turns into an entirely different rant.

The point is, if I haven't already made it abundantly clear, a game's content is not necessarily indicative of its fun factor or its playerbase. For one final example, let's take The Sims. I hate people. Logic would follow that a game about random, ordinary people and their mundane, stupid lives, would be the last thing I'd ever want to play. However, I can't count the number of weeks lost to my little sim people and their stupid, boring lives. The premise belies the fun, and the fun transcends the premise. If only more people, both gamers and non, could realize that.

/owns a set of gaming maracas

Unit 2: Rock

What does it say about me, and my sense of humor, and my personality, that as I was careening off the road, heading straight for a gigantic rock, that the only thought running through my head was, "Well, shit, now I can't make fun of my friends for crashing their cars. Damnit."? What does it say that, after a couple obscenities, and assuring that my friends were alright, my first action was laughing? And what does it say about my friends, that they did exactly the same?

Hell, I dunno. It was completely rhetorical.

So, yes, my crash-free driving streak of always has ended. I'll probably always look back on this as kind of a milestone in my life; not only is it the first time I ever crashed a car, it's also the first time I've ever been in a crash in any way, shape, or form. I think I'll recap the entire story here and now, not only for the story's own longevity, but also for anyone who wasn't present at the time.

It's Wednesday, wings night. It's also beginning to snow. Nonetheless, it is Wednesday, which means bad weather can suck it, we're eating, and to hell with mother nature for trying to stop us. Before I leave, my mom offers the obligatory, "The roads are bad, I don't want you driving." I retorted with my obligatory, "Don't worry, I'll be fine." Since Bobby was working that night, I had assumed that I would be picking up Kera, as is the way of things when Bobby works on wings night, so I drive all way down to Shillington. As I'm in the process of knocking on the door, I get a phone call, in which I'm informed Kera is already at the store. Needless to say I looked like a jackass when her sister opened the door. Whoo.

So, the irony would have multiplied a million-fold had the crash occured during the completely unnecessary side trip, which is actually a thought that occured to me. Then those bastards would have felt sorry for not letting me know that little peice of info earlier, if I were dead.

Eventually I made it to our meeting place, and after everyone laughed at me for driving all that way, it was time to split up into cars. Generally Mike drives, and since Dustin was driving as well, that should have left me out of it. Mike's car was in the shop, however, so I volunteered.

So we're driving down to the restaurant, my car in the lead. I take a turn, a turn I've taken a hundred times. I am not speeding, in fact, I think I'm going more slowly than normal, on account of the snow, yet I still find myself hurtling off the road. I try to countersteer, to no avail. Oh shit, we're in someone's yard. There's a rock! *Kerchunk*. And now we're past said rock.

After we manage to wave down our stupid friends, laugh our asses off, and I nearly lose my hands to frostbite while calling my parents and receiving no help from them at all, we make sure there's nothing leaking, and I manage to turn the engine over. I'm assured that Johnny will follow me back to my house, and I take off, thinking things will be a lot eaiser if I can manage to get the vehicle back to my house. About halfway up the hill the car begins making a sound akin to a cat being wrung through one of those old-tyme washing machines, what with the crank and the roller dealies, and volumes of white smoke begin pouring from beneath the hood. Afraid that I'm going to explode at any moment, I pull off into a driveway, and decide to attempt to flag Johnny down as he drives by. It didn't actually work that way though, as Johnny drove right by me without looking. Fuck. My phone actually has reception, so I try calling Johnny. Thrice, in fact, before I realize that Johnny's phone is actually in my coat pocket, and I had used it to call my parents down the road when my phone didn't have reception. Fuck. And I had wondered why my coat was buzzing. At one point I actually thought I had trapped a bee in there. I was wondering why the fuck a bee would be flying around in January, and flying around so much that he managed to find his way into my coat. That may demonstrate my idiocy more than anything ever, honestly.

None of my other friends managed to drive by, so I said to hell with it, and began walking home, where my Christmas gift of a AAA membership was still on my computer desk. Yeah, I'm not exactly on top of things.

So I trudge over to my house, and am then informed that my friends have been calling the house, wondering where the hell I am. Of course it never occured to me to call Turkey Hill, where they all were, because I'm fucking stupid.

After all that I finally call AAA, try to explain where my car lies while battling my massive directional retardation, and they tell me they'll dispatch someone immediately, but I must call the cops. I was kinda taken aback by that, since I only hit a rock, but I just ignored her. Mike and I begin walking back to my car, and I recieve 2 calls in rapid sucession: the bitch AAA dispatcher who took my call and was rude, and the actual tower himself, both of whom tell me I have to call the police before they would dispatch. Fuck. So I go down to Turkey Hill, and use their phone to call the police, and let them know I've only hit a rock, everyone is fine, and no one needs to be sent out. What do they tell me? "Oh, an officer will be right out there." Fuck.

At this point everyone else leaves for wings, because I shouldn't be keeping them from eating. At this point only Bobby, who is working, and I are standing around, waiting for the police officer to show up. A man walks in, walks over to the milk, pays for his milk, and then starts towards the door. Just before he leaves, he turns to the two of us and says, "You guys be careful out there, the roads are starting to get pretty slick," and walks out. I managed to stifle my laughter until the door swung closed behind him, and then we both exploded in laughter. I was laying across the counter, slamming my fist on that same counter, and laughing so hard I was crying, which I'm going to begin referring to as craughing (pronunced kraf-fing); I use it so much, it really should be a single word. Isn't it funny how life does shit like that to you? The timing seems almost divinely inspired. See? God does have a sense of humor. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't lived my life, that's for damn sure.

During my time working at the Turkey Hill, I managed to get to know all the cops pretty well; a few of them are incredibly cool guys. I was hoping the entire time that one of the awesome cops would come down to handle this, and maybe we could get this whole thing sorted out in about 10 minutes. Imagine my dismay when a cop I had never seen in my entire life pulled up. Fuck.

I get in the vehicle, and start explaining what happened, and where. We drive past my car, because he wants to see the accident site. The whole time, I can't think of anything except that I should be with my friends, laughing and eating and having stupid, recorded conversations, if only it hadn't been for this damn weather. Fuck. So I show him the rock, he asks me if I was drinking (didn't see that one coming a fucking mile away), and then we go up to my car, where begins the frantic search for my registration and insurance. Too bad I can't find either. Fuck.

After some more searching, I did manage to find my registration, but the insurance was no where to be found. I did, however, have the insurance for Bobby's car, from when it was still my dad's car. My mind is still boggled by how the fuck that managed to happen. Luckily, it was the same company and policy, so the nice policeman took my word for it and used that information. Whew. The tower then showed up, and asked me if I had my AAA card. At this point I realized I had left it at the Turkey Hill. Fuck.

