[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Playing  ]
And thus the internet did become the ultimate environment for anonymity and second identity. We can change our names at any time we want. Our avatar. Our tone in our writing. Even our environment. With a few clicks of the mouse and taps on the keyboard, suddenly, I am transported to October 1999, a time of hope and prosperity. Freshman year of High School, thoughts of lost virginity, Michael Jackson jokes on Letterman, Bill Clinton jokes on Leno, and my escape plan, college, was only four years away.

Even this layout reminds me of Pier One commercials starring Kirstie Alley. And I’m okay with that. What next? Dive back into some old literature. Beatnik blues cafe stuff from the fifties and sixties, the collected works of Neal Cassidy and Allen Ginsberg, Phillip K. Dick and turn of the twentieth century worship. Anything done stream-of-conciousness, China Mieville, and MST3K movie marathons. crooOOOOOOOOW!

I have six more days off until I work again. Until then, I intend to go nuts. I think I’ll put my ugly Leia action figure up on ebay and see who salutes. Maybe claim that there’s an image of the Virgin Mary in the hologram on the side in the item description.

Well, I just burned through my first run of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. That was a pain in the ass. Controls that decided whether or not to respond on a whim, PS2 graphics, game crashing bugs, and an RPG upgrade system that pretty much did everything for you, making the choices you made if you took the system into your own hands feel futile.

Its cool seeing Spider-Man next to Wolverine next to Iron Man next to Ghost Rider, kicking ass and unleashing the fury on some Doom Bots and Asgardian Viking warriors… But it would be a lot cooler if they would just abandon the freakin’ dungeon crawler look. The environments look like crap, the characters look like crap, there’s no lip synch in-game… Basically, the whole game is alternating between the a-button and b-button while trying to get from one side of the map to another.

All of the character pretty much control exactly the same. There is virtually no incentive to choose to play as Colossus over Luke Cage, or Spider-Man over Deadpool, or Captain America over Mr. Fantastic. The selection of characters is initially pretty impressive, and its fun to put together teams like the Fantastic Four or the New Avengers, but its all cosmetic, which eventually becomes boring. There’s also a lot of heavy hitters missing due to rights issues. Volition has The Punisher busy cleaning up New York, Ubisoft has The Hulk under lockdown, and there are zero (0) characters from any of the Max comics. Not even Keanu Reeves as Constantine. In other words, this is a very kid friendly game, and if you have a nephew to keep quiet for a few hours, sit him down with this and you can go use the internet in peace. I, however, hated this game.

Ultimate Alliance had a lot of potential and failed me miserably. It had a lot of hype behind it, and a lot of that hype carried into the initial 8.0ish reviews. In the end, this game disappoints more than Ang Lee’s big gay Hulk movie.

[  Mood: Cool ]
NES/Famicon – Heterosexual male. Suffered greatly from the frat boy mentality that the only way to express committment was through pain. Almost every game for it is impossibly hard, a great way for those who aren’t looking to get into any long relationships to get out of them quickly. Gave V.D. to Peach, Zelda and Samus Aran.

SNES – Bisexual transgender shemale. There was something for everyone on this console. Games were so fun, that you felt dirty after playing them. Gina Gershon in 32 bit form.

Nintendo 64 – Asexual male. The first console to have a phallic controller.

Between James Bond, Mario Kart and Bomberman 64, it had no need for the touch of a woman.

Gamecube – Virgin female. Total chick console.

Wii – Most fun girlfriend ever. She likes go karts, paintball, bowling and cartoons. You don’t want the relationship to go forward nor end, you just want these lovey dovey days to last forever, and so does she.

[  Mood: Confused ]
I was clicking around this site, looking for a deal on Astroboy DVD sets for my dad, when I noticed they had an adult section. I’m thinking, "Yeah, okay, hentai, I’m kinda passed that at this point in my life. Might as well, just to have something to make an obscure reference to at a later date."

Seriously. I got burned out on cartoon porn after dating a girl who loved it far more than I did – but she’d only watch it if it had the original Japanese voices. Apparently girls who both look and sound like they’re twelve getting tentacle raped turned her on. Not that I’m complaining, she was a freak in the bedroom and a… also a freak on the street, probably why that didn’t last.

After I got passed the idea of a Hello-Kitty vibrator and "girlfriend knee pillow," I stumble upon this mysterious, gellatenous device:

That, my friends, is not what it looks like. Unless you thought it was a pocket vagina, in which case, it’s exactly what it looks like. I am so very tempted to order one of these. Not for personal use, mind you, as it looks wrong and dangerous and disgusting. BUT it would be awesome to go digging around for my car keys, and whoosh, here comes the pocket vagina, straight into my best friend’s hand, "Hold this for a second, I need to get to my keys." "What’s this?" "Pocket vagina."

