God fucking dammit.

Michael Crichton died today.

Anyone who knows me and has come close to discussing literature with me knows that he is my favorite author.

That aside, I can honestly say that he is a person who I have never met, yet who has impacted my life. My first memory of Crichton was reading Eaters of the Dead in something like 6th grade, and doing a book report on it. I had some trouble with the book itself and my dad had to help me get past some of the words. Even to a 6th grader, Crichton's style was readable. Poetics aside, I think there is some value to a simple, direct style. I made (with the help of my parents of course) a bitching diorama - complete with big clay figures re-enacting the scene where Bulwyf and Ibn mass their troops together to fight the Wendol. It beat the living crap out of the rest of the class who had some shoe boxes covered in construction paper.

I got an F. My teacher told me that I shouldn't be reading about or thinking of such violent things.

From what I read in Crichton's speeches and essays, we shared something about or childhood. People in authority never liked us, and just as he once purposefully plagiarized a George Orwell essay to prove a point, so have I, many times, sacrificed a good grade to mouthing off to a professor or instructor with whom I disagreed. I grew up not trusting teachers in general, and nowadays I find it ironic that I'm on track to becoming one myself. I also think it has something to do with why I'm 25 and still live in a fucking college apartment.

From then on, Crichton became my favorite author. I read everything I could get my hands on, and each time a new book arrived I grabbed it up days after it was on the shelf. I watched his films. I read his essays and watched his interviews. I even followed ER for a few seasons and I don't even fucking like dramas.

I always found my own writing to be very unpoetic. I try to be as objective as possible and leave it up to the reader not to interpret what happens, but what it means and implies. Clarity, I have found, often raises more questions than ambiguity. Leaving something open to interpretation has always seen sort of drab to me. Leaving something open to discussion is far different. That is the little bit of stylistic territory Crichton seems to have forged into for himself.

Put flatly, Crichton is the reason I began writing - specifically fiction. I ask a question and, like myth-makers of three thousand years ago, dream up an answer. I can only hope that there is a place for me somewhere out there among all of those real writers in the world.

Beyond that I don't really know what to say. I'm still in shock I suppose. With the death of another of my heroes, George Carlin, the election, and my graduating from college, there seems to be a strange sense of finality in the air. Like, this is it. I don't really know what it is, but it's coming. And soon. And if there was one thing that I took away from Crichton, it is that the world is an ever-changing place, and it is okay to be okay with that. Things change, and that is the way it is. Change is natural and normal, not something to be afraid of, as so many people are. Change causes us to re-evaluate our positions, re-adjust our methods, and ultimately to grow. With that in mind, maybe this ominous, looming it isn't such a bad thing after all.

If I could say one thing: at the very least, Crichton kept a socially awkward kid from New Jersey's imagination alive. I can only hope to achieve that. Thank you.

Admittance

Local political debates are always fun. I stayed at the one hosted here at my college for about five minutes - long enough to see the Green Party candidate get thrown out. Good to see the open forum American democratic system at work.

Anyhow.

Admitting you are an M. Night Shyamalan fan to anyone who considers themselves movie-savvy is a bit like admitting you're gay to your absurdly Republican, right-wing, Christian mother, or telling your black girlfriend that you recently decided to become a white supremacist. It doesn't fly. He is one of a collection of public figures who, to borrow the title of an Offspring song, is cool to hate. Shyamalan has joined the ranks of Rob Smith of The Cure and countless others who everyone likes to aim at when they make another movie or release another album.

My interpretation behind such uninhibited dislike is that, despite the fact that lightning never strikes the same place twice, the viewing public seems to affix the task to whoever makes it strike in the first place. The Sixth Sense was great; however, whatever film comes after it (in his case, Unbreakable) is by and large expected to be The Sixth Sense. While it seems that M. Night, and countless others, are intelligent enough to understand that, short of becoming Ahamenatuku*, The Rain God, himself, the task of making movie lightning hit the same target twice in a row is impossible. The catch 22 they inevitably fall into is that "fans" of the first movie don't actually want a new film: they simply want to sit in the dark and watch The Sixth Sense over and over again, and crank on the flamethrowers so hard IMDB's corporate headquarters might burn to the ground when the next film doesn't measure up to the first.

Fine for them: not for someone who, say, actually wants a fucking career.

Which brings me to The Happening. M. Night's latest movie, in a word, was a total dissapointment. Okay, two words, one noun. The acting was campy - I couldn't really figure out of he was aiming for that fifties horror film campy - but it did not work. Plus, far too much emphasis was placed on the fact that it was his first R-rated movie. Some of the suicide scenes were pretty creepy, but a majority was a little to hokey to believe. For example, in the opening, a girl comments that people were clawing at themselves. It makes sense if one's brain is being eaten apart by plant chemicals. Never do we actually see a person actually clawing at themselves. Instead, the chemical doesn't so much induce self-destructive behavior, so much as it makes people think of creative ways to injure themselves. It was a stretch.

The centerpiece to Shyamalan's movies is always the twist. But there really wasn't a twist. The explanation of the Thirty-Seconds-To-Kill-Yourself drug is given in the first five minutes of the film - obviously. Attempts to mislabel it as a terrorist attack are so thin and full of holes that it does not do justice to his normal skill in covering his movies in thick layers of Mystery Cream. Plus, Mark Whalberg? Come right the fuck on.

Admittedly, I'm a fan of M. Night's movies, and my hope is that this film is a fluke - a shock-jock fluke to show that the director is capable of appealing to the bloodlust of modern teenage audiences.

Since they're the only demographic that can actually afford a movie anymore.

*Not an actual God.

Back... again!

Now that I can finally think again, I'll use up some precious drops of Brain Goo (highly scientific language here) on bloggin'. I've been keeping away from writing for the internetz since my departure from The Fhiz, because I am working more and working on harder classes, and because I'm getting every last viable drop of fecal matter sued right the fuck out of me.

Personally I have not been up to much. I've been keeping tabs on this Sarah Palin chick and getting a much-needed giggle every time the bitch opens her absurdly collagen infested mouth. And note that bitch isn't a word I use often - I find it very sexist, and ironic that it is the #2 term used by women to describe other women. I only load up the word cannon with bitch bullets for the truly deserving, like frat boys, Tipper Gore, and now Sarah Palin. And yeah, okay, we get it, she's hot. Who the fuck cares? Maybe McCain's penchant obsession with being surrounded by models who might as well have "Made In China" stamped on their foreheads for how much fucking plastic makes up their bodies speaks to the overwhelming amount of males in this nation who never got past the kind of women they thought were sexy when they were still embarrassingly pitching tents at age fifteen. Maybe it's just a masculine fuckwit kind of thing? I don't know, but just so you know, male populace, it makes all of us thinkin' men look bad. The Biden/Palin debate is tonight and I've already made plans with my roommate to watch. Might even order Chinese.

And speaking of roommates, I have new ones, and they are good. I'm now surrounded with more video games than I can handle, and of course this has to happen when I'm swamped with work. I still do a majority of the cooking and more domestic tasks, but what the fuck: at least this time I'm appreciated. Two of them are up in Rhode Island this weekend for an anime convention, which I get to stay home and paint pretzels.

I wish I was fucking kidding.

I've been playing Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, which has proven to be a bit of a treat. It has a system of working with two characters at once, and adds a nice change to the sub weapons by making a metric fuckton of them, making them easy to find and making them equippable items. Johnathan, the male character, uses the classic Castlevania culprits: a knife, an axe, a boomerang and a spear, among others. He also gets martial arts attacks, which adds to his capabilities as a fighter. Charlotte, his travel companion, is the spell caster, and can charge her sub weapons for more deadly effects (just so you know, Konami, Ice Fang is way overpowered.) The two characters need to work in tandem to get to new locations. For example, one ability allows you to jump off of the inactive character's shoulders for more height, and is fun to do because it looks like you are kicking them in the head for a boostie. My only complaint is that use of the pen and touch screen is almost absent, but there is already enough in the game to make it rather unneeded. Which also begs the question: when the hell is a decent 2D Castlevania going to hit for an actual console system so I don't need to subject my eyes to squinty, squeezy pain to see a three-inch screen? Also, I would have liked the female's name to be Mina. Figure it out.

