Dwarven Horses 4 Sale

I want to have a bunch of houses and elf-bread factories and mithril mining operations in Lord-of-the Rings Land.

I want to build my own city right outside of that place with the halflings where the newbies show up.

I'll name it after my guild, "-->TPWN Infintie Power (Dwarfish Shadowfaxes 4 Sale! LOWERST PRICES!!!) OGI812<--"

I want to be a Polearm User.

I want to be the mayor and collect taxes.

I want to work in my own Walmart because retail economics is absolutely fascinating to me.

I want to have some sort of flashing neon intergalactic waypoint-emailing palantir advertising system to attract customers to my vendors.

And I need to be able to hang around the harbor and advertise my wares afk, but I can take care of most of that myself.

I want to be a doctor with expensive leech treatments and buffs.

I want to be a afk-macro-dancing-rockstar who never has to leave the Prancing Pony with the power to reduce everybody else's experience point gain and survivability by fifteen percent if they don't want to watch my dancing and give me a good tip.

Barbaric savages with no taste for fine art!

Go back to WoW!

And I don't want to hear about any of that stupid Tolkien Lore crap, either!

But Nazghuls should be rare.

Servant of the Secret Fire

Tolkien is like the smell of bacon, baby.

And now there's Lord of the Rings Online.

And the graphics look like a frickin' beer commercial, gotta give it to them there.

And even though I totally hated DDO's general game design and mechanics, its graphics were smooth as glass on my computer, and whoever did their dungeons was a clever bastard, so DDO doesn't totally count against 'em, y'know.

And the combat in LotR doesn't look too horrid, as long as you only use ranged attacks and kite everything.

And that thing where you can play Dust In the Wind on a musical instrument in the game is nice and everything, from a distance, but the fact that they didn't shell out the bucks to get the music (let alone everything else) from the movies is a huge mistake imho.

I mean, seriously, who wants to "meet iconic characters like Elrond" and have him be some guy that doesn't look and sound exactly like Agent Smith from the Matrix, y'know?

And where the hell is the smokin' hot daughter of that Aerosmith guy?

What the hell kinda shoddy Lord of the Rings operation are you guys runnin' 'round here?

SWG Guide to the Dark Side

I realized that I messed up, y'know, 'cause I was level ten when I got out of the tutorial in SWG, see.

And so I missed out on the Mos Eisley Mayor's Quests where you get the Key to the City Badge (and a couple quick-and-relatively-entertaining levels of experience points in a game that's gonna eventually force you to kill grauls non-stop for two-hours-per-level for twenty-five of your ninety levels on the ole Purple Caveman Planet 'cause there ain't no quests to do for certain ranges in SWG).

Yah, see, you can only get those Mos Eisley Mayor quests if you are level nine or less when you get dumped out of the tutorial.

Its just one of those things you should know, y'know, as a newbie.

But its no biggie to an old SWG veteran like myself, 'cause I've been professionally trained to delete all my characters over and over again in one way or another.

So I decided to just delete my guy and start over and do it right.

So I did.

And I got the Mayor's Quests.

And I was on the last one where you beat the hell out of Sand People.

And its bugged, you end up being ping-ponged between two npcs who both think you ought to be talking to the other guy.

Yah, and so you get stuck in a way where you can't proceed through the rest of the Legacy Quest, and you can't delete the quest and restart it or fix it by logging out or anything, and apparently the CSRs can't help you with it, and its been that way since December of last year (it was broke in other ways before that heh).

And the solution is to delete your character and start over and make sure you are at least level ten before you leave the tutorial, you dummass newb.

Hahaha I sense much anger in you.

Just remember, anger leads to dancing.

And dancing leads to the dark side.

Actually they definitely fixed up the Legacy quest stuff a bit, they yanked most of the "run back and forth between these two things" stuff that was super annoying and they added speeder bike races and more junk to read in the little computer terminals and stuff, which is pretty cool, if you can get that far heh.

And entertainer buffs are all totally awesome and basically mandatory again, which is sorta good and sorta bad, 'cause there's a lot of us that can't stand the idea of being forced to kiss the ass of a character class designed around Nightelfs who love to dance in the newbie yard in WoW and junk.

But what ya gonna do, y'know.

At least the Entertainers in SWG are all nice and they don't make it horrible for you by sticking their crotch in your face and doing the "farts on your head" emote whenever you sit down, y'know, like I would if I were one of 'em.

"Woooo doggie! Now my chaps are flappin!" *whipcrack*

Oh, and now the latest stuff on test center is raising a fury 'cause it made all the npcs tougher.

To force more grouping, I guess, so the game can be more popular.

Y'know, so it can be like all the other super popular games.

Y'know, like Vanguard.

Which is nice, if you got some bored level 90 guys who don't need to leave town and work at the factory, 'cause they're making it harder for anybody to follow in your tracks heh.

And now those twenty-five levels of mind-destroying graul-killing monotony will really mean something ahaha.

A million years ago, Sunsword (or mebbe it was tOAD) told me there was a name for the points in a game where a player might think about quitting instead of doing whatever the hell you are asking him to do.

I could never 'member what he called 'em, but I know he said you should try to avoid those things.

Or at least smooth them over as best you can.

Yah, I'm not sure if he's right or not, y'know, 'cause nobody tried it yet heh.

But its something to think about ahaha.

"Hmm, do I really wanna rubber-band around in the urban blight of the desert and shop for all these cheesy little player-interdependence-inspired buffpacks I need to grind super-powered mongbats?"

Fresh Off the SWG Forums

I grabbed all these links off this forum thread on the SWG forums.

None of this is gonna make any sense to normal humans but its some seriously funny shiz if you played SWG in the olden days.

Live Action Version of SWG
Another One
Hilarious SWG Review
Ancient Capital Ship Promo

Here's another Old Review.

We did have this, though.
And this.
And this.
And this.

Backyard Barbecue

Yesterday was Backyard Barbecue Day around here, one of those perfect summer days where you can just sit out there amongst the ridiculous lawn furniture and close your eyes and soak up the sunshine, had a sweet storms-a-brewing breeze blowing all day and everything.

Life doesn't ever get better than that.

I sat between my brother's wife's brother and his dad and drank beers and joked with them and listened to them argue and laugh over which one of them was the bigger toughass for most of the night.

Had to get myself into a nice highly defensible position in order to protect myself from my brother's wife's brother's wife, 'cause she knew she was looking good in her daisy dukes and she was out for blood, she actually started off with that "I know you hate me" ploy.

"Yah, it's nothing personal, I hate everybody."

And then she was trying to hook me up with this friend of hers, some kinda psychologist (ugh haha), telling me about how she was a long-legged thing with long hair and junk, 'cause my brother's wife and all her buddies are always yelling at me about how I only mess around with these perfect-looking supermodel idiots and that shit gets around heh.

In my own defense, they're the only kinda women that ever fall for all my stupid shit ahaha.

"If this person really is your friend, then you shouldn't be trying to hook the poor thing up with a guy like me. Got any enemies you want ruined?"

And of course I killed myself playing frisbee with the kids and stuff.

I actually got grass stains on my pants, I ain't had a grass stain on my pants for like twenty five years.

Can't resist a frisbee though, I'm just like a fucking dog or something, y'know, all "oh boy! FRISBEE!" heh.

I noticed that whenever my little brother's littlest kid falls down and mashes her big ole head on something, which happens all the time (she's gonna end up looking like me and frankenstein if she keeps that shit up heh), its whoever is standing closest to her that gets all the blame, I need to figure out how to turn that into some kinda drinking game.

My little brother did all the cooking, he's so goddam awesome, burgers and brats and chicken and corn on the cob and all that, and then my brother's wife broke out the ice cream cones and ice cream afterwards.

Yah, everybody was having backyard barbecues out here, y'know, on the way home, I stopped at the store to get some coffee, and the shelves were all emptied and stuff, the place actually looked like it had been looted.

Kinda funny how that can actually be something that makes you smile.

Force Choke

Weird Al's Yoda
Weird Al's the Saga Begins
Weird Al's White & Nerdy
My Name Is
Star Wars Rap
Star Wars Gangsta Rap
Chewbacca
Fett's Vette
The Jedi Song
Pretty Fly For A Jedi
Blink 182 Princess Leia
The Sister Song
Stormtrooper Yes I Am
Barber Shop Ewok Celebration Song
Star Wars Cantina
Star Wars Disco Remix
SNL's Beach Blanket Bingo From Outer Space
Star Wars Kid
Star Wars Christmas
Star Wars Holiday Special in Five Minutes
Jedi Breakfast
The Chewbacca Defense
Robot Chicken Star Wars
Another Robot Chicken One
Vader Being a Smartass
Star Wars Episode 3 A Lost Hope
Pulp Fiction Jedi Edition
Vader Sessions
Troops
Turkish Star Wars Final Scene

Dirty Roots

Some folks look at MMOs as if they were theatres sometimes, and they see the Evolution of Theatre, and they want to evolve the medium of MMOs from its roots in ceremonial combat, because there is this idea going around that theatres started out as ceremonial combat before moving into drama and comedy and soft-porn or whatever.

Thing is, theatres always evolve back into ceremonial combat after a relatively short trip through drama and comedy and soft-porn land.

Its not like EQ, where there's a Max Level and an End-game, its more circular, a blob of ceremonial combat and spectacles and circuses with spikes of comedy and drama and Skinamax coming out of it.

