Thursday, January 28, 2010

Stupid Shit

This post is about Stupid Shit.

Let's just use some examples to describe what I mean here. First off, I have a cold, have had one for a couple weeks now, and frankly it's annoying. Some days I feel fine, other days, like today, I feel like something the cat vomited up and looked at you like "I'm not cleaning that up." and then walked off. I'm coughing, I'm sneezing, my nose ran right the hell off my face, and yet, here I am at work, bravely soldiering through another day at my boring dead end job. And yes, I used the word "soldiering" because that's what it is. Pish, you think those marines facing bullets and explosives and losing body parts over in Iraq are having a rough day, try walking a 90 year old woman who's never seen a computer before through setting up the internet on her computer, using an operating system you yourself have never used before, WHILE YOU HAVE A COLD. Yea, bitch. I'm like the Special Forces of Tech Support. Although in an actual gun battle I would probably be on the ground wetting myself, crying for my mommmy, I expect those Special Forces guys would have the same problem working at my desk for a day. My cold, while we're on the subject, falls under the category of Stupid Shit You Have to Deal With.

As an aside here, let's just remark how I seem to be the No-Tell Motel resort destination when it comes to viruses (or virii). If there's a virus within 100 miles of me, it's on it's way to check in at my front desk. After checking in, it's going to have a nice, restful night's sleep, wake up, and then proceed to have a reproductive orgy while blaring Guns N Roses into my head at full volume while downing tequila slammers. After a few days, a weekend, or several weeks of staying in my body's luxuriously appointed suites, it's going to leave them a wrecked sodden mess and frankly, my inner maid is damn tired of cleaning the soiled sheets. Luckily, she's swearing at me in spanish so I can't understand a word she's saying.

So while I am driving into work this morning, I see a jogger jogging down the street. And I don't mean on the sidewalk, I mean, DOWN THE STREET. Sure, it's january, so I expect a lot of people have made new years resolutions to stay in shape. But it's JANUARY, so today we also have the problem of icy winds, blowing snow, icy roads, and snow drifts to deal with. Obviously, a jogger jogging down the actual STREET, falls under the category of Stupid Shit You Shouldn't Be Doing In Inclement Weather. Drivers have to swerve out of the way just to avoid hitting her, and on icy roads it's just ridiculous, she's creating a traffic hazard, especially with the blowing snow. I suppose it was a good thing she was thin, if she was a 350 pound fatty jogging down the street, she'd be taking up an entire lane for herself. Which also makes it that much more annoying, she's SKINNY! Why are you jogging down the middle of the icy street when you know drivers are having a hard enough time? Pick a nicer time to do your jogging than MORNING RUSH HOUR. And stick to the damn side streets and use the goddamn sidewalk for crying out loud! It wouldn't surprise me if she got nailed by someone who couldn't swerve or stop in time. But she's thin so maybe she's nimble enough to dodge out of the way, who knows. I'd have tried aiming for her myself, but she was on the other side of the road, so i'd have had to cross 4 lanes of traffic to run her over, and two lanes is my limit. I am just too lazy to cross 4 lanes of traffic to run someone over, no matter how tempting it was.

So I'm in the kitchen the other day, looking around for lunch, and Mom offers to make me a grilled cheese sandwich. Being the lazy git that I am, I am fine with a 77 year old woman making my lunch for me. Don't judge me. I'm keeping her alive by keeping her active. If she didn't have to do something for me once in a while, she'd get no exercise whatsoever and probably get a blood clot or something. Besides, she offered. So Mom's getting the bread into the pan and she asks, what I think is a stupid question because she's never asked it before "How many slices of cheese do you want on your grilled cheese sandwich?" Now, I'm getting my lunch made for me, so I respond pleasantly "Well, how many do you normally use?" I mean, I don't know, I've never made myself a grilled cheese sandwich in my life. At least, not that I can recall while sober. So she tells me two. I tell her to use two slices then, and make it like she normally makes it. She says "One would be better for you, less fat." Now I know I'm a chubby bastard, but I don't need it spelled out for me. Regardless, I politely respond that I would still like two slices on my grilled cheese sandwich. Now at this point she begins arguing with me about how fat I am and how I need to cut down. I'm at something of a loss here, so I ask the obvious question... "Why ask me how many slices of cheese I want on my sandwich if you aren't going to do what I want anyway?" Which started a bit of a row with her. This would be the Stupid Shit That I Wish I Didn't Have To Deal With category. I mean honestly, I wouldn't have known one way or the other, right? Make it with one or two slices or 7 slices, I wouldn't know the difference unless it's obvious that there's more or less cheese than the last time i had one, and by that time, I've already got the sandwich, I probably won't complain much. But why ask? Like I always say, don't ask me the question if you don't want to hear my answer. Because goddammit, if you ask me, I am going to make sure you hear my answer, blunt honesty and all. So don't ask me if you look fat in those jeans, honey, because YEA YOU DO. And for the sake of all the Stupid Shit I have to deal with, if you ask me if you look nice and I say yes, don't argue with me. It's only going to make it worse. Just be happy you either do, in fact, look nice, or I cared enough about you to tell a little white lie in the first place, because if I am pressed about it, I'll tell you the truth. I'd make a terrible spy, I'd blab everything within seconds of even being suspected of anything. lol

