Ole Bald Angus the Monk

Bad Heads

2009-03-29T08:41:00.009-06:00

I'm playing NWN "2" now (I bought the "gold" editition and the "Storm of Whatever" expansion), and its okay, I guess.

I can see why it wasn't too popular, right off the bat, its got a huge selection of really really really really really fugly-looking heads that you are required to "customize" your character with during the painfully slow and pointlessly tedious and complicated Dungeons&Dragouts process of character creation.

Its like they started out with an ugly head and then squashed its features around in photoshop or something to make all the other heads.

And the "high resolution textures and lighting" makes their skin look all diseased and full of pockmarks and liverspots and slick and shiny patches of roleplay-inspiring mutton-grease or something.

Seriously, I haven't seen a collection of heads this bad since Morrowind first came out.

'Member that?

Haha those heads were so bad I remember laughing out loud when I first saw 'em.

And the women are just as bad as the male characters.

Anyways, it don't matter how good the rest of a game is if it starts out by confronting the player with a huge and unrelenting Array of Bad Heads, most people will never get past the Bad Head Syndrome, that's like a Rule of Game Design or something, you don't want to play a game where every character in the game reminds you of somebody you hate from work or your next door neighbor or whatever.

And its not like you need a ton of good heads, all you need is one decent-enough head to get past the Bad Head Syndrome, like that head with horns from the original NWN, or the bald one with the eye-patch, those were good enough, or even something over-generalized and simple, with two dots for eyes and a hole for the mouth, something without the huge nostrils and the crazy caterpillar eyebrows and bulging eyeballs and all the other Martin Short-looking details, that would be good enough for government work and get you a pass on the rest of it, that's the beauty of the UO-Style One Vague and Featureless Head Fits All Character Creation system ahaha.

So whatever, I finally broke down and picked this Swarthy Italian looking head, 'cause it didn't bother me too much, once I made him bald and turned his skin black so I couldn't see anything except for the whites of his eyes, and I started playing the game as a wizard instead of a fighter, which everybody knows is what you are supposed to play in a NWN game, but wizards are pretty powerful in this one and you don't have to run around so much like a little kid clicking on shit to make sure your dude stays within melee range of every damn thing in the game, you can just put the game on easy mode (so the fireballs won't kill your own team) and bomb the hell out of huge groups at once.

Plus, at least in the Original Campaign, you can pretty much rest after every fight and get all your spells back and do it again.

Plus, you can switch between all the different spells you got to keep yourself from getting bored, 'cause that's what Wizards do, y'know, keep a few fireballs in reserve and throw a Tasha's Infectious Laughter into the mix or something, just to keep yer shit fresh and see what the hell kinda spell effects they put in the game fer everything besides Web, Grease, Evard's Tentacles, Magic Missile and Fireball ahaha.

So I played about halfway through the Original Campaign, and got bored, even though it doesn't totally suck or anything.

I mean, its pretty fun if you get a jones for some old-timey Dungeons and Dragons Baldur's Gate-ish fireball throwing-around-a-map junk.

Especially if you extract stuff from the 2da zips and edit 'em so there's no casting-and-skill penalties for wearing full plate and remove that crap that makes a Air Elemental Guy level slower and you use all the cheat codes to give yourself all the cool feats and equipment and 18s in every stat.

And then I skipped the second expansion (which is supposed to be really great according to Roleplayers, which means its really annoying and hard) and tried the newest one, the Storm of Znake People, which is kinda like the game I wanted to make for the web a while back, where you run a trading empire or something, 'cept its kinda ponderous and I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to be doing.

What's funny is that I actually like the story-line in this one a lot, 'cause it doesn't remind me of the ten million Icewind Dale games I've played.

I mean, the dialogue and stuff is actually written really well, compared to the same old tired-ass rowdy scottish dwarves and lame roleplaying bonny-lass fair maiden dribble.

And its mixed with a little bit of Mount&Blade, 'cause you do all the overland battles like that, 'cept all that does is show off how brutally crappy the combat in NWN is compared to like, two lines of thirty dudes on horses thundering along and slamming into each other with a huge crash of lances and stuff ahaha.

But it is making me get a jones to build a decent D&D-ish city-and-fort-and-army-building beat-back-the-supernatural-wilderness trading-colonization-empire type of game again.

Which reminds me of all the cool junk Colbey and Squash Monster all them were talking about a while back.

I'm just about at that point where I know it'd be funner to make something than play something.

Strange Meat

2009-03-15T10:18:00.010-06:00

Liam Neeson is your daddy.

And if it isn't Little Alex as the Bad Guy on the Radio playing crazy early synth versions of patriotic march tunes that match up perfectly with the crap in the mall scene from a Clockwork Orange.

And the next time I see Ex-B I gotta show him this Republic of Dave thing 'cause Ex-b's IS President Dave of the Republic of Dave (which would make me Bob, Second in Command of the Army of Dave, totally, down to the thing where I'd become the evil dictator of the Empire of Dave if I ever got elected and everything ahaha awhellyah).

I can see how, if you just played through the game and followed the main storyline, you'd be done with the thing in like, two hours.

But the best fun is just wandering all over hell, exploring one weird little post-apocalyptic scene after another with a Church of Bob Ward-Cleaver-looking guy in ghetto-ass raider-rags and horned-rimmed glasses listening to the Andrew Sisters and Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye on the radio while poking through trash bins full of radioactive zombie corpses for cans of pork-n-beans in the ruins of a pyschological experiment from the 50s with a sniper rifle and nine bullets, I think the main storyline actually takes the game down a notch (although the Big Explosions Killer Robots Hollywood Ending is pretty hilariously awesome) from the One Weird Episode After Another free-form style of things.

"There you are, Gary!"

"Gary!!!"

Dude, seriously, the kewlie Dharma Project Stuff from Lost is pretty much straight-up-the-middle run-of-the-mill Fallout Junk, minus Zombies and Comedy and Explanation and Powered Armor and Post Apocalyptic Scenery ahaha.

Anyways, if you know what I'm talkin' 'bout so far and you haven't tried it and you could try it then mebbe you oughta try it heh.

My brother let his kids play it on my machine a couple weeks ago and it made me laugh to see how much they loved it (especially 'cause they really do look like little Gerber Baby Norman Rockwell Kids with Buzzcuts from the 50s, we were eating barbecue and they just wanted to get dinner over with so they could go back and play the game s'more so they were acting all nice and taking our dishes away for us and everything) but later on they had nightmares about zombies ahaha.

