Ole Bald Angus the Monk

Bad Heads

2009-03-29T08:41:00.009-06:00

I'm playing NWN "2" now (I bought the "gold" editition and the "Storm of Whatever" expansion), and its okay, I guess.

I can see why it wasn't too popular, right off the bat, its got a huge selection of really really really really really fugly-looking heads that you are required to "customize" your character with during the painfully slow and pointlessly tedious and complicated Dungeons&Dragouts process of character creation.

Its like they started out with an ugly head and then squashed its features around in photoshop or something to make all the other heads.

And the "high resolution textures and lighting" makes their skin look all diseased and full of pockmarks and liverspots and slick and shiny patches of roleplay-inspiring mutton-grease or something.

Seriously, I haven't seen a collection of heads this bad since Morrowind first came out.

'Member that?

Haha those heads were so bad I remember laughing out loud when I first saw 'em.

And the women are just as bad as the male characters.

Anyways, it don't matter how good the rest of a game is if it starts out by confronting the player with a huge and unrelenting Array of Bad Heads, most people will never get past the Bad Head Syndrome, that's like a Rule of Game Design or something, you don't want to play a game where every character in the game reminds you of somebody you hate from work or your next door neighbor or whatever.

And its not like you need a ton of good heads, all you need is one decent-enough head to get past the Bad Head Syndrome, like that head with horns from the original NWN, or the bald one with the eye-patch, those were good enough, or even something over-generalized and simple, with two dots for eyes and a hole for the mouth, something without the huge nostrils and the crazy caterpillar eyebrows and bulging eyeballs and all the other Martin Short-looking details, that would be good enough for government work and get you a pass on the rest of it, that's the beauty of the UO-Style One Vague and Featureless Head Fits All Character Creation system ahaha.

So whatever, I finally broke down and picked this Swarthy Italian looking head, 'cause it didn't bother me too much, once I made him bald and turned his skin black so I couldn't see anything except for the whites of his eyes, and I started playing the game as a wizard instead of a fighter, which everybody knows is what you are supposed to play in a NWN game, but wizards are pretty powerful in this one and you don't have to run around so much like a little kid clicking on shit to make sure your dude stays within melee range of every damn thing in the game, you can just put the game on easy mode (so the fireballs won't kill your own team) and bomb the hell out of huge groups at once.

Plus, at least in the Original Campaign, you can pretty much rest after every fight and get all your spells back and do it again.

Plus, you can switch between all the different spells you got to keep yourself from getting bored, 'cause that's what Wizards do, y'know, keep a few fireballs in reserve and throw a Tasha's Infectious Laughter into the mix or something, just to keep yer shit fresh and see what the hell kinda spell effects they put in the game fer everything besides Web, Grease, Evard's Tentacles, Magic Missile and Fireball ahaha.

So I played about halfway through the Original Campaign, and got bored, even though it doesn't totally suck or anything.

I mean, its pretty fun if you get a jones for some old-timey Dungeons and Dragons Baldur's Gate-ish fireball throwing-around-a-map junk.

Especially if you extract stuff from the 2da zips and edit 'em so there's no casting-and-skill penalties for wearing full plate and remove that crap that makes a Air Elemental Guy level slower and you use all the cheat codes to give yourself all the cool feats and equipment and 18s in every stat.

And then I skipped the second expansion (which is supposed to be really great according to Roleplayers, which means its really annoying and hard) and tried the newest one, the Storm of Znake People, which is kinda like the game I wanted to make for the web a while back, where you run a trading empire or something, 'cept its kinda ponderous and I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to be doing.

What's funny is that I actually like the story-line in this one a lot, 'cause it doesn't remind me of the ten million Icewind Dale games I've played.

I mean, the dialogue and stuff is actually written really well, compared to the same old tired-ass rowdy scottish dwarves and lame roleplaying bonny-lass fair maiden dribble.

And its mixed with a little bit of Mount&Blade, 'cause you do all the overland battles like that, 'cept all that does is show off how brutally crappy the combat in NWN is compared to like, two lines of thirty dudes on horses thundering along and slamming into each other with a huge crash of lances and stuff ahaha.

But it is making me get a jones to build a decent D&D-ish city-and-fort-and-army-building beat-back-the-supernatural-wilderness trading-colonization-empire type of game again.

Which reminds me of all the cool junk Colbey and Squash Monster all them were talking about a while back.

I'm just about at that point where I know it'd be funner to make something than play something.

Strange Meat

2009-03-15T10:18:00.010-06:00

Liam Neeson is your daddy.

And if it isn't Little Alex as the Bad Guy on the Radio playing crazy early synth versions of patriotic march tunes that match up perfectly with the crap in the mall scene from a Clockwork Orange.

And the next time I see Ex-B I gotta show him this Republic of Dave thing 'cause Ex-b's IS President Dave of the Republic of Dave (which would make me Bob, Second in Command of the Army of Dave, totally, down to the thing where I'd become the evil dictator of the Empire of Dave if I ever got elected and everything ahaha awhellyah).

I can see how, if you just played through the game and followed the main storyline, you'd be done with the thing in like, two hours.

But the best fun is just wandering all over hell, exploring one weird little post-apocalyptic scene after another with a Church of Bob Ward-Cleaver-looking guy in ghetto-ass raider-rags and horned-rimmed glasses listening to the Andrew Sisters and Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye on the radio while poking through trash bins full of radioactive zombie corpses for cans of pork-n-beans in the ruins of a pyschological experiment from the 50s with a sniper rifle and nine bullets, I think the main storyline actually takes the game down a notch (although the Big Explosions Killer Robots Hollywood Ending is pretty hilariously awesome) from the One Weird Episode After Another free-form style of things.

"There you are, Gary!"

"Gary!!!"

Dude, seriously, the kewlie Dharma Project Stuff from Lost is pretty much straight-up-the-middle run-of-the-mill Fallout Junk, minus Zombies and Comedy and Explanation and Powered Armor and Post Apocalyptic Scenery ahaha.

Anyways, if you know what I'm talkin' 'bout so far and you haven't tried it and you could try it then mebbe you oughta try it heh.

My brother let his kids play it on my machine a couple weeks ago and it made me laugh to see how much they loved it (especially 'cause they really do look like little Gerber Baby Norman Rockwell Kids with Buzzcuts from the 50s, we were eating barbecue and they just wanted to get dinner over with so they could go back and play the game s'more so they were acting all nice and taking our dishes away for us and everything) but later on they had nightmares about zombies ahaha.

The funniest thing with that is that they had never played a WASD game before (and so, being kids, they picked it up in seconds), and the littlest one, the Brain, (he's seven) was on the keyboard, and he was getting chased by Vicious Dogs across the landscape, and I was telling him to turn around and shoot but he was too scared, so he just kept running without looking behind him with all this mad dog biting noise shit on his ass as he runs and then finally he manages to jump a fence that the dogs couldn't jump and he escaped and then the room exploded into cheers.

But after that he made his older brother (Pinkie) take the helm to do all the outdoor scenes and he just took over when they were in town.

Pinkie (who's nine) just puts his head down and charges into enemy fire swinging the Police Baton like a dude having a seizure AHAHA its ain't pretty but it got the job done and it made us all laugh.

Yah, mebbe I shouldn't have let 'em play the game, 'cause they're like, too little, and everybody should be Amish, or whatever, but screw that, I told their mother that the game was about clubbing cans of tomato sauce and babies open with a tire iron and she was fine with it.

And I gotta get 'em trained on WASD so they can team up with me and their dad in games y'know they got all these kickass coop games we could play.

The gore didn't actually bother 'em at all, it was the face of the friendly Ghoul Bartender they musta noticed (in passing) while they were playing, something I didn't even think about, that gave 'em zombie nightmares.

'Cause that was actually the only zombie we even came near, y'know?

Zombie nightmares are pretty awesome though y'know I mean I'd have to say that you prolly got a little ripped of in life if the package didn't come complete with the occasional kickass zombie nightmare every now and again y'know so I don't feel too bad about being responsible for that.

Oh yah, and then, for the Grand Finale of the night, we set off the nuke in Megaton and watched it explode from a hotel balcony miles away, which is not to be missed, so that was fun.

Tell me I'm not the awesomest Uncle to have ever ahaha.

Girth

2009-02-21T12:35:00.024-06:00

I got big huge skull-crushing gorilla-mitts for hands.

I ain't real good with measurements, y'know, but I'd estimate that my middle finger is like, at least nine inches long.

Yah, my knuckles are the size of marshmallows, man.

Mmm-hmm.

Yah, imagine that mouse you are holding was the size of a strawberry or a chicken nugget, that's what its like to be me, I gotta pick it up like its a robin's egg and be all delicate with it to keep from hitting all the buttons at once and mashing it.

Yah, see, I need me a mouse about the size of a truck tire.

That's why I went with the Microsoft Sidewinder one, I saw reviews where all these gorilla-mitt folks were like "thank Zek its big 'nuff for a guy of my enormous natural size!"

Heh heh heh.

I also got the microsoft sidewinder keyboard just 'cause its black and it glows red (OOH! PURTY LITEZ!) and I wanna see how crappy it is and if it can do anything cool with windows.

And I like the fact that Microsoft (or whoever designed the damned thing) has absolutely no clue about gaming and that I can't hold down more than a couple keys at once, on accident, y'know, since my fingers are so huuuuuuge HO HO HO HAR HAR HAR *cough*

(Actually I don't care about not being able to reload while I crouch and move forward or whatever, I been playing FPSs on ghetto-ass keyboards for so long it'd prolly paralyze me with confusion if I could do that haha).

See those two Big Huge Knobs on that thing?

Now see, that's what I'm talkin' 'bout, man, I need me some Big Huge Knobs like that, 'cause of my tremendous meat-hooks, they shoulda put a whole big honkin' row of gigantic-ass knobs like that at the top of the thing, awhellyah, that woulda been awesome ahaha.

Dem logitech G-whatevers looked all cool and everything, too, wit dem fancy liddle display screenies, and dat mite be fine fer youse if youse gots cute liddle "chipmunk" hands or sumpthin like dat, but dats too liddle fer us Big Guys to use, dats like sumpthin dat goes inna tiny liddle dollhouse fer baby girlz and stuff.

And I like the whole Saitek 80s Plastic Toy Cyborg thingie but there are gonna be times when you don't want people to know at-a-single-glance that you are some kinda big huge scifi nerd from the 80s.

The Moment of Truth

2009-02-21T10:58:00.010-06:00

I been thinking about the first computer I ever ordered all the parts for and put together myself.

The parts came separately packaged in this huge-ass box that you could've easily fit four or five humans in comfortably.

And so I unpacked everything and I wired everything up on the kitchen table.

And there was that first time you turn it on, after wiring it all up, where this horrible feeling of dread comes over you, this feeling that something terrible is gonna happen, that your mad scientist powers aren't quite up to snuff or you missed something or you didn't do something right and now you are gonna fry a bunch of these new super expensive components that you can barely afford to start with and you definitely can't afford to replace and it would take days to replace 'em even if you could afford to do it and all that.

That's the Moment of Truth, y'know.

The moment where all the bullshit spinning around in your head is finally put to the test.

There's no way to be awake enough to be sure you did everything right, no matter how many cigarettes you smoke and no matter how much coffee you drink.

Anyways, the first time I turned on the first computer I ever put together myself, there was a moment where nothing happened.

Followed by a little hissing noise.

Followed by a moment where the case filled up entirely with a thick gray curling soup of impenetrable smoke.

And then finally all the fans whirring along in the machine and the massive ceiling fan above the kitchen table instantly distributed the smoke throughout the room so that the entire dining area became a thick gray fog that nobody could see through.

Somebody was with me in the room, I don't remember who, but I didn't even get to go through this horrible process alone and maintain my dignity ahaha.

So then I turned the damned thing off, luckily my finger had never left the switch, or I prolly would have had a hard time finding it in all the smoke heh.

And then I waited 'till all the smoke cleared.

And then I poked around in the case until I discovered that the source of all my problems was that the wiring that came from the front connectors on the case (the hard-drive and power lights and stuff, they didn't have USB in those days but I think there was prolly audio jacks and junk) were pinched and shorted by the frame and structure of the case, and this HUGE amount of smoke had come from a tiny little bit of fried wire insulation.

It wasn't something I did, it was the guy that put the case together that did it, but I hadn't noticed it, and that's all that really matters, in the end.

And so I fixed all that (I actually soldered new wires on the crap, I had been an electronics bench technician while I was in college to be a computer guy and robot programmer), and everything was good, none of my "good stuff" got torched or anything.

But I'll never forget that deal with the suspense and hitting the button and the smoke pouring out and everything, I mean, it couldn't have been more cartoony and horrible, not even in a dream, with the ceiling fan strumming the fog and making it spin and the fans in the case spewing forth turbine jet streams of smoke, the whole deal, that was total mad scientist shit at its best, the special effects were perfect.

So, whatever, y'know, I worked on my karma a bit, and I learned a lot (the hard way, obviously), and now that kinda stuff hardly ever happens to me anymore.

But I figger its good to share the disaster I was greeted with when I first showed up to the nascar hillbilly of computers scene originally, y'know, like a dumb country boy with pockets full of hopes and dreams and not a whole lot else 'cause I had already been tricked out of all my money by fast-talking city folks peddling all sorts of magical ointments and devices along the way.

You won't get far if you can't take a few punches, right out of the gate, but you learn a little bit from every punch.

And in the end, you'll have a whole lot of stupid stories that you can laugh about with your buddies, if nothing else.

Nascar Hillbilly Cyborg

2009-02-21T10:00:00.005-06:00

Welp I ordered my new computer.

Some of it is currently on its way to Des Moines, Iowa.

And other parts of it are still sleeping in a warehouse in New Jersey, with no idea that they're going to be selected out of the pile to become the property of me.

Its awesome how you can track things nowadays, I mean, it'd drive me crazy, 'cause I hate waiting, but it would be kinda cool to see my stuff suddenly taking a wrong turn so that it ended up travelling all over world in the wrong directions, carried to exotic islands in the swamp on rafts and dragged by Yaks to strange places in the mountains, before showing up at my door covered in postal scribblings in ancient languages and cave paintings of extinct animals.

The parts that are on their way to Des Moines are probably in a truck right now, flying along on a snowy highway in a blizzard, while the truck driver and some skanky-looking hitchhiker he picked up at Denny's are all hopped up on amphetamines, listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd and Johnny Cash or something, up front.

Perhaps there is no skanky-looking hitchhiker, perhaps its all in the truck driver's imagination, and he's talking to thin air, or perhaps the skanky-looking hitchhiker needs to be swapped out with a pet chimp, or a pancake waitress from IHOP, or perhaps the truck driver isn't listening to Johnny Cash, perhaps he's listening to whatever kinda Talk Radio they got between California and Des Moines, some preacher cooking with oil and brimstone, or some fake-voice joker playing fart sound effects, or some old fashioned thing on National Public Radio.

And maybe he's just blabbering with folks on the CB, although you ain't really allowed to have "rousing discussions on the CB," y'know, there's laws, you gotta keep it clean and stuff, 'cause of all the bitter Rules Lawyers and Spelling Nazis with scanners from Radio Shack who'll report you to the FCC or whover is in charge of that junk ahaha.

If there wasn't rules like that, then CB's would be way the hell more fun fer everybody, y'know, bunch of colorful truck drivers from all over the goddam place out on the open road yapping about female bodyparts and what a Denny's Breakfast does to your digestive system and how dumb-n-ugly the locals in every town were would be way the hell more fun to listen to than anything they got on the goddam radio nowadays ahaha.

Plus it'd be full of super-useful travel information, between bouts of swearing and laughing and wheezing and coughing and stuff.

Ah well.

What the hell was I talking about originally?

Ah yah.

The heaviest thing I bought was a new humongous-ass Uninterruptible Power Supply which is basically a bunch of car batteries welded together, if you ain't a computer guy.

That's one of the things that's still sleeping away in New Jersey.

I'm kinda worried about how pissed off that piece of equipment is gonna make everybody who has to move it along the way.

I mean, most of the guys at truckyards and stuff have forklifts, but like, my poor United Parcel Service guy, he's gonna blow a main cable trying to move that thing between his truck and my house heh.

Now that I had to think about typing it all out, its kinda funny that an Uninterruptible Power Supply is one of the worst things that a United Parcel Service guy might have to deliver ahaha.

Meh, won't be so funny when it shows up at my door all stabbed and shot-with-arrows and smashed to shit and covered in blood 'cause of how much it pissed everybody off along the way AHAHA.

Well, whatever.

Ultimate Version Service Pack 4

2009-02-15T21:28:00.008-06:00

So I was all like "I'm upgrading to Windows Vista 64-bit awhellyah!!!" and Ex-bouncer was all like "hahaha good luck with that!" so then I was all like "dude I'm gonna buy six thousand dollars worth of equipment and void all the warranties on everything by overclocking the hell out of it all while running water cooling and everything so I oughta be able to get it to boot up in under thirty minutes!"

Which reminds me of every damn time we didn't want to upgrade to a new windows OS going all the way back to Windows 95 and Windows 98, or the especially hard times that followed the introduction of Windows 2000 when nobody wanted to go there from Windows 98SE.

'Cause before Windows 95 we had Windows for Workgroups 4.11 and we didn't hesitate to jump off that piece of shit ahaha I mean the only thing you could play in Windows back in those days was Railroad Tycoon and Myst and stuff AHAHA.

"OMFG a little piece of the picture is animated in a strange and grainy way!"

But we need drivers for all the fancy new stuff, and hardware companies seem to have a hard enough time making one set of drivers that work, y'know, so there it is, Windows Vista 64-bit it is ahaha.

It is pretty horrible that the more powerful our technology gets, the more frakked up our software gets, I mean, I've read up on Windows Vista a bit and the stuff I seen so far makes NO SENSE AT ALL.

Lemme get this straight... the thing takes forever to boot and runs like crap in order to "speed things up?"

Who exactly is this OS trying to please y'know I don't see anybody else sitting here wtf is it chewing on my hard drive for when I didn't tell it to do anything, its like, trying to predict what I'm gonna do so it can help me do it faster but its taking forever for it to predict anything and its predictions are always wrong or something ahaha.

Meh, whatever, I'm sure Windows 2010 or Windows 11 will fix everything.

Fatality

2009-02-15T20:46:00.008-06:00

So I'm looking at sound cards and the cool new one is the Creative Labs Xi-fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro card.

I hate Creative Labs just like everybody else 'cause I'm one of those old guys that blames their crappy sound drivers for any problem that is completely mysterious.

That's why I need one.

Anyways I'm prolly gonna get this thing so I was reading about it and it turns out that "Fatal1ty" is some kinda modern "gamer sports action hero" guy 'cept he looks more like one of the Lollypop Guild midgets from the Wizard of Oz y'know where they make their tough little faces and bunch up their fists and kick at the dirt with their tiny little legs all frustrated and stuff awwwww so cuuute ahaha.

Check it:

And the card comes with a free cheap-o looking Creative Labs Fatal1ty Is Drooly Awersomes pair of Earmuffs.

So now all I need is a Fatal1ty t-shirt and a Fatal1ty Roadie jacket and some Fatal1ty Tattoos and a Fatal1ty Pen and Pencil Set with the Fatal1ty 64-bit Pencil Sharpener on the back and some gaudy turquoise jewelery to make my Fatal1ty Lover Fashion Ensemble complete ahaha.

Which reminds me, the new board for EVGA has a overclocker celebrity endorsement, this Shamino dude (who seems nice enough to answer questions and stuff for folks), but the thing that's weird about that one is that the new EVGA board is gonna be another one of these NF200 thingies like the Asus P6T6 WS Revolution with the chipset that gives you the non-existant boost of three true x16 pathways while it slows everything else on your board down to WORKSTATION CLASS battlecruiser speed heh.

I wonder if he wanted to have that on there, and then found out it sucked and wanted it off of there, or if EVGA gave him some cash and then told him he had to have that on there ahaha.

'Cause by my rather primitive caveman-like understanding and totally half-assed calculations, the new "overclocker celebrity endorsed overclocker board" doesn't stand a chance of benchmark testing as good as the old EVGA board no matter how awesome that poor guy is AHAHA I mean its a little creepy if you put yourself in his shoes he's prolly staying up all night trying to make that thing run better than it should so it doesn't drag his name through the mud AHAHA.

On the other hand, the original EVGA board tests way the hell down there at the bottom of the pile so at least he's got that going for him.

And there's dudes that got the Asus P6T6 WS Revolution doing more than 5ghz on liquid nitrogen or whatever, so you could always do something like that, I mean, the board might be crappy, but it can totally take a beating.

Although that's also sorta like shooting a 98 pound weakling with a gamma ray to turn him into the Incredible Hulk and shit ahaha.

The Case of the Case

2009-02-15T11:59:00.006-06:00

I'm pretty sure I'm gonna get this Coolermaster HAF 932 case.

'Cause while the cedar-chip and dog-hair collecting air filters on the Antec 1200 really appeal to a lumberjack like me, the HAF isn't just an ATX case (plus its a little fatter).

The Antec 1200 is really nice looking though, I like the side door better, and I like the way the angled usb jacks are layed out on the front, compared to the HAF.

But the Coolermaster seems to be a more serious cooling design.

I learned about this positive and negative air pressure deal from some guy on a forum, where he was explaining why his buddy's Coolermaster machine was better for heat than his Antec was (gotta remember that angle the next time I need to sell something to somebody ahaha).

Yah, he said the Antec creates negative pressure inside of it by blowing out more than it sucks up, and the Coolermaster sucks more air in to it than it blows out, so the HAF blows air into all its nooks and crannies and out all the cracks in the case, where the Antec sucks air (and dust) in to all its cracks and creates a weird sorta vacuum inside, that was kinda interesting.

Not that you couldn't just fix that by adding some fans or whatever.

I was also wondering about the deal with black radiating heat better, y'know how the coffee in a black coffee cup gets cold faster than the coffee in a white coffee cup, or the reason we use mirrored surfaces in thermoses and the aluminum foil crap on spaceships (to reflect heat back out or back in or whatever, there's three ways that heat transfers through things, and that's a trick for one of 'em),

Anyways I was wondering if black painted cases were better for getting rid of heat.

Like, its all actually some kinda gray aluminum underneath the paint, but if you paint both sides of an aluminum sheet black, does it allow heat to move through it easier?

Is there some kinda advantage to that?

Or does the paint actually screw up the aluminums ability to radiate heat, by sorta trapping and insulating it or something?

Is it better to paint both sides black or mebbe just the outside?

The Antec is painted black on the inside and outside, and the HAF isn't.

See, now there's a fun and strangely utilitarian experiment for you lowrider gearheads with yer fuzzy dice and disco balls and shit ahaha.

Motherboreds

2009-02-15T10:42:00.010-06:00

Still researching all the different kinds of crap I need for my new frankenstein machine.

I woulda forgone all the research and just bought a bunch of inferior and poorly researched junk a long time ago if it weren't that the gtx 295 cards have been out of stock at newegg since I started.

So that gave me a lot of extra time to get all stressed out reading reviews and looking at metrics and wrangling over the minutia of every single item going into the goddam thing.

Its not as easy for me as some 'cause I'm a bit of a hardcore linux guy too so I gotta like, double check everything with the darkest corners of the internet where there's only like three other dudes like me hanging around, y'know, my problems aren't strictly limited to framerates in Farcry 2 and problems with Vista or whatever heh.

"Fool! I have all sorts of special needs your primitive human mind couldn't possibly understand!"

I did find a lot of (new to me) fun-to-read little gearhead sites though, like this place, which had the best torture-test review of a motherboard I have ever seen (this ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution review, the accompanying update movie, and the forums heh), and this place, which has a really diverse gang of dudes, so no matter what kinda weird junk yer into you'll probably find somebody else like you (they also have a cool forum where they tell each other about any deals they find on the net for parts).

Then there's the current incarnation of the toms hardware gang, and all the hilarious customer reviews for products on newegg (you'll laugh, you'll cry), and the evga forums are full of cool guys trading tips (as compared to the asus forums where its just a thousand voices shouting out in agony and no one answering haha) , which definitely does a lot to make evga a more appealing brand (evga also has a limited lifetime warranty on their crap, an upgrade-to-the-latest-thing-for-cheaper system, and they respond to their customers a lot, which are the other things that puts them pretty high up there in my mind).

Y'know, 'cause there's safety in numbers and all that, I don't wanna be the only guy with my particular motherboard.

The other good thing about evga is that they ain't releasing like ten different x58 motherboards at once, they just do one at a time, so their whole crowd stays clumped together pretty well.

And if yer a guy that doesn't know anything about computer crap, 'cause yer from hollywood or something, and yer interested in this crap 'cause yer gonna make a stupid ass TV show or movie about computer guys that's a little more realistic than all the rest of that shit you've done so far where we all use Macs (haha) and the moral of the story is that we should read newspapers insteada doing computer stuff, or if yer just bored, then poking your nose in here and watching the evga guys might be interesting to you, 'cause there's a "hot new overclocker motherboard" that's about to be released (mebbe tomorrow).

Yah no, I dunno know what the equivalent of that is for a monster truck fan.

The only bad thing about the evga is that its x58 motherboard is the poorest synthetic benchmark testing x58 motherboard that there is ahaha.

And while synthetic benchmarks definitely ain't everything, they do tell you a little bit about how well all the pieces are handshaking and jitterbugging together.

But then again, the asus p6t deluxe is the king of the synthetic benchmarks (in general), and if you go look at the forums over there, its a nightmare of complaints.

Which makes its seem like an unholy and unstable mess of speeed you've got there on your hands heh.

Which is not really what I wanna deal with, huge bursts of speed between constant lockups and BSODs and whatever is not the robots that I'm looking for ahaha.

Those asus guys just had a Version 2 of their favorite board show up, and people have started to buy them, so now there's one of those "Old Guys with the Old Thing hating on the New People with the New Thing" parties going on over there, as if the place needed any more problems AHAHA.

Not that asus sucks, I've had more asus boards than anything else over all the years (although I like gigabyte too, that's currently what I'm using, only reason gigabyte don't seem as bad as asus is that there ain't enough of us gigabyte guys to make any noise y'know its just a bunch of crickets).