I also got my equivalent to video game black tar heroin, Stalker: Clear Sky. I have not spent too much time with it thanks to school, but by my estimate, I'm about 1/3 through. The fighting is much improved, as is some of the more annoying aspects of the first, such as items being far too overpriced and individual artifacts being kind of useless. Now, it only takes one artifact to stop bleeding or increase healing, which is rather nice. There's a new system of finding them too, which involves detectors, that is pretty intuitive. I guess intuitive would be a good word for the game overall. There are guides which take you to far-away locations. There are mechanics who repair and upgrade your items, and each weapon has it's own set of upgrades. Some missions are a little annoying, like the fact that when you must run from an emission, you need to run to one specific place to avoid it, instead of finding any number of locations that match the required one. Some of the missions are buggy and there seems to be a problem with save files getting corrupted, but it doesn't make the game unplayable. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about... too bad. More on that mess later.

To follow up on my last post, so many months ago, yes, I am now required to tutor the kids I worked with over the summer, and yes, it's as bad as it sounds.

Back.

...from Hell. I shouldn't say that. In retrospect, I think I had more fun that I realized, but it is difficult to notice said fun when you are getting your phone shut off because the idiot office staff fucked up your paycheck. But I'm willing to let that go. Anyway, instead of summing up my EOF experience with all the gory details, I'm putting a conclusions in the form of an open letter. Once again I take my post as the one who leads America's sacred cows to the slaughterhouse. Regular readers despair: it's not exactly funny.

To Assistant Dean Santana and EOF Office Staff,

Now that the summer 2008 EOF program has concluded, I feel I am more apt and able to speak my mind. There are two reasons for this: first, the pressure of performing my duties as a tutor are absent and second, I have the benefit of hindsight and time to draw serious, meaningful conclusions from this experience.

As a rule, I never sign anything without first knowing every detail of what it is I am getting myself into. In general, this is good advice, and is mainly taken with things such as bank accounts, credit card applications, loans, car payments, and other such contract-oriented agreements: reading the fine print. In my last few days in the program, it was brought to my attention that the students were placed at their respective levels as incoming freshmen completely on their SAT scores. Given the copious amount of research into standardized testing and its tentative but overwhelmingly concordant results, the SAT is a very flawed test. One does not need to study the questions to score well, only the test itself. And, like standardized IQ tests, it is not an accurate representation of an individual's intelligence. This is evident in the fact that there are classes and guides built specifically to prepare students for the SAT. They do not teach facts, comprehension, models, or anything that can be applied outside of the test, only the test itself. This, as any college student will argue, is very different than the actual kind of work they will encounter.

Why, then, were the students and tutors led to believe that the classes and pre and post tests the students were given placed them? What is the point of five weeks of excruciating work if the game ended before the students even got to roll the dice? The only thing the classes get the kids are professor recommendations, which nobody is at all obligated to follow. It seems as though the EOF program runs in contradiction to the advice, "Read the fine print." In this case, there was no fine print to read: you just kept your mouth shut and hoped nobody would ask.

The program here at Stockton has a sort of militaristic ring to it. Students, tutors and professors alike are bought in not quite knowing what they are getting into, and must quickly adjust to an alien living space with, frankly, ridicules rules. They are taught to applaud those in a position higher than them, but comply not out of the respect you hope to instill, but out of fear of being punished. They are taught to be on time to class, not out of the work ethic you hope to instill, but out of fear of being punished. They are taught to smile and show school spirit not out of actual praise for the institution, but out of fear of being punished. Conditioning one for success does not make one successful, just as conditioning an athlete for running does not mean they will be a good kick-boxer or accountant. The tools these kids have been given are a kind of one-trick pony. What will happen when that trick gets old?

Additionally, the enforcement of mandatory tutoring and library work for these students is ludicrous. Had you consulted with anyone who works in the tutoring center (me, for example) you would know that the writing lab specifically is understaffed and unequipped to handle 77 new freshmen, all who require two days a week of tutoring. This will not only burden the tutors, and thus reduce the quality of our work, but it will create backups during busy weeks. Additionally, this semester we are in the unique position of having very few trained tutors (5, including me) and an overflow of untrained tutors in the Practicum class. That aside, just how long do you intend to hold these kids' hands? You cannot force them into doing well in writing and math, and some of the kids will probably not require tutoring services, so it just hurts them by wasting their time. Part of college, from a parents point of view, is letting go. Parents must realize that their children are now adults and must pull their own weight in terms of classwork. So must you.

And while I'm at it, for Christ's sake, get presenters who know the plural of deer.

My overall feeling of the Stockton EOF program is that it looks great on paper. 77 out of an original 80 students made it through - wonderful - except you don't mention that they are admitted normally by SAT scores, like every other freshman, and even failing their EOF summer classes is considered acceptable. Students will be seen using the writing and math centers, but not because they are hard working; their grade and academic standing depend on it.

As far as my personal feelings, I believe the kids will eventually suffer from this. They are being led along through college for too long, and when that guiding hand releases it's grip, they will be lost, and in their second year, when things become much more serious. I worry for those who felt it was necessary to sign up for a five-year Master's program, bright-eyed and eager, not realizing they may hate the thing to which are are signing their future. I do not feel as though I helped the kids to the best of my ability because my job depended so much upon me keeping everyone happy and in line. I have done little more than help a typical American company (and have no illusions: a college is a company) limp its way toward a pathetic, pitiless terminal breath, satisfying the facade of academic success instead of academic success itself. My part in all of this accomplished nothing.

Our constitution states that it is not only the ability of a citizen to question his government, but the responsibility of that citizen to question his government. In writing this, I am simply complying with the wishes of those great men who founded this land. I am questioning you, and I expect answers. My concerns, keep in mind, begin and end with the kids. If I am not mistaken, this is your belief as well.

Thursday

"It must have been a Thursday. He never quite got the hang of Thursdays."
Douglas Adams, The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy

I never got the hang of them either.

I hate Thursdays. It is the universal bad day out of the week, and I think there are more who agree with me. Most people finger Monday as the taker of the Shitty Day Trophy, mostly because most people have lives and do things on the weekend. Monday is the rude awakening back into the work world, the first echoing click of the black cogwheel called monotny. Tuesday dodges the bullet, and why not? Tuesday is an acceptable day. It is fueled by the energy gained realizing that Monday is over with and the realization that you, the worker, are once again indoctrinated into and also innoculated against the rest of the week. Many people find Wednesday to be the most desirble day, some simply because of the nickname "Hump Day." But the hump is a myth, dear readers. Most work weeks are shortened to ...

I fell asleep. Now it's Friday.

Where was I? Wednesday's role as the crest of the hill is overrated. Sure, you can rest your tired legs and let the bike just coast down the easy slope, straight into the brick wall that is Thursday. Fridays are alright and there isn't much more to say. Weekends, like Wednesday, operate on conditional enjoyment.

Thusday is that awkward gap between the middle of the week and the end, a 24 hour walk from the elation of passing the midway and crossing the finish line. Thursday is that weird space where you ask, "What do I do now?" Do you just wait for Friday? Do you even try to get through the day or just coast, hoping you've built up enough momentum to get through? And the cogs of time do not wait for you to make these seemingly trivial, weekly decisions that untimately are the most important of the week. It's a kind of endurance test. Thursdays wear you down.

If you're wondering why I'm rambling about Thusdays, I've had a stressful 11 day work week and visited home only to get in yet another fight with my alcholoic mother. I return today to try and reconcile, once again. I'm too old for this crap.

