The Game

So, since it's the night before my birthday, I'm bored, and I haven't used any of this social networking crap in a long time, some updates. (Mostly because I'm bored.)

I worked at Staples again. Then I remembered why I hated it there and got a job at Best Buy. The catch? I'm selling TVs. Which, guess what, I hate. There's a Barnes and Noble opening at the mall that I was in a job faire for, and a night auditor position open at a small hotel about a minute from my development. I'm hoping for the night auditor position. It may be third shift, but it's not retail (the underline means it's important to me) and third shift would actually mesh well with my current college schedule.

Still no progress on any of the projects I actually want to do. Lots of ideas, but I always get new ones and the old ones dry up that quick.

School. School is, well. I'm stumbling through it. I really should not have taken the time off that I did after high school, because now I'm struggling to try and get back into the school mindset and not exactly succeeding. I'm majoring in Human Services now, to hopefully become a high school guidance counselor. Because let's face it, making a living writing is a pipedream that only the most talented can achieve, and I'm nowhere near the word "talented".

Kanye. I really think I'm sorry man, I'ma let you finish, but Angry Video Game Nerd had the best rant of the year! (I'm sorry. I had to. And Kanye is a jackass.)

The LL Cool J NCIS thing: Not nearly as bad as I expected. I rather enjoyed it, actually.

Heroes: I don't think they intended for me to laugh every time I saw "Nathan" onscreen, but that was my reaction all the same. Still. I'll watch, if only to see them wreck more terribly than the train in season 1. (Do you see what I did there? Train and wreck. I am implying in a faux subtle fashion that the show is a train wreck. I am so clever!)

Supernatural: My friends and I are still catching up on season 4, though I know what happens at the end and I know roughly what went down in the first episode of season 5. Truthfully, the show's gotten predictable, but it's still leaps and bounds better than most crap on TV today.

Drew Barrymore and Ellen Paige making out: Y'know, I feel that this is something I can really get behind. (Badum-PISH!) (The only reason this even gets a comment is 'cause I just saw it on Colbert and wanted something else to put here.) (But seriously, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, MIRITE?)

Disney buying out Marvel: As long as Disney holds to its promise not to interfere, great. A bigger budget for the movies, an established animation studio for the more obscure characters (although I doubt we'll see Pixar putting their name on Hank Pym slapping the shit out of his wife) and a company that is infinitely better and more experienced with marketing than Marvel is. Oh, and Disney can kill anyone involved with the Spider-Man comics right now, because any stories after "Spidey makes a deal with essentially the devil" are, well, born of a bullshit concept. (Although if Pixar did decide to commit suicide, putting their name on Hank Pym slapping the shit out of Janet would just about do the trick. Bonus un-points if they put their name right on his hand.)

My 360: Stop overheating, you asshole. I would like to play Ghostbusters without you overheating in the first ten minutes.

I am pretty much just typing to hear myself type at this point. Also if you are not watching Fringe you need to start watching Fringe because it is awesome but if you do you need to get the first season because JJ is not historically very good at making shows that are easily understood from a middle-point.

Also, and this is just something that those who know what I'm talking about will get and those that don't, won't: When your only solution to your problems is detonating a hydrogen bomb, it may be time to seriously consider suicide as an alternative option. Although I would still hit the thing with a rock because man, what a way to go.

So. I thought I'd make something based on something that's on my mind. And also, Boromir would like to warn you all of something.



I'm so serious about this. You have not played an addictive game until you have built your own civilization, founded religions, discovered new means of governing your mighty empire, and conquering nations like Spain and Germany. I just did the latter myself, and found myself actually whooping a victory cry.

My father, who is sitting across the room from me, looked at me like I was crazy.

Heed this warning, folks: Do not "play" Civilization IV. You must live it. Love it. Become one with it. For if not, it will devour your soul anyway.