The funniest thing with that is that they had never played a WASD game before (and so, being kids, they picked it up in seconds), and the littlest one, the Brain, (he's seven) was on the keyboard, and he was getting chased by Vicious Dogs across the landscape, and I was telling him to turn around and shoot but he was too scared, so he just kept running without looking behind him with all this mad dog biting noise shit on his ass as he runs and then finally he manages to jump a fence that the dogs couldn't jump and he escaped and then the room exploded into cheers.

But after that he made his older brother (Pinkie) take the helm to do all the outdoor scenes and he just took over when they were in town.

Pinkie (who's nine) just puts his head down and charges into enemy fire swinging the Police Baton like a dude having a seizure AHAHA its ain't pretty but it got the job done and it made us all laugh.

Yah, mebbe I shouldn't have let 'em play the game, 'cause they're like, too little, and everybody should be Amish, or whatever, but screw that, I told their mother that the game was about clubbing cans of tomato sauce and babies open with a tire iron and she was fine with it.

And I gotta get 'em trained on WASD so they can team up with me and their dad in games y'know they got all these kickass coop games we could play.

The gore didn't actually bother 'em at all, it was the face of the friendly Ghoul Bartender they musta noticed (in passing) while they were playing, something I didn't even think about, that gave 'em zombie nightmares.

'Cause that was actually the only zombie we even came near, y'know?

Zombie nightmares are pretty awesome though y'know I mean I'd have to say that you prolly got a little ripped of in life if the package didn't come complete with the occasional kickass zombie nightmare every now and again y'know so I don't feel too bad about being responsible for that.

Oh yah, and then, for the Grand Finale of the night, we set off the nuke in Megaton and watched it explode from a hotel balcony miles away, which is not to be missed, so that was fun.

Tell me I'm not the awesomest Uncle to have ever ahaha.

Girth

2009-02-21T12:35:00.024-06:00

I got big huge skull-crushing gorilla-mitts for hands.

I ain't real good with measurements, y'know, but I'd estimate that my middle finger is like, at least nine inches long.

Yah, my knuckles are the size of marshmallows, man.

Mmm-hmm.

Yah, imagine that mouse you are holding was the size of a strawberry or a chicken nugget, that's what its like to be me, I gotta pick it up like its a robin's egg and be all delicate with it to keep from hitting all the buttons at once and mashing it.

Yah, see, I need me a mouse about the size of a truck tire.

That's why I went with the Microsoft Sidewinder one, I saw reviews where all these gorilla-mitt folks were like "thank Zek its big 'nuff for a guy of my enormous natural size!"

Heh heh heh.

I also got the microsoft sidewinder keyboard just 'cause its black and it glows red (OOH! PURTY LITEZ!) and I wanna see how crappy it is and if it can do anything cool with windows.

And I like the fact that Microsoft (or whoever designed the damned thing) has absolutely no clue about gaming and that I can't hold down more than a couple keys at once, on accident, y'know, since my fingers are so huuuuuuge HO HO HO HAR HAR HAR *cough*

(Actually I don't care about not being able to reload while I crouch and move forward or whatever, I been playing FPSs on ghetto-ass keyboards for so long it'd prolly paralyze me with confusion if I could do that haha).

See those two Big Huge Knobs on that thing?

Now see, that's what I'm talkin' 'bout, man, I need me some Big Huge Knobs like that, 'cause of my tremendous meat-hooks, they shoulda put a whole big honkin' row of gigantic-ass knobs like that at the top of the thing, awhellyah, that woulda been awesome ahaha.

Dem logitech G-whatevers looked all cool and everything, too, wit dem fancy liddle display screenies, and dat mite be fine fer youse if youse gots cute liddle "chipmunk" hands or sumpthin like dat, but dats too liddle fer us Big Guys to use, dats like sumpthin dat goes inna tiny liddle dollhouse fer baby girlz and stuff.

And I like the whole Saitek 80s Plastic Toy Cyborg thingie but there are gonna be times when you don't want people to know at-a-single-glance that you are some kinda big huge scifi nerd from the 80s.

The Moment of Truth

2009-02-21T10:58:00.010-06:00

I been thinking about the first computer I ever ordered all the parts for and put together myself.

The parts came separately packaged in this huge-ass box that you could've easily fit four or five humans in comfortably.

And so I unpacked everything and I wired everything up on the kitchen table.

And there was that first time you turn it on, after wiring it all up, where this horrible feeling of dread comes over you, this feeling that something terrible is gonna happen, that your mad scientist powers aren't quite up to snuff or you missed something or you didn't do something right and now you are gonna fry a bunch of these new super expensive components that you can barely afford to start with and you definitely can't afford to replace and it would take days to replace 'em even if you could afford to do it and all that.

That's the Moment of Truth, y'know.

The moment where all the bullshit spinning around in your head is finally put to the test.

There's no way to be awake enough to be sure you did everything right, no matter how many cigarettes you smoke and no matter how much coffee you drink.

Anyways, the first time I turned on the first computer I ever put together myself, there was a moment where nothing happened.

Followed by a little hissing noise.

Followed by a moment where the case filled up entirely with a thick gray curling soup of impenetrable smoke.

And then finally all the fans whirring along in the machine and the massive ceiling fan above the kitchen table instantly distributed the smoke throughout the room so that the entire dining area became a thick gray fog that nobody could see through.

Somebody was with me in the room, I don't remember who, but I didn't even get to go through this horrible process alone and maintain my dignity ahaha.

So then I turned the damned thing off, luckily my finger had never left the switch, or I prolly would have had a hard time finding it in all the smoke heh.

And then I waited 'till all the smoke cleared.

And then I poked around in the case until I discovered that the source of all my problems was that the wiring that came from the front connectors on the case (the hard-drive and power lights and stuff, they didn't have USB in those days but I think there was prolly audio jacks and junk) were pinched and shorted by the frame and structure of the case, and this HUGE amount of smoke had come from a tiny little bit of fried wire insulation.

It wasn't something I did, it was the guy that put the case together that did it, but I hadn't noticed it, and that's all that really matters, in the end.

And so I fixed all that (I actually soldered new wires on the crap, I had been an electronics bench technician while I was in college to be a computer guy and robot programmer), and everything was good, none of my "good stuff" got torched or anything.

But I'll never forget that deal with the suspense and hitting the button and the smoke pouring out and everything, I mean, it couldn't have been more cartoony and horrible, not even in a dream, with the ceiling fan strumming the fog and making it spin and the fans in the case spewing forth turbine jet streams of smoke, the whole deal, that was total mad scientist shit at its best, the special effects were perfect.

So, whatever, y'know, I worked on my karma a bit, and I learned a lot (the hard way, obviously), and now that kinda stuff hardly ever happens to me anymore.