Fuck you, Thusday.

The World is a Darker Place

George Carlin passed away Sunday.

There are not many people who I consider heroes, but he was one of them. And not just because he is a personal hero, but because Carlin literally embodied the worst, and the best, of what he saw of the world. He was a comedian who dredged up some of the darkest, most profane, sickest humor one could ever hear, particularly in his last two routines dubbed Life is Worth Losing and It's Bad for Ya!. Yet, it made us laugh.

I've mainly been covering the election year in my sham of Internet political journalism for The Fhiz, but I've touched on some touchy subjects: the decline of the United States, suicide, terrorism, fraud, and Facebook to name a few. Despite that, I never try to let the tone get too serious, and inject some (often off-color) humor into it, be it making silly comparison of McCain to an office employee who shows up for work high on valium or just tossing a grumbled "fuckberries" in there somewhere. In George's words, "Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits."

That, which has become the veritable centerpiece of my writing, comes from George Carlin. The argument that I'm only 25 and he is "before my time" holds no water here. Carlin was just as relevant to youth culture on the day he died as he was in 1971 when he was arrested with Lenny Bruce, or in 1967 when he was just a feature on the Ed Sullivan Show. The man spanned generations in a bigger way than hit movie stars or famous bands: he, in a sense, grew up with the legend. Paul McCartney might be a "living legend," but anything he does is not going to live up to The Beatles or Live and Let Die. Carlin managed to avoid that trap, never passing a real prime, and never allowing the fame to get the better of him before he could create something new and meaningful.

These traits have followed over into all of my writing, from fiction to poetry to blogging. Comedians, and comedy itself, are important because of two things. Humor makes issues accessible. Nobody, not even me, wants to talk about politics all the time. But everyone loves a chuckle. Mixing the two allows the writer/speaker/poet/whoever to draw in a bigger audience from a wider range of backgrounds and opinions than if they stood behind a podium and listened to a politically correct, gender neutral, nonracial, formal English speech. In particular, humor does not concern itself with being offensive, so issues that make us squirm are all dealt with. Eddie Murphy did this in the 1980s with AIDS, and Jon Stewart does it today with politics. Most of what is covered in this not-news is bigger, more relevant, and more important than the news itself.

Secondly, and going hand-in-hand with the first, is humor's ability to soften the blows. By nature, we humans are pretty fragile mentally. We can only take so much bad news before there is some effect of it. Imagine if you watched Fox News all day, and all you heard about was how the A-rabs were going to come and kill you and how you need to tape your doors shut when the drop the chemical bomb and how Bird Flu is rampant and that your kids will go insane unless you get them on the hot new prescription and your husband will leave you and the President doesn't care about and God will send you to Hell unless you hate this, hate that, hate me, and hate yourself.. If you were sane, you'd change the channel, but given that Fox is still around, it is safe for me to assume most people don't. Humor does not stop all of the negativity, but, like unspoken issues, it makes it accessible. It's the unbreakable, full-body wetsuit you wear when jumping into a big pile of cow shit.

If there is a "most important thing" I'll take away from Carlin, it is this, which I believe is the lesson that comedy itself teaches: Never. Stop. Laughing. Ever. Because, if we laugh at it, we can deal with it. "It" could be our sham of a country, poverty, crime, suicide, the collapsing market, international terrorism, racism, the new disease that's wiping the human race out, global warming, alien invasion, World War 3, the cool new drugs your precious teens are sucking down, twelve year olds having babies, cancer, giant corporations polluting our back yards and giving us diseases, rednecks shooting anything that looks like its wearing a towel, or fucking nuclear bombs. Desperation, pointlessness, hopelessness, and doubt can all be kept at bay with a well-timed joke. I think, and I hope I'm right, that one thing George Carlin stood for was facing all of the evils the world has to offer without guns and bullets, without laws and police, without big ideas about encompassing philosophies - just facing the world clear-eyed and naked, with a damn good joke.

George Carlin: thank you.

Wii Fit Review, or, What I do At Work

Work was pretty dead today and my boss brought her Wii in, accompanied by the strange and oddly sturdy pad that goes with Wii Fit. I didn't get through much of it as it was limited to breaktime only, but it was enough to give some solid first impressions.

Surprisingly, there is little use of the remote, and the main focus of the "game" - I suppose it's more of a tool - is on balance. Basically, you stand on this pad and answer a bunch of questions, including age, height, weight, and then you take a balance test. The pad is kind of freaky because there is this computerized voice that sounds like a typical reserved Japanese girl, and as it is calibrating it flashes messages like, "Please don't step on me yet." The creepiest is when you step on to measure your weight, and as soon as your smooth, silky foot graces the pad, you hear a quiet little, "Oooh..." from Computer Girl. Afterward, the game spits out your body mass index and your "Wii Fit Age," supposedly the age that you are in terms of health.

And I'm 28!? What the fuck, Wii? What the fuck?

Afterwards, you start the games, which are in four categories: Yoga (which I didn't try because frankly yoga scares me), Strength, Balance and Aerobics. You also earn minutes, which are the currency of Wii Fit Land and unlock more games and bonus material. So, on to the games.

My best activity was push ups, where I did six iterations of a push up, then this weird twist-on-your-side thing -- OH YEAH!

I forgot to mention the trainers. When you do exercises, you pick between a male or female trainer. They are these kind of glowing, blue people who look like something right out of the Ethereal section of a D&D Monster Manual, only in gym clothes, and their mouths don't move when the speak to you! It is kind of weird to see this glowing person tell you how to do a Warrior pose or how to catch a hula hoop and see no mouth motion what-so-freakin-ever.

::ahem::

As I was saying, I did best at the push ups, scoring 91% on my first and only go, when quickly collapsing from exhaustion and crawling under a table (I wish I was fucking kidding.) I proved decent at hula hooping, and was average at everything else I tried: the ski jump, ski slalom, jogging, and soccer goalie. Ing.

Soccer was by far the most entertaining - though really me and my co-worker making asses out of ourselves was probably better - because you are suppose to lean towards balls to block them, but occasionally a shoe or a severed panda bear head will fly at you, slapping into your Mii's face with a hint of brutal realism and causing you to lose your hard-earned points.

The only game that actually used the "Wii"mote (God I hate that) was jogging, where you just run in place and keep the remote in hand or in pocket as a pedometer. We quickly found a way to cheat by flailing our arms around wildly, but even that gets tiring after a while, and besides, what kind of fucking pathetic loser do you have to be to skimp out on a video game workout? These people, honestly.

My knee-jerk reaction to Wii Fit was the world was in a sad, sick state of affairs when we had to market exercises gear in the form of a video game because people are too lazy to go outside, but I've had some time and now experience to rethink that. People, particularly in the U.S of A, need to work out more, and Wii Fit is innovated enough to actually get your sweating. Or at least it got my apparently 28-year-old ass sweating. The game also comes with a calender where you can check off days you exercise and how well you did, and also set goals on how much weight you wish to lose by a given date. Since the focus is on cardio workouts almost exclusively, it is designed to burn fat. And, while a hundred and seventy bucks might seem steep for a game, home gym equipment is double or triple the price, massive and heavy, and non-portable. You can fit Wii Fit in a backpack. And lets face it, a Bow Flex or that thing Chuck Norris sells is just far less entertaining. See, see, the bastard can't do everything!

It was a smart move on Nintendo's part to see that people took to the Wii as a form of exercise and capitalize on the idea. Wii fit is one of, if not the biggest selling Wii game to date, and it helps in that stupid Arms Race of entertainment because it is something neither the Xbox nor the PSIII can offer.

Fucking 28.