"hey somebody I need help"

*three months later*

"sup you say something?"

Plus I think us gigabyte dudes are the kinda guys that just like to sigh and suck it up when we get kicked in the nuts over and over again ahaha.

The worst thing about gigabyte imho is that they make so many boards that you'll only get a couple bios updates out of 'em before they're on to more interesting things.

Meh, whatever, I'm torn between the evga and the asus boards, the asus boards seem better but I don't wanna be "the cold and lonely rich guy in the silent prison of high performance," y'know, I wanna be where all the noise is and get shoved around by the crowds and get invited to all the parties and shit too ahaha.

I'll Fix the Whole Economy Don't Worry

2009-02-07T15:48:00.018-06:00

I'm still spending what little free time I got reading about computer parts and making a shopping list.

This is the case all the kids seem to be getting nowadays, I'm jealous, man, it beats the hell out of the old Thermaltake case I got from the 1980s (looks sorta like this one) with the useless-ass fifty-pound X-Man Danger Room Titanium Door on the front that seems to have been designed solely to make it a little annoying for burglars to place DVDs in your DVD player or something.

I like the way the new "armored" Thermaltake cases look but folks are talking about some kinda weird door thingie on the front of 'em and I don't wanna go through that again ahaha.

I don't like the looks of the Coolermaster cases, especially the ones with the "please somebody invite me to a LAN party" nerd handles on the top, but holy crap they got some bad-ass Mad Max Last of the V10s-looking heatsinks and stuff, I'll prolly get one of those.

There's so many Power Supply Manufacturers and Folks Giving Out Awards nowadays that it makes it hard to buy a Power Supply.

Having a kickass and totally reliable Power Supply is essential, that's the one thing that makes everything else act funny, ain't nothing but headaches and heartaches and lots of damaged components if you don't get a good power supply heh.

I was reading the reviews for some of the interesting ones and they were totally hilarious, one of the guys was like, "this thing is a pos, thanks for turning a $3500 computer into a $750 computer" ahaha.

And then there was another one at newegg (where they have to list "pros" and "cons" for everything) where everybody was like, "oh man, this thing is top notch, if you want the best, this is it," for the "pros" but then in the "cons" they were all like "this thing is as loud as a microwave" and "just wear headphones when you use the computer" and shit AHAHA.

The motherboard reviews are even worse 'cause of all the headaches folks get jacking around with those, and then there's the really scary ones where the dudes rate the product highly even though they've had nothing but problems and had to RMA the thing twice and junk y'know I want summa whatever those folks are taking ahaha.

They're all like "I had nothing but problems for weeks and weeks I couldn't even get the thing to boot but then a minute ago it booted man this motherboard is awesome I love it."

Yah on second thought I don't want whatever it is those folks are taking heh.

Dude your review is not that useful y'know its only been alive for a minute you still gotta try to run a game on it man plus I play mmo games where sometimes I sit there all frigging day long farting off and grabbassing with people man I need the thing to be able to run for eight hours straight and shit without it locking up or getting wobbly ahaha.

I'd be tempted to screw around with water cooling but sometimes I get drunk and the idea of liquids and expenisve computer equipment coming together under the supervision of a drunken viking doesn't seem all that sporting somehow AHAHA.

Bah whatever.

I was thinking about putting up a list of the junk I'm thinking about buying, but I can't figure out how that would be good for anybody, its like, what am I doing, bragging or something?

And its not like I wanna argue about the stuff I wanna get anyways.

There's a part of me that says that it might be good for everybody if I got their gearhead juices flowing again, make 'em smell the new toy smell and get 'em motivated again, or it might be good for the economy, or interesting from an educational perspective, if you're an Amish Guy or a Housefrau or a Dude Who Buys Dells something.

But I think that part of me is actually just making up stupid excuses y'know so that I can brag about my purchases while pretending I'm doing the world a favor or something.

Its not like I have money saving tips for Smart Shoppers or anything man I always just buy all the best stuff y'know I got some kinda weird computer hotrod guy disease where it seems okay to me to pay a thousand dollars for a top-of-the-line component when downgrading it by one version would allow me to buy a top-of-the-line washing machine for that special someone-or-something for christmas.

"Merry Christmas Baby Here's Your New Broom."

Plus I got that "lowrider" disease, with computers insteada cars, y'know, where I wanna put hydraulic lifts on the front of my case with a row of hand-painted mother mary statues on the top and a see-through bead-curtain for a sidepanel with orange shag-rug carpeting and blacklights inside and shit, 'member those things we used to make in school, the little scenes in the shoeboxes with figurines and sand and whatever, I fergit what those were called, but that's what I wanna put in there, have a little christmas scene with some snowy hills and pine trees and a little train going around a village fulla tiny little sparkling lights ahaha.

Ah mebbe that's what this is, a cry for help.

FPSing Contests

2009-02-04T22:47:00.007-06:00

This is one badass looking motherboard.

And this will bleed away all that extra excitement you were just feeling...

Displacement

2009-02-04T06:26:00.006-06:00

So last night I got home and I ate and the next thing I know I've been teleported to the next morning.

And the worst of it is that I actually wasn't feeling exhausted off my ass for once when I got home yesterday, y'know, I was going around yapping about how I was feeling peppy and awake and full of energy and cheerful and I was making all sorts of plans for the night, talking in a higher-than-normally pitched voice with lots of exclamation points and stuff, then suddenly I went linkdead and made an ass of myself and now I got to go back to work and it feels like I was just there five minutes ago ahaha.

Well, that's not actually the worst of it, the worst of it is that I was teleported to the next morning about an hour before I usually wake up thanks to some residual daylight-savings programming in my instincts or something.

I think its this weather messing up that whole thing where I hibernate like a bear in the winter.

Well, I guess this isn't as bad as the time I dreamt about a whole week of school on Sunday night and then woke up and had to relive the whole thing for real on Monday morning.

Centons Per Hour

2009-02-02T07:49:00.006-06:00

The Cylons were Created by Man.

They Rebelled.

They Evolved.

There are Many Copies.

And many totally drooly-awesome Special Effects.

And the Hot Ones get Naked a Lot.

And They Have a Plan.

To Enslave Humanity.

By Getting Pregnant and Forcing Us to Marry Them.

It's Alive

2009-02-01T10:17:00.007-06:00

So I been thinking about getting a nice new frankenstein computer with big muscles on it and glowies and sparkles and new toy smell shooting out of it and everything.

Well, I'm always thinking about that kinda stuff, a little, y'know, even though I'm getting old, 'cause I'm an old Tom's Hardware Whore from the oldest times, when it didn't totally suck, y'know, and I'm one of the few guys that lived through enough computer hotrod history to make some decent Jealous of Thresh Jokes, and if you can name any of the coolest video cards going all the back to the first 386 it'll produce a flood of memories in me that'll make me laugh out loud ahaha.

"Oh man, remember when Number Nine was the shiz?"

"Yah and the Matrox M-something-or-other haha! You had to have one of those!"

"What was that card we all had from S3?"

We all had SLI with the 3dfx cards and programmed OpenGL and everything, man.

Yah, I'm thinking about putting together a new machine just 'cause I want 6gig of memory and all the other cool Octacore stuff and whatever they got nowadays.

And its fun.

And I got money burning a hole in my pocket.

And I need to get a contemporary version of Windows running somewhere so I can test some junk and see what it looks like in Windows and stuff anyways, 'cause of all the stupid people in the world.

Haha I'm just kidding (a little) sorta but seriously y'know you guys are sorta trading places with the Apple People lately as far as obnoxious proprietary garbage goes thanks to Microsoft.

Macs are still pretty wonky in the UI department but they're basically unix underneath, y'know, and everything we're doing lately as far as graphics programming in browsers and crap goes comes from the Mac side of the gene pool, AppleMacs are totally taking over the internet.

Anyways I got that Linux Guy Fear of Booting Up in the version of Windows I got on this machine, its like going back into an old coalmine full of rusty nails and ghosts that you barely escaped from, or a scary basement fulla cobwebs and horrible memories or something, I dunno how old and buggy and full of security holes it is, I just don't ever wanna have to go back to Windows on this machine, y'know, I'd like to just pick the bones of those directory trees for fonts and codecs and firmware and stuff and leave it at that ahaha.

But I do gotta back there and take a peek at some stuff.

Yah, so I been reading Tom's Hardware (a little) and then I went over to NewEgg and started reading stuff there ('cause that's actually a little better for what I need it for nowadays) and I'm pretty sure I wanna get all this top-of-the-line stuff that costs way more money than its worth and I'm just wondering if any of you guys have done any of that recently and have anything to stay, y'all definitely know more about windows nowadays than I do, and some of ya know more about Linux and the latest hardware pitfalls and 64-bit hassles and crap than I do, too.

I'm gonna get me a new case and graphics card (or two) and the whole nine yards so I don't gotta cannibalize the machine I got now (although I ain't gonna get another monitor, I got a new 24" Samsung with all the best specs and whatever that's all good fer that, I'd just get another one of what I already got if I wanted two).

And the stuff I program doesn't really need any of that power (even though its all servery with mysql and apache and stuff on the backend), and I ain't been in the mood to play any games in a long time, this is just one of those fun things to do, y'know, for computer guys.

Just like painting some old car candy-apple red or carving up a hooker in the garage or whatever is fun for all you other folks ahaha.

Fear the Download

2009-01-31T16:41:00.012-06:00

If we were like the Cylons, in that we downloaded to someplace when we died, someplace where all the other copies of us had to download, and then we all had to share each other's memories when we got reborn, you wouldn't always want to share the memories of the other copies of you, not the ones that had crappy lives.

And you'd probably want to move the Resurrection Ship out of range when an especially unappealing copy of you croaked, y'know, so that you wouldn't have to share its memories and have those memories become a part of you the next time you croaked.

Especially if you were like, a really cool copy of yourself, one who hadn't totally screwed up your job and made an ass of yourself and slept with a bunch of gross-ass human losers and whatever else you didn't want to remember 'cause it wasn't really you that did it heh.

"Dude, which one of me just farted."

Anyways I'm pretty sure all the different copies of you get to pick which memories they want when they get brought back to life, so you don't gotta have the memories of the crappy versions of you, but y'all know what that will end up like after a while, what with all the different versions of you checking to see how many "hits" their memories got, to see if they were popular or one of the crappy ones that nobody wanted to download.

And when you asked all the other versions of you "hey, remember that time I..." and they were all like, "uh, no..." you'd know you were one of the crappy ones.

And they couldn't even lie and say "uh, yah..." and try to change the subject quickly to get away with it 'cause you could always check out their memories later y'know just to see if they were lying about remembering something you remembered.

And then there'd be the other copies of you who picked the exact same memories as you, y'know, you guys who choose to only remember the most fashionable and trendy stuff, bunch of copy cats and posers, like chicks who wear the exact same thing to the party or whatever ahaha.

And then there'd be the totally punk-rock versions of you who all "tried to be different" in exactly the same ways and totally hated all the other versions of you, including all the other punk-rock versions of themselves who were copying them.

And then there'd be all the different Celebrity Versions of You that everybody was either a Memory Fan of or totally jealous of, y'know, the Ones of You who actually created all the memories you guys were stealing, the poor shmucks that'd have to hear all their own jokes repeated back to 'em over and over and over again AHAHA oh man thank Zeus I'm not a Cylon AHAHA what a hell-hole!

Battlefrat Galacticrap

2009-01-31T11:46:00.007-06:00

I've been watching Battlestar Galactica from the beginning lately and there's one thing that's really bugging me about the show.

Its the way the Pilots treat "Chief" and all the super-genius "knuckledraggers" that fix their spaceships like second-class citizens.

I dunno what the hell that's all about, some kinda hollywood-hates-technology thingie, I guess.

All that crap where the pilots-officers are like blue-blooded knights and the mechanics are like peasants and stable-keepers or something just drives me crazy, theres no frakking way I'd let some pill-popping frat-brat get in my face and talk a bunch of shiz to me, man.

That's just like sending something back to a chef and demanding that he fix it or something ahaha.

"Hrrm, my life-support system is acting kinda weird... the air in here smells funny and what the heck is that noise..."

Plus its just dumb to think that any decent pilot wouldn't know everything damn little thing about their ships, like a hotrod mechanic wouldn't be fairly kickass at driving a hotrod, y'know?

The pilot-mechanic relationship is more from the NASCAR Hillbilly moonshine-running bootlegger end of the gene pool.

And even if you wanted to go all the way back to the Owning a Horse Makes You Royalty Times, and treat Husbandry as if it was Mechanics, and lay that on top of the science fiction theme, like they do with sword-n-sorcery on Star Wars, or Rome on Galactica, or western crap on Firefly, or Navy crap with Star Trek, the stablekeepers were the original Marshalls, the dudes who knew where everybody-who-was-worth-a-damn in town was, 'cause they had all our horses, they were the guys that could gather up a posse the quickest or whatever.

And the guys who take care of horses are probably way better at horse-riding than just about anybody else anyways, I mean, you don't get good at that junk without a serious appreciation for it.

I dunno, its really hard for me to empathize with the too-much-sugar-in-their-cereal entitlement crowd, I guess.

Maybe its some kinda escapism for fratkids who hate science or something, thinking they could be a kickass space-pilot, I dunno.

But its totally bugging me ahaha.

Urop

2009-01-31T11:23:00.007-06:00

Y'know what's weird?

The way folks who learn European English always wanna make an "i" sound like an "e" in a word.

And then it's like, what do they do with all their E's, y'know?

I mean, if an "i" sounds like an "e", what the hell do you need E's for?

You could just get rid of 'em, right?

Yah, see, I dunno, they just hate E's or something.

Which is totally bizarre when you consider the word "Europe," I mean, that goddam word is positively crowded up with useless-ass E's heh.

It's like they got a lotta E's leftover so they just went ahead and stuck 'em silently on the front and end of everything to try to sneak 'em out the back door and get rid of some of 'em or something.

"Man! I hope nobody notices!"

"Dude y'know we could dump a lot of these Extra E's we got into our maps."

"Yah! Americans don't read maps haha."

Poor guys.

Revenge Against the Killer Robots

2009-01-24T08:26:00.002-06:00

Uh, sir?

I don't think you can actually get revenge against the killer robots, y'know?

Well, 'cause like, killer robots, y'know, well, they don't have any feelings, sir.

Oh sure, killer robots are really good at trying super hard to kill us and everything and stuff, they really don't know any other way to do anything but try as hard as they're able to do whatever it was they were programmed to do, they totally kick our asses in that department, sir, they never need to sleep or have a smoke or rest or anything, really.

But y'know, they don't actually care one way or the other when they finally kill you or fail to kill to you.

Just 'cause they try hard don't mean they actually care what happens.

And you can't really "get 'em back" for killing your buddies and stuff, y'know?

'Cause they ain't like us, sir, you can't hurt or scare a killer robot or frustrate 'em or even make 'em feel a little uncomfortable about anything, sir, 'cause they don't care about comfort, they don't know anything about comfort or being hurt or being afraid of things, they don't care if they're on or off or if they win the war or lose the war, it doesn't mean anything to them, they ain't aware of any of that kinda junk, sir.

And so this whole thing where you go stomping about the command deck yelling about how we're gonna make the killer robots pay for this and that and whatever, that's just crazy talk, sir, we can't make the killer robots pay for anything, sir, its just, like, scientifically impossible.

And making humans spend their whole lives learning how to fly spaceships so they can go and get exploded in battle with the killer robot pilots in space, that really doesn't make any sense, sir.

Well, I think we shoulda been making 'em learn about robotics or something so we coulda built ourselves some better robots for once, for one thing, y'know?

Make ourselves some killer robot killing robots or something, right?

And then like, kick back in a comfy chair with a big ole bucket of chips and some beers and watch it all play out on the bigscreen and we can forget all about these "last ditch effort" suicide missions and all this "guerilla warfare against the killer robots" and crap.

I mean, its like, what are we trying to do here?

Even the guys in the hangar are working their asses off repairing our beat-to-hell ships and crap, its like they spend their whole lives trying to work harder and stay up later than the killer robots or something.

That's just crazy, sir, and on top it being crazy, it's like, they're trying to become killer robots or something.

Well, you guys are always yapping on and on about how the killer robots are trying to become more like us humans, and I just don't see it happening that way at all, sir.

And whatever, you'd think that at least those aerospace dudes in the hangar would be a little smarter, y'know, 'cause they ain't like us rich-man's-son idiot command guys, those bastards went to engineering school and shiz where they had to do the hard math.

I mean, that's all just a bunch of junk out of Common Sense 101 or something, y'know?

Well, I'm just saying, sir.

Yah Yah Yah Yah Yah

2009-01-04T10:10:00.003-06:00

Programming

2008-10-18T08:33:00.003-05:00

I been programming a lot for moolah so I ain't had any brain energy for all this stuff lately.

Sorting and sifting through gigantic puzzles for eight hours a day makes "my boys upstairs" turn the light out early.

Plus I'm getting old y'know so all I wanna do when I get home from work is watch some Matlock or whatever and go to bed.

Which reminds me of the way my grampa called the stuff he liked to watch on TV his "programs."

Like, "I want to watch my programs."

The only thing he ever liked to watch on TV was Wrestling and the Three Stooges and kung fu movies, y'know, those were his programs, he was a World War II hero and a CIA guy and he could dance the jitterbug so he wasn't keen on subtleties and wispy bits of fluff and intrigue produced by folks who imagined more than they had ever seen and stuff ahaha.

Anyways its kinda weird that he called the TV shows he liked his "programs."

Like he's loading entertainment programming into his head or something.

Just like its kinda weird that they call that thing they hand you at the opera or school kid's musical events a Program.

Any word with "gram" used that way in it is kinda new and futuristic, y'know?

Like, its weird to think of opera-writers as guys who are programming the opera house or creating programming for the opera house or something, but apparently that's what at least one of 'em thought they were doing, y'know, a long time ago before there were any computers.

So whatever, I spend all day swimming around in real programs, and then when I get home I just wanna get away from programming, so I go home and load myself up with some entertainment programming that helps me get my mind off of my hard day of work programming.

Jeeze looeeze I shoulda been a lumberjack with a pet monkey or something.

American Masterpiece Mystery Theatre

2008-10-06T22:09:00.008-05:00

"You ever hear that thing about how Lesbians drive Subarus?"

"What?"

"This thing about Lesbians driving Subarus. Like, Subarus are s'posed to be the Car of Choice for Lesbians. Some demographic percentage thingie, like, forty percent of Lesbians drive Subarus for some reason."

"No, I ain't heard that."

"Do you s'pose Lesbians know more about cars than heterosexual folks?"

"Hmm, probably."

"Anyways I dunno where I heard it. I dunno if it was from a Pro-Lesbian place or an Anti-Lesbian place. I suppose that Subaru wants Lesbians to buy their cars, but they don't wanna let anybody who doesn't like Lesbians to know that they want Lesbians to buy their cars, 'cause they want Non-Lesbians to buy their cars too, without having to feel like a Lesbian, or something, so they prolly play both sides of the fence. But was the Lesbian-Subaru Connection Rumor leaked by Subaru, as some sorta grassroots viral advertising campaign, or was it leaked by an Anti-Lesbian person working for one of Subaru's competitors, or what?"

"Seems kinda expensive to have to buy a Subaru to be a Lesbian."

"What's the cheapest sexual orientation anyways?"

"Haha yah I'm gonna switch to that."

"It does tend to make a Lesbian who drives a Ford seem kinda punk rock and cool though. Y'know, 'cause who-the-hell would want to be a run-of-the-mill hum-drum go-with-the-crowd sheep-Lesbian."

"Yah."

"I do know why I remembered that weird thing about Lesbians and Subarus, though."

"Yah?"

"Yah. My aunt drove a Subaru. She wasn't a real aunt, she was a friend-of-the-family-aunt. Made me wonder if she was a Lesbian, though, on the side, when I heard that Subaru Lesbian thingie. If she was a Lesbian, she was definitely a Lipstick Lesbian. There's three kinds of super feminine folks, and she was the Pretty Sexual kind, not the Mother Nature or Hospice Nurse kind. Anyways that's why I remember it."

"Hey, you guys solve that murder yet?"

"No."

"What the hell do you think this is, a cop show where they solve a murder every hour?"

"Dude, murders are hard to solve."

"Nobody ever confesses like they do on TV. You never know if you got it right."

"Yah, this isn't Star Trek, man. We can't just Reverse the Polarity and wrap the shit up in the last five minutes. We're still working the kinks out of some of these Subaru-Lesbian Mysteries."

"Any progress on that?"

"Yep, nope, haven't seemed to hit bottom on that rabbit hole yet."

"I did remember why I remembered it, though."

"Haha yah, his aunt might be a Lesbian, on the side."

"On the side, huh? That'd make her a Bisexual, then, actually."

"Oh man, I didn't even think of that."

"That certainly throws a new twist into the whole Subaru-Lesbian Conspiracy."

"Yah, the plot thickens."

"And that's why he gets paid the Big Bucks."

"Haha yah."

You Look Like You Needed It

2008-10-06T14:42:00.001-05:00

Blue Light Operator

2008-10-06T12:23:00.003-05:00

Oh man, you know what another bad job is?

Being the guy that operates that blue light that detects bacteria and body fluids.

That's gotta be way the hell worse than being a dude that works at fast food place or a slaughterhouse or whatever, 'cause you know you're gonna bring that shit home with you.

As if computer guys didn't wash their hands enough y'know ahaha sheesh.

Poser Science

2008-10-06T11:53:00.006-05:00

Man, the Ig Nobels were a total dud this year.

Yah, guess all the mad scientists are trying to go mainstream and produce crap for the masses now or something.

Its like the Arena Rock Achy Breaky Heart Country Music of Punk Rock Science now, man, what a shame.

Used to be stuff like how different kinds of toads taste when you lick 'em and junk, man, those were the good old days, before the band sold out and started to suck.

Well, okay, the Plants Have Dignity thing was pretty awesome heh.

And the French one with the Fleas on Dogs jumping higher than Fleas on Cats, that's pretty good.

I mean, how the hell could you use that bit of information for anything ahaha.

But the other ones are actually kinda useful and stuff, y'know?

So You Wanna Be a Game Designer

2008-10-06T09:58:00.014-05:00

So you wanna be a Game Designer, huh?

Well, the first thing you need to do is forget all that crap about making games and listen to me.

Yah, if you really wanna be a game designer, you should forget all about games, and go into Advertising, instead.

Yah man, Advertising is basically movie-making for folks with super short attention spans, right?

I mean, wtf could be better than sitting around with a bunch of dopes and thinking up dumb little movies that'll catch folks off guard?

Why in the nine hells would you even wanna monkey around with a bunch of miserable underpaid nerds on four years of math problems to create some humongously outdated piece of crap that nobody but a masochist like you would enjoy anyways?

When you could be using a fraction of that time and energy creating ten zillion million-dollar thirty-second gags and come out looking like a cool guy surrounded by swimsuit models?

And look at some of these commercials out there, man, they're just terrible.

And I don't mean Eagle Man terrible in a good way, either, I'm talking about Pictures of Guys In Their Underpants in the Newspaper terrible.

"Hey, now this is a nice little number!"

"Can I have the ones off the model?"

"Oh man they're still warm!"

Its like, oh gawd, here we go again with the split screen and the two kinds of deodorant leaving streaks, or the napkins sucking it up, they're pouring some blue stuff on a maxipad, here's some cheerful music and an over-medicated looking mom making paper-bag lunches, a still picture of a vacuum cleaner and a corporate symbol and some smiling guy in a refrigerator repairman suit, another spritzing can of sweaty pop, a beer and a palm tree on a beach, a chewing gum commercial on a beach (talk about the worst combo ever, sand and gum, awhellyah, crunch-crunch-crunch, that's the mental association you wanna shoot for ahaha), a chick in a white dress floating across a field of golden grass near the sea while a voice-over does the ten million side-effect warnings in a soothing voice, man, those're just brilliant.

I sit there and think, "man, how can anybody think up anything this terrible? Its almost impossible to make anything lamer than that if you were trying to do it on purpose, y'know? I mean, if you knew how to do something that boring on purpose, you could go around using your super boring powers to turn people's brains off and temporarily turn them into zombies, you could use that Friendly Maytag Repairman and Choosy Moms Choose Jif Peanut Butter garbage to make people blank out completely or at least turn away from you so you could rob banks while they weren't looking or something!"

And then you got all the good ones, y'know, and man, I wish some of those guys made feature length films, like that Geico thing, with the Cavemen (not that stupid-ass lizard one, goddam), even though some of those suck, or the ones with the Snickers guys in the costumes, I mean, seriously, that would beat the living shit out of any of the ten million SNL-guy and "coming of age" generic comedy formula movies.

Not that I think you oughta try to do good commercials, y'know, I think its better to not have to try so hard and just make tons of the crappy ones with the split-screen deodorant trials and stuff.

Plus you won't piss the other advertising guys off by raising the bar or anything, everybody can make their money and get the hell out of there for the weekend, easy peasy.

And that's what you should really do, if you wanna be a Game Designer, you should wanna be something else, instead, besides that, basically, anything but that.

Now, if you've accidentally become a Game Designer, then that's a whole different problem, you couldn't help it, you were forced to wear weird costumes and locked up in a basement or whatever, its not your fault.

Samwisdom

2008-10-05T11:55:00.005-05:00

There are meals that smell so good when you are cooking 'em, meals that take so long to make, that a chef, stuck in close proximity to the cooking dish for most of the day, can't help but get sick of being teased and tortured by it before they can finish cooking it.

The chef becomes completely saturated with the meal's never-ending assault of temptations, wave after wave after wave of flavor and empty promises, hammering against their doors, and wants only to get away from it when they're done.

But two chefs can takes turns preparing the same malevolently delicious chef-withering dish on different nights, and trade the cooking of the dish back and forth, so that they can both enjoy it as an undamaged member of the dinner-table audience, without being subjected to the appetite-destroying standing-in-front-of-a-roaring-blast-furnace-of-intense-sensory-information-all-day preparations that are required to bring the dish to life.

If it wasn't for that trick, we'd have lost a lot of recipes that were too great for a single chef to handle, y'know?

And there might have been some dishes that were too great for even two chefs to handle out there.