He was cool with it though, said he understood I was frazzled, and began towing my car off towards the garage, where my dad was waiting. I, however, in a flash of guilty conscience, decided to not lie to the police and tell them I was alone in the car, but instead told them the truth, since the last thing I needed at this juncture was being arrested for filing a false police report. Since Brecknock is douchebaggish about not placing a cell tower, my repeated calls to the group about getting Johnny and Kera to give thier info to the cop for the report were left unreceived, so we had to make a physical trip up to the restaurant to get their names and phone numbers and addresses and whatnot. It was here that I began realizing that this cop was pretty cool, we were talking about football and whatnot, and he told me that doing this and writing up the paperwork would actually give him something to do on an otherwise boring night.

We get to the place, and he says I should go get my friends who were in the car and bring them out here, as a cop in full uniform walking into a restaurant seldom leads to good things. I go inside to retrieve Johnny and Kera, and as we're leaving, Johnny tells me he thinks he has whiplash and Kera that her leg hurts. I kindly tell them to shut the fuck up and not mess around, since the other last thing I need is my friends saying they were injured in my car crash and people taking them seriously, not realizing that not a damn thing that we ever say is not said in jest.

Finally we begin heading out, as the cop will take me home to my waiting and probably very pissed off parents. Honestly, they weren't too angry anymore, my mother had even recovered from the fit of rage I gave her by saying that I still wanted to go to eat wings and "just because I crashed my car doesn't mean everything tonight has to suck". Hoo boy, did that ever make her angry. Still, they were more than anything just releived that everyone was ok, and worried that my friends, who were still out, were now "lying in a ditch" from another crash. I told them I was going to Turkey Hill to meet my friends and get the wings they ordered for me (See? As assholish as they can be sometimes, they really are friends) and whatnot. The following actually transpired, and in this exact order:

Me: Alright, Imma head down to the store.
My dad: You're going to walk?
Me: No, I'm going to drive my invisible backup car.
My dad: *Unbelievably pissed off stare*
Me: *Opens door, runs down stairs*

I think it's a good thing I'm bigger than my dad, or he may just have smacked the shit out of me at that point.

The wings, though kinda cold, were delicious, as I informed my friends it probably wouldn't be a good idea to hang out out my place tonight, what with the angry parents and all, and and at Turkey Hill I stayed until just about midnight. I then went home and got online, but only for so long, as by that point I was exhausted. I suppose the entire ordeal was more draining than I had thought at first.

So, yes, my car is fuckered, it will probably cost me about $1000 to fix, unless my frame is cracked, in which case I'm screwed. Still, maybe it was all hype and it'll be really cheap. Please? Please!?! Hello, God? Jesus, Allah, Buddha, I love you all!

As for the title of the entry, the police report went a little something like this:
Unit 1: Red 1991 Cadillac DeVille
Unit 2: Rock

I dunno about you, but I found that hilarious. And what does the whole ordeal really say about me? I suppose it's that, as long as it's not someone who I care about being dead, I'll probably laugh at it, no matter how horrible it is. Then again, I could have told you that about myself long before his happened, so if the Cosmos were trying to teach me some lesson, I already fucking knew that, assholes! You didn't have to trash my car! Cocksuckers.

/bloody weather

Damn straight, Windows XP

It's been a while since an update, but I'm working on one about the transcendence of video games, and another about the egotistical sensationalist exageratory bullshit in the media, but for now I'm tired and just took two quiz thingies, so what the hell:

Which OS are You?

Take the "Which FARK Cliche Are You" quiz!

W00t. Just what I would have imagined on both counts. Domo Kun kicks ass. :)

/santa claus != (emperor || demon);

/god I love c++

It's a shame I love punk rock so damn much

Way back in the day, I listened to the same shit that everyone did. Pop. Stupid pop. At the time I didn't think it was stupid, because I was stupid. When I entered my preteen years, however, I discovered alt-rock, and to a point, punk. My favorite bands back in late elementary school and junior high were Green Day, Offspring, the Smashing Pumpkins, and of course Weezer. High school came around and I moved into metal, Korn and Limp Bizkit and Staind and the like. I really don't have any regrets about what I've listened to over the years except some of the very early stuff (I'm not sorry for Limp or Korn or what people refer to disgustedly as nu-metal - I still think they're good, and I still listen to it on occasion, but it's not my main thing anymore).

One time during our senior year of high school, I was in smoker's car late one night driving back from lord knows where, and the music we were listening to was very intriguing. It was loud and unbelievably fast and the lyrics were - by god - smart and catchy and uplifting. The vocals were sung with pure emotion and not sugar coated but utterly real. The guitars ripped shit up and I couldn't believe anyone could drum that quickly. I asked him, and he told me the band was named Pennywise. I immediately took the album and burned it. I began listening to it, and I became accustomed to it. I began listening more often. It became a permanent fixture within my stereo.
Soon, any day that passed without listening to that album seemed incomplete, fractured, and worthless. I became obsessed, I was taken in, not only by PW's sound, but their vision. Punk music that wasn't filled with doomspeak or hatred? That can't happen, you may say. But it truly was, and is to this day. That album was Full Circle, and for the past 3 years, it's been my favorite record. Pennywise soon eclipsed Weezer as my favorite band, and I was inexorably hooked. I went clamoring back to smoker for more, but he had no more Pennywise albums. He did, however, have a plethora of Bad Religion.

I had heard BR before, mostly notably in the soundtrack to the original Crazy Taxi, which I played so much I had calluses on my hands and nearly caused my Dreamcast to have a nuclear meltdown. 3 tracks in a video game, however, can't really give you a terribly accurate picture of a band, so while I found the stuff on the CT soundtrack catchy and interesting, I never really investigated them any more. Soon I was in possession of nearly every Bad Religion album produced, and I loved them all. In the mean time I ran out and completed my pennywise collection. Within a few months there was no turning back. I had sold my musical soul to punk rock, and I was happy.

Anyway, you can only listen to so many records from the same two bands for so long before they cease to be new, although still kicking ass, and this is where I began to run into problems. As I searched for new punk to listen to, I often ran into the same problem - kickass sound and some brilliant lyrics and concepts, but also some lyrics that were misleading, and, to me, not what I want to hear.

I'm all for free speech, I'm very anti-censorship and all, as I'm sure you all know, especially in terms of entertainment media. I'm not saying they shouldn't be able to say what they want to - hell, all of punk was and is based on rebellion against more or less commonly held beliefs - it just upsets me that they pick these ones. Most of the problems I have with punk lyrics are centered around that of anti-government sentiment. Now, I'm the first to admit that the American government can often times be slow and stupid and illogical and they try to stick their noses into too much shit, occasionally, but I also believe that most government officials are working for the best, at least individually, even if the government as a whole isn't. I don't believe anyone in particular in our government, especially our current president, is an evil or malicious person, or even that he's doing a bad job (well, except Leiberman and Brownback. Those fuckers can suck my cock and die). Here's an example: I recently picked up a bunch of back Punk-O-Rama discs. POR is a compilation put out by Epitaph (the best damn record label in the world) showcasing a song from pretty much each one of their bands; you get about 25 tracks for $6, it's a great deal. On the most recent one there was a song, which at first I was totally into. It was about the bandwagonesque patriotism in America after the terrorist attacks, which is something I feel very strongly about, and it also sounded absolutely badass. Nearer the end of the song, however, came some lyrics that I object to greatly:

"Makeshift Patriot
The Flag Shop Is Out Of Stock
Hang Myself at Half Mast

Makeshift Patriot
The Flag Shop is Out of Stock
I hang myself...via live telecast.

