I'm still supporting Pennywise for President.

Check this out.

It's great to see that we have our priorities in the right place, since most news sites have articles on the OJ Simpson trial listed above any articles pertaining to the stock market dying...

I've been having a bit of trouble moving forward with The Witcher lately, and this is due to the current chapter of the story being overwhelmingly boring. The only thing that is keeping me going is that I know some of things that are going to happen later on, and I very much want to see those thing. The problem right now is that I'm on a very long and extended quest chain that is at the very base a detective story. I'm trying to solve a mystery, and most of my quests revolve around questioning people and looking for clues. As such, there's so little fighting going on right now that I've taken to slaughtering beggars in the street as a source of entertainment as I'm running from one suspect to the next. I also had sex with a druid, which was a strange experience to say the least.

In any case, I'm looking forward to the action picking up once I finish these blasted quests outside the city. I think I'm about at the end now, probably only one or two more interrogations to go. I think the private detective I'm working for is the culprit anyway. I hope I can decapitate him the next time I see him.

It's strange, because I generally don't mind when RPGs do this. I think the problem is that I just need to go pick up a new shooter and play that, because I'm sure that's the type of game play I've been wanting lately. I almost loaded up Half-Life 2 over the weekend, but ended up watching some Bond movies instead.

I have devised the perfect solution to solve traffic problems. I've given this a lot of thought, and it's actually quite brilliant. I can solve the problem in 2 easy steps:

1. I kill everyone.
2. I enjoy no traffic.


If you're wondering, yes, some idiot ran into some other idiot this morning and made me late for work while we waited for some other idiot in a tow-truck to remove them from the highway.

I'm a horrible, horrible person. I'm getting this out of the way right now before getting to the point of this post, so I can refer back to that sentence when people try to chastize me for laughing hysterically at this:

Tasered Naked Man Falls to His Death

Watch the video. I laughed for at least 10 minutes after watching him fall. Yes, yes, I know he died. That's sad. But Christ that video is so pathetically funny. Naked man with a fluorescent light bulb just boards up and falls over. Fuck, I'm starting to laugh again...

Let's compare, it'll be fun.

First the background. I've been hooked on the song "I Don't Care" by Apocalyptica, featuring Adam Gontier of Three Days Grace.

Yesterday I downloaded the song. Immediately, I noticed a difference between that song I downloaded, and the one I had heard on the radio. I realized today that the different isn't minor...the lyrics are almost completely different, even though they sound exactly the same melodically.

I discovered that the version on the radio and in the music video is quite rare and hard to find, while the album version, naturally, is the version you get when you buy the album. Since I'm quite resourceful, I found both version and I now offer them to you to compare. You can find both in my playlist.

As for me, I prefer the Promo version.

In similar news, I also got "I'm Not Jesus", which is from the same album and featuring Corey Taylor of Slipknot. Also an excellent song.

I started this post with the intention of sharing the story of the week that will surely win the Worst Week Ever award at this year's awards ceremony. I actually had 3 paragraphs written before I finally decided I didn't really want to remember that week again and thus didn't want to right about it.

So, a quick summary instead. Power went out 8:00 PM Sunday and didn't come back on until 3:30 PM Wednesday. Internet came back on around 9:00 PM Thursday. I got a cold that thoroughly kicked the shit out of me on Thursday, which is persisting to this day. Thursday and Friday were clearly the worst of the cold, given that my sinuses were draining so much that I was actually throwing up.

All in all, it was lovely. I damn well better have gotten some positive karma points for that fucking week.

Ok, so I'm replaying The Witcher.

First of all, let's go over why I stopped playing it the first time. Basically it was time. I think I started playing this game the first time right when I was first stepping into Black Temple in WoW. Not really a good time to start playing another RPG.

I did still have my saved game from back then, but I decided to start all over again from the beginning. The reasons for this stem from the same reasons I stopped playing the game -- time. When I went through the first time, I was only doing the primary quests that moved the story along. I ignored all the side quests. This time I'm doing every quest that I find, and it's really enhancing the story this time around. The only quests I'm not doing are the ones that I accidentally locked myself out of doing by moving the story forward before I was able to do them.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about the game. The main story is that you are a witcher. Witchers are mutants, and they go around hunting monsters. You're basically a medieval Jedi Knight, wielding swords and using telekinetic powers. My favorite "force" move right now is the knockback one, which throws bad guys back and to the ground. I recently got one that puts a seal on the ground. Enemies slow down when they walk over it, and I can enchance it further to cause them damage.

