Super 8 Vs. 8 Mile

* = GAH! Oh wait, I love Mix Tapes...












Yesterday’s blog was long, I mean REALLY long, especially considering it was just me babbling on and on about Doctor Who and other nerdy stuff. I kind of figured I might be done blogging this week. Then last night happened.

First off when we finally did get home last night we had to shovel out the driveway. It was the worst shoveling I can remember. The snow was wet and SUPER heavy, so we couldn’t snow blow it. As you went the temperature was dropping so the wet driveway and the left over remnants of snow started to freeze, so you were skating. We were both tired already, so when we were done we were DONE. It’s the worst ‘quality’ of shoveling we’ve done, but it’s was good enough. Then the night got interesting.

Last night my lovely wife and I had our Video Gaming Night, busting out Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance for Xbox. We sort of hemmed and hawed our way through the initial ‘talky talky’ portion of the game. Although I had forgotten just how busty, and how much the designers paid creepy attention to the physics of that bust, the barkeep was.
I mean WOW, those things jiggle constantly, and it’s seriously a distraction. Anywho, we then got about the ‘bidniz’ of killing and looting in the area below the tavern. So it was basically us killing giant rats. While doing this I realized something, I LOVE killing giant rats with my wife. No, I’m serious. We did the same thing playing Fallout: Brotherhood Of Steel, and it was glorious. There is an art to Dungeon Crawl ‘kill, loot, level, repeat’ games, and it’s cooperation. When you have a good vibe with someone you can really work well together. You can use tactics to beat swarms, you can effectively share loot, and then you can be successful. That’s what we were doing; we sort of got in a zone, and were ‘crushing’ it. Then the Xbox died. It was pretty funny actually. I bought that thing used from some buddies for next to nothing about 10 years ago or so. I used it, quiet a bit actually, but recently it’s been lying dormant. So to fire it up, get 30 minutes in and have it die was just funny. Well it was to me, my wife was not amused, and she was frustrated. So strangely enough we decided to get a ‘new’ one, refurbished actually. It’s strange to know that I turned down a getting a new next generation console not even three months ago, but without hesitation we dropped around $70 on a refurbished console. I guess it just goes to show how much we love killing giant rats together.

I found the trailer for this movie on the interwebs this morning;
Neighborhood Watch

Say what you will about the hit or miss nature of Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and even Jonah Hill, BUT if you say one thing bad about Richard Ayoade, then you and me are going to be in a fight.
This genius of comedy man-child was ‘Moss’ on the incredibly funny ‘The IT Crowd’ & the legendary ‘Dean Learner’ from both ‘Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place’ & ‘Man To Man With Dean Learner’. If you haven’t watched any of these shows then I feel sorry for you. I mean like you ‘had a death in the family’ sorry for you. Mr. Ayoade is a really hilarious guy, and he’ll be the perfect bizarre straight man for the rest of the actors in what looks like it could be a really funny movie.

I made the mistake this morning of reading some Yahoo news pages. Let me just help you all out and give you a piece of advice; if you’re thinking about reading articles that sound intriguing because of your politics or religious affiliation DON’T! To read about bankers making over 350K a year bitching about how tough they have it makes me want to drown baby kitties. To see that a Catholic Priest denied a Lesbian woman Communion at her Mother’s funeral makes me want to push old people into traffic. And the idea that a Federal Judge doesn’t feel he’s racist for sending racist e-mails about the President is like the idea that it’s not wrong that I want to punch babies when I read this. Even better is if you have the stomach to scroll down and truly stare into the abyss, the comments section. Whenever I’m feeling particularly positive about human beings in general I just go there and it reminds me that we truly are deplorable.