Coming live from my own funeral...the beautiful weather offered a nice shine, Which is suitable for a full view of a forever altered skyline.
It's times like these I freestyle biased opinions every other sentence.
My journalistic ethics slip when I pass them off as objective.
"Don't gimme that ethical bullshit."
I've got exclusive, explicit images to present to impressionable American kids, And it's time to show this world how big our edifice is!

That's exactly what they attacked when a typically dark skinned Disney villain Used civilians against civilians and charged the trojan horses into our buildings.
Using commercial aviation as instruments of destruction, Pregnant women couldn't protect their children. Wheelchairs were stairway obstructions.
Now I have to back petal...from the shower of glass and metal, Wondering how after it settles we'll find who provided power to radical rebels.
The Melting Pot seems to be calling the kettle black when it boils over, But only on our own soil so the little boy holds a toy soldier...
And waits for the suit and tie to come home. We won't wait 'til he's older, Before we destroy hopes for a colder war to end. "Now get a close up of his head..."

Makeshift Patriot
The Flag Shop Is Out Of Stock
Hang Myself at Half Mast


Makeshift Patriot
The Flag Shop is Out of Stock
I hang myself while the stock markets crash

The city is covered in inches of muck
I see some other pictures of victims are up Grieving mothers are thinking their children are stuck Leaping lovers are making decisions to jump While holding hands...to escape the brutal heat. Sometimes in groups of the three.
The fall out goes far beyond the toxic cloud where people look like debris.
But all they saw after all was said...beyond the talking heads Was bloody dust with legs looking like the walking dead calling for meds.
Hospitals are overwhelmed. volunteers need to go the hell home.
Moments of silence for fire fighters were interrupted by cell phones.
Who's going to make that call to increase an unknown death toll?
It's the one we rally behind. He's got a megaphone...and he's promising to make heads roll, So we cheer him on, but espestos is affecting our breath control.
The less we know...the more they fabricate...the easier it is to sell souls. An addictive 24 hour candle light vigil in TVs.
Freedom WILL be defended...at the cost of civil liberties. Viewers are glued to television screens. Stuck...'cause lots of things seem too sick.
I use opportunities to pluck heart strings for theme music.

I'll show you which culture to pump your fist at and what foot is right to kiss.
We don't know who the culprit is yet...but he looks like this.
We know who the heroes are. Not the xenophobes who act hard, "We taught that dog to squat. How dare he do that shit in our own back yard?!"

They happened to scar our financial state and char our landscape.
Can you count how many times so far I ran back this same damn tape?
While a camera man creates news and shoves it down our throats on the West Bank, With a 10 second clip put on constant loop to provoke US angst.

So get your tanks and load your guns and hold your sons in a family huddle, Because even if we win this tug of war and even the score...humanity struggles.
There's a desperate need of blood for what's been uncovered under the rubble, Some of them dug for answers in the mess...but the rest were looking for trouble.

Makeshift Patriot
The Flag Shop Is Out Of Stock
Hang Myself at Half Mast

Makeshift Patriot
The Flag Shop is Out of Stock
I hang myself.
Don't waive your rights with your flags.

Pass me that bottle of Jack, would you?

So. Yeah. My stoic stance against d2 was ruined last night when I picked up a Skullders and then soon after got the Diablo Clone to spawn in my game. Then the guy I had come help us kill him took my damn annihlus charm. I was still in a good mood though, because I was happy about the skullders.

So I wake up this morning, freshly re-addicted, and start running the pit. I find a Mav's Diadem. Woot. That thing's a bastard to find, it's a TC 87 Set item, which means it's definitely up there with the rarest items in the game. I was feeling even better. 2 runs later, I find an ethereal berzerker axe. You know, the ones that they use to make Breath of the Dying Weapons, the most powerful in the game. Those things trade for fucking HIGH GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING RUNES . I could have gotten anything I wanted, and more, for that axe. Guess what happens? The game fuckers, and when I log back in, the axe is gone.

I'm depressed. I know that makes me sound like a geek among geeks, and I am. I truly am. But... ah, Jesus christ. I can't believe it. I'm still stunned. It's like I'm floating, kind of.

Everyone knows I'm constantly decrying drinking for the sake of getting drunk, but right now I'm so pissed and depressed that I feel like getting completely and utterly shitfaced. Jesus. I suck. Bah.

So, yeah, no more desire to play Diablo 2 at all right now. I was so close to having it all, and now I have no desire to play at all. Perhaps this was what I needed - maybe I needed to be fucked royally in order to shake myself of the shackles that blizzard has placed on me. Perhaps I am finally free. We'll see how long this lack of desire to play lasts. I feel sick to my stomach. Does this game really have that much of an effect on me?

Now I'm rambling and can't stay on topic, but this is why I love video games, as odd as that sounds. Look at how it's affecting me. This is why FFVII changed my life. I cared about what happened in that game. That's what I want to do with my life - make games that affect people in reality. For better or for worse, Diablo 2 has most definitely affected my real life. That's kind of heartening to me. Still doesn't make me any less pissed off. I think I'm going to go to Turkey Hill and bitch to my friends. Oy.

/it was IN MY FUCKING INVENTORY

Quick Factiod

Was curious so I just checked it out, and counting this one, there are 71 instances of the word "Fuck" on this page, which averages out to 7.1 per entry, or one per every 112.62 words. Actually, that last stat there seems kind of low, doesn't it? Perhaps I should get my per word average up. I'll try harder, I swear.

/was very hard to only use the word one time in this entry, so as not to screw up my calculations

I'm just so damn right about everything

A comment was made the other night about how arrogant I seem to be. I'd just like to remind everyone that I suck any any arrogance that I project is nothing more than an illusion that I use to boost my own self-esteem.

Nonetheless I kick ass and am right about everything, so I figured I'd do a service for the masses (read: the 4 people who actually look at this) and, in all my infinite wisdom, tell you exactly what you should be watching, playing, and listening to. So, here comes the "2003 I friggin' rock awards", where I tell you what the best crap to come out in the past year was.

New TV show of the year

Honorable Mentions:

Kid Notorious (Comedy Central), Tactical to Practical (History), Reno 911(Comedy Central)

Runner up: Arrested Development (Fox)

Simply unbelievably funny, David Cross steals the show. The premise is great, and it's very hard to beat cousin on cousin sex jokes. Arrested Development proves to me that I was right in watching no network television but Fox for the last 5 years. Also, can I get a huzzah for sitcoms without a laugh track? Huzzah!

Winner: Chapelle's Show (Comedy Central)

Anyone who saw the first episode with the black white supremacist leader knew that he was on to something, and in the end the only thing that was wrong about the first season of Chapelle was Comedy Central's goddamn notoriously short season runs (ditto on Reno 911 and Kid Notorious). The new season starts in late January, and we can only hope it'll be longer than 6 freakin' episodes.

