Symphony Of Madness

I have a great love of old school arcade games. Give me asteroids, pong, snake, space invaders, and I'll be happy. Actually, pong kinda sucks. Come to think of it, they're all pretty bad, and while I love them despite that, I love (fairly) modern re-makes even more (e.g.). Fuck messy 3D graphics, sophisticated game engines, and plot; just give me a straightforward concept and 3 different commands. Distill everything to extremely simple skills: shoot the rocks, shoot the aliens. Anyone can be hardcore about entertaining games, which is why I respect the gamers of old you stuck with terrible graphics and repetitive gameplay for so many years.

The total lack of explanation is one of the most charming things about these games. Take Space Invaders for instance: no attempt whatsoever is made to explain the premise of the game, you just have to infer it from the title. "'Space Invaders', ok, well I guess those things coming at me are invaders...from space, and I have to shoot them before they get too close or, you know, they'll have invaded". Why is this charming? I like to think that there's actually an elaborate story behind the games, we're just not told about it. Random elements like why different alien ships have different spots in the formation or what the hell the mothership is doing there suddenly become not random, but rational parts of a sophisticated setting that we can only guess at through subtle hints left us by ancient programmers.

Pursuing that thread this summer, I began programming a "sequel" called (cleverly) Earth Invaders: it's payback time. The angle was that, unlike in the original, you controlled an alien vessel attacking Earth. It also differed from the original in that the aliens deployed single, better armed ships that dropped bombs from high altitude instead sending huge suicidal waves towards the surface. The rationale for this new strategy? During the first invasion of Earth (the original game), the aliens had no information about humans and assumed they were like other intelligent, more advanced species they'd encountered. In "traditional" warfare between extraterrestrials, bombs were of no use because of powerful (but short ranged) shields that protected the surface. Instead, attacks would have to fly extremely close to the surface and deploy troops or biological weapons. Since surface defenses employed sophisticated homing missiles, evasive maneuvers were pointless. This same strategy of moving slowly towards the surface was employed against the humans. Needless to say, it failed, largely because of the large population of heroic nerds living on Earth; a weapon the alien interlopers failed to predict.

After the humiliation of this first war, the aliens vowed to return and erase the embarrassment...and the human race along with it. Being aliens, they learned from their mistakes. Instead of sending huge formations at the surface, they opted to send bombers to every major city they could find, where they would pummel the humans from the relative safety of the skies. The outcome? I got sick of working with graphics and intimidated by the prospect of optimizing my shitty code.

This Is Why You're A Lame-Ass-Bitch-Ho

Someone around here (who must live in suburbia, because that's what 'here' is, and is therefore extremely lame already) named their wireless network "home". First of all, that is an incredibly uncreative name. I hate uncreative name (yeah Rob Thomas, I said it). What a waste, not to mention the future of that poor network that will get made fun of by all the other networks for its fucking stupid name. But that's not the real issue. The issue is this: whatever loser made this network must've been thinking "Well, I'll name this 'home' because I suck and I use it when I'm at home, so I'll know to use this one". The problem? Everyone is at home you dumb shit! Everyone who opens internet connect around here will, if only for an instant, think "Oh, 'home', that must be the one I want since I'm at home".

So yeah, basically I hate you. One day I'll return to this place and hack your stupid network and rename it Lamoland. Plus I'll protect it with a password that looks something like this:

lakefglawhgkbcskvbskdjbfajkwbfk,jwd And I won't write it down. Anywhere.

Prequel

An Ode To The Good Ol' Days

Want someone to blame for the recent holiday* in Georgia? Look no further than the following:



That's right. Blood on her hands. Want to piss off Russians? Try having an ex-pat win gold for America. In gymnastics. Silver lining? At least she wasn't a synchronized swimmer. Had little Nastia pulled this shit back in the '80s, the KGB would have put her back in her place:



*The People National We Got Fucked Day, traditionally celebrated by inserting something red, white, and blue up your ass.

Anniversaries

About a year ago, or was it two...well, if you were to take this period of time and round it off to moths, it'd probably be almost divisible by three. Or four. Anyways, the aforementioned amount of time ago, I wrote about skittles. Now, some time later, I sit here with a brandy glass full of chocolate skittles next to me.

By the way, did you know that, if I google "chocolate skittles", the skittles homepage isn't the first result? Clearly they need a better website.

On a related note, I heard that there's a javascript command called "set googlebot trap", that attracts 'trolling google bots, snaps their necks, and raises them as little zombie google bots which then obey your website and can help it move up on the results page.