Which brings me to two bits of nerdy ‘Hate’ I found this week. One was about a couple of gaming stores in North Carolina who are engaged in a feud that has ignited the Geek Internet(s). It seems that a couple of good guys bought out a game store and made their intentions known about starting up their revamped store, name and all. Well that didn’t set to well with the store across town, so they bought every domain name online they could to screw the ‘new guys’. This is illegal and called ‘cybersquatting’, & no Dave that's not what I thought that term meant either. That didn’t stop them from doing it, or threatening to sue for libel once their little scheme was exposed to other gamers online. Really? As a gamer I can’t figure out why you would want to alienate other gamers, it’s basically like fiscally shooting yourself in the face. I have worked a few game & comic stores in my life, and I’ve never had issue with steering someone to a different store if they met a need we couldn’t. The community is small enough without having greedy, territorial pricks shrinking it further. Which brings me to the articles on both Penny Arcade & on the-ISB dot com regarding how ‘professional’ Fighting Game, this would be like Tekken, players are routinely sexist, racist, and unrelentingly mean to not just other male players but especially female players. The thing is these guys don’t see anything wrong with that. So, again, a niche group of people are taking great pains to alienate and upset other members of their own niche group in order to satisfy some bizarre need to prop themselves up. The best part is this guy Aris Bakhtanians defends his & his cohorts behavior by saying this is ‘America not North Korea’. Hmmm, so that means Aris if we met and I didn’t like you I could tell you that you’re an incredible douchebag and punch you? 'Cause you know it's 'Merica! Didn’t your mothers hug you enough as children? Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. I can drive with my feet; it doesn’t make it a good idea.

See, I HATE, I mean I HATE a lot, and I’m good at it.
However I try to only Hate when it’s called for, to do so in a way that gets across my point and then be done with it. I try not to Hate in a way that destroys lives or even in attempt to make someone’s life more difficult. One because I don’t have that sort of platform, two because it’s wrong, and three because there is ALWAYS a Bigger Hater out there to destroy you. The social Darwinism of modern society is shrinking as folks find it easier and easier to hide behind a screen name. Now I’m going to try and not get on one of those ‘back in my day’ rants, but back in my day if I wrote a check with my mouth that my ass couldn’t cash I paid for it. I’m a big guy, I’m a strong guy, and I’d like to think I’m pretty tough, that doesn’t mean I haven’t taken more than my fair share of ass kicking’s, and most of them well deserved. The thing is I learned from those; think before you speak, don’t be a prick, be nice, remember the world doesn’t revolve around you; no one cares what you want or think, etc. These are social lessons learned through trial and error, mainly error. I think a lot of folks are missing these lessons, and what really disappoints me is now people in the communities that I thought were better about this are showing me they aren’t. Ah humanity, you never cease to disappoint.

What’s so sad about both the political things I’ve talked about as well as this new run in GEEK RAGE this week is they are the same damn thing. It’s more of the epidemic of selfish behavior and a lack of humanity. There just seems to be a lack of emotional reciprocity between most human beings. It seems we can’t have a civil conversation when having differing views anymore without it degrading into name-calling. I find that incredibly sad. I keep hearing lately about morality or how ‘We’re going to take back our country’, but these are the people who do the most shoe banging on the bully pulpit. I just remember that there was a time when I could talk to some of these people, or even listen to them on television, without it erupting into diatribe. I miss that. I don’t feel like I get any smarter listening to these folks because they just upset me when they repeat pre-arranged talking points ad nausea or when I try to talk to them and they have NO interest in a conversation they just want conversion. It’s as if communication has been ‘Weaponized’ in Modern ‘Merica. There is not conversation because there has to be a WINNER! I’m just finding that the more I deal with ‘Normal’ people the more I don’t want to.

GAH! Why can’t I just find something that doesn’t get my blood boiling in these people? Even my conversation about Libertarianism on ‘Teh Fazebookz’ was hijacked and I was just summarily told I was ‘wrong’ if I didn’t agree. Which was funny because I was talking about how I felt that the ‘name calling’ was counter productive to their cause. I think this is what KILLS me about all of this crap, it could be avoided if people just spoke to others like they’d like to be spoken to. For the Religious folks it means think before you call someone a ‘baby murderer’, because I don’t think the Big J.C. (or Mohammed, or Buddha or Thor or etc.) would do that. For those of us who aren’t down with the J.C., respect that other person’s faith and move on. You don’t like the President, that’s cool I don’t always like him either, but it doesn’t give you green light to compare him to Hitler, because that’s just dumb, it’s hyper-hyperbole for the sake of being inflammatory. Like on the other side of the coin if I don’t care for someone like, let’s say ‘Mittens’, I shouldn’t refer to him Pol Pot. Why? Because it’s F’Ning STUPID. We can debate all day whether or not Obama pushes a European Socialist like agenda, just like we can do the same about ‘Mittens’ propensity to be a serial flip flopper. They both are true to a degree; the severity is in the eye of the beholder. I think that might be what it boils down to, Perception Vs. Reality.