Some new music

I got some new music lately, and by new I mean out for a few months already. Anyway, the first is Looking Glass by The Birthday Massacre. There are three things that attracted me to this band: the name, the title track from the first album of the same name, and that I actually did a double-take while listening to said song and had a, "Did she just say murder-tramp? Neat." moment. They are a female-led rock band with some electronic elements, or as they call it in Merry Old England, electro. Points are automatically earned for having a keytar player, an instrument that died out, much like the dinosaurs, when everyone decided for some fucking reason Devo wasn't cool anymore. And while I still don't see a whole lot that is really special about the band's music, it is at least different in a music industry that happily shovels shit and piss down the gaping maw that is MTV, only for it to regurgitate all over the crying faces of 16-year-old Myspace kids with too much money like a giant mother bird.

::cough - social commentary - cough::

Anyway, the new album has an interesting 80s Asian rock quality to it, particularly the title track, with some nice bleeps and bloops that remind me of "I Think I'm Turning Japanese" or anything done by Wang Chung - don't you fucking telling me you don't know who I'm talking about! However, they do fall into that heavy-as-the-planet metal guitar snare drum sound trap that almost all metal bands do, and given that it is a female singer they have to sound like that crappy E-something band that got that one song on Daredevil a few years back. That would ultimately be their downfall, as it would rocket them to fame for roughly the same amount of time it would take to be put into a giant slingshot and shot up into the stratosphere, only to come crashing down and turn into a greasy spot, with accompanying YouTube set to equally bad metal music.

Seriously, what the fuck is up with those people? When I sign into YouTube, I just want to watch some Thundercats. What kind of poor taste do you have to think that goes with Slipknot, what!? If you see a weird ass cartoon of yesteryear and the first place your head goes is to images of burly men in jumpsuits and scary masks with lots of blood-painted pentagrams and screaming in the background: GET! HELP! YOU! WANKER!

Overall, I like the new album. Since I first heard them I developed a soft spot, a small one, but a soft spot nonetheless. It isn't very deep and the high school aged whining feels like riding down a kiddy slide made of cheese graters naked, but it is one of the few instances where I'll say the originality of the sound and execution makes up for it. A little.

The other is The Slip, the new Nine Inch Nails album. I thought Mister Reznor's first two albums were pretty interesting, and anyone who can come out and say that God is dead and no one cares is okay in my book. However, there isn't much I can say about the new album because it is pretty bad. At ten tracks it's a bit brief, a fact that I should be thankful for. I have always found NIN albums to be a self-deprecating to the point of being obnoxious and while I will concede that all of them are brilliant musically, The Slip well, slips.

::da-dum-phsssssss::

The entire thing is short and repetitive and sounds very lazy. I will give Senior Trent that his new album is totally free via their website, which is pretty awesome. I'd give him more credit if he were anyone other then Trent Reznor and didn't have enough money to buy real estate on Mars and could have used proceeds from the album to eat, but what the hell. One cannot exactly fault philanthropists for being wealthy, and the more free shit there is out there, the better.

Even if it is shit.

So, Birthday Massacre's Looking Glass and NIN's slip. Good for a listen, not worth the money, but, counterpoint; it isn't like anyone pays for music anymore anyway.

NOTE: There is no scientific correlation between the extinction of dinosaurs and the popularity of Devo.

Grandpa Fuckin Spaceshuttle

Yep, Grandpa Fuckin Spaceshuttle.

Foiled Again

I love NASA. I think that space exploration is one of the human race's better endeavors, and I support it with the energy and fervor I usually reserve for being misanthropic or eating cake. But I can sort of see where some of the criticisms of them being time wasters and money-eaters come from. A few days ago, the Phoenix lander safely arrived on Mars to do some soil testing. Bravo, well done. Now NASA has to send the space shuttle up to the ISS (International Space Station) on an emergency mission to fix the toilet.

The humor in the situation is obvious (and as such I'm going to try and get through this without a poop joke), and it isn't like toilets are these Herculean machines made of frozen strong that take cleaning chemicals and dirty water and products of the less family-friendly human orifices by the ton every day but they stay on track no matter what, God damn it. Point is, the things break. And apparently, even space toilets on space stations in space break.

It does make me wonder why nobody thought to pack supplies to fix it on board the station itself. I mean, it has people on it. People make some nasty by-products. And launching the space shuttle is expensive; taxpayer money too. Yes, you, me, and every other red-blooded American is sending a small part of our dollars to send a space shuttle to fix a space potty. In space. I know that when the power dies at my house a small part of me panics thinking, "Where is it all going to go?" But those guys are on a motherfucking space station. Popping outside for a quick wee is not exactly an option.

Critics of NASA have long said that they use too much time and money on useless endeavors, and while I'll argue that sending a man to Mars is a pretty useless endeavor (unless it's Ewe Boll minus one spacesuit) sending an entire space shuttle to fix the pot may not be useless, but it sure is wasteful. And I can't imagine the poor guys up there, thinking, "Oh Christ, it's everywhere!"

...

shit piss wee urine pee-pee turds chocolate logs land mines droppings defecation urination whiz dump spoor stool giant PILES OF CRRAAAPPPPP!

God damn it.

The American legal system did something right. It gets a cookie.

I've been told that the number one way to get fired nowadays is to blog on the job. Well, ha! Take this corporate America. Yeah.

So Jack Thompson's trial wrapped up recently. I really hate to talk about this guy because he is the kind of media whore who gets off on attention, and bolsters his reputation on attention. It doesn't matter what kind of attention, and with the absolutely pathetic state of the Internet and its users, getting good attention is almost impossible nowadays - not that it matters anyway. You'd have to prove your ancestry to Jesus and build skis out of the True Cross and make a cape out of the shroud of Turin and win the Olympic ski slope for the USA, crushing the Chinese, cover the world in solar panels mocked up to look like the stars and stripes, and then go and feed a bunch of babies in The People's Republic of the Congo all while humming "Amazing Grace" and the national anthem out of each side of your mouth and winning on American Idol to get any kind of good attention on the webs, and you'd still be hated and mocked just for doing so damn well for yourself you bloody overachiever.

::breathes::

Anyhow, Game Politics probably has the best coverage, and I mean that as a flat-out compliment despite my altercations with them. He is guilty of almost 31 counts of misusing, misrepresenting, or flat out breaking Florida Bar Association laws, which all falls under the title of Professional Misdemeanor, mostly in non-video game related matters. This makes it all the more sweeter because it proves that aside from an insane right-wing weirdo who touted the "fact" that pretend violence is much worse than real violence, the guy is a flat out incompetent lawyer even when, to put it one way, out of his element.

This also is not the first time Thompson has been slapped in the balls by the courts. In 2005, his pro hac vice licence (Latin for "for this event," meaning a lawyer can sit in or consult on a case with which they are otherwise unaffiliated) was revoked during the trial of Devin Moore. Moore shot two police officers and a dispatcher supposedly because Grand Theft Auto told him it was okay. Thompson, naturally, jumped all over this in the same manner a squirrel would jump on the last acorn on Earth, which resulted in Judge Moore revoking the licence and stating, "Mr. Thompson's actions before this Court suggest that he is unable to conduct himself in a manner befitting practice in this state [Alabama]."

My favorite charge he was found guilty of is, taken from Escapist Magazine, "Using means that have no other purpose than to embarrass, delay or burden a third person." I think that describes the man to a capital T.

But we have to remember that this is America, and as such it is pretty difficult to get a news camera pointed at you (You Tube notwithstanding.) It is even more difficult when you are the kind of genetic freak who does not speak in five second sound bytes and actually has something deep, meaningful, challenging, in insightful to say. Thompson is the same model of person as Madonna or Oscar Wilde, not to say that he is a talented singer or a wonderful writer, but he has a knack for attracting the media. Television and particularly the Internet do not provide any kind of quality control with the information the beam into your forehead. Thompson has been around for a while now, ever since Columbine made it cool to scapegoat pop culture and popular media for the sake of terrible parenting and to avoid making upper-middle class white folks look bad. He is only one man representing what has come to be a rather accepted point of view: games, music, and movies turn your pink-skinned virgin-eared bright-eyed Christian children into baby eaters.