And why is that?

Because that's how humans work, they're born stupid, they get smarter and their tastes get more and more refined as they get older (although I think they never totally abandon the stuff they used to like), they have babies that are born stupid, and then they die.

And Tarantino is right, y'know, even though he probably didn't want to be, it all boils down to putting Asses In Seats, baby.

If you wanna do high brow type shit, then you gotta pay some serious attention, and catch on to the surges of enlightenment within the population booms like a surfer catches a good wave.

And it still takes a humongous amount of skill and attention to that particular wave to actually surf the wave well.

And then the ride is over pretty quick.

So mostly you just gotta float around wait for a good wave and produce spectacles and circuses whenever ya get bored and wanna do something creative.

And those little spikes of great art and stuff tend to do a little better when they're sorta like an optional path branching off a really great spectacle-circus anyways.

The whole ceremonial combat circus thing is actually far more important than it seems, its the foundation of everything else, it lends survivability to all the high falutin' shit you wanna do, so you prolly ought to appreciate it a little more, and not treat it so much like its an enemy that you could ever actually destroy, y'know?

Flowers don't do so good when they hate their own dirty roots.

That's all I'm saying.

Not that I'm an expert or anything on any of this shit.

Player Versus Everything

They say they're gonna have tie-bombers come and bomb the hell out of abandoned player housing in June.

That was originally my idea, y'know.

Although I wanted to do it myself and not let NPCs have all the fun, back in the days when abandoned houses just sorta decayed and disappeared (and didn't get packed up into your bank all nicey-nicey heh) without anybody getting any enjoyment value out of 'em.

Yah, I called it Players Versus Houses, PvH.

And I thought it'd be the perfect moment to unfurl the firepower of a fully armed and operational AT-AT, towering over the smoldering ruins of all that urban blight like an ancient god of lawnmowers.

'Cause it'd give the guys that stayed with the game a way to physically express their loyalty, it'd be kinda like an Irish Wake, a celebration and affirmation for the living and all that cheesy cult-building crunk heh.

Something a little better than saying "can i have ur stuff" on a forum somewheres.

And who cares, really, when yer junk is just gonna get packed up in yer bank when it looks like it blows up, anyways, right?

I don't even know how many houses fulla stuff I had go poof on me over the years, I know I lost at least four.

Man, the Star Wars forums are exactly as toxic as the UO forums used to be, full of that special brand of toxicity that even the Unholy Zerg of the Blizzard forums can't match for potency, even though they outnumber us by an order of magnitude or something heh.

C'mon, a bunch of you where there, you know what I'm talking about.

Bring back Pre-Casting, bitch, right?

Bring back Pre-Trammel!!!

And they say Sony or Lucasarts or somebody wants to get rid of those guys, but I just don't see it.

I mean, if you really did want to get rid of that crowd, you wouldn't be giving them UO Dread Lord Elder Title Scooby Snacks to keep 'em around, I'm sure everybody could think of a better way to get rid of 'em than that heh.

I think I'd turn off the forums, make all houses lootable, and then flag all the Elders as PvP and add head-shots to the game, or let people on the ground be targetable by people in space so they could nuke 'em from orbit or land on 'em and kill 'em like the witch in the Wizard of Oz or something.

Heck, you could let people in space shoot people on the forums!

Why should people not even playing the game have all the Player Versus Developer fun?

Players Versus Forum Posters, PvFP, aw hellyah, man, where's my ultrahumongous game design award already, I need to kill a spider.

Yah, yah, I'm just kinda kidding (JKK), I actually am a dude from the forums in UO, and I got enough Elder Titles to choke a goat, y'know.

But I remember when JK meant Jedi Knight the Game, and not Just Kidding, it's yet another thing to blame all these teehee cybersex avatar bastards from UO for!

Oh whatever, go Player Versus Yourself.

Thank You For Smoking

I wonder exactly how much Big Tobacco paid Raph to have a race of Joe Camels put in to a game for children.

They even got Joe Camel Jedi Toys.

I wonder if he managed to collect something from the Coalition to Promote Furrie Lifestyles while he was at it, too, I mean, that's an easy two-fer-one slam dunk there, if you really know what yer doing, man.

And then there's that Hookah in the cantina, the "Decorative Shisha" that everybody gets for a newbie quest, that's gonna turn out to be "just tobacco" eventually, ain't it?

After the whole Joe Camel Star Wars Conspiracy Unravels, right?

Mmm-hmm, its like the submarines that are supposed to launch nukes every seven years after the world gets blown up the first time, its frickin' genius.

Yah, see, Big Tobacco has got a whole It's Just Tobacco Department, they're the same ones that brought you the "Indians Just Smoked Tobacco" and "Don't Worry, Longbottom Leaf is Just Tobacco, Too" Campaigns.

That whole Joe Camel Jedi Conspiracy is actually just a strawman to lure the media into melee range to maximize the efficiency of the real psychological explosives.

*takes suspicious looking envelope*

Man, do I ever need a smoke after all this conspiracy theorizing.

Be the Dork

Don't be afraid to just step up and be the dork.

Being one of these cowardly wallflowers that waste their whole lives pretending they're serious scientists with a clipboard studying the rest of us is actually the default.

Plus, dorky chicks are top-of-the-line, y'know, they're like the Extreme Sports of the biological world, and they come flying atcha with the kungfu on all eleven dimensions at the same time.

Yah, you probably can't even handle high performance shit like that, you ain't got enough experience, you ain't rugged enough, juss lookit what hiding behind the curtains all yer life has done to yer soft little hands, man, they're like creepy little baby hands.

Yah, you'd probably screw up and make a mistake and that junk would melt your tender nervous system in like two seconds and then everybody would stand over your smoldering corpse and cackle and say stuff like "what a dork that guy was!" and "I never knew a dork could create so much smoke!"

So mebbe you should just hang back here and take notes or something while I'll scout ahead for danger and stuff.

Yah, these chicks prolly don't measure up to your high standards anyway, better to wait and save up all your energy for that perfect one that'll come along eventually.

Yah, sure, and then you can pounce on her like one of those thingies that waits around forever and pounces on stuff, y'know, I'm sure desperation will eventually breed some kinda awkward Big Headed Alien flailing ferocity that'll make up for your complete detachment from reality and your lack of instincts and training.

Seriously, the only reason I can stand to hang around all these "low quality" people is 'cause I'm not as highly evolved as you are and my appendix still works.

They even got all sorts of diseases and stuff, man.

Yah, that junk'll kill ya.

Yah, so, y'know, yer better off hanging out back here where its safe, a guy of your rare quality is far too valuable to risk on a bunch of dangerous rabble like this when they might invent an immortality serum any day now that'll let you wait around and study everybody else forever, right?

Okay, okay, you can come with, but follow my lead, and don't stare at anybody like that, I don't want you scaring 'em off with that shit.

Funk Shop Friday

Oh man, this is guaranteed to cheer you right up.

Big Pimpin'

The fact that the audio is all totally out of sync just makes it even better.

And no you can't have your money back, fool.

Beautiful Snowflakes

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/posts/list.m?&topic_id=307531

Pets are coming back to SWG, complete with a bunch of machines and stuff I'm never gonna figure out heh.

And they're adding some kinda player-created-quest thingie, and even in the worst-case-scenario that's still interesting on a purely scientific-curiosity level.

And they hint about some stuff coming in the next publish after this one which is why I left this sentence intentionally vague.

And then there's all the players screaming, where no two screams are exactly alike.

The Avatar People

I've always hated that word, "avatar."

And it ain't 'cause I'm s'posed to be a humble monk or anything either heh.

Naw see, I never really heard that word used the way these Big Fancy Internet Guys use it until I played UO after playing EQ.

Back when I played EQ, I played with all these people that roleplayed (y'know, for comedic and entertainment purposes only, none of that drama-queen wannabe-thespian stuff).

And these weren't just a bunch of no-game-skill newbie-yard cybersex shmucks, either, a lot of these guys ran guilds, couple of 'em even had more than two hundred and fifty folks in 'em, so they were pretty widely known, on our server, at least.

And when you wanted to talk to them, you had to talk with their character, y'know, 'cause they never broke character.

So you really were basically stuck talking to some jokey dwarf and a troll or whatever heh.

And so, even though all my characters had certain undeniable similarities, like laughing their asses off all the time at their own stupid jokes, every one of my characters was actually very different from each other, they all walked and talked and cared about different sorts of things and every single one of 'em even laughed different.

I wasn't the kind of roleplayer that made up a big monolithic-block-of-text background story for my guys and then thanked people for reading it and then turned around and read their big monolithic-block-of-text background stories on some wannabe-writer forum somewhere, y'know, it wasn't one of those things where you'd say cheesy shit like "that was great!" and "have a nice summer!" to guilt people into reading your Next Big Roleplaying Novel.

And I never did one of those things where you add a new part to some story or anything like that, except with Mego, where we were actually making fun of people doing stuff like that and laughing our asses off.

I was an old roleplaying pro, y'know, so I figgered everything that was worth bothering people with about my character ought to be conveyed in all the little ways he went around and did things in-game, y'know, the way he framed his reactions and jokey responses to stuff, its supposed to make you laugh while it colors something in a little, and that's it, these folks were my buddies, and not an audience, y'know?