Some other Stupid Shit I have to deal with, and this would fall under the Stupid Shit That Doesn't Make Sense category, is that I get accused of cheating all the time at games. Now these are mostly online games and the like so I get accused of running trainers and such. I almost always cheat at the single player games, but not at anything having to do with multiplayer, and here's why... Single player games are set up to challenge everyone the same way, and as a result of all people being different, some people will do better and some will do worse. So the game designers rig the game, either with various difficulty settings, or by making the game so hard nobody can beat it playing it fairly, so that you are continuously playing the game trying to best it. It's in the game designers best interests to make it that way, because the longer you play a game, the more positive the response to it. Sure you might get frustrated, but who amongst us just gives up on a challenge without trying just a little bit harder one more time? Very few of us, I'd say. In any case, I cheat at the single player games because I'm tired of having to reload my game from several hours ago because I forgot to save it 2 minutes before the final boss fight, and the final boss just bitchslapped me into next week. The whole loading and reloading and saving and doing it over just isn't realistic, I mean, if they are trying to teach me to be persistent, I get it, but if you haven't already learned that from your daily life, a game's not going to teach you, it's just going to aggravate the shit out of you. At least, it does that to me. So I cheat at the single player games. Now multiplayer, I don't cheat at, because human players make everything different every time you play, and are a truer test of your ability. That makes the game fun, and cheating at multiplayer would just be ridiculous. So if I beat you, it's just because I am faster, more skilled, had a better strategy, or I'm just plain luckier. It happens. Get over it. I file this under Stupid Shits Who Can't Handle Getting Their Asses Kicked.

There seems to be a lot of them out there, sadly. I call them n00bs. if there's anyone reading this and asking themselves "Did he just call me a n00b? Yes. Yes I did.

I just noticed I wrote this days ago and forgot to post it. Yea, I may not have been in my right mind.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Movie Review - Twilight

Oh yea, I know, this movie came out years ago, but I don't go to the theaters and I don't rent DVD's so this weekend was the first time it came on cable and I had time to waste watching it. Sad state of my affairs at the moment that I had nothing better to do on a saturday night than watch Twilight, but there it is, and if anyone is actually reading this, you get to benefit from my lack of a social life. Aren't you lucky?

I don't know if normal people do this, because I haven't been anywhere close to normal in so long that I have no idea what normal people do, but I tend to psychoanalyze the writer when I watch something on TV or read a book. I mean seriously, if you know someone and all they talk about is sports, you might guess that they enjoy watching ESPN, you know what I am saying? So while watching Twilight, I came to a few educated guesses about the writer. And keep in mind, I only saw the movie version, so if it's wildly different from the book, I could be completely off. I think the writer's name was stephanie meyer or something like that.

So apparently, old steph here is in love with gay guys. Yea, I haven't even got to the movie review part of this blog yet and I can already tell. She may possibly even be a necrophiliac. All the guys in this movie seem to be zombie-like, uncommunicative and lifeless to the point of brain death. On the other hand, it's entirely possible she's just a lesbian and finds guys completely uninteresting, but that doesn't explain the females in this movie being just about as lifeless, so I'm fairly sure she likes dead gay guys. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, in this day and age, as long as she has a good relationship with a coroner or something where she can get easy access to dead gay guys, that's entirely up to her and that she may be breaking the laws of man nature and the lord almighty above, has nothing to do with me, so I could care less. Each to his or her own, as I always say, even if it's dead gay guys.

A short summary of the movie, for those of you who haven't seen it, which, I had not until this weekend, so there would probably be a few, goes like this... Emotional basket case moves to new school, meets dead gay guy, she falls in love, they end up hanging out. Other dead gay guy gets jealous and uses her as an excuse to get a rise out of the first dead gay guy. Movie ends. Yep, that's about it. And if you haven't seen it, spoilers may follow, so if you care, you have been warned.

There's no sex, no nudity, very little violence, and in fact the closet thing i could find in this movie to something actually happening is this emo girl bonding with her parents and the dead gay guy's parents. Or fake parents, as the case appears to be. In fact some of the only interesting parts in this movie were where this emo girl goes to visit the dead gay guy's "parents" and they end up trying to use the kitchen for the first time in this vastly large and expensive home, because of course, they don't eat. But she's already eaten, because she knows they are vampires and don't need to eat, so they've gone to all that trouble for nothing. I'd have killed her then and there for making me try and fix italian food in my own kitchen and her not eating it, the lying, cheating, non-eating slut. And she actually does eat, which makes her choice of not eating in my kitchen just ridiculously unfeeling! Even for a human!

I did actually find her relationship with her dad to be kind of endearing in that he doesn't hover, talk to her, try to understand her, or any of the above. He just lets her be, which makes for some awkwardness but makes the part of her father (who also happens to be the sherriff) probably the only real part in the movie, and the actor who played it did an excellent job, I think. If this movie was just about this emo girl who moves to washington and renews her relationship with her estranged dad, it might be a perfectly fine lifetime movie of the week, and I'd have nothing bad to say about it at all (if I even watched it, which I probably wouldn't have). But of course, it isn't.

The rest of the movie is just silly. The writer doesn't break any new ground as far as vampires are concerned. Super strength, speed, reading people's mind, yea, we've heard it all before in a thousand other movies. Possibly the only difference is that instead of bursting into flame in daylight, they glitter. Which, when you consider how the writer likes dead gay guys and doesn't want them to burst into flame while emotionally enchanting 15 year old girls in high school, it just makes sense. I mean, seriously, they GLITTER. You can't get any gayer than that.