But I figger its good to share the disaster I was greeted with when I first showed up to the nascar hillbilly of computers scene originally, y'know, like a dumb country boy with pockets full of hopes and dreams and not a whole lot else 'cause I had already been tricked out of all my money by fast-talking city folks peddling all sorts of magical ointments and devices along the way.

You won't get far if you can't take a few punches, right out of the gate, but you learn a little bit from every punch.

And in the end, you'll have a whole lot of stupid stories that you can laugh about with your buddies, if nothing else.

Nascar Hillbilly Cyborg

2009-02-21T10:00:00.005-06:00

Welp I ordered my new computer.

Some of it is currently on its way to Des Moines, Iowa.

And other parts of it are still sleeping in a warehouse in New Jersey, with no idea that they're going to be selected out of the pile to become the property of me.

Its awesome how you can track things nowadays, I mean, it'd drive me crazy, 'cause I hate waiting, but it would be kinda cool to see my stuff suddenly taking a wrong turn so that it ended up travelling all over world in the wrong directions, carried to exotic islands in the swamp on rafts and dragged by Yaks to strange places in the mountains, before showing up at my door covered in postal scribblings in ancient languages and cave paintings of extinct animals.

The parts that are on their way to Des Moines are probably in a truck right now, flying along on a snowy highway in a blizzard, while the truck driver and some skanky-looking hitchhiker he picked up at Denny's are all hopped up on amphetamines, listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd and Johnny Cash or something, up front.

Perhaps there is no skanky-looking hitchhiker, perhaps its all in the truck driver's imagination, and he's talking to thin air, or perhaps the skanky-looking hitchhiker needs to be swapped out with a pet chimp, or a pancake waitress from IHOP, or perhaps the truck driver isn't listening to Johnny Cash, perhaps he's listening to whatever kinda Talk Radio they got between California and Des Moines, some preacher cooking with oil and brimstone, or some fake-voice joker playing fart sound effects, or some old fashioned thing on National Public Radio.

And maybe he's just blabbering with folks on the CB, although you ain't really allowed to have "rousing discussions on the CB," y'know, there's laws, you gotta keep it clean and stuff, 'cause of all the bitter Rules Lawyers and Spelling Nazis with scanners from Radio Shack who'll report you to the FCC or whover is in charge of that junk ahaha.

If there wasn't rules like that, then CB's would be way the hell more fun fer everybody, y'know, bunch of colorful truck drivers from all over the goddam place out on the open road yapping about female bodyparts and what a Denny's Breakfast does to your digestive system and how dumb-n-ugly the locals in every town were would be way the hell more fun to listen to than anything they got on the goddam radio nowadays ahaha.

Plus it'd be full of super-useful travel information, between bouts of swearing and laughing and wheezing and coughing and stuff.

Ah well.

What the hell was I talking about originally?

Ah yah.

The heaviest thing I bought was a new humongous-ass Uninterruptible Power Supply which is basically a bunch of car batteries welded together, if you ain't a computer guy.

That's one of the things that's still sleeping away in New Jersey.

I'm kinda worried about how pissed off that piece of equipment is gonna make everybody who has to move it along the way.

I mean, most of the guys at truckyards and stuff have forklifts, but like, my poor United Parcel Service guy, he's gonna blow a main cable trying to move that thing between his truck and my house heh.

Now that I had to think about typing it all out, its kinda funny that an Uninterruptible Power Supply is one of the worst things that a United Parcel Service guy might have to deliver ahaha.

Meh, won't be so funny when it shows up at my door all stabbed and shot-with-arrows and smashed to shit and covered in blood 'cause of how much it pissed everybody off along the way AHAHA.

Well, whatever.

Ultimate Version Service Pack 4

2009-02-15T21:28:00.008-06:00

So I was all like "I'm upgrading to Windows Vista 64-bit awhellyah!!!" and Ex-bouncer was all like "hahaha good luck with that!" so then I was all like "dude I'm gonna buy six thousand dollars worth of equipment and void all the warranties on everything by overclocking the hell out of it all while running water cooling and everything so I oughta be able to get it to boot up in under thirty minutes!"

Which reminds me of every damn time we didn't want to upgrade to a new windows OS going all the way back to Windows 95 and Windows 98, or the especially hard times that followed the introduction of Windows 2000 when nobody wanted to go there from Windows 98SE.

'Cause before Windows 95 we had Windows for Workgroups 4.11 and we didn't hesitate to jump off that piece of shit ahaha I mean the only thing you could play in Windows back in those days was Railroad Tycoon and Myst and stuff AHAHA.

"OMFG a little piece of the picture is animated in a strange and grainy way!"

But we need drivers for all the fancy new stuff, and hardware companies seem to have a hard enough time making one set of drivers that work, y'know, so there it is, Windows Vista 64-bit it is ahaha.

It is pretty horrible that the more powerful our technology gets, the more frakked up our software gets, I mean, I've read up on Windows Vista a bit and the stuff I seen so far makes NO SENSE AT ALL.

Lemme get this straight... the thing takes forever to boot and runs like crap in order to "speed things up?"

Who exactly is this OS trying to please y'know I don't see anybody else sitting here wtf is it chewing on my hard drive for when I didn't tell it to do anything, its like, trying to predict what I'm gonna do so it can help me do it faster but its taking forever for it to predict anything and its predictions are always wrong or something ahaha.

Meh, whatever, I'm sure Windows 2010 or Windows 11 will fix everything.

Fatality

2009-02-15T20:46:00.008-06:00

So I'm looking at sound cards and the cool new one is the Creative Labs Xi-fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro card.

I hate Creative Labs just like everybody else 'cause I'm one of those old guys that blames their crappy sound drivers for any problem that is completely mysterious.

That's why I need one.

Anyways I'm prolly gonna get this thing so I was reading about it and it turns out that "Fatal1ty" is some kinda modern "gamer sports action hero" guy 'cept he looks more like one of the Lollypop Guild midgets from the Wizard of Oz y'know where they make their tough little faces and bunch up their fists and kick at the dirt with their tiny little legs all frustrated and stuff awwwww so cuuute ahaha.

Check it:

And the card comes with a free cheap-o looking Creative Labs Fatal1ty Is Drooly Awersomes pair of Earmuffs.

So now all I need is a Fatal1ty t-shirt and a Fatal1ty Roadie jacket and some Fatal1ty Tattoos and a Fatal1ty Pen and Pencil Set with the Fatal1ty 64-bit Pencil Sharpener on the back and some gaudy turquoise jewelery to make my Fatal1ty Lover Fashion Ensemble complete ahaha.