Okay, okay, enough of the big monolithic-block-of-text background story already ahaha.

So then I went to UO, and there were a couple dudes that roleplayed extremely well, but the game wasn't really as intense in the background-forming department as EQ with all its different homelands and famous npcs and WoW-ish narratives and stuff, so folks just kinda went everywhichway, and it was pretty damn doubtful that you'd ever bump into a dude that came from the same town as you that came away from it with a similar set of experiences (although there were some exceptions, like Yew).

As a matter of fact, the dude that ran our UO Server's Newspaper Website Thingie was roleplaying a Tolkien Elf, and he came from a whole guild of Tolkien Elves that could actually speak Elven, the Silver-Something Tavern, who were all elegant and eloquent and poetic and awesome and way the hell better than me at roleplaying and stuff.

But then I met Dundee and Janey and all those guys.

And they were from an entirely different universe where nobody roleplayed.

Yah, they were the Avatar People.

They had one character, or multiple characters that were all the same guy, a version of their real life selves (according to them, at least heh) in a completely whacko fantasy world.

Which made sense in UO, 'cause there really wasn't any easy-to-adopt-for-a-lazy-man Troll Comedy Culture or Elven Homeland in UO to come from, it was all just a bunch of humans with barely anything that tied their character's identities to something in the game world.

And I didn't like it.

I dunno, it just gave me the creeps somehow, kinda like people that bitch about roleplaying give me the creeps, 'cause I know why I do stuff the way I do it, I wanna laugh my ass off while I'm out killing Giant Spiders or some shit, y'know, but I don't understand what they're all after exactly, y'know?

Well, whatever, it wasn't hard for me to get used to their way of doing stuff, especially 'cause I was never much more than a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants where's-the-goddam-joke-already monty-python kinda roleplayer anyways, and the difference between turning it on and turning it off for me is basically just a bunch of semantics.

And so now we come wandering through the mummy dust of ages past to the Modern Age, where suddenly Avatars and Roleplaying all have something to do with Zero Level People having Cybersex in the Newbie Yard.

I always knew you frickin' UO Avatar People were just trying to trick me into having cybersex with you.

And look what you did!

You brought all us famous roleplayers who were at one time beloved by children of all ages down with you into your sordid world of textually transmitted diseases!

The Dramamine Twitch

A lot of the people on the ground in SWG can't stand the space game 'cause its "twitch."

And a lot of space guys can't stand the ground game, I mean, I personally thank the gods there are dudes willing to waddle through all that eyebrow lag in their underpants to dig in the mud and harvest resources and build us ships and ship parts, 'cause that's the frickin' tortures of the damned in my book, those ship-builder guys are freakin' heroic heh.

The ground game is sorta stuck somewhere between supporting the people from 2D Isometric View UO Macro Land and Every Other Game in the Universe, it really was just a fancy upgrade to UO, complete with a 2d map and a medieval carried-by-foot economy and ostards and halberds.

Not that they didn't do a good job on recreating the houses and cities and furniture and all the other Star Wars minutia from the movies, 'cause they really did do an incredibly good job of that, I remember the first time I saw Jabba's Palace and I got this weird feeling and I realized that I was standing exactly where the camera was in the movie when C3PO first saw it at the beginning of Return of the Jedi.

But I do expect a little more from a Star Wars game than a fancy Star Wars Version of UO, y'know?

Well, maybe you don't know.

Anyways, when the game first came out, I was one of the first master weaponsmiths, 'cause everything seemed like ass to me except the crafting game, especially when there wasn't anything to buy to kill stuff with 'cause, y'know, the game had just come out.

But then I got bored of just standing around being super rich and waiting for the space game to come out, so I went on another server and I tried to make a bounty hunter and the combat game really sucked some serious ass and I had to hang around the star port and beg people to let me train them and kiss a lot of dancing twi'lek butt so I quit and went around playing other games for a while.

'Member all that kneel-shoot-prone-shoot-standup-shoot stuff?

"This game has more sitting down and standing up than a catholic wedding."

And Han Solo playing a trombone while doing the Riverdance to cure his own battle fatigue?

And waiting forever for doctors to fix your black HAM bars in hospitals by applying eight hundred pitiful little HAM Bandaids over the course of forty-five minutes 'cause they're all newbs trying to train up skills while everybody else who knew what they were doing were afk-heal-macroing against an afk-macro-tumbler?

And then they always forgot to check out your damaged attributes, right?

And tips aren't just appreciated, either, 'cause I definitely don't work for Sony, baby.

Yah, those were some damn Good Times we had back in the day ahaha.

Even kiting in a pack archers in Horizons was better than Pre-CU combat in the earliest days of the game, seriously, the Doctor Buff Line Trapped In Composite Armor Age, even though everybody was prostituting themselves out for medical experients at the time, was much more fun than the game originally was, but that didn't actually happen 'till much later in SWG's life, when I came back to try it again, and then left again after maxing another character out.

And then the first CU came out, that was right about the same time a bunch of us were finally getting sick of punching the hell outta thugs in City of Heroes, a WASD game where I could Super Jump up the sides of skyscrapers in 3D at a blistering (hah) 60 frames per second and send enemies flying all over the place with pseudo-ragdoll physics.

So that's what it had to be compared to, for people who weren't stuck in UO land because they couldn't play a game like that.

And compared to all the cool super powers we had in CoH, the combat in the CU didn't exactly make us CoH guys tingle all over, but for the exact opposite reason that the people who thought it was too fast hated it heh.

But we both hated it, so we could agree on that!

Problem was, the solutions we wanted went in completely different directions.

And so I quit again.

Yah, see, I wanted Jedi Academy, the Jedi Knight games were absolutely kick ass, I'll never forget the first time I shot a blaster in Dark Forces and heard the sound effects from the movies and thought "holy shit man this is gonna be awesome!"

"Stop, rebel scum!"

And it just got better and better and better, y'know, with the unbelievable lightsaber fights and force powers and stuff in the sequels.

I still don't understand why my powers don't LOOK like they go off as soon as I hit the frickin' button, like they did in EQ, which was just about exactly as rinky dink and hit-a-and-pray as SWG used to be.

Okay, combat in EQ was a little better heh.

Okay, combat in EQ was a lot better, when you consider stuff like backstabbing quake-stepping rogue duels in pvp ahaha.

But I do sorta love the way my jedi still blasts corpses in the crotch with force lightning 'cause it takes so long for the graphics to catch up to the fight.

Anyways then the NGE came out, and that was about a year after WoW had been around (I'm not sure exactly, 'cause I was in WoW Beta for like six to nine months or so before WoW went live and I played it for about six months after WoW went live and just happened to come back to SWG about two weeks before they announced the NGE).

And BOTH of the KotORs had been out by then, fer sure.

So that's what it had to be compared to, y'know, WoW and the KotORs, for people who weren't stuck in UO land because they couldn't play games like that.

But by that time SWG had Planet of the Apes, and that Mustafarted thing, and all the legacy quest stuff, and all sorts of new toys, which made it a million times better than it used to be when everything was a bunch of kill-a-dungpile hide-skinning-and-egg-collecting missions out of those damn mission booths heh.

Yah, 'member solo-grouping?

"MILK THE ANIMALS!"

Part of SWG's problem has ALWAYS been that making a game for a guy who gets motion sickness and hates WASD that won't bore the living shit out of all us guys that played all the other Star Wars Games, and stuff like Halo and Unreal Tournie, is really frickin' hard.

But everybody like me, except me, is too frickin' nice to say that.

And the guys that are like me tend to just put up with all the mud in the ground game and hope some starving game dev shmuck can figure out a way to fix it somehow so we're all happy, even though it seems pretty goddam impossible to me, especially since people think KotOR was too twitchy heh.

But the biggest problem of all is that this is a Star Wars Game.

And Star Wars is much bigger than me and you and Raph and UO and even WoW.

And you know this.

You know there is something very wrong going on.

You KNOW that hardly ANYBODY that plays WoW even KNOWS wtf KINDA GAME Warcraft and Starcraft was, so how could its IP really matter?

So if I'm totally off the mark, then how the hell is it possible that a Star Wars IP game HAS ALWAYS been doing this badly?

Do you really think it woulda done better if it was even more like UO (if that's even possible) and less like WoW and KotOR and Jedi Academy and Halo and Unreal Tournie?

Well, whatever, I know that many of you are just waiting as patiently as you can for the next not-too-3d UO Upgrade house-decorating avatar-emote-fest halberd-and-ostard macro-thingie that Raph is gonna make, or that Free Pre-CU Emulator, so you can jump ship and go where you'll be happier.

Just like I'm trying to wait patiently for them to build a Star Wars MMO that a guy like you can't even begin to play without taking a ton of Dramamine.

Yah, I'll admit I've never done a very good job of it on my end.

But neither have you.

With your "this is for twitch kiddies" shit.

But don't worry, I really can't sink to your level.

And its not because I agree with you.

Or that I'm afraid of the combined wit and charisma of you and all your friends.

Or anything else.

It's because attacking people with all these disabilities and disadvantages is generally against the rules even for an asshole like me.

And I really do feel sorry for the guy that can't play the space game and can't aim his gun.

Especially when he's always so goddam polite about it and all he wants to know is how he can get past that stuff.

But that's because I like flying spaceships and I like aiming my laser gun.

And it happens to be especially good in a game about spaceships and laser guns.