Album of the Year

Honorable Mentions:

A Perfect Circle, Thirteenth Step; NOFX, The War on Errorism

Runner up: The White Stripes, Elephant

Absolutely brilliant. The music is basic but loud and catchy, and the lyrics impossible to get out out of your head. If you didn't think "The hardest button to button" was the best damn song to get radio play all year, you're only fooling yourself. Oh, and Jack White beat the living fuck out of this dude, too.

Winner: Pennywise, From the Ashes

If you didn't see this one coming, you don't know me very well, do you? The best band evar comes back with their best album since, well, their best album, Full Circle, released 6 years ago. Screaming guitars, powerful lyrics, and a sense of social conscience show that you can play meaningful music that still kicks ass, play punk without being whiny or bitching all the time, and be a liberal or a reformist without being a self-righteous moron dickwad. If you're still not listening to Pennywise, rot in hell.

Movie of the Year

Honorable Mentions:

Underworld, Pirates of the Carribean

Runner up: Kill Bill, volume 1

From the moment I saw Kill Bill I was enthralled, and I came out of the theater talking about what a damn shame it was that it came out in the same year as a Lord of the Rings film, much like with Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back back in 2001, since LotR was the only thing standing in the way of their claiming Film of the year. Kill Bill is the coolest movie I've ever seen, it drips style and cool everywhere you look. It's hard to beat the combination of humor and violence, and Kill Bill does it perfectly. If Volume 2, which comes out in February, is as good as the first, I don't see how any movie up for release next year can come close to matching its awesomeness.

Winner: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Still debating whether I like RotK or TTT better, but, really, if I have to tell you why RotK kicks ass, then, I dunno, just die.

Game of the Year:

Honorable Mentions:

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Temple of Elemental Evil, FFX-2, Dark Cloud 2, Soul Calibur 2

Second Runner up & Gamecube GOTY: Viewtiful Joe

Capcom does it again, and they do it well. Reminiscent of old school side-scrolling platformers but loaded with originality, it has a unique cell-shaded look and a bunch of awesome gameplay mechanics. Insane difficulty on its own with 4 separate difficulty settings will have you playing for a long while, and loving every second of it, even when you're throwing your controller through the television because of the difficulty.

First Runner up & Xbox & PC GOTY: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

While I'm not a huge star wars geek, I do enjoy star wars, and I am a huge geek. Combining dorky things nearly always leads to new revolutions in dorkiness, so putting Star Wars, D&D and video games all together was more or less a natural marriage of 3 heavyweights of geekdom. The result is some of Bioware's best work and a testament to their legacy, now that they're gone (Fuck you, Interplay). It's now out on Xbox and PC, so you've got no excuse for not playing it.

Winner & PS2 Game of the Year: Disgaea: Hour of Darkness

The spiritual successor to the original Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea packs awesome visuals, a cool story, multiple endings, a great battle system, and a basically infinite number of levels for your characters to gain, not to mention it's the funniest game since Lunar: SSSC on the Playstation. Kudos to Atlus and Nippon Ichi for making the best damn game since Metroid Prime, which was the best game of the last 3 years. If you haven't played Disgaea, well... you can write your own ending here.

Special Awards:

Best Freaking Movie that I never saw until this year, and I could strangle myself for it: Boondock Saints

Do yourself a favor, and go buy this movie right now. It'll cost you no more than $10 at your local bigass retailer, and it's really incredible. The story of two young Irish Americans living in Boston who take on the Russians and the Italian mob, and killing evil men to promote the proliferation of good. It never got much press when it was released because it was based upon a couple guys with big guns who kill a lot of people, and its original release date was set for... 1 week after some jerkoffs shot up their school in Littleton, Colorado, so it was kept on the downlow. Do yourself a favor and watch this move. It's beyond words.

Biggest business decision that has incurred my wrath for all eternity: Interplay shutting down Black Isle

Rot in hell, you bastards. I wanted to WORK FOR BLACK ISLE, DAMNIT. They've only made the best PC games in the world for the past 6 years, why keep them around, eh, assholes? Not a good award, but I was pissed about this and never ranted about it elsewhere, so I figured I'd put it in here.

Best Weapon: Mace

Not pussy-type mace that comes out of a can, but the bigass ball on the end of a stick that shatters skulls. This isn't really an award of the year, it's more of a "Lifetime Achievement" kind of thing, becasue Maces are the best weapons ever. Most armor is designed to stop piercing and slashing weapons, few protect against bludgeoning. Oh, fat lotta good that helmet is going to do to protect you when I crushed the fucking helmet with my mace, bitch. Looks like your head is caved in now, too. Maces rock.

Well, there you have it folks. I rule, and that's what you should be playing and watching and whatnot. Don't forget, I'm right about everything.

Coca-Cola, you can lick my fuggin' nuts

I'm pretty sure that by now, eveyone in the universe knows I'm a rabid pepsi-phile. Even though my recent diet has forbidden me from drinking full-flavored sodas at all, I remain in principle a pepsi fan, even though I find pretty much all diet soda destestable, including pepsi's. It began because Pepsi simply puts Coke to shame; there is no comparison between the two. Drinking Coke is analogous to drinking battery acid - the taste is about the same and it replicates the terrible burning sensation in your mouth as well. Pepsi, on the other hand, is a gift from the good lord himself - it is like drinking of the mythical ambrosia. If I had three wishes, the first would be to greatly reduce the amount of ignorance in the world, as ignorance leads to nearly all of the world's problems, yet I think we can all agree that a world devoid of any and all ignorance would be boring. Second would be for unlimted personal wealth that would, through some suspended logic or outright magic , would not throw off the world economy and send it into a tailspin, dooming mankind to a Warhammer 40k-esque dark age of technology. I have to throw that disclaimer in there, because I don't feel like destroying the world. I then think, having taken care of those two problems, the 3rd wish would be for a neverending supply of pepsi that tastes exactly like pepsi but is carb and calorie free and ideally prevents and/or cures cancer and heart disease.

As I said, it started simply because Pepsi is inherently better than coke in every way imaginable. Albeit this is only my opinion, and as right as I undoubtedly always am, people will of course have differing opinions on things that they deem "subjective", such as taste. As such I can understand that there are people who proport to like coke better than pepsi, even though I'll think they're out of their goddamn minds till the day I die. There are, however, several other reasons to hate coca-cola. First of all, there's their choice of color. Red? Who the hell likes red? On the other side of the spectrum, Pepsi uses blue, which is universally recognized as the best color evar. Include the fact that Coke commercials are so retarded that you could swear that every ad exec in the whole of Atlanta has the mental capacity of an menangitis-riddled alheimer's-suffering frequently-head-traumaed mac user who injects bleach into his temples for fun, and there's a pretty strong case against them. Pepsi ads have a tendencty to suck and all, but they don't even come close to comparing to the intelligence swallowing, suicide inducing drivel that inherently accompanies that dumbass red and white logo. And, finally, there was this . Props to Greg Dean for bringing this to my attention.