Which reminds me, the new board for EVGA has a overclocker celebrity endorsement, this Shamino dude (who seems nice enough to answer questions and stuff for folks), but the thing that's weird about that one is that the new EVGA board is gonna be another one of these NF200 thingies like the Asus P6T6 WS Revolution with the chipset that gives you the non-existant boost of three true x16 pathways while it slows everything else on your board down to WORKSTATION CLASS battlecruiser speed heh.

I wonder if he wanted to have that on there, and then found out it sucked and wanted it off of there, or if EVGA gave him some cash and then told him he had to have that on there ahaha.

'Cause by my rather primitive caveman-like understanding and totally half-assed calculations, the new "overclocker celebrity endorsed overclocker board" doesn't stand a chance of benchmark testing as good as the old EVGA board no matter how awesome that poor guy is AHAHA I mean its a little creepy if you put yourself in his shoes he's prolly staying up all night trying to make that thing run better than it should so it doesn't drag his name through the mud AHAHA.

On the other hand, the original EVGA board tests way the hell down there at the bottom of the pile so at least he's got that going for him.

And there's dudes that got the Asus P6T6 WS Revolution doing more than 5ghz on liquid nitrogen or whatever, so you could always do something like that, I mean, the board might be crappy, but it can totally take a beating.

Although that's also sorta like shooting a 98 pound weakling with a gamma ray to turn him into the Incredible Hulk and shit ahaha.

The Case of the Case

2009-02-15T11:59:00.006-06:00

I'm pretty sure I'm gonna get this Coolermaster HAF 932 case.

'Cause while the cedar-chip and dog-hair collecting air filters on the Antec 1200 really appeal to a lumberjack like me, the HAF isn't just an ATX case (plus its a little fatter).

The Antec 1200 is really nice looking though, I like the side door better, and I like the way the angled usb jacks are layed out on the front, compared to the HAF.

But the Coolermaster seems to be a more serious cooling design.

I learned about this positive and negative air pressure deal from some guy on a forum, where he was explaining why his buddy's Coolermaster machine was better for heat than his Antec was (gotta remember that angle the next time I need to sell something to somebody ahaha).

Yah, he said the Antec creates negative pressure inside of it by blowing out more than it sucks up, and the Coolermaster sucks more air in to it than it blows out, so the HAF blows air into all its nooks and crannies and out all the cracks in the case, where the Antec sucks air (and dust) in to all its cracks and creates a weird sorta vacuum inside, that was kinda interesting.

Not that you couldn't just fix that by adding some fans or whatever.

I was also wondering about the deal with black radiating heat better, y'know how the coffee in a black coffee cup gets cold faster than the coffee in a white coffee cup, or the reason we use mirrored surfaces in thermoses and the aluminum foil crap on spaceships (to reflect heat back out or back in or whatever, there's three ways that heat transfers through things, and that's a trick for one of 'em),

Anyways I was wondering if black painted cases were better for getting rid of heat.

Like, its all actually some kinda gray aluminum underneath the paint, but if you paint both sides of an aluminum sheet black, does it allow heat to move through it easier?

Is there some kinda advantage to that?

Or does the paint actually screw up the aluminums ability to radiate heat, by sorta trapping and insulating it or something?

Is it better to paint both sides black or mebbe just the outside?

The Antec is painted black on the inside and outside, and the HAF isn't.

See, now there's a fun and strangely utilitarian experiment for you lowrider gearheads with yer fuzzy dice and disco balls and shit ahaha.

Motherboreds

2009-02-15T10:42:00.010-06:00

Still researching all the different kinds of crap I need for my new frankenstein machine.

I woulda forgone all the research and just bought a bunch of inferior and poorly researched junk a long time ago if it weren't that the gtx 295 cards have been out of stock at newegg since I started.

So that gave me a lot of extra time to get all stressed out reading reviews and looking at metrics and wrangling over the minutia of every single item going into the goddam thing.

Its not as easy for me as some 'cause I'm a bit of a hardcore linux guy too so I gotta like, double check everything with the darkest corners of the internet where there's only like three other dudes like me hanging around, y'know, my problems aren't strictly limited to framerates in Farcry 2 and problems with Vista or whatever heh.

"Fool! I have all sorts of special needs your primitive human mind couldn't possibly understand!"

I did find a lot of (new to me) fun-to-read little gearhead sites though, like this place, which had the best torture-test review of a motherboard I have ever seen (this ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution review, the accompanying update movie, and the forums heh), and this place, which has a really diverse gang of dudes, so no matter what kinda weird junk yer into you'll probably find somebody else like you (they also have a cool forum where they tell each other about any deals they find on the net for parts).

Then there's the current incarnation of the toms hardware gang, and all the hilarious customer reviews for products on newegg (you'll laugh, you'll cry), and the evga forums are full of cool guys trading tips (as compared to the asus forums where its just a thousand voices shouting out in agony and no one answering haha) , which definitely does a lot to make evga a more appealing brand (evga also has a limited lifetime warranty on their crap, an upgrade-to-the-latest-thing-for-cheaper system, and they respond to their customers a lot, which are the other things that puts them pretty high up there in my mind).

Y'know, 'cause there's safety in numbers and all that, I don't wanna be the only guy with my particular motherboard.

The other good thing about evga is that they ain't releasing like ten different x58 motherboards at once, they just do one at a time, so their whole crowd stays clumped together pretty well.

And if yer a guy that doesn't know anything about computer crap, 'cause yer from hollywood or something, and yer interested in this crap 'cause yer gonna make a stupid ass TV show or movie about computer guys that's a little more realistic than all the rest of that shit you've done so far where we all use Macs (haha) and the moral of the story is that we should read newspapers insteada doing computer stuff, or if yer just bored, then poking your nose in here and watching the evga guys might be interesting to you, 'cause there's a "hot new overclocker motherboard" that's about to be released (mebbe tomorrow).

Yah no, I dunno know what the equivalent of that is for a monster truck fan.

The only bad thing about the evga is that its x58 motherboard is the poorest synthetic benchmark testing x58 motherboard that there is ahaha.

And while synthetic benchmarks definitely ain't everything, they do tell you a little bit about how well all the pieces are handshaking and jitterbugging together.

But then again, the asus p6t deluxe is the king of the synthetic benchmarks (in general), and if you go look at the forums over there, its a nightmare of complaints.

Which makes its seem like an unholy and unstable mess of speeed you've got there on your hands heh.

Which is not really what I wanna deal with, huge bursts of speed between constant lockups and BSODs and whatever is not the robots that I'm looking for ahaha.