Or just leave it lying around in public. When I was a freshmen in High School, I was once so bored that I left a note on every fifth car in a grocery store parking lot that simply read, "Sorry about the ding." The desperation on people’s faces as they scanned their car up and down in every direction from every angle, the angst, the confusion, the pain, the laughter, the tears… They should have sent a poet.

Anyway, leaving a pocket vagina lying around in, say, a dentist’s office or on top of a public library computer’s keyboard, maybe with a note with an arrow pointing to it that simply said, "pocket vagina." I’d be busy for days, waiting to see if someone tried to pick it up and run off with it, or freak out, or sniff it, or Pan knows what.

What’s yen to dollars? Like one dollar = one Japanese grotto? Something like that… Or is that pesos…

[  Mood: Distorted ]
[  Currently: Playing soccer. ]
Saddam Hussein, Gerald Ford, Peter Boyle and James Brown. Men with so much in common. I’m next. THAT WAS INAPPROPRIATE. Oh, gah, forget it. The last line Hunter Thompson wrote was "This won’t hurt." I bet he was wrong. It must hurt like a super son of a bitch to blow your brain out. Like hitting your head on the corner of a half open cupboard times a thousand. And what if that’s your eternity? Before Islam, people in the middle east believed that you would be trapped in the last sensation you had when you were alive. Or maybe that was the Incans. Yeah, Persians believed your spirit would travel into a cave filled with dust and darkness with no silence, and you’d have to wait patiently until the end of time without anything to do or anyone to talk to. I’d prefer feeling like the cupboard thing, because holy crap, do I get bored easily. Its my entire generation. The news has to come at me from eight different directions with a bunch of whooshy sounds and gongs and ominous warnings of the immediate future to keep my attention, and even then, I’m like, "Ohhhhhhhh, tort reform! Fuck that, time to play Far Cry!" And then there goes my two liter of Sprite flying at the screen. I don’t understand the silent "gh" sound. "Ghost" is okay be me, I don’t care. But "lighter"? Whiskey tango foxtrot? I need that on a sound board for when I make phone calls. That and a bunch of Schwarzenegger sound bites. "I’M A COP, YOU IDIOT!" should be my entire answering machine message. I have no idea to access my messages, so it doesn’t matter. Its all the luck of the draw. It’s 5:30 in the morning, I’m back from New Year’s, good times. I’m worried that if I sleep now, I will pee. I am waiting for the alcohol to go through my system before I sleep, so that I have nothing to worry about when I wake up. It just hit me before I started all this. So very recent, so painful. I’m not waking up tomorrow. That dark cave of dust and silence thing sounds pretty good now that I’m anticipating a hang over. I tried that Kahlua stuff tonight – bleh. Five percent alcohol. That’s what my mother’s breast milk was when I was nursing. I also hate that commercial for Bacardi mojitos, because I do enjoy Bacardis, but don’t tell me that the people who drink it have great butts and dress nicely. That’s a damn lie. It’s basically Sprite. Dangerous stuff, you don’t feel shit until you’re on the hotel room floor, waiting to get to sleep. I did that in Vegas, went to sleep drunk, woke up drunk. Never want to do that again. Gotta maintain. I maintain. I have only rarely blown chunks, maybe two or three times in my life. First time I ever got drunk, I was in Tijuana with some friends. Finished a bottle of Tequila by myself, and was hallucinating and freaking out. I thought that I was a Mexican Buddhist monk, and it was my job to help the spirit of the worm at the end of the bottle to transcend into the wheel of life and be reincarnated. BUT I ONLY KNEW TWO YEARS OF HIGH SCHOOL SPANISH. I didn’t mean to yell, sorry. But the worm didn’t know english. He was Mexican. Most of the Mexicans in the U.S. don’t even speak English. What social resources do we have invested in to help Mexican tequila worms learn english? Particularly the disembodied souls of those trapped in a centimeter thick glass bottle? I don’t drink tequila any more.

