I sometimes find inspiration from music that I wouldn't normally enjoy. For example, I'm not exactly a fan of rap or hip-hop, or R&B for that matter. I prefer rock, alternative, heavy metal, etc. But that doesn't mean I never listen to anything else. I would like to think that I enjoy a wide spectrum of music.

Recently, I've been really enjoying this song:



It's not something that I would normally listen to, but it's been helping me out the last couple of days. While the things he's singing about are depressing, the song to me is actually uplifting in some way. I like the "up, down, down, up" beat that exists throughout the whole song, and I like the lyrics. I dunno, the song has just made me feel a little better. Hard to explain, I guess.

Run, Forrest!

I laugh at other people's misfortunes often, but only when there's no serious, long-term harm involved. If someone slips on an icy sidewalk and falls on their ass without breaking a hip, I'm going to laugh at them. Stuff like that. I think anyone can relate to that.

I was on time this morning. Good for me. Unfortunately, a certain school bus was early. Right now you're probably thinking, "So what? You don't go to school and you don't have kids. Why do you give a crap about a school bus being early?"

I care because the big yellow mother fucker was in front of me on my way to work, stopping every ten fucking feet to pick up some little bastard. I can't describe how annoying it is to be behind a school bus. It's like being behind some fat guy when you're waiting in line at the supermarket. They're both huge and block your view (and sunlight), they both emit noxious gases behind them into your face, and they're both FUCKING SLOW.

But, I had my retribution, even if it was at someone else's expense.

At the last stop the bus made before turning off the road and out of my way, it picked up two kids. As it was pulling away, I noticed a third kid frantically running up the side street, waving her arms in an attempt to catch the attention of the driver. Have you ever watched a school kid run? Kids under 12 run like retards to begin with. Add into that a heavy winter coat, and a heavy backpack on the kid's back. That just equals quality entertainment for my morning.

I rolled my window down and cheered her on. She still missed the bus, though. Mwa-hahaha.

For your edification...

Trust me, this lesson in international cuisine is necessary. I am about to make you more cultured. You're welcome.

Sushi is not raw fish. It's not even necessarily fish! Get that out of your head. While in America, most places generally, and incorrectly, tell you that a Japanese dish of fresh raw fish is sushi, that is not what they call it in Japan. In Japan, a dish of fresh, raw fish is actually sashimi. Sushi is a term used to describe any dish prepared using vinegared rice. This rice can then be served with any types of other things -- steamed vegetables, cooked beef, raw fish, cooked fish, you name it. Therefore, sushi is not always a raw dish by any means.

Thus endeth the culinary lesson for today.

Special Guest Star: Me

It's funny how we stop noticing certain things about ourselves. It's not surprising, though. Unless you have frequent out of body experiences, you're spending more time with yourself than any other person, so it's only natural that we grow accustomed to many of our own intricacies. As a result of this, sometimes we are surprised when other people point out certain things about ourselves. The term "All the world's a stage." is quite prevalent today, at least it is for me. I act differently depending on where I am and who I'm with. There's "Work Steve", there's "Home Steve", there's "Alone Steve", along with a few other Steve's hanging about. I've won a few Academy Awards for my role as me.

The point of this whole rambling post is something that happened to me at work the other day. Since I don't care to really know any of the people in this office who I don't work with directly, I make them afraid of me. I have most of them convinced that I have tourette syndrome, since I tend to yell random obscenities whenever any of them are in earshot. There was one kid that I actually kind of felt bad how frightened he was around me, so much that I almost told him I was just fucking with him. Anytime I would pass him in the hall, I would jump at him and yell "wharrrrrrglbl!". I'm glad I never told him, though, because he ended up being a sexual predator. He's in jail now.

Anyway, more to the point of this whole story: One of my more distinguishing personality traits is that I'm quite sarcastic. This is especially true when I'm dealing with rather stupid people, and as in any workplace there are lot of stupid people here. But here I play the role of "Work Steve", and I'm usually pretty good at keeping my sarcastic comments to myself. At least I thought I was, but this all goes back to how we tend to not notice certain things about ourselves.