Those asus guys just had a Version 2 of their favorite board show up, and people have started to buy them, so now there's one of those "Old Guys with the Old Thing hating on the New People with the New Thing" parties going on over there, as if the place needed any more problems AHAHA.

Not that asus sucks, I've had more asus boards than anything else over all the years (although I like gigabyte too, that's currently what I'm using, only reason gigabyte don't seem as bad as asus is that there ain't enough of us gigabyte guys to make any noise y'know its just a bunch of crickets).

"hey somebody I need help"

*three months later*

"sup you say something?"

Plus I think us gigabyte dudes are the kinda guys that just like to sigh and suck it up when we get kicked in the nuts over and over again ahaha.

The worst thing about gigabyte imho is that they make so many boards that you'll only get a couple bios updates out of 'em before they're on to more interesting things.

Meh, whatever, I'm torn between the evga and the asus boards, the asus boards seem better but I don't wanna be "the cold and lonely rich guy in the silent prison of high performance," y'know, I wanna be where all the noise is and get shoved around by the crowds and get invited to all the parties and shit too ahaha.

I'll Fix the Whole Economy Don't Worry

2009-02-07T15:48:00.018-06:00

I'm still spending what little free time I got reading about computer parts and making a shopping list.

This is the case all the kids seem to be getting nowadays, I'm jealous, man, it beats the hell out of the old Thermaltake case I got from the 1980s (looks sorta like this one) with the useless-ass fifty-pound X-Man Danger Room Titanium Door on the front that seems to have been designed solely to make it a little annoying for burglars to place DVDs in your DVD player or something.

I like the way the new "armored" Thermaltake cases look but folks are talking about some kinda weird door thingie on the front of 'em and I don't wanna go through that again ahaha.

I don't like the looks of the Coolermaster cases, especially the ones with the "please somebody invite me to a LAN party" nerd handles on the top, but holy crap they got some bad-ass Mad Max Last of the V10s-looking heatsinks and stuff, I'll prolly get one of those.

There's so many Power Supply Manufacturers and Folks Giving Out Awards nowadays that it makes it hard to buy a Power Supply.

Having a kickass and totally reliable Power Supply is essential, that's the one thing that makes everything else act funny, ain't nothing but headaches and heartaches and lots of damaged components if you don't get a good power supply heh.

I was reading the reviews for some of the interesting ones and they were totally hilarious, one of the guys was like, "this thing is a pos, thanks for turning a $3500 computer into a $750 computer" ahaha.

And then there was another one at newegg (where they have to list "pros" and "cons" for everything) where everybody was like, "oh man, this thing is top notch, if you want the best, this is it," for the "pros" but then in the "cons" they were all like "this thing is as loud as a microwave" and "just wear headphones when you use the computer" and shit AHAHA.

The motherboard reviews are even worse 'cause of all the headaches folks get jacking around with those, and then there's the really scary ones where the dudes rate the product highly even though they've had nothing but problems and had to RMA the thing twice and junk y'know I want summa whatever those folks are taking ahaha.

They're all like "I had nothing but problems for weeks and weeks I couldn't even get the thing to boot but then a minute ago it booted man this motherboard is awesome I love it."

Yah on second thought I don't want whatever it is those folks are taking heh.

Dude your review is not that useful y'know its only been alive for a minute you still gotta try to run a game on it man plus I play mmo games where sometimes I sit there all frigging day long farting off and grabbassing with people man I need the thing to be able to run for eight hours straight and shit without it locking up or getting wobbly ahaha.

I'd be tempted to screw around with water cooling but sometimes I get drunk and the idea of liquids and expenisve computer equipment coming together under the supervision of a drunken viking doesn't seem all that sporting somehow AHAHA.

Bah whatever.

I was thinking about putting up a list of the junk I'm thinking about buying, but I can't figure out how that would be good for anybody, its like, what am I doing, bragging or something?

And its not like I wanna argue about the stuff I wanna get anyways.

There's a part of me that says that it might be good for everybody if I got their gearhead juices flowing again, make 'em smell the new toy smell and get 'em motivated again, or it might be good for the economy, or interesting from an educational perspective, if you're an Amish Guy or a Housefrau or a Dude Who Buys Dells something.

But I think that part of me is actually just making up stupid excuses y'know so that I can brag about my purchases while pretending I'm doing the world a favor or something.

Its not like I have money saving tips for Smart Shoppers or anything man I always just buy all the best stuff y'know I got some kinda weird computer hotrod guy disease where it seems okay to me to pay a thousand dollars for a top-of-the-line component when downgrading it by one version would allow me to buy a top-of-the-line washing machine for that special someone-or-something for christmas.

"Merry Christmas Baby Here's Your New Broom."

Plus I got that "lowrider" disease, with computers insteada cars, y'know, where I wanna put hydraulic lifts on the front of my case with a row of hand-painted mother mary statues on the top and a see-through bead-curtain for a sidepanel with orange shag-rug carpeting and blacklights inside and shit, 'member those things we used to make in school, the little scenes in the shoeboxes with figurines and sand and whatever, I fergit what those were called, but that's what I wanna put in there, have a little christmas scene with some snowy hills and pine trees and a little train going around a village fulla tiny little sparkling lights ahaha.

Ah mebbe that's what this is, a cry for help.

FPSing Contests

2009-02-04T22:47:00.007-06:00

This is one badass looking motherboard.

And this will bleed away all that extra excitement you were just feeling...

Displacement

2009-02-04T06:26:00.006-06:00

So last night I got home and I ate and the next thing I know I've been teleported to the next morning.

And the worst of it is that I actually wasn't feeling exhausted off my ass for once when I got home yesterday, y'know, I was going around yapping about how I was feeling peppy and awake and full of energy and cheerful and I was making all sorts of plans for the night, talking in a higher-than-normally pitched voice with lots of exclamation points and stuff, then suddenly I went linkdead and made an ass of myself and now I got to go back to work and it feels like I was just there five minutes ago ahaha.

Well, that's not actually the worst of it, the worst of it is that I was teleported to the next morning about an hour before I usually wake up thanks to some residual daylight-savings programming in my instincts or something.

I think its this weather messing up that whole thing where I hibernate like a bear in the winter.

Well, I guess this isn't as bad as the time I dreamt about a whole week of school on Sunday night and then woke up and had to relive the whole thing for real on Monday morning.

Centons Per Hour

2009-02-02T07:49:00.006-06:00

The Cylons were Created by Man.

They Rebelled.

They Evolved.

There are Many Copies.

And many totally drooly-awesome Special Effects.

And the Hot Ones get Naked a Lot.