In any case, it is still a victory. It is a victory not so much for the fact that this psycho can no longer practice law, but that it peels back the veil of righteousness and authority that the Jesus loving, gay bashing, protect whitey crowd wears just a little more. It shows that one of the leading voices in the angry-mob-pitchfork-and-torches march on games and music is nothing more than a slimy immature lying son of a bitch that even Florida will not defend.

Canon? Try Fanon.

Fanfiction is the kind of thing I wave a dismissive hand at and assume it is reserved for awkward unwashed teenagers who watch far too much bad Japanese cartoons and prance around in capes yelling, "i'm a riter!" And I will readily admit I've gotten in it my head to try my hand at it, but after a few pages of bad ideas and notably terrible writing, I deleted the Word document. Then took a shower. Then cried a little.

But even I cannot deny that there is a lot of the stuff out there, so much so that it has been getting serious attention as a serious form of writing. The website FanFiction dot com is the sewer grate that collects a good deal of it as it flows through the tubes of the Internet. And I am not going to go so far as to say that all "fanfics" are bad writing. I'll use one that my very own younger sibling wrote as an example of what I'm taking about (yeah, sorry sis, going to stick your head on a fence post. You can have it back when I'm done.) Most of the complaints I have about fan fiction are because it is fan fiction.

My sister's piece, Kage Matsuri, and I use italics because it is over 30,000 words so it might as well be treated like a long-form work, is based on the comic slash cartoon slash live action movie slash line of home appliances Death Note. Now, to someone who is very familiar with the world of Death Note, I'm sure the characters make perfect sense. To someone like me, who has only seen about five episodes of the cartoon before starting to suffer cognitive dissonance, it seems to take place in a Paper Mario 2D world where the good guys have the depth of a 1960s-era Superman, everyone else is a gargantuan idiot, and the word "whammy" is taken grossly out of cultural context.

As I said before, there isn't much I can complain about in the way of actual writing. There is some genuinely gritty action and witty dialog, but once again, that assumes I know the "canon" - what goes on in the actual base story the fiction is based on. You have to know the "canon" to get the "fanon," is another way of putting it. Thus anything written using the canon of whatever story is the basis of the fan fiction is meaningless unless you know it.

This is my first big complaint about fan fiction as a whole. Writers, at least the good ones, write for everyone. Even books like historical fictions or sci-fi, again, the good ones, go to great lengths to explain themselves so the reader isn't completely lost. Jurassic Park wouldn't have the popularity it did if it assumed that the reader already understood all there was to know about the finer points of replicating dinosaurs from preserved DNA. In fact, almost half of the book revolves around explaining stuff, but that doesn't detract from it being a suspenseful, exciting read. It seems to me that fan fiction wants to channel that detail in the literary world while not having to use up a hundred and fifty pages explaining it all, so it just takes place in a nice pre-made world with pre-made characters. Plus, it is virtually impossible to give an honest critique of fan fiction because of this. Chances are, if you already like Death Note, you'll enjoy its fan fictions, if indeed you are the type who reads them. Since things like plot, setting, and aspects of character such as motivation and personality are already taken care of, it is impossible for a given critic to appraise them unless, again, they know the canon.

And just to drive the point home, the "Reviews" on FanFiction-decimal point-com, if they could be called that, are not exactly the most helpful things in the world. For example, the "Half-Life Full-Life Consequences" thing, made more famous on YouTube by a funny-as-hell Garry's Mod video (click here to see what I mean), is a Half-Life 2 fiction about the sci-fi series hero Gordon Freeman's brother. According to the authors information, he is a nine-year-old boy who has some serious trouble grasping the English language, even for a 3rd grader. Reviews quote-un-quote ranged from, "Eat shit and die you sack of pig sick." to "OMG!!!!!!!!!! I want 2 hav ur BABYS!" Maybe it's just me, but something tells me that neither of those are going to land in the NY Times book review section. Reviews are supposed to analyze the subject and give some at least somewhat informed opinions on them, not just express hatred of a writer who is probably some thirty year old guy living in a basement reading them, saying between mouthfuls of cake, "Dance, puppets, dance!"

So again, most of the complaints I have about fan fiction are mainly because it is fan fiction. Now Tim, you Herculean Exemplar, you say, that isn't fair, you can't criticize something for what it is. Well, yes, you can. You can criticize Nazis for being Nazis. Getting back to my sister's writing, I really wanted to give her monster story offshoot an honest read, but because I don't know too much about Death Note, I had no idea what was going on. And honestly, if you are going to write a story for a specific person, you might as well just write them a god damn letter.

::hands head back:: All done.

About damn time.

In the spirit of buying a game and letting it sit for two years before I beat it, I finished Fatal Frame 2 last night. The entire thing was a bit of a let-down, given how much I loved the original Fatal Frame. If you don't know, the series (and it's always a series) is a line of games where you play an absolutely adorable Japanese girl who is supposed to be 12 but could easily pass for 18, and you have a magic camera that can banish ghosts if you take their picture. In the original, you played a student who goes looking for her beloved teacher in a haunted Japanese mansion and becomes entangled in a whole mess with ghosts and antiquated sacrifice rituals. In Number 2, you play as Mio, a typical Japanese girl who has a thing for abandoning her sister, and occasionally as her twin Mayo, who get lost in the woods and land in a haunted Japanese village, which really just consists of four haunted Japanese houses, and the twins need escape before they become the subjects of another antiquated sacrifice ritual.

My main complaint about FF2 is the fact that it is, well, Japanese. It is Japanese to the point of being noticeably Japanese, as if a Japanese man was standing behind you right now with a baseball bat carved from a Japanese cherry tree and was about to beat you silly with it but don't turn around and look because that will really piss him off! For example, the storyline does not make sense to us Westerners unless you understand that a popular myth in Japan is that certain deaths, generally suicides, are doomed to repeat their deaths for all eternity as ghosts. That is never explained in FF2, even though it is the driving force and central idea behind the plot. Mio and Hellman's, I mean Mayo, are caught in the village's last day before an evil spirit was released and went Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the place. The game's Japanese-ness also shows through in the completely linear storyline. Not that FF1 wasn't linear, but there are these sequences when the twins become separated, where you play as Mayo, and you basically have to run her from one end of a hallway to another. During one I tried to go into another room and there was an invisible wall. I wonder why the developers even let you control her if there is only one possible thing to do? The game is so chock-full of pre-rendered sequences anyway, another two or three couldn't hurt. When the twins are together, it seems as though Mayo is possessed by the spirits and the will speak through her, but Mio doesn't seem to notice. You'll be running around with your sister behind you and she'll say, "The ritual... we were born for this purpose..." and there is no reaction from Mio whatsoever, as if Mayo just does this all the time, the freak. I could go on bashing the game for being so ethnic but there's plenty of other bad design areas at which to whack.

The movement is painfully slow. I don't want to jump to conclusions but it looks like the game drives home the stereotype of Japanese girls being small and mousy. Mio runs from bloodthirsty, disfigured angry spirits the same way one would casually prance through a field of daffodils. Which doesn't hurt combat much since, for as fucking slow as Mio is, the spirits are slower. The controls are workable, though switching between 3rd-person running around view and 1st-person take pictures of shit view takes some getting used to. It would have been better if the keys were customizable since in 3rd-person the cancel button is the same as the take a picture button in 1st-person. The camera angles seem designed to give the most atmospheric shots of the village and houses, which works beautifully if ignore the fact that a player is controlling a character. I do have to give the game that it's atmospheric, but it lacks the same claustrophobic, trapped feeling that the first one had. Why the twins couldn't leave the village is never explained except for the fact that there is another one of those invisible walls made of concentrated stupid at the exit. And while I'm on the topic if things the game forces you to do, there are these retarded sequences where certain doors will not open unless you capture the right spirit. It took me an hour to find one of said spirits because there is no indication of where the damn thing might have been hiding. Sorry, Japan. Sorry for not know where to look for something that's fucking invisible.