Mmm I'm getting hungry.

Jungle Bus Airlines

2008-10-04T22:25:00.009-05:00

Oh man you know what we need?

A cargo plane that can land in the water.

One that we can turn into a recreational vehicle on the inside.

And a pilot guy to fly it.

I'll be co-pilot and crack jokes and shit to keep him awake.

And then we'll also need an Arabian Prince or something to keep us supplied with fuel.

Yah man, then we just fly the thing down to the tropics and make a website where folks can charter us for vacations, easy peasy.

We can come and pick 'em up and everything.

Dude if there's a VTOL cargo plane that can land in the water we could land on the street in front of their house.

If they ain't got one of those maybe we can get the Arabian Prince to build one for us, like in one of those A-Team Montages where they built crazy vehicles in a junkyard.

And we could even make it into some kinda Internet TV-show thingie or turn it into some kinda weird airborne late night talkshow or something so more people will wanna sign up for vacations with us.

Add Captain Bob's Treasure Hunt thingie into it.

And sell some Wish You Were Here Postcards for Pets and stuff.

Or we could make it into a fake reality TV show like the Office mixed with the occasional actual cheesy vacation charter thingie, if we're feeling lazy but we still need the tourist money to pay for hula dancers and alcohol.

Mixed with a little "Lost" so that it doesn't have to make any sense.

With random stressed-out looking people walking through jungle bushes for five minutes at a pop between commercials and stuff.

Easy peasy man.

Australia's Joke

2008-10-04T21:19:00.011-05:00

Australia was this 65-year-old hitman-looking guy from Australia who used to ride the train with us in a stylish black leather jacket, and he had this joke he did over and over again until all of us starting repeating it with him whenever he did it, and then eventually all I had to say was the first few words of his joke and everybody would start laughing.

We'd be on the train together and you know how the conductor will speak over the PA on the train and declare "Next stop, beautiful downtown Lemont!" or whatever to tell everybody what the next stop was, that was what triggered it, the repetition of that day after day until we had it all memorized, there were a couple towns on the route that were just godawful shit-holes and it was kinda funny to hear the conductor say how beautiful they were 'cause you know he couldn't possibly be honest or anything about it so that sorta called all of his other PA Opinions of Town Beauty into question even though some of the other towns were actually pretty cool looking y'know its like listening to him lie about how beautiful your town was just made things worse for the people who had to get off in the crappy towns 'cause that's where they lived.

Yah, the conductor saying that crap in his cheap little prison-guard uniform with a smile on his face and his eyes twinkling and his keys jangling day after day made him seem like some kind of creepy claymation cartoon character in a Twilight Zone Episode that you couldn't trust fer shit ahaha.

Anyways, once you guys got off at your shitty town (so that you couldn't be offended), Australia would always do this "First prize is one week in beautiful downtown Lemont! Second Prize is two weeks in beautiful downtown Lemont!" routine while imitating the way the conductor sounded on the PA (and just about everybody who ever had to ride a train to work for any amount of time can imitate their conductor perfectly, that shit gets burned into the back of your brainpan after being subjected to it day after day after day).

That's why I only had to say "Second Prize is two weeks..." in my version of the train conductor's voice and everybody would laugh.

And because that was sorta like an inside joke, y'know, 'cause you ain't got enough information unless you heard the whole thing before, I could do that bit as we pulled up to a shitty town and the people who lived there wouldn't have any idea of what I was talking about but everybody from the stops farther down the route would be laughing.

Yah that's awful and evil or whatever but that's what makes it funnier, y'know, when you are covering your mouth and making those weird hitching noises while yer trying not to laugh ahaha.

Australia was a good-hearted guy so his face would turn all red and his eyes would be watering from how hard he was laughing-while-trying-not-to-laugh even though I took his joke and made it way the hell more awful and stuff by changing the timing of the thing.

Like, what the fuck are you gonna do about it anyways, y'know?

Damn ugly town might as well be worth a laugh to somebody ahaha.

Hey, I didn't live in a good looking town either man.

And I never said anything like everybody else did on the train about how all the people from Lemont looked they were related to each other and it was weird how they were so awful to each other in the parking lot y'know I was one of the good guys man I hardly talked any shit at all compared to all the old ladies and everybody else!

Actually Lemont was one of the prettier towns I just used them 'cause saying the real names of the shitty towns involved seemed like adding insult to injury and shit.

Well, actually Lemont was that town where everybody looked like they were related to each other and they were all mean and pushing each other out of the way and acting like little kids in the parking lot but I was talking about everything I said aside from that.

Television City

2008-10-04T21:03:00.005-05:00

I noticed the Three Stooges called a cigar a "heater."

And its always been a bad sign as a Time Traveler if you ever get stuck with a guy who calls a handgun a "heater."

That's the kinda thing that makes Time Travelers laugh in an uneasy, worried laugh kinda way.

And then there's what we called "heaters" when I was a kid.

Which was a girl's boobs.

'Cause I come from a place where it snows a lot.

So cigars, guns, and tits.

Has all the makings a brand new elite government-funded cult-fighting strike-force: "Mammaries, Tobacco & Firearms" or something ahaha.

While there is some kinda cool-guy link between those things, its a little weird that those things are all tied together with the word "heater," even if you're a cool guy with a medically limited vocabulary 'cause of some kinda weird motorcycle accident or something.

I think the Three Stooges "cigar" usage of "heater" is the odd man out, though.

I mean, we used to say stuff like "don't point those things at me!" when I was kid, so the link between the other two seems okay, you can see how that'd work.

But the "cigar" one is a little weird.

Maybe that's 'cause the world I'm used to is pretty much cigar-free.

I don't smoke cigars, maybe some of the people I know smoke cigars, but they don't smoke 'em in public, so its like, you basically never see anybody smoking a cigar.

But if you think about a world where everybody has a cigar in their hand twenty-four-seven, where little kids and housewives and everybody is always smoking cigars all day long and running around with cigars in their hands, then people pointing cigars at each other might be a bit of problem, too.

And saying "hey man don't you point that heater at me!" might be a pretty common thing, then.

So I guess that's the strange world of the Three Stooges.

Man, its no wonder that they're so weird.

Joe Six Pack

2008-10-04T16:40:00.003-05:00

With all the hockey mom crap lately, its made me really start to appreciate how smart the soccer moms were.

I mean, soccer moms have started to seem almost unobtainable and aristocratic in their intellectual elegance and magnificence.

Soccer moms are practically supernaturally graceful and delicate at this point, like the scent of nectar from the elder days of yore that we can only half-remember in dreams that are too strange and silky to survive the moment we wake, chased like the dew before the clumsy warmth of the morning.

And while my mind may ineffectually ponder the passing of creatures in the mists of even more ancient times and of even greater beauty than the Soccer Mom, my heart knows that is not fit for the adventure, and it dares not to follow, for fear of breaking!

The Hessian

2008-10-04T13:23:00.010-05:00

I know you're a little scared, being pulled over in your strange little horseless coach, as it were, by a Headless Spectre mounted atop a Nightmare on an ancient dirt road in the middle of the Old Dutch Country that never seems to notice the passage of time, where everyone can still smell the old-time fairy magic lingering in the air that will doubtlessly make them dream strange dreams every night that they remain here.

But I've been thinking about things while I've been riding up down these paths over all these years and something funny just occurred to me and I felt that I just needed someone to talk to y'know and I noticed that you happened to be a schoolteacher and I thought "oh man now this would be sorta perfect and ironic and stuff!" ahaha ghosts love that sorta junk!

So like, relax and fear naught and let me speak my peace and thus shall ye shortly and safely be transported on your way unharmed by me and whatever.

Washington Irving, right?

You know who I'm talking about.

First Great American Author blah blah blah and all that.

Guy wrote the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, y'know, starring me, of course, but he also did Rip Van Wrinkle, and a bunch of other stuff that was just sorta okay.

Made fun of a lot of things, but he's probably most famous for his portrayal of Ichabod Crane, the greedy and craven dorky-looking schoolmaster slash con-artist who wanted to marry everybody's daughter so he could steal their farm and eat everything on it.

Which was bad for his reviews, 'cause reviewers are generally craven dorky-looking schoolmaster slash con-artist types like you ahaha just kidding yer not all that bad actually.

But that means, when you read a review of Washington Irving, you got to take it with a bit of salt, right?

Especially if the guy doing the review don't ever say nothing about Irving's profound sense of humor.

I mean, that's pretty much a sure sign that its some craven schoolmaster con artist type doing the review, some fool with no sense of humor, right?

And if a guy like Irving writes a two-page "why I write" gag claiming that he admires the way Europeans think about Americans as Degenerate versions of Europeans, and that he'd like to meet the Great Men of Europe who must stand as tall as a mountain in comparison to him, that's probably a joke, right?

Any fool can plainly see that that was probably a joke, right?

Well the jokes on you if you can't!

And its as if anybody could write an accurate explanation of why they write that should be taken at face value in the first place ahaha!

Sorry I'll try to quit laughing so much I know its a little freaky.

Anyways, I think folks mostly feel the desire to write in order to fill a void, to put something into circulation that they feel is missing, something that's been tumbling around in their head that they wanna get out there, something that they don't see anybody else doing.

Much as we all did as children, standing atop logs and waving our sticks at each other and imagining that we were pirates on a great adventure, specifically because there was actually nothing of the sort to do about the dreary farms and weary cities where we grew up.

Or, at least, that's the most common inspiration, or the thing that governs how they select what they're gonna write about, even if they're doing it for money on a schedule and whatever.

And that's got to be one of the bigger reasons that its kinda stupid to compare the things Irving wrote to the stuff that Poe and Hawthorne did much later.

Its okay to say you like the stuff that Poe wrote more than the junk that Irving wrote, that the kinda stuff that Poe wrote was the kinda stuff that you have an appetite for, that Poe filled one of your voids better than the stuff that Irving produced did, whether its the style you like or the subject matter or the plot structure or that you thought that being a fan of Poe would do more to get you in the good graces of loose high-performance women or whatever.

And of course Poe is going to have more appeal to the schoolmarm type folks who don't have any sense of humor 'cause Poe was a lot of things but he definitely wasn't much of a comedian ahaha!

Sorry, sorry, the laugh, I know.

Anyways you see how the schoolmarm Ichabod Crane types might like Poe a bit more than scruffy-old Irving with his gags and con-artist characters and stuff?

Heck man, Ichabod Crane was totally into reading scary stuff about witches and junk, the kinda stuff that Poe wrote, Crane used that kinda stuff to tickle the imaginations of all the farmer's wives he was always hitting on.

In my story I'm actually just a legend that provided Ichabod Crane's competitor (for the affections of a farm lass) something to dress up as, and not even a real character!

I know!

There's actually no ghosts or magic or anything at all in my story ahaha!

Ah sorry sorry sorry I promise I'll try to keep the creepy echoing laughter under control but you know how it is with being a Literary Apparition and all that I'm fighting against my own overly simplistic design specifications here and I don't have a lot to work with!

Anyways some people got this idea that there's One Best Thing, and thinking that way makes them think that diversity is something you need to snip away, to whittle things down to perfection, insteada appreciating diversity, insteada thinking of everything as a quilt made out of all sorts of different patches that make the quilt more interesting, the more patches, the more different the patches, the more detailed the patches, the better.

Where all the different authors of each patch give you something different to look at night after night as your tastes change over the years and you start to think that this patch is actually better or more suited to your present situation than the patch that was your favorite patch of yesterday.

Its whatever fits the times the best, whatever fills the void of the moment.

I'm sure when Irving looked out at everything going on in his current frame of reference, he was inspired to put something into the pot that would make the stew taste better that very night, something that nobody had ever seen before, each detail of it carefully selected for different reasons.

And you can't really judge that against what the stew seemed to need when Poe showed up and what Poe decided to season everything with during the course of his frame of reference.

And its not just the time, its also the place and the scenery, and the people and ideas around them, and how old the chef was, and what sorts of things he was going through.

You can have a taste of what they decided to season the stew with, and that might tell you a little bit about the stew they were looking at the night they wrote whatever it was they were gonna write, or at least, what each of them thought the stew needed, or maybe what sort of seasonings they had the most of in their pockets, but you can't really taste the stews themselves, and so you can't really compare the stews, and so you can't really compare the chefs.

You just don't know enough to do that.

Especially if you still ain't got a sense of humor after all these years and Ichabod Crane still offends you ahaha!

And that's all a book report is, really, too.

Some bit of seasoning designed to make the daily stew of some craven and humorless schoolmaster con artist who hates Washington Irving more tasty.

That's all we're really getting graded on, in a book report, how well we can please all these cowardly guys that wanna sleep with our sisters and eat everything on our farm and never have to do any honest work!

Please them by telling lies and saying that we don't like Washington Irving, pretending that we didn't even notice all of his jokes, pretending that the guy was obviously a hack and that he wasn't anywhere near as good as the Really Really Great Greats like Edgar Allan Poe or Hawthorne, when you look at everything from some bizarre-ass no-frame-of-reference frame-of-reference!

And so book reports are actually just support systems for evil people!

You shouldn't be training the children to do that kinda stuff!

And that's why nobody should have to write book reports!

Well, whatever, y'know, its just something I was thinking about lately, while I been looking for my head.

Ha ha ha.

Like I never heard that one before.

You ain't seen it, have ya?

Yah I figured.

Well, I think they wanna keep me like this so they can milk me for royalties for all eternity or something, the bastards!

Well, have a good night.

And remember that stuff I said about the kids in school and those damn book reports of yours.

Nah, I'm not going to threaten you with some sort of supernatural doom, that's too cliche.

Witty Title Number Blah Blah Blah

2008-09-30T21:31:00.005-05:00

He couldn't handle compliments.

That was the first thing anybody ever told me about him.

That he wasn't any good with compliments.

I was saying something like, "hey wtf! why does this guy hate me so much?"

And then some good-hearted person felt bad for me and they said "oh don't worry, he's always like that, he just doesn't know how to handle compliments."

So then I said something like "so what are we supposed to do if we like something he did? Call him an asshole?"

And then I laughed at my own joke 'cause I always laugh at my own jokes even if its a really shitty old joke I mean hell man I ain't never been picky ahaha.

And then he saw me laughing and he laughed too.

Later on I saw other new people going through the same thing as me.

They'd say "hey wtf! why does this guy hate me so much?"

And then I'd get to say "oh don't worry, he's always like that, he doesn't know how to handle compliments."

And then some of 'em even did the "wtf should I call 'em an asshole?" joke.

And some of 'em even laughed at their own shit afterwards.

And then he'd laugh too.

And then I'd laugh 'cause there's some weird kinda multidimensional humor to the way the pattern keeps repeating, y'know?

Its not exactly ironic, and its not deja vu, I dunno wtf it is, but its funny.

I mean, at first you're all like, "ah, he ain't gonna laugh this time, 'cause he's heard this one before."

But that's what makes it funny to him, y'know?

That he keeps hearing this same joke over and over again.

That's why he laughs.

And that's why I laugh, 'cause he was laughing at how he keeps hearing the same joke over and over again, and that's funny.

It never occurs to anybody else to laugh because I always laugh 'cause he was laughing at how he keeps hearing the same joke over and over again, 'cause that's just way too complicated and multidimensional for humans and stuff.

Plus you need an extra guy for that.

And nobody laughs because its funny that it don't matter how funny the original asshole joke was, nobody is that smart.

But it is kinda funny to explain all this stuff to you heh.

Well, whatever, I'm easy.

Yah, nobody is ever gonna tell you "oh don't worry, he's always like that, he doesn't know how to handle compliments" about me.

'Cause we ain't all like that guy that wasn't any good with compliments, I'm totally fine with compliments, if you think I hate yer shit, then I probably do totally hate your shit, and for a good reason, too heh.

That would actually make it even funnier if you asked, "hey wtf! why do he hate me so much?" and then somebody lied and said that I wasn't good at handling compliments, even though I actually was pretty good at handling compliments and I really did hate your ass just fine ahaha.

But nobody on top of nobody is that good man, so don't worry AHAHA.

Anyways what I meant to say was thank you.

Thank you for making me laugh.

Even though I been mostly laughing at my own jokes the whole time.

Well, I prolly woulda never thought of the jokes that made me laugh if it wasn't for you.

Just kidding, I prolly woulda thought of all those jokes whether you were there or not.

Actually I always kinda hated you for no good reason, even when you were giving me compliments.

Hmm, maybe I actually ain't any good with compliments.

That would certainly explain a few things.

Oh Canada

2008-09-30T12:51:00.006-05:00

You know what else the U.S. could do for money?

Get Canada to pay us to make them look cooler at parties.

We could be like, Canada's rent-a-friend Hot Chick.

BFF! looools!

Vote For Rent

2008-09-29T13:24:00.006-05:00

I'm hoping John McCain's campaign numbers really start to slide in a huge way.

'Cause that would drive up the value of supporting him.

That's where the big money is, his wife, y'know, she's got more money than all the rest of 'em combined.

But she ain't gonna pay us jack shit for our votes unless he really needs us.

Yah, see, this whole "close race" thingie is totally ruining the economy, man!

User User

2008-09-29T12:56:00.005-05:00

Dude, I think we can make a feature-length film for like, a couple hundred bucks.

If we all lived in one of the many abandoned mansions that are currently littering the landscape and made big batches of Ramen Pride Noodles to feed the volunteer cast and crew.

With campfire marshmallows for dessert awhellyah.

Hell, we could make a reality show about a bunch of people trying to make a feature length film with a couple hundred bucks for a couple hundred bucks.

And a documentary about a contest for positions in a reality show about making the feature length film awhellyah baby that's like three-to-five birds with one couple hundred bucks right there, if any one of those things actually work we'd be sitting on a goldmine!

All you need is a bunch of random character-based bullshit to get people into it, like, you need a nerd, you need a psychic, you need a jock and a cheerleader and a doctor and an indian and a construction worker, blah blah blah, make 'em all weepy, easy peasy.

Yah, its sorta like a cross between going camping and a cooking show and Survivor and Lost.

Yah, where you get the people on the Reality Show to do all the work as if that was part of the Reality Show.

Hey man, if it turns out to be shit, you can just say "I meant to do that" and call it a comedy.

And if it turns out good, its like, high quality drama or whatever.

Dude, I'm totally in to this User-made Content stuff.

Blabberjockey

2008-09-29T11:52:00.005-05:00

The first thing most people do when they first get on the internet is vent all of their fury at the universe.

Not everybody does that, some folks seem to keep a cool and sorta-professional Disney-quality exterior no matter what, but most of 'em do that.

And then most of them give up and disappear.

Meanwhile the rest of us are like, well, thanks for venting all your acid and bile on us, I dunno what folks expect to get back from that ahaha.

Anyways, after you been blabbering on the internet for about a million years, you start to evolve a bit.

How exactly you evolve sorta depends on why you were blabbering about stuff in the first place, so I'm not familiar with all the different kinds of guys, I only understand my own selfish thing, where you're trying to cheer your buddies up and make 'em blow milk out of their noses and shit while you rub your brain against the grindstone to keep it sharp.

And so when it gets tough to think of something that would cheer my buddies up, when I'm feeling bummed out myself, that's when I'm the most proud of what I do, that's when I give myself the highest points for difficulty, the hardest times to do it are when I feel like I oughta be doing it the most.

And that's like the exact opposite of the folks who first show up and use the internet to vent the junk that's bugging 'em and whatever heh.

Of course, this is just my own small corner of the shit, I got all sorts of complex little rules that govern how I do things, and there's a million other ways to do it, and a million other things you could do with it.

And I'm mistaken by strangers for a lot of things I ain't, y'know, like, I'm not a public entertainment system and whatever-else ya might think just 'cause I got talked into putting most of my shit in one place on the internet so that it wouldn't be so hard to chase me around.

And I'm not really against strangers joining up with my team of buddies, I'm pretty big on the need for new blood, compared to the crustier and more jaded folks, but the junk I put out there is designed to naturally select what I want to get back out of the mess, so I don't usually gotta deal with folks I wouldn't like, I'm always meeting cool folks with tons of personality that know about all sorts of shit insteada loud-ass know-nothing robots like me ahaha.

Yah there's only room for one loud-ass know-nothing robot like me in my universe, buddy AHAHA.

But enough about me.

What the hell was I talking about?

Oh yah, I'm right in the middle of doing some kinda super-manipulative thingie where I try persuade folks to write some shit that'll cheer me up make me laugh heh.

Pfft, this isn't gonna work, you guys suck ahaha.

The Mad Scientist Party

2008-09-29T10:19:00.014-05:00

Its stupid that there's only two political parties when even the Planet of the Apes had three.

Oh sure, they combined scientists and hippies, and separated the might-makes-right and religious folks into two separate groups, and that's a damned dirty hippy-ape trick to get the scientist-apes on their side, 'cause hippy-apes are the "artistic and persuasive" apes who make ape-movies.

Everybody wants the scientist-apes on their side 'cause they want weapons to use against the apes they disagree with.

But then everybody hates the scientists-apes.

Oh sure, all the fashionable and artistic hippy-apes are like, dude, scientist-apes are nerds, they collect comic books, they're ruining the planet, Paula Abdul is drunk, Ben and Jerry should use breastmilk, crystals have healing powers, do these flared jeans make my butt look fat?

And then religious apes hate us and cast their spells on us and stuff.

And the might-makes-right apes can't be bothered to learn anything from smart little scientific weakling apes but they need kickass futuristic helicopters and lasers and stuff to kill us with.

And then everybody is all like, no you scientist-apes can't have your political party 'cause it would only mess up whether the hippy-apes or the religious apes win.

Kinda hilarious for the math-hating apes to dictate the math of the situation to us ahaha.

Anyways I propose that we create a new party.

Yah, the Mad Scientist Party.

Only thing that sucks is that its gets kinda annoying to have your research interrupted all the time when the public demands to blabber with you.

I've been trying to do it for a while now and every time I turn my back to continue my research the villagers go right back to being depressed and crazy and demanding I do something about it and stuff its soooo annoying.

Its especially bad if I have to appear in person instead of communicating through holographic projection 'cause I live in a top secret underground research base near the planet's core, y'know, for the free geothermal energy, and its takes forever to teleport to the surface.

Yah so maybe we should just find a new planet.

Dude, I wonder if somebody even smarter than us already thought of that, y'know, like, its theoretically possible that somebody left all the moron-apes of our planet behind them a long time ago, and all the morons that got left behind were too moronic to make a record of it.

Yah, and then they just watch the morons do their little junk like a bunch of hamsters in a hamster cage, it'd be pretty easy to baby-sit all the little aluminum-foil space programs and laugh while making sure that the morons don't intercept any of your signals.

Our planet might actually be some sort of Prison Planet for the mentally inferior and unstable or something!

That would certainly explain of a few things.

Hmm, I'll need to check some of my instruments, try to figure out what I did wrong, why I got put here.

Yah, that'll be an embarrassing day, when we finally meet the "aliens" and learn that we've all been sentenced to Life on a Cosmic Short Bus!

Well, I don't care if they're smarter than us, I just want to be able to say "See! I told you so!" when it happens muahahaha *rubs hands together evilly*

The Pattern

2008-09-28T11:31:00.004-05:00

You know, I been thinking lately about how things from the past keep repeating themselves.

No, I'm not talking about the Great Depression and the first failure of trickle down economics and the rise of isolationism and the world-wide economic crash and the rise of fascism and the start of World War II with militant countries testing the waters to see what they can get away with and FDR showing up with his New Deal, goddam you guys are depressing.

And wtf are you trying to say that a black dude is like a guy in a wheelchair?

Sheeyit.

Yah hell no I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about Blazing Saddles, man.

Dude the shit that happened in Blazing Saddles is almost exactly like what's happening right now, its totally freaky how there's soooooo many similarities, its like they were psychic or something.

Ahaha yah whatever man that movie was awesome.

Gunga Galunga

2008-09-27T18:45:00.009-05:00

Anger comes from misunderstanding.

Hostility comes from your lack of appreciation.

Let's try to get that through our fat heads before you people really piss me off ahaha nyuk nyuk nyuk.

The Mysterious Island

2008-09-27T14:13:00.008-05:00

Instead of looking for a job, you should be starting your own company.

And then you should hire me.

Ahaha no seriously man I'm not good at anything except leeching off people but I am honest and stuff and oh man I hate it when somebody else comes along and starts to leech off the guy I'm leeching off of y'know so I can protect you from that ahaha.

Yah you should make a company, and then we can get a boat and go around the ocean visiting all those weird-ass rich guys that own their own islands and stuff until we find a good one.

If we bring a camera along we can make a reality TV show out of it, Weird-Ass Rich Guys That Own Their Own Island's Got Talent or something.

Well, whatever, its something to think about.

Serious Political Opinion

2008-09-27T11:49:00.012-05:00

People probably wonder what I am politically.

I'm not anything.

I'm pretty liberal if we're talking about sex and shit like that.

But I support the right for folks to be different, so I'm not against conservatives, 'cause that's just one of the ways you can be different, imho.

A republican is just a kind of democrat to a guy like me.

I'm not against anything that rewards folks for innovation and stuff but I don't think that we need to reward people for preying on each other to do that, so take what you will from that.

I think the most important thing about America is the way that we're made up of the greatest adventurers from all over the world, that there's some place on this planet that folks can run to when they're being persecuted, some place that appreciates and welcomes 'em based on the fact that we're all exactly the same kinda strange adventurers as them, a place that appreciates anything anybody is willing to bring to the table and share as far as the wisdom and beauty and comedy of their culture and traditions and ancestors goes.

'Cause that's why I got Egg Rolls and Tamales to eat insteada Haggis, thank the gods.

And that's how we got Isaac Asimov (thank you Soviet Union), and Enrico Fermi (thank you Mussolini), Groucho Marx, all 47 flavors of beautiful women, and everything else.

That's how I got the wisdom of teachers from all over the world (including the Native Americans, who came across the Ice Bridge a zillion years ago).

And that's how we got Amish Hobbits and plastic dudes from the 80s living together in peace and harmony.

Hell, even Bon Jovi is still allowed to be popular in some places *stares at Rockford*

And I wouldn't want to go back to the places my genetics crawled away from and live in some town where every dude looked like me, that'd totally freak me out, man, I dunno how those people can do that, I'd go crazy, that's like something out of a scary movie man ahaha.