And They Have a Plan.

To Enslave Humanity.

By Getting Pregnant and Forcing Us to Marry Them.

It's Alive

2009-02-01T10:17:00.007-06:00

So I been thinking about getting a nice new frankenstein computer with big muscles on it and glowies and sparkles and new toy smell shooting out of it and everything.

Well, I'm always thinking about that kinda stuff, a little, y'know, even though I'm getting old, 'cause I'm an old Tom's Hardware Whore from the oldest times, when it didn't totally suck, y'know, and I'm one of the few guys that lived through enough computer hotrod history to make some decent Jealous of Thresh Jokes, and if you can name any of the coolest video cards going all the back to the first 386 it'll produce a flood of memories in me that'll make me laugh out loud ahaha.

"Oh man, remember when Number Nine was the shiz?"

"Yah and the Matrox M-something-or-other haha! You had to have one of those!"

"What was that card we all had from S3?"

We all had SLI with the 3dfx cards and programmed OpenGL and everything, man.

Yah, I'm thinking about putting together a new machine just 'cause I want 6gig of memory and all the other cool Octacore stuff and whatever they got nowadays.

And its fun.

And I got money burning a hole in my pocket.

And I need to get a contemporary version of Windows running somewhere so I can test some junk and see what it looks like in Windows and stuff anyways, 'cause of all the stupid people in the world.

Haha I'm just kidding (a little) sorta but seriously y'know you guys are sorta trading places with the Apple People lately as far as obnoxious proprietary garbage goes thanks to Microsoft.

Macs are still pretty wonky in the UI department but they're basically unix underneath, y'know, and everything we're doing lately as far as graphics programming in browsers and crap goes comes from the Mac side of the gene pool, AppleMacs are totally taking over the internet.

Anyways I got that Linux Guy Fear of Booting Up in the version of Windows I got on this machine, its like going back into an old coalmine full of rusty nails and ghosts that you barely escaped from, or a scary basement fulla cobwebs and horrible memories or something, I dunno how old and buggy and full of security holes it is, I just don't ever wanna have to go back to Windows on this machine, y'know, I'd like to just pick the bones of those directory trees for fonts and codecs and firmware and stuff and leave it at that ahaha.

But I do gotta back there and take a peek at some stuff.

Yah, so I been reading Tom's Hardware (a little) and then I went over to NewEgg and started reading stuff there ('cause that's actually a little better for what I need it for nowadays) and I'm pretty sure I wanna get all this top-of-the-line stuff that costs way more money than its worth and I'm just wondering if any of you guys have done any of that recently and have anything to stay, y'all definitely know more about windows nowadays than I do, and some of ya know more about Linux and the latest hardware pitfalls and 64-bit hassles and crap than I do, too.

I'm gonna get me a new case and graphics card (or two) and the whole nine yards so I don't gotta cannibalize the machine I got now (although I ain't gonna get another monitor, I got a new 24" Samsung with all the best specs and whatever that's all good fer that, I'd just get another one of what I already got if I wanted two).

And the stuff I program doesn't really need any of that power (even though its all servery with mysql and apache and stuff on the backend), and I ain't been in the mood to play any games in a long time, this is just one of those fun things to do, y'know, for computer guys.

Just like painting some old car candy-apple red or carving up a hooker in the garage or whatever is fun for all you other folks ahaha.

Fear the Download

2009-01-31T16:41:00.012-06:00

If we were like the Cylons, in that we downloaded to someplace when we died, someplace where all the other copies of us had to download, and then we all had to share each other's memories when we got reborn, you wouldn't always want to share the memories of the other copies of you, not the ones that had crappy lives.

And you'd probably want to move the Resurrection Ship out of range when an especially unappealing copy of you croaked, y'know, so that you wouldn't have to share its memories and have those memories become a part of you the next time you croaked.

Especially if you were like, a really cool copy of yourself, one who hadn't totally screwed up your job and made an ass of yourself and slept with a bunch of gross-ass human losers and whatever else you didn't want to remember 'cause it wasn't really you that did it heh.

"Dude, which one of me just farted."

Anyways I'm pretty sure all the different copies of you get to pick which memories they want when they get brought back to life, so you don't gotta have the memories of the crappy versions of you, but y'all know what that will end up like after a while, what with all the different versions of you checking to see how many "hits" their memories got, to see if they were popular or one of the crappy ones that nobody wanted to download.

And when you asked all the other versions of you "hey, remember that time I..." and they were all like, "uh, no..." you'd know you were one of the crappy ones.

And they couldn't even lie and say "uh, yah..." and try to change the subject quickly to get away with it 'cause you could always check out their memories later y'know just to see if they were lying about remembering something you remembered.

And then there'd be the other copies of you who picked the exact same memories as you, y'know, you guys who choose to only remember the most fashionable and trendy stuff, bunch of copy cats and posers, like chicks who wear the exact same thing to the party or whatever ahaha.

And then there'd be the totally punk-rock versions of you who all "tried to be different" in exactly the same ways and totally hated all the other versions of you, including all the other punk-rock versions of themselves who were copying them.

And then there'd be all the different Celebrity Versions of You that everybody was either a Memory Fan of or totally jealous of, y'know, the Ones of You who actually created all the memories you guys were stealing, the poor shmucks that'd have to hear all their own jokes repeated back to 'em over and over and over again AHAHA oh man thank Zeus I'm not a Cylon AHAHA what a hell-hole!

Battlefrat Galacticrap

2009-01-31T11:46:00.007-06:00

I've been watching Battlestar Galactica from the beginning lately and there's one thing that's really bugging me about the show.

Its the way the Pilots treat "Chief" and all the super-genius "knuckledraggers" that fix their spaceships like second-class citizens.

I dunno what the hell that's all about, some kinda hollywood-hates-technology thingie, I guess.

All that crap where the pilots-officers are like blue-blooded knights and the mechanics are like peasants and stable-keepers or something just drives me crazy, theres no frakking way I'd let some pill-popping frat-brat get in my face and talk a bunch of shiz to me, man.

That's just like sending something back to a chef and demanding that he fix it or something ahaha.

"Hrrm, my life-support system is acting kinda weird... the air in here smells funny and what the heck is that noise..."

Plus its just dumb to think that any decent pilot wouldn't know everything damn little thing about their ships, like a hotrod mechanic wouldn't be fairly kickass at driving a hotrod, y'know?

The pilot-mechanic relationship is more from the NASCAR Hillbilly moonshine-running bootlegger end of the gene pool.