A couple things that generally annoy me about this movie and vampire movies in general... One, emo girl is driving in a car with dead gay guy and brushes her fingertips against his accidentally. She immediately recoils in horror at how chilly he is despite how warm it is inside the car. And yet 20 minutes later she's kissing him. I have heard vampires are supposed to be romantic or something, but if brushing his fingers in a broiling warm car makes you recoil in horror, and you find yourself kissing his cold lifeless wet lips and getting turned on, you are definitely a necrophiliac. I'm sorry, there's just no other explanation. Get over it. That is something i have never really understood in vampire lore, I mean, unless you've been charmed or entranced or whatever it is they can sometimes do depending on the tale, you are literally kissing a cold decaying corpse. If you've been charmed or entranced, at least you have an excuse, you are not in your right mind. But if you haven't been, yea, you need counseling at least. It's like me letting a frozen steak thaw out on my kitchen counter, and then before it actually warms to room temperature, I use it to masturbate with. Which, while it sounds fun in theory and i may try it later, it's probably not a mentally healthy thing to do. Oh supposedly after a recent feeding, vampires are warmer, or so some of the mythology goes. Well, let's see, when you consider 98.6 degree blood being sucked into a 40 or 50 degree vampire, physics would dictate the temperatures evening out, assuming the blood and vampire were of equal volume (which they wouldn't be, but for the sake of argument, let's say they are), would raise the average vampire temp to maybe 70 degrees (Fahrenheit) or so. So assuming the vampire's cold dead hands were the same temperature as his blood after a feeding, they'd be about room temperature. So, it'd be more like leaving the steak out until it actually thawed to room temp, and then kissing/jerking off with it. I suppose that's marginally better. Still, while eating decaying dead flesh in the steak's case is a good thing, especially when you sear it on the grill for an hour or so, falling in love and wanting to spend the rest of one's existence, or even worse, eternity with it, well, let's just say I have always found that disturbing to say the least.

Two, why are the vampire "good guys" in these movies always abstaining from drinking blood? Think about it, every vampire good guy in every vampire movie has always either completely denied himself from drinking blood or has survived on rats, pigs' blood, stealing blood supplies from hospitals, or the like. Why? Why should abstaining from eating what your body is telling you to devour make you an instant good guy? I think of myself as a pretty decent guy, and while I may be a little twisted, when I see some ice cream sitting in a bowl in front of me, I down that stuff so fast I'd give myself a permanent ice cream headache, if I had a brain. Come to think of it, I haven't given myself an ice cream headache in a long time. I wonder why? I eat ice cream just as much. I just never get a headache from it. Maybe my brain has entirely frozen over at this point and further injections of iced heaven no longer have any effect. It is possible, I suppose. but in any case, let's say I make myself a bowl of ice cream, and set it down on a table, and instead of eating it, I walk away from it. Does that make me instantly a good guy? Why should I be considered a paragon of virtue because I showed a modicum of self control? There's tons of villains in other movies that don't go around shooting people that randomly piss them off, and yet they are still villains, right? I don't get it. Must be something to do with that whole christianity thing, where you deny yourself all the pleasures that life has to offer so you can be closer to some mean old deity that wants to deprive you of heavenly bliss if you piss him off. So if you deny yourself, you are more christian than the other vampires. lol It sounds so ridiculous when I type it out like that, but that's probably how people think of it. I think it's just ridiculous, I mean if blood makes you stay young and healthy forever, for god's sake, bathe in rivers of it. When was the last time you denied yourself a burger just because you could? Let's face it, when you are hungry, you eat. Unless you are some sort of anorexic who is constantly starving yourself to stay thin (fat is a problem vampires don't have to worry about, apparently), then you eat when you are starving. It's just something you do to live, and how people can relate to a dead thing that starves itself for no apparent reason and can't stand the sunlight... wait, I think i just described every emotional teenage girl in existence. Hmmmm.

From a geek's and a guy's point of view, this movie is pretty worthless. Kristin Stewart, while moderately cute in some situations, doesn't get naked at all in this movie. Neither does anyone else. The extent of the violence comes in a swiftly done and forgettably ridiculous "climax" wherein dead gay guy #1 and dead gay guy #2 get in a fight in, of all places, a ballet school. Perfect setting for it, I grant you, but there's very little blood, no lost limbs, and the actual fight consists of a couple throws and a little choking before the evil dead gay guy gets his neck snapped and is burned. Alive, I would presume, because snapping a vampire's neck seems ridiculously easy to do and has never resulted in their death in any movie I have ever seen before. But alas, they don't really show any of that, the movie is too busy focusing on dead gay guy #1 to bother with showing how dead gay guy #2 is disposed of. It's almost an afterthought, really, which just seems wrong to me. Vampires are supposedly hard to kill; they are already dead, but ending their unnatural existence should be harder than SNAP and lighting the corpse on fire with a bic lighter. Every vampire's death scene i have ever seen has been explosive and dramatic, and the various ways they go out is usually pretty interesting. Not so here. Very uninteresting. Frankly, I was rooting for the bad guy, but not because the bad guy had a great part or he was an excellent and full-of-character villain, but because he'd have ended this stupid series of movies before it got started. Sigh.

Well, obviously, I wasn't very fond of this movie. I'm sorry i wasted my saturday night watching it, but in my defense, I was really bored and i was already paying for the cable, anyway, so i figured eh, it's only 2 hours of my life. In comparison, The Legend of Chun Li with Kristin Kreuk , which i saw right after Twilight, was slightly better. But now I want those two hours back. I WANT THEM BACK, DAMMIT!!!