This just in: chocolate skittles suck. These things are positively vile. They taste like plastic that's been soaked in chlorine. Honestly, I have never encountered faker chocolate, not even when I took a safari to Coke Presents New Cocoaland. Also, one of the flavors is "vanilla". What the fuck? A vanilla chocolate skittle? Now my head hurts, just like my stomach. These abominations are just the latest in a trend by candy manufacturers (recently merged with, it would seem, shit factories); "let's take this cool product we make, and create an inferior version". Just look at dark chocolate milky ways. Shit for brained dingos.

Fuck, every one of these flavors just tastes like chemicals. It actually takes effort just to see what the fuck they're talking about when they say "this one s'mores, and this one's caramel!". Yeah, and this one is soylent green, courtesy of the people in our company who actually had good ideas.

You know how there's always some douchebag who likes to say "everything that can be invented, has been", and we all turn around and say "lol, owned, we just invented something"? Well, he's right about candy. So instead of simply continuing to make original, tropical, wild berry, smoothie (if they insists), tart'n'tangy and sour, double sour, Xtreme fruit, and carnival skittles, along with both skittles mints and mint skittles, they decided to go ahead and make chocolate ones too. Seriously? But no, like seriously? Why not put the R&D money towards advertising the existence of carnival skittles? Because, really, skittles should not have a big R&D budget (nor should that department's strategy be "exhaustive search").

Moments Of Restraint

I hate glaciers. Really, honestly, I do. First of all, they clearly should have an 'sh' in them, not this foreign glah-see-ay gibberish. But America-and-freedom-hating spelling habits are only the beginning of their suckiness. They're lazy as hell; all they do is sit there, crushing stuff, preventing cave man expansion, and being cold. They must know they're melting (and have been for kind of a while now) yet they do nothing about it, it's like they're expecting us to solve their problems for them. Well, let me just say this: "we remember the ice age, and it sucked, so look elsewhere for help, buddy". Oh, and I haven't even mentioned how they're hogging a ton of fresh water, and not even drinking it. And we know they've been a menace to their caretakers, the polar bears. Clearly it was stress that made their hair turn white.

But here's the worst part; they absolutely ruin the terrain they leave. How inconsiderate. Seriously, I'm SICK of hills. All I have is a bike and I'm absolutely SICK of biking up your godamned hills! Do you hear me? SICK of it. New England would be a great place to live if you hadn't rolled through here and all these fucking HILLS! Seriously, no matter where I go, there's this huge fucking hill in my way. Would it have killed you to flatten stuff out a little on your way out? Water makes stuff flat and smooth, so what the fuck is your problem? Godamned selfish chunks of ungrateful ice. And you know what? I ride a BIKE! It isn't producing an CO2 to melt you sorry asses and yet you choose to make my life HELL! Fuck you.

Good Thing I Took Three Ranks In 'Jargon'

The scene is thus: I am Dr. Dominic Monague, a "rouge" anthropologist, thrown out of reputable circles because of my...unconventional theories about demonic influences in history. Desperate to be taken seriously, I descend into the criminal underworld, rob the Louvre, and sell my bounty on the black market for African conflict diamonds. With these, I can pay a rebel faction in the South American country of Guyana to lead me into a jungle to find an ancient, accursed temple that will (hopefully) prove my theories.

Here's the brilliant part: on the boat trip into the jungle there is, among the varied crew (which included a possessed house wife and rebel gun-runner), a reverend. He seems to be a normal enough guy, and soon becomes my closes friend, because everyone else thinks I'm insane. With so many other members of the crew with interesting stories, I assumed he was just there for color. Days later, he springs me from jail. This was highly suspicious, but I shrugged it off as simply a plot device to get me out of a sticky situation. The next session, the reverend (who had been an NPC controlled by the story teller) is replaced by a real person. The new player was a goofy guy more enamored with playing a gunslinger than a priest, so we all assumed he was just messing around when he put all his skill picks into fighting, not theology.

Now the real genius: after much struggle, we've finally made it to the rebel leader, Mad Dog. After securing final passage into the jungle, we quietly enjoy our breakfast as the reverend asks to speak alone with Mad Dog, allegedly about some information he has. Then, out of no where, he shoots the rebel commander, surrounded by guards. My first thought is "what the fuck?! You're going to get us all killed!". True story, we all died, game over.

But here's the kicker.

He was, from the very beginning, a government agent on a mission to kill Mad Dog. None of us, even out of character, saw this coming at all. It was absolutely flawless in its execution. As he packed up his notes and we crossed out health boxes, the storyteller smiled and said "well, that was a good end, don't you think?"

Yes, yes it was. I have never been so happy to have a character eaten alive by dogs, because this was epic. Epic with a "p".