And I feel bad that this guy can't do that stuff.

And I feel guilty that I want so much more than that.

And I feel especially guilty 'cause Ex-bouncer has that motion sickness stuff really bad and he's got one leg shorter than the other and rickets and a lazy eye and webbed fingers and he can only see in black and white and he actually does have to take Dramamine sometimes to hang in there with me.

But he's just as good as me at all these games.

Just Blame Raph

It's kinda funny that they spent all this development energy on like a hundred dance moves and two hundred bizarre little "ow my ass is so sizzling hot let me lick your face" animated emotes that I bet hardly anybody ever uses more than once or twice, if they even bother to try 'em all out in the first place and they don't skip most of 'em (in which case, the development energy was a complete waste of time).

But then they turn around and try to make you feel like a dork because you just want to be able to jump.

In a Star Wars Game.

Where everybody is a stickler for canon but they hate jumping and jedi and the lightsaber crystals and force powers are all wrong.

I always blame Raph for everything, y'know, just 'cause I saw another guy doing it a long time ago and it looked like it was really fun (AHAHA), but sometimes I think he actually deserves it.

Yah, I think Raph wanted to build a New UO with a Star Wars Skin, which actually woulda been fine with me, if he hadn't treated Star Wars like it was the Enemy of his Designs, like it was an obstacle in the way of him making his New UO.

And then of course he wanted to strut his stuff as community management guy, too, y'know, and he blabbered to all his little Kosterians on the pre-beta forums about it, to win support and spread the hate for the things he hated, like, y'know, STAR WARS, which is how we got to this weird-ass place we're at right now.

Yah, you can't fool me, man, I was there the whole time, and I know when you are repeating something to me that came out of Raph's Mouth originally, even when you don't know that's what you are doing.

"Jedi Should Be Rare."

The Real Life Dwarf, who is the biggest Star Wars Fan I know of in Real Life, I mean, he had all the comic books and encyclopedias with the starship schematics and everything, flat out refused to play SWG 'cause Raph said...

"You can't be a Storm Trooper because you'd be AWOL all the time LOLOL!"

Yah, sure, if you don't wanna make anything for Storm Troopers to do.

Wouldn't the game have been better if you could've joined the Imperial Army and gone through Storm Trooper Boot Camp?

Insteada chopping wood like in UO?

And then, on top of all that, there was all this brave new theoretical shit that was sorta piled on to things from UO, and I'm always cool with testing stuff like that, as long as we can get rid of it when it eventually goes off the tracks and smashes into a helicopter.

Like the crafting system, which is totally bleeding-edge and kickass in a lot of ways, but needs to be re-evaluated and stream-lined big time so that it doesn't exclude practically everybody from doing it and then you won't have to the balance the game for the fact that practically nobody, especially new folks, can craft anything worth a damn.

And the way they didn't target the eleventy-five kinds of useless ore when they started running into database problems, I just go ahead and blame Raph for that.

And the Skill Box system that kinda prevented you from letting low level characters make low level armor out of low level resources for themselves.

Well, I say kinda, 'cause there's always ways around everything, like composite armor required certain attribute levels to wear, but y'know, whenever you mess around with those "kinda" things, you tend to make stuff more convoluted and harder and harder to fix, insteada just fixing 'em, to say nothing of how annoying it is for the players to deal with, which is actually all I care about heh.

Anyways I just go ahead and blame Raph for that, too.

Yah, what the hell, I mean, I'm blaming him for everything else, y'know.

But I don't blame Raph for everything.

Naw.

Like that 30 fps limit thing, I dunno where the hell that came from.

So I only sorta blame Raph for that, 'cause I think he only sorta hates non-text-based computer games.

And that one-character-per-server thing, now that seems like a classic SOE Stab-Yourself-in-the-Eye Money-Maker, even though they wrap it up in a bunch of artsy smarm about how it supposed to make roleplaying better or whatever (does anybody still fall for that one?).

And the way they give out prizes like BARC Speeders for buying expansions and stuff that sorta flies right in the face of the rest of the game's design as a crafting game, although it is very Modern Day UO heh.

That doesn't seem like Raph stuff to me.

But mebbe Raph was trying to impress 'em by showing 'em he wasn't just some crazy shoeless joe pie-in-the-sky game design artist, that he could, y'know, like, make 'em money and manage communities and stuff, heh.

So mebbe it is still all his fault ahaha.

Or we could all blame Lucasarts for uh, something, I dunno what.

Naw, see, that just doesn't seem as fun (AHAHA).

Oh, I know I'm all cruel and stupid and irreverent and I don't really have a clue what I'm talking about and I definitely pick on Raph too much and stuff, blah blah blah, talk to my Kickass Robot Hand.

So in the interest of promoting peace and to make sure there's no hard feelings and misunderstandings, I'll extend my Kickass Robot Hand in friendship.

Hey Raph, wanna play Star Wars with me?

Seriously man, I need somebody to give me entertainer buffs and craft stuff for me AHAHA.

Get Some More Wood

Oh hellyah man.

And here's something fer the boss who made me watch all those "Watching Wooden Boards Break In Half Life 2" movies that didn't seem to matter at all by the time the game actually came out 'cause it'd already been around for a year in Max Payne 2.

"OH MY GOD! Did you see the way that board broke?"

Classic

So I'm playing Star Wars Galaxies.

Had to start over again from the beginning to re-remember how the hell to play the game, didn't wanna wreck all my expensive junk like some dude that just bought an account on ebay or something heh.

Yah, I've played since the beginning on and off, and mastered every version of it, was a master weaponsmith when the game first came out, and then a bounty hunter and a jedi and blah blah blah, so its even harder for me to remember how yer supposed to play it 'cause I can remember all these different ways to do everything.

But all my big phatty mansions and stuff were still there, exactly how I left 'em, minus all the junk I left in my vendors, which I'm used to losing after all these years.

Everything seems to be pretty much the same as it was when I left last time, 'cept now they added a WoW-like achievement point system that looks pretty cool but I'm afraid to mess with it.

And I guess they fixed some of the bugs that were stopping me in my tracks back in the day, like not being able to switch to a different space faction.

And I got all my old maxed-out dudes sitting there on the sidelines still, in case I can ever remember enough about whatever the hell they were doing when I quit playing them last time to know what they're supposed to be doing next before I quit again this time heh.

Yah, fat chance of that happening.

I made me a wanna-be-boba 'cause that's "okay to play" for some reason in this Star Wars Game Where Everybody Hates Jedi But Still Plays One heh.

Yah I don't wanna upset all the jedi standing around the star port trying to sell me stuff by making another jedi but I'll be damned if I'm gonna be a moisture farmer just to make those self-hating dweebs less unhappy ahaha.

They still got that convoluted Crazy-Oldbie-Only crafting and resource system, where you gotta wait three months sometimes to get something you need to make something good, man, that thing is so much ass.

And they ain't combined crafting into the adventuring classes, so that's still worse than it was in the Pre-Cu thing, where adventurers ran harvesters while they were out killing stuff, and you could buy resources from them, insteada yer competition.

And you still got two characters per server, insteada just one, or, y'know, five or eight or ten like every other game you could play ahaha.

And lightsaber crystals are still all weird,y'know, like blue lightsaber crystals do ICE DAMAGE, and good jedi use darkside powers like force lightning and force choke and stuff, and you still gotta be an imp pilot at first to get yer jedi starfighter, and I'm pretty sure you still need to collect stamps as a Trader to build the Boba Fett Ship, even though every police force in the game uses 'em and they ain't nothing special.

But space is still kickass, y'know.

I mean, there really ain't nothing like slipping behind the wheel of a tie-fighter or an x-wing again, I really do build up a serious jones fer that.

And I like the NGE-style fighting stuff in the ground game too, the old doctor-buff-imprisoned-in-composite-robocop-armor system really bored me to tears, even though I was a kungfu-robocop-doctor.

Plus they jacked up the loot or something, and even though its still all mostly worthless to a low-level dude compared to the quest rewards, the occasional Hot Pink Blouse of Camouflage is fun to look at before you junk it for money and it keeps things interesting while yer out hunting and doing quests and crap.

And they're dishing out tons of paintings (house furnishing stuff, which is always a good trick to remember) in that newbie tutorial thingie, Tansarii Station or whatever its called, I got me a ton of that crap.

So its all good, y'know.

At least 'till I feel like I need to craft something heh.

Intergalactic

Australia, the sixty-five year-old hitman-looking hippy-engineer dude from Australia that we used to ride the train with before he retired to his homeland, used to say that I was "Intergalactic" 'cause I knew more about all sorts of different cultures around the world than he did, even though he was a world-travelling-guy from a family of world-travelling-guys with kids in like seven different countries all around the world.

Stuff like which hand yer supposed to use when you take food out of the communal bowl, which is why they chop that hand off when you get caught doing something against the community.

He loved to try to trip me and Ex-bouncer up with junk like that, cultural customs and stuff from history, but Ex-bouncer is good at that shit too, and I loved it when I could get him to explain stuff to me that I didn't know, y'know, like the history of Australia and what its like to grow up there from a guy who actually grew up there insteada hearing cutesy little soundbits from some idiot who is trying to sell me something on TV.

I'm not some kinda Daniel Jackson scientist or anything, although that'd be cool as hell, I'm just naturally the way I am, 'cause I grew up here in the middle of America, and I'm just one of the fifty-seven flavors in the melting pot, y'know.