What's cool about the knockback move is that you can use it to quickly kill what you're fighting. Something that would normally take you 5 sword attacks to kill can be one-shotted when they're laying on the ground incapacitated, and the moves your character does when you perform such a "finishing move" is very fun to watch. My favorite one is when I jump up on the bad guy's shoulders and shove my sword down through his skull. And then backflip off of him.

So yeah, how about some screenshots:

This is from the very beginning of the game. This place served as Witcher headquarters before it was invaded by the Salamandra, who stole a whole bunch of the mutagen secrets that are the core of the Witcher's powers. The rest of the game involves tracking these guys down and trying to find out what exactly they plan on doing with the formulas they stole.

The Frightener, the first creature in the game that thoroughly kicked my ass until I finally figured out how to kill it.

This guy was very happy to see me. Lawl.

The graphics are impressive -- look at the detail on the marble floor and the lighting effects from the fireplaces.

How romantic.

Your mother sucks cocks in Hell.

The talent screen.

Scary!

Time for my first 4-day weekend adventure story.

So just a few minutes ago, I'm sitting here in front of my computer playing Spore and talking to Lofts in vent. I lean back in my chair as I take a drink and then lean forward again to work on my creature some more.

Soon, it feels as though something is trickling down my back. I put my hand under my shirt and I feel something wet, and bring my hand out to see it's covered in blood. I'm mildly alarmed.

I looked behind me, and saw a sharp shard of metal protruding through the back of my chair. Realizing now what has happened, I took my shirt off and went to the mirror. At this point, blood was freely running down my back, and I mournfully looked at my now ruined Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt, soaked in blood.

I started soaking up blood with paper towels as I went upstairs and looked for a band-aid. Sadly, there were no band-aids in the fucking house large enough to cover my wound. Still soaking up blood with paper towels, I made a make-shift bandage out of a folded sheet of paper towel and six band-aids. After wiping off all the blood that was on my back, I quickly put the bandage in place. Then, I took the half a roll of bloody paper towels and arranged them nicely at the very top of the waste paper basket in the bathroom.

Someone is going to FREAK OUT tomorrow morning when they see THAT. LOL.

First impressions of Spore:

Ok, for starters, my expectations for this game were very high. I've known about it for about the past two years, and the whole concept of the game is really quite brilliant. In a nutshell, the game encompasses billions of years of evolution, and you get to tweak what happens every step of the way.

Given that premise, I was expecting something with a little more depth. But, it's a game rated E for Everyone, and was obviously made with kids in mind. And a lot of the stuff in the game is kids stuff, mainly the cartoonish graphics.

I'm probably being too harsh about the complexity, since I've only invested a few hours into the game thus far. But I've completed all of the Cell stage, and I really don't feel there was much to it at all. Eat, grow, have sex, evolve, and then grow legs and move on to the next stage.

The creature stage is a BIT more complex, but not much. I only hope that once I hit the Tribal stage, things will pick up a bit.

Aside from that complaint, I really enjoy the gameplay. The controls are fine and easy to use. Swimming around in the cell stage was quite fun, and it was really cool when my creature would grow, and things that were once HUGE became bite-sized to me. (That huge green thing that I had to swim around became a morsel I could eat, for example.)

The music is a lot of fun too, probably one of the highlights of the game so far.

I haven't quite figured out how the online portion of the game works. I'm always connected to a server when I'm in the game, but I'm not sure how you go about finding buddies to play with, or if you can even do that at all. I read somewhere in one of the manuals that it's possible to intereact with other people's creations, but all the creatures I've seen so far have been computer generated by the program (it actually tells you this when you click on a creature.)

All in all, I will say it's worth the purchase. It's a very different and new gaming experience based on the familiar idea of The Sims, but expanded into a much larger scope and scale.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1839708,00.html

Sooooo, a bunch of scientists just exclaimed that exercise will help you lose weight. Does this make anyone else want to hit themselves in the head with a blunt object?

As I was driving in to work this morning, the guy in the car in front of me decided to clean his windshield. The result was that my own windshield was sprayed with that vehicles windshield wiper fluid, which struck me as funny as I thought, "The car in front of me just gave my car a facial."

I then proceeded to clean my own windshield because of this, which I'm sure then sprayed onto the car that was behind me. So that person was getting not only my car's fluid, but that of the car in front of me too. I'm not sure what to call that one, but it's pretty gross when you think about it. It also makes me wonder how long the chain had been going on. Was the car in front of me prompted to clean his windshield because the car in front of him did so? And how far behind me did this go? Questions I will never have answers to.