And I understand that you need to let folks keep some dignity, even though I ain't any good at it heh.

And some of the dudes in the countries we came from are all wise and stuff, too wise to be adventurers like us, the adventurer lifestyle ain't for everybody.

Oh and I'm not a big fan of monarchies that you don't get to vote for.

That's about all I got for serious political opinion, really.

So am I still free to go?

Or have you guys changed that.

Eat the Rich

2008-09-27T10:06:00.006-05:00

The rich people need our help.

Oh sure, you're unemployed, the house you are paying for is worth half of what you still owe on it, your town is flooded with toxic waste, you can't leave because gas is so expensive, food prices are soaring and malnutrition is rampant, all the money you put toward your retirement got spent by somebody on coke and hookers, you don't have any health care, your educational system sucks, your kids are under constant surveillance, you're at war with ten or more countries that you probably couldn't even find on a map, there's terrorists everywhere, and the earth is melting.

But even with all that, we haven't been heartless and selfish toward the rich, we've provided the rich with all sorts of loopholes over the years, we've provided them with the time and materials to hire lobbyists and bribe officials with extravagant parties and gifts, and we don't even think to ask 'em for as little as a thank you.

But the loopholes we provided for them aren't enough, and our political system has failed, the politicians they hired turned out to be idiots, and now there's nothing left in your retirement fund to steal!

You don't understand the seriousness of the problem, rich people don't know how to take care of themselves, y'know, you may be comfortable living an post-apocalyptic wasteland where civilization is a thing of the past and rats are good eating, 'cause you're all resourceful and adventurous and stuff.

But these people need to solve all of their problems with money, and they're completely unequipped to deal with the vulgar details of day to day living that you peasants find so enjoyable.

So for only three hundred and fifty dollars a day, slightly less than it costs to fill up your tank with gas, you could adopt a rich person.

And let your show of heartfelt support give these poor unfortunate souls who are medically incapable of considering anything but their own self-interests the chance they need to get back on their feet and go dormant while you figure everything out and fix everything so we can all start cannibalizing your future again together.

Don't let their parents be the last to do it, that'd be like, totally unfair.

Parallel Universe 42's Got Talent

2008-09-26T21:49:00.015-05:00

Man I just watched the debate and there's these two dudes standing there making lists of all the countries that they're going to attack as president and its like they picked every single country EXCEPT France wtf obviously neither of these guys wants my vote!

I'm not even from this stupid-ass parallel universe y'know in my parallel universe President Mondale united the entire world around our mutual hatred for France and then we figured out Time Travel and now Afghanistan's Got Talent is a popular TV show so I dunno wtf is gonna happen over here but seriously you guys need to start thinking this shit through a little better!

It'd be a shame and like totally bad for my career as a Time Lord if the only parallel universe where Conan was elected to public office self-destructed before we got a chance to see what kinda crazy-ass shit you freaks did next!

That's Life

2008-09-26T15:03:00.008-05:00

I don't think France has ever made me laugh.

Well, not on purpose, anyways, heh heh heh.

And I think Indiana could probably take France in a fight.

But I'm not totally anti-uh-francotronic or whatever it is you are when you don't like France.

I know all about "Lafayette! We are here!"

And I knew a bunch of other shit about France that I can't remember, too.

And I went out with a totally cute French chick once.

So I know everything there is to know about that, I explored the French Culture extensively *nudge nudge wink wink* knowwhutImean heh.

I even took two years of French in high school, but as fate would have it, I sat next to a hot spanish chick, so I learned more Spanish than French ahaha.

Well, whatever, I don't mean to pick on France all the time, its not like I really hate the place or anything, even though their food is gross and I can't really think of anything else I like about the place besides their women AHAHA.

Yah I hate art so you ain't gonna get me on any of that shit that Jim Morrison fell for ahaha.

Oh I'm just kidding, only place I really hate is Canada, but I can't even hate them 'cause they invented Insulin, the bastards.

Seriously, who else can we make fun of, if we can't make fun of France?

Its like they're the last guy out in musical chairs or something, the process of elimination burns everybody else up for one reason or another, y'know, s'like, there's a ton of places that ain't psychologically healthy enough to handle a bunch of stupid-ass jokes, so that rules them out, and all the places that can take a joke have great senses of humor and that sorta ruins the whole fun of picking on 'em!

Yah, France, France is awesome, man, what's that one song they got, Psycho Killer, yah, see, now that shit is awesome, Psycho Killer! Qu'est-ce que c'est! fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fahaha *does the robot*

Fawlty Wiring

2008-09-26T10:55:00.009-05:00

I am so jealous of the Monty Python guys.

A comedy team funded by Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.

Like, those are your bosses, that's who you have to please, that's who you are supposed to be entertaining when they get off duty, holy shit.

And you get to work with all these other dudes who are totally hilarious.

Y'know, like, could it get any better?

And its not like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd were the least creative bands that ever lived or anything, either, y'know, you're getting up there into that Jim Henson level of creativity, man, without the Ewoks Ruined the Trilogy crap where you gotta do stuff for kids heh.

Of course, now that we can download everything off the internet and there's no money in music, the only musicians who are making any money are the ones that are grinding out garbage for all the computer-illiterate folks who still have to go to the stores to buy things, and those guys are a bunch of bland pap-producing idiots, so us intellectual know-it-all folks have sorta totally screwed ourselves in the ass there man ahaha.

Y'know, its like, who wants to be the comedy team produced by Britney Spears?

Wtf kinda sad-ass Bob Saget shit would be involved in making folks like that laugh?

Its like our intelligence and cunning has somehow turned around on us and thrown us under the Ewoks Were Awesome Bus or something.

Oogly Woogly Hypno-Eyes

2008-09-25T14:56:00.005-05:00

Y'know, when chicks try to protect themselves from my witchcraft, I know they're just playing hard to get.

Dude, could this chick get any hotter?

Clankety Clank

2008-09-25T14:39:00.004-05:00

Dee dee dum dee dee dee dum dee...

Dee dum dee dee dee dum dee...

...if I only had a brain. I'd...

Dum dee dee dum dee dee...

Dee dum dee dee dee dum dee dee...

...if I only had a braaain.

Got My Eyes On YOU, Pal

2008-09-25T12:11:00.008-05:00

There's this thing lately with people telling us that the "world is watching us as Americans to see what we'll do" or something.

I don't like it.

Dude, nobody is watching me.

And there's definitely nobody watching all the crazy hillbillies in the woods, that's why we're afraid to go in there.

And even if there was somebody watching me, they oughta be watching those crazy hillbillies in the woods so that we won't have to be afraid to go in there no more.

Dude, I bet the rest of the world is just trying to goad us into watching them back with that "we're watching you" stuff.

Well, you know how they're always getting all mad at us for not paying any attention to them and being ignorant of where they are located on maps and shit!

Watching them, watching us, watching them, yah man, that'd be a huge waste of time, that's why the rest of world ain't doing anything worth watching, they're too busy watching everybody else, if we fell fer that, then nobody would be doing anything worth watching, it'd be like a French Apocalypse of Nothing Happening or something, what with everybody sitting there, sipping coffee, watching each other watch each other!

Plus watching people is just snoopy and creepy and disrespectful.

That's why I'm proud to maintain my ignorance in all these matters, I consider it my patriotic and sacred duty as an American to conform to the highest standards of excellence in ignorance, I'm not willing to sink to everybody's elses dishonorable level, snooping on each other and invading each other's privacy and treating everybody like shit and rumor mongering and filling the world with jealousy and hate, no matter what it may cost me in Geography-related points on Gameshows, somebody has to maintain some integrity around here and quit cannibalizing the less fortunate in a never-ending illustration of our personal superiority while we smoke cigarettes and try to get laid!

Or whatever, y'know, what do I care, really ahaha.

Shanty Momma

2008-09-25T10:54:00.011-05:00

Hey, if we're gonna end up living in cardboard box shanty towns, then we're gonna come together as Americans and make sure that our cardboard box shanty towns are the best cardboard box shanty towns that the world has ever seen!

We can like, attach our cardboard boxes together and make huge-ass cardboard box mazes and mansions with tennis courts and exercise rooms and treehouses with working elevators and shit, it'll be awesome, we'll be the envy of the Better Cardboard Boxes & Gardens community baby.

We should make a fake documentary about failing to make a documentary about some guys who failed to make a successful Greeting Card For Pets company, where the whole thing takes place next to a rack of "greeting cards for pets" at a tourist shop on a tropical island or something.

Y'know, where they're all like, "Missing You" and "Wish You Were Here" cards for all the guilty rich people on vacation to send back to the pets they have locked away in kennels and shit, rich people don't actually care about their pets, but some of 'em do care about how they seem to care about their pets, its just that the poor people at the Greetings Card For Pets company over-estimated their vanity and under-estimated their stingyness, that's like, the whole statement of the movie, its this existential tension thingie where you watch one rich tourist after another make faces and noises as they decide not to buy "Wish You Were Here" postcards for their pets.

I'd rather make a fake documentary about failing to make a documentary about some guys who failed to make a successful Travel Show on PBS but that sounded too expensive, y'know.

Unless the reason they failed to make a successful Travel Show was that it was too expensive to actually travel to the places they were supposed to do the shows about, that'd be kinda funny if they never got to go anywhere and they got caught (by a competing Travel Show Star) for trying to trick everybody into thinking that they actually went to the places they were talking about ahaha awhellyah man I am a veritable goldmine of shit like this.

See, no matter what happens, the folks who live in my cardboard box shanty town are never gonna have to worry about what we're going to do for some entertainment.

Bush Rider

2008-09-24T17:34:00.016-05:00

Dude this economy thingie must be pretty serious if George W is willing to risk pissing off the last of his supporters by interrupting Knight Rider to blabber about it.

Ah he's going on at 8pm after Knight Rider is over boy that dude is one sly fox huh nothing to worry about there man he prolly just wants to be the first to talk about how cool Knight Rider was ahaha.

Hey, I got an idea for a new gameshow:

"Are You Smarter Than Somebody Who Married a Millionaire"

It'd work, trust me, its got everything it needs built into it already ahaha.

Yah its one of those "bittersweet victory" thingies even if you win, those are worth extra points y'know heh.

Hey, I told you asshats to marry a millionaire but you hopeless-ass romantics were all like "oh no dude I think I'd rather be poor" so I don't wanna hear none of yer shit dude I should be living large in your poolhouse as your "spiritual advisor" or something already ahaha.

Big Brotherocracy

2008-09-24T15:39:00.010-05:00

This is pretty goddam funny.

I think it would get more people involved in the democratic process if we switched the whole thing around so that we were allowed to vote for who we hated the most and get rid of them.

Hate has way less accessibility issues than love does, y'know?

Like, on our touch-tone phones, we could just press 1 to get rid of this guy, or press 2 to get rid of that guy, y'know, it could be all instantaneous and futuristic and stuff like that.

And then the guy we voted off the show would be notified on his phone with a foghorn sound effect or something heh.

Have it all happening in real-time with camera phones everywhere, y'know, government should be reality-tv style, totally, none of this crap where folks have all this time to dick around and have folks write 'em speeches and shit, we need to pick up some speed here, baby, think a little quicker on our toes, I don't wanna hear all these stupid excuses for everything, things need to start getting done.

Democracy oughta be all smooth and responsive and super adaptive and shit like that.

Dude, now that is the way to do it, one slip up and blam, the People Have Spoken, you are outta there, pack yer shit, flintstone.

Huh?

Yah well we'd have to come up with some kinda secondary system for putting people up on the Block and shit, I still got some kinks to work out and junk ahaha.

The Smoking Monkey Show

2008-09-24T11:41:00.018-05:00

When I said we should do a TV show, I didn't mean a good one.

I don't wanna get trapped doing anything like the Mentalist, where we got characters that are supposed to be all super smart and stuff, duking it out in a battle of wits every episode, that kinda shit is way the hell too hard to write.

Yah, you can go ahead and try to pull shit like that off week after week after week, we'll see how long you last heh.

Yah, naw, I meant that we should do something with totally low standards and properly managed expectations and shit, y'know, like Knight Rider or something, something where folks would be surprised and happy any time we accidentally did something that was halfway decent.

Just thinking about all the parents that are gonna be stuck watching that Knight Rider show makes me laugh man ahaha.

But we could do something good for those people.

Maybe not something as good as Knight Rider, y'know, 'cause that's a lot of work, actually, you need a fancy looking car with like, working lights and stuff for that, and you gotta do jumps and stunts and stuff, there's way the hell too much effort and money and danger involved in something like that.

Naw, see, I was thinking more along the lines of one of those shows where they got a talking monkey or something.

Yah, naw, see, we don't need a monkey that can actually talk, we could just have the whole show be one of those voice-over narration type dealies, from the perspective of the monkey, like they did everything on the Wonder Years, y'know?

So we can save ourselves some money there, we could just get ourselves a nice cheap non-talking monkey fer something like that.

Yah, I dunno how much monkeys cost but they can't be that expensive, a non-talking monkey has gotta be cheaper than a talking car, its prolly only a couple hundred bucks or something.

See, that'd be perfect, and all the parents would be stuck watching our talking monkey show, too, y'know, 'cause you can't watch shit about serial killers, if yer a parent, and kids love that talking monkey shit hahaha suckers.

Dude c'mon seriously the added bonus of getting to torture all the parents stuck watching our talking monkey show with their kids really puts this one over the top heh.

And we can make the monkey do all sorts of bad shit, too, like smoking cigarettes and crap, so that the parents have to be mean to their kids and not let 'em watch the show 'cause the monkey might teach 'em to smoke ahaha awhellyah y'know now that's the kinda awkard and awesome shit that makes life worth waking up for in the morning ahaha.

Meanwhile all the cool kids at school with cool parents that let 'em watch the Smoking Monkey Show will get all the chicks, and the ones that aren't allowed to watch it will end up as social misfits and rejects and they won't be able to find anybody to go to Prom with let alone reproduce with and thus the Smoking Monkey Show Fans will eventually take over the world.

Heck, the controversy alone is all the publicity we need, y'know with the way the journalists on the news are all insane-o with the health consciousness stuff, trying to keep everybody frightened so they'll keep watching the news for answers, they're gonna look like extremist dietary whackos going after our cute little Smoking Monkey, what with their barbie doll plastic surgery faces all twisted up into unnatural and rubbery looking masks of corporate pharmaceutical-fueled outrage ahaha.

Hell yah man, we could probably even get some fundage from Big Tobacco, too, y'know, like the talking car commercial show gets money from whoever makes the car.

Dude, a smoking monkey is a million times more loveable and American than a smoking camel, I mean, c'mon, wtf, don't camels spit and shit?

And Tobacco is a plant, man, so its all "green" and automatically environmentally conscious and stuff, just like the peaceful nature-loving Monkey ahaha.

"The Smoking Monkey is against Global Warming!"

Yah man, see, this idea just keeps getting better and better.

The Good News

2008-09-24T08:54:00.019-05:00

Teachers, frustrated with how stupid their students are, unanimously voted for a shift in the grading system today, where a score of 1% will now be considered a "D," and anything over a score of 50% or more will now be considered "unanimous."

All the other letters are in the middle of them two things, they didn't get rid of any.

"This is a huge win for teachers," said this hot teacher chick, "now we won't have to waste so much time with that crap."

"And this will make the students be smarter," said this other guy, "and that's what teaching is all about."

"Now the teachers won't have to teach us so hard," said another person who was shorter than the other guy.

As for the rest of the community, they seemed to be under the mistaken impression that I was auditioning them for that America's Got Talent thing on TV, you know, with the English Judge guy, it seems kinda weird that we use an English Judge guy to judge American Talent like that, don't it?

Its like they're looking for English talent or something, really.

See, that's probably why people are having such a hard time winning the thing!

Which reminds me, isn't it kinda dumb to call the news "news" just because its new?

I thought this stuff was supposed to be all smart and serious and spelled right and junk.

Calling it "news" just seems kinda cheesy, to me, if you really think about it, its like the "s" on the end is supposed to make it sound cute or something.

Well, whatever, some of them really could sing pretty good, and there was a couple of ones that might actually make it.

We'll be keeping our fingers crossed over here, Bob.

What Is Good In Life

2008-09-23T14:45:00.006-05:00

You people need some cheering up.

So I want you to imagine some hobbits.

Spending their entire day doing something related to the food they were eventually gonna get to eat, y'know, churning butter, taking care of animals, growing spices, perfecting recipes, making silverware, building booze barrels, baking bread, whatever.

That's all nice and everything, right?

And after a hard day of that shit, and a nice huge feast, they hang out on the porch in the fresh night air with a cool breeze moving through the trees and they eat desserts and smoke pipes and crack jokes and tell stories for a bit and they watch all the lights down there in town twinkle along with the reflections of the stars and everything on the lake or whatever.

Totally cool and smooth.

But they suck in bed, what with the weird little rubbery noises they make, and the way they're all inhibited and twisted, totally unable to express themselves and get comfortable and shit, its nothing but sheer sexual frustration there, the biting and hair pulling is actually the good stuff, there ain't no hobbits that know how to kick off their shoes and let their hair down and sink into each other with kisses, they seize up and freak out when they grab on to each other, their whole process of reproduction is all awkward and terrifying and unsatisfying and traumatizing to everybody involved, that's why Bilbo lived alone and never talked about it and shit man ahaha.

So don't be all jealous of the hobbits, man.

That's like being jealous of homeless people 'cause they get to go camping all the time.

Yah, Eating is only one of the Big Three.

Yah no, Shitting isn't one of 'em, Shitting sorta goes with Eating, I think.

Well, I'm not an expert or anything, y'know, so maybe you're right.

The Art of Plagiarism

2008-09-23T09:52:00.008-05:00

Its interesting, the way artists steal stuff from each other.

Like, books steal stuff from real life.

And comic books steal stuff from books.

And movies steal stuff from comic books.

And television steals stuff from movies.

In these cases, the stolen goods are traveling from a less-well-known source, something edgier and more underground with a cult following of people who are willing to put a lot of effort into getting at the highest quality entertainment, to a more widely accepted format that's easier to get at with a lower barrier to entry.

And even if the stolen goods weren't all watered down on purpose, in preparation for their delivery to the masses, or cut with something cheaper, so you could spread a tiny bit of goodness over a longer period of time, they'd still lose some of their potency, just due to the process of copying 'em, 'cause nobody understands what they're copying as well as the dude who made the original copy that they're all copying off of, and so there's always little bits and pieces that don't get copied.

Which is why, given the choice, you'd probably want to make your copies from the most intense and original sources, and not the most bland and over-boiled sources, just to increase the odds of capturing more of the colors and flavors and textures involved.

But that's not how games do it.

Nope, see, I think games actually have a tendency to do things the other way around, 'cause they got self-esteem issues and they want to steal acceptance by the masses more than they want to be thought of as "artistic" and "edgy" and "original" and all that heh.

Yah, y'know, you might be tempted to steal from a bland and widely accepted format, if your medium was having problems with acceptance, if your medium was considered "nerdy" or whatever.

Which is the exact opposite of the problem with TV, where its thought of as "stupid," and it needs to steal stuff that makes it seem more original and edgy and artistic ahaha.

Of course, books also steal stuff from comic books, and comic books steal stuff from movies, and there's all sorts of cross-pollination stuff like that, I'm generalizing here.

And you can also play semantics, and say that we're not really stealing things, that we're just being influenced by things, that these things are our "influences," there's a whole art to that shit.

And we can make an art out of stealing things, where we sorta admit that we're stealing things, we can say that we're doing a nod or a hat tip to something we like, or bringing some edgy cool and underground thing to the masses, as if we were doing them a favor, we're Prometheus Bringing Fire, we're the well-paid herald of Galactus or something.

Or we can just try to not get caught at it heh.

And then fall back on the Prometheus stuff if we do get caught or something ahaha.

But everybody is actually stealing things, imitation is the highest form of flattery and all that.

And every once in a while we do think up something new and original, while we're stealing stuff, 'cause the stuff we're stealing has a tendency to inspire new ideas and new twists and stuff.

I'm not one of those guys that go around moping about how everything has been done before, I mean, just because something is tough to do doesn't mean its impossible and that we should all just give up or whatever, all the cool things are tough to do, and I'm all totally into doing new stuff that nobody has done before, even if I'm not the kinda guy to worry about holding my nose when I need to steal shit 'cause I can't think of nothing new to do heh.

You gotta explore the map out to the edges to get to the new stuff, y'know?

Hell, you gotta explore the map out to the edges to even know what the new stuff is.

Anyways, there ain't nothing wrong with thinking of story-telling as being a DJ, where you spin records, or in this case stories, there's an art and a skill and a craft and a bunch of knowledge and appreciations and understandings that go into spinning 'em good, even if you ain't responsible for any of the songs that you are twisting together.

Its probably better to think of it that way than to think of it in any other way, actually, 'cause it tends to get less and less honest the more you move away from that heh.

And you can also get so good at mixing crap together that you can start making new songs out of bits and pieces of old songs, too, y'know, at that point, the line between doing that and sitting in a rocking chair and plucking out your favorite chords on an old guitar is starting to get pretty blurry.

And there's another rule I have, probably the most important rule of all, and that's to not ignore a thing just because "its been done before."

Everything is a tool, and you don't ignore all the things a tool might be able to do, just because some other dude used them once.

You don't need new tools, all the time, to make new things, we'd still be living in caves if we all thought shit like that ahaha.

And you don't wanna ignore the tools that bad guys use, either, just because a bad guy used it to do bad things, 'cause there's no such thing as Bad Guy Tools, its all in how you use it, as soon as a Good Guy picks up a Bad Guy Tool it tends to turn into a Good Guy Tool.

That's why I'm okay with drinking, y'know, it shouldn't be "against the rules" for the Good Guys to seek a little lubrication when they need it, after a long hard day of doing Good Deeds and all that shit ahaha.

Anyways, all of these things can be done well, or done poorly, that's how you know that there's an art to 'em.

And there's even all sorts of arts involved in stealing things.

But you ain't never gonna figure 'em out unless you start with being honest with yourself about how dishonest you are.

Y'know, yer just gonna end up being some crazy dude in the land of make believe heh.

I'm not an expert or anything, but I'm pretty sure that Artistic Integrity doesn't start with a river in egypt ahaha.

Well, whatever, we really should get together and make our own TV show.

Yah man, apparently we can just copy shit scene by scene from movies like the Fly and whatever nowadays and we don't even have to do the usual reach-around hat-tip thingie where we do a little name-dropping and point folks in the direction of the thing we stole it from ahaha.

Yah, I dunno, I'm guessing that its 'cause most of the TV audience right now is too young to see R rated movies, so we can just steal willy-nilly from Rated R shit and pretend we came up with all that junk!

Could it get any goddam easier?

See, we should be striking while that iron is still hot baby ahaha.

Emmy Fever

2008-09-22T18:32:00.007-05:00

I am neither proud of nor disturbed by the fact that I don't even know what the Emmies are.

I could guess, without looking in the wikipedia (the fact that I can't be bothered to even look it up in the wikipedia oughta tell you all you need to know, you ultra-hip folks can stop reading right now AHAHA), that they're for TV shit, insteada movie shit, 'cause I'm pretty sure (although not totally sure) that the Oscars are for movie shit.

But then there's the Academy Awards and the People's Choice Awards and I have no idea who the Academy is or who The People are but I am sure that nobody has ever asked me to vote for any of this shit so I apparently don't belong to whatever clubs I need to belong to in order to care about the opinions involved in the outcomes of those contests.

I've never watched an award show for anything, now that I think about it, I mean, you name it, I ain't watched it, so my lack of interest in the opinions of invisible people that I don't know anything about isn't limited to movies and television heh.

Oh, this movie won an Oscar, oh that actor won a Egor and an Ernie, y'know, it's all the same to me, that's great, good on you, there, buddy.

I do like those awards for the worst research of the year, the Ignobles or whatever, now that shit is a riot, but I just read about that stuff, y'know, I don't need to see anybody with weird hairdos struttin' up and down a runway with their boobs hanging out (although it certainly wouldn't hurt, now that I think about it heh).

Then again, I dunno who gets to vote on the Ignobles either, who the hell even knows what all the mad scientists are doing, man, I really oughta join that club, I could be hanging out at underwater supervillain research bases and stuff, checking out the latest info on which toads are the tastiest to lick, holy shit man, that'd be sweet ahaha.

A Three Hour Tour

2008-09-22T13:34:00.009-05:00

I heard Heroes is running from 7 to 10 pm central.

That's three hours of Heroes Goodness, man.

That's a lot of Heroes Goodness, actually, I mean, seriously, damn, three hours, man, hmm, that's a lot of Heroes to take in, y'know, in one sitting.

I think Boston Legal is starting up today, too.

Yah, its on at 9pm.

Man, there's an interesting who-would-win, Hulk Vs. the Thing type of fight, y'know, Boston Legal fans vs. Heroes fans, gonna take me a bit to get my aching head around that one ahaha.

I'm a fan of both shows, so its a contest between my Inner Boston Legal Fan Versus my internal Heroes-fan-who-has-already-been-stuck-eating-Heroes-for-two-hours-and-I-dunno-if-I-can-stand-three-hours-of-broadcast-television-in-a-day sorta Clash of the Titans thing going on there, which complicates things a bit.

And Fringe is tomorrow, y'know, the show where they give you sixty seconds to pee.

Sixty seconds is not enough time to pee and wash your hands afterwards, y'know.

Well, I'm just saying.

Yah you Fringe Fans ain't fooling me man, I ain't sharing my popcorn with any of you fuckers ahaha.

Spread Around S'more of This Rare Talent

2008-09-22T10:34:00.014-05:00

Man, I need to hook up with somebody making movies or something.

Screw this game crap, its too much work for everybody involved, its too much work to make the shit, its too much work to play the shit, and it don't pay enough.

Not when we could be having fun eating donuts on location and being creative while making something that was an hour and a half of fun to watch and eat donuts to and be done with it.

Something that was composed of short, cheetah-like bursts of energy, captured on film, something we could prepare ourselves for and execute over and over again, insteada some long-ass overly drawn-out endurance-test-of-a-thing where only the most exhausted shit manages to make it through the spanking machine and leave faint impressions on the tape.