My final big complaint, game play wise, is the difficulty. The enemy spirits range from pathetic (ghosts in houses) to mildly annoying (ghosts of farmers) to totally fucking impossible. Standard ghosts have a predictable attack pattern of wander on up to you at 2 feet per hour then strike. The only break from this are the female ghosts who channel Ringu far too much in looks (black hair isn't scary anymore guys) and charge at you from across the room, or the farmer ghosts who hit you with sticks. Or, the ghosts of sticks? But at one point I was in basement when a priest ghost attacked. Not only did he randomly teleport every time I hit him, he shot flying skulls out of his staff and moved like one of the normal spirits hopped up on some spirit amphetamines. Of course, it wasn't that hard of a fight considering you trip over powerful ammo (film) and healing items, and even the crappy herbal medicine restores a minimum half of your health bar. There was an attempt to compensate for how easy it is to dispatch the spirits, by first making them all have tons of hit points so it takes ten shots to kill them, and also by making you fight the same ghosts two or three times in a row. Making enemies hard to kill based on their life bars is not good game design.

To round it all out, Fatal Frame 2 has some of the worst storytelling I've ever seen. Most of it is told in flashback, going between what once happened in the village to the history of the two sisters. Along the way you learn that the village has this ritual where one twin girl kills her sister in order to appease the gods, otherwise the gates to hell open. One of the sisters in the original village, Yae, runs off with the son of a scientist (anthropologist? reporter? It's never explained who this guy is but he's in the village studying it.) and as a result the ritual fails. Another point in where the Japanese-ness of the game shows is the heavy reliance of reincarnation as a plot point, which is also something that is not widely understood in Western mythos. Sisters Mio and Miracle Whip (sorry, last time, I promise) have the same soul as sisters Yae and Sae, therefore they are expected to complete the ritual. Nothing else keeps the two in the village besides sheer idiocy. There are characters who are introduced and never go anywhere, such as a white haired boy locked in a shed who occasionally gives advice and Dr. Aso, who made the magical camera that somehow just ended up in the village. In Fatal Frame 1, most of the story revolves around the camera, and in this, it is just there, pending explanation like every other god damn thing.

I'd say this game is reserved only for three kinds people: ones who like Japanese horror movies a little too much, golfers, and hardcore Fatal Frame fans. I do give FF2 that it is atmospheric and genuinely creepy, but too much time was put into the extras and not into the game itself. When you beat it on normal mode you get hard more, which is exactly the same as normal except you get some new lenses for your camera and the ghosts with too many hit points get more hit points. There's also a mission mode, which I have no intention of trying. If the game isn't fun to begin with, what makes you think it'll be fun otherwise? There are also the trademark extra costumes, which hammer the proverbial Japanese nail in the proverbial Japanese coffin of the proverbial fucking Japanese-ality of this game. Mio's costumes include a schoolgirls uniform, a maid outfit, and some skimpy bondage gear. She's twelve for fuck's sake! Add people with Japanese schoolgirl fetishes to the list of those who'd like this game.

One redeeming factor is that in the books that talk about the ritual, they replace certain words with "*" or "**". The writing quality for the game was pretty bad, so I just substituted some suggestive language for the "*"s.

The gate to hell is called the balls.
Gaze not upon the balls.
Eyes that glimpse the balls will be blinded by the balls.
Speak not of the balls.
The mouth which utters balls will be made speechless by the balls.
Listen not to the balls.
Those who heed the balls are turned heartless by the balls.

Yeah, I'm 5.

Summah-Time

And it's fucking forty degrees out. Awesome.

Anyhow, another semester is over and for as weird as it is for me to say, I actually miss it. Summers for us college freaks host this strange lull where you aren't writing papers every week or staying up all night doing research and stuff like that. Well, I suppose that applies to us college freaks who pay attention, not the lazy shits and business majors. But I digress. (Or do I? Mua-ha-ha-ha-ha!)

What?

One thing I am looking forward to this summer, now a mere 12 days away is the new Indiana Jones film. I generally avoid IMDB due to the fact that 50 percent of it's users are idiots and the other 50 percent, as the case with the alleged Silent Hill 2 script proved, lying assholes. But since the info about the film released is modest anyway it's safe to look up who is going to be in it and who isn't and disregard any other information as complete and utter bull. Kate Blanchett and that annoying kid from Saved by the Be -- I'm sorry Transformers -- are making appearances, which worries me. Blanchett is totally hit or miss and has never really impressed me and if Temple of Doom was any lesson to Speilberg whatsoever, he should know younger, fast-talking sidekicks DO NOT WORK.

One thing that gives me hope is that, again allegedly, from an interview with the man himself, very little of the movie will be done with computers. I have nothing against graphics, but so far the best examples of films that have done it right are Lord of the Rings and Brotherhood of the Wolf, where the graphics were simply streamlined into the film, such as the Orc costumes in LOTR being made in meticulous detail, then simply enhanced. Speilberg and Lucas each rely way too heavily on graphics, but at least Lucas does it right. I cite Minority Report as not only an incompetent movie but one that simply vomits acidic light all over its viewers because someone in the tech department thought that bloom makes everything better.

In spite of myself, and my whining, I'm looking forward to the movie anyway. Its a throwback to the kinds of things that inspired dozens of really shitty adventures stories I wrote at age 9, and don't ask because they have all been destroyed for the betterment of humanity.

Kickin' it old school!

Great.

Last week of school and apparently I'm sick.

And that smell in my apartment is back.

Connexion?

Short Story

Being the end of the semester I've been doing a lot of writing. In between that I need to find something to do to relax, so of course, it's more writing. Not that this is a bad thing. The finished product might be crap, but at least it's getting put to paper.

Anyway, this story is a nice parody of my hatred of SUV owners. To clarify, I don't hate everyone who drives and SUV, or are SUV drivers by default assholes and bad parents. But I have noticed some patterns when it comes to people who drive big trucks. One, they all universally seem to have some kind of confidence issue, and the first thing I assume when I see a man driving an SUV is, "So you've got penis size issues then." Second, SUVs are a symbol of wealth, and as such people trying to fit into some kind of 'Merican Apple-Pies-And-Cash dream get one to prove that they are better than the rest of us small, foreign car driving peons. But the last thing is the most interesting to me. SUVs are hailed as the safest cars around, and a tendency to flip over when making a turn aside, they are. You, the driver, are half as likely to die in a head-on accident if you are driving an SUV. But, you are twice as likely to kill the person you hit. I'm quite sure most people who drive the things aren't even aware of this, but even if they were, they wouldn't care. They have the safety their fat-faced snotty kids deserve and fuck everyone else who gets in the way. Right, parents? Am I right?

Anyway, here's the story, in glorious PDF format.

I hate college.

I suppose that phrase is a bit overused these days, but I'm taking it wildly out of popular context. Apparently I'm some kind of genetic freak whose brain is malformed and because of this I get sick enjoyment out of learning things, Acquiring new knowledge is like having a sexy Hello-Nurse inject morphine directly into my spine. Yeah, it's that good. My GPA is decent and I get enjoyment out of writing, so why then would I say I hate college? There's the roommate thing, but anyone who knows me personally probably wants to kill me and/or themselves and/or bystanders with how much I complain about that, so I'll spare you. If I had to sum up my grievances in one word, and if I needed an effective transition to the next paragraph (which I do) I'd say the whole thing is very bureaucratic.

Literary fag stuff ahead.

It reminds me of the Vogons in Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (the book.) In the sequence where hero Arthur Dent and company need to free one of their ranks from Vogon prison, they must fill out the appropriate form. The Vogons are not portrayed as evil so much as political, to an extreme degree, and the forms must go through an insane, painstaking cycle of being filled out, copied, filed, un-filed, re-filed, lost, found, buried in your grandmother's back yard, dug up, stamped, approved, seconded, and so on. And in the end the heroic company fills out the wrong form and needs to start the whole bloody process over again.