I was in a manager's meeting, and my boss was ranting about the product manager for the software that I work with. He was just going off about the guy, about how much of a moron he is, about how he can't keep a release date to save his ass, etc, etc. After he was done with his tirade, he paused, took a breath, and then looked at me and said, "I'm starting to become nearly as sarcastic as you!"

You fail, Work Steve!

At least it's not really a problem. My boss seems to enjoy how sarcastic I am. He's taking lessons, actually.

Wii = Circle Jerk

I would first like to point out that I rarely make fun of Canada. But sometimes it becomes unavoidable, as it was in the case of this email that I got this morning (on my Blackberry, no less):

Please be advised we are experiencing a BlackBerry outage in the United States affecting employees West of the Mississippi including our Pittsburg Office.

/sigh

Perhaps you should speak with...

I've been dealing with a lot of typical office politics lately. There's a new release for one of our software products coming out soon, and much QA is commencing. And of course the blame game starts soon thereafter. Who implemented this? Whose idea was this? Who's responsible for this? Yadda, yadda, yadda.

In order to survive this without being fired, I've developed a set of phrases I use to reply to people instead of the real phrase that I was going to say initially.

(Note: Yeah, I probably stole this from somewhere a long time ago. Not sure where, but whatever. I think I may have posted this somewhere, at sometime before. But it applies so well for me at work right now that I just had to post it again.)

I say: "Perhaps I can work late."
Instead of: "And when the fuck do you expect me to do this?"

I say: "I'm certain that isn't feasible."
Instead of: "No fucking way."

I say: "Really?"
Instead of: "You've got to be shitting me."

I say: "Perhaps you should check with..."
Instead of: "Tell someone who gives a shit."

I say: "I wasn't involved in the project."
Instead of: "It's not my fucking problem."

I say: "That's interesting."
Instead of: "WTFuken?!"

I say: "I'm not sure this can be implemented."
Instead of: "This shit won't work."

I say: "I'll try to schedule that."
Instead of: "Why the hell didn't you tell me sooner?"

I say: "He's not familiar with the issues."
Instead of: "He's got his head up his ass."

I say: "Excuse me, sir?"
Instead of: "Eat shit and die."

I say: "So you weren't happy with it?"
Instead of: "Kiss my ass."

I say: "I'm a bit overloaded at the moment."
Instead of: "Fuck it, I'm on salary."

I say: "I don't think you understand."
Instead of: "Shove it up your ass."

I say: "I love a challenge."
Instead of: "This job sucks."

I say: "You want me to take care of that?"
Instead of: "Who the hell died and made you boss?"

I say: "I see."
Instead of: "Blow me."

I say: "He's somewhat insensitive."
Instead of: "He's a prick."

I say: "She's an aggressive go-getter."
Instead of: "She's a ball-busting bitch."

I say: "I think you could use more training."
Instead of: "You don't know what the fuck you're doing."

I went out to breakfast with my Mom this morning, and as she was ordering for us I went outside to get a newspaper. I love those old machines for newspapers because they never work. I always have to fight with the mother fuckers in order to get my damn newspaper. So I'm standing there, fighting with this thing, and out of the corner of my eye I see a car about to park in a space over to my right. I'm not sure what made me look over, but I did, and I then watched the car pull into the parking spot and then smash right into the wall. BAM!

Even though I saw it was going to happen, I still nearly shit my pants when I heard the crash. The guy busted up the left side of his fender near the headlight pretty good, and also busted the wooden guard in front of the wall, too.

Probably ruined his Sunday pretty effectively.

Fallout 3 is an interesting game. I've never seen a title so flawlessly combine the best aspects of a role-playing game and an action game into one package. Because truthfully, by doing so you are attempting to appease two very differents types of gamers. You have those RPG players who live for creating their character, tweaking it, making choices that will make and shape that character, and basically spend hundreds of hours exploring, deciding, building, changing, etc. Then you have the action game players who just want to shoot stuff. But this game works, and it works very, very well.