Something that would matter more in the long run anyways by virtue of its sheer accessibility alone.

A television show would probably be better than making movies, movies are kinda bad for some of the same reasons games are bad, its the timing of the it, the pacing involved in the making and enjoyment of it, time is really the red-headed step child of dimensions, we're not real good at looking at it and understanding it yet, y'know, compared to length, width, and height, we're just barely starting to get our heads around the way things move through time, we like to look at stuff as snapshots, frozen in time, 'cause we get confused when all the parts start to move again, and it gets hard to measure things, and we get lost.

Movies are bad 'cause you got too much time to make 'em, and you don't gotta make as many of 'em, same as games.

But whatever, somebody's gotta be making a TV show that we could hook up with, and I don't mean something that's already famous, I don't wanna work on Battlestar Galactica or Stargate or any of that shit, I want something that we're free to give personality to, something we can bring to life any way we want without getting yelled at ahaha.

Oh, its probably just as bad as everything else, where some idiot execs from somewhere tell you that you oughta change the ending of the season finale and whatever, but there's a million ways to get around that kinda shit.

Yah, the only thing really bad about TV is the censorship stuff, when you automatically sorta tone yourself down and self-edit, but that can actually be a good thing sometimes, too, y'know, I could give examples, like the way the dude from Hill Street Blues mellowed out Lynch on Twin Peaks, and the result was better than the sum of the parts, there's an art to toning things down in places, its the big difference between Hitchcock and Tarantino, really, ain't it?

Y'know, those are the calm little avenues of shadowy accessibility for folks with more delicate sensibilities and your points of contrast amidst the hot and glaring splashes of technicolor zombie blood spatter sizzling on the pavement and the daisy duke hitchhiker climbing-into-the-VW-bus ass-shots in the orangey-orange sunshine.

Dude, somebody should get Tarantino to produce a TV show, and then hire me to help them eat the donuts and act as an advisor or something.

Yah, we can sell it to Showtime or some shit, pfft, those dudes will buy anything, juss lookit that Medieval piece of soft-porn shit they got and all the marketing behind it, I mean, seriously, could a show be a bigger waste of time and more boring than that?

I feel bad for the marketing geniuses that are wasting their lives and talent trying to prop pieces of crap like that up.

Y'know, how many times have you said to yourself, "man, the goddam commercials are better than this show, I wish the guys who were making these commercials would do a show!" ahaha.

I think the furniture is the most interesting thing on the Tudors, its like Antiques Road Show With Tits or something heh.

Oh whatever.

Seriously though, somebody get on that shit and hook us up!

Y'know, its like, wtf, I could write a season of Lost every day, there's all this "rare talent" that's just going to waste ahaha.

"Dude, I think you mighta painted yourself into a corner there, y'know, with the polar bear sequence."

"Pfft don't worry about it, I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually."

"Well, whatever, as long as this whole thing don't turn out to be some kinda stupid-ass dream, where the guy wakes up at the end and goes..."

"..."

Shit man, I could write a full season of a show about a bunch of guys making a show like Lost in a day ahaha.

And heck, Sundry could probably wrote two seasons worth of that kinda shit in a day AHAHA.

Yah man, we should all band together and create some kinda Creative Consulting Company.

All we really need is somebody specialized in creating Creative Consulting Companies, some kinda creative creative consulting company creative consultant guy from a creative consulting company creation consultation company or something.

Yah, I dunno how to do that shit, "I'm just a cheerleader" ahaha.

Flying Man

2008-09-22T09:39:00.005-05:00

"Your character is supposed to be going through a rough patch, where he's filled with sorrow over the loss of his brother and turned to drinking, that's why we need you to grow a beard or something."

Later...

"Hmm, he still doesn't look like a drunk going through a rough patch."

"Yah, naw, he looks like a News Anchor celebrating Abraham Lincoln Day with a Fake Beard or something."

"Man, this is bad."

"There's like, no way to make this dude look kinda scuzzy and rough around the edges, he's just too 80s or something."

"Yah, its just gonna end up being confusing for the audience."

"Mebbe we oughta write this part out."

Hay Fever Hero Rundown

2008-09-22T08:29:00.013-05:00

First off, you got your Hiro Nakamura.

He's really the heart of the show, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, we could just skip the rest of it and stick with Hiro the whole time and I'd be perfectly happy, he's an old fashioned superhero, cheerful and optimistic about people and all that (and he's got his officespace sidekick Ando to carry any pessimism that needs carrying), but its cleverly done and totally believable and everything.

That whole samurai thing from last season was kickass.

Where it turns out that his dad Sulu raised his kid on stories of this hero from ancient times that turns out to be the very kid that he's telling the stories to who went back in time and made sure that all the stories he heard turned out right?

Goddam that was good, seriously.

Then you got Noah Bennett, Claire's dad, who is a totally kickass character, which is why they keep threatening to kill him off, to keep us watching.

He's sorta like the Revenge of Clark Kent and Batman and the Husband from Bewitched or something, 'cause he ain't got any super powers, y'know, he's just got training and smarts, but he's also got this "is he a good guy or a bad guy" thing running along on the side.

Bad guys that turn into good guys is always a good one.

Like his buddy, the Haitian, who started out as a totally scary dude that never said a word, with the totally freaky power to make you forget shit or even turn you into a vegetable.

And then, when he finally speaks, he turns out to be this sweet-hearted and gentle religious dude who is anything but selfish, he's like all tapped in to the bigger picture and stuff.

Even though his power and the stuff he has to do is anything but sympathetic and gentle heh.

That's pure gold, baby.

And I like Syler, the bad guy, but I think they totally screwed up when they did that stuff with his mom, where they made him into one of those serial killers that was abused when he was a kid, as if that explains everything.

That's the same kinda thing as any movie where the serial killer is a serial killer just because he's gay, as if that explained everything.

Syler woulda been a better character without that "I was abused so I became a serial killer" shit, y'know?

He woulda been better as a regular guy, with a horrible-to-use needs-to-eat-brains super power, who gave in to using it just 'cause it made him incredibly powerful.

Its like the choice between morality and power right there, you can be good guy, and be all weak and stuff, or you could eat brains and fly and lift things with your mind and read people's thoughts and live forever.

You don't need any "mom whipped me in the tub" shit for that, that's a tough one even if your momma didn't love you enough heh.

Aside from the dumb reasoning, Syler is totally kickass as a badguy, I loved the junk where he was driving around in Mexico with that girl with the black stuff that came out of her eyes and her brother and that dude that they busted out of jail, that was award-worthy writing and directing and everything right there, they coulda easily had a spin-off show based on Joyrides with Syler or something heh.

Well, aside from the way they clumped it together with the Big Cowinky-dink that made everybody groan, where they're driving along and they find Syler laying in the middle of the road, ugh man, that was beyond terrible, and the Recovery of Syler, previous to that, with that chick who do illusions (which was cool), made no sense at all.

But I assume they'll go back and make more sense out of that later, in a world where people can travel through time and read minds and predict the future and stuff, its easy to explain away bad bits of plot with a quick flashback or whatever, I assume that the illusion chick was only working for the people who fixed Syler up, that she was sorta like a tasty little mouse dumped into a snake cage, and that there's more to that story.

As far as the rest of the folks on the show go, they're just kinda marching along in place, I wouldn't quit watching the show if any of the rest of 'em got killed off.

A lot of 'em had good setups, as characters, and they got some really good and likeable actors, like that almost-too-pretty-to-be-a-man Mohinder guy, but they haven't really gone anywhere with 'em, the Policeman who can read minds is bottoming out and losing his humanity (which was the only thing he had going for him as a character), the flying senator never had any humanity, Claire's "you don't know what its like to have super powers" crap is really getting old.

And they're completely ignoring the murderous internet porn chick with split personalities, who is the show's version of Wolverine.

And I really don't like the good guy Neo-wannabe version of Syler, the guy who doesn't have to eat brains to steal everybody else's power, I mean, it seems so unfair to have that dude be the "superman" that fights Syler, 'cause his power was so easy to aquire in comparison, where the bad guy actually had to put some elbow grease into it, to say the least heh.

I seriously hope that Syler eats his brain, and gets that guy's power, 'cause then Syler won't have to eat brains anymore ahaha.

The Medicine Isn't Working

2008-09-21T16:55:00.007-05:00

I've got a cold and hay fever and the flu and everything, and I'm sorta wavering in and out, between bouts of crystal clarity and a hot fog that's hard to breathe through, the leaves began to fall from the trees and they sound overly loud, crackling like wood-chips when they hit the ground, the hummingbirds (there's two of them) chase each other around my head a few times, for a moment, and I know I'm a real life picture of a dizzy cartoon character with birds flying around my head, but it doesn't even occur to me to laugh, and so they land (I've never seen a hummingbird land before) and we stare at each other and I can see how small they really are, they're just tiny little birds the size of your thumb.

I think about how cello and violin music is really good, the serious stuff, like the stuff they had in Arcanum, that was all class, man, that's style, that's what you should use in a game, it isn't just classical music that makes something timeless, its that cello and violin stuff.

But I don't really know anything about classical music, I'm like a guy that has never seen star wars or something, when it comes to classical music, I mean, I love Beethoven and I can talk some shit about Mozart and Grieg and a few other ones, if I got cornered, but that's like saying the Beatles were a good band or something, y'know, I couldn't name that music I like from those airplane commercials or anything, that stuff I always think of as Turn of the Century Music, looking forward to some science fictional future full of awesome inventions (which we have, but we lost the music that was supposed to go along with it, on the way, somehow).

I don't know what kind of music the cello and violin stuff I like is, there's probably a name for it, but I've never talked with anybody about classical music, I've never met anybody that knew as much as I do about it, in real life, and I don't feel like I know anything about it, so its just like some strange and beautiful ocean out there that I believe in but have no proof of.

I'm smart enough to know that if you do a Peter-and-the-Wolf type thing, where you tie a character to a theme, then you need to make sure their theme can evolve along with them, or you'll be stuck with static characters that never seem to change or grow, non-dynamic characters.

That's not always a bad thing, sometimes people want characters that are always the same, its comforting, in a way, like your favorite ratty-old t-shirt, the t-shirt that's so worn out that its become almost filmy and ghostlike in places, its pattern is staying the same but its growing fainter, this is how it exits the stage, by fading away right before our eyes, insteada making sharp turns and stomping about, there's something to think about there, but I can't think of the words to take me down those alleyways, at the moment, the thoughts escape me, weighed down by the flu, or whatever it is that I got, I can't follow the things that stay the same and fade away.

I know that its because I'm trying to figure out how sick I am all the time that my senses seem sharper than normal, I'm paying more attention to how they work than I normally would, now that I don't trust them completely.

Normally I just go around squinting at everything all the time, hardly noticing anything, ignoring everything on the sidelines, like the birds and the way that the leaves sound when they hit the ground, that's why its surprising me, its like I've never bothered to listen to them before, never noticed how strange they are.

So in a way, this is like a cool little vacation, a strange little trip, and the way my nose is all raw from our skirmishes with the box of kleenex, the way that my eyes are hot and weary and my head is heavy with fog, the way my thoughts are a like a bunch of logs half rolling and half sliding down the stairs, leaving a trail of black and dirty smudges and bark, well, that is a small price to pay for this temporarily heightened sensory state, right?

Just a Centon

2008-09-21T11:08:00.007-05:00

I think you need to integrate your fantasy life with your menial household tasks a little more.

Perhaps that half-filled can of tomatoes is the very last half-filled can of tomatoes in the Intergalactic Wagon Train, the last tomatoes from our home planet, now that it has been destroyed by a terrible robot apocalypse.

And thus great care must be taken with the freshness of its contents, for it carries one last taste of a place called "home," a limited-use potion of childhood memories that must be used soon and can never be used again, with every passing moment the chemical bonds within it weaken, and it must be preserved!

And now you have been tasked by a sexy (and potentially dangerous) alien woman to find some strange and colorful little piece of xenopological pottery amongst the air-sealed panels and lockers and assorted storage areas of her mysterious ship, something that will, without doubt, turn out to be an intentional example of how different or similar this civilization is, from and to our own, designed by some prop-and-special effects guy who had never intended it to actually be used, and you must ponder the alien woman's impossible-to-guess storage methodologies to locate it, perhaps they sort things alphabetically, or by smell.

That's actually not that much of a stretch for me, I have no idea where an exotic alien female might store her futuristic-looking ration containers heh.

You can add in some stuff about being the last of your kind and the continuation of the species and all that classic shiznit if you require some motivation to perform her simple tasks as assigned, and you can always season it to suit your tastes, spice things up with some exotic alien mating rituals, perhaps her alien physiology is different, her erogenous zones may be located in previously undiscovered and unusual places, y'know, whatever.

Thanks to your healthy science-fiction-fueled imagination, and the Trapped in an Elevator Effect, pretty much every chick can suddenly transform into that barefoot chick from the Forbidden Planet heh.

See, you didn't have to work this hard when the Sopranos were still on the air, 'cause that show was all about cooking and eating ahaha.

Lies

2008-09-20T20:24:00.011-05:00

It might surprise you to know that I, the Greatest Roleplayer Alive ('cause all the other ones have drown in mysterious accidents), am a horrible, terrible liar, when it comes time to actually lie about something.

Being able to do little song and dance numbers and funny voices and going off on crazy tangents to make folks laugh and being able to spin yarns and read minds and detect micro-changes in air density and stuff doesn't really lend itself to lying as much as you'd probably think if you weren't any good at that stuff.

I never lie.

I never lie 'cause I'm one of those guys cursed with that thing where everybody can read my mind.

Seriously, most of the time, when folks ask me a question, I don't even have to say anything, everybody can just reach right into my hat holder and get at whatever answers they need, its like living in the Village of the Damned and shit and being the only guy without any super powers.

But even if you never bother lying to yourself, or for yourself, you can still get stuck in positions where you've got to try to lie for somebody else.

Like when they tell you a secret that they don't want somebody else to know, and then it never fails that the very person that they don't want you to tell the secret to the most homes in on you at a party with a terrifyingly accurate line of interrogation (like a dude being careful with a djinni wish), as if he can see the secret through the skin of your forehead, and you're stuck, either lying, or telling him the secret.

And I always have to choose to lie, then, 'cause I'm from Chicago, and that's just how we have to do it, even though I know it ain't going to work heh.

And that's when my total disregard for the arts of deception really becomes apparent.

I think what happens is tied in to the way that everybody can read my mind, its like an extension of the same property.

Its like my brain has to work so hard, in order to lie, that it has to reverse polarity on all the vibes I emit, or something, its like the earth stops rotating as my brain grabs for traction, and everyone in the room can feel it, there's this horrible jarring sensation that runs through everybody's nerve endings, a collective inhalation of breath, an inaudible shudder as an electromagnetic pulse goes flashing invisibly through the room and makes everyone forget what they were doing, discussions stop dead, there's a horrible silence and stillness, everything freezes, and everyone, even people across the room, turn and look at me, standing at the source of all this discomfort, to see what the hell is causing such a humongous-ass disturbance in the force.

And I feel like I'm standing on the edge of a cliff.

That's what always happens, right before I manage to spit out the lie, whether its something tiny, like a "yeah" when I should've said "no," or something more complicated, like making up some stupid ass story to cover somebody's trail.

I can't even get away with an "I don't know," 'cause I always do know, and everybody knows that I do know.

And "I have no idea..." doesn't work for the same reason, I always have at least one idea, and its almost always the right one heh.

And nobody has ever fallen for one of my horrible-ass weak little lies, I'm so bad at lying that people have actually started smiling and laughing out loud at how horrible I am at it, I usually don't even get in trouble for it, 'cause people think I'm just trying to make 'em laugh or something, there's like no ill will or anything ahaha.

Haha man my eyes are watering from the stress of just thinking about it, that's how bad I am at lying!

Yah, actually my eyes are all watery like this 'cause I got some kinda wicked-ass flu or something, seriously.

But whatever, that's why you can be sure that I'm not trying to trick you, baby, I would never do that to you, I couldn't do that to you even you wanted me to, I just don't have it in me.

Antediluvia

2008-09-20T14:38:00.006-05:00

There is one exception to the "arse" rule.

And that's when folks say that they "can't be arsed" to do something.

That doesn't translate into Americanglish properly, so that's still okay to do.

Saying you "can't be assed" to do something doesn't make any sense.

Which also makes it pretty goddam funny.

So I'm gonna start doing it.

And that means that you are on borrowed time if you are still "arsed" into doing things "ye olde" way.

Haha yah I'm giving you all Official Notice, the countdown clock on the last of the Arse Holdouts has begun.

"I can't be assed to switch to the new way."

"New way? What's this about a new way? There's been some very large talk behind my sleeping back, and no error."

"Don't worry, these are the blokes that still measure shite by the length of some King's foot."

One of the Top Ten Books of Some Year

2008-09-20T12:54:00.022-05:00

I been reading High Fidelity.

Its a lot of fun, even though there's bits of it that are word-for-word what you saw in the movie ('cause it couldn't be rewritten into a script without losing some of the personality).

The main difference between the book and the movie is that its actually s'posed to be a bunch of british dudes in London or something, and that actually helps to keep it interesting.

Yah, like, every once in a while, the dude will say something like "that's a corker!" and I'll be all like, wtfizzat.

Y'know, 'cause a lot of folks say stuff like "sabre" and "colour" is the "European Spelling" of the "Americanized" words "saber" and "color."

But what is really going on there is that that kinda shit is actually Ye Olde English and the Antiquated Poetic and Vestigial spellings of those words, maintained by the equivalent of Amish people who refuse to adapt to the modern times for whatever reason.

I can't use that kinda spelling without people thinking I'm going into character or Lovecraftian Mode or something heh.

Hey man, people give Lovecraft a lot of shit for being an Anglophile and all he ever did was spell a couple words funny ahaha.

Anyways the character telling the story thinks its funny that Americans actually use the word "horny."

And I think "corker" is pilgrim-talk.

So its a fair trade I guess ahaha.

Well, whatever, on the back of the paperback copy I got, there's this quote.

It says "One of the Top Ten Books of the Year - Entertainment Weekly" without some of the caps.

And the first thing that latched on to me about it was that being "One of the Top Ten Books of the Year" isn't all that great.

Its not like being One of the Top Ten Books of the Decade, or Top Ten Books of the Century, or One of the Top Ten Books of All Times.

Couldn't they find somebody that liked it better than that?

There's all sorts of weird-ass people on this planet, there's gotta be some freakasaur out there who put that book at number one of all times.

Its like you didn't even bother to look!

Its a pretty good book, imho, I mean, it definitely deserves better than being put somewhere in the Top Ten Books of the Year (which really means that it must be somewhere between 5 and 10, or else he woulda said it was in the Top Five, right?).

And that's especially true if you only read a couple books per year.

'Cause if you only read two or so books a year, then the fact that both of 'em are gonna be in your Top Ten of the Year sorta goes without saying.

That don't mean they were any good.

Maybe you don't read many books 'cause the Top Two of the Year were pieces of shit.

They should have found somebody that only reads one book a year, and then paid him to read High Fidelity, 'cause then he could honestly say that it was the best book he had read all year.

And its also the worst book he had read all year but whatever that's what quotation marks were invented for *snippety-snip* ahaha.

And just because a dude reads more than ten books a year, its not like he read all of the books that were written that year, y'know?

Its not like the opinion and ordination of a ten-book-a-year guy would be worth a shit.

And its not like you can just say shit like "its in the Top Ten of the Year" and think its official without realizing that this book probably did not earn that title competing amongst millions of hopeful contestants in some kinda international gladiator ring for books with impartial judges.

Even if being in the Top Ten of the Year is kinda wimpy, it probably didn't even really earn that, somebody probably just sorta said that in an off-handed way, and then it became gospel.

And thinking about all that shit gave me the time to realize that maybe the critic hadn't even read the fucking book.

'Cause the book is all about Top Five of All Time lists, not Top Ten of the Year lists.

And if the critic was trying to be funny and clever, he totally fucked that up.

Or maybe the critic was trying to be a dick, by fucking it up on purpose.

I do stuff like that sometimes.

Sometimes I do shit like that and it isn't even on purpose.

But then again, I prolly wouldn't have read the book either, if somebody told me I had to 'cause it was my job, I would've just scanned it a little and came up with a cheerful quip, without overdoing it, y'know, in case, when the real critics who actually read the books they review all the way through show up, it turned out that the book sucked fer some undeniable reason, like the literary version of a mathematical proof that proved both that the book sucked and that you were a total fraud as a reviewer or something.

No sense in muddying up your journalistic integrity on some stupid book that you ain't even gonna bother to read by giving it too much praise or whatever, better to play it loose and just dunk it in the lower five of the Top Ten of the Year.

You don't want people saying stuff like "oh man, that's the reviewer that said that that fucking High Fidelity book was like, the 8th best book of 19-whatever! That guy sucks! He didn't even read it!"

Yah, Top Ten of the Year is playing it safe, that's saying there's like a twenty percent chance of rain.

Plus ain't nobody gonna keep track and actually count how many times you put a book in your Top Ten of the Year as long as you never list 'em all out somewhere and never specify what year you are talking about, so that's good to use on all the ones you ain't gonna bother to read.

Still, maybe that Top Ten of the Year thing was a slam.

That be a pretty fucking good slam, coming from a dude who actually read the book, y'know?

That'd be kinda like a smashed-it-out-of-the-park-and-into-the-side-of-Jupiter slam, if it was on purpose.

And maybe the people who published the book didn't realize it 'cause they hadn't bothered to read the fucking book either.

'Cause they saw the movie, just like everybody else, and thought that the book seemed to be pretty much the same as the movie, same as everybody else.

Except the movie was only an hour and a half long and the book would take like, a month to read or something (which would leave two books out of your Top Ten every year, if you read non-stop all year round).

They prolly didn't even notice the parts where the guy says stuff like "thats a corker" and "arse."

Which is what makes it worth reading, really.

Its the tale of some tragically hip musical trivia dude that talks like a medieval sailor, what's not to love about that?

Its all weird and twisted and interesting like that dude on Boston Legal who played the original Daniel Jackson.

Its like writing a book about people who are too cool to read books for people who are too cool to read books.

That's the witty and ironic kinda shit that makes the British sense of humor world-famous, but at the same time, its sorta like its no wonder that nobody can finish the damn thing.

And the movie doesn't help, 'cause its like, "oh man, I seen all this before, dude, that Jack Black was hilarious, heeheehee, I'll just flip past this part" *flip-flip-flip*

"Yah, fuck this, I'm just gonna do a review of this weird little buzz-phrase on the back of the book."

Don't Worry, Steve's DNA Is On Our Side

2008-09-20T11:28:00.010-05:00

That show was the last time I watched Colbert.

Yah, seriously, I saw that on TV, and then I was thinking about what would be funny to say about it, and I realized that that was the last time I ever watched Colbert.

I used to love Colbert.

But that show kinda made me sick.

And I didn't really think about it too much at the time, y'know how we sorta automagically block painful memories and stuff so we can continue on with grits-n-gristle of day-to-day survival?

But now that I've gotten some distance from it, I think I'll be able to talk about it some, without bursting into tears.

Yah, see, when I saw that, I had a vision.

Oh yes.

A vision of Richard Garriott's DNA being picked up by aliens who used it to produce a clone army of blue leather-catsuit and whip-wearing Richard Garriotts, an army of guys that look sorta like a cross between Chuck Norris (without the muscles) and a Magician from the 70s, an army of Creepy Kings in Futuristic Latex that the aliens could use to take over the Earth and rule the world.

A Richard Garriott Apocalypse.

And I understood what Colbert was doing there, 'cause he realized that the Earth's only hope against such a nightmarish turn of events would be for him to make a latch ditch effort to get in there and make friendly with Richard Garriott and his Handservants, to make sure that the aliens had a sample of Colbert's DNA, too, so that they might also be tricked into creating a clone army of Colberts, one that us human freedom fighters in the Resistance could rally to our cause and use to turn back the tide of Richard Garriotts.

It was a great personal sacrifice for Colbert, 'cause he knew that I would never watch his show again, after he seemed to turn on us like that, in order to go undercover.

Hang on, I need a moment to compose myself, the memories are starting to... get to me *sniffle*

Okay, I think I can continue.

Anyways I applaud his heroism.

From a distance.

Okay, okay, I'm just jealous.

But I don't have a lot of time for TV, so I just watch Craig Ferguson, y'know, for the news.

Maybe one day I'll tell you guys the time-traveling parallel universe demonic possession black hole laser apocalypse story that explains why nobody on the internet spells "Fergusen" with any consistency.

Its for his own protection.

Happy World

2008-09-20T10:10:00.005-05:00

Its not okay to use the word "retarded."

Its still okay to the use the word "stupid," though.

That's weird.

I guess the stupid people haven't gotten around to voting yet.

And nobody cares about the stupid people like they care about the retarded people, so nobody votes in their place, like they do for the retarded people.

Everybody is all nice and protective of you, as long as you're retarded.

But move one little bump up the ladder to stupid and its like they wanna kill you when they get stuck behind you in traffic.

Its okay to want to kill stupid people.

But you can't even say the word retarded, 'cause you might hurt a retarded person's feelings.

That's weird, man.

I wonder if, one day, in the distant future, it'll be against the rules to say anything negative.

Its interesting to think about, y'know, this eventual blissful utopia that these happy pandas who-hate-stupid-people envision, where they get rid of all the negativity and you can't even say shit like "I think this milk is spoiled."

'Cause you might hurt the feelings of spoiled people.

Haha yah that would never work, 'cause we can always say stuff like "nice pants" and "oh that was really smart" ahaha.

"Thank the gods, for in their eternal wisdom, they hath forseen all things, and provided us with sarcasm."

You can't even say that you can't say something without being super negative.

Well, you ain't on the team that's trying to encourage folks to do good stuff better.

That ain't what you're doing.

No, see, you are engaging the "bad guys" in combat and trying to take away their right to talk and stuff.

Did you guys ever think about that?

What if your "bad guys" are only bad 'cause they're retarded and they don't know any better?

Ah, but its okay to go and be inhumane to 'em if they're stupid.