For starters, I'm just going to list each and every word and phrase in that article that made me twitch with rage:

fashion accessory
chic elite
select Manhattan clubs and boutiques (the phrase)
boutiques (the word itself)
hipper
celebrity-soaked
dark clubs
trendsetters
hot New York bars
mixer du jour
innovation
trendy
trendy (said twice)
Winnie
zippy

Nearly every word on the above list is up there for the same reason: they're essential parts of the lexicon of the pretentious, the vapid, the douche bag, the 'trendy'. These are the people who coke is now shooting for. Dumbasses who are too caught up in themselves and their standing to care that they're being pandered to because of their pretentiousness, or that they're paying twice as much for a fucking can of inferior soda. The only two up there for other reasons are "Winnie" because it's an insufferably stupid name and "innovation" because of the context in which it's used. This is not an innovation, asshats. It's a rehash on a packaging method that wasn't really innovative in the first place when it came out years ago. They took they cylinder and elongated it. How the fuck is that innovation, you goddamn dickfaces? The can holds less, it's inefficient, it's a step backwards. Current 12 ounce soda cans are geometrically designed to hold the most liquid while using the least amount of material. Now, if soda cans had always been retarded, like energy drink cans, and there we changed to real, current soda cans, which are more efficient, that's innovation. Perhaps they meant the innovation was fucking their consumers out of more money, or pandering to dumbasses who will eat this shit up because they are, in fact, dumbasses? Nah, that's been around for centuries, nothing new there. The only logical conclusion left is that the quoted (note this person is never named, probably because they're ashamed to admit they were a part of this fucking idea or company in any way, shape, or form) is a goddamn imbecile.

And, finally, there is the quote. That this dumb bitch is a comp sci major almost makes me ashamed to also be a comp sci major. I'm hoping that she's not actually a comp sci major, but instead is a retard and since she at one point took a class where she had to do a powerpoint presentation in front of everybody, thinks she is a comp sci major instead of of interior design or communications or environmental science or some other bullshit major that nobody cares about, so she said it to appear smart. Too bad that all fucking backfired when she actually opened her motherfucking mouth, as Winnie says, and I quote:

''People like to try different things if they taste the same.''

What the fuck does that mean? That doesn't make any sense! It's bullshit. You opened your fucking mouth but nothing but nonsensical asshole dickweed trendy clubber jargon came out. That makes less sense than shit that Johnny says when he's been up for way too long. Let's break this quote down:

People like to try different things

Taken by itself, this does make sense, although it elicits somewhat of a "duh" reaction.

if

A conditional meaning 'in the event that'.

they taste the same.

Referring to the kinds of coke. No shit they taste the same, they're the EXACT SAME FUCKING PRODUCT. This is where the conflict comes in. Apparantly you are a fucking tard, so I'm going to put this as simply as I can:

You are fucking stupid. You contradicted yourself within the same sentence. There are a sparse 3 words between "different" and "taste the same", which are inherently opposites. If it is the "same" then it is in no way "different" you fucking dolt. Do yourself and the rest of us a favor and fucking die. You are a worthless drain on society.

These are the fucking people that coke is courting. Yet people still ask me why I fucking hate Coca-cola. Why don't you ask me why I hate Gap or Tommy Hillfiger or the motherfucking mall? I think it's blatantly obvious at this point. There are far too many morons walking around on earth. I hang out with a grand total of about 10 people, and stay away from everyone else. You know why? Everyone else is fucking stupid, and probably drinks coke.

/has lost faith in humanity

Congratulations! You didn't get it, asstard!

It's rant time, baby! I was actually in a pretty good mood until I stumbled across this link over at FARK a little bit ago.a little bit ago. Go ahead and read the article, please.

Now, I'm sure that most of you, after reading that article, are shaking your respective heads and and sighing and saying "idiot" under your breath, or perhaps over your breath. Some of you may be saying, "Yeah, NGE made me want to kill shit too", and some more of you may be saying, "What the hell is NGE?". Most of you, though, if you're reading my FTOTITHSOI, know not only what Eva (or NGE, i'll probably flip back and forth between the 2 names during the course of the rant), but also my stance on fictional media inspiring real life violence, which is, in its most sceintific terms, complete and utter fucking bullshit. It's lame. It's not true. If GTA3 or Boondock Saints or NGE makes you go killing people, you're fucked up in the head and you would have snapped and killed some people at some point anyway. Let's kill you and get your tainted genes away from the future of humanity.

I am also shaking my head and calling this kid a moron. But it's not because he decided to kill his mom over a work of fiction. I mean, that kind of shit happens all the time, and it is kind of sad, but it misses the whole original point: THE FUCKING MORON DIDN'T GET IT. He blames Anno and Gainax for influencing him to do this, but the fucker didn't even understand the point that Gainax and Anno were trying to make. That's what upsets me. He killed his mom because he was too stupid or lazy to figure out what Eva actually meant.

Perhaps we need some background here for those of you who may not know what Eva is. (DISCLAIMER: I'm doing this entirely from memory and not looking up any background facts at all. This is all from the research I did after I first saw NGE and was trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. Most of it is very very close to accurate, though there may be a few details that I'm missing out on). Back in 1998 there was a more or less fledgling Anime studio named Gainax and a fledgling anime writer/producer named Hedeki Anno. They had had a few minor successes but nothing huge. Anno, in the meantime, was struggling with mediocrity and was slowly spiraling into insanity and suicidal tendencies. During this time Anno began writing and envisioning a new anime series roughly translated as "new evolution evangelion" (which was translated for american release to "neon genesis evangelion", go figure). The show is stunningly animated, and becomes a bit of a success, much like Gainax's other work, but is not originally a gigantic hit.

Meanwhile, Anno himself is beginning to get into the "absolutely batshit fucking insane" stage of his psychosis, and the show began to take on much of the same air. It became more twisted, disturbing, and deep, all of which I'll get into more later. About halfway through the series the show began to change pace, and it started to become more of a hit. When time came to produce the final two espisodes of the show, however, eps 25 and 26, Gainax was flat fucking broke. The original plans of the grand finale of the series was scrapped, and out of necessity, 2 bargain basement episodes were created, with no action at all, nothing but self-introspection of the main characters and a bunch of reused and very cheap animation. And then the show ended. It was a shock to anyone watching.

After these last episodes are completed, the show's popularity grows, and after a while NGE is a gigantic success in japan. Gainax is swimming in cash and Anno's life is reaffirmed. They go on to make the final 2 episodes that they wanted to, made it into a feature length movie, made a shit ton more money and made Hideki Anno a star of the anime world. Anno soon comes out of his insanity and revels in his celebrity.

Now, the show itself. It begins as as your standard giant-robot saga that's so standard in anime (or at least so it seems at first, later you'll find that even in these early episodes there was far more going on than you'd ever imagined your first time watching it). There is the reluctant anti-hero, a young boy who doesn't want to fight but is at first tricked into it, then spends the entire series trying to figure out why he fights, even though he doesn't enjoy it. He is of course accompanied by several unbeleivably hot girls with which there are many love triangles and octogons and whatnot, drives a badass looking robot, fights evil to protect humanity from ultimate destruction, all while trying not to be controlled by the powers that be.