Monday, January 18, 2010

Game Review - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

This past Christmas I was sorely lacking on computer games. And anyone who knows me can agree, when I lack the sweet sweet heroin release of hours spent blasting my opponents into bloody giblets, I get... Well, let's just say, a bit cranky. So after various failures such as Torchlight and the like, I went and got Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Now, this game has been out for, oh, a few months now, I think. But it still cost me $60 to get it on xmas. Which, is just crazy for a computer game. CRAZY. I mean, usually they are $50 or less, it's just, like, a requirement for PC games or something. Unless you get a special edition or something. And wtf is up with special editions nowadays? $60+ spent on maps or figurines and extra special looking attire in the video game is one thing, I mean, I don't NEED that stuff to play the game and enjoy it, it's just, well, fluff, I'd call it. And I proudly admit to being a geek, but come on, figurines, maps of the game world and special costumes? When I reach that level of geekiness, I am going to apply for membership to MENSA or something, so I can at least have a cool aspect to my nerddom.

Let's take Dragon Age: Origins for example, and I know I'm going off-topic here, but hey it's an RPG and a game so it's sort of along the same lines here. They released a "special edition" of it that gave you some downloadable content when the game was first released. I doin't know why they couldn't have included this content WITH the original game, or just released it as an "additional adventure" later on... Oh wait, I know, GREED. That's why they released it as downloadable content at game launch. In any case, I have two problems with the extra content. One, the original special edition price was like, I don't know, maybe $10 more than the plain old version when it first came out, and when you try to add it on after you've bought the original version, it's an extra $22. Second, you have to activate and buy the content through Electronic Arts game interface and using their account. Which is both a pain in the ass, and forced me to recover my old EA account pw (I didn't even know I had one). Then, after going through all that crap, I have to buy "points" to spend in-game on the extra content. I can't just buy the appropriate content (there were actually 2 different ones) and have it install, OH NO SIRREE BOB. I had to buy points at the site, then go back to the game and "buy" the content with the points I just bought. And you can't buy the points in one lump sum, either. I had to purchase points in 3 separate purchases to add up to the points I needed to get both the content packages. And then, as if making me jump through flaming hoops wasn't enough, I can't even play the additional content in offline mode, NO... I HAVE to be connected to the EA servers with my newly renewed EA account JUST to have access to the extra content when I play. Utterly ridiculous, and I think Electronic Arts should DIAF.

Luckily, Modern Warfare 2 has no such requirements, or at least, I didn't run into any. You do need to be online to play the multiplayer portion of the game, but that's just a given since if you aren't online, your only friends are Patches, the slightly messy blow up doll, and your growing collection of World of Warcraft miniatures, assuming you don't have the luxury of imaginary friends. Before I get into the multiplayer aspect, let me just outline the single player portion of it, which is blessedly brief and gives you a quick insight into how the multiplayer aspect works. First, when I say brief, I mean it took me about two or three days of playing it straight through, with a trainer on so I could cheat, to finish the campaign. DON'T YOU JUDGE ME. I'm an adult, if I want to cheat at my single player games in the privacy of mom's basement while I fondle my dear friend Patches, that is my business and has no impact on you. So butt out or I'll sic Patches on you, and she can be a violent bitch when she's protecting her man-meat. The campaign can be a lot of fun if you like dying and viewing the game constantly through a haze of red, since the screen turns bloody red when you get shot. I played it on the hardest setting and cheated like a crackhoe, so I got the, erm "full" experience of the game. I won't give away any details of the campaign, because I know fighting a fully armed modern battle tank with a broken 1940's-era swiss army knife can be a thrilling experience, but I will say this much. I've played two of these games now, and refreshingly, they follow the same characters almost, but I'd like to see the main character actually walk away from the fight. I know in war people get injured and all, but in the last mission, he nearly died on a bridge that was about to give way and drop him into a crevasse, and I don't mean nearly died as in, he got off the bridge in time by running away, I mean, he got shot multiple times, fell, managed to shoot the bad guy with a pistol, and was finally dragged off the decaying bridge by his teammates while probably falling into a coma. And in this one he doesn't exactly redeem my faith in his combat training. Maybe on the easy setting, he comes out of it with nothing more than a splinter, but on the hard version, well, if he lived at all I'd be surprised.

That having been said, the multiplayer aspect of the game can be quite addicting. It is a first person shooter, so if your fast twitch reflexes are decent and you can see fairly well (my reflexes are great but I can't see bean at more than a foot from my nose), you'll have fun racing around shooting stuff and sticking semtex to your enemies and watching them dance around in fear trying to get the explosives off before they go BOOOM. Which, is hilariously funny and if real people didn't die when they went BOOM I'd do it in real life, but my violent tendencies are more than satisfied by this computer game. And no, mom's not currently chilling out in the large freezer in the garage. I am very non-violent and if you continue to persist in your accusations I AM GOING TO KILL YOU. Erm. Figuratively speaking of course. (innocent grin) There are levels to go through to get the various perks and such in the game, but the perks are not required to kill the higher-level people, and though there are 70 levels in the game, you can make them pretty fast just by wandering around the game maps and blasting the shit out of your enemies. They tend to breeze by pretty fast, sometimes without you even knowing it, and if any of my readers (if I have any) are familiar with the "grinding" aspect of games with levels, there was only one such instance of it that I ran into here. That was when i was waiting to get the mini-Uzi, a gun I loved from the first game, and once I got it I proceeded to shoot the crap out of everyone around me. Team-mates included since, as I may have mentioned, my vision isn't that great and sometimes I have a hard time telling friends from enemies in the game. Which, is not only why I am not a soldier, but also why I have so few friends. Erm. Well, in any case, the multiplayer is really the reason to buy this game and it will eat up hours of your spare time, if you have any to spare.

So, all in all, great multiplayer, decent single player, pretty passable graphics (they are good enough where I can't complain about them, so they must be okay, right?), sound is good, and... and... well, I don't have a rating system or anything, but Patches is getting lonely over there in the corner, you know what I'm saying?