[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Working in four hours. ]
Main street is lit up. Soft Christmas music rumbles low in the ambience. Elaborate reef decorations hang over head between three story buildings, one every fifteen feet. On one end of the road, between city hall and the town’s high class italian restaurant, a massive Christmas tree shines and glitters with all the warmth and love of a hug from a grandparent. On the other end of the road is Cinderella’s castle, its color changing every one hundred seconds into one of one hundred eighty four palettes and patterns, each one more lovely than the next. Electric lights suddenly turn on, turning the sad lack of energy that comes with dusk into an inspiring and energetic beginning of a great night. Then there is a slight buzz in the air, and the Bing Crosby music grows louder – its eighty degrees at night, but its snowing. A Christmas miracle. A young boy in a Buzz Lightyear costume looked up at me from his stroller, his brown eyes opened as wide as possible, and he shouted "NIEVE VERDAD!" through his big, white smile. "That’s right, ranger," I smiled back, "Real snow." His family, still looking up at the black night sky, trying to swat a flake or two with their hand unsuccessfully, continued on to Tomorrowland.

Merry Christmas.

[  Mood: Confused ]
[  Currently: Playing Rainbow 6 Vegas ]
I loves me some Tom Clancy. I have a lot of family in the military (namely: all of them except me), so I got switched on to his novels at an early age. The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, NetForce… I’ve been cover to cover with them all, mainly on cross country flights. While all the stories have been good, ghost written or not, the videogames written in Clancy’s name have been sort of a mixed bag.

I read Rainbow Six the novel long before I played Rainbow Six the videogame. It was a great story about the UN’s need to form an international team of specialists to deal with terrorist threats by sharing playbooks. Thus, cultural and strategic diversity gave the team its name, "Rainbow."

The Six of the title is actually a military nomer for team leader. And the team leader of Rainbow, the Six, is an iconic Clancy character, like Jack Ryan and Sam Fischer, named John Clark. Formerly a CIA spy and Navy SEAL, Clark is now an old man and has to stop the terrorists from the sidelines, sending his son in law and a bunch of European fruitloops after eco-terrorists and remnants from the IRA. Despite being full of diplomatic holes and unlikely terrorist team ups and leaps of logic in what foreign intelligence agencies are capable of piecing together, it was a great read and stank of foreshadowing to 9/11 – the first chapter takes place during a 747 hijacking by a group of Islamic suicide bombers, and back in the days when people in high places could get a permit to bring their gun on a plane.

This franchise inspired a series of videogames, titled after the books, but only the first few games included John Clark, the man who literally was Rainbow Six. I’m almost through the first level of the latest installment, Rainbow Six Vegas, and so far, there’s only five members of Rainbow, so its not really Rainbow, there’s no John Clark, so there’s no Six, and its taken place in Mexico, so no Vegas. Okay, that’s fine, it’s still early in, maybe things will change. But what I can bitch about is that the game has decided to take a more narrative approach, whereas earlier Rainbow Six games focused on tactics. This means that you can take one or, if you’re lucky, two shots before you keel over dead, whereas earlier games also allowed you to die easily, but it let you switch perspectives to your next team member in line to continue the mission and finish the fight. The character that died had a face, a name, a specialty and ranking in that specialty (demolitions, infiltration, assault, computers, etc.), a back story and a medical history. If they were wounded in the leg, they’d limp and could take a couple missions off to heal up. If they died on the mission, they were gone, and their specialties and utilities could no longer be used. You’d feel bad that not everyone made it home, even though the character development was minimal, if not non-existant. You’d become frustrated if you lost a team, especially if your failure meant that you’d lost someone who was the best at what they did.

Now things are frustrating in a whole new way.

The change in gameplay philosophy ensures that you’ll be constantly be going through the same process over and over – play for thirty seconds, turn a corner, get shot in the face, get pissed off, grow angrier as the game takes a full minute to reload, play for thirty five seconds, avenge your earlier death, get killed two seconds later, get pissed off, etc. Vicious cycle. It does not help that the friendly A.I. is borderline retarded, sometimes seeming to be waiting to be stumbled upon and killed, while the enemy A.I. is nothing short of genius and relentless.

In the end, whether this game is fun or good or not may boil down to how much work went into the story, since the strategy elements have been neutered. The last Rainbow Six game was not much better than a direct to video Jean Claude Van Damme movie, or maybe it was worse. So far in level one, things aren’t sounding too bad – something about Coyotes smuggling terrorists through the massive idiotic holes in the U.S./Mexico border. You know, the ones that someone can ride an elephant through preceeded by a mariachi band and not get caught.

Maybe things will turn around later. Who knows? If I can find my Zoloft, I just might be able to beat the first level before I lose it and drop the disc in the nearest gas station urinal.

Yeah, Mike, I’ve seen a *lot* of this game.

I think it’s a good idea to start creating more Christian fiction that is easily accessable by everyone, all ages, races, and yeah, especially look to include non-Christians in our fun. Marketing people are also wise to continue hyping the older stuff like Narnia and Phillip K. Dick stuff and (so I’ve heard in a convuluted and confusing assed way) LotR, all of which has been successful in the past and continues to be because they are really, really good times.