Your Perception becomes Your Reality. The world as I perceive it around me is what I perceive as reality. So when we deal with something as abstract as opinion or the processing of information and then try to regurgitate that to someone else it can’t help but become ‘Our Reality’. So when that Reality conflicts with someone else’s Perceived Reality whose is Real? Unfortunately, I think it becomes that of the speaker. I think the crux though is being self-aware of this enough to not be dogmatic in your thinking. It's sad to say, but the vast majority of us have become personal ideologues. We try to force our perception on EVERYTHING & EVERYONE else. We don’t seem to or want to understand that there is something more than us, now, in this moment, in this thought process, and inside this Perceived Reality. We don’t want to ‘get’ that an opinion is not fact, it’s just an opinion and could and should be challenged, in a nice way, by others who have differing but equally important opinions. This is part of what would make us human, or ability to communicate, to think, to change, and to grow mentally. It’s just that a lot of what I see proves to me the vast majority doesn’t care about this anymore. At all. Are we a lost cause, not just as a country, but also as a species? Do we care so little about each other that we can’t see past the ‘I’ to the ‘Us’ in any fashion except in a self-serving one where we simply group together in common dogma to attack our perceived enemies? Does it make me strange to think about this? I wish I had answers rather than just more and more questions. I wish things were different. I also wish I had a pet monkey. I guess we can’t always get what we want.

Well that took a strange turn, that’s what you get when you write stream of consciousness I guess. How about something far less ‘heavy’, how ‘bout some…

RANDOM CRAP!

- I get it, we should support the troops, however I’m confused as to why we glorify the idea of being a soldier. I always thought the interesting thing about the guys who fought in WWII was that they didn’t want to kill. Hell, they weren’t even proud of it, but it had to be done. Since then there has been this sort of emphasis on propping up these folks as ‘special’, not to mention the national desire to show war as ‘cool’. War is not cool. It’s the killing of other people, and most of the time it’s the killing of other people who really are just doing what there told, just like our troops. Things like the current movie ‘Act Of Valor’ seems like propaganda. Again before I get a bunch of ‘YOU HATE AMERICA’ type comments, let me specify I don’t even dislike the troops, I just don’t get it. I mean I understand that in modern ‘Merica our #1 export is War. The things we do best are invading and bombing your country and then ‘Nation Build’ you back up. Maybe it’s justification for the MASSIVE military budgets or the no-bid military contracts that these guys kick back to each other. This is especially true when you learn about what an incestuous little group this is. A General retires, becomes a consultant to a military contractor, and then uses his old contacts to get that no-bid multi-million dollar contract. Of course this is just the same thing almost all politicians do when they become lobbyists or lawyers do when they leave the government and go to work for the companies they were supposed to be prosecuting. I just don’t get. We don’t reward education, humanity, or really even art anymore, but man do we love War, and that confuses me.
- There I go getting ‘heavy’ again. Maybe I just need a hug.
- I need to paint minis this weekend. Last week I only finished three, and this week I’ve finished none. The table is out; the minis are there I’ve just lacked ambition.
- Subway has some decent Chili. I was shocked by how spicy, and yet tasty it was.
- We are in discussions to sell “Blue”, my wife’s car. If this happens then it would put ‘The Plan’ into high gear. This along with the potential sale of my father’s car, splitting the revenue three ways, and the decent tax return have put us in place to get a lot of our 16 Month fiscal plan done in a MUCH shorter time span, that is strangely exciting & reassuring.
- Maybe we’ll play some Champions Of Norath on PS2 until the new Xbox arrives.
- Speaking of a lack of ambition I’ve also slacked off on my D&D Adventure System Games card making. I did make the changes to my last card this morning at like 5:30am since I couldn’t sleep. I need to knock out about 30 more Encounter Cards, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. My Pathfinder set is still relatively small, and the Dragon’s Tears set still has at least 10 holes in it. I think Saturday if I get up early I’ll take the morning to listen to the Powertrip’s 4th Hour and knock out a pile of cards. Then I’ll pour the rest of my attention into my wife, and maybe some painting.
- I need to watch ‘The Mighty Boosh’.
- Andrew Breitbart died today. Although I disagree philosophically with almost everything the guy stood for, I admire(d) his tenacious nature & his willingness to engage in debates with even his most vehement detractors. The guy could go on a show like Real Time with Bill Mahr and have a rational & passionate discussion. Now the guy was a ‘firebrand’ and did use a lot of inflammatory dialogue at times, however the man wasn’t a coward and that’s to be admired if nothing else.
- Dave, can we PLEASE get a game of Small World in this weekend?
- So it sounds like the Vikings stadium is going to get done. It’s sounds as if it’s going to get done in Minneapolis. It’s a nice example of this state doing something on the ‘cheap’, and by ‘nice’ I mean disappointing. The Vikings are going to end up in another situation where they’ll have a mid to low end range stadium and it’ll need to be done again in the future. The fact that Arden Hills couldn’t get done is really sad. Hell, or even in Shakopee! The power brokers in Minneapolis sat on the sidelines until they HAD to jump in or lose it, and then they flexed their considerable political muscle to force the state & the Vikings to do it where they want it or not do it at all. The really smart thing they’ve done, and the legislature as well to a degree, had made the Vikings organization the ‘bad guys’ in this situation. It’s a complete fabrication, but who cares? As long as they convince the masses that their point of view is the ‘truth’ it doesn’t matter that the Vikings have been trying to get this done for around ten years. It doesn’t matter that the Twins & the Gophers got new publicly funded or at least subsidized stadiums. It doesn’t matter that the Metrodome was obsolete in the 1990’s. It doesn’t matter that the Vikings are a HUGE draw, but rank in the bottom in revenue drawn because of where they’ve played. All that matters is the spin. Congrats Minneapolis you’ve spun effectively. You’ve won, enjoy the fruits of your ‘labor’, but just don’t be surprised if it costs you again in the near future.
- Speaking of spin I caught the Daily Show thing the other night where ‘Mittens’ was calling Rick ‘Crazy Pants’ Santorum out on his robo-calls to Democrats in Michigan to come out and vote Santorum to screw ‘Mittens’. I think he called it ‘vile’. Well, that’s funny because then John Stewart and company showed two clips from not to long ago where ‘Mittens’ bragged about doing the exact same thing to Democrats.
So let me get this straight, either you still are a lying flip-flopping ass hat OR it’s ok when you do it, but not if it’s done to you? Which is it ‘Mittens’? I really don’t know how anyone with any common sense could vote this fraud into any office, including Office Depot.