ADDENDUM: No review of Modern Warfare 2 would be complete without mentioning the new server system. IWNet, Infinity Ward's (the game's publisher) system of servers or whatever, has some pretty major flaws. First off, half the time, it can't find a game for you to join. Second, sometimes it will add you to a full server, which, will then kick you out, then, the automated search feature will rejoin you to the same server, and then because it's still full, you'll get kicked out again, and so on. Also, occasionally during play the action will cease while the game tries to find a new host. So everything freezes while the game searches and downloads everything to the new host, then gameplay resumes. Also, with this system, the lag can get pretty bad at times. I was running down a long open area towards about 3 guys, and all of a sudden I jumped backwards about 30 feet, which is indicative of lagging, so I stopped, waiting for the lag to clear. However, the guys firing at me continued to fire, and I expected to die. But I didn't. So I strolled forward and as they kept firing, the lag was making their bullets miss, so I used my knife to kill all three of them. Why my knife still worked through the lag, I have no idea. But there it is. Pretty funny at the time, though. The server issues do put a damper on the fun though, a lot of players will just quit when the lag starts. These young kids nowadays, they have no patience. You want to know about lag, back in '95 while I was on IRC, we had lag so bad, I left a chat room where nobody was answering, came back in, started talking with a friend, and then saw MYSELF come in, say "Hello?" wait a moment, during which time, I said hi back to myself. I suppose if I had seen myself the first time I'd have created a paradox and destroyed the universe or something. Then i saw myself say "Hello?" again, and then I saw myself say "Any bodeeee hooooooooommmmme?" And then I left. I did not come back a second time, that would have just been weird. But that, now that was lag.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

A Personal History of Social Networking

IN THE BEGINNING there was Prodigy, and I looked upon Prodigy with it's multiple chat rooms and subject matters and the ability to create your own chat rooms, and I saw that it was good. I learned much of LOL and LMAO and ROFL, and even chanced upon the great and powerful ROFLMAOPMP on rare occasions. And I didst wander amongst the chat rooms, and frolicked, and I was happy for a time. But Prodigy became greedy, and charged per hour, and after spending $1100 just to chat one month, I cast it down into the lake of fire to burn forever in its own excrement. This was back in 1995, shortly after the birth of the internet universe.

After Prodigy, I realized the true freedom of the Internet Universe that is IRC, or Internet Relay Chat. And again, I roamed free and unfettered, and in my wanderings I learned many things, but IRC is a vast vast desert of nothingness where only the few Oases have any life, and frankly, the view is terrible. I mean, seriously, there were no graphics at all, unless you count ASCII porn, and, errr I mean, uh, and Yea verily didst I pass happily out of this parched land, in search of something more.

And though I wandered through the dark ages of the internet, searching and yearning for the promised land of milk and honey, or at least a good place to chat, I found nought, and spent many years wandering aimlessly. It felt like 40 years, though it was probably closer to 3, maybe 2 and a half, which, in internet time, is like, forever!!! OMG!!!!!!

And lo, there in the darkness I chanced upon a thriving city named Yahoo, and made it my home. There were many many many many many many many fine chat rooms, and you could create your own, and the ale was cold, and the whores were mostly clean, and there was much rejoicing. But as in most cases where something is good and clean and fine, the powers that be decided, in their infinite wisdom, NOT to follow the old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." And lo, Yahoo was smited. Or, maybe smitten? Smoted? Smote, I think it's smote, yea that's probably the past tense of... errr. And lo, yahoo was smote... that sounds wrong somehow. Yahoo was whipped, and the user created rooms were cast out, and none could again find their majesty. And thus the city of Yahoo was reduced in size, and many fled it's fewer wonders, but still I kept a summer home there, for the views are nice that time of year.

And in time I looked upon the fields of Myspace, where the shepherds and peoples and minstrels frolicked, and I created another place there. And amongst my peoples, there was much rejoicing, for I am funny and weird and wondrous, and they marveled at my blog, and probably had to change their undergarments a few times from their endless mirth. And long did I keep my house there, at least until Myspace decided that all my works would be theirs, and they could useth tham as they pleaseth. It was then that I didst decide it wast time to move on, and burnt my homes and holdings to the ground so that myspace couldst not despoil my great works for their own betterment. I am a spiteful god.

Fleeing the greediness of Myspace, I chanced upon Facebook, and dwelled not long amidst its youthful gaiety. For gay it was, and annoying it became, with its constant alerts and emails and messages from a thousand sources, keen to whittle my spirit down to the nothingness from whence facebook was born. But I am not a god of peace and surrender, I am a god of War, and Facebook could not scratch me. I threw its slings and arrows to the side of the road, and continued my journey unchallenged.

I briefly traveled through the myriad roads of AOL Instant Messenger on my travels, but I did not stop, simply greeted travelers along the way, and perhaps pausing to shoot the shit while kicking the road dust off my boots.

But no road is without peril, nor curve, nor incline, not to mention the occasional pothole, and I wouldst briefly list my trips and falls upon the road on Twitter. I didst not spend long on this road, for its length is stopped at 140 cubits (what the hell is a cubit, anyway?), and no man may lengthen his time there, though he travel it back and forth. I quickly grew short with such brevity, and longed again to expound at length.

And we have come to the crux of our journey, where I stand at the crossroads of life and extoll the virtues of blogspot. Truth be told, tis but a small Inn by the side of the crossroads, and I shant know how long it will be ere I move on. But for the nonce, tis fine. For the nonce.