So, I've gotten myself a new laptop, and this one has a nifty built in mic and webcam! This means that I may vlog. Y'know, like this:



FYI, the sound in the background of the video is the cooling fan I've got going underneath the laptop. Will there be others? Probably. But, like I say in this video, I think I may need to be drunk to actually work up the nerve to do it. XD

In a manner of speaking. I don't think you can be too prepared, because it's a chaotic situation, and if you become too dependent on your plan, then when the inevitable change occurs you'll be less prepared to cope and handle it.

So in short: A little from column A, a little from column B.

So watching the Watchmen trailer on Youtube reminded me of something I meant to ask when I posted about it.

Does anybody know what song that is? Bonus points for a link to where I can download it. Here's the trailer, for those that want to see/don't remember the song:

I would like to add that there was a trailer for Watchmen attached to The Dark Knight.

I am no longer worried about this movie's success. It looked fanfuckingtastic.

So Dark Knight was fucking amazing.

Heath's portrayal was so good, though, that I don't think they can use Joker again, because there's nobody they could cast to deliver the same level of performance. Two-Face was excellent as well.

A+++

They're dead.

All dead.

It's only me now.

I had to kill them. Had to. They'd all been bitten.

You know what happens when they get bitten, don't you?

They wouldn't have wanted that. So I killed them.

Now I'm all alone. What now?

Not a killer. Not a killer.

Close to the end now. Running low on bullets. Can't raid more by myself.

Can't find off zombie hordes by myself.

...But I can make a big explosion if I ram the bus into a downed tanker.

Always wanted to go out with a bang.

Jesus...

Christ almighty. It happened. It really fucking happened.

They were wrong. They were wrong. The book, it was-there was no dragon! No horsemen! Just a lot of fucking dead bodies...

Holed up in a bus I stole from a dying driver. Got some friends. Hit up Walmart, stole some guns and ammo. Canned goods from grocery store. Internet sketchy. Wireless iffy. Making best of bad sitch. Mall's out. Everybody and mother will hit mall. Dumb idea. No malls around here with nonperishables.

Cheeses, sealed. Crackers. Cell's out. Tower probably knocked down. So many goddamn zombies...

SHIT! Need go. Zombies. Check in later!

Nietzsche will have to forgive me for this bastardizing of his quote.

Free speech is dead.

I'll be playing WoW all night. I wouldn't be good company right now. Feel free to drop me emails, but no calls, please. Right now I just need to be in a fantasy world of fake things because I really don't like humans much right now.

...I am fucking astounded. I really am.

I was ready to move on.

I was.

And then they screen a comment for no reason on an apology about a lack of communication and the removal of freedom of speech?

Epic. Fucking. Stupidity.

I have a myspace. I think I'll be using it more often. I may or may not abandon LJ, but I damn well won't be posting fiction of any kind on it anymore, and I doubt I'll be anywhere near as active as I was. Which is saying something, since I wasn't that active to begin with.

I'll still check my flist. I might still comment on stuff, I haven't decided.

But fuck this shit. Fuck it and the horse it rode in on, man.

So. The strikethrough.

I have a question for you, LJ.

I'm a writer. I write Silent Hill fanfiction. Silent Hill, the games, is kind of...well, fucked up. Things like precisely what innocent people got suspended for crop up. One of my stories even has a key plot element involving a teenage girl getting raped and the seven shades of nutzo that drove her older brother.

How can I feel even remotely safe in posting stories like this on LJ now? You can say all you like that things like that wouldn't be suspended or deleted, but your actions speak louder than your words, and right now those actions aren't very flattering.

Give me a good reason to feel comfortable posting fiction, both of the fan and original variety, on here. I want you to. But you're going to have to do more than just write some pretty words. This isn't a problem that can be solved overnight and the trust of the userbase will not be won back with a few reversals of suspension. By doing what you did, you accused these innocent people of being some of the worst monsters humanity can become. Forgiveness for that won't come from fanciful words and idealistic promises.

Show us that you really care about the userbase. Because right now, we're not really seeing that in your actions.

I just love dysthymia. It can make an already bad week even worse.

Swiped from a friend on blogger.