I think my next goal will be to make about 5 cars in front of me clean their windshields at the same time. I will call that one car bukkake.

Spore!

OMG, it's finally time. I thought this day would never come.

http://www.spore.com

Spore is coming out on September 7th. I first heard of this game probably close to two years ago, and the idea just seemed quite brilliant: You start out controlling a single-celled organism, and you help it evolve until it's a space traveling intelligent life form. How epic.

Well, the game seems to have sneaked up on me, but I've rectified the issue. I just pre-ordered my copy two minutes ago =)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4682260.ece

I love stories like these, because it just gives me so much material to use in regular conversation here at the office (because Mark and I thoroughly enjoy making fun of mankind).

First, the two of us spread panic through the office by delivering completely exaggerated versions of what, exactly, these scientists are about to do. We now have half the office convinced that on September 10th, we're all going to be sucked into a black hole in France while being attacked by mosquitoes and chased by clowns on bicycles. (They all float.)

I also like the fact that the Swiss are doing this. So they've gone from making watches, to making doomsday machines. Quite a step up, isn't it?

I remember a dream from last night. This happens only rarely as I typically don't remember my dreams at all, but when I do I always try to figure out the source of what was in the dream. First of all, the setting was the Old West. That's an easy one -- my father watches Westerns a lot. Yesterday when I walked by his room on my way to take a shower, there was a Western on his TV. Now, in addition to me, there were 3 other people in the dream. One of them was my grandfather, and I don't know who the other 2 were. I've thought about my grandfather pretty recently, so it's no surprise he showed up in one of my dreams.

I'm not sure the meaning of what happened in the dream, however. All I can remember is that the 2 people I didn't know disguised themselves as my grandfather and me, and vice versa. Then, those two guys disguised as us were killed. I seem to think it was a shootout between them and the two of us, but I can't be sure. After the shootout (if it was such a thing), my grandfather and I looked at each other, not sure who we were, and then we both took off our disguises at the same time. Then we smiled at each other, and that's when I woke up.

This would be my reaction as well.

I don't like family gatherings. This is not an uncommon statement by any means, but my reasons for not liking them are probably a bit different when compared to that of the common man. I'm sure most people dread such events because there's always that family member that no one can stand, but who is inevitably invited to every family gathering out of necessity. That person is family, and therefore must be included even if everyone hates them.

There's a twinge of irony in that, for me.

For myself, I don't like family gatherings because my family really doesn't know or understand me. I will be the first person to admit that mostly, the reason for that is my own fault. There is obviously no reason why I couldn't let them know who I really am, aside from my own unwillingness and fear of doing so. That fear being the fear of becoming the person that I mentioned up in paragraph one. That would be the irony I was talking about.

Do I know for sure that it would happen? No, of course not. But that doesn't stop the anxiety when I think about it. Typically, it didn't much bother me that my family doesn't really know who I am. Not until recently. And this is the part of the whole thing that has be intrigued, and has had me analyzing it. Why does it sort of bother me now?

It's probably a combination of things. It could be that as I'm getting older, I'm desiring more and more to act like myself. It could be that after years of typically not saying more than 5 words to my family members, I would like to be able to carry on conversations with them if they would accept me. It could be that after being brutally honest with a few other friends in my life, that I would like to continue the trend with everyone else.

While all of those are probably true in a way, I think there's one other reason. And, I think it is the main reason.

I lost a friend, recently, and I lost this friend because I wasn't honest with them. There were other contributing factors, but I firmly believe the lack of honesty was the main reason for the destruction of the relationship. The reason I was not honest with them is because I believed everything would be much better if I wasn't. And for the longest time, that was true. But then they started to make incorrect assumptions. They started to (and probably still do) believe that I was just naturally a liar and two-faced. And, no matter how much effort I put forth, and no matter how honest I was with them after they started believing that, it didn't matter.

I also understand, however, that if this person would have had any shred of maturity, or even any bit of understanding of my situation, things would not have concluded the way they did. But it doesn't make it any easier, and it doesn't stop me from wondering what I'm supposed to do.

My feelings are mixed. In one sense, this whole situation has given me a desire to be more open and honest. In another sense, it has made me want to construct even larger barriers. And in the end, I'll probably end up in the middle where I've been my entire life -- putting everyone on a need to know basis. And most people don't need to know.

I feel better now though, because writing about something always helps me.