Plus, it's freakin easy to post here, I just log in and type. Yea, I know, I am pretty lazy, that's why I do things the easy way. :-)

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

LifeForce, a Story of Love

So I am talking to my nephew the other day, and I forget the title of an older movie I used to love. It took me a few minutes to recall the name of the movie, mostly because i am old now, but the movie was called LIFEFORCE. This immediately made me want to see the movie again, because it had been my favorite movie for YEARS. Yes, even more than Aliens.

So, being the internet junkie that I am (I exaggerate, I'm actually a gaming junkie, the internet is just my normal mode of playing games), I promptly go to hulu.com. Hulu is a website where they have some TV shows and movies that you may have missed during the week, so you can watch what premieres you missed or catch up on your favorite shows. I've watched Kung Pow there (the entire movie) before, so I thought, HEY, MAYBE THEY HAVE LIFEFORCE!!!!! Yes, that was exactly my thought exclamation points and all. Hulu did not have Lifeforce, however, it linked me to Crackle.com, which did. So, within 30 seconds of wanting to watch an old movie that you probably couldn't rent or buy on DVD anymore, i was watching it over the internet. I turned to my nephew and said THE INTERNET IS AWESOME!!!!! I LOVE THE INTERNET!!!!! He's deaf now.

So basically, Lifeforce is a story of love. This shuttle commander flies off to visit Halley's Comet (hey the movie was made in 1985, Halley's comet was big back then), intending to study um... you know... comet-related... stuff... And instead they find an alien spacecraft! Well, not instead. I mean, the comet was there, too, but who the hell really cares? It's a goddamn comet. It's like made of ice and rock and space shit, and has a long tail made of tied-together space ribbons. Whatever. ANYWAY, if you'll quit goddamn interrupting, I'll get back to my story.

So basically, it's a story of astronaut-boy meets space girl, boy loses space girl, space girl wakes up naked inside a secret SAS base (SAS because the entire movie was filmed in and is based on london, i believe, and is entirely believable, I mean, who here hasn't woken up naked inside an SAS base after a bender?), spacegirl wanders off naked, SAS recruits boy to find spacegirl, boy finds girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl, boy and girl engage in kinky alien space sex scene in a catacomb beneath a london church. Now, I am a little kinky, but in a catacomb beneath a CHURCH? Good god, man. Have some respect for the dead. Oh, and somewhere in there, there's zombies and aliens and vampires thrown in.

If you don't want me to give away anything because you think you may watch this movie, then stop reading here. Or don't. Because you may find my synopsis of this sordid tale of love has little to do with the actual movie, and my insane ramblings may only confuse you. Which may be another reason to stop reading here. But anyway, I am going to mention some of the good parts.

First thing I'd like to mention is, the space chick is naked for half the movie. I first saw this when I was like 16 or 17, and I can tell you as a 16 year old geek, there's nothing quite like a naked chick walking around. Come to think of it, I don't mind naked chicks walking around much at 39. Hot naked chicks, I mean. And the space girl is pretty hot, I mean, she's french, and we're not talking year-1990+ stinky hairy skanky french chicks, like in La Femme Nikita or anything, oh noes, Mr Bill. Oh NOES. We are talking primo, mid 1980's french chick here, when france was still cool to visit and they didn't lynch americans in the street. So think John Cusack's french girlfriend in Better Off Dead walking around naked for half the movie, minus the orange-tossing-at-stopsigns thing, and that will give you some idea of what I am talking about.

For that matter, Better Off Dead would have been a much better movie if whatever her name was had been naked through half of it, don't you think? Hollywood, you guys should pay attention, I may be onto something here. Keep remaking films, I mean obviously, no one can stop you from raping my childhood, but make all the hot female leads spend half the movie nude. Think how much more money transformers would have made if Megan Fox had been naked during most of Transformers! And honestly, do you think she'd have minded? I don't want to sound mean here, but she doesn't seem like the type to mind showing off her naughty bits. I could be wrong. But anyway, I digress.

LifeForce seems to have all the pieces of every sci fi or horror film ever made, and instead of sucking, like you'd think it would, it turned out to be AWESOME. I mean, maybe none of the actors are particularly well known nowadays, but back in the mid 80's these actors were pretty big deals. Well, one of them was slightly popular, anyway. Hell, it's got Captain Picard in it, for crying out loud! And they wanted Anthony Hopkins to play one of the male leads! And they wanted Billy Idol for it, but he was getting his hair restyled, or something. But basically, it's got zombies, vampires, aliens, space ships, naked chicks, it's like a teenage geek's dream come true. The only thing that would have made it better would have been to include giant robots (and the alien ship might count since it's something of a transformer itself) and possibly a lesbian sex scene might have made it the best movie of all time. It does have Steve Railsback in it, and in the 80's, steve railsback was The SHIT. I have no idea what he's doing now, maybe putting on a spider man costume and playing at kid's birthday parties for cash, like I hear Tobey Mcguire's doing. Or whoever that guy was who played in the spider man films. The films were decent but I had never heard of tobey-whoever before or since. Maybe that's why he's doing birthday parties now.

There's also this awesome scene where they think they have the she-alien trapped in the body of captain picard, but as they are taking her and another body back to a secure facililil... a secure facilill... a secure location, the bodies start erupting with blood and piss and bile and vomit and snot and it all flows into the center of the helicopter and forms into the body of the space-girl, but she only maintains this form long enough to eject her mental essence from the place and then splashes to the floor like a half-digested dinner at a cheap bar. I mean, where the hell else can you see shit like that? I haven't seen anything even close to that kind of special effects since the time someone spiked my melonball with acid back in '94.