Your results:
You are Mr. Freeze

Mr. Freeze 67% Venom 62% The Joker 46% Lex Luthor 43% Dr. Doom 43% Juggernaut 38% Two-Face 38% Dark Phoenix 37% Green Goblin 34% Kingpin 33% Magneto 30% Apocalypse 29% Catwoman 26% Riddler 26% Mystique 22% Poison Ivy 16%

You are cold and you think everyone else should be also, literally.

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test


Yeah, I think that fits.

Breakthrough!

Start with something completely mundane. Pretty.

A little girl. She's wearing a yellow sundress. She's smiling a doll's smile.

Add ambience.

The lighting as you creep around the open front door is dim. The moon barely manages to penetrate the cloudy night at all, and what little light reaches you isn't enough for you to see more than a few feet in front of your face. In the house it's even less. Where are the others? They were supposed to meet you here. Without them the whole place seems chokingly oppressive.

Commence build-up.

Fuck it. You can't wait any longer. Not with that smell wafting out from the inside of the house. It's like somebody left ground beef out for too long... The others will just have to catch up. You pull out your knife, wishing you'd taken Jack's advice and bought a gun instead. Whatever you're gonna find in there, you've got a feeling your puny little knife ain't gonna cut it.

You can practically feel the silence as you take step after agonizingly slow step through the front hall. Your hair stands on end. The butterflies in your stomach feel like they're going to explode. You can taste bile in the back of your throat. Fear twists your gut into knots and the rising stench threatens to overcome your ability to hold back your gag reflex. Jesus, you think, what the fuck happened here?

Defile the mundanity.

And then you see her. She's standing there in the kitchen. A little girl, couldn't be more than seven or eight. She's in a yellow sundress that might once have been bright. Now it's faded, and plastered to her body thanks to a sticky red liquid you're pretty sure isn't ketchup. For a second you think it's hers, until you notice the bloody hunks of a body behind her. A man's body... That's when you notice the bloody knife in the girl's hand, and the smeared blood around her mouth.

"Mummy said daddy tasted like sweets." The girl smiles her sweet little doll smile up at you. The sweet smile that's now smeared with blood, some of it fresh and some of it congealed. "Do you taste like sweets too?"

Horror.

This is just me checking to see what those "fixes" are.

Yeah, not fixed enough. Fuck man, when do we get the old layout back? Because, I mean, not letting us at least have the option to choose the old layout would just be horrible service, and LJ would never-

...Oh. Right.

Because I was tagged by ladynorbert heeeeeeeeere is a meme. Also: "That was merely a test mortals, now the contest really begins! i.e. your weapons are mine!"

A Meme: Rules: Write ajournal entry for this meme with five random facts about yourself. Then pick five of your friends list and tag them – no tag-backs! These rules should be included in your entry.

1. I wasn’t always a fan of RPGs. I know, it seems like that’s all I play (and with a rare few exceptions, that’s exactly right) but there was a time when I didn’t even know what RPGs were. Even when I did find out what they were, I kind of gave them funny looks. I was young and brash and damnit, I didn’t want to have to trudge through anything to get to the action! I just didn’t see the point. Then, the summer before 8th grade, I rented Star Ocean: The 2nd Story on a whim. Sweet jibbly Jeebus, I was hooked. Final Fantasy VII and VIII followed and the rest, as they say, is history.

2. My first RP character was a horribly emo Stu. Yeah, I know, I know. Based in the Final Fantasy VII world, he was part demon…but, well, this guy is crap right from the beginning. He lived in Nibelheim (no, I didn’t put him in Cloud’s hometown on purpose, I just needed mountains and that was the first town that came to mind) with his adoptive family. One summer, when he was fifteen, his adoptive brother (older than him) went on a hiking trip…elsewhere. I can’t remember where. This is important because Drake (the brother) was pretty highly regarded for his fighting ability. So when a demon waylaid the town and tried to force them to pay taxes and sacrifices (yeah, I’m groaning as I write this) Nathan decides that he’s going to go fight this thing. His parents stop him, he makes a show of giving in, and then sneaks out at night. Alone and armed only with a sword, he climbs the monster-infested mountains until he finds the demon’s lair. Amidst a huge thunderstorm they do battle, and Nathan proves much stronger than the demon expected. They fought to a standstill. Then Hades, either a high-ranking demon or the chief of demons (Hades actually appeared in FFVII and was never specified as having a real role in any hierarchy, so I just didn’t specify) decided it would be fun to fuse the demon to Nathan’s soul. Nathan thought he’d won…until he experienced a fit of anger the next day. The demon came out and slaughtered everybody. I think I even had it spell out words with people’s limbs. Somewhere along the lines, he lost both his forearms and had them replaced with metal claws. He was just so emo it was ridiculous. Why no one at the game I played him at called me on it, I’ll never know.