As cliched as all that is in the world of anime, even from the beginning you can tell there are some deviations from the formula. Shinji is not your normal anti-hero who's good natured and funny and kind of embarassed around girls, he's a stupid fucking whiner pussy who you want to punch in the goddamn throat, even from the beginning of the series. You will fucking LOATE Shinji Ikrari with every fiber of your being. He is the epitome of annoying stupid wussiness. He does nothing but complain and bitch while ogling the girls that are all around him and being unable to confront them about it. He goes beyond being awkward with rei and asuka to the point of being fucking retarded. Generally, you don't despise the protagonist of an anime, which is the biggest difference you'll see from the beginning.

So despite this, and a few other oddities, the show moves along in a somewhat standard, formulaic fashion, nontheless remaining interesting the whole time, not only because it's beautifully animated, but because the premise generally works well.

About halfway through the show, things begin to take on a much more serious note. The somewhat steady humor in the face of utter destruction that permeates the first half of the series quickly fades, we learn far more about the characters, and the kinda sorta christian religious themes there were present but not prevalent during the first half come out in full fucking force, to the point where they begin to drive the plot. Shinji becomes more of a cunt, even though you could have sworn that was impossible before it actually happens, and you quickly realize that all the characters, not just Shinji and Gendo, are fucked up beyond all redemption. I mean FUCKED THE FUCK UP. You learn of Seele's ulterior motives, and about how everyone is fighting for what they think truly is best. You learn that no one, not even the angels, is truly malevolent in their actions, and you begin to question everything. Then, you see the last 2 cheapass self-introspective episodes and HOLY FUCKING SHIT WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! MY HEAD! GET IT OUT OF MY FUCKING HEAD! THERE IS NO GOD!

Then you put the shotgun in your mouth and sob hopelessly as you try to convince yourself that pulling the trigger is the only way to purge your brain of what you've seen in the last hour. This is why I don't recommend watching NGE by yourself the first time. Gather friends around, preferably ones who have already seen it and can assure you that it will get better.

So you pull the gun out of your mouth, and you listen to your friends, and you watch the movie. After watching the movie, you instead use the shotgun to kill your friends cause you know they were just fucking with you and forced you to watch the movie, which is so incredibly fucked up that it makes the final 2 episodes of the series look like fucking sesame street. At that point you'll probably go to jail for slaughtering all your friends and have the rest of your life to stew over NGE and what it did to you. But this is only if you DON'T get it, like the shithead in the article.

If, however, you're intrigued enough, instead of killing your loved ones and yourself, you'll start asking questions, and figuring out what was going on in the series in the movie. After doing a bit of research and thinking about what you've seen, it'll start to come together. Then, once you watch it all one more time, you'll get most, if not all of it, and realize that, holy sweet goddamn, Hideki Anno is a motherfucking genius.

There was one thought that drew Anno out of his suicidal desires and insanity, and he tried with all his might to transfer this into his masterwork. You see it at the end of the series, with Shinji's final revelation, even though many people are so blinded by the horrendous mindfuck - not just the mindfuck of the visuals or what's going on in the plot, but that a run of the mill cliche giant robot saga turned into this - that they don't realize it. Shinji, in the end, however, comes to realize that, as miserable as his life is so often, the occasional bits of pleasure that he has are worth it. That, in a sense, pain makes the happiness all the more worthwhile, and as such, losing that bit of happiness to live in as an amorphous, joyless amalgomation that Seele was trying to make, devoid of pain it may be, was not worth it at all. That's what Anno was trying to get through to his viewers: live for what you enjoy. Even when life sucks, it's worth it for whatever fun you may have. Revel in it.

Or, at least that's what I got out of it. After interviews with Anno that I read afterwards, it seems like that was what he was shooting for.

This was worked in as an addendum to my life philosophy, which I have marked as Steve's Life Philosophy v. 3.2. Most people probably don't care what I live for, or why, and I doubt anyone even read that whole bullshit explaination of what I got out of an insane japanese guy's attempt to not kill himself to get to this point, but I'll put it here anyway. At its most concise, I believe the meaning of life is to be happy. That, however, is oversimplification, and how I explain it to people who don't understand the more in depth explaination, which is thus:

We don't know why we are here. We have no idea what our purpose in life is or what happens in the afterlife. We have ideas and theories and religions and beliefs, but in terms of true facts and knowledge, we really know nothing, we're far too stupid as a species to comprehend whatever higher purpose we may have. When you boil it down to that most basic concept, would you rather live your life being happy or being depressed and down about it?

To many people I'm sure that makes no sense, or it seems as if I'm pulling it out of my ass, and I'm really not shitting on your belief system in any way. This is just what I think. Some people choose to call me an optimist, but I don't really consider myself one. An optimist looks for the best in every situation, by definition. I just believe that in the end things will work out, and if I feel better having fun with things and thinking about things that make me happy, then I've lived a more fulfilling and fun life than someone who dwells on things they can't change and that which drags them down.

I used to be a pessimist, angry and upset at a lot of things. I dwelled on the future and the past and what other people thought. I can't say that Neon Genesis Evangelion was what rewrote my thoughts on life, but I can say with a certainty that it was one of many things that contributed to it. There are 2 corollaries to the above philosophy.

Corollary 1: Don't be a dick to other people. Help and be a generous person if you like, but above all else, simply don't fuck people over.

Corollary 2: The Eva principle. Whatever joy, however little it may be, one gets out of life, is worth the pain endured to reach it.

So, there you go. Probably way more about me and my way of thinking than you ever wanted to know. But, now that you know all that, I return to my original point. That guy was a dipshit. Not because he killed his mom, but because he didn't fucking get it. Not only didn't he get NGE, he didn't fucking get life. Good fucking riddance when they kill the bastard for what he did.

/i'm so fucked up

Macs suck ass, redux

I was fresh off my mac rant, and feeling far better, on Wednesday. I thought, with the Fetch FTP problem fixed, I would be able to stay away from them for a while. Oh, how very, very wrong I was. We've been having a problem getting the macs in our building to sync up with our managed servers for NAV (Norton Anti-Virus for the illiterate). Long story and needlessly complicated, but, in essence, the macs were causing a problem where the PCs work perfectly fine. Are you surprised? Naaaah, me neither. Since the universe hasn't accepted my "stop helping the dipshits" policy yet, we're pretty much obligated to fix these damn things. An internal FTP with the virus defs is set up, and we head off to the nearest mac we can find to test this shit out. It was the worst of bad omens when we couldn't even find a web browser on the first mac we came across. Ugh. We then find IE, only to find that NAV isn't even installed on this POS (acronyms rock). On to another crapintosh (haha! look what I did! I changed the first part of the name to crap to facilitate making fun of it!) and began work again. Blah blah blah. I really don't feel like recounting the entire story at the moment, mostly cause I'm very tired, if it wasn't blatantly obvious already, considering I can't even stay on my own damn topic. So, several uninstall attempts, several reinstall attempts, tons of swearing, and a whole bunch of failed reboots later, we're absolutely nofuckingwhere new. Somewhere along the line our boss stopped by and asked us if we had gotten a sad mac face. I mentioned that seeing a frowning, unhappy mac would make it as if the angels themselves had smiled upon me, so I later did a GIS for 'sad mac' and, indeed, their frowns made me smile. I hate to think that macs may be happy. Whenever I think of a mac blissfully running, having fooled its hippie owner into thinking it's an actual useful peice of machinery, I become sad. Thinking of macs realizing that people are on to their fucking bullshit, depressed because their days are numbered,simply places me in euphoria. The link in the name of this post is a link to my favorite one of these sad macs. I'm thinking of making it a permanent fixture somewhere on this page, possibly in the top left hand corner, so every time I visit my FTOTITHSOI I'll become uncontrollably happy.