The interesting part about this movie is, you could take all the aliens, zombies, vampires and space ships out of it and it'd still be a wonderful story about love. Probably one of the most romantic movies ever, not unlike Return of the Living Dead 3. Shut up, that movie was THE most romantic movie EVAR, and I will not hear your lies. I cried at the end.

So basically, without the aliens, zombies, etc, the movie plot goes like this. Man meets woman. Woman destroys all man's friends and wrecks his ride. Man flees. Woman becomes a slut and proceeds to suck the life out of anyone she meets and infecting all the survivors with STD's, as many women are wont to do. SHUT UP I AM NOT BITTER, YOU GODDAMN LYING WHORE!!!!! Man cannot live without woman and goes back to her. Man and woman die in a tragic suicide pact during wedding ceremony.

You know, if you were to call the man Bubba Joe and the woman Lorna, there'd be a great country music song in there somewhere. I'd write it myself but I can't see through the tears. Poor Bubba Joe. He shoulda frying-panned that bitch. He shoulda frying-panned that bitch and SENT HER TO HELL!!!!!!

Friday, January 8, 2010

Under The Dome

Monday night, I finished Stephen King's latest book, Under the Dome. Now the first thing I want to say about this book is, it's heavy. I don't mean in a metaphysical sense (although it is), I mean this sucker is over 1000 pages and in hardcover, and frankly, my scrawny arms got freakin tired holding this thing up long enough to read it. Sweet Jesus Mr. King, I know I could have just waited a few months for the paperback edition, but have a little empathy for your readers! Maybe you got the money to have naked love slaves holding up your book and turning the pages for you while you eat bon bons, but holy crap, man! I got it for christmas and I thought it was a fully loaded toolkit before I opened it!

Now before I get into the review proper, I want to say two things. One is, I been reading Stephen King books since I was 7 years old (I started with Christine), and he's definitely one of the longer lasting and more famous authors out there, so this review probably doesn't mean squat to him. Two, I don't like his endings, despite the fact that he's probably the reason why I want to write books for a living.

Something I always disliked about novels was the giving away of plot points or hinting to the end. I mean it's one thing to give hidden hints, you know, little clues that you might remember later on and go "Ohhhhh, so that's what he meant... The Stars Above!" to quote Kung Pow, but Mr King just randomly throws in flashforwards for his characters. I mean, here I am, trying to get into this monster of a book, and my friggin arm is aching from the strain, and here's Mr King letting me know that this character will come to regret their action later on, and that character will never pass by this point again, and what not. I mean, what the hell, isn't the point of reading the damn book to FIND OUT what happens to the characters? Shit, if I wanted to know at the beginning what happens at the end, Mr King could have just wrote "Almost everyone Dies" in the first paragraph and I wouldn't need surgery for torn biceps trying to hold this 800 pound book up so I could read it.

Another thing just pissed me right the hell off, I mean, I know we're reading the book from a 3rd person omniscient viewpoint, so we can zoom in wherever we want and just see what's going on here and there. It's a given, and I get that we're trying to focus on the action or the major plot points so we know what's going on. But what I don't need during the zooming is Mr King describing the action like it's a handheld camera on a porn film set. At one point, he talks about zooming across town, and the READER bumps a streetlight and makes it sway. What the fuck? I'm not in the story, Mr King. If I wanted MY actions to have some effect, I'd be playing a video game, and I'd have killed all the bad guys in the beginning of the book so the good guys weren't all dead at the end. It's a jarringly annoying way of taking me right the hell out of enjoying the book and letting me know it's just old Stephen King there, tapping away at the keys and writing whatever the hell he wants. Look, Mr king, I know you're a famous rich author, but that's like seeing a boom microphone in an action shot. In a movie, it's just sloppy, but in a book, it's like you're slapping the reader across the face to get his head out of the book. If you wanted to put in a spot for a bathroom break, just put in an intermission! Slap a coupon for a mars bar in the middle of the book or something! That'll do an even better job and you won't have to spend time actually typing it out!

Other than those annoying things, I guess the book was okay. I didn't like the end, Stephen King's books have gotten more and more preachy lately, but the characters were well written if not particularly interesting. The climax was rather short, though, no epilogue, so I really don't have a clue what happened to some of my favorite characters. I guess they lived? Eh. This is definitely not something you want to read while on beach during the summer, but if you happen to be snowed in for the winter and have a week to kill (and strong biceps) you could give it a shot. It is kind of depressing, though, so the combo of the book, winter and being snowed in could make you off yourself. On the plus side, if you hold the book between the gun and your head, I don't think a bullet would make it through all the pages. I don't recommend trying this at home, though. Maybe we could line police vests with hardcover copies.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

I have PROOF!

I've long been convinced that humanity is composed entirely of the stupid and the insane. I fall into the insane category. And finally I have proof of my convictions. After reading through several pages of this, tell me you don't agree with me. About the people part. I think everyone agrees that I am insane. No argument there. (crickets) That's what I thought.

http://notalwaysright.com

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

I'm Such A Stud

I just wanted to brag about how great I am with the ladies, and since I don't like to brag and nobody actually reads this thing, I think this is the place to do it.

So I have this, I don't know, you could call her a friend of a friend. I see her regularly, let's say. And whenever I ask her how she is, you know, just trying to be polite (not really caring how she is, to be perfectly honest), she responds with "I hate you." in that oh-my-god-is-this-asshole-talking-to-me-again tone of voice. Now I know it's not me, because I am not only smooth with the ladies, but am adored by one and all, so I know it's a problem on her end. She's obviously insane. I mean, I'm just trying to be civil, I have to see this person occasionally and I try to make nice and this is the response I get, so she's obviously a psychotic who's off her meds and I am sure we can all agree on that.

