THIS WEEK STARTS DHARMA BUM OFF AT HIS NEW JOB AND COLLEGE! HE ASKED ME TO BLOG FOR HIM BECAUSE HE’S TOO BUSY! I AM HERE TO MAKE YOU LAUGH! I AM HERE TO MAKE YOU DANCE! HERE’S A LITTLE FRIEND TO HELP ENCOURAGE YOU!!!!!

THAT BRINGS US TO THE TOPIC OF THE DAY! THE BEST THING ABOUT THE INTERNET IS ALL THE WOMEN HERE! SOME LADIES EVEN RESPONDED TO MY AD ON CRAIGSLIST!

"Dear Strong Mad,

I love men who can tell me what’s what. Ever since I saw your picture, I’ve dreamed about waxing your cube like mass with some turtle grease. How would you like to return the favor?

Single in Singapore"

DID YOU JUST SAY TURTLE GREASE?

"clientsnameis;Strong Mad,

How are you doing with the burlington coat factory after Christmas event? Take off your glasses and start slip sliding across the floor in your new jeans, that’s how! Please enter your identity theft numbers in a poptart box, and throw it out the window. A special collections agency agent will specially collect your collection special agent’s collection agency special collections agency agent special collections!

Special!
Helga Vrumbgoldsts"

I’M NOT FALLING FOR THAT ONE AGAIN! I GIVE MY HEART AWAY TOO EASILY!

"MR. STRONGMAD,

WHAT IS UP WITH YOU? YOU ARE SO CUTE! I THINK YOU ARE SO CUTE!

GIRL STRONGMAD,
GIRL STRONG MAD"

DELETED! MAYBE E-DATING ISN’T FOR ME! THAT IS OKAY, AS LONG AS I HAVE MY HOT ALBUMS!

THIS ISN’T HELPING ME WITH MY PORTUGESE!

Damn republicans with their Machiavellian vote manipulation tactics.

Pauly Shore, the Shia LaBeouf of the late 80s, made a movie in 2004 where he faked his death in order to get attention, which ponders his legacy. In spite of all expectations a rational mind would have, it is not a terrible, terrible movie. Essentially an hour and a half of B and C list cameo appearances, it might as well have been an excellent episode of Family Guy without the Griffins. Which is damning it with faint praise, but it is a Pauly Shore movie, so it could’ve been a really horrible episode of Family Guy with Pauly Shore in it.

I did not sit down to this with masochistic tendencies. I watched "Pauly Shore is Dead" because it was on at one in the morning and I’ve got a cough that won’t let me sleep. So I watched a bunch of big name celebrities, many of whom I hate, half ass act like they miss Pauly Shore. Rubbing salt into the wound, there is a subplot that allows Pauly to dress like the unibomber, wave a very obviously plastic squirt gun around as if it were real, all while he snickered and spazzed his limbs in odd directions.

After the whole damn movie inevitably goes down the drain, Sam Kinison makes an appearance as Pauly’s guardian angel. The scene might have been a little deeper than what I got out of it, because I only know who Sam Kinison is because most of my friends are twenty years older than me. In fact, Britney Spears comments on how dated every joke in this movie is during her cameo, by calling someone to find out who Pauly Shore is and commenting, "Oh, he was on MTV before I was born." This moment with Kinison still kind of drives home the point of the film, in an all caps "THIS IS THE POINT OF THE FREAKING MOVIE" kind of way: dried up, shitty actors are not just walking non-sequitors that will be forgotten very soon, they are also train wrecks that haven’t happened yet, but nobody is stopping. All throughout the movie, I was picking out random faces and saying to myself, "Hey, there’s that guy I vaguely know who just went to jail," or "Hey, there’s that random chick from some thing I kinda remember who is dead now," or "Ooh, hey, some jerk on the E channel said that guy is dying from hepatitis b."

So Pauly Shore is not dead. But he will be, probably soon, and he’ll probably die a sad millionaire who nobody understood, exactly as he put it in his movie. He’ll either get two minutes of mourning between stories on bioluminescent cats and someone getting tazered, like James Brown and Jimmy Carter, or he will get a month or two of MSM weeping, like Anna Nicole Smith and Randy Newman. The twist to the whole movie, is that apparently he’s aware of this, and is pretty much resigned to his station. That idea, which exists inside and outside of this really bad movie, makes "Pauly Shore is Dead" not terrible to sit through. In fact, it offers a gut twisting message about this miserable existence. Or maybe I’m just depressed from coughing up green phlegm while watching a filking Pauly Shore movie.

What the Hell is this thing?