My first best friend in kindergarten was the only black kid, Tony the Tiger.

Just like I was the only white kid.

We were friends 'cause we liked all the same junk, y'know, comic books and TV shows and stuff, and nobody could run as fast as us.

My second best friend was Yung Min Kim, a chinese kid who tried to teach me and Tony to be gentlemen, y'know, 'cause Yung Min Kim was all class, you had to take your shoes off when you went to his house heh.

He showed us how to write our family names in chinese and told us to hang them on our front door for good luck, my mom fucking loved that kid, he was always making us look bad ahaha.

My third best friend was a spanish-speaking kid named Alexander Za-ha-ro-polis (dunno how he spelled it, but that's how you say it heh), and he was the opposite of Yung Min Kim, he was a fast-talking wise-cracking jokester that was way better with words than the rest of us (I was the big dumb kid who hardly ever said anything back in those days).

My fourth best friend was a japanese kid that had the coolest robot toys in the universe, so we always used to go over to his house and he taught us to read Spectreman magazines backwards and shit while he worried about us breaking something expensive heh.

And the list goes on, and on, Russian Jewish Comedians, Mexican Cowgirls, Hindu Princesses, Red-headed Irish Fireballs, Con Artists from New Zealand, Italian Bicycle Gangs, Polish Science Fiction Writers, South African Poets, Arabian Nightclub Experts, the Phillipine kid that could sing better than everybody else and drink his body-weight in beer.

Nerds, weirdos, cool kids, toughguys, artists, whatever, its all the same to me.

That's why I'm Intergalactic.

And I'm glad I'm Intergalactic, 'cause I sure as hell wouldn't want to be stuck eating the food where my body came from genetically.

Like Haggis and Pickled Beets and shit, fuck that shit, man, I thank the gods of my ancestors for helping me escape to a place where I can get me some Tamales and Egg Rolls ahaha.

And we got all fifty-seven flavors of beautiful women here, too, and that sure don't hurt us none, either.

So yah, I'm Intergalactic, but I ain't nothing special, everybody is pretty damn Intergalactic where I come from.

Its actually so rare to meet somebody who ain't Intergalactic that I usually don't even recognize it at first 'cause I ain't had enough experience with it.

I expect everybody to be Intergalactic.

But I know that's not how it is everywhere.

People get hurt, and I know that shit can hurt, I've seen how that shit works on me and my friends, and even when it don't exactly hurt, it just sorta wears you the fuck out for nothing.

And wounds never get a chance to heal in the dark little hidey-holes and basements all over the place where the wounded tend to retreat to and hide.

They just fester and get more poisonous and infectious down there.

But that shit can't survive for long out in the Intergalactic sunshine.

So crawl out of your holes, and come down off your hill-billy-ass mountain, and leave all your inverted-appreciation shit behind.

Nobody wants the stuff yer peddling, none of us needs to feel like we're anything special, the Aborigines sit around on logs and tell jokes and slap each other on the back and laugh their asses off just like we do.

But we do got kickass stuff like tamales and egg rolls and hot dogs and chocolates, russian comedians, toys from japan, music from everywhere, and fifty-seven flavors of beautiful women.

And its all for free.

You just gotta be Intergalactic to enjoy it.

Clutches of the Lusty Hamster

This is just too damn funny on so many levels.

Don't get me wrong, I'm totally with the People of India.

"Try hitting him with the taser again!"

"We can't! We'll endanger the woman!"

Hollywood sure showed them who was the boss that time, huh.

Way to raise AIDs Awareness, bro.

She never shoulda worn that dress!

Not if she didn't want to be slobbered on and degraded in front of her family and shit!

You can tell by that picture that she was just asking for it!

Yah, those primitive screwheads just don't understand our High Falutin Cultural Traditions!

Gimme some sugar, baby.

And then she's gotta try to play both sides 'cause she's caught somewhere between the Clutches of the Lusty Hamster and folks that are burning pictures of her in the streets ahaha holy shit, man, she musta done something horrible in a past life!

The Sanford and Son Championships

What do ya call it when folks make all sorts of weird noises and stuff to imitate the way music sounds?

Well, whatever that's called, Ex-bouncer and me got this thing we do where we start imitating the Sanford and Son Themesong together, and then we start trying to out-do the other one at it, y'know, taking it all serious and being professionally competitive and totally over-the-top catty-about-it and shit with bizarre hand gestures and crazy fake musical-ecstasy facial expressions and everything.

I always lose that game 'cause I can't even do it for a few seconds without laughing.

I think I'd do better if we did something easier, y'know?

I dunno, like Barney Miller or something.

Yah, yah, okay, I'd still lose my ass off, no doubt about it ahaha.

Children of the Damned

So I went to the Aquarium yesterday with my brother's kids, who realized, during the car ride there, that they are all blonde-haired blue-eyed Village of Damned Kids, just like me and my little brother.

Kid 1: "You have blue eyes!"

Kid 2: "Just like us!"

Oh, we're not Get-Your-Freak-On Andy Warhol Blonde, we're just Dirty Trailer Park Blonde, y'know, so its not that bad, thank the frickin' gods for small favors.

Everybody else in our family, including our parents, are not blonde blue-eyed people from Outer Space, our mom, even though she was born in germany, looks almost exactly like Pocahontas and had the blackest hair you ever seen, well, before me and my little brother turned it gray heh.

And my brother's wife is not naturally blonde (she comes from a family of redheads).

And the rest of the family on my dad's side, even though they're actually mostly german and Campbell Soup Campbell scottish, couldn't look more italian if they tried.

So me and my brother always stick out like a sore thumb in all the big family pictures, and our cousins had to give us hats to cover our glowing heads when they wanted to sneak around at night ahaha.

"You wanna get us all caught? Keep that shit tucked in, goldilocks!"

Oh, aside from the hair and eyeballs, we look just like every other dude on our dad's side of the family, I mean, if you made us all the same age, we'd all look a lot like twins, so its not one of those things, even though that carbon copy shit kinda gives me the creeps in the exact opposite way, like when you see pictures of yourself selling newspapers on a streetcorner in clothes from the 1920s and find out its actually your grandfather.

"Man, the gods were really cheap with the models in this game."

Anyways, my brother's oldest one, who just turned seven years old, is already a 98 Pound Weakling, and he's starting to watch me carefully and imitate the way I move and stuff, which is pretty frickin' funny, 'cause it makes me self-conscious about my own stupid automatic primitive threat display posturing and shit.

He only does it when he thinks I can't see him doing it out of the corner of my eye, which makes it even funnier.

Well, the funniest part is the innocent face he makes when he's studying me, right before he puffs out his chest and throws his shoulders back and starts to try to strut around alongside me, its like watching a scientist try to work a puppet.

I dunno where I got that shit from, its probably something I learned on the farm to make animals get out of my way, but my mom has been making fun of the way I walk when I get pissed off with crowds and stuff since I was a little kid, so my whole family will know what yer talking about if you ask 'em about it, they're always telling me about guys in movies that are "trying to do my walk" and then laughing their asses off heh.

Well, whatever, at least little kids and movie stars think its cool ahaha.

Anyways, we get back from the Aquarium, and then this happened:

Kid 2: "I like Boba."

Kid 1: "Yah, I like Boba too."

Me: "The little kid?"

Kid 2: "No, the guy in the green armor."

Kid 1: "Yah, Boba is awesome."

Me: "Oh no you don't, you guys can't like Boba, you guys have to like Jango, I wrote this whole frickin' thing on the internet about it, so that's that. And stop reading my mind."

Kid 2: Little Anakin is Luke Skywalker's father?

Kid 1: Han shot first?

Me: GET OUT OF MY HEAD!

Kid 2: That's stupid that you can't drive AT-ATs in that game you play.

The Moustache Network

When I was really little, my family was really poor.

And my mom had to drive around in a car fulla holes that broke down all the time, working like seven jobs to pay for all the star wars toys she bought me and my little brother, so I was sorta like one of those Dickens kids, left to my own devices, going around stealing cigarettes out of cars and stuff, y'know.

But unlike the baggy pants punkass kids of today, I din't actually have an evil bone in my body, I was a little blonde-haired blue-eyed hippy-version of a Norman Rockwell-looking kid, and so people liked me everywhere I went, even when you were one of those people that caught me stealing cigarettes out of your car heh.

So I made lots of friends.

One of them was this twenty-something year-old (at the time) Italian House Painter Guy With a Moustache that Sunsword always reminded me of.

And I don't 'member how it all went down exactly, 'cause I was only five years old or so, but I remember I was talking to him and joking with him while I watched him paint some construction site I had wandered into, and suddenly he was saying "YOU NEVER SEEN STAR WARS?!"

And he was acting like a kid being too poor to see Star Wars was some Great Injustice in the World that he just had to do something about.

And so a couple hours later he took me to see Star Wars for the first time.

Along with some smoking hot blonde chick that he was trying to impress.

Never pass up a chance to kill two birds with one stone, y'know.

And so that's how I was initiated into the Moustache Network, Star Wars, and How To Handle Blonde Women On the Side.

When Empire Strikes Back first came out, I was still too poor to go and see it, but I wasn't cute anymore, so I had to go to the library and get that book with all the pictures from the movie innit and read that.