- The more I think about this crap the more I realize that I’m living Pink Floyd’s ‘Darkside Of The Moon’. Or perhaps I am as crazy as I think I might be.

Remember when this blog used to ‘fun’?

”If Knee Deep In Catnip At The Old Ice Box,
I Recommend You Whistle And Give The Box Three Knocks.
Should You Be So Lucky To Hear Whispering,
It Is An Invitation For You To Leap In.

May You Go Marching In Three-Measure Time,
Dressed Up As Asses And Drunk To The Nines.
Swing From The Rafters Shouting Those Songs
Gone Unsung For Far Too Long.

If Boxing Your Shadow At The Wall Full Of Moss
And Antlers Approach You, Then I Am At A Loss.

May You Go Marching In Three-Measure Time
Dressed Up As Asses And Drunk To The Nines.
Swing From The Rafters Shouting Those Songs
Gone Unsung For Far Too Long.

Drink To The Dead All You Still Alive
We Shall Join Them, In Good Time.
Should You Go Crossing That Silvery Brook,
It's Best To Leap Before You Look.
Drink To The Dead All You Still Alive
We Shall Join Them, In Good Time.
Should You Go Crossing That Silvery Brook,
It's Best To Leap Before You Look.

If Surrounded By Toadstools At The Old Green Glen,
I'm Afraid There Is Little That I Can Recommend,
Save All Of Your Courage And Sincere Prayer.
And Where You Go A' Treading Take The Utmost Care.

Drink To The Dead All You Still Alive
We Shall Join Them, In Good Time.
Should You Go Crossing That Silvery Brook,
It's Best To Leap Before You Look.
Drink To The Dead All You Still Alive
We Shall Join Them, In Good Time.
Should You Go Crossing That Silvery Brook,
It's Best To Leap Before You Look.”






* = This one's for the Ladies. And Dave. And me...