There's also this co-worker, I mean, I know we have to work together and all, so I do my usual "Hey, how are you, how did that visit with the psychic lady go?" Yes, this is the one who believes in psychics. She promptly responds with "It was interesting, I'd talk about it but you don't believe so I'd just get frustrated." And that was the end of that. Now honestly, I don't mind not talking to her, but at least I am trying, and since I am a manly stud who all women adore, I guess we all know who has the real problem here, don't we? She's obviously smitten with me and can't stand that I don't share her faith in the psychic lady's prediction that we should be married. Because frankly, I'm not really up for the whole wedding thing right now, I mean, I'm keeping my options open for the time being.

I use to have a friend who I emailed regularly but she stopped returning my emails. I'm not sure if she did it because I kept asking her to leave her husband for me or because I kept sending her nude pictures of myself in a santa hat. hey, it was the holiday season, isn't that a tradition?

Pfeh, these women nowadays, you give em pants and they want the world. I think my mom has even stopped speaking to me.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Why Does That Seem Odd?

Okay, so I'm at work and I am reading this article about how there was this offshoot of human beings about, oh, 10,000 BC called the Boskops man, I believe they termed it. I've already lost the link for the article and I am too lazy to look it up again, so don't quote me on this, but what they said was, there was this offshoot of humanity that had a brain capacity about 35% larger than the average human being of today. That's right, the skulls weren't smaller than modern humans, they were LARGER. Now I know we probably aren't all up on the latest research in neuro-archaeology (I have no idea if that's a real term or not, I just made it up), but what the article suggested was that this meant the average Boskops fellow had an IQ of about 150, with the smartest individuals having an IQ well beyond what was measurable by today's standards.

Now the interesting part about this article was that it was wondering WHY the Boskops offshoot (and it was an actual offshoot, they found many specimens) died out instead of taking over with their obviously superior intelligence. Apparently, according to the article, the much larger Boskops guys would have been more able to process clues from their environment, better able to establish the correct connections with those clues, and planned much farther ahead than their less intelligent counterparts. The article writer seemed confused why they didn't make it, this superior race of dreamers, thinkers and planners.

DOH! I don't know who wrote this article, but even a look at today's culture should make the answer obvious. INTELLIGENCE IS NOT SELECTED FOR SURVIVAL. Oh sure, you have the occasional genius as well as the occasional moron, and certainly there's a lot of varieties in between, as well as multiple varieties of genius and moron respectively, but come on now. Who has the most kids in today's society? Sports stars. Actors. Bubba Jimmy Joebob from east bohunk, tennessee. The Octomom. Jon and Kate Gosselin. No offense to Bubba Jimmy Joebob, because he is an awesome guy, and I want to do those muddy drunken doughnuts in the kid's go karts with you again soon, but these people are not known for their awesome intellect. Sure, Bill Gates might have a wife, but he has no kids that I know of. There's no little Stephen Hawking Jr running around solving quadratic equations while he's waiting for the bottle to heat up for his afternoon feed. For every baby a smart person has, there's about 20 of those Duggins kids, was that their names? The mom pops out a new one every year or so. I'm not saying they aren't bright kids, mind you, but how many geniuses do you know of who claim to have fathered a dozen brats? Let's face it here, smart people just don't breed as much.

Sure, smart people will keep popping up along the evolutionary chain every so often, I mean, when you have 20 kids per couple, there's bound to be a brainy one in the bunch somewhere. Not that he's going to seem very smart. When you're brainy and you're outnumbered 19 to 1, you try to blend in just to survive, right? So the smart guys won't even try to do anything smart, they'll just act stupid so they can fit in with the other idiots.

Now I don't know whether it's just that smart people are pickier, or have the brains not to want to deal with 20 screaming kids at one time, or it's just an entirely genetic thing, but less intelligent people are always going to outnumber and outbreed the smarter ones, which means, any offshoots with brains are going to have a hell of a time making it in the long term.

I should think that would be obvious to anyone with intelligence. Not saying which side of the fence I'm on, mind you. That should also be obvious.

Oh That Was Not Nice

It's starting to be a crappy new year already. I'm back at work now, but I missed my first day back because, for no apparent reason (most likely food poisoning, I swear I didn't have any alcohol for days before this), I woke up just before my alarm for work was supposed to go off, wandered into the bathroom with a belly ache, and promptly threw up. Since throwing up is unusual for me (might happen once every year if I am unlucky), I decided it best not to head into work. Thereby negating my holiday pay for both christmas AND new years. Then all of yesterday I felt bad. All that wonderful food gone down the drain. Sigh.

This morning, I am standing at my parents' bedroom door, and my Dad (who's been dead for several years now, obviously I am dreaming), wakes up and asks me if I will be home today. "Yes," I reply. "It's saturday, I'll be home all day." And then I turn to go back to bed... And my alarm goes off, waking me for work. On a Tuesday. Just stick the knife in and TWIST!

So I've already used my Vomit Day up for the year, and I'm only 5 days in. I guess I am going to have to give up drinking til 2011. I don't know if I can make it through the entire year sober. Happy Bloody New Year. On a related note, I've decided to start up Gaming and TV/book review blogs as well. Site addresses to follow once I make them. This one being my more personal, warm, fuzzy blog. The "intimate one" he says in a deep Barry White week-long bender voice.

Happy Halloween!

And OHMRAT 2023 ends just as it began.  With a quiet whimper.  Sadly, I had no time this month.  Too busy trying to stay alive.  But, I did ...