ETA: Now how could I forget this part of the story? Somehow, he got into SOLDIER, then thrown out. I can't remember if he made 1st Class or not, but he was unjustly thrown out and became a mercenary. ...Someone please kill my younger self. This character is a crime.

3. I wouldn’t be opposed to doing cosplay, if I could find a character I could pull off that wasn't Frog from Chrono Cross. (Frog's cool, but it's a little humiliating to be walking around in that costume.)

4. I’m mad jonesing for some FF RP, but have no idea where to look.

5. I’m terrified of flying, not because of the heights involved, but because I refuse to entrust my life to two people I’ve not said one word to in my entire life.

Tagging:

vampyric_lycan
clez
sethoz
siddyq
utopia_tears

Last night, I went to a Lewis Black show with my dad. Now, Lewis is an amazing comedian, but his routine depends on the really depressing parts of the news and current events, so at the end, he said he wanted to read us two news stories (real stories from real newspapers, mind you) that would surely let us leave with lighthearted glee. The first story was the funniest. Now, I shit you not...

Woman nearly bites off husband's penis while he makes pancakes.

The story here is absolutely priceless. The guy was making pancakes. So you're thinking, how could his wife nearly bite his pecker off?

She was giving him a blowjob. While he was cooking pancakes. Now, pancakes are good. I get that she maybe wanted to thank him for cooking them. But a bj? While he's cooking?

But that's not all. In a hilarious display of relativity, this guy loses his grip on the pan and spills boiling oil all down his wife's naked body. The searing pain of the boiling oil caused her to clench her teeth down on her husband's dick. (Enough to nearly bite it off, remember.) And then he, reacting on pure instinct, bashed her in the head with the frying pan.

I really can't say anything that would make that story funnier than it already is.

So. First experiment into herbal tea: Hibiscus tea is absolutely vile if not sweetened. Although I may have used too much. >.> See, it says that you use a few pieces of the flower per cup of boiling water, but the pound I bought looks more like cuttings.

...So, um, I used 1/4 cup of cuttings with my cup of boiling water. I boiled the water first, in the microwave, and then I took it out and put the cuttings in to steep. Now, maybe it's just my inexperience that views the bubbling, mad scientist-esque reaction as a worrisome thing, but...

That said, I did manage to strain it pretty well even without a proper strainer. I got a small paper cup and poked a few holes in the bottom with a bent paperclip, which did the job pretty well. I took a little sip once it cooled off and, well, it was viley-vile-vile. So I warmed it back up so that sugar would dissolve and I put in, uh...well, I'm hoping that "quite a bit" is "enough" because this shit was really, really vile before. I haven't tasted it yet as it's still a bit too hot, but I'll edit in the results once I have.

ETA: Oh god, the sugar may have made it worse. >.< At this point, I'm reasonably certain I used entirely too much. This stuff, I wager, should not be blackish-purple.

Son of ETA: I r dum. The reason I used 1/4 cup of the stuff was because I found a thing online that said you were supposed to use a few pieces of the flower per cup of boiling water. So I figured, with cuttings, you'd have to multiply that. Know what I just noticed?

There's a little label card in the baggie of herbs that says "Hibisucs Flower." Flower.

And here's the second part of my as-yet-untitled project. Still not sure what I'll do with it, but I do have a general plan for the story.

( Opinions please. )