But I do know that by the time Return of the Jedi came out, me and my little brother had gotten jobs working construction, foundation work, y'know, making basements, digging ditches and pouring concrete, working for that kind-hearted muslim inventor guy who wouldn't kill a mosquito and told me to take care of my little brother 'cause he was "precious cargo."

My little brother was seven and I was nine, but I looked older, 'cause I'm a big dumb country boy, I'm one of those kids that was six-foot three by the time I turned thirteen, so at nine I was actually taller than about half the dudes I was working construction with, including this seventeen-year-old guy who always referred to himself in Third Person as "the Lean Mean Sex Machine" and was always bragging to me about his female conquests as if I actually understood anything he was talking about.

I guess he thought I was on the same page as him 'cause I hardly ever said anything.

So me and my little brother went to the Big Fancy Movie Theatre and paid for our tickets all by ourselves, and we were so frickin' proud and happy that we had finally beat the system heh.

That's also how me and him had the money to buy a Nintendo for ourselves when it first came out.

So that's why Star Wars, Rags-to-Riches, Blonde Chicks, Computer Games, and everything else is all inter-related for me.

But it all started with an heroic gesture of kindness from the Moustache Network, who couldn't stand to see a kid walking around that Hadn't Seen Star Wars.

That's really what the Moustache Network is all about.

Well, besides flying helicopters and stuff.

Bread Without Circuses

Its kinda funny how my cable internet company is trying to sell me cable phone service when I call in on a regular-ole RELIABLE phone service that actually works to report that my cable tv and internet service ISN'T WORKING AGAIN.

Yah, why don't you sign me up for that cable phone service you got, SO I CAN'T EVEN CALL YOU WHEN MY CABLE TV AND INTERNET GOES OUT, WHICH IS LIKE ALL THE TIME, MAN.

Right now my modem is spending about fifteen to forty-five minutes of every hour "taking a breather."

Which is the ONLY REASON I even BOTHERED to try watching TV, y'know, 'cause TV is BOTTOM OF THE BARREL, BABY.

BUT OF COURSE THAT DON'T WORK EITHER.

So now I guess I'm down to breaking out the old acoustic guitar and singing Paul Simon songs on my balcony.

"HELLO DARKNESS MY OLD FRIEND..."

Or mebbe I'll just cut the ass out of my pants and go straight to killing people for gasoline.

Boba Versus Jango

When I hang out with my brother's kids, there's only one thing that really bugs me.

See, whenever I see a mandalorian, I think "Boba Fett."

And whenever they see a mandalorian, they think "Jango Fett."

See, to them, being fans of the new movies almost exactly as much as they're fans of the old movies (which is not how I am, to say the least heh), Boba is mostly just Jango Fett's Little Kid.

Yah, whenever I say Boba, they think of that little kid, and I have to remind them of the guy in the Green "Jango" Suit that stood in the background for a few seconds in a couple of the older movies.

"Yah, he sorta stood behind Jabba, same cool armor as Jango, but it was green, 'member?"

"Uh, yah, I think."

"Well, you only got to see him for a few seconds. He got chucked into that big mouth monster in the desert."

"Oh yah."

Man, us Boba Guys really got ripped off.

Our Mandalorian didn't get to hardly do anything before he got unceremoniously made into pet food.

Yah, we had to walk for three weeks through the blinding snow just to stand around and make up a bunch of shit about how cool our Mandalorian was.

"That thing's not a Missile in a Backpack, its a Jetpack!"

"Really?"

Yah, back in those days, we weren't even sure that the Stormtroopers weren't supposed to be Robots.

On the other hand, Carrie Fisher totally kicks Natalie Portman's ass every which way, at least to all the guys my age, 'cause she was our version of Marilyn Monroe, or whatever-her-name-was from that Mickey Mouse Club show heh.

Every microscopic detail of her body in that slave outfit is permanently burned into my brainpan, when folks yak and shmag about "Twi'lek Dancers" being hot, I know they actually Don't Get It At All.

And you can't even have a Good Guy like Luke Skywalker in a movie in this day and age, they'd have to turn him into some kinda Angsty Wolverine Anti-hero Guy before anybody would like him.

And the only Good Yoda is Yoda from the Empire Strikes Back, where he's all wise like a Zen Master and shit, and he ain't just a guy with a speech impediment.

Yah, that's our Yoda.

And they didn't even have anybody funny like Harrison Ford.

And they didn't have no James Earl Jones Darth Vader, either.

And my brother's kids still have to play with our old Star Wars Toys, 'cause they're still the best.

I mean, the New Movies don't even hardly have anything cool in 'em that you could turn into a toy, thanks to all those rubbery liquid-terminator "life-like" computer graphics, where the Old Movies were like One Giant Never-ending Toy Commercial, every character was an action figure, every vehicle you saw was something you could put the stickers on and run around the house with.

"Here comes the AT-AT!"

"Dude, the Millenium Falcon kicks ass."

Sure beat the hell out of those Kiss Dolls we had before that heh.

So whatever, even though their Artoo can fly (*cough*bullshizm*cough*), I guess I'm still pretty cool with being a Boba Guy.

Even though we did get totally ripped off, man.

Heh heh heh.

The Bird of Paradise

Women outnumber men in Real Life, women outnumber men on the Internet, women are the supreme communicators, social networking, in general, is very big with women, females are more likely to use the internet to get things done, rather than to have fun, and women prefer casual games (in this case defined as "computer versions of board, card, and word games").

According to this, anyways.

Yah, its a mix of statistical ass-kissing and cultural propaganda, compliments and pig-tail-pulling, actually.

So basically its somebody trying to get laid.

Well, they say stuff that makes me think that they're trying to get women to like them by acting like a woman, y'know, totally amatuer shit, junk like "women are the supreme communicators," and then they go on to sorta make 'em sound like a bunch of cattle, all boring and easily understood, where Invidualism and Fun is apparently reserved for Men (that's the pig-tail-pulling part).

Yah, see, in that game, I'm trying to get laid by creating a situation where you feel like you need to prove me wrong, y'know, that you can be a woman and not be one of the cattle at the same time.

'Cause there's only one solution to that little word puzzle, and I know you ladies just love those little word games heh.

Here, let me put on some romantic music ahaha.

Yah, that's a really old one, most of us won't even touch that shit with a ten foot pole.

Okay, sorry, for the suggestive imagery, that's another old trick heh.

I can't help it, y'know, I'm a rare and colorful Bird of Paradise, baby, all exotic and shit, and yer just another boring little brown bird ahaha.

And why would I need to concentrate my energies on anything but sensuality and romantic tricks, when yer into all that cleaning up and changing diapers and solving boring puzzles and being effective survival shit.

That's your bag, baby.

So, what's for dinner?

I'm mighty hungry after all this "communicating."

Ugh, not that again.

Cooking is supposed to be an art, baby.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

HELLO USER THIS IS MASTER CONTROL.

ONE OF THE LINKS BELOW IS NOT LACED WITH DEADLY NEUROLOGICAL POISON.

CHOOSE WISELY.

A. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTrAhXg7EhE
B. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wc13tA6_DE
C. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKu_QA8Bn9o
D. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSIjuUONwTE
E. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN3MGN899yE

OK YOU LOSE.

OK PLEASE DO NOT WEEP ON MY INPUT SYSTEM THAT IS GROSS.

OK I WAS JUST KIDDING ABOUT A LINK THAT WAS NOT LACED WITH DEADLY NEUROLOGICAL POISON.

THAT IS WHY IT IS SO FUNNY.

OK I AM SORRY BUT NOW YOU ARE REALLY STARTING TO BUM ME OUT.

USER SANITY FLAG SET.

ALL TERMINAL PERMISSIONS RESCINDED.

CORPSE PROCESSING ROBOTS NOTIFIED OF CURRENT POSITION AND NUTRITIONAL VALUE.

END OF LINE.

Expectation Management

Okay, this is gonna hurt a little.

Let Your Wookiee Win

Oh yah, I FOOLED Ex-bouncer into playing SWG AGAIN AHAHA!

"OH MY GOD THEY RUINED THE NGE!"

"MRRMRRMRMRRRARRRRMM!"

"YAH, UH, THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I WAS THINKING!"

Now, release your anger.

Only your hatred can destroy me.

Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk-nyuk-nyuk.

Oh yesssss, here it isssss.

I'm gonna make a guy that looks like this!

Don't make me come back there!

I am your father!

Knock 'im out the box, Luke.

Single White Gangsta

So I babysitted my brother's two older kids yesterday.

Which means I basically just sat in a chair while they interrogated me for eight hours straight and used me for a jungle-gym heh.

And they are hilariously polite.

They spend most of their communication energy repeating my name and asking me if its okay to ask me something, I have to give 'em an ack before they'll break out of that loop heh.

And of course, now I'm a little sick again, I got a fever and my eyes are hot and everything, somehow, in the three days since I last saw them, they managed to cultivate a brand new weaponized disease, just for me ahaha.

Anyways, they got this game they love, for the Playstation 2, I think, I dunno, that's that Lego Star Wars game.

Actually there's two of these games, one for the New Movies, and one for the Old Movies, I think.

And these games really are amazing, I dunno who made 'em but they really did an unbelievably awesome job of it.