End literary fag stuff.

This is not unlike college. If you want to get anything done, such as change your major, you need to fill out a form and hand it over some bored student worker secretary who makes flying bastard's shit wages and couldn't give a flying bastard's shit about you or your flying bastard's shit major. And then you sit there picking your nose while you wait for aforementioned secretary to file the paperwork. And that's the beginning of the process. You need signatures of your adviser; it needs to be stamped by advising, and in the end it can always be denied. And God help you if you want a minor.

Almost nobody graduates in four years anymore. Counting time in Programming Trade School Dirt (PTSD), community college, time off, and odd jobs in between, I've been doing the college thing for seven years now. Seven years! It hurts my brain to think that nearly a full decade of my existence has gone to getting a bachelor's degree, and right at the time when the job market in this fucking country is so bad a B.F.A might as well stand for Bees Fucking you in the Ass. And this delay in graduation isn't due to lack of effort. Colleges seem to be spending less and less time hiring competent professors or worrying about how they are going to feed the growing numbers of on-campus students, who surround the food courts like brain-hungry zombies, and more into how they can monkey around with stealing credits from community college transfer ingrates like myself, who didn't have the sense to go to college directly out of high school. Maybe it's a kind of subtle punishment for the fact that I refuse to buy things from the grossly overpriced college bookstore or I don't pimp out the school's name on every fucking overpriced article of clothing that conceals my supple body. The fuck am I supposed do: advertize to people who have already decided to go to your college? I really fail to understand how I'm supposed to have school spirit when they insist upon beating me on the head with a blunt object and expect me to come crawling back like an abused housewife, saying through apologetic sobs, "I won't burn the steak again!"

Getting back on track: I use the word bureaucratic to mainly describe the credit-handling system. The old rule was that if you transfered in with an Associates Degree you got to send 64 credits over and start as a Junior, and that promise has been made good on. Of course it all falls to shit when you've got a graduation requirement system that resembles a Final Fantasy combat interface in terms of complexity, an credit allocation interface that you, the student, cannot access, and a management program that is about as friendly as Microsoft Excel using an Arabic language package. It reminds of the time before Martin Luther and the reformation, when John Wyclif translated The Bible into English and was burned at the stake for heresy because normal dirty shit-eating peasants weren't fit enough to interpret religion and had to take the pious Latin speaking Master Race's word for it. Sorry, I didn't warn you that there would historical fag stuff in this too. That being said, I don't actually know how my college's system works, and I've talked to three different professors and gotten three different answers, and what that does for me is, you guessed it, flying bastard's shit. I don't know if I need two classes or four classes, and whether they need to be core classes, cognates, or "At-Some-Distance" classes. Whatever the fuck that means. Additionally I need to know if I've taken enough "W1" or "Q2" classes, and if I've fulfilled the required R2D2 study hall and the C3PO lecture.

Okay, not funny.

I suppose the point of all this nonsensical late-night insomnia-fueled whining is that my English schoolboy's impression of college a place where you go to learn and get catapulted into that magical far-away place called the real world, riding the updraft of letters of recommendation and applause from your stern but overall supportive professors was bullshit. The college organization itself does not look out for the welfare of its students and most of them burden their professors with so much busywork that they last thing they have time for is actual teaching. And the last thing nailing the proverbial wooden outhouse with me still in it shut is that nobody is grandfathered into anything anymore. Apparently starting a given student in a track and keeping with it all the way through has gone the way of durable goods after the 1960s; making things that last is bad for economics. And that's what college is: a business. The students are like an unfortunate byproduct of the whole thing, an appendix to the large intestine, if you will. And when appendices get inflamed, some doctor just slices the little dongle off.

I'm done explaining my bad analogies; take that any way you want to.

If I did it...

And I did do it. Make a rotating banner image, not murder someone (but that is the joke.) Since this feature doesn't come standard with Blogger and I couldn't find an apropriate plugin, I found a way to get it working that a) doesn't require you to install anything new and b) works with any template. So here you, the public, are:

Step 1: Go to Dashboard --> Layout --> Edit HTML. You'll get a text box with a whole mess of code in it. In the Body section, find a div tag called "header." I believe it can be called something else in other templates; in the "Minima" template that I use it's called header. There should be a property to this called Locked and it is set to true. Replace it with false, and save the template.

What this does: The locked property makes it so you can't remove or change a given element. Setting it to false means you can move or delete it.

Step 2: Delete the header element. Note that regardless of whether it is there or not, it will set the title of your page, so before you kill it, make sure your title is what you want it to be. The title is what displays in the upper-left corner of the browser window, if you did not know. If you do delete the header without setting the title, you'll have to add it again, change the title, then delete it.

Step 3: Go back to Layout. Click the large "Add a Page Element" link at the bottom of the blog template. Pick "HTML/Javascript" from the list. Now you'll have a new element at the bottom of the page. Move it up to the top where the the header used to be. This will be your new header.

Step 4: Here is where it gets tricky. You'll have to add some Javascript to this, which I've provided below.

<script language="JavaScript">

<!-- hide from non-javascript browsers


images = new Array(3);

images[0]="<p align=center> <img src='Your First Image.jpg'></p>";
images[1]="<p align=center> <img src='Your Second Image.jpg'></p>";
images[2]="<p align=center> <img src='Your Third Image.jpg'></p>";

index = Math.floor(Math.random() * images.length);

document.write(images[index]);

/stop hiding-->
</script>
<noscript>Text version of your header</noscript>

What it does (JavaScript OK people can skip this): The Script tag tells the computer you'll be using script. "images" is an array, a kind of variable that has multiple values, that stores the locations of the images you want to use as banners. There is also a P tag in there to assure that the image is centered. You can change that property to "left" or "right" if you want your header on a specific side of the page. This example is set up so that there will be three rotating banners, but it can be as many as you want. Just remember that you'll have to make a new value for images for each banner, and that while the array has 3 values, images begins counting at 0, not 1. So if you had ten banners, images would be: images[0] through images[9].

The next bit sets "index" to a random number. The random function generates a value between 1 and 0, and if you multiply it by images.length, it will generate a number between 0 and whatever the amount of images you have is. Therefore, this line works with any number of banners, whether you have ten or ten thousand.

Finally, the document.write command prints the value stored in the image variable, and the number of the array is the random number generated by the math command. It actually prints the HTML code stored in the array.

Step 5: Close the script tag. The No Script tag at the end will display whatever text is inside of it if the browser does not support or allow scripts. It would be a good idea to put a text version of your header, or an image link to a default header in this case, because if the browser doesn't support JavaScript, the code won't work anyway.

So there you are. I hope whoever sees this finds it useful.

I am ... *yawn*

Characteristically putting myself behind on the movie curve, I saw I Am Legend last night. The otherwise nonfunctional DVD drive in my laptop decided to work so viewing it in my room was possible, and of course today the fucking thing is busted, which leads me to believe that it has something to do with ghosts. Anyway, I Am Legend.

I'll start off by saying that I enjoyed it, which is a break from the usual "intelligent" - and by intelligent I mean not paid for by Warner Bros. - reviews of this film. It was short, sweet, to the point and lacked any major plot holes which usually decorate Hollywood movies like big shiny flashy Christmas light that spell out the words plot hole. The story, for those who have not read the identically titled book or have not seen The Last Man On Earth or Omega Man, stars Robert Neville, a military scientist who proves immune to a human-created disease that wipes out most of the planet, and turns a good portion of what is left into "Dark-Seekers", a kind of speedy zombie with the vampiric trait of frying to death in sunlight. Neville lives in New York City and for the past three years has been trying to come up with a cure for the disease.