Or spoiled.

Hey, I'm just being nice about it 'cause yer an idiot.

Hey now, don't you accidentally try to hurt me, you don't even know what you are doing, you might hurt yourself!

Lord of the Apes

2008-09-20T08:56:00.015-05:00

Elephants blow water out their nose, y'know?

That's gross.

Its especially gross when they wash themselves in stuff they blow out of their nose.

S'like they're blowing their noses into their own armpits and over the tops of their own heads and cleaning behind their ears with the stuff.

Cooling themselves off with their own mucus or whatever.

Hey man, I don't care how hot you are, buddy, that'd be some gross ass shit if I did it.

Rubbing mucus into my skin and going "ahhhh that's better! I was so hot! And now that I've slicked myself up and gotten myself all nice and slippery, I'm going to latch my jaws onto your face and suck your brain out through your nose and eat it!"

Yah see, its all freaky like that.

Unless I was an elephant.

'Cause humans actually clap for that stuff, they even laugh when the elephants squirt human beings.

With liquids from their nasal passages.

Liquids that have been sitting in their long, gross-ass tubes fulla dirt and slimy wires and hairs.

And they say that elephants are all smart and junk.

So its like, you know they know what they're doing.

Blowing their noses on all the humans and laughing at the way the humans get all happy when they do it, as if they were a sprinkler or busted open fire hydrant or something.

They must think that we're idiots.

Elephant better not try to pull that shit on me, man.

Its the same thing with whales and their blowholes, y'know.

"Thar she blows!"

And then people wanna swim with them.

I'm not swimming in that stuff that came out of their noses, man!

Meanwhile, if I hock a gob, nobody claps.

Nobody wants to celebrate their connection to nature and dance under the glittering spray of one of my sneezes.

Nobody gets the sudden impulse to swim with me in a foamy puddle of my own mucus.

Or take a shower in that shit like Tarzan.

Yah, Tarzan, our embassador to the jungle, "he knows the animals!"

Meanwhile the elephants are all like, "omfg I can't believe he's letting you do that to him! I think I'm gonna puke!"

What an idiot.

Idiots.

Well, okay.

We do tend to clap and laugh and dance around a little when a human blows milk out of their nose.

Or coffee or whatever.

Or when somebody does a good spit-take.

And you can't get the "misting" effect if you ain't willing to fire some of that crap out of your nose.

Yah, y'know, a spit-take where the guy just horks the water right back out of his mouth in a stream ain't funny, that's just gross.

For some reason.

I dunno.

Well, I think its like watching a rich kid puke in that awkward rich kid way that they do everything else.

Y'know, s'like watching something pretending to be human, just to fit in with the gang and make folks laugh, and then halfway through the routine they realize that they can't go through with it, and then they get all scared that everybody is gonna figure 'em out, and they end up doing shit that's even more gross than a human would do, 'cause its so awkward and unnatural, and its totally uncomfortable and not funny at all for everybody involved.

Its like it starts out as comedy, gets disgusting, and then it ends with medical concerns and pity or something.

Way to ruin it, rich-boy!

Good times!

Milk coming out of an android's nose isn't funny!

Well, whatever, I guess we aren't that weird.

But still, laughing at a spit-take and wanting to take a shower in it are two different things.

So Tarzan is still an idiot.

Cheap Theatrics

2008-09-17T22:06:00.016-05:00

Some actors definitely think scifi is uncool, that scifi is unbecoming, somehow.

Meanwhile Emergency Room Drama is the shiznit, I mean, seriously, that's where its at, pretending to be a pediatrician or a dude with cancer, aw hellyah, actors eat that shit up, they think that's all class, you get to cry and have tender moments with Tiny Tim and everything.

Pretty much every show takes a turn at some point where they have summa that cheesy ass medical drama stuff innit, I think its even more common than the "ticking timebomb" dealie, even shows like the A-Team had more than a couple tender scenes at an operating table and shit, I'm pretty sure ahaha.

And we sit through that crap and we don't say anything about it even though we know that we're just stuck watching that shit 'cause its something that actors like to do.

Nobody else likes that shit, do they?

Yah, mebbe the women.

Yah, you know how they eat up that disease-of-week garbage heh.

Hell yah I blame them too man I always punch out at whoever is closest to me when I bump my head on a doorway and shit ahaha.

But look at how happy the actors are, with their stethoscopes and clipboards, its like watching a bunch of kids in a treehouse.

And they really think they're doing something important or something.

When the chicks that like that disease of the week crap ain't really all that as far as discerning audiences go.

Its not like they're the toughest critics in the world, man, those are the people that go "awwww" when you hold a puppy up to the screen heh.

Well, they definitely ain't better than the nerdy and general well-read audience that watch scifi shit man c'mon I mean seriously, those are the kinda people that actually might know the name of the author of the thing you are working on and a little bit about the history of theatre in the medieval times and all that horseshit ahaha.

"I don't want to be famous for being the second Daniel Jackson!"

"Well you ain't gonna be famous for being the nine millionth Hamlet, buddy."

Serious actors are funny 'cause its like they've forgotten that they're really just a bunch of carnies from vaudeville with flowers that squirt water and chicks that are willing to flip up their skirts for a buck and stuff heh.

Angelvision

2008-09-17T22:06:00.013-05:00

Two angels perch on a branch at the very top of a tree at the very top of a hill, looking down on all things from the edge of some sleepy little town, just as the sun comes up.

Well, angels can't to go where the sun doesn't shine, they can't stand in the shadows under a tree, or bug people in their houses or wander around in basements, 'cause they'd get disconnected from the Light.

Yah, I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure they need to maintain line-of-sight, like, "where angels fear to tread" and all.

Well, I think the disconnected ones become ghosts or something, actually, that's why houses are haunted with things that can't find their way and stuff like that.

Anyways they don't have eyes, not like me and you, they ain't made out of cells and bits of organic stuff that react to light and replicate and transfer messages to an electro-chemical blob that turns it all into pictures somehow, they don't have any of that junk that gets buried in the junkyard when you die like a used car with cheetos crunched into the floormats.

I think that's why they say angels are blind.

But they ain't, not really, or at least not totally, and not all the time.

They just don't see the same as us, they don't see the same way we do.

But they also don't always see the same as each other, either.

In this case, the first angel on the tree can only see the evil in everything.

And the second angel can only see the good.

And they can stare right through all the roofs and walls and floors of the town and see all the evil and good in everything as it happens and argue with each other about it.

Yah, angels love to argue with each other, I dunno why, they could be hooting and hollering and singing and flying all over the place feeling the sunshine on their wings and enjoying creation and everything, but fer some reason, they tend to sit around and crab about shit to each other a lot.

Anyways all the evil-vision angel ever sees is a bunch of evil stuff everywhere.

So he's a little dark-n-moody, y'know.

He sees all the bad stuff that's gonna happen even before its gonna happen, he sees it moving through the alleys, he sees it driving to work.

And there ain't a whole helluvalot he can do about it, 'cause he can't go where the bad stuff usually happens.

Well, bad stuff hardly ever happens out in the sunshine, out there on the angel-turf, in front of the gods and everybody.

And the angel that sees the good in everything, y'know, you'd think that that guy would have a better outlook on stuff, seeing momma's singing to their babies, and kids playing in the alleys, and folks helping people who are hurt, and people falling in love for the first time, but he (actually angels ain't guys or gals, they ain't got any of that stuff that you bury in the ground to make the plants grow, but you know what I'm saying) ain't a whole helluvalot better.

'Cause as the good-vision angel looks around, he sees less and less good stuff going on, he sees all the places where the good isn't growing.

And he's mad that he can't get in there and fix things sometimes, too.

He's mad that he has to sit up here, on this tree, and just watch all the good stuff wink out down there, in the dark corners, without being able to do anything about it.

'Cause he ain't allowed to go in there where the light doesn't shine.

But that's his choice, y'know, he could look at it any way he wants.

Just like the angel that can only see the evil in everything could've decided to watch all the places where the evil wasn't growing, and take heart in that.

See, that's the problem with angels, nobody is immune to being the guy that goes around yelling at everybody about how somebody stole his sunglasses while he's actually been wearing 'em on the top of his head the whole time heh.

And the gods were apparently pretty stingy when they were handing out the sense-of-humors too ahaha.

Swapmeat

2008-09-17T22:06:00.008-05:00

Sometimes I think stuff like, "dude, everybody is such a merchant."

But its actually really tough to not be a merchant.

Way harder than it seems.

'Cause of the way we're programmed for survival, and the way our brains work, and the way we communicate in metaphors, pretty much all we are is value-sorting machines, trying to make a buck and get a step ahead.

And you can be a merchant of ideas, too.

And you can sell yourself on your own ideas.

And you might be selling yourself when you make friends with people.

So its not as simple as it looks.

Of course, if there ain't nothing that you want from folks, then why the hell are you sticking around and bugging 'em?

And if there ain't nothing that you want from folks, then why the hell are you sticking around and letting them pull their sales pitches on you?

See, its pretty tough to break out of that loop heh.

You help somebody, and then they're all like, "I owe you, man."

Like its a credit system or something heh.

And then you're all like, "you don't owe me anything."

And they're all like, "is this some kind of trick?"

And you're all like, "naw, uh, if you need to pay it off, just do something nice for somebody else or something."

Getting paid to do heroic things kinda ruins the heroic part, y'know?

Its like it lowers the heroic value of it by however much you get paid ahaha.

Gawd its hard to break out of that loop, ain't it?

And I think sometimes we make fun of our buddies, as we're trying to cheer 'em up, so that they'll feel like they don't gotta worry about paying it off.

Y'know, like, you start your joke with a slam, and then add something at your own expense on to the end of it, something self-deprecating, so that everything comes out even in the end and nobody feels like they need to dig out their wallets heh.

Self-deprecating humor is so Last Friday man ahaha.

Free Speech Kills Rainforests

2008-09-17T22:06:00.007-05:00

Stephen King does more crap in his books than I think I'd ever need to do as a story-teller in a game.

There's all sorts of gross supernatural blowjobs and people getting their tits hacked off and everything, I don't think I'd need to do anything like that to tell my kinda stories heh.

Not to single him out, King doesn't actually give me even half the willies that Straub does brrrr! whew! ahaha.

But if I made a Stephen King sorta game, I'd be doing it for adults.

And I don't mind stuff that makes it easier for folks to restrict shit for their kids, as a default, if that's what they wanna do, I don't think folks should have to worry that their kids were gonna get preyed on by carnies and con artists that wanna sell their shit to 'em or take advantage of them somehow.

Y'know, like Disney does, with all those goddam commercials before they show their goddam features ahaha.

Even though I never had to worry about what the "rules" were for the "adult" and "kids" section of the library, my mom and me were grumbling in the car about how bad the endings were to certain Stephen King books by the time I was in third grade.

Don't get me wrong, my mom actually is kinda old fashioned, she's just old fashioned like an American Indian heh.

But I don't think everybody oughta have to do stuff the way my family does it.

Yah, naw, see, for the first few years of a kid's life, they should prolly be locked in a basement or something so their parents are the only ones that would be allowed to sell their shit to 'em and take advantage of 'em and stuff ahaha.

Anyways, the only problem with doing games that are restricted to adults is that you ain't gonna make as much money, right?

'Cause the kids of people that restrict their kids to kid shit are the big market, yah?

People with kids won't buy anything for themselves, but they'll buy just about any stupid ass thing in the world for their kids, as long as its some stupid-ass tasteless british food kinda kiddie stuff ahaha.

And so quality entertainment for adults and mexican food is a niche market or something.

"Games are for kids."

Or that's the self-pertuating myth, at least.

Even though Stephen King did pretty well for himself.

But I do think game companies sorta turn a blind eye at certain key points, and play the gray area game, maybe its for kids, and maybe it isn't, don't ask don't tell, playing it as close to the line as they can so they keep their target markets as wide as possible and get more money.

Y'know, you don't want anybody playing your game to say "this stupid game is for kids!" but you actually do want retail stores and parents and everybody else to say shit like that ahaha.

I can't see how to look at that in any way that isn't a little sinister and predatory on the part of the game company, really.

Not that I don't see something sinister in everybody involved heh.

Hey, the Bible is rated R, right?

Well, there's all sorts of hookers and gore with piles of penis skin and supernatural sex junk and freaky stuff like that in that one heh.

You dirty little oinkers ahaha.

One Eyed Jack

2008-09-16T08:53:00.003-05:00

If you get tired from recording data, and need to sleep so that your brain can sort through the stuff you've seen and move junk from short-term to long-term memory, then a guy with one eye ought to be able to stay up later than a guy with two eyes.

Hiro's

2008-09-15T11:03:00.009-05:00

My favorite character on Heroes is Claire Bennet's brother.

The one who is hardly ever in camera focus.

Seriously, if you can remember what that guy looks like, you probably have some kinda super power heh.

And all that dude ever has to do is run down the stairs halfway and start to say something before Claire tells him to shut up.

And sometimes he has to stand with the rest of the Muggles and carry Claire's mom's dog around in outdoor scenes.

I'm fascinated with the way they keep him hanging around in the background.

Waiting to sacrifice his job on the show in some eventual subplot that'll give Claire a chance to say something like "you killed my family!" and be more interesting for a few minutes.

See, so that job is actually a lot more heroic than it seems.

They should give him his own spin-off show heh.

Something for regular people who are sick to death of listening to people with super powers complain about how hard their lives are ahaha.

"You don't understand! You don't know what its like to be an invulnerable cheerleader who lives forever!"

"Tell me about it! This whole 'being able to fly' thing is the worst!"

The Style of No Style

2008-09-15T10:24:00.009-05:00

You could do a Harry Potter Encyclopedia.

Even if you screw it all up 'cause you ain't even seen all of them Harry Potter movies let alone read any of them books, heck, it'd prolly be better for you in the long run, if the encyclopedia was totally screwed up and wrong in a million places, 'cause it'd create a "furor of controversy" among the Harry Potter fans and stuff.

"Frogbeard is not the name of the guy in charge of the Frogwarts!"

And then that chick that writes those books would prolly sue you to protect her intellectual property.

And that'd make you famous.

And then you could use the media attention to do something useful.

Heck, if your encyclopedia was totally wrong about Harry Potter in every way, you could just change the title, y'know, after saying there was some sort of mistake at the printers or something.

And then the Hairy Walter Encyclopedia (or whatever) would be your intellectual property, and you could use the whole Harry Potter Hubbub to have your encyclopedia turned in a series of motion pictures and stupid books and stuff.

See, that's like taking lemons and converting 'em into gold, right there.

I'm surprised more people haven't done that already ahaha.

The Price

2008-09-13T12:38:00.003-05:00

It's one thing to be mad at me if I don't pay you for something that you did for me.

Its quite another thing to be mad at me for not falling for some trick you tried to pull on me.

Especially if you were really lazy and half-hearted about it.

I mean, I'm willing to pretend I fell for yer shit, a little, to encourage you to keep practicing, but I gotta see you putting some serious effort into it next time.

Or, y'know, you could try to do something for me, insteada to me, and then just be mad that I didn't pay you for it.

Either way.

S'up to you, really ahaha.

No Seriously

2008-09-13T10:00:00.009-05:00

There's a good reason to try to be ethical.

You can fool more people that way.

And you can string your friends and your family and everybody in your neighborhood and countless amounts of faceless strangers along with your benevolent behavior while you wait for a really good pay off to cash in on.

And you can even sell everybody out more than once.

You can sell everybody out every day, multiple times a day, you could even run a commercial between each of your benevolent gestures.

And since you are selling yourself out anyways, you might as well ask everybody to buy some Delicious Ramen Pride Noodles while they're at it.

And the better you are at doing that, the better the offers to sell out will be, and the more offers you will get.

But, and here's the important part, you can also ask everybody not to buy some Delicious Ramen Pride Noodles.

Yah.

Insteada working malevolently toward your friends and your family and everybody in your neighborhood and all of the faceless strangers on the internet, you could share whatever powers you have to help them.

You can try to protect your friends, and your family, and everybody in your neighborhood, and even all of the faceless strangers on the internet.

Or teach them to protect themselves, in a certain way.

And then, for a certain fee, you could hand over your keys and look the other way, when a group of corporate barbarians showed up at the gate, wanting to plunder your town.

That's where the real money is baby ahaha.

Plus you don't have to put any serious effort into doing that shit AHAHA.

But still, you don't wanna do that too much.

'Cause of supply and demand, y'know.

The more restricted the access, the more presitigious and noble the plunder, the higher the pay-off for selling 'em out.

So even then, its good to hold out longer and maintain your integrity and be patient.

And there's only one thing that you really have to worry about.

And that's that people are gonna figure you out.

Yah, they have a way of figuring things out eventually.

Most of the time its the ones like us, who helped us get to the top, that start harboring resentment when we don't share the pay-offs with 'em.

They get all "dude you are treating me like one of the suckers! you're selling me out along with everybody else!"

So you got to watch out for those ones, they can be a real problem.

Especially if the pay-offs are so small that they're hard to divvy up amongst your goons without feeling like you ain't getting nothing for your troubles.

And there's some other types you need to be prepared for.

Which are detailed in chapter seven of my book, "Exploiting the Gray Areas for Dummies."

Hahaha I'm just kidding.

And that's just a small sample of the hilariousness you'll find in the "Bitch-a-Day Jokebook."

Don't forget to buy the t-shirt.

Or there might not be any left.

And then we won't be able to tell you apart from the suckers.

When it comes time to divvy up the loot.

Hahaha I'm just kidding.

No really I'm being serious this time.

Most people are predators.

But its pretty easy to see who is preying on who.

And who works together for mutual benefit.

And who doesn't.

And how much each of them are paid for doing it, or not doing it.

And what they're getting paid in.

Who takes advantage of who, how they do it, and how they profit from it.

And what tribe everybody is in.

And what tribes would fall for your shit.

And what tribes wouldn't fall for your shit, but might still put up with you anyways.

And what tribe you really need to be careful around.

Because they might be able to see right through shit that even you can't see through.

Even if they ain't saying nothing about it.

'Cause it ain't worth the time and energy for them to bother with it.

Yet.

Hahaha I'm just kidding.

No seriously.

A True Taste of Immortality

2008-09-12T21:12:00.012-05:00

Agatha Christie was born in 1890, the year that Idaho and Wyoming became a state and Sitting Bull was killed, which was only thirty years after Abe Lincoln left the stage, eight years after New York got its first electric street lights, and four years after France gave us the Statue of Liberty.

Germany still had a king at that point, and Russia still had a Tsar (the end of those monarchy thingies and that whole communist dealie with Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky and all them was actually about as far off into the future as Abe Lincoln was into the past).

She was twenty-four when World War I was starting up.

She died in 1976, which means she missed seeing Star Wars by one year.

But she probably saw the Planet of the Apes movies, and could've seen Jaws, so there's that heh.

Better yet, Jack Dempsey, the famous boxer guy, world heavyweight champ from 1919 to 1926, was born five years after Agatha, in 1895.

He died in 1983.

And it musta been pretty freaking weird for a tough guy like him to see Bruce Lee come (and go) eh?

And I can't imagine what musta been going through his mind when he had to watch David Hasselhoff strut around a talking car in his tight pants ahaha.

What did he think of Mr. T AHAHA.

Did Jack like Led Zeppelin?

He lived through the disco age.

And the 60s.

And the 50s.

And the 40s.

And the 30s.

And the roaring twenties.

The stuff you like musta been pretty different from the stuff he was listening to as a kid in the early 1900s heh.

And that's half a lifetime away from the sock hop crap that must've seemed like Heavy Metal to him ahaha.

Dude, Dempsey could've listened to Metallica back when they were good AHAHA.

And seen all the Star Wars movies that were worth seeing AHAHAHA.

Oh and Alien too!

Dempsey was twenty-five by the time that women got the right to vote, and the year he died was the same year that the first woman went into space.

That was also the same year that the first man-made object left the solar system (apparently the day when woman-made objects would leave the solar system was still way off in the distant future ahaha suckers).

Anyways putting yourself in Dempsey's shoes is like totally impossible, right?

He's like people from ten different time periods put together.

But now I'm gonna handshake back even farther.

Just a little.

Mark Twain published Huckleberry Finn six years before Agatha Christie was born (he died when she was twenty).

Andrew Jackson was the 7th president when Mark Twain was born (he died when Mark Twain was ten) and Abe Lincoln was only 26.

Andrew Jackson was born in 1767, which was the year that Mozart completed his first opera, at the age of eleven.

He was thirty years older than Mary Shelley.

So Mozart was eleven years older than Jackson who was thirty years older than the chick who wrote Frankenstein who was twelve years older than Abe Lincoln who was 26 years older than Mark Twain who was 55 years older than Agatha Christie (and sixty years older than Dempsey, who mighta hated Knight Rider and probably felt that the Ewoks ruined the trilogy).

That shit is awesome.

Snake Oil Artist

2008-09-12T16:13:00.006-05:00

My trick to maintaining my "journalistic integrity" or whatever is to not be a journalist.

Abstinence is the only thing that really works, trust me, I've tried everything.

Or I just go out there and steal stuff instead of taking bribes, that works pretty good.

Yah, see, 'cause that way its like you uh... earned it... or... something.

But then again, I'm not a whatever-you-are.

Yah, naw, see, my purpose is two-fold:

1. To "freak out the robots."

And the second one is something-something I forget.

Anyways you can't really maintain your artistic integrity by trying to present yourself as something that is better than you are, that's like the opposite of maintaining your artistic integrity, ain't it?

Holding yourself up to some weird ideal that ain't the real you?

Perpetuating some kinda illusion?

Yah, see, that's why you shouldn't try to be all "good" and not take bribes and stuff, 'cause fer one thing, its dishonest.

And fer the second thing, its something-something I forget.

Who cares really ahaha.

Devs Suck For Treats

2008-09-12T09:51:00.011-05:00

People might think I'm hooked up to the industry through Dundee or something (actually I think I was torturing Brad McQuaid for years before I ever even heard of Dundee, and torturing other people before there were MMOs), but devs are actually the most worthless things in the world if you are after perks and treats and having fun, y'know, 'cause they always have to be "good" and "professional" and "fair" and "politically correct" or whatever.

Its like hanging out with an FBI Agent or something.

"Dude, that was illegal, I'm going to have to arrest you."

"Seriously?"

"Naw, I'm just kidding. Sorta."

I think they're all robotic-and-the-same like that 'cause they all signed on to some "14 Bullet Points" dev-cult thingie that Raph wrote a long time ago heh.

And they always go around moping about the game industry and taking everything so serious 'cause they consider themselves "artists" and they signed ten thousand NDAs and they might get sued by the PR department of the company they work for and you might get sued by the PR department of the company they work for if you try to defend them when they come under attack so the whole thing is just a big fat headache.

Meanwhile everybody else is running around cheating and having fun duping gold and getting free lightsabers and howling all their complaints and stuff so its like "wtf man why am I stuck riding around with this guy in this shitty obiwan-mobile with the broken tail-light while all the newbs are whipping past me on BARC speeders!" heh.

AND THEN SOMETIMES SOME OF EM MAKE YOU ROLEPLAY AND STUFF omfg its horrible yer like this shoeless-joe loser that has to play the game "the right way" and read all the quests and take it all serious and try to be constructive and not say anything bad about it ahaha.

Screw that shit man that's why I never hang out with those guys.

Head on over to marketing and get yourself some free lightsabers and donuts and stuff!

Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk

2008-09-12T07:12:00.015-05:00

I had a press pass for WoW, that's how I got to play the thing for like a year before it went live, but it wasn't 'cause they knew who I was or anything, heck, if they woulda known who I was, they prolly woulda taken it away heh.

Same thing with CoH and a few other ones.

The big game advertising and outlet companies get piles of those passes, so its good to make friendly with those guys, 'cause they gotta get one of their co-workers to cough up his pass so that you can use it.

Of course, me being friendly with those guys means I do actually have a little power to do some damage to a game, y'know, if I really wanted to, or even on accident, if I can't keep my mouth shut.

Y'know, by shaping their opinions about the thing, like, when you and your buddies all start laughing yourself sick at how frustrating or stupid something in the game is, which is where those addictive buzz phrases that seem to stick to a game forever always come from.

Only thing that sucks about that press pass crap is that you're stuck playing with somebody from the press and you gotta listen to their whiny little high-pitched voices on voicecom and be nice to 'em the whole time y'know and that really kinda sucks heh.

Y'know, there comes a point where you gotta start thinking about the trade-offs yer making and what you are getting out of the deal, like, "I'm paying for being able to play this game by being friendly to this dude and letting him ruin my gaming experience for me every time I play" ahaha.

What is fifteen bucks per month in dollars per hour?

"I''m still waiting on that check from your momma."

Plus sometimes the game ain't any fun to play even IF there wasn't some dweeb from the press ruining it for you!

And who the hell wants to play on a server full of press people, omfg ahaha.

Oh I'm just kidding my guy is all funny and nasty, he's an old school quake whore and a pk AHAHA.

Oh yah, I also got turned into a GM in one game just 'cause I asked them something and there was some confusion at the language barrier.

"Dude! I don't wanna have to go around and help people get unstuck and shit!"

AND I got a free account for a game just by writing an email to the guys running the thing and telling them that their work wasn't professional enough for me to trust 'em with my credit card number, but I felt guilty for that 'cause they turned out to be really nice folks so I never did that Hannibal the Cannibal kinda thing again.

On the other hand, I've also been a called a motherfucker by one of the presidents of 20th century fox, and not in a aw-just-joshing-ya-buddy kinda way, either ahaha.

'Cause those pvp servers full of press people from different companies killing each other can get pretty nasty AHAHA.

In other news, Obama calls McCain a newb.

Foghorn

2008-09-11T20:29:00.010-05:00

I wanna get some cheap web and MySQL database hosting, and I'm pretty sure there's quite a few of you guys that know more than I do about it, so I'd appreciate anything that'd make it quicker and easier for me, y'know, like that XAMPP tip from Dundee, man, that was a beaut.

And even though I can write a dimetric engine map editor in about the time it takes to make a pot of coffee, and my own forum software in about the time it'd take to drink it, I'm actually a total newb when it comes to webmastery stuff, I've never had any interest innit (and I still have a hard time drumming up any enthusiasm for it ahaha).