Mass Effect has been out for three weeks. In that time, it has sold 1,000,000 copies. With regular and special edition SKUs, that translates to over $60,000,000 in sales. Halo 3 recently passed the five million copies sold mark. That is well over $300,000,000 in sales, with the more expensive SKUs, including one that retailed for $129.99, profits may be as much as $400,000,000 – $420,000,000. And it ain’t even Christmas yet.

Comparing the game industry and the movie industry this year, the game industry made more profit. With Hollywood lobbing crappy propaganda films and botching the major franchise releases, and also Fred Claus, it has been a rough year for movies, and this is not the first time this has happened. But you look at the amount of competition to break into Hollywood versus what it takes to make it in the gaming world, and it is disgusting, but they both mostly cater to the same audience – 12 year old boys. Maybe the video game industry is on a bit of a bubble, as the MMO craze may end up being a fad, and there are no doubt missteps to be made with major sequels to established titles. But still! Put down $15,000,000 for development – and get literally twenty times that on your investment… Halo is it’s own animal, and that doesn’t happen every time. But it’s like every single successful game is the budget equivalent of The Blair Witch Project. No doubt there are and will be flops, but my mind is just blown by these big, beautiful numbers.

Tis rare that spam forces its way past the might gmail blockade, but when it does, it is usually a doozy. Either the Chinese want my bank account number, or I won the Brazilian super lotto, or that old favorite:

I had to read this ten times to make up my mind whether this was a real junk e-mail, or if it was something I sent myself when I got bored. There’s broken english, a play on infomercial talk, and it’s about penises. At this point I must wonder, am I imitating them, or am I them? Is my life leading up to a twist? While thinking that I am Jack, am I actually Jack’s prostate?

Only the people at MegaDik know for sure.

Paris Hilton has destroyed the world. It is at times like these, I wonder if Gabe has pissed off Tyco. Per his prophecy:

"I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one.

When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming—as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then, as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin.

I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth."

And now:

I can hear children. Screaming.

Because I’m waging my future on the video game industry, it’s something I like to keep an eye on from all sides. A big industry story that’s been getting a lot of attention on the net for the past two weeks has been the firing of Jeff Gerstmann, an editor at GameSpot who has worked there for over ten years. The big conspiracy, very simply, goes something like this:

1. Jeff gave a negative review to a title called Kane and Lynch.
2. The game’s publisher pulled their advertising from the site.
3. Jeff was fired for hurting the company by losing those advertising dollars.

There’s only a little circumstantial evidence that point to this being true. Chief amongst them, one of the higher ups at GameSpot is a game advertising guru, who supposedly was pushing the writers for softer critiques so that the company could maintain friendly relations with game publishers. I don’t believe what is commonly believed is true.

1. Why go after such a big fish? Jeff worked for GameSpot for over a decade. He had a very strong personality, and even developed something of a fan following. When a critic site has to respond to outside pressure, they usually maintain as much of their journalistic integrity as they can by gutting a freelancer. Nobody cares about them – they’re just random names on a page. Gerstmann was a site staple since the Nintendo 64 days.

2. If the review hurt the publisher so bad, why aren’t they pulling it? Apparently, the video review of Kane and Lynch was taken down, and the text review has been edited – but it’s still up, and the 6.0 score still stands. So, what’s up with all that? The video review was taken down due to bad production values, but the site is apparently sticking by Jeff’s final piece.

3. Gerstmann is a polarizing figure, and a bit of a d-bag in his writing. I’m guessing this is why he was really fired. By all means, good luck to him in the future, but he did have somewhat of a reputation of going harder on games than most other critics. Somewhat of a saying on the Penny Arcade forums is that, whenever a game gets reviewed by IGN before GameSpot, all you have to do to predict the GameSpot score is subtract 1.5 from the IGN score. That sort of negative attitude at the site is going to be Jeff’s legacy there, as he helped establish that.

I could be wrong, of course. Counter to my beliefs, some of Jeff’s fellow employees are anonymously telling people the real scary truth of the situation – that is, if you believe they’re actually Jeff’s fellow employees. But if I was suddenly fearing for my job and feeling like I was under the thumb of my greedy corporate boss’ boss, the last thing I’d do is start flapping my lips and attracting digg.com’s attention.

The internet can sensationalize mundane daily activities. I wouldn’t be surprised if in this situation a guy getting canned for being an ass escalated into questioning an established finger of the new media’s journalistic integrity. Whether it is true or not, the trust people had in GameSpot has been damaged, but in a few months, it’ll all blow over and nobody will remember it any more. What the industry is actually suffering from right now, is a slow news cycle.