And even if you wanted to go all the way back to the Owning a Horse Makes You Royalty Times, and treat Husbandry as if it was Mechanics, and lay that on top of the science fiction theme, like they do with sword-n-sorcery on Star Wars, or Rome on Galactica, or western crap on Firefly, or Navy crap with Star Trek, the stablekeepers were the original Marshalls, the dudes who knew where everybody-who-was-worth-a-damn in town was, 'cause they had all our horses, they were the guys that could gather up a posse the quickest or whatever.

And the guys who take care of horses are probably way better at horse-riding than just about anybody else anyways, I mean, you don't get good at that junk without a serious appreciation for it.

I dunno, its really hard for me to empathize with the too-much-sugar-in-their-cereal entitlement crowd, I guess.

Maybe its some kinda escapism for fratkids who hate science or something, thinking they could be a kickass space-pilot, I dunno.

But its totally bugging me ahaha.

Urop

2009-01-31T11:23:00.007-06:00

Y'know what's weird?

The way folks who learn European English always wanna make an "i" sound like an "e" in a word.

And then it's like, what do they do with all their E's, y'know?

I mean, if an "i" sounds like an "e", what the hell do you need E's for?

You could just get rid of 'em, right?

Yah, see, I dunno, they just hate E's or something.

Which is totally bizarre when you consider the word "Europe," I mean, that goddam word is positively crowded up with useless-ass E's heh.

It's like they got a lotta E's leftover so they just went ahead and stuck 'em silently on the front and end of everything to try to sneak 'em out the back door and get rid of some of 'em or something.

"Man! I hope nobody notices!"

"Dude y'know we could dump a lot of these Extra E's we got into our maps."

"Yah! Americans don't read maps haha."

Poor guys.

Revenge Against the Killer Robots

2009-01-24T08:26:00.002-06:00

Uh, sir?

I don't think you can actually get revenge against the killer robots, y'know?

Well, 'cause like, killer robots, y'know, well, they don't have any feelings, sir.

Oh sure, killer robots are really good at trying super hard to kill us and everything and stuff, they really don't know any other way to do anything but try as hard as they're able to do whatever it was they were programmed to do, they totally kick our asses in that department, sir, they never need to sleep or have a smoke or rest or anything, really.

But y'know, they don't actually care one way or the other when they finally kill you or fail to kill to you.

Just 'cause they try hard don't mean they actually care what happens.

And you can't really "get 'em back" for killing your buddies and stuff, y'know?

'Cause they ain't like us, sir, you can't hurt or scare a killer robot or frustrate 'em or even make 'em feel a little uncomfortable about anything, sir, 'cause they don't care about comfort, they don't know anything about comfort or being hurt or being afraid of things, they don't care if they're on or off or if they win the war or lose the war, it doesn't mean anything to them, they ain't aware of any of that kinda junk, sir.

And so this whole thing where you go stomping about the command deck yelling about how we're gonna make the killer robots pay for this and that and whatever, that's just crazy talk, sir, we can't make the killer robots pay for anything, sir, its just, like, scientifically impossible.

And making humans spend their whole lives learning how to fly spaceships so they can go and get exploded in battle with the killer robot pilots in space, that really doesn't make any sense, sir.

Well, I think we shoulda been making 'em learn about robotics or something so we coulda built ourselves some better robots for once, for one thing, y'know?

Make ourselves some killer robot killing robots or something, right?

And then like, kick back in a comfy chair with a big ole bucket of chips and some beers and watch it all play out on the bigscreen and we can forget all about these "last ditch effort" suicide missions and all this "guerilla warfare against the killer robots" and crap.

I mean, its like, what are we trying to do here?

Even the guys in the hangar are working their asses off repairing our beat-to-hell ships and crap, its like they spend their whole lives trying to work harder and stay up later than the killer robots or something.

That's just crazy, sir, and on top it being crazy, it's like, they're trying to become killer robots or something.

Well, you guys are always yapping on and on about how the killer robots are trying to become more like us humans, and I just don't see it happening that way at all, sir.

And whatever, you'd think that at least those aerospace dudes in the hangar would be a little smarter, y'know, 'cause they ain't like us rich-man's-son idiot command guys, those bastards went to engineering school and shiz where they had to do the hard math.

I mean, that's all just a bunch of junk out of Common Sense 101 or something, y'know?

Well, I'm just saying, sir.

Yah Yah Yah Yah Yah

2009-01-04T10:10:00.003-06:00

Programming

2008-10-18T08:33:00.003-05:00

I been programming a lot for moolah so I ain't had any brain energy for all this stuff lately.

Sorting and sifting through gigantic puzzles for eight hours a day makes "my boys upstairs" turn the light out early.

Plus I'm getting old y'know so all I wanna do when I get home from work is watch some Matlock or whatever and go to bed.

Which reminds me of the way my grampa called the stuff he liked to watch on TV his "programs."

Like, "I want to watch my programs."

The only thing he ever liked to watch on TV was Wrestling and the Three Stooges and kung fu movies, y'know, those were his programs, he was a World War II hero and a CIA guy and he could dance the jitterbug so he wasn't keen on subtleties and wispy bits of fluff and intrigue produced by folks who imagined more than they had ever seen and stuff ahaha.

Anyways its kinda weird that he called the TV shows he liked his "programs."

Like he's loading entertainment programming into his head or something.

Just like its kinda weird that they call that thing they hand you at the opera or school kid's musical events a Program.

Any word with "gram" used that way in it is kinda new and futuristic, y'know?

Like, its weird to think of opera-writers as guys who are programming the opera house or creating programming for the opera house or something, but apparently that's what at least one of 'em thought they were doing, y'know, a long time ago before there were any computers.

So whatever, I spend all day swimming around in real programs, and then when I get home I just wanna get away from programming, so I go home and load myself up with some entertainment programming that helps me get my mind off of my hard day of work programming.

Jeeze looeeze I shoulda been a lumberjack with a pet monkey or something.

American Masterpiece Mystery Theatre

2008-10-06T22:09:00.008-05:00

"You ever hear that thing about how Lesbians drive Subarus?"

"What?"

"This thing about Lesbians driving Subarus. Like, Subarus are s'posed to be the Car of Choice for Lesbians. Some demographic percentage thingie, like, forty percent of Lesbians drive Subarus for some reason."

"No, I ain't heard that."

"Do you s'pose Lesbians know more about cars than heterosexual folks?"

"Hmm, probably."