Everything I write is straight-up javascript and php-to-the-database and that's it, I don't think I need or want anything else.

Oh and I don't wanna run a commercial website or a public playground or anything like that, I just wanna fool around and do some experiments and have some fun with my buddies and stuff, doesn't even need to be persistent or anything.

Normally I'd just ask Ex-bouncer to do this kinda junk for me 'cause he knows all about this stuff (he sold his first porn-on-the-internet-business when he was 18 heh) but he's been moping down there in Florida lately, y'know, crying in his beer, the guy is one of them hopeless romantic heart types, I don't understand any of that existential lovelife voyage-of-self-discovery mumbo-jumbo crap 'cause I'm just a simple robot and thus not equipt to do anything but disguise my cold-blooded and murderous nature with dippity doo dah cheerfulness, thank the maker ahaha.

Sketch Artist

2008-09-11T12:58:00.007-05:00

Hey Sun is still hiring.

I dunno what a Character Artist is, I guess I'm too much of a real artist to know heh heh *cough*

But I could definitely be a Sketch Artist.

Hell yah, Sketch Artists are kinda like weathermen, right?

They're like, "50% chance of Artistic Accuracy today" or something, ain't they?

"Dude, that picture could be anybody."

"Yah, I only know how to draw one kind of face."

"Yah, its like GI Joe, where they all had the same head but different colored hair."

Its like being a Somewhat Inaccurate and Hasty Artist With No Pressure heh.

"Hey man I can't help it if the victim sucks at describing stuff!"

"What kind of nostril-holes did he have again?"

"Wait, what exactly do you think beady means? Small round and shiny? No? You meant little? Well then why the hell din't you just say that he had LITTLE eyes? Goddam as if drawing the guy wasn't hard enough, I'm stuck dicking around with your f'd up vocabulary."

Well, whatever, I'm still waiting to a see a job description that fits my exact skillset as a Professional Brass Button Fiddler and Assistant Moustache Operator Second Class in the Department of Mysterious Scribblings.

Yah, I assist in the piloting of those Top Secret Musical Steam Powered Antisasquatch Submarines you've probably heard about in the last couple hundred years.

Yah, in the War with the Sasquatches.

Yah, yah, I'm the guy with the cool napoleon hat with the huge feather.

No, I don't "look through the periscope," that's a different guy.

No, I don't do the thing where I repeat orders to people either.

No, actually its rather difficult to fire torpedoes at Sasquatches, they're capable of semibrachiation, you know.

Yah, no, my expertise is actually in the field of Subaquatic Moustache Sciences, but we already had one of those on board, so I spend most of my time playing in the Steamphony Happy Bubbles Motivational Orchestra, just waiting for him to die on an away mission so I can get promoted.

Well, its definitely the least likely place to become the victim of a savage Sasquatch attack, so it has that going for it.

And the carpeting and everything is really nice and soft and fancy and lacey and stuff.

We got tons of jewels and treasure too, I'm kinda used to drinking coffee out of a trophy covered in rubies, I don't think I can even remember how to drink out of a regular cup, what are those made out of, stone or... er wait, no, glass, the cups you drink out of are made of glass, right?

Haha glass omg that's even what you call 'em, "glasses," haha, 'cause they're made out of "glass."

Haha its weird that you only do that with glasses, y'know?

Well, you landlubbers don't call things "stones" just 'cause they're made from stone, or "cardboards" 'cause they were made out of cardboard, or anything else, like that, really.

Yah, see, that's kinda weird.

Plus you used the word for spectacles, too, which makes it even weirder, 'cause like, what's the point in specifying that particular detail, I mean, what else could spectacle lenses be made from, y'know?

Ice?

Yah, see, and you call me the weird one.

Sarah Connor: Militiawoman

2008-09-10T20:14:00.009-05:00

I get as far as the "sexual inadequates" bit in that quote, and then I get stuck on the idea of sexual "adequacy."

What the hell is "sexually adequacy" all about?

You'd have to be twisted up like a pretzel to have something like that roll out of your head, man.

Is "Adequate" better or worse than "Satisfactory" on a report card?

And what we all really wanna know is how much is Adequate in inches? AHAHA.

I guess what he's implying is that the measure of a man is in how much he can please a woman, and the best we can hope to achieve is a score of "adequate" in that department, so he's like, kissing some serious dominatrix butt so that MAYBE those stone cold insane taskmistress biatches will be more receptive to being persuaded on his next point, which is that he doesn't want women to vote for that Sexy Alaskan Gun-Toting Book Banning Church Lady MILF ahaha.

See, the real problem is that a lot of us dudes LOVE yummy Four-Eyed Inga the Nasty Warden with Beehive Hairdo chicks like that, I don't think intelligent women got anything to do with that problem AHAHA.

Dude, I'm totally attracted to chicks that I hate, y'know, somebody that makes me feel good when I treat her terrible AHAHAHA.

And that whole "adequacy" thing is just sad in so many ways, that's the soulless dry-humping robots-bumping-their-parts-together kinda stuff that makes ET turn pale and die, man.

Dude I've seen chicks melt in ways that are so humiliating for them that they will NEVER be able to talk about it in public and I AM TERRIBLE in bed y'know its like I don't give a shit WHAT the other person gets out of the deal man it actually bugs me when they have too much fun y'know and there comes a time when its every man for HIMSELF baby if I could get it over with in two seconds I'd be SMILING ALL THE TIME I mean c'mon seriously folks who can't please themselves can't please nobody y'know the best somebody like that could hope for is fooling somebody as well as they can fool themselves AHAHA.

And I don't think anybody's gonna be able to overcome that problem if they ain't willing to get dirty enough to recognize it either.

As far as racism goes, we got all forty-seven flavors of beautiful women in this country, all this awesome food from all over the place, and all these different kinds of world-traveling comedians and storytellers and free thinkers and adventurers from distant lands to hang out with, out here on the frontier at the very edge of the Old World.

It takes way the hell too much energy to try to remain ignorant about how great that is forever and ever.

Not that folks ain't got a right to complain and shit, y'know, we wouldn't have gotten as far as we have without complaining, I'm just saying that mebbe we shouldn't forget that there's some cause for celebration, too.

Look at the dudes in second place, y'know, we definitely ain't pefect or anything, and we still got a lot of room for improvement, but we're a thousand miles ahead of those motherfuckers heh.

Well, actually, if we're talking about Australia and New Zealand, then we're actually not that far ahead, we're celebrating 80 years of women being able to vote, and Australia has had that for over a hundred.

But we're still doing pretty good y'know ahaha.

Australia's only a little over a hundred years old, y'know, they formed a country and gave women the right the vote the next year, 'cause they were a bunch of escaped convicts trapped on an island with no women and they needed to attract some, so its not really fair to compare them to us guys that had to live through all the stupid parts that came before that AHAHA.

I'm a little jealous of the way their founding fathers were cool pirates and shit insteada sexually uptight cracker-ass pilgrims with buckles on their shoes y'know but whatever that just shows you how far we've come heh.

I'm not big on politics, y'know, I'm still waiting for an American Indian to run for president, I dunno how long that's gonna take.

Dude, a smoking hot American Indian Chick with the long black hair hanging down that shit would be awesome man I mean c'mon seriously!

If I ever run for president that's what I'm picking for a VP y'know you sizzlechested bitches can eat my blonde-eyed blue-haired dust baby I'm going right over your heads like a rocket all the way to the TOP man ahaha.

And not only would I legalize pot, I'd make sure that everybody in America grew the best pot that the world had ever seen, so we could make tons of money selling it to all them know-it-all sweater-wearing shmucks who were too scared to leave the Old Countries AHAHA.

Yah see, this is exactly why I should just stay the hell away from politics, I'm not really centrist, I'm like an omnidirectional extremist or something ahaha.

Dialogue

2008-09-10T11:09:00.003-05:00

Hmm, for a guy who was pals with George Lucas, being picky about dialogue is a little weird.

"GRAB THE SWORD BOB ITS THE ONLY CHANCE!"

You'd THINK you'd be saying stuff like "I like the way the chick jumped down the building after that guy!"

"Yah, she not only didn't hesitate to jump to the fire escape, she jumped even FARTHER than him the second time!"

"...and then she was rescued by the super geek squad guy who outsmarted him AND THEN punched him out."

"Yah well THAT wasn't so good heh."

"I DID like the part where they made her strip down to her panties, injected her with LSD, and made her take a bath in front of a bunch of cameras though."

"Yah, now THAT was some classic sbiznish."

"It don't get any better than that."

"Well, the first Stargate show did have a COUPLE totally naked chicks layed down on slabs of alien technology and forced to endure the attentions of tentacle creatures."

"Hmm, yah."

"So I guess it DOES get better than that."

"Yah, sometimes."

"But that was on showtime."

"Yah, so its like, no fair."

Hitchcocker

2008-09-10T08:50:00.008-05:00

There's this thing with "Eastern Philosophies" and "Western Philosophies" as it regards to storytelling.

Where folks say that "Western Philosophy" stuff needs a beginning and an end, a bad guy and a good guy, all the mysteries need a solution, blah blah blah, y'know, all that duality stuff.

Meanwhile Eastern Philosophy stuff is okay with an ever-unfolding mystery that never gets solved, and the audience that can handle that appreciates the ability of the storyteller to produce more and more beautiful mysteries, they appreciate each layer of the onion as it gets peeled back, rather than have the author solve them in a clever way and close the book on 'em so we can forget about 'em and get on with the next thing.

So as long as the journey is well done, it don't ever need to end or get anywhere, really, everybody maintains the potential to be a bad guy and a good guy in an Eastern Philosophy thingie more than they do anything else, and that potential hardly ever gets converted into any kind of kinetic energy that you could nail 'em for heh.

Its almost like the author is afraid to commit to saying anything is one way or another, while hoping that being vague will work to their advantage and that something random and awesome comes along at just the right time to save 'em, and in some cases, it is exactly that.

I don't think things need to be broken down like that, really, I mean, seems like there's plenty mixing going on between the two "types" in a mutually beneficial way, in all the good stuff, anyways.

And I'm a monk and everything, but I gotta admit that I like the Western Philosophy stuff.

A lot.

And when I saw that Fringe thing, all I was worried about was that it was gonna be another Lost, where its just like, a bunch of random weird stuff that tries to never make a point or tell you anything so that you can never complain and feel let down about it ahaha.

Like, the story is advancing without touching any of the walls or the ground, its keeping its options too open.

And the more you hold an audience back and tempt them and build suspense and make them waste their time wondering about your stuff like that, the better your ending better be, y'know?

You can't drag gunslingers along for months and months and then have a dud fer the ending where it all turns out to be a dream of a guy in an asylum and a big waste of time that nobody would've comitted to if they would've known that from the beginning or whatever heh.

But you do need to drag 'em along and tease 'em.

And the more you drag 'em along and tease 'em, the more time they waste messing with your crap, putting their hands on the steering wheel and all that, the more likely it is that they'll buy the car, even if you have a dud fer Le Grand Finale, y'know, that's that whole Cognitive Dissonance bit.

And the Eastern Philosophy Camp says that's okay, that's what its all about, yer making brain kindling, baby, I can help you help yourself!

Yah, see, so that's a good excuse to use heh.

"Oh its all enlightened and Zen and shit!"

Yah, when I think about it, see, I put myself in the shoes of a guy who just has to randomly make shit up for a show like Lost, and I'm like, shit man, that's too goddam easy, that's just like artists that are allowed to splash down totally random blobs of paint and call it art.

All the guys I like do the hard bits good, y'know, like taking that totally clumsy Western Philosophy thing with all its sharp edges and trying to do something interesting with it, something deliberate and awesome with a totally awkward and smoky piece of farm equipment.

Y'know, like Hitchcock.

You gotta take a chance and be kinda daring and ballsy to do a Hitchcock, where every single second is a bullet in your eye.

You can't even fail to do anything totally random and senseless, except by accidentally doing something that makes sense.

So there's like, points awarded for difficulty, there, like they do for gymnastics and diving and stuff, y'know?

Anyways, the weird thing is that I spent so much of Fringe worrying that it was gonna turn out to be a totally random bunch of crap like Lost that I didn't even notice how bad or good it was really ahaha.

That's like a new evolution of the medium right there, where you can sorta hide behind how bad Lost was AHAHA.

Actually it seems like a pretty good vehicle for telling weird stories, with the setup they got, I always thought the X-files had an awesome setup, as a vehicle for carrying stories, y'know, even if a lot of the shows themselves were a waste of time and I coulda done without the background story-arcs that remind me of the way superheroes tend to get all tangled up with too many visits to alien dimensions and too many uses of the time machine.

'Cause like, the Fringe is like, halfway between the X-files and the Matrix, y'know, with their "the world is a mad scientists lab, and he has a plan," that's pretty damn cool, right there heh.

If they get "guest" directors and writers like Mr Pink on the Sopranos, and like the X-files did, it could have some really good shows ahaha.

Hey, at least it ain't like CSI Miami!

Dude, CSI ain't even a mystery show, its a bunch of models walking around piles of gore and neon lights!

What is up with American Mystery shit, its so pitiful compared to English junk, its like they're writing Mysteries for Nascar folks or something.

Why can't they do good mysteries and still have it be for Nascar hillbilly folks and shit AHAHA.

I mean, c'mon, Poe and Lovecraft and Howard and all them, those were Americans, right?

Poe even married his sister and died from drinking too much or something, I mean, c'mon, seriously, doesn't get any more Nascar Hillbilly than that ahaha.

Aw whatever.

Edit: Like how I din't really commit on whether I liked it or not?

Goddammit ahaha.

Sweet and Soulful

2008-09-09T16:19:00.010-05:00

I'm a WKRP in Cincinnati kinda guy.

I'm a Barney Miller kinda guy.

Not a Friends or Beverly Hills 90210 kinda guy, even though I got some buddies that eat that stuff up, and it makes me laugh that they like that stuff, and that definitely don't make me like 'em any less.

But I like Sanford and Son better.

I was born in the 70s, and went to kindergarten in the early 80s, and the first president I knew of was Ronald Reagan, so I don't know who to blame for the way I am (heh), but I really got no stomach for American Idol type stuff, its nothing personal, its just that that's a bunch of intolerable New Kids on the Block crap, to me, y'know?

That's like somebody telling me that lounge singers and British Food is good, or that we should waste a time machine trip on the 50s.

I'd rather go to the 20s or the anytime after Lost in Space or the Forbidden Planet came out.

I need texture.

I ain't really got any stomach for all that dramatic vampire stuff either, I drink beer and fart and laugh about it just like everybody else, I'm a wolfman, baby.

So, saying all that, I'm pretty weird, I guess *rolls his one good eye* and I don't really get why people would wanna do things the way they do most things.

Why you'd wanna be "professional and serious" and take part in a gaming industry that was modelled on the way SOE does stuff, or whatever.

'Cause you don't have to do it that way.

Why ain't there any WKRP in Cincinnatis of the gaming industry?

There's tons of Less Nessmans and Herb Tarleks and Venus Flytraps out there man.

Heck, half the Loni Andersons out there are actually Less Nessmans and Herb Tarleks ahaha.

So what's with everything being so 80s?

Is it because y'all live in Texas and its still the 80s over there?

Are you the guys that are keeping Bon Jovi in business?

Goddam it must be just like Rockford Illinois or something AHAHA.

Dude, the 80s were kinda fake and cheesy, y'know?

I mean, there was some good stuff, like the A-Team and Night Rider and Tron and Sledge Hammer, but the rest of it was pretty sad, actually ahaha.

I wonder if its 'cause of the hair band metal guys at Id.

Y'know, 'cause they were like, death metal nerds, and I have the sneaking suspicion that they started some cultural thingie where all the rest of the nerds think they needed to be death metal nerds to be cool and get laid or something, which arrested the cultural development of the region and sorta froze things into the way they were in the 80s.

Most people don't really live long enough, once they go down the death metal nerd road, to realize that Panterra ain't really all that and a bag of chips *winky-wink* ahaha.

The folks who start out liking Panterra might eventually go into that soft metal ballad crap eventually, when they get older and "more sensitive," but that's about as conscious and enlightened as they're ever get, y'know?

AHAHA.

I dunno what it is, but the whole gaming industry thingie seems so soulless and morbid and unpleasant to me, somehow, sorta like that, like Robots from the 80s or something.

Y'know, there's like nobody that likes pancakes and the occasional John Denver tune and shit heh.

That's what I think is wrong with the art of the whole thing.

The 80s wasn't really known for its art and attention to craft and detail and texture and shit, s'like, 90% of the stuff people wore and carried around with them and half the furniture in the 80s was made out of plastic heh.

And the 90s were like the 80s minus the ballsiness and energy that made Cameo some cool ass shit ahaha.

Here's one of those places where Raph really shines, though, 'cause he's some cheesy ass WKRP in Cincinnati shit, alright.

Heck, he's from the 1800s or something, actually.

That's why it bugs me when I see him "trying to fit in" ahaha.

I mean, he's better than that, his folk songs and poems and all that Tiny Tim shit he's self conscious of, that's what makes him cool, y'know?

Dude, look for a video of Tiny Tim when he was young, standing next to anybody else from his time period, some hair-oil dweeb that was representative of what was "cool and appropriate at the time," some shmuck that you can compare him to, and then you tell me that Tiny Tim don't look exactly like a Time Traveling Archaeologist from the future singing his favorite songs from the distant past or something ahaha.

Well, whatever, I didn't really mean to pick on Raph and make him look all freaky, I was actually trying to explain how cool he was AHAHA.

Anyways, that's why I'm not really into the whole "game industry" thingie, its all so Orwellian and soulless and shit.

And I think it'd be easier for you guys to detect that, in the junk that came out of it, if it wasn't all made by a bunch of dudes who drank too much pop before hitting the old 3d Studio Max ahaha.

That's really all that's making it colorful and somewhat cheerful, sometimes, I think, the abuse of caffeinated beverages and shit, y'know?

Take one of those poor mopes with the shaved head and the dirty prison jumpsuits from 1984, prop his skinny ass up in a chair, pour coffee on him until he starts smiling and tapping his feet, and then make him do 3d Studio Max shit so we'll have plenty of unicorn tentacles to ride on!

Its so sad and soulless really, its like the way the Emperor from Warhammer 40k ate psychics or some shit ahaha.

And I think that's at the heart of the art problem, the heart of the weakness of the medium, really, there's nothing to be sympathetic toward, just crayons rubbed on paper over skin and bones and nastiness wrapped in colored plastic for merchandising percentages, really, its so starved and beaten to death that's its barely sentient and human anymore.

No WKRP in Cincinnati to it.

This is all part of that thing where the folks who are the loudest and most romantic about a thing prolly ain't never actually seen it for real, ain't it?

Man, I hate that one ahaha.

That's not that damn Nietzsche again, izzit?

Sounds like something he'd think.

Goddam I hate that guy ahaha.

Anyways, screw that Texas stuff, and I don't even wanna hear about California and what kind of tea the endless misty gray-ass of Oregon gently weeps, wake me up when one of you guys move that whole "game industry" down there out of the 80s and into something more like WKRP in Cincinnati, that shit oughta be in Boulder Colorado or somewhere cool like that, y'know, Mork from Ork knew what the shit he was doing when he landed his suspendered ass there AHAHA.

Smash TV

2008-09-06T13:03:00.007-05:00

I'm still working on my game, all the time.

Its just that its hard to think of anything to say about it most of the time.

Mostly what I'm doing right now is drawing cartoons and doing experiments with animation (trying to find the best way to do things so it'll run on crappy computers) and collision detection and structural crap like that, stuff that don't exactly beg to be blabbered about, and although there's some funny one-liner shit in there every once in a while, I tend to keep working and forget about it insteada coming here and writing it up.

And I got to the point where I don't wanna do screenshots and stuff 'cause I might need to reserve a domain name or copywrite or trademark some shit and I don't know anything about that kinda crap and I ain't got any time to think about it right now either.

Basically its all just 'cause I'm bad at thinking up names fer shit, so the few passable ones that I do I think up, I wanna keep, y'know, so I don't gotta keep thinking up new ones and redoing the artwork and all that heh.

Right now I'm sorta stuck on this thing where its hard to come up with junk that ain't all about killing stuff.

Its so easy to make a game where you go around blowing shit up with submachine guns and missiles and lasers, y'know?

My game can do all the Syndicate-Style junk now, left click to move, right click to hose stuff down with your weaponry.

But then I think about how that'd make Pete Seeger cry, and I'm all like, "shit man, I better think of something else, something with some redeeming qualities, y'know? Something to sorta go along with all this sinfully delicious Smash TV boobs and gore!" heh.

So there's this whole existential nightmare thingie to it, that I'm trying my best to "conveniently ignore" by trying to convince myself that its a "satire" or something, but I ain't succeeded in fooling myself yet ahaha.

Y'know, it really is fun to blow shit up and look at hot chicks, there's just no getting around it, you can sing songs about holding hands and sharing the land and all that till yer blue in the face but that don't change a thing about how fun it is to right-click on stuff and hose it down with Missiles & Miniguns & Flame Throwers AHAHA.

Oh, I know, I'll have stuff like farming in the game.

So we'll be able to do something "green."

AND patrol around the farm in our powered armor and hose down weeds and zombies with our machine guns while collecting cash and valuable prizes and stuff.

And then I'll have something in there that makes it sorta satirical, so its like, its teaching you that going around and hosing things down with flamethrowers is bad!

...while it lets you do exactly that, sorta like those scifi shows where they're gonna televise somebody getting executed...

"oh that's so awful!"

"I wonder if they're gonna show it!" ahaha.

Thats just so goddam cheesy man, this isn't gonna do anything for the good of humanity, goddamit, I wanna do something good, y'know, like Star Trek, man, but that's so goddam boring and hard to do AHAHA.

Musers

2008-09-06T12:38:00.005-05:00

There's musicians that make music to be famous and get laid.

And there's musicians that make music in order to help everybody in the audience get laid.

Personally, I'm forever indebted to the poet that taught me that the best moment in the world is that moment when a woman first steps her leg out of a car, when all you can see is that flash of leg, and everything else is mystery.

The guy who taught me that Doormen are the Luckiest Bastards in the World.

And the guy that taught me about how great warm mexican asses are, compared to cold white asses that practically give you a heart attack in the middle of the night when you accidentally bump into them with your leg.

That's what really matters, y'know.

Even Doctor Phil knows that, although he could never admit it in front of his particular audience without being torn to shreds.

Poor guy.

Dude Ginger Is Hot

2008-09-06T11:08:00.009-05:00

There's a whole lot of different directions I could go with this things at Dundee's.

First off, I'll do a negative one.

"Television" isn't really getting any better or worse than it ever was, its always had a few supergenius artist writers and directors and actors, and a whole ton of crappy ones, there's old shows that make me sit back and wonder how the hell they came up with what they came up with, and there's old shows that make me say stuff like "oh, this must've come from back in the days when nobody cared about plot" ahaha.

So there's a bit of "dude, nobody has written anything as good as Fahrenheit 451 since" in there.

As far as it evolving as a medium, though, I think it actually has evolved as a medium, in the only way a medium can really evolve, and that's sorta mechanically, like a science, or through shared techniques and technology.

I wonder if the "lack of serial entertainment qualities" thing Dundee is noticing is really more due to the fact that shows spend more of their life in a repackaged and re-released on DVD state now than they did in the days before that was an option.

So now, instead of people having to catch the show on the TV, and the writers having to worry about the audience missing a recent episode (which would make you tend to package each story in a way where it didn't matter what order you saw the shows in, if you were a writer), they actually got to worry about it in the other direction, where the show might look terrible on DVD (or at least not sell so well) if it doesn't have some ongoing plot and "evolution of the characters" and stuff.

Remember those "recap" shows they used to do that they don't gotta do anymore?

We actually used to like those, back in the day before we could record or buy and replay the shows ourselves, 'cause it let us know what we missed heh.

And the guys doing the shows liked 'em, 'cause it was a cheap show, playing back bits of other shows ahaha.

And there's that old joke about knowing that the main characters on Star Trek are never gonna die, that's tied into that too, even though that show did kill a character or two and do some character development over time junk (it was kinda minimal, but then, on the other hand, Deep Space Nine did a ton of it, and it was actually hard to follow if you missed a couple shows).

Anyways the audience has evolved a bit, too, blabbering about their favorite bits and pieces of the Sopranos and the A-Team and Night Rider and Six Feet Under at work for fifty years will tend to do that sorta thing, even the most dimwitted folks can listen in to everybody else and repeat the stuff they heard.

And that's a major factor there, that's the people the writers are thinking about when they write the show, they want folks to be talking about it the next day at work, that's what shit like Twin Peaks (which is what Desperate Housewives reminds me of, much thanks to Cooper being in there heh) and "Lost" was all about.

Not that there's just "one best way" to do that stuff, I'm not saying that, either, there's a place for stuff like Gilligan's Island, too, I know people talked about Gilligan's Island at work until they ran out of shit to talk about ahaha.

"Dude Ginger is hot."

"They are never gonna get off that island!" AHAHA.

But whatever, I guess the main thing is the evolution of a medium, and that I think its the evolution of the techniques and technologies used to make it and the exploration and understanding of the science behind it that does it, really, even in the audience, 'cause as time goes on, they understand more and more of that stuff too, and you gotta shoot a little higher to surprise 'em.

But you can't just go straight to expert, you gotta have your bunny hills running simultaneously, 'cause there's a sucker born every minute, and understanding the stuff they're teaching on the bunny hills provides you with the POV the "fresh ones" are gonna have when they come to take a peek at your work.

And the stuff that it takes a supergenius to understand ain't gonna be that popular.

And you may be cool with that, just draw a line in the sand and be an elitist prick and wait for all the smart folks in future history to recognize you long after you've become a mummy, 'cause the only opinion that really matters is an intelligent opinion and all that.

But you could teach people how to get from A to B and stuff too, y'know, while you were at it, just like somebody taught you, and then you'd be farming your own audience, tending to your flock and shit, that's probably the more appreciative and responsible way to do it.

Saying stuff like "Gilligan's Island is for mouth-breathers" might get you in good with the folks who wanna feel superior to the mouth-breathers, but who is that, really?