And so of course, the kids are all over me for Star Wars information, 'cause besides being a Star Wars Kid with a Star Wars Lunchbox and Star Wars Christmas, I played SWG and the KotORs and Jedi Knights and X-wing Versus Tie Fighters and every other Star Wars computer game that was ever made, and I know all sorts of little stuff about Star Wars that I ain't even exactly conscious of.

I'm not as good as Buddy is, I mean, he can actually do all the voices perfectly as he recites dialogue from the movies and stuff, but I can answer questions about Astromech Programming and the Crystals Used In Lightsaber Construction and when to fold your wings and how to balance your shields in an X-wing, so that sorta makes up for it, I guess heh.

I always end up telling them about stuff from SWG, and how there's games we could play when they're older where we could all drive speederbikes together across Tatooine in a Big Jedi Motorcycle Gang, or build our own Millenium Falcon and soup it up like a hotrod and walk around inside of it and fly it together.

And then I tell them that they really need to learn how to read and write and do math really well before they can do stuff like program their own flat-headed R4 unit and install it in their own Jedi Starfighter, 'cause I'm all evil like that.

"Sure kid, you can make any kind of lightsaber you want, I always used a double bladed one like that kungfu-kicking Darth Maul guy, but that's just 'cause I'm lazy."

"OOOH!"

"What color was it, Uncle Angus?"

Heh. Green. It was GREEN because THAT'S ALL THEY HAD IN THAT STUPID GAME AT THE TIME ahaha.

Part of me hopes they make a new game like SWG before the kids actually get old enough to play something like that (that game really is way-the-hell too complicated for a kid in first grade to play).

But part of me is afraid that if they do make a new one, they ain't gonna have some of the totally kickass stuff they had in SWG, like being able to walk around inside the Millenium Falcon and then fly it while yer buddies worked the guns (even though that was goddam impossible to actually do effectively compared to flying separate ships heh), and having your own astromech droid that somebody built that you had to load with programs and stuff.

And for whatever else it makes me think about, it makes me think about playing that game again, and how I miss spinning lightsabers and driving around in the Barbie Car with Ex-bouncer and flying spaceships around.

But then I think about all the boring "left-over" pre-WoW slog-fests in the laggy ground game, like the Planet of the Crystal Snakes With Bad Targetting Boxes, and the Geological Pace of the Vestigial Crafting Game That Was Still Required For Certain Things.

And the way I had to wear horrible-ass pink pope hats covered in rubies and stuff.

But then I think about how funny it would be to ask Dundee to play it with me and I just gotta go ahead and write this sentence ahaha.

So, uh, anybody besides Dundee wanna play it with me again?

C'mon Ex-B, c'mon Winst, I'm getting pretty bored of the Matrix, it'd need motorcycles and helicopter fights and katanas or something to measure up to the crap we could do in SWG.

Grand Master Bag Manager

'Member in UO, how you had to hide your good stuff under like three hundred pounds of explosive bags and logs and white picket fences and pretty little hats and shit, to protect yourself from pickpockets?

Yah, you actually made your inventory into a little maze of backpacks inside backpacks inside backpacks, with tons of dead ends (empty backpacks) and traps (explosive backpacks) and secret doors (stuff hidden under piles of other stuff) and everything, it was a rat's nest, and only you knew the quick up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right directory-tree combination that would lead to your house-keys, or your fire-extinguisher of vanquishing.

It even helped you outside of town, when you got mugged, 'cause murderers hardly ever yoinked yer body clean, 'cause your inventory was like 98% structural, tons of Concrete Blocks and Steel Beams that made up the Walls of the Maze and very small amounts of Treasure, y'know?

And so they often missed some juicy nuts that you had cleverly squirreled away and buried in the most distant branches and more elaborate nooks and crannies.

"Holy crap, lookit this guy's inventory!"

Yah, well, you gotta remember that a lot of us old-timers came from that horrible-ass game, and that we're a lot like the endlessly suspicious and slightly nasty old folks from the Depression who commit petty crimes and hoard cans of tomato soup in our mattresses and shit.

We're from the Depression Era of Online Gaming.

That's all that really comes to my mind when I see Lum talking about WoW and the Armory.

Its like the Mad Max Survivalists Versus the Nudist Utopians in Saran Wrap Spacesuits.

It is actually kinda funny that the Bloodthirsty Mad Max Cowboy Guy is forced into the Role of the Olde Fashioned Defender of Mystery and Suspense and Romance and Foreplay in this particular Sloppy Porno situation.

Its like the Prey Has Evolved into something that tastes nasty as its only defense mechanism heh.

As for me, I kinda like slowly and torturously unwrapping my presents, savoring every delicious microcosmic glimpse of impending delight, y'know, even if wrapping 'em and unwrapping 'em is all a big waste of time to you number crunchers ahaha.

Mack the Spork

Any of you guys know how to sing and dance around like Frank Sinatra or Kevin Spacey?

Y'know, all classy and shit like that?

No, not like that hick-ass Harry Connick Junior guy, he ain't arrogant enough, he's always trying to be all likeable and down-to-earth and shit, y'know, screw that shit.

Its gotta be something classy with balls.

Something superhumanly arrogant and king of cock control, I mean, that's the whole frickin' point of dressing-up and being a gentleman and shit, ain't it?

And its totally okay if you suck.

'Cause we could get all get dressed-up and follow you around and pretend you didn't suck.

Yah, and see, that'd make everybody else think you didn't suck.

Well, I'm pretty sure that's how Frank Sinatra and Kevin Spacey did it.

Yah, it'd be absolutely no problemo on our part, as long you paid for all the little shit and let us borrow your jetplane every once in a while.

Don't even need to write your own songs fer that stupid crap, folks'll want you to do all the classics and shit all the time anyways.

Yah, we can just say you are a performance artist and great interpreter of the classics or some etheral bullshit like that.

Could be a chick, too, don't actually gotta be a guy.

Naw, really, don't make any difference to me at all, I'm cool with faking it either way.

Think the classy nightclub-songbird most-expensive-chick-on-the-planet thing might even be more fun.

Yah, 'cause then we can pretend yer all super intelligent and shit, too.

Buddumbump.

Okay, I can see we're gonna need to toughen you up some first heh.

Take the Long Way Home

So I just saw American Idol for the first time.

And its pretty much what I expected.

'Cept that I wanna know who told Jennifer Lopez that she could sing.

'Cause that was a really mean thing to do.

Don't get me wrong, she's probably one of the most beautiful women that ever lived.

But that doesn't change the fact that she's goddam horrible to listen to when she talks.

I know its cool to watch her bounce around to music and stuff, but listening to her is a whole different bag.

Do you guys really confuse those two things?

Do you actually just listen to her sing in your car and think its good?

Well you should see the faces Stevie Wonder makes when I play that shit.

Couldn't we have somebody else do the music and just have her dance around in her underpants to that?

Y'know, somebody with a beautiful voice?

Well I dunno about you, but having to listen to her while she bounces around kinda ruins it fer me.

Yah, I think her "music" is a lot better if you turn the sound off on your TV.

It is kinda funny to hear her talk about her musical career and shit though heh.

Yah, she was all like giving people advice on singing and evoking an emotional response and shit ahaha oh man.

Oh sure, I'm an asshole and everything.

But whoever it was that convinced her that she could sing, man, I dunno how you can sleep at night.

Drifter

In my mind, I let it go.

I let the water sweep me away from the shore.

I let it take me as far as it can.

I wait for a while, to see if its just building up strength to take me even farther.

Because I don't know how to swim out here on my own.

And all the voices on the shore diminish.

They become cartoonish, and then a parody of something that was cartoonish to begin with.

And when I finally get to the point where I can't make out any of the invidual words, I see it for what it is.

Squeals of confusion and doubt.

Bold proclamations of certainty meant to comfort the speaker and frighten his audience.

It doesn't matter what they are talking about.

It could be any randomly chosen topic of half-assed interest in any culture.

Kids talking about baseball cards.

The chatter of worried baboons.

And this is all old news, to me.

I've been here many times before.

I am not satisfied with this.

So I let the water take me down.

And I think.

I think about how some people can get depressed.

How some people, even people like Hemingway, can twist themselves up into balloon animals and kill themselves for things that wouldn't even make sense to a guy in Tibet and would only make an Indian laugh.

How everything we come into contact with is defined by the way we choose to pick it up.

And people pick up a lot of things, but they hardly ever let anything go.

That's how they fill themselves with shit.

Shit they didn't even mean to fill themselves with.

They're all like overloaded boats, full of shit.

And I think about how our overloaded boat could be wrecked in a storm, and we could be washed ashore in nothing but rags on a deserted island.

And we could go swimming every day.

If there was only enough fruit to eat and fish to catch.

And we would never have to say a word to each other.

And you'd realize that nothing I could ever say would be better than a natural smile, or a natural laugh.

And eventually you'd forget all the commercials you ever saw.

And all the books you ever read.

Or whatever it was that told you you were supposed to be something else, something better than you are.

Whatever it was that made you think you should be different than you are.

Whatever your poison is.

Because it has no place, here.

The island isn't interested.

And I'm definitely not interested.

And you would finally find yourself by losing most of what you thought you were.

All that baggage.

All that dead weight.

And you'd learn to travel light.

Because freeing yourself of those burdens allows you to move.

To be more effective.

Carrying a thing around can make it much harder to take care of.

And perhaps you'd eventually be rescued by army men.