I said that I enjoyed the movie, but there is a pretty clear distinction between the first and the second half. Midway through the film a new character, Anna, appears, rescuing Will Smi - I mean Neville - from the Dark-Seekers. At that point, there is a miraculous sunrise and while Anna is questioning Neville, a big cross bearing the one and only Jesus takes center-shot. Anna claims that there is a survivors colony in the north, because the virus could not deal with cold weather, and when Neville asks her how she knows, well, God told her. From that point on, every sequence, even up to the finale, can be explained with the phrase, "God did it."

I don't particularly have a problem with religion in films, and I don't mind that Anna's character is a Jesus freak, but the movie validates it. Even Neville, who staunchly refuses to believe in God, has a conversion at the end. For a film that tries to so hard to be realistic, and spends so much time with panoramic shots of abandoned NYC, it breaks all of that work down in the end. That, just so you know, is not good film making.

I Am Legend did not strike me as a bad film, but it did strike me as a very lazy one. I mentioned before that it avoided major plot holes, but I didn't say anything about minor holes. Examples: A good deal of time is spent in Neville's lair: a townhouse converted into an armored fortress. In one shot, a gas-powered generator is shown, which readily explains why he has electricity. Fine. So how does he keep his lab powered? One gas generator isn't enough to provide power for a few computers, halogen lights, electronic medical equipment and a gene sequencer. Another example of laziness that leads to plot holes is how Anna came to find Neville. In an effort to contact other survivors, Neville broadcasts a message each day. Anna just happened to turn on her radio one day and hear is message. And yes, that is how it is explained: not, "I've been scanning different frequencies and heard your broadcast" or "I found a radio and used it" but "I've had a perfectly good radio this whole time and had to wait to hear the word from The Man Upstairs to turn it the fuck on."

I don't expect every movie to be Chinatown, but put some damn effort into it. Lazy might not be an elegant word that flaunts my massive writer's vocabulary, but it sums up I Am Legend perfectly. I can see where some would take this movie as Christian propaganda, but it is most certainly not a God movie. It replaces legitimate plot points with a series of coincidences, and takes the flow of the story out of the characters hands. The reason why Robert Neville is important is because he is Robert Neville, and saying that it doesn't matter because God sorts his shit out in the end means he could very well have been Robert Smith of The Cure. Or Ghandi.

I Am Legend might be good for a jump out moment or two, and some unintentionally funny Will Smith moments, but leaves the bitter taste of "So what?" in the views mouth. Or, eyes.

Can eyes taste?

What if they could?

That'd be weird...

Attractive Qualities

Since, it seems, God hates me, one night I decide to actually have fun I end up stricken with insomnia. I had a few drinks earlier, which is something that, as a rule, I don't do. Drinking is strictly a social endeavor for me, and one that I neither pay much attention to nor into which I put much effort. In this past year, I've been to a bar twice, and been full-blown honest-to-Shiva drunk once, not because I wholly wanted to be, but my roommates seem to enjoy me being social more than I do. I don't drink to accomplish things like: make myself feel better, remove inhibitions about talking to girls, or make myself look cool. As any human who knows anything about this planet knows though, there are people who do, and they seem to all be my age and concentrated in New Jersey.

Being a kind of English major and, for the first time, diving into creative writing, puts me into contact with some pretty unsavory fellows. By that I mean the type of twenty-something "I write deep fiction about heavy shit" kids (and yes, I can say kids), all convinced they'll grow up to be the next William Faulkner. Or Wallace. Take your pick. I use William Faulkner as my base because he was one of the many artists who was a raging boozer, along with other well-knowns like Edgar Allen Poe, Tennessee Williams and Jackson Pollock. All of whom were also famous assholes. One quality these kids have is the tendency to flaunt their drinking problems, all of which I believe are either totally fabricated or at the very least highly embellished. When I enter into conversation with Wandering Human #18 of the day, and they start rambling on about how they'll drink at 7 AM if the work schedule calls for it or how their writing process is to take a shot of [insert weirdly spelled foreign whiskey here], my eyes start to glaze over and I think a nice quiet life alone a few hundred miles outside of Anchorage, Alaska in an igloo with wall-to-wall cargo pallets and a pet Malamute named O'Mally where I do nothing but eat frozen salmon and snow all day is a perfectly reasonable alternative to present company. Flaunting is not an attractive practice and alcoholism is not an attractive quality. To the sane, it's a subtle way of saying, "I have no self-confidence and my beer intake should intimidate you" or , "Hi, I'm a cunt."

And after all (culture commentary ahead), this is just my pathetic generation's given way for individuals to drop their pants and swing their wangs around in a "Mine's Bigger Than Your's" contest which doesn't end in indecent exposure charges and a restraining order. One example of this is tanning. Melanoma is in season simply because it is a sign of wealth. Back in Shakespeare's time, tans were considered gross because, if you were tan, you worked outside, and if you worked outside, you were a peasant, not fit for the pasty-faced wig-wearing Latin-literate Master Race. Nowadays, most jobs are indoors, so being pale is a symbol of working too much, spending too much time in front of a computer, being "emo," or any combination of the bunch. Tanning tells everyone but the blind that you have the money to afford skin cancer. The same can be said about obesity in Japan. Until recently, the Japanese viewed being overweight as an attractive asset because it meant that you had attractive assets. Being fat meant you had the money to be fat; you could afford to shove sushi and noodles down your throat and were five steps and fifty pounds above those toothless, rice-gumming country yokels.

Being a booze hound satisfies all of these cultural needs. One of the reasons I limit my drinking is because that shit is expensive. Claiming that you drink every night is a nice way to separate yourself from poor fuckers who don't possess the means, sheer force of stupidity, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder required to be an alcoholic. It also takes care of self-esteem issues in the same way guys with tiny dicks make up for it by going balls-deep in debt to own a massive truck. It gives a sense of identity without having to go through all the work to have an actual personality.

At the core of this, I think, is the word subtle. Walking around shoving your drinking problems in people's faces is not a subtle activity, but the messages conveyed are. I've argued for a while now that my generation has fallen victim to the notion that personality replaces character. Sure, a bar-hopper can have a personality, and most of them do. You kind of need one to live that lifestyle. But what is the character of an alcoholic? An addict. A waste. And someone who genuinely dislikes themselves.

Man, O'Mally's a sweet name for Malamute.

Here we go again.

So this marks yet another attempt at me keeping a personal blog. I've never much liked the idea of blogs, but started keeping one to see if it would improve my writing ability. Or, at the very least, force me into some impromptu creativity to keep me writing. Every blog I've had, from an old site my best friend and I kept, to the one I tried to maintain on my MySpace, back when I had a MySpace, has failed. This was mostly due to me realizing nobody read it and losing interest. Ironic that I should land an independent study where all I basically do is blog.

I'm starting this one up because my writing for said study - a swanky little site called TheFhiz.com - has me doing a political column and my writing for it is ... sporadic. I'm the king of off-topic when it comes to that site, so I'm categorizing. Or multitasking. Or something. In fact, I never understood Internet lingo. Up until a few years ago I didn't know what "lol" meant. And just this month I learned what "imho" meant. The whole thing scares me. What these shortcuts do is reduce something like laughter into one universal symbol. It makes talking on something like AIM or texting easier, but it destroys a certain meaning in the language. What kind of laugh? Is it sarcastic or hearty? Honest or forced? Or even diabolical? "LOL" can't answer these questions.

So English is important to preserve, which I guess is what is at the heart of this blog. I'm told I write well, and I think in my largely dysfunctional brain that injecting good, and if not good, at least grammatically sound writing into the Internet might change something. And if not, it gives me another outlet to bitch about the misuse of language. Among other things.

So what else would I write about? Anything I guess. I'm an interesting person and I form opinions about everything, some of which may be valuable, most of which are just one person's opinion. But enough of that; here's the deal. You stick with this, and so will I.

"One-Free-Man?"

Play Half-Life 2.