I don't think that somebody who ain't a mouth-breather ever has to worry about being mistaken for a mouth-breather.

Its just those "borderline mouth-breathers" that are grabbing for things that'll help them distinguish themselves from the ordinary mouth-breather.

I think that's especially true when you are grabbing for stuff that's at the ordinary mouth-breather's expense heh.

Smart folks know that's its actually advantageous to be mistaken for a mouth-breather.

Ah crap, I think I'm doing exactly what I'm complaining about while I'm complaining about it again ahaha.

Goddammit AHAHA.

Tons of Mavericks

2008-09-03T22:15:00.002-05:00

If you had to take a drink every time somebody used the word "maverick" at the republican national convention, you'd be pretty goddam drunk.

Animation Hell

2008-08-11T11:48:00.009-05:00

Now I remember why I learned all the 3d and computer stuff.

It was so that I wouldn't have to do this kinda junk anymore heh.

I guess I shouldn't complain, it ain't nothing compared to how mind numbing disney-style stuff is, I'm trying to get away with the minimum amount of drawing necessary, y'know, if you really look at UO, there wasn't a whole helluvalotta frames to that shit, it was all like, frame 1: "halberd guy with foot forward swinging his arms," frame 2: "wrap up" and crap, click click click click ahaha.

When you do really bad animation, its fun to walk around in real life imitating it, swinging your arms all super fast into the next position and stuff, its all totally Farley-Time man, using that belt like a hula hoop AHAHA.

Oh yah, now I remember what I was gonna talk about, the way I suck at drawing wimpy guys, I gotta like, draw a muscle guy, 'cause that's all I really know how to draw, (since I learned how to draw from studying myself in the mirror *cough*) and then "skinny him up" to make him into a poindexter type dude.

Actually I learned how to draw when I was little, copying the pictures from the dinosaur books and stuff like that from the library to turn 'em into coloring books for me and my little brother, all hillbilly ghetto-style.

I'm still a lot like a medieval scribe would be in the pen and paper isle at the grocery store, y'know, all "omfg! sixty four colors and a quill sharpener on the back!" ahaha.

Thought I Was Kidding

2008-08-08T01:15:00.014-05:00

Well, I ain't been lazy.

First I got my cheesy 3d starfield-thingie working, so I can do 2.5d stuff with sprites for spaceships and spacestations and planets and crap.

It was actually a lot of work, that 3d translation and rotation stuff hurts my pretty little head, I couldn't just copy it from somewhere else 'cause nobody had one that could do forward-and-reverse and side-to-side and turning.

It wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't sorta cheating to make it run fast wherever possible ('cause its a key thing for me that this whole mess has to be able to work well on the crappiest computers) AND having to think about comparative camera position and stuff, that camera junk adds a flip-flop to everything that makes me want to take a nap ahaha.

Anyways that's all good, its all mouse for steering and I even got the vertical-takeoff-and-landing bumblebee-of-death descent style controls working.

There's no "roll" though, I might not add a "roll" to the thing, y'know, for a couple different reasons, like the way that kinda junk makes Ex-B sick, and it just confuses the hell out of folks who ain't good at flightsim stuff, and then there's the mechanical reasons, where browsers ain't too hot at rotating images and I could take the processing power it'd take to do that and put it somewhere else.

Plus big ship battles and the bumblebee-of-death-in-space style (which is sorta like flying a super-responsive helicopter, where you can move sideways back-and-forth and straight up-and-down quickly) don't really beg for old airplane crap like barrel-rolling anyways, y'know, I'm not really trying to make an arcade game (although I'm sorely tempted and sometimes some of that gets through and I add it as an option heh), I wanna do the "click on the space map and the ship autopilots there" and auto-target fire-and-forget-photon-torpedoes kinda crap, and having the ships automagically "align themselves to the solar plane" and whatever is good 'nuff for government work ahaha.

I'm still in the middle of blood-and-guts of the thing, deciding exactly how I want to do the computer systems interface (which is actually what this whole going-into-space mess sorta accidentally evolved out of, I was working on the "command console" on the bridge of my terraforming tower slash time-machine slash-everything else, where you repair HAL and all that) and the controls for throttles and setting destinations and the transitions for landing on planets and spacestations and all the other junk that goes with this stuff, which is a lot of back-and-forth between doing the art for it and programming it, but its all a bunch of fun interactive-cartoon junk.

Plus its all a bunch of crap that my brother's kids are gonna love heh.

Oh yah, they aren't "stars," they're uh... "particles of space dirt reflecting starlight" and "space bugs" or something ahaha.

Whatever man, y'know, you need something to make you feel like you are swooshing along, up and down and all around through the soup of it in 3d.

And I just got the basic mechanical stuff for the EVE-style scrolling nebula skybox junk in the background working, I haven't actually made any tileable skybox pictures of my own, I was right in the middle of deciding if I should try to do some kinda blending and transparency trick to let folks add hubble pictures of weird stuff (or whatever) as a background for their own private solar systems and crap, although I kinda doubt that there'd be lots of folks who were into doing something like that (besides me, 'cause that'd make my life easier ahaha).

Beavertown

2008-07-31T10:39:00.022-05:00

Let's start out with this:

The original stargate, with its spinning metal wheel and its jets of steam and its vault doors and weird little metal staircase, is way better than the new Miami Vice pastel-colored solid-state "electronic" stargate from Atlantis.

And I know its tough to figure out what to do with the thing, 'cause its like, a ring and everything, and the only sensible thing to do with it would be to lay it down on the ground and then jump and dump shit into it, and that wouldn't look good on TV, but it doesn't look good half-buried in the floor, either.

Man, if I had a stargate, I'd use it to get rid of trash, y'know, there'd be an "alpha site," and a "dump site" for old TVs and diapers and bags of crap and shit, the Trash Planet that you never hear about on Stargate heh.

There's got to be an alien race that uses the stargates for that, "incoming wormhole sir!," and then a couple bags of trash come tumbling out of the thing ahaha.

And you know there's tons of planets with kids that have easy access to working stargates, man, I mean, if we had access to a stargate when we were kids, we woulda been doing "prank calls" and playing ding-dong-ditch and throwing of bags of burning dog shit and our buddy's favorite hat through there at randomly-dialed super-serious alien races, I don't think they can even figure out who dialed 'em 'cause of the way wormoles work, its perfect AHAHA.

And even though I'm a sorta scottish guy, the scottish medical dude on Atlantis needs a new hairstyle.

Its almost hilariously cheesy the way each dude on Atlantis has the same hair, twisted in a different direction, so people with bad eyes can tell 'em apart or something, y'know?

Its kinda like the way they all started out with different colored lapels on their jumpsuits, like the Power Rangers or something, the boss chick had red, the science guy had blue heh.

I guess that was supposed to be something like Star Trek, where the "science guys" have blue uniforms, and the "military" guys have red, or something, but that's not how it ended up, 'cause the only people that wore the outfits were the main characters, so it ended up looking all stupid, 'cause your brain is like, "dude, does the government pay for these costumes, or is this supposed to be something that the characters choose to wear and color coordinate amongst themselves? Dude, the boss chick is a civilian. Why are they dressed like power rangers?"

And the scottish medical guy, being a less important character, got the bottom of the barrel "Friends" hairstyle, y'know, its the "oh man, we're out of hairstyles, oh wait, I got an idea!" hairstyle, 'cause all the more important dudes on the show picked the good ones and nobody else can have the same hair as them 'cause that would detract from their awesomeness or something.

Seriously, the medical guy's hair is like, combed from the back of his neck forward or something ahaha.

I wouldn't want a guy with crazy hair like that performing surgery on me, man, the dude would sew your legs on backwards and shit AHAHA.

And you know how his character sorta got killed off over and over again, the guys at the show probably think folks don't like the guy 'cause of his acting or something.

IT'S THE WEIRD HAIR MAN.

Not that I want him back in the place of the chick from Firefly, now that they finally decided to give her a little personality.

Dude, I liked her way better as the dirty-faced mechanic chick, you can't really beat a cute and loose spaceship mechanic chick who can swear in chinese for a character, its impossible.

And you know the way that all the actors always go around pretending they don't know anything about their character, like Gillian Anderson on all the Late Shows this last week, as if she had more important and serious things to think about, like her musical career.

Dude, you know she studied her character way more than any of us ever will, you know she bugged the writers about stupid detail changes and everything, that's like, her job man ahaha.

And there's something multidimensionally funny about her, a beautiful woman, famous for playing a smart character, pretending to be a dumb hot chick in real life, and... failing?

Because she's either a dumb person in real life who is too dumb to act like a dumb chick well or maybe she's into that whole thing where "if you can pretend to be one then you probably ain't one" heh.

Like, here's a beautiful woman that doesn't want people to think she's smart, for some reason, which is strange enough in the first place, and I'm not sure if she's failing or succeeding at it either ahaha.

"Oh, just think of me as a hot chick, that's good enough."

"Uhm, is this a trick?"

And why do scifi writers add all sorts of Leave It To Beaver crap to their scripts, like making pregnancy enhance the super powers of pregnant women, even though they're supposed to be super liberal scifi writers and stuff?

Pregnancy always enhances a woman's latent supernatural powers heh.

Barefoot and pregnant women are the best, that's a womans super power right there, that's all they're good for, non-pregnant women aren't as good ahaha.

"Hmm, I think the black dude needs to be an alien. Let's see how he looks with a lump of clay attached to his head."

"Maybe we should give him a visor."

"Dude, that's been done before."

"How about a unicorn horn?"

"Let's not get crazy now. Let's just spraypaint him silver or something."

"Dude I think somebody died from that in the old days."

See, its something like this, some dude from the future, making fun of this stuff, that's probably what makes all the scifi people self-conscious about the shit they do.

When I love scifi, I would never say anything bad about scifi.

What I actually think is cheesy is hollywood and actors and "real life" and shit.

And it really is the human element that I'm interested in heh.

Kinda weird that I'm the exact opposite of all these hollywood folks who seem to think that they're interested in the human element but that scifi is the cheesy thing ahaha.

Anyways all this junk is another part of the game me and Ex-b were talking about, having a Scifi show (and a bunch of other media stuff, like newspapers and magazines for AI) inside the game, sorta like Wormhole X-Treme for Stargate, y'know, 'cause this is supposed to be an eleven dimensional game and everything.

And that made me realize that its actually the behind-the-scenes dimension that's where all the comedy is, when you make fun of a scifi show, you aren't really making fun of the scifi part, you're making fun of the show part.

And that whole thing evolved from me and Ex-b talking about how weird it was, the way we're 100% serious and 100% not serious at the same time, in parallel or in quick succession (unless its a long mechanical description) in series.

I think we're both super serious and super not serious at the same time, all the time, I think comedy and scifi and everything else in the world is the same way, the guy standing guard on the castle wall has to stay frosty, but at the same time he's the dude that really needs to come up with a joke to release some of the tension, its sorta like that.

Not that I meant to suddenly get all serious on ya heh.

Okay, let's go back to the funny hair thingie ahaha.

Change It a Little So We Don't Get Sued

2008-07-30T17:54:00.015-05:00

Actually everything I'm working on is part of this thing where you are s'posed to be restoring the mind and sanity (and some of the memory) of your AI guy at the beginning of the game, repairing one subsystem after another and stuff (the last thing I posted was for a cheesy flashback thingie, y'know, like yer jiggling his wires and his synapses start firing).

And 'cause I'm working out all these different subsystems to his consciousness and stuff, that made me think to make the guy upgradeable, y'know, like a regular computer with hardware and software, you might loot components or make or buy crap that you can stick in its "server rack" slots and whatever.

So now I gotta really figure out what this dude is made out of before I can finish the thing heh.

Anyways, that wasn't really what I meant to talk about.

Naw, see, the thing I really wanted to talk about comes from the way I gotta avoid using red and green and 'cause of that red and green color blindness thingie that Ex-b has, which is totally annoying to me heh.

I mean, when you got to do stuff like traffic lights and computer systems and health and mana bars and good-n-bad-memory chips and yadda-dadda-dah its kinda nice to do the ole "green is good and red is bad" dealie.

So I was building this "repair HAL" thing and I hit another one of those green and red patches, and it made the minigame I was doing into a test for color blindness.

Which I could turn around and work into the plot of the story by having HAL jump up and declare you defective or something once he figures out that you can't tell red from green heh.

"Defective humans aren't allowed to operate on my delicate subsystems!"

Which reminded me of this other thing that occurred to me about the way you could make a minigame into a technical aptitude test that would prevent all the english majors from playing heh.

Dude, there's a lot of shit on PBS where liberal arts people talk about philosophy, you english major guys can't imagine how crazy that stuff sounds to a dude that talks to computers in math and logic, I spend most of those shows going "I can't believe that something thinks that that is a question" ahaha.

Anyways all that stuff made me think about games with Intelligence Tests in 'em, shit man, that's a comedy goldmine, y'know, nobody ever does stuff like that, 'cause they're all like, oh man, we want stupid people to play, 'cause we want their money.

But if you really don't care about that (or if you don't buy into that logic, that's sorta like the logic that games shouldn't be scary, because people don't like to be scared ahaha), then you can do whatever the hell you want, y'know?

Aw I'm just kidding, its a good thing for spoiler sites or my loremaster woulda never finished that goddam level 15 class quest with the bookshelves, holy shit man was my loremaster ever a dummass AHAHA.

Plus, while I don't mind my game being something that'd teach ya something while it entertains you, I don't want it to be so bad that my brother's kids can't play the thing.

Actually, they're smarter than I am, the littler one was giving me physics advice as soon as he could talk, but I think I'm gonna stick with my first story ahaha.

Alright, so I might as well blabber about what I'm doing, I gotta work it out s'more anyways.

See, all these AI-spaceship guys are related to each other, and they got a hierarchy where they end up sorta being like a pantheon of greek gods, where some of 'em are crazy and they try to kill and cannibalize each other and fight over power and there's civil wars and all that.

And as you go along fixing yourself ('cause the AI guy is a character that belongs to you, its something that you play, uh, sometimes, when you ain't playing your clone-characters), its basically the AI character creation system, and its supposed to determine where you fit into the hiearchy and which side you are on and all that kinda crap.

I actually kinda hate that moral crap in games, so don't worry, it ain't gonna be all sucky and simple and lock you into anything and limit you and shit, its just supposed to be a way for me (as the programmer) to figure out some shit about how you wanna play and how you want to portray yourself, I don't even have that hierarchy shit all figured out, exactly, so its not like I'm obfuscating a system where you are choosing sides in a war that you can't change your mind about later (when you actually have some experience and knowledge about the multiverse in the game) or anything horrible and stupid like that heh.

Yah, these AI guys have their own cultures, they'll eventually have their own heroes and villains and news networks and celebrity AI gossip and favorite shows on their eleven-dimensional TV channels and stuff, that's all part of it.

Although the game isn't just about some civil war thingie between 'em all, they might fight with each other and get murderous and stuff sometimes, but mostly they deal with other advanced civilizations, I don't wanna get all introverted and stuff.

Its just that the story starts out with your ship being wrecked on a multidimensional beach somewhere 'cause you got jumped by some bad guy AIs, and in order to escape you translated yourself across the database of the multiverse in a way that caused you to forfeit your grip on a few of the dimensions that you were using for data storage (and the guys who were attacking you didn't want to erase themselves to chase you, so they gave up).

So you're sorta getting your shit together after a nasty drive failure and a wicked beating, basically, y'know, pulling yourself up by your own bootstrap programming and starting over, and you don't even really remember exactly how you got so messed up (not that its a fascinating mystery that you need to solve or anything, the bad guys were gonna use you for parts, the bigger guys tend to cannibalize any of the smaller AI-ships that they can catch whenever there is any kind of fight that they feel like they need to "gather their strength" for).

Although there's a chance that it didn't happen exactly like that.

'Cause mebbe you weren't a runt, mebbe you were a famous ship or something before you erased yourself.

Yah, easy peasy *rolls his one good eye*

I'm not even getting into the crap I got to think about with the mapping of the conscious mind into fun little subsystems that you can fix and shit heh.

Actually this is pretty easy stuff, its more artwork and organization than anything, its not like I gotta make up an entire universe in detail or anything, I'm just making little arthouse tetris thingies and screwing around, all the cool stuff comes for free.

The hardest part is actually the whole deal where I can't use red and green for different things 'cause of that whole colorblindness crap ahaha.

Big Wheels

2008-07-30T16:12:00.017-05:00

I had to get rid of the hood ornament 'cause it was too cheesy even for me heh.

This is just the first of a bunch of ships I gotta do 'cause I'm doing one of those George Lucas thingies with a whole fleet of ships moving along at different speeds so it looks like its all in 3d and stuff.

I wanna end up with that effect you get when you look down into clear water and see all the different levels of fish swimming around but we'll see how good that turns out, I ain't no stickler fer perfection ahaha.

This is one of the bigger ships in the center of the fleet of those eleven-dimensional AI spaceship thingies.

And I totally cheated on the background, and the picture of the sun, 'cause the sun is supposed to be a sorta-transparent animated "thrumming" engine thingie and I ain't bothered to do that yet, but at least I got the mask set up for it now.

The original idea I had was a ship that was so big that it could have continents and oceans, just sitting on the hull, held down by gravity, in that circular thingie at the center, but when I do a ship like that I'll need skip the windows and shit, 'cause it won't look right.

And I guess some ships have black holes in their center, when they get really old and horde a lot of mass, and then there's smaller ones with all the different kinds of stars, and even smaller ones that have gas giants, and even smaller ones that just have a bunch of water or hydrogen or something, and then there's supposed to be all sorts of really tiny ones that look like regular fighting ships without the whole gigantic planet-eating borg dealie, but the general idea was a space civilization that strip-mines everything it comes into contact with centered around a bunch of huge-ass "cargo" ships-slash-cities-slash-planets (slash-solar-systems, I guess) in the center.

I kinda like the idea of ships that are so huge they get gravity powered fusion for free and maybe even iron as a waste product heh.

And the whole black hole gravity dealie is about as good as you can do for making the whole warping timespace crap believable, y'know, I'm all about sweeping all my loose ends into a black hole 'cause of the way that they can turn tons and tons of bad ideas into a "singularity" ahaha.

And since I'm totally into the handwavium and unobtanium thingie already y'know its like wtf I might as well go all the way and get me some kickass ground effects and subwoofers in space going untz untz untz and everything awhellyah its the Starship Alabama, baby, its the Mississippi Queen AHAHA.

Mmm Hmm Nah

2008-07-28T12:34:00.010-05:00

Alright, so Ex-b is down in Florida right now, somewhere around Orlando, looking for any old crummy job and an apartment that we can turn into a Big Lebowski version of a mad scientist laboratory and underwater supervillian fortress, some kinda antarctic research base where we can stay up all night eating macaroni and cheese and working on this game thingie of ours together.

And I'm working on all sorts of weird and awesome and hilarious scifi game crap that me and him came up with.

Actually I'm doing some pretty boring stuff right now, trying to settle on a scale for the art and redoing the interface for all the interior-of-the-Tower-slash-spaceship stuff at the beginning of the game that you probably shouldn't even know about 'cause it's already sorta "ruining some of the movie" for ya, but I'm half-tempted to tell you guys exactly what kinda stuff we came up with so you can help us evolve it some more heh.

And then again, I don't wanna be like some jackass talking about how delicious the chocolate cake was at the party you weren't invited to, so I should probably just shut up already ahaha.

The scale thing is really annoying 'cause I want the characters on the screen to be big enough that I can do funny shit with their facial expressions and a bunch of animated gag junk like that (in the backgrounds, too) but small enough that they're still "vague" and generic enough for your imagination to fill in most of their details to suit your tastes.

So that a dude who wants to play the game serious ('cause there's a lot of serious stuff in there, I dunno how to do cool space stuff that ain't kinda freaky, let alone all the other stuff I wanna do) won't be too put out.

Y'know, I can't make all the dudes all cartoony with big heads and shit like Pip Boy or something 'cause while that's fine for some junk, the whole "muppet babies" garbage would totally suck for Ancient Rome and Cthulhu-type crap heh.

Plus I'm kinda hoping I don't gotta do multiple scales so that they'll be able to play around with long range combat and stuff.

On the other hand, I'm already doing some of that for vehicle combat, and I probably don't need to do a lot for all the super small "character" images on the world map, 'cause they're so damn blurry and symbolic and tiny that they could be anything.

Its In Your Face

2008-07-28T10:26:00.004-05:00

Clone Shoes

2008-07-27T10:30:00.003-05:00

The Tower

2008-07-25T10:54:00.022-05:00

Here's sorta what I'm working on right now.

I say "sorta" 'cause I keep changing my mind about certain key elements as I figure out ways to reorganize stuff to create more interesting scenarios and situations later on.

Anyways the basic idea is that there's all these eleven dimensional spaceships from way the hell in the future, beyond the extinction of the human race, and the ape race that replaced 'em, and the robots that replaced the apes, and the holograms that replaced the robots, and the memetic collective that replaced the holograms, and whatever else there was, intelligent plants and ghost empires and ape-vs-robot-vs-cowboy-vs-zombie apocalypses and stuff heh.

And the spaceships can travel through time and space and parallel universes, 'cause they're these huge-ass machines that only partly exists in normal time and space, if they bother to exist in normal time-space at all.

And they were created to terraform alien planets and parallel universe versions of the Earth and recreate all sorts of different civilizations, like a Human (and whatever) Backup Array, Jurassic Park Style.

So its full of automated factories and cloning facilities and all sorts of cool stuff on the inside, and it mostly looks like a terraforming tower or an elevator or a vault door in the ground on the outside, when it ain't flying around like the city from stargate atlantis (although it can disguise itself as a Lodge or a Log Cabin or a Stone Tower or a Castle or an Office Building with a nice lawn or just stealth itself with holographic technology at the snap of its fingers to fit any time period it may be interested in recreating).

And the characters you create are clones (although not necessarily human clones) created and let loose on the planet (12 monkey style) by the AI that runs this great big machine, 'cause (of course) its all broken down and shit and it needs your help to repair itself and recover its full capabilities.

And it doesn't trust you, 'cause its made some other clones that ended up turning bad on it (there's my built-in arch-nemesis shit ahaha), so you gotta do missions and stuff to earn its trust and be allowed access to certain areas aboard the ship, and each new area comes with new crap to fix before you can access the full capabilities of that area.

So everything in the game, including being able to create new characters and build your own vehicles and use the cyborg and genetic augmentation areas of the medical lab and firing up the terraforming tower to turn the ruins of a city into a jungle so you can do the sim city thingie and being able to fire up the engines and fly the entire ship around, has a way of being unlocked and repaired and upgraded junk.

Actually, at the moment, I'm sorta toying with the idea of making the Player, as a User, be the artificial intelligence aboard the ship, so you can name your ship when you first start playing the game and use that as your handle for adding content to the game and crap, and then your characters would be the clones of your AI, who acts sorta like a little god or something, and all your characters are your AI's "hands and eyes on the ground."

"Waking up as a clone" or whatever with no memory to initiate some suspension of disbelief has been done to death already, waking up as an AI that just finally managed to get some crucial part of itself operational after a terrible multidimensional crash landing or collision or something that happened six hundred thousand years ago and creating your clones yourself instead using some kinda lame-ass character creation screen is a little more kickass as far as story-telling goes.

And its not like the AI is gonna know what the hell its doing until it gets more fixed up anyways, all the damn AIs that always run the eleven dimensional spaceships in all these damn eleven dimensional spaceship story thingies never know anything useful until the very end of the story anyways ahaha.

The only thing that sucks about it is that it messes up my "earn the AIs trust" access-to-new-areas setup for the clones.

'Cause like, you can probably trust your own characters, y'know?

I suppose there's some angle to work that with "earn access" thing as an AI, instead of having it be by character, where the characters, autonomous as they may or may not be, depending on the player (who doesn't really have to mess with this spaceship crap at all, I plan on making it so that a new character could just leave and go play the game with his buddies and fight monsters and gamble and trade and do whatever he wants to do out of other cities instead of building his own, y'know, all I gotta do is make the "tutorial" starter-thingie something where you repair the transport system that lets you do exactly that and we are good-to-go).

Anyways that's what I'm working on right now, more specifically the map of the tower and at least some of the areas that you can unlock, like the cloning area (which will get mushed into character creation), some tutorial thingie, and the stuff that requires you to scan and explore the grid of the apocalyptic ruins of a city on the surface before repairing and firing up the terraforming system.

I already started making it as an isometric cartoon thingie that you can dungeon crawl around in and work all the little machines, which is what I wanna do for the "scan and clear toxic materials and lifeforms and salvage parts and crap before terraforming can begin" too.

And I guess its good to do the "User is the AI" thingie, 'cause then you don't gotta do the tower shit all over again with different characters, y'know, 'cause while some stuff, like the terraforming-and-exploring-the-ruins and building new cities junk, is kinda fun 'cause its easy to randomize and make interesting, all that "earning trust and credentials" tutorial rat maze crap over and over again ain't no fun.

Hmm, I s'pose I better plan to make some of that a toggle though, in case that starter crap is kinda fun.

None of this junk, no matter how I end up doing it, precludes using your first tower to create new towers so you can create more than one city (even in different parallel universes) or anything, it just turns it all into a part of the game, being able to create new towers is just another thing to unlock.

And the tower as the central feature thingie gives me a way to let folks admin their own worlds (to make 'em fun for their buddies) in a gamey and unsucky way.

Plus its cool for folks who just like to build junk and show it off to other players.

And I can instance everything so you can check out everybody else's crap without bothering 'em, or by invitation, and these spaceship-tower-slash-city-running AIs can team up together in at least a couple different interesting ways and even wrestle each other in a couple different and interesting ways (terraforming fights! ahaha), so that's cool.

And the whole thing with having you, as a user, be the AI of the ship figuring out everything on your own actually makes it kinda nice and interesting for me as a narrator, 'cause then I can just sorta deliver information to you directly as you investigate crap insteada doing that moldy-old "talk to the player through some goddam pestering puppet" thingie heh.

I know I do that a lot here on my blog but I don't like being stuck feeling like I gotta do that shit all the time y'know that junk is only good for a couple laughs and then it starts getting old really quick ahaha.