This screenshot gives you a little bit of an idea of the graphics. They are superb. People look like people, cockroaches look like cockroaches, etc. And the UI is almost nonexistent, which is a good thing because it makes you feel ever more part of the game rather than the guy behind the keyboard controlling the character.

The first "level" took place fully within the confines of the "vault", which was basically your introduction to everything -- movement, combat, story, skills, etc. You start out being born, leap ahead to one year old, then ten years told, then sixteen, then finally nineteen when you escape. To see this:


Needless to say, the world is fucked.

Taken from Wikipedia:

A third documentary film, titled His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th, is slated for a February 2009 release. The film will be directed by Daniel Farrands, who directed two documentaries on The Amityville Horror and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, and be broadcast on the Starz television channel the first week of February.^[127] The film will also be released on DVD on February 3, 2009. The documentary is hosted by special make-up effects artist Tom Savini, and interviews cast and crew members from each of the films, asking them questions on how and why they made they choices they did during filming. It also features interviews with journalists and other filmmakers, who offer their opinion of the series.

This is, of course, referencing a new documentary for the Friday the 13th film series. Specifically, about Jason. I'm really looking forward to getting this on DVD for a number of reasons. First of all, obviously I'm a fan of the film series. I grew up with these movies, as they had just started reaching the peak of their popularity when I was about 8 or 9 years old. The part of this I like most of all, however, is that they got Tom Savini to host the program. I've always followed his career because he's a Pittsburgh native, and because I consider him a genius when it comes to special make-up effects. I love his style, and anytime you see him in a documentary or in behind-the-scenes footage, it always looks like he's having a blast. He loves his job, that's for sure.

I always enjoy how he usually uses himself for his most ambitious projects. The most notorious of these is, bar none, would be the "Disco Boy Scene" from the movie Maniac. Savini dressed himself up in full disco attire, and then had his head blown off by a 12 gauge shotgun at point blank range. This is the best image I could find of the scene on Google, which really is a piece of crap image to be honest and doesn't even begin to show you how realistic and disturbing the actual scene was.


But you get the idea. Might I add that the scene was shot in slow motion. You don't miss a thing. (The movie, as you can obviously guess, was released unrated. It would have most CERTAINLY been rated X otherwise.)

I think my favorite work of his would have to be all the Dead movies he worked on with George Romero (another Pittsburgh native!) And, of course, for creating the Jason that we all know and love today.

This cracked me up: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7864733.stm

So the little bastard saw his shadow. I'd like to know how that's even remotely possible, since it's been about two weeks since I've seen the freaking sun. And I don't live in a hole in the ground.

Oh wait. Yes. Yes I do.

Let's talk RPGs for a moment. Notice I said RPGs, not MMOs. There's a different blog for that.

First off, Fallout 3 has been named RPG of the Year. And Game of the Year, coincidentally. I obviously haven't played it yet, but after reading the Game of the Year article I think I need to do so. I probably won't finish it until 2012, but hey, at least I can check it out. I think I still have some Best Buy gift cards lying around here somewhere.

I haven't played a new RPG since The Witcher (which was a very, very good game). And the thing that I liked best about The Witcher was the fact that I didn't keep playing it to get that new piece of loot so my character looked more badass, or so he was all the more powerful, or so that my stats went through the roof. I kept playing it because I wanted to see what happened next. It was the story that kept me engaged. My character looked visually the same from the time the game started to the point where the game ended, and I didn't even care. That's a very tricky thing to accomplish in an RPG, and The Witcher got it done in spades.

This brings me to my next topic, which is Dragon Age: Origins. I recently read a preview about this game, and I was surprised to see the person writing the article first commented on the very thing I just talked about above: he was driven to keep playing the game so he could see what was going to happen next. That alone makes me want to play it, but it has a lot of other positive things going for it as well. First of all, it's going to be a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, which should be enough to perk your interest right there if you're any kind of RPG fan. Next, it's being made by Bioware, who hasn't let me down yet. And lastly, I've seen some of the creature designs. Think of what kind of animal you would get if Winnie the Pooh fucked a cactus.

I'll leave you with that thought =)