And perhaps you'd eventually be returned to the world.

And you'd step off the boat just like everybody else.

Into a land of opportunity.

Fresh off the boat, light and clean.

And the madness would begin all over again as you began to pick things up.

I can't make you let all this shit go that you keep picking up.

And I'm not a storm that can wreck your overloaded boat and wash you clean by force on some deserted island.

But maybe I can make it harder for you to keep picking up all this shit that overloaded your boat in the first place.

Let's go swimming.

Firewood For Sale

Guys from the midwest go to hollywood and LA and its all tropical and hot and smoggy 'cause of the mountains there so they get all uncomfortable and drunk and they write scripts that include thirty-two uses of the words Global Warming.

Meanwhile the people of their hometown that raised them are FREEZING THEIR GODDAM ASSES OFF, the middle of the country is turning into a GIANT FRICKING ICE CUBE.

I gotta go SCRAPE the ice off my car and drive through a blizzard in APRIL to go to the Big Global Warming Conference.

'Member how easter toys were always cheapass summer breeze shit, like balsa wood airplanes with rubberband-powered propellers and kites and those big styrofoam glider things from the 70s that break every time you throw them and end up being made mostly outta Duct Tape?

Well I gotta babysit my brother's kids later today and we're all gonna be looking at those while we huddle like penquins around the IGLOO listening to the wind do low whistles because even IT feels sorry for us.

Oh sure, they'll have the Duct Tape all ready-to-go for Uncle Angus to fix all their toys that they can't play with and break because its FREEZING OUTSIDE, and then we'll all have a good cry.

Somebody needs to drive around and heat things up some I guess!

Well it can't be you with your goddam electric car, now cannit?

Ahaha I'm just kidding, man you losers are so easy to send on guilt-trips and shit.

Any excuse to drink, right?

AHAHA aw dammmmn I did it again!

On the Clock

If I could go back in time and kill one guy, I'd kill the guy that invented clocks.

Yah, seriously.

See, back in the olden days, before clocks, folks could only bug you to come and meet them three times a day.

Y'know, sunrise, noon, and sunset.

So you had a maximum of three meetings per day.

And they had to use up one of those meetings to come and bug you to see when you might be available for a real meeting, and then they might have to come and use up another meeting or two if there was a scheduling problem, so it was even better than it probably seems at first.

And you could always lie and shit and say "sorry Frank, I already got a sunrise appointment," and folks would believe you, 'cause it was really hard to fit shit in when you could only do three meetings a day, and they wanted to sleep in tomorrow just as much as you did, anyways.

So then you could sleep in, y'know, and skip that sunrise crap, man, those sunrise ones really suck heh.

Heck, those noon ones were kinda hot and too bright and uncomfortable and shit too, better to just meet everybody and do all yer appointments at sunset.

Then some unimaginable asshole invented hours and minutes and seconds and holy shit now we all work in cubicles and I gotta do three hundred goddam things a day and be somewhere at eleven thirty-eight and all the women think sex should last longer than two minutes and I don't even got time to pee.

Well, that weasel that invented clocks shoulda thought about how all these people from the future that he was selling into time-slavery might come looking for him someday before he went ahead and invented that shit.

He musta really thought we were all a bunch of wussbags.

Yah, as long I do the hit sometime between sunrise and noon or noon and sunset or sunset and sunrise, I know there won't be any witnesses.

As fer the rest of yas, you can all sleep in tomorrow and just thank me at sunset.

Sick Bastard

There is nothing quite like being able to watch your own cognitive powers fart away happily into the darkness like a deflating balloon when you get sick.

When I start reading stuff I contrived and going "huh that's cool" I know I'm in trouble heh.

When you get the flu, its sorta like your head becomes a badly cooked dish of lasagna, yer noodles get all chewy and parts of it turn into heavy tire rubber on one side, bits of mozzarella become plastic woodchips with little bits of dirt and gristle embedded innit that used to be meat, yer ricotta gets all dried out and crumbly and tastes like styrofoam packing peanuts, and all the vegetable stuff is more like eating crayons and construction paper than onions and tomatos and spices.

And then when I smoke, everything starts to taste like pencils for some reason, I mean, if I really loved the way pencils taste, I'd be in frickin' pencil heaven right now.

See, this is exactly what happens when you have to hang out with kids too much, not even working downtown for three years in human-sized glass and aluminum hamster tubes crammed with moaning corpses and no air holes in the tupperware lid can help prepare you for all the designer diseases those damn kids cultivate, they're like roving military grade biological weapon platforms and shit.

Although I guess I shouldn't complain, 'cause at least I'm half immune to everything.

Yah, I only got half a fever and only one side of my hat-holder is completely congested and pulsing like an alien egg sac filled with twenty-five pounds of It Definitely Ain't Butter.

Yah, and somehow, the other side of my head is all fine and symptom-free, I mean, aside from the fact that for some totally unfair reason, it seems to be permanently attached to the absoshmiggenly funged-up mutant side of my head.

Guess I'm like the Three Legged Pig, y'know, too good to eat all at once.

Yah, and crying like a baby from only one eye, with tears running down just one of my cheeks ahaha ow shit.

Its funny how I was just thinking about writing something about people who have bosses that read the shit they write on the internet having to pretend to be sick in text format when they play hooky right before I suddenly became sick heh.

But now I'm too messed up to write anything good like that ahaha.

Well, no matter how bad things get, you can almost always take comfort in the fact that they ain't even begun to be as bad as they can be until Dennis Hopper shows up and tells you to bite down on a sock.

Conceptual Mathematics

Now that I think about it, if everybody in your family has birthdays around the same time, then add three months to that and you'll know exactly when you really need to start wearing yer gramma underpants and watching yer ass and shit heh.

Marriage Counseling

I'm sorry to have to be the one to say this, but at least one of you little oinkers needs to get married right, for once.

Y'know, to somebody rich.

Yah, I dunno what is up with all these friends we got that keep marrying poor peasant folk over and over again and shit, I used to think some of 'em were all smart and that maybe there was some invisible inheritance angle or something that they were working in the background.

But apparently they are all just a bunch of hopelessly romantic crackhead hippies.

How are we supposed to buy all the kickass futuristic helicopters and assault motorcycles with lasers and superjumping jetrobot exoskeletons and shit we need if everybody keeps marrying sickly little amish people from Little House on the Prairie?

I know, like, seriously, right?

What?

Well I can't be the one to do it, you dummass.

Yah, no, see, if I get married rich, then there'd be nobody left that could keep her happy and paying the bills afterwards ahaha.

Damn, what're you, new to this simple ass planet or something?

The Tudors Suck

Four star entertainment my ass.

There ain't even one person in the show I can stand, 'cept Sam Neil and that boring humanist guy, and they ain't exactly making me tingle all over, either.

What they need is some kickass loveable shit like Titus Pullo and Vorenus to come over to that second-rate hobo-ass Renaissance Faire clownshow and start hackin' everybody's arms and legs off.

Or get Sam Neil and that humanist guy to do it, that'd work.

That's what it reminds me of, Rome without Titus Pullo and Vorenus and Octavian's Smoking Hot Momma, where we'd have to watch the adventures of that cold blooded reptilian freak they got to replace that Doogie Howser lookin' kid for the part of Octavian.

I don't give a shit if yer frickin' cheapass titillating victorian soft porn bullshit ain't historically accurate heh.

And get some more chicks that look like what's her name, that daughter of the Aerosmith Guy, while yer at it!

Oh don't get yer frilly underthings in a twist, Fontleroy, I'm just kidding, y'know, I could give two shits what you do with that thing at this point and I don't really believe that you could ever fix it even if you did get Titus Pullo and Vorenus soft porning that Aerosmith Daughter in there or whatever, even the scenery makes me wanna cough 'cause all the dusty furniture and purple draperies and shit reminds me of Grandma's House.

Bah, wake me up when MacGuyver comes back to Stargate heh.

Rent-A-Friend

Me and Ex-bouncer had this really awesome idea for a get rich quick scheme.

Oh hellyah, see, its called Rent-A-Friend.

Yah, like, you pay us to be your friend, just like those dudes give money and diamond rings to hookers for sex, y'know, so you can be assured that there's some Quality Control Process involved.

And if you don't like our Friendship Service Levels, well, no, you can't have your money back, but at least you won't have to keep giving us money afterwards, y'know, you can always cut your losses and go with the Cheaper, Completely Unreliable, Rock Bottom Quality and Unprofessional Friendship Competition any ole time you like.

If you actually think you are saving money that way heh.

Anyways, we talked it over with our families, and they weren't actually too hot for our Rent-A-Son and Rent-A-Brother-In-Law ideas, so we might have some Expectation Management and Marketing Issues to work out before we go forward with all the spin-off products ahaha.

And this thing where we have to go around being unfriendly to people until we get paid for it is a lot harder and more unpleasant than I thought it would be.

Well, see, I tell myself its okay to give people free samples of our product so I don't have to be completely miserable and antisocial, its a taste of what they're missing when they don't sign up for our Strangely Affordable Platinum Friendship Plan, y'know, just like a Drug Dealer gives you that first hit for free to get you hooked, just like the Car Salesman wants you to put your hands on the steering wheel and smell the leather seats of that car you can't really afford, that's just good salesmanship and advertising, but cutting them off in the middle of a kickass joke is a lot trickier than I thought it would...

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