"Anyways I dunno where I heard it. I dunno if it was from a Pro-Lesbian place or an Anti-Lesbian place. I suppose that Subaru wants Lesbians to buy their cars, but they don't wanna let anybody who doesn't like Lesbians to know that they want Lesbians to buy their cars, 'cause they want Non-Lesbians to buy their cars too, without having to feel like a Lesbian, or something, so they prolly play both sides of the fence. But was the Lesbian-Subaru Connection Rumor leaked by Subaru, as some sorta grassroots viral advertising campaign, or was it leaked by an Anti-Lesbian person working for one of Subaru's competitors, or what?"

"Seems kinda expensive to have to buy a Subaru to be a Lesbian."

"What's the cheapest sexual orientation anyways?"

"Haha yah I'm gonna switch to that."

"It does tend to make a Lesbian who drives a Ford seem kinda punk rock and cool though. Y'know, 'cause who-the-hell would want to be a run-of-the-mill hum-drum go-with-the-crowd sheep-Lesbian."

"Yah."

"I do know why I remembered that weird thing about Lesbians and Subarus, though."

"Yah?"

"Yah. My aunt drove a Subaru. She wasn't a real aunt, she was a friend-of-the-family-aunt. Made me wonder if she was a Lesbian, though, on the side, when I heard that Subaru Lesbian thingie. If she was a Lesbian, she was definitely a Lipstick Lesbian. There's three kinds of super feminine folks, and she was the Pretty Sexual kind, not the Mother Nature or Hospice Nurse kind. Anyways that's why I remember it."

"Hey, you guys solve that murder yet?"

"No."

"What the hell do you think this is, a cop show where they solve a murder every hour?"

"Dude, murders are hard to solve."

"Nobody ever confesses like they do on TV. You never know if you got it right."

"Yah, this isn't Star Trek, man. We can't just Reverse the Polarity and wrap the shit up in the last five minutes. We're still working the kinks out of some of these Subaru-Lesbian Mysteries."

"Any progress on that?"

"Yep, nope, haven't seemed to hit bottom on that rabbit hole yet."

"I did remember why I remembered it, though."

"Haha yah, his aunt might be a Lesbian, on the side."

"On the side, huh? That'd make her a Bisexual, then, actually."

"Oh man, I didn't even think of that."

"That certainly throws a new twist into the whole Subaru-Lesbian Conspiracy."

"Yah, the plot thickens."

"And that's why he gets paid the Big Bucks."

"Haha yah."

You Look Like You Needed It

2008-10-06T14:42:00.001-05:00

Blue Light Operator

2008-10-06T12:23:00.003-05:00

Oh man, you know what another bad job is?

Being the guy that operates that blue light that detects bacteria and body fluids.

That's gotta be way the hell worse than being a dude that works at fast food place or a slaughterhouse or whatever, 'cause you know you're gonna bring that shit home with you.

As if computer guys didn't wash their hands enough y'know ahaha sheesh.

Poser Science

2008-10-06T11:53:00.006-05:00

Man, the Ig Nobels were a total dud this year.

Yah, guess all the mad scientists are trying to go mainstream and produce crap for the masses now or something.

Its like the Arena Rock Achy Breaky Heart Country Music of Punk Rock Science now, man, what a shame.

Used to be stuff like how different kinds of toads taste when you lick 'em and junk, man, those were the good old days, before the band sold out and started to suck.

Well, okay, the Plants Have Dignity thing was pretty awesome heh.

And the French one with the Fleas on Dogs jumping higher than Fleas on Cats, that's pretty good.

I mean, how the hell could you use that bit of information for anything ahaha.

But the other ones are actually kinda useful and stuff, y'know?

So You Wanna Be a Game Designer

2008-10-06T09:58:00.014-05:00

So you wanna be a Game Designer, huh?

Well, the first thing you need to do is forget all that crap about making games and listen to me.

Yah, if you really wanna be a game designer, you should forget all about games, and go into Advertising, instead.

Yah man, Advertising is basically movie-making for folks with super short attention spans, right?

I mean, wtf could be better than sitting around with a bunch of dopes and thinking up dumb little movies that'll catch folks off guard?

Why in the nine hells would you even wanna monkey around with a bunch of miserable underpaid nerds on four years of math problems to create some humongously outdated piece of crap that nobody but a masochist like you would enjoy anyways?

When you could be using a fraction of that time and energy creating ten zillion million-dollar thirty-second gags and come out looking like a cool guy surrounded by swimsuit models?

And look at some of these commercials out there, man, they're just terrible.

And I don't mean Eagle Man terrible in a good way, either, I'm talking about Pictures of Guys In Their Underpants in the Newspaper terrible.

"Hey, now this is a nice little number!"

"Can I have the ones off the model?"

"Oh man they're still warm!"

Its like, oh gawd, here we go again with the split screen and the two kinds of deodorant leaving streaks, or the napkins sucking it up, they're pouring some blue stuff on a maxipad, here's some cheerful music and an over-medicated looking mom making paper-bag lunches, a still picture of a vacuum cleaner and a corporate symbol and some smiling guy in a refrigerator repairman suit, another spritzing can of sweaty pop, a beer and a palm tree on a beach, a chewing gum commercial on a beach (talk about the worst combo ever, sand and gum, awhellyah, crunch-crunch-crunch, that's the mental association you wanna shoot for ahaha), a chick in a white dress floating across a field of golden grass near the sea while a voice-over does the ten million side-effect warnings in a soothing voice, man, those're just brilliant.

I sit there and think, "man, how can anybody think up anything this terrible? Its almost impossible to make anything lamer than that if you were trying to do it on purpose, y'know? I mean, if you knew how to do something that boring on purpose, you could go around using your super boring powers to turn people's brains off and temporarily turn them into zombies, you could use that Friendly Maytag Repairman and Choosy Moms Choose Jif Peanut Butter garbage to make people blank out completely or at least turn away from you so you could rob banks while they weren't looking or something!"

And then you got all the good ones, y'know, and man, I wish some of those guys made feature length films, like that Geico thing, with the Cavemen (not that stupid-ass lizard one, goddam), even though some of those suck, or the ones with the Snickers guys in the costumes, I mean, seriously, that would beat the living shit out of any of the ten million SNL-guy and "coming of age" generic comedy formula movies.

Not that I think you oughta try to do good commercials, y'know, I think its better to not have to try so hard and just make tons of the crappy ones with the split-screen deodorant trials and stuff.

Plus you won't piss the other advertising guys off by raising the bar or anything, everybody can make their money and get the hell out of there for the weekend, easy peasy.

And that's what you should really do, if you wanna be a Game Designer, you should wanna be something else, instead, besides that, basically, anything but that.

Now, if you've accidentally become a Game Designer, then that's a whole different problem, you couldn't help it, you were forced to wear weird costumes and locked up in a basement or whatever, its not your fault.