Also at work sometime last week, I was shown an unbelievably funny video parody of those fucking mac switch campaigns that they did a while back, whose only good contributions to society were that stoner chick (she wasn't actually stoned, she's said, but full of cold medicine. uh huh. whatever, pothead) and a slew of parodies. Penny arcade, Dave Chapelle, and this.

I'm exhausted. I don't know why I'm still up. Really. I'm dead. I just had to put that out there, and I dunno why. I slept too much today as it was already. Ah well, to hell with it. I'm going to sleep.

/the united states of america - we wash our asses

Damn you, Diablo II! Damn you, Blizzard!

So, yeah, I did a couple site updates that I said I was gonna do last weekend. Only a week late. Not that bad. Shut up. It's not. Leave me alone. No, seriously, shut up. Only a week. Lalalalalala. Not listening.

In any case.

So, yeah, links are actually linked, and I switched the visited links and non-visisted links color, cause I thought that green looked really cool. New punk rock quote also. Bit of worthless Steve trivia that no one cares about: Dookie by Green Day was the first Cd I ever owned, from way back on my 12th birthday, with my first Cd player. Yeah, but I heard that song on the radio the other day and it reminded me how much I friggin' love it.

So Diablo II has hooked me again. If you've never been a slave to Blizzard's Evil-slaughtering power-leveling character-twinking sorta-MMORPG, this may seem odd to you, and, yeah, it's unbelievably odd that I keep coming back. If you're currently enslaved or once were, however, you can do nothing but shake your head and sigh, knowing that one day, one day , It'll come get you too. As I said the other night, it's almost like I'm suffering from some odd form of Battered Wife Syndrome, called Frustrated Gamer Syndrome. With FGS, I know if I begin playing D2 again, It'll piss me off immensely. I know it will eat hours and hours of my life, every day, for months. I know that in the end I'm just going to stop using this character and make another one cause the build sounds cool. I know I'm going to get beat to that kickass unique that Baal drops, and I know I'm going to begin screaming profanities at my computer, my still-slightly-less-than-lightning-fast-reflexes, my mouse, Baal, the game, the bastard that got my item, and any people and/or things in the general vicinity.

And yet still, I always come back. I can't get away. I enjoy it, in some twisted, perverted way. There's so little of the game that I actually enjoy. I hate playing with people on B.net, I hate the graphics, I hate the frustratingass enemies. It has no story to speak of once you play through it the first time, no character development at all. I've done every quest a hundred times. The only thing that still keeps me playing are character builds that I think would be cool, and looking for new items. That such stupid little pittances can keep me investing thousands of hours into a game against the relative anger it causes me in nearly every other aspect gives me more introspection into my own soul and personality than pretty much anything else ever, and it is cold in my heart. I don't know if I can ever escape for longer than a few months at a time. I really don't. What the fuck is wrong with me?

Whew.

Anyway, there are a few more things I could write about, and I probably will later today. But as for right now, I can feel my arm begin twitching uncontrollably. I want to reach for my D2:LOD disc and place it in my computer. Alternately I want to go sit in the fart chair and play FFX-2 all day. Between the two of them, if I don't satiate one of my two gaming urges within the next couple minutes, I think there's a good chance I may be rend in twain. And, since I have no death wish, I think imma go get my game on.

/and they compel others compulsively until the world is all like them

Not quite as bad!

Well, lookie lookie. I abandoned the bastardized base template and replaced it with one I made myself. It has two colors and six fonts! Goooooo web design! Anyway, it's easier on the eyes, and dark blue kicks the ass. I've got a place up there for the crazy punk rock quote, but I think the font for that may be too small, we'll have to see. I've also got links, but I'm too lazy to link them ATM. I'll fix that soon enough, and add a whole crap ton more. I'd like to throw some pics on here, once again I'm just too lazy right now. Perhaps over the weekend. Definitely over the weekend. *attemps to convince self*

Anyway, I think I may still be able to punch out another rant tonight. Perhaps a short, easy, mindless one instead of the far more involved one about punk that I've been going over in my head for the past few days. We'll see. Or maybe I'll just start reading something awful and get nothing accomplished for the rest of the night. I wouldn't hold your breath waiting. :)

/this is Buddy the Elf, what's your favorite color?

Macs == t3h suck

Alright, so, I have plenty to be pissed off about despite having an otherwise stellar day (at least before about an hour ago, damn frigging Microsoft product codes). But ah well, today is not a day for bitching about Microsoft, today is a day for bitching about Macs. "But Steve," you may burst uncontrollably, "you bitch about macs every day". True. Very true. Some days are special though. I eat every day, but Thanksgiving is a special eating occasion. Today I feel like some tasty, delicious mac bitching, not unlike the tasty, delicious turkey I will consume en masse a week from tomorrow.

I work as a computer tech for my co-op. Anyone reading this, of course, is already aware of the fact. I've also never really liked Macs at all, stemming from way back in the day during third grade computer lab, when we were forced to use the peices of shit because Apple has some sort of deal with the American public school system. Here's how it works, I think:

Apple gives public schools deep discounts on their retarded computers.

The schools agree to only use inferior computer systems that won't run software that anyone normal has, because they're getting said shitty computer systems so cheap.

Apple hopes that using their stupid GUI from near birth will brainwash young children into thinking they're "cool" instead of "utter fucking garbage", so they give the computers to the schools at a great discount.

Children instead still realize that macs fucking suck and resent their schools for it.

The students' indifference or even outright hatred at the school for forcing them to use Macs keeps them from putting anything into the community or showing any progress in their education.

Parents, upset with their children's apathy and lack of knowledge, vote down school tax mesaures out of spite.

Schools have no money, as such they need a very low cost computing solution... and they turn to Apple.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

So, I've always dispised macs (and the American education system, as it were). Not only did they anger me from a young age, but they won't play any games, are inordinately expensive, and ONLY HAVE ONE FUCKING MOUSE BUTTON. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU? ONE MOUSE BUTTON? ARE YOU A FUCKING MONKEY? ARE 2 BUTTONS TOO DAMN MUCH FOR YOU? Jesus effing Christ.