HELL YES! I mean…

But the Left Behind series doesn’t hinge on the books being really, really good times, they hinge on being hyped from the pulpit. Which worked really well, by the way, especially in smaller churches and on BTV (Baptist Television. I’m serious, it’s in extended cable. There’s a tubby black woman with floppy tits jumping around screaming on it right now). The writing translates the authors into characters in a post apocalypse world, and the whole story is totally narcicistic and is all about them and their courageous adventures and deeds, and how they assume the world will go down, and its all very petty and small and unrealistic, and I hate this series, you get the point.

So, we start with a book series I don’t really respect, but in all fairness, other people liked the story and I’m not that big on the whole "book thing," anyway. That’s why I’ve got a picture of Stiltman getting nailed in the balls with a rocket pinned in front of my toilet. Because I don’t need Reader’s Digest, I just need to see something and laugh a few times, and all I have to do is tear out a page of Perdido Street Station and my business is done.

Now on to calling the game a piece of shit before I’ve played it. Its like the developers asked themselves, "What would be the least fucking relevant genre to host this series in an interactive way that will totally cut off the console market, yet appeal to the eight PC gamers who love heavily censored violence and shitty graphics? OH I KNOW, AN RTS!" It’s the least narrative type of game that you can present, and since the focal point of the books is how two men survived the apocalypse, I’m guessing it’s not going to translate the story very well, which is okay, because it sucked. In a way, the genre itself is sacriligious, because in RTS games, you play God.

Its Alanis Morrissette. Get it? Because it’s ironic? Bah.

Anyway, here we have a game that has, from the looks of things so far and for whatever reason, been poorly made on the cheap, appeals only to the Christian gamer market, focuses on the "fuck you, non-believers, you’re going to suffer and then go to Hell" part of the new testament, and is of a genre that has never told a story very well, ever, and IMHO, was done after Starcraft in 1997. I’m guessing some Christian geek in his basement was playing Red Alert 2 and said to himself, "You know what’s missing from this game? FEAR OF GOD." He slapped on the name of a Christian franchise that was already popular and voila, a game for fifty bucks cheap. And you know what the worst part of it is? Some asshole I know is going to think, "Well… He’s Catholic… He’s a gamer… What can I get for a Catholic gamer?" AND THEN BAM!

It’s right there waiting for me under the Carone family Christmas tree without a return receipt, forcing me to re-gift it as soon as possible to make some other poor sap who doesn’t want it miserable. Or I can use it to piss off orphans by donating it to charity. That’d be the Christian thing to do. Heh heh heh, stupid orphans.

And I have no idea what the Hell the vikings are all about. Those guys show up in the weirdest places.

[  Mood: Confused ]
[  Currently: Eating both. ]
Now is the winter of our discount tent. As it is ten o’clock in the post-meridian, I find myself having waited too long to order a pizza, and have three choices.

1. Go out to eat at Denny’s or Wendy’s.
2. Finish off the ice cream in the fridge.
3. Stop getting fat by eating at 10 P.M.

If I go out to eat, I will spend upwards of five dollars on a meal that tastes like shit. If I finish the ice cream here, I will be hopped up on delicious sugar, and I will not have said ice cream for a later date. The other contents of my refridgerator are as follows:

11 Dasani Water bottles
1 Jar of Publix Brand Yellow Mustard
1 Tub of Heinz Ketchup
6 Sam Adams Boston Lagers
1 Empty box to something

My father told me the other day that these are the best years of my life. I am going to Wendy’s and will stop by 7/11 for toilet paper. That sentence was not a non sequitur.

[  Mood: Evil ]
[  Currently: Watching the internet. ]
1. Lock them in a room with Christmas in the Stars playing in the background.
2. Yell, "WHAT DID YOU DO WITH WALT’S HEAD, MURDERER!?" at a guy in a Mickey costume at Disney World in front of a bunch of kids.
3. Sneak up on a duck and punt it into a crowd.
4. Raise your leg, grab your ankle and do the Roger Rabbit while farting in an elevator.
5. Take a bite out of every piece of food at a cafeteria lunch line, and then put it all back. Then vomit on the register, and announce, "My what a lovely tea party."
6. Constantly talk about how much better the Star Wars prequels would be if it had been more like your eight years old fan fiction.
7. Be fat and brag about your black belt.
8. Approach a podium at a Science Fiction convention and refuse to step down until someone asks a question about your book.
9. Sit between rows of pews and meditate on the Buddha while chanting in the middle of mass.
10. Naked public yoga.

Do I regret moving from California? Honestly, a little.