Alright. Anyway. *takes deep breath*. Whew. Ok. Now, here's what set me off today, especially. As a computer guy, Macintoshes effectively double my work, in nearly every aspect. We need to remember procedures for doing everything on a Mac in addition to the PC. We need to keep The exact same programs on hand for Mac that we do for Pc. Need to give out twice the instructions for the few dipshits who feel the need to use a Mac instead of Windows. If there's one thing I despise, it's doing excess unnecessary work. And Macs. I hate those fuckers too. Okay, 2 things then.

So the bastards in the advertising department use Macs, because they're pretentious self-important dick fucks (more on this later). Today, they had a problem with their FTP program, they couldn't get into an FTP server to get the pictures needed for their advertising dealies, or some shit. I dunno. So there were 3 of us: me and a co-worker from the internet services department, and another guy from the IT department. All sitting around this Mac, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with this FTP program. Trying to navigate the stupid, rediculous GUI. Using this fucking chooser, and doing the WHOLE FUCKING THING WITH ONLY A SINGLE MOUSE BUTTON. WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT DICK FUCK NUT ASS BALLS HELL FART BITCH CUNT!?

*slaps self*

Whew. Sorry. Jesus.

So, we're up there for well over 2 hours, trying to figure this out. The whole time, I can't help but think about how, if this was a PC, you know, which we actually know about and are useful, we coulda been in and done in less than 10 minutes. Because some fucking hippie decides he wants his computer to be "different" and "nonconformist", I have to spend 12 times as long fixing it? To hell with you, and to hell with your fucking computer.

People ask why I don't bitch like this about linux. There are a couple reasons, actually, but the first is this: People who use linux are computer literate enough to fix their own goddamn computers. 97.3% (estimation) of all Mac users are goddamn computer n00bs who call on people with some technology sense to help them when something goes wrong. They're also usually whiny little fuckers who don't realize that fixing computers takes time, especially when said computer is stupid and doesn't conform to the rules of computers that don't suck.

So, not only are they ignorant, impatient little bastards, but they also look down upon you for your pedestrian taste in computers that aren't florescent fucking pink and cost 3000 goddamn dollars. This sums it up just about perfectly, I think.

There's probably more that I could go on and on about, but I'm almost exhausted at this point. I do, however, have a final solution for the Macintosh problem: we stop helping them. People who use macs are utterly helpless. Sure, there is the occasional computer literate person who uses, and possibly even likes, Macs for their quirkiness. Or maybe they're just really stupid. I dunno. Either way, they are the vast, vast, VAST minority. Then, we the exception of these 7 or so weirdos, idiots who use macs will have no recourse when they stop working. This leads to two secnarios, both fatal for Apple computers:

1)The morons stop using their computers becasue they won't work. Eventually they will either shun technology and die, or make the switch to PCs, where at least their stupidity can be tolerated with far less time consumed.

2)The morons will simply buy new Macs when their old ones break, because no one will fix them for them. While this will push up Apple profits for quite a while, but eventually the morons will go broke, because Macs are needlessly expensive. They will run out of food and die. No more Macs will be sold, and the world will have less pompous, elitist assholes. Done and done, and the world is a far better place.

Well, there you go. Mac tirade done, and I feel far better. And hey, that was only 1 of 3 rant topics that I came up with today. We'll see if I have the energy for the others. If not, they'll be up sometime in the next day or two. We'll see how things go. Thanks for reading my stupid bullshit :).

/fuck you, Steve Jobs.
/In fact, fuck Steve Case too, even though he has nothing to do with this.

I knew I'd come up with something

See, I talk about how I have nothing to say, and 15 minutes later I remember. So, here goes the inagural mini-rant.

People overestimate the Bush adminstration's curtailing of civil liberties. I'm not going to get into the whole Bush, war on terror, everyone hates us thing now, but I'm sure I will one of these days. People act like we live in a goddamn police state these days. Pull your head out of your ass, you dicknozzle. Look around you. He's not a dictator, he's not a tyrant. Americans have everything so well off that they bitch about things to make it seem like they suffer horribly.

Stupid Goddamn American: Bush is a simpleton primate who should not be allowed to run a nation!
Someone from a backwardsass country that really is screwed up: Our leader approves of sending out mercenary guerillas to kill his dissenters and rape their wives.
Stupid Goddamn American: Oh yeah, well Bush passed the Patriot Act!

Fucking get over yourself and the patriot act. We've got a better standard of living and more freedom than 99% of the world. We have it good here. Shut the hell up. Sure, there are problems (mostly having to do with the idiocy of the masses) but look at it relatively, damnit. Blech.

What made me think about this in the first place was the beginnings of a flame war today on the FARK.com comments thingee (which I helped start with the post I'm about to reproduce here, thank you very much). I thought about what this guy said and posted this reply to it, and kinda touched a vulnerable spot on the overly sensationalist exageratory (word? no? not sure) liberals. Anyway, here goes:

Bush is a stupid farker

Hmm... no FBI agents in my cubicle. No transmitters in my wall. No tracking device in my ass. Hold on, let me try again.

We should never have invaded Iraq

Hmmm... still nothing. Oh well. I'll try to get word to you folks if they come for me in my sleep tonight.

I was pretty proud of that post. Anyway, I'm sure there'll be plenty more crap like this soon to come. I feel better now. Peace out.

/and then I'd laugh, cause I said 'cum'

Lookie what I did...

Let me tell you a story. This story begins in Matheson Hall, room 209, where I have to take my dumbass suicide-inducing accounting class.

As I was sitting there earlier tonight, my mind was wandering, as it so very often does, thinking of a bunch of random shit that no one but me gives a damn about anyway. Despite the fact that I know that no one but me cares, I told myself that I should be writing this crap down for future generations, when they'll look back and realize I'm a friggin' genius. Then they'll bring me back to life with their advanced technology a la that episode of The Simpsons. If you don't know which episode I'm refering to, then get the hell off my FTOTITHSOI.

Since everything is a billion times better when it's on the internet, "why not put my stupid brain farts there?" (or here as it were, I suppose) I thought to myself. Yeah, so, I started a blog. Only it's not a blog, it's a FTOTITHSOI. In fact, it's the official FTOTITHSOI. What's the difference between a blog and a FTOTITHSOI? Nothing, really, except when you tell someone you have a FTOTITHSOI they'll have no idea what you're talking about and won't make fun of you for being an uber intarweb dweeb. Not that I care, of course.

Of the 3 people who may look at this at some point, I'm sure they all know what FTOTITHSOI stands for anyway, but I figure I'd put it here for the hell of it:

Fucking
Thing
On
The
Internet
That
Has
Shit
On
It

Thanks to Smoker for the acronym, of course.

At the moment I have nothing to rant about, it seems, which is a shame, cause that's really why this is here. Ah well. Stuff will come to me in time, I'm sure.

If you happen to stumble across the FTOTITHSOI in its current, basic, stupid looking state, I feel sorry for you. However, after trying to edit the HTML raw and making it into a horrible pathetic mess, I decided to just go with the least offensive base template until a time where I can use a computer program to make up for my woeful inadequacies as a web designer. It still won't look any good, mind you, but it might not kill you, as my bastardized original layout probably would have. Anyhoo, that's about it, I suppose.

/and I